Tillie and Gus (Paramount, 1933)

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

Recently I had broken open one of my latest DVD acquisitions – an 18-film boxed set that appears to contain all the films W. C. Fields starred in for Paramount and Universal from 1932 to 1941. I had got this largely for the film If I Had a Million, which I’d previously ordered as a stand-alone from a grey-label source that hadn’t tracked properly, so I looked for another copy and found I could get that one movie on Amazon.com for $17 while I could get the full box for just $10 more. The box overlapped in content with the two W. C. Fields Comedy Collection boxes I’d got earlier but had quite a few movies I hadn’t seen in years, including a marvelous 1933 vest-pocket movie (only 58 minutes) called Tillie and Gus of which I had fond memories when it showed up on Channel 36 in San José (which by a freak of UHF signals came in uncommonly well when I was growing up in Marin County, California just north of San Francisco) in the early 1970’s. My husband Charles had seen the list of other films on the first disc in the box and had said he’d love a chance to see the 1933 all-star comedy International House again – a great movie I’ve already commented on extensively in my moviemagg blog (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/01/international-house-paramount-1933.html), so all I’ll add now is it has fine comic performances not only from people you’d expect them from – Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Franklin Pangborn (as – what else? – a hotel manager) – but one actor you wouldn’t: Bela Lugosi. The film is about a group of representatives from various countries who descend on Wu-Hu, China (“played” by sets recycled from Josef von Sternber’g 1932 masterpiece Shanghai Express, with Marlene Dietrich and Clive Brook) to bid on a new invention, a “radioscope” (essentially a projection TV but one that can eavesdrop on any event anywhere in the world with no need for TV cameras or broadcast signals), and Lugosi plays the Russian representative, General Nicolai Pernovsky Petronovich, as a screamingly funny comic villain. (It’s a pity he didn’t get more roles like this, but his shaky command of English – he never learned more than a few simple sentences and learned most of his parts phonetically – probably put him at a disadvantage for roles like this.)

Tillie and Gus is a fine little movie but also an odd one; the title is clearly an homage to the 1930 MGM film Min and Bill, and it seems that by casting W. C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as Augustus and Mathilde Winterbotham, they were trying to create a middle-aged man-and-woman comedy couple similar to Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler at MGM. Tillie and Gus (as they’re known throughout the film) are an estranged couple who told their niece Mary Sheridan (Jacqueline Wells, later known as Julie Bishop) they were working as missionaries, she in China and he in Alaska. In fact he’s a fugitive wanted for shooting another man over a card game – though he wins the jury’s sympathy when he claims that in the near-fatal game he was holding four aces and the victim offered five (even for a W. C. Fields movie, nine aces in a card deck is too many!), while she runs a nightclub and gambling joint in Shanghai (so once again Paramount got to recycle a set from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express) which is so popular I joked, referencing Casablanca, “Everybody comes to Tillie’s.” Unfortunately, when we meet her she’s on the point of being cleaned out by an unscrupulous gambler who brought his own pair of dice – obviously loaded, which makes me wonder why she didn’t call him out on it and make him use another pair – and rolls 7’s over and over again until he wins the place from her. Tillie and Gus meet up when they receive word that Mary’s father, John Burke (we’re never told which one was his sibling, Tillie or Gus), has just died and Tillie, Gus, Mary and her husband Tom (Phillip Trent) are all entitled to shares of the inheritance.

Only there isn’t any inheritance because John’s corrupt attorney, Phineas Pratt (the marvelous character villain Clarence Wilson), has looted it all. The only thing the Sheridans have left is a crumbling old ferryboat, the Fairy Queen, and a contract to run it on the local lake. Even that is in jeopardy because Pratt has inveigled the local authorities to cancel the contract on the ground that the Fairy Queen is not seaworthy and has offered to buy the boat for $400. What he’s really after, of course, is to operate the ferryboat contract himself, for which he’s ordered a new state-of-the-art ferry, the Keystone (one wonders if the writers were thinking of Mack Sennett’s old comedy studio) – though, like the Fairy Queen, it’s still driven by paddle wheels rather than screw propellers. Pratt challenges the Sheridans to a race between the two boats, the winner to get the contract. Tom Sheridan has trained as an engineer (though he’s unable to complete college because the inheritance he was hoping for failed to materialize) and he’s confident he can repair the boat’s engine to get it in working order if Tillie, Gus and Mary can fix the craft’s non-mechanical parts to make it worthy as a passenger vessel. There’s one scene in which Gus is trying to convince the city inspector that the Fairy Queen is operable even though one of its railings collapses and the life preserver sinks like a stone when it falls off the boat. The big race is scheduled for the Fourth of July, and of course it turns out the way you expect it to – the Fairy Queen wins (partly due to the success of Gus’s sabotage efforts against it the night before – in one of the film’s most funniest scenes he gets into a deep-sea diver’s suit to tie the boat to the dock, with Tillie there to run the hand pump that in the pre-SCUBA days was the only way divers could get air under water, only she’s discovered by the captain of the Keystone and she has to stop pumping, while the captain puts his lit pipe in front of the air vent so Gus’s diving helmet fills with tobacco smoke) and Pratt’s villainy is exposed.

But it’s the sort of film in which the fun is getting there: aside from the deep-sea diving sequence there’s also a great gag in which Gus is listening to a radio show’s instructions on how to mix paint for the home (he’s planning to repaint the boat) and the Sheridans’ bratty kid, “The King” (Baby LeRoy, in his first of three films with Fields), changes the station to an exercise program. (With those paddle-wheeled steamers and overall air of nostalgia, the only thing that gives away that this film takes place in its 1933 present is this radio gag.) There’s also a goose that runs in, around and through the action, and late in the movie in which Baby LeRoy’s portable bathtub falls overboard during the big ferry race I was half expecting the goose to grab its rope and swim it to shore – only instead Tillie and Gus bail from the boat and use a life raft to rescue the kid, leaving Tom on the boat to feed fuel to the boiler and Mary to steer. Of course, Gus has inadvertently dumped all the boat’s remaining wood, so in desperation Mary pushes boxes of fireworks down to Tom (it was the Fourth of July, after all!) and Tom feeds them into the boiler, resulting in sparks that blind the captain and pilot of the Keystone and allow the Fairy Queen to catch up and win the race. Tillie and Gus is an intriguing movie, largely due to its director, Francis Martin, who was mainly a writer (he has a co-writing credit on this film as well, with Walter DeLeon as his collaborator and Rupert Hughes, Howard Hughes’ uncle, as author of the “original” story). Martin was mostly a writer – his last fiction film credit was in 1942, though he worked on two documentaries about unidentified flying objects in the early 1950’s and lived until 1979) – and imdb.com lists 16 credits for him as a director, but this is his only even marginally feature-length directorial effort.

It’s actually quite well directed, including an elaborate moving-camera shot in the early going (at a time when directors and cinematographers were publicly feuding over moving-camera shots and cinematographers were demanding their elimination because they were allegedly too hard to keep in focus) that was quite rare in a “B” comedy from 1933. It’s also a movie I’ve long loved because Alison Skipworth was a perfect foil for W. C. Fields, essentially a female version of him, who could keep up with him both as a roguish villain and a battler on the side of good (the way Marie Dressler had been in her MGM films with Wallace Beery which Paramount was clearly trying to emulate with Tillie and Gus). Skipworth is one of my all-time favorite character players, largely on the basis of her three films with Fields (If I Had a Million, Tillie and Gus, Six of a Kind) as well as Strictly Unconventional – a 1930 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Circle, in which she played a middle-aged woman who 30 years ago left her husband to run off with her lover, and since then has had a life with him as dull as she would have had if she’d stayed with her husband – and Satan Met a Lady, the 1936 version of The Maltese Falcon (made five years after the first film of it, with Roy Del Ruth directing and Ricoardo Cortez, Bebe Daniels and Dudley Digges as the star; the famous Maltese Falcon, with John Huston directing and Hymphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet, was the third version, made in t941), in which the character of Casper Gutman was changed into a woman, Skipworth played her and provided one of the few bright spots in a pretty dreary movie. Also, Baby LeRoy isn’t as obnoxious here as he was in his later films with Fields, The Old-Fashioned Way and It’s a Gift (where he was so much an attraction the opening title read “W. C. Fields in IT’S A GIFT with Baby LeRoy”), though Tillie and Gus is the source for one of Fields’ most iconic lines: asked, “Do you like children?,” he matter-of-factly mutters back, “I do if they’re properly cooked.”

American Experience: “Citizen Hearst,” part 2 (WGBH, PBS, 2021)

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

The Tuesday night schedule on KPBS has been quite frustrating of late because for the second week in a row they’ve devoted it to continuations of multi-night documentaries about fascinating Americans which I’ve watched anyway but have seemed abysmally incomplete because I didn’t get to watch the earlier parts. Last night the long-running series American Experience showed the second half of a two-part documentary on the life of William Randolph Hearst, almost inevitably called Citizen Hearst, a weird and back-handed acknowledgment of how much the historical perception of Hearst has been based on Orson Welles’ classic 1941 film Citizen Kane – and how the distortions of Hearst’s life in the script by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles, particularly their portrayal of Marion Davies as a no-talent hack, have been read back into the real history. (Citizen Hearst was also the title of the first major biography of Hearst, by W. A. Swanberg – who later on wrote an equally lucid and well-researched biography of the next generation’s big media mogul, Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce – though the biography they were working from here was a more recent one, The Chief, by David Nasaw, who was interviewed for the film.) Neither imdb.com nor the American Experience Web site notes who directed or wrote this documentary (imdb.com is generally lousy at documenting non-fiction films), but judging from this second episode – which begins in 1919 with the end of World War I (though it flashes back two years to Hearst’s meeting with Marion Davies, his mistress and companion for the rest of his long life) and continuing through Hearst’s death in 1951 – its “take” on Hearst’s life is a pretty familiar one of the youthful progressive (both politically and in business) who turned both more reactionary and more crotchety in his old age.

If anything, the show emphasizes how much Welles and Mankiewicz got right in their movie – images like the ones of Charles Foster Kane being buried in effigy and the oval-shaped logo with the man’s last initial as his company logo, affixed on the Hearst Building in New York City and outside “Xanadu” in Florida (read: San Simeon in California) in the film have real-life analogues in Hearst’s career. So does his opposition to the whole idea of organized labor – when Joseph Cotten as Kane’s lifelong friend warns him that working people are organizing into unions and are going to start demanding rights “as their due, not as your gift,” that tracks quite closely to the real Hearst’s fierce union-busting. The documentary makes it clear that the reason Hearst, who did a couple of bizarre political 180°’s in 1928 and 1932 (Hearst had endorsed Republican Andrew Mellon for President in 1928; Mellon lost the nomination to Herbert Hoover and fiercely opposed even the minor steps Hoover took to intervene in the economy to end the 1929 depression, saying the country should “liquidate everything” to purge the “moral poison” out of the system; in 1931 Hearst wrote an editorial that ran in all his papers calling for massive government deficit spending to end the Depression, he endorsed FDR in 1932 and then violently turned against him when the National Recovery Act of 1933 included a clause – later passed separately as the Wagner Act in 1935 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the National Recovery Act unconstitutional – that guaranteed American workers the right to organize and form unions), turned so decisively against Roosevelt was his support of organized labor.

Of course, it’s impossible to watch a documentary about William Randolph Hearst in 2021 and compare the real man to the fictitious “Charles Foster Kane” – and in particular to the biggest changes Welles and Mankiewicz made in their film from Hearst’s real life. As Welles himself put it, “William Randolph Hearst was raised by his mother. Charles Foster Kane was raised by a bank.” Indeed, as was detailed in part 1, when Hearst’s father died his mom still had control of the family fortune, and whenever he wanted money to expand his business and follow through on his ambitions (not only for the newspaper business but anything he wanted to expand into, as well as for his maniacal collecting) he had to beg her for it, which must have been humiliating. Phoebe Hearst finally died in 1919 and from then on W. R. had full control of his family fortune – and in the boom period of the 1920’s both his business and his private surroundings expanded before the Depression hit. The film makes clear that the nosedive in Hearst’s fortunes in the 1930’s came not only because the overall economic collapse hit him hard in his advertising income but because the working-class readers on whom he’d built his empire turned against him when he turned against Roosevelt and the New Deal. (This development is especially ironic now, when the white working class has turned so decisively against the Democratic Party and social-welfare programs in general – as I’ve argued many times before, the Democrats have so totally and decisively lost the votes of white men that the only way Democrats can win election is if enough women and people of color vote for them to make up for their loss of white men.)

It’s also impossible to watch this show without thinking of the parallels between then and now, and do the thought-experiment of who fills the role of Hearst and the other media barons today. Rupert Murdoch is probably the closest, both in the extent of his media holdings and his determination to use them to advance his political agenda; but towards the end, when the commentators started talking about the enduring legacy of Hearst and in particular the question that gets raised about whether it’s good for democracy for one man to have as much power over people’s perceptions of the news as he did (remember the line in Citizen Kane in which Kane’s first wife warns him, “Really, darling, people will think – ” and he angrily replies, “What I tell ’em to think!”), the name that usually gets mentioned is Facebook owner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s hard to imagine Zuckerberg as the Hearst of today because the usual criticism of Facebook is the opposite of that made of the Hearst papers in their heyday – Zuckerberg is considered evil by his and Facebook’s opponents precisely because of his refusal to exercise editorial judgment, his insistence that he can’t censor people’s posts and therefore his platform gets used by people spreading misinformation and outright lies. The show also depicts Hearst’s relationship with the movie industry, as he organized Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce Marion Davies’ films (as well as a movie he produced even before he met Davies: Patria, a bizarre serial in which a virginal heroine, played by dance star Irene Castle, foils a sinister plot by Japanese and Mexicans to take over the U.S. – as the show notes, Japanese and Mexicans were particular bêtes noires in Hearst’s demonology, and when the U.S. entered World War II Hearst’s papers strongly supported the internment of Japanese-Americans and – unlike other supporters of internment, whose arguments for it were more dog-whistle ones about military preparedness – Hearst’s editorials supporting it were open and out-front in their anti-Asian racism) and distributed his productions first through Paramount, then MGM and finally Warner Bros.

There’s a bit of print-the-legend in this film’s treatment of the conversion from silent to sound films – notably the statement that virtually all the great silent stars’ careers were killed by the talkies; the truth is that most of the major male stars survived the transition (Ronald Colman, William Powell, Gary Cooper and John and Lionel Barrymore all had major careers in both silent and sound films), and the women had as much or more trouble by the age a lot of them were hitting when sound came in (their early 30’s, a problematic time for actresses even now) than by the difficulties of dealing with sound (Gloria Swanson is mentioned as a victim of sound, but her first talkie, The Trespasser, was the biggest hit she ever had; what killed her career was her involvement with Joseph P. Kennedy and the lousy stories he picked for her to do) – there are honest assessments of Marion Davies. The film makes the point that Davies was actually a superb light comedienne – only Hearst thought producing and starring Davies in comedies was beneath his and her dignity, so he kept putting her in lavish costume dramas. There’s a great story about Hearst meeting with Frances Marion, who had written many of Mary Pickford’s vehicles, because he was trying to recruit her to write for Davies. At one point, to emphasize how seriously Hearst was pushing her career, said, “I am prepared to spend at least $1 million on each of Marion’s pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion told him. “Marion is a marvelous light comedienne, and you’re smothering her in production values.” When word of that conversation spread around Hollywood, the general reaction was, “At last! Someone told him what’s wrong with the way he’s pushing her career. The rest of us never dared!” The documentary also included a clip from the 1931 film Five and Ten, a talkie in which Davies’ fabled stutter is nowhere in evidence (apparently she stuttered terribly in real life, but she could speak without stuttering when she was singing or speaking pre-memorized dialogue for a film) and she holds her own in a scene with the far more highly regarded Leslie Howard.

In some ways the most fascinating parts of this documentary are the later ones, including the financial crisis Hearst went through in 1937 when his bankers called in their loans to him and forced him to reorganize and turn over control of his empire to their nominee (an event depicted in Citizen Kane but set earlier during the Depression); the loan he got from Marion Davies (who had taken the money he’d given her and invested it more wisely than he was doing with his own) that kept him going, and the unexpected bailout he got from the way the media business changed during World War II. The U.S. rationed newsprint paper during the war – which meant newspapers had to be smaller, which made them cheaper to produce – while the popularity of newspapers increased because even people who had boycotted Hearst over his opposition to Roosevelt in the 1930’s bought his papers, along with everyone else’s, to follow the war news. By the time the real Hearst died in 1951 (11 years after his cinematic avatar, Charles Foster Kane) his company was in the black again and Davies, to whom he’d given control of it on his deathbed, turned it over to his five sons (by his wife, socialite Millicent Hearst – who, unlike her opposite number in Citizen Kane, had been a teenaged showgirl when they met – the same pattern he followed with Marion Davies two decades later – only she’d re-invented herself as a society matron and regularly lent her name and the Hearsts’ money to charitable causes) for $1 and stayed out of the public eye for the remaining 13 years of her life.

The film argues that the real reason Hearst fought so hard to suppress Citizen Kane – to the point of banning any mention in his papers not only of Kane but of any films made by its producing studio, RKO (and cancelling a serial Hearst’s papers had been running of Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle as a cross-promotion with RKO to push the 1940 film of it in which Ginger Rogers starred and won her Academy Award) – was its portrayal of the three women in his life: his mother (whom the film’s commentary unfairly claimed that Welles and Mankiewicz turned into “a witch” – actually Agnes Moorehead’s one scene as Charles Foster Kane’s mother is sympathetic and gripping in its pathos as she reluctantly turns him over to corporate guardians because she knows she doesn’t have the expertise or overall smarts to raise someone who’s going to be very rich; once Welles no longer controlled her career, Moorehead got cast in a lot of unsympathetic roles, notably the murderess in the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, but she didn’t really play a witch – in both senses – until the 1960’s, when she got cast as the mother-in-law literally from hell in the TV series Bewitched), his first wife (a chorus girl who reinvented herself as a socialite in real life, a born-to-the-purple 1-percenter in Citizen Kane) and, most of all, Marion Davies, whose reputation is still suffering from the devastating portrayal of her Welles and Mankiewicz created and Dorothy Comingore brilliantly acted. And the documentary also depicts one other important relationship Hearst had with a woman, albeit a purely professional one: Julia Morgan, the architect of San Simeon and Hearst’s other building projects. The depiction of the construction of San Simeon reminded me of documentaries I’ve seen about Adolf Hitler (whom Hearst personally interviewed in 1934 and wrote a fawning profile of that, like all Hearst’s personal editorials, ran in all his papers) and the elaborate residences and fortresses he had constructed for himself with a similar money-is-no-object attitude towards them and an obliviousness to the engineering challenges they created. Of course, Hitler had an entire government treasury to play with while Hearst only had a private fortune, albeit a large one!

If I Had a Million (Paramount, 1932)

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the Lifetime movie The Perfect Wedding and then followed it up with a DVD of one of the quirkiest movies from Hollywood in the early 1930’s: If I Had a Million. This one was made in 1932 by an all-star lineup of stars, writers and directors from Paramount, though the main reason it gets shown today is that W. C. Fields was in it (it was included in the boxed set of 18 Fields films from Paramount and Universal I bought recently), centered around a story premise from writer Robert Hardy Andrews (oddly listed as Robert D. Andrews on his credit). An aging multimillionaire named John Glidden (Richard Bennett, father of Constance and Joan Bennett and a star in his own right in an earlier generation; his final film, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, would also cast him as an aging tycoon facing imminent death), whose going businesses include a shipyard, a steel mill, a construction company and a bank, is disgusted by both the people on his staff who would presumably take over his businesses after his death and the greedy relatives who are crowding around him waiting for him to croak so they can grab his fortune. (One of them has a bratty kid who plays a bit of the song “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” on a phonograph, and Glidden overhears it and says the kid is the only honest one of the bunch.) So, instead of leaving his fortune to any of them, he decides to pick 10 people at random from the phone book and give $1 million to each of them in a certified check – a form of money my husband Charles said banks don’t issue anymore, which guarantees that the money has already been earmarked for the check’s recipient and therefore there’s no chance the check will bounce. Andrews’ basic story frame introduces a number of different plot lines about what various people would do with such a dramatic windfall, and among the directors assigned to film the segments were Ernst Lubitsch and James Cruze along with Norman McLeod, H. Bruce Humberstone, Norman Taurog (who filmed the prologue establishing the basic plot and a surprise epilogue – more on that later), Lothar Mendes, William A. Seiter and Stephen Roberts. Surprisingly, the best directors didn’t always turn in the best sequences – between them Roberts and Humberstone turned in the best ones while Lubitsch’s and Cruze’s were the most disappointing.

The first segment, directed by McLeod (who after his Marx Brothers’ movies Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, seems to have become Paramount’s go-to director for zany comedy), features Charlie Ruggles as a put-upon worker in a china shop. He used to work in the firm’s office but he got a promotion to work on the shop floor – which technically included a raise, only every time he breaks a piece his pay is docked for it, so he’s actually making less money than he was. When he gets a check that’s $11 less than it would have been if he hadn’t broken anything, his wife (Mary Boland, who played the nagging wife of Charlie Ruggles in a whole series of their films together, including a later one with Fields, Six of a Kind) tears into him about it and he has a dream in which all the big, fragile pieces in the store (including a faux “Chinese” head) are glaring at him. Of course,.when he gets his random million he goes to the store, breaks everything in sight and then tells them to send him the bill. There’s a segment featuring Wynne Gibson – one of those actresses who got a big buildup but slipped through the cracks, though her performance here is indelible – as Violet Smith, a “woman of the streets” who in her opening scene gets pawed by a sailor who’s trying to pick her up in a bar (with the relatively honest depiction of sexuality in the so-called “pre-Code” era of 1932, the film doesn’t come right out and say she’s a prostitute but it comes as close as the filmmakers would dare to doing so). After Glidden bestows his $1 million on her, she uses it to rent a hotel room for one night and sleep in luxury – in a telling moment, she removes one of the two pillows from the double bed and puts the remaining one dead center to emphasize that this is one night she’ll be spending blessedly alone. The scene is one of the most powerful in the film and expertly directed by Stephen Roberts, who also did the movie’s final episode (once again, more on that later).

The next segment, directed by Humberstone, is one of the film’s grimmest: George Raft plays Henry Jackson, who has a long record for forgery – so when he tries either to cash the check or open an account with him, everyone assumes he’s forged it. As he gets more and more desperate (and the usual lackadaisical Humberstone stages his plight in shots that get closer and closer to proto-noir) Jackson ends up in a flophouse, where he doesn’t even have the obligatory dime for a bed for the night. He gives the flophouse owner the $1 million check, and the guy – who also assumes the check is no good – holds it to a gas jet in his establishment and sets it on fire so he can light his cigar with it. The scene everyone remembers in the film is the one with W. C. Fields, who plays Rollo, the live-in partner of retired vaudevillian Emily La Rue – played by the magnificent character actress Alison Skipworth, who made two more films with Fields after this (Tillie and Gus and Six of a Kind; she also played a sex-changed version of Casper Gutman in the 1936 film Satan Met a Lady, the second and weakest of the three versions of The Maltese Falcon, though she’s great in it) and was one of the few performers of either gender who could keep up with him on screen. Unlike a lot of other vaudevillians, Emily husbanded her money, and after she got too old to perform she opened a tea shop (though judging from its signage it’s also a full-service restaurant) and it’s doing well enough she can finally afford the one luxury she’s dreamed about all these years: her own car. (It’s interesting how as late as 1932 this film still treats a personal automobile as a luxury item.) She doesn’t seem to be able to drive, so Rollo does that for her. (The imdb.com page for the film listed Rollo’s last character as “La Rue,” indicating that he and Emily are married, but there’s nothing that specifies that in the actual film – and the framing scene that introduces Emily, talking to one of her own vaudeville friends, suggests that they aren’t: her friend asks Emily whatever happened to Rollo, and Emily says, “He’s right here.”) Alas, a hit-and-run driver crashes into Emily’s car and totals it just minutes after she got it, and so when Emily gets her $1 million she and Rollo use it to buy a fleet of used cars, hire a cadre of drivers and organize what Charles jokingly called a “road-rage squad” to drive all road hogs off the streets and demolish their cars. The sequence, directed by Norman McLeod, is brilliantly staged and quite funny even though it harkens back to Mack Sennett and the Keystone style of broad slapstick.

Then the film shifts towards irony as one of Glidden’s $1 million handouts goes to John Wallace (Gene Raymond) on the night he’s about to be executed for his participation in a robbery in which someone was killed. When his $1 million arrives he’s sure he’ll be reprieved so he can use his good fortune to find a quality attorney who can get him a new trial, or at least have his sentence commuted to spare him the electric chair. His wife Mary (Frances Dee) visits him on the night of his scheduled execution, and though he doesn’t really want to see her under these circumstances he’s still convinced the money will set him free – until they take him to the death chamber and he realizes they’re going to kill him on schedule, though at least he can take comfort in that his wife will be able to survive him comfortably. This could have been one of the film’s most powerful scenes, except that it goes haywire in Cruze’s direction; he’d been a top director in the silent era, had seemed to make the transition to sound all right with his 1929 film The Great Gabbo, and a year after If I Had a Million would make a marvelous movie, I Cover the Waterfront, but within five years he’d be reduced to directing “B”’s for Republic (including the original version of Gangs of New York, later remade by Martin Scorsese – who also made The Aviator, a biopic about Howard Hughes, who produced James Cruze’s great 1928 anti-racist film The Mating Call), but Gene Raymond and Frances Dee, usually understated actors, both turn in such intensely overwrought performances (the worst in the movie) that Charles expected a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style denouement in which it would turn out they were actors doing a play about a man about to be executed.

The next segment is “The Clerk,” written and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, which casts Charles Laughton as an anonymous office drone named Phineas T. Lambert who works in a huge office with a whole regiment of other people, sitting at identical desks lined up in a military-style formation (a depiction of office work copied from King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd and used by innumerable directors since, including Alfred Hitchcock in his early masterpiece Rich and Strange and Billy Wilder in The Apartment). When he gets his million he ascends a series of staircases and goes through a succession of doors announcing the occupants of these private offices until he gets to the one of the president of the company and blows a big “razzberry” in his face. Garson Kanin’s book Hollywood recalled this as one of the greatest scenes in moviedom, which it isn’t; it’s a disappointing payoff and the earlier “China Shop” sequence with Charlie Ruggles had done the gag of the put-upon proletarian getting his revenge far better. The next scene is one of those rather sad stories in which one laughs but one also feels sorry for the three buddies who literally let a fortune slip through their fingers: they are Marines Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper), Mulligan (Jack Oakie) and O’Brien (Roscoe Karns) – one wonders if there’s an ethnic slur intended given that all three have Irish names. They are cut-ups who brawl, gamble and spend most of their time in the guard house; in one of their rare evenings outside they chat up a woman who works at a hot-dog stand near a carnival, and they trade the $1 million check – thinking it’s someone’s gag – to the stand’s owner in exchange for hot dogs and $10 so they can take her to the carnival. They have their evening with her, and the next time they see her she’s getting into a fancy car with the hot-dog stand owner, both of them dressed to the nines, and Gallagher stares at the camera and, with Gary Cooper’s fabled laconicism, says, “I wonder if that check was good after all.”

The final segment, directed by Roberts, is arguably the best part of the film: it’s set at an old-age home for women run by Mrs. Garvey (Blanche Frederici), who runs the place with all the sensitivity of Auschwitz and refuses to allow the inmates – oops, I mean the residents – to play cards with each other or do anything else that might be remotely fun. This time Glidden’s $1 million goes to Mary Walker (May Robson), about the only resident of the house who rebels against Garvey’s insane rules and regimentation, and when she gets the money she uses it to buy the house, force Mrs. Garvey and the establishment’s equally obnoxious cook to sit in rocking chairs all day (she continues to pay them but says she’ll fire them if they do anything else), and turns the house into a fun place where she and her fellow senior women can play cards to their heart’s content and use the kitchen to make anything they want to eat. This includes not only biscuits (before her windfall Mary had been chewed out by Garvey and the cook for wanting to use the home’s kitchen to bake biscuits) but pies, which she starts regularly sending to Glidden at his office so he can enjoy them and she can thank him for the windfall. In fact Glidden is so overjoyed at finally being treated like a human being that he starts hanging out at the old women’s home and having a good time, finally having realized that he had essentially wasted his life working so hard to become ever-richer and he had neglected the simple pleasures that really give life meaning. The ending is startlingly similar to that of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, made six years later, and the whole film is full of Capra connections: May Robson would star in Capra’s Lady for a Day the next year (and Capra in his autobiography made it seem like she’d never made a movie before; in fact it was her 27th film: she made her debut in a 1908 one-reeler and by the time she made If I Had a Million she’d been in important movies like the first, silent version of Chicago – playing the prison matron Queen Latifah played in the 2002 musical – Letty Lynton with Joan Crawford and Red-Headed Woman and Dinner at Eight with Jean Harlow). Gary Cooper would later make two films with Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe, and one of the writers on this project, Sidney Buchman, would work with Capra on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

At least two of the writers involved in If I Had a Million, Buchman and Lester Cole, were Communist Party U.S.A. members, which may account for the veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist sentiments sprinkled throughout this movie – and the final sequence is also an indictment of how the U.S. treated old people before the advent of Social Security, where they were utterly dependent on the ability and willingness to support them of their kids (and if they hadn’t had kids they were really up the proverbial creek) and were often reduced to begging or scrounging up whatever sort of living they could. (Of course, today’s Libertarian Republicans would call those “the good old days.”) If I Had a Million is also an indication that the modern-day anthology movies aren’t anything new (they weren’t even in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when British producers made Quartet and Trio, anthology films based on short stories by W. Somerset Maugham), and as with the 1934 film The Captain Hates the Sea – a very strange movie that seems to go out of its way to avoid a plot through-line – it plays so much like a Robert Altman film I wonder why Altman didn’t seek the rights and remake it. Charles and I both noticed plot holes in the movie – notably that at the start all John Glidden’s businesses are going concerns, and he would have had to liquidate them to turn them into cash, a process that would have taken months – yet his decision to give away his money is presented as impulsive. (Of course it’s possible his business would have had a $10 million cash reserve as well as the actual illiquid businesses.) And Charles also pointed out that in the George Raft sequence, Eddie Jackson could have gone to the bank that actually issued Glidden’s check, where they would have known it was good, opened an account and withdrawn some of the money immediately – but this is one movie in which the Kafka-esque predicament Jackson finds himself in is more powerful drama than a more accurate story would have been.

The Perfect Wedding (MB Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

My husband Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” The Perfect Wedding, at 8 p.m. I was somewhat surprised that, unlike most of the “Perfect … ” movies (in which the heroine thinks she’s found the “perfect” nanny/husband/teacher/nurse/whatever and finds that “perfect” means “psycho”), this was not written by Christine Conradt. Instead it was written by Andrea Canning and Elizabeth Stuart (Canning is a familiar name to me from other Lifetime films, though Stuart isn’t) and directed by Roxanne Boisvert. The story deals with Brandon Holt (Eric Hicks) and Lindsay Williams (Tenika Davis), who are already living together but are planning a wedding ceremony in a week. Brandon is a white man and Lindsay is a Black woman, and once again it’s nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which an interracial relationship is presented as no big deal – even though Hicks and Davis have about zero chemistry together and, unlike some of the other interracial couplings we’ve seen in recent Lifetime movies, it’s hard to accept them as being able to make a long-term commitment work. At least part of that may be due to the structure of the Canning-Stuart script, which through most of the movie depicts Brandon and Lindsay on the “outs” after the events of their respective bachelor parties. Brandon’s is no big deal – just him and his work buddies sitting around a card table playing poker – but Lindsay’s is: she goes to the bar of the hotel where all of them seem to be staying prior to the wedding with two friends, Catherine Tucker (Lydia Zadel) and Dina Metras (Julia Borsalino). (The imdb.com page on this movie lists her name as “Dana” but “Dina” is what I heard on the soundtrack.)

Dina is Lindsay’s true friend, but Catherine – unbeknownst to Lindsay – is out to break her and Brandon up so she can have Brandon, whom she works for as his assistant at the Standforth advertising agency, for herself. So she hires an escort named Jake Powell (Nicolas James Wilson, not surprisingly the sexiest guy in the movie) to crash the bachelor party, offer Lindsay a drink that he’s actually spiked with a drug, then take Lindsay to a room in the hotel and leave her there, with her clothes strewn about the floor and an empty condom wrapper on top of the dresser, to make it look like Lindsay and Jake had sex. Canning and Stuart are not going for suspense here; we learn almost immediately that Catherine masterminded this whole thing to break up Brandon and Lindsay, and we see her paying off Jake and telling him, “Lose my number.” The incident has the effect Catherine wanted – Brandon has a jealous hissy-fit and tells Lindsay the wedding is off and he never wants to see her again, which since they were already living together is a bit of a problem. Faithful Dina offers to put Lindsay up in the home of Dina’s parents, which she’s house-sitting for them while they’re spending the summer in Europe, and the two are determined to find out who the guy was that set her up and who arranged for him to do so. Only their amateur sleuthing efforts hit a snag when Jake contacts Catherine and tries to blackmail her for more money or he’ll report her to the police, and Catherine responds by getting in her car and running Jake over, killing him. Lindsay and Dina have already obtained Jake’s photo from hotel security but they had no idea who he was until they caught the TV news coverage of the supposed hit-and-run “accident” that killed him. They contact the escort service he worked for but find he wasn’t working a gig for them that Saturday night.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s scheme to get Brandon by eliminating the competition hits a snag in the person of Brandon’s mother Nancy (Barbara Gordon), who never thought Lindsay was good enough for him and wants to fix him up with her yoga teacher, an old family friend named Brooke Weston (Erica Anderson). Brandon insists that the wounds from his breakup with Lindsay are too fresh for him even to think about dating again, but mom tricks them by inviting them to dinner at the hotel restaurant, then claiming she has to go to a nonexistent “book club” so Brandon and Brooke can be alone. It’s not clear where this relationship might otherwise go, but as it turns out it goes nowhere because Catherine worms the secret out of Brooke by taking her yoga class and gossiping with her. She also overhears that Brooke, even though she makes her living off physical fitness, has a “heart condition” that makes it dangerous for her to jog. So Catherine is able to eliminate Brooke by overpowering her in her office at the yoga studio and giving her an injection of potassium chloride (the drug they use in lethal-injection executions, by the way) – most Lifetime movies that depict murder by injection at least establish that the person giving the injection had been a nurse or had had some medical training, but this time the writers couldn’t be bothered. Meanwhile Lindsay and Dina turn up William “Billy” Simpson (Drew Moss, who’s supposed to be your typical Lifetime loser schlub but whom I found quite sexy in a bear-ish way), Jake Powell’s former roommate, who’s living in a house owned by Catherine and turns out to be her half-brother. Catherine shows up at Billy’s place just after Lindsay and Dina do, and warns him not to tell her secrets or else – which I presumed was Andrea Canning and Elizabeth Stuart signing his death warrant, but in fact he’s alive and well at the end and Lindsay and Dina are able to get him to come with them and report his evidence to the police. It turns out that he and Catherine are half-siblings (same mom, different dads) and that Catherine had previously obsessed about a man she was working for who died a week after they broke up. The official verdict was he’d been killed by a mugger, but it was really Catherine beating him to death in a jealous hissy-fit after he told her he was leaving her.

Lindsay and Dina rush to contact Brandon before he leaves on a business trip to New York with Catherine in tow, saying she’s dangerous and under no circumstances should he make the trip with her, especially because New York is where she killed her last boyfriend. (The story is set in Philadelphia; Lifetime often isn’t specific about where their plots take place, but this time they were – though for some reason Brandon and Catherine are depicted as planning to fly to New York for their “business meeting.”) The ending is oddly anticlimactic for a Lifetime movie – no one produces a gun, no one has a struggle to the death and Dina is not marked for death as the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine (usually the heroine is white and the best friend is Black, but this time Canning and Stuart seemed to be reversing the usual races of these characters). Instead Catherine is simply arrested for Brooke’s murder – the cops, smarter than usual in crime fiction, figured out that Brooke was murdered after her body was autopsied and the track mark from Catherine’s hypodermic was discovered – though they seem uninterested in charghing her with killing Jake as well, maybe because the evidence wasn’t as strong or maybe because Jake was merely an escort and thereby marked in police jargon as “NHI” (“no humans involved”). There isn’t even a tag scene showing Catherine in jail, either obsessing about Brandon (still) or making a play for another male authority figure, a prison official or a guard. Instead the final scene shows the “Perfect Wedding” going off as scheduled, albeit a week late (during which time Brandon’s mom had been bitching about having to eat the non-refundable deposits she’d paid to the caterers, photographers and other suppliers), after Brandon begs Lindsay’s forgiveness for doubting her. I still don’t find much chemistry between Eric Hicks and Tenika Davis, and I was also disappointed that we didn’t get a soft-core porn scene between them (I get off on the color contrast between the two bodies in interracial sex scenes and was upset I didn’t get my kinky thrill from this one), but The Perfect Wedding is a workmanlike Lifetime thriller with an acceptable instead of truly inspired performance by Lydia Zadek as the “bad girl.”

2021 Global Citizen Concert (Global Citizen Foundation, ABC-TV, aired September 25,. 2021)

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

Yesterday I spent the entire day at home, watching more than nine hours of the 2021 Global Citizen telecast, an annual event designed to build awareness, funding and the political will to deal with human-caused climate change and global poverty. The event was actually scheduled for 24 hours and encompassed concerts in various cities, including Paris (where the opening ceremony was held), New York, Los Angeles, London, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Sydney and Lagos (the capital of Nigeria), with special one-artist presentations from places like Tuscany (Andrea Bocelli), Johannesburg (a South Afrkcan dance troupe) and Seoul, South Korea (so they could accommodate the inexplicably super-popular Koirean boy group BTS, who are still cute but getting older and noticeably heavier, while their music remains a confusing bowl of various ear candies; as I’ve joked about BTS in previous TV appearances, sometimes they sing in English, sometimes in Korean, and sometimes in a gibberish mash-up of the two). I watched the program from 10:45 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time, and the concert telecast (on YouTube – ABC was supposed to show some of it but they decided college football was way more important, so I was stuck to listening and watching some of today’s leading pop musicians on a tiny fragment of a computer screen and with very faint sound even though I turned my computer up to full volume – I can see why people are buying stereo systems these days not to connect to a turntable or a CD player, but to a computer or smartphone) during those hours featured almost exclusive Paris and New York. Not that it was all that easy to tell which artists were performing at which venues, because the concert organizers ordered that the stages in every city look exactly the same, with a giant red ring enclosing the performers.

The first song I saw and heard was Elton John doing his star-making 1970 hit, “Your Song” (and doing it in a considerably lower key than he did then – he started as a tenor but is now definitely a baritone, and an old, croaking baritone at that), and “Rocket Man” (an ironic choice for this particular event, if only because it’s Donald Trump’s favorite Elton John song and we all know Trump thinks – if he can be said ever to think at all – that human-caused climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China to get the U.S. to destroy its own economy). Elton John has acknowledged that he’s had surgery on his vocal cords to remove nodes, and that on top of the natural effects of age (especially on untrained voices) has left his voice a shell of what it once was. Before I turned on he’d sung “Tiny Dancer,” one of his most beautiful songs – but not the way he sings it now. When he and Miley Cyrus guest-starred on Stephen Colbert’s show, their arrangement was that they would do whatever song she selected from his catalogue – and she picked “Tiny Dancer,” which I thought was gratuitously cruel to him. This time he had no one to blame but himself. He deleted the “oh no no no” falsetto break from “Rocket Man” because those notes are not in his voice anymore, and Elton John never had that great a voice to begin with. What made him a star was the fabulous quality of his songs and a voice that was serviceable enough to do justice to them.

After that came the one singer on the program whose voice was truly revelatory: Angelique Kidjo from Nigeria (though she was performing not in Lagos, but in Paris), who did two songs – one of which I variously guessed the title as “Which One of Us?” and “We Need Each Other,” and the other was her anthemic “Mama Africa.” In a show in which most of the performers were professionally effective but on the bland side (among the artists in today’s music I’d like to have seen there who didn’t perform were Rhiannon Giddens, Brittany Howard, Maren Morris and Tenille Townes, all of whom would have given emotional shots in the arm of these somewhat dull proceedings), Kidjo’s pieces grabbed the heartstrings and wrenched them. She’s someone I’d certainly like to hear more of! (If my husband Charles reads that he’ll think, “Oh, no. He’s going to flood the house with Angelique Kidjo CD’s.”) The next artist was an Egyptian-born opera singer named Fatma Said, who sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” (a song that gets trotted out on these all-star social-conscience concerts even though it also literally got him killed; as Newsweek magazine reported shortly after John Lennon’s murder, his killer was not a “deranged fan,” he was a Fundamentalist Christian who had never forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus or for writing a song with the line, “Imagine no religion,” and he’d been part of a prayer group which had prayed, “Imagine, imagine John Lennon dead”). She sang the first two choruses in the usual keys most female singers use for “Imagine,” then went up for the third chorus and started to sound like an opera singer – though of course I can’t judge how good an opera singer she is until I actually hear her in opera. Then they showed a girl group from Buenos Aires doing a song in Spanish whose title I guessed as “Numerán.”

The next “name” act was the Black-Eyed Peas, which did four songs that were mostly rap – though they have a fine female soul singer in their lineup they used her only as punctuation between the raps, and I’d like to hear more of her. The show then cut to Johannesburg for a South African group named Shi Man Josi and cut back to Paris for a dance by the Lemonade Dance Company. (What is it with lemonade in pop music these days? Beyoncé;s big album, for which she did those ridiculous videos that looked like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl, was called Lemonade, and Tenille Townes’ glorious debut album was called The Lemonade Stand.) The next act up was Christine and the Queens, an all-female singing group (though Wikipedia lists her as a solo artist, true name Héloïse Adélaïde Letissier, there were certainly more than one of her on stage in Paris yesterday!) doing four songs, one of which I marked as “Bird Song” in my notes if only because it contained the word “oiseau” (French for “bird”) and the other three in English, whose titles I guessed as “Missing Out,” “To Heal,” and “Does It Matter?,” along with an intriguing cover of George Michael’s “Freedom.” (To my mind the best song ever written called “Freedom” was the one Richie Havens largely improvised at Woodstock; because of the traffic jams leading up to the festival site Havens was the only musician able to get there for several hours; because there was no one else the organizers could put on stage Havens played through his entire repertory and then made up “Freedom” on the spot, basing it largely on the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”)

The next band up was an Italian rock group called Mánaskin – it’s an indication of how far rock has fallen from its long-time top of the perch of popular music, replaced by rap and “EDM” (“electronic dance music”) that they were about the only hard-core rock band in the part of the concert I saw – who sang in English and sang mostly about sex, either how excited they are about getting it from their current partners or how angry they are at being denied it by their exes. Both the lead singer and the drummer performed shirtless, which was nice – they are attractive (considerably more so than the pioneer of this sort of thing, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who goes on performing topless even though he no longer has the body for it) and a brief poetry reading from an African-French poet, Kerry-Gladys Ntirampeda. The next set was six songs by yet another nondescript young would-be dance-music diva, Doja Cat, whose titles I recorded as “Millions,” “Piggy Like That,” “I Like It,” “Principal,” “My Twin’s Big Like Tia” (actually the song of hers I liked best, even though “my twins” appeared to refer to her tits). The next song was one of the concert’s highlights: a medley of “Get Up, Stand Up” and “One Love” by Bob Marley, performed in multiplex fashion by various all-stars among the different concert venues, led off by Nile Rodgers in London, someone my notes record as “Marie Kelly” but that’s probably me garbling an African name from Lagos, Angelique Kidjo from Paris, Jon Batiste (Stephen Colbert’s musical director) from New York, Dalita Goodron from Sydney, Adam Lambert from L.A., Anit Kapoor from Mumbai (apparently she’s one of those people who’s a major star in India even if no one in the rest of the world has heard of her), Cyndi Lauper and the Black-Eyed Peas (New York) and Alessia Cara (also probably from New York since that’s where she played her own set later on) and Marley’s son Skip (so many of Marley’s sons have taken up the family business it’s hard to keep track of them all). The idea of an all-star rendition with different singers each singing a small slice of a song started with Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” – an original song by Geldof that kicked off the whole charity fad of raising money to feed starving people in a Third World country and led to the Live Aid concerts in 1985 and the “We Are the World” phenomenon (more on that later).

The show cut back to Paris at this point for the final act in their portion of the program, Ed Sheeran, who played six songs whose titles I recorded as “Arrow to the Heart,” “We Fell in Love Where We Are,” “Tell Me When It Kicks In,” “You Look Perfect Tonight,” “I’m in Love with Your Body” (which I think was his star-making hit) and “Bad Habits Lead to You.” I may not have transcribed the song titles accurately but you get the idea: Ed Sheeran is one of those cute guys (though, like the BTS members, he’s not as cute as he used to be) who writes obsessively about sex and tries to spread a thin romantic veneer of romance and affection over songs which are mostly about his sex drive. He reminds me of all those self-consciously “sensitive” singer-songwriters who cluttered up the music scene in the 1970’s, and when he’s not getting too raunchy his music is inoffensive but it’s also bland. One gets the impression that if one woman doesn’t yield to his dubious charms (I’m assuming he’s straight, though I can’t remember any lines in his songs that specify a gender for his love objects) there’ll always be another one available. Then came one of the highlights of the show: Cyndi Lauper performing her two trademark songs, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “True Colors.” She did “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” better than she had in 1983, I thought – slower, more soulfully (perhaps making that fascinating Memphis Blues album taught her to sing with a bluesier feeling) and with a depth that has come from the years. “True Colors” is a song I can’t be objective about because I remember hearing the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus perform it at a concert while one of my home-care clients had just been put in a nursing home; she had been a difficult person to get along with, mainly because she had a temper and frequently unleashed it, but I loved her anyway and could tell that she was a wonderful, loving person under her outbursts. So when I heard the lines, “I see your true colors shining through/I see your true colors, and that’s why I love you/So don’t be afraid to let them show/Your true colors, your true colors/Because you’re beautiful, like a rainbow,” I started crying uncontrollably and ever since I’ve identified the song with her. (She died shortly thereafter and I used the song as part of a memorial CD mix I presented to her surviving brother.)

Then the organizers put on Alessia Cara for three songs – which was good programming in a way but also a mistake because following Cyndi Lauper revealed how much Alessia Cara owes to her (and how much both of them owe to the 1960’s singer Melanie, one of the most criminally underrated performers of that era who began the whole style of singing at the top of the female range and using a fast vibrato that’s turned up since in the work of plenty of other singers, including Lauper, Cara, Jewel, Lorde, and most recently Tenille Townes.) Cara did “Scars to Your Beautiful” – a song I fell in love with when I first heard her at another all-star telecast, though later I got disillusioned that she licensed it to a beauty products company for a commercial – along with a song from her newest album, “Best Days,” and a song I couldn’t decide whether the title was “The Clock Is Ticking” or “Stay.” They put on Jon Batiste for two songs, “I Just Need You” and “Freedom” (a different song from Richie Havens’ or George Michael’s) and then brought up Camila Cabello, whose greatest claims to fame are reviving the popularity of Cuban music in the U.S. with her hit “Havana” (which was her first song yesterday) and for being the girlfriend of Shawn Mendes (thereby dashing the hopes of millions of Gay men who were hoping and wishing he were one of us). After opening with “Havana” she did “It’ll Never Be the Same,” then brought on Mendes for a song called “Señorita” that they both referred to as “our song.” Cabello’s set was briefly and blessedly interrupted by the appearance of a Trans poet named Blok – they presented as female (albeit with small breasts) but their voice sounded male, and their reading was the best of the three poems I heard on the telecast. After Blok’s reading Cabello continued with “New York” and “Don’t Go Yet.” The next act up was a Nigerian singer-rapper called Burna Boy whose rap fell victim to the most bizarre mistranslation of the night – through much of the show I had been laughing at some of the really weird translations and transcriptions of the open captions. My husband Charles suggested they were using a talk-to-text program and then, for people singing or speaking in languages other than English, were running them through a computer translator – which would explain why the start of the line from “Rocket Man,” “Mars ain’t a place to raise your kids,” came out as “Marvin, please” – but Burna Boy suffered the worst translation of anyone: “I feel my beloved to be wearing a bomb.” (It made it sound like he and his beloved were going to become joint suicide bombers.) Aside from the translation glitches, Burna Boy came off well but I’ve seen stronger Nigerian performers who’ve “grabbed” me more, including Angelique Kitjo and Yemi Alade.

The show then cut to New York for one of its oddest segments: a tribute to previous all-star benefits against global hunger featuring, of all people, Chinese pianist Lang Lang. He’s normally a classical musician but this time around he was basically doing his Liberace impression – at least pianistically; visually he was wearing a white suit rather than the famously flamboyant costuming of his role model. Lang Lang began with a treacly arrangement of parts of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” supposedly in commemoration of Queen’s performance at the 1985 Live Aid concert, which sounded very much like the way Liberace would have played it (and since Liberace still had nearly a decade to live when “Bohemian Rhapsody” was released, he could have played it). I’m really getting tired of the mythologization of Queen’s performance at Live Aid; it wasn’t especially memorable – by far the best performance at Live Aid came from U2, whose music, both on that performance and generally, had everything Queen’s lacked: power, passion, soul. Ironically, Freddie Mercury’s best moment at Live Aid came not with the band, but in a solo performance of a song called “Is This the World We Created?” that not only fit the purpose of the event but he sang with a real sincerity his work with Queen usually lacked. Lang Lang continued for three more songs, a version of “Imagine” with Billy Porter (one of the New York M.C.’s and self-described as a “Black Queer man” – well, thank goodness he called himself that instead of an “African-American LGBTQ+ person”) singing John Lennon’s great (and lethal to him) song less thrillingly but more straightfowardly than Fatma Said had). Then we got more Liberace-eaque treacle from Lang Lang’s fingers on a Whitney Houston medley – “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?” and “The Greatest Love of All” – and a rendition of “We Are the World” that reminded us of what a terrible song it is even though we weren’t hearing the sappy lyrics. (At least the announcers acknowledged that Michael Jackson co-wrote the song instead of “unpersonning” him.)

The next artist was Lizzo, who did three songs – “Cool as Hell,” “Bad Bitch” and :So You Know,” which may also be called “Blame It on My Juice.” I have profoundly mixed feelings about Lizzo: I think she’s got a great gospel-soul voice – when I first heard her I thought she’d be a great person to play Mahalia Jackson in a biopic (though Danielle Brooks played the great Mahalia in a Lifetime biopic and did it superbly), and I also love the fact that not only is she a “woman of size” but so are all her backup singers and dance performers – like Adele and Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo sends a badly needed message to the zaftig women of the world that they too can be attractive and sexy. But oh, her potty mouth! She dropped so many F-bombs and S-bombs on her CD I felt like the latter item was being shot at me. Yesterday she was being a bit less relentless with the swear words (and at least she wasn’t being bleeped, this being YouTube, which would have made it even more bothersome), but still … The next artist up was Shawn Mendes, who came off as a sort of American Ed Sheeran: the same boyish good looks (which, being only 23, he hasn’t started to lose the way Sheeran has), the same self-consciously “sensitive” presentation, and the same obsessive concern with sex and the same thin romanic veneer spread ever so slightly over songs that are clearly about lust masqueradiing as love: “There’s Nothing More,” “By My Side,” “What If I Fell?,” “Better Than He Can,” and “Summer of Love.” (Aside from the last one – which he actually announced – those titles are once again my best guesses, but even if they’re wrong they’ll at least give you a general sense of the material.) Then there was another poetry reading by someone named Fanta Bylo, and Mendes returned for one more song, “It’s in My Blood,” on which he played electric of acoustic guitar and had at least a little more spirit than he did on the rest of his material.

Next up was someone I think was called “Meek Mike” – though I might have the name hideously wrong (one annoying thing about shows like this was they seem to assume the audience already knows who these people are and what songs they’re singing, so they don’t bother with announcements or chyrons) – and my guesses for his three rap numbers are “I’m the Boss,” “Let’s Go” and “Cry Like a Girl.” (There was a text box on the show’s YouTube page to which you could make comments, and while most of them scrolled too fast for me to read them, one I did notice was one questioning whether that last piece of material was really appropriate for the occasion.) The next performer was Jennifer Lopez, ordinarily one of the most repulsive people in celebrity-dom, and she did three songs that epitomized what I don’t like about her – “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” a half-sung and half-rapped number with Ja Rule, and the utterly disgusting, infuriating song “Jenny on the Block” in which this pretentious woman, dressed to the nines in the most lavish costumes and makeup her well-paid courtiers can construct for her, tries to convince us that she’s still an ordinary person. (I’d probably like her more if instead she’d written a song about how she drives through her old neighborhood in a solid gold Cadillac, dripping ultra-expensive jewels, but she does that to inspire them and make them think that someday maybe they, too, can enjoy her level of success.) Then she startled the hell out of me by doing a song called “On My Way to You” from an upcoming movie (scheduled for release on February 14, 2022, which will give you a general idea of its contents) called Marry Me, and she cut out all the celebrity affectations and sang with real power and soul.

The last artist I saw on Global Citizen 2021 was Billie Eilish, whom I have an intriguing relationship with (no, I’m not some crazy under the delusion that I actually know her!). I bought her CD – the one that ended up sweeping the Grammy Awards – in the CD counter at Target (back when they still had a counter selling CD’s and DVD’s) partly because of her first name (given that Billie Holiday is my all-time favorite popular singer, anyone who has the name “Billie” is going to intrigue me) and partly because of the bag-lady outfit she was wearing on the cover. Who, I wondered, is this woman who’s presenting herself as a singer and not dressing in scanty outfits that show off her bod for the delectation of horny teenage straight boys? I picked up her album and I quite liked it even though there are other modern-day singers I like a good deal more. Eilish has gone through a series of visual changes – first she had black hair, then she dyed part of it green and made it look like a bird had crapped on her big-time, and now she’s blonde and pig-tailed. Also her act yesterday was a clash of images: she’s still wearing the baggy clothes but this time it was a white top and shorts, which showed off her legs, and instead of just standing (or sitting) still and singing she was jumping around the stage like Madonna. She was also swearing a lot – not during the songs themselves but during her stage raps, which included one of the few times during the event any of the performers got overtly political. She pointed out that the Congress is currently considering one of the biggest pieces of legislation ever aimed at stopping climate change, and people needed to call their Senators and House members to support it. (Throughout most of this show I was struck by the clash between its attempt to present concern about climate change as a universal issue uniting the human race and former Obama pollster David Shor’s arrogant dismissal of the climate issue, and advice to the Democrats to take it out of the big reconciliation bill, because only “very liberal white people” care about climate change.)

Eilish brought out her brother Finneas, who’s also her co-producer and co-writer of all her material, and formally duetted with him on a song apparently called either “How Could You” or “If You Could Take It All Back,” and her other songs, as far as I could tell, were “I’m the Bad Girl,” “I’m in Love with My Future,” “Look Away,” “All Good Girls Go to Hell,” and “Happier Than Ever.” Though there were plenty of other acts remaining, after nine hours and 15 minutes of watching music acts on my computer in faint sound I was worn down and considered myself lucky I could at least see all of Eilish’s performance (incidentally her real name is Billie Eilish O’Connell and her brother is Finneas O’Connell, though the only reason I know that is I watched the Grammy Awards and that was how they were cited on the awards for songwriting), and she was one of the high points. The other big annoyance about this show is the sheer amount of jabber between the songs, most of it corporate greenwashing by the likes of Citibank, Cisco (Charles laughed at their pledge to become carbon-neutral since they’re a software company rather than a manufacturer or an energy company), and even Delta Airlines, which pledged to make their operations “carbon-neutral” by 2030. No, they don’t mean they’ve figured out a way to fly planes all over the world without leaving a carbon footprint; they’re going to do “offsets,” though that’s going to mean planting an awful lot of trees all over the world at a time when forests are actually shrinking, either by deliberate governmental policy (as in Brazil and much of Africa) or through climate-change caused fires (as in California and the Pacific Northwest).

Once again, the great contradictions governing (and ruining) the climate-change issue are the gaps between the enormity of the problem and the pathetic little steps we’re told we can take to help, and the canyon between what needs to be done and the power of the vested interests that actually run the world and their determination to prevent the sweeping social changes that would be needed even to stop global warming, let alone reduce it. A recent poll showed that 56 percent of young people in America (I’m not sure how they defined “young people,” but I assumed it’s teens and 20’s) believe the Earth is doomed, and quite frankly I do too. Climate change will not be stopped, not because it’s technologically impossible to stop it, but because the world’s ruling classes have too much of a vested interest in how the world currently works economically, technologically and socially to allow the needed changes to be made – and too much global power to prevent the world and its people from making the required transformations.

Deadly Debutante (Almost Never Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

After nine hours and 15 minutes of the Global Citizen concerts, it was almost a relief to switch to Lifetime for their usual Saturday night “premiere” movie, Deadly Debutante. There’s some confusion about the title because imdb.com also lists it as Deadly Debutantes – plural – and A Night to Die For. It takes place in a generic small town called Newton, though the community is large enough to have a well-established 1 percent, and their high school has had an elaborate “Debutantes’ Ball” contest for over 100 years in which one girl is crowned “Belle of the Ball” and gets to go to the college of her choice on a full-ride scholarship as the first prize. Directed by Lindsay Hartley – a familiar name to Lifetime watchers, but mostly as an actress – from a script by Mark Valenti (so once again a woman director is stuck, in a story about women’s psychologies, with a script by a man!), Deadly Debutantes is about the rivalry for the Belle of the Ball contest between two entrants in particular. One is Anna Phillips (Angelina Boris), spoiled rich-bitch daughter of 1-percenters Howard (Michael Wagemann) and Diana (Leah N. H. Philpott) Phillips. Anna is pissed off at her parents because they’re always dashing off to “business” dinners instead of staying home with her, but she loves having access to their money and being able to throw parties in their home because they’re away so often. Her rival for the contest is Sophia Martinez (Natalia De Mendoza), an intellectual student and a potential fiction writer who’s being sponsored by her English teacher, Blair Dennison (Angela Baumgartner), to run in the debutantes’ contest because if she wins she can use the scholarship award to go to Webster University, which is otherwise too far out of her reach money-wise. Sophia is living with her father, who’s raised her as a single parent since the death of her mother a year or so earlier. Sophia has no money or social position, but she charms the contest judges – and her sob story about the recent death of her mom doesn’t hurt either (she could give Joe Biden lessons in turning personal tragedy into political advantage!).

Meanwhile, sinister things start happening around Anna – the lights go out at one of her parties and it turns out someone broke in and turned out her circuit breakers; later on someone tries to run her down, and after that someone slashes the tire of her car. (Aside from Sophia, who borrows her dad’s car when she needs one, this is yet another of those annoying movies in which every high-school student seems to have their own car, a present from their parents when they reach driving age. If my mom had been able to afford to do that for me, maybe I would have learned to drive, too!) Anna needs to turn in an essay as part of the debutantes’ contest, and since she’s too lazy to write her own and doesn’t trust her own writing skills anyway (they’re supposed to turn in the usual pretentious pap about what they plan to do to make the world a better place and help the underprivileged – though in my head I thought that Anna could have triumphed by writing an Ayn Rand-ian essay about how the underprivileged are where they’re supposed to be and the world should be more unequal so the superior rich people can have the resources they deserve and not have to share them with their inferiors. My remix of the movie along these lines would reveal the contest judges secretly agreeing with her, not daring to say so in public, but giving her the prize anyway on the ground that whatever you thought of her ideas, she expressed them vividly and eloquently) she buys an essay from the school’s male intellectual, Marvin. She bribes him with a promise of tickets to an upcoming Billie Eilish concert (ironically I was watching this just after I’d seen the real Billie Eilish on the Global Citizen Webcast!), but with no time to write a fresh essay for her he gives her one he wrote for a class assignment the previous year. The school authorities note the similarity and accuse Anna of plagiarism, but her dad’s influence over the school (and the rest of the town) is strong enough the incident is hushed up and she gets away with it.

Anna gets the chance to turn in another essay, and this time she scores one from her friend and fellow debutante contestant Mia (Revell Carpenter), who drafted one for her own entry but hadn’t turned it in yet. This time Anna bribes Mia with a $2,000 fur-lined leather jacket in exchange for giving her the essay and withdrawing from the contest (leading to a scene in which Mia’s mom lambasts her for dropping out and giving up her dreams for a fancy piece of clothing). Only the deal turns out to be nearly fatal for Mia when an unseen assailant pushes her off a balcony on campus, nearly killing her, and since she was wearing Anna’s jacket Anna deduces that she, not Mia, was the intended victim. Mia ends up in the hospital – Anna brings her flowers and Mia says she’d rather have painkillers (which made me wonder if they’d show Anna scoring some from a drug dealer on or near campus, but fortunately Mark Valenti avoided that particular set of Lifetime clichés) and the story proceeds to the night of the big debutantes’ contest. Anna angrily broke up with her boyfriend Kenny (Raymond Roberts), captain of the school’s football team, when he made a date with Sophia – ostensibly so she could tutor him to help keep up his grades so he didn’t get cut from the team – and Anna heard about it from her “friends” and didn’t bother to find out the truth. Deadly Debutante was a reasonably good Lifetime thriller (and the sight of all those hot young women wearing as little in the chest department as the standards of basic cable would allow no doubt turned on some of the straight guys watching this!) but it suffered from being too obvious.

I knew who the person who was sabotaging the contest and attempting to drive Anna out of it was from the first act: it was [spoiler alert!] Anna’s English teacher and unofficial contest sponsor, Blair Dennison, though I got her motive wrong. Judging from the smoldering close-ups of Andrea Baumgardner staring intently at Natalia De Mendoza, I thought it was going to be one of Lifetime’s “psycho mentor” stories, the monster woman who “helps” the young protégée because she never made it herself and wants the girl to have the career, fame and money she thought she deserved. I was even wondering whether the payoff would be that Dennison had an unrequited Lesbian crush on Sophia, but the actual resolution was far less kinky than that. It turns out that Blair was a debutante contestant herself in her high-school days and, since her mom and her grandmother had both won, she thought she had a “lock” on it – only Diane, who eventually became Anna Phillips’ mother, used her family’s power and influence to buy the contest title herself. So Blair never forgave her and hatched a plot that when Diane’s daughter Anna became eligible for the contest, she would pick someone else to sponsor and do whatever she had to, including murder, to make sure her candidte won instead of Anna. Mark Valenti did pull one surprise I wasn’t expecting; instead of having Sophia win the contest after all, since neither she nor Anna is available for the final event – a ceremonial walk to the judges’ podium accompanied by their fathers (one wonders what they’d do if a contestant’s father, not her mother, had died) – because Blair has knocked Sophia’s dad unconscious and Anna’s dad is frantically looking for her because Blair has grabbed her and is holding a gun on her – the judges announce that both Anna and Sophia are disqualified and the contest goes to the third-place winner, Nicole Green (Christina Susanna Patterson). It felt good to my anti-racist heart to see a Black contestant win the prize, but I felt sorry for Sophia that after all she’d been through, including being falsely accused of attempted murder, she wouldn’t get the big prize that would get her into college and launch her writing career. I also felt that Valenti had been weird to give her Kenny as a boyfriend (he takes the bullet Blair fired at Anna and/or Sophia – by that time it’s not clear whom she’s more mad at – though he recovers) when it was clear that Marvin, the campus “brainiac,” was more right for her. After all, I was a high-school brainiac and I ended up marrying another brainiac …

Columbo: “Double Exposure” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1973)

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

At 11 p.m. last night I watched a 1973 episode of Columbo on the Sundance Channel featuring a gimmick Charles remembered from watching the show when it first ran (when he was only 10 years old). As the show begun he even wrote the final gimmick on a piece of paper and showed it to me at the end just to prove he had remembered it correctly. Written by Stephen J. Cannell (who, like Steve Bochco, who’’d written the last Columbo rerun Charles and I watched, went on to be a major TV writer and producer in his own right, specializing in mystery and crime shows), this Columbo episode, “Double Exposure,” was clearly inspired by the 1958 book The Hidden Persuaders by sociologist Vance Packard. Packard’s book was an exposé of how advertising agencies were hiring psychological consultants to do research in humans’ basic needs, desires and drives in order to create ad campaigns potential customers would find irresistible. The main figure in The Hidden Persuaders was a man named Dr. Ernest Dichter (whose last name, by the way, is the German word for “poet”), who ran an elaborate operation to research human nature for the benefit of advertisers.

The comparable character in “Double Exposure” is Dr. Bart Kepple (Robert Culp, five years after the end of his star-making TV series I Spy), who has built a business mini-empire largely on the funding of ad agency owner Vic Norris (Robert Middleton). One of the techniques he’s working on is “subliminal cuts,” a technique advertisers experimented with in the 1950’s: the idea is if you spliced a single frame of film containing a picture of food – popcorn, a hamburger, a drink – into the middle of a movie, the audience would register that image and it would subconsciously make them hungry for that sort of food and they’d go to the theatre snack bar to buy it. Apparently, these attempts to affect audience members with subliminal cuts didn’t work – they actually confused audiences and made it more difficult for them to follow the movie – but in this story Dr. Kepple (he continually corrects Columbo (Peter Falk) when the police lieutenant calls him “Mr. Kepple” and says, “That’s Dr. Kepple”) uses the subliminal cutting technique as part of an elaborate murder plot … and Columbo uses it at the end of the episode to trap him.

The person Dr. Kepple wants to murder is his backer Vic Norris, whom he wants to kill because Norris is about to cut his funding for Kepple’s institute and Kepple figures that if he kills Norris and frames Norris’s wife (Louise Latham) for the crime, whoever inherits the agency will continue to fund him. He decides to kill Norris at a screening of the latest movie he’s made, an ode to salesmanship as the key factor in making the American economy work. Since he hasn’t recorded the film’s narration with a professional commentator yet, Kepple decides to create an alibi for himself by supposedly narrating the movie live – only he has a portable tape recorder with the commentary on it and he plays the tape and slips away from the mike during the screening. (His tape recorder is a cheesy cassette portable and there would have been a noticeable drop in sound quality when he stopped the live narration and turned on the tape – but that’s just one of innumerable plot holes in this program.) Before the screening he feeds Norris a plate of caviar, a salt-heavy food which will make him thirsty, and we’ve also seen him cut a single frame of film containing the image of a drink so Norris will be psychologically impelled to leave the theatre and get a drink, whereupon Kepple can shoot him. Charles questioned how Kepple’s aim could be so good he could drop Norris with a pistol from a substantial distance, but I referenced his I Spy role and said, “He was an international spy for four years! Of course he knows how to handle a gun!”

The way he sets up Mrs. Norris for the frame is to call her, disguising the voice, and tell her he’s the boyfriend of Tanya Baker (Arlene Martell), a hot-looking model Kepple frequently uses in his presentations (a still of her appears in his movie as an example of sex appeal and the narrator rather patronizingly describes her appeal as irresistible), and that Tanya is having an affair with Mr. Norris and if he meets her at a streetcorner she can catch them together. She duly drives to the corner where Kepple told her to go, and of course nothing happens and she’s stranded there for an hour, thereby ensuring that when her husband gets killed she won’t have an alibi. Dr. Kepple explains that in 70 percent of the cases in which a married person is murdered, their spouse is the culprit (a statistic that gets quoted in a lot of crime shows today, not by the killer but by the cops!), but as usual in the Columbo formula Lt. Columbo seems to intuit that Kepple is the murderer and continually nags and annoys him into confessing.

Midway through the story Kepple was subject to a blackmail attempt by his projectionist, and responds by going to the movie theatre where he works and shooting him during the running of a movie (High Plains Drifter with Clint Eastwood as both star and director, and like Columbo a Universal release). The murder is noticed when the film suddenly stops at the end of reel two, and of course the police assume the killing happened when the second reel was running – but Columbo deduces that Kepple actually killed the projectionist during the first reel and threaded and started the second reel himself. He knows this because the projectionist talked to Columbo and explained his habit of sticking a nickel towards the end of a film reel so when the reel was about to run out, the nickel would fall to the floor and the sound would signal him to change the reel. (He explained – and I’m sure this is real – that projectionists get bored running the same film over and over again during a theatrical run and look for other things they can do in the booth; in his case, he reads crime novels.) Later in the episode, Columbo gets into a golf cart and drives out on a course where Kepple and some of his rich friends are playing, getting in his way and spoiling his shots by making him nervous. One obstacle in Columbo’s attempt to nail Kepple for the crime is the killer used a .22 pistol, but Kepple’s two guns (stored in a glass-doored cabinet in his office and visible to everybody) are larger calibres and their ballistics don’t match that of the murder gun.

In the end Columbo essentially breaks into Kepple’s office and has a police photographer take photos of him in various poses, with the idea that by using subliminal cuts he will get Kepple to reveal where he’s hidden the device he used to commit the murder: a so-called “calibration converter” he could insert into his gun to make the barrel smaller so it could fire a smaller-sized bullet than it’s supposed to. I wondered if calibration converters were a real thing, and I found a Wikipedia entry that says they are – only the link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliber_conversion_sleeve, calls them “caliber conversion sleeves.” This source describes sleeves that go into the chamber where the bullet is stored before it is fired, and said that sleeves like the one in this story that shrink the whole barrel – not just the chamber – are rarer and require much more radical modification of the gun to work: “Sleeves that exceed the chamber length are generally used in break open actions, which allow easy insertion and removal. Like supplemental chambers, caliber conversion sleeves completely surround the new cartridge case, but cannot be ejected or fed from a magazine, so they only offer a single shot per barrel without manual extraction and reloading. The calibers supported by caliber conversion sleeves are limited by the difference between the calibers. The sleeve's barrel must be thick enough to provide structural integrity to the barrel, and so requires a large enough internal barrel diameter to hold the new barrel. One manufacturer has a .40 caliber (10 mm) minimum diameter for these inserts in .22 rimfire caliber.” That – .49 to .22 – seems to be what the character of Kepple used in the episode (though it isn’t a break-open gun and he just slips the sleeve in and out of the barrel), which of course ends with him being arrested during the latest screening of his movie.

I’m impressed that Charles remembers as much as he does of shows he saw when he was 10, and Columbo holds up pretty well largely due to the contradictions within Columbo himself – he’s an intelligent investigator who carefully cultivates the image of a proletarian doofus – though it’s also amazing this show lasted as long as he did (and earned Peter Falk a ton of money, much of which he used to fund the independent movies shot by his friend, John Cassavetes, most of which co-starred Falk and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands) when essentially Columbo’s whole strategy was to intuit the guilty party at the beginning and then annoy them into confessing.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “And the Empire Strikes Back,” “Never Turn Your Back on Them” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 23, 2021)

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

I watched last night’s season premieres of Dick Wolf’s last remaining New York-set crime shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU was actually quite a good episode, a two-hour extension of the previous season’s closer in which a neighbor’s complaint about prostitution in a subsidized affordable housing project led the Special Victims Unit to uncover a ring of supposed do-gooders, including community activist Catalina Machado (Zabryna Guevara) and Congressmember George Howard (Ben Rappoport), who are placing young women in the subsidized housing units and then threatening them with eviction if they don’t let Congressmember Howard and his well-connected male friends have sex with them regularly. Only Howard doesn’t find these women all that appealing and he wants more nubile teenage flesh that has the kinky thrill of being underage. He starts seducing young women who come to him for internships, including Jenna Evans (Isabelle Poloner), whose child he fathers when Jenna is only 15 and who subsequently gets an abortion arranged by Ruben Ortiz (Ryan Garbayo), Howard’s overall fixer and dirty-tricks guy. SVU writers Warren Leight, Julie Martin and Bryan Goluboft (the first two are long-time Law and Order contributors but the third is a new name to me) concoct a tale in which the character of Congressmember Howard seems to be mashed up of equal parts Donald Trump (he talks about running for President and what we hear of his platform is against abortion and for protecting the rights of pharmaceutical companies to gouge people), Florida Congressmember Matt Gaetz (real-life target of a federal investigation for violating the Mann Act, a World War I-era statute that forbids “the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes” – it was an early attempt at an anti-human trafficking law but it was also used against a lot of people government officials simply didn’t like, including rock star Chuck Berry) and Jeffrey Epstein, alleged procurer of underage girls to the stars (including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump) who supposedly “committed suicide” in prison awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, though I’ve long been convinced he was really murdered so he couldn’t expose the ultra-rich and super-powerful men he’d supplied fresh meat for their sick sexual tastes.

The drama heats up as three of the key witnesses against Howard – Machado, Ortiz and a plumber in the building who got sexual freebies for keeping his mouth shut – are all found dead, the plumber beaten to death in a jail (as a guard looked on and did nothing to stop it) and Machado and Ortiz faked to look like suicides. So the cops have to lean on Jenna to testify and also go back to Rosa Estrada (Angelic Zambrana), one of the original victims, who had been forced to have sex with Congressmember Howard and others while her son was in the apartment and she desperately tried to shield him from any awareness of what was going on. The cops and prosecutors trace the killings not to Congressmember Howard but his attorney, Myron Gold (Glenn Fleshler), who has been doing the dirty work of so many people in major positions of power, including Hollywood stars as well as politicians and business leaders, he offers the police and prosecutors information on them in exchange in leniency for his own case. But the good guys receive word from higher-ups in the New York Police Department and beyond that Gold is not to be touched, so they nail Congressmember Howard on a guilty plea but Gold is allowed to “skate” for ordering three murders. Ths show suffered from some of the periodic attempts by Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners to turn this into Law and Order: The Soap Opera, including having Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) and former detective turned prosecutor Dominic Carisi (Peter Scanavino) start an affair with each other (remember, this is a woman who’s already had two kids by two different men, neither of whom she was married to!), and they dropped a thoroughly unwelcome hint in the trailer for the upcoming episode (they’re doing a three-hour “crossover” between SVU and Organized Crime, the strategy I had expected them to pull this time for the season opener) that they’re actually going to steer Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) towards the bedroom together. Oh, please – Dick Wolf once told an interviewer that during the 12 years Meloni co-starred with Hargitay on SVU he got a lot of “When are you going to get them together?” letters but he wisely – at least in my opinion – kept it from going there precisely because he wanted to present a man and a woman who could have a close working relationship without either fucking each other or wanting to do so. But it looks like the people he’s got running these shows now are about to take that thoroughly unwelcome step.

I was also disappointed that this SVU episode eliminated the characters of Detective Katriona “Kat” Tamin (Jamie Gray Hyder, who was a real breath of fresh air when this show entered its 21st season – and not just because she was an “out” Lesbian and her partner was also a character on the show) and assistant chief of detectives Christian Garland (Demore Barnes, a hot-looking Black actor and definitely the sexiest guy on the show since Meloni left). Meloni also appeared briefly on this SVU season opener, but only as an hallucination – though he’s wearing the beard he grew to infiltrate an Armenian drug gang in the season opener of Law and Order: Organized Crime and Benson would not have hallucinated Meloni’s bearded face (which makes him look a lot like Gay Leather leader “Papa” Tony Lindsey) since she’d never seen him that way in real life. The Organized Crime episode that followed this SVU was a real disappointment, a by-the-numbers tale in which Stabler is assigned to infiltrate an Armenian drug gang whose leader naturally starts getting suspicious towards the end, and Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), the Moriarty-esque super-criminal on the show, is released from prison because he’s supposedly been cooperating with federal authorities to nail other organized-crime leaders. There’s also tension between the Armenians and a Black drug gang who hijacked one of their shipments and started selling it themselves – though when the Armenians corner them they claim they only sold the drugs and some other gang sold them to them – a plot device which reminded me of the 1929 and 1942 films Broadway in which rival bootleggers started gang wars by hijacking each other’s stocks of illegal booze. In crime stories, as in life, plus ça change, plus ça même chose …

Muhammad Ali, Round Four: “The Spell Remains” (Florentine Films, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night I watched the fourth and final part of Ken Burns’ mega-documentary on the life and times of Muhammad Ali – I missed the first two parts but I can probably catch them on “streaming” from PBS itself or Amazon Prime if I’m really interested (about the one thing I found myself missing from the parts I hadn’t seen was however Burns and his collaborators, daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, handled the break between Ali and Malcolm X in 1964, when Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to form a group called Hanafi that aligned itself more with traditional Islam than the bizarre theology of Elijah Muhammad; though Malcolm X had recruited Ali to the Nation, he stood with Elijah Muhammad as Malcolm X left and was murdered a year later, ostensibly by members of Elijah’s “Fruit of Islam” security force but more likely by the white power structure – in his autobiography, Malcolm had predicted both his own assassination and Martin Luther King’s, saying the white power structure would permit neither of them to live). The fourth part was called “The Spell Remains” and told Ali’s increasingly sad story, from one of his triumphs – the fight Ali called the “Rumble in the Jungle,” his 1974 regaining of the world’s heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaïre – to the string of fights he continued to have long after most people thought he should have retired (his last professional bout was in 1981 and he lost on a decision), his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, his second and third marriages (and the inveterate womanizing he did outside of his marriages), and his final moment in the public eye when he was chosen as the last torchbearer in the U.S. Olympic opening ceremony in Atlanta in 1996. Ali’s participation in that event was a closely guarded secret – though my recollection is that word was starting to leak out and so his appearance wasn’t the total surprise the Olympic organizers were hoping for – and by then he was so severely debilitated by Parkinson’s that it was anybody’s guess whether he could even make it up the stairs to the Olympic torch. For me it was like watching the film of Fred Astaire’s last public appearance, to accept a lifetime achievement award (the sort of thing the late director Billy Wilder called the “quick-before-he-croaks awards”) and this man, who had dazzled his audiences with his superb control of his body, could barely hobble up the stairs to the stage to accept his award.

One of the quirks of this treatment of Muhammad Ali’s life is that it was, at best, a sports film; other documentaries have focused more on Ali the political symbol of racial equality and war resistance and relegated his actual career to the sidelines. Not this one: it showcases long excerpts from his most famous fights and reminds us that, for all his public protestations of piety and pacifism, Ali still made a living in one of the most violent forms of entertainment ever devised. And despite Ali’s attempts to make himself not only a great boxer but a symbol of Black resistance to white oppression, there’s an uncomfortable feeling about seeing these repeated shots of two Black men (virtually all Ali’s professional opponents were also Black) beating each other up in public for the delectation of whites. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that one of the main roots of professional boxing as an American sport was the practice of slaveowners to pit their prize slaves against each other in all-out fights, as if you could prove yourself a bigger man than your neighbor if your slave could beat the shit out of his slave. But then Ali’s career is full of contradictions: the man of peace who made his living through violence (though when he asked about the contradiction – why he could fight other people for a living but would not fight in his country’s war – he said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing”), the contradiction between his public morality and his messy sex-filled private life (though that’s an all too common one among Black males, and indeed among males in general; on a posthumously released live album from his last concert tour, Marvin Gaye tells his audience, “I’m a very spiritual person” – right after he’s sung three songs in a row about sex); the committed athlete who often was too busy partying or showing off to train properly (virtually all of Ali’s five defeats in the ring were at least partly due to him coming in without having done the full training regimen); and the brash trash-talker whom his family remembers as a quiet, private man when he wasn’t in the public eye or preparing to be. In one sense Ali’s story is of a man who not only outlived his enemies but was often ahead of his time – one point this film made was that in 1967, when he refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army to fight in Viet Nam, most Americans supported the war and Ali was called an ingrate and as traitor.

By the time he came back in 1970 a majority of Americans now opposed the war and Ali was considered the prescient hero who had tried to alert them to how stupid the war was. (According to the Burns père/Burns fille/McMahon script, by 1970 most Americans had concluded that the Viet Nam war was a “mistake,” though I remember liberals and radicals having arguments over whether it was a “mistake” or a deliberate expression of U.S. imperialism. I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was both: it began as an imperialist war but turned into a mistake when the U.S. government threw far more men, materiel and money into it than Viet Nam was worth, and past the time when genuinely rational imperialists like the French would have withdrawn, as they indeed had after losing at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.) At the same time one often overlooked point about Ali was that he literally saved the sport of boxing. In the early 1960’s two fighters, Davey Moore and Benny Paret, had died of injuries sustained in the ring, and many people – especially progressives – were calling for Congress and state legislatures to make boxing illegal. Then Ali came along, and progressives who admired Ali for his politics found themselves becoming boxing fans so they could support Ali. When San Francisco 49’ers Colin Kaepernick took the knee during the national anthem before a football game to protest police brutality against African-Americans, one of my oldest friends messaged me to ask if this meant we were going to have to start liking a bloodthirsty sport like football because we wanted to support Kaepernick – and I pointed out that something similar had happened in the 1960’s. People who had previously called for the elimination of boxing now embraced it because they wanted to show support for Ali. Ali’s story has an unusually sad ending: between the Atlanta Olympics appearance in 1996 and his death 20 years later, he was more just surviving or existing than actually living, and for a man who had lived such a rich, full life those final years, trapped in a once beautiful and graceful body that no longer functioned for him, and a man largely forgotten by the American public until – as so often happens with faded or fading stars – his death reminded the public of how he had lived and what he had done.