Blade Runner: The Final Cut (The Ladd Company, Shaw Brothers, Warner Bros., Blade Runner Partnership, Michael Deeley Productions, Ridley Scott Productions, Scott Free Entertainment, 1982, revised 2007)

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

Last night (Monday, October 30) my husband Charles and I ran a 4K HD Blu-Ray disc of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, a 2007 re-edit of the science-fiction classic originally directed by Ridley Scott in 1982 based on a script by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples itself adapted from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Alas, Dick died just before the release of Blade Runner and therefore didn’t get the boost in income from a film that, though its initial box-office returns were disappointing, ultimately became a cult classic and encouraged other filmmakers to make offers to the Dick estate for movie rights to his other stories. Dick said his inspiration for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had been reading transcripts of the Nuremberg trials of high-level Nazi officials just after World War II for his counter-factual historical novel The Man in the High Castle (in which Germany and Japan win World War II). Dick was shocked at how flatly and unemotionally the captured ex-Nazis described the terrible things they’d done as soldiers for the Reich, and he got the idea for a novel about a race of rebel robots who get tired of being humanity’s slaves. So they start rebelling and slaughtering the people at the “Off-World” colonies to which Earth’s surviving people are being relentlessly urged to migrate. Six rebel robots, called “Androids” or “Andys” for short in Dick’s novel but given the snazzier name “Replicants” in the film, slaughter an entire Off-World colony, then commandeer a spaceship and use it to fly back to Earth. Hero Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a “blade runner” – essentially an executioner of killer robots, though the official term used is the euphemistic “retirement” – is assigned to hunt them down and kill them. To find them out, the company that made them has set up a series of tests to see whether the subjects feel emotions, including empathy, the lack of which would indicate “androidicity.”

Though Blade Runner was officially released in 1982, I hadn’t seen any of the various versions (more on that later) until June 17, 2018 (I posted about it the next day at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/06/blade-runner-warner-bros-ladd-company.html), when I dug out the DVD of the so-called “director’s cut” from 1991 and screened it for Charles and I, at least partly because the next day the San Diego Public Library was showing the sequel, Blade Runner 2049. (This turned out to be a truly terrible movie, written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green and directed by Denis Villenueve, which in my blog post at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/06/blade-runner-2049-warner-bros.html I called “one of the worst sequels ever made and a total disgrace to the memory of the film it was supposedly a sequel to.”) Blade Runner exists in no fewer than seven different versions, though only three are considered canonical: the original 1982 theatrical release, which included a voice-over narration written by veteran screenwriter Roland Kibbee and inserted into the film over Ridley Scott’s objections; the 1991 so-called “Director’s Cut” (actually the version Ridley Scott had the least to do with because when it was created he was busy directing his Christopher Columbus biopic 1492: Conquest of Paradise, though he sent notes to the studio indicating what he wanted); and the 2007 “Final Cut.” Since I first saw the “Director’s Cut” in 2018 I’ve participated in a podcast to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original release and I’ve also actually read Dick’s original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

It’s no surprise that Dick’s novel is a considerably richer and more moving work of art than the film – that’s what usually happens when books are converted into movies (though the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon is as good a work of art as the Dashiell Hammett novel, mostly because it is the novel; director John Huston simply took the story and dialogue from Hammett and cut it down to the length of a feature film; and at least one science-fiction novel, Raymond F. Jones’s This Island Earth, was actually improved when it was filmed). If I’d read the novel before I saw the film, I’d have probably had a similar reaction to it that I did to the movie of The Hunger Games, which I liked but it wasn’t the film I’d envisioned when I read the book. One of Ridley Scott’s motivation for wanting to re-edit the film once again and create the “Final Cut” was he wanted to use digital technology that hadn’t existed in 1982 to tweak the special effects, including erasing the wires that had originally suspended the flying cars over the miniature sets. Key elements in the book that barely made it into the “Director’s Cut” and were hardly present at all in the “Final Cut” include the electronic animals that have taken the place of real pets, which have become so scarce due to mass extinction events as the climate becomes progressively worse that they are prohibitively expensive. Indeed, when I first heard of the book I had assumed the “electric sheep” in the title was a poetic metaphor, but it turned out that on the very first page there’s a reference to the real-life electric sheep Deckard owns, which is malfunctioning and he wonders whether it’s worth spending the money to have it repaired. There’s a scene in the “Director’s Cut” in which Deckard marvels at a toy horse made of wood, which itself has become an ultra-rare high-end material, but it’s absent in the “Final Cut.”

There are other changes that reflect the typical Hollywood meat-grinder: Deckard is married in the novel (in fact, one of his key motives in working as a blade runner is he’s hoping to make enough bounty money to buy his wife a real animal) but single in the film, and the book is set in the San Francisco Bay Area (where Dick was living when he wrote it) while the film takes place in L.A. In fact, certain key scenes take place inside the Bradbury Building, an iconic location for 1940’s films noir. I was also bothered that Fancher and Peoples changed the occupation of one of the replicants, a female, from the opera singer she was in the book to a woman who does a cheap nightclub act with snakes. (Apparently Philip K. Dick was a huge opera fan and he and his friends, including fellow science-fiction writer and opera buff Anthony Boucher, would have long discussions about it.) The plot features Deckard chasing the killer robots through a dystopian L.A. landscape and more or less falling in love with Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant but one who’s been spared the artificial four-year lifespan built into most of them so they won’t learn to simulate human emotions and therefore be able to pass the tests. At least two of the most chilling scenes in the film were retained in the “Final Cut” version: the opening, in which replicant Leon Kowalski (Brion James), being interviewed by test-giver Holden (Morgan Paull) and realizing he’s failing the test, pulls out a gun and shoots Holden dead; and a later sequence in which Batty (Rutger Hauer), leader of the rebel replicants, confronts Tyrrell (Joe Turkel), CEO of the company that invented the replicants, gives him the Judas kiss and then strangles him and also kills the company’s chief genetic engineer, J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson). As I wrote in my initial post on Blade Runner, “The confrontation scene between the three is by far the best in the film: it seems to me to come closer to the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein than any of the films of Frankenstein itself.”

But the great irony of Blade Runner is that, even though it’s a movie whose basic premise proclaims the superiority of human beings who can feel emotion towards each other over replicants who can’t, it’s an oddly cold film – and by deliberately short-changing the elements of pathos and humanity from Dick’s novel that had somehow survived in Fancher’s and Peoples’s screenplay, the “Final Cut” seems even colder than the “Director’s Cut.” Blade Runner has been called the first science-fiction film noir (which it isn’t; I’d give that honor to the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel from a script by Daniel Mainwaring in 1956 and a much better movie than either of the remakes, and later I discovered an even earlier antecedent, a 1946 Monogram movie called Decoy in which a crook is literally brought back from the dead through scientific means by two fellow criminals who want to find the location of his secret stash of loot, though the sci-fi elements in Decoy are used only in passing), and when I first saw it I thought it was the kind of science-fiction film Josef von Sternberg would have made if he’d ever done one. But I still think there was a better film lurking within Dick’s novel than the one that got made, no matter what the version!

Secrets of a Celebrity Nanny (Robbins Entertainment, Daro Film Distribution, Penalty Vox, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 29) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Secrets of a Celebrity Nanny, as if all the good Lifetime titles were taken already. The titular celebrity nanny is Gabrielle “Gaby” McFadden (Monroe Cline), and the celebrity she ends up working as a nanny for is singer Justice Grayce (Yolanthe Cabau). Years before Justice and Gaby’s mother had been school friends before Gaby’s mom died, so when she saw Gaby’s name on a list of prospective nannies Justice was so determined to get her she actually descended on the home Gaby shares with her roommate Hannah (Lily Wirum). Gaby is actually interested in being a writer, but she’s running low on income and it’s an open question as to how both young women are going to be able to afford the rent. So, with Hannah agape at the prospect of having Justice Grayce in her home and her roommate working for Justice as a nanny, Gaby takes the job. Gaby soon learns that the kid she’ll be a nanny to is Justice’s 13-year-old daughter Willow (Lilly Williams), whom she had with her first husband, Hudson Thayer (Matthew Blade). Justice currently has a much younger boyfriend, heavy-metal musician Ian Pierce (Memphis Taylor), whom we first see in Justice’s home aimlessly strumming an unconnected electric guitar and wearing a body shirt that shows off all his tattoos. When Gaby arrives at the Grayce household things are a mess; it seems that Justice has laid off almost the entire household staff and the only people around are Ian, Willow and a heavy-set security guard named Damien Gries (Dominic Pace). Damien is a large, intimidating man who used to be with the Los Angeles Police Department before an injury forced him to retire, whereupon he took the job as Justice Grayce’s head of security.

There was also a previous nanny named Mia who was killed on the premises – this was the subject of a typical Lifetime prologue, in which she was strangled from behind with a cord just as she was trying on one of Justice’s fur jackets (this startled Charles because fur has become so politically incorrect these days it’s rare to see its use depicted in any film, even one set in the recent past, and when it is shown it’s usually accompanied by an end-credits disclaimer saying that the filmmakers are showing it because it’s historically accurate but they want to make it clear that they don’t approve of people wearing dead animal skins) – and Justice was worried that the fact that her previous nanny was killed at her home might make it difficult for her to hire a new one. As soon as Gaby starts on her first day at work, Damien demands that she sign a non-disclosure agreement and confiscates her phone until she signs it. She also finds that the place is a hotbed of sexual intrigues: Justice is supposedly engaged to Ian but is still sleeping with her ex-husband Hudson, who married her before she became famous and broke up with her because he couldn’t handle the strain of being a celebrity’s husband – even though he has a career of his own in book publishing and naturally wants to have a look at Gaby’s manuscript. Meanwhile, Ian not only cruised the previous nanny Mia – or at least the tabloids reported that he had – but he’s got an ex named Samara (Brittany McVicker) who doesn’t want to be quite so “ex” and is stalking Justice to see if she can get them to break up so Samara can get Ian back on the rebound.

Justice also has another stalker, Isaac (Isaac Levi Anthony), who seems like the typical crazed-fan psychotic who’s convinced that he and Justice are pre-destined soulmates even though Justice has never formally met him and wouldn’t be interested if she had. Besides Damien, the only other person in Justice’s entourage keeping things together is an African-American personal manager who’s constantly ushering her out of her house to attend one celebrity function or another – much to the disgust of Willow, who’s understandably miffed at how little face time she gets with her mom. It’s also established that despite her continuing fame, Justice hasn’t had a hit record since Willow was born 13 years earlier – we know she’s coasting on her previous fame because the best gig she can get is a one-night stand at a theatre also hosting the Kingston Trio (remember them?), and that only because Ian will be on stage with her even though their two styles blend about as well as oil and molasses. During a rehearsal for Justice’s show, someone sneaks up behind Samara, who’s crashed the show and is sitting in the otherwise empty auditorium, and strangles her, though the rather obtuse cops rule it suicide. Later, at the actual performance, Damien flashes his gun and shoots and kills Isaac the crazed-fan stalker – only this causes both Justice and Gaby to realize that he was the killer of Mia and Samara. In a totally unsurprising resolution, his motive turns out to be that he had a decidedly unrequited crush on Justice and wanted to eliminate the competition so he could have her. Fortunately, as he’s holding Gaby hostage, Justice sneaks up behind him and knocks him out with the proverbial blunt object, though Damien survives long enough to be arrested by his former colleague and friend with the LAPD, a Black woman detective named Rhodes (Shawn Woodward). But the scandal surrounding Damien firing a gun at Justice’s performance earns her enough Internet “hits” it looks like her duet record with Ian will become her first hit in 13 years.

Energetically directed by Dylan Vox (which explains why one of the production companies for this film is called “Penalty Vox”) from a script by old Johnson Production Group hands Jason Shane-Scott, Richard Clark and Jeremy Inman, Secrets of a Celebrity Nanny ends up with Gaby doing a signing for her new book, also called Secrets of a Celebrity Nanny (one wonders how she got out of her NDA – probably Hudson handled getting Justice to allow the book to be published), and making out one copy to the three of them: Hudson, Justice and Willow. It’s an unusual Lifetime movie in some respects, even though totally clichéd and predictable in others – almost from the moment Damien was introduced I was thinking he’d be the villain, and unrequited love for Justice would turn out to be his motive – mainly because of its no-holds-barred depiction of love, sex and obsession among the famous, near-famous or wanna-be-famous. All too much of it reminded me of George Harrison’s quote, “I just wanted to be successful, not famous.” Alas, as one-fourth of the greatest rock band of all time, for him being successful and being famous came as a package deal!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount-Artcraft, 1920)

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

Afterwards I wanted to watch the Turner Classic Movies Silent Sunday Showcase, but it had already started at 9 p.m. and therefore overlapped the Lifetime movie by an hour. Fortunately, it was a film I already had on DVD – the 1920 Paramount film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – in a Kino on Video boxed set of four silent films featuring John Barrymore. (The others in the box were the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, 1927’s Beloved Rogue – in which he played François Villon – and 1928’s Tempest, a tale of the Russian Revolution based on an original story by Erich von Stroheim, and it’s a pity he didn’t get to direct it as well.) Gene Fowler’s biography of John Barrymore rated this as the only truly good silent film he ever made – Fowler seemed to think Barrymore really needed sound for his acting to register at its peak – though it’s an oddly poky film despite a literate script by Clara Beranger, who ripped off Oscar Wilde’s famous line from The Picture of Dorian Gray about how the only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it. (That was enough that imdb.com listed Wilde as an uncredited writer on the project, along with Thomas Russell Sullivan, who wrote a stage play based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella that Beranger must have drawn on.) The DVD we were watching was a Kino on Video release from 2001 (though there’s been a newer restoration and added soundtrack from 2018) that contained several extras, including a 1925 Stan Laurel spoof called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde; clips from a competing version of the story, also made in 1920, produced by Louis B. Mayer and starring Sheldon Lewis in the title role(s); and one I played last night, a 1909 Columbia recording of the final speech from the play, in which Dr. Jekyll (Len Spencer) bemoans the experiment that changed him from kindly Dr. Jekyll to evil Mr. Hyde and prepares to commit suicide, as he does at the end of Stevenson’s novel and the 1920 Paramount film with Barrymore as well. (In the competing Mayer production, it all turned out to be a dream at the end – though, as my husband Charles pointed out when we watched the Mayer/Lewis version years ago, at least its script went into greater detail about the evil things Hyde has done and some of them weren’t sexual in nature.)

One surprise about the Len Spencer record was that it wasn’t just the actor reading; it contained a full orchestra (as much of one as could be recorded in 1909) and an organ in the background, and Mr. Hyde calls out the organ to stop playing, presumably because its religious connotations seem like a personal insult to him. It’s also interesting that Spencer pronounces Dr. Jekyll’s last name “GEE-kull,” not the “JEH-kull” pronunciation that’s become standard these days. The Kino Lorber blurb for this film on their Web site says the 1920 Barrymore Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is “[c]onsidered by many to be the first great American horror film” – which it isn’t; though I’ve never seen it, I suspect D. W. Griffith’s 1914 film The Avenging Conscience, a compilation of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, is likely to be better. Ploddingly directed by John S. Robertson, the 1920 Paramount Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde misses as many points as it makes. Like the 1935 Universal film The Werewolf of London (a film I really like, actually; it was a Laemmle-era product and has struck me as a far finer movie than the “New Universal”’s much better-known entry into lycanthropy, 1941’s The Wolf-Man), it suffers from a leaden script that spends too much time at high-end London dinner parties and not enough time in the London slums. Dr. Henry Jekyll is depicted as almost saintly – a far cry from his characterization in Stevenson’s novel, in which he’s the usual jumbled mixture of good and evil (in fact, Stevenson describes Hyde as physically smaller than Jekyll because he only contains the evil side of Jekyll’s nature, which made me think that the best way to film it would have been to use two actors, and I know who they should have been: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde) – who’s late for one of those damned dinner parties because he’s running a free clinic for the poor in Soho. Jekyll ends up doing his diabolical scientific experiment on the unwitting urging of Sir George Carewe (Brandon Hurst), who tells him he’s frittering his youth away on social service and should start having fun instead.

Carewe takes Jekyll to a music hall, where Jekyll meets Italian dancer Gina (Nita Naldi) and her boss (Louis Wolheim), who in this genuinely “pre-Code” film appears to be pimping her. The problem is Jekyll is engaged to Carewe’s daughter Millicent (Martha Mansfield, who delivers a quite impressive and very restrained performance not at all like the stereotype of the “good girl” in a silent movie). Later Hyde moves in on Gina and makes her his sex slave – though, unlike the incarnations of her character in the 1932 and 1941 films of the story, she at least doesn’t get murdered by Hyde at the end. Instead Hyde clubs Carewe to death out of anger that it was his temptations that led Jekyll to mix his famous drug. I’ve long argued that Stevenson’s story is the first “Just Say No” tale: it was written at a time when heroin and cocaine were still legal and the evil, addictive effects of them were just becoming known, In Stevenson’s book Jekyll reflects that if he’d been in a better frame of mind when he first took the drug, he’d have become absolutely good instead of absolutely evil, a refrain frequently heard in the 1960’s about the use of psychedelics and how the only responsible way to take them was in the company of someone else who could guide you through adverse effects. One thing that happens in both Stevenson’s novel and Beranger’s script is that Jekyll runs out of the key ingredient in his drug, though Beranger left out a point from the novel that when Jekyll finally obtains a new supply, “the ebullition followed, and the first color change – but not the second one,” and he deduces that his original sample had been impure, and that impurity had been key to the drug’s effect. There’s also a rather risible scene in which a giant model spider literally crawls inside Dr. Jekyll (through double exposure) to indicate that he’s no longer in control of the process and he’s changing into Hyde at random without further doses of his drug.

The transformations themselves are surprisingly effective even though they’re done with simple dissolves instead of the colored lights and filters used in Rouben Mamoulian’s stunning 1932 version, and there’s an interesting story in Gene Fowler’s book about John Barrymore using his Hyde makeup to his personal advantage. It seems that he’d agreed to buy a house in L.A. for $6,000, but he got the price knocked down to $5,000 by showing up for the closing dressed as Hyde. The good points of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are Barrymore’s performance (though he does overdo the twitching and writhing when he actually transforms from Jekyll into Hyde) and also Martha Mansfield’s, and the sets by William Cameron Menzies and Clark Robinson, especially the ones representing the lower-class Soho district of London. Otherwise it’s an estimable work whose principal defect is that virtually all the directors in the world who could have made this story work in 1920 were in Germany: Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau (who actually made a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde knockoff in 1920 called Der Januskopf – “The Head of Janus” – in which a Roman relic of the two-faced god Janus instead of a chemical formula was what turned the protagonist into his evil self; alas, that one is lost except for a few surviving stills).

Good Night, Nurse! (Comicque Film Corporation, Paramount, 1918) and The Haunted House (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures, 1921)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 28) I went to a Hallowe’en concert at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, which turned out to be an indigestible mess consisting of San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez performing songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals The Phantom of the Opera and the far less well-known sequel, Love Never Dies. (You didn’t know there was a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera? Neither did I.) The songs were sung by two of Raúl’s favorite local singers, Anna Belaya and Bernardo Bermudez. Belaya, who regularly appeared at the Organ Pavilion for a while after the start of the Ukraine-Russia war (oops, sorry, “special military operation”) to kick off Raúl’s concerts with the Ukrainian national anthem and one or two Ukrainian folk songs as a show of solidarity, is billed as a soprano but sounds more like a mezzo to me. Bermudez is billed as a “bari-tenor” and he’s basically a baritone, but with a formidable upper extension that allows him to hit high notes usually considered the province of tenors. Unfortunately, the amplification on both voices was so loud they turned piercing, rendering the listening experience almost excruciating. I’ve heard both singers before at the Organ Pavilion and they’ve never sounded as ugly as they did last night, which I attribute to the sonics rather than anything wrong with their voices per se. The program consisted of songs from Phantom and Love Never Dies interspersed with showings of two two-reel silent comedies – for which local theatre organist Russ Peck replaced Raúl at the console (it’s nice that there’s one thing Raúl admits he can’t do on the organ) – and a rather leaden dance to Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” by a local dance group that appropriately calls itself “Thriller San Diego.” From where I was sitting (at the back of the first group of seats) it was hard to tell exactly what they were doing, and before they started there was a gap of several minutes while the sound people tried to get the record going (which made me wonder why Raúl didn’t just go ahead and play the piece himself; judging from his solo performances of Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he’d probably do quite well with “Thriller”). I was also miffed that Vincent Price’s original rap from the record was replaced with a lousy imitator just so they could sneak in references to the Spreckels Organ and the venue; I hate those little self-promoting interjections a lot of local companies do.

The films were both slapstick comedies, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s Good Night, Nurse! from 1918 and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House from 1921. The Arbuckle film was listed in the program as Good Night Nursey and imdb.com claims Good Night Nurse without the punctuation marks as an alternate title. It’s an O.K. movie whose best scenes are at the beginning: Arbuckle, after a long night “on the town,” stumbles home drunk and brings home an organ grinder and his monkey. He stops in front of a drugstore in a pouring rainstorm and takes quite a few pratfalls, including one involving a woman played by Arbuckle’s then-sidekick, Buster Keaton, in drag. When he comes home his long-suffering wife (unlisted on the film’s imdb.com page but quite possibly Minta Durfee, Arbuckle’s real-life wife at the time) has seen a newspaper story claiming that there is now a scientific cure for alcoholism being offered at the “No Hope Sanitarium.” So she signs him up for this 1918 version of rehab, only when he gets there he finds himself in an operating room – and the surgeon who’s going to operate on him is Buster Keaton, dressed in a blood-stained lab coat that undoubtedly doesn’t inspire Arbuckle’s confidence. They put Arbuckle under with a huge jug of ether and he gets in a pillow fight in the operating room that ends with him being hailed as some sort of hero – only that turns out to be a hallucinatory dream sequence and he comes to on the operating table and flees the establishment. This film is a souvenir of the days when pillows and comforters were still stuffed with goose down, and the “snow” really flies when the pillows are tossed around. The Haunted House was made three years later, after Arbuckle had graduated to feature-length comedies and producer Joseph M. Schenck had made Keaton the star of the two-reeler unit. Arbuckle’s career was cut short in 1923 when a starlet named Virginia Rappé died mysteriously at a wild party Arbuckle was hosting in a San Francisco hotel. Paramount immediately withdrew all Arbuckle’s films from release and he became an “unperson” in Hollywood. He also underwent three trials for allegedly raping and murdering Rappé; the first trial ended with the jury split 10 to 2 for acquittal, and the second with the opposite split – 10 to 2 for conviction. After Arbuckle was finally acquitted in the third trial, the jury foreman sent a note to the judge reading, “Acquittal is not good enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” But Arbuckle’s career was ruined, though he secretly directed a few more movies under the pseudonym “Will B. Goodrich.” In 1933 Jack Warner gave Arbuckle a chance at a comeback and starred him in six sound two-reelers; they did well enough Warner offered Arbuckle a chance at a feature, but he died before he could make one. Keaton recalled that he was invited to that San Francisco party but turned it down, and he said that was the best career decision he ever made.

Keaton and Eddie Cline, a veteran of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio, are credited with co-writing and co-directing The Haunted House, which like Good Night Nurse is an O.K. two-reel comedy, not as good as some of the other Keatons like One Week, The Boat, Cops and The Electric House but still with a good share of laughs. Keaton plays a bank clerk in a small town who mistakenly uses glue on his fingers instead of resin. He was hoping to make the stacks of cash easier to handle, but of course the glue has the opposite effect: the money literally sticks to his fingers (and his ass when he falls on top of it during a typical slapstick scene) and there are some good laughs, especially over Keaton’s attempts to pour hot water on himself and one of his colleagues so he can peel off the glue-soaked money. The titular “haunted house” isn’t really haunted; instead it’s been rigged up with various devices by a corrupt cashier at Keaton’s bank (Joe Roberts), who’s working with a gang of counterfeiters to launder their fake money through the bank. Among the tricks the crooks use to scare people away from the house where they have their press is a central staircase that, at the pull of a lever, turns into a slide and sends the person who’s walked up the stairs down again. Also in the mix is the local Daredevil Opera Company, who as a title explains is “executing Gounod’s Faust – and he deserved it.” The singer playing the Devil in the opera somehow makes his way to the house and helps establish its “hauntedicity,” as do a number of people covered in sheets. By far the best scene in The Haunted House is its ending: Keaton’s character has died and is ascending the staircase to heaven, only St. Peter decides he isn’t worthy enough and pulls a lever that turns the stairway to heaven into a slide to hell.

Russ Peck gave a brief explanation of how accompaniments for silent movies were arranged; the biggest theatres had full orchestras (Allan Dwan, who directed the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, recalled touring with the film and rehearsing the orchestra the night before it opened to make sure they’d supply the sound effects on cue). The next rung down had organs, the rung just below that had string trios (piano, violin and cello), and the cheapest theatres just had a piano. Music publishers put out books with themes that could be used for various types of scenes, including cues called “Hurry” for chase scenes as well as love music for romantic sequences. A theatre organist would weave together familiar bits of both classical and popular music of the time, the pre-printed cues from the theme books, and his or her own improvisations. The biggest films had scores especially composed for them which were sent out along with the films in various editions based on how many musicians the theatre had available – D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had a score by an otherwise forgotten composer, Joseph Carl Breil, though for the climactic ride in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of white Southern womanhood against out-of-control Black sex maniacs Griffith stipulated that the music be Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (which I’ve called one racist artistic genius paying tribute to another). Before Good Night, Nurse – a film I suspect was inspired by the success of Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure, a much better film on the same subject (a drunk goes to rehab) – Peck demonstrated the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” which he was going to use for a scene in which Arbuckle and company literally end up in a lake. He pointed out that in 1918 audiences would have immediately recognized the song, whereas in 2023 it’s just another anonymous song in the mix. Overall the Hallowe’en concert at the Organ Pavilion was an O.K. event that could have been a lot better (in previous years they’ve shown the 1925 Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom of the Opera with live organ accompaniment, and though I’ve seen that film innumerable times I would have liked that better than what we actually got), and I’m sick to death of Raúl’s overbearing personality – which got even more overbearing than usual last night when he decided to attempt trick voices in some of his stage raps (and his normal voice is bothersome enough as it is).

Experiment in Terror (Geoffrey-Kate Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 28) I was able once I got home just after 9 p.m. to put on Turner Classic Movies for this week’s entry in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series, the 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror. I got home as the opening credits were still rolling and so I was able to watch all the movie proper, though it’s not really a film noir. There are only a few scenes that contain the visual atmospherics of film noir, it doesn't have the moral ambiguity either (the good gyls are 100 percent good and the bad guy is 100 percent evil), and it’s thematically closer to a Hitchcock-style thriller than a noir. Directed by Blake Edwards and written by a husband-and-wife team called “The Gordons” (his first name, as well as his last, was Gordon – one wonders what his parents were thinking – and her name was Mildred) based on a novel of theirs called Operation Terror, Experiment in Terror deals with Kelly Sherwood (Lee Remick), teller at the Crocker-Anglo National Bank in San Francisco. (I remember the bank from my childhood in the Bay Area; it went through several changes of ownership, becoming “Crocker-Citizens Bank” and then just “Crocker Bank.”) She receives a phone call one night from a wheezing man with asthma who knows a great deal about her, including that she has a sister named Toby (Stefanie Powers) who attends high school as a senior, has a boyfriend and likes to go to a local coffee shop called The Hangout. The mystery man threatens to kill Kelly and despoil Toby (there was still enough enforcement of the Production Code for him not to make clear just what sexual abuses he had in for her) unless Kelly embezzles $100,000 from the bank and hands it over to him. Of course he warns her not to notify the police or tell anyone else, but she immediately calls the FBI and gets put in touch with special agent John Ripley (Glenn Ford, top-billed), only just as he’s connected with her, the asthmatic villain sneaks back into her apartment, kicks her to the floor and hangs up. Ripley is concerned enough that he orders his fellow agents to research by calling everyone in the local phone books named “Sherwood” to try to re-establish contact with her. Ultimately he does so and also gets the branch president, Raymond Burkhardt (William Sharon), involved.

Experiment in Terror is an O.K. thriller with some great set-pieces, including a sequence in which Kelly’s friend Nancy Ashton (Patricia Huston), a sculptor who makes and paints mannequins, is murdered by the villain and hung up in her own workshop so the cops at first think her corpse is just another one of her art pieces. Later there’s a sequence at a jazz nightclub and strip bar (actually that’s two separate establishments); the villain has summoned Kelly to meet him at the strip club. Having no idea what he looks like – Kelly has heard him on the phone but their in-person interactions have only been with him behind her – she gets into a car with a man (Al Avalon) who just approached her to pick her up for sex. Later he finds himself surrounded by FBI agents with their guns drawn, and I actually felt sorry for the guy that he just wanted to get laid and had to deal first with the woman angrily bolting from his car and then law enforcement people out to arrest him for bank robbery. Ultimately the FBI is able to learn the suspect’s identity; he is “Red” Lynch (Ross Martin), and he’s pulled this scam before in other cities – including on one woman in Oklahoma whom he killed when she wouldn’t cooperate. They learn, among other things about him, that he’s into dating Asian women, and they trace a girlfriend named Lisa Soong (Anita Loo) who’s evasive and doesn’t want to rat him out. We learn why when Special Agent Ripley (whom I couldn’t help but think of as “The Untalented Mr. Ripley”) interrogates Lisa’s seven-year-old son Joey (Warren Hsieh) and learns that he knows the man as “Uncle Red.” Lisa explains that Joey is disabled and “Uncle Red” is paying for his medical treatments, albeit with the money he’s making from his embezzling schemes. Through a tip from a police informant named “Popcorn” (Ned Glass), the FBI are able to trace him. Red kidnaps Kelly’s sister Toby and makes her strip to bra and panties; he does something else to her that we can only guess at but it traumatizes her enough that when the cops finally rescue her she’s visibly shaken.

He then sends Kelly a package containing Toby’s sweater and a ticket to a baseball game at Candlestick Park, where he wants the actual handoff of the money to take place. (This film simultaneously nailed one of my pet peeves about movies – Lee Remick and Stefanie Powers looked enough alike they were believable as sisters – and hooked one of Charles’s: Kelly is supposed to be carrying $100,000 in $20 bills in a purse way too small to contain that amount of money.) Red disguises himself to get close enough to Kelly to grab the money, but the cops are on to him. He tries to hide out in the crowds leaving the ballgame (according to Eddie Muller, the sequence was shot during a real baseball game at Candlestick Park on August 18, 1961), only when he realizes the cops are onto him he tries to flee across the now-deserted playing surface and the cops shoot him down, His body falls picturesquely across the pitchers’ mound. Certainly Experiment in Terror is, shall we say, “influenced” by Alfred Hitchcock, especially in having its final sequence take place at a big public location (like the British Museum in Blackmail, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest), though to his credit Blake Edwards got considerably more out of his big public set-piece ending than Mick Jackson did in the film The Bodyguard, which ends with an unthrilling sequence of a crazed killer stalking a celebrity at the Academy Awards. (When my husband Charles and I saw The Bodyguard I wrote, “As Jackson futzes around with this sequence and gives us his usual Cuisinart editing style one can only think — regretfully — of what Alfred Hitchcock could have done with the situation of a killer intending to murder a celebrity in the middle of the Academy Awards.”) I remember watching Experiment in Terror with Charles years ago and thinking that the title was a bit of a misnomer – there was nothing the slightest bit “experimental” about the terror the Gordons put Kelly Sherwood through (and the novel’s original title, Operation Terror, might have worked better for the film as well) – but it’s an O.K. movie with some great sequences even though it’s really not a film noir.

House of Usher, a.k.a. The Fall of the House of Usher (Alta Vista Productions, American International Pictures, 1960)

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

Last night (Friday, October 27) I put on Turner Classic Movies for a film I’ve been curious about for ages: House of Usher, a 1960 production from Roger Corman’s Alta Vista Pictures, released through American International and Corman’s first of seven films more or less based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Actually Poe’s original title was “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and though most reference sources (including imdb.com) list the title simply as House of Usher, TCM’s print gave the full title of Poe’s story: The Fall of the House of Usher. I was able to look up and read the Poe story online through archive.org before the film began and thereby had a good inkling of just how close the film, directed by Corman from a script by science-fiction writer Richard Matheson, came to the source. Unusually closely, as things turned out; though most films ostensibly based on Poe have used little more than his titles and bits and pieces of his story, House of Usher is a generally faithful adaptation despite a few compromises made to steer the story closer to the standard Hollywood clichés. It was also, I believe, Corman’s first film in color – the process American International used was Pathécolor, which was particularly strong in blues and reds, the colors American International most needed: blue for the skies and waves of their beach-party movies and red for their horror films. In Poe’s original story, a young, unnamed narrator comes to the titular house of Usher (Poe’s punning title refers both to the crumbling old mansion where the Ushers live and the impending extinction of their family, since at the time the story takes place we’re down to just two Ushers, they’re brother and sister and there’s no hint of any romantic or sexual interests that might keep the Usher line going – a plot point Matheson makes considerably more of than Poe did). He’s an old college friend of Roderick Usher and he comes to visit his former buddy – only he finds Roderick very much the worse for wear, looking far older than he remembered him from his college days. Roderick lives in the Usher mansion alone except for his fraternal twin sister Madeline, who’s prone to cataleptic fits that make her appear dead. A doctor comes to the Usher home to treat her, only in the end Madeline has one of her fits. Roderick orders her buried, thinking she’s dead, but she isn’t; she escapes from her tomb and scares the hell out of both Roderick and the readers before the house of Usher literally crumbles around both survivors of the family, while our narrator escapes just in time.

For the movie, Matheson made Madeline (Myrna Fahey) considerably younger-looking than Roderick (Vincent Price, surprisingly without his trademark moustache) and gave her a backstory: at one time she lived in Boston and attracted the attentions of a young man named Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon). Philip proposed to her and she accepted, only before they could actually get married she fled back to the Usher home and hid out there. The film opens with Philip, like Poe’s unnamed narrator, arriving at the Usher manse and at first being refused admittance by the Ushers’ supercilious and hostile butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe). Bristol orders Philip not only to take off his overcoat but to remove his boots and put on slippers instead. Then he reluctantly takes him to see Roderick, who couldn’t be less hospitable. Roderick does everything he can short of pulling a gun on Philip to tell him he’s not welcome. Roderick is also acutely sensitive to noises of all kinds – that’s why Bristol told Philip to take off his boots – in a condition that actually exists: it’s called hyperacusis and for 2 ½ years I dated a man who had it and went into excruciating pain every time he heard a noise, particularly one with a very high frequency. Roderick is also worried that the Ushers suffer from genetic insanity, which is why he doesn’t want Philip to marry Madeline: Roderick fears that they might have children who would inherit the Ushers’ madness and keep the family’s curse going through more generations. Instead Roderick wants to make sure he and Madeline are the last of the Ushers. When Madeline goes into a cataleptic fit, Roderick immediately orders her body placed in a casket and put in the family’s on-site tomb. Philip wonders what’s the point of the rush and why Roderick insists on burying Madeline immediately instead of reporting her death to the authorities and having a doctor pronounce her really most sincerely dead. We learn Madeline isn’t dead when her fingers start moving while her body is lying in an open casket – which Roderick almost immediately orders closed so the D.I.Y. funeral can proceed as planned even though the “corpse” isn’t a corpse. Then Philip hears Bristol make a chance remark that Madeline suffered from catalepsy and immediately he puts it all together; he demands both Roderick and Bristol tell him where Madeline is – since her body is no longer in the elaborate coffin it was placed in when she “died” – and he’s still hoping he can get her out of the Usher castle and to a place where they can be married. Only Madeline has turned into a monster and attacks Philip, whereupon the crumbling old house finally catches fire and is destroyed, with Roderick and Madeline both meeting their deaths in the flames before the surrounding lake rises, puts out the fire and the house sinks into it. The final credit is a quote from the last lines of Poe’s story: “[A]nd the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.”

House of Usher is actually a pretty well-made movie, though it suffers from a relatively weak cast: while Vincent Price is authoritative as usual in the sort of role he got “typed” in (and didn’t resort to the campy affectations he got into later when he was saddled with really stupid scripts), and Harry Ellerbe is quite good as the overall factotum, Myrna Fahey can’t act at all and Mark Damon isn’t much better. Just as I had a decade ago when my husband Charles and I watched the immediate follow-up, Pit and the Pendulum, I found myself wondering why Corman hadn’t cast the young Jack Nicholson (then under contract to American International) as Philip; even that early, Nicholson had a manic intensity that would have given the character some dimension instead of making him just one more boring romantic lead. Where the film scores is in the behind-the-camera talent Corman recruited for it: besides Matheson as screenwriter, the film featured Floyd Crosby as cinematographer (he’d won an Academy Award in 1931 for the F. W. Murnau-Robert Flaherty collaboration Tabu and was the father of the late rock star David Crosby), Daniel Haller as production designer (and his sets for the house of Usher are covered in so much webbing I found myself thinking, “Cobwebs ‘R Us”) and, above all, Les Baxter as composer. Baxter is probably one of the most underrated musicians of the 20th century; he’s mostly remembered as a middle-of-the-road lounge music guy, but get him away from that style and give him a more challenging assignment (like Voice of the Xtabay with Yma Sumac, The Passions with Bas Sheva, or his subsequent scores for Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum and the U.S. release of Mario Bava’s Black Friday) and he could rise to the occasion. Baxter’s House of Usher music is full of radical harmonies and polytonalities that at times make it sound like Stravinsky descended from his personal Mount Olympus in L.A. and decided to write music for a horror film. Corman sensibly kept his team together for Pit and the Pendulum, though after that film Baxter left and his replacement, Ronald Stein, just churned out standard horror-music clichés with barely a trace of Baxter’s imagination. Still, House of Usher is a quite welcome film and a good, if hardly great, work of imaginative Gothic terror on screen before the “horror” genre sank into the cesspool it’s in today, in which directors go for the cheap scares the modern-day audiences want and get their effects by splashing blood all over the screen.

Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1947)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 26) I watched one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen in a while, a movie I found myself liking better than I have before: Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy in which he played a man who, after working as a bank clerk for over 30 years, suddenly loses his job during the 1929 Depression. He goes into business for himself as a serial seducer of women; he gets them to turn over their small but significant fortunes to him and then he kills them. Chaplin made this movie at a quite uncertain time in his personal history; he’d been through a couple of sex scandals, including one in which he was put on trial for statutory rape by a young actress named Joan Barry whom he’d been grooming for a part in a never-made movie called Shadow and Substance. Chaplin was acquitted in the trial, but subsequently Barry sued him for paternity and won a court order requiring Chaplin to support her child despite a blood test that proved he couldn’t have been the biological father. Chaplin was also under fire for his politics, including the fact that he hadn’t served in World War II in either the American or British armed services (he had been exempted from the draft in World War I because he was only 5’ 4” tall and just over one hundred pounds, and he pointed out that while he hadn’t served in World War II, his oldest sons both had) as well as his overall Leftism and in particular his internationalism. At one point, asked why he’d never become an American citizen despite his long residency in the U.S., Chaplin said, “I consider myself a citizen of the entire world; I owe no allegiance to any particular country.” That got him in much the same kind of political hot water as John Lennon later encountered when he wrote a song that said, among other things, “Imagine there’s no countries.” In fact, I once drew a parallel between Chaplin and Lennon as radical British artists who were threatened with expulsion from the U.S. (and in Chaplin’s case he actually was expelled) over their internationalist views during times of heavy-duty political repression.

Monsieur Verdoux was Chaplin’s first-ever box-office flop after a film career that had lasted 33 years, and it probably would have been a tough sell even if it hadn’t been hurt badly by the political and sexual controversies swirling around Chaplin at the time. For one thing, it was a “black comedy” before black comedy became a “thing” – even in the best of times audiences wouldn’t have known what to make of seeing the formerly lovable Chaplin playing a black-hearted villain who murders women for their money. James Agee wrote extensively about Monsieur Verdoux in both The Nation and Time, and among the things he pointed out about it was that Verdoux the character was a throwback to the villains he had played in his very earliest films for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio: the opportunistic reporter in his first movie, Making a Living, and the cold-blooded seducer he was in his first feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance. (I remember seeing Tillie’s Punctured Romance for the first time in a storefront theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s, and you could feel the hostility from the audience when they realized the man they were used to seeing as the sympathetic “Tramp” was playing a black-hearted villain.) It also didn’t help that the advertising campaign for Monsieur Verdoux practically dared audiences to like it: the slogan on the original posters read, “Chaplin Changes! Can You?” Yet Chaplin’s 1965 autobiography made clear that he had no idea Verdoux might fail at the box office; he seems to have just assumed it would be a hit.

Monsieur Verdoux is a film I’ve gradually grown to like better over the years; this time around I found it quite estimable and right now I’d rank it alongside my list of movies that don’t quite achieve what they set out to do, but even falling short of their goals accomplish more than most films. (Among the other movies I’d put in this category are George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett, Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn and Marnie, Orson Welles’ The Trial and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.) Monsieur Verdoux was based on an idea suggested by Orson Welles – and on one go-round with the film I thought it might have been a better movie if Welles had directed it as well and James Agee had been hired to write the script. A Welles-directed Verdoux would have certainly been more noir–ish than the one we got, with Chaplin as his own director, writer and composer, and Roland Totheroh as his cinematographer (he’d been with Chaplin since 1915!) – but noir-ish atmospherics might have played against the comedy instead of reinforcing it. This time around I found myself loving the movie, albeit not unreservedly; at times – especially in the opening scene in which members of the Couvais family are wondering what became of their relative, a woman who came into a small but substantial inheritance and then disappeared with her new husband – it looks like an early-1950’s TV sitcom. But it also features brilliant performances by at least three of the principals: Chaplin himself, trotting out his old seduction lines at various women and getting surprisingly far with them; Martha Raye, who was on the downgrade from her former fame (as Jack Oakie had been when Chaplin cast him as the Mussolini analogue in his Hitler spoof The Great Dictator) but is absolutely brilliant here; and Isobel Elsom, bringing a rare sense of dignity to a role as one of Verdoux’s would-be pigeons. Indeed, I remember reading an interview with Martha Raye in TV Guide in the early 1970’s in which she was asked what the greatest experience of her career had been, and without hesitation she said, “Working with Chaplin.”

Monsieur Verdoux keeps its audience off balance, never quite settling into a groove between comedy and horror, and Chaplin as both director and actor makes his psycho almost lovable and keeps us uncertain as to just how we’re supposed to feel about him. The Production Code Administration had some weird objections to Monsieur Verdoux, including a determination to make sure Chaplin didn’t depict Verdoux as having sex with any of his bigamous victims – it was O.K. for him to kill them but he couldn’t make love with them – and the famous scene towards the end in which Verdoux, convicted of his crimes and about to be guillotined, is visited in his cell by a priest, Father Fareaux (Fritz Leiber), and, as head censor Joe Breen put it, “You constantly have Verdoux scoring off the priest.” The exchange begins with Father Fareaux telling Verdoux, “I’m here to help you make your peace with God,” and Verdoux answers, “I am at peace with God. My problems are with Man.” It ends with the priest saying, “May God have mercy on your soul,” and Verdoux firing back, “Why not? After all, it belongs to Him.” Chaplin also has Verdoux claim that next to the atrocities committed on all sides in the 20th Century’s wars, he’s a piker by comparison. “Mass killing – does not the world encourage it?” he asks in court, and later, talking to a reporter just before the priest enters, he says, “Wars, conflict – it’s all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify!” It’s hard to imagine a film with such a misanthropic and cynical attitude being a box-office hit in any era, let alone in one in which the Western world in general and the U.S. in particular was turning away from the ideals we claimed to be fighting for in World War II and towards a mindless knee-jerk patriotism and an official religiosity that increasingly defined our Cold War enemy as not just Communism, but “Godless Communism.”

Chaplin ended up as one of the most prominent scalps racked up during the McCarthy era, denied permission to re-enter the U.S. from what he had thought was just another vacation and forced into an uneasy exile in Switzerland from which he emerged just twice: to make one last anarchic masterpiece, A King in New York (1957) – a film that ends with a wish-fulfillment scene in which Chaplin turns a fire house on the House Un-American Activities Committee – and a rather lumpy film called A Countess from Hong Kong based on a story he’d written in the 1930’s with non-comedians like Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren and ‘Tippi’ Hedren in the cast. (Chaplin cast himself in a cameo role as a rail-station porter who drops a heavy trunk on his foot – the same gag he’d pulled in the 1923 film A Woman of Paris, the only other movie which Chaplin directed but did not star in.) Chaplin published an autobiography in 1965 that sold well, and in 1972 he made a triumphal return to the U.S. to accept an honorary Academy Award; the next year he won a competitive Oscar for his score for the 1952 film Limelight (which was newly eligible because it hadn’t been shown enough times in the L.A. area on its initial release to qualify), and he died quietly in his Swiss exile in 1977 (a bad year for celebrities: it also cost us Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley).

NOVA: "Ancient Earth: Inferno" (WNET Group, ARTE, BBC, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Wednesday, October 25) I watched a couple of science shows on PBS, a NOVA episode called “Ancient Earth: Inferno” and a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Eiffel’s Race to the Top.” “Ancient Earth: Inferno” was apparently an episode in a mini-series-within-the-series set of NOVA shows, since next week’s episode is going to be called “Ancient Earth: Humans.” This episode was about a cataclysmic set of climate events that took place at the end of the Permian era 252 million years ago and rendered extinct 90 percent of the then extant species of life on earth. At that time over two-thirds of the earth’s surface was water (which is just about the case today!), and the land masses we know were all congealed into a giant super-continent called “Pangaea” before tectonic forces under the earth separated them and moved them apart from each other to form the continents we know. The volcanoes were apparently centered in Siberia in an area called the “Siberian Traps” but their effect was worldwide. Not only did the volcanoes themselves throw a lot of hot matter out and therefore heat up the world, they also covered much of the landmass of Pangaea with super-heated coal, which thanks to the enormous heat caught fire spontaneously and released lots of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Sulfur dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas but carbon dioxide certainly is, and the volcanoes thus contributed to an era of global warming. The show’s narration argued that the volcanoes had much the same effect as the burning of fossil fuels today, albeit orders of magnitude more intense. A few species survived and even thrived in the intense heat – mostly aquatic animals who were stimulated by the warm temperatures (the show argued that the world’s oceans became giant hot tubs) – but most animals and plants couldn’t handle it and died off.

The heat lasted for about 20 million years until yet another major climactic shift, the “Carnian Pluvial Episode,” drenched the world in intense rains for 1 to 2 million years. (Wikipedia’s page on the Carnian Pluvial Episode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnian_pluvial_episode, begins with an admission, “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.” You can say that again.) All this happened while the Permian era was giving way to the Triassic era, which ended with yet another mass extinction event that cleared the way for dinosaurs to rule the earth during the next two eras, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. One thing the great volcanic eruption and the resulting heat wave did was destroy almost all coral and the organisms that create it, bleaching it white and making it crumbly and delicate. Similar phenomena are happening in the world today, and for the same reason: a massive increase in the temperature of the ocean (now caused not by super-volcanoes but by humanity’s continuing use of fossil fuels) has created so much heat in ocean waters that corals could not survive. The commentary on this program admitted that the climate cataclysm that suddenly killed off the dinosaurs – the fall of a huge meteor that so totally changed the world’s weather patterns that both dinosaurs and the plants they fed on, directly or indirectly, died out en masse – is far better known than the one they were talking about, or the intermediate one that ended the Triassic era and launched the Jurassic one and the rise of the dinosaurs.

It’s ironic, to say the least, that an episode of NOVA, a show that until the late and (to my mind) very un-lamented death of David Koch was largely sponsored by something called “The David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science” (now it’s just called “The Science Fund”), when David Koch and his brother Charles, who had made their fortunes in fossil fuels, were giving enormous sums of money to political candidates and parties that denied that human beings were changing the earth’s climate, took this hard a line that human-caused climate change is real and threatens the very survival of the human species on earth. The interviewees – mostly a succession of scientists from universities around the world who blended into a pretty anonymous mass (though some figures stood out, among them Cindy Looy of UC Berkeley, Kiersten Formoso of USC, Priyu Shikub of UC Davis and Evelyn Kustascher of South Tyrol; there was also Jeffrey Binca of UC Berkeley, a relatively young and cute man who almost alone among the scientists was shown wearing shorts and actually working in the field instead of just sitting in an office or lab and pontificating) – made the point that even the worst mass extinction events have some surviving species. The point of the show was we may be re-creating the conditions of the great extinction 252 million years ago through the overuse of fossil fuels to produce energy, and though some forms of life on earth will undoubtedly survive and adapt through evolution, human beings may not be one of the surviving species.

Secrets of the Dead: "Eiffel's Race to the Top" (WNET Group, ZED Productions, ARTE France, FTV Prima, Movistar Plus+, TV5MONDE, RTBF Documentary Unit, TV5 Québec, RSI, PBS, 2023)

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

After this show my husband Charles and I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Eiffel’s Race to the Top,” about the competition between two French architects and engineers, Gustave Eiffel and Jules Bourdais, for the commission to design and build a 300-meter tower in Paris for the 1889 International Exposition, essentially a world’s fair. The show was co-directed by Mathieu Schwartz and Savin Yeatman-Eiffel (Gustave Eiffel’s great-great-great-grandson), and it was a fascinating and very au courant depiction of the politics involved in building great public monuments and how factionalism within the French government gave Eiffel the nod to build the famous tower that is still an iconic landmark in Paris. The contest also became a metaphor for the conflicts within French culture between the old and the new: between traditional ways of doing art and architecture and the innovations that were sweeping the artistic world. The age of modern art had begun in Paris in 1863 with the so-called “Salon des Refusées,” when the government had set up an alternative exhibition of all the paintings that had been turned down by the official Salon that year. Among them was Édouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” (“Luncheon on the Grass”), in which the titular lunch was being consumed by two men wearing ordinary clothes – and two nude women. Eleven years later, Claude Monet had shown his painting “Impression: Sunrise,” which gave its name to a whole new movement in painting that rejected realism and sought to reproduce the play of light on various objects. Impressionism would become a war cry among people working in other art forms as well – Claude Debussy’s music, which emerged in the 1890’s, would come to be called “Impressionist,” though he personally hated the term.

In architecture, the revolution was in the use of metal in general, and iron or steel in particular, not only to build frameworks that would allow larger, taller and more elaborate buildings to be constructed but actually to make the metal visible instead of concealing it behind wood, brick or stone façades. Both Eiffel and Bourdais had “made their bones” with previous projects, Eiffel with a railway bridge in Bordeaux that was the largest span ever attempted to that date and Bourdais with the lavish Palais de Trocadero, built for a previous international exposition in Paris in 1878. The idea of a 1,000-foot tower had been kicking around Great Britain and the United States since 1833, when British architect and engineer Richard Trevithick – best known for inventing the railroad locomotive – proposed using the remains of the Crystal Palace, built for yet another world’s fair in London, to build an enormous tower. Alas, Trevithick died before he could actually obtain the funding for his project. The next attempt was made in the U.S. by two engineers named Clarke and Reeves, who wanted to build a tall steel tower for the 1876 exposition to celebrate the American centennial in Philadelphia but couldn’t get financial backing. For the 1889 Paris exposition Jules Bourdais designed a tower built of stone that would have electric lighting mounted at the top. His idea was to give all of Paris electric light whether they wanted it or not, and to do it in a cheaper way than actually wiring every house for electricity. (Like the tower itself, this idea had previously been proposed in Great Britain; the New York Public Library’s Web site contains a postcard, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-92f1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, of what the proposed structure would have looked like and how it would have dispersed electric light throughout London.)

Eiffel proposed a tower that would be built entirely of iron, and whose sole function would be to give Parisians and tourists alike the opportunity to ascend the tower via elevators (themselves a relatively new invention in the 1880’s) and get an aerial view of the city and its surroundings. In fact, Eiffel, whose construction company was already making a lot of money building bridges and factories, offered to pay for the tower himself in exchange for getting all the revenue from ticket sales at the tower for the first 10 years. Eiffel had to lobby the French government, and he was at a disadvantage in that the newly elected French president didn’t like him and was a good friend of Bourdais, but the culture minister, Édouard Lockroy, sided with Eiffel. Lockroy declared a supposedly open competition for designs for the great tower – but he wrote the specifications for the competition so Eiffel’s design would qualify while Bourdais’ wouldn’t. Other competitors emerged, but they just basically copied Eiffel’s design and added a few ornamental flourishes. One of the principal advantages of Eiffel’s design was that it offered better wind resistance because it was really just an open-air iron framework. Eiffel’s one remaining roadblock came from Charles Garnier, who’d been hired as master architect for the 1889 Paris Exposition and who hated Eiffel’s design. In late 1886 Garnier recruited a number of Parisian intellectual and cultural figures, including composer Charles Gounod and writers Alexandre Dumas fils (the one who wrote Camille instead of his father, who wrote The Three Musketeers) and Guy de Maupassant, to sign an open letter protesting the decision by the French government to inflict this monumental iron eyesore on the citizens of Paris.

Eiffel also got thrown a curve ball when the people running the exposition decided to move the tower closer to the Seine River than the site Eiffel had originally intended and designed it for – which meant building it on considerably wetter soil. This complicated the task of building the tower’s foundation, which Eiffel solved by working out a system of compressed air plunging holes in the ground, which he then filled with cement and other materials to create a solid foundation that could support the weight of his tower. Eiffel also had most of the tower’s components made in his factories, then shipped to the site and assembled there – one of the earliest examples of prefabricated construction and something his company had also previously done with the inner framework of the Statue of Liberty, which was fabricated in Eiffel’s factory and then shipped to New York for final assembly. The Eiffel Tower was completed in time for the 1889 exposition and was an instant hit – Eiffel made his money back from ticket sales in just 2 ½ years – and it became an iconic structure that came to symbolize not only Paris but all France. Meanwhile, Bourdais’ architectural masterpiece, the Palais de Trocadero, was torn down in 1935 to make room for an even more spectacular building for yet another international exposition in Paris. One myth about the Eiffel Tower that this show exploded was that the design was entirely Eiffel’s idea; among the people who worked with him on it and talked about their roles later were Maurice Koechlin (the show quoted a 1939 interview with him) and Stephen Sauvestre. Nonetheless, this was a fascinating series episode about a big project and the forces arrayed both for and against it, and it offers valuable object lessons to today’s infrastructure builders.

Soup to Nuts (Fox Film Corporation, 1930)

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

Last night (Monday, October 23) I ran my husband Charles a DVD of a quite interesting and very funny movie from 1930: Soup to Nuts, based on a story by cartoonist Rube Goldberg – whose name has enshrined itself into cultural history as synonymous with particularly elaborate machines designed to accomplish mundane tasks. Goldberg said the inspiration for his cartoons was a story he was sent to cover as a journalist about a scientist who had invented a complicated machine to determine the weight of the earth. That got him to thinking about doing cartoons featuring people inventing machines equally complex but aimed at doing simple things like raising Venetian blinds or reminding them to mail letters. Goldberg was actually prominent enough that the Fox Film Corporation, which produced this movie, billed him above the title – the only person involved with the film who got that honor. Goldberg also makes a cameo appearance as himself, opening his mail in a restaurant. But what has kept Soup to Nuts more or less in circulation is that it represents the film debut of the Three Stooges. At the time they were literally the “stooges” of Ted Healy, a rather overbearing comic actor who almost literally kept them on a tight leash. The Stooges in this film are Shemp Howard – a first-rate comic actor who appeared in films alongside W. C. Fields, Olsen and Johnson and Abbott and Costello – his brother Moe (billed here under his original name, Harry) and Larry Fine, along with a mute comedian named Fred Sanborn. (Charles, no doubt thinking of Harpo Marx, asked if it was obligatory for every brother-based comedy team to have a mute member.) Later Shemp would leave the act and his and Moe’s brother Curly would replace him, though Shemp resumed the Stooge mantle in 1947 after Curly suffered a stroke and was no longer able to work (Curly died in 1952 and Shemp in 1955).

I first encountered Soup to Nuts in the late 1980’s, when American Movie Classics showed it as part of one of their film preservation festivals – but I missed half an hour of it due to a phone call I got while the movie was on (probably from my mother; I can’t imagine having let anyone else distract me that long from a movie I wanted to watch!) and, though I’d had my VHS recorder on, I subsequently lost the tape so I never had a chance to see the whole movie until last night. The ads for the film promised 176 laughs, and though I don’t think there were that many I was too busy laughing at the film to keep count. Though there were some of the usual crudities of an early talkie – Charles noted that even as late as 1930 actors in this film were still taking long pauses between their cue lines and their own dialogue, though I thought that might have been because so many of the actors were vaudevillians used to pacing themselves so a live audience would hear and understand what they were saying – overall Soup to Nuts is a quite entertaining and very funny film. It’s also a surprisingly Jewish one: it’s set in the Jewish district of a major city and features a lot of actors playing the Jewish schtick whether they themselves were Jewish or not. Otto Schmidt (Charles Winninger) is the owner of a costume shop whose principal creditor, Mr. Carlson (whom we never see), has thrown it into involuntary bankruptcy and sent his son Richard (a personable young man named Stanley Smith) to run the business in his place. Only Richard forms an immediate crush on Otto’s niece Louise (Lucile Browne), who’s attracted to him at first but her love turns to hate when she realizes who he is and why he’s there. Richard has a plan, however, not only to bail out Schmidt’s costume shop but put Schmidt back in charge of it. It involves getting his father’s attorney to pose as a theatrical producer and put in a huge order of costumes for his latest (alleged) show. He insists the order be channeled through Schmidt’s top salesperson, Teddy (Ted Healy), so Teddy will get a commission on it and have the money to marry his girlfriend, Queenie (Frances McCoy).

Only Teddy doesn’t like waiting around Schmidt’s and much prefers to hang out at the fire station where the Three Stooges and Fred Sanborn work as firefighters. In fact, whenever he has to get to Schmidt’s or anywhere else in a hurry, Teddy just commandeers the fire truck so it tears through the streets (the real L.A. streets, by the way, not a process background), sirens and bells going off big-time. My amusement was tempered by wondering what would happen if there were a real fire in the neighborhood and the alarm went unanswered because Ted Healy was playing tricks with the engine. In one quite effective scene, Teddy is having an argument on the phone with his girlfriend Queenie, and he breaks off in the middle of it, takes the fire truck to Schmidt’s, and shows up while she’s still chewing him out on the phone and hasn’t noticed that he walked out on the conversation and is now there in person confronting her. The Three Stooges are first shown in the opening sequence, singing surprisingly good barbershop-trio harmonies on a song of their own called “Tears,” which they’re rehearsing for the upcoming Firemen’s Ball at the restaurant owned by Gustav “Gus” Klein (George Bickel). Klein’s restaurant is next door to Schmidt’s costume shop and the two men are old friends – Klein even offers Otto a job as a waiter even though from the looks of things, Klein’s restaurant isn’t doing much better business than Otto’s costume shop. In one delightful scene, an alleged customer (Mack Swain, former Keystone comedy star and Charlie Chaplin’s nemesis in The Gold Rush) comes in, brings his own sandwich and tea bag, then demands a cup of hot water to brew his own tea. The night of the Firemen’s Ball, which is a costume party, arrives, and Richard Carlson and Ted Healy hatch a plot by which the two will wear identical costumes and during the evening Carlson will cut in while Healy and Louise are dancing – only Louise notices the difference and “outs” Carlson.

Just then a real fire, set by a man bringing in a birthday cake with pre-lit candles tripping on the building’s stairs, starts and the Three Stooges leave the party to go fight the fire, at which they’re predictably inept. There’s a great sequence in which Fred Sanborn is playing a xylophone solo at the Firemen’s Ball – and he keeps on playing, oblivious to the fact that the building is burning down around him and his entire audience has fled. Ultimately Carlson rescues Louise from the burning building, then announces to her that though the fire has totally consumed Schmidt’s shop, fortunately Carlson took out fire insurance on it so Schmidt will be made whole. Soup to Nuts did well enough at the box office that Winfield Sheehan, then production chief at Fox, tried to hire the Stooges away from Healy and sign them to a contract, but Healy wouldn’t let them go. Eventually he took them to MGM, where they made a few shorts and guest appearances in features like Dancing Lady (1933), a musical with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone and, making their film debuts, Fred Astaire and Nelson Eddy. Then the production chiefs at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, decided they wanted Ted Healy as a character actor but could do without the Stooges. So the Stooges decamped to Columbia and made the long (23 years!) series of two-reel shorts on which their reputation rests, while Healy went on to a number of small parts in movies like the horror classic Mad Love (1935) until he died of injuries sustained in a barroom brawl in 1937. What makes Soup to Nuts surprisingly good is its overall irreverence – aside from the Marx Brothers’ Paramount films, it’s hard to imagine any movie comedies from this period that come so close to total plotlessness – and the Stooges themselves are quite amusing and considerably less annoying than they’d become later. At one point Shemp and Moe got into a slapping routine at the Firemen’s Ball and I joked, “Now it looks like a Three Stooges movie!” Even Larry looks relatively normal – this was before he frizzed out his hair and he’s surprisingly attractive – and Soup to Nuts is more than just an historical curiosity; it’s a genuinely entertaining and quite funny movie, well worth seeing even if you’re not that big a Three Stooges fan.

Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes (Max Roach Film LLC, Black Public Media, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2023)

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

After the 1930 comedy Soup to Nuts my husband Charles and I watched a show on KPBS I was really looking forward to: Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes, an American Masters episode about the great drummer and civil-rights activist Max Roach. Born in January 1924, Roach, along with the older Kenny Clarke, was the pioneer of the bebop drumming style. He got his first big break at age 18 when he was hired as a substitute for Duke Ellington’s regular drummer, Sonny Greer, at the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan. In December 1943, at age 19, he made his first recordings with a quartet led by tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and by March 1944 he was recording with a Hawkins-led big band that also featured trumpeter John “Dizzy” Gillespie. Bebop revolutionized jazz with its advanced harmonies and rhythms, and one of the key changes Clarke and Roach made in playing jazz drums was to transfer the basic pulse of the song from actual drums to cymbals (though before either of them, Jo Jones, Count Basie’s drummer, had been toying with that) and using drums to accent the soloists and give an overall lift to the performances. Bebop drummers became known for “dropping bombs” – playing loud thuds on the bass drum instead of using it to keep time. In 1947 Roach landed the dream job for a bebop drummer, playing in the Charlie Parker Quintet alongside Parker’s alto sax and the young Miles Davis’s trumpet. He recalled that Parker would warm up the band by calling the fastest tunes in his repertoire as the very first numbers of a performance. The Drum Also Waltzes did a good job covering the basics of Roach’s career; directors Samuel Pollard and Ben Shapiro started making the film in 1993, while Roach was still alive and active, and shot extensive interviews with him. Then they ran out of money and had to put the project aside, completing it well after Roach died in 2007 and interviewing three of his five children (son Daryl and daughters Maxine and Aya) as well as various musical associates, including fellow bebop pioneer Theodore “Sonny” Rollins (one of two musicians who recorded commercially with Charlie Parker who are still alive; drummer Roy Haynes, who replaced Roach in Parker’s band in 1949, is the other); the late singer Harry Belafonte; bandleader, trumpeter, arranger and record producer Quincy Jones; rapper Fab Five Freddy (Roach’s godson, with whom he collaborated on records); Roach’s ex-wife, singer Abbey Lincoln; pianist Abdullah Ibrahim; and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.

The show hit most of the high points of Roach’s career, though one major story it left out was the formation of his own record label, Debut, from 1952 to 1957. Debut Records was a co-venture of Roach and bassist Charles Mingus; I’d read one report that the seed capital came from a rich white woman Roach was then dating, but the Wikipedia page on the label says it actually came from Mingus’s mother-in-law. Mingus and Roach played on almost all the Debut releases, and in later years Mingus said that the reason the label flopped was that in the 1950’s the Mafia controlled record distribution in the U.S., and they didn’t want a label owned by two African-American jazz musicians to succeed. Roach led his own bands through most of the 1950’s, and his most successful group was the one he co-led with trumpeter Clifford Brown from 1954 until Brown’s death in an auto accident in 1956. The accident also claimed the life of Richie Powell, Bud Powell’s brother and a fine pianist in his own right, and it apparently occurred because Powell let his wife Nancy drive at night even though she was terrible at it. Roach was devastated by Brown’s death – and later by the early death (through illness) of his next trumpet player, Booker Little. In the show there’s a haunting scene of Roach sitting at a piano and singing and playing a lament for Brown. Though Roach had taken himself off heroin, the drug of choice among a lot of the bebop pioneers (most notably Charlie Parker), he responded to Brown’s demise by drinking a lot and lashing out suddenly at his children, his bandmates and anyone within range. Ironically, things turned around for him thanks to his increasing involvement with the African-American civil-rights movement and his determination to use his music as a weapon in the fight for justice and equality. In 1958 he joined forces with Sonny Rollins and bassist Oscar Pettiford to record an album called The Freedom Suite, and two years later Roach and his fiancée, singer Abbey Lincoln, took the theme even farther with an explicitly anti-racist concept album, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. (In making his music explicitly political, Roach was following a trail blazed by Duke Ellington, who in 1941 had written a musical called Jump for Joy which was supposed to explode the racist stereotypes of Black culture once and for all. In 1943 Ellington followed this with a 45-minute jazz symphony called Black, Brown and Beige, a misunderstood masterpiece which he billed as a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro.”)

We Insist! opens with a visceral lament against slavery called “Driva Man,” sung by Lincoln with incredible power and authority and backed by Roach and a band that included Coleman Hawkins (the star tenor saxophonist from the 1920’s that had taken up bebop and hired Roach and Thelonious Monk for their first recording dates) and trombonist Julian Priester, another interviewee on the program. Abbey Lincoln had been a Black pop singer working the nightclub circuit, and the film features a pre-Roach clip of her singing a faux gospel song called “Spread the Word” from the 1956 film The Girl Can’t Help It, wearing a tight-fitting red gown. She’d been deliberately instructed by her management to wiggle under the gown so her breasts would bounce up and down as she sang. Then she started dating Max Roach, and he pressed her into service as the singer for his civil-rights anthems, including a song on We Insist! called “Tears for Johannesburg” in which she does the sort of wordless “extended vocal” screaming Yoko Ono became notorious for later. Lincoln also started wearing the so-called “Afro” or “natural” hair style instead of trying to straighten out her hair as previous Black women entertainers had done, and she was largely responsible for starting that fashion trend. Lincoln and Roach married in 1962 and divorced in 1970 – though the film doesn’t mention their breakup other than asking Roach’s children if they had any idea about why, which they didn’t. Roach continued to innovate and push himself in particular and jazz drumming in general (though he didn’t approve of the word “jazz” to describe his music; at the start of the film Roach says in one of his interviews that he equates the term “jazz” with the “N-word” and says it should be called “African-American instrumental music” – once again, he was following in the footsteps of Duke Ellington, who in 1928 approached Fletcher Henderson and suggested they insist that their music be called “Negro-American Music”).

He started an all-percussion ensemble called M’Boom that featured vibraphone and steel drums to provide melodic content, as well as the So What Quintet, which featured him and four brass players – no reeds, piano or rhythm. Roach also turned Martin Luther King, Jr. into a rap artist by recording a drum accompaniment to the “I Have a Dream” speech, and he recorded with the rapper Fab Freddy Five. His weirdest experiment might have been Lift Every Voice and Sing, an album he recorded at the behest of Atlantic Records. It was the late 1960’s, just after Miles Davis had recorded the rock-influenced album Bitches’ Brew, and the “suits” at Atlantic were pressuring Roach for a crossover project that would jack up his record sales the way Bitches’ Brew had done for Miles. Roach pointed to the enduring popularity of Black spirituals and recorded an album featuring him and his avant-garde jazz group along with a gospel choir. It’s obviously unfair to judge this entire album on the basis of the minute or so heard here, but it sounded to me like someone playing a gospel album on one player and an avant-garde jazz album on another player simultaneously, not my idea of a good time. Still, Max Roach deserves credit for continually exploring new ideas in rhythm and sound – including pioneering the art of playing entire pieces, both live and on records, as extended drum solos without any other instruments. Many other jazz (sorry, but I can’t help using that term) musicians who’ve had long lives rested on their laurels and played pretty much the same music as they had their whole lives; like Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins, Roach wasn’t afraid to move with the times and take his art in new directions over a long and productive life and career.

The Neighbors Are Watching, a.k.a. The House Across the Road (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 21) I more or less subjected my husband Charles to two movies on the Lifetime channel, The Neighbors Are Watching (shot under the working title The House Across the Road) and My Landlord Wants Me Dead. These were both “O.K. but nothing special” movies. The Neighbors Are Watching dealt with Amy Horton (played by an actress with the unlikely name “Kabby Borders”), who settles in a suburban town and takes a job as a teacher at “East Coweta High School” to escape her traumatic past. Her traumatic past included a husband who beat her regularly and threatened to kill her if she ever left him. It’s quite a while before we find out what happened, but eventually it’s revealed that during their final confrontation he threatened to shoot her, she tried to grab for the gun, they wrestled for it and ultimately it went off and killed him. She was arrested for his murder but acquitted on grounds of self-defense, after which she resumed her original name and under that identity got the teaching job at East Coweta High. In her new suburban community – of which we get some aerial shots indicating that it’s the sort of “instant” village Malvina Reynolds satirized in her most famous song, “Little Boxes” – she’s instantly approached by a motley crew of neighbors befriending her and welcoming her to the neighborhood. Among them is a middle-aged white woman named Betsy (Elena Kent) who’s married to an age-peer Black man named Steve (Jerard McWhirter), and it’s indicative of how much racial progress we’ve made that this is depicted matter-of-factly and no big deal is made of it. Betsy welcomes Amy to the neighborhood with a bottle of wine, which they proceed to drink in midday, as well as a preposterously ugly lamp Betsy dug up on one of her antiques-buying expeditions. There’s also a newlywed couple, Jared and Nicole (Jordan Frechtman and Deb Foster), who inundate Amy with a succession of home-baked apple pies. Just as Amy is moving in, so is a hot-looking young man named Henry Hach (Will Holland), and apparently because they’re the only two single people in the neighborhood, Betsy is bound and determined to get them together. Any hardened Lifetime movie-watcher would be suspicious of Henry if only because in Lifetime’s usual iconography hot-looking men are almost always villains, but it takes writer Ken Miyamoto and director Haylie Duff seemingly forever to tell us what Henry is up to really.

Midway through the movie Henry, who by this time has already seduced Amy and is having a hot ‘n’ heavy affair with her, leaves for a couple of days on a so-called “business trip.” He’s a building contractor who said he needed to travel out of town to arrange future jobs, but when he returns Amy spots him with another woman, frolicking with her in his living room while both are stripped down to their underwear. Though Henry and Amy have only been dating for a month, Amy has taken the relationship seriously enough she gets jealous at the thought of him with another woman. Amy confronts Henry about it and Henry tells her that the woman is Henry’s sister and she only stayed at his place because she had nowhere else to go. Amy later sees the same woman at Henry’s place again, and this time she directly confronts Henry and literally slaps his face in front of the neighbors. The third time Amy sees Henry with this other woman, he literally carries her out of his house while she screams at the top of her lungs. Then Henry carries a bundle out of his home and puts it in the trunk of his car, and Amy assumes it’s the woman’s body after Henry has killed her. She reports it to the police, but the officer who comes out to investigate, Detective Wilson (Major Dodge), finds out that it’s only a rolled-up carpet and criticizes Amy for being alarmist and jumping to wrong conclusions. Before long Amy is fired from her teaching job by her boss, Principal Richard Diaz (Henry Noble), after it’s revealed that she got her job under false pretenses because she didn’t reveal she’d been tried for murder under her married name and had then reverted to her original one to apply for the job. In vain she protests that she was acquitted in court, but the school board rules that she violated the school district’s “honor code” and orders Diaz to let her go. Writer Miyamoto puts Amy through the Kafka-esque tribulations beloved of Lifetime scribes generally, as the neighbors take Henry’s side and some of them tell Amy she needs to get over him and get professional help.

Ultimately Amy breaks into Henry’s home – fortunately he’s left a spare key under his doormat (do people actually still do that?) – and steals his laptop, which is open to a prostitution Web site from which Henry hired the woman both we and Amy previously saw at his place. She is Nikki (Jessie Vaughn), and Amy rents a motel room for the night and calls her. Nikki naturally assumes at first that there’s a man with Amy and she’s been hired for a three-way. Then, when Amy says, “There’s only me,” Nikki assumes that Amy is a Lesbian – and when Amy says she only wants information but is willing to pay Nikki double her usual rate for it (since she’s just lost her job and still owes house payments, where is Amy getting all this money?), Nikki gets the lowdown on what Henry hired her for. First he just wanted her to come over and talk; the second time they actually had sex – though she recalled it as rough – and the third time Henry told her he wanted her to undress down to bra and panties and let Henry carry her outside while she screamed as if in terror. There was a fourth time, too, but she doesn’t offer any details other than it was so bad she didn’t want to see him again. At first I thought Henry was an O.K. guy and it was Betsy who was the real villainess; later I fell for a red herring Miyamoto threw us about the woman who’d previously owned Henry’s house and whom the neighbors had driven away because she wasn’t friendly enough for them; but ultimately I decided that Henry must be a relative of Amy’s abusive ex out for revenge against her for killing him. He turns out to be Henry Lombardi, brother of Joe Lombardi, Amy’s late ex – though when Amy learns that “Lombardi” was Henry’s real last name, she doesn’t seem to associate that with her late husband (or was he using a different last name during their marriage?). Ultimately Henry corners Amy in her house and is about to kill her when Betsy emerges as a deus ex machina and clobbers him with a surpassingly ugly lamp she’d given Amy early on in the story (sort of like Chekhov’s pistol).

The Neighbors Are Watching is a pretty mediocre Lifetime movie, though it has its good points. Actress-turned-director Haylie Duff has a real flair for Gothic horror and suspense, and it would be nice to see her get a script that would offer her more to work with than this one. And Miyamoto’s writing has some nice things to say about the peculiar fishbowl this community is and how oppressed it would get after a while. If you ever thought you’d like to have neighbors who took an interest in you and cared about your comings and goings, this film would quickly disabuse you of that notion; these people are so good at delving into each other’s lives and finding their deepest, darkest secrets one wonders why the CIA doesn’t just hire them en masse. Other than that, The Neighbors Are Watching is O.K., and I could have wished for a better actress in the lead than the ridiculously named Kabby Borders (though her performance gets stronger as the film progresses), but I particularly liked Elena Kent as Betsy. She’s middle-aged and heavy-set (her imdb.com page doesn’t give her age, but she’s been married to Kevin Kent since 1996 and it’s not hard to deduce that she’s been around the block more than a few years), and no doubt she’s all too aware of the limited opportunities available, but oh, how she seizes on this one!

My Landlord Wants to Kill Me (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

After that Lifetime showed a movie whose very title is a “spoiler”: My Landlord Wants to Kill Me. Directed by Farah White (a woman, and like Haylie Duff an actress-turned-director) from a script by Richard Dane Scott, My Landlord Wants to Kill Me stars Emily Roslyn Villareal as Madeline “Maddie” Evans. She just dropped out of college after the pre-med courses she was taking to become a nurse were too much for her, and she goes to the home of her aunt, Grace Bell (Anzu Lawson), because Grace is a professional photographer and Maddie has decided she wants to pursue a career as a photographer, too. Unfortunately Grace is married to Paul (Roy Abramsohn), the titular killer landlord, and though Grace talks Paul into letting Maddie stay there rent-free while Grace goes off to Africa for an assignment, Paul is obviously not happy about it. While there Maddie meets and immediately gets the hots for Kevin (Joey Heyworth), a boyishly handsome young man who’s a neighbor of Grace and Paul. The house where Maddie is living doesn’t have a wi-fi Internet connection (or any Internet connection at all), and the cell-phone service that far in the boondocks is spotty at best, but they have a landline with a rotary-dial phone. There’s a nice joke in Scott’s script that Maddie remembers seeing rotary-dial phones – in a documentary on the History Channel. Unfortunately, though Paul wasn’t supposed to be there while Maddie was using the house, he keeps turning up unexpectedly while she’s there and butting in – when he’s not spying on her through the windows and stalking the place in the black hoodie that’s become the standard attire for Lifetime villains. Maddie uses the phone to call her best friend, Layla (Lauren Vaz), and the moment we see her and realize she’s African-American it’s clear writer Scott is setting her up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her.

There’s also a brief confrontation scene between Paul and cutie-pie Kevin that briefly made me wonder if Kevin was part of Paul’s plot and the two were working together – after all, guys as cute as Joey Heyworth in Lifetime movies are usually playing villains – but no-o-o-o-o. And there’s the sinister master bedroom which Paul has ordered Maddie not to use, and indeed he keeps it locked at all times and the key for it isn’t on the set of keys left behind for Maddie’s use. Like Judith in the Bluebeard legend, Maddie is overcome with curiosity as to just what’s in that room, and eventually Kevin picks the lock one night while he’s there and the two make love in Paul’s and Grace’s bed …while Paul looks on from outside. (Fortunately we get a hot soft-core porn scene between Joey Heyworth and Emily Roslyn Villareal that’s quite the most entertaining thing about this movie.) There’s also Paul’s insistence that the house’s thermostat be set no higher than 65 degrees; periodically Maddie sets it higher and Paul sneaks in and turns it back down again. The entire intrigue turns out to revolve around Kaycee Arwin (Clara Carlo), a young woman Grace hired a year or two earlier as a model. Kaycee was sufficiently attractive she ended up having an affair with Kevin, but Paul also got a crush on her, and when he came on to her and she reminded him that he was married, he said, in the classic manner of all husbands seeking extra-relational activities in made-for-TV movies, “That’s been over for years.” Paul eventually got into an argument with Kaycee and ultimately strangled her – we’ve guessed pretty early on that Paul killed her but everyone else in the story just thinks Kaycee disappeared and went back home to New Orleans. What makes this film unusually macabre is what Paul’s done with her body after he killed her: he’s kept her wrapped in plastic and preserved in a basement whose entrance is a trap door under his bed, and he continues to have sex with her even well after she’s dead. (I’ve seen a lot of Lifetime movies, but this is the first one I can recall that features necrophilia.) At least that explains why he insists on keeping the house so damned cold, though I would think that even at 65 degrees Kaycee’s body would start stinking pretty soon!

Ultimately Paul manages to dispatch virtually the entire cast; he stalks Layla to her city apartment and kills her there with an overdose of chloroform, and he stabs Kevin to death and leaves Maddie to discover the body. (I was hoping Richard Dane Scott would at least keep Kevin alive and have him and Maddie get together at the end.) Grace – ya remember Grace? – comes home from Africa just in time to see Paul being arrested for murder, Kevin and Layla dead at his hands and Maddie bereft, but there’s a tag scene heralded by a chyron, “Six Months Later.” Six months later Grace and Maddie are giving a joint exhibit of their photographs, and pride of place in the exhibit goes to the photos of Kaycee, Kevin and Layla, all Paul’s victims. Grace gently urges Maddie to go back to nursing school, but Maddie says she’s found a small college which teaches photography and she’d like to go there. The End. My Landlord Wants to Kill Me has some good moments – I especially liked the decision to make the dastardly villain homely instead of drop-dead gorgeous like most male Lifetime bad guys (and motivated largely by his homeliness) – but, though I criticized Kabby Borders in The Neighbors Are Watching for weak acting, Emily Roslyn Villareal makes Borders look like Meryl Streep by comparison. The rest of the acting is passable, though I think writer Scott deliberately wanted to keep Paul enigmatic and therefore gave Roy Abramsohn little to work with in terms of building a character. And as far as actresses-turned-directors are concerned, Farah White is hardly in Haylie Duff’s league!