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.

Something New (F. A. Croghan Presents a Nell Shipman Production, Essex Motor Company, 1920)

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

Also last night (Sunday, July 20) Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” was doing a double bill of Buster Keaton’s comedy masterpiece Seven Chances with an oddball entry from 1920 called Something New. I figured my husband Charles and I could strategically change the channel at the right moment and get to see Something New, which was an interesting product of actress Nell Shipman and her life partner (then), Bert Van Tuyle. Nell Shipman was a minor star in the early silent days who was best known for playing feisty, independent-minded pioneer women. She was born Helen Foster-Barham and got the name “Shipman” from her first husband, whom she broke up with in 1920, the year this film was made. In 1925 she married Charles Ayres, whom she divorced in 1934, and was single for the rest of her life until her death in 1971 at age 77. The imdb.com “Biography” page on Shipman lists Van Tuyle as her second husband, between the other two, but gives no dates for their marriage – which makes me wonder if they were just living (and working) together and weren’t legally wed. Something New casts Nell Shipman as a frustrated writer who needs new experiences to give her prose works some character and power. Her full name isn’t given in the film, though apparently her last name is “Bickley” because she’s single and her father Sid Bickley (L. M. Wells) appears as an on-screen character. In search of new experiences, Miss Bickley takes the stage (not horse-drawn but motorized, this being 1920) from San Diego to Tijuana (and one amusing thing about this movie is the primitive state of the border crossing in 1920 versus the militarized zone it is now and will be even more so if Führer Trump has his way and builds his “big, beautiful wall”) to see her dad, who owns an enterprise called the Blue Lotus Mine.

Along the way she meets Bill Baxter (Bert van Tuyle), who falls in love with her at first sight. Unfortunately, the Blue Lotus mine has been taken over by a gang of at least 20 Mexican bandidos led by Agrilla Gorgez (William McCormack). The name “Agrilla Gorgez” is silly enough for a Mexican (or any other human being, for that matter), but it gets worse when we see the sheer amount of goop plastered on his face in a futile attempt to make him look “Mexican.” It’s not clear just what Gorgez and his bandit gang have in mind to do with the Blue Lotus once they’ve taken it over, though we guess they’re going to eliminate Sid Bickley and take the mine over themselves. What is clear is that once Our Nell shows up, they’re overjoyed at seeing a woman on the premises and desperately want to gang-rape her, though Gorgez insists on going first before any of his men can have their wicked ways with her. Fortunately, Bill Baxter owns a Maxwell car, and though the path to the Blue Lotus mine is supposedly impassable to anything other than a human or a horse, in a series of extended but singularly dull scenes Bill manages to drive his car along a series of rocks and bits of other seemingly impassable terrain. According to a postlude from “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, this film was actually bankrolled by Essex Motors, makers of the Maxwell, to show how tough their car was and essentially market it as an all-terrain vehicle. Ultimately Bill rescues Nell from the bandidos and tries to take her back to civilization, but the bandits ride off in hot pursuit and, since there are about 20 of them and only two of the good guys (though Nell has previously shown an uncanny ability to pick off and kill any bandit she shoots at), they’ll clearly be done for unless Our Heroes can think of something to stop them. After Bill starts nodding off at the wheel of the Maxwell, Nell takes over and continues their escape while I was wondering, “How do they keep the car running? And where do they get gas?” (Charles said a lot of early motorists drove around with jerry-cans of gas to refuel, but we’re never shown Bill and Nell stopping to refuel even if they had their own gas supplies with them.)

The something that finally stops the bandit gang is a precariously perched mountain boulder, which Bill tells Nell to keep backing into until it falls, whereupon it starts an avalanche that buries those ol’ debbil bandits the way Pharoah’s army was drowned in the Red Sea. Now I realized why Jacqueline Stewart had double-billed this rather strange movie with Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, with its famous avalanche scene at the end cooked up by Keaton and his assistant, Clyde Bruckman, after preview audiences disliked the film’s original ending and only laughed when Keaton tripped over three rocks. Keaton figured that if they laughed at him being chased by three rocks, they’d find it screamingly funny if he were chased by a whole bunch of rocks, most of which were fakes made of papier-maché (as were a few of the ones in Something New as well). Something New was a pretty strange movie, and the background score on TCM’s print – played by an outfit from Chicago – just made it worse. Whoever composed this had the dumb idea of backing this 1920 action-adventure film with music that sounded like 1960’s avant-garde jazz, complete with blaring saxophones and loads of free-form percussion. The score screamed “Anachronism” from the first note and almost never got any better, though at least they didn’t have anyone singing the way they did with the equally awful score they came up with for Helen Gardner’s Cleopatra (1912). Frankly, I wish they had shown the Milestone Film and Video release from 2007, with an uncredited piano score and (courtesy of a print found at UCLA) the original color tints, which were missing here.

The Phantom Thief (Columbia, 1946)

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

Last night (Friday, July 18) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of a movie called The Phantom Thief, made at Columbia in 1946. It got my attention when the post was marked “Free with Ads,” a qualification YouTube usually puts on either relatively new films or acknowledged classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Later I was able to find another YouTube post of The Phantom Thief that allowed us to watch it without ads – or at least with just one ad we were able to skip past after five seconds. The Phantom Thief turned out to be another in the Columbia Boston Blackie “B” series, directed by D. Ross Lederman – a journeyman hack who had exactly one truly great film on his résumé: End of the Trail (1932), an incredible movie about a U.S. officer who is drummed out of the service for allegedly selling guns to the Native Americans and responds by joining a Native tribe. It’s essentially Dances With Wolves 48 years early – I’ve posted about it before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html – and its star, Tim McCoy, had got interested in the subject when in the late 1920’s he interviewed Native survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn for an oral history project. With that one shining exception (and it’s clear that, though Lederman directed, McCoy was the auteur), Lederman’s work reached a level of pleasant hackiness, always entertaining but rarely sounding any depths even within the limitations of the material he got. The Phantom Thief is a haunting title that deserved a better movie.

Written by the usual committee (Jack Boyle gets credit for creating the Boston Blackie character, a reformed jewel thief who crosses paths with the police as he solves crimes that stumped them; G. A. Snow wrote the “original story,” Richard Wormser and Richard Weil wrote the script, and Malcolm Stuart Boylan got an “additional dialogue” credit), The Phantom Thief is a well-trod tale. Horatio “Boston Blackie” Black (Chester Morris, older and seedier than he was in his early 1930’s films but still an authoritative actor) gets mixed up in a crime scheme when Eddie Alexander (Murray Alper), an old friend of Blackie’s sidekick “The Runt” (George E. Stone), is assigned by his employer, Anne Parks Duncan (a woman named Jeff Donnell who figured in a lot of mid-1940’s Columbia “B”’s), to steal a mystery box from phony psychic Dr. Nejino (Marvin Miller, who was a quite good villain in RKO noirs at the time but here is saddled with a supposed “Asian” makeup that makes him look like a more heavy-set Turhan Bey). Alexander and The Runt bring the mysterious box to Blackie’s apartment. Alexander was told the box only contained papers, but when it’s opened a valuable necklace is inside, and just then the police come knocking on Blackie’s door. Realizing that if they catch him with the necklace, they’ll assume he stole it, Blackie hides it under an armchair cushion. The three decide to go to Dr. Nejino’s live-work space and attend one of his séances to give him back the necklace, no questions asked. Nejino sees them arrive via a closed-circuit television that’s essentially the 1940’s equivalent of a Ring camera and sends out his assistant Sandra (Dusty Anderson, who quit the business that year to marry director Jean Negulesco and made just three more uncredited bit appearances – a pity, because she was really pretty good even though she and Jeff Donnell look too much alike to make the film credible) to greet them. Unfortunately, Eddie is killed in the middle of the séance – which goes the whole nine yards in terms of mysterious skeletons, disembodied hands, and horns that play music without any visible person playing them.

Once I watched a movie with Charles that used these gimmicks to depict a phony séance and lamented that modern-day psychics don’t use them and only do so-called “cold readings” (the sorts of things in which the alleged psychic says things like, “I see a woman in a red dress … no, it was a blue dress,” and the mark says, “You’re right! It was a blue dress!”). Charles explained that most modern-day psychics are angling to get on TV, and you can’t do those on TV because the lights needed for television would show the wires and expose them. Anne is married to Rex Duncan (Wilton Graff), who represents himself as being one of the “Carolina Duncans,” but when Blackie sees his friend, pawnbroker “Jumbo” Madigan (Joseph Crehan) – who presumably he got to know when he was still a jewel thief and Madigan was his fence – he learns that Rex has no money at all. Instead he’s living off the money his wife inherited on the death of her father, and constantly pawning items from her collection. Rex also formed a corrupt partnership with Dr. Nejino in which Rex steered Anne to Nejino’s operation and got a share of the money Nejino extracted from her. The business of the phony psychic using his “spiritual services” as a front for blackmail had been used in much better films than this, including Murder, My Sweet, made at RKO in 1944, based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and the movie I’d name as the quintessential film noir. Ultimately, after another murder, Rex lurks outside a window and takes a pot shot at Anne. Blackie and the police work out a plan by which Anne will pretend to be dead and “play” her own spirit at yet another Nejino séance, where Rex loses it completely and shoots at Anne’s “spirit.” All he hits are a series of mirrors Nejino uses in his act, but when Rex confesses to Anne’s murder, the police arrest him for it and also arrest Nejino for fraud and as Rex’s partner in crime. The Phantom Thief is a pretty good movie on its own, but we get the sense a lot more could have been done with the plot. It’s also the sort of film in which everyone looks tired, as if cranking out these formulaic movies had worn them down and left them disillusioned with what level to which their careers had sunk.

Crawlspace (CBS, Titan Productions, 1972)

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

Last night, when my husband Charles and I got home from the organ concert in Balboa Park, we watched a YouTube post of the 1972 film Crawlspace, the third of three TV movies Jerry Goldsmith wrote scores for between 1968 and 1972 that are represented on a new Intrada Records CD I’ve been assigned to review for Fanfare magazine. The other two are Pursuit (1972), a dull wanna-be “thriller” directed by Michael Crichton from a novel called Binary he wrote as “John Lange”; and The People Next Door (1968), a marvelous melodrama about a suburban family who discovers that their seemingly innocent 16-year-old daughter is into drugs and casual sex. Crawlspace is a horror-tinged thriller whose central characters are senior-citizen couple Albert and Alice Graves (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright), who have retired to a small town in upstate New York and bought a house there. Unbeknownst to them, a troubled young man named Richard Roy Adley (Tom Happer) is secretly living in the crawlspace under their house. The Graveses hear tell-tale noises that alert them to the fact that the crawlspace is occupied by an uninvited house guest. When they finally discover Richard, they actually invite him in, largely because though they’ve been together for decades they never had children of their own and therefore their parental instincts, unfulfilled all this time, have kicked into high gear. Richard is mostly taciturn, though occasionally the Graveses are able to get him talking at least in monosyllables. He explains that before he moved into their crawlspace, he was living in a literal cave about a mile or so away.

Crawlspace wasn’t especially good at first – the Graveses’ Good Samaritan act was just too unbelievable – but the film, directed by John Newland and an uncredited Buzz Kulik from a script by Ernest Kinoy (best known for having adapted Alex Haley’s Roots into the classic TV miniseries) based on a novel by Herbert Lieberman, got better as it progressed. Richard is shown chopping firewood for the Graveses’ home, thereby establishing that he’s a mean man with an ax, and he gradually builds enough trust with the Graveses that they send him to the local general store (this town isn’t big enough for a supermarket and the store is in a building so seedy-looking that at first Charles thought Richard was ripping off the Graveses and using their money to buy drugs) with a $20 bill and a long shopping list which Richard has memorized. (Charles, who works at a grocery store, was amazed at how much $20 could buy in 1972 – and people thought inflation was a bitch then.) Unfortunately, Harlow (Dan Morgan) lets his two young assistants, Dave Freeman (Matthew Cowles) and Wheeler (Fleet Emerson), wait on Richard – which they refuse to do. Instead they ignore him, wait on customers who arrived after he did, steal his $20 and then claim they never got it. Richard tells all this to the Graveses, and Albert responds by reporting the incident to the local sheriff, Emil Birge (Eugene Roche). But Birge, who’s known Dave and Wheeler all their lives, treats the incident with a boys-will-be-boys dismissal. Albert confronts Harlow, who takes Dave’s and Wheeler’s side and blows off the incident. Richard is upset enough that he sneaks out in the dead of night, breaks into Harlow’s store, and vandalizes it. Albert lies for Richard and tells Sheriff Birge he was home all night, later rationalizing it to his wife by saying Birge would have killed Richard if Albert had let the sheriff know where Richard was.

Dave and Wheeler target Richard for further harassment – we’re never told why they’re so down on Richard, though we got a clue earlier when Sheriff Birge complained to Albert about all the kids who came to town to attend the nearby college, then dropped out, stayed in town, hung out and gave the town a drug problem. Richard is out driving the Graveses’ car when Dave, Wheeler, and a third friend of theirs identified in the cast list only as “Blond Hoodlum” (Dean Tait), bash into the rear end repeatedly and try to drive him off the road. Once again Albert tries to report the damage, and Sheriff Birge covers for the kids and tells Albert there’s no harm done since his insurance will pay for the repairs. Ultimately Dave, Wheeler and “Blond Hoodlum” show up at the Graveses’ home and, at least to me, lt looked like they intended to burn it down with Richard and the Graveses all inside. Richard confronts Dave with the ax and kills him, and in a final scene that was set up when Richard told the Graveses that even people who pretended to be his friends ultimately turned against him and betrayed him, Richard attacks Alice Graves. To save his wife, Albert pulls out a small gun he’s kept in storage and shoots him dead, but the stress of the whole situation triggers Albert’s bad heart (it was because he had a heart condition that he and his wife moved to the country in the first place) and he dies, too.

Charles remembered a TV-movie he’d seen called Bad Ronald (1974), in which the crazed teen protagonist was a young man named Ronald Wilby (Scott Jacoby) who one night accidentally killed his girlfriend’s sister, and his mom Elaine (Kim Hunter) covered for him by helping him build a secret entrance to one room in their house where he could live without fear of being discovered and arrested. Then mom died and her heirs, having no idea that someone was still living there, sold the house and the new couple who moved in started getting evidence that someone else was inhabiting the place. There’s a direct connection between Crawlspace and Bad Ronald in that Buzz Kulik, the uncredited “ghost director” on Crawlspace, got the full-out directorial credit for Bad Ronald from the get-go. Crawlspace seemed to me to be a prototype for all the Lifetime movies, especially the ones with the title, “Girl in the … .” One could readily imagine a Lifetime producer remaking it today, though Lifetime’s writers would probably change the person living in the crawlspace from a man to a woman, make her the kidnap victim of a long-forgotten man who stuck her in the crawlspace and let her out only to get food, and made the couple who owned the house at least middle-aged instead of senior citizens. Jerry Goldsmith supplied quite a good score for Crawlspace, though it’s a functional score used to build up the emotion of already intense scenes rather than to stand out on its own.

A League of Their Own (Columbia Pictures, Parkway Productions, 1992)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 13) my husband Charles and I watched director Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own, about the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The league really existed; it was founded during America’s involvement in World War II at a time when the head honchos running major-league baseball worried that fans would lose interest in baseball with so many male players going off to war and being replaced either by teenagers or over-the-hill older guys. The real one was started by chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley (fictionalized for the movie as chocolate maker “Walter Harvey” and played by Garry Marshall, director Penny Marshall’s older brother) in 1943 and consisted of four teams: the Rockford Peaches, Racine Belles, South Bend Blue Sox, and Kenosha Comets. Originally the teams played a combination of baseball and softball, using the larger softball and requiring all pitchers to throw underhanded, and also playing on a smaller field than a regulation baseball diamond – though Marshall and her writers (Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson, documentary filmmakers whose PBS film about the league inspired Marshall to make the film and who got credit for the original story; and Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, two male writers from Marshall’s TV show Laverne and Shirley whom she hired to do the script after she couldn’t get a woman writer to do so) ignored that and shot the film with the actresses playing on normal baseball fields and using regular baseballs. In the film, Walter Harvey sends scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) to Oregon to scout Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), who’s working at a dairy and plays amateur baseball with the dairy’s women’s team. There’s a charming bit in which Ernie refers to Dottie’s job as “plucking cows,” revealing he knows nothing about agriculture. Dottie refuses to sign up for the league unless they also take her younger sister, pitcher Kit Keller (Lori Petty). Ernie, who’s seen Kit bat and strike out, is not impressed, but he’s willing to take Kit if Dottie agrees to join.

As part of the promotion for launching the women’s league, Harvey and his P.R. man, Ira Lowenstein (David Strathairn, 13 years before he got his 15 minutes of fame playing Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck), decide to hire male managers who were former baseball players and would bring out fans on their own appeal. For the Rockford Peaches, the team both Dottie and Kit end up on, the manager is Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a star in major league baseball until he became an alcoholic and literally drank himself out of his career. Dugan promises Harvey he’ll quit drinking if he gets the job, but of course he doesn’t, and when he shows up for his first day on the job the first thing he does is take a long piss right in front of the women. The women are so flustered they take out their watches and time his urination. When the team starts playing, Dugan is so disinterested in it that Dottie has to take over and give the umpires the Peaches’ starting lineup. Dugan is also such an asshole that when Dottie shows him one of his old baseball cards and asks him to sign it for her husband Bob (Bill Pullman), who’s off fighting in the war in Italy, Dugan nastily tears it up. When I did my moviemagg review of the film Elvis, in which Tom Hanks played Col. Tom Parker, I wrote it was the most unsympathetic role Hanks had ever played – his stock in trade as an actor has always been lovability – but Jerry Dugan is pretty damned close. Penny Marshall had previously directed Tom Hanks in his film Big, the role that broke him out of the TV ghetto and established him as a feature-film star, so she had no trouble getting him for this role as well. Among the other players are former dance-hall girl Mae Mordabito (Madonna, who also sang a song over the closing credits, “This Used to Be My Playground”); Doris Murphy (Rosie O’Donnell); Helen Haley (Anne Ramsey); the aggressively homely Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanaugh), whom Dottie has to persuade Ernie to sign because she may be unattractive but she can hit; Betty “Spaghetti” Horn (Tracy Reiner, Penny Marshall’s real-life daughter); Shirley Baker (Ann Cusack), who at first doesn’t know she made the teams because she can’t read (Mae, Madonna’s character, teaches her to read with a soft-core porn book); and Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schramm), who’s having child-care issues with her husband that force her to take their son Stillwell (Justin Scheller) along with the team on its road trips.

Evelyn assures her teammates that Stillwell will be well-behaved, but of course he’s anything but: on their first road trip with him, he gets in the face of the bus driver so the driver literally can’t see where he’s going, and the driver’s response is to stop the bus in the middle of the road and bails out on them. Jerry takes the wheel, which is worrisome enough given that he’s still drinking, and for the rest of the movie we don’t see who’s driving the bus. There are some charming little vignettes along the way, including the preposterous etiquette and posture classes led by the team’s chaperone, Miss Cuthburt (Pauline Brailsford) – of whom Jerry jokes, “Didn’t I see you in The Wizard of Oz?” – which the women players are forced to undergo before the season starts so their off-the-field behavior will be properly “ladylike.” They’re also forced to play in super-short skirts about 20 years before the mini-skirt was invented, for the delectation of males in the audiences. The players are instructed never to drink, smoke, or date men – though men are of course hitting on them all the time – and there’s one sequence in which some of the players sneak out to a roadhouse to relax. Marla is cruised by the roadhouse’s manager, Nelson (Alan Wilder), and decides to bail on the team to marry him. And there’s a great scene early in the movie in which one of the men in the crowd starts mincing in his sexist impression of what a woman ballplayer would be like – and Dottie deliberately throws a baseball at him, then says, “It slipped.” Harvey is about to close down the league because its games aren’t well attended, until Ira arranges with a Life photographer to attend a game. He takes a photo of Dottie doing a sensational dive at home plate to tag a runner out, that photo makes the Life cover, and the publicity starts drawing big crowds to the games. The attendance persuades Harvey to keep the league going even though he’s confident the war will end soon (it actually went on another two years) and therefore male ballplayers will be returning and they won’t need women’s teams to keep interest in the sport going. (In fact the league survived until 1954, and as it evolved the rules became less like softball and more like baseball.)

There’s also a fascinating scene in which the team receives a notice from the War Department that the husband of one of the members has been killed in combat. For bureaucratic reasons the Western Union carrier won’t deliver the message immediately, leaving every married woman on the squad heartstruck and asking, “Is it my husband?” Dottie is convinced it’s her husband Bob, who stopped writing her three weeks before after he’d regularly written every week,but it turns out to be Betty’s after Jerry grabs the telegram from the delivery man’s hand and opens it himself. Ultimately the rivalry between Dottie and Kit gets so extreme that Dottie demands to be traded to another team – but they end up trading Kit instead. There’s a reference to the fact that the Rockford Peaches are doing so well they’re going to make the playoffs – which both Charles and an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor red-flagged as a mistake; since there are only four teams in the league, how can any of them not make the playoffs? (Major League Baseball didn’t start doing division playoffs until 1969, and didn’t start the two-tiered playoff system between the regular season and the World Series until 1994.) Unfortunately, just as the World Series between the Rockford Peaches and the Racine Belles (the team Kit got traded to) is about to start, Dottie’s husband Bob (ya remember Bob?) shows up, wounded and limping but still alive. The two decide to drive out from the Midwest to Oregon immediately (in the middle of the war, with gas rationing still very much in place? I don’t think so!) even though that means Dottie can’t play in the World Series, but she thinks better of it and returns for the seventh and last game. By now anyone who’s seen even one sports movie in their life is sure what’s going to happen – Dottie is going to score the big game-winning home run and the Peaches will win the series – but instead [spoiler alert!] Racine gets a runner on scoring position in the bottom of the ninth and Kit, who’s pitching the game for them and is also Racine’s final batter and base runner, knocks the ball out of Dottie’s hand and thereby keeps her from tagging her out at home, so Racine wins.

The film is framed by sequences taking place in 1987 (with a whole different set of actors playing the principals) on the eve of the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in which the survivors meet up with each other. By then Evelyn is dead but her son Stillwell (Mark Holton, looking surprisingly credible as a middle-aged adult version of Justin Scheller) is still alive and attends the reunion. The film ends with the former players still active and playing baseball for fun on the hallowed diamond at Cooperstown. A League of Their Own makes some back-handed comments about sexism and shows a scene in which a woman lecturer is talking about how it’s the bounden duty of all the women who got war jobs to give them up once the war ends and the men return, and another social commentator narrates a newsreel saying that all these professional women are emasculating men. (There was a lot of this nonsense in the immediate post-war years; Ferdinand Lundberg, a progressive on economic issues who coined the phrase “America’s Sixty Families” to describe what later writers and activists called “the power elite” and ultimately “the 1 percent,” co-wrote a fiercely sexist book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex in 1947.) What’s good about this movie is the mostly flawless re-creation of the atmosphere (though there are a few glitches, like the band in the roadhouse playing the Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton hit “Flying Home” with far more musicians audible on the soundtrack than we see on screen) and the riveting performances of Geena Davis and Lori Petty as the feuding sisters. Davis is so good and authoritative in the role that it’s a surprise that she was only the third choice. Penny Marshall originally cast Demi Moore, but she got pregnant just before shooting started. Then she offered the part to Debra Winger, who bailed when she learned that Madonna was also going to be in the movie. Also, in order to get parts in the film the women had to try out their baseball skills to prove they could play the game to Marshall’s satisfaction before she’d let them read for the roles. A League of Their Own holds up quite well as a sports movie and a women’s solidarity film, though the reason I was watching it – to write a review for Fanfare of the new release of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack music – proved to be disappointing. This is what I call a “functional” film score rather than an “expansive” one, making its points economically and adding to the film’s appeal but without being very interesting listening on its own.

The Three Musketeers (Walt Disney Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Wolfgang Odelka Filmproduktion GmbH, Filmfonds Wien, One for All Productions, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1993)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a quite remarkable movie from 1993, The Three Musketeers, yet another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s 1844 novel Les Trois Mousquetaires with Chris O’Donnell as D’Artagnan, Kiefer Sutherland as Athos, Oliver Platt as Porthos, and Charlie Sheen top-billed as Aramis. In fact, when I first heard of this movie I wrote it off with the thought, “Not another one.” Not only had the basic story been done several times by American studios – in 1911 by Edison, in 1916 by Thomas Ince, in 1921 with Douglas Fairbanks (a milestone in his career because it propelled him out of contemporary rom-coms and into big historical epics), in 1935 by RKO with Walter Abel, a spoof in 1939 at 20th Century-Fox with Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers, a big-budget MGM version in 1948 with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, and a 1969 TV-movie with Kenneth Welch and Christopher Walken – but the template for modern adaptations seemed to have been set by Richard Lester, who shot The Three Musketeers and the sequel The Four Musketeers back-to-back in 1973 and 1974. Lester’s films had all-star casts (Michael York, Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, and Peter Sellers’s old Goon Squad partner Spike Milligan) and took a cheekily irreverent approach to the material without descending into out-and-out camp. There were also quite a few adaptations of the story in its native France (where the earliest now-lost Three Musketeers film was made in 1903), and since the 1993 The Three Musketeers there have been many other versions as well, including a Ukrainian musical from 2004 featuring current Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky that gender-changed the Musketeers into women. Surprise: the 1993 The Three Musketeers turned out to be a quite nicely paced entertainment, capably directed by Stephen Herek from a well-constructed script by David Loughery.

I was watching this in preparation for writing a Fanfare magazine review of a two-CD set of Michael Kamen’s music for the film, and this is one movie that comes close to fulfilling Jack Warner’s demand of his music director, Ray Heindorf, that the music start when the opening studio logo came on screen and not stop until “The End” credit. (There even is a “The End” credit in this film, a nice retro touch. I really miss “The End” credits.) The plot deals with a young country lad named D’Artagnan (Chris O’Donnell) who dreams of becoming one of the King’s Musketeers (essentially the equivalent of the Secret Service) in 17th Century France. The king is Louis XIII (Hugh O’Conor), but the real power behind the throne is Cardinal Richelieu (Tim Curry), who as the film opens is touring the dungeons under the palace in Paris and wantonly murders one of the prisoners who’s begging him for forgiveness. Richelieu got the King to disband the Musketeers because he wanted to substitute his own Cardinal’s Guards as the King’s security force, which would mean he could assassinate the King at any time he wanted and no one would have the authority to stop him. (We later learn that Richelieu put Louis XIII on the throne in the first place by having his father, Henry IV, assassinated.) Unbeknownst to anyone, Richelieu has also secretly negotiated a deal with the Duke of Buckingham, who essentially is to the King of England what Richelieu is to the King of France, to sell out France to England and put himself on the throne directly instead of having to rule through a monarch that might at any moment grow the proverbial pair and tell him to take a hike … or worse. He sends Milady Countess Sabine de Winter (Rebecca De Mornay) with the treaty to take it to England on a ship called the Persephone. Richelieu has also persuaded the King to sign an order officially disbanding the Musketeers and drafting them as common infantrymen in the upcoming war against England. Meanwhile, D’Artagnan is being chased by Girard (Paul McGann) and his brothers, who accuse him of taking liberties with their sister, and they follow him all the way to Paris.

D’Artagnan unknowingly challenges each of the three remaining Musketeers to duels, though when they finally encounter each other they decide to let him live and join their band of outlaws. D’Artagnan also meets Constance (Julie Delpy), lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne (Gabrielle Anwar), who recalls that she was put in an arranged marriage to Louis XIII but once she met him, she decided she was in love with him after all. D’Artagnan and Constance also fall in love with each other at first sight, but then she disappears from the action and they don’t finally get together until the very end. At one point the Musketeers hijack Richelieu’s private carriage, throw the gold coins in it to the starving French people, sample its alcoholic beverages and ultimately burn it, while leading Richelieu’s cavalry on a merry horseback chase in which, among other things, the Musketeers set fire to barrels of gunpowder, at least one of which blows up and takes some of Richelieu’s men with it. Ultimately the Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan recruit all the other former Musketeers to re-don their emblematic blue tunics, stage an assault on the palace in Paris, foil Richelieu’s assassination attempt on the King (which he planned because the hated British were demanding a demonstration of Richelieu’s power before they cut a deal with him), and restore the King to full power. King Louis XIII not only reinstates the Musketeers but officially names D’Artagnan to the Musketeers’ ranks, in a ceremony that looks more like a granting of knighthood than merely hiring another security guard. Loughery gives Louis this final speech that sounds all too relevant today in the Age of Trump: “This world is an uncertain realm, filled with danger. Honor undermined by the pursuit of power, freedom sacrificed when the weak are oppressed by the strong. But there are those who oppose these powerful forces, who dedicate their lives to truth, honor, and freedom.”

The 1993 The Three Musketeers is an exciting action picture in the recent modern manner, and Herek and Loughery deserve credit for creating a film with a lot of action even though they’re hamstrung by the low level of 17th century technology. It’s also a quite relentless movie, in which no sooner than one plot line starts to trail off than another one comes in and assumes equal importance. As for the casting, I had my qualms about Chris O’Donnell – like the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and James Franco in Tristan + Isolde, he seems just too modern, like he just walked in from a Renaissance Faire where he was cosplaying rather than actually inhabiting a different historical age. But the rest of the cast is quite good, and it was a stroke of at least minor genius on the part of Herek and his casting director, Sharon Bialy, to give the part of Richelieu to Tim Curry. Best known for playing Rocky Horror in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry here is almost 20 years older and even seedier. Curry gives Richelieu a marvelous portrayal of controlled evil, quite the best I’ve seen since George Arliss’s 1935 biopic (in which Richelieu was depicted sympathetically). The actors playing the Musketeers are also excellent, particularly when they reveal their secrets: Aramis once studied theology and can still quote the Bible effectively, and Porthos used to be a pirate – a skill that comes in handy when the Musketeers hijack the Persephone and sail it back to France. The Three Musketeers is a nice, engaging movie (though the repetitive action scenes were starting to wear me down by the end), and it’s fun in a way all too many “serious” action movies aren’t anymore.

It also helps that cinematographer Dean Semler for once makes the color look colorful on screen. About the only times we’re stuck with the dark, dingy, faded browns and greens that are the stuff of most “color” films today. The 17th century looked a lot darker than today’s times, and where Semler shoots in dirty browns and greens it’s because he’s filming the scenes in the dungeon and other locales where you expect things to be terribly lit. Elsewhere, especially in the many outdoor scenes, this film is like a breath of fresh air – almost literally – an explosion of color to match the film’s old-style movie action. And one of the things I liked about The Three Musketeers is that it acknowledges that a “musket” was a firearm, albeit a hideously impractical one that had laboriously to be reloaded (which included inserting a charge of gunpowder, tamping it down, loading the bullet and then cocking the trigger to prepare to fire) for each single shot. The Three (and sometimes Four) Musketeers didn’t always fight the enemies with swords the way they’ve been shown in most of the film versions. Indeed, the scene in which Richelieu and his hired gun Rochefort (Michael Wincott) test out the skills of the professional assassin they’ve engaged to kill Louis XIII by having him shoot out a portrait of the king and hit him squarely in the eye is still chilling now!

Shopworn (Columbia, 1932)

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

Late last night (Thursday, July 10) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual 1932 movie on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEgu9ts4oA0): Shopworn, a Columbia production that starred Barbara Stanwyck as Kitty Lane, daughter of a construction worker who gets killed in the film’s spectacular opening: a whole mountain gets dynamited to clear the way for a new road. I suspect the crew at Columbia followed the old Mack Sennett stratagem of scouring the newspapers for announcements of some big spectacular event that was going to happen anyway, then sending a crew to film it and building a story around it. (Sennett’s most famous use of that gimmick was when he heard that a reservoir was to be drained. He got the idea of sending a comedy couple out in a rowboat and having them row across the reservoir, then look appropriately panicked and scared when the water started disappearing around them.) With his dying breath, dad tells Kitty to stay with his sister Dot (ZaSu Pitts, mournful as usual; I can’t watch her play these deadpan comic roles without ruing the tragedy that the self-destruction of Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career wreaked on Pitts as well: Stroheim insisted that Pitts was the screen’s potentially greatest tragic actress, and they proved it in the three films he made with her – Greed, The Wedding March, and Hello, Sister! – but she never got the sort of break Sally Field did 50 years later with Sybil and Norma Rae). Dot co-runs a restaurant in a college town with her husband Fred (Lucien Littlefield). They put Kitty to work as a waitress in the restaurant, and she predictably gets hit on by all the horny young college boys who eat the establishment’s miniature hamburgers, essentially a silver dollar-sized meat patty drowned on a full-sized bun. At one point she rejects an especially persistent suitor by hitting the button on her cash register that reads, “NO SALE.”

One young collegian catches her eye: David Livingston (Regis Toomey), a medical student whom she agrees to date. They have a nice affair that includes a trip to an amusement park where they get a photo taken together against a fake Middle Eastern desert backdrop. The cameraman running the concession is using a big old view camera (there’s a charming shot of Stanwyck and Toomey with their images upside down as the photographer would see them), only they ruin the first take by impulsively kissing each other. Ultimately David decides he wants to marry Kitty, but he runs into a stone wall of opposition from his neurotically overprotective mother (Clara Blandick – that’s right, Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz as a villain!). Mrs. Livingston and her friend, the influential Judge Forbes (Oscar Apfel), first offer Kitty a $5,000 payment to leave David alone. When she angrily refuses, in the closest Stanwyck comes in this movie to her fabled emotional intensity, they use their social power to frame Kitty for violating the public morality act and get her sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. They also get David to accompany his mother to Europe and trick him into thinking that Kitty accepted the bribe, and Kitty’s marital uncle Fred backs up their lie because Judge Forbes has bribed Fred with $100 to do so. (At first Judge Forbes tries to palm Fred off with a check to be sent later, but he’s got sense enough to insist on an immediate cash payment.) When Kitty finally serves her sentence, Fred doesn’t want her back and neither does any reputable employer, but she stumbles on a theatre that advertises “40 Beautiful Girls 40” and gets a job in their chorus. Within the space of a few minutes of a montage sequence, Kitty has risen through the ranks and become a major star. She’s also attracted a French male admirer, André Renoir (Albert Conti), who’s offering her a European tour and all the money and boyfriends she could want.

David tries to see her after a show, but she decides to get her revenge against him by pretending to want to see him and then not showing up. When she’s named as the co-respondent in a divorce suit – illustrated by big headlines in a newspaper – she retreats to the small town where she started her journey six years earlier. By now David has finished medical school and become a highly regarded surgeon – part of his repute comes from his ability to claim (rightly) that he finished his medical education in Europe – but his mother still has him tied tightly to her apron strings. When a local paper announces that the notorious Kitty Lane is coming to town, mom first tries to hide the paper from David and then, when he demands to see it, concocts a big social dinner at the local hotel restaurant and insists that he show up. By luck – or authorial fiat – Kitty is dining alone at the same restaurant on the same night, and David gets so bored with the company at his mom’s big table he bails on the party and joins Kitty at her table. Ultimately Kitty invites David to her room, but mom shows up too, crashes the party, and ultimately pulls a gun (the derringer that was established in movies as “the woman’s gun”) on Kitty and threatens to shoot. Kitty walks towards Mrs. Livingston, daring her to shoot her, and ultimately mom wimps out and Kitty takes the gun from her. Eventually it ends as you’d expect it to, with mom reluctantly accepting Kitty as her daughter-in-law and Kitty and David smooching on the couch at the fade-out. It was the sort of ending that to me raised more questions than it answered. Was David going to expect Kitty to give up her star career in show business and just be a stay-at-home wife and mother to their eventual children? Were they going to try to make it work as a two-career couple (obviously far more common now than it was in 1932)? And would David’s medical practice suffer from him being married to That Kind of Woman – which was one of the reasons Mrs. Livingston was so determined to break them up in the first place?

Shopworn had a mediocre director – Nicholas Grinde (usually credited as Nick Grinde, and sometimes as Nick Grindé, with the accent), a journeyman “B” director who cranked them out so fast a lot of Hollywood jokesters thought his last name was all too appropriate. But it had real talent at the writers’ desks: the basic story was by Sarah Y. Mason (who, with her husband Victor Heerman, would write the script for the stunning 1933 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn) and the actual script was by two future Frank Capra collaborators, Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin. The cinematographer, Joseph Walker, and the editor, Gene Havlick, were also Capra people. Shopworn was billed on its YouTube post as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era, 1930 to 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced relatively loosely, but the only version that seems to survive was a 66-minute “post-Code” edit from the late 1930’s. The existing title cards bear a Code certificate number 4749R, the “R” indicating a reissue. Shopworn is a quite good movie of its type, and though the film was presumably edited for its “post-Code” reissue I didn’t notice any of the blatant lacunae we’ve seen in other movies, like Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties, that got caught in the transition between loose and strict Code enforcement.

In his autobiography Frank Capra wrote about Stanwyck’s greatest weakness as a film actress – that she gave her best performance on the first take, and anything she did after that was just a pale copy. Capra described how he worked around this by shooting Stanwyck’s close-ups first, with multiple cameras so she would only have to do the scene once. I suspect Archie Mayo did that for one of Stanwyck’s best early films, Ever in My Heart (1933), in which she played a woman whose marriage to a German is broken up and doomed by World War I (it’s essentially Romeo and Juliet, only instead of the lovers being broken up by two feuding families, it’s two feuding countries), but I don’t think Grinde bothered. Also one major disappointment with Shopworn was that we don’t get to see any scenes of Stanwyck actually performing on stage – though she was a quite capable singer, maybe not at the level of the top white women jazz singers of the time (Mildred Bailey and Connee Boswell), but well enough to sing in The Purchase Price (1932), made two films after Shopworn, as well as in Ball of Fire (1941), in which she sang “Drumboogie” with Gene Krupa’s band, and Lady of Burlesque (1943). Shopworn doesn’t offer Stanwyck at her best (I still think she’s the greatest movie actress of all time, mainly for her versatility, matched by no other woman in the classic era and only one, Meryl Streep, since) but it’s still a raw, appealing movie that touches on moral dilemmas that are very much alive today, including the ability of the 1 percent to wreck the lives of anyone else for sometimes maddeningly arbitrary reasons and do it with impunity.

The People Next Door (CBS, Titus Productions, 1968)

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

Last night (Wednesday, July 9) I ran my husband Charles an unexpectedly good movie from the archives of CBS: The People Next Door (1968), the opening episode of the second season of the network’s attempt to revive the classic Playhouse 90 anthology series from the 1950’s. I ran it from YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMq4Y2QeJM because I’m supposed to be doing a Fanfare music review of a CD composed of three scores Jerry Goldsmith composed for TV-movies between 1968 and 1972: The People Next Door, Pursuit, and Crawlspace (a horror tale of a suburban couple who move into a house they’ve bought, find a young boy living under it in the crawlspace, and adopt him, only to find they’ve got a monster on their hands). Charles and I had watched Pursuit the previous night and found it a rather dull wanna-be “thriller” that had very little action (and very little of Goldsmith’s music). The People Next Door was another matter altogether: a surprisingly good, finely honed story about the conflicts between middle-aged suburban parents Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Lloyd Bridges and Kim Hunter) and their teenage children Artie (Peter Galman) and Maxie (Deborah Winters). There were a lot of these kinds of stories being made in the late 1960’s, but this one is unusual for the moral complexity director David Greene and writer J. P. Miller brought to it. The crisis begins when Arthur and Gerrie invite their “people next door” neighbors David and Tina Hoffman (Fritz Weaver and Phyllis Newman) to dinner, only Artie refuses to leave his room to join the dinner party because, as he bluntly tells his father, he can’t stand the Hoffmans. Gerrie finds a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in the closet and immediately she and Arthur both assume it’s Artie’s. Artie says drugs are “not my scene anymore” (indicating that he, like me, tried them briefly and decided they didn’t work for him; my two teenage attempts to smoke pot both left me violently nauseous, and I assume that’s a physiological reaction on my part because to this day being around other people smoking marijuana makes me queasy). Instead he’s going to stay in his bedroom practicing his guitar, though eventually he comes down for dinner because he’s hungry.

During the party the Masons hear whimpers from Maxie’s room, and Artie immediately realizes that Maxie is in the middle of a bad LSD trip and starts trying to talk her down from it. Unfortunately, Artie and his dad get into a huge argument that results in Arthur literally throwing his son out of his house and telling him never to come back. Their fight is over Arthur’s assumption that his son turned his daughter on to drugs, which he didn’t. Symbolically, Arthur’s and Artie’s confrontation leads to Arthur breaking the neck of his son’s guitar, which Artie leaves behind, though we later see him rehearsing with his folk-rock ensemble even though he doesn’t have a guitar anymore and therefore can only sing. Gerrie gives Maxie two sleeping pills in hopes that will get her to calm down and get some sleep, but she rather nervously awakes in the early morning hours. In the next few days, Arthur and Gerrie have a series of confrontations with their daughter in which she tells them they’re both hypocrites and idiots. Among other things, Maxie tells her parents that her bad trip wasn’t the first time she’d dropped acid, and also that she’s been sexually active with at least two male partners even though she’s only 16. She points out that Arthur and Gerrie had sex with each other before they were married – something she knows because once she had a sleepover with a female friend whose father was a doctor, and she brought along a stethoscope so they could eavesdrop on Maxie’s parents’ bedroom conversations. She also accuses Arthur of having sexual affairs with other women on nights he’s supposedly working late. This has a galvanic effect on Gerrie, who’d long suspected her husband of extra-relational activity but to have it confirmed so bluntly, and by their own daughter no less, turns her attitude towards her husband around so dramatically she isn’t sure she still wants to sleep with him.

At Gerrie’s insistence, Arthur reluctantly agrees to take Maxie to a therapist, Dr. Margolin (a young Robert Duvall, three years before his role as the consigliere in The Godfather made him a star), for both family and group sessions, but Maxie’s continued hostility both to her parents and the entire idea of group therapy ensures that the sessions aren’t beneficial. At one point, Maxie runs off to the East Village in New York City and, with Artie’s reluctant help, they find her in a squalid apartment in bed with her boyfriend. Later, in a quite startling sequence even today, Maxie secretly takes a dose of the LSD-like chemical STP (an acronym for “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace” even though the drug offers none of those things) and dashes out of the Mason home totally naked. (I’m not sure whether Deborah Winters was wearing a body stocking or was actually nude, but despite – or maybe because of – David Greene and the uncredited cinematographer’s careful choices of camera angles, the scene still shocks today, I can’t help but wonder what 1968 TV audiences thought of it.) This time she ends up in a mental institution run by Dr. Salazar (Nehemiah Persoff), who offers a grim prognosis for Maxie. Since Arthur and Gerrie don’t have the $25,000 to $40,000 (in 1968 dollars; $232,000 to $371,000 today) to pay for a high-end rehab program for their daughter, they’re stuck with leaving her in the public hospital indefinitely. Dr. Salazar bluntly tells them she might have to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, David and Tina Hoffman discover that their model son Sandy (Don Scardino), who’s planning to attend law school after he finishes high school and college, is [spoiler alert!] a drug dealer. He conceals his inventory in the trunk of his red Sunbeam sports car, which he keeps in his parents’ garage and reacts angrily when his mom wants to borrow the keys. David is so upset by this revelation he literally calls the police and turns his son in, but Sandy is convinced that the charges won’t stick. They don’t; a judge dismisses the case based on illegally seized evidence, and the police drive Sandy back to his home. Having realized that it was Sandy who provided Maxie with drugs, the moment he gets out of the cop car Arthur attacks him physically, and Frank immediately tells the police to arrest Arthur for assault. The End.

The People Next Door is an absolutely gripping tale that held my interest start-to-finish, and one of the things I liked about it was it didn’t moralize. Most of the teenager-on-drugs tales that made it onto television in 1968 were blatantly propagandistic just-say-no stories. This one wasn’t; we get a good idea of both why the parents are so shocked that their daughter turned to drugs and why she did. Also, though he doesn’t stress it, J. P. Miller’s script quietly makes the point that the parents are just as dependent on various mind-altering substances as their kids. Not only do the elder Masons and Hoffmans drink themselves into alcoholic stupors and smoke incessantly (when Maxie asks her dad for a hit on his cigarette, even though it’s only tobacco, Gerrie is shocked and tells her, “I didn’t know you smoked”), but David admits that the reason his wife Tina has such trouble sleeping is she’s taking amphetamines to lose weight, and they keep her awake so late she needs either alcohol, sleeping pills, or both to get any rest. One of the most interesting aspects of The People Next Door is that Artie, the one truly sympathetic character – the one who tries hardest to be the voice of reason amidst all the insanity going on around him – is also the one that gets treated the worst. At one point after she’s institutionalized, Maxie insists that Artie be allowed to visit her because she needs someone of her own generation whom she knows she can trust. Peter Galman’s performance as Artie is quiet but intense, like the character. As for Maxie, Deborah Winters delivers a portrayal that convinces us her life is literally on the edge, and the two sequences in which she enacts bad trips are heart-rending and decidedly authentic-looking. (I’ve never known anyone who, at least to my knowledge, has taken LSD or STP, but I’ve known enough meth heads to know what a bad trip on that substance looks like – and Miller’s script attributes Maxie’s bad LSD trip to her dose having been laced with “speed.”) The People Next Door also is quite daring for its open ending; unlike the modern-day Lifetime movies that are the descendants of the made-for-TV films of this era, it doesn’t neatly wrap up all the issues in its standard running time. Instead it leaves us grieving for all the characters, their fates, and in particular the messes they’ve made of their own and each others’ lives by keeping secrets and telling each other lies.

The People Next Door was remade as a feature film in 1970, just two years after this version aired, and it carried over David Greene as director (though he was so disgusted by studio interference he tried to have his name taken off the feature version) and J. P. Miller as writer. Fortunately, Deborah Winters as Maxie remained from the original cast, as did Don Scardino as Sandy and Nehemiah Persoff as Dr. Salazar. But all the other actors were different: Eli Wallach and Julie Harris as the Mason parents, Stephen McHattie (who would later star in a TV-movie biopic of James Dean) as Artie, and Hal Holbrook and Cloris Leachman as the elder Hoffmans. Also pop-jazz arranger Don Sebesky replaced Jerry Goldsmith as composer, though the original 1968 TV version had given Goldsmith major opportunities that he didn’t get from the rather dreary Pursuit four years later. In particular, Goldsmith got to write music in different styles for the characters, with Greene using Woody Allen’s trick from a few years later of illustrating the gaps between the characters by their tastes in music. The People Next Door opens with ragtime piano being played on the Masons’ family instrument, then segues to Artie’s quiet acoustic-guitar picking. Even before we’ve heard a word of dialogue, this illustrates the “generation gap” that drives the story. There’s even a sequence in which the Masons and the Hoffmans try to show they’re “with it” by playing a Beatles song in ragtime style – but the song is “She Loves You,” while we’ve seen posters of the Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper’s era in the kids’ bedrooms that show that Artie and Maxie have moved on from what John Lennon contemptuously described in retrospect as the “she loves you, you love her, we all love each other” banality of the Beatles’ early music.

Pursuit (ABC Circle Films, ABC, 1972)

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

Last night (Tuesday, July 8) my husband Charles and I watched yet another movie I’d ordered online from Amazon.com because I was assigned to do a Fanfare review of its soundtrack CD. The film was called Pursuit, and it was a 1972 made-for-TV movie notable mainly as the directorial debut of author Michael Crichton. It was based on a novel called Binary which Crichton had just published under the pseudonym “John Lange.” Crichton had started writing under the “John Lange” name because he was still in medical school and hoped to make some side money for his education, but he didn’t want to use his real name because he was worried that writing what amounted to pulp fiction would affect his credibility as a doctor. But it seems odd that he was still using the “Lange” name in 1972, three years after the blockbuster success of The Andromeda Strain (the first book he published under his real name) had definitively propelled him out of medicine and into writing as a full-fledged career. It also seems odd that Intrada Records would release a soundtrack album of three films featuring Jerry Goldsmith as composer – this one, The People Next Door (about a suburban couple whose daughter becomes a drug addict), and Crawlspace (described on imdb.com as “A childless middle-age couple adopt a troubled youth they find living in their crawlspace and attempt to get him to rejoin society with tragic results”) – when all Goldsmith did for Pursuit was write a few generic “suspense” cues.

Indeed, the first 10 minutes of Pursuit – showing a group of terrorists ambushing a U.S. military truck and stealing two big canisters of gas – are totally unscored, and certainly could have benefited from music. What’s more, Goldsmith took this decidedly low-end assignment just two years after his iconic score for the big-budget biopic Patton established his reputation as a “name” composer for Hollywood’s “A”-list. Pursuit is a decidedly dull tale of a group of government agents, led by Steven Graves (Ben Gazzara), on the trail of a terrorist band led by a crazy Right-wing politician named James Wright (E. G. Marshall). Wright leads a group called “Americans for a New Nation,” and we first see him giving a televised speech before the logo of his group (which he’s standing so closely in front of we can’t make out all of it) denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as corrupt pawns of a heinous political establishment whose members are interested only in feathering its own nests at the expense of the rest of us. I suspect Crichton in 1972 (the script was actually written by Robert Dozier based on Crichton’s novel) loosely based this character on George Wallace, but today he seems like a prototype of Donald Trump. Graves has an uneasy relationship with his immediate supervisor, Robert Phillips (William Windom), who puts limits on his efforts to go after the bad guys because of the pesky due-process requirements of the U.S. Constitution. Graves and his colleagues are stalking the baddies, including Wright and his field commander Timothy Drew (Martin Sheen when he was still young and relatively sexy), through the streets of San Diego in 1972.

All this is happening during a major-party political convention represented by stock shots of a real one – Crichton and Dozier try to avoid specifying which one, but the floor signs for Ronald Reagan give it away – and Wright’s plan seems to involve some sort of attack on the convention. But it takes the good guys a while to figure out just what the weapon is and when and how the attack will take place. One aspect that marks this film as being ahead of its time is how the bad guys acquired the information on which they based their plot: though the Internet was still in its infancy in 1972, the baddies had enough experienced computer hackers to sneak their way into the government’s databases and extract top-secret files. The title of Crichton’s original novel, Binary, refers not to computer code but to the terrorists’ ultimate weapon: “Binary-75” and “Binary-76,” two gases that are each harmless on their own but, when combined, they form a toxic substance that kills within minutes. The good guys watch a captured video from Czechoslovakia showing a prisoner being executed with the substance, and this gives both them and us the necessary information on how dangerous it is. Graves tries to call the White House to get the current President to cancel his plan to travel to San Diego to speak to the convention, but whoever he’s talking to refuses to disrupt the President’s plans. Amazingly, there are no women in this movie except for two bikini-clad babes we briefly get to see as some of the good males train their binoculars on the pool of the resort where Wright and Drew are staying.

In the closest the film gets to generating any real excitement, Graves has himself lowered on a rope to break into the room where the gases are being held. To protect himself against the gases’ combined effects, he’s been outfitted with a pre-inserted needle he’s instructed to inject himself with at the key moment just before he’s exposed. Crichton and Dozier make the rookie mistake of putting their big climax into effect – the successful dismantling of the bomb that was supposed to release the two gases together – with 15 minutes of the film’s 75-minute running time still to go, with the remaining open question of finding the gang’s back-up plan. It involved coating the black canister (they’re color-coded, one yellow and one black) with paint made of plastic explosive and setting it to blow up after they’ve turned off the building’s elevators so the good guys can’t evacuate the yellow canister. The idea is the black canister will blow up, taking the yellow canister with it, and release the toxic gas so one million people will die and Wright will achieve his desired “reset” of American politics and governance. Ultimately Graves realizes what’s going on – with the help of a bomb-sniffing device and the technician who operates it, even though he left it in his car and has to run back for it and arrives with just a minute left to spare – and he tosses it out the hotel-room window after yelling out a barely audible warning to the passers-by below to get out of its way. The black-canister bomb duly explodes in mid-air without blowing up the yellow one, humanity is saved and the good guys can go back to whatever it was they were doing before that.

Pursuit was fun for Charles and I to watch because of the glimpses it gave us of the San Diego skyline – particularly downtown and the waterfront – eight years before I moved here and well before Charles lived here as well. Obviously this was made when the 1972 Republican Convention was still scheduled for San Diego, though because of a political scandal it was later moved to Miami where the 1968 Republican Convention had also taken place. Aside from that, though, it was deadly dull, a cardinal sin in a movie that at least genre-wise was supposed to be a thriller. Crichton’s imdb.com page lists seven other directorial credits for him, six for feature films – including his very next one, Westworld (1973), which eventually spawned an extended cable-TV series and became an iconic success after Crichton’s death in 2008. His other movies as director, mostly based on his novels or screen originals, were Coma (1978), The Great Train Robbery (1978), Looker (1981), Runaway (1984), Physical Evidence (1989) – the only film Crichton directed which he didn’t write as well – and a video-game version of his time-travel novel Timeline (2000).

The Patriot (Columbia Pictures, Centropolis Entertainment, Mutual Film Company, Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Company Medien KG, H2L Media Group, 2000)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 6) my husband Charles and I watched the 2000 movie The Patriot, a tale of the American Revolution produced by Dean Devlin, directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat, and starring Mel Gibson as South Carolina farmer Benjamin Martin. Benjamin is a farmer and a single father of seven children (Rodat’s original script said they were only six, but when Gibson was cast he insisted Rodat give him an extra child to match the seven kids Gibson had in real life; he’s since had two more). The film begins in 1776, after the Revolution has already started but while the Continental Congress is still debating whether or not to declare formal independence from Great Britain. In 1775 the Congress had sent to London the so-called “Olive Branch” petition, which proposed an arrangement similar to what later became the British Commonwealth of Nations: America would become functionally independent but still recognize the British Crown as sovereign. Alas, King George III or (more likely) his supporters in Parliament rejected the petition without any serious consideration, setting up the Revolutionary War. When the film begins Benjamin has been summoned to a meeting in Charles Town, South Carolina, the colony’s capital (it was not given its current name, Charleston, until 1783), to debate whether or not to support the declaration of independence, as eight of the 13 colonies have already done. Benjamin is as upset as anybody about the heavy taxes the British Crown is levying against them, but he’s against declaring independence. As he puts it – in a line screenwriter Rodat cribbed from a real-life Loyalist, Rev. Mather Byles of Boston – “Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

Benjamin’s sympathies do an abrupt about-face when one of his children, Thomas (Gregory Smith), is killed by British soldiers rampaging through the area. He watches a battle in which the official forces of the Continental Army are massacred en masse by the British Redcoats after both sides confront each other by standing up and marching towards each other. Benjamin pronounces the Continental commander stupid and decides to join the war, not as part of the regular Continental Army but as leader of a band of guerrilla fighters (today they’d be called “unlawful combatants”), whom he recruits partly from churches and partly from bars. He asks the field officers of the Continental Army to assign him his eldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger, in the role that made him a star and launched his meteoric eight-year career before his tragic death from a prescription drug overdose in 2008), as his second-in-command. Benjamin’s irregulars fight a number of battles in which they seem to come out of nowhere and pick off the British soldiers at random, and they’re so effective at this that the British officers nickname Benjamin “The Ghost.” Unfortunately, in one battle in which they’re fighting side by side, Gabriel is mortally wounded just after his wife Anne Howard (Lisa Brenner) is incinerated in a church set on fire by the film’s principal villain, sadistic British Col. William Tavington (Jason Isaacs, cast after the original choice, Kevin Spacey, turned down the role because Mel Gibson was already being paid $25 million and that didn’t leave enough in the budget for him) after he locked and chained all the doors so the colonists couldn’t get away. The film proceeds to the final battle, modeled after the real life Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina on January 17, 1781. Benjamin finally fulfills his promise to kill Col. Tavington by his own hand, and the revolutionaries score a major victory that sets up the final end of the war at Yorktown, Virginia nine months later.

Other characters in the mix include Rev. Oliver (René Auberjonois, for once not playing a screaming queen), the minister who married Gabriel and Anne and pastored the church Tavington burned down; and the rather supercilious French officer Jean Villenueve (Tchéky Karyo, who was born in Turkey but raised in Paris), who bears the brunt of the criticism of Benjamin and his men that the French aren’t doing enough to help their nominal U.S. allies. Their relations are complicated by the fact that Benjamin had previously fought in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 and had led a campaign in the Wilderness. That had given him a reputation as a war hero, even though what he’d actually done (as he confesses midway through the movie) was commit a series of war crimes including massacring a group of French-Canadian civilians en masse. I had ordered a three-hour “extended version” of The Patriot on Blu-Ray (the standard theatrical version was 2 hours 45 minutes) and I generally liked the film a lot better than Charles did. Charles thought that Mel Gibson, who was born January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York and therefore was 44 when he made this movie, was too long in the tooth to play an action hero. Ironically, the role was originally offered to Harrison Ford, who was even older (born July 13, 1942), but he turned it down because he felt Rodat’s script had reduced the American Revolution to a one-man revenge struggle. And that’s a particularly strange complaint given how long John Wayne played action heroes almost until he croaked!

One of the things I liked most about The Patriot is the way it depicts the American Revolution as a turning point in world history, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect, or the ways American history proclaims it. Col. Tavington – who as a character reminded me quite a lot of President Trump’s nastiest policy advisor, Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s deliberately cruel jihad against immigrants – is constantly at odds with his immediate superior, Gen. Charles Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), because Cornwallis insists that there are gentlemanly rules that should govern even as inherently inhumane an enterprise as war, while Tavington has the more modern attitude that a military should do anything to win, including targeting innocent civilians and destroying their houses and farms. There’s a great scene of Cornwallis hosting an outdoor party that reminded me of James Agee’s description of a similar scene involving the French on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944): “Olivier transforms the French into sleepy, overconfident, highly intelligent, highly sophisticated noblemen, subtly disunified, casually contemptuous of their Dauphin – an all but definitive embodiment of a civilization a little too ripe to survive.” The final confrontation between Cornwallis and Tavington takes place when Cornwallis orders Tavington to find and kill “The Ghost,” and Tavington replies that this will mean using tactics that will not be “gentlemanly” – which prefaces his burning of the church and everyone inside it once he extracts the information of where Benjamin is hiding.

One of the things I didn’t like so much about The Patriot is that Rodat, like a screenwriter in Hollywood’s classic era, fills his script with so many “plants,” so many coincidences (like the framing of Benjamin’s character arc with the loss of Thomas in the beginning and Gabriel in the end), and a horrendous “comic relief” sub-subplot I could have lived without. Anne is at first reluctant to date Gabriel because of a prank he pulled on her when she was just 11 – he spiked her tea with ink, which she said blackened her teeth for a month (which seems hard to believe given what they used for ink in the period), and after they’re married she gets back at him by spiking his tea with ink, then gets her own teeth blackened from him kissing her. One of the best things about The Patriot is it shows just how home-grown a war the American Revolution was. Not only was it a low-tech war (one of Rodat’s weird bits of symbolism was to have Benjamin take his late son Thomas’s toy soldiers and melt down each one in turn to form pellets to shoot in his musket, recalling an article I read once about how modern-day defenders of the Second Amendment ignore the fact that when the Second Amendment was written, guns were things that basically shot marbles), it was an oddly down-to-earth one. When we first see the rival British and American armies standing straight as they charge each other, our first thought was, “Why aren’t they going to ground?” Then I realized it was because they didn’t think they had to: the guns of the day were so low-tech they had to be laboriously reloaded after each shot (Emmerich fortunately avoided the error I’ve seen in other films about 16th and 17th century wars in which the filmmakers had people fire multiple shots from their guns in quick succession, something the firearms of the period couldn’t do), and so the armies had to hold their fire and shoot at each other in synchronized barrages as ordered by their commanders. It was only in the 19th century, as gun technology improved and it became possible to fire sustained barrages from a single gun, that armies started going to ground and ultimately digging trenches (an innovation of Ulysses S. Grant in the American Civil War that got copied and helped lead to the insane carnage of World War I).

I also liked the way slavery was treated in Rodat’s script. He had Benjamin make clear that the Blacks who work on his farm are free laborers, not slaves, and when Benjamin takes in the slave Occam (Jay Arlen Jones) after his master has abandoned him and fled, he enlists him in his militia. Occam agrees to join, despite the opposition of a racist in the militia who can’t believe that Benjamin is willing to give a Black man a gun, largely on the basis of a promise made by George Washington that any slave who joined the Continental Army and fought for a year would be given his freedom and a bonus payment. (Actually, as an imdb.com “Goofs” poster pointed out, that promise only applied to people who joined the regular Continental Army, not an informal guerrilla group like Benjamin’s.) Occam’s discontent with the final outcome of the war, and particularly his well-founded fear that the promised “freedom” won’t be delivered to people who look like him, subtly and cunningly evokes the still unfinished (and, under the current regime, actively reversed) task of making people of color truly equal Americans. Overall, The Patriot is quite a good movie and a well-done homage to the American Revolution, which has been the subject of all too few movies – especially by contrast to the number that have been made about the Civil War, including two of the all-time blockbuster hits, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.