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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Party Girl (Euterpe Productions, MGM, 1958)

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

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

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

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

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

A Dangerous Profession (RKO, 1949)

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

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

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

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

MacArthur (Zanuck-Brown Productions, Universal, 1977)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange Impersonation (W. Lee Wilder Productions, Reoublic, 1946)

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

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode January 23 I looked for something I could watch while waiting for my husband Charles to come home from work, and I found it in one of those annoying YouTube posts from “Mc Cult Hollywood.” It was an unnamed thriller (the reason I find “Mc Cult Hollywood” so annoying is he lops off the opening and closing credits of his movies so you don’t know for sure what they are) which he headlined as “Hillary Brooke Classic Noir Thriller Movie | 1946 | English Cult Movie | English Thriller Movie.” (I suspect the word “English” in his post title is meant to indicate only that the film is in English, not that it originated in the U.K.) Fortunately that gave me enough information to trace the film on imdb.com: Strange Impersonation, made at Republic Studios in 1946, directed by Anthony Mann (a year after he made his early masterpiece The Great Flamarion, one of the best films noir of the original cycle and a largely unsung movie that deserves to be better known) from a story by Anne Wigton and Lewis Herman and a script by Mindret Lord. Though Hillary Brooke is in it, she’s the second lead; the star is Brenda Marshall (a former Warner Bros. contractee whose best-known credit is probably 1940’s The Sea Hawk, in which she took over from Olivia de Havilland in the thankless role of the damsel in distress eventually rescued by Errol Flynn). She plays Dr. Nora Goodrich, a medical research chemist who’s just invented a new anaesthetic. She’s also engaged to fellow researcher Dr. Stephen Lindstrom (William Gargan, considerably heftier than he was in his brief late-1930’s heyday and equipped with a thin moustache that makes him look oddly sinister for a character we’re supposed to like), but she keeps putting him off and delaying their wedding until she finishes her current research.

Hillary Brooke plays her lab assistant, Arline Cole, who secretly has a decidedly unrequited crush on Stephen. Two things happen to derail Nora’s life: her car strikes a pedestrian named Jane Karaski (Ruth Ford), and while she’s uninjured Jane hooks up with a crook named Jeremiah W. Rinse (George Chandler) who tells her she can get $25,000 in damages from Nora; and Nora takes a dose of her new anaesthetic home with her to test on herself. Nora takes the prescribed 10-cc dose but after she’s under, Arline pours 30 cc more of the stuff into Nora’s flask and causes an explosion. Nora survives the house fire that results but her face is badly scarred (as badly as Bud Westmore, head of Republic’s makeup department, could make it on a limited budget, and her costumers help him out by having her wear veils on her face for the next few reels). Jane comes to Nora’s apartment demanding more money, They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, you have a lot to answer for!), and ultimately Nora kills Jane accidentally and Jane takes a tumble off Nora’s balcony and falls to the street below. Before that Jane had held the gun on Nora and demanded her engagement ring from Stephen as well as her wallet, and when the police find these items on Jane’s corpse they assume Nora was the victim. Nora then decides to assume Jane’s identity – the “strange impersonation” mentioned in the title – and she undergoes plastic surgery, giving her surgeon, Dr. Mansfield (H. B. “Jesus Christ” Warner), pictures of Jane to serve as a guide when he reconstructs her face. While she’s in the hospital recovering from the plastic surgery, Nora sees an article in a chemistry-industry magazine announcing that Dr. Stephen Lindstrom and Arline Cole have just got married and settled in New York City. When Nora reads this she instantly decides to go to New York herself and reclaim her former boyfriend from his new wife. She gets a job as Stephen’s lab assistant and is so good at her work Stephen is reminded of Nora and falls in love with her all over again.

Nora as “Jane” is invited to dinner at Stephen’s and Arline’s home, and explains her in-depth knowledge of Nora’s background by saying the two grew up together in Vermont and went to the same college at the same time. Arline notices the growing affection between Stephen and “Jane” and decides to divorce him, which leads Nora as “Jane” to accept Stephen’s offer to go to France with him and help him set up a lab there. Alas, Jeremiah Rinse turns up again and rats them out to the cops, who show up at the airport and arrest “Jane.” By this time we’re beginning to wonder how the writers are going to write themselves out of this one – especially as we watch an hallucinatory scene in which all the important people in Nora’s life surround her in extreme close-up and denounce her as Jane’s murderer. The one they pick is the oldest chestnut in the book [spoiler alert!]: It was all a dream! At least they were good enough to “plant” this by explaining early on that vivid hallucinations might be a side effect of Nora’s anaesthetic, but still … I wouldn’t exactly call Strange Impersonation a film noir (though it might have qualified if Arline had been a stronger character and more of a femme fatale), but it’s surprisingly well made and quite compelling even though it suffers from the lack of a major-studio cast. Mann’s direction is strong and puts the actors he did have through their paces well. One imdb.com reviewer listed this as Mann’s third film noir, after The Great Flamarion (which he or she admits he hasn’t seen; whoever you are, you’ve missed a truly great movie!) and Two O’Clock Courage (which is more of a 1930’s-style comedy-mystery than a noir), and closed their review with words with which I’d agree: “That the film succeeds as much as it does in spite of the meager cast, inexistent production values and cop-out finale is a tribute to the mastery of a filmmaker who is just finding a firm footing in a genre he will be making his own in the following year or two.” When Strange Impersonation started I briefly wondered if it would be a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a woman protagonist(s), and that might have been a better movie than the one that got made, but the one that got made is quite good. And also this was yet another historical movie showing people puffing away on cigarettes in doctors’ offices, hospital corridors and patients’ rooms – a far cry from the modern reality, in which smoking in any of these places is strictly verboten!

Nocturne (RKO, 1946)

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

Last night (Tuesday, January 21) I watched two more entries in Turner Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to actor George Raft. The rumor about Raft had been that he was a gangster himself until he had the good sense to get out of the illegal liquor business, and he found acting a safer and more lucrative occupation than bootlegging. (The Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. character in Little Caesar is reportedly based on Raft.) The two films were both made by RKO after World War II – Raft was working his way down the Hollywood food chain from Paramount to Warner Bros. and finally to RKO. They are Nocturne, directed by Edwin L. Marin from a script by old pulp hand Jonathan Latimer based on an original screen story by Frank Fenton and Rowland Brown, and Race Street, also directed by Marin and written by future producer Martin Rackin “suggested by” a story by Maurice Davis. Rowland Brown had one of the saddest careers in Hollywood; desperate to show off his unique “take” on gangster films and unconcerned with audience reactions with his elaborate but somewhat staid plots about people finding into and out of gang life, he took assignments at Fox to write and direct two quite good gangster movies with genuinely complex characters, Quick Millions and Blood Money. Then Brown ran afoul of MGM on a 1936 film called The Devil Is a Sissy, yet another tale of innocent young people drawn into a life of crime, only MGM fired him as director in mid-shoot (a real pity because Brown had actually got Mickey Rooney to underact for the first time in his career, while replacement director W. S. Van Dyke let Rooney chew the scenery as he did in all his other films). And in 1937 he sold a gangster story called Angels with Dirty Faces to the independent Grand National studio as a vehicle for James Cagney, who’d broken his Warner Bros. contract in court and signed with Grand National after no other major studio would risk Jack Warner’s wrath. Brown’s deal with Grand National called for him both to write and direct, but when Warners won Cagney back on appeal Grand National sold the story to Warners, who put their own writer (John Wexley) and director (Michael Curtiz) on it.

By 1946 the temperamental Brown was pretty much persona non grata in Hollywood, while Nocturne’s producer, Joan Harrison, was on her way up. She’d begun her career as Alfred Hitchcock’s secretary, but Hitchcock liked her ideas so much he gave her successive promotions until she was associate producer on most of his films, Then she struck out on her own and got a production deal from Universal, where she made Phantom Lady (1944) and Uncle Harry (1945) – only she was so upset by the “suits” at Universal second-guessing her on Uncle Harry she left for RKO and made Nocturne there. Screenwriter Jonathan Latimer wrote Nocturne from the Fenton-Brown story, and Edwin L. Marin (whose name was pronounced “MAAR-in” – I’d always assumed it was “Muh-RIN,” like the California county just north of San Francisco where I grew up) was hired to direct. (Marin’s best-known films are A Study in Scarlet, 1933; and A Christmas Carol, 1938, both starring Reginald Owen as classic characters from British literature: Sherlock Holmes and Scrooge, respectively.) Nocturne was one of the first films I showed my husband Charles from classic-era Hollywood when we started dating, and we were both taken by the initial plot gimmick – womanizing songwriter Keith Vincent (Edward Ashley) calls all his multitudinous girlfriends “Dolores” because he can’t trouble himself to remember their individual names. In fact, it became an in-joke between us for quite a while; we joked that if I saw any other men, I’d call them all “Charles” to avoid confusion. I remembered it as quite a bit better than it seems now – while the second George Raft item I watched last night, Race Street, I liked better than I had originally. The plot is that Keith Vincent is talking to his latest “Dolores” while he’s at his piano, writing a new song called “Nocturne” which begins as a declaration of undying love for his current conquest but ends as a kiss-off.

George Raft plays Lieutenant Joe Warne of the Los Angeles Police Department, who’s on the detail originally assigned to the case but gets taken off of it and suspended because he insists that Vincent was actually murdered even though the coroner’s verdict is suicide. Of course, this makes Warne even more determined than ever to find Vincent’s killer. The case draws him to Frances Ransome (Lynn Bari, in a more morally ambiguous role than her usual femmes fatales), an aspiring singer and bit actress who has a small role in a Sinbad the Sailor movie at RKO (we see the entrance to the real studio as Warne goes there to question her) and her sister Carol Page (Virginia Huston), a singer at the “Keyboard Club” where her accompanist was Ned “Fingers” Ford (a quite good performance by future director Joseph Pevney). Also in the cast list are Eric Torp (Bernard Hoffman), a large and rather dull man obviously modeled after Moose Malloy in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and the 1944 film of it, Murder, My Sweet. His job is to push Fingers’s piano around the Keyboard Club so he can be heard by whichever customers he’s playing for, but he also gets into several scrapes with Warne, including one in which he leaves a major gash, requiring stitches, over Warne’s right eye. The police are convinced Vincent killed himself because there are powder burns both on his forehead and on his gun hand, but Warne deduces how the real killer faked this: he loaded the revolver with a live first round and a blank second round, so the first one would kill him and then he could plant the gun in Vincent’s hand, fire the blank round leaving powder burns on Vincent’s face and hand, then carefully extract the spent blank shell so it would appear there had been just one bullet in the gun and Vincent had committed suicide with it.

Both Warne and we realize who the killer was when “Fingers” plays the complete song “Nocturne,” including the ending Vincent had played the night of his death but hadn’t had a chance to write down on the score. It turns out “Fingers” was Carol Page’s husband, Vincent seduced her from him, and he was willing to let her go if Vincent was going to marry her but decided to kill him when he realized Vincent regarded Carol as just another trophy on his wall. That last part is almost literally true: the walls of Vincent’s living room were studded with a long line of professionally shot photographs of Vincent’s various “Dolores”’es, and one of the clues that helped Warne solve the case was the photo of Carol was missing, obviously taken by Vincent’s killer. Later in the film Warne gets a call from Vincent’s photographer, who promises him some information, but when he gets there the photographer is dead, hanged in his own home. Nocturne is a strangely haunting film but not an especially good one, though cinematographer Harry J. Wild (who also shot the film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet) manages to get a convincing noir atmosphere even though all the dwellings and nightclubs are high-end instead of the gritty, grungy urban settings of most films noir. And like a lot of George Raft’s Warners vehicles in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the action comes to a dead stop so Virginia Huston as Carol can sing three songs, “Nocturne” by Leigh Harline and Mort Greene, and “Why Pretend?” and “A Little Bit Is Better Than None” by Eleanor Rudolph. (Her voice double was Martha Mears, whom Charles and I had just heard dubbing for Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire. She managed to push up her pitch and lighten her voice enough to double convincingly for the higher-voiced Virginia Huston.)

Race Street (RKO, 1948)

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

Last night (Tuesday, January 21), after Turner Classic Movies showed the 1946 film noir Nocturne, they followed it up with another George Raft starring vehicle as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to him, Race Street (1948). Because it was set in San Francisco and because [spoiler alert!] Raft’s supposed girlfriend (Marilyn Maxwell) turns out to be a villain, in league with her supposedly “dead” husband (Frank Faylen) to run the “protection” racket aimed at driving all San Francisco’s bookies out of business unless they pay 25 percent of their income to be allowed to live and operate, it was tempting to see this film as an indication of how Raft might have done as Sam Spade in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, a role he turned down because he didn’t want to work for a man – John Huston – who’d never directed a film before. Of course the comparison cuts both ways; it’s easy to imagine Race Street as a much better movie with Humphrey Bogart in Raft’s role! When I wrote the commentary below on January 11, 2006, I hadn’t seen Raft’s only performance in a story written by Dashiell Hammett, the 1935 version of The Glass Key, in which he’s O.K. but nothing special. I posted a review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-glass-key-paramount-1935.html and I pretty much stand by it, though when I mentioned Race Street I got Raft’s profession wrong (he’s a bookie, not a private detective). Here’s what I had to say about Race Street the last time I saw it:

The film I picked was Race Street, an O.K. but somewhat intriguing RKO “B” from 1948, directed by the sometimes interesting Edwin L. Marin (his best films are his two starring vehicles for Reginald Owen, A Study in Scarlet and A Christmas Carol), written by future producer Martin Rackin from a story by Maurice Davis, and starring George Raft as San Francisco bookie Dan Gannin. The film is narrated in flashback by Gannin’s friend, Lt. Barney Runson of the San Francisco Police Department (William Bendix) and deals with Gannin’s efforts to get himself out of the bookmaking business and into legitimacy via a nightclub he’s opened called the “Turf Club” — in which he’s made his sister Elaine (Gale Robbins) and her dance partner his star entertainers — while at the same time romancing Robbie Lawrence (Marilyn Maxwell, blonde bombshell turned brunette femme fatale) and shielding himself and his other best friend, crippled fellow bookie Hal Towers (Henry Morgan, who even though 20 years younger than he was when he played his two most famous roles — Jack Webb’s partner in the 1960’s color iteration of Dragnet and Col. Potter on M*A*S*H — didn’t look that much younger, probably because even this early his hairline was already receding) from the efforts of a “protection” racket muscling its way into San Francisco and demanding a 25 percent cut from all the local bookies. It’s tempting to see this film as an indication of what The Maltese Falcon might have looked like with Raft as its star, not only because it’s set in San Francisco but because his character is an independent businessman with an arm’s-length relationship with a local police officer and [if I were writing this for imdb.com I’d have to insert a “spoiler” alert here!] Robbie Lawrence, his supposed girlfriend, turns out to be one of the masterminds of the protection racket, along with her husband, Phil Dickson (Frank Faylen, the marvelously twitchy nurse from Bellevue in the film The Lost Weekend), whom she told Gannin had been killed in World War II but is in fact very much alive and running the racket via a series of stooges.

Race Street is one of those movies I like to call film gris, because it’s attempting to be film noir but isn’t really “dark” or morally ambiguous enough to qualify — though there are some marvelously chilling scenes, notably one in which the goons from the protection racket kill Towers (who can walk, but limps due to a childhood accident) by tripping him at the top of a flight of stairs and letting him fall to the bottom. (This was one year after Kiss of Death started the trend for films in which disabled people were murdered by being thrown down stairs.) There’s also a good scene in which Gannin is taken to a meeting with the head of the protection racket and he’s blindfolded and driven in a sealed car (which makes one wonder how he recognizes the guy later even though he’s supposedly never seen him and has heard his voice only through a distorting voice box), and an ending built on a series of betrayals in which Gannin is shot and killed after not only his presumed girlfriend but also one of his best friends in the bookie business turn on him. (A comment on the imdb.com site from “Sol” from Brooklyn suggested that Raft had learned his lesson after turning down High Sierra because the Production Code people obliged his character to die at the end — more likely it was eight years later and Raft’s star had fallen low enough he could no longer afford to be as picky as he’d been when he turned down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.) With a stronger script that put Gannin through more angst over the betrayals — and, likely, a more sensitive actor than Raft who could have seized the opportunities of a deeper, richer script on this story than the one Rackin provided — Race Street could have been a memorable noir. As it is, it’s just another movie from Raft’s “down” years, hardly as interesting as Crack-Up or Nocturne but reasonably entertaining even if the yawning gulf between Raft and Humphrey Bogart in overall acting talent, emotional depth and “star” charisma is only accentuated by the San Francisco setting and the Maltese Falcon comparisons it inspires. — 1/11/06

This Gun for Hire (Paramount, 1942)

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

Last night’s (Monday, January 20) “feature” for my husband Charles and I was This Gun for Hire, a 1942 early film noir from Paramount directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, Laird Cregar and Alan Ladd, billed in that order on the closing credits. The script was by future Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz and Little Caesar creator W. R. Burnett based on a 1936 novel called A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene. Greene’s novel was a pretty straightforward tale of intrigue dealing with a hired killer named Raven who’s engaged to assassinate the Minister of War for Czechoslovakia by two men high up in a munitions company, CEO Sir Marcus and his assistant, Willie Davis a.k.a. Cholmondeley, who’s described in the Wikipedia page for the novel as “a grossly sensual man.” Sir Marcus’s hope is that the assassination will trigger a second world war and his company will make tons of money supplying both sides. Also involved in the case are a police officer, Jimmy Mather, who joined the force after his brother committed suicide; and his fiancée, Anne Crowder, a chorus girl. Maltz and Burnett moved this plot to present-day San Francisco and Los Angeles and set it in the 1942 present, incorporating the actual World War II into the story. Here the CEO is wheelchair-bound Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall) of a L.A.-based explosives company called Nitro, and the “grossly sensual” assistant is Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who in addition to his duties at Nitro runs an L.A. nightclub, the Club Neptune, that specializes in “girlie shows.” He confesses a weakness for the female flesh – a surprise coming from Cregar, who not only was Gay in real life but is playing the part as a screaming queen – and he’s in San Francisco as the film begins both to supervise the killing of a former Nitro executive, Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson), who made off with the formula for a super-explosive that could prove decisive to whichever side gets it, and to audition talent for his nightclub in L.A.

His hired killer is Raven (Alan Ladd, who’d been kicking around the minor studios for years – his first known film was Tom Brown of Culver in 1932 and his initial screen credit was for the first PRC release, Hitler: Beast of Berlin in 1939 – and by 1941 had worked his way up to fourth billing in a quite good vest-pocket gangster film called Paper Bullets, also for PRC, but Paramount still gave him an “Introducing” credit). The imdb.com cast list and other sources for the film give Raven the first name “Philip,” but he has no first name in the film and apparently he didn’t in Graham Greene’s novel, either. Raven shows up at the San Francisco address he’s been given and dispatches both Baker and his “secretary” (Bernadene Hayes) – really a dark-haired bimbo floozy he’d picked up for the night – but there’s a heart-stopping moment when he and we see a crippled girl (Virita Campbell) on the staircase and he briefly reaches into the leather case in which he carries his gun before he finally thinks better of it and lets her live. Unfortunately for Raven, he’s paid off in bills stolen from a bank, and the San Francisco police have been given a list of their serial numbers and sent bulletins out to store personnel telling them to watch for bills with those numbers. Raven of course has no idea of this, but he passes one of the marked bills to a dressmaker for whom he’s buying a dress for his landlady – he tore her previous dress when he caught her trying to shoo away his pet cat. The store clerk reports it to the police and the call is taken by detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston), whose girlfriend Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake, top-billed) is auditioning for Gates’s floor show with a quite good magic act performed while she sings a song called “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.” The song was composed by Jacques Press with lyrics by Frank Loesser (who would write “dummy” tunes to indicate what sorts of settings his composers should give his words; when he wrote the words and a tune to “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” his wife said, “Don’t send that out to a composer. Get it published yourself, with your melody,” and so Frank Loesser became a full-fledged songwriter and not just a lyricist), and it’s O.K. but I can’t help thinking it would have been better if we’d got to hear Loesser’s melody as well. Veronica Lake had one of Hollywood’s all-purpose female voice doubles, Martha Mears, whose contralto matches Lake’s low-pitched singing voice quite well.

Needing to flee San Francisco before the police catch him for the murders, and anxious for revenge against Brewster and Gates for having paid him off in useless money, Raven takes the train to L.A. and runs into Ellen, who befriends him and helps him sneak through the police barricades. The cops running them have been told to look for a man with a big scar on his left forearm (though there’s a glitch: when we finally see Raven’s arms the scar is on his right forearm), but Ellen aids him by draping her coat over him. Then Ellen is waylaid by a mysterious figure who turns out to be Senator Burnett (Roger Imhof), who actually recruits her as a spy for our side in the war to root out the Fifth Columnists at Nitro. One problem with This Gun for Hire is how often it changes tone: it’s a film noir, an old-dark-house horror movie (especially in one scene in which Raven and Ellen are trapped inside, you guessed it, an old dark house, which cinematographer John F. Seitz lights – or doesn’t – with the full armamentarium of both horror and noir tricks), and a musical with bits of screwball comedy. Whenever Robert Preston appears on screen we expect him, based on his two most famous roles (in The Music Man and Victor/Victoria), either to start singing about seventy-six trombones or donning drag. Also writers Maltz and Burnett never give us a clear motive for Brewster and Gates to be stealing military secrets from their own company and selling them to the enemy (in Graham Greene’s novel at least the motives made sense!), especially since making the stuff for our side would seem to be at least as profitable financially for them. This Gun for Hire ends with a shoot-out at an oil refinery in which Raven finally dies and Ellen and Detective Crane get together at the end. It’s a frustrating film because it certainly qualifies as a noir visually, and thematically it’s at least on the cusp, but Veronica Lake is a “nice” girl and therefore much less interesting than she’d be as a femme fatale, and Alan Ladd moves through the film with a kind of stoic blankness that works to establish him as a hard-hearted villain but doesn’t give the actor much to do. He’s been described in the literature on This Gun for Hire as a sadist who gets pleasure out of killing people, but I saw him as a figure similar to the one Humphrey Bogart played in his late-1930’s gangster films: a man who doesn’t either enjoy murdering people or have guilt feelings about it, but simply accepts it as a grim necessity for his own survival. Ladd would get better parts later, though he still never became a truly great actor and Raymond Chandler once compared him to Humphrey Bogart thusly: “Ladd is a teenage boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the real thing.”

Out of Africa (Mirage Enterprises, Universal, 1985)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 19) my husband Charles and I watched the Blu-Ray disc of the 1985 film Out of Africa, one of the soundtracks I’m going to be reviewing for the May-June 2025 issue of Fanfare magazine. I was assigned to review some soundtrack CD’s from Intrada Records and ordered DVD’s or Blu-Ray discs of the films so I could watch them and hear how the music was used in context. I had fond memories of Out of Africa even though I hadn’t seen the film since it was new (and neither had Charles), and today it still seems a good movie but also dated in ways and awfully slow and ponderous. It began life as a 1937 memoir of writer Isak Dinesen’s (true name: Karen Dinesen Blixen) 18-year stint running a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1913 to 1931. Screenwriter Kurt Luedtke based his script on Dinesen’s own memoir plus two biographies about her, Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller and Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski. In the 1980’s it was made into a movie by producer/director Sydney Pollack, who gave it a sheen of Importance with a capital “I” and cast Meryl Streep as Dinesen and Robert Redford as her lover, British game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. With Redford in the male lead (even though we don’t see him until half an hour into the film) it turned into a star vehicle for him and the up-and-coming Streep. I once talked to a man I rode with regularly on a bus – whom I’m inclined to take more or less seriously as a source because he knew a good deal of film trivia and remembered more about who won the Academy Awards for what in which year than I did – who told me that when Redford showed up for the role (the exteriors were shot in Kenya and the interiors, as well as the scenes in a Danish castle, were shot in the U.K.) he had worked out a perfect British accent. But Sydney Pollack told him not to use it and instead to speak in his normal voice so people would realize he was Robert Redford and not think it was a British actor who looked an awful lot like him. Meanwhile, Streep did her best impression of a Danish accent; this was in the middle of a sequence of roles for her that drew on so many accents the joke around Hollywood was, “How do Meryl Streep’s kids talk?”

The film starts with Dinesen’s arrival in Kenya in 1913 to meet and marry her husband-to-be, Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and join him on their plantation in Kenya. It’s established that she had originally dated Bror’s brother but he had turned her down. It’s also established that the Blixen family had noble titles but almost no money, while Karen was well-to-do because her late father was a landed aristocrat and her mom came from a family of shipowners. So Bror married Karen for her money and the two settled in Kenya in 1913. Their initial plan had been to run a dairy, but without telling Karen, Bror spent her money not on cows but on setting up a coffee plantation. It turned out Bror was a lot more interested in hunting and chasing after other women than he was in running a coffee plantation or being with his wife. Karen and Denys have a “meet-cute” when she’s getting off a train and encounters him wrestling with a pair of elephant tusks. Denys is already one of Bror’s regular hunting partners, and with Bror away from the plantation a lot of the time, Karen and Denys become friends and, eventually, lovers. In 1965 Dwight Macdonald, reviewing the film The Pawnbroker, coined the phrase “The Bad Good Movie,” as an analogue to “The Good Bad Movie” (the sort of film that, unlike “Good Bad Movies” like Plan Nine from Outer Space or Robot Monster that are so inept they work as camp, is clearly aiming at Significance but not quite hitting the mark). I wouldn’t quite call Out of Africa a Bad Good Movie, but through much of its running time it came awfully close. I think I’d say of it what I said of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 film of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: “It aspires to greatness and achieves goodness.”

Among the plus sides are David Watkin’s glorious cinematography – it’s so nice to see a modern-day color movie that’s actually colorful, that contains a great deal of the visible spectrum instead of those dank greens and browns that dominate most recent films – that does full justice to the locations, particularly the Shaba National Game Reserve in Kenya. Also, Robert Redford looks more credibly handsome than I can recall seeing him in any other film, either before or after. Though I wouldn’t put him in the group with Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power or Tom Selleck as performers who got to be better actors once they started to lose their looks, Redford’s 1960’s performances made him look like an animated tailor’s dummy. Out of Africa captures him at a significant point in his career, during which his face was starting to look careworn without the craggy mountain-man appearance he had (appropriately enough) in The Horse Whisperer (1998). Charles joked about Gary Liddiard’s credit as Redford’s makeup artist – Streep also had her own, J. Roy Helland, while two other people, Mary Hillman and Norma Hill, did the rest of the cast – and wondered, “What did he look like before he got made up?” And it at least feints at a critique of colonial and cultural imperialism – especially in a scene in which Karen demands of the creditors who are foreclosing on her failed coffee plantation that they save a space for the Kikuyu people who were her main work force because “it was their country, we stole it from them” – though it does little more than feint at it. On the down sides are the slow, almost soporific pace and the clunkiness in Kurt Luedtke’s script. Though Luedtke was actually from the U.S. (he was born in Michigan, and he died there as well), much of the dialogue was so stiff I wondered from his German-sounding name if he’d written the script in German and either he or someone else translated it into English. (This would actually have been appropriate for a film about Isak Dinesen, who wrote most of her books bilingually in both Danish and English.) Redford’s character, like the real Denys, died in a crash of his private plane – a yellow biplane that practically became an iconic image of this movie (the posters featured Redford and Streep in the cockpit together flying over the stunning African locations) – but in a mistake that would have earned Luedtke a failing grade in Screenwriting 101 we’re only told, not shown, that.

I also had an authenticity problem with the music; Denys is depicted as the sort of man who takes music everywhere he goes, courtesy of a portable gramophone and a supply of records. He even lugs along his equipment on safari (though I wondered how he kept himself supplied with styli, since in 1913 you were supposed to put in a new one every time you played a record). Most of his selections are classical, including Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, “Rondo alla Turca” and Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, but instead of using actual records from the period Pollack licensed modern recordings (usually by Neville Marriner, who also supplied the Mozart music for Amadeus) and put them on the soundtrack with a bit of filtering to shrink their dynamic range but without any hint of the ineradicable surface noise of real records from 1913 to 1931. Out of Africa is also the victim of changing notions of political correctness; in 2025 it’s hard to admire a character who kills elephants for their tusks, especially after all those TV commercials for the World Wildlife Fund that tells us elephants are an endangered species and need our contributions to save them from being hunted to extinction for their tusks. It reminded me of S. Z. Sakall’s comment in the 1945 Christmas in Connecticut, when Barbara Stanwyck’s character says, “I need a mink coat!” Sakall fires back, “The only one that needs a mink coat is the mink!” – which has become far more the consensus view of fur coats today than it was then. I also didn’t realize while I was watching it that the film takes place from 1913 to 1931; I had thought it had a much shorter time frame than that and ended in the early 1920’s.

Out of Africa was a major hit then and was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning seven: Best Picture, Best Director for Pollack, Best Screenplay for Luedtke, Best Art Direction for Stephen B. Grimes and set decorator Josie McAlvin, Best Cinematography for Watkin (who thoroughly deserved it), Best Original Score for John Barry (who showed a surprising skill for romantic music given that he’s best known as the “James Bond guy,” though it occurred to me later that his music, like the film itself, is strongly reminiscent of Another Dawn, a 1930’s Warner Bros. tear-jerker that’s also set in Africa during the First World War and also features a heroine having an adulterous relationship with a man who flies a private plane; the music for Another Dawn was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he recycled his big love theme for the first movement of his 1947 Violin Concerto), and Best Sound for Chris Jenkins, Gary Alexander, Larry Stensvold, and Peter Handford. Charles said after the movie that he’d assumed Isak Dinesen was a cult writer with a tiny following who’d become a star briefly only because of this movie – until I looked her up on Wikipedia and we found out she’d worked steadily between 1934 (after her return to Denmark following the events of this film) and her death in 1962, and three of her novels had been Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Overall, Out of Africa holds up as a good movie but not a great one, though it’s hard to dislike it while you’re watching Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in front of all that glorious African scenery (including one elevated mesa that made me joke, “Monument Valley, Kenya”), stunningly photographed by David Watkin and with equally inspiring music by John Barry.