Häxan (a.k.a. Witchcraft Through the Ages) (Aljosha Production Company, Svensk Filmindustri, 1922)

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

Last night at 9:15 Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” featured a truly odd movie from Danish director Benjamin Christiansen in 1922 called Häxan, ostensibly a documentary on the history of witchcraft and its persecution in medieval Europe. The title is simply Danish for “The Witch,” and I’d actually seen it before in 1971 on a double bill with a Russian movie called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, an abstract love story set in Ukraine in which a young man named Ivan unknowingly falls in love with the daughter of the man who murdered Ivan’s father. The version I saw in 1971 was actually produced in 1968, was retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages and eliminated the silent-film intertitles. Instead it contained a narrator – William Burroughs, of all people – who explained the plot as it was going along, much in the manner of a 1970’s documentary. It also had a newly composed musical score featuring jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, which the version we saw tonight (a restoration from 2001 supervised by Gillian Anderson for the Criterion Collection) replaced with the compilation of classical music pieces heard at the film’s premiere in Copenhagen. Among them were the famous slow movement from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria,” the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s Tannhäuser (ironically used inappropriately to underscore scenes of witches consorting with the devil – Wagner meant this music to symbolize the opposite: decorous love and Christian piety) and other pieces that sounded familiar even though I couldn’t place them.

The Criterion version also retained the original color tints – which forced us to watch much of the movie through an eerie red glow which only added to the film’s overall incomprehensibility – and it restored famous scenes that were cut from the original by censors in various countries, including one particularly gruesome shot in which a witch pulls the finger off a severed hand, which she’s obtained from the corpse of a murderer who’d been hanged, tries to boil it for one of her potions, but finds it’s too dry for use as she intended. I found this version of Häxan almost totally unwatchable – I kept nodding off through much of it and I suspect I would have been more entertained by the 1968 version with Burroughs’ narration. (The online sources don’t say whether Burroughs actually wrote the narration or just read it.) I’ll say one thing for Benjamin Christiansen; his film eerily anticipates the Ken Burns style of documentary filmmaking, with its extensive use of on-screen texts. Many of the shots are printed books from the Middle Ages, or more likely modern-day reproductions of them, with a literal pencil point showing us the relevant portions.

As it stands, though, Häxan is a rather lumbering mixture that has some powerful individual scenes – including the ones in which witches literally kiss the ass of Satan (played by Benjamin Christiansen himself!) as a gesture of fealty – but is pretty dull and slow-going as a whole. In fact, that’s a common failing of a lot of silent-era documentaries; first-rate filmmakers like Robert Flaherty (in Nanook of the North and Moana) and the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack team (in Grass and Chang) were able to make tightly focused and incredibly beautiful and moving true-life films in the silent era, but for the most part silent documentaries were deadly dull for the same reason Häxan is: it’s just a written lecture on title cards interspersed with scenes that kinda-sorta illustrate what the lecture is about. Christiansen went on to a rather checkered career as a director; for a time in the late silent era he worked in the U.S. and made a few films, most of which are lost. One that survived was Seven Footprints to Satan (apparently Christiansen had a “thing” for movies involving the Devil!), which Charles and I saw decades ago, albeit in a really bad VHS bootleg with awful image quality and titles in Italian. (Apparently the one print that survived was from Italy.) That was the same source from which we got some other films, including a 1965 movie called Who Killed Teddy Bear? featuring Sal Mineo as a serial killer, and the 1931 version of The Black Camel (the only one of Warner Oland’s first five Charlie Chan films that survives, and a great movie and one of the best in the Chan series), and The Black Camel managed to come through even without the benefit of the pristine professional transfer it later got in Volume 3 of the 20th Century-Fox series of Charlie Chan boxed sets.

Law and Order: "Twelve Seconds" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 28, 2022)

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

With all that’s been going on in the life of me and my husband Charles the last few days, it’s taken me this long to have a chance to write about the three Law and Order shows I watched last Thursday night, October 28. The night began with an episode of the flagship Law and Order series called “Twelve Seconds,” and it opens with a nice-looking young man named James Pell (Jack Lynch) at 6 a.m. lifting his boat out of the water after having taken a rowing ride on the Hudson River. At first I thought he was going to be a guest body-finder, but it turns out he’s the victim, a 25-year-old law student who gets clubbed to death with a pipe laying by the side of the dock. Of course we don’t see who was wielding it, but as the police investigate Pell’s death it turns out he was a big asshole. Not only was he blackmailing a woman he’d dated for two months by threatening to post nude photos of her he’d taken when they were together, he was also involved with a much older man, a Hudson University law school professor named Ezra Nichols (Charles Parnell). This actor has a shock of gray hair that reminded me of David Brown, a Black Gay man I used to know in my days as a volunteer for the local AIDS organization Being Alive San Diego. Nichols is well known as a local attorney who’s done a lot of pro bono work (legal-speak for “free”) on behalf of civil rights causes, including what this script, following the dreadful modern parlance, calls “the LGBTQ community.” He also has a strange and incomprehensible relationship with James Pell, whom he has sponsored for a number of positions for which he’s unqualified, including editing the school’s law review.

Though Ezra Nichols is married to a woman named Michele (Hilary Ward) and has two sons, a 14-year-old named Cyrus (Isaiah Nicholas Pierce) and a five-year-old, the cops at first suspect Ezra of having a Gay affair with Pell and paying him for sex by recommending him to all those positions and honors. But testimony from Pell’s fellow students, including the man he beat out for those honors even though he was far more qualified than Pell, indicates that far from being in love (or at least in lust) with Pell, Nichols was barely cordial to him and made his distaste for him quite obvious every time they were seen together. The clue from which the cops finally piece the story together comes from a cocktail waitress who witnessed an incident at a banquet held to honor the first Afriican-American Gay man appointed to the New York Supreme Court, and the titular “12 seconds” during which Nichols called the appointee a “fag” and was recorded doing so on Pell’s cell phone. Pell threatened to post the clip online if Nichols didn’t reward him with all those plum assignments, but Nichols balked when Pell demanded that Nichols recommend him for a spot as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk. Unable to break Nichols’ own alibi for the morning, prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) indict his wife, but it turns out that both are innocent and the real killer was their 14-year-old son Cyrus. Eventually Cyrus is turned over to family court, since he’s still well underage, and supposedly the Nichols family is destroyed – which they wouldn’t have been if Ezra Nichols had told James Pell to go to hell, confident that his name and reputation would survive the revelation that he’d once used a bad word to someone at a party. Dick Wolf and his writers were clearly attempting a statement about so-called “cancel culture” and its corrosive effects on society, but this time around the story they came up with just didn’t support their ambitions.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Breakwater" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 28, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Breakwater,” was one of the very best shows in the recent history of this series. Written by Denis Hamill and Monet Hurst-Mendoza, two relatively new writers in the SVU firmament, it tells a tight-knit tale of Paul Greco (James Carpinello), a supervisor and trainer of the city’s would-be lifeguards. He is also an equal-opportunity sexual harasser and rapist, forcing himself on both women and men. The cops learn about this when the Manhattan Special Victims Unit receives a complaint from one of Greco’s lifeguards/victims, 19-year-old Diego Rodriguez (Damien Diaz, who aside from being a quite capable actor has pecs to die for!), who tells the cops that Greco assaulted him years before and is now abusing his 14-year-old sister Martina (Samantha Boscarino). As punishment for reporting him, ostensibly for showing up drunk to work but really for ratting him out to the cops about his sexual exploitation of the younmg lifeguard recruits, Greco orders Diego to swim back and forth between two buoys until he llterally starts to pass out from the strain. The lifeguard on duty, one of Greco’s dick-driven hires, panics and it’s up to SVU detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), to try to rescue Diego by diving into the water – only he’s too late. Diego dies in the hospital after a futile attempt to revive him, and both the police and prosecutor Sonny Carisi (Peter Scanavino) learn that they’re unable to prosecute Greco for Diego’s murder.

Then they decide to look at previous cases of drowning at beaches staffed by lifeguards who’d got their positions “putting out” for Greco rather than actually being qualified – including the lifeguard who was on duty when Diego drowned and who did nothing to save him because he was barely able to swim – and see if they can make a manslaughter case against Greco for the deaths of 10 people who’d drowned at beaches staffed by Greco’s unqualified lifeguards. This was an especially interesting SVU episode because the villain was multidimensional and well drawn. Of course he’s got the classic macho thing going, telling the cops that they can’t understand his job and the risks it entails, and lamenting that his lifeguards can’t save absolutely everybody. Under pressure from the city government, which fears that if word of Greco’s antics gets out they’ll be faced with multiple lawsuits from family members of people who drowned at beaches staffed by Greco’s girlfriends or boyfriends, prosecutors agree to a plea bargain, reasoning that Greco will be in prison until he turns 70 and he’ll no longer be the hot young stud muffin who was able to prey on those vulnerable people of both (mainstream) genders. Every time I start to think SVU has got stale and is just rehashing old formulae, and it may be time to put this show out of its misery already, Dick Wolf and his show runners and production staff – including executive story editors Kathy Dobbs and Nolan Dunbar – come up with an episode this good that proves there’s life in this old show yet!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Behind Blue Eyes" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 28, 2022)

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

Once again, the third show in the Thursday night run of the Law and Order franchise, Law and Order: Organized Crime, “Behind Blue Eyes,” was the weakest of the three. This show, too, had a fascinating villain: a man with especially intense blue eyes (hence the title, and also hence the victims’ ability to recognize him even though he wears masks while pulling his heists) who’s assembled a crew of gangsters to disguise themselves as New York City police officers. They use that guise to raid the homes of suspected drug dealers, steal their stuff and leave them intimidated because they don’t know the difference between the pretend cops and the real ones. The leader of this unusual gang is Vaughn Davis (Christopher Cassarino), a white guy who recruits recently paroled African-American Dante Scott (Pooch Hall – yes, that’s actually the name of the actor imdb.com credits with this role!), only Dante is morally appalled by Vaughn’s penchant for raping any reasonably attractive woman whom they encounter on one of their raids and then killing her so she can’t identify him later. Vaughn also threatens to kill Dante because he called him by name during one of the crimes – apparently writer Barry O’Brien had seen the 1949 movie White Heat, in which Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) similarly freaks out when someone in his gang calls him by name during a heist.

The Organized Crime series generally is not as good as it could have been – Dick Wolf’s writers have made way too much of white senior citizen Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) being commanded by a Black Lesbian sergeant who’s probably less than half his age (Meloni was born April 2, 1961 and Danielle Moné Truitt, who plays his commanding officer, Sgt. Ayanna Bell, was born March 2, 1981 but looks about a decade younger than that), and the chemistry between them is not great. (While I’m glad Dick Wolf’s writers resisted the temptation to have his and Mariska Hargitay’s characters become lovers, either during the SVU days or since, in their 12 seasons together on SVU they had an easy, if sometimes strained, chemistry that was far more appealing than the morre tense relationship between Meloni’s and Truitt’s characters here.) The best sequence in this show by far was the one in which the members of the Organized Crime squad end up in a three-way firefight with both Vaughn Davis’s gang and a group of uniformed NYPD officers who, having no idea that the plainclothes people are actually cops while the uniformed “cops” shooting at them really aren’t, just start firing first at the Organized Crime detectives and then indiscriminately at both groups at random. Otherwise, this show suffers even more than most Organized Crime episodes from Dick Wolf’s new-found obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and the resulting refusal to supply this show with an actual ending. The indication we get is that Dante Scott wants to leave the gang he’s been reluctantly recruited into, and Vaughn Davis is hinting that he won’t let Dante do so – at least not alive – but that’s only a hint and we’ll have to wait at least until the next episode, and probably until the writers decide they have got enough out of this so-called “story arc,” actually to bring it to a satisfying (or eve a not-so-satisfying) conclusion.

The Phantom of the Opera (Universal, 1925)

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

My husband Charles and I had been to last Sunday’s free 2 p.m. concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, and at the end of the show San Diego’s civic organist, Raúl Prieto Ramírez, had announced that on Saturday, October 29 the Pavilion would be presenting a special Hallowe’en evening concert (two days before actual Hallowe’en, but any relation between actual holidays and the dates they’re observed has got so fleeting over the years it didn’t matter) featuring a showing of the 1925 classic film The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian (and Edward Sedgwick, mostly a comedy director, who was brought in to restage the final chase scene after Julian’s version fell flat during previews) and starring Lon Chaney, Sr. with Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry. The event was in three parts: a pre-game show at 5:30 p.m. featuring Raúl doing a truly awful pretend “monster” voice and promoting a trivia contest at 5:30 p.m.; a performance by soprano Victoria Robertson and tenor Bernardo Bermúdez (the singers from last week’s “Opera4Kids” presentation of The Enchanted Tail, a pastiche opera based on themes from Carmen, Don Giovanni and The Merry Widow) doing a medley of the Big Tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera musical – “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Think of Me,” “Music of the Night,” and “All I Ask of You,” in that order – and the showing of the 1925 film.

I was curious as to how Raúl would do as an accompanist to a silent movie, but as it turned out he didn’t; the accompanist was Mark Herman, a Los Angeles-based piano and organ player who was there to accompany Robertson and Bermúdez and also to play for the movie. In 2002 (have we really been together that long?) Charles and I attended a live screening of the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera with a much better organist, Jim Riggs, whom we had a chance to talk to before the film began. Riggs said he wouldn’t include any of the music from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical because he can’t stand it, and he also wouldn’t include any music from Gounod’s opera Faust even though it’s the opera the Paris Opera is performing in the film. Mark Herman made musical choices that were considerably kitschier than Riggs’s had been (yes, that was 20 years ago, but I remember Riggs’s score as considerably darker and more dramatic, while Herman’s was more sentimental), and while he blessedly didn’t include any references to Lloyd Webber’s score (well, we’d already heard the Big Moments from it!), he did rather annoyingly use the big aria “Even bravest heart may swell” as a theme for Raoul de Chagny, the juvenile male lead, which in the opera is actually the big number for the baritone singing Valentin, brother of the heroine Marguerite. He also more logically incorporated the music from the big final scene from the opera, in which Marguerite (the woman Faust seduced, got pregnant and abandoned under the influence of the devil Mephistopheles) literally is lifted into heaven by angels as she dies in prison for having killed her and Faust’s baby, as aspiring opera singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) performs that scene on screen at the Paris Opera.

As far as the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera is concerned, I’ve commented on it pretty often over the years (one can read my previous posts on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/11/phantom-of-opera-universal-1925.html) and it’s an amazing film, even though it’s not what it could have been. It’s still far and away the best adaptation of Phantom ever done, and though the script-writing committee (Elliott Clowson, Bernard Conville, Frank McCormick, Raymond Schrock, Jasper Spearing and future director Richard Wallace, plus Walter Anthony and Tom Reed supplying the intertitles) included only one of the six torture chambers the Phantom maintains on the way to his underground lair, that’s still one more than any other film adaptation has used. Carlos Clarens, in his 1960’s book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, claimed that Lon Chaney himself directed most of the Phantom’s scenes (and if Chaney was personally responsible for the sense of doomed romanticism in such haunting images as the veil of Christine’s dress floating on the water as the Phantom takes her in his gondola to his redoubt, it suggests he might have made an excellent director), and imdb.com credits Chaney and Ernst Laemmle, studio head Carl Laemmle’s nephew, as one of four directors on this project along with Julian, Sedgwick and Chaney. (Carl Laemmle was so notorious a nepotist that Ogden Nash joked, “Uncle Carl Laemmle has a large faemmle.”) One thing I hadn’t realized before I saw Phantom on this go-round is how it anticipates Universal’s later Frankenstein movies in having essentially a posse of backstage crew members at the Paris Opera House go after the Phantom and drown him in the Seine at the end. In Phantom the posse is recruited by Simon Buquet (Gibson Gowland, star of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed) to avenge the Phantom’s murder of Simon’s brother Joseph (Bernard Siegel). But the origins of the famous mobs of villagers who stormed the Frankenstein castle in just about every movie Universal made featuring the Frankenstein Monster are clear here.

El Vampiro Negro (The Black Vampire) (Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I., 1953)

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

I had relatively good bus luck leaving the Organ Pavilion on Saturday night and as a result I was able to get home in time to see a fascinating and surprising film on Turner Classic Movies, El Vampiro Negro (1953). I had assumed from the title – Spanish for “The Black Vampire” – that it would be one of these cheap horror movies churned out by the yard by Mexican studios in the 1950’s and 1950’s. Wrong on all three counts: it had quite impressive production values, was made with a sense of genuine artistry, and it’s from Argentina, not Mexico. It was written and directed by Ramón Viñoly Barreto, though he put someone else’s name on the credits as co-writer (the someone was his former camera operator, Alberto Etchebehere, just to make the film seem less like a one-man operation). He derived the story largely from Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M. about a psychopathic murderer of children, whcih when El Vamprio Negro was made had just been remade in the U.S. ini 1952 with Joseph Losey as director and David Wayne replacing Peter Lorre as the villain. Both the Lang and Losey films center around two groups of people wh o are out to catch the child-murderer, the police who want to bring him to justice and a loosely organized syndicate of gangsters who want to capture him themselves and summarily execute him because the cops’ searches for him are disrupting the gangsters’ illegal but lucrative businesses. Director Barreto decided to give the tale a feminist spin, emphasizing the women who either have already lost their children to the murderer or are afraid of that happening. His central character is Amalia, stage name “Rita” (OIlga Dubarry, who had appeared semi-nude in a previous Argentinian film and by 1953 had acquired the reputation as “Argentina’s Marilyn Monroe,” though she’s actually a far more capable, determined and authoritative actress, albeit without Marilyn’s obvious vulnerability on screen).

She’s a singer in a seedy second-rate cabaret owned by Gastón (Pascual Pelliciota), who was recently released from prison on charges of trafficking drugs. He insists that he’s learned his lesson and is running a legitimate business, but the police, led by prosecutor Dr. Bernar (Roberto Escalada) – some sources, including the film’s Wikipedia page, have a “d” at the end of his last name, but imdb.com doesn’t – are convinced he’s still dealing and trafficking in drugs using his cabaret as a cover. Dr. Bernar(d) is also in charge of investigating the child murders, and in one scene he leads a raid on the cabaret where Alicia and her best friend Cora (Nelly Panizza) work. Alicia actually saw the killer dump a body in a nearby sewer (this is a city that still has open-air sewers) but she refuses to tell Bernar that because she’s afraid that if the people running the private school where her daughter Gogó (credited only as “Gogo” on the cast list but actually played by the director’s own eight-year-old daughter) attends find out that she’s a cabaret entertainer, they’ll expel the girl. Along the way Barreto copies quite closely some of the famous scenes from M, including the piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt which the killer whistles when he’s on the prowl, and the blind man who recognizes the song and gives the police the clue they need to find the killer.

The killer turns out to be someone nicknamed “The Professor” (Nathán Pinzón), whose real name is Teodoro Ulber. He makes his living teaching English as a second language to Argentinian kids – the one bit of English we hear in this otherwise all-Spanish film is him leading one of his lessons – and though he’s closer as a “type” to David Wayne than Peter Lorre, he does an excellent job with the character. Barreto didn’t even try to do the “court of the underworld” that’s so much a part of Lang’s film (and which Joseph Losey was forced to retain in the American remake even though he didn’t think it worked in the U.S. c. 1952; the original producer, Seymour Nebenzal, had made a deal with the U.S. Production Code Administration to be allowed to remake M as a new version of an acknowledged classic, but the permission would be withdrawn if he made any but the most minor changes in the story). Instead he ripped off another classic, The Third Man, and had the cornered Teodoro try to escape through the city’s underground sewers – where he’s confronted by a group of homeless people who live there and make it clear that he disgusts them. Barreto staged this scene with actual homeless denizens of the Buenos Aires sewers, and he immediately preceded it with a scene he ripped off from the first (1934) version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much – the mother confronts the killer who’s holding her daughter hostage (though I found myself wishing she’d been established as a crack shot, the way Edna Best’s character was in Hitchcock’s film, where she was able to pick off the person holding her daughter hostage without harming the daughter). It’s a matter of Barreto’s artistry that these borrowings from other movies don’t seem forced – instead they form a seamless artistic whole.

Also, El Vampiro Negro is stunning visually, thanks to Barreto and his cinematographer, Anibal González Paz, who create stunning black-and-white images and do some radical superimpositions most American or European filmmakers either wouldn’t or couldn’t have dared. The title refers to the killer’s love of blood – I remember once watching a really tacky videotape of a movie about real-life vampires, not (of course) undead people who keep themselves alive through drinking the blood of normal humans but people who get a sexual kink out of drinking their own or other people’s blood, and El Vampiro Negro includes a psychiatrist character whoi explains that Teodoro is irrational in that he craves the sight of human blood, but once he sees it, his desire is sated and he can go about the business of disposing of the body rationally. And as if that weren’t enough, prosecutor Bernar has a disabled wife (Gloria Castilla), and at one point ini the film he complains to Amelia that he’s lonely – and makes an out-front pass at her, to which she reacts basically by saying, “You men are all alike.” There’s also an undercurrent of social criticism in the way the police arrest people willy-nilly if they have even a remote connection to the crimes, despite one of the cops commenting that if we arrest everyone who provides them information, they’re not going to get much help from the community. About the only jarring note is the framing sequence – the film begins with Teodoro’s trial and the prosecutor and his attorney (Alberto Barcel) are arguing over whether Teodoro should be sentenced to death or confined in a mental hospital. Ultimately the jury votes to give him a death sentence – something that would probably have ticked off Fritz Lang, who said he made M at least in part as a message film against capital punishment.

Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (New Wave Entertainment, Warner Home Video, 2005)

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

Last night at about 9:45 I ran my husband Charles what I thought would be one documentary on the great 1940’s horror-film producer Val Lewton, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007), narrated by Martin Scorsese and written and directed by Kent Jones, which I remember seeing on Turner Classic Movies in 2008 on the day Heath Ledger’s death was announced. In fact this was a different Lewton documentary from two years earlier with a similar title, Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, directed by Constantine Nasr and co-written by him and Steve Haberman. The two cover much the same ground, though Shadows in the Dark begins with a photo of Orson Welles, whose connection with Lewton was an odd one: though they never worked together, it was the financial debacle of Welles’ two masterpieces at RKO Radio Pictures, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (now considered two of the finest films ever made, despite the horrible butchery wreaked on the latter by cutters and alternate directors at RKO after Welles left for South America to make his unfinished documentary It’s All True) that jeopardized RKO’s very existence as a movie company. George Schaefer, the RKO studio boss who had hired Welles, was fired and replaced by Charles Koerner, who announced that from then on RKO films would be based on “showmanship instead of genius” – an obvious slap at Welles. Koerner also demoted the crack team of artists and technicians Welles had assembled to make his films – including editors Mark Robson and Robert Wise, who between them had edited Citizen Kane – to the studio’s “B”-picture unit “because of our love for him, because of our hopes for him,” as Robson later recalled to interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse. Then Koerner looked at the enormous grosses Universal was making on their horror films in general and The Wolf-Man (1941) in particular. He wanted some of that box-office gold for his own studio, and hired Val Lewton to supply it.

Lewton was then West Coast story editor for David O. Selznick, who had hired him in the first place because Selznick had wanted to produce a screen version of Taras Bulba by 19th century Russian author Nikolai Gogol. If he were going to make a movie set in a foreign country, Selznick liked to hire writers who were from there in hopes of making his films more authentic – and Lewton qualified because he’d been born in Yalta, which was then part of the Russian empire and is now part of the Crimea in Russian-occupied Ukraine, on May 7, 1904. His parents divorced when Lewton, born Vladimir Leventon, was just two and his mother moved to Berlin and ultimately emigrated to the U.S., where she hoped to emulate the success of her sister, the internationally known actress Alla Nazimova. (The character of the aging, reclusive actress Julia Farren in Lewton’s film The Curse of the Cat People is clearly based on Nazimova.) In the 1920’s Lewton made his career as a journalist (where he was fired by one paper for making up a story about a crate full of kosher chickens dying of exposure after the truck containing them was run off the road by another driver) and pulp-fiction writer, where he got a story called “Bagheera” – after the panther in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book – into Weird Tales in 1930 at a time when H. P. Lovecraft was one of their star writers. As Selznick bounced around from Paramount to RKO to MGM, where in 1935 he filmed an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities in which his second-unit director was French-born Jaqcues Tourneur (once again Selznick was hiring someone from the country where his film was set!), Lewton ultimately became not only his story editor but one of his associate producers, and he and Tourneur took charge of the second unit on A Tale of Two Cities that shot the storming of the Bastille and other action scenes of the French Revolution.

Lewton advised Selznick against producing what became his magnum opus, Gone with the Wind, and as a result he was ordered to stand outside the restrooms during the film’s one preview screening and keep a tally of how many people used them. Selznick was having an argument with Al Lichtman, head of MGM’s distribution department, over whether the film should have an intermission, and he wanted to document that so many people would need to use the bathroom during the film that an intermission would be necessary. I was about to type that story two years ago, when I had just seen Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie for the umpteenth time, and I suddenly realized that if I Walked with a Zombie was the movie Lewton wanted to make about slavery and the plantation system, in which even though slavery had been abolished in the West Indies since the early 19th century Lewton, Tourneur and writers Curt Siodmak (whom Lewton brought over from Universal, where he’d written The Wolf-Man) and Ardel Wray clearly depict the family at the center of the story as a bunch of privileged white people morally corrupted by the slave labor that produced their family’s fortune, no wonder Lewton didn’t want Selznick to make Gone with the Wind. Maybe it wasn’t because he didn’t think a film based on Gone with the Wind would be commercially successful; maybe Lewton gave Gone with the Wind what would today be called a “woke” reading and didn’t want Selznick to film it because of its racism. In fact, one of the aspects of Lewton’s films I like best – and it was oddly unmentioned in either documentary – is the extraordinary sensitivity and complexity with which he treated people of color. Characters like the Black calypso singer Sir Lancelot, whom he used in three movies (I Walked with a Zombie, The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People), or the native American Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman) in The Leopard Man, emerge as rich, deeply drawn creations, a far cry from the racist stereotypes most Blacks and Natives were shown as in almost all other American movies. And as Charles observed when we watched Lewton’s first film, Cat People, and its (sort-of) sequel The Curse of the Cat People back-to-back not long ago, at least some of Lewton’s films would pass the “Bechdel test,” named after Lesbian writer Alison Bechdel, defined on Wikipedia as “whether a film features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man.”

Lewton felt stuck at Selznick’s operation in 1941 and newly appointed RKO chief Charlie Koerner made him an offer to head a production unit to produce “B” horror movies, with three conditions: the films couldn’t cost more than $150,000, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given him by RKO’s marketing department based on their ideas of what would draw horror-movie fans to theatres. Lewton realized that with budgets so small he couldn’t do the kind of in-your-face horror films in which Universal specialized, so he wouldn’t try. Instead he would figure out ways to scare the bejeezus out of audiences by suggesting monsters with shadows, eerie lighting and sound effects. (One of the things that shaped Lewton’s approach was all those technicians who had learned the evocative use of sound from radio-drama master Orson Welles.) One of the Lewton legends debunked here is that he was drawn to his first assigned title, Cat People, by his own fear of cats – here the debunker is his son,Val E. Lewton, who says in this documentary that the Lewton family actually owned a cat and, while Lewton never bonded with it, he never seemed scared of it, either. Using a no-name cast starring a French actress named Simone Simon (she was supposed to be Serbian, but in 1940’s Hollywood one accent was considered as good as another, which is how the Swedish Ingrid Bergman played a Frenchwoman in Adam Had Four Sons) and his old friend Jacques Tourneur as his director and DeWitt Bodeen as his writer, Lewton turned out a horror masterpiece that cost $135,000 and reportedly grossed $4 million. (Actually, as some of the interviewees in Shadows in the Dark acknowledged, it’s hard to measure how much a “B” picture made because they were essentially sold like yard goods. Theatre owners paid for “A” movies with a percentage of the box-office take but “B” movies were sold on a flat-fee basis, so the studio made the same amount of money on them whether they were any good or not.)

Lewton’s second film as producer was I Walked with a Zombie, and elsewhere I’d heard that the title came from a magazine article that was merely a travel piece about Haiti – and he and Tourneur came up with an anti-racist masterpiece that disappointed a lot of later film watchers who were expecting more like a traditional zombie movie and got a work of art. The one personal quote attributed to Val Lewton on his imdb.com page was from a letter he wrote to his sister saying, “You shouldn't get mad at the New York reviewers. Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called I Walked with a Zombie a good review.” After one more film together, The Leopard Man, RKO decided to separate Lewton and Tourneur (which one of the talking-head interviewees compared to the breakup between John Lennon and Paul McCartney that ended The Beatles) and assign both of them to movies with bigger budgets. But Lewton blew his chance because he insisted that Mark Robson direct his first big-budget feature and RKO wanted him to use a better-known director. So Lewton remained mired in “B” movies and Robson made his directorial debut with The Seventh Victim, which was supposedly the first Lewton film to lose money (though, again, it’s hard to say because “B” movies weren’t separately accounted and how much money they made – or lost – didn’t necessarily depend on how many people paid to see them). According to Robson, it didn’t achieve a following in the U.S. but it did in Britain. British producers “John and Roy Boulting came out here about that time, wanting to meet the fellow who had directed it. They used to bicycle a print of The Seventh Victim around London, among [directors like] Carol Reed and [Alberto] Cavalcanti and people like that, thinking it an advanced, weird form of filmmaking.”

Lewton’s next film, also with Robson as director, was The Ghost Ship, which could not legally be shown for over 50 years after its initial release because of a plagiarism suit the studio lost. They had worked out a small settlement with the writers Samuel Golding and Norbert Faulkner, who claimed to have written the story and offered it to Lewton. Golding and Faulkner were nuisance claimants who were well known to RKO and the other major studios, and RKO’s legal department thought it made more sense to give them a little money so they’d go away, but Lewton insisted on taking the case to trial and lost. (As I noted when I finally saw The Ghost Ship and posted about it on moviemagg, The Ghost Ship is simply a generic story about a group of sailors on board a ship with a crazy captain, and had RKO’s legal department been savvier, they could have dug up plenty of similar stories safely in the public domain, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Melville’s Moby Dick.) After that came The Curse of the Cat People, which aside from that lurid title is Lewton’s most personal film; the incident in the movie in which Amy Reed (Ann Carter) invites the neighborhood kids to her sixth birthday party but none of them show up because instead of a real mailbox she put the invitations in a hollowed-out tree because three years earlier her dad had told her that was a “magic mailbox” actually happened to Lewton during his childhood, and as I noted above the eccentric retired actress in the movie is clearly based on Lewton’s aunt, Alla Nazimova.

Then Lew Ostrow, Lewton’s supervising producer at RKO, died suddenly and his replacement, Jack J. Gross, signed Boris Karloff to a three-film contract and insisted Lewton use him. Lewton wanted no part of Karloff – he epitomized the in-your-face Universal style of horror he wanted no part of – but when the two finally met they hit it off perfectly and, according to Val E. Lewton, became close friends until Lewton’s death io 1951. In one respect the advent of Karloff (and Bela Lugosi, whom Gross signed for one film, The Body Snatcher) changed Lewton’s style; while his previous films had been set in the modern world, he reasoned that Karloff’s more formal acting style would mean he would work better in period pieces. Lewton and Karloff made three movies together – The Body Snatcher (based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson but, in my view, a deeper and richer work than the Stevenson story), Isle of the Dead and Bedlam – and there was going to be a fourth, Blackbeard, with Karloff as the notorious real-life pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Tench. This film was supposed to be the one that finally got Lewton out of the restricted world of “B” movies and gave him bigger budgets. Then Lewton did his usual meticulous historical research and learned that the pirates of Blackbeard’s time hadn’t sailed in large, ungainly vessels. Instead they had commanded fleets of small, fast, maneuverable cutters, much like the speedboats used by modern-day pirates in Somalia, and used them to surround the ships they meant to rob. RKO’s “suits” got a look at the script Lewton submitted and said no; they weren’t going to give Lewton an “A” budget for a film starring Boris Karloff as captain of a fleet of fishing boats.

Between that and the financial disaster of Bedlam – it did O.K. in America but the British Board of Film Censors slapped an absolute ban on it that lasted until the early 2000’s and thereby, as Karloff biographer Donald Glut put it, prevented Karloff’s countrypeople from seeing “perhaps his finest film since Frankenstein” – Lewton lost his job at RKO. He secured a production deal at Paramount that was guaranteed for two years, but he only made one film there – a romantic comedy called My Love Came Back – and then went to MGM for another romantic comedy, Please Believe Me. (Why Lewton didn’t aim his sights at making the sorts of crime movies that came to be called film noir is beyond me; certainly Lewton’s dark, shadowy style was well suited to film noir, and as I’ve argued before The Seventh Victim is on the cusp between horror and noir.) Lewton’s final film – and the only one of his post-RKO films I’ve actually seen – was a 1951 Western at Universal called Apache Drums, a brilliant film fully the equal of Lewton’s RKO movies for sheer creativity and artistry. It’s about an Army garrison being besieged by a band of Apaches, but the Native Americans seem to have been watching Lewton’s previous movies, because they decided to surround the camp and persuade the garrison to surrender mainly by playing the titular drums incessantly until they get so spooked they give up. It’s also a quite beautiful film for its use of color – the only time Lewton ever used it.

Shadows in the Dark features a quite impressive set of interviewees, including directors like William Friedkin, Joe Dante, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero and John Landis, and writers Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, and Richard Matheson, as well as director Robert Wise (who co-directed The Curse of the Cat People and was sole director on The Body Snatcher and was therefore the only person featured here who actually worked with Lewton), Lewton’s son Val E. and Karloff’s daughter Sara. If anything, however, the film overstates Lewton’s influence on contemporary horror films; all too many horror directors today go fro gross-out effects, and if Val Lewton had produced Friedkin’s The Exorcist he’d probably have asked him, “Do we have to have Linda Blair throw up pea soup and her head spin around on her neck?” I remember when I saw Wes Craven’s film Scream and was delighted by the first hour and a half of it – it seemed neo-Lewtonian and marvelously done in terms of translating Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror to the modern era – and then in the last half-hour Craven symbolically threw his hands up in the air and apparently thought, “O.K., I”ve proven I can be an artist. Now I’m going to give my audience what I know they want and spurt blood and gore all over the screen” – which, alas, he did.

Live at the Belly Up: Sam Outlaw (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2018)

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

After the Val Lewton documentary last night I wanted to watch the latest episode of Live at the Belly Up, featuring a man named Sam Outlaw – “Yeah, right,” you’ll be going, and you’d be right. He was born July 26, 1982 in Aberdeen, South Dakota as Sam Morgan, but at age 10 he was moved with his parents to the town of Poway, a suburb of San Diego. As a young man he pursued a career in advertising, but he was already an aspiring country music. His Wikipedia page claims that his parents were hard-core Fundamentalist Christians who severely limited the kinds of music he could listen to when he was growing up, but as a young man he discovered the neo-country band Asleep at the Wheel and said their tribute album to Bob Wills was "country music in a bottle" for him. He decided to put a band together ahd the first thing he did was go to a local music store in Los Angeles, where he was working and living, to ask if anybody knew of a pedal steel guitar player. They did, and he and Outlaw became the nucleus of a band that as of the Live at the Belly Up show they did in 2018 consisted of seven players: Outlaw on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, Molly Jensen on second vocals and rhythm (electric) guitar, men on lead guitar, bass, keyboards and pedal steel guitar (one downer of having to watch these shows live as they air is I can’t stop the screen to read the personnel lists and write down who plays what), and a woman drummer. She also handles basking vocals and is damned good. Outlaw performed 15 songs – just one less than Deer Tick played the last time I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode – and, as I’ve noted earlier about this show, one can tell whether the group is a tight-knit song band or a loose jam band based on the number of songs they can crowd into the Live at the Belly Up time slot (which is usually 52 minutes, though I think they give Outlaw slightly more time than that).

My favorite song of the night was his second, called “I’m Not Jealous” and the one true doet of the night between Outlaw and Molly Jensen; for once, instead of just lead and backup singer, they were doing a true duet, and the song sounded like the sort of things George Jones and Tammy Wynette were recording together for years, since Columbia’s Nashville head Billy Sherrill was making a ton of money off them and wasn’t about to let them stop recording together just because they had broken up as a couple. Whether Outlaw and Jensen are a real-life couple off-stage I have no idea, though I got a vibe from them that they are; I was hoping his Wikipedia page would clarify and also give me the names of his musicians, but it didn’t. Outlaw describes his music as a fusion of the traditional honky-tonk country of Hank Williams and his imitators; the so-called “Bakersfield sound” of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard (“and Rose Maddox!,” I muttered under my breath, given how big a fan of hers I became almost instantly once i first heard of her on the Ken Burns mega-documentary on country music; Maddox was the first woman country singer to project feistiness, independence and self-sufficiency, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton or Tammy Wynette without the trail Rose Maddox blazed); and the Southern California folk/rock/country sound of James Taylor, The Eagles and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

The so-called “L.A. Country” sound actually began in 1968, when The Byrds hired pedal steel guitarist, singer and songwriter Gram Parsons and made a country album called Sweetheart of the Rodeo which got them booed off the stage at the Grand Ole Opry because they wore long hair. Parsons had an all too typical drug-shortened rock-star life, but not before he recruited the singer Emmylou Harris to country after she’d started out singing rock. Sam Outlaw’s music sounds like country with pop flavorings, though so far (at least) they remain no more than flavorings. It’s interesting how he mixes the pedal steel guitar (that once-paradigmatic country instrument now usually either omitted altogether or buried deep in the mix) front and center. His song titles include “Kind to Me,” “I’m Not Jealous,” “Who Do You Think You Are?,” “Two Broken Hearts,” “Say It to Me,” “Look at You Now,” “Ghost Town” (inspired, he said, by his mom leaving his dad and then dying almost immediately afterwards), “You’re Playing Hard to Get (Rid Of)” (which he said was about an ex-girlfriend, someone he had a hard time getting rid of, “Love Me for a While,” “Tenderheart” (one word), “Angeleno” (which Charles got a sideways glance at the chyron when the title was on air and he mistakenly read it as “Anglican,” which ied him to a few amusing conjectures about what a country song about the Church of England might sound like), “All My LIfe,” “Keep It Interesting,” “Trouble,” and “Hole Deep in My Heart.” Outlaw’s music is pleasant and engaging but not especially memorable, and he does pretty much what he sets out to do, which is plumbing the usual emotional realms of country music and saying something engaging but not really mind-blowing or attention-grabbing.

The Leopard Man (RKO, 1943)

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

Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched two more movies from the Warner Home Video boxed set of nine movies produced by Val Lewton for RKO between 1942 and 1946: The Leopard Man I1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945). The Leopard Man was the third and last collaboration between Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, the French-born son of another prominent director,Maurice Tourneur. Previously Lewton and Tourneur had made Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the latter of which Tourneur described as “a terrible title for a very good film – the best film I’ve ever done in my life.” (The imdb.com page on Val Lewton has one quote from him, taken from a letter to his sister in which he wrote, “You shouldn't get mad at the New York reviewers. Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called I Walked with a Zombie a good review.”) Alas, Tourneur’s reminiscences of The Leopard Man in his interview for the Charles Higham-Joel Greenberg book The Celluloid Muse were considerably less positive: “It was too exotic, it was neither fish nor fowl, a series of vignettes, and it didn’t hold together.” The main problem with The Leopard Man was it was a mystery whodunit masquerading as a horror film. The original trailer made it look like a male version of Cat People or a feline knockoff of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941) – which itself had been referred to in Cat People in which Tom Conway’s character ironically joked to Kent Smith’s when he was about to confront the cat person, “Maybe I should have a gun with a silver bullet.”

Instead it was based on a novel by noir writer Cornell Woolrich called Black Alibi and takes place in a town on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Southwest. Tourneur recalled the locale as Mexico, but it isn’t; the town sheriff, though called “Robles” (Ben Bard), is a white man who speaks unaccented English, and all too many of the actors playing Mexicans speak in terrible Frito Bandito accents. A press agent named Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), worried that his client and girlfriend Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks, first wife of writer/director Richard Brooks, who would go on to an unforgettable appearance as the title character of Lewton’s next film, The Seventh Victim) would be upstaged by the local dancer Clo-Clo (Margo, a Mexican actress who made her screen debut in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion, playing the mistress of a super-lawyer who kills her and uses his legal knowledge to cover up his crime; her most famous role was in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon [1937], in which she played the woman who ages immediately once she’s taken out of Shangri-La), rents a black leopard (portrayed by an animal named “Dynamite” who was the same beast who played the black panther in Cat People) from a Native American named Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman). Charlie How-Come has toured out of a carnival wagon with the animal for over 10 years, and he bills himself as “The Leopard Man.” He’s also drawn with a level of sensitivity and pathos, representing Lewton’s usual depictions of people of color as fully multidimensional characters instead of racist stereotypes.

Manning’s deal with Charlie How-Come is he’ll pay $10 to rent the leopard for one night, but will owe him $225 if anything happens to the beast. Unfortunately, while Kiki makes her dramatic entrance at the local club (an outdoor venue with a large fountain which I suspect was recycled from the 1940 RKO film Too Many Girls, best known as the movie on which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz first met), the leopard panics and escapes. A Mexican teenage girl named Teresa Delgado (Margaret Lsndry) is sent out by her mother (Kate Drain Lawson) to buy corn meal so the family can have fresh tortillas, but in one of the film’s few great sequences she arrives too late at the mercado, is forced to go across town to a market that is still open, and on her way home she’s attacked and ultimately killed by the fugitive leopard. Lewton and Tourneur worked out an effect similar to the famous “bus” scene in Cat People in which Teresa is momentarily startled by what turns out to be the sound of a passing train, and she’s finally set upon and killed by the leopard just as she’s outside her home and pleading in vain for her mom to unlock the door and let her in. Mom had previously locked it and told her she wouldn’t be let back in until she brought the corn flour (which she’d dropped in her previous flight) and it’s only when her brother realizes what’s going on and forces open the lock that the door finally opens – too late, as we’ve learned by a stream of Teresa;s blood flowing under the door and into the Delgado home. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this effect in an earlier movie, but it’s still a chilling scene and a very Lewtonesque way of indicating the death of a character.)

Later Consuelo Contreras (Tula Parma) also goes out at night to leave flowers on the grave of her father – and to meet a boyfriend named Raoul Belmonte (Richard Martin) – only the groundskeeper of the cemetery warns her he’s going to lock the front gates at 6 when he closes for the night. Consuelo misses the man’s warning signal and is trapped in the cemetery, where a man approaches and offers to get a ladder so she can leave – onliy she gets killed. Later Clo-Clo also gets. killed when she goes out at night to retrieve a $100 bill her sugar daddy gave h er. The police assume it’s the leopard striking again, but Jerry Manning is convinced that Consuelo and Clo-Clo were actually murdered by a human, a psychopath who yielded to temptation and knocked oer off in a way that made it seem like the leopard killed her. The original trailer gave away the fact that the second and third killings were human murders, and it’s not that big a deal to figure out whodunit: it’s Dr. Galbraith (James Bell, who’d had a smaller but more interesting role as the hapless Western doctor in I Walked with a Zombie). He’s been hanging around the action peripherally and giving bits and pieces of exposition about the killing habits of both leopards and the humans who emulate them, and he makes his living running a small museum of local artifacts. Ultimately Jerry and Kiki expose him as the murderer and Raoul, Consuelo's boyfriend, shoots him – whereupon Sheriff Robles reluctantlyi arrests him.

The Leopard Man has some genuinely creative uses of sound – Clo-Clo likes to walk around clinging away with her castanets, and the sound of them becomes a Leitmotif on the soundtrack until she’s killed ‘But there were too many bad scenes,” Tourneur told Higham and Greenberg, “and even though we used an effective Mexican birthday song, the effect was spotty, uneven.” Charlkes noted that the film was essentially a reworking of I Walked with a Zombie – they’re both clashes of cultures set in towns of uncertain loyalty where indigenous and Western cultures meet – but I Walked with a Zombie is a much deeper, richer film and the culture clashes in Zombie are far more important. I Walked with a Zombie is about the entire heritage of the New World and how slavery shaped it to the extenit that almost a century after it was abolished, great families were living off the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated on the backs of slaves and dealing with the moral corruption of that, while The Leopard Man is more or less a straightforward whodunit with an exotic locale.

The Body Snatcher (RKO, 1945)

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

After The Leopard Man Charles and I jumped forward two years to the 1945 film The Body Snatcher, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story of the same name but heavily remodeled by writers Philip MacDonald and “Carlos Keith” (a pseudonym for Val Lewton). This one came about because of the sudden departure of Lewton’s immediate superior at RKO, Lew Ostrow, who had come to the company following the success of the Hardy Family series at MGM, Ostrow had personally produced these films but like his MGM mentor, Irving Thalberg, had not taken on-screen credit for them because “a credit you give yourself means nothing.” Alas, Ostrow was replaced by the appropriately named Jack J. Gross, who not only took on-screen credit on Lewton’s later films for RKO but directly interfered with his artistic vision in ways Ostrow never had. Among Gross’s decisions were the three-film contract with Boris Karloff which Gross signed and assigned the horror star to Lewton’s unit. Lewton was aghast – to him, Karloff represented exactly the kind of in-your-face horror from Universal that he had always tried to avoid. Then he and Karloff actually met, and Karloff began the meeting by telling Lewton he’d loved his films and was looking forward to working with him. But the advent of Karloff and Bela Lugosi, whom Gross had signed to make one film for the Lewton unit, had one detrimental effect on Lewton’s style; instead of setting his films in the contemporary world, he decided that the more stylized, pageant-like acting styles of Karloff and Lugosi would work better in period stories. For Lewton’s first film with Karloff he selected Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher,” first published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, a macabre tale Stevenson only sent to the magazine when they rejected a previous submission, “Markheim,” as too short. Though Stevenson himself thought “The Body Snatcher” “too horrific” for publication, he sent it to the magazine anyway – and it was an instant hit.

Stevenson’s inspiration for “The Body Snatcher” was the real-life case of William Burke and William Hare, two men in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1828 who were known as so-called “resurrection men” – crooks who stole recently dead bodies from graves and sold them to medical schools for dissection. Unfortunately, Edinburghians weren’t dying fast enough to meet the demand, so Burke and Hare decided to start increasing the supply by murdering people. After a two-month killing spree they were caught when fellow residents of the lodging house where they lived recognized their latest victim, Margaret Docherty, and called the police. Hare was given iimmunity for testifying against Burke and his wife, and in the end Burke was convicted and sentenced to death while his wife’s trial ended in a verdict of “not proven” – a Scottish invention in which the accused was technically acquitted but not legally exonerated. Burke’s own corpse was donated to the University of Edinburgh Medical School for dissection, and his skeleton is on display there to this day. Meanwhile, Robert Knox, the director of the University of Edinburgh Medical School who had authorized the purchase of bodies from Burke and Hare, was never prosecuted and went on to a long and respected career in British medicine until his own death in 1862.

Stevenson’s story starts with a framing sequence set in the 1880’s, when he wrote it, in a tavern called The George in Debenham, Scotland, in which four men were drinking and having a conversation. One of them, Donald Fettes, is a long-time homeless alcoholic who once went to medical school in Edinburgh and still remembers enough of his skills to set fractures and do other minor care for his fellow homeless people. He’s shocked out of his drunken stupor when he hears the voice of his old teacher, Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane, who has arrived at The George to treat a rich Londoner who had fallen ill while staying at the attached hotel. Fettes narrates the story of how when he was a young man, he was Dr. Macfarlane’s assistant, and his duties included dealing with “resurrection man” John Gray. He recalls one night when Fettes and Macfarlane met at a tavern and Gray came in and called Macfarlane “Toddy,” a nickname Macfarlane couldn’t stand. In a scene from the story MacDonald and “Keith” retained for the film, Macfarlane says to Gray, “Don't you call me that confounded name.” Gray says, “Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do that all over my body,” to which Fettes replies, “We medicals have a better way than that. 'When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.”

MacDonald and “Keith” made the line even scarier by taking out the word “dead,” as if doctors were regularly knocking off no-longer-wanted friends by cutting them to pieces. In the story’s climax Macfarlane decides to get rid of Gray by killing and dissecting him, then have to take up grave-robbing themselves to keep the medical school supplied with cadavers. They set their sights on a recently deceased street person named Jane Galbraith and steal her body, only when they load it into their carriage they find that it has supernaturally transformed into, as Stevenson put it in his chilling closing line, “the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.” Reflecting Val Lewton’s distaste for using supernatural elements in his films ujnless he absolutely had to, in the movie the dead Gray’s appearance in the carriage is only an hallucination on Macfarlane’s part, and while the story ended with both men surviving the carriage crash, the movie ends with Macfarlane dead from the crash and Fettes walking off, presumably to pursue a healthy and lucrative medical career of his own.

The film The Body Snatcher takes place in 1831, just three years after the Burke and Hare murders, and the public revulson against them has made it harder than ever for Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane (Henry Daniell) to get specimens for his anatomy classes. The film basically follows the outline of Stevenson’s plot but adds a few wrinkles that to my mind mostly add richness and fine detail to the tale. Their principal change was to add the character of Georgina Marsh (Sharyn Moffett, from whom director Robert Wise extracts a performance almost as good as the one he got from Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People), whose mother (Rita Corday, a surprising role for a woman best known as a femme fatale in RKO’s various detective series) is desperate to get Dr. Macfarlane to operate on her disabled daughter. She got crippled in the same carriage accident that killed her father and forced her mom to raise her as a single parent, and her disease is getting worse and so is her level of pain. Dr. Macfarlane originally doesn’t want to operate – he’s worried if he says yes, so many patients will flood his schedule he’ll have no time left for teaching, and he’s also scared that he might not be a good enough doctor to do the job. But John Gray (Boris Karloff), who in this version is a cab driver as well as a grave-robber and who has already taken an interest in the little crippled girl and her welfare, blackmails Macfarlane into performing the operation. Georgina has taken a fondness to Gray’s white horse and he’s promised her that one day the animal will call to her and she’ll be able to walk to the horse and greet her (or him, since the horse’s gender is unspecified), which I figured was MacDonald and “Keith” making a deposit in the clichébank for withdrawal when they need to shock Georgina into wanting to walk again. (Surprisingly, they didn’t.)

They also give Dr. Macfarlane a wife, Meg Cameron (Edith Atwater) – though for reasons of prestige he feels he has to pass her off as a maid – and she’s effectively drawn as a woman sexually obsessed with her husband but also not happy with what he does and how he lives his life outside the bedroom. And Dr. Macfarlane also has a manservant, Joseph (Bela Lugosi, in his last of eight films with Karloff), a rather slow-witted man who in the two legendary horror actors’ final scene together tries to blackmail Gray into paying him to keep quiet about the murder Gray committed to supply Macfarlane with a fresh corpse. Gray inveigles Joseph into joining him in a scheme to “Burke” various people and sings him a doggerel ballad about the original Burke and Hare. (Boris Karloff was proud of his singing voice and he was persuaded to play a mad opera singer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Opera with the promise that he could sing himself, but at the last minute the producers decided Karloff’s voice wasn’t good enough and he was dubbed.) Gray offers to demonstrate to Joseph how Burke and Hare killed their victims through an in-your-face strangulation that left no wounds that would have made the bodies useless for dissection, but it’s all a ruse for Gray to kill the slow-witted Joseph. Gray later sends the body to Macfarlane and Fettes for dissection, and this gives him even more leverage because “you wouldn’t want the world to know that the great Dr. Macfarlane gets bodies for dissection from his own household.”

The woman whose murder unravels the whole plot becomes a well-known street singer (Donna Lee) whose sole repertoire seems to be the Scottish folk song “Huntingtown,” also known as “When Ye Gang Away, Jamie?” Val Lewton and Robert Wise stage her demise in a haunting way that epitomizes Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror: we see merely a dark street with a small light at the end of a path, and we hear Donna Lee’s voice singing the song until she makes a brief strangling noise – and then she’s silent, to indicate she’s dead. (In 1945 Universal made the last in their “Mummy” sequence, The Mummy’s Curse, a pretty bad movie but one that shows the folks at Universal had been watching Lewton’s films. They tried to graft his approach onto theirs by setting The Mummy’s Curse in a Louisiana bayou and having much of the film take place around a grungy nightclub with a proprietress who entertains there – only they had a hard time tapping into the Lewton formula while still having a big, ugly monster clunking around the set. In The Mummy’s Curse, the mummy patiently waits for the nightclub performer to finish her song before he kills her.)

The most fascinating things about The Body Snatcher are the multidimensionality of the characters – particularly the principal villains, Wolfe Macfarlane and John Gray – and the progressive social commentary and clear disdain for the British class system. Not only does Mrs. Macfarlane have to hide her status from the world and pose as merely his maid instead of his wife, but there’s one scene in which John Gray explains himself and says, “As long as I can make the great Dr. Macfarlane jump to my will, then I am a man, Without that, I am nothing.” (I know virtually nothing about Val Lewton’s politics, but judging from his films they were probably pretty progressive.) Henry Daniell is playing the sort of role Karloff himself had played in a number of previous movies (most of them for Columbia): the dedicated scientist and educator who wants to create something that will help humanity, but pursues it in an unethical way that eventually turns him evil. And Karloff becomes a figure of real pathos; in this (and, to a lesser extent, in his two other films for Lewton, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam), he’s evil but he’s also understandable, and we feel for him far more than we do for the creepy Macfarlane. Two films after The Body Snatcher Daniell played Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green, one of the last Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and he’s clearly warming up for that role here. The Body Snatcher is a morally complex film (much more so than Stevenson’s original story!) which ultimately is about not only how evil can come from good but how good can come from evil: crippled Georgina can walk again only because the film’s two principal villains get together and make it happen. Looking at the fine Gothic atmospherics of Robert Wise’s direction, it’s hard to believe that 21 years later he would be directing The Sound of Music!

Cat People (RKO, 1942)

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

Last night at 9 I broke open a boxed set of DVD’s I’d just received from Amazon.com, The Val Lewton Collection, a set of the nine horror classics producer Val Lewton made for RKO Radio Pictures between 1942 and 1946. This box came out in 2008 but I didn’t buy it then because I was upset that it didn’t include the two non-horror subjects Lewton made for RKO in that time, Mademoiselle Fifi (an adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant short story that had also been the distant inspiration for John Ford’s Stagecoach) and Youth Runs Wild (a pioneering film about juvenile delinquency that was about 10 years ahead of its time). I was hoping to get the Lewton box by Hallowe’en so I could screen my husband Charles these decidedly odd, fascinating films again (I had some of them in off-the-air recordings from Turner Classic Movies and others, but not all together and not in professional transfers). The disc I chose to screen was the one containing Lewton’s first film as a producer, Cat People (1942), and its nominal sequel, The Curse of the Cat People (1944). After a long stint as West Coast story editor for David O. Selznick – during which he advised Selznick to pass on making Gone with the Wind, though fortunately his East Coast story editor, Kay Brown, talked him into it. The last time I watched Lewton’s second film as a producer, I Walked with a Zombie, I got the impression that Lewton’s real reason for not wanting Selznick to make Gone with the Wind was its racism. I Walked With a Zombie is about a white family living in the West Indies and, though it is set in contemporary times, they are still living a life of privilege based on a fortune accumulated with slave labor, and the last time I watched it I thought, “If this is the movie Val Lewton wanted to make about slavery and the plantation system, no wonder he didn’t want Selznick to make Gone with the Wind!”

Lewton got his chance to produce “B”-budget horror movies from Charles Koerner, who had been appointed studio head of RKO after his predecessor, George Schaefer, was fired largely because of the tons of money the studio had lost on Schaefer’s pet hire, Orson Welles. Koerner announced that from now on RKO films would be based on “showmanship instead of genius” – an obvious slap at Welles – and he demoted the team Welles had assembled to work on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, including film editors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, both of whom became directors under Lewton’s sponsorship, to the “B” ranks. Fortunately, they ended up working on Lewton’s unit, and Lewton grabbed the chance to work with a Welles-trained technical crew because he had already decided to use subtlety, shadows and sound effects to make his movies and scare audiences. As I wrote in my blog post two years ago on Lewton’s fourth (and, I think, best) movie, The Seventh Victim, “Lewton was given three restrictions -- his films couldn’t cost more than $150,000 to make, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given to him by RKO’s marketing department based on what they thought they could sell to the horror audience -- but within those limits he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.” Lewton picked Cat People for his first RKO production because he had a phobic fear of cats himself, and he developed the story around a foreign woman because the star assigned to his unit, an on-the-downgrade Simone Simon, had an accent even though she was French and the character she plays here is Serbian. Lewton and his collaborators, director Jacques Tourneur (who was also French, and one wonders if he directed Simon in French the way Josef von Sternberg famously directed Marlene Dietrich in German) and writer DeWitt Bodeen, originally wanted to set the film in Serbia and have it deal with a village whose inhabitants apparently go along with the Nazi occupiers but secretly turn into were-cats at night to slaughter them.

Knowing that to do this on a $150,000 budget would be impossible, Lewton had Bodeen rewrite the story to take place in contemporary New York City and make the central character, Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a Serbian immigrant making a living doing sketches for a fashion house. She has a meet-cute with Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), an engineer for a ship constructing firm, when he runs into her at a zoo where she’s doing sketches of a black panther that fascinates her. Irena tears off the page on which she’s done her latest panther sketch and tries to throw it away, but misses the trash can. Oliver picks up the sketch and points to a nearby sign, “Let no one say, and say it to your shame/That all was beauty here until you came.” Irena then makes another sketch, which she also discards, and Oliver doesn’t open the crumpled page but we get to see it: it’s a drawing of the panther with a sword stuck through it (the same motif we’ve seen in the opening title). Oliver invites Irena to tea, and rather than go somewhere the two share tea in Irena’s apartment, a brownstone. “I’ve often wondered what’s behind these brownstones,” Oliver says, and when they go in we see what’s behind this one, at least: the famous entry hall Mark-Lee Kirk designed for Orson Welles’ film The Magnificent Ambersons. (As I’ve noted in these pages before, RKO probably amortized their losses on that movie just by how often they reused its sets.) Oliver notices a statuette on Irena’s coffee table, and Irena explains it’s a statue of King John of Serbia in full armor holding a sword with a cat impaled on it. Irena explains that during King John’s reign he had to deal with a group of Satanists who had taken over the village Irena later came from, and while most of the Satanic witches were put to death, a few escaped into the mountains and became cats after dark, terrorizing the populace.

Oliver and Irena get engaged and ultimately marry, despite the unease and discomfort of Oliver’s co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who was in love with Oliver herself. Only at the wedding party Irena is confronted by an odd-looking woman who resembles a cat. She addresses her in Serbian and Irena explains, “She called me her sister!” Oliver moves into Irena’s brownstone but the two are unhappy together because Irena fears that if she ever allows herself to become sexually aroused by her husband, she’ll turn into a were-cat and kill him. Oliver is convinced this is only a fantasy from her childhood and the tales she heard while growing up, and at Alice’s suggestion he hires a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway in full “Falcon” mode), to treat her. Dr. Judd hypnotizes her and she has a rather crudely animated dream of cats – an effect Lewton and company may have borrowed from the 1941 MGM version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which similar images accompany one of Spencer Tracy’s transformations between the title roles – but draws back from seeing him again. Irena starts stalking Alice, and in the film’s most famous scene Alice is walking along a tree-lined path at night with Irena following her. Suddenly there is a loud, gigantic hissing noise on the soundtrack and we think for sure Irena has changed into a cat-woman and is attacking Alice – but the noise is revealed as merely the sound of air-brakes on a bus. (Lewton used this sort of sound effect – scary at first, even though its ultimate source is innocuous – in virtually all his films, and his crew even started calling it “the bus.”) Alice, no fool she, takes the opportunity to escape Irena by getting on the bus.

Later there’s a scene in which Alice is swimming at night in a pool at the building where she works – apparently the employees of this film can breeze in at all hours of the day or night and catch up on their workloads – and she’;s scared out of her wits by sinister noises even though she doesn’t see anyone there. However, when she gets out of the pool she finds that her bathrobe has been slashed to ribbons as if by the claws of a giant cat. Alice shows the slashed robe to Dr. Judd and tells him she thinks Irena in cat-woman form clawed it. Dr. Judd sees Irena two more times, and the last time he makes a pass at her – either out of lust or just to demonstrate that Irena can handle sexual stimuli in a normal human fashion. Instead Irena turns into a cat and kills him, though as with the entire movie (except for one scene in the office at night in which RKO’s executives pulled rank on Lewton, Tourneur and Bodeen and told them to have an actual panther prowling around the office, where the filmmakers had wanted to stay consistent and suggest the were-beast’s presence with sound effects alone) we’re carefully shown very few details, just bits and pieces of two humans engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Wounded in the struggle with Dr. Judd – he had a cane with a sword in it which he used to defend himself – Irena retreats to the zoo and opens the panther’s cage with a key she stole earlier when the zookeeper carelessly left it in the lock. Irena frees the panther – who promptly gets run over by a truck driver and is killed – and she lays on the floor of the enclosure as she dies.

Cat People was a huge box-office hit – it reportedly grossed $4 million on a production budget of $135,000 – and it no doubt helped RKO recoup some of its losses on Orson Welles. It was remade in 1982 with Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, directed and co-written by Paul Schrader, but I avoided that version after reviewers warned me that Schrader had jettisoned Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror and made the film explicitly sexual and gruesome. (I’m convinced there’d be a modern audience for Lewton’s style of horror cinema; when I saw Wes Craven’s Scream I loved the first hour and a half, which seemed to be aiming for the Lewton touch and which I found delightfully scary. Alas, for the last half-hour Craven abandoned artistry and instead gave the modern-day horror audience what it wants by splashing blood all over the screen.) The 1942 Cat People is a fascinating film that holds up beautifully, and Charles noted how plainly the film’s first few reels were shot – up until the echoey sound effects cut in and the mood becomes more sinister and Gothic. It’s a film that works on every level, even though the actors were either character types or faded stars (like Jack Holt, who plays Oliver’s and Alice’s employer, “The Commodore”), and is an example of how sheer ingenuity and skill can make a fantastic film on a limited budget.

The Curse of the Cat People (RKO, 1944)

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

Two years after Cat People. Lewton, Bodeen and two new directors – Gunther von Fritsch, a documentarian whom Lewton gave the opportunity to make his first fiction film, only to fire him midway through the shoot and replace him with former editor Robert Wise, who would go on to a long career making major films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Want to Live!, West Side Story (co-directed with Jerome Robbins, who’d directed the original stage production) and The Sound of Music, teamed up for what RKO tried to pass off as a sequel to Cat People called The Curse of the Cat People even though the two films have virtually nothing in common except three characters and a similarly shadowy approach. It takes place long enough after Cat People for Oliver Reed and Alice Moore to have got married and had a six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter, who was eight when she made this film). They’ve also moved out of New York City to Tarrytown in upstate New York, famous as the location of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and Hawthorne’s tale of the headless horseman figures prominently in the film. Amy is a lonely, alienated child whose attempts to make friends her own age keep going wrong. She invites the neighbor kids to her sixth birthday party, but none of them show up because instead of mailing the invitations in a real mailbox, she left them in a hollow tree stump because three years earlier her father Oliver had told her it was a “magic mailbox.” Naturally the other children are upset because Amy promised them she’d invite them to her birthday party but they never received the invitations.

Amy is a child who spends much of her time alone, dreaming and inventing fictitious friends because she doesn’t have any real ones. Though the child in The Curse of the Cat People is a girl instead of a boy, the film is largely autobiographical; as a child, Val Lewton himself had a birthday party to which no one showed up because he’d put the invitations in a hollow tree stump thinking it was a “magic mailbox.” Her only confidant is her parents’ Black manservant, Edward – played by the marvelous Black calypso singer Sir Lancelot, whom Lewton had brought to Hollywood for I Walked With a Zombie two years earlier. Knowing that calypso singers in Jamaica and Trinidad often sang topical songs about the current events on those islands, Lewton asked Sir Lancelot to write a similar song about the events of I Walked With a Zombie as if they were really happening. The result was “Shame and Scandal,” which was a good enough song the Black folksinger Odetta covered it in the late 1950’s. Though in The Curse of the Cat People Sir Lancelot is down to the traditional servant role Black people played in Hollywood movies, he’s portrayed in such a way that he seems more like one of the family than the traditional dumb, shuffling stereotype to which most Black actors were then relegated. It was a shock when I first saw the film Happy Go Lucky, a 1942 Paramount production made just before Sir Lancelot’s three films for Lewton (he was also in the long-lost The Ghost Ship), in which he had to play the usual demeaning stereotype. One of the things I most love about Lewton is his treatment of people of color in his films, which was miles ahead of how most filmmakers of the time used them. Actors of color who got cast in Lewton productions got to play rich, detailed characters, and Lewton frequently built the prejudices against them into his plots in order to condemn it. Like John Huston, Val Lewton was anti-racist well before anti-racism was cool.

The Curse of the Cat People also features two dysfunctional families, the Reeds and the Farrens. The Farrens are long-retired actress Julia Farren (Julia Dean) and her daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell). Lewton clearly based Julia Farren on his real-life aunt, silent-screen star Alla Nazimova, who in the ‘teens built herself a lavish mansion called The Garden of Allah and by the 1930’s her financial state had fallen so low she was reduced to renting a single room in the mansion she had once owned outright – a very Lewtonian plot situation. Julia has become convinced that her daughter Barbara is actually an impostor and the real Barbara died when she was only six (by coincidence, Amy’s age in the plot). Julia wraps a ring around a handkerchief and throws it out to Amy when she walks by the old house where she and Barbara live, and she calls out to her to visit in ways that to a modern audience make her seem like either a wicked witch or a child molester, but they’re actually only the importunings of an old, eccentric woman – though thank goodness DeWitt Bodeen avoided the obvious plot device of having Julia hallucinate that Amy was in fact her long-lost daughter Barbara.

Amy’s main interaction in the film comes when she gets a supernatural visit from a young, attractive woman who turns out to be Irena Dubrovna (once again played by Simone Simon), her father’s first wife. It’s not clear just how Irena, who died before Amy was born, came into Amy’s consciousness (or subconsciousness) when she’s never met her nor seen a photograph until one spills out of Oliver’s end-table drawer and Amy asks her dad, “Oh, so you know my friend, too?” Oliver, thinking he’s doing the right thing, burns all the extant photos of Irena except for one showing the two of them together, and of course Amy sees that and concludes that her new friend is someone her dad knows. Irena makes three visits to Amy in the garden of the house, and the two repeat the line “Amy … and her friend” so often Val Lewton actually asked for permission to change the film’s title to Amy and Her Friend, but the executives in RKO’s marketing department wanted to sell it as a sequel to Cat People and wouldn’t let him. Oddly, the film was so well known in the psychiatric community it was frequently shown to psych classes to show would-be psychiatrists how to diagnose this form of mental illness in children – and Robert Wise recalled being at such a screening in which he was asked, “I love the movie, but why does it have such a horrible title?” Wise also said that real-life psychiatrists praised the way Ann Carter as Amy kept her mouth tightly shut throughout the film, opening it just enough to speak when she needed to. The psychiatrists explained that this was precisely the expression real-life children with the mental illness Amy is depicted as having in the film show, and Wise had to explain to them that the closed-mouth face wasn’t something they had intended Ann Carter to do deliberately. Instead, she had lost a tooth just before the shoot and Val Lewton’s budget didn’t have the money to do dental work on her.

It’s not really fair to describe The Curse of the Cat People as a sequel because it isn’t one; it’s a rich, beautifully made film about an introverted child and how she is finally brought out of her shell by friends, both real and imaginary. It’s full of marvelous touches, including the ritual surrounding Amy’s first spanking – her dad gives it to her very reluctantly while her mom and her grade-school teacher, Miss Callahan (Eve March), treat it as a rite of passage. (Miss Callahan quite often visits the Reeds at home to check up on Amy, something it’s almost impossible to imagine today’s overworked, underpaid and disrespected teachers doing!) There’s even a scene in which Amy is singing on the staircase of the Reeds’ home, and though she’s virtually tuneless one of the adults in the movie tells her that even when it’s not done well, singing can be a positive form of emotional release – and we feel like we’ve been flash-forward to the same director’s The Sound of Music 22 years later. The two movies make an odd pairing even though they’re nominally part of the same story sequence, but both films are full of Lewton’s quirks and the marvelous spells his and his collaborators built around their characters so they seem like real people you could get to love (or maybe not-so-much love) in terms of how you interacted with them. It’s quite a beautiful film and it’s one with a strong identification factor for me, too, since i was also a shy kid, often bullied (as Amy is in at least two scenes in the film) and rarely able to connect with people my own age until, ironically, I got into high school and was able to find enough fellow misfits to have something of a social life and come out of my shell so I wasn’t the nerdy kid shown in this film and described in songs like the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” and the Beatles’ “There’s a Place,” the first Beatles song I ever liked because I identified with the line, “There’s a place where I can go/When I feel low, when I feel blue/And it’s my mind” – and the moment John Lennon sang “And it’s my mind,” he had me.

The Podcast Murders (CMW Horizon Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 Lifetime aired another “premiere” of something called The Podcast Murders, and if the two previous Lifetime “premieres” had been at opposite ends of the quality scale – Let’s Get Physical was considerably better than average and Swindler Seduction quite a bit worse – The Podcast Murders was about average, though it was weighted down by a truly terrible “twist” ending (more on that later). It’s about a series of killings in a typically generic American small town (though, as ini so many Lifetime movies, America was “played” by Canada: in this case, Kamloops in British Columbia) that’s been going on for at least two years. The police have more or less dropped any active investigation and let the trail go cold, and unto the breach stepped intrepid podcaster Chloe Joy (Lanie McAuley), who had launched a podcast about the killings to goad the police into doing more to solve them. Chloe has carefully covered her own trail because she wants to keep the podcast anonymous, but she’s called by a reporter named Ellie Manchester (Natalie Sharp) who says she works for a lifestyle magazine. Ellie tells Chloe her magazine is going to do a story about her whether she cooperates or not, and if she agrees to be interviewed Chloe will get a substantial paycheck as well as some control over how the story is written. Chloe is also approached by a young man named Josh Rogers (Clayton James, who as Clayton Chitty played Britney Spears’ husband Kevin Federline in a decidedly unauthorized Lifetime biopic called Britney Ever After) who works out at the same gym she does. The two start dating and it’s touch and go whether Chloe can balance her new best friend with her new boyfriend. She continues to investigate the case and visits the house where the most recent killing, that of Lucy Miller (Jennifer Proce), took place.

The film actually opened with a sequence showing Lucy’s murder – she was lured to a house for sale in a remote location and the killer ambushed her there and knocked oer off – and the scene then cut to Chloe narrating the story on her podcast. To get inside the house, Chloe has to deal with the real-estate agent, a heavy-set man who looks vaguely Black (though the one actor on the cast list who might be playing him is named David Fung, so it’s possible he’s at least part-Asian even though Fung’s imdb.com page contains no photo, so I can’t check his appearance with what I saw in the film). She goes there twice, and the second time around he pleads with her for money and she says she won’t be blackmailed, though it’s left ambiguous as to what he could be blackmailing her about. Chloe and Josh go on several dates until he tells her that his job as an advertising representative will require him to take a week-long out-of-town trip. Chloe tries to call and text him several times and Josh’s phone goes to voicemail and he ignores her texts. We’ve also seen a mysterious series of phone calls between Josh and Ellie, and we start to wonder if Josh is the mystery killer and Ellie is covering for him in an elaborate scheme to find out how much Chloe knows. Only at the end, a climax taking place in a disused winery that’s been foreclosed on, it turns out [big-time spoiler alert!] that Chloe herself is the killer. Her would-be boyfriend “Josh” is in fact Jack Hansen, brother of the killer’s first victim, Meghan Hansen (Carolyn Yonge), whom Chloe knew in college and befriended until Meghan went after a man Chloe was interested in and grabbed him for herself. Chloe never forgave her and killed her, then picked off three other women, Emma Jacobs (Sydney Hendricks), Amber Swanson (Shanelle Connell), and Lucy Miller. Chloe killed these young, pert blonde women because they had either dumped her as a friend to be with people who were more “in” or moved in on a man in whom Chloe was interested. Ellie was Jack’s fiancée and she agreed to be part of his plot to expose Chloe by befriending her, then letting Jack seduce Chloe, then making a big public display of affection for Jack in Chloe’s sight so Chloe would think, “Ah, I’m being dumped again,” and try to kill Ellie – only she and Jack would alert the police so as soon as they recorded Chloe’s confession, the cops could arrest her.

The trick ending reminded me of director Fritz Lang’s last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), which stars Dana Andrews as a reporter who decides to frame himself for murder to show how easy it is to convict somene on circumstantial evidence and send him to the electric chair – only Lang’s producer, Bert Friedlob, forced him to shoot a trick ending in which Andrews’ character really did kill the victim. Lang protested; as he told Friedlob in a conversation he later recalled to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and thirty-eight minutes and then in the last minute reveal that he’s a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke.” To their credit, the makers of The Podcast Murders, director Alex Caulfiend and writer Ken Miyamoto, did drop a few clues and played at least a bit more fairly with their audience than Friedlob and his writer, Douglas Morrow, did. In addition to the odd blackmail scene between Chloe and the realtor, they had Chloe stress in her podcast that while the victims had been tortured and killed, they had not been raped – which would lead us to wonder if the killer was a woman.

They also left a contradiction in Chloe’s story – throughout the film she says that the reason she started the podcast is that she was a survivor of an abusive boyfriend (which she wasn’t, though in several scenes we see Chloe having nightmares that flash her back to being abused), and the experience forced her to drop out of college. Later she tells Josh that the money she’s making from her podcast helped to pay off her student loans. They may not be inconsistent – it’s possible Chloe (or, to use her true mane, Rebecca Wagner) had run up a major student loan tab before she dropped out – but one thing writer Miyamoto keeps ambiguous is how Chloe makes her living aside from the money from the podcast. In fact, early on I started wondering, “Maybe they’re going to have Chloe turn out to be the killer,” though I didn’t really think that Miyamoto and Caulfield would go there. That still leaves open the question of why she started the podcast in the first place when it was building public interest in a series of murders the police had pretty much given up on solving. It reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s late Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” in which Holmes realizes that his client, Josiah Amberley, really killed his wife and her lover and tried to blame it on an unknown stranger. When Watson asks Holmes why Amberley would hire him to solve two murders he had committed himself, Holmes says, “Pure cheek! He wanted to be able to say, ‘I have called not only the police but even Sherlock Holmes.’” The Podcast Murders is probably a better movie than I’m giving it credit for, but I’m so irritated by the ending it’s a film that’s very hard to endorse, let alone actually like.

Let's Get Physical (Everheart Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Milojo Productions, Lofetime, 2022)

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

I watched last Saturday’s “premiere” movie on Lifetime, Let’s Get Physical, which they re-ran at 2 yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t watched it last week because I wanted to watch RoboCop on Turner Classic Movies instead, and I hadn’t held out much hope for it because of its overall plot: a young woman named Sadie Smith (Jenna Dewan, who’s in excellent shape for her 41 years and is thoroughly believable as a high-end hooker) comes to the hidebound town of Luton, New Hampshire and opens Dazzle ‘n’ Spin, a dance and exercise studio, from which she also turns tricks on the side. I had thought this film would be so dreadful I could start making jokes like, “If Olivia Newton-John weren’t already dead, this movie would have killed her,” but in fact the movie turned out to be unexpectedly good. The main reason was the filmmakers, director Robin Hays and writers Margaret Froley and Kelly Fullerton (I’m presuming all three of these people are women, though Kelly Fujllerton’s imdb.com page doesn’t have a photo or list a gender), gave it a surprisingly light touch and avoided the heavy-duty moralism of Lifetime’s previous movie on this topic, 2010’s The Client List (which they showed right afterwards). The film starts with Sadie being arrested for prostitution and tax evasion in the middle of leading an exercise class in which she’s teaching, among other things, pole dancing. The raid is led by Daphne Bartlett (Malaika Jackson), a Black woman police officer (it’s all too typical of Lifetime that the only African-American female in the cast is a police officer rather than one of the girls!).

Then the film flashes back with a typical Lifetime chyron, “Five Months Earlier,” and five months earlier Sadie is newly arrived in Luton. She befriends April Macintosh (Jennifer Irwin), who runs a beauty salon next door to the space Sadie has just rented from the town’s mayor, Brian Kemp (Mar Andersons), who makes his non-political living as s realtor. Sadie moves into an apartment on the property of April and her husband Marty (Bradley Stryker, who’s definitely attractive and a couple of cuts above the usual sandy-haired, lanky type Lifetime generally casts as innocent husbands). We first learn that Sadie is running a side business when Mayor Kemp comes over to her place for a “massage,” and it’s clear – especially when sadie asks him to turn over and lie on his back on the tabie – what he’s really there for. Apparently Sadie jacked him off, because the next thing we see is Mayor Kemp blissfully smiling as he gets up from the table. Sadie racks up an interesting list of clients, including the town minister and a widower who hasn’t had sex at all in the eight years since his wife died. The film gives us a running tally of Sadie’s clientele in both ends of her business – the women who come in for exercise and the men for her alternate service – only Sadie gets into trouble from Carol Martin, owner and principal reporter for the Luton Gazette. Surprisingly, neither Lifetime’s own Web site nor indb.com lists who plays this character, even though a) she’s the villainess of the piece and b) she’s damned good.

Once Carol catches her 17-year-old son Ben (Seth Isaac Johnson) watching Sadie doing a live webcam in which she plays with her vagina and makes sexy comments, she’s determined to put Sadie out of business even though, when she first complains to the cops, the Black woman detective explains to her that there’s nothing illegal about adultery, doing live-streamed computer porn or anything short of out-and-out prostitution, which we know Sadie is donig but Carol does not. April Macintosh hears the sounds of sex coming from Sadie’s studio in her beauty shop next door, and eventually she rats Sadie out to the authorities after she becomes convinced her husband Marty is one of Sadie’s customers. When Sadie is finally busted – not only for prostitution but for tax evasion, which carries a mandatory prison sentence – Carol insists on printing the names of the various johns on Sadie’s client list despite April’s argument that she’ll just hurt people and destroy lives and marriages by doing so. The name “M. Macintosh” is on the second tranche of names Carol publishes, and April immediately assumes that’s Marty and he cheated on her (oops, had extra-relational activities) with the town whore – only it turns out, after April has already thrown Marty out of their home and literally ruh over his belongings with her car, that the “M. Macintosh” on Sadie’s list wasn’t Marty but his sister Marcia (Eliza Norbury). Apparently Marcia was what in the common parlance of the Queer community is called “questioning” – that is, wondering whether or not she might be Gay. She hired Sadie for a Lesbian tryst to find out for sure, and she had such a great time with Sadie she came out once and for all.

In the end Sadie draws a one-year jail sentence but April is there to meet her when she’s released, and the two of them agree that Sadie really shook up Luton. Among other things, she enlivened up several of the town’s marriages because Sadie’s exercises made the women more comfortable in bed and more sexually aggressive towards their husbands, and even the guys who tricked with Sadie one time learned more about their own sexuality and became better partners towards their wives. While I was watching the film I thought of my friend, the late Lesbian activist Gloria Johnson, and the arguments she used to get into with fellow feminists who bought into the standard conception of prostitution as a loathsome business that destroys the self-respect of anyone who engages in it. Gloria Johnson was very much in favor of making prostitution legal, and I couldn’t help but think of her,especially in the scene in which April is protesting to Sadie that what she’s doing is illegal, and Sadie says, “It shouldn’t be.” About the last place I would expect to hear the case for legalizing proistitution made is in the script for a Lifetime movie – most depictions of the Oldest Profession on Lifetime describe its practitioners as human trafficking victims who’ve been kidnapped or psychologically forced into it by vicious pimps (and of course such people exist in the real world, too!), but Let’s Get Physical argues that sex work can be a life-affirming choice for those who engage in it voluntarily and unashamedly.