The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story (Housewife Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 29) I watched two movies in quick succession: a Lifetime production called The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story and a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a 1951 film called No Questions Asked – though since the two showings overlapped I watched the latter on YouTube rather than switch from Lifetime to TCM in the middle of The Killer Inside. The Killer Inside was at least nominally based on a true story: Ruth Finley (Teri Hatcher) lives in Wichita, Kansas with her husband Ed (Tahmoh Penikett). The year is 1977, when the so-called “BTK” (the initials stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”) serial killer is terrorizing Wichita, and though the identity of BTK is kept ambiguous in this film, we at least see him as an on-screen character, played by James Ralph. We see him at work on several anonymous victims, and Ruth becomes obsessed with him, following his exploits on TV news while Ed and Ruth’s mother Fay (Candice Hunter) try to get her to change the channel. Ruth works in an office at the Southwestern Bell phone company, though we’re never told what (if anything) Ed does for a job, and the couple have no children. Just as Ed is talking about the two of them taking a vacation to Europe – he wants to go to London, Ruth would rather go to Paris – he suffers a heart attack and nearly dies. Ruth takes a leave of absence from her job to take care of him (as my husband Charles did when I had my heart crisis in December 2021), but she also reports that two men, one of whom was the BTK killer, abducted her and drove her to a deserted stretch of country, only she was able to get away by pepper-spraying them. (The pepper spray comes in a container with a very 1950’s-ish graphic of a woman who was presumably helpless without it.)

Later she reports that a man accosted her in a mall parking lot after she’d gone out to go shopping, very much against the advice of her husband, and stabbed her three times, fortunately missing any of her vital organs. Director Greg Beeman, working from a script by Katie Gruel, cuts from a scene of the attack on her to a shot of a surveillance camera, presumably recording the whole thing, and we think, “Ah, the police are going to look at the surveillance footage and see who did it.” Then, about two-thirds of the way through the film’s running time, we see [big-time spoiler alert!] Ruth Finley herself setting fire to the couple’s home, or at least to the shrubbery outside it, then getting back into bed until her husband Ed, thinking her mystery stalkers set the fire to kill her, rescues her. Throughout the movie Ruth has been narrating a story of how she was abducted and raped as a teenager, including being branded on both thighs with a clothes iron, and she’s been getting letters written in all caps, like the letters from the real BTK, issuing various threats, including that she pay him money or he’ll reveal the truth about her. We’re not sure after the big reveal whether this one really happened, but eventually Fay tells the police investigating the case that when Ruth was three years old and they were living in Kansas’s farm country, she was sexually molested and abused by a neighbor who’d take her out to his barn to have his wicked way with her.

Eventually, after Ruth is committed to a mental institution and the police are threatening to charge her with falsely reporting a “crime” that only took place in her mind, her therapist, here called “Dr. Kenneth Mitchell” (and played by an actor with a striking resemblance to Mad magazine’s iconic logo, Alfred E. Neuman) though his real name was Dr. Alfred Pickens, diagnoses her with multiple personality disorder and says another personality took over Ruth Finley’s consciousness, reported the false “attacks” and set fire to the Finleys’ home. (I had thought it would be Munchhausen’s, but this works about as well even though the fact that Ruth seemingly had only one other “alter” didn’t give Teri Hatcher the chance to give the sort of bravura performance Joanne Woodward and Sally Field did when they played multiple personalities in The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, respectively.) Ultimately the cops decide not to prosecute her and she and Ed are free to take that European trip, where a closing shot shows them at a street café in front of the Eiffel Tower and a few credits explain that Ed and Ruth stayed married until his death in 2011 and she survived and remained relatively healthy, both physically and mentally, until her own death in 2019.

The Killer Inside is well directed and decently scripted, though neither Teri Hatcher nor Tahmoh Penikett are that great as actors (Hatcher’s performance, especially in the early scenes, is so stiff and unemotional that after the big reveal I was wondering whether we were supposed to read her impassivity as a symptom of her mental illness instead of just bad acting). There’s also one anachronism: as Ruth is being ragged by Susan (Victoria Bidewell), her best friend at work, about how predictable her life is, Ruth tells Susan she’s picking a different brand of popcorn for the at-home “movie night” she’s going to have with her husband. At-home “movie nights” weren’t a “thing” until the videocassette recorder was marketed, which wasn’t until 1981 – four years after this film supposedly takes place. I was surprised that after the care the filmmakers took to make everything else look age-appropriate – including the big, clunky sedans the characters drive – they slipped up big-time on that one. I was also amused at the way in which so many of Ruth’s fantasies were presented as actual events on screen and depicted the way she narrated them; in his 1950 film Stage Fright Alfred Hitchcock had pioneered a flashback sequence on screen that turned out to be a character’s lie, but this film goes whole-hog with that gimmick. And when we see the actual surveillance footage from the parking lot where Ruth was supposedly near-fatally stabbed, she does so much writhing around while experiencing the mock “attack” I was surprised she didn’t go full-fledged psycho and tell the cops who showed her the footage, “Didn’t I tell you? My attacker was invisible!”

No Questions Asked (MGM, 1951)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 29), after my husband Charles had come home from work and I’d already started a dinner for us (frozen tilapia filets and baked potatoes with salad), I ran the movie No Questions Asked from a YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjMwO6RD-9A). Eddie Muller had run it on last night’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies (and he’d shown it on at least one prior occasion sometime around March or April, since his intro and outro were also posted on YouTube and the outro contained a reference to Easter being next week), but I looked for it on YouTube instead of watching it “live” partly because I wanted to see all of The Killer Inside on Lifetime (the showings overlapped by an hour) and partly because I wanted to share it with Charles. No Questions Asked was a 1951 MGM attempt at film noir – the sort of movie that in the past I’ve called film gris because it tried for film noir but really didn’t achieve it. It was produced by Nicholas Nayfack, a protégé of recently appointed MGM studio head Dore Schary, and directed by Harold F. Kress, who’d just been promoted from film editor to director and had recently made one of the worst movies of all time, The Painted Hills, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Lassie. (Yes, you read that right; MacDonald’s co-stars had descended from Maurice Chevalier to Nelson Eddy to Lassie.)

It was based on a story by Berne Giler, who quit feature films shortly after this project and ended up writing for series television, though the actual script was by Sidney Sheldon (who later became a blockbuster novelist in the 1970’s with his best-seller The Other Side of Midnight; it was turned into a mini-series and Harold F. Kress was its film editor!). It starred Barry Sullivan as Steve Kiever, a young attorney with an insurance company, who goes to his boss for a raise in salary so he can marry his girlfriend, Ellen Sayburn (Arlene Dahl), who’s just returned from a vacation in Sun Valley. Alas, Steve gets the predictable turn-down from his boss, Henry Manston (Moroni Olsen), and when he goes to Ellen’s apartment with an engagement ring he’s bought with a bonus from his boss for recovering some stolen furs with “no questions asked,” he finds from her landlady (Madge Blake) that she’s already got married to a wealthy man, Gordon Jessman (Dick Simmons), she met on her Sun Valley trip. Steve, who in the course of this movie gets involved with at least two other women, “good girl” Joan Brenson (Jean Hagen, just before entering movie immortality as the barely competent vamp actress Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain) and bar singer Natalie (Mari Blanchard, warming up for her big role replacing Marlene Dietrich in the 1954 remake of Destry Rides Again), decides to continue brokering insurance company-sponsored buybacks of various stolen goods and demanding a cut of the proceeds for himself.

Though what he’s doing is not technically illegal, he arouses the ire of the police in general and two policemen in particular, Inspector Matt Duggan (an outrageously miscast George Murphy) and Detective Walter O’Bannion (Richard Anderson). These two cops believe Kiever’s activities are encouraging crimes that otherwise wouldn’t happen because without Kiever’s help it would be too hard for the crooks to fence the loot and turn it into freshly laundered cash. Things come to a head when Kiever takes Joan to the opening of a Broadway show, only during the intermission the ladies’ powder room is raided and the patrons robbed of their jewels by two “women” who turn out to be men in drag. Charles and I had advance warning that something unusual was going to happen in the powder room because I wasn’t able to turn off the YouTube auto-play of Muller’s outro in time, but I had thought only the taller of the two men, Roger (William Phipps), was a man in drag and I’d assumed his assistant, Floyd (William Reynolds), was genuinely female and the two were a straight crime couple. Given a 48-hour deadline by his former boss Henry Manston to recover the jewels, Kiever traces the crooks to the costume shop where they got their drag makeups and confronts them, saying they must have been professional female impersonators in burlesque. “Vaudeville,” an insulted Roger says, “We’re artists!” (This plot twist reminded me of a mid-1950’s Dragnet episode, “The Big Girl,” in which a tall man dresses in drag to get picked up as a hitchhiker by lonely male drivers he then robs.)

Meanwhile, Steve has also resumed his affair with Ellen, who tells him she only married Gordon for his money and never really loved him. Only, in yet another bizarre reversal Messrs. Giler and Sheldon indulged in, while he’s in his apartment with the box of stolen jewels awaiting his payoff, Steve is knocked out and when he comes to, Detective O’Bannion has been shot dead on his floor (and, like typical idiot movie characters, instead of leaving the gun where it lay, he picks it up, obligingly gets his fingerprints all over it, and puts it in his pocket) and he realizes he’s been framed for O’Bannion’s murder. Steve realizes that very few people knew when and where the exchange of money for jewels was supposed to take place, and at first he suspects his cab driver, Harry Duyker (Danny Dayton), of being the hijacker and cop-killer. When Harry denies it, Steve realizes that Ellen was the only other person who knew when and where the exchange was to take place, and he discovers not only that she was in on it but so was her husband Gordon. Gordon killed O’Bannion and framed Steve for the crime, only crime boss Franko (Howard Petrie) kidnaps them both and tortures them to get where they’ve stashed the jewels. Franko, who it’s previously been established is world-class at the skill of holding one’s breath under water, not only kills both Gordon and Ellen but wrestles Steve under the swimming pool at the gym where he runs his business as a front. Duggan and a squad of other cops arrive in time to arrest Franko, and a police diver is able to dive into the pool and rescue Steve before he drowns. In the end he’s alive, well and united with nice-girl Joan at the fade-out.

As Charles pointed out, the first hour or so of this 80-minute film is a pretty straightforward gangster drama – one could readily imagine the story being made at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s with James Cagney in Sullivan’s role – and it’s only at the point two-thirds of the way through where O’Bannion is killed that it even starts to look like film noir. All of a sudden cinematographer Harold Lipstein starts shooting in noir style, with chiaroscuro nighttime effects and deep-focus shadows as well as the underbelly of urban decay for which fans of film noir come to the genre. But by then it’s too late, and the schlocky happy ending doesn’t help; frankly, I think the film would have been stronger if Steve had been killed by Franko inside the pool, as indeed seems at first to have been what happened!

My Life Is Murder: "Remains to Be Seen" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, June 28) I watched the next episode of the fascinating Australian crime show My Life Is Murder, one of whose most creative tricks is the way they integrate the title of the show into the opening credits in a different way each episode. Here it turned up on an EKG monitor plugged into the show’s heroine, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless), after she’s been taken to an emergency room after she collapsed from atrial fibrillation while on a jogging run. Alexa’s own bout with heart disease (even though it was considerably less severe than my own real one in December 2021 that forced my early retirement) makes her all too aware of her own mortality. Alexa is a retired police detective who’s set up shop as a private investigator and is routinely referred cold cases by her former police partner, detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This time it’s the murder of Patrick Mandel (Damon Hunter), an investment broker and compulsive gambler (one could say they amount to the same thing!) until he lost his financial company by pursuing his gambling addiction. Alexa interviews his former girlfriend, mortuary operator Katrina Logan (Nadine Garner), and rejects the idea pushed by Alexa’s friend and assistant Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans) that Patrick was killed by a Russian gangster to whom he owed a five-figure sum of money. The reason Alexa is so sure the mobster didn’t kill Patrick was that he was clubbed to death on the back of his head, and dumped into a previously dug but unfilled grave intended for the wife of a local man who’d bought adjoining cemetery plots so they could have his-and-hers final resting places. Alexa realizes the gangster would have had one of his thugs shoot Patrick and display the body in plain sight to intimidate the other people who owed him money into paying up.

Katrina insists that she had no idea that Patrick was a gambling addict and certainly wasn’t giving him any money to gamble, but Detective Inspector Hussey turns up a photo of the two of them taking money from an ATM at a casino a year before his murder. Alexa also questions Katrina’s daughter and assistant at the mortuary, Gabby Logan (Lily Stewart). She steals the cremains of Katrina’s father and goes through them at her home, and she finds a shard of ceramic in the ashes. From that she’s able to piece the whole thing together: Patrick had sneaked into the mortuary one night after hours to look for valuables he could sell or pawn to pay off his latest round of gaming debts. Gabby caught him and clubbed him from behind – she didn’t mean to kill him, but she did – with an ornate ceramic teapot which she then hid in the casket containing her grandfather’s ashes. Then she relied on her boyfriend, Tye Danzinger (Richard Davies), a gravedigger at the cemetery where Patrick’s body was found, to move Patrick’s body and bury it for her in the open grave – only it was discovered when the widow of the original cemetery plot owner duly died herself and the site was being made ready for her burial when it was discovered that another body was already in that grave. “Remains to Be Seen” (a clever title) was directed by Ben C. Lucas and written by Tim Pye, to whom I’m grateful that his script included an explanation of the difference between a coffin and a casket (a coffin has six sides, a casket has only four). Pye came up with a credible mystery with an effective and believable resolution, and showed Patrick’s actual murder in a silent flashback sequence (much like the one in the Warner Bros. Perry Mason movie The Case of the Curious Bride from 1935, in which Errol Flynn made his U.S. film debut playing the victim) that explained why they needed an actor to play Patrick even though he’s supposed to be five months’ dead at the start of the episode.

Live at the Belly Up: Aviator Stash (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

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

After that I kept on KPBS and watched the first of a new run of episodes of the local TV show Live at the Belly Up, after the live-music venue in Solana Beach that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The band was Aviator Stash, a local group of people who went to Carlsbad High School together but didn’t actually start playing with each other until they formed the band in 2017 when they were already in their 20’s. Aviator Stash consists of Greg Kellogg (lead vocals), Sal Russo (lead guitar), Drew Lang (keyboards), bassist Eric Schneider (identified only as “Diz” on the Web site) and drummer Tyler Pinto. According to the band’s own Web site, “Aviator Stash is a genre-hopping powerhouse of indie-rock energy and party culture vibes. When listening to their music, you can find many influences ranging from funk, 2000's-era rock, and various electronic styles. The band gained local attention when their debut single ‘Lazy Summer Days’ received regular play as the ‘Local Break’ from the legendary San Diego radio station 91X in 2018.” Greg Kellogg was the band’s designated spokesperson on the interstitial interview segments, and they named a wide variety of influences, though at first I thought they sounded like a lot of local San Francisco Bay Area bands I remembered hearing in the mid-1970’s. They have a real gift for infectious dance grooves; though the Belly Up Tavern really is too small a venue for dancing, a lot of people in the audience were essentially dancing in place, bobbing up and down to the band’s rhythms.

They began their 13-song set (I’ve learned to judge Live at the Belly Up shows largely by the number of songs the band performs; if they play 15 or 16 songs they’re performing carefully crafted pop material, while eight or nine songs means they’re doing a lot of jamming) with a great dance-pop groove song called “Funky Tongue.” I was convinced this was going to be an instrumental until Kellogg took the mike and started singing midway through! After that they did a song called “She’s Money” that had a lower-tempo but still infectious groove. Their next songs, “Elevator” and “Tyler the Beat” (an obvious tribute to their drummer), blended into each other. Then they played “This Time of Year,” “Lotus” (a nicely moving romantic ballad) and “Lefty,” before doing an edgier song called “99 Days” with a guest artist, an African-American rapper called “Dr. Savvy.” Then they played “Shot Song,” which they dedicated to the Belly Up bartenders (Kellogg urged the audience members to tip them generously), “Prescribed Television” (which led my husband Charles to joke, “Does that mean TV you have to watch?”) and “Hype,” an anti-drug song. After a quite good performance of that prize-winning single “Lazy Summer Days,” Aviator Stash closed the show with what was essentially a pro-drug song, “TJ,” which advised their listeners to get good and high on American drugs before crossing the border on the ground that Mexican drugs aren’t as good. I was gratified that the copyright date on this program was 2024 – before that Live at the Belly Up had been doing mostly reruns from pre-COVID days, often a decade or more old and featuring performers like local blues queen Candye Kane who have since died. They’ve announced a season of 50 shows to commemorate the venue’s 50th anniversary, and I can hardly wait – especially if all of them are going to be as much fun as this one!

Hope in the Water: "Farming the Water" (Intuitive Content, PBS, 2024)

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

Last night (Wednesday, June 26) I watched a couple of reasonably interesting science programs on KPBS, including “Farming the Water,” the second of three parts in the mini-series Hope in the Water. The basic thesis of this series is that much of humankind’s future is resting in and on the oceans, especially as the amount of arable land in the world steadily decreases due to climate change as well as long-term human development. The host for this episode is one of my least favorite people on earth these days, Martha Stewart, who was trotted out as a guest host I guess in hopes her name attached to the program would draw more people to watch it. Stewart got dragged along in a fishing boat by a young man named Struan Coleman, who had ambitions to become a lobsterman in his native Maine. Alas, there were two roadblocks to that career path: the tightly held grip on lobster-fishing licenses by the people who currently had them – the waiting period for one could be as much as 10 to 12 years – and climate change, which is warming up the oceans off the Maine coast so both lobsters and the things they feed on are moving elsewhere. According to Google.com, “People used to think that lobsters were scavengers and ate primarily dead things. However, researchers have discovered that lobsters catch mainly fresh food (except for bait) which includes fish, crabs, clams, mussels, sea urchins, and sometimes even other lobsters!” So Coleman decided to forgo a career as a lobsterman and instead use an elaborate series of traps, nets and underwater stations to raise scallops.

His segment was the second of three stories on this show; the first, and in some ways the most interesting, was the fascinating tale of Paul Damhof, a drop-dead gorgeous young man and a third-generation dairy farmer until one day his father’s doctors essentially gave him an ultimatum: either the cows go or you go. So in 2015 Damhof and his dad organized a sale of his entire herd of dairy cows, and looking for an alternative that could save their farm, Damhof’s mother ran across an article on how to make money by raising shrimp. This required a major up-front investment, including building eight swimming pools on the Damhof property (which not surprisingly raised eyebrows among his neighbors!) – at the moment he’s using six of the pools as farms to breed and grow shrimp, and he’s getting ready to farm shrimp in the other two – and buying huge quantities of salt in bulk to turn the water in them appropriately salty. One of the most interesting people profiled in this documentary was Tran Huc Loc, Ph.D., a researcher in Viet Nam who came from a long-time family of shrimp fishermen. In the early 2010’s shrimp all over the world began dying of a mysterious new disease that ultimately cost the shrimp industry between $2 and $4 billion. Loc was part of the research team that studied the disease, and he helped figure out that it was infectious and caused by two pathogens working together. He also worked out ways to prevent it by spiking the water in which shrimp were grown with probiotics, and running the newly hatched shrimp through fish ponds stocked with certain kinds of fish, like tilapia, that actually eat shrimp feces.

While Paul Damhof and his business partner Barb Frank were working out the glitches in their indoor shrimp pools in Minnesota – 1,300 miles away from the nearest ocean – Struan Coleman was working out an elaborate system for farm-raising scallops off the coast of Maine. Farming scallops requires an elaborate system of nets and traps to ensure that the scallops remain in place for the two years they need to mature and become edible. Coleman showed Martha Stewart how he uses a small-bore drill to drill tiny, harmless holes in the shells of the scallops to ensure they remain on the line until they are fully grown. The third segment of the show was perhaps the most interesting: it dealt with a Native Alaskan Inuit named Dune Lankard, who’s worked out a way to farm kelp, an underwater vegetable. “My Eyak name is Jamachakih, which means little bird that screams really loud and won't shut up,” Lankard said, adding that he’s lived up to that name big-time. He’s shown harvesting kelp and processing it for human consumption, including cutting slices off the big balls that form on kelp stalks as they grow. That had me wondering just what kelp tastes like; when the kelp bulbs are sliced they look like onion rings, though that doesn’t leave much of a clue as to what they actually taste like. Lankard is shown using them as the basis for his own seafood cakes, usually with crab as the protein ingredient. Like the first episode of Hope in the Water, “The Fish in the Sea,” “Farming the Water” is a rare breath of optimism in the field of nature documentaries, most of which these days are about how humans in their short-sighted greed are plundering the planet and rendering it uninhabitable for themselves and their descendants.

NOVA: "Arctic Ghost Ship" (Lion Television, 90th Parallel, CBC Canada/Radio Canada, Channel 4, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2015)

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

After that KPBS re-ran a NOVA episode from September 23, 2015 called “Arctic Ghost Ship,” about the attempt to recover the remains of the two ships that sailed from Great Britain in 1845 across the Atlantic into Canada in an attempt to find the fabled “Northwest Passage” from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. The expedition was commanded by Captain John Franklin and consisted of 129 sailors in two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. To make sure they could survive the long Canadian winters, the ships were outfitted with oak and iron planking, were given both sails and steam engines to propel them, and carried enough food and other supplies to last three years. None of that did any good, though; within the first year of the expedition at least three crew members had died – their tombstones were discovered a few years later – and ultimately all the crew disappeared, as did the ships themselves. The show dealt with an effort mounted by the Canadian government and some private companies to trace what happened to the Franklin crews and see if they could discover the wreckages of one or both of the ships. The show’s narration, delivered by Richard Allinson, is quite blunt about just why finding out what happened to the Franklin crews has become a major issue for the Canadian government. “As global warming melts the ice, interest in extracting the Arctic's natural resources will likely grow,” the narrator explains. “These surveys will allow safer navigation here, in the years to come. These vessels host a diverse task force, led by the underwater archaeology team of Parks Canada.”

The 2014 expedition runs into some of the same problems that sank – literally and figuratively – Franklin’s crews, notably the rapidly shifting ice on the surface of the seas they’re traversing and the ultra-short time window afforded by the brief North Canadian summer before the ice across the sea becomes solid and impenetrable by ships. One high-tech gizmo they have is an unmanned submersible called the Arctic Explorer, a sort of large yellow torpedo which they can launch from either of their ships – but they can only use it when the surface ice is relatively absent because the ice could easily crush the craft to pieces if it comes in suddenly, which it does. The program runs on two parallel tracks, one telling the story of the Franklin expedition itself and one on the modern-day crews’ efforts to retrace it and find the wreckages of its ships. Among the clues they have to trace the Franklin crews’ stories are oral accounts from the Inuit, Canada’s indigenous people, including one tale that got repeated in The Times of London on October 23, 1854. It was a letter to the editor written by British explorer John Rae, who’d lived among the Inuit and had been told a grisly story of how an Inuit hunting party had discovered one of the boats from the Franklin ships. “The bodies of some 30 persons … were discovered,” Rae wrote. “Some were in a tent, others under the boat, which had been turned over to form a shelter. … From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and from the contents of the kettles, it’s evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means of prolonging existence.” This caused a major controversy among the British public; in a surprisingly racist comment from someone usually regarded today as a progressive, Charles Dickens wrote that he didn’t believe such grisly tales from “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” But in 1992 bones belonging to some of the Franklin crew members were discovered that had knife wounds in them consistent with the use of then-modern Western knives to cut the corpses into pieces for human consumption.

Ironically, despite the high-tech Arctic Explorer, the key clue that finally led the 2014 crew to discover the remains of the Erebus underwater came from an overflight with a helicopter. The flight crew found a U-shaped object that turned out to be a metal fitting used to support one of the ship’s cranes. With that clue, the 2014 crews were able to locate the underwater wreckage of the Erebus, and were able to tell which ship they had found by doing a high-tech comparison between the sonar images of the wreck and the surviving original plans for both ships, which were slightly different in shape. A postlude to the original program read, “In 2016, the Arctic Research Trust discovered the HMS Terror largely intact in Terror Bay. In 2018, Britain transferred ownership of the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus to Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust.” It’s an intriguing story, even though there’s also a bit of anticlimax to it that one of the most engrossing legends of the sea would have such a prosaic ending. It’s also ironic that the Franklin expedition occurred during an extended period of unusually cold weather even for the Canadian Arctic. Ice cores drilled from the area revealed that in the 1840’s that part of Canada was much colder than usual and the seas were frozen for far longer periods than the norm. So the Franklin crew had the bad luck to set sail across Canada in search of the Northwest Passage in historically awful times for such a journey – and even in 2014 the crews were literally racing against time to get the information they needed before the seasons changed and the sea froze over for the winter.

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, part 2: "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" (BBC, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 25) I put on KPBS for a couple of intriguing programs: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” the second of three episodes in a mini-series with the God-awful title Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution; and a bizarrely poetic quasi-documentary by filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon called King Coal, about growing up in West Virginia and the mythic importance of coal to the Appalachian region in general and West Virginia in particular. “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” was irksome to me for the sheer amount of what I call “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers and historians to claim that the person or people they’re writing about were the first in the world to do something even though plenty of other people were doing it before them. The basic thesis of this show was that disco was a force for social change particularly in the Black and Queer communities, and that before it Black women who wanted to “cross over” to the white audience had to sell themselves as sex kittens. The most blatant examples of first-itis in the program came from an art historian named Dr. Lisa Farrington, who argued that by changing their name from Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles to just Labelle in 1974, Patti LaBelle and her group (which actually broke up two years after the name change) established a fierce independence that no Black woman artist in pop music had ever achieved before. C’mon, Lisa, do the names “Billie Holiday,” “Abbey Lincoln” and “Nina Simone” mean anything to you? Under the new name, they recorded a song called “Lady Marmalade” in 1974 that became a number one hit for one week on the Billboard Hot 100.

It was a song about a prostitute that didn’t portray her as either a seductress or a victim, but simply as a young girl trying to make a living as best she could. Of course, that had been done before in New York in 1927 by Mae West in her play Sex – a word considered so risqué then that the New York Times didn’t consider it fit to print (the Times ads promoted “Mae West in that certain play”) – in which she played a prostitute. West was actually arrested for obscenity and sentenced to ten days in city jail (though she only served eight, and by special dispensation with the judge she was allowed to wear her normal silk underwear in jail instead of having to don the standard-issue stuff). In later years West noted the irony that she was in jail for playing a prostitute and most of the other women there were in jail for being prostitutes. Dr. Farrington made one good point about the image change – she showed videos of the group both in their Bluebelles incarnation (identically dressed in costumes obviously copied from The Supremes) and in their Labelle guise, dressed differently from each other in skin-tight sequined costumes that projected their sexuality. “Lady Marmalade”’s catch line was, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?,” which means, “Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?” – but Patti LaBelle herself said, “I didn’t know what it was about. I don’t know French and nobody, I swear this is God's truth, nobody at all told me what I'd just sung a song about.” (And “Lady Marmalade” was actually written by two white guys, one of whom was Bob Crewe, who co-wrote most of the Four Seasons’ biggest hits with fellow Four Season Bob Gaudio.) Labelle member Nona Hendryx seemed more aware of what “Lady Marmalade” was about when she said in an interview for this program, “It’s like a playwright, you know, someone describing something as opposed to judging it and in a way that – not celebratory, but in a way that was not downtrodden and horrible and that this is just yet another aspect of life.”

The attempt to make disco seem like a celebration of the revolutionary spirit runs headlong into the fact that the music itself was never (or almost never) anything more than a celebration of sheer hedonism – if you wanted to hear socially conscious pop music in the late 1970’s you listened to punk rock instead – though Dr. Farrington argues that this was a big part of its appeal. “Black women became stars with huge LGBTQ followings,” Dr. Farrington said. “The Black disco diva was a breakthrough persona, and this means everything to Black women because the minute you see yourself in a raised position, you know, as a world-class artist that people would pay a fortune to buy a ticket, you could fill up Madison Square Garden, this kind of thing, it opens possibilities.” As if no Black women before disco had become major stars, including major stars with major Queer followings? John Hammond, who discovered Billie Holiday (and many others, including Aretha Franklin, who achieved the kind of mega-success with white audiences Dr. Farrington is attributing to the disco queens and did it at least a decade before disco), said in his autobiography that he was aware of the following Billie Holiday had among Gay men – not as big as the following for Judy Garland, but still a major part of her audience.

“Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” tells the horrific story of Candi Staton, a Black woman singer who was opening for Ray Charles in Las Vegas. One night, after her set, she decided she wanted to sit in the audience and watch Ray Charles work – and her then-husband literally went berserk when he couldn’t find her. “My suite was way up on the 20th-something floor, and he pushed me,” she recalled. “He was pushing me all the way through the lobby to the elevator, and then we get to the floor. He said, ‘I'm gonna kill you tonight. I tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna throw you off the balcony." 20-something floors. He picked me up, and [was] holding me over the banister like this, and I'm like, ‘This man is gonna kill me tonight. How in the world am I gonna get out of this one?’ I said, "You know you're in this hotel, and it's owned by the Mafia. This is Las Vegas. … How are you gonna feel with my body splattered at the bottom and my name is on the marquee? You won't make it out of Vegas.’ He brought me back in, and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna shoot you.’ I was so tired, I just laid down on the bed. I said, ‘O.K. Shoot me.’ I went to sleep. He had the gun like this. I said, ‘Just shoot me. I won't know it. I just – forget it.’” Staton said her near-experience with death at the hands of a psychotic husband was the inspiration for her star-making disco hit, “Young Hearts Run Free.”

Disco created a new generation of Black women singing stars, including Thelma Houston (who credited her star-making hit, “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” to Suzanne DePasse, who’d become head of artists and repertoire for Motown Records and thought that song, a hit for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, could be even more popular sung by a woman) and Gloria Gaynor (whose masterpiece, “I Will Survive,” was originally relegated to the “B”-side of her single “Substitute” until she took control of her own promotion, had test pressings of “I Will Survive” made up and gave them to DJ’s at discos until the play in discos made the song a hit). Then there was the all-time disco queen, Donna Summer, a fascinating singer whose breakthrough story isn’t told here. She was living in Munich, Germany studying to be an opera singer when she got a call from producer Giorgio Moroder, who wanted an opera-quality voice for a song he had in mind called “Love to Love You Baby.” The “song” consisted of a long series of orgasmic moans – the title was also the entirety of the lyric – and Summer took the gig because she didn’t take it seriously. She was so convinced the basic concept was stupid she made the record, got paid, and thought nobody would ever hear it and she could make a little money to pay her voice teachers. Instead the U.S. rights were picked up by Neil Bogart for his label, Casablanca Records (a name he chose because the Casablanca film had starred his namesake, Humphrey Bogart, though Neil’s birth name was actually “Bogatz”). His wife, Joyce Bogart-Trabulus, became Donna Summer’s manager and had “Love to Love You Baby” re-edited so it was 17 minutes long. Neil Bogart bought half-hour blocks of time on various radio stations and used them to play the full-length version of “Love to Love You Baby,” with the result that the radio stations who’d played it only because Bogart was forcing them to had to deal with listeners demanding that they keep playing the song even after Bogart’s time slots ended.

The other major talent profiled here was Sylvester, whom I remember vividly. He was actually a drag queen who got his start in the late 1960’s with a troupe called the Cockettes – I remember seeing them once, though by then he had already left – and I did see him as opening act for David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour (or at least the San Francisco performance at Winterland on October 28, 1972). Between his Cockettes days and his emergence as a disco diva in the late 1970’s Sylvester’s act was basically Ike and Tina Turner – he even had three hot-pantsed drag queens as his Ikettes – and I remember attending that show in the company of several friends of mine, one of whom was visibly nervous about seeing a supposedly Gay rock star like David Bowie. I remember asking him midway through Sylvester’s third song how he liked it, and he said, “She’s O.K.” I said, “You realize that’s a guy up there?” – and his jaw dropped. The producers of this show, Grace Chapman and Louise Lockwood, were so determined to make their disco = revolution point no matter what that they showed a photo of Sylvester, in full drag, with San Francisco’s legendary Gay political leader, Harvey Milk. In fact, Milk’s favorite form of music was opera – in his early days as a super-closeted New York stockbroker before he moved to San Francisco, he and his then-partner Scott Smith had been season ticket holders at the Met – and Randy Shilts’s biography describes how many of Milk’s younger volunteers were nonplussed when he’d bring opera cassettes into his office and play them into the wee hours. Of course the show couldn’t help but mention the rise of Studio 54, the infamous New York disco built on drugs (there was an animated neon drawing of a coke spoon on the wall), quick on-premises sex and an ultra-exclusive policy in which the co-owner, Steve Rubell, decided on the spur of the moment whether or not you qualified for admittance. The show ended with the popularity of Saturday Night Fever and how both the movie and the successful soundtrack LP mainstreamed disco but also took it away from its Black and Queer roots by making the white, (presumably) straight John Travolta the icon of disco and its culture.

King Coal (Drexler Films, Cottage M, Fishbowl Films, Requisite Media, 2023)

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

After “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” KPBS showed a P.O.V. (as in “Point of View,” a long-running series of independently made documentaries) program called King Coal, essentially an autobiographical meditation on the social, political, economic, psychological and even spiritual power of coal. The film’s director, co-producer and co-writer was Elaine McMillion-Sheldon, and instead of a straightforward presentation of the history of coal mining in general and its importance to the Appalachians – which range from Newfoundland in Canada to Alabama, but are mainly concentrated in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and McMillion-Sheldon’s home state, West Virginia – in particular. It’s a fascinating program but also an odd one that cuts back and forth between scenes of a teenage girl – I wasn’t sure whether these were actual home movies of McMillion-Shelton as a girl or re-enactments with a modern-day teen actress playing her in scenes re-creating her childhood – and more standard documentary footage. The discovery of coal in West Virginia is usually attributed to British explorer John Peter Salley – who’s such a legendary figure in West Virginia history he’s referred to simply as “John” in the documentary. In 1742 he was exploring the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia when he came upon a river, then known as the “New River” (even though, according to this film, it’s the second oldest river in the world), and noticed an outcropping of coal. He renamed it “Coal River” (though today it’s called the Kanawha) and it became the centerpiece of West Virginia’s coal economy.

Much of the film consists of McMillion-Sheldon’s interviews with veteran miners who remember the glory days of the region in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when coal from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and other states in the Appalachian and Allegheny regions was being shipped out steadily to power America’s industrial revolution. Just about all the major products of the industrial age were ultimately manufactured with the energy derived from coal. Coal fired the great steel mills that produced the girders that built the skyscrapers and the metal that became the raw material from which cars were made. Coal acquired such a quasi-mystical image that it was referred to as “King Coal,” and if you said anything bad about coal – either the pollution it caused or the sheer toll it took, both short- and long-term, on the health and welfare of the people who mined it – you were socially ostracized. Among the weirder segments (at least to a life-long Californian who’s never lived in coal country) were a high-school beauty contest to crown a teenage girl as “Queen of Coal” (one contestant does a spectacular dance number she says is a tribute to those who have lost their lives in the mines), an odd recitation in which a former coal miner leads a high-school class in a recitation of the lyrics to Merle Travis’s song “Sixteen Tons” (including the song’s most cynical line, recalled by Travis as something his coal-miner father had often said: “Tell St. Peter I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store”), and a rather bedraggled procession by members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place over five days in August and September 1921 and involved an attempt by mine owners in Logan and Mingo Counties in West Virginia to keep the UMWA from organizing their mines. The mine owners hired a private security firm called Baldwin-Felts to keep out the union and summarily fired any miners who joined the UMW. An historical marker on the site of the Blair Mountain catastrophe sums up the story: “BATTLE OF BLAIR MT. In August of 1921, 7000 striking miners led by Bill Blizzard met at Marmet for a march on Logan to organize the southern coalfields for the UMWA. Reaching Blair Mt. on August 31, they were repelled by deputies and mine guards, under Sheriff Don Chafin, waiting in fortified positions. The five-day battle ended with the arrival of U.S. Army and Air Corps. UMWA organizing efforts in southern WV were halted until 1933.” Eventually the Great Depression, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932 and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 took the federal government (at least temporarily) out of the union-busting business, and the local UMWA officials pointed out (correctly) that their struggle led to the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and successful struggles to form unions in the auto, rubber, textile and steel industries as well. Then there’s the sad story of an older Black woman who recalls how her grandfather was driven from the coal mines by an accident that occurred just six months before his 20th anniversary, which would have qualified him for a pension. “And so he just just left the mines, and there was, you know, no other options for him, as far as getting a retirement,” she said. “There was no one out there to help him fight for it. It's sad to say the union didn't fight for Black miners like they did white miners.”

King Coal has an elegiac tone, as the growing awareness of coal’s environmental costs led to a decrease in demand for its use and sapped much of the coal region’s economic importance. There’s a fascinating postscript to this program in which the locals in a West Virginia town stage a mock “funeral” for King Coal, featuring a Black woman who turns in a stunning performance of a song heralding and mourning the death of King Coal. It was ironic that I watched this right after an MS-NBC interview conducted by Stephanie Ruehl at a political conference in Aspen, Colorado with U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (I-West Virginia), the man who along with fellow Senator Krysten Sinema (I-Arizona) hamstrung much of President Biden’s agenda. Watching King Coal, Manchin’s quirky politics made more sense – especially since, before he left the Democratic Party, he was the one Democrat left in statewide office in West Virginia, which went from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican as the rise in environmental concern among national Democrats led them to policies promoting renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels, including coal. Manchin had won his first election to the U.S. Senate largely from a TV spot in which he took the text of a legislative bill to create a “green economy,” tied it to a tree, took a rifle and literally shot at the bill, blasting it to smithereens. Those of us in relatively liberal states like modern-day California make blithe assertions that the workers of West Virginia could be retrained for jobs in more environmentally benign energy sectors – but the reality Elaine McMillion-Sheldon shows us in King Coal is that the people in West Virginia and other Appalachian states derive so much of their identity, both as individuals and as a culture, from coal that getting them out of the coal business is virtually impossible.

The Bad Orphan (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 23) I watched a trifecta of movies on TV, two of them from Lifetime and one from Turner Classic Movies. The Lifetime ones were the one I’d skipped the night before, The Bad Orphan, and a new “premiere” called Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story. The promos for The Bad Orphan had made it look like a knockoff of The Bad Seed: long-term interracial couple, Black architect Karl Long (Mark Taylor) and his white wife, realtor Jessica Long (Betsy Brandt, top-billed) already have a teenage daughter, Rhiannon, called “Rhee” for short (Eve Edwards, who shows the right degree of racial ambiguity we can believe her as the offspring of a mixed-race couple). But they want another child, and since they either won’t or can’t have another au naturel they’ve decided to adopt. Only their attempts to adopt a baby keep falling through, so in desperation they take on an eight-year-old girl, Gabrielle “Gabby” Sadler (Chloe Coco Chapman), despite the warning from the adoption agency that the child has “special needs.” We’ve already seen a typical Lifetime prologue in which Gabby has set fire to the home of her previous foster parents – though the male half of the couple was drunk at the time and the authorities rule he probably started the fire by accident. When Gabby shows up she’s hostile from the get-go to both her adoptive parents and Rhiannon. She rips down all the posters from Rhiannon’s bedroom wall and puts them up in her own room, and even steals Rhiannon’s track trophies and displays them as her own. She also looks oddly, shall we say, well-developed for an eight-year-old, and when she’s taken to school the authorities are perplexed by how much she already knows even though she’s supposedly never been to school before.

Gabby’s official origin story was that she was born in Portugal to a U.S. couple, but her mom decided to abandon her dad and pair up with a Portuguese man, who later died in a major earthquake that conveniently destroyed all records of Gabby’s previous existence. Gabby was shipped off to her grandmother June (Maureen Rooney), but June soon got age-related dementia and had to be packed off to a nursing home, leaving Gabby to the untender mercies of the foster-care system. Actually, it soon dawns both to Gabby’s adoptive parents and to us that Gabby is quite a bit older than she’s said: we’re later told she’s really 15 and at one point she had a friend forge a Portuguese birth certificate for her, giving her age as eight. Alas, Gabby so torments Jessica in particular that in sheer desperation Jessica ties her up and sticks her in a kitchen cabinet – with the result that she’s adjudged guilty of child abuse and sent to a mental institution, while Karl, Rhiannon and Gabby stay together and settle into an uneasy piece. There’s a final close-up showing Gabby wearing one of Rhiannon’s barrettes in her hair, indicating a) she’s still up to her no-good ways and b) there’s almost certainly going to be a sequel to this, just as there was to Lifetime’s rancid 2018 remake of The Bad Seed (in which the “bad seed”’s dad, played by Rob Lowe, who also directed, tries to kill her once he realizes she’s a psycho but is killed himself before he can do so) to which this one owed a lot more than it did to Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film of The Bad Seed. The director is Michelle Ouelett, a name I’ve seen in fair-to-good Lifetime movies before, and the writer, Doris Egan, does a workmanlike job.

If there’s a saving grace to this film, it’s in the remarkable performance of Chloe Coco Chapman in the title role. There’s an odd ambiguity about her in that the link to her on imdb.com goes to another Chloe Chapman altogether, a producer and director known for Indecent Proposal (2015), Noisey (2016) and No Passport Required (2018). The only actress named “Chloe Chapman” listed on imdb.com made just one film, a horror short called Spotlight (2017). I had to do an online search and found a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/movies/2024/06/14/lifetime-chloe-coco-chapman-betsy-brandt-bad-orphan/stories/202406200001) article on the real Chloe Coco Chapman, a 17-year-old “little person” who attends Keystone High School in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. She gave an interview with the Post-Gazette in which she talked excitedly about how thrilled she was to be making her acting debut in The Bad Orphan. “It’s insane!” she exulted. “I never thought that my first anything would be this big or with Lifetime. I was overwhelmingly excited when my mom told me about this role. I think I ran around my house with excitement!” She studied acting at Barbizon PA, a school with dual locations in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Chapman told the Post-Gazette, “I’ve always wanted to be a role model to other people. It’s awesome I get to be in a movie and show other little people ... and people with disabilities in general that they can be in movies and do stuff they didn’t think they could do.” Just how making a movie in which she plays a psycho killer who poses as an eight-year-old is going to advance the cause of rights for people with disabilities in general and little people in particular isn’t clear to me, but Chapman triumphs in the role and it’ll be interesting to see where her career goes from here.

Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story (Lifetime, 2024)

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

After The Bad Orphan Lifetime showed another really quirky movie with a standout performance in the title role: Devil on Campus: The Larry Ray Story. It’s based, at least more or less, on a true story: an ex-convict named Larry Ray (Billy Zane) gets released from prison and moves into Sarah Lawrence College with his daughter Talia and her roommates. Once there, he settles in and establishes himself as a man with an almost Svengali-like influence over his daughter and her friends. When a young man in Larry’s circle named Daniel Levin (Mike Merry) admits to Larry that he thinks he might be Gay, Larry responds by ordering Daniel to have sex with one of the girls in his entourage, Isabella, while Larry and everyone else in the commune watches. Larry exerts a power over his charges comparable to that of a religious cult leader, and according to a story about him in Vanity Fair magazine’s “The Cut” section from April 2019 (https://www.thecut.com/article/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence-students.html), the real-life Larry Ray was even more like a cult leader than the one depicted in this film, directed by Elisabeth Röhm (primarily known as an actress who did four years as an assistant D.A. on the original Law and Order from 2001 to 2005 and made her directorial debut there) and written by Waneta Storms. The real Larry Ray enrolled his charges in a cult-like pop-psychology program he called “Q4P” (which stood for “Quest for Potential”) and attempted to mind-control them by, among other things, repeatedly playing the song “Baba O’Riley” by The Who at top volume. The song isn’t in the movie, I’m guessing because Pete Townshend refused to license the rights. In any event, it’s an ironic song for the context because the lyrics are a satire of cults in general. It seems odd that Larry, who kept his people in a state of constant psychological dependence largely by having them continually beg him for “forgiveness” for various personal, psychological or financial slights, would embrace as part of his mind-control strategy a song with the line, “I don’t need to be forgiven.”

Like the real Larry Ray, the one in the movie pulls all the classic cult-leader strategies to keep his devotées in line. He isolates them geographically, moving them from the Sarah Lawrence dorms first to a New York apartment – where he keeps having run-ins with the landlord, who shows up at the most inopportune moments asking for back rent – and then to a farm in North Carolina where he says he needs them to do unpaid construction work so his supposedly evil mother can’t take the farm away from his stepfather. Larry also keeps his cult members isolated from their families, even when they get hospitalized for attempting suicide on his watch. In one chilling scene that actually happened, grieving parents are told they’re not allowed to see their son unless Larry is also present. Another strategy Larry pulls on his cult victims is debt peonage: he tells them that they’ve racked up six-figure debts to him for items they’ve allegedly stolen or destroyed, including a $300,000 back hoe his principal victim, Claudia Drury (Tedra Rogers), supposedly wrecked when she left a wheelbarrow in its path in North Carolina. (It didn’t look all that wrecked on screen.) The parents of one of Larry’s victims even had to sell their home to cover all the money their son was giving to Larry in the guise of “repayment,” and when they went to see Larry’s apartment so they could check for themselves the extent of the “damage” they were being told to pay for, Larry refused to let them in. Larry also makes his charges keep journals, and of course he reads them all to get even more information he can use to manipulate them. And like the real-life cult leader Werner Erhard of EST, Larry tells his people there’s no such thing as an “accident”: every time someone thinks they’ve “accidentally” done something, it’s really a sign of their own mental disturbance that caused them to lash out at an object and then claim it was an “accident.”

In one particularly nasty scene, Larry psychologically manipulates Claudia into a bizarre sequence of “confessions,” including trying to murder Larry and his daughter Talia by a long-term series of poisonings, while another cult member records it on her cell phone so Larry can threaten to give it to the police in case Claudia ever tries to report him. He also concocts a way of making money off Claudia; when she writes in her journal that she had a one-night sexual encounter with someone who wanted to dominate her and she unexpectedly enjoyed it, Larry tells Claudia she should work as a BDSM escort and turn over the money to him to pay her “debt” for the “wrecked” back hoe. This doesn’t work out quite the way Larry expected it to: one of her Johns, a man named “David,” insists on being the sub in their scenes together. He explains that he runs a company with over 135 employees and has to be in command at work, so when he plays he likes to be dominated for a change – a pattern I’ve also heard from real-life BDSM practitioners. Eventually he falls genuinely in love with Claudia and is ready to leave his wife and family for her – a danger not only to him and Claudia but to Larry as well. Larry tells Claudia to stop seeing David, but ultimately (at least in the movie) David shelters Claudia and that allows the FBI agents who are investigating Larry to catch up with her. Larry’s downfall occurs thanks to Vanity Fair reporters Ezra Marcus and James T. Walsh, who do a profile on him first published in April 2019 that alerts the FBI to his activities. Larry had also previously interfaced with the FBI when he claimed to have information about a pump-and-dump stock scandal involving a Mafia capo, and the FBI first enlisted him as an informant – they even paid over $10,000 to install security devices in his home – before they realized Larry was only posing as an informant to cover up his own involvement in the scheme.

When he was arrested and convicted – the film begins with his release from the prison sentence he received – he blamed then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and formed paranoid obsessions with both of them that are very much a part of this movie. (He was right about Giuliani and Kerik. Thanks to their associations with former President Donald Trump, Giuliani has lost his law licenses and been forced to declare bankruptcy, while Kerik was convicted of income-tax evasion and then pardoned by Trump in the last days of his first term.) Once again, what makes Devil on Campus worth watching is a first-rate lead performance by the actor playing the principal villain. I’ve had a curious relationship with Billy Zane ever since I saw the James Cameron Titanic in 1997; he was playing the asshole fiancé of the Kate Winslet character, but he also seemed so much sexier than Leonardo di Caprio that I had the feeling Winslet’s character was definitely trading down. In fact, the day after my husband Charles and I watched Titanic, I bought a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom mainly so I could see Billy Zane play a good guy! I’d pretty much lost contact with him after that, and not surprisingly Zane has got older and seedier since those credits of nearly three decades ago, but he’s fully in command of his role. Not only does he strikingly resemble the photos of the real Larry Ray as published in Vanity Fair, he strikes just the right combination of surface folksiness and underlying depravity (including his tortures of various members of his entourage that stop just short of murder) to make us believe in the character and the role.

The Red Lily (MGM, 1924)

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

My husband Charles came home from work in time to join me for the third movie on my agenda last night: The Red Lily, a 1924 melodrama from MGM directed and written by Fred Niblo (he’s credited with the original story and Bess Meredyth with the screenplay) and co-starring Enid Bennett (his wife; they married in 1918 and stayed together until his death in 1948) and Ramon Novarro. Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart made a big deal of the fact that of all the major studios, MGM had the reputation for being the most wholesome, whereas this is a dark, almost noir movie that explores crime and sex work. In fact MGM’s reputation as the most wholesome of the major studios only began after production chief Irving Thalberg’s death in September 1936. Thalberg had wanted to build a reputation of MGM as a source for sophisticated stories that dealt more or less honestly with human relationships, including human sexuality, and between the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era from 1930 to 1934 and Thalberg’s tenure as studio head, MGM green-lighted some pretty edgy melodramas that were far from Louis B. Mayer’s later insistence on wholesomeness: A Free Soul, The Easiest Way, Five and Ten and blockbuster hits like Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight. Ironically, though The Red Lily has some pretty edgy sexual content by 1924 standards, its TV rating is “G.” The Red Lily begins in a small town in Brittany, France in which the poor cobbler’s daughter, Marise La Noue (Enid Bennett), is in love with a rich boy, Jean Leonnec (Ramon Novarro), son of the town’s mayor (Frank Currier). The film opens with a scene of them riding through town in a horse-drawn carriage; they cross a set of train tracks but they get over them harmlessly just before a train comes speeding through. (The gag is they were so much into each other they never noticed the train; it reminded me of a favorite Buster Keaton gag, used in several films, in which the oblivious protagonists narrowly miss being run down by a train – only to be hit by another train going the opposite direction on an adjoining track.)

Alas, catastrophe strikes when Marise’s father suddenly dies of a heart attack, and since she isn’t yet of age she’s shipped off to live with her scumbag relatives, including a drunken husband who wants to whip Marise just for his sick set of kicks. She runs away and Jean agrees to help her flee with him to Paris, where he plans to marry her as soon as they’re old enough, only in the meantime Jean’s father discovers that his home safe has been rifled and his money stolen. Convinced that Jean did it to finance his escape, the mayor swears out an arrest warrant against him and two cops take him into custody after he gets off the train in Paris and take him back to Brittany – only he escapes when the cops get so wrapped up in a card game they’re playing with each other, they allow him to flee. Marise sits at the train station in Paris waiting for Jean to arrive … and waiting … and waiting. Ultimately Jean returns to the train station, but in yet another gag the makers of The Red Lily borrowed from Buster Keaton they just keep missing each other. Meanwhile, back in Brittany, the mayor discovers that it was another man who stole from his safe and Jean is innocent after all – but there’s no way to communicate that to him. Both Jean and Marise end up mixed up in the Paris underworld in general and one member of it, Bo-Bo (Wallace Beery), in particular. Bo-Bo encounters Marise when she’s sitting on the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide, and he’s going to steal her purse. Then he thinks better of it when he opens it and sees she only has three small coins, only he has another change of heart and steals the coins before replacing the purse. Later, encountering Jean while he’s also contemplating suicide via the Seine, Bo-Bo talks him out of it by telling him there are thousands of women in Paris available for the taking. Bo-Bo also talks Jean into a real-life safecracking job; Bo-Bo escapes but Jean is sentenced to a year in prison. When he gets out Bo-Bo is there to meet him and says, “Just one year in prison? I’ve done 10!”

The two do a lot of hanging out at a sleazy café owned by Madame Poussot (Milla Davenport), and for the scenes in the café composer H. Scott Salinas, who added a new score for this film in 2005, makes his music sound deliberately scratchy like a 1924 recording. Poussot’s café has a regular hooker, Nana (Rosemary Theby, who was W. C. Fields’ leading lady in his hilarious 1933 Mack Sennett short The Fatal Glass of Beer), and Madame Poussot also hires Marise to be a B-girl. (The online information about this movie says Marise ends up as a prostitute, and “The Red Lily” is her nom de whore, but that’s not mentioned in the film itself.) On the run from the cops (again) after having assaulted a uniformed officer, Jean crashes into Marise’s apartment. At first he doesn’t recognize her, but when he realizes what she’s become he’s so disgusted he literally slams her to the floor, cutting her cheek. The cops trace Jean to Marise’s apartment via a trail of his blood – he was wounded in a gun battle with them – but she hides him out and tells the police that was her own blood. Eventually he’s arrested and serves two years, but the final scene shows them back together in the little town in Brittany, still in that horse-drawn carriage and still barely missing being run over by a train they’re blissfully aware of – though the final shot shows Bo-Bo sitting in the tailgate of their carriage, carrying a bird in a cage and registering heavy-duty disgust at being their third wheel.

If nothing else, The Red Lily has shot my estimation of Fred Niblo up several notches. I’d always thought of him as a hack, perpetually enlisted to take over troubled projects that had come a-cropper under other directors (he took over Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand from George Fitzmaurice – much to Valentino’s disgust – and the blockbuster silent Ben-Hur, also with Novarro, from Charles Brabin), but here, in a personal project he both wrote and directed (and in which his wife was the female lead), he shines. Though it’s more a romantic melodrama than a crime story, The Red Lily could be considered a film noir 20 years early, not only in the sordid nature of the story but Victor Milner’s powerful chiaroscuro images. It occurred to me that in The Red Lily Niblo might have consciously been trying to make an American version of the so-called “street films” that were coming out of Germany in the mid-1920’s about the urban poor and their sordid struggles to stay alive. (The most famous “street film” was G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street from 1925, mainly because the second female lead was the young Greta Garbo, in her last European film and her last made anywhere other than at MGM.) It also occurred to me that Niblo was probably influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), also about an innocent country girl who flees to Paris and is forced to sell herself, both physically and psychologically, to make her way in the big bad city. The two films even have virtually the same ending, though in A Woman of Paris the heroine makes her way back to her country town alone because her original boyfriend has committed suicide in the meantime. The Red Lily is an amazing movie, a welcome rediscovery from the silent vaults and a highly sophisticated movie in its own right that ratchets up my respect not only for its director but also its female star. I’d seen Enid Bennett before, mainly as the leading lady in the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood (1922), but in The Red Lily her director/husband puts her through her paces and gets a marvelously nuanced performance out of her. It’s a much more challenging role than Maid Marian was, and like Niblo she rises to the challenges effectively.

Danger in the Dorm (Lifetime Films, Lifetime Television, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 22) I watched a rerun of the Lifetime “premiere” from the week before: Danger in the Dorm, a workmanlike tale of, well, danger facing a group of college students at the relatively new (established 1967) Brighton University in the Poconos, which I’d always thought were in upstate New York but are actually in Pennsylvania. The central characters are actually Kathleen Roberts (Clara Alexandrova) and her domineering mother Joanne (Bethnney Frankel, top-billed). Kathleen has just started her freshman (freshperson?) year at Brighton and is looking forward to getting out from under the iron grip of her mother, who brings new meaning to the term “overprotective.” Mom has been especially suspicious of Kathleen because one day she came home from work unexpectedly early and found Kathleen messing around with a boy and apparently preparing for sex, though we get the impression mom’s arrival put the kibosh on the proceedings before they ever got to the actual down ‘n’ dirty. We also get the impression that Kathleen owes her existence to her mom having similarly played fast ‘n’ loose with her virginity when she was Kathleen’s age. She had a one-night stand with a guy who knocked her up and went on his way, forcing her to abandon her lofty career ambitions and take whatever sorts of jobs she could to raise Kathleen as a single parent. (We’re not told this in so many words by writers Benjamin Anderson and Ramona Barckert, but they certainly hint at it strongly enough and it’s the only reason we can think of for why Joanne is so determined that Kathleen not have sex and why Kathleen’s dad isn’t in the picture.)

Kathleen has a long-time best friend, Becky Swafford (Grace Vukovic), who signed up for Brighton to be with Kathleen, be her dorm roommate and even enrolled in all Kathleen’s classes, but within a few days of the start of the school term Kathleen and Becky have an argument because Becky insists that Kathleen’s mother was right that she should wait to have sex. As a result Kathleen asks for a single room in the dorm and Becky drops out of all the classes she and Kathleen were enrolled in together. Then Becky gets stabbed to death and the police immediately suspect Kathleen. Kathleen’s alibi was she was doing some late-night studying at the school library with Wade (Jason Fernandes), but Wade slipped out of the library and then slipped back in, so Kathleen can’t be sure that Wade didn’t kill Becky. The police assign an African-American detective named Jessica Harken (Lily Yawson) to the case, and later another woman student, Tammy Bennett (Marlowe Zimmerman), gets assaulted by being clubbed from behind with a brick. The school’s dean, Matt Carrigan (Milo Shandell), announces that any student who wishes to drop out will be allowed to do so without penalty and will be readmitted the following semester, and Joanne Strongly urges Kathleen to take that option, but at the last minute Kathleen decides to stay in school and do her own investigation into Becky’s murder and Tammy’s assault. The finger of suspicion points first at Conor Miller (Jeffrey Pal, who looks Asian despite his character’s bland Anglo last name), who hassled Becky at a frat party before she was killed, but from the moment I watched that scene I thought, “Red herring!,” and I was right.

When Detective Harken tries to interrogate Kathleen at the school cafeteria, mom Joanne comes on the scene, goes ballistic and insists that Kathleen not to speak to the police without an attorney present. Joanne even hires a lawyer and gives Kathleen his business card, with instructions to call him in case the cops try to question her again. About half an hour before the end, the cops actually arrest another suspect at a nearby school and everybody breathes a sigh of relief. This happens after an opening flash-forward in which we see the new attack the guy got popped for, though when Detective Harken questions him, he insists that he clubbed Tammy with a steel pipe instead of a brick. She angrily dismisses him as a copycat and reopens the case. Eventually the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Patrick (Matthew Nelson-Mahood), the proverbial nice guy with a seeming heart of gold even though he’s also something of a “bad boy” who’s learned to make fake ID’s and fake pass cards to get into and out of electronically locked doors on campus. Patrick is what’s come to be called an “incel” (short for “involuntarily celibate”), a straight guy who somehow can’t get women to have sex with him and responds with a murderous rage against them. (I remember joking to a friend after an “incel” went on a murder spree in Santa Barbara that it was a pity that people can’t change their sexual orientation voluntarily, since though they may have struck out with women, some of the “incels” I’ve seen photos of looked like they could do well in a Gay bar.)

It took me about an hour and a half into this two-hour (including commercials) film to guess that Patrick would turn out to be the killer, though Kathleen doesn’t realize it until she sees him carrying Becky’s teddy bear around with him. They’re in the school’s computer room, where Patrick is making Kathleen a fake ID so she can get into bars (he made it with her real name but advanced her age to 23). Patrick has his laptop with him but Kathleen gets on one of the school’s own computers, which are old enough they still have CRT monitors, and uses it to send an e-mail to Detective Harken to get her to send a squad to arrest him. Danger in the Dorm is an unusual Lifetime movie in one respect: Lifetime produced it itself instead of buying it from a production company like Hybrid, Johnson Production Group or Reel One Entertainment. The director is Robin Hays (a woman), who has seven previous directorial credits on imdb.com plus two more “in production,” including another Lifetime thriller called Amish Affair that’s already far enough along Lifetime ran a promo for it for July 6. She’s got the requisite flair for suspense and getting Gothic atmosphere even out of plain, ordinary modern architecture, but as is so often the case with Lifetime directors she’s hamstrung by a pretty formulaic and predictable script. The parts of Danger in the Dorm that rang truest for me were the scenes between Kathleen and her mother Joanne, whose combination of outward domination and below-the-surface caring reminded me all too vividly of my own mother! Danger in the Dorm was based on a story by true-crime writer Ann Rule, though it’s unclear whether this was supposed to be fact-based or Rule just wrote a work of fiction this time.

The Locket (RKO, 1946)

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

After Danger in the Dorm I broke off watching Lifetime’s next production – something called The Bad Orphan that seemed like too much of a ripoff of The Bad Seed – and instead turned the TV back on at 9:15 p.m. for a Turner Classic Movies showing on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program of the 1946 film The Locket. The Locket was based on a real-life incident in the childhood of writer Norma Barzman, in which one of her best friends was the daughter of the housekeeper of the well-to-do George Peabody Gardner and his sister Belle. The housekeeper’s daughter was accused of stealing a valuable locket belonging to George’s daughter, the Gardners fired the housekeeper, and the daughter grew up to be a troubled young woman, a kleptomaniac and a victim of clinical depression. Barzman wrote a screen treatment of this story called What Nancy Wanted, and actor Hume Cronyn bought the rights intending it as a vehicle for his wife, Jessica Tandy. Then he sold it to RKO, where the project was taken over by executive producer Jack J. Gross (who crossed swords with Val Lewton over his desire to put “name” horror stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi into Lewton’s films), who assigned Bert Granet to produce and Sheridan Gibney to rewrite Barzman’s script (though apparently the only change Gibney made was to move the World War II service of two of the characters from the U.S. to Britain).

As director Granet borrowed John Brahm from 20th Century-Fox; Brahm was essentially Fritz Lang Lite, though he certainly knew his way around Gothic horror and had proven it with back-to-back masterpieces at Fox, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). He threw his full armamentarium of tricky camera effects and chiaroscuro lighting into The Locket, and Nicholas Musuraca, one of the two master noir cameramen at RKO (Harry Wild, who shot Murder, My Sweet, was the other), was the cinematographer. The main problem with The Locket is that all the visual stylistics overwhelm the relatively simple story, though it’s told in an unusual structure that involves a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It begins on the eve of the wedding of Nancy Patton (Laraine Day, quite good in a role both Olivia de Havilland and her sister Joan Fontaine wanted, though maybe they asked for too much money for Bert Granet’s budget) to John Willis (Gene Raymond, billed fourth and making his return to the screen following service in World War II). Willis has an unexpected visitor at the pre-wedding party, who insists on speaking to him alone. The visitor is Dr. Harry Blair (Brian Aherne, adopting the imperious gentlemanliness of Herbert Marshall), who explains that he was Nancy’s previous husband for five years until she had him fraudulently committed to a mental institution, following which she divorced him (a glitch in the plot because you can’t divorce someone who’s been adjudged insane) and went on her merry way until she hooked up with John.

Blair tells John that he was visited in turn by painter Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum, billed third; he was an RKO contract player who’d achieved overnight stardom and an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in the war film The Story of G.I. Joe, made on loanout to Lester Cowan and United Artists; once RKO got him back they weren’t sure what to do with him, though film noir would turn out to be his niche once they cast him in Out of the Past a year later). Norman was teaching art classes in the middle of the Depression – he didn’t want to waste his time teaching when he could be doing, but he needed the money. Nancy got dragged to one of his classes by a fellow student, and she brought along a sketch pad that impressed Norman with her work. Norman asked her for a date and ultimately fell in love with her and proposed, only at a reception given for aspiring young artists by critic and collector Drew Bonner (Ricardo Cortez), a valuable jeweled bracelet owned by Bonner’s wheelchair-using wife (Fay Helm) disappears during the evening and Norman later discovers it in Nancy’s bag. Then, at a later party, Bonner is mysteriously murdered; another man is arrested, convicted and set to be executed for the crime, but the night before the execution Norman goes to Dr. Blair’s office and tells him the story of his affair with Nancy as a flashback within a flashback. The flashback within the flashback within the flashback is told by Nancy herself and relates to events in her childhood (in which she’s played by Sharyn Moffet). She was the daughter of the housekeeper for grande dame Mrs. Willis (Katherine Emery), whose daughter Karen (Gloria Donovan) gave Nancy a diamond-studded locket as a present, only Karen’s mom forced Nancy to give back the locket and later accused Nancy of stealing it, physically attacked Nancy and fired Nancy’s mom (rendering them homeless as well) over the incident even though the locket later turned up in the folds of Karen’s dress.

At the finish of Norman’s flashback narration, and after the newspapers have already announced the execution of the man who was convicted of Bonner’s murder, Norman throws himself out the window of Dr. Blair’s office several stories up in a high-rise, killing himself. The film then returns to the present, on the wedding day of John and Nancy, and Dr. Blair watches the two of them together and comments sardonically that John is going to make the very same mistakes all the previous men in Nancy’s life have made, and she’s going to ruin him. That no doubt is where a modern-day filmmaker, not hamstrung by Production Code limitations, would have ended it, but the Code decreed that Nancy must pay for her sins. This happens when Nancy finally realizes, as her mother-in-law to-be pins on her the very same locket Nancy and Karen had fought over lo those many years ago, that she is the same woman who tormented her unjustly and set in motion all her mental issues. She collapses as her previous life flashes before her eyes as she walks to the altar, and Dr. Blair painstakingly explains to John that Nancy’s real problem is that she’s never been loved, but if John will stand behind her she can be cured. TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller said after the movie that The Locket was one of at least three films that year – the others were Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Lewis Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers – which dealt with repressed memories coming back to life and haunting the characters in the present. The Locket was made at the height of Sigmund Freud’s influence over Hollywood and, like a lot of other films of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (up to and including Rebel Without a Cause), it seems to be a parable-like illustration of Freud’s basic theories on how the human psyche develops and how sexual repression plays a part in that. But the film The Locket most reminded of is one Hitchcock made almost two decades later, Marnie, which is also about a woman who becomes a kleptomaniac because she was abused as a child – and both films are flawed but The Locket, for all the parts of it that seemed to be spliced together with baling wire and duct tape, is the better movie of the two.

Laraine Day turns in a top-notch performance – it was, not surprisingly, her favorite of her own films – though the men in it are decidedly off-kilter. Gene Raymond hardly seems even to be there; Brian Aherne is working too hard to present himself as an island of sanity in a sea of madness; and Robert Mitchum seems painfully aware of how miscast he is and responds by giving one of his most somnolent performances. One (this one, anyway) can’t help thinking it should have been Humphrey Bogart in Mitchum’s role and Herbert Marshall in Aherne’s! As things go, too little use is made of Ricardo Cortez, who was no stranger to film noir (he’d played Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931, and had done so quite capably even though hardly at Bogart’s level), and it’s never made clear just how Cortez’s character died. Did Nancy shoot him in cold blood? Did she kill him in justifiable self-defense after he tried to rape her? (The writers did communicate, even within the Production Code limits, that he’d long wanted to make her his mistress, but she had refused.) Or did he shoot himself after being overwhelmed by Nancy’s latest rejection? (The shot in which the gun falls out of his bed after his body is removed, with no sign of whoever may have held it, had me thinking that he’d committed suicide and dropped the gun as he expired.) The Locket is a haunting film, made even more so by its narrative loose ends – including whether Nancy deliberately set out to seduce the son of the woman who’d tormented her as a child or it was sheer coincidence – and the sheer aplomb with which it is staged, even though it’s all strung together on the threads of a plot that barely makes sense, however much it had its roots in the reality of Norma Barzman’s friend. (Barzman, incidentally, was taken off the credits due to the Hollywood blacklist, which ensnared both her and her husband Ben, and though her credit was supposed to be restored, both The Film Noir Encyclopedia and the print shown on TCM give Sheridan Gibney sole credit as writer.)

My Life Is Murder: "Old School" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, June 21) I watched the next episode in sequence of My Life Is Murder, a quite good crime show set in Melbourne, Australia and featuring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a veteran of the Melbourne Police Department who recently retired but is still involved with crime as a free-lance detective. She’s called in by her friend, Detective Inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), who’s still in the Melbourne PD to work cold cases as a private eye. This episode is called “Old School” and is about the supposedly accidental death of Imelda Beecroft (Jillian Murray), the universally beloved headmistress at the all-women school Alexa herself went to in her 1980’s girlhood. The show opens with a prologue set in 1985, when the young Alexa (Hattie Hook) and her best friend, Miranda Lee (Edwina Brodie), made a VHS tape with a camcorder (ya remember camcorders?) in which Alexa, as a prank, stole Beecroft’s car and promptly crashed it into a tree. (The crash wasn’t supposed to happen.) Then the film flashes forward to the 2019 present (2019 is when this quite interesting series started airing), when Alexa shows up at the school and starts nosing around. She greets the current Miranda Lee (Magda Szubanski), who turns out to be a grey-haired, heavy-set bitch who runs the place with all the sensitivity of a concentration camp. We actually get to see Miss Beecroft die – she’s in the room where the school keeps its rowing shells, pulling down posters from a student group demanding “All Access Now!” (The demand, it turns out, is to end the school’s policy of forbidding its boarding students to leave the campus grounds after school hours.) She reaches for an “All Access Now!” poster that’s been taped to a shell on the top row, and the entire rack collapses and crushes her.

Alexa finds sawed-off bolts that convince her that the rack was sabotaged and therefore it was intentional murder. There are plenty of suspects, mostly students, and Alexa concludes that since everybody loved Miss Beecroft she wasn’t the killer’s intended target. That would have been Ms. Lee, who as assistant headmistress under Beecroft set up an ultra-strict disciplinary system that kept the students in line by constantly threatening them with expulsion. One girl named Juliana Lloyd (Erana James) fires back, reminding Ms. Lee that her parents give so much money each year to keep the school going that she can’t be expelled without blowing a hole in the school’s budget. Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] another student, Gemma Shaw (Alexandra Jensen), who like Alexa in her own school days was there as a scholarship student. That couldn’t help but remind me of George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his acid account of his days at a British “public school” (which means the opposite of what the term means in the U.S.; in Britain it means an ultra-exclusive private school) in which he recounted how the students on scholarships (including Orwell himself) were constantly being bullied by the ones whose parents could afford to pay their way there. Gemma was under the thumb of her mother, Kate Shaw (Julia Davis), who was aiming her for a political career. When Ms. Lee’s disciplinary system threatened to expel her, Gemma fought back by sabotaging the rowing room’s mounts so the frame would crush and kill Ms. Lee as she made her rounds in the rowing room after school hours – only it was the beloved Beecroft who went into the room, pulled down the “All Access Now!” poster, triggered the trap and died. Her motive was that an expulsion would not only throw her out of the school she and her mom had worked so hard to get her in, it would have destroyed her chances at a future career in politics.

While the very interesting character of Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), Alexa’s Indigenous sidekick, wasn’t much involved in this episode, Alexa’s friend George Stathopoulos (Alex Andreas), was. He’s shown getting involved with a girlfriend and promising her a half-share in the business if she helps finance his expansion – only Alexa warns him that he’s getting too involved both commercially and romantically with a woman he barely knows, and by the end of the episode their business partnership is off even though there’s a hint that they’re still intimate. There’s also a comic-relief scene in which Alexa, who’s already been in an ongoing feud with her landlady over the noise of her bread-making machine (though George thinks her bread is good enough he’s buying loaves of it from her and serving it in his coffeehouse), gets upbraided because she and George are drilling holes in a wooden beam. Alexa is doing this to test whether the bolt attaching the beam in the rowing room could have separated by accident or did it have to be sabotaged first, but when the landlady calls her on the noise Alexa asks George if he can drill more holes just to get her more annoyed!

Fruitvale Station (OG Project, Significant Productions, The Weinstein Company, 2013)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 20) I showed my husband Charles a movie I’d long wanted to see: Fruitvale Station (2013), the first film written and directed by one of the finest filmmakers active today, Ryan Coogler. I’ve been collecting Coogler’s work since I was blown away by his superhero extravaganza Black Panther (2018), his third film, and that led me to seek out his second, Creed (2015) as well as wait for the inevitable Black Panther sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). When I mentioned to Charles that I wanted to watch Fruitvale Station, he groaned and said, “I’d like to have seen that movie before 2019.” I realized that I’d stepped on a psychological land mine when he said that, because in 2019 Charles’s Black nephew, Miles Hall, was shot and killed by police officers in an incident tragically similar to the real-life shooting of unarmed Black man Oscar Julius Grant III (Michael B. Jordan, who also starred as the lead in Coogler’s Creed and the principal Black villain in Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) at the Fruitvale BART station on January 1, 2009 that inspired Coogler’s film. It wasn’t exactly the same – Oscar Grant was killed in the Fruitvale BART station after he got into a fistfight on a train with a white man he’d previously antagonized when both were inmates in San Quentin two years before, while Miles Hall had a history of mental illness and his grandmother (Charles’s mom) had called the police when he was having a seizure, only instead of treating him sensitively they confronted him and ultimately shot him – but it was close enough that for Charles it opened up a lot of old wounds. (Miles’s mother, Charles’s Black half-sister Taun, set up the Miles Hall Foundation, which, according to its Web site at https://www.themileshallfoundation.org, “promotes initiatives that will save lives and will protect those impacted by mental illness.”)

What makes Fruitvale Station a particularly beautiful and compelling movie is that it refuses either to glamorize Oscar Grant or to suggest that he brought his death upon himself. Though for some reason Variety reviewer Geoff Berkshire criticized the film’s “relentlessly positive portrayal" of Grant and added, “Best viewed as an ode to victim's rights, Fruitvale forgoes nuanced drama for heart-tugging, head-shaking and rabble-rousing," that’s one of those reviews that makes me wonder if the critic saw the same film I did. The thing I liked best about the movie is precisely that it refused either to idealize Grant or to damn him. Instead, we get a multi-dimensional portrayal of Grant as a man who’s trying to live the best life he can under his rather dire circumstances, but is sometimes his own worst enemy. When the film begins he and his partner Sophina (Melonie Diaz) are having an argument because she caught him having extra-relational activity with another woman. He claims that’s the only time he’s ever had sex with anyone but her in their whole relationship and specifically says that was his only time with that particular “other woman” – and neither she nor we believe him. The two have a daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), whom they’re somehow raising the money to send to a private elementary school. Grant’s mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer) was born on New Year’s Eve and is planning an elaborate birthday party for herself, for which she asks Oscar to pick up crabs and shrimp for her fabled gumbo. Oscar goes to Farmer Joe’s market for these items; he pretends he’s still working there, but in fact he was fired two weeks before. He pleads with the owner for his job back, even offering to work full-time for half-time pay, but the owner refuses on the ground that he’s already hired someone else, and that person doesn’t come in late the way Oscar did. Oscar has another source of income as a small-time drug dealer, in which capacity he drives out to the Oakland oceanfront to meet a customer who’s going to buy a bundle of marijuana from him – only before the guy arrives, Oscar thinks better of it and throws the pot into the ocean. Then the guy shows up and Oscar gives him a small baggie of something or other for free.

Oscar also befriends a stray dog (the dog gets a credit line and is played by “Ian”) at a gas station he’s pulled up to, only a hit-and-run driver runs over and kills the dog in an odd, if somewhat clumsily “planted,” parallel to what’s going to happen to him at the end of the movie. We already know that Oscar Grant III is going to perish in a confrontation with police because Coogler opened the film with actual video footage of Grant being gunned down in the Fruitvale BART station – something he was at first unwilling to do. “I didn’t want any real footage in the film,” Coogler said later. “But you sometimes have to take a step back. Being from the Bay Area, I knew that footage like the back of my hand, but more people from around the world had no idea about this story. It made sense for them to see that footage and see what happened to Oscar, and I think it was a responsibility that we had to put that out there.” There are a few too many instances of Coogler “planting” hints in the film that lead to the ultimate resolution. One is the dog sequence, and another is the flashback to Oscar’s incarceration that shows the white fellow convict he had his beef with who would turn up two years later in the BART train and provoke the confrontation that ultimately led to Oscar’s death. (Remarkably, Coogler was able to get permission to photograph this scene inside the real San Quentin prison.) There’s also a later scene in which Wanda persuades herself that she was to blame for Oscar’s death because she urged him to take BART to the San Francisco New Year’s fireworks instead of driving there. And there’s a sequence in Farmer Joe’s in which a young white woman named Katie (Ahna O’Reilly) is at the fish counter shopping for supplies for a fish fry she’s hosting that night. Oscar offers to help and even puts his mom on the phone to give Katie advice, and it’s pretty clear Oscar is cruising her. Later Katie will turn up on the BART train and call out to Oscar, which alerts his white nemesis from San Quentin that he’s there, and still later she appears as an amateur videographer who recorded the police assault and murder of Oscar. Otherwise Coogler remained close not only to the real-life story but to the task of keeping Oscar’s character basically sympathetic without turning him into the saint he decidedly wasn’t.

Fruitvale Station is an appropriately edgy film but also a beautifully made one, well staged by Coogler and vividly acted by Michael B. Jordan (who under Screen Actors’ Guild regulations has to bill himself with that middle initial to avoid confusion with the basketball superstar Michael Jordan, who’s also appeared in films), Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer (who offered to put up her own salary for the film’s production when Coogler was having trouble meeting his budget), Ariana Neal and even the white actors who play the villainous cops, Kevin Durand and Chad Michael Murray. Aside from a few filler themes from Ludwig Göransson (the white Swedish composer whom Coogler met at USC’s film school and has worked with ever since), the film is scored entirely with hip-hop music, though the opening track, despite its typically raunchy rap title “Mob Shit,” is actually a surprisingly lyrical and infectious groove by The Jacka, Cellski and Peezy, and while the rest of the music is the typical rap sludge it works perfectly in context as the sort of music you’d expect Oscar Grant III to be listening to. One thing I’d have liked to see more of in the film is some insight into the male members of Grant’s family: his mother and grandmother both appear as characters and as ongoing presences in his life, but his father and grandfather are nonentities. The Wikipedia page on Oscar Grant III gives at least some clues as to why: it said that Oscar Grant II was himself serving time in San Quentin. As a result, when various members of Oscar Grant III’s family sued BART for wrongful death, the women got settlements but Grant’s father got nothing because they ruled he’d never played a meaningful part in his son’s life due to his own incarceration. Still, the fact that Oscar Grant had a “III” on the end of his name suggests there must have been something about the male half of his lineage to be important to somebody!