The Boy Who Vanished, a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched two unusually good (at least by their standards) Lifetime movies with been-there-seen-it-all titles: The Boy Who Vanished (shot under the working title The Forgotten Son) and Girl in the Attic. The Boy Who Vanished starts with a scene in which a young man calls 911 to report himself missing from his family. The young man is, or at least purports to be, Jackson “Jack” Reese (played by a very attractive actor named Aiden Howard), and he’s a teenager who ostensibly disappeared from home 12 years earlier. His parents are Haley Conner Reese (Tegan Moss) and her husband, Richard Reese (Matthew Kevin Anderson). The police keep him in custody for a few hours before finally releasing him to his (purported) parents. This includes giving him a DNA test (though we’re never told the results), and later on he takes an aptitude test at Montgomery, the local high school (the story is set in Seattle, presumably so the town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada could “play” it), that reveals that, far from being academically behind where he should be given his age, he’s actually far advanced intellectually. He explains this by telling his parents that during the 12 years he was away, he was held inside a cult – not a religious or sexual one but a financially predatory one which survived by pulling scams on well-to-do people – and they made him read serious books and watch high-end movies on VHS tapes. Our first inkling that Jack isn’t what he says he is is a phone call he receives from Travis (Gord Pankhurst), a rather seedy-looking individual with 1960’s-style hippie-length hair who drives around in a light grey van and appears to be stalking the Reeses: Richard, Haley, Jack and Jack’s younger brother Tyler (Kingston Goodjohn), who’s understandably jealous of the new-found attention long-lost Jack is getting from his parents and is feeling neglected by comparison.

Jack assures whoever is calling (we don’t yet know it’s Travis but we soon learn that) that he’s still on board with the plan, but having both Travis and another accomplice, a red-haired woman named Luna (Maia Michaels) who accosts Richard while he’s getting into his car, spits on his car window and chews him out for thinking he’s better than she is just because he’s rich, stalk the Reeses is not helping with whatever the plan is. Travis and his partner, it turns out, are after the estimated $100 million Richard Reese is holding on behalf of his wealth-management clients; they sent Jack into the Reeses’ home to hack into his computer and use it to transfer all $100 million into their and their cult’s account. Only Luna jumps the gun by literally bumping into Richard at a second meeting and stealing his wallet, then using the information on his credit cards to order thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise and run up such big bills all the cards get canceled. So when all four Reeses (Richard, Haley, Jack, and Tyler) go out to a fancy restaurant, they’re unable to pay the bill until Haley realizes she has enough cash on her to cover it. (Why Richard didn’t notice his wallet missing until their dinner date is something of a mystery.) The only person in the Reeses’ circle who’s at all suspicious of Jack and his true motives is Haley’s brother, Michael Conner (Jesse Moss), who was initially the prime suspect in Jack’s disappearance 12 years earlier. Michael was suspected then because a few bits of Jack’s clothing were found in the trailer in which he lived, and because he was a heavy drug user – though the shock of being suspected of such a heinous crime led him to quit drugs.

With the plot starting to unravel and the Seattle police getting closer to them, Travis and Luna kidnap Michael and forge an e-mail in his name confessing to having killed Jack 12 years earlier after spiking his soda with drugs so he’ll O.D. and die. Haley goes to Michael’s trailer home to see him and finds him incapacitated, calls 911 and Michael is taken to a hospital, where the doctors literally bring him back from death’s door. Jack, as part of Travis’s and Luna’s plot, sneaks into Richard’s home office and gets ready to transfer the $100,000,000 – only when he’s there he finds his own birth certificate, which finally reveals the secret of his true parentage. The birth certificate lists “Haley Conner” as his mother but leaves the father’s name blank. It turns out the father was Travis’s brother Wyatt, whom we never see because either during her pregnancy or just after Jack was born, Haley and Wyatt got into an argument, Wyatt pulled a gun on her, they both reached for the gun (score another one for Chicago’s original author, Maurine Dallas Watkins!), and she accidentally shot him, then met Richard and agreed that she would marry him and they would raise Jack as if he were both of theirs. Only Travis has been convinced all these years that Haley deliberately murdered his brother, and this has all been an elaborate revenge plot not only to kill her but to destroy her reputation and her and her husband’s finances.

Ultimately Jack sets up the $100,000,000 transfer but at the last minute can’t go through with it, and there’s a predictable final confrontation in which Travis is about to kill both Haley and Jack when Richard sneaks up behind him and clobbers him with a convenient baseball bat. We’re not sure if Travis is arrested or killed, but Jack is reunited with Haley and Richard and seems to be on his way to a happy, well-adjusted life with his family and his high-school girlfriend Summer (Grace Beedie). Though there were a few points on which writer Ken Miyamoto could have been more clear-headed about plot details, for the most part The Boy Who Vanished is quite compelling suspense filmmaking, well directed by Christie Will Wolf. But in 2015 Lifetime did an even better movie, Lost Boy (reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html), on the same theme, in which the supposedly long-lost son was deliberately faking it but the makers of that movie, writer Jennifer Maisel and director Tara Miele, kept his motives powerfully elusive.

Girl in the Attic (Studio TF1 America, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

I wasn’t expecting much from the second movie on Lifetime’s schedule, Saturday, June 14’s “premiere,” Girl in the Attic, especially since there wasn’t an imdb.com page for it until Monday morning, June 16. But it too turned out to be surprisingly effective even though it hewed close to Lifetime’s standard formulae. The central character is Kelsey Romano (Sophia Carriere), a 16-year-old woman who’s responded to her mother’s recent death from breast cancer by determining to run a half-marathon race in her home town, Portland, Oregon. (Once again, as in The Boy Who Vanished, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada “played” a U.S. city in the Pacific Northwest.) She’s raising money by shooting a video blog and posting it on local social media, and so far she’s collected $5,000 in pledges, halfway to her $10,000 goal. Unfortunately, she’s decided to keep this a secret from her father (John Cassini), portrayed as a typical Italian-American working-class guy. Even more unfortunately, she’s attracted the twisted attentions of Billy (Keenan Tracey), who ironically combines both my husband Charles’s job and my former one. He’s a clerk at a big-box grocery store and he’s also a caregiver for his disabled mother Debbie (Jean Louisa Kelly), who was formerly a singer and dancer until an auto accident and impending arthritis combined to take away her mobility and leave her in a wheelchair. Billy kidnaps Kelsey by ambushing her while she’s on one of her practice runs. He lures her by pretending to be searching for a missing dog – and both Charles and I were taken aback by this plot line because, while “searching for a missing dog” is a classic line used by pedophiles to lure children they want to molest, we had a hard time imagining it working on someone as old and relatively worldly as Kelsey.

Billy sneaks Kelsey into the proverbial attic while Debbie is out with her neighbor Mrs. Byrd (Beth Fotheringham), who appears to be her only friend. When Kelsey comes to, she realizes she’s literally bound to an old mattress in the attic, and Billy is insisting that she’s going to be his “wife” as soon as she proves herself “worthy” of that rather dubious honor by obeying him implicitly. At one point Billy takes Kelsey downstairs to bathe her in Debbie’s bathtub, and Debbie finds women’s hair in the drain and deduces from that that Billy has been sneaking a woman in there. At first she assumes this is just a normal, mutually consensual relationship, and she even demands to meet her son’s new girlfriend. She sets up a dinner party for them that Sunday, but Billy claims that his girlfriend is “ill” and can’t come. Billy fakes a video showing Kelsey looking suitably sick, but Debbie catches on when she recognizes her old hope chest, containing relics of her entertainment career, in the background of the shot and realizes it was taken in her attic. When Debbie finally meets Kelsey, they realize that they’re both being held prisoner by an increasingly demented and power-mad Billy, and the two form a wary bond as they plot a means of escape. Debbie’s first idea is to have Kelsey, who now that Debbie is aware of her existence Billy has changed her status to that of live-in maid and forces her to do housework, spike his beer with old sleeping tablets left over from Debbie’s late husband’s stash. Only that plan is unwittingly foiled by Mrs. Byrd, who comes over and presents Billy with a wooden box containing high-end whiskey. Billy decides that he’d rather drink the whiskey than beer, and when he pours out the beer in the kitchen sink he sees the drug residue it leaves behind and realizes he’s been had.

Debbie’s next attempt to break herself and Kelsey from Billy’s control involves crawling up the steps to the attic (and Jean Louisa Kelly’s acting in this scene is so convincing I looked her up on Wikipedia just to see if she’s disabled in real life, which she isn’t), but unfortunately her cell phone slips out of her pocket and Billy grabs it before she can use it to call the police. Kelsey and Debbie finally make their escape when Debbie uses nail polish remover to set her house on fire – a major sacrifice on her part because her house was the one constant in her life and she’d moved heaven and earth to hold on to it – confident that Mrs. Byrd’s hearing aid will respond to the fire alarm and she’ll notice the house is burning and will call 911. Eventually the police arrive, arrest Billy, and in the final scene Kelsey is reunited with her dad after a year and a half in captivity and she’s once again running, literally, as if her life depended on it. There’s an intriguing plot twist that’s mentioned in the online summaries of this film but is only slightly alluded to in the movie itself: supposedly Billy is trying to monetize Kelsey’s captivity by forcing her to shoot sexually explicit videos and posting them online to pay-to-view sites. Girl in the Attic is a film shrouded in mystery: at least three people were listed in various online sources as its director – David Weaver, Kaila York, and Michael Mortimer (Weaver is the one named in the actual credits) – and the writing was done by a committee: Tawnya Bhattacharya, Jill Abbinanti-Burke, and Ali Laventhol.

The producing company is listed as “Studio TF1 America” (the imdb.com page for The Boy Who Vanished also lists “Studio TF1 America” as its producers, but the actual credits list Champlain Media and Reel One Entertainment), and at least one major crew member, cinematographer Diego Lozano, worked on both. But I quite liked it, mainly because of the moral ambiguity of the characters. Billy is depicted not as a stock-figure villain, but as a basically nice if weak and unassuming figure who’s lousy at normal social interactions and “grows a pair” in the worst way possible: by exerting absolute authority over two helpless women. Kelsey has a spunk about her that keeps her from being the usual Lifetime victim, and Debbie is in some ways the most interesting character in the movie. She’s shown perched on the thin edge between being wheelchair-bound, able to use a walker (which she calls “Bridget”), and being totally mobile. One of the cruelest scenes is when Billy deliberately flushes a whole bottle of her anti-arthritis medication down the toilet – only Kelsey rescues her by finding another bottle of the drug under a bed in a room she’s been ordered to clean. I don’t recall having heard of Jean Louisa Kelly before, but she’s actually had a pretty compelling career: she got her start as a child actress, playing the late John Candy’s obnoxious niece in Uncle Buck (1989) and having an important singing role in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). Kelly is also a quite competent singer who’s released at least two full-length albums, Color of Your Heart (2013) and a standards album called For My Folks (2017), as well as a five-song EP, Willing. She’s 53 years old, a tough age for women at any stage in entertainment history, but more power to her if she’s got as great and tough-minded a performance in her as the one she gives here!

Crack-Up (RKO, 1946)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 14) I watched another “Noir Alley” showing of a quirky 1946 film from RKO, Crack-Up – not to be confused with a 1936 Crack-Up, an airplane drama with Peter Lorre as a foreign spy trying to steal the plans for a new plane for the proverbial sinister foreign power. This Crack-Up was made 10 years later and stars Pat O’Brien (who for some reason tried to revitalize his career at RKO in noir movies even though in his salad years at Warner Bros. he’d essentially been the good Irish guy to James Cagney’s bad Irish guy in films like Angels with Dirty Faces, in which Cagney played a gangster and O’Brien played a priest!) as, of all things, a curator at a big-city art museum. Crack-Up began as a short novel by crime and science-fiction writer Fredric Brown called Madman’s Holiday, though Brown’s original is almost impossible to find: it was republished only in a limited edition of just 350 copies and the quoted price on Amazon.com is $5,000. O’Brien was trying to restore his standing as a major star through “dark” roles in films like this one, Perilous Holiday (also 1946), and Riffraff (1947). In Perilous Holiday he was a reporter unjustly accused of being part of a counterfeiting ring he’s actually investigating for a story; in Riffraff he’s an unscrupulous private detective and “fixer” in Panama City; and in Crack-Up he’s a museum curator named George Steele, whose irreverent lectures to museum patrons as he leads them through tours have already got him on the outs with the management.

In the opening scene he’s shown literally trying to break into the museum where he works by smashing two windows and hitting a cop who tries to bust him. Steele is finally subdued and the museum’s management talks the cop out of pressing charges, saying they’ll handle the matter internally to avoid giving the museum a bad name. The museum has a large staff consisting of similarly venerable officials, including the museum director, Stevenson (Erskine Sanford); Traybin (Herbert Marshall), who’s on loan to the U.S. museum from the British Museum to investigate suspected art forgeries; Dr. Lowell (Ray Collins, reuniting him and Sanford from the cast of Citizen Kane), a member of the museum’s board as well as an M.D. who takes charge of Steele’s care; and two women, Steele’s girlfriend, magazine writer Terry Cordell (Claire Trevor), and Barton’s secretary Mary (Mary Ware). Steele is convinced he was in a train wreck the night he was caught trying to break into the museum, and we get vivid flashbacks as he’s interrogated by police lieutenant Cochrane (Wallace Ford), the cop who caught him. The flashbacks show Steele on a train after he responds to an emergency call from his family saying that his mother suddenly took ill and is on her deathbed, but Cochrane tells him there’s no record of a train accident in the area and Steele’s mother is just fine, thank you. (There’s a bit of a plot hole in that Steele pays for his train ticket but doesn’t collect it from the station window, and no conductor asks him for it while he’s on the train.) At least part of the MacGuffin involves two paintings, one by Thomas Gainsborough and one, Adoration of the Kings, by Albrecht Dürer, which the museum had been exhibiting on loan from European musea, only the Gainsborough was supposedly lost at sea when the ship taking it from the U.S. back to Britain blew up in an “accident,” but Steele was convinced that the Gainsborough being returned was in fact a copy and the real painting had never left the U.S. He wants to use an X-ray machine to examine the Dürer to see if it, too, is a fake, but Barton won’t buy him the X-ray machine because “we’re a museum, not a hospital.”

In an attempt to see what happened to him on his alleged train ride, Steele takes the same train the next night, asks various people he meets – including the conductor, the ticket agent, and a vendor selling snacks and cigarettes in the cars (the idea that you could still smoke on a train really dates this movie!) – and finally learns that the night before two men escorted a drunk who looked a lot like him off the train. Steele is convinced that he was the mystery “drunk,” and he’d actually been drugged to incapacitate him and discredit anything he might have to say about the fake paintings. (Bits of the “Gainsborough” were recovered from the shipwreck, and the British Museum did tests on them and determined the missing painting had been a fake.) This rather oddball recension of Gaslight with a male as the person being “gaslighted” has to do with a plot by someone connected with the museum to steal the original paintings, substitute copies, and then destroy the copies in fake “accidents” – and the objective behind the assaults on Steele has been to discredit him as an expert and therefore make sure his allegations that the paintings are fakes won’t be believed. For most of the movie I was thinking that Herbert Marshall’s character would turn out to be the villain, especially since he was playing the part with the same smarmy self-righteousness he brought to his actual villain role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1941), but the real bad guy turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Dr. Lowell, whose idea is to steal valuable paintings for his own collection and keep them from the rest of the world.

He even has a marvelously classist and elitist speech giving his justification: he says museums open the great works of art to people too stupid to appreciate them properly. Only, unlike most of the movie villains who steal famous works of art and keep them to themselves, he doesn’t have a private room in his home where he keeps them locked up so only he can look at them. Instead he hides them in his home behind a thoroughly mediocre painting, and we don’t learn where they are until the end, when Mary, who was part of his plot, agrees to tell the authorities where the real Gainsborough and Dürer are in exchange for leniency. Crack-Up got mediocre reviews and was a box-office disappointment, largely because critics of the time thought that the plot was too convoluted and hard to follow. Certainly all those old men in charge of the museum got a bit too tiresome, and too hard to tell apart, after a while. One big disappointment was the casting of Claire Trevor in a good-girl role rather than either a femme fatale, as she was in her best film, Murder, My Sweet (1944, and also at RKO), or the part of a gin-soaked former cabaret singer in Key Largo (1948) that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. We watch her through the whole movie waiting for the claws to come out, and they never do. Still, Crack-Up is a compelling thriller despite the convoluted plotting, and it offers Pat O’Brien a quite good showcase as at least a slightly more complicated character than he usually got to play!

La Cage aux Folles (Da.Ma. Cinematografia, Les Artistes Associés, 1978_

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

Last night (June 12) I watched a legendary movie I can’t recall ever having seen before: the original La Cage aux Folles (1978), a French-Italian co-production based on a 1973 play by Jean Poiret about a Gay male couple who own a nightclub together in a resort community in the south of France. The more butch member of the couple is Renato Baldi (Ugo Tognazzi, who was supplied by the Italian studio, Da.Ma. Cinematografia, and who refused to speak any language besides Italian, so director and co-screenwriter Éduardo Molinaro had to tweak his lines so the French version, spoken by a voice double, would match his lip movements). His partner, who owns 80 percent of La Cage aux Folles nightclub and stars in its drag shows, is Albin Mougeotte, who performs as “Zaza Napoli.” (According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, “Folle” is French slang for an effeminate Gay man.) Twenty years earlier, Renato ended up in a single compromising encounter with a woman, Simone Deblon (Claire Maurier), and in one of those “infallible pregnancies at a single contact” classic-era Hollywood producer David O. Selznick often ridiculed, Renato’s one-night walk on the straight side produced a son, Laurent (Rémi Laurent, who’s easily the sexiest guy in the movie even though one wonders how Renato keeps all the horny Gay guys in his establishment from hitting on his son). It’s not clear just how Laurent has been raised – we do know his mom bailed on him almost as soon as he was born, and we get the impression that his dad was the custodial parent but he spent most of his time in boarding schools and camps.

But he’s fallen in love and become engaged to marry Andréa Charrier (Luisa Manieri), the rather empty-headed daughter of Right-wing French politician Simon Charrier (Michel Galabru) and his wife Louise (Carmen Scarpitta). Simon was the speechwriter for the French president, who ran on a “Unity and Morals” ticket, until said President suddenly died of a heart attack while in the middle of having sex with an underage prostitute. Now the media are hounding Simon for comment and he’s been reduced to coming and going to his house via a ladder to escape the omnipresent gaggle of journalists and bottom-feeders. Trying to talk up her fiancé and get her parents to agree to the marriage, Andréa has invented an elaborate tale that Laurent is really from a family of diplomats, with his father being sent around the world on a regular basis while his mother is a housewife. Naturally the Charrier parents want to meet the remarkable young man who’s about to become their son-in-law, and they essentially invite themselves to dinner at Renato’s home not realizing that a) he’s Gay, b) he’s in a 20-year relationship, and c) both men make their livings running a drag club. There’s a grimly amusing scene in which Renato, Albin, Laurent and their manservant, a queeny Black man named Jacob (Benny Luke) who appears to be an immigrant from one of France’s former African colonies with a penchant for wearing as little as possible and disdaining shoes, try frantically to “de-Gay” their living space in preparation for the Charriers’ visit. This includes removing all the sexually explicit statuary – mostly reproductions of Greek athletic nudes but also a bowl in the shape of an ass and a statuette with a prominent (and decidedly beyond scale) penis sticking out of the front. When one of them breaks off the statue’s dick, they decide they can leave the rest of it in place.

In preparation for the dinner, Albin decides to show up in full drag and pose as Laurent’s mother, while Renato has meanwhile gone to visit Laurent’s actual mother, who in the meantime has become a major executive and is referred to as “Madame President.” He’s able to get in to see her despite the usual phalanx of receptionists and secretaries controlling access to her, and – much to the disgust of Albin, who’s tagged along for the ride and is waiting outside Simone’s office – the two of them huddle inside and the red door indicating that no one is allowed to enter and interrupt them goes on. Simone agrees to show up at the dinner party and acknowledge her actual status as Laurent’s mother and also pretend that she and Renato have had an ongoing relationship. Renato and Albin have Jacob dress up in full butler’s uniform, including shoes, and serve the dinner – though Jacob uses a set of sexually explicit plates with the same ancient Greek-style depictions of athletes as on the statues they got rid of. Jacob hurriedly covers the potentially offensive images with a yucky-looking red soup he announces is from an old peasants’ recipe. Meanwhile, the reporters and paparazzi, alerted by a leak from Simon Carriere’s chauffeur (Venantino Venantini), have surrounded La Cage aux Folles and the home above it with cameras at the ready, eager to top the scandal of the supposedly “moral” French president shacking up with an underage Black prostitute with one about his campaign manager visiting a Gay bar in the south of France. With the media bottom-feeders and scumbags surrounding the place, Renato and Albin decide there’s only one way to get Simon out of the way safely: by dressing him in drag. The finale takes place at the big church wedding of Laurent and Andréa.

La Cage aux Folles (the official English translation was Birds of a Feather, though Google Translate renders it as The Cage of the Madwomen!) became the most popular foreign-language film ever released in the U.S. until the Chinese martial-arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 topped it, and it was a ground-breaking movie in a lot of aspects, including not only presenting an older Gay male couple but showing them as still very much in love despite the constant bickering much like long-term married straight couples. Ironically, though I was familiar with the story through its American incarnations – my late partner John Gabrish bought the original cast CD of the 1983 U.S. musical adaptation by Gay composer Jerry Herman and Gay playwright Harvey Fierstein, and I’d seen the brilliantly funny 1996 U.S. remake The Birdcage, directed by Mike Nichols, written by Elaine May (reuniting them from the short-lived two-person improv act they had done in the early 1960’s with sensational success) and starring Robin Williams (as the more butch of the partners because he had already done Mrs. Doubtfire and he didn’t want to do two drag roles in a row) and Nathan Lane, with the action moved to South Florida – I don’t think I’d ever seen the original film until last night. Charles had seen it many times, and I’m sure it had been on the periphery of my cultural awareness even though I never actually sought it out.

I also remember reading about it in Steven Bach’s Final Cut, his memoir of his years as a United Artists production executive, in which he recalled visiting the set in the south of France and hearing the actors complain about the incredible heat they faced wearing their elaborate drag costumes both indoors on the sets and outdoors in the hot sun of a southern French summer. It still holds up surprisingly well as a rambunctious farce with a veiled but unmistakable political subtext (which, not surprisingly, became considerably less veiled in the 1983 musical, with its big anthemic song “I Am What I Am” that became a near-mandatory item on the playlists at Pride events), even though – an old bugbear of mine – there’s almost no depiction of physical affection among the characters that are supposed to be Gay. Granted that Renato and Albin are a long-term couple and their ardor in (and out of) the bedroom has no doubt cooled over time, but still my husband Charles and I (who’ve been together as a couple for 30 years and been legally married for nearly 17) kiss and hold hands together sometimes!

Desire (Paramount, 1936)

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

Last night (June 11) I watched another movie in Turner Classic Movies’ month-long salute to “Star of the Month” Gary Cooper: Desire, a 1936 romantic comedy starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper (billed in that order! In their one previous film, Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco from 1930, he had been top-billed) in a rather strange tale that casts her as a jewel thief and him as her unwitting “mule.” Desire began as a Hungarian play called Die Schönen Tage von Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez) by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle, which got adapted by no fewer than five writers: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein, Virginia Lawrence, and Benn W. Levy (the last two uncredited). Gary Cooper plays Tom Bradley, a mechanical engineer for the Brunson car company, who is pleading with his boss, Mr. Gibson (William Frawley – so, even though he and Dietrich never appear in the same scene, that still puts Dietrich one degree of separation from Lucille Ball!), to be allowed a two-week vacation to visit France and Spain. The film actually opens in Paris, where Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich) – who’s referred to throughout the film as “Countess,” even though she isn’t one – hatches an elaborate plot to steal a two-million franc pearl necklace from jeweler Aristide Duvalle (Ernest Cossart). Then she slips the swag into the jacket pocket of Tom Bradley and follows him across the France-Spain border, at one point stealing his car and then crashing it. Bradley doesn’t discover what happened to his car until he sees its spare tire, emblazoned with the slogan “You’ll Be Happy Driving a Brunson 8,” on the back of a horse-drawn cart.

Madeleine has to meet up with her partner in crime, Carlos Margoli (John Halliday), and give him and Aunt Olga (a marvelous crotchety-old-lady performance by Zeffie Tilbury) the necklace, which means she has to get close enough to Tom Bradley to pick his pocket and get the necklace back. Desire was directed by Frank Borzage, though Ernst Lubitsch is listed as the producer, and the film is full of the famous “Lubitsch touches” like the argument Bradley and Gibson get into over what the advertising slogan on the tire should be (Gibson proposed “You’ll Be Delighted” and “You’ll Be Glad,” and they compromised on “You’ll Be Happy”) and the process by which Madeleine actually steals the necklace. She poses as the wife of prominent psychiatrist Dr. Maurice Pouquet (Alan Mowbray) and asks Duvalle to present Dr. Pouquet with the bill, then tells Dr. Pouquet that Duvalle is her husband and has a mania for presenting people with bills for items they didn’t order. But once the intrigue settles down it’s an oddly dull film, not bad but also not sparkling the way Lubitsch’s best films were. In that respect it reminded me of another film Lubitsch produced and someone else (George Cukor) directed, One Hour with You (1932). Through the later stages of the film I was wondering how the writing committee was going to allow the Cooper and Dietrich characters to get together while fulfilling the iron dictates of the Production Code that criminals must always be punished, somehow, for their crimes. They did it by having Bradley hit on the idea of returning to Paris and presenting Duvalle with the stolen necklace, saying they were “returning” it and managing to get him to drop the charges against her. I couldn’t help but compare this film to one of Lubitsch’s masterpieces, Trouble in Paradise (1932), also a rom-com about jewel thieves but one which took advantage of the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Code enforcement.

Desire had more than its share of behind-the-scenes perils. While they were making Morocco together Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper had had an affair – no surprise there since Dietrich was notorious for seducing virtually all her leading men – only when she wanted Cooper as the leading man for her next film, Dishonored (1931), he flatly turned it down. Dietrich wondered what she’d done to offend him so much he didn’t want to work with her again, but Cooper’s problem wasn’t with Dietrich. It was with her director, Josef von Sternberg, whom Cooper had first worked with on the 1928 film Children of Divorce. It was Clara Bow’s next film after It, and, impressed by Cooper’s bit part as a reporter on that film, she’d requested him for her male lead. Alas, the film went so far behind schedule that when the Paramount executives assigned Sternberg to take it over and complete it in a few days, he executed that order by having the soundstage doors locked and cots moved in so the actors couldn’t leave the set. He had food and drink brought in so they could eat, and allowed them to sleep between takes when they weren’t actually needed on camera, but Cooper found the whole experience appalling (understandably) and blamed Sternberg for it. He agreed – reluctantly – to make Morocco for him, but he was once again appalled, this time by Sternberg’s insistence on directing Dietrich in German even though the film was in English. Adolphe Menjou, the film’s second male lead, had grown up in France and had learned German as a second language, but the rest of the cast and crew were not happy about Sternberg giving Dietrich directions in a language they couldn’t understand. But Cooper liked working with Dietrich and as soon as he was offered a film with her that didn’t involve Sternberg, he took it.

Dietrich had also started an affair with faded silent-film star John Gilbert and had even let him move into her home. She used her clout to get him cast in the second male lead, but in the meantime Gilbert went to see his ex, Greta Garbo, and Dietrich had a hissy-fit and threw him out. Then Gilbert died suddenly of the long-term ill effects of his chronic alcoholism, and so Paramount had to recast the part. It’s a pity they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get John Barrymore for it – the part cried out for Barrymore’s intensity and got Halliday’s querulousness. Also for some unearthly reason, in 1935 Paramount’s executives had hired Lubitsch as their studio head, which worked out about as well as it did for Columbia 50 years later when they gave the job of running the studio to British producer David Puttnam on the strength of his mega-hit Chariots of Fire. One wonders why Paramount thought a European known for his sophisticated films could run an entire studio and greenlight the sorts of bread-and-butter American movies that were the major companies’ stock in trade, and three years later they not only relieved Lubitsch of the job of running the studio but fired him as a director as well. (Lubitsch went to MGM, where he made two of his finest films, Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, before ending his career at 20th Century-Fox.) It also doesn’t help that Dietrich sings just one song in Desire, “Awake in a Dream,” by Friedrich Holländer (who’d become her favorite songwriter after his songs for The Blue Angel and whom she insisted on bringing to America, though Paramount “Americanized” his name as “Frederick Hollander”), in John Halliday’s living room, supposedly accompanying herself on piano but with Borzage and cinematographers Charles Lang and (uncredited) Victor Milner shooting from one of those damnable angles that interposes the bulk of the piano between us and her and therefore makes it all too obvious that she isn’t really playing it. I wouldn’t call Desire a bad movie; it’s reasonably entertaining, but it could have been a lot better, and it doesn’t help that Lubitsch had made a much funnier and more charming film about international jewel thieves in Trouble in Paradise four years earlier.

FRONTLINE: "Syria's Detainee Files" (BBC-TV, GBH Foundation, PBS, aired June 10, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 11) I watched a quite moving but also very depressing documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series: “Syria’s Detainee Files.” We Americans used to be able to watch shows like this detailing the repression by which dictatorships in other countries kept themselves in power in the comfortable assurance that “it couldn’t happen here.” Today we can’t believe that anymore: given the armed invasion of the streets of Los Angeles by 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines ordered by Führer Donald Trump (over the objections of both California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass), ostensibly to facilitate deportation operations being carried out by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) but actually to suppress peaceful protests against them, this depiction of Syria’s past looks all too much like America’s future. It was a program to which I had to pay strict attention because virtually all the interviews were in Arabic, and rather than do voice-over translations directors Sara Obeidat (who also co-produced and narrated) and Sasha Joelle Achilli chose to run the English translations as subtitles. That meant I pretty much ignored my husband Charles when he came home from work about three-fifths into the program. What made the show especially fascinating was that it included interviews not only with some of the victims of the Syrian government’s torturers but also some of the torturers themselves.

Syria is a Middle Eastern country which was put under the control of France through a League of Nations “mandate” after World War I in 1920. Its formal independence was guaranteed after World War II when it was admitted to the United Nations, and in 1958 it briefly merged with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt as the United Arab Republic. In 1961 a military coup took place in Syria and the generals now running the country terminated the political union with Egypt. In 1963 the Ba’ath Party, whose main platform was (ironically) the union of all Arab countries into a super-state, took over and Hafez al-Assad emerged as dictator in 1970. When Hafez died in 2000 his son Bashar al-Assad took over and ruled until late 2024, when after decades of insurgency his regime was finally overthrown and he sought and received political asylum from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Under Bashar’s regime a vast network of intelligence agencies was created, of which the most brutal and repressive was one with the innocuous title “Air Force Intelligence.” Agents of Air Force Intelligence – including its national chief, Major General Jamil Hassan – ran several private prisons, detention centers and torture chambers while Bashar claimed “plausible deniability.” A surprising number of participants in Air Force Intelligence’s torture activities agreed to be interviewed, though only one – a bulldozer driver named Yusuf Obeid who was pressed into service to use his bulldozer to dig mass graves for people who’d died under torture – actually allowed his real name to be used.

Obeid recalled that he’d been working as a bulldozer driver for the city of Damascus when one day he received orders from an intelligence officer to drive his bulldozer to Najha cemetery on the outskirts of the city. “There was an armed agent,” Obeid said. “He said, ‘Follow me,’ and drove in front of me. He arrived at the cemetery entrance and I followed him. We continued until there were no more graves. He told me to dig a large 15x15 meter pit, at least 3 meters deep. A black Mercedes arrived, followed by two large, refrigerated trucks, then a military truck carrying soldiers. I started to smell something. As they got closer there was a horrible stench. Then I realized what was inside those fridge trucks. It smelled like rotting dead bodies.” One of the torturers, interviewed under the name “Hussam,” said, “On Wednesday mornings, back when I worked there, we would have an ‘execution party.’ Our role in executions was to place the rope on the prisoner, then step aside. Only an officer can push the chair out. One time, we put a guy on the rope. [The officer] pushed the chair, the rope tightened, but after 22 minutes, he still hadn't died. So they told me, ‘Grab him and pull him downward.’ I grasped the prisoner like this and I pulled him down. He still didn't die. So another guard who's bigger and stronger said, ‘Go, I will do it.’ Before he died he said one thing: ‘I’m going to tell God what you did.’ Just that, that's all he said.”

Another, an officer using the name “Osama,” recalled, “They would keep them under harsh torture day and night until they admitted to killing so-and-so. On that basis, they’re sent to the field court, where no questions are asked. It’s just about confirming your statement and signing it with your fingerprint. A month or two later, their sentence would be delivered to the prison.” The accounts from some of the torturers almost inevitably reminded me of the stories told by some of the Nazis who worked as guards in the concentration camps, who were at first appalled at the brutality they witnessed but ultimately not only became desensitized to it but emerged as willing participants. If “Syria’s Detainee Files” had any heroes, they would be the brothers Shadi and Hadi Haroun, who got caught up in the Syrian resistance during the so-called “Arab Spring” protests of 2010-2011. They recalled attending a peaceful gathering in one of Damascus’s town squares to demand that Bashar resign and allow free elections to replace him, when all of a sudden one of them noticed a sniper on a balcony overlooking the crowd. The sniper started picking people off, and then a full army unit invaded the town square and just started firing at people indiscriminately. Shadi was arrested and sent to the notorious Air Force Intelligence prison at Mezzeh, and Hadi took advantage of a series of town-hall meetings Bashar al-Assad was holding throughout Syria to confront the president and get him to release Shadi.

Hadi actually got an oral commitment from Bashar himself for Shadi’s release, but that wasn’t good enough for Major General Hassan. When he met the general, Hadi recalled, Hassan “raised his glasses and looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to release your brother, it's that simple.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Major General. There is an order from Bashar al-Assad to release him.’ I said it so confidently. He said, ‘Sure,’ then picked up the phone and dialed a number. ‘With respect, sir, you ordered the release of Shadi Haroun. But he is a danger to the country. I want to question him myself. Then, with your approval, I’ll decide if he should be released.’ He said, ‘You see, I don’t want to release him.’ I couldn’t understand what he was doing. Was he trying to send me a message that Bashar al-Assad may be the president of this country, but I'm the president of this mini-state? As in, ‘I am the president of the state of Air Force Intelligence.’” Ultimately Shadi was moved to an even nastier prison at Harasta and then to a still worse one at Saydnaya, where Hadi was also detained. The prison conditions were so overcrowded that prisoners were literally stacked on top of each other, and a number of them died from simple oxygen deprivation because the cells were so full none of the prisoners could get enough air. Shadi recalls one interrogator who stuck a gun in Shadi’s mouth and told him that he was going to be tortured to death anyway, so he should let the officer shoot him and get it over with relatively quickly.

When they were finally released, the Harouns understandably left Syria and fled to southern Turkey, where they remained until Bashar al-Assad’s rule of terror finally ended in December 2024. Then they returned to Syria, went to Mezzeh prison, and tried as best they could to piece back together the incomplete records of how the prison had been run under Bashar and who had been kept there. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since many of the records had been destroyed or thrown away. There’s one heartbreaking scene in which the brothers find a binder that was supposed to have held the records of anyone executed there – only the binder was blank. All the pages had been removed. Also, when they arrived there the prisoners were each assigned a number, and no record was kept of their names, because the people in charge wanted to be able to say honestly that they’d never heard of them. The sheer cruelty and organized viciousness of the Syrian authorities – or their brethren among dictatorships in general is very much apparent on this program. It gave rise to Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer’s oft-quoted comment (and book title), “The cruelty is the point,” and it’s also the attitude expressed by O’Brien, the representative of the ruling party in George Orwell’s 1984, when he tells the book’s dissident protagonist Winston Smith (as he’s torturing him), that power is the ability to make another human being suffer.

“Obedience is not enough,” O’Brien says, “Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” We are now experiencing in the United States the transformation of an imperfect but still hopeful republic into an authoritarian, even a totalitarian, dictatorship in which our new masters will demand, as Bashar al-Assad and hundreds of similar dictators throughout history have done, not only to be obeyed but to be worshiped. “Syria’s Detainee Files” illustrate the human cost of such a world and what it does to the torturers as well as the victims. One of the torturers interviewed in this movie, a former warrant officer in Air Force Intelligence called “Abbas,” said, “In my opinion, every human being has two souls – an evil soul and a good soul. They are in a constant state of war. One of them is telling you to think and have empathy. The other is telling you to be selfish and destructive, saying, ‘You’re an agent of this regime. Keep quiet. Or you’ll die.’” Actually I’ve long felt that Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Mike Johnson, Stephen Miller, and the people like them who are now ruling the United States and seeking to destroy its last vestiges of democracy don’t have “good souls” because they have deliberately purged themselves of everything noble and decent in their natures. They equate kindness, compassion, and empathy with “weakness” and believe, like O’Brien in 1984, that the world they want, like Syria’s past or America’s likely future, is “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Escape Me Never (Warner Bros., filmed 1945, released 1947)

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

Last night (June 9) Turner Classic Movies was doing a salute to director Peter Godfrey, who inexplicably got a number of high-prestige assignments at Warner Bros. in the mid-1940’s, including films with “A”-list talents like Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn. The film my husband Charles and I watched together was Escape Me Never, a remake of a 1935 film from Britain starring Elisabeth Bergner and one which Charles and I had seen many years ago in the first flush of our relationship. We’d seen it on a VHS tape of a previous TCM showing hosted by their founding on-air personality, the late Robert Osborne, who’d told a fascinating story. It seems that Escape Me Never was released while its star, Errol Flynn, was shooting a big-budget swashbuckler called The Adventures of Don Juan for director Vincent Sherman. Until Escape Me Never was released, Flynn had been behaving himself on the Don Juan set, but when the film came out and critics savaged Flynn’s acting, he was so traumatized he went off the deep end and started turning up either late or not at all. I remember being amazed by that story if only because, of all the four principals in Escape Me Never, Flynn turned in by far the best performance of the lot! I’ve mentioned several times that Flynn, like such other pretty-boy types of his generation (Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor – and, decades later, Tom Selleck), actually grew as an actor once he started losing his looks and realized he could no longer coast on them. Escape Me Never was based on a novel by British author Margaret Kennedy as part of a cycle of stories about the Dubrok family, a group of musicians who’ve maintained their talents through several generations. Another story in the Dubrok cycle that Warner Bros. had just filmed in 1943, The Constant Nymph, starring Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer (Fontaine said in her autobiography that Boyer was by far the best co-star she ever had in terms of being willing to work with her and not hog the spotlight; not surprisingly, she said the worst actor she’d ever played with was Orson Welles), had been a major hit, so Jack Warner and his second-in-command, Henry Blanke, green-lighted this one.

The story takes place in 1900 and opens in Venice. When the new year starts, mediocre composer Caryl Dubrok (Gig Young) is engaged to marry heiress Fenella MacLean (Eleanor Parker). Only as Caryl is packing up to leave an outdoor nightclub gig, Fenella’s parents (Reginald Denny and Isobel Elsom) are accosted by a young woman named Gemma Smith (Ida Lupino) who’s part of a school tour group visiting the old castle where the MacLeans are staying. They catch Gemma in their daughter’s bedroom stealing a pair of gloves, and she explains that she’s not really a student, but she poses as one because by joining their tour groups she can cadge free lunches for herself and her infant son Piccolo. Gemma tells us that just about every emotionally significant person in her life has died: first her mother, then her father, then the husband who was Piccolo’s father. (Charles read that last twist as the usual Production Code-mandated B.S., a cover story to hide Piccolo’s illegitimate origins.) She’s living with Caryl’s far more talented brother, Sebastian Dubrok (Errol Flynn, oddly clean-shaven in this movie even though Warners’ make-up man Perc Westmore did up Gig Young with a moustache of his own and a lot of black goop in his hair to make him at least look like Errol Flynn’s brother), though at least at first there’s no sexual or romantic relationship between them. Sebastian had just taken pity on her and offered her a place to stay, but when Gemma shows up and asks the whereabouts of a musician named Dubrok, son of a famous father, the MacLeans assume she means Caryl and he’s a no-good bastard who’s two-timing their daughter. The MacLeans take Fenella and head for the Dolomite Mountains, a sub-range of the Alps on the Italian-Swiss border, and Sebastian and Caryl decide to hike there to follow them and explain the mixup. At first they plan to leave Gemma behind, but she insists on coming along and bringing Piccolo with them. Once they arrive Sebastian and Gemma work out a musical act to make them some money by playing in outdoor cafés, and the big song they perform is called “Love to Love,” actually written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (who scored the entire film, including the big ballet sequence towards the end) with lyrics by Aldo Franchetti and Harold Arlen’s old collaborator, Ted Koehler. (According to imdb.com, Ida Lupino had a voice double: Peg LaCentra, Artie Shaw’s female band singer in the mid-1930’s.)

Unfortunately, having no idea who she is, Sebastian makes a moonlight pass at Fenella and he’s so stricken by her he’s inspired to compose a new ballet, “Primavera,” which Fenella offers to help him get produced in London when they all return there. Fenella’s connections also help get the great conductor Heinrich (Albert Bassermann, who performed so memorably in the films Foreign Correspondent and A Woman’s Face even though he knew no English and had to have people interpret for him; Foreign Correspondent’s director, Alfred Hitchcock, had got his start in Germany and had learned German to communicate with his crews, while on A Woman’s Face his interpreter was co-star Conrad Veidt, who had fled the Nazis in 1933 and made films first in Britain and then the U.S.) and the music publisher Steinach (Ludwig Stössel) to help. Steinach also gives Caryl a job, presumably as a music editor or copyist, so he and Fenella will be able to marry at last – only Fenella isn’t sure she still wants to marry Caryl now that she’s got the hots for Sebastian. Things come to a head in London, where Sebastian agrees to marry Gemma even though he’s also carrying on an affair (as torrid a one as the Production Code would allow) with Fenella. At the dress rehearsal for his ballet Sebastian has an argument with the prima donna ballerina Natrova (Milada Mladova) and the ballet appears to be off, but he relents and changes the title from “Primavera” to “Gemma – Escape Me Never.” He also redoubles his commitment to Gemma after her baby son Piccolo dies, and sends Fenella off to marry Caryl. Escape Me Never is a problematic film in a lot of ways, and it was such a major flop it didn’t even make back its negative cost, much less draw enough to cover whatever Warner Bros. spent on advertising and promotion, but as I said about it the last time I saw it, it’s an excellent showcase for Errol Flynn. Sebastian works as a character because in a lot of ways he is Errol Flynn, torn between a devil-may-care attitude about life and especially about romantic commitments and a fierce pride in his work. Sebastian feels about composing the way Flynn felt about acting: on one level he pretends not to care about it while he gets fiercely proud of his skills and reacts quite strongly whenever anyone questions his talents.

And this time around I liked Ida Lupino’s performance a lot better than I had the last time I saw it; she plays Gemma as a tough, no-nonsense broad, unsentimental and scarred throughout her life by the deaths of just about everyone near and dear to her: first her mother, then her father, then her husband (assuming there was one), and finally her son. She also has a light but thoroughly believable Cockney accent, making it even more ironic that just a few years after making this film, she was turned down for a role as a British woman because the director said that, even though she was British originally, she’d lived in America so long she’d lost the accent. What’s hard to take about Escape Me Never is the sheer weight of Margaret Kennedy’s plot melodramatics (she not only wrote the original novel, she did her own adaptation as a play and she co-wrote the script for the film with Thames Williamson and an uncredited Lenore Coffee) – the moment we see that child in reel one we know he’s going to come to a bad end somewhere along the line. We do get the impression that the London fog and the straitened circumstances in which Gemma and Sebastian lived (he constantly has to borrow money from Caryl to keep the lights and heat on) did Piccolo in, and frankly she’d have been much better off staying in Venice and and marrying the baker who was genuinely in love with her even though he was a widower twice her age and with five kids of his own. Escape Me Never was the last film score Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed under his 12-year contract with Warner Bros.; when he took the assignment it was with the understanding that as soon as his contract ended he would leave the studio and return to his first love, classical music. Korngold had been a child prodigy in Vienna – he composed a ballet at 11 and a piano sonata at 13 – and went on to a major adult career writing operas like Violanta and Die Tote Stadt (“City of the Dead”), a macabre tale about a young man whose girlfriend dies and then he meets a woman who is either her ghost or someone who looks almost exactly like her.

In 1934 Korngold was lured to Hollywood by stage director Max Reinhardt, who had done a famous production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – first in August Schlegel’s German translation and then on Broadway in Shakespeare’s original English. He had hired Korngold to adapt and rework Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play (“incidental music” is just like film music except it accompanies a live play instead of a film), and when Reinhardt got an offer from Warner Bros. to do a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he brought Korngold along and put him in charge of the music. Over the next 12 years Korngold worked at Warners and composed some of the greatest film music of all time, notably for the blockbuster hit Anthony Adverse (for which he won his first Academy Award) and Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood – for which he won his second Oscar – and The Sea Hawk). But after Escape Me Never he decided he was through with Hollywood because, while the studio had given him a comfortable living, it had also cost him his reputation with the classical-music audience and he was determined to win it back. Between his departure from Warners in 1947 and his death 10 years later, Korngold would work on only one more film: adapting the music of Wagner for William Dieterle’s biopic Magic Fire (Republic, 1956). One of the great frustrations of Escape Me Never is we never get to see the whole ballet – just a contentious rehearsal sequence in which Sebastian and Natrova have their big blow-up – and I think Warners missed a big opportunity not only to show the full ballet but to shoot it in color. Still, Escape Me Never is a much better movie than its reputation, and if this was to be Korngold’s exit from film music, he went out with the proverbial bang. Errol Flynn and Ida Lupino turn in excellent performances – as I noted above, in his surface affectation of a devil-may-care attitude towards life while he really cares deeply about his reputation as an artist, Sebastian Dubrok basically is Errol Flynn – and his and Lupino’s sincerity (and Sol Polito’s dark, almost noir cinematography) overcome the weaknesses of the supporting cast, Kennedy’s story, and Peter Godfrey’s professionally acceptable but not great direction.

78th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, League of Broadway, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 8, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 8) my husband Charles and I watched the 78th annual Tony Awards from 5 to about 8:15 p.m. It was the usual lumbering spectacle awards shows generally are, though it did feature some nice performances of songs from the nominated Broadway musicals. The most interesting aspect of the show was the sheer amount of gender-bending involved. Sarah Snook won for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play for The Picture of Dorian Gray, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel in which she literally plays all the parts. Cole Escola (whom we’d seen on Stephen Colbert’s show and who considers themselves “non-binary” and thereby insists on plural pronouns), who stars in a one-person show they wrote called Oh, Mary! (a radical re-interpretation of the Lincoln assassination that posits that losing that dorky husband of hers was actually the best thing that could have happened to Mary Todd Lincoln, who in Escola’s script recovers and becomes a cabaret entertainer), lost for Best Play to Purpose but won for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, and their director, Sam Pinkleton, also won. My favorite winner was Jak Malone, one of the four performers in Operation Mincemeat, an adaptation of the story told in Ewen Montagu’s 1953 book The Man Who Never Was and Ronald Neame’s 1956 film of that title. It was a true story from World War II about a British Secret Service operation to fool the Germans about where the Allied invasion of Italy would take place. It was actually planned for Sicily but the idea was to make the Germans think it was going to be on Sardinia, and in order to do that MI-5 wrote up a set of fake plans for a Sardinia invasion and planted them on a corpse which they released off the coast of Spain where a known German agent was operating. Operation Mincemeat uses a four-person cast, each playing multiple roles, and Malone’s principal role is as a woman named Hester Leggatt who uses her own memory of having lost a boyfriend during World War I to write a phony letter ostensibly from the mystery man’s fiancée.

In their acceptance speech, Malone (who mostly presented as a male but wore bright red lipstick) praised the play and the theatre community in general for its openness to new concepts of gender that don’t fit the classic male/female binary. They also thanked their “partner” Jasmin. Indeed, there are so many Queer folk involved in the Broadway theatre (a tradition that began, according to Sam Stagg’s 1968 book The Brothers Shubert, with Lee Shubert, who deliberately hired only Gay men for his casts and crews because he didn’t want any younger, hunkier straight guys around competing with him in cruising the chorus girls) that when a husky, heavy-set Black playwright named Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won Best Writing of a Play for Purpose (which is essentially Succession with Black people: it’s the story of a retired minister and civil-rights activist and his family), it was no particular surprise that he thanked his husband. The real surprise came when Jonathan Spector won for Best Revival of a Play for Eureka Day (a story about an outbreak of measles at a progressive private day school in Berkeley and the resistance of several parents to vaccination) and came off as such a screaming queen it was startling when he thanked his wife and their two children! There was a similar surprise late in the show when Darren Criss, winner for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical for Maybe Happy Ending – a quirky show about two robots who fall in love even though both of them are nearing the ends of their shelf lives and are about to die when their batteries run down – also thanked his wife and their kids when he was just dripping with Gay-style male hunkiness. Maybe Happy Ending also won the award for Best Musical (which disappointed me; I was hoping it would be Operation Mincemeat), though the song Criss and his female lead, Helen J. Shen, performed on the show was an awfully twee number about hunting down fireflies together. (I was amused by how many presenters who referred to the show got its title wrong and said Maybe Happy Endings, plural.)

The show was hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a particular favorite of mine, and she got two big numbers, one at the beginning called “Sometimes All You Need Is a Song” and one at the end which was a bizarre rewrite of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Effie’s big number from the musical Dreamgirls, rewritten as “And I Am Telling You I Am Going.” Megan Hilty from the cast of Death Becomes Her, a musical based on a 1992 film by Robert Zemeckis whose imdb.com synopsis, “When a fading actress learns of an immortality treatment, she sees it as a way to outdo her long-time rival,” makes it sound like a modern-dress version of Carel Kapek’s The Makropulos Case and Leos Janacek’s opera based on it, sang a song from it. Originally it appeared to be titled, “Everything I Do, I Do It for the Games,” only as the song wound on I started to hear the last word as “gains,” and then I finally realized it was, “I Do It For the Gays.” The Wikipedia page on the show says the actual title is “For the Gaze,” but the Queer impression was only reinforced by all the hot, hunky, muscular chorus boys cavorting behind her! Natalie Venetia Balcon, who won Best Actress In a Featured Role in a Musical for Buena Vista Social Club, did a Spanish-language number from the show and managed to look and sound like a part-Cuban Ella Fitzgerald. Jonathan Groff from Just in Time, a one-person bio-musical about Bobby Darin, sang a medley of three Darin songs: “Mack the Knife,” “That’s All” (one of the most aggravating records Darin ever made; he took a song written as a plaintive ballad, and sung that way superbly by Nat “King” Cole, and turned it into a bouncy uptempo nightclub number), and “Once in a Lifetime.” Then Nicole Scherzinger came on and did “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard (which won for Best Revival of a Musical and scored Tonys for Scherzinger and its director, Jamie Lloyd, who’s shaved his head and had the whole head covered in tattoos; Charles said that after he heard Lloyd lived in London the bizarre extent of his body art seemed a little more understandable); she did it stunningly, and whatever else you say about Andrew Lloyd Webber, he knows how to write a great power ballad for a woman.

A few awards later and it was time for the next musical number, done by David Hyde Pierce and the cast of something called Pirates: The Penzance Musical, a pointless rewrite of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance taking place in 19th century New Orleans and featuring a chorus of washboards. (Why?) Then came the Maybe Happy Ending duet and, after that, a nice medley of songs from the revival musical Floyd Collins, based on the same story of a man trapped by a cave-in and the media circus it became as Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole. The next number up was a 10th anniversary celebration of the play Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s by-now legendary retelling of the American Revolution in general and Alexander Hamilton’s life in particular through rap (or “hip-hop”) music. That brought back memories of the year that one of the Grammy Awards shows featured a live telecast of the opening number of Hamilton, which momentarily convinced me that rap can actually be beautiful, moving, and communicate an artistic message – and then the very next number was a typical piece of garbage by Kendrick Lamar that reminded me of what a cesspool of offal rap usually is. (I got even angrier the next day when the Los Angeles Times reviewer praised Lamar’s piece of shit as the best number on the program, and when Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize for music I got even more outraged and said, “They wouldn’t give it to Duke Ellington, but they gave it to Kendrick F***ing Lamar.”) After that Erivo and Sara Bareilles, who seemed headed for Britney Spears’s sort of career until Broadway saved her and gave her a chance to write truly great songs, did the big number “Tomorrow” from Annie as accompaniment to the “In Memoriam” segment honoring those theatre talents who passed away in 2024. (Charles thought that was a strange song choice because if you’re dead, then you have no more tomorrows.) One of the quirkier numbers was by the cast of Dead Outlaw, based on a real incident in which the people running a California Wild West museum discovered in 1976 that an object they’d been exhibiting as just a plaster replica was in fact the mummified remains of a real-life outlaw who’d died in Oklahoma in 1913. The songs were a ballad called “I’m Here” and an all-out country stomper called “And So Are You” (dead, it meant).

The most disappointing number of the night was, surprisingly, Audra McDonald’s performance of “Rose’s Turn” from the musical Gypsy, composed by Jule Styne with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim from 1958 and a vehicle for Ethel Merman. The reason this was such a big surprise – and not at all a positive one – was not only that McDonald is usually such a reliable performer but Charles and I had seen her do another song from Gypsy, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” on Stephen Colbert’s show and do it quite well. Not “Rose’s Turn,” though; she took this brilliant theatrical tour de force and mangled it, emphasizing all the wrong things. My reference is the 1962 film version with Rosalind Russell as Rose; though she may have been doubled by Lisa Kirk for all or much of the vocal (albeit when I saw Russell at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival she insisted that all the singing was hers), she was still a lot better than McDonald. Midway through her performance I rather grimly joked to Charles, “Just because Ethel Merman introduced this song, that does not mean you have to sing it as badly as she did!” The best number of the evening was “Born to Lead,” the song that opens Operation Mincemeat, which is about the upper-class status of the MI-5 officials who are planning the deception at the root of the story. To my mind (and Charles’s, too), it had far more of both the letter and the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan than the weird farrago of nonsense performed earlier as Pirates: The Penzance Musical. And it was followed by a song almost as strong: “Jugglin’,” from a show called Real Women Have Curves, about the multiple jobs Latinas in New York City have to juggle to support themselves. The heroine of Real Women Have Curves is a high-school student who’s training to become a journalist but still has to help out in her mom’s sewing shop.

Though there were a few veiled political comments in this year’s Tony Awards, mostly vague references to America’s unsettled and divided political climate, the Tony Awards definitely declared themselves part of the opposition by the sheer number of Queer people who won awards and nominations, as well as the multiplicity of genders involved in the casting of the various shows. If anything, it was a refutation of the whole absurd idea President Trump has tried to proclaim by executive order that there are only two genders, male and female, and your biological sex at birth inflexibly determines which one you are. And the extent to which Trump and the theatre community are at odds is only heightened by the fact that at least two of the shows represented, Hamilton and Eureka Day, canceled their engagements at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. once Trump took personal charge of its programming and fired all the Democrats on the Kennedy Center board.

Gayn*****s from Outer Space (Lindberg & Kristensen Film Studios, 1992)

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

After the Tony Awards lurched to their conclusion at 8:15 p.m. Sunday, June 8, my husband Charles and I took a break from TV so I could make a salad, then watched the 1924 Harold Lloyd comedy classic Girl Shy on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase.” We’d already seen it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/01/girl-shy-harold-lloyd-corporation-pathe.html and I won’t need to write anything more about it. Eventually Charles and I watched a truly atrocious 1992 Danish film, directed by Morten Lindberg, with the God-awful title Gayniggers from Outer Space, a half-hour short Charles wanted to look up on YouTube. Apparently this became a cause célèbre in 2024, when various people on social media urged each other to bid this wretched movie up in the imdb.com and Wikipedia rankings by searching for such topics as “what space movie came out in 1992” or “space movie 1992.” Gayniggers from Outer Space is a sorry (alleged) spoof of science-fiction and Blaxploitation movies in which a spacecraft from the Planet Anus, crewed by ArmInAss (Coco P. Dalbert), Captain B. Dick (Sammy Solamon), D. Ildo (Gerald F. Hail), Sgt. Shaved Balls (Gbatokai Dakinah), and Mr. Schwul (Konrad Fields), visits various planets to seek out ones in which men are being oppressed by women and denied the chance to express their own native Queer sexuality. They find Earth and launch their attacks on Ukraine, China, and Germany, using ray guns to annihilate all the female members of those countries’ populations so the males will be “liberated” from them and feel free to express their inner Gayness. This rather airy acceptance of genocide is one of the many things that put me off this film, along with its ultra-cheap production budget and the line deliveries of the “actors.” I’d be tempted to say they reach porn-star levels of incompetence, except that the people on-screen in this film make your average porn model seem like Olivier by comparison. In fact, this film is so relentlessly misogynistic that if I were a Fundamentalist Christian making an anti-Queer propaganda video, I’d use clips from this movie to illustrate the idea that all Gay men utterly loathe and despise women, and seek their total annihilation.

Once they’ve exterminated all Earth women, the crew decide to put one of their number through a physical transformation so they can beam him down to Earth (though nowhere near the level of the ones on the original Star Trek, the beaming effects are actually done pretty well and are the only special effects that even remotely approach credibility), and in the process they turn him white. He thus becomes the so-called “Gay Ambassador” sent to Earth to teach the Earthlings how to be Gay – and when he beams down on this mission, the image suddenly turns from black-and-white into color as the Ambassador lands beside a swimming pool where various white male Earthlings look like they’re already having a pretty good time with each other. The film’s Wikipedia page compares this to The Wizard of Oz, which isn’t like this at all (except that both movies appeal, in very different ways, to Gay male audiences), and Gayniggers from Outer Space – pardon the pun – pretty much peters out with a final credits sequence for which Lindberg ripped off Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” and The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” The fact that this film contains what’s become Donald Trump’s favorite song is funnier than anything else in the movie, including the parts that were clearly meant to be funny (and missed big-time). One of the film’s minor mysteries is how they found so many Black men in Denmark, though at least I enjoyed the “spacesuit” costumes they were wearing, which were clearly form-fitting linen which did a nice job showing off the cast members’ members. The film’s Wikipedia page mentions a 2019 book called It Came from Something Awful, whose author. Dale Beran, described the film as a “Queer-interest Dutch [sic] B movie in the hyper-transgressive tradition of John Waters” that appealed to an audience of “nerdy white boys” who liked the concept of Blaxploitation. Actually It Came from Something Awful is a serious political work on the rise of Right-wing social media sites like 4chan and 8chan and how these helped Donald Trump gain his first term as President in 2016 – its subtitle is How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office – and no matter how deliberately John Waters was being transgressive, there was always a strain of real wit in his work that kept it from being as downright offensive and lame-brained as this film.

Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story (Allegheny Image Factory, Marwar Junction Productions, Red Letter Media, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (June 7) at 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime movie that turned out to be unusually good despite a piss-ant exploitative title: Kidnapped by a Killer: The Heather Robinson Story. Heather Tiffany Robinson (a marvelous performance by Rachel Stubington) is the 16-year-old adoptive daughter of Mike Robinson (Ross Crain, who was a bit hard to take in the role for no fault of his own: he looks like a more heavy-set version of J. D. Vance) and his wife Karen (Molly Miller). They’ve had a long and troubled relationship because Heather gets along well with Mike but is deeply suspicious and resentful of Karen. At one point she chews out Karen and says that Mike actually treats her like his daughter while Karen regards her as an “ornament.” This plot line is intercut with the story of Heather’s uncle John Robinson (Steve Guttenberg), whom she’s taken to see in an early scene. John Robinson is ostensibly a businessperson and activist for people with disabilities, including young women who’ve got pregnant out of wedlock, though in fact he’s a con artist who has a criminal record for forgery and fraud. We learn about John Robinson’s true past – or at least some of it – through an interview he has with parole officer Lisa Coy (Jana Kramer), who summons him from Kansas, where he lives and has a decaying farm, to Missouri because she’s convinced that after his most recent release from prison he’s still committing other crimes. Coy is determined to bust John for whatever he’s doing, and it turns out that he’s considerably worse than a con artist. He’s a serial killer whose modus operandi is recruiting young women who’ve left their families with phony job offers, holding them hostage, forcing them to sign their names on sheets of yellow legal-pad paper, and then killing them. The reason he has them sign their names to otherwise blank pages is so he can forge letters to their parents or families saying they’re all right and living elsewhere when in fact they’re dead and stuffed into 55-gallon oil drums on his property or a storage unit he’s rented in the name of one of his victims. At least some of the parents get suspicious of these phony letters because they don’t read like what their daughters actually said or wrote them, and one mother deduces that the letters are forged because the names of her daughter’s two dogs are misspelled.

The two plot strands meet when Mike and Karen announce that they’re taking Heather from Illinois to Kansas to attend the wedding of family member Samantha to her long-time fiancé, and Uncle John will be there. There’s a grimly funny scene in which Karen takes Heather shopping for a dress to wear to the wedding, and Heather predictably dislikes everything Karen comes up with and says of one particularly ugly dress that it makes her look like a doll. At the wedding reception John asks Heather to dance with him, though Mike cuts in in mid-dance. Uncle John is depicted as a nice if rather eccentric middle-aged guy – referencing Steve Guttenberg’s past, I joked to my husband Charles during one of the promos for this, “Old teen idols never die; they just end up on Lifetime” – and it brought back memories of my mother’s relatives who wanted me to kiss them on the cheeks even though I didn’t want any physical contact with them. (It wasn’t that I had anything against them; it was just that I was revolted by the idea of kissing and touching anybody that old.) Coy gradually convinces reluctant police officers to surveil John and gather enough evidence against him for a search warrant – the local D.A. is a Black man who at first is skeptical of the whole investigation but ultimately agrees to seek the warrant. On John’s farm the cops discover three large black oil barrels, two of which contain bodies in various stages of decomposition. Ultimately they identify at least eight of John Robinson’s victims. They and we also learn that Heather’s real name is Tiffany Stasi (it’s pronounced “Stacy” but I’m still trying to figure out why writers Shawn Linden and Pamela Gray gave her the same name as the infamous East German secret police) and her mom was Lisa Staci (Lily Talevski), whom we saw John dispatching in a prologue even though we didn’t yet know it was he. John killed Lisa and gave her baby to his brother Mike and Mike’s wife Karen. He charged them $5,000 for Tiffany, allegedly as “adoption fees,” and he faked a series of legal-looking adoption papers to give them ostensible justification for raising her as their own.

When all this comes to light, Heather finds herself in a pickle because she literally has no legal identity: she can’t work, get a driver’s license, or even attend school because legally she does not exist. The Robinsons hire a tutor to home-school her so she doesn’t fall too far behind – though the tutor is more interested in pumping Heather for details about her weird and unusual existence than in teaching her anything. Ultimately the police arrest John Robinson and he’s put on trial for multiple murders and sentenced to death. But Heather still lives in fear that either her grandmother or her father will claim her as their own and assert parental rights over her, forcing her to leave the Robinsons and move down South where grandma lives. Heather calls a man she’s been told is her biological dad, who to her disgust insists on calling her “Tiffany,” but she intuits that he’s a fake when he’s unable to describe the color of her eyes. She does drive south to meet her grandmother, who gives her Tiffany’s old baby book which, revealingly, has a blank space where her father’s name should be. The final scene takes place on Heather’s 18th birthday (ironically she’s learned that the date she’s always celebrated as her birthday was as phony as the rest of her knowledge of her existence), in which she celebrates her liberation from legal limbo but also asks the Robinsons to do an adult adoption of her so she’ll finally have an above-board and legally acknowledged family.

I’ve since looked up the real John Robinson on Wikipedia, and his actual story would have made an even more compelling film – he ostensibly trolled the Internet for his victims (the first known serial killer to do so) under the screen name “Slavemaster” – but the one we have is quite fine, thank you. Judging from the imdb.com synopsis – “A teenager’s life changes forever when she discovers her uncle is a suspected serial killer, forcing her to confront dark truths about her adoption and her biological mother’s fate” – I thought it was going to be a knockoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt (1943), also a story of a teenage girl who discovers that her beloved uncle (her biological kin in this one) is a serial killer. But though Kidnapped by a Killer hardly has the psychological resonances of Shadow of a Doubt (nor did I expect it to), it is a quite striking tale that raises questions of personal identity and whether we can ever be that sure of who we really are. It’s also quite well plotted by Linden and Grey and expertly directed by Lee Gabiana, who gets a superb performance from Rachel Stubington as a young woman whose whole sense of who she is is wrenched away from her by dramatic and traumatic surprise events that shake her life to its very core.

Catch Me If You Can (Dreamworks Pictures, Kemp Company, Splendid Pictures, Parkes/MacDonald Image Nation, Amblin Entertainment, Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2002)

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

Last night (June 6) at 10 p.m. Turner Classic Movies showed a film my husband Charles and I could have seen together in a theatre when it first came out, but didn’t: Catch Me If You Can (2002), Steven Spielberg’s quite engaging true-life story of Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), who in the seven years between 1963 and 1969 successfully scammed Pan American Airways and various hospitals and law firms of millions of dollars before he was finally tracked down and arrested – whereupon the government, acting on the to-catch-a-thief principle, gave him a sweetheart deal and allowed him to leave prison early in exchange for his becoming an FBI operative helping to uncover and track down schemes like the ones in which he’d participated. Abagnale was directly involved in this movie in several ways: the film was based on an autobiography he co-wrote with Stan Redding, he was credited as “consultant,” and he’s even in the movie in a bit part as a French policeman who assists FBI special agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) in busting him in Marseilles, France in 1969. TCM showed this as part of a regular series they’re doing every Friday night in June of films about con artists, and the June 6 screening followed A Face in the Crowd (Elia Kazan’s and Budd Schulberg’s masterpiece about a no-talent hick who gets elevated into major stardom and political influence – sound familiar?) and Elmer Gantry (a 1960 movie I first saw in 1972 after I had read Sinclair Lewis’s novel, which disappointed me because the film only dramatized the middle third of the book and I kept waiting and hoping they’d make a sequel with Burt Lancaster repeating the role; in that part Gantry rises above his faith-healer revival-tent origins and becomes pastor of an influential big-city mainstream church).

At first I thought Catch Me If You Can was paced too slowly, but it soon caught a groove. In fact, for me (at least) it caught a groove even before the film itself started; Spielberg tried to make it look as much as possible like a film from the 1960’s and to do that he brought in animator Lee Lennox to do a dazzling opening credits sequence much like the ones Saul Bass did in plenty of 1950’s and 1960’s classics. Charles was in the kitchen getting himself a snack when the credits flashed on (he often makes fun of my insistence on watching opening credits sequences) and I actually called him to the living room because I thought he should have a chance to see them. When the film opens Frank Abagnale, Jr. is growing up in New Rochelle, New Jersey (which fans of the Dick Van Dyke Show will recall as the suburb in which his and Mary Tyler Moore’s characters lived). His father, Frank Abagnale, Sr. (Christopher Walken), met his mother Paula (Nathalie Baye) in Montrichard, France while he was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. When the film opens Frank, Sr. is serving as a well-respected official in the local Rotary Club but he’s also being investigated for tax fraud by the Internal Revenue Service. In addition he’s pulling petty grifts like borrowing a white Cadillac from a local auto dealer, ostensibly for a test drive but really to make a “splash” in New York City by having his son pose as his chauffeur and hold the passenger door open for him once they park. When the family is forced to move to a different neighborhood and Frank, Jr. has to change high schools, he insists on wearing the blazer from his old school to the new one, and he gets bullied. He gets his revenge on his bully by striding into his high-school French class and posing as a substitute teacher. (We presume he learned French at home from his French mom.) We get the point quickly: Frank’s dad has taught him to have a blasé attitude towards the law and the normal rules and regulations of society, and Frank, Jr. is going to ramp that up and work his way up to truly big cons. Frank, Jr.’s life really goes off the rails when his parents break up, and given a choice as to which one he should live with, he chooses neither and runs away instead.

He scores a Pan American Airways uniform and, by posing as a reporter for his high-school newspaper, interviews a Pan Am executive for information on how a co-pilot is supposed to behave. With this imposture, he’s able to travel as so-called “deadwood” – a service airlines offer each other’s personnel to get them to the destinations from which they’re supposed to fly out again. He also starts forging paychecks, getting official Pan Am logos from soaking off the decals off model planes (there’s a grimly amusing scene of him having first one such model in his bathtub, then a whole slew of them) and cashing them at airport banks. Later he forges a medical-school diploma from Harvard and uses that to talk his way into a job as an emergency-room doctor on the night shift even though all he knows about practicing medicine has come from watching doctor shows on TV. Along the way he has various sexual encounters, including one with a woman whom he declares is the best date he’s ever had and another who’s a high-end hooker. She’s holding a deck of cards, and every time he quotes a price for a night with her, she says, “Go fish,” and tosses one of the cards to the floor – until he bids up to $1,000 and she agrees. He pays her with a forged $1,400 paycheck he makes over to her and gets her to reimburse him $400 in cash. Having already successfully posed as an airline pilot and a doctor, Frank, Jr. then settles in New Orleans because his latest girlfriend, Brenda Strong (a young Amy Adams), has a family there. Brenda met Frank when she was a volunteer nurse at the hospital at which he was posing as a doctor, and he seduced her by giving her a gold-plated necklace (he seems to have a large supply of these things, and his modus operandi with them is to hand them to the woman he’s after and say, “You must have dropped this”). When they first meet she’s wearing braces, but later she gets them removed. Brenda tells Frank that her family disowned her when she got pregnant and had a secret and illegal abortion, and Frank immediately offers to marry her and go to her home town, New Orleans, to get her parents to take her back and agree to let him marry her.

When Frank learns that Brenda’s dad is local prosecutor Roger Strong (Martin Sheen), he decides to impress him by passing himself off as someone with dual graduate degrees in medicine and law and announcing that he’s going to resume his legal career. Dad gives him a job in his prosecutor’s office even though, as with doctoring, all Frank knows about lawyering is what he’s seen on TV. He copies Raymond Burr’s approach as Perry Mason and goes full-tilt even at a preliminary hearing with only himself and a very exasperated judge present. While all this is going on, Carl Hanratty (reportedly a composite character made up by screenwriter Jeff Nathanson out of several FBI agents involved in the manhunt for Frank, Jr.) has been tracking Frank, Jr. across the country and the trail of bad checks he’s left behind him. He gets a clue from an unlikely source; he’s having lunch at a restaurant when a teenage waiter (Jeremy Howard) sees the name “Barry Alden” listed repeatedly on a document showing how a person using that name has cashed a long series of bad checks in various locations. The waiter tells Hanratty that “Barry Alden” is the alter identity of the comic-book superhero The Flash, and from that Hanratty deduces that his elusive prey is a teenager because that’s (or at least it was) the main audience for comic books. Nathanson makes Hanratty a Captain Ahab character with Frank, Jr. as his Moby Dick; it’s probably the least sympathetic performance of Tom Hanks’s career until he played Col. Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic. Hanratty is so relentlessly humorless that, when his FBI colleagues challenge him to tell a joke, he says, “Knock knock.” When they answer, “Who’s there?,” he says, “Go fuck yourselves.” (He only gets to complete this routine once in the film because one of the quirkier rules of the motion picture ratings board is if you say the “F”-word more than once, you get an NC-17 rating automatically.)

Acting more like a comic-book villain than a rationally self-preserving con artist, Frank, Jr. makes it a point of calling Hanratty every Christmas Eve and taunting him. At one point Hanratty traces Frank’s father – by then his mom has remarried to one of Frank’s old Rotary friends and the two have had a daughter – who tries to cover up for his son by denying any knowledge of his whereabouts. But Hanratty notices a letter addressed to Frank, Sr. from a return address in Atlanta and traces him there, only to lose him again. When Hanratty and his men show up at his wedding reception for Brenda, Frank, Jr. shows her suitcases full of cash and tries to get her to flee the country with him, but naïve little Brenda is too stunned to react either way. Ultimately Hanratty traces Frank, Jr. to his mother’s home town, Montrichard, France (which really exists, by the way), because he’s figured out that Frank’s fake checks are coming from a professional-grade printing press which is hidden somewhere in plain sight. When Hanratty gets a list of the locations of presses like that in Europe and Montrichard is on it, he figures the most logical place for it to be is Frank’s mother’s old home town. Hanratty shows up there and insists he’s going to arrest Frank and there are 12 French police officers outside to support him. Frank thinks Hanratty is bluffing, and he comes outside expecting to see no one – and suddenly a squad of French police drive up in their Citroëns (a 1950’s version of a space-age vehicle and one of the oddest-looking cars ever built). Hanratty takes Frank into custody and announces they’re going to fly back to the U.S. together. As the plane is about to descend and a group of nervous flight attendants tell Hanratty and his fellow agents that they need to take their seats so the plane can land, Frank goes into the plane’s restroom and manages to pry the toilet loose from its moorings (it’s only plastic anyway) so he can crawl out under the plane’s landing wheels and make an escape attempt. Ultimately he’s nailed, after a poignant scene in which he goes to his mother’s and stepfather’s home on Christmas Eve and watches his half-sister through the big picture window but doesn’t dare try to make contact with her. But as I mentioned at the outset, as with a lot of more recent computer hackers, the FBI cuts a deal with Frank, Jr. for his help in nailing other criminals who are trying to pull the same scams he did.

I remember seeing two promotional TV interviews about this film when it was in theatres; one was with Frank Abagnale, Jr. himself warning people how to avoid computer scams, and the other was with composer John Williams. In scoring this film, Williams avoided the sort of big, symphonic score he’d written for the Superman and Star Wars films, as well as their myriad sequelae, and instead went back to his roots in 1950’s big-band jazz. The film also makes a quite effective use of source music, including Judy Garland’s 1940’s record of George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” (Billie Holiday’s version, also from the 1940’s, remains definitive, but the Abagnales aren’t the sorts of people who would have been listening to Billie Holiday in the early 1960’s); the Stan Getz/João Gilberto/Astrud Gilberto “The Girl from Ipanema” (played, natch, while Frank is hobnobbing with various nubile young women in an Atlanta swimming pool); and quite a few other inspired choices. Spielberg’s determination to make something that looked like a 1960’s film also inspired his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. Unlike all too many color films these days in which everything is so drenched in dank, dirty greens and browns one wonders why, if they’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum, they don’t just go ahead and shoot in black-and-white, Kaminski’s work here is actually colorful. It’s drenched in bright pastels that emphasize both the beauty and the ultimate phoniness of the world Frank Abagnale, Jr. has created for himself. It’s also worth noting that the last name is pronounced “Aaaah-bag-nail,” since both Sr. and Jr. are quite impatient with anyone who tries to show off by reverting to its original Italian pronunciation.

Among other things, Catch Me If You Can is a testimonial to the era before personal computers and the Internet, in which identity theft was still a relatively rare crime because in order to impersonate another person, you literally had to forge physical documents saying you were that person. You couldn’t just hack into a database from a remote location and set up a phony personal file and online presence like you can now. (That's the real point made by those laborious scenes in which Frank, Jr. painstakingly soaks the decals off from the models of Pan Am's jets so his fake paychecks from them will have the correct logo.) Ironically, Leonardo DiCaprio made a virtual remake of this movie 11 years later in The Wolf of Wall Street (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-wolf-of-wall-street-red.html), in which he also played a real-life con artist (corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort) who scammed a lot of people before he finally got his comeuppance. That film was directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by Terence Winter, and was also based on an autobiography by DiCaprio’s character, but somehow Scorsese and Winter missed the kind of artful balance between making us root for their con artist and wanting to see him get caught that Spielberg and Nathanson nailed beautifully. What’s more, Jordan Belfort targeted ordinary people who in some cases entrusted their life savings to him and his corrupt brokerage, while Frank Abagnale, Jr. went almost exclusively after deep-pocketed corporations which could relatively easily absorb what he was stealing from them.

Pirate Party on Catalina Isle (MGM, 1936)

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

Last night (June 4) at 9:15 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies to watch a 1936 MGM short called Pirate Party on Catalina Isle and the 1938 feature The Adventures of Marco Polo. Pirate Party on Catalina Isle – which I briefly had confused with La Fiesta de Santa Barbara, the stunning three-strip Technicolor short which featured Judy Garland’s MGM debut as one of the Garland Sisters, nèe the Gumm Sisters (as all Garlandmaniacs probably know by now, the name she was born with was “Frances Gumm”) – was a three-strip Technicolor two-reeler shot in and around Catalina Island and featuring glimpses of real-life movie stars, including Cary Grant and Randolph Scott sitting at an outdoor restaurant table and looking for all the world like a Gay couple. (Grant and Scott lived together for many years and there were always the inevitable rumors about the true nature of their relationship; the modern consensus seems to be that they were a Gay couple but they had an arrangement by which either could break off the relationship temporarily if they wanted to date a woman.) The plot, such as it is, features Chester Morris as a pirate captain whose ship, the Cabrillo, invades Catalina and hijacks the tourist vessel Avalon (and yes, the movie’s theme is the old “Avalon” song by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dreyer based on the orchestral introduction to the aria “È lucevan le stelle” from Puccini’s Tosca, enough so that Puccini’s publisher Ricordi sued the American songwriters for plagiarism and won). The Cabrillo is crewed by a number of hot-pantsed chorus girls who do a lot of dancing on stage to the music of Charles “Buddy” Rogers and his orchestra. Rogers was best known for being Mary Pickford’s third (and longest-lasting) husband and for a stage routine in which he’d pick up several instruments in succession and play O.K. solos on each one. (In John Hammond’s autobiography he recalls seeing Gene Krupa playing with the Rogers band and getting successively more bored as Rogers went through his routine, with one instrument after another. Hammond was there to offer Krupa the job of playing drums for Benny Goodman, and Krupa was overjoyed at the opportunity.)

Naturally, since this film takes place on an island and a lot of boats are involved, there were plenty of opportunities for the filmmakers (the producer was Louis Lewyn, the director was Gene Burdette, and the cinematographer was Ray Rennahan, with the omnipresent Natalie Kalmus there as color supervisor) to show the one color three-strip could do justice to that the earlier two-strip process couldn’t: blue. There was also a quite good dance number by Johnny Downs (the athletic tap dancer Paramount briefly tried to turn into their answer to Fred Astaire) and Betty Burgess (who’s wearing a quite daring outfit for a 1936 film: a vest with straps that go across the front and reveal a surprising amount of cleavage for the time); a nice scene in which various chorines (including an anonymous Lynn Bari) parade across the camera in small sailboats; and nice shots of real celebrities of the time, including Grant, Scott, Robert Armstrong, Errol Flynn (with his first wife, Lili Damita, whose star fell as his rose: A Star Is Born with the genders reversed), Lee Tracy, a surprisingly restrained Mickey Rooney, and Marion Davies, who’s introduced as the “Queen of Hollywood” based on a fan-magazine contest she’d won … in 1922. There’s also a quite nice cameo by banjo star Eddie Peabody (who’s shown as a fisherman pulling a toy banjo from the sea and throwing it back because it’s too small) introducing a banjo ensemble (with one guitar thrown in) led by someone named Rue Tyler that reminded me of the banjo section in James Reese Europe’s pre-World War I band. And there’s a nice bit by Leon Errol as (what else?) a drunk.