Chicago P.D.: "Survival" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 28, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 28) I got so tired of the depressing news coverage on MS-NBC that at 10 p.m. I switched to the flagship NBC network for an episode of Chicago P.D. It’s a show I used to watch regularly when it first went on the air, largely because I wanted to support its star, Jason Beghe (playing Hank Voight, head of the Chicago Police Department’s intelligence unit), who had been a member of the Church of Scientology until he quit in disgust and went public with his hostility. Beghe was threatened by the Church (as is just about anybody who exits) and told that there were so many Scientologists in powerful positions in Hollywood it would be career suicide for him to leave. So I’m glad that he was not only able to survive career-wise as an actor but thrive, landing a long-term series lead that has so far lasted 10 seasons. I don’t think he’s that great as an actor – his hectoring, bullying style gets to be a bit much after a while – but he’s a good fit for the role he plays here (sort of like Christopher Meloni’s part in the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but even cruder and more “edgy”). This episode, called “Survival,” turned out to be unexpectedly good, at least in part because it reflected the sensitivity with which Dick Wolf and his cadre of writers, producers and show runners depict the Queer community. The show opens with Hank Voight walking down one of those proverbial mean, dark streets that abound in noir stories both in films and on TV, when he spots some blood on the sidewalk. Naturally he wonders how it got there, and when he sees a convenience store that has an outboard video camera, he walks in and demands that the man at the counter show him the video footage. The footage shows a young man being clubbed by an unseen assailant with a jack handle and then stuffed into the back of an SUV.

The victim turns out to be Noah Gorman (Bobby Hogan), a 19-year-old who graduated from high school in Indiana two months earlier and moved to Chicago after he “came out” to his parents as Gay. His parents immediately declared him the “spawn of Satan” (which makes me wonder what they are) and not only threw him out of the house but disowned him. Hank learns this when he calls Noah’s family to tell them he’s been kidnapped, beaten and probably tortured, and Noah’s father tells Hank it serves him right and it’s Noah’s own fault for going against God’s divine will. The police immediately suspect Zach Jones (Colin Bates in a superb performance as a small-time crook with big pretensions; he’s the sort of person who doesn’t just demand an attorney but sings about it, loudly and obnoxiously), a drug dealer with a reputation for kidnapping and kneecapping people who stiff him on payment. The cops eventually find Noah, albeit near death and in terrible shape. Hank is working with an assistant district attorney, Nina Chapman (Sara Bues), who’s futilely tried to prosecute Zach twice before. Zach has escaped accountability both times on technicalities (a running theme on Dick Wolf’s shows generally) but Chapman thinks she has him dead to rights at long last. Noah Gorman actually identified Zach Jones as his assailant when shown a six-person photo line-up in the hospital, where he’s recovering from (among other things) his eyes having literally been stapled to keep them open. But that’s not good enough for Hank, who’s convinced Noah was lying about the I.D. because he was so stressed out by the police asking him questions he identified his drug dealer as his assailant just to get Hank to leave.

Hank believes that Noah was being stalked and followed by a sadistic maniac who, unlike Zach, had meticulously planned his crime and knew exactly what he was doing, including holding Noah in a factory that made pallets (Noah himself gave Hank the clue when he said he was held in a place with a lot of pieces of wood around) and fastening him to a wall with relatively sophisticated bondage devices. Alas, that’s about as much of a resolution as we got because, in accordance with modern TV producers’ worship for and reverence towards the Great God SERIAL, it ended with Noah being released from the hospital and Hank taking him in because he literally has nowhere else to go. It had already been established that he was homeless, though he spent a lot of his nights at a church-run shelter where he was known as a loner who had no friends. What’s more, the show is going on a weeks-long hiatus so we won’t find out how this turns out until March 20. I’m wondering if writer Matthew Browne is going to have Noah offer to have sex with Hank, not because he’s attracted to him but simply because he’ll think that is what Hank will expect in return for giving him a place to stay. But I quite liked the episode and in particular its social comment angle and its plea for parents of Queer children to be sympathetic to them instead of just tossing them out like so much garbage.

Shrek Forever After (DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, Paramount, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 26) my husband Charles and I watched the fourth and, so far, last of the Shrek movies: Shrek Forever After (2010), which had a new director (Mike Mitchell) and writers (Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke) and was at least marginally better than its immediate predecessor, Shrek the Third. Given that we’ve watched all four Shrek movies in the space of a little over two weeks, we’ve been hyper-sensitive at the various lacunae between them, including one big one. King Harold of Far, Far Away (John Cleese) not only returned to life in this film but resumed his human form instead of being a frog, his original form to which he reverted at the end of Shrek the Third. (I had assumed he’d died at the end of that one, too, but here he was, alive, reasonably well and once again human. My husband Charles read the above and said he thought that the scene was a flashback that occurred before Shrek the Third.) At first Shrek Forever After seemed a bit on the dull side, but it quickly livened up with the story’s villain, Rumplestiltskin (Walt Dohrn), tricking Shrek (Mike Myers) into signing a contract by which he was never born. The film then turns into a screamingly funny parody of Frank Capra’s 1946 feel-good classic It’s a Wonderful Life, as Shrek enters a decadent makeover of Far, Far Away and Klausner and Lemke effectively recycle the culture shock Capra and his writers, Jo Swerling, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, put George Bailey (James Stewart) through as he gets his wish that he’d never been born. (I loved the director’s cut of the film The Butterfly Effect because it was essentially It’s a Wonderful Life in reverse: that film’s protagonist realizes that the world would indeed have been better off if he’d never been born.) Rumpelstiltskin reigns over a seedy version of Far, Far Away and his principal courtiers are five Wizard of Oz-style wicked witches (Lake Bell, Kathy Griffin, Mary Kay Place, Kristen Schaal and Meredith Vieira), one of whom he dissolves in water just for the hell of it.

It turns out that the only way Shrek can return to his former existence is to get a redemptive kiss from his wife Fiona (Cameron Diaz) – only Fiona a) has no idea who Shrek is, b) takes an instant dislike to him as soon as they meet, and c) is much more interested in launching a resistance movement against Rumplestiltskin’s tyranny with a gang of ogres she’s recruited for her jihad. There follows a lot of back-and-forth as the ogre army assaults Rumplestiltskin’s castle and gets easily captured, thanks to a new character, the Pied Piper. The Pied Piper doesn’t have any dialogue but he does have a magic flute with which he can make the ogres forget about their revolution and dance uncontrollably. (The song with which he accomplishes this is Peaches and Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing,” which especially amused Charles.) The magic flute playing is supplied by veteran musician Jeremy Steig, who not only had his 15 minutes of fame leading a jazz-rock band called Jeremy and the Satyrs in 1968 (they started as backup band for folksinger Tim Hardin in 1966 but released their own album two years later) but was also the son of William Steig, who created the character of Shrek for his 1990 children’s book Shrek! (Note the exclamation point.) Shrek tricks Rumplestiltskin into setting all the ogres free, but the deal doesn’t include Fiona because she isn’t a pure-blooded ogre: she’s part human (and, as anyone who actually remembers Shrek the Third – which apparently didn’t include the writers of Shrek Forever After – will recall, part frog on her father’s side). Shrek and Fiona end up imprisoned in a cell in Rumplestiltskin’s dungeon where they’re both chained to the wall, and the chains are just the right length that they can’t reach each other for the kiss that will set them free and return them to their home in the swamp with their three children (who no longer exist thanks to Shrek’s stupid agreement with Rumplestiltskin). Earlier Shrek tried to kiss Fiona, but the kiss didn’t work to end the curse because Fiona hadn’t fallen back in love with him yet.

It all ends the way you expect it to, with Shrek and Fiona finally getting free of their bonds so they can kiss, Shrek is restored to his old life with Fiona and their ogre kids in the swamp, and they all presumably live happily ever after – or at least until DreamWorks Animation, its new owners (Universal) and/or Paramount get it together for a Shrek 5. Apparently the original intent was for a five-film cycle but it stopped after Shrek Forever After, though there’s a bonus item on the DVD that showcases the 2010 stage show Shrek: The Musical, which was scheduled for a major U.S. tour in a few large cities. Well, if Disney could pull a viable stage musical out of The Lion King, there’s no particular reason why DreamWorks Animation couldn’t have out of Shrek!

Broken Arrow (20th Century-Fox, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 25) my husband Charles and I watched an interesting pair of movies, both Westerns set in the early 1870’s in Arizona and dealing with the clash between white settlers and Apaches over control of the territory. The first film was Broken Arrow, made in 1950 by director Delmer Daves for 20th Century-Fox and starring James Stewart as Tom Jeffords, a former Union Army cavalry officer in the Civil War who in 1870 is living in Arizona as a gold prospector. He encounters the Apache in general and Cochise (Jeff Chandler), the chief of the Chiricahua Apache in particular, and he immediately sets himself up as a negotiator to bring peace between the Apache and the white settlers even though there’s a state of war between the U.S. and the Natives. Jeffords seeks out an older Apache named Nochalo (Chief Yellow Bird) to improve his command of the Apache language and teach him about Apache culture. The film is narrated by James Stewart in first-person and he apologizes for the fact that he’s telling the story as it happened except that the Apache characters will be speaking “our language” instead of theirs, a fascinating acknowledgment of the absurdity that just about everybody in an American movie speaks English regardless of where they’re from or what’s happening in their part of the world. Broken Arrow was based on a 1947 novel called Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold, and from what I’ve read about it on imdb.com and elsewhere Western movies sympathetic to the Native cause seem to have been an unintended casualty of the holy war waged on Hollywood by the Roman Catholic Church in 1934. In the so-called “pre-Code” era between the promulgation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930 and its strict enforcement in 1934 there were quite a number of Native-sympathetic Westerns, and while most of them (including the pioneering 1925 film The Vanishing American, made at MGM and starring Richard Dix) were modern-dress stories, in 1932 Tim McCoy made a great film called End of the Trail that presented the conflict between Natives and whites in the Dakotas and was essentially Dances with Wolves 48 years early. (I’ve posted about this quite remarkable film at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html.)

Unfortunately, thereafter pro-Native depictions of the American West almost completely disappeared from U.S. films until after World War II, and this one led the way. Broken Arrow was directed by Delmer Daves, a sporadically interesting filmmaker who was at the top of his game here, and it was secretly written by Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz, though the original writing credit went to a “front,” Michael Blankfort. (The current print restores Maltz’s rightful credit and does so in a visually convincing way that makes it look like he was credited at the time.) Jeffords gets involved in the whites vs. Apache conflict when he rescues a 14-year-old Apache boy dying from buckshot wounds, and when the boy tells him that he was on the journey that would mark his transition to manhood (essentially the Apache version of a bar mitzvah) and his mother will be worrying about him if he doesn’t get home on time, Jeffords is stunned by the realization that Apaches have normal human emotions and aren’t just savage beasts in vaguely human form. Jeffords attracts the ire of the whites, many of whom lost family members to Apache attacks – notably Ben Slade (played by a future blacklistee, actor Will Geer). He and Cochise also unwittingly spark a virtual civil war between the Apaches, as one of the local warriors decides he wants no part of a truce between the Apache and the whites. In one of the film’s big moments, he declares that he’s abandoning his traditional Apache name and calling himself by the insulting name the Mexicans had given him: Geronimo (Jay Silverheels, an actual Native American best known for playing Tonto on the 1950’s TV series The Lone Ranger). Jeffords also falls for a Native woman, Sonseeahray (Debra Paget), and though the casting was criticized at the time because not only was Paget non-Native (a concern even in 1950), she was 25 years younger (though the age difference is acknowledged in the script), it works surprisingly well even though Debra Paget is hardly one of the most illustrious names in movie history. Jeffords and Sonseeahray go through an Apache wedding ceremony once her father gives them the required permission, only Sonseeahray is shot in the back and killed during an ambush started by Ben Slade, who spread a false rumor about Apaches stealing two horses from whites to break the truce and re-start the war.

The white general who negotiates the peace between whites and Apaches is a character who not only existed in real life but is one of my historical heroes: General Oliver Otis Howard (Basil Ruysdael), who was appointed to lead the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to supervise the integration of the newly freed slaves into American society. Howard fought with Andrew Johnson, the racist pig who took over the U.S. Presidency after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, largely over the broken promise General William Tecumseh Sherman had made that each of the freed slaves would be given “40 acres and a mule.” The historically Black Howard University, alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris and many other illustrious African-American leaders, was named for him. Broken Arrow is a quite remarkable film in virtually every respect: James Stewart shows the added depth he brought to his performances after serving in combat in World War II (though he’d hinted at it in a few pre-war films, notably Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), and though he wasn’t Native Jeff Chandler brings both visual and personality credibility to Cochise. (The film was criticized then and since for having the lead Native characters played by white actors, but there are a number of Native people in the supporting cast, including Jay Silverheels, Chris Yellow Bird and J. W. “Iron Eyes” Cody.) I also got the impression that Albert Maltz was deliberately constructing his script as a metaphor for the Cold War, which was at its peak when this film was made. Certainly the mutual incomprehension among both sides in the conflict and the readiness of the most hot-headed partisans among both Apaches and whites to believe the worst about the other mirror what was taking place between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the time Broken Arrow was filmed, and the willingness of the white characters to denounce Jeffords as a traitor for trying to bring about peace is also very much part of the Cold War Gestalt.

Taza, Son of Cochise (Universal-International, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film my husband Charles and I watched last night (Sunday, February 25) was Taza, Son of Cochise, made at Universal-International in 1954 and directed by Douglas Sirk from a script by Gerald Drayson Adams (story) and one of Sirk’s favorite writers, George Zuckerman (screenplay). Zuckerman and Sirk would work together again on two of Sirk’s most highly regarded movies, Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1957). Taza, Son of Cochise was originally shot in 3-D and there are a number of scenes that showcase that – instances of guns being fired or rocks being heaved at the camera – but after our dismal experience with the 3-D version of Wings of the Hawk I chose to run the film in 2-D. Oddly, even in 2-D Taza, Son of Cochise looked oddly dark for a film in late three-strip Technicolor. One complaint I often have about 3-D films in color is the color gets darker because of the colored glasses needed to get the 3-D effect, and I was a bit surprised to see that was a problem with the 2-D version as well – though even in 2-D there’s an unusual depth of field to the images. Though Taza, Son of Cochise wasn’t directly billed as a sequel to Broken Arrow – they were made by different studios, directors and writers, and Jeff Chandler as Cochise is the only actor who appears as the same character in both – that’s really what it is. It takes place in 1872, two years after Broken Arrow, and Cochise is dying at the start. Douglas Sirk recalled to Jon Halliday in their book-length interview his trepidation at asking Chandler to repeat the role when his character would die just a few minutes into the movie, but he got Chandler’s approval and the film benefits from his haunting, if relatively brief, performance.

Cochise summons his two sons, Taza (Rock Hudson in his second of eight films with Sirk, a director/star collaboration worthy of comparison with John Ford/John Wayne, John Huston/Humphrey Bogart, and more recently Tim Burton/Johnny Depp) and Naiche (Rex Reason), and asks them to pledge to continue the peace treaty he negotiated with the whites at the end of Broken Arrow. Taza is on board with that but Naiche isn’t; he wants the Chiricahua Apache to reunite with Geronimo (Ian MacDonald) and restart the war against the whites. Taza and Naiche are also rivals for the hand of Oona (Barbara Rush), daughter of Grey Eagle (Morris Ankrum), who like Naiche wants to resume the war against the whites and who has promised Oona to whichever of Cochise’s sons gives him the bigger bribe. Taza presents Grey Eagle with various trinkets but Naiche gives him $300 in U.S. currency with which to buy guns and ammunition for the war against the whites. When the white traders try to cheat the Natives out of the guns they had arranged to buy – they tell Naiche and Geronimo that the price has gone up from $25 per gun to $50 – Naiche and Geronimo take the six guns their $300 will pay for and use them to shoot and kill the scumbag traders. Then Naiche and Geronimo lead a raid against the whites, and the local white commander, Captain Burnett (Gregg Palmer), invokes a clause in the original treaty that allows the U.S. to order the Apache off their mountain lands and onto a much smaller and more barren location on the San Carlos Reservation in case the Apache ever broke it. Taza wangles a promise from Captain Burnett that the Apache will at least be supplied with blankets, seed corn and livestock so they can support themselves on the reservation. The supplies duly arrive in covered wagons emblazoned with the initials “U.S. Q.M.D.” (I’m guessing the “Q.M.D.” stood for “Quarter Master’s Department”), but Naiche is more pissed off than ever that the hunter-gatherer Apache are going to be turned into sheepherders and cattle-raisers.

There’s also an attempt to create Taza as a sort of in-between character at home neither among the Natives or the whites, symbolized by the U.S. army uniform he’s given to wear midway through the film as part of his job leading the Apache “reservation police,” credentialed to enforce the law on the reservation, albeit under ultimate white supervision. Taza’s fellow Natives tell him they no longer trust him now that he’s wearing the uniform of the white enemy, and before the final scene Taza takes off the uniform and resumes his Native garb. It all ends in a shoot-out in which Taza and the good Natives take on Naiche and the bad Natives, Naiche is conveniently killed and Taza and Oona can marry at long last. Though the Adams-Zuckerman script for Taza, Son of Cochise is hardly as well crafted as Albert Maltz’s for Broken Arrow, it makes at least some of the same points – and when Naiche defends his breaking the peace treaty by pointing out that whites had broken every other treaty they’d made with Natives, of course I thought, “He’s right, you know.” The acting is also not as good as that in Broken Arrow, though Rock Hudson is actually quite credible in the lead. Sirk complained to Halliday that Hudson really wasn’t a good enough actor to play what he called a “split character,” one torn between various personal desires and social roles (for his film about real-life Korean War hero Dean Hess, Battle Hymn, Sirk wanted Robert Stack but got Hudson), but he’s just fine here, and Halliday was fascinated by Taza’s wardrobe and how economically it symbolized the conflicts in his character. Ian MacDonald is hardly in Jay Silverheels’ league as Geronimo (and not just because MacDonald wasn’t really Native and Silverheels was), and Barbara Rush is about on the same level as Debra Paget for believability as a Native woman. Sirk’s direction is capable enough, and he gets some interesting 3-D effects without overdoing them, but though he was on the whole a better filmmaker than Delmer Daves, Daves’s direction of Broken Arrow has it all over this one (of course, he was working with a better script as well!). Still, Taza, Son of Cochise is an estimable movie, and I was glad that Charles and I watched them back-to-back.

Funny Girl (Columbia Pictures, Rastar Productions, Polyphony Digital, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 24) Turner Classic Movies showed part of their “31 Days of Oscar” annual tribute with a night of movies featuring women who either won or were at least nominated for Best Actress. The two I watched were Funny Girl (1968) and Mildred Pierce (1945). Funny Girl was based on a 1964 stage musical that, like the film made four years later, starred Barbra Streisand as real-life singer, actress and comedienne Fanny Brice. I remember reading an autobiography by Billy Rose, Fanny Brice’s second husband, who said that in the early 1960’s producer Ray Stark (Fanny Brice’s son-in-law) came to him with a proposal for a musical based on Brice’s career and in particular her relationship with her first husband, gambler Nick Arnstein (Omar Sharif), and Rose warned him, “You’ll never be able to cast it.” In fact, Ray Stark was able to cast it quite effectively and brilliantly, and I suspect one reason Streisand got the role is she’d already had a minor hit on a Fanny Brice cover, “Second-Hand Rose” by James F. Hanley and Grant Clarke. Ray Stark also retained the movie rights to Funny Girl, though he went with Columbia Pictures on a co-production deal (the way most movies have been made since the demise of the studio system), and because he owned the rights he was able to insist that Streisand repeat her stage role in the movie. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Columbia originally wanted Shirley MacLaine for the role, but Stark held firm for Streisand and she ultimately got the part. In fact, Streisand was so totally identified with this role that Funny Girl wasn’t revived on Broadway until 2022, with Beanie Feldstein as Brice. Stark also signed William Wyler to direct the film and Isobel Lennart to adapt her stage script for the screenplay. The cinematographer was Harry Stradling, who so impressed Streisand – apparently he was the only cameraman in Hollywood who didn’t think her nose was too big to allow her to be a star – that she insisted on him for her next three films and, when he died in the middle of The Owl and the Pussycat, she demanded that his son Harry Stradling, Jr. replace him.

Alas, instead of keeping the same songs as the original stage show, Ray Stark not only added genuine songs from Brice’s repertoire – “Second-Hand Rose,” “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You” by Fred Fisher and Billy Rose, and “My Man” (originally in French as “Mon Homme” by Maurice Yvain, later adapted to English by Channing Pollock) – but also hired the original composer and lyricist, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, to write new songs, including a title ballad, so there’d be songs in the film eligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. My mother had the original Broadway cast album with Sydney Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin’s second son by his second wife, Lita Grey) as Arnstein, and I regretted the omissions of “Cornet Man” and “The Music That Makes Me Dance” and their replacement by “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You” and “My Man,” respectively. Also in 1939 20th Century-Fox had produced a film called Rose of Washington Square, and while it changed the characters’ names to “Rose Sargent” (Alice Faye) and “Barton DeWitt Clinton” (Tyrone Power), it was close enough to the Fanny Brice-Nick Arnstein story that Brice sued for $750,000. (The case was settled out of court, probably for considerably less than that.) I’d posted on Rose of Washington Square at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/08/rose-of-washington-square-20th-century.html, and though that was about 8 ½ years ago the competition between the two films strikes me as about even. As a vehicle for Barbra Streisand in an explosive movie debut that won her an Academy Award (and pissed off a lot of veteran Hollywood stars, including Lucille Ball, who envied Streisand for how quickly and easily major movie success had come to her), Funny Girl is a great success. As an overall movie, though, it’s pretty mediocre. The film’s worst element is the horrendous miscasting of Omar Sharif as Nick Arnstein; he’s certainly handsome enough, but he can’t sing, he can barely act and his character has “loser” stamped across him so totally from the get-go you practically want to walk into the screen and tell her, “Fanny! Don’t get involved with him! He’ll just burn through your money and ruin your life!” I remember the last time I watched Funny Girl it was with my husband Charles, and during the big duet “You Are Woman – I Am Man,” he joked, “You’re a singer … ,” obviously in contrast to Sharif himself. (I was reminded of that not long ago when Kansas City Chiefs tight end and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce responded to his team’s victory in the Super Bowl by croaking his way through the opening bars of Elvis Presley’s hit “Viva Las Vegas.” I joked, “Well, at least one member of that couple can sing.”)

After I wrote the above I dug out the CD of the Funny Girl stage album and played the Streisand/Chaplin version of “You Are Woman,” and while Sydney Chaplin wasn’t exactly one of the great voices of the 20th century, he was a damned sight better than Sharif – and that wasn’t the first time Sydney Chaplin had been passed over for the film version of a role he’d created on stage. When MGM filmed the Judy Holliday musical Bells Are Ringing they hired Dean Martin to replace Chaplin in the male lead – and while Martin was also horrendously miscast, at least he could sing. The picture-postcard color doesn’t help, either; though I frequently complain about today’s color movies that they use only dirty greens and browns and ignore the rest of the spectrum, this one errs overboard in the other direction. I remember being amused when Charles and I watched William Wyler’s 1929 part-talkie The Love Trap and noticed that he’d copied an early scene from that film – an aspiring chorus girl loses her step in a rehearsal and gets fired – in Funny Girl 39 years later. But Omar Sharif isn’t the only supporting cast member in Funny Girl I had problems with; it was O.K. to cast Walter Pidgeon as Florenz Ziegfeld (and this wasn’t the first time Pidgeon had played a part originated on screen by William Powell: in 1939 Pidgeon starred in an MGM programmer called Society Lawyer, a remake of a film Powell had made in 1933 called Penthouse) except that he’d aged so visibly his face now looked like it was made of badly cured leather, and once again Hollywood was casting a tall and decidedly Anglo-looking actor to play a short, squat Jew. At least we had the delightful casting of Kay Medford as Brice’s mother and the hauntingly ill-used Anne Francis as Georgia James, Brice’s friend and confidante among the Ziegfeld cast members.

And best of all we had Barbra Streisand, singing beautifully in both comic numbers and straight songs, though the “traveling” staging of some of the songs got silly at times (notably the finale of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” as she stands at the front of a tugboat in New York Harbor; imdb.com credits Nelson Tyler as “helicopter photographer”) and I still think the final staging of “My Man” is a misfire. When Fanny Brice introduced this song to U.S. audiences in 1920 Ziegfeld gave it a quite simple staging – a replica of a Parisian street scene, with only a lamppost and a kiosk as decorations – and Irving Cummings, director of Rose of Washington Square, used exactly that staging. Streisand was obliged to sing it in close-up with a bank of red, white and blue theatre lights behind her, and she pulls the same trick she’d done earlier in the movie on “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You.” She begins the song nervously, as if so overcome by the collapse of her relationship with Nick that she can barely pull herself together to sing, but by the end of the song she’s not only singing strongly, she’s belting it out at full volume and intensity. Alice Faye’s foghorn contralto was far better at communicating the song’s self-pity than Streisand’s super-powerful belting, though to my mind Billie Holiday’s three studio versions (1937, 1948, 1952) remain the definitive readings – and for some reason Streisand isn’t allowed to do the song’s verse but goes straight to the refrain. Frankly, I still miss “The Music That Makes Me Dance” in its place – and we have at least two great recordings of that, by Streisand on the original-cast album and Carmen McRae on one of her 1960’s orchestral recordings for Mainstream. And though it may seem heretical, I saw Funny Lady, the 1975 sequel to Funny Girl, first and I actually liked it better. It helped that her co-star was James Caan (playing Billy Rose), who unlike Sharif actually held his own against her, and overall the film (directed by Herbert Ross, who’d staged the big dance numbers in Funny Girl as well) just seemed more comfortable and more entertaining.

Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Funny Girl TCM showed the 1945 Warner Bros. melodrama Mildred Pierce, based on a 1941 novel by James M. Cain that had to be drastically remodeled to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code Administration. Cain’s novel – on which he worked off and on for nine years, at least partly because he chose to tell it in the third person whereas all his previous books had been first-person – told the story of Mildred Pierce, a woman whose husband Bert loses his job in the middle of the Great Depression. She’s determined to raise their two children, daughters Veda and Ray (called “Kay” in the 1945 film and played by Jo Ann Marlowe) as a single mother and ultimately lucks into a job as a restaurant waitress. Veda Pierce regards waitressing as beneath her family’s dignity but Mildred works her way up in the restaurant business, eventually opening a restaurant of her own and then building on it to create a three-restaurant chain. Veda is studying for a career as an opera singer (Cain himself had trained as a baritone and at least three other stories besides Mildred Pierce – Serenade [1937], Career in C Major (1938), and The Moth [1948] – involved opera in their plots), while younger daughter Ray dies as a child. Ultimately Mildred starts losing money – the restaurants are doing well but Mildred starts siphoning money, first legally and then illegally, to pay for Veda’s extravagances – and in order to save her business she agrees to marry her former boyfriend Monte Beragon. Caught by Wally Burgan, her former partner and briefly lover between her separation from Bert and her marriage to Monty (and played in the film by the insufferably boorish Jack Carson, who for some reason gets second billing), Mildred confronts Veda and demands the return of some of the money Mildred has lavished on Veda over the years. Unfortunately, Mildred catches Veda in bed with her stepfather Monte Beragon, and Mildred responds by strangling Veda. Veda survives but apparently loses her voice, and Mildred moves to Reno to establish residency for a quick divorce from Monte. Then Veda makes a vocal comeback and it’s revealed that she didn’t really lose her voice; she just said she did to get out of her existing contract and sign a new one with more money. Mildred and her first husband Bert, Veda’s father, reconcile and get drunk at the latest example of Veda’s ungrateful and bitchy behavior.

James M. Cain’s stories posed a quandary for filmmakers in the 1940’s; they were incredibly popular but also almost impossible to film within the guidelines of the Production Code. Fortunately, director Billy Wilder was able to get Double Indemnity (book 1935, film 1944) on the screen in a Production Code-safe manner, and in quick succession MGM filmed Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946 and Warner Bros. took on Mildred Pierce. Producer Jerry Wald hit on an ingenious solution to the task of making Mildred Pierce Production Code-safe: he decided that Veda would murder Monte at the start of the film. We would see the murder in the opening frames but not be shown whodunit until the end, and along the way the finger of suspicion would point to Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) and Mildred herself (Joan Crawford) before finally landing on Veda’s (Ann Blyth) slender shoulders. Mildred would narrate the story in an interrogation with police inspector Peterson (Moroni Olsen) – thereby ironically bringing the story closer to Cain’s earlier first-person novels – and we would watch the rise and fall of Mildred’s restaurant business and her growing frustration with Veda. It didn’t take long for Jerry Wald to realize that Mildred Pierce demanded two quite different writing styles, half soap opera and half film noir, and though he cycled quite a number of writers through the project (including William Faulkner, Margaret Gruen, future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Albert Maltz, Louise Randall Person, Margaret Buell Wilder and Thames Williamson), ultimately he used Catherine Turney for the soap-opera scenes and Ranald MacDougall (who ended up with sole credit) for the noir parts. Also, much to Cain’s displeasure, Wald and his writers eliminated opera as a plot element, though Veda is still a music student (she studies Chopin’s “Valse Brillante” on piano) and later gets a job singing pop songs at a sleazy bar. Wald also had a hard time casting Mildred; ordinarily a part like that would have gone to Warners’ resident bitch, Bette Davis, but she turned it down and probably regretted it when her bitter rival Joan Crawford not only got the part but won the Academy Award for it. Also it’s hard these days to watch a film in which Crawford plays a bitch-goddess mother after her adoptive daughter Christina’s memoir Mommie Dearest and what it told us (true or otherwise) about her real-life parenting strategies.

Crawford made Mildred Pierce at a crucial juncture in her career; she’d been under contract to MGM for nearly 20 years when they abruptly dropped her after the financial failure of her 1942 film Above Suspicion. (This was a film in which she co-starred with Fred MacMurray as an American tourist couple being exploited by British intelligence to take pictures of Nazi German military installations under the guise of just being tourists. Ironically, both MacMurray and Crawford would make major comebacks after this film, and both in stories by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.) She had just signed with Warners and for her first film there they cast her as herself in Hollywood Canteen, in which she appeared with Bette Davis for the first time even though they had no scenes together. Then they reluctantly gave her Mildred Pierce – and she ran with it. It was a part that drew on much of her previous work – many of her MGM films also had cast her as a woman of modest means who rose up the socioeconomic ladder out of sheer grit, determination and an ability to latch onto wealthy but basically honest men – while also giving her an entrée into film noir. Crawford would stay at Warner Bros. for seven more years, and many of her films there – Possessed (1946; she’d also made a film called Possessed at MGM in 1931 but the two had totally different plots), Daisy Kenyon (1947, on loan to 20th Century-Fox), Flamingo Road (1949), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), were gangster films or noirs. Once Warners released Crawford and she had to adjust to making movies in the brave new world of post-studio system Hollywood, she triumphed with yet another noir, Sudden Fear (1952). Mildred Pierce is a triumph of the Hollywood studio system and the cool professionalism with which Warner Bros. in particular could churn out this sort of story; it was superbly directed by Michael Curtiz (who tends to get neglected by the auteur critics because he had such easy-seeming command of many different film genres, though he made Casablanca and quite a few other great films) and vividly photographed by Ernest Haller with an easy mastery of both the soap-opera and film noir looks. And Crawford’s Academy Award was fully deserved, even though in an ideal world she’d have won it four years earlier for A Woman’s Face, made by an even greater filmmaker (George Cukor) and a movie that “stretched” her much more than this one did.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Zone Rouge" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 22, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 22) I watched episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU show, “Zone Rouge,” blessedly wrapped up the ongoing narrative story arc of young-teenager Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), whom Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) first saw in this season’s opener being kidnapped by an older man in a stolen energy-drink van. She saw the girl in the front seat of the van but didn’t stop it because there was that little matter of not having probable cause, the kidnapper got away with her and ever since Benson has been haunted by her failure to find and rescue the girl. Her parents Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray) have also been riding her about it. “Zone Rouge” opens with Maddie and her kidnapper, whom she knows only as “George from Canada,” riding on a train out of state into New Jersey and Pennsylvania on its way to Cleveland, Ohio. A young man, Cash Bowford (Kevin Csolak), sees them and Maddie, disguised as a boy, slips him a note that says “Call NYPD,” but he sits on the note for three days and the New York police only get called when his girlfriend, Heather Pittenger (Lindsey Dresbach), spots the note three days later while doing his laundry and makes the call. Given that the kidnapper has taken his captive across a state line, the FBI is now involved (thanks to a law passed after the Charles Lindbergh, Jr. kidnapping in 1932) in the person of female agent Shannah Sykes (Jordana Spiro), who is especially determined to find Maddie because in her own teen years her younger sister was kidnapped and was never recovered, alive or dead. The two take an unauthorized trip to Pittsburgh to trace Maddie’s whereabouts, only to find that the kidnapper, George Brouchard (Patrick Carroll), has doubled back to Buffalo, where they successfully arrest him.

Brouchard’s attorney (a woman public defender) demands a light sentence in return for him telling them what he did with Maddie – he was arrested with a wad of cash on him he got by selling her – but the cops fortunately don’t have to deal with him because they are able to trace Maddie’s whereabouts via other information. Her purchaser is Leonard Fleming (Alex Parkinson), a 35-year-old construction worker with an arrest record as a peeping Tom, and fortunately for Maddie he didn’t want to have sex with her, just to look at her naked. Ultimately Benson and Sykes are able to trace her and recapture Maddie alive, and Sykes is so disgusted by the whole thing that after 10 years as an FBI agent she steps back from the Bureau and arranges for an ongoing loanout to Manhattan SVU. “Zone Rouge” was Brouchard’s slang term for an area of small towns in which he felt he could operate freely – though the only places we know of where he’s been are large or fairly large cities (New York, Pittsburgh, Buffalo). One of the points made by this episode is something I’ve already written about in connection with some of the true-life stories that have been the subjects of Lifetime movies, like Cleveland Abduction: the democratization of sexual sadistic abuse. (I’m using a rather awkward term to distinguish abuse from consensual S/M, which I’m fine with as long as both parties know what they’re doing and are aware enough of the risks to consent freely.) In the old days sexual abuse was strictly the province of landed aristocratic élites who had massive fortunes and steady incomes so they didn’t have to work; sadism and masochism are named for the Marquis de Sade and the Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, respectively. But now it’s a hobby, albeit a sick and disgusting one, available to the masses, including blue-collar workers like the ones in Cleveland Abduction and here who ingeniously combine their kidnapping, torture and rape of young people (boys as well as girls) with ordinary lives and live in normal suburban neighborhoods among people who don’t know what’s going on in their neighbors’ homes.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Missing Persons" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 22, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “Missing Persons,” was also moving despite a rather slow opening in which Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but still hot) is already suspended from the New York Police Department and being hounded by agent of the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. Stabler is also on the prowl for a missing young girl, though this time the victim he’s seeking is Romanian émigré Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), who was lured by human traffickers to the U.S. with promises of well-paying work and was turned out as a prostitute. Stabler had thought he got Rita out of that life, and as a symbol of her liberation he gave her a public-domain copy of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Count of Monte Cristo (also a story about a prisoner who escaped against all odds and found wealth and justice). Only Rita disappeared again, and though he’s suspended from the police force and therefore has no more authority than any other ordinary citizen, Stabler investigates. He traces her to a party hosted by corrupt Long Island district attorney Noah Cahill (Reed Diamond), who lures teenage hookers to his “do’s,” forces them to “entertain” his horndog male guests, and ultimately kills them.

In the course of his illegal investigation Stabler stumbles upon another missing girl, Christine Olston (Christina Leonardi), who started turning tricks after she decided she wanted to go to her high-school prom in a fancy dress which her parents Collin (Ric Sechrest) and Journey (Amy Lynn Stewart) told her they couldn’t afford to buy her. Collin said she could have the dress if she could earn the money for it herself, and so she set out to do just that – only she worked one of Cahill’s parties, and Cahill kidnapped her and held her hostage in a concrete bunker along the beach left over from World War II. Apparently the U.S. military during World War II was sufficiently concerned that the Germans would attempt an amphibious invasion along the Atlantic that they installed these fortifications just in case they were needed to repel one. Cahill initially has the support of the hard-edged woman who’s the chief of the Long Island police, Captain Nazanin Shah (Nicole Shalhoub, who according to Google is not related to actor Tony Shalhoub), but eventually she comes around to Stabler’s side when he rescues Christine Olston alive and, alas, finds Rita Lasku dead and buried in a shallow grave on the beach. Stabler also recruits the help of the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s outside consultant, computer whiz Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), who seems put out when Stabler tells him he’s not an official part of the force and therefore can help him with information without risking repercussions, including disciplinary proceedings against him. The reason seemed obvious to me: as a consultant, Vargas is not subject to police discipline and therefore could assist a disgraced, suspended officer freely without suffering any consequences.

There’s also a subplot involving both Stabler’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris) but his younger brother Eli (Nicky Torchia), who after a life on the outskirts of the law seems finally to have found gainful and legitimate employment as a wine distributor – he even sends a bottle of his stock to the Stabler family reunion. Only Stabler finds a folded piece of aluminum foil Eli left behind at the reunion party with some sort of chemical residue on it. We’re not sure exactly what it is, but it’s clearly some sort of illegal psychochemical substance and its appearance among Eli’s effects gives the lie to his assertion that he’s now on the straight and narrow. It’s one of those annoying hints Dick Wolf’s writers (here, Amy Berg) like to drop these days now that Organized Crime, unlike the other shows in Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, which is neither developed nor resolved but simply deposited in the Writers’ Cliché Bank for future withdrawal. I thought Berg had done well enough setting up the story arc of the corrupt D.A. who’s also a serial killer – they find three more bodies besides Rita’s on that stretch of beach and realize Cahill is a psychopathic multiple murderer – but no-o-o-o-o, like a lot of Lifetime writers she didn’t know when to stop. Still, this was one of the better Organized Crime episodes, and one which offered Christopher Meloni the chance to play warmth and pathos instead of being just the implacable revenge machine we’re used to seeing him do.

Secrets of the Dead: "Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science" (GA&A Productions, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, Program 33, Discovery Channel, History Channel, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 21) I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode on KPBS from 2017 with the rather grandiose title, “Leonardo: The Man Who Saved Science.” What made that quite odd is that the entire point of the show, written and directed by Mark Daniels, is that while Leonardo da Vinci was undoubtedly a very smart man who was especially good both as artist and scientist, a lot of innovations he’s often credited with were actually built on other people’s ideas. Some of them originated with the scientists of ancient Greece and Rome, while others came from people closer to his own time, including one Mariano di Jacopo (1382-c. 1453), known as “Taccola” – “The Jackdaw.” Taccola presumably died the year Leonardo was born, and his books existed only as manuscripts, but at least three of them survive to this day and his treatise De Ingenis (“On Engines”) was first printed and published in 1969. Leonardo almost certainly got to see Taccola’s manuscripts in his apprentice years in Florence, and among the designs Taccola drew well before Leonardo did was the first parachute. Ironically, Leonardo borrowed a lot of his designs from Taccola and others around him but made key improvements that rendered the gadgets practical: it was Leonardo, not Taccola, who made the parachute actually work by figuring a way to coat the fabric so it would be both airtight and watertight – though even here there’s a report that an Arab inventor 500 years earlier had not only made a parachute but successfully tested it himself, hurling himself off the minaret of a mosque and landing with only minor injuries. Indeed, one of the most fascinating subtexts of this program was that during the Middle Ages Christian authorities were deeming the great books of ancient Greece and Rome heretical and destroying them right and left, while Arab scholars living under Islam not only read them but carefully preserved them. Indeed, it’s my understanding that a lot of important scientific and technological works from Greece and Rome survive only in Arabic translations.

Leonardo was born in a small town called Vinci, product of an extramarital liaison between Florentine notary Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido and Caterina di Meo Lippi. Vinci was about 20 miles north of Florence, and at age 14 Leonardo moved to the big city and apprenticed in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading Florentine artist of the time. While there, Leonardo helped work out the technique for transferring a giant copper sphere onto the top of the dome of one of the major churches, the Cathedral of St. Mary’s, though he’d had nothing to do with building the dome in the first place and that was itself a major engineering feat for the time. Because he was illegitimate, Leonardo never had a formal education but picked it all up himself, reading voluminously and teaching himself Latin so he could read the scientific and technological treatises of his time, which were almost all in Latin. Leonardo was also almost certainly Gay; according to his Wikipedia page, “[C]ourt records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal.” (In the early 20th century, Marcel Duchamp would famously paint a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and exhibit it as an artwork of his own, L.H.O.O.Q. – which if you read it in the French pronunciation sounds like “She has a hot tail.” His explanation was that because Leonardo was Gay, his ideal of beauty was male, and Duchamp was essentially “outing” the Mona Lisa as Gay by supplying “her” with a moustache to reveal that “she” was actually a “he.”)

In 1482, Leonardo applied for and won a position at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan, writing a letter that’s been called the world’s first résumé. In it, he offered copies of drawings by Taccola and others and claimed they were his own inventions. Sforza was unusually familiar with the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome because he’d hosted the last Byzantine Roman Emperor on a state visit to Italy 15 years before he was overthrown by the Ottoman Turks – who were also Muslims but had a much lower threshold of interest in science, especially science that couldn’t be used for military purposes, than the Arab Muslims had had. While in Sforza’s service in Milan, Leonardo worked on a number of inventions, often improving them so they would actually work – as he did with the parachute and also with Taccola’s design for a screw-pump for water. The show pretty much leaves Leonardo behind after he gets to Milan, though the rest of his biography is pretty hectic: in 1499 he was forced to flee Milan after the French invaders conquered the city and forced Sforza into exile. Thereupon he went to Venice in 1500 and returned to Florence in 1503. There he painted the first version of the Mona Lisa (which, at least according to a previous PBS documentary, is in the hands of a private collector in London; the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is allegedly a copy Leonardo painted from memory during his final years in France), then went back to Milan in 1508, was summoned to Rome by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Giovanni, who became Pope Leo X in 1513, and in 1517 he cut a deal with Francis I, King of France, to settle in France, where he died two years later.

This Secrets of the Dead show featured a mix of documentary-style talking heads and re-creations of Leonardo’s life with actors playing him and his associates and employers. I suspect these were shot for an Italian-language movie and then dubbed into English, because the actors’ lip movements were frequently at odds with what they were saying on the soundtrack. Also, a number of the interviewees were speaking either Italian or French, with English voice-overs, and the actor playing the adult Leonardo, Giuseppe Lanino, was quite attractive, with an almost angelic face and a really nice ass (appropriate given that the real Leonardo was Gay). I usually don’t care for these hybrids of documentary and dramatized footage, but this time I didn’t mind so much and the story is so compelling it overcame my usual distaste for the format. It’s also yet another illustration that scientific progress depends on the free interchange of ideas between researchers, and modern intellectual property laws, far from encouraging invention, actually sometimes inhibit it because later researchers tend to shy away from building on previous work and risking being sued and potentially bankrupted by patent litigation. Ironically, both Taccola and Leonardo published almost nothing about science and technology during their lifetimes, and Taccola at least was quite frank about why: he was worried about others stealing his ideas. In one of his manuscripts Taccola wrote, “My speech has been veiled. ... I say what I say because of the ingratitude of some people, and not of all men.” Leonardo’s manuscripts were literally indecipherable for centuries because he wrote them in a backwards-style script that was hard to read (which has led some researchers to conclude he was dyslexic), and though he continued to work in science and technology almost all his life he kept virtually all that information secret. As a result, Leonardo was remembered for the first four centuries after his death almost exclusively as an artist, and his contributions to science were largely ignored until researchers started transcribing and translating his diaries, journals and private papers in the early 20th century.

American Experience: "Fly with Me" (Sarah Colt Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired February 20, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 20) I watched two consecutive episodes on PBS’s long-running documentary series American Experience. One was called “Fly with Me” and was about the checkered history of airline stewardesses; they’re now called “flight attendants” but in the 1930’s, 1940’s and especially the 1950’s and early 1960’s the airlines essentially sold them as glamorous sex objects and animate Barbie dolls. The concept of women flight attendants actually began in February 1930 with a woman named Ellen Church, a registered nurse and also an amateur airplane pilot who’d learned to fly because she wanted to be part of the technology of the future. She went to the San Francisco offices of United Airlines at a crucial moment in the history of commercial aviation. Before that, as historian Mia Bay explained in the documentary, in the 1920’s airlines had hired Black Pullman porters to be flight attendants. “But there's a longstanding association between technological know-how and white supremacy,” Bay explained. “And they do not think that Black people have the kind of authority to kind of help people through the challenges of flying.” According to Ann Hood, another historian on the program who’d previously worked as a flight attendant herself, Church’s big push to the United executives was that if planes had nurses on board, people would be less afraid to fly because there’d be trained medical personnel to take care of airsickness and provide first aid in case the plane crashed. This was in an age before pressurized cabins, which means planes had to fly below 10,000 feet and that “means you feel every bump,” Hood explained. “It was always turbulent.” Another historian, Victoria Vancoch, added, “There were no circulation systems. So you could smell hot oil, and the disinfectant used to clean up after airsick passengers. To go from coast to coast it took 28 hours at minimum. Often planes would get grounded in the middle of nowhere, passengers would have to wait for several days until the weather cleared. It was really a big adventure, instead of a reliable way to travel.” A third interviewee, Phil Tiemeyer, said, “The airlines started to realize the passengers were more attracted to having a woman do the job for the charm that she brought, the attractiveness that she brought to an otherwise exceptionally unpleasant experience.”

Like the airline industry itself, the opportunities for women flight attendants zoomed upward after World War II and again with the introduction of jet aircraft in 1959. Even before the jet era, more advanced planes like the Douglas DC-6 with pressurized cabins allowed planes to fly higher in the sky, with less turbulence, and offered the passengers air conditioning. Also, the U.S. still regulated commercial air travel through something called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). While another agency, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), was in charge of governing air traffic and making sure planes were safe, the CAB put in a draconian series of price controls, so until the CAB was abolished in 1979 (under a Democratic Congress and Democratic President Jimmy Carter) airlines were forced to charge the same prices and couldn’t compete that way. So they had to do elaborate ad campaigns to focus on service, image and various intangibles to make flying on their airline seem more pleasant than a competitor’s. Among these were promoting the beauty of their stewardesses, which meant making them look as interchangeable as possible. Former flight attendant Patricia Ireland said, “We all got our hair cut just the length of our chin bone. We were all supposed to look the same, both our hair, but also our makeup. Red lipstick, mandatory. There was an idea, I think, to make us into little machine parts and not think of ourselves as individuals.” Another ex-stewardess, Kathleen Heenan, said that when she looked at the graduation photo of herself and 19 other women who were in the same flight attendant training class, she literally couldn’t pick herself out of the crowd. The rules for stewardesses were quite demeaning and arbitrary: you were supposed to maintain a low weight depending on your body height, and if you were over even by one pound you would be given a demerit and a deadline to lose the extra weight or be fired. You were also forced to retire at a relatively young age – either 32 or 35, depending on the airline – and you weren’t allowed to be married because the whole fantasy the airlines were selling was that stewardesses were at least theoretically sexually available.

What was in it for the women were not only better pay than the other traditionally acceptable women’s jobs – secretary, librarian, teacher – but the promise of worldwide travel. Stewardesses were paid to go to fabled places like Paris or Rome, and could do it on the airline’s dime. One woman recalled that being a stewardess had something of the same air of glamor as being a movie star, and others said you could crash other people’s weddings. Also, in order to be a stewardess you had to be white because there was enough racism embedded in the kinds of men who ran airlines that the assumption was that no one would want to fly on an airline that hired Blacks or other women of color. That particular glass ceiling was broken by a feisty young African-American woman named Pat Banks, who was reading a fashion magazine in 1956 when she saw an ad for the Grace Downs Air Career School in Manhattan. “I applied and I was accepted in 1956,” Downs recalled, even though at the time she’d never even been on an airplane. “I was the only student of color in the school,” Banks said. “There were no Black teachers, no Black students. I remember we had a makeup class and someone made up my face. I have to laugh now because I was white. And when I looked in the mirror, I'm saying, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to get home like this?’ They had no makeup, of course, for people of color.” Banks completed the course and applied to three airlines: TWA, a major carrier, and two regional airlines, Mohawk and Southern-based Capital. Unfortunately, she got no response to any of her applications, and a veteran stewardess took her aside one day and said, “Pat, I hate to see you go through this, but the airlines do not hire Negroes.” Banks told this story to a neighbor who knew African-American Congressmember Adam Clayton Powell, at a time when the U.S. didn’t have a civil-rights law prohibiting race-based discrimination in employment but New York state did. Ultimately Banks filed suit against Capital, the one airline of the three she’d applied to where the statute of limitations hadn’t yet run out, and after years of fighting she finally won her case in February 1960. “I was working for Con Edison, going to college at night,” Banks recalled. “And there was a little candy store on the corner where I used to get the bus to go home. When I got into the candy store, the man in the store said, ‘Pat, Pat, you won the case,’ I couldn't wait to get home. My mother says, ‘Patsy, the phone is ringing off the hook. You won! You won! You won!’ Oh, my God.”

The show also details the history of flight attendants joining labor unions and organizing, even though many of them had come from politically conservative homes where labor unions were anathema. One pioneer in organizing flight attendants was Dusty Roads, who was looking at the age limit creeping up on her. “My family was very Republican and unions were naughty, naughty, naughty, terrible,” Roads recalled. “Nobody in my family had ever belonged to a union. That was just, oh my goodness, we're college people, we don't join unions, oh!” Though Roads was protected by a so-called “grandmother clause” that would allow her to keep flying even after she turned 32, she decided to organize a media event that featured four flight attendants under 32 and four who were over 32 – and challenged people in the audience to tell who was who and what age they were. Roads also launched a lobbying campaign. “I figured out that the Congress was in session on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then they went home on Friday,” she said. “So I bid the Washington trip on Monday, and I'd always have a bunch of congressmen on board and they got to know me. ‘Dusty, how’re you doing?’ I said, "Oh, I’m really upset about this. My best friend's being fired because she’s 32.’ They said, ‘What? They fire you?’ Here, these guys are 60.” Things started to look up for the flight attendants in 1964, when the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, and thanks to a last-minute amendment by Senator Howard Smith (D-Virginia), it banned discrimination in employment based on gender as well as race. Smith was a racist who most likely made this amendment as a “poison pill” thinking that so many Senate and House members would find the idea of banning gender-based discrimination so absurd they’d vote against the whole bill, and/or out of conviction that white women deserved protection at least as much as Black men. But the word “sex” went into the final bill as passed alongside the word “race,” and when the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), created under the law to enforce it, opened for business, flight attendants seeking an end to sex-based discrimination were the first to file complaints.

According to Jean Montague, who was with Dusty Roads when they first filed their complaint, “There were people putting typewriters here and chairs there and getting it all straightened out. They had just opened the doors. They weren't really ready at all.” They had inside help: a woman attorney named Sonia Pressman who started leaking information to the media about the persistence of sex-based discrimination and how the EEOC was refusing to address it. “There were commissioners who were favorable to women's rights,” Pressman explained. “But the Executive Director was opposed to women's rights, the Vice Chair was opposed. And on the staff level, I was the only woman speaking out.” The documentary, directed by Sarah Colt (who also wrote it) and Helen Dobrowski (who also produced), parallels the organizing by flight attendants with the overall trajectory of the women’s movement and so-called “second-wave feminism,” including the national shock waves when psychologist-turned-homemaker Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan, who’d given up her own career to become a wife and mother because that was the social expectation on women then, wrote about what she called “the problem that has no name,” the continued unhappiness of women despite the social conditioning that all women were supposed to be completely fulfilled by housewifery and motherhood. In 1966 Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a kind of gender analogue to the NAACP, and NOW supported the flight attendants’ cause as they took on discrimination not only by the airlines but by officials in the unions that were supposedly representing them.

At the same time “Fly with Me” also demonstrates how the advent of the sexual revolution in the early 1960’s, due largely to the invention of the birth-control pill and its legitimation by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) – a case members of the current radical-Right majority on the Court have said they want to revisit and maybe overturn the way they did with Roe v. Wade – led to even more sexual objectification of flight attendants by the airlines which employed them. Among the campaigns that sold stewardesses to the flying public as avatars of sex were Braniff’s hiring a major fashion designer to create new and far more revealing uniforms for their flight attendants – one woman recalls how these dresses were literally made of paper and when she put one on she had to worry about whether it would tear – and National’s air campaign featuring head shots of stewardesses with the slogan, “Fly me.” The implications of this weren’t lost on the flight attendants themselves. Flight attendant turned writer Casey Grant recalled thinking, “‘Fly Me.’ Fly me how? What are you going to do, get on top of me?,” and Kathleen Keenan remembered her reaction: “It was pretty close to ‘Fuck me.’ I hated that. It was really an insult.” “Fly with Me” also covers some of the other social changes, including the Viet Nam war – which affected flight attendants because the U.S. government leased private commercial aircraft to fly troops to Viet Nam and back – and the increasing number of bomb threats called into airports, which meant flight attendants had to do the ultra-hard work of leading an orderly evacuation off a targeted plane.

The documentary builds to a climax with the 1974 court victory in a case brought by Mary Pat Laffey and other Northwest Airlines stewardesses angry that they were being passed over for jobs as pursers – who did the same work stewardesses did except a) they were all male, and b) they got paid a lot more. What’s more, they didn’t have to go through weight checks, they were allowed to wear glasses on the job (flight attendants weren’t), and they could stay in single rooms on layovers while stewardesses had to double up. The case finally went to trial in 1972, and Laffey has vivid memories of the judge literally laughing at the defense Northwest presented that staying in double rooms was what the women wanted. In 1974 the judge issued a sweeping ruling awarding the plaintiffs full back pay for the differences between what they could have earned as pursers and what they’d actually made, as well as compensation for the inconvenience of having had to stay in double rooms. But, as their attorney, Michael Gottesman, recalled, “Their strategy was to take every opportunity that was legally available to them to defer the final moment when they were going to have to pay this money out. It took 11 years.” Laffey remembered vividly the day in 1985 when Northwest finally exhausted its appeal rights and had to pay up: “My sister was folding her laundry and she called me and said, ‘Patty, you won.’ I said, ‘What?’” “Fly with Me” is an excellent slice of American history and a reminder of how major social changes can come from the unlikeliest of sources – as well as a cautionary tale of just how fragile social advances are and how easily they can be taken away if we let our guard down and allow the forces of reaction to take power again.

American Experience: "The Lie Detector" (Apograph Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2022, aired January 2, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards KPBS showed another American Experience show called “The Lie Detector,” made in 2022 and premiered by PBS on January 2, 2023. This time my husband Charles, newly arrived from work, joined me and we watched it together. The so-called “lie detector” – or polygraph machine, to use its formal name – was the product of three psychological researchers who ended up in a bitter rivalry not only over credit for the invention but also the limits of what it could and could not do. The show, written and directed by Rob Rapley and narrated by André Braugher, gave primary credit for the invention to John Larson, an unlikely officer with the Berkeley Police Department in the early 1920’s. “John Larson wasn’t like the other cops,” Rapley’s narration explained. “The twenty-nine year old was a newcomer to California from New England. He joined the Berkeley Police in 1920, quickly proved himself the worst shot in the department, and was such a bad driver that he wrecked two squad cars in a single day. Worst of all, as far as the old-timers were concerned: he was the only officer in the country with a Ph.D. He spent his spare hours auditing courses on criminal psychiatry, and he was writing a book on fingerprinting.” At the time most police officers routinely beat up and physically abused suspects in custody – the so-called “third degree” – until they confessed. Officers who did this ran into the same problem more recently faced by the U.S. intelligence officers who used torture, euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” on suspected terrorists in Iraq and at Guantánamo. People being tortured aren’t necessarily telling you the truth; they’re telling you what they think you want to hear to make you stop torturing them.

Larson looked for a way to do policing without torture and thought he’d found it in various involuntary bodily responses that supposedly occur when someone is telling a lie and not when they’re telling the truth. Fortunately, his boss – Berkeley Police Chief August Vollmer – was appalled by the abuses of old-style policing and fully supported Larson’s efforts to create what he initially called a “Deception Machine.” Larson brought in a high-school student named Leonarde Keeler as his assistant, and the two tried out their prototype on a real-life crime wave in the Berkeley area: a woman in the girls’ dormitory at UC Berkeley was stealing money, clothes and jewelry from others in the building. Larson thought he had fingered the culprit, Helen Graham, whom he interrogated relentlessly until Graham confessed, quit school and left town. Larson officially called the machine he’d created the “cardio-pneumo-psychograph,” but local journalists covering the story came up with a catchier name: the “lie detector.” But the thefts continued, and Larson realized he’d made a mistake, especially when Graham wrote him a letter saying the only reason she’d confessed was that she’d had a troubled childhood, including a history of being the victim of sexual abuse. “[I]n her fear that this machine was going to uncover her secrets, she made admissions to try to forestall the questioning,” psychologist Matthew Barry Johnson said on the show. Eventually lie detector tests were ruled inadmissible in courts of law – a prohibition that remains in place to this day – and Larson spent the rest of his life crusading against the abuse of his invention. “There is no test in its present state,” he wrote, “suitable for the positive identification of deception.” Unfortunately, two other researchers – including Larson’s own former assistant, Leonarde Keeler – were not so scrupulous.

In the fall of 1922 Larson got a letter from Dr. William Moulton Marston, then head of the psychology department at American University in Washington, D.C., asking Larson to endorse Marston’s “Deception Test.” It was a much cruder instrument than Larson’s “cardio-pneumo-psychograph” – just a blood-pressure cuff that took continuous readings of a subject’s blood pressure during an interrogation – and Larson tried to warn Marston about the limitations of his approach. But Marston had already wangled his way into a high-profile murder case (https://jaapl.org/content/42/2/226). In November 1920 Dr. R. W. Brown, a well-known African-American physician and president of the National Benefit Life Insurance Company, was shot and killed. In August 1921 police arrested James Frye, another Black man, and charged him with Brown’s murder. Marston gave Frye his “Deception Test” and, on the basis of its results, testified that Frye could not have been Dr. Brown’s killer. But the trial court refused to accept Marston’s evidence, an appeals court opinion upheld this, and Frye spent the remaining 18 years of his life in prison, still protesting his innocence. “He believed that his defense was lost in all of the uproar about the lie detector,” Matthew Barry Johnson explained. “The lie detector and Marston became the big story, and his legal defense became secondary.” Marston went on to a long and checkered career, signing a contract with Universal Studios in 1928 to monitor people’s reactions to test screenings of films and recommend re-edits that would supposedly make the movies more effective in bringing about the desired audience reactions. He only lasted six months. Marston then cycled through a series of academic appointments, each one at a less prestigious university than the last, until in 1942 he struck pay dirt. He sold Detective Comics, better known by its initials “D.C.,” on the idea of a female superhero, Wonder Woman. It’s revealing, given Marston’s preoccupation with the scientific detection of truth (or untruth), that one of Wonder Woman’s big superpowers is her so-called “Lasso of Truth,” which forces anyone lassoed with it to tell the truth.

Meanwhile, Leonarde Keeler went on to a lucrative career that kicked off in 1923, when he followed August Vollmer to Los Angeles. Vollmer had just been hired as L.A.’s police chief to clean up the department’s chronic corruption, and Keeler moved with him and patented an improved model of Larson’s device, which he called the “Polygraph” because it measured various involuntary bodily responses and recorded them on a graph. Keeler actually got Marston’s old job at Universal after the studio let Marston go, but after the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago on February 14, 1929 Keeler and his wife Katherine were hired by Northwestern University to join their Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. As historian Ken Alder explained on the program, “The goal for Keeler was to turn this delicate scientific apparatus that Larson had created into a robust box that could be easily transported and was simple enough to use that even a cop – not some Ph.D. cop but just an ordinary cop – could use the device.” Keeler also marketed his gadget to employers – especially banks anxious about their employees pilfering cash from the tills – and found a booming new market. “Keeler's brought in to solve a number of crimes at banks and one of the things he discovers is that many different employees of the bank have been committing petty crimes, pocketing cash on occasion,” Alder explained. “Keeler said, ‘I will come back and retest these people regularly every six months, and you will be amazed that these will become your most honest employees.’ And this began to spread really widely.” Keeler’s career was also boosted by the Wickersham Report, the result of a nationwide investigation of police departments that revealed the often brutal and abusive tactics cops used to gain confessions.

“When Keeler started at the Crime Lab, he was one of the only operators in the country, and his department almost an afterthought,” Rapley’s narration said. “Within two years, he was doing more business than all other departments combined. In 1933, he was given an award for the most outstanding civic contribution to Chicago. Cops came from around the country to study with him at the Crime Lab; they spread the word back home. Keeler was becoming a media darling.” Though the polygraph still wasn’t considered admissible in nearly all courts of law, its use as an interrogation technique was quickly embraced by police departments. Keeler himself conceded, “The success of this device is attributed in large measure to the psychological effect it has in bringing about confessions.” The end of World War II and the abrupt change in the U.S. “party line” from the Soviet Union as heroic defender against Nazi Germany to evil monstrosity out to destroy the “American Way of Life” and impose Communism on us by force led to an immense new market for the polygraph. The U.S. nuclear weapons lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee ordered polygraph tests for all its employees, and regular polygraphing contributed to the climate of fear surrounding the so-called McCarthy era. Queer employees of the U.S. government lived in special fear as the government went after so-called “perverts” and, when they found one, they not only fired them but “outed” them at a time when being Gay was illegal in all U.S. states and it was virtually impossible for people publicly known as Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual to find employment. (The show featured footage of the very first march for Queer rights in U.S. history: the 1965 demonstration led by Washington, D.C. Mattachine Society official Frank Kameny, a former government astronomer who’d been fired and disgraced for being Gay.)

Keeler gradually shifted his attentions from using the polygraph to establish guilt (or psychologically coerce people into confessing to crimes whether they committed them or not) to using it to prove the innocence of the unjustly convicted. He even played himself in the 1948 movie Call Northside 777, which starred James Stewart as an intrepid reporter convinced that a particular Death Row inmate didn’t really murder the person he was convicted and sent there for killing. Unfortunately, two of the three people involved in inventing the lie detector died young; William Moulton Marston of a stroke, aggravated by polio, in 1947 at age 53; and Leonarde Keeler, also of a stroke brought on by tobacco, alcohol and stress, in 1949 at age 45. John Larson lived to be 74 but he too was consumed by the machine he’d invented – he even compared himself to Baron Frankenstein as the man who created a monster and then couldn’t control it – and he died in the middle of writing an unpublished exposé of the abuses of the lie detector that had grown to 900 pages. Polygraph abuse lasted until the 1980’s, when unrepentant Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan became President and ordered a return to the 1950’s policy of mass polygraph testing of government employees. However, the Zeitgeist had turned and in 1988 Reagan reluctantly signed a law passed by Congress to ban the use of polygraphs by most employers, including private-sector ones. “[T]hree hundred thousand honest Americans are branded as liars every year,” protested Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Writer-director Rapley gives the last words in his documentary to historian Douglas Flowe: “The lie detector persists even though we understand that it's not necessarily accurate. It's about this uniquely American confidence in technology. … The lie detector takes a problem that can’t be controlled and turns it into something that, at least in your imagination, can be controlled. There can be a sense of certainty. And Americans are looking for certainty.”

Shrek the Third (DreamWorks Animation, Pacific Data Images, Paramount, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 19) my husband Charles and I watched Shrek the Third, third film in the four-movie Shrek cycle loosed upon the world by DreamWorks Animation starting with the original Shrek from 2001. The films were made at three-year intervals – Shrek 2 in 2004, Shrek the Third in 2007 and the final one (so far), Shrek Forever After, in 2010. Shrek the Third had a different creative team from the first two; the director was Chris Miller, with Raman Hui officially listed as “co-director” (which suggests, to paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, that Miller and Hui were equal but Miller was “more equal” than Hui). The writers were William Steig (whose 1990 children’s book Shrek! – notice the exclamation point – provided the basis for the whole cycle); Andrew Adamson, who co-wrote and co-directed the first two Shreks, credited with the original story; Jeffrey Price, Chris Miller, Peter S. Seaman and Aron Warner with the screenplay; and Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Roger S. H. Schulman and Joe Stillman getting the credit they also got on Shrek 2 for adding “additional characters” to the Shrek universe. Shrek the Third didn’t have quite the élan of the first two films in the series – which had pleasantly surprised both Charles and I in their relative sophistication and in particular for the way they mashed up old fairy tales in new and quite innovative ways (when we watched the first Shrek I had compared it to Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods as a fairy-tale mash-up, and though Into the Woods is a considerably darker and more ominous story than Shrek, they’re close enough to withstand the comparison). This time around, the director(s) and writers went far more for slapstick than for creativity – in one early scene they even repeated Buster Keaton’s (and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s before him!) old gag of having the wall of a building fall on their main character, who escapes harm only because he’s under an open window when the wall falls.

The marvelous panoply of reworked characters from old fairy stories that did so much to make the first two Shrek films entertaining is here reduced to a sort of Greek chorus of princesses: Sleeping Beauty (Cheri Oteri), Snow White (Amy Poehler), Cinderella (Amy Sedaris) and Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph). They sit by and comment on the action, and Rapunzel goes over to the Dark Side of the Force and hooks up with the piece’s principal villain, Prince Charming (Rupert Everett). In Shrek 2 Prince Charming was the chronically weak son of the Fairy Godmother (Jennifer Saunders); this time around he’s an out-and-out bad guy out to usurp the throne of Far, Far Away (the legendary locale) now that King Harold (John Cleese) has croaked his last – pun definitely intended, since at the end of Shrek 2 Harold reverted to his origins as a frog and it’s as a frog that he dies here. On his deathbed (or deathpad) Harold wills the kingdom to the ogre Shrek (Mike Myers) and his wife, Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), but Shrek protests that he’s not cut out to be a ruler of anything and he just wants to get back to his swamp so he and Fiona can live out their lives as happy little ogres and have ogre kids. Shrek’s utter incompetence at the king gig is shown when he’s assigned to christen a ship, only he forgets to break the ceremonial bottle against it and throws it at the departing ship instead – on which it has the effect of a Molotov cocktail, blasting a hole in the stern and setting the whole ship on fire. Before he croaks his last, Harold tells Shrek that there’s only one other heir, Artie (Justin Timberlake, of all people), true name Arthur Pendragon (yes, that King Arthur!), and Shrek and his sidekicks Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) set out for Worcestershire to fetch Artie and bring him back to Far, Far Away so he can rule as the next king.

Worcestershire (and of course the writers couldn’t resist the gag of having someone – Eddie Murphy’s character – butcher the pronunciation of the name!) turns out to be a super-status-conscious high school that seems to be imported from a John Hughes movie, and Artie is the runt of the litter, the put-upon and much-bullied kid who’s written off by his classmates as a hopeless nerd. (He even name-checks “Guin” – short for “Guinevere” – as the girl he has a doomed crush on, and I was amused at the in-joke because Julie Andrews, who’s in this movie as the voice of Queen Lillian, Harold’s wife, played Guinevere in the original Broadway production of the Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe musical Camelot.) One would think a boy like that would jump at the chance of leaving that environment and going to a fairy-tale land where he could be king, but Artie keeps trying to get away and Our Heroes keep having to track him down. Meanwhile, back in Far, Far Away Prince Charming has recruited an all-star cast of fairy-tale villains – the Evil Queen (Susanne Blakeslee), the Blind Mice (Christopher Knights), the walking, talking trees from The Wizard of Oz (Andrew Birch and Christopher Knights again), Rumplestiltskin (Conrad Vernon, who co-directed Shrek 2) and Captain Hook (Ian MacShane) – to aid him in his evil quest to keep both Shrek and Artie off the throne so he can claim it for himself and make Rapunzel his queen. (There’s a great scene in which the good guys pull on Rapunzel’s famous golden hair – and it comes off and reveals her as bald underneath.) They managed to clap Shrek and company into a dungeon before the good guys somehow break free. Artie is installed as king and Shrek and Fiona return to their swamp, where Fiona gives birth to a litter of ogre triplets.

While I was a bit disappointed in Shrek the Third – maybe it was the change in creative personnel behind the cameras, or maybe the concept was just getting a bit threadbare this time around – it was at least a fun movie and acceptable entertainment, though one thing I sorely missed was a post-credits musical medley as appeared in the home-video versions (though not the theatrical releases!) of the first two films. Charles and I were also amused that the DVD we were watching began with trailers for two other DreamWorks animation films, Megamind (2010) – a spoof of Superman which posits that two families on planets about to self-destruct sent their newborn babies to Earth, one who became the superhero Metro Man (alas, they couldn’t call him Superman!) and one who became the super-villain Megamind – and Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), narrated on screen by Jack Black, who voiced the title character. The reason we found the trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2 particularly noteworthy was we’d just seen TV spots advertising the latest in the series, Kung Fu Panda 4!

The Man in the Guesthouse, a.k.a. Man in the Guest House (Maple Island Films, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 18) my husband Charles and I watched a better-than-average Lifetime movie, The Man in the Guesthouse. At least that’s how the title is spelled in the opening credits, with that abominable mash-up “guesthouse” – one word, as if English were German (I’m still annoyed with the horrible, similar neologism “healthcare”), though imdb.com spelled it Man in the Guest House – “guest house” as two words and without a definite article at the start. The Man in the Guesthouse begins with Brandon and Ashley Burke (Ignacyo Matynia and Kristen Alderson), a 10-year married couple, pushing their budget for a fancy dinner to mark their 10th anniversary. Ashley has proposed they rent out their guest house as an ADU (an “accessory dwelling unit”) to save money, since while he has a good job as a trainer for a chain gym called Forever Fitness, she recently quit her job working for a consulting firm for reasons that don’t become clear until the end of the movie. They remodel and clean up the back cottage – it’s a totally separate building on their property rather than an attached garage – and advertise with a Web site called “House and Home.” Almost immediately they have an applicant, Dan Hansen (Allen Williamson), who identifies himself as a 20-year-old graduate student in business administration at the local college, Astonishingly, they let Dan move in immediately without bothering to check his reference or (as Charles pointed out) even asking to see a student ID to find out if he’s really the student he claims to be.

Mysterious poltergeist-like things start happening around the Burkes, including their hot-water heater pilot light going out and leaving them immediately without hot water (which Charles once again questioned: even if the pilot light is turned off, there will still be a reserve supply of warm water in the heater’s tank until either it’s used up or cools down naturally, which takes time) and their ceiling developing a leak. Dan is, of course, responsible, though it takes the Burkes a long time trying to figure that out. Dan is also dating Ashley’s best friend from college, an Asian-American woman named Shelley Patterson (Anne Patterson), who thinks he’s really nice. But Dan’s presence at the Burkes’ home and his repeated offenses against them, including hosting a wild party into the wee hours and playing ultra-loud music just as the Burkes are trying to get some sleep, turn out to be part of an elaborate revenge plot hatched by Dan’s mother Myra (unlisted on imdb.com), who blames Ashley Burke for the breakup of her marriage to Dan’s dad – who, in a plot twist that like the endings of the two Lifetime movies I’d suffered through the night before, A Widow Seduced and The Beach House Murders, was a lot less surprising than writer Adam Balsam thought it would be – turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Ashley’s former boss, Clay Morris (James Hyde). I’d been suspicious of this character ever since he was introduced and he strongly resembled George Clooney – at least as close to George Clooney as a Lifetime casting director could get on a TV-movie budget.

It turns out that while Brandon Burke was successfully fending off any number of nubile young women at the gym who wanted to engage him in extra-relational activities under the guise of “personal training,” Ashley had drifted into a short-lived sexual affair with Clay. Clay kept trying to recruit her to come back, and there’s a snippet of dialogue between them about him complaining that he hasn’t been able to replace her because he hasn’t yet found someone who can deliver her “unique personal services.” This gets repeated as a flashback towards the end of the movie once she’s tearfully confessed her affair to her husband and we’ve become aware of just what those “unique personal services” were. The film ends with a typical Lifetime confrontation scene between Dan, Myra, Brandon and Ashley in which Dan is supposed to kill the Burkes at his mom’s insistence, only Dan and Ashley Both Reach for the Knife and Dan ends up accidentally stabbing his mother to death. Though The Man in the Guesthouse had some of the same flaws as the previous night’s Lifetime movies – including the surprising physical resemblance between Ignacyo Matynia and Allen Williamson (inverting my usual complaint about movies in which people who we’re told are genetic relatives don’t look like each other; this time they’re supposed to be total strangers but Matinya and Williamson look enough alike they could have been cast as brothers, a problem I had with The Beach House Murders as well: nice Black guy Cj Hammond and nasty Black guy Devante Winfrey also could have been playing brothers) – somehow they didn’t bother me as much this time around. Despite all the plot holes, including that it takes them an hour of running time before they finally decide to check out Dan’s story and learn that he’s not enrolled in college at all, The Man in the Guesthouse was nice and inoffensive, and of course it certainly helped that both male leads were drop-dead gorgeous and director John Murlowski (who also was the cinematographer) gave us plenty of shots of both of them topless (yum!). Certainly Murlowski was a lot better at his jobs than the writer, Adam Balsam, was at his!

Highway 13 (Lippert Pictures, Screen Guild Productions, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ultimately Charles and I watched another movie last night, an hour-long “B” gangster pic from Lippert Pictures in 1948 called Highway 13. It starts with a long montage of trucking accidents, which I’m presuming came from whatever stock shots of trucks losing control and crashing as Lippert’s stock-footage library contained. As I joked to my husband Charles as I started running the film, it starred Batman – or at least Robert Lowery, who’d played Batman in the second Columbia serial, Batman and Robin (1948). Here Lowery is Hank Wilson, who drives for a long-haul trucking company called “N-E” (“Norris Express”), and when he isn’t working hangs out at a local garage and coffee shop run by Bill “Pops” Lacy (Clem Bevan in what at first appears to be the sort of cornball comic-relief character Walter Brennan specialized in). There are two reasons he goes there: Lacy services his company’s trucks and Hank is romancing the main waitress there, Pops’ granddaughter Doris Lacy (Pamela Blake, who turns in a serviceable but unspectacular performance that drags down the film a bit, albeit in a nothing role). Norris Express’s CEO, J. E. Norris (Tom Chatterton), decides to bring in a private detective, George Montgomery (Gaylord Pendleton, later known as Steve Pendleton), to investigate the crashes of his company’s trucks as well as a private car driven by his daughter, Henrietta Denton, which went out of control on a deserted road. Henrietta’s husband, company executive Frank Denton (Michael Whalen), briefs Montgomery (whose name must have jarred late-1940’s moviegoers since there was a real actor named George Montgomery, who’s probably best remembered for having been briefly married to Dinah Shore and turning in a wretched performance as Philip Marlowe in 1947’s The Brasher Doubloon) on the situation and pairs him with Hank Wilson on the next truck run.

Only Montgomery is killed in an accident in the yard after a truck’s handbrake mysteriously detaches, causing it to roll backwards and crush the undercover private eye. Hank distinctly recalls that he set the handbrake on that truck properly and realizes he’s being framed for the sabotage, so he determines to get to the bottom of it. Part of his strategy is to romance the company’s executive secretary, Mary Hadley (Maris Wrixon, who turns in a quite nice femme fatale performance), though this leads to a jealous hissy-fit from Doris Lacy, who releases Hank from his marriage proposal and tries to give him back his engagement ring. Fortunately, he doesn’t take it back and she keeps it. Highway 13 was directed by William Berke, who had a rather quirky career; he began in independent films in L.A., mostly “B” Westerns which he produced himself. Berke got a contract with RKO and directed some of the later films in “The Falcon” series, then (like a lot of “B” directors who hadn’t cracked the “A”-list) ended up in television, though just before he died he’d returned to the world of independent filmmaking and made movies of the first two 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, Cop Hater and The Mugger. (Cop Hater featured an early performance by Jerry Orbach as a juvenile delinquent, decades before he played a cop himself on Dick Wolf’s TV franchise Law and Order.) The script was nothing special – the original story was by John Wilste and the screenplay by Maurice Tombragel, and there’s a reason you’ve never heard of these writers before – but Highway 13 delivers the goods effectively and becomes a quite good if unambitious crime thriller with overtones of film noir. We’re kept in legitimate suspense as to just who the guilty parties are; among the subplots is the mid-film revelation that that seemingly nice old comic-relief character, “Pops” Lacy, actually was a gangster in Chicago in the 1920’s, and there’s an unexpected scene in which his wife Myrt (Mary Gordon) throws a pie in his face with the aplomb of a 1920’s slapstick comedian.

Eventually just about everyone in the cast is part of the plot – Hank and Doris are the only ones who aren’t. The sabotage and accidents are part of a scheme hatched by Frank Denton, who was going extra-relational on his wife with Mary Hadley and killed her by messing around with his car. His motives were to drive the stock price of Norris Express down so he and Mary could buy out the company and acquire it on the cheap, and “Pops” did the actual sabotage while Myrt tried to stop him. (It’s not clear just how much involvement Myrt had with the saboteurs.) Ultimately “Pops” tries to kill Hank by putting him into a truck that’s been monkeyed around with and setting it off while he’s under the influence of a drug “Pops” has slipped him in his coffee – only Doris has hidden herself in the cargo compartment and manages to break through the glass window separating it from the driver’s cab. She grabs hold of the steering wheel and keeps the truck from crashing until enough of the drug has worn off that Hank is capable of driving again, and Frank and Mary are killed when their own car crashes and takes a tumble off a mountain road. Highway 13 is an O.K. crime thriller and Berke’s direction, though not a patch on what he achieved either with major-studio backing in his “Falcon” films or at the end of his career (and his life; he died in 1958 at age 54) with Cop Hater and The Mugger, is capable and sometimes more than that, especially in the performance he got out of Maris Wrixon. Her career is one of the most curious Hollywood might-have-beens: she started out in independent “B”’s and then got a contract at Warner Bros., where she starred in Spy Ship, a “B” remake of the 1934 Fog Over Frisco in which she played Margaret Lindsay’s role in a script remodeled to base the character of her sister (Irene Manning in a role played in Fog Over Frisco by Bette Davis!) on real-life aviatrix and Nazi sympathizer Laura Ingalls. Then, alas, her career faded out, she got dropped and returned to the world of “B” movies and, ultimately, television – though her next-to-last credit was as a minor character in the opening party scene of The Graduate. But she’s quite good here as a relatively understated femme fatale.