The Stepdaughter (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 31) Lifetime showed a two-part, four-hour TV-movie, The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on the network. It was one of their “race” movies, in which all the principal characters were Black, and it’s about Joanna Lawrence, true name Maggie Dillon (Cassidey Fralin), who shows up one afternoon unannounced at the home of her biological father Michael (Blue Kimble) and his new wife, Whitney Hughs (Annie Ngosi Ilonzeh). The imdb.com cast list spells Whitney’s last name as the more normal “Hughes,” but “Hughs” is what we see on an online news story announcing their wedding. Whitney brought to the marriage her two sons by an earlier marriage that ended with the death of her husband, Brian, also known as “B.K.” (have it your way!) and Eric. The brothers are played by real-life brothers Akeem (Brian) and Jered (Eric) Cheatham – well, that’s one way to make sure your characters look biologically related: cast real biological relatives. It’s not clear what Michael does for a living, but Whitney has built a moderately successful cosmetics company catering to Black women and is ready to take it to the next level. She’s arranged for a meeting with executives from Walmart to see if they’ll carry her products in their stores, but Joanna sabotages the meeting by spiking Whitney’s cosmetics with lye, which literally burns the skin off of the faces of the two women Whitney had hired as models. She does a lot of other nasty things to the Lawrences as well as attempting to seduce both of Hughs’s sons (since they’re not biologically related and therefore it wouldn’t be incest in the literal sense) as well as their best friend, Dante Owens (Aaron Bryce Sheets). When Dante grabs Joanna’s private diary in a little black book (really!) and starts reading it, Joanna goes ballistic and beats him to death – though she somehow manages to conceal the crime even though it left blood all over the sheets. She’s somehow able to sneak the body out of the house and dump it off a bridge, though we don’t find this out until several acts later and in the meantime none of the other characters seem perturbed about Dante’s sudden disappearance.

Joanna also accepts Whitney’s invitation for a girls-only afternoon together during which they’ll go to a beauty parlor, but Whitney collapses during the outing under the influence of some powerful drugs with which someone has spiked her normal prescription medications. Through most of the film, co-written, co-produced and directed by Christopher B. Stokes, we’re unclear whether Joanna is just a teenage psychopath or something else is driving her. We do learn she had a singularly unhappy childhood, losing her mother when she was 10 and losing her grandmother more recently – it was grandma’s death in Louisiana that propelled her to cross the country and turn up in Orange County, California to seek out her dad – so for a while we’re not sure whether we’re supposed to hate her or feel sorry for her and the awful background she endured that has made her a monster. It’s only in the last act that we learn [spoiler alert!] that Michael, her father, is in on her game; the two of them are con artists. Michael seeks out well-to-do Black women he can marry so he can grab their fortunes and then kill them, sort of like Henri Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin’s pioneering black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and collect their inheritances and/or get life insurance payouts on them. Only [double spoiler alert!] Joanna, whose real name is Maggie Dillon, learns that Michael actually killed her mother by spiking her meds with the same “cocktail” of cocaine and two other dangerous drugs Joanna later used on Whitney, so she turns against him and they’re about ready to kill each other when Whitney grabs a gun one of them has left on the floor during their big confrontation and shoots Michael in the back. Episode one ends with both Michael and Joanna in police custody, and Whitney’s sister Cassandra (Judi Johnson) and police officer brother-in-law Terrance Clark (Rayan Lawrence) – the only two sympathetic people in the entire story – take custody of Brian and Eric after Whitney is adjudged an unfit mother because cocaine and other drugs were found in Whitney’s system after she allegedly tried to kill herself. Of course, it was all Joanna’s fault – she gave Whitney the incapacitating drugs and slashed her wrists to make it look like she’d tried to kill herself, and she also gave tranquilizing injections to both Cassandra and Terrance so they wouldn’t interfere with her plans to kill both Michael and Whitney to grab the Hughs inheritance for herself.

The Stepdaughter 2 (Footage Films Studios, Tubi, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The Stepdaughter 2, which Lifetime showed at 8 p.m. Sunday, August 31 right after rerunning the original The Stepdaughter from its own “premiere” showing the night before (though both these movies had originally aired on the Tubi “streaming” service in 2024 and Tubi got a co-production credit along with the awkwardly named Footage Films Studios and Lifetime), established that Michael Lawrence had somehow escaped from prison and landed a job running a restaurant inside a hotel in San Diego. He’s latched onto a new pigeon, Tessa Daniel (Erica Pinkett), who owns a company called Stretch that makes spandex clothes. She’s a multibillionaire, thanks to the fortune she inherited from her late husband as well as the fortune she’s made on her own from her clothing company. As the film begins Michael, who’s using the name “Christopher Michaels,” is putting on his big seduction act and eventually she induces Tessa to marry him. Only no sooner has that happened that Michael’s psycho daughter Joanna once again turns up at their home and is up to her old tricks again. We learn that Joanna was in a coma for a month, but when she came to she murdered the doctor who’d been treating her and escaped custody by impersonating her. She insists that Michael join him in a scheme to kill Tessa for her money and make it look like an accident – until then it’s been unclear whether Michael genuinely loved Tessa and saw her as an opportunity to get off the murder treadmill and live the rest of his life decently and honestly or whether he intended her as a target from the get-go. It’s unclear whether Christopher B. Stokes, who directed, co-wrote, and co-produced The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2, ever made up his mind on that point either. Michael takes Joanna aside in his guise as “Christopher” and tells her that he’ll join in her plot to take down Tessa and grab her fortune on condition that she not try to seduce Tessa’s son Trevor (Keyon Bowman), who aside from his weaknesses in math is an honors student in high school with firm admission and scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton. Trevor is supposedly Tessa’s son by her late husband Hank, but midway through we learn that his actual biological father is Tessa’s ex Brandon.

The imdb.com page on The Stepdaughter 2 is confusing because it credits a white actor, Ken Lawson, as Brandon, but the character we see on screen is definitely Black; indeed, whoever’s playing Brandon looks so much like Blue Kimble, who’s playing Michael, that during their fight scenes it’s hard to tell which one is which. What’s more, during all this Tessa, despite being 50 years old, has got pregnant by Michael, and she wants to keep this a secret until she has a chance to tell him. Of course Joanne learns it through guile – she finds Tessa’s positive pregnancy test in her trash – and spreads the news far and wide, surprising Tessa’s girlfriends who had assumed she was past child-bearing age. Michael is overjoyed by the news that he’s going to be a father again, but Joanne cruelly reminds him that Tessa’s new baby is just one more potential heir standing between them and the Daniel fortune and therefore the only way they can inherit Tessa’s money is to kill Tessa before her baby is born. They also need to kill Trevor while they’re at it. While all this is going on we have periodic flashbacks to the characters from the first The Stepdaughter. We re-meet Whitney Hughs at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, telling the group that the stresses from the first film’s events led her first to prescription drugs and then to wine, then to hard liquor, until she hit the proverbial bottom and started to recover. We also meet two new police officer characters, Detective Hines (Mike Hill) and Detective Irving (Apryl Jones). Detective Hines is still determined to recapture Michael and Joanne Lawrence despite Detective Irving’s puzzlement that he’s so desperate to reopen this particular cold case. It turns out that Detective Hines actually dated Whitney Hughs before she married Michael Lawrence, and he’s determined not only to give her justice but to catch Michael and Joanne so he can win back Whitney’s love. Detective Hines even goes to see Whitney and offers her police protection, including an unmarked car stationed outside her door, in the unlikely event Michael ever comes to see her again. The Stepdaughter 2 has a particularly frustrating open ending in which Michael and Joanne are once again arrested, only we’re told that they’ve escaped and in the chilling final scene, Michael once again shows up at Whitney’s home and we’re left with the sinking feeling that somehow Christopher B. Stokes is setting us up for The Stepdaughter 3. (That prospect reminded me of the Los Angeles Times reviewer who wrote about the film Saw 4 and pleaded, “Don’t see this movie. Don’t give them an excuse to make Saw 5.” As things turned out, they made not only a Saw 5 but a Saw 6 before the series blessedly sawed itself out of its – and our – misery.)

The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd Productions, Paramount, 1927)

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

After the horrors of the Lifetime movies The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2 on Sunday, August 31, my husband Charles and I got to watch a truly great film: a Blu-Ray transfer of Harold Lloyd’s 1927 film The Kid Brother. It was reportedly Lloyd’s favorite of his own films and one of the few he would allow to be shown publicly during the last two decades of his life (his dates were 1893-1971). It was also a commercial disappointment because it was so dark. Lloyd’s stock in trade was playing the brash middle-class striver in happy-go-lucky comedies, often with spectacular thrill sequences. Lloyd himself once commented, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anyone remembers!” The Kid Brother is a pastoral comedy in which Lloyd plays Harold Hickory, growing up in the town of Hickoryville under the long shadows of his father, Sheriff Jim Hickory (Walter James) and his brothers Leo (Leo Willis) and Olin (Olin Francis). Harold is relentlessly bullied by his dad, his brothers, neighbors Sam Hooper (Frank Lanning) and his son Hank (Ralph Yearsley), and just about everybody else in town. Hickoryville is invaded by “Prof. Powers’s Medicine Show,” which since the recent death of Prof. Powers has been run by his daughter Mary (Jobyna Ralston, who took over from Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s leading lady when Mildred quit to marry Lloyd for real; they stayed together until her death in 1969, and of the leading male comedians of the silent era – Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon – Lloyd was the only one who married just once) and two shady associates, “Flash” Farrell (Eddie Boland), who’s taken over from the late Prof. Powers the job of hawking the patent medicine the show sells (which he says is good not only for whatever ails you but also for polishing furniture and keeping horses’ harnesses supple), and strongman Sandoni (Constantine Romanoff).

While he’s wearing his dad’s sheriff’s badge, Harold is tricked by the medicine-show people into signing a permit for them to operate in Hickoryville, and when dad finds out he sends Harold to shut down the show. Of course, Harold has no chance of doing that against the throngs of people who’ve been attracted to it. He tries to sneak his way to the front of the crowd where “Flash” is hawking the magic elixir, and eventually he ends up trapped on stage and literally handcuffed to a swinging trapeze bar. That isn’t enough for “Flash,” who lights a bed warmer and waves it under Harold’s ass, only he loses control of it and sets the entire medicine show on fire. Mary frees Harold from the handcuffs (she happens to have the key) and Harold takes her into the Hickorys’ home – but a local busybody couple takes Mary out of the Hickorys’ place and into their own because they don’t think it’s proper for a woman to spend the night with a whole house full of unmarried men. (We don’t see a Mrs. Hickory, so we’re obviously supposed to assume Jim is a widower.) To escape his brothers, who are after him at least to beat him up and possibly to kill him, Harold fakes it to look like he’s gone out to sleep in the barn while he actually sleeps on the couch in the space he made up for Mary. Brothers Leo and Olin both think Mary is the person sleeping on the couch and compete to bring “her” breakfasts and flowers. While all this has been going on, the good citizens of Hickoryville have been collecting money to build a dam for the town and have entrusted the cash to Sheriff Jim, who will hold it until a representative of the state treasurer comes to collect it the next day. (There’s a glitch in that the letter from the Hickorys announcing that they’ve collected the money for the dam is dated May 5, but the calendar on the wall is set to August.)

Unbeknownst to anyone but Harold – and even he is unsure as to what’s really going on – “Flash” and Sandoni are skulking around the Hickorys’ home intending to steal the dam money, which they do. This sets up the film’s most audacious sequence: while the rest of the townspeople have been convinced by Sam Hooper that Sheriff Jim has stolen the dam money and are literally preparing to lynch him over it, Harold sees a leaflet for the medicine show and deduces that “Flash” and Sandoni stole the money and are hiding inside the Black Ghost, an old, derelict sailing ship beached on the town’s nearby lake. Harold rows out to the wreck of the Black Ghost and there ensues a series of scenes that when I first saw this movie with Charles in the 1990’s (as one of a series of Harold Lloyd films I’d recorded onto VHS from Turner Classic Movies showings) reminded me so much of F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu (1922) I was convinced Lloyd had seen it and was deliberately parodying it. Not only does the cadaverous appearance of Constantine Romanoff as Sandoni remind me of Max Schreck, the star of Nosferatu, there are plenty of sequences “copped” from Murnau’s film, including shots of faces of people (or, in some scenes, a pet monkey) leering over open hatches or through portholes on the ship’s decks. Ultimately Harold catches Sandoni (presumably “Flash” escapes, but without the money) and literally traps him inside a stack of life preservers. Since his own boat has drifted away, Harold brings the captive Sandoni by getting on the life preservers and literally rowing them to shore, using a broom as his oar. Then he commandeers an open wagon and loads Sandoni on it to drive it to town, though there’s some nice suspense editing as the life preservers binding Sandoni fall off one by one and we wonder whether he’ll still be captive when Harold gets to town in time to return the stolen money and save his dad from being lynched. The film ends as you’d expect, with Harold finally accepted into his family as the equal of his father and brothers, and also ending up with Mary’s love.

One of the ironies of The Kid Brother is that in 1927, Buster Keaton was making one of his lamest vehicles – College, a blatant ripoff of Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) – while Lloyd was making this ground-breaking and audaciously dark film. Keaton had been forced by his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, to make College after the financial failure of his 1926 masterpiece, The General, and likewise Lloyd ran for cover after the commercial failure of The Kid Brother and the next year made Speedy, a light-hearted comic romp through the streets of New York City that cast Lloyd as the son of a horse-drawn streetcar proprietor who’s being threatened with the loss of his concession if he doesn’t run it every day. (Speedy would be Lloyd’s last silent film; in 1929 he’d make his no-fuss entry into the sound era with a film called Welcome Danger that was based on the same kinds of thrill sequences he’d become famous for in movies like his best-known film, 1923’s Safety Last!) Despite its bland title, The Kid Brother is an audacious film that shows Lloyd not only going for Chaplinesque pathos but also displaying some of Keaton’s mechanical imagination, notably in his combination butter churn and washing machine that washes clothes and automatically hangs them on a clothesline. He has a similarly economical way of washing dishes: after they’re washed, he puts them on a combination drying rack and shelf so he can rack them back on the walls after he’s done with them. Lloyd would embrace the dark side yet again in The Cat’s-Paw (1934), an amazing sound film in which he plays the son of an American missionary couple who aised him in China who comes to the U.S. as an adult for the first time, is drafted to run a campaign for mayor by a political machine as a phony “reformer,” wins and takes the job seriously enough he uses old tricks he learned in China to bust the city’s gangsters. The credited director on The Kid Brother is Ted Wilde, though imdb.com lists other contributors, including Lewis Milestone (already a major name then!), J. A. Howe, and Lloyd himself – and it’s quite clear that here, as in all his major films, Harold Lloyd is really the auteur.

The Heroes of Telemark (Benton Film Productions, The Rank Organisation, Columbia, 1965; U.S. release, 1966)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 30) my husband Charles and I watched one entry in the Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to actor Kirk Douglas: The Heroes of Telemark, produced by a British company called Benton Film Productions in association with The Rank Organisation in 1965, released in the U.K. that year and in the U.S. by Columbia in 1966. It was basically a knock-off of The Guns of Navarone (1961), with Douglas in essentially the Gregory Peck role of the leader of a group of commandos assigned to destroy a particularly important piece of infrastructure for the Nazi war effort. The Heroes of Telemark was at least ostensibly based on a true story that took place in Norway in 1942. The Germans were using the Norsk Hydro power plant in Telemark, Norway to produce heavy water for their program to develop an atomic bomb. From my grade-school and high-school chemistry classes I remembered that hydrogen atoms come in three isotopes: standard hydrogen, whose nucleus contains one proton and no neutrons; deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, with a nucleus of one proton and one neutron; and tritium, with one proton and two neutrons. Heavy water is simply water made with deuterium atoms instead of normal hydrogen atoms, and it’s useful in the production of nuclear energy (and, hence, nuclear weapons) as a moderator in nuclear reactors because it already has a neutron and therefore doesn’t absorb neutrons needed to continue the fission reaction the way ordinary water does. The Heroes of Telemark was loosely based on two books about the sabotage operation aimed at destroying the Germans’ ability to produce heavy water in Norway, Knut Hauklied’s Skis Against the Atom (the memoir of the original for Richard Harris’s character) and John Drummond’s novel But For These Men, though the actual script was by Ivan Moffat and Ben Barzman with an uncredited assist from Harold Pinter, of all people.

The film was directed by Anthony Mann, and he was able to get Kirk Douglas to play the lead because Douglas felt guilty about having fired Mann from the job of directing Spartacus (1960) – Stanley Kubrick replaced him, the only time in Kubrick’s career he worked as a director for hire taking over a project conceived by someone else. So when Mann offered him the lead in The Heroes of Telemark, Douglas accepted without even bothering to read the script. The film cast Douglas as Rolf Petersen, a physics professor at the University of Oslo who’s approached by Knut Strand (Richard Harris), a leader in the Norwegian Resistance to Nazi occupation, with drawings of the Norsk Hydro plant’s equipment for producing heavy water. Rolf looks at the drawings and immediately decides he needs to take a trip to England to show the officials of the British government that the Nazis are producing heavy water in Norway for a potential atomic bomb. The two and some of their Resistance buddies hijack a ship, the Galtesund, traveling up the Norwegian coast and commandeer the crew into sailing it to England despite the hazards of mines – one of which Rolf bats away from the ship with a long grappling pole, which provokes a joke from Knut about him playing billiards with mines. The ship makes it to England and Rolf gives the British government his briefing, and they authorize an operation to destroy the heavy water-making gear (the film includes a number of closeups of heavy water dripping down out of a lab-tank faucet, enough to establish it as the real star of this film). Rolf and Knut ski through the Norwegian countryside (well, it’s Norway around Christmastime, so how else are they going to get around, especially before snowmobiles existed?) and reach the hut of a fellow Resistance member, only to find that the Nazis have been there first, burned it to the ground and presumably murdered its inhabitant. So they have to keep going for two more days until they reach the home of Rolf’s ex-wife Anna (Ulla Jacobsson), and it becomes clear both to Anna and us that Rolf wants to change the “ex-” part of that.

We also meet the rest of Knut’s commando team, including Arne (David Weston) and Oli (Alan Howard), and of course the moment we learn that Oli’s wife Sigrid (Jennifer Hilary) is pregnant with his child, we know he’s going to be a-goner during the operation, as indeed he is. Midway through the movie the plane carrying 50 British commandos into Norway crashes and burns, so even though there are only nine of them left the Norwegian Resistance fighters decided to carry out the operation themselves, wearing British uniforms so if they’re captured the Germans won’t carry out wholesale revenge killings against the Norwegian population. Midway through the movie the team successfully infiltrates the factory and blows up the tanks for making heavy water with a long, snake-like stretch of C4 explosive that Rolf threads between the tanks to make sure they are all obliterated (“Is that the slow fuse or the quick fuse?” I joked, referencing Blazing Saddles). Only that turns out to be a false climax because the Nazis had a spare set of tanks ready in Germany – which both Charles and I spotted as a major plot hole because if the Germans already had the equipment to produce heavy water in their own country, why did they have to schlep themselves and their equipment to Norway to do it? Unless there’s some important mineral to the production of heavy water that Germany doesn’t have and Norway does, this makes no sense. Michael Redgrave appears in the film as Knut’s uncle, who gets shot by the Germans as he tries to hold them off with a shotgun.

There’s also a character identified merely as “Quisling” (this became a standard term for collaborators after Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian prime minister who agreed to head the Germans’ puppet government) who stumbles onto the Resistance fighters when he’s out in the countryside hunting. He pleads with them that he’s on the side of the Resistance because his wife is the daughter of a major Resistance leader and for that reason the Nazis put her in a concentration camp. Rolf wants to shoot him immediately but the others talk him out of it, saying that that would make them no better than the Nazis. As it turns out, Rolf was right; the Quisling eventually rats them out to the Nazis when they agree (not that they have any intention of doing so!) to set his wife free if he gives them the information. Ultimately the commandos learn that the Nazis have created enough heavy water for their nuclear program and plan to ship it out of Telemark on a series of freight trains that can be loaded onto a ferryboat and sailed to Germany. So it’s up to our intrepid Norwegians to sneak bombs onto the ferryboat and blow it up before it can reach Germany, and as if to ramp up the tension as well as the moral dilemmas Rolf spots Sigrid (ya remember Sigrid?) and her newborn baby boarding the ferry. Rolf gets on the ferry himself, paying for his fare with spare change because he didn’t have a ticket, and in order to save all the children on board he organizes a game called “Lifejacket” in which the kids all congregate on the end of the ferry, as far away from the bombs as possible, and race to put on their lifejackets so they’ll be easy to rescue when the bomb goes off and destroys the ferry. The Heroes of Telemark is an O.K. movie with some surprisingly ponderous moments – it’s the sort of story that took its makers two hours and 15 minutes when a classic-era director and writing team could have polished it off in an hour and a half – and the real-life model for the scientist Kirk Douglas played denounced it as almost wholly fictional. But it has a certain haunting quality and it’s surprising how credible Kirk Douglas, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the U.S. (his birth name was Issur Danielovitch), looks as a Scandinavian. (Well, he’d already played a Scandinavian in The Vikings seven years earlier.)

Big Bands on Screen: “Thousands Cheer” and Shorts

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008, 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I discovered this golden oldie that I’d drafted in 2008 but apparently never published before. Here it is:

I ran my husband Charles a movie from the previous night’s Turner Classic Movies big-band tribute, Thousands Cheer, a 1943 MGM portmanteau movie. Though it appropriated most of the title of Irving Berlin’s famous 1933 revue, As Thousands Cheer (a show whose conceit was that every song and sketch in it was patterned after a section or a feature in a newspaper — Ethel Waters sang her anti-lynching song “Suppertime,” anticipating Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” by six years, in it as a main news story and the show also introduced “Easter Parade” as representing the rotogravure section in which color photos were printed, a really big deal in a paper then; that’s why the song has the otherwise incomprehensible line, “You’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure”), Thousands Cheer used none of Berlin’s songs and added a plot (a story by Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins called “Private Miss Jones”) about a young aspiring opera singer, Kathryn Jones (the young Kathryn Grayson, whose life was obviously being made easier for her by giving her character the same first name as her own), who’s grown up with her mother Hyllary (Mary Astor) after she separated from Kathryn’s father, career military officer Col. Bill Jones (John Boles), because she couldn’t stand constantly being abandoned while he went off on one posting after another.

Kathryn has achieved enough success that she regularly appears with an orchestra conducted by José Iturbi (playing himself and making his first — but not, alas, his last — film; he’s a quite competent pianist even though hardly on the level of his contemporaries Rubinstein, Horowitz or Barere, an O.K. conductor and a thoroughly lousy actor who can’t even play himself credibly), where in the opening scene she sings a credible version of “Sempre libera” and even goes for the interpolated ultra-high note at the end. Since Grayson was ordinarily a mezzo, I wondered how they got her to sing that high: did they transpose it down? Did they transpose it down for the pre-recording and then speed it back up to score pitch when she lip-synched during the shoot? Did they have another singer “patching” her highest notes the way they did in Ziegfeld Follies?). But she’s decided to join her father at his latest posting — a training camp — and do her part for the war effort by organizing shows for the servicemembers. While waiting for the train, where she’s to meet her dad, she’s suddenly picked up and kissed by draftee Private Eddie Marsh (Gene Kelly) because every other guy there seems to have a girl to kiss goodbye and he doesn’t, and the first hour of Thousands Cheer becomes a dull love story interspersed with an even duller story about the arrogant young man who has to learn to adjust himself to the requirements of military discipline. The kicker this time is that Kelly was himself a star in civilian life — a member of the Flying Corbinos team of circus aerialists (ironically the imdb.com plot summary describes them as “acrobats” even though the film itself makes a great to-do about the difference between acrobats and aerialists) — and his antagonism towards the military comes largely from his feeling that a man who’s spent so much of his working life in mid-air ought to be in the Air Corps instead of training for the infantry.

Thousands Cheer lumbers tediously along through the usual complications for its first half, and its second half is the show Grayson’s character is supposed to have put together for the boys, filled with much of the talent on MGM’s contract roster: Mickey Rooney (at his most overactedly obnoxious) is the M.C. and the performers include Red Skelton, Frank Morgan, Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball, Virginia O’Brien, Eleanor Powell (doing a boogie-woogie tap number originally filmed for Broadway Melody of 1943, an abandoned project that was supposed to co-star Powell and Kelly), Marsha Hunt, Marilyn Maxwell, Margaret O’Brien, Donna Reed, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, Judy Garland (she sings and Iturbi plays a dated novelty called “The Joint Is Really Jumpin’ in Carnegie Hall” about the invasion of jazz and swing music in what had hitherto been a temple devoted exclusively to the classics) and by far the best, Lena Horne singing and Benny Carter playing a marvelous version of Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” that is also the only number in the film shot with any degree of creativity. Whereas all the other revue “turns” were photographed in front of a plain curtain, “Honeysuckle Rose” begins with Carter playing the melody silhouetted against an otherwise black background, and the designs, lighting and angles throughout this song are so much better than those in the rest of the movie I can’t help thinking they called in a different director than the amiable hack George Sidney, the overall director of record. (Before he made his debut as a full-fledged director with Cabin in the Sky, an all-Black musical featuring Horne, Vincente Minnelli had shot numbers for Horne in films like Panama Hattie, and maybe he shot this sequence as well.)

The final gimmick is that the Flying Corbinos are called in to perform their act in the camp show, and Eddie Marsh is released from the guardhouse (where he was imprisoned for keeping Kathryn Jones out too late on a date and punching out the sergeant who tried to apprehend him) to perform with his (adoptive; his real ones died when he was 4) parents and family and thereby relearn the need for teamwork so that when his unit ships out — as it’s about to do — he’ll finally knuckle down, follow orders and be a good soldier. Gene Kelly does get one dance number midway through the film, dressed in T-shirt and blue jeans (almost as if he were challenging Fred Astaire, “Take that, you with the top hat, white tie and tails!”) that shows off his athlete’s musculature (Astaire was a superlative dancer, but it took Kelly to show that you could be a male, a dancer and still be butch) and doing a solo routine involving a mop (a gimmick both he and Astaire would use again!), and his number and Lena Horne’s song are the two real highlights of the film. Kelly prided himself on doing his own stunt work — including the Fairbanksian leaps in his 1948 version of The Three Musketeers — but in this case I’m sure that, though his exercise on the practice bars is recognizably his, the long shots of him on the trapeze were almost certainly doubled. The film ends with the regiment Kathryn’s father commands and Kathryn’s lover serves in marching off to war and Kathryn doing her last bit for the war effort, reuniting her parents (even though it’s only so her mom can see her dad off again!) — an obsession with producer Joseph Pasternak, who is using Grayson here the way he used Deanna Durbin before and would use Jane Powell later, as the catalyst to restore her parents’ marriage — and singing a grandly pretentious number called “United Nations on the March,” composed by Dmitri Shostakovich (of all people to end up an MGM songwriter!) in what the studio ballyhooed as a piece written especially for the film, but which was probably just a chip off his workbench supplied to Harold Rome and E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the English lyrics. One could see why World War II-era audiences would have lapped this up — they would have been entertained by the numbers and accepted the dull plot as a morale booster — but it wastes Gene Kelly’s talents and really doesn’t hold up that well. Also, early on Kathryn Grayson sings the haunting ballad “Daybreak” (by Ferde Grofé and Harold Adamson), introducing it as her (movie) father’s favorite song, but though she sings it well she simply can’t create the sense of atmosphere Frank Sinatra did when he recorded it with Tommy Dorsey early on in his career as a promotion for the film.

After Thousands Cheer TCM ran six big band-themed shorts and Charles and I watched four of them (the fifth, Desi Arnaz and His Orchestra, we’d seen before — the most remarkable thing about it was the line early on in which the narrator boasts that Arnaz has had three successful careers, as singer, actor and now bandleader, and I joked, “If you think that’s impressive, wait ’til he gets to his fourth career!” — as producer and co-star of the most successful situation comedy in early television, I Love Lucy — and the sixth, a Martin Block-hosted show with the pleasant but unswinging music of Ray Noble and Buddy Clark, I’d watched in the wee hours while recording it and waiting for John P. to go to bed). The first was a Pete Smith Specialty called Groovie Movie, showing some of the jitterbug dance steps and their origins in older, more sedate dance moves like the curtsy and the waltz. Charles was startled at the use of the term “groovy” in a film this early, and I liked the gag of the narrator saying how this was young people’s music and then panning to the face of the piano player, clearly that of a bald, fleshy old man with coke-bottle glasses that made him look like Albert Dekker in Dr. Cyclops. After that they showed shorts devoted to Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Larry Clinton. Herman’s was made in 1938, long before his band became a truly great one — he sings “Carolina in the Morning” and “Dr. Jazz” and plays a few O.K. clarinet solos (he wasn’t a virtuoso on the level of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, and he was the first to admit it), and there are some spectacular dancers, though the promise of the great singer Lee Wiley was unfulfilled — she’s listed in the credits but there weren’t hide nor hair of her in the actual movie.

The next short, a 1945 (though TCM’s schedule lists 1947) depiction of Stan Kenton and His Orchestra, was the best: Warners’ recording showed off Kenton’s band — particularly Kenton’s use of unusual keys (creating a more brilliant sound than the normal, relatively “easy” keys of C and F most bands played in but also being a lot tougher on the musicians) — better than the records he was making at the time for Capitol, and though the conceit (supposedly a musical biography of Kenton from his early days playing in a trio for tea dances to his later success) was a bit silly and June Christy’s costume and Phyllis Diller hairdo horrendously unflattering (this is not the poised, self-assured Christy we saw on all those 1950’s album covers!), Christy gets an offbeat blues number and sings like a goddess. As I’ve joked before, Kenton owed so much of an aesthetic debt to Edward Kennedy Ellington both as pianist (especially as band accompanist) and as bandleader that, well before David Bowie coined the phrase, Kenton could well have been called the “Thin White Duke.” The next short was one with Larry Clinton (which I tried to fast-forward to on the DVD and ended up glitching it — there was an occasional freeze-frame and the timer counter froze in place, a warning that it’s probably not that sensational an idea to do scans on a home-recorded DVD made at the slowest speed you can record on and still play the disc on a machine other than the one you recorded it on) and his star singer, Bea Wain; tall, grey-haired, balding and rather cadaverous, Clinton didn’t look much like a swing bandleader, and Wain sang nicely on the song “Old Folks” (though Bing Crosby’s version was far better) but then had to do a novelty called “Corn Pickin’” with a male singer; still, some of their music had the righteous bounce and drive. Clinton’s band was horrendously uneven; I’ve heard records where they did good swing (especially the Decca compilation from 1939 to 1941, A Study in Clinton) and records that were so draggy they were almost unlistenable (like the Hindsight Records transcription album from 1937-38), and here in this film short they were about in the middle.

The Last Crooked Mile, a.k.a. Detour Dead End (Republic, 1946)

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

Last night (Wednesday, August 27) Charles got home from work relatively early (shortly before 10 p.m.), and I ran him a movie off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GejCipmwD_s). Whoever posed it gave it the title Dead End Detour, but it was actually The Last Crooked Mile, a crime “B” made at Republic Studios in 1946. I was attracted to it mainly because Ann Savage was the female lead the same year she made the real Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer at PRC and one of the mini-masterpieces of the film noir era. The Last Crooked Mile was also one of Republic’s attempts to give their Western star Don “Red” Barry – so called because he’d become a major attraction in their 1940 serial The Adventures of Red Ryder – a chance at modern-dress roles. Here he’s billed as “Donald Barry” and is playing a characterization very much like Lee Tracy in his starring vehicles in the mid-1930’s. The film opens with the Harrison Bank being robbed (one seemed an awfully family-oriented name for a bank, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were banks in the area called Lennon, McCartney, or Starr) by four gunmen, one of whom is blond and another has clear-polished fingernails. One of the robbers is killed by a security guard who is wounded by one of the cops, and by pre-arranged plan the other three ditch the car in a garage, drive off in a new one, and the “blond,” Jarvis (John Dehner), takes off his wig, which he wore just to avoid later detection. Alas for the robbers, though Jarvis has ditched the blond wig, his confederate still has the well-polished fingernails. When they’re stopped at a police checkpoint, a sharp-eyed officer notices the fingernails and tells the bandits he’s going to arrest them. Instead they tear off and a chase ensues, in which the determined officer shoots out a rear tire on the getaway car and causes it to crash.

I’d assumed The Last Crooked Mile would keep the crooks, or at least some of them, alive longer and the main part of the movie would be the hunt to catch them. Instead they are dead in the first 20 minutes and the mystery becomes what did they do with the $300,000 they stole from the bank. It’s then that Donald Barry’s character, private detective Tom Dwyer, arrives on the scene. In a tense meeting with the bank’s manager, Floyd Sorelson (Tom Powers); the agent for the insurance company which will have to pay the bank’s losses if the money isn’t recovered; and Lt. Blake (Harry Shannon), the policeman who’s in charge of the investigation, Dwyer shows up and says they should hire him because he can do things the cops can’t. They agree, and the next scene takes place at a carnival where the so-called “Jarvis Death Car” is on exhibit in one of the sideshow booths – only the proprietor, Ferrara (Nestor Païva from the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), has stupidly had the car restored instead of leaving it looking like it did when it crashed. (In 1934, the car in which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed was publicly exhibited with all its bullet holes and other damage kept lovingly intact.) The surviving members of Jarvis’s gang, led by Ed “Wires” McGuire (Sheldon Leonard at his oiliest) – so called because of his penchant for strangling his enemies with thin wire – are determined to get back the car because apparently the loot is hidden within it. Just when the bandits had the time to work out such an elaborate hiding place (the money was concealed in the vestigial side fenders a lot of 1940’s cars still had, which reminded me of The French Connection and the way the drugs in that movie were hidden inside a car’s rocker panels, the ledges under the doors that you step over when you get in or out) and hide the money there is unclear, but then a lot about this movie is unclear.

Dwyer runs into an old girlfriend, Bonnie (Adele Mara), with whom he’s continually breaking dates, and he forces her onto a roller coaster even though she’s deathly afraid of them (which reminded me of my experience in the late 1980’s when John Gabrish and I went to Disneyland and he got me onto the Big Thunder Mountain ride; I endured it with clenched teeth, and after it blessedly ended he asked me, “Were you scared?” I said, “No, I just fail to see why anybody would find this entertaining”). They end up in the next-to-last seats and when the ride is over they discover a dead body, strangled with a thin wire, had been dumped along the ride onto the seat behind them. Later Dwyer visits a nightclub called the Blue Moon, where entertainer Sheila Kennedy (Ann Savage) is performing. She sings the 1920’s Isham Jones/Gus Kahn song “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” and while I’m not sure if the voice is her own or a double’s, at least she’s quite competent even though hardly at the level of Ella Fitzgerald, from whose 1940’s Decca record I first learned this song. Dwyer is investigating Sheila because she was supposedly the girlfriend of the late, unlamented Jarvis. Ultimately, after an unseen person takes a blowtorch to the side of the “Jarvis Death Car” (as it’s being exhibited) and extracts the money, Dwyer deduces that there’s only $150,000. [Spoiler alert!] The rest of the loot was actually embezzled by Sorelson, who hired the Jarvis gang to rob his own bank to cover up his embezzlements.

Dwyer has been alternating his affections between Bonnie and Sheila – Bonnie is a typical movie blonde bimbo and Sheila seems to be a better choice for him until the final scene [double spoiler alert!], when Dwyer realizes Sheila was a criminal and the mastermind of the whole thing. She holds a gun on him and forces him to get out of the car he’s driving while they’re speeding down a narrow mountain road, only instead he swerves, the car drives off the road, and two police officers show up to arrest Sheila while Bonnie turns up literally hiding in the car’s rumble seat. (A rumble seat – a seat hidden under what ordinarily would be the trunk lid – was common in the 1920’s but, like side fenders, was pretty anachronistic by 1946.) The Last Crooked Mile, directed by Philip Ford (John Ford’s nephew) from a pretty crazy but at least wisecrack-filled script by Jerry Sackheim, Jerome Gruskin, and Robert L. Richards, has more plot holes than a slice of Swiss cheese but at least hints at the potential of being a far better movie than it is. But somehow Ann Savage is less watchable as a good girl who turns out to be bad than she was in Detour as a hard-bitten dame who’d long before realized that basic morality and common decency were luxuries she couldn’t afford.

Three Laurel and Hardy Shorts: "Putting Pants on Philip" (Roach-MGM, 1926, released 1927); "Two Tars" (Roach-MGM, 1928); and "Liberty" (Roach-MGM, 1929)

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

Last night (Monday, August 25) my husband Charles and I went with several friends to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” as part of the annual Monday nights’ summer organ festival at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. We got there early enough to hear the organist, Russ Peck, rehearse his program of short selections before the movies (there were three, more on that later). I was amused that the first thing he played, both in rehearsal and in the actual concert (the normal routine is the organist plays a short pre-film recital of theatre-organ pieces, including arrangements of pop songs, while waiting for the sky to get dark enough to render the movie visible), was “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The irony was that it was this song, probably more than any other, that killed the silent movie as an art form. In the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson sang the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face” (one of his many bathos-filled ballads honoring motherhood) and then went into “Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” The original plan had been that Jolson would only sing in the otherwise silent film, but he started barking out instructions to the on-screen conductor, Louis Silvers, on how he wanted to be accompanied. When the film and its accompanying record (this was the Vitaphone process in which the sound was on a separate disc and a motor with an elaborate set of synchronizing gears ran the projector and the turntable simultaneously) were processed, the “suits” at Warner Bros. were so impressed at how well Jolson’s speaking voice matched his image that they wrote another talking scene into the film, the one between Jolson and his mother (Eugenie Besserer) – thus sounding the death knell for the silent film.

Since the program included three Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, Putting Pants on Philip (released in 1927, though actually shot a year earlier); Two Tars (1928); and Liberty (1929), Peck’s musical program drew on songs composed in each of those years. This was a bit of a mistake, because Putting Pants on Philip – not the first Laurel and Hardy film, but the first in which they were co-starred and got above-the-title billing – was actually shot in 1926, but not released until a year later. For 1927 Peck played a medley of “Me and My Shadow,” “Diane,” and “Thou Swell.” For 1928 he only played one song, the novelty hit “Nagasaki” – though his arrangement included a snatch of “The Sailor’s Hornpipe” because one of the two things the real Japanese city of Nagasaki is famous for is as the setting for Puccini’s naval opera, Madama Butterfly. (The other thing Nagasaki is famous for is as the site of the second U.S. atomic bomb attack on Japan on August 9, 1945.) For 1929 he went back to the medley format and did “Sunny Side Up” (ironically a song from a Fox talking musical that was one of the biggest film hits of the year), “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” “Green Eyes,” and Thomas “Fats” Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” To Peck’s credit, he not only mentioned that Waller made records on pipe organ (his label, RCA Victor, had bought an abandoned church in Camden, New Jersey, and the purchase included the organ), he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’” with a relatively light touch that reflected Waller’s organ records rather than the thick, heavy theatre-organ voicings most organists who play Waller give his songs. (I’ve heard more than one theatre organist play Waller and make me want to scream because he or she has obviously not heard any of Waller’s own organ recordings, which showed perfectly how he wanted his music to sound on the instrument.)

The first film on the program, Putting Pants on Philip, reflected the rather unusual way Laurel and Hardy became a team. Facing the loss of his biggest comedy star, Harold Lloyd, in 1924 (the parting was amicable but Lloyd had outgrown the independents and formed his own company, releasing through major studios), producer Hal Roach gathered together what he called the “Comedy All-Stars.” They were a group of comic actors who could collectively draw audiences to their films even though no single individual among them had the power to make a movie a hit. Gradually Roach realized that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had more audience appeal than the others, though it was director Leo McCarey who had the idea of co-starring them and building them into a comedy team. He also conceived the idea for Putting Pants on Philip, in which Hardy plays influential social leader J. Piedmont Mumblethunder. He receives word that his nephew Philip (Stan Laurel) is arriving by ship from Scotland, and goes to the dock to meet him. The letter alerting Mumblethunder about Philip’s arrival warns him that he has one weakness: women. Every time he sees a pretty girl on the street, he’ll kick up his leg and run after her in a move far more like Harpo Marx (at a time when the Marx Brothers hadn’t yet made a released film, though Harpo had had a brief comic-relief role in a 1925 Paramount rom-com called Too Many Kisses) than the Laurel we know from their later films.

Philip arrives in a kilt and sporran, and when Mumblethunder insists that this is America and he must wear a pair of pants, Philip says he’s never worn pants in his life and doesn’t intend to start now. The issue gets forced when Philip and Mumblethunder walk down the street together, and several times Philip steps over air vents that blow his kilt above his waist – an interesting precursor of the famous gag Marilyn Monroe did in The Seven-Year Itch almost 30 years later. On the last blow-down Philip’s underpants fall down and he’s literally naked under the kilt. When they go to a tailor (Harvey Clark) Philip is too ticklish to have his inseam measured, and the three end up in a free-for-all on the tailor shop’s floor. Ultimately the film ends with the scene everyone who’s seen it (and a lot of people who haven’t but have seen the clip in various comedy compilations) remembers. Philip seeks to help a young woman cross a muddy street by laying down his jacket like Sir William Raleigh supposedly did for Queen Elizabeth, but she ignores the gesture and steps over the jacket. Philip walks across the mud unscathed, but when Mumblethunder tries it the ground gives way and it turns out the jacket was covering a large hole in the sidewalk, through which Mumblethunder falls and, when he pulls his head out of the murk, he registers the famous exasperated gesture and expression that would become a Hardy trademark for the next two decades. Putting Pants on Philip is the first appearance of a trope Laurel and Hardy often used: Hardy has achieved an at least semi-respectable position in society until Laurel comes in, all anarchic energy and drives, and releases him from it.

Two Tars (1928) was the movie Russ Peck said introduced him to Laurel and Hardy. It happened in 1965, when a teacher who owned a 16 mm projector and a few copies of silent films brought it into school and played it for a student audience – who found it hilarious. It’s a fascinating movie in which Laurel and Hardy (once again calling themselves “Stan” and “Ollie” as their character names as well; in late-in-life interviews Laurel explained that was because if they’d played characters, the studio they were working for could have claimed ownership of the character, forbidden them from playing it anywhere else, and recast the series with other actors; Laurel reasoned that if he and Hardy played characters with their own names, they could use those characters wherever they worked) play two sailors on leave in the U.S. after having been on an extensive cruise. They pick up two women (Thelma Hill and Ruby Blaine) in a rented Ford Model “T” after rescuing them from a recalcitrant gum machine that literally grabbed their fingers (Hardy’s attempt to shake it loose results in all the gumballs spilling out over the sidewalk, much to the store owner’s exasperation), and drive them around Los Angeles. (Even though this movie was made in 1928, its locale – where Hal Roach’s camera crews could get to quickly and with little fuss – is obvious.) Ultimately the boys get into a traffic jam that turns into a major altercation, with “supervising director” Leo McCarey staging one of the famous “tit-for-tat” gag sequences he loved so much. Instead of going at each other all at once, the participants in these sequences will release some visible sort of mayhem against each other’s person, car, or other belongings, and the victim will patiently wait their turn before retaliating.

At least one of those gags didn’t work for me: a driver comes through with all his belongings tied with ropes to the top of his car, only the belongings get loosened from their bonds and knocked to the ground. This hadn’t happened in 1928, so I can find this gag at least partially forgivable, but I’ve seen too many films, both documentaries and dramatizations, of people fleeing the Midwestern Dust Bowl in the 1930’s with their cars similarly accoutered with all the belongings they had in the world to find a scene like that funny. Aside from that one lapse, Two Tars is a quite amusing film (though other Laurel and Hardy vehicles, including their joint masterpiece, Sons of the Desert, were better), and car customizer Dale Schrum got a credit for creating the bizarre-looking wrecked cars (one of which has to be driven by its owner’s feet à la the Flintmobile in the 1960’s Flintstones cartoon TV series) that all drive off into the distance at the end, as a train coming in the opposite direction from the cars smashes them all into smithereens – except Laurel’s and Hardy’s, which just gets narrowed but still runs. One nice touch in this movie is that the two women Laurel and Hardy picked up watch the action unfold with barely controlled glee at all the mayhem – until a police officer shows up on a motorcycle eager to arrest somebody for starting the melée, until a steamroller drives by and flattens the motorcycle into a pancake shape. The girls flee rather than waiting around to be arrested. Charles and I had seen Two Tars before in a live program on the waterfront with members of the San Diego Symphony providing live accompaniment and Stan Laurel’s daughter and Buster Keaton’s widow as featured guests. It was a great occasion, but even though they tried to wait until late in the evening to show the films it was still too bright for Two Tars to make the effect it deserved.

The third film on the program was Liberty (1929), which begins with an odd sequence detailing the various struggles in American history for liberty, including George Washington at Valley Forge, Abe Lincoln during the Civil War – and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in striped prison jumpsuits. They had help making their break from two former confederates who bring them normal street clothes – only, when they try to change inside the car, Laurel gets Hardy’s pants and Hardy gets Laurel’s. The first half of the film details their increasingly panic-stricken attempts to get enough privacy long enough to switch pants – including one stop by a truck dispensing seafood, from which a live lobster emerges and leaps into the big pair of pants. (One French critic whose name escapes me at the moment said that the frequent shots of Laurel and Hardy in their underwear in this film proved that they were playing a Gay couple. Actually, as I’ve previously written about Laurel and Hardy, one of the joys of their films is how they blended pre-sexual, homosexual, and heterosexual tropes in their relationships to each other and the world around them. They did that with enough subtlety that they were able to pull some quite audacious gags – including the 1932 film Their First Mistake, in which Hardy’s wife sues him for divorce and names Laurel as the co-respondent – while maintaining their image as “clean” comedians.) The first half of Liberty – in which the only awareness we’re given that these guys are escaped convicts is a police officer (Jack Hill) is chasing them – is mostly a situation comedy with a great slapstick scene. A music-store owner (James Finlayson, a frequent supporting player in Laurel and Hardy films) puts out a large standing record player, puts a six-inch stack of records on it, and tops it with a sign that anyone who buys the player gets the records free. Well, with a setup like that you know what’s going to happen: the boys are going to knock over the player and break some of the records, then ineptly try to pick the rest up and only succeed in breaking them all, to Finlayson’s predictable comic rage.

Then the boys end up in the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction. They take a construction elevator and end up stranded on a high floor when the elevator is summoned back down – and at that point Liberty turns into a Harold Lloyd knock-off as the boys try their best to get back down. There’s a ladder on the side of the building but it only goes down another floor or two, and when Laurel gets on it, it works itself loose from the side of the building and leaves Laurel perilously dangling from the end. It’s not clear just how much danger Laurel and Hardy were actually in filming the scene; they were not as insanely dedicated to thrill comedy as Lloyd was. Though we get a few vertiginous shots looking down at the ground below and making us all too aware of the fate awaiting Our Heroes if they fall, for the most part the backgrounds are process screens, and not too convincing process screens at that. (Hal Roach’s studio wasn’t known for the quality of its process work; the chase scene that ends 1932’s County Hospital is nowhere nearly as thrilling – or as funny – as it could have been with better process effects.) I suspect the boys were really shambling around on those girders, but they were more or less safely inside a soundstage and if they’d fallen, they’d only have had about 12 feet to fall instead of hundreds, which would have been fatal. Liberty has a great if a bit tasteless ending sequence: the boys finally get the elevator back to their level and use it to descend off the building, only as it lands it squishes the cop who’d been chasing them all movie and he emerges in little-person size. Russ Peck boasted before the showing that he was going to use the authentic 1920’s song “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” to accompany this sequence, and it worked marvelously. After we got home Charles had an interesting comment on the bill: he said that each of the three movies were more plotless than its predecessor. Putting Pants on Philip had an interesting and well-developed through line; Two Tars also had a through line, though not as strong a one; and Liberty was just a series of disconnected incidents with little to hold them together.

Do Exactly As I Say (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 24) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Do Exactly As I Say, woefully inadequately represented on imdb.com that gives much of the crew – including director Wendy Ord and writer Joy Nicole Fox – but only two actors, and neither is listed by the character names (though after you’ve seen the film it’s not hard to figure out who they are). Helen (Erin Karpluk) is a young organic chef who’s won a job as a private cook for Roman Durant, who runs a high-tech green energy company that has just developed a new technology called Palermo that is expected to transform the world. Durant has an equally glossy wife named Ardanelle, or something like that, and Helen’s direct supervisor on Durant’s household staff is a woman named Tiffany. The film opens with a chilling scene in which a blonde woman is driving at night when suddenly all the controls on her car stop working. Unable to get the car to move, she’s hit and killed by a passing fire truck. When the authorities investigate, they find nothing wrong with the car and assume she committed suicide. The scene then cuts to Helen, a widow, giving a 10th birthday party for her daughter Poppy, who confesses that for her last birthday wish she wished that her mom find a job. (The actress playing Poppy looks more like 13 or 14 than 10, but that’s a common enough movie failing we’ll let that pass.) Poppy walks home from school one afternoon and forgets to lock the door behind her, and when Helen returns home from work she finds that Poppy is gone and her stuffed giraffe is gone with her. Helen suspects that Poppy has been kidnapped, and she gets confirmation of that when a mysterious and heavily filtered voice phones her and tells her she will have to do three tasks to get her daughter back alive, sort of like the legendary 12 labors of Hercules. Helen pleads with the kidnapper at least to be given the whole list of tasks at once, but she’s told no, they will be doled out one by one. Of course, Helen also gets the standard-issue kidnappers’ warnings not to call the police or to tell anyone.

It turns out all the instructions relate to Durant’s personal and professional secrets. The first one is to hack his computer (fortunately the mystery voice has all his passwords, which alone should have let Helen know it’s a job from inside Durant’s household) and download a file containing all the extant photos of Durant in flagrante delicto with all his extra-relational partners. The second is similarly to download, this time onto a thumb drive (which leads to the same sort of silly high-tech suspense sequence that ended John Grisham’s The Firm: will she get all the files copied before the bad guys catch her?), a set of published reports indicating that the Durant company, belying its self-created image as environmental saviors, is actually generating massive amounts of toxic waste and dumping them in poor neighborhoods. (Once again, I found myself wondering why this was being portrayed as some deep, dark secret that would ruin Durant’s company when all the articles seem to have come from already published sources.) Meanwhile, we’ve seen Helen’s boss Tiffany on her car phone actually giving Helen the instructions through a heavily filtered voice – until her car stops working the same way the anonymous victim’s (whom we’ve since learned is a former Durant employee named Julie) did in the first act. Ultimately Tiffany’s car veers off a side road into a ravine below, killing her. But that doesn’t stop the instructions from the kidnapper. Helen’s third task is to murder Roman Durant – which she has no intention of doing until the kidnapper leaves Poppy’s stuffed giraffe on her car with a note attached saying, “Roman or Poppy. You decide.” Accordingly she takes an herb and inserts it into Roman’s ice cubes while they have a steak dinner with servings of whiskey. Helen gives Roman a preposterous excuse that she’s always been trained to drink “straight,” so Roman throws the ice cubes from her glass and gives her a straight shot instead. Roman collapses during the dinner and Helen takes a photo of him and sends it to the kidnapper to prove that Roman is dead.

Then Helen learns that Poppy has been in the Durants’ home all this time and the real mastermind behind the plot was [spoiler alert!] Roman’s wife Ardanelle, who was determined first to destroy Roman’s company and his reputation and then get rid of him and frame Helen to take the fall. Only Roman isn’t dead – whatever it was Helen gave him merely incapacitated him instead of killing him – and there’s the predictable final confrontation during which Roman sneaks up behind Ardanelle and grabs her gun, she draws a knife on him, the two kill each other and then the police (previously called by Ardanelle on 911 as part of her plot to frame Helen for Roman’s murder) arrive and take both Helen and Poppy (who begs them for an ambulance ride) out of the situation. There’s a finale in which Helen has sold her house and is moving to Portland (the whole story takes place in Oregon, but it’s not clear where Durant’s home and offices were, though Eugene seems likely), where Helen has lined up a job at an actual restaurant instead of a private home. David (Philip Prajoux), Roman’s original right-hand man and old college buddy until Roman fired him for reasons director Ord and writer Fox kept ambiguous (though they did a pretty good job of setting David up as a red herring), comes up to them as they’re moving out. He confesses that he’s long been romantically interested in Helen and also informs her that the board of directors of the Durant company has hired him as the new CEO, now that Mr. and Mrs. Durant have eliminated each other and he’s got the best chance of anybody to rehabilitate the company’s destroyed reputation, and there’s a hint of a future relationship between them.

Aside from the ultra-limited information online about it, Do Exactly As I Say is a frustrating movie given how many plot holes it contains. There are some neat things about it, including Helen’s rather futile struggle for privacy as she takes the phone calls from the kidnapper while alone – just about everyone in Roman’s inner circle keeps walking in on her just as she’s in the middle of a high-stakes conversation with the kidnapper – and the whole gimmick of the car being operated by remote control so the driver no longer has command of it is just a higher-tech version of the separate set of pedals villain Steve Cochran had in the back seat of his car in the 1946 film The Chase through which he could take command from the nominal driver and control how fast the car would go, though not in which direction. Do Exactly As I Say had the makings of a first-rate thriller (and the writing of Roman as something of an Elon Musk clone is nicely done even though, with the Trump counter-revolution in full swing, the idea that a major ultra-rich oligarch would be seeking his fortune in alternative energy and presenting himself as the environment’s ultimate savior seems horrendously dated), but much of Fox’s script literally makes no sense. The film’s biggest improbability is why Ardanelle would be working so hard to destroy her husband’s reputation when even if she did kill him and get away with it, her investment would be worth a lot less than it would have been if her husband’s dirty secrets had stayed secret. Also, it’s hard to get worked up about these people when we’re given so little information about who they are and what their motives are, either for good or ill.

Arson, Inc. (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, 1949)

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

After we watched the Lifetime movie Do Exactly As I Say on Sunday, August 24 my husband Charles and I watched another late-1940’s “B” cheapie on YouTube: Arson, Inc., a 1949 Lippert production directed by William Berke from an “original” story by Arthur Caesar and a script by William Tombragel. William Berke had an interesting career arc: he began in independent films (mostly cheap Westerns) in the 1930’s, won an RKO contract in the 1940’s and did most of the later Falcon-series films with Tom Conway, ended up working on TV series in the 1950’s and did a quick indie comeback with the first two Ed McBain 92nd Precinct novels, Cop Hater and The Mugger (both 1958) before his sudden death on February 15, 1958 at age 54. From the YouTube synopsis I’d assumed Arson, Inc. would be a film about a wide-ranging syndicate who hired itself out to start fires for people who wanted to commit insurance fraud, but the intrigue turned out to be considerably smaller-scaled than that. It was introduced in a narration by an authority figure sitting at a desk just like the old MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts. Said authority figure is the Los Angeles Fire Department chief (William Forrest), who in the opening gives us some statistics about the value of property lost to fire every year and stresses the importance of the fire department’s arson squad. Then he introduces the film’s lead, firefighter Joe Martin (Robert Lowery, a year after he became the screen’s second Batman in the 1948 Spencer Gordon Bennet serial Batman and Robin), who’s just risen through the fire department and is being offered a chance to join the arson squad.

He got the job largely because he was on the crew that fought a fire in a fur warehouse whose owner, Thomas Peyson (Byron Foulger, who was a specialist at playing oily small-time villainy, as he does here), claimed to have lost $50,000 work of mink pelts – only Martin discovered scraps of fur that turned out to be just rabbit and muskrat. Deducing that Peyson first moved all his truly valuable furs somewhere else and then set the fire and filed a false claim, Martin is assigned to surveil Peyson’s insurance agent, Frederick P. Fender (Douglas Fowley, who usually played gangsters but turned in a marvelous performance as the male lead in Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House and got to be in a major movie as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain). Later Martin discovers that Peyson filed another insurance claim for a fire, this one in his apartment, that supposedly destroyed his wife’s $30,000 fur coat. Martin goes to Peyson’s apartment and the Peysons are out, but their baby-sitter Jane Jennings (Anne Gwynne) greets him guardedly at the door and makes him show his firefighter’s I.D. before she’ll let him in. Of course, once they see each other it’s love at first sight, complicated by the fact that she rooms with her grandmother (Maude Eburne) and the first time Martin goes to see her at her place he runs into grandma instead and kisses and hugs her. Martin notices that Fender has assigned one of his gang, Pete Purdy (Ed Brophy), to tail him. Seeking to go undercover and ingratiate himself with the gang,

Martin befriends Purdy and they go to an underground bookie joint where horse races are broadcast on TV (still a relative novelty in 1949; the TV is a Stromberg-Carlson and I wondered if the company paid a product placement fee, a practice that was just starting in 1949). Martin is lamenting at how little he makes as a firefighter, and just then the joint is raided and Martin punches out the police officer who tries to arrest him. The incident is recorded by a newspaper photographer and published on the front page, which leads the chief to fire Martin – though, as anyone who’s seen the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots (or any ot the others who ripped off this gimmick, including Across the Pacific and Desperate Journey) can guess, it’s all a ruse to make it look like Martin is disgraced and open to criminal employment. Fender offers him a heist job that involves stripping a warehouse of its valuables and then setting it on fire, but fortunately Martin is able to get word to both the police and fire departments in time. There’s a shootout in which the bad guys shoot and kill Martin’s contact on the police force, but in the end Fender and his vampy secretary Bobby (Marcia Mae Jones) are killed in a car crash on a darkened road with a police car chasing them, while the fire department successfully puts out the blaze and arrests the remaining bad guys. Though Arson, Inc. is a hardly original story – both the plot and the cast list seem like compendia of things that were already annoyingly clichéd in the 1930’s – it’s at least a coolly efficient one and quite a bit better than Fingerprints Don’t Lie, also a Lippert film. And at least it has an orchestral score instead of the dippy organ accompaniment of Fingerprints Don’t Lie; Raoul Kraushaar is credited with the score with our old PRC friend David Chudnow gets a credit as “music director.”

Girl in the Cellar (PF Maple Productions, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime ran a “world premiere” TV-movie called Girl in the Cellar, which unlike their other “Girl in the … ” movies did not appear to be based on a true story. Directed by Robert Adetuyi from a script by Eva Gonzalez Szigriszt (alas, imdb.com has no biographical information about her and therefore I don’t have a clue as to where that tongue-twisting name comes from), it begins with a Black woman named Rebecca West (Kyla Pratt) looking down at her daughter Lory (Kelcey Mawema), whom she’s locked in the titular cellar for six months because on the evening of the high-school prom Lory sneaked out of Rebecca’s house to attend the 18th birthday party of her sort-of boyfriend Austin (a great hunk of man-meat named Kyle Clark). Rebecca is looking down at Lory from the entrance to the cellar and telling her that Lory has to die so Rebecca can survive. Then we flash back six months earlier, and though for the first act Rebecca simply looks like your garden-variety overprotective mother, she quickly turns into the Psycho Bitch from Hell. First she gets mad at Lory for not telling her she’s been kicked out of her assignment as captain of the school’s women’s track team, then she gets even angrier when she finds that Austin has asked Lory to be his date at the prom (for which Lory was on the organizing committee and mom was also involved as one of the chaperones), and she gets angrier still when Lory returns from Austin’s 18th birthday party even though she’s sober (naturally the party was full of red plastic cups, which in a Lifetime movie is usually a sign that underage drinking is going on) and still has her virginity. (Austin is white, but it’s nice that whatever objections Rebecca has to him, the fact that they’d be an interracial couple is not one of them.) Also Lory hopes that if she does well enough in her final school track meets she’ll get a full-ride scholarship to UCLA, but Rebecca is dead set against that because it’ll mean Lory leaving their home in Michigan and going to school halfway across the country.

So Rebecca forces Lory to take a ride with her to an old abandoned house on the outskirts of town. She tells Lory she just needs some help going through old things in the cellar, which was built by Rebecca’s parents as a fallout shelter in the early 1960’s (when fallout shelters were briefly a “thing”), but when they get there Rebecca literally locks her daughter in and tells her she’s going to keep her there at least until the prom is over. One of the things that sparked this was that Rebecca confiscated Lory’s phone and saw a text on it from Austin suggesting that the two run away to California together. Austin is an industrious kid who’s been working as a landscape gardener for two years, and Rebecca at first threatens to call the police on him when he starts turning up at the Wests’ home. Rebecca adds Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy to her other mental illnesses when she goes to the media and becomes a crusader for herself and other parents of children who’ve gone missing. She cries a lot of crocodile tears on various TV interviews about how Lory was literally her dream child – for years she and her husband had tried to have a baby, only her husband died while Rebecca was still pregnant with Lory and she decided to raise Lory as a single parent and give her the advantages Rebecca herself had never had from her own abusive parents. Rebecca even went back to church to thank God for bringing her Lory (at different times in the film, both Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema sing “This Little Light of Mine” in church services). The film expertly cuts between Rebecca’s public persona as the grieving mother and her private reality as her daughter’s tormentor. She’s mounted a red security camera on the wall of the cellar, through which she can not only spy on Lory at any time but speak to her in almost godlike tones.

At first Rebecca tells the attendees at the prom that Lory caught sick at the last minute and couldn’t go. Instead Rebecca shows up at the prom for her chaperone gig in the same red dress she bought for Lory to attend, and Austin sneaks up behind her and taps her on the shoulder thinking she’s Lory. (I’d been questioning the casting of two such similar-looking actresses as Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema as mother and daughter – Pratt looked more like Mawema’s older sister than her mother – but the visual similarity between the two becomes an important plot point later on.) At one point Rebecca lowers a pen and paper to Lory and forces her to write a note reading that she ran away from home but is tired and wants to come back, and Lori does so in hopes that will get her mom to let her out. But no sooner does Rebecca have the note that she gets an invitation to speak at a mayor’s luncheon on the subject of missing children, and she crumples the note and throws it away because it’s no longer needed. While they’re working together on the search for Lory (of course, mom knows exactly where she is!) Rebecca and Austin form a modus vivendi. Austin shows up one morning to start mowing Rebecca’s lawn, and we get some nice look-sees of Kyle Clark’s shirtless (and, alas, hairless – you can’t have everything) body as he works. Eventually Rebecca invites him in for iced tea, and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have Rebecca seduce Austin,” they have Rebecca seduce Austin. (It’s an interesting inversion of the central premise of Lolita: instead of the older partner romancing the mother to get close to the underage daughter he really has the hots for, it’s the younger man screwing his missing girlfriend’s mother to get closer to her.)

Unfortunately, the next morning Rebecca’s scheme starts to unravel when, getting ready to leave Rebecca’s home after their tryst, Austin spots Rebecca’s laptop and sees a scene of someone who looks like Lory being held prisoner in a cellar. He reports this to the police, only the woman detective on the case (Heather Doerksen) tells him they need more evidence and Austin needs to keep hanging around Rebecca’s place to get some. Meanwhile, Lory has hooked up a storage battery in the cellar to some lights so she can read, and she finds [spoiler alert!] an old diary Rebecca kept when she was being held prisoner in that same cellar by her own abusive parents. After finding no online presence for “Rebecca West” anywhere in the cloud, the detective finally realizes that Rebecca might have been using another name before her marriage to Lory’s father, and she finds a copy of the marriage certificate that gives Rebecca’s maiden name: Johnson. Then she traces news reports of a fire at the house where the cellar is located, which Rebecca had never bothered to have rebuilt even though she owned it after the deaths of her parents. The report explains that the fire was arson and Rebecca was the prime suspect; obviously she burned her parents alive to escape their maniacal control. While all this is happening, Rebecca has decided that she needs Lory to die, so she stops sending in the food packets (designed for astronauts) that are the only things she’s been giving Lory to eat, intending to starve her. The woman detective and a squad of police ultimately go to the old address and rescue Lory in the proverbial nick of time.

Girl in the Cellar is a rather odd movie, powerful and moving in some aspects and pretty silly in others. The biggest mystery about it is why Rebecca suddenly turns from mother to monster, from declaring her love for Lory to abusing her in this extravagant fashion; the revelation that her own parents similarly abused her offers a partial but not totally fulfilling explanation. (It also comes a bit too close for my comfort to what I call the vampire theory of child abuse: that abused kids become abusers themselves when they grow up and have children of their own.) Where the film really scores is in Kyla Pratt’s performance. She expertly captures the character in all her moods: the psychopathic monster she is underneath, the grieving-mother façade she puts on in public, even the seductress taking advantage of Austin’s combination of lovestruck boyfriend (that’s the real reason casting director Lindsay Chag had to pick two strikingly similar-looking actresses for the leads; they had to look close enough in age that Austin’s willingness to fuck Rebecca because he really wants to fuck Lory would be believable) and horny teenage straight boy. Girl in the Cellar isn’t a great movie even by Lifetime standards, but Kyle Pratt’s incredible acting skills make Rebecca a believable character even though through much of it she looks and acts so much like a wicked witch we could think she’s auditioning to play Elphaba in Wicked. It’s also the sort of movie that ends just when it’s beginning to get interesting: one would like to know how the rescued Lory would adjust after having lost six months of her life at her mother’s hands, and whether she and Austin got back together or whether the trauma of knowing Austin had sex with Lory’s ultra-abusive mom would destroy their subsequent chances at a relationship.

Fingerprints Don't Lie (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Spartan Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

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

My husband Charles came home about midway through last night’s (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime movie and later we watched a film together from YouTube: Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951), a sort of PRC production in exile since the producer, Sigmund Neufeld; the director, Sam Newfield (they were brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” the name and Sigmund didn’t); and the cinematographer, Jack Greenhalgh, were all PRC stalwarts. Having been cut adrift when J. Arthur Rank took over PRC in 1947 and changed its name to Eagle-Lion to symbolize the union of American and British interests (Rank wanted a guaranteed U.S. distributor for his British films and had an enormous hit off the bat with the 1948 ballet melodrama The Red Shoes), the Newfields (including Sigmund’s son Stanley Neufeld, who gets a credit as second-unit or assistant director) set off to make movies for whatever cheap-jack producer would have them. Fingerprints Don’t Lie begins in the middle of the murder trial of Paul Moody (Richard Emory) for allegedly killing the city’s reform mayor, Wendell Palmer (Ferris Taylor), by clubbing him to death with a telephone. (The earliest example I know of with a telephone as a murder weapon was Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, written in 1928, filmed in 1932, and apparently based on a real-life case Baum had read about.)

The chief witness against him is forensic expert James Stover (Richard Travis, top-billed), who reports and testifies in court that he lifted five perfect fingerprints off the phone that were an obvious match to Moody’s. After the trial, a reporter comes up to Stover and asks how it feels for him to have killed another person, perfectly legally. Stover starts to have second thoughts about the case when he’s lobbied to reopen it by Carolyn Palmer (Sheila Ryan), the late Mayor’s daughter. But he’s torn between his personal doubts that Moody, an artist with a growing reputation for cheesecake (we see him with two models, including one played by an actress billed merely as Syra – her full name was Syra Marty – with a thick but nationalistically unclassifiable accent) who allegedly lost the contract to paint a new mural at City Hall because Mayor Palmer didn’t approve of his daughter dating him. Fortunately, there’s another suspect: Frank Kelso (Michael Whalen), police chief under the former administration aligned with political boss King Sullivan (George Eldredge). Carolyn Palmer suspects that Kelso either killed her dad personally or had a hand in it because he was upset that Mayor Palmer was determined to fire him after he caught him taking bribes from liquor interests and casino owners. There’s also a really disgusting so-called “comic relief” character named Hypo Dorton (Sid Melton, amazingly billed third), a newspaper photographer who keeps trying to take action shots of the principals and whose flashbulbs never work. (I can remember when cameras had to have separate flashbulbs for indoor shots; Charles, nine years younger, remembered the flash cubes that replaced them and gave you four shots before you needed to change them. Later, of course, film cameras started coming with built-in flash units, and still later digital photography took over and flashes were no longer needed since digital could record nearly as well in indoor light levels as it could in daylight.)

Ultimately Stover realizes that in his days as a police detective, Kelso had done an in-depth study of fingerprint technology, and if anybody could forge a set of fake fingerprints and plant them on a murder scene, he could. Kelso catches on to the way his scheme is unraveling and plans to flee to Mexico with his mistress, hard-boiled dame type Connie Duval (Dee Tatum, easily the strongest actor in the piece and the one person who truly gets to play a multidimensional character), only Connie refuses to run away with Kelso because she’s been Sullivan’s love (or at least lust) interest all along and she just seduced Kelso because Sullivan wanted to compromise him so he could get the department to leave Sullivan’s illegal enterprises alone. The confrontation takes place in Connie’s apartment, where Sullivan orders his henchman Rod Barenger (an actor with the appropriate nickname, at least for this role, of Karl “Killer” Davis) to kill Kelso, The two of them move the body from Connie’s place to Kelso’s to make it look like he committed suicide by filling his apartment with gas, but in nothing flat Stover notices the strangulation marks on Kelso’s neck and says he was murdered. In the end Sullivan takes a header off an open window to his death on the ground below, Rod is arrested, and the finale takes place at a restaurant/nightclub with Paul Moody and Carolyn Palmer reunited, while Stover is there with Moody’s other model, Nadine Connell (Margia Dean). Sid Melton’s unfunny “comic relief” scenes really drag this movie down, though at least we get some fascinating glimpses of Stover’s lab work that make this movie seem like a CSI episode nearly 50 years early.

Greenhalgh shoots it plainly and in full light when the story could have used some of the visual trappings of film noir even though it doesn’t qualify morally (it’s either all-good good guys or all-bad bad guys, except for Connie, who doesn’t seem to have had a hand in Sullivan’s sordid manipulations besides seducing Kelso on Sullivan’s orders and who walks away scot-free at the end). It’s a perfectly decent movie (except for Melton, who just gets so annoying one wishes someone would kill him before the end), but also a quite ordinary product of the Neufeld family with little to recommend it besides a fairly audacious premise (and how did Kelso get his phony fingerprints onto the phone? He certainly had access to Moody’s prints since Rod had broken into his art studio and stolen them, but how he got them on the phone and fooled a fingerprint expert like Stover at least temporarily is beyond me). And I also wondered about the really cheesy organ score that accompanied the movie (the credited composer was Dudley Chambers and imdb.com lists Bert Shefter as well), sometimes with a piano or chorus but usually with no other instruments at all. These kinds of organ accompaniments were fairly common in radio shows, especially really cheap ones from stations that couldn’t afford full orchestras (or even partial ones), but really? Couldn’t they at least have got a rent-a-score from somewhere? The only really good music in this movie is a solo jazz piano piece that signals the introduction of Connie Duval into the action – the sleaziest character would get the best music – which reminded me vaguely of Duke Ellington’s “Black Beauty.”

People on Sunday (Film Studio 1929, Filmstudio Berlin, 1929, released 1930)

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

Last night from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of a film I’ve literally been curious about for decades: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), an independent silent film from 1929 (though it wasn’t released until 1930) featuring a lot of people who ended up in the U.S. and had either important or at least semi-important careers here. The officially listed directors are Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Siodmak’s brother Curt, Fred Zinnemann, and Rochus Gliese listed on imdb.com as uncredited co-directors. The writing credits list Billy Wilder for the screenplay based on “reportage” by Curt Siodmak, and imdb.com lists Robert Siodmak and Ulmer as uncredited co-writers. The cinematographer is Eugen Schüfftan, the special-effects wizard behind such legendary films as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, and Zinnemann and Ernst Kunstmann are listed on imdb.com as uncredited members of the camera crew. People on Sunday is an example of a sort of al fresco filmmaking that was actually fairly common in the silent era, though when sound came in it pretty much disappeared. It only became technically possible again in the 1960’s, when cameras became smaller and Nagra and others developed more compact and sophisticated tape recorders with which you could do synchronized sound on location. Billy Wilder had fond memories of this movie when Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse: “In 1927 I ran into a group of young guys who were interested in making movies. I wrote a script and – my God! – somehow we turned it into a film, People on Sunday. We borrowed money from the uncle of Robert Siodmak, the director. And Robert was the director for a very simple reason: when kids play football on a meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and he owned the camera.” (One wonders how Ulmer got a co-director credit; did he own a second camera?) While some of the people, including Ulmer and Schüfftan, had had professional film credits before, most of the people involved in the film were newbies, some of whom scored major contracts with UFA, the largest studio in Germany, after it became a surprise hit.

The makers of People on Sunday worked with nonprofessional actors who actually worked the sorts of jobs the script tells us the characters worked: taxi driver Erwin Splettstößer, record seller Brigitte Borchert, wine seller Wolfgang von Waltershausen, movie extra Christi Ehlers, and fashion model Annie Schreyer. The film opens on a Saturday, when Erwin and Annie, who live together, have an argument which results in their tearing down the photos of movie stars they’ve put up on their wall, him putting up women like Greta Garbo and she putting up men like Willy Fritsch (best known as the male leads in Fritz Lang’s Spies and Woman in the Moon). Erwin was planning an outing to a local beach on Sunday, but Annie begs off. Erwin ends up picking up a woman named Christi, who tags along on the Sunday picnic with Wolfgang and his girlfriend Brigitte. The four of them have a pretty ordinary day during which they take a ride on the lake in a preposterously driven rental boat they have to pedal (naturally the men do the pedaling while the women sit in front). They have their pictures taken by a professional photographer who, according to the German titles (this print had English subtitles under the original German intertitles), tells his subjects, “Bitte recht freundlich!” The official translation we’re given is “Smile, please!” but the literal meaning is “Please be friendly.” (Google Translate rendered it as “Please be kind.”)

There are cuts back and forth between the photographer working with the subjects and freeze-frames of the resulting pictures. There’s also a scene in which Erwin and Christi are listening to a record on a portable phonograph of the kind Christi sells at her workplace, and one of the records breaks as they make love. (Charles joked about all the movies in which a relative of one-half of a couple has to die, or at least get injured or sick, so they can have sex. At least, this time, it’s only a record.) Things start to unravel between the four when the two men spot two young women in a rowboat. They’ve dropped one of their oars into the water, and one of Our Heroes rescues it from the water and hands it back to them. Then he writes something, presumably his phone number, on a piece of paper, which he crumples up and throws at the rowboat. Naturally Brigitte and Christi are not happy about how blatantly their dates are flirting with other women. They get a sort of revenge when the men come up a mark short of the boat rental and have to borrow it from one of the women. In the end, Erwin returns to Annie – who’s spent the day sleeping in. Monday rolls around and there’s a dramatic montage scene of not only the principals but everyone in Berlin returning to work after their Sunday afternoon off.

People on Sunday is a lovely pastoral that’s considered a representative of the “New Objectivity” in German art that was challenging Expressionism. It’s also a heartbreaking look at Berlin in the later days of the Weimar Republic just before the Nazi takeover in January 1933; one can’t help but look at the children in the film and wonder how many of them survived World War II and the Holocaust, and in what shape. It’s a haunting movie in its sheer ordinariness, and yet it’s nowhere near as innovative as the German critics of the time thought it was. Much of it reminded me of the 1928 U.S. film Lonesome, which was cast with professional actors and was more tightly scripted than this one, but also featured a plot line of ordinary people enjoying themselves on a beach resort for the weekend. Lonesome had some sequences in two-strip Technicolor, including at least one that contained synchronized dialogue – and I suspect that was the first time a film sequence had both sound and color. People on Sunday was an estimable way for some major talents (Wilder, Zinnemann, Ulmer, Schüfftan, and both Siodmak brothers) to start their film careers, and through much of it I wondered why Christi Ehlers in particular didn’t have more of a movie career. Not only does she have the most arresting face of anybody in this film, as an extra she was already used to working in movies, and she can act. It turns out that that’s just one more missed opportunity you can blame on the Nazis: Ehlers’s father was Jewish and the moment the Nazis took power, they skedaddled out of Germany, first to the British-held island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain, then to Britain itself and briefly to the U.S., where she played a minor role in an anti-Nazi movie called Escape (1940). The two men in People on Sunday went on to at least minor careers in German films, many of them with Siodmak as director; among Waltershausen’s other credits is Der Mann, der seinen Mörder schucht (“The Man Who Hides His Murderer”) (1931), the Siodmak-directed original for the 1949 and 2022 versions of D.O.A., in which a man who’s been given a slow-acting poison has to find who gave it to him and why in the few days he has left.

Suspense (radio series): "Donovan's Brain" (CBS, Roma Wines, aired May 18 and 25, 1944)

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

Last night (Monday, August 18) my husband Charles and I rushed home from the Monday night organ-and-orchestra concert in Balboa Park (see https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/08/san-diego-civic-organist-raul-prieto.html) and ultimately ended up listening to a quite effective radio version of Donovan’s Brain aired on the CBS show Suspense in two parts on May 18 and 25, 1944. The only people credited on the program were producer-director William Spier and the star, Orson Welles, who played the central role of Dr. Patrick Cory. I had seen this program mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Donovan’s Brain and, since I’d already downloaded all the extant episodes of Suspense from archive.org, I decided to dig them out. The basic story is familiar: Dr. Patrick Cory, a research scientist, lives in a remote community in the Arizona desert with his wife Janice and – in this version – their son David. He runs a lab where he experiments on keeping monkey brains alive by submerging them in an artificial solution, running a synthetic artery into them, and connecting them to electrodes to keep them alive without their bodies still being attached. He gets the chance to take his experiment to the next level when a private plane crashes near his home. The entire crew of the plane dies in the crash but their passenger, William H. Donovan (he’s called “Warren Donovan” in the other versions, Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel and the two major films, 1944’s The Lady and the Monster and the 1953 film Charles and I had watched), is alive, though barely. His legs are so badly injured they would have to be amputated and his other bodily functions are so incapacitated he would die within hours anyway, so Dr. Cory and his sometimes assistant Dr. Schratt extract Donovan’s brain and plug it into his apparatus. Only Donovan’s brain keeps growing stronger and more powerful, especially without the encumbrance of a physical body to cart around, and it starts taking over more and more of Dr. Cory’s will.

The story is narrated by Dr. Cory via a journal he’d been keeping all along detailing his experiments, and it begins with an announcement that this is the last entry he will ever make in his lifetime because … Then it flashes back to his early failed experiment with the capuchin monkey, his decision that the reason he’d failed to keep the monkey’s brain alive was that he’d killed the monkey first, and his determination not to make that same mistake again but to extract Donovan’s brain while he was still alive, albeit barely. His wife Janice tries to stop him, saying that it’s murder, but he goes ahead anyway. Only Donovan’s brain keeps taking more and more control over Cory, and at one point under Donovan’s influence he literally has his wife committed to a mental hospital for fear she would interfere with his great experiment. I don’t know who wrote this radio adaptation, but I give him or her a lot of credit for cleverly adapting Curt Siodmak’s story for radio. The writer(s) gave Donovan a recurring phrase – “Sure, sure, sure” – which the pre-mortem Donovan was fond of uttering so we can tell whether Cory is thinking his own thoughts or Donovan’s, imposed on him by the sheer will power of Donovan’s disembodied brain. In this version Donovan hypnotizes Cory into murdering his own son so he can implant Donovan’s brain inside David Cory’s body, and once he’s regained a body Donovan can continue with his plan to become a dictator and eventually rule the world. The writer(s) seemed to be evoking memories of Welles’s similar performance as Professor Pierson in his infamous October 30, 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, likewise looking out on an apocalypse and pondering his own responsibility for it.

The writing also powerfully evokes both Frankenstein (particularly Colin Clive’s tortured performance as Frankenstein in the 1931 film, especially the scene in which he says, “I made it with my own hands, and with my own hands I shall have to destroy it”) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (particularly the tortured ending of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novel, in which Dr. Henry Jekyll recounts his own history and the experiment that went terribly wrong on the eve of his own suicide). There’s a nice touch towards the end as Dr. Cory literally sacrifices his own son to make him a suitable habitat for Donovan’s brain (though Charles said that, at least as depicted in the 1953 film, Donovan’s brain grew so much in size during the experiment that it’s hard to imagine it fitting inside any human cranium). In his final monologue he compares himself to the Biblical Abraham, who was told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on the Mount of Olives and laments that God didn’t stop him from sacrificing his son as he did with Abraham. We then get a postlude informing us that the remains of Dr. Cory and his son were buried in the Mount of Olives cemetery, and Janice Cory, who was previously unjustly committed to a mental institution, has now gone genuinely crazy and legitimately been committed to the same institution after the mysterious deaths of her husband and their son. And in its concept of a psychopathic egomaniac seeking to use a young, attractive body as his vehicle in a plot literally to conquer the world, Donovan’s Brain not only evokes such real-life dictators as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin (both of whom were alive, well, and pretty much at the peak of their powers when Curt Siodmak wrote the novel) but it can’t help but bring to mind such modern-day dictators or wanna-be dictators as Vladimir Putin and his good buddy, Donald Trump. (Well, you didn’t think I could write two blog posts on successive days about a story about an evil financier with ambitions for world domination and not mention Donald Trump, did you?)