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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donovan's Brain (Allan Dowling Productions, United Artists, 1953)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 17) at about 10 p.m. I dug out an old home-recorded DVD I’d made off Turner Classic Movies in 2013, three years before Cox Cable and the media industry in general lowered the boom on home recordings off cable or on-air channels by making them “all-digital” and ensuring that VCR’s and home DVD recorders could no longer work with the new technology. It contained four movies, three of which we’d already watched together – Pirates of Tripoli, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, and Miami Exposé – but the one I wanted to run last night was the first film on the disc, the 1953 version of Curt Siodmak’s 1942 science-fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. It was produced by Allen Downing and directed by Felix E. Feist (whose only other claim to fame was making the 1936 one-reel musical Every Sunday, a classical-vs.-jazz musical battle with Deanna Durbin representing classical and Judy Garland trying her best to represent jazz; as great as she was Judy was never really a jazz singer, and when she was platonically dating Artie Shaw in 1938 when Billie Holiday was his band singer, Judy was flamingly jealous of Billie and wished she could sing like her), who also wrote the screenplay based on an adaptation by Hugh Brooke. Donovan’s Brain had previously been filmed by Republic in 1944 as The Lady and the Monster, a truly schizoid film in which the central character of Siodmak’s book, Dr. Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen in The Lady and the Monster, Lew Ayres here), is merely the assistant to a floridly mad scientist, Dr. Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim).

One difference between the two films is that where Dr. Mueller conducted his experiments in an old-dark-house style castle located in the middle of the Arizona desert, Dr. Cory performs his in a typical suburban ranch-style house, though similarly remotely located. The remote location is essential to the story, since it enables Dr. Cory and his friend and assistant Dr. Frank Schratt (Gene Evans), who’s being threatened with losing his job as the official county doctor because he’s an alcoholic and also because the head of the local board of supervisors has a brother-in-law he’d like to hire in Schratt’s place, to perform the sinister experiment at the heart of the plot in an out-of-the-way place free from prying eyes. Well, free from all but one set of prying eyes – more on that later. Dr. Cory has developed a method for removing an organism’s brain and keeping it alive in a solution by connecting electrodes to it and keeping it electronically stimulated, while the liquid in the fish tank he’s keeping it in will supply it with nutrients. He’s already tried this unsuccessfully on three monkeys, and when we meet him he’s driving home with a fourth monkey in tow while his wife Janice (Nancy Davis, born Anne Frances Robbins, later given the name of her stepfather Dr. Loyal Davis, and ultimately known as Nancy Reagan after she married Ronald Reagan in 1952) tries to comfort the monkey and asks her husband if they can keep it as a pet. (This film is already unintentionally weird enough politically – Mr. Conscientious Objector co-starring with Mrs. Ronald Reagan – but it gets even odder when Nancy’s character is portrayed as an animal-rights activist at least two decades early.)

Dr. Cory’s experiment with the fourth monkey is a success, and just then he’s called out of his home on a medical emergency to tend to multimillionaire Warren H. Donovan, whose private plane has crashed in the middle of the Arizona desert. Since there isn’t time to take Donovan’s body to a fully equipped hospital, Dr. Cory offers to operate on him at his home, which has an operating table and surgical supplies, but Dr. Cory soon realizes Donovan is too far gone to be revivable. Instead he and Dr. Schratt harvest Donovan’s brain and keep it alive in the fish tank, only of course the experiment works too well: given an unending supply of nutrients and no longer encumbered by the limitations of an attached body, Donovan’s brain gets more and more powerful over time and gradually takes over Dr. Cory’s body. Already Dr. Cory, Janice, and Dr. Schratt have grabbed hold of every publication they can find about the living Warren H. Donovan and have researched him. They’ve found, not too surprisingly, that the living Donovan was a self-made man who hated labor, hated charities, and above all hated the Internal Revenue Service. (In other words, he was your typical asshole Libertarian.) In fact, he set up at least five fake bank accounts to shield as much of his fortune as possible from the IRS, and through his growing telepathic contact with Donovan, Dr. Cory learns where those accounts are and in whose names they’re in so he can drain the money from them. The one person who gets suspicious of what Dr. Cory is doing is Herbie Yocum (Steve Brodie), a free-lance reporter and paparazzo who invades the Corys’ home, ostensibly to take a photo of the operating table on which Donovan died, though he also takes a shot of Donovan’s brain in its aquarium-like tank. Yocum threatens to expose the story to the whole world, but Donovan is able to send a pure beam of thought energy to Yocum so he crashes his car, gets killed, and is no longer a threat to Donovan, alive or dead.

Cory gives the money from Donovan’s secret accounts to Donovan’s former legal advisor, with instructions to use it to build an elaborate mausoleum for Donovan with the idea that the brain will be housed there permanently, taken care of by a round-the-clock team of medical specialists, and with its pure psychic energy will be able to dominate the world’s financial affairs and essentially have unlimited power. (Remember that when Curt Siodmak wrote it, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were both alive and at the peaks of their powers, so a malevolent intelligence capable of ruling the world and turning it into a hellhole wasn’t altogether the stuff of science fiction.) Ultimately, in Dr. Cory’s absence, Dr. Schratt figures out a way to use the energy from a lightning storm to annihilate Donovan’s brain once and for all. In the book, he sacrifices his own life in the process of doing this; in the 1953 film, he survives. Alas, Brooke and Feist omitted one of the most fascinating subplots of Siodmak’s original: Donovan was ardently seeking a pardon and freedom for convicted murder Roger Collins (played by Bill Henry in The Lady and the Monster) for reasons that remained mysterious. A lot of people assumed it was because Collins was Donovan’s illegitimate son, but it turns out in the book that Donovan simply wanted Collins freed to show the extent of his power. (In Dane Lussier’s and Frederick Kohner’s script for The Lady and the Monster, the murder Collins had been convicted of and was scheduled to be executed for was actually committed by Donovan himself; the victim was a former secretary of his who was planning to publish a book exposing him and his crimes. In Siodmak’s novel, Collins was actually guilty, and after the death of Donovan’s brain Dr. Cory, who narrates the novel, laconically states that Collins has been executed, as he richly deserved to be.)

Both films of Donovan’s Brain were major frustrations for Curt Siodmak, because he wanted to direct the screen version of his novel but never got to do so. Curt was ferociously jealous of his brother, Robert Siodmak, for having got to direct films while Curt was still stuck as just a writer. Eventually Curt got to direct Bride of the Gorilla in 1951 – a surprisingly good horror cheapie with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Raymond Burr – and followed it with seven “B” movies and 12 episodes of a 1959 TV series called 13 Demon Street, but he never gained the reputation brother Robert had as a director (including Phantom Lady, The Spiral Staircase, Christmas Holiday – from the title and the stars, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, you’d expect a Christmas-themed musical but it’s really a film noir – and Burt Lancaster’s first film, The Killers). I remember reading Curt Siodmak’s novel and thinking it was better than either of the films (there was a third version in 1970 called simply The Brain, but I’ve never seen it), and Charles read the above and said he thought that a disembodied brain without any senses or any capability to feel anything would literally go crazy and show all the symptoms of paranoia. That would be an interesting remix of the story in case anyone out there wants to take a crack at a fourth version!

I'll Never Let You Go (CMW Autumn Productions, Studio TF1 Television, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 16) I watched two consecutive Lifetime movies, I’ll Never Let You Go and the awkwardly titled I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead. I’ll Never Let You Go was directed by Troy Scott from a script by Alex Wright, and it’s basically your standard-issue Lifetime movie of a frustrated middle-aged woman who’s just sent her daughter off to college in Berkeley. This was one of their “race” movies in that all but one of the major characters were Black, and the central character is Emily Westover (Meagan Good, who also executive-produced, whatever that means). Her daughter Sophia (Hana Huggins) has left to attend UC Berkeley, and she’s left behind in Napa, where she works for an art gallery whose viability as a business depends on the success of its next exhibit. The artist who was about to show there suddenly cancels, though Emily’s supervisor at the gallery, Sasha (Marnie Mahannah), lines up a new hotshot photographer from Italy named Carlo Barone (Antonio Cupo). Emily is married to Tom (Thomas Cadrot) and has been for 20 years since they were high-school sweethearts, but Tom is busy writing a novel and has no time for anyone or anything else, including sex with his wife. After Tom rather rudely brushes off her advances (this is one Lifetime movie in which the woman is definitely the sexual aggressor), this leaves Emily a sitting duck for the seduction strategy of Carlo, who shows up and demands dinner and a lot of coddling, which turns into a lot of cuddling, which turns into something else. Sasha is using Emily to persuade Carlo to do press interviews for his upcoming show, and also to get Carlo to make more photographs for it, since he only brought seven and they need 20 for a commercially viable exhibit. There’s also a quite stereotypical Gay man named Byron (Julian Lao) who works at the gallery, and it’s a wonder he doesn’t lust after Carlo – though it’s a quirk of mainstream Hollywood movies that we can be told a character is Gay (though here we don’t even have to be told: Julian Lao’s queeny mannerisms leave us with no doubt) but he can’t be shown actually dating another person of his own sex.

Anyway, Emily has a few hot flings with Carlo, including one in the women’s restroom (where Carlo has sneaked in), until she thinks better of it. Of course, as you might have guessed from the title, Carlo isn’t willing to let Emily go – and she should have been warned by one of the most erotic photos in his collection. She asked who the model was, and Carlo said, “My last gallery owner.” Emily refuses to answer Carlo’s calls, and Carlo gets more insistent, including deliberately scratching the hood of her car when she turns him down. Emily gets into trouble when her daughter Sophia gets in an auto accident after one of her extra-relational sessions with Carlo – which reminded me of an odd sequence of movies my husband Charles and I watched over a decade ago in which for a woman to be able to get laid, someone in her family had to die or at least get seriously ill, and with Emily, shall we say, otherwise occupied her husband Tom had to take charge of their daughter’s care. Meanwhile, Carlo had secretly taken a photo of Emily half-naked in bed after one of their trysts. He promises to delete it from his phone once Emily sees it, but he doesn’t. Instead at the opening of his gallery show he unveils it as his latest creation. Tom and Sophia are there, and Sophia gasps in horror, “Mom?,” as she recognizes the subject. Sasha decides Emily has definitely crossed the line and immediately fires her from the gallery. Carlo sees this as his opening to get her to run away with him and leave her husband for him.

Then we are told he’s done this sort of thing before; in fact, his last girlfriend back in Italy took out a restraining order against him. Carlo’s stalking gets so much of an issue for not only Emily but Tom as well – at first Emily made the mistake of lying to Tom and saying the incriminating photo was digitally faked to put her face on someone else’s body – that ultimately they relocate from Napa to Berkeley, partly so they can be in the same city as their daughter and partly to live down the scandal. Emily has landed a new job in another gallery, but Carlo tracks them down via their social-media presence (this movie is, among other things, a warning to people not to get too revealing on their social-media accounts) and literally steals their pet dog. Emily and Tom report the dognapping to the police, but when the cops learn that the dog isn’t a pedigreed animal but just a mutt they rescued, they lose interest. The finale takes place at Tom’s and Emily’s new home, after a spat caused when Emily finally comes clean to her husband and admits she and Carlo did have an affair. Carlo sneaks in (he’s overheard where Emily keeps her Hide-a-Key) and holds both Tom and Sophia hostage, and threatens to kill either or both of them if Emily doesn’t come over. Emily tries to sneak in and call 911, but in the end Tom is able to cut through his bondage ropes with a kitchen knife and go for the gun he keeps in a safe – only Carlo easily wrests the gun from him. Fortunately, Emily saves the situation by blasting Carlo with his own gun, which he’d dropped, and a year and a half later she and Tom are back together and celebrating the publication of Tom’s book, a novel called The Empty Nest, with Emily as the cover designer. I’ll Never Let You Go is typical Lifetime, though at least we get Meagan Good in soft-core porn scenes with both the men in her life (and when we see her and Tom making love, cinematographer Diego Lozano lights the scene so oddly it looks like his right nipple is a flashlight bulb). If Charles had watched it with me he’d have probably called it a lesson against “cheating,” which it is, but it’s also good clean dirty fun in the best LIfetime manner.

I Thought My Husband's Wife Was Dead (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The second Lifetime movie I watched on Saturday, August 16, I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead, was disappointing in that it had the potential to be a lot more interesting than I’ll Never Let You Go but blew it on too many spectacular neck-snapping reversals. It’s another movie with African-American leads, though it started out as a novel by Minka Kent called Unmissing – a great title which the filmmakers should have kept. I looked up the Goodreads entry on Unmissing and, though Kent was involved with the production as an executive producer (a catch-all credit which can mean anything from a person who owned the property at one point to an actor, writer, or director grabbing a credit that will mean a bigger slice of the pie financially). The screenwriter, Tamara Gregory, made a few changes to the story – the central couple, called Luca and Merritt Coletto in the novel, become Leo and Layla Winters (Jamall Johnson and Sherilyn Allen), while the mystery woman who arrives out of nowhere and disrupts their lives is changed from Lydia to Vicki Knight (LeToya Luckett). (I suspect the name changes were largely because, while it’s not impossible for Black people to be named “Coletto,” it’s not a typically “Black”-sounding name.) Vicki claims to be Leo’s wife, who was thought to have died five years before (in the novel it was 10 years), but in fact she was held hostage by a mystery man who made her call him “The Master” and regularly abused her sexually, physically, and psychologically until she escaped and was rescued by a group of off-the-grid nomads.

For a while I thought Kent and Gregory were going for the marvelous moral ambiguity Christine Conradt brought to her Lifetime scripts, in which the characters were not clearly delineated heroes and villains but are real people with rationally clashing agendas. Vicki seems to be understandable and even sympathetic in her desire to restart her life after she’s been held captive for five years and ended up homeless (there’s a great scene in which she’s been sleeping on a restroom floor until she has to get up and leave when the building it’s in opens for business in the morning), but she’s also shown as greedy in her constant importuning of Leo for money she claims he owes her. Leo is a boor, and Layla is a spoiled rich bitch who buys $700 pairs of shoes and multiple copies of the white dresses she favors. The only truly sympathetic character in the film is Gina (Angela “Blac Chyna” White), owner of a Black-oriented beauty shop, who when Vikki shows up asking for a job, agrees to put her up in a spare room, let her use the shop address for employment applications, and agrees to let her sweep the shop floor in exchange for these benefits since Gina can’t actually pay her above-board as she has no I.D. Leo and Layla run a fancy restaurant called Chameleon with a rather twitchy executive assistant named Mark (Max Montesi), the only significant white person in the dramatis personae. Mark has obsessive-compulsive disorder and says he met Leo during the search he made for Vikki when she supposedly died. Chameleon is bombing because the décor is stunning but the food sucks – it advertises “healthy comfort food” but the fare is neither – until Vikki talks her way into a job there as “food consultant” and brings in her family’s recipes, which make the restaurant a success. We also learn that Vikki’s mother has been married five times.

Just when we’re starting to think that Mark, who’s making no particular secret of his sexual interest in Vikki, is the mysterious “Master” who held her captive all those years, we learn that [spoiler alert!] it was really Leo Winters who held her in that trailer in the middle of nowhere for five years and took out his sick urges to torture and rape a woman on her. His motive was to grab the $2 million payout on the life insurance policy he took out on her, and Vikki’s hold on him is that if she turns out to be alive, the life-insurance company is naturally going to demand all that money back, which he’s already long since spent on the Chameleon restaurant and Layla’s insane consumerism. About three-quarters of the way through the movie we learn [double spoiler alert!] that Layla was in on it the whole time and was actually Leo’s co-conspirator. Layla had met Leo when Leo was working as a package delivery driver, and he accidentally gave her a high-end package that was intended for someone else. Leo kept giving her high-end goods other people had ordered, and with her ultra-deluxe tastes she loved every minute of it, until Leo’s employers caught on to what was happening and fired him. The two of them then hit on the idea of having Leo marry someone else, take out a huge insurance policy on her, then kill her in a way that would look accidental – only Leo, who was willing to go along with most of Layla’s scheme but drew the line at murder, instead of killing Vikki hid her out in that trailer for five years and did all the nasty things with her that Layla wouldn’t allow in their own relationship.

Layla has also been pregnant throughout the movie with a child they conceived through in vitro fertilization and, after she’s already had two miscarriages, she’s nervous about losing this baby as well – a fact that has made her seem like a more sympathetic character than she deserves. When the baby is finally born, in yet another shock reversal [triple spoiler alert!] Layla stabs Leo to death in their kitchen, apparently to collect on yet another round of $2 million insurance policies she and Leo had taken out on each other. Her plan is to frame Vikki, who’s already bled them dry for $500,000, for the crime, but in the end the police come, arrest Layla, and Vikki as Leo’s legal wife inherits his estate, including his restaurant, and also gets to raise Leo’s and Layla’s daughter. Then a deus ex machina appears in the form of a reality-TV show producer named Mimi (Shaughnessy O’Brien), whom Layla had been lobbying for a show about her and Leo’s lives, only Mimi had told her there wasn’t anything exciting enough to merit one. In the last scene, Mimi sets up a visit between Vikki and Layla, who’s in prison for Leo’s murder. Vikki brings a baby carriage containing the daughter with a hidden camera that films the confrontation in which Vikki boasts that she has taken over Layla’s entire life – her fortune, her daughter, her restaurant, her fashion sense, her social standing – and there’s nothing Layla can do about it. Then, in yet another reversal, Vikki tells Mimi she won’t go through the reality-TV show after all. I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead is an example of a potentially great story dragged down into banality and unwitting silliness by all the reversals, as well as the plot holes (can we really believe Vikki didn’t recognize that the man abusing her in that trailer was her own husband, with whom she’d presumably had a normal sex life?). A situation that could have made for a genuinely challenging and moving film instead gets reversaled to death.

Dr; Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick Productions, Hawk Films, Columbia, 1964)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 14) Turner Classic Movies showed one of my all-time favorite films as part of their day-long “Summer Under the Stars” salute to Sterling Hayden: Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr. Strangelove began life as Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom, by a writer named Peter George – though for some editions (including the paperback I read) he signed the book with the pseudonym “Peter Bryant.” George’s novel was published in 1958 and dealt with a senile U.S. Air Force general named Quinten who orders an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union under “Wing Attack Plan R,” which allows a lower-level commander to order the use of nuclear weapons in case a first strike by an adversary has decapitated the U.S. government and left the President either dead or so disabled he couldn’t order a retaliatory attack. The following year Harvey Wheeler published a short story in Dissent magazine called “Abraham ‘59,” and he and Eugene Burdick turned it into a novel called Fail-Safe which was first published as a three-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and then was put out as a full-length book. Though the U.S. nuclear attack on Russia in Fail-Safe is triggered by accident (a European airliner strays into the zone between American and Russian airspace and leads to a decision to launch the attack), the two plots were similar enough, especially in the detail that the U.S. President actively cooperates with the Soviet government to help shoot down the errant aircraft that are about to start World War III, that George sued Burdick and Wheeler for plagiarism and settled out of court. Director Stanley Kubrick bought the movie rights to Red Alert and hired George to help him write the screenplay. Meanwhile, another production team bought the rights to Fail-Safe and placed it at the same major studio, Columbia, that was co-producing Kubrick’s film.

To research for his film, Kubrick started reading the theoretical literature on how a nuclear war could be fought and won, and he decided that the ideas on that were so ridiculous that the only way he could dramatize their absurdity was to make his movie an out-and-out comedy. So Kubrick added Terry Southern to his writing team, and it was most likely Southern who was responsible for the cartoonish names of the characters. The errant general that invokes “Plan R” and orders an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union became “Jack D. Ripper” (Sterling Hayden). The President of the United States became “Merkin Muffley” (Peter Sellers) and his principal military advisor became “Buck Turgidson” (George C. Scott, apparently warming up for his Academy Award-willing portrayal of General George S. Patton six years later). His scientific advisor became “Dr. Strangelove” (also Peter Sellers), a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi who keeps inadvertently referring to President Muffley as “mein Führer,” and in an aside his original German name is revealed to be “Merkwürdigliebe,” which literally means “strange love.” Ripper’s assistant, a British Royal Air Force colonel officially on loan to the U.S. as part of an officer exchange program, is “Lionel Mandrake” (Peter Sellers again), and the base General Ripper commands is called “Burpleson.” (It’s ironic that of the three parts Sellers plays, his accent sounds phoniest when he’s playing a Brit, even though he was British in real life.) The never-seen Russian premier is called “Dmitri Kissoff” and the Russian ambassador is “Alexi de Sadesky” (Peter Bull). There are also supporting characters with equally ridiculous names, including the pilot of the attack plane, Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens; originally Peter Sellers was supposed to play this part, too, but he had a heart attack just before the scenes inside the B-52 cockpit were to be filmed); his crew member, Lt. Lothar Zogg (James Earl Jones, six years before he was launched into stardom by playing a boxer based on real-life African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope on stage and then on film in 1970; I joked to my husband Charles, who returned home from work and joined me for the last three-fifths of the film, that this was 13 years before Jones voiced Darth Vader, also a crew member in service to an evil empire); and the leader of a U.S. commando team that attacks Burpleson, “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn).

What follows is a delightfully absurd movie about the follies of warmongering and political bureaucracies in general. General Ripper admits that he ordered the attack because he couldn’t get it up anymore; he traced his problem, common among older men (including me), to fluoridation of drinking water, which he associated with a Communist plot to sap Americans of their vitality and ruin the “purity” of their “bodily fluids.” Ripper tells Mandrake that he still has sex with women, but “I do deny them my essence,” which I presume meant he pulls out before he ejaculates. Ripper’s intent in ordering the unauthorized nuclear attack is to spark an all-out nuclear war with the U.S. as the aggressors, and in a secret Cabinet meeting President Muffley calls to discuss the situation Turgidson seems actually willing to go along with Ripper’s plan. Muffley disagrees, saying, “I am not willing to go down in history as the worst mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” He calls Soviet Ambassador Sadesky to the War Room meeting and asks for his help getting Premier Kissoff on the phone. When Muffley finally gets Kissoff on the line, he sounds like a hapless teenager who’s borrowed the family car for a date and then wrecked it and is having to call his parents at home. Ambassador Sadesky’s face goes white as he delivers the dreadful news that the Soviets have installed the “Doomsday Device,” a series of nuclear weapons coated with Cobalt-Thorium G that will be automatically fired and envelop the world in a radioactive cloud that will kill all human and animal life on earth and render the planet’s surface uninhabitable for the next 200 years. If even one of the 40 attack planes in General Ripper’s group gets through and drops bombs on its target, this will trigger the Doomsday Device. Sadesky defends his government’s decision to build the Doomsday Device by saying that the U.S. was already considering one of its own, and when that’s questioned, he thunders, “Our source was the New York Times!” Dr. Strangelove admits that the U.S. did consider building and maintaining a Doomsday Device, but decided not to “for reasons that should be obvious right now.” Strangelove also asked why the Soviets kept their Doomsday Device a secret, and Sadesky answers that the Premier was about to announce it at next Monday’s Communist Party conference and “our Premier likes surprises.”

With General Ripper having sealed off all communications to and from Burpleson Air Force Base, the President has no way to contact them. So he orders a commando team to attack Burpleson, whose soldiers defend the base because they’ve been told by General Ripper that the enemy might come disguised in American uniforms. The shots of pitched battles for control of an Air Force base plastered all over with the real Strategic Air Command’s oxymoronic slogan, “Peace Is Our Profession,” are some of the most grimly ironic and satirical in the film. Another aspect of this movie is that the U.S. President is shown as a basically decent but helpless man trying to do the right thing in a roomful of advisers pulling him in different directions, each of which is abysmal and barbaric. At one point he snaps at General Turgidson, “I’m getting tired of your ideas about what is and isn’t possible!” (In other words, he’s more Biden than Trump.) Yet another amazing thing about this movie is the way it equates nuclear war (and the desire for it) with sex. The film’s famous opening sequence is a series of stock shots of B-52’s being kept aloft via air-to-air refueling, and Kubrick, cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, and editor Anthony Harvey (who later became a director himself) emphasize the phallic nature of these images. (The same stock shots were used in 1964 in one of the greatest movies ever made, this one; and one of the worst, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.) Buck Turgidson is called to the War Room in the middle of a sexual encounter with his secretary, called “Miss Scott” on the cast list (Tracy Reed) but identified in some publicity photos wearing a sash proclaiming her “Miss Foreign Policy,” and Turgidson refers to their planned sexual activity in explicitly military terms: “You just start your countdown, and ol’ Bucky will be back before you can say, ‘Blast off!’” Later in the movie, after Kong’s B-52 has successfully dropped its bomb (and created one of Kubrick’s most legendary images: Slim Pickens riding the bomb to its target yelling and waving his cowboy hat in the air like he’s riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo), the men in the War Room are plotting how to keep a fraction of the human race alive by evacuating it into mineshafts.

Dr. Strangelove explains that in order to repopulate the mineshaft communities it will be necessary to have 10 women for every man. Turgidson says, “Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?” “Regrettably, yes,” Dr. Strangelove replies. “But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.” “I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor,” chimes in Russian Ambassador Sadesky – leading Turgidson to panic about how the Russians might build more mineshafts and occupy them with more people than the Americans. “WE CANNOT ALLOW OURSELVES A MINESHAFT GAP!” Turgidson thunders, and later he catches Sadesky photographing the map of Russia inside the War Room with a miniature camera, an indication that the madness that brought the human race to the brink of its own destruction is going to continue even after what’s left of the human race is living under ground and biding its time for the earth’s surface to be habitable again in 200 years. (In this respect Dr. Strangelove is a prequel to the many 1950’s movies, including World Without End, in which humans had already moved underground in the wake of a nuclear holocaust and are still living there even though enough of the earth’s radiation has dissipated that it’s no longer dangerous to live on the surface.) I remember in the early 1970’s thinking that Dr. Strangelove was a worthy successor to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933), also a satire about political egomania and the needless wars it creates, and a movie that flopped originally and didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young audiences enthralled by Dr. Strangelove and its cynical (to say the least!) view of politics and the military discovered a then-30-year-old movie that had essentially done the same thing.

Dr. Strangelove doesn’t seem quite as funny in the second Trump era as it did in the 1960’s or since, mainly because the U.S. is now being run by a bunch of people who are just as crazy as General Ripper is. Ripper was based on a real-life character, General Daniel Walker, who in the early 1960’s started making speeches not only attacking then-President John F. Kennedy but strongly suggesting that the U.S. needed a dictator and General Walker should be it. The fact that we now have a President who has literally proclaimed himself king (on a fake magazine cover posted to the White House Web site) and a Health and Human Services Secretary who genuinely believes that fluoridation is a source of evil inevitably makes the satire of Dr. Strangelove less amusing and more real. Dr. Strangelove was also based on a real person, and though the various candidates have included Henry Kissinger and Wernher von Braun (former head of the German rocket program and later a top scientific adviser to NASA), the most likely real person on whom Strangelove was based was Edward Teller, who fled Nazi Germany before World War II, worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the atomic bomb, then went on the warpath against Oppenheimer and got his security clearance taken away because Oppenheimer was against developing the hydrogen bomb, which was Teller’s pet project. Dr. Strangelove holds up as an all too accurate view of the world as it works (or doesn’t) and the extent to which politicians’ egos (and their libidos) drive the world repeatedly to the brink of catastrophe. It’s frequently been compared to The Mouse That Roared (1959) – also a Columbia movie that satirized the Cold War, had Peter Sellers in multiple roles, and showed a sequence of the world succumbing to nuclear annihilation (though in The Mouse That Roared that sequence is a nightmare fantasy, not reality) – but Dr. Strangelove is a much deeper, richer movie, and it holds up as well as it does precisely because its depiction of the base motives of politicians and the entrenched stupidity with which they make major life-or-death decisions rings all too true today – indeed, even truer in 2025 than it did in 1964 on the eve of President Lyndon Johnson’s insane escalation of the Viet Nam war, which among other things would leave a lot of young people receptive to the message of relentless political satires like Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove.

Siren of Atlantis, a.k.a. Atlantis, the Lost Continent (Seymour Nebenzal Pictures, United Artists, 1948)

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

Last night (Monday, August 11), after we returned home from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a stunning organ concert by San Diego-born Chelsea Chen, my husband Charles and I ran a rather strange movie from YouTube from 1948, originally called Siren of Atlantis but reissued as Atlantis, the Lost Continent, probably to grab some of the audience away from George Pal’s big-budgeted spectacle Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961). Siren of Atlantis began life in 1919 as the second novel by French pop writer Pierre Benoit, whose father had been an officer in the French colonial army in Africa and which gave him the background for some of his tales. His first novel was called Königsmark (1918), a Ruritanian tale published in English as The Secret Spring (it was a major hit in France but flopped in the U.S. and Britain). His second novel was called L’Atlantide (“Atlantis”). Benoit drew on his childhood living in Tunisia with his military-officer father to construct a plot in which a remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis survived underground beneath a mountain range in the Sahara Desert, and was ruled by Queen Antinea (Maria Montez), who was supposedly immortal. (In the book she had already had 53 male lovers and, after she tired of each one, he was turned into a golden statue. She had niches for 120 of them, and as soon as she reached that number she would will herself to die.) One of Benoit’s trademarks as an author was that each of his books would have exactly 227 pages, and the central female character would always have a name that began with “A.” L’Atlantide was first filmed in the silent era in 1920 (though the movie wasn’t released until 1921), and in 1932 German producer Seymour Nebenzal grabbed the rights and hired director G. W. Pabst to film the first sound version. Pabst, as was common in the early talkie era, made three separate films with three different casts in German, French, and English.

Then the Nazis took power and Nebenzal fled, but he carried with him the rights to his old movies – including Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which he remade in 1952 with Joseph Losey directing and David Wayne playing the role of a psychopathic rapist and murderer of children that had been Peter Lorre’s star-making part in Lang’s version. By 1947 he was settled in Hollywood doing low-budget remakes of his German films, and when he decided to remake Siren of Atlantis he first sought out Douglas Sirk (another refugee from the Nazis, originally Detlef Sierck) to work on the script and direct it. Sirk did some writing with Rowland Leigh (who got co-credit for the screenplay with Robert Lax), but tried to talk Nebenzal out of the remake, saying he should just reissue Pabst’s version instead. In a book-length interview with British film historian Jon Halliday, Sirk recalled telling Nebenzal that he “didn't have the money to do the necessary fantastic sets. You know, Atlantis depends on inspiring people's fantasies. The old Pabst picture had great sets, but you do need money to construct a hidden city and that kind of thing. It's no good trying to shoot this sort of film on a small budget, as Nebenzal wanted – and then he wanted me to use some of the long-shot material from the old Pabst, and so on.” Nebenzal cycled through various other directors, including Arthur Ripley and yet another German refugee, John Brahm, though the final directorial credit went to the film’s editor, Gregg W. Tallas. (Tallas went on to a minor career as a director, making 11 more movies, most of them science-fiction cheapies.) At least he got competent help on both sides of the camera; the cinematographer was Karl Struss (a major name who had shot Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler satire The Great Dictator in 1940), the art director was Lionel Banks (10 years after he’d created Shangri-La for Frank Capra on Lost Horizon), the film’s attractive score was by French composer Michel Michelet, and the cast included Montez; her then-husband, French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (who’d just got through playing Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in The Song of Scheherazade at Universal); and an outrageously miscast Dennis O’Keefe.

The film begins with Lt. André St. Avit (Aumont) being rescued in the middle of the Sahara and telling his rescuers a fantastic tale about how he, the sole surviving member of an expedition led by Captain Jean Morhange (O’Keefe, who like all the American actors cast as French people in this movie doesn’t even try for a French accent) to find a lost previous expedition led by French anthropologist Marchand. Marchand had become convinced that Atlantis had not only existed but its remnants were in the Sahara, which had been an ocean before it dried up and became a desert. Morhange, St. Avit and their company were attacked by Tuaregs, a desert tribe, and ultimately they were kidnapped and brought to Queen Antinea’s court, where St. Avit was promptly seduced by Antinea. He replaced Lindstrom (Allan Nixon) as her boy toy, and Lindstrom promptly became an alcoholic on his way to golden statuehood. Morhange tries to get St. Avit to snap out of his infatuation with Antinea and escape, despite the warnings from Antinea and her prime minister, Blades (Henry Daniell, acting his impossible role with his usual authority) that no one escapes from Atlantis and anyone who tries will be tracked down and killed. Antinea tricks St. Avit into thinking that she’s seduced Morhange – which she hasn’t – and in a fit of the usual stupid jealous rage that drives all too many movie plots, St. Avil stabs Morhange several times and ultimately kills him. Then he manages to escape Atlantis after all, and in the film’s best scenes he’s shown making his way through the desert and repeatedly being engulfed by waves of ocean – which, of course, are just mirages. Finally he’s put through a military court-martial for allegedly killing Morhange, though without any evidence to back up his claims the court-martial acquits him and sets him free. Then a Tuareg comes to the French camp bearing a love token – a piece of Atlantean jewelry Queen Antinea had given to St. Avit – and dropping it in the sand in front of St. Avit. St. Avit orders the Tuareg released and follows him into the desert in search of the lost entrance to Atlantis, collapses in the desert, and a sandstorm comes up and presumably buries him alive in the sand. The End.

Siren of Atlantis closely resembles the plot of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), also about an immortal queen of a mysterious realm hidden from the outside world who takes a series of boy-toy lovers and is said to be immortal. In fact Benoit was accused of plagiarism at the time, though he successfully defended himself by saying he couldn’t have read Haggard’s novel because it was in English, which Benoit didn’t understand, and hadn’t yet been published in French. This 1948 film is a preposterous mixture of the moving and the silly. Given the limitations of Nebenzal’s budget, it’s surprisingly well done, with Nebenzal skilfully recycling old sets and deploying stock footage to make it look like a bigger-budgeted film than it was. As Aumont recalled, when they needed three camels they borrowed them from a local zoo – but the zoo only had one-humped dromedaries and they glued fake humps onto them with rubber cement. Though both Charles and I were looking forward to Montez’s unequal struggles with English from her Universal films like Cobra Woman (1944) – in which, playing an imperious Polynesian queen, she revealed her genuine Latina origins by punctuating her executive orders with, “I have espoken!” – her English had improved a great deal since her Universal vehicles. She actually delivered a pretty good performance in a nearly impossible role, and she’s better than both male leads. Aumont recalled having to wear shoes with three-inch lifts so he’d look taller than O’Keefe, and it’s clear neither he nor O’Keefe were able to do much to make their characters believable as Frenchmen (despite Aumont’s real-life French accent), military officers, or human beings. Siren of Atlantis is one of those middle-range movies that’s not great but not so bad it works as camp (though one wonders what the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could have done with it), and one has to have at least a grudging respect for Nebenzal and his various directors for what they were able to accomplish on a shoestring budget.

A Stranger's Baby (Enlighten Content, HTRTC Productions, Tubi Films, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 10) I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie called A Stranger’s Baby, about a woman named Donna Fendyr (pronounced “fender”) Dusk (Jessica Lowndes), who’s six months pregnant when her husband Scott Dusk (Justin Lacey) is killed in a traffic accident while driving the truck they use in their moving business, which has the clever name “From Donna to Dusk.” (That might have been a better title for the movie, too.) We see this in a prologue, and then the film flashes forward a year and Donna herself is involved in a car accident. She survives but she’s in a coma for a week, and when she comes to she’s startled that her brother Mason Fendyr (Brad Harder, who was so nice-looking I wondered if he was going to turn out to be the villain, the way most Lifetime movies that feature hot-looking guys have them turn out to be bad guys) has been looking after her three-month-old baby. This puzzles Donna because her recollection was that she lost her and her husband’s baby to a miscarriage just before her accident. The airwaves of the town in Arizona where this is taking place are being flooded with announcements from Dr. Leon Weston (Clayton James) and his wife Amira (Zibby Allen) looking for the people who allegedly kidnapped their baby daughter. Slowly Donna becomes convinced that her own baby did indeed die in a miscarriage and the baby Mason has been taking care of on her behalf is the Westons’ missing child. She also realizes she’s being stalked by mysterious strangers who may not be so strange after all; both the Westons are hanging around her place spying on her for reasons that for the moment remain mysterious. When Donna and her brother Mason order a DNA test on the baby, whose name is Cleo, they get back a report that the baby’s DNA is only a 23 percent match for Donna’s – indicating that the child is a blood relative but not her direct progeny.

Eventually both we and Donna learn [spoiler alert!] that the baby is indeed Amira Weston’s but the father is Donna’s brother Mason. Cleo is the product of an extra-relational affair between Amira and Mason, which Mason agreed to enter into on Amira’s assurance that she was planning to divorce Leon and Mason’s growing conviction that he had found the woman for him. As things turn out, Leon is the real villain of the piece – and Clayton James delivers a deep, effective portrait of barely controlled evil. Leon is a controlling bastard who exemplifies the old joke, “What do you call a man who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a man who knows he’s God? A doctor.” One night he comes home from work and declares to his wife, “I saved a life today – several lives, actually.” He denounces her as “a whore” for her extra-relational affairs, though he’s also determined to recover baby Cleo and raise her as his own. In one chilling scene, which Donna witnesses because she’s sneaking around the Westons’ home convinced that her late husband Scott was having an affair with Amira (which, it turns out, he wasn’t), Leon threatens to beat and rape his wife. Donna is frustrated because she’d like to report the crime in progress to the police but she doesn’t dare because then the call could be traced to her. So she and Mason drive out to a motel that still has a landline and call the police from there, but by the time the cops, in the person of a heavy-set Black officer named Graeme (Byron Wilson), arrive at the Westons’ Amira is so intimidated by her husband that she lies to protect him and said the noises whoever called thought they heard were just the sounds of consensual, if rather rough, sex. Officer Graeme questions the propriety of them having sex while their daughter is missing, but Amira turns the tables on them and says how dare he question their grief and their choices for how to deal with it.

Ultimately we learn [double spoiler alert!] that Amira herself deliberately turned over baby Cleo to Donna in the hospital because she wanted her to be raised by her dad and her aunt rather than become just one more weapon in her unequal power struggle with Leon, only Donna forgot this because of the “retrograde amnesia” caused by her own accident. Determined to recover his wife’s baby, Leon visits Mason’s home and pistol-whips him, taking the baby, while in the meantime he’s given his wife Amira an injection of a knock-out drug and tied her up to her bed, from which Amira uses her Amazon Alexa to call Donna and ask her to come over. Amira specifically tells Donna not to call the police, though eventually Donna does and she and Mason press charges for assault against Leon. But Leon still has Cleo, and he makes Donna an offer she can’t refuse: in exchange for Mason dropping the charges against him, Leon will show him his security video of what actually happened to Scott. Mason and Donna agree to the deal, and what Leon shows Donna convinces her that Amira was directly responsible for Scott’s death: he crashed to avoid hitting her car and she left the scene without calling 911, which could have saved Scott’s life if an ambulance had come to the scene in time. Leon gives Donna his gun and tells her to go kill Amira in revenge for Scott’s death, and Donna actually fires four bullets at her back during an outdoor confrontation at night. Fortunately, all four bullets miss, and when she and Amira finally confront each other, Amira explains that it was actually Leon who was responsible for Scott’s death. Leon was standing in the roadway on purpose that fateful night, and it was to avoid hitting him that Scott made that fatal swerve into a lamppost. When the accident happened, Amira actually got out of her car and offered to help Scott, but Scott, not realizing how badly he’d been hurt, told her to keep fleeing her husband.

It ends in another dead-of-night confrontation in which Leon is determined to kill both Mason and Donna, only Amira, whom he thinks he’s incapacitated, sneaks up behind him and kills Leon right when Leon is about to kill Donna. In a tag scene taking place a year later, Mason and Donna are shown co-parenting Cleo (well, Mason is her father, after all, and Donna her aunt) and giving her her first-year birthday party. A Stranger’s Baby was ballyhooed as a Lifetime “premiere,” which it wasn’t; it was actually made in 2024 for the Tubi free ad-supported streaming service and racked up a number of imdb.com reviews in the Tubi incarnation, most of them pretty lukewarm. I actually quite liked the film, partly due to the effective suspense direction of Monika Mitchell, partly due to the well-constructed (albeit with a few lapses; I really didn’t believe how easily Leon was able to convince Donna that Amira murdered Scott, and I was expecting to hear that the video allegedly implicating Amira in Scott’s death had been created by Leon via AI) screenplay by Helen Marsh, but mainly due to Clayton James’s excellent performance as the villain. Instead of either going for Lawrence Tierney-style overstatement or Anthony Perkins-style understatement (the two basic ways of playing a psychopath on screen), James is cool as the proverbial cucumber, pursuing his evil agenda with a grim determination and a relentless self-assurance that dares anyone to come along and prove that he’s really a bad guy. I was also struck by Clayton James’s resemblance to Elon Musk; the two look enough alike that if anyone out there wants to dare make a biopic of Musk and show him as the sick, crazed monster he is, Clayton James would be excellent casting for the role.

The Sandpiper (Filmways Pictures, Venice Productions, MGM, filmed 1964, released 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 9) Turner Classic Movies did one of their all-day “Summer Under the Stars” tributes to Elizabeth Taylor, and as part of it they showed the film I watched last night: The Sandpiper, made in 1964 and released in 1965 as the third of the 11 movies that co-starred Elizabeth Taylor and her fifth husband, Richard Burton. They famously met in 1962 on the set of her film Cleopatra, which cast Liz in the title role, Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar, and Burton as Mark Antony. They instantly started an affair even though they were both married to other people – Taylor to Eddie Fisher (whom she’d started dating after the death of husband number three, Mike Todd, and pulled away from his first wife, Debbie Reynolds) and Burton to Sybil Williams. So for their third film together (their second was The V.I.P.’s, 1963) producer Martin Ransohoff, who also wrote the original story, came up with the idea of casting two real-life adulterers (though by 1964 they’d divorced their previous spouses and married each other) in a story about adultery. To his credit, Ransohoff hired two formerly blacklisted screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to turn his story into a shooting script, but that might have been a mistake because Trumbo and Wilson larded a relatively simple story of sin and quasi-redemption with all too many Biblical asides and feints at a critique of capitalism. After Ransohoff’s first choice as a director, William Wyler, turned it down, he hired Vincente Minnelli, who had worked with Taylor before when she was just becoming an adult in the films Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel, Father’s Little Dividend (1951). The Sandpiper has been called Minnelli’s worst film, which it wasn’t – there were worse ones to come, like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and A Matter of Time (1976), in which Minnelli directed his and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza in a thoroughly wretched and old-fashioned story about a middle-aged movie star who flashes back and relives her past.

In The Sandpiper, Laura Reynolds (Elizabeth Taylor) is a free-spirited young woman living off the coast of Big Sur, California, hanging out with a crowd of arty types between the Beatnik and Hippie eras, and raising a young son, Danny (Morgan Mason, real-life son of actor James Mason and husband of rock singer Belinda Carlisle), whom she’s home-schooling before home-schooling was acknowledged and made legal. Laura makes her living painting and selling anodyne watercolors, but saves her true creativity for a series of spectacular symbolist oils that she can’t sell. Alas, Danny gets in trouble with the law when he somehow acquires a high-powered hunting rifle and takes a shot at a young deer. (Ironically, this is presented in the movie as a symbol of his free-spirited independence, while today – at least in most sane circles – this would be considered an indication that he was potentially a mass murderer.) He misses, thank goodness, but he’s hauled before the stern Judge Thompson (veteran character actor Torin Thatcher), who insists that Danny be taken away from his mother’s custody and installed as a boarding student at the notoriously strict San Simeon Episcopal boys’ school. The school is run by Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton), a tough, no-nonsense headmaster, whose wife Claire (Eva Marie Saint, so I was watching her for the second night in a row, after 36 Hours, in a movie for which she was horrendously overqualified) is on campus as a sort-of go-fer and all-around assistant. We learn Dr. Hewitt is morally compromised even before he meets Laura when he’s told that the boy he’s about to flunk out is the son of a major donor, and he quotes $2,000 as the size of the donation he’s expecting to ignore the boy’s lousy grades and keep him in the school.

For the first 40 minutes or so The Sandpiper is actually a pretty close reworking of Auntie Mame, with Taylor in the Rosalind Russell role and Burton in Fred Clark’s role as the nasty authority figure who’s trying to take control of a boy (her nephew in Auntie Mame, her son here) from the rambunctious, free-spirited woman who has him now. But the Ransohoff-Trumbo-Wilson script totally lacks the light-hearted wit and genuine emotion Patrick Dennis, Betty Comden and Adolph Green brought to Auntie Mame. The mutual lust between Dr, Hewitt and Laura Reynolds starts at a low simmer when Hewitt begins inventing excuses to visit Laura at her beachfront home (which looked so precarious and sloppily constructed I kept expecting to hear she’d built it herself), ostensibly to discuss the progress of her son. Among the movie’s more bizarre props is a (presumably) anatomically correct statue of Laura Reynolds, carved out of redwood by her current boyfriend, sculptor Cos Erickson (Charles Bronson, of all people, though under his original name Charles Buchinsky he’d previously played a sculptor in the 1953 film House of Wax). The real sculptor was local artist Edmund Kara, whose girlfriend, jazz singer Stella Brooks, posed for it, though the studio took a plaster cast of Elizabeth Taylor’s face and gave it to Kara to help him make the statue look like her. MGM produced a 10-minute featurette on the making of the statue that mentioned that after it was finished, it had to be shipped to France because both Burton and Taylor were British nationals, and that limited the number of days they could work in the U.S. without being subjected to American income tax. During one of his visits to Laura’s home, Hewitt bursts out and admits, “I want you! I want you!” The two become lovers not long after that and do a lot of canoodling in and around the spectacular Big Sur beaches (where much of the film was shot and where a real-life restaurant called Nepenthe, after the “drug of forgetfulness” in Greek mythology, was used), though with the old Production Code still nominally in force their first scene together as an adulterous couple had to be filmed decorously. We see Burton and Taylor in bed together, fully clothed, and then we cut to a shot taking place the next morning with Taylor as Laura at first wondering if Hewitt slipped out during the night, then finding him making himself coffee in her kitchen and tying his tie to prepare to go to work.

Along the way we get bits and pieces of Laura’s backstory; she was 17 when she met Danny’s father, who got her pregnant and wanted to marry her. She refused – she explains, “I was in love with him, but I didn’t love him,” and she wasn’t looking forward to waking up in the morning when they were both middle-aged and seeing his face in bed as she regained consciousness – and so her parents offered to get her an abortion. This was at a time when abortion was still illegal in all 50 U.S. states (what today’s Republicans think of as “the good old days,” though ironically the first break in that total nationwide ban on abortion was passed in California in 1967 and signed into law by a Right-wing icon, then-Governor Ronald Reagan), but Laura refused because she actually wanted the child. Then her folks said she could move back in with her and have the baby there, but she refused that, too, because she didn’t want the sense of shame she’d have got big-time from being an unwed mother still living with her parents. Instead she moved to California and for a while became the mistress of Walter Robinson (Tom Drake, who’d worked for Minnelli before as Judy Garland’s “boy next door” boyfriend in Meet Me in St. Louis), with whom she spent two years. She let him pay her way through art school but then dumped him after two years and moved to Big Sur with her son. Alas, Walter is also a major donor to San Simeon’s school and he’s hanging around there not only to talk business with Dr. Hewitt but also to get back into Laura’s ample pants. Meanwhile, Dr. Hewitt traces Laura out to a wild (or as wild as filmmakers could make it in 1964) night at Nepenthe, which takes place under a crudely assembled driftwood sculpture that looks like they’re about to start Burning Man 22 years early, where he and Cos (ya remember Cos?) get into a fight (Richard Burton and Charles Bronson, action heroes!) over Laura’s dubious affections.

Hendricks is the first one from Hewitt’s outwardly respectable life to catch them when he sees the two dining together in a non-countercultural restaurant and holding hands across the table. Ultimately Hewitt and his wife Claire (ya remember Claire?) confront each other while they’re in Hewitt’s 1965 Ford Fairlane station wagon (a car whose very plainness symbolizes Hewitt’s character). He confesses to his wife that he’s been having extra-relational activities – “We made love – even in motels, God help me!” (a bit of a surprise since everything actually or potentially sexual we’ve seen between Hewitt and Laura has taken place either at her home or on the beach in front of it, nowhere near a motel) – and she responds in the over-the-top fashion of a Lifetime wife when she learns that her husband has been cuckolding her. She demands that she stop the car, she gets out in the middle of nowhere, and when they finally make it home together she refuses to sleep with him anymore, and since San Simeon is a live-work space for both of them he’s reduced to sleeping in the school’s library. Thanks to Hewitt’s buying a painting of hers for $100 Laura has finally started to get a name for herself as an artist, and she’s looking forward to moving to San Francisco, getting an apartment and studio, and raising Danny there. But Danny likes it at San Simeon and in particular likes having friends his own age. The film’s climax occurs at the school’s end-of-the-year ceremony, in which Hewitt announces his resignation as headmaster, also announces that he’s converted the fund he was raising for a new school chapel into a scholarship fund so students from poor economic backgrounds can attend (earlier Laura had submitted designs for the stained-glass windows of the new chapel, Hewitt had rejected them, and Laura had burned them – much like Brahms, who’s known to have composed four times as much music as survives because he was so fiercely self-critical he destroyed anything that didn’t live up to his standards), and in the end he walks out on both Claire and Laura and goes his own way heaven knows where in the kind of alienated cop-out that became a maddening movie cliché in the late 1960’s.

The Sandpiper – the title comes from a wounded bird Laura finds at the beginning of the film, puts a splint made from a drinking straw on its broken leg, and takes care of until it can once again fly free – is the sort of film Dwight Macdonald called “the Bad Good Movie,” one which starts out to make high-flying pronouncements about the Human Condition and ends up as just another Hollywood potboiler, with Richard Burton in particular making thunderous statements about the guilt he feels over having an affair that reminded me of his similar pronouncements over a decade earlier in The Robe (1953). It also reminded me of Harry and Michael Medved’s declaration of Richard Burton as the worst actor of all time in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (1979), in particular their citation of Burton’s “ability to make even the most trivial lines of dialogue sound as if they were painfully ripped from his inner regions.” (The Medveds also named Raquel Welch, whom my husband Charles and I had just watched two nights before in Kansas City Bomber, the worst actress of all time.) Burton’s paroxysms of guilt expressed through tightly clenched teeth also reminded me of Mike Nichols’s and Elaine May’s famous comedy routine, “Adultery – It’s Coming Back” (more likely it never left), in which the American adulterous couple talk endlessly about their own guilt feelings and the man finally blurts out, “You know how I feel? If I hadn’t already paid for the room, I’d say let’s forget about the whole thing!” About the only good thing that came out of The Sandpiper was “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a lovely theme song with music by Johnny Mandel and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster (who also worked on great songs like Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and campily terrible ones like the 1960’s Spider-Man theme) that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and stayed on the charts for years.

36 Hours (Perlberg-Seaton Productions, Cherokee Productions, MGM, 1964)

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

Last night (Friday, August 8) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that I literally remembered from my childhood: 36 Hours, starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, and Rod Taylor in a quirky World War II story about an elaborate plan by an American-born German doctor, Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), to deceive U.S. Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) into giving away the Allied plans for an invasion of France. It’s well known historically that the Allies put a lot of effort into fooling the Germans that they were going to invade France at the easiest point to reach it from Britain, the Pas de Calais, when they were actually planning to make the D-Day landing at Normandy. I was turned on to 36 Hours while it was still playing in theatres by my stepfather, a World War II buff who was quite taken by the movie’s central premise: Major Pike is captured by German soldiers while on a mission to neutral Portugal, and when he came to he’s in a secret German hospital where part of his hair has been dyed grey. The idea is to fool him into thinking he has amnesia and it’s really 1950; the war has long since been won by the Allies; Hitler, Göring; and Goebbels were all conveniently blown up by a suitcase bomb; Henry Wallace is now the U.S. President; and the hospital Pike is in is part of an Allied occupation force. By getting him to reminisce about the invasion as if it were a long-since done deal, Gerber hopes to extract from Pike the information as to just where the Allies will be landing, how many troops they will have, and what their battle plans will be.

The basic premise came from a story writer Roald Dahl published in Harper’s Magazine in 1944 called “Beware of the Dog,” only in Dahl’s story the person the Germans are trying to fool is Royal Air Force pilot Peter Williamson, whom they’ve shot down in a routine raid over occupied France. Williamson has lost a leg from a cannon shell and is being cared for in a hospital he thinks is in Brighton, England but is actually in France. Williamson hears German planes flying overhead far more regularly than they would be if he were really in Brighton; he hears a nurse complaining about the “hard” mineral content of the local water when he remembered from going to school in Brighton that its water was “soft”; and the ultimate realization came when he looks out a window and sees a sign in French: “Garde au Chien” (“Beware of the Dog”). When a German pretending to be an RAF officer comes in to ask Williamson for information about the whereabouts of his squadron, Williamson refuses to say anything more than his name, rank, and serial number – all the Geneva Conventions require a captured soldier to give. (That scene is closely copied in the movie.) My husband Charles, who came home from work with about one-third of the movie to go, actually recalled reading “Beware of the Dog” either in middle school or high school as part of a textbook that explained what a short story was and offered interspersed examples. Writer-director George Seaton used Dahl’s story and another one by Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance to develop the script for 36 Hours. He counterbalanced the sympathetic German Dr. Gerber with S.S. officer Otto Schack (Werner Peters), who’s convinced Gerber’s plan won’t work in time and wants to take Pike over for what would now be called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture.

Also involved in the plot is nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), a survivor of the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps who in order to avoid being sent back there is willing to go along with Gerber’s plot, including posing as Mrs. Pike, complete with an engagement and a wedding ring Pike had got from his mother. PIke blurts out that the Allied invasion of France took place (i.e., will take place) at Normandy, along with the code names for the five landing sites and their locations. The deus ex machina that gives the game away to Pike is a small paper cut he gets on a screen back in London while he was being briefed for his ill-fated trip to Portugal, and once he realizes the truth the movie becomes less interesting, essentially a long chase scene in which Pike and Anna Hedler flee the German hospital, which is conveniently located near the Swiss border. They have help from a couple of typically obnoxious comic-relief characters, Elsa (Celia Lovsky, wife – and by then widow – of Peter Lorre) and border guard Ernst Furzen (John Banner). Elsa is the housekeeper of a minister who’s been known to help anti-Nazi fugitives flee, but the minister himself is in Munich (clear on the other end of Germany from where they live) and she does the best she can with Furzen’s help. Furzen demands payment for his services and, since Pike and Anna have no money and he figures the war will soon end and German money will be worthless anyway, he demands the rings and Pike’s gold watch. Elsa takes the engagement ring and puts it on her own finger, and Otto Schack recognizes it and knows he’s on the right trail – only Furzen shoots him in the back and Pike and Anna arrange his body to make it look like he was the one trying to escape and Furzen shot him in the line of duty.

Frankly, the escape scenes are so reminiscent of The Sound of Music (which wouldn’t be filmed for two more years, though the story had been done on Broadway as a stage musical since 1960) one expects to see Julie Andrews and her on-screen kids traipsing through the mountains at any moment singing at the tops of their voices. 36 Hours is the annoying sort of movie that wastes a potentially fascinating premise, and part of the problem with it is James Garner. Yes, I know he not only starred in it but helped develop the project through his own company, Cherokee Productions (named in honor of his maternal grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee – I certainly hadn’t known James Garner was part-Native until TCM host Ben Mankiewicz mentioned that in his outro!) – but there were plenty of actors around then, including Gregory Peck and Paul Newman, who could have given Pike a more subtle and nuanced reading. As for Gerber – whose backstory would have made a considerably more interesting movie than the one we have (why did a U.S.-born person of German ancestry return to Der Vaterland at age 16 and how did he become so committed to the German cause?) – he kills himself with poison when he realizes that his plot has failed and no one in the German high command believed his story about a Normandy invasion anyway, and with his dying breath he tried to dispatch Schack after giving Pike and Anna the all-important papers about his neurological research on genuine amnesia patients. 36 Hours is a quite impressive movie, but it also has its weak spots, and after the audacity of the basic concept, the film’s descent in its second half to the commonplace escape-and-pursuit conventions can’t help but be boring.

My husband Charles and I had previously watched 36 Hours on March 9, 2004, and here’s what I’d had to say about it then:

The film I picked for us was 36 Hours (Leslie Halliwell’s film guide spells out the numeral in the title, but both the actual credits and the reference in Jon Douglas Eames’ The MGM Story have it as above), a 1964 MGM World War II movie with an intriguing plot premise: Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner), one of the few men on earth who as of the end of May 1944 knows exactly where the Allies are about to launch the invasion of occupied France, is tracked to Lisbon by Nazi agents, where he’s kidnapped, given incapacitating drugs, flown to Germany and there kept in what is ostensibly an Allied occupation military hospital. The whole gimmick is the idea of German Major Gerber (Rod Taylor), who’s concocted the plan to convince Pike that it is now 1950, he’s had amnesia for the previous six years, the war has ended with an Allied victory, and therefore it’s perfectly safe for him to talk about the invasion since it has long since occurred. The premise is inventive and fascinating — though Charles recalled reading something similar in a short story and it’s possible it was one of the sources for this film (writer-director George Seaton patched his plot together from two stories, one by Roald Dahl and one by Carl Hittleman and Luis Vance) — but it’s one of those films that takes an inventive and fascinating premise and does surprisingly little with it before it falls back on the usual clichés. Among the things the film does right is detail just how Gerber creates this phony reality, including authentic-looking newspapers (Seaton devoted some thought to what sort of future a Nazi psychologist would concoct for 1950, and in it Henry Wallace is President, he’s attempting to negotiate a peaceful solution to a war with China, and as for FDR, he’s still alive and has retired to his home in Warm Springs, Georgia), a staff of hospital workers trained to speak accentless English (he threatens anyone who lapses into German with a court-martial, and in several conversations with his higher-ups he insists that they speak English to stay in practice), a thoroughly researched medical dossier of what’s supposedly happened to him during his “missing” six years, and such physical accouterments as grey hair dye and atropine in the eyes to make him need glasses. To aid him in worming the secret out of Pike, Gerber has extracted a concentration camp inmate (she started out at Auschwitz and ended up at Ravensbrück) with previous nursing experience (Eva Marie Saint, playing her role in a surprisingly Dietrichesque way), but once Pike finds out what’s really going on he’s able to get her to fall in love with him and help him escape.

The title comes from the fact that the Nazi High Command, distrusting Major Gerber’s methods, has given him only a day and a half to extract the secret from Pike, after which they are sending in an SS man (Werner Peters) to use less subtle and more brutal methods to worm the secret out of him; and one irony of the film is that even though Gerber actually gets Pike to tell them the Allied invasion is scheduled to take place at Normandy, the German generals are so convinced that it will take place at Calais they don’t believe the correct information. (Charles pointed out that throughout the war the Germans simply assumed that the Allies would take the shortest route everywhere; they were surprised when the British forces that had wrapped up the Egyptian campaign moved directly to an invasion of Italy without going to Greece first; and I’ve always been amazed at the sheer depth and scope of the British disinformation effort to fool the Germans as to the location of the D-Day invasion, to the point of hiring set-builders from the British film studios to construct fake tanks, landing craft and guns and display them across the English Channel from Calais to reinforce the German view that the Allied invasion would take place there, the way the medieval English invasions of France under Edward III and Henry V both had.) Alas, the biggest single flaw of this film is how quickly Pike finds out the secret — he remembers cutting his finger on a map back at British headquarters and notices that the cut still hasn’t healed, as it surely would have in six years! It would have been far more effective for him to notice little bits that seemed out of place and have him slowly put the truth together instead of discovering it all at once — and once he does there’s nothing more that the filmmakers can think of to end the movie but an all-too-stereotypical Mortal Storm-like chase scene in which the hero and heroine desperately flee to the Swiss border while the Nazis come after them in hot pursuit and both Gerber and the SS man end up dying. There are some welcome supporting actors in the cast — Sig Ruman (as the peasant farmer who helps them escape), Celia Lovsky (Mrs. Peter Lorre) as his wife, Martin Kosleck (as a member of the German staff), and Alan Napier (as the head of British intelligence — though he made this film two years before starting his TV role as the butler in Batman, at least both had in common that he had to be very good at keeping a major secret!) — but for the most part I feel about 36 Hours now much the way I felt about it when it was new: a provocative film but also a rather disappointing one.

Kansas City Bomber (Artists’ Entertainment Complex, Levy-Gardner-Leven, Raquel Welch Productions, MGM, 1972)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 7) my husband Charles and I watched one of the oddest films ever made: Kansas City Bomber, a 1972 MGM melodrama directed by Jerrold Freedman from a committee-written script: Barry Sandler came up with the original story and Thomas Rickman and Calvin Clements, Jr. did the screenplay. Kansas City Bomber is a film about roller derby that casts Raquel Welch as Diane “K. C.” Carr, who starts the film as the star of the Kansas City team until she falls victim to her penchant for alienating her own teammates. She and her larger, heavier teammate Big Bertha Bogliani (Patti “Moo Moo” Cavin, presumably a real-life roller derby star since imdb.com lists this as her only film credit) have a running feud that ends with them doing a so-called “match race.” The idea is they’ll do five laps around the track and there are essentially no rules about what the skaters can do to each other. Big Bertha wins the match race and thus K. C. is forced to leave Kansas City and move to Portland, Oregon, where she apparently drives all the way because her car (a red something-or-other made by Chrysler) in Portland still has Missouri license plates. She briefly skates for a team called the Renegades but ends up on the Portland Loggers, where she alienates the team captain, Jackie Burdette (Helena Kallianiotes) while simultaneously starting an affair with the team’s owner, Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Burt takes K. C. out to dinner and then takes her back to his place, and when he makes the obligatory pass at her at first he says, “I didn’t mean for this to happen.” “Didn’t you?” K. C. replies. “Yes,” Burt admits (though we don’t see them do more than some heavy-duty smooching, this being made just four years after the Production Code finally died, and old habits died hard).

When she’s not out roller-derbying K. C. has a tense relationship with her mother (Martine Bartlett), who’s taking care of her two children, daughter Rita (10-year-old Jodie Foster in her second film) and son Walt (Stephen Manley, who also had a later film career, though far short of Foster’s subsequent stardom). Rita is enthusiastic about her mom’s status as a skating star – K. C. even shows Rita how to roller-skate – but her brother Walt couldn’t be less interested in K. C.’s stardom and is actively repelled by how she makes her living. When K. C. is in Portland (where most of the film was shot) she is staying with Lovey (Mary Kay Pass), about the only teammate who actually befriends her, on her houseboat (the interior shot reminded me of the houseboat my mother, my brother, and I lived on for a while in Marin County, California, complete with the funnel-shaped stove that was our main source of heat when it was needed), until Burt trades Lovey to another team because he doesn’t want anyone – male or female, sexual or not – competing for K. C.’s affections. In the middle of the film the skaters, both male and female – among the many things neither Charles nor I knew about roller derby is that it’s racially integrated, men and women both compete (not against each other, but on the same teams, alternating in different heats), and the scoring system is of almost Byzantine complexity – repair to a local dive bar (“played” by the real World Famous Kenton Club in Portland), where her male teammate Randy (William Gray Espy) hits on her. “I don’t date skaters,” she says when she puts him off, later explaining that they’d have to be on the same team together even if their relationship soured. Alas for K. C., her relationship with Jackie Burdette flares into mutual hostility; they knock each other over and body-check each other just as they’re supposed to be doing to the other side’s players.

Eventually Burt arranges for K. C. and Jackie to have the same sort of “match race” with which the film opens, but Burt wants K. C. to throw it. He’s hatched a plot to open a new roller derby franchise in Chicago and wants K. C. to be the star of that team, complete with a major TV contract, but he needs to get her off the Portland team to do it. When K. C. protests that this will separate her from her kids, Burt says, “Bring them” – but only after a so-called “decent interval” of two months or so during which Burt will establish K. C. as both a star and single. The match is a desperate struggle between the two women, and at the end K. C. manages to grab the finishing tape first and win – and then the movie suddenly ends, with no explanation of what that’s going to do with her relationship with Burt (which was on its way out anyway due to her disgust at his treatment of her as a commodity). The most interesting character in the movie is “Horrible” Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden), who’s been built up as a comic-relief character on the track. People are constantly making “Soo-ee” pig noises around him, and in one game, as the fans on both sides start literally throwing things at him, he completely freaks out, starts indiscriminately beating up guys on the other team, and ultimately gets not only thrown out of the game but is demoted to “free-agent status” – i.e., fired – by Burt. Kansas City Bomber is a pretty strange movie, and any attempt by the writers to make roller derby acceptable as a film sport is undercut by the way they and director Freedman make it clear that roller derby, like ice hockey, just spreads a thin veneer of athletic respectability over an activity whose main audience appeal is getting to watch people fight.

I looked up the imdb.com “Trivia” page for Kansas City Bomber, and it claimed that Barry Sandler’s first choice for the female lead was Elizabeth Taylor (huh? By 1972 she was way too old and heavy-set to be credible as an athlete), and that Welch and Ann-Margret were rivals for the role after that. By 1972 Ann-Margret was just coming off her great performance in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (a movie about straight cruising whose moral seemed to be that heterosexual men demand women for sex but otherwise can’t stand them), which was interesting because to me one of the great disappointments of Welch’s career was that she never got a director as good as Nichols to draw out her acting skills. Raquel Welch gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times at the time Kansas City Bomber was released in which she said it was the first film she’d made of which she was genuinely proud. Even Harry and Michael Medved, whose snarky comments on Welch in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (they named her the Worst Actress of All Time), conceded that in the roller derby sequences of Kansas City Bomber Welch was powerful and effective. Out of the rink, they said, “she reverted to the icy immobility audiences had come to expect from her.” It’s also unclear just how much of the skating was actually Welch’s; the various “trivia” posts claim that she did much of her own stunt work (and broke her wrist doing so, resulting in a six-week delay in the production while she went to Hungary for a co-starring part in the 1972 film Bluebeard, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Richard Burton, for which Welch said, “They didn’t care if my arm was broken”), but she was also doubled by genuine roller derby star Judy Arnold. (Arnold also got a small speaking role in the film. Since she was blonde and kept her hair short, when she doubled for Welch she had to wear a long dark wig.) Another professional roller derby skater, Sally Vega, doubled for Helena Kallianiotes as Jackie Burdette.

One of the more intriguing might-have-beens about this movie is the theme song the great political folksinger Phil Ochs was commissioned to write for it, which Ochs first recorded as a demo with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees and then professionally with the Australian band Daddy Cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAyxWKCqVgU&list=RDmAyxWKCqVgU&start_radio=1. Ochs was a fan of roller derby and was thrilled to get the assignment to write a song for a movie about it, but the song was not used. I suspect it was because it was too doleful and not the sort of rah-rah “entertainment” number for which the film’s producers (including Jules W. Levy, who 25 years earlier had tricked Billie Holiday into playing a maid in her one feature film, New Orleans) were looking. Ultimately Ochs salvaged it by getting his record company, A&M, to issue it as a single backed with the country song “Gas Station Women” from his 1969 album Phil Ochs’s Greatest Hits (a joking title since all the songs were new). I had assumed Kansas City Bomber was the only film ever made about roller derby aside from Rollerball (1975), a serious dystopian science-fiction film produced and directed by Norman Jewison, in which the sport has devolved into something William Harrison, author of the story on which it was based, called “Roller Ball Murder.” Wikipedia actually lists 12 other roller derby films: Blood on the Flat Track, Derby (1971), Derby Crazy Love, Hell on Wheels (2007), Murderdrome, Roller Derby Girl, Roller Life, John McTiernan’s 2002 remake of Rollerball, The Shaggy D.A. (a weird 1976 Disney sequel to 1959’s The Shaggy Dog in which Dean Jones stars as an attorney who periodically turns into a dog), This Is Roller Derby (a 2011 Australian documentary), Unholy Rollers, and Whip It. Still, Kansas City Bomber is a weird movie outlier; it’s fun to watch and the skating and fight scenes are quite convincing, while the stuff in between them is also compelling. It’s also the sort of movie that puts a fresh spin on some old-fashioned Hollywood clichés even though the only novelty about it is the oddball sport about which it revolves.