The People vs. Dr. Kildare (MGM, 1941)

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

I searched the Turner Classic Movies Web page and found two quite interesting movies. One was a 1941 entry in the MGM Dr Kildare series called The People vs. Dr. Kildare, seventh of the nine movies made during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s before the U.S. was attacked by Japanese forces at Pearl Harbor and the series' star, Lew Ayres, wrecked his own career overnight by declaring himself a conscientious objector and refusing to be drafted into the military. Ironically, given the role he’d just been playing, he did volunteer to serve as an Army medic, which put him in as much front-line danger as actually fighting (if not more so, since he wasn’t armed and therefore couldn’t fight back), but when the war ended he was relegated to working in independent productions like Olivia de Havilland’s The Dark Mirror (of which James Agee said that he wished he could have been as proud of Ayres’ service after the war as he was during it) and his career never regained its former luster. (Then again, as my husband Charles pointed out, Lew Ayres had begun his career at the top – as Greta Garbo’s leading man in her last silent film, The Kiss, and then the lead in the high-prestige anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front – and so he had nowhere to go but down.) The ironies about the Dr. Kildare series continued with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer’s choice of director: Harold S. Bucquet, who despite the excellence with which he staged the films’ medical sequences was a hard-core Christian Scientist who refused all medical attention himself. Katharine Hepburn thought Bucquet was a potentially great director and insisted on using him for his “A” feature Without Love, co-starring Spencer Tracy, but at the close of that production Bucquet developed appendicitis. Hepburn, being the kind of no-B.S. person she was, pleaded with him to go to the hospital and be operated on, but Bucquet held fast to his Christian Science principles and died all too young from it.

The People vs. Dr. Kildare begins promisingly with ice-skating star Frances Marlowe (Bonita Granville) involved in an auto accident with a truck driver just as her manager has negotiated a deal with her for three times the money she’d been making. Dr. Janes Kildare (Lew Ayres) just happens to come along when, on a date with his fiancée, Nurse Mary Lamont (Laraine Day), he happens to witness the accident and performs an emergency operation to repair Frances’ ruptured spleen because she’d die if he waited for the ambulance to arrive, The operation seems to be a success except that Frances’ leg is paralyzed, and she and her manager hire attorney Mr. Reynolds (Paul Stanton) to sue Drs. Kildare and his supervisor, Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore, playing his part from a wheelchair because by then his chronic arthritis had become so bad he really needed one), along with Blair General Hospital where they both work. There is a lot of comic relief in this movie, and much of it comes from Red Skelton, billed sixth and cast as an orderly while waiting for bigger and funnier roles to come. Also a surprise in the cast list is Tom Conway as the attorney hired by Blair General to defend their case, though he isn’t used as creatively here as he was in the Val Lewton unit at RKO (where he got to work in vest-pocket masterpieces like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim). Still, Conway (like his more famous brother, George Sanders – Tom changed his last name to avoid coasting on his brother’s fame) projects a much-needed aura of urbanity to the courtroom sequences, in which the height of the movie is Lionel Barrymore’s visible frustration at the way courtroom procedure prevents him from just talking to the jury and getting the point across that, while it’s too bad that Frances is paralyzed, neither he nor Kildare had anything to do with it.

Eventually I was startled that the writers – Max Brand (who created Dr. Kildare in the first place even though he was otherwise known mostly for Westerns) and Lawrence R. Bachmann, story; and Willis Goldman and Harry Ruskin, script – ended the story: Kildare seeks out the truck driver involved in the original accident and the driver tells him that Frances seemed paralyzed even before he crashed into her car. From this, he and Gillespie deduce that she suffered from spina bifida occulta, Latin for “:hidden soft spine” and a nascent condition that could have been triggered by a recent fall while Frances was skating. The jury foreman suggests that either Frances will go through an operation or they will award her damages if the surgery doesn’t work, and in the final scene Frances, post-op, shows off her skill on roller skates and is back to normal. The People vs. Dr. Kildare is an engaging film, even though I’ve never been that big a fan of medical dramas and the only other Kildare film I’ve seen is the first one, Internes Can’t Take Money, made at Paramount in 1937 and featuring Joel McCrea as Kildare and top-billed Barbara Stanwyck (my favorite all-time actress of the classic period, with a versatility matched by none of her contemporaries and only Meryl Streep since) as a young ex-con whom McCrea helps to find her child. I especially loved the courtroom scenes, in which the opposing attorneys are good buddies outside the courtroom and the judge is an old college chum of the plaintiff’s lawyer; this is characteristic of real-life trials and makes a lot of people wonder, “Just what side is my lawyer on, anyway?”

Girl Shy (Harold Lloyd Corporation, Pathé Exchange,.1924)

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

After The People vs. Dr. Kildare (a misnomer of a title since Drs. Kildare and company are only subject to a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution), TCM ran their “Silent Sunday Showcase” and showed one of the finest films they’ve ever run in that time slot: Girl Shy, a 1924 comedy starring Harold Lloyd as Harold Weathers, who works as a tailor’s assistant for his uncle in the small town of Little Bend, California, where an introductory title tells us, “Only three things happen – morning, noon and night.” Harold is so terminally shy around women that he doesn’t even dare go to the Saturday night dance, the only thing Little Bend has to anything resembling a social life, for fear of having to ask a girl to dance with him. Yet Our Hero is also writing a book in which he styles himself a great lover, and at least two of the chapters – in which he seduces a vamp (Nola Luxford) by feigning indifference and brutally wins a flapper (Judy King) by acting like a cave man – are depicted on screen and turn out to be among the funniest scenes in the film. While on a train to a big city to present his book to publisher Roger Thornby, who boasts that he’s made his authors famous and himself rich (a line of dialogue reprised in the recent film Cadillac Records), he meets and flirts with Mary Buckingham (Jobyna Ralston, who took over as Lloyd’s leading lady on screen after his previous one, Mildred Davis, quit to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd for real: it worked out both ways since Ralston was a far better actress while Davis literally stayed with Lloyd until death did them part: of all the great silent comedians, Harold Lloyd was the only one who married just once).

What he doesn’t know is that Mary is fleeing from an arranged marriage with a creepy rich guy (Carlton Griffin) who, unbeknownst to her, has a wife already but he’s unwilling to be seen with her or acknowledge her publicly. Harold and Mary are drawn together largely when he helps her conceal her dog, which she’s not allowed to have on the train, and for the next two hours he rides with her in a fog of emotions symbolized largely by his Acme dog biscuits, which he has to eat himself to conceal that there’s a dog on the train, and the Cracker-Jacks box he buys her. (A lot of people are surprised that Cracker-Jacks existed as a “thing” as early as 1924.) But their low-pressure courtship is interrupted when the train reaches the end of the line and she gets off to join her rich fiancé while Harold seeks out Thornby, who at first rejects the manuscript but then decides to publish it after all, largely because his readers all think it’s hilarious. He retitles it The Boob’s Diary and sends Harold an advance check for $3,000 (which as my husband Charles pointed out would be a large advance for an unknown author today!). Only Harold, thinking it’s just a rejection slip, tears up the envelope without opening it and it’s not until his uncle uses a back scrap to light his cigar that they actually realize it’s an advance check. Meanwhile, Harold sees a newspaper story announcing Mary’s upcoming wedding to the rich creep, and just in case he needed any more incentive to crash the wedding, the rich guy’s secret wife shows up and pleads with him to break up the marriage for Mary’s sake so she won’t be an unwitting bigamist.

The rest of the movie is Lloyd’s pretty typical thrill comedy, as Harold commandeers various vehicles and finally rides to the rescue on a horse-drawn cart that looks for all the world like an old-time chariot. Along the way he rides through a ditch being dug and the workers tumble out of it via the motorcycle Harold is riding on the chase – a gag Clyde Bruckman sold not only to Lioyd but also Buster Keaton for one of the best scenes in Keaton’s 1924 masterpiece Sherlock, Jr. Alas for Bruckman, while Keaton couldn’t have cared less about protecting his intellectual property, Lloyd was furious at Bruckman for having recycled one of their old gags and sued – and, facing financial ruin at Lloyd’s hands, Bruckman borrowed a gun from Keaton and used it, much to Keaton’s horror, to commit suicide. The ending of Girl Shy sounds amazingly like the ending of The Graduate 43 years later, as Harold drags Mary kicking and screaming out of the church and doesn’t think of asking the minister who was already there to marry them. Instead he gives her an al fresco proposal by the side of the road, but it’s still a surprisingly anarchic image for the ending of a 1924 comedy. Girl Shy was Harold Lloyd’s first independent production following his amicable break with Hal Roach, who’d produced his earlier films, and it’s a relentlessly funny movie with Lloyd at the height of his powers. It could have been even funnier if writers Sam Taylor (who also co-directed with Fred Newmeyer, though Lloyd himself was the auteur of all his films), Ted Wilde and Tim Whelan had got into it an account of how Harold’s book fared in the marketplace and done some of the obvious gags about this milquetoast man becoming an icon of male sex appeal, but even as it stands Girl Shy is a great movie and a worthwhile addition to the Harold Lloyd canon.

Three Shorts: The Story That Couldn't Be Printed (MGM, c. 1942); The Voice That Thrilled the World (Warner Bros., c. 1942); Blackface in Hollywood (Tujrner Classic Movies, c. 2022)

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

Along with the two features TCM also showed three fascinating and compelling shorts. One was an entry in MGM’s Passing Parade series called The Story That Couldn’t Be Printed, about one of my personal heroes, John Peter Zenger, whom I named the magazine I published for 18 years after. It was a 10-minute vest-pocket retelling of the story with the familiar cast of characters. Among them were the anonymous source for the story who was thrown in the stocks and whipped; New York’s tnen-governor, William Cosby, who was stealing public money for his personal use and threatening to prosecute anyone who attempted to expose him; John Peter Zenger, reporter and printer who was bound and determined to get the story out no matter what; his friend Mr. Alexander, New York attorney who, like anyone else taking Zenger’s case against Cosby, was threatened with disbarment if he represented Zenger; and Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer from Philadelphia (and therefore outside Cosby’s jurisdiction) who was brought in by Mr. Alexander and made an eloquent plea to the court saying that there should be freedom of the press. Naturally this dramatization set the story in what was then the modern context, with the rise of dictatorial governments throughout the world who wanted to stay in power by controlling what their people were allowed to speak, hear or read about what was going on in their world, and the need for the U.S. and the world’s other democracies to unite and fight to protect freedom against tyranny.

A second was The Voice That Thrilled the World, about the coming of sound to motion pictures and the attempts of Thomas A. Edison to bring his two great inventions, movies and audio recording, together to create pictures with sound. As befitted a short produced by Warner Bros., who pioneered early sound but used the wrong process – Vitaphone, in which the soundtrack was on a separate record that had to be played independently of the film (the record player was attached to the turntable with a mechanism that was supposed to keep them in synch, but they didn’t always stay together and you often had scenes like the one dramatized in the film Singin’ in the Rain in which the man started speaking with the woman’s voice, and vice versa) instead of Movietone, in which the sound was photographed on the film itself. (Actually the system that became standard was yet a third one, Photophone, which like Movietone photographed sound on film but used variable-area instead of variable-density recording, which produced better and clearer results.) The Voice That Thrilled the World was a whirlwind history of sound from its earliest uses in experimental shorts to tne scene between Al Jolson and Eugenie Besserer (playing his mother) in The Jazz Singer to bigger, larger movie scenes that could only have been done with sound-on-film, including the titular scene in Charge of the Light Brigade and Busby Berkeley’s still bizarre “By a Waterfall” number from Footlight Parade.

The short opened and closed with scenes from the 1942 musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, illustrating that the movie won the Academy Award for Best Sound as well as its star, James Cagney, winning the award for Best Actor. (I’ve pointed out before that Cagney always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart and in his autobiography he said his one career regret was he had made so few musicals. He even devoted a whole chapter of the book to his 1937 film Something to Sing About, the only musical he was in between Footlight Parade and Yankee Doodle Dandy.) There are also scenes showing the government training films the studios producing to help teach soldiers and sailors how to fight in World War II, and a brief and amusing bit from the film Sergeant York showing how the film was dubbed in French and Italian to serve as a training ground and as propaganda for democracy.

The last short we watched was about blackface in Hollywood and featured a lot of African-Americans, including film historian Donald Bogle and TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, giving what’s become the politically correct blanket condemnation of blackface even while acknowledging that it also gave white performers an excuse to let their hair down and be more open as to who they really are. I’ve already noted on various blogs that blackface was just one of many ethnic stereotypes American popular entertainment traded in. For example, the Marx Brothers began by playing standard ethnic humor: Chico the Italian, Harpo (until his character evolved and became mute) the Irishman, and Groucho the Jew. (Modern-day audiences, knowing the Marx Brothers were actually Jewish, tend to read Groucho as the most “authentic” of the three, but that’s not how audiences of the time would have read them.) And Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler parody in The Great Dictator was done as the standard comic stereotype of a German. The film included clips from the famous fantasy heaven in the 1934 film Wonder Bar – including the scenes of pork chops hanging off the vines and giant slices of watermelon (manipulated much the way the giant bananas were in The Gang’s All Here nine years later), and though the film acknowledged Fred Astaire for admitting how much he owed to Black tap dancers in general and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in particular, it faulted him for the comic minstrel-show outfit he wore in his big “Bojangles of Harlem” number from the film Swing Time when Robinson’s costumes in his films were always immaculately turned out dress suits. (I used to joke, “Fred Astaire got to dance with Ginger Rogers. Gene Kelly got to dance with Judy Garland. Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson got to dance with Shirley Temple. A case study in American racism” – though all Robinson ever said about Temple was how good she was and how she only had to demonstrate a routine once before she picked it up perfectly. Robinson said Temple was the best student he ever had, which is an even more amazing compliment when you realize he also taught Sammy Davis, Jr.)

In previous comments about Wonder Bar I’ve noted that – unlike singers such as Eddie Cantor, who sang in blackface exactly the same as they did in whiteface – Jolson rethought his style when he sang in blackface, slowing his vibrato, singing more from the chest and emulating the style of the greatest Black singers of the time. I’m bothered by a lot of the condemnation of blackface as a kind of reflexive attempt at “woke” anti-racism even though some of the agenda behind these performances was quite openly racist (can you say The Birth of a Nation, in which D. W. Griffith cast white actors in blackface to depict Black characters as the slavering, bestial monsters of his racist imagination?), and I think it’s important to draw a line between performers who used blackface to exploit racial (and racist) stereotypes, and ones (in which category I would put both Jolson and Astaire) who were doing blackface as a conscious homage to African-American culture even if the homage seems rather twisted in the racial politics of today.

Janet Jackson. (Arts & Entertainment Networks, Associated Entertainment Corporation, Lifetime, 2022(

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

I settled in at 6 p.m. to watch all four hour-long segments Lifetime and the Arts & Entertainment channel co-produced on the life of Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson’s name has been off the cultural radar screen for decades now, even though a lot of the baby divas out there regard her as a major influence and Janet finally got admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, over a decade after she first became eligible. As a much younger man in the late 1980’s, I enjoyed the Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 albums as well as anybody, and at least had some dim awareness that they were a sort of declaration of independence from the all-encompassing management contract of their father, Joe Jackson. The show went back all the way to the Jackson family saga’s beginnings in the steel town of Gary, Indiana, though Janet, the youngest of nine children, was only four years old when Joe Jackson and his wife Katherine moved from Gary to Los Angeles and therefore he has virtually no living memories of their existence there. In the show she’s taken back to the Jackson family home in Gary, where she’s struck by how small it was and recalled how she and two of her brothers had to sleep on the same living-room couch. (The Jacisons had their nine kids in the same sequence of three: boy-boy-girl, boy-boy-girl, boy-boy-girl.) The first hour deals with the discipline and work ethic Joe Jackson had instilled in his children and the musical talent he nurtured in them to keep them out of gangs and off of drugs, and Tito Jackson recalled how he was practicing on dad’s guitar one day when he broke a string. Dad was about to wallop him when one of Tito’s brothers pointed out to him that Tito now played better than dad ever had and he should listen to him.

Of course no telling of any tale relating to the Jacksons can avoid mentioning the tragedy of the most gifted and most controversial Jackson, Michael, whose early home videos taken well before the family turned professional (when Michael was only 10) reveal him already to be a polished performer, looking for all the world like a miniature James Brown. One can’t help but watch that kid, wearing the beehive Afro while performing his heart out, and not feel sad because we already know how the story ended. I used to joke, “Nostalgia means being able to remember when Saturday Night Live was still funny and Michael Jackson was still Black,” and the biggest laugh I ever got from that line came from a woman who was Black herself. There’s even an ironic reference to Michael Jackson in the film Three Kings, in which the Iraqi torturing Mark Wahlberg’s character asked him about Michael Jackson and the horrible racism in America that had led him to do those bizarre treatments to his face. “Actually, he did that to himself,” said Wahlberg’s character – and the Iraqi doesn’t believe him.

The Janet Jackson documentary shows the explosive success of the Jackson 5 and how it transformed the family’s lifestyle. All of a sudden they were living in a big house in Encino with a swimming pool and they were hosting parties at which celebrities were frequent guests. Janet recalled being especially fascinated by Elizabeth Taylor and the sheer immobility of her massive head of hair. Eventually the Jackson 5 fired their father as manager, and so he negotiated a recording deal for his youngest daughter Janet with A&M and maintained a tight level of control over her first two albums, from choosing the material to picking the cover photos. (Janet recalls the cover of her first album being a picture she particularly hated, but dad picked the photo and his word was law.) When Janet, too, fired her dad as manager and took control of her own career, no doubt there was an air of “Et tu, Bruté” about it: the film revealed that the moment Janet fired him, Joe Jackson closed up his office and went out of the management business instead of having to recruit new talent outside his family and taking an I’ll-show-them attitude towards the whole thing.

Janet Jackson sought out and got the hottest production team in Black music – Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis of Morris Day and The Time, who had made a name for themselves as Prince’s opening act – and hired them to work on her new album even though she nad to go to Minneapolis to work on it. To make sure we all got the point, she called the album Control and wrote a title song that was an anthem to her new-found artistic independence, Both this album and the follow-up, Rhythm Nation 1814, sold exceptionally well. Janet decided to do a worldwide tour after she saw brother Michael performing at London’s giant Wembley Stadium to promote his album Bad. She put together a show with a troupe of dancers and a choreographer – reminiscent of the way her brother Michael and Madonna between them revolutionized audience expectations of what a pop-music concert would be. No longer could a singer just stand front and center on the stage and belt out song after song: reflecting the rise of music videos and how they revolutionized the audience’s expectations of what a live show would look like, the concerts of the future would be elaborate productions in which the star singer would have to work out to be fit enough to perform and a whole battery of dancers and associate performers would have to be brought on the tour to rehearse separately and then perform together. (One of the saddest things about Michael Jackson’s last film, the documentary This Is It which shows rehearsal footage for the 50 shows at London’s O2 arena which he didn’t live long enough to give, was his awareness that he was going to have to get himself together in his late 40’s to duplicate moves he’d done in videos in his 20’s with the benefit of retakes if he screwed up.)

The Janet Jackson documentary also includes segments on her absolutely wretched choices of men: her first husband, James DeBarge, he admits she married more to get out from under her dad’s control, and she was only with him for a year until she was able to have it annulled. The show included one of the most bizarre rumors to circulate around the Jackson family: the idea that she and DeBarge had had a baby whom Janet had given to one of her two older sisters to raise, despite footage showing that during her year with DeBarge she had made regular public appearances and surely someone would have noticed if she were pregnant. (That sounds to me like the plot of Bellini’s opera Norma, in which we were supposed to believe that the high priestess of Druid England has had an affair with the Roman general and had two kids by him despite her having to make a public appearance every month at the time of the full moon without anyone noticing.) The documentary doesn’t mention an even weirder rumor that Michael and Janet Jackson were actually the same person – though the rumor gained so much traction Michael actually brought Janet on an awards show just to prove they were different people.

The show deals with her signing with Richard Branson’s Virgin label after her contract with A&M expired following the release of Rhythm Nation, and her first appearance with Branson at the launch of one of his hot-air balloons. (Ah, for the days when mega-billionaires were content with hot-air balloons instead of building rockets and firing themselves into space!) The show ends with Janet ruefully comments that her public support of Michael when he was put on trial for pedophilia made her seem “guilty by association” even though she knew her brother well enough to be sure he would never have committed such a crime. (Michael Jackson was acquitted on all charges, but over a decade later – well after the statute of limitations for perjury had expired – two of the young men who had testified for Michael now said they had lied under oath and Michael had actually molested them. Their excuse was essentially the Michael Cohen defense – they had literally been star-struck and had wanted to protect their celebrity friend – but at least Michael Cohen took responsibility for his actions and pleaded guilty of perjury instead of waiting until he was beyond the statute of limitations. If it sounds like I’m blaming the victims, so be it: trials are supposed to settle claims like this once and for all and people who lie under oath screw that up.)

Janet recalled the time she worked with Michael on the song “Scream” and the accompanying video, which cost $7 million to make at a time when you could still make a major feature film for that amount, and she recalled Michael as being more withdrawn and harder to get along with than the version she’d grown up with – though the last time they ever spoke, about a month before his death, they ended their conversation with mutual “I love you”’s. The show also mentioned Janet’s later relationships with men, including her second husband, René Elizondo, who was such a control freak people who saw them together wondered how a woman who had recorded a song called “Control” would let a man walk over her like this. After the breakup she briefly dated a music producer from Atlanta named Jermaine Petri, but she broke up with him over their conflicting schedules and the sheer number of women who threw themselves at him because he was dating Janet Jackson. The show also covers the controversy over her decision at age 50 to get pregnant and have a child – though they didn’t mention who the father was and they didn’t actually show the baby on screen (no surprise there!).

The dominant story in the show’s fourth one-hour episode was the fooforaw over her baring her breast during her performance in the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl, including one member of her entourage who said, “It’s a nipple. Get over it.” There were the usual self-proclaimed moralists who got on their little social soapboxes and demanded action, including threatening to sue every CBS station that had carried the program, which would have cost the network millions. The controversy eventually died down, but not without taking a toll on Janet Jackson’s career: MTV and VH-1 banned playing her new album and after her previous singles had charted at number one, the new one only made it to #2. (That’s still a sales figure a lot of other artists would die for!) The show ended with Janet Jackson ready for rehearsals for a new worldwide concert tour in 2020 – the worst possible time she had planned for one due to the COVID-19 pandemic – but Janet Jackson is still a survivor (she’s outlived Michael by several years now and had a measure of stability in her life that sadly eluded him) and it’s clear we haven’t seen or heard the last of her.

The Unforgettable Nat "King" Cole (BBC-TV, 1989)

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

At around 9:20 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a couple of YouTube video posts on the great singer and pianist Nat “King” Cole: a 1989 BBC documentary called The Unforgettable Nat “King” Cole and a 1963 telecast, also from the BBC, called An Evening with Nat “King” Cole. Nat “King” Cole had one of the most extraordinary careers in all show business: he started out as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time and then went on to an even greater and more astonishing career as a vocalist. The only other talent from the jazz world I can think of who made a comparable transition from virtuoso instrumentalist to star singer is Louis Armstrong, and I’ve long held the theory that Armstrong and Cole approached singing very differently based on the instruments they had played before. Armstrong was a trumpet player and he sang the way a trumpet player would, bending and slurring his notes and extending his phrases. Cole was a piano player and he approached singing the way a pianist would, hitting each note cleanly and percussively. One thing that sets Cole apart from other male vocal stars – including his greatest white contemporaries, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra – is his excellent diction. Cole was sometimes lumped in with the crooners because of his smooth vocal style, but he never crooned: he sang each note crisply and distinctly the way he would if he were still playing piano.

In fact, the legend of Nat “King” Cole is that he was a piano player first and foremost, and he got dragged into a vocal career by record-company executives who took him aside and told him, “You know, Nat, they sell a lot better when you sing on them.” The legend of Cole the reluctant vocalist got thrown for a loop with the recent release of a seven-CD boxed set of all Cole’s recordings before he joined the Capitol label in 1945, including radio transcriptions as well as the handful of studio recordings he made pre-Capitol, and through most of these recordings the three members of the King Cole Trio sang in unison and gave the same bouncy mid-tempo treatment to everything, including songs sung better by other artists as ballads. I was disappointed by the set because I wanted to hear more jazz instrumentals as well as more vocals by Cole alone. Cole was the son of a Black minister who pastored a church in his native Montgomery, Alabama until his parents (a minister father and his wife, who played piano and directed the church choir in a manner common to Black as well as white religious couples) moved to Chicago when Nat was only four. Nat’s dad’s church was right around the corner from the famous Grand Terrace Ballroom, where Earl “Fatha” Hines led the band, and Cole would sneak over to the Grand Terrace to watch Hines rehearse. (In 1928 Hines and New Orleans clarinetist Jimmie Noone would record the song “Sweet Lorraine”; 17 years later the same song would become Cole’s first hit record.)

By the time Cole was a teenager he was leading a band of his own (his brother Freddy recalled being impressed by the green gabardine uniforms Cole had his band members wear) and he made his first records at 17 with a band led by his older brother, Eddie Cole. Cole got to record under his own name in 1940 for Decca, who dropped him after 16 sides, and he was reduced to recording for small labels like Exclusive, Excelsior and Atlas until Atlas sold his contract to Capitol, where he remained from 1945 until his death 20 years later. One other thing Cole had in common with Louis Armstrong besides their talents as both instrumentalists and singers is that they were the first dark-skinned Black entertainers to cross over to a white audience. The 1930’s were the days of the infamous “paper-bag test” at the Cotton Club: auditioners for the club’s chorus line would have a light-brown paper grocery bag to their faces, and if they were darker than the bag they wouldn’t get the job. It was also the era of internal racism within the Black community, in which lighter-skinned “high yellow” actors would get the leading roles in African-American “race” movies while their darker-skinned brethren would be relegated to the same roles as villains or comic relief that Black performers would play in white movies. (There are some rhythm-and-blues songs from the 1940’s in which the singers lament that they couldn’t hold on to a “high yellow” man but they had – and lost – a Black one.) Aside from Armstrong, the most important Black celebrities – including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Ethel Waters, as well as earlier male singers like Herb Jeffries and Billy Eckstine – were identifiably Black but still light-skinned until Cole came along.

The documentary on Cole had some bits of “first-itis” (my term for the tendency of biographers in all media to say that the person they’re biographing was the first to do or be something even though other people had done it before), but for the most part it told the story honestly and well. It had its macabre aspects, including clips of Cole interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on his celebrity TV show Person to Person; the macabre aspect is you see Murrow and Cole smoking on stage when they were two of the most famous victims who died from smoking-related lung cancer. Also one thing that isn’t generally known about Nat “King” Cole hs he was one of the pioneers of what has come to be called “world music”: performing in Cuba just before the 1959 revolution, he saw the Cuban bands and decided to record an album with them, Cole Español, even though he didn’t know a word of Spanish or Portuguese at the time. (This had an ironic reflection in Cole’s recollection that he’d heard a singer in Switzerland who did a near-perfect copy of Cole’s record of “Route 66” and then went to meet the guy. It turned out the singer knew no English except what he’d picked up phonetically from Cole’s records.)

An Evening with Nat "King" Cole (BBC-TV, 1963)

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

The Cole documentary was followed by a 1963 BBC-TV telecast of an extraordinary performance by Cole himself from one of his British tours, given a tasteful colorization job and presented in that format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIimLXLNh0. Cole starts his performance singing his heart out on several ballads, including Victor Young’s “When I Fall in Love” and the standard “Unforgettable” (when Frank Sinatra, dressed surprisingly slovenly for him, said no one but Cole had recorded that song, he forgot about Dinah Washington – or Aretha Franklin, who made it the title track of her 1964 tribute album to Dinah). Then he brings on the members of his small group, including trumpeter Reunald (pronounced “Renald”) Jones and guitarist John Collins, and sits at the piano for jazz versions of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and his star-making hit, “Sweet Lorraine.” Cole makes a few oddball jokes about the non-portability of his instrument (my favorite line was, “You know why they call it a grand piano? Because that’s how much it costs to ship it”), but it’s clear that the piano remained his musical first love even though his skill level deteriorated. One is tempted to weep at how much technique he had lost in his left hand over the years when he had concentrated so much on singing; he’d lost the speed and capability he can be seen in the Soundie (a sort of early music video meant to be watched on a visual jukebox) of the instrumental “Breezy and the Bass” in which Cole’s left hand is as fast as his right. (In the mid-1940’s Cole produced a session for Norman Granz featuring tenor saxophonist Lester Young and drummer Buddy Rich. Granz didn’t hire a bass player, but Cole’s left hand was so strong he didn’t need to.)

After the piano interlude (which I found the most fascinating and entertaining part of the show) Cole joked that he was going to make a major wardrobe change – in fact the only thing that looked different was the music-hall setting he walked in on and the straw hat, cane and what appeared to be an eight-string ukulele he was carrying (though when he pantomimed “playing” it the sound was really one or more banjo players in Ted Heath’s orchestra, which were backing him up). He did a few older songs, including a lovely ballad called “That Sunday in Summer,” before reverting to the music-hall atmosphere for his novelty hit “Those Hazy, Lazy, Crazy Days of Summer” and closing the show with an audience sing-along of his latest hit, “Ramblin’ Rose.” Therein hangs a tale: in addition to his other ventures, Cole was the first Black artist to do an entire album of country songs (he beat Ray Charles by about six months), and though various Black singers had made one-off singles of country songs before (including Leadbelly’s 1935 cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ 1928 song “Daddy and Home”) it was Cole, with his ceaseless exploration of new musical territory, who made a whole album of this material. (Ironically, while most of his famous records were made with white arrangers like Pete Rugolo and Nelson Riddle, for his country album he chose a Black one, Belford Hendricks.) The 1963 BBC program shows Cole at his most laid-back, with his patter full of self-deprecating humor and his performances magisterial, as befitted his name. It’s a welcome document of his art, and a slice of his life as well.

Three Kings (Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Village-A.M. Partnership, 1999)

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

My husband Charles and I ran a movie last night at about 9:20 p.m. called Three Kings, made in 1999 by director David O. Russell – he not only directed it but wrote the screenplay as well, though John Ridley came up with the original story. It’s set during the first Persian Gulf war before there was a second one, and it was amazing how young stars George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg looked on screen. They were the principal white characters and they, along with the film’s token Black, Ice Cube, hatch a plot to steal millions of dollars in gold ingots Saddam Hussein had ordered his men to steal from the government of Kuwait after the war is officially over and Our Anti-Heroes find a map giving the location of the bunkers where the Iraqis stashed the loot. The film turns into an odd reworking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as the three protagonists increasingly get on each other’s nerves – it’s well known that, among other things, George Clooney considers himself the Humphrey Bogart lama (one of his films, The Good German, even ripped off the famous poster from Casablanca) and so it’s not at all surprising that the Ridley-Russell script turns into a Bogart-esque morality play in which the three scapegraces grow consciences, they give the gold away to anti-Saddam Iraqis and in the final scene help them flee across the border into Iran even though this breaks official U.S. policy against negotiating anything with Iran. (Not only did Iran offer asylum to fellow Shi’a Muslims during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 and beyond, but when the U.S. finally invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in 2002 most of the people we put in charge of running the country after that survived Saddam’s terror by fleeing to Iran.)

Three Kings was advertised as a dark comedy, but as with the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink I kept asking myself, “I get the darkness, all right, but where’s the comedy?” It’s full of scenes indicating the horrible brutality of war – Three Kings is not your movie if you recall the (first) Gulf War as a triumph of good over evil, and “nice” Arabs (the Kuwaitis and their allies in Saudi Arabia) against the “nasty” Arabs from Iraq. It helped the film a great deal that a fourth servicemember (Spike Jonze) ends up mortally wounded and, though he’s insisted he’s a Christian all his life, asks to be taken to a Muslim cemetery in Qom, Iran at the end because he’s so impressed by the Arabs’ version of heaven. And for me, the most interesting character was a woman, NBS reporter Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), who when we first meet her is incensed because the male Army officer who’s supposed to be her escort is actually screwing a younger, hotter reporter from another organization. She ultimately turns the tables on him and insists on driving their dune buggy through the desert and picking the stories she wants to cover – including the desperate struggle of Our (Anti-)Heroes to keep their charges across the border to safety in Iran against the demands of U.S. goverment officials to arrest them at the Iraq-Iran border and take their own soldiers into custody for violating tine U.S.’s interdict against any official or semi-official contact between the U.S. and Iran.

Three Kings is sometimes an off-putting movie (the scenes of Spike Jonze’s Iraqi captors torturing – oops, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on – him are especially “much,” and so is the sequence of an Iraqi woman getting shot to death in the head and leaving her husband and their daughter bereft, which was deleted from the Australian release to keep tie film from getting an "R" rating) and it’s definitely not your movie if you want to see war (and this war in particular) as a black-and-white morality play. But on its own terms it works beautifully even though already in his career George Clooney was striking notes of taciturnicity that would eventually leave him, in the late Douglas Sirk’s term, “petrified.” (My husband Charles read the above and offered some corrections: it was Mark Wahlberg's character, not Spike Jonze's, who was subjected to "enhnaced interrogation" by the Iraqis, and Geporge Clooney's character who was suspposed to be mindiung Adriana but was actually fucking the other reporter. My apologies for my errors.)

Fantasia (Walt Disney Productions, RKO, 1940)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I brought out a 2011 Disney DVD of the original 1940 Fantasia and the 2000 sequel, FAntasia 2000, and we ran the original movie last night. Fantasia was one of the most unusual projects to come out under the Walt Disney imprimatur because, instead of an animated retelling of a fairy tale the way Disney’s previous features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, had been, it was a plotless excursion into the world of classical music held together by the celebrity status of its two on-screen hosts, conductor Leopold Stokowski and music critic Deems Taylor. It actually began as a 10-minute short that was one of Disney’s periodic attempts to restore the luster of his first star character, Mickey Mouse. He had the idea of teaming Mickey with Stokowski for a film based on French composer Paul Dukas’s tone poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” based on a German folk tale about the titular sorcerer’s apprentice who, charged with filling a cauldron with water, brings a broom to life and gets it to be his water-bearer. Only he can’t get it to stop, and when in sheer desperation he takes an ax to the broom and cuts it into splinters, each splinter grows into a whole new broom and buries the room, and poor Mickey the sorcerer’s apprentice, into ribbons. In one of the film’s most frightening moments, Mickey tries to use the sorcerer’s book of spells as a combination resource and life raft, but he’s unable to find the counter-spell and it’s left to the sorcerer himself (drawn, according to the film’s imdb.com page, as a caricature of Walt Disney) to reverse the spell.

Then Disney got the idea of doing an entire feature out of those vignettes based on classical music, and while “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” had been recorded in Los Angeles with studio musicians, for the rest of the movie Stokowski was able to use the Philadelphia Orchestra (by that time he had relinquished the job of music director to Eugene Ormandy, but he was still its principal guest conductor and he used them for various film assignments, including the Deanna Duirbin vehicle One Hundred Men and a Girl) and record it in a nine-channel stereo system called “Fantasound.” (Alas, almost nobody got to see the film in Fantasound because it was too expensive to wire the theatres to show it.) Disney also got pioneering German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger to direct the opening sequence, an abstract depiction of Stokowski’s orchestration of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, but Fischinger quit the project because he wanted the sequence to be totally abstract whereas Disney wanted realistic images of musicians on the opening slowly dissolving into abstractions. He said he wanted the sequence to look like what you would see if you were nodding off at a concert.

I’m pretty sure I’d seen Fantasia only once before, at a theatrical reissue screening in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s; Disney left this one in the vaults after its 1940 first release was a commercial disappointment and didn’t take it out again until 1966, the year of his death. A number of hippies sneaked marijuana into the theatres showing Fantasia and watched the movie “high.” Walt Disney was shocked and wanted to pull the film from release, but his more pragmatic brother Roy, the chief financial officer, told him that as much as Walt might disapprove of what the hippies were doing in the theatres, they had paid the Disney company good money to be there. Viewed today. Fantasia is one of the landmarks of the Disney company and particularly of the incredible team of animators and technicians he had assembled for short films and which created the first five Disney features (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo) before the bitter animators’ strike of 1941-42 abruptly ended the halcyon days. Disney’s studio survived by making training films for the U.S. war effort – ironic since after the war he adopted the visceral hatred of government typical of the American radical Right – but he would not make another all-animated feature again until Cinderella in 1950. (He did make a few short features combining live action with animation, including one called Make Mine Music in 1946 whose most spectacular sequence, featuring a Benny Goodman small band playing “After You’ve Gone,” suggests what a jazz version of Fantasia could have looked like.)

Fantasia works best in its more abstract sequences – the opening Bach piece (however already mangled by Stokowski’s infamous orchestral transcription even before Disney’s animators got to it), the Dukas, the magisterial evocation of primitive life on earth set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky got to see the film and resented the way his score had been retouched; he complained bitterly but he was unable to block its use because when he composed this in 1913 he was still a citizen of Tsarist Russia, and when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 they abrogated all intellectual-property laws, including Stravinsky’s copyrights), and the finale, an odd mashup of Missorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” which was supposed to represent the triumph of good over evil and spirituality over Satanism. Elsewhere the creators of Fantasia really went for the cutes: the bizarre dance of the mushrooms set to the “Chinese Dance” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (Deems Taylor’s intro says the complete ballet is “rarely performed today” –didn’t he realize what a cash cow it is for the ballet industry, with just about every ballet company in the world putting it on during Christmas season and making at least half their yearly “take” from it?) and the Sugar Plum Fairies (plural) at the opening of the sequence; the bizarre bastardization of Greek mythology to Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony and the horribly cutesy-poo cavorting of dragons and elephants to the “Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. (Deems Taylor says in his intro that the ballet is supposed to be a divertissement at the home of Prince Alvise. He fails to mention that Alvise is actually the opera’s villain.)

“Black” Disney biographer Richard Schickel blames the commercial failure of Fantasia for Disney’s visceral contempt for high culture that seeped into his work and his public statements from then on because he had mistaken what Stokowski and Taylor had offered him for “culture.” And yet what doesn’t work about Fantasia pales by comparison to what does work about it: the stunning visual quality, the integration with music and the overall artistic ambition of the piece. I hadn’t realized before how much Fantasia owed to Busby Berkeley, whose numbers were created with living bodies instead of animation abstractions but had a similarly monumental sense of ambition and scope, and a determination to upend the audience’s expectations of just what a movie could be and how it could either express reality or play with an audience’s expectations of how far a movie could go and what one could look (and sound) like.

The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros., Odyssey Entertainment, Really Useful Films, Central Partnership, 2004)

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

At 9:10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 2004 film version nf Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Charies and I had seen a bootleg production of this at a local theatre – where the famous falling chandelier was a cheap thrift-store item and its collapse occurred at the very beginning – but the plot of the film, directed by the ever-reliable (you can count on him to screw up potentially good material, including the Batman and Jurassic Park franchises) Joel Schumacher, who also co-wrote the script with Lloyd Webber, withholds the collapsing chandelier to the very end of the story and makes it a big set-piece. Charles said he can’t be fair-minded about the Phantom music because his boyfriend before me had had a copy of the soundtrack CD and played it incessantly, whereas I nad bought the Phantom album when it first came out and liked it but still didn’t obsess about it at all, let alone to that extent. I also remember loaning my copy of Phantom to my good friend Cat Ortiz so she could learn the songs for that bootleg production.

The 2004 film of Phantom joined that odd list of mega-hit stage musicals that have been turned into flop movies (can you say A Chorus Line or Lloyd Webber’s Cats?), and it’s a film that virtually defines “uneven.” Passages in the film of great Gothic beauty and genuine terror alternate with others of almost stupefying banality, and for that I’m more inclined to blame Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than Joel Schumacher or anyone else. Lloyd Webber is a master at one type of song, the power ballad – though even there he’s hot always good at delineating the characters musically: the big duet between the Phantom and Christine Däae, the ingenue lead (“Music of the Night”) sounded almost exactly the same as her later duet with the male lead, Raoul de Chagny (“As If We Never Said Goodbye”). They should sound different from each other, reflecting the conflict that grips the entire story – whether Christine should embrace the light and love of Raoul or the darkness, despair and ultimate triumph of the Phantom’s legacy – but even in the power ballads that are his specialty and the one thing he does well as a composer, he’s not all that good as a delineator of character.

And on the non-ballad songs, including the so-called “book songs” that are there to advance the plot, like “Masquerade,” Lloyd Webber is competent but not particularly inspired at all. It was his bad luck to be a contemporary of Stephen Sondheim, who never wrote the big blockbuster hits Lloyd Webber did but was a far more creative force in musical theatre and a much more creative composer. One can imagine Lloyd Webber thinking of Sondheim the way Bing Crosby thought of Frank Sinatra: “A talent like that comes along once in a lifetime. Why did it have to be my lifetime?” I remember when Carol Williams was civic organist in Balboa Park, where she would routinely play music from Phantom and other Lloyd Webber hits, and I would write afterwards that I didn’t think Andrew Lloyd Webber was the greatest show composer of all time and I didn’t think he was single-handedly ruining music, either: I liked some of his songs, disliked others (his much-ballyhooed Requiem I thought was quite good except for one middle movement of crushing banality) and could generally take him oir leave him. And both the good and the bad aspects of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom are done justice (or injustice) in this movie, where the producers threw the full armamentarium of modern-day “production values” at the story.

The cast is as uneven as the rest of it: the Phantom is played by Gerard Butler, who’s a good actor but too closely associated with the action-hero Secret Service agent in the … Has Fallen movies he’s credible as a darkly romantic lead in a Gothic thriller. (One expects at any moment him to reveal that the real reason he’s wearing the mask is he’s there to protect the president of France from some dastardly terrorist plot to assassinate him inside the opera house.) His voice is uncomfortably reminiscent of David Bowie’s and simply does not have the “chops” for Lloyd Webber’s material, and Patrick Wilson as Raoul is properly boyishly handsome but doesn’t sing much better than Butler. Byh far the best singing is done by the Christine, Emmy Rossum, who handles Lloyd Webber’s not particularly adept attempts at coloratura as if they were the real deal. Though only 18 when the film was made, she sings and acts her part with a vitality and virtue that eludes her co-stars; the film gained her a Golden Globe nomination and a lot of praise even though her credits list since then has not exactly done justice to her skill level here. I also loved the cameo performance of Minnie Driver as Carlotta, an aging over-the-hill diva whom Christine replaces at the opera, even though they camped her up too broadly and gave her a Susan Alexander level of incompetence.

Overall, I’m not sure what to make of this “official” film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera; the Lloyd Webber-Schumacher script deserves credit for retaining at least some of the Phantom’s booby traps (not since the first and still the best version, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. in 1925, has a film crew bothered to stage the vivid sequences in Gaston Leroux’ source novel) but Raoul still gets caught in one of the traps (the old cliché of the escape from the water-filled dungeon, in which he uses his last breath to turn a valve and open it just before he suffocates). There are also some pointless sequences set at the Paris “Opéra Populaire” in 1919, 49 years after the main action, in which various props are being auctioned off and an aged Raoul is bidding on some items associated with the elements of the main story. (And the script ignores the fact that France fought an existential war with Germany in 1870 and another that had just ended in 1919.) Still, there are some sequences that work beautifully (and not just when Emma Rossum is singing) and an overall air of chill that suggests Joel Schumacher is a better director than I have often give him credit for; this is the man who made The Lost Boys, after all, so he had (he died in 2020 at the age of 80) some idea of how to make the Gothic horror sensibility accessible to modern audiences.

Secrets of Playboy, episodes 1 and 2: "The Playboy Legacy," "The Girl Next Door" (The Intellectual Property Corporation, Arts & Entertainment, 2022)

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

I watched the first two episodes of the much-hyped TV series Secrets of Playboy on the Arts & Entertainment channel. The shows, “The Playboy Legacy” and “The Girl Next Door” (from an early-2000’s “reality” TV show called The Girls Bext Door produced by Playboy for one of Arts & Entertainment’s ancestor channels, E!), had an awful lot of Casablanca about them – “I’m shocked, shocked to find there was a lot of sex going on at the Playboy Mansion!” – and overall it was an attempt to reinvent Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for the #MeToo era, which as one interviewee mentioned Hefner missed by only about six months. Actually the show was considerably more fair-minded than the promos made it sound: it featured the light, as well as the dark, side of Hefner’s complicated legacy, notably his stands against racism and sexism. Hefner not only editorialized in favor of the civil-rights movement, he did a TV show in the late 1950’s in which Black and white performers visibly mingled on screen and he refused to allow the Playboy Clubs to be segregated.

I remember my father telling me he’d been to a Playboy Club once as a guest and had found it boring – as a child I’d read about the experience and found its promos made it seem like a modern-day Shangri-La, so it was disappointing (to say the least) to hear my dad tell me it was just dull. Hefner’s whole attitude towards sex seems to have been flash-frozen in his teens, when a woman he desperately wanted to date instead went on a hayride with a close friend of his, and though one interviewee on this program compared it to the “Rosebud” moment in Citizen Kane it sounded more like The Great Gatsby to me: a frustrated poor guy becomes rich and throws fabulous parties in search of the lost love from his adolescence. At the same time the whole so-called “Playboy Philosophy” (which Paul Krassner, fellow envelope-pusher but on a far, far smaller scale with his little magazine The Realist, once described as “more rationalization per square tit than any other magazine”) comes off today as just a silly adolescent sex fantasy in which a thin veneer of liberation is spread over sexual exploitation. In fact, my husband Charles just read the above and suggested that Hefner deliberately set up a world where he could be constantly stimulated and opportunities to have the sort of sex he wanted – casual, often in groups, and quite frequently just mechanical . would abound.

The shows both featured women who claimed to have been Hefner’s victims: in episode one it was Jennifer Saginor, daughter of Hefner’s longtime doctor, Mark Saginor. Jennifer described herself as having a Lesbian affair witn one of the retinue of women designated as “Hefner’s girlfriends” and then having sex with Hefner himself as she was admitted into the sanctum sanctorum of his fabulously appointed bedroom. She said she was only 15 at the time and it was the first time she’d ever been penetrated by a man. In 2006 Jennifer Saginor tried to publish a book called Playground: My Childhood Lost Inside the Playbuy Mansion, but she found that a number of people whom she had wanted to interview suddenly canceled under pressure from the Hefner empire, and so her book was weaker than it might otherwise have been. For episode two the lead exposé artist was Holly Madison, one of Hefner’s “girlfriends” from 2001 to 2008. The show featured her extensively and mostly presented her as just another victim, but with positive elements in her experience, especially when she was chosen to howt the TV series The Girls Next Door and she found the host’s job exhilarating. Like Jennifer years earlier, she got rather mechanistically deflowered by Hefner in front of his retinue even though she also got deluded into thinking that somehow she would be the one he would marry and could have him all to herself.

The show depicted the sheer amount of video footage shot at the Playboy Mansion and the various rooms therein, all of which were wired, and suggested that a large amount of Hefner’s power came from the sheer amount of derogatory material he had collected on various individuals who might have otherwise been in a position to expose him. It also mentioned that Hefner’s security people were either current or recently retired police officers, and they would use their police contacts to make sure Hefner never got busted for underage partners and other sexual transgressions. Also, for all, Hefner’s lip service to women’s equality and liberation, one of his favorite avocations (shared by a lot of his friends as well) was literally to put leashes on women and make them crawl around on all fours like dogs. One of Holly Madison’s odder recollections was about Hugh Hefner’s obsession with Charles Manson: Hefner collected video of Manson’s court appearances and reportedly admired Manson’s ability literally to get women to kill people at his direction. (I remember Charles getting upset that in prison Manson was able to get other inmates to sign autographed photos instead of signing them himself – and I reminded him that Manson was in prison in the first place not for killing people himself but for getting other people to do it for him.) The show featured a chilling clip taken before the murders showing Manson’s girls with guns and telling the camerapeople how they’d been trained to use them. While in a more normal setting one would have thought it was Manson who would have been in awe of Hefner, not the other way around, for some reason Hefner was awed by Manson’s ability to take ordinary human beings with (presumably) ordinary consciences and turn them into stone-cold killers at his whim.

Hugh Hefner’s legacy is considerably more complex than the version we got here – and the version actually presented on the program was more ambiguous than the one we got from the promos – and I remember when he died The Nation magazine ran an obituary from one of their women columnists who said, among other things, that there never could have been a woman who would have been allowed to do what Hefner had done: maintain a Hollywood mansion and fill it full of hot studs available at her command, and pose as an icon of sexual liberation while doing so. That incensed me because it didn’t take me long to think of a woman who had done just that, becoming a major movie star in the process, writing the scripts for her own films (and demanding that her credit as writer be in letters 75 percent of the size of her credit as star), and attracting so much attention from the moralists of her day that the Roman Catholic Church organized something called the “Legion of Decency” to put her out of business. And what’s more, she did it 20 years before Hefner did. Her name was Mae West.

Vanished: Searching for My Sister (Big Dreams Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday afternoon Lifetime re-ran the TV movie they had “premiered” the day before, Vanished: Searching for My Sister, followed by a new “premiere,” Deadly House Call. Vanished: Searching for My Sister was an O.K. production in that sub-genre of film noir in which an ordinary person living a normal life suddenly finds herself in the noir underworld, usually as the result of the sudden death or disappearance of a family member who, unbeknownst to the protagonist, had been living a double life. I was also intrigued by the name of the star, Tatyana Ali, if only because I found myself wondering if she was any relation to Muhammad Ali (no). In Vanished the younger and unrelated Ali plays Jada, who’s concerned that her sister Kayla (also played by Tatyana Ali, though she disappears after the first commercial break and never reappears again) was crucial to the plot because the two women have to look alike for the rest of the story to work. Jada and Kayla are both in the process of breaking up from their husbands and making new lives for themselves as single mothers – Jada and Kayla are both Black, but while Jada’s husband is also Black both Kayla’s husband, Warren Davis, and the boyfriend she’s seeing on the side, Gary Burton, were white. (One was surprised that this Gary Burton had the same name as the legendary real-life jazz vibraphonist, who is also one of the very few major jazz musicians who has come out as openly Gay. We’re ill-represented in the ranks of the majors: aside from the classic blues queens like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the only other Gay or Bisexual jazz musicians I can think of are Bix Beiderbecke and Billy Strayhorn, and Bix has been disputed.)

Kayla has had a history of drug abuse, though at the start of the story – at least according to Jada – she’d been “clean” for two years. Jada suspects that Kayla has relapsed under the influence of Gary Burton and she starts hanging out at two bars Kayla was known to frequent, where guys start hitting on her thinking she’s Kayla. The last time Jada actually saw Kayla her sister begged her for a check for $2,000, which Kayla explained she needed to pay first and last month’s rent for a new apartment she can live in with her daughter Olivia (Aria Jennal Pulliam), but later Jada discovers the check uncashed and it’s the first intimation she has that Kayla has met with foul play. Jada makes herself a nuisance with the two women detectives assigned to investigate the case by the local police department, and at one point she accuses the lead detective of putting in only the most minimal effort and caring about the outcome only in the most perfunctory way. Then the detective whips out a snapshot of another woman and explains that it’s her wife, who disappeared 15 years before and the case never was solved. It’s the rawest and most emotional scene in the whole story, even though her partner was so butch I mentally remixed the story and decided they were “partners” in more than just the police sense.

Eventually Jada turns over the mattress in Kayla’s home – she seems to be able to let herself in any time she wants to and the cops are understandably frustrated that she keeps doing that and potentially contaminating a potential crime scene – and finds it sticky with blood. The cops arrest Warren, Kayla’s husband, but they can’t hold him until tne test results on the blood’s DNA come forth in two days and definitively identify the blood as Kayla’s. So they have to let him go, and in the meantime Jada makes yet another trip to Kayla’s apartment. Warren corners her there and he confesses to killing Kayla after she cheated on him (oops, had “extra-relational activities”) and relapsed into drug use. He calls the mother of his child a scumbag whore, and even from prison he recruits a fellow prisoner to knock off his former sister-in-law so she can’t testify against him in court. Only the fellow prisoner apparently reports the offer to the police, quite obviously hoping for a break on its own sentence, and so Warren is going to rot in jail while Jada appears ready not only to reconcile with her own (Black) ex-husband, but he arranges with his office to work a desk job instead of being a traveling salesman so the two can get back together and make a home not only for Jada’s biological daughter but her niece Olivia as well.

Vanished: Searching for My Sister isn’t a patch on the most obvious antecedents in the noir sub-genre – the 1949 thriller The Reckless Moment and its quite good 2001 remake The Deep End (in which the protagonist was an ordinary housewife and the victim was her straight daughter in The Reckless Moment and her Gay son in The Deep End) – and writer Christina Welch filled her script with so many red herrings, including a menacing drug dealer riding a motorcycle and threatening Our Heroine with murder if she doesn’t come up with the money Kayla owed him, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Still, I quite liked Vanished even though Charles guessed early on that Warren the firefighter husband of Kayla would turn out to be the killer even sooner than I did, if only because writer Welch was not setting it up to make it seem like Kayla was still alive and attempting to take over Jada’s existence à la A Stolen Life!

Deadly House Call (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

The next Lifetime movie was considerably more formulaic in its plotting and, though there wasn’t an imdb.com page, I was able to write down from memory and a screening based on another Web page at least to recall who the three major stars were. It was titled Deadly House Call and it was pretty much a by-the-numbers thriller in which the victim is Ruth Lockhart, long-time wife of investment banker Warren Lockhart (Neville Edwards) – and one thing I’ve said before about these Lifetime movies is at least they show a world in which African-Americans can become well-to-do and have built successful long-term businesses. The protagonist is actually Warren’s daughter Madison (Joanne Jansen), who was being groomed to take over on Warren’s retirement. Warren’s retirement actually occurs considerably ahead of schedule because of the machinations of Our Villainess, Rebecca Wilson (Sierra Woolridge), who not only killed Ruth in the opening scenes, she wangles a job as Warren’s caregiver and feeds him a lot more drugs than he should be on. What’s more, she seduces Warren’s young assistant Gregory and feeds him a hot shot of an extreme tranquilizer that leaves him comatose and near death himself – though my suspicion that the writer or writers will deposit him in the cliché bank and thaw him out again to reveal Rebecca’s villainy was mistaken and Rebecca gets “outed” in another way instead.

There’s another character lurking around Rebecca and at first I think he’s her boyfriend and the two are working a scheme to steal all the Lockhart family money – but instead he turns out to be her younger brother, Jesse Butler (Rebecca’s real name is Jane Butler), and the two of them are from a (Black) family who once had money until they lost it all and they blame Warren Lockhart for that. It turns out their claims are actually justified – Warren embezzled from his clients’ funds and used the loot to make bad investments – but of course, this being a Lifetime movie, any sympathy one might feel towards the Beckers is immediately undercut by their dastardly actions. In the climax Jesse holds a gun on Emmett and their daughter Hailey and threatens to kill them both unless Jane signs a document transferring total control of Lockhart Investments to Jane, who is holding Our Heroine at a deserted lakeside cabin (not another deserted mountain or lakeside cabin!) along with their dad Warren and as soon as she gets Madison’s signature on the document is going to set the place ablaze with a jerry-can of gasoline she has conveniently brought with her.

In the end, though, Madison gets the upper hand on that bitch Jane by grabbing her dad’s ultra-expensive pen and stabbing her with it, which has already been established as an iconic object even before then (there’s been a lot of talk about how Warren signed all his important documents with that pen and Jane a.k.a. “Rebecca” complains how that pen costs more than her car). There have also been some quite kinky scenes in which Jane tries to get the combination of Warren’s safe, which holds the all-important handwritten account ledgers Jane needs to document Warren’s fraud, by posing as Warren’s late wife Ruth and wearing her red dress, silver strands of pearls, and perfume. Deadly House Call cheats a bit on the title – the titular deadly house call occurs during the first act – but for the most part it’s a standard-issue Lifetime would-be thriller whose main deviation from the pattern is the central characters are all Black and therefore it’s the heroine’s white best friend, Nia, who stumbles onto the villainess’s plot but gets killed before she can warn anybody!

Kolchak: The Night Stalker: "The Ripper," "The Zombie," “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …..” (Universal, 1974)

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

My original plan for last night was to watch the Lifetime movie Vanished: Searching for My Sister at 8 p.m. but I nodded off in my chair and didn’t get up until 815 p.m. I looked for someone else in the DVD backlog and fount it in the first three episodes of the 1974-75 TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. This was originally a TV-movie from 1972 called The Night Stalker for which someone at Universal had the bright idea of combining a modern-style newspaper drama, starring Darren McGavin as a hard-boiled reporter and Simon Oakland (mostly a TV actor, though his most famous feature film credit was as the therapist who comes on at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to explain Norman Bates’ psychopathology to us and he also was in such important films as the 1961 West Side Story and 1969\s Bullitt and he played the cop running David Cassidy’s character in the late 1970’s cop series David Cassidy-Man Undercover) as his equally irascible editor. The gimmick was that this show featured real-life monsters, partly if not totally from Universal’s horror stable, as the bad guys, and of course Kolchak cannot get his editor and the police (with whom he has an antagonism between a love-hate relationship and a hate-hate relationship) to believe him.

The three episodes we watched last night were “The Ripper,” “The Zombie” and the awkwardly titled “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …..” In the “Ripper” episode, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) decides that the serial killer currently terrorizing women in his home town of Chicago is the original Jack the Ripper, somehow miraculously preserved after nearly 100 years, He has periodically surfaced in a major city somewhere n the world and does his thing, murdering five women (the total the real Jack the Ripper racked uo) who, if not out-and-out sex workers, were people who work at the fringes as strippers or illegitimate “masseuses.” Kolckak’s investigation centers around the Sultan’s Palace “massage” parlor (I’m putting the word “massage” in quotes out of respect for the people I know who are legitimate masseurs and masseuses), where one woman is strangled to death and there’s a lot of atavistic comic throwback concerning Updyke (Jack Grimmage), who for some reason editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) gets assigning to these grisly murders even though he’s appalled at the sight of blood and keeps dashing out to the nearest men’s room. (In a 1930’s version of this story Edward Everett Horton would have played him.) Kolchak finally realizes that bullets just go right through him but the one thing he’s vulnerable to is electricity – he realizes this when he finds that the first execution by electrocution occurred in 1908 (not true: I just Googled it and it was in 1890) – and ultimately he literally melts the Ripper in a lake of mud into which he’s plugged in an electrified fence.

The next episode in sequence was “The Zombie,” in which both white and Black numbers runners run afoul of a voodoo priestess, Marie Juliette Edmonds (Paulene Myers) – referred to as “Mamaloie” (and Charles gave credit to the makers of this show for having the character correct the Anglo cops by insisting her honorific be pronounced “Mamalwah” instead of “Mamaloi”). She’s out to avenge the murder of her dead son by keeping him alive as a zombie (this show was made six years after the film Night of the Living Dead but back when the term “zombie” still meant a person who is dead but his iife was artificially prolonged by voodoo spells and/or drugs, not a mindless radiation victim who survived by eating people’s brains), and in one of the show’s cleverest touches the authorities bury him no fewer than three times and finally give up. Another nice touch was the presence of “Scat Man” Crothers as one of the Black numbers gangsters involved in the racket.

Charles and I were undecided at first as to whether to watch the third show in sequence, “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be …,” but I’m glad we did because it turned out to be by far the best of the three. This time the monsters were space aliens who’ve landed their spaceship and aren;t either good guys seeing to be taken to our leader or bad guys wanting to conquer us, but simply folks anxious to get their spacecraft up and running so they can go on about their business and not fear or have anything to do with earth at all. If this plot sounds familiar, it should: it’s the basis for the marvelous 1953 Universal vest-pocket sci-fi script It Came from Outer Space (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-came-from-outer-space-universal.html), written by Ray Bradbury – officially he was credited only with the overall story and Harry Essex wrote the script, but there is enough sensitivity in the actual dialogue it’s hard to believe much of what the actors say didn’t come from Bradbury’s treatment. The Night Stalker treatment, credited to Dennis Lynton Cook for story and Rudolph Borchert for teleplay, retains much of the sensitivity of the original even while still building suspense as to whatever the great whatsits are and why they’re doing what they’re doing, including sucking the bone marrow of every living thing, human or animal, they consume and taking over a planetarium (this is supposed to take place in Chicago but I was able to recognize the familiar steps of the Griffith Park Observatory and inevitably wonder where James Dean and Sal Mineo were).

The scenes of the planetarium machine being taken over by the space aliens and literally hunting down Kolchak as he tries to hide behind the seats are marvelously frightening and a far cry from what we usually get at this level of budget – though I suspect that for the scenes of the spacecraft Kolchak ultimately encounters, parked in an out-of-the-way location along dedicated parkland, Universal borrowed the set and props from the 1966 20th-Century Fox film Fantastic Voyage. In the show’s usual postlude explaining how the events we’ve seen occurring were covered up, Kolchak says the city first attempted to replant the saucer’s footprint but ultimately had to pave the park with concrete after nothing would grow there. There’s also a spectacular sequence in which, cornered in a warehouse full of lead, the space aliens escape by literally melting down the lead. This episode was being a feature for “guest star Dick Van Patten,” but while he’s definitely there and recognizable he’s only in one minor scene and he scarcely qualifies as a “guest star.” I suspect Kolchak: The Night Stalker earned Universal’s DVD release because it was being hailed as a precursor to The X-Files 20 years later, though Charles recalled having seen a TV show from the 1950’s which used the same Jack-the-Ripper-never-died plot trope. I never liked The X-Files – to me it seemed like an ordinary policier with bits of the supernatural thrown in – but Kolchak: The Night Stalker holds up surprisingly well despite the lame bits of so-called “comic relief” that no doubt seemed dated even in 1974.

The First Wives Club (Paramount, 1996)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched the 1996 movie The First Wives Club, a film I’d spotted in our backlog just next to The Gang’s All Here. I was mildly curious about this movie after a Right-wing op-ed writer dissed it in the pages of the Los Angeles Times when it was new and suggested it was a horribly socially irresponsible movie because it made dumped first wives engage in macabre revenge plots instead of accepting the inevitable and going gently into that good night while their husbands collect themselves younger, hotter, sexier trophy wives. The First Wives Club turned out to be a delight from start to finish, even though as a film it’s very dated and doesn’t buzz with the sheer feminist anger Colin Higgins brought to the movie Nine to Five 16 years earlier. The three women are actress Elise Elliot (Goldie Hawn), housewife Brenda Morrell (Bette Midler) and professional doormat Annie McDuggan (Diane Keaton). They are old college buddies (and different actresses play their younger selves, though the double castings are quite carefully matched) who reunite after a fourth friend of theirs, Cynthia Swann (a young Stockard Channing), commits suicide following the breakup of her marriage to financier and Wall Street master of the universe Gil Griffin (James Naughton).

The three have an extended lunch (director Hugh Wilson, working from a script by Robert Harling based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, shows how extended it is through a montage sequence in which the restaurant gradually empties over time until it’’s just the three of them and an increasingly exasperated wait staff) during which they hatch various plots for revenge, first against their own husbands and then to protect any women treated similarly. The film takes a bit too long to get to the good stuff of what we want to see – the women getting revenge (or, as they put it, justice) against their straying husbands, but once their plots kick into high gear The First Wives Club becomes a comedy gem. I was particularly impressed with the deadpan nature of much of the humor, despite the over-the-top acting of both Midler and Hawn (Keaton is more reserved, as befits her training with Woody Allen), and Hawn’s performance turns into a spoof of Sunset Boulevard as she tries to have herself cosmetically remodeled so she can play ingenies on screen even though she’s 45. There are plenty of references to old Hollywood, including a sequence straight out of the 1933 classic Dinner at Eight in which John Barrymore shows up for an audition and instead of being offered the starring role gets a cameo with just a few lines (and he responds by killing himself in a scene the director, the young George Cukor, stages like a love scene); in The First Wives Club Hawn goes to audition for the part of Monique in her ex-husband Bill Atchison’s (Victor Garber, best known for playing Liberace in the better of the two late-1980’s TV movies about him) new film, only Bill has groomhg Monique for his new flame, Shelly Stewart (Sarah Jessica Parker), and he wants Elise for the bitch role of Monique’s mother instead.

Brenda learns from her uncle Carmine (played by Philip Bosco as a standard-issue Mafioso) that both her husband Morty Cushman (Don Hedaya) and Annie’s husband, Aaron Paradis (Stephen Collins), are crooks – Morty began by stealing stock off trucks and Aaron has engaged in higher-end forms of skullduggery – but Elise looks in vain for her ex until she finds it: Shelly, it turns out, is a high-school dropout and just 14 years old. Along the way there are some slapstick scenes, including one in which Our Heroines have to beat a hasty retreat through a window-washer’s scaffold after stealing some of Aaron’s stash, and another scene set at Christie’s auction house in which the three are selling off Bill’s possessions to raise the money to buy out Aaron’s advertising agency and make themselves his boss. The auction scene evokes memories of the 1929 Paramount classic The Cocoanuts – the Marx Brothers’ first surviving film – but it’s still amusing. There are also old-Hollywood tie-ins like the use of old songs like “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Tangerine” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” for properly romantic high-end parties on the soundtrack. Overall The First Wives Club holds up surprisingly well, and it’s fun to see cameo appearances by such celebrities as New York’s then-Mayor, Ed Koch, as well as Ivana Trump, a first wife par excellence if there ever was one!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime (Duck Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC, episodes aired January 20, 2022)

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

My husband Charles and I watched the latest two episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU was an interesting offtake on an episode they’d done earlier in which a star National Football League quarterback who’s secretly a Gay man plans a big coming-out event, only he’s murdered before he can stage his big party and the killer turns out to be his manager and personal coach, whose motive is all the money he’s going to lose if the athlete comes out and it destroys his career. In the 2022 version the athlete is a mixed martial-arts fighter, Tommy Baker (Cole Dornan), who was beaten badly by another contender and is now ready for a rematch. He’s married to a woman from back home in the Southern small town he came from, Chrissy (Dana Melanie, one of those oddball names which sounds backwards), but she’s O.K. with his being Gay and content with being his “beard.” Alas, she wants her ashes hauled at least once in a while and the man she’s picked for this is Tommy’s sparring partner, Ricky Nowak (Ignacyo Matynia), and the guy is ripping Tommy off for the money he can get out of him.

The writers seemed to be setting up the league’s owner as the villain, but it turns out that not only is the man not a homophobic asshole, he was actually going to promote Tommy’s Gayness and offer him to the world as the “Rainbow Warrior.” When Tommy doesn’t turn up for the big fight – he’s found badly wounded in his truck and taken to the hospital (which made it seem like a busman’s holiday to me right now!), the cops investigate and soon find out that Tommy’s predicament was caused not only by Ricky but by Tommy’s own partner, Phil Diaz (G. K. Uman), a physical trainer who nursed him back to health after his shoulder was dislocated in the previous fight and fell in love with him, only to be blackmailed by Ricky into plundering Tommy’s bank balance. The writers didn’t make clear just how much of a hold Ricky had over him, but at one point they have Ricky complain, “Tommy wasn’t even the man in their relationship – Phil was!” The Organized Crime that followed it was actually a better program, even though a) the show suffers from his obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and b) because NBC is telecasting the Winter Olympics from Beijing, the next in sequence will not be aired until February 25.

The main issue raised during the previews for this episode was Elliott Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) attempts to piss off Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) by making it look like he’s having an affair with Wheatley’s once and (it seems) future wife Angela (Tamara Taylor, who’s important enough to the cast list she’s billed third, after Meloni and Danielle Mone Truitt as Meloni’s openly Lesbian superior on the police force). But it was just part of Stabler’s overall war against Wheatley, who the writers work into such levels Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty sound like golfing buddies by comparison. Among the cops’ tactics against the crooks are installing a pair of computer hackers in the apartment upstairs, a male whom they caught as a hacker who’s agreed to turn state’s evidence and the dedicated and sworn female police officer who’s been assigned to work with him. (Predictably, he’s got the hots for her but she couldn’t be less interested in him “that way.”) The cops find that Wheatley staged a 15-minute power outage at the building that houses the New York Stock Exchange and is using it to make himself billions of dollars – as well as millions for his partner in crime, Sebastian McClain (Robin Lord Taylor), though to Wheatley’s disgust McClain has a Robin Hood complex and insists on giving the money away to everyone from legitimate non-governmental organizations to people he’s run into at random from his redoubt at the New York Public Library. (Though I have no idea whether they intended this or not, I was struck by the irony that McBride is staging his computer crimes from a redoubt of the old information-storage technology computers have largely displaced.) The show moves quickly to a satisfying cliff-hanger and I was disappointed only by the fact that we’ll have to wait over a month to find out how it turns out!

George and Ira Gershwin: Girl Crazy (Nonesuch Records: 1990 studio recording)

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

Last night I played for my husband Charles and I a recording of the complete score for the 1930 George and Ira Gershwin stage musical Girl Crazy, a simple tale of a young rich scapegrace named Danny Churchill whose dad ships him off to a ranch in Arizona to make a man of him. While there, he falls in love with the local postmaster, Molly Gray. Predictably, she has no interest or desire in him at first, but he gradually wears down her resistance. There are also several supporting cast members, including a man named Sam whom Danny knew in New York and whom Molly uses to date in order to make Danny jealous. The original Broadway cast featured Allan Kearns as Danny, Ginger Rogers as Molly, and Ethel Merman as local girl Katie, who stopped the show with the score’s big hit, “I Got Rhythm.” (For the Columbia compilation CD From Gershwin’s Time, released in 1999 to commemorate the centennial of George Gershwin’s birth, “I Got Rhythm” was sung by Kate Smith, whose voice was just as loud as Merman’s and whose musicianship – especially her intonation – was far superior.)

The record we were listening to was a 1990 CD on the Nonesuch label conducted by John Mauceri, with David Carroll as Danny, Judy Blazer as Molly, and Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s other daughter, as Katie. Judy Garland got to sing the big “I Got Rhythm” finale in the 1943 MGM film version (Mickey Rooney starred as Danny and Judy played a mix of Molly and Katie) and so Lorna was following in her mother’s footsteps –– and the family resemblance in their voices is unmistakable. (When Judy shot the number, director Busby Berkeley had cannon shots going off over her voice, and both Judy and her musical director, Roger Edens – who’d also coached Ethel Merman on stage – insisted that he be fired from the rest of the film. So Norman Taurog, a specialist in working with child stars, directed the rest of the 1943 Girl Crazy and, rather than pay him his contract salary for doing nothing, MGM loaned Berkeley out to 20th Century-Fox for The Gang’s All Here.)

Though written only a year or two before Of Thee I Sing, Girl Crazy is a far more conventional show, with far fewer choral numbers and a lot of songs to showcase the stars. And unlike Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Girl Crazy is full of songs that have become standards, not only “I Got Rhythm” but “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me.” There are also songs that hung out on the netherworld of standard-dom, including “Could You Use Me?” (the opening duet for Danny and Molly in which she insists she could not possibly use him), “Bidin’ My Time” (written for a barbershop quartet called the Fourmost who played toy instruments – a harmonica and three ocarinas – as part of their act), “Sam and Delilah” (memorably covered by Duke Ellington at the time on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r9G_ed9IUY) and “Boy, What Love Has Done to Me.” Another piece of trivia about the 1930 Girl Crazy: producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley wanted a romantic dance duet to “Embraceable You” for Ginger Rogers and Allan Kearns, and to design it they called in a young man named Fred Astaire when he was still doing a novelty act with his sister Adele. It was the first time Astaire and Rogers worked together, three years before they actually danced together in a show or film. And the pit orchestra on opening night was led by Red Nichols and featured such future swing stars as Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa – alluded to in the long trumpet solo on “I Got Rhythm” in the 1990 recording even though it was hardly played with the panache Nichols undoubtedly brought to it.

We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Candid Records, 1960)

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

The last thing my husband Charlesand I istened to was the extraordinary but also frustrating 1960 album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, an awkward title forced on Roach because two years earlier Sonny Rollins had recorded an instrumental album called Freedom Suite on which Roach had played as a sideman. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite was among the first records n which major jazz musicians addressed the nascent civil-rights movement of Black Americans – though as early as the 1930’s musicians like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday had written, played and/or sung songs dealing with racial intolerance. We Insist! Freedom Now Suite opens with its most powerful track, “Driva Man” (“driva” as in “slavedriver,” the man at the otner end of the whip used to beat recalcitrant slaves and bludgeon them into submission), with a powerful vocal by Lincoln (her last name is all too appropriate here!) and a scorching tenor sax solo by Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins was a veteran of the 1920’s jazz scene who had embraced the new bebop style’ unlike most of his contemporaries, he had not only praised bop, he played it! It was Hawkins who gave such major bop players as Roach and Thelonious Monk their first opportunities to record – in Roach’s case for Apollo Records, whose owner, Bess Berman, got her label up and running and kept it in business quite a while despite the twin handicaps of being Black and female.

Alas, the second song on the suite, “Freedom Day,” is an attempt to depict musically the excitement the slaves must have felt when they received word of the Emancipation Proclamation; it’s good but Duke Ellngton’s depiction of the same scene in “Emancipation Celebration” from his symphonic masterpiece Black, Brown and Beige, though a lot shorter, is better. There follow three movements in which Lincoln’s voice is used wordlessly and she comes off as an odd combination of Yma Sumac and Yoko Ono, and Roach not only brings in a conga drummer (Michael Olatunji, who became something of a star in his own right and wrote “Jingo,” later Santana’s first big hit) but appears to be playing hand drums himself. The effect is oddly like one of those pseudo-”exotica” records Les Baxter was churning out throughout the 1950’s, a strange sound indeed for an album supposedly part of a concept record dealing with civil rights. The last track on this album is called “Tears for Johannesburg” and it was obviously intended as an anticipation of the struggle against South African apartheid – which actually ended more definitively and with less racial animus than the similar bitter-enders in the United States have managed.

The MS-NBC shows last night featured a UCSD professor named Barbara Walter (note the absence of an “s” at the end of her last name) who’d written a book called How Civil Wars Start, who among other things was surprised she was when South Africa managed the so-called “transition to Black rule” without massive bloodshed, and said that was really the responsibility of South Africa’s white business community for realizing that the game was over and if they wanted to keep making profits – which of course they did – it was time to end apartheid. I haven’t always supported what the African National Congress has done with their power since (does the name “Jacob Zuma” mean anything to you?), but they deserve a ton of credit for negotiating a peaceful end to South Africa’s racism while that task remains elusive in our own country.

Gershwin: Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Eat Cake (audio recording by Michael Tilson Thomas, CBS, 1985)

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

In lieu of watcvhing one or more Lifetime movies – wth the holidays over they’re back to doing the usual “pussies in peril” crap but I wanted lighter fare – I was inspired to dig out the 1980’s recordings of the complete scores of the George and Ira Gershwin musicals Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let “Em Eat Cake (1933). Of Thee I Sing was a huge success and won the Pulitzer Prize for best play – the first time it was given for a musical, though since the Pulitzers didn’t give a prize for music for another decade the prizes went to George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the book and Ira Gershwin for the lyrics, but not to brother George even though the score is among the Gershwins’ best. >Of Thee I Sing concerns the Presidential candidacy of John P. Wintergreen, whose campaign song featires the refrain, “He’s the man the people choose/Loves the Irish and the Jews.” (One wonders about that line given that all four of the show’s creators were Jewish.)

The plot of Of Thee I Sing deals with Presidential candidate Wintergreen, who’s running on a platform that “Love Is Sweeping the Country,” having agreed to marry the winner of a beauty contest, French girl Diana Devereaux, only he refuses because he’s already in love with U.S. girl Mary Turner, who’s won his heart with her incredible corn muffins. (I’m not making this up, you know.) This causes the French ambassador to break off diplomatic relations and threaten to declare war on the grounds that Diana is “the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of an illegitimate nephew of Napoleon” and therefore Wintergreen’s rejection of her is an insult to all France. War is averted only when Mary announces that she and Wintergreen are going to have a baby, and the characters gather around her to determine the baby’s gender. (This reminded me of my own stint in the hospital, when I had at least two nurses who were visibly pregnant. I asked them both, “Boy or girl?” One told me definitively it was a boy, while the other said she and her husband had to wait and let nature describe them.) In the end war is averted when Mary gives birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

The plot of Let ‘Em Eat Cake is considerably darker: Whitergreen has just lost his re-election bid to John P. Tweedledee, only he works with the Secretary of War to foment a revolution and declare himself dictator. He’s also gone into the shirt-manufacturing business to finance the revolution and, once he gets back in office, he issues a decree that not only is he going to have the White House repainted blue, but everyone in the country is going to have to wear the blue shirt of freedom. (This reminded me of China during the 1960’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong decreed that everyone should show their support for his regime by going about in properly “proletarian” overalls.) There is also a baseball game between the U.S. and the League of Nations over who wll pay up the war debt other nations of tle world will repay the war debts, double or nothing. Vice-president Alexander Throttlebottom calls the game and in the end allows the League to win on a ball he called fair and everyone else thought was foul, and the army – who were hoping to divide up the war debt in what was obviously a parody of the Bonus March real-life veterans had staged in Washington, D.C. the year before and the action of then-general Douglas MacArthur in having firehoses to get them to disperse – goes to demahd that Throttlebottom be arrested and executed for treason. Only at the end Wintergreen and Mary step down from the White House to concentrate on their fashion business and Throttlebottom assumes the presidency.

The books of both shows are full of what Marx Brothers biographer Joe Adamson called Kaufman’s “cold-soup negativity that passes for wit,” and in 1947 Kaufman returned to political satire with his film The Senator Was Indiscreet, in which a dark-horse U.S. Senator and presidential candidate was derailed by a sex scandal. (This time Nunnally Johnson was his collaborator.) Heard today, Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake date very badly – one is astounded to think that this silly stuff is considered cutting-edge political satire of this time, especially when Kaufman’s and Ryskind’s former stars, the Marx Brothers, made Duck Soup in 1933 and it holds up a lot better than this. There are a few zingers in the scripts for these shows, but what strikes me as most interesting about them is George Gershwin’s writing as a choral composer. Much of the plot is driven by choruses, and though these are from half a century later and from a different social, cultural and political Zeitgeist the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan hangs heavily over them.

These recordings were made during a short-lived fad for complete records of classic American musicals, from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s kicked off largely by the discovery of the archives of one man, Hans Spialek, who had worked on the original orchestrations of these scores and had saved everything, until he turned over his archives to Gershwin’s and others’ publishers just a year before his death in 1983. The record of Of Thee I Sing and Let ‘Em Eat Cake was made by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for what was still called “CBS Records” before its acquisition by Sony in 1987, and it featured the CBS nameplate on the labels. It was a relatively sensitive reading for me, who has become annoyed at all hell with companies like Sony and Warners who claim credit for records they didn’t have a thing with actually making!