NOVA: "Sunken Ship Rescue" (Windfall Films, National Geographic, BBC, PBS, 2015)

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

Last night (Wednesday, August 30) KPBS re-ran a NOVA program from 2015 called “Sunken Ship Rescue.” The sunken ship they were rescuing was an Italian cruise liner called the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off Giglio Island on the west coast of Italy on January 13, 2012 – just three months shy of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The similarities are eerie, even though the Costa Concordia ran aground on a reef instead of being sunk by an iceberg; the Costa Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, ran her too close to the shore and the ship struck the side of a reef and partially sank. The show mentioned that he was arrested for manslaughter in connection with the deaths of 32 people in the wreck – which, given that the ship had a capacity of 3,200, was actually a pretty good survival rate (though 32 deaths – 33 if you count the diver who died in the closing stages of the salvage operation – were still 33 too many). In fact he was actually convicted and served prison time. The rescue project was a joint effort by U.S., British and Italian operations, and the reason the various authorities were willing to spend $1.2 billion to raise the ship and move it to safer waters for scrapping – over twice the $500 million its owners, Carnival Cruise Lines, had spent to build it – was the Costa Concordia happened to sink in the middle of an environmentally sensitive area. If the ship had fallen off the section of underwater reef on which it precariously balanced itself after it partially sank, 2,038 tons of diesel fuel as well as other highly toxic chemicals (including the ones various items, including automobiles, the ship was carrying contained) would have been released into a delicate ocean ecosystem that includes, among other things, species of coral and underwater plants that exist nowhere else in the world.

The show, released in 2015 – just three years after the accident – detailed the long, expensive and elaborate process of moving the wreck off the reef and making sure it didn’t break apart in the process of being re-righted and refloated. A previous shipwreck in France had been salvaged by using giant welding torches to cut the wreck into nine segments, each of which could then be relatively easily salvaged and moved onto cargo vessels, but because of the extreme environmental sensitivity of the area that approach was right out for the Costa Concordia. Instead they had to figure out ways to keep the vessel intact as they refloated her after first getting her right-side up in the water – the ship had sunk at about a 45° angle and it needed first to be put upright. Among the techniques used were laying down huge balloons which were filled with cement to create a sturdy underwater platform for the ship to rest on, and creating so-called “blister tanks” to support the bow (front) of the ship so it didn’t break off and sink further into the water during the righting and raising processes. They also needed to build giant steel tanks called “sponsons” and weld them to the sides of the ship; the sponsons were filled with water and then the water was pumped out and replaced with air, so the ship could once again float and be towed to a salvage yard outside Genoa for actual dismantling and recycling. The sponsons were each the size of an 11-story building but had to be welded to the hull with such precision as to be no more than two inches apart. The technique for actually raising the Costa Concordia was called “parhauling” and had been developed by the U.S. Navy. After the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the port had been littered with sunken battleships and other large vessels, including the U.S.S. Oklahoma and Utah. To clear them out of the way so the Navy could still use the port, Navy divers threaded huge steel cables under the ships and used on-shore motors to pull the cables and right the ships. The Oklahoma was raised intact but the Utah wasn’t; it broke apart during parhauling and bits of it are still in the harbor to this day.

“Sunken Ship Rescue” was above all a tale of engineering heroes and how they managed to solve problem after problem and get the job done in an unheroic, matter-of-fact manner, though I suspect the people involved – including the story’s two biggest heroes, Nicholas Sloane (salvage master with his own company, who won the German Sea Prize in 2015 for his work on the Costa Concordia) and Rich Habib (former managing director of Titan Salvage) – had no idea when they undertook the job in the first place that it would take over 2 ½ years. (An added end title revealed that Habib died in 2016.) Among the grimly amusing scenes in the film was one in which a diver working underwater on the wreck had to isolate inside an air-pressure chamber for hours after his shift, which could only be 40 minutes long so he didn’t get “the bends” (a potentially deadly disease caused by the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream after exposure to the intense water pressures of deep-sea diving). The actual raising of the Costa Concordia is a moment of deep suspense as the crew applies 5,000 tons of pressure on the various cables – and the ship doesn’t move. Though the engines they were using to power the lifting cables could produce up to 13,000 tons, they didn’t want to go that high because that would have increased the risk of breaking up the ship. Eventually they applied 6,900 tons and the ship finally righted itself – though they had to continue the operation at night because once they started it, they couldn’t stop without risking losing control and having the ship descend to a lower level of the sea, causing exactly the environmental catastrophe they were spending all that time and money to prevent. This show ends with the towing process (done by a small fleet of tugboats) just getting under way, though once they got it to the Genoa shipyard that, like all the previous stages in the process, took longer than anticipated. The last of the sponsons were removed in August 2016 and the final dismantling of the Costa Concordia wasn’t complete until July 2017. If nothing else, the Costa Concordia disaster is a fascinating example of the law of entropy in action: it’s a warning that creating something, whether a ship or a salvage operation, takes immense amounts of energy and time, whereas destroying it happens relatively quickly.

The Freshman (Harold Lloyd Productions, Pathé, 1925)

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

Last night (Monday, August 28) my husband Charles and I went to the annual silent movie night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We left home at about 4:15 p.m. and got to the Pavilion at 5 – and were a bit surprised to find it almost empty. In previous years Charles had got there way early to stake us out a seat near enough to the screen where we could actually see the movie, but though the place was pretty packed this year it wasn’t anywhere nearly as crowded as it’s been in years past. (I think a lot of people have still not got back into the habit of going out after COVID-19.) The film was Harold Lloyd’s 1925 college comedy The Freshman, which we’ve seen before, and the live organist accompanying it was Clark Wilson, an Ohio-based musician and organ curator who, according to his official biography, learned the art of silent-film accompaniment from John Muri, who had been old enough to have practiced it “in the day.” Wilson’s bio makes me wish we could have seen and heard him accompany a serious silent drama instead of a comedy; for The Freshman he relied mostly on pop songs from the 1920’s, which was appropriate (one of his principles, as expressed in his bio, is that “the musical style of the time remains intact; no attempt is made to distract from the picture by using themes or styles that entered the musical scene years later,” a principle I wish had been followed by some of the composers who have concocted awfully anachronistic scores for silent films shown on Turner Classic Movies or released on DVD) but also made his score seemed just a bit shopworn. As usual, the live organist presented a concert recital of a few songs while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to allow the film to be shown – Wilson joked that he usually plays for silent films in old, restored movie palaces whose ceilings were painted to resemble sky, but in this case the sky was the real deal – but Wilson’s own pre-film concert was disappointing.

First of all, he began in medias res by playing a fanfare even before he was actually introduced, and the person who introduced him, Spreckels Organ Society president Randy Wood, announced that Wilson was going to open the concert with a “melody.” He meant “medley,” and Wilson did indeed do that. Unlike previous movie night organists, he did not announce his selections in advance, and both Charles and I were stumped by a lot of what he played. Wilson opened with Alfred Newman’s 20th Century-Fox fanfare and then played a mélange of pieces including “Believe It or Not,” the theme from the early-1980’s TV sitcom The Greatest American Hero, “We Are the World” (both Charles and I did double takes when this song emerged from some of Wilson’s noodling) and bits from John Williams’ film scores – including the Star Wars movies (though he blessedly avoided the over-familiar main title; I believe he used the Imperial March instead) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (though I don’t think I’d have recognized that if the U.S. Navy Band Southwest hadn’t played it at their final “Twilight in the Park” program last Thursday, August 24). Fortunately, for The Freshman Wilson knuckled down and played a score mostly drawn from actual pop songs of the mid-1920’s, many of them about college life as it was seen in the popular fiction of the time. The Freshman cast the 31-year-old Harold Lloyd as Harold Lamb, a would-be college student who’s raised the money to go to Tate College by selling vacuum cleaners (which suggests that Lloyd could have done a prequel that would have been at least as funny as this!). Harold’s vision of college life has been shaped by a movie he’s seen eight times called The College Hero, whose star does a weird little dance before he puts out his hand to shake someone he’s just met – a gesture Harold emulates. There’s a great scene early on in which Harold’s father, an amateur radio enthusiast, hears Harold making weird noises in his bedroom. Harold is just practicing college yells, but dad thinks it’s static from his radio, and when Harold’s practice cheers include a few phrases in pidgin-Chinese, dad rejoices and says, “I’ve got China!”

Later, on the train to Tate College, Harold meets Peggy (Jobyna Ralston, who took over as Lloyd’s leading lady on screen when Mildred Davis retired from acting to marry Lloyd for real; they stayed together until her death in 1969, two years before his, and of all the superstar male comedians of the silent era Lloyd was the only one who married just once). She’s solving a crossword puzzle – a national craze in the mid-1920’s – and he’s trying to come up with a word meaning romance. An elderly woman overhears them on the train and thinks they’re an actual couple, in a charming little aside that marks Harold Lloyd as one of the founding fathers of situation comedy even though he’s remembered today, if at all, only for his daredevil stunts. (Lloyd lived long enough to complain about that; he once said, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anybody wants to talk to me about!”) Once he gets to Tate, the other students gang up on him and successfully talk him into taking them to the local ice cream parlor, where all the ice cream is on him. This stunt makes a huge dent in Harold’s bankroll, so much that he has to abandon his original living arrangements and live in a cheap rooming house run by Peggy’s father. Harold soon realizes that his only shot at collegiate success is by becoming a football star, though his initial attempts are predictable wash-outs; he gets pressed into service as an animate tackling dummy and then is made the team’s water boy, though he’s led to believe that he’s actually made it onto the squad. Harold’s next chance at popularity is as host of the annual “Fall Frolic,” a dance which it seems is unilaterally hosted and paid for by one student. In 1924 it was Chet Trask (James H. Anderson), the real-life “college hero” Harold is trying to duplicate, and in 1925 it’s Harold – only his tailor (Joseph Harrington) is late making his suit, thanks to regular dizzy spells only brandy can ease.

The tailor warns Harold that he’s only basted the suit – holding it together with weak, easily torn stitches because he hasn’t had time to do the final assembly yet – and he should be careful moving around in it. Well, the moment the writers (Sam Taylor, Ted Wilde, John Grey, Tim Whelan and an uncredited Lloyd himself; Taylor and Fred Newmeyer also directed the film, though Lloyd was the real auteur) drop that hint, we know what’s going to happen. Harold’s suit is going to unravel spectacularly in mid-dance, and even the attempts of the tailor to mend it while Harold is partying fail spectacularly. In James Agee’s famous article on silent comedy, he claimed that in the original version of the scene Lloyd refused to allow his pants to drop, thinking that dropping his pants was too low-comedy and he would lose only the jacket. After a disappointing preview, Lloyd called back the entire cast – including all the extras – for a costly reshoot in which he did indeed drop his pants at the end, to hilarious effect. At the party the College Cad (Brooks Benedict) tries to rape Peggy, who’s working the dance as a hat-check girl, and when Harold breaks it up and preserves Peggy’s virtue, the Cad announces that he’s going to get his revenge by telling Harold that he’s been the butt of jokes all year, and he’s only the water boy on the football team, not an actual member. After that comes the big annual football game between Tate and Union State, who jumps out to an early 3-0 lead on a field goal (which we don’t see, though Lloyd sent out a second unit to the 1924 East-West Game for stock footage of actual football played to a packed stadium). Union State’s players are so rough the Tate squad literally runs out of players, and the Tate coach (Pat Harmon) is forced to put Harold into the game. Harold does surprisingly well – not really, given that he is the film’s star (and producer) and he’s obviously going to stack the deck for himself – though he blows his big chance when, previously told by a referee that he’s supposed to drop the football whenever he hears the referee’s whistle, hears a nearby factory whistle blow just as he’s at the one-yard line about to score the game-winning touchdown for Tate. The other team scoops up the ball, but Harold is able to wrest it away from them and win the game for Tate in a broken-field run down the full length of the field, which makes him an instant hero and wins him the love of Peggy.

In 1947 Preston Sturges cast Lloyd in his last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, and got Lloyd’s permission to use the last reel of The Freshman to begin his movie, which cast Lloyd, 25 years after his transitory college triumph, stuck in a dead-end accounting job until he rebels. The film was produced by Howard Hughes, who three years later cut about 15 minutes of it and re-released it through RKO, which he then owned, as Mad Wednesday. The Freshman is a fine, funny film, and yet it’s far from Lloyd’s best even though it was a huge hit on its initial release. It made more money than any of Lloyd’s other films, and it started a cycle of college movies that focused almost exclusively on athletics and social life. Unusually for a film supposedly set at a college, there’s absolutely no education depicted in this spoof of “higher education.” The football field and the dance hall are the abodes of this movie; never do we see an actual classroom and the only faculty member in the dramatis personae is the college dean, who one of Thomas J. Grey’s best intertitles describes as never having married because if he had, his wife would expect to call him by his first name. The Freshman inspired a lot of college comedies, including College (1927), which Buster Keaton was forced to make by his producer, Joseph Schenck, after the financial failure of his masterpiece, The General (1926); and probably the greatest of them, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932), which not only had scenes in classrooms lampooning college curricula but spoofed the then-current practice of colleges hiring professional “ringers” to play on supposedly “amateur” student teams. I remember being startled by seeing “serious” films of the early 1930’s, including The Sport Parade (RKO, 1932) and College Coach (Warner Bros., 1933), which depicted dramatically the same scandals the Marx Brothers were ridiculing. But among Lloyd’s better silents were the iconic Safety Last! (1923) – the famous one in which he climbs a skyscraper to win a bet and gets tangled up in a clock – For Heaven’s Sake (1924) and the awesomely dark The Devil’s Brother (1927), which seemed to me a deliberate parody of F. W. Murnau’s unauthorized Dracula knock-off Nosferatu (1922).

Mystery Train (Mystery Train, JVC Entertainment Networks, 1989)

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

Our “feature” last night (Sunday, August 27) was Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), the fourth feature made by this writer-director whose movies practically define the term “idiosyncratic.” My husband Charles had expressed interest in seeing this film again – he’d watched it in the early 1990’s when it was relatively new – when I was playing the soundtrack CD to the documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2019) and it contained both Junior Parker’s original recording of the song “Mystery Train” (1953) and Elvis’s cover (1955, his final record for Sun). Jarmusch’s film is actually book-ended by both those records – we hear Presley’s at the beginning and Parker’s at the end – played by a couple of late-teenage Japanese tourists, Jun (Masatochi Nagase) and his girlfriend Mitsuko (Yûki Kudô), who show up in Memphis, Tennessee to visit Graceland and the Sun Studios at 706 Union Street as part of a pilgrimage to the holy sites of the Elvis cult. Mystery Train is a film that has three different but intersecting plot lines that occur at the same time but only occasionally interact, and rather than intercut between them Jarmusch devotes a little over half an hour of screen time to each one. The only common time clues are a broadcast on a radio station that segues between Roy Orbison’s Sun record “Domino” and Elvis’s “Blue Moon” (recorded for Sun but released on RCA Victor after the big label bought Elvis’s contract in a deal which included the rights to all Elvis’s Sun recordings) and a few sound effects that originate in one story line and cross over to be heard by characters in another. Among those are the sounds of Jun and Mitsuko having sex and a gunshot fired in the Arcade Hotel, where the main part of the film takes place. The Arcade Hotel was already derelict when Jarmusch shot the film and it was torn down a year later (disappointing many film fans who travel to Memphis hoping to see it), though the Arcade Restaurant across the street not only still exists but remains in business, or at least it did as of 2010 when the Criterion Collection released the Blu-Ray disc on which we were watching the film.

The young Japanese tourist couple’s journey through Memphis – we only hear that they got to Graceland but we actually see them in the Sun studio, though later they admit to each other that they couldn’t understand what the Sun tour guide (Jodie Markell) was saying because she spoke so fast and in a to-them incomprehensible Southern accent – is one of the three stories, subtitled “Far from Yokohama.” (In an interview included as a bonus in the film, Jarmusch said he originally wanted to have them come from Osaka because Osaka is the center of Japanese rock ‘n’ roll, but his two actors were from Tokyo and couldn’t learn the unique Osaka accent in time.) They also argue throughout the movie over who was better, Elvis or Carl Perkins; Mitsuko insists Elvis was the one and only “King,” while Jun says Perkins was better. (In the interview Jarmusch says Perkins was a better guitar player but Elvis a better singer, and I’d agree with that but also give Perkins points for writing most of his own songs, which Elvis didn’t.) The second plot line, “A Ghost,” concerns Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), an Italian woman who is planning to fly out of Memphis with a coffin containing her late husband’s remains. (Jarmusch said he’d been asked if the corpse was supposed to be that of Roberto Benigni, Braschi’s real-life husband. He replied, “I hope not!”) She meets up with a con man (Tom Noonan) who accosts her in the Arcade Restaurant and offers to sell her a comb he says he got from Elvis personally (remember that Elvis had been dead for only 12 years when this film was made) for $20, which she gives him but only to get him to go away. Then Luisa meets Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco), a woman who says she’s stuck in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend and is planning to move to Natchez, Mississippi to get away from him. Since the rooms at the Arcade Hotel cost $22 per night each, and Dee Dee doesn’t have the money, Luisa offers to split the charge with her and the two spend a rather uneasy night together. At one point Luisa sees a ghost of Elvis in their room and wakes Dee Dee to show it to her – only, you guessed it, as soon as Dee Dee recovers consciousness and gets angry with Luisa for waking her up, the ghost is gone. Later the two hear the sounds of Jun and Mitsuko in the room upstairs having sex with each other, and one of the women dismissively says, “They’re fucking.”

The third plot line, “Lost in Space,” is by far the most interesting (and the one Charles remembered the most from the last time he’d seen this film). It’s about three small-time crooks, two white – Johnny (Joe Strummer, formerly of The Clash, who shows real promise as an actor here) and Charlie (the young Steve Buscemi in his 15th feature film) – and one Black. The three hang out in a combination bar and pool hall called “Shades,” and when Johnny upsets his friends by showing up with a loaded revolver, the three go out to a liquor store – where Johnny pulls out his gun and holds up the place. When the store clerk attempts to resist, Johnny shoots him, leaving the other two fearful that the clerk will die and all three will face a murder rap. They go to the Arcade and demand from the desk clerk (played by the great 1950’s R&B singer “Screamin’” Jay Hawkins) that he hide them out. He sticks them in Room 22, the grungiest spot by far in this already grungy hotel, where Johnny threatens to kill himself, Charlie tries to stop him, They Both Reach for the Gun and Charlie ends up wounded in the leg big–time – the source of the gunshot Luisa and Dee Dee heard. Strummer and Hawkins aren’t the only professional musicians in the film; Rufus Thomas appears as a man at the train station where Jun and Mitsuko arrive, and Tom Waits plays the radio station D.J. in the main sequence that links all three plots. (Waits had previously acted for Jarmusch in the 1986 film Down by Law, and though he was actually seen in that one while in Mystery Train only his voice is heard, Jarmusch insists it was the same character.) Waits also announces on his radio show that the police are looking for a gang of three, two white and one Black, and naturally the crooks hear that and get scared. They needn’t be because they easily evade the cops, whom we see go tearing off in the wrong direction. It ends with Dee Dee on the train to Natchez, Luisa on the plane to Rome, and Jun and Mitsuko aboard a train to heaven knows where with cassette players blasting Junior Parker’s original “Mystery Train” in their ears.

I liked Mystery Train, though it didn’t move me or stir my emotional depths the way the greatest films do. I give Jarmusch points for using just eight original records (Parker’s and Presley’s “Mystery Train,” Orbison’s “Domino,” Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” Rufus Thomas’s “The Memphis Train,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time,” Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart” and The Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger”) instead of drowning the film in cool music cues as, he admits, he was tempted to do – he joked the soundtrack album could have been a five-CD set. The movie is a surprisingly quiet, restrained work – Charles said that when he first saw it he expected something wilder, more “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” – reflecting Jarmusch’s sensibility and his odd love of lowlife characters. The disc also contained a brief documentary on the Memphis music scene and in particular how many of the landmarks in the city’s musical history have been destroyed – including most of Beale Street, razed by a racist city government after Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, as well as the converted movie theatre where most of the Stax soul classics were recorded. The mini-doc features Rufus Thomas making his fabled complaint that once Elvis hit the big time, Sun Records owner Sam Phillips almost overnight dropped almost all his Black artists and signed only whites from then on. So Thomas, who had been on the first Sun Records release – “Bear Cat,” an “answer record” to Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (later also covered by Elvis, though Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is so much better the records practically inhabit different universes) – went to Stax, became one of their first hit-makers, and brought his daughter Carla Thomas to Stax as well.

Vanished in Yosemite (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 26) at 8 Lifetime showed a “premiere” movie called Vanished in Yosemite, which I watched with relatively low expectations, probably because it was presented as a follow-up to the 2022 Lifetime movie Disappearance in Yellowstone (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/05/disappearance-in-yellowstone-johnson.html). Both films were made by the same studio, Johnson Production Group, but by different writers and directors: Disappearance in Yellowstone was directed by Tony Dean Smith from a script by Paul A. Birkitt, while Vanished in Yosemite was both written and directed by Doug Campbell (though a woman whose name escapes me was listed alongside him as co-author of the original story). Vanished in Yosemite actually turned out to be a better movie than Disappearance in Yellowstone, though alas I had to piece together information about it from various Web sites because imdb.com didn’t have a page for it yet. It’s about two sisters, Jennifer (Skye Coyne) and Katrina (Kelcie Stranahan) Stewart, who decide to take a vacation in Yosemite National Park. Only Jennifer is a control freak who has them scheduled practically to the minute, while Katrina is more footloose and easy-going. Katrina is also, shall we say, a lot freer with her affections towards men than Jennifer.

The opening night of their stay Katrina is cruised by Rick Edgewood (Rob LaColla) at the restaurant at the Buena Vista Hotel, where she and Jennifer are staying. Rick says he’s a photographer for a climate action group who’s in Yosemite to take pictures to show how human-caused climate change is affecting its environment, and he’s got a camera with a very long white telephoto lens to prove it. Rick invites Katrina to go hiking with him the next morning; Jennifer insists on coming along, but the next morning she’s suffering from food poisoning and so Rick and Katrina go off alone together. The film began with an elaborate prologue in which a woman is shown sleeping on a bed in the middle of the great outdoors – the bed is equipped with a matching dresser and mirror – and she’s shown being chased by an unseen assailant shooting arrows at her with a mechanical bow. The significance of this scene doesn’t become apparent until the very end of the film, and through much of the movie I was wondering whether it was a flash-forward, a flashback or a dream sequence. Anyway, Rick and Katrina go off together on their hike, only our suspicions (and Jennifer’s) that he was up to no good are confirmed when he sneaks over to Katrina’s bag and, while she’s conveniently not looking, drops three drops of a knockout drug into her water bottle. Then he reminds her to hydrate, and no sooner has she drunk some of the drugged water than she starts to fade out of consciousness. Eventually she goes fully under and Rick throws her into the bed of his white pickup truck. When she comes to she finds herself in a shabby old shack on the outskirts of the park, tied to a bed, and Rick explains that she can call for help all she wants but no one will hear her. Rick leaves her alone to get food, and returns with a can of chili, only when he tries to feed it to her she spits it in his face twice.

Meanwhile, Jennifer is convinced her sister has been kidnapped, and she calls her ex-boyfriend Wally (Jason Tobias), whom she broke up with three years earlier after she caught him having extra-relational activity and responded by having an extra-relational affair of her own with a man named Marcos. At first Wally couldn’t be less interested in helping his ex find her sister, but eventually he joins her in Yosemite and the two try to find what happened to her. They have two clues: the site where Rick dumped Katrina’s phone and an Indian bead bracelet he was wearing when Jennifer first saw him. Jennifer makes a series of videos appealing for help finding her sister, which in an intriguing plot twist earns her the ire of Merced Mayor Dan Jefferson, Buena Vista Hotel manager Teresa Williams, and sheriff’s deputy A. James. The latter two are Black, and all three join forces in demanding that Jennifer take down her videos because they’ve spread so far and wide that already the Buena Vista Hotel has had 40 percent of their outstanding bookings cancel on the eve of the busy tourist season. Rick not only cuts the brake line of Wally’s car so it crashes in the park, he also uses his knife to vandalize the room Jennifer and Wally were staying in (in twin beds). Teresa Williams accuses Jennifer and Wally of trashing the room themselves and uses that as an excuse to throw them out of the hotel, and A. James adds to the threat by telling them he’ll arrest them if they return to the park at all. Nonetheless, they do precisely that, and distract A. James by starting a fire in a trash can so they can sneak past him and get back into the park.

They have what appears to be a stroke of luck when a woman named “Miranda Brown,” or something like that, approaches them and said that Rick tried to kidnap her, and she knows where his cabin is. Only [spoiler alert!] “Miranda” is actually Rick’s younger sister and partner in crime, and for an ending Doug Campbell rips off The Most Dangerous Game. Rick and “Miranda” are international big-game hunters who, like General Zaroff in Richard Connell’s oft-filmed story, have got bored hunting traditional game animals and taken to hunting humans instead. Rick takes out Wally by pushing him off a cliff, and he and “Miranda” overpower Jennifer as well as Katrina, after Rick has earlier also knocked off a cute young nature photographer who came upon Katrina in the deserted mountain cabin and tried to rescue her. The film ends as it began, with a bed, dresser and mirror set up in the middle of nature, and Rick and “Miranda” hunting down the terrified Jennifer and Katrina – only Jennifer ducks just in time to miss one of Rick’s arrows, and it lands in “Miranda” instead and kills her. Rick is grief-stricken over having accidentally killed his sister – it’s the one even remotely human moment of his otherwise totally evil portrayal – and this gives Jennifer and Katrina the opportunity they need to beat him to death with two small logs they’ve conveniently found. There’s an epilogue in which Jennifer and Katrina return to Yosemite a year or so later, with Wally in tow – fortunately he landed in a canopy of pine trees so he was merely injured, not killed, and he walks with a limp and needs a cane but should be O.K. long-term as soon as he gets enough physical therapy. Also Jennifer and Katrina have gone back to school – Katrina to become a trauma counselor and Jennifer an M.D. – and Jennifer and Wally have not only become a couple again, but at the end of the movie Jennifer announces she’s pregnant. “Who’s the father?” Katrina asks her snottily, when it’s not that difficult to figure it out.

Despite some silly moments (including a flashback that shows “Miranda” actually spiking Jennifer’s food so she’d get sick and couldn’t resist when Katrina went for her hike with Rick the day he abducted her), Vanished in Yosemite is actually a pretty good Lifetime thriller, and I liked the way Doug Campbell and cinematographer Christopher Jordan counterpointed the sheer natural beauty of Yosemite with the dastardly deeds going on there. There are enough shots of Half Dome and the other natural wonders of the park to qualify this as a nature documentary. Vanished in Yosemite is also relatively well acted, though the scenes of Rick actually holding Katrina hostage are a good deal less interesting than Jennifer’s and Wally’s obsessive quest to find her. Rob LaColla’s performance as Rick is especially chilling, far better than Aren Bucholz’s in the analogous role in Disappearance in Yellowstone: he’s disarming, almost charming, and one could readily imagine oneself falling in love (or at least lust) with him at first sight just as Katrina does: her final text message to Jennifer before her abduction reads, “I think I’m in love!”

Midsomer Murders: "Beyond the Grave" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, Arts & Entertainment, American Public Television, 2000)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 24) I turned on KPBS for a rerun of a Midsomer Murders episode from 2000, “Beyond the Grave,” which already featured John Nettles as the lead cop, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, but considerably younger than I’m used to seeing him in later incarnations of this series. It centers around a museum in the fictional “Midsomer County” in central England devoted to the memory of Johnathan Lowrie, a Cavalier who was killed by Roundheads in 1644 in the English Civil War between supporters of King Charles I and backers of the Puritans led by Oliver Cromwell. The royalists were called “Cavaliers” because the men wore their hair long and dressed in dandy fashions, while the Puritans were called “Roundheads” because they shaved themselves bald and wore stark black and white clothing. James Tate (James Laurenson) leads guided tours of the museum, which is in the old Lawrie family home – Johnathan Lawrie is even buried under his living-room floor because he left orders that his final resting place was to be wherever he died, and that’s where a Roundhead death squad cornered him – until one day when he’s pointing out the portrait of Lawrie, and it’s been severely vandalized. Tate calls in the one experienced painting restorer in the area, Sandra MacKillop (Cheryl Campbell), to fix the portrait, and she does her best but freaks out when she realizes how much John Lawrie resembled her late husband David, who died less than a year before. Barnaby investigates the vandalism with his usual assistant, Sergeant Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), and Nico Bentley (Ed Waters), an actor who’s dating Barnaby’s daughter Cully (Joyce Howard) and has lined up a job playing an assistant police detective. There’s a nice line for Gavin Troy in which he expresses his discontent that Nico is going to make more money playing a police detective than Gavin makes actually being one.

Sandra is more or less living with her brother-in-law Charles (David Robb), who co-owned a lucrative software company with his brother David, Sandra’s late husband. She’s also had a history of mental illness in the months since David died, and somewhere along the way she started taking heroin and ultimately developed a habit, though she apparently kicked. There’s also a memoir by the late George Burton, who masterminded a robbery years before and then, after he served his prison term, wrote a book about it. James Tate was a member of his gang, under his original name, Michael Whistler, and his assignment was to create a blocked account so that they could keep the money after a decent interval had passed and the victims of the big robbery had stopped looking for it. Only one of the original crooks, Ralph Bailey (Roger Sloman), has traced Tate and demands his share of the money at once. Meanwhile, Nico has translated a Greek inscription on the Lawrie tombstone which nobody else had been able to read; it said he was buried there with all his possessions, including a silver service which his direct descendant, Marcus Lowrie (Charles Simon), wants. Only Marcus is beaten to death inside Johnathan’s grave by a man wearing a suit of armor that once belonged to Johnathan Lawrie and was sent to the museum by a family member living in Champaign, Illinois. There’s also the character of Alan Bradford (Malcolm Sinclair), who’s James Tate’s assistant at the museum and in a rueful scene confesses to Tom Barnaby in a rather elliptical way that he’s Gay.

One of the ways the people running the Lawrie museum promote it is by claiming that it’s haunted by the ghost of Johnathan Lawrie, and as part of her mental illness Sandra (by far the most interesting of this rather dreary lot of characters) believes it. A local medium named Eleanor Bunsall (Prunella Scales, who played the wife of ex-Monty Python star John Cleese in Fawlty Towers and has a number of distinguished credits in films over the years) regularly holds séances at the Lawrie estate and is caught by the cops walking across the grounds. A fire breaks out inside the museum and later a bust of King Charles I moves, seemingly of its own accord, and breaks on the floor. Later, however, Tom Barnaby deduces that both these incidents had prosaic causes: the fire was ignited by a beam of light concentrated by a part of the stained-glass window that acted as a prism, and the statue was moved by a fishing line hooked on it. It turns out that Sandra McKillop is being gaslighted by her brother-in-law in league with her therapist, Linda Marquis (Sylvestra Le Touzel), to get her declared legally insane and incarcerated in a mental institution so Charles can grab her share of the software company (ya remember the software company?), which if she died would revert to her sister. Directed by Moira Armstrong and written by Douglas Watkinson based on characters created by Caroline Graham, “Beyond the Grave” is an overly complicated and not particularly thrilling mystery – this show really has got better over the years – but it has a comfortable feeling like a lot of British mysteries, which make even murder seem pretty genteel.

Ringo Starr: One of Them (Entertain Me Productions, 1091 Pictures, 2022)

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

On Wednesday, August 23, after my husband Charles got back from work, we watched an intriguing 43-minute YouTube video on Beatles drummer Ringo Starr called Ringo Starr: One of Them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mHop-TmIzQ). It featured interviews with two of the other three, Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon, though the main authority figure was someone I’d never heard of before, Sid Griffin. Apparently he’s a Louisville native, an eighth-generation Kentuckian and a long-standing country-rock musician who’s been in a series of bands including The Long Ryders, The Coal Porters (a marvelous pun) and Western Electric, as well as briefly a member of punk bands called Death Wish and The Unclaimed. He made a privately produced EP with The Unclaimed in 1980 on the Moxie label that contained his first recorded songs. Griffin is also a biographer of country-rock legend Gram Parsons (a drug casualty from the early 1970’s who recruited Emmylou Harris into the country world; other than that he’s one of the most boring musicians ever) and has written two books about Bob Dylan, including the definitive history of the so-called “Basement Tapes” recordings of 1967-68. Griffin has appeared as a talking-head in documentaries on John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, Adele and now Ringo Starr.

Ringo Starr: One of Them showcases Ringo’s early life, including the long hospitalizations during his youth (for peritonitis at age 7 and tuberculosis at age 14) that basically threw him out of school; his discoveries of music in general and percussion in particular (when he was in hospital he’d amuse himself by banging on various furniture fixtures with a stick, and at age 17 his stepfather, Harry Graves, bought him his own drum set after Richard Starkey (his real name) injured himself on his first day of work as a furniture joiner. One of the quirks about Ringo’s background is he was by far the poorest of the Beatles when he was growing up; while John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all came from solidly middle-class backgrounds, Ringo grew up in The Dingle, Liverpool’s slums. His parents broke up when Ringo was three, and though his mom remarried (Ringo jokingly referred to her new husband as “stepladder” instead of “stepfather”) the family was a good deal worse off economically than those of the other Beatles. Happily, Ringo got a surprising amount of work on the Liverpool rock-music scene because he was one of the few people in town who actually owned his own drum set – as did Pete Best, who got the gig with The Beatles in 1960 because he owned his own kit and the rest of the Beatles needed a drummer for their proffered engagement in Hamburg, Germany. Ringo became the drummer for Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, who went to Hamburg themselves and ultimately alternated sets with The Beatles at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club. In 1960 one of Rory Storm’s musicians decided to make a demo showing off his own voice, and he picked The Beatles as backup but demanded Ringo play on it because he was Rory Storm’s drummer. Alas, this recording does not exist (Allan Williams, the Beatles’ first manager, lost it in a drunken binge on his way to delivering it to Ringo), but this is the first known instance of John, Paul, George and Ringo playing together.

By 1962 The Beatles were back in Liverpool playing at the Cavern Club, a dank, sweaty nightspot in an industrial basement, and after their failed audition for Decca Records in January they finally won a recording contract with Parlophone Records in June. The history of how Ringo joined The Beatles was screwed up in this video; Pete Best was still their drummer when they auditioned for George Martin at Parlophone, and Martin refused to record them with Best and told them he’d call in a session drummer for their record dates. In his 1979 autobiography All You Need Is Ears, Martin said he thought his denunciation of Best was the final straw that led The Beatles to fire him and offer Ringo the gig as his replacement. When The Beatles showed up in London for their first official Parlophone session on September 4, 1962, Martin had never even heard Ringo, though he used him on the version of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” recorded that day and released as a single. Then he re-recorded the song with session drummer Andy White one week later, September 11, and that’s the version that ended up on The Beatles’ first album. (You can tell because Martin gave Ringo a tambourine to bang on the track.) The show did mention that Pete Best had a big following in Liverpool; The Beatles literally got death threats for having fired Best and fans showed up at The Cavern with signs reading, “Pete Forever! Ringo Never!” One of the interesting aspects of this show is its analysis of what Ringo actually brought to The Beatles musically. Though he was left-handed (ironic that both the surviving Beatles, Ringo and Paul, are “lefties,” though Paul is right-handed in normal life but left-handed as a musician), he played drums with a right-handed setup, so when he started a drum roll he was beginning it with his dominant arm. Ringo also didn’t just keep straight time like most rock drummers did; he accented a song and played fills that answered what John, George and Paul did.

Though the video doesn’t mention this, that’s how jazz drummers usually play, and though Ringo didn’t have any jazz experience (unlike other 1960’s drummers like Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, John Densmore of The Doors and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience), he nonetheless expanded the horizons of rock drumming. At the same time both Charles and I thought of a 1950’s rock drummer who had also been important in creating the overall sound of his band: Jerry “J. I.” Allison of Buddy Holly and The Crickets. Allison not only co-wrote Holly’s two biggest hits, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue,” he essentially created hard rock and heavy metal with his paradiddle drum licks on “Peggy Sue.” (The Crickets also were the source for The Beatles’ name; their example gave John Lennon the idea of naming his own band after an insect.) Ringo Starr: One of Them also mentions Ringo’s – and the other Beatles’ – growing dissatisfaction with the circus-like atmosphere of their live tours. In other interviews Ringo has said he got so bored with touring his musicianship suffered; he got lazy and played only the afterbeats of the songs. In the Beatles’ last appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, September 12, 1965, when they did “Ticket to Ride” Ringo started out just playing the afterbeats, but a few seconds in, when the song reaches the lines “I don’t know why she’s riding so high,” his musical instincts kick in and he started playing normally – and powerfully. Oddly, for someone like Ringo who had the reputation of being the most good-natured Beatle, he was the first to leave the group in early 1968 during the recording of the White Album, and there are still debates among Beatles fans over how much of the drumming on the White Album is Ringo’s and how much is Paul’s via overdubbing. (There’s even one song, “Dear Prudence,” which starts out with Paul on drums but there’s a school of thought that at 2:50 into the song Ringo enters and takes over. A YouTube video on this is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptAmOYIFIx8&t=57s.) When Ringo thought better of it and returned, the rest of The Beatles had put a huge arrangement of roses on his drum set that spelled “Welcome home, Ringo.”

Ringo Starr: One of Them is about two-thirds over before The Beatles break up, and not surprisingly Ringo was the Beatle who maintained the best relations with the others: not only did he play on both John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band albums, but after two Ringo solo albums during which he sang standards (Sentimental Journey) and country (Beaucoups of Blues), for his third one he got Richard Perry to produce and the three other Beatles all contributed songs to the Ringo album as well as his next two, Goodnight Vienna (1974) and Ringo’s Rotogravure (1976). Ringo went through a bad patch of alcohol and drug abuse in the early 1970’s and there’s an odd interview clip with John Lennon in which he recalled the so-called “Lost Weekend” in Los Angeles in 1973. He was there with Harry Nilsson, supposedly to produce a Nilsson album called Pussy Cats but actually to room with Nilsson, Ringo and Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer. The four of them consumed huge amounts of alcohol and various drugs, and Lennon savored the irony that he was the one who decided to knock it off, return to at least a semblance of sobriety, and pull the album together (though it’s not clear which album he was talking about, Pussy Cats or Lennon’s own Walls and Bridges and Rock ‘n’ Roll).

Ringo was also hailed as the Beatle most able to pursue a career in movie acting after his charming “This Boy” interlude in The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and he made his solo acting debut in a minor role in Candy (1968) and then a more important part in The Magic Christian (1969), both based on novels by Terry Southern. Later he would do Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) – he played Zappa’s alter ego and the best scene in the movie is the one in which Ringo as Zappa meets Zappa as Zappa – as well as a Western called Blindman, a film called That’ll Be the Day (1973) about the early days of British rock ‘n’ roll, and Harry Nilsson’s vampire spoof Son of Dracula (1973). In 1981 Ringo made a comedy called Caveman and there met his second (and still current) wife, actress Barbara Bach. Later he launched a series of concert tours with his so-called “All-Starr Band,” attracting a huge audience who had despaired of ever seeing any of The Beatles live – Paul has continued to tour but his ticket prices are a lot higher than Ringo’s – and he also has done children’s TV shows in Britain. Ringo Starr: One of Them is a welcome example that sometimes the good guys actually win; for a poor, sickly kid from one of the worst neighborhoods in Liverpool to make it to international superstardom and a genteel afterlife is a fate devoutly to be wished!

Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" Symphony (WNET 13, PBS, 2022)

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

Last night (Monday, August 21) at 9 I put on KPBS for a broadcast of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony (1963) from the Ravinia Music Festival in 2022. The Ravinia Music Festival is a summer season for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, much like Tanglewood in Boston or Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia, held in a complex of theatres, some outdoor, some indoor, that on screen looked a lot like San Diego’s Old Globe. The orchestra involved was the Chicago Symphony, along with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and a children’s choir formerly known as the Chicago Children’s Choir but now given the preposterously P.C. name “United Voices,” which seems to be a reflection of the multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds of the members. The conductor was Marin Alsop, a woman who was a protégée of Leonard Bernstein – the show illustrated this with a still photo of the two of them together – and who’s taken on an uncanny resemblance to him. Frankly, when she came out to conduct she looked like Leonard Bernstein in butch-dyke drag. She’s done re-recordings of a number of Bernstein’s works, including the still-controversial 1972 Mass (I have her version on Naxos somewhere around here), which calls for even bigger forces than the Kaddish Symphony and is likewise a full-frontal assault on the Judeo-Christian conception of God. The Kaddish was premiered right after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and a lot of people (including me) assumed that the hysterical (in all senses) narration, originally delivered by Felicia Montealegre (Mrs. Leonard Bernstein) and spoken here by Black actress Jaye Ladymore, was Bernstein yelling out his anger at God for having allowed the Kennedy assassination to happen.

Bernstein did several revisions of the Kaddish, including one allowing for a male narrator (apparently a number of powerful and influential Jews had hissy-fits over the very idea of a woman leading the Kaddish, or any other Jewish prayer for that matter), and there’s even a posthumous version from 2005 that substituted the original narration with an account by Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar of his experiences both during the war and afterwards, though that version is authorized by the Bernstein estate only if Pisar delivers it personally (no longer possible since he died in 2015). But Alsop chose to perform the 1963 original, and in a filmed introduction she said that while there had been previous symphonies with a choir (including Beethoven’s Ninth) and with a children’s choir (Mahler’s Third), she claimed that there isn’t a previous symphony with a narrator, Sorry, Marin, but that’s yet another example of “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re biographing is the first to do something even though there are previous examples. It didn’t take me long to think of at least one previous example of a major symphonic work with a narrator: the Sacred Service by Ernest Bloch, who (like Bernstein) was Jewish. In fact, Bloch’s purpose in writing the Sacred Service was to create an overwhelming piece of music expressing the Jewish religious tradition the way Bach, Handel and Beethoven had for Christianity. And though it’s not formally a symphony, I suspect Bernstein was also influenced by Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which premiered in May 1962, less than two years before the Kaddish, in its intermingling of traditional religious texts (in Latin in the War Requiem, in Hebrew in the Kaddish) with secular material in English (Wilfred Owen’s World War I poems in Britten’s piece and Bernstein’s own narration in his) and in the use of both adult and children’s choruses as well as vocal soloists.

For the soprano part in the Kaddish Alsop recruited another African-American woman, Janai Brugger, who was excellent in the softer, more lyrical parts of the score. Obviously Bernstein intended the relatively cool soprano part to give us some relief from all the screaming by the narrator! Brugger also had a massive pair of breasts, partly visible through her ultra-low-cut gown, that looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen. The Kaddish Symphony is a mixed work, with its fast movements punctuated with the loud, spiky percussion sounds Bernstein loved (there’s even a section involving three, count ‘em, three xylophones, and a piano way in the back of the orchestra even though its player has nothing much to do except strike an occasional chord) and its slow sections hauntingly lyrical and by far the best parts of the piece. (For an earlier symphony – his second, The Age of Anxiety – Bernstein originally wrote a piano part just in the last movement, but then extended it so the pianist played throughout the piece, thereby turning it into more of a piano concerto than a symphony.) Like the Mahler symphonies that clearly inspired it (and of which Bernstein the conductor was a major advocate; indeed, though there had been Mahler records before him, Bernstein’s recordings, more than anyone else’s, “made” Mahler’s name as a major composer in the 1960’s), Bernstein’s Kaddish is a work that practically defines “uneven,” but there’s enough good in it to make it worth your time. Alsop handled it as well as anyone could now that Bernstein is dead (and has been for 33 years), and it’s an unenviable challenge just to hold the massive performing forces together, much less create a truly expressive performance (which she did). It’s just that I’m not the kind of person who gets terribly excited about being yelled at on the subject of God.

The Magic of Callas (WNET 13, PBS, 2021)

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

After the Kaddish Symphony performance, I stumbled on the PBS Great Performances Web site mainly to make sure I had the right names for the soloists, both spoken and singing, but while the page was open I spotted an intriguing title called The Magic of Callas that turned out to be a show from the 48th season, originally aired January 15, 2021. The Magic of Callas was built around the live video of her in Act II of Puccini’s Tosca from the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London on February 9, 1964, but true to form for music shows like this it didn’t just show the act complete with front-and-back commentaries about it. Instead, associate producer Katelin Levy (the only behind-the-cameras person credited on imdb.com’s page about this show) and whoever else was involved decided to show clips of the performance of Callas and her co-stars – baritone Tito Gobbi as Scarpia, tenor Renato Cioni as Cavaradossi, and Robert Bowman as Spoletta – interspersed with talking heads, some of them genuinely relevant, others less so. This show also repeated one of the longest-standing Callas myths: that this February 9, 1964 telecast was the only film footage that survives of Callas actually acting a role on the operatic stage instead of just singing detached arias in recital. Surprisingly, Callas biographer and friend John Ardoin said that in his 1977 book The Callas Legacy (published while Callas was still alive, though she died later in 1977 and Ardoin periodically revised his book to include additional Callas recordings that surfaced afterwards, including the legendary “Lisbon Traviata” of January 1958) that this telecast “is the only known existing visual document of Callas in live performance.” In fact, his book lists at least two others, and all three are of the second act of Tosca: a November 23, 1956 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in which Callas’s Scarpia is George London, a December 19, 1958 French telecast marking Callas’s debut at the Paris Opéra, and this one.

Ardoin writes of the 1956 Ed Sullivan Show, “The second-act scene begins with the line, ‘Salvatelo,’ and cuts come fast and furiously, reducing the music by a good third and omitting the character of Spoletta,” and of the Paris show – which began as a recital of arias and orchestral selections, but after the intermission became a fully staged performance of Act II of Tosca, also with Gobbi as Scarpia – “Neither singer achieves his [or her] best, giving the intrusive conducting of [Georges] Sebastian; their interplay is sketchy and minus the subtleties that would come later. However, when engrossed in the action of a scene rather than trapped by the ambience of a concert, Callas is more giving and certain of herself. In Tosca, her voice is more assured and compelling than at any other point in the evening.” About the February 9, 1964 telecast, Ardoin kvetched that “the camera work is quite ordinary. It tends to stay on whoever is singing at a given moment, while often Callas is her most exciting and involving when silently reacting to another on stage. This is, of course, particularly true of her dramatic episodes with Gobbi. On this BBC [sic; it was actually for Britain’s commercial TV network, ITV] film, you only sense the mighty interplay which existed between the pair in the theatre.” The show also had a confusing and largely inaccurate portrayal of Callas’s tumultuous personal life, including her bizarre love affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and it said they had definitively broken up when Callas gave her Covent Garden Tosca performances in January and February 1964 – which they hadn’t. The documentary quotes Onassis’s kiss-off line to Callas – “You’re nothing but a sung-out old singer” – and dates his relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy as starting well before it did, all to suggest that Callas was doing method acting when she sang Tosca at Covent Garden and drawing on her tumultuous real-life relationship for inspiration. This ignores the fact that Callas had sung Tosca brilliantly well before she met Onassis, or even knew who he was, including on the 1953 La Scala recording (also with Gobbi as Scarpia) that is still considered the finest recording of this opera, bar none.

Three of the talking heads – baritone Thomas Hampson (who is quoted as saying that if you’re an aspiring baritone and don’t know Gobbi’s work, you don’t know anything about being a baritone) and soprano Kristine Opolais, and pop singer Rufus Wainwright – are listed on imdb.com. The six who aren’t include two more opera singers, soprano Anna Prohaska and tenor Rolando Villazón, along with conductor Antonio Pappano (current musical director of Covent Garden), fashion designer Wolfgang Zoop, journalist Jürgen Kestag and Brian McMaster, who attended one or more of the Callas Toscas at Covent Garden and recalled the rock-star atmosphere surrounding them. He said there were lines for tickets stretching for blocks around Covent Garden, and though he showed up almost a day in advance he was far from the first in line. He also remembered that even though his seats were in the galleries far from the stage, nonetheless the acoustics were excellent and he could hear Callas’s voice with perfect clarity. Wainwright, who came from a family that was part of America’s 0.1 percent, recalled he and his friends taunting Jackie Kennedy over her engagement with Onassis by driving by her home with a tape recorder blasting out Callas’s recording of “Casta diva” from Bellini’s opera Norma. The opera singers interviewed stressed the sheer power of Callas’s and Gobbi’s acting and said that, unlike other singers who sang the part. Callas actually screamed in pain when the libretto called for her to do so.

The production was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who had previously worked with Callas in (among other things) a 1958 Covent Garden production of Verdi’s La Traviata with Callas but had sworn he would never direct Tosca – until Callas asked him to, and he accepted. Zeffirelli did a great job except for one issue I have with him: he had quite a lot of actual physical contact between Tosca and Scarpia before she first agrees to have sex with him in exchange for her lover’s life and freedom, then kills him rather than go through with it. I remember reading an interview with Geraldine Farrar, who sang Tosca in the early 20th century at the Met and was coached in the role by Sarah Bernhardt, who had starred in Victorien Sardou’s play on which the opera was based. Bernhardt told Farrar that Tosca’s loathing for Scarpia should be so complete she would not let so much as the hem of her dress touch him. Bernhardt also explained in detail all her elaborate stage business between Tosca’s murder of Scarpia and the close of the act, and when Farrar explained that Puccini hadn’t given her enough music to do all that stuff, Bernhardt said sadly, “Then it is impossible for you to do justice to the scene.” Oh, how I wish some opera director and star soprano would have the guts to do this scene the way Sarah Bernhardt did! Also, one of the talking heads said that because the surviving film is in black-and-white, it takes on a Gothic quality not unlike a 1930’s Universal horror film – something I’d been thinking all along, too. It’s not hard to imagine a 1930’s movie of Sardou’s play with Boris Karloff as Scarpia, Bela Lugosi as his assistant Spoletta, and maybe Zita Johann, heroine of Karloff’s 1932 film The Mummy, as Tosca and David Manners as Cavaradossi.

Baby Face (Warner Bros., 1933)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 20) was the Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Barbara Stanwyck, my choice for the finest actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age, mainly because of her versatility. She could play literally anything: drama, romance, crime, screwball comedy, Westerns, even musicals (she never made a full-dress musical but she could sing and she does so in several films, including The Purchase Price, Ball of Fire and Lady of Burlesque). No other actress in classic Hollywood even approached her range, and only one other woman (Meryl Streep) has done so since. I ended up catching four films in the Stanwyck marathon: Baby Face (1933), Executive Suite (1954), Clash by Night (1952) and Night Nurse (1931). I had seen all of them except Executive Suite before, and I’d seen Baby Face back in 1997 on my very first viewing of TCM after Cox Cable added it to their basic-cable lineup. They were doing an afternoon of movies that had had trouble with the censors, and back then I didn’t like it much mainly because TCM scheduled it right after Sadie Thompson (1927), a masterpiece (despite the fact that currently extant prints are missing the last reel and outtakes and stills from star Gloria Swanson’s archives are used to fill out the film and approximate the original ending) written and directed by Raoul Walsh from W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson” and the play John Colton and Clemence Randolph adapted from it called Rain. Seen right after Sadie Thompson, a work of art which treated prostitution and its appeal with sympathy and depth, Baby Face looked cheaper and more exploitative than I suspect it would have on its own.

The plot casts Stanwyck as Lily Powers, a girl from an industrial town who’s working as essentially an indentured servant for her father Nick (Robert Barrat), who runs a speakeasy that caters to the local factory workers, all of whom seem to frequent Lily for beers (during Prohibition) and to sexually harass her. (To paraphrase a much later Warner Bros. movie, “Everybody comes to Nick’s.”) Lily is befriended by an old German cobbler named Adolf Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), who gives her a copy of Nietzsche’s book Will to Power and tells her to follow its advice and be a master, not a slave. What that means in practice is he wants Lily to move to a big city and use her obvious sex appeal to move her way up in the world and accumulate the good material things of the world. She follows his advice by making her way to New York with her Black friend and (ultimately) maid Chico (Theresa Harris), stowing away on a train and successfully seducing the guard who finds her and threatens to have her arrested. She then sets her sights at the Gotham Trust Company bank and seduces various males in the bank’s employ to work her way up through the hierarchy. Baby Face was based on a story by “Mark Canfield,” an alias for then-Warner Bros. production chief Darryl F. Zanuck, though the actual script was by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola, and it was directed by the sporadically interesting Alfred E. Green. One neat trick Green and the writers pulled was to illustrate Lily’s progress through the bank’s hierarchy (and the men employed there) by a series of panning shots of the bank’s central headquarters, a New York skyscraper, with each floor labeled on the outside as Lily rises in both her income and her level.

Along the way the men she exploits sexually include Jimmy McCoy, Jr. (a young John Wayne, instantly recognizable even though you’re likely to react, “What’s John Wayne doing in a movie like this?”), Brody (Douglass Dumbrille), Ned Stevens (Donald Cook) – fiancé of Ann Carter (Margaret Lindsay, already “typed” as the “good girl” to the female lead’s “bad girl,” a role she’d later play opposite Bette Davis), daughter of the bank’s CEO, J. R. Carter (Henry Kolker), and eventually J. R. Carter himself. During her rake’s progress Lily has sex with Brody in the women’s restroom; Stevens catches them and threatens to fire her but Lily throws herself at him to persuade him not to. Later Carter fires Stevens for having cheated on his daughter with Lily, but Lily is able to seduce him and ultimately becomes his mistress. Only recently fired Stevens gets jealous and follows Lily to the apartment Carter is paying for, where she finds her with him and shoots first Carter and then himself. This causes a scandal that forces the bank to send Lily off to Paris to work in their French branch, and to recruit Courtland Trenholm (George Brent, second-billed even though he’s only in the last 20 minutes or so), grandson of the bank’s founder, to take over as CEO. Only Courtland has to go to Paris on bank business, and Lily goes after him, eventually getting him to marry her – which back home in New York sparks a scandal that starts a run on the bank, rendering it insolvent almost overnight. Courtland and Lily return home and Courtland is arrested for bank fraud and tells Lily he needs $500,000 to keep himself out of prison. When she refuses to give back all the bonds, jewelry and other items he and her previous paramours had bestowed on her, Courtland shoots himself, but in a scene obviously tacked on to satisfy the censors he’s merely wounded, not dead, and Lily turns up in the ambulance taking him to the hospital and pledging to remain faithful to him both financially and sexually.

Baby Face exists in two separate versions, an original, rediscovered in 2004 – the one TCM showed last night – and a heavily censored version released in June 1933 which featured an even tackier ending in which Lily and Courtland retreat to the small town where she grew up and he takes a job in the factory, ending up poor but honest instead of rich and licentious. It also changed Cragg’s advice to Lily just before she leaves the small town to be more “moral.” Barbara Stanwyck liked the script because it gave her the chance to be more “glamorous” and wear height-of-fashion clothes and jewels, though she also insisted on a script rewrite that established her father had been pimping her out all along, so she was used to being exploited sexually and saw her New York exploits as turning the tables on the male gender. I liked Baby Face a bit better than I had the last time, but it still seems a fundamentally exploitative movie and hardly in the same league as its admitted model, MGM’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), with Jean Harlow playing essentially the same character Stanwyck plays here but playing her for laughs.

Executive Suite (MGM, 1954)

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

The next film in TCM’s Stanwyck tribute was Executive Suite (1954), a melodrama about life in a major corporation, the Tredway Furniture Company, and the battle for the succession after its CEO, Avery Bullard, has a heart attack and stroke and drops dead in the street at only 56 years old. A street person pickpockets the dead Bullard’s body and steals his wallet, so his ID is gone and it’s hours before he’s actually identified. During the interregnum, Tredway board member George Nyle Caswell (Louis Calhern) short-sells 3,700 shares of Tredway stock, figuring that once people learn of Bullard’s death the share price will plummet, but his plans are short-circuited by the company’s controller, Loren Phineas Shaw (Fredric March, surprisingly successful as a slimy villain), who releases Tredway’s excellent earnings report along with the news of Bullard’s death. The main intrigue of the film is who will replace Bullard as CEO: Shaw, sales chair Josiah Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), long-time treasurer Frederick Alderson (Walter Pidgeon) or research chief McDonald Walling (William Holden, top-billed). It’s no particular surprise that Walling eventually wins the title, mainly because he’s the only one with both professional and personal integrity – he’s more or less happily married to Mary (June Allyson) while both Dudley and Caswell have mistresses – and Dudley’s mistress, Eva Bardeman (Shelley Winters, just starting to put on the pounds that eventually turned her from low-budget Universal-International sex symbol to bag lady), is bored out of her wits out of his apparent disinterest in her. During one of their dates from hell she’s desperately hungry while he keeps getting distracted by business issues and refuses to allow her to order anything.

Stanwyck plays Julia Tredway, daughter of the company’s founder, who inherited the bulk of it when he died and installed Bullard as the CEO to salvage the company and keep it in business and in good financial health. Shaw is convinced that he will be the next CEO, and to secure Caswell’s vote he promises to get him 4,000 Tredway shares to make good his loss on the short-sale deal. Julia Tredway makes a big show of burning her stock certificates after she gives Shaw her proxy, only after briefly contemplating suicide (we see her at an umpteenth-floor window about to jump when the clock in Tredway’s skyscraper booms 6 p.m., the time of the board meeting to choose Bullard’s successor) she changes her mind and decides to attend the board meeting after all. Julia rips up the proxy she gave Shaw and instead casts the first vote for Walling as the new CEO after Shaw and Walling have a big argument that sounds contemporary today. Shaw insists that a corporation exists only to pay dividends to its shareholders, while Walling says other factors should be considered, including its overall reputation for creating a quality product, the pride of the workers in what they make, and its ability to keep up with market demands as customers’ tastes change. Walling wins in the movie but Shaw has won in real life, alas.

About two decades after this film, University of Chicago economics professor Milton Friedman published a famous article saying the only reason a corporation exists is to maximize shareholder value, and thinking it has any other purpose is “socialism.” In fact, most modern-day corporate managements have even rejected dividends as a measure of success; instead they focus relentlessly on stock price. Among the most common strategies are borrowing large amounts of money in order to buy back the company’s own stock, thereby saddling it with large amounts of debt for an artificial boost in the stock price. This has led to bizarre phenomena like the use of “market cap” as a measure of how much an enterprise is worth; “market cap” (short for “market capitalization”) merely means multiplying the total number of shares outstanding by the stock price per share. It’s a measurement that rewards stock bubbles and penalizes long-term management, especially since it ignores the price-to-earnings ratios that past generations of investors relied on to measure how valuable a company’s stock was and whether it was overpriced. My husband Charles wondered how many movies besides Executive Suite dealt with the internal politics of a single corporation, including The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) – which treated a similar situation (but with much more open corruption) as a subject for comedy (and also co-starred Paul Douglas) and Putney Swope (1969), written and directed by Robert Downey, Sr. and an out-and-out satire of capitalism and racism (Putney Swope, the token Black member of the board of an advertising agency, becomes the new CEO because the other board members vote for him only because they assume no one else will). I thought of at least one other: While the City Sleeps (1956), in which the conflict is over who will become editor of a big-city newspaper after the incumbent suddenly dies.

Clash by Night (Wald-Krasna Productions, RKO, 1952)

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

The third film we watched in last night’s (Sunday, August 20) Barbara Stanwyck tribute on TCM was the one I was really looking forward to seeing: Clash by Night, a 1952 melodrama about a Monterey fishing community directed by Fritz Lang and written by Alfred Hayes based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets that was originally a Broadway production with Tallulah Bankhead in the role Barbara Stanwyck plays here. She’s Mae Doyle, a woman who left the fishing village of Monterey, California where she grew up 10 years before. She drifted into an affair with a big-city politician who strung her along with vague promises of marriage as soon as he could divorce his current wife. Then he died suddenly and the wife and her relatives descended on her and, in a series of lawsuits, took the bequest he’d willed her. Broke and at loose ends, she’s just returned to Monterey when the film opens. She moves in with her brother Joe (Keith Andes, who got an “introducing” credit and should have become a major star), who works on the local fishing boat owned by Jerry D’Amato and is dating Peggy (Marilyn Monroe, billed fourth but above the title for the first time). Jerry has his hands full not only with the fishing business, which is getting harder due to the thinning out of the fish schools, but with his alcoholic father (Silvio Minciotti) and uncle Vince (J. Carrol Naish). Nonetheless, he’s immediately attracted to Mae, and though she isn’t really in love with him she accepts his marriage proposal. They live together in Jerry’s home along with his dad and uncle, and eventually they have a child, Gloria (Deborah and Diane Stewart: identical twins, Hollywood’s usual work-around for the laws governing how many hours a child can work).

Only Mae is still restless and lonesome, so she's vulnerable to the advances of the cynical Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan), who runs the projectors at the local movie theatre and has a wife who’s a burlesque stripper, frequently out of town on tour. Eventually Mrs. Pfeiffer decides to divorce him and Earl reacts by grabbing Mae and virtually raping her – though she seems thrilled by his overall virility even while seemingly being turned off by his cynicism. When Jerry finds out the two have been having an affair, he kidnaps Gloria and hides her on his fishing boat. Earl threatens to run off with Mae but Jerry tells her that if she does that, she’ll never see their daughter again. Earl confronts Jerry on the boat and Jerry assaults him with murder in his eyes and heart, but then Mae shows up and tells them to knock it off. Eventually Earl goes off and Jerry and Mae attempt a rather guarded reconciliation. I’d seen this before with Charles in the early 1990’s on a VHS tape I’d recorded off TCM back when I still could (and I recorded TCM by the yard back then!) and was quite impressed. It’s still a good movie but not as much so as I thought back then, and its main problem is Clifford Odets. He really, really, really didn’t like women (though he certainly had a lot of affairs with them!), and there’s an annoying strain of sexism in the dialogue even though it’s nowhere nearly as awful as Odets’ The Country Girl in this regard. In fact, Clash by Night offers a few feminist moments not only from Stanwyck (which we expect) but from Monroe (which we don’t): at one point Keith Andes is loudly proclaiming his intent to dominate the woman he marries physically – and she responds by punching him in the arm. At this point I joked, “Ah, a road-not-taken for Marilyn!”

Director Fritz Lang had fond memories of this film in his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse. “Working with Barbara Stanwyck was one of the greatest pleasures of my career,” he said, “She’s fantastic, unbelievable, and I liked her tremendously. When Marilyn missed her lines – which she did constantly – Barbara never said a word. I remember a particularly difficult scene between the two of them in which Barbara was hanging out some laundry and Marilyn had to say one or two lines. Although Marilyn missed her cue three or four times, all Barbara said was, ‘Let’s try it again.’” Lang said that during the shooting reporters were pushing past Stanwyck and saying things like, “Who wants to talk to that old Stanwyck dame? Who’s that girl over there with the big tits?” And during the remaining 10 years of her life Monroe often said that, of the older generation of Hollywood stars, Stanwyck was the only one who had been nice to her and treated her respectfully. Clash by Night strikes me as a stronger-than-usual movie in one regard; though they’re hamstrung by having to speak Clifford Odets’ intellectually clunky dialogue, at least the leads are able to make their characters seem like real people with genuinely complex emotions instead of the usual cardboard characters of most movies. It’s a real pity that Lang couldn’t get his men to act with the same restraint as his women; Stanwyck gives a first-rate performance and so does Monroe in the small amount of screen time she has (her line blowing notwithstanding; though Monroe had made at least 12 movies before this one, this was only the second that actually required her to act; John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle was the first), but Paul Douglas starts at 11 and Robert Ryan starts at 10 ½. There are Fritz Lang movies in which he gets powerfully restrained performances from his men – including Peter Lorre in M, Spencer Tracy in Fury, Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once, Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and later Raymond Burr in The Blue Gardenia – but not this time.

Night Nurse (Warner Bros., 1931)

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

The final Barbara Stanwyck film my husband Charles and I watched last night was Night Nurse, a 1931 Warner Bros. proletarian melodrama in which Lora Hart (Stanwyck) wants a job as a nurse in a big-city hospital, at least partly because they offer her money to train as well as once she’s licensed. At first she’s turned down by the hospital’s formidable nursing director, Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis), because she dropped out of high school to take care of her sick mother, but then she bumps into the hospital’s director of surgery, Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger), as she’s leaving her first failed interview. Dr. Bell accidentally knocks Lora’s box of belongings out of her hand, they spill and he gallantly helps her pick them up. Then Miss Dillon pops out, says, “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Dr. Bell?,” and hires her on the spot. (So a far more innocent incarnation of the Stanwyck character has unwittingly used the same strategy to get ahead she did in Baby Face far more intentionally and ruthlessly.) The nurses’ training program at the hospital requires the would-be nurses to live in a dormitory inside the building (as was true 20 years later when my mother trained to be a nurse under similar circumstances), and Lora luckily gets similarly down-to-earth Maloney (Joan Blondell) as her roommate. Lora draws the decidedly unwelcome attentions of an intern (Allan Lane) who plays a prank on her by sneaking a skeleton into her bed, and she ends up with a bootlegger boyfriend, Mortie (Ben Lyon, second-billed), who becomes her best bud when she treats him after he’s been wounded in the arm in a shoot-out and she breaks the law by not reporting the bullet wound to the police. Lora gets assigned to the night shift as a punishment, but eventually both she and Maloney get their credentials.

Lora’s first assignment outside the hospital is as a private-duty nurse to take care of two young girls, Desney (Betty Jane Graham) and Nanny (Marcia Mae Jones) Ritchey. The Ritchey girls were doing well in the hospital but their condition has nose-dived since they were discharged and sent home. Their mother (Charlotte Merriam) has become a drunk, dissipated woman who throws wild parties in her home, complete with a live jazz band playing W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (a piece also used as a symbol of decadence in Baby Face). Since the death of the girls’ father she’s taken up with her chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable, on loan from MGM), and along with a corrupt doctor named Milton Ranger (Ralf Harolde), who’s replaced Dr. Bell as Desney’s and Nanny’s designated physician, they’ve hatched a plot to allow the kids to die so Mrs. Ritchey and Nick can grab their trust fund. Lora learns about this when the girls’ ostensible nanny, Mrs. Maxwell (Blanche Frederici), spills the beans about the girls having a trust fund from their late well-to-do father, and she threatens to go to the police – only Dr. Ranger warns her not to. It’s only by the skin of her teeth that she’s able to get her bootlegger friend Mortie (ya remember Mortie?) to contact Dr. Bell and get him to override Dr. Ranger’s orders that are allowing the kids to get sick and die. Ultimately the children are saved, Mortie takes Lora on a date (where he asks her to shift gears and she keeps accidentally putting the car in reverse), and while Dr. Bell warned Lora that reporting Nick to the police would involve the hospital in a scandal, Mortie has a better way of getting rid of him: he tells a couple of his gangland “friends” to get rid of Nick, and in the end Nick is brought to the hospital in an ambulance, only the orderlies who unload him say sadly, “This is a case for the morgue.”

Night Nurse has one unforgettable scene in which Lora corners Mrs. Ritchey in her palatial apartment’s living room and snarls at her, “You – mother!” It’s not clear whether she’s upset at the way Mrs. Ritchey is ignoring the responsibilities of motherhood or Lora is on the point of saying something very censorable even in 1931, but either way, when I first saw Night Nurse in a revival theatre in the early 1970’s the effect of that line on the audience was galvanic. Charles said Night Nurse was one of the films I’d shown him in the VHS days that he most vividly remembered, and I can certainly see why; it’s a great Stanwyck vehicle and Blondell also helps. Before he showed the movie TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that for years a lot of people had thought the reason for Night Nurse’s enduring popularity was the number of scenes showing Stanwyck and Blondell in their underwear, but Stanwyck disagreed and said, “It was really Clark Gable! We couldn’t take our eyes off of him!” While I’m sorry TCM’s Stanwyck marathon didn’t include one of her most underrated films, Ever in My Heart (1933) – a fascinating combination of romantic melodrama and war movie in which Stanwyck marries a German (Otto Kruger) on the eve of World War I (it’s essentially Romeo and Juliet, only instead of being kept apart by two feuding families they’re being kept apart by two feuding countries); Charles and I watched this right after the September 11, 2001 attacks and I thought it would have been a good movie to remake, with the German replaced by an Arab and 9/11 taking the place of the sinking of the Lusitania as the big event that drives her and her husband apart – the films they did include were mostly among Stanwyck’s best.

Daddy Long Legs (20th Century-Fox, 1955)

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

Yesterday (Saturday, August 19) afternoon at 5 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a film they were showing as part of their all-day “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Fred Astaire, Daddy Long Legs, made in 1955 at 20th Century-Fox (Astaire’s only musical for them) with Leslie Caron as his co-star. The story began as Daddy-Long-Legs (the hyphens were part of the original title), a so-called “epistolary novel” (i.e., written entirely in the form of letters ostensibly written by one or more of the characters) by Jean Webster in 1912. It’s about an orphan girl named Jerusha Abbott (so named not by her parents, who seem to have croaked before they had the chance to name her, but by the headmistress of the orphanage) who lucks out when one of the four trustees who fund the place notices her, decides she has a potentially great gift as a writer, and decides to give her a college education. But his conditions are that she may never know who he is, she will write him a letter addressed to “Mr. John Smith” every month because he thinks letter-writing is great practice for a professional author, but he will never reply to her letters. Webster herself adapted her novel into a stage play in 1914, and the first film of the story was made in 1919 with Mary Pickford (who else?) as the heroine. In 1931 it was remade with Janet Gaynor in the lead, and in 1935 it was refashioned into a vehicle for Shirley Temple as Curly Top (yet another Temple remake of a Pickford role!). In 1938 a Dutch company made yet another movie version, Vadertje Langbeen, and since the Astaire-Caron version in 1955 there’ve been Bollywood and Japanese animé adaptations.

In the 1955 film, directed by all-around hack Jean Negulesco and written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora Ephron’s parents), the benefactor is Jervis Pendleton III (Fred Astaire), who discovers heroine Julie André (Leslie Caron) at a French orphanage named after Joan of Arc. He’s a super-rich Wall Street financier whose grandfather founded, among a lot of other things, an all-girls’ college called Walston, and because he’s taken with the young girl (who grew up at the orphanage and later became a teacher there, like Jane Eyre) he agrees to finance her education at Walston but to do it secretly. One difference between Webster’s story and the Ephrons’ screenplay is that Julie isn’t told that her benefactor isn’t going to reply to her letters, so there are heart-rending scenes of her checking a P. O. box regularly but seeing nothing from him. She calls him “Daddy Long Legs” because she only saw him once, with his back to her, and got the impression he was an old, tall man with very long legs (one of the few details from Webster’s novel that found its way into this movie). Instead, the letters Julie writes get intercepted by Jervis’s business manager, Griggs (Fred Clark, not as outright crooked as he was in The Solid Gold Cadillac but still an asshole), and they collect in a huge file kept by Griggs’s secretary, Alicia Pritchard (Thelma Ritter in one of her typical voice-of-reason roles). Alicia chews Griggs out for heartlessly refusing to show Jervis his mentee’s letters, but the letters just accumulate until Jervis himself demands to see them all just as Julie is about to graduate from Walston. Julie has lived at the school with two roommates, Jervis’s niece Linda (Terry Moore, gooey-sweet as usual) and Sally McBride (Charlotte Austin). She’s tried to set up Julie with Sally’s brother Jim (Kelly Brown), who’s attending an adjoining male college and training to be a mining engineer. Jervis goes to Walston to attend a big school event featuring dancing to Ray Anthony and his band (playing themselves), and there he meets Julie (again) and is immediately smitten with her – and she with him, despite him being sufficiently older that the other college kids assume he’s a professor.

He knows who she is but she doesn’t know who he is, and to get rid of the competition Jervis offers Jim a job at his company’s tin mines in Bolivia – a move Griggs compares to the Biblical story of David, Uriah and Bathsheba (though this seems a bit unfair because at least Jervis isn’t sending Jim on a suicide mission the way David did with Uriah). Eventually Jervis thinks better of it and summons Jim back to the U.S., where he pairs up with Linda Pendleton. There are the usual Astaire dance-seduction sequences with Caron, including one to a song by Johnny Mercer (unusually for him, Mercer wrote not only the lyrics but all the music to this film’s songs as well) called “Something’s Gotta Give” which was recycled as the title for Marilyn Monroe’s last, unfinished movie at 20th Century-Fox seven years later. There’s also a great number called “Sluefoot” which first indicated Astaire’s growing interest in rhythm-and-blues, leading to a spectacular dance sequence between him and Caron while Ray Anthony’s band rocks out. And there are two big ballet sequences for which Astaire brought French choreographer Roland Petit for, one dramatizing Julie’s dreams of what her anonymous benefactor is like and one set in Paris after Jervis bails on their relationship (only temporarily, it turns out) and is photographed in the tabloids with other women. Seen today, Daddy Long Legs dates rather badly, though the aspect of it that would make a modern audience uncomfortable – the extent to which Jervis seems to be “grooming” Julie for sexual exploitation – was an issue then, too. It’s addressed in the film by the man who essentially brought Jervis and Julie together, Alexander Williamson (Larry Keating), the U.S. ambassador to France who arranged for Jervis’s trip there.

It also features Astaire’s third appearance as an on-screen drummer, after A Damsel in Distress (1937) and Easter Parade (1948); he plays along with Ray Anthony’s records in a secret room in his live-work space whose ground floor is a semi-public art gallery with a docent giving guided tours. (There’s a cute sequence in which one of the exhibits is the family portraits of the three Jervis Pendletons: I is painted by James McNeill Whistler, II by John Singer Sargent, and III is a Picasso-esque cubist version because, the docent explains, the current Jervis Pendleton has broken with the family tradition.) Daddy Long Legs was a movie with an unusually troubled production history; before he started it Astaire had shown the script to his then-wife, Phyllis Potter, and she had loved it and urged him to do it. Then, while he was on vacation, he got word that she had taken ill and eventually she died. Astaire would frequently break off shooting and go to a corner of the set and cry, and at one point he asked to be released from his contract and was willing to pay the studio whatever it cost to replace him. He was talked out of it by being reminded that his late wife had loved the script and therefore he would be honoring her memory far more by finishing the film than abandoning it. Director Negulesco and cinematographer Leon Shamroy manage to tame the unwieldy shape of the CinemaScope screen (which Alfred Hitchcock once said was usable only for “snakes and funerals”), and though Astaire was 55 when he made this film and no longer the spry young thing he’d been when he danced with Ginger Rogers, as compensation he used a lot more drops and other modern-dance moves. I was also amused that Leslie Caron was short enough Astaire let her dance with him wearing high heels – despite the by-now moth-eaten joke that “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels,” the fact is Astaire didn’t like his dance partners wearing high heels opposite him because he worried that he was so short heels would make them tower over him.

Silk Stockings (Arthur Freed Productions, MGM, 1957)

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

I took a break from TCM during the next Astaire movie they showed, Royal Wedding, since I had a fairly recent moviemagg blog post on it already (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/royal-wedding-mgm-1951.html), and turned it back on for the 1957 film Silk Stockings. This one also had a complex gestation: it began life as a story by Melchior Lengyel called Ninotchka that became a brilliant 1939 film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and starring Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas and Ina Claire. The story is about three Russian commissars who come to Paris to sell some of the old royal jewels to raise money for the Communist government, only when they get seduced by the bourgeois social decadence of Paris a woman named Nina “Ninotchka” Youshenko (Greta Garbo) is sent there to take over the job. Only Ninotchka attracts the attentions of a young man (Melvyn Douglas) who, it’s hinted, is the kept man of an older woman socialite (Ina Claire), and he sets out to seduce Ninotchka away from her deadly serious Communist mission and into his arms. In 1955 this story was refashioned into a musical play called Silk Stockings by George S. Kaufman, Abe Burrows and Leueen McGrath, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, which starred Don Ameche and Hildegard Knef and was a major hit, running for 478 performances. Since MGM already owned the movie rights to the story, the movie version was made there, with Arthur Freed producing, Rouben Mamoulian directing, Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spiegelgass doing the script (after Freed’s first choice, Harry Kurnitz, had bombed out: Freed had hired him to write the movie in defiance of the Hollywood blacklist, but years of trauma over his unemployabilty had apparently leached all the humor out of him, and maybe it wasn’t that great an idea to give a Leftist writer a story in which capitalism totally and unambiguously triumphs over communism) and Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as the leads.

Astaire plays Hollywood movie producer Steve Canfield, who has made an offer to Russian composer Piotr Ilytich Boroff (Wim Sonneveld) to write the score for his new film, a heavily altered adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace turned into a musical. The film’s star is Peggy Dayton (Janis Paige), a brassy “dame” type whose character is apparently a parody of Esther Williams, since both she and Canfield announce that this is her first non-swimming role and throughout the movie she makes gestures as if trying to shake the last drops of water from her ears. The three commissars are Brankov (Peter Lorre, who needed a voice double to join the other two in song but is otherwise delightfully droll), Bibinski (Freed Unit stalwart Jules Munshin) and Ivanov (Joseph Buloff), and the arts commissioner who sent the trio to recover Boroff and bring him back to Russia is Vassili Markovich (George Tobias, a decided step down from Bela Lugosi, who played this part in the Garbo Ninotchka and got fourth billing even though he was only on screen for five minutes). Canfield wants permission to rewrite Boroff’s big piece, “Ode to a Tractor,” into a pop song for his movie, so he assigns Peggy Dayton to vamp him while he attempts to seduce Ninotchka out of her humorless devotion to Communist orthodoxy. Cole Porter wrote a great duet for Canfield and Ninotchka called “Paris Loves Lovers,” in which he attempts to explain the romance of the French capital while she regards it as all decadent nonsense that will be swept away in the coming world revolution. The song harks back to Irving Berlin’s “Play That Simple Melody” and George Gershwin’s “Mine” in having two different melodies for the two singers, but it also reveals Porter’s obvious affection for, and influence from, Gilbert and Sullivan. Another ballad Canfield sings to Ninotchka, “All of You,” became a jazz standard courtesy of Miles Davis, who a year after the stage show premiered on Broadway recorded it on his first major-label album, ‘Round About Midnight (Columbia, recorded in 1955 and 1956 but not released until 1957).

Canfield’s seduction of Ninotchka is successful, but there’s a blip in their relationship when she and the three commissars come to the set of Canfield’s movie – and are deeply offended when they hear Janis Paige belt out “Josephine,” the big pop song for the film adapted from “Ode to a Tractor.” Oddly, the best numbers in the movie are the ones with the least relevance to the plot: “Stereophonic Sound,” Porter’s spoof of the movie industry’s obsession with bigness to compete with TV and get people going to theatres again (“It’s gotta have Glorious Technicolor, Breath-Taking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound,” with a heavy echo on the words “stereophonic sound” whenever they appear); “Red Blues” (danced by Cyd Charisse spectacularly in a solo that appears when the principals briefly return to Moscow, a plot point far more powerfully drawn in Ninotchka) and “The Ritz Roll and Rock,” composed by Cole Porter at Astaire’s request for a rock ‘n’ roll number. Supposedly Porter had never tried to write in the rock style before (though in MGM’s High Society, made a year earlier, he’d inserted a rock reference into “Now You Has Jazz,” a duet for Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong that’s the best thing in that otherwise sorry rehash of The Philadelphia Story). He called a friend and asked for some rock records, which he then drew on for a truly great number showcasing Astaire, in his trademark top hat, white tie and tails, break-dancing to a song that manages to sound like big-band pop-rock while keeping the Porter suavity and wit. (In their book on Astaire, Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt called it “more Ritz than rock.”)

Silk Stockings is a farewell movie in more ways than one; it was Rouben Mamoulian’s last completed film (though he would start two more, Porgy and Bess and the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, from which he’d be fired) and Astaire’s last full-dress musical until Finian’s Rainbow 11 years later. It completed Astaire’s MGM contract, and from then on he’d play mostly dramatic and “straight” roles, returning to MGM only to shoot a dance duet with Gene Kelly for the 1976 compilation film That’s Entertainment, Part Two. (The song was “A Couple of Song and Dance Men,” originally written by Irving Berlin for Astaire and Bing Crosby in the 1946 film Blue Skies. It was Astaire’s last dance performance on film.) Silk Stockings dates somewhat in its Cold War triumphalism, but it’s nonetheless a good piece of 1950’s-style entertainment, and I was amused to read an anecdote on Astaire’s imdb.com page. It came from Tony Martin, Cyd Charisse’s husband, who said he could tell which one of MGM’s great song-and-dance men his wife had been dancing with all day from the condition of her body when she got home. If she came back full of bruises, she’d been working with Gene Kelly. If she came back pristine, it was with Astaire.