Japanese Story (Australian Film Finance Corporation, Fortissimo Films, Gecko Films Pty. Ltd., Showtime Australia, ScreenWest, Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, Film Victoria, Film Australia, The Australian Film. Commission, The South Australia Film Commission, Associantione, equinox, Footpreint Films, Premium Movie Partnership, Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie from Australia called Japanese Story, a 2003 production about an Australian woman geologist, Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) – well, given that her job is to explore the Australian outback desert looking for deposits of metal ore, “Sandy” is an appropriate name for her – and Hiromitsu Tachibana (the boyishly handsome Gotaro Tsunashima), an executive with the Japanese company that owns the mining firm for which Sandy works. He flies in to Australia on a private jet – Charles got a kick out of the airport sign reading, “All Passengers Disembark,” when Hiro (as he’s called for short throughout the movie) is the only passenger – and wants Sandy to drive him around the outback to show him all the sites where the company is working. What follows is something Charles called “an extended meet-cute,” as Sandy and Hiro slowly let down their guards and end up making love at least twice, though after their second encounter Sandy spots in Hiro’s wallet a photo of him with his wife and their child, and she’s immediately guilt-ridden even though she had no idea he was married.

Then the two of them stop to swim in a nearby pond – only [spoiler alert!] Sandy gets out safely but Hiro doesn’t. At this point, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes through a sudden change of tone much like that of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (released just a year later, in 2004). Just as Eastwood’s film turned about two-thirds of the way through from a drama about boxing to one about euthanasia, so this film turns from a romantic comedy into a tragedy. At first I couldn’t believe the filmmakers were actually going to kill off Hiro – I kept expecting either that he’d come to or Sandy’s CPR efforts on him would succeed – and from then on the film turns into a rather grim tale of how to process his sudden death. This means flying in a doctor from one of the more heavily populated parts of Australia to make the official pronouncement of death, and finding an icebox in the morgue to keep his body relatively fresh until the doctor arrives. Also, company executive Bill Baird (Matthew Dyktynmski) pisses off Sandy no end by boxing all Hiro’s belongings and sending them back to his family in Japan, thereby leaving Sandy literally nothing to remember him by. (We get the impression – or at least I did – that Bill is in decidedly unrequited love with Sandy.)

There are certainly intimations early on that the filmmakers have a dire fate in store for at least one of the characters; early on Sandy has a scene with her mother (Lynette Curran), who keeps a scrapbook about her life with clippings about everyone she knows who has died, and she’s leaving the last page blank for her own obituary. Later, after Hiro’s widow, Yukiko Tachibana (Yumiko Tanaka), flies in from Japan to claim his body, there’s a tense but quietly played confrontation between the two women in which almost nobody says a word, aside from a few brief phrases of condolence in Japanese that Sandy has learned for the occasion, but it’s economically made clear that Yukiko knows her husband and Sandy had an affair. The final scene shows Sandy reading the note Hiro had left behind for her, intending to give it to her after she saw him off on his flight home (which she’s doing as she reads it, albeit under different circumstances from the ones he imagined when he wrote it), and though she’s still been through a lot, his letter brings her a sense of closure.

I liked Japanese Story a lot better as it went on – early on Charles compared it to Gus Van Sant’s awful film Gerry, but I liked it far better (if I were to do a list of the 10 worst films of all time, Gerry would definitely be on it) even before the tragic turn of the ending. I did find some faults with it; during the 1980’s, at the peak of Japan’s economic boom when Japanese businesspeople were going around the world buying just about every company that would sell to them (a trend mentioned in the film via the character of Jimmy Smithers, played by Paul Young, who recalls growing up during World War II and how everyone was afraid of a Japanese invasion, and now “they’re buying up the whole country”), there were articles in the U.S. business press warning people that Japan was educating its executives in our customs and we weren’t educating ours in theirs. These stories specifically mentioned that Japanese companies were making sure executives they sent to English-speaking countries knew our language perfectly and we weren’t training our executives to speak Japanese – so it was hard for me to believe that a Japanese company would send a representative who spoke virtually no English to an English-speaking country. And yet Hiro had to know very little English for the culture clashes writer Tilson wanted to create. I also fault Tilson for way overdoing the “inscrutable Asian” schtick in Hiro’s character. But overall Japanese Story is a stunning piece of filmmaking, with finely honed acting and stunning cinematography of the red deserts of the Australian outback (the director of photography was Ian Baker), and a welcome continuation of the excellent record we’ve had from the North Park Lobrary’s giveaway DVD’s after Jersey Girl and The Wife.

Vacation Home Nightmare (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, January 29 Lifetime showed a new “premiere” followed by one they had “premiered” the night before and had given a huge ballyhoo to as part of their true-crime series. The Sunday “premiere” was of a film called Vacation Home Nightmare which was pretty much what you’d expect. Danielle Banks (Audrey Reynolds) is in the process of divorcing her husband Craig (not bad-looking Nick Checket) after she caught him in their bed having extra-relational activity with another woman (whom we only see in one brief flashback scene). Danielle is afraid of pissing off Craig since his name is still on her mortgage and he could conceivable do her out of their house of he so chose, but because she’s already int he final stages of dumping the guy legally she yields to the suggestion of her best friends, Alesha (Felicia Cooper) and Hannah (Yolanthe Cabau) to rent a vacation home by the beach. One of the other women even grabs Danielle’s laptop and logs on to the Web site for the company booking the resort home, and I said to my husband Charles, “It’s never a good idea for a woman in a Lifetime movie to let her best friend sign her up for an app she’s never heard of before.” Sure enough, the women find themselves tormented by a mysterious man in a ski mask. They go out long enough to cruise the beach, and specifically to cruise three hot young guys playing volleyball, and Danielle takes the hottest of the three guys, Jack Casey (Christopher Sky), to the villa with her and it looks like they’re going to get it on on the spot.

They make arrangements for a date the next day – though Danielle is careful not to call it a “date” – only the mystery guy in a ski mask gets into Jack’s house that night and kills him. When Danielle waits for him on their non-date and he doesn’t show up,she naturally assumes he stood her up. But she’s got other things on her mind: the ski-masked assailant has tried to rape her in the vacation rental and she angrily moves out and demands her money back. The rental agents turn out to be two pretty smarmy guys, Anton King (Justin Berti) and his assistant Michael Snyder (Grant Wright Gunderson). It doesn’t take long for director Linsday Hartley (who’s best known as an actress) and writer John F. Hayes to reveal that Anton is the mystery killer in the ski mask, and Michael is his gu9ilt-ridden sidekick who’s covered up for him for years. This also explains the odd prologue scene in which Anton strangled to death an unknown woman who later turned out to be Linda Winter, the original owner of the vacation home, which Anton somehow got away from her estate legally after he killed her. Anton outfitted the place with an elaborate series of hidden cameras and microphones so he could see and hear what was going on in there 24/7, and he’s also able to plant bugs in Danielle’s handbag and on her car so he can keep track of her movements.

Damoelle’s attempted rape case is assigned to a Black woman detective named Gwen Greer (Anastacia McPherson), who immediately assume Jack was the killer until his body is discovered, whereupon she next points the finger of suspicion on Craig until he has an airtight alibi. Meanwhile, Craig’s bimbo has thrown him out – in the one flashback scene I mentioned earlier, he bolted from her place after she demanded he impregnate her and he, obviously not wanting to be stuck with the task of parenthood, refused – and he tries to move back in with Danielle, much to her distress. Then Anton sneaks into his home (this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the villains seem to have an almost supernatural ability to get in places where they’re not supposed to be) and poisons him, then grabs a hunk of his hair and plants it in Dnaielle’s car in an apparent attempt to frame her for the murder of her husband. Anton also murders his sidekick Michael after Michael discovers too much about Anton’s past.

Ultimately, after Anton kidnaps Hannah and holds her at knifepoint to lure Danielle to a meeting, he explains his motive: he wanted to punish Danielle for having an adulterous relationship with Jack (even though she never actually made it to bed with Jack and she was only technically married to Craig at that point). The three women confront Anton, grab his knife and shove him into the swimming pool at the resort home, from which we don’t see him emerge: are we supposed to believe he drowned because he couldn’t swim? Or were Hartley and Hayes deliberately making the ending ambiguous because they wanted to leave open the possibility of bringing Anton back for a sequel? It’s true that the man generally regarded as the greatest suspense-film director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock, regularly let the audience know who the villain was from the get-go – he achieved suspense by making us wonder when the characters would find out who the bad guy was and what would happen to them when they did – but Lindsay Hartley, though a capable director of the sorts of stories Lifetime’s and Hallmark’s producers give her, is no Hitchcock, and Hayes isn’t in the same league as Hitchcock’s writers, either. Vacation Home Nightmare is just another formula Lifetime movie, with a banal title all too accurately describing its ultra-predictable contents.

Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini (Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie they showed after that, Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini, was a much better movie, probably at least in part because it was based on a true story. In 2016 Sherri Papini, a married woman with two kids in Redding, California, disappeared for three weeks and claimed, when she later returned home, to have been kidnapped by three Latinas (though in the movie the number of her alleged kidnappers is cut to just two), who held her for heaven knows why. In fact she was shacking up with an old boyfriend, Chris (Josh Collins), who I thought had it all over her aggressively butch husband Keith (Matt Hamilton) in the male sexiness department. Hoax is a surprisingly sensitively written (by Katie Boland) and directed (by Marta Borowski) movie, with quite a few nicely done touches. First Sherri (a marvelously subtle performance by Jaime King) tells the public side of her marriage and family at her four-year-old daughter’s birthday party (though the child actress playing her looked more like eight to me). She says that Keith first kissed her in seventh grade and she fell in love with him instantly, even though they soon drifted apart and didn’t reconnect until they were adults. Then their daughter’s birthday party ends ignominiously when the balloon playhouse the Papinis rented for the occasion springs a leak and falls down, trapping the kids inside until Sherri dives in and rescues them. I don’t know whether this happened in real life, but it makes a great metaphor for the way the Pepinis’ life together is about to implode.

After the party breaks up we get a scene of Keith and Sherri having a major argument in their kitchen while they’re doing the dishes, and both complain about how little money they have. Each accuses the other of wasting money, and the conversation devolves further as Sherri suggests she go out and look for a job, while Keith insists that he can support his family just fine and no wife of his is going to work for wages. (Someone needs to tell Keith that this is the 21st century.) Keith tries to get a raise at his job, an unspecified gig at a big-box store called (if I heard the name on the soundtrack correctly) “OddMart,” but gets the usual times-are-tough brush-off from his boss. Then Sherri goes out one morning for her usual jog, only she never returns and Keith finds her phone and her earbuds by the side of the road on her usual route. He reports it to the police as a mysterious disappearance and organizes his friends to find her, including starting a GoFundMe page for her safe return. The police assigned to the case are Black woman detective Molly Rollins and her older, white male partner, Andy Bertain, neither of whom are listed on the film’s imdb.com page even though they’re both quite good, especially the woman.

Molly notices discrepancies in Sherri’s descriptions of the kidnappers – in one she said they were only a little larger than he was, while atterwards she says at least one of them was heavy-set – and this leads her to suspect that Sherri wasn’t kidnapped at all. Molly also tells Sherri and the audience that women almost never kidnap other women. Meanwhile, Sherri is getting restive with her hot-blond stud; maybe the idea of running off with her lover seemed thrilling at first, but the reality is they’re licing in a two-bedroom apartment instead of the house Sherri is used to and Chris won’t let her go out for fear she’ll be discovered and their secret will be revealed. Most of all, she misses her children and the regular local news footage of Keith and the kids making do without her impels her to fake an “escape” from her fake “kidnappers.” There’s a marvelously kinky scene in which Sherri orders Chris to brand her with the end of a golf club and kick rubber objects that look like hockey pucks at her so she’ll look like she was physically abused, beaten and branded by her kidnappers. Sherri returns home three weeks later and gets offers of interviews with TV talk shows, which Keith urges her to take because they could certainly use the money. Sherri says they could use the money they raised from the GoFundMe account instead.

Eventually Sherri’s scheme unravels when Chris’s cousin comes forward and says he saw her at Chris’s place, and Sherri’s ex-husband also comes forward with records from their divorce that indicate Sherri is a pathological liar and nothing she says is to be trusted. There’s also a political slant to the story, as Molly takes it as a personal affront that Sherri blamed her “kidnapping” on Latinos (thereby encouraging local bigots to target Latinos and beat them on the street), and Molly discovers a poem Sherri wrote and posted online a decade or so earlier that’s a typically stupid ode to white supremacy. )This part of the story reminded me of the Susan Smith case; in 1994 she murdered her children because she was dating her boss and he didn’t want kids around. She blamed the crime on a fictitious criminal and bolstered the credibility of her story by making him Black.)

Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini is a quite well-done movie but it suffers from the Beyond a Reasonable Doubt problem – named after a 1956 film directed by Fritz Lang which starred Dana Andrews as a reporter who decides to frame himself for murder to show how easily an innocent person can be convicted and sentenced to death based solely on circumstantial evidence. Only producer Bert Friedlob insisted on a trick ending in which Andrews’ character actually did kill the victim, then worked out this elaborate scheme to escape being held accountable. Lang, as he recalled later, protested: “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for an hour and thirty-eight minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke.” Likewise, Hoax director Borowski and writer Boland do such a good job making Sherri Papini out to be a sympathetic, if screwed-up, character – including depicting her as genuinely in love with two men at once – that it’s a jolt when in the last act they have to paint her as a heartless bitch and liar who’s manipulated people all her life, including telling Chris that Keith has beating her (which he wasn’t) and telling Keith that her mom Loretta (Christina Sicoli) had beaten her as a kid (which she hadn’t).

We even feel sorry for her when Keith announces he’s divorcing her and taking the kids, since the kids were the reason she short-circuited the “kidnapping” plot and returned home. At least partly because it was based on a true story, Hoax turned out to be one of the better Lifetime movies – basing a film on reality, however much twisted and altered in the dramatization, seems to bring out the best in Lifetime’s filmmakers – and Sherri emerges as an oddly sympathetic character despite her manipulativeness and mendacity.

Highway 301 (Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 28) I wanted to watch a couple of movies being shonw in Turner Classic Movies, including a 1950 production called Highway 301 that was the feature on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” time slot even though it’s not really a film noir. Oh, there are scenes in it that look like noir visually – including a great chase scene between heroine and villain that looks like writer-director Andrew Stone had carefully studied Val Lewton’s films and copied his style – but thematically it’s not a film noir at all. It’s about crime, but the good guys are very, very good and the bad guys are very, very bad. Highway 301 was actually inspired by a true story about a group of criminals whom law enforcement named the “Tri-State Gang” because they concentrated their activities in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, along with Washington, D.C. At the time this movie was made, Andrew Stone was a not-so-young man in the make (he was born in 1902 and died in 1999) and he had a wife and producing partner, Virginia Stone (though they divorced in 1971 and she died in 1997 – so Andrew outlived her by two years). They had met at Universal, where he was an up-and-coming director and she was a film editor, and the two formed a professional as well as personal partnership that involved them co-writing their films and sometimes effectively co-directing even though he got sole credit for both those tasks. Stone spent much of the 1940’s trying to get into one of the major studios, and his one success was the all-Black musical Stormy Weather (1943) starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne (and casting them as lovers even though Robioson was old enough to be Horne’s grandfather).

In 1950 Stone sought out Bryan Foy, head of the “B”-picture department at Warner Bros., and sold hm on the idea of making a low-budget crime thriller based on one of the hundreds of true-crime stories on which the Stones had files. Because it was a low-budget film, Andrew Stone was required to update the story from 1934 to 1950 and also shoot it mostly on the Warner Bros. lit instead of going to the actual locations in the Southeast. (Andrew Stone was such a bugbear for authenticity that for his 1960 film The Last Voyage, a disaster movie set on an ocean liner that anticipates The Poseidon Adventure, he actually bought a real ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, shot the film on board and sank it deliberately for his ending.) But he used the real names of the Tri-State gangsters and lucked out in getting Steve Cochran to play the gang’s leader, George Legenza. After no fewer than three wrap-around opening scenes showing the governors of Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina all warning the viewers that crime does not pay (these sorts of prologues were common in movies during the Production Code era to satisfy government agencies, women’s groups and the Production Code Administration and assuage their worries that films like this would glamorize crime and lead people to take it up for real), we meet the gangsters – Legenza, William Phillips (Robert Webber in his film debut), Robert Mays (Wally Cassell), Herbie Brooks (Richard Egan), and Noyes Hilton (Edward Norris).

We also meet the gangsters’ women, who are by far the most multidimensional characters in the film: Madeline Welton (Aline Towne), whom Legenza offs early on after she threatens to rat out the gang; Mary Simms (Virginia Grey), a hard-boiled noir dame who’s not only aware that she’s traveling with a bunch of criminals but is fully on board with their activities; and Lee Fontaine (French actress Gaby André, whom Warners had brought over during a brief vogue for French actresses in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s), a French-Canadian women who married one of the gang members in the belief that he was a legitimate dealer in jewelry and furs. When she finally realized that the only jewelry and furs he’d ever handled had been stolen from their rightful owners, she got antsy and threatened to leave. After the three state governors have had their say, Highway 301 begins with a spectacular bank robbery scene in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in which the crooks escape capture by ditching the stolen car they used as their getaway vehicle and continuing in their own car, which they had stashed in an old barn. After their money runs out (surprisingly this film does not make the point other gangster movies made to establish their anti-crime credentials by showing how little of the stolen money the gangsters actually get to keep once fences and other underworld bottom-feeders have taken their cuts), the gang plots the traditional “one big score” they hope will provide them enough money to live on easy street for the rest of their lives.

Alas, though they hijack a shipment that’s supposed to contain $2 million (and Legenza kills the truck driver who’s in charge of the dough), it turns out to be “cut” – i.e., shredded and therefore useless. Legenza gets his revenge by killing the heavy-set man who gave them the tip on that shipment in the first place. Lee Fontaine’s husband is killed in a shootout with the police, and she realizes that without him to protect her it’s only a matter of time before Legenza either rapes her, kills her or both. She tries to escape in the Lewtonesque scene I mentioned earlier, but gets ambushed by Legenza when he substitutes himself for the driver of the cab she hailed. Alas for the crooks, though, Legenza’s shot just severely wounds her and renders her comatose but not dead. The finale takes place in the hospital, where the police, led by Washington, D.C. Detective Sergeant Truscott (Edmon Ryan), by far the savviest cop in this film, are waiting for her to come to so they can question her.

Anxious to finish the job of silencing Lee,Legenza sends Mary Simms into the hospital to find out where Lee is being treated. To do this, she adopts the identity of reporter “Mary Graham” and says she’s a leg person for a columnist at the Washington Star – only Truscott calls the paper and finds out she doesn’t work there.The climax is a shootout in the hospital in which three of the four remaining gangsters are killed and the fourth is arrested. Highway 301 would have been a much better movie – and closer to classic noir – if it had focused more on the women and their moral dilemmas (and we’ve already grown to like Lee Fontaine so mucy we’re relieved to see her alive, weill and on her way back to Canada at the end), but as it is it’s a tough, no-nonsense thriller even with its all-bad gangsters and all-good cops, and Steve Cochrain’s peculiar intensity really makes this movie.

Zabriskie Point (Carlo Ponti Productions, MGM, 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards TCM showed one of the all-time movie legends for all the wrong reasons: Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, made in 1970 and an odd movie which attempted to combine a film about the youth rebellions of the late 1960’s, especially on college campuses, with a typical Antonioni art film. Zabriskie Point was named one of “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” in the 1978 book of that title by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss (Medved and his brother Michael did three more books about particularly awful movies before Michael Medved re-invented himself as a Right-wing film critic denouncing Hollywood for abandoning traditional values). One of the book’s strategies was to pick out allegedly awful films by major directors like D. W. Griffith (Abraham Lincoln, 1930 – which turned out to be a quite good movie, especially when the originally cut scenes were restored in the 1970’s), Sergei Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible, 1943-1946, which I regard as a masterpiece despite the Stalinist ban on the kind of quick cutting that had been Eisenstein’s hallmark during the silent era), Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn (1939) and Michaelangelo Antonioni (here).

Surprise: like some other legendarily bad movies (can you say Heaven’s Gate?), Zabriskie Point turns out to be a quite good, if deeply flawed, work. I actually liked it considerably better than Antonioni’s immediately previous film, the more highly-regarded Blow-Up (1966).The first half-hour of Zabriskie Point is a marvelous return to those thrilling days of yesteryear in which college students way too young to know better earnestly debated the finer points of making a Left-wing revolution in the U.S. The film opens at an unspecified college campus in which the Black Students’ Union has declared a strike and a biracial meeting has been called to discuss what support white students can provide in shutting down the campus altogether. Though I wasn’t a college student until the 1970’s, after the brief flurry of student activism had died on the killing fields of Kent State and Jackson State Universities (which caused many students to pull back from activism after they realized the authorities would not hesitate literally to kill them) and the savvy decision of the Nixon administration to end the draft had made ending the Viet Nam war seem considerably less urgent to young people scared of being pressed into service to fight in it, I still remember some of those meetings and the swagger Black participants brought to them in insisting that only they could be the true American revolutionaries since we white radicals could always dive back into our lives of power and privilege.

The two principals of Zabriskie Point – whose script wa written by Antonioni, his frequent Italian collaborator Tonio Guerra, Franco Rossetti, Claire Peploe and playwright Sam Shepard – are Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin). Indulging in a common European casting practice called “typage” – using people with little or no acting experience in leading roles because their real lives were similar to their characters – Antonioni cast novices as his leads and used only one professional actor of Hollywood standing, Rod Taylor, as Lee Allen, land developer and Daria’s father. (So Daria Halprin was playing the well-to-do child of privilege she in fact was – she came from a prominent family in San Francisco – and Mark Frechette was also the footloose hippie spirit he plays in the film.) There’s also a brief appearance by veteran character actor Paul Fix as owner of a diner in the middle of nowhere, whose disconnect from the hippie scene is symbolized by his playing Patti Page’s early-1950’s hit “Tennessee Waltz.” (One of the good things about Zabriskie Point is Antonioni’s artful use of music to symbolize the relative positions of the characters to the counterculture, and for his background score he hired a then little-known British cult band called Pink Floyd, who of course would go on to become superstars.)

Unfortunately, after the frist half-hour Zabriskie Point veers off into Antonioni’s usual maddening obscurity. Mark goes to the local airport and steals a private plane (belonging, it turns out later, to Daria’s father), then he flies out to Death Valley and buzzes Daria, who’s driving a 1950’s-era car. He eventually lands the plane and the two have one of the most bizarre meet-cutes in movie history, and then end up making love in the desert and doing a lot of rolling around in the sand – and Antonioni and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie get some beautiful artistic effects as the light skin of Mark’s and Daria’s bodies visually melt into the light color of the sand. The two hike out to the real Zabriskie Point, a location within Death Valley, and see the tourist sign explaining the spot’s significance as a source of gypsum, Naturally, the two have only the vaguest idea of what gypsum is. At this point I decided that Zabriskie Point is an updated remake of Rebel Without a Cause, complete with the out-of-the-way location where the central characters meet and have their idyll, and even a scene in which Mark takes the bullets out of his gun and throws them away the way James Dean disarmed Sal Mineo in Rebel. Unfortunately, this being an Antonioni movie, we neer get any explanation of how Mark knew how to fly a plane, and when he and Daria decide to repaint the plane with psychedelic artwork and political slogans (including giant tits on the tops of the wings), there’s never any indication of where the paint came from. (Later we learn that the plane had originally been painted pink because that was the favorite color of Daria’s late mother, so the repainting is at least in part an attack on her parents.)

Mark’s and Daria’s idyll in the desert ends darkly when the two separate and return to their original vehicles, and Mark’s attempt to return the plane meets with disaster when police at the airport decide he’s resisting arrest and shoot into the cockpit, killing him. That should be the climax, but the film drones on for 20 minutes more as Daria walks through the desert where her dad is building a huge development, and ultimately the stunning cliffside houses blow up, one by one. Once again, we aren’t clear whether this is a real development in the story or just Daria’s dream (the first explosion we see is clearly a dream but the others seem to be real, though since this is Antonioni we don’t have a clue as to whether or when or how Daria planted the bombs to blow up dad’s development), and according to a “Trivia” item on the film on imdb.com Antonioni wanted the movie to end with a plane flying a banner over the razed development reading, “Fuck You, America” – only the then-head of MGM production, Louis F. Polk, vetoed it. Later Polk was fired and replaced by James Aubrey, who restored most of the cuts Polk had ordered but refused to put back the “Fuck You, America” ending.

There are plenty of anti-corporate bits in Zabriskie Point, including scenes showing the ubiquity of corporate logos, and neat little comments like the scene in which Mark and a number of student demonstrators are rounded up by police. Mark gives his name to the booking sergeant as “Karl Marx,” and the clueless sergeant writes “Carl.” Another man gives his occupation as “associate professor of literature,” and the sergeant says, “That’s too long for the form. We’ll just write, ‘Clerk.’” One of the fascinating things about Zabriskie Point is that much of it seems horrendously dated, and parts of it don’t seem dated at all. The reaction of the police to any real or perceived threat to their authority is to strike back, hitting people at random and in at least one case killing someone – and that part of this movie seems all too relevant today in the wake of the police murder of Tyre Nichols (and George Floyd, and so many others before him). Zabriskie Point is a weird mess of a movie, very much “of its time” and also very much of Antonioni’s sensibility; reportedly he and Frechette argued throughout the shoot over whether the film would be a serious semi-documentary about the radical student movement (as Frechette wanted) or an art film (as Antonioni wanted). I think Zabriskie Point would have been a stronger work (though it would probably seem more dated) if Frechette had won.

I’ve never been that much of an Antonioni fan, anyway, though my level of respect went up for him when I got a Blu-Ray disc of his second film, The Lady Without Camellias (1952), a well-structured film in which each scene directly relates to what has gone before and the ending is coherent and follows logically from what we’ve already seen. Alas, after that Antonioni started worshiping at the Great Shrine of Ambiguity, and over time his films started making less sense and lost the pointed sense of social criticism that made The Lady Without Camellias interesting, watchable and great.

Home Alone 3 (Hughes Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 1997)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After my husband Charles specifically requested a light movie last night because he’d been so depressed by the news out of Memphis, Tennessee on Friday, January 27, I found something suitably funny in Home Alone 3, the 1997 sequel to the sequel to the big 1991 hit, Home Alone. (According to imdeb.com, the original Home Alone came out in 1990, but I identified it as a year later because I made a joke about the name of its director, Chris Columbus: “At last! His first hit in 499 years!”) This time John Hughes, who served as both producer and screenwriter even though this time he got another director, Raja Gosnell, instead of Columbus, changed the dramatis personae completely and also changed the formula. Instead of Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) being inadvertently abandoned at home twice when the rest of his large family goes on vacation, the central character this time is eight-year-old Alex Pruitt (Alex D. Linz, who was born January 3, 1989 in Santa Barbara and whose last imdb.com credit was for a 2007 movie called Choose Connor; I was looking up his page to see if he’d had an adult acting career, which apparently he hasn’t) .who actually doesn’t get left home alone for over an hour or two. It seems his parents, Karen (Haviland Morris) and Jack (Kevin Kilmer), both have professional positions with domineering, egomaniac employers who call them out ot their home after regular hours daily. Who summon them to the office or a meeting somewhere or other and tell Alex to fend for himself as best he can.

Home Alone 3 contains an interesting MacGuffin – a computer chip that can be installed on a guided missile to make it invisible to radar – which has been stolen by four thieves, Petr Beaupre (Olek Krupa – any relation to Gene? Probably not, since Olek was born in Poland and Gene Krupa was a Greek-American from Chicago), Alice Robbons (a nice ice-queen performance by Rya Kihlstedt), Burton Jernigan (Lenny von Dohlen) and Earl Unger (David Thornton). Unlike the baddies in the first two Home Alones, this quartet are carefully not played for laughs themselves, which in a way is actually an improvement (though I liked the fact that Joe Pesci made the first Home Alone right after his role in a serious gangster film, Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, and showed himself equally adept at dramatic and comic villainy). The not-s-ofantastic four obtain the computer chip (actually an integrated circuit that contains at least two chips, judging from what we see of it here) but then have to figure out a way to smuggle it out of the airport and home in San Francisco. They hide it in a remote-controlled toy car and put the car in a Parisian sourdough French bread bag, only the bag gets mixed up with another person’s purchase of French bread and winds up on its way to Chicago. (I loved the gag of the bread’s intended recipient disappointed because the bag doesn’t contain it; I remember Parisian French bread from my days in San Francisco and how good it was.)

It ends up in the home of Mrs. Hess (Marian Seldes), who serves the same plot function as the male recluse Marley, played by Roberts Blossom,in the first two films in the cycle. Mrs. Hess has hired Alex Pruitt to sweep the snow from her front yard, but she’s so disappointed in his work that instead of paying him in cash she palms off the toy car on him. Alex, of course, is overjoyed and gets a real kick out of playing with it. Then the bad guys in San Francisco realize that the toy car in which they concealed the chip ended up in Chicago – and so do the FBI’s team led by Special Agtent Stuckey (Christopher Curry) who are tasked with recovering it. After a couple of incidents in which Alex spots the crooks in Mrs Hess’s house with his toy telescope and calls the police, only the crooks get away before the cops show up and Alex is chewed out by the police chief nad his parents for reporting false claims, the crooks duly show up and Alex gleefully torments them with some of the same booby traps Kevin worked up in the first two films. (They’re not as funny this time around because we don’t see Alex actually manufacturing them.) Eventually the police and the FBI arrive in time to save Alex from being done away with by the crooks, Special Agent Stuckey recovers the tell-tale chip, and though at first he takes only three of the gang into custody and insists he’ll still be going after the fourth in language that makes him sound like Ahab in a spoof of Moby Dick, ultimately Alex sets off a room full of firecrackers and in so doing flushes out the remaining bad guy so Stuckey can arrest him.

There are some delightful gags, notably one in which Alice tells two of her male confederates to leap off the roof of the house, confident that the circle on the ground is a trampoline. It’s actually the cover to the Pruitts’ swimming pool, and the two crooks end up virtually drowning in ice-cold water. It also helps that Alex has only two older siblings – he’s just the last of three kids instead of the last of seven as Kevin was in the first two movies – and the sibs, brother Stan (Seth Smith) and sister Molly (Scarlett Johansson, about the only person associated with this film who went on to a major adult career; she was only 12 when she made this, but she looks a few years older) are considerably less annoying than the ones in the first films. Home Alone 3 is a quite good movie, well up to the standard of the first two and a tribute to John Hughes’ versatility as a filmmaker that he could do family comedies with kid protagonists as well as films about alienated teens. My husband Charles had an interesting analysis of the three Home Alone movies in which he argued that the first Home Alone was the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy – imagining a world without your parents around setting limits on what you can and can’t do – while the second was about atonement and this one was about the military-industrial complex and its influence on society.

Live at the Belly Up: Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Friday, January 27, right after we saw the film Home Alone 3, my husband Charles and I watched a neatly engaging Live at the Belly Up episode featuring Tennessee-based band Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors. According to Holcomb’s interstitial interviews, he founded the band in 2007 after briefly pursuing a career as a solo artist. One of his band members was 17 years old at the time the band was founded and there were plenty of gigs he couldn’t play because he was too young to be in a place where alcohol was served. Later Holcomb attended the University of Tennessee, and by the time he graduated, his sideman was over 21 and could therefore play with the band as a full member. The musicians in The Neighbors are Ian Miller (the cutest one) on keyboards, Nathan Dugger on lead guitar and pedal steel guitar (this is one of those bands in which the lead singer plays acoustic guitar as a rhythm instrument and someone else supplies leads on electric guitar), Rich Brinsfield on electric bass and Bill Sayers on drums. Holcomb has a basically attractive voice, though it turns harsh when he goes too high or sings too loudly; it’s not a great voice (not even in the way Bob Dylan’s is; like Louis Armstrong, Dylan at his best brought a sense of dignity, commitment and emotional intensity that made up for the lack of true beauty in his voice) but it serves his material well. Holcomb recalled his early dais in the business playing gigs in which he was supposed to cover other people’s songs in front of bar audiences that weren't listening to him – an all too common sort of apprenticeship – and sneaking in a few of his originals just to see if he could get away with it. Audiences would usually react quizzically, trying to identify the song and saying, “Gee, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.”

Holcomb has been married for 15 years to his wife Elle, who used to be a part of the band until she quit to raise their daughter Emmylou (as in “Harris”?) and,when she returned to the business, struck out on her own as a solo act, though she and Drew are still together and happily so. Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors played 13 songs on the hour-long Live at the Belly Up time slot, which indicates a relatively tight-knit band with relatively little instrumental jamming. The songs were “End of the World,” “Tennessee,” “Maybe,” “The Morning Song,” “American Beauty,” “But I’ll Never Forget the Way You Make Me Feel” (a rather odd song in which he claims that he will still love his wife even if they get Alzheimer’s or some other sort of age-related dementia that makes them each forget who the other is; well, there’ve been worse ideas for love songs than that), “When I’m With You,” “Family” (an infectious song he acknowledged was influenced by Paul Simon’s Graceland and which he used as the first song on his latest album, Dragons), “Bittersweet,” “You Never Leave My Heart,” :Shine Like Ligntning,” “Ring the Bells,” and his closer, “Here We Go.” Charles especially liked “Ring the Bells” because it’s an attack on all the people who have appropriated Christianity in general and Jesus in particular and turned it into a religion of hate; Charles described it as “liberation-theology Christian rock,” and I suspect he wishes there were more songs like that. So do I, even though Holcomb’s understandable passion for the message took his voice into the high territory where it becomes loud and strident instead of quiet and beautiful.

Law and Order: "Almost Famous" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As usual with the three remaining series based on Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise these days, the original flagship, Law and Order, was by far the best. It was called “Almost Famous” and was a grim satire on the allure of the fleeting fame offered by social media and its real-world consequences. The prologue shows a 14-year-old boy, Eli Barone (A. J. Landy), alone on a couch with so-called “acting coach” Sean Kapinski (Andrew Kober). Sean hugs the boy and strokes his shoulder in a way that could be either legitimate comforting or a prelude to seduction. An then the opening credits come on. When the show resumes Eli is found shot dead in a stairwell of the apartment building in which he lived with his widowed mother (Claire Karpen). Though Sean turns out to have been living under an alias to conceal his decade-old conviction for possession of child pornography (which he insists was just a nude photo of his then-girlfriend), he’s just a red herring. Eli’s real killer is Virgfil Gilbert (Danny Garcia), who shot the kid in what he thought was self-defense – he heard the sound of someone kicking in the door of his basement apartment and fired without seeing who it was – but because he was afraid of being prosecuted for possessing an illegal gun (how 20th century since the current radical-Right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is well on its way to declaring virtually all restrictions on gun ownership a violation of the Second Amendment!), he moved Eli’s body from in front of his door to the stairwell.

As the show’s principal cops, detectives Frank Cosgrove (jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), investigate the case they find it’s like peeling back the layers of an onion. It turns out Eli Barone was put up to kicking in Virgil Gilbert’s door because a friend of his named Max Brewer (Garrett Gallego, who looks strikingly like the young Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson) put him up to it because Max was living in a so-called “content house” run by an unscrupulous character named Jason Wheeler (played by Patrick Ball as a marvelous piece of controlled villainy). The members of the “content house” have to do increasingly dangerous stunts to stay in Jason’s good graces so they can get more views on social-media Web sites, and the cops trace the legal responsibility for Eli’s death from Virgil to Max and ultimately to Wheeler. They charge Max with manslaughter and actually start his trial, but as evidence given at the trial implicates Wheeler as the person ultimately responsible, they cut a deal with Max to testify against him. Only Max’s parents withdraw him from the case because Wheeler pays them $1 million, which Wheeler’s attorney says is not a bribe to keep Max quiet but merely accumulated royalties from his social-media posts.

Max's parents get ready to take him back to Florida, where they live, and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) take Wheeler’s case to trial, but without Max’s testimony they have no way to link Wheeler to Eli’s death. They try to get a young woman named Amber Koenig (Kiera Allen), who’s now permanently paralyzed and in a wheelchair because of the increasingly dangerous skyscraper climbs Wheeler sent her on, but she refuses to testify because Wheeler is paying her medical bills. Ultimately they force Wheeler to take a plea after they find enough of his victims who are willing to testify against him, but Wheeler draws only a five-to-10-year sentence and at the end Price and Maroun order Max to be arrested and re-tried for manslaughter because “a deal’s a deal” and by walking out on their arrangement, he’d left himself open to a 15-year sentence. One of Dick Wolf’s favorite themes over the years of Law and Order has been impunity: the protection being rich and powerful gives you from having to answer for your crimes. Though Wheeler isn’t completely consequence-free, it’s clear he’s got considerably less in the way of punishment than he deserves, and certainly less than the lower-level guy in the criminal food chain who’s getting far more harshly punished than Wheeler, who exploits the kids in the “content house” for 70 percent of their earnings, is!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Blood Out" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Oddly, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed was also thematically about the power of impunity and how carefully build up wealth and influence allow you to behave in ways us poor, benighted souls on the right side of the law can’t. In this case the super-villain is Oscar Papa (Goya Robles), who unlike the way most street-gang bosses are played in movies and TV shows about them is quiet, soft-spoken and almost courtly in his manner: the velvet sleeve conceals the dagger. During the course of the show, which ties in to two previous episodes about the Salvadoran gang called “BX-9” (obviously patterned on the all too real MS-13) which Oscar Papa leads, he’s able to have killed virtually everybody who could help hold him accountable, from his former driver who secretly recorded him in the car plotting murders of various people to Detective Mike Duarte (Maurice Compte), who’s cornered in a convenience store in the barrio by two machete-wielding thugs ini BX-9 just after he and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) had finished sharing a drink. I for one was sorry to see Duarte go, not only because he was a quite interesting character – he would frequently compare himself to the Italian-American cops who took the lead in busting the Mafia because they regarded it as an embarrassment to their community, and he took a similar role even though while testifying under cross-examination at Oscar Papa’s trial Papa’s attorney tried to suggest that as a Mexican-American Duarte was prejudiced against Salvadorans – but because it seemed like Dick Wolf and his writers were building up Duarte as a potential love interest for Benson.

Instead they took her long-term association and collaboration with Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in a decidedly unwelcome direction (at least to me) when, after the main intrigue is past – Oscar Papa gets a plea deal for plotting Duarte’s murder on a prison phone, confident that he can keep running BX-9 from prison because so many of his gangbangers are n there with him and can relay his instructions outside as well as kill anyone in the jail he wants to get rid of – when Stabler, called into the case for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, makes a pass at Benson. I remember during the 12 years Meloni and Hargitay co-starred on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit there was considerable fan debate both in the imdb.com message boards (whose summary elimination I greatly regret) and in the letters section of TV Guide as to whether Stabler and Benson should become lovers. I was definitely in the “no” column – I liked the idea that a man and a woman could work together and be professional collaborators and have a tight, emotional bond of friendship without letting sex get in the way – but now, 12 years later (and having killed off Stabler’s inconvenient wife in the opening episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime) they’ve at least dropped a jint that they’re prepared to go there.

There was also a subplot that took this show into more traditional SVU territory, as Detectives Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) stumble on a Black prostitute who was raped and given a deliberate overdose of opioids by a white veterinarian who’s done this several times before (and whom we never actually saw). There’s the nice irony that since she was already addicted to heroin, she was able to recover since her body had a tolerance for opioids that a non-addicted fellow “sister” wouldn’t have, but the emergency nurse stoll says she needed three doses of Narcan to bring her back from the brink of death. The best part of this episode was the characterization of Oscar Papa as a black-hearted villain but also a seemingly nice guy; in some ways his character reminded me of Malcolm X’s statement in his autobiography that there were plenty of Black Americans who had the potential to be legitimate entrepreneurs in legal businesses, but because Blacks were locked out of the credit system they were forced to apply their skills to numbers rackets, drugs, prostitution and other illegal enterprises instead.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Partners in Crime" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Once again the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode, “Partners in Crime,” was the weakest of the three, though it had its moments and it also took on at least in part the subject of impunity. It begins at an early-release hearing for a prisoner named Octavio Montanero (Brandon Espinoza), who’s been “inside” for 10 years since he confessed to murdering a Black male police officer who was now-Sergeant Ayanna Bell’s (Danielle Moné Truitt) original partner and mentor on the force. Only he now says he didn’t do it; the real killer was Irish-born gangster Eamonn Murphy (Timothy V. Murphy), and Bell, who had originally gone to the hearing to testify against his release, now decides to reopen the case, especially since the ballistics tests on Montanero’s gun were “inconclusive.” Unfortunately, just as Bell is starting to re-investigate Montanero’s case, he’s knifed to death in prison in what authorities rule a “suicide.” From then on writers Barry O’Brien and John A. McCormack (did Dick Wolf and company decide they needed Irish-American authors to write convincingly about an Irish-American crime boss?) proceed abotu the business of building up Eamonn Murphy into the latest of this series’ Moriarty-like super-villains, setting up a bar on the premises of an old Irish drinking establishment run by a youngish-looking man who I think is supposed to be Teddy Silas (Gus Halper) from their last big story arc, though I could be wrong.

When this episode starts he’s under house arrest, but the police offer to let him out of home confinement at least long enough to reopen his bar in hopes that Murphy, his principal lieutenant Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), and their gang will make it a favorite hangout. That means that all the bar personnel have to be undercover cops, including their blackjack dealer (since they’re reopening not only the bar itself but also the illegal casino in its back room), a young series regular named Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger) who proiudly boasts that she put herself through college working at Atlantic City casinos and deliberately stacking the decks to let her customers win so they’d give her bigger tips. (By the way, Ainsley Seiger has the same birthdate as I do, though of course hers is 45 years later than mine!) Once the bar has its grand reopening Seamus O’Meara is pleased not only with the winning streak he’s on at the blackjack table but the comely dealer he’s handing him these hot cards. The episode ends with a cliff-hanger that is fortunately less annoying than those things usually are, and it’s interesting that now that this show has cycled through Anglo, Black, Mexican and Cuban super-villains, it’s now the turn of the Irish. Eamonn Murphy is depicted as someone actually born in Ireland but one who immigrated to the U.S. as a young adult, and the extent of his evil is revealed when he confronts Montanero’s widow Mia (Gladys Torres) with a particularly vicious man-eating dog at his side. Mia protests that the reason her husband turned on Murphy was that Murphy stopped paying them the bribe money, and in a positively (or negatively) Trumpian way Murphy protests, “Loyalty is supposed to be unconditional.”

Sudan (Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 23) at shortly after 10 I ran myself and my husband Cahrles the third and last film on the single-disc Blu-Ray of three of the six overripe Technicolor extravaganzae featuring Maria Montez and John Hall, made at Universal between 1942 and 1945. The film was Sudan, sixth and last in the series, and deals with a fictional kingdom called “Khemmis” in and around ancient Egypt. Montez plays Naila, who on the death of her father, the King of Khemmis, is crowned Queen and heir. Only the real power behind the throne is her prime minister, Horadef (George Zucco, who as befits a character actor of his stature and renown basically owns the movie, dominating every scene he’s in), who either personally murdered the King or hired someone else to do it. (The script by Edmund L. Hartmann is predictably unclear on the point.) But in order to keep Naila from catching on to him, he tells her that the King was actually killed by Herua (Turhan Bey), leader of a gang of escaped slaves who hide out in a mountain redoubt and periodically lead raids on slavers to set their captives free and invite them to join their band in the mountains. Naila announces her intention to ride into the mountains and meet Herua face to face so she can find out why he killed her dad, but Horadef arranges with a thug in Naila’s court to have her kidnapped and sold into slavery herself, whereupon he intends to take over the throne of Khemmis and rule for his own ill-gotten gains.

Naila is rescued by a pair of thieves, Merab (Jon Hall) and Nebka (Andy Devine, whose casting is an ill-advised attempt to provide the supposedly necessary “comic relief”)/ In one scene Andy Devine rips off one of W. C. Fields’ classic gags, in which he uses ventriloquism to make it seem as if his horse can talk, though neither he nor screenwriter Hartmann thought to include the punch line of Fields’ version: when he finally sold the supposedly talking animal (a dog in Fields' case), Fields has the dog say, “For your selling me, I’ll never talk again,” and Fields drawls on in his own voice, “He probably means it, too.” The slavers brand Naila with a big letter “S” on her forearm, but she ultimately escapes with the help of Nerab and Mebka, only she’s recaptured and this time she’s rescued by Herua and his band. Herua and Naila fall in love – much to the chagrin of Merab, who hoped to get her himself – and Herua explains the defense mechanism he’s built into their mountain redoubt> a series of huge piles of rocks, held in place alongside the walls of the valley that is the only entranceway, held in place by ropes which he and his men will cut whenever an invading army comes up the defile, burying them under huge boulders and rubble. Unfortunately, Naila still thinks Herab killed her father, so he condemns him to death even though she’s in love with him,

Merab sneaks into Herua’s prison cell and seems to be ready to take his place being executed – was screenwriter Hartmann thinking of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities here? – when Naila gets arrested herself now that Horadef has installed his men and is ready to take over Khemmis. Merab and Naila confront each other in the prison and Merab pickpockets Horadef, showing Naila the dagger and the purse he stole from Horadef. Naila recognizes the ring as the one her father was wearing when he rode off to meet Herab, and this convinces her that Herua is innocent and Horadef is her father’s real killer. Horadef raises an army to invade Herua’s stronghold and either capture or kill both Herua and Naila – though Naila is actually leading the column towards Herua’s redoubt, mainly because she’s aware of the booby-trap and she’s willing to sacrifice her own life to kill Horadef and avenge her dad. Fortunately the plan doesn’t work that way because Herua deliberately delays setting off the booby-trap until after Naila is past it, so the bad guys get crushed by all the papier-maché rocks (which for the climax of a supposedly serious action drama looked all too much like the ones in Buster Keaton’s 1926 comedy masterpiece Seven Chances to me!). Naila stabs Horadef personally, fulfilling her vow to avenge her father’s death, and as I wrote in my journal entry on Sudan the first time I saw it, “The good gibberish-named people live happily ever after while the bad gibberish-named people get their just desserts at the end.” Naila ends up with Herua at the end – a surprising twist given that in Maria Montez’s previous films with Jon Hall they had ended up together, but here she’s paired with Turhan Bey ahd Hall and Devine ride off in the sunset together to pursue their joint career of petty thievery.

Of the three films on t his Kino Lorber release of half the Montz-Hall oeuvre, Sudan was by far the best, partly because George Zucco was a much stronger villain than Thoams Gomez in White Savage or Douglass Dumbrille in Gypsy Wildcat and partly because, instead of just poaching the familiar Hollywood-adjacent locations in L.A. as they did in Gypsy Wildcat, Universal shot the exteriors for Sudan in Arizona’s spectacular Canyon de Chelly/ So while Gypsy Wildcat looks like a Republic Western, Sudan looks like one by John Ford. One curious thing about Turhan Bey’s career at Universal is he at least partially escaped the usual typecasting that hamstrung most actors of color. He was born March 30,. 1922 in Vienna, Austria (which is also where he died on September 30, 2012) to a Turkish father and a Czech-Jewish mother, His birth name was Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Şahultavi, but in October 1938, with the Nazis having taken over Austria and his parents having dovirced, he moved to the U.S. with his mother and settled in Hollywood. Bey took actling classes fromBen Bard at the Pasadena Playhouse; supposedly he enrolled jus to improve his English, but Bard saw real potential in him as an actor and encouraged him to apply himself to that craft. Bard also suggested “Bey” as a stage last name for him because it was an honorific in Turkish.

Bey cycled through various studios, including Warner Bros., Universal and RKO, before re-landing at Universal in 1942 and working with John Rawlins, director of Sudan, who took him under his wing. In 1943 Universal cast him in a not very good horror film called The Mad Ghoul and actually made him the good guy. He was the accompanist of aspiring singer Evelyn Ankers and ended up with her at the end, while an Anglo actor with the boring name “David Bruce” played the titular monster. Here in Sudan two years later he also got the leading lady at the end. Bey’s career was derailed by World War II, though in an unusual way. Though he’d been born in Vienna he was legally a citizen of Turkey, and therefore he was exempt from the U.S. draft – until Turkey declared war on Nazi Germany in February 1945. Bey was drafted in June 1945 and,though he entered the Army Air Corps too late to see actual combat, his 18-month Army stint interrupted his career momentum. After he turned down a comeback film at Universal, the studio sold his contract to Eagle-Lion, where he made four cheapies and then did Song of India at Columbia. It was a flop, so Bey left Hollywood after just one more film (Prisoners of the Casbah, 1953) and returned to Vienna, where he became a commercial photographer. Bey returned to the U.S. film industry in the 1990’s and made a few films as well as TV appearances in Murder,She Wrote (whose star, Angela Lansbury, was quite partial to giving fellow veterans of Hollywood’s golden age roles on her show) and SeaQuest 2032, finally retiring to Vienna, where he died of Parkinson’s disease at age 90.

Bad Behind Bars: Jodi Arias (Cineflix Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, January 22 I spent the evening watching a trifecta of Lifetime movies: Bad Behind Bars: Jodi Arias, The Plot to Kill My Mother and Catfish Killer. Bad Behind Bars had first aired Saturday night as part of their true-crime series, and like Lifetimeps previous movie about Jodi Arias, Dirty Little Secret (which I’ve already commented on at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/08/jodi-arias-dirty-little-secret-city.html), it turned out to be surprisingly good. I’d deliberately avoided the true-crime hysteria about Jodi Arias’s case while heer trial was still going on (and was being aired gavel-to-gavel on CourtTV), so when I came to the story “fresh” Jodi Arias reminded me a lot of the heroine of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. Both Butterfly and Arias had the misfortune to fall deeply in love with men who regarded them merely as sexual conveniences and looked forward to marrying a woman of their own class and social and religious background. Both even tried converting to their lover’s religion to show how serious they were about the relationship. And both men ultimately left them for the “real American wife” or “real Mormon wife” they’d always said they really wanted (though Arias’s partner, Travis Alexander, went Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton one better – or worse – by actually telling Jodi to her face that she was just a sexual outlet for him and not a real marriage candidate). The only difference was at the end Butterfly killed herself and Arias killed Alexander instead.

Bad Behind Bars begins in the Maricopa County, Arizona jail when Joe Arpaio was still the sheriff (a name I would have been content never to hear again in my life!) and the central characters are not Jodi Arias, but two fellow prisoners, Donovan Bering (Tricia Black) and Tracy Brown (Lynn Rafferty). Donovan narrates the story as an extended flashback as she’s hooked up to a loe detector because she’s agreed to be polygraphed to prove toi the rest of the world that, however strenuously she defended Jodi Arias in public, she’d had nothing to do with her crimes. Donovan and Tracy are Lesbian lovers, and it’s made clear from about the midway point that Donovan, at least, was a Lesbian before she was incarcerated; she recalls having been bullied and teased as a “dyke” when she was growing up. When Jodi Arias (Celina Sinden) is put in the mix and becomes Tracy’s cellmate, Tracy takes an instant dislike to her and is convinced she’s a police snitch put there to get the other women to make self-incriminating statements. Donovan suggests to Tracy that she ask Jodi to do something illegal, which she wouldn’t do if she were a snitch. The illegal thing they ask Jodi to do is tattoo Donivan; it’s against the jail rules for the prisoners to tattoo each other but Jody agrees quickly. In fact, Jodi tattoos her own name on the arms of both Donovan and Tracy, thereby getting them into a lot of unnecessary and unjust trouble later on. Donovan and Tracy are serious enough about each other they even go through a mock wedding, complete with a white strip of cloth they tie around each other’s arms to symbolize their union, but someone rats out their relationship to jail authorities and Tracy is sent to solitary confinement. Donovan deliberately acts up to get herself sent there because at least that way she’ll be able to see Tracy for a minute or two each day.

Jodi convinces Donovan of her innocence and tells her Travis was murdered by two masked intruders, a man and a woman, and she fled before they could kill her too. Once Donovan serves her time and is released, she becomes a public advocate for Jodi’s innocence, including running her social-media accounts – it’s already been established that Jodi was doing a lot of media interviews from jail – and coordinating with other Jodi Arias supporters around the world, including a German computer expert named Lukas and an attorney in Florida who gives her legal advice. Donivan also befriends Jodi’s parents – who for some reason are getting death threats themselves – and she throws herself whole-hog into supporting Jodi’s cause. In fact, she spends so much time on defending Jodi in public, she gets fired from the job her paro9le officer set up for her. Donivan’s other consideration is the welfare of Tracy, who has been transferred to state prison and into a much rougher environment. Donovan knows it will take up to 10 years for Tracy to serve her sentence and be released, but she waits patiently for her. Donovan’s disillusionment with Jodi begins when she attends her trial, and to her shock Jodi’s attorney announces that Jodi killed Travis Alexander but did so in self-defense. Then Jodi takes the stand in her own defense, and Donovan hears her testify that her parents regularly beat her when she was growing up and her mom had a wooden spoon with which she bear her so hard one day it broke, after which mom started using a belt on her instead.

Donovan’s B.S. detector goes off big-time when she hears that, not only because Jodi’s account of her childhood in jail had stressed how normal and pleasant it was but because Donovan recognizes the story as one her partner Tracy had told her and Jodi when they were in jail together. Ultimately Donovan turns against Jodi and changes all the passwords on her social media accounts, freezing Jodi and her support network out of them, and she gets it from both sides> a thug hored by one of Jodi’s supporters breaks into her home and threatens her, while she’s still being vilified by the anti-Jodi forces as well, one of whom writes the word “DIE!” in red spray paint on her outside wall. Ultimately the film has a sort-of happy ending – Donovan and Tracy reunite after Tracy’s release from prison and the two of them get legally married in Arizona in 2018 – though apparently they had only a few years left because the film closes with a title, “In loving memory of Tracy Brown Baring.” Bad Behind Bars is powerfully directed by Rama Rau, a Canadian woman who’s already made independent feature films even though most of her credits are for TV series or movies like this. She definitely deserves a chance at the big time, and so does this film’s writer, Kim Barker, who manages to humanize Donovan and Tracy and make what could have been a cheesy exploitation title a worthy and even noble film. The acting is solid, and Lynn Rafferty’s performance as the hard-bitten Tracy is exceptionally good. I keep watching Lifetime in hopes of finding gems among their usual output, and Bad Behind Bars – despite its terrible title – is truly a fine one.

The Plot to Kill My Mother (Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, CME Spring Productoins, Lifetime, 20923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie I watched January 22 was The Plot to Kill My Mother, directed by Simone Stock from a script by Lisa Joy, and this one was rather deceptively advertised in Lifetime’s promos. For some reason I had the impression that it would be about a young woman who grew up with her mother as a single parent, only to learn along the way that her mom was in the federal witness protection program,and when her former enemies in the underworld came after mom, the two of them would team up to find them and report them to the police. In fact, mom Teresa McLaughlin, nèe Teresa Russo, gets killed even before the first commercial, strangled by an unknown assailant who, like most Lifetime killers these days, wears a hoodie so we can’t tell what they look like or even whether they’re male or female. Mom got herself killed when she left the carefully constructed alternative identity the Federal Witness Protection Program had created for her in Ohio to visit her own mother back east, who’s terminally ill. Daughter Elena (Romy Weltman) immediately launches her own investigation, much to hte chagrin of her mom’s U.S. Marshal, Carter (Milton Barnes), who feels professionally embarrassed by Teresa’s death because until then he’d prided himself on never losing a protectee. Carter is a tall, strikingly handsome African-American and his scenes with Elena are so sexually charged I was hoping Lisa joy would have them become lovers, but she perhaps wisely didn’t go there and their relationship remains purely professional.

Carter follows Elena to her original home back East and watches as she moves in with her mom’s best friend from high school, Jacqueline, and finds out that four people – her mom Teresa, Jacqueline, Lorenzo Russo (who turns out to be Elena’s father) and another Italian-American man who from his photo looks like a gangster – all were involved in a car crash in high school. Elena gets a job in the mail room at Lorenzo’s real-estate development company because she’s convinced her dad had her mom murdered and she’s hoping to get the goods on him. While there she befriends a co-worker named Allie (Samantha Brown) whom she’s seen both at Lorenzo’s offices and at the hospital where Elena’s grandmother – whom she’s never met before – is a patient. Allie explains that she just took the job at Lorenzo’s to work her way through nursing school. Eventually we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Jacqueline, and when they were all in h igh school both Teresa and Jacqueline had affairs with Lorenzo and both gave birth to daughters by him. Only Jacqueline got upset because Lorenzo clearly preferred Teresa over her, and when Teresa testified against Lorenzo in a criminal trial Jacqueline gave herself points for having stayed loyal to him while Teresa ratted him out and testified against him. While in prison Lorenzo took stock of himself and emerged rehabilitated, but both Jacqueline and their daughter Allie (who’s also Elena’s half-sister) nursed a grudge against Teresa and, when she showed up to see her own mother and then was murdered, they decided to go after her daughter.

There’s a quite good chase scene in which Allie confronts Elena on a trestle and fires three shots at her, then gets away even though Carter had followed her there and shot her himself to protect Elena. In the end Jacqueline ends up dead – killed inadvertently by Elena when she shoves Jacqueline against a fireplace mantel, which fatally injures her – and Allie is arrested by the local police. There are some great scenes along the way, notably the “meet-and-greet” private meeting in Lorenzo’s office to which he subjects all his new hires – especially his young, comely female ones – and I couldn’t help but think Lorenzo made it a habit of hitting on the young women in his employ and we were going to get a kinky thrill out of watching him come on to his own daughter. Instead Elena blurts out the reason she’s there and her suspicions about him having ordered her mom’s murder, Naturally she has to escape as fast as she can, and that’s when Allie corners her on the trestle and tries to shoot her down. The Plot to Kill My Mother is supposedly “inspired by a true story” (though beware when Lifetime tells you one of their movies was merely “inspired by” a true story instead of “based on” it!), but whatever the true story was that “inspired” this film, in practice it became the usual Lifetime sludge, and it doesn’t help that Jacqueline’s characterization strains credulity. She’s yet another Lifetime villainess who seems perfectly composed until she just loses it at the end and starts doing beaver imitations on the scenery.

Catfish Killer (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime did the makers of their third January 22 movie no favors b y showing it right after The Plot to Kill My Mother and therefore making the similarities between the two all too apparent. This one is called Catfish Killer and deals with an honors student in high school in suburban California, Hannah Davis (Nicolette Langley), whose mom Marianne (Alicia Leigh Willils) is raising her as a single parent. As so often happens in a Lifetime movie, we’re not sure what happened to Hannah’s dad – did Marianne divorce him or did he die? – though we’re all too clear about what happened to Hannah’s best friend, Jane (Emary Simon). First Jane’s dad died, then Jane’s mom remarried Greg (Anthony Farrell), and then she died, leaving her with a stepfather who can’t stand her and is just waiting for her to turn 18 so he won’t have legal responsibility for her and can throw her out on her proverbial ear. Hannah has her mind set on attending Kinzer University in New York but can’t afford it on her own or her mom’s money. She’s hoping for a scholarship that was endowed by a woman who became successful after attending first that high school and then Kinzer; the scholarship is a free ride but only one is awarded per year. Hannah is called into the office of Principal Edwards (René Ashton) and told the scholarship trustees have awarded it to her. Then she’s confronted by a fellow student, Eli Johnson (Jason Marrs), who demands that she give up the scholarship and let it go to him instead because he’s the runner-up and he is so into the idea of attending Kinzer he wears a Kinzer sweatshirt everywhere he goes.

When she’s not studying, Hannah likes to pal around with Jane and their friend Scott (Daniel Grogan), who seems to have a crush on Hannah – but Hannah isn’t interested in him “that way” and instead is responding to the attentions of Kevin (Anthony Farro), a jock who’s on the school football team. By coincidence, Kevin’s dad is also attracted to Hannah’s mom Marianne. The plot kicks into high gear when Jane signs Hannah up for “Click,” a new social-media app to which Hannah quickly becomes addicted. She’s trolled on the app by a man named “James,” who seems to be in the area because he’s aware of h er every move on campus and in particular on who her actual or potential boyfriends are. Greg offers to help Marianne and Hannah track down “James,” but he’s encrypting his posts to the site and bouncing them around different IP addresses around the world even though it’s clear from his posts that “James” is in town and likely a student at the high school. All the tension sends Hannah’s school grades down and he’s in danger of losing her scholarship, especially when she’s caught turning in a plagiarized paper on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She finds the paper she actually wrote has mysteriously been erased from her computer and the only copy that still exists is one she e-mailed herself to enable her to work on it on the school’s computers.

Eli Johnson also works on the school’s computers, and one night he’s in the school library tapping away until he takes a drink from a thermos and collapses. Eli dies well before anyone can help him, and it turns out the drink was spiked with peanuts, to which Eli was allergic. Throughout the movie writer Sandra Bailey has led us to believe that the culprit is Scott, until about two-thirds of the way through, when he turns up in his car in the garage of Jane’s house. The car is running and filling the space with carbon monoxide, and when Hannah tries to rescue him she finds a suicide note on his phone. (At this point I joked to my husband Charles, who had joined me half an hour into Catfish Killer after returning home from work, that this high school was turning into Cabot Cove, Maine, the locale of the TV series Murder, She Wrote. Charles said his problem with the show was that Cabot Cove was such a small town he couldn’t believe there was still anybody there who hadn’t been murdered after a season or two. Maybe that’s why the Murder, She Wrote writers started taking Jessica Fletcher, played marvelously by Angela Lansbury, out of town and having her find murders to solve wherever she went.) Most of the dramatis personae end up either dead or in the local hospital; Kevin and Hannah are nearly run down by a car, and while her injuries are minor, his are severe enough to sideline him for the rest of the football season. When Kevin is released, Hannah spots him on campus kissing and necking with another girl; he says he never told her they’d be exclusive, and she dumps him (which might cause some household tensions since her mom is still dating Kevin’s dad).

In the end it turns out the real culprit is [spoiler alert!] Jane, Hannah’s best friend, who was second runner-up for the Kinzer scholarship. She was desperate to attend Kinzer because both her parents went there, and indeed that was where they met. Only Jane couldn’t afford to attend Kinzer without a scholarship because she didn’t qualIfy for financial aid due to her stepfather’s money, even though he’d made it clear that once she turned 18 she’d be on her own with no money and no place to live. Once again, as in The Plot to Kill My Mother, a Lifetime villainess seemed self-controlled and calm throughout the running time of the movie, only to turn floridly crazy in the final reel, and in the end Jane confronts both Hannah and Marianne. Jane incapacitated Marianne but Hannah knocks her out and thus saves her mom, while Jane is arrested. Director Olivia Kuan turns in some nice Gothic atmospherics and gets a few neo-noir compositions even into a relatively sterile environment, and at the end Hannah visits Scott in the hospital (he wasn’t dead after all, just incapacitated) and they decide they feel “that way” about each other after all. Catfish Killer probably would have seemed better than it did after The Plot to Kill My Mother – the gimmick of having the heroine’s girlfriend turn out to be the villainess in both films weakened each one – and I certainly thought Daniel Grogan was sexier than Anthony Carro, though the darkly handsome Jason Marrs did more for me in the looks department than either of the others!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Lights, Camera, Murder!" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS showed an interesting episode of the quirky TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries – a spinoff created by Jude Tindall based on the Father Brown stories by G. K. Chesterton – called “Lights, Camera, Murder!” This was actually the second snow of the series, originally aired February 8, 2022, but I suspect the local PBS outlet, KPBS, aired it now because it’s become unexpectedly timely. State authorities in New Mexico have nust announced that they’re going to put actor Alec Baldwin on trial for involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of a Western film called Rust which he was shooting there on October 21, 2021. Most people at the time (including myself) originally assumed the death would be ruled accidental – one of those regrettable incidents in which an actor was given a supposedly blank-loaded gun that turned out to have real bullets in it. But according to a dispatch from CNN on January 19 (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/entertainment/rust-movie-shooting-alec-baldwin-charges-decision/index.html), Baldwin and the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, will be tried and the film’;s assistant director, David Halls, already pleaded guilty to one count of “negligent use of a deadly weapon,” which suggests that when the case comes to trial he will be a witness for the prosecution.

The “Lights, Camera, Murder!” episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries also begins with the discharge of a gun that turns out to have real bullets instead of blanks on a movie set; the location is the convent where Sister Boniface and her fellow nuns live and work, and by odd coincidence the fatal shooting on Rust also involved a church (albeit the set of one rather than the real deal). For some strange reason, a lot of the nons on this episode of Sister Boniface Mysteries have male first names – the overall person in charge of the order (or at least this branch of it in the English countryside) is Canoness Basil (Felicity Montagu) and among the other nuns are Sister Peter (Tina Chiang), Sister Reginald (Virginia Fiot), and Reverend Mother Adrian (Carolyn Pickles). The producer of the TV show-within-the-show,, Dick Lansky (Michael Higgs), has booked the convent as a location for a spy drama, Operation Q-T, in which two heroes, Hugo Steele (Andrew Schrborough) and Debra Diamond (Stephanie Booth), are British MI-5 agents on the trail of a Russian baddie named Ivan. (Remember this show is set in the early 1950’s, when the Cold War was still very much a “thing.”) The real-life producers of Sister Boniface Mysteries clearly had fun re-creating the cheesy spy series, including appropriately stupid and banal “action” music by the show’s real-life composer, Michael Price.

Unlike the bullet fired on the Rust set, this one doesn’t kill anybody, but Sister Boniface deduces from the fact that a week before, while the show was shooting interiors at a London studio, a big light fell down and nearly brained an actor that someone has a vendetta against the show in general and Lansky in particular. The case reaches a head when Lansky himself is found dead in a locked room in the convent, and he’s been killed by an electric shock administered by a device similar to the one the actor playing Ivan was supposed to use in the show’s script. This reminded me of an old movie which Charles and I watched years ago in which a murder took place on a film set, several other murders followed, and the detectives deduced that the film’s screenwriter was the killer because the murders followed the plot in his script. In this case, however, the writer is not only innocent but is given a spiked bottle of booze to ensure that he can’t do a last-minute rewrite and avoid a scene in which the real killer has planted a live bomb in a suitcase that was supposed to contain a fake one.

He turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Bruno Milton (Ian Drysdale), who was in the very first episode of Operation Q-T and was given a highly dangerous stunt to do involving a deliberate motorcycle crash. He protested to Lansky that the stunt was too risky, but Lansky gave him a drink to steady his nerves before the take. Alas, Bruno’s premonitions turned out to be all too real; he crashed the motorcycle and his face burned so badly it cost him his potential career as a leading man. Instead he was reduced to playing a clown at children’s parties because the clown makeup would disguise the facial scars. After several operations he once again had a presentable face, though nowhere nearly as handsome as he had once been, but good enough he was able to land the role of Ivan, the villain, and write himself a torture scene which incorporated the same device he used to off Lansky for real. The cops arrest him and he confesses that he’s planted a real bomb in the suitcase thet’s supposed to contain a fake one, and there’s an exciting race against time in which Sister Boniface manages to disarm the bomb with just one second to spare. I’ve quite liked the Sister Boniface Mysteries episodes I’ve seen so far – it seems more interesting and sympathetic than the Father Brown series from which it sprung – and I liked the whole idea of a nun being a huge devotée of a TV series all about espionage and sex.

In Concert: Chris Botti with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Dallas Symphony Orchestra,PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode, my husband Charles and I watched a show rather awkwardly called In Concert: Chris Botti with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, filmed in October 2021 and turned into a PBS pledge-break special now. Chris Botti is a pop-jazz trumpeter who’s basically yet another white kid who wants to be Miles Davis. The show featured 11 songs with a wide array of guest stars, ranging from a quite beautiful acoustic guitarist named Leo Amuedo to violinist Caroline Campbell and singer Veronica Swift. Dressed in a mini-skirt outfit and wearing a pair of huge disc earrings that looked like she was trying to receive radar signals, Swift was described by Botti as a singer in the tradition of Anita O’Day, “Diana” [sic] Washington and Billie Holiday. Actually she sounded like none of those people, except for some O’Day-ish scatting on a song or two. Instead the singers she reminded me of were Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter and Barbra Streisand – I got Streisand mainly on her chest-sung high notes, especially on her opening song, “There Will Never Be Another You.” Veronica Swift is certainly a major talent with a spectacular voice, but like Betty Carter she has a tendency to over-ornament a song. I remember one time when I heard versions of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” in quick succession by Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter. Both ornamented Porter’s melody, but the difference was that Ella had enough good taste to know when to stop, and Carter didn’t. When Swift sang “Embraceable You” on this show I was reminded of Betty Carter at her worst, turning in so overdone a performance it’s the kind of thing that makes people who hate jazz say, in disgust, “Where’s the melody?”

The program opened with a Chris Botti original (his only one in the concert) called “Sevdah,” which turns out to be the name of a Balkan folk dance, and it was strongly reminiscent of the orchestrations Gil Evans used to write for MIles Davis on albums like Sketches of Spain. Botti’s thin, rather pinched trumpet tone also evokes Miles, both when he played “open” and when he uses the Harmon mute – a piece of equipment that became so totally associated with Miles that when Clarence Shaw was playing with Charles Mingus in the 1950’s and Mingus asked him to use one, Shaw said, “But if I do that they’ll accuse me of copying Miles!” Botti’s second song was the standard “When I Fell in Love” by Victor Young and Edward Heyman, and he segued into “Seven Steps to Heaven” by the real Miles Davis. After that he brought on Veronica Swift (and in his introduction of her got Dinah Washington’s name wrong) for “There Will Never Be Another You” and Jon Hendricks’ vocal version of Bobby Timmons’ “Moanini’,” first recorded by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (with Timmons on piano, Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet, Benny Golson on tenor sax and Jymie Merritt on bass, one of the great soul-jazz records). Swift sang the lyrics to “Moanin’” by Jon Hendricks and did quite well, her best singing of the night. After that Botti played a quite lovely ball.ad version of “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland’s signature song from The Wizard of Oz, with a beautiful introduction by acoustic guitarist Leo Amuedo. The tune featured some discreet string fill-ins by the Dallas Symphony, who otherwise were little in evidence after the opening “Sevdah.”

Then came Veronica Swift singing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” written by David Mann and Bob Hilliard for Frank Sinatra’s pioneering 1955 concept album of the same title (his marriage to Ava Gardner had just broken up and he picked a set of songs that would express his heartbreak, much the way rock singer-songwriters would start doing about 15 years later), and Veronica Swift did O.K. with this lovely song even though much of it was taken too fast and some of the lyrics were rather awkwardly rewritten to suit a woman. (For some reason, it sounds O.K. for a man to sing, “You lie awake and think about the girl,” but just creepy for a woman to sing, “You lie awake and think about the boy.”) Then came “Embraceable You,” the wonderful ballad by George and Ira Gershwin that Swift just ruined with her over-ornamentation, and afterwards came another respite. The song was “Hallelujah,” and while one might have expected Vincent Youmans’ 1927 song of that title from the Navy-themed Broadway musical Hit the Deck, it was actually the 1980’s song by Leonard Cohen that is probably one of the most over-covered songs of all time. Foirtunately Botti did it beautifully as an instrumental with more excellent guitar playing by Leo Amuedo.

The next song was “You Don’t Know What Love Is” by Gene De Paul and Don Raye, which turned out to be a feature for Botti’s band – Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, tenor sax; Holger Marjarmaa, piano; Reggie Hamilton, bass; and Lee Pearson, drums – who were so good frankly Botti could have left the Dallas Symphony at home and just played the show with his jazz quintet and brought in the other guest stars as needed. For the big finale Botti did the Earth, Wind and Fire hit “Shining Star” from 1980, one of my all-time favorite songs of that era (indeed, this and “Serpentine Fire” are my all-time favorite Earth, Wind and Fire songs) with a quite strong and exciting vocal duet by Veronica Swift and Sy Smith – the latter an odd name indeed for someone who quite obviously presents as a woman. It was a nice close to a show that wasn’t nearly as eclectic as the PBS pledge-break announcers made it seem; despite the inclusion of “Hallelujah” and “Shining Star” on he program (neither of which are rock songs; “Hallelujah” is folk music and “Shining Star” is soul), Botti’s music remained jazz, albeit pop-jazz, and I for one would like to hear him do a straight-ahead jazz album with that great band of his and forgo the guest stars and those tepid dips with his toes into other musical genres.

Rick Steves' Europe: "Germany's Fascist Story" (Rick Steves' Europe,Back Door Productions, Oregon Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that KPBS re-ran a show originally broadcast November 7, 2020 – while the U.S. Presidential election was just about over byt Donald Trump and his crew were hatching their plots to keep him in office despite his having lost his re-election bid. It was an episode of the travel show Rick Steves’ Europe called “Germany’s Fascist Past,”and within it’s half-hour running time Steves managed to crowd in a brief history of the rise and fall of Nazism, a warning that the forces that brought the original Fascists in Germany and Italy to power are very much alive in today’s world, and a tour of historical sites associated with the Nazis and their crimes agaisnt humanity. It was an odd program mainly because Steves’ golly-gee-whillikers way of hosting the show felt oddly ill-matched to the material he was presented and the lessons from history which he wanted us to glean from it. There’s also a problem with touring modern Germany in search of the Nazi sites; most of them either don’t exist anymore at all, or exist only in ruined form. They were deliberately destroyed first by the Nazis themselves, who knew what the Allies would think of them and so they did their best to wreck the infamous death camps before the Allies came in and liberated their survivors; then by the Allies, who not only bombed the Chancellery in Berlin and Adolf Hitler’s redoubt at Berchtesgaden in the Alps in hopes of killing him but afterwards went out of their way to destroy the historic sites of Nazism, fearing that Germans still sympathetic to the Nazi cause would turn them into pilgrimage shrines; and lastly by the West German government, who didn’t want to see the fledgling democracy they established in 1949 go the way of the Weimar Republic of 1919-1933.

They also didn’t want the historical sites of Nazism become objects of veneration by Germans who still believed in the ideas behind Hitler and Nazism, including scapegoating the Jews and blaming them for all Germany’s post-World War I problems. So the great stadium at Nörnberg (to use the traditional German spelling of Nuremberg), which the Nazis modeled on the Roman Colosseum and where Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will was filmed (and of course Steves couldn’t resist using Riefenstahl’s masterpiece of propaganda as “B”-roll!), is today as much of a ruin as the Roman original. The site of Auschwitz (which, remember, was not in Germany, but in Poland) has been turned into an outdoor memorial and just about all that remains of the death machinery is the entrance gate, with its motto, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (which inexplicably has turned into a motto for neo-fascists worldwide, both in the German original and in translation, which in English is “Work makes you free”). The most chilling part of Steves’ mini-documentary on Nazism is how easily it could all happen again – and indeed is in certain parts of the world, notably in Hungary, which fought in World War II on the German side and is now controlled by fascist leader Viktor Orbán, a modern-day hero to much of the American Right.

The Wife (Silver Reel, Meta Film, Anonymous Content, Tempo Productions, Embankment Films, Creative Scotland, Spark Film & TV,, Film I Väst, Chimney, Sir-Reel Productions, Sony Pictures Classics, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Fridan, January 20 my huisband Charles and I enjoyed a 2017 movie called The Wife, directed by Swedish director Björn L. Runge and written by Jane Anbderson based on a novel by Meg Wolitzer. I had picked up the DVD from a free pile at the North Park library and I thought it sounded interesting, but it turned out to be even better than I’d anticipated – even though it was annoyingly preceded by no fewer than seven previews, including one for a film called The Happy Prince starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde, and a documentary about Maria Callas which apparently featured Joyce Di Donato impersonating Callas on the soundtrack. (The film would probably annoy me because judging from the preview it’s neither fish nor fowl: neither a documentary about Callas nor a fiction film with Di Donato playing her – and I can think of worse choices.) I was expecting The Wife to be a tale of the put-upon wife of a famous novelist traveling with him to Stockholm where he’s scheduled to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. As things turned out, I got a much better movie than that. The central character in The Wife is Joe Castleman (Glenn Close), wife of celebrated novelist Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce).

They met in 1958 while she was an English major at Smith College and he was her professor. In a flashback scene in which they’re played by younger actors (Annie Starke as Joan and Harry Lloyd as Joe), she meets him in his office and he asks her what she’s doing that night. Both she and we think he’s hitting on her, but it turns out he’s already married and has a daughter, for whom he needs a baby sitter. Proximity works its magic and they end up falling in love – or at least lust – and after Joe leaves his first wife Carol for her, they stay together despite his occasional extra-relational activities, all of which get turned into books that become best-sellers and enhance his reputation. The main part of the story is set in 1992, in which Joe receives the call from Stockholm advising him he’s won the Nobel just after he’s had sex with his wife – or at least he’s fingered her to orgasm, to her initial distaste but eventual pleasure. On the flight to Stockholm (aboard the Concorde) Joe is harassed by Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), who wants to write a biography of Joe Castleman and wants Joe to authorize it. The Castlemans are also accompanied by their son David (Max Irons, Jeremy Irons’ son), who aspires to be a writer like his dad and has written a story, which his mom thinks is good but his dad can’t be bothered to read.

They have another child, daughter Sussanah (Alix Wilson Regan). But she doesn’t come along on the trip to Stockholm because she’s in the late stages of pregnancy, We never meet her husband or partner, and we find out very little about her, but Joe is naturally delighted at the prospect of becoming a grandfather. When they arrive in Stockholm they’re coached on the proper etiquette for the Nobel ceremony, including receiving the award directly from the King of Sweden. They’re also subjected to an endless series of formal banquets and receptions. Joe is also assigned a photographer, a young woman named Linnea (Karin Franz Körlof) who’s in awe of him and looks like she’s going to be his latest extramarital conquest until they’re interrupted by yet another call to a dull reception. Director Ronge and writer Anderson keep dropping hints that all is not as it seems between the Castlemans. There’s a flashback scene in which the Castlemans go to hear author Elaime Mozell (Elizabeth McGovern, who’s in just that one scene but makes na indelible impression) read from one of her novels, and when Elaine asks Joan if she intends to keep writing and she answers noncommittally, Elaine sais, “Don’t.” She points to her books as part of a shelf of Smith College alumnae and says the novel she read from has sold a grand total of 200 copies, mostly to her relatives.

Elaine tells Joan that women writers just aren’t taken seriously by the men who run the publishing industry, and Joan just needs to face that. Also, Nathaniel takes Joan to a bar in Stockholm and over drinks he tells her that he’s been doing preliminary research for his Castleman biography and has read some of his early stories – which were nothing spectacular. He then tells Joan that her story in the Smith archives read more like early Joe Castleman than his did. There’s also another hint in which son David rather testily tells his dad that maybe he should be looking to his other parent for literary inspiration. Eventually we learn that [spoiler alert!] Joan, not Joe, has been the actual writer of the Castleman novels; he has been the public face of their partnership while she stayed at home. The two of them worked in an office together and locked everyone else out, including their kids, while she typed out the manuscripts and actually created the acclaimed novels. We’re first dropped that information in a context that briefly makes us wonder whether we’re supposed to believe it, but then Ronge and Anderson cut to another flashback with the younger actors, set in 1963 in their home office, that makes it clear it is she, not he, who is the literary genius.

Joan gets disgusted and threatens to leave him, he responds by starting to give her a back rub – his usual technique for persuading her to stay after she gets angry with him – and just then he has a heart attack that proves to be fatal. On the plane back home, Nathaniel Bone confronts her and says he’s going to write a book that will expose the decades-long deception, and Joan threatens to sue him for everything he’s got if he does so. Then she tells David that as soon as they get home, she will tell him and his sister the whole story. The last scene shows her looking over a notebook containing a half-finished something-or-other, and ini my mind the way I’d have liked to see The Wife end was that this turns out to be notes for a novel. Eventually Joan would write a book based on it, publish it as her completion of his last, unfinished story, and the critics would give it rave reviews align the ines of, “She’s so perfectly absorbed his voice it’s impossible to tell where his work leaves off and hers begins.”

My husband Charles and I have both been wracking our brains since to figure out whether The Wife is based on a true story. Certainly there are extensive tales in the literary world of women using either male pseudonyms (like George Eliot, George Sand or Charlotte Brontë, who first published Jane Eyre under the gender-ambiguous name “Currer Bell”) or initials (like Harry Potter creator Joanne “J.. K.” Rowling or early Star Trek writer Dorothy “D. C.” Fontana) to disguise their true gender. There have also been a few couples in which both people wrote but only the male signed the stories, like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald or science-fiction author Henry Kuttner and his wife, C. L. Moore. Long after his death, painter Walter Keane was revealed to have signed his name to paintings actually created by his wife – and a movie has been made about them, too – but I don’t know of a case in which a literary couple pulled off the long-term deception depicted in this film. Still, it’s all too believable even today that a genuinely creative woman writer would realize she stood no chance of long-term success, either artistic or commercial, without using her husband to “front” for her!