Live at the Belly Up: Johnny Clegg Band (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2017)

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

Last night (Friday, September 29) I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode, rerun from 2017 (though it was the first episode in quite a while which I didn’t have a previous entry on at moviemagg) featuring a musician whom I’d vaguely heard of but turned out to have had a quite important and ground-breaking career – not just musically but politically as well. His name was Johnny Clegg and he was from South Africa, though he was born in Bacup, Lancashire, England on June 7, 1953 (making him just three months older than I am!). He was the product of a marriage between a British man and a woman who was born in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Clegg’s parents broke up when he was six and his mother first took him back to Rhodesia and then moved him to Johannesburg, South Africa. In his early teens Clegg discovered the music of Black South Africa, particularly the Zulu people. As Clegg’s Wikipedia page explains, “Under the tutelage of Charlie Mzila, a flat cleaner by day and musician by night, Clegg mastered both the Zulu language and the maskandi guitar and the isishameni dance styles of the migrants.” Clegg formed his first band, Juluka, in 1969 with a Black musical partner, Sipho Mchunu, when he was just 16. The band soon grew to a six-piece, with three white and three Black members, and with apartheid in full force most of Juluka’s concerts were given in private homes, hostels, universities and churches. Juluka broke up in 1985 and Clegg founded another interracial band, Savuka, with another Black musical partner, singer and dancer Dudu Zulu.

Savuka’s first album, Third World Child (1987), was a best seller in Europe and generated some of the songs Clegg played on his Live at the Belly Up program, including “Giyani,” “Asimbonanga” (a tribute song to Nelson Mandela written while the South African government was still holding him in prison), and “Great Heart” (later covered by Jimmy Buffett, though his live version was deliberately left off Buffett’s live album). Savuka broke up in 1993 after Dudu Zulu was shot and killed while trying to mediate a dispute among taxi drivers. Clegg continued his career as a solo artist, and got his songs in some unusual films: “Scatterlings of Africa” appeared in Rain Man (1988), “Life is a Magic Thing” was in Ferngully: The Rain Forest (1992), “Great Heart” was used in both Jock of the Bushveld (1986) and Whispers: An Elephant’s Tale (2000), “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” was in Opportunity Knocks (1990) and Career Opportunities (1991), and his hauntingly beautiful ballad “Dela” – which closed his Live at the Belly Up appearance – appeared in the Tarzan spoof George of the Jungle (1997) and its 2003 sequel. “Dela” was also covered by an Australian roots-rock group called The Beautiful Girls (even though all its members are male). The band Clegg brought to Live at the Belly Up in 2017 – two years before his death from pancreatic cancer on July 16, 2019 – featured four white musicians and two Black ones, a percussionist who wore a shapeless African dress (it was only once the camera got close enough to show his face, including a beard, that he was “outed” as male) and a bass player. The white musicians included Clegg himself on vocals, acoustic guitar, concertina and mouthbow (umhubhe), a traditional Zulu instrument that looks like the sort of bow arrows are shot with and consists of a single string attached to a long tube. The player blows air into the tube and simultaneously bows the string to determine pitch.

The others were an electric lead guitarist, a keyboard player who doubled on soprano and alto saxes (my husband Charles questioned whether soprano sax is really a “world music” instrument, but I figured it’s an honorary one since John Coltrane incorporated many traditional and indigenous instruments into his bands, especially in the last three years of his life), and a drummer. The songs Clegg and company played were “Rolling Ocean,” “Africa,” “Giyani,” “Malonjeni,” “The Crossing,” “Digging for Some Birds” (a political song protesting environmental devastation), “I Call Your Name” (which Clegg introduced with a long solo on the mouthbow), “Great Heart,” “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World,” “Asimbonanga” and “Dela.” Though the songs sounded pretty similar to each other, almost all in medium-fast dance tempi, the show as a whole worked much better than other Live at the Belly Up programs have because Clegg’s forces achieved a variety of textures and rhythms despite the similar tempi. That’s a total of 11 songs, and since I’ve taken to judging Live at the Belly Up programs largely on the number of songs the band plays (the number usually runs from eight to 15, and since the time slot is an invariable 52 minutes the number of songs they can crowd into the time period indicates whether they’re a jam band or one that tightly crafts and controls their own songs), at 11 songs Clegg’s band was in the middle, allowing the members some freedom to jam but within relatively strict limits. Clegg’s music is infectious enough, with its fusion of white pop and Black South African township jive, that the program stayed interesting throughout and didn’t flag or lose energy as previous Live at the Belly Up shows have done. And Clegg was also an excellent dancer; his free rhythmic stage moves added excitement to the show. Though he’d had his first surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2015, two years before this Live at the Belly Up episode was filmed, he certainly didn’t look like a man who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness; he moved with the sheer energy and power of a man in his 30’s and seemed in excellent physical shape overall.

Piccadilly (British International Pictures, 1929)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 28) my husband Charles and I watched a quite remarkable late-silent movie from 1929: Piccadilly, made in the United Kingdom for British International Pictures by director E. A. Dupont, written by Arnold Bennett and starring Gilda Gray, Jameson Thomas, Anna May Wong, Charles Laughton (in his first film) and Cyril Ritchard. Dupont was actually German-born and had achieved international fame as the director of the 1925 film Variety, which starred Emil Jannings as a middle-aged trapeze artist whose wife (Maly Delschaft) is also his partner in the act. To liven things up they hire a younger couple, Berthe-Marie (Lya de Putti) and Artinelli (Warwick Ward), only Jannings’ character gets obsessed with Berthe-Marie and ultimately murders both her and Artinelli. Dupont wrote the script for Variety as well as directing it, though the story came from a novel by Felix Holländer, and one of the most remarkable things about it is it’s narrated in flashback by Jannings’ character as he’s being released from prison, where he served 10 years for the murders. So it’s not surprising that Piccadilly is also a story about love, sex, jealousy and revenge among show people. Gilda Gray was billed first; she was the first white dancer to do the shimmy and she’d become an international stage star with it. Gray appeared exactly 25 years later on a “Great Personalities” episode of Liberace’s syndicated TV show, along with Nick Lucas, the virtuoso pop guitarist for whom “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” later a novelty hit for Tiny Tim (who sang it in Lucas’s style), was written (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/liberace-great-personalities-guild.html). Liberace felt a kinship to Gilda Gray because they were both of Polish descent and had grown up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Gray’s parents emigrated from Poland when Gray was eight and where Liberace was born.

Piccadilly is set largely at the big nightclub and restaurant called the Piccadilly Club, owned and run by Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas). Gray plays Mabel Greenfield, half of a dancing couple that is the club’s star attraction. Her partner in the act is Victor Smiles (the young Cyril Ritchard), who wants to be her partner off-stage as well – only Mabel has utterly no interest in Victor because Valentine, or “Val” as he’s universally nicknamed, is the only man she cares about “that way.” The two make their entrance dancing down matching staircases before meeting up and partnering each other on the floor – an arrangement Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and director George Stevens copied for the Astaire/Rogers musical Swing Time seven years later – though their dance is interrupted by a persnickety customer (Charles Laughton) who complains that one of the dishes he’s been given is dirty. Val traces the problem and finds out that the dishwashers are being distracted by one of their number, a young Chinese girl from Limehouse (London’s Chinatown) named Shosho (Anna May Wong). Shosho does a hot dance number of her own in the scullery, and Val watches it and fires her for distracting his dishwashing staff. Later Val fires Victor for his sexual harassment of Mabel in full view of the audience, despite the impact this has on his club – all of a sudden the place is virtually empty. He hits on the idea of hiring Shosho and having her dance as part of his floor show, and Shosho agrees on condition that Val pay 80 pounds for an ornate costume from a Limehouse tailor and also that her friend Jim (King Ho Chang) lead her accompaniment on a traditional Chinese lute.

Shosho is an instant hit, but Mabel quits the club out of jealousy and disgust with the way Shosho is being built up as an attraction. Val starts flirting with Shosho, and at one point they go to a sleazy pub in Limehouse whose owner throws out a Black patron for dancing with a white woman. At first Shosho is diffident about her boss’s attentions to her, but eventually she slips him a key to her room and they spend the night together. Dupont cuts away before we find out exactly what happened, but the implication is clear enough that they had some sort of sex. Later, after Val leaves Shosho’s room, Mabel crashes the place and the two women confront each other. Mabel insists that Val is too old for Shosho, Shosho fires back that Mabel is too old for Val, Mabel draws out a small pistol from her handbag and Shosho reaches for a Chinese dagger hanging on her wall. The film blacks out at this moment and it’s only later that we learn Shosho got fatally shot during the confrontation, though it’s still unclear by whom. The obvious implication is that Mabel killed her, but at the coroner’s inquest Jim admits that he killed Shosho out of jealousy that she’d left him for a white guy. He says this while he’s already shot himself, and he arranges it so his body will lie next to Shosho’s as he dies. (It helps this film a lot that we get one last glimpse of Anna May Wong in flashback even after her character is dead.)

E. A. Dupont had a rather strange career as a director; after the international success of Variety Universal hired him for a 1926 film called Love Me and the World Is Mine that seems to have been their attempt at an ersatz Erich von Stroheim film (the movie’s leads were two Stroheim favorites, Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin), but the film flopped and Dupont returned to Europe and spent the next few years alternating between Germany, Britain and France. He made his first talkie, Atlantic – the story of the Titanic – and filmed it simultaneously in German, English and French, but it was apparently a pretty statically acted film and a box-office flop. Then Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 and Dupont definitively relocated to the U.S., where he directed mostly “B” films until 1939, when he was fired from a Warner Bros. “B” called Hell’s Kitchen (with the “Dead End” kids, Margaret Lindsay and Ronald Reagan) for having slapped a cast member who made fun of his accent. Dupont didn’t get a directorial job for another 12 years, until he got a chance to make one of the most undeservedly forgotten films noir of all time: The Scarf, starring John Ireland as an escapee from a mental institution where he was being held for having allegedly murdered his wife. Then he meets a woman (Mercedes McCambridge) wearing the identical type of scarf as his wife had when she was killed with it, and the sight of the same sort of scarf on another woman jogs loose his memory and he’s able not only to prove he didn’t kill his wife but figure out who did. He made a few more films in the early 1950’s, including Pictura (a compilation film about famous painters), Problem Girl, The Neanderthal Man and the pioneering air-disaster film The Steel Lady before dying of cancer in 1956 at age 64.

Dupont’s German heritage is very much in evidence in Piccadilly, notably in the vertiginous camera movements he favored (he had a German cinematographer, Werner Brandes, and a German art director, Alfred Junge, who’d also worked on many of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British films) and the shadowy, chiaroscuro lighting style. I’ve long believed that one can trace the origins of what became film noir in Germany during the 14 years of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933), when this dark, shadowy look was known internationally as “the German style,” and as the great German directors fled Hitler and settled first in France in the mid- to late-1930’s and then to the U.S. once France fell to the Nazis in 1940, they brought the style with them. Film noir came about when directors – many of them German expatriates (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, John Brahm et al.) – realized that “the German style” was a great way to film the “hard-boiled” pulp detective and thriller fiction of authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and others in their style. The bonus features on this Blu-Ray disc edition of Piccadilly included a prologue added in 1929 for a sound version to show in the growing numbers of theatres that had laid off their live in-house musicians and could offer only pre-recorded music and sound effects tracks to accompany “silent” films. The prologue features Jameson Thomas and another actor, playing a character who doesn’t appear in the main body of the film, who’s just returned to Britain from China and is surprised to see the great Valentine Wilmot run a cheap local bar in London when he remembered Wilmot as the owner of the prestigious Piccadilly Club. Wilmot announces that he’s going to tell him the story of how his fortunes sank following the events of the main film. Phrasing the story as an extended flashback brings the film even closer to Dupont’s star-making hit Variety than it is on its own.

The disc also included clips from a panel on Anna May Wong at the 2004 San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, in which four of her movies were revived (Toll of the Sea, Piccadilly, Shanghai Express and Daughter of Shanghai) and a discussion of her legacy was held featuring her friend Nancy Kwan (one of the leads in Flower Drum Song, which Wong was scheduled to have a role in when she died in 1961 at age 56) and pioneering biographer Graham Hodges (the only male on the panel and the only non-Asian). And it featured an interview with Neil Brand, who composed the score for a seven-piece jazz orchestra that appeared on the Piccadilly Blu-Ray release; though quite frankly I’d have preferred to watch it with the original 1929 soundtrack, Brand said he took the job because “I’ve always wanted to score a film noir.” He used jazz music for the nightclub scenes, especially those in which Debroy Somers and His Orchestra (who play themselves in the film, even though we couldn’t hear them) accompany Gilda Gray and Cyril Ritchard in their big dance. Brand said that the shots of Debroy Somers conducting on-screen helped him get the right rhythm for these scenes. Piccadilly is a marvelous movie, showing the silent film at its acme even though it was about to be blasted into oblivion, and though Anna May Wong still had to die at the end for having a sexual affair with a white man (the cliché ending of many of her films) she got to play a character with at least a bit more moral complexity than the ones she’d portrayed in the U.S. Wong is an electrifying actress who for on-screen charisma and appeal wipes the floor with Gilda Gray. It’s also one of those movies I found myself remaking in my head as I was watching it, particularly wishing that Shosho had stayed with her nice Chinese boyfriend (who gets a scene in drag when she asks him to try on the costume Val wants to buy for her act because she wants to see how it looks on someone else first) instead of drifting into an affair (or at least a one-night stand) with Val. And at the ending I found myself mentally remixing the film so Shosho kills Mabel with the dagger before Mabel can shoot her with the gun, then is acquitted when she and Jim persuade the coroner’s jury that she acted in self-defense.

Becoming Frida Kahlo, episode 2: "Love and Loss," a.k.a. "Frida and Cristina" (PBS, 2023)

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

Yesterday (Tuesday, September 26) at 9 p.m. I put on KPBS for a couple of documentaries, including the second episode of a three-part miniseries called Becoming Frida Kahlo. I’d missed the first part of this the previous week but the second part proved quite compelling. It dealt with the years 1930-1937, much of which was spent in the United States, where her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, was fulfilling commissions for heroic murals inside capitalist institutions like the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, Henry Ford’s office buildings in Detroit, and Rockefeller Center in New York. Rivera was actually a Communist, but he didn’t mind taking the capitalists’ money as long as they didn’t tell him what he could and couldn’t paint. So he played a double game, filling the murals with veiled but unmistakable references to the workers’ paradise Communism would supposedly create. Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico on July 6, 1907 to a German immigrant father and a mestizo (part-Native, part-Spanish) Mexican mother. During her lifetime she was far less famous than her husband – the publicity surrounding them was basically DIEGO RIVERA!!!!! (and his wife also paints). In 1925 Kahlo and her then-boyfriend were involved in a major traffic accident on a bus which put her in pain for the rest of her life. It also forced her to abandon her ambition to go to medical school and become a doctor – though this also accounts for the meticulous attention to medical detail in her later paintings, particularly her stunning self-portrait, “Henry Ford Hospital,” which she painted after she suffered a spontaneous miscarriage after four months of pregnancy in 1932.

She and Rivera met in 1927 at a Communist Party meeting and married two years later. Since Rivera was in his mid-40’s and had already been married twice, it wasn’t surprising that he continued to pursue extra-relational activities even during his marriage to Frida – and she had more than her fair share of them as well, sometimes with women as well as men. This episode officially was called “Love and Loss,” though some sources have the title as “Frida and Cristina” – Cristina being Kahlo’s sister, with whom Rivera had an affair. Though Frida had forgiven Rivera’s previous infidelities, him having sex with her sister was the final straw: they divorced in 1939, though they remarried in 1940 and this time they stayed together until her death in 1954. Their stay in the U.S. coincided with the worst of the Great Depression and both Rivera and Kahlo were conscience-stricken over the money they were making from the rich while they could see hundreds of thousands of poor people starving on the streets. They first came to San Francisco, where Rivera got a commission to paint a mural for the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange and, not surprisingly, started an affair with the woman tennis player he’d selected to appear in the mural as the Spirit of California. Kahlo also had a special exhibit at a San Francisco gallery, but it was only as a loss leader for her husband’s work and one reviewer of her show savaged it, saying that she’d never have got a show if she hadn’t been married to an artistic superstar. Later the couple moved to New York and hobnobbed with the rich and famous of the time, and still later they moved to Detroit for Rivera’s commission to paint murals for Henry Ford. This was right around the time when Ford ordered his private security force to fire on unarmed auto workers picketing his factory demanding higher wages and union recognition, and even for a “trickster” couple like Rivera and Kahlo it’s hard to imagine, especially in today’s world, how they reconciled taking money from a major capitalist who literally had his workers’ blood on his hands.

The Riveras’ stay in the U.S. came to a bitter and ignominious end when he got a commission from the Rockefeller family to paint a mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center – only he sneaked an image of Vladimir Lenin, Russian dictator and founder of the Soviet Union, into the painting, called Man at the Crossroads and depicting humanity literally at the crossroads between a capitalist hell and a communist heaven. The Rockefellers demanded that Rivera remove Lenin’s portrait from his mural. Rivera refused, and Kahlo got a tip from someone inside the Rockefeller organization that the mural was about to be destroyed. She got one of her women friends (and former lovers) to sneak a Brownie box camera into the center to take pictures of the mural so Rivera could reconstruct it elsewhere, and this documentary featured the woman’s granddaughter reading from the diary her grandmother had kept about Frida and their relationship. This documentary savors the irony that it was ordinary working people, the proletarians whom Communist ideology regarded as the revolutionary class that would destroy capitalism, that meekly followed their bosses’ orders and jackhammered Rivera’s masterpiece into oblivion. (At the invitation of the Mexican government, Rivera repainted the same mural in 1934 in the lobby of the Palacio des Bellas Artes in Mexico City, retitling it Man, Controller of the Universe. I got to see it there when my mother, my brother and I spent a summer in Mexico in 1967.) Rivera was thrown out of the U.S. after the Rockefeller imbroglio and his commission to paint a mural for the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress world’s fair was cancelled, though he got paid in full for the Rockefeller mural that was destroyed. Later the Riveras resettled in Mexico, Diego Rivera started his affair with Frida’s sister Cristina, and he and Frida broke up over it at least in part because Frida had long been jealous of her more conventionally “beautiful” sister.

This episode ends in 1937 but a third show in the series concludes with the rest of Frida’s life, including long periods in hospital and her ultimate death on July 13, 1954 from her ongoing illnesses. It’s ironic that the respective places of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the art world have flipped; when they were alive he was the superstar and she the also-ran, but as the art world has made a fetish of “inclusion” and in particular adding works by women and people of color to the artistic canon, Frida’s star has risen while Diego’s has fallen. Charles saw the computer opened to Frida Kahlo’s Wikipedia page this morning and he commented that Frida Kahlo has become so iconic that plenty of people of Mexican descent hang reproductions of one of her many self-portraits on their walls, alongside the Mexican flag and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Frontline: "Putin vs. the Press" (Oxford Films Production for GBH/FRONTLINE and Channel 4, aired September 26, 2023)

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

On Tuesday, September 26 PBS showed a documentary on their Frontline series called “Putin vs. the Press,” though it’s not a story of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on all independent media outlets but one newspaper, and one individual, in particular. The newspaper is Novaya Gazeta (“New Gazette”) and the individual is its editor/publisher, Dmitry Muratov. Muratov co-won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, a journalist from the Philippines who likewise defied a dictatorial and corrupt government to report the truth about it to her readers. In his acceptance speech, Muratov said these depressing words: “The world has fallen out of love with democracy. The world has begun to turn toward dictatorship. In my country, and not only there, it is popular to think that politicians who avoid bloodshed are weak, while threatening the world with war is the duty of true patriots.” Even the United States, long considered the world’s bastion of republican government, is undergoing a long-term embrace of dictatorship; the Republican Party has virtually abandoned democracy as a long-term goal or a short-term practice. Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign is on a major roll, not despite but because of its openly dictatorial character, It seems like nothing will break his hold on the overwhelming majority of his party, and as he himself has boasted, every new criminal indictment against him just strengthens his hand politically and reinforces his absolute rule over his party.

Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 with seed money from the Nobel Prize scholarship awarded to former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, who tried and ultimately failed to break Russia’s long-time record of authoritarianism. Gorbachev wanted a mixed economy for the Soviet Union and an end to the forcible repression of political dissent. He saw a free press as crucial to the latter and he backed Muratov’s enterprise as one way to ensure that future Russian governments would face legitimate criticism from an independent media. Muratov recalled during the show that he had got interested in journalism in particular after two star players on a Russian hockey team had brusquely refused his request for autographs. His mom complained to the local state-owned newspaper and they ran a story that resulted in Dmitry receiving signed photos of the two hockey players in the mail. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s president at the end of 1999 and immediately declared war on the free press, punishing newspapers and other media outlets that dared criticize him with threats, denials of licenses needed to publish, and worse. During the show Muratov notes he’s been to the funerals of at least six of his best reporters, all assassinated – he thinks – by Russian goon squads associated with Putin and in some cases directly working for him. “Igor Domnikov was the first,” Muratov said on the program. “He was a brilliant guy. He was killed by bandits for his series of investigations. Yuri Shchekochikhin, my closest friend and an outstanding journalist. He was poisoned. Anna Politkovskaya. She made it to Chechnya, disobeying all orders. And I was on vacation at the time. Of course, I blame myself terribly for this. I should also mention Nastya Baburova and Stas Markelov. Natasha Estemirova, who was Anya Politkovskaya’s main collaborator on Chechnya. Their portraits hang on the walls right above the table where we meet and I see them many times a day. I’m ashamed of myself, but not the newspaper.”

Things got even worse for Muratov in 2022 when Russia launched its invasion of and war against Ukraine. If I were in Russia I could be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for writing the above sentence because Putin and his puppet legislature, the Duma, has literally made it a crime to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine a “war” or an “invasion” instead of the Russian government’s preferred euphemism, a “special military operation.” For years Muratov had gone up to the limits of Putin’s censorship without actually crossing the line – there’s footage of him asking Putin about his designations of certain individuals, including journalists, as “foreign agents” without any due process or right to appeal. Muratov once even asked Putin at one of the president’s press conferences, “I still have a question about ‘foreign agents.’ This law has no judgment. There is no court there. You are declared a ‘foreign agent.’ There is no evidence. There is no sentence. You are just branded a criminal. Let me remind you of our favorite childhood book. This is exactly what happened to Milady in The Three Musketeers. But when Milady was beheaded at dawn, she was at least finally read the sentence.” Putin replied, “First of all, I would like to congratulate you on being awarded the Nobel Prize. So, your concern about ‘foreign agents.’ I’m not going to beat around the bush. You said there was no verdict. You’re right, there really isn’t one. Milady was sentenced and her head was cut off. But no one is cutting anything off here.” Muratov also lost a key protector when Mikhail Gorbachev died of natural causes in August 2022 at age 91, cutting off one of the few remaining disincentives for Putin to mess with him directly.

During the early 2020’s Muratov was more or less freely allowed to travel outside Russia – a privilege the Russian state in its various authoritarian regimes (the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, now) hasn’t always allowed its citizens.. In this documentary he’s shown in Oslo, in Riga (the capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic republics Joseph Stalin forcibly annexed to Russia in 1940 and whose departure in the 1980’s started the chain of events that led ultimately to the Soviet Union’s disintegration) and even in New York, where he went to witness the auctioning off of his Nobel Prize medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. His trip to Riga was particularly consequential because he was there ostensibly to be a judge at a documentary film festival, but really to supervise the evacuation of many Novaya Gazeta staff members, including young journalist Roman Anin, to Riga to publish an edition in exile there. Muratov took great pains to maintain the idea that the version published in Riga had no connection to his old one from Moscow, but after the film festival was over he returned to Moscow despite the warnings from Anin and others in his circle that this wasn’t a good idea. “I came to Novaya Gazeta in 2006 when I was 19 years old,” Anin said in this documentary. “He’s like my second father. People think that his job is to be the chief editor, but his job is to save people, and he has always been like that. I’m afraid that something might happen to him. I wouldn’t go [back to Russia] … [b]ecause I know that they most likely will arrest me. I know that nobody survives Russian prison, or at least there is a very small chance that you can survive Russian prison. And he knows all of that, and despite that he goes back.” When Muratov went back he got red paint laced with acetone, which burned his eyes and nearly blinded him, thrown at him in his train car. The Russian authorities identified his assailant but, all too predictably, did nothing. Muratov’s own reporters were able not only to identify him but document his connections to the Russian secret police.

Ultimately, on September 1, 2023, Muratov was officially declared a “foreign agent” by the Putin government for “promoting anti-Russian views.” It’s not clear just what the consequences of being declared a “foreign agent” are – whether it’s like the apartheid South African government’s practice of “banning” certain individuals, including forbidding them to be named or mentioned in the media, or it goes farther than that. But it’s certain that Putin has an ultra-low threshold of tolerance for dissent, including sending out hit people to assassinate those he considers “enemies of Russia” even in other countries. Muratov himself equated being declared a “foreign agent” with being called an “enemy of the people.” No sooner had Muratov returned to Russia that two of his reporters, Elena Milashina and Sasha Nemov, were seized by agents of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya. “They were severely injured, beaten,” he said. “Sasha Nemov and Elena Milashina were taken right after the flight [from Russia to Chechnya. Attackers] threw the driver out, put them in a car, took them to be tortured. [They had liquid iodine thrown on them and were repeatedly beaten with hard plastic sticks.] The people who did this, it was an armed group of 10-12 people. They knew what plane, on what flight, at night by Utair they would arrive in Grozny. This means that these people had access to the passenger flight booking system. To me, this shows that these people represent the authorities of the Chechen Republic.” “Putin vs. the Press” is an inspiring tale of resistance but also an extremely depressing program that shows how easily the virus of authoritarianism can infect even a country like our own which has traditionally taken its status as a republic for granted. Given the current state of American political affairs – with Donald Trump dominating the Republican polls and running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election, and radical-Right House Republicans threatening to shut down the U.S. government and demanding an end to U.S. military aid to Ukraine as part of their price for keeping it open – Russia’s present could well be America’s future.

Wings of Desire, a.k.a. Der Himmel über Berlin (Heaven Over Berlin) (Road Movies Filmproduktion [Berlin], Argos Films [Paris], Westdeutscher Rundfunk [WDR], Wim Wenders Stiftung, Orion, MGM, 1987)

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

Yesterday (Monday, September 25) at about 9:50 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched Wings of Desire, a.k.a. Der Himmel über Berlin (“Heaven Over Berlin”), a 1987 art-house film produced and directed by Wim Wenders from a script he co-wrote with noted German author Peter Handke. (Wenders and Handke had previously collaborated on a 1975 “road movie” called The Wrong Move.) Two other writers are listed on the film’s imdb.com page: Richard Reitinger, who isn’t listed at the beginning but is credited at the end; and Bernard Eisenschitz, who isn’t credited at all. Charles had recommended Wings of Desire to me partly after we’d just seen Barbie and he saw a parallel between the two movies in that both involve protagonists who leave a mythical realm to interact with the real world. I don’t see that at all. Wings of Desire is a magical-realist fantasy about an angel named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) who’s stalking out Berlin with another angel, Cassiel (Otto Sander). The two are dressed in black and don’t sport wings – though Damiel’s very first scene in the movie shows him wearing wings which almost immediately disappear – and they drive around the divided city (remember this film was made two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Wall figures prominently in the film’s plot) in a black BMW convertible. They have the telepathic power to listen to the conversations and innermost thoughts of the normal human beings who surround them, many of which are of a stupefying banality. We get reams of this stuff in German with English subtitles (Charles was worried we’d have to tweak the DVD settings to get the subtitles, but they popped up automatically).

Supposedly Damiel and Cassiel are there not only to eavesdrop on humans but to comfort and console them, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of them succeeding at this, at least in part because, though the angels move about freely in the human realm, they’re invisible and inaudible to ordinary people. In one of the film’s most intense scenes Damiel tries to reach out to a young man (Sigurd Rachman) who’s about to commit suicide by jumping off a tall building, and though Damiel stands behind the man and literally reaches out to him, the man feels nothing and goes through with his suicide. (I love the German term for suicide: Selbstmord, literally “self-murder.” In the credits, Rachman’s role is listed as “Der Selbstmörder,” “the self-murderer.”) Most of the film is in black-and-white to emphasize the angels’ alienation from the normal human world, though there are flashes of color occasionally through the first three-fourths of the film and the last one-fourth is the opposite: mostly in color, but with a few flashes of black-and-white. The color represents Damiel’s reaching out for contact with normal humanity and the way in which he’s yearning for both physical and emotional connection with people in general, and one person in particular. The person he’s yearning for the most is Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a woman trapeze artist who works for a traveling circus called the “Circus Alekan” (after the film’s cinematographer, Henri Alekan, a veteran cameraman who shot, among other things, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, the 1948 British version of Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh, and the 1953 Hollywood production Roman Holiday, filmed in Europe with William Wyler directing). Perhaps since Henri Alekan was French, the circus is a bi-national affair with its performers and staff speaking to each other in both German and French (something Charles noticed before I did).

The Circus Alekan is set up on the ruins of the old Potsdamer Platz, frustrating an elderly man who looks for the former location of Potsdamer Platz and can’t find it. It’s also going broke financially and is about to give its last performance (though there are two or three circus shows in the film and it’s unclear which one is supposed to be the last performance), after which Marion is anxious about what she’s going to do with her life and whether she’ll still be able to make a living. There are at least two scenes in which she reluctantly considers going back to being a waitress, which is what she did before she joined the circus. There’s also one rather creepy scene in which Damiel is inside the circus trailer in which Marion lives; he watches her put on a record by Nick Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds (later Nick Cave appears as himself in the film in a nightclub scene in which he performs two songs, “The Carny” and “From Her to Eternity”). He pats her on the back at one point, only because he’s intangible to her she doesn’t respond to him at all, let alone in the predictable way in which you’d expect a woman to panic when she realized a strange man was with her in her bedroom. And there’s a running subplot which features Peter Falk (as himself), who’s in Berlin to make a film set in 1945 in which he plays an American detective (what else?) investigating a rumor that in the last days of the Third Reich Joseph Goebbels hired an actor to impersonate Hitler, and either the actor rather than the real Hitler committed suicide (or it was faked to look like he had) and the real Hitler is still alive, or the actor took on the role and so there’s a faux “Hitler” out there somewhere. There’s an ironic comment on fame in which a bunch of German teenage boys spot Falk on the Berlin streets and one of them goes, “Is that Columbo?” The other three decide he isn’t.

In fact, Wings of Desire is full of ironic comments and individual scenes that are quite moving, but they’re tied to a plot that makes almost no sense. The final one-quarter of the film, which is mostly (but not entirely) in color, consists of Damiel somehow overcoming his angelhood and finding at least brief love in Marion’s arms – though the two do no more than kiss and I’m grateful to Wenders and Handke for not showing Damiel and Marion having graphic, explicit sex (or the fakes that pass for it in mainstream films). In fact, Wings of Desire is so decorous one could almost imagine it being made under the 1930’s to 1960’s Hollywood Production Code – though there was a very similar story actually made during Code-era Hollywood, I Married an Angel (1942), the eighth and last joint appearance of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. It was based on a plot Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had suggested to MGM studio head Irving Thalberg in 1933 as the first MacDonald-Eddy movie, but even in that supposedly “pre-Code” era the censors nixed it. Rodgers and Hart went on to do it as a stage musical in 1938, but for the film that finally got made the writers had to fudge the plot premise and make it all, if not a dream, then certainly a fantasy of Eddy’s character.

This morning I asked Charles what about Barbie had reminded him of Wings of Desire, and he said the whole idea of a being traveling from a fantasy realm to the real world – but that’s a quite common story trope in all sorts of fiction, as is the idea of a god-like figure coming to Earth and making love to an ordinary human. Countless tales from Greco-Roman, Norse, (East) Indian and Native American mythology depict gods coming down from Olympus, Valhalla or wherever they live to have sex with humans and produce super-powered offspring. That’s also, of course, the founding myth of Christianity, though Christians are asked to believe that it only happened once. Wings of Desire is the sort of film I want to like, and there were parts of it I found genuinely moving while other parts made me laugh out loud, but it’s also a film frustrated by its own intellectual pretensions – though I liked Henri Alekan’s hard-edged (mostly) black-and-white cinematography, the common look of foreign films in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Alekan was born on February 10, 1909 in Paris, which made him 36 years older than his director (Wim Wenders was born August 15, 1945, just 3 ½ months after Adolf Hitler’s death and the end of the European theatre in World War II), and this movie was so beautifully photographed that I had the weird feeling of nostalgia for the Berlin Wall.

Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Pilgrim Media Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 24) I watched two Lifetime movies on TV: Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard and Murder at the Country Club. Stolen Baby was Saturday night’s Lifetime “premiere” and Murder at the Country Club – shot under the working title Country Club Scandal until someone at Lifetime apparently thought “murder” would be a bigger draw to audiences than “scandal” – was last night’s “premiere.” Stolen Baby didn’t yet have an imdb.com page when we watched it last night (my husband Charles joined me for the last half of it), though it does now, albeit with a horrible and risible mistake in the synopsis: “Based on the true story of the murder of Magen who was murdered by her friend Heidi.” It was in fact Magen Fieramusca (Emily Osment) who killed Heidi Broussard (Anna Hopkins), not the other way around, and as the overall title suggests her motive was to kidnap Heidi’s two-week-old baby and raise her as her own. The movie was based on a real-life case from Austin, Texas in December 2019 – though for some reason writer Alexandra Salerno changed the names of all the true-life characters except Heidi’s and Magen’s. Heidi’s live-in boyfriend and the baby’s father, Shane Carey, became “Cody Maxwell.” The baby herself, Margo Carey, was turned into “Emma Maxwell” in the film, and Magen’s boyfriend, Christopher Green, became “Greg Bowman.” Magen and Heidi had met 10 years before in a Christian youth group called the Texas Bible Institute (a meeting that’s dramatized in the film, with Kendall Christie as the younger Heidi and Morgan Douglas as the younger Magen), and they had become and remained close friends. The crisis is precipitated when Greg Bowman tells Magen over dinner that he’s going to leave her, and Magen announces, “I’m pregnant.” She isn’t, but she figures she can avoid having Greg throw her out (which will leave her homeless) by lying and pleading with him to let her stay at his place at least until the baby is born. Then she has to go whole-hog impersonating a pregnant woman, including buying one of those body appliances you can wear around your chest to make you look pregnant (one of the odd things I’ve learned reading mystery novels is there’s enough of a market for those things they’re mass-produced commercially), only this puts her under the burden of having to produce a baby nine months later.

Magen lures Heidi Broussard into her car with Emma with yet another lie – she says Greg is beating her and wants the two of them to go to a local coffeehouse to talk about it – only once she gets Heidi alone she strangles her with a dog’s leash as well as her hands. Director Michelle Ouelette (one of Lifetime’s better filmmakers, actually) doesn’t show the murder (which is probably just as well), though she does show Magen carrying the dead weight of Heidi’s body and stuffing it into the trunk of her car. Then Magen leaves the car parked behind Greg’s home for the next 10 days, while the cops, local detective Bonnie Majors (Sonia Dillhon Tully) and FBI agent Paul Richards (Paulinho Nunes), grill Cody as the primary suspect in his fiancée’s disappearance, presumably on the ground that the spouse is always the prime suspect. They even give him a lie-detector test and the polygraph examiner declares his results “inconclusive.” Meanwhile, Greg is as unimpressed with being a father as he was with staying Magen’s boyfriend. When Magen asks him to pick up some formula, Greg says he’s on his way to work but he’ll do it on the way home. Greg has noticed that the baby suffers from jaundice and needs medical attention, and gets suspicious when Magen refuses to take the kid in, but ultimately his purchase of the formula alerts the authorities to Magen as a potential suspect. Two officers of the Texas Rangers show up at Magen’s and Greg’s home under the guise of doing a “welfare check” on “Lily,” as Magen has renamed Emma (the actual false name Magen gave the kidnapped baby was “Luna”). They demand to see the inside of her car’s trunk, and Magen, realizing the jig is up, goes along and meekly surrenders as they arrest her for Heidi’s murder. Ultimately the real Magen Fieramusca pleaded guilty – though that didn’t happen until this year, almost four years after the murder – and was sentenced to 55 years in prison; obviously the plea deal she cut was to avoid the death penalty, which Texas is notorious for (Texas executes more people than all other death-penalty U.S. states combined).

There are potential subtleties in the real-life case this film misses – including the likely jealousy of Magen for Heidi, who’s considerably better-looking and has a partner who genuinely loves her instead of a doofus like Greg who just wants to bail – but the film is nicely acted, especially by the two principals. Emily Osment is pitch-perfect as Magen – homely but not altogether unattractive, quiet and unassuming except when she loses her temper, and the sort of person you could imagine getting away with a major crime just because she doesn’t look like “the type.” And Anna Hopkins matches her as Heidi – even though Salerno’s script contains so many flashbacks we aren’t always sure when as well as where we are (I suspect Hopkins actually got more screen time in flashbacks than she did when her character was still alive). Ian Lake is also effective as Cody, looking hunky though not so hot we suspect he’s up to no good (given the usual Lifetime iconography that really hot, sexy men are villains); and he’s had a big-screen career, including one of the Star Trek movies. The faults are in Salerno’s sometimes confusing script and the continuing (and confounding) flashbacks; when Charles joined me in mid-movie I had to explain to him that one of the women in the scene was the victim and it was a flashback.

Murder at the Country Club, a.k.a. Country Club Scandal (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Georgia Film and Television Office, PeachTree Post, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Murder at the Country Club didn’t have the imprimatur of a true story (however chopped and channeled), but it was good, sleazy fun and actually more entertaining than Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard. It’s all about the Pinecrest Country Club in Gateway, a town in west Georgia (the Georgia Film Office supported this production even though the script isn’t very flattering to the state), where Cassie Randolph (Alex Mitchell) has just taken a new job. She got the gig largely because her father Brad (Donald Ome) is an influential long-time member and he pulled a few strings. (Incidentally Brad’s last name is spelled “Randolf” on the film’s imdb.com page, but in the final shot we see Cassie’s name on a newspaper byline and it’s the usual spelling, “Randolph.”) Cassie got hired in the first place to replace a woman named Lisa Harkin, who discovered evidence of embezzlement from the club by its newly elected president, Frank Sanders (a marvelous villain performance by Adam Harper) but has since mysterioiusly disappeared. Cassie’s direct supervisor is a woman named Ava Worth (Layla Cushman), who’s having an extra-relational affair with Frank – the two aren’t particularly discreet about it, emerging from his office and quickly rebuttoning their clothes after a sexual quickie. It turns out Frank is also a practiced embezzler, getting himself appointed to run successful enterprises, looting them for his personal gain and then driving them into bankruptcy. Cassie is living with a boyfriend who’s an investigative reporter for the Gateway Gazette – whose irascible editor, a character “type” one seems to have stepped in from a 1930’s screwball comedy (even though the “paper” seems to publish only online), keeps telling him that a) he doesn’t have enough evidence for a story about the skullduggery at the Pinecrest Country Club, and b) even if he did, no one cares about a bunch of rich people screwing each other over financially.

There’s also a quartet of hot-looking young men who work at the club as golf caddies: Milo (Cody Kahaku), Jeb (Dilon Ballard), Owen (Cade Gass) and Jamie (Kyle Findley). They all live together in what amounts to a bachelor pad on the premises, though this causes the predictable problems when one of them has a date with a woman and wants to invite her over (not that we ever get to see this happen, more’s the pity). Milo attempts to organize the others to go on strike during the upcoming big golf tournament that supplies the club’s largest source of income, but the other three beg off and say that even though the new Frank Sanders management has just cut their pay by 20 percent, they’re still willing to accept it rather than risk losing their jobs altogether. Jeb is Frank Sanders’ personal caddy and he’s become a double agent, reporting on the activities of the office staff whenever they get too close to finding out the truth about Frank’s criminal activities. The film opens with a confusing prologue that made it seem like Lisa Harkin was another one of Frank’s paramours, only they got into a fight, he knocked her over and accidentally killed her. It turns out later that Ava was the woman who was with Frank last night, that she was demanding they have sex outdoors on the Pinecrest grounds, and she spotted Lisa and killed her on purpose because Lisa had prepared a two-page document detailing the embezzlements and the offshore accounts Frank and Ava had created to hide the money. Much of the suspense around the story is about Cassie’s attempts to print out this document, which keep getting stymied first by the password protection on Lisa’s account (though in the climactic scene Cassie is able to print it out without being asked for a password, and writer Michael M. Scott never explains how she was able to manage it), then by the printer mysteriously being declared “out of order” when it isn’t, and finally by Ava, who turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the real brains behind the operation.

It was Ava who killed Lisa when she discovered her and Frank on the club grounds, and Ava also ran over Milo and Lisa’s sister Tracy (Alex Bowling) in separate auto “accidents” once they were about to meet with Cassie and spill the beans about what they knew. Ultimately Cassie gets fired from her job but she’s able to get back into the club anyway – for some reason no one asked her to return her keys – and print out Lisa’s document. Alas, she’s discovered by Frank and Ava, who had sneaked into the office building for one of their sexual encounters (ironically, he would rather do it in a hotel room and it’s she who wants the added thrill of having their trysts in potentially dangerous places), and Ava pulls out a gun and shoots Frank because she never really wanted him, just the money. At this point one wonders who’s going to play the role of the Seventh Cavalry coming in and changing the situation for the better, rescuing Cassie and giving Ava and Frank what they deserve. The Seventh Cavalry or deus ex machina character turns out to be Tracy Harkin, who overpowers Ava and threatens to strangle her out of revenge for killing her sister Lisa. Only Cassie is able to talk her out of it and point out that turning Ava over to the law is a better alternative than making herself a murderess. Ultimately Ava and Frank are arrested, and Cassie gets her byline on the Gateway Gazette article exposing the fraud and scandal at the Pinecrest Country Club even though it’s supposed to be her boyfriend who’s the investigative reporter. Murder at the Country Club is a good bit of Lifetime’s usual sleazy fun – though some soft-core porn scenes between Ava and Frank, or better yet between Ava and one of the young caddies, would have helped. It’s effectively directed by Dave Thomas, who has enough of a reputation that, instead of reading “Directed by Dave Thomas,” his credit says, “A Dave Thomas Film.” Thomas began his career as a documentarian doing an award-winning film on the history of emergency rooms (which may explain why so much of Murder at the Country Club takes place in hospitals), and he also made the recent Lifetime movie The Paramedic Who Stalked Me, which I thought was quite a bit sillier than this!

Exodus (Otto Preminger Films, United Artists, 1960)

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

After I got home from yesterday’s (Sunday, September 23) three-band concert at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, I switched on Turner Classic Movies and watched Otto Preminger’s megalith of a film, the 1960 movie Exodus, adapted from Leon Uris’s 1958 novel that was a blockbuster hit, supposedly selling more copies than anything written since Gone With the Wind. As all the world knows, Exodus the movie (like Uris’s book) is an unabashed piece of propaganda celebrating the 1947 birth of the state of Israel in historic Palestine. Needless to say, my attitude towards Israel and its existence is considerably more jaundiced than that of Uris or the film’s auteur, producer-director Otto Preminger. I think it was a moral mistake, verging on evil, to displace the Palestinian Arabs to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The fact that this happened largely as an atonement for the Western world’s refusal to take in Jewish refugees during the Nazi Holocaust or do much of anything to stop it while it was in progress seems to me the classic example of the proverb, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” My attitude towards Israel is basically Abraham Lincoln’s attitude towards slavery before the Civil War: he thought it was wrong but was willing to allow it to continue in the places that already had it. I think the establishment of Israel was morally wrong but we’re stuck with it now, and it would do much more harm than good to get rid of it.

The villains of Exodus are the British, who were ruling Palestine under a League of Nations mandate and severely restricting Jewish immigration there; and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s leading Muslim cleric and both spiritual and political leader. According to this film’s script, which Preminger hired Hollywood blacklistee Dalton Trumbo to write and promised him screen credit, though the Grand Mufti is never shown as an on-screen character he was working hand-in-glove with a former Nazi German officer, Von Storch (Marius Goring), to finish off the Jewish population in Palestine once and for all and dash the hopes of the liberal Labor Party that governed Israel for nearly 30 years that Jews and Arabs could live in peace there. The principal characters of Exodus are Jewish freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman, whose casting was called into question in 1960 and ever since because, even though his father was Jewish, he looks totally Anglo white); Mrs. Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), who’s been at wit’s end since her husband, a newsmagazine photographer, was killed while covering a battle; and Dov Landau (Sal Mineo), a young Holocaust survivor who was a gravedigger at Auschwitz and who was spared execution because the Nazis turned him into a Gay sex slave. (“They used me like you use a woman!” he whines in a scene that’s particularly ironic now that we’ve long known Mineo was Gay for real.) British General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson) is an old friend of Kitty’s and her late husband’s and there are rumors that he’s part-Jewish himself; it’s he who wangles permission from the British government to let the ship Olympia, which the Jews have rechristened Exodus, sail with its cargo of over 600 Jewish refugees from the island of Cyprus to Palestine. This takes place despite the opposition of his second-in-command, Major Caldwell (Peter Lawford), who refuses to let the ship sail presumably out of his own anti-Jewish prejudices. (According to the film’s imdb.com page, Preminger asked Trumbo to tone down the anti-British sentiments of Uris’s book, but the film still flopped in the U.K.)

When the Exodus nèe Olympia finally gets across the Mediterranean to Israel, Ari, his father Barak (Lee J. Cobb) and his uncle Ashiva (David Opatoshu) base themselves at a kibbutz village called Gan Dafna, which is situated on land given them by the local Arab mukhtar; he’s dead now but his son Taha (John Derek) is mukhtar now and shares his late dad’s hope of a future Israel where Jews and Arabs can live in peace. Dov Landau falls in love with 15-year-old Karen Hansen Clement (Jill Haworth, six years before she played Sally Bowles in the original Broadway production of the musical Cabaret) and also joins the Irgun, the terrorist organization headed by Menachem Begin (who later became the first Prime Minister of Israel from the Right-wing Likud party instead of Labor and still later cut Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab country, Egypt). As an Irgun member Dov plants several bombs in British installations, including one in a toilet (actually either he plants two bombs in different toilets or one travels through the sewer pipe so it explodes in a different toilet from the one in which he planted it). Unfortunately, the hope of an Israel in which Jews and Arabs can live together in peace is dashed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in cahoots with his Nazi ally, Von Storch. The Mufti announces it’s the sacred duty of all Arabs in Israel either to exterminate all the Jews or, failing that, to flee. The Mufti, whatever his real-life politics may have been, is an important figure in Israeli demonology; Israel’s current (and seemingly eternal) prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, once blamed the entire Holocaust on him. Netanyahu said that Adolf Hitler had been willing to exile the Jews from Europe and it was the Mufti who talked him into killing them all instead – probably the stupidest thing that’s ever been said about the Holocaust aside from denying that it happened at all.

Exodus runs nearly 3 ½ hours, and there’s a tale that when it was first screened in L.A., at about 2 ½ hours in Jewish stand-up comedian Mort Sahl stood up in the theatre and called out to Preminger, “Otto – let my people go!” It finally lumbers to a close when the Arabs, responding to the Mufti’s call for jihad, sack Gar Dafna, Dov is standing guard outside the village when Karen joins him, only he sends her away – big mistake, because the Arabs immediately capture and kill her (my husband Charles noted afterwards that this is one of the few films Sal Mineo made in which his character does not die at the end). Taha is hanged by his fellow Arabs, and in one of the film’s most chilling images, his killers carve a Star of David on his chest and paint another Star of David and a swastika on nearby walls. Our hot-looking Anglo-looking Jewish stud and his equally hot-looking shiksa girlfriend order the bodies of Taha and Karen buried in a double grave – though Dov refuses the opportunity to shovel dirt over the bodies – and they ride off in a convoy of trucks going heaven knows where to continue the fight for Israel’s existence.

The original trailer claimed that Exodus the novel was the biggest seller since Gone With the Wind (another politically problematic production these days), and Otto Preminger was clearly hoping to make “a film for the ages” on the level of David Selznick’s epic. He failed because he simply wasn’t that good a director; though he made a big to-do in the credits that the entire movie was filmed on location in Israel or Cyprus (the latter proved difficult because the Cypriot government was then dealing with an insurgency that wanted to take the country over and align it with Greece, and the Cyprus authorities looked askance at supporting a movie about people rising up against a legitimate government), the film as it stands is interminable. Even the action scenes, which one would have thought would be sure-fire, are boring. The film also fails in a way that’s going to be ironic coming from me; for a while I’ve been lamenting that modern-day color films mostly use dark greens and browns and longing for the days when color films were actually colorful. Exodus is literally too damned colorful for its own good: Sam Leavitt’s cinematography and the vibrant Technicolor give us luscious picture-postcard visions of the Mediterranean and all that gorgeous desert scenery – and this plays quite against the darkness of the story about people fighting for their lives and their liberties in a revolution against a brutal oppressor (two brutal oppressors, actually: the British and the Arabs).

Two O'Clock Courage (RKO, 1945)

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

After Exodus Turner Classic Movies showed a film that was one-third as long and about ten times as entertaining: Two O’Clock Courage, a 1945 “B” from RKO starring Tom Conway as an amnesia victim who may or may not have been mixed up in a murder, and Ann Rutherford as Patty Mitchell, the woman cab driver who runs into him – almost literally – and takes him under her wing to help him find out who he is and whether he was involved in the murder of a theatrical producer. TCM showed it as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show, but it’s really not a film noir. Rather, it’s a good example of the comedy-mysteries that were really big in the 1930’s but by 1945 had been pretty much killed off by the noir movement. Indeed, though the original novel by Gelett Burgess was called Two O’Clock Courage and was published in 1934, it was originally filmed in 1936 as Two in the Dark with Benjamin Stoloff directing and Walter Abel and Margot Grahame in the leads. This time around Stoloff returned but merely as producer, with the young Anthony Mann directing (one of his first gigs at a major studio) just after his magnificent The Great Flamarion at Republic. The Great Flamarion really is a film noir, with superb performances by Erich von Stroheim and Dan Duryea and a great femme fatale role for Mary Beth Hughes (rivaling Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour).

Two O’Clock Courage is not a noir at all, but it is very entertaining and manages to balance the mystery and comedy elements quite well. The principal suspects in the producer’s murder are his former chauffeur, Dave Rennick (Carl Kent), and his butler, Wilbur Judson (Harold De Becker, proving that they didn’t break the mold after they made Arthur Treacher). But other suspects emerge as Tom Conway’s character investigates the murder and his own identity with the few clues he has – two ticket stubs to a theatre performance of a play called Menace, a matchbook from a nightclub and $500 he got from the producer (he and we both think at first he stole it from the producer’s body but later we and he learn the producer gave him the money before he was killed). Meanwhile, the crime is being investigated by Inspector Bill Brenner (Emory Parnell), the usual doltish cop in these productions, and reporter Al Haley (Richard Lane), who keeps calling his irascible city editor (whenever did a reporter in a 1930’s or 1940’s movie work for an editor who wasn’t irascible?) with fresh new theories about the murder. The editor invariably accuses the reporter of drinking on the job, while the cop presses the reporter into service to re-enact the crime by lying on the floor of the room where the killing took place in exactly the same position as the corpse.

Along the way we meet quite a few possible suspects, including Mark Evans (Lester Matthews), who claimed to have written Menace but really stole it from a script by one Lawrence Curry called Two O’Clock Courage; good-time girl Helen Carter (Jane Greer, still using her original name of Bettejane Greer two years before her femme fatale role in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past and five years before her career would be destroyed by Howard Hughes, who had just bought RKO and figured that entitled him to sex with any of their contract actresses), who makes a play for Conway’s character and gets Patty jealous; and Barbara Borden (Jean Brooks), actress star of Menace and former girlfriend of the murder victim. When Conway’s character visits the nightclub and his old college buddy Steve Maitland (Roland Drew) addresses him as “Skip” – as do several other people – he gradually realizes that his real name is Theodore “Ted” Allison and “Skip” is a nickname he got from being particularly good at college football. He also finds a note from Lawrence Curry’s mother appointing him her late son’s agent for the purpose of getting Two O’Clock Courage produced, and he goes to the victim’s home to look for the playscript. He finds it, but he’s shot by an unseen assailant; he survives, but the shock brings back his memory and he recalls his confrontation with the producer, the $500 he received as part of the play’s royalties, and that Mark Evans the plagiarist was there at the time.

Later, when Ted comes to, a shot is heard and Mark is found dead; the cop and the reporter immediately assumed he killed himself but Ted, who through so much of this film channels his recurring role as private detective Tom Lawrence in the Falcon movie series I half-expected it to turn out that he was really “The Falcon,” notices that the gun in Mark’s hand hadn’t been fired recently. Ultimately he deduces that Barbara Borden is the real killer of both the producer and the plagiarizing “playwright,” though her motive remains obscure. Though not a film noir, Two O’Clock Courage shows that even as late as 1945 there were still some chunks of meat left on the old bones of the comedy-mystery genre, and it has a great gag ending in which Patty Mitchell’s irascible landlady is about to throw her and Ted out of her room when she produces a marriage license to prove they are Production Code-legitimate cohabitors – and for good measure slaps a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the landlady’s back. Though just about everyone involved in this made better films either earlier (Ann Rutherford’s recurring role as Mickey Rooney’s girlfriend in the Hardy Family movies, and Tom Conway and Jean Brooks for Val Lewton) or later (Jane Greer in Out of the Past – even though I think that’s a good but somewhat overrated movie – and Anthony Mann in his later Eagle-Lion noirs and the noir-in-Western-drag Winchester .73, his star-making film and a sensational success that earned its star, James Stewart, $1 million in profit participation), Two O’Clock Courage is a fascinating and quite entertaining little film that deserves to be better known. Eddie Muller boasted at the end that Two O’Clock Courage is the sixth Anthony Mann film he’s shown on “Noir Alley” – but is The Great Flamarion one of the other five, and if not, why not?

Bombs Over Burma (PRC, 1942)

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

Last night I watched a couple of relatively short movies; just before 9 p.m. I put on the DVD of Joseph H. Lewis’s Bombs Over Burma and then after that I watched (in real time) an episode of the British TV show The Mallorca Files called “Number One Fan.” I already posted a moviemagg comment on Bombs Over Burma on March 25, 2011 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/03/bombs-over-burma-prc-1942.html and this time around I liked it a bit better, but still found it disappointing overall. I’d made a major mistake about it in my previous post: I’d said that Anna May Wong and Noel Madison were playing an interracial couple and gave Lewis and his co-writer, Milton Raison, for being unusually progressive for 1942. In fact Madison was actually supposed to be playing an Asian – his character name is “Me-Hoi” – and I hadn’t realized that the first time around only because his “yellowface” makeup was so singularly unconvincing I just read him as white. Otherwise, as I noted last time, it was a boring would-be spy melodrama in which Lin Ying (Anna May Wong), a schoolteacher in Chungking on the border between China and Burma, and her Buddhist-monk father are accused of being the spies who are letting the enemy Japanese know where and when convoys to resupply Chungking are coming in so they can bomb them and keep up their effort to starve Chungking into submission.

The real spy, to no one’s surprise, is Sir Roger Howe (Leslie Dennison, turning in a quite effective, ringing performance evoking comparisons to George Sanders and his real-life brother Tom Conway), ostensibly a British officer but really a German one impersonating a Brit to throw off suspicion and infiltrate the Chinese resistance on behalf of Germany’s ally, Japan. I also misremembered the final scene: after Howe leaps out of the lead truck in the convoy (he’s radioed the Japanese it’s on its way via a two-way radio concealed in his electric razor, which sends Morse code; the Wong and Madison characters have challenged him to ride with them in the lead truck, but it’s really a decoy convoy and the real one is taking a different route across the familiar Southern California rocks used in countless Republic Westerns) it’s a number of Chinese peasants who, signaled by a whistle from Wong, surround him and eventually do him in by stabbing him with a pitchfork (making last night the second in a row I’d seen a show that used a pitchfork as a murder weapon; the first was the “Judgement Day” episode of Midsomer Murders KPBS had screened Thursday, September 21). Director Lewis, who’s thrown in a few shots with occasional visual distinction (in his earlier days as a “B” Western director at Universal he’d become known as “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he owned a large collection of wagon wheels of various sizes which he’d bring to the set and shoot through every time he had to film a particularly stupid or dull dialogue exchange, and there’s at least one scene in Bombs Over Burma which he literally films through a wagon wheel), shoots the final confrontation between Howe and the Chinese peasants in an almost Eisensteinian manner, full of obliquely angled close-ups of the peasants as they converge on Howe preparatory to killing him. I also liked Anna May Wong’s performance a bit better than I had last time, when I accused her of “sleepwalking through her part.”

The Mallorca Files: "Number One Fan" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, 2019 or 2020)

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

The episode of The Mallorca Files was a fun show, though at 45 minutes it didn’t have much time either to waste or offer much depth to its story. The series leads are British-born Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and German-born Max Winter (Julian Looman), lead police detectives on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. They work under the immediate supervision of Inés Villegas (María Fernandéz Ache), who doesn’t particularly like or trust them, and it gets worse when during the course of this episode Inés has her 45th birthday party and Miranda, relying on Max’s deliberately false information, shows up with a balloon that proclaims Inés’s age as 50. The crime they’re investigating is the mysterious disappearance of German supermodel Valentina Caligari, who suddenly vanished off a train supposedly carrying her from Mallorca to Germany for an international models’ contest she’s already won five times. This means that Miranda and Max have to infiltrate the impossibly pretentious artists’ community headed by Valentina’s brother Otto (Matthias Zera) and featuring all sorts of red herrings, including Valentina’s former agent and boyfriend Abe Steiner (John Schwab), who was forced to sell his yacht after Valentina dumped him both professionally and personally; Hades Jaffar (Paul Bazely), a man with a well-waxed handlebar moustache with whom Steiner is playing a particularly nasty game of pool; and Richard Webb (Al Weaver), a nerdy waiter and cook at the Caligari compound who’s already been arrested for stalking famous models. Webb had had a crush on Valentina, but she already had a Lesbian partner, Azra Bolat (Hazar Ergüçlü).

Valentina and Azra had not only made up matching yin-and-yang heart-shaped pendants for each other, they had planned to have a child together, with Azra bearing the baby and Valentina’s brother Otto as the sperm donor so the kid would at least be biologically related to both “mommies.” Only Azra fell in love with Otto for real – the script by Rachael New takes a refreshingly non-essentialist view of sexual orientation – and as a result of a confrontation between Otto and Valentina over which one will end up with Azra, Otto killed Valentina accidentally and then decided to dump her body at sea. Then Otto and Azra hatched a plot to dress Otto in drag and pass him off as Valentina so “she’d” be seen getting on a train, from which Otto would later disembark so it would look like Valentina was still alive and just ditching her career. Only Richard Webb, stalking Valentina as usual, spotted the whole thing and pocketed Valentina’s half of the heart-shaped pendant, forcing Otto to wear Azra’s matching half and giving the cops the clue they needed to unravel the whole plot. The episode ends with some Nick and Nora Charles-esque banter between the two leads – though they’re not depicted as romantically or sexually involved with each other, and if anything this show (like the original Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) is a testament to the idea that a man and a woman can work together as professional partners without letting love or sex get in the way. The Mallorca Files is a sporadically interesting show, whose main assets are the Mallorca scenery and the vivid, bright colors with which director Charlie Palmer and cinematographer Kieran McGuigan film it. It’s also a colorfully insouciant show, and I especially loved the scene in which Miranda and Max, forced to chase Webb after he tries to escape them by car, leap into Miranda’s BMW convertible and tear off after him. “Now I know why they had to drive a convertible!” I joked.

Midsomer Murders: "Judgement Day" (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, September 21) at 10 I watched another Midsomer Murders rerun from the show’s early days as a co-production between the British All3 Media company and the American Arts & Entertainment channel – which was obvious in the show’s many false climaxes where the commercial breaks for A&E’s telecasts occurred. This episode was called “Judgement Day” – note the British spelling of the word “Judgement,” which in U.S. usage doesn’t have that first “e” – and the titular judgment day (to use the American spelling) is of a local village called Midsomer Mallow in the fictitious Midsomer County in central England. The show, first aired on January 29, 2000, starts with a prologue in which a martinet-like housekeeper is stabbed to death by an unseen assailant. It wasn’t until these shots reappeared at the end of the show that I realized the prologue was set years before the original action, though the clues were that the housekeeper was watching a small-screen black-and-white TV (a crime show, naturally, and one obviously patterned on the big 1950’s U.S. hit Dragnet) when she was stabbed. The episode was written by Anthony Horowitz and cleverly directed by Jeremy Silberston, who in the prologue mounts a quite effective elevator crane shot to link the action in the crime show the housekeeper is watching to the real-life assault and murder of her. The girl the housekeeper was baby-sitting, Annabella Weston (Emily Canfor-Dumas), supposedly slept through the entire incident and is found in bed by her parents, Michael (Richard Trinder) and Ruth (Caroline Faber), but at the end of the episode we learn that she was actually the killer and she was incarcerated in a mental institution for decades until she was sent to a halfway house, called Sebdon Manor but nicknamed “The Retreat,” in preparation for releasing her altogether as her doctors had judged her no longer a danger to herself or others. (Wrong, big-time.)

The current action begins with a series of burglaries in Midsomer Mallow committed by the local Lothario, Peter Drinkwater (a young and already strikingly handsome Orlando Bloom), in collaboration with Jack Dorset (Tobias Menzies), son of the local butcher, Ray Dorset (Bill Thomas). Peter is sexually involved with both his age-peer girlfriend, Caroline Devere (Chloe Tucker), daughter of Marcus Devere (Timothy West) and his wife Bella (Hannah Gordon), and older woman Laura Brierly (Marsha Fitzalan), frustrated wife of local leader Gordon Brierly (Richard Hope). Laura pays Peter 50 pounds for each of their trysts. Gordon is spearheading Midsomer Mallow’s entry in the “Perfect Village Contest,” a competition whose judges include Frank Mannion (Nickolas Grace), host of a TV gardening show and an obvious screaming queen (he’s constantly slipping off for Gay quickies with local waiters and the like); Rosemary Furman (Maggie Steed), who edits a magazine called Country Living but actually lives in London and can’t stand the country (sort of like Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Christmas in Connecticut); and Samantha Johnstone (Josephine Tewson), a friend of Rosemary’s she enlists at the last minute. Samantha is a writer and she’s had at least some success, but she’s also an alcoholic who suffers from clinical depression and has made at least one suicide attempt. Also in the mix is Edward Allardice (Moray Watson), a decently remembered character actor from the London stage (he recalls playing Laërtes in a 1955 production of Hamlet directed by and starring Laurence Olivier which had the play set in a doll’s house and reduced the number of actors to seven, though Allardice insists that Olivier did that just to give himself more stage time) until he suddenly retired following an auto accident that killed his wife, stunningly beautiful actress Jane Rochelle (Shelagh Fraser).

Only Jane Rochelle actually didn’t die: she emerged from the accident hideously disfigured but still alive, and Allardice hid her out in the big house he bought in Midsomer Mallow and never let anyone from the outside world see her. Writer Horowitz almost certainly cribbed this plot device from Jane Eyre (maybe we were supposed to believe Allardice had once acted in a stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic), and it sets up one of the most chilling scenes in the episode, in which eyes belonging to an otherwise unseen face watch Peter and Jack as they burglarize Allardice’s home but she does nothing to stop them. (At that point we don’t yet know that she’s a she and I thought Allardice himself was watching his house being burglarized but doing nothing, presumably out of fear for his safety, or maybe because he was having a Gay affair with one or both of the burglars.) The local police, series regulars Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) and his partner Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), get involved partly because Peter Drinkwater gets stabbed with a two-pronged pitchfork just before Barnaby and Troy arrive at the abandoned farm he’s living at to question him about the burglaries, and partly because Barnaby’s wife Joyce (Jane Wymark) won a TV contest to be the fourth judge in the Perfect Village Contest. Also Barnaby’s daughter Cully (Laura Howard) is an aspiring actress and writer who’s researching a history of the local playhouse and wants to interview Allardice for it. Other murders occur: Rosemary Furman dies from drinking poisoned wine at the big local festival for the Perfect Village judges. On the same occasion Bella Devere takes a sip and collapses but survives, though she falls in such a way that she knocks over the table and thereby destroys the other wine glasses and therefore wipes out the evidence.

Later Samantha Johnstone is found stabbed to death in her hotel room, and Barnaby and Troy ultimately deduce that Bella Devere is in fact Annabel Weston, who returned to the village following her release from custody and hooked up with Marcus through answering his lonely-hearts ad. Marcus figured out who she was but fell in love with her anyway, and the reason Bella Devere a.k.a. Annabel Weston poisoned the wine is that Samantha could have recognized her and exposed her as a former mental patient because the two of them met at “The Retreat” following Samantha’s suicide attempt. It’s still not clear why Bella offed Peter Drinkwater, but even with that rather important plot hole left unfilled “Judgement Day” remains one of the better Midsomer Murders episodes. Its characters are compelling creations, the intrigues more or less make sense (making the principal villainess a madwoman helps in that regard; then you can always say, “Of course her actions don’t make sense! She’s crazy!”) and the show overall manages to maintain its trademark lightness even though it’s dealing with some pretty dire aspects of human nature.

NOVA: "London Super Tunnel" (WGBH, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night I watched a sporadically interesting NOVA episode called “London Super Tunnel,” which is something of a misnomer because it’s a major expansion of the London Underground (also colloquially known as “The Tube”), the world’s oldest subway system that involved building multiple new tunnels and stations. The Underground was first constructed and opened in 1863, which begs the question of how the trains were powered then. According to Google, it was equipped with “gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives,” which must have made for some unpleasant smells inside the tunnels. It originally ran between two stations, Farringdon and Paddington, and the current expansion is officially called “Crossrail” and is designed both to link up with the existing Underground and to expand its capacity. The project was first launched in 2006 by Boris Johnson, then mayor of London and later architect of “Brexit,” British prime minister and ultimately forced out of that job in disgrace after he wilfully ignored the ban on mass gatherings during the COVID-19 lockdown to host large parties. (Johnson got to be mayor in the first place by defeating Ken Livingstone, one of my personal heroes, in a particularly nasty re-election campaign that anticipated Donald Trump and his slash-and-burn approach to politics.) The show was filled with various characters involved in the construction of the new system and the massive computerization needed to run the new trains effectively, including one man named “Pradeep” who designed and wrote the software for the system and had to deal with the inevitable glitches – though he wasn’t shown much on screen and most of the interviews about the software were done with his assistant, a man named Rory Mitchell. (I specified his sex because “Rory” is a bi-gendered name.)

Needless to say, the software glitched badly on its first official test, in which four trains got stuck behind each other because the part of the software that was supposed to keep them apart failed big-time. What struck me most about the project was the contrast between the overall massiveness and the delicacy required in the actual execution. One station required a glass wall that had to be built in segments, sent in to the station on what amounted to a freight train, and then assembled to tolerances of a fraction of an inch – much like the way the huge Cinerama images were created by cameras with lenses the size of a contact lens. The project began construction in 2008 and was finally ready to be opened to the public in May 2022, following an official dedication ceremony presided over by the late Queen Elizabeth II in one of her last public appearances before her death on September 8, 2022. The Crossrail line, or at least the part of it that actually opened in May 2022, was formally called the “Elizabeth Line” in her honor. One of the most interesting people shown in the documentary was Linda Miller, an American-born woman who supervised the construction of the Farringdon station; just how she ended up in charge of a major subway project in the U.K. wasn’t all that clear, but there she was, and as a general principle it’s nice to see women and men work alongside each other in projects that have historically been male-only. The big problems involved in the construction were doing this in the middle of an incredibly busy and crowd-filled city (no doubt building the original Underground in 1863 was far less intrusive) and making sure the large tunnels didn’t collapse before the concrete was laid to hold them in place. One section had to be braced with 40 cross-beams, called “props,” and once the concrete was poured each prop had to be cut up laboriously and removed piece by piece.

One unexpected crisis came up because one of the tunnels had to be run under Barbican Hall, essentially London’s version of Lincoln Center in New York: a prestigious theatre that hosts live plays and concerts of classical music. To keep the noise of the subway trains from disrupting performances at Barbican Hall, the engineers involved in Crossrail worked out a system that essentially laid concrete slabs on giant metal springs, sort of like shock absorbers, to smooth out the vibrations of the passing trains so the noise wouldn’t disrupt Barbican shows. Not surprisingly given its size and scope, the Crossrail project ran four billion pounds over budget – it was originally supposed to cost 14.8 billion pounds and was scheduled to open in December 2018; in fact it cost 18.8 billion pounds (about $23.6 billion) and opened in May 2022. The initial Crossrail line was designed to reduce the travel time from Heathrow Airport, London’s main airport and the largest one in the world, to central London from an hour to 27 minutes,and that’s what it did. “London Super Tunnel” is a good show depicting the trials and tribulations of big infrastructure projects, though I can’t help but think it could never (or almost never) happen in the U.S. because the American Right would oppose it as a giant government boondoggle and an assault on the sacred “right” of individuals to travel in their own private cars, the environment and the general efficiency of public transit be damned. I’ll never forget the comment of the late Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) on the California high-speed rail project to the effect that he had helped kill all the other high-speed rail proposals in the U.S. and he’d kill that one, too.

Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Elevator to the Scaffold (Ascensceur de l'Échafaud) (Nouvelle Éditions de Film [NEF], Lux Compagnie Cinemathéque de France, 1958)

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

Last night (Tuesday, September 19) I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of a film I’d originally watched with my husband Charles on a VHS videotape I’d recorded from a previous TCM showing: Louis Malle’s first film, Elevator to the Gallows (1958) – though the official title of the film in French, Ascensceur pour l’Échafaud, literally means “Elevator to the Scaffold.” (The Google French-to-English translation app gives only “scaffold” as a translation of “échafaud.”) It’s an oddball thriller based on a novel by French writer Noël Calef, with Roger Nimier and Malle himself doing the screenplay. Elevator to the Gallows has been called both an early example of the French “New Wave” (nouvelle vague) and a film noir. Its nouvelle vague credentials are stronger than its noir ones; though it’s a story about a bored woman, Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau, later an international star and a nouvelle vague icon), who plots with her lover, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), to murder her sugar-daddy husband, industrialist and war profiteer Simon Carala (Jean Wall), it’s treated very differently from the film noir norms for such situations. Malle and his cinematographer, Henri Decaë (though his last name loses its umlaut in the actual credits), shoot it in a matter-of-fact visual style; yes, there are shadows, but no more than you’d expect from a film that largely takes place at night. Malle and Decaë grabbed shots on the streets of Paris, at one point following Moreau around with a camera concealed inside a baby carriage. The filmmakers got complaints from their producer, Jean Thuillier, that Moreau didn’t look glamorous enough because they had her play these long night scenes without makeup and mostly using available light (though they followed her around with a hand-held battery-powered lamp), but given that she’s supposed to be wandering around Paris at night at her wit’s end because she thinks Julien has abandoned her for another woman and copped out on his promise to kill her husband, she looks appropriately worn and haggard, though still beautiful.

One of Malle’s directorial decisions that helped make this film really special was his use of a jazz score. While American filmmakers were starting to use highly elaborate, through-composed “jazz” scores by people like Elmer Bernstein, André Previn and Henry Mancini, Malle hired Miles Davis. Malle booked a recording session for Miles and a band he assembled for the gig consisting of three French musicians (Barney Wilen, tenor sax; René Urtreger, piano; and Pierre Michelot, bass) plus an expatriate American drummer, Kenny Clarke, whom Miles had also worked with in the U.S. Instead of leaving Miles to his own devices, Malle explained carefully where in the film he wanted music and what emotions he wanted it to convey, then left Miles and his band to improvise cues that would fit the film and supply what Malle wanted. The result was a hauntingly played musical score that became the basis for one of Miles’s best-selling albums, Jazz Track (released on Fontana Records in Europe and Columbia in the U.S.; Miles was under contract to Columbia but at the time Philips, Fontana’s parent company, was Columbia’s European distributor), and showed him playing far more adventurously and with more authority and power than he had a half-decade earlier in the records for Blue Note I had just got on CD (in a Spanish reissue that at least grouped the songs together in chronological order instead of helter-skelter the way Blue Note’s own releases had).

Elevator to the Gallows starts with Julien using a rope and a grappling hook to climb up at least one floor on the Carala company’s headquarters so he can sneak into Simon Carala’s office and shoot him with Carala’s own gun (which Florence previously stole from him), so he can kill him and make it look like a suicide. Julien does the dirty deed – the bemused you-can’t-be-serious reaction Simon has towards his previously trusted executive when he holds a gun on him and the shock when Simon realizes it’s his own gun are treasurable moments in their own right – and locks all the doors to Simon’s office as he gets away (making Elevator to the Gallows in effect a locked-room mystery). Only he forgets to retrieve the rope and grappling hook from the balcony, and worried that his carefully plotted murder plan will be undone when those items are discovered, he sneaks back into the building to retrieve them. Unfortunately for Julien, just as he’s got into the elevator to take him to Carala’s floor, the security guard on duty leaves for the night and turns off the master switch that controls the building’s electricity. So Julien winds up stuck inside the elevator with no way to leave the building. Since he expected to be done with his errand and leave quickly, he left his car (a 1952 Chevrolet convertible with an automatic top) parked outside with its motor running. A local lout named Louis (Georges Poujouly, of whom we get some nice topless shots later on) finds the temptation irresistible; he gets in the car to take it for a joy ride and beckons his girlfriend Véronique (Yori Bertin), who works at a florist’s shop down the street from the Carala building, to join him. She does, and just as the two of them drive off for the countryside Florence spots them. She recognizes Julien’s car and sees that the woman in the passenger seat is Véronique, but she doesn’t see who is driving. So she assumes the driver is Julien and he’s cheating on her with the flower girl, and probably he copped out on the job of killing her husband too.

Meanwhile Louis and Véronique literally run into a couple of German tourists, Horst and Frieda Bencker (Iván Petrovich and Elga Andersen), who are touring France in one of the most spectacular and iconic cars ever made, a gull-wing Mercedes 300 SL sports car. (It was called a “gull-wing” because its doors opened up instead of out, creating a bird-like effect.) Rather than get upset that these crazy French kids have damaged his incredibly expensive car (which has got more expensive over the years, by the way; an example of one particularly rare model made of aluminum instead of steel recently sold at auction for more than $4 million), Horst and Frieda invite them to spend the night with them and register at the same motel. Because Louis doesn’t want the cops to trace him – he already has a criminal record and he’s worried about being arrested for stealing Julien’s car – he and Véronique identify themselves to the motel clerk as “Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier.” Only Horst Bencker leaves the keys to the Mercedes in the car, and Louis and Véronique decide to steal it and ditch the already hot car they were in before – but Horst catches them in the act of stealing his car (or trying to). Louis shoots Horst and also Frieda, and though we don’t actually see them die it’s no surprise when later in the film a group of rather haggard and grim police officers inform them and us that the Benckers are dead. The police discover the bodies of the Benckers the next morning – just as Julien has finally extricated himself from the elevator – and because “Julien Tavernier” was the name on Louis’s motel registration, the police arrest the real Julien for the Bencker murders. Julien protests that he was literally stuck in an elevator all night, but the cops fail to believe him.

Just then a deus ex machina turns up in the form of a roll of film from a Minox camera – an ultra-small article of photographic equipment which, as an imdb.com “Trivia” poster explained, “was originally developed as a luxury item, but it gained notoriety from its use as a spy camera.” The real Julien had left it behind in his car and Véronique had found it and realized there were still three available photos left on its roll of film. She had turned it in for developing at the motel’s photo lab after shooting pictures of Louis and the Benckers together, and the next morning the police intercept the photos and find pictures of the Benckers with Louis. But they also see previously shot photos of Julien and Florence being intimate, so the cops are able to figure out who killed whom and arrest all four principals for the crimes they actually committed. (It doesn’t turn out like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which the male lead gets away with the murder he actually committed but gets popped for the death of his adulterous lover, which was really just an accident.) Elevator to the Gallows is a nicely done thriller, even though the adulterous-lovers plot is treated very differently from the way it would have been a decade earlier in the U.S. (for one thing, Jeanne Moreau’s character would have been a more openly villainous femme fatale instead of just a bored woman seeking to get rid of her well-to-do husband while holding on both to his money and her boy-toy), and the “New Wave” aspects (including Henri Decaë’s guerrilla-style cinematography and Miles Davis’s exciting score) predominate. This was the film that launched Jeanne Moreau’s career and made her an international star even though she’d done 21 films in the nine years since her debut in 1949 and was established as an icon in France.

It’s worth noting that the title is a misnomer. By the time the film was made hanging was already obsolete as a form of capital punishment in France; since 1792 just about all executions in France had been by guillotine, and that would remain the case until France abolished the death penalty in 1981. (The only exceptions were for “crimes against the safety of the State” – i.e., acts of terrorism – for which the prescribed death sentence was by firing squad.) The last victim of a guillotine execution in France was a murderer named Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977, four years before newly elected French president François Mitterand pushed through an amendment to the French constitution abolishing capital punishment once and for all (though recent polls show a narrow majority of French voters actually want to bring back the death penalty).