Crime Wave (Warner Bros., 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a rather interesting 1953 movie from Warner Bros. called Crime Wave, which begins in medias res with three hard-edged escaped convicts from San Quentin, “Doc” Penny (Ted de Corsia), Ben Hastings (played by a hatchet-faced young actor then known by his birth name, Charles Buchinsky, who later became an action star as Charles Bronson), and Gat Morgan (Nedrick Young, who despite the Hollywood blacklist would become a major writer for Stanley Kramer and win an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones, also a film about escaped convicts). The Terrible Trio have worked their way down south along the California coast, stealing various cars and sticking u p small-time targets along the way. Now they have arrived in Los Angeles, where they stick up a gas station just as the attendant on duty, Gus Snider (Dub Taylor), is about to hear his favorite record being played on an all-night D.J. request show: Doris Day singing “S’Wonderful.” (Even for a low-budget crime thriller with noir pretensions, Jack Warner couldn’t resist bringing in his studio’s greatest star at the time.) Morgan impersonates the attendant when a motorcycle cop rides up to investigate the situation, but the cop knows Snider personally and realizes it’s not he. The cop asks Morgan for identification, and Morgan polls out a gin and shoots him.

The cop dies and Morgan is fatally wounded, though he manages to walk a mile to the home of his former cellmate at “Q,” Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson). Lacey was paroled two years before and since then has led a law-abiding life, working as an airplane mechanic and marrying Ethel (Phyllis Kirk). Only Ethei is getting tired of all the late-night phone calls they get from various ex-cons asking Steve for help, and she’s even less thrilled when Morgan shows up at their doorstep demanding shelter. Morgan has contacted Otto Hessler (Jay Novello), a former doctor who drank himself out of a medical career and now works as a veterinarian, though he’ll still care for humans on the wrong side of the law for cash. Later Doc and Ben show up at Lacey’s place and threaten his wife if he doesn’t let them stay, and when Hessler shows up still later he steals $100 from Morgan’s corpse even though he’s dead and therefore no longer in need of medical help. Still later the Laceys and Morgan’s body get visited by Detective Lieutenant Sims (Sterling Hayden) of the Los Angeles Police Department, in what is almost certainly the nastiest portrayal ever of a cop who’s not outright corrupt. Sims is convinced that Lacey is still a crook and is masterminding the whole thing, and he goes so far as to arrest him and hold him in custody in the county jail for three days. Apparently he’s hoping the other crooks will think Lacey had ratted them out in custody and will either kill him or beat him up for doing so. Sims is confronted by Steve’s parole officer, Danny O’Keefe (James Bell, the actor who played the killer in Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man), who tries to talk Sims out of his vendetta against Steve – to no avail.

When Lacey gets out, Hastings becomes convinced that Hessler was the one who ratted them out and kills him, though a newsboy witnesses the crime and reports it to the police. In order to get to the doctor’s vet hospital, Hastings stole Lacey’s hot rod, and when the cops find it of course it has both Lacey’s and Hastings’ prints on it, making Sims even more convinced that Lacey has resumed his life of crime. Eventually “Doc” hatches an elaborate plan for which he brings in three other thugs; the caper is a robbery of a Bank of America branch in an L.A. suburb and one reason they want Steve along is that the target is just a few blocks from where Steve works and he can steal a plane and fly them to Mexico. One of the new crooks, Johnny Haslett (a marvelously twitchy performance by Timothy Carey), takes such a perverted personal interest in Ethel Lacey we’re convinced that she’s not going to make it out of the movie with her virtue intact. After the robbery proceeds, seemingly without a hitch, there’s suddenly a shoot-out inside the bank and we’re not sure why until later, when Lt. Sims explains that the cops got wind of the plan and had everybody in the bank – from the president and the tellers to the ostensible customers – replaced with police officers. In a bizarre tag scene, Sims chews out Mr. and Mrs. Lacey for not having called him earlier – the Wikipedia synopsis says Sims got wind of the robbery plan from a note Steve left in his medicine cabinet alerting them.but there’s only a vague allusion to that in the film itself – and Steve protests that the only reason he didn’t call the police directly is the crooks were holding guns on him and his wife.

The most fascinating thing about Crime Wave is the sheer venomous nastiness of Lt. Sims. The irony of this movie is that Sterlikg Hayden was far more likable and sympathetic in noir classics like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1957), in which he played crooks, than he is here playing a cop. Even Clint Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry (1971) and its four, count ‘em, four sequelae, wasn’t as sheerly mean-spirited as Hayden is here. Even in that final speech in which he more or less admits, grudgingly, that he was wrong about Steve, he seems to be ordering the Laceys to leave town, maybe so Steve’s old crook “buddies” will no longer be able to find them. Crime Wave is one of those movies that, as Chalres said, doesn’t seem to end so much as just stop, and one searches in vain for any evidence that Hayden’s character has learned anything from his total misjudgement of Steve.

Crime Wave was directed by André de Toth and written by Crane Wilbur – the same team as on Warners’ successful horror thriller House of Wax, made the same year (though Wikipedia gives 1954, not 1953, as the date for Crime Wave) – and the two also have two of the same actors in the casts, Phyllis Kirk and Charles Bronson. The story went through various permutations; it was originally a 1951 Saturday Evening Post short story called “Criminal Mark” by John and Ward Hopkins, and Bernard Gordon and Richard Wormser are credited with “adaptation” while Wilbur gets sole credit for the actual screenplay. It’s a film that really isn’t all that noir – though it has some noir-ish visual compositions, notably two scenes if Dr. Hessler ascending the stairs to the Laceys’ apartment (I almost inevitably joked, “Up those mean stairs aman must go … “), and the cinematographer is Bert Glennon, who learned the noir look from one of its pioneers: Josef von Sternberg, for whom he shot some of his amazing early-1930’s films with Marlene Dietrich. Crime Wave is a solid, unpretentious movie that neither achieves nor aspires to greatness – we got it paired on a DVD with Decoy, a much weirder movie but also a more adventurous one – and it was entertaining even though it was hardly at the level of Decoy, let alone the truly great noirs.

Live at the Belly Up: The Motet (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a band called The Motet. Given the rapidly deteriorating state of my eyes, I originally read that on the KPBS Web site as “The Motel” and wondered how they differed from The Motels, the engaging 1980’s band featuring the haunting, beautiful voice of Martha Davis. It turned out the last consonant in this band’s name was ”t,” nto “l,” and The Motet turned out to be an all-out funk band in the style of mid- to late-1970’s bands like Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament/Fuinkadelic (basically the same band, signed to two different labels; the only difference was Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t), and Earth, Wind and Fire. According to the Wikipedia page on The Motet, every year from 2000 to 2012 they did a tribute concert on Hallowe’en playing a whole night of music by various other acts: The Beatles in 2000, The Headhunters in 2001, Stevie Wonder in 2002, Tower of Power in 2003, Prince n 2004, Michael Jackson in 2005, Madonna in 2006, Jamiroquai in 2007, Talking Heads in 2008, Sly and the Family Stone in 2009, Earth, Wind and Fire in 2010, the Grateful Dead in 2011 (under the rubric “Funk Is Dead”), and Parliament/Funkadelic in 2012. The Motet was founded in 1998 in Boulder, Colorado (not exactly one of the world’s hotbeds of funk or soul) by drummer Dave Watts, though he’s the only original member left.

The group was formed with the intention of having the personnel be flexible – one reason they picked the name “Motet” instead of “Quartet,” “Quintet,” “Sextet” or “Septet” was to avoid being locked into a particular number of members – and the group’s spokesperson on this 2020 show was lead singer Lyle Divinsky, who left shortly after this show was filmed and took the band’s very interesting Black trumpet player, Parris Fleming, with him. Divinsky turned out to be the hectoring sort of frontman that always puts me off, with his constant exhoirtations to the audience to sing along, dance or just bounce up and down and clap their hands on cue. That can be fun in a live context, but watching a show like that on TV can get annoying and boring very quickly. I think I was especially disappointed in this Live at the Belly Up because last Friday’s show with Samantha Fish was so good. She was an excellent white blues singer, guitarist and songwriter, and her music had real depth and polish to it. She reminded me of Janis Joplin, but her singing and playing had far more discipline (a word I kept thinking of during her performance) and she’d already outlived Janis by at least three years when she did her Live at the Belly Up show.

By contrast, The Motet just droned on through one good but all-too-familiar dance track after another, mostly with pseudo-funk titles like “Highly Compatible,” “Whatcha Gonna Bring?,” “That Dream,” “Keep On Don’t Steppin’” (I defy anyone in The Motet to explain just what that title means!), “The Truth,” “Death or Devotion” (which they introduced as the title track of their next album and said was a departure in that it was more politically and socially conscious than most of their songs, though it didn’t sound different to me either musically or lyrically), and “Get It Right.” By far the best song they played was a cover of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire,” a marvelous song in the original version (it and “Shining Star” are easily my two all-time favorite Earth, Wind and Fire songs) and given a pretty good reading featuring guitarist and singer Nick Ciccorini, who was alas listed in the closing credits only as a guest artist instead of a regular band member. I liked his contribution and also the horn solos by trumpeter Fleming and tenor saxophonist Drew Sayers, who managed to sound like John Coltrane would have if instead of venturing into avant-garde jazz in the 1960’s he’d survived the decade and gone into funk.

The problem with The Motet is that they don’t seem to me to add much to the original recipe, despite a claim by the Belly Up’s Chris Goldsmith that they were adding Latin and other elements to it (which I didn’t hear). I couldn’t help but think of all the bands in the 1970’s who did this sort of thing and did it quite a bit better than they did – and not just the big professional bands led by enormous stars like Sly Stone, George Clinton (the P-Funk guy) and Maurice White (the mastermind of Earth, Wind and Fire; when he died on the eve of a Grammy ceremony salute to the band I watched as his two brothers vainly tried to bring the same spark to their music than he had). I had a tape of a purely local band from Berkeley called Elements Precise I recorded at a political rally in 1975 that did this sort of music way better than The Motet did in 2020!

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (John Hughes Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Given how much last night’s news coverage on MS-NBC had focused almost exclusively on Donald Trump, it was with some degree of trepidation that the movie I chose to screen for my husband Charles and I last night was Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. This was the 1992 sequel to the original Home Alone, which Charles and I had watched Christmas night, and it’s the one in which Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), lost and alone in New York after he got on the wrong plane – his family was going to spend the Christmas season in Florida but he missed the plane and got on one flying to New York instead – encounters Donald Trump, playing himself, and asks him for directions to the Plaza Hotel lobby. At the time this film was made Trump owned the Plaza Hotel (he sold it in 1995 and it’s now, according to Google, “owned by Katara Hospitality, a Qatar based hospitality group that owns more than 40 international hotels”), and I suspect that Trump made it a condition of allowing producer John Hughes and 20th Century-Fox to use the Plaza Hotel that he be in the movie. (It is known that Trump had a hissyfit when his cameo was edited out of the vrsionshown on Canada's commercial TV channel; he claimed it was part oif a political vendetta against him, when it was really just an effort on the part of 20th Century-Fox to get the film's running time down from 120 to 100 minutes so they coujld squeeze in more commercials.)

Since Trump only has the one scene, and it’s over relatively quickly, his appearance does almost no damage to the entertainment value of this movie, which is actually quite strong. Writer John Hughes did a good job of working various plot elements fron the original Home Alone inito this sequel – since we watched them just four days apart we probably picked up on the similarities more readily than we would have if we’d seen them two years apart – without just basically making the same movie over again. This film begins with Kevin arguing with his parents because he refuses to forgive his bullying older brother Buzz (Devin Ratrey) after Buzz offers a patently insincere “apology,” As a penalty, Kevin is locked into the attic again with his bed-wetting brother Fuller (played by Kieran Culkin, Macaulay’s real-life brother). Once again, as in the first film, the McCallisters nearly miss their plane – this time, instead of a storm-caused blackout, it’s the fault of Kevin’s dad Peter (John Heard), who unplugged the clock radio in order to recharge his phone – and though the rest of the McCallisters make the plane to Florida in time, Kevin ends up on a flight to New York by mistake. Meanwhile, the two spectacularly incompetent burglars from the first movie, Harry Lynne (Joe Pesci) and Marv Munchins (Daniel Stern), have escaped from prison and found themselves in New York, eager for a big score.

For his first day or so in New York Kevin has the time of his life at the Plaza Hotel, courtesy of his dad’s credit card, which was in a bag Kevin was carrying for the family. He checks himself into the Plaza Hotel and gets the attention of a supercilious concierge (Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, who comes off like an A-1 graduate of the Franklin Pangborn School of Hospitality). Kevin tells the concierge that his dad is joining him any moment now and, when the concierge sneaks into the room, Kevin has rigged up an inflatable mannequin to make it look like dad is taking a shower. As one of the peris of staying at the Plaza, Kevin books a stretch limo and gets it to take him to Duncan’s toy shop,whose owner, Mr. Duncan (Eddie Bracken, comic leading man from Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero in the mid-1940’s), insists on taking all the proceeds from his Christmas Eve business in cash and giving it to a children’s charity because, it’s explained, he just loves little kids. (In today’s much less innocent age, the moment we hear that this adult man loves children we almost immediately assume he’s a pedophile and wants to seduce them – the kinds of allegations made against Macaulay.Culkin’s real-life friend, Michael Jackson, whom Culkin testified for in his trial on molestation charges.) Naturally the burglars hear about this and target Duncan’s toy shop as their next big target.

In the meantime, the other McCallisters are inFlorida – where their vacation is literally being washed out by heavy rainstorms that are forcing them to stay in their hotel room (a nice, if rather obvious, irony on the part of writer Hughes). Peter reports his credit card as “stolen” – and Tim Curry’s concierge says nothing as his computer declines Kevin’s card, but the expression on his face says, “I knew it!” – at least partly in the hope that if Kevin tries to use it,it will activate a signal from the card company that will let the rest of the family know where Kevin is. Though Kevin has been thrown out of the Plaza, he’s taken in by a character identified only as ‘Pigeon Lady” (Brenda Fricker), who sneaks him into Carnegie Hall for a Christmas “pops” concert conducted by John Williams (who also composed the score for this, as well as the first Home Alone) and pours out her tale of woe that she lost a lover as a young woman and never got involved with anyone romantically again. Kevin takes pity on her and ghves her one of two turtle dove pins he got at Duncan’s toy store, explaining that they’re love tokens and whenever one of them looks at theirs, they’ll be reminded and emotionally connected to the other. Kevin finds his dad’s address book and learns the location of the brownstone where another uncle of his lives when he’s not in Paris (where the McCallisters were on their way to see him in the first film), only he doesn’t realize that the house is closed down and in the process of being remodeled.

Naturally that gives him lots of material he can play with to booby-trap the place with the same kinds of gags he used in the first Home Alone, and though once again some of the gags are unpleasantly sadistic (notably one in which Kevin not only sets Harry’s hair on fire but, when Harry tries to dunk his head in the toilet, he doesn’t realize that Kevin has filled the bowl with kerosene, and as soon as Harry puts his head in the toilet director Chris Columbus cuts to an explosion). This time the gags look less like the stuff of silent-film comedy and more like animated cartoons, including a marvelous scene in which Marv is about to have a bag of cement dropped on him, and Columbus shoots the scene in slow-motion the way it was done in an old cartoon. The bag seemingly takes forever to reach its target – and Daniel Stern stares helplessly at it and doesn’t even try to get out of the way. Eventually the two burglars ambush Kevin and threaten to kill him – only he’s saved by the pigeon lady, who throws bird food on them so the pigeons attack the bad guys. (When this scene came on I joked, “Mary Poppins meets The Birds.”) Meanwhile, mom Kate (Catherine O’Hara) deduces that since Kevin loves Christmas trees so much, he’s likely to seek out the biggest Christmas tree in New York – the one at Rockefeller Center – and the two eventually reunite, though there’s a tag scene at the end when Peter gets the bill for Kevin’s unaccompanied stay in New York and learns he ran up almost $1,000 in room-service charges.

Home Alone 2 is a quite charming film, a sequel not only made by most of the same people who did the first movie but also they clearly understood what had appealed to people about their first movie and worked to duplicate it with just enough variations to makeit interesting. (Compare it to the ghastly Ghostbusters II, which was likewise made by most of the same creative people who worked on the marvelous original but missed what had made the first film so good: the contrast between the dark, almost noir backgrounds and the comedy scenes that were played against them.) Though I hadn’t seen it when it was new, now Home Alone 2 turned out to be a quite funny and moving entertainment, definitely worth seeing and a flim of real quality even if, like the first Home Alone, it falls far short of masterpiece status.

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman Productions, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s programming on Turner Classic Movies was co-hosted by Jacqueline Stewart and Carla Hayden. Both are African-American women and Hayden is both the first female and the first Black person to head the Library of Cognress. She was there to initroduce various films she’d ordered added to the National Film Registry to denote movies of lasting historical, artistic or cultural importance. While Stewart and Hayden also showed a number of fiction films in last night’s salute to the Registry and its newest arrivals, the two I chose to watch were documentaries: Titicut Follies and Word Is Out: Stores of Some of Our Lives. Titicut Follies was shot in 1966 at the Massachusetts Correctins Institution’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, and depicts an unsparing look at the horrible way its inmates were treated. It was an early example of director Frederick Wiseman’s style of filmmaking, which tried to make its editing as seamless as possible (though he still boiled down 600,000 feet if film to an 84;minute running time) and omitted narration and background music to avoid guying the audience’s perceptions with those familiar film.

Titicut Follies has the fascinating distinction of being the only film in history, aside from Todd Haynes’ first film – the short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which told the tale of The Carpenters using Barbie dolls and was blocked by a lawsuit from the doll’s maker, Mattel – to be banned from public showing in the U.S. for reasons otner than obscenity, indecency or alleged harm to the national security. Though it was originally released to international acclaim – it won awards for Wiseman at film festivals in Germany and Italy – when Wiseman tried to show it at the New York Film Festival in 1967 the Massachusetts state government sued him and the film on the ground that it violated the privacy rights of the inmates depicted. Wiseman’s defense was that he had releases from the state hospital authorities that ran the institution and, according to Massachusetts state law, stood as legal guardians of the inmates. He also pointed out that whatever privacy rights may have been violated, there was a greater good in that the film exposed the abusive treatments the inmates were receiving under the care of people supposedly there to “help” them.

Wiseman suspected that the real reason Massachusetts state authorities wanted the film banned was that it embarrassed them and made the people running the place look like amoral monsters (which makes me wonder how he won their permission to make the film in the first place – were they so blind they didn’t realize just how terrible they would look on screen?). Though a New York judge denied Massachusetts’ request for an injunction and allowed the film to be shown at the festival, the following year Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus (as in “callous,” making his last name ironically appropriate) ordered not only that the film be pulled from distribution but all extant copies be burned. Wiseman, a former attorney, appealed all the way to the U S. Supreme Court, which denied to hear the case, but he 1959 he did win a compromise from the Massachusetts Supreme Court that allowed the film to continue to exist and to be shown, but only to professionals involved in the care of the mentally ill: doctors, lawyers, judges,social workers, health-care professionals and students being trained in one or more of those fields.

Then in 1987, a lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts and the mental hospital on behalf of family members of seven people depicted in the film. The suit alleged mistreatment of the inmates and used Wiseman’s film as evidence. According o Schwartz’s 1987 lawsuit, “In the years since Mr. Wiseman made Titicut Follies, most of the nation's big mental institutions have been closed or cut back by court orders” – which is true; public revulsion against the treatment of mentally ill people in the institutions supposedly there to “help” them. In fact, there were two major waves of de-institutionalization, one in the early 1960’s and one in the mid-1970’s – the first after the publication of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the second after the release of the multiple Academy Award-winning film based on it. So one of the shocks offered by Titicut Follies to a modern audience will be to hear the inmates ranting on endlessly about their paranoid fantasies of how the world is really run, and by whom. As everyone who lives in a major or semi-major city can attest, today people who think like that aren’t in mental hospitals anymore; they’re wandering around on the streets declaiming their crazy ideas about the world to anyone who will listen, as well as plenty of people who don’t but find themselves forced to anyway.

If there’s a message to Titicut Follies, it’s that the therapists and other professionals running the institution seem to be as crazy as the people they’re supposedly there to “help.” Aside from the fact that all the people who work at Bridgewater are smoking like chimneys – even the man who’s in charge of tube-feeding a patient who has refused to eat normally is smoking while he’s administering the procedure, including lubing the tube before he sticks it down the man’s nose all the way to his stomach – the so-called “therapists” often sound as bonkers as the people they’re supposedly treating. One therapist listens impassively as a patient describes the sexual encounter with an 11-year-old girl that got him arrested and sent to Bridgewater in the first place, and one can admire his detachment while wondering just what having to listen to this stuff is doing to his psyche. Another sequence shows the institution’s chaplain, Father Mulligan, doing an elaborate purification ritual in which he blesses each successive body part withholy water and says he’s taking away the sins associated with each human sense – including the crotch – and then Wiseman cuts to a man in the exercise yard expressing his opinion that none of the people running the Roman Catholic Church, from Father Mulligan on up to the then-current Pope, Paul VI, are illegitimate and the true rulers of the church are Cardinal Francis Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (whom Mad magazine once lampooned as “Fulton J. Showbiz”).

Then Wiseman cuts to another inmate in the same exercise yard, this one singing the praises of Father Mulligan while literally standing on his head. Aside from showing that Wseman’s style was not as “non-interventionist” as he claims it to be – one can’t watch the juxtaposition of those scene without thinking that the director deliberately intercut those scenes to make a point about the human condition and how even the best-minded of people bring their own agendas to their work of “helping” others – the film seems to be informed by British psychologist R. D. Laing and his views on the social nature of so-called “mental illness’ Among Laing’s criticism of psychiatry is that ot sought to define “mental illness” with the same specificity with which the medical profession in general diagnoses physical illness: an outside agent – either a microbe, an inherent genetic defect or a toxic exposure – makes the body goes haywire and creates a specific set of symptoms which the doctor can then treat with medication or surgery. infiltrateOne of the most powerful scenes in Titicut Follies is one in which various hospital personnel are discussing a specific patient and trying to decide just what sort of “box” his behaviors put him in and what sort of medications they should administer to “treat” him. We get the impression that not only do they not have a clue what’s really going on inside this person’s head to manifest itself as something they define as “mental illness,” they are debating this man’s condition on the basis of unspecified criteria and another group of therapists might analyze the same behaviors and come up with a quite different conclusion. I remember hearing a story about a medical professional who decided to infiltrate a mental institution to see how its patients were being treated, and among the things he did was take notes during a therapy session. The “therapist” leading the session noted in their records that he exhibited “compulsive writing behavior.” infiltrateLike that story, this film dramatizes the extent that once a person has been classified as “mentally ill,” everything they do, no matter how innocuous or “normal,” will be regarded as just one more manifestation of their “illness.” Since Titicut Follies was made, not only have many mental institutions been closed (with the unintended consequence of turning these people loose on the streets, since the network of follow-up clinics the original advocates of de-institutionalization was never set up) but the technology of drugs to treat mental illness has vastly improved, though still nowhere near the level the people in the profession (both the doctors and others who administer the drugs and the companies that make them) like to pretend and tell us how they can be used. While certain mental illnesses can be treated more or less ont he same model as physical ones, many of them remain pretty intractable and, as Laing said, all too often “mental illness” is in the mind of the beholder.

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (Mariposa Film Group, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives was a pioneering documentary, filmed over a five-year period and released in 1977 whose imdb.com page describes it as, “Twenty-six diverse Lesbian and Gay people are interviewed about their lives and the challenges they experience in a homophobic culture. A ground-breaking documentary is now an artefact of a different time.” Not as different as we’d like to think; though the overall Queer community (to give it the name I use as an all-inclusive term for Lesbians, Gay men, Bisexuals and Transgender people because I hate the ugly and preposterous acronym “LGBTQ+ people” that has regrettably become standard in most media depictions of us) has won an extent of legal, social and political recognition that few people would have dared imagine in 1977, we still have a long way to go and, as one woman who survived the McCarthy-era witchhunts and the mass discharges of Lesbians from the Women’s Army Corps says in the movie, whatever acceptance we’ve gained is fragile and could just as easily be snatched away. I’ve often cited the example of Germany, which during the Weimar Republic era (1919 to 1933) was the most Queer-accepting country in the Western world, only when the Nazis took power that suddenly reversed itself and Queer people were marked for elimination in the Holocaust along with Jews, Communists, Gypsies and others the Nazis considered scum of the earth.

Warning bells about the fragility of our acceptance went off big-time when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case last June, and Justice Clarence Thomas (one of the most thoroughly evil people who has ever sat on the Supreme Court) published a concurring opinion saying that now that the Court had got rid of Roe v. Wade it was time to re-look at the decisions that had banned anti-Queer sodomy laws and found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. That sparked the U.S. Congress to pass the “Respecdt for Marriage Act” in the waning days of 2022, but though that protected the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of federal law, it did not (as the Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision did) require states to allow same-sex marriages themselves. It just says they legally can’t refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in a state where such marriages are legal.

My personal involvement with Word is Out came not from the film itself, which I didn’t see for many years after it was made, but from the accompanying book the so-called “Mariposa Film Collective” (the six people who made it: Peter and Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Rob Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix, and Veronica Selver) published. This was one of the first books I read when I finally decided, as a 30-year-old in late 1982 who’d been involved in a live-in relationship with a woman for nearly five years, that I was going to accept the reality that I was a Gay man. (She and I remain good friends and my husband and I recently spent Christmas having dinner with her and her daughter.) The book was structured differently from the film; whereas the film intercut between the interviews (not always clearly: the filmmakers didn’t use chyrons to tell us who was talking – they just put everybody’s picture in a single title card at the start of each of the three parts of the film, and good lu9ck trying to remember who was who), the book presented each subject in their own chapter and allowed us to get more of a “feel” for each one as an individual. The filmmakers deserve credit for attempting to show the sheer diversity of the Queer community; there are older people, younger people and middle-aged people, and there are Black, Latino/a and Asian people as well as white people. (One of the clearly demonstrably wrong impressions a lot of people have of the Queer community – especially by its political enemies – is that it’s all, or nearly all, white.)

However, it pretty much dodges the question of Bisexuality (two of the male interviewees hint that they’re actively Bisexual, but the filmmakers don’t press them on the subject) and includes virtually no Transgender people. The one man in the film who seems Trans when we first meet him explains that, though he likes to present as both male and female, he had eventually decided to self–identify as a Gay man. (I suspect if a similar person came out today they’d identify either as Trans or as “non-binary.”) Yet one of the most progressive aspects of Word Is Out is that, even among the people in the film who say they were “born this way,” a lot of them talked about the major parts of their lives they lived as heterosexuals, including marrying opposite-sex partners and having children with them. One of the saddest moments of the film is when a Southern-born woman who got married, had children and then fell in love with a female partner had all her children taken away from her and given to their father – so while she’s raising her partner’s children as a co-parent, she’s cut off from any contact with her own. It’s also fascinating to me that both the Lesbians and Gay men in the family who have children regard them as an integral part of their lives and don’t at all consider them a burden; in fact, the people in the film who do have kids talk up the experience to their partners or friends who don’t and say how much their children have added to their lives even though they’ve walked away from the world of reproductive sexuality.

Another elephant in the room that’s inevitably going to come up is the impact of AIDS on the Queer community; as the “Trivia” section on the film’s imdb.com page notes, “In a special feature of the thirtieth-anniversary DVD of Word Is Out, Rick Stokes discusses the impact of AIDS on the Gay male community in San Francisco. Images of the film's interview subjects who died of AIDS appear on the screen as he speaks: Donald Hackett, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and Stokes' own lover, David Clayton.” The imdb.com page also lists “Deceased Cast & Crew” members, though many of them died not of AIDS comlpications but simply of old age: Pat Bond, John Burnside, Sally M. Gearhart, Elsa Gidlow, Donald Hackett, Harry Hay, Rick Stokes, George Mendenhall, Nadine Armijo, Tede Mathews, Michael Mintz, and co-director Peter Adair. I was especially gratified that Harry Hay was extensively featured – in 1994 I chose him as the cover boy for the first issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine because he had more to do with starting the Queer liberation than any other individual (in 1950 he founded the Mattachine Society, the beginning of continuous Queer liberation activism in the U.S.) – and the Word Is Out filmmakers co-interviewed him with his partner, John Burnside, for an example of growing old as a Gay male couple my husband Charles and I can use now.

It was also interesting to see Rick Stokes as a hero because in the late Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, he’s presented as essentially a villain: the Gay member of the San Francisco political establishment who was put up as a candidate against Milk when he ran for the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco in 1977. Though Stokes wasn’t that conservative – he was still a Democrat, after all – he comes off in the movie asd representative of the sorts of Queers who were repulsed by the more flamboyant participants in the Pride parades, but he still comes across as a multi-dimensional figure and an example of how even a relatively “conservative” man or woman in their personal presentation can identify with the Queer movement and be a part of it.

Word Is Out is an unexpectedly relevant movie for our own time in that, even though we seem to have reached a plateau of acceptance, there are mass social and political forces in this country who aim to take it all away from us. The same year Word Is Out was released – 1977 – former orange-juice spokesperson Anita Bryant launched the so-called “Save Our Children” campaign against Queer-rights legislation. Bryant argued that “homosexuals cannot reproduce’ therefore, they must recruit,” and she said that we needed laws to repress the Queer community because otherwise we’d recruit so many children the very existence of the human race would be threatened. Bryant’s rhetoric lives on in the governor of her own state, Ron DeSantis of Florida, who’s positioning himself to run for President as a Republican in 2024 largely on a promise to stop the so-called “grooming” of children by unscrupulous Gay men. DeSantis pushed through the Florida legislature the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans discussion of sexual orientation oir gender identity not only in the first three grades of elementary school but throughout the curriculum. Opponents of the bill argued that it could be used to fire a Gay or Lesbian teacher who honestly answered a student’s question about their marital status. One of the film’s interviewees answered the so-called “grooming” charge by saying that as a 12- to 14-year-old he aggressively cruised older Gay men, and he was the sexual aggressor.

He also recalled his days as a “regular” at the Black Cat Café in San Francisco, where Imperial Court founder José Saria put on parody operas and led the crowd at closing time with a rewrite of the British national anthem called “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” Black Cat Café “regular” George Mendenhall said in Word Is Out, “It sounds silly, but if you lived at that time and had the oppression coming down from the police department and from society, there was nowhere to turn ... and to be able to put your arms around other Gay men and to be able to stand up and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens' ... We were really not saying 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' We were saying, 'We have our rights, too.” In 1963 Saria became the first openly Queer candidate to run for poiitical office – the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – and despite the fact that police regularly maintained a blacklist of just about everyone who publicly advocated for Queer rights in any way whatsoever, he got enough people tosign his nominating petition and he made it onto the ballot. All in all, Word Is Out 45 years later is an extraordinary document, at once a slice of history of the pre-AIDS Queer community and a reminder that, however much progress we think we’ve made, it could all be snatched away from us pretty easily and we may have to learn from our foremothers and forefathers how to fight these struggles all over again.

Westinghouse Studio One: "Little Women: Jo's Story" (Westinghouse, CBS-TV,. aired live December 25, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Christmas night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of Christmast-themed movies, one obscure and one familiar. The obscure one was a CBS-TV Westinghouse Studio One episode originally aired on December 25, 1950 (so I had to do a manual search through all the Studio One episodes to come up with its imdb.com page, and that also meant Charles and I were watching it on the 72nd anniversary of the original telecast) called Little Women: Jo’s Story. It was actually a follow-up to the previous week’s episode, Little Women: Meg’s Story, which had been telecast December 18, 1950. If the two of them didn’t tell the entire story of Louisa May Alcott’s famous autobiographical novel, they probably came close. One of the remarkable aspects about this production was it was helmed by a female director, Lela Swift, who had a number of TV credits in the 1950’s but never got the feature-film assignments she clearly deserved. Instead she switched to producing and made a number of TV series, of which probably the most interesting was Dark Shadows, the late-1960’s Gothic-horror soap opera featuring a vampire as the lead character.

Luttie Women: Jo’s Story benefits from its focus on the character who’s by far the most fascinating of the four March sisters, Jo, the tomboy and proto-feminist who was played by Katharine Hepburn (almost inevitably) in the great 1933 film of the book directed by George Cukor. Though the most recent cinematic reference point for Little Women when this TV show was aired would have been MGM’s 1949 remake with June Allyson as Jo (directed by Mervyn LeRoy after Cukor turned it down because he thought Allyson was too far from Hepburn’s league), the Jo March of this telecast, Nancy Marchand, seemed to be aware that Hepburn had played this role 17 years earlier. Marchand copied quite a lot of Hepburn’s famous intonations and mannerisms, though not to such an extent that they became oppressive caricatures. Instead she used the older actress as a model while still creating her own reading of the part, and she managed to make Jo March the force of nature she has to be for the character to work. Indeed, the entire cast was quite good, though there’s a rather odd glitch on the imdb.com plot synopsis: it states that the story takes place during the U.S. Civil War and the March women’s father is off fighting in it, but by the time the story actually shown here takes place it’s 1868, the war has been over for three years, and the father, Jonathan March (Richard Purdy), is actually an on-screen character. And Marchand was just six years younger than Mary Sinclair, who plays her mother (also called Jo, though usually addressed as “Marmee”).

The story deals with Jo’s frustration at losing the chance to go to Europe as the traveling companion of a rich woman who’s a friend of her aunt, her sister Amy (Lois Hall) going in her place, Amy marrying Jo’s long-time boyfriend Lawrence (Berry Kroeger) after Jo turns down his proposal because she enjoys having him as a friend but nothing more, her trip to New York which is cut short when her frail sister Beth (June Dayton( is diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor, and her ultimate pairing off with a man twice her age, Professor Fritz Bhaer (Kent Smith, a surprising role for him; in the Hepburn film he was played by Paul Lukas, who was Hungarian-born but usually played Germans, both good guys as in Watch on the Rhine and bad guys as in Confessions of a Nazi Spy) after they meet in a New York boardinghouse where Jo is staying and bond over their shared love of books, music and high culture in general.

This was the third item on the public-domain DVD I dug out of the backlog that also contained an abbreviated (69 minutes instead of the original 78) of the 1935 British film Scrooge, an adaptation of Chalres Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Seymour Hicks in the title role, and a color cartoon, also from1935, called Somewhere in Dreamland produced by the Fleischer Brothers. I actually enjoyed this more than the other two: it was a heartwarming story but cut with enough fierceness and power to avoid being too sentimental, and whoever Lela Swift was, she got excellent performances from her cast even within the limitations and pressures of a live on-screen telecast, fortunately preserved on kinescope (a crude technology that involved sticking a film camera ini front of a TV monitor and filming the result, though the cameras needed to be synchronized to current for the difference in frame rates between the 24 frames per second standard for motion pictures and the 30 frames per second of TV). The shows were seen live on the East Coast and then the kinescope films were flown across the country so they could be shown on the West Coast three hours later, albeit in such poor video quality that when Desi Arnaz produced I Love Lucy he insisted it be shot on film so it would look as good no matter where in the U.S. it was shown.

Home Alone (John Hughes Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on Christmas evening Charles and I watched the 1990 (that’s the date on indb.com, though I remembered the film coming out in 1991 and my joking about the name of its director, Chris Columbis, “Ah! HIs first hit in 499 years!”) original Home Alone. I hadn’t seen it in years – not since it first came out on VHS tape in the early 1990’s – but when Charles’s mother Edi was giving away her DVD’;s because she’s gone over to the dark side of “streaming” (as far as I’m concerned, “streaming” is what I do when i pee), I grabbed her boxed set of all four Home Alone movies (did you realize there were that many of them? I sure didn’t!). I screened the first Home Alone last night, not only because it was a Christmas-tthemed movie but because I’d had fond memories of it and had found it an utter delight. I still do; it’s by no means a great movie, but it’s a thoroughly entertaining one and, as Charles said after we watched it, it didn’t aim high but definitely hit the target its makers (notably John Hughes, who produced the film and wrote its script even though he didn’t direct it) intended.

By now just about everybody in the civilized world knows the basic plot of this story, but just in case, here goes: Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is the youngest of seven children, and his parents Peter (John Heard) and Kate (Catherine O’Hara) are planning to take the entire family to Paris to spend the holidays with Peter’s brother Frank (Gerry Bamman), who lives there. Only the night before they’re supposed to leave they lock Kevin in the attic, and when they have to depart in a hurry they simply forget about him. Their family passes the head cound due to a neighbor kid who sneaks in to their line and essentially takes Kevin’s place, and in one of the great comic-shock scenes of all time the McCallisters are on the airliner to Paris when Kate suddenly realizes she forgot something. She and Peter sort out the obvious things, from their passports to their toothbrushes, and all those things they have on them. Then, with a jolt, she sits bolt-upright in her airplane seat and exclaims, “KEVIN!”

The film is at once a coming-of-age tale for the eight-year-old Kevin (though Culkin was 10 when he made it), whose six onder siblings have made fun of him for being so lame and incompetent but who develops amazing powers of resourcefulness, and a tale of how his parents frantically search for a way to get home in a hurry and find out that every plane is booked solid for the holidays. Kevin manages to shop for himself (courtesy of a stash of money he’s found in his oldest brother’s bedroom) and vanquish a pair of comically inept burglars, Harry Lynne (Joe Pesci, who proves just as adept ini comic villainy as he was in real villainy in films like his immediately previous one, Martin Scorsese’s gangster drama GoodFellas) and Marv Munchins (Daniel Stern). The two have concocted an elaborate scheme for hitting as many of the houses in this affluent Chicago-suburb neighborhood as possible: Harry poses as a police officer and knocks on the doors of various residents to inquire about their travel plans for the holidays and the security arrangements they’ve made. Then he and Marv will use this information to burglarize them.

Only they run afoul of Kevin, who rigs up an elaborate set of traps not only to protect the house from the wanna-be burglars but to make them hurt so much they’ll either give up or be sitting ducks for arrest by the real police. Kevin recognizes Harry as the “cop” who visited them before they were supposed to leave because of an ill-fitting gold tooth filling on his lower jaw, which comes off during one of the Three Stooges-like slapstick scenes. Kevin also has his comeuppance when he realizes that, as hard as he wished his whole family would disappear, the reality of having them all gone is more than he can bear and he welcomes them back when they finally return. There’s also a subplot about a scary-looking old man, Marley (Roberts Blossom), who at first seems so hostile and forbidding the McCallister kids make up stories about him being a never-caught serial killer – when he first appeared I referenced Meet Me in St. Louis and joked, “I hate you, Mr. Brouckoff!” – who turns out to be just a lonely old man because he’s become estranged from his son and therefore has to sneak into church to hear his granddaughter sing in the choir. Of course Kevin runs into him at a late-night Christmas Eve service and worms the story out of him, eventually encouraging him to contact his son and reconcile. There's also a great cameo by the late John Candy as Gus Polinski, leader of a polka band who are driving from New York to Milwaukee and offer Kate McCallister a ride to Chicago because it’s on their way.

When I watched Macaulay Culkin in his first major adult role in the 2003 film Party Monster, a marvelous and woefully underrated film in which Culkin played real-life killer Michael Alig, leader of a “club kid” subculture he helped create, I commented that in Home Alone Culkin played a child with the resourcefulness of an adult, while in Party Monster he played an adult with the emotional immaturity of a child. This time around, while watching Home Alone, it occurred to he that this is the sort of film Buster Keaton would have made if he’d entered movies as a child. Remember that Keaton was already a professional performer since age three – though he wouldn’t discover filmmaking until 1917, when he heard Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was shooting a movie in New York, showed up on the set to see what this filmmaking business was about and ended up playing a part in the film. Keaton was essentially a stooge for his parents in their vaudeville act, billed as “The Three Keatons, Featuring Buster the Human Mop” – and at one point the Gerry Society, a do-gooder group in New York, reported the Keatons to child protective authorities. Buster Keaton recalled having to perform his act in a courtroom before a judge to prove that, as dangerous as it looked on stage, he was a fully trained acrobat and wasn’t in any real harm’s way.

One thing Charles and I both liked about Home Alone is that John Hughes and Chris Columbus were able to create gags that built on each other in an ever-increasing cascade of laughter – a largely lost art that was second nature to Chaplin, Keaton and the other great silent comedians – and I was impressed with the slapstick in Home Alone even though I was also made a bit uncomfortable with the amount of sheer pain inflicted on Harry and Marv. Granted, they’re burglars and therefore we’re supposed not to feel too sorry for them, but still I had some of the same level of unease I get when watching the Three Stooges and realizing how much their gags must literally have hurt them.

Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas with Vanessa Williams (Nouveau Productions, American "Pops" Orchestra, PBS-TV, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched two Christmas specials on KPBS, of which the first was a quite engaging 60th anniversary tribute to the Ella Fitzgerald Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album from 1960. It wasn’t billed as a 60th anniversary tribute, but since it was made in 2020 it obviously functioned as one. I first encountered Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas as a cassette I bought from the old Sam Goody’s location on the third floor of Horton Plaza before they moved to a bigger location on the first floor and then lamentably went out of business altogether in 2013. I burned a CD copy from my tape just as it was about to self-destruct and then got a CD version at Auntie Helen’s thrift store in North Park, though according to Wikipedia a later CD edition contained six bonus tracks, three of which were alternate takes. The original Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album, produced by Norman Granz (Ella’s long-time manager and producer and almost certainly the best thing that ever happened to her career-wise besides Chick Webb, the Harlem drummer and bandleader who discovered her in the first place), wisely avoided sacred Christmas songs and focused exclusively on the secular side of Christmas music: “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” (a wistful ballad by Frank Loesser, who later said he’d never intended it to be a holiday song but it became one anyway). “Sleigh Ride,” the Mel Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song,” the Count Basie/-Eddie Durham-Jimmy Rushing “Good Morning, Blues” (which qualifies as a Christmas song because its lyrics reference Santa Claus), “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and “White Christmas.”

In 1967, during the “lost years” of Ella’s recording career after Granz left the record business in 1966 and before he returned to it in 1972, she made a second Christmas album for Capitol, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas, which was as terrible as Swinging Christmas had bewen great. The reason was that for some reason the folks at Capitol decided to have Ella record exclusively sacred Christmas songs, and her voice just wasn’t suited to that sort of material. (Sarah Vaughan made a stunning record of “City Called Heaven” and the Schobert “Ave Maria,” but Ella, great as she was, couldn’t pull off the kind of singing needed for songs like that to work.) The horrible arrangements by Ralph Carmichael – as opposed to the great ones Frank DeVol concocted for Swinging Christmas – didn’t help either. This 2020 tribute was staged by something called the American “Pops” Orchestra, based in Washington, D.C. and conducted by a young cutie named Luke Frazier, who said he formed the group to help preserve America’s heritage of classic songs from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. I wasn’t aware this part of America’s musical heritage needed preserving; while the rock revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s temporarily swamped this sort of music, it came back gradually in the 1980’s as Tony Bennett made a comeback and rock artists like Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Rod Stewart and even Bob Dylan started recording standards. Country star Willie Nelson also made three albums of this kind of material, and they were among his best-sellers.

The show was hosted by Vanessa Willaims, and along with her it featured Dee Dee Bridgewater, Nova Peyton, Carmen Ruby Floyd, Morgan James, Norm Lewis (the one token male on the program) and Dave Detweiler (a trumpet player in the band who was featured instrumentally on “Frosty the Snowman”). I made the mistake of playing the original Ella Fitzgerald album before I watched the show, which made me a bit hyper-critical of the first few songs because the way the modern singers were interpreting this music didn’t reach Ella’s heights (though Dee Dee Bridgewater came closest; she is an acknowledged jazz singer, even though her shaved head makes her look more like a super-villainess in a Marvel Comics movie than a jazz singer). The songs were performed in the same order as on Ella’s original LP, with Bridgewater singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “Sleigh Ride,” Peyton doing “Jingle Bells” and :Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Floyd doing “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and “White Christmas” (a bit disappointing as the closer, but then as far as I’m concerned – and pretty much the rest of the world agrees – Bing Crosby owns this song, now and forever), James doing “Winter Wonderland,” and Lewis,who seems to be going for “Black Tony Bennett” as his marketing niche, doing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “The Christmas Song.” Aside from Dave Detweiler’s trumpet feature on “Frosty the Snowman”(which I enjoyed except for the vocal interjections by a chorus, which I could have done without), the other songs – “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” and “Good Morning, Blues” – were sung by Vanessa Willliams herself. Though she’s usually one of those performers critics love to hate, she was great here, phrasing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” perfectly and giving “Good Morning, Blues” the grit it needs. Next to Bridgewater, she was the best singer onthe show. I also liked the tweaks Frazier did to the original arrangements, especially the “hot” passages for ensemble violins.

The show also featured interstitial segments about Ella Fitzgerald herself, who survived a childhood as grim as her great contemporary Billie Holiday’s – rendered homeless when her mother died in 1932 after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather (he was a Portuguese immigrant fisherman and her only recorded comment about him came during her recording a tribute album to Brazilian singer-songwriter Antonio Carlis Jobim that required her to sing in Portuguese; she told Norman Granz that if she’d known someday she’d have to sing in Portuguese she’d have paid more attention when her stepfather tried to teach it to her). In 1934, while homeless, she entered an amateur night contest at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theatre and originally planned to dance, but after seeing the on-stage headliners do a spectacular dance number together, she realized she couldn’t compete with them and decided to sing instead. (By coincidence, Billie Holiday also showed up at her audition intending to dance, but bombed out as a dancer and, at the suggestion of teh rehearsal pianist, quickly shifted to singing.) She sang Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Judy,” which she had learned from the hit recording by The Boswell Sisters (Ella always named Connee Boswell as her biggest influence; ironically Boswell was a white singer whose voice sounded Black and Ella a Black singer whose voice sounded white), and when the crowd applauded her and asked her to sing something else, she sang the flip side of the Boswells’ record, “The Object of My Affection.”

In 1935 the noted Harlem bandleader and drummer Chick Webb hired her for his band – since she was still underage Webb and his wife adopted her – and within two years she was making hit records with Webb’s band. Her breakthrough came with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” a nursery rhyme she and arranger Van Alexander adapted into a pop song; the record sold over a million copies and broke her into stardom. When Webb died the next year Ella at least nominally assumed leadership of his band – the first woman to front an otherwise all-make big band – though trumpeter Taft Jordan was the musical director and pretty much ran the show. After that Ella never looked back, and one reason for her long success was a protective management team that kept her from the traps of alcohol, drugs and men that led to Billie Holiday’s burnout and early death. One of Ella’s biographers discovered a previously unknown husband named Benny Kornegay, the sort of exploitative man who latched on to women with money and lived off them, which her managers got annulled and did such a good job covering up no one knew about it until this author discovered the original marriage license in the New York records. Ella’s second husband was jazz bassist Ray Brown; they broke up because of career conflicts but remained good friends and sometime collaborators. They adopted a son, Ray Brown, Jr.,,who wanted to follow his parents into the music business but didn’t make it because he wanted to be a country singer, at a time (before Charley Pride) when that wasn’t a career option for Blacks. Ella continued her successfil career until 1991, when her diabetes had progressed to the point where both her hegs had to be amputated; she retired after a concert at Carnegie Hall (her 26th appearance there) and died five years later – but her records, and tributes like this, keep her legacy alive.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (PBS-TV, filmed December 7, 2019, aired December 24,2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas PBS showed a quite different holiday-themed special, The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King. Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker has become a staple of the holiday season – just about every ballet company in the world mounts a production of it during the Christmas season and makes so much money off it it provides half their income for the year – but John Mauceri, American-born conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, decided to do a new version that would bring the story closer to its original source, the 1816 novel by German writer. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Most classical music fans know of Hoffmann, if at all, as the central figure of Jacques Offenbach’s last opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, which not only draws on three of his stories but presents Hoffmann as an on-stage character, a man routinely victimized by love and relationships that turn out to be grotesquely unworkable and toxic. But he was also a multi-talented artist, including a quite good composer in his own right (I’ve heard one of his piano concerti, a single-movement work strongly reminiscent of his great contemporary, Beethoven.)

Not surprisingly, Hoffmann’s original story is considerably darker than the one we know, including a long prologue about the rivalry between humans and mice for control of a fairy kingdom. The human king and queen hired a man named Christian Drosselmeyer to invent a mousetrap and used it to kill most of the mouse population in their castle, but to get revenge the Mouse Queen put a curse on their daughter, Princess Pirlipat, so the girl, once the most beautiful baby in all the world, became a hideous creature with green eyes, a mouth that extended all the way across her face, and a small beard. (It sounded to me like a prototype of the Joker in Batman.) Drpsselmeyer told the human king and queen that their daughter could be restored to her natural beauty only after 15 years had passed and she was old enough to marry (at least under German law back then), and only by a young man who could crack the world’s hardest nut with his teeth and who had never shaved or worn boots. After searching the world for the nut and the young man (represented by some of the national dances that Tchaikovsky and his choreographer, Marius Petipa, used to fill out the second act of the ballet), Drosselmeyer found both of them while on a visit to his home town, Nuremberg. The nut belonged to Drosselmeyer’s brother and the young man was his nephew. Drosselmeyer staged the ritual needed to bring Princess Pirlipat’s beauty back, but in the process his nephew stepped on the Mouse Queen and, as she lay dying, she put a curse on him that turned him into a nutcracker. The second half of the story takes place at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum and their two children, Fritz and Marie (named after E. T. A. Hoffmann’s own kids).

Drosselmeyer is a traveling clockmaker who periodically shows up with remarkable Christmas gifts, including a batch of toy soldiers that march in formation when they’re wound up (Hoffmann was big on automata and one of the stories in The Tales of Hoffmann depicts him falling in love with one). But Marie only has eyes for the nutcracker that used to be Drosselmeyer’s nephew, and she goes to bed on Christmas Eve and has an elaborate dream in which the nutcracker slays the Mouse Queen’s seven-headed son and is proclaimed the rightful ruler of a candy kingdom. Once the spell on him is lifted and he becomes human again, he proposes marriage to Maria and she accepts, journeying back with him to co-rule the candy kingdom from a giant castle made of marzipan. Then Maria wakes up, tells her parents about her dream, and is upbraided for believing in anything so preposterous. Mauceri decided to present this story asFor his narrator he chose Scottish-born actor Alan Cumming, star of the last Broadway revival of the musical Cabaret, and Cumming added to the charm of the tale even though his Scottish accent got a bit thick at times.

Mauceri made some ill-advised references to some more recent legends, from the Arthurian tales and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to both Wagner’s and Tolkien’s Ring cycles, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. All ini all, it was an engaging tale even though some of it got a bit too “arch” for me. I was amused at how much one of the oboe players in the orchestra looked like the young Mitch Miller (who also got his start as an oboist) and the black-clad woman who played the celesta part in “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and wherever else one was required. Mauceri cobbled together his score from various Tchaikovsky works, including both familiar and unfamiliar numbers from The Nutcracker as well as other works by the Russian master, which he did not name. He also did a commentary in which he referenced the conductor as if they were twi different people named John Maucery – the show was filmed December 7, 2019 at the Royal Scottish National Theatre in Glasgow, at the second performance of Mauceri’s pastiche. It would be interesting to see a modern choreographer use Mauceri’s adaptation to construct a ballet version (and according to various online sourcesn, there ave alreqady been attempts to rework the ballet closer to Hoffmann's story), but until that happens this one will do just fine.

Live at the Belly Up: Samantha Fish (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 11 p.m. on Friday, December 23 I caught a Live at the Belly Up show on KPBS which I quite liked, featuring a 30-year-old blues-rock musician named Samantha Fish. In her interstitial interviews she said she grew up in Kansas City and started at age 13 as a drummer before switching to guitar and vocals at 15. So far she’s made 11 albums, some leading the Samantha Fish Blues Band and some on her own, and the copyright date on this show was 2020 (which would mean they got in just before the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of all live venues for almost two years). Most of the songs she played came from her 2019 album Kill or Be Kind – a song she wrote about the dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship – including the spectacular opening song, “Bulletproof,” which she played on a guitar with a long neck and a rectangular body that reminded me of a cigar box (the body even had filigreed ornamentation around it to make it look more cigar box-like) and also the famous custom-built rectangular instrument Bo Diddley used to play. Most of the show she played on a white guitar with black trim, but she later switched to a lime-green one and I think she used a wood-grain solid-body electric on one song. She didn’t play acoustic guitar at all, and it would have been interesting to hear her on either an acoustic or a hollow-body electric playing more traditional blues standards, but she was quite spectacular in what she actually did. She loves to shred – which reminded me of the clips from Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at a British TV concert in 1964 in which she shredded, and I was led to joke, “Ah, shredding! Another thing white people think they invented.”

Fish’s performance was great; her vocals reminded me of Janis Joplin’s but she is a much more disciplined performer than Janis ever was (let’s face it, a lot of us who were alive when Janis was watched her hurtling towards self-destruction with a sort of sick fascination; I remember being convinced when Janis was alive that her career couldn’t last long because, even if she’d lived, she would have burned out her voice in a few years). By chance I’d recently heard a CD of Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen from a tape they made in September 1964 when they were rehearsing for a folk-music gig and neither of them had any idea that both their careers would be totally changed by the 1960’s rock revolution – and aside from once again making me wonder how Janis’s career might have gone if she’d joined the Jefferson Airplane when their original female singer, Signe Toly Anderson, left, the stripped-down traditional blues on this 24-minute tape (including a cover of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) sounded more like Samantha Fish’s music than the rock Janis is best known for. Fish performed 10 songs on Live at the Belly Up – it’s become a key indicator for me of how disciplined a band is and whether they’re really into jamming based on the number of songs they fit into the Live at the Belly Up’s one-hour time slot, and at 10 Fish’s show tended towards the jammier end of things, though not so much that she didn’t give a sense of discipline (a word I keep thinking of in connection with her).

Fish played with a fairly large band, including two horn players – a trumpeter and a saxophonist, both of whom contributed short, sweet solos – and a quite good drummer who kept a basic rhythm but also played loosely enough with the beat he reminded me of the way Mitch Mitchell played with Jimi Nendrix or Keith Moon with The Who. Fish’s songs were “Bulletproof,” “Kill or Be Kind,” “Watch It Die,” “Love Letters,” “She Don’t Live Around Here,” “You Got It Bad” (which she said was about the pressures of being in the music business and how it pretty much wipes out any chance of an off-stage private life), “Dirty,” “Little Baby,” “Fair-Weather” (the hyphen is very much a part of the song title) and her exciting finale, “Crow Jane.” Fish’s lyrics tend toward the elliptical but not so much so that they’re incomprehensible. She came out dressed in a tight black leather outfit which she showed off midway through the show when she took off the light white jacket she’d worn over it through the first few songs, and one can readily imagine straight guys (or Lesbians) having fantasies about her even though she’s not going out of her way to merchandise herself as a sex object, which is O.K. by me. Since this show and the Kill or Be Kind CD she’s released one more album, Faster (2021), which features an appearance by guest rapper Tech N9ne on a song called “Loud” – a fact which led me to think, “Et tu, Samantha?”

Decoy (Bernhard-Brandt Productions, Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I eventually settled in and watched a Warner Archive DVD of the 1946 movie Decoy, a strange little film from Monogram starring Jean Gillie and Edward Norris. At least there are some familiar “names” in the supporting cast, including Robert Armstrong from King Kong and Sheldon Leonard from It’s a Wonderful Life, and the director was a young man who was then Jean Gillie’s husband, Jack Bernhard, who though born in the U.S. (in Philadelphia in 1914) enlisted in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II and met Gillie when he was stationed in London. Gillie had already made a number of films in her native Britain, of which the only one I’d heard of was The Tawny Pipit (the title is the name of a bird), which James Agee had ridiculed in his film column for The Nation in the mid-1940’s) when she met and married Bernhard, who took her home with him to the U.S. after the war and sought to build her a career as a major star. Bernhard co-produced Decoy with a business partner named Bernard Brandt and directed it on his own. The script was based on a radio play of the same title by Stanley Rubin, though the actual screenwriter was Nedrick Young, a former actor who’d played the romantic lead in the haunting film Strangler of the Swamp for PRC in 1945. (Strangler of the Swamp was one of the five best films PRC ever made, along with Lady in the Death House, Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour, and interestingly all five were made by foreign directors: Frank Wisbar on Strangler, Steve Sekely on Lady in the Death House and Edgar G. Ulmer on the other three.)

I’d wanted to watch Decoy on its airing on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, but alas it was on December 3 while Charles and I were visiting his mother, and her cable provider offered TCM only as a special subscription channel. So I bought the DVD, which paired it with another film noir, Crime Wave (1953), and finally got a chance to watch it with Charles on December 22. We were able to see Muller’s intro and outro before and after we watched the movie – they were posted on YouTube even though we had the film itself on DVD and watched it on our normal TV – and I’m a bit surprised that despite their usual obsession about “spoiler alerts,” IMDb actually gave the big plot twist away on their home page for this film [spoiler alert!]: “A mortally wounded female gangster recounts how she and her gang revived an executed killer from the gas chamber, to try and find out where he buried a fortune in cash.” This had me wondering whether I’d been committing “first-itis” in insisting that the first science-fiction film noir was not Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) but the original Don Siegel-directed version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, 26 years before Blade Runner. Now here was a science-fiction film noir a decade earlier!

Actually, though, the science-fiction element in Decoy doesn’t last long. The man who’s revivified after being executed for murder committed during an armed robbery that netted him $400,000 is Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), and his return to life lasts only long enough for femme fatale Margot Shelby (Jean Gilles) and her sort-of boyfriend Jim Vincent (Edward Norris) to get Frankie to draw them a map to where he hid the loot from the robbery. They get him to do this in the presence of the man who’s revived him, Dr. Lloyd L. Craig (Herbert Rudley), who did it by administering a gas containing a chemical called methylene blue. Methylene blue really exists, and one of its properties is it functions as an antidote to cyanide, and Stanley Rubin ran with that and posited that it could be used to revive someone who’s been executed with cyanide gas, as was the standard in California then and for years after until, like all other states that still have the death penalty, they switched to lethal injections. Then, once they’ve wormed the secret out of him, Margot and Jim shoot him in the back, killing him permanently.

The film actually begins with a long sequence during which a heavy-set man hitchhikes his way to San Francisco, where most of the film takes place, and he moves so stiffly and almost never speaks. At first I thought he would be the revivified execution victim, but eventually he turns out to be Dr. Craig, whom Margot and Jim forced to drive them to the hiding place on Frankie’s treasure map. Only once Margot got the treasure, she ran down Jim and shot Dr. Craig and left him for dead by the side of the road. Dr. Craig is tracked down in San Francisco by police sergeant Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), who stood by outside Margot’s door and watched as Dr. Craig let himself in with a drawn pistol and shot her. As she lays dying she tells Portugal the whole story and then, when he moves in to try to kiss her, she laughs in his face and says all she was ever interested in was the money. She appears to last long enough for Portugal to open the satchel containing the loot, only in a scene obviously derived from the end of The Maltese Falcon [spoiler alert!], it turns out to contain a one-dollar bill, a few stones to fill out the weight, and a note from Frankie saying that he set this up as a decoy for anyone who tried to get his secret stash and “I leave the rest of the loot to the worms.”

rDecoy is a quite accomplished movie that for the most part makes the most of a Monogram-sized budget, though most of it takes place in confined spaces and the one street exterior we get looks so familiar from other Monogram movies we expect Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall to show up any moment. Decoy was filmed during down time from Jean Gillie’s role in a much more prestigious production, The Macomber Affair, based on Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and starring Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, Robert Preston and Reginald Denny. (Gillie was billed fifth, after them.) Gillie was able to make both films simultaneously because The Macomber Affair was filmed over three months and Decoy in eight days. One of the most fascinating things about Decoy is that Jack Bernhard evidently thought that he could make a major star out of his wife by casting her as a black-hearted bitch with utterly no redeeming qualities whatsoever. We were also supposed to believe that the mere appearance of Gillie would get the various men in her life to give up their careers and their integrity while she went merrily on her way, single-mindedly focuses only on getting the money and doing nothing even to hint at reciprocating their sexual interest in her. One wonders if this is what Jack Bernhard eally thought of her and if that explains why their marriage didn’t last long; they divorced in 1947 and Gillie moved back to Britain, where she died of pneumonia in February 1949 at the age of just 33 without making another film. One also wonders whose idea it was to give her such a silly last name as “Gillie”; the name she was born with was Jean Mabel Coombes, and quite frankly “Jean Coombes” would have made a better screen name as well.

Homeward Bound: A Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon (Ken Ehrlich Productions, filmed April 2022, aired on CBS-TV December 21,2 022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 CBS-TV ran the awkwardly titled program Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon. I had just started watching it when my husband Charles came home from work during the second song, the Jonas Brothers’ version of “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” The songs of Paul Simon are among the greatest parts of our cultural heritage from the second half of the 20th century – he’s at the same level as John Lennon and Paul McCartney (jointly and severally), Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder – but they’re also tough nuts for cover artists to crack because most of them admit to only one sort of interpretation. These lumbering tribute shows to various artists generally produce a few horribly awful or misguided performances as well as great ones; in last night’s Simon tribute there were no outright dogs but also very few performances that illuminate anything new to the songs. One terrific exception was the performance of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Stevie Wonder (his second song of the night, after “Mrs. Robinson” with Sheila E. and the Jonas Brothers). Wonder had already recorded “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at least twice, in 1970 at the Talk of the Town nightclub and later as part of a benefit concert called Help for Haiti (visible on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYscleK5hqo), but last night’s show (originally recorded in April 2022, which explains the smattering of audience members wearing masks) featured a dynamite heavy-set Black female gospel singer whose name I scrawled down as Lutecy.

My husband Charles was able to find her real name online – it’s Ledisi – and she delivered one of the best performances of the evening, really standing out in the second chorus of the song during which Wonder played, not his usual organ or synthesizer (on previous tribute shows he’s played a miniature synthesizer that looks like a laptop) but a normal piano. Wonder played it like a man possessed of the spirit, and like Aretha Franklin’s 1970 Live at Fillmore West version (which unfortunately omitted one of the song’s three verses) they returned the song to its Black church roots even though it was written by a white Jewish guy from New York. The concert began with Brad Paisley’s version of “Kodachrome,” the hit single from Simon’s second solo album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and he stuck close to Simon’s original version except for the added country twang in Paisley’s voice. Then the Jonas Brothers came out for “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and they did an infectious job on it. I particularly found the lead Jonas Brother’s electric blue suit – and the basket he flashed under it – appealing for aesthetic reasons, which is the whole appeal of a boy band even though, unlike most of the others, the Jonas Brothers do play their own instruments (some of them, anyway).

Before the Jonas Brothers performed Woody Harrelson, one of the many guest hosts sprinkled throughout the evening (they ranged from Dustin Hoffman, whose star-making film The Graduate included Simon and Garfunkel songs even though Hoffman got the film’s release date wrong – it was 1967, not 1968 – to Oprah Winfrey, who said she first heard “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” in high school as she was breaking up with her then-boyfriend), warbled a few bars of “Old Friends” in the middle of his talk. Afterwards the First Couple of Country Music, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, came out for a duet on “The Boxer” – and though I don’t recall ever having heard them in duet before, their voices blended beautifully even though his overpowered hers in the mix. The next song was “A Hazy Shade of Winter” by Susanna Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, who brought a ferocious punk energy to what was already one of Simon and Garfunkel’s hardest-rocking songs. (Charles said he’d heard that song for years and not realized Paul Simon wrote it.) After that Sting came out for a version of “America,” the haunting travel song from the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends, and Billy Porter dedicated his rendition of “Love Me Like a Rock” to his mother. He also explained he was brought up as a Pentecostal Christian and so mom didn’t take too kindly to him being Gay, though eventually she came around.

After that Stevie Wonder came out with “Mrs. Robinson,” and then Bonnie Raitt and Brad Paisley duetted on an early Simon solo song, “Something So Right.” Next on the program was that incandescent version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Stevie Wonder and Ledisi (whose full name is Ledisi Anibade Young and who has recorded, among other things, a cover of Nina Simone’s “Four Women”), and after that came a version of “Mother and Child Reunion” – an early Paul Simon solo song and, I believe, the first reggae song ever written and recorded by a white artist – by two genuine Jamaicans, Jimmy Cliff and rapper Shaggy. Afterwards the show organizers brought two legends of New Orleans soul, Irma Thomas and Trombone Shorty, for “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” (inevitably), and then Eric Church came on for a respectful version of the show’s title song, “Homeward Bound.” (I can’t hear that song without thinking of the anecdote between Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. Dylan asked Simon why he wasn’t performing live in those days, and Simon complained, “Because audiences would come and want to hear me do ‘The Sounds of Silence,’ ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Homeward Bound.’” Dylan replied, “But if I went to a Paul Simon concert, those are the songs I’d want to hear you do!”) The next band featured was the country group Little Big Town, who did “Slip Sliding Away” and, as usual, their two women sang with far more power and emotion than their two men.

After that came a tribute to Simon’s ground-breaking 1986 album Graceland, which swept the Grammy Awards and won Album of the Year even though it had been controversial because Simon not only recorded it with South African musicians, he actually did some of the recording in South Africa, thereby violating the international boycott against apartheid. The controversy became sillier when Simon’s critics conceded that they’d have had no trouble with Simon recording the same songs with the same musicians in the U.S. or Britain, and in the event Simon was right: the album’s international success led to a boom of interest in Black South Africa’s culture and may have helped hasten apartheid’s end. The Graceland tribute featured South African-born Dave Matthews, Angelique Kidjo and the a cappella vocal group Take 6, who kicked off the proceedings with their own version of the song “Homeless,” performed by the Black South African group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the original album. Afterwards Matthews and Kidjo duetted on “Under African Skies,” a fascinating song choice given that the original recording was a duet between Simon and Linda Ronstadt – and Kidjo’s grittier version was quite different and equally effective as Ronstadt’s clear country soprano. (I’ve long thought that, out of all the different incarnations of Ronstadt’s voice, she was at her best as a country singer.)

The Graceland tribute ended with Matthews leading the on-stage band in “You Can Call Me Al,” after which Paul Simon himself came onstage and continued the Graceland homage with a version of the title song. Simon announced that he was featuring South African bass player Bakithi Kumato, whom he said was the last surviving member of the original Graceland band. He also paid special tribute to the late Joseph Shabalala, leader and founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who died in 2020 at age 79. Simon’s voice is a shadow of what it once was, though it was still effective enough to put the song across. The next item in Simon’s three-song set was “American Tune,” on which he turned over the lead vocal to the great Rhiannon Giddens (one of my favorite living singers) while playing some surprisingly virtuosic guitar behind her. In line with her mixed ancestry – part African-American, part Native American and part white – Giddens changed the last chorus of “American Tune” (a really beautiful song Simon wanted as the single from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, though Columbia Records then-president Clive Davis didn’t think it was strong enough and made “Kodachrome” the single instead) from referencing having come over on the Mayflower to being brought here involuntarily on a slave ship. (Giddens did a similar transformation to the Johnny Cash-Johnny Horton song “The Vanishing Race,” adding a whole new melodic strain and lyric to assert that Native Americans are not vanishing, but are very much still a part of the American population and culture despite white Americans’ best efforts to commit genocide against them.)

For the final song, Simon did the inevitable “The Sounds of Silence,” playing an instrumental chorus before beginning the famous lyric. I was more than a bit surprised that “Scarborough Fair” was not included, and I was even more disappointed that two people who should have been there weren’t. One was Art Garfunkel – I have no idea what relations between the two of them are like now (there was bitterness over the breakup that sandbagged several later attempts at a reunion) – and the other was Simon’s son Harper, a quite capable singer-songwriter in his own right despite the long shadow of his dad. (Frank Sinatra, Jr., Julian and Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan have had the same problem.) In fact, I remember discovering Harper Simon on a sampler CD on which I thought, “That guy sounds a lot like Paul Simon,” and I looked at the liner notes and realized it was his son. But those qualms didn’t keep me from being genuinely impressed and moved by this great music and the respectful (if at times a bit too respectful) way the various artists performed it.

Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All (CBS-TV, filmed December 16, 2022; aired December 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

One of this year’s biggest Christmas-themed TV specials was Merry Christmas to All by singer Mariah Carey, filmed “live” in concert at Madison Square Garden in New York December 16, 2022 and aired on CBS four nights later. Though my husband Charles was working the night it was aired, we’d seen Mariah Carey on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show a few nights before and she’d visibly and audibly bristled at being referred to as “the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas.” Mariah Carey said that, whoever proclaimed her the “Queen of Christmas,” it wasn’t she – though her mega-hit song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” seems to have taken over from Bing Crosby’s (and Irving Berlin’s) “White Christmas” as the Christmas-themed pop song. In his introduction, Colbert also stated that at 200 million records sold, Mariah Carey is the best-selling solo artist in recording history, taking the title from Garth Brooks who in turn took it from Elvis. (But if you count all the records he’s been on, both with his former group and on his own, the biggest-selling recording artist in history is Paul McCartney.) Carey and Colbert also talked about her mixed-race ancestry: African-American (and some Venezuelan) on her father’s side and Irish-American on her mother’s – the same as the woman who to my mind is the greatest non-classical singer of all time, Billie Holiday.

The extravaganza began with a large orchestra playing a medley of “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” fromm Victor Herbert’s operetta Babes in Toyland and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Then Madame Mariah entered and did a version of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” with the “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” chorus from “Angels We Have Heard On High” – this process of grafting bits of songs onto other songs persisted throughout much of the evening. Mariah’s next song was “Joy to the World” – actually a medley of both songs of that title, the original carol and the one Hoyt Axton wrote for Three Dog Night in the early 1970’s. Mariah’s next two selections both paid tribute to the classic album A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, recorded in September and October 1963 and unfortunately released on November 22, 1063, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Carey did two tracks from the Phil Spector-produced album, Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride” as performed by the Ronettes and the one original song, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Carey brought a lot more soul, to that song than Shania Twain had in another Christmas special Charles and I watched together – after which Charles joked that even at her current age (81), Darlene Love could have sung it better – though neither singer came close to Love’s incandescent original. Then Carey did a slightly gospel-ized version of “Silent Night” – it wasn’t as good as a straightforward presentation of the original (the way Bing Crosby did it in his extraordinary 1935 special record made as a fundraiser for a missionary project in China, and as Elvis Presley did surprisingly effectively on his first Christmas album in 1957) or an all-out gospel-soul version like Big Maybelle’s or Baby Washington’s, but it was appealing.

Then Carey brought out one of her children, daughter Monroe Cannon, for a duet on “Away In a Manger.” Just how many kids Mariah Carey has is something of a mystery; her imdb.com page lists only two, twins Monroe and Moroccan Cannon (from her second husband, Nick Cannon, to whom she was married from 2008 to 2016), but the show featured several other children and it sounded to me like she was introducing at least some of them as her offspring. Monroe Cannon has a perfectly acceptable kid’s voice but it’s not (at least yet) the stuff of which professional singing careers.The next song on the program was something else again: “Jesus Had a Mother Like Mine” sung by a young Black man named Christian, who has the makings of a great soul singer and may or may not be Mariah’s son. After Christian’s phenomenal performance, Mariah came back and did a few po- Christmas-themed ditties like “Christmas Time Is In the Air Again,” “Miss You Most at Christmas Time,” and “When Christmas Comes,” the last of which ended with a quote from “Jingle Bells.” Then came one of the most stunning performances of the evening, Mariah’s rendition of Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Nigh t” (originally “Cantique de Noël”), in which her phenomenal range easily encompassed Adam’s high notes. Carey can still reach notes that are usually the sole province of “vapor voices,” singers like Loulie Jean Norman (whom you’ve heard even if you don’t know who she was: hers was the voice that soared wordlessly above the orchestra on the original theme from the TV series Star Trek), and Mariah used the “vapor voice” register to great effect in the last few bars of “O Holy Night.”

Afterwards, though, the quality level of the show fell drastically: a band including her kids came out and did something called “Christmas Is Coming,” followed by a novelty number from Mariah herself called “O Santa.” The next song was absolutely dreadful: an extended medley of “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane” and “Up on the Housetop” featuring a bunch of aggressively untalented rappers, of whom the only one whose name I caught (like a disease) was “Slick Rick,” that ended with a paean to Mariah Careh’s hairdressers. (In the immortal words of Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) After the blessed ending of that number Mariah made a bizarre apology for the fact that she was about to sing non-Christmas songs – she said she won’t allow anything but Christmas music to be played in her home from the end of Thanksgivng until New Year’s Day , but she honored her fans’ desire for a medley of her hits. I missed the titles of the first few songs on the medley – they sounded like “Magic,” “We Will Be Driving,” and “Sweet Fantasy” – but the rest of the titles I was able to get from the chyrons. They were “Heartbreaker” (a perfectly decent pop song but hardly in the same league as the previous “Heartbreaker” songs by the Rolling Stones and especially Dolly Parton), “My All,” “It’s Like That,” “Emotions,” “Make It Happen,” and “Fly Like a Bird.” After the medley she did two more non-Christmas songs from her catalog, “We Belong Together” and “Hero,” justifying the latter by saying she thought it had enough of an inspirational message to be appropriate for the holidays.

The finale was the inevitable “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” sung by Mariah Carey with the special’s various cast members, as well as some people in the parking lot after the show ended giving forth with their own strictly amateur versions. The outro featured post-show interviews with some of the fans, who seemed to describe the concert as if it were a religious experience, and one male audience member even wore a T-shirt with the absurd legend, “Mariah Carey Invented Christmas.” While I was writing the above I was listening to a YouTube stream of Mariah Carey’s Christmas recordings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37uWgeaGzvI), and judging from this post she may be one of those artists who actually does better in the recording studio than she does “live.” The studio versions of some of these songs, like “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World,” seemed stronger and more soulful than the concert renditions, and the Carey Christmas albums include some songs, like “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (another nod to the Phil Spector Christmas album and the version therein by The Crystals), that would have improved the concert immensely if she’d performed them. One of the biggest surprises of the YouTube post is an all-out gospel number, “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child,” which suggests Mariah Carey could become a great gospel singer. Ironically, through much of the night I’d been faulting her for trying to add gospel and soul vocal inflections to songs that didn’t really support them – I found myself thinking, “Mariah, you have a great pop voice, but don’t try to be Mahalia Jackson or Aretha Franklin” – but when I heard “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child” I found myself astonished at the sheer power and fervor of her rendition and wishing she’d make a full-fledged gospel album the way Aretha did in 1972 with Amazing Grace.

Scrooge (Twickenham Film Studios, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, December 19 at about 19 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched two films off a three-movie public-domain DVD which I had assumed was made from live TV broadcasts early in the days of the medium. In fact, the featured item was Scrooge, a 1935 theatrical feature film made by the Twickenham studio in Britain, based (of course) on Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol and featuring a rather overwrought actor named Seymout Hicks and Donlad Calthrop, a quite interesting British character actor who usually played villains (his best-known role is in Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie, 1929’s Blackmail, in which he’s the blackmailer; he also played a bitter disabled man in a quiite good film from 1936, The Man Who Changed His Mind, retitled The Man Who Lived Again n the U.S., which featured Boris Karloff in the first of his mad-scientist roles) in a change-of-pace part for him as Bob Cratchit. Alas, the version we were watching was an hour-long cut-down from the 78-minute theatrical original, and the lacunae showed in at least one scene: the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge that Tiny Tim Cratchit will die of his crippling disease and, when Scrooge expresses sadness at this, the Ghost says, “If he be like to die, let him do it and decrease the surplus population.” As all A Christmas Carol buffs will know, the Ghost is throwing Scrooge’s own previous words back at him – Scrooge had earlier refused to donate to charity with that very sentiment (which Dickens no doubt was referencing the then-popular political philosophy of Edeard Hobbes, whose book Leviathan famously argued that the root cause of poverty was overpopulation) – but the scene in which Scrooge was solicited by a representative of this charity was left out of the version we saw, though it was presumably in the 78-minute version.

The film was directed by Henry Edwards, whom I didn’t have that good a regard for based on the one other film of his I’ve seen – the 1936 movie Juggernaut, which starred Boris Karloff (who made it during a trip home to his native England in 1936 right after he made The Man Who Changed His Mind) as an unscrupulous medical researcher determined ti murder as many people as he has to in order to get his hands on a fortune he needs to continue his research. Edwards’ path crossed Dickens’ again in 1948 when, as an actor, he played the minor part of a police official in Davld Lean’s film of Oliver Twist. Like the U.S.-made Mystery of Edwin Drood which Charles and I had seen December 11, Scrooge is filmed as all-out Gothic horror only occasionally lightened up until the final scene of Scrooge’s reformation. The story is so familiar it’s the sort of film in which you watch wondering how the filmmakers are going to handle every time-worn incident, dialogue exchange and plot point instead of wondering what’s going to happen next. As Charles pointed out early on, Seymour Hicks (billed as Sir Seymour Hicks in the credits, at a time when it was still a relative novelty for actors to receive knighthoods) mght not be the meanest Scrooge we’ve seen but he’s certainly the roughest. Not only does he chew out Bob Cratchit for trying to sneak a few lumps of coal back to his desk to keep himself warm, this Scrooge takes it as a personal affront when whatever he’s doing in his office is interrupted by the noise from a reception down the street in which Queen Victoria herself is the guest of honor. (We don’t actually see the Queen, but we hear the British national anthem in her honor, though there’s an odd glitch in that at the song’s beginning we hear “God Save the Queen,” properly for the time period, but at the end it’s “God Save the King,” which was correct in 1935.)

The critical consensus seems to be that Alistair Sim, in the 1951 British version, was the screen’s best-ever Scrooge, but Hicks is certainly right up there even though he gets to be even more overbearing than most movie Scrooges – and there are several felicitous touches, notably the decision of Edwards and his writer, H. Fowler Mear, to have Jacob Marley’s ghost invisible to the audience so the character becomes a scarier figure when we only hear his voice and don’t see a ghostly image on screen. (Maybe Twickenham simply didn’t have the special-effects capacity or budget to show the ghost more normally in the double-exposure effect typical of how the screen presents ghosts, but it’s still surprisingly effective.) And the one flashback we get from the Ghost of Christmas Past is of Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle (Mary Glynne) angrily giving him back his engagement ring after he’s demanded the eviction of a hapless young couple who’ve fallen behind in their rent. Another neat touch is we see Scrooge literally trying to wipe off the name from his tombstone – and the scene dissolves to him waking up from his dream and frantically wiping at the blankets on his bed.