Hitler Lives (Warner Bros., 1945)

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

tLast night I was curious about Don Siegel’s second Warner Bros. short, Hitler Lives (of which there’s some confusion as to the title: it’s also referred to in some sources as Hitler Lives?). So I looked it up on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEYeJKCFQgA and it turned out to be a fascinating 17-minute document. Its main argument was that Germans were inherently warlike and wanted to rule the rest of the world by force. The documentary, written by Saul Elkins (also co-writer of Sievel’s first directorial effort, Star in the Night) and narrated by Knox Manning in the voice-of-God tones that had become de rigueur for mass-market documentaries since the fabulous success of The March of Time newsreels starting in 1935 (their narrator was the spectacularly well-named Westbook Van Voorhis, who survived until 1968), argues along the lines of the so-called “Pan-German” plot. The film argued that Germany had made at least two previous attempt to conquer the world: under Otto von Bismarck in the 1860’s and 1870’s; under Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I; and under Adolf Hitler in World War II. Manning’s narration describes German history, and especially Germany’s relations with the rest of the world, as a cycle of “war, phony peace, war, phony peace, war.” The film explicitly warns the rest of the world not to be fooled by Germany’s lilting music (there’s a stock shot of Wilhelm Furtwängier conducting the Berlin Philharmonic), sunny outdoors and overall apparent friendliness to letting their guard down; the Germans,the film says, are just waiting, planning and searching for the next opportunity to rebuild their military and take a fourth run at world conquest. It was a sentiment expressed quite openly in the last days of World War II and its immediate aftermath – most notably in Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau’s plan for a postwar Germany that would be allowed to be only an “agricultural and pastoral” country with no industrial base.

tThe Western line about Germany spectacularly changed within a year or two as Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union emerged as the U.S.’s major enemy and worldwide threat. Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that an “Iron Curtain” had descended over Eatern Europe, and Stalin – who’s depicted in this film in a chilling stock shot of the founding of the United Nations as one of the good guys who had helped save the world for peace and democracy – now replaced Hitler in American demonology as the over-arching villain whose evil regime needed to be contained at all costs. One of the means of containing it was to build a strong, peaceful, republican Germany out of the three Western occupation zones (the U.S., Britain and France) that would serve as a buffer state between Russia and France/ So the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949 and, amazingly given all the predictions of various Allied political leaders, has lasted until now and become a stable democracy from which we could learn lessons. (Among the things I like about the German political system that I wish we could adopt was a parliamentary government and proportional representation, which makes founding alternative political parties a sensible strategy. In Germany, once you win five percent of the vote nationwide you get representation in the legislature equal to the total percentage of the nationwide vote. So if you’re a German and you vote for the Green Party, you get what you wanted – more Green Party members in the Bundestag, the German legislature – while if you vote for the Green Party in the U.S. you only hurt the Democrats and thereby help elect more Republicans.)

tWhat’s most interesting about Hitler Lives from today’s perspective is the shots of the nast five minutes or so of Hitler’s symp-athizers in the U.S. as well as our own crop of wanna-be dictators. There are a lot of pre-war clips of people who fit into one or both of those categories, including Huey Long and someone I think was Fathe rCharles Coughlin (illustrating a passage in Manning’s narration that claims even some clergymen disgraced themselves and the principles of their religion by embracign fascism or its sympathizers), as well as a number of others my husband Charles would probably more readily recognize than I did. In an era in which one of America’s two major political parties has openly abandoned belief in democracy – what we hear from modern-day Republicans is that either they won or the election was stolen – this part of Hitler Lives is more relevant than ever.

Los Angeles: City of Film Noir (Wichita Films, 2015)

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

tAfter Hitler Lives I watched a rather odd presentation on YouTube: a 53-minute documentary originally made in France by filmmakers Clare and Julia Kuperberg called Los Angeles: City of Film Noir. There are three main interviewees in the movie: neo-noir novelist James Ellroy, Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, and The Film Noir Encyclopedia co-editor Alain Silver. Ellroy’s interview segments were particularly interesting since he’s an L.A. native and when he was a boy of nine his dad would drive him out to motels and tell him to wait outside while Daddy went into a motel room for “business.” It didn’t take Ellroy long, even at age nine, to figure out that the sort of “business” his dad was transacting in those motel rooms involved women other than his mother. Ellroy became a peeping Tom and found the sight of women in rooms who didn’t know they were being watched exciting. He seemed to be suggesting that this oddball upbringing was what first led him to investigate the sordid side of Los Angeles as a writer. Ellroy is best known for his cycle of four novels based on the so-called “Biack Dahlia” murder of Elizabeth Short in Hollywood in 1947 – the case’s nickname came from a mistaken reference to The Blue Dahlia, a 1946 film noir that was Raymond Cnandler’s only original screenplay that was actually filmed. Ellroy’s books in the “Black Dahlia” cycle were The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. and the first and third books in the cycle were filmed: The Black Dahlia acceptably and L.A. Confidential brilliantly (and Ellroy gives points to the makers of L.A., Confidential for having taken his sprawling novel and made a coherent story out of it that worked as a film). I

t’ve only read two of Ellroy’s books, The Big Nowhere and an earlier one called Because the Night (whose central character is a psychiatrist who starts a religious cult to manipulate his patients into committing crimes for him), and I suspect the reason The Big Nowhere was not filmed even though the books on either side of it in Ellroy’s cycle have been was it’s about homosexuality and the main character is an L.A. cop who’s assigned to investigate a series of Gay-related murders and in the process realizes he’s Gay himself. (the book ends with him committing suicide, which if it were filmed that way would piss off Queer-friendly and Queer-hating audiences equally.) The L.A.-centric interviewees make a good case for Los Angeles as the noir city, even though many of the classic noirs were filmed there simply because that’s where the major studios were based. The interviewees make an interesting comparison between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, pointing out via clips from The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep (actually from the trailers to both films,since the Kuperbergs used the old Arts & Entertainment Biography dodge of u sing clips from trailers, which were generally not copyrighted during the classic age of Hollywood, rather than having to pay the license fees for use of the fims themselves) that Chandler’s concept of the private investigator was considerably more romantic than Hammett’s. The reason is well known: Hammett had worked as a private detective himself for the Pinkertons, and he knew first-hand how little the job had in common with the way other pulp writers had depicted it. Chandler was a failed oil executive who lost his career in the Great Depression and figured he could make a living writing the sorts of stories he’d enjoyed reading in the pulps, and all he knew about being a detective was what he’d read in pulp fiction.

tPerhaps the most interesting aspect of this documentary is the discussion of sexuality and how the directors of classic noirs fought a running battle with the Production Code enforcers in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Among the most interesting aspects of his discussion was the depiction of the hit men played by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman in Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955, and a movie I’ve always thought of as more of a gangster film than a noir) as a Gay couple. Ellroy remembered discussing the film with Earl Holliman, who gave him points for having figured that out – though, if anything, an even more explicit depiction of a Gay male relationship in a film noir is between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Coiok, Jr. in the 1947 film Born to Kill, in which the two are shown in bed together and Cook’s character is trying to tell Tierney’s, “You shouldn’t kill so many people. It’s not practical.” Eddie Muller recalled watching the film Gilda, with Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and George Macready in what looks an awful lot like a Bisexual love triangle, with Evelyn Keyes, who had been married to its director, Charles Vidor. Based on her relationship with Vidor, Keyes told Muller about every sexual innuendo Vidor had inserted into the film. (Keyes was also married to an even more seminal noir director, John Huston.)

tFilm scholars have had a hard time defining film noir as a genre, even though its origins are obvious: the noir style was rooted in the films made in Germany during the Weimar Republic by directors and writers like Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, and one can trace the style of film noir from pre-Nazi Germanmy to France to the U.S. as its creators fled Nazism as it moved across Europe. Film noir was essentially the union of German expressionist filmmaking with the American crime dramas published in Black Mask and other pulp magazines. There’s a school of thought that the term film noir came about because the French publisher who had the rights to the works of major hard-boiled crime writers like Hammett, Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich issued them in books with black covers and called them the série noir – and French film critics adopted the term film noir to indicate movies based on books from the série noir. One of the questions this movie asks about the original noir cycle is why this series of cynical films came out at a time when the mood of America was optimism – we had just won World War II and were headed for a future of unprecedented prosperity . The makers of this film suggested that these were really pent-up feelings left over from the Great Depression, when many of the novels the great films noir were based on had been written, and the filmmakers were expressing cynical feelings they hadn’t been allowed to use during the war because most of Hollywood’s output in the early 1940’s was upbeat and patriotic.

Star in the Night (Warner Bros., 1945)

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

tLast Sunday night, November 27, after they showed two Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle comedies, the feature Leap Year (1921) and the short Love (1919), as part of TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” they showed the 1945 short Star in the Night. It was an intriguing reworking of the Nativity story that was the first directorial credit for Don Siegel, Siegel had worked his way through the ranks at Warner Bros. and had become the head of their montage department – in which capacity he worked out the brilliant sequence of giant ticker-tape machines literally melting over Wall Street to signify the advent of the Great Depression in the film The Roaring Twenties (1939). For years he had begged Jack Warner for a chance to direct, and for years Warner had turned him down until he offered him this short. Siegel grabbed the assignment and deliberately avoided montage sequences because he wanted to prove he could do other sorts of filmmaking. Written by Robert Finch and Saul Engel (though according to imdb.com, Slegel took an uncredited hand in the writing himself), Star in the Night begins with three cowboys traveling through the American Southwest when they see a giant star blinking on the horizon.

tThe star is an electrically lit sign for the Star Auto Court, owned by Nick Catapoli (J. Carrol Naish, top-billed and once again, as Tom Weaver noted, playing every ethnicity except his real one, which was Irish) and his wife Rosa (Rosina Galli). A hitchhiker (Donald Woods) shows up and he and Nick get into an argument, with Nick saying that people are basically good and the hitchhiker maintaining that people are only out for themselves. Naturally, this being a Nativity allegory, this is all taking place on Christmas eve. The cowboys (Dick Erdman, Johnny Miles and Cactus Mack) bought a lot of junk from a trading post just before the film begins, and they’re wondering what they’re going to do with it since they don’t need any of it themselves and don’t know anybody to give it to. A shirt salesman named Mr. Dilson (Irving Bacon) complains toNich that the shirts he sent out to be laundered came back wrinkled and (in one case) torn, and he demands that Nick pay for the damaged goods.

tA woman named Miss Roberts (Virginia Sale) complains that the people in the next room are keeping her awake singing Christmas carols and she needs to get up at 5 the next morning. An older couple (Dick Elliott and Claire Du Brey) show up and take the ;ast room in Nick’s motel, so there’s no room at the inn when a young Mexican-American couple named José and Maria Santos (Anthony Caruso and Lynn Baggett) show up and need a place to stay. Nick tells them that they can stay in the shed in back of the property along with the animals, which they accept. Then Maria, who’s pregnant, goes into labor and all the assorted guests of the motel pitch in to help her deliver her baby. Mr. Dilson even rips up his shirts when Maria needs bandages (though one wonders why her giving birth was so bloody they were needed), the traveling couple donate the extra blankets they’d asked for, and in the end the baby enters the world on Christmas morning and Siegel dissolves to a painting of the real Nativity on the wall calendar of Nick’s office. (Fortunately the writers avoided the obvious gimmick of having the Santoses name their baby “Jesús.”)

tStar in the Night is a film of real charm, occasionally it gets a bit treacly but for the most part it avoids the cheap sentimentality the overall concept would have invited (and achieved in lesser hands than Siegel’s). >tStar in the Night was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Subject – as was Siegel’s follow-up film, Hitler Lives, which was full of montage sequences and whose message was that even though America and the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II, Adolf Hitler’s spirit still lived and his ideas lurked around the corner just waiting to be re-activated. (That sounds like an all too contemporary concept for our time; the horrors of the Holocaust inoculated the world against the most vile, evil manifestations of hatred in general and anti-Semitism in particular, but it’s clear that tne vaccination has worn off and the anti-Semiitc prejudices that gave rise to the Holocaust have flared up and become epidemic again.) In his early-1970’s book-length interview with film historian Stuart M. Kaminsky, Siegel rather bitterly lamented that he’d received Academy Award nominations for his two shorts but never for any of his features.

Leap Year (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Paramount, 1921)

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

Last night there were a number of items I’d have wanted to watch on TV, including part one of a two-part minoseries on the African-American church (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before but I did a search on moviemagg for “The Black Church” and didn’t find one; however, just “Black Church” turned up https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2021.html). But I ended up watching an intriguing “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation on Turner Classic Movies: Leap Year, a feature-length comedy made by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1921. This hour-long film was Arbuckle’s 10th feature-length movie and ultimately his last as star, writer and co-director (James Cruze got credit for the direction but Arbuckle almost certainly had a lot to do with it). The reason was the sensational scandal that broke after Arbuckle took some of his cast and crew members to San Francisco for a party on the Labor Day weekend in 1921. A young actress named Virginia Rappé died during the festivities, and since Arbuckle had been seen going into her room shortly before her body was discovered, he was accused of murdering her in the process of raping her. Arbuckle endured three trials on these charges; his first two ended in hung juries (the first jury broke for acquittal and the second for conviction) and the foreman of the third jury in the case was so appalled by the lack of any real evidence against him that he sent a note to the jud reading, “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” (Most modern scholarson the case beliee Rappé died from peritonitis or another infecdtion she got from a botched illegal abortion.)

But the scandal totally wrecked his career; Paramount scrapped the three unreleased features he had made for their release (including this one) and no other studio would touch him even after his ultimate exoneratioin. In 1927 William Randolph Hearst, who told his friends that Arbuckle’s trials had sold more newspapers than any other story he’d printed, hired Arbuckle to direct a film called The Red Mill, an adaptation of an old operetta starring Hearst’s girlfriend, Marion Davies. Alas, even though Arbuckle used a pseudonym, “Will B. Goodrich” (which Hollywood wags interpreted as a coded promise from Arbuckle, “Will be good – and rich”). the film flopped. (I’ve seen it on a previous TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” and it isn’t very good.) Ironically, until the spectacular crash and burn of his career, Arbuckle had made more money for the studios and himself than any other silent comedian except Charlie Chaplin – more than Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon. Arbuckle had also mentored both Chaplin and Keaton – Chaplin when they both worked for Macn Sennett’s Keystone Studos in 1914 and Keaton after Arbuckle left Keystone and started his own studio, Comicque Film Corporation, in partnership with producer Joseph M. Schenck in 1917. Keaton had visited the set of Arbuckle’s first Comicque film, The Butcher Boy (1917), just to see what this motion picture business was about, and he ended up playing a part in the movie and working for Arbuckle for the next two years (with a break because he was drafted into World War I, though luckily for him the war was over before he arrived in France and he spent most of his time in the Army doing camp shows; Keaton’s 1930 film Doughboys, by far the best of his early talkies, offers a good glimpse of what he actually did) until 1920, when Schenck decided it was time for Arbuckle to start making features and he had Keaton take over as the star of his shorts.

Arbuckle’s first feature was The Round-Up (1920), and for the next two years he made 10 features in all until the scandal that foreshortened his career. I’ve long been curious as to whether Arbuckle could have sustained a feature-length film because all too many of his shorts are disjointed. Unlike Chaplin and Keaton, Arbuckle seems to have been willing to do anything as long as he thought it would make an audience laugh, character consistency be damned. I’ve also noted in prior comments on the great silent comedians that each of them seemed to occupy a defined class niche – Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Arbuckle the working-class everyman, Lloyd the middle-class striver and Keaton the upper-class twit. Yet in Leap Year Arbuckle cast himself as an upper-class twit: to wit, Stanley Piper, who’s been raised by his bitter, gouty, dyspeptic and woman-hating uncle Jeremiah (Luien Littlefield). Jeremiah has a visiting nurse, Phyllis Brown (Mary Thurman), only in the opening scene he fires her because he can’t stand her helmet-like bobbed hair or her overall femaleness. He demands a man to replace her, but she hangs around because she’s got a crush on Stanley. Unfortunately, so do a lot of other women in the movie, including Loris Keene (Harriet Hammond), mistress of married man Scott Travis (Clarence Geldert). Scott asks Stanley to be his “beard” and escort Loris while his wife (Winifred Greenwood) visits Catalina Island, where he’s staying for a vacation with Loris. Loris forms a huge crush on Stanley, and so does Irene Rutherford (Maude Wayne), who fishes him out of the sea and brings him aboard her yacht. Another woman named Molly Morris (Gertrude Short) also falls for Stanley, and when he tries to scare all these unwanted womenfolk away by feigning uncontrollable mental fits, Phyllos and Molly compete for the privilege of nursing him.

Leap Year is pretty much a one-joke movie, and the one joke – Stanley’s alleged irresistibility to women – gets awfully tiresome after a while. The plot ends rather abruptly – I think Stanley and Phyllis end up together, but I’m not sure – and if there’s any indication from the script by Sarah Y. Mason (who co-wrote the script for the 1933 Little Women with her husband, Victor Heerman, who also intersected the careers of comedy legends when he directed the second Marx Brothers film, Animal Crackers) and Walter Woods as to why the film is called Leap Year, I missed it. If Arbuckle could have sustained a feature-length movie as star and auteur, he certainly didn’t prove it here.

Love (Comicque Film Corporation, Paramount, 1919)

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

Ironically, TCM followed up Roiscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's 1921 feature Leap Year with one of Arbuckle’s shorts, Love (1919), which was one-third the length of Leap Year and a hell of a lot funnier. It begins with Arbuckle introduced driving what’s called in the intertitle “Ford’s economy model,” a truly weird contraption that looks to today’s audience like a cross between a motor scooter and a go-kart. He’s passed on the road by Al Clove (Al St. John, a “regunar” in Arbuckle’s company and usually cast, as here, as the villain who’s trying to get Arbuckle’s girl away from him) riding a high-wheel bicycle (our friend Brandon Carpenter, a high-wheel rider himself, would undoubtedly love this movie). There’s a long sequence in which Frank (Frank Hayes), father of Arbuckle’s love interest Winnie (Winifred Westover), is repeatedly dunked in a well, along with his farmhand (Monty Banks, later a comedy director and star in his own right). To get back at Frank for having decided he’s too fat to be allowed to marry Winnie, Arbuckle’s character sneaks soap into their dinner stew. This causes Frank to fire his cook Kitty (Kate Price), who’s previously lectured Arbuckle about his weight even though she’s as big as he is. Guess who gets the job after Frank fires Kitty. That’s right: it’s Fatty Arbuckle in quite convincing drag. He figures out how to marry Winnie without her dad getting noticed: he announces he’ll stand in for Al at a “rehearsal” for the wedding ceremony, then when the officiant asks the standard “speak now, or forever hold his peace” question, Arbuckle stands up and announces that Winnie can’t marry Al because “she’s already married – to me,” a gag that no doubt plays quite differently to a modern audience than it did in 1919. Love is a brilliantly funny film that suggests Arbuckle’s true métier was in shorts!

Boys Don't Cry (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Independent Film Channel Productions, Killer Films, Hart Sharp Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 1999)

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

On Saturday night, November 26, I watched a couple of intriguing films on Turner Classic Movies, including the 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, co-writen (with Andy Beinen) and directed by Kimberly Peirce, based on the real-life muirder of female-to-male Transgender person Brandon Teena (born Teena Brandon) in Falls City, Nebraska in 1993. Kimberly Peirce appeared on TCM along with regular host Ben Mankiewicz as part of their series in November showing films that were socially and culturally significant, and she had some interesting comments about the genesis of the film. Peirce said that when she originally proposed the project, it was going to be a Civil War-era story about a woman living as a man in order to survive (my husband Charles has run across a surprising number of those stories online). only her film professor suggested that she do a story set in the present day and dealing with a Transman who dressed as a male and assumed a masculine identity not as a survival strategy, but because they felt they were really a man. Just then the real-life story of Brandon Teena’s murder broke nationwide, and Peirce seized on it and developed a film around it. Peirce’s first notion was to get a real Trans person to play Brandon, but she couldn’t find anyone who could act well enough to sustain the movie, Eventually she cast Hilary Swank as Brandon, and Swank prepared for the role by living as a man for several weeks. When people who \knew her and her husband asked “him” who “he” was, she invented a non-existent brother and instructed her husband to tell people, “Oh, he’s my brother-in-law.” The film was shot on a miniscule budget, and though three other “executive producers” are listed in the credits, Peirce herself said the principal producer was Caroline Kaplan because she’d made movies before with first-time directors on low production budgets, and was very helpful in showing Peirce the ropes.

I first heard of Brandon Teena from a book called All She Wanted by Aphordite Jones – the book and film had nothing to do with each other except both were based on the same real-life events – and I read it for a short-lived Queer book club in San Diego in which one of the members was visibly upset that we were reading a book about a Trans person. He had the then-common belief among Gay men and Lesbians that Trans people weren’t “really” part of our community because most Trans people are romantically and sexually attracted to the gender other than the one they identify with and are therefore not “really” Gay or Lesbian. (Peirce herself told Ben Mankiewicz that when she started making Boys Don’t Cry she identified herself as a butch Lesbian, but after she made the movie she realized she was Trans – though she did not insist on “he” or “they” as her pronouns.) Later I smiled when this same individual made the motion to include Trans people in the mission statement of the San Diego Democrats for Equality, and I smiled at the thought that my calling him on his Transphobia way back when might have had something to do with that. Charles and I watched Boys Don’t Cry when it first came out on DVD and we both loved it, though this time around I was a bit bothered at first at how lumpen the characters were. Brandon himself was the product of a one-night stand and had no idea who his biological father was; his mom raised him as a single parent and had to scrounge for the money to support both of them. He created an elaborate fantasy about her family – including a brother who was a success in the music scene in Memphis, Tennessee and a sister who was a model and about to become an actress in Hollywood – and he made his living by forging checks and other low-level sorts of crime.

Brandon attracted a number of girlfriends; the most important one was Lana Tisdal (Chloë Sevigny, whom Peirce asked to audition for the role; told by her agent that Sevigny was above auditioning and if Peirce wanted her for the movie she had to guarantee the role, so she did and Sevigny turned in a fine performance as by far the most sympathetic character in the film), who dumped her rather boorish boyfriend John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) for Brandon. Not surprisingly, John was not happy about this, especially since he considered himself a butch man and God’s gift to women (or at least any woman he deigned to show interest in). John had already noticed something “off” about Brandon because he wouldn’t show his dick or take his shirt off, and he wouldn’t roughhouse with the other guys. Later he realizes that Brandon is really, at least biologically, a woman, and this of course angers him even more. He and his friend Tom Nissen (Brendan Sexton III) team up to assault and rape Brandon, and when Brandon surprisingly reports them to the police, they gang up on her again and this time shoot her. One of Perice’s most blatant departures from the real story was having Lana Tisdal present when Brandon is murdered; she wasn’t, and since the whole point for John and Tom in killing Brandon was to eliminate the witness against them on the rape charge. If Lana had been there John and Tom would have killed her too.

Boys Don’t Cry is a film that works on almost every level; Peirce and Beinen wrote a sensitive enough script that we care about Brandon despite the things we don’t like about him (like his life of petty crime), and the whole issue of sexuality is fairly depicted. We get to see a bit of Brandon making himself look suitably masculine, including wrapping his breasts with Ace bandages to mash them down, putting on men’s underwear and sticking something down their crotch to make it look like he has a dick. We also see him and Lana making love, and later during the rape scene Peirce’s direcdtion makes it clear that John ahd Tom are raping her anally to inflict the maximum amount of humiliatioin and both physical and psychological pain. Hilary Swank won the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress for her acting here, and she deserved it – though it’s a pity that Peirce couldn’t have found a real Transman to play the role – and the current obsession on the Republican Party and the far-Right in general with Trans people makes this film seem as groundbreaking now as it did 23 years ago when it first came out.

la muerte de ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) (Guión Producciones Cinematográficas, Suevia Films - Cesáreo González, Trionfalcine, 1955)

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

Afterwards TCM showed on their regular “Noir Alley” feature an engaging movie from Spain in 1955 called la muerte de ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) – the actual credits list the Spanish title in all lower-case letters as if typewritten – that’s actually a good movie but far closer to Italian neo-realism than anything usually associated with film noir. Two of the production companies were Italian and so was the film’s female star, Lucia Bosé, who plays Maria José de Castro, a woman who’s married into a rich family, including a boorish husband named Miquel (Otello Toso, who looks like after they made Nat “King” Cole they decided to do him over agan and this time use white plastic in the mold). She’s drifted into an affair with Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Chosas, whose family had fled Spain after Franco’s forces won the 1936-1939 civil war; they had settled in Argentina, where Alberto had become a star in Argentinian films and writer-director Juan Antonio Bardem, uncle of modern-day star Javier Bardem, cast him because his name would help the box office in other Spanish-speaking markets), whom she dated during the civil war but drifted apart from when the war ended with Franco’s victory and she married Miguel. Now they’ve hooked up again and they’re driving through the Spanish countryside at night when they accidentally swtrike and hit a bicyclist. Juan checks the guy out and finds he’s still breathing, but because they’re both afraid of the consequences if they’re linked to the accident they just abandon the guy on the road where they hit him and leave him to die. Juan is an assistant professor at a local college in Barcelona, where the film takes place, and in some ways he’s a prototype for the character of George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like George, he got his job only through the intervention of a powerful brother-in-law and he’s not terribly ambitious. He lives with his mother, who perpetually nags him about either finding a better job or writing the novel he’s talked about for years.

The adulterous couple hope that no word will leak out about the death of the cyclist they’d ran over, but news starts to leak out. Juan first reads about the death in a newspaper he’s looking at while he’s supposed to be supervising a student presentation on analytic geometry, and he’s so flustered by the realization that the cyclist’s death has attracted media attention that he snaps and tells the student whose presentation he is supposed to be grading, Matilda Luque Carvajal (Bruna Corrá). He tells Matilda to shut up, which results in her failing the class and blaming him for flunking out. Later she comes to see him at his office to see if there’s anything she can do to make up the assignment and pass the class, as she clearly deserves it, and still later her fellow students stage a protest outside the university and throw something through Juan’s window demanding his resignation. Meanwhile, Maria is having problems of her own: a seedy character named Rafael “Rafa” Sandoval (Carlos Casaravilla), who claims to be a journalist but is really a blackmailer, has figured out that Maria and Juan are having affair and threatens to tell Maria’s husband Miguel if she doesn’t pay him off. Juan decides the only honest and honoirable thing for them to do is turn themselves in, but in a final sequence that reflects sone of the compromises Bardem had to make with the Spanish cdnsors (who acted in this case much like the enforcers of the Production Cide in the U.S. at the time) Maria and Juan drive out to the same stretch of road where the original accident occurred. Alas, while Juan is standing beside the stretch of road where they ran down the cyclist in the first place, Maria decides to eliminate him by running him down with the car, sure in the knowledge that her rich and powerful husband, who was planning a trip outside the country for both of them, can maintain her impunity and make sure she’s never prosecuted for either killing.

Director and co-writer (with Luis Fernando de Igoa) Bardem wanted this ending as a critique of Spanish fascism and its ability to insulate the rich and powerful from prosecution, but the censors vetoed it. Instead they have Maria swerve her own car to avoid hitting another cyclist, only she dies in the crash while the cyclist escapes unharmed. If there had to be an ending in which Maria got her comeuppance, this was a good a choice as any – it reminded me of the two versions of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter, in which Jeanne Eagels, acting in the truly “pre-Code” era of 1929, got to speak the play’s famous final line, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!,” while Bette Davis in the 1940 remake (much to her irritation) had to get killed by one of the native boys so she wouldn’t get away with murdering her lover on the opening scene. But it weakened the film considerably, just as the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia would have been considerably stronger with Raymond Chandler’s original ending (Buzz, played by William Bendix, actually killed the murder victim due to brain damage suffered in combat in World War II) than the unbelievable one he hade to cobble together to satisfy not only the Production Code Administration but also the U.S. Navy, which made it clear they would not cooperate with any future Paramount production if the studio released a film in which post-traumatic stress disorder made someone a murderer.

Live at the Belly Up: Eric Henderson and The Believers (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2019)

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

Last Friday night, November 25, my husband Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a musician named Eric Hutchinson who led a band called The Believers. Eric Henderson was born September 8, 1980 in Takoma Park, Maryland and he’s tall, baby-faced and for his Live at the Belly Up appearance wore a red outfit that made him look sexy in a nerdish way. Henderson shot this show in 2018, though the copyright date on it was a year later, and when he made it he was just coming off a four-year hiatus in his career during which he had decided that whatever he wanted to do with the rest of his life, playing music was not it. Fortunately he came back, organized a new band called The Believers, and made an album in 2018 called Modern Happiness which was, he said, the first time in his life where he’d made the music he wanted to make instead of what he thought would sell. In the interstitial interviews Henderson talked about how much he likes to write songs that are cross-purposes with each other, often setting lyrics about doleful subjects to bright, upbeat, happy melodies. He mentioned onie woman who came up to him after a gig and said, “I’ve been doing housework to one of your songs for four years now and I just realized that the lyrics are about suicide.” Henderson said Stevie Wonder was his main inspiration even though he sounds very little like him; he said what he likes best about Wonder is his ability to slip political and social messages into his songs but avoid the anger that usually traps most protest singers. Instead, Henderson likes the way Wonder presents his messages in terms of peace, love and bringing people together instead of setting them apart. He also mentioned Randy Newman as his model for a song called “New Religion,” which he wrote in the persona of God lamenting the injustices and idiocies people perpetrate in the Deity’s name – though “Dear Me” is considerably less angry than Newman’s own (marvelous) song on the same topic, “God’s Song (That’s Why i Love Mankind).”

The songs Henderson played on this occasion were “A Little More,” “Miracle Woman,” “New Religion,” “I’ll Always Be the One Who Makes You Cry,” “Happy Like a Chicken With Its Head Cut Off” (itself a pretty good index of Henderson’s loopy sensibility), “Hands” (written as a tribute to his father, who got a late-onset form of muscular dystrophy that first hit him at age 35 and cost him the ability to clench his fists; as the disease has progressed Henderson, Sr. has largely lost the ability to walk, but it’s typical of Henderson, Jr.’s outlook on life that he chose to focus the song on what the old man still can do instead of what he can’t), “Take It Easy on Me,” “For the First Time,” “Watching You Watch Him” (which, according to Henderson’s Wikipedia page, came about when he watched his wife Jill watching the famously hunky tennis star Roger Federer on TV), “Dear Me” (an engaging song – I notice I’m using the word “engaging” quite a lot to describe Henderson’s music – about what advice the 39-year-old Henderson would give his 18-year-old self), “Rock and Roll” (which isn’t the usual raveup you get from a song with that title) and “Tell the World.” I’ve taken to count the number of songs an act performs in the one-hour Live at the Belly Up time slot as an indication of whether they’re a band with tightly knit songs or a more free-flowing jam band The more songs they can get into the hour, the more carefully crafted they are, and Henderson’s 13 puts him towards the “carefully crafted” and “tightly knit” side of things.

Back to the Future (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1984)

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

On Thanksgiving night my husband Charles and I didn’t watch any TV until 7:30 p.m., when I turned on the set, started flipping through channels, and finally lighted on the Bravo cable network, which was showing all three of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future movies in sequence. Charles had seen the first one when it was relatively new – either in a theatre or on a premium cable channel, he couldn’t remember which. But he’d never seen either of the sequelae and I hadn’t seen any of them, a bit surprisingly given how iconic these movies have become in the history of science-fiction films in general and the films of the 1980’s in particular. Just about everyone knows the central premise of these films by now, but in case you've been living under a rock for the last 38 years, here goes: the central characters are suburban teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his mad-scientist neighbor, Dr. Everett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who’s invented a time machine and built it into a DeLorean automobile because, as he explains to Marty, he wanted something stylish rather than a bland-looking car. (The DeLorean had a bizarre history; John DeLorean had been an engineer at General Motors and he had fought the corporate bureaucracy to pursue innovative concepts in automotive design. In 1979 he published a book about his experiences at GM and the following year he started his own car company, which was such a financial failure that in 1982 he got involved with an undercover FBI agent and allegedly participated in a deal to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. to make enough money to bail out his company. His conviction was later reversed on appeal. A second attempt by the U.S. government for allegedly defrauding investors in his company also resulted in acquittal, and he lived until 2005.)

I suspect Robert Zemeckis and his producing and writing partner, Bob Gale, intended the three Back to the Future films from the get-go as a cycle instead of just making one film and hoping it would do well enough to merit a sequel. Not only do the first two films have explicitly “cliff-hanger” endings, the three stories fit neatly together and just seem to have been conceived of as a unit even though the cycle’s name is a bit deceptive. Actually it probably should have been called Forward to the Past instead of Back to the Future, because Marty and Dr. Brown don’t actually go back (or forward) to the future until the first half of the second film, and they spend much more of their time travel in the past than in the future. In the first Back to the Future movie, made in 1984, Marty McFly is a high-school junior in a suburban community with his dad George (Crispin Glover), his mom Lorrainie (played by Lea Thompson in the flashback sequences but I don’t know if she plays the older version of her character or they got someone else), brother Dave (Zemeckis regular Marc McClure) and sister Linda (Wendie Jo Sperber, another Zemeckis regular). There’s also a girlfriend for Marty, Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), and an unseen Uncle Joey (Lorraine’s brother) who’s in prison, He was expected to be paroled and Lorraine baked a welcome-home cake for him, but he was denied parole so the McFlys will just have to eat it themselves The film begins in the Rube Goldberg-esque home of Dr. Brown, who’s equipped his house with a device that automatically feeds his dog Einstein, though as the film opens he’s been gone for several days and Einstein’s food has piled up uneaten because he took the mutt with him and forgot to turn off the feeder.

Dr. Brown has invented a time machine, but he needs plutonium to power the “flux converter” that makes it work, which he obtains from a gang of Libyan terrorists who want him to build them a nuclear bomb. Of course he double-crosses them and keeps the plutonium for himself, but the terrorists come looking for hom driving a VW minivan and ultimately kill him. To escape, Marty has to go back in time to November 12, 1955, when the clock tower in their town of Hill Valley, California was struck by lightning and froze in place. He interacts with the Dr. Brown of 30 years before and also goes back to the local high school, where the film turns into a weird reworking of Oedipus Rex as Lorraine finds herself attracted to Marty (whose name she thinks is “Calvin Klein” because that was the name on his underwear when she and her parents took him in after he was run down by a hit-and-run driver. She couldn’t be less interested in George, which causes a quandary for Marty because if George and Lorraine don’t get together, they won’t be married and Marty will cease to exist. Drawing on Cyrano de Bergerac as well as The Courtship of Miles Standish, Marty coaches George in how to court Lorraine and get her to go with him to the “Enchantment Under the Sea” school dance, where in Marty’s time line they kissed for the first time and thus fell in love. Meanwhile, George is being bullied in both 1955 and 1985 by the school thug, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), who in 1955 forces George to do his school papers for him and in 1985 is his boss and forces George to write his reports for him. On the night of the bog dance, Marty hatches a plot to come on to Lorraine and try to attack her, whereupon George will come to her rescue – only the plot gues awry when Lorraine is all too willing to have sex with hot, hunky Marty. Instead Biff cuts in and tries to rape Lorraine, only George steps in and for the first time in his life punches out Biff. This leads to a change in the timeline in which Biff becomes a pathetic figure who makes his living waxing other people’s cars, and George lords it over him, demanding two coats.

There are some genuinely funny gags along the way, including one townsperson who, when Marty says he’s from the future, asks just who is President in 1985, “Ronald Reagan,” Marty says, and the incredulous man asks, “Ronald Reagan, the actor? Does that mean Jane Wyman is First Lady?” (That’s a mistake in the script, since Reagan and Wyman divorced in 1949 and by 1955 he’d already been married to Nancy Davis for three years.) There’s also a sequence in which in order to torment Marty, Biff locks him in the trunk of one of the cars parked outside – which turns out to belong to one of the musicians in an all-Black band. It didn’t seem likely to me that an all-white suburban high school in 1955 would hire a Black band for their dance, but that was needed to set up a clever if somewhat off-putting gag for me in which one of the Blacki musicians, Marvin Berry (Harry waters, Jr.) cuts his hand open trying to get into the trunk. The rest of the band is about to call the gig quits because without a guitar player with a working hand they can’t perform, but Marty agrees to step into the breach and leads the band in a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” which didn’t exist until 1957. Marty tells the band to just play blues riffs in B behind him, and he goes crazy, playing his guitar behind his head, lying on the floor while playing, and doing other rock-star moves that wouldn’t be seen by a mass music audience for years, or at least that’s what Zemeckis and Gale tell us in their script. They even stick the knife in when they show Marvin putting in a call to his cousin Chuck and saying, “You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? I’ve just heard it.” Though Chuck Berry didn’t write “Johnny B. Goode” until 1957, by late 1955 he was alreadn an established rock ‘n’ roll star with at least two big hits, “Maybelline” and “You Can’t Catch Me,” under his belt, and methinks if a Black musician had seen a white one in 1955 playing his guitar behind his head or on the floor, he’d probably have thought, “Where did that white kid see T-Bone Walker?”

The first Back to the Future has a spectacular ending scene in which Dr. Brown works out a way to get Marty back home to his original time period of 1985 via the lightning from the storm that’s supposed to hit the clock tower, which necessitates rigging the DeLorean with one of those electrical connections like the ones that power old-fashioned trolleys, and when Marty returns toi 1985 his dad is a science-fiction writer who’s just published his first novel and his mom is considerably more slender than she was when he left. Marty also times his return from 1955 to 1985 to make sure he arrives a few minutes before Dr. Brown got killed by the Libyan terrorists, so he can intevene and save the good doctor’s life. If nothing else, the first Back to the Future certainly expresses Roibert Zemeckis’s unusual sensibility (which was evident as early as his first feature, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a delightful fantasy about four teenage girls on the night of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show). It’s also a neat reminder of just how sexy Michael J. Fox was before he became the world’s poster child for Parkinson’s disease; he’s got a quite hot ass (which Zemeckis gives us lots of shots of from behind as we see that great bubble butt clad in skin-tight blue jeans), and the close-ups of his face are so hauntingly beautiful it surprises me that no one thought of casting Fox in a biopic of Elvis.

Back th the Future Part II (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1988)

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

Back to the Future Part II (Roman numerals in the title and no comma between “Future” and “Part”) is also a nice movie, though it’s considerably darker than the first film and it’s also the only one of the series in which Marty and Dr. Brown actually travel to the future. It’s also the one with the most references to previous movies, particularly Rebel Without a Cause and It’s a Wonderful Life. The reference to Rebel comes from Marty totally blowing his cool whenever anybody calls him “chicken” – the actor playing Biff Tannen, Thomas F. Wilson (who doubles as his son Griff in the scenes set in 2015), even makes some of the infamous “cheep-cheep-cheep” noises the gang kids made at James Dean in Rebel (by the way, the real James Dean had already been dead for a month and a half when the November 1955 scenes in this film take place). The resemblance to It’s a Wonderful Life – particularly the scenes that show the moral cesspool Potterville, nèe Bedford Falls, would have become if George Bailey (James Stewart) nad never been born – comes in the scenes in which Biff has become fabulously wealthy and by 2015 totally runs Hill Valley. He’s opened a huge casino and it’s established that his fortune came from a series of outrageously lucky sports bets, starting with a horse race. Only his fortune really came from a sports almanac Marty picked up on his and Dr. Brown’s trip to 2015, which contains the results of every major sporting event from 1950 to 2000. (The magazine we see doesn’t look anywhere big enough to contain all that information, but we’ll let that pass.) Marty picked it up hoping to use it to make himself some money back in 1985, but he left it in the DeLorean time machine and Griff stole it for a joyride, flew it back to 1955 and gave the book to his father Biff.

Griff told Biff to keep the existence of the book a secret and never to let it out of his sight, and the biggest thing that happens in Back to the Future Part II is that Marty has to figure out how to steal the book from Biff before Biff can misuse it not only to make himself an ill-gotten fortune but to kill Marty’s father George and force Marty’s mother Lorraine to marry him. (There’s an exceptionally brutal scene between them in which Lorraine threatens to leave him, he strikes her down and knocks oer to the floor, and to the utter shame of her son Marty, she apologizes to him and stays together with him.) The result is a furious car chase in which Marty retrieves the book and, at Dr. Brown’s insistence, burns it. Part of the fun in watching or reading a science-fiction story set in what was still the future when it was created but is now the present or even the past is having a look at what they got right and what they got wrong. Among the things they got wrong was the same mistake that the creators of the marvelous 1930 science-fiction musical (yes, you read that right!) Just Imagine did: they assumed that personal planes would become so ubiquitous they’d fill the skies and take the place of the more terrestrial traffic jams we’re used to.

In fact, Back to the Future Part II contains an ad for a service that would convert your old-fashioned earth-bound auto into a hovercraft.and whereas the first Back to the Future shows Marty McFly breaking apart one of those homemade wooden scooters with roller-skate wheels underneath and riding it like a skateboard, Part II features a flying skateboard which Marty uses to great effect to escape the baddies, even though he runs out of power in mid-air and plunges into a lake outside the high school (which is otherwise unchanged, except for being more dilapidated, from the first film). There’s also a scene that takes place in a 1980’s retro coffeehouse in 2015, in which the record they’re playing is Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and later when Dr. Brown tells Marty he will need to dress in proper 1950’s attire for their return to 1955 in the second half of the film, Marty dresses in the iconic costume Michael Jackson wore at the time. This in turn sets up some nice effects shots in which Michael Jk Fox has to avoid running into himself because the consequences for the space-time continuum would be disastrous if two Marty McFlys would meet in the same time stream.

Back to the Future Part III (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1999)

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

At the end of Back to the Future Part II Dr. Brown has dropped a reference to the time and place he’s really want to visit, the Old West in 1885. That in turn sets up Back to the Future Part III, which struck me as the weakest, a not terribly funny Old Western spoof in which Marty learns that Dr. Brown is going to be murdered by Biff’s and Griff’s ancestor, outlaw Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (you guessed it, Thomas F. Wilson again!). This time the alias Marty adopts once he gets back to the Old West is “Clint Eastwood,” and I’m sure Zemeckis, Gale and their crew intended Michael J. Fox to look as ridiculous as he does in the hat and serape the real Clint Eastwood wore in his early “spaghetti Westerns.” Back to the Future Part III doesn’t have that much to offer – in this one the time travelers inadvertently arrive during an Indian attack (one wonders if these used film clips from earlier Universal Westerns the way Mel Brooks used footage from John Ford’s classic The Searchers to represent the wagon train Cleavon Little’s parents were denied admission to in Blazing Saddles). A stray arrow from the Indian hordes puncture the DeLorean’s gas tank, and while the time-travel part of the car runs on plutonium it still needs to run on regular gasoline to reach the 88 miles per hour needed for it to bridge the time barrier and move to the past or the future. There are echoes of John Ford’s late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in the bizarre confrontation between Marty McFly and Buford Tannen, who’s out to kill somebody and he really doesn’t seem to care who.

The one genuinely moving plot line in this film is the burgeoning live affair between Dr. Brown and schoolteacher Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen), which achieves some of the same pathos Harlan Ellison did in his marvelous late-1960’s Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) go back in time to San Francisco in 1930 because Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) has already inadvertently done so and screwed up the space-time continuum. The poignance of the show came in the character of Edith Keeler (Joan Collins in what was probably the greatest performance she ever gave), a mission operator and pacifist whom Kirk falls in love with, only to realize that for the future to work out the way it was supposed to, Edith must die in a car crash because if she lived, she would lead a pacifist movement that would be so successful the U.S. would never enter World War II, Hitler and the Nazis would win and history would be altered n a decidedly negative direction. (I suspect that was Ellison’s Jewishkeit coming out again.) Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale hardly get as much emotion out of this situation as Ellison did, but they do set up a similar dilemma for Dr. Brown: stay in 1885 with the woman he’s come to love or return to 1985 and preserve the space-time continuum in place. Dr. Brown also rigs up an elaborate system to accelerate the DeLorean, in the absence of fuel, to the requisite speed to get Marty back to 1985: he hijacks a steam locomotive and drives it off an uncompleted bridge, hoping that by 1985 the bridge would be complete and Marty would be able to drive the rest of the way safely.

Back to the Future Part III already was starting to qualify as steampunk (an interesting science-fiction sub-genre in which steam power becomes ever more sophisticated while electricity remains a novelty),m and it goes full steampunk in the final sequence, in wh ch the DeLorean is destroyed but Dr. Brown and Clare remain alive because the locomotive turns into a time-travel machine. I thought the ending silly, but engagingly so even though it’s obvious Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wanted to give their saga a happy ending at long last, no matter what the consequences or how much of a pretzel twist they had to give the logic of their story to achieve it!

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, episode 2: "Adrift" (Amazon Studios, HarperCollins Publishers, New Line Cinema, Tolkien Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved ≤br>
Last night my husband Charles and I watched the second of seven episodes in the first season of Amazon Prime’s new streaming serial The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. This was called “Adrift” and the title pretty much summed up the way I felt about it. I remember when Charles and I first watched Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung together he complained that in the first three episodes there seemed to be only 12 people in the entire universe, and when we watched The Lord of the Rings movies together and he served as my “Tolkien whisperer” the way I had served as his “Wagner whisperer,” I had the opposite problem: I had a hard time keeping track of the various populations – the elves,the dwarves, the humans, the Hobbits – and though there aren’t any Hobbits in this prequel (actually a pre-prequel since the cycle originally started with The Hobbit) I’m still having trouble keeping track of the multiple plot lines and resent the fact tha just when one set of characters and one plot line starts getting interesting, director J. A. Bayona and writers John D. Payne, Gennifer Hutchinson and Patrick McKay wrench us away from it. The main character appears to be Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), whom we first encounter swimming alone in the ocean after she jumped ship in the previous episode. She runs into a life raft but most of the people (or eives, or whatever) don’t want her there and eventually a hostile ship rams them and everyone appears to die except for one young man who takes her on board the remnant of the raft they have left.

Meanwhile, Elf-King Elrond (Robert Aramayo, easily the sexiest guy in this cast) goes to visit dwarf Prince Dunn IV (Owain Arthur) for help constructing a giant tower (which I’m presuming is one of the titular Two Towers in the second book of The Lord of the Rings, or is it the third if you count The Hobbit?). He’s hoping to get Dunn’s assistance because the two are – or at least were – friends, but Dunn has a major case of hurt feelings because Elrond hasn’t seen him for over 20 years during which time Dunn has got married and had two kids. Elrond challenges Dunn to a contest which has the sort of gibberish name that abounds in fantasies in general and Tolkien in particular, which turns out to be a rock-breaking contest in which, if Elrond loses, he will be permanently banished from the dwarves’ realm. He loses, but Dunn’s wife intercedes for him, insists on inviting Elrond for dinner, and eventually they renew their friendship. (The wife is played by a Black actress in the sort of cross-racial casting that attracted a lot of ire among Tolkien fans on Twitter, but I actually liked it.) And while all that is going on, there’s yet another subplot involving two young girls, Non Brandyfoot (Markella Kavanaugh) and Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), who rescue a giant known only as “The Stranger” (Daniel Wayman) from the woods and take him home, even though they have no way of communicating with him. All these plot lines do not converge or bounce back and forth reinforcing each other: they just clash with each other and don’t do anything to reinforce each other. I’m really not feeling this series or identifying with it, and it’s just pretty much flowing over me (much like the three episodes of The Hobbit did) without actually moving me or reaching me emotionally.

Next at the Kennedy Center: "A Joni Mitchell Songbook" (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, PBS, filmed May 25 and 26, 2022; aired November 22, 2022)

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

Last night at 9 I watched a couple of quite interesting music-related shows on PBS. The first was an hour-long entry in a series called Next at the Kennedy Center, which looks like an attempt by the PBS station in Washington, D.C. to do a show to compete with the long-running New York show Live from Lincoln Center. This episode was called “A Joni Mitchell Songbook” and had its roots not only in Joni Mitchell’s music generally but specifically in two albums she made about 20 years ago, Both Sides Now and Travelogue, in which she performed several of her old songs backed by a 50-piece symphony orchestra under the direction of Vince Mendoza. This telecast was filmed May 25 and 26, 2022, and at the time COVID-19 was enough of a live issue that many of the musicians – particularly the string players, who unlike the reed and brass players don’t have to blow into their instruments to get them to sound – were wearing face masks. The concerts featured other singers doing Joni Mitchell’s songs with the arrangements Mendoza originally wrote for Mitchell herself, and instead of grabbing major “names” from today’s pop music world Mendoza went for more obscure talents, or at least people I’d never heard of before: Aoife O’Donovan (given that name I assumed she was Irish; she was actually born in Massachusetts, though she spent summers in Ireland as a girl and learned traditional Irish music at the source), Jimmie Herrod (a young Black man with a naturally high voice who reminded me a bit of the frustratingly under-recorded Black jazz singer Jimmie Scott), Raul Midón, Lelah Hathaway (a heavy-set Black woman who I thought was the strongest singer on the program) and the one singer I had heard of before, opera star Renée Fleming.

I’ve never been that big a fan of Joni Mitchell – she’s always been one of those artists I’ve admired much more often than I’ve actually loved – and quite frankly my favorite Joni Mitchell records were her albums from the 1970’s, beginning with Court and Spark (1973) and on through her remarkable Mingus (1979). The latter began as a collaboration between Mitchell and jazz great Charles Mingus, and they wrote three songs together befo0re Mingus’s ALS disability became too great for him to continue on the project. So she completed the album herself, writing lyrics to Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” (a tribute to Lester Young written after Young’s death in 1959) and adding two more songs of her own, including one about Mingus called “God Must Be a Boogie Man.” Though I was disappointed in one aspect of the album – her decision to use an electric bassist, Jaco Pastorious, instead of an acoustic bass player as Mingus had been – otherwise Mingus was a brilliant album and a surprise from someone I’d previously written off as just another folkie. (Besides creating the music, Mitchell also painted the hauntingly beautiful cover art.) Last night’s program contained eight songs – I presume trhe actual concerts were longer – and it began with Aoife O’Donovan’s slow, beautifully phrased version of Mitchell’s song “Woodstock.” I still have major problems with the mythologizing of Woodstock – unlike a lot of other people, I was alive (though on the other end of the country) when it happened and I remember the initial coverage as a muddy disaster before the myth-making took over (I’ve extensively discussed the Woodstock myth before on moviemagg, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/08/by-time-we-got-to-woodstock.html, and I notice I even used the famous catch phrase from Mitchell’s song, “By the time we got to Woodstock … ,” as my title) and bailed out the capitalist entrepreneurs who had launched the festival in the first place.

The next song after O’Donovan’s haunting “Woodstock” was “A Case of You” sung by the high-voiced Black male Jimmie Herrod. Then Renée Fleming came on for “The Circle Game,” which she said was written by Mitchell to reassure her good friend Neil Young that he still had a life and a career left even though he was about to turn 20 years old. (It’s indicative of the youth cult of the 1960’s that a prodigiously talented musician like Neil Young would worry about burning out at 20, especially since he’s still alive and has had a quite remarkable and exploratory career.) Alas, Fleming’s version was just too slow and missed the spirit of Mitchell’s original. Fortunately, the next singer was Raul Madón doing an infectious version of one of Mitchell’s jazziest tunes, “Be Cool” (even the title is an iconic sentiment in the jazz world!). Then Madón joined forces with Lelah Hathaway for “Sex Kills,” arguably the closest Joni Mitchell has ever come to writing a punk-rock song. Jimmie Herrod seemed to get lost in the convoluted lyrics of Mitchell’s “Hejira,” but fortunately Aoife O’Donovan redeemed things with her interpretation of “River.” There was an interstitial clip of jazz pianist Herbie Hancock reminiscing about recording “River” with Wayne Shorter on sax as part of his 2097 album River: The Joni Letters, which won him a Grammy award for Album of the Year (the first time a jazz album had won since the 1964 release Getz/Gilberto, a classic fusion of jazz and Brazilian bossa nova music). River: The Joni Letters alternated instrumental tracks and vocals by guest artists; “River” was sung by Corinne Bailey Rae (she and O’Donovan do it equally well). and other guest singers included Norah Jones,Tina Turner (surprisingly restrained on “Edith and the Kingpin”), Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen (doing a rap version of “The Jungle Line”), Sonya Kitchell, and on one song, “Tea Leaf Prophecy,” Joni Mitchell herself.

After “River” the Kennedy Center concert (or at least the TV version) concluded with Lelah Hathaway doing what is probably Mitchell’s best-known song, “Both Sides Now.” The song was a hit for Judy Collins in 1968 and Mitchell’s first version (on her second album, Clouds) seemed oddly bored, as if she were thinking, “Well, people know I wrote this song and they’re going to want to hear me sing it, but I really don’t want to.” But she did choose it as the title track of one of her big orchestral albums two decades ago, and it ended up here in a heart-felt version that gives the lie to Will Freidwald’s denigration of the song in his book on Frank Sinatra (who covered it during one of his attempts to seem “with-it” in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) that “Both Sides Now” doesn’t build to any sort of emotional climax but “just drones on and on.” Though I had the same problem with “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” that I’ve had with similar PBS tributes to Woody Guthrie – songs that were light, fast uptempo numbers in their creator’s recordings were slowed down and turned into Great Monuments of American Culture – one thing I really liked about the show is it showcased just how fine a melodist Joni Mitchell is. A lot of singer-songwriters seem to regard the tunes as just a vehicle to carry the words; Mitchell’s music, especially as heard here, is complex and rich in its own right. There’s enough musical meat and sinew in Mitchell’s music, quite apart from the sincere if sometimes convoluted poetry of their lyrics, to give Mendoza plenty to work with as an arranger and conductor. “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” allowed me to hear aspects of Joni Mitchell’s music I’d never heard before, which is what a good tribute concert should do.

And I really liked her drummer, Brian Blade, a jazz-influenced player who said that Mitchell herself sets the tempo with the right hand of her guitar playing, and all he has to do is follow her lead and play fills and breaks behind her. That was also something KT Tunstall had said about her music on her 2019 Live at the Belly Up appearance: she said the record producer on her first album had noticed that she set the basic rhythm herself and told the drummer to follow her rhythm instead of trying to set the tempo himself. Blade also said that when he first played with Joni Mitchell, it was just the two of them,and he had to get used to playing her songs with a 50-piece orchestra. He obviously learned to do very well, because his jazz-influenced polyrhythmic drumming helped add life to the music and keep the simple beauty of Mitchell’s songs from being drowned out in an ocean of strings.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On (Eagle Vision, Manitoba, Ontario Hydro, Paquin Entertainment Group, White Pine Pictures, 2022)

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

After “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” PBS ran another documentary on a legendary folksinger who gut her start in the 1960’s and is still alive: Buffy Sainte-Marie. The show was called Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On and told the story of this fascinating figure in American music and culture. She was born in Canada on February 20, 1941 to a Cree Indian couple on the Piapot 75 Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan. But at age two or three she was forcibly removed from her parents to be raised by an adoptive family in Massachusetts under the name Beverly Sainte-Marie. This was part of a deliberate policy by the Canadian government to rip apart Native American families and assign their children to be raised by white families so they would grow up without any knowledge of the supposedly “barbarous” Native traditions. Buffy described herchildhood as a nightmare of abuse, including sexual abuse, that ended only when she was old enough to go to college at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she graduated with degrees on teaching and Oriental philosophy. She also realized she had an aptitude for music when her parents received a second-hand piano as a gift, and she began copying songs she heard by ear. Later she also taught herself guitar, and in the early 1960’s she moved to New York City and settled in Greenwich Village. Buffy made the rounds of the coffeehouses that showcased folk acts, and she got crucial support from the young Bob Dylan. Dylan had already started to make a name for himself in the folk-music scene, and he recommended Buffy to the owners of venues where he’d played, including Gerde’s Folk City and the Gaslight Café.

Buffy Sainte-Marie looked like the stereotypical image of a woman folksinger – a face framed by long dark hair – but she didn’t have the pure soprano voice of Joan Baez, Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell. Instead she sang ini a hard, raspy voice that throbbed with emotion, which gave her songs – especially socially conscious ones like “Universal Soldier,” which she wrote after meeting some wounded veterans returning from Viet Nam at a time when the U.S. government was still denying that we were fighting a war there – an unusual edge. Indeed, it occurred to me that one reason Bob Dylan tried to boost Buffy Sainte-Marie’s career was he might have heard her as a female version of himself. Sainte-Marie signed a recording contract with Vanguard Records, the classical and folk label that had launched Joan Baez’s career, in 1964 and her first album for them was ironically titled It’s My Way – ironically because, as she says in an interview heard here, she was given no control over what material she was to record, how the album was to be mixed or which takes of the songs would be used. In fact, one of the artists interviewed for this documentary was Joni Mitchell, who said that Sainte-Marie had told him about her difficulties with the executives who ran Vanguard, and as a result Mitchell decided to turn down their offer to sign her. (That may be why, when Mitchell finally did sign a record contract with Warner Bros.’s Reprise label, she had it written into her contract that she would never have to take orders from a male in the studio.) Sainte-Marie recalled that when she first arrived in New York City she was disappointed at all the trash in the streets – like many other people, she’d been led to believe that everyone in New York was affluent – and she had never met a businessman or a lawyer. When she signed her first contract with Vanguard they asked her if she had a lawyer, and when she told them she didn’t, they said, “Then you can use ours.”

When a successful folk group called The Highwaymen offered to record her “Universal Soldier,” they asked who the publisher was. She said she didn’t have one, and a man at the next table at the restaurant where they were meeting introduced himself as a music publisher and bought the rights to “Universal Soldier” for $1. (Ten years later Sainte-Marie was able to buy back half the publishing for $25,000.) Like W. C. Handy, who was similarly gypped out of the publishing rights to his first hit, “Memphis Blues,” Sainte-Marie learned her lesson and never sold the publishing rights to one of her songs again. She even maintained that attitude when Elvis Presley wanted to record one of her songs, “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (which the makers of this documentary cite as a ground-breaking song because it acknowledges that love relationships are temporary and shouldn’t be expected to last “‘til death do us part”). Elvis and his scumbag manager, Col. Tom Parker, were notorious for demanding cut-in credits on every song Elvis recorded so Elvis would get a co-composer credit and, more importantly, 50 percent of the songwriting royalties. A lot of people put up with this to get Elvis to record their songs – among them singer-songwriter Otis Blackwell, who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up” and many of Elvis’s other big hits, who said he agreed to Col. Parker’s demand “because 50 percent of something is a whole lot better than 100 percent of nothing.” But Buffy Sainte-Marie refused, saying, “Elvis didn’t write the song – I did.” And she got away with it because, unbeknownst to her, Elvis and his wife Priscilla had made it “their song” and he was so determined to record it he overruled Parker (for once) and did so with Sainte-Marie credited as sole composer.

Buffy Sainte-Marie’s career nosedived at the end of the 1960’s because she had become an active supporter of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and as such was put on a blacklist by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had decided AIM was a subversive threat to his vision of America and anyone who associated with it or helped it financially needed to be stopped. Hoover sent a letter to radio stations throughout the country telling them to stop playing Sainte-Marie’s records – and virtually all of them complied. Sainte-Marie’s career dried up, which at the time she assumed merely was a common phenomenon in the music business – people ride a wave of popularity and then their audiences start to fade as the novelty wears off. Sainte-Marie made a comeback via an unusual avenue: Sesame Street. The Children’s Television Workshop, which produced the iconic program, originally approached her to write jingles for the show about the alphabet and arithmetic, but eventually they put her on as a personality, showcasing her nursing her recently born son Cody (Sainte-Marie noted in the documentary that there were no protests against her nursing her baby on TV when the show originally aired, but today when the clips are posted to YouTube there are a lot of scathing comments and demands that the “offensive” content be taken down.)

In 1982 Sainte-Marie’s career got another unexpected boost when the producers of the film An Officer and a Gentleman hired her and her then-boyfriend Jack Nitzsche (who had been musical director for Phil Spector’s fabled “Wall of Sound” recordings in the 1960’s) to write a song called “Up Where We Belong,” with Will Jennings as lyricist. The song was sung in the film by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warren, and one of Sainte-Marie’s friends interviewed for this documentary said that Cocker was quite closely copying Sainte-Marie’s phrasing in his singing. “Up Where We Belong” won the Academy Award for Best Song, though Sainte-Marie ruefully notes here that she remains the only Native American to have won a competitive Oscar. One thing Sainte-Marie is especially proud of is her efforts to expand opportunities for Native people in the film industry – she formed an organization for that purpose with, among other people, Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the 1950’s TV series The Lone Ranger and remains one of the few genuinely Native actors who’s played a Native character on TV. Sainte-Marie had already struck a blow for this cause when she was invited to be a guest star on an episode of the 1960’s TV series The Virginian, and one of her conditions for appearing was that all the other Native characters on her episodes be played by actual Native actors.

Alas, Sainte-Marie’s marriage to Jack Nitszche fell victim to his heroin addiction; in what became the final straw, he sneaked over to her and gave her a skin-pop injection of the drug. To her this was not only a betrayal of trust, it flashed her back to an early experience in the 1960’a in which she had been given injections, supposedly of “vitamins” but actually of opiates. The experience had led her to go through withdrawal and had inspired one of her most famous and most-covered songs, “Cod’ine” (though ironically a lot of the artists who covered it didn’t learn its lesson: the list of people who recorded “Cod’ine” includes such famous drug casualties as Janis Joplin and Gram Parsons). After a decade out of the music scene, Sainte-Marie got back into recording when she bought one of the first Macintosh computers in 1984 and ultimately formed a long-distance professional relationship with a producer in London. She was living in a remote area of Hawai’i and wasn’t willing to leave, but through an early version of the Internet they were able to collaborate long-distance. Today Buffy Sainte-Marie is 81 years old and still going strong; this film ends with her winning a Canadian music award in 2021. Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On is a tribute to an artist who, despite a career with more than the usual ups and downs, has made a huge contribution to the culture and succeeded on her own terms, including endowing scholarships for Native people (one of her awardees just became the principal of a Native school in Canada) and other worthy causes because she hasn’t been interested in accumulating a lot of money for herself, but instead wanted to use her money to help others.

Philadelphia (TriStar Pictrures, Clinica Estetico, 1993)

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

Last night at 7:15 I put on Turner Classic Movies so my husband Charles and I could watch a couple of interesting movies about various kinds of social prejudice. One was the 1993 AIDS movie Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks in his first of two back-to-back Academy Award-winning roles as hot-shot Philadelphia attorney Andrew “Andy” Beckett, who unbeknownst to anybody at work is a Gay man who contracts AIDS. He is fired from his job, ostensibly because of incompetence – he allegedly misplaced an important complaint just an hour and 15 minutes before it had to be filed or the statute of limitations would run out, and mysteriously both the hard copy he printed out and the file fromhis computer (Charles chuckled at the ancient monochrome CRT display monitor on his computer) disappear and eventually the hard copy turns up in a room full of completed case files – but Andy is convinced that he’s really being set up to be fired because he has AIDS. Andy wants to sue for wrongful termination, claiming that he was covered by a U.S. Supreme Court decision preventing people with disabilities from being fired if they can still do the work, but he approaches nine lawyers to represent him and all turn him down. In desperation, Andy calls on Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), a so-called “TV lawyer,” an ambulance chaser whose TV commercials have made him ubiquitous around Philadelphia. At first Miller doesn’t want to take the case, either, and he makes it clear that his own hatred of Queer people is one of the reasons. But eventually Miller takes the case after he runs into Andy in a public law library and sees an officious clerk try to get Andy into a private room because he can see Andy’s KS lesions (for some reason KS – short for Kaposi’s sarcoma, a form of skin cancer – generally appeared only in Gay and Bisexual men who got AIDS, not in other people who contracted the syndrome) and is worried their patrons can, too – and this gets through to Miller on a personal level. Not so much so that Miller isn’t revolted when a young Gay Black law student comes on to him in a supermarket, apparently assuming that Miller wouldn’t be representing a Gay plaintiff in an anti-discrimination lawsuit if he weren’t Gay himself. Miller responds by threatening to beat the guy up, and it’s only after Miller leaves that we see the young man throwing a football up and down, as if to say, “Maybe I’m Gay, but I’m still more athletic than you.”

There’s also a scene in which Andy takes Miller to a Gay party (where Michael Callen’s a cappella group The Flirtations are doing their cover of the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman,” though alas director Jonathan Demme did not include the song’s second chorus with its famous punch line, “And lots of wavy hair like Liberace,” which took on a quite different meaning when the song was sung by Gay men after Liberace’s own AIDS diagnosis had dragged him out of the closet at last) and he’s the proverbial fish out of water. When I first saw Philadelphia I watched it with my then-partner John Gallagher on a rented VHS tape and I didn’t care for it; I thought it was way too didactic and I dreaded the scene a Gay friend of mine had warned me about in which, he said, Tom Hanks “flounced” around the set while playing Denzel Washington an opera record. When I finally saw the film I loved that scene; it was the sort of conversation I’ve had myself many times in which I’ve tried to explain what I love about opera to someone who has no ear for it and doesn’t see why anybody would listen to all this singing in languages they don’t understand. This time around I did think Tom Hanks overacted the scene (especially given that Hanks’s stock-in-trade as an actor is Spencer Tracy-esque naturalism), but it’s still the one part of the movie where director Demme and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner gave Andy Beckett some dimensionality instead of making him just a stick-figure victim. When I first saw Philadelphia I found myself wishing that Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington had switched roles. With his experience ini situation comedies on TV Hanks would have been far more believable as the clownish “TV lawyer” figure he starts the film as, and with his more serious mien Washington would have been better as the person with AIDS, especially since he could have been drawn as someone who had reached the top rung of the legal profession despite the dual, disadvantage of being Black and Gay. But Nyswaner was trying to create, not a character with depth in his own right, but a poster child for AIDS awareness, and given the political and social atmosphere of 1993 the AIDS poster child couldn’t have been Black. It had to be a straight white guy playing a Gay white guy with an ample extended family who supported him and had long since accepted his Gayness as O.K.

Demme even added to his imprimatur by casting Joanne Woodward, of all people, as his mother – and Jason Robards, Jr. as his tormentor at the law firm, the partner responsible for firing him, who boasts proudly that during his stint in the Navy he and his fellow sailors in the Navy had targeted a Gay guy aboard ship by shoving his head into a latrine after they all had just used it. One thing watching Philadelphia again 28 years after it was made was it brought back the sheer terror of AIDS at a time wh en a diagnosis of it was literally a death sentence. I have grim memories of the time during which the news that you had AIDS was a signal that it was time for you to wrap up your affairs and get ready to leave the planet early, and the film plays quite differently in an era in which the AIDS industry has declared “HIV” (and the shift in nomenclature from “AIDS” to “HIV disease” to just “HIV” is revealing enough in itself, as well as the only allegedly viral disease in history for which a positive test for antibodies, which for most genuinely viral diseases is a sign of immunity, is considered a sure-fire sign that you will get the disease and die from it without “treatment”) “a chronic, manageable illness” and drugs both to treat it of you have it and “prophylaxis” to keep from getting it if you don’t are widely advertised on television. AIDS was a devastating catastrophe for the Queer community, especially Gay men, but it also had a weird silver lining; it convinced much of America that Gay men aren’t just sex-driven pigs. We really love each other and form enduring attachments just like straight people, and when we get sick our partners care for us and visit us in the hospital.

To me one fascinating aspect of this movie is the way in which Andy’s partner Miguel (Antonio Banderas, a straight actor who achieved stardom in the films of openly Gay director Pedro Almodóvar) is basically told to get lost when Andy is in the hospital and he’s asked if he’s part of Andy’s immediate family, and the way Charles was treated at the hospital when I had my own health crisis in late 2021. I told them that Charles was my husband, and he was properly respected and treated decently and reasonably as someone who would be responsible for my care after I left the hospital. It’s a measure of just how far we have come since this film was made almost three decades ago that in 1996 the U.S. Congress passed the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” stating that only marriages between one man and one woman would be legally recognized by the federal government for tax, health benefits and other purposes; and the recent vote in the U.S. Senate, with 12 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats, to allow a first debate on the floor for the “Respect for Marriage Act,” which would enshrine the rights of same-sex couples and interracial couples to marry into federal law. It is also a measure of how far we’ve come that, though the radical Right (especially the radical religious Right) still opposes what they refer to as “so-called ‘Gay rights,’” they’ve realized that they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns bashing Gay and Lesbian people and are focusing their ire on Trans people instead. (I wrote the above after the news of the shooting at the Club “Q” in Colorado Springs, Colorado but before the latest news coverage of it, including reports that far-Right Web sites are actually praising the lethal assault on Club “Q” at which five people and more “moderate” Web sites saying that the victims brought it on themselves by attending a drag show or whatever. Maybe I was being overly optimistic about the broader acceptance of Queer people in general in society.)

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Wildwood Enterprises, Artemis Rising Foundation, Foothill Productions, Be Natural Production, 2018)

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

After Philadelphia Turner Classic Movies showed a major documentary on the pioneering French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché called Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. The 2018 film was inspired by a book by Alison McMahan called Alice Guy-Blaché, Lpsr Visionary of the Cinema. The film is a real treat for people like me who feel frustrated and angered by what I call “frist-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re writing about was the first to do something even though it’s often quite easy to trace someone who did it before. In Alice Guy-Blaché’s case (and in the case of most of the women filmmakers who had important roles in the industry from the 1890’s to the early 1920’s and have been quite consciously written out of the standard film histories) it goes beyond “first-itis” to a deliberate whitewashing of the history of early film to eliminate the substantial contributions of women in the early days. The usual “print the legend” version of movie history is that Thomas A. Edison invented them, his right-hand man Edwini S. Porter pioneered the job of movie director and was the first person to think of film as a medium for storytelling, D. W. Griffitn who invented the basic grammar of film – including close-ups, moving-camera shots, suspense editing and intercutting – Thomas H. Ince who was the first studio head, and Mack Sennett who pioneered comedy, especially slapstick.in films. This documentary makes a good case that the movies were actually invented in France, and Alice Guy-Blaché arguably was the true pioneer in all the disciplines of filmmaking: the first screenwriter, the first director, the first studio head and the first to make genuinely funny films.

Alice Guy was the fifth child of a French couple who had just moved back to Paris from a long stint in Chile, and later her parents moved back there so she grew up speaking both Spanish and French. Later the family returned to France, and when her father died Alice was forced to find work to support herself and her mother. She got a job as secretary to Léon Gaumont, inventor of a movie camera that was sufficiently different from Edison’s version that it was legal to use without paying Edison royalties, and she began making films using the Gaumont camera. Gaumont was a friend of Louis and Auguste Lumiére, who organized the first public exhibition of moving pictures in Paris in November 1896 but had given a private screening earlier that year in March at which Léon Gaumont and Alice Guy were present. It was Alice Guy who apparently first thought that movies didn’t have to be just documentary scenes of ordinary life – trains approaching the camera, surf at the beach, people going to or coming home from work, and the like – but could actually tell a story. In 1896 she wrote and directed The Cabbage Fairy, a fantasy that anticipated another French pioneer, Georges Méliès, in its whimsical nature (the titular cabbage fairy grows cabbages in a patch and they turn into babies, whom she sends to expectant parents) and early use of special effects. The Cabbage Fairy was a smash hit, and Léon Gaumont put Alice Guy in charge of producing movies for his company (which still exists; it’s the oldest movie studio in continuous operation anywhere in the world, having started in 1892, a year before the second oldest, Pathé).

In 1907 she started a relationship with another Gaumont employee, Herbert Blaché, and they became engaged – much to the displeasure of Léon Gaumont, who had planned to send Blaché to Germany to open a branch of Gaumont there. Alice went with him despite not knowing German, and the two eventually married. Gaumont ultimately sent them to the U.S. to organize an American branch of his company, but in 1910 they decided to strike out on their own and formed an independent studio called Solax,whose logo was a rising sun. During her French years Alice Guy pioneered color films (the colors were hand-painted on the film using stencils, essentially an early form of colorization) and also sound films through the Chronophone, a Gaumont invention by which the sound was pre-recorded on a phonograph disc and then the film was shot with the actors miming to the pre-recording, much the way musicals would be made after the success of The Broadway Melody in 1929. Several surviving Chronophones were included in this documentary – though, as Charles noted, it’s not clear whether these were originals or modern reconstructions – and the subjects were established French vaudeville and cabaret singers performing and recording their public acts. Edison experimented with sound films at around the same time, but his system differed in that he tried to record the picture and sound simultaneously, which given that he was still using acoustic recording, the actors had to turn to the giant recording horn to have any chance of being heard.

Solax set up shop in New Jersey, which was actually the center of U.S. film production in the 1910’s, and both companies that were part of the “Motion Picture Patents Trust” set up by Thomas Edicon and film manufacturer George Eastman (founder of Kodak) to control the industry, and independent studios like the companies that later became Paramount, Universal and MGM located there. Alice Guy-Blaché and her husband continued to run Solax until the early 1920’s, when a combination of a studio fire, financial problems and the breakdown of the Blaché/Guy marriage (Blaché was an inveterate womanizer and among his paramours were Solax’s biggest star and Mrs. Phillips Smalley, who using her maiden name, Lois Weber, became the second major woman film director) led to the studio’s collapse in 1922. Alice Guy-Blaché returned to France that year and vainly tried to get work in the industry she’d helped create. In 1927 she went back to the U.S. to try to recover prints of her films, but she couldn’t find any; at that time movies were considered totally disposable, and it wasn’t until 1939 that the New YOrk Museum of Modern Art set up a film curation department and put Iris Barry (another woman pioneer!) in charge of it. For the rest of her life she lived in retirement, writing a book of memoirs that was not published until after her death in 1968. For much of that time she was supported by her daughter Simone (much the way Alice herself had supported her widowed mother decades earlier), who got a job with the U.S. State Department.

The documentary featured interviews with Alice Guy-Blaché herself and her daughter Simone; it was narrated by Jodie Foster and featured interviews with modern-day women filmmakers – among them Catherine Hardwicke, Gale Ann Hurd, Julie Taympr and Ava DuVernay – understandably upset that Alice Guy=Blaché’s name had literally been written out of film history. In the 1930’s Léon Gaumont wrote an official history of his company and left Alice totally out of it, and years later a film documentary on Fort Lee, New Jersey when it was the filmmaking center of the U.S. attributed the founding of Solax exclusively to Herbert Blaché and once again made no mention of his wife, even though Alise had not only personally directed a large number of Solax’s releases but had functioned as the studio head, assigning writers,directors and actors to various projects. The showing of the documentary was followed by two surviving films directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, Algae, the Miner (1912) – a one-reel comedy Western about Algie, an effeminate young man (who actually kisses another man on the lips!) who gets sent out to the wild West in hopes that this will “make a man of him” (a plot line that’s been used by innumerable comics since,from Buster Keaton to Don Knotts) and The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ, a 1906 Gaumont production based on the so-called “Tissot Bible.”

This was an illustrated version of the New Testament (or at least the four canonical Gospels) with illustrations by an artist named James Tissot who went to the historical locations in Palestine to see what they looked like first-hand, and Alice Guy-Blaché essentially set 25 of Tissot’s plates and filmed them. The result is a rather static movie – if Guy-Blaché pioneered close-ups and suspense editing in other films,she didn’t do it here; the film is a series of tableaux and you’d be hard pressed to keep track of the story if you didn’t already know it. But it was a visually impressive production with elaborate sets and literally 300 extras filling out Guy-Blaché’s visual tableaux. Unfortunately, surviving prints don’t carry the name of Alice Guy-Blaché as director and instead credit the film’s assistant director, a man named Victorin Jassot who directed the crowd scenes, as the director: yet another insult to Guy-Blaché’s personal and professional reputation.

The Unfaithful (Warner Bros., 1947)

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched a movie on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies: The Unfaithful, a 1947 Warner Bros. film directed by Vincent Sherman and written by David Goodis and James Gunn. It was actually a clever reworking of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Letter” (1926), which was adapted into a play in 1927 and had already been filmed twice with Maugham attributed as the original writer: by Paramount in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and by Warner Bros. in 1940 with Bette Davis (who had previously played a character loosely based on Eagels in the 1935 film Dangerous). In 1947 Warner Bros. producer Jerry Wald decided to remodel “The Letter” from its original setting in the South Seas to contemporary Los Angeles. The original story is about a woman who’s been having extra-relational activities and kills him to get rid of his no longer wanted attentions. Then she lies about it, telling her husband that she’d never met the man before and she killed him in self-defense when he tried to rape her. But a local blackmailer has a letter she wrote to him the night she killed him luring him to her home, and she gets her husband to give her the money to buy the letter even though this means he can’t buy the new plantation he had arranged to purchase and move with her to run it. In 1947 Ann Sheridan played the woman, Chris Hunter, and Zachary Scott played her husband Bob (a real bit of anti-type casting since we were used to seeing the rather seedy-looking Scott as the cuckolder, not the cuckoldee).

The victim is a sculptor, Michael Tanner (Paul Bradley), who met Chris while her husband was overseas fighting in World War II. Instead of a letter, Goodis and Gunn made the blackmail object a statue, a bust of Chris which she posed for while she and Michael were having their affair. Bob has a best friend, divorce lawyer Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), who takes Chris’s case when she’s arrested for Tanner’s murder. Also in the dramatis personae is Paula (Eve Arden, who’s absolutely superb and comes close to stealing the film from its nominal leads), a conniving bitch with an air of superiority similar to the character played by Agnes Moorehead in the film Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and based on a Goodis novel (though Arden here, unlike Moorehead in Dark Passage, isn’t playing a killer). The other odd thing about this movie is the sheer length of time the writers take to let us know that Chris Hunter has actually been unfaithful to her husband – even though the very title gives it away. The Unfaithful has some pretty radical ideas about marriage and its obligations – though the omnipresent pressure from the Motion Picture Production Code Authority kept it from getting too radical in that department – and it ends pretty much the way you’d expect it to, with Bob Hunter determined to divorce his wife until Larry Hannaford talks him out of it and convinces him to forgive her,.

It’s a nicely acted piece of melodrama that wears its literally pedigree lightly – the equivalent of the plantation the man in “The Letter” wanted to buy but couldn’t because his wife had paid the blackmailer for the letter is a housing development in Oregon Bob Hunter was building for returning servicemembers (a lot of the development of suburbs in postwar America was fueled by the federal government’s GI Bill of Rights, which gave low-interest loans to returning servicemembers – returning white servicemembers, anyway, which is one reason for the still yawning gap in equity between white and Black Americans) and hoping to move to himself – and the film also benefits from two unusually good supporting performances. One is by Steven Geray as Martin Barrow, a conniving art dealer who owns the statue and is working with Tanner’s widow to blackmail Chris; and the other is Marta Mitrovich as Eve Tanner, Michael Tanner’s widow, who turns ini a remarkable etched-in-acid reading as the woman who’s not going to let the Hunters get away with getting rid oif her husband even though he not only had extra-relational activities on her but lived off her financially as well. There’s also a welcome appearance by Jerome Cowan, Miles Archer in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, as the prosecutor, even though the usually cool and collected Cowan plays this character in an overextended rage throughout and one gets the impression that the judge in Chris’s trial (John Elliott) is about to send both Cowan and Lew Ayres to their corners for a time-out!