Falbalas (Paris Frills) (Essor Cinématographie Français, André H. Des Fontaines, 1945)

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

There were a couple of films being aired on Turner Classic Movies and I was particularly interested in the first one, at 7:30 p.m.: Falbalas, an unusual French word which according to the translation program I checked means “fripperies, frills.” This movie, whose official English title is “Paris Frills,” was actually made in 1945, just after the liberation of France in general and Paris in particular from Nazi occupation. it deals with prominent French designer Phlippe Clarence (Raymoud Rouleau) getting ready to show his new spring collection – which is so late, due to Philippe’s artistic temperament and also the privations of Nazi-era Paris (where, among other things, the on-air host explained that shoes hoad to be made of wood or cork because the Nazis had requisitioned the entire supply of leather to make combat boots). He gets into an argument with his principal fabric supplier, Daniel Rousseau (Jean Chevrier), over the quality of the fabric he can get Philippe. They settle the argument when Philippe agrees to make a custom wedding dress for Daniel’s fiancée,.Micheline Lafaurie (Micheline Presle, who as of this writing is still alive and is about to turn 100 this August 22; her most recent film credit is from 2014 and is called Sex, Love and Therapy). Of course Philippe – who up until now has considered women simply as disposable commodities; he starts an affair with one of his models, uses it for a while, then catalogues the dress he made for her and hangs it in a locked closet in his salon – naturally falls hard for Micheline. He wants to run away with her even though a) she’s already engaged to someone else – and someone he considers a friend – and b) the entire show on which the viability of his business is hanging is coming up and he’s also frantically preparing for it.

Directed by Jacques Becker (a filmmaker I’d otherwise never heard of, though his imdb.com page says he was one of the few Old Guard French directors admired by the New Wave filmmakers who emerged in the late 1950’s) from a script he co-wrote with Maurice Auberge and Maurice Griffe, Falbalas is a film that works on several levels. It’s at once a romantic-triangle drama, a movie about the artistic temperament and how individuals with major talents literally think they’re above the common laws of humanity and decency, and a film about the whole preposterousness of France’s attempt to keep a fashion scene going even under the horrible conditions of Nazi occupation. One of the most fascinating characters is Philippe’s assistant Solange (Gabrielle Dorziat), a tough, no-nonsense middle-aged woman with a gravity-defying hairdo that practically becomes a character itself. She not only runs the business aspect of Philippe’s salon but keeps the all-important fashion show going even in Philippe’s absence. The plot moves to a crisis point when Anne-Marie (Françoise Lugagne), one of Philippe’s models and discarded girlfriends, commits suicide. We don’t get a clear understanding as to why, but it quite likely has to do with Philippe’s growing infatuation with Micheline. Philippe has told Micheline he loves her, and when she makes the inevitable I-bet-you-tell-that-to-all-your sex partners line, he insists that he’s never said “Je t’aime” to any woman before. Micheline confesses to her fiancé Daniel (ya remember Daniel? Actually Jean Chevrier is so much sexier an actor than Raymond Rouleau that it’s hard for us to explain that, either) that she’s been seeing another man. She doesn’t tell him who, but Daniel doesn’t have a hard time figuring it out.

Daniel picks a fight with Philippe which Becker cuts away from before we see its outcome, and when Philippe doesn’t show for the big fashion show at the end (though Solange takes over and runs it just fine), our first thought is Daniel murdered him. Then Philippe shows up at last for the end of the show, and the last item exhibited is the wedding dress he made for Michelinie’s wedding to Daniel. (Ending a show with a wedding dress was apparently a major convention among French couturiers of the time.) Philippe, in a mental daze, takes the dress off the model who wore it in the show, puts it on one of his mannequins (one of the film’s most subtle and savage jokes is that in many scenes it’s hard to tell the mannequins apart from the live movels) and he hallucinates that the mannequin is coming to life. He embraces the mannequin and then, just as Daniel has managed to break down the locked door of the salon (a bit of unspoken sexism here because all the other people there were women, though Solange looks strong enough she could probably have broken down the door in time to save her boss), Philippe and the mannequin crash through the salon window and are discovered below, with him dead. This scene was actually shown at the opening of the film – in which a crowd assembled below and marveled that both he and the woman were visibly undamaged by the fall, and it’s only afterwards when we see the scene again that the “crowd” were actually Daniel, the real Micheline, and the models and staff of the salon. The “woman” was the mannequin clad in Micheline’s wedding dress. Though I had a hard time doping out the subtitles, given the worsening state of my eyes as well as the number of them that were essentially white-on-white, I quite enjoyed Falbalas even though fashion is not exactly one of my big interests in life; as I’ve more than once joked to Charles, if there is such a thing as the “Gay gene” neither of us got the fashion alleles!

Raw Deal (Reliance Pictures, Eagle-Lion, 1948)

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

Last night, after Turner Classic Movies showed the fascinating French film Falbalas (“Paris Frills”) from 1945, they showed a U.S. movie from three years later: Raw Deal, a 1948 film directed by Anthony Mann from a script by Leopold Atlas and John C. Higgins based on a novel called Corkscrew Alley by Arnold B. Armstrong and Audrey Ashley. Apparently the original story involved counterfeiters, but the movie doesn’t; instead it starts out with Pat Regan (Claire Trevor, more sympathetic than she was in Murder, My Sweet and oddly restrained) delivering a voice-over as she describes her efforts to help her boyfriend, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe, surprisingly effective as a noir actor given his background as a comedian – but then Dick Powell made a successful transition from boy crooner to noir icon in Murder, My Sweet), break out of state prison. We’re told that he took the rap for another, nastier criminal, Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr at his oiliest – Mann and cinematographer John Alton copied the trick Orson Welles and Gregg Toland used in Citizen Kane of shooting Burr from low angles consistently so he towers over everyone else in each scene he’s in; Burr’s “heavy” performance, in both senses, marked him as a villain type, and though he occasionally escaped being typecast, notably as the prosecutor in George Stevens’ 1951 film A Place in the Sun, Burr was so totally known as a villain a lot of people were shocked in 1955 when CBS announced he would play Perry Mason on TV!).

We never find out exactly what Joe went to prison for, but it really doesn’t matter; in a story oddly reminiscent of Dark Passage, filmed the previous year at Warner Bros. bu director Delmer Daves with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (their third film together and, since most of it was shot in San Francisco, they took it as an opportunity to have a honeymoon at Warners’ expense), Joe heads to the home of Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), supposedly the “good girl” to Trevor’s “bad girl” but quite a bit more morally ambiguous than that. The three of them ultimately end up on the run together, and the predictable antagonism between the two women in Joe’s life becomes palpable as they have a series of narrow escapes, including one in which they were trapped in a mountain hideout by cops actually looking for someone else, a man identified in the character list only as “Morderer” (Whit Bissell) who killed his wife for reasons even he can’t explain and who ultimately goes out, brandishing a gun, and commits what would now be called “suicide by cop.” Eventually Ann is captured by Rick and tortured to get the information on Joe, whom Rick wants to see killed by the police because Rick still has the $50,000 loot from whatever it was he and Joe did and he doesn’t want either to share it or to risk Joe ratting him out to the cops in exchange for a pardon. We already know Rick is a bad-news guy because we’ve previously seen him throw a flaming bowl of cherries jubilee at an obnoxious blonde woman who kept hitting on him. (Given what we know about the real Raymond Burr’s sexual orientation, I wished I could go into the screen, take her aside and tell her, “You’re wasting your time – don’t you know he’s Gay?”)

This was one of the scenes in this movie that nearly kept it from being made because Joseph L. Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, said he flat-out wouldn’t approve the story for filming. Mann and his producer, Edward Small, hired Breen’s son as a script consultant, and insisted that the fiery dessert would not be shown landing on its intended victim. Instead they had Burr flip the flaming dish directly at the audience, which is scarier. Raw Deal ends with a scene in which Joe and Pat are ready to take a freighter from San Francisco to Panama, where they hope they can settle in Latin America and start a new, honest life together, much the way Bogart and Bacall did in Dark Passage, only at the last minute Pat tells Joe that Rick is holding Ann as a hostage, and the two leave the boat so Joe can track down Rick – only they end up in a gun battle in which both are killed, an unusually dark ending even for a film noir. Anthony Mann had had an up-and-down career, starting at Republic where he made one of the most unjustly neglected films of all time, The Great Flamarion, with Erich von Stroheim playing a crack shot who’s induced to murder the alcoholic husband (Dasn Duryea) of a femme fatale (Mary Beth Hughes, deiivering one of the finest “bad girl” performance of the film noir era, rivaling Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet and Ann Savage in Detour).

Two years later he got to make another film noir at RKO’s “B” unit, Dangerous, and then he signed with Eagle-Lion – the former PRC, now purchased by J. Arthur Rank as a distribution outlet for his British productions (the name “Eagle-Lion” was supposed to celebrate the union of American and British movie interests), where he made Railroaded! and then followed it up with T-Men, about the U.S. Secret Service doing its original job of tracking counterfeiters. It was at best a borderline noir both thematically and visually, but it was a huge hit and it was notable as the first film in which the U.S. Treasure Department gave the filmmakers permission to show real money on screen instead of the fake stuff all movies had had to do before that. Raw Deal was Mann’s next film, and while it seems more a compendium of film noir clichés than a coherent story (let’s face it, by 1948 film noir had been around long enough to have a cliché bank screenwriters and directors could draw from), it’s also a quite good movie even though I still think The Great Flamarion is even better. Incidentally, composer Paul Sawtell used the theremin in the film’s score; the theremin had been invented by a Russian expat in France in the 1920’s and the first composer to use it in a film score was Miklós Rósza in two films with mentally discombobulated male leads, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Alfred Hitchcock\’s Spellbound, but by now the theremin has become so totally associated with science fiction my first thought when I heard its unmistakable electronic whine was, “Where is the flying saucer landing?”

Dear Murderer (Gainsborough Pictures, J. Arthur Rank, 1947)

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

Last night at 9 I ran my husband Charles a fascinating movie on YouTube, a 1947 film called Dear Murderer that was one of the sporadic attempts by British filmmakers to make films noir. Dear Murderer egan life as a play by St. John Legh Clowes that had premiered in a small London theatre specializing in Grand Guignol-type fare and was so sensationally popular it got transferred to the West End in 1946. Produce Sydney Boix bought the film rights to it and produced it at Gainsborough Pictures, the venerable production company that had helped launch Alfred Hitchcock’s career in the 1930’s but, thanks largely to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s closure of most of the British film industry for two years in the middle of World War II, had fallen on hard times as the war drew to a close. The plot deals with Lee Warren (Eric Portman, a strong and powerful actor even though a bit on the homely side, though that’s not inappropriate for the S.O.B. he’s playing), who returns to London following an eight-month business trip to the U.S. While he was in New York doing a big deal for his employer (though we never find out who he works for, what he was doing for them in New York, or what the overall business of his company is), he left his wife Vivian (Greta Gynt) behind but asked her to write him every day.

She did that for the flrst three weeks, but after that his letters stopped coming and he even went to the trouble and expense of arranging a long-distance phone call, to no avail. So when he returns he’s already convinced that his wife has been having extra-relational activities, and as soon as he comes to his home he finds letters addressed to her from a man named “Richard.” Lee checks out the address on the letters and finds that “Richard” is Richard Fenton (Dennis Price), and when Lee shows up at Richard’s place seeking vengeance the exterior looked enough like No. 190 Downing Street that I was briefly tempted to joke, “Is she cheating on him with the Prime Minister?” Actually, Richard Fenton is a barrister (a courtroom attorney; in Britain business lawyers are called solicitors, and Mexican law makes a similar distinction between an abogado, a courtroom lawyer, and a licenciado, a business lawyer), and when Lee shows up at Richard’s flat he offers him a deal. He will explain his plot to murder him, and if Richard can see ant flaw in it that could lead to Lee being caught, convicted and hanged (when this film was made Britain still had the death penalty),he will let Richard live. In a vain attempt to get Lee to spare him, Richard tells him that Vivian has other alternate boyfriends in her life besides him.

Lee ties up Richard with silk scarves so there won’t be any marks on him, and Lee also has Richard write a farewell letter to Vivian and then, after the first letter is ruined when Lee spills a drink on it, he has Richard write it over again but stops him in the middle to make it look like a suicide note. Lee’s plan is to incapacitate Richard and then stick his head in the oven so he will die of asphyxiation and it will look like he committed suicide. Only Lee’s plan goes awry when Vivian shows up at Richard’s apartment with yet another young man in tow, Jimmy Martin (Maxwell Reed). Lee shifts his plan to make it look like Jimmy killed Richard, so this will get rid of both Vivian’s extra-marital lovers in one fell swoop: he’ll have killed Riichard and Jimmy will hang for Lee’s crime. Only Vivian offers to reconcile with her husband if Lee undoes the frame on Jimmy, and Lee tells Inspector Pembury of the London police (played by a British actor named Jack Warner, a name Charles got a kick out of because of the far more celebrated and important Jack Warner, studio head of Warner Bros. in the U.S.) a preposterous version of the events in which he omits any responsibility for Richard’s death but tries to exonerate Jimmy. Then it turns out that Vivian loved Jimmy after all, and she works out a plan to kill her husband and make it look like he committed suicide, exactly the way Lee tried to off Richard in the opening scenes – but the cops catch on and at the end Lee is dead and Vivian is arrested for killling him.

Dear Murderer is actually a well-done movie, except for two strange scenes in which the background music is mixed so loud it drowns out the dialogue (the composer is Benjamin Frankel, but the music is performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra with Muir Matheson as conductor, and them I’d heard of). Director Arthur Crabtree turns in a quite atmospheric job (though he couldn’t keep Eric Portman from overacting), and the writing by Sydney Box himself along with his wife Muriel and Peter Rogers took a rather talky play and made a viable movie out of it. They were aided by Stephen Dade’s appropriately chiaroscuro cinematography – Dear Murderer looks like a film noir, at least, even though it’s only borderline thematically (had Vivian been developed more into a true femme fatale this movie would be closer to film noir than it is). The cast is pretty no-name – the only actor in the film whose name I recognized was Hazel Court, pretty wasted ini the thankless role of Richard’s sister Avis, who was Jimmy’s lover until Vivian seduced him away from her – but they’re effective in the workmanlike way of British actors. Dear Murderer is a neat movie and an effective suspense piece – the many reversals pretty much stay within the bounds of credibility – even though Charles and I predictably argued about the moral. “It’s a movie about the destructive power of jealousy and possessiveness!: I said – and Charles replied, “No, it’s a movie about the destructive power of cheating!”

Black Swan (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Coast Creek Pictures, protozoa Pictures, 2010)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film about the fiercely competitive world of professional ballet that won the Academy Award for Best Actress for its star, Natalie Portman. She played Nina Sayers, a young dancer who as the film opens is up for the leading role in a new production of Tchaikovsky’s classic story ballet Swan Lake. Black Swan – no definite article in the title, as I’d always assumed (search imdb.com for The Black Swan and the first thing that comes up is a Tyrone Power costume drama from 1942) – began as a story by Andrés Heinz and was worked up into a screenplay by him with Mark Heyman and John J. McLaughlin. I had high hopes for this, at ieast in part because my late friend and home-care client Robert Cavanaugh loved it – I’m not sure if he thought it was the greatest movie ever made, but it was right up there – and I thought this might be the film that finally displaced The Red Shoes as the greatest movie about ballet ever made. Indeed it might have been if the screenwriters and director had known when to stop instead of larding on the melodrama until it reached absurd proportions.

Black Swan centers around the rivalry between Nina and fellow up-and-coming ballerina Lily (an electrifying performance by Mila Kunis, who deserved an Academy Award as much as Portman did) and artistparallels the rivalry of their characters to the plot of Swan Lake. In the ballet, Prince Siegfried is alone in a forest when he stumbled on a sorcerer named Rothbart and his prisoner, Odette, a woman he has turned into a swan through his magical powers. According to the plot, Odette can only be freed from this curse by the true love of a good man – only Rothbart, to make sure this doesn’t happen, sends Odette’s evil twin sister Odile, the Black Swan (who is always played by the same dancer as Odette), to seduce Siegfried. In the end Odette, cursed by her lover’s infidelity to remain a swan for the rest of her life, finally achieves her liberation by committing suicide. (Stravinsky’s first ballet, The Firebird, has the same basic plot – the hero is called Ivan, the sorcerer is Kastchei, and the Firebird takes the place of the swan, though unilie Odette she does not become Ivan’s love interest at the end and Ivan falls for Taormina, one of the 13 princesses Kastchei has enslaved, instead.)

The film’s credits make the parallel explicit by listing Portman as playing “Nina/The Swan Queen” and Kunis as “Lily/The Black Swan.” Nina’s stage mother, who tried for ballet stardom herself (at one point Nina taunts her by saying, “At least I got a starring role! You never got out of the corps!” – i.e., the corps de ballet, ballet’s equivalent of a chorus line), is listed as “The Queen” and is played by Barbara Hershey, while Winona Ryder has a brief role as over-the-hill ballerina Beth Macintyre, “The Dying Swan.” Beth is unceremoniously fired by the ballet’s fierce and domineering artistic director, Thomas Leroy (Vindent Cassel, whom the credits list as “The Gentleman” even though he’s anything but that). With all the hot young women playing up to him and all too many of them offering their bodies to him in exchange for better parts, Thomas Leroy comes off as a better-looking version of Harvey Weinstein. One of the curious things about Black Swan is it’s full of scenes that may or may not be part of the story’s reality and may or may not represent dreams or hallucinations of the heroine.

In one series of scenes, Lily tricks Nina into going out with her for a night on the town just a day and a half before the big Swan Lake production is set to open, and they meet up with two young men named Tom (Toby Hemingway) and Anthony (future Marvel regular Sebastian Stan), though Lily insists on calling them “Tom and Jerry” after the cartoon characters. It’s never clear whether Tom and Anthony are a Gay couple or out on the prowl for hot young women who look like ballerinas, and later Nina and Lily end up in a quite exciting soft-core Lesbian porn scene in Nina’s bedroom, while Nina locks the door to keep her mom from bursting in and interrupting things – only the next day at the ballet company Lily denies that any such thing happened and ridicules Nina for having Lesbian fantasies about her. The stress Nina is under as she prepares for her first big role, has to deal with Leroy’s contemptujous dismissal of her as having the qualities needed to play Odette but not her Black Swan counterpart, confronts the indignity of Lily being appointed as her understudy (an appointment Leroy insists upon, and later when she and we catch then in the hot throes of sexual passion we realize why) and finally shows up for her Big Nignt only to find Lily already rehearsing and prepping for the starring role, forces her to lose it.

Midway through the performance, just as the stressed-out Nina has fallen off the arm of Prince Siegfried (Benjamin Millepied as “David,” who dances Siegfried in the ballet) and thus wrecked the part of the ballet she is supposed to be good at, Nina and Lily get into a big fight that we think ends with Nina killing Lily, albeit in self-defense, and then stashing her body in a backstage closet and putting a blanket over the spilled blood. Then Nina goes on for the Black Swan act and dances it stunningly – only to find that Lily is very much alive and she pulls away the blanket and sees no blood under it. At the end of Act IV, when Odette is supposed to free herself from Rothbart’s enchantment by killing herself, Nina apparently stabs herself with a shard of broken glass from her assault on Lily – which may or may not have happened. As a story of a young, talented ballerina being destroyed by the pressures of her career and her life, Black Swan doesn’t begin to come close to The Red Shoes – although, as I said before, it could have come a lot closer if the makers had just known when to stop. And did I mention the mysterious scratches on Nina’s back, which may or may not be self-inflicted, and the bleeding she does not only in her feet (which we can understand, since one thing Black Swan is good at is showing the sheer level of physical stress ballet dancing puts on the people who do it) but from her fingers as well?

It’s almost as if Black Swan is a film with a moral, and the moral is (to paraphrase Willie Nelson), “Manas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be ballerinas.” There’s even a sinister music box Nina supposedly received years before as a present from her father (who otherwise isn’t mentioned at all during the film – I suppose we’re meant to assume that he’s dead), which features a toy ballerina dancing by clockwork to the opening of Act II of Swan Lake, the same strain Universal used as the theme music for two classic horror films, Dracula (1931) and The Mummy (1932). This music box also appeared in the recent Lifetime movie Hider in My House as a symbol of the way that film’s heroine was being tormented by the stranger secretly living in her apartment. Black Swan is the sort of frustrating movie you want to like better than you do, and it certainly has some haunting moments (including Aronofsky’s use of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, as arranged and cut-up by Matthew Dunkley and Clint Mansell; even the pop songs used in the film sample bits of Swan Lake, a marvelous touch), but overall it’s just “too much” in all the negative senses of that term.

Thor: Ragnarok (Walt Disney Picture, Marvel Studios, Government of Australia, 2017)

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

Last night at about 8:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the third of the four movies so far in the Marvel Thor sequence: Thor: Ragnarok. “Ragnarok” is the name of the Nordic apocalypse, in which Asgard and Valhalla burn to the ground and take all the gods with them – in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung he called it “Götterdämmerung,” which means “Twilight of the Gods.” I had high hopes for Thor: Ragnarok because it was directed by Taika Waititi (a native New Zealander despite his African- or Polynesian-sounding name; I remember my surprise when Steplen Colbert had Waititi on his show and a white person came out), and one of the things I had liked best about the most recent Thor movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, was the campy sensibility Waititi had brought to it. Alas, on Thor: Ragnarok Waititi was merely a director, not a co-writer as well, and Ragnarok has one of those convoluted writing credits that are the bane of modern-day superhero movies. According to imdb.com, no fewer than nine writers did credit-worthy work on Ragnarok, though three of them – Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby – got credit for creating the Mighty Thor comic book on which these films were based. The others were “written by” Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher L. Yost – Pearson’s name was separated by the word “and” from the other two while Kyle and Yost were linked by an ampersand, which is Writers’ Guild-speak meaning that Pearson worked on the script solo, then was replaced, and Kyle and Yost worked on it as a team – and three other writers are also credited. Greg Pak and Carlo Pagulyan are listed as having created something called ‘Planet Hulk” that was the source for some of this film’s story elements, and imdb.com’s page on the film lists it as being “based on the works of” Walter Simionato. On Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi didn’t just direct: he also wrote the original story and co-wrote the script with Jennifer Kaylin Robinson, so that film shows far more of Waititi’s sensibility than the relatively staid Ragnarok.

Thor: Ragnarok comes off as a perfect example of my General Field Theory of Cinema: that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. (One writer – or two working in direct collaboration – is optimal.) The sheer messiness of the writing credits on Ragnarok is a good indication of why the movie also seems messy; there are a few bits of Waititi’s sensibility, notably Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) insistent that he’s about to do some really stupid, risky and foolhardy thing because “I’m a hero, ahd that’s what heroes do,” but most of the movie is in the heavy, ponderous Marvel house style in which we’re apparentlyi supposed to mistake sheer ponderousness for profundity.​​ There is something of a plot to Thor: Ragnarok – Thor is supposed to save Asgard from the titular apocalypse, which we at first think is coming from Surtur (Clancy Brown), a fire-creature with a weird headdress, but we ultimately learn is coming from Thor’s older sister, Hela (Cate Blanchett; when I was watching the movie I had no idea it was she, but she makes a marvelous all-out villainess and really turns in the best performance in the film), who’s pissed because Odin (Anthony Hopkins, who’s barely in this movie) passed her over in favor of Thor and made him, not her, his heir. (If the writing committee had been clearer that the reason Hela was passed over was because Odin wanted a man, not a woman, to succeed him, this plot line might have had a lot more pathos than it does.)

Along the way two other characters from the Marvel stable make guest appearances: Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) shows up briefly on one of Thor’s few (in this movie, anyway) trips to Earth, and later on the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) appears as a gladiator on a world ruled by “The Grandmaster” (Jeff Goldblum, who used to be a good actor but his personality quirks have taken over his performances and made thm just annoying) and the two have a fight to the death. Well, not really to the death – the fight ends inconclusively and bothThor and Hulk claim that they won – and Hulk reverts to his normal identity as Dr. Banner (whose first name is never specified: he was “Bruce” in the comic books and “David” on the TV show from the 1970’s that used two actors, Bill Bixby as Banner and Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk). In the end Thor, Banner, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson, who’s a much more interesting character when she returns in Love and Thunder) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steal the Grandmaster’s spaceship, which looks like a giant flying doughnut, to go to Asgard and try to save the home of the gods from Ragnarok. Only they end up evacuating the gods and bringing them to Earth instead if trying to stop the apocalypse because, as Odin tells Thor repeatedly, “Asgard ins’t a place, it’s a people.” Thor: Ragnarok is 130 minutes long – 12 minutes longer than the current Love and Thunder, which also has a much more interesting mix of characters – and despite a few good aspects, it mostly lumbers through a not-especially-interesting story and a good cast wasted in boring, slovenly material. Fortunately Waititi got to make another Thor movie that was actually well constructed, fun and genuinely entertaining!

Hider in My House (Almost Never Films, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I turned on a LIfetime movie called Hider in My House, which not at all coincidentally is also part of the title of a new Lifetime TV series, Phrogging: Hider in My House, about an allegedly new sort of crime: living in someone else’s home without their knowing. Lifetime did a movie with this plot premise earlier, though I can’t recall the title, and I made the mistake of posting a review on imdb.com to the effect that though the filmmakers had intended this to be scary, it seemed more comic than anything else: one could readily imagine Chaplin or Keaton having made a film with this premise in the silent era. I got my proverbial hat handed to me by another reviewer who said the premise was very serious and I shouldn’t have called it unintentionally funny. I’ll say one thing for Hider in My House: there’s nothing funny about it, either by intention or unintention. The film was a production of Almost Never Films, Inc. and ht had some of the same personnel as this outfit’s other contributions to the Lifetime schedule, including director Dave Thomas, who is quite good at doing Gothic horror even within the confines of a modern-day suburb (in this case Clearwater, Florida, where Thomas’s last Lifetime credit, Nightmare PTA Moms, was also set). The writer is Ken Miyamoto, and the film opens with a prologue which Thomas shoots in quie good black-and-white.

The prologue features an argument between a mother and father over their son, who is psychopathic and showing violent tendencies. His dad wants to put him in a mental institution,but his mom won’t hear of it and insists that she keep him at home and make sure he is safe inside these walls. Then we get a typical Lifetime title chyron, “Twenty Years Later,” and 20 hears later the apartment has just been purchased by best-selling author Molly Bachman (Meghan Carrasquillo, whom my husband Charles thought looked like progressive New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio’Cortez) on the earnings from her first book. Though it was presented as fiction, it was inspired by a real-life experience she and her sister Bella (April Consalo) had at the hands of a sexual predator. The first or second day she moves in, she meets a terminally nice young man named Kyle (Thomas Gipson) who offers to help carry her groceries home and accidentally switches coffee cans on her so she gets his decaf, much to the disappointment of Bella, who’s living in the apartment with Molly as her house guest until she can move in with her boyfriend Carter (Roman Jacob Boyle). Alas, she also starts hearing odd noises from inside the apartment, many of which trigger dreams that flash her back to the assailant who unwittingly inspired her best-seller. She also leaves out a frying pan on her stove, only when she wakes up the next morning the pan has been washed and put back in its drawer. As if that weren’t bad enough, Molly is also facing immense pressure from her editor, Heather (Kimber King), to show her some pages of a new book. Heather actually tells Molly at least twice, “You’re only as good as your next book,” and she herself is being pressured by the publishers of Molly’s first novel, who naturally want a follow-up as soon as possible.

Only she’s terminally blocked until Kyle tells her the story behind her new apartment: it had been in the same family, the Chamberses, since the 18th century when the building was built in the first place. The last surviving Chamberses were father Daniel and his son Ethan – mom had died of cancer some years before – and the only reason the place had come on the market was that Daniel’s mistress, Gayle Waterford, had inherited it from Daniel much to the horror of Ethan, whose mom had promised him he could live in it permanently. When Daniel told Ethan he and Gayle were going to sell the building and move out of the country together, Ethan killed him with a hammer and threw his corpse down a disused elevator shaft he’d discovered in the building. A seedy-looking man who turns up at Molly’s book signing turns out to be Detecdtive Kramer (Marc Lucia), who’s investigating the disappearances of Daniel and Ethan Chambers as a cold case. While everything else is going on, Molly has also begun to date Kyle, and the two of them have ended up in bed together for a few soft-core porn scenes in which Thomas Gipson’s pecs are things of beauty and joys to behold. Molly is fascinated by the dark history of her new home and decides not only to write her next book about it but to present it as a true-crime story instead of fictionalizing it the way she’d done with her first book, and she starts piecing the story together from online research. She also discovers the hole in the wall through which Ethan Chambers dumped his dad’s body, though of course she doesn’t understand its significance. She just notices a joint where a cabinet had been crudely glued to the wall, pries it open and discovers Ethan Chambers’ secret hideout, after first leaving her sister Bella (ya remember her sister Bella?) a voicemail asking her to come over and talk her out of going inside the walls.

Bella duly arrives just as Molly is having her big confrontation with Kyle, who not to anyone’s surprise turns out to be Ethan Chambers; He’s convinced that the two of them are destined to be together, live in the apartment and she’s going to keep him safe the way his mom promised him she would. The only reason Charles and I didn’t guess that Kyle would turn out to be Ethan the Phrogger was neither of us thought Ken Miyamoto would be that obvious; indeed, my money was on Bella’s boyfriend Carter as the unwelcome inhabitant. Instead Kyle tries to bend Molly to his will by threatening Bella, and in the end Molly saves her sister and pushes Ethan to his death down the same disused elevator shaft which with Ethan disposed of the body of his father lo those many years ago. Hider in My House is full of narrative inconsistencies and plot holes, including how Ethan survived all those years: how did he make a living, how did he feed himself, how (and where) he used the bathroom, especially since his crazy mom home-schooled him and he therefore has lived his life almost totally isolated and unacculturated from normal human society. At one point Kyle tells Molly he has a job in real estate – that’s his explanation for how he knows the dark history of her apartment – but other than that there’s no clue as to how he’s made his living all these years. There are other, more minor lacunae in the plot, including what Bella and Carter do for a living, too; we learn they fell in love after working in the same office but we’re never told just who they work for or what their employer does.

And Hider in My House is not only a giveaway title – as Charles pointed out, it closes off a lot of other possibilities, including an outside stalker (perhaps even the assailant about whom Molly wrote her first book, who may have read it, recognized himself and gone out for revenge) – the ending leaves a sour taste in my mind. One wonders not only how Molly will ever be able to have a sex life again, especially since it took her years after her initial assault to be able to trust a man, and it turned out to be Kyle t/n Ethan the Psycho Phrogger, but also if she’ll need to have a horrible real-life experience every time she wants to write something else!

The Ghost and the Guest (PRC, 1943)

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

After Hider in My House, Charles and I watched a 1943 movie from PRC via YouTube: The Ghost and the Guest, which by pure coincidence also turned out to be about a person hiding in someone else’s home unbeknownst to its rightful inhabitants. The rightful inhabitants are newlyweds Webster “Webb” Frye (James Dunn, an actor way too old for this sort of role; he’d played Shirley Temple’s dad in Baby, Take a Bow and Bright Eyes and been so convincing a lot of 1930’s moviegoers thought they were father and daughter for real) and Jacqueline “Jackie” DeLong Frye (Florence Rice). No sooner are they married that they get into an argument: Webb wants to take her to California for their honeymoon, but Jackie insists on moving into a deserted farmhouse in upstate New York her parents have bought them as a wedding present. As she sings the praises of farm life and all the animals they will be able to raise, I started thinking, “All right, it’s Green Acres with the genders reversed.” Webb has a Black manservant named Hominy (Sam McDaniel) – actually the indb.com page on this show lists the character as “Harmony Jones” but it sure sounded like the characters say “Hominy” – who’s the Black voice of reason much the way Mantan Moreland was in the contemporaneous Charlie Chan movies at Monogram (and McDaniel got to be in a movie with major stars in 1949, when Warner Bros. cast him in Flamingo Road with Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet and David Brian). As usual with these characters, McDaniel gets the best lines in the film even though he’s still playing the shuffling Black stereotype.

The newlywed Fryes show up at the mansion and find they already have a caretaker, Ben Bowron (Robert Dudley), who just retired as the town’s hangman and still boasts about his days in that job, in dialogue as gory as the Production Code would let them make it and not sacrifice the overall comedy. The Fryes take delivery of a crate they think contains some of their belongings, but it’s really supposed to be the earthly remains of Ben’s last hanging victim, Honey Boy Sprague. Only the “corpse” opens the coffin from within and takes up residence in the home, which was formerly Sprague’s until Jackie’s parents bought it from the state and gave it to her and Webb. Though it turns out Sprague is actually dead, another convict, “Killer” Blake (Tony Ward), sneaked into his coffin as a way of breaking out of prison, and his gang members show up and assume family identities – “Little Sister Mabel” (Mabel Todd), “Big Sister Josie” (Renée Carson), plus the more anonymous male henchmen like Harold (Eddie Foster) and Ted (Anthony Caruso). The film was directed by one of the most slovenly directors of all time, William Nigh, and was based on an “original” story by Milt Gross that was turned into a screenplay by Morey Amsterdam. Yes, that Morey Amsterdam, best known today as one of the inhabitants of Alan Brady’s (Carl Reiner) writers’ room on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and inevitably I joked on the basis of this movie that Amsterdam could have said, “I really am a writer! I don’t just play one on TV!” Alas, Nigh shoots most of the second half of the movie in total or near-total darkness that makes it excruciatingly difficult to tell what’s supposed to be going on, and while the film ends pretty much the way you expect it to – the local police pick up the gangsters and the Fryes end up staying together and pretty much resigned to rural life – it was nowhere nearly as entertaining as the much cleverer PRC comedy-mystery from the next year, Shake Hands with Murder, which Charles and I had just watched.

Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955)

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

First up on the Turner Classic Movies program for last night was the 1955 juvenile-delinquency classic Rebel Without a Cause, which they offered as part of a tribute to costume design in films in conjunction with an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York consisting of various rooms outfitted by well-known film directors and costume designers. I’ve read a lot about Rebel Without a Cause for years, ever since I first heard of it in 1968 in an article in a rock-music magazine written by a person who’d stumbled into a theatre showing it in a revival, and so far nobody had mentioned it in connection with costume design. The only thing I’d ever heard about Rebel in connection with the clothes worn in the film was that the so-called “WarnerColor” (actually Eastmancolor – the Eastman Kodak company allowed studios to use Eastmancolor but call it “WarnerColor,” “Metrocolor,” “Pathecolor” and the like) process didn’t reproduce blue jeans accurately, so the jeans worn by the characters had to be re-dyed. Rebel Without a Cause was the second of James Dean’s three major films, the only one in which he was top-billed and the only one that took place entirely in his own time. (His first film, East of Eden, was set before and during World War I; his last film, Giant, starts in the 1920’s and moves forward in time, with Dean and the other principals, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, wearing age makeup in the final reels.) By chance, Dean was killed in that famous auto accident just four days before Rebel was released, and Warner Bros. went ahead with the release plan they’d started on before Dean’s death (complete with poster art showing Dean in the trademark red jacket and blue jeans, with the slogan, “He’s Got a Chip on BOTH Shoulders!”). But many of the original reviewers noted the irony that, as one of them put it, “In the movie, Dean wins an auto race with death. Just four days ago, in real life, he lost one.”

Rebel Without a Cause started life as a nonfiction book by psychiatrist Robert Lindner about a teenage psychopath he’d treated in the early 1940’s, during World War II. It was enough of a best-seller that Warner Bros. bought the movie rights in 1946. Intending the part of the teen psycho for a hot young New York stage actor named Marlon Brando who hadn’t yet made a film, though they thought the psycho in Rebel might be the part that would lure him. It didn’t, and the property lay fallow in the Warners vaults until 1954, when after East of Eden was released and made James Dean an instant movie star, the studio assigned director Nicholas Ray to develop Rebel as a Dean vehicle. Ray immediately wrote his own story – inspired, at least one source said, by the time he caught his then-wife Gloria Grahame in bed with Tony Ray, Nicholas’s son by a previous marriage – and he used almost nothing of Lindner’s booki except a bit of backstory for Sal Mineo’s character. One of the things that amazes about Rebel was the degree to which Ray and his eventual writers, Irving Shulman (who had previously written a novel about New Jersey youtube gangs called The Amboy Dukes, filmed by Universal as City Across the River with Tony Curtis as one of the teen gangsters) and Stewart Stern. sneaked in Gay content despite the Production Code’s flat ban on “sex perversion or any inference of it.”

The sexualities of the three main characters reflected the real lives of the actors playing them: the Bisexual Dean, Gay Sal Mineo and straight Natalie Wood. When the three come together in the old, deserted mansion that had been used just five years earlier in another movie masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard (complete with scenes taking place in the swimming pool, drained in Rebel, into which William Holden fell when Gloria Swanson shot him), they form what becomes both a surrogate family (earlier there’s a scene in which Mineo’s character opens up a latest envelope received from his father,who has long since left his mom, which contains nothing but a check and a typewritten note reading, “For Support of Son”) with Dean and Wood as Mineo’s substitute parents, and also a love triangle with Wood and Mineo competing for Dean’s affections. Throughout the movie Ray and his writers identify Mineo with femininity, from giving him the real name “John Crawford” (reminiscent of Joan Crawford, whom Ray had worked with just a year before in the film Johnny Guitar, in which he cast her in a butch role) to posting a photo of Alan Ladd in his school locker just below a mirror in which he first glimpses James Dean. Even his nickname, “Plato,” references Queerness; it comes from the famous Greel philosopher Plato, who in his dialogue The Symposium at least obliquely celebrated the joys of same-sex love.

Rebel has its flaws, and as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions a number of them have to do with the film’s almost worshipful attitude towards the theories of Sigmund Freud. Much of Rebel seems as if the writers were deliberately creating a story to illustrate Freud’s ideas in dramatic terms, from the apron Jim Backus wears as Dean’s father (he’s bringing Dean’s mom breakfast in bed) while he lectures his son on the obligations of manhood to the visceral fury with which Wood’s father reacts when she tries to kiss him. I’ve long read their relationship as a hint that he’s sexually attracted to her and at the same time he’s ashamed of it and so scared by it that he’s afraid to show her any physical affection at all, even in socially and morally legitimate ways. At the same time there are fascinating scenes illustrating the “generation gap” between parents and children, including two key scenes between Dean and Backus which highlight the differences in their perspective. In the first, which takes place before the “chickie run” in which Dean survives and his acquaintance Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen, who would resurface in the late 1970’s as director of the pilot episode of the short-lived David Cassidy: Man Undercover show, in which he played a young-looking adult cop assigned to infiltrate a high school to bust its drug dealers), Backus assumes the role of a worldly-wise father figure (even though he’s still wearing that apron, indicating how much he’s been “de-balled” by his domineering wife and mother-in-law) and tells his son, “Look,.in ten years you’ll laugh at yourself for ever thinking this was important.” Dean replies, “Ten … years Ten … years?,” a line which becomes poignant not only for the contrast between the philosophical dad and the headstrong son who needs an answer now but also in light of our knowledge that the real Dean didn’t even have ten months, let alone ten years, left to live when he shot this scene.

Later on, after the “chickie run,” is the even greater scene in which Dean appears to step backwards from the 1960’s (even though he missed surviving to that decade by at least four years) as his parents urge him to cover up his involvement in Buzz’s death. His parents say that if no one saw him there or identified him in any way, there’s no reason for him to stick his neck out and get involved – and Dean, sounding like a voice from the future and the next generation of teen rebels with various causes, says, “But I am involved! We are all involved!” The more often I see Rebel Without a Cause, the better I love and admire it, especially the depths Ray and his writers were able to sound; though Ray didn’t use the technique Elia Kazan had in East of Eden of using the broad expanse of the CinemaScope screen to place Dean off to one side while the rest of the characters interact on the other, thereby visually dramatizing his alienation, he shoots the confrontations in the various characters’ living rooms (all of them seem to live in two-story houses with staircases between the floors) from oblique angles to emphasize the dramatic tension between the generations. One critic pointed out that even the last names of Dean’s characters in his first two films are anagrams of each other – he was “Cal Trask” in East of Eden and “Jim Stark” here – and oif course in both films he’s desperately trying to have a social and emotional relationship with a cold and distant father.

Something I hadn’t noticed before was that both Wagner and Brahms appear in this film – in the opening scene in the police station Dean hums the “Ride of the Valkyries” and later, in the mansion, Wood hums Brahms’ “Lullaby” – and though the filmmakers probably had no intention of doing this, they unwittingly referenced the alienation of teenagers in 1890’s Germany, in which Wagner was considered the hero of youthful rebellion and Brahms the symbol of clueless fuddy-duddy adulthood. (We known this from conductor Bruno Walter’s autobiography, Theme and Variations, in which he recalled his own youth and his celebration of all things Wagnerian against the antagonism of the immediately older generation.) The tragedy of Rebel is only heightened by the early deaths of all three of its leading players (I remember once watching a documentary on PBS called James Dean: The First American Teenager, made by a British film crew in 1975 ahd which was ballyhooed for including interviews with both Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo; obviously its makers had got them just in time), and as Ray later boasted, teenagers were taking their parents to see the film to tell them, “Look, this is why I’m so alienated.” And this time around I was also struck by the way Rebel observes the unities of time (a single day’s duration) and place (just one part of the world) Aristotle prescribed as the correct way to write dramas.

Breathless (Lies Films Impéria, Les Productions Georges Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinematographique, 1960)

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

After Rebel Without a Cause Turner Classic Movies showed another iconic film about youth rebellion, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 directorial debut Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small-time crook with delusions of grandeur fueled mostly by watching Humphrey Bogart movies and adopting his trademark “look,” including a fedora; and Jean Seberg as an equally bored American-born journalist for the New York Herald-Tribune (which, despite its name, was really an English-language newspaper published in Paris) who hawks the paper on the streets and is still wearing her butch haircut from the film that made her a star, Otto Preminger’s 1957 biopic Saint Joan. I’ve never seen the alleged Breathless remake with Richard Gere from 1993 (Charles has, and h e said it’s not worth my while “unless Richard Gere really turns your crank,” which he doesn’t; when Diane Lane went extra-relational on Christopher Meloni with Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe I thought she was definitely trading down) and I’d only seen the 1960 Breathless once before on a PBS screening I videotaped. I didn’t like it then – for all Godard’s dedication of the film to Monogram Pictures, Monogram would never have issued a film so relentlessly overexposed (and I mean that literally!) – and I didn’t like it much better this time around either.

Breathless was written as well as directed by Godard, with help from two of the other Cahiers du Cinema writers turned film directors – François Truffaut and Chaude Chabrol (and Charles noted a scene in the film in which a copy of Cahiers du Cinema appears on-screen!),and it’s a thoroughly unpleasant and annoying story about two small-time losers who talk a lot about having sex – both with each other and with other people – but never actually do so, at least as far as we can see on screen. If there’s one aspect about Breathless that works, it’s in the relationship of the characters to the media in general and filmmaking in particular; we’re told that Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) worked as a low-level assistant at Cinecittà Studios in Rome (built by Benito Mussolini in 1937 and subsequently the playground for Federico Fellini and the other greats of Italian cinema in the immediate aftermath of World War II) and some of the scenes involving Patricia Franchini (Seberg) take place in a photographer’s studio, festooned with huge lights and reflector shields around them. We get the point that these are two individuals whose lives have been shaped by the media – in her capacity as a reporter, Patricia regularly interviews writers who’ve just published long romantic novels – and who are trying to shape their lives according to the images the media have fed them. It’s this aspect that made Breathless a more appropriate film than Rebel Without a Cause to show in a series about costume design and how the clothes worn by movie stars on screen have frequently shaped tastes in what people will wear in ordinary life.

Also one odd thing about Breathless is that, especially for a first film, it had an oddly funereal quality: the Bogart film showing when Michel is seen outside the theatre striking his pose is The Harder They Fall – Bogart’s last film, made in 1956 just before he announced his diagnosis of cancer of the esophagus – and later the record he and Patricla listen to is of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622, the last work Mozart completed entirely by himself. (A few other pieces, notably the Requiem, were left incomplete by Mozart and finished by his student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, after Mozart’s death – and Mozart loved Süssmayr so much he named one of his sons Franz Xaver Mozart.) But I still find Breathless a monumentally overrated film, especially by comparison with the two other movies that launched the French “New Wave” in the late 1950’s: François Trussaut’s The 400 Blows (the first in what would become a five-film cycle showing its protagonist, Antoine Doinel [Jean-Pierre Léaud] as he naturally aged through the years) and Jacques Fivette’s far less well-known Paris Belongs to Us (set and shot in 1957 but not released until 1961). The plot of Paris Belongs to Us is just as elliptical as that of Breathless, albeit ini a different way, but at least the characters have agendas and do more than just strike poses.

Also Rivette and his cinematographer, Charles L. Bitsch, filmed it quietly and effectively without the relentless overexposure in which Godard and his d.p., Raoul Coutard, indulged in Breathless. (The film also featured white subtitles even though we were watching a 2997 restoration from an outfit called – if I remember it correctly – Pixie Pictures – a number of other films have gone out with color subtitles even if the films themselves were in black-and-white, but not this one, and the white-on-white titles were frequently too much for my rapidly deteriorating eyes.) And though Jean-Paul Belmondo would become an international icon of sexiness later, here he’s still pretty nerdy-looking and one wants to take him aside and tell him, “Look, you’re not Bogart, so don’t even try to be.”

5 Against the House (Romson Productions, Columbia, 1955)

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

Last night, after the showings of Rebel Without a Cause and Breathless Turner Classic Movies ran under the rubric of “Following the Thread” of fashion in movies, they ran a curious film called 5 Against the House – the numeral is part of the title – as part of Eddle Muller’s “Noir Alley” series even though it’s only tangentially a film noir. It was the third starring role Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn gave his new discovery, Kim Novak, in his campaign to build her into a major star. In 1948 he had briefly had Marilyn Monroe under contract, but had let her go after six months and just one role, as the second female lead in a “B” movie called Ladies of the Chorus, with Adele Jergens top-billed as Monroe’s mother even though Jergens was just nine years older than Monroe. Having let go a woman who would become one of the most legendary stars of all time, Cohn nursed a sense of grievance and determined to make right his mistake by discovering a new actress whom he could build into a Monroe clone. He selected a blonde he’d seen on a TV commercial; her name was Marilyn Novack (ironically the real name of the actress he was grooming her to replace was not Marilyn, but Norma Jean!), and for her first film he gave her Pushover, a true noir in which she played the girlfriend of corrupt cop Fred MacMurray.

To me one of the most interesting aspects of Novak’s career is how often she was cast as what she essentially was: a woman recruited by a powerful man and carefully groomed to take part in a scheme that involved passing her off as something other than what she was. Her part in Pushover fit this template; so would her stunning performance in what’s become by far her best-known film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and in her last major role, in 1968’s The Legend of Lylah Clare, she plays an actress recruited by an old-line director to star in a biopic of his late wife, Lylah Clare, whose career ended with her tragically young death. Though her part in 5 Against the House is only tangentially related to this template, there are certainly aspects of it: she plays Kay Greylek, girlfriend of Al Mercer (Guy Madison, top-billed), one of four college students attending the fictitious “Midwestern University” in Kansas following their discharge from the Army after serving in the Korean war. The other three are Brick (Brian Keith), who saved Al’s life in combat but has since developed what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is clearly in need of mental treatment he doesn’t want; Roy (Alvy Moore); and Ronnie (Kerwin Mathews, who eventually would become “typed” as a dashing young action hero in Ray Harryhausen’s elaborate monster fantasies for Columbia). Ronnie is a bored rich kid who, after the four of them take a summer-vacation trip to Reno for an hour’s play at Harold’s Club (a real casino whose owners actively recruited Columbia to film their heist movie there; probably because Reno was being out-promoted by Las Vegas as America’s gambling haven and Harold’s wanted to do something to fight back), they witness an inept attempt to stick up the place that is easiul foiled by the in-house security.

They hear a pit boss boast that no one could possibly rob Harold’s, and Ronnie takes this as a challenge. He works out an elaborate scheme to rob the casino and then give back the money, just to prove they can do it. Only the scheme needs all four of the students for it to work, and the other three trick the reluctant Al into going along by pointing out that Reno is also a place known for quickie weddings, so he and Kay can be married there. Kay has landed a job as a singer at a local nightclub (though Kim Novak’s singing was actually dubbed by Jo Ann Greer – a better match for her speaking voice than Trudy Stevens, who dubbed her in Pal Joey three years later) and she has misgivings about walking out on her job, but agrees to accompany her fiancé and his three buddies on the trip to Harold’s, which they intend to do on Thanksgiving weekend because the Western-themed club not only has a larger than normal crowd there but they encourage people to come in costume, which means it will be easier for the robbers to disguise themselves. Part of their plot involves building an exact duplicate of the money carts Harold’s uses to move cash from one part of the casino to another, and rigging the inside with a tape recorder (still a relatively novel consumer product in 1954). The idea behind this is they can take one of the casino employees hostage and tell him there’s a live assassin in the cart, a five-foot man who used to work as a jockey in horse racing, and he will kill the hostage if the hostage doesn’t follow their orders. Only, as in all the caper films inspired by The Asphalt Jungle and its success in depicting the careful planning of a single crime, things get botched in the execution. First, on the way there Al realizes what the others have planned to do and is ready to push the duplicate cart off a cliff – until Brick, who unlike the others actually wants to keep the heist money they’re going to steal, literally turns a gun on him and forces him and Kay to go along with the plot. Then the hostage, genuinely convinced there’s a small man inside the phony cart, pushes it down a staircase (or a ramp, I’m not sure which) and yells that there’s a man inside with a gun who’s part of a plot to rob the casino. There’s a chase scene between Brick and Al in the middle of a mechanical parking garage in which the cars are lifted into place by an elevator and automatically parked by gadgetry, and eventually the police arrest everybody and Al and Kay are put in the back of a patrol car while their friends grimly joke that this is the way everybody should spend their honeymoon.

5 Against the House was based on a story by Jack Finney, originally published in Good Housekeeping magazine, and Finney’s other projects around this time included creating the Mickey Mouse Club TV show for Disney and writing The Body Snatchers, which under the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers was filmed in 1956 (a vest-pocket masterpiece and the first science-fiction film noir), again in 1979 and twice more since then. Finney also published a science-fiction novel called Time and Again which Eddie Muller said in his introduction was never filmed, though I had thought the 1980 film Somewhere in Time was based on it even though Richard Matheson’s name is the only one on its writing credit). 5 Against the House was directed by Phil Karlson, who ironically was also the director of Ladies of the Chorus and was therefore the first, and quite likely the only, director who worked with both Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, and Finney’s story was adapted by Stirling Silliphant (who also co-produced), William Bowers, John Barnwell and an uncredited Frank Tashlin (an odd name here since he was mostly associated with Jayne Mansfield and Jerry Lewis). The result was a quite solid Asphalt Jungie-ish crime film, not all that noir-ish but done with real quality and style – and its chiaroscuro cinematography by Lester White was a real relief after the relentless overexposure (literally!) of Raoul Coutard’s work on Breathless!

Shake Hands with Murder (PRC, 1944)

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

At 10 p.m. yesterday my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly entertaining “B” movie from PRC, the 1944 production Shake Hands with Murder, directed by Al Herman from an “original” story by Martin Mooney and a script from it by John T. Neville. Shake Hands with Murder was a comedy-mystery, a genre rather long in the tooth by 1944 – three years after the smash success of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon in 1941 launched the film noir cycle and turned crime back into serious business on screen. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, the 1930’s made great gangster movies but seemed at sea in depicting more prosaic forms of crime, and one of the things Hollywood routinely did wrong in thrillers in the 1930’s is saddle them with overextended and not particularly funny “comic relief”: characters.) Shake Hands with Murder proved to be a quite literate and genuinely fun movie, with Herman’s direction more than usually disciplined (Don Miller in his book “B” Movies made fun of Herman for the way his characters broke down doors – instead of swinging open on their hinges they fell forward, top first – but fortunately no such scene occurred here), and Mooney won his Hollywood spurs by gaining his 15 moments of fame when he, as a reporter, was subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating organized crime and went to jail rather than rat out on his sources. When Warner Bros. lured him to write the script for the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots, starring Edward G. Robinson as a New York police detective who infiltrates organized crime, they billed him in the trailer as, “Written by MARTIN MOONEY – The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk!”

Shake Hands with Murder opens in the office of small-time bail bondsmen Patsy Brant (Iris Adrian, playing the sort of hard-boiled “dame” role that a decade earlier at Warner Bros. would have gone to Joan Blondell or Glenda Farrell) and Eddie Jones (Frank Jenks, the comic-relief guy for Universal’s three “Crime Club” movies based on Jonathan Latimer’s drunken slacker detective Bill Crane, played by Preston Foster, here promoted to a lead but still played mostly for laughs). Patsy collects $5 to $10 fees for bailing out small-time offenders but Eddie ls looking for a big score – and thinks he’s found it when he has the chance to put up a $25,000 bond for accused embezzler Steve Morgan (Douglas Fowley, a first-rate actor, especially in PRC’s superb thriller Lady in the Death House, whose overall homeliness mostly kept him mired in the “B”’s but he did get a minor role in a major film, as the director in Singin’ in the Rain). Only when he shows up in their office with Morgan’s check for $2,500 (the usual nonrefundable 10 percent of the bail), Patsy is upset because not only is Morgan maintaining his innocence, she’s heard he has no intention of showing up for his court date – and that will wipe out the small capital of their business. Both Patsy and Eddie determine to track down Morgan, and Patsy does exactly that; she runs into him at a bar in the building housing the Clark Investment Company, for which Morgan used to work and from which he allegedly stole the money in easily negotiable bonds. Morgan is in the building for a secret meeting with the firm’s CEO, John Clark (played by veteran silent-era leading man Herbert Rawlinson).

While he isn’t absolutely sure that Morgan didn’t steal the bonds, Clark is convinced that one of the members of his board did the crime based on a scrap of paper, torn from one of the missing bonds, he found at the company’s mountain lodge (which is too remote to have electricity or telephone service – an interesting forerunner of the Lifetime writers’ gimmick of having the climaxes of their scripts take place in locations off the cell-phone grid). Since his board members, including Morgan, are the only ones with keys to the lodge, Clark deduces that one of them must be the thief. Only Clark is quietly strangled to death in his office on the afternoon he’s summoned his board members for a meeting – and so now Morgan is suspected not only of embezzlement but murder. There’s a great scene in which Patsy and Morgan meet in the Clark building’s bar, but neither knows who the other is – and we get to savor the irony that she’s being cruised by the man she’s looking for but doesn’t know it because Eddie didn’t bother to show her a photo of Morgan until after they had their meeting. Later there’s a car chase between Patsy and Morgan, set against a backdrop that to me looked like a bad process shot and to Charles looked like an even worse painted background inside a soundstage, which ends with Patsy’s car breaking down and her bumming a ride from Morgan – who knows he’s wanted for embezzlement but has no idea he’s now a murder suspect because he doesn’t know Clark is dead until Patsy tells him so.

The film’s climax takes place at the lodge, where the other Clark Investment board members – George Adams (George Kirby), William Howard (Gene Stutemoth, who unsurprisingly later shortened his last name to just “Roth”), Kennedy (Forrest Tucker), Haskins (PRC “regular” I. Stanford Jolley), and Stanton (Juan de la Cruz). From the moment we hear Stanton’s thickly accented voice (which actually sounds German despite the actor’s Hispanic name), we’re sure he’ll turn out to be the killer, and he duly does so. The title of Shake Hands with Murder appears to come from an ingenious trap in the lodge’s living room set to go off whenever anyone tries to open the secret panel behind which the stolen bonds (ya remember the stolen bonds?) are stashed. A life-sized suit of medieval armor is attached to a wire that fires a gun at anyone who tries to open the doors to the panel. In the end it’s not clear whether Patsy pairs up with the well-to-do and now-exonerated Morgan or goes back to small-timer Eddie Jones (much like the ending of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, in which Glenda Farrell’s reporter character helps exonerate a rich playboy but ends up marrying her editor, played by Frank McHugh – a terrible fate for an intelligent and attractive young woman), but overall Shake Hands with Murder is a delight, one of those diamonds in the rough we hope for when we scour through the surviving output of Hollywood’s Poverty Row studios looking for just such gems as this!

Undertow (William Castle Productions, Universal-International, 1949)

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

Last night I ran a movie for my huisband Charles and I called Undertow off YouTube, made by Universal-International in 1949 and directed by Wiliam Castle. It looked oddly familiar and both Charles and I realized that we’d seen it fairly recently. Charles recognized it when he saw a photo of a rural family with a tow-haired kid (the family represents the good rural people our central character, reformed gangster Tony Reagan – the last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” as Ronald Reagan did when he was a movie star, not “RAY-gun” as Ronald called himself once he entered politics – intends to go into business with on a ranch just 40 acres north of Reno, Nevada) and I recalled it even earlier, right when William Castle’s directorial credit came. Charles and I had first seen this movie as part of a four-DVD boxed set containing two films by Fritz Lang, You and Me and Ministry of Fear, and two by Castle, Undertow and Hollywood Story (the latter an intriguing production based loosely on the infamous, unsolved murder of film director William Desmond Taylor in 1922; it was made in 1951 just after Sunset Boulevard had started a brief vogue for movies in which Hollywood dredged up the more sordid aspects of its past). I bought this one mainly for You and Me, which I’d never seen before and turned out to be a lot better than I’d expected (even Lang himself called it “deservedly my first real flop”), but the other three films in the box were all capable noir thrillers.

William Castle got a schlock reputation from his later horror films, mostly for Columbia but also for Allied Artists (nèe Monogram), and the bizarre gimmicks he used to promote them, ranging from the usual $1 million insurance policy he said he took out in case anyone died of fright during a showing of one of his films to inserting frame-breaking devices like “Emergo” (in which a model skeleton was supposed to emerge from behind the screen and traverse the theatre across the screen, representing a character who had supposedly been immersed in an acid bath and all but his skeleton had been eaten away) and “Percepto” (in which he had certain theatre seats wired so they would deliver mild electric shocks on cue – John Waters recalled seeing The Tingler, the film for which Castle used “Percepto,” and getting to the theatre early so he could make sure he got one of the hot-wired seats). But he was also a former assistant to Orson Welles on The Lady from Shanghai and his skills as a director, already above average in the “B” world in which he started, only improved from his experience with Welles. Undertow is a perfectly respectable noir thriller in which Tony Reagan (Scott Brady, the sort of actor who was too homely for major stardom but superb for this type of role) shows up in Reno and has a meet-cute with Ann McKnight (Peggy Dow), a personable young teacher who’s in Reno on vacation after coming out on a bus from Chicago with her fellow teachers. Tony takes her under his wings, teaches her the basics of craps, she wins three points in quick succession and then he tells her to stop while she’s ahead – and she, unlike virtually any other gambler in a Hollywood movie, does so.

By coincidence (or authorial fiat by Arthur Horman and Lee Loeb), Tony is also going to Chicago on the same plane (thanks to Tony’s advice, Ann had the money to buy a plane ticket back instead of having to ride back on the bus), though Ann is crestfallen when Tony tells her why. He says he has a fiancée there, Sally Lee (Dorhthy Hart), and he’s going to ask her uncle, Chicago gangster “Big JIm” Lee, for permission to marry her. Only when he arrives in town “Big Jiim” is dead and Tony is beaten up by two thugs and held in a dark hall as part of a plot to frame him for Big Jim’s murder – and all of a sudden Undertow loos like a film noir. The police, represented by Captain Kerrigan (Thomas Browne Henry), accost Tony at the airport and order him to leave town. Tony protests that he hasn’t done anything, but he realizes the police will be watching him, and once he’s carefully set up for the murder of “Big Jim” he realizes that every cop on the Chicago Police Department except one will be gunning for him – as will whoever the crooks were who actually did in Big Jim. In desperation Tony hunts down Ann and asks if she can put him up – which she does. Though that doesn’t stop him from having a hot date in a waterfront park with Sally. At one point the two decide to meet at the park aquarium, and for a moment I thought Castle was going to copy the marvelous scene in The Lady from Shanghai in which Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles meet in aquarium for what they thought would be a clandestine adulterous tryst – only they’re discovered by an entire class of grade-school students whose teacher is leading them on a field trip. Alas, Castle, Horman and Loeb didn’t go there, perhaps because that would have required an additional set for the aquarium – it occurs to me that Castle and his writers could have gone Welles one better by having Ann McKnight be the teacher who’s leading the field trip and has to watch the guy she’s fallen for making love with someone else.

Instead Tony gets beaten a few more times, including once by a Black manservant of Big Jim’s who apparently had enough residual affection for his employer that he lets out his anger at the hapless Tony for allegedly killing Big Jim. Tony also hides out in Ann’s room despite her typically suspicious movie landlady,who in one scene lets herself into the room with her pass key and looks for Tony – who’s there, all right, hiding in the other room, but Ann comes home unexpectedly and chews her out for butting in. He has found her in the first place by tearing out the page of a Chicago phone book with her address and phone number, but the police find the phone book and are able to find her by tracing all the “Ann Mc-”’s on the page. Tony also contacts his one friend on the Chicago police force, detective Charles Reckling (Bruce Bennett), who helps him out with certain information on the case and ultimately is called on the carpet by Captain Kerrigan, who suspends him awaiting disciplinary action because he had Tony and let him get away. Tony says he can get help from his old army buddy, Danny Morgan (John Russell),

but what he doesn’t know – though we do – is that Danny is actually in cahoots with Sally Lee to kill Big Jim, frame Tony for the crime, and run the entire Chicago rackets by themselves. We learn this about a reeli or two before Tony does, and the cloe that gives it away is the engagement ring Tony sees on Sally’s finger, one which Danny Morton had shown him as a gift for his intended when the two of them ran into each other back in Reno. Ultimately the bad guys are taken down and Danny Morton is cornered by the avenging Black angel who was Big Jim’s manservant and, oblivious to his own life, walks straight at Danny while Danny shoots him but the bullets only slow him down. The film ends with Tony and Ann hooking up at long last and heading across country to take over that tourist resort 40 miles north of Reno. Undertow is an unambitious but well done movie, and obviously someone at Universal-International green-lighted a trip to Chicago that involved the stars (Scott Brady and Dorothy Hart, at least), since the scenes at the lakefront park are pretty obviously the real deal and not done with process screens. It’s a nice little movie and proves that William Castle was a director of real power and ingenuity who didn’t need the gimmicks to attract an audience.

The Westland Case (Universal, 1937)

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

After last night’s organ concert in Balboa Park my husband Charles and I returned home and watched The Westland Case, a 1937 thriller from Universal as part of their so-called “Crime Club” series. The “Crime Club” was a line of mystery novels published by a subsidiary of Doubleday, and they sold the rights to do a series based on the books on radio as well as on film. The Westland Case was the first film in the series and introduced the character of Bill Crane (Preston Foster), a hard-drinking private investigator mostly based in New York, who in this case is summoned to make a last-ditch attempt to exonerate attorney and financier Robert Westland (Theodore von Eltz) from impending execution for the murder of his wife. The person who summons him is his attorney. Charles Frazee (Clarence Wilson, whom I’m so used to seeing as corrupt villains in W. C. Fields films – including his marvelous turn as a crooked attorney in Tillie and Gus – it was weird to see him playing a sympathetic character!), and Crane shows up with his inevitable comic-relief sidekick, Doc Williams (Frank Jenks), in tow. It turns out Westland was romantically involved with another woman, Emily Lou Martin (Carol Hughes), and that’s why the police and prosecutors were so convinced Westland killed his wife, along with the $30,000 inheritance Westland was going to get from her. They’re also convinced because her body was found in a locked room to which – stop me if you’ve heard this before – only Mr. and Mrs. Westland had keys.

It turns out Mrs. Westland was shot with a Webley-Fosbery gun, a British make of which few were ever imported into the United States and they were no longer being manufactured by the time this story takes place. The moment I heard the name “Webley-Fosbery” as the brand name of a gun I flashed back to The Maltese Falcon, in which a Webley appears as the gun with which Sam Spade’s partner Miles Archer was shot, and as in The Last Warning – based on a novel by one of Dashiell Hammett’s Black Mask colleagues, Jonathan Latimer, called Headed for a Hearse – the salient plot point about the gun is precisely that it’s unusual and no longer being made. Alas, the gun with which Mr. Westland allegedly shot Mrs. Westland is missing, so there’s no way to do ballistics tests on it. Crane and Williams assemble the usual list of suspects, including Emily Lou Martin; Miss Brentino (Astrid Allwyn), the firm’s faithful secretary (and, it’s hinted, herself in unrequited love with Robert Westland and thereby presumably interested in eliminating the competition). Agatha Hogan (a classic “bad girl” played by Barbara Pepper in an unusually close imitation of Mae West – the same breathy sighs, the same come-hither attitude, the same no-nonsense demands that her would-be lovers come across with both money and sex whenever she demands them), and Westland’s business partners, Richard Bolston (George Meeker) and Mr. Woodbury (Russell Hicks).

On the last day before Westland is about to be executed for the crime he didn’t commit, Crane flies out to Peoria to interview the dealer from whom the real murderer bought the gun – he shows the man a photo and the man recognizes him as his customer, but we don’t get to see the photo so we’re kept in the dark for another reel or so. Then Crane announces that he’s going to get all the suspects in a room together at the prison (once again, does this sound familiar?), with a man from the governor’s office ready to call off the execution but only if Crane can produce the real murderer. Of course he can: the real killer is Richard Bolston, who not only was buying fraudulent bonds and substituting them for Westland’s legit ones, he was also secretly married to Emily Lou Martiin – though why he would have wanted her to vamp Westland and string him along is never quite explained. (Neither Jonathan Latimer nor screenwriter Robertson White were all that big on plot consistency.) In the end Robert Westland is exonerated and leaves prison with Miss Brentino on his arm, and Bill Crane’s hopes to get Agatha Hogan in the sack are foredoomed by Charles Frazee, who leaves with her on a flight to Miami. It’s not clear whether she’s interested in him or his bankroll, but Crane books a seat on the same flight just to keep an eye on them. The Last Warning is a competent thriller that could have been the framework for a great film noir if it had been made a decade or so later and with a writer more sensitive to the potentials of some of the characters – Emily Lou Martin could have been turned into a great femme fatale and more could have been done with Agatha Hogan as well. But noir-izing the story would have required making the detective character much more serious and eliminating the comic-relief sidekick altogether.

Lies My Sister Told Me (Robbins Entertainment, DARO Film Distribution, K5IVE Entertainment, Penalty Voc Productions, Lifetime, 2022)

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

LLast night at 8 I watched a LIfetime movie called Lies My Sister Told Me, about a best-selling romance novelist named Jennifer Ray (Nicole Marie Johnson) who, unbeknownst to her fan base or virtually anyone else, has an identical twin sister, Tracy (also Nicole Marie Johnson), who’s in a mental institution following a long-term nervous breakdown that started with bipolar disorder and soon devolved into full-blown psychosis. When Jennifer shows up at the institution for one of her periodic visits to her sister, Tracy overpowers her, injects her with an incapacitating drug (where did she get it?), and takes her place in the outside world, Charles and I both thought it was ridiculous that in the short amount of time that’s elapsed between Jennifer’s arrival and Tracy’s departure, Tracy was able not only to dress in Jennifer’s powder-blue dress suit and wear her gold-lamé stiletto shoes but even get her own tousled hair to look like Jennifer’s professional perm, while all the while dressing Jennifer in Tracy’s own institutional outfit. Once Tracy gets out and assumes Jennifer’s identity, the film, directed by Dylan Vox (which explains why one of the five, count ‘em, five production companies that made this is called “Penalty Vox”) from a script by David Chester, becomes a pretty typical impersonation story, as through most of the film we’re led to wonder just what will happen when the other people in the story realize that this is not the “Jennifer Ray” they know and at least presumably love. The other people in the story include Jennifer’s college-senior daughter Layla (Kate Edmonds), Layla’s boyfriend Rob (Dominick Ficco), Jennifer’s publisher Chad Poole (Jonathan Stoddard) with whom she’s been having a long-term affair even though he’s married, and her literary agent Karen (Scout Smith).

LThe only person who’s on to the truth is Peter (Emerson Niemchick), whom Jennifer blurted out the secret to one night in a bar in which she’s trying to pick him up – Jennifer’s husband Alex died 15 years ago and in the meantime she’s been involved with different non-serious flirtations and hook-ups with men. Only Peter is a blackmailer who has been extracting regular $5,000 payments from Jennifer to keep him from revealing her secret. When Tracy-as-Jennifer tries to palm off Peter with just $500 instead of the full $5,000, Peter gets angry and physically attacks her, and Tracy kills him with a screwdriver she had previously picked up to try to pick the lock of a locked room in her (Jennifer’s) house. Instead of doing the rational thing even for an irrational person, which would be to call the police and claim she killed him in self-defense after he tried to rape or assault her, Tracy hauls Peter’s body out in her own (or rather Jennifer’s) car and dumps his body in a convenient patch of ground. Tracy leaves quite a few clues that she’s not the real Jennifer, from giving Layla a wad of cash so she and Rob can go on vacation during the summer (the real Jennifer had refused this request) to announcing at a book signing that her latest novel will be about a mental hospital and will be totally different from anything she’s written before, then refusing to sign any books, claiming she’s injured her hand. Also, while Jennifer is ready and even eager to have sex with Chad Poole, Tracy turns him down and tells him to reconcile with his wife, whom he was planning to leave for Jennifer.

LThe person who ultimately stumbles onto the truth is Karen, who recalls a photo she’d seen of Jennifer with another woman who looked just like her, and though she’s white instead of Black she ends up fulfilling the Lifetime formula character of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. The scene in which Tracy actually does in Karen turns into a bit of totally unintended humor, as Layla and Rob (ya remember Layla and Rob?) show up at Tracy’s (actually Jennifer’s, and looking so much like the exterior set of Foxworth Hall in Lifetime’s currently running mini-series Flowers in the Attic: The Origin I wondered if it actually was the same) home just after she’s clubbed Karen with one of Jennifer’s book awards and while Karen is still trying to get away with her life. For me, the best scenes in the film were the ones in the asylum, in which an increasingly desperate Jennifer tries to convince the doctors and nurses that she’s not Tracy and she’ not crazy – and everything she does just makes them more certain that she is crazy and hs going throughone of her periodic delusions that she’s her sister. Where I thought David Chester was taking us was to a denouement in which Tracy would confront Jennifer and get killed, and Jennifer would respond by writing a best-seller about her secret twin that would get her the best reviews of her career since her first book, Time After Time, which everyone regarded as her best work.

LInstead Chester throws us a real curveball in which [biug-time spoiler alert!] it’s revealed that it was actually Tracy who was Alex’s wife, Layla’s mother and the author of Time After Time, only Alex committed suicide and this drove Tracy off the deep end and into certifuable mental illmess. Jennifer kept writing romance novels to pay for the cost of Tracy’s care, but audiences could tell they were strictly formula pieces since Jennifer didn’t have Tracy’s gifts as a writer. (There’s a hint of this earlier on in which Chad Poole – ya remember Chad Poole? – demands to see the first 20 pages of the novel Tracy is writing about the mental institution, and when he reads them he proclaims them the best thing she’s written since Time After Time.) The film ends with a reconciliation between the sisters; in David Chester’s continuing effort to write six impossible things before breakfast, we’re supposed to regard this as a happy ending that blithely ignores the fact that we’ve seen Tracy kill two people. Until that weird curveball of an ending I had liked Lies My Sister Told Me (originally titled My Stolen Life, which evoked comparisons Lifetime and its producers probably didn’t want to make with the marvelous 1946 Bette Davis vehicle A Stolen Life) – it wasn’t a great Lifetime movie but at least it had its points – but that bizarre finish made me like it considerably less. Compared to this film, the surprise ending of the Jack Wrather/Monogram film The Guilty (1947) – also about a pair of identical twins played by the same actress – seemed a good deal more reasonable!

The Walking Target)Zemnotj {productions, United Artists, 1960)

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

LThe YouTube “B” movie Charles and I watched after Lies My Sister Told Me turned out to be considerably more interesting; It was called The Walking Target and was a product of Zenith Productions, a company set up to make low-budget crime films for United Artists release. It was produced by Robert E. Kent – a screenwriter notorious for being able to write a script while narrating the events of the baseball game he’d seen the night before – and directed by Edward L. Cahn, who had once been a minor fish in a big pond; He’d directed shorts for MGM in the mid- to late-1930’s and then graduated to short features for companies like PRC (where he made an auto-racing drama called Born to Speed in 1947) and in the 1950’s made mostly low-budget crime films and science-fiction fare like Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, and Zombies of Mora-Tau. Written by Stephen Kandel, who would go on to a long career on television writing for crime dramas like Batman, Mannix and the original MacGyver,

LThe Walking Target is a predictable but still interest-grabbing story about a hard-assed criminal, Nick Harbin (Ron Foster), who as the story opens is about to be released from prison following a five-year stretch for armed robbery. The prison warden, John B. Haggerty (J. Edward McKinney), warns Nick that because the $260,000 he stole from an armored truck during the robbery is still missing, he’ll be a “walking target” for both the police and other criminals who will want to hijack the loot. Though Edward L. Cahn didn’t direct the first MGM “Crime Does Not Pay” short, Buried Loot (1935), that film had a similar plot line – a convict nurses a long-term plan to get his buried loot back as soon as he finishes his bid. When Nick gets out he finds his girlfriend, Susan Mallory (Merry Anders), has taken up with his former best friend, Dave Prince (Robert Christopher). We know from the way she dresses and her obviously dyed blonde hair that Susan is not a woman to be trusted. Things get worse for Our Anti-Hero when an older crook, Arnie Hoffman (Berry Kroeger), decides to go after the loot himself. He gets Dave Prince to help him, but even Dave doesn’t know where the loot is.

LWe know, thanks to a flashback to the original robbery, which Nick planned with a partner named Sam Russo (Norman Alden) who worked out of a garage he owned as an auto mechanic. The two of them executed the robbery, only Sam got shot by a cop trying to stop the crime in progress. He ultimately died, but not before he hid the money by welding it into a hiding place he worked up in a car belonging to his wife Gail (Joan Evans, top-billed), who after his death moved to her native Arizona and set up another garage there as well as working in a café in her home town, Gold City. It’s established that Gail was Nick’s lover before she married Sam instead, and the two of them rekindle an odd but desperate relationship. Unfortunately, everyone is able to trace her there: not only the police, led by Detective Max Brodney (Harp McGuire), but also Hoffman and his gang, who send a hit squad with silencer-equipped guns. The gangsters get there well ahead of the cops and ambush Detective Brodney as soon as he arrives – though it’s not clear whether le lives or dies at the end – but eventually Hoffman and his gang members are subdued and Nick and Gail decide to present the loot to the Arizona cops so they can get free of any criminal entanglements and live the rest of their lives together as a poor but honest couple.

LThe Walking Target has been called a film noir, which it really isn’t; it harkens back to the gangster films of the 1930’s instead. Indeed, one could readily imagine this plot line being a late-1930’s Warner Bros. film, with James Cagney as Mike, Humphrey Bogart as Dave, either Joan Blondell or Ann Sheridan as Gail and Claire Trevor as Susan. Even when they weren’t set in period – like another Edward L. Cahn film, The Music Box Kid, which took place in the 1920’s (the title referenced the leading character’s Thompson submachine gun, essentially the AR-15 of its day, which he affectionately called his “music box”) – they had all the attributes of standard gangster films and the only noir-ish aspects to The Walking Target are the chiaroscuro cinematography by Maury Gertsman (who had a long career at Universal shooting mostly crime dramas and Westerns) and the femme fatale aspects of Susan’s character – and even she is not that much of a “bad girl,” just one who will take up with whatever man is available. Still, The Walking Target is a nice, exciting little movie, well acted by a cast which doesn’t contain any major names but the people who are in it are well-suited for their roles – especially Ron Foster, whose homeliness and overbearing attitude make him just right for Nick.

Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, part 2: The Mother (A&E Networkis, Lifetime, 2022)

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

LLast night at 8 Lifetime aired the second installment of what they’re ballyhooing as a five-part mini-series called Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, based on the fifth and final novel in the so-called “Dollanganger Saga” begun by writer V. C. Andrews that began with Flowers in the Attic (1979), in which a demented old woman named Olivia Foxworth (played in the previous films in the cycle by Ellen Burstyn) locks her two grandchildren in the attic of her large mansion, Foxworth Hall, for years. They grow up to be an incestuous couple mainly because they’re brother snd sister who come to sexual maturity in a settingi where there’s literally no one else available, and the title comes from the paintings of flowers the young boy and girl print on the attic walls to simulate the outdoors they’ve never consciously known. Andrews wrote three other stories in the cycle – Petals in the Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981) and Seeds of Yesterday (1984). Andrews planned a fifth novel, Garden of Shadows (1986), that would be a prequel to the whole cycle explaining how Olivia became such an evil bitch she could do that to her grandkids. Alas, Virginia Cheo Andrews the person died on December 19, 1986 after a long battle with cancer, and her publisher, deciding the name “V. C. Andrews” was too commercial a property to be allowed to die with her, assigned Andrew Neiderman to complete Garden of Shadows and continue to write and publish more “V. C. Andrews” novels, thereby making him literally a ghostwriter. Garden of Shadows was the basis for Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, which like most of Andrews’ works centers around an evil man and the terror through which he puts the women in his life.

LThe man is Malcolm Foxworth (Max Irons), who married an independent-minded woman named Olivia Winfield (Jemima Rooper) he met in New York where he had gone on business. Olivia was an extensive reader and imagined her new husband as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Rochester in Jane Eyre, but he turns out to be an amoral monster who rapes and impregnates any woman nearby. That includes not only Olivia – who bears him two sons, Mal (Buck Braithwaite) and Joel (Luke Featherston) but then loses the ability to conceive anymore – but also his stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), who shows up on the arm of Malcolm’s father Garland (Kelsey Grammer, who no doubt would have had a field day with the Foxworths’ madnesses in his most famous role as the psychiatrist on Frasier) with a kind of dewy-eyed admiration for hmi. After she has a son by Garland, Christopher (Callum Kerr), Malcolm rapes her and kills his dad when Garland catches him in the act. This results in a pregnancy which can’t be attributed to Garland since he’s been dead too long to be the father, and so Olivia works out a scheme in which she will pretend to be pregnant while Alicia will be locked in the east wing bedroom until she gives birth, whereupon the child will be passed off as Malcolm’s and Olivia’s while Alicia will go to Pittsburgh with Christopher. Olivia hoped by doing this that she could spare her from being raped by Malcolm again, but through a secret door she didn’t know about he enters her room anyway and does the dirty deed again.

LEventually, the baby is born and it’s a daughter, whom Malcolm insists on naming Corinne after his late mother (who seems to be the only person, other than himself, Malcolm ever actually loved). Only Olivia eventually learns that Malcolm also raped Nelly (T’Shan Williams), their Black servant, and thereby fathered her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller). And if all this raping isn’t enough, Malcolm is also a regular patron of the local whorehouse in Charlottesville,Virginia (where all this is taking place), and when 16-year-old daughter Corinne sneaks off to a dance and comes back pregnant, Olivia arranges for her to have an underground abortion through the whorehouse madam. Mal, Malcolm’s older son, becomes engaged to Helen (Carla Woodcock), only on their wedding day Malcolm forces himself on Helen as the price for releasing Mal’s inheritance, money he knew Helen was after. In the middle of all this Olivia discovers a secret garden on the Foxworth grounds filled with poisonous plants, and to paraphrase Anton Chekhov, if you establish a garden of poisonous plants in act two someone has to get poisoned with them in act four. Malcolm duly gets poisoned with them but unfortunately survives, and he blames Mal for trying to kill him to get his hands on his inheritance. In fact, the true culprit is Corinne, who has just turned 16 (about a third of the way through this movie it suddenly jumps 15 years forward in time) and has no doubt noticed that her own dad is eyeing her with lascivious eyes as she dresses after a shower. But Malcolm sneaks some of the herbs from the poisonous plant into Mal’s marijuana stash (one nice thing about this movie - and there aren’t many – is it shows how the demi-monde is nothing new and things like pot-smoking, rape, incest and homosexuality occurred in the 1930’s as well) and Mal gets in a car accident with Corinne and dies. The Gay angle comes in when Malcolm’s younger son Joel starts hanging around the garage on the Foxworth estate, interested first in the blues music the Black mechanic Henry (Jordan Peters) plays in a portable phonograph and then in Henry himself.

LIf the first Flowers in the Attic: The Origin episode starts at 11 and worked its way to 15, this one started at 15 and worked its way up to 20 or even 25. It’s a farrago of silliness and it doesn’t help that neither Max Irons nor Jemima Rooper are all that interesting – or that Irons doesn’t get visibly older-looking despite the 15-year sudden jump in time in the story and at times it’s hard to believe he’s really the father rather than the son of Buick Braithwaite. (In my earlier post on the first Flowers in the Attic: The Origin film I mistakenly identified Braithwaite as playing the elder Malcolm, and even more erroneously identified Celia as Nelle’s mother instead of her daughter. That’s an index of how confused the relationships are in these films, in which we’re supposed to believe that Henry the Black Gay mechanic is somehow related to Nelly and Celia; I think Henry was supposed to be the son of Nelly’s stepfather, but we never meet this man in the action.) With the possible exceptions of Nelly, Celia and Henry, all African-Americans, there aren’t any people in Flowers in the Attic: the Origin we actually like, and the film ends abruptly when Alicia Foxworth returns to the action on the day of Mal’s funeral with a gasoline can with which she intends to burn down the poisoned garden (ya remember the poisoned garden?) and we in the audience wondering, “Why are we wasting my time with such silliness?”