Nebraska (Paramount Vantage, FilmNation Entertainment, Blue Lake Media Fund, Echo Lake Entertainment, Bona Fide Pictures, Paramount, 2013)

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

Last night at 10 p.m. I ran my husband Charles one of the best 21st century movies I’ve seen in quite a while: Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, an extraordinary 2013 film starring Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, a curmudgeonly old man who’s convinced he’s won $1 million in a magazine sweepstakes but only if he can get from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim the prize in person. Woody’s adult son David (Will Forte, a nice-looking heavy-set man who’s easy enough on the eyes without being disconcertingly sexy) reads the letter dad got from the company and figures it out immediately. It’s a scam, of course, a come-on to get him to buy magazine subscriptions and of course it doesn’t actually guarantee its recipient a $1 million prize. But try to explain that to Woody! David takes an unauthorized leave of absence from his job (as home electronics salesman for the local Best Buy) to drive his father clear across the country to Lincoln. David takes his father on this quixotic quest partially to relieve the boredom of his own life – the woman he’s been living with for two years has suddenly left him, apparently because he wouldn’t actually marry her – and partly in hopes that en route with his dad he’ll somehow be able to explain it to him that he is not an actual millionaire.

On the way they stop for a brief visit to Mount Rushmore – Woody is unimpressed and he says it looks unfinished, which it is. As I wrote in a 2013 review of a PBS documentary on Mount Rushmore, “[I]n 1935 the South Dakota Senator Peter Norbeck, [Mount Rushmore artist Gutzon] Borglum’s principal backer for the project in Washington, D.C., got sick with cancer and the project finally expired in 1941 when the U.S. entered World War II. Borglum died in April 1941 but work continued for a few more months under his son Lincoln’s direction. [S]o what you see when you go to Mount Rushmore today is four giant faces and a huge pile of rubble beneath them.” More importantly, on their way to Lincoln they stop in Hawthorne, Nebraska – a town I hadn’t known the existence of until I saw this movie. The only city or community I knew of in the U.S. named Hawthorne was the one in southern California, where the Beach Boys were from, but according to the Roadside Thoughts Web site (https://roadsidethoughts.com/ne/hawthorne-xx-lancaster-profile.htm) there are a total of 32 towns named Hawthorne in the U.,S. and Canada; besides the ones in California and Nebraska there are Hawthornes in Connecticut, Florida (2), Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland (2), Michigan, Mississippi (2), Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Nova Scotia, Ontario (3), Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas (2), Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Apparently the Grant family actually grew up in Hawthorne, Nebraska and a lot of their relatives, friends and acquaintances are still there. Among them is a man named Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) who claims Woody owes him $10,000 – while Woody remembers him mainly as a man who “borrowed” his air compressor 40 years before and never returned it. Woody’s relatives, including his sister Martha (Mary Louise Wilson) and brother Ray (Rance Howard), also demand money from him, claiming he owes them for all the times he got drunk and they had to bail him out either financially or literally. (Woody is one of those annoying men who keeps denying that he’s an alcoholic even though he quite obviously is one.) At one point David takes Woody to a local cemetery with his wife (David’s mom) Kate (June Squibb) and David’s older brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), who’s become a substitute anchor on a local Billings news show (at one point he gets into a bar fight ahd pleads with his opponents not to hit him in the face because the bruises would show on TV) to the local cemetery. In the film’s most audacious scene, Kate spots the tombstone of one of her old boyfriends, lifts her skirts (Payne wisely keeps the camera behind her but we get the idea of what’s going on) and says, “You see what you could have had?” (The film got an “R” rating but the only reason given was “some language” – to wit, a couple of “fucks” and a few “shits” and “bullshits.”)

Ed Pegram, who used to own the local garage as Woody’s business partner until he sold it (and it’s now owned by Hispanic people, which we “get” by hearing them speak to each other in Spanish), gets so desperate for the money that he gets two friends of his to mug Woody for the sweepstakes money – and when he reads it he realizes it’s a scam and reads it openly in a local bar (a lot of this movie takes place in local bars, including one that has a karaoke machine on which one of the characters sings Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” though otherwise all the songs heard in the film are country) as a form of ridicule. The film ends with Woody and David showing up at the Lincoln office of the company that sent it, and a sympathetic young woman reviews it, punches a few numbers on her computer, tells Woody and David it’s not a winning number, and David asks her if this happens often. She says yes, and adds, “I hope you folks didn’t come too far.” When David says, “Montana,” she looks sorry for them even though there’s nothing she could do to help. (It occurred to me that had this film been made in the 1930’s, the million-dollar prize would have been real.) The film has a happy ending of sorts, though, as David sells his car to a local used-car dealer and buys a truck – Woody had said that the first thing he intended to do with his million dollars was buy a truck, even though David pointed out he couldn’t do anything with it since he lost his driver’s license over a decade before (presumably due to drunk driving) – and even puts it in his dad’s name and lets him drive it for a few blocks once they get back home to Billings.

I loved Nebraska from start to finish, and I suspect it was a particularly good film to be watching on the eve of Charles’s 60th and my 69th birthdays. It’s a film with special appeal to folks our age who are looking back at their lives with a sense of regret that we accomplished so little with them. Most of the characters, especially the others Woody’s age, are living in the past hand harboring resentments as well as regrets. Though Alexander Payne didn’t write the script for Nebraska – Bob Nelson did – it’s very much in Payne’s wheelbase; like his most famous film, Sideways (also a road-trip movie, which follows a journey of wine collectors across country in search of exciting new vintages), it’s a marvelous film in its quiet, subtle way. Oddly, Charles didn’t like it as well as I did; he thought it seemed padded and quoted back to me a lot of the things I’ve said over the years about “narrative economy” and how filmmakers in the 1930’s could tell much longer and more complicated stories in far shorter running times than directors today. That wasn’t a problem I had with Mebraska, though, and I suspect it’s because Payne and Nelson used a relatively slow pace to get us into the headspace of their characters and bring them to life in all th eir faults and frailties as well as their good sides. I think Nebraska is a beautiful film, and Payne shot it in black-and-white to give it a warm, nostalgic glow without drowning us in color. Nebraska is a film that evokes the best of classic films while still using the greater sexual and social freedom avaliable to filmmakers today, and I think it definitely belongs on any list of underrated films by major directors. Since Mebraska Payne has made only one more feature, Downsizing, set in a dystopian future in which people are encouraged literally to “downsize,” to shrink themselves and live in miniature worlds so they don’t use as many resources to survive.

A Night in the Show (Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, 1915)

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

Last night’s Balboa Park organ concert, the annual showing of one or more silent films with live organ accompaniment, underwent a sudden last-minute change which apparently was organist Clara Gerdes’ idea. The scheduled films were Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 short A Night in the Show, Buster Keaton’s 1920 short Neighbors, and two experimental films by French director Segundo de Chomón, Avant la Musique (translated by imdb.com as “Music, Forward!”) (1907) and La Leçon de Musique (*The Music Lesson”) (1909). Instead Gerdes apparently asked to perform the Chaplin short and a full-length Keaton feature, Seven Chances (1925). I was particularly anxious to see the Chaplin short – one from his year at the Essanay studio (which made mostly Westerns, as evinced by the silhouette of an Indian head that was the company’s logo) – because it was based on the famous sketch, called Mumming Birds in Britain and A Night in an English Music Hall in the U.S., that Chaplin performed in his apprenticeship with Fred Karno’s comedy troupe on stage well before he first set foot in front of a movie camera. Chaplin made his American stage debut with the Karno company in a different sketch, “The Wow-Woes,” which parodied the popular British summer camp resorts, on October 3, 1910 at the Colonial Theatre in New York, and Variety gave him this review which indicates he already was a major star on both sides of “The Pond” before he started making movies: “Chaplin is typically English, the sort of comedian that American audiences seem to like, although unaccustomed to. His manner is quiet and easy, and he goes about his work with a devil-may-care manner. … Chaplin will do all right for America.”

A Night in the Show is a thinly veiled reworking of A Night in an English Music Hall, in which Chaplin played “The Drunk,” who stumbled into the theatre and disrupted the show. (HIs understudy in the role was another British comedian who became a screen legend, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy.) For A Night in the Show Chaplin played a dual role, “Mr. Pest” and “Mr. Rowdy.” As “Mr. Pest” hw wore the familiar Chaplin makeup of tousled hair and toothbrush moustache; as “Mr. Rowdy” he wore the older makeup he had worn with the Karno troupe, with a pointed cap and a walrus moustache. (This is the get-up Chaplin wore in his first film, Making a Living, made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1914, before he hit on the “Tramp” makeup and costume in his second film, Kid Audy Races at Venice.) “Mr. Pest” first attracts the ire of the other patrons when he cuts in front of them in the line to buy tickets. When he finally gets in, he sits in an orchestra seat quite near the stage, gets moved around a lot by the ushers, picks a fight with several musicians in the pit (including the conductor, who accidentally strikes him while moving his arms to lead the band) and ends up on stage, where his antics convulse the audience. It’s a situation Chaplin would later use in what’s probably his most underrated feature, The Circus (1928), in which he plays a young man desperate to break into the circus and get a job as a clown, but who can make people laugh only when he’s not deliberately trying to.

“Mr. Rowdy” arrives drunk, takes several near-close calls during which he almost falls off the balcony where his seat is, and at the film’s climax he grabs a fire hose and tries to put out the fires set on stage by the fire-eater, whose antics seem to have been copied from the famous “trick films” of Georges Méliès. Ultimately he drenches the entire audience with the outflow from his hose. A Night in the Show is not major Chaplin (as some of his Essanay films, notably The Tramp and Police, are), but it’s a fascinating curio and a fortunate insight into Chaplin’s beginnings as a performer. My husband Charles noticed a Black man in the balcony audience, and though it was actually a white actor, frequent Chaplin foil Leo White, in blackface, it was still a surprising sight. There are also a lot of gender-bending scenes; at least one of the heavy-set “women” performers in the show-within-the-show is played by a man in drag, and in one scene that seems audacious even today “The Pest” sits next to a heavy-set straight couple, reaches for the woman’s hand and grabs the man’s hand by mistake.

Seven Chances (Joseph M. science Prudictions, Metro-Goldwyn, 1925)

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

When the projectionist cued up the opening of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), a lot of people in the audience were surprised to see that the main credits were in color. Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who has the annoying habit of thinking he knows more about absolutely everything than anyone else, immediately decided that the film must have been colorized and made a bad joke about it. In fact the opening sequence was actually shot in two-strip Technicolor (to my knowledge Keaton is the only one of the great silent comedians to use two-strip Technicolor), and though the sequence is badly faded (and no one involved ih Keaton’s cinematic legacy has tried to restore it), it’s still a charming prologue in which Jimmie Shannon (Buster Keaton) keeps showing up at the flower-strewn cottage where his wanna-be girlfriend Mary (Ruth Dwyer) lives but is too shy to tell her he loves her. He brings along a dog, and as the year progresses the dog gets noticeably larger in each scene. Seven Chances is not a Buster Keaton original; it was originally a Broadway play by David Belasco (who’s probably most famous today for the two plays, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, which were turned into operas by Puccini) and a writer named Roi Cooper Negrue gets credit for adapting it for the screen. (Negrue died in 1927 at age 44, though seven of his 12 credits on imdb.com are for films made later than that, including The Bachelor, a 1999 remake of Seven Chances with Chris O’Donnell in the Keaton role.) Regular Keaton collaborators Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell get credit for the actual screenplay, though given the way comedy movies were usually written in the silent days they were most likely part of a writers’ room (originally invented by Mack Sennett, by the way) with Keaton himself in overall charge.

The plot kicks off when an attorney shows up at the offices of Meekin (T. Roy Barnes) and Shannon. A title explains that the firm “had been tricked into a financial deal that meant disgrace – and possibly prison – unless they raised money quickly.” Needless to say, both Shannon and Meekin run away from the lawyer, thinking he must be a process server connected with the deal that threatens them with disgrace and possibly prison. The attorney finally shows up and tells Jimmie that he’s in line for a $7 million inheritance, but only if he’s married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday. “Whern is your 27th birthday?” Meekin asks Shannon. “Today,” Jimmie shame-facedly tells his partner. He first runs over to Mary, the woman he actually loves, but she’s predictably upset when he tells her about the inheritance and she assumes he just wants to marry her for the money. Meekin offers Jimmie the titular “seven chances” – single women from his little black book – but he strikes out with all of them, including one who tears up the “Will you marry me?” note he wrote her and drops the teared pieces over him, where they fall in a slow-motion pattern two years before Josef von Sternberg did a similar effect with the feathers in Evelyn Brent’s boa in the film Underworld. There’s a famous scene in which Jimmie approaches a theatre stage door with a portrait of an attractive woman on the bill – only it turns out to be Julian Eltinge, a famous female impersonator of the time, and Jimmie leaves after clearly having been beaten up by Eltinge. (One wonders who the writers of The Bachelor used for this gag – assuming they kept it in. Maybe RuPaul.)

Meekin goes to the offices of the local evening paper and gets them to print a story about Jimmie’s predicament – and literally hundreds of women in bridal gowns and veils show up at the Broad Street Church to see if they can grab him and a share of his millions. (Before that we’ve seen Jimmie finger two train tickets: “Niagara Falls,” the famous honeymoon destination, and “Reno,” the equally famous locale for divorces.) When Jimmie arrives at the church he sits alone in one of the pews and falls asleep; when he wakes up the church is full of would-be brides and the minister tells them they’ve been the victims of a practical joke. The brides-to-be chase Jimmie through the streets and are angry enough to tear him limb from limb. Jimmie flees them, in that remarkable way Buster Keaton had of running – with his legs moving with the regularity of pistons – and he stumbles into a construction site and is literally lifted off by a crane and swung overhead in mid-air by one of the women who has taken it over. (As usual, Keaton did this stunt himself and it was every bit as dangerous as it looks on screen.) Amazingly, when Keaton previewed the film, the chase scene, with the women showing the same grim determination to get him the police showed in his marvelous 1922 short Cops (a wickedly funny parody of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 – the radical politics in Keaton’s films may not have been as obvious as they were in Chaplin’s, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there!), almost nobody in the audience laughed. The only laugh Keaton’s antics got was when he tripped over three rocks on screen, and the rocks rolled towards him.

Realizing that he had to take desperate measures to save the film, Keaton decided to build a whole series of papier-maché rocks and have them chase him as well, producing one of the most audacious comedy scenes in film history. Meanwhile, Jimmie’s girlfriend Mary has thought the better of her rejection and sends a Black servant on horseback to “ride like the wind” to catch Jimmie and give him a note that she’ll marry him after all, only he takes the slowest horse in creation and at one point he misses Jimmie’s car as it zips by. Meekin gathers up the minister from the church and tells Jimmie he’ll have the officiant at Mary’s house if he can make it by 7 – only he just misses the deadline and he thinks he’s sunk. Mary offers to marry him even if he ends up penniless, disgraced and possibly imprisoned, but at the last minute Jimmie looks at a public clock in the town square and it says it’s still a couple of minutes before 7. The two finally get married, and the dog from the prologue shows up and is now enormous. I have no idea how close Seven Chances is to the Belasco play on which it was nominally based, but I suspect Keaton and his crew radically reshaped it to turn it into a Keaton vehicle – and as such it’s a masterpiece, a brilliantly funny film that’s remarkable for the sheer audacity of the gags and the marvelous way they’re staged so they build on each other – a seemingly lost art of comedy construction, though I remember Charles and I going to the old library and seeing Scott Prendergast’s great 2007 comedy Kabluey, a brilliant satire of the dot-com boom and bust, and the number of ruined lives it left in its wake. Like Chaplin and Keaton, Prendergast directed his film as well as starring in it, and he created an old-style comedy even though the content was up-to-date.

Avant la Musique/La Leçon de Musique (Pathé, 1907 & 1909)

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

Once Charles and I got home I looked up YouTube to see if they had the three films that had been listed for the silent-film showcast but hadn’t actually been shown: Avant la Musique, La Leçon de Musique and the 1920 Neighbors. Avant la Musique and La Leçon de Musique both turned out to be the brainchildren of one Segundo de Chomón, who was obviously hired by the French Pathé studio to make movies in blatant imitation of the films of Georges Méliès. Méliès was a former stage magician who had pioneered the use of stop-motion photography and other camera tricks – eventually they would come to be called “special effects” – and his films were sensationally popular worldwide until the advent of World War I in 1914, when French movie audiences decided they wanted more serious fare. Chomón was definitely “segundo” to Méliès in more ways than just his first name, but the two films were quite clever and well done, audacious fantasies in which, among other things,musicians’ heads were literally pulled off their necks and thrown onto a staff of music paper, and in La Leçon de Musique the musicians’ necks become elongated (when I saw this I thought, ”If Modigliani had made a movie, tihs is what it would have looked like) and look like animated representations of flowers growing and blooming. There are also stick-figure animations that dance in time to the music – at least that’s what we think they are doing, since no music is heard. (The post Charloes and I found for Avant la Musique was scored with John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell” march – these days best known as the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus – but the one from La Leçon de Musique was, alas, not scored with anything at all.) The two Chomón films Charles and I watched last night were both charming child-like fantasies, and I’m sorry they were not performed “live” at the Organ Pavilion because it would have been nice to hear what Clara Gerdes could have done with them.

Neighbors (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1920)

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

The 1920 film Neighbors was a 20-minute short, an early entry in the Buster Keaton canon – made while producer Joseph M. Schenck was still putting his first name in quotes, as “Buster” Keaton. The name originally came from Harry Houdini, who was once on the same vaudeville bill as Keaton and his parents, who had an act called “The Three Keatons.” Houdini saw young Keaton take a big fall on stage and called out, “That was a real buster” – and the name stuck. Eventually Keaton’s parents started billing the act as “The Three Keatons, Featuring Buster, the Human Mop.” At one time the act ran afoul of the Gerry Society, an organization formed to stop the exploitation of child performers on stage. The Gerry Society filed a complaint against Joe Keaton, Buster’s father, saying that he was endangering his son’s life every time they performed the act. Buster saved himself from an orphanage and his parents from prison by performing the act in court and convincing the judge that, however life-threatening it looked on stage, he was a fully trained acrobat and he was in no real danger.

I mention this in connection with Neighbors because it’s a Romeo and Juliet-style plot in which two young lovers (Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox, later Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck) who live next door to each other are being kept apart by the enmity of their parents, particularly their fathers – and Buster Keaton’s father in the film is played by Joe Keaton, his father in real life. At one point, Buster Keaton tries to see his girlfriend by climbing up her building’s fire escape, in an obvious parody of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, and he takes a few tumbles that, like his old stage act with his parents, look life-threatening but really aren’t. (Unfortunately, Buster Keaton inherited something else from his dad – alcoholism – and as his marriage fell apart and he lost control of his career to the “suits” at MGM, he responded by drinking more and losing the superb coordination he had once had, which forced him to use stunt doubles.) There are audacious scenes in which Keaton is carried across the courtyard that separates his and his girlfriend’s buildings on top of two other men – they may be the “Flying Escalantes” mysteriously listed in the credits on imdb.com – and it all ends as happily as one would expect. Neighbors was co-written and co-directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, a former Keystone Kop who’s also in this movie – as, what else? a police officer) and who would go on to direct W. C. Fields’ last three starring vehicles at Universal in 1940 and 1941: My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Like A Night in the Show in Chaplin’s filmography, Neighbors is a minor entry in Keaton’s, but it’s still amazing and screamingly funny.

Danger in the House (CME Autum Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night I watched another Lifetime “premiere,” Danger in the House, and then when my husband Charles came back from work I screened him another YouTobe post, The Brasher Doubloon, the second 20th Century-Fox film based on Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window. Danger in the House was directed and written by women – Michelle Ouelette and Ansley Gordon, respectively – though in yesterday’s comments on Bodyguard Seduction and how the sensibilities of its female director, Lindsay Hartley, clashed with those of the male screenwriter, Paul A. Birkett, I expressed hope that the next time Lindsay Hartley directs a film it will be with a woman writer. After Danger in the House I express the even more fervent hope that that woman writer not be Ansley Gordon! Gordon cooked up one of those convoluted Lifetime plots in which there’s so much skulduggery of all kinds going on it’s hard to tell which of the plots are important and which are just throwaways or red herrings. The basic plot is – or at least seems to be – about Connor Covington (Jamie Spilchuk) and his fiancée Taylor Hayes (Kathryn Kohut). They’re living in a big house – one that makes the Amberson mansion look like a pied-à-terre – also inhabited by Connor’s mother June (Barbara Gordon – well, I guess she had to do something with her life once she got too old for the Batgirl gig).

Mom and her late husband built up a contracting business that is one acquisition away from dominating the business in whatever city this takes place in (for some reason I got the impression it was Philadelphia even though I don’t recall anything in Ansley Gordon’s script that said so; and I looked up their bios on imdb.com but couldn’t find any indication that Ansley and Barbara Gordon are related to each other). Only dad is dead and mom is suffering from the general debilitation that comes from old age, including a weakness for fainting spells. Knowing that he and Taylor are going to be away from home a lot to complete the acquisition of a family-owned company and fend off another family-owned company that’s making a rival bid, Connor decides he needs to hire a professional caregiver to take care of her. When June has a fainting spell while she, Connor and Taylor are dining out at a fancy restaurant, Nora Reed (Rebecca Liddiard) comes along, gives her first aid and eventually Connor decides to hore Nora as his mom’s caregiver on the spot, especially after Nora says she’s a registered nurse. Connor’s housekeeper Lucy (Cory Reed) is predictably put out by the presence of an arch-rival, but she rather glumly adjusts. Then we see a brief shot of Taylor in the office of Covington Construction making out with the chief financial officer, Rex Veloz (David Pinard),and that’s our first intimation that all is not what it seems between her and Connor.

At the same time Connor is being stalked by his ex, Emma (Alex Jade), who’s trying to give him a mysterious manila envelope containing papers she insists he must see for his own good. There’s also a reporter, Madison Peters (Hayden Rose), who wrote a story about an incident in Greenville, where Nora lived before she took the job with the Covingtons, and Taylor drove out in the middle of the night to pick up a clipping of this story, which is – or at least seems to be – about Nora fleeing town after causing the death of a previous client. And as if those weren’t enough ingredients in Ansley Gordon’s stew pot, Nora herself has an abusive husband, Ben Wyatt (Chris Young), who keeps running into her despite her best efforts to avoid him. When he isn’t physically stalking her, he’s sending her threatening texts saying he’ll kill her mother unless she gets him the combination to the Covingtons’ safe, which contains the priceless jewels June’s late husband bought her. All this is leading to a neck-snapping reversal in which [spoiler alert!] Taylor turns out to be the real villainess of the piece. She’s actually Hannah, daughter of a man who used to work in the Covingtons’ accounting department until he either embezzled a large amount of money from them or was framed by the real crook.

Hannah’s embittered dad raised her to hate the Covingtons and seek revenge on them, which she did by getting the son and heir to fall in love with her while simultaneously seducing the CFO to embezzle over $1 million from the company and stash it in a secret bank account in the Caymans. Now she plots to murder June to get her hands on the Covington fortune and frame Nora for it, after which she’s going to dispose of Connor as well and have the entire fortune for herself. Just how she plans to get away with that one is unclear – and as with previous Lifetime movies in which a woman has to enter into a long-term sexual relationship with a man she can’t stand to ensnare him into one plot or another, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s a certain bizarre kinkiness about the whole idea. A genius director like Alfred Hitchcock could pull off a reversal like this, which changes our point of view towards everything we’ve seen and shows that the characters we thought were good were really evil, and vice versa. In fact, Hitchcock did it magnificently in one of the oddball French-language films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, he made in 1944, after the liberation of France during World War II, to commemorate the Resistance (and he used actors who were in Britain because they had fled the Nazi occupation of France). I forget just which film of the two he pulled off that reversal in, but he and his writers managed to make that totally believable whereas the micro-talents of Michelle Oulette and Ansley Gordon didn’t.

The Brasher Doubloon (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

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

After Danger in the House I ran my husband Charles a YouTube post of the 1947 film The Brasher Doubloon, 20th Century-Fox’s second go at Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window. Their first attempt was as the seventh and last entry in their series of films from 1940 to 1942 starring Lloyd Nolan as private detective Michael Shayne, Time to Kill. We had recently watched Time to Kill, also on YouTube (for some reason Fox left out the two best films in the Nolan Shayne series, Dressed to Kill and Time to Kill, out of their boxed set of four of the seven), and it made me want to re-watch The Brasher Doubloon again just to see how it compared. I remembered seeing The Brasher Doubloon for the first time at the old Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco in the early 1970’s and being grievously disappointed in it, mainly by the horrible casting of George Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. I’d also recorded it onto a Beta tape which I subsequently dubbed to VHS and ran for Charles when he was still living in the room on Centre Street (in a building that no longer exists) where he was when we first started dating.

What’s odd is that Time to Kill is in all respects a much better movie: though it changed “Philip Marlowe” to “Michael Shayne,” every member of its cast except one was superior to their counterpart in The Brasher Doubloon. The Brasher Doubloon was directed by John Brahm, a German expat who was essentially Fritz Lang lite; in 1939 he made a film at Columbia called Let Us Live which not only copied the plot line of Lang’s masterpiece, You Only Live Once, two years earlier – an ex-con marries an innocent (in both senses) young girl but can’t hold down a legitimate job because his criminal past still haunts him – but even used the same actor, Henry Fonda, as the ex-con. Only Brahm and his writers gave the story an unbelievable happy ending instead of the tragic one of Lang’s original. In 1942 Brahm signed with Fox and made an unusual werewolf movie called The Undying Monster, then went on to bigger-budgeted horrors including a nominal remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (Hitchcock’s version was from 1926, Brahm’s from 1944) and a film called Hangover Square (1945) based on a novel by Gaslight author Patrick Hamilton. These three were collected in one of the Fox Horror Classics boxed set and reveal that horror was Brahm’s real stock-in-trade.

In The Brasher Doubloon (a title Raymond Chandler had rejected for his novel because it seemed too clinical and obvious for him). Brahm’s’ attempt at film noir comes out all wrong; the atmospherics are O.K. (particularly the high winds that seem to be blowing every time he visits the Murdock home in Pasadena) – Lloyd Ahern was the cinematographer – but the casting is wrong. George Montgomery as Marlowe is just snotty, almost totally missing the brilliant world-weariness conveyed by Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart, and leading lady Nancy Guild is trying even harder to be Lauren Bacall than Montgomery was to be Bogart, and falling equally short of her model. In Time to Kill her part was played by the marvelous British actress Heather Angel (whom Brahm had worked with on The Undying Monster). Her fearsome employer, Elizabeth Murdock, was played in Time to Kill by the intense British actress Ethel Griffies with a force-of-nature fervor; in The Brasher Doubloon she’s played by Florence Bates, a competent character actress but hardly with Griffies’ power and authority.

The one cast member in The Brasher Doubloon who’s better than their counterpart in Time to Kill is Conrad Janis as Mrs. Murdock’s spoiled son Leslie. In Time to Kill Leslie was played by character actor James Seay, a far less interesting performer (though at least closer to the right age for the role; in The Brasher Doubloon Janis looks more like Florence Bates’ grandson than her son). Janis comes off as a sort of beta version of James Dean (seven years before the real Dean burst onto the Hollywood scene in East of Eden), mumbling his way through the role in true Method fashion. It’s hard to believe this is the same actor who achieved late-in-life TV stardom as the owner of the music store in Robin Williams’ comedy vehicle Mork and Mindy. And the flaws of The Brasher Doubloon don’t end with the surprisingly weak casting: though they had 11 more minutes of running time to work with (72 minutes as opposed to the 61 of Time to Kill), writers Leonard Praskins and Dorothy Bennett left out a lot more of Chandler’s plot than Clarence Upson Young did on Time to Kill.

They omitted the character of chanteuse “Linda Conquest” completely (in Time to Kill Diane Merrick played her; Young made her a lot more sympathetic than Chandler had and paired her with Lloyd Nolan at the end) and rewrote the character of fellow detective George Anson so we only see him as a corpse. (In Time to Kill he’s shown on screen following Shayne around and looking sinister; in The High Window he’s a joke, placing a ridiculous ad in a newspaper in what Chandler clearly meant as an overly glamorous satire of his readers’ idea of a private detective.) What’s more, Praskins and Bennett include two knock-offs of the famous scene in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon in which Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) tries to stick up Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in order to search his office. Coming from a studio like Fox that had done some pretty good noirs and at least one masterpiece in the genre, Kiss of Death, The Brasher Doubloon remains a major disappointment, not only a huge step down from Time to Kill in its treatment of this story but hardly the film it could have been if they had rethought it the way RKO did when, after they filmed Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely as The Falcon Takes Over in 1942, they considerably improved on it for the first “official” Marlowe movie (and still the best!), 1944’s Murder, My Sweet.

Bodyguard Seduction (Shadowbozer Filsm, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I put on the Lifetime “premiere” movie, Bodyguard Seduction, a 2022 effort from the Johnson Production Group and their usual house director, Lindsay Hartley, and writer, Paul A. Birkett. Until recently I’ve known Hartley primarily as an actress – her imdb.com page describes her as “an actress and singer” – and I’ve been impressed with her clear chops as a director but quite frankly I’d like to see her work with other writers than Birkett, especially women writers. Bodyguard Seduction is one of those movies where there’s an annoying clash of sensibilities between the female director ahd the male writer, and I suspect either Hartley herself or another woman writer would have made this story more credible and brought a femnist “edge” to it the film desperately needed. The central character is Charly Huxton (Jessica Morris), who’s graduated from supermodel to businesswoman. She’s started a company that makes female sportswear and she owns 51 percent of it, which means her word is law. Her business partner, Lark Embridge (Alicia Blasingame), is chafing at her domination, especially since though Charly had the name and reputation, Lark actually brought the design expertise into the company. Without running it by Charly, Lark also has brought in her own designer, Godfrey Lewis (Jesse Klick) and given him carte blanche to sneak onto Charly’s computer and change her designs.

The film opens with Charly being interviewed by a TV reporter who wants the dish on her recent breakup with a movie star called Dylan (presumably his first name, though we never hear whatever other names he might have) over a year before. It’s established through this interview that Charly hasn’t “dated” (i.e., had sex with) anyone since her breakup with Dylan, and given Paul A. Birkitt’s sexist view of the world we’re clearly supposed to assume that the reason Charly is behaving like such a bitch at work is sheer sexual frustration. We;re clearly supposed to believe that what Charly needs more than anything to turn her back into a human being is a good stiff cock up her cunt, and said good stiff cock turns up attached to a nice-looking if not drop-dead gorgeous young man named Jonathan Makepeace (Ross Jirgi). His imdb.com page says he’s of Norwegian,Finnish and Czech ancestry – though it doesn’t say which of those gave him his last name – and it also says he has an older brother, Ryan Jirgi, who’s an American football coach (a defensive coordinator for Bates College in Lewiston, Maine). We first meet Jonathan – whose last name, “Makepeace,” my husband Charles recognized from a 1980 film called My Bodyguard, in which the title character is an older schoolkid who takes on the job of bodyguard to two younger kids to keep them from being bullied; the actor who played the bodyguard was Chris Makepeace – and his old Marine buddy Anthony Vargas (Ryan Francis) on the set of a TV series featuring an egomaniacal star named “Harvey” for whom the two were working as personal assistants.

When “Harvey” disappears into a green room labeled as his with a young woman in tow, we first assume that it’s for a round of quasi-consensual sex in which the woman is agreeing to the star’s demands in hopes of more money and/or a bigger role. One of the assistants even comments to the other that the woman was an extra but “she’s going to get a speaking part” for this. Then, as the two assistants wait in front of the closed door for “Harvey” and the girl to finish whatever it is they’re doing, the two play rock-paper-scissors to decide which of them will face the potentially career-ending task of letting “Harvey” know he needs to finish his fun and games and report back to the set. Just then, as Jonathan loses the game and screws up his courage to knock on the door, he hears a woman scream from inside the green room and crashes the door to rescue her. “Harvey” announces that he’s going to fire both of them and blacklist them so they can never work in Hollywood or anywhere else again. When this scene first came on I assumed that “Harvey” and Charly’s ex, “Dylan,” were the same person and their breakup had been triggered by similar shenanigans she caught him engaging in earlier – but no-o-o-o-o, the only purpose of the scene is to explain why Jonathan was available to be hired by Lark to be Charly’s bodyguard and why Lark thought he would be incompetent in the job. It seems that Lark has worked out an elaborate plan to drive Charly out of the company they founded, and hiring Jonathan is part of it. She also gets Godfrey to try to run Charly down in a stolen car; Jonathan catches on in time to save Charly and take a few pot-shots at the car with his gun, but a shaken Godfrey makes the mistake of complaining to Lark about the risk she put him in. Lark off-handedly kills Godfrey with the identical sort of gun to the one Jonathan used to shoot at the car, then plants a bullet from Jonathan’s gun into Godfrey’s fatal wound in hopes that a ballistics test will link the bullet to Jonathan’s gun to frame him for Godfrey’s murder.

Jonathan and Charly are at the police station when the detective in chage of the case announces he’s going to put them both under arrest – he for murder and she for obstructing justice – only, in the sort of utterly preposterous scene Paul A. Birkett loves to write, Jonathan attacks the cop who’s trying to arrest him with a judo throw and the two of them flee. They first ask Anthony to hide them out, but Anthony is getting harassing phone calls from gamblers he owes a lot of money to and he figures the best way to get the money he needs is to sell out Jonathan and Charly to Lark. He demands $200,000 and Lark offers him $100,000 plus stock options in the company, only in exchange he’s not only supposed to kill Jonathan and Charly but destroy their bodies utterly. Anthony duly shows up with a silencer-equipped gun – given the way adding a silencer to a pistol accentuates its already phallic qualities by making it longer, it becomes an odd counterpoint to all the wild soft-core porn we’re getting between Jonathan and Charly – only Charly flees in time and goes to another hiding place she uses. When they get there Jonathan is surprised at how quickly she locates the hidden key so she can let them in, and though Anthony has followed them there and shows up with his silencer-equipped gun, Charly talks him out of killing him there because the place is Lark’s and she won’t approve of him dirtying up her blankets and carpets with their blood. Eventually Lark shows up and she and Charly have a struggle to the death, as do Jonathan and Anthony, and at the end the cops arrive, summoned by a phone call to 911 Charly made on her phone. Charly also records Lark making a confession to the crime, and though Lark insists that the call will never be admissible and the attorneys she can afford to hire will get it thrown out, eventually they’re arrested and Charly gets both her company back and her hot stud muffin of a bodyguard.

Bodyguard Seduction offered many delights for this old Gay man, including lots of beefcake poses of Ross Jirgi’s hot bod with great, muscular pecs. My favorite scene takes place in Charly’s company’s restroom, where Jonathan has gone to change clothes after he’s spilled coffee all over himself and we get some choice glimpses of him wearing nothing but tight black undies (and director Hartley gets as close to his basket as she dares given that she’s working for Americna basic cable). What irked me about this film is the basic sexism of its plot, particularly the idea that the only reason Charly is being such a total bitch to her staff is she hasn’t been laid in over a year, and she needs Jonathan’s member inside her to turn her back into a decent human being. A more feminist writer might have done wonders for the basic plot, including offering more insight into how differently men and women are treated in the business world and how Charly in particular is looked down on because she’s drop-dead gorgeous, she used to be a model and she’s assumed to have no head for business at all. Director Hartley gets a first-rate performance out of Jessica Morris as Charly – the two of them manage to turn Birkett’s male wish-fulfillment fantasy about her into a fully fledged, richly complex human being – but everybody else is one-dimensional, either all good or all bad. In somethimg Birkett is wont to do – he’s done it in his other Lifetime scripts, too – he plants ambiguous hints that Jonathan may be a willing, aware participant in Lark’s plot against Charly (a series of text messages back and forth between his phone and someone else’s saying that Charly is their mutual problem) but then drops them as soon as they make their point. As I said, I’d like to see Lindsay Hartley direct a film with a script written by a woman; until then, she seems doomed to do the best she can with stupid, sexist scripts written by men and expressing ultra-macho fantasies of who women are ahd what they want.

Letter to Brezhnev (Yeardream, Palace Pictures, Channel Four Films, 1984)

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

After Bodyguard Seduction my husband Charles ran me a movie on YouTube that he’d heard about when it was new (1984) but hadn’t actually seen: Letter to Brezhnev, a quirky British film about two young women in the Kirkby district of Liverpool, Elaine Spencer (a woman with the very unfortunate name Alexandra Pigg) and Teresa King (Margi Clarke). When the film begins they’re two women on the prowl in LIverpool’s night life, going to a number of dreary clubs with recorded music (one wonders why the Liverpool live-music scene had apparently disappeared in the over two decades since the Beatles broke out of it into international stardom). In one of the clubs Teresa attracts the attention of an old, creepy-looking guy and offers to dance with him – only she’s really interested in picking his pocket, which she does. Then he notices her and responds to the loss by chasing her through the Liverpool streets, making subhuman grunts and growls that suggest he’s going to turn into the Incredible Hulk at any moment. Nineteen minutes into the movie, we finally get a connection with Russia when we meet two Russian sailors, Peter (Peter Firth, Pigg’s real-life husband since 2017) and Sergei (Alfred Molina). We can tell they’re Russian because Peter’s sailor’s cap has a single red star affixed to it. Actually, Charles pointed out that the Russian connection had been established earlier on when the two sailors cried out, “Liverpool!,” and said how excited they were to be in the city that gave the world The Beatles. But I had been thrown by the name of their ship, “Brazil,” into thinking the movie was actually set there.

Anyway, the two women hook up with the hot Soviet sailors – remember this was when the Soviet Union was still a going concern and Leonid Brezhnev was still alive (albeit barely) and its leader – and while Teresa, a good-time girl who reminded me of the heroine of Dorothy Parker’s marvelous short story “Big Blonde,” instantly “shags,” as the British would say, Sergei, Elaine and Peter spend a more starry-eyed (literally, since Peter points out a star in the sky to Elaine and says it’s “their” star) night in bed, cuddling but never doing the down-’n’-dirty. Elaine falls hopelessly in love with Peter and becomes determined to go to Russia herself and join him. The fact that this is ludicrously impossible – the Russian ship was spending only one day in Liverpool and another day in Scotland before heading home (which made me think director Chris Bernard and writer Frank Clarke were going to give us a Liverpudlian version of On the Town, also a film about sailors in a big city with only one day’s leave th hook up with female companionship) – only fuels Elaine’s determination. She attracts the attention of a British tabloid reporter who dies a front-page story on her quixotic quest for her Russian sailor lover-boy. Her parents (Joey Kaye and Eileen Walsh) flatly tell her they won’t let her go to Russia. She seeks out the British foreign office but they’re no help, either. She gets a lot of lecturing from her friends about how terrible the Soviet Union is, how repressive and inhuman its government is and that even if she goes to Russia, if she doesn’t like it she won’t be allowed to leave.

Finally she hits on the idea of writing Leonid Brezhnev himself and asking him to help her reunite with her Russian boyfriend – and, in a fantastic happenstance writer Clarke doesn’t even attempt to explain, he writes back, dictating a response to his secretary. (Iggy Navarro is credited as playing “President of Russia” in this scene.) The reply includes a one-way plane ticket to Moscow and Elaine is determined to use it, despite the attempts of all her friends to talk her out of it. When she hears everyone she knows tell her how repressive and awful Russia is, she fires back, ”Have you ever been there?” Naturally, none of them have – they’re just repeating what the Western media have had to say about it. Finally Elaine is summoned to a meeting with a British diplomat who actually has been to Russia – he was one stationed at the British embassy in Moscow – and he even rattles off a few sentences in Russian to prove to Elaine that he can speak the language, or at least some of it. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I assumed foreign diplomats assigned to a particular country are picked in part because they are already fluent in its language. I once read a book about the experience of the American hostages held in Iran from 1979 to 1981 and how the diplomatic staff didn’t want their captors to find out they knew Farsi, Iran’s language, because then the Iranians wouldn’t use Farsi around them. Some of them figured it out and started speaking to each other in Turkish, not knowing that the Americans they were holding knew Turkish, too.)

He shows Elaine a picture of Peter and asks her if this is indeed the man she wants to go to Russia to be with, and when she says it is, the next photo he shows is of Peter with a woman whom the consular official says is his wife. Needless to say, this flummoxes Our Heroine and discourages her from going, until Teresa talks her back into it, saying that maybe Peter is married and maybe he isn’t, but the only way she’ll find out for certain is if she goes to Russia and tracks him down. The film ends with her confidently striding through the airport on her way to board the plane, and the closing credits appear over a background of a cut-glass rendition of the Moscow skyline. Letter to Brezhnev is the sort of quirky film that got made quite often in the 1980’s, and though Charles had never seen it before and wasn’t sure what to expect, we were both charmed by it. Charles said that one of the major publicity points about the film was it was made on a budget of 50,000 pounds (though imdb.com lists a budget at £400,000) and still attracted major distribution and a worldwide audience. It holds up despite one major plot point that didn’t mean much in 1984 but means a great deal today; it’s established that Peter and Sergei are from the Black Sea region, which would make them not Russian but Ukrainian. In 1984 most people both in and out of Russia assumed that Ukraine was and always would be part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that replaced it; the fact that within just six years the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc would collapse, Ukraine would become an independent country for three decades, and Russia would launch a full-scale war, a so-called “special military operation,” to reconquer it would have been inconceivable.

Blue, White and Perfect (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2002, 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night, after all the news shows on MS-NBC and PBS, I ran Charles a movie, Blue, White and Perfect, the fourth in the cycle of seven movies from 20th Century-Fox made between 1940 and 1942 starring Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne. Muchael Shayne was the hard-boiled detective character created by writer Davis Dresser under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday” – apparently he was a writer in all the major pulp genres but he signed his stories with different names for each, but it was his “Brett Halliday” mysteries that really caught on with the public and produced 12 movies – the seven at Fox with Lloyd Nolan as Shayne, five additional ones from PRC in the late 1940’s with Hugh Beaumont, a TV series with Richard Denning and several other adaptations. Blue, White and Perfect opens with a bang: Michael Shayne’s long-suffering fiancée, beauty salon owner Marie Garland (Mary Beth Hughes – one peculiarity of the Shayne series at Fox is they regularly used the same actresses, like Hughes and Helene Reynolds, but not in the same parts!), is leaving him to marry someone else. To stop the wedding before it can take place, Shayne calls in a tip to the police that the prospective groom, Alexis Fournier (Ivan Lebedeff), is a forger and a bigamist. It’s B.S., at least as far as he knows, but when the police arrest him they find he has a long criminal record and is indeed a forger and a bigamist.

Marie is so grateful to Shayne for sparing her the indignity of marrying someone who’s already married that she reconciles with him on condition that he give up his detective career and find a normal job. Accordingly, he gets a job as a riveter with the Hughes Aircraft Company – but he’s really been hired as an industrial spy to find Axis saboteurs. In a nice touch from screenwriter Samuel Engel, who worked from a story by Borden Chase – whose best-known screen credits are the Western classics Red River and Winchester .73 – Shayne is initially inclined to walk out on the job when he thinks he’s being hired to bust workers for trying to organize, and it’s only when he’s assured that his job is to go after saboteurs that he agrees to take it. Just as Shayne is about to start his first day at riveting school – with the U.S. having just entered World War II, war production workers were at a premium and a lot of people were being hired for riveting and other butch blue-collar jobs they’d never done before – the factory is stuck up and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of industrial diamonds are stolen. Shayne deduces from the fact that he rolled his eyes when he was supposedly unconscious that the security guard who apparently was knocked out by the thieves, was actually part of the gang and he faked his own injury to allow the gang access to the safe. This was easy enough to guess because his name was Vanderhoefen and he was played by Steven Geray (let’s see, we have a Russian playing a Frenchman and a Frenchman playing a Dutchman) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Geray movie in which he wasn’t a bad guy!

The diamonds are being smuggled to Hawai’i aboard an ocean liner and, in order to get the money to get on it, Shayne embezzles $1,000 from Merle (she thinks the money is going to buy them a ranch where’ll they’ll live as a couple) and ends up in a shipboard romance with an old flame, Helen Shaw (Helene Reynolds), who’s also being chased by a half-Latino, improbably named Juan Arturo O’Hara and even more improbably played by future Superman George Reeves, decked out with a moustache and a lot of shoe polish in his hair to make him look appropriately swarthy and dark. The overall tenor of this film isn’t that different from the Saint and the Falcon movies RKO was churning out at the same time, but it seems wrong because Michael Shayne isn’t a debonair, romantic character; he’s a grungier sort of guy being played by an American actor and this rather superficial style of mystery film doesn’t really play to the strengths either of Brett Halliday’s (t/n: Davis Dresser) character or Nolan’s performance. Like its immediate predecessor, Dressed to Kill (unfortunately not in the 20th Century-Fox boxed set of four of their Nolan Shayne movies, though Charles and I recently caught it on YouTube), Blue, White and Perfect is much more in the style of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s than the darker, richer noir style of the 1940’s – though ironically both cycles were kicked off by hit films based on novels by Dashiell Hammett. The 1934 The Thin Man kicked off the engaging fusion of screwball comedy and murder mystery that dominated in the next seven years, while the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon set the parameters for film noir even though there had been noir precursors made before that.

One thing that bothered me about Blue, White and Perfect this time around is that, for a studio like Fox that had made so many movies largely or totally set aboard cruise ships, the sets in the shipboard scenes are singularly unconvincing. You really have to look (and listen) hard for any clue in the dialogue that you’re anywhere else than a totally land-based hotel. Still, there are nice touches throughout this film, including the opening dialogue in which Merle’s assistant Ethel (Marie Blake), asked by Shayne how Merle got together with Fournier in the first place, Ethel explains that he came by the shop to get her to carry his one-hour wart remover. She also says he demanded that his last name be pronounced, not the usual “Furn-Yay” but “Fo-Nay,” and she says of his alleged wart remover, “Boy, is it fo-nay!” There’s also a nice scene in which Shayne and O’Hara, who’s supposed to be an undercover FBI agent, are nearly drowned inside a water-tight compartment on the ship and they muse that they’re about to drown on board a ship that is still afloat. (It reminded me of the sequence in the second “Harper” film, The Drowning Pool, in which Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward come close to a similar fate.) And there’s a nice moment for Helene Reynolds, whose character, Helen Shaw, turns out to be a member of the ring that stole the diamonds but who turns against them when she realizes they’re not just ordinary crooks out to make a dishonest dollar, but Axis saboteurs stealing the diamonds so Nazi Germany can use them for their war production. It reminded me of the marvelous moment in the 1942 film Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror in which Kitty (Evelyn Ankers), a member of London’s underworld, nonetheless rallies her fellow crooks to help Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) to find the Nazi spy living among them because even criminals have a right to be patriotic.

In the end, Helen gets shot and killed for her pains by the real secret head of the ring, Freidrich Gerber (Curt Bois), who [spoiler alert!] has been masquerading as a particularly obnoxious comic-relief character named Nappy Dubois. (For some reason the other actors pronounced “Gerber” as if it were “Goebbels,” the name of the infamous Nazi Minister of Propaganda.) Shayne discovers the stolen diamonds when he accidentally tries to eat one of the candies containing them and nearly breaks a tooth on it. Charles said he wondered why the Nazis were smuggling the diamonds the long way around via the Pacific instead of taking them through the Atlantic. One imdb.com “Goofs” commentator red-flagged that one and another suggested that, “because with the submarine war sinking cargo ships in the Atlantic, it made sense to take the longer route through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific.” That still didn’t make much sense to Charles, who said that given the fact that the war was just as active in the Pacific as in the Atlantic, it would have made more sense to send the diamonds via South America, where there were still a number of governments reasonably friendly to the Nazis. The whole thing was an example of how ill-prepared screenwriters were to incorporate the real war into their scripts, and how much catching=up they had to do geographically!

Thunder Bay (Universal-International, 1953)

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

Last night I checked the Turner Classic Movies schedule to see if there would be a movie on worth watching, and I found a pretty good one in Thunder Bay, a 1953 Universal-International production that marked the fourth of eight collaborations between star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann. Their professional relationship had begun with a bang with the 1950 Western Winchester .73, for which Universal president Lew Wasserman agreed to pay Stewart a percentage of the profits in addition to a salary because he couldn’t afford to pay Stewart his going rate up front. The film was a huge success commercially (and an artistic masterpiece as well; i've often described it as "a film noir inim Western drag") and Stewart’s income from that one movie was over $1 million. Wasserman put Stewart and Mann together for two more Westerns, Bend of the River and The Naked Spur, and then for thier fourth movie together Wasserman and Universal producer Aaron Rosenberg decided to do something more contemporary. They chose an original story by John Michael Hayes (later a frequent collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock) based on an “idea” by George W. George (who would later co-direct a documentary on James Dean with a then-unknown collaborator named Robert Altman) and George F./ Slavini, with Gil Doud also listed as co-writer of the screenplay.

The story deals with the clashes between oil drillers and shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico pff the coast of Louisiana in 1946. Two seemingly penniless grifters, Steve Martin (James Stewart) and John Gambi (Dan Duryea), show up in a small Louisiana fishing town to promote a wildcat oil drilling operation. The local fisherfolk are almost literally up in arms against it, not only for the obvious reason that they’re worried that oil from the rig will spill into the gulf and ruin the shrimp catch on which they depend for their livelihood, but also because they’re fearful of the lowlife people who will come into town to work on the oil rig and what that will do to the town’s moral climate. The opposition is led by two rival fishing-boat captains, Dominique Rigaud (Antonio Moreno, a Rudolph Valentino wanna-be in Hollywood in the 1920’s and leading man to Greta Garbo in her second American film, The Temptress) and Teche Bossier (Gilbert Roland, billed third ahead of Duryea and another Valentino wanna-be from 1920’s Hollywood who had made an unexpected comeback as a character actor after John Huston cast him in his 1949 film We Were Strangers). The town’s opposition to the oil men is led by the two captains and Rigaud’s two daughters, Stella (Joanne Dru, whom I’ve never thought much of before but she turns ini a vivid, acid-etched performance that’s arguably the best acting in the film) and Francesca (Marcia Henderson, who unlike Dru is terrible, she gives the sort of performance that makes you wonder, “Whom was she sleeping with to get the role?”).

It turns out that Stella’s determination to drive the oilmen and their heavy equipment out of the community is fueled by her disastrous attempt to relocate out of her community and go to Chicago, where in elliptical Production Code-mandated way enforced on them were able to suggest a great deal. She tells her dad, “You didn’t think I could afford to send all that money home on a secretary’s pay, did you?” Elsewhere she alludes to the promises she heard from a man in Chicago whom Stewart’s character reminds her of, which he was unwilling or perhaps unable to keep. Of course my mind flashed back to the 1931 film The Easiest Way, about a woman who hires herself out as a mistress and uses the money to help fund her poor, innocent family back home, and maybe the reason Stella got screwed in both senses of the term is her sugar daddy a;ready had a wife and was either unable or unwilling (or both) to divorce her to marry Stella. Steve’s and John’s financial backer is former oil wildcatter Kermit MacDonald (Jay C. Flippen), who had already spent $1 million of his company’s money on leasing drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico and needs $2 million more to build the equipment and actually drill for oil. Steve offers him a revolutionary new drill and platform design based on driving pilings to support the rig, and MacDonald reluctantly agrees to back him despite the opposition of jos assostamt amd bisomess manager Rawlings (Henry Morgan, one of my all-time favorite character actors, who would work with Stewart and Mann again as Glenn Miller’s pianist Chummy MacGregor in the 1954 biopic The Glenn Miller Story). Rawlings represents the board of directors of MacDonald’s company, and he’s laboriously researched Steve’s previous record of failure in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela.

Plenty of other stuff happens, including a big bar fight between John and Philippe Bayard (Robert Monet – presumably no relation, though throughout the film I thought I was hearing his character name as “Felipe”), who was promised to Francesca when they were both children and who naturally resents John’s attentions to “his” girl. There’s also a massive hurricane that precipitates a crisis in which Philippe determines to blow up the oil rig with several sticks of dynamite he’s stolen from the oil crew, only Steve happens to be sleeping in his quarters the night of the hurricane. Stella shows up and demands that he shelter her as well – she and her dad have had an argument – and in the middle of the night Steve catches Philippe, who not only can’t get the fuse to the dynamite lyt but falls to his death in the water below, thereby predictably eliminating John’s rival for Francesca’s affections. Meanwhile Stella confesses to Steve that she’s been attracted to him from the beginning, even though she’s been fighting it because she doesn’t want to be hurt again. John sneaks off the rig to marry Francesca, and in his absence there’s a salt-water blowout on the rig and this threatens the safety and profitability of the whole project. At one point MacDonald announces that the entire project is broke, with just eight days left to get the oil out of the ground before they forfeit their lease. When Steve asks MacDonald why he can’t continue the drilling with his own money, MacDonald says that they have been doing just that for the duration of the project, since the company board authorized him to drill but refused to fund the project and voted to cut their losses and cancel.

This forces Steve to give a speech to the men, who are understandably reluctant to work without pay, to go into the familiar James Stewart “persuasion” mode from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, promising them a $200 bonus (later raised to $300) when the well comes in and keeping them on the job. Unexpectedly (well, maybe not so unexpectedly if you’ve seen more than three or four movies before in your life), the oil well’s intake valves keep getting clogged with giant shrimp – what Teche Bossier (whose character name seems to defeat the best efforts of the other actors to pronounce it) calls the elusive “golden shrimp” they have been looking for all these years – and the oil well spurts the expected gusher. It turns out the oil drilling is actually going to be good for the fisherfolk as well, and Steve successfully fends off a flotilla of fishing boats led by Dominique (why did the writers ghve the paterfamilias of the family a character name usually associated with women?) to kidnap Dominique’s daughter Francesca away from her lawfully married husband.

As a movie, Thunder Bay is preposterous as all hell, and our attitudes towards offshore oil drilling today are considerably more,shall we say, nuanced than the ones in this film. In fact, they were more nuanced in 1953, too; the year Thunder Bay was made there were Congressional hearings on the safety and security of offshore drilling, which had not been successfully done anywhere in the world until 1946. It seemed odd, to say the least, to watch a movie in which James Stewart, teeth gritted in his usual attempt to look convincing as a tough guy, insists that “oil ls life” and without it the entire economy would grind to a halt in an historical era in which we’re reaping the whirlwind from our two centuries of dependence on fossil fuels. It was an odd movie to watch on the day the California government announced that through executive action by the state’s Air Resources Control Board, it will ban all sales of new gasoline-powered cars in 2035 and thereafter – that’s Californiaa, which brought the freeway to the United States and, more than any other state, birthed the “car culture” that now threatens the very existence of humanity (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3614147-california-to-approve-2035-ban-on-gas-powered-car-sales/). Thunder Bay is at once an historical curio, an ode to machismo in the face of social change (it’s no accident that the U.S. opposition to acknowledging and doing something to stop human-caused climate change is, I think, bound up with sexism and the sense that “real men” dig their energy out of the ground as coal or drill for it as oil, and only effeminate wimps build windmills or set up solar panels) and a fascinating movie even though it’s pretty much a minor film in the Mann-Stewart canon (they made eight films together, as many as Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson and two more than John Huston and Humphrey Bogart).

Under the Volcano (Conacito Uno, Ithaca, Universal, 1984)

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

Last night at 9:15, as part of a Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Jacqueline Bisset, I watched a screening of John Huston’s 1984 film of Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry was a writer who enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1970’s, possibly because that was the time the first major biography of him was published, and he lived his entire adult life in a state of alcoholic stupor from which he only occasionally arose to write. Lowry’s Wikipedia page attributes his lifelong melancholy to an incident in college at St. Catharine’s in Cambridge in which his roommate, Paul Fitte, was a Gay man who made a pass at Lowry. When Lowry turned him down, Fitte committed suicide, and years later Lowry published a story with the poignant title “Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid.” His first wife, Jan Gabriel, said years after their marriage had ended that the reasons she left him were his drinking and the constant attention he was getting from Gay men interested in him. In his early years he signed on as a sailor on a private vessel, and the experience formed the basis for his first novel, Ultramarine, written while he was still an undergraduate.

In 1936, in a last-ditch attempt to make his marriage work, he moved to Mexico, arriving in Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead in 1936. Within two years he’d been deported from Mexico for his alcoholism and the public disturbances he created “under the influence,” and he settled in Los Angeles. While there he began a long-term relationship with another woman, Margerie Bonner, an actress and writer who later became his second wife. He also worked on Under the Volcano, a largely autobiographical novel based on his experiences in Mexico and which he had actually started writing there. When Lowry left again for Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he left the unfinished manuscript behind. Margerie joined him in Vancoiver and brought Under the Volcano with her, and it was finally published in 1947. Today it’s considered one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and it’s been reprinted in various althonogies, but when I tried reading it in 1975 – at a particularly low point in my own life – I literally could not get through it. I put it aside midway through – something I almost never do with a book – because the story was so relentlessly downbeat and despairing I feared that if I kept reading it, the author would convince me to commit suicide.

This was almost a decade before Under the Volcano was filmed by director John Huston – no stranger either to obsessive quests (many of his movies concern a small group of characters after some hidden treasure who get undone by their own human frailties) or to drinking. Under the Volcano had gained the reputation as an “unfilmable” book because of its dense imagery and symbolism, though movies figure prominently in the plot: one character in the novel is an expatriate French film director (though Huston and his writer, Guy Gallo, left him out of the film) and the cheap, sleazy movie theatre in Cuernavaca is showing the 1935 film Mad Love, based on a story called The Hands of Orlac that was done as a silent film and remade in the U.S. in 1935 with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive, directed by Karl Freund. The Mexican release of Mad Love reverted to the story’s original title and called it Los Manos de Orlac, and its story – about a concert pianist (Clive) who loses his hands in an accident, and a super-surgeon (Lorre) who grafts new hands but doesn’t tell him the hands come from a serial killer named Orlac who was executed for his crimes, but the hands might be tempted to kill again … – is obviously an appropriate choice for a film set in the Hallowe’en season.

The central character is Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney), who despite his different career trajectory – he’s the former British consul to Cuernavaca rather than an aspiring writer – he’s basically a fictional stand-in for Lowry himself. The other major characters are Firmin’s American-born actress ex-wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset, turning in a surprisingly accomplished performance, especially from someone who basically became a star through her big tits, teasingly encased in a wet white T-shirt, in the film The Deep) and his half-brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews). All three of these characters drink – they even go out on drinking binges with Geoffrey, which seems to me about the worst thing you can do with an active alcoholic, especially one you’re trying to sober up with as part of an attempt at a reconciliation. The story starts in Cuernavaca on the Day of the Dead – November 1, 1938 – and the spectre of World War II haunts the story, especially when Hugh points out a fellow traveler on the bus they take from Cuernavaca to the Mexican countryside and notices the badge that identifies him as a Sinarquista, a member of a group of Mexican fascists that were secretly being funded by Nazi Germany.

Other than that, though, it’s just a series of increasingly depressing incidents as Geoffrey Firmin falls farther and farther off the wagon, and ends up disgustingly drunk and ultimately dead. Significantly, at the beginning of the film he’s drawing enough of a line in his alcohol consumption that he announces he won’t drink mescal, a particularly strong (verging on lethal) Mexican liqueur; by the end of the film, trapped inside a Mexican whorehouse with the bizarre name “El Amor de los Amores,” he orders mescal. He also ends up in one of the rooms of the brothel being orally serviced by a Mexican hooker, and of course while this is going on (and Geoffrey is shown as too drunk either to resist or consent) Yvonne and Hugh arrive and she catches him with the whore,while just about every Mexican in the bar claims that Geoffrey owes them money for the truck. What was surprising to me is that Yvonne Firmin doesn’t make it to the end of the film alive, either; at the end both Geoffrey and Yvonne run afoul of some creepy and corrupt local Mexican politicians and get themselves assassinated (though in the book she actually dies before he does), and the final scene of the film is Hugh, who apparently had an unrequited crush on Yvonne, cradling her body as she expires.

Watching Under the Volcano was like watching a slow-motion train wreck – all too much of it brought back my own memories of being very much in love with an active alcoholic and realizing how helpless I was in the face of his addiction – and the only even halfway likable character in the film is Hugh, who at least has tried to do something meaningful with his life. He’s worked as a reporter and as such he covered the Spanish civil war and the fall of Madrid, the last city to hold out for the Loyalists against Franco’s fascist Phalange,and at one point, in one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, he borrows a guitar from a Mexican musician working the tables at the outdoor bar and sings one of the songs about the resistance. (Remember Tom Lehrer’s line: “Remember the war against Franco/That’s the kind where each of us belongs/Though he may have won all the battles/We had all the good songs.” Even more than with The Mighty Quinn, Under the Volcano had the feeling of a film made during the wrong decade. Had John Huston been able to make it during the decade between the novel’s publication and the death of his greatest star, Humphrey Bogart, Under the Volcano might have been a masterpiece; Bogart’s multidimensionality and demonstrated ability to play a piece of human flotsam (as he had done so brilliantly under Huston’s direction in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made in 1948 and also set and largely shot in Mexico; according to its credits, Under the Volcano was entirely shot in Mexico, in the state of Morelos where the story takes place) while still keeping him interesting would have brought Geoffrey Firmin vividly to life.

Another actor who would have been good for it was Richard Burton in his prime, which he was well beyond by the time Under the Volcano was filmed (he died August 9, 1984), but his own well-known fondness for the bottle and his previous success playing a burned-out alcoholic under Huston’s direction in The Night of the Iguana (1963, and also set in Mexico!) would have suited the role. In fact, it turns out Burton actually read excerpts from Under the Volcano for a 1976 Canadian documentary on Lowry’s life. Instead Huston ended up with Albert Finney, whose idea of playing the on-his-last-legs drunk was to alternately mumble and bellow all his lines; Finney won an Academy Award nomination for this film, but sometimes all you need to do to get an Oscar nomination is to leave no stick of scenery unchewed, and whatever the limitations of his performance, Finney definitely accomplished that. (I’m still angry that Al Pacino finally won his long-deserved Academy Award for one of his worst movies, Scent of a Woman, after being passed over for all his great ones, including the first two Godfathers, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon.) Maybe a better movie is lurking within the nether regions of Under the Volcano – or maybe Lowry’s novel is itself overrated, a piece of self-justification from a hopeless alcoholic who seems to have drunk his way out of a major literary career. (F. Scott Fitzgerald was also an alcoholic, but at least he wrote some truly great novels along the way!)

The Mighty Quinn (Olive Films, A&M Films, Star Partners, MGM, 1989)

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

Last night shortly after 9 my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of the 1989 movie The Mighty Quinn, a film which practically defines “quirky.” The film was based on a novel by Albert H. Z. Carr called Finding Maubee, set on a fictional Caribbean island called “St. Cara” and dealing with a local assistant police chief, Xavier Quinn (Denzel Washington), whose boyhood friend Maubee (Robert Townsend) is the prime suspect in a particularly brutal murder. The victim’s head was severed and placed in his own Jacuzzi, but it turns out that he actually died from the bite of a fer-de-lance snake (also the murder weapon in the first Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance) and whoever severed his head was attempting to kill someone who was already dead. The film was shot in Jamaica but it was pretty clear that it was not actually set there; the island’s chief executive, Chalk (Norman Beaton), is called “Governor” as if it were still a British colony, not an independent member of the British Commonwealth like Jamaica, whose chief executive bears the title “Prime Minister.”

The novel was published in 1971, after Carr was already dead, and it won a posthumous Edgar Award for Best First Novel even though Carr had been active at least since the 1930’s writing magazine serials and film stories, mostly romantic comedies like Let’s Get Married and Women Are Like That. It’s unfortunate that the film wasn’t made immediately after the novel was published, while Sidney Poitier (a real-life Bahamian) was still young enough to have played the lead – Denzel Washington tries his best but the requirement of a Caribbean accent pretty much defeats him. Still, he’s fine at playing a sort of in-between character at home neither in the world of respectable St. Cara society (white or Black) nor in the criminal underworld he has to live in to do his job as a homicide cop. The Mighty Quinn is an odd film to categorize because it has the potential to be film noir – it has an implacable villain, a suggestion of corruption in high society and the political system, and even a potential femme fatale – and it also counts as a musical.

The “Soundtracks” page for it on imdb.com lists 19 separate songs, at least half of which are actually performed on screen, mostly by an aspiring female quartet of reggae singers, including Cedelle Marley and Sharon Marley Prendergast, daughters of reggae legend Bob Marley. The film credits Marley’s widow Rita (mother of Cedelle and Sharon, though Bob Marley had children with women other than his wife) as musical consultant, and she’s in the film as one of the singers at a local wedding where the story begins. What’s more, the songs were pre-recorded at Bob Marley’s old studio, Tuff Gong in Kingston. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that this fim contains a lot of music, since it is named after a song by Bob Dylan – though he subtitled it “Quinn the Eskimo,” which seemingly makes it an odd choice for a film set in the Caribbean. The song is performed at least twice in the film in an “adaptation” by Michael Rose. (“The Mighty Quinn,” the song, needs all the help it can get; Bob Dylan wrote it in 1967 and he wrote a great hook for it – “Come on without, come on within, you’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn” – but the rest of the song is a mess. Dylan said at the time, “I write in chinese of flashing images,” and sometimes the images hung together and created a powerful poetic whole, but they didn’t this time and it took Manfred Mann’s cover for “The Mighty Quinn” to become a classic rock song.) There’s even a scene in which Delzel Washington sings and plays piano (he probably had help with the piano part but it’s almost certainly his real voice) on a cover of Taj Mahal’s “Cakewalk Into Town,” though as other musicians join in it segues into the film’s second version of “The Mighty Quinn.”

Directed by Carl Schenkel from a script by Hampton Fancher – the director’s name meant nothing to me, even though Charles and I have seen one of his other films, Knight Moves; but the writer worked on the scripts for Blade Runner, one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made, and its sequel Blade Runner: 2049, one of the worst) – The Mighty Quinn made for a fascinating comparison with the Lifetime movie Temptation Under the Sun, also set on a fictitious Caribbean island (“St. Luke”) and also with intimations of political, social and moral corruption. Both feature incorruptible law-enforcement officials, though the one in Temptation Under the Sun is a white woman instead of a Black man and she’s a U.S. citizen ordered to take a vacation because her higher-ups are trying to protect a City Councilmember whom she’s investigating for murder. In Temptation Under the Sun the woman cop ends up in a hot, steamy affair with a local fishing-boat operator; in The Mighty Quinn the film seems to be leading up to a sexual encounter between Quinn and Hadley Elgin (Mimi Rogers, the first Mrs. Tom Cruise), wife of sinister white authority figure Thomas Elgin (James Fox, the white British actor who played a gangster fleeing from the law and ending up in the home of a rock star, played by Mick Jagger, in Nicolas Roeg’s first film, Performance [1968]) who’s among the people warning Quinn to let the case alone and join in the frame of Morbee for the murder.

According to the film’s imdb.com “Trivia” page, Washington and Rogers actually shot an interracial sex scene but the studio, MGM, deleted it after both Black and white preview audience members reacted hostilely. Though my mind was reaching back to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) and the scene in whckh Madeline Kahn’s Dietrichesque character asks Cleavon Little if it’s true Black men are “unusually gifted,” and after they have sex she screams, “It’s twue! It’s twue!”, I can see why preview audiences did not want to see the two have sex. Not only is Washington’s character married to Lola (Sheryl Lee Ralph, one of the singers in the reggae quartet) and they have a son, Henry (David McFarlane), but like Philip Marlowe, Quinn has too much integrity to be sidetracked from a murder investigation just by the promise of a hot bod. There’s also the interesting character of a “conjure woman,” Ubu Pearl (Esther Rolle, who along with Washington turns in the best performance in the film), who despite living in a remote cabin and needing a wheelchair greets people on her front porch who make the long journey to see her. She’s also the aunt of Isola (Tyler Ferrell), a young woman who was impregnated by the original murder victim and is raising the baby as a single mother while getting no help from dad – which means we’re not at all sorry to see him go.

Ubu Pearl is herself murdered by the film’s ultimate villain, Fred Miller (M. Emmet Walsh), a white American involved in a scheme to fund the Nicaraguan contras with $10,000 bills; the U.S. Treasury no longer prints bills that big, but did in the 1920’s and again in the 1950’s and part of Miller’s scheme was to steal some from the Treasury’s hoard and use this money that doesn’t officially exist to fund the contras. One of the film’s running gags is that Quinn keeps hearing reports from his underworld contacts that they’ve seen $10,000 bills while the U.S. officials he contacts insist that no such bills exist. The money is actually in an old brown suitcase Maubee had stolen and Miller grabs it and recovers the funds – only in a scene that’s become clichéd ever since it seemed so fresh and original in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Asphalt Jungle (both directed by John Huston!), most of the money blows away at the end. Miller himself tries to flee in a helicopter, but both he and his pilot are bitten by a fer-de-lance that either sneaked into the cockpit or was planted there. (That’s right, snake ex machina.) Morbee also gets blown up, but even in a film made over 20 years at the end of the Production Code he had to pay for his crimes even though our sympathies are with him. Charles had seen this movie before when it was relatively new at the “Magic Cinema” in Grass Valley, California, where he and his mother then lived, and he told me he’d been disappointed that it wasn’t even more of an anti-contra film than it was, but it holds up surprisingly well even though some of the stories aren’t all that developed and I’d personally have liked to see far more of Robert Townsend’s character, including more insight into how Morbee and Quinn bonded as friends and have stayed that way over the years.

Big Lies in a Small Town (CMV Lakeside Productions, Champlain Media,Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday evening I watched two films on Lifetime that turned out to be unusually good – not in the sense of breaking new ground with their formulae but at least telling familiar Lifetime stories in a welcome new way. The first was last night’s “premiere,” Big Lies in a Small Town, directed by Danny J. Boyle (who uses his middle initial so he won’t be confused with the other Danny Boyle, the Academy Award-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting) and co-written by him and Nicholas Jackson (they worked together on the original story and Jackson turned it into a script on his own). It stars Rhonda Dent as Rachel Baker, who as the film opens is driving her daughter Hannah (Kristina Paras) to her first day of college (the film is set in Washington state, and the famous forest scenery for which Washington is known is very much a part of this movie). They stop at a convenience store on the way and attract the decidedly unwelcome attentions of two men, a large thug-type with a bulldog face and a smaller, better-looking man.

Then the Bakers get back on the road in their red mini-SUV and find themselves being chased by a big black car whose driver is trying to force them off the road. Ultimately they crash into the car and Hallah ends up in a local hospital, where the medical personnel insist that she was alone in the wreckage and there was no daughter. The crash is investigated by the local sheriff, who tells Rachel in no uncertain terms to bug off and go back where she came from. Of course Rachel refuses, saying that she’s not leaving the little town until either she finds her daughter Hannah alive or, if Hannah is dead, at least learns what happened to her. Rachel’s car is towed to a local garage owned by Gus, a grey-haired, full-bearded man who works as a mechanic and has an overbearing manner and a hair-trigger temper. The Boyle-Jackson script drops dark hints that sinister goings-on are happening, and in particular that other teenage girls that were traveling with their single mothers (we’re eventually told that Rachel’s husband, Hannah’s dad, died when Hannah was still a very young girl and Rachel has been raising her as a single parent since).

We even get a typical Lifetime prologue showing a teenage girl being abducted and killed when she won’t comply with the demands of her kidnappers, whatever they are, and a “One Week Later” Lifetime chyron before we meet the story’s principals. My first thought was there was a human-trafficking ring operating in town and it was being protected by a corrupt sheriff and a lot of local townspeople who seemed to have more of a sinister motive than just the usual we-don’t-want-outsiders-here attitude of people who live in small towns (especially movie small towns). About the only people on Rachel’s side are Mark (Matt Hamilton), who runs the local motel and rents Rachel a room; and Nurse Grace Ross (Natalie von Rotsburg, an oddly Teutonic name for a Black actress), who finds a bracelet at the accident site and realizes it’s the one surviving piece of evidence that confirms that Rachel’s daughter Hannah really existed and was in the car with her when it crashed. Only she’s brutally murdered by the two thugs we saw in the opening sequence, and the killers take the bracelet away so there’ll be no physical evidence of Hannah’s existence. (So, even though they’ve only recently met, Grace takes on the stereotyped LIfetime role of The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her.)

The mystery killers also dispatch Gus’s chief mechanic, Jake, a Black man who had earlier suggested they take the black paint scrapings off Rachel’s car and send them to Seattle for forensic analysis, since it’s a color only used by two different manufacturers and he thinks it can be used to trace the killers’ car – only Gus cuts the brake lines of Jake’s car and he dies in the ensuing crash. As for Mark, he explains his sympathy for Rachel’s plight by saying he also had and lost a teenage daughter, not through death but because he and his daughter’s mom went through a bitter divorce and mom turned the girl against him. Then Hannah herself recovers her cell phone long enough to call Rachel, only she’s quickly overpowered by whoever kidnapped her and Rachel has the chilling experience of hearing her daughter in trouble without being able to do anything to save her. Rachel traces her daughter’s cell-phone signal to a deserted stretch of forest where she finds a mummified body, only it turns out it’s not Hannah. Presumably it’s the young girl we saw murdered in the prologue. Rachel ultimately traces Hannah to the home of the better-looking of the two thugs, whose own daughter was killed in a car accident and who’s been looking for a replacement so his wife can regain her will to live, only working together Rachel and Hannah are able to subdue the bad guys and escape, while the sheriff redeems himself by taking the killer couple in custody.

Writers Boyle and Jackson drop hints throughout the movie that Mark himself may be up to no good and part of the plot against Hannah – in one scene Rachel is warned by Mark’s ex-girlfriend Kerry (Ashley Alexander), a waitress at the local diner, not to get romantically involved with Mark (the attraction is definitely there but the parties don’t go through with it), and there’s also an odd scene in which Mark goes through Rachel’s belongings (she left her purse in the car Mark had loaned her when he didn’t need it himself) and lovingly fingers her driver’s license. In the end, though, Mark turns out to be as good as it seems even though he decides to sell the local motel and buy a similar one in Florida just to get out of town. The final scene shows Rachel actually getting Hannah to college … six months later. Big Lies in a Small Town is an effective Lifetime melodrama, well directed by Boyle, who also gets tough, subtle performances from his leads even though he doesn’t do much with the other cast members: Gus in particular turns out to be a one-dimensional thug villain and the couple at the center of the intrigue are just dull. But the film has some nicely Kafka-esque scenes of the predicament Rachel finds herself in, as well as the Lady Vanishes–ish gimmick of the heroine being told she didn’t have a daughter and hallucinated her existence. (Then again, there has been another Lifetime movie in which a mother is driving her young daughter to college, only the whole thing is an hallucination and in that film the daughter is already long since dead.)

Temptation Under the Sun (Vest Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

After last night’s “premiere” Lifetime showed the previous Saturday night’s “premiere,” Temptation Under the Sun, in which the heroine is a Detroit police detective, Cassidy Cruz (Annika Foster), who in the opening scene runs afoul of a well-connected Detroit City Councilmember whom she’s convinced is a murderer. Only the Councilmember has enough political clout to get Detective Cruz not only off the case but o ut of the country; he orders the police chief totell her to use the vacation time she’s accrued. Accordingly she goes to the (presumably fictional) Caribbean island of St. Luke but takes her case files with her, intending to keep working her cases even while she’s ostensibly on vacation. On her first night at the island resort she goes to the bar and is accosted by two local (white) men, one good and one not-so-good. The good one is Travis King (Mike Markoff), an American expatriate who owns a boat he takes out on charter tours – though he tells his local (Black) friend Winston (Samuel Selman) that he’s tired of doing charters because he’s tired of leading around overly privileged middle-aged American one-percenters who are doing cocaine. The not-so-hot (at least in the eyes of the film's casting director, Thomas Sullivan; I thought he was also quite sexy and part of me hoped that he and Travis would get together!) one is Sean (Laith Wallschager), who makes a crude pass at Detective Cruz which attracts Travis’s ire.

The co-owner of the local bar is Minerva (Christina Gray), a local Black woman who once had an affair with the local constable, Chief Inspector Dexter (Scott Carpenter), only six years before the main action she dumped him and took up with Travis, only to move on from him, too, though Travis is still interested in getting back together with her and cruises her in a charming, boyish way. In fact, the script by Paul A. Birkett (a veteran Lifetime hand) depicts Travis as a kind of child-man, physically exciting but not all that mature and prone to making offhand passes at women, definitely including Cassidy Cruz. In fact, one morning she shows up at his boat thinking they have a breakfast date –only he’s just got out of the shower and literally has nothing on, though he grabs a cushion and holds it in front of his crotch so Cruz doesn’t get embarrassed by him. (We certainly get the impression from her reaction that he’s unusually well hung.) When Minerva is murdered mysteriously in her home, Chief Inspector Dexter announces that Travis is the prime suspect and even arrests him, and Travis offers a kind of what-can-you-do resignation at the prospect of spending the rest of his life in an island prison for a crime he didn’t do. Travis explains to Cruz that “island justice” isn’t at all like what sue’s used to in the States: on St. Luke an arrest is tantamount to a conviction and there aren’t any legal niceties like due process.

Between them, Winston and Cruz pool their money to pay Travis’s bail, and Cruz intends to use her professional skills to find Minerva’s real killer and thus get Travis off the hook. Only Chief Inspector Dexter turns out to be the real killer, and in order to eliminate those bothersome Americans he plants an explosive on Travis’s boat and sets it off with a remote-control detonator. Travis notices the bomb just in time and he and Cruz dive off the boat to safety, but while swimming in the sea they get lost and end up not back on St., Luke but in a truly deserted island, where Cruz tries to use her cell phone and Travis throws it away. The two of them end up trapped in a mysterious hole in the ground – and the film brought back memories of an odd Japanese film from 1964, Woman in the Dunes, in which, according to its imdb.com page, “An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them,” and eventually he resigns himself to his fate, accepts being trapped in the dunes, and becomes the woman’s lover. In Temptation Under the Sun Travis and Cruz strip down to as little as they can be wearing ans still remain within the censor rules of basic cable (he has a pair of grey indies and she has black panties and bra), ostensibly to make a rope so they can climb out of the hole, but the sight of each other in a nearly total state of undress ignites their lust and they end up in a very hot soft-core porn scene, effectively and lubriciously directed by Lane Shefter Bishop (a woman, by the way, though one of this film’s producers is Andrew Bishop, presumably her husband).

Once they are rescued off the island and taken back to St. Luke by Winston, they seek the aid of another police official, Detective Inspector Marley (David Carey Foster). I know what you’re thinking – you hear someone named “Marley” in a film set on a Caribbean island and you think you’re going to see someone Black with dreadlocks and a great voice for reggae, but this Marley is white and bald. Travis and Cruz are hoping Marley will have an interest in finding Minerva’s killer since he was Minerva’s godfather (not that sort of godfather!), but at least at first Marley is outraged that the two white people from the U.S. are saying nasty things about his lifelong friend and superior officer, Dexter. Travis also explains to Cruz that the reason he can’t return to the U.S. is he’s being hounded by the Internal Revenue Service over a $900,000 tax bill he ended up owing. The bill was actually run up by his former partner, an accountant who was really an embezzler, but the other guy somehow managed to stick Travis with the crime. (This part of the story reminded me of the Humphrey Bogart character in Casablanca, who also couldn’t return to the U.S. for some crime he was blamed for, though the writers of Casablanca rather more powerfully left Bogart’s crime unexplained, and in one of the film’s most remarkable lines the collaborationist police chief, played by Claude Rains, says, “I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.”) Eventually Marley comes around when Travis and Cruz are able to sneak into Dexter’s office and find a letter that reveals why Dexter killed Minerva: he was putting together a big land deal for a condo development on the island and he needed the parcel of land on which Minerva’s bar sat. Dexter tried to get her to sell it, he killed her and then planned to buy the bar at her estate sale. The film ends with a bittersweet leave-taking between Travis and Cruz, only she returns to the island two months later for the grand reopening of Minerva’s bar, which he and Marley co-own now because Travis used the money he got from the insurance in his boat (ya remember the boat?) to buy her share of it. Though I found Bret Domrose’s musical score often irritating – if I hear another film set in the Caribbean scored with steel drums and slack-key guitars I think I shall choke myself on a dinner of poi (and slack-key guitars, like poi, are Hawai’ian, not Caribbean) – I quite liked Temptation Under the Sun. Like Big Lies in a Small Town, it was well done within the Lifetime formulae, and I especially liked the way Paul A. Birkett was able to make the affair between Travis and Cruz have some emotional weight instead of just being what Cruz calls a ‘meaningless vacation fling.” And I especially liked the fact that both leads, Annika Foster and Mike Markoff, pronounced the “t” in ‘often”!