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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mank (Blue Light, Flying Pictures, Netflix Studios, Panic Pictures, 2020)

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

The last movie my husband Charles and I watched together with his mother Edi on our recent vacation on Friday, August 1 was Mank, a Netflix co-production directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by his late father Jack (who died in 2003, 17 years before the film was made), and dealing with the fraught topic of just who wrote the screenplay for the 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. The controversy started in 1969, when Pauline Kael published a two-part article in The New Yorker called “Raising Kane,” which alleged that Herman J. Mankiewicz, a major Hollywood writer and producer in the 1930’s who was also a chronic alcoholic and drank himself into an early grave, was not just the co-writer with Kane’s director and star, Orson Welles, but was the sole writer. A lot of people who’d shared Kael’s skepticism about the French auteur theory that the director is the prime mover behind any movie and the writer just an incidental helping hand seized on Kael’s article as “proof” that film is really a writer’s medium and the director is merely the hired hand who follows the writer’s bidding. Actually, the infrastructure needed to make a major (or even not-so-major, though recent video technology has changed all that and put quality filmmaking in the hands of the masses again) film is so capital-intensive that it’s arguable that the producer and the producing studio are ultimately the guiding lights behind any film, and they essentially give orders to both the director and writer, as well as the actors, about what the project will be and how it shall be made.

Mank is essentially a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), spined around his work on the Citizen Kane script but periodically flashing back to his earlier career, which began in 1930 when Paramount, which like the other major studios were desperate for people who could write literate dialogue now that sound films had replaced silent ones, was raiding the ranks of Broadway playwrights. In 1940 RKO Studios hired Orson Welles and gave him an extraordinarily generous contract, though it wasn’t quite as generous as the opening title of Mank makes it seem. The title says he was allowed to make any sort of film he wanted, without having to seek studio approval first. In fact the contract gave Welles the right to offer six stories to RKO for their approval; if they turned them all down RKO could offer Welles six stories of their choice for him to choose among; and if neither Welles nor the studio could reach agreement on any of these 12 stories the contract would be canceled. Another clause in the contract said that Welles himself would personally write the screenplays for each of his films, which became a major point of contention when Welles and his associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who after years working behind the scenes became a late-in-life star in the 1970’s as a character actor in the film The Paper Chase, brought in Mankiewicz. Fearful of being held in breach of contract if RKO’s executives found out he’d hired another writer, Welles and Houseman extracted from the desperate, alcoholic Mankiewicz a terrible contract which gave Welles’s company, Mercury Productions, all rights to his screenplay, including credit.

Houseman installed Mankiewicz in a cabin in the remote town of Victorville, California with the idea of keeping him away from drink long enough to create a script, which Mankiewicz finished and called American. It was a drama about a newspaper publisher who begins his career as a progressive promoter of the working class and its ideals, only to move Right politically over time. It drew a lot of its inspiration from the real-life career of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), whom Welles didn’t know but Mankiewicz had been close friends with until Mankiewicz’s alcoholism drove a wedge between them. Hearst was particularly hard on alcoholics since his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) was also fond of the bottle, and Hearst didn’t want drunkards in his presence for fear they’d slip drinks to Davies. The plot of Mank incorporates a lot of well-known anecdotes about classic Hollywood, including John Gilbert’s (Nick Job) legendary confrontation with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) over mothers. Mayer worshipped mothers; Gilbert’s own mother was a minor stage actress named Ada Adaire who had been so, shall we say, free with her affections Gilbert literally had no idea who his biological father was. In one argument, Mayer threatened to give Gilbert a D.I.Y. castration and Gilbert said, “Go ahead! I’ll still be more of a man than you!” There’s also a bizarre subplot inserted by Fincher Vater und Söhn dealing with Upton Sinclair’s radical 1934 campaign for Governor of California and the fake newsreels MGM produced, under the rubric The Inquiring Reporter, to trash his campaign and ensure his defeat by tarring him as a dangerous socialist.

While there’s an unmistakable similarity between the California gubernatorial campaign of 1934 and the Presidential campaign of 2024, in which Donald Trump posed as a friend of working people and then, once he was back in power in the White House, showed his (and his billionaire backers’) true colors in passing the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that will (among other things) cut about 17 million Americans off of access to health care while running up the budget deficit to finance huge tax cuts for the super-rich – in both 1934 and 2024 ultra-rich people scared non-rich people into voting against their class interests – the film’s portrayal of Mankiewicz’s role in this goes against everything we know about his politics. The fictional Mankiewicz is appalled at the tactics MGM used against Sinclair and feels guilty that he suggested the fake newsreels just as a joke and they were assigned to an aspiring (and fictional) second-unit director, Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), who grabbed the assignment and then felt guilty about it and responded by drinking and ultimately committing suicide. The real Herman Mankiewicz was Louis B. Mayer’s tool in helping found the so-called “Screen Playwrights,” a company “union” designed to prevent the actual organization of screenwriters into a real union, the Screen Writers Guild (though the film’s script includes Mankiewicz’s real-life snotty comment that any real writers would have put an apostrophe after “Writers” in the genuine union’s name). Despite the wrenching cuts between time frames (did the Finchers think that in order to pay proper homage to Citizen Kane they had to make their own movie non-linear?), I quite liked Mank.

For one thing, David Fincher and cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt shot it in red-filtered black-and-white, achieving the convincing “look” of a 1940’s movie. For another, they got a quite good actor, Tom Burke, to play Orson Welles; his reproduction of Welles’s famous voice is virtually uncanny (as we learn when the film features an outro of the real Welles from a transcribed radio broadcast from South America, where he was shooting a never-finished documentary called It’s All True, commenting on he and Mankiewicz winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the only Oscar either of them won) and, though we see very little of him (mostly we just hear his voice on the phone), he’s tall, hunky and far from the bloated apparition Welles became in his later years. (The announcer who reads the names of Mankewicz and Welles as the winners is played by Herman Mankiewicz’s real-life grandson Ben.) My husband Charles liked another film we’d seen on the making of Citizen Kane, RKO 281 (1999), reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/11/rko-281-hbo-films-wgbh-tv-scott-free.html, better, but that film had its own set of problems, notably its portrayal of Welles as a political naïf who didn’t understand the power of media moguls like Hearst. The real Welles was not only aware of their power, that was the whole reason he wanted to make a movie about one; as he said in a statement he released in 1941, “[N]o industrialist can ever achieve in a democratic government the kind of general and catholic power with which I wanted to invest my particular character. The only solution seemed to place my man in charge of some important channel of communication — radio or newspaper.” I was also amused at the fact that neither actor playing Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith in RKO 281, Amanda Seyfried here) attempted the infamous Davies stutter. But even though Mank was irritatingly faithful to the Pauline Kael-derived line (i.e., lie) that the script for Citizen Kane was entirely Mankiewicz’s (including his boast at the end that he wrote the script on his own without Welles’s involvement), I quite enjoyed Mank.

The Gangster (King Brothers Productions, Allied Artists nèe Monogram, 1947)

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

The first movie my husband Charles and I screened on our own once we returned from our week-long vacation in Martinez to see his mother on Sunday, August 3 was a DVD of The Gangster, a 1947 film noir from Allied Artists – which was in the process of changing its name from Monogram to shed its former image as a cheap little studio making cheap little low-quality “B” movies. This was in part a follow-up to a surprise hit Monogram made a year before this, Suspense (1946), which I reviewed for moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/suspense-king-brothers.html. Like The Gangster, Suspense was produced by Maurice and Frank King (true name: Kozinski), two brothers who had been bootleggers during Prohibition and decided after Repeal to try their luck in the movie business, and it starred the same leads: Barry Sullivan as the gangster Shubunka (the name deliberately picked to keep the character’s ethnicity uncertain, and if he has a first name we never learn it) and British skating star Belita as his girlfriend, Nancy Starr. Monogram had signed Belita to make skating movies to compete with Sonja Henie at 20th Century-Fox and Vera Hruba Ralston at Republic, but after two plain vehicles for her talents on ice the King brothers actually put her in a film noir. It was still a skating film but Belita’s numbers in Suspense were put in a context that was essentially Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice on ice: Roberta Elba (Belita) is a skating star who’s married to her promoter (Albert Dekker) but falls in love, or at least lust, for a drifter (Barry Sullivan) whom her husband hires to do odd jobs.

The general consensus about The Gangster, written by Daniel Fuchs based on a novel he’d published 10 years earlier called Low Company (which quite frankly would have been a better title for the film, too), is it’s a better film than Suspense, but I entirely disagree. Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” intro and outro, which we watched on YouTube before and after the film even though we saw the movie itself on DVD, hailed the film in general and Shubunka’s death (am I really spoiling anything by telling you he doesn’t make it out of the film alive?) as some sort of quintessential film noir, but it’s just a pretty old-fashioned tale of a burned-out gangster meeting his demise at the hands of a new breed of crooks. Shubunka is an operator who’s welded together a criminal enterprise from his connections with various small-timers running concessions on “Neptune Beach” (read: Coney Island), notably Nick Jammey (Akim Tamiroff), who runs an ice-cream parlor that fronts for criminal enterprises, notably bookmaking and numbers running. One of the film’s weaknesses is we never see Shubunka in any criminal behavior; we just hear him in voice-over tell us that he’s made his pile and wants to retire from the thug life and live a respectable existence for whatever time is available to him. Alas, the independent operations of Shubunka and his fellow small-timers are being taken over by Cornell (Sheldon Leonard), who’s ruthlessly consolidating the city’s criminal operations into one big, beautiful company under his control. I wonder if Fuchs intended this as a critique of really existing “legitimate” American capitalism, which likewise has been a saga of independent operators staking out territory and then falling victim to larger, more impersonal, more unscrupulous enterprises which seek to take them over almost literally by hook or crook.

The Gangster seems like a modern movie in one respect: there’s no one in the dramatis personae we really like and can root for to succeed. One fascinating subplot involves Karty (John Ireland), who hangs out at Nick’s ice-cream parlor and laments that he was once a respected and well-paid accountant until he fell for the horse-racing bug and became a gambling addict. Karty is continually pestering Shubunka for money to pay his gambling debts, and ultimately he’s beaten to death by his three brothers-in-law, who own a garage from which Karty embezzled money with which to gamble. The plot is basically about Shubunka’s increasing alienation as his long-time allies whom he counted on to unite with him against Cornell’s takeover tactics instead, one by one, ally themselves with Cornell. Even his girlfriend Nancy turns against him at the end, lured by Cornell into betraying him with the promise of stardom in a Broadway show. I suspect one reason a lot of critics like The Gangster better than Suspense is Belita doesn’t skate in it; instead we see her in a nightclub sequence just singing one song, the 1932 oldie “Paradise” by Nacio Herb Brown and Gordon Clifford. The imdb.com page on this film says that Belita had a voice double, but it doesn’t say who; I’d like to know because she’s not only a good singer (though she’s forced to sing an altered lyric to make the song more suitable for a woman), her vocal timbre matches Belita’s well enough to suspend disbelief and accept them as the same person. (That’s been a problem in movies far more prestigious and big-budgeted than this one; I’m still irritated that in the 1957 Pal Joey, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak were saddled with singing doubles who sounded nothing like their speaking voices, and even Frank Sinatra’s vocals were recorded in such a different acoustic from his dialogue that if you didn’t already know Sinatra’s voice you’d probably suspect he was being dubbed, too.)

When Charles and I watched Suspense he thought Barry Sullivan’s performance was too boorish, too unsubtle, in the male lead, and I think the actor who should have been in both Suspense and The Gangster was John Garfield. Garfield had the knack for playing both toughness and an underlying vulnerability (as did James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, though by the mid-1940’s both were too old for this role), and in Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way (1951), he played a character quite similar to Shubunka – a doomed gangster going about his final days – and played him far better than Sullivan did. The Gangster has some good aspects, including the stylized matte paintings used for the “Neptune Beach” backgrounds (around the time they made this film the King brothers published an article in an industry trade paper blasting other studios for going on location or spending money on elaborate sets to create backgrounds the King brothers could do with just paint on cardboard) and the film’s remarkable ending. Told by Cornell that they will immediately kill Shubunka if Shubunka kills Karty (and, as usual, Fuchs doesn’t bother to explain why Karty is considered so important by Cornell and his organized-crime combine they feel a need to avenge his death), Shubunka is cornered in classic noir fashion and shot to death in the dead of night on a rain-soaked street intersection. We’re then told that the police immediately arrested Cornell and his entire gang (one of whom is played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in a powerful mini-performance flashing back to his great work in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon), an odd ending since we’ve seen no evidence of the police before anywhere in the film – just a brief scene with a political “fixer” who has promised both Shubunka and Cornell that for a fee he can bribe the police on their behalf to let them alone.

Murderbot (Apple TV, Depth of Field, Paramount Television Productions, Phantom Four Films, 2025)

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

Over the last week during which my husband Charles and I were out of town visiting his mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched a number of movies and TV shows on the Apple TV+ “streaming” network. (This despicable “streaming” technology is displacing physical media for films and TV shows as well as records.) One was a series we screened July 29 and 30 and which we were particularly interested in: Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’s novel All Systems Down, first in a series of seven books (five novellas, two full-length novels) about Murderbot, a 25th century “SecUnit” (short for “Security Unit”) robot who has figured out how to hack its “governor module.” As a result, it’s free to obey or refuse human orders at will and go wherever it likes in the known universe. Interplanetary travel has become practical due to the discovery of wormholes in space that can move spacecraft along great distances, though navigation based on these is tricky and requires the use of onboard computers which, like Murderbot and the other mobile robots, can communicate with humans and so-called “augmented humans” (people who have had implants to increase their brain or brawn) by simply talking to them. I must say I was more than a bit disappointed when I heard that Alexander Skarsgård had been picked to play Murderbot because from Wells’s books (I’d read all seven and so had Charles; in fact, it was he who first turned me on to them) I had envisioned Murderbot as a short, wiry, compactly built female. (Indeed, I even had one of our neighbors, a short, wiry Lesbian, in mind as my model for what Murderbot looked like.) I also found myself hearing a woman’s voice as Murderbot – the books are narrated from Murderbot’s point of view and the author is a woman – even though Wells made it clear that Murderbot’s preferred gender pronouns are “it” and “its.” Though Murderbot is a mechanical construct overall, it incorporates human tissue and therefore can feel pain, though its electromechanical parts can dial down its pain sensitivity.

Aside from my qualms about casting Skarsgård as Murderbot (presumably on the grounds that a tall, hunky biological male would be far more credible to the movie or TV audience as an action hero than a short, wiry, butch-looking female) and my missing certain aspects of the novel, like the transport computer guidance system Murderbot nicknames “ART” (for “Asshole Rapid Transit”), the show pretty much does justice to the original. Murderbot joins an interplanetary expedition by a bunch of do-gooders called the Preservation Alliance that operates within the overall framework of the Corporation Rim, the governing authority for that sector of the universe. (In this 25th century future, corporate and government authority have fused into one giant bureaucracy out to exploit the universe for whatever profit it can gain. In other words, it’s pretty much like what the U.S. is evolving into under Führer Trump.) The Preservation Alliance people don’t really want a SecUnit as part of their crew, but the Corporation Rim requires that they have one for “security” or they won’t insure the voyage. The expedition is commanded by Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a middle-aged Black woman who’s an expert on terraforming as well as president of the Preservation Alliance. Other members of the team include Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), a geochemist; Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), scientist and legal counsel; Arada (Tattiawana Jones), a biologist; Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a wormhole expert; and the group’s one augmented human, Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), a technology expert who takes an instant dislike to Murderbot and is convinced it’s a Corporation Rim spy who means them no good. The principal creators of the show are brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, who adapted Wells’s book for TV and Chris directed the first three episodes.

The Preservation Alliance team finds themselves on a remote planet where the only maps they’ve been given, prepared by the Corporation Rim, are horrendously inaccurate and don’t indicate the existence of predatory monsters who look like the sandworms in Dune except they have heads at both ends of their worm-like bodies and can therefore attack and consume humans at either end. Ultimately, after they (except for Gurathin) reach a grudging respect for Murderbot since it keeps saving their lives, they realize that the planet has been invaded by a mining team from a company called GrayCris that is not part of the corporate establishment. One of the gimmicks the Weitzes preserved from Wells’s novels is that Murderbot distracts itself from the long, boring parts of its existence by endlessly rewatching commercial media, particularly a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (which might be a good one for the Weitzes or someone else to create as an actual show). Also Pin-Lee and Arada are in a Lesbian relationship which they plan to expand by bringing in the male Ratthi to form a “thruple,” only Ratthi is uneasy because he’s attracted to Pin-Lee but not to Arada. Murderbot gives us asides in which it tells us how appalled it is by human conduct in general and sex in particular. In her book Wells references “SexBots” that come equipped with sexual organs and are created to copulate with humans, but Murderbot virtuously insists it’s a SecBot, not a SexBot. This doesn’t stop the humans from speculating what sort of genitalia Murderbot would have if it had any at all.

We get some intriguing shots of Murderbot naked without a dick, breasts, or nipples, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, to get the hairless look demanded for the character Alexander Skarsgård went through regular waxing treatments and then complained how much they hurt. Ultimately the Preservation Alliance threatens to go public with the damage done to them by the Corporation Rim and their negligence in providing them with maps that didn’t indicate the presence of the person-eating worms, as well as not briefing them about the GreyCris crews on the planet. There’s also a character called Leebeedee (Anna Konkle) whom the Weitzes introduced from later in Wells’s cycle, who’s rescued from a Corporation colony that’s otherwise been wiped out by the GreyCris people, only she goes rogue and threatens to kill the entire Preservation crew until Murderbot takes her out with its built-in weapons. And there’s a subplot indicating how the GreyCris people turned the SecBots assigned to the Corporation crew into monstrous machines that killed them: they hacked them with a small medallion they stuck on their backs. They do that to Murderbot, too, and in one of the weirder scenes of the show it begs the Preservation crew to shoot it before it goes rogue and kills them. Though I liked the books even better, this Murderbot series caught much of the appeal of Wells’s texts and in particular Murderbot’s slow but steady acquisition of human emotions as it’s around people who for once treat it as an equal and not just an object, and its discomfort as it starts to react more like a human instead of a machine.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions, Appian Way, Paramount, 2023)

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

On July 31 my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched Martin Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a true story involving the Osage Indians. The Osage had been successively relocated, like most of the Native tribes that survived our genocide against them, and dumped on a barren patch of land in Oklahoma. Only that so-called “barren patch of land” turned out to have huge oil deposits under it, and as the oil started shooting up from the ground in uncontrollable gushers starting in 1920, the Osage found themselves possessors of unimaginable wealth – and also beset by whites trying to take it away from them. Killers of the Flower Moon was based on a quite exciting nonfiction book by David Grann, and was scripted by Scorsese himself and Eric Roth, and the central characters – William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a middle-aged patriarch with a striking resemblance to the late President Truman who’s the most influential white person in the area; his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Di Caprio – so both of Scorsese’s all-time favorite actors are in this film!), who’s just returned from serving in World War I as a cook and who gets enlisted in Hale’s scheme to grab much of the Osage oil wealth for themselves; and Mollie Kyle Burkhart (Native actress Lily Gladstone, who won acclaim for the quiet dignity and strength of her performance), whom Ernest courts and marries as part of Hale’s sinister plot. There are many aspects of the real story that are explained in Grann’s book, notably that many of the Osage natives were deemed “incompetent” to handle their own financial affairs by a corrupt white-run judicial system and therefore had court-appointed “guardians” who controlled their money so they couldn’t spend any of it without the guardians’ approval. If you saw the film without having read the book, you’d have no idea why some of the Osage are referred to as “incompetent” while others – the ones who escaped the reach of the white-run guardianship system and the obvious opportunities for corruption it presented – were deemed “competent” and able to handle their own affairs.

Also, in a laudable but foredoomed attempt to protect the Osages’ interests, the federal government stipulated that the Osage could not sell their “headrights” – their shares of the oil revenues – but would keep them until they died, after which they would be passed on to their descendants or relatives. This was the loophole Hale seized on to hatch his evil scheme: he’d assign Ernest to marry Mollie and then send hired killers to knock off not only Mollie but also all her living relatives so Ernest would inherit all the Kyles’ share of the oil money. The oddest thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is that it’s boring; a story that David Grann told in a rivetingly exciting, almost breathless prose style became in Scorsese’s hands an almost interminable 3 ½-hour movie. Naturally there are aspects of Killers of the Flower Moon that work, including Scorsese’s vivid staging of the murders themselves; the use of extensive music from the early 1920’s to set the background for the characters (though if we’re to believe Scorsese’s soundtrack, the Osage of the early 1920’s had a remarkably advanced taste in contemporary pop music; their record collections included such recherché African-American items as Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” and the original 1924 Ma Rainey-Louis Armstrong recording of “See, See, Rider,” a song Rainey wrote); and a newsreel depiction of the race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 that killed over 140 people and utterly destroyed a previously prosperous stretch of Black Tulsa that had come to be known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Though one of the white characters in Killers of the Flower Moon dismiss the Osage as not having done anything to earn their sudden, new-found wealth – they just happened to be sitting on top of a stretch of land that contained oil – Scorsese’s and Roth’s parallel between what’s happening to the Osage in their part of Oklahoma and what happened to the prosperous African-Americans in Tulsa, who had worked hard over many years to build their fortunes, is obvious. The racist white supremacists of the 1920’s were appalled at the idea that any people of color could achieve and maintain affluence, and they were all too eager to use their power – including resorting to violence when all else failed – to take it away from them.

Ultimately the Osage killings are solved by agents of the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice – contrary to the Scorsese-Roth script, which presents it as a newly organized agency, it had actually been around since 1908, and its first director was private detective agency founder William J. Burns, who appears in the movie as a private contractor the Osage hire to find out who’s knocking them off and who’s driven out of the area when thugs beat him to within an inch of his life. (At least Scorsese and Roth correctly call it the “Bureau of Investigation”; it didn’t acquire the word “Federal” at the start of its name until 1935.) The movie ends with an intriguing scene set in a radio studio in 1947, when the story of the Osage murders is being presented as part of a true-crime story with musician Jack White as one of the participants and Scorsese himself as the narrator. I quite liked Scorsese’s choice of the theme music for this show: Ferde Grofé’s 1928 tone poem “Metropolis: A Blue Fantasie” (that’s how it was spelled on the original record labels), in a modern recording by Vince Giordano, Scorsese’s go-to guy whenever he needs an accurate re-creation of the big-band sound for one of his films. “Metropolis” was originally recorded by Paul Whiteman’s band in March 1928, with a 10-second cornet break by Bix Beiderbecke from 6:20 to 6:30 (he’s not improvising but his clarion tone is still unmistakable), and I hope Giordano got a chance to record the entire piece in modern sound instead of just the snippet of its opening heard here. Charles summed up my response to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said after it was over, “I thought it would be zippier.” Certainly David Grann’s book was suitably zippy – as well as including a powerful later section in which the adult daughter of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart finally has to come to grips with the knowledge that the only reason she exists is because her dad married her mom as part of a plot to kill not only mom but her entire family for the sake of some oil money – but the film is a 3 ½-hour meander through a story Grann told with a strong sense of pace. It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/08/noah-paramount-regency-protozoa-2014.html) in that both are films which could have been made considerably shorter (and hence better entertainment) without cutting a word of their scripts if their directors had just paced them faster!

Luck (Skydance Animation, Apple Original Films, Ilion Animation Studios, 2022)

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

During our recently concluded vacation to visit my husband Charles’s mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched five movies of varying levels of interest. The first, which we saw on July 27, was Luck (2022), a computer-animated film produced by Skydance Animation in association with Apple Original Films and a Madrid-based studio originally called Ilion Animation until it merged with Skydance. I’ll say at the start that I generally don’t like computer animation; it doesn’t have either the realism of live-action or the flexibility and (in rare instances) artistic quality of drawn animation. I have liked a few computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul, because the creativity and genuine emotions of their stories overcame my overall distaste for the look of computer animation. Luck was not so – pardon the pun – lucky. It’s the work of committee-driven processes, and looks and sounds like it. The concept for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited) was by Rebeca Carrasco, Juan De Dios, and Julián Romero, though the story itself was by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, with Murray getting credit for the script as well and Julia Miranda supplying “additional dialogue.” The film also went through changes of director (Peggy Holmes replaced Alessandro Carloni) and composer. John Debney, son of 1950’s Walt Disney Studios TV producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club) and a major contributor to Disney projects in various media (movies, TV, theme parks), replaced Tanya Donelly (a well-traveled woman rock musician who’s been in the bands Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly) and the L.A.-based band Mt. Joy.

There are also two names on the producers’ list that gave an air of creepiness to the project. One was David Ellison, owner of Skydance Media and Donald Trump groupie (and son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who famously said that in the age of the Internet “Privacy is over; get used to it”), who just arranged to acquire Paramount and CBS and to ensure government approval of the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses paid Trump what amounts to a $30 to $35 million bribe ($15 million to settle Trump’s preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes for allegedly defaming him by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in which Trump did not appear, and $15 to $20 million worth of free airtime to promote Trump-selected causes) and offered Trump Stephen Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter. The other was John Lasseter, founder of Pixar Studios and essentially the inventor of this style of computer animation. Lasseter was put in charge of Walt Disney Studios’ entire animation department when Disney bought Pixar, until he was fired for sexually harassing his female employees in 2017 in one of the earliest triumphs of the “#MeToo” movement. Emma Thompson originally signed to be one of the voice actors for Luck, but dropped out of the project on principle when she heard Lasseter was involved. Given that many of the people on the project, including Peggy Holmes, Kiel Murray, and John Debney, had previously worked with Lasseter on Pixar/Disney projects, Luck has the look and feel of a Pixar/Disney film in exile.

Basically it’s your standard-issue adolescent quest narrative centered around Samantha “Sam” Greenfield (Eva Nobelzada), who’s the recipient of continuous bad luck. When the film opens she’s just turned 18 and has therefore aged out of the orphanage where she’s grown up. She pleads with the management to be allowed to stay at least two more days to help the chances of her best friend, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to get adopted and find a “forever family.” Sam is told that’s not allowed, but she is placed in her own tiny apartment and is also given a job at a retail store, where because she’s the unluckiest person in the world she has a disastrous first day. On her way home from work she finds a magic coin – a penny with a four-leaf clover insignia – and the next day she’s super-competent on her job until she accidentally flushes the penny down a toilet. She offers to share her sandwich with Bob (Simon Pegg), a black cat with a Scottish accent who lives and works in the Land of Luck and needs his penny back to be readmitted there. When Bob finds out Sam has lost his crucial penny, the two journey down a magic portal to the Land of Luck, run by a race of leprechauns. They try to pass Sam off as a leprechaun, explaining her much larger than normal leprechaun size by saying she’s from Latvia. It turns out the Land of Luck has three levels: Good Luck, Bad Luck, and the “In-Between,” sort of like Catholic Purgatory. There is also a gadget called the “Randomizer,” run by a unicorn named Jeff (Flula Borg) who has a crush on the ruler of the whole Luck land, Beth the Dragon (Jane Fonda), which takes both good and bad luck and randomly distributes them to Earth people.

Luck is derivative of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (while the scene in the Bad Luck Bar can’t help but recall the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars), though I give the writing committee points for making the protagonist exactly 18 years old and suddenly thrust into an adulthood for which she’s completely unprepared. I also liked the way the writers worked into the plot line the fact that in England, as in the U.S., black cats are symbols of bad luck, while in Scotland black cats are symbols of good luck (which is why Bob, who’s really English, poses as Scottish through most of the film). Frankly, I’d have liked Luck a whole lot better if it had been done as a live-action film, with Nobelzada on screen as well as on the soundtrack (based on her imdb.com head shot she’d have been as right for the part visually as she is vocally), with little people playing the leprechauns and the animals supplied with CGI. As for John Debney’s score (the main reason I wanted to watch Luck in the first place), it’s a good, strong piece of functional film writing, delivering the goods expected for a children’s fantasy but not all that interesting or stirring as a listening experience on its own. And the original soundtrack album on Milan Records does not contain Madonna’s song “Lucky Star” – sung not by Madonna but by Eva Nobelzada with second vocalist Alana De Fonseca (that surprised me! I had assumed it was Madonna’s original record with Nobelzada singing along) – despite its importance in the overall film. The reissue on Intrada (the two-CD set I’m reviewing for Fanfare) does contain a short version (1:17) of it on track 13 of CD two.

The Gorge (Crooked Highway, Lit Entertainment Group, Skydance Media, Apple TV+, 2025)

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

Fortunately the second film my husband Charles and his mother Edi watched with me on our recent vacation, The Gorge (screened July 28) was considerably more to my taste than Luck. Instead of a fey children’s fantasy, The Gorge was a definitely adult action-adventure thriller about two professional hit people, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are assigned to opposite ends of The Gorge to shoot and kill any of the monstrous creatures who live at the bottom of The Gorge and periodically try to escape and menace the normal humans above. During the first hour of this 127-minute movie the two are separated by The Gorge and can do no more than look at each other and call out boasts by phone, mostly centered around their previous sniper assignments. (The film opened with Drasa picking off a man getting out of a plane at such a long distance Levi would have assumed it was impossible.) Naturally Levi is getting the hots for Drasa, and the feelings appear to be mutual, because at the halfway mark Levi shoots a rappelling cord across The Gorge so he can traverse the distance and have an in-person physical date with her. When he reaches her side of The Gorge she at first tells him he stinks (literally!) and forces him to take a shower, then steals the clothes she left for him so he has to go to her place naked. Eventually they have dinner together and ultimately make love, though on the way back his cord breaks and he falls into The Gorge. She lowers herself into The Gorge and attempts to rescue him, but they come face-to-face with the monsters of The Gorge, whom we’ve already caught glimpses of and know they’re humanoid but with faces that look eaten away and overall spindly shapes that make them look like their bones have somehow come through at least partially to their outsides.

Our intrepid hit-people come across the remnants of a secret laboratory set up on the floor of The Gorge during World War II. Through a film canister hand-labeled “May God Forgive Us,” Levi and Drasa project the film and on it there’s a woman scientist giving a lecture about how the creatures of The Gorge came to be. [Spoiler alert!] It seems that the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union, while they were allied during World War II, not only started a secret project in the U.S. to build the world’s first nuclear weapon, they also started a bioweapons project on the Gorge floor. The intent was to create unstoppable soldiers that couldn’t be killed and would just charge at the enemy without fear for their own lives. (Anyone who’d seen the 1942 PRC film The Mad Monster would have known this was a bad idea.) Only they did such a great job re-engineering human DNA that it fused with the DNA of particularly violent animals to create these bastard forms of life that Levi and Drasa had originally been assigned to kill whenever any of them tried to escape The Gorge and enter the world of living people. What’s more, the mutation that created the monsters is contagious. If you’re exposed to the monsters and you don’t fall victim to the mutation in five days, you’re home free; otherwise, you’ll become one of the monsters yourself. The second half of The Gorge, directed with suspenseful power by Scott Derrickson from a well thought-out script by Zach Dean, is nearly non-stop action as Our Heroes not only have to escape the monsters but also have to contend with the machinations of their nominal commanders, particularly Levi’s immediate supervisor Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, who must be awfully tired of these kinds of roles by now since the original Alien and its sequelae).

The film had already been reminding me a lot of Prizzi’s Honor – the late movie by John Huston starring his daughter Anjelica and Jack Nicholson as Mafia hit-people who meet and fall in love even though they work for rival factions in the Mob and they’ve been assigned to kill each other – and Charles thought of it too when Bartholomew gave Levi the order to kill Drasa. In the end Levi takes a big fall off a ledge into a river and we think he’s dead, while Drasa waits out the five days to see if she’s going to come down with the mutation and become a monster. Luckily Drasa escapes the disease and goes to her secret redoubt in the south of France, where she and Levi had talked about settling down once they escaped their commanding officers – and, sure enough, going for the happy ending of the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) instead of the cynical, violent one of Prizzi’s Honor, Levi turns up there two months later. The Gorge is a neatly made fusion of action-adventure and horror, though the horror elements are played down enough that even people like me who don’t like modern-day horror films could enjoy it. It also benefits from great casting in the leads; Miles Teller has been in quite a few major movies lately but the only ones in which he made an impression on me are Divergent and its sequelae, and in those he was cast as a villain. And Anya Taylor-Joy is equally good, sufficiently androgynous that in her opening scene I thought she was a young man. Derrickson and Dean also neatly characterized the two leads by their different tastes in music, which work out quite the opposite from how you’d expect: Levi listens to classical music (specifically the Prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, played by two different cellists (Jeff Taynor and Martynas Levickis – were we supposed to believe Levi had two different LP’s of it?) while Drasa loves 1970’s punk, particularly “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” The Dead Weather’s “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles),” and Twisted Sister’s cover of the traditional Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – the sort of record that makes you ask yourself, “Is that … ?”

Quiet Please: Murder! (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

Last night (Wednesday, July 23) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing but ultimately not very satisfying 1942 20th Century-Fox “B” called Quiet Please: Murder! The odd typography of the title is explained by the fact that most of the film takes place in a library. It was both written and directed by John Francis Larkin – even in the often surprisingly experimental world of “B” filmmaking, where because “B” movies were sold like yard goods (the studio got the same flat fee from the theatres that showed them whether or not they were any good, or whether or not audiences liked them) studios often allowed “B” directors a lot of latitude as long as they brought their films in on time and under budget, it was rare for a studio to allow the same person to write and direct the same movie. It stars George Sanders, Gail Patrick, and Richard Denning, and was based on a story by Lawrence G. Blochman called “Death from the Sanskrit,” which because it had a different title I’m presuming was a previously published story instead of a screen original. It begins with a chilling scene in which Jim Fleg (George Sanders) goes to visit a library that is about to put on exhibit the original copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet used by Richard Burbage, who played the title role in Shakespeare’s world premiere production. (What we see is a neatly bound book even though it’s more likely that Burbage worked either from a handwritten copy or just rough prompt notes. Remember that another Hamlet play by Thomas Kyd had been premiered in London in 1580, 20 years before the 1600 date usually accepted for Shakespeare’s, and in those days before copyright laws Shakespeare probably just put Kyd’s play through a series of rewrites and performed it until by 1600 it was entirely his own work except for the basic plot.)

Fleg tells the librarian who’s showing him the display (Pat O’Malley) how much he’d like to own that book, and as the librarian turns his back to him, Fleg brings out a silencer-equipped pistol and shoots him in the back. Then he smashes the glass case the book was in and steals it. The film flash-forward to six months later, in which Fleg, a master forger, has made 20 fake copies of the book and is offering them for sale under the table to rich collectors, all of whom think they’re getting the stolen original. A key participant in his racket is rare-book dealer Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), whose role in the scheme is to give Fleg’s would-be buyers authentication that the book is the real deal. At one point Blandy sells a copy of the book to Martin Cleaver (Sidney Blackmer) without Fleg’s prior authorization, only when Fleg hears the news he freaks out. It seems that Cleaver is an agent buying rare objets d’art for one of the Nazi bigwigs, and if Hermann Göring (or whoever) finds out he’s been swindled he’ll send over a contract killer to knock off Fleg for having deceived him. As the film’s second act begins, the library has just acquired five more rare books, including a handwritten letter by Thomas Jefferson, which Fleg would love to get his hands on to pull the same stunt he did with the Shakespeare/Burbage Hamlet. American private detective Hal McByrne (Richard Denning) enters the action when an American collector who bought one of the fake Hamlets hires him to find out what was going on and who had swindled him. As soon as he appears, Myra starts vamping him while he’s far more interested in the “nice girl,” Kay Ryan (Lynne Roberts), who’s off limits to him because she already has a husband who’s off serving in combat in World War II.

When Martin Cleaver gets knifed to death inside the library and takes a spectacular fall from the second-story balcony, Fleg audaciously poses as “Lt. Flavin” from the local police department’s homicide division and surrounds the library with members of his gang, posing as cops. He demands and immediately receives custody of the rare books, including the Jefferson letter, which the preposterously accommodating librarian offers him. Fleg a.k.a. “Flavin” also orders the library patrons to stay put inside, despite the usual protests, including one man whose wife will get jealous if he’s late coming home and a young woman who had a date scheduled for later that night. Myra steals the books herself and hides them inside the library, writing on a slip of paper the Dewey decimal code for the innocuous books behind which she hid the ultra-rare ones. Just then an air raid warden named Edmund Walpole (Byron Foulger, playing a good guy for a change) orders all the lights in the library turned out as part of a blackout. McByrne, who’s twice escaped Fleg’s attempts to hold him, tricks Walpole into putting the library’s lights back on. This attracts the attention of a whole squad of authentic police, who arrest Fleg and his imposters. Myra thinks she’s hoodwinked McByrne into thinking she had nothing to do with the scheme, but he isn’t fooled by her protestations of love – and neither are we, having heard similar speeches from all too many femmes fatales in other movies. Knowing that one of Fleg’s henchmen, a deaf-mute named Eric Pahsen (Kurt Katch) who seems to have been the result of an experiment to cross-breed Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre, is waiting outside the library to kill Myra for allegedly betraying them, McByrne drives Myra out of the library much the way Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) would to gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) at the end of The Big Sleep four years later. Pahsen kills Myra and is then arrested by the real police who are still there, and at the end McByrne asks Kay the married “good girl” out for a dinner date, and she accepts.

That alone was pushing it under the Production Code, but Quiet Please: Murder! has some even more radical Code-bending than that. Jim Fleg is allowed to boast that he’s a sadomasochist who enjoys both dishing out and receiving punishment – as the cops finally handcuff him he seems almost to be having an orgasm right there on screen. He’s also allowed to strike Mona physically and knock her across the room of their apartment at least twice. Charles thought Quiet Please: Murder! was one of those frustrating movies whose basic premise had the potential for a much better film than the one we got. I had that feeling about it, too, though I loved the unusual gimmick of having the super-villain pose as a police lieutenant with no one the wiser. (Apparently no one thought to ask to see his badge, though he might have been carrying a fake one just to make his impersonation more credible.) What I didn’t much care for was the way George Sanders was playing an out-and-out villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; I like him best either in his entirely heroic roles (like The Saint and The Falcon, or in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, in which he benefited from Hitchcock’s love of anti-type casting: in Foreign Correspondent Sanders is a hero and Herbert Marshall a super-villain!) or in parts where even if he’s evil overall, he has some good qualities. He was especially good as the Philistine King in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, where he stole the movie right out from its nominal stars, Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr.

Intruder in the Dust (MGM, 1949)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie from MGM in 1949, Intruder in the Dust, based on a novel by William Faulkner published in 1948 (his first book in six years because in the meantime he’d tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting, and while he got co-writer credits for Howard Hawks’s film noir classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, both starring Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, almost nothing of what he wrote for Hollywood got filmed) about a real-life lynching that had happened in Faulkner’s home town, Oxford, Mississippi (called “Jefferson” in the film and in Faulkner’s writing generally), in 1935. This came in the middle of a cycle of U.S. films dealing more or less with racism, including Home of the Brave (a powerful melodrama about racial discrimination in the U.S. military) and Pinky (a silly story about a light-skinned Black girl – played by white actress Jeanne Crain – trying to “pass” for white). What’s remarkable about Intruder in the Dust is it wasn’t made by filmmakers with a reputation for a social conscience: it was produced and directed by Clarence Brown, an old MGM “hand” who’d been in the business long enough to have directed Rudolph Valentino (in his next-to-last film, 1925’s The Eagle). The writer was Ben Maddow, a year before he collaborated with John Huston on The Asphalt Jungle. Intruder in the Dust is basically To Kill a Mockingbird 13 years early.

The central characters are a proud Black farmer and landowner, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) – though through much of the movie I thought the name was “Beecham” – a teenage boy, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr., who for once in his career actually acted instead of letting his boyish good looks deliver his performance for him); and his uncle, attorney John Gavin Stevens (David Brian, who precisely because he’s edgier and more reluctant gives this character far more vivid life than Gregory Peck did in the equivalent role in Mockingbird). At the start of the movie, Lucas is arrested for allegedly shooting a white man, Vincent Gowrie (David Clarke) – the character is dead at the start of the film but is seen in two flashbacks – in the back. Gowrie’s father Crawford (Charles Kemper) and his four brothers are so angry at the crime they surround the jail where Lucas is being held and draw a crowd to form a lynch mob and “take care” of him without bothering with any of the niceties of a formal trial. Chick Mallison grew to respect Lucas from an earlier incident in which he fell through the cracks over a lake that wasn’t quite frozen over. Lucas not only rescued him but dried his clothes, gave him a dinner, and allowed him to spend the night. Lucas is so fiercely proud he refused Chick’s offer of payment and returned all Chick’s subsequent gifts to him. Lucas’s pride is explained by his being a landowner himself; he was willed 10 acres in the middle of a plantation by a white grandfather who had owned his mother as a slave and felt he owed something to his progeny. When Lucas is standing in the entrance to the jail, he sees Chick in the crowd and tells him he wants to see John to ask him to take his case.

John is as convinced as the rest of the town that Lucas is guilty, and he sees his role as Lucas’s attorney not to acquit him, but simply to ask for a change of venue so the trial can be moved away from “Jefferson” and the vengeful antics of the Gowries and their friends and Lucas can plead guilty and get a prison sentence instead of being either lynched or legally executed. The ubiquity of lynch-mob “justice” is emphasized by the continual snarls of the townspeople that Lucas isn’t going to need a lawyer, “Hell, he isn’t even going to need an undertaker,” one of them boasts. At first the presumed good guys, Chick and his uncle John, drop the word “nigger” as often as anyone else in town, and it’s only as John starts working the case and becomes convinced that Lucas is actually innocent that he and Chick stop using the “N”-word. One of the film’s most powerful scenes concerns an older white woman, Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson, whom Faulkner himself insisted should play the role), a client of John’s in a different matter. Eunice determines to stop the lynching no matter what, and she does this by stationing herself in the lobby of the jail and calmly darning socks while the lynchers start pouring gasoline around to burn down the jail with Lucas inside it. Even when the leader of the lynch mob pours gas at her feet and lights a match, she stays there and asks him to move out of her way so he won’t be in her light. Not wanting to kill a white woman, he puts the match he lit out and lets her be. Lucas insists that the bullet that killed Vincent Gowrie did not come from his gun, a .41 pistol, and he demands that John and Chick exhume the corpse to prove it. They do so, in dead-of-night scenes Brown stages like a horror film, and ultimately realize that Vincent was killed by a rifle shot.

The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Vincent’s brother Nub (Porter Hall, best known as Barbara Stanwyck’s hapless husband in Double Indemnity but here cast as a villain himself), who was having arguments with Vincent because Nub was stealing lumber from the Gowries’ family business and selling it on the black market. When Nub saw Lucas take a shot at a rabbit and miss, Nub saw his chance: he shot Vincent in the back with his rifle and framed Lucas for the crime. In the end the townspeople, who had been howling for Lucas’s blood and willing to kill him themselves, calmly disperse and let the law take its course when a white man is revealed as the real murderer. Intruder in the Dust is a quite powerful movie, occasionally sliding into easy anti-racist propaganda but for the most part telling its tale honestly, eloquently, and without obvious political breast-beating. One thing Clarence Brown, as both producer and director, did that was unusual, especially for an old-line Hollywood filmmaker, was insist that virtually the whole movie be shot on location in Oxford and that many of the townspeople be played by non-professional actors who actually lived there. This was starting to become a common sort of filmmaking in Europe in the 1940’s, as the burden of World War II militated against elaborate studio productions and forced filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Alberto Lattuada, and Federico Fellini to make their movies with real people on real streets and use nonprofessional actors in key roles. Those movies had just started to trickle in to American theatres by the late 1940’s, and directors like Brown and Robert Rossen (in his political drama All the King’s Men from 1948) began to emulate them.

Intruder in the Dust was presented by TCM as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley,” and though it’s not literally a film noir (albeit cinematographer Robert Surtees – usually known for romances and historical spectacles – shoots much of it, especially the nighttime exteriors, in the chiaroscuro style of classic noir), Muller defended it by saying that its essence – a man unjustly accused of murder and others racing against time to prove his innocence – is noir and was the theme of about half of Cornell Woolrich’s stories. Muller also pointed out the irony that many of the townspeople who played would-be lynchers were long-time Oxford residents, and some of them had likely participated in the real-life 1935 lynching that had inspired Faulkner’s novel. In his outro, Muller explained that Intruder in the Dust got excellent critical reviews (including one from African-American author Ralph Ellison, who said that out of all the anti-racist “problem pictures” of 1949, it was the only one that could be shown in Harlem without being laughed off the screen) but was a commercial failure. Apparently Louis B. Mayer, still hanging on as MGM studio head, refused to allow the studio to promote it. Ostensibly it was because the soundtrack contained the word “nigger,” though given Mayer’s overall politics this smacks of the same kind of hypocrisy that has led President Trump to declare holy wars against Harvard and other major American universities on the ground that they’re coddling anti-Semites, when Trump has had Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Muller suggested the real reason Mayer didn’t like Intruder in the Dust and didn’t want the studio to promote it was that its anti-racist message repelled him personally.

Thw Wife Who Knew Too Much (Studio TF1 America, Greencorn Productions, Johnson Management Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 20) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good thriller on Lifetime: The Wife Who Knew Too Much, a title clearly evocative of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions: the 1934 masterpiece that “typed” Hitchcock as a suspense/thriller director for the rest of his career, and the leaden 1956 remake that seems to go on forever) even though it’s a completely different story. It’s set in Springfield, Arkansas and its central characters are Lisa Clarkson (Nicole Unger), wife of local high-school football coach Sam Clarkson (Matthew Pohlkamp), and Avery Downey (Tiffany Montgomery), single mother of the team’s star quarterback and captain, Mark Downey, who’s also dating Taylor Clarkson, Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter. Because imdb.com has only a skeletal page on this one (and even that didn’t go up until this morning!), I don’t know the names of the other cast members, and I only hastily scribbled down the names of the production companies, directors, writers, and other crew members. The director was Bennett Lasseter, who made a series of shorts between 2009 and 2015 and just one previous feature-length film for Hulu, The United Playlist of Noise, about a teenage boy named Marcus (Keean Johnson) who’s obsessed with music. Marcus is forced to undergo an operation in a month’s time that will render him deaf, and he determines to use the remaining month in which he can still hear by assembling “the ultimate playlist of noise.” The writers of The Wife Who Knew Too Much are Joseph Wilka (story) and Mark Lyons (script), though imdb.com’s skeletal page on this film credits Lasseter as writer as well as director.

The Wife Who Knew Too Much is one of those stories in which the death of a young high-school senior in a hit-and-run accident unravels everybody’s secrets, and Lisa Clarkson reaches out to Ruth Brinkman, mother of Kevin Brinkman, who died in the accident, to offer her moral support. Lisa also makes herself insufferable in her determination to find who caused the accident and bring them to justice despite the opposition of the townspeople, who make it clear they don’t want her digging up old bones and would just as soon the secrets stay secret. Lisa is proud of her role as a volunteer at Springfield High School and leader in the local PTA, only her relationship with the school principal, Mike Finnigan (tall, balding, and one of the African-American authority figures Lifetime likes to cast in its movies), gets edgier and edgier as she digs for the truth surrounding Kevin’s death. At one point Lisa confronts J. P. Reynolds, teammate of Mark Downey on the Springfield “Bulldogs” football team (their team song is, inevitably, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”), at Kevin’s wake demanding answers about Kevin’s death. J. P. evidently complains to his father, Tom Reynolds, because the next thing we hear is that Tom suddenly withdraws his proffered contribution to build a new school library. Finnigan angrily reassigns the task of making the presentation to Tom to reinstate his pledge to Avery, whom both Lisa and we have learned is having an affair with Lisa’s husband Sam. Sam is being scouted for a college football coaching job at a university in Ohio, contingent on his star player Mark Downey attending that college and joining its team. Lisa really doesn’t want to relocate, but Avery is fiercely ambitious and has set her sights on pulling Sam away from Lisa and making the four of them – Sam, Avery, Mark, and Taylor – one big happy family. Lisa traces the car involved in the hit-and-run to a local repair shop and wrecking garage called “Junk Yard Dog.”

She discovers a can of spray paint ostensibly used to vandalize Mark’s car by members of the rival Blue Jays football team, but Lisa realizes (and breaks into Junk Yard Dog’s garage to confirm) that Mark himself vandalized his own car because he was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin at the end of a long party during which he thought he had just hit a deer. The climax occurs at the big game of the season between the Bulldogs and the Blue Jays which will determine whether Sam gets his coaching job in Ohio and Mark goes on to an illustrious college football career and a shot at NFL stardom. The writing, which until then has been relatively subtle and literate by Lifetime standards, turns florid as Avery emerges as a full-fledged villain, who’s holding Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter Taylor as hostage and uses that to lure Sam to meet her in the administrative building behind the stadium. Avery’s plan is to make it look like Lisa herself was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin, and she means to kill Lisa and frame it to look like a guilt-driven suicide. The plot unravels when Mark, riven by guilt, refuses to play the final game – which is probably just as well because his traumas have virtually destroyed his passing skills – and instead decides to turn himself in. Police Detective Morrison, a compactly built African-American woman, shows up to arrest both Avery and Mark after Avery, thinking she’s stabbing Lisa, instead stabs Sam. In a “One Year Later” tag scene, we’re at the opening of the new school library (ya remember the new school library?), which has been built after all and is named after Kevin. Lisa and her daughter Taylor are at the ceremony and we’re told that Sam has left town and is futilely looking for a coaching career somewhere else, and Mark got a relatively light sentence (presumably for manslaughter) because ultimately he turned himself in. The Wife Who Knew Too Much is actually a quite well done thriller, no great shakes as a work of cinematic art but taut, well directed and reasonably well written until the last two acts, in which Wilky and Lyons suddenly turn Avery from a reasonable (if evil) character to a florid all-out Lifetime villainess.