Look Who's Stalking, a.k.a. Haunted by My Stalker (Shadowboxer Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 30) I started with a couple of Lifetime movies – now that Lifetime seems to have ended their latest cycle of V. C. Andrews (or Andrew Niederman, since it was he who picked up the “V. C. Andrews” baton after the original author died in 1986) movies and gone back from the Gothic hothouse of the “Andrews” world to more contemporary “pussies in peril” movies. Last night Lifetime showed a recent production called Look Who’s Stalking – a silly title (the original one, Haunted by My Stalker, is more sensible but also more generic) and then a “premiere” called To Kill a Stepfather. Look Who’s Stalking begins with a prologue in which successful woman surgeon Dr. Hope Connors (Alissa Filoramo) is being stalked by Toby Miller (Isaac Stackonis), who’s apparently been making her life miserable for months now. Toby is chasing Dr. Connors up a flight of stairs when he suddenly has a heart attack. Dr. Connors’ first instinct is to help him survive, but she thinks better of it and leaves him on the stairs, presumably to die, because if she’d saved him he’d only be that much more convinced that their destiny was to be together no matter whether she wanted them to be or not. The film then flashes forward “Two Months Later,” and two months later Dr. Connors is having a party to celebrate being rid of Toby. Among the guests are her husband Evan (the not-bad-looking Harley Jay), her daughter Danielle (Kiana Nicole Washington) who’s visibly Black (though how the white Dr. Connors could have had a Black daughter is never explained, we were obviously supposed to assume she was the product of an earlier marriage to an African-American man), Dr. Connors’ old friend Nadine (Robin De Lano) and her new assistant, Mary Le Roux (Juliana Destefano). Evan, an aspiring musician who’s living off his wife’s money even though he’s not happy about doing so, even sings a song to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” only it’s an ode to the joys of Toby’s passing: “Happy Death-Day.”

The only problem for Dr. Connors is that she’s still being stalked by Toby, or his ghost, or someone who’s doing a damned good job of impersonating him. What’s more, her possibly paranormal stalker has an uncanny knack of showing up at precisely the right times to discomfit her. As the film begins Dr. Connors has just left the hospital where she’d been working (the film takes place in Los Angeles) and taken a job at a private surgery practice owned and run by Dr. Fitzgerald (Howard M. Lockie), until she freezes up in the middle of an operation and nearly loses the patient. Then she pulls herself together and finishes with the patient still alive, but her lapse causes Dr. Fitzgerald to fire her. Even before that crisis moment, she’s increasingly driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by Toby’s apparent reappearances, including one incident when Mary is attacked outside her home by a figure in a black hoodie wearing a red mask (black hoodies have become the favorite attire of Lifetime’s killers because, among other things, they allow the wearer to conceal their true gender so both the victims and the audience can’t be sure whether the assailant was a man or a woman) and beaten unconscious, though she survives. The writers (alas uncredited on imdb.com, and I didn’t get their names off the opening credits if they were listed on the film itself) do a good job of putting Dr. Connors in a Kafka-esque pickle in which she has no idea of who’s doing this to her and what their motives are. Knowing that the one thing she can be sure of is the plot against her is coming from someone who knows her well enough to understand her schedule and show up at precisely the most infuriating and discomfiting moments, she briefly suspects just about everyone in her inner circle: her assistant Mary, her long-time friend Nadine, her husband Evan and her daughter Danielle. The writers give us a brief dialogue exchange between Evan and Danielle about how they need to “stick to the plan,” which briefly suggests that Evan and Danielle are having an affair and conspiring to put Dr. Connors out of the way so they can be together and can enjoy the fortune she’s saved up. Hope reports her suspicions to the police, but the case is assigned to Detective Adler (Jon Briddell), who tells her and Danielle that nothing the mysterious stalker has done is illegal and therefore there’s nothing the police can do unless her stalker actually comes forward and assaults her – which provokes the predictably angry response from Danielle that the cops can do something only if her mom gets attacked.

Two-thirds of the way through the writers and director Doug Campbell (a well-known name among Lifetime buffs and someone who’s quite good at moving these insane stories along fast enough we don’t have time to dwell on their improbabilities until after the movie ends) let us in on what’s really going on: Toby survived the events of the prologue and “Mary Le Roux”’s real name is Mary Miller, Toby’s sister. The two have hatched the whole scheme as part of a revenge plot because Hope broke the Hippocratic oath in the opening scene and refused to intervene to save Toby’s life. Mary is also upset because, though Hope was well aware that Toby was mentally ill and needed psychiatric help, she didn’t intervene and use her contacts in the medical business to recruit him a therapist. As for the mysterious dialogue between Evan and Danielle that set Evan up as a red herring for a couple of acts, that turns out to be Evan having wangled a deal with the owner of a recording studio to get some free time to record a professional-quality demo for both of them, since Danielle has real vocal talent and might be able to land a record contract. Thanks to Hope’s persistence with the authorities, she gets a court order allowing Toby’s grave to be exhumed – and of course his coffin is empty. Later Toby and Mary get into an argument over drugs (Mary has asked him to get her some prescription benzodiazepine so she can use it to poison Hope) and Mary stabs him, thereby this time rendering him really, most sincerely, dead. The climax happens in Mary’s home, where Hope goes to confront her but Mary overpowers her with a baseball bat and ties her up, intending to inject her with benzodiazepine in a solution – only in a clever variation on Maurine Dallas Watkins’ “they both reached for the gun” schtick, Hope has managed to free herself from Mary’s bondage with the scalpel she happened to be carrying, and the two women both reach for the syringe. Mary ultimately gets the potentially fatal dose, though Hope reverses her error in the prologue and administers epinephrine to keep Mary alive so the cops simply arrest her instead of carting away her corpse. Look Who’s Stalking is a nicely done Lifetime thriller, despite that silly title they stuck on it at the last minute, capably directed by Campbell and decently if not spectacularly acted by a professionally competent cast.

To Kill a Stepfather (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night’s second Lifetime movie, To Kill a Stepfather, was a good deal better: in fact, one of the best things I’ve seen on this network recently even though its credits only said it was “inspired by” actual events rather than “based on a true story.” “Inspired by” usually means no more than that something vaguely similar to the story of this movie more or less kinda-sorta happened to a real person once upon a time. This time the auteur is Peter Sullivan, who co-wrote the script with Jeffrey Schenck and Robert Dean Klein and also directed, and the three of them came up with a story about hot-shot L.A.-based attorney Nicole Ray (Alex Camacho) who’s just won a jury acquittal for a woman accused of killing someone in a hit-and-run accident when she’s on her way back home to the small town of “Eastboro” (a fictional locale so generic that Messrs. Sullivan, Schenck and Klein don’t even tell us what state it’s in). Years before Nicole left Eastboro to pursue a major legal career, going to a prestigious law school and winning a job with a major firm in Beverly Hills, while her sister Riley (Kelly McCart) stayed behind and worked as a nurse’s assistant at the local hospital. On the plane from L.A. to Eastboro Nicole is accosted by a fellow passenger who tells her in no uncertain terms that she thought Nicole’s last client was guilty and deserved to rot in prison, and Nicole did the world an acute disservice by winning her an acquittal. That’s just a foretaste of what awaits Nicole once she arrives in Eastboro: it seems that Nicole’s and Riley’s mother, Kate Rafferty (Elyse Mirto), has been arrested for murdering her second husband, Matthew Rafferty. Just about the whole town thinks Kate is guilty, not only because Matthew was wildly popular in town as a philanthropist and co-owner of a custom distillery but because when he died from a fall down stairs, not only did the autopsy reveal he was first assaulted with a blunt instrument but Kate was in the middle of an alcoholic blackout at the time and therefore she had no memory of whether she killed him or not.

Though Sullivan and his co-writers have assembled their story from familiar elements – the big-city attorney who returns to the small town where she grew up and finds the townspeople unremittingly hostile to her, the defendant who can’t say for sure whether she committed the crime or not, and a whole lifetime of family secrets in which Kate isn’t sure she wants the legal services of her hot-shot daughter even though her only other alternative is an older and typically overworked public defender named Chuck (Ross Turner) – they also put some fresh spins that elevated this movie over and above Lifetime’s usual standards. One of the nicer twists Sullivan and company gave the story is that the prosecutor, Bobby O’Driscoll (Jamel King), is an old boyfriend of Nicole Ray’s, and he’d clearly like to resume their relationship even though she’s focused only on her mother’s case. One thing that convinces Nicole there was a third person present at the time of her stepfather’s murder was that the windows to Kate’s house were all closed at the time the police arrived, even though Kate always kept them open on hot days (which the night of the murder was). Nicole continues the investigation despite the hostility of Matthew’s brother Wyatt Rafferty (Joe Finfera), who at one point tries to run Nicole’s car off the road, and Matthew’s business partner Kirk Holloway (John D. Michaels), who had just been disinherited two months before when, at Riley’s insistence, Matthew changed his will so that Kate would inherit the whole business and, if she pre-deceased him, it would go to Riley. The moment Nicole learns this she starts wondering if Matthew and Riley were having an affair and she decided to off him and frame her mom for the crime to grab the fortune, since the distillery itself is barely making money but a major developer was offering $1.5 million for the land on which it sat.

Nicole interviews two key witnesses, neighbors Harold (Frank Graves) and Helen (Iris Anthony) Mullins, who had called the police on the night of Matthew’s murder after overhearing an argument between him and Kate. It turned out that the argument was about the affair Matthew was having with a local woman who was younger than Kate and blonde – that’s all the Mullinses could recall about her – which apparently Kate had discovered and that had tumbled her off the wagon and started her drinking again. At one point Kate gets so disgusted she actually fires Nicole as her attorney, but Nicole keeps digging on the case anyway and soon realizes Matthew’s affair partner and the real killer was [spoiler alert!] Sadie (Avis Wrentmore), the bartender at the local pub, who’s younger than Kate and blonde, and who killed Matthew when he broke off the affair between them at Kate’s insistence. There’s a nice gimmick in which the love messages Matthew sent Sadie are all quotes of the words to the song “It Had to Be You,” composed in 1924 by Isham Jones with lyrics by Gus Kahn and used as the theme song for the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, a Warner Bros. production directed by Raoul Walsh with James Cagney as a good-bad gangster and Humphrey Bogart as a bad-bad gangster. Though we didn’t see enough of the movie Nicole was watching on TV in her motel room one night to tell what it was, just that it was a black-and-white gangster film, I’d like to think Peter Sullivan intended it to be The Roaring Twenties to tie in with the allusions to that song.

It also was a nice touch to have the husband of an alcoholic having his extra-relational activities with a bartender, and that the cast features two interracial couples (the white Nicole and the Black prosecutor Bobby, and the Black Harold Mullins with his white wife Helen) without making a big deal about it at all. Though To Kill a Stepfather isn’t exactly the freshest or most original storytelling of all time, and the title’s similarity to To Kill a Mockingbird (a very different sort of story!) bothers me, it’s still a very nicely done work, and among the things it does well is capture the emotionally incestuous nature of a small town, in which everyone knows everyone else’s business and the lead police officer investigating the crime, Charlene McManus (Andrea Pazmino), is herself part of the network of small-town folks who has to work hard to keep her own emotions and feelings about the people involved from interfering with the objectivity of her investigation. The acting in To Kill a Stepfather is also quite good, finely honed and much better than that in Look Who’s Stalking.

Three Harold Lloyd Comedies: "Number, Please?," "High and Dizzy," "Get Out and Get Under" (Rolin Films, Hal Roach Studios, Pathé, 1920)

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

After the two Lifetime movies I switched to Turner Classic Movies for the last episode of their “Silent Sunday Showcase” weekly feature with host Jacqueline Stewart before it and Eddle Muller’s “Noir Alley” both go on hiatus for the month of August, when TCM does its “Summer Under the Stars” feature (in which they showcase the work of a different movie star each day in the month of August). Last night they showed three two- or three-reel shorts from 1920 by the great comedian Harold Lloyd: Number, Please?, High and Dizzy and Get Out and Get Under, all of them produced by Lloyd’s own company in partnership with Hal Roach Studios and originally released by the U.S. branch of the French company Pathé. All three co-starred Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s leading lady, a post she held until 1923, when she abruptly quit acting for him to become Mrs. Harold Lloyd in real life. She remained married to him until her death in 1969, two years before he passed, making Lloyd the only one of the major male stars of silent comedy to marry just once. (Charlie Chaplin had four wives and Buster Keaton, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Harry Langdon each had three.) All three films were credited to Roach himself as director, though Number, Please? had a co-director credit to Fred C. Newmeyer, who would become Lloyd’s usual director when he and Roach split on friendly terms in 1925 (and who on his own would make one of the worst films of all time, A Shriek in the Night, a relentlessly silly melodrama so bad it wasn’t released for eight years and only surfaced when its star, Lon Chaney’s son Creighton, became a Universal horror star as Lon Chaney, Jr.). I had anticipated Number, Please? would be about Lloyd’s character having a telephone installed in his home and High and Dizzy would be about him buying an airplane and getting into various scrapes attempting to fly it, but I was wrong on both counts.

Number, Please? actually casts Lloyd and Roy Brooks as romantic rivals for Mildred Davis, in which both men want to take her on a balloon ride at a fairgrounds. Only the man who pilots the balloon and runs the concession tells them that they need permission from Mildred’s mother to take her, and Mildred herself sets up a race between them: the first one who can reach her mom and get her to give her permission will be the one she takes. Roy actually wins the race – when Harold finally reaches Mildred’s mom she says she’s already given the permission to Roy – but, because he was the star, the producer and soon to be Mildred’s leading man for real, it’s Harold who ends up with her at the fade-out. High and Dizzy, which along with Get Out and Get Under lapsed into the public domain at one point (and I remember seeing both in that form on American Movie Classics in the early 1980’s), is actually another story about Harold and Roy Brooks being rivals for Mildred’s affections, though this time the authority figure they have to deal with is not her mom but her dad (Wallace Howe). The reason this one is called High and Dizzy is that Mildred’s character is a sleepwalker who in the film’s climax takes a somnambulistic stroll out of her room. Harold, anxious to protect her against a fall (according to imdb.com the room set was built only a few feet off the ground but the sequence looks as scary as all get-out), follows her on the ledge, but unbeknownst to him Mildred has returned to the room and closed and locked all the windows. So Harold finds himself locked out on the ledge, and I thought, “Ah, now it looks like a Harold Lloyd movie!” (Lloyd himself complained that all too many audience members thought of him only in terms of death-defying stunts: he once said, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anybody wants to talk to me about!”) For the edition TCM was showing, a restoration from 2004 copyrighted by Lloyd’s notoriously litigious granddaughter Suzanne, Robert Israel supplied a new musical score and appropriately quoted the big final aria, “Ah, non credea mirarti … Ah, non giunge!” from Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera La Sonnambula, a comedy about a sleepwalking woman who inadvertently ends up in a nobleman’s bed, much to the hurt and anger of her boyfriend.

Get Out and Get Under I regarded as the funniest of the three films; this time Harold is an aspiring actor in a local theatrical company and also the proud owner of a relatively new car of which he boasts, “Just two more payments and then it will be mine, all mine!” The title would have made 1920 audiences instantly expect that the film’s plot would be about car trouble – it came from a 1913 song by Maurice Abrahams, Grant Clarke and Edgar Leslie, “He’d Have to Get Under – Get Out and Get Under (To Fix Up His Automobile),” about a man who was out driving with his girlfriend but every time he started necking with her, the car would break down and he’d have to, you guessed it, get out and get under it to fix it. In Lloyd’s version, his girlfriend (Mildred Davis again) is acting in an amateur play which Lloyd is supposed to star in, only he’s already late and keeps getting later because of all his car trouble. Harold is worried because if he doesn’t make it to the play on time, his rival (Fred McPherson instead of Roy Brooks this time, though Brooks is listed on imdb.com in an uncredited role) will displace him as both the play’s leading man and in Mildred’s affections. The play requires the leading male to appear in a heavy-duty costume that conceals his true appearance, and for a while it looks like Harold never got there and Fred played his part, but at the fade-out it turns out Harold got there after all and he and Mildred end up in the obligatory clinch. Lloyd actually begins his film with a prologue set in a photographer’s studio, in which he is having a formal portrait taken – only various vermin, including a fly (Mike Pence fans, take note!) and a mouse, get in the way; the fly lands on his nose and the mouse crawls up his pants leg. (Incidentally Harold is shown with the back of his neck in a brace to keep him from moving during the long exposure time needed to take the shot – a phenomenon of 19th century photography but one I was surprised to see in a film made and set as late as 1920.) Then the photographer tells Harold that the girl he was having the picture taken for is scheduled to marry the other guy that very day – and though the imdb.com synopsis lists this as a real event in the plot I had assumed it was a dream sequence.

While I can’t think of Harold Lloyd without recalling Stan Laurel’s bizarrely left-handed compliment towards him – “He hardly ever made me laugh, but I admired his inventiveness” – his films are generally quite funny and hold up well. It’s true he didn’t have the blazing imagination of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, but in their own lower-keyed way his films are just as entertaining even though only rarely (notably in his little-known 1927 feature The Devil’s Brother) did Lloyd “push” himself as far as Chaplin or Keaton did. Lloyd also earned my admiration for how he coped with physical disabilities – in 1919 he lost two fingers on one hand when a prop bomb unexpectedly exploded while he was holding it, and he had a prosthetic glove made to conceal the missing digits (it still amazes me that he was able to do all that daredevil climbing in his best-known film, 1923’s Safety Last!, with less than a full complement of fingers) – and his unusual solution to the problem of how he could still portray single characters after he was a married man. That’s right: he developed another prosthetic glove so he could keep wearing his wedding ring even while appearing not to be on screen. And though Lloyd’s visual trademark was his horn-rimmed glasses, he really didn’t need them; look carefully at his close-ups and you’ll see the “glasses” are just empty frames. Lloyd boasted that the glasses gave him a privilege rare among movie stars at his level: “With the glasses I am Harold Lloyd, Without them I’m just an ordinary citizen.”

Desperate (RKO, 1947)

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

This morning’s (Sunday, July 30) presentation on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies was of a film I’d seen before at San Francisco State University in a class on movies made during 1947: Desperate, directed by Anthony Mann for the “B” unit at RKO with a four-person committee-written script: Mann himself and Dorothy Atlas took credit for the “original” story and Harry Essex for the script, with future producer Martin Rackin getting an “additional dialogue” credit. I hadn’t seen it since, though, and I remembered very little of it. Desperate is often listed as Anthony Mann’s first film noir, both by The Film Noir Encyclopedia and by Eddie Muller in his intro, but it isn’t: two years before Mann had made his actual first film noir, The Great Flamarion, at Republic, and though Desperate is a quite good movie I like The Great Flamarion even better, mainly due to a stronger cast. The principal actors in Desperate are Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr and Douglas Fowley; the leads in The Great Flamarion are Erich von Stroheim, Dan Duryea and the awesome Mary Beth Hughes, whose performance as the femme fatale who ruins Stroheim rivals Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour.

Desperate centers around Steve Randall (Steve Brodie, a friend and former roommate of Robert Mitchum – and the connection between them is apparent from the opening scene, in which Brodie finishes a cigarette and flicks it away from his mouth with his fingers as Mitchum often did in his films) and his wife of four months, Anne (Audrey Long, whose performance is so spectacularly incompetent one wonders whom she was having sex with to get the part; a pity Mann couldn’t have got Mary Beth Hughes for the role, since in other films she’d shown herself as adept at playing “good girls” as she was as the “bad girl” in The Great Flamarion). They’re celebrating their four-month anniversary and Anne is trying to bake them a cake (their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Roberts – played by Carol Forman – helps her out by explaining that the recipe calls for six tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of salt, not the other way around, and when Steve rings the doorbell and poses as a meter reader Anne puts the cake as well as the pans to bake it in inside the oven, so we’re surprised when the cake is seen later, apparently actually edible) and has got four big-ass candles, one for each side. Only Steve, an independent truck driver who owns his own “rig,” gets a mysterious call from an old high-school buddy, Walt Radak (Raymond Burr, in his fourth film; apparently Steve Brodie was a friend of his and insisted on the studio giving him the part). Walt’s offering him $50 to drive a load of perishables from a warehouse to an unspecified destination, but soon we learn that Walt is actually the leader of a gang of crooks. They need Steve because their usual driver has attracted the attention of the police, who have his truck under surveillance, and Walt figures Steve is naïve enough he won’t realize he’s being used to commit a robbery until it’s too late for him to back out.

Walt yields to the entreaties of his younger brother Al (Larry Nunn) to be included on the job even though Walt had wanted to keep Al out of crime altogether, only Al blurts out while they’re in the warehouse that there’s a bundle of furs inside along with whatever they were planning to steal. This makes Steve realize that he and his truck are being used to commit a crime, and when the crooks won’t yield to his demand that they put all the stolen goods back in the warehouse, he flashes his lights to alert an on-duty cop. Unfortunately, the cop tries to stop the in-progress robbery with his gun, and Al Radak shoots back and kills him, then gets busted by other police officers, is tried and ultimately sentenced to death. Walt hits on the idea of forcing Steve to go to the police and confess that he shot the cop so Al will be off the hook, and when Steve refuses to do this voluntarily Walt and his thugs beat him to within an inch of his life in a surprisingly violent and graphic scene for a 1947 movie. Then one of the thugs breaks a glass bottle and threatens to use it to scar Anne permanently if Steve doesn’t go to the cops and tell them what Walt and the other crooks want him to say. Steve decides to tell Anne to take a train out of town and flee to hide in a safe place until whatever’s going to happen blows over. The newspapers get hold of the story and publish Steve’s photo, saying he’s wanted by the police – the picture they have of him is in his Army uniform (Steve was a World War II veteran trying as best he could to make a living post-war) – and while he and Anne are together on a train Steve notices a man staring at him and decides he’s recognized them and will turn them in. So Steve and Anne abruptly leave the train – and then the film cuts back to the man and his wife, who thought they were honeymooners just besotted with love for each other.

Steve tries to buy a car and offers the dealer, Ace Morgan (the marvelously slimy Cy Kendall), $90 for a 1929 Ford that barely runs – but once Steve fixes the car with his skills as a mechanic, Morgan reneges on the deal and keeps Steve’s money, saying that now that the car is fixed he can get $300 for it. Steve returns to Morgan’s lot and steals the car, but it breaks down again in the middle of nowhere. He and Anne are rescued by a man named Hat Lewis (Dick Elliott), who offers them a ride to the nearest garage where Steve can buy a distributor to get his car running again, only midway through the ride Hat, who turns out to be a local sheriff’s deputy, recognizes Steve, realizes he’s wanted and turns the car around to take him in to the police. Steve and Hat fight over the wheel of the car and ultimately it crashes, leaving Hat unconscious (though still alive), and Steve and Anne leave the out-of-it Hat by the roadside and drive off in Hat’s car. They’re on their way to the home of Anne’s aunt and uncle, Klara (Ilsa Grüning) and Jan (Paul E. Burns), to hide out and get some of that country air that will hopefully get them back to rights with God, the Production Code and the overall country-good, city-bad ideology of most American films of that era. Only Pete (Douglas Fowley in one of his best performances – though the acme of his career was his superb role as the executioner boyfriend of Jean Parker in PRC’s great 1944 thriller, Lady in the Death House, and he got at least one role in a major movie as the film director in Singin’ in the Rain), a disgraced and de-licensed private detective, has found out where Jan and Klara live by stealing a letter they wrote the Randalls inviting them to come over.

Walt and his gang come to the small rural community where Jan and Klara live, but Steve spots one of them in town and he and Anne flee again – even though Anne is pregnant with their first child and all this running around isn’t good for her own or the baby’s health. They get out just before the bad guys arrive at Jan’s and Klara’s farm and threaten them, though Walt is able to talk one of his henchmen out of shooting an innocent bystander who comes upon them and Walt is himself wounded and the illegal “doctor” who treats him tells him he needs two months’ bed rest. With the announcement of Walt’s brother Al’s execution date, that’s about the last thing on Walt’s mind; instead, he’s single-mindedly set on revenge and to that end he and his gang break into Steve’s and Anne’s apartment and hold them hostage. Walt insists that he will shoot Steve precisely at midnight – the same time Al is scheduled to be executed – though in the end the police, led by Lieutenant Ferrari (Jason Robards, Sr.), arrive in the nick of time and Walt gets a spectacular death scene, falling down the center hole of a winding staircase in an apartment building (a shot almost certainly done with a dummy for Raymond Burr, but still quite convincing).

Desperate is an unusual film noir; a lot of films in the genre feature leads who are whirled out of their comfortable (or not-so-comfortable) urban or suburban existence into the noir underworld, but few are as relentless as this one in whipsawing them back and forth between the normal and noir worlds. It’s also a film of great individual scenes more than a coherent plot; I especially liked the scene between Steve and Captain Ferrari in which Steve tells him his story and Ferrari flatly says he thinks Steve is lying his head off and is really part of Walt’s gang, and when he lets Steve leave the police station rather than putting him in custody Ferrari tells his surprised assistant that he’s only letting Steve go to draw in the other members of the gang. Ferrari changes his tune and decides Steve is innocent after all thanks to a deathbed confession from one of the actual gang members after a police shootout, and he tells Steve about his change of heart just after Steve mails his wife (he’s sent her on to California to buy them a gas station they intend to settle down and run) a life insurance policy he’s bought from a pestering agent. This guy was being obnoxious towards Steve for much of the movie, until Steve hit on the idea of buying a policy in case the gang picks him off; at least the $5,000 will provide his wife and their daughter (the baby has been born in the meantime and we know it’s a she) an income. Though I think The Great Flamarion is an even better movie than Desperate, Desperate is quite good in its own way and a hallmark of the films noir Mann would make later – Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night, Reign of Terror (a quite good historical melodrama that uses the iconography of film noir to tell the story of the French Revolution) and Mann’s breakthrough film, Winchester .73, a film noir in Western drag.

Lighthouse (PRC, 1947)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, July 27) I watched the first and last items on Turner Classic Movies’ last Thursday-night salute to “B” movies: Frank Wisbar’s Lighthouse (1947), made for the ultra-cheap PRC studio (the initials officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” but – with certain exceptions – the quality of their output was so relentlessly bad the joke around Hollywood was it really stood for “Pretty Rotten Crap”) and Frank R. Strayer’s Blondie (1938), the first in a series of 28 films based on Chic Young’s comic strip made by Columbia until 1950 and always with the same actors: Penny Singleton as Blondie Miller Bumstead and Arthur Lake as her hapless husband Dagwood. In between I watched an odd 2022 documentary on the recently deceased (at 97!) singer Tony Bennett called Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not, and after the first Blondie TCM showed a very intriguing short called What Do You Think? (Number Three), one entry in a series from MGM about events that might or might not have involved the supernatural. Lighthouse I had hopes for mainly because of its director, Frank Wisbar, who was born in East Prussia, Germany in 1899 and had a fairly substantial career as a director in Nazi Germany pre-World War II until he fled in 1939 and ended up in the U.S. Wisbar quickly found himself relegated to PRC, where he made one film of real accomplishment and quality: Strangler of the Swamp (1945), a remake of his German film Fährmann Maria (“Ferryman Maria”) (1936) and a quite good vest-pocket horror thriller. Then Wisbar was assigned to Devil Bat’s Daughter (1946), a direct sequel to PRC’s 1941 hit The Devil Bat (Bela Lugosi’s one PRC credit) and a film that tries to be Gaslight and achieves high camp.

Lighthouse was Wisbar’s next credit after Devil Bat’s Daughter, and if Strangler was actually sophisticated drama masquerading as cheap horror, and Devil Bat’s Daughter was cheap horror showing occasional flashes of something that could have been better (the female lead is former beauty contest winner Rosemary La Planche, and there are bits in her performance that suggest that had she been signed by a major studio and carefully built up, she might have become a more than competent actress; instead she got signed by PRC and plunged into leads immediately way before she was ready for them), Lighthouse was just dull. It’s a romantic-triangle story about Hank Armitage (John Litel), who runs a lighthouse just off the coast of Vermont; Sam Wells (Don Castle, top-billed and one of the many actors MGM tried out as a replacement for Clark Gable who never made the grade), his assistant; and Sam’s on-shore girlfriend Connie (June Lang, whom TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller really talked up; she was a strikingly beautiful woman and she showed more than a few hints of genuine acting talent, but she blew her career when she married gangster Johnny “Handsome” Rosselli). Connie has been having an affair with Sam even though he’s already married to someone else – we hear her talked about but never actually see her – and her roommate Jo-Jo (Marion Martin), who in some ways is the most fascinating and complex character in the movie, gossips about yet another woman Sam is seeing who works at the same cannery as Connie. Upset with Sam because of all his carrying-on, both with the wife we never see and the other “other woman” we don’t see either (and after a while we get the impression she might not exist except in Jo-Jo’s overly fertile imagination), Connie agrees to marry Hank on the rebound.

They sleep together in the Production Code-obligatory twin beds under the awful PRC-obligatory wallpaper, and it’s obvious Hank is stirring with sexual frustration while Connie is still carrying the torch for Sam. At one point Hank falls into the water off the island where the lighthouse is set up, and injures his leg – and while Hank is incapacitated he notices that Connie and Sam have closed the bedroom door behind them and the light has gone out. Hank immediately assumes that the light went out because Sam was too busy having sex with Connie to notice, and though Connie insists that nothing untoward happened between them, Hank is determined at best to fire Sam and at worst to kill him. There’s a fight between the two men that for a moment looks like one of them is going to tumble to his death down the lighthouse stairs, only Connie reaches inside a bedroom drawer and extracts a gun. She holds it on both men, but only to get them to stop fighting and settle their differences reasonably, which they do by Sam taking the lighthouse’s boat and leaving while Connie stays on the island and forms a renewed determination to make her marriage to Hank work even though she doesn’t really love him because she thinks she can learn to do so. Eddie Muller compared the movie to the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, which likewise centers around a homeless drifter, the older man who takes him in and the woman they both fall for, but The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on a novel by James M. Cain published in 1934 (it took that long for someone in Hollywood to figure out how to film it without running afoul of the Production Code), ends with the homeless drifter and the wife conspiring to murder the husband, only the drifter gets into an auto accident, the wife is killed and the drifter, who escaped justice for the murder he did commit, is executed for one that was just an accident. Nothing that happens in Lighthouse is anything either that exciting or that grimly ironic; it’s just a 65-minute “B” that fills out its running time without being interesting or exotic in any way.

Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not (Entertain Me Pictures, 1091 Pictures, 2022)

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

The 2022 documentary Tony Bennett: Forget Me Not was written and directed by Ramani Ramchaitar-Jackman, and it tells a good vest-pocket version of the life story of this remarkable singer and entertainer. I found the movie annoying in its sheer amount of stock footage, often purportedly representing events they couldn’t possibly have had access to film of, starting with a baby being pulled out of his mother’s womb. Ramchaitar-Jackman tries to make this off as footage of Tony Bennett’s actual birth, which of course it isn’t, and he uses this stratagem throughout this film, including a bit of stock footage of an amphibious landing in World War II to make it look like a battle in which Bennett was involved, which it isn’t. Bennett was drafted during the last stages of World War II and assigned to fill out a unit that had been decimated during the Battle of the Bulge, and while he arrived too late to see much in the way of combat he did participate in the liberation of at least one of the concentration camps, and as with everyone else who saw the results of the Nazis’ tyranny and genocide up close, it deeply affected him for the rest of his life. Though he was born Antonio Dominicci Benedetto in San Francisco in 1926, he eventually settled in New York after his parents broke up when he was 10, and it was in New York where he began his career as a singing waiter. After World War II he studied acting at a theatre school in New York and also made his first record in 1949 for a tiny label called Leslie, a duet with Pat Easton on a song called “Vieni Qui” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq15sBf_FBE) backed with George Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm,” both under the name “Joe Bari” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5f-e3Wajq4). Neither sounds much like the Tony Bennett we know and love from his later recordings, particularly the ones he made under Mitch Miller’s tutelage at Columbia, where he signed in 1951 and almost immediately had a huge hit with “Because of You.”

This 48-minute film offered a whirlwind view of Bennett’s career – he got his big break from Bob Hope, who picked Bennett to open for him at the Paramount Theatre and also gave him his stage name, simply “Anglicizing” his real one to “Tony Bennett.” (Where “Joe Bari” came from, I have no idea, though I’d heard of “Vieni Qui” from the book Simon Says by music critic George T. Simon, who co-wrote “Vieni Qui” and reported that Leslie’s pressings were so cheap his copy of the record had literally disintegrated.) Bennett kept his career going throughout the early 1950’s, and when rock ‘n’ roll became popular in the mid-1950’s his response was to break out into jazz. Though it’s oddly not mentioned in this documentary, Bennett had his biggest hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” in 1962 – an uncertain period in pop music in which death (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, Eddie Cochran), scandal (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis), the church (Little Richard) or the draft (Elvis Presley) had decimated the ranks of the early rockers and there was still space for a pre-rock crooner to squeeze his way back to the top of the charts. (A decade earlier Tony Bennett had covered Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” – therefore he’d already dipped his toes into the country music that, along with Black R&B, formed the basis of rock ‘n’ roll.) In the late 1960’s Bennett came under pressure from Clive Davis, newly appointed president of Columbia Records, to move in a more rock direction. Bennett recalled Davis making the ridiculous suggestion that he record a tribute album to Janis Joplin (though Janis herself had dipped her toes into Bennett-style repertoire, recording Gershwin’s “Summertime” for the Cheap Thrills album and the Rodgers and Hart “Little Girl Blue” for Kozmic Blues).

Davis’s recollection was that Bennett actually made an album called Something (after the George Harrison song stunningly recorded by The Beatles for the last album they made together, Abbey Road), which included rock ballads carefully arranged to suit Bennett’s voice. Davis was so pleased with that album he even wrote the liner notes personally, something he almost never did. Davis’s thinking was that older audiences wanted to hear the new songs, but toned down and with the voices of artists familiar to them; he’d already revitalized Andy Williams’s career with this approach and he thought he’d do the same for Bennett. Bennett fought him all the way and left Columbia for MGM Records, which put him on their jazz label, Verve. Later they dropped him and Bennett formed a label of his own, Improv, but he couldn’t find a major company willing to distribute it for him. Bennett made three albums with pianist Bill Evans for the Concord Jazz label in the late 1970’s, but as his career spiraled down he got hooked on cocaine and his sons Danny and Dae did what is now called an “intervention” to get him off drugs and point him towards a comeback. Danny Bennett took over as his dad’s manager and settled his back tax debts to the Internal Revenue Service. He also decided in the mid-1980’s to market Tony Bennett as a timeless artist whose commitment to the old songs marked him as an icon of quality. Danny Bennett negotiated a new contract for Tony with Columbia, and his first album under the new deal was called The Pursuit of Excellence, an indication of the sort of image his son was building for him.

The rest, as they say, is history; Tony Bennett became an icon of the timeless music of the “Great American Songbook” and the composers he revered: George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and such lesser-known but still important names like Harry Warren. He made two Duets albums that differed from the ones Frank Sinatra had made in the early 1980’s in that, unlike Sinatra, Bennett insisted on actually having his duet partners in the same studio at the same time instead of allowing them to add their parts later electronically. The Duets albums included Amy Winehouse’s last recording – a duet with Bennett on Johnny Green’s classic “Body and Soul” – which ironically made Bennett the oldest artist ever to top the pop charts. Bennett’s last two albums were duets projects with Lady Gaga (true name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and therefore like Bennett of Italian-American ancestry), Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, and he also recorded with k. d. lang for what amounted to a tribute album to Louis Armstrong, though it wasn’t advertised as such. Lady Gaga partnered superbly with Bennett because, even though she’d built her reputation on electronic dance music, she had a loose enough sense of rhythm to handle the standards repertoire and meet Bennett on his own turf. (Now that Bennett’s gone I’d love to see Lady Gaga do a standards album of her own.) Despite its ups and downs, Tony Bennett had a great career and my sense of loss at his passing is mitigated by the length of time he was around and the fact that he continued as a creative artist well past the time most people of his generation were either retired or dead.

Blondie (King Features Syndicate, Columbia, 1938)

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

The next movie I watched was Blondie, first of a series of 28 movies made over 13 years by Columbia Pictures under license by King Features Syndicate, a branch of the Hearst Corporation that owned the rights to Chic Young’s Blondie comic strip that originated the characters. Columbia launched the series in 1938 and got two actors to play the leads that stuck with the series throughout its run: Penny Singleton as the ditzy wife Blondie Miller Bumstead (her maiden name is revealed in passing in this first episode) and Arthur Lake as her hapless husband Dagwood Bumstead. They also got the obligatory cute kid, Larry Simms, to play their son, referred to only as “Baby Dumpling,” and an even cuter dog, Daisy, to play the family pet. In the 1950’s King Features Syndicate reclaimed the rights to these films from Columbia and repackaged them for television, adding prologues extracted from the films as “teaser” sequences and reshooting the opening credits, adding a pop-rock song about the Bumsteads to give the films a more contemporary feel (though the cars we see still mark this as a product of the late 1930’s). Columbia also made an unusual choice for director: Frank R. Strayer, who until this foray into situation comedy had been primarily known as a horror filmmaker. His best-known horror films were The Vampire Bat (1933), a fascinating mash-up of the Dracula and Frankenstein tropes (Lionel Atwill plays a mad scientist who’s developed a formless protoplasm that can only be kept alive via human blood), and Condemned to Live (1935).

Strayer ended up directing the first 12 Blondie movies – he took a break from the series only for one film, Go West, Young Lady, a vehicle for tap-dancing star Ann Miller that also carried over Penny Singleton and writer Richard Fluornoy from the Blondie series – and the first Blondie emerged as a predictable but still charming film. Thanks to the King Features Syndicate’s prologue, we knew in advance that it was going to end in a ludicrous confrontation in jail, and the confrontation is between Dagwood, Blondie, C.P. Hazlip (Gene Lockhart) – a developer whose new project needs a contractor to build it, and Dagwood has been assigned to sell Hazlip the services of his boss’s company – and Hazlip’s daughter Elsie (Ann Doran). By coincidence (or screenwriter fiat on the part of Fluornoy), Dagwood had co-signed a note for over $560 to a woman also called Elsie, a previous secretary of his boss, J. C. Dithers (Jonathan Hale), only he fired her, she used the money to get out of town and now Dagwood is on the hook to repay the note. C. P. Hazlip has been inundated with salespeople, including Dithers (who has called him multiple times at his hotel), but Dagwood inadvertently gets in to see him and the two bond over their mutual attraction to tinkering with mechanical gadgets. When a Black porter at the hotel (played in the usual sickeningly stereotyped way by Willie Best) gives up on the vacuum cleaner because it’s stopped working for him, Hazlip and Dagwood descend on it and try to fix it themselves. In order to carry it up to Hazlip’s room the two pull it by its extension cord and essentially walk it like a dog. There’s a funny running gag when an elderly woman who’s just been to the optometry shop in the hotel lobby sees the vacuum cleaner being walked like a dog, or other things happen to it (including its mysterious disappearance altogether), and pops right back into the optometry shop.

Dithers gets so exasperated with Dagwood that he fires him, but once Hazlip offers Dagwood the contract to build his new development (which would earn Dagwood the bonus and raise Blondie was counting on to pay for the new furniture she’s just bought for their home) Blondie becomes Dagwood’s business manager and negotiates him a new contract with Dithers. Back in the 1960’s a local San Francisco Bay Area TV station had regularly aired the Blondie movies, but I’d avoided watching them; now that I’ve finally caught up with one I can report that they were charming, unpretentious pieces of entertainment, secure in their utter predictability (it was obvious Dagwood would get the Hazlip contract and it would resolve all his financial problems) but very much along the lines of the similar sitcoms that would clog up TV schedules in the early days of the medium.

What Do You Think? Number Three (MGM, 1938)

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

My final film on TCM July 27 was a quite compelling short called What Do You Think? (Number Three), a vest-pocket little tale of the love story of aspiring violinist John Dosier (Arthur Rieck) and his girlfriend Mary (Mary Howard). They get married and set off on a one-year honeymoon, only at the close of it John gets a fatal disease and died. Mary suffered a premonition one night when they poured champagne to drink a toast to their happiness, but one of the glasses broke mysteriously and Mary took it as an omen of impending doom. Mary had the predictable reaction to losing John so suddenly, and after a year of hiding herself away from the world, she ventured out again to a party hosted by John’s mother (Mary Forbes), only just as she’s finally ventured out into the world, a strolling violinist plays the “Sonata for a Kiss,” which John had composed for Mary as a love token lo those many years ago. Mary’s adjustment to her grief is suddenly thrown in reverse and she goes back into her shell again. Deciding she has nothing to live for, she determines to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills and plays John’s record of “Sonata for a Kiss” (on the real Victor label, not a phony one made up for the movie) so his playing will be the last thing she hears before she exits the world.

Only, wouldn’t ya know it, the final high note on John’s record breaks the glass into which she’s dissolved the sleeping pills and most of the lethal solution spills out onto the dresser on which she’d put the glass. Mary interprets this as a message from John telling her to keep on living and keep dating Fred (Roger Converse), who’d been the best man at their wedding and had been more or less dating her since John’s death. What made this film unusually interesting was its director, Jacques Tourneur, a year before he made his first feature (Nick Carter, Master Detective, a 1939 MGM “B” starring Walter Pidgeon as the title character, essentially a U.S. knock-off of Sherlock Holmes). It’s not a particularly ambitious film but it’s a perfect short vehicle for Tourneur’s unusual gift for atmosphere, especially evident in his three films for Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) at RKO in 1942-43. Of course the whole point of the story by writers Carl Dudley and Jack Woodford was to pose the question to the audience – not, “Is it live or is it Memorex?,” as I inevitably joked when the first glass broke, but “Is it physically possible or is it supernatural?” – and leave us wondering, in the film’s title, along with narrator Carey Wilson, “ What do you think?” I think it was an engaging little film, probably the best of the four I saw that night, and given that Val Lewton’s whole approach to horror was to keep the audience in suspense as to whether the events in his films were real or supernatural, it was a good training ground for Tourneur in his Lewton collaborations and his subsequent films.

NOVA: "The Planets: Saturn" (BBC Studios, Tencent Penguin Pictures, The Open University, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Wednesday, July 26) at 10 I put on the fourth of five episodes of the long-running PBS-TV series NOVA dealing with “The Planets,” this one about Saturn – which is perhaps the strangest object in our solar system, especially since it doesn’t have a core of solid rock like most planets do. Instead its center is of molten metal, around which has formed a core of frozen gas under tremendous pressure – enough, the show explained, to crush carbon into diamonds and then split up the diamonds again. The show was full of fascinating tidbits about Saturn I hadn’t known before, including that its fabled rings are made of ice – that’s right, frozen H2O – and that one of its moons (no, not Titan! Sorry, Kurt Vonnegut fans), Enceladus, contains the underground volcanic hot springs that most scientists who study these things were where life began. As usual, this show contained stunning visuals – most of them digital re-creations, though Saturn was sufficiently photographed from the Voyager and Cassini probes that at least a few of the images are authentic. Most of these NOVA shows on “The Planets” have centered around an interesting woman scientist who worked on the initial NASA probes and did some of the key analysis of the information they sent back – and this time the woman was Michele Daugherty, billed as the “principal investigator, Cassini Magnetometer.” She was down to earth and obviously thrilled with the info the probe was sending back, and she recalled her sadness when it came time after the last bit of data had been transmitted to direct the spacecraft to descend into Saturn and destroy itself.

At the same time she and others on the project mentioned the 90-minute time lag it takes for a radio signal from Earth to reach Saturn – which meant that any instructions to the craft had to be timed to take into account the three-hour time lag for the craft to receive the signal from Earth and respond to it. Indeed, one of the reasons Daugherty gave for their determination to let Cassini burn up in the Saturnian gravitational field was to make sure Earth life didn’t contaminate whatever ecosphere exists on Enceladus, so if we someday land on Enceladus and find life it won’t be something we brought with us and unintentionally planted there. I still have my quibbles with these NOVA programs on outside worlds, including my ongoing qualm about just how they can be so authoritative about what the various planets are made of when they can only observe and measure them from above in space – I guess that’s what Daugherty’s magnetometer is for – but at the same time I’ve found them impressive and awe-inspiring, and in some ways they confirm Werner Heisenberg’s (the inventor of quantum theory and the physicist Adolf Hitler put in charge of Nazi Germany’s program to develop the atomic bomb) famous quote, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Deliverance (Helen Keller Film Corporation, George Kleine Productions, 1919)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 23) Turner Classic Movies did three silent movies in a row, two as part of their month-long salute to the portrayals of people with disabilities in films and the third their regular “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature. I bypassed the first one, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, but watched the other two, and the first one I saw turned out to be utterly fascinating. It was called Deliverance – not to be confused with the 1972 melodrama by John Boorman based on James Dickey’s novel about two friends (Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight) who take a whitewater-rafting trip to the country and meet several sorry fates. This Deliverance was made by George Kleine in 1919 and is the life story (to that point) of Helen Keller. Helen Keller was born in 1880 in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of a local newspaper editor and former soldier in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. At 19 months she got a disease then diagnosed as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain" (which according to modern researchers was likely meningitis) which left her both blind and deaf. As Keller’s Wikipedia page describes it, “In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisholm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan developed as Keller's governess and later her companion.”

The story was told by Keller herself in her first book, The Story of My Life (1903), later dramatized by playwright William Gibson as The Miracle Worker and turned into a movie of that title in 1962 that won Academy Awards for both Anne Bancroft, who played Sullivan, and Patty Duke as Keller. The big breakthrough came at the Keller family’s water pump, when Keller finally realized that the word Sullivan was spelling out to her using the finger alphabet was “water” and represented the liquid coming out of the pump – and Deliverance director George Foster Platt staged this scene much the way Arthur Penn did in The Miracle Worker. “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers,” Keller wrote in The Story of My Life. “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!” Keller pursued her studies with a fierce determination, not only learning to read in Braille but studying various languages, including French, German, Latin and Greek, as well as mathematics. In 1900 Keller was admitted to Radcliffe College, the women-only auxiliary of then men-only Harvard University, where she excelled and became the first deaf and blind person to win both undergraduate and graduate degrees. (Anne Sullivan had to sit next to her in her classes, spelling out the words the lecturer was saying so Keller could understand them.) Keller also became a social activist, usually on the Left – she was a member of the Socialist Party, U.S.A. and later the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), she donated to the NAACP and was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 – though she also briefly supported the pseudo-science of eugenics, the idea that human evolution was still going on and needed to be consciously directed by humans so the “superior” people would breed and the “inferior” would die out. (Eugenics was a fashionable cause in the 1920’s and 1930’s until its association with the Nazis, who justified the Holocaust largely on eugenic grounds, would taint it and lead to its virtual disappearance.)

I had expected the film Deliverance to be an historical curio; instead it turned out to be intensely moving and well-made. It’s divided into three acts, “Girlhood,” “Maidenhood,” and “Womanhood,” and it’s distinguished in that different actresses play Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan in each episode. In “Girlhood” we get Etna Ross as Helen and Edythe Lyle as Anne; in “Maidenhood” Ann Mason plays Helen and Edythe Lyle repeats as Anne; in “Womanhood” Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan both play themselves. Naturally writer Francis Trevelyan Miller couldn’t resist making an already intense story even more melodramatic; Helen has a childhood friend named Nadja (Tula Belle in the first act, Flora Braidwood in the second and Arditta Mellinnina in the third) who studies music, meets and marries a fellow music student named Josef (Josef De Serino), only he catches an unnamed disease and dies. Nadja is left with a son (J. Parks Jones) who reluctantly enlists in World War I and comes back blind, but when your best friend is Helen Keller mere blindness isn’t that much of a problem for you: Helen gets her airplane pilot brother Phillips (also playing himself, as is their mother) to fly Nadja’s son to a super-doctor who can help him rehabilitate. Naturally Helen is exhilarated by the sensations of flying in an open-cockpit plane. Apparently the real Helen Keller was not happy with some aspects of the film, particularly its assertion that she could tell just by touching an object what color it was, but it dramatizes that she could appreciate music by sensing the vibrations of the instruments that played it even though she could not actually hear it. There’s a scene in the movie in which Nadja is playing a harp and Helen is standing next to her doing just that. Deliverance is an amazing movie, fully alive and sensitive to the implications of its story, though I wondered how George Kleine’s budget extended to the elaborate allegorical scenes of the American Revolution (triggered by Helen’s visit to the tree where George Washington received word that he would be the commander in chief of the Continental Army) and other historical sequences that allegedly came to life in Helen’s imagination – or were they stock footage from other films, even this early in the history of moviemaking?

Fanchon, the Cricket (Famous Players [later Paramount],1915)

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

Unfortunately the “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature shown after Deliverance was a pretty sorry piece of work. It was called Fanchon, the Cricket and was made in 1915, directed by James Kirkwood for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players company (later to become part of Paramount) and starring Mary Pickford as the titular Fanchon (called “Fadette” in the 1840 novel by George Sand on which the film was based – and the idea of Mary Pickford starring in a story by George Sand made me think this was going to be a much better movie than it was). At the time Pickford died in 1979 this film was presumed lost – much to Pickford’s disappointment because not only had she worked her ass off to make sure all of her films (or at least the ones she had control over) were preserved, it’s the one time she appeared with both her siblings, sister Lottie and brother Jack. Ultimately a duplicate negative was found at the Cinemathéque Française in 2007, then an incomplete print was discovered at the British Film Museum, and a restoration company in Italy brought the two surviving prints together to assemble a composite of the complete film, which was then digitally reprocessed to create the version TCM showed last night. It turned out to be a pretty dreary film, set in a small farming village in central France where dancing seems to be the principal amusement. The only hints we get that farming is going on is a scene towards the middle in which Mary Pickford as Fanchon is strolling through a corn field whose stalks are taller than she is, and a scene towards the end in which Fanchon’s boyfriend Landry (Jack Standing, one of those strong, reliable, solid and rather stolid leading men who abounded in the silent era, at least until Rudolph Valentino became popular in the early 1920’s) walks through an equally imposing wheat field.

Other than that, the movie is an endless series of big community dances, mostly around a May pole, Fanchon lives with her grandmother – or at least the woman who’s raised her and told her she’s her grandmother – who’s suspected by the locals of being a witch and having taught Fanchon “the craft,” but precious little is made of that. She manages to get Landry away from his previous girlfriend, Madelon (Lottie Pickford), but aside from that virtually nothing happens. Matters weren’t helped by the terribly doleful musical score added to the film by two modern-day composers, whose work was praised by “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart as “folk-rock” but no doubt made it harder for both my husband Charles and I to stay awake during the film: Charles called it “Windham Hill noodling” and said he wished the Mary Pickford Foundation could have commissioned modern-day rock artists to contribute songs the way Giorgio Moroder did for an early-1980’s reissue of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (I’ve never actually seen the Moroder version of Metropolis, but Charles has and believes it was his first encounter with Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece.) My own wish for a score for Fanchon, the Cricket would have been an instrumental version of Joseph Canteloube’s Songs from the Auvergne, a set of folk-song adaptations which would at least have been authentically “French” and appropriate for the setting. Fanchon, the Cricket was a disappointment all the way round (up to and including the preposterously ugly font selected for the intertitles, which had to be back-translated into English from the French ones in the Cinemathéque Française print – and a lot of those translations “in the day” were themselves pretty preposterous; the 1914 Pearl White serial The Perils of Pauline only survived in a French print and some of the titles literally make no sense) and hardly the film I was expecting and hoping for from the combination of Mary Pickford and a George Sand story!

Father Brown: "The Hand of Lucia" (BBC Studios, BBC Worldwide, Albert+ Sustainable Productions, 2017)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 22) I watched a Father Brown episode from 2017 called “The Hand of Lucia” and then a Turner Classic Movies presentation of the 1956 film Julie. “The Hand of Lucia” is about author Lucia Morell (Hetty Baynes), who’s just published a best-seller called Lulu and Lucia about a Lesbian affair she had about 20 years before. This has allowed her to buy a big house in the central England county where the Father Brown mysteries take place, and to be the typical prima donna bitch towards her staff, her neighbors and everyone else. Lucia Morell has put out the word that her next novel will reveal the true identity of “Lulu,” though Father Brown has already deduced who it is. She’s Lady Ursula Langford (Carol Royle), who lives in the same neighborhood in a large house she inherited from her wealthy family and has used the fortune she was left to start a sort of halfway house for young women who were just released from prison. Lucia is nearly killed when some unseen person or persons push a giant crystal container off her roof and onto her below. This puts out one of her eyes, but she recovers long enough to wear a preposterous-looking eye patch and to attempt a seduction of Ursula’s overweight son James (Kristoffer Olson). Things go badly for James when, confronted by the sexually aggressive Lucia, James literally can’t rise to the occasion. Instead of being understanding the way older women are supposed to be in stories like this, she tears into him, tells him he’ll never be able to satisfy a woman, and he might as well just give up on the whole idea of sex. (By now I was thinking maybe he’d turn out to be Gay; like mother, like son, after all.)

Later Lucia is found dead in her bed, victim of an assailant with an axe, and her hand is severed and hidden inside a toilet tank, where Bunty (Emer Kenny), a halfway-house inmate whom Father Brown has befriended, finds it while having an attack of vomiting from a meal she ate. Still later, one of the residents of Ursula’s halfway house, Mildred Nook (Claire Brown), is also killed, this time with poison, and found in a bathtub. Father Brown gets involved in the case, much to the predictable discomfort of Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton), the local representative of official law enforcement, who’s so fixated on the obvious suspects he makes Inspector Lestrade seem like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. Father Brown, Bunty and Father Brown’s housekeeper, Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack), take turns reading chapters of Lucia’s novel hoping to find clues that will help them solve the crimes. Mrs. McCarthy’s disgust at the explicit (for the 1950’s) sexual content of the novel is hilarious, especially when it turns out that she’s already read it and owns several copies. There’s also a disgraced friar on the Langford property, Friar Novak (Sam Cox), who works as Ursula’s groundskeeper and still dresses in monk’s drag, and who looks like he stepped out of a Grant Wood painting. In the end the killer turns out to be yet another of Ursula’s charges, Scarlet Finch (Nicola Thorp), who served a 10-year sentence for a crime actually committed by Lucia Morell – for whom she supplied a false alibi that ended up making her the fall girl. Lucia incorporated Scarlet Finch into the book as the “Red Cardinal,” changing her gender and making him/her/them another one of her lovers, and in the end Scarlet tries to kill Ursula. She surprises her in her garden and is carrying the axe with which she dispatched Lucia – she also killed Mildred because Mildred had caught her in the act of hiding Lucia’s severed hand in the toilet tank – when Father Brown and Bunty arrive just in time to save Ursula.

Eventually we learn that Lucia was a Bisexual sadist who loved to pit her various sex partners against each other – we get a dramatized scene from her novel in which two brothers who got along with each other just fine until they both got involved with Lucia’s character literally fight a duel to the death for one night with her – and Ursula broke up with her because she got tired of the horrible sadistic things Lucia kept making her do to her other partners. We also learn that, contrary to what Ursula told her son James that his father was killed in World War II (remember that the Father Brown stories take place in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s), he was actually the product of a rebound relationship she had with Friar Novak, and the friar/groundskeeper was his biological father (and got thrown out of his monastic order for violating the vow of celibacy). James is so shocked by the revelations of his mother’s past and his true ancestry that he leaves the estate for good. From the title I had expected this Father Brown episode to be about opera and madness – I was, of course, thinking of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and in particular its mad scene, and I was expecting the story to revolve around a long-retired and picturesquely crazy soprano who’d been especially famous for her Lucia – but what I got was a charming story (as charming as a story about an axe murderer can be, anyway) expressing the odd mix of gentility and horror at the root of so many British mysteries.

Julie (Arwin Productions, MGM, 1956)

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

After that I switched to TCM for a highly unusual presentation of the 1956 film Julie, written and directed by Andrew Stone for Arwin Productions, the company founded by Doris Day and her husband Martin Melcher, released through MGM. Melcher was determined to extend his wife’s range as an actress and get her stronger, more challenging roles than she’d got as a Warner Bros. contractee. This was the second Arwin production – the first had been Young at Heart, a 1954 musical remake of Four Daughters which featured Day in the part originally played by Rosemary Lane and Frank Sinatra (in their only film together) in John Garfield’s old role, which Arwin and Warner Bros. co-produced – and in between Melcher had landed Day plum roles as 1920’s torch singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (probably Day’s finest acting role) and as the female lead opposite James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his 1934 British hit The Man Who Knew Too Much. (Contrary to Hitchcock’s remark to François Truffaut that “the first version was made by a highly talented amateur and the second was made by a professional,” I’ve always like the first The Man Who Knew Too Much far better than the second – and after I saw Day’s 1953 film Calamity Jane, which cast her as an expert markswoman, I wished Hitchcock and his writers had kept the original ending in which the woman uses her shooting skills to pick off the villain who’s holding her child hostage without hurting the child.)

Julie was a particularly difficult film to make because she literally had to relive her past. It cast her as Julie Benton, recently married to Lyle Benton (Louis Jourdan) following the mysterious death of her first husband Bob (whom we never see), and in the early 1940’s when Day was just starting her career as Les Brown’s band singer she’d been in abusive marriages herself to band musicians Al Jordan and George Weidler. In fact, Jordan had been so angry when she got pregnant that he beat her up in hopes of triggering her to miscarry. It didn’t work – she gave birth to her first and only child, a boy named Terry – though it’s not surprising given what his biological dad did to his mom that he used his stepfather’s last name, Terry Melcher. (Terry Melcher grew up to be a rock record producer for his mom’s label, Columbia, where he signed Paul Revere and the Raiders and The Byrds. He also encountered a young, terrible singer-songwriter named Charles Manson, who expected Melcher to sign him to a Columbia recording contract. When Melcher declined, Manson formed a psychopathic hatred of him and decided to get back at him by sending the women in his “Family” commune to kill him. But since Melcher no longer lived in the house on Cielo Drive where Manson had visited him, Manson and his girl goon squad ended up killing the people who did: Sharon Tate and her entourage.) Julie the movie has similarities to Gaslight – a woman married to a psychologically (and, in this film, physically as well) abusive husband whom she realizes wants to kill her – but in Gaslight it took a while for both the heroine and the audience to realize the husband was evil, whereas in Julie we know that from the get-go.

The opening scene features Julie and Lyle (the name “Lyle Benton” seems oddly Anglo for a character played by an actor as ineradicably French as Louis Jourdan) driving home from a party at which Lyle had a jealous hissy-fit over Julie talking to another man. Lyle reaches his leg over to Julie’s and pushes her foot full-bore on the accelerator, causing the car to speed uncontrollably. She pleads with him to get his foot off hers so she can drive normally, but he refuses. Ultimately the car veers off the road, though at least it doesn’t crash into anyone or anything. Lyle is predictably apologetic, asking Julie to forgive him his spate of uncontrolled jealousy, and she does. In fact the first third of Julie is a quite good presentation of the dilemma faced by a woman in the grip of an abusive husband; she makes the predictable excuses for him and refuses the advice of her late husband’s best friend, Cliff Henderson (Barry Sullivan – and seeing him as a good guy is as surprising as seeing Louis Jourdan as a bad one). Julie tells Cliff that she can’t leave Lyle because he’ll just track her down and either beat her into submission or kill her. Cliff has re-investigated the death of Julie’s first husband Bob and has concluded that Lyle actually killed him and then faked it to look like suicide (which is what the police ruled it) just so he could get Julie on the rebound. They take their suspicions to the San Francisco police (Julie is set in San Francisco and just south of it in Carmel, where ironically Doris Day settled and lived for decades after she retired), but are told by Detective Lieutenant Pringle (Frank Lovejoy) that there isn’t anything the law can do to protect her until Lyle actually attacks her. Nonetheless, she tries to break free from him, leaving town and taking a job as a flight attendant for Amalgamated, a so-called “nonscheduled” airline (essentially the Val-U-Jet or Spirit of the 1950’s), since that’s how she’d made her living before she married Bob. Alas, Lyle tracks her down and terrorizes her again.

She’s able to escape him – for now – and moves into a San Francisco apartment building under a different name, rooming with fellow Amalgamated flight attendant Denise Martin (Aline Towne). Because Lyle has lost track of Julie, he goes after Cliff instead, waylaying him and forcing him to drive to a deserted spot in the countryside, where Lyle shoots him. Fortunately, Cliff is only wounded, not killed, and a local farmer, Ellis (Hank Patterson), takes him in and calls the local operator to get Cliff medical help. When Cliff comes to, he frantically calls the San Francisco police to warn them that Lyle is on his way to San Francisco to kill Julie, but he can’t remember the name of her apartment building (only the first four letters) or the name she’s using there. Meanwhile, the dispatcher at Amalgamated calls Julie to cover a flight that needs someone in an emergency, and Julie at first refuses but then reluctantly takes the gig for fear of losing her job if she doesn’t. Alas, Lyle – using Cliff’s car – is following her and ultimately ends up at the airport, where he somehow sneaks on to the plane where she’s working. His intent is to torture her by shooting both pilots so the plane will crash uncontrollably and kill not only Julie and Lyle himself but all the passengers on board. He kills the flight captain and wounds the co-pilot sufficiently that he’s too weak to fly the plane himself, and from there Julie turns into an Airport movie as Julie takes the controls herself and brings the plane in for a bumpy but safe landing at San Francisco International Airport with the help of the ground crew giving her step-by-step instructions.

If nothing else, Julie is a good example of the Doris Day that became an icon among second-wave feminists: not only is the first half of the movie almost an object lesson in the helplessness of women in the face of abusive husbands (the laws on the books today to protect women in situations like this didn’t exist in 1956, and even now they often don’t work), the second half is a tribute to the courage of an ordinary woman put into a situation where other people’s lives are dependent on her mastering a skill set she’s totally unfamiliar with, and she comes through beautifully. (Julie mentions during the climactic scene that she’s not a total novice at flying – she once took a flying lesson with a trained pilot who put her behind the controls – but it was a small private plane instead of an airliner and she didn’t have to land it.) After the film, Eddie Muller mentioned the movies made since that have used the situation of a flight attendant pressed into service to land a plane in an emergency – Airport 1975 and the spoof Airplane! five years later – though I have vague memories of one that did it even before Julie: a late-1930’s film from (I believe) RKO with Robert Armstrong as the trained pilot on the ground who gives the flight attendant the necessary step-by-step instructions on how to land in an emergency. I also found myself mentally remixing the ending of Julie to have Julie decide to make flying her career and train to become an airline pilot for real. Talk about flying through the glass ceiling, both figuratively and literally!

To End All War: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (NBC News Studios, aired July 21, 2023)

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

Last night (Friday, July 21) at 10 MS-NBC showed a new documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic bomb, called To End All War – reflecting Oppenheimer’s optimistic and forlorn hope that the use of nuclear weapons would render war so frightening that it would become obsolete. The appearance of this documentary was an example of synergistic marketing at its most blatant: it premiered on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s dramatic film Oppenheimer (starring Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty) opened in theatres. It was brought to us by a news network of NBC, which is part of Comcast – as is Universal, the studio that produced the Nolan film. There have been innumerable documentaries, as well as fiction films, about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on the first atomic bomb – as well as his controversial refusal to work on the hydrogen bomb and the jihad against him in the early 1950’s led by Dr. Edward Teller, who took on the H-bomb project and denounced Oppenheimer as a Communist and a traitor for having opposed the H-bomb program. In fact, the first documentary on the Manhattan Engineering District (the code-name for the A-bomb program, though it colloquially entered American history as the “Manhattan Project”) was a March of Time episode from 1946, just a year after the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, which Oppenheimer in one of his many references to religion and spirituality called “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne mentioning the Holy Trinity of Christianity (odd since Oppenheimer was Jewish, at least by ancestry), which reproduced that test and featured Oppenheimer playing himself. Quite a few films were made about the Manhattan Project while Oppenheimer was still alive (he died in 1967 of cancer of the esophagus, the same disease that had killed Humphrey Bogart a decade earlier, and like Bogart, Oppenheimer almost certainly got it from his constant tobacco use), as well as more than one dramatic feature (including the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy, which starred Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as General Leslie Groves, the man the Army put in charge as overall administrator of the Manhattan Project; the title came from the two different bombs made at Alamogordo, the smaller one used on Hiroshima and the larger one dropped on Nagasaki). There have also been a number of other movies called The Manhattan Project, ranging from a 1986 teen comedy with Christopher Collet and John Lithgow in which a teenage scientific prodigy builds a working A-bomb and then has to figure out how to disarm it to a 2022 “inspirational” movie about a man dying of terminal cancer who wants to kill himself before nature takes its course.

As presented here, J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a pretty tortured life, in which his “Rosebud” moment appears to have been being literally locked in a giant ice chest by bullies at summer camp in his boyhood. He grew up to be a physics student but did poorly at experimental science; when he discovered theoretical physics, he found his calling because then he could just think and work out equations all day without getting into the messy grind of actually having to make things work. So when word got around the physics community that Oppenheimer had been chosen as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director, his colleagues joked, “He couldn’t run a hot-dog stand.” Oppenheimer is also shown as a man who wasn’t especially political until the Great Depression hit when he was a junior physics professor at Berkeley in 1929, when he was 25 years old. He was shocked at the effect the Depression was having on his students, including one who literally had to live on cat food because that was all he could afford. (This was actually more common than a lot of people realize: in the 1960’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed a regulation requiring pet-food companies to make their products fit for human consumption because in the days before food stamps, a lot of people were feeding themselves pet food to survive.) This inspired Oppenheimer to become decidedly Left-wing in his politics; though there’s no evidence that he actually joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. (and if there were, surely the U.S. government investigators leading the postwar witch hunt against him would have found it and publicized it to justify what they did to him!), his brother was a CPUSA member and so was his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, whom he dated in the late 1930’s and visited at least once during the early 1940’s, when he was working on the Manhattan Project and married to Kitty Puening Harrison, who was already on her third husband when she and Oppenheimer started a sexual relationship and conceived their first child, Peter. (She got a quickie divorce from Mexico and married Oppenheimer six months before Peter’s birth.) This two-hour documentary devotes as much running time to Oppenheimer’s post-war activities, including his forlorn hopes for the international control of atomic energy and his opposition to the congealing Cold War consensus that the Soviet Union was as implacable an enemy and as clear and present a danger to the peace of the world as Nazi Germany had been.

Like many of the other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had rationalized his research and development of a weapon of mass destruction on the basis that Hitler and his scientists were almost certainly working on one – after all, the basic research documenting atomic fission had all been done in Germany – and the U.S. and its allies needed to build the bomb and do it first before the Nazis could. Ironically, the main reason (at least in my reading of the historical evidence) the Nazis didn’t get the bomb was that Werner Heisenberg, the physicist in charge of the Nazis’ bomb program, made a huge scientific error; his calculation of the amount of fissile material which would be needed to set off a chain reaction and an atomic explosion was about 1,000 times greater than the true amount, and on that basis Heisenberg reported to Hitler and his Nazi colleagues that a nuclear weapon would be too big to be practical. It also didn’t help that the Nazis had driven out many of the top German physicists and other scientists because so many of them were Jews, and Hitler and his colleagues had publicly denounced atomic research as “Jewish physics” and essentially ordered it, if not banned, at least heavily restricted. I love the fact that the Nazis’ racism helped keep them from developing the atomic bomb! Oddly, Oppenheimer didn’t share the reluctance of some of his Manhattan Project colleagues about using the bomb against Japan once the Nazis were definitively defeated in May 1945; he argued not only for using it but for using it against cities instead of doing a demonstration blast over a relatively uninhabited area of Japan, and apparently his thinking was that he wanted to demonstrate the sheer awfulness of the A-bomb to make sure that its first two uses would also be the last. (That’s been true so far, but who knows how much longer? Already Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, especially if the U.S. and its NATO allies send in active-duty forces to fight Russians in Ukraine or cross another of Putin’s ambiguous and frequently changing “red lines.”)

At the same time the show described a contentious meeting between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman at the White House in October 1945, at which Truman asked Oppenheimer how soon the Soviet Union would have the bomb. Oppenheimer was noncommittal but said it would be within a few years, and Truman said, “Never!” (In fact, the Soviets did have the A-bomb in 1949, sparking yet another witch hunt throughout the U.S. government to look for the spies that allegedly “stole” it for them – when more sober-minded critics, including most of the nuclear scientists themselves, said that the Soviets would have discovered the bomb anyway because the only “secret” was whether or not it would work, and the U.S. had already demonstrated that. Ironically enough, the head of the Soviet bomb program would also run afoul of his country’s political police and become a dissident: Andrei Sakharov.) Then Oppenheimer told Truman, “I have blood on my hands,” and what Oppenheimer apparently intended as a statement of humility just enraged the President; he abruptly ended the meeting and told a staff member, “Get that crybaby scientist out of my office and don’t let me see him again.” The last 40 minutes or so of the Oppenheimer documentary deal with the bizarre proceeding by which the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), then in charge of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power (the highly-touted, overhyped program by which scientists who’d felt guilty over developing the worst, most potentially destructive weapon of all time tried to atone by figuring out a way to use nuclear technology for humanity’s benefit – though I remain as committed an opponent of nuclear power as I am of nuclear war because the technology is just too damned unforgiving of the inevitable natural accidents or human errors, as demonstrated at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.), stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

The proceeding was full of dirty tricks on the part of the government, including bugging the offices of Oppenheimer’s attorneys so the prosecution knew what the defense was going to say before they said it. According to this documentary, the attack on Oppenheimer had the desired “chilling effect” on other scientists, including any who might have otherwise been tempted to speak out against the H-bomb itself or the nuclear tests that dominated the news in the early 1960’s and spewed huge amounts of dangerously radioactive material in their wake until President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a mutual attack of good sense and negotiated a limited test-ban treaty in 1963. Ironically, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was restored, but not until 2022 – 55 years after his death and far too late to do either him or the cause of rational debate about nuclear energy any good. Oppenheimer remains a fascinating historical figure precisely due to his contradictions: as one of the few scientists (along with Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal) who took religion seriously, he seems to have been obsessed not only with the effects of his actions (good and bad) on humanity but their meaning in the broader cosmos, and he never won the Nobel Prize for physics even though as early as the 1930’s he was propounding scientific ideas, including the positron and the black hole, that would later be taken up by other theoretical physicists, many of whom did win the Nobel. Christopher Nolan’s movie was based on a biography of Oppenheimer called American Prometheus – one of whose authors, Kai Bird, was interviewed for this documentary – and of course that couldn’t help but make me think of a classic novel whose author also referred to her central character as “the modern Prometheus” – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Preview Murder Mystery (Paramount, 1936)

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

Last night (Thursday, July 20) I did a marathon on Turner Classic Movies and watched six, count ‘em, six movies in a row, five as part of their month-long salute to “B” films plus a “ringer,” Woody Allen’s Bananas. The first film in the sequence, The Preview Murder Mystery, was actually quite good; it was made at Paramount in 1936 and directed by Robert Florey, a French émigré who found a niche in “B” movies almost immediately and rarely got to do anything else (the same fate that befell German expat Edgar G. Ulmer in Hollywood). The Preview Murder Mystery takes place mostly on the Paramount lot – though the studio is called “World Attractions” here (albeit there’s a brief giveaway when we see the back of an arc light with the Paramount, not the “World Attractions,” logo) – and deals with World Attractions’ sound remake of one of the studio’s biggest silent hits, Song of the Toreador. The original silent film featured actor Edwin Strange (though the photo representing him on the office wall of the studio head is actually Rudolph Valentino), while the remake stars Neil DuBeck (Rod LaRocque, real-life silent star who played the villain in the modern portions of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 version of The Ten Commandments) and Claire Woodward Smith (Gail Patrick), real-life wife of director E. Gordon Smith (Ian Keith), who helmed both silent and sound versions. The good guys are studio publicity head Johnny Morgan (Reginald Denny, usually a comic-relief supporting actor but here quite good in a lead) and his secretary/girlfriend, Peggy Madison (Frances Drake), a heavy-duty devotée of astrology who keeps giving Johnny warnings of his impending demise based on what the charts she’s casting for him tell her.

Neil DuBeck is receiving a series of threatening notes announcing that he won’t live to see Song of the Toreador previewed, and though he actually makes it to the preview he dies during it from a poison someone slipped into his bicarbonate of soda. (There’s a bit of byplay, surprising from a film made during the period of strict enforcement of the Production Code, indicating that DuBeck is addicted to some sort of drug and his “bicarbonate of soda” is the vehicle through which he takes it. Ordinarily the Production Code forbade drug addiction or any mention of it.) Later on Claire is shot at by a supposedly blank-loaded gun that actually contained real bullets – though she survives because the actor who was supposed to shoot her missed and hit a mirror instead – and director Smith becomes the second victim. The police, led by Detective McKane (Thomas E. Jackson, who made a lifelong specialty playing tough cops), immediately seal off the studio, allowing no one in or out. Johnny Morgan and Peggy Madison investigate the case themselves, and after they get a report that someone who strikingly resembles the late Edwin Strange has been seen around the studio, they deduce the truth: Edwin Strange did not die in an accident years before, as everyone assumed. Instead he was disfigured (courtesy of an earlier shoot in which director Smith had insisted he walk through a big blaze, only he caught fire and was so badly burned he could never act again) and found the corpse of a homeless person whom he could pass off as his own body. When “World Attractions” decided to remake his big silent-era hit, Song of the Toreador, the still-living Strange (Conway Tearle) decided to sabotage the film so it would never be released and therefore make people forget about the silent version in which Strange had starred. The Preview Murder Mystery was written by Brian Marlow and Robert Yost from an original story by Garnett Weston, and it’s a neat enough story, but it’s Florey’s direction and the expert cinematography by Karl Struss (a far more prestigious name than one expects to see on the credits of a “B”) that make this one really special.

Passport to Destiny (RKO, 1944)

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

The second item on TCM’s July 20 marathon of “B” movies was a truly odd film from RKO in 1944 called Passport to Destiny, which despite its awe-inducing title was actually a low comedy starring Elsa Lanchester as Ella Muggins, a cleaning woman still in mourning for the loss of her late husband, Army sergeant Albert Muggins. We never see him as a live character but he’s represented by a framed photo of (guess who?) Elsa Lanchester’s real-life husband, Charles Laughton (who was actually Gay; in Lanchester’s autobiography she says he sprang that piece of information on her on their wedding night, which surprised her, though for whatever reasons they stayed married from 1929 until the end of Laughton’s life in 1962). Lanchester was well aware that she was not conventionally attractive, and she did her best to turn that into an asset: she said, “I was content because I was fully aware that I did not like straight acting but preferred performing direct to an audience. You might call what I do vaudeville. Making a joke, especially impromptu, and getting a big laugh is just plain heaven.” Her best-known film was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which at the insistence of James Whale, her old friend from the London theatre (and also a Gay man!), she played both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the prologue showing how the novel Frankenstein came to be written and the Bride of Frankenstein herself. For the latter role she had to wear a large cage-like structure on top of her head into which makeup genius Jack P. Pierce teased her own hair, and (like Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Phantom of the Opera) she also had to wear uncomfortable frameworks in her eyes so she would not blink. Only the grey streaks on either side of her head were not her own hair. (I remember mentioning that to Charles, who said, “You didn’t think the grey streaks were hers?,” and I said, “Actually, I was surprised in the other direction. I’d always thought the whole thing was a wig!”)

Passport to Destiny casts Lanchester as a free-spirited character proud and unembarrassed by her job, and convinced that a magic amulet her late husband gave her will protect her from all harm. When the attic of the house she has to clean has to be emptied because of the Blitz she takes it as a personal insult and decides to travel to Germany to get this Hitler guy a piece of her mind. Amazingly (by fiat of screenwriters Muriel Roy Bolton and Val Burton) she makes it into Berlin and rescues Captain Franz von Weber (Gordon Oliver); the two steal a German bomber and use it to fly to safety in Britain, though realizing that the RAF will likely try to shoot down the plane they bail out of it and float to earth by parachute. It’s not that good a movie, but it was cute and a decent showcase for Lanchester, whose sense of humor is better displayed as an eccentric artist in one of her husband’s vehicles, The Big Clock (1948), a Paramount film noir based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing about a maniacal publisher (Charles Laughton) who murdered his mistress and a crusading editor for one of his publications (Ray Milland) who’s suspected of the crime. The director was Ray McCarey, Leo McCarey’s brother, of whom I once joked regarding a Ray McCarey movie in which the star was Bing Crosby’s brother Bob, that both star and director had far more prestigious and better paid brothers in the same business!