Playhouse 90: "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (CBS Television Network, Playhouse 90, aired October 11, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, February 3) my husband Charles got home from work an hour earlier than usual, which gave us a chance to watch the original version of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, done on live TV October 11, 1956 as the second episode in the Playhouse 90 anthology series. We’d just watched the 1962 film version on Sunday night after the Grammy Awards, and though I didn’t recall having seen it before Charles remembered it from a 2013 viewing I’d posted about to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/08/requiem-for-heavyweight-columbia-1962.html. Serling wrote the script for the film version as well, and both were directed quite capably by Ralph Nelson, but while at least one actor in a minor role (Stanley Adams as Pirelli, the wrestling promoter) repeated from the TV show, all the principals were different and so were two of the four major characters’ names. The central character in both fought under the nom de pugil “Mountain,” but on TV his real name was Harlan McClintock and he was played by Jack Palance. In the 1962 film his real name was Louis Rivera and he was played by Anthony Quinn (I guess as a nod to Quinn’s real-life part-Mexican ancestry). The sympathetic social worker who takes an interest in him was changed from Grace Carney to Grace Miller, and in 1956 she was played by Kim Hunter – a much better choice than Julie Harris in the 1962 film. (Like Heath Ledger, Harris was great at playing tortured introverts, as she did in Member of the Wedding and East of Eden, and sucked at anything else. It’s altogether fitting that the capstone of Harris’s career was her one-woman show as the ultimate real-life introvert, Emily Dickinson, in The Belle of Amherst.)

As for the two people in Mountain’s camp, manager Maish Rennick and “cut man” (the person responsible for patching up a fighter so he can “go the distance”) Army, in 1962 they were played by Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney, respectively, while in 1956 Playhouse 90 producer Martin Manulis (who in the 1980’s introduction looked considerably younger than his colleagues from the old show) made a truly brave and incredible casting tradition. He cast Keenan Wynn as Maish and his father, Ed Wynn, as Army. Ed Wynn had been a vaudeville and radio comedian for decades (as “The Perfect Fool” on stage and “The Fire Chief” on radio) but had never before played a dramatic role. Most of the introduction, which was shot for a short-lived 1980’s series re-running old kinescopes from the so-called “Golden Age of Television,” consisted of various people who’d been involved in the original program reminiscing about Ed Wynn and how many difficulties he caused them during the show’s rehearsals. He kept blowing his lines and trying to insert old gag lines from his days as a comedian when he did so, and it got so bad that at one point they were seriously considering firing him and replacing him with actor Ned Glass (who was in the show in the minor role of a bartender). They didn’t dare only because Manulis was worried that getting rid of a major (if faded) star on the eve of a broadcast would screw up his ability to recruit Hollywood “names” for future episodes. In the end Ed Wynn came through marvelously and delivered a spot-on performance that far outpointed Mickey Rooney (though when we’d watched the 1962 film I’d given director Nelson major points for calming Rooney down and getting him to underact for one of the few times in his career), In fact, all four principals on the TV show totally out-performed their replacements in the film.

The plot of Requiem deals with a former heavyweight contender who’s been so badly beaten in his latest fight, which he lost by a knockout in the seventh round, that he’s told by the ring doctor that he must never fight again or he risks being blinded. That puts him in a quandary because he didn’t finish high school (he dropped out in the ninth grade on the 1956 TV version and even earlier than that, in sixth grade, in the film) and he literally doesn’t know how to do anything but fight. A sympathetic state employment development counselor, Grace, takes at least a platonic interest in him (they kiss on the cheeks in 1956; in 1962 they kiss on the lips and then he tries to rape her, though she successfully fights him off) and thinks she can get him a job teaching athletics to boys in a summer camp. Meanwhile, Maish is in hock to two gangsters with whom he bet on Mountain’s last fight: he bet against Mountain and lost his bet when, though Mountain lost the fight, he actually kept it going until 2:34 in round seven. Maish had bet that the fight wouldn’t last more than three (in 1956) or four (in 1962) rounds, and when Mountain stayed in until round seven, Maish ended up owing the gangsters $3,000 he had no way to pay. To keep from getting himself beaten up (or worse), Maish hits on the idea of selling Mountain’s services to a corrupt wrestling promoter who stages fixed fights. This hits Mountain’s pride hard since he had never thrown a fight and didn’t intend to this time. Maish arranges with Pirelli, the wrestling promoter, to have Mountain wrestle under the banner of a mountaineer with a silly hat that reminded me of the one Ed Wynn wore as the Fire Chief (in 1962 he was going to pass Mountain off as a Native American), and it’s here that the plots of the two versions radically diverge.

In the 1962 film Mountain blows his chance at a camp job by letting Maish and Army get him drunk at Jack Dempsey’s bar (Dempsey played himself and served as a living example that you could survive a prizefighting career with your brains and body relatively intact and, if you’d husbanded your money, have a reasonable post-fighting career). So he misses his 10 p.m. interview with a rich couple who run a summer camp for boys, and he’s forced to be humiliated in the wrestling arena. Six years earlier, Serling gave his tale a much more hopeful ending: Grace buys Mountain a train ticket to his original home town, Kenesaw, Tennessee, and tells him to go back there and re-establish ties with what’s left of his family. On the train Mountain runs into a boy who wants to learn to box, and though the kid literally doesn’t know his left from his right, Mountain gives him a few pointers and his face lights up as he realizes he has a knack for working with children and that’s a suitable career path he should pursue when he gets back to New York. Ralph Nelson did some unusual camera tricks in the 1962 film he couldn’t have done on live TV, including shooting most of the boxing match at the opening (in which Mountain was fighting real-life heavyweight contender Cassius Clay, who two years later would convert to Islam and take the name Muhammad Ali; I did a double-take when he appeared and I thought, “Is that Muhammad Ali?”) from Mountain’s increasingly blurry point of view, and a later scene in Mountain’s apartment in which he makes his inept pass at her. But all four of the principals in the 1956 TV version acted better than their counterparts in 1962, and in particular Jack Palance was stronger and more powerful. Palance played Mountain in a relatively understated way that suggested he had begun as a man of normal intelligence whose brains had been scrambled by 15 years of blows to the head in the ring, while Quinn in the film looked like someone severely mentally challenged (or whatever the au courant euphemism is for the “R”-word) even before he took up boxing as a career.

Both the TV show and the film illustrated how much Serling owed to Budd Schulberg, who in 1954 (two years before the Playhouse 90 version of Requiem) had written the script for On the Waterfront, and in particular the famous scene in which Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy lamented his former boxing career, which ended ignominiously when his corrupt manager ordered him to throw a fight. In both versions Serling seemed to be channeling Schulberg’s scene in which Brando as Malloy said that if he hadn’t gone along with the fix, “I coulda been a contenda, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” In both versions of Requiem, Mountain gets a strikingly similar speech in which he tells Grace that he was once considered number five on the list of contenders for the heavyweight championship, and that’s the part of his life of which he’s most proud. An imdb.com reviewer of the Playhouse 90 version wondered why Rod Serling took a TV script that offered at least a glimmer of hope for its protagonist and turned it into a film of unrelieved despair: “When the Anthony Quinn-Julie Harris version was made in 1962, Serling was deeply involved in crafting The Twilight Zone series – a very major undertaking. But that in itself does not seem to explain how this rather simple and often touching story about several troubled people morphed into a generally downbeat tale that ends with such a negative feeling of loss. It is not difficult to understand why the Playhouse 90 production – even with all its well-known creative and technical problems – was such a huge popular and critical success, while the feature film, with its greater invested resources and production values, was unsuccessful at the box office. The latter is actually a difficult movie to watch, with so much unrelieved pain experienced by the characters and audience from beginning to end. What was the point of Serling’s decision to tell a quite different story in making the feature film version, and in doing so abandoning the positive possibilities inherent in the television play?” Actually, in 1962 Serling had been producing The Twilight Zone for five years and CBS-TV had made the shocking decision to cancel the show even though it was doing well in the ratings, and that might have made the 1962 Serling much more cynical about life in general and show business in particular than he’d been as the Bright Young Man of early TV writing six years earlier.

67th Annual Grammy Awards (Fulwell 73 Productions, Grammy Studios, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, aired February 2, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 2) the 67th annual Grammy Awards took place in Hollywood at an arena named after a cryptocurrency (barf!). It was hosted by Trevor Noah, who began the event by saying that in light of the recent big fires in Los Angeles it had been touch and go for a few days whether the Grammy Awards would even happen at all. In the event, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), hosts of the Grammy Awards, decided to turn it into a combination awards show and telethon, with one of those disgusting QR codes at the bottom of the screen (those horrible things that look like very bad miniature black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Mondrian) which you could photograph with your smartphone to open a Web site through which you could make a donation. Noah also tried to guilt-trip members of today’s super-rich (you know, the ones who brought you Donald Trump 2.0) sitting in the luxury balconies and looking down at the rest of us like the gods in human form they are (or at least pretend to be) into making some big-ticket donations. They ended up raising $7 million total from people for whom $7 million is pocket change. The show opened with a duo called Dawes, consisting of brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith, announcing that both the home they grew up in and the one they were living in now, complete with their home recording studio and all their instruments, had been destroyed in the blazes. They were joined by an all-star lineup including John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard and St. Vincent, for – of all things – Randy Newman’s song “I Love L.A.”! Both Charles and I can remember when this song was considered a negative one, a parody of L.A.’s affectations by one of music’s master humorists, but here it was being offered as a unique and sincere tribute to the city in its hour of need.

Then Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas (whom I’ve sometimes referred to as the Richard Carpenter of today: the brother willing to step back from the limelight and promote the career of his superstar sister) did a quite lovely song called “Birds of a Feather” on a set representing nature. I’m sure much of it was process-screened in, but they certainly looked like they were playing among at least some dried plants and vegetation. I liked that, especially by contrast to the high-tech numbers I was expecting (and dreading) later. After that Sabrina Carpenter (not, as far as I know, any relation to Richard and Karen) did a modernized version of a big-band number on her hit song “Espresso,” which seems to be about a woman who’s working late and needs the strongest caffeinated beverages she can find to keep going. She performed in the obligatory spangled white hot pants and matching top – both she and her dancers wore such skimpy outfits it reminded me of the “rehearsal clothes” the dancers in Busby Berkeley’s 1930’s musicals wore when they were rehearsing before they put on the lavish costumes they wore in what were supposedly the final performances. I would have liked it even better if they’d been clad in longer and snazzier dresses that would have done more to evoke the late-1930’s feel Carpenter seemed to be going for both in her song itself and the overall stage set, but that’s just me. Following that were two awards presentations, with Doechii winning Best Rap Album for Alligator Bites Never Heal (according to her Wikipedia page, Alligator Bites Never Heal is available only as a mixtape; it also said Doechii is Bisexual and she recently gave up alcohol and drugs, the latter of which she alluded to in her acceptance speech) and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n Sweet (that’s how it’s officially spelled!) for Best Pop Vocal Album.

The next artist who performed was Chappell Roan, whom I’d seen in a previous appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert performing “Red Wine Supernova,” a much gentler song from her album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, nearly a year ago (February 15, 2024). I had made a note of her then but had never followed up with her, and that was my loss. Roan’s Grammy performance of a song called “Pink Pony Club” was preceded by a biographical segment that identified her as a Lesbian (according to her Wikipedia page, she’s in a relationship with a woman who isn’t in the music business and she wants to keep her partner’s identity secret because she’s already put out enough by menacing letters she’s received from so-called “fans”). “Pink Pony Club,” her breakthrough hit, was inspired by The Abbey, a Gay club in West Hollywood, and for her Grammy performance of it she dressed in a party costume with a hat that fell off in mid-song and had a dance troupe that I suspect were all women, though many of them were wearing false beards and other nods to the so-called “drag king” community of women who dress more or less as men. I liked her a lot after that and liked her even more when she won the Grammy for Best New Artist, and instead of the usual acceptance-speech platitudes she launched into a long diatribe, most of which she read from a notebook, about how the music industry exploits young talent. She said that when she signed her first recording contract (with Atlantic in 2017) she was underage, and she pleaded with the industry to give young artists stipends and health coverage. I’d like to say, “RIGHT ON, SISTER!” (and I will), even though horrifically the trend in employment is going in entirely the opposite direction: as part of their ever-present drive to make themselves richer and the rest of us poorer, modern-day employers are figuring out more and more inventive ways to turn employees into “independent contractors” so they don’t have to provide steady salaries and benefits. Be that as it may, Chappell Roan’s CD has just zoomed to the top of my Want List after both of her performances last night.

After the award for Best Country Album went to Country Carter by Beyoncé (I’m glad Beyoncé felt like she could make a country album even though the people hailing it as some sort of genre-breaking innovation are guilty of first-itis; Black artists have been recording country music at least since Nat “King” Cole and Ray Charles in the early 1960’s, and 60 years after Charley Pride’s breakthrough there are plenty of Black artists that identify themselves wholly or mostly as country singers), the Grammy producers lumped together all the remaining Best New Artist nominees and had them perform one after each other. First up was a mixed-race, mixed-gender rock band from Houston called Khruangbin doing a song called “May Ninth,” after which Benson Boone (a reasonably attractive and talented young white singer-songwriter) did “Beautiful Things” and rapper Doechii did “Catfish.” Next up was a white man named Teddy Swims doing a would-be soul song called “Lose Control” that reminded me of Joe Cocker’s similarly inept attempts in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s to sound African-American. Fortunately the next artist was a genuinely Black singer called Shaboozey doing a song called “Tipsy.” Though Shaboozey is being marketed as a country singer, his song had far more of the genuine spirit of soul music than Teddy Swims’s wanna-be effort. The Best New Artist nominees section closed with an absolutely electrifying performance of the song “Oscar-Winning Tears” by Raye, an African-British singer (her father was English and her mother Ghanaian and Swiss). If they still want to do a biopic of Lena Horne (one had been set up for Janet Jackson until she had her infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl and Horne was so offended she withdrew the rights), Raye would be great casting. It’s a real pity she had to be nominated for Best New Artist the same year as Chappell Roan!

The next performance after Chappell Roan’s great acceptance speech for Best New Artist was a duet of the old The Mamas and The Papas’ hit “California Dreaming” by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga. Not surprisingly, she outsang him, but at least this is the first time I’ve seen Mars when he didn’t seem to be auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson! The next segment was a long speech by NARAS president Howie Mandel, who prattled on about how the Grammy sponsors have expanded their membership to include more women and people of color (memo to Mandel: that is so last year! In the Trump Reich the emphasis is on getting rid of programs that promote “DEI,” short for “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” and the latest big Right-wing swear word!). A number of presenters said just before announcing the winners (sometimes they said, “And the winner is … ” and sometimes they said the more politically correct version, “And the Grammy goes to … ”) that they had been voted in by 13,000 NARAS members, a number that got repeated so often it became a talisman. Mandel then introduced The Weeknd, who had vowed to boycott the Grammys before they went on their big “inclusion” drive, who played a couple of songs called “Will I Lie for You?” and “Timeless.” After that they sneaked in one of the best performances of the night – Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” – disguised as a MasterCard commercial! After Shakira won the Best Latin Pop album for Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (which my husband Charles helpfully translated for me as “Women Don’t Cry Anymore”), the next item was musically one of the best performances of the night.

It was an extended tribute to the late Quincy Jones and it began with Herbie Hancock playing a beautiful piano instrumental version of “Killer Joe” (a welcome throwback to the days when the Grammy Awards made at least token efforts to include classical and jazz instead of focusing relentlessly on modern-day pop and rap!), Cynthia Erivo doing a stunning version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (an obscure album track by Peggy Lee, who recorded it under songwriter Bart Howard’s original title, “In Other Words,” until Quincy Jones, producing the Frank Sinatra/Count Basie album It Might as Well Be Swing, dug it up, retitled it, and came up with an iconic recording that made the song a standard), Lainey Wilson and pianist Jacob Collier doing “Let the Good Times Roll” (the one Louis Jordan introduced and Ray Charles covered), Stevie Wonder playing harmonica on Jones’s instrumental “Bluesette,” a tribute to the all-star charity record “We Are the World” featuring two L.A. private high-school choirs, and Janelle Monaé paying tribute to Jones’s records as Michael Jackson’s producer by doing a spectacular version of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and duplicating Michael’s famous dance movies as well or better than anyone else alive. Afterwards Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars won Best Pop Duo or Group for “Die with a Smile.” In her acceptance speech, Lady Gaga reaffirmed the humanity of immigrants and Trans people (even though she is neither) and at least dropped a hint that the creative community of America is mostly not on board with Donald Trump and his Reich. Then came the “In Memoriam” segment, during which Chris Martin of Coldplay and Gracie Abrams sang a song called “All My Love,” and ironically one of the people they paid tribute to was one of the few singers publicly aligned with Trump, country star Toby Keith. Among the names in the tribute were Kris Kristofferson, John Mayall, Dickey Betts (from the original Allman Brothers), Jack Jones, Steve Lawrence, Sergio Mendes, L.A. singer-songwriter J. D. Souther (better known for the songs he placed with Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne than his own records), and the next-to-last person alive who made records with Charlie Parker, Roy Haynes. (The last one is Sonny Rollins.)

Then Shakira came out and did a medley of two or three songs (I’m not sure since the medley contained a slow section in the middle but that may or may not have been a separate song) which the Google app identified as “Olos Así” (once again, my husband Charles came up with a helpful translation: “Eyes Like That”) and something Google kept telling me was called “BZRP Music Sessions, Volume 53 (Tiësto Remix).” (I didn’t know Spanish ever used umlauts.) Then one of the most disgusting people in music, Kendrick Lamar, won both Song of the Year and Record of the Year for something called “Not Like Us.” I’ve hated Kendrick Lamar ever since he performed a totally unintelligible rap on a previous Grammy Awards show in which he followed the opening number from the mega-hit Broadway musical Hamilton, which used rap and non-traditional casting to tell the tale of America’s Founding Fathers, and as I wrote after that show, just as the cast of Hamilton had briefly made me think that rap could actually be beautiful, moving and express an artistic point, here came Kendrick Lamar to remind me once again of the garbage it usually is. I got even angrier when the Los Angeles Times came out with a review the next day saying that Lamar’s incomprehensible piece of shit was the best song on the program and lamenting that he hadn’t won Album of the Year. Since then Lamar has made a career of winning awards that rightfully belonged to his artistic betters; when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music I thought, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to fucking Kendrick Lamar.” And last night one of the records he beat out for Record of the Year was “Now and Then,” the last single to feature all four of The Beatles. (In fairness, “Now and Then” – based on one of John Lennon’s late-1970’s demo tapes which they tried to work up into a new recording in 1995 for the Anthology project, which is how George Harrison got on it – isn’t that great a song.)

After a final performance by Charli XCX of a medley of “Von dutch” (that’s the correct typography) and “Guess,” the Album of the Year award went to Beyoncé for Country Carter. Host Trevor Noah exalted that Beyoncé had finally won Album of the Year, an award a lot of people thought should have gone to her 2016 album Lemonade. (I wasn’t one of them, though; she lost to Adele’s 25, and though even Adele said publicly Lemonade should have won, I was put off by the fascistic videos Beyoncé put out for it, which looked like they’d been directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.) The show, which ran just 10 minutes short of four hours, ended limply with Randy Newman’s original recording of “I Love L.A.” played as the closer over clips from the show.

A Raisin in the Sun (Paman-Doris Productions, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 31) my husband Charles and I watched the 1961 film of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Daniel Petrie and written by Lorraine Hansberry based on her New York Drama Critics’ Circle award-winning 1959 play. The movie was co-produced by David Susskind, who then hosted a show called Open End, later The David Susskind Show, on what was then “National Educational Television” and later became PBS, and became so famous for interrupting his guests that Allan Sherman recorded a satire of him that began, “Mr. David Susskind, shut up.” Susskind also hosted the film’s trailer, which began with the title “A Message to Moviegoers from David Susskind.” That will give you a good idea of how this film was marketed in the racial and political ferment of its time: not as light entertainment but as cinematic medicine that you should see for your own good. I had an odd relationship to the film of A Raisin in the Sun because its producing studios, Paman-Doris Productions and Columbia Pictures, cut it up into 10- to 20-minute segments and offered those to high schools as educational films about the lives of Black people – and during my days in high school (1966-1970) these were regularly trotted out and shown during periods of heavy racial unrest, which in the late 1960’s was virtually all the time. So I had the weird experience of having seen this film in bits and pieces well before I had the chance to see it start-to-finish. A Raisin in the Sun was originally written by Lorraine Hansberry based on an incident she experienced in her childhood: her parents had made an offer on a modestly priced house in a suburb of Chicago and ran afoul of the so-called “restrictive covenants” through which neighborhoods tried to keep themselves all-white by requiring new home buyers to sign agreements promising that they would never sell their home to Blacks. The Hansberrys were offered a sum of money greater than what they’d put up as a down payment for the house to sell it back to a so-called “Neighborhood Improvement Association” so they could make sure it stayed in white hands. They were supported by the white family which had sold them the house in the first place, and one writer about the incident, which took place in 1934, suggested that the reason the white owners were willing to sell to a Black family was that because of the Depression they just didn’t get a high enough offer from white buyers.

Lorraine Hansberry remembered this injustice from her childhood and, as a grown woman, decided to write a play about it after she moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1950’s. Though she married a white man, Robert Nemiroff (who became her literary executor after her death from cancer in 1965), Hansberry was also a closeted Lesbian who contributed two articles (signed only with initials) to The Ladder, the pioneering publication of the Lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis. The story takes place in a low-budget but decent and clean apartment on the south side of Chicago (the city’s historically Black neighborhood) and centers around the Younger family. The Youngers are headed by matriarchal grandmother Lena Younger (Claudia McNeil), who lives in the apartment with her two adult children, son Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier) and daughter Beneatha (Diana Sands); Walter’s wife Ruth (Ruby Dee); and their son Travis (Stephen Perry). Walter Lee is a scapegrace who likes to hang out at the local Black bar, the Kitty Kat Club (a name which seems almost risible now since the bar in the musical Cabaret was called the Kit Kat Club), with his two disreputable friends, Bobo (Joel Fluellen) and Willie Harris (Roy Glenn). The conflicts within the Younger family boil over when Lena’s husband dies and the remaining Youngers anxiously await the $10,000 check from his life insurance policy. Lena wants to use the money to buy the family a house of their own, and she does so in a previously all-white neighborhood only because the houses in Black or integrated neighborhoods are priced too high for their budget. Walter Lee wants to use some of the money to open up a liquor store with Bobo and Willie as partners, which evokes understandable moral revulsion from Lena, who is a God-fearing woman who doesn’t want any of her or her late husband’s money to be used for a business that disreputable. Walter’s sister Beneatha wants to use some of the money to finance going to medical school so she can become a doctor. Beneatha, who I suspect is the character Hansberry modeled after herself, also wants the family to be more aware of the African-American civil rights struggle and she wants to reconnect with her African roots. Accordingly, there’s a scene in which Beneatha turns off the family phonograph when it’s playing an instrumental rock ‘n’ roll record and says, “Enough of this assimilationist junk!” Then she replaces it with a record of African drums, and Walter gets into the spirit and starts drumming on various tables and countertops while imitating the African cries Beneatha starts making along with the record.

Eventually the check arrives and Lena cashes it and uses $3,500 for the down payment on the house, and she gives the rest to Walter with instructions to open two bank accounts with it, $3,000 in Beneatha’s name for her college fund and the rest for himself to live on and deposit his earnings as chauffeur for a white man we never see. Of course we can guess what Walter does with the money; instead of opening the accounts he gives all of it, including the $3,000 that was supposed to fund Beneatha’s education, to Willie Harris to invest in the liquor store. Willie insisted that he needed the money in cash to go to Springfield, the state capital, to bribe the state inspectors to come through with the needed licenses. To no one’s surprise except Walter’s and Bobo’s, Willie turns out to be a scam artist who absconds with the money. Other plot threads include Beneatha’s growing disinsterest in her African-American boyfriend George Murchison (a very young Louis Gossett, Jr. in his first feature film) and her growing interest in African exchange student Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon), who wants Beneatha to marry him and move together to his native Nigeria. Just as the Youngers are preparing to move to previously all-white Clyburn Park, an unassuming white guy named Mark Lindner (played by John Fielder, whose whole stock in trade was naïve niceness) shows up from the “Clyburn Park Improvement Association” and offers them a good amount more than they paid for the house in if they’ll sell their house to the Improvement Association so they in turn can sell it to a white buyer. Hansberry’s writing and Fielder’s playing of this character are spot-on, especially when he denies being a racist even while he’s pushing a racist agenda and we, the Youngers and he himself all know that’s exactly what he’s doing. (In 1948, 11 years before A Raisin in the Sun debuted on stage and 13 years before the film was made, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case called Shelley v. Kraemer, had ruled in a roundabout way that restrictive racial covenants of the kinds that had screwed over Hansberry’s parents were unconstitutional; the court didn’t outright say that such covenants were illegal, but it ruled they could no longer be enforced in the courts.) The first time Lindner shows up with his offer, the Youngers righteously turn him down and throw him out. Later, after Walter loses what’s left of the insurance money, he calls Lindner and tells him they’ll take his offer – only, in the film’s famous finale, the Youngers once again refuse him and insist they’re moving into the house even though, without the remaining insurance money, Lena and her sister-in-law Ruth will have to do that much more housecleaning and washing for white families to make the house payments.

One of the things I like best about A Raisin in the Sun is that there are no cardboard characters; the people in the story emerge as real flesh-and-blood humans, and even the ones we like act in ways that make us think they could be “real handfuls” in actual life. Another thing I’ve long enjoyed about this film is it gave Sidney Poitier a chance to play an unsympathetic role; here he’s not the Black man you would want your white daughter or sister to marry, but a deeply flawed individual with the proverbial feet of clay. It’s one of my two favorite Sidney Poitier films. (The other is To Sir, With Love, because in that one – which cast Poitier as a teacher who tames a rebellious high-school class – there’s nothing in the plot that requires Poitier’s character to be Black: he’s Black only because the actor playing him is. It makes me miss all the more a film Poitier never made: a 1960’s remake of Fritz Lang’s Fury. In the 1936 original Spencer Tracy played a white man who barely survives a lynching and returns as an embittered revenge figure. For years Lang told interviewers he had asked the studio, MGM, to allow him to make that character Black; while biographers like Patrick McGilligan pointed out how impossible that would have been in 1930’s Hollywood, that begs the question of why Lang didn’t seek to remake it in the 1960’s, when he could have used a Black protagonist and Poitier would have been perfect for the role.) A Raisin in the Sun has its flaws; the piece betrays its stage origins in almost never leaving that damned apartment set (when Walter sneaks out to the Kitty Kat Club, we know it’s to indulge the bad side of his character but we’re also relieved that he’s taking us someplace else!), and Daniel Petrie is a functional director rather than a great one. When Claudia McNeil as Lena has to react to the news that Walter has lost all her late husband’s insurance money, she overplays the scene so relentlessly I was tempted to joke, “I’m going to prove that Black people have as much of a right to overact as whites!” For the most part, however, it’s a finely honed piece of drama that holds up amazingly well – even though Charles was surprised that, though the film critiques racism, it says virtually nothing about sexism even though its author was a Black woman, and a woman-loving Black woman at that!

Law and Order: "The Hardest Thing" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 30) I watched the latest episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the return of the CBS-TV show Elsbeth after the winter hiatus. The Law and Order show was called “The Hardest Thing” and began with a Gothic scene of Charles Harper (Rich Henkels) alone in his New York apartment listening to a classical piece by Handel over headphones when someone breaks into his apartment by smashing a window, reaches over to unlatch it, enters and fires a gun from behind him, while Charles has the music on so loud he hears none of this. The police initially suspect it was an attempted robbery gone wrong, but suspicion soon fastens onto the rich financier’s adult children, Sean Harper (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Victoria Beyer (Katie Lowes). The police at first think it was Sean because he’d been arguing with his dad over the old man’s refusal to bail him out from a bad startup investment, but eventually they fasten on Victoria and indict her for the murder. The cops are convinced Victoria did it because Charles was pissing away her potential inheritance (though Victoria and her husband were successful in their own right) by having fallen for a scam in which a person calls and says they’re from the Department of Homeland Security and needs their bank-account and credit-card information to continue their investigation. Of course it’s a “phishing” scam and Charles has fallen for it big-time, but it turns out the reason he was vulnerable was because he has a rare and terminal illness which robs you of your mental faculties before it kills you. The implication was that Charles would never have fallen for this scam if he’d been in full possession of his faculties.

About 45 minutes into the one-hour show, Victoria and her attorney make a proffer in which she explains that she did kill her father, but only because he wanted her to: he had decided he didn’t want to live as a vegetable and wanted her help in killing himself. Rather than giving him lethal drugs, she bought a gun and shot him so it would be quick and relatively painless, and also because that way they could still collect on his life insurance, which they couldn’t have if it had been an out-and-out suicide. The case is being prosecuted by assistant district attorneys Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), and midway through the action Nolan’s brother Tom (Justin Chatwin) shows up and tries to talk to him about their father, who by coincidence (or scriptwriter’s fiat; the writer is old Law and Order hand Art Alamo) is also terminally ill. Nolan has dad’s medical power of attorney, and he and Tom are arguing over whether they should authorize a feeding tube, since dad has lost the ability to swallow food normally, or they should just let nature take its course and let their old man die. Though previously he’d been dead-set against letting Victoria plead to a lesser charge, the experience of losing his own father in similar fashion causes Nolan to have a change of heart and allow Victoria to plead out to manslaughter, with a five-year sentence instead of the 15-to-life she’d have got on a murder conviction. This was a well-done Law and Order, and despite the blatant bit of coincidence-mongering it made its point effectively; the fact that this show can still come up with storylines that compelling even after 25 years of continuous production (despite the five-year hiatus between seasons 20 and 21) is a remarkable testament to the strength of producer Dick Wolf and the crew he has behind him as storytellers.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Deductible" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that followed, “Deductible,” was just as good as the Law and Order show. It dealt with Kyra Thompson (Nicole Zyana), up-and-coming executive with an insurance company, who one night is escorted to the hotel room of Jim Hogan (Michael McGrady), who runs a high-end helicopter service to ferry rich passengers from downtown hotels. Kyra is taken there by her boss, Frank Bailey (David Alan Basche), who has his female chief operating officer, Grace Callahan (Lucy Owen), place a phony phone call posing as his wife to tell him their son had a peanut allergy and had to be rushed to the E.R. Frank uses that as an excuse to duck out, and Jim sexually assaults Kyra, getting down on the floor and pushing up her dress so he can go down on her. Kyra hides out in the hotel room’s bathroom and literally spends the night there until she’s discovered by the hotel maid. It turns out she’s especially worried because she’s raising her younger brother Jay (Leo Easton Kelly) as a single parent since their own parents were killed in an accident two years earlier. SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her squad correctly deduce that Frank Bailey had set up the whole thing and that Kyra was the “signing bonus” for the deal. Frank had told Jim that Kyra was willing to do “whatever he wanted” to get him to sign, and the next morning Jim – at Frank’s suggestion – sends her a bouquet with a dozen roses and a note thanking her for “a great evening,” which only pisses her off more. That night when she comes home from work she hides in the bathroom again, and her younger brother Jay calls the police. Captain Benson takes the call and talks to her woman-to-woman, saying she should file a complaint and also undergo a rape kit, which reveals traces of Jim Hogan’s DNA on her.

The cops get Hogan to turn state’s evidence and offer him a reduced sentence for his testimony against Frank, who it turns out had blackmailed Kyra into going along with it by stealing $2,000 in cash he gave her for a company party and then claiming she’d have to “work off” the loss. Assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. indicts Frank Bailey after the SVU cops find a number of other women who worked for him and also were coerced into providing sexual services to would-be clients in exchange for fat commission bonuses and promotions in the firm. But the trial isn’t going well for the good guys because Frank was careful enough not to tell the women outright they were expected to have sex with the potential clients – until Captain Benson makes a direct appeal to Grace Callahan, who it turns out 10 years earlier had Frank pull the same scam on her. He gave her an envelope with cash for an office party, had someone pick her pocket for it, and then said he wouldn’t report it to the police if she’d have sex with the customers until the “debt” was worked off. Grace testifies against her boss and ultimately the jury finds him guilty of two counts of “coercion.” While the two counts together only draw a 2 ½-year sentence, Carisi is relieved because Bailey, testifying in his own defense, lied under oath and he can be prosecuted for perjury. This reminded me of the 1932 movie She Had to Say Yes, co-directed by Busby Berkeley (his first non-musical assignment) and Warner Bros. editor George Amy, and starring Loretta Young as an innocent young woman who takes a job with a clothing manufacturer, only to discover that the men she has to say “Yes” to are the department-store buyers to whom the company is trying to sell its clothes. This SVU is a powerful statement of men’s exploitation of women, though I also felt sorry for all the women – including Kyra, who risks losing Jay to the foster-care “system” if she can’t hold a job that can support them both – who are going to be out of work now that their scumbag employer has been legally exposed.

Elsbeth: "Unalive and Well" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired January 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 30), after I watched the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit shows on NBC, I turned to CBS for the resumption of Elsbeth after a month-and-a-half-long hiatus. Elsbeth was a show I hadn’t thought I’d like from the previews, but I started watching it anyway because Found, the NBC show that replaced Law and Order: Organized Crime, looked terrible (and it had those fatal words at the beginning that turn me off completely: “Previously, on … ,” which to me indicate obeisance to the Great God SERIAL) Last night’s episode of Elsbeth was a good one called “Unalive and Well,” which dealt with one of my all-time favorite subjects: exposing a quasi-religious New Age cult. In this case, the cult leader is called Tom Murphy (Eric McCormack) and he preaches a strict regimen of health foods, meditation and cutting yourselves off from the outside world. He’s apparently attracted rich people and celebrities as “regulars,” and one of the things he does that he’s not supposed to be doing is administering a drug called “Combo” derived from the venom of poisonous Latin American frogs. He gives this to people by heating a red-hot needle containing it and burning the skin with it three times. His most recalcitrant camp member is a young man named “Bobby” (the genuinely cute Michael Hsu Rosen) who is getting tired of The Program and in particular all the overpriced food he’s supposed to eat as part of it. “Bobby” wants to leave and after an angry confrontation between them Tom is inclined to let him go. Only Tom has spiked all his junk food (he has various items of it in his car where he repairs when the camp’s regimen has got too much for him) with mustard-seed oil because “Bobby” is deathly allergic to sesame-seed oil and mustard and sesame are close enough in the plant world that if you’re allergic to one, you’re allergic to the other. “Bobby” is found dead in his white Mustang on the Van Wyck Expressway after he ran it off the road in a crash caused by his loss of consciousness due to the mustard-seed oil he’d been ingesting.

Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) – and I give kudos to the show’s director, Nancy Hower, for having all the actors pronounce the name correctly, “Tashioni” (one of the peculiarities of Italian is if you put an “h” in front of a vowel, it takes away the “h” sound that would otherwise be there) – is a former attorney turned consultant to the New York Police Department. While the New York Beat (or whatever this show calls its equivalent to the New York Post; in Dick Wolf’s New York it’s called the New York Ledger) is raking up Elsbeth’s sordid past as an attorney in Chicago and in particular her success in helping a super-rich man screw over his ex-wife in their divorce settlement by portraying her as a slut, Elsbeth grabs onto the “Bobby” case as a ticket to redemption. She infiltrates the cult and buys a ticket to one of its retreats even though that’s way more money than she can afford and her boss at the NYPD, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), makes it clear to her that the department won’t reimburse her. She discovers that “Bobby” was really Cole Campbell, whose older sister was killed 10 years before by Tom Murphy’s regimen and in particular the “Combo” drug. The family sued Murphy and his organization and won a settlement but had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get it. Part of the settlement’s terms was that Murphy would stop using “Combo,” but Cole bought his way into the cult under a false name in hopes of proving that Murphy and the cult were still using the banned substance. He had just uncovered the evidence that he hoped would lead to Murphy’s prosecution for the murder of Cole’s sister when Murphy caught him and hit on this rather roundabout means of eliminating him completely.

Elsbeth gets herself locked into a geodesic dome that’s used on the site of the cult as a greenhouse, and as the temperature goes up and she finds herself locked in, at first I assumed that Murphy had locked her in and was using this as a way to get rid of her increasingly threatening presence – but in the end it turns out to be an accident and Murphy’s second-in-command, “Starlight” (Cailen Fu), rescues her. (If “Starlight” has another name, we never learn what it is.) Ultimately the cops come to the compound and arrest Murphy for murder in the middle of him leading a truth-telling session in which only the person holding the ball (which looks like a small coconut with a face painted on one side) is allowed to speak. From the promos I had assumed Elsbeth would be way too campy to be entertaining for me, but I’ve come to like the show and in particular the dry sense of humor expressed by Carrie Preston and the show’s writers (here, Matthew K. Begbie and Leah Nananko Winter) through which they express her character.

Party Girl (Euterpe Productions, MGM, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 29) Turner Classic Movies did a birthday tribute to actress Cyd Charisse, and I watched one of her least characteristic movies: Party Girl, a 1958 gangster movie from Joe Pasternack’s Euterpe Productions, released through MGM (which had had both Charisse and the film’s male lead, Robert Taylor, under contract for years, but released them both after this film was made; host Ben Mankiewicz said they were the last actors MGM had under contract when the studio system finally breathed its last gasp, but that’s not true: Elizabeth Taylor owed MGM one film on her contract, so before she could do Cleopatra they forced her to make Butterfield 8, a lousy movie that for some God-forsaken reason – probably her near-death experience on the set of Cleopatra – won her an Academy Award). Party Girl was basically like the cheap black-and-white gangster movies that were being made by the yard in the late 1950’s, though it’s different in that it’s in color (so-called “Metrocolor,” which was actually Eastmancolor; Eastman Kodak allowed the major studios who used their process to slap their names on it, which is also how we got “WarnerColor” – though American International’s “Pathécolor” process was actually the old Agfacolor from Nazi Germany and later, after the Russians grabbed it, the Soviet Union) and it has a quite a bit more interesting director, Nicholas Ray. (Most of the black-and-white films in the genre were helmed by Edward L. Cahn or others equally hacky.) The screenplay is by George Wells based on a story by Leo Katcher. Robert Taylor plays Tommy Farrell, a crooked attorney for the Mob in general and one Mob boss in particular, Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb, whose Method affectations don’t fit in all that well in a movie whose stars are pre-Method Hollywood veterans).

Tommy has a disabled leg, courtesy of a childhood dare in which he climbed a drawbridge, held on as it opened and then got crushed when it closed again. He effectively uses that, as well as a watch he claims is a childhood heirloom but really is one he buys almost literally a dime a dozen, to win acquittal for Rico’s top hit man, Louis Canetto (John Ireland). Cyd Charisse plays aspiring dancer “Vicki Gaye” (I think we’re supposed to assume that’s a phony name she made up, though if she has a real name we’re not told what it is), whom Farrell meets at one of Rico’s joyless parties at which his minions pay attractive young women to attend. One of the interesting things about this movie is it follows Ray’s obsession with red. Because when you look at a black-and-white photo your eye is drawn to the largest object in it but when you look at a color photo your eye is drawn to the brightest object in it, Ray made it a habit of dressing the most important character in his color films in red so they’d stand out: Joan Crawford’s red sweater in Johnny Guitar, James Dean’s iconic red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause, Cyd Charisse’s red dress here, and even Jeffrey Hunter’s red robe as Jesus Christ in King of Kings. Ray also cast psychopathic gangster Cookie Lamont with Corey Allen, the twitchy actor who’d played “Buzz,” the kid who loses the chickie-run in Rebel to James Dean.

Charisse’s two big numbers are certainly spectacular: after Farrell persuades Rico to give her a featured spot in his nightclub instead of relegating her to the chorus, she first does a spectacular dance in the red dress to an instrumental version of the same theme song we heard in a vocal rendition over the opening credits. Later, in a leopard-skin pattern which reveals a surprising amount of crotch for a film that was still made under the Production Code (however much enforcement had loosened gradually over the years), she does a vaguely Latin-themed number. (Because these are both instrumental solo dances for her, producer Pasternack doesn’t have to worry about either a chorus line or a voice double, since Charisse couldn’t sing.) Most of the film is taken up by Farrell’s crisis of conscience between Rico’s insistence that he stay as his lawyer and Vicki’s that he get out and set up shop in another city where people haven’t heard of him before. Midway through the movie both Farrell and Rico drop out – Rico because he beat a man nearly to death at a meeting of the South Side Club (where a black-and-white process shot of an elevated train passing outside on a track nearby adds to the sinister atmosphere) and Farrell told him to leave town, and Farrell because he’s heard of a doctor in Switzerland (were Messrs. Katcher and Wells thinking Magnificent Obsession here?) who can do a series of surgeries on his leg that would repair the damage done all those years ago (though when he returns from Switzerland he still needs a cane to walk). Then both return with a vengeance as Rico summons Farrell to represent Cookie in a case involving the wholesale elimination of Cookie’s potential competitors – and Farrell refuses. Farrell puts Vicki on a train to take her to L.A. and relative safety, but Rico sends two thugs to kidnap her off the train and bring her back to headquarters at the South Side Club.

The climax takes place at the club, where in a marvelous scene that indicates the level of his cruelty Rico pours acid over a red paper New Year’s decoration, rotting it and saying that’s what he’s going to do to Vicki if she doesn’t come back to him. Vicki duly shows up, but fortunately so do the cops, summoned by Farrell when earlier at an Italian restaurant he wrote down the address on the wall by a public phone so district attorney Jeffrey Stewart (Kent Smith from the Cat People movies and The Fountainhead) and his detail can track them down and either arrest or kill them. In the end, after Farrell gives Rico a big speech to the effect that when they were growing up together as kids, Rico used to fight the bullies and now he’s become one, Rico meets his death in a fall from the top window of the hall and dies. One frustration with Party Girl is trying to figure out when it takes place; the opening title simply reads, “Chicago in the 1930’s,” but it’s hard to figure out from external evidence as to just when in the 1930’s. In particular it’s hard to figure out whether Prohibition is still in effect or not; there are hints that it is (at least one of the drinking establishments shown is obviously a speakeasy) but also hints that it isn’t, including the impeccably labeled bottles of booze out of which the characters drink and the wide-open nature of Rico’s most famous and successful club. It’s also a quite violent movie for 1958, though after The Godfather and its progeny the violence in Party Girl seems quite tame by comparison. Party Girl is an unusual movie but also a flawed one, though one of the things I like about it is the sheer strength and power of Robert Taylor’s performance, Enacting the usual Humphrey Bogart character arc of the disillusioned person who’s been corrupted and then reasserts his idealism and redeems himself, Taylor proves surprisingly good as an actor. I’ve mentioned him, Dick Powell, Errol Flynn and (decades later) Tom Selleck as actors who got stronger and more convincing once they lost the boyish good looks that had made them stars and got cast in deeper, richer, meatier roles.

A Dangerous Profession (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 28) I watched a potentially interesting but ultimately not very good film on Turner Classic Movies called A Dangerous Profession, made in 1949 at RKO as a follow-up to Raft’s previous movies there, Johnny Angel (1945), Nocturne (1946) and Race Street (1948). TCM had originally scheduled A Dangerous Profession for the first night of their Raft tribute, January 7, but for some reason instead of A Dangerous Profession they showed a movie from 1929, Side Street (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/01/side-street-rko-1929.html), which co-starred Tom, Owen and Matt Moore as on-screen brothers, as they were in real life. My husband Charles walked in on Side Street as he got home from work and got to see Raft’s one scene as a dancer in a floor show that we both agreed was easily the most entertaining part of Side Street. Because it cast Raft and Pat O’Brien as business partners in a bail-bond company, I was hoping A Dangerous Profession would be either a remake or reworking of Rowland Brown’s great 1933 film Blood Money (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/blood-money-20th-century-pictures.html), but it wasn’t. Instead it was an all too lame tale about a couple of bail bondsmen who are uncertainly united in one firm, Joe Farley (Pat O’Brien, with whom Raft apparently had a reunion-of-old-friends relationship with while filming) and Vince Kane (George Raft, top-billed). It was directed by Ted Tetzlaff – a major cinematographer who’d worked with Raft before in 1935 on Rumba (the second and last film in Paramount’s short-lived attempt to turn Raft and Carole Lombard into their Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and had switched to directing after shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Tetzlaff had just finished another RKO thriller with Raft, Johnny Allegro, and before that he’d made his masterpiece as a director: The Window, a reworking of Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in which child actor Bobby Driscoll played a boy who can’t convince his parents that he actually saw their neighbors murder a man in their apartment.

The script for A Dangerous Profession was by Martin Rackin and Warren Duff (Rackin had also written Johnny Allegro) and was apparently originally intended first for Humphrey Bogart and then for Fred MacMurray before it finally ended up in Raft’s hands. (Given that two films Raft had turned down, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, were both huge career-boosting successes for Bogart, it’s tempting to imagine him playing the lead in just about every film Raft made after 1941.) A Dangerous Profession centers around Vince Kane’s former lover Lucy Brackett (a marvelously understated performance by Ella Raines), who comes to Farley and Kane when her husband Claude Brackett (Bill Williams, who along with his wife Barbara Hale co-starred in another 1949 RKO thriller, The Clay Pigeon – evidently RKO was hoping to turn them into another Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but they didn’t have the on-screen chemistry for that to work) was arrested and held for $25,000 bail on a minor charge. Police Lieutenant Nick Ferrone (Jim Backus, who also narrates the film) explains that he’s been after Claude Brackett for years because, even though the charge they’ve arrested him on is relatively small, they’re convinced he is a major figure in a criminal organization and if they can keep him in jail, sooner or later he’ll rat out the gang and turn state’s evidence. But Vince Kane is equally determined to bail him out, and when Lucy can only raise $1,600 of Claude’s bail, Vince agrees to provide the other $9,000 out of his company’s funds. Ferrone is not happy that Vince, an old friend of his from the LAPD (where Vince used to be a detective until he quit to enter the bail-bonds business because it paid better), got Brackett released from jail. Farley is also unhappy because he’s concerned that if Brackett “skips,” the firm is out $9,000 it can ill afford to lose. Midway through the movie Brackett is murdered by Roy Collins, a.k.a. Matt Gibney (Robert Gist), a professional hit man working for crime boss Matt McKay (Roland Winters, an odd credit for him given that he was best known as Monogram’s last Charlie Chan).

Vince breaks the news to Lucy, who identifies Brackett’s body, and for a while I was expecting a twist reversal ending in which Brackett had merely faked his death, and Lucy had been part of his plot and fulfilled her end by falsely identifying the corpse in the morgue as her husband’s. But no-o-o-o-o, Brackett is really most sincerely dead, and instead the film climaxes on a deserted road in which Kane has arranged to meet McKay and Collins a.k.a. Gibney. Kane has demanded a $50,000 bribe from McKay to forget the whole thing, and in addition he’s asked Farley for $25,000 to buy him out of the bail business. Only it’s all a trap; in reality he’s invited Lt. Ferrone to the meeting so Ferrone and his fellow cops can bust McKay and Collins for bribery and make the charges stick. The film ends with McKay in custody, Lt. Ferrone shooting and killing Collins to save Kane’s life, and Kane and Lucy (who’s there because she insisted on riding with Lt. Ferrone and two other cops to the rendezvous) in a clinch. Lt. Ferrone offers Kane help in getting back his old job as a police detective, but Kane turns it down and is content with Farley’s offer to raise his share of the bail business from 20 to 30 percent. A Dangerous Profession is a potentially good movie that ends up just being mediocre. Raft’s monotone line deliveries aren’t exactly the stuff of which screen legends are made (memo to Raft: there’s a reason why Bogart became a bigger star than you off two films you turned down!). The Rackin-Duff script totally avoids the class consciousness that made Rowland Brown’s script for Blood Money (which he both wrote and directed) so interesting, particularly the parasitic relationships between bail bondsmen and rich parents who rely on the bondsmen to bail (both literally and figuratively) out their scapegrace children who break the law purely for fun. While the previous Raft RKO films had made money, A Dangerous Profession lost the company $280,000. It also came at a particularly rocky time in the studio’s history, as Howard Hughes had just bought it two years before and was running it in the same ham-handed, egomaniacal way Elon Musk runs X nè Twitter. A Dangerous Profession seems to have escaped the horrible re-editing Hughes imposed on several RKO films, but it isn’t very good, either. New York Times critic A. H. Weiler ended his review by saying that the film “proves that the bail-bond business can be dangerous and that it also can be the basis for an exceedingly ordinary adventure.”

MacArthur (Zanuck-Brown Productions, Universal, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 26) my husband Charles and I watched Universal’s 1977 biopic MacArthur because it’s one of the films for which Intrada Records has released a new version of the soundtrack which I’m reviewing for Fanfare magazine. MacArthur was obviously intended as a follow-up to the blockbuster success of the 1970 biopic Patton. According to Jeff Bond’s liner notes for the Intrada two-CD release, MacArthur was produced by Frank McCarthy, who in 1945 had been an aide to General George C. Marshall and briefly assistant secretary of state. So he almost certainly had known both Patton and MacArthur personally before he went on to make movies about them. Though MacArthur was produced at Universal, it seems like a 20th Century-Fox film in exile because not only was McCarthy a refugee from Fox, so were the executive producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown. (Zanuck had left Fox in 1971 after his father, studio founder Darryl F. Zanuck, was forced into retirement.) McCarthy’s initial plan for MacArthur was to reunite the star, George C. Scott, and director, Franklin M. Schaffner, from Patton, but Scott turned it down and actually suggested, of all people, Cary Grant for the role. (Scott was quoted in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as saying that Grant, who’d been retired for a decade by 1977 and hadn’t shown any strong desire to go back to work, was “an aristocrat, just like MacArthur” – which Grant wasn’t; he was a Cockney who had reinvented himself as an actor to play a natural aristocrat with debonair grace.) Other candidates for the lead in MacArthur were Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson (really?), John Gavin, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Charlton Heston, John Wayne and the actor they finally hired, Gregory Peck.

According to Bond, Peck, a well-known Hollywood liberal, was originally skeptical about playing MacArthur – he’d been around when President Harry Truman had fired MacArthur from command in Korea in 1951 and then had supported Truman’s decision – but his attitude turned around when he started reading about MacArthur to research the role. “I decided to learn all sides of him and become his advocate,” Peck told Cue magazine in a 1977 profile timed to promote the movie. “I came to understand how deeply he believed in the old-fashioned values of honor, duty, and country.” In fact, Peck became so strongly supportive of MacArthur it caused the film’s director, Joseph Sargent, problems. “One difficulty we encountered during the filming was that Greg fell so much in love with the character that he resisted doing the negative sides of the man,” Sargent told the Los Angeles Times. McCarthy and Sargent also had problems with Universal in terms of budget constraints, which prevented them from shooting as much of the film as they’d wanted on the original locations. Most of it was shot on the Universal backlot and the beaches of California, though West Point and the now-decommissioned battleship U.S.S. Missouri (site of the September 2, 1945 surrender of Japan that formally ended World War II) did get to play themselves. (Sargent later acknowledged that many of the sites where the film’s events had taken place had been redeveloped so extensively they no longer looked as they had during World War II or the Korean “police action” – a euphemism MacArthur ridicules during the film.)

The film also suffered from budgetary constraints in that its running time was only 2 hours 10 minutes, compared to the 2 hours 52 minutes of Patton, and so the screenwriters, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, could only show a slice of MacArthur’s life. The film begins when MacArthur has already lost the Battle of the Philippines in 1942 and is ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Dan O’Herlihy, delivering a surprisingly inept performance for such a usually fine actor) to evacuate to Australia, leaving the hapless General Jonathan Wainwright (Sandy Kenyon) to face the inevitable and surrender what was left of the U.S. Army in the Philippines to Japan. (Wainwright spent the remaining three years of the war as a Japanese POW, the highest-ranking U.S. servicemember they captured.) It ends with MacArthur’s dismissal of his command in the Korean War by President Harry S. Truman (Ed Flanders, who had already played Truman in the TV short Harry S. Truman: Plain Speaking and a TV-movie, Truman at Potsdam, and would play him again, though only as a voice actor, in the 1980 film Inchon, also about MacArthur and the Korean War) and his fabled “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech to Congress on his return. A broader portrayal of MacArthur would have included his first appearance as a national celebrity in 1932, when he led the U.S. Army forces to expel the Bonus Marchers (World War I veterans who’d been promised a postwar bonus and marched on Washington to demand it), as well as his rather crabby retirement in which he was often quoted by anti-Viet Nam War protesters as having said the U.S. should never again fight a land war in Asia. It’s not at all clear when – or even if – he said that, though the film makes it clear that MacArthur had no patience with the concept of “limited war” that was at the heart of the American debacle in Viet Nam. To MacArthur, war was something you fought all out, with all of your resources and no quarter given, or not at all.

One gets the impression that McCarthy, Sargent, Barwood, Robbins, and Goldsmith simply didn’t find Douglas MacArthur as interesting a character as they or their artistic counterparts had with George S. Patton. Perhaps because he fell so in love with MacArthur during his researches, Peck portrays him basically as Atticus Finch in uniform. Though there are brief hints of the filmmakers’ ridiculing MacArthur’s affectations, including his insistence that newsreel cameramen always shoot him from low angles so he’ll look taller (a common Hollywood trick that director Billy Wilder and cinematographer John F. Seitz used in Sunset Boulevard to make it look like Gloria Swanson was towering over William Holden even though she was really one foot shorter than he), for the most part MacArthur portrays its central character as an unalloyed hero. At one point he’s declaring, as commander of the U.S. occupying forces in Japan after World War II, that he will insist on Japan enacting land reform programs, allowing women to vote, and making other changes reminiscent of the New Deal. Later in the movie he’s equally insistent on his undying hatred of Communism, and we’re clearly meant to approve of both these contradictory positions. We do get the impression from MacArthur that there was a much stronger and more artistically interesting film of MacArthur’s life than the one we got. For one thing, it doesn’t mention that in addition to MacArthur having a wife (social heiress Louise Closser Brooks), he also had a mistress (Jean Faircloth) who became his second wife in 1937 after Louise divorced him in 1929. (The one actress playing Mrs. MacArthur in the movie, Marj Dusay, looks oddly Asian, which had me wondering if she was a Filipina MacArthur had met on his earlier deployment there in the mid-1920’s.) It also doesn’t mention MacArthur’s desire to use tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War after China joined in 1950. In an interview he gave in 1954 but which was only published after his death a decade later, MacArthur acknowledged that he had requested four atomic bombs for the Korea campaign and asked for sole discretion as to whether and when they would be used. A report published in Time in the 1970’s said MacArthur had not only wanted to use nukes in Korea, he’d asked that the entire boundary between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel be impregnated with radioactive material so it would be literally toxic to pass for thousands of years hence. The Time article claimed that these dangerous and crazy ideas were the real reason President Truman fired him from command in 1951.

MacArthur the movie begins and ends with his farewell speech to West Point in 1962. (Obviously the filmmakers were intent on reproducing the famous opening scene of Patton, which featured George C. Scott’s scorching delivery of a speech given by the real Patton.) There’s a hauntingly ironic scene at the start of MacArthur in which the woman driving him to the ceremony hails the beauties of West Point and asks, “Have you ever been here before, sir?” Of course MacArthur had, many times since his enrollment there in 1899 (he came from a military family and his father, Arthur MacArthur – the MacArthurs always alternated between “Arthur” and “Douglas” as the names for their first-born male children – had won the Medal of Honor for service at Missionary Ridge in the Civil War; when Douglas won it in World War II the MacArthurs became the only father-and-son winners in its history), and in the speech he was there to give, he said, “I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. I bid you farewell.” (MacArthur’s emphasis on “duty, honor, country” as his living values rings pretty hollow in this era in which the American people have just returned to office a President who believes in none of those things!)

Woman on the Run (Fidelity Pictures, Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, January 25) I watched a surprisingly interesting film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies: Woman on the Run (1950), an unusual production from Howard Welsch (who owned Fidelity Pictures, which two years later would produce Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, essentially a film noir in Western drag like Jacques Tourneur’s Blood on the Moon and Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73). His secret partner in producing this film and putting up the money to make it was its female star, Ann Sheridan, who’s quite good in the lead role of Eleanor Johnson, estranged wife of artist Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott). She and Welsch cut a deal with Universal-International to distribute and release it, and though the original story, “Man on the Run” by Sylvia Tate, had been written to emphasize the male lead, Sheridan insisted on switching the little around to emphasize her part even though it’s her on-screen husband, not her, who’s “on the run” for most of the movie. Woman on the Run opens with one of its best scenes: a dimly seen young man is cornered inside his car by an overweight Irish-cop stereotype who demands 75 percent of the money the man – obviously a police officer of some kind who took a bribe to look the other way at one of the city’s gang boss’s crimes. An assassin – obviously a hit man hired by the city’s crime bosses – shoots the corrupt cop and throws the body down a ridge (this is set in the hilly city of San Francisco, where plenty of ridges are available to throw bodies from; this scene reminded me of Miles Archer’s murder in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon). The scene is witnessed by Frank Johnson from his apartment window, and he responds by immediately fleeing the scene and going into hiding, so it really is the man, not the woman, on the run! The police investigating the murder, led by Inspector Ferris (Robert Keith, Brian Keith’s father), crash Frank’s and Eleanor’s apartment and make themselves monumentally obnoxious.

Eleanor makes her disinterest in finding her husband readily apparent by her monotone-like responses to the police officers’ questions and her lack of any apparent concern over his well-being. Frank, it turns out, was an aspiring artist but one who kept sabotaging his own career because he never thought he was “good enough,” and he kept moving around from city to city in search of fresh inspiration. Once, without telling him, Eleanor entered one of his paintings in a contest and it was good enough to win a $500 first prize, but Frank turned down the money and withdrew it from the competition. Ultimately Frank was so broke he had to take a job as a window dresser for a local department store, where he sculpts a mannequin bust in Eleanor’s likeness. (Three years earlier, Ann Sheridan had made a film called The Unfaithful in which a bust of her was also a major plot point.) There’s a neat scene in which the cops searching Frank’s and Eleanor’s apartment see the kitchen cupboards contain only dog food, and Eleanor explains that she and Frank eat all their meals out (which even in 1950 would have got expensive very quickly, especially for people living as much on the financial edge as the Johnsons). Their dog is named “Rembrandt,” a street rescue which Eleanor glumly says got that name because “it’s as close as we’ll ever come to owning one.” Eleanor has got tired of Frank’s lack of ambition but, when she visits his doctor, Dr. Hohler (Steven Geray), she learns that he has a congenital heart condition and needs regular doses of a medication to survive (though we never learn just what the all-important drug is). So it’s literally a matter of life or death for him that she find him. It’s also important to the police, who are frantically searching for him because the man he saw being murdered is the only witness they had against the city’s crime syndicate, and now Frank’s testimony against the gang and its hired killer is the only way they have to fight back and nail the gang.

Early on in the film Eleanor is accosted by Dan Legget (Dennis O’Keefe, making his Dick Powell-inspired transition from comedy and musical star to film noir actor), who tells her he’s a reporter for the San Francisco Graphic and his paper will pay them $5,000 for exclusive rights to his story if they can find him. About a third of the way through the film [spoiler alert!] we see Dan using a combination cigarette case and lighter we saw the unseen killer use in the opening scene, so we know he is the hit man assigned by the gang to eliminate the last witness that can put them away and he’s hooked up with Eleanor to help her find Frank so he can kill him. Along the way Eleanor sees various paintings Frank has made of her and given away to different people, including a bar owner who’s hung it over his bar, and becomes convinced that Frank loves her after all – and as she searches for him she realizes that she still loves him, too, and she gradually recommits to making the marriage work if and when she finds him alive. At one point Frank sends her a mysterious letter telling her he will be hiding in one of their former haunts, which forces her to dredge up memories of their old past dates to figure out where he could be. Unfortunately, the cops beat her to the letter and open it themselves. Later Eleanor and Dan realize that Frank has changed clothes since the cops know what he was wearing the last time he was seen alive, and they visit the clothes dealer who took his old coat and sold him a Navy pea coat (not an uncommon sight in a major port city like San Francisco) and matching cap. Ultimately they trace him to a beachfront amusement park – which filmmaking magic constructed from bits of San Francisco’s Playland and the Santa Monica Pier (I remember Playland from my childhood and the Santa Monica Pier from visits with a former partner in the late 1980’s who told me his parents had courted each other there).

Dan takes Eleanor on a roller-coaster ride despite her fear of roller coasters (one the real Ann Sheridan shared with her character; she got impatient and anxious as director Norman Foster called for take after take), and Foster and cinematographer Hal Mohr (a veteran who’d grown up in San Francisco, lived through the 1906 earthquake and fire as a child, and 21 years later had to reproduce it for the 1927 Warner Bros. film Old San Francisco) shoot it in a choppy, vertiginous style that seems to have wandered in from a film about 20 years later. (Mohr used a hand-held camera for some of these scenes and, rather than have an assistant shoot the hand-held scenes, did them himself.) The people running the roller coaster allow you to take a second ride for half price if you do so immediately after the first, and Dan uses that as a way to get Eleanor out of the way so he can go kill Frank, whom they’ve both spotted on the amusement-park grounds. There’s some effective suspense editing as Eleanor is whirled around on the roller coaster, helpless to stop Dan from killing Frank, and a rather gruesome sequence in which Dan and Frank struggle on the roller-coaster tracks as it passes by and one of them is decapitated. (It’s shot so gingerly as to get by the Production Code Administration – we certainly don’t see the severed head, as we would in a modern film – but we still get the point.) At first Eleanor and the cops both think Frank is the victim, but when the headless corpse is wearing a grey coat instead of Frank’s black one, they realize Frank got the better of Dan and is now out of immediate danger. The film ends with a close-up of the famous laughing female robot clown I remember from my days as a kid going to Playland before “The End” credit comes up (I miss “The End” credits) and we get a cast list.

Woman on the Run is both a commonly available film and one that’s become rare and obscure. Like a lot of films made during the transition between the studio system and the modern-day method of making movies through ad hoc production companies, it slipped out of copyright and so for years was available in public-domain prints. But most of those were in terrible condition, and the one known pristine copy was destroyed in the Universal Studios fire in Los Angeles in 2008. Then a negative turned up at the British Film Institute and was borrowed by UCLA, who struck new prints and did a major restoration job that (unlike such other UCLA restorations as the two-strip Technicolor version of the 1930 Paramount musical The Vagabond King with Jeanette MacDonald and Dennis King, or Anthony Mann’s great and little-known 1945 film noir The Great Flamarion) they’ve actually released to the general public. (I’ve often compared UCLA’s film archive to Fafner in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, who turned himself into a dragon to guard the stolen treasure but never did anything with it.) The film turned out to be a real sleeper: Norman Foster had been a protégé of Orson Welles (he co-directed the 1942 film Journey Into Fear, based on an Eric Ambler novel, with Welles) and a good chunk of Wellesiana turns up in this movie. The Lady from Shanghai is particularly referenced, not only because the film is set in San Francisco and climaxes at its famous beachfront amusement park but because a key turn of the plot involves Asian-American performers Sam (Victor Sen Yung, best known as Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son in the films with Sidney Toler, who I didn’t realize until last night was actually born in San Francisco) and Suzie (Reiko Sato). They’ve formed a vaudeville team and are honing their act at a rooftop Chinese restaurant Eleanor and Frank Johnson frequented, only Suzie gets killed after Frank gives her a sketch of the man he saw commit the murder – and Dan kills her, then steals the sketch and tears it up. Eddie Muller presented Woman on the Run with an interesting co-host: African-American cinematographer turned director and writer Ernest Dickerson, who remembered the roller-coaster scene from his childhood. He walked in on his godmother while she was watching this movie on an old, dim black-and-white TV and vividly recalled the shot of Dan’s headless corpse floating in San Francisco Bay even though it wasn’t until years later that he realized what the movie was called, what it was about, or who else was in it.

Sherlock: "The Empty Hearse" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 24) my husband Charles and I watched one of the weakest episodes of Sherlock, the BBC-TV reboot of the Sherlock Holmes mythos from 2010 to 2014 that made an international star of the actor who played Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch. It was called “The Empty Hearse” and opened season three of the show, as the previous episode to which it was a sequel, “The Reichenbach Fall,” had ended season two. Writer Mark Gatiss (who also co-created Sherlock with Steven Moffat and played Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter older brother, in all the episodes in which he appeared) really should have been ashamed of himself for this one! The show contained two, count ‘em, two separate and incompatible explanations for how Sherlock Holmes survived his rooftop confrontation with James Moriarty (Andrew Scott) and his apparent suicide at the end of “The Reichenbach Fall.” In one, Holmes was wearing a bungee cord around his waist when he jumped; in the other, there was a large blue air mattress in the street waiting to catch him when he fell; and in both members of Holmes’s squad of homeless people (equivalent to the Baker Street Irregulars in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories) helped carry out the switch in which an already dead body who vaguely resembled Holmes would be put on the street in his place. One of the tricks was that one of the Irregulars would run into Watson with a bicycle, which would distract him long enough to make the switch without him or anyone else noticing. During the two years (one year shorter than Conan Doyle’s pause between killing Holmes off in “The Final Problem” and reviving him in “The Empty House”) Holmes is supposedly “dead,” Dr. John Watson starts dating Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) and is about to propose to her when Holmes reappears disguised as a particularly obnoxious waiter. Holmes, in the meantime, had been infiltrating an international terrorist organization (which is so international we’re not given even so much of a hint as to where it is!) whose other members are brutally torturing him demanding secret information as to when the next terrorist assault on London will be. Holmes breaks up his affair with the young hot-looking lab tech Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), who gave him a short kiss on the lips when he was rescued in at least one version of the flashback but subsequently decided he was just way too weird for her.

There’s also a subplot in that the terror attack on London will take place on a subway train. Holmes and Watson search for the terrorists’ bomb and realize it’s the subway car itself: it’s been planted full of bombs and will be blown up right under the British Houses of Parliament on November 5, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s famous plot to do just that. Charles, sooner than I did, recognized the disappearing train involved in some sinister plot as from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost Special,” in which Sherlock Holmes (though he’s not named in the story) writes an anonymous letter to a London newspaper giving a bizarre and incongruous explanation for the disappearance of a special train. He turns out to be wrong in Conan Doyle’s story but right in Mark Gatiss’s script, and Holmes and Watson are trapped inside the booby-trapped car while a renegade Member of Parliament named Anderson (Jonathan Aris) sets off the bomb by remote control. Only within the 2 ½ minutes Holmes and Watson have to stop the bomb from going off, Holmes merely reaches behind it and turns off the on-off switch. “Every bomb has an on-off switch,” Holmes tells the thunderstruck Watson. (Alas, that’s far from true in real life.) This show is full of alleged flashback or flash-forward sequences telling or showing things that aren’t about to happen in the story’s reality (such as it is), including an animated or CGI sequence of the Houses of Parliament actually collapsing from the bombs going off under them (which, of course, they really don’t). And the title is explained with the information that “The Empty Hearse” is a private group of Sherlock Holmes fans who’ve come together after his “death” to keep his memory alive and indeed to raise concern about whether Holmes might be alive after all, since they’ve talked to two people – including one who’s allegedly seen him – though when he cuts them out rather cruelly they turn against him and are only too happy to see him arrested. Fortunately, before that they’ve taken steps to rehabilitate his reputation and regain the public trust he had before Moriarty ruined it with his P.R. campaign against him.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Walt Disney Enterprises, Bryna Enterprises, Buena Vista Distribution, 1983)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after watching that disastrous Sherlock episode Charles and I had enough time last night (Friday, January 24) to watch a great movie: Something Wicked This Way Comes, a 1983 film produced by Peter Vincent Douglas (Kirk Douglas’s son and Michael Douglas’s half-brother) for Walt Disney Enterprises based on a 1962 novel by writer Ray Bradbury. Both novel and film had convoluted production histories; Bradbury (who disliked being pigeonholed by the term “science fiction”; he said he wrote just one science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451, and the rest of his work was fantasy) first conceived of the basic idea – two boys in a small town in the northern Midwest are transfixed by the arrival of a carnival in October, well after the usual season, only this carnival harbors dark secrets – in 1945. He originally called it either “The Ferris Wheel” or “Dark Carnival” and sold the story under the latter title to Weird Tales in 1948. Bradbury used Dark Carnival as the title for a short-story collection he published with Arkham House (an independent company owned and run by H. P. Lovecraft’s literary executor, August Derleth), but he did not include the story in the collection. He then left the material alone until 1955, when his good friend Gene Kelly (to whom he dedicated the book) showed him an as-yet unreleased movie Kelly had made in Britain in 1953 called Invitation to the Dance. Bradbury was fascinated by the film, which was just three extended ballet sequences telling three different stories without dialogue, and he immediately decided to write his carnival story as a screenplay for Kelly. But Kelly was unable to get financing, so Bradbury decided to turn the tale into a novel and spent the next seven years working on it. He also switched from his original plan to write the novel as a first-person narrative of the adult Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and wrote it in third person instead, though when it came time to make this movie Bradbury reverted to his original plan and started the film with a narration by an adult Will (Arthur Hill).

It takes place in “Green Town,” a fictionalized version of Bradbury’s own birthplace, Waukegan, Illinois, which he used in many stories. Will and his best friend, Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), were born just minutes apart on Hallowe’en, though Jim was born on October 31 and Will on November 1. Will lives with his father, librarian Charles Holloway (Jason Robards), and his mother (Ellen Geer); Jim lives with his mom (Diane Ladd) and has an elaborate fantasy that his absent father is a big-game hunter and explorer in Africa, though it becomes pretty clear after a while that his dad is dead. They are drawn to Dark’s Phantasmagorial Carnival (in the book it was Cooger’s and Dark’s, but the film downgrades Cooger to just an employee) and meet both Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce) and Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fischer). The carnival contains a mirror maze that discomfits anyone who enters it, including schoolteacher Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield); a large number of freaks; and a merry-go-round that can change a rider’s age depending on whether it spins forward (you get older) or backward (you get younger). Mr. Dark has a series of illustrations on his body that show moving images – he’s billed as “The Illustrated Man” (a character from an earlier Bradbury story that was itself filmed in 1968) – and he claims to be able to use these to predict people’s futures. The carnival also features a “Dust Witch” (played by the marvelous 1970’s Blaxploitation actress Pam Grier, though she’s so heavily made up and veiled it’s hard to tell she’s Black) who lets loose a swarm of tarantulas on our boy heroes. (The credits list on imdb.com includes five people as “tarantula suppliers” and three more as “tarantula handlers.” That’s the sort of thing you had to do to have exotic menaces from the animal world in your movie in the days before CGI.)

In the book she puts a spell on Will and Jim that keeps them from talking, hearing or seeing, but the spell in the film just stops them from talking, and only briefly. Mr. Cooger gets on the magic merry-go-round and morphs into a younger man (Scott De Roy) and then into a child (Brendan Klinger), and as a child he moves in with Miss Foley – who’s undergone her own age reduction via the magic mirrors and is now played by Sharan Lea – and poses as her long-lost nephew. (I want to give a shout-out to the film’s casting directors, Virginia Higgins and Pam Polifroni, for being so good at finding actors who could be believable as the same person at different ages.) Will and Jim realize that the carnival’s proprietors have marked them for death, and in a chilling scene taken straight from Bradbury’s novel they hide under a street via a grate and worry that they’ll be discovered by the denizens of the carnival as they parade down the street. As the story progresses Charles Halloway emerges as the film’s most important character; he discovers where the kids are hiding and tells them to meet him at the town library, where he works. There he explains that the “carnival” is actually a group of people who are neither alive nor dead but have kept themselves going by feeding off the fears and heartbreaks of normal people. Though the explanation in the movie is inevitably shorter and less comprehensive than in the novel, the version in the book ends:

“All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They’re a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn’t care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along the way.”

If I still thought of Ray Bradbury as a liberal – if I hadn’t read the Wikipedia page on him, which revealed how hard-Right his politics turned over his later years to the point where, giving an interview in 1994 on the 40th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, he said the novel should now be read as an assault on Left-wing political correctness (“Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The Black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control”) – I’d cite that passage as among the best explanations available for the power of Donald Trump and his appeal to so many Americans that has put him in the White House not once, but twice. Like the people in Bradbury’s carnival, Trump and his supporters get off on other people’s pain and nourish themselves by making others (immigrants, Trans people, poor people, people of color) suffer. And the book ends with Charles Halloway telling Will and Jim that the only way to destroy the carnival’s power over them is literally to laugh at it. They act as silly as possible and sing Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susannah,” and they keep themselves in a state of joy so long that eventually the carnival from hell literally disintegrates around them. That again reminded me of Trump, and specifically his savage attacks on late-night TV comedians – Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers in particular – for making fun of him on their shows.

I was a bit worried about the directorial credit on the film of Something Wicked This Way Comes: Jack Clayton, a British director who made only 10 films in his career. One, Room at the Top, was a great film about an opportunistic young man determined to achieve business success no matter how many people he had to step on or exploit along the way. Another, his 1974 version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, was a dreary bore; Clayton utterly failed to find any cinematic equivalent to Fitzgerald’s prose style. When I first saw it in 1974 it made me wonder if the book was as good as I’d thought it was; years later I got the DVD and ran it with Charles, who said, “It was like attending a reading of the book in evening dress at San Simeon.” The Great Gatsby was such a box-office disaster it took nine years for Clayton to get to make another film, this one – and though he’d failed to dramatize Fitzgerald’s quasi-poetic prose style in Gatsby, he did a vivid job of exactly that with Bradbury’s. (Maybe that was because when Clayton made Gatsby, Fitzgerald had been dead for 34 years; when he made Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury was right there, having written the script.) Bradbury also added a quite haunting character: Ed (James Stacy), the bartender who lost both his left arm and left leg (presumably in combat in World War I – this film takes place in the 1930’s) and hops around town reliving his past as a college football star. There are flaws in Something Wicked, and some of them are pretty typical of moviemaking: Jason Robards would be more credible as Vidal Peterson’s grandfather than his father. Also, either Bradbury, Clayton or both muffed the ending so we don’t get the all-out explosion of laughter and joy that ended the book. But overall it’s a surprisingly strong tale, and (getting back to why I was both reading the novel and watching the film in the first place: I’m writing a review of the new soundtrack CD for Fanfare), James Horner supplied an excellent score that notably added to the film’s incredible mood-setting and the sweep and scope of Clayton’s quite good direction.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Master Key" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 23) I watched a particularly chilling Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Master Key,” in which a 16-year-old white boy named Anthony Reed (Ricky Garcia, who’s actually 25, as I suspected) disappears from the group home he’s living in, which is run by a Black woman with all the sensitivity of a concentration-camp commandant. Anthony’s roommate Eric, an African-American, watched him get into a gold mini-van driven, it turns out, by Colin Clark (Ben Fine). The police visit Clark’s home and speak to his wife Leslie (Jo Twiss), who predictably has no idea that her husband is out pursuing extra-relational activities with teenage boys. Then they trace Clark to a by-the-hour motel and find him dead and Anthony sitting up straight in an adjoining room, looking almost catatonic. Anthony insists that Clark tried to rape him and he grabbed Clark’s gun and shot him dead in self-defense, but the police and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) don’t believe him. For one thing, there’s a huge amount of blood on the floor of the motel room as well as blood on the bed, and the blood on the floor convinces the investigators that Anthony can’t have shot Clark while he was on the bed. Nor do they think Anthony could have moved the body from the floor to the bed on his own. They also find a partial print on the gun that doesn’t match either Anthony’s or Clark’s, though the print is so partial they can’t identify whose it is.

The police have also investigated Anthony’s background; he got into the foster-care system when his father was murdered while Anthony was 10 and his mother died of a fentanyl overdose a year later. Among the people they interview along the way are Anthony’s case worker with the Department of Child Protective Services, Michael Strickland (Zach Appleman), who from the moment we lay eyes on him seems too good to be true as he declares to the cops that he’s a dedicated public servant who takes his job seriously and would never harm a kid. As it turns out, he’s the primary villain of the piece: not a pedophile himself but someone who’s been pimping out his charges, both male and female, including Anthony. Clark was one of Anthony’s johns, and Strickland himself was the third person at the scene of his killing. Apparently Anthony was the real shooter, but when he couldn’t go through with killing Clark, Strickland grabbed his gun hand and essentially forced him to do it. The cops discovered a series of text messages supposedly between Anthony and Clark declaring their intention to run away to California and be together, but it turns out they were forged by Strickland. The police also uncover Strickland’s “dark Web” page advertising his victims to potential johns. This SVU episode was full of plot twists they’ve explored before, but it’s redeemed by Ricky Garcia’s powerful performance as Anthony. He really makes you believe in his character as a young man so traumatized by a child “protective” system that has screwed him over, literally as well as figuratively, at every turn. Anthony’s disinclination to cooperate with the authorities becomes vivid and totally understandable in Garcia’s amazing acting. He’s a young actor we really need to see more of (and he’s quite a bit hotter-looking on his imdb.com photo than he is in this episode!).