Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, Toho Company, Huahua Media, Wanda Qingdao Studios, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film my husband Charles and I watched last night was Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a 2019 production from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures (as I can imagine Charles joking, “They’re not real pictures – they’re just legendary”) based on the monster characters rather churlishly credited to “Toho Studios, Inc.” Godzilla and his monster brethren (and, in one case at least, sistren; the giant moth Mothra is specifically identified in the closing credits as female) were actually the creations of an individual, Ishirô Honda (sometimes his first name is transliterated “Inoshiro”), who wrote and directed many of the early Godzilla films and also did the effects work. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the third in the Warner Bros./Legendary cycle they’ve started calling the “Monsterverse,” dealing with the efforts of a super-secret society within the federal government (of the U.S., though their operations are worldwide) called MONARCH (we’re never told whether that’s an acronym or what, if anything, the letters stand for, though their logo is a sideways hourglass shape apparently supposed to suggest the outspread wings of a monarch butterfly) that, depending on which MONARCH official is speaking for the group that day, was designed either to contain the so-called “Titans” – the multitudinous monsters Honda and his colleagues at Toho created for all those Japanese movies in the 1950’s and 1960’s that began with the near-masterpiece Gojira (1954), a much better movie than the chopped, channeled and Raymond Burr-ized version American-International gave U.S. audiences two years later, but eventually became a sort of worldwide joke – or to release them.

The first film in the “Monsterverse” cycle was Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot of Godzilla, which I remember as a reasonably entertaining movie but one that could have been a good deal better (it was aiming for some of the social-comment aspects of the original Gojira but part of me would have rather watched a modern-day CGI version of a Godzilla movie – and Godzilla himself appeared in only about 10 minutes of that two-hour film!) – and of which Godzilla, King of the Monsters turned out to be a direct sequel. It begins in a burned-out San Francisco following Godzilla’s attack on the city at the end of the Edwards film, and it continues from there with the human conflict between divorced couple Mark (Kyle Chandler) and Emma (Vera Farmiga) Russell. Both of them have “Dr.” in front of their names, indicating that they’re scientists, but they end up not only physically separated but on opposite sides of a great debate over whether MONARCH should continue to keep the monsters contained or use Emma’s super-invention, a sound generator called “Orca” that will summon the monsters, to turn them loose. Emma is nominally the captive of Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) – note the symbolism of his last name – a renegade deep ecologist who’s become convinced that in order for the world to survive, the human race must either become extinct or at least be severely reduced in population size and influence so the rest of the natural world can recover from the years of wars, faminss, pestilences and deaths we have inflicted on it. Jonah has seized on the “Titans” as his way of bringing about the near-extinction of the human race and the recovery of the world under their dominance, and at first Emma – like Dr. Zarkov in the Flash Gordon serials and his counterparts in the competing entries from Republic – seems to be going along reluctantly because Jonah is holding Emma’s and Mark’s daughter Madison (a quite remarkable young-teen actress named Millie Bobby Brown who actually turns in the best performance among the human characters!) hostage. But eventually Emma becomes a true believer in Jonah’s cause.

The film cuts back and forth between the mobile lab installation Jonah is working from and the other one in which the MONARCH establishment is attempting to control the monsters and get them back in their world-spanning containment centers – environments that look so similar we don’t really know which is which until we see which set of people is inhabiting which. This isn’t that much of a plot, but at least it is a plot and we don’t have the sense we sometimes got from Kong: Skull Island that the movie was simply an excuse to copy war-movie clichés and stick bits of monster action in between them. Surprisingly for a film that was intended as a big summer blockbuster, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is actually an auteur film, the auteur being Michael Daugherty, who not only directed (and got a possessory credit – “A Film by Michael Daugherty”) but also co-wrote both the story and the script (Max Borenstein gets co-credit for the story and Zach Shields co-credits for both the story and the actual screenplay). It also includes some nicely done references to the first Godzilla film, Gojira, which featured a Japanese scientist character named Dr. Ishiro Seriwaza (played here by familiar Japanese actor Ken Watanabe). In the original Gojira Dr. Seriwaza invented a super-bomb called the “oxygen destroyer” that would eliminate all life within a two-mile radius and flew a kamikaze mission into Gojira to explode the bomb inside him and thus destroy him. In this one Dr. Serizawa has also invented the “oxygen destroyer” and the good guys at MONARCH try to use it to destroy Mothra, Rodan and the three-headed flying monster Ghidorah (also introduced in a 1964 Toho production that was released in the U.S. as Monster Zero, with faded U.S. star Nick Adams spliced in the way Raymond Burr was in the U.S. release of the original Godzilla) after having already mortally wounded Godzilla and sent him to the depths of the “inner Earth” from which the monsters originally came.

Only Ghidorah (in a nice touch from Daugherty and his co-writers, Dr. Serizawa calls the monsters by their original Japanese names, “Gojira” and “Ghidorah,” while the Americans in MONARCH call them “Godzilla” and “Monster Zero”) turns out to be unaffected by the oxygen destroyer because he’s not a terrestrial monster; he’s something from another planet who’s come to Earth to mobilize the native monsters and destroy it. (I was sort-of expecting an explanation that he wasn’t affected by the oxygen destroyer because, like a terrestrial plant, he breathes carbon dioxide – which might make him useful to have around as a tool to combat climate change caused by greenhouse gases.) The MONARCH scientists realize that the only creature that can possibly fight and kill Ghidorah is Godzilla, and in this one Dr. Serizawa does his kamikaze mission underwater not to kill Godzilla but to revive him with a bomb that will give him a charge of atomic energy and bring him back to life – only he does this too well and we learn that Godzilla will go super-critical and blow up like a nuclear bomb in two hours. Meanwhile, Madison Russell has grabbed her mom’s ORCA device and is broadcasting it through the P.A. system in Boston’s baseball stadium, Fenway Park, so the monsters worldwide will hear a signal to stand down. There’s a final climactic sequence in which Madison is reunited with her dad, but her mom refuses to get into the evacuation craft because there’s something or other she thinks she still has to do with the monsters, though eventually the family is reunited and presumably the adult Russells reconcile.

This isn’t a great movie – even by the meager standards of the giant-monster genre, which to my mind has produced only two genuine artistic triumphs (the 1933 King Kong and the 1954 Gojira) – but it’s a legitimately entertaining one, and here as with Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (which essentially recast the Biblical Noah as the first deep ecologist, hoping that the Flood will bring about the extinction of humanity and the restoration of the rest of the biosphere) I found myself wondering why Arne Naess’s arguably nihilistic “deep ecology” philosophy – essentially that the world needs to rid itself of the infestation of human beings in order to safeguard the rest of life and the continued existence of Earth itself – has appealed to these filmmakers. (At the same time I suspect that if humans continue to screw up the climate so totally they render themselves extinct, cockroaches and other insects will be our replacements as the dominant species; just as we replaced the dinosaurs, we’ll be replaced by something even smaller.) Though I have at least one bone to pick with Daugherty’s direction and Lawrence Sher’s cinematography – we only get to see the monsters through smoky, foggy twilight-style shots, never in full light as in the old Toho films – for the most part Godzilla: King of the Monsters is good entertainment, reasonably fun to watch and with just enough seriousness to serve as seasoning for an otherwise unambitious spectacle with a lot of monsters beating each other up and only incidentally rendering human beings and their property as collateral damage. (The issue of how things are going to get rebuilt after these catastrophes – and who’s going to pay for it – usually get dodged in movies like this.)

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Hollywood Pictures, Interscope Communications, Nomura Babcock & Brown, Warner Bros., Buena Vista, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon I checked the Lifetime Web page and found they had scheduled a movie I had never seen, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which wasn’t made for Lifetime –it was a theatrical feature from 1992 (though it took me a while to realize it was that old – as old as Citizen Kane and Casablanca were when I first saw them in the early 1970’s) starring people I’d actually heard of outside the Lifetime context, Annabella Sciorra and Rebecca De Mornay, and with a major director, Curtis Hanson, whose marvelous use of music in the films L.A. Confidential (1997) and Wonder Boys (2000) made me rush out to buy their soundtrack albums as soon as I saw the film (though I kvetched when the Wonder Boys album didn’t contain Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” used so powerfully in the actual film). I suspect Lifetime was showing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle because, like the Julia Roberts battered-wife vehicle Sleeping with the Enemy, it’s launched a thousand knock-offs on Lifetime; Christine Conradt’s first script for them, The Perfect Nanny, was made in 2000, only eight years after The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. The title comes from the phrase, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” in a poem of that title by William Ross Wallace (1819-1881) that is essentially an ode to the power of motherhood (http://www.potw.org/archive/potw391.html). It’s used ironically here, of course.

Written by Amanda Silver, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle has a powerful opening sequence that sets the stage for the rest and gives us a much more coherent and believable explanation for the Psycho Nanny’s motives than we’ve got in most of the Lifetime variations on this theme since. Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra) and her husband Michael (Matt McCoy) are about to have their second child, a son – they already have a four-year-old daughter, Emma (Madeline Zima) – when the pediatrician who took care of her during Emma’s birth abruptly retires. He recommends Dr. Mott (John de Lancie) as his replacement, but on her first visit to him Dr. Mott insists on giving Claire a full breast and pelvic exam. We’re already suspicious of him when he fondles Claire’s breasts far longer and more lovingly than would be required professionally, and we know what he’s up to in a marvelous insert in which just before he sticks his hand in her vagina he takes off his medical gloves – proof that what he’s doing is not professional but sexual. Claire realizes what’s going on, not in time to stop it but in time to ignore the nurse who, as she bolts from the exam room, asks her to make another appointment. Of course she’s shaken by having essentially been raped on a doctor’s exam table, and she and Michael argue over whether she should file a complaint with the police. Eventually she does, word of the complaint reaches the media and four other women come forward to say Dr. Mott did the same thing to them – a quite contemporary #MeToo-ish plot twist that briefly made The Hand That Rocks the Cradle seem a more recent movie than it is. Faced with not only losing his medical license but the threat of going to prison, Dr. Mott commits suicide – and his widow (Rebecca De Mornay) is shocked to learn that because he killed himself, she won’t receive a payout on his life insurance policy and she’ll lose her affluent lifestyle and the custom-built home in the Seattle area (a big white modernist structure that practically becomes a character in and of itself).

Also, Mrs. Mott was herself pregnant when her husband was exposed as a serial rapist and shot himself, and due (at least we’re supposed to believe) to the shock of it all she suffers a miscarriage and her doctors have to give her an emergency hysterectomy to save her life – so even if she found another man she could never have a child of her own. She blames Claire for all this, and she hatches a revenge plot: she will get herself hired as Claire’s nanny – Claire is involved in quite a few home-improvement projects, including building a greenhouse on her property and replacing the chicken-wire fence with a picket fence, for which she’s hired a learning-disabled (or whatever the currently P.C. term is) Black man named Solomon (Ernie Hudson) who becomes a red herring. At first he rides his bike onto Claire’s and Michael’s property and scares the shit out of them and Emma, but then they find out who he is and why he’s there and he becomes almost a member of the family. Calling herself “Peyton Flanders,” Mrs. Mott moves into the home of Claire and Michael and almost immediately begins her plot, which includes ingratiating herself into the lives of Emma and newborn son Joe (a performance credited to three apparent siblings, Eric, Ashley and Jennifer Melander – it’s a common dodge in the movie business to cast a baby or a very young child with identical twins to avoid breaking the law on how many hours a day a child can work, but it’s rare that a baby’s role is so long the filmmakers needed three real babies to play him). She goes so far as to nurse Joe herself – she used a breast pump to keep herself lactating even after her own pregnancy met its gruesome end – to get him to bond with her instead of his biological mother Claire.

She also sets her sights on Michael, intending to seduce him away from Cialre and end up with a husband and two kids she can raise as her own, and when he turns her down, saying that Claire is the only woman he’ll ever love, Peyton booby-traps the greenhouse so the glass ceiling will fall on the next person who enters it and kill them. Only the person who’s caught in the trap isn’t Claire but her best friend Marlene Craven (Julianne Moore), who’s just discovered who “Peyton” really is because she’s a realtor who has just received a listing on the Motts’ big custom-built home – and she’s recognized “Peyton” as Mrs. Mott in a photo of the place that included the couple. Marlene tries to call Claire with the news (on a landline-style radio phone in her car since The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was made just before cell phones were introduced – it was also made before the Internet, which is why Marlene finds the photo that “outs” Peyton as Mrs. Mott on microfiche cards she’s viewing instead of on line) but she gets caught in the booby-trapped greenhouse and dies before she can tell Claire Peyton’s secret. (The gimmick of the best friend who discovers the villainess’s plot but gets killed before she can warn the heroine has become one of Lifetime’s most common and most annoying tropes – though in this film the best friend is white and usually in subsequent Lifetime films she’s been Black). Along the way she also picks Michael’s pocket at a restaurant and tears up an envelope containing a grant proposal he was about to send in – a plot twist that seemed anachronistic not only because a real grant proposal would be a considerably longer and heftier document, but even though this film was made before cell phones and the Internet, Michael is shown with a computer monitor on his desk and therefore he’d presumably have had his proposal saved on his hard drive and would be able to print out another copy.

Peyton also somehow drains the medication from all the asthma inhalers Claire uses (it’s established early on that Claire is chronically asthmatic, though Annabella Sciorra did the inhalers wrong; when she was supposed to be using them she just took a quick puff instead of the long drag required for the things to work), and of course Amanda Silver uses Claire’s asthma the way Chekhov used his pistol: the fact that thanks to Peyton, she no longer has a working inhaler prevents her from being coherent when she’s trying to call 911 after Peyton breaks into their home and starts threatening her and trying to take the kids. And after the Black handyman Solomon discovers Peyton nursing Joe from her own breast, she gets rid of him by stealing a pair of Emma’s panties, putting them in Solomon’s dresser drawers and thereby framing him for trying to molest Emma. Though The Hand That Rocks the Cradle has plenty of situations Lifetime has done to death since, its origins as a theatrical movie are obvious in the greater sophistication of Hanson’s direction – he and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, use far more moving-camera shots than Lifetime’s budgets could afford, so we discover the action instead of baldly being cut into it – and also Hanson’s trademark use of music.

Michael is a big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan – early on in the film there’s a scene in which he and Emma are singing the patter songs together – and Hanson uses “O Dry the Glistening Tear” from The Pirates of Penzance as a personal theme for Peyton (she has her alarm clock programmed to play it and it’s worked into Graeme Revell’s musical score), and as an imdb.com “trivia” poster pointed out, both Gilbert and Sullivan operettas heard in the film, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, are about incompetent (though at least not corrupt or psycho) nannies who switch babies shortly after their births, with complications that come back to haunt them once they grow up. Also, when Michael and Marlene secretly go to a restaurant together (they’re planning a surprise party for Claire but Claire, egged on by Peyton’s Iago-style hints, thinks Michael and Marlene are having an affair), some jazz is heard as background music – and instead of a stock-music clip from an anonymous band it’s the John Coltrane Quartet playing the Jimmy McHugh-Frank Loesser song “Say It (Over and Over Again)” from Coltrane’s 1962 Ballads album. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is a quite impressive movie and it’s not hard to see why future Lifetime writers and directors raided it so extensively for material which they soon hardened into clichés!

Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story (EveryWhere Studios, Lighthouse Pictures, Peace Out Productions, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story was a considerably better-than-average Lifetime movie that got its “premiere” Saturday, June 26. It was based not only on a true story but a surprisingly recent one; many of Lifetime’s true-crime efforts have been cases from the 1990’s or 2000’s but this is a story that “broke” in 2019. The film was directed by Bradley Walsh from a script by Stephen Tolkin; Walsh has no other directorial credits on imdb.com but Tolkin has an extensive list of prior scripts, including other Lifetime movies based on particularly sordid or inexplicable crimes: The College Admissions Scandal, Cleveland Abduction, New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell, Twist of Faith, The Craigslist Killer. It’s not surprising that one of his previous credits has the title Twist of Faith (about the unlikely pairing of a Jewish man who withdrew from the world after losing his family and a Black woman who redeems him, played incandescently by singer/actress Toni Braxton), because this story is about a very different sort of “twist of faith.” Lori Vallow (Lauren Lee Smith, star of the Canadian TV series Frankie Drake Mysteries and a more highly regarded actress than the ones who usually play in Lifetime movies) is living in Arizona after having just separated from her husband (her fourth one, we eventually learn) and is raising two kids, one a teenage daughter named Tylee Ryan (Astrid Trueman) and one an adopted autistic son named J. J. Vallow (Aias Daiman).

She’s living a presumably contented, though financially stressed, life in Arizona when she encounters a book called Spread Your Wings by Chad Daybell (Marc Blucas), a cemetery worker and self-proclaimed messianic minister. Ordinarily you’d think a book with an anodyne title like Spread Your Wings and the equally banal cover art we see would be a platitudinous self-help tome, but in fact it’s part of a series Chad Daybell has self-published, a set of novels themed around the idea that we’re living in the end times and the return of Jesus Christ is just around the corner. Though this isn’t stressed in the movie, Chad was a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – he’d graduated from Brigham Young University in 1992 with a B.A. in journalism – and it’s pretty obvious that his end-times theology and the particular way it manifested itself was rooted in the colorful history of Mormonism and in particular all those raffish aspects of Mormon history the current church has tried to live down and suppress as much as possible. Lori’s fourth husband, Charles Vallow – to whom she’s still legally married, though separated, at the start of the film – was also a Mormon and made her convert when they married in 2006. Lori had been a lifelong Roman Catholic before that, but it’s evident from the film that – especially once she starts reading Chad’s books (which were part of a self-published series he called Standing in Holy Places) and ultimately meets him at a book signing – she’s adopted the beliefs of the farthest-out branches of Mormonism, including the ones about certain “elect” people being in direct communication with God and receiving “omens” about the imminent deaths of loved ones, as well as reincarnation (supposedly Chad Daybell told Lori Vallow that she had had 14 previous lifetimes, though only five were on Earth, and they had been married to each other in nine of them) and the idea that certain individuals can be literally possessed and taken over by Satan. Unlike Lori’s previous Roman Catholic faith, Chad’s version of “possession” doesn’t allow for any sort of exorcism; the soul of a possessed person, in his theology, can be set free only by the death of his or her (current) body.

Much of the interest in Doomsday Mom is in the sheer contrast between the banality of the characters’ lifestyles – all of them, good or evil, are suburbanites, “white” not only as to ethnicity (unusually for a Lifetime movie, there aren’t any African-Americans or other people of color in the dramatis personae) but in terms of the seeming blandness of their lifestyles, and about the only truly interesting villain here is Lori’s brother Alex Cox (Joshua Hinkson), who had served 90 days in jail in Texas for assaulting one of Lori’s previous husbands during their divorce trial. Lori and Chad start a love affair after he seduces her with all his talk about their previously having been married and their destiny to be together in these incarnations. He announces to Lori that her estranged husband Charles has been taken over by Satan and is therefore “no longer Charles” but the demon inside him that can only be liberated by his death. Of course, Lori has another, more mercenary motive for wanting Charles out of the way permanently: a $450,000 life insurance policy. Accordingly, she has her brother Alex murder Charles and fake it to look like an accidental killing in self-defense (Alex claims Charles attacked him with a baseball bat and he merely fought back), but they don’t college on the policy because shortly before his death Charles changed the beneficiaries on his policy to his sister (Linda Purl) and her husband (Patrick Duffy – father of the one who played on Dallas, and though it’s oddly unmentioned on their imdb.com pages he and Purl are married in real life and have been since 2017). Chad tells Lori that he’s had visions direct from God that indicate the imminent deaths not only of her husband but his wife Tammy – and while Charles duly dies on schedule, Tammy’s death takes a little longer until Chad can, shall we say, “arrange” it. (At this point one wishes that polygamy would have been one old Mormon tradition Chad would have revived from early Mormonism; whatever their relationship was like, it would have been far better for Tammy to have had to accept Lori as a “sister-wife” than for her husband to kill her.)

In his ability to manipulate events and get other people to kill for him, Chad Daybell resembles Charles Manson – only he’s such a part of American white-bread suburbia his crimes can’t be blamed on hippies, the counterculture or drugs the way Manson’s were. Doomsday Mom is fascinating precisely for the contrast between the supposedly “moral” lives the characters live on the surface and the deeper, nastier drives in their personal conduct – and Tolkin’s script maintains a marvelous sense of uncertainty as to how much the characters (Lori and Chad in particular) are using their end-times religious beliefs and the sense that the imminence of Christ’s return means they don’t have to obey those pesky human laws as conscious rationalizations, and how much they actually believe them. Lori’s kids “mysteriously” disappear, first Tylee while she, Lori, Chad and Lori’s friend Melanie Gibb (Alison Wandzura), who joined Chad’s cult when Lori did but balked when Lori asked her by phone to lie for her to provide a false alibi, take a trip to Yellowstone and pose for a selfie at the edge of a cliff, then J. J. when Lori abruptly pulls him out of a special-needs school in Rexburg, Idaho, where Chad announced that he’d had a religious vision telling them to move to (though he subsequently skedaddles out of the country with Lori and sets up housekeeping in Kauai, Hawai’i, where Lori had formerly lived with one of her previous husbands). Lori says she’s going to start home-schooling him, but he’s never seen nor heard from again – until months later, when the Rexburg cops finally assemble enough evidence to get a search warrant for Chad’s pet cemetery (the scene is dominated by a really creepy-looking larger-than-life statue of a dog) and dig up J. J.’s remains.

By the ending of the movie, Lori has so totally “lost it” that she’s going on to a cellmate that she can hardly wait for a visit from her attorney because he’s really her son by a “celestial marriage” – supposedly this is proven by the attorney having blue eyes – so it’s not at all surprising when a line in the closing credits indicates that on May 27, 2021 a judge ruled that Lori Vallow was incompetent to stand trial for the murders of her kids. (The judge let the case against Chad Vallow, who was also charged with killing his wife and making it look like an accidental drug overdose, go to trial, but the trial hasn’t happened yet.) Doomsday Mom is an extraordinary parable of the dangers of religious faith and blind acceptance of utter silliness in the guise of religion and its teachings. I’m no longer the militant atheist I once was, when I would have cited a story like this as part of a blanket condemnation of all religion, but I still don’t like churches that make you check your common sense at the front door. Most of the origin stories of the great religions are pretty stupid – people with a bias against Mormonism like to cite the story of Joseph Smith, Jr. getting the text of the The Book of Mormon on golden plates from the Angel Moroni’s celestial lending library and being given two “seer stones,” the Urim and Thummim, with which by putting them into his hat and looking through them at the plates he could translate the so-called “reformed Egyptian” they were written in into English (so when Smith dictated the text of The Book of Mormon he was literally talking through his hat!), but that’s not appreciably sillier than the idea that Christ was born of a virgin impregnated by God, or the Angel Gabriel chose to dictate the text of the Koran to a camel-driver who could neither read nor write.

There are plenty of serious religious people who don’t believe these stories are literally true and take them essentially as symbols or metaphors, but if you insist that the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon are literally the word of God, you can get into an awful lot of trouble and you can end up like Lori Vallow, believing the creepiest things (like first your husband and then your kids being “possessed by Satan” and needing you to kill their bodies to liberate their souls). I was trying to avoid using Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Adolf Eichmann as an exemplar of what she called “the banality of evil,” especially since as I read her book Eichmann in Jerusalem it occurred to me that she could have reversed her abstract nouns and called it “the evil of banality,” since Eichmann (at least in her conception of him) was amoral rather than immoral and had been raised in a culture that so overvalued conformity and obedience, and so undervalued independent thought he (in Arendt’s view, which I agree with) had no frame of reference even to register that what he was doing was evil, let alone to form the moral courage to resist it. Likewise Lori Vallow, who successively believed in two of the most mysterious branches of the Abrahamic religious tradition – the Roman Catholics, who for years insisted on conducting their services in a language the congregants didn’t understand; and the Mormons – was in essence a sitting duck to be manipulated by someone with an agenda like Chad Daybell’s (though neither the script of this movie nor the historical record is all that enlightening as to What Made Chad Run – was he as deliberate an evil manipulator as Hitler or Manson or was he himself a victim of a crazy belief system that blinded him to normal human decency, like some of the other Mormon breakaway leaders who ultimately sanctioned murder?), with his talk about God, Satan, possessed people and promises that he could enroll her into an “elect” which would survive the end times and live, in the old fairy-tale phrase, “happily ever after” for all eternity?

Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (Columbia, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I crowded into our schedule and ran after he came home from work unusually early was a 1942 Columbia “B” called Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen. Ellery Queen began as the lead character in a series of mystery novels co-written by Frederick Dannay and Manfred Remington Lee, and though those names were themselves pseudonyms (“Dannay” was really Daniel Nathan and “Lee” was Emmanuel Benjamin Napofsky), they started writing Ellery Queen stories in 1928 and even offered “Ellery Queen” as the named author as well as the lead character. The series also spawned a pulp paper called Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which Dannay originally edited and which (unlike most 1930’s pulps) still exists. Ellery Queen made his film debut in 1935 in a Republic production called The Spanish Cape Mystery, but in 1939 Columbia acquired the rights and launched a series with Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen and Margaret Lindsay as his long-suffering secretary and sort-of girlfriend, Nikki Porter. The schtick of Ellery Queen was that he was a private detective and his father was a real cop, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department, and they often worked as unofficial partners even though the writers Columbia assigned to the films usually turned Richard Queen into the traditional dumb cop (with an even dumber cop sidekick!) shown up by the smart private eye.

Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen was the 12th and last in the Columbia Queen cycle, and by then Bellamy had left the series after the first seven entries and William Gargan (who was quite good as a police detective posing as a theatrical producer in the 1939 film The House of Fear) had taken over as Ellery Queen, though Margaret Lindsay was still on board and Inspector Queen was played by Charley Grapewin. Referencing Grapewin’s most famous credit as Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz, at one point I joked, “He just hasn’t been the same since his niece had that crazy dream in which she got flown out of Kansas by a cyclone and had to desi with wicked witches, winged monkeys and talking trees.” The script for Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen was by Eric Taylor and the direction by James Hogan, who died the next year at the relatively young age of 53 right after finishing one of Universal’s worst horror movies, The Mad Ghoul. Taylor deserves credit for pulling a few neat surprises that make his film different from the “B” mystery norm – especially “B” mysteries made during World War II and incorporating the war into their plots. The film starts inside a German submarine hunting for U.S. and British cargo ships in the North Atlantic, though the lead officer on board, Heinrich (Sig Ruman), orders the sub’s captain not to torpedo a particular cargo ship.

It turns out that that ship is carrying a shipment of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy to a New York art gallery, where it’s supposed to be protected against possible war damage and exhibited to the public (actually Egypt was in World War II on the Nazis’ side – which led to the bizarre situation of one of John Lennon’s aunts being forced to register as an enemy alien during the war because, while she was born in Britain, she’d married an Egyptian man and taken Egyptian citizenship). As I joked, had this been a Universal movie the mummy would have been brought to life by a sinister cult of Egyptian expatriates, but since this was Columbia the mummy is irrelevant (we never actually see it, it disappears from its coffin midway through and we never learn what happened to it) and what’s really important is a large cache of diamonds secreted inside its case by a Dutchman named Van Dorn, whose wife (Gale Sondergaard) runs a smaller gallery in New York. Also involved in the smuggling plot is one Paul Gillette (Gilbert Roland), who the moment we see him, hear his vaguely foreign accent and see his “roo” moustache we’re convinced he must be a Nazi agent up to no good. Our suspicions are especially reinforced when he runs into Nikki Porter at a counter at a train station, and when the clerk tells him that the item he wants to purchase costs “five and a quarter” he doesn’t know what that means and Nikki has to explain, “He means five dollars and twenty-five cents.”

Later Gillette takes Nikki hostage in a car and accuses her of being a Gestapo agent, and we ultimately learn that he’s actually a good guy, part of a ring of Dutch resistance agents smuggling the diamonds into the U.S. to sell them and raise money for the partisans back home. Mrs. Van Dorn is also part of the operation (offhand I can’t think of another movie in which Gale Sondergaard was on the side of good!), only the Nazis are also tracing the diamonds and Ellery Queen, his father and dumb cop Sgt. Velie (James Burke), who let a captured Nazi spy escape on the train bringing the principals in to New York City and got suspended from the force and threatened with being fired, are trying to figure out how the Nazi spies knew about the diamonds. Paul Gillette is found murdered in a cemetery – his body has been stuffed into the mummy case (ya remember the mummy case? Ya remember the mummy?) – and Ellery Queen tells Velie to report it to headquarters and get credit for discovering Gillette’s body, only meanwhile enemy agents crash the cemetery, make off with Gillette’s body and stuff the incapacitated Ellery Queen into the mummy case instead. The principals all converge on an establishment called the Lido Club, which is not a nightclub (as one might think from the name) but a health spa, though it’s really a front for the Nazi spies, who are getting all sorts of secret information by offering a “valet service” where they hold the customers’ valuables while they work out – and then rifling through their letters and papers looking for dirt on the Allied war effort. The film ends with a big fight scene in which the Nazis are subdued, Ellery and Nikki reunited, everyone saved from peril and the diamonds rescued from the fate Heinrich had in mind for them – which was to be cut down and used to make precision tools for Nazi war production.

Charles liked Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen considerably less than I did – after it was over he joked, “At the top of movie detectives there’s Sam Spade, in the middle there’s the Saint and the Falcon, and at the bottom there’s Ellery Queen” – but I enjoyed the movie even though it’s held together with spit and baling wire and it changes tone so often the film takes on an unintentionally surrealistic air. It starts out as a pretty straightforward thriller, then throws off a few hints of film noir (notably in some nice chiaroscuro compositions by cinematographer James S. Brown, Jr.) and ends up almost camp. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to take Sig Ruman as a serious Nazi menace when his best-known films star the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny. It also doesn’t help that director Hogan decided to shoot the final action climax in fast-motion, an effect that these days seems pretty much reserved for comedy. And I got very annoyed by all the snide sexism Ellery aimed at Nikki. Still, Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen is a reasonably entertaining vest-pocket mystery, with some genuine surprises in the plotting and the casting, though I’ve never seen any other entries in the Ellery Queen series and apparently the war theme made this one quite different from its predecessors.

Kong: Skull Island (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Tencent Pictures, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I ran a really peculiar movie with an odd production background: Kong: Skull Island, a 2017 production from Warner Bros. that was apparently conceived as the second film in a cycle they’re calling the “Monsterverse,” a mashup of the King Kong and Godzilla legends which apparently began with the 2014 Godzilla reboot directed by Gareth Edwards and followed up with this movie, then two sequelae: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021). Charles had actually wanted to rent Godzilla vs. Kong from a Redbox machine but couldn’t find one in working order, so I went on Amazon.com and found that the cheapest way to get Godzilla vs. Kong was by buying a three-disc Blu-Ray boxed set with Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters as well. Then I looked up the three films on imdb.com and found not only that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was not only a different film from the 2014 Godzilla (which I already had and which we’d pretty much put in the good-film-that-could-have-been-way-better category: for my review, see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/godzilla-warner-bros-legendary-pictures.html) but actually the third movie in the cycle, as well as a throwback to the original Japanese Godzilla cycle, particularly the film Son of Godzilla (1967), which posited an island out in the middle of nowhere in the South Pacific that supposedly had evaded discovery from airplanes and other modern means of detection where a number of Toho Studios’ copyrighted monsters hung out and either allied with or fought each other.

Kong: Skull Island was supposed to be the second in the series and involved MONARCH, a super-secret research organization, either part of the U.S. government or at least funded by it, which under the guise of doing weather observations set sail for the mysterious Skull Island. Like the legendary Bermuda Triangle (which is actually referenced in the dialogue), Skull Island is supposed to have been the graveyard of various ships, including a U.S. Navy destroyer in 1944 which was discovered as a derelict with only one survivor aboard: Bill Randa (John Goodman), who never forgot the experience of Skull Island and insisted on forming MONARCH and setting up an expedition to it to find the monsters that supposedly dwell there and document their existence. The government turns down Randa’s requests for the money and personnel he needs to find Skull Island – which supposedly is surrounded by a permanent storm system in the atmosphere, which is why it’s never been seen from the air or otherwise documented by the normal surveying means that have eliminated “previously unknown lands” as locales for stories – and mount his expedition. Then Randa can get his expedition going because the U.S. has just withdrawn from active combat operations in the Viet Nam War and therefore there are plenty of U.S. military personnel in that part of the world to fill out his mission and also lots of equipment, including the helicopters that fly them to the island from an aircraft carrier that takes them most of the way there. He recruits the usual motley crew for the expedition, including British soldier of fortune James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston, whom we saw again after the movie in clips from a Marvel Cinematic Universe production, Loki, on an episode of the Jimmy Kimmel Show in which Kimmel was interviewing his Loki co-star Owen Wilson) and war journalist and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson, who according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post took the role because she wanted to play an action figure as opposed to the nearly helpless victim she portrayed in her best-known film, Room), along with the military man in overall command, Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson – and Charles questioned his casting because he didn’t think there were that many African-Americans in positions of authority in the U.S. military at the time – 1973 – this film is set).

The copters that fly Randa’s company to Skull Island are almost immediately brought down by a huge (140-foot, about six times the size he was in the original 1933 film) Kong, a surprisingly flexible-looking giant ape considering his size, in a scene that almost seems like Kong getting a twisted sort of revenge on aircraft for having brought him down at the end of the 1933 film. From there the film turns into an oddball mashup of monster movie and war story; one imdb.com contributor mentioned that Warner Bros. copied the iconic copters-against-a-sunset image from the posters for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Viet Nam war epic Apocalypse Now – only that’s not all they copied. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts duplicated many of Coppola’s famous scenes, including one of the helicopter crew flying in with suitably “inspirational” music on the soundtrack during which I joked, “I guess using the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ would have been too obvious.” (Charles counter-joked that if they’d used the “Ride” the audience would have been expecting someone to say, “Kong don’t surf!”) The biggest problem with Kong: Skull Island is the almost total failure to maintain a sense of suspense and terror – the things the creators of the 1933 King Kong (directors Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack and their writer, Ruth Rose, who was also Mrs. Schoedsack) did so well. We get an awful lot of a rapidly diminishing number of military and quasi-military people slogging through the jungle and some exciting and occasionally terrifying monster-attack scenes (my favorite was the giant flying spider that can jettison its legs and send them flying through the air to impale its victims – the first human we see lose his life to this thing ends up with the leg embedded into his mouth that makes it look like he’s playing the world’s biggest and most malevolent didgeridoo) before a plot of sorts eventually emerges.

The film began with a prologue set in 1944 in which an American and a Japanese soldier were saved from another one of the island’s monsters by Kong. They swore a bond of friendship with each other and now, in 1973, the Japanese soldier is apparently dead of natural causes but the American, Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly, who steals the film once he’s introduced), is still there. Naturally the writers – John Gatkin, story; and Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, script – make a good deal of the culture shock a man who hadn’t seen or heard anything from the outside world for nearly 30 years would experience. He asks if the war was over, if the U.S. won, if the Chicago Cubs (he’s from Chicago originally) ever won a World Series, and what is the weird sort of music the other people on the expedition are playing and when and how it displaced swing. (He mentions being a fan of Benny Goodman while the modern-day crew are playing a portable phonograph – a neat way of introducing music of the era without just plunking it onto the soundtrack the way Coppola did in Apocalypse Now – and listening to David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” I resented that a little because I personally like both Benny Goodman and David Bowie, just as I resented it a bit when the 1943 film Reveille with Beverly set up an opposition between classical music and swing, when I was sure that even in 1943 there were people who liked both.) Marlow has built a weird sort of watercraft scavenged from parts of wrecked planes, and he offers it to the expedition members as their only hope to get away from the monster-ridden parts of the island to the shore were a Navy ship is supposed to pick them up in exactly three days – and when we saw this boat in action on the water I joked, “Now it’s The African Queen.”

Marlow has also befriended a native tribe – yes, there are indigenous humans on Skull Island, just as there were in the 1933 King Kong – and there’s even a wall across the island, though it’s built not to keep Kong out but to ward off the really terrible monsters who live inside the earth and periodically emerge to consume whatever life forms they can get their hands, claws, beaks and teeth on. The nastiest one of these is a species called the “Skullcrawlers,” who when they first appear look innocuous enough – like naturally-existing green lizards scaled up to giant size – but turn out to be malevolent predators that, among other people on their diet, abruptly eat John Goodman. Director Vogt-Roberts clearly knows his way around a monster action scene but he has little sense of pace; the movie is just a dull slog through the jungle that occasionally cuts in a monster sequence. There are a few brief references to the original King Kong – notably a battle scene in which Kong lovingly cradles Mason Weaver in his left hand while using the other hand to fight off a nasty monster – and some in-joke references (notably the character names “Marlow” and “Conrad”) to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the original story source for Apocalypse Now. (The “explorer” character in Heart of Darkness was called “Marlow” in Conrad’s novel, but was changed to “Willard” in Apocalypse Now.) There are also some predictable anachronisms in the film, including terms like “embedded” and “deploy” that wouldn’t have been used in 1973, at least not to mean the same things they do now. And of course the writers couldn’t resist having all those big macho guys react with surprise and shock when Brie Larson’s characer shows up and they exclaim, “You’re a woman!” – a sexist gag I would have thought we’d outgrown by 2017.

Both Charles and I had the feeling that there was a much better movie possible from the basic plot and situations of Kong: Skull Island than the one that actually got made, and I was amused to find an imdb.com “Trivia” item that indicated director Vogt-Roberts had some of the same problems with it we had: “Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts co-wrote and appeared in the Honest Trailers of his own movie, highlighting some legitimate flaws with the film, such as massive (in his own words) structural problems, lack of character arcs for most of the human cast, and the fact that there are too many human characters to begin with. However, he still stood by the film and attacked the video made on the film by CinemaSins shortly before Honest Trailers was released. He also spent some time on Twitter attacking CinemaSins for their video on the film, calling them trolls and countering some specific sins.” Part of the problem with this film is not only did it have four separate writers, one for the story and three for the script, but the script writers’ credits on screen are linked with the word “and” instead of an ampersand – which is Writers’ Guild of America-speak to indicate that instead of working together as collaborators, each new writer took over from his predecessor. The result was a jumble of motivations and “takes” on the various characters, which was probably reflected in the rainbow of paper colors the scripts the actors worked from were printed on. The Writers’ Guild requires that each new writer or writing team assigned to a project must write on a different color paper from his, her or their predecessors so the Guild can later figure out who wrote what and therefore who contributed enough to a script to merit screen credit. One reason Hilary Swank accepted her role in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby was, she said in an interview, that when the script came to her it was entirely on white paper – which told her that there had been only one writer on the film, Paul Haggis, and therefore she wouldn’t have to figure out how to integrate different writers’ conceptions of her character into her performance. Obviously the people who acted in Kong: Skull Island didn’t have that luxury!

Look in Any Window (Scott R. Dunlap Productions, Allied Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8:45 p.m. I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that proved unexpectedly interesting: Look in Any Window, a title that’s an obvious knockoff of the 1949 classic Knock on Any Door (directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and John Derek – Bogie and Bo Derek, one degree of separation!). The film was shown as part of a month-long festival of films about what quaintly used to be called “juvenile delinquency,” though as one of the characters points out, “There’s a thing called adult delinquency, too,” and that’s basically the theme of the movie. It’s set in a small and relatively affluent suburban community – I don’t think the film specified its location but it looks likes the L.A. area – and the central characters are Jay Fowler (Alex Nicol), a civilian mechanic for the Air Force who’s just been fired from a job and returns from his assignment in Alaska with his dismissal notice, to which he responds by ramping up his already formidable alcohol consumption; his wife Jackie (Ruth Roman), who’s getting restive at home and looking for other emotional and sexual opportunities; and their son Craig (Paul Anka, in his third film), who’s become a peeping Tom, going out at night wearing a preposterous mask and scaring the neighbors as he spies on them. The other leading family in the movie are the Lowells: husband Garrett (Jack Cassidy, in his first film), a well-off car dealer (he drives an Alfa-Romeo sports car and we’re evidently supposed to think that represents his usual stock) who has enough money to have a swimming pool on his property around which much of the action centers; his long-suffering wife Betty (Carole Matthews), who’s having an attack of “the problem that has no name” well before Betty Friedan articulated it; and their daughter Eileen (Gigi Perreau), who’s trying to be a nice girl and ward off the attention of the neighborhood J.D.’s.

The film was produced by William Alland, who had got his start in films playing the reporter Thompson who does the interviews in Citizen Kane and then decided to become a producer himself. He not only produced this one, he co-wrote the script and directed as well, and while Look in Any Window is his sole directorial credit he’s actually quite good. In the 1950’s he’d been put in charge of Universal-International’s science-fiction and horror films, and there’s a quite impressive Gothic flair to much of the direction here. The plot gimmick is that Anka’s nocturnal wanderings and the efforts of the neighbors – including the town’s other teenage guys as well as a couple of LAPD officers, one a patrolman and one a detective, to catch him catalyze the situation and essentially lead to the revelations of all the town’s dirty secrets. It’s basically Rebel Without a Cause meets Peyton Place, and though Anka is top-billed he pretty much fades into the woodwork. At one point the three hard-core J.D.’s in the town offer to take Anka’s character to a “party,” promising him a sexually available girl, though it’s pretty clear they really want to ambush him and beat him up. Later Anka takes a sip of his father’s half-finished whiskey glass and at first can’t stand it, but eventually it emboldens him and he makes a crude pass at Elaine after she’s just returned home in disgust from a “date” with one of the J.D.’s, who drives a hot-rodded Ford pickup (we know it’s a hot rod because it has no hood and we see a gleaming carburetor mounted on top of its engine) and takes her on a “date” but really wants to have sex with her.

The adults are, if anything, screwing around even more than the kids: Garrett Lowell and Jackie Fowler are having an affair – and, like the adulterers in the recent Lifetime movie Secrets of a Marine’s Wife, they’re hardly bothering to conceal it, necking with each other in public in ways we feel would surely be discovered. At one point Garrett wants to drive out to Las Vegas at midnight with his wife for some quick play at the casinos, and when she turns him down he takes Jackie instead – and Jackie departs so abruptly she leaves the hose with which she was watering her lawn turned on. (Her son Craig turns it off in one of his nocturnal prowls.) Meanwhile the abandoned Betty Lowell spends an evening téte-a-téte with Lindstrom (Robert Sampson), a scientist who’s recently moved to the neighborhood. He’s a widower whose two kids are away in boarding school on the East Coast, and like every other maie in this movie (except Jay Fowler, who’s too plastered to do anything sexual with his wife or anyone else) he’s only after one thing from a woman … Look in Any Window is actually a surprisingly good movie – I wasn’t expecting much in the way of quality, but it turned out to be a tough-minded exposé of suburban amorality whose message was, “How can we expect our kids to behave when we don’t?” And there was at least one other Citizen Kane alumnus involved besides William Alland: the makeup artist was Maurice Seiderman, whom Orson Welles brought to Hollywood to figure out how to age Charles Foster Kane through the course of the film – but who didn’t get credit on Kane because the makeup artists’ union had blackballed him. (Welles took out an ad in the trade papers to credit his contribution.) If Look in Any Window has a flaw, it's it's raison d’etre, Paul Anka, who delivers a depressingly incompetent non-performance in a role Sal Mineo from the Rebel Without a Cause cast could have played to perfection – a shy, rather nellie wanna-be who isn’t really comfortable either trying to be a nice kid or trying to be a J.D. – but other than that Look in Any Window is a quite powerful, unsparing movie thqt deserves to be better known.

Inchon (One Way Productions, Unification Church, United Artists, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a peculiar movie made in 1980-1981 and funded by the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his worldwide Unification Church. The film was called Inchon and was based on one of the biggest battles of the 1950-1953 Korean War – or, as it was officially called in the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing it, a “police action.” The Korean War had its roots in May 1945, when instead of brokering a peace deal between the other allies and Japan – as the Japanese government had hoped they would – the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and sent an army to occupy the Korean Peninsula, which had previously been occupied by the Japanese. Like the Soviet strategy in Europe, which had basically been to send their armies as far as they could into the Nazi-occupied countries of eastern Europe and the eastern half of Germany itself, then claim rights over those territories and install friendly Soviet-style dictatorships in those countries, the Soviets sent an expeditionary force into Korea and essentially squatted in the north of the country. The final peace treaty between the Allies (the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union) and Japan set an arbitrary line across the 38th parallel and divided Korea into Soviet and American occupation zones. By 1950 these had become two separate sovereign countries – the North becoming a Left-wing Communist dictatorship and the South becoming a Right-wing military dictatorship.

Then, just after the success of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China in 1949, North Korea’s government under the leadership of Kim Il Sung (grandfather of current North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un) decided to invade South Korea and unify the country under their rule. The scattered U.S., forces did the best they could to aid what there was of a South Korean army to mobilize a resistance, but they were unable to do much until June 25, 1950, when the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing its member nations to intervene in Korea to block the military takeover of the South by the North. U.S. President Harry Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur, who had been running the U.S. occupation of Japan since 1945 (and who kept a bust of Julius Caesar in his office that led to people calling him the “American Caesar”), as supreme commander of U.S. and allied forces in Korea. By the time the war began in earnest, North Korean forces, armed with Soviet weapons, had easily swept through most of the Korean peninsula and occupied most of the south except for a small territory around the southern city of Pusan. Rather than land an army in Pusan and try to push their way up the peninsula to the South Korean capital, Seoul, MacArthur hit on the idea of staging a landing at Inchon, a port city on the west coast of Korea within striking distance of Seoul. His idea was to mount a huge amphibious invasion using 175 to 250 ships, establish a beachhead at Inchon and use that as a base to recapture Seoul and as much South Korean territory as possible.

Inchon the movie is a dramatization of the preparations for this invasion as well as the actual battle and its immediate aftermath. Its long-term aftermath was that MacArthur’s forces pushed north almost to the Yalu River, the boundary between Korea and China – and China responded by sending its own army in to fight the Americans and recapture Korea to the 38th parallel. MacArthur responded by asking President Truman for permission to use nuclear weapons against China and to mine the border on the 38th parallel with radioactive material so no one could safely pass over it. Truman thought he was nuts and fired him, but never revealed just why – so a huge mythology got built up around MacArthur and his supposedly “unfair” removal from command of a war he’d been winning (more or less). Truman lost any chance of being re-elected and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who’d commanded the overall Allied war effort in Europe in World War II, won the presidency with a pledge to go to Korea and negotiate an end to the war. He did so, with the uncomfortable result that all the lives lost and property destroyed in the conflict ended up having no effect at all: the two Koreas remained divided at the 38th parallel and North Korea has remained a Communist dictatorship while, after decades of rule by strongmen like Syngman Rhee, South Korea finally became a democratic republic in the early 1990’s.

My principal source for information about the movie Inchon had been the hilarious article about it in the book The Hollywood Hall of Shame by Harry and Michael Medved (before Michael switched from writing intentionally funny books about silly movies to unintentionally funny Right-wing criticism of Hollywood and its allegedly all-powerful “liberal elite”). I first heard of Sun Myung Moon in 1973, when he came seemingly out of nowhere to do lecture tours in the U.S. (he spoke in rapid-fire Korean and his English interpreter was Col. Bo Hi Pak, who was also an aide to Korean spy Tongsun Park, who cooked up a scheme to bribe leading U.S. politicians) to announce that God had appointed Richard Nixon to be the President of the U.S. and those pesky people investigating Watergate were therefore doing the work of Satan. He’d actually got his start in Korea 20 years earlier and made his debut on the world stage by sponsoring tours by a singing group called “The Little Angels.” They were presented as Korean orphan children organized to sing their hearts out and build worldwide awareness of the plight of their countrypeople – but in fact, at least according to the Medveds, most of the Little Angels’ parents were alive and well in Korea, regularly tithing their kids’ earnings to Moon’s organization, the Unification Church (so called because Moon’s proclaimed ambition was to unite all the world’s religions into one big church establishment under his direct control).

Throughout the 1970’s Moon’s minions expanded his operations in the U.S. and the Unification Church was frequently denounced as a cult who picked up impressionable young people, subjected them to indoctrination, forced them to break with their families and work hours on the street selling flowers and other items to raise money for the church, and generally breaking their will to resist whatever the church wanted from them. I remember attending the University of California in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s and constantly running into Moon’s followers – “Moonies,” as they were derisively called – on the street, importuning me to come to their public lectures, where the one time I went I was told about their wonderful conference center in Boonville where, I later found out, the indoctrination took place. Moon’s movement got enough bad publicity that he decided to whitewash his image by investing in American media, including starting a Right-wing newspaper in Washington, D.C. to compete with the Washington Post and buying other media properties. In the late 1970’s Moon and his followers at the top of the Unification Church leadership decided to make a big-budget movie; at first they considered doing a biopic of Jesus but eventually they hit on the idea of making the movie about the Korean War and in particular around the epic and all-important battle of Inchon.

They decided to open their coffers to recruit an all-star cast, including Lord Laurence Olivier to play Douglas MacArthur; Ben Gazzara as MacArthur’s assistant, Major Frank Hallsworth; Jacqueline Bisset as his estranged wife Barbara, who’s understandably put out that her husband has been having an affair with a Korean woman; Toshiro Mifune as Saito-San, a Korean friend of Major Hallsworth with a boat (we assume he’s a fisherman but the actual movie doesn’t make it clear just what he does for a living) who goes out on a dangerous mission before the invasion to de-mine the Inchon harbor so the U.N. ships can get through; Richard Roundtree (the token Black cast member) as a sergeant whose main function seems to be to drive the white cast members out of trouble; David Janssen (in his last film; he completed the visual part but some of his lines needed to be re-recorded after his death and the producers got impressionist Rich Little to do it) as a hard-bitten, skeptical war correspondent; and then-fashionable film critic Rex Reed as Janssen’s friend, who got stuck in the middle of the war when the North Korean attack occurred during a New York Philharmonic tour of South Korea (so Reed got to be in two of the most legendarily bad movies of all time, this one and Myra Breckinridge 10 years earlier).

The Medveds’ account of the making of Inchon is a comedy of errors in which Moon and his designated “producer,” Japanese media baron Mitsuharu Ishii (a well-to-do Unification Church member who had booked the Little Angels singing group on a tour of Japan), ran into trouble from South Korean authorities who held up the needed permits for filming (Moon was a highly controversial figure in his homeland and in his younger years, according to the Medveds, held the interesting distinction of having been imprisoned by both North and South Korea), tricky tide patterns that made the movie’s reconstruction of the Inchon invasion as risky as the real one had been, and a restive cast who were unused to working in as austere a capital as early-1980’s Seoul. Moon and Ishii first hired Andrew V. McLaglen – son of actor Victor McLaglen and an established action director best known for working with John Wayne – and when he quit the project they hired Terence Young, a British director best known for some of the early James Bond movies. To write the film they hired Robin Moore, best known at the time for having written the book The French Connection on which the hugely popular 1971 film had been based, and the Medveds quote an interview at the time in which he said he liked to work in the nude because “I feel clothing inhibits creativity.” Moore was co-credited with Paul Savage for the film’s story and with Laird Koenig for the script. Jacqueline Bisset brought along her own costume designer, Donfeld (his name was originally “Don Feld” but he apparently thought his credit would look classier if he mashed the two names together), who draped her in giant straw hats because he was worried that her face would swell up and get visibly burned in the hot Korean sun.

Laurence Olivier prepared for his role as MacArthur by interviewing Alexander Haig, who’d been an aide to MacArthur during the Korean War and later was Richard Nixon’s chief of staff after H. R. Haldeman was forced out by Watergate, and still later the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan who high-handedly tried to take over the U.S. government and push aside Reagan’s vice-president, George H. W., Bush, when Reagan was incapacitated by an assassination attempt in 1981. Haig reportedly told Olivier that MacArthur’s speaking voice sounded “just like W. C. Fields” – and Olivier took that to heart and uttered the grandiloquent lines Moore and Koenig crafted for him in the famously nasal tone and drawled-out intonations of the famous comedian. The film also went through some changes of title: it was originally supposed to be called Oh, Inchon!, then just Inchon! until it was finally stripped of its exclamation point (though the print we were watching included it). Sun Myung Moon screened a rough cut and demanded changes, including more scenes of gory attacks on innocent South Koreans by their evil, rapacious brethren to the North and a larger throng to greet the victorious MacArthur at Seoul’s Government House after the battle of Inchon and his subsequent reconquest of Seoul. This posed a problem as the shots of Olivier acting the scene at the real Government House no longer matched the crowd shots, and Olivier refused to make another trip to South Korea just for this retake. Instead they built a mockup of Government House in a studio in Dublin and filmed Olivier redoing the scene in front of a badly matted-in process screen shot of the cheering throngs. (The retakes reportedly brought the cost of filming this five-minute scene to $3 million.)

The film premiered in a 140-minute version at a gala event in Washington, D.C. – and got roasted by the critics. It had a general release in 1981 to virtually no business whatever and got cut down to a 107-minute version in 1984, which also bombed. Then in 2001 Moon’s minions put it on TV in a 4:3 aspect ratio version on a cable network they then owned, which had begun in 1985 as The Nostalgia Channel, showing mainly old movies – most of them in the public domain. In 1993 a Unification Church front group called Concept Communications joined two other companies to buy the channel, rework its programming format for faith-based “family entertainment,” and in 1998 Moon’s church bought out the other two companies, assumed sole ownership and changed its name to “Good Life TV Programs.” The church sold the channel in 2009 – it still exists but it now has the even sillier name “Youtoo America,” or “YTA” for short – but in 2001 Moon’s executives aired a 138-minute version of Inchon on Good Life TV, and that was the source of the grey-label DVD (obviously dubbed from a VHS recording off the air) we watched.

Inchon has a reputation as one of the worst films ever made, but it’s really not that bad – just mediocre. Charles suggested that director Young not only didn’t tell his cast not to overact but actually encouraged them to do so – and he got Olivier to give one of his legendary over-the-top performances rivaling other silly Olivier roles like the Mahdi (leading an anti-imperialist Muslim freedom fight) in Khartoum, the Nazi dentist and torturer in Marathon Man, the aging auto tycoon in The Betsy (the name is the super-car Olivier’s character brings to market) and Warner Oland’s old role as the cantor’s father in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. (I’ve never seen the latter two films but I’m going by reputation – and Charles actually did see the Neil Diamond Jazz Singer when it was new.) Olivier gave an interview that was devastatingly frank about why he did stupid movies like this: “People ask me why I'm playing in this picture. The answer is simple: money, dear boy. I‘m like a vintage wine. You have to drink me quickly before I turn sour. I'm almost used up now, and I can feel the end coming. That's why I’m taking money now. I’ve got nothing to leave my family but the money I can make from films. Nothing is beneath me if it pays well. I’ve earned the right to damn well grab whatever I can in the time I’ve got left.”

Inchon is the sort of movie that makes you feel like the writers had a checklist of war-movie clichés and they ticked each one off after they’d written it to ensure that all of them got into the film – the star-crossed local couple (the war interrupts their marriage, they get separated on a refugee march out of Seoul, the wife tears up her wedding dress to bandage wounded soldiers, and of course in the end they’re both dead); the war orphans taken in by Bisset’s character (she gets a group of orphaned refugee kids to a convent and tucks them all into one big bed – “Why do I expect her to start singing ‘The Lonely Goatherd?’” I joked. “Or maybe ‘My Favorite Things’?”); the bloody advance of the North Korean army against a batch of barely armed peasants that are sitting ducks; the strong-willed overall commander overcoming the petty objections of his immediate subordinates and ordering the attack; the scene of self-doubt as MacArthur is ready to scrub the mission because the lighthouse his commandos had to capture, take from the enemy and light so the ships could see where they were going hasn’t been re-lit yet – only, of course, just before he’s supposed to send that message the lighthouse does go on and the mission goes ahead. Lots of war movies employ some of the traditional clichés, but the makers of Inchon seem to have gone out of their way to include them all.

There are some good aspects of Inchon, including two genuinely authoritative performances by Ben Gazzara and David Janssen and a quite impressive musical score by Jerry Goldsmith (who obviously got the job on the strength of his Academy Award-winning score for Patton 10 years before) which would have made a good soundtrack album. Otherwise, though, it’s the sort of movie that goes wrong in a million subtle ways that add up to a story of real potential power being turned into mucilage – and the most reputable actor in the movie is ironically the most risible performer in it. Olivier’s acting is so ridiculous one imdb.com reviewer wrote that he was “simply so bad that every award he ever received should have had to have been given back.” (That seems decidedly unfair to the good movies and plays that won him those awards in the first place; they didn’t automatically become terrible simply because he acted so wretchedly in this.) Charles noted the continuity glitches – like MacArthur being referred to as supreme commander of the U.N. forces in Korea at a time when the U.S. servicemembers in Korea had no way of knowing that; or one scene in which he arrives in Pusan on a plane, is shown getting off it and then the next scene shows him back on the plane with no reason how or why he got there. (I briefly wondered if the scenes had been spliced together in reverse order.)

I’m glad to have seen Inchon and satisfied my curiosity about it, even though these weren’t under the very best auspices – Good Life TV showed the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio (the original theatrical version was 2.35:1) and blipped a lot of swear words from the soundtrack – though, oddly, they left “bitch” in while taking out “son-of-a-bitch.” It’s not that different from the big movies several U.S. studios, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, in particular, that had taken epic battles of World War II and dramatized them with big-budget production values and all-star casts (The Longest Day, about D-Day; the underrated Tora! Tora! Tora!, about Pearl Harbor; and Midway, as well as a MacArthur biopic starring Olivier’s co-star from The Boys from Brazil, Gregory Peck), though it’s not as good as most of its WW2 predecessors and Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, which is everything this movie isn’t – tight-knit, gripping, simply constructed, and morally ambiguous – remains my favorite film about the Korean War.

Johnny Cash: A Night to Remember (CBS-Sony Entertainment, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday night, June 19, KPBS showed one of their usual pledge-break specials which turned out to be a lot more interesting than most of them: a recently discovered filmed live performance of Johnny Cash from the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles on May 5, 1973. If the concert had one flaw (aside from the usual problems with PBS concert specials – the endless begging sessions American public television, lacking the guaranteed revenue stream from license fees for TV sets that funds the British Broadcasting Corporation, including the frustrating boasts that what we’re seeing on air is just a fraction of the full concert and to see and hear the rest we’ll have to make a substantial contribution to the station to get the DVD), it’s that the original director kept the cameras focused on Cash throughout. We heard his backup musicians but didn’t get to see them – a real pity because he not only used his original bassist (Marshall Grant) and drummer (W. S. “Fluke” Holland) from his Sun Records days but had Carl Perkins, composer of “Blue Suede Shoes” and a giant of white rock ’n’ roll in his own right, as his lead guitarist. Cash’s original guitarist, Luther Perkins (no relation), had died in 1968 and Carl Perkins was already a member of Cash’s traveling troupe – he used both Carl Perkins and the then-current generation of his in-laws, the Carter Family, as opening acts – so it made sense for Cash to press him into service as an accompanist. Though it remained Cash’s show, Carl Perkins supplied searing lead guitar parts that expertly accompanied Cash and added to the music. The Cash concert was pretty much what you’d expect and want to hear from him, opening with the haunting “Big River” from his early days (1955-1958) at Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records label from Memphis, Tennessee.

Sun Records is legendary for all the major talents it launched; in its early days as a Black-oriented rhythm-and-blues label it helped start the careers of B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas and Rosco Gordon, and once Phillips shifted to signing white artists who could do credible R&B and soulful country music he signed Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich (whom Phillips called the most natural talent he ever worked with) and Johnny Cash. The first song on Cash’s set in L.A. May 5, 1973 was “Big River,” one of his most haunting Sun recordings and a song he was inspired to write when he read a TV Guide article that began, “Johnny Cash has the big river blues in his voice … ”. Then he did Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” – it was the tradition in country music then that you started your career by selling a song to an already established major artist, and if it hit you could get a label interested in recording you. (Willie Nelson’s career started when he sold “Pretty Paper” to Roy Orbison and “Hello, Walls” to Faron Young, and it really got going when he got Patsy Cline to record “Crazy.”) Kristofferson reportedly placed “Sunday Morning Coming Down” to Cash by flying a helicopter to Cash’s home and landing it on his lawn during a party (before he sought a career in music Kristofferson had been in the military and had trained as a helicopter pilot), and that and two other songs he placed with major stars – “Me and Bobby McGee” with Janis Joplin and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” with Sammi Smith – did the trick and established Kristofferson as a star.

The next song on Cash’s concert set was one he introduced as one he’d just written while on tour in Australia, “The Ballad of Barbara,” and it’s a quite beautiful ballad (reminiscent of the old Scottish folk song “Barbara Allen”) and somewhat surprising that it isn’t one of Cash’s better-known songs. After that Cash did the inevitable “A Boy Named Sue” (and oddly dodged the sensitive words that got drowned out by bleeps on the original record; as he had in his command performance for Richard Nixon at the White House three years before, he changed the last line to celebrate his own son, John Carter Cash). Then he did a number that started out quoting two classic chain-gang songs, “Another Man Done Gone” and “Sylvie,” before settling into a song called “Goin’ to Memphis.” Of course Johnny Cash had indeed gone to Memphis – not after being released from prison, like the character in the song, but after quitting a dead-end job in an auto factory to show up at Sam Phillips’ doorstep to see if he could get a record deal and make his career in music. After the inevitable pledge break, the next selection was another medley, this one involving trains: it began with “Hey, Porter” (the first song Cash ever recorded; it was based on a poem he’d written and published in Stars and Stripes while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Air Force – incidentally Cash’s birth certificate gave his name as “J. R. Cash” and he got “Johnny” not from his parents, but from the recruiting sergeant who signed him up for the Air Force and insisted that the “J.” had to stand for something) and then included “Folsom Prison Blues” (a Sun-era song inspired by the 1951 movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, which Cash revived in 1968 when he did a live album at the real Folsom Prison and made a powerful recording that boosted him to a comeback), “The Wreck of the Old 97” (a song by Vernon Dalhart originally recorded for Edison in 1920 and remade for Victor in 1924 – the Victor version became the first country record to sell over a million copies, but for some strange reason Ken Burns’ mega-documentary on country music omitted Dalhart and his ground-breaking song completely) and ends with a hot version of “Orange Blossom Special” that’s a lot more exciting than Cash’s record. On it he plays two harmonicas, switching rapidly back and forth between them, presumably because they were in different keys, for a quite impressive and entertaining effect.

The next two songs were classic hits Cash had recorded with his second wife, June Carter, “Jackson” (ironically a song about divorce!) and their cover of folksinger Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.” The concert – or at least that part of it PBS presented to non-contributors – ended abruptly with “Lord, Is It I?” from one of the most peculiar projects of Cash’s career: The Gospel Road: A Story of Jesus, a 1973 film directed by Swedish documentarian Robert Elfstrom, who had previously (1969) made a “straight” documentary called Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, and now collaborated on a strange-sounding film in which Elfstrom directed and played Jesus (silently, since all Jesus’s thoughts and statements were reflected in songs), Cash co-wrote and did the soundtrack score, and June Carter played Mary Magdalene. Cash strolls through the production, dressed in his trademark black and serving much like the narrator, “The Evangelist,” in Bach’s Passions, giving a running account in song of what’s going on. The song from the film Cash performed at the Ahmanson Theatre is called “Lord, Is It I?” – in their book The Golden Turkey Awards Harry and Michael Medved ridiculed the title, but it’s actually grammatically correct (“Lord, is it me?” is more common but technically wrong) – and the song, which sets the scene at the Last Supper when Jesus tells his disciples, “One of you will betray me, and one of you will deny me,” is powerful enough it makes me curious to see the entire film, which is apparently available on YouTube.

It’s impossible for me to avoid comparing Johnny Cash to the one Sun star who had a subsequent career as big or bigger than his, Elvis Presley. Elvis may have been hunkier (at least until years of Southern-fried cooking ballooned his weight past what his diet of amphetamines and opiates could control) and had a more flexible voice – Cash himself admitted that he couldn’t sing faster than medium tempi or do rock ’n’ roll (what he called “frantic chanting”) – but Cash seems a far more interesting person, a man of much greater personal strength and integrity. Both Elvis and Cash succumbed to prescription drug addiction, but Elvis ultimately died from it while Cash recovered (albeit after what amounted to an intervention by his wife and their friends, who warned him that the path he was traveling could have led him to end up like Hank Williams, who died of an overdose while he was being taken to a concert date). What’s amazing about Cash’s career is how much he was able to accomplish despite only rarely deviating from the simple chunk-a-chunk rhythms he used from the early days at Sun. A man who began hanging out with Elvis at Sun Records ended by making a shattering cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” – and after 25 years at Columbia and an unhappy period at Mercury (where he got signed to the sort of contract that seeks to suck the last marrow of the bones of a great but fallen star’s previous popularity), he ended his record career much the way he’d begun it: working for a visionary producer (Rick Rubin at American Recordings) and doing a wide variety of material that reflected a personal vision rather than an attempt to follow some banal conception of “what the public wants.”

Johnny Cash became an American monument, and even now, 18 years after his death, in a way he seems alive as ever, an eternal American voice. The PBS special on him not only included 45 minutes of his 1973 L.A. concert but also an oddball documentary on his relationship to Britain – where most of his ancestors had come from (he was a descendant of King Malcolm IV of Scotland – son of the rightful heir who replaced the usurper and murderer Macbeth at the end of Shakespeare’s play, which Cash read aloud to his family when they traveled in Scotland – and the show displayed at least two castles with the name “Cash” on them) and where he had some curious connections, including British New Wave rock stars Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe (who was briefly married to Carlene Carter, June Carter’s daughter by her first husband). This film was made to promote a really peculiar album released in 2018 called Johnny Cash and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in which the original accompaniments to 12 of Cash’s best-known songs were filtered out and the Royal Philharmonic dubbed in. The arranger was Don Reedman, and he stated that his idea was to keep the symphony as much out of the way as possible – which makes one wonder what the point of the album was in the first place.

It’s especially weird when you remember that when Johnny Cash started recording, the big sound in country music was the sort of thing called “countrypolitan,” in which singers like Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow recorded with large orchestras, including string sections, and tried to sound as much as they could like the era’s mainstream crooners: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher. Cash became popular in the first place because country music audiences heard him as a return to the music’s roots – indeed, by omitting bluegrass-style violin and pedal steel guitar, he had an even more spare lineup than his great predecessor, Hank Williams, had used. So giving Johnny Cash’s voice the big-orchestra treatment 15 years after his death seems strange, to say the least – despite the claims of his son, John Carter Cash, that he would have liked it because he always liked to do new things – though you can’t argue with it commercially; the Wikipedia page on it calls it Cash’s “first charting album” since Out Among the Stars, a 2014 release of an album Cash had recorded for Columbia in 1981 – only the “suits” at the label regarded him as over-the-hill and not only rejected the record, they cut him from the label. Little did they know that he had 22 years left to live, and in those years (especially after his first album for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings in 1994) he’d make some of the most powerful music of his life!

Secrets of a Marine’s Wife (Front Street Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, June 20 Lifetime re-ran their “premiere” from the night beflre and added a new “premiere” in the immediately following time slot. The one from the night before carried the provocative title Secrets of a Marine’s Wife, but though it had its appeal there weren’t any big “secrets” about it. It was based on a true-crime story written by the late Shanna Hogan – we know she’s deceased because the closing credits contained “In Memoriam” dedications both to her and the real-life murder victim, Erin Corwin (Sadie Calvano). It starts out in Tennessee, where Eris is getting restive and impatient with still living with her parents. She sees her way out when local boy John Corwin (Evan Roderick) – the name is spelled “Cornyn,” like the current Texas Senator, on the imdb.com page but “Corwin” is what we hear on the soundtrack – wants to marry her just before he ships out to the U.S. Marine Training Center in Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Her parents warn her that she’s way too young to be thinking of tying herself down to just one man for the rest of her life, but she insists that she’s “of age” – which she is, barely – and she knows what she’s doing. John says he’s in love with her but he also has a mercenary reason for wanting a wife: that way they can save money living in married couples’ housing on the base.

When they finally arrive, the base’s community for married Marines turns out to be a hotbed of gossip, largely because the women have nothing much to do: while their husbands are out marching around the countryside playing at being (and at least ostensibly training to become) soldiers, their wives have nothing much to do except housework, games and gossip. John turns out to be a dull young man and about the only thing he does that answers the call of usual husbandly duties is get his wife pregnant. They even talk about the baby’s name, which John insists should be “Sam” whether it’s a boy or girl – but the pregnancy ends in a miscarriage and that evaporates whatever lingering interest Erin still had in her husband. So she’s easy prey for the attentions of fellow married Marine Chris Lee (Tom Stevens) – both he and Evan Roderick are easy on the eyes (and director Manu Boyer gives us plenty of shots of both men with their shirts off – yum!), but John looks pretty bland while Chris smolders with that old-fashioned ever-reliable James Dean stare. He’s also got dispensation from the Marine Corps to wear his hair relatively long – at least over the ears – and all around I thought Tom Stevens was way sexier than Evan Roderick. So does Erin – she and Chris start an affair that progresses from kissing to heavy necking and ultimately full-out sex – and so, obviously, did the Lifetime casting directors, who went with their usual iconography of making the male villain considerably sexier than the male lead.

The most curious thing about the affair between Erin and Chris as it’s dramatized here is how little they even attempt to keep it secret: both director Boyer’s camera and the other residents on base are constantly discovering Chris and Erin in various stages of amorous passion. The whole story is told as a series of flashbacks framed by a police investigation of Erin’s mysterious disappearance – one day she drove into the Mojave Desert and never returned, and the cops quickly reject the idea that her disappearance was accidental and assumed someone encountered her in the desert and killed her. The “mystery” angle isn’t terribly mysterious given that there are only two real suspects – Erin’s husband John and her lover Chris – and in the end the police find Erin’s car, locate another set of tire tracks near it, and deduce from that and several other pieces of information that Chris followed her into the desert in his Jeep, caught up with her, killed her by strangling her with a garrotte the Marines had helpfully provided him with as a potential weapon of war, then dumped her body down an old, abandoned mineshaft (it was established earlier that Chris is particularly interested in exploring mineshafts). Then he dropped a tank of propane gas – the kind you connect to gas-fired grills – and intended to shoot it, thereby starting a gas explosion that would collapse the mineshaft and obliterate Erin’s body and all other evidence of his crime – but he wasn’t a good enough marksman to hit the tank at a range of 150 feet below.

His motive was that Chris had got Erin pregnant, and while Erin’s plan was not to tell anybody and pass the baby off as John’s, Chris got hyper-concerned that his wife Nichole (Emma Johnson), already ticked at him over his extra-marital activities, would go ballistic and leave him if she knew another woman was carrying his baby. After Erin’s disappearance Chris and Nichole take their kids on their long-planned trip to Alaska following his discharge, but they’re stopped on the way by police. Chris is put on trial – apparently in a civilian court (presumably since he’s just been discharged) rather than a court-martial – and convicted of the murder. There’s an odd tag scene in which John returns to Tennessee and shares his grief with Erin’s parents. Secrets of a Marine’s Wife gets a few things right – it dramatizes how rough it is to be a woman in this ultra-macho community where nobody seems to have heard of “the feminine mystique.” and the most interesting part of Chris’s character is how he lets everyone else at the base believe that he’s actually fought in a war, where it turns out (as he admits to Erin, but no one else) that though he was in a combat zone, he was a “glorified security guard” and never actually fired a gun at anybody. Otherwise, it’s just a pretty ordinary piece of entertaining Lifetime trash, decently if not spectacularly written by Richard Blaney from Hogan’s book – but I still had a lot of fun looking at hunky topless guys!

Cradle Did Fall (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After re-running Lifetime’s last Saturday “premiere” this Sunday, they showed the Sunday “premiere”: Cradle Did Fall, yet another movie ostensibly based on a true story, though this time the writer, Adam Rockoff, changed the names of the characters and “tweaked” the story quite a bit in ways that were obviously intended to make it more dramatically interesting but, quite frankly, had the opposite effect. This time the central characters are Taylor Lewis (Ali Liebert), who just gave birth to baby girl Maya six months earlier and is beset with loneliness because her husband Dean is out of town on a long business trip (he’s some sort of United Nations official, and this time, for once in a Lifetime movie, we’re supposed to read “business trip” as just that and not a cover for “affair”); and Kathy Driver (Kirsten Robek), who runs into Taylor in the local park (the location is unspecified in the movie but the real story took place in Colorado Springs) and starts photographing her and Maya. Taylor is immediately suspicious that Kathy is stalking her and her baby, but Kathy assures her that she’s really an aspiring photographer. So far she’s specialized in landscapes but she’s looking to branch out into portraiture and make a career of it.

Kathy volunteers to shoot a set of baby pictures of Maya, and since she doesn’t have a professional studio she asks if they can do it in Taylor’s home. Of course it turns out her real motivation is she plans to kidnap Maya and give her to Kathy’s daughter Skyler, who has been unable to get pregnant even though she’s fixated on the whole concept of motherhood. Later we learn that this obsession has cost Skyler both her husband (one gets the impression he wanted to be a husband, not just a stud service) and her job. Kathy is determined to kidnap a child for Skyler not only because Skyler is so desperate for one, but kidnapping is how she got Skyler in the first place – she grabbed her two decades earlier and raised her as her own, with neither Skyler nor anyone else suspecting. Why Skyler’s biological parents never tried to find her is a mystery, but Kathy is worried that Taylor is not going to be so accommodating and will never rest until he finds her missing daughter – which means, to Kathy, that she will have to kill her.

Kathy and Skyler are helped immeasurably by the obligatory stupid cop, Detective Jim Gallagher – not listed on the imdb.com page but played by the usual avuncular African-American and portrayed as a near-total idiot who makes Inspector Lestrade look like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. Like most mystery-movie cops, he has a habit of fastening onto theories about the case that turn out to be totally wrong, and hanging on to them like a dog with a bone. First he’s convinced that Taylor killed her own kid as an outcome of post-partum depression. Then Taylor’s best friend, Lindsay Walsh, is ambushed at her home by Kathy Driver, who gained entrance by posing as another cop, “Cyndi Winters,” then sneaked up behind her and strangled her with her scarf. (So Lifetime showed two movies in a row that depicted deaths by strangulation – and with similar-looking weapons, at that.) Lindsay was white, not Black, but that didn’t spare her the fate of the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed for Her Pains in Lifetime’s sacred formulae. Kathy not only kills Lindsay, she strings her body up from a beam on her ceiling to make it look like she committed suicide, and left baby’s formula bottles and other detritus of infant parenting around to make it look like Lindsay had kidnapped Maya and then gone crazy over the strain and killed both Maya and herself.

In the end Taylor and Kathy have the usual Lifetime climatic fight to the finish and Taylor eventually kills Kathy in self-defense, and Skyler is arrested and put in a mental institution – but there’s one of the ominous tag scenes Lifetime has become addicted to recently, in which we get a credit reading “Two Years Later,” and two years later Taylor and her husband Dean (who’s actually quite sexy, especially for an actor playing an innocent husband on Lifetime!) are out in the park playing with Maya when we see them stalked by another photographer – presumably Skyler Driver, released from the mental hospital way too early. Lifetime has done other, much better melodramas about the lengths frustrated would-be mothers will go to kidnap babies so they can enjoy the thrill of parenthood – including Cries in the Dark (2006), in which a woman police detective investigates the murder of her eight-months-pregnant sister, in which her belly was literally sliced open so the killer, yet another frustrated would-be mother, could retrieve the baby when it was viable and essentially perform a D.I.Y. C-section (it was previously established that she had trained as a nurse, so she knew something about medical practice) so she could have “her” own kid at last. I remembered that one not only because it was unusually powerful and kept the gore to a necessary minimum, but because I formed an instant crush on Adrian Holmes, the actor who played the woman detective’s police partner, and I even posted a review to imdb.com urging Dick Wolf and the staff of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to hire Holmes as Christopher Meloni’s replacement if and when Meloni quit the show. (Alas, they didn’t.)

Cradle Did Fall could have been a more powerful movie if it had stuck closer to the facts of the case – the fictional Kathy Driver and her daughter avoid any presence on social media (one reason Taylor gets so suspicious of them), while Kathy’s real-life prototype, Juliette Parker, not only had a Facebook page (which gave the cops some of the information they needed to catch her), she was such a public figure she even ran for Mayor of Colorado Springs in 2019. But there’s one good aspect about it: director Keenan Connor Tracy, who takes Rockoff’s rather silly and predictable script and has a feast day with it, dressing it up as almost Gothic horror and showing lots of scenes in which Kathy seems to have a nearly supernatural power to stalk Taylor and to frame her for Kathy’s own crime.