Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Respect (BRON Studios, Creative Media Finance, MGM, United Artists, Universal, 2021)


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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been wanting to see since it first came out earlier this year: Respect, a biopic of Aretha Franklin directed by Liesl Tommy (a woman who’s mostly worked on TV – notably on The Walking Dead, AMC’s modern-dress zombie series – and has no other feature-film credits) from a script by Callie Khouri and Tracey Scott Wilson. There’s another Aretha Franklin biopic floating around out there, made for a streaming service and starring Cynthia Erivo as Aretha, but this one more or less had the imprimatur of official status. Supposedly, a month before her death Aretha Franklin met with Jennifer Hudson and told her that if anyone ever made a movie of her life, she’d like Hudson to play her – and it’s a measure of how limited the opportunities for Black women in films still are that it’s taken 15 years since Hudson’s star-making turn in the film Dreamgirls for her to get another role fully worthy of her talents. Respect is the sort of movie that’s good as it stands but could have been a great deal better; in a laudable attempt to avoid the Jazz Singer clichés that were virtually inevitable in a film with this basic story – a clergyman’s offspring forsakes the music of his/her dad’s church and makes it as a star in popular music – writers Khouri and Wilson and director Tommy fell into another set and turned the film essentially into a Black version of the 1955 tear-jerker biopic of white singer Lillian Roth, I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

It also didn’t help that Tommy and her cinematographer, Kramer Morgenthau, shot the whole film in the murky past-is-brown look that’s become Hollywood’s default look for just about everything. As I’ve written before in connection with even better reality-based Black films like Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the past-is-brown look is hard enough to take in a film in which the principles are white and it’s even more annoying when the principals are Black: their brown faces blend all too readily into the murky brown backgrounds and it’s often hard to pick them out. Also the script bears little more than a casual relationship to the facts of Aretha’s life: it’s true that I’ve never read a biography of her and so I don’t know whether her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (pastor of the largest and most influential church in Detroit and the best-selling artist on Chicago’s Chess Records even though he didn’t sing or play an instrument: his records were merely recordings of his sermons), was living with another woman he wasn’t married to after Aretha’s mother left the family, or whether Aretha had a bout with alcoholism at the height of her career in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that nearly incapacitated her, and she intended her return-to-gospel album Amazing Grace (1972) as a prayer of thanks to God for getting her off the booze the way John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964 as a thank-you letter to God for giving him the strength to get off alcohol and heroin.

But the parts of this story I do know about are told in this movie so far from how they actually happened I have little trust that Khouri and Wilson are giving us the real story of the parts I don’t. In this movie Aretha is sexually molested at age 10 in the middle of a party at her father’s house at which several illustrious soul singers, including Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke, are present; a man at the party sneaks into Aretha’s bedroom, asks if she has a boyfriend, and when she says no he asks her, “Would you like me to be your boyfriend?.” and without her having a chance either to say no or get the hell out of there, he closes the bedroom door behind them and … According to Khouri and Wilson, this is Aretha’s “Rosebud” moment: she never tells anyone (her mom – or at least the mother figure who’s living with her dad and functioning as such – notices something is wrong with her and tries to pry the secret out of her, but without success) but she periodically withdraws into near-catatonic fugue states during which she won’t even speak, much less sing, and these continue to afflict her even as she eventually becomes a superstar and brings soul music to the white masses worldwide.

I find it virtually impossible to believe such an influential and highly regarded Black minister as Rev. C. L. Franklin could have sustained a relationship with a woman he wasn’t married to, and given what I’ve read about the antagonism between the gospel and R&B audiences (though to us white people gospel and soul may sound awfully similar, they appealed to two dramatically different audiences and lovers of gospel music generally rejected R&B and soul and refused to listen to them; I’ve often told the story that a month before he died, Sam Cooke tried to sit in with his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and was literally booed off the stage with catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!”) it’s hard to believe that Rev. Franklin would have even allowed R&B and soul records to be played in his home, much less invited singers in those styles to his home. (At the same time, if Khouri and Wilson had accurately depicted this dividing line between gospel and soul in the script, this film would have seemed like even more of a ripoff of The Jazz Singer than it does.) The film doesn’t mention that Aretha Franklin cut her first album, a gospel record, for Chess in 1956 at age 14 – Rev. C. L. Franklin was Chess’s biggest-selling artist (moving more records than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf!) and when he told the Chess brothers he wanted his 14-year-old daughter Aretha to record a gospel album, they let him – but they did the album on the cheap. Instead of getting her into a studio and recording her properly, they just clipped her songs from the recordings they’d made of Rev. Franklin’s services to create the best-selling albums of Rev. Franklin’s sermons. Still, this is the first Aretha Franklin album – made four years before she launched her career as a secular soul singer at Columbia Records, where she was signed by the legendary producer John Hammond.

It’s not clear from the movie exactly how Hammond discovered her – it was on a demo he’d received from songwriter Curtis Lewis, who had recruited Aretha to sing a song he’d written called “Today I Sing the Blues” – or what sort of music Hammond wanted from her. The script for Respect makes it seem like Hammond produced all her Columbia records, but he didn’t: at a loss for what to do with her, Columbia recruited Clyde Otis (one of the first Black producers to work for a major white label) from Mercury, where he’d masterminded Dinah Washington’s rise from Black star to crossover superstar with her 1959 record “What a Difference a Day Made.” During her five years at Columbia Aretha worked with various producers, sometimes singing soul versions of 1920’s songs like Dinah had (the one Columbia record with Aretha that even nosed into the pop charts was her unlikely cover of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” a record that’s been ridiculed by generations of writers who’ve never heard it – it’s actually pretty good), sometimes attempting jazz (Hammond had reportedly heard her as the next Billie Holiday – who had died just one year before Aretha signed with Columbia) and sometimes edging towards the kind of searing soul that would eventually launch her career into superstar orbit when she switched labels from Columbia to Atlantic in 1967.

In his autobiography Hammond was resentful about the way his bosses at Columbia took control of Aretha’s career and recruited other producers to make her records there – and every nasty thing he’d said about how he could have made Aretha a star in 1961 if he’d stayed in control of her records was confirmed when in the early 1980’s Columbia released a compilation of Aretha’s records there called Aretha Sings the Blues, in which they presented 13 songs that showed Aretha groping towards her later style and then one, “Maybe I’m a Fool,” in which she achieves it. The only song on the compilation actually produced by John Hammond, “Maybe I’m a Fool” is as good as anything Aretha cut for Atlantic – a searing gospel-rooted vocal, hammering piano triplets (by Ray Bryant, whom Hammond recruited as her accompanist because he, too, had had roots in the Black church), and even a lyric surprisingly similar to her first Atlantic hit, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” another one of those blues laments in which the singer tells us that her man is a creep but she loves him anyway. (Don’t believe me when I say “Maybe I’m a Fool” was Aretha’s first masterpiece? Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjWrFgQ1Vs.)

The film also rather oddly portrays the relationship between Aretha and her great predecessor, Dinah Washington. Dinah is played by Mary J. Blige (who wouldn’t be bad casting for a Dinah Washington biopic) and appears in two scenes, in one of which she gets upset that the 10-year-old Aretha sings a jazz novelty at one of Rev. Franklin’s parties and Dinah announces she was planning to record the song herself; and a later scene at the Village Vanguard nightclub in New York in which Aretha acknowledges that Dinah is in the audience and goes into a version of one of Dinah’s greatest songs, “This Bitter Earth” – and Dinah angrily turns over the table she’s sitting at and chews Aretha out for doing one of her songs in her presence. The film doesn’t mention that Dinah Washington died of a prescription drug overdose in December 1963 – which, ironically, benefited Aretha’s career by eliminating her principal competition. As long as Dinah was alive Aretha would have been only “another Black girl who sings like Dinah Washington.” Once Dinah died, Aretha was her natural successor – even though it took three more years and a change of record labels to bring Aretha the stardom she deserved. In February, 1964 – just two months after Dinah’s death – Columbia recorded Aretha in an album of Dinah’s songs called Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, and though Dinah had been billed as “Queen of the Blues” and Aretha as “Queen of Soul,” there’s definitely an air about this album of “The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.”

The film depicts both Hammond (Tate Donovan) and Aretha’s producer at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron), as the usual music-industry assholes – though there’s a nice scene in which Rev. Franklin shows up at one of Hammond’s sessions with Aretha and apologizes for her bad behavior. Hammond says he worked with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and they gave him a lot more trouble than Aretha did, and Rev. Franklin fires back, “Aretha didn’t grow up in a whorehouse like they did.” There are also other annoying deviations from the known facts in this film; in the movie Aretha recruits her sisters Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Halley KIlgore) as her backup singers – Aretha’s real backup singers on her early Atlantic records were a vocal trio called the Sweet Inspirations (one of whom, Cissy Houston, was Whitney Houston’s mother) whom she recorded and toured with until Elvis Presley lured them away because he could pay them more. And of course, being the lead character in a biopic about a woman singer, the men in her life are monsters: Ted White (Marlon Wayans) is shown as an egomaniac wife beater, and the man she finally leaves him for, Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones), isn’t much better.

Not surprisingly, Respect comes most searingly to life when Jennifer Hudson as Aretha is shown actually making music; though her voice doesn’t have quite the edge and power of Aretha’s own, Hudson is one of our very best living woman soul singers (when I wrote a long obituary on Aretha’s death I named her, along with Jill Scott and the gospel singer Mandisa, as the three singers who seem to me to be carrying forward Aretha’s legacy) and she’s certainly appropriate casting. But the I’ll Cry Tomorrow turn the plot takes gets to be a bit much – while the fictional Aretha is shown turning up bombed for a concert date in Europe and collapsing on stage, the real Aretha was performing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and making an incandescent live album that’s one of the highlights of her career. Respect is full of great moments that deserved a better movie – like the scene in which Aretha shows up at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to make her first Atlantic single and notices that all the musicians are white. “Don’t they have any Negroes who play music around here?” she says (and for all the criticism I’ve been leveled at Khouri and Wilson for their script, at least they get that right and use the word “Negro,” which was historically accurate, instead of “Black,” which came later), and Jerry Wexler notices the look of distaste she gives them at having been dragged all the way to Alabama to record with a bunch of Southern white boys with Southern white-boy racial attitudes. “Percy Sledge had that same look on his face – until he heard these boys play,” Wexler says. Later Aretha is shown working out her rewrite of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” with her sisters, who take their childhood nickname for her, “Ree,” and use it as the basis of the backing vocals – and the result is such an electrifying transformation of the song few people today identify it with anyone but Aretha. (It was Aretha, not Redding, who wrote the spectacular chorus that became an anthem of feminist empowerment: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB.”)

The film also does an O.K. job of depicting Aretha’s relationship to the civil rights movement, including her friendship with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown, who does an acceptable turn in the nearly impossible task of playing someone whose actual looks and voice are so much a part of the public record), her increasing militancy (Aretha and her father have the debate between nonviolence and harsher forms of resistance a lot of Black people were having in the late 1960’s, and she publicly supports Angela Davis and records a cover of Nina Simone’s anthem of Black pride, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”) and the shock she and her family felt when King was killed, as if they’d lost one of their own. But once again Khouri and Wilson can’t resist tweaking an already good story: they have Aretha sing King’s favorite song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” at King’s funeral – which she didn’t. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (who’d been onstage behind King at the 1963 March on Washington and had seen he was bombing with a dull historical lecture; she got in his ear and told him, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!,” which he famously did) sang “Precious Lord” at King’s funeral – and Aretha sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral four years later. The writers build the recording of the Amazing Grace album into an appropriately uplifting finish (though even there they slip up – when she tells her father that he taught her all the songs she;’s going to sing, I couldn’t resist saying, “Except Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholly Holy,’ which I learned from his album What’s Going On; and Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ which she learned from her album Tapestry”) for a movie that’s magnificent in parts but also frustrating in parts, containing a stirring performance by Jennifer Hudson but marred by a script that ran roughshod over Aretha’s real life.

Monday, November 29, 2021

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: One Last Time (CBS-TV, aired November 28, 2021)


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

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a much-hyped CBS-TV concert special featuring Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga performing at Radio City Music Hall for what was billed as “One Last Time.” Bennett is 95 and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though, as with Glen Campbell, it doesn’t seem to have affected his musicianship any. Experts on Alzheimer’s have said that out of all one’s memories, music is the last to go – and Bennett’s singing on this show, though hardly what it was in his glory years, was tuneful and musical. Only one high note in one song escaped his reach; otherwise he was in quite good late form. The concert began with four songs by Lady Gaga solo, which showed that despite the occasional heaviness of her voice she’s got the chops to be a great jazz singer. When I first heard Lady Gaga on her album The Fame Monster (actually an earlier record called The Fame reissued in a package with an EP called Monster) I was impressed more by her songwriting than her singing. There’s not much you can do with so-called “electronic dance music” anyway except spit out the lyrics in time, but what impressed me about Gaga was she wasn’t just sticking a few words on top of a dance groove and calling it a song. Her songs were well constructed and had identifiable beginnings, middles and ends.

Then I heard her and Bennett do “The Lady Is a Tramp” on Bennett’s Duets II album (unlike Frank Sinatra’s two duets albums, Bennett insisted on recording the parts with his partners present in the studio and singing with him in real time instead of overdubbing their parts later) and it impressed me that Lady Gaga had the rhythmic flexibility to sing standards and wasn’t strait-jacketed into the strict tempi of dance music. (It also made me wish the late Donna Summer had cut a standards album: judging by her beautiful phrasing on the slow introductions of songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio,” a Summer Sings Standards album would likely have been quite good.) The four Lady Gaga solo songs that opened last night’s show were Frank Loesser’s “Luck, Be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls, Milton Delugg’s and Willie Stein’s “Orange Colored Sky” from 1950, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” from the late 1920’s and John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s “Theme from New York, New York.” After Lady Gaga subjected “Luck, Be a Lady” to some awkward lyric changes to make it more suitable for a woman (it was originally written for a man), I was wondering what she was going to do to “Let’s Do it” to duck the P.C. Thought Police’s condemnations she would surely have got if she’d sung the opening lines of the refrain, “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it.” As it turned out, she deleted that part of the song altogether, going straight from the verse (which she phrased beautifully) to the ninth bar of the refrain.

She said “Orange Colored Sky” was one of two jazz songs she’d sung at a benefit which Bennett was also present for; he sent someone backstage to her and asked to meet her, and when they finally got together Bennett told her, “You’re a jazz singer.” “Orange Colored Sky” was written in 1950 and first recorded a year later as Capitol Records’ choice for a vehicle to pair Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton – and as Cole tried his best to swing with the big brassy blatts of Kenton’s elephantine ensemble behind him, he closed the record with a joke, “I thought love was quieter than this!” (“Of course you did!” I joked back. “Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!”) I was also amused that Lady Gaga, in the middle of “Theme from New York, New York,” “A lady can sing this song, too” – either she forgot or she never knew that this song was written for a woman, Liza Minnelli, for the film New York, New York that gave it its title. Then Bennett came out for his solo set, three songs: Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens,” Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out” (written for Fred Astaire’s 1948 musical Easter Parade and the title track of Bennett’s tribute album to Astaire) and Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon” (originally called “in Other Words” when it was recorded by Kaye Ballard and Peggy Lee in the early 1960;s, but retitled by Frank Sinatra when he recorded it with Count Basie for the album It Might as Well Be Swing).

The next set featured duets between Bennett and Gaga on the song “The Lady Is a Tramp” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and two songs by Cole Porter, “Love for Sale” and “Anything Goes,” to promote the Bennett-Gaga duet album (their second) which features exclusively Porter songs. Cole Porter wrote “Love for Sale” as the world-weary lament of a prostitute, something that didn’t really come off here even though they included the song’s rarely performed verse. But my favorite version remains Dinah Washington’s from the 1955 album After Hours with Miss D, which doesn’t include the verse and made one change in the lyrics (“Appetizing young love for sale” became “I’m advertising young love for sale”), but her rendition buzzes with anger and venom over being sexually exploited. Bennett and Gaga did the verse relatively slowly but sped up to Dinah’s tempo on the refrain, though without the sense of righteous indignation. For “Anything Goes” Bennett and Gaga were clearly both having fun with Porter’s song about changing mores (the verse reads, “Times have changed/And we’ve often rewound the clock/Since the Puritans got a shock/When they landed on Plymouth Rock/If today, any shocks they would try to stem/Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock/Plymouth Rock would land on them”). After that Lady Gaga sang a verse of “Happy Birthday to You” to Bennett on his 95th birthday and then introduced what she claimed would be the last song Tony Bennett will ever sing in public – and of course it was his greatest and most monumental hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

That song had an emotional significance for me, not only because when it became a hit in 1962 it was a blessed respite from all the garbage rock ’n’ roll that was clogging the charts just then (with most of the great rockers from the 1950’s – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis – sidelined by death, draft or scandal, the pop charts were filled with the so-called “rock” of people like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Brian Hyland, whose hit “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” would be my choice for the absolute worst song of all time), but because both Tony Bennett and I were born in San Francisco. The song was discovered by Bennett’s long-time accompanist, the late (and beautiful) pianist Ralph Sharon, who thought it might be a nice novelty item for Bennett to add to hsi set list when his upcoming tour played San Francisco. Then Bennett’s label, Columbia, mounted a big promotion for the Broadway musical All American, not only recording the original cast album but having Duke Ellington record an entire album of the All American songs and getting as many of their other artists to record songs from the musical’s score as they could. They assigned Bennett to do the show’s lovely ballad “Once Upon a Time” and needed something to put on the B-side of the record. Bennett and Sharon trotted out their little novelty and recorded it, whereupon some D.J. somewhere flipped the record over, played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and it turned out to be an enormous hit, the biggest of Bennett’s career and the legacy song for which he will no doubt be best remembered when he finally croaks. Kudos are also in order for the exciting jazz band that backed Bennett and Gaga on this show – especially the ferocious Black drummer, whose first name is Donald (I didn’t catch his last name), who drove the performances aggressively.

China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America (CNN, aired November 28, 2021)


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

After the Tony Bennett-Lady Gaga special I ended up switching channels and watching a quite different sort of show, a Fareed Zakaria special report called China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America. Xi Jinping is the current President of China, and Zakaria’s show argued that his leadership is as revolutionary as those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, who ruled China as virtually an absolute dictator from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to his death in 1976, not only created the current Communist government of China but periodically threw the country into economic and social chaos with big campaigns like the Great Leap Forward of 1958 (an ill-advised attempt to modernize China by literally encouraging people to install steel furnaces and other bits of industrial infrastructure in their backyards) and the Great Proletaroan Cultural Revolution of 1966. This was the one in which Mao purged virtually the entire leadership of China, sending politicians and intellectuals into the Chjinese countryside to work as farm laborers and upending the entire social structure of China. One of the victims of this was Xi Jiaoping, whose father had been in the leadership class Mao was determined to purge, and instead of racing to it by becoming either an active or a secret opponent of the regime, Xi responded to being essentially orphaned in his teen years by becoming “redder than red,” in the Chinese phrase, and embracing the orthodoxy with the fervor of a true believer. (Come to think of it, this was probably toue outcome Nao wanted for the cadres he so suddenly displaced and relegated to manual-labor jobs.)

Xi applied for membership in the Communist Party and at first was rejected several times because of the continuing disgrace of his family, but ultimately he got in and rose methodically through the hierarchy. He also specialized in agronomy as his career and spent several years in the U.S. learning American farming methods. When Xi became vice-president under Deng – whose policies opened the door both to Chinese capitalism and to foreign investors (and leading to the essential de-industrialization of America as U.S. companies en masse moved their production to China, where wages were low and the repressive dictatorship banned trade unions and blocked any attempts by workers to organize or demand higher pay, benefits and safer working conditions), thereby rendering China a “Communist” country in name only – he was hailed as a reformer, met with U.S. Presidents, and projected a boyish, energetic image. When Xi became President of China on Deng’s death and subsequently had himself proclaimed “President for Life” by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (he did that while Donald Trump was President of the U.S., and Trump’s reaction was predictable: “‘President for Life’? That sounds like a good idea to me”), he swung China towards a policy of even more bitter repression, a huge military buildup aimed at reconquering Taiwan and dominating the South China Sea and the Asian-Pacific region in general, and an aggressive industrial and high-tech development project that, among other things, is making China the world’s leader in renewable energy technology.

While China skipped the recent Glasgow summit on climate change and is openly defying any international efforts to limit the use of highly polluting fossil fuels like coal, it’s also vastly expanding its renewable energy technology while the U.S. is basically ignoring it – with the likely result that when the U.S. finally decides to switch to renewable energy (most likely because we’ll simply be running out of any other kind), we’ll probably have to buy the technology from China. Among the concerns of the current Chinese government are any attempt at political opening, which they regard as an invitation to allow the whole regime to collapse the way the Soviet Union did in 1989 – which, Zakarla explains, is the main reason not only for the forcible takeover of Hong Kong and the systematic breaking of all the agreements China made when it received Hong Kong back from British colonial rule in 1997, but also for the fierce, almost Nazi-style repression of the Uiguhrs, the Muslim community in northwestern China’s Sinjiang province. The film graphically portrayed China as a country on the move while the U.S. is mired in political conflict and stasis – Zakaria included footage of the January 6, 2021 riots in the U.S. Capitol (which Chinese propagandists have been showing around the world to get non-aligned countries to come to their side instead of ours: the message China is sending with these images is, “This is what democracy looks like – and this is why you shouldn’t want it!”) and contrasted it with the lock-step military parades in Tienanmen Square last June to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

It also briefly discussed the fate of China’s leading high-tech entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who mysteriously “disappeared” for three months on the eve of a major initial public offering for one of his companies, and when he reappeared on Chinese TV, instead of the highly flamboyant figure he’d been before (including performing as a rock musician at company parties in makeups and costumes the members of KISS might have found excessive) he looked defeated and wan. One gets the impression that in China there’s room for only one personality cult, and it’s Xi’s. Shows like China’s Iron Fist seem to me eerily to invoke the similar debates during the 1930’s over whether democracy or dictatorship was better for the long-term health of a society: a lot of people in the 1930’s seriously argued that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Soviet Union could handle the Great Depression and the other issues facing major countries better than presumably slower-moving, less efficient republican systems like Great Britain’s and the U.S.’s. World War II was long assumed to have resolved that conflict on the side of republican democracy (though Britain and the U.S. had had to ally themselves with Stalin’s dictatorship to defeat Hitler’s), but now it’s coming back big-time as today’s ruling classes increasingly regard democracy as an expensive luxury they can do without. When people have a right to vote on their leaders – even within the highly circumscribed limits imposed on them by capitalist ruling classes – they have a tendency to elect people who will at least try to slow down the current ruling elite’s long-term project of increasing wealth and income inequality. Between that and the ways in which public dissent from that is taking shape – not as calls for socialism or a more egalitarian capitalism, but as nationalism, racism and calls for long-term democracies like the U.S. to become more dictatorial and seek a return to previous cultural norms and thereby “make _____ (fill in country’s name) great again,” the prospects for democracy worldwide look even bleaker today than they did in the 1930’s.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Alien (20th Century-Fox, 1979)


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

Yesterday I did little but write an extended journal entry and, after 6:30, do one of my movie marathons, watching three films in sequence on Turner Classic Movies and then running a Blu-Ray disc of a fourth. The first film in my sequence was Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror thriller Alien (1979), a film I’d previously seen only under poor circumstances on an airliner as an in-flight film (one wonders how anyone who ordered an in-flight dinner during a showing of Alien could possibly keep it down!). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz reminisced about how he first saw Alien at home via a TV screener – this was before videotapes of movies were widely available but he had scored one for promotional purposes – and he had a hard time with the film because it wasn’t interrupted by commercials and therefore there was nothing to break Scott’s artfully built-up tension. Alien was filmed in 1979 in Scott’s native England (later, after its huge box-office success, he’d get the green light to film Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? under the title Blade Runner, but he had to shoot it in the U.S. and have to deal with American crews’ insistence on strict scheduled breaks and other inconveniences he hadn’t had to deal with at home).

It was based on a story by Ronald Shusett that was adapted into a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, and it concerns a cargo spaceship called the Nostromo (the name is from Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, though the plots of Nostromo and Alien seem to have little to do with each other) which is on its way back to Earth with about 20,000 tons of refined ore space crews on other planets are shipping to Earth for use. We first get some long atmospheric shots of the interior of the Nostromo, beautifully composed and accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning music (I know film scores aren’t supposed to call attention to themselves, but this one does and seems quite a bit better than the usual run of Goldsmith film music), before we start meeting the seven-member crew. They are Dallas (Tom Skerritt, top-billed – given that it’s become practically Sigourney Weaver’s life’s work to star in Alien movies, it’s surprising she didn’t get top billing on the first one), the ship’s captain; Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer; Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); Brett (the young Harry Dean Stanton); Kane (John Hurt); Lambert (Veronica Cartwright – I had quite forgotten there was another woman in the cast besides Sigourney Weaver!); and the token Black guy, Parker (Yaphet Kotto).

The opening scenes of the spacecraft reveal a strong influence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, oddly, the computer monitors look considerably lower-tech than they did in Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece and the onboard computer, “Mother,” can talk but mostly communicates to the crew via cathode-ray video displays that have already become obsolete) in the way the ship’s exteriors and interiors are constructed, the ways people interact on board (though the synthetic food they have to eat is considerably closer to the real thing than the stuff in 2001, which one critic referred to as “sanitized swill”) and the mixing Scott and his sound designers (imdb.com lists eight people on the sound crew) did, including the astronauts’ breaths heavily amplified to indicate they’re moving around in spacesuits. The action kicks into gear when the Nostromo receives what the crew originally interprets as a distress call from another spaceship right when they’re in the middle of an argument about the size of the bonuses they can expect and how to wheedle more money from the company they work for. Parker, the voice-of-reason Black guy around all the stupid white people, tries to talk the rest of the crew out of answering the call, but he’s overruled because company policy is that if there’s a distress call in space the crew has to answer it or forfeit their bonuses altogether. The ship duly sends out Kane to investigate the wreckage and see if he can find any living people to rescue, but all the humans are on board are not only dead but in a fossilized state. Of course, the creature that made them that way – a malevolent alien being that feeds on any other life form that crosses its path – latches onto Kane and makes its way into the Nostromo.

From then on Alien turns itself into pretty much a remake of the 1951 film The Thing – also a science-fiction tale about a military crew in an isolated environment having to battle a conscience-less space alien who thinks of them only as a food source – and indeed the huge success of Alien was used by director John Carpenter to get approval for a 1982 remake of The Thing that I thought was better than the earlier film (especially since Carpenter restored the monster’s shape-shifting ability it had had originally in the source story, John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” but which the screenwriter of the 1951 film, Charles Lederer, had deleted) – with Weaver essentially playing the role Margaret Sheridan had in the 1951 The Thing and Ian Holm as the Robert Cornthwaite character, the stupid scientist who wants to let the alien live and even protect it against the others because he regards it as a higher life form that needs to be respected. In fact, in a surprise twist towards the end of the movie that reveals a veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist message, it turns out that Holm’s character is actually a robot that’s been programmed with a secret order, unknown to the rest of the crew, to keep the alien alive at all costs and fly it back to earth. “Crew considered expendable,” the order reads, and it’s clear that the company operating the Nostromo is interested in keeping it alive to develop as a bioweapon for military use.

Of course the most famous scene in the movie is the one in which the alien bursts through Ian Holm’s shoulder not only killing him but literally splashing the rest of the crew with his blood and guts. It’s become as iconic a scene of movie horror as Anthony Perkins knifing Janet Leigh to death in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s been copied quite often – including a ludicrous low-budget ripoff from the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it had a real name instead of the preposterous concoction “SyFy”) in which the “alien” was so obviously a hand puppet you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all-too-sheer material. The scene was also spoofed in Mel Brooks’ 1987 spoof Spaceballs, which was mostly a takeoff of Star Wars – but Brooks couldn’t resist the temptation to have the alien burst through the man’s chest (John Hurt again!) wearing a straw hat, carrying a rattan cane and doing a tap dance to the song “My Ragtime Gal.” At the end the alien (created as a puppet by Carlo Rambaldi, who three years later would manufacture an animatronic puppet for a far more benevolent alien creature in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fairy-tale masterpiece E.T., though enough scenes in this pre-CGI film were done with a human actor in costume that Bolaji Badejo gets screen credit for playing the alien) has knocked off all the crew members except Ripley.

She’s inside the ship’s shuttlecraft and thinks she’s got rid of the alien at long last, but it’s right in there with her and she has to zap it into space in hopes of annihilating it before she reaches Earth. I had misremembered the ending from that long-ago in-flight screening – I had assumed Weaver’s character had sacrificed herself to keep the alien from reaching Earth and turning its entire population into food – and on the basis of that recollection I had questioned the whole idea of making a sequel to Alien. In fact, there have been three: Aliens, Alien3 (that last numeral is supposed to be an exponent but I don’t know how to do those on my current word processor) and Alien: Resurrection, with increasingly preposterous plot gimmicks to explain the continued existence of Weaver’s character (in Alien: Resurrection she was actually supposed to be playing her own clone!). At least the next two Alien movies themselves helped launch the careers of future major directors – James Cameron and David Fincher, respectively – and however silly the sequels may have got (though Alien3 is the only one I’ve actually ever seen, and that was 20 years ago!), the first Alien holds up beautifully as an artful combination of science-fiction and horror, and a nicely honed piece of direction by Ridley Scott in what was only his second full-length film!

It’s In the Stars (MGM, 1938)


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

After Alien Turner Classic Movies showed an odd short film from MGM in 1938 called It’s In the Stars, about a college whose leading fraternity and sorority both hold simultaneous meetings at which they decide that partying and dating members of the opposite sex are only distracting them from their studies. So they decide to impose an outright ban on social contacts with class members of the opposite gender – which in our age of growing acceptance of Queer people (I use the term all-inclusively because I can’t stand the ludicrous and ever-growing set of initials, “LGBTQQIAA+” or whatever it’s up to this week, that in the same sort of perversion of language that gave us the equally bizarre “Latinx” has somehow become the standard designation for us) plays quite differently than it no doubt did in 1938. The most interesting aspect of this movie is its behind-the-camera personnel, who would quickly graduate to major films: director David Miller, writers Robert Lees and Fred Rinaldo (who would end up at Universal in the early 1940’s writing the star-making vehicles for Abbott and Costello), musical director David Snell and cinematographer Alfred Gilks. Gilks would later win a shared Academy Award for color cinematography for the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris, for which he shot all but the last 20 minutes – but I suspect those last 20 minutes, a ballet staged to George Gershwin’s tone poem of the same title and stunningly directed by Vincente Minnelli and photographed by John Alton, really won the film its cinematography award.

Anyway, It’s In the Stars features dancer Johnny Downs (who was briefly under contract to Paramount, where they paired him with an even more forgotten talent, Eleanore Whitney, in an attempt to create their own competition to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and singer-dancer Eleanor Lynn, who are so attracted to each other they end up violating the no-dating rule and are caught when the school’s astronomy professor, Mr. Jones (Roger Converse) – who also seems to be moonlighting in psychology on the side – when he wants to show the class a projection of a lunar eclipse and there are Downs and Lynn making out in front of the telescope and casting their silhouettes on the screen on which Mr. Jones is projecting his image. The other students ostracize them and literally push them into the water at the base of the school’s fountain, but Mr. Jones is determined to break their silly no-dating rule. He tricks them into sponsoring a dance to raise money to renovate the school’s gym, only the dance is a bust at first: the students attend but just stand around the bandstand while the band plays a lackluster easy-listening version of “My Melancholy Baby.” The professor asks some of the students who know the terminology of swing what he should tell the bandleader to play hotter music, and the band members start to go to town on the same song. Downs and Lynn start patting their feet in time and ultimately end up dancing, and as the band starts running through swing standards of the period like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Running Wild” the other students get the idea and soon the gym floor is a hopping dance venue. I kept expecting some prankster to pull the switch that would open the floor and dunk everybody in the swimming pool underneath – the same gag done so beautifully by Frank Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – but they didn’t. Instead the film ends with all the newly coupled college students join Downs and Lynn for a reprise of the title song, with Downs and Lynn had previously performed as a dancing couple; it’s an O.K. piece of material (by Michael Cleary with lyrics by Max and Nathaniel Leaf) but, like the film itself, nothing special.

Tight Spot (Columbia, 1955)


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

The next movie on TCM’s Saturday schedule was Tight Spot, a 1955 late entry in the film noir cycle from Columbia with Edward G. Robinson as a federal prosecutor, Lloyd Hallett, determined to convict mob leader Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene, of all people, leading a quite different sort of “family” than he did in his best-known role as patriarch Ben Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza) even though at the moment the only thing he has to nail him on is being an undesirable alien subject to deportation. I’d already watched this film with Charles in 2010 and commented on it on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/04/tight-spot-columbia-1955.html, and I feel pretty much the same about it now as I did then except I found myself liking the film’s unlikely star, Ginger Rogers, a lot better this time around. Rogers plays Sherry Conley, a woman who drifted into modeling as a teenager and ended up dating various criminals, including Costain associate Pete Tonelli (Alfred Linder), who took her on a yachting trip to South America with Costain on which Costain did something definitely contrary to U.S. law.

Just what Sherry did remains obscure (she explains she let her boyfriend stay with her when the police were looking for him for robbing a bank, but it’s uncear whether she was more involved in his crime than that) – the script is by William Bowers based on a play called Dead Pigeon by Leonard Kantor (and so much of the film takes place in tightly confined spaces its origins as a stage play are all too obvious) – but it’s given her a stint in a women’s prison that still has 11 months to go when the movie opens. Hallett suddenly needs a new witness against Costain because Tonelli, who was supposed to turn state’s evidence, has just been rubbed out by Costain’s gang and the case against Costain will be dismissed the next morning unless Hallett can find someone to put on the stand in his place. He has Sherry brought to a hotel suite near the courthouse with prison matron Mrs. Willoughby (Katherine Anderson) and basically holds her hostage overnight, using a combination of appeals to her social conscience (of which she has none), bribery (mostly with four-star haute cuisine meals delivered to her) and threats to get her to testify at the trial next morning. It’s a battle of wills further complicated when Costain’s gang gets word that Hallett is holding a secret witness and finds out where she is from a cop, Vince Striker (Brian Keith), whom at first we assume is an incorruptible rock of integrity but eventually we find that he’s been on Costain’s payroll for 10 years.

He’s instructed to leave the bathroom window of Sherry’s hotel suite open so Costain’s hit people can get in. At one point Hallett traces Sherry’s sister, Clara Moran (Eve McVeagh), and brings her to the hotel room hoping she can talk Sherry into confessing, but Clara makes it clear she doesn’t want Sherry to talk because Clara’s husband Roy owns a bar and would thus be an easy target for retaliation by Costain’s gang. When I first saw this movie I thought it would probably have been better if it had been made 20 years earlier and had used Rogers and Robinson when they were still contract players at Warner Bros. – Rogers had already played her share of hard-boiled, bitter dames and it’s easy to imagine her making that her “type” if her career hadn’t taken the spectacular detour it did, ending up at RKO and becoming Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. The main difference in my reaction to this film is I had a lot more respect for Rogers’ performance than I’d had 10 years ago: she made this the year after she’d played a murderess in the quite intriguing 1954 film Black Widow (essentially a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve – if Margo Channing had killed that ungrateful little bitch Eve Harrington, the resuit would have been the 1954 Black Widow), and it’s obvious she was reading the calendar and realizing that as she aged she couldn’t keep playing ingenues and would have to look for more challenging character roles.

This made me shocked when TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller used his post-film comment to blast Rogers and also blast Columbia for casting her, suggesting that Judy Holliday, Jean Hagen or Gloria Grahame would have been better choices – though he conceded Grahame had already played a similar role in the 1953 film The Big Heat, directed by Fritz Lang and also about a hard-bitten woman who has the evidence authorities needed to bring down a major criminal enterprise. As it stands, Tight Spot is a tough movie, decently acted by the two leads and well directed by Phil Karlson, even though he seems a good deal more turned on when he can get the story out of the confines of the small rooms in which the play took place – and even though I can readily imagine my own favorite, Barbara Stanwyck (whose incredible versatility, matched by no one in her generation and only one actress, Meryl Streep, since has made her my all-time favorite female star), in the role (which she too had played equivalents of 20 years earlier in films like Ladies They Talk About), I think Ginger Rogers is just fine in the role, thank you! In fact, if anything I think Ginger turned in a better performance than Robinson, who seemed to be sleepwalking through his role; he too had played his character before (notably in the 1938 Columbia crime thriller I Am the Law, in which he played a law-school teacher turned special prosecutor to bus a particularly predatory “protection” racket) and he seemed to be pulling all the stops by rote rather than making this Edward-G.-Robinson-character-on-the-right-side-of-the-law any different from his previous ones.

Thunderbolt (Paramount, 1929)


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

My husband came home about halfway through Tight Spot and we ended up watching yet another movie, one I had recently ordered because I was startled to see it had actually made it to a home-video format (a Blu-Ray from the redoutable Kino Lorber enterprise): Thunderbolt, a 1929 crime drama from Paramount and Josef von Sternberg’s first sound film. Sternberg had started his film career in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, about a group of lowlifes eking out a living on a barge. It was at a time before the coming of sound, when making an independent movie was relatively easy to do; all you needed was a camera, some actors, some interesting locations and a director with an eye for dramatic lighting and composition, and Sternberg had all four. Charlie Chaplin saw the film and hired Sternberg to direct a film called The Woman of the Sea starring his former leading lady, Edna Purviance, in an attempt to resuscitate her career (while he pulled the female lead from The Salvation Hunters, Georgia Hale, and made her his co-star in one of his greatest films, The Gold Rush), but he decided it was too weak to release. Sternberg got a contract from MGM but got fired in the middle of making a movie called The Exquisite Sinner (he was yet one more individualistic director who couldn’t hack MGM’s factory-like production system).

Paramount picked him up and assigned him to finish a movie called Children of Divorce with Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, and given the amount of script he still had to shoot and the limited time he had available he decreed that for the rest of the shoot the cast and the crew would literally live at the studio, sleeping on cots and grabbing whatever rest, and whatever food, they could get when they weren’t actually needed on camera. The actors ended up hating him but the film was a success, and so Paramount’s production chief, B. P. Schulberg (father of writer Budd Schulberg, who based his anti-Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? on the man who forced his dad out of that job, Emmanuel Cohen) assigned him to a movie called Underworld based on a story by Ben Hecht, one of a number of writers who had started out as journalists covering organized crime in Chicago in the 1920’s and then got called by Hollywood to write screenplays about it. Underworld set the template for the gangster movie as a genre and made stars of Sternberg and its leading actors, George Bancroft and Evelyn Brent. Sternberg followed it up with The Last Command, starring Emil Jannings (billed by Paramount as “the world’s greatest actor” following his international triumphs in the films The Last Laugh and Variety) as a Czarist Russian general who, after the 1917 Revolution, ends up in Hollywood making a movie about the Revolution directed by the Bolshevik (William Powell) who had him arrested and exiled; and The Docks of New York, which starred Bancroft as a dock worker who rescues a woman from suicide and then feels responsible for her.

Then sound came in, and Sternberg returned to gangsters as a theme in Thunderbolt, this time casting George Bancroft as bank robber and killer Jim Lang, nicknamed “Thunderbolt” by criminal associates, crime reporters and, ultimately, the police. The film opens with Thunderbolt’s ex-girlfriend, whom he calls “Ritzie” even though her actual name is “Mary” (yet another example of screenwriters – in this case Charles and Jules Furthman, with Sternberg and Herman J. Mankiewicz providing additional dialogue and Mankiewicz’ brother Joe credited with writing titles, presumably for the alternative silent version issued to theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound – using the Mother of Christ’s name to denote a particularly innocent and “virginal” female character) and who’s played by Fay Wray, on a date with a young bank teller named Bob Moran (Richard Arlen) who lives at home with his mother (Eugenie Besserer, also Al Jolson’s mother in the pioneering sound film The Jazz Singer but looking oddly younger here). The opening shot shows Bob and Mary necking in a park – and Sternberg has a black cat walk past them to indicate that they’re going to have some pretty severe troubles on their way to a happy ending. Their main problem is Thunderbolt, who doesn’t take rejection very well; he’s sworn to get Ritzie back to him by any means necessary, and also to kill the man who had the temerity to take her away from him. The two lovers part uncertainly, not wanting to be seen together for fear one of Thunderbolt’s agents will report back to him, and Mary gets into a cab – only what she thinks is a cab is really a police van.

Then we get a scene that seemed to anticipate the central plot of Tight Spot, the movie from 26 years later which we’d just seen: the ex-girlfriend of a mobster being browbeaten by police and prosecutors trying to get a line on Thunderbolt’s whereabouts so they can arrest him. Fay Wray’s performance is one of the highlights of this film; she usually got cast as innocent ingenues but here she’s a tough, hard-boiled broad, wanting to be rid of Thunderbolt but either too loyal to him, too scared of him, or both to want to talk. The first half of the film is about Thunderbolt’s ham-handed attempts to get Mary/Ritzie back, including taking her to a Black cabaret where he starts a fight by squirting an obnoxious woman with a seltzer bottle and getting her companion mad at him. (Intriguingly, Sternberg has the club’s singer heard on the soundtrack but we don’t get to see her, Theresa Harris, until Thunderbolt and Mary are thrown out of the club – and the band behind her is Curtis Mosby’s Blue Blowers, the top Black jazz band in Los Angeles and therefore a go-to group for moviemakers needing a Black band for a film scene.) Thunderbolt traces Bob – who’s already lost his bank job because the bank manager gave him an ultimatum, either end his relationship with a bank robber’s girlfriend or leave, and he left (he has a rather blasé attitude towards losing his job, but then this film was released June 20, 1929, four months before the stock market crash that kicked off the worldwide Great Depression, so this is still a 1920’s rather than a 1930’s Zeitgeist movie) – and goes to the apartment building where Mary is staying (platonically) with him and his mom.

But his attempt to kill her is blocked by a neighborhood dog, whom Thunderbolt can’t get out of his way – Bancroft resorts to going on all fours and playing with the dog in what was clearly Sternberg’s idea of a comic relief sequence, albeit a grim one reflecting the movie’s overall cynicism) – and he’s finally arrested by the police, who happen on him while he’s still stuck with that damned dog. The second half of Thunderbolt takes place on Death Row, where Thunderbolt has been sent after being convicted and sentenced to death, and what’s been a competent and reasonably interesting gangster movie up until now becomes even better. The main intrigue of the second part of the film is Thunderbolt’s determination to get Bob Moran killed even though he’s facing execution himself, and he goes about that by having his gang members write Bob a phony letter, ostensibly from the bank manager who rired him, offering him a meeting presumably to discuss reinstatement, then robbing the bank themselves at the precise time Bob is going to be there, shooting a police officer and planting the gun on Bob so he’ll be accused of the murder, convicted of it and sentenced to death himself. Eventually Thunderbolt has a crisis of conscience and decides to confess the truth to the warden, but his gang members are so convinced Thunderbolt wants Bob dead they assume it’s merely a trick so Thunderbolt and Bob will be out of their cells at the same time and Thunderbolt can shiv him to death – and Sternberg and his writers keep us in suspense until the very end whether Thunderbolt means to murder Bob at the last minute or is letting him go free and back to Mary at the end.

Once the film gets to Death Row, Sternberg and his writers ramp up the cynicism big-time – and Sternberg was apparently as cynical off-screen as he was in his movie. When a Paramount executive asked him to put in some musical numbers because in the early days of sound just about every movie had at least some musical elements, Sternberg said, “Fine. I’ll have a Black convict singing spirituals on Death Row.” That’s just what he did – only he went even farther. Not only did he have a Black convict singing spirituals (and accompanying himself on a piano delivered to his cell by special dispensation of the prison warden – played by Tully Marshall, the only person in this cast besides Fay Wray who worked for both Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, as a harried bureaucrat instead of the cadaverous figure of evil he was in Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly), he has some of the white prisoners organize a barber-shop quartet. When Thunderbolt arrives on Death Row one of the barber-shop quartet members asks him if he sings tenor – “I kill tenors,” he says – and they explain that their previous tenor’s death sentence has just been carried out and they need to replace him. There’s even an inmate orchestra that assembles whenever there’s an execution and plays background music as the prisoner is led to the death chamber. (This was at a time when producers frowned on the whole idea of background music, thinking it was an out-of-date holdover from the silent era, so the only way you could have music in your movie was if it was “sourced” – if it came from a live band, a radio, a record or some other visible source. Sternberg remained reticent about background music even after it became standard in sound films: one of his most effective scenes, the ending of his 1930 film Morocco, is scored only with the drums of the French regiment, the natural noises it would make marching into the desert, and the sounds of the sandstorm: no music.)

Technically, Thunderbolt is very much a movie of its time – Sternberg didn’t ride herd on the actors and sound people as much as some of the other early sound directors (notably Vidor, Mamoulian, Milestone and Capra) did, and though Thunderbolt is relatively free of the maddening pauses between lines that afflicted too many early talkies, it’s still a highly stentorian movie. George Bancroft seems to have thought that he’d project menace by speaking his lines slowly and ominously – a far cry from later gangster stars like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, who spat out their lines at near-warp speed and often snarled them – and Richard Arlen, who become an accomplished sound film actor later, still seems to be finding his sea legs and learning how to act with his voice as well as his face and body. At the same time, Thunderbolt is so cynical in its overall depiction of the criminal justice system and the complexity of its characters it almost seems like a 1960’s movie. I have a boxed set of Sternberg’s last three silents on order and after Thunderbolt I look forward to seeing them at long last (Underworld in particular is one of those movies I’ve heard about literally for decades without ever having had the chance to see), and I had thought of waiting on Thunderbolt until I could show Charles and I its silent predecessors, but I was too curious to want to wait and I ran Thunderbolt immediately – and it’s an intriguing film that marked the end of that phase of Sternberg’s career. The next year he’d travel to Germany on a one-film deal with the big UFA studio and make The Blue Angel, which was supposed to be Emil Jannings’ comeback picture after Paramount had fired “the world’s greatest actor” because they didn’t think he could speak English well enough (and I’ve long suspected there was a certain amount of I’ll-show-them in Jannings’ decision to play a professor teaching an English-as-a-foreign-language class to German students), only instead of Jannings’ performance as a professor ruined by falling in love with a cabaret entertainer, the player they remembered was Marlene Dietrich as the girl who ruined him.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

Mankiller (Red-Horse Native Productions, Valhalla Entertainment, 2017)


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

I’ve had such a busy week I haven’t had time to comment on a quite interesting PBS special I watched on Monday night at 10 p.m. – a time slot KPBS is using for some quirky and fascinating political documentaries after Antiques Roadshow. The film had the provocative title Mankiller, and it’s about Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010), a Cherokee whose life was shaped by the political and social ferment of the 1960’s and exemplified what’s meant by that ugly but fashionable Leftist term “intersectionality.” She was born in Tahlequah on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma and lived in that state’s Adair County on her family’s allotted land until 1956. Then the U.S. government pulled one of the many sadistic and cruel tricks they’ve played on American Native people over the centuries: after decades of policies like “assimilation” and “termination” aimed at severing Native people from their cultural and social traditions and forcing them to accept the norms of white life and culture (one brutally honest official referred to it as “killing the Indian to save the man”), the Eisenhower administration called the man who’d supervised the World War II-era relocation of Japanese-American people into internment camps (ostensibly for military security but actually motivated by racism) for the duration of the war. His new assignment was to move as many Native Americans as possible outside their traditional communities and dump them into cities, and in the case of the Mankiller family they were shoved into the middle of Hunters’ Point, one of the slummier parts of San Francisco and a hothouse of prejudice against them by both whites and Blacks.

Wilma – whose unusual last name was a Cherokee slang term meaning “warrior” – got exposed to the political, social and cultural changes in San Francisco at the time. She met and married a man from Ecuador and had two daughters with him, but ultimately left him when he expected her to give up her political activism and stay home as a wife and mother. While in the Bay Area she met César Chávez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers and saw the original Black Panthers running free breakfast programs for Black schoolchildren. She was also exposed to 1960’s feminism (Gloria Steinem became a close friend and was interviewed extensively for this documentary), and it was that awakening that led her to divorce her husband in 1976, move back to Oklahoma, and use the tactics and techniques of community organizing to make lives better for her people. Her first project was to ask the local Cherokees what they wanted most – she assumed they’d want a school for their young people but what they actually needed most was running water for their community. Wilma became adept at lobbing the Federal agencies and getting them to find what the tribe’s members said they needed instead of what the Feds assumed would be best for them, and after doing her original organizing as a volunteer she ultimately got a paid position within the Cherokees’ tribal administration. She also got married again, to a fellow Cherokee named Charlie Soap who co-directed a film about her campaign, The Cherokee Word for Water, that in 2015 was voted the best film about Native Americans in the previous 40 years by the American Indisn Film Institute.

She was hired by the Cherokees’ Principal Chief (an elected position voted on by the tribe), Ross Swimmer, who ran for re-election in 1983 with Wilma as his running mate. Not surprisingly, there was quite a lot of opposition from other tribal leaders to having a woman on the ticket of a Principal Chief – this documentary pointed out that, like a lot of other traditional people worldwide, historically their communities had been run by women, but white Americans had come in and “taught” them to adopt a patriarchal system instead – but her ticket won, and when Swimmer was appointed to a federal post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, Wilma succeeded him as Principal Chief. She was then elected Principal Chief in her one right in 1987 and re-elected in 1991 with 80 percent of the vote. As Principal Chief, her top priority was to increase the income of the tribe so it would no longer be dependent on federal handouts, and towards the end of her term she made the controversial decision to use the option the federal government nad made available to Native tribes to build and operate a casino on their land, despite the opposition of Christian ministers and businesspeople on the reservation. She stepped down as Principal Chief in 1995 due to deteriorating health, but returned to activism as an outsider after her successor’s administration was embroiled in financial scandal. Ms. magazine featured her on their cover as one of America’s 20 leading women activists, and she got an audience at the White House from President Bill Clinton. In 2010 her various health issues caught up with her and she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61.

Wilma Mankiller’s story is an inspiring one and has some odd turns I hadn’t expected – like the story of how, in December 1973, Richard Nixon signed into law a bill giving land back to Native Americans for the first time in U.S. history. (I’ve long been fascinated by the Nixon presidency because in a real sense he was the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of U.S. presidents: Jekyll Nixon signed into law America’s landmark environmental legislation and proposed national health insurance and a guaranteed annual income, and also recognized China and sought to tone down the Cold War with Russia. Hyde Nixon, meanwhile, expanded the Viet Nam war into Cambodia, kept it going unconscionably long, and concocted an elaborate series of corrupt plans to ensure his own re-election which eventually became known as the Watergate scandal and drove him from office prematurely.) Wilma Mankiller is one of those American heroines who’ve fallen through the cracks – certainly I’d never heard of her before – who showed off just how much good can be accomplished despite the obstacles the U.S. throws up in the way of anyone who tries to do anything positive for ordinary people, especially ordinary people of color, and most especially the people who were here well before we were and from whom we stole this country at gunpoint!

Lust in the Dust (Fox Run Productions, New World Cinema, 1984)


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

Last night at 11:30 p.m. I ended up turning on Turner Classic Movies just to see what was on there and whether it would be worth watching – and it turned out it was: it was a 1984 spoof Western called Lust in the Dust, directed by Paul Bartel (whom I actually met at San Francisco State University in 1979; he was showing his brilliant half-hour short The Secret Cinema, a vest-pocket masterpiece from 1968 that anticipates The Truman Show and all those other movies from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s featuring central characters whose lives, unbeknownst to them, were being manipulated and filmed as a form of mass entertainment; and his 1975 film Death Race 2000, in which he said the studio, American International, gave him teeny Volkswagen-powered cars and expected him to film a thrilling movie about drivers racing each other to the death, so he shot the auto races in fast motion and camped it up) from a script by Philip John Taylor. By chance my friend Garry, whom I’d had over for dinner earlier in the evening, is an enormous fan of this movie – he had it on VHS and one year I bought him a DVD of it as a holiday present – and he had once insisted on showing it to me. I hated it then and wasn’t sure I should watch it again – afterwards I told Garry, “Me; Brooks’ Blazing Saddles is my idea of a comedy Western” – but this time around I liked it a whole lot better.

Lust in the Dust got its title from the controversy surrounding David O. Selznick’s 1946 production Duel in the Sun, a convoluted big-budget Western set in the New Mexico desert and featuring Selznick’s second wife, Jennifer Jones, as “Pearl Chavez,” bad girl who’s the object of a rivalry between good brother Joseph Cotten and bad brother Gregory Peck. Though its 1970’s reissue was considered so bland it got a “G” rating, for 1946 it was an unusually sexually explicit movie and it got nicknamed “Lust in the Dust” by Hollywood’s jokesters. Aside from a parody of Jones’s extended death scene at the end of Duel in the Sun, Lust in the Dust really doesn’t have much in common with the Selznick film. Instead it’s a breezy 84-minute run through a lot of Western tropes, with the sort of oddly assorted cast its star’s usual director, John Waters, liked to put together. The lead is fading heartthrob Tab Hunter, whose role as “Abel Wood” is a parody of the ludicrously taciturn and alienated heroes Clint Eastwood played in the mid-1960’s “spaghetti Westerns” (so-called because they were shot in Italy) in which director Sergio Leone made Eastwood an international star. The “female” lead is Divine, the gender-ambiguous actor Waters used in most of his movies until her death in 1988 (I’m using the female pronoun because she was genetically male but usually played women, though in her last film, Waters’ Hairspray, he cast her in two roles, one as a woman and one as a man), with Lainie Kazan as the second female lead and old names like Cesar Romero and Woody Strode (who’d actually starred in Sergeant Rutledge for John Ford in 1960, probably the first Western ever made for a non-“race” audience that featured a Black actor in the male lead) filling out the cast.

The film opens with Divine getting stranded in the New Mexico desert (the entire film was shot in New Mexico and the spectacular desert canyons and mesas really help this film and make it look like it had a bigger budget than it did). She loses the liquid in her canteen – which turns out to be not water, but gin – and she’s waylaid and gang-raped by a group of five outlaws. This being a Divine film, she’s unclear about whether she’s repelled by the experience or she actually enjoys it – we do know that one of the outlaws who came to rape her ends up complaining that she wore him out sexually. She’s on her way to the town of Chile Verde in hopes of finding a job singing at Marguerita Ventura’s (Lainie Kazan) cantina, only to find when she arrives that Marguerita doesn’t need to hire a singer because she does the entertaining herself. While in the desert she also runs into Abel Wood (Tab Hunter) doing his bizarre Clint Eastwood parody and sort-of leading Divine, as “Rosie,” to Marguerita’s place. Marguerita’s place is supposed to be a whorehouse but she only has three women available: herself, Ninfa (Gina Gallego), and Big Ed (Nedra Volz), who definitely presents as a cisgender woman but is also way too, shall we say, “long in the tooth” to be believable as a prostitute in any but this fantasy-spoof context. There’s also a priest, Father Garcia (Cesar Romero), who hears Abel Wood’s confession and not surprisingly turns out to be one of the desperados out after the film’s thoughtfully provided MacGuffin: a buried treasure of gold embezzled by a bank official who absconded with it, buried it before he could get caught, but was ultimately shot and killed. (His gravesite – which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be where the gold is hidden – becomes a major center for the action in this movie.)

It’s the sort of movie in which the characters have sex in multiple combinations and for not very well-specified reasons – though Divine’s moans of ecstasy as various people seem to crawl inside her voluminous skirts and diddle with whatever parts she’s got down there are delightful (it’s a film being driven by the same sensibility as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in particular the scene in which Brad Majors realizes he’s being diddled by Dr. Frank N. Furter and says, “Don’t stop, don’t stop – I mean stop, stop!”). Lust in the Dust is driven plot-wise (to the extent it matters, which it really doesn’t) by two clues as to the location of the treasure: a limerick that references Scotland and two halves of a map indicating its location, which are each tattooed on a buttock belonging to the two “female” leads – which indicates in a late-arriving revelation that the two were really sisters and their dad, the original embezzler, tattooed the map on their butts, each side unreadable without the other. In the end various contestants for the treasure, including the feared gang leader “Hard Case” Williams (Geoffrey Lewis) and Marguerita’s pianist “Red Dick” Barker (Courtney Garris, the twinkiest guy in the movie and one who exits well before the finale, more’s the pity – he explains his nickname by saying his name is Richard and he has red hair – it’s that sort of movie), converge on each other and there’s a big final shoot-out, after which Abel and Marguerita escape with the gold (ya remember the gold?) and Rosie, after flopping around like Jennifer Jones in the movie that inspired this one, picks herself up and gets to exit with a line from another David O. Selznick heroine, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

It occurred to me that Lust in the Dust compares to Blazing Saddles much the way The Rocky Horror Picture Show compared to Brooks’ Young Frankenstein: while Blazing Saddles had its share of tasteless gags and sex jokes, it also was made with a certain reverence for its models which Lust in the Dust definitely lacks. I’m not sure why I reacted to this movie so differently last night than I had when I saw it before, but this time I really enjoyed it, reveling in its no-holds-barred approach to sexual humor and its total irreverence towards normal standards of filmmaking. The film contains three songs – all written by Karen Hart and arranged by 1950’s and 1960’s pop arranger Peter Matz – including an opening number, “Tarnished Tumbleweed,” sung by Mike Stall (he’s good but this would have been even funnier if the producers had been able to get Frankie Laine to sing it the way Mel Brooks did in Blazing Saddles), and vehicles for the golden throat of Divine (“These Lips Were Made for Kisses”) and Lainie Kazan – who actually had a reputation as a singer, though you couldn’t have told it from her work here (“South of My Border”) – and the songs just add to the overall quality of this movie, which transcends most ordinary notions of quality in movies but still manages to be very funny and quite entertaining (and leaves me wondering why I didn’t connect to it earlier!).

Sunday, November 21, 2021

Niagara (20th Century-Fox, 1953)


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

Yesterday I turned on Turner Classic Movies at 5 p.m. yesterday for a Marilyn Monroe double bill featuring her films Niagara (1953) and Bus Stop (1956). Niagara was one of the movies Charles Brackett produced after he broke up his partnership with Billy Wilder following Sunset Boulevard (1950) and moved from Paramount to 20th Century-Fox. It was directed by Henry Hathaway – a competent if rarely inspired director who was next on the list if you had John Wayne attached to a project and neither John Ford nor Howard Hawks were available – from a script by Brackett, Walter Reisch and Robert Breen, and according to Ben Mankiewicz’s pre-film introduction on TCM it was originally planned as a low-budget exploitation film noir. With Marilyn Monroe’s popularity exploding, Brackett and the “suits” at Fox decided to up the budget, feature her and give her top billing. They also decided to make the film in color, which might have been a mistake; oddly, the original trailer available on the film’s imdb.com page is in black-and-white, and some of the noir compositions from Hathaway and his cinematographer, Joseph MacDonald, look more appropriate and more moving in the black-and-white trailer than they do in the actual movie. It was Monroe’s first color film, and from then on she would work in color exclusively except for two of her last three movies, Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Misfits (1960).

As it stands, Niagara is part travelogue about Niagara Falls (Brackett, Reisch and Breen carefully constructed their script around some of the most famous tourist attractions at the Falls, including the Maid of the Mist boat, the walk under Horseshoe Falls and the Cave of the Winds, along with the carillon bell tower that figures prominently in the plot), part sexploitation and part noir. Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten play Rose and George Loomis, a couple of psychologically damaged people that have come together in a relationship made in hell. George is a Korean War veteran suffering from what the script calls “battle fatigue” but would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Rose is a woman he picked up and impulsively married when he saw her working as a waitress at a bar in Chicago, only just because she’s married she doesn’t see any reason why she should limit herself sexually to her husband or any other guy. The film counterpoints the Loomises with a “normal” 1950’s couple, Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters, who gets third billing under Monroe and Cotten, and the unspeakably boring Max Showalter, using the name “Casey Adams”). Ray works for Nabisco – when he arrives at Niagara Falls he’s more interested in the view of the main Nabisco plant than the Falls themselves – and he’s there because he won a marketing contest and is supposed to collect the prize from the company’s principal vice president, J. C. Kettering (Don Wilson, Jack Benny’s long-time announcer). The Cutlers weren’t able to have their honeymoon when they actually got married two years earlier, so they’ve decided to combine it and a business trip – only they have to wait at the resort (called the “Rainbow Lodge”) because he’s out of town on a business trip. While on one of the sightseeing walks around the Falls, Polly Cutler spots Rose Loomis necking with another guy, Patrick (Richard Allan) while she’s supposedly on a shopping trip.

It turns out she’s doing more than just necking – or even having sex with – Patrick; the two of them are plotting to kill George and flee to Chicago to start a new life. Only George finds out about the plot and kills Patrick instead, then picks up Patrick’s shoes from the check-in where you were supposed to trade in your street shoes for galoshes on one of the wet walks around the Falls, and surprises Rose and kills her at the Falls’ bell tower – where you can deposit “musical requests” for the bells to play a particular song. The song Rose and Patrick have made “their song” is a ditty called “Kiss,” written for the film by Lionel Newman (music) and Haven Gillespie (lyrics), which Monroe recorded as a single for Columbia Records in 1954 (backed with “You’d Be Surprised” (by Irving Berlin, from her later film There’s No Business Like Show Business). In one scene she breaks in on a party being thrown by a bunch of teenagers at the resort, where they have a portable record player that’s giving forth with various swing standards, including the Count Basie-Lester Young classic “Lester Leaps In” (albeit in a faster, louder big-band version than the original Basie-Young version from 1939). Only Rose enters carrying a record of “Kiss,” asking the teenagers to play it for her, and she leans back and sings the words along with the vocal group on the record – and George spots her from the front window of their cabin, comes out in high dudgeon, pulls the record off the player and crushes it to bits, cutting his hand in the process.

Polly offers to minister to him with mercurochrome and later she ends up his hostage as he steals a boat and plans to flee from the Canadian to the American side of the Falls. She pleads with him to turn himself in, saying he could make a credible self-defense claim for killing Patrick, but he says, “It’s too late for that – I’ve killed Rose.” He is able to hot-wire his stolen boat and get it to start, but he runs out of gas and in his one noble gesture in the entire movie, he manages to get Polly onto a rock sticking out of the river just before the Falls while he dies when his boat gets caught in the current and goes over the Falls. The final scene is a big suspense set-piece in which the U.S. rescue service flies a helicopter with a basket chair to rescue her, and though at first she has trouble getting into the chair, she finally does so and her life is duly saved. A rather unctuous tour guide meets the Cutlers when they’ve been reunited and says he hopes this won’t sour them on a later visit to the Falls. The End.

Niagara is a schizoid movie, part travelogue, part sexploitation and part noir, and it was rather weirdly promoted as offering viewers two great wonders of nature: Niagara Falls and Marilyn Monroe. (One of the teen boys at the party sees her walk by and asks his girlfriend if she can’t get a dress like the red, clingy, ultra-revealing one Rose has on. “To wear a dress like that, you have to start laying plans at 13!” she replies.) Sol Kaplan’s musical score underlines just what Marilyn was doing in this movie with the slide whistles and trombone glissandi with which he heralds her entrance, and throughout the whole movie one senses Monroe fighting to establish a degree of humanity and sympathy for her character despite everything the studio is throwing at her, including that iconic red dress that literally marks her as a “scarlet woman.” One amazing thing about her performance is that she does not chew the scenery or act downright evil – frankly it’s hard to believe she’s plotting with her lover to murder her husband. She taunts him when he catches her all dressed up and admits she’s put on fancy clothes and cheap perfume “to meet a man – anybody at all, as long as he’s a man.” One doesn’t know what to think about her – is she a villainous home-wrecker or just a woman who happens to like a lot of sex and doesn’t much care where, or from whom, she gets it? Monroe fought throughout her career to put meat on the bones of the underwritten characters studios, producers and directors kept giving her, and while her main stock in trade was ribald sex comedies that played on her oddball combination of sexuality and innocence that made every woman in the audience want to protect her and every man in the audience want to fuck her, when she was given a dramatic role (as here) she was able to bring real dimension to a character written really only to flaunt the actress’s sex appeal.

Bus Stop (20th Century-Fox, 1956)


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

After Niagara TCM continued its two-film salute to Marilyn Monroe with Bus Stop, a prestige production of sorts that marked Monroe’s return to the screen after a two-year absence. Monroe was understandably disenchanted with 20th Century-Fox not only because they kept giving her cookie-cutter sex-bomb roles – like the film they offered her in 1955, How to Be Very, Very Popular, which as critic Marjorie Rosen noted was “very, very unpopular” and destroyed the career of Sheree North, the actress who played the role originally written for Monroe, before it had a chance to get started. Monroe was also unhappy – understandably – that they were still paying her only $500 per week on a starlet’s contract when her movies were returning giant profits for the studio. While she was off the screen and fighting Fox in court, Monroe moved to New York and enrolled in Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actors’ Studio, home of the so-called “Method” school of acting, which had also trained people like John Garfield, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean. I’ve never been that big a fan of Method acting – though some of the actors Strasberg trained became powerful performers and major stars, I suspect it was more in spite of his training than because of it. Method actors were trained to dredge up the traumas of their past and use similar situations they’d been involved in for real to play scenes in their parts. Also the training relied on breaking up plays into different scenes, and while that was ironically a good skill for aspiring movie actors – since movie scenes are shot out of sequence and the actors must therefore turn in a performance that will not only convince in that one scene but fit seamlessly into a whole story, it also meant a tendency for the actors to go for “big moments” instead of shaping a coherent performance as they would in a continuous production of a play.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that, as much as Monroe’s involvement with the Actors’ Studio in geheran and Strasberg in particular (on Bus Stop and her subsequent films she brought in Strasberg’s wife Paula as her own private acting coach, which bedeviled directors who thought they, not an outsider, should be the one giving the actress notes) was ballyhooed, her acting in Bus Stop is not really that different from her playing in Niagara three years earlier without Method training. In fact, some of Monroe’s biographers have argued that the Method was destructive to her mental health because all that business of dredging up old memories to play your scenes more credibly just led her to relive the traumas of her childhood and made her even more screwed up. Seen today, Bus Stop – the work of playwright William Inge, a psychologically tortured Bisexual who committed suicide at age 60 from career declines and a personal life that had never brought him fulfillment – is itself a badly dated story, and it’s indicative of the conflicts surrounding Monroe’s life and career that she seized on this as a high-profile prestige production that would prove to the world once and for all that she was an actress and not just a buxom broad with big tits.

Bus Stop centers around Grace’s Diner, a roadhouse and (you guessed it) bus stop on the way to Phoenix, where passengers on a cross-country bus are stranded by a sudden snowstorm that makes the roads impassable. At least that’s what it was in the play: screenwriter George Axelrod “opened it up” considerably, as they say in the trade, having the characters actually get to Phoenix and then revisit Grace’s when the snowstorm happens on their way back. The plot deals with Beauregard “Bo” Carter (Don Murray), who’s grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana with apparently no human contacts at all, and certainly no unrelated female ones. He’s en route to Phoenix to compete in a big rodeo, and his companion and “keeper” is Virgil “Vergie” Blessing (Arthur O’Connell), who when he isn’t playing guitar and sort-of singing the film’s theme (a rather silly pseudo-folk song about all the things the singer will get the woman he’s proposing to if she’ll just marry him) is trying to shoehorn the rambunctious Bo a little closer towards normal human behavior. In a Phoenix saloon he meets entertainer Cherie (Marilyn Monroe), a girl from the Ozarks who escaped with dreams of fame and fortune in Hollywood, though her talent-less performance of the song “That Old Black Magic” lets us know she doesn’t stand a chance of becoming a high-level professional entertainer. Once again, as in La Signora Senza Camelie (a film whose central character seems to be living Monroe’s career – a woman makes it to movie stardom on sheer looks and tries to develop as an actress, including taking lessons from a prestigious teacher, before reluctantly resigning herself to sex roles that will do nore than show off her body – before the real Monroe did), we see a woman showing off her acting chops by playing a character considerably more inept at performing than she herself is. One sees Monroe’s pathetic rendition of “That Old Black Magic,” complete with torn and dowdy-looking costume and clothespins on the floor-mounted lighting switches so she can change the color of the stage lights herself – and one aches for the version she could have done if she were performing at the peak of her powers instead of playing a character with no talent.

Bo sees Cherie doing her wretched act and hears the customers at the club talking over her, and he instantly decides she’s the “angel” he’s been waiting for. He causes a ruckus by ordering everybody in the club to shut up while Cherie sings, and he launches a boorish pursuit of her in which he insists she’s going to marry him and literally will not take no for an answer. The film detours from the bus and the bus stop (its only settings on stage) to show Bo winning the Phoenix rodeo (ya remember the rodeo?) and Cherie and her friend Vera (Eileen Heckart) literally crash the rodeo, crossing over the ring in the middle of the proceedings and putting themselves at risk for being trampled or gored by the animals. It’s the sort of movie in which the supporting players – Heckart, Betty Field (as Grace, the owner of the bus stop) and O’Connell – often outshine the leads. Monroe’s performance is intriguing and quite sensitive, but despite all the Method studying her acting skills hadn’t really developed that much farther than they had in Niagara pre-Method. She does her best at an Ozark accent and she devised her own makeup, making her face look almost chalk-white on the ground that as an entertainer who worked at night, she would literally never see (or be out in) the sun.

The film’s director, Joshua Logan (who had his own share of mental issues: he was later diagnosed as bipolar and put on lithium), recalled in his memoir Movie Stars, Real People and Me that he had discussed the character with Monroe and they’d reached an understanding of what Cherie should be. Then the 20th Century-Fox costume department came up with this really hot-looking, impeccable costume for her to wear during the “Old Black Magic” number. Logan was upset with Monroe when she approved the costume, until she explained to him that she had to approve it because if she didn’t the costume department would just keep sending even flashier and less appropriate ones. Logan asked her if she actually liked that costume, and Monroe said, “I don’t! I hate it the way it is. But it’s not going to be the way it is.” Then, to Logan’s astonishment, she took the cigarette she was smoking and started burning holes in the costume. She also deliberately made small tears in it and then crudely tried to sew them up again, indicating that this was a costume Cherie had bought because she thought it made her look glamorous, but she’d worn it so long and abused it so extensively it was now literally a tattered remnant of what it had once been. Monroe’s performance in Bus Stop is a marvel of sensitivity – the stereotype of Monroe is that she was on so many prescription drugs she could barely even function, let alone think, but people who knew her recalled a high degree of intelligence and interest in intellectual things under that well-honed dumb-blonde exterior – but it also deserved a better story and a better leading man.

Inge’s tale of love and conquest really dates badly, even though we’re supposed to believe Bo gets his comeuppance when the bus driver challenges him to a fight and beats him up, leading him actually to court Cherie in a socially acceptable manner instead of just slinging her over his shoulder like a calf he’s just roped in a rodeo, but he’s still such a boor it’s hard to imagine her final acceptance of him and willingness to move to a quite different lifestyle (including getting up at 4 a.m.) on his ranch as a happy ending. (Like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this film ends just when the story is beginning to get interesting: a tale of this unlikely creature’s adjustment to a much harder and more physically demanding lifestyle than the one she’s used to would be far better drama than the slice of the story we actually get.) And Don Murray, who got an “Introducing … ” credit for a performance that fully shows off his inexperience, is totally wrong for this role: physically he’s robust enough (though I suspect most of the scenes showing him win the rodeo, if not all of them, were done with stunt doubles) but he comes off as a boor and he’s not a good enough actor to suggest any vulnerability or weakness under the boorish exterior. It’s a pity that the actor who would have been utterly perfect for this role, James Dean, had died a year before it was made, and it also didn’t help that Bus Stop was one of the long list of roles Montgomery Clift was offered and turned down.

He’d passed on great films like Sunset Boulevard and East of Eden (though precisely because Clift was so much better an actor than William Holden, Sunset Boulevard wouldn’t have worked with him because he’d have been too good at making the audience feel sympathy towards his character, whereas with the more stolid and less self-aware Holden in the role our sympathies remained with Gloria Swanson, where they belonged), and he turned down Bus Stop because he thought Marilyn Monroe was just a studio-created sex commodity and he didn’t want to work with her. When the film came out Clift saw it and realized how wrong he’d been, and when he got another chance to work with Monroe – in her last completed film, The Misfits – he grabbed it. Clift’s star-making role in his first film, Red River, had certainly proved he could be credible as a cowboy and convincingly butch, and he might have made us able to understand Bo’s surface boorishness and see a softer side to him in ways that totally eluded Don Murray. According to imdb.com, another legendary star was considered for the role of Bo – Elvis Presley – but, as he would do with the Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg project A Face in the Crowd a year later, which was offered to Elvis before it was finally cast with Andy Griffith, Elvis’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, turned it down without telling Elvis it had been offered to him. It seems that Col. Parker didn’t want Elvis making films of real quality and power; he wanted him safely ensconced in vehicles of stupefying banality that would offer no artistic fulfillment, so Elvis wouldn’t get any ideas about being anything more than a money-making commodity for himself and especially his super-manager. It occurred to me this time around that there’s a striking similarity between the opening of this film and the opening of the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, made at MGM in 1954 and starring Howard Keel as a cowboy who, like Bo Carter, thinks he can acquire a wife the same way he would buy a horse and has to be taught a lesson in how to treat women as people – only in that film the woman who tames him was played by Jane Powell and was a much stronger character than the catalogue of vulnerabilities Marilyn is playing here. But because Seven Brides played this situation for comedy, and because Powell’s character fought back in ways Monroe’s character couldn’t, it holds up a lot better today than Bus Stop.

Saturday, November 20, 2021

Columbo: “Murder with Too Many Notes” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 2001)


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

Late last night at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched yet another rerun of the TV series Columbo on the Sundance Channel, this one from the tail end of the series: 2001. Columbo, the legendary show about the seemingly bumbling but actually highly savvy Los Angeles Police Department homicide lieutenant, was created by Richard Levinson and William Link, debuted in 1971 with veteran character actor Peter Falk as the star, and became a huge sensation. It vaulted Falk to superstardom and made him a ton of money, much of which he used to finance the independent films of his long-time friend, actor-director-writer John Cassavetes, usually starring in these films alongside Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands. The original run ended in 1979 but a decade later Levinson, Link and their backers at Universal decided to revive it as a limited-run series that lasted until 2003, but if this episode is any indication to diminishing returns both artistically and commercially. This episode was called “Murder with Too Many Notes” and told the tale of highly regarded film-music composer Findlay Crawford (Billy Connolly) and his long association with director Sidney Ritter (Charles Cioffi), with whom he’s worked frequently, mostly on action-suspense films. (We see a film within the film of a young woman followed, cornered and eventually stabbed to death by a knife-wielding man, ostensibly on a recording stage where Crawford is conducting.

Since Columbo was flmed at Universal, a long-established studio with plenty of real-life facilities for filmmaking, director Patrick McGoohan (himself a highly talented actor best known for the British TV series Secret Agent and The Prisoner; when James Bond film producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli were putting together the first Bond film, Dr. No, their short list for Bond was Sean Connery, Roger Moore and McGoohan, in that order, though unlike the other two McGoohan never got to play 007) was able to shoot on an actual recording stage and show the process as it is for real. The conductor stands in front of the orchestra and at the back wall there is a screen projecting the movie as the musicians lay down the orchestral tracks that will accompany it. As this is going on, a young man is standing on the roof of the soundstage where the recording is going on, listening to a boombox containing a recording of the score and conducting it himself, albeit with nobody there. He, it turns out, is a young apprentice composer named Gabriel McEnery (Chad Willett, proof that Universal was still able to find these tall and blankly handsome young men they’d put in their 1970’s TV shows as late as 2001) who’s actually been ghost-writing most of Crawford’s most recent scores. The idea of an unknown working as a “front” for a famous but burned-out talent has been done pretty often – the film I was most reminded of in this movie was The Phantom Broadcast, a remarkable 1933 film from the first-iteration Monogram (which made films of genuine quality, including the 1934 Jane Eyre with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive, as well as some of the usual “B” dreck), in which a handsome young man becomes a star on radio, only little does his audience know that he can’t sing at all and the real singer is a homely hunchback who stands behind a curtain in the radio studio and does the actual singing while he merely lip-synchs “live.”

In addition to dubbing Sidney Ritter’s latest film, Crawford is planning a live concert of his music, “Crawford Plays Crawford,” to take place on a Universal soundstage, and to appease Gabrlel’s growing bitterness that something that was supposed to be an apprenticeship is turning into a full-time career as Crawford’s ghostwriter and his own career is going nowhere, Crawford offers Gabriel a chance to conduct the opening piece after the intermission, the theme from the film The Killer, for whose score Crawford won an Academy Award though it ws really Gabriel’s work. Only it’s a trick: Crawford has discovered an elevator in the soundstage where he’s going to hold the concert (just under the spot of the roof from which Gabriel does his pretend “:conducting”) previously installed by a hot-shot director who used it for only one shot in a film that flopped and killed his career. He intends to rig it in such a way that he will first drug Gabriel, then leave his body across the trap door, then secretly turn on the elevator just before the concert starts so that the trap door will open and Gabriel will fall to his apparent death from an accidental fall. (Supposedly Crawford has picked a drug for this purpose that dissipates so quickly in the body it won’t show up on toxicology tests.) The best parts of this episode are, as usual, the cat-and-mouse playing Columbo does with Crawford, though much of it doesn’t make much sense either as police investigation or as policier plotting: at one point Columbo pretends to run out of gas when he’s supposedly leading Crawford to the late Gabriel’s bungalow cottage, forces his way into Crawford’s car and then deliberately drives him to the address in Bel Air without taking the car out of first gear.

In these later Columbos the writers (in this case McGoohan and Jeff Cava) show a good deal more of the rest of Columbo’s homicide squad and don’t leave as much of an impression as they did the first time around that Columbo was solving one elaborate murder case after another all by himself – but they also put in far fewer of the scenes in which Columbo plays cat-and-mouse with the killer (whose identity he always seemed to intuit well before he had any actual evidence), and they’re nowhere nearly as deliciously written as they had been in the glory days of Columbo in the 1970’s. Peter Falk is clearly older-looking and more heavy-set than he’d been in this series’ early days – though since he was never a glamorous actor to begin with he suffered less from age than did former matinee idols like Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn), but what was pretty obvious was that by this time in his career he was doing Columbo just for the money and was totally bored – well, not maybe totally bored, bit he knew what was expected of him and, like an old pro (which he was) he delivered it. For me the best part of the show was tha actual music, composed for it by Dick DeBenedictis, who expertly caught the style we’re told Crawford works in – though at the end of the movie, after he’s killed his ghostwriter and he’s on his own to score a romantic drama, DeBenedictis supplies a theme that still seems to have half its leg in the action genre and Ritter chews him out, saying that it’s the wrong sort of music and wondering if Crawford is losing his inspiration. I joked at the TV screen, “Just do what all film composers do when they’re stuck – rip off Wagner!