The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Color Force, Good Universe, Lionsgate, 2023)

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

Last night (Tuesday, November 28) I went to the Bears San Diego Movie Night at the AMC Mission Valley 20 to see the rather awkwardly titled The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to the fantastically successful cycle of Hunger Games stories concocted by novelist Suzanne Collins and filmed in 2012 (The Hunger Games), 2013 (the immediate sequel, Catching Fire), 2014 and 2015 (the third book in the series, Mockingjay, which as with the last books in the Harry Potter and Twilight cycles was split between two separate films). I’d been wondering what Collins was going to do for an encore but I hadn’t imagined she’d go back to the Hunger Games well and do a prequel, set 65 years before the original cycle began and dealing with the adventures of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who in the original Hunger Games was the authoritarian president of Panem (the fictional republic representing the northeastern portion of the current United States where the Hunger Games cycle is set) and was played by Donald Sutherland. Collins was setting the filmmakers – director Francis Lawrence (who also helmed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay movies) and writers Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt – the same problem the makers of the second and third Star Wars prequels, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, had with Hayden Christensen’s character, Anakin Skywalker. Just as the people in charge of Star Wars made Anakin an heroic protagonist in those stories but with an audience already aware that in later installments he turned into the evil Darth Vader, so Lawrence, Lesslie and Arndt had to turn Coriolanus Snow into a lovable action hero while keeping in mind the despicable figure he became later in the cycle. They actually did a better job of that than Collins did – I’ve read the book and found it disappointing, but I actually liked the movie better, though maybe that was because I’d read it and therefore knew the plot in advance.

In some ways The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes becomes a story about the making of a villain in which Coriolanus Snow is torn between his good instincts, represented by his genuine affection for District 12 heroine Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zigler, who not only plays the character credibly but sings the various songs created for her – with lyrics by Suzanne Collins and effective musical settings by Dave Cobb, who also produced her recordings, and Wesley Schultz – quite well, though that shouldn’t be a surprise since she played Maria in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story and her breakthrough came in an amateur show in which she covered “Sorrow” from the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version of A Star Is Born) and his determination to rebuild the Snow family’s power and social position in the Capital. Both Snow’s parents died in the rebellion that the Capital crushed 10 years before this story starts, and the film starts with a gruesome prologue in which Snow and his cousin Tigris – played as their younger selves by Dexter Sol Ansell and Rosa Gotzler, respectively (with Hunter Schafer as the adult Tigris) – watch a desperately poor man in the streets of the ruined Capital cut off the leg of a human corpse to eat it. Then the film cuts to the main story and the 10th annual Hunger Games, which have not yet become the big institutionalized spectacle they were 65 years later but work on the same principle. The 12 Districts from which the spoiled Capital elites extract the surplus value they need to sustain their lavish lifestyle each are obliged to send two “Tributes,” one male and one female, young people who will fight to the death in a televised spectacle in the arena in what I, in my blog post on the first Hunger Games movie, called “a combination gladiatorial duel and Most Dangerous Game-style human hunt.” As a 10th-year innovation, each Tribute is assigned a mentor from the Capital, and Coriolanus Snow is assigned Lucy Gray Baird even though, unlike Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the made-earlier, set-later films, she’s not an urban warrior but a slight young woman whose only discernible skills are making people feel good and singing.

At the pre-game show where the Tributes are introduced, Lucy wildly impresses the audience with an old-fashioned folk ballad (though actually composed by Warren Schultz with lyrics by Suzanne Collins herself; Collins also wrote the words for the other songs Rachel Zigler sings with Dave Cobb composing the music) called “The Hanging Tree,” in which a fictional Lucy Grey gets in trouble for falling in love with a high-born lord’s son and is sentenced to death. It’s not clear from the song whether she actually dies or escapes, but the song gets all Panem to fall in love with her – and Coriolanus Show in particular gets the hots for her. When one of the Tributes kills his mentor beforehand, and later rebel terrorists bomb the arena the day before the Hunger Games and leave the place in shambles, Snow works out a plan to have Lucy hide out in the tunnels under the arena, though he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the tunnels, like the rest of the arena, have been wired with cameras so everything that goes on in there is potentially part of the show. Snow also sneaks Lucy in his mother’s old compact, which he has filled with rat poison, and keeps his mother’s handkerchief – which becomes an important plot point when the Hunger Games’ designer, genetic scientist Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis – reading the book I’d imagined her as white, but Davis turns in a full-blooded villainess performance; I wondered if she’d ever played a villain before, but it turns out she has in the film The Suicide Squad), breeds literally thousands of poisonous snakes and turns them loose in the arena at the climax of the Games. The ruling elite of the Capital have decided that there should be no winner of the Games that year, but Snow saves Lucy by sneaking his mother’s old handkerchief into the tank containing the snakes, which have been bred to avoid a Frankenstein-style catastrophe by not harming anyone whose scent is familiar to them.

Lucy is declared the winner of the Games and is sent back to District 12, but instead of the reward he was expecting – a university scholarship funded by the family of his friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), who worked their way up from the Districts to become part of the Capital before the government closed down all opportunities for upward mobility – he gets drafted into the Peacekeepers, the combination police force, army and Gestapo of the Capital. He’s originally assigned to District 8 but he uses the last of his family’s money to get sent to 12 instead so he can see Lucy again, who has returned to her old gig as a traveling musician with a band called “The Covey” that plays what we now would call country-folk. (Among the songs in their repertoire is a cover of the Carter Family’s “Keep On the Sunny Side.”) Sejanus also pulls strings to join the Peacekeepers and get sent to District 12, though his real reason is to help kick off a new revolution which will be led as a front by Spruce (George Somner) and will include Lucy’s abusive ex-boyfriend Billy Taupe (Dakota Shapiro). Alas, Snow records Sejanus and Spruce plotting their rebellion on a “jabberjay,” a live bird bio-engineered by Dr. Gaul to remember any conversation held in its vicinity. In the book it was implied that this was an accident, but in the film Snow deliberately records the conversation and sends it to Dr. Gaul, thereby getting both Spruce and Sejanus hanged for treason. Snow then runs off to the north with Lucy, who has plotted this escape to get beyond Panem’s jurisdiction, but when he finds that she had stored guns in their hideout and was therefore part of the revolution, Snow guns her down in the wilderness. A flock of mockingbirds picks up her song and relays it back to Snow, freaking him out – director Lawrence and his sound designers did an effective use of directional sound here so the mockingbirds’ song really seemed to come at us from everywhere in the theatre – and at the end he’s awarded the coveted Plinth prize after all and is effectively adopted by Sejanus Plinth’s father as a surrogate son and launched on the way to an illustrious career that will end up with him becoming President of Panem in the cycle’s later entries.

What’s most interesting about The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, besides how well made it is as a movie (Francis Lawrence is an excellent director of action and suspense, but the film is a well-integrated whole and not just a series of barely connected action scenes with ponderous bits of exposition to set them up), is the Zeitgeist issues it raises. Suzanne Collins’ first Hunger Games novels and the films based on them were all products of the Obama years, in which a relatively young and vigorous President set an agenda of hope and genuinely excited younger voters. This prequel comes well into the Trump years – and though Donald Trump may have technically lost the 2020 election he still bestrides American politics like the proverbial Colossus and dominates the news, and judging from the polls it’s looking more and more like Trump will regain the Presidency in 2024 and implement a frankly authoritarian and even fascist agenda. Trump’s legacy lives on in his utter domination of the Republican Party and his ability to destroy the political careers of anyone who dares to oppose him within the GOP, and the tough-minded rhetoric of the Trump Republicans, who like their master regard cruelty as a virtue and compassion as a vice, is very much reflected in the way the Capital elites in this movie speak and their agenda to maintain their power no matter what. Even the film’s visuals evoke dictators of the past: the entrance gate to the Peacekeepers’ camp looks like the infamous one at Auschwitz with its slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (which translates either as “Work Brings Freedom” or “Work Makes You Free”), while the poster at the District 12 train station similarly evokes the official art of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

If the ultimate message of the original The Hunger Games was one of the futility of rebellion – Katniss and her lover Peeta turned their backs on society at the end and started literally cultivating their garden like Voltaire’s Candide – the message of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is even grimmer. It says that humanity is and will always be run by thugs at the top – including the fascinating character of Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, playing essentially the same sort of person he did in Game of Thrones), who makes it clear that he’s engineered the events of the film to destroy Snow and his family once and for all, and who also dreamed up the idea of the Hunger Games but becomes a guilt-ridden drug addict once he saw what it turned into in practice, and whom Snow murders at the end by spiking his drugs – and we’re naïve and stupid if we think it will ever be any other way. It says a lot about our society – most, if not all, of it negative – that a film with such a dark anti-human message would be the number one movie in the country on the eve of the year in which our real-life Coriolanus Snow, Donald Trump, is increasingly likely to return to power and become an absolute dictator. It’s even eerily appropriate that much of this movie was made at the rebuilt Babelsberg studio in Berlin, where the Nazis (the real ones) made most of their big propaganda movies!

Friedkin Uncut (Quoiat Films, Ambi Distribution, 2018)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 26) my husband Charles and I watched a quirky 2018 documentary on director William Friedkin, Friedkin Uncut, on Turner Classic Movies, which followed it up with one of Friedkin’s two most famous movies, The Exorcist (1973), and then a previous filmed interview with Friedkin done right after The Exorcist’s release. Friedkin Uncut was written and directed by Francesco Zippel and was based on extended interviews Zippel did with Friedkin in 2017 in his palatial home in the Hollywood Hills which he shared with his wife, former 20th Century-Fox studio head Sherry Lansing (the first woman to run a major movie studio, unless you count Mary Pickford at United Artists in 1919). William Friedkin was one of the many major directors who got his start doing live television in the 1950’s – he said he got his first job by accident by going to the wrong building and missing the job he meant to seek; he got hired to work in the mailroom and within a year he was a TV director. During that apprenticeship he made a documentary show called The People vs. Paul Crump, about an African-American man named Paul Crump who was unjustly convicted of murder and served nine years on Death Row until Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois, saw Friedkin’s film and pardoned Crump. The idea that a movie could undo a miscarriage of justice and literally save someone’s life impressed Friedkin big-time and made him more determined than ever to get out of the relative media backwater of Chicago and crack Hollywood. Friedkin got his start in feature films from the rather unlikely quarter of Sonny and Cher – his first theatrical feature was their exploitation musical Good Times – and even that early he got a reputation for taking on unusual and edgy projects, including the film of Mart Crowley’s pioneering Gay play The Boys in the Band. He also made a film of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and directed Bert Lahr in his last film, The Night They Raided Minsky’s.

Then Friedkin got his big break when he directed the blockbuster Academy Award-winning hit The French Connection, which he shot in a guerrilla style. Instead of shooting the New York street scenes early in the morning when the streets were empty of traffic, he shot during the day and caught New York’s actual teeming millions as they went about their ordinary business. For the film’s famous car chase, Friedkin hired the stunt driver who’d previously driven the car Steve McQueen’s character chased in Bullitt (1969) and, rather than risk turning the cinematographer’s wife into a widow, he got in the camera car and literally shot the scene himself. Friedkin got the job of directing The Exorcist when William Peter Blatty, who’d written the novel on which The Exorcist was based and had cut a deal with Warner Bros. to write the screenplay as well (Blatty’s biggest previous film credit was for the original The Pink Panther, hardly a movie that suggests he’d be good at creating a horror story!), saw The French Connection and decided he wanted The Exorcist to have that same sort of raw energy. Blatty based The Exorcist on a real-life case of alleged demonic possession in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown suburb in 1949, and Friedkin traced participants in the real-life exorcism, interviewed them, got details that hadn’t made it into Blatty’s book and incorporated them into the film. The real case had involved a 14-year-old boy, but Blatty changed the possession victim into a girl (he described her as 12 in the novel, but Linda Blair, who played her in the movie, was actually 14 and looked it). The Exorcist was a huge hit – people literally lined up for blocks to get in to see it – and Friedkin would have seemed to be on his way to a huge career both artistically and commercially.

Alas, he didn’t make another movie for four years (unless you count his 1975 filmed interview with director Fritz Lang), and when he did it was a financial bomb: Sorcerer, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) starring The French Connection co-star Roy Scheider as one of four truck drivers assigned to deliver a load of dynamite to the site of an oil-well fire. Friedkin insisted that Sorcerer wasn’t a remake of The Wages of Fear since he and his writer, Walon Green, took only the basic situation of the original – four men driving two trucks down barely functional roads in a remote South American country – and invented new characters and plot points. He also called Sorcerer his best film and the one for which he’d most like to be remembered, though of course when Friedkin died in August 2023 at the age of 87 the films that got mentioned in his obituaries were his back-to-back early-1970’s blockbusters, The French Connection and The Exorcist. After another crime thriller, The Brink’s Job (1978), Friedkin’s next movie was Cruising (1980), which starred Al Pacino as a homicide detective going undercover in the New York Gay S/M scene to catch a serial killer preying on Gay men in S/M clubs. Friedkin found himself the target of an intense pressure campaign by Gay organizations who insisted that Cruising should not be made at all because it would inspire copycat real-life murders of Gay men. Picketers formed strike forces to invade Friedkin’s locations and disrupt the filming, and Friedkin Uncut includes an interview with one of the Gay activists who tried to work his way around the seeming contradiction between upholding freedom of speech and calling for the suppression of a specific film. I remember the controversy around Cruising quite well and there was a certain degree of “Ét tu, Bill?” around it because the same director who’d depicted Gay men sympathetically in The Boys in the Band was now joining the Gay-bashers and making a movie that supposedly exalted them. In any case, the AIDS pandemic started in 1981 and almost immediately turned Cruising into a museum piece – the free-and-easy sexuality of the Gay clubs Friedkin’s film was about ended almost immediately.

Friedkin’s career after Cruising had its ups and downs; among the ups included a quite good crime thriller called To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), for which Friedkin got the British synth-rock duo Wang Chung to write a quite effective score and killed off one of his protagonists, Richard Chance (William Petersen), three-fourths of the way through the movie. Friedkin claimed that this was a major innovation, but this was a typical case of “first-itis”: a quarter-century earlier Alfred Hitchcock had shocked his audiences by killing off Janet Leigh midway through Psycho (and well before Hitchcock did it, James Whale had pulled the same gimmick with the young Gloria Stuart in his 1933 film The Kiss Before the Mirror). Friedkin mentioned in his interview that he deliberately wanted to cast To Live and Die in L.A. with unknowns because he wanted audiences to come to the characters without any previously conceived expectations of having seen them in earlier roles, though one of his newbies, Willem Dafoe, became a star later. (Dafoe was the second actor Friedkin worked with who’d also played Jesus Christ: Max von Sydow, who played the title character in The Exorcist, had played Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, eight years earlier, and Dafoe would play Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1987, two years after To Live and Die in L.A.) Later Friedkin would hook up with playwright Tracy Letts for an adaptation of Letts’ play Bug (2006) and another crime film, Killer Joe (2011), and he’d also do a documentary on a real exorcist, The Devil and Father Amorth (2017), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Friedkin said he didn’t like the whole concept of film festivals, and particularly the competition between films for awards at them (he refused to allow any of his movies to be entered in festival competitions, though he’d let them be shown out of competition), but he’d always wanted to visit Venice and he found the entire concept of building a city on water so enthralling that he joked that if he has another life after this one, he’d want to be a gondolier. My memories of William Friedkin as a filmmaker is he was talented but also frustrating, though there was one fascinating anecdote about him. One of the many other filmmakers Zippel interviewed for his film compared him with Sidney Lumet as a director who would almost never shoot more than a single take of a scene – and it occurred to me that was because both Friedkin and Lumet got their starts as directors on live TV, where you had to get it right the first time and retakes weren’t an option at all.

The Exorcist (Warner Bros., Hoya Productions, 1973)

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

Last night, after the TCM showing of the documentary Friedkin Uncut, I stayed on the channel for the next two movies in sequence. One was the legendary 1973 horror film The Exorcist, which caused a sensation when it first came out 49 years ago but which I’d never seen before. Neither had my husband Charles; when it came out originally he was too young for it (11) and I was put off by the gross-out factor, which turned out to be a lot less extreme than I’d assumed from what I’d heard about the film. As just about everyone knows, The Exorcist is about a young girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who starts having horrific experiences with a malevolent spirit that has taken over her body. She starts manifesting this when she complains that her bed is literally shaking with her in it, and in no time at all she’s throwing up green slime, spouting obscenities and speaking in the deep, low, sepulchral tones of veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge. She’s also being penned in by her own bedroom furniture – for me the most frightening scene in the film is when a chest of drawers moves under its own power and blocks the doorway so she can’t get out – and ultimately she develops a pointed green tongue and a level of crimson scars on her face that makes it look like she got into her mom’s lipstick and tried to paint herself like a Native American. Regan is being raised as a single parent by her mother, screen actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, whom I’m so used seeing in Lifetime movies like Flowers in the Attic at her current age I’d forgot she was ever young), who’s in Washington, D.C. shooting a movie about student demonstrations. She’s shown making a scene from this film in which she pleads with the students who are occupying their college campus that the only way to achieve change is to work within the system. Unfortunately, the director of her film, Burke Dennings (Jack McGowran), is interested in Chris as a woman but Regan, or rather the demon inside her, isn’t thrilled by having him as a stepfather and makes sure that doesn’t happen by causing him to fall out a window to his death several floors below. (We never meet or even learn anything about Regan’s real-life dad; unlike similar characters in Lifetime movies, he never shows up during his daughter’s distress.)

Chris takes Regan to various doctors, but none of them can do anything to relieve Regan’s condition; one diagnoses it as a tumor on her temporal lobe, but X-rays of her show no sign of such a tumor. (There’s an unintentionally funny sequence of Regan’s X-rays – lined up in a row on a viewing board and virtually identical with each other – that led me to joke, “Who’s her lab tech, Andy Warhol?”) For me, the film’s most interesting character is Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), whom Chris seeks out for help with her daughter’s frustrating condition and who ultimately decides that Regan is the victim of demonic possession and what she really needs is an exorcism. Miller got into The Exorcist from a play he had written and starred in called That Championship Season (1972), about a high-school basketball coach who dominates the lives of his players well into their adulthoods. William Friedkin had seen the play in its original off-Broadway run and liked Miller’s acting so much he paid off Stacy Keach, whom he’d originally signed for Damien, and cast Miller instead. It helped that Miller had actually gone to seminary to become a Roman Catholic priest and then had had a crisis of faith that led him to drop out and study psychiatry – an interesting inversion of his character in the film, who became ordained in the Jesuit order and then studied psychiatry to help him become a better and more helpful priest. (Ironically, when Miller directed a film of That Championship Season in 1982, Stacy Keach was in his cast.) Father Karras is having guilt feelings over the recent death of his mother (Vasiliki Maliaros), with whom he shared an apartment, because she croaked while he’d left her in the apartment alone. Father Karras starts the stipulated procedures to determine whether Regan is really a victim of possession or is just mentally ill; at one point he sprinkles her with a small jar of what he says is holy water – and she indeed burns at the touch of it – though later he says it was just tap water and she’s flunked that part of the possession test. The church authorities ultimately approve Regan’s exorcism but decide they want someone more experienced at it to conduct it.

The person they pick is Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), who shows up seen from behind, dressed in black with a wide-brimmed black hat, and who looks like he should be playing the lead in a show called Have Crucifix, Will Travel. We’d already met him in a prologue set in Iraq at an archaeological “dig” near the ancient city of Nineveh – which is how a film so thoroughly steeped in Roman Catholic theology and ritual begins with the sound of a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to Friday prayer at a mosque. Father Merrin discovered a small statue of a demon at this site, which we are evidently supposed to accept as the source of whatever it is that possesses Regan in the main part of the story. Ultimately Father Merrin and Father Karras work together to exorcise Regan, and there’s a battle of wills in which Regan’s demon fights them back and kills both of them even though the exorcism is successful. The Exorcist was a huge box-office hit and people literally lined up for blocks to see it, but 50 years later it still packs a punch (or several) but it’s not the giant scare-fest it apparently was in 1973. I wondered if time had caught up with it, but then I remembered that the original Frankenstein film was 39 years old when I first saw it on TV in 1970 and I loved it. Even though Jack P. Pierce’s makeup job to turn Boris Karloff into the Monster had become so ubiquitous and such a major part of the cultural landscape it had lost its ability to scare, the film still worked for me as an almost primordial myth, a vivid parable of creation, destruction and our responsibility for the technological havoc we wreak on the world. The Exorcist 50 years later has virtually none of that kind of resonance, and though it’s relatively restrained by the standards of modern-day horror filmmaking it didn’t really ramp up the gore quotient in the genre (that would have been Night of the Living Dead, made five years earlier). One of the weirder stories William Friedkin told in his documentary interviews was that Max von Sydow kept blowing the line in which he’s supposed to call out to the demon possessing Regan (who in later films in the cycle was called “Pazuzu” but is nameless here) to leave her in the name of Jesus Christ. He apologized to Friedkin, saying that as an atheist he had trouble speaking that line – which seems really bizarre given that eight years before he made The Exorcist von Sydow had played Jesus Christ in George Stevens’s epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Cleopatra (Helen Gardner Picture Players, United States Film Company, Cleopatra Film Company, 1912)

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

After The Exorcist TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” screened a truly fascinating and bizarre film from 1912, Cleopatra, produced by and starring actress Helen Gardner for her own company, Helen Gardner Picture Plays. Given that most of the films Charles and I had seen recently on “Silent Sunday Showcase” were from the mid- to late-1920’s, when silent movies had matured into an art form and developed the basic grammar of film – including shot-reverse shot cutting, close-ups and suspense editing – the 1912 Cleopatra had none of that. This version of Cleopatra began as a French play by Victorien Sardou, who’s known today (if at all) mainly as the author of the play Tosca on which Giacomo Puccini and his librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based their enduringly popular opera. Sardou is also famous for his quote that his formula for successful drama was, “Torture the women!” – a phrase Alfred Hitchcock was fond of quoting. Sardou’s play got turned into a film by Helen Gardner – who not only starred in and produced the film but also designed her own costumes – and her husband, Charles L. Gaskill, who wrote the screenplay and directed. Before we see any of the actual movie, Cleopatra begins with an elaborate disclaimer which reads, “Certain stage traditions originally founded in ignorance and preserved after they became traditions, have not been considered; the object of the Director has been to insure naturalness in an atmosphere of romance, the object of the Author to intimate the nobilities and grandeur of the woman who was devotedly loved by Julius Caesar. Perfect freedom has been exercised in the adaptation.” In other words, “Professors and history buffs, don’t write us snippy letters saying that we got our facts wrong.” It’s also ironic that the foreword mentions that Cleopatra “was devotedly loved by Julius Caesar” when Caesar doesn’t appear as a character and the story doesn’t begin until after he’s been killed.

In the opening scene Pharon (played by an actor billed only as “Mr. Howard” – for some reason the credits list the players by last names only, and while the film’s imdb.com page fills in some of the first names, a few remain unknown – a pity in “Mr. Howard”’s case since he’s easily the hottest and hunkiest guy in the film, at least by modern standards!), a slave to one of the local fishermen in Alexandria, is declaring his love unto death for Cleopatra. Iras (Pearl Sindelar), one of Cleopatra’s ladies in waiting, is trying to talk him out of his hopeless crush on Cleopatra because she’s interested in him herself, but eventually Cleopatra notices him and makes him an offer he literally can’t refuse. She’ll let him be her boy-toy for 10 days if he’ll kill himself at the end of it – though in the end he doesn’t die because Iras hides him out and keeps him from the Queen’s wrath. She also tries to get him to flee Egypt, but he doesn’t leave. Ultimately Cleopatra gets word that the Roman general Mark Antony (Charles Sindelar – presumably Pearl’s brother rather than her husband because Pearl was identified as “Miss Sindelar” in the credits) has summoned her to Tarsus to stand trial for opposing Rome – but, needless to say, Antony falls for Cleopatra at first glance and the two head back to Alexandria, where they spend several reels canoodling while Antony’s wife Flavia (whom we never see) is dying in Rome. Ultimately Antony is called back to Rome to do battle with Caesar’s nephew Octavius (Mr. Russ), who ultimately took the throne as the Emperor Augustus, though a Roman officer named Venditius (James R. Waite) arranges a deal to bring peace to Rome by having Antony marry Octavius’s sister Octavia (Miss Robson). Alas, Cleopatra has a jealous hissy-fit and manages to lure Antony back to Alexandria and to her bed, unraveling the peace treaty and setting up the big sea battle at Actium. Antony is counting on the support of Cleopatra’s battle fleet, but she bugs out on him and has her navy retreat because, as Gaskill’s intertitles say, she was worried that if Antony won the battle and reconquered Rome he’d no longer have any interest in her. Antony loses and returns in disgrace to Egypt, where his men falsely tell him that Cleopatra is dead. He accordingly stabs himself with his dagger and he expires just as word reaches him that Cleopatra isn’t dead after all – was Victorien Sardou ripping off the ending of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet here? – only she soon will be: she’s gone into a secret room in her palace where she has a date with a lethal serpent.

Cleopatra is a clunky film by any normal standard and yet it’s oddly haunting in its very staginess. This was one of the first feature-length films ever made in the U.S. – the 2000 Turner Classic Movies restoration runs nearly 90 minutes at a time when most films were limited to 20 to 25 minutes – and it was shown in a highly unusual fashion for the time. The film toured with specially trained projectionists who lectured either before or during the movie, and it played in legitimate stage theatres, opera houses and public meeting halls rather than the cheap nickelodeons where most films were screened then. It’s also an example of what a lot of misguided intellectuals of the period considered “quality” in film: the whole thing takes place on stagy sets, the camera never moves, pans or cuts during a scene, there are lots of intertitles (over 100 – they’re numbered in the movie to make sure they were placed in the right order, since generally in the silent era only one frame of each title was put into the original negative so titles in different languages could be inserted depending on where the film was going to be shown) and the acting is … well, let’s just say that the 1912 Cleopatra is a pretty good indication of what a “quality” stage show would have looked like at the time. Helen Gardner came to silent-film acting after having run a school to teach actors pantomime, which would seem to have been excellent training for pre-sound movie actors, but her performance, though hauntingly beautiful at times, is also pretty wooden and suffers from the stylized acting discipline of the time, particularly in all the scenes in which she puts her hand to her forehead and throws her head back to indicate anguish.

Also, TCM equipped the 1912 Cleopatra with one of the worst musical accompaniments ever slapped onto a silent film; they commissioned an “original” score by Chantal Kreviazuk and Raine Maida that combined the worst elements of minimalism and 1980’s synth-rock. While much of the score worked O.K. as mood-setting, Kreviazuk and Maida made the huge mistake of including vocal tracks – notably a really dreadful song that plays during the scene in which Cleopatra registered loneliness and frustration over Antony’s extended absence. One wishes (I wish, anyway) that someone would outfit this film with a musical score based on Massenet or one of the other major pre-Debussy French composers of the turn of the last century. Also one regrets (I do, anyway) that this film has survived while the potentially far more interesting 1917 Cleopatra with Theda Bara remains lost; an earlier Flicker Alley/TCM presentation called Fragments, containing the surviving bits of silent movies that are otherwise lost, included the few remaining seconds of the Theda Bara Cleopatra and whetted one’s appetite for the rest of it.

Yong chun jie quan (Use the Whole Spring Festival) a.k.a. Bruce Lee Secret, a.k.a. Story of the Dragon a.k.a. Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story a.k.a. Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu (Golden Sun Films, The Eternal Film Company, 21st Century Film Corporation, 1974-1977)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 25) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies. One was a really hacky martial-arts movie made in Hong Kong in the mid-1970’s just after the death of the first international martial-arts movie star, Bruce Lee. A number of other Chinese producers tried to keep the martial-arts cycle going with other male leads, and in this one the male lead was an actor born as Ho Chung-Tao but ultimately given the transparently obvious pseudonym “Bruce Li.” I remember when my then-girlfriend Cat and I were still together in 1980 when an old friend of ours from the San Francisco Bay Area, Jim Smith, came to visit San Diego. We took him for a walk through downtown and passed by the movie grindhouses that were shortly to be torn down for Horton Plaza and the Gaslamp Quarter. I noted that these theatres just showed really cheap films, and Jim said, “You mean Bruce Lee movies?” I said, “Yes, and not even Bruce L-E-E movies. Bruce L-I movies!” This film is so obscure it has no fewer than five titles: its original Chinese name was Yong chun jie quan, which Google Translate rendered as “Use the Whole Spring Festival.” The title on the print TCM showed was Bruce Lee Secret – no punctuation marks – and it’s also been called Story of the Dragon, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story (the title under which TCM’s online schedule listed it) and Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu (its imdb.com page). It’s also not clear just when the film was made: online estimates give the date as anywhere between 1974 and 1977, which would at least put it after the death of the real Bruce Lee in 1973. It was passed off as a Bruce Lee biopic but really wasn’t. It opens in San Francisco – we can tell because the first scene is a stock shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and then there’s a traveling shot of San Francisco’s Market Street as it existed in the mid-1970’s, when I was still living in the Bay Area, that brought back memories.

Bruce Li is supposedly playing Bruce Lee, and once we get past the scene-setting shots we discover him working as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. His best friend is a waiter, and he’s tripped by a group of nasty young customers including a heavily Afro’ed Black American who, in a wonderful turnabout scene that’s the one piece of genuine wit in this film, abuses the young Asian waiter with the same racist taunts that whites routinely aimed at Blacks in other movies of this vintage. Bruce whatever-his-name-is exacts revenge by attacking the obnoxious customers with his martial-arts skills, thereby wrecking the place (the customers just happen to be sitting at the one breakaway table in the restaurant) and getting himself and his friend fired by an understandably upset proprietress. They open a martial-arts training school and attract the ire not only of the bad guys from the restaurant but their bosses and the ultimate capo di tutti capi (or whatever the equivalent is in Chinese). The film devolves into a series of martial-arts brawls that, contrary to the “Deadly Kung Fu” title, don’t look particularly lethal on screen. There’s one long-haired Asian fighter who’s supposed to be on the side of the villains but who to my mind was both way hotter physically and more charismatic than Bruce Li. He kicks the shit out of Our Hero, which forces him to regroup and come back with a new style of kung fu which he tries to explain incomprehensibly to his students. Ultimately the film lurches into a series of martial-arts confrontations with only the barest hints of plots between them. Most of the intrigues against Our Heroes are concocted by an oddly wizened-looking Asian man with a voice like James Cagney’s who announces his intent, with a gang of thugs that for some reason includes the obnoxious young men from the opening scene in the Chinese restaurant, to take over the waterfront – which just gives directors Chang Chee and Hua Chen (Hua Chen also co-wrote the script with Hsin-Yi Chang) a chance to stage some of the fight scenes out of doors.

Bruce Lee Secret would have made excellent fodder for Mystery Science Theatre 3000 but au naturel it’s just boring, though the hot guys are at least fun to look at (my favorite was a slender young long-haired white guy dressed in a white shirt and tight-fitting lime-green pants who’s in the opening restaurant scene, but to my disappointment I didn’t recognize him in the rest of the movie, though he could have been in it somewhere). The film is atrociously dubbed from Chinese to English with a sloppiness that would have embarrassed the distributors of the English-dubbed Godzilla movies, and the print we were watching had recognizable image tears as well as a very dirty and grainy scene that was quite obviously a stock shot no one bothered to clean. Wikipedia has a whole page on the so-called “Brucesploitation” films with which the Hong Kong martial-arts movie industry tried to keep going after the real Bruce Lee’s death, generally with young Chinese martial-arts practitioners with only a vague resemblance to Bruce Lee but outfitted with appropriately “Bruce-ian” names – though the sleaziest of these faux “Bruce Lee” movies were the ones made by producers that somehow got the rights to film clips of the real Bruce Lee and did with them what Ed Wood had done to Bela Lugosi in Plan Nine from Outer Space: spliced them into movies otherwise shot with replacements and then advertised them as “Starring Bruce Lee” even though the real Lee was only in a few minutes – sometimes just a few seconds – of the film.

Storm Fear (Theodora Productions, United Artists, 1955)

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

Afterwards I watched a TCM “Noir Alley” telecast of a film that was only a bit better than Bruce Lee Secret: Storm Fear, a sort-of noir made by actor Cornel Wilde, who not only starred but produced and directed as well. The title made me think of two far more famous movies, Storm Warning and Cape Fear. Storm Fear began as a novel by Clinton Seeley, who didn’t publish any other full-length book, and the screenplay was by Horton Foote, who was far more famous for the adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (also based on a novel by a writer who didn’t publish another book-length tale in her lifetime). It takes place in a deserted mountain cabin near the U.S.-Canadian border where aspiring writer Fred Blake (Dan Duryea, this time cast as a good guy for a change; one of Wilde’s purposes in making this movie was to show he could play roles other than stalwart heroes, so he cast himself as the villain and Duryea as a sympathetic but ineffectual good guy) lives with his wife Elizabeth (who had just become Mrs. Cornel Wilde for real after they’d both been in unhappy previous marriages, though judging from her performance in Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof the previous Mrs. Wilde, Patricia Knight, was a considerably better actress) and their son David (David Stollery). Their home is invaded in the middle of a snowstorm by a gang of bank robbers including David’s brother Charlie (Cornel Wilde) and his accomplice Benjie (Steven Hill, who decades later would appear as the first district attorney on Dick Wolf’s policier series Law and Order) along with Benjie’s girlfriend Edna Rogers (Lee Grant, who’d been blacklisted for alleged Left-wing sympathies after her breakthrough performance in William Wyler’s 1951 film Detective Story; Wilde insisted on casting her, and it was a good thing he did). With the police using snow plows to close in on them and the mountain roads so clogged with snow drifts they’re impassable, Fred, Elizabeth and David are stuck with their unwelcome visitors seemingly indefinitely.

Charlie was wounded in the leg during the robbery, and not surprisingly the wound has become infected and Elizabeth volunteers to remove the bullet – which she has to do al fresco because of that pesky legal requirement that any doctor who treats a bullet wound has to report it to the police. Fred has a wracking cough that makes one wonder (it made me wonder, anyway) why anyone thought it would be a good idea to live in the mountains and have to deal with super-cold winters instead of moving to a warmer, more temperate clime. We gradually learn that Elizabeth had an affair with Charlie before she married Fred, and David is in fact Charlie’s biological son, not Fred’s. Fred agreed to marry Elizabeth so the boy would have an official father and she wouldn’t have to suffer the stigma of an out-of-wedlock child in the censorious 1950’s, but the two never loved each other and we get the distinct impression that they’ve never had sex with each other, either. There’s also a hired man on the Blakes’ farm, Hank (Dennis Weaver at his twitchiest), who’s got the hots for Elizabeth and makes a crude pass at her in one scene. The fact that Storm Fear’s title is a mashup of two considerably better films (though it was made seven years before Cape Fear) gives a premonition of what the story would be like. Wilde and Foote blatantly copied the scene in John Huston’s Key Largo in which the failed nightclub singer (Claire Trevor in Key Largo, Lee Grant here) is forced to sing one of her old songs, though in this movie it’s the swing version of “Loch Lomond” instead of “Moanin’ Low” and Grant had a better voice (or a better voice double). They also took the relationship between the boy David and his “uncle Charlie” straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, though in that case the child impressed by the out-of-town relative who turns out to be a serial killer is a teenage daughter instead of an 11-year-old boy. David even ends up killing Benjie in self-defense the way Teresa Wright’s character killed Joseph Cotten’s in Shadow of a Doubt, though here David shoots him instead of pushing him off a train.

After the film Eddie Muller delivered an outro in which he said he didn’t particularly like it and thought Horton Foote’s dialogue was overly stagy and explained the characters and situations to death. He also thought that Foote and Wilde should have shot the whole film from the perspective of boy David and given it the aspect of a coming-of-age tale the way Foote’s script for To Kill a Mockingbird did. Even as the film stands, though, David is quite clearly the film’s most interesting character by a long shot – and also its most morally ambiguous one. He’s basically a decent kid but he forms an intense emotional bond with Charlie – though he ends the film with nobody telling him that Charlie is his biological dad, he seems to have realized it by the end because Charlie has bonded with him in a way Fred never did – and at the end David agrees to lead Charlie, Benjie and Edna out of the mountains over a secret pass after Fred sneaks out of the house to fetch the police. The trek ends disastrously, not surprisingly, as Edna finds she can’t walk through the snow wearing her mink coat (a symbol of affluence that itself dates this movie badly!) and ultimately she falls into a ravine. Instead of going down there and helping her as any decent person would, Charlie throws her a packet of the stolen money from the bank job and tells her it’s her share. To nobody’s surprise, Edna ultimately dies in the snow – and so does Benjie after David shoots him in self-defense. Hank the hired man picks off Charlie with a long rifle with a telescopic sight – we know that because we see a brief point-of-view shot through crosshairs as he aims it – and we assume Charlie is going to die, too. But at the end Charlie is in a hospital bed (where, praise be, no one is smoking: a far cry from Not As a Stranger, in which hospital personnel, patients and visitors were all shown puffing away big-time in the hospital’s sacred precincts!), telling David that he’s a no-good crook and the boy shouldn’t admire him (shades of Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces!) before he’s presumably taken into police custody and arrested.

One thing Charlie doesn’t tell David is that he’s David’s real father – Fred, in the meantime, has been found dead of snow and exposure in the big storm, and there’s a hint Elizabeth and hired man Hank are going to get together and Hank is going to be David’s new stepdad. One thing that particularly bothered me about Storm Fear is that, for all the ferocity we’re told with which the storm has hit, we don’t see any of it: no winds, no snow drifts and no shots of actors’ breaths steaming in the cold. You’ll remember the last was a big deal to Frank Capra, who shot key scenes in Lost Horizon, Meet John Doe and It’s a Wonderful Life in a literal icehouse to get the shots of actors’ breaths steaming the way they would in a real snowstorm, but Wilde either couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered to seek that level of realism, especially in an independent production (the film was made by Theodora, a company Wilde and Wallace co-founded, and released by United Artists) on a limited budget.

Midnight Lace (Ross Hunter Productions, Arwin, Universal-International, 1960)

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

Last night (Friday, November 24) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies: Midnight Lace, a 1960 crime thriller starring Doris Day as a put-upon woman who’s the victim of a plot to drive her to commit suicide and Rex Harrison as her husband. The film was set in Britain and was based on a 1955 play called Matilda Shouted Fire by British playwright Janet Green, though at the time producer Ross Hunter bought it for Universal-International as a Doris Day vehicle it had only played the British provinces and hadn’t yet opened in London. The film was also shot in Britain by director David Miller (Green’s play was adapted for film by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts), which meant they had access to the marvelous pool of British actors, including Hermione Baddeley (who does a great turn as a bar owner), Roddy McDowall, Herbert Marshall (as a board member of Preston Oil, the company of which Harrison is the CEO), John Williams (repeating his role as a Scotland Yard super-cop from Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder) and Richard Ney (the actor who played Greer Garson’s son in Mrs. Miniver and subsequently married her). Midnight Lace – the title comes from a sheer black lace negligée Kit Preston (Doris Day) buys early in the film in hopes of impressing her husband Anthony (Rex Harrison) – is a Gaslight-style melodrama (in fact TCM showed it right after the 1944 Gaslight, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten) that begins in a London fog. Kit tries walking home across Trafalgar Square in a fog so thick visibility is almost zero, and as she’s making her way across towards her home she hears a weird voice coming from different directions but all belonging to the same person, a man who tells her point-blank and matter-of-factly he’s going to kill her. Later she starts getting threatening phone calls from the same individual.

She turns for help to her husband, to her aunt – an American woman named Bea Vorman, played by the great Myrna Loy, whom Ross Hunter persuaded to come out of retirement for the role – and to Brian Younger (John Gavin), a young American contractor who’s supervising a building site on the same block where the Prestons live. It’s established that Kit Preston is a well-to-do American heiress, and when she reports the psychological assaults she’s receiving both to Inspector Byrnes of Scotland Yard (John Williams) and her doctor, Garver (Hayden Rorke), they both urge her to see a psychiatrist. The film rambles for almost two hours’ worth of running time as Kit becomes more and more discombobulated, including one scene in which Kit gets her friend Peggy Thompson (Natasha Perry) to lie for her and say she, too, heard the mystery phone voice – only Anthony catches them out on the lie by revealing that their phone had actually been out of order for the last half-hour. Midnight Lace builds to a surprise ending (sort of) in which [spoiler alert!] Kit’s seemingly devoted and supportive husband turns out to be the principal villain. Anthony Preston never actually loved Kit; he just married her for her money. He’d been embezzling from his company, his accountant Daniel Graham (Richard Ney) had noticed the shortage in the books but had not yet traced it to him, and in order to cover his losses he’d married Kit with the intent of knocking her off by driving her crazy and ultimately getting her to commit suicide so he could grab her fortune. Peggy was his accomplice and his lover, and the rat-faced man we’d seen in several sequences and assumed was Kit’s tormentor was actually Peggy’s sailor husband, Roy Ash (Anthony Dawson), who’d deduced that she was having an extra-relational affair by the sheer number of letters she was writing him and gifts she was sending him while he was away at sea.

The voice that tormented Kit both in the fog in the opening scene and on the phone was Anthony’s own, voice-filtered and doctored and played back on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder at a time when pocket-sized recording devices were a novelty. At one point Kit had asked Anthony to call the police for her, giving her the confidence that they were on their way and would rescue her, but he just pretended to make the call; he really just called the phone number that gave you the correct time (something I remember from my childhood!), though Inspector Byrnes had wiretapped the Prestons’ phone anyway in a search for Kit’s mystery tormentor and he’d heard the whole thing. Ultimately Kit ends up literally fleeing for her life across the framework of the uncompleted building Brian Younger’s (ya remember Brian Younger?) work crew is building next door, and while Kit predictably ignores Brian’s warnings not to look down, in the end he rescues her while Byrnes and his fellow bobbies arrest Anthony and Peggy. Midnight Lace is a good film but also a frustrating one; given that at least two of the cast members had worked for Alfred Hitchcock (Day in the second The Man Who Knew Too Much and Williams in Dial “M” for Murder), and the story is very “Hitchcockian,” one can’t help but wish that Hitchcock himself had been around to direct it. There’s even a scene in which Kit Preston returns home to find a man standing outside her building reading a newspaper – and one gets the impression that if Hitchcock had directed Midnight Lace, that would have been Hitchcock himself making one of his trademark cameos.

What’s most convincing about Midnight Lace is Doris Day’s performance; she starts out as her usual perky, lovable self but as the film progresses and the events of the plot start attacking her sanity, she gradually loses her sang-froid on-screen and becomes both physically and psychologically disheveled. Apparently in this film, as in her earlier thriller Julie – also about an innocent young woman who gradually realizes that her husband is a psycho determined to do her in – Day did the Method thing and drew on her own personal experiences to create her character. In Day’s case the personal experience she drew on was a wretched first marriage to a man named Albert Paul Jorden, who was both physically and psychologically abusive – so much so that their child, a son named Terry, used his stepfather’s last name and called himself Terry Melcher. After Julie Doris Day said she would never make another thriller because the strain of reliving her relationship with Jorden for the role had given her what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and though Ross Hunter talked her into doing Midnight Lace the same thing happened to her psychologically and she never again made a film that wasn’t a comedy and/or a musical. It was a pity because, like Lucille Ball, Doris Day was a far rangier and more sensitive actress than she allowed herself to be and had a lot more potential than was tapped by the sprightly comedies for which she’s best known.

Odds Against Tomorrow (HarBel Productions, United Artists, 1959)

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

Two nights ago (Tuesday, November 21) I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, both part of a “Star of the Month” tribute to actress Gloria Grahame, a troubled woman with a pretty wild life off-screen. In 1950, while she was married to director Nicholas Ray, he caught her having sex with his 13-year-old son by a previous marriage – and years later Grahame and the son, Tony Ray, actually got married themselves. The films were Odds Against Tomorrow and Not As a Stranger, and I was especially interested in Odds Against Tomorrow because it was the first of two films produced by HarBel Productions, Harry Belafonte’s production company, and I had just seen and been quite impressed by HarBel’s second film, The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Odds Against Tomorrow was an odd quasi-noir directed by Robert Wise and written by Abraham Polonsky (who’d been blacklisted and had to work through Black writer John Oliver Killens, a friend of Belafonte’s, as a “front”) and Nelson Giddins based on a novel of the same name by William P. McGivern. (McGivern was best known for writing the source novel for Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir The Big Heat and for an early-1970’s novel called Night of the Juggler, about the tensions within a big-city police department as they go after a serial killer.) The film’s music score was by John Lewis, jazz pianist, composer and leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and jazz critic Martin Williams – reviewing a concert in which the MJQ played two selections from the Odds Against Tomorrow music – called the film “a very skillful, very entertaining, essentially trashy thriller, with an either naïve or corrupt moral which I can only interpret to say that race prejudice prevents bank robberies.”

Odds Against Tomorrow is basically a knock-off of The Asphalt Jungle in which a corrupt ex-cop, David Burke (Ed Begley, Sr.), plans a big bank robbery in a small New York upstate town which has a major oil refinery. The workers are still being paid in cash and the bank is flush with cash on Thursday afternoon, so Burke’s plan is to hit the bank after 6 p.m. (it stays open that late on Thursdays) and get in through a side door guarded by a watchman who gets a sandwich order for dinner every night at 6. The two men Burke recruits to commit the robbery with him are ex-con Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), a thoroughgoing racist – we learn that about him almost immediately when a Black kid gets in his way as he’s on his way to see Burke and he says, “Get away, you little pickaninny” – and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), a Black nightclub singer and gambling addict who’s into Mob enforcer Bacco (Will Kaluva) for $7,500 in bets he lost on horse races. Odds Against Tomorrow is basically what The Asphalt Jungle would have been if Sterling Hayden’s character had been a racist and one of the other crooks had been Black; at different times both Belafonte’s and Ryan’s character drop the “N-word” and at the end of the movie Johnny and Earl end up in a shoot-out, not with the cops (though that happens too) but with each other. Frankly, the racial angle of this film seems forced and not too convincing; Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson said more against racism in one scene in The Killing (another “caper” film with Sterling Hayden in the lead), in which the elaborately worked-out timetable for the robbery of a horse-race track is thrown off by a Black parking attendant who thanks one of the crooks for not being racist – and then the crook has to pretend to be a racist to get the Black guy to get lost, than the makers of Odds Against Tomorrow manage to say in 95 minutes of running time.

Odds Against Tomorrow is a mediocre film with some great moments, and Ryan’s performance in particular is quite strong: he had been a boxer before he got into acting, and his sheer physicality and hair-trigger temper (his previous crimes include assault and manslaughter: he’s never before participated in a crime that actually stood to make him some money!) are powerfully portrayed. In case you’re wondering where Gloria Grahame fits into all this, she’s Helen, a neighbor of Slater’s girlfriend Lorry (Shelley Winters, who was starting to put on the pounds on her way from her former sexpot roles at Universal-International to what she looked like in The Poseidon Adventure) and she more or less non-seriously flirts with Slater, though why two women would be so interested in this jerk is something we keep wondering about and never quite believe. Odds Against Tomorrow draws to a didactic and rather sorry close when the crooks are fleeing past the oil refinery (ya remember the oil refinery? It’s the reason the bank they targeted was so flush with cash in the first place!), only Johnny and Earl decide to have it out with each other with long guns. In the process they set the refinery ablaze – apparently McGivern, Polonsky and/or Giddens had seen the spectacular ending of the 1949 gangster film White Heat, which ends with gangster Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) on top of a blazing oil tank yelling “Top of the world, Ma!” – and when the cops come on the scene and find the refinery totally destroyed and Johnny’s and Earl’s bodies incinerated, they try to decide which body was which. One of the cops says, in an anti-racist statement that manages to be both powerful and silly, “Take your pick.”

Odds Against Tomorrow also features two musical numbers performed by Belafonte in his job as a nightclub singer, in which he also plays vibraphone (though his playing was almost certainly dubbed by the MJQ’s ace vibes player, Milt Jackson); “My Baby’s Not Around,” his solo feature; and “All Men Are Evil,” which is supposed to feature Black woman singer Mae Barnes but which Belafonte ruins by adding scat vocals and clanging away at the vibes until Barnes walks off the stage in disgust. He’s supposed to be doing that because he’s just come back from a disastrous pre-crime meeting with Burke and Slater. Odds Against Tomorrow is the sort of movie you want to like better than you do; as Herbert Hoover said about Prohibition, it was “an experiment noble in purpose,” and yet you can’t help thinking of other, better movies that involved the same people: Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! (a much greater movie about lowlife criminals that featured a major jazz score), Harry Belafonte’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Robert Ryan’s The Set-Up and Gloria Grahame’s The Big Heat.

Not As a Stranger (Stanley Kramer Motion Pictures, United Artists, 1955)

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

After watching Odds Against Tomorrow on November 20 I kept on Turner Classic Movies for Not As a Stranger, a truly odd 1955 medical melodrama starring Olivia de Havilland, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra (billed in that order even though Mitchum’s character is clearly the lead) based on a novel by Morton Thompson. I remember seeing the Ernest Hemingway home in Havana in December 1977 – the Cuban government has maintained it as a museum – and seeing Not As a Stranger on his bookshelf, I was momentarily surprised that he’d have such a trashy novel (I hadn’t read it – and still haven’t – but its reputation is as a potboiler) on his shelf. Not As a Stranger was bought as a movie by producer Stanley Kramer before the book was even published, and though he’d made a number of films as producer for both United Artists (Champion, Home of the Brave, High Noon) and Columbia (Death of a Salesman, The Wild One and the bizarre cult classic The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.), for this one Kramer decided to direct it himself as well. (He would remain a producer/director for the remaining quarter-century of his career.) The plot deals with aspiring doctors Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) and Alfred Boone (Frank Sinatra) in their years at medical school and then as young, aspiring doctors. Their principal teacher is Dr. Aarons (Broderick Crawford, who in the first half steals the movie out from under both of them), who begins the class by starting the dissection of a human with a lecture that until a few days before this was a living, breathing person with a soul. Now all that’s left of them is a corpse, and he bids his class to study attentively out of respect for the person whose soul once inhabited that body.

Lucas and Alfred end up as roommates, only Lucas is financially broke – his alcoholic gambler father has run through the money that was supposed to get him through medical school. Desperate for a way to come up with the tuition for his next term, he starts romancing nurse Kristina Hedvigson (Olivia de Havilland), who comes from a Swedish immigrant family – her parents are Henry Morgan and Virginia Christine, and not only does it try our suspension of belief big-time that Henry Morgan (born April 10, 1915) could have sired Olivia de Havilland (born July 1, 1916), the entire family speaks in some of the worst faux-”Swedish” accents of all time (rivaling George F. Marion as Greta Garbo’s father in the 1930 Anna Christie – though at least they don’t have the competition of a real Swede in the cast!). Lucas gets a dinner invitation from the Hedvigsons and Kristina announces that she’s got several thousand dollars saved up – and immediately Lucas decides to court her and ultimately marry her even though he’s not in love with her. He even does the usual faux-galant thing of waiting for her to suggest to him that she use her savings to bail him out. There’s a marvelous scene in which Boone and all the other doctors-to-be (including a young Lee Marvin) are talking excitedly about their plans to establish big-city practices and make themselves tons of money, while Lucas virtuously insists he’s going to move upstate to the farming community of Greenville and practice there. Lucas gets a job as assistant to Dr. Runkleman (Charles Bickford) and lives a catch-as-catch-can existence; in one nicely amusing scene we see Kristina roasting a chicken the Marshes got in lieu of cash from a local farmer he treated.

Alas, Lucas falls into the clutches of “bad girl” Harriet Lang (Gloria Grahame) and starts an affair with her – represented by a shot of a white stallion chasing after a black mare, in the sort of pretentious symbolism directors had to use to symbolize erotic attraction in the Production Code era – and when Kristina figures it out, she’s ready to leave him even though the town is in the middle of a typhoid epidemic and Lucas is also working on a mass vaccination campaign (with no public resistance, surprising in our modern era when millions of Americans have become convinced that vaccinations are a threat to their autonomy and freedom). Ultimately Dr. Runkleman has a heart attack and Lucas takes over the operation – and blows it, leading to Runkleman’s death. The experience also humbles him enough that he returns to Kristina and she inexplicably forgives him. It’s also been established that Kristina is pregnant – though one wonders how since not only were she and Lucas sleeping in the Code-obligatory twin beds, he was away from home so often for either medical emergencies or trysts with Harriet we wonder just when he and Kristina had time to have sex – and if they broke up she’d have had to raise the baby as a single parent and return to work as a nurse to earn the money to do so.

The American Medical Association opposed the filming of Not As a Stranger and pleaded with Kramer to make sure his writers, Edward Anhalt and his wife Edna, included scenes making the point that most doctors were dedicated, selfless professionals concerned only with the welfare of their patients – though that’s not the impression we get from the film, in which most of the doctors are depicted either as political hacks (the head of surgery at the hospital that services Greenfield, Dr. Snyder [Myron McCormick], is an appointee way out of his depth in the job) or money-grubbing assholes. What works about Not As a Stranger is the quiet strength of the acting of Mitchum and Sinatra in the male leads. Everything else, from Kramer’s serviceable direction to the awful Swedish accents and the miscasting of Olivia de Havilland (who was not only 20 years too old for her part, she was totally wrong as a “type”), sort-of works but not well enough to achieve true greatness (or even goodness; I once wrote of a later Kramer film, Ship of Fools, “It aspires to greatness and achieves goodness,” but simple goodness would have been an improvement for Not As a Stranger). Not As a Stranger is the sort of movie that alternates between genuinely moving scenes and utter tripe, and though James Van Heusen and Buddy Kaye wrote a theme song for the film and Frank Sinatra recorded it as a single for Capitol, it’s not heard in the movie – not even under the opening credits – nor does its melody have anything to do with the background music George Antheil (former “bad boy” of French music turned respectable Hollywood composer) wrote for the film’s score. What’s more, the Anhalts’ script never explains what the title means or how it relates to the film.

Secrets of the Dead: "The Princes in the Tower" (Briarhawk Productions, WNET, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode on PBS that I was eagerly looking forward to because it was based on an historical mystery I’ve been fascinated by since I first read Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time in the 1970’s. The episode was called “The Princes in the Tower” and was based on the still-controversial attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard III, the last King of England from the York dynasty, who took the throne in 1483 after his nephews, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were declared illegitimate and therefore ineligible to reign. Richard ruled for two years until the Earl of Richmond led an invasion force from France to England and defeated and killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The common history is that Richard III literally murdered his way to the throne; he kidnapped the princes, locked them in the Tower of London (actually a fortress rather than a prison, though it had a wing called the “Bloody Tower” where people under a death sentence were held until they could be executed) and sent a professional assassin, Sir James Tyrrell, to kill them. That was the version that got told by the greatest playwright of all time, William Shakespeare, in his Richard III play, written in 1595, while the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty founded by the Earl of Richmond (who took the English throne as Henry VII), Queen Elizabeth I, was still alive and in power. But almost as soon as Elizabeth died in 1603 and the Scottish House of Stuart, in the person of James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England), took over, historians – most notably Sir Horace Walpole (1717-1797) – started challenging this consensus view.

I’m not sure how Josephine Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and who wrote mystery novels as “Josephine Tey” and plays as “Gordon Daviot”) got interested in rehabilitating Richard III, but in 1934 she wrote a play called Dickon that presented Richard III as a sympathetic character and in 1951 she wrote The Daughter of Time. The novel dealt with Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, who’s laid up in the hospital from injuries sustained on the job and is inspired to re-investigate the case of Richard III with the help of an American researcher who becomes his leg man, looking up documents in the British Museum and elsewhere. Ultimately Grant decides that not only did Richard III not have his nephews killed, but when Henry VII took the throne “they were still alive and their whereabouts known.” The Secrets of the Dead episode “The Princes in the Tower” featured two modern researchers, Philippa Langley – an amateur historian who deduced the location of Richard III’s remains – and Rob Rinder, a barrister (a British criminal lawyer) whom Langley engaged to review the evidence and pass his professional judgment as to whether or not it was credible. They mount a merry chase throughout Europe and meet with, among other people, Nathalie Minjun and Zoë Maula of something called the Dutch Research Group and German history professor Henrike Lahnemann from the Saxon Institute of Medieval Studies in Dresden. Along the way Langley uncovers four documents: an alleged autobiographical sketch by Richard, Duke of York telling how he escaped England and fled to France, stopped at various European capitals and ultimately led an attempt to reconquer England; receipts from both Edward V and Richard, Duke of York for money advanced to them for the reconquest by Maximilian IV, Holy Roman Emperor of the day and relative of Margaret of Burgundy, the two princes’ aunt and Edward IV’s and Richard III’s sister; and an account of a big coronation ceremony for Richard, Duke of York at Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin.

The conclusion Langley reaches – and Rinder eventually endorses – is that the princes from the Tower were actually killed in unsuccessful invasions, Edward V at Stoke in 1487 (in an invasion hamstrung by tactical and linguistic differences between the German, French and Irish soldiers in Edward’s army and in particular by the Irish fighters’ refusal to wear armor, which made them sitting ducks for Henry’s British archers) and Richard, Duke of York in Cornwall 10 years later. Both unsuccessful invasions were attributed by Tudor historians to pretenders who weren’t really the princes in the Tower: the Battle of Stoke to a 10-year-old named Lambert Simnel whom Henry VII put to work in the royal kitchen after the battle was lost; and the rebellion at Cornwall to Perkin Warbeck, an alleged pretender just posing as Richard, Duke of York. Though Henry VII was notoriously bloodthirsty when dealing with pretenders to his throne, he went relatively easy on both Simnel and Warbeck; when he lost the battle in Cornwall Warbeck was given an apartment in the king’s walk-in closet and allowed to come and go around the palace grounds pretty much as he pleased. It was only when he tried to escape and was recaptured that Warbeck was put in a dungeon, shackled and bound, and ultimately executed. The Secrets of the Dead episode ends with Rob Rinder basically convinced that Philippa Langley has made her case that Richard III was innocent of having had his nephews killed. Even the one document whose authenticity he had questioned, Richard, Duke of York’s alleged autobiography, he came around to after two medieval historians he showed scanned copies to concurred that it was for real. This episode was certainly of interest to me given the quality of Tey’s novel and the eloquence with which she, relying on completely different historical evidence from what Philippa Langley and Rob Rinder were using, made the case for Richard III’s innocence in the context of a modern-day (well, 1951 modern-day, anyway) mystery novel and also her confirmation of the old case that “history is written by the winners” and George Orwell’s contention, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Lady Be Good (MGM, 1941)

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

Last night (Monday, November 20) my husband Charles and I watched the 1941 film Lady Be Good on Turner Classic Movies. This was an early Arthur Freed musical at MGM, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (whose most famous movies are Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) from a committee-written script: Jack McGowan wrote an “original” story (quotes definitely intended!) and then worked it into a script with the help of Kay Van Riper and John McClain. Freed took the film’s title from a 1924 Broadway stage musical by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira, but he junked the original story (about a brother-and-sister dance team, played by real-life brother-and-sister dance team Fred and Adele Astaire, who find themselves broke, so each decides to help the other land a rich spouse to replenish the family fortunes) and all but two of the original Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” (Fortunately, when Fred and Adele Astaire went to London in 1926 to play the musical on the East End, they made records of “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Hang On to Me,” also from the Lady Be Good score, with George Gershwin himself on piano as their accompanist.) Instead the writing committee came up with a new plot about a feuding husband-and-wife songwriting team, Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan Crane (Ann Sothern), who when the film opens are appearing before a divorce-court judge, Murdock (Lionel Barrymore, who plays his entire role behind the judge’s bench to conceal that he no longer could walk and had to use a wheelchair). Dixie is on the witness stand being examined by the couple’s lawyer, Blanton (Tom Conway), and as she testifies we see a flashback of how she and Eddie met in the first place. It seems that Eddie was an aspiring songwriter using an office in Tin Pan Alley he borrowed from music publisher Max Milton (Reginald Owen). Eddie is trying to write a song and he has a melody all worked out, but the man he’s brought in as a lyricist can’t think of anything to fit Eddie’s melody.

Dixie, who’s hanging out there with a dog called Buttons who’s assumed the classic “His Master’s Voice” pose, starts scribbling down her own ideas for a lyric on her handkerchief, and in no time at all Eddie and Dixie have their first song, “You’ll Never Know” (one of two original songs with producer Arthur Freed supplying the real lyrics and his musical assistant, Roger Edens, coming up with the tunes). They place it in a nightclub show featuring radio singer Buddy Crawford (John Carroll, a singularly repulsive screen presence with a stentorian voice; he’s shown introducing Eddie’s and Dixie’s songs and making them hits, but as I wrote on moviemagg before, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/06/lady-be-good-mgm-1941.html, his voice is so terrible it sounds like the songs are becoming hits in spite of him) and dancer Marilyn Marsh (Eleanor Powell, inexplicably given top billing even though she’s really playing a second lead). Eddie and Dixie get married and they land a plum assignment to write an entire score for a Broadway revue (which meant a musical without a plot) in which Marilyn will star. Only success goes to Eddie’s head and he surrounds himself with “society” phonies whom Dixie can’t stand. They get divorced, but then proximity works its magic on them again because they’re still committed to write songs together even though they’re no longer a couple. There’s a great Production Code-bending scene in which the two have been up all night working on “Oh, Lady Be Good” when Dixie forgets they’re no longer married and starts undressing for bed. Since the underwear she’s wearing is still concealing enough she could probably have gone out in it, even in 1941, and not risked being arrested for indecent exposure, it hardly seems to matter, but she realizes her mistake and throws her dress back on. They get married again but almost as soon as they’re back together, they start having the same old arguments and things come to a head on the night of a songwriters’ association banquet where they were being honored. This sequence features the movie’s strongest emotional moment: Ann Sothern performs “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” written by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics) after Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940. Hammerstein had spent enough time in pre-war Paris he felt the loss personally, and sought out Kern even though he was working on a musical with Sigmund Romberg at the time. He and Kern licensed the song to MGM, which put it in this movie; it won the Academy Award for Best Song (probably because of its topicality; Kern himself thought Harold Arlen’s and Johnny Mercer’s “Blues in the Night” should have won, but it was showcased far less effectively in its film than “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” in which stock clips of pre-war Paris dramatized the lyric and added to the emotional impact).

Unfortunately, on the way home Eddie and Dixie get into another round of the same arguments that broke them up in the first place, and Eddie stops the car in which he was driving Dixie, Marilyn and her song-plugger boyfriend, Joe “Red” Willett (Red Skelton, who as I wrote in my previous post really should have been given more to do in this film; he’s billed sixth, not seventh as I wrote earlier, and it’s arguable Freed and his fellow MGM producers agreed with me because in Powell’s next film, Ship Ahoy, she and Skelton were the romantic leads) and strands them in the middle of nowhere. In their second divorce hearing, lawyer Blanton asks Dixie how they got home, and she makes a thumbing gesture with her hand to indicate they hitch-hiked. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – this time Judge Murdock appoints himself the defender of traditional morality and refuses to grant Eddie and Dixie their second divorce, saying that in the good old days people got married and stayed that way. The film ends the way you’d expect it to, with Eddie and Dixie once again both professional and personal partners, while Marilyn and Red pair off as well. Eleanor Powell gets two spectacular dance sequences in the film; one is a duet with her dog Buttons on “Oh, Lady Be Good” (according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, Powell was dissatisfied with the dogs the studio offered her for the sequence and bought a dog herself from a prop man; apparently she taught the dog herself, though the credits list Jack Ackerman as the film’s dog trainer: today he’d be called a “dog wrangler”) in the set representing her apartment. The other is her big final number, set to “Fascinating Rhythm” and designed and directed by Busby Berkeley. He really went to town on this one, including three grand pianos each occupied by a young Black man (together they were the Berry Brothers, who seem to have been MGM’s attempt to recruit their own Nicholas Brothers; they’re one of the most entertaining elements in this film). He also went to town with his typically arduous working methods; as Hugh Fordin wrote in The World of Entertainment, his biography of Arthur Freed, Berkeley was given an ultimatum by Freed that he had three days to rehearse the number and one day to shoot it. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set,” Fordin said. “Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” But the result was typically stunning and showed off Powell’s skill at dancing with her entire body, not just her legs.

This time around I liked Lady Be Good a lot better than I had the time before; I found myself enjoying the film for what it was and not wishing for what it could have been with a better director and cast (like Leo McCarey, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who had made a similar story at Columbia in 1937 called The Awful Truth; Grant and Dunne played a divorced couple who get back together and Dunne was not only a better actress than Ann Sothern but a better singer as well; she had auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera as a mezzo-soprano in 1929 but decided to sign a film contract with RKO instead). It’s a pretty dorky film at times and Freed would go on to bigger, better and considerably more sophisticated productions like Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, but Lady Be Good is a lot of fun on its own merits and genuinely entertaining.

Father Brown: "The Sands of Time" (BBC Studios, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, November 18) I watched a Father Brown episode on PBS called “The Sands of Time,” and then a 1949 RKO “B” film noir called Strange Bargain. “The Sands of Time,” written by Neil Irvine and directed by Dominic Keavey, was an unusually good Father Brown episode full of emotional complexities. It begins with a rather dotty old Englishman named Oswald Hartigan (Bob Barrett) preparing to unveil the crown jewel of his private clock collection, an ultra-rare gold clock made for the royal family of Poland. Oswald is angrily confronted by his nephew, Lord Quentin Hartigan (Jesse Fox), who accuses him of squandering the family fortune on collectible clocks instead of allowing him to inherit it. Quentin demands money from Oswald and angrily stalks out when he doesn’t get it. From this opening I was expecting to see Oswald get murdered and Quentin unjustly suspected of the crime, but instead Irvine threw us a curveball and had Quentin be the murder victim. What’s more, he’s killed by being clubbed with the incredibly expensive clock, which subsequently disappears when Oswald stages his grand “unveiling” and there’s an ordinary vase under the curtain instead of the super-clock. It turns out that Oswald wrote Quentin a check before Quentin died – though no one can find it – and, though Oswald had just married his maid Betty (Jasmyn Banks), he wasn’t actually sleeping with her and she’d allowed herself to be seduced and impregnated by Quentin. The reason Oswald wasn’t sleeping with Betty was that he was actually Gay; he’d had an affair with a fellow soldier named Stan Hoskens (Stephen Kennedy, who looks in the role like a bizarre attempt to cross-breed Woody Allen and Bill Barr), and Stan has just come back into his life. It turns out that Quentin caught Oswald and Stan embracing, realized what their relationship actually was, and blackmailed Oswald into paying him off.

Stan gets arrested for the murder by the usual stupid official cop, Chief Inspector Sullivan (Tom Chambers), though the killer turns out to be Betty Hartigan, who walloped Quentin with the clock after he tried to rape her. There’s also a young man named Jake Hunt (Rowan Polonski), who took a false name (his real one was long and Polish) to get a job on Oswald Hartigan’s household staff. He’s also romancing Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood), a young African-British woman who’s on the household staffs of both Oswald Hartigan and Father Brown, and though their relationship was off-and-on he manages to get Brenda to quit both her jobs and agree to relocate to London with him. Oswald Hartigan has acknowledged Jake as the rightful owner of the collector clock (ya remember the clock?) because he was the heir of the Polish family who owned the clock until the Nazis conquered Poland at the start of World War II and looted it along with plenty of other Polish art treasures, and Jake gave Brenda a tearful explanation of how the clock was near and dear to him because it was all he had left of his family. Only Jake plans to finance his new life in London by selling the clock at auction, and Brenda is so furious with him over his mercenary attitude towards it she breaks off with him and, in a quite exciting suspense climax well directed by Keavey, literally leaps off the train as it’s gathering speed on its way out of the station and back into the waiting arms of Father Brown and his housekeeper (and Brenda’s boss) Mrs. Devine (Claudia Blakely). And though it’s pretty anachronistic, I also liked the equanimity with which Father Brown accepts that Oswald Hartigan is Gay and Stan Hoskens his partner, though it’s hard to believe that a Roman Catholic priest in the 1950’s would be that Queer-friendly!

Strange Bargain (RKO, 1949)

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

After that I watched the 1949 film Strange Bargain on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” telecast on Turner Classic Movies. I first heard of this movie in the 1970’s from William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film, which described it as having “a particularly cunning plot about a bankrupt businessman [Malcolm Jarvis, played by Richard Gaines] who plans to commit suicide, but asks his accountant, a man badly in need of money [Sam Wilson] (well played by Jeffrey Lynn), to change the evidence afterward to suggest murder so that his widow [Edna Jarvis, played by Katherine Emery from Val Lewton’s Isle of the Dead] will still be able to collect the insurance money which would be invalidated on a suicide death.” Malcolm Jarvis first disappoints Sam Wilson by not only turning down his request for a badly needed raise – Sam has a wife, Georgia (Martha Scott, top-billed), and two kids, Roddy (Michael Chapin) and Hilda (Arlene Gray), and both of them want bicycles and other items Sam can’t afford to get them on his meager salary – but telling Sam he’s about to be laid off because the firm is going broke. Then he offers him the particularly cunning proposition Everson referred to and says he’ll pay him $10,000 in cash for it – and when Sam asks why, if he has $10,000 to spare, he doesn’t put that in to the business to salvage it, Malcolm explains that since he owes $250,000, $10,000 would be a useless drop in the bucket. It also turns out that until three months previously Malcolm’s and Edna’s life insurance policies were just for $50,000, but he’s upgraded it to $250,000 – which would seem to give the cops ample reason to suspect insurance fraud of some kind. When Sam shows up to carry out his end of the strange bargain – he’s supposed to pick up the gun Malcolm used to shoot himself and fire two bullets through the window from outside so the police will suspect a random killer – Malcolm is already dead but not by his own hand.

The cops interrogate and surveil all the firm’s surviving principals, including Sam and also Malcolm’s business partner Timothy Hearne (Henry O’Neill), who had been after Malcolm to sell his share in the firm to him; and the company’s rather twitchy secretary, Miss Vantay (Betty Underwood), who in any other film noir would be a femme fatale who got her romantic hooks into Malcolm Jarvis and bled him dry financially, then killed him. Only the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Edna Jarvis, who figured Malcolm was going to wimp out on his plan to kill himself and leave her the insurance money. So she shot him herself, and though this means she can’t collect the insurance, her and Malcolm’s son Sydney (Raymond Roe) can and ultimately will, while Sam is exonerated and gets a promotion from assistant bookkeeper to head bookkeeper after Hearne buys out Jarvis’s share and takes over. Eddie Muller said he thought the film’s ending was a cop-out and cited a Murder, She Wrote episode from 1987 that was essentially a sequel to Strange Bargain, with Jeffrey Lynn and Martha Scott repeating their roles as they had naturally aged – only in the Murder, She Wrote version Sam had just been released following a 17-year sentence for insurance fraud. A number of other characters also returned from the first film, either with the same actors or replacements of similar vintage (Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury often had the show’s writers create older characters for which she could use friends of hers from her early days in Hollywood). William Everson noted that the most interesting character in Strange Bargain is the lead police investigator on the Jarvis murder, Lt. Richard Webb (Henry Morgan, the only actor in the film whose work I know at all well, mainly from his iconic TV roles as Jack Webb’s partner in the 1960’s reboot of Dragnet and Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H), who uses a cane throughout and is a good example of the dogged, determined law officer who achieves through persistence (and a Columbo-style knack for annoying the principal suspect into confessing – at one point he even says, “Just one more thing … ”) what other movie cops could only accomplish with fisticuffs or bullets.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (Sol C. Siegel Productions, HarBel Productions, MGM, 1959)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 19) my husband Charles and I watched two more movies on TCM, including the second half of a two-film tribute to Harry Belafonte: The World, the Flesh and the Devil. It was made in 1959 at a time when post-nuclear apocalyptic stories were all the rage; the most famous World War III movie was Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, adapted from a novel by Australian writer Nevil Shute. The World, the Flesh and the Devil was the brainchild of director and co-writer Ranald MacDougall, though its basic story was an oldie from 1901 (before the existence of nuclear weapons!) called The Purple Cloud by British author Matthew Phipps Shiel. (His last name was originally spelled “Shiell,” with two “l”’s, but he dropped one “l” from his last name and used only initials for his first two as a pen name.) As the Wikipedia page on The Purple Cloud explains, “The story is about Adam Jeffson, a man on a polar expedition who discovers a mysterious and deathly Purple Cloud. In the wake of the massive global deaths wrought by the Purple Cloud, Jeffson becomes ruler of the world and builds a huge palace to his glory. He meets a young woman and the two become the heirs to the future of humanity.” A writer named Ferdinand Reyher worked up Shiel’s story – first published as a serial and then as a novel – into a screen treatment called End of the World, and MacDougall further developed it as a script and directed it as this film. The movie was co-produced by MGM with Sol C. Siegel Productions and HarBel Productions, the latter owned by the film’s star, Harry Belafonte. Belafonte had begun training as an actor in New York in the early 1950’s, but in order to raise money to go to acting school he also began singing in nightclubs. By 1955 he was a major recording artist with RCA Victor (apparently he was their second best-selling artist, next to Elvis), especially after he abandoned jazz and pop singing in favor of folk music.

In 1959 Belafonte was at the peak of his vocal career – he’d just recorded a two-LP set called Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall that was a huge seller – and he also starred in his own TV special for CBS (though this was two years after Nat “King” Cole had broken the color barrier with a regular series on NBC, which got good ratings but didn’t last because NBC couldn’t find a sponsor for it). His movie production company focused on stories that would incorporate anti-racist themes; his first film as producer as well as star was Odds Against Tomorrow (also 1959), in which he played a Black petty crook who teams up with a white racist (Robert Ryan) to plan an elaborate bank robbery. The World, the Flesh and the Devil cast Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a mining engineer who escapes the deadly atomic dust (reflecting its pre-Hiroshima origins, the deadly radioactive menace that lays waste to the world in this story is not an explosive device, but a toxic dust that irradiates the world; this is also the atomic weapon at the heart of Robert Heinlein’s fascinating 1940 short story “Solution Unsatisfactory,” in which the invention of radioactive dust as a weapon forces the rest of the world to accept a benevolent dictator even though no one, including the dictator himself, is particularly happy about that) because he’s been trapped underground by a cave-in for five days. He manages to find a car in working order that he can jury-rig to start and drives it from Pennsylvania, where the accident happened, to New York City. Ralph is able to approach the quality of his former existence by accumulating canned food and restoring power through a generator he discovers at a now-closed radio station. He also starts broadcasting to see if anyone answers and hence is still alive. Ultimately Ralph discovers there’s at least one other survivor in New York, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), and the two of them drift into a guarded relationship of sorts. It’s explained that she survived the deadly radioactive dust by being in an experimental laboratory while the dust attack happened. Then a third person shows up, a white guy named Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer), who’s still mourning the deaths of his wife and two children from the dust.

The three principals settle into an edgy co-existence in which the big dramatic issue becomes which of the two men Sarah will pair up with – a plot twist Bob Dylan parodied in his song “Talking World War III Blues,” in which in a post-apocalyptic future he gets his face slapped by a woman after he approaches her and says, “Let’s go play Adam and Eve.” Ultimately Benson stumbles on a gun store and he and Ralph start stalking each other around New York City with murderous intent – until Ralph spots an inscription on the wall of a New York church quoting the Biblical passage about turning swords into plowshares and not learning wars anymore. That reminds him that the murderous attitudes that are driving both him and Benson at the moment are the same ones that got the world into this pickle in the first place. Ultimately Ralph leaves New York and Benson gets Sarah, while Ralph says he’s determined to find other survivors (he’s already talked to one, though the one who’s answered his radio calls spoke only French and Ralph spoke only English) and mobilize them to rebuild the world. The ending is a bit of a cop-out and is rendered even more ironic by the fact that, though Inger Stevens was (like Marlene Dietrich) notorious for seducing the leading men of all her movies, she was also secretly married to a Black man, producer Ike Jones. Of course, since this was a Harry Belafonte movie made at a time when he was far more famous as a singer than an actor, he gets to sing three songs in it, including a minor ditty called “I Don’t Like It Here” (co-credited to Belafonte and MacDougall) which he sings in the caved-in mine in which he’s trapped in the opening, as well as “Gotta Travel On” (three years before he recorded the song on his album The Midnight Special) and “Fifteen.” The World, the Flesh and the Devil has its silly aspects, including a cop-out ending that denies us the thrill of having Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens pair up together (at the time the Production Code, with its prohibition against miscegenation, was still in effect, and it’s not hard to imagine how MGM’s Southern distributors would have reacted to an Adam-and-Eve story in which Adam was Black), but mostly it’s a surprisingly gripping tale that makes its anti-war and anti-racist points effectively without making us feel like we’re being hit over the head with them.

Old Heidelberg, a.k.a. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (MGM, 1927)

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

After The World, the Flesh and the Devil I kept TCM on for a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a long-time favorite movie of mine: a 1927 film variously called Old Heidelberg (that’s the name on the official title) and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (the title of the 1922 Sigmund Romberg/Dorothy Donnelly operetta based on the same story) starring Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer and Jean Hersholt and brilliantly directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Old Heidelberg originated in 1898 as a German novel by a man named Wilhelm Meyer-Förster, who not only published it under the title Karl Heinrich – after the central character, a spoiled-rotten prince of a German domain called “Karlsburg” who gets sent to Heidelberg University, where he meets and falls in love with a barmaid named Kathi – but even signed the novel “Karl Heinrich,” as if he were presenting it as the central character’s autobiography. Meyer-Förster later (1901) adapted his novel into a play, and in 1915 the first film was made, produced by D. W. Griffith, directed by John Emerson (Anita Loos’s husband) and starring Wallace Reid as Karl Heinrich, Dorothy Gish as Kathi and Erich von Stroheim in the minor role of Lutz, one of Karl Heinrich’s fellow students at Heidelberg and a man with a penchant for dueling. There’s a claim that MGM offered Stroheim, who by then had become a major director with a penchant for long running times and letting his films go way over budget due to his intense commitment to realism, the directorship of the 1927 version, but by then – even though Stroheim was coming off one of his biggest hits, the first of three films of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow – he and MGM production chief Irving Thalberg hated each other so much Stroheim refused to work for him again. Instead Thalberg hired Lubitsch, whose history TCM host Jacqueline Stewart oddly mis-presented in her intro.

She said that Lubitsch had made his initial reputation in Germany on the basis of massive historical spectacles based on infamous royal mistresses like Madame Du Barry and Anne Boleyn – which is true – and he came to the U.S. at the behest of Mary Pickford, who hired him to direct her in the 1923 film Rosita. Where Stewart went wrong was in saying that it wasn’t until the sound era that Lubitsch became known for the subtle romantic comedies with which the name “Lubitsch” is associated today. In fact, once Rosita was a box-office flop Lubitsch was picked up on the rebound by Warner Bros., then a minor studio, and given rom-com scripts like The Marriage Circle, Three Women, Forbidden Paradise, Kiss Me Again, Lady Windemere’s Fan (based on the play by Oscar Wilde) and So This Is Paris before being loaned out to MGM for Old Heidelberg. This film is full of the fabled “Lubitsch touches,” including an early scene in which the young Prince Karl Heinrich (Philippe de Lacy) is playing catch with two very bored-looking adults – only through the gates of the palace he sees a group of boys his own age having spontaneous fun playing catch with the same sort of ball – and one later on in which he’s being quizzed by his tutors on how well he’s learned his lessons being homeschooled in court. He’s asked when Philip II reigned – and at first I thought of Philip II of Spain, who ruled in the 16th century (he was the king who sent the Spanish Armada in a vain attempt to conquer England and force it to re-adopt Roman Catholicism as its religion), but no-o-o-o-o: they mean Philip II of Karlsburg. Karl Heinrich is stumped until his tutor, Dr. Jüttner (Jean Hersholt), stands in front of the real Philip II’s royal portrait, which helpfully gives the dates of his life as the 18th century.

The film, brilliantly photographed by John Mescall (who’d turn up a decade later as the cinematographer on James Whale’s Show Boat, despite his alcoholism that had made other directors and producers wary of working with him), is at once a romantic idyll and an illustration of Thomas Wolfe’s old adage that “you can’t go home again.” Karl Heinrich has a happy time at Heidelberg (even though, as usual, the “education” part of higher education is given short shrift; we see only one actual classroom, and it’s just a professor giving Karl Heinrich a lecture in a room that’s otherwise empty) until his father, stuck-up King Karl VII (Gustav von Seyffertitz, for once playing something other than a nasty villain), gets sick. At first Karl Heinrich is sure it’ll be just a temporary absence – dad will get better and he’ll be back to Heidelberg and the waiting arms of Kathi – only the old king croaks and Karl Heinrich has to assume the throne and go ahead with the dynastic marriage his dad had arranged for him with Ilse, Princess of Altenburg. He returns to Heidelberg for old time’s sake and discovers that the old inn where Kathi had worked is in a dilapidated state – “the students never even come here anymore,” Kathi’s uncle Rüder (Otis Harlan) tells him – and Kathi herself is still there but tells him that the two will both marry other people and be happy. Earlier Kathi had shown him a photo of the homely man her parents wanted her to marry, and the scene is full of intimations of Novarro’s real-life Gayness that made me wonder if the writers of this film (the only writing credits are to Marian Ainslee and Ruth Cummings for the intertitles and “Karl Heinrich” for the original novel) were pulling the same trick on Novarro their colleagues at Universal-International would pull on Rock Hudson a generation later. Not only does Kathi respond to showing Karl Heinrich her sort-of fiancé’s photo with the acid comment, “Would you marry him?,” but later a drunken student (in-house MGM comedian George K. Arthur) comes into the room where Karl Heinrich and Kathi are hanging out and kisses both of them.

My husband Charles and I had seen Old Heidelberg once before, when I made the mistake of running a videotape of it and then showing the disastrous 1953 remake, also from MGM, which used the Romberg-Donnelly score and ran afoul of Mario Lanza’s bizarre primo don antics. It seems that Lanza was cast as Karl Heinrich and also pre-recorded the great songs from Romberg’s and Donnelly’s operetta, then when MGM production chief Dore Schary tried to get him to slim down to a camera-friendly weight and start going to acting rehearsals, Lanza put him off with a flood of obscenities and sued to demand that the studio be forbidden from using the pre-recordings he’d made. MGM responded by hiring Edmond Purdom to play Karl Heinrich on screen and got Lanza’s suit thrown out of court (it’s clear from Schary’s memoir Heyday, my source for this story, that Schary was compassionate towards Judy Garland and her difficulties but venomously hated Lanza). At the time I remember wishing that Lubitsch could have remade this film in the 1930’s with Jeanette MacDonald (whom Lubitsch had discovered and cast in her first film, 1929’s The Love Parade) and Nelson Eddy. Later I read Edward Baron Turk’s biography of MacDonald and found that MGM had indeed offered The Student Prince to her and Eddy, but MacDonald had turned it down because it would have been more his film than hers (a real pity and a case of an artist’s ego denying us what could have been a great movie).