Midsomer Murders: "With Baited Breath" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2019)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 29) I watched a Midsomer Murders episode from 2019 called “With Baited Breath.” This was an unusually quirky episode of this generally quirky show based on Caroline Graham’s series of novels about the fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England and the police officers who investigate murders there, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), police trainee Jade-Marie Pierce (Eleanor Fanyinka) – an African-British woman whom Winter has the hots for – and their medical examiner and forensic technician, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland). A lot of the Midsomer Murders shows are based around alleged competitions that supposedly take place every year in the environs, even though no one seems to have heard of them before. The script for “With Baited Breath,” written by Jeff Povey and directed by Jennie Darnell, features two such competitions, the so-called “Psycho Mud Run” that’s essentially a military-style obstacle course that attracts teams of competitors and a fishing competition at nearby Solomon Lake in which there’s a 20,000-pound prize for catching “Ahab,” the giant 20-pound fish (well, it’s central England so it’s not going to be anything truly monstrous, though Darnell and Povey use the fish in some quite amusing parodies of Jaws) that inhabits the lake.

Alas, the promoter of the “Psycho Mud Run,” Ned Skye (Nitin Ganatra), has re-routed the course so it runs by the lake, which will screw up the fishing competition by scaring the fish into hiding at the bottom. Ned is also having running arguments with his daughter Simone (Krupa Pattani), who works at the local inn owned by Izzy Silvermane (Nicola Stephenson) and is in love with fellow staff member Harper Kaplan (Lloyd Everitt), another Afro-Brit, but dad doesn’t want them to get together because he has no career plans. Kaplan was fired from the local fire department three years earlier by Lex Bedford (Andrew Brooke, who bore a striking resemblance to my hero Christopher Meloni from the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), who used to be a champion angler until he gave it up and is back in town but only to participate in the Psycho Mud Run. Izzy keeps getting postcards from her daughter Lola, who supposedly left town years before and is traveling around the world. The first crime occurs when someone strews fish hooks across the path of the Psycho Mud Run, leading to a number of contestants having their legs literally cut open and scarred. I was beginning to wonder when the actual murders would start, and soon enough the corpses started piling up: first, Lex Bedford’s; then, Nick Frye’s, and then that of Cornelius Tedbury (Miles Jupp), who’s killed with a slingshot (how David and Goliath!) as he’s bent over the water fishing with an underwater camera and a tablet computer so he can find the mystery fish Ahab.

Barnaby and Winter enlist the aid of retired police detective Artie Blythe (Vincent Franklin) to help investigate the case, but it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Blythe is the actual killer. Three years earlier Lola Silvermane was actually killed in a hit-and-run auto accident involving a Jeep being driven by Griffin Twigg (Morgan Watkins), who crashed into her because he was momentarily distracted by Lex Bedford, who was waving around the fishing trophy he had just won. Also in the car were Ned Skye and Blaise McQuinn (Bronagh Waugh), a fisherwoman who had been having an affair with Lex and was now doing a worldwide blog challenging the institutional sexism of the competitive fishing world. The four decided to conceal the crime by sinking the Jeep in the lake, where Cornelius’s hidden camera shot pictures of it, and sending Izzy fake postcards whose origins precisely tracked the cities from which Blaise did her blog posts. Artie’s motive was he was actually Lola Silvermane’s father, and he was angry with the foursome for having deprived him of the chance to watch her grow up and become a woman; he killed Cornelius by mistake because Griffin, the intended victim, had left his hat beside the lake and Cornelius had put it on. This was a quite charming Midsomer Murders episode, and the climax had real pathos, though I was disappointed that the hot young (straight) couple we saw in the opening scene were never heard from again; I wanted to see more of that sexy young man!

Love at First Lie (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 25) I watched two recent Lifetime movies, a “premiere” called Love at First Lie and a biopic of current R&B/soul star Keyisha Cole called Keyisha Cole: This Is My Story. Love at First Lie is an incredibly overused title – imdb.com lists quite a few other movies using it, including one from just last year – and I wanted to make sure I had the right imdb.com page for the movie Lifetime was showing last night. (I did.) Love at First Lie (this one) was created by the same team that did last March’s Lifetime “premiere,” Home, Not Alone (a title considerably cleverer than anything in the film itself): Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan wrote the “original” story, Adam Rockoff turned it into a screenplay, and Amy Barrett (not the third Donald Trump appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court that provided the crucial vote to overturn Roe v. Wade!) directed, and it’s a pretty typical Lifetime movie. The “pussy in peril” heroine is Kate Burns (Lexie Stevenson), a journalist turned realtor (which sounds like “trading down” to me!) who works for another woman, Vivian (Katelin Chesna, who looks like a modern-day version of Edna May Oliver). Vivian had become a sort of surrogate mother to Kate, helping her through the traumas of a bad four-month relationship with a man named Frank, and she indulges Kate while Kate spends a lot of her “work” time flipping through the photos of eligible young men on a dating app she’s downloaded. Presently she sees and hits the “like” button on a man identified as Walker Stevenson (Greg Kriek, who’s tall, blond, clean-shaven and speaks with a British accent; he’d have been perfect casting as Prince Harry in LIfetime’s biopic except the actor they actually got, Murray Fraser, was even better!).

Walker claims to be a high-end art dealer who goes out of the country a lot and tells the totally smitten Kate that a gang of international criminals is after him and he’s carrying a priceless painting by Pieter Brughel the Elder that’s worth over $6 million which he’s purchased on behalf of a super-rich individual who doesn’t want anyone else in the world to know he owns this particular painting. The moment he said that I assumed he’d turn out to be an international art thief stealing masterworks from established musea or galleries on behalf of ultra-rich people who wanted to own them for their private collections, as in movies like Scotland Yard Investigator and The Fake, but “Walker Stevenson” – or Steven Cammell, to use his true name – turns out to be a more prosaic sort of criminal than that. He’s a con artist who scams professionally successful women by getting them to fall for him and then hand over their credit cards and their life savings to him after claiming to be super-wealthy himself (at one point Kate tells Vivian that Walker lives in a world of such wealth $10,000 is small change to him – Walker, as part of his scam, actually has given Kate a bundle of cash of that amount as so-called “security” for her loaning him her credit card). In a prologue sequence we see Walker pulling this same scam on his ex, Eliza (Skye Coyne), who looks enough like Kate we figure this is Walker’s “type” (tall, thin, leggy, with long raven-black hair). Later Eliza, who’s the closest the writers came to creating a truly multidimensional character, “casually” runs into Kate and gives Walker an enthusiastic endorsement, saying he’s a “keeper” and she should hold on to him – Eliza explains that the only reason she broke up with Walker is she got tired of his constant travels – only Eliza turns up at Kate’s home after Kate has realized Walker is a scam artist. At first she pretends to be a fellow victim, but then she pulls a knife on Kate and declares that she’s avenging Walker because she’s genuinely in love with him.

Kate has finally seen through Walker’s schemes at this point, and there are two Black women helping her to bring Walker to justice. One is a police detective, Carmen Logan (Alicia S. Mason), who’s been researching police and banking records trying to build a forensic case against Walker even though she doesn’t know where he is. The other is a podcaster, Sarah Masters (Jessi Laday), who puts Kate on her podcast and has her tell the story of how she was scammed by Walker. The podcast includes his photo just to warn other potential victims not to fall for him. Detective Logan offers to stake out Kate’s house all night in hopes Walker will come to get her and either kill her or rough her up, only Walker lures her out of her car and clobbers her with a board (later Logan slyly confesses that she’d been out of practice with her street skills because she let herself be so easily overpowered). That’s when Kate gets her visit from Eliza, and later Walker himself shows up and kidnaps her, taking her to a secret location and demanding that she give him the password to her last bank account so he can loot it along with all the others he’s already stolen. Alas, Walker bound her with duct tape, which Kate relatively easily figures out a way to open so she can free herself and go after him with a convenient fireplace poker. Meanwhile, Vivian (ya remember Vivian?) has called Kate’s phone, and while Kate hasn’t answered (she is just a bit occupied!) Vivian’s call has apparently set off the location detector on it and the cops are able to show up at Walker’s redoubt and rescue Kate. Walker escapes, though, and the final scene shows him at a museum in Paris (we know it’s Paris because we see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe) chatting up his latest victim and using yet another name, “Roger Cain.”

Love at First Lie is an O.K. Lifetime movie, basically following the genre conventions, and if it’s of more interest than usual it’s almost exclusively in the character of the villain. For once he’s not openly psychopathic – just a cold, calculating, callous businessman who’s hit on a way to monetize his good looks and surface charm – and though Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff haven’t given him a deep, dark secret or much of an indication into What Makes Walker Run, that’s probably just as well because it makes him that much more sinister that we can’t peg a deep-seated psychological motive on him.

Keyshia Cole: This Is My Story (Lifetime Movie Network, 2023)

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

The Lifetime movie they showed after that, Keyshia Cole: This Is My Story, was a good deal more interesting. It deals with the popular soul/R&B singer Keyshia Cole – someone I’d vaguely heard of but didn’t know before – and Cole not only executive-produced the movie but played herself in it. (The 40-something Cole is surprisingly credible as her teenage self, assuming it is indeed she and not another actor playing the character younger; imdb.com doesn’t list anybody else in the role but then their credits list is woefully incomplete, including no mention of the actors playing the two men in Cole’s life, professional basketball player Daniel Gibson and would-be rapper Niko Khale.) The film was co-directed by Manu Boyer (a white man) and D’Angela Proctor (a Black woman) from a script by Angelica Chéri (who I’m presuming is a Black woman, though imdb.com doesn’t show a photo), and it opens in 2021 with the funeral in Oakland, California of Cole’s biological mother, Francine “Frankie” Lons (a terrific performance by Debbi Morgan, who’s been active since the 1970’s and was in Roots: The Next Generation). The film flashes back to 1999 and the troubled relationship between Cole and her adoptive parents, family friends Leon and Yvonne Cole. Leon is easygoing but Yvonne is a tough M.F., literally locking Keyshia out of the house when Keyshia stays out late with her boyfriend Jamal. Yvonne is worried shitless that Jamal (or some other guy) is going to get Keyshia pregnant, and she doesn’t believe Keyshia’s insistence that she and Jamal are not having sex. The reason Yvonne is so worried about this becomes apparent when we get to know Frankie, Keyshia’s biological mother, who’s an alcoholic and crack addict willing to trade sex for drugs. In fact, we’re pretty sure that’s how Keyshia came to exist in the first place, along with six other half-siblings.

Though the story as shown here delves into the rest of Keyshia’s life – including the $14,000 award she gets from the government when she turns 18, which allows her to relocate from Oakland to L.A. away from Yvonne’s concentration-camp commandant control of her life and kick-start her entry into the music business – the key plot issues are Keyshia’s relationship with her mom and her ongoing uncertainty about who her biological father is. There’s a peculiar scene in a nearly empty Black church in which she approaches the minister for help praying to God for the success of her music career – I was wondering briefly whether Chéri was going to make Keyshia a church girl like Aretha Franklin and build conflict within her between her religious beliefs and her entry into the secular music world, but no-o-o-o-o – instead Keyshia gets a job in a Black beauty parlor and seeks in vain for an entrée into the music biz. She gets her chance when she hears about a party being thrown by and for various music magnates, both white and Black, and after seeing through the transparent attempt of a Black hustler who wants her to come to his place so he can “hear her demos,” she hooks up (platonically) with white producer Ron Fair (Douglas Dickerman) of A&M Records, who signs her and produces her first album, the sensationally successful The Way It Is (2005). Keyshia hooks up with Daniel Gibson and has a son with him, the two of them end up doing a reality-TV show on Black Entertainment Television (one wonders if the network booked them after the sensational success of their reality series with Whitney Houston and her scapegrace husband, Bobby Brown; they also did a reality series with Toni Braxton and her alliteratively named family). Only she calls a halt to it after three seasons, much to the disappointment of her mom and her siblings, who were making money off it. In fact, they were doing so well behind it they sneak around Keyshia’s back and make their own deal with BET to continue it. Her relationship with Gibson ends when she finds a pair of red panties in his laundry and confronts him; later she hooks up with Niko but that doesn't last either.

Throughout the film Keyshia worries about her mom doing drugs, having sex with bad men to get drugs, and ultimately dying of an overdose. Mom goes into rehab at least twice – the first time at Keyshia’s insistence and the second time as her own idea – and she speaks movingly about the demons within her that keep leading her to use. As someone who lived through a relationship with an alcoholic who ultimately drank himself to death, stories like this have a personal resonance with me. Alas, Keyshia’s mom has a fatal overdose right on her 61st birthday (itself a resonant date with me since my younger brother died at 61), and at least as depicted here she lost consciousness right as Keyshia was calling her on her cell phone. Mom tried to answer the call but went under just before she could swipe – one wonders if this is how it really happened or this was one of the scenes Angelica Chéri embellished, as we were warned she had with a disclaimer at the end indicating that some scenes had been fictionalized. But whatever the truth of how Frankie Lons met her end, it’s a real tragedy and an indication of the power of addiction: nothing, including having a celebrity daughter and being able to have anything she could want (at least anything material), could sway Frankie from the path of self-destruction and the bad habits that took her life at the end. Incidentally, Keyshia also locates her biological father, a man named Virgil Miller, though she remains uncertain about it because he refuses to take the DNA test that would definitively establish his paternity. (One would think he would, if only because then he could have bragging rights: “Hey, I’m Keyshia Cole’s father!”) I wasn’t all that interested in this movie – Keyshia Cole was one of those names at the periphery of my consciousness, and though she sings instead of raps her early mentors included rappers like M.C. Hammer and the late Tupac Shakur, which wasn’t exactly calculated to make me take an interest in her – but I was rewarded with a powerful generational role-reversal tale in which the offspring has to deal with a parent’s drug addiction, and Debbi Morgan’s indelible performance (as well as Cole’s power in the lead; unlike Whitney Houston, she could play herself on screen) make the movie for me!

Vertigo (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Paramount, 1958; reissued by Universal, 1984)

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

The film I showed Charles was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, blessedly letterboxed to the original VistaVision format (which in turn was considerably less oblong than CinemaScope) and preceded by a documentary, Obsessed with “Vertigo,” hosted by Roddy McDowell (that queen!), dealing equally with the original production (including some costume-test stills of the original female star, Vera Miles — replaced by Kim Novak after she got pregnant! — in the famous grey suit) and the controversial restoration by Robert Harris and Robert Katz, which reportedly cost more than a million dollars and involved re-recording the entire soundtrack so Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful musical score could be added to the film in stereo (as it was recorded in the first place). While I don’t agree with the critical assessment in the documentary that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s all-time best film — as magnificently moody and obsessive as it is, there are some longueurs in it and I’d rate a few of Hitchcock’s earlier films as better, including Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train and the similarly obsessive Notorious, which has some interesting plot similarities to Vertigo — it is a masterpiece (inexplicably left out of The Film Noir Encyclopedia — as was Rear Window, despite the latter’s basis in a short story by echt-noir writer Cornell Woolrich: the Hitchcocks they did list were Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train and The Wrong Man), rich and dazzling, clearly a personal statement of Hitchcock’s own obsessions in spite of (or perhaps because of) a nasty streak of male chauvinism epitomized by this statement of Hitchcock himself from his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse:

"One girl is dead and the James Stewart character has had a nervous breakdown. Then he discovers a brunette girl who resembles the dead woman. You’re really starting a new story and asking yourself: What are the audience saying now? 'Oh, he’s found another girl. She looks like the dead one so he wants to make her over.' By revealing the truth you give the audience two more things to think about: What will Stewart say when he finds out it’s the same woman? Will the girl submit to the making-over? We can understand her objections. Previously we wouldn’t understand her objections. Had I saved everything until the end the audience would have been more or less impatient with Stewart making over the girl." [Emphasis added.]

I find it incredibly revealing that — in the context of discussing a film that deals so extensively with role-playing and the control certain kinds of men exert over women — Hitchcock would say that “we wouldn’t understand her objections” to being ruthlessly dictated to by a man in terms of specifying the exact outfit she must wear and the hair color she must adopt, all so she can take on the resemblance to his idealized, (presumably) dead lover (Stewart’s character tells her over and over again in the dialogue that he doesn’t care about the living Kim Novak, only her presumably “dead” incarnation) if we didn’t already know that she was the same woman and she had been forced through this process once before. As he often was, Hitchcock was more honest in his film than he was in his discussion of it — we sympathize with poor Judy’s plight as the simple discomfort of a woman whose individuality is being systematically stripped from her and who is being remodeled to replicate a dead dream-image; and our pre-knowledge of who she “really” is (i.e., that Novak/“Judy” and Novak/“Madeleine” are really the same person) only adds an overlay of intensity to her grim emotions through this scene. There are enough witnesses to Hitchcock pulling real-life scenes like this with his leading actresses, especially the ones he worked with after Vertigo — taking them clothes-shopping and meticulously instructing them on what to wear and how to wear it, off-screen as well as on — to indicate that he saw absolutely nothing wrong with a man treating a woman this way (as indeed the characters in Vertigo don’t either — the female salesperson who keeps telling Novak, “the gentleman seems to know what he wants,” just adds that much more claustrophobia and demeaning humiliation to the scene).

I presume from Hitchcock’s overall comments that in the original novel (From Amongst the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the French authors who also wrote the novel on which Diabolique was based, and who later told Hitchcock they had deliberately written From Amongst the Dead with the aim of writing something for which Hitchcock would want to buy the movie rights!) the leading man doesn’t know the woman he’s picked up and made over is the same person as the one he was trailing earlier until the very end of the story. It’s interesting to imagine what the film might have been like if Hitchcock hadn’t moved up the revelation to early in the film’s second act — the ending would have been more of a jolt (like the ending of Diabolique, in which any clarity as to who is doing what to whom is kept from us until the very last minutes) but the movie might have lost some of its power early on, especially in the scene in which the “new” Kim Novak, suited and blondined and made up to an exact simulacrum of her alter ego, emerges from a logically inexplicable but visually arresting fog in the middle of a cheap room and she and Stewart clinch. (Fortunately Harris and Katz retained the foggy quality of this scene in their restoration instead of mindlessly “correcting” it to crisp, clear color.) When I first saw Vertigo — in the theatrical reissue of 1984, though not in wide-screen and in color values that seemed perfectly adequate to me even though Harris and Katz have criticized them — I remembered being particularly impressed by the Bernard Herrmann score (especially the way he copied the central musical device of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — stacking chromatic chords on top of each other without resolving them — for the same dramatic purpose: the musical depiction of an unrequited and doomed love) and the long stretches of dialogue-less film which give away the fact that Vertigo was directed by a man whose career as a director started in the silent era.

This time around I appreciated those same values and was also amazed by the marvelous acting of Kim Novak. There’ve been a lot of patronizing words written about her performance in this film — Hitchcock himself said, “What fascinated me was the idea that Jimmy Stewart was trying to turn the girl into someone she once had to play as part of a murder plot and is later trying not to be — and I’m not sure Kim Novak had the ability to put this across,” and screenwriter Samuel Taylor (who had to share writer credit with Alec Coppel, who wrote a previous, rejected version, even though all accounts I’ve read of the production indicate that Taylor rewrote the whole film start-to-finish and probably should have got sole credit) said, “If we’d had a brilliant actress who really created two distinctly different people, it would not have been as good. She seemed so naïve in the part, and that was good. She was always believable. There was no ‘art’ about it, and that was why it worked so very well.” Knowing what we do about how Novak got into movies in the first place — she’d done a TV commercial for refrigerators in 1953 and attracted the attention of Harry Cohn, autocratic founder of Columbia Pictures, who had let Marilyn Monroe go after six months in 1948 and, now that Marilyn was a big star, wanted to find another girl with big tits and make his own Monroe clone — we can see how the whole idea of playing a woman who is constantly being “directed,” being taken over by rich and powerful men and forced to remodel herself physically according to their whims, tied in to her own life and was therefore a role she could play well. (This part of Taylor’s comment I agree with; a “brilliant actress” might have been tempted to make Madeleine and Judy too different, thereby undercutting the film’s credibility when Hitchcock and Taylor let us know they’re really supposed to be the same person.)

Hitchcock shoots the makeover in a way that makes it resemble an actress being prepared for a movie scene (even down to that chilling moment in which her lips are painted by an unseen hand and we see it through one of those gigantic magnifying glasses movie makeup artists use), creating one of those marvelous moments in film in which illusion stacks upon illusion and the process of filmmaking itself becomes the only reality — and, as I’ve written before, I find it fascinating that a director who said he would never work with Marilyn Monroe because her sex appeal was too obvious was nonetheless able to take an actress who’d been carefully built up as a Monroe clone and turn her into “his kind of woman.” (Indeed, it’s possible to read the initial appearance of Novak in her “Judy” persona — brown-haired, as Monroe was genetically; slovenly, ill-dressed and coarse and common in manner — and Hitchcock’s transformation of her into the “Madeleine” persona, blonde, well-tailored, impeccably groomed and upper-class in manner, as his ultimate comment on what he thought of the high-priced sex bombs of the 1950’s and how anemic and unattractive they were compared to his own dream vision of the high-class, enigmatic cool blonde.)

Charles told me after we watched Vertigo that he too had seen it for the first time in the 1984 revival, and had remembered the barest elements of the suspense plot — including the revelation that the two Kim Novak characters were one person and the final confrontation at the bell tower — but not the psychological aspects of the film or its overall spirit of obsession. I told him that when I first saw it I picked up on an important contradiction in the plot — that Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor whose spirit was supposedly reincarnated in Novak as “Madeleine,” was supposed to have been a suicide but was actually buried inside a mission, in what would have been consecrated ground and therefore off limits to a suicide victim according to Catholic theology. I don’t think this was just a mistake, since Hitchcock was a practicing Catholic all his life and knew the theology of his religion well enough to avoid something that obvious (though there’s an even more obvious physical mistake in the final film: both times Stewart and Novak drive from San Francisco to the mission in Santa Cruz, they drive on the left side of the road, as if Hitchcock had momentarily forgotten he wasn’t in England anymore!); and when I first saw the film I conceived the idea that Carlotta, Madeleine (the real one — the wife of Tom Helmore that we don’t see except in that flashback showing how she was actually murdered) and Judy are all done to death by the men they loved: Carlotta (in the backstory) presumably ordered killed by the rich man who’d kept and then abandoned her; Madeleine killed by her husband in the elaborate murder plot that underlies the first half of the film; and Judy taken to the bell tower and driven to her death psychologically by the Stewart character.

Charles didn’t think much of this explanation, since the actual death of Novak at the end is directly precipitated by the nun who climbs the bell tower and appears at the end (in line with Hitchcock’s skill at indirection, she appears at first as only a black shape — more devil than angel — and it’s only when she calls out, then steps into full light, that we realize it’s only a nun and she has a perfectly rational reason to be there). But when I first saw Vertigo I read the final scene as one in which Stewart is responsible for Novak’s death — after all, he’s been attempting to destroy her psychologically, and he’s sufficiently mentally unhinged in the final scene that one could readily imagine him killing her if she hadn’t first accidentally fallen after the nun — serving almost literally as a dea ex machina — startled her. (David Thomson said that Hitchcock had once intimated that Stewart’s own character might have jumped from the tower right after the fadeout, to join his beloved in death à la The Flying Dutchman.) The film also carries over a lot of the legend of Tristan and Isolde — not only the Wagnerian adaptation but also the original tale, in which there are two Isoldes, the original one and the later one (Isolde of the White Hands) with whom Tristan takes refuge after the scene in the garden and the fatal wound from Melot (comparable in a way to the two separate personae of the Kim Novak character in Vertigo).

And has anyone else noticed that — in a 1958 film, with the Production Code slightly weakened but still very much in place — the Tom Helmore character blatantly and unmistakably gets away with murder? (As we find out at the end, he dumps the Novak character who was his accomplice, flees to Europe and gets to spend his dead wife’s fortune while his unwitting accomplice, Stewart, stays behind and has his nervous breakdown.) Hitchcock may have been influenced here by the success of some of his TV shows in leaving the murderer unpunished at the end — and there are plenty of references to his earlier films as well, including that obscure French-language short, Bon Voyage, echoed in Vertigo in the first scene in the bell tower, first shown to us in real time and then in a flashback that, like the second half of Bon Voyage, lets us in on the information we need to find out what the scene “really” means. — 10/11/97

•••••

Last night (Saturday, June 24) Turner Classic Movies showed a pair of films I really wanted to watch, including a movie that’s one of my all-time favorites: Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 romantic melodrama in thriller guise featuring James Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective forced into early retirement after a colleague falls to his death during a rooftop chase. He’s hired as a private detective by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), an old college friend but one whom he barely remembers, to tail Elster’s wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). Madeleine has supposedly become obsessed with her long-dead great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdez, who lived in San Francisco in the early 19th century when California was still part of Mexico. Scottie traces her on long drives through San Francisco, including stops at a seedy hotel that was once the Valdez family home and the Legion of Honor museum, where a painting of Carlotta hangs. I first heard of Vertigo in the late 1960’s after my father gave me a copy of David Thomson’s book Movie Man, which also introduced me to a number of other, even kinkier films by major directors (Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Lady Without Camelias, Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes and Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us), though I didn’t get a chance to see it until 1984, when Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia cut a deal with Universal to reissue it and four other films Hitchcock owned outright (Rope, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry and the second – and, I think, decidedly inferior – The Man Who Knew Too Much). That turned out to be a sensation, as even four years after his death Hitchcock asserted his superiority over all still-living thriller directors.

It also sparked renewed interest in Kim Novak, who’d been hired by Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures in 1953 because Cohn had briefly had Marilyn Monroe under contract in 1948 and let her go after six months and only one film (Ladies of the Chorus, a surprisingly good “B” musical directed by Phil Karlson, who got more out of Monroe than many of her more prestigious directors did). Like a lot of other Hollywood producers, Cohn decided to create his own Monroe clone, and he chose a woman whose real name was actually Marilyn – model Marilyn Novack – and decided to rename her “Kit Marlowe.” She rebelled and agreed to accept “Kim,” the name of an ancestor and close to “Kit,” as a first name, while keeping “Novak” as her last name and just dropping the “c.” One thing that has often struck me about Kim Novak’s career is that she was frequently cast as a woman who’s involved with a man who, for no-good reasons of his own, physically and stylistically remodels her into his image of a perfect woman – a plot line that seems to parallel Novak’s own grooming at Harry Cohn’s hands. Her first film in a leading role, Pushover – a 1954 film noir starring Fred MacMurray and essentially a knockoff of Double Indemnity, only instead of a corrupt insurance agent he’s a corrupt cop – shows her being groomed by MacMurray’s character as part of a scheme to grab the missing $210,000 an at-large criminal and his partner stole in a bank robbery – and Novak would continue to play parts in which she was being remodeled by powerful men until her last major film, The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), in which she played a young actress who attracts the attention of a veteran film director (Peter Finch) because she’s the spitting image of his late wife Lylah Clare, also a movie star, and he decides to cast her in a biopic.

I fell in love with Vertigo in 1984 and I still love it today, even though I was upset when it replaced Citizen Kane atop the Sight and Sound decennial poll of the 10 best movies ever made in 2012 (if any film deserved to displace Citizen Kane it was 2001: A Space Odyssey), and I don’t consider it Hitchcock’s best movie (I’d rate Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train ahead of it). My husband Charles also first saw it in 1984, and when we re-watched it together for the first time in 1997 I wrote an extended journal entry about it (see above) that referenced all sorts of parallels, including Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (as well as the original Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan, in which there are two Isoldes, as there are two characters played by Kim Novak in the film even though they turn out to be the same person). This time around I was also struck by the parallel between Vertigo and Rear Window, made four years earlier and also with Hitchcock as director and Stewart as star, and though he’s not physically wheelchair-bound in Vertigo as he was in Rear Window, in both films he’s essentially a walking-wounded man traumatized by an accident and nursed to health by a female “buddy” (Thelma Ritter in Rear Window, Barbara Bel Geddes here) who makes fun of the growing attraction between Stewart’s character and the usual Hitchcock “cool blonde” (Grace Kelly in Rear Window and Novak here).

Also last night was the first time I’ve seen Vertigo since I read Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose (1920), a story Hitchcock never got to film even though he wanted to literally for the entirety of his career. He’d seen the premiere production of Mary Rose – a fantasy-drama about a young woman who periodically disappears from life and reappears having not aged a bit, despite however long she’s been gone – and been fascinated by the whole idea, including the practical problem of what we would do with the dead if they did start coming back to life en masse. But Universal, the studio where he ended his career, was so fearful of the lack of commercial appeal of this story that they actually had it written into Hitchcock’s contract that he could not make Mary Rose – a real pity because it could have been one of Hitchcock’s greatest films (and after Marc Forster’s brilliant Finding Neverland, in which Barrie appears as a character, I thought he’d have been the perfect director to take up Mary Rose after Hitchcock’s death).

Storm Warning (Warner Bros., 1949, released 1951)

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

After Vertigo Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” came on for a film that is actually only tangentially film noir: Storm Warning, shot in 1949 but not released until 1951 and essentially a throwback to Jack Warner’s “ripped from the headlines!” dramas from the 1930’s. It takes place in the fictitious Southern town of “Rockport” and deals with model Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers), who on a trip to a fashion show in Baltimore stops over in Rockport to visit her married sister, Lucy Rice (Doris Day). When she arrives she finds that the bus station and the diner close well before they’re supposed to, and the town’s one cabdriver announces that he’s not picking up any passengers. Marsha is forced to walk to the recreation center where Lucy works, and along the way she sees a lynch mob of people in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, including white robes and hoods, drag a prisoner out of the town jail and kill him on the spot. Though most of the Klansmen are hooded, one isn’t, and later when Marsha meets Lucy and her husband Hank (Steve Cochran), she recognizes him as the non-hooded Klansman who actually killed the victim. The case falls to the local prosecutor, Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan, whose presence in this movie as an apostle of racial justice and civil rights practically defines “irony” in light of his later political career), who is determined to break the Klan’s stranglehold over Rockport once and for all.

The victim was a reporter named Walter Adams (Dale Van Sickel), who had come to Rockport to do an exposé on the Klan, and when the local Klan boss, Charlie Barr (Hugh Sanders) – who also runs a fertilizer business for which Hank Rice works as a truck driver – makes the predictable speech about how Rockport doesn’t need “northern agitators” coming down to stir trouble, Rainey points out that Adams was actually from Birmingham, Alabama. Rainey thinks he has the witness he needs when Marsha turns up, but at the coroner’s inquest she lies and says she saw nothing because she wants to protect her sister against being exposed as the wife of a cold-blooded killer. Storm Warning was directed by Stuart Heisler (a decent Hollywood hack) from a script by Daniel Fuchs and Richard Brooks, and it’s mostly a good movie except for a finale that goes way over the top. Hank Rice gets plastered at the local bar following the verdict of the inquest that Walter Adams met his death at the hands of “person or persons unknown,” and he comes back to the home where he lives with his wife and Marsha is staying. Drunk out of his gills and certain that Lucy is at work all night and won’t be coming home soon, he threatens to rape Marsha – a scene which led Eddie Muller to compare the film to A Streetcar Named Desire, also a story about a woman who comes to visit her sister in a Southern town and finds the sister married to a macho boor who tries to rape her. Muller even suggested Steve Cochran would have been good casting for Stanley Kowalski if Warner Bros. hadn’t been able to get Marlon Brando.

The revelation that her husband is a killer leads Lucy to decide to leave him, and she and Marsha plan to leave town together – only the Klan gets wind of this and, realizing that once Hank and Lucy break up Marsha no longer has an incentive to protect them, they determine to kidnap Marsha. At best they intend to terrorize her into submission and at worst they plan to kill her, and in a truly kinky scene they actually whip her with five lashes before Rainey shows up with one police car. Rather than overpower him as they could easily have done, the Klansmen doff their white robes and hoods and flee like the panicked cowards they are, and Hank goes totally off the rails and shoots Lucy. At first I thought the filmmakers were going to leave it uncertain as to whether Lucy lived or died, but as the film fades out it’s clear that Lucy is dead – Marsha’s lie to protect her sister literally got her killed, ah the irony! – and Muller noted in his outro that in Doris Day’s long film career this was the only time her character died. Muller also compared this film to the 1937 Black Legion, about a real-life bunch of wanna-be Klansters which he said sparked a lawsuit from the Klan alleging that Warner Bros. was defaming them (though if the Ku Klux Klan had sued anybody over Black Legion it should have been the real Black Legion for copyright and/or trademark infringement!). Sorry, but though Storm Warning is a good movie Black Legion is an even better one, partly because it’s far better cast – the star is Humphrey Bogart – and frankly I was hoping Storm Warning would have ended like Black Legion, with Cochran on Bogart’s character arc of a basically decent man who got hoodwinked into joining an evil organization and killing someone, then turning state’s evidence against them. And I certainly would have wanted Doris Day to live at the end instead of going the route of Bette Davis’s innocent sister in Marked Woman and getting killed just for being a decent and totally law-abiding person literally caught up in a reign of terror!

Hello, Everybody! (Paramount, 1933)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 22) at about 10:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a really peculiar 1933 movie called Hello, Everybody! It was directed by William A. Seiter (who made two truly great movies, 1933’s Sons of the Desert and 1935’s Roberta, both with legendary duos: Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert and Astaire and Rogers in Roberta, but was otherwise pretty hacky) from a script by Lawrence Hazard and Dorothy Yost based on an “original” story by Fannie Hurst. Its star was Kate Smith, the surprisingly great singer who became a legend singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (which wouldn’t be written until 1939, six years after this film was made) and raising more money during World War II at public War Bonds sales events than any other entertainer. Kate Smith was born in Greenville, Virginia on May 1, 1907 and was sent to nursing school by her father for nine months in the mid-1920’s in a vain attempt to keep her from pursuing singing as a career. (Like so many other great singers, both white and Black, Kate Smith started in church.) Smith was discovered by vaudevillian Eddie Dowling, who heard her in Boston and offered her a part in his Broadway revue (a plotless musical) called Honeymoon Lane. The show was reviewed thusly in the New York Times: “A 19-year-old girl, weighing in the immediate neighborhood of 200 pounds, is one of the discoveries of the season for those whose interests run to syncopators and singers of what in the varieties and nightclubs are known as ‘hot’ songs. Kate Smith is the newcomer's not uncommon name.”

The reference to her weight played up the aspect of Smith that would pretty much dictate the course of her career; she was what today is delicately called “a woman of size,” and while today that may not seem like such a big deal – Adele, Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion have managed to have major careers despite being similarly zaftig – Smith’s size led her to getting cast in major musicals like Hit the Deck (in which she sang Vincent Youmans’ great song “Hallelujah!” in blackface) and Flying High. Unfortunately, the latter cast Smith as “Pansy” and her entire role in the show, which starred Bert Lahr as a man impersonating a celebrated airplane pilot, consisted literally as well as figuratively of being the butt of Lahr’s unending stream of fat jokes. Smith would hide out in her dressing room and cry her heart out after each performance, traumatized by her humiliation. (When Flying High was filmed in 1931, Smith’s role was reassigned to Charlotte Greenwood, a rail-thin comedienne, and the fat jokes became ironic.) Fortunately Smith signed a recording contract with Columbia, and Ted Collins, assigned to produce her records, quit his job with Columbia to manage Smith full-time. Collins had the idea to steer Kate Smith to a career on the rising medium of radio, where it wouldn’t matter what she looked like and she could become a star on the basis of her voice alone. And Kate Smith’s voice was one of the most remarkable of the time: though she never had a singing lesson in her life, she had a 2 ½-octave range and her contralto timbre was the best range for a woman singer on the airwaves then. (Another woman, Vaughn De Leath, recalled years later being coached to drive her range down from soprano to contralto to get radio jobs in the late 1920’s.)

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the movie industry at first weathered the storm – thanks largely to the momentum generated by the changeover from silent to sound films – but by 1931 the Depression caught up with the film business and studios looked to radio for potential new stars. Sometimes they scored; Bing Crosby had his first starring role in a feature, Paramount’s The Big Broadcast, in 1932 and the movies elevated him from star to superstar. Sometimes they bombed: Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll had become huge on radio as Amos and Andy, but when they put their act on film in the 1930 movie Check and Double Check, they looked like just what they were – two white guys in not very convincing blackface – and the film flopped. Kate Smith got the nod from Hollywood in 1933, when after outbidding several other studios Paramount signed her to make a film called Hello, Everybody! after the tag line she used to introduce her radio show. I first heard of Hello, Everybody! in the Harry and Michael Medved book The Hollywood Hall of Shame, in a chapter that made the film seem even worse than it is. It’s actually an O.K. movie, but an imdb.com “Trivia” poster said, “Costing $2 million, this was the most expensive movie musical produced up to 1933.” That’s almost impossible to believe; even though Collins reportedly negotiated major fees for both Smith and himself (though I can’t find an online source for precisely how much they got paid), including a minor role for Collins in the film as himself, the film itself is a 69-minute rural comedy shot entirely on the “rural” sets of Paramount’s back lot and the “urban” sets of their soundstages.

Kate Smith (Kate Smith) and her younger sister Lily (Sally Blane, real-life sister of Loretta Young; like George Sanders' brother Tom Conway, Blane took a different last name to avoid being accused of coasting on a more famous sibling) are farmers in the Virginia hills whose existence is threatened by the General Water and Power Company. General Water wants to build a dam that will choke off the farm community’s supply of water and therefore make it impossible for the farmers to keep farming. (The dam would not flood the valley, as a few commentators have claimed; instead it would do just the reverse.) General Water and Power sends various representatives to the farm community, including Hunt Blake (Randolph Scott), who because he’s young and hunky is assigned by the company to romance Kate Smith and get her to sell her land and water rights. Only Hunt falls genuinely in love with Kate’s more conventionally attractive sister Lily, the two get married and Hunt quits his job with the company because he’s conscience-stricken over what he’s been assigned to do. The company arranges a radio broadcast from the town in hopes to win public opinion to their side, and Kate Smith is invited to appear on it as the warmup act for a windbag ex-Senator (Edwards Davis) who’s supposed to convince the world that the dam is actually a good thing. The ex-Senator literally loses the entire live audience when it walks out on him en masse, but Kate Smith is an instant radio star and gets a letter from Ted Collins inviting her to do her own program – only the show would be broadcast from New York and therefore she’d have to leave her beloved farm community. However, Smith ultimately accepts the offer because the community needs to raise money for its legal battle against the dam. Kate Smith goes to New York and becomes a radio star, sending most of her money back home to fund the community’s legal battle against the company – only the company wins all the lawsuits.

Kate comes back home to find the townspeople have organized what amounts to a lynch mob against the company and its CEO, Mr. Marshall. Fortunately she gets back in time to talk her neighbors out of lynching him and just then Hunt Blake arrives with the information that by building the dam somewhere else, the company can avoid putting hundreds of farmers out of business and still expand its ability to service cities. Marshall had earlier rejected that route because it would cost $100,000 extra, but Kate Smith has an answer for that, too. She says that with her newly signed radio contract, she can personally fund half of the additional cost (one hopes she thought to ask for stock in the company for her investment), and so the farm village is saved, progress marches on and Kate Smith has a long and prosperous career as a radio singer. Along the way Kate Smith gets to sing some rather mopey but still effective “torch” ballads by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow, along with a “ringer” – the Harry Akst-Sam Lewis-Joe Young 1925 hit “Dinah,” used for a rather odd sequence in which Smith not only sings at the Central Park Casino (despite her initial reluctance because she hears the word “casino” and assumes gambling goes on there) but does a “hotcha” dance as well. The Medveds ridiculed her dance number, saying she looked like a football player in drag, but she’s actually pretty good – not at the level of Megan Thee Stallion, but still she moves with an idea of where she’s going and gets caught up in the rambunctious spirit of the music. The low point of this film is a bizarre Johnston-Coslow song called “Pickanninies’ Heaven,” which is if anything even more racist and wince-inducing than you’d guess from the title. Kate Smith sings it as part of her radio show and dedicates it to all the little Black children in orphanages around the country – and director Seiter cuts to a Black children’s hospital in which the youngest kid gets caught up in the spirit of the number (full of lines that promise the “good little pickanninies” a heaven with “a Swanee River made of real lemonade”) while two older boys listen with disgust on their faces.

Al Jolson pulled the same concept in the “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule” number from his 1934 film Wonder Bar, in which the racist “pickanninnies’ heaven” vision was stunningly realized by Busby Berkeley and Jolson actually tried to sound Black, but hamstrung by a production budget that was almost certainly considerably less than $2 million and a total lack of Berkeley’s demented imagination, Seiter couldn’t make this number visually interesting enough to overcome its obnoxious political content. This number strikes even more of a wrong note when you realize that both Kate Smith and Fannie Hurst, author of the “original” (quotes definitely intended) story that became the basis of this film, were anti-racist pioneers: Hurst had written Imitation of Life and Smith said in 1945, “Race hatreds, social prejudices, religious bigotry, they are the diseases that eat away the fibers of peace. … [I]t is up to us to tolerate one another in order to achieve peace.” (In 1945, those were definitely not the anodyne sentiments they seem today; Frank Sinatra was denounced as a Communist for saying similar things and for making the anti-racist short The House I Live In.) This makes it even more ironic that in the “cancel culture” of the 21st century, Kate Smith has been denounced as a racist, and her likeness and her record of “God Bless America” purged from sports stadia, for performing “Pickanninnes’ Heaven” and an equally problematic song from two years earlier called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” (Smith’s defenders point out, among other things, that Paul Robeson – who was not only Black but a particularly fierce and committed anti-racist whose career suffered when he fell victim to the McCarthy-era blacklist of the 1950’s – also recorded “That’s Why Darkies Were Born”; Smith’s record of it is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_11Fb01Ujw and Robeson’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqaw2jviEsQ.)

Hello, Everybody! is a movie fascinating in its wrong-headedness, not only cinematically but politically as well; the basic plotline of good farmers vs. evil power company is pretty progressive but there’s that awful racist Black song to spoil it. Kate Smith sings terrifically – even though most of her songs are slow torch ballads that are individually effective but start to pall after a while – and, unlike Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, she’s at least a good enough actress to play herself on screen. Both Charles and I spent much of the movie wondering about that claim that it cost $2 million to make, and we weren’t the only ones: in 2016 a reviewer identified only as “Danny” published a post on the “Pre-Code.com” site (http://pre-code.com/hello-everybody-1933-review-with-kate-smith-sally-blane-and-randolph-scott/) that asked the same question we did: where did all the money go? Hello, Everybody! runs only 69 minutes and it doesn’t contain any spectacular production numbers (it’s what I’ve taken to calling a “monomusical” because only one cast member sings), any Technicolor sequences or anything that would have lifted it above the normal run of mid-budget programmers. At the time the most expensive film ever made was Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, which cost $2.5 million (a record not broken until the $4.25 million David O. Selznick spent on Gone With the Wind), and in Hell’s Angels you could see the spectacular aerial footage on which Hughes spent most of that money.

I think Kate Smith has been treated unfairly by cultural historians, largely because she made it through the 1960’s and 1970’s (she had her last hit record in 1974, retired in 1976 and died in 1986) and because in the cultural and political polarization of the time she was on the “wrong” side. In 1969 she co-headlined a concert with The Lettermen, Anita Bryant and Jackie Gleason that was organized by the Nixon administration in protest against The Doors’ infamous concert in Miami where Jim Morrison had allegedly exposed himself to the audience, and in 1982 Kate Smith went to the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan (who had introduced her singing "God Bless America" in the 1943 film This Is the Army, her first film appearance since the debacle of Hello, Everybody!), who said, “In giving us a magnificent, selfless talent like Kate Smith, God has truly blessed America.” Kate Smith had become so totally identified with “God Bless America” that it was startling to me to hear some of her other records, first a version of George Gershwin’s “Somebody Loves Me” from a 1950's LP compilation, The Music of George Gershwin, on Columbia’s budget label Harmony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTuu8R0Sz9c), and then an even more powerful Gershwin recording: “I Got Rhythm,” from a 1999 Columbia CD compilation From Gershwin’s Time. “I Got Rhythm” had been introduced by Ethel Merman in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, and it had made her a star, but Smith’s voice was just as big as Merman’s and her musicianship – especially her intonation – was far superior (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoluxDoYCNQ). I still wouldn’t call Hello, Everybody! a great film, but it’s a workmanlike showcase for a talented singer and it was worth watching at least once.

The Celluloid Closet (Telling Pictures, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, Home Box Office, Channel 4, ZDF/Arte, 1995)

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

I put on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) last night (Wednesday, June 21) at 9 for a showing of the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and written by them and Sharon Wood based on the 1981 book of the same title by Vito Russo. Vito Russo worked as an archivist in the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art (a crucial institution in the history of film preservation thanks to its pioneering photo curator, Iris Barry, who in 1939 started acquiring prints of old movies to make sure they weren’t lost forever; along with Paul Killiam, Barry is responsible for us having as much of the legacy of the silent era as we do) and, as a Gay man, started doing research on the history of depictions of Gay men, Lesbians and other Queer folk in film. I remember reading Russo’s book in 1983, two years after it was published and as I was first coming out as a Gay man, and I specifically recall that instead of a salacious book attempting to dope out based on the fragmentary evidence available who in Hollywood history was, wasn’t or might have been Queer, he stressed he was going to focus on the actual content of the films themselves and the messages they sent to both straight and Queer moviegoers about who we are and how we fit in – or don’t – into society. I first saw the film The Celluloid Closet shortly after its release at the late and very much lamented Ken Cinema on Adams Avenue in San Diego. The narration was written by Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City novels, and delivered by Lily Tomlin, one of the quieter Hollywood Queers; she never really trumpeted that she was a Lesbian but she didn’t bother denying it, either, and people quietly understood that Jane Wagner was more than just her filmmaking partner.

Epstein and Friedman bought the movie rights to Russo’s book shortly after its publication and also when they were riding high off their Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. They intended to make The Celluloid Closet their next project, but in the meantime the AIDS crisis hit and instead their next film was AIDS-themed: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989). During the time they were waiting for financing to come through for The Celluloid Closet – an unusually expensive proposition because they needed the money to license clips from the films Russo had mentioned as well as others made during the intervening 14 years – Russo himself died of complications from AIDS in 1990. There’s one scene in The Celluloid Closet which still rankles me: Epstein and Friedman carefully do parallel editing to compare the scene in which Sebastian Venable is hunted down and cannibalized by the Spanish boys he’s been molesting in the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer with the villagers chasing the Frankenstein Monster in James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. The point Epstein and Friedman thought they were making with this juxtaposition was that Hollywood’s treatment of Gay men was straight out of a horror film – both the Monster and Sebastian were creatures of unstoppable menace that needed to be destroyed to preserve the “normal” social order – but in fact, as I pointed out in my moviemagg blog post on The Bride of Frankenstein (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-bride-of-frankenstein-universal-1935.html), “[W]hat it really indicated was the difference between an out and proud Gay man like [Bride of Frankenstein director] James Whale expressing sympathy for the outsider and turning the Monster into a man, and a bitterly self-hating closet case like Tennessee Williams expressing hatred and fear for the outsider and turning Sebastian into a monster.”

Suddenly, Last Summer was based on a play Williams wrote at the suggestion of a psychiatrist who, in line with the medical orthodoxy of the day, was trying to “cure” him of being Gay. One of the ways Williams’ psychiatrist had of doing this was to tell him to stop writing plays about monstrous heterosexuals and instead write one about a monstrous homosexual. The Bride of Frankenstein/Suddenly, Last Summer connection in the film The Celluloid Closet especially rankled me because, despite Vito Russo’s stated intention in his book to avoid discussing whether particular people in Hollywood history were Gay, he deliberately made an exception for James Whale, whose Queerness is all over his work in his compassion for the outsider (when he was preparing to direct the 1931 Frankenstein he told his partner, David Lewis, that the more he read the various scripts the more sympathy he felt for the Monster) and his love of theatricality and artifice. Other than that major glitch, though, The Celluloid Closet holds up quite well, even though the interview with writer Gore Vidal on the alleged Queer undertones in the 1959 Ben-Hur was rightfully criticized because the two people who could have confirmed or disconfirmed it, director William Wyler and actor Stephen Boyd, were both conveniently dead when Vidal’s interview was shot (and while Vidal had some involvement in writing the script for Ben-Hur he didn’t get a credit; Karl Tunberg was the sole credited screenwriter).

The Celluloid Closet contains some of the most stunning images of sexual role-playing ever put on screen, including Marlene Dietrich’s on-screen kiss of another woman in Morocco (1930) and the scene in a Greenwich Village bar of two effeminate men singing a song about sailors from the 1932 Clara Bow vehicle Call Her Savage. (Since then I’ve seen Call Her Savage complete [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html], and it turned out to be one of the masterpieces of the so-called “pre-Code era,” a remarkable vehicle for Bow and director John Francis Dillon and a film that deserves to be far better known than it is.) Russo variously identified this and the rather sorry joint in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent 30 years later as the first Gay bar on film; Advise and Consent was a political melodrama in which one of the Senators holding up a contested nomination for Secretary of State is Brigham Young Anderson of Utah (Don Murray), who on the surface is a good little Mormon boy but secretly had a Gay affair with a fellow soldier in World War II, and now his former partner is blackmailing him. Brig enters the bar to meet her lover-turned-blackmailer and the soundtrack plays a song specially recorded for the scene by Frank Sinatra, who never released it as a record so it can only be heard in the film. In The Celluloid Closet Armistead Maupin remembered seeing this film while he was a teenager (and still a virgin) and wondering whether this would be what he’d have to look forward to when he grew up and attained sexual maturity. Otto Preminger, a mediocre director but one with a flair for controversial themes (he’d antagonized the Production Code Administration, the movie industry’s self-censorship board, twice before – using the words “virgin” and “pregnant” in his 1953 sex comedy The Moon Is Blue and confronting the Code’s flat ban on depicting drug addiction in the 1956 melodrama The Man with the Golden Arm), announced that he’d bought the rights to Allan Drury’s novel Advise and Consent and he intended to film it with the novel’s Gay subplot intact despite the flat ban under the Production Code on depicting “sex perversion or any inference of it.” Preminger’s persistence got the Code amended to allow “sex aberrations” to be shown “with discretion and restraint.”

In the meantime, British filmmaker Basil Dearden had made a 1961 thriller called Victim about a Gay man who’s being blackmailed, and is ultimately murdered, because he’d been having an affair with a politician played by Dirk Bogarde, and while one wonders why the blackmailers didn’t go after Bogarde’s character instead (he had much more money and a lot more to lose), it’s still a quite gripping movie and The Celluloid Closet includes the great scene in which he has to tell his wife about his Gay desires. Though British filmmakers had to contend with actual government censorship instead of the mere threat of it which the Production Code was meant to forestall, it’s long been the case that European censors have come down harder on violence but easier on sex than American ones. Indeed, one of the reasons foreign films began to build a following in the U.S. after World War II was precisely that, not hamstrung by the Production Code, they could deal with sex far more honestly and openly than American ones. The Celluloid Closet begins to lose its rigor once the filmmakers start dealing with more recent movies that were made between 1981 and 1995; aside from including clips from films as varied as My Own Private Idaho, Silkwood, Thelma and Louise (where the two doomed heroines kiss each other on the lips just before they drive their car off a cliff), Personal Best and the audacious Desert Hearts – Donna Deitch’s remarkable movie about a hostelry in Reno where an unhappily married woman goes to get a divorce and discovers her Lesbian yearnings – it’s a rather muddled presentation lacking the tight-knit structure of Russo’s original material.

Russo ended his book with a discussion of the movie Cruising (1980), a film so blatantly homophobic (it starred Al Pacino as a police detective investigating a serial killer targeting Gay leathermen) Queer demonstrators picketed the film’s locations while it was still being shot. One interviewee said both he and his partner were Queer-bashed and nearly killed by two men who told them during the attack, “If you saw Cruising you’d know why we had to do this.” Since 1995 we’ve seen a slightly greater acceptance of positive depictions of Queer characters on screen – and as the film points out, for some reason Lesbian depictions raise fewer hackles than those between men (I suspect it’s at least in part because Americans define sex in such exclusively phallic terms that they don’t see how two people who don’t have a dick between them can really have “sex”) – but we’ve also seen the usual one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience virtually all oppressed minorities have to deal with. Just when it seemed that Americans had reached a modicum of acceptance of homosexuality in general, along came modern-day Republicans with their so-called “war on woke,” “woke” being defined as just about anything they don’t like, including a jihad against Queer people in general and Trans people and drag queens in particular.

Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist (Janus Films, 1979)

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

After The Celluloid Closet TCM showed a half-hour mini-documentary on the life and times, both easy and hard, of Paul Robeson: Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, written and directed by Saul Turell. The film was narrated by Sidney Poitier, who in a sense succeeded Robeson as the great Black star who didn’t have to play servile comic-relief roles on screen. Both Robeson and Poitier managed to portray figures of such towering authority audiences simply could not have believed they could be the usual Black stereotypes; even when Robeson played a servant, as he did in Show Boat both on stage and in Universal’s magnificent 1936 film (directed by James Whale with his usual sympathy for the outsider, and featuring Robeson in a music-video-style performance of the show’s signature song, “Ol’ Man River,” that among other things convinces me that Whale had the hots for Robeson, as just about every straight woman or Gay man he met did), he played with such mastery and power he didn’t demean himself. Saul Turell tracked the familiar outlines of Robeson’s rise and fall: his rise occurred during the 1920’s and 1930’s when he rose to movie stardom (though he made most of his films in Britain because there he didn’t have to deal with Hollywood’s out-front racism) after he’d achieved fame on stage in Eugene O’Neill’s plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. (O’Neill had written these for a Black actor named Charles Gilpin, then had worried they could no longer be produced after Gilpin retired – until Robeson came along.)

Fortunately The Emperor Jones was filmed with Robeson as star and Dudley Murphy directing by an independent company in New York in 1933, and so we have an audio-visual record of his performance in it even though the script was by Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward, who stuck on an extended prologue showing how Brutus Jones got to be the Emperor of a Caribbean island in the first place. Robeson had been an all-star football player in college and had trained to be an attorney, but he got sidetracked into acting and then singing after he was told by a director in a particular play that he should make his exit whistling. Robeson told the director he didn’t know how to whistle, so the director said, “Just hum … or sing.” Robeson sang, and blew everyone away with the range and power of his bass voice. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the part of Joe in Show Boat for him, though when the musical premiered in 1927 Robeson was in Britain and so another Black singer, Jules Bledsoe, played the part on Broadway – though Robeson played it in Britain in 1928 and on Broadway in the 1932 revival that was Florenz Ziegfeld’s last production. Robeson also became the first Black actor to star in William Shakespeare’s Othello with an otherwise all-white cast, in Britain in 1930 and in L.A. in 1943, with the then-unknown José Ferrer as his Iago (there had been some previous productions of Othello with all-Black casts), and though Robeson’s performance was not filmed it was recorded as an audio-only album by Columbia and this show features a clip of Robeson in costume explaining how he worked out the correct “Shakespearean” pronunciation of the dialogue.

The second half of the story is familiar – and sad; it tells of how Robeson ended up caught in the post-war U.S. blacklist of liberal and progressive entertainers in general and Black entertainers who spoke out against racism in particular. Robeson never made any secret of his admiration for the Soviet Union and Communism in general, he made an infamous statement in 1949 to the effect that American Blacks should refuse to fight for a government that treated them as second-class citizens, and after he came home from a 1949 concert tour in Europe the U.S. State Department rescinded his passport in 1950 on the grounds that allowing Robeson to travel would endanger the U.S.’s national security. This cut him off from any income whatever, since he couldn’t work in the U.S. and he couldn’t go anywhere else (though he gave a few preposterous concerts at the U.S.-Canada border in which he stood on the U.S. side while the Canadian audience sat or stood to hear him in their country), and though Robeson eventually won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1958 his health had started to fail and he ultimately retired in 1961 and died 15 years later. Narrated by an actor who essentially took over from Robeson as the African-American star both Black and white audiences could look up to as a figure of national, racial and human pride, Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist is a nice little vest-pocket telling of Robeson’s story and in particular of the ways he “tweaked” the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” over the years, from his first recording of the song (which included the “N”-word before Hammerstein deleted it) to later versions in which he changed the ending to, “I must keep laughing/Instead of trying/I must keep fighting/Until I’m dying,” transforming Kern’s and Hammerstein’s faux spiritual into a song of political, social and moral protest.

The Flash (Warner Bros. Discovery, DC Comics, DC Entertainment, New Zealand Film Commission, Québec Production Services Tax Credit, The South Australian Film Corporation, 2023)

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

The film I saw with the Bears San Diego last night (Tuesday, June 20) was The Flash, a movie that had a long and convoluted production process that reportedly involved shooting three different endings before they finally hit on one that worked … sort of. The Flash himself was one of the weakest DC comic-book superheroes, mainly because his only super-power was speed; I remember in my early teens encountering the comic books featuring him (a few of them, anyway) and thinking, “Is that all he can do – he runs?” Warner Bros., which bought Detective Comics (DC) mainly to get the movie rights to their various superhero characters, Superman and Batman in particular, started attempts to do a Flash movie in the 1980’s and they got a Flash TV series briefly on the air in 1990-1991 and another longer-lived cable series from 2014 to May 2023, when what was announced as its final episode was shown. Writers, directors and actors rotated in and out of the Flash movie project over the years until the final crew included Andy Muschietti as director, Joby Harold writing the “original” story, Christina Hodson doing the screenplay, and actor Ezra Miller starring as a rather nebbishy Flash whom we first meet in his non-superhero identity, Barry Allen. He shows up at a combination coffeehouse and deli and expressed disappointment that the woman who usually serves him is off that day (“She’s probably with her boyfriend,” he says glumly) and the young man working the counter doesn’t know what sort of sandwich he wants. (One of the wittier running gags in the film is how much The Flash has to eat to sustain his energy level.)

The first half-hour of The Flash is sheer delight; true, it’s just a bunch of exciting action sequences with little or no connection between them, but at least early on the movie maintains a fun aspect and doesn’t take on the degree of Anguished Seriousness all too many comic-book derived superhero films do these days. Then Anguished Seriousness takes over with a vengeance; after the exciting opening in which The Flash, Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) team up to keep a pair of pretty anonymous villains from poisoning the water supply of (fictional) “Central City” with a killer virus, the true plot point of The Flash emerges. It seems that Barry Allen’s father Henry (Ron Livingston) is in prison for murdering his mother Nora (Maribel Verdú). His alibi is that he was off at the grocery store buying Nora a second can of tomatoes to fill out a recipe she was making and someone else came into their house and stabbed her, but he isn’t able to prove that based on the store’s grainy security-camera footage. Since he’s recently discovered that if he runs fast enough he can move back and forth in time, The Flash a.k.a. Barry Allen determines that if he can get to the grocery store in time to make sure his mom doesn’t forget that second can of tomatoes, he can save his mom’s life and keep his dad from taking the fall for his murder. Only by doing that he, you guessed it, unravels the entire fabric of the space-time continuum and ensures that in this universe Kal-El, the original Kryptonian name of Superman, never comes to Earth; Wonder Woman and Aquaman also don’t exist; and though Batman is still real he’s now played by the aging Michael Keaton instead of Ben Affleck and he’s retired from crime-fighting after the two films in which Keaton played Batman originally and Tim Burton directed (marvelously; in fact I long thought the 1989 Batman with Burton directing, Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker was the best comic-book superhero movie ever made – until 2018’s Black Panther came along and easily topped it). Also someone else besides Michael J. Fox stars in the Back to the Future movies.

The original Barry Allen loses his Flash powers while a younger incarnation of the character (also played by Ezra Miller? I’m not sure and there’s no listing on imdb.com for another actor as The Flash, but for my money the younger Flash was considerably sexier and hotter-looking than the older one) gains them. As one of the people from Bears San Diego pointed out, this whole concept of the “multiverse” – the idea of different parallel universes that intersect at various space/time points and can interact with each other under unusually freaky circumstances – has been more characteristic of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe movies than the ones from their principal rival in the superhero biz, DC, and one of the most recent Marvel movies had been called Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. At a previous Bears film night one of the other guys pointed out that James Gunn, director of the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy movies, had been lured away by DC for the film The Suicide Squad and a sequel-TV series called Peacemaker. (Then Marvel had to borrow him back for the third Guardians of the Galaxy because the stars of the first two movies refused to return to their roles without him.) So it’s possible that the mixing of creative personnel between the two superhero powerhouses might be blending their storylines as well and leading to both companies using dramatic gimmicks like the “multiverse.” One of the subsidiary gimmicks of the “multiverse” is that they can blend various depictions of the iconic heroes; in this case, having at least four different Batmen (Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, Adam West in a clip from the 1960’s TV series, and [spoiler alert!] George Clooney, who turns up as Bruce Wayne in the final scene even though Clooney has previously denounced his earlier Batman movie, Batman and Robin [1997], as the biggest mistake of his career, and just two years ago he gave an interview in which he said he would not allow his wife or their kids to see it) and three different Supermen, George Reeves from the 1950’s TV show, Christopher Reeve from the iconic 1970’s and 1980’s movies, and the most recent (and badly cast) Superman, Henry Cavill (though I don’t think the cameo Cavill shot made the final cut).

I quite liked the earlier parts of The Flash, but the film just got drearier and drearier as it progressed and the ending really made no sense even by the meager standards of superhero fiction. At least we got to see weird-looking light-studded balls in the black sky of space, presumably representing all the various earths made possible by Barry Allen’s misbegotten attempts to rework the space-time continuum so his mother doesn’t die and his father isn’t arrested and convicted of killing her. (For a truly great writer’s “take” on this dramatic principle – a man who realizes that he has to let the woman he loves die in order to fulfill the correct destiny of human history and keep evil from ruling the universe – check out Harlan Ellison’s award-winning script “The City on the Edge of Forever” from the original late-1960’s Star Trek.) The Flash’s script also brings back General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his sidekick, Faora-Ul (Antje Traue), from the 2013 Superman film Man of Steel (which irritated me partly because at least half of it took place on Superman’s planet, Krypton, before it blew up, and partly because Cavill was so wretchedly miscast as Superman; in the comics he was drawn as taller and more robust than most Earth men, and the original live-action Supermen – Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve – were cast that way, but Cavill is short, wiry, and while he was in excellent physical shape when he made Man of Steel, partly due to the exercise regimen he went on for the part, he’s not the stuff of which Supermen are made), as principal villains who want to exterminate Earth’s entire population to make way for the Kryptonians, whose entire collective DNA is encased either in Superman’s in Man of Steel or in Supergirl’s (Sasha Calle) here.

The General Zod plot line was reasonably scary in Man of Steel but just seems like a wash here, and contrary to a rather strange article on the cbr.com Web site (https://www.cbr.com/the-flash-man-of-steel-improvement/), I don’t think the moral dilemma was handled anywhere nearly as well here as it was in Man of Steel, in which Superman realized he had to kill General Zod to spare Earth’s indigenous population from total annihilation. The Flash is one of those movies that seemed to have been put together with spit and bailing wire; it exists not because dedicated, visionary filmmakers had a story they were dying to tell (if you want a superhero movie that is also an auteur masterpiece, see Black Panther) but because some people at a major studio (or two, or several) wanted to make a ton of money recycling the old superhero formulae – and don’t get me started on Ezra Miller’s general weirdness as a human being (he claims to be non-binary and uses they/them pronouns; he’s also had a relationship with a 12-year-old girl and been through various mental crises that at one point got so severe he had to seek medical help or Warner Bros. was going either to scrap this film altogether or recast it), the kinds of stuff all-powerful studio publicists were able to conceal from the public in the Golden Age of Hollywood!

How It Feels to Be Free (Yap Films, American Masters Pictures, ITVS, Chicken & Egg Pictures, documentary Channel [Canada], Fremantle, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night (Monday, June 19) in honor of the Juneteenth holiday, and just because it had been in the backlog for a while and I wanted to dig it out, I ran my husband Charles and I a quite interesting DVD of an American Masters show called “How It Feels to Be Free.” Directed (and presumably written) by Yoruba Richen based on a book called How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement by Ruth Feldstein, the two-hour documentary profiled six Black women performers who were alive and active in the 1960’s and took an active role in the civil rights movement. They were Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier, though the show acknowledged at least one woman who preceded them and put her career on the line to tell the truth about her people and the racism that afflicted them: Billie Holiday. The show also mentioned Paul Robeson (a political as well as artistic mentor to Lena Horne) and the Café Society nightclub in New York in 1939, which was owned by a shoe magnate named Barney Josephson. Josephson asked legendary record producer John Hammond for help finding talent for his club, and Hammond agreed on one condition: Café Society would be fully integrated. Billie Holiday introduced her famous anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” there (with a band that included at least one active Communist, trumpeter Frankie Newton), and also on the Café Society bill were Lena Horne and singer-pianist Hazel Scott. (Scott is not profiled on this show but there is a spectacular clip here of her sitting at two pianos, playing one with her right hand and the other with her left.) The documentary was especially interesting when it discussed the way these great Black artists were torn between the demands of the white entertainment industry that they be “glamorous,” “beautiful” and non-threatening, and their own consciousness that the anti-racist struggle was reaching a boiling point in the 1960’s and they needed to be part of it in whatever ways they could.

Lena Horne was the first Black performer to sign a long-term contract with a major movie studio, MGM, from 1942 to 1949, though during that time she made only two movies, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, in which she actually got to act. In all her other films she’d just come on and do a song or two, which was deliberate on MGM’s part because distributors in the South could easily cut her numbers from the films. Richen tells the story of how Lena Horne lost the role she most wanted – Julie Laverne, half-Black second lead in the Jerome Kern musical Show Boat – though she gets it a bit garbled. Horne actually sang Julie’s big number, “Can’t Help Loving That Man,” in Till the Clouds Roll By, a 1946 MGM biopic of Kern (not the 1946 MGM revue film Ziegfeld Follies as Richen states here), and producer Arthur Freed put her in that film as a sort of elaborate screen test for Show Boat, but when he wanted to cast Horne as Julie MGM’s distribution department went ballistic. They pointed out that no Southern theatre would show the film with Horne in it, and eventually white Southerner Ava Gardner played the role (with white jazz singer Annette Warren as her voice double). Ironically, the makeup Gardner wore to look credible was something called “Egyptian Blend No. 5,” which Max Factor had invented to make Horne look believable as a Latina (a brief idea of Louis B. Mayer’s that got scotched when Horne refused to go along with it and insisted she would fulfill the contract, but only as the African-American she was). One great story about Lena Horne that wasn’t included here, though it could have been, was that in 1952, three years after she’d completed her MGM contract and walked out of movies because she could make more money on stage in nightclubs, she was offered a gig at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. At the time Black entertainers in Vegas weren’t allowed to stay or even hang out in the hotels where they performed, so they had to stay either in cheap Black-only motels or in private homes. Horne insisted as a deal-breaking contract term that she be given a room in the Flamingo to stay in for the duration of her engagement, and when she was told Blacks were not allowed to stay at the Flamingo, she said, “Why not? If I’m good enough to sing on your stage, I’m good enough to sleep in your bed.”

Abbey Lincoln was originally presented as a Black sex kitten live and on records, but that changed abruptly when she started a relationship with jazz drummer Max Roach (they married in 1962 but divorced in 1970), who used her on his socially conscious albums like We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960) and Straight Ahead (1961). The latter got slammed by Down Beat reviewer Ira Gitler, who denounced Lincoln as a “professional Negro,” which led to a recorded debate involving Lincoln and Gitler in which she pointed out to him that as an entertainer who performed in public for a living, and as a Black woman, she could hardly not be a “professional Negro.” We Insist! Freedom Now Suite consists of five songs, including an opening track called “Driva Man” about slavery and the way Black women could be forced into sex with their white owners and overseers and they had no right to say no because they were literally property. The album also features Lincoln doing the same sort of wordless “extended vocal” singing for which Yoko Ono later became famous (or infamous). In the 1960’s Lincoln made an independent film called Nothing but a Man that was a love story between a working-class Black man and a Black woman who was a schoolteacher and the daughter of a minister. She also started wearing the so-called “Afro” or “natural” hair style in public, which itself became a subject of debate because it didn’t fit at all with what Black entertainers were supposed to look like.

Nina Simone originally was a nightclub singer and pianist who sang and played mostly the same songs other people did in those gigs – my mother had her first album on Bethlehem Records and it opened with an uptempo version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” a slow-paced version of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” (a Walter Donaldson song Eddie Cantor had introduced in blackface in the 1930 movie Whoopee!), and her first hit, a cover of “I Loves You, Porgy” from George Gershwin’s Black-themed opera Porgy and Bess. Then Simone, like Lincoln, got caught up in the civil-rights struggle and started writing original songs like “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Mr. Backlash” and the awesome “Four Women” that explicitly denounced racism. She also performed at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (often referred to as the “Black Woodstock” and featuring two acts that also performed at Woodstock, The Chambers Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone), reading an incendiary poem by David Nelson called “Are You Ready?,” calling for Black-on-white violence. (Lincoln and Roach also performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, but their footage was left out of Summer of Soul, the 2021 documentary by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.) There’s a brief interview segment with Simone in which she recounted her meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., in which she told him flat-out that while she admired what he was doing, “I am not non-violent.”

Diahann Carroll seemed poised for Broadway stardom in 1961, when she appeared in No Strings, composer Richard Rodgers’ first show after the death of his long-time collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II for which Rodgers wrote lyrics as well as music for the songs. Critics hailed her as the only reason to see the show, and she won a Tony Award for it, but as with so many other Black performers (including the other five women profiled in this film), stardom eluded her because there weren’t enough roles for Blacks on which to build a career. She got her second big break in 1968, when white Southerner Hal Kanter, who’d previously produced the TV version of Amos ‘n’ Andy and the early 1950’s sitcom Beulah, which cast Hattie McDaniel as (what else?) a maid, created a TV series called Julia which cast Carroll as a middle-class Black nurse raising her son as a single parent after her husband is killed in a war. Julia became a hit but also raised controversy by Black critics who disdained its sanitized version of Black urban life and said the show didn’t offer “a realistic depiction of Black people.” Carroll replied to that criticism by telling a TV Guide interviewer, “Show me a TV show that offers a realistic depiction of white people.”

The other two women on the show, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier, were the only ones still alive in 2021 when this film was made, and both talked in different terms about the challenges they faced as actors as well as being dark-skinned in an era in which most “crossover” Black artists were relatively light-skinned (from Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway to Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln and Johnny Mathis; a previous PBS documentary noted that of all the Black performers who found white audiences in the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, the only dark ones were Louis Armstrong and Nat “King” Cole). This actually reflects a weird internal racism that pervaded the Black community in the U.S. in which Blacks classified themselves as “yellow,” “brown” or “black,” with the “yellow” ones considered superior (blues singers like Blind Willie McTell, Big Bill Broonzy and Helen Andrews sang songs about this trichotomy, and the 1934 film Imitation of Life was about a light-skinned Black woman who “passes” for white; ironically, in 1934 the part was played by light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington and in the 1959 remake she was played by white actress Susan Kohner). Tyson achieved stardom (and an Academy Award nomination) for Sounder, in which she played the matriarch of a Black family who is forced to work her ass off to keep their farm going, but she lost the Oscar to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret (possibly because she had competition from another Black nominee, Diana Ross for the execrable alleged Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues). She also became notoriously picky about what roles she would take, wanting to avoid anything that came too close to reinforcing the old stereotypes of what Black women were like.

Pam Grier made her mark in the short-lived so-called “Blaxploitation” genre of the early 1970’s, in which Hollywood, desperate for films that would bring back audiences to the big inner-city theatres left over from the 1920’s and 1930’s in neighborhoods that had since been abandoned by whites fleeing to the suburbs, started making cheap action movies featuring mostly Black casts. There’s an interesting film clip here of Cicely Tyson denouncing these movies that were Pam Grier’s stock-in-trade as demeaning and reinforcing stereotypes of all Black people as either drug dealers, drug addicts or both. Grier achieved legendary status as the first Black woman action hero in films like Coffy and Foxy Brown (both of which I’ve seen; they’re terrible movies but Grier’s bad-ass acting alone makes them watchable), and decades later writer-director Quentin Tarantino, in a nod to the grind-house movies of his youth, cast Grier in the title role of his 1997 film Jackie Brown. Grier’s success in action roles challenged not only Hollywood’s racism but also its sexism, yet despite her popularity, her career faded out when the Blaxploitation craze ended abruptly in the mid-1970’s. How It Feels to Be Free also features interviews with more recent Black women, including Alicia Keys (who also co-produced the film) and Halle Berry, who finally became the first Black woman to win the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role for Monster’s Ball (2001) and who talked about how Hollywood occasionally opens itself up to stories about people of color – and then just as suddenly, tightly closes itself again. Like virtually all stories about the African-American experience, How It Feels to Be Free (which closes with a clip of Nina Simone singing the song that gave the film its title) is a weird cross of how-far-we’ve-come and how-far-we-still-have-to-go; it’s a monument both to the persistence of racism and to the progress we’ve made, albeit temporary and all too easily reversed, in fighting it.

A View to Kill For (RNR Media, Almost Never Films, Lifetime. 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 18) I watched what turned out to be a surprisingly good Lifetime movie: A View to Kill For. It begins with a prologue in which a rich old guy named Lionel Fitzpatrick (John Fleischmann) is shown coming down the stairs of his palatial mansion in an ultra-exclusive community called “Bellanca Bay” (I Googled it and found only a listing for the Bellanca Hotel at Avalon on Catalina Island, and the long-defunct Bellanca aircraft company) clutching at his heart. He makes it down the stairs and into his study, opens his desk drawer and tries to retrieve the heart medication he’s supposed to take in case this happens to him – only the bottle is empty and we see a dimly lit figure of a woman (director Brittany Underwood lets her regrettably unidentified cinematographer get close enough to her we can see her gender) who essentially murdered Lionel by throwing out the med that could have saved his life. (Obviously, at some point in her life writer Rosy Deacon had seen The Little Foxes, in which Bette Davis murders her no-longer-convenient husband Herbert Marshall by withholding his heart med – though the film was directed by William Wyler and photographed by Gregg Toland, both of whom managed it quite a bit more powerfully than it is here.) The film then cuts to the not-too-tranquil lives of husband Charlie Nolan (Samuel Whitten, considerably hunkier and hotter than the usual actors Lifetime cast as good-guy husbands), wife Molly (Tiffany Montgomery, top-billed) and their two kids, high-school senior Heather (Demi Lehman) and pre-pubescent Finn (Bryson JonSteele). Charlie is a community-college professor and Molly put her ambitions to become an art photographer on hold when she started having children.

Molly was adopted at age two or three following the death of her natural mother and the disappearance of her father, and though she’s made a few desultory attempts to locate him she doesn’t learn who he was until he – Lionel Fitzpatrick – is already dead. The police in Bellanca Bay ruled it an “accident” and it turns out that, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby, Lionel willed Molly his entire multi-million dollar estate as well as his home in Bellanca Bay. Molly and Charlie eagerly grab Lionel’s legacy as their ticket out of a drab inner-city existence (Molly gets the word of her inheritance just as vandals have smashed into the side of her car and broken its window), and the kids are less thrilled – Heather in particular doesn’t like the idea of being uprooted and forced to finish high school in a new community where she doesn’t know anybody – but the Nolans still move. The house comes equipped with a housekeeper, Grace (Lynne Marie Triebold), whom writer Deacon makes a few stabs at turning into a Mrs. Danvers-like figure but ultimately turns out to be reasonably good-hearted. Molly decides to make a plate of white sugar cookies and pass them around to the neighbors – she even insists on baking them herself instead of letting Grace do it despite Heather’s whining, “But it’s her job” – only her first stop is a disaster. She brings the cookies in their glass container to imperious Justine Spencer (Libby Blake) – “of the New Jersey Spencers,” she insists – and Justine not only declines the gift (“too much gluten”), she makes it clear that the Nolans don’t belong in Bellanca Bay and she wants them to take their inner-city asses back there as soon as possible.

The only two people who seems to be sympathetic to the Nolans is their real-estate agent, Rebecca Jones (Brittany Goodwin), who wangles them an invitation to join the local country club and attend their annual gala dinner; and Theresa Diaz (Courtney Lana), who despite her Latina-sounding name is actually Black. Theresa was Lionel’s attorney and arranged the will that left Molly all his money and his house, and though she and Molly hardly get to know each other she ultimately fulfills the Lifetime cliché function of The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Rosy Dawson is actually quite good at creating red herrings, including Darla Weaver (Kylie Delre), who was engaged to Lionel for the last year of his life but found out only after he died that he’d disinherited her. Naturally Darla is resentful of Molly for having breezed into Bellanca Bay and grabbed the multi-million dollar fortune Darla believed was hers by right. Darla also has a spoiled-brat son Heather’s age, Paul Weaver (Anthony Nathaniel Lee), whom she meets when she sees him swipe a piece of candy from the local coffeehouse. Naturally Heather gots all huffy about it – and is even more perturbed by Paul’s attitude towards it, that it’s no big deal and he’s entitled to take anything he wants no matter what the consequences are for anyone else. Heather starts dating Paul because he’s the only age-peer in Bellanca Bay who actually is nice to her. The rest of her new high-school classmates are thunderstruck when she tells them she’s never been skiing, and with a sudden realization of just where she came from they ask, “Were you poor?” Only mom Molly takes an instant dislike to Paul and orders her daughter not to see him again, especially once she catches them ditching class and Paul acts like it’s no big deal. Paul’s whole attitude towards the world has been conditioned by the sense of entitlement Bellanca Bay seems to instill in all its residents; at one point Heather asks him if he isn’t worried about the police, and Paul says, “The cops in town do whatever we tell them to do.” In fact, one of the main things that sets A View to Kill For apart from other Lifetime movies is Rosy Dawson’s brilliance in creating a set of such insufferable snobs we can readily believe any of them literally capable of murder.

Naturally, this being a Lifetime movie, tensions between the Nolans and the townspeople escalate, from the early scene in which someone sneaks into the Nolans’ home and paints in blood-red letters, “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE,” to a later attempt to asphyxiate them by leaving one of the burners on the gas stove on (for which Molly initially blames her daughter Heather and chews her out for being careless), a vandal attack on their living room, and a still later attempt to burn the place down by pouring gasoline over the garage floor and leaving a lit cigarette on the edge of something or other in hopes that the cigarette will fall to the floor and ignite the spilled gas. The Nolans keep calling the police, who keep saying that there’s no sign of forced entry and therefore there’s nothing they can do. All the Nolans’ repeated appeals to local law enforcement earn them are yet more put-downs from Justine Spencer, who says pregnantly that nothing like this ever happened in Bellanca Bay before the Nolans arrived. Molly Nolan also previously embarrassed herself at the country-club gala when she went up to the man Justine was with and assumed he was her husband Richard; he was actually Warren (Joe Komara), one of Justine’s extra-relational amours (something she was notorious for throughout Bellanca Bay), and an act or two later Molly has scouted out a location for a photographic arts gallery she wants to open in Bellanca Bay. Realtor Rebecca Jones has arranged the deal for Molly, and Molly loves the space and is ready to rent it until the owner turns out to be Warren, who flatly refuses to rent to her because she embarrassed him at the gala.

Eventually [spoiler alert!] Rebecca turns out to be the real villain – something I was already starting to suspect, not only because she boasted that she was the one person in Bellanca Bay who knew all its secrets but because in a previous Lifetime movie, Home, Not Alone, “premiered” last March and which they were re-running after this one, the villainess also turned out to be a psycho realtor. Rebecca’s motive turned out to be a bit of a surprise; she turned out to have been Lionel Fitzpatrick’s illegitimate daughter and therefore Molly’s half-sister (and though the relationship is supposed to be a big surprise, Tiffany Montgomery and Brittany Goodwin look enough alike they are fully believable as half-sisters). She traced Lionel to Bellanca Bay and established herself there in hopes that she’d get his estate after she killed him, then had to dispose of Theresa Diaz when she figured out from Lionel’s legal papers that he had another daughter besides Molly and who she was. A View to Kill For is an unusually good Lifetime movie, partly because of the class critique of Rosy Deacon’s direction and partly because Brittany Underwood directs it brilliantly, filling it full of Gothic imagery and making the rather stock class conflicts of Dawson’s script come alive as both dramatic and cinematic issues.