Earthquake (The Filmakers Group, Universal, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched the 1974 disaster film Earthquake on Turner Classic Movies last night (Wednesday, June 17) as part of a night’s tribute to disaster movies in general. I’d seen it before but not since the late 1980’s, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I watched it on a commercial TV showing on the Mexico-based Channel 6. Earthquake, produced and directed by my old friend Mark Robson (a graduate of the Orson Welles and Val Lewton schools of filmmaking) from a script by George Fox and (of all people!) The Godfather creator Mario Puzo (apparentliy Puzo did the first draft, got recalled by Paramount to write The Godfather, Part Two,, and Fox was called in to finish it), was released by Universal in 1974 and was the first film to feature a new technique called “Sensurround.” This didn’t affect the visual portion of the film at all but involved dubbing a low-frequency rumble to the soundtrack so the theatre seats would shake. The ads promised, “You’ll Feel It as Well as See It in Sensurround!” In a number of older theatres (including Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, when the film was previewed there), that proved literally true; as bits and pieces of the molding started to fall off the roofs of badly maintained movie houses, audience members could have been forgiven for thinking they were really being victimized by an earthquake like the one in the film. Though John Gabrish and I were watching it on an ordinary 1.33:1 aspect ratio TV, we were listening to the soundtrack on a local FM radio station that simulcast it to give at least part of the impression of “Sensurround.” Earthquake came in the middle of a disaster-film cycle which, as I joked at the time, seemed to be the major studios’ attempt to get people to go to movies again by systematically scaring them away from any other form of entertainment. “You want to go on an ocean cruise?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Poseidon Adventure.” “You want to go to San Francisco and look at the tall buildings?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Towering Inferno.” “You want to go to L.A.?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Earthquake.” “You want to go to a beach resort?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Jaws.” “Oh, hell, then let’s just go to a movie.”

I wasn’t that impressed by Earthquake when I saw it in the late 1980’s but I liked it a lot better now even though it’s still not a great movie, and given that it was made when the whole idea of the genre was spectacular action scenes, the more spectacular the better, it didn’t play to the Lewtonesque less-is-more aesthetic that was Robson’s greatest strength as a director. Like most of the major disaster films of the time, Earthquake has a multi-character plot line and an all-star (at least sort of all-star) cast. Charlton Heston stars as Stewart Graff, a former college football star turned construction engineer for a company founded and headed by Sam Royce (Lorne Greene). He’s also married to Royce’s daughter Remy (Ava Gardner, considerably seedier than she was in her glory years), though they’re unhappy together and she demonstrates this by faking a suicide attempt (not for the first time) in the film’s opening scene. Graff is having an affair with Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), widow of a man who died on a previous construction job Graff had assigned him to. Denise has an 11-year-old son named Corry (Tiger Williams) whom Graff presents with an autographed (by Frank Gifford) football. Meanwhile, Los Angeles police officer Lew Slade (George Kennedy) is in trouble with his superiors over a car chase he was involved in; the would-be thief (Bobby Ferro) crosses the city line into L.A. County and then crashes the car into a hedge belonging to a rich person’s mansion. Slade then punches out the L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy who won’t allow him to give chase, and for that he’s suspended by his superior on the LAPD and ends up in a bar, still in full uniform in the middle of the day. Another storyline deals with Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), a motorcycle stunt rider who’s trying to be the Black Evel Knievel (the name is actually checked in the script). He’s worked out an elaborate stunt that involves riding on a loop, then accelerating on a roller-coaster-style ramp, and finally crossing through a hoop of flame. His manager, Sal Amici (Gabriel Dell from the old Bowery Boys films), needs a can of butane to make the hoop burn and bums $10 for it from Officer Slade. Quade (or Roundtree’s stunt double; this film featured 141 stunt people, a record to that time) successfully executes the stunt but then his attempt to repeat it for a Vegas promoter falls victim to the first of several big earthquakes in the film, which destroys the elaborate equipment.

Sal had enlisted his sister Rosa (Victoria Principal, who apparently auditioned for the part with her normal hair but arrived at her call-back with a shorter “do” coiffed to resemble an Afro; Robson was so impressed with her new hair she got the part), to parade at Quade’s big audition wearing a T-shirt with his logo and showing off her breasts, but the strait-laced Rosa bailed and went to a movie (the Clint Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter) instead. There’s also a supermarket manager named Jody (Marjoe Gortner) who tries to get Officer Slade to bust the group of Hare Krishnas who are chanting and singing outside his store. Slade refuses, asking Jody, “You got something against God?” – an in-joke reference to Gortner’s past as a traveling evangelist (a career he was literally born into because his parents were also traveling evangelists and mashed up “Mary” and “Joseph” when they named him). Jody lives in a building with three other young men and is training to be a bodybuilder, which has led him to adorn the walls of his room with photos of musclemen and has led his roommates to Queer-bait him. There’s also a scene at the California Institute of Seismology in which a junior seismologist named Walter Russell (Kip Niven) insists on the basis of his boss’s theories that L.A. is ready for a truly massive earthquake, only in the boss’s absence the place is being run by Dr. Willis Stockle (Barry Sullivan), who refuses Russell’s entreaties to go to L.A. Mayor Lewis (John Randolph) to ask for a major evacuation order. When word comes through that Russell’s boss has been killed in Fresno by a preliminary earthquake, Stockle takes Russell’s warnings seriously, but Mayor Lewis insists that he doesn’t want to panic the population unnecessarily, though he’s concerned enough he calls out the National Guard. Jody is a Guardsman and his unit is one of the ones mobilized – as he puts on his uniform his roommates taunt him and say he’s about to go out and play at being a soldier. Finally there’s intrigue around the big Mulholland Dam outside L.A. that supplies most of the city’s drinking water; a man is found drowned to death in an elevator shaft, and the dam starts developing visible cracks. Then the big earthquake (measuring 9.9 on the Richter scale, bigger than any actually recorded quake) happens and the city is thrown into turmoil.

The National Guard sets up an emergency medical station in the Wilton Plaza parking lot and its basements, until an aftershock destroys most of Wilton Plaza. I especially liked the sudden appearance of Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors, as the doctor in the emergency scenes. I suspect he got the part from having played the doctor Diahann Carroll’s nurse character worked for in the TV series Julia. There are thrilling scenes showing the evacuation of the Royce Construction building using an elaborate makeshift system Graff works up consisting of an office chair with arms and a firehose; Royce himself is successfully rescued but dies later of a heart attack in Wilton Plaza. Officer Slade commandeers Graff’s specially designed vehicle and presses it into service as an ambulance. Miles Quade’s vehicle also gets used as an ambulance, and among the people he and his crew rescue are Denise Marshall, though it's not until several reels later that she and her son are finally reunited. Jody busts Rosa for stealing a doughnut from a now-deserted deli and insists he’s got a right to hold her in custody for looting, but not surprisingly it turns what he really wants is Rosa’s body (she was a regular at his supermarket and he’s got a major crush on her). Ultimately Jody goes crazy out of lust and Officer Slade shoots him before he can do the dirty deed on Rosa. Ultimately the Mulholland Dam gives way and floods the city (Anton Chekhov, call your office!), sweeping away both Graff and Remy. That wasn’t in the original script; Charlton Heston insisted on rewriting the ending so both he and Ava Gardner’s characters would die. (Perhaps he was thinking of the sudden shock audiences had felt when Gene Hackman’s character died at the end of The Poseidon Adventure.) The original ending would have killed off Remy but left Graff alive and paired him with Denise. One of the most interesting aspects of Earthquake is the musical score by John Williams; it opens with some surprisingly atmospheric and musically advanced cues (anticipating some of the equally interesting cues in films like Jaws and E.T., both scores that are far more complex than the Big Tunes everyone knows) that do an excellent job of scene-setting. Though it’s still not a great movie, I liked Earthquake considerably better this time around even though the special effects, which won a special Academy Award, were variable. Some of them were utterly convincing; others, particularly the suburban houses that get smashed to bits during the Big Quake, looked like crudely constructed cardboard models. Apparently the technicians at Universal invented a device that could make an entire camera body shake instead of just jiggling the lens, as had been done in previous earthquake films, but they didn’t use it all that effectively. Still, I thought Earthquake worked as cheesy entertainment.

Ladies of the Big House (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a film that turned out to be surprisingly good: a 1931 Paramount melodrama called Ladies in the Big House. It began as an unproduced play by Ernest Booth, who was himself a convict. He’d been arrested for burglary as a teenager, served time in the Preston School of Industry (a so-called “reform school” that, at least in the movies, never seemed to reform anybody), and ultimately ended up in San Quentin. There he wrote a treatment for a crime-related story called Ladies of the Mob which Paramount bought as a vehicle for Clara Bow, directed by William Wellman (unfortunately that film is lost), and in 1931 Paramount came a-calling again and bought the rights to Ladies in the Big House. The story takes place in an unnamed city where the district attorney’s job has just been taken by reform-minded Lawson (George Irving) who’s determined to use his power to smash the crime ring that controls the city government. The ring is led by Martin Doremus (Rockcliffe Fellowes, who made this movie as a no-good gangster the same year he played the sympathetic gangster Joe Helton in the Marx Brothers’ spoof Monkey Business), and his lieutenant is Joe “Kid” Athens (Earle Foxe). Doremus has a spy on Lawson’s payroll: his assistant John Hartman (Purnell Pratt), whom Lawson is convinced is the one honest man in the previous administration. Lawson couldn’t be more wrong about that: Hartman is in regular contact with Doremus and is keeping him up to date about Lawson’s activities against him. On a tip from Hartman, Doremus orders Athens to leave town for a while to avoid a murder rap Lawson is about to pin on him. But Athens refuses to leave because he’s fallen so intensely in love with a local woman he doesn’t want to leave town without her and she won’t leave with him at all.

The woman, it turns out, is flower seller Kathleen Storm (Sylvia Sidney, top-billed), who’s a decent girl who went on a few dates with Athens but broke up with him once she realized who he was and how he made his living. Athens hangs around the florist shop where Kathleen works and demands that she not date anyone else, but no sooner has he left the store than someone else shows up: Standish McNeil (Gene Raymond, billed second). McNeil has just returned from a business trip to France – he’s a consulting engineer and he works around the world – when he comes to the shop and buys a bouquet of forget-me-nots, giving them to Kathleen. The two date for two weeks and ultimately get married, but Athens has a plot up his sleeve. He calls the police on the McNeils, and the police duly show up in the person of Detective Martin French (Robert Emmett O’Connor, who seemed to play nothing but decent but dimwitted Irish cops). Then Athens sneaks into the McNeils’ apartment, shoots Detective French in cold blood, and tosses the gun on the floor so it will look like Standish McNeil killed the cop and Kathleen was an accessory. With Hartman prosecuting the case personally, both McNeils are convicted of murder, and he’s given a death sentence while she’s sent to a women’s prison for life. Once the film gets to the women’s prison it becomes a lot more interesting; Kathleen meets up with her fellow convicts and has to sleep in a giant dormitory because the prison is so overcrowded she’ll have to wait her turn to be assigned to a cell. Among the people she meets are Susie Thompson (Wynne Gibson in a performance that steals the film out from under the nominal leads), who was Athens’s girlfriend until he dumped her for Kathleen. Susie tells Kathleen flat-out that she has no reason to like or befriend her, but she will just to get back at Athens for leaving her and letting her rot in prison. There’s also a quite remarkable Black character named Ivory (Louise Beavers), who plays piano in the recreation room and leads a prison band; and a Latina named Maria (Miriam Goldina), who was pregnant when she was arrested and is determined not to have her baby in prison.

The film cuts back and forth between the women’s prison and Death Row, where McNeil makes friends with the inmate in the next cell over even though they can only speak to each other through the windows of their cells. At one point Maria decides to attempt an escape (Harold Booth was known for several escape attempts in real life as well) and Kathleen insists on going with her once her appeal is denied. Ivory tries to cover for them by instructing the prison band to play as loudly as possible, but the two are caught and Maria is shot dead by guards, moaning about her unborn baby as she expires. Just when we’re wondering how the writers – Booth got credit for the original story, Louis Weitzenkorn (author of the play on which Five Star Final, a “pre-Code” masterpiece from 1931 starring Edward G. Robinson as a guilt-ridden tabloid editor who dredges up a 20-year-old scandal and Boris Karloff as his star reporter, was based) as the screenwriter and William Slavens McNutt and Grover Jones credited with additional dialogue – are going to arrange it so that McNeil isn’t executed and they’re both exonerated, fate intervenes in the form of a tabloid story about the case. It was occasioned by John Hartman, who arranged for a meeting between McNeil and Kathleen just so one of his friends in the press could send a photographer to take a picture of them embracing for a feature story about the case. The feature also contains a photo of the gun used to kill the police detective that shows the inscription, “With Love.” Susie Thompson recognizes the inscription as belonging to a gun she bought and had so engraved as a present for Athens, and she duly reports this to the warden (Frank Sheridan). Unfortunately, the assistant D.A. Lawson sends to investigate this is none other than John Hartman, who meets with Kathleen and tells her there’s nothing he can do because the word of a convict like Susie Thompson would be meaningless in court. The writers and director Marion Gering (a Russian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1924 and worked mostly on the stage, though he was brought to Hollywood in 1931 when the studios were looking for directors with experience handling actors who had to speak lines; he directed a lot of Sylvia Sidney’s films, including a 1932 nonmusical adaptation of Madame Butterfly with Sidney as Cho-Cho-San and Cary Grant as Pinkerton) ultimately have Susie Thompson approach the warden and D.A. Lawson directly, and she fingers Hartman and at least three other city officials as being on Doremus’s payroll. This revelation happens literally in the nick of time, on the morning of McNeil’s scheduled execution, and though for some reason the McNeils are told they must remain in prison for a few days longer while everything gets sorted out, the film’s final shot is of them together, blessedly free, and heading out on a ship to Baku, Russia, where McNeil’s latest engineering job awaits them.

Ladies of the Big House, which I’d bought on a Blu-Ray disc that also contained Confessions of a Co-Ed, turned out to be a much better movie, largely due to some chiaroscuro compositions Gering and cinematographer David Abel concocted that look a good deal like film noir (though in 1931 that would have been called “the German look”). Indeed, Ladies in the Big House qualifies as proto-noir, not only visually but in the moral ambiguity of Wynne Gibson’s character, and it’s also welcome to see a film from classic Hollywood in which an African-American like Louise Beavers is allowed to portray dignity and independence instead of just being shuffled into the usual stupid servant stereotype. Indeed, Charles was surprised that the prison in Ladies of the Big House was racially integrated, at a time when apparently most U.S. prisons, both male and female, were segregated. And at least one major Black actress besides Beavers appears: one of the inmates is played by Evelyn Preer, star of many of Oscar Micheaux’s films and a woman whom Paul Robeson called the greatest artist of the Black theatre. Though there are some of the usual Hollywood sillinesses – Charles complained about the brilliantine in Gene Raymond’s hair even when he’s about to be executed (and the more scenes I see in classic-era films of people looking immaculately dressed and coiffed even after they’ve been through dire situations, the more I admire Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack for that remarkable scene in the 1933 King Kong in which Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray emerge from the jungle with their hair and clothes disheveled as we’d expect from what they’d been through in the immediately previous scenes) – for the most part Ladies of the Big House is a surprisingly good movie and a welcome souvenir of the so-called “pre-Code” era in Hollywood history. Incidentally Ernest Booth was paroled in 1937 and spent the next few years writing stories about crime and prison for the various studios, of which three actually got filmed – Penrod’s Double Trouble (1938), Women Without Names (1940), and Men of San Quentin (1942). Unfortunately he also returned to his previous profession and got arrested in 1947 for a series of burglaries and robberies, and he returned to San Quentin and served time there until he died in 1959.

A Modern Musketeer (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, Artcraft Pictures, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 14) Turner Classic Movies showed on its “Silent Sunday Nights” feature a film I’d long been curious about: A Modern Musketeer, made in 1917 by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. after he’d only been in Hollywood for two years. In that time he’d acquired such a following that when he told Adolph Zukor at Paramount that he wanted to film E. P. Lyle’s short story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” and he wanted to shoot the second half of it on location at the Grand Canyon, he got the green light without any apparent difficulty. Made by the Douglas Fairbanks Picture Company and released through Paramount’s higher-end label, Artcraft Pictures (which would also release the films of Fairbanks’s wife-to-be, Mary Pickford), A Modern Musketeer was directed by Allan Dwan (the fifth of his 11 films with Fairbanks) and also written and edited by him. The film actually starts with an elaborate prologue showing Fairbanks playing D’Artagnan, and it’s clear that playing this sequence gave Fairbanks the idea to make a full-fledged adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers, which he would do four years later and definitively transition his career from modern-dressed romantic comedies to costumed period pieces. Once the dry run is out of the way, Fairbanks’s modern-day character is revealed as Ned Thacker, a young man from Kansas who’s obsessed with D’Artagnan and the whole mythos of The Three Musketeers. A later flashback sequence explains why: Ned’s mother (Edythe Chapman) was reading the novel incessantly while she was pregnant with him, and we’re supposed to assume that her obsession with Dumas penetrated the womb and got transmitted to her as-yet unborn baby. When Ned grows up he lasts six months at college (an intertitle tells us “he finished four years of college in six months … by request”) and gets into a lot of trouble, as when he pulls on an older man on a trolley and demands he give up his seat for two women. The man turns out to be the town police chief and Ned ends up serving a brief sentence in jail. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge (Kathleen Kirkham) is deeply in debt and decides she can get out of it by essentially selling her daughter Elsie (Marjorie Daw) to Forrest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), “the richest man in Yonkers.” Forrest suggests that Elsie and her mother take a road trip in Forrest’s chauffeur-driven car, while Thacker’s father sends him out of town by giving him a car (a Model T Ford, of course!) the way D’Artagnan’s father gave him a horse. The two cars meet in Arizona, where Forrest’s car stalls out at the edge of a precipice and Ned is quite taken with the chauffeur because he’s from France, the country of which Ned dreams.

Of course Ned is also quite taken with Elsie Dodge, but he’s got at least two rivals for her. One is Forrest Vandeteer and the other is Chin-de-dah (Frank Campeau), a Native chief who lives in one of the stone dwellings built into the side of the Grand Canyon and offers refuge to various outlaws and crooks. Among the residents of his compound are James Brown (Tully Marshall) and an unidentified bandit (Jim Mason). Surprisingly, especially since Tully Marshall (best known for his creepy villain roles in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly) is playing him, James Brown turns out to be a sympathetic character, a man who was swindled out of a fortune and who became an outlaw only when his family accused him of being the swindler. Another surprise is that midway through the film, Mrs. Dodge has an attack of conscience and realizes that she shouldn’t essentially sell her daughter to the rich guy but should let her pair up with Ned instead. Of course Chin-de-dah wants to kidnap Elsie and turn her into his sex slave – and we get a flashback sequence that shows what happened to the last woman he kidnapped for that purpose: she got a knife and used it to commit suicide. It’s obvious what’s going to happen: Ned is going to rescue Elsie from Chin-de-dah and also gallantly save the life of Forrest, who ends up dangling over a gorge on a rope that Ned pulls up to rescue him. Thereby Ned will fulfill his lifelong ambition of being a real-life D’Artagnan. I liked the first half of A Modern Musketeer a lot better than the second. Fairbanks designed his films largely to show off his athletic skills, including elaborate “trajectory” gags that reminded me of Buster Keaton. (Later I recalled that Keaton’s first feature, The Saphead, had been based on a play Fairbanks had performed on the Broadway stage before entering films. So the similarities between them are not accidental.) The second half is considerably less interesting, despite the stunning Grand Canyon scenery which must have wowed movie audiences in 1917. One of my problems with the film is the frankly racist depiction of Native Americans, particularly the whole idea that the chief is willing to kidnap and enslave a white woman simply because he's bored with the Native women available to him more or less consensually. The action scenes are also surprisingly dull, especially by comparison with what Fairbanks and Dwan would achieve just five years later in their joint masterpiece, Robin Hood (1922). They’re shot with the camera miles away and little suspense editing. A Modern Musketeer is an O.K. film that obviously delivered the goods for its 1917 audiences, and it’s a welcome preservation today (the existing print was restored by the Danish Film Archive, which preserved a surprising number of silent films that would have otherwise been lost, and outfitted with a score in 2006 by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra that was O.K.; I’m surprised they didn’t use Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite for some of the underscoring, but I believe that would still have been under copyright protection in 2006) but an acceptable entertainment rather than a truly great film.

Somewhat Secret (MGM, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Modern Musketeer on June 14 Turner Classic Movies squeezed in a quite charming half-hour 1939 short called Somewhat Secret, directed by Sammy Lee (one of the relatively unimaginative dance directors hired by the studios en masse during the early sound era that lost their gigs when Busby Berkeley arrived) from a script by Richard English (“original” story), Julian Hochfelder, and Mort Greene (screenplay). It’s a satire on the attitude of 1930’s elders towards swing music, which they argue is corrupting the youth of America and undermining their morals. (That’s what older people have had to say about every sort of music young folks like, from 1920’s jazz to modern-day hip-hop. Indeed, when I read Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations I was surprised to read that when he was growing up in Germany in the 1890’s there was a similar generation gap in musical tastes over Wagner, whom the young people liked and their parents couldn’t stand.) It takes place at the Dimsdale Hall Finishing School, where assistant dean Emily Godsall (Mary Howard) is giving a lecture telling the women students at Dimsdale that anyone caught listening to swing music will be disciplined for it. Emily is in love with the school’s chemistry professor, Benjamin Barnes (Tom Collins, who’s first shown wearing one of the most blatantly fake moustaches and beards in movie history, though eventually we learn why it’s so fake), who also doubles as the school’s music director and plays piano while Emily sings a sappy song called “You and I Were Made for Love.” Needless to say, the students, led by “Alice, the Tattletale” (Mary Bovard), have no intention of obeying Emily’s anti-swing edicts; they’ve already discovered an off-campus boîte called “Nick’s Nook” where a jukebox blasts away with swing, and they’re laying down plans to escape the campus and go to a major swing festival at the “Billion Dollar Pier” in Atlantic City. (There really was a big ballroom in Atlantic City called the Million Dollar Pier.)

Two gangster types lay in wait outside the Dimsdale campus one night; one of them (Billy Wayne) carries a violin case and we instantly assume it’s concealing a submachine gun, while the other (Benny Rubin) is armed with a pair of drumsticks and hammers away at any available surface. It turns out they aren’t crooks, though; they’re members of a major big band called the “Swingopators” and they’re at Dimsdale to kidnap their former pianist, Benny “Barrelhouse” Barnes, to reunite the Swingopators for the big Atlantic City gig. It turns out Barnes fled the band after an altercation in which he struck one of the band’s piccolo players and thought he had killed him, but when the two interlopers assure Barnes that the man survived and therefore he isn’t facing a murder rap, he agrees to rejoin. That means he blows off the engagement party at which Emily planned to announce that she and that nice young chemistry teacher (who’s shown in a sequence of him frantically pouring chemicals out of one container into another in a way that makes it look like he’s about to construct the Frankenstein Monster) are to be married. Emily traces Barnes to Nick’s Nook and then to Atlantic City, where to absolutely no one’s surprise she finds herself actually liking swing, tapping her feet to the music and then sort-of dancing to it. She realizes that the band’s pianist is her fiancé when a vandal draws a fake beard on the poster advertising him and she herself supplies the moustache and Harold Lloyd-style glasses he wore on campus at Dimsdale. Though I’m surprised the writers missed the gimmick of having Elsie sing a swing song herself at the finish, Somewhat Secret is still an imaginative little movie that at once acknowledges the clichés and plays fast and loose with them.

Blackout, a.k.a. Murder by Proxy (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” episode, a really quirky 1954 film alternately called Murder by Proxy in its native Great Britain and Blackout in the U.S. Like Four-Sided Triangle and “X” the Unknown, which Charles and I had watched recently, it was made under a co-production deal between Robert Lippert’s company in the U.S. and Exclusive Films (which both before and after this was known as Hammer Films, and within a few years would make The Curse of Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula and thereby take over from Universal as the world’s main purveyor of Gothic horror on film) in the U.K. The deal was that Hammer would supply the production staff and supporting actors, while Lippert would offer American stars to boost the films’ appeal to U.S. audiences. Alas, Lippert couldn’t afford the biggest names in Hollywood, so he had to settle for Dane Clark, who’d had a fair-to-middling career as a Warner Bros. contract star (he was Jewish and his real name was Bernard Zanville, but as they had previously with Edward G. Robinson nèe Emmanuel Goldenberg and John Garfield nèe Julius Garfinkel, Warners gave him an Anglo name). Warners were hoping that Clark could take over from Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, but he was too much a thug type for that to work. Blackout was based on a novel by Helen Nielsen, who would never again have a novel directly adapted to the screen, though she would sell a number of scripts to TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason. Blackout is a convoluted story in which a former U.S. World War II soldier named Casimir (Dane Clark) has rechristened himself “Casey Morrow” and is bumming around Europe. He's in London at a swanky nightclub (as swanky as a Hammer production budget could make it, anyway) listening to British jazz singer Cleo Laine do a quite nice version of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Then an electrifying-looking woman named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee, who was just 19 when she made this; she worked steadily for the next six years until dying suddenly in an auto accident at age 25) sidles up to his table and offers to pay for his drinks. Eventually she offers him 500 pounds if he’ll marry her that very night, and he accepts, only to wake up the next morning with blood on his overcoat and no memory of what happened to him the night before.

He awakens in a flat occupied by Phyllis’s slightly older roommate Margaret “Maggie” Doone (Eleanor Summerfield), where the first thing he sees is a large portrait Maggie has painted of Phyllis. With only the vaguest memories of what happened to him the night before, Casey goes out for a walk and runs into a news agent selling copies of the Daily Mail, whose lead story is of the sudden murder of Phyllis’s father that night. At Maggie’s urging, Casey starts investigating the case himself, fearful that if he goes to the police he’ll be arrested for the crime, especially since with her dad and mom having separated, Phyllis will be next in line to inherit her dad’s fortune and therefore Casey will have had an enormous motive for knocking him off. Casey learns that Phyllis was engaged to marry the Brunner family’s lawyer, Lance Gordon (Andrew Osborn), who turns out to be an egotistical creep. He also finds out from Phyllis’s mother Alicia (Betty Ann Davies) that Gordon was scamming the family by soliciting phony “contributions” to an alleged charity called “Green Pastures.” This was supposedly an outreach to set up homes for children left orphaned by World War II, but it was really a scam sucking money from the Brunner family fortune to buy houses that didn’t exist. At one point after visiting Gordon, Casey is tailed by the driver of another car who attempts to run him down. Later he traces the recipient of the check Alicia Brunner cut to buy the phony property for “Green Pastures” and it’s Victor Vanno (Harold Lang), who was also Travis, the driver who tried to kill Casey earlier. There are three main suspects, including Phyllis herself; attorney Gordon; and the actual killer [spoiler alert!], Alicia Brunner, who knocked off her husband because he was allowing Gordon to swindle him out of large chunks of the family fortune. Also Phyllis at first insists that she married Casey, then denies it, then acknowledges it again after her mom has been popped for murdering her dad. The film ends with Casey and Phyllis committing to each other and deciding to make their marriage work, which will be a lot easier than it would be otherwise because with her father dead and her mother on the way to the gallows for killing him, Phyllis is going to inherit the Brunner fortune.

“Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller classified Blackout as part of a sub-genre called “blackout noir,” of which the most famous examples are Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) and Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), both made at Universal in the U.S. and both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Black Angel is arguably the most intriguing example of the genre because the lead character, Dan Duryea, is suspected of murder, works with his wife (June Vincent) to clear himself, and ultimately realizes that he’s the killer after all. Muller also faulted the script of Blackout by Richard H. Landau for containing too many extended passages of expository dialogue which the director, Terence Fisher (who’d later work on most of Hammer’s horrors), shot quickly and in single takes. He pointed out one scene in which Dane Clark blew his line and said, “I know,” when he was supposed to say, “You know,” then corrected himself immediately – and Fisher left it in the final cut. He also mentioned the problems the film’s script supervisor (they used to be called “script girls” and now are called “continuity people,” and their job is to make sure that scenes match and you don’t see an actor with a hat on in one shot and without it in another shot supposedly taking place at the same time), Renée Glynne, had with Belinda Lee. As the Wikipedia page on the film explains, “Script supervisor Renee Glynne later recalled that Belinda Lee ‘was still very inexperienced at that time and I had to watch her quite carefully. She’d cross her legs the wrong way or turn her head at the wrong moment or come out with the wrong line, so I'd have to correct her and try to help her out. Dane [Clark] obviously fancied her and got very cross with my professional interference. He got quite nasty and was actually pushing me away from her.’ Glynne says she had to take medication ‘in order to survive the rest of the film. After that I had to give all my instructions to him through the director, Terry Fisher ... after some shots he'd have to put his head under cold water because he was so enraged that I was even there. Eventually he realized how silly it all was and went down on his knees, tears streaming down his face, begging me to forgive him. But I still asked [Hammer producer] Tony Hinds to take me off the next film he was in.’” Blackout a.k.a. Murder by Proxy is only tangentially a film noir, and the ending is really a cheat; Eddie Muller joked about how unlikely it seemed that Casey and Phyllis would be able to make their marriage work, and I had thought it would end with Casey and Maggie getting together because she seemed like a much better, more down-to-earth match for him even though they would have both been broke financially.

A Night to Remember (The Rank Organisation, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 10) my husband Charles and I watched the 1958 British film A Night to Remember on Turner Classic Movies as part of a night of films about both real and fictional shipwrecks. We’d watched the film together in the late 1990’s on a pre-recorded VHS tape in the wake of the mega-success of James Cameron’s Titanic, and I had quickly decided it was my all-time favorite movie about the Titanic disaster. My main reason was it had no fictional characters: everyone in the dramatis personae had actually lived and been involved with the Titanic as either a crew member or passenger, one of the dignitaries wishing it good luck as it set off on its first (and, as it turned out, last) voyage, or a crew member on the two ships in the vicinity of the Titanic as it sank on April 15, 1912: the Californian (which ignored Titanic’s distress calls for reasons that became important plot points in the movie) and the Carpathia (which actually rescued most of the Titanic’s survivors). A Night to Remember began as a book on the Titanic disaster by Walter Lord, and the screenplay for the film was by Eric Ambler – a surprising name because he was usually known for fictional crime stories and spy thrillers. (It would have been like James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, writing a nonfiction book about the Bermuda Triangle.) The director was Roy Ward Baker (credited as just Roy Baker), who six years earlier had made the 1952 Hollywood film Don’t Bother to Knock starring Marilyn Monroe (in her first top-billed role) as a psychotic babysitter (and reportedly Monroe had been freaked out by being directed by a man with her real last name in a tale about childhood and the loss of innocence). There were some other prestigious names behind the camera: the cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, who a decade later would shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey for Stanley Kubrick; and the art director was Alex Vetchinsky, who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on his 1938 British film The Lady Vanishes. The cast was quite large, and virtually all of it was drawn from that remarkable pool of British (and British-trained) character actors.

Kenneth More, who a year later would star in the 1959 remake of Hitchcock’s 1935 masterpiece The 39 Steps, played the lead role of Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on board the Titanic and the highest-ranking officer to survive the disaster. The real Lightoller led a quite interesting and movie-worthy life (you should look him up on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lightoller) and was already 38 years old when he set sail on the Titanic on April 10, 1912. (Later, in retirement, he would sail his private yacht across the English Channel in 1940 as a volunteer in the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, and the movie Dunkirk includes a character based on him.) More turns in an authoritative performance even though, like the real Lightoller, he gets quite annoying when he rigidly enforces the women-and-children-first policy to determine who gets on the lifeboats in spite of the pleas of couples not to be separated from each other or their kids. Incidentally the real Lightoller preferred to be addressed by his middle name, Herbert, or his nickname, “Lights.” A Night to Remember is a well-crafted movie, beautifully directed by Baker and photographed by Unsworth in high-contrast black-and-white (it’s one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies needed color) and vividly acted. I especially liked Tucker McGuire as the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, and as an American (born in Winchester, Virginia on January 29, 1913) she had no problem with the character’s U.S. accent. She certainly holds her own against the formidable competition of Debbie Reynolds (in The Unsinkable Molly Brown on both stage and film) and Kathy Bates (in James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic), especially when she grabs command of her lifeboat from the nominal sailor who’s supposed to be running it and orders her crewwomen to row in the direction of other survivors.

Some of this film’s footage comes not only from surviving newsreel clips of the actual Titanic setting off on its maiden voyage but the 1943 German film Titanic, one of the most fascinating movies about the disaster because it ran headlong into political winds from its Nazi sponsors. The original director of the 1943 Titanic, Herbert Selpin, was arrested during the production for allegedly having made disparaging comments about the ability of Germany to win the war, and he was ultimately found hanging in his cell while his replacement director, Werner Klingler, finished the film but was not credited. Selpin and his co-writer, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius, had concocted a fictional German officer, Petersen (Hans Nielsen), to serve aboard the Titanic and try to talk the British officers out of steaming full speed ahead through the ice fields, and when Joseph Goebbels green-lighted this film it’s obvious he wasn’t seeing beyond “German good – British bad.” In fact, as Charles and I realized years ago when we watched the Kino DVD of Titanic, it’s about a hierarchical organization which puts demands on people that border on the insane and lead to a predictable catastrophe. Once Goebbels watched the finished film he insisted that it only be released in occupied France, not Germany itself; it wasn’t released in Germany until 1949, well after the war, when the Allied occupiers were desperate to find any German-language films that didn’t carry too much of the taint of Nazism. But the German Titanic was the biggest-budgeted film made in Germany to that date, and four clips from it were used in A Night to Remember: two of the Titanic sailing in calm waters before the catastrophe, and two of the engine room flooding after the collision.

It’s interesting to note that Ambler’s script for the film contains various legends about the Titanic that have since been debunked. Modern research notes that the Titanic may have been doomed from the start by its very size; when it was launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast where it was built (and where James Cameron discovered the original plans and used them to construct the replica Titanic for his 1997 film), the undertow from it pulled the docking pier close to it. This suggests that the iceberg that caused the Titanic to sink might also have been pulled close to it by the draft of the ship (as the mine that sank the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic, when it was being used as a hospital ship in December 1916 off the coast of Turkey during World War I). It’s also been guessed that the iceberg (which is really just a giant ice cube in the middle of the sea) had a spur on it that sliced open the ship’s watertight compartments (which were supposed to render it “unsinkable”) like a can opener. One thing we do know about the Titanic that wasn’t known then was that the ship actually broke in two as it sank. Some survivors said it had, some said it hadn’t, and here (as in all previous films about the Titanic) it sinks in one piece. It wasn’t until 1985, when improvements in diving equipment, including unmanned submersible craft that allow objects under thousands of feet of water to be photographed, had been made, that the wreckage of the Titanic was photographed for the first time. The footage confirmed that the Titanic had indeed broken in two as it sank, and Cameron became the first director of a dramatic film about the Titanic to incorporate that information. Another myth about the Titanic that this film perpetuated was that the last song heard aboard the vessel as it sank was the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” This was disconfirmed partly from the recollections of survivors, who named the last song as a French piece called “Autumn Dream,” and partly from a 1909 magazine interview with the man who became bandmaster for the Titanic. He told the interviewer that he’d never play a depressing song during a shipwreck, but would keep the music lively to keep up the passengers’ spirits. (Alas, even James Cameron couldn’t resist putting “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on his soundtrack as the last song the Titanic passengers heard before it sank.)

This time around Charles faulted the film for the cleanliness of the engine room, which reminded me of Duke Ellington’s 1935 short film Symphony in Black, with its stokers shoveling coal into a boiler from a perfectly clean, pristine soundstage floor. Overall, though, both of us liked the movie and its ability to generate enough drama to hold the interest with just the real people who’d been on board the Titanic instead of dragging in fictional characters (as the Titanic films of 1943, 1953, and 1997 did; I’ll never forget when Charles and I watched the 1953 20th Century-Fox Titanic and he was so appalled when Robert Wagner started to sing the song “Vive la Compagnie!” he turned to me and said, “I’m rooting for the iceberg”). Incidentally this version of A Night to Remember underwent a major restoration job courtesy of ITV, Britain’s private commercial TV channel, and while I hadn’t found anything particularly wrong with the picture quality the last time I’d seen it, the film’s visual appeal was excellent and really did justice to the chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography and the whole approach to the film. Though it didn’t go anywhere nearly as far as the 1943 German Titanic (which is actually about the stock speculation White Star Line CEO J. Bruce Ismay was doing in connection with the ship’s maiden voyage), there are certainly anti-rich and anti-capitalist elements in A Night to Remember, including the horrific scenes of steerage passengers being locked out of the upper decks and thereby being trapped like rats as they try to escape (one of them takes an ax to break apart the wood to which the metal gate is latched and is upbraided by a White Star sailor for destroying the line’s property) and the complaints of the upper-class passengers that all this bother about an iceberg and an evacuation is totally spoiling their lunches, tea breaks, and other diversions. There’s also a great running gag about a card sharp who inveigled his fellow passengers into a high-stakes poker game that goes on until literally the last minute; a large metal covered food tray that slides around in the ship’s evacuated restaurant; and the final desperation as many passengers literally jump off what’s left of the ship in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves despite the frigid cold of the Arctic waters. A Night to Remember is the Titanic movie to watch if you’re going to see just one (though I’d also recommend the German Titanic of 1943 as well as James Cameron’s, which for all its bits of silliness does have some first-rate elements; I especially liked Gloria Stuart, who played the old version of Kate Winslet’s character and in a letter to the Los Angeles Times acclaimed Cameron one of the three best directors she’d ever worked for, alongside James Whale and John Ford).

Bubbles (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 7) my husband Charles and I watched a 1930 Warner Bros. short called Bubbles that was filmed in two-strip Technicolor but now only exists in black-and-white. What makes this one interesting is it was one of three short films made featuring Judy Garland (though she was still using her birth name, Frances Gumm), and apparently the only one that survives with both picture and sound intact. The first one, The Big Revue of 1929, is totally lost, and for the second, Blue Butterfly, we have the Vitaphone soundtrack record but not the film itself. In Bubbles Judy sang a song called “The Land of Let’s Pretend,” and she’s not very good: her voice was still that of a little girl and her intonation was all over the place. I was amused that one of the other songs in the film contained the word “rainbow,” since even though Judy (or Frances) didn’t sing it here the word “rainbow” would become crucial to her later career. Not only did she sing “Over the Rainbow” in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, two years later MGM dredged up the 1920’s song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” for her and also commissioned a song for her called “The End of the Rainbow” (you get the idea?). Somehow in the five years between 1930 and 1935, for which we have the next surviving recording of Judy’s voice – a broadcast aircheck of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” from a show in which the announcer broke the news that Judy had just signed a seven-year contract with MGM – her voice developed into that of a fully mature woman and gained the artistry and precision that would ultimately make her a star, albeit a highly troubled one.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 6 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe; TV series episode, aired March 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, June 5) I watched another Death in Paradise episode, number six of season 14, which was ballyhooed as a story about the dangers of Internet dating. It’s actually about a rather silly Englishwoman, Danielle Bailey (Charlotte Spencer), who flies out to the Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism board co-produces the show, obviously thinking that the gorgeous island scenery depicted in vivid color will attract visitors despite the morbid nature of the plots) to meet a man she’s been in an online relationship with for a month or so but hasn’t previously met. She knows the man as “Kristion Butler” and he’s a tall, strikingly handsome Black man (Danielle herself is white). Unfortunately, when she flies in on the private plane that’s the only way you can get onto or off of Sainte Marie by air (the island isn’t big enough for anything bigger than a general-aviation airport) and calls Kristion to let him know she’s arrived, she watches a scene on her video phone in which he’s accosted and attacked by an unknown male assailant. She goes out to his home, a villa on the outskirts of the island, and finds him dead. The police have four suspects for the murder: Danielle herself; her white Anglo ex-boyfriend Gary Baines (Alexander Cobb), who was convinced that “Kristion” was a scam artist out to rip her off financially; Delmar Lloyd (Tony Marshall), the driver who picked her up at the airport and was there when she got the fatal phone call; and Kelly Herbert (Tala Gouveia), one of “Kristion”’s former victims. It doesn’t take the police long enough to realize that “Kristion” was a professional con artist whose racket was seducing women online over long distances and scamming them out of their money, then dumping them after he’d milked them dry. The cops learn this when amongst his belongings they find five passports and five drivers’ licenses, all in different names but with his same photo on all of them, and also four cell phones, each of which has a texting history with all women as his recipients. They also learn that his real name is Adam Carter.

There’s a great scene in which Kelly Herbert pushes the unfunny “comic relief” character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), off a pier as he’s trying to question her. Interspersed in all of this are two subplots, one about the continuing efforts of Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) to solve the mysterious disappearance and death of his mother; and another about Wilson’s immediate supervisor, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who’s being removed from that job by the governing authorities in Kingston, Jamaica and replaced by an insufferably snobbish and maddening young man, Sterling Fox (Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge). Ultimately the main intrigue is solved by writer James Hall in one of those absurdly contrived mystery resolutions that might have made Agatha Christie blush: it seems that the apparent murder scene Danielle saw on her phone was a staged video Adam Carter had created himself to convince his pigeons that he needed money immediately to pay off some particularly violent creditors. Adam was actually killed after Danielle saw the video on her phone, and the killer was [spoiler alert!] Delmar Lloyd, who was involved with Adam in a criminal scheme that gave him access to Adam’s considerable stash of rolls of large-denomination bills. Alas, Lloyd was ripping Adam off by substituting counterfeit money for Adam’s real deal (though how he made enough convincing counterfeit money to pull off the scheme, writer Hall never quite explained), and apparently it was to keep Adam from finding him out that Delmar determined to bring a pistol with a silencer to Adam’s villa (which, true to form, he merely rented even though he told his “pigeons” that he owned it) and kill him after he brought Danielle there while Danielle was still slowly making her way through Adam’s house before coming on his dead body. I had a hard time with the ending as well as the not particularly amusing confrontations between retiring Commissioner Patterson and his rather ludicrous replacement, who said he'd been sent out by the authorities in Kingston to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the Sainte Marie police department (he starts to sound like a Black version of Elon Musk after a while!), but this was still a fun show and worth watching if only for the gorgeous Caribbean scenery against whose backdrop the skullduggery takes place!

Leadbelly (Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V., Brownstone Productions, David Paradine Productions, Paramount, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 4) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies that was part of a night of films about the blues (more or less). The first one we watched was Leadbelly, a 1976 biopic of the great African-American blues singer, born Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949), written by Ernest Kinoy – who’d later address the Black American experience from a different perspective as the principal screenwriter for the TV mini-series Roots – and directed, stunningly, by Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a still photographer for Life magazine (the first African-American to hold that job) who branched out into film direction in 1969 with an adaptation of his own autobiographical novel The Learning Tree. In 1971 he got the plum assignment to direct the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft, an enormous hit. One of the ironies behind Shaft is that the communal apartment lived in by the Black militant group “The Lummumbas” has a living room dominated by a giant poster of Malcolm X – printed from a photo Parks had shot of him for Life. When Charles and I saw Shaft I noted that most of the Blaxploitation films seemed to have been directed by people who didn’t know a camera from a dildo. Parks was the great exception; scene after scene of Shaft was planned and executed by a director who was a master of photography. Parks later directed the immediate sequel, Shaft’s Big Score, and another movie called The Super Cops co-written by Shaft’s creator, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. He looked set for a major career as a filmmaker when he took on Leadbelly’s story for Paramount and a bizarre array of “independent” production companies including one with the African-sounding name “Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V.” There was also a credit to Paradine Productions, the company owned by British-born TV host David Frost, who actually co-produced the film. Alas, Leadbelly ran into political troubles at Paramount; the studio management that green-lighted it was fired while Parks was still in post-production and the new people in charge gave the film limited promotion and didn’t leave it in theatres long. The fiasco seems to have derailed Parks’s directorial career; his only subsequent credits as director on imdb.com were an episode of PBS’s drama series American Playhouse and Moments Without Proper Names, a documentary about Parks himself.

It’s a pity, because though the film has one major flaw (more on that later), Leadbelly is a stunning piece of work. Parks and his cinematographer, Bruce Surtees, manage to make the past-is-brown look work even with a mostly Black cast; I’ve previously complained that the past-is-brown look is particularly annoying when the protagonists are Black because their brown skins tend to blend into the brown backgrounds and make them difficult to see. That wasn’t a problem with this film, in which Parks and Surtees manage the feat of making the Texas countryside (Leadbelly was a Louisiana native but the film was entirely shot in Texas, where Leadbelly led much of his pre-stardom life and got a long sentence to a chain gang under the name “Walter Boyd”) glow with beauty while Kinoy’s script didn’t short-change the perpetual burden Southern Blacks lived under the region’s racism. Black Southerners lived their lives in the all too vivid awareness that not only their liberties and livelihoods but even their lives were lived under the suffrage and tolerance of whites. Lynch mobs could and often did literally kill Blacks any time they wanted to, with total impunity. They’d even boast about it afterwards, saying they had a “great barbecue” the night before when they’d hanged a Black person from a tree and set the corpse on fire, often after cutting off pieces of the body and trading them as grisly souvenirs. Incidentally there’s continuing confusion as to both Leadbelly’s stage name and his real one; he didn’t like the name “Leadbelly” and insisted when he played live on being introduced as “Huddie Ledbetter.” Also the name “Lead Belly” was usually spelled as two words during his lifetime but the spelling “Leadbelly” became more common after his death. And I’d always assumed his real first name was pronounced “Huddie,” as it’s spelled, but the actors in the film use “Hoodie,” with the double-o pronounced in the long style, as in “smooth.” Kinoy’s script for Leadbelly tells the legend of Leadbelly’s life and in particular his involvements with prostitutes (one of his guitars is a present from Miss Eula, played by Madge Sinclair, madam of a whorehouse on Fannin Street in the red-light district of Shreveport, Louisiana, who takes him as her lover after she catches him grabbing a freebie from one of her women) and lowlifes in general. Leadbelly is shown making his living mostly from playing for tips in bars and challenging all comers to guitar-picking duels. One of them beats him with a 12-string guitar (until then Leadbelly had played only six-stringed guitars but later he buys the man’s 12-string and becomes a master of that instrument).

The film also features another legendary blues musician besides Leadbelly (Roger E. Mosely, voiced by HiTide Harris; there was some controversy at the time about Parks’s use of an actor who needed a voice double, which may account for Ryan Coogler’s insistence when he made the film Sinners that all the actors playing blues musicians either be able to sing and play for themselves, or be willing to learn): Blind Lemon Jefferson (Art Evans), who barnstorms with Leadbelly through the South. (The real Leadbelly recorded a song called “Blind Lemon,” and in his spoken introduction he says he traveled with Blind Lemon for 18 years and used to lead him around.) They buy a Model “T” Ford from a white man and are so preposterously ignorant of how it works that the white guy they bought it from has to hand-crank it for them to get it to start. Blind Lemon at first insists on driving, saying that he’s not totally blind, but Leadbelly pushes him out of the driver’s seat and takes over even though he’s never driven before in his life either. Blind Lemon keeps talking about his ambition to go to a Northern city like New York or Chicago and make records – which the real Blind Lemon Jefferson did. He became one of Paramount Records’ two biggest Black stars (along with Ma Rainey) and he was so popular that when he died in 1929 Paramount hired impersonators so they could keep cranking out “new” Blind Lemon Jefferson records even after he’d passed. The film depicts Leadbelly as a troublesome prisoner who’s always clashing with authorities and getting either whipped or locked in “the hole.” It’s also relatively accurate in depicting how he got out of prison: in 1925 Texas Governor Pat Hare (John Henry Faulk, one of the most regrettable victims of Hollywood blacklisting, who fought back and had something of a comeback in the 1970’s) ordered Leadbelly to be work-furloughed to play at a fancy whites-only party he was hosting. Hare was so impressed by Leadbelly’s performance, especially of a song he’d written pleading to be let out of prison, that Hare promised to draft pardon papers and sign them on his way out of office – which he actually did. Hare was succeeded by “Ma” Ferguson, who’d run for governor for the first time when her husband was impeached and removed from office by the Texas legislature, and both Fergusons were so famous for pardoning people (including Clyde Barrow of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame) Charles was startled by a story about a well-known prisoner being set free from a Texas prison by a governor other than one of the Fergusons.

Later Leadbelly got re-arrested in Louisiana and also sentenced to a chain gang, where in 1933 he was visited by a folk-music researcher named John Lomax (James Brodhead). Lomax was traveling through the South collecting songs with a portable recording machine, and he visited Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison. In an earlier scene Leadbelly’s father, Wes Ledbetter (Paul Benjamin), had shown up at the prison intending to bribe the captain of the guards to set his son free. Wes had got the money by selling 15 acres of prime bottom farmland his family had owned since the end of the Civil War (in the movie the farm was in Louisiana; it was really in Texas), and when the captain tells Wes that he can’t buy his son’s freedom, Wes asks if he can at least have the money put in Huddie’s prison account. He’s told he can’t do that either, but then he asks the captain at least to take the money and use it to buy Huddie a 12-string guitar, which the captain does. Ultimately Leadbelly serves his time and is released, though the Lomaxes (John and his son Alan, who joined his father in his folk-song collecting activities and kept on after John died in 1948) put out the story that once again Leadbelly had sung for a governor (O. K. Allen, who ran in 1932 as the imposición stooge for the termed-out Huey Long) and had so moved him he won a pardon. The one flaw in Leadbelly is that it ends just when it’s getting interesting: as good as it is, it could have been even greater if Parks and Kinoy had dramatized the culture shock this unlettered Black blues musician would have faced suddenly plunged into the big white cities of New York and Chicago and confronted with the music establishments there. One of the quirkier parts of Leadbelly’s story was that he actually got convicted a third time in New York in 1939 of stabbing a man in a bar fight, and the judge was blatantly prejudiced against him because of his prior criminal record. Leadbelly served a year in Riker’s Island but managed to continue his career after his release, including making an album in 1940 for RCA Victor (then America’s biggest record company) called The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. (This was in the days of 78 rpm records, made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay, and an “album” meant just that: a group of records packaged in hard cardboard sleeves and bound together like a photo album.) The story of Leadbelly’s encounters with the white-controlled music industry and his later tours, including post-World War II appearances in Europe (the first Black American folksinger to tour there), could have made an even more interesting movie than the one we have – but the one we have is quite good, thank you, beautifully photographed, handsomely directed, sensitively written, and with an excellent performance by Roger E. Mosley as Leadbelly (even though he didn’t do his own singing for the role).

Blues in the Night (Warner Bros./First National, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second “blues” film my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies Thursday, June 4 was Blues in the Night, a real weirdie from Warner Bros./First National in 1941. The title song by Harold Arlen (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song but lost to “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1941 MGM musical Lady Be Good, at least partly due to World War II-inspired patriotic reasons (even though the U.S. wasn’t in the war yet when it was filmed). Blues in the Night is a combination gangster film and musical which began life as an unproduced play called Hot Nocturne by Edwin Gilbert. A young actor with directing aspirations named Elia Kazan bought the rights with the intent of tweaking it and opening it on Broadway, but he was sidetracked by Warner Bros., which bought the film rights and assigned the young Robert Rossen to do the screenplay. It starts in a nightclub where Nickie Haroyan (Elia Kazan, who not only sold Warner Bros. the screen rights but got to be in it as well) is hanging out with a piano player named Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf, another actor who went on to a directorial career). Nickie’s father and four older brothers are all big-shot lawyers and dad is expecting Nickie to follow suit, but he’d much rather play clarinet in a jazz band than add to the surfeit of attorneys in his family. They encounter a hot-shot trumpet player named Leo Powell (Jack Carson), but they end up in a bar fight after Jigger punches out a customer that demands he play “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” They end up in jail and Nickie has to shame-facedly call his mother to bail them out. Leo is married to a young singer with the preposterous name “Character” (Priscilla Lane, top-billed) and the quartet, along with a bassist and drummer, end up literally riding freight cars all over the city. While in jail they heard a Black prisoner (William Gillespie, whose real career ambition was to try for the Paul Robeson niche as a Black concert singer and who would later appear as Porgy in the Porgy and Bess sequences of Warners’ 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue) sing “Blues in the Night.” They immediately assume it is an African-American folk blues (the preposterousness of thinking this well thought-out three-strain composition by a Jewish-American songwriter is a Black folk song bothered me when Charles and I first saw this film in the 1990’s) and go to New Orleans in search of the inspiration behind it.

While they’re hopping the freights they run into a gangster named Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors even though he entered wearing so much facial hair I didn’t recognize him until he spoke). They protect him from the railroad detectives and he repays them by holding a gun on them and sticking them up for the $6 they have between them. Then, when Our Heroes have a chance to rat out Del to the railroad bulls but they don’t, he tips them that they may have a job opportunity at a club called “The Jungle” in New Jersey across the river from New York City. There were quite a few movies around this time about the rise of a struggling jazz band, including Birth of the Blues (1941), with Bing Crosby as a jazz singer and Brian Donlevy in the role Carson plays here as a scapegrace trumpet player; and the 1942 RKO film Syncopation. There were even more than a few that combined jazz music and the gangster world, but not to the extent seen here. Del Davis is an escaped convict who went to prison after being part of a heist that also involved the club’s owner, Sam Paryas (Howard da Silva), and its star attraction, singer Kay Grant (Betty Field). Kay is a typical film noir femme fatale, though like Ann Savage’s role in Detour the character isn’t drawn as evil, just as having long ago concluded that conventional morality is a luxury she can’t afford. Accordingly she bee-lines first for Leo, even though he's married, and when he turns her down she goes after Jigger instead. Meanwhile Character has learned she’s pregnant, and the doctor she sees insists that she stop work for at least a month before the baby’s due date. Jigger insists on training Kay to be the replacement singer for however long Character is out, and the middle reels turn essentially into a jazz version of the Susan Alexander sequences of Citizen Kane, with Jigger futilely trying to hammer some vocal talent into the scratchy-voiced singer while her self-hating disabled accompanist, Brad Ames (Wallace Ford), gambles and steadily loses at the illegal craps tables Del has installed in the upper floor of The Jungle.

Ultimately Kay persuades Jigger to abandon the band and flee with her to New York, where he can get a job with a commercial band and play popular novelty tunes even though this means giving up his ambition to play jazz. Kay makes the transactional state of her affections clear when one night, as Jigger is being featured with “Guy Heiser” (played by real-life bandleader Will Osborne, who must have been quite resistant to vanity, and/or quite addicted to money, to allow himself and his band to be used in a film that ridicules their style of music), Kay walks out with two obviously more affluent men in the audience. When Jigger confronts her she says that Del is the only man she’s ever really loved, even though earlier in the film she considered Sam’s suggestion that she get from under Del’s shadow by reporting him to the police and getting him arrested and returned to prison in California. Kay actually tells Del that Sam tried to get her to turn him in, but instead of applauding Kay’s loyalty Del brings in two thugs to make Sam “disappear” permanently and tells Kay to leave The Jungle – which is why she fled for New York and took Jigger with her. When Kay leaves Jigger he becomes an alcoholic and drinks himself into a perpetual stupor for three months. When the other members of Jigger’s former band track him down, he pretends he’s been working on a symphonic composition based on “Blues in the Night,” but he turns out to be unable to play it. He’s diagnosed with nervous disorder and is detoxed at a hospital, where he has a nightmare – vividly dramatized by another future director, Don Siegel, in a montage sequence in which, among other things, the piano keys melt into a mass of white goo as he tries to play them. The band returns to The Jungle but Kay tracks Jigger down there and tries to get him to run away with her again. Jigger pretends to go along, and Kay shoots Del five times with a gun and leaves him for dead. Then Brad (ya remember Brad?) tells Kay that he’s arranged with Jigger to take her away, though he really intends to drive their car off the road and take both of them out in a murder/suicide. This duly happens, meeting the solemn obligations of the Production Code that the criminals must be punished, and in the final scene the bandmates are back together, still riding freight cars as they pursue that One Big Break. They have the option of being fancy free again because Character’s baby was stillborn. It’s a rather strange ending for this sort of musical, in which we expect to see the leading band finally hit it big at the finish.

Blues in the Night has sometimes been called a film noir, which it is mainly in Anatole Litvak’s overdirection (Charles was especially amused by one shot of Jigger playing piano in which Litvak and cinematographer Ernest Haller pick a point-of-view angle from the piano keys) and Betty Field’s character. Birth of the Blues is also noteworthy as the only film ever to feature Jimmie Lunceford and His Orchestra (though his first name is given the more familiar “Jimmy” spelling in the credits). Lunceford’s was a Black band which, if not quite matching the crossover appeal to white audiences of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, at least came close. They’re not terribly well used here; they’re cast as “A Barnstorming Band” and only shown in one scene, in which Leo picks up his trumpet and starts jamming with them in the middle of their show. (One of Lunceford’s trumpeters, Eugene “Snooky” Young, was one of Jack Carson’s trumpet doubles in the movie; Frankie Zinzer was the other.) Elsewhere they’re heard on the soundtrack playing about a minute of “Blues in the Night,” a record that turned up on the two-CD set Hollywood Swing and Jazz, which Lunceford also recorded in a two-part version (taking six minutes, both sides of a 10-inch 78) featuring a vocal by alto saxophonist Willie Smith and the band. (Lunceford’s was one of those bands that didn’t carry singers but had the instrumentalists in the band double on vocals.) My favorite versions of “Blues in the Night” from the time it was written are Johnny Mercer’s own recording for a label he called Capitol Criterion (later he shortened it merely to Capitol) with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers vocal group, and a stunning version by Artie Shaw on Victor in which arranger Bill Challis artfully combined Shaw’s clarinet, a string section, and the Armstrong-esque singing and trumpet playing of the great Oran “Hot Lips” Page. Blues in the Night is one of those frustrating movies that doesn’t quite jell but it achieves an hallucinatory appeal in its very wrongness, in the inability of the filmmakers to get the various ingredients (musical, gangster story, film noir) to come together into a coherent and entertaining story.

Strike (Kinostudiya, Imeni M. Gorkogo, 1-ya Goskino Fabrika, Goskino, Proletkult, filmed 1924, released 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 31) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” presentation of Sergei Eisenstein’s first film, Strike (filmed 1924, released 1925). Strike was the one extant Eisenstein film I’d never seen before in any form, and it’s become the stepchild among his politically themed movies of the 1920’s. Eisenstein’s next two films, Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October, a.k.a. Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), are considerably better known today even though Strike is at least their equal, and in some ways considerably more experimental. I suspect that’s because Strike has a grimly unhappy ending – the striking workers are victims of a massacre that kills all, or virtually all, of them – rather than the happy (at least in the context in which all these films were made) ones of Battleship Potemkin (the sailors on other vessels in the Russian Navy refuse to fire on the mutineers of the Potemkin and instead join their cause) or October (the Bolsheviks win the Revolution). TCM “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American whom I’ve long respected because she proves that you don’t necessarily have to be either white or male to be a film nerd) introduced the film as the most audacious and ground-breaking cinematic debut in film history (the only one I can think of that comes close is Orson Welles’s classic Citizen Kane from 1941). Eisenstein came to this film after having briefly studied architecture and engineering, the latter his father’s profession. In 1918 he left school and joined the Red Army, fighting on the Communist side in Russia’s civil war while his brother Mikhail fought on the opposing White side for the restoration of the Czars. In 1920, after a brief stint in Minsk following the Red Army’s final victory, Eisenstein settled in Moscow and joined the Proletkult (“Proletarian Culture”) theatre.

One of his last Proletkult productions was a play called Gas Masks (1923) which he staged in an actual gas factory, with audience members being required to follow the actors around the factory as they witnessed various scenes. This, plus Eisenstein’s experience making a short film called Glumov’s Diary that was incorporated into the Proletkult’s production of a live play, convinced him that cinema was the right medium for what he wanted to do artistically. (Ironically, before Citizen Kane Orson Welles also directed a short film designed to be shown as part of a live play, William Gillette’s Too Much Johnson.) Eisenstein worked out a number of theories about how to make his movies, including what he called “the montage of attractions.” The French word “montage” originally just meant editing, but it came to mean specifically the rapid-fire style Eisenstein and his Russian colleagues (Dziga Vertov, Veslovod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and others) developed. Set alternately in 1903 and 1912 (I’ve seen sources reference both dates) but definitely before the Revolution, Strike deals with a factory whose workers are being brutally treated by their bosses. Among other ways to keep the workers in line, the bosses have created a force of secret police to watch over them and report whenever any of them start trying to organize a union or do any other thing that might fight back against the bosses’ control. The various secret agents are given the code names of animals – Monkey, Owl, Bulldog, Bear – and Eisenstein intercuts sequences of them with their animal namesakes to show their real natures. The strike is triggered when one of the workers, Yakov Strongin (Mikhail Gomorov) – the only character that actually has a name, Eisenstein and his co-writers (Grigory Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s lifelong assistant and, according to some sources, his Gay lover, along with Ilya Kravchunovsky and Valerian Pletnev) having carried to the max the idea that the characters are supposed to represent class archetypes and we’re not supposed to be concerned about them as individuals – is falsely accused of stealing a micrometer, a measuring device which costs 25 rubles. Knowing that he’ll be docked that amount – three weeks’ pay – for stealing the micrometer, and he won’t be given the chance to prove that he didn’t do it, Strongin commits suicide by hanging himself from one of the belts that move the giant machines that do the factory’s work. (We never find out just what the factory makes, but as with Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, we really don’t need to know.)

Another Eisenstein technique that he used in Strike and his other silent films was “typage,” casting people in the principal roles who’d acted either slightly or not at all because they resembled, physically and/or in terms of their work experience, the people they were supposed to be playing. Most of his actors were either actual factory workers or members of his casts at the Proletkult Theatre. At the same time he reached back to American cinema, D. W. Griffith in particular, for the intercuts between the impoverished masses literally hanging on for dear life in the face of starvation and the 1-percenters living it up at a party and indulging themselves on champagne and caviar. Griffith had pioneered both this cinematic technique and the political message behind it in his 1912 short A Corner in Wheat, in which he cut back and forth between the speculators who have “cornered” – monopolized – the wheat market and the ordinary people who are suffering and starving from their actions. Like just about every other Soviet director in the 1920’s, Eisenstein did the same thing here, including heart-rending shots of one of the workers’ children begging his parents futilely for dinner and another tugging helplessly at a samovar (a Russian teapot). The workers have a secret printing press in a basement room of the factory which puts out leaflets urging the locals to support them; the bosses have goon squads and guns, as well as high-tech gadgets like a spy camera. (Charles suspected this was the first time one was ever shown in a film.) The bosses’ hired police use images shot with the spy camera to identify the leader of the workers’ struggle so they can gang up on him and beat him within an inch of his life, while a “woman of the streets” looks on and enjoys the spectacle with sadistic glee. Later on, as the workers’ common-sense demands for decent pay and an eight-hour day are summarily rejected, the bosses hire yet more goons, recruiting them from members of the Russian underground who literally live in holes in the ground. They’re ruled by the so-called “King and Queen of Thieves” (Boris Yurtsev and Yudif Glizer) and they add muscle and firepower to the bosses’ side of the equation.

Ultimately the strike is suppressed after members of the King and Queen of Thieves’ ragtag army burn down a state liquor store and the authorities blame the workers for it. After the workers survive having firehoses turned on them – the workers called the fire brigade hoping they’d put out the fire at the liquor store but instead they got high-powered hoses used as a weapon – the final scene shows members of the Russian military charging at the strikers, who are of course unarmed, and massacring them en masse. Strike is a major movie but also a quite depressing one, and seeing this over 100 years after it was made one of the most saddening things about it is how little the tactics the ruling classes use to repress social action against them and their privileges have changed over the years. I couldn’t watch the scenes of peaceful strikers being hosed down by the police without thinking of the similar scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when racist Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered fire hoses turned on peaceful civil-rights demonstrators. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Connor “a racist who prided himself on knowing how to handle the Negro and keep him in his ‘place’.” Of course I couldn’t also help but be reminded of the similar tactics used by Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents during their occupation of Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this year. Strike ends with a title urging audiences to “remember” the abuses strikers and activists in general suffered under the Czars – which is ironic given that the Soviet Union also repressed dissent in many ways similar to the ones in this movie, including summary executions, long stints in the Gulag, and the use of spies to report on any workers who tried to organize against the regime.

Confessions of a Co-Ed (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching Strike on Sunday, May 31 my husband Charles and I wanted something at least a bit lighter, and we got it – sort of – with a film called Confessions of a Co-Ed, made by Paramount in 1931 which we discovered from a YouTube film clip featuring Bing Crosby and the other two members of the Rhythm Boys vocal trio, Harry Barris and Al Rinker (singer Mildred Bailey’s brother) performing live at a college party (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yib17tXwxj4). Confessions of a Co-Ed was co-directed by David Burton and Dudley Murphy; Burton is a name I’m not familiar with but I’m quite fond of Murphy, mainly for the three films he made featuring African-American performers: the shorts St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith and Black and Tan with Duke Ellington (both 1929) and the feature The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson, loosely based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. Murphy had also proven in his 1932 film The Sport Parade that he could make an effective movie without Black principals, though that was a “serious” exposé of the college athletic scandals of the early 1930’s the Marx Brothers vividly parodied in Horse Feathers (1932). One odd thing about Confessions of a Co-Ed is that there are no writing credits, either on the film itself or on its imdb.com page; I’m guessing Burton and Murphy also wrote the script, though it’s possible Paramount didn’t credit any writers because the conceit behind the film is it’s based on a diary written by its central character, Patricia Harper (Sylvia Sidney), during and after her days as a co-ed at “Stafford College” in California. (I suspect we were supposed to read it as the real-life Stanford University.) Patricia gets caught in a romantic triangle between fraternity brothers and roommates Dan Carter (Phillips Holmes) and Hal Evans (Norman Foster, who would later become a director and co-direct the 1942 thriller Journey into Fear with Orson Welles).

The romantic triangle turns into a romantic quadrilateral with the arrival of Peggy Wilson (Claudia Dell, who a year later played opposite Tom Mix in the first version of Destry Rides Again), Pat’s sorority sister and Dan’s former girlfriend. The scene with Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys occurs early on at a fraternity party at which various couples are dancing, and Bing is enough in the action that Dan addresses him by name and briefly interrupts his singing of “Out of Nowhere” while he’s dancing by. (Later the Rhythm Boys do a joint performance of the song “Ya Got Love.”) Peggy warns Pat off Dan by claiming that it’s wrong for a sorority sister to steal one of her sisters’ boyfriends, and Peggy also tells Pat about Dan’s various pickup lines, including, “You’re the first girl I’ve met whom I’d rather talk to than kiss.” Of course Pat fell for that one; it’s already been established that she’s a serious student when she was shown inside a chemistry lab after Hal, the son of a big-shot attorney who’s also a Stafford trustee (as was his father before him), pulled rank and got her into the class in the first place. (It was nice to see at least one scene acknowledging the “education” part of higher education; most collegiate movies from this period totally ignored it.) Pat is well enough aware that she’s not the equal of Peggy or some of the other, hotter sorority babes in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex; she even asks why Dan would be interested in her instead of one of the more conventionally attractive people. The plot heats up one night when Dan takes Peggy out to Lovers’ Lane in Hal’s car, which he's borrowed for the occasion. Of course by then any residual affection between Dan and Peggy has died out, at least on his part, and he’s just going through the motions.

The college administration has declared Lovers’ Lane off limits and there’s a police officer on a motorcycle ready to bust the errant students just for being there (though I couldn’t help but wonder what the charge would be). Dan and Peggy are the last ones to get away, the motorcycle cop gives chase, and just as I was beginning to wonder how the chase would end – either Dan would crash the car or the cop would crash his motorcycle – the anonymous writers made both happen. Dan’s car has a front-wheel blowout, which causes him to lose control and crash into the bike cop. Dan and Peggy desert the scene, but Peggy is caught when her vanity case is found in the wrecked car. Confronted by the college dean of women, she admits it was hers and is expelled from school and forced to work as a coffee-shop hostess to stay in town. Two months pass, and Pat, Dan, and the other remaining students take a ski trip to Lake Tahoe (the only clue we get as to the film’s overall geography), whereupon Dan and Pat sneak out for the night and manage to have sex in a deserted cabin usually occupied by the park ranger. Of course, this being a 1931 movie, this inevitably leads to the “inevitable pregnancy at a single contact” producer David O. Selznick liked to ridicule. Pat realizes she is pregnant, and Peggy, who’s briefly returned to the Stafford campus to pick up her belongings, Hal is still interested in marrying Pat, but Pat is not only not in love with Hal but she’s unable to tell Dan that she’s about to have his child because in the meantime Hal, out of jealousy over Pat’s attachment to Dan, has ratted out Dan to the college authorities and he’s been expelled, too. He gets away in a cab just before Pat goes out to confront him, and he spends the next three years in South America and returns home to find Pat and Hal in an uncertain marriage built on the lie that Pat’s child, a son played by veteran child actor Dickie Moore, is Hal’s. At Peggy’s urging, the night Dan left Pat had written Hal a letter explaining the whole situation; Pat asked Peggy to give Hal the letter but Peggy, after having told her to write it in the first place, ostentatiously burned it instead.

Three years later, Dan and Hal reconnect and Dan tells Hal he’s returned to the U.S. to pick up where he left off with the woman he really loves, and Hal of course has no idea that Dan’s dream girl is Hal’s wife. When Dan confronts Hal and demands that Hal give up Pat so they can get back together and their son can be raised by both his biological parents, Hal at first angrily refuses but then accepts the inevitable and Dan and Pat get back together and take the boy with them. The End. Confessions of a Co-Ed is a rather strange movie in that the first third is incredibly creatively directed; Burton, Murphy, and cinematographer Lee Garmes (who for some reason is credited as the film’s editor on its Wikipedia page; John Leipold, actually the film’s composer, is given the cinematography credit) keep the camera in almost constant motion as it dollies through the halls and pathways of the Stafford campus and discovers the characters along the way. Alas, the latter two-thirds turns conventional in terms of both the plot situations (let’s face it, even in the so-called “pre-Code” era there weren’t many alternatives as to how to present a situation in which a sympathetic character becomes pregnant without marriage) and the directorial style. I remember reading in James Curtiss’s biography of James Whale that in the early 1930’s there was a rather strange cold war in Hollywood between directors who wanted to do more moving-camera shots and cinematographers who rebelled because they took longer to light. Though Lee Garmes was known as one of the more creative and innovative cameramen in the business, it’s possible even he put his foot down and told Murphy and Burton to knock it off with the moving-camera shots. Confessions of a Co-Ed lurches to a conclusion that we’re supposed to read as a happy ending even though it seems like Pat is trading an affluent, albeit unhappy, existence for a more hand-to-mouth one.

Charles likes Phillips Holmes as an actor considerably more than I do (I think he finds him physically attractive), but like John Gilbert in his talkies Holmes seems to have only the barest idea of how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. He didn’t even have the excuse of having started in silent films that Gilbert did, and after Holmes’s film career petered out in 1938 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force only to be killed when his transport plane crashed. I know Charles used to get irritated with me when I’d do thought experiments like this, but think of this movie with the young Cary Grant (who showed his mature acting chops just a year later with his first feature, This Is the Night, also for Paramount) in Holmes’s role. Sylvia Sidney went on to a long and storied career into the 1980’s, when she played the grandmother of a Gay AIDS patient in the first TV-movie about the syndrome, An Early Frost. But of all the people in this movie it was Bing Crosby who went on to the longest and most legendary career. Indeed, just a year after this film was made, Paramount would sign Crosby, whose Cremo Cigars radio show had made him a nationwide star, to a term contract that would last a quarter-century and make both of them tons of money. This morning both Charles and I were joking, “Who else recorded with both Paul Whiteman and David Bowie?” One thing that’s quite apparent in this film is how early in his life Crosby got male pattern baldness; one can see his high hairline in his closeups, and in later movies and most public appearances thereafter he’d wear a toupée (or, as he called it, his “brain doily”). Frank Capra recalled that in the two films he and Crosby made together, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951), Crosby was insanely picky over his toupée and refused to emerge from his dressing room until he had it on just right.

House of Numbers (MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 30) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show hosted by Eddie Muller: House of Numbers (1957), a truly weird semi-noir that cast Jack Palance in a dual role as Bill and Arnie Judlow, and Barbara Lang (who got an “introducing” credit but was hardly heard from again; she got a supporting role in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl a year later but most of her subsequent credits were for series TV) as Arnie’s wife Ruth. The big gimmick is that Arnie, who was sentenced to a life term in San Quentin for beating up and nearly killing a man in a bar because he thought he was making a pass at Ruth, has hatched an elaborate escape plot that requires Bill’s participation. The gimmick is that Bill will break into San Quentin and take Arnie’s place while Arnie digs a tunnel to escape, and since the two look exactly alike (though Palance was a good enough actor he differentiated between the characters by giving Arnie more tousled hair and a different, more whispery voice), then can switch places inside the prison and no one, including the guards, will be the wiser. House of Numbers began as a novel, serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine before it was published as a book, by Jack Finney, who also wrote the source novel for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was turned into a movie in 1957 by director Russell Rouse, who also co-wrote the script with Don M. Mankewicz. Rouse was always looking for “different” stories. In 1952 he’d made a film called The Thief, starring Ray Milland, and had made it without any dialogue, reverting not so much to the silent cinema as to what Sergei Eisenstein called “the sound film,” which would not use dialogue but would incorporate sound effects and recorded music to heighten the emotion. Though House of Numbers contains dialogue, it does have long wordless scenes featuring Jack Palance in one of his incarnations that are among the best parts of the film.

The film opens with a spectacular scene in which a prisoner pushes a guard off a balcony railing to the floor three stories below, and though we don’t know who these people are until much later, it turns out that the prisoner was Arnie Judlow and the guard was an anonymous drone who’s lying in a coma after the assault and it’s touch and go whether he’ll survive. Arnie is in a rush to escape after this incident because he knows that if the guard dies, it’ll mean an automatic death sentence for him. So he hatches the scheme in which his brother Bill and his wife Ruth will pose as a married couple and rent a house nearby San Quentin, only their next-door neighbor, Henry Nova (Harold J. Stone), is a guard at the prison and rather quickly figures it out when he catches Bill, impersonating Arnie, lighting a cigarette after a meal in the prison mess hall despite the prohibition against smoking, which Arnie would have known about but of which Bill was totally ignorant. Nova is actually the film’s most interesting character; he begins as just a hail-fellow-well-met sort of annoying neighbor, whom Bill and Ruth try to fend off because his innocent getting-to-know-you gestures might blow the whistle on the whole plot. Later he turns bad and attempts to blackmail Bill and Ruth after he figures out what they’re up to. House of Numbers, which my husband Charles and I had seen before in the 1990’s when I was still able to record TCM by the yard onto VHS tapes, is a quirky movie which seems to hold within it the seeds of a much stronger and more interesting film than the one we get. We’re told that Bill built an elaborate tree house for himself and Arnie when they were boys and Bill always wanted to be an architect but the family didn’t have the money to send both boys to college. So Arnie went instead, only to drop out after two years because he was good enough at boxing he wanted to try for a career as a professional prizefighter – only he flamed out after eight bouts, six of which he lost. That was one reason why he got a life sentence for a bar fight even though his opponent survived; since he’d fought professionally, the judge in his case ruled that his fists were “a deadly weapon” under the law.

We’re not sure just what Bill did for a living before Arnie recruited him to be his patsy, though it was presumably low-status enough that Bill was willing to give up whatever job he had to follow Arnie to California and join his escape plot. We also assume that Bill and Arnie are identical twins (after all, the same actor is playing both), though the dialogue tells us that Arnie is a year younger than Bill. According to Eddie Muller, House of Numbers was a major money-loser for MGM, though that’s hard to believe since the total budget was just over $1 million and it grossed $1.1 million. One of the things MGM did right was get permission to film the prison scenes inside the real San Quentin. The closing credits acknowledge California Corrections Department head Richard McGee and San Quentin warden Harley O. Teets (which sounds like a really silly name for someone in that job) for the rights to film there, while the on-screen warden is played by Edward Platt, billed third even though he’s barely in the movie until the end. Platt’s casting fits right in with his most famous roles as social worker Ray Framek in Rebel Without a Cause and the head of CONTROL in the TV James Bond spoof Get Smart. There’s also an incredible supporting performance by Timothy Carey as Arnie’s cellmate “Frenchy,” whose twitchy manner could well inspire someone to knock him off even if they hadn’t had to share the confined space of a prison cell with him. Eddie Muller also paid special tribute to the film’s veteran cinematographer, George Folsey, who’s part of the Academy’s Dishonor Roll in that he was nominated 13 times for Best Cinematography but never won a competitive Oscar (though he did win an Emmy Award for a TV special in 1958). He began as an errand boy for the Famous Players-Lasky studio (later Paramount) in 1913, got his first cinematography credit in 1919 for His Bridal Night, continued to shoot movies until 1972 (his iast credit is for Bone), and died in 1988.

Critics savaged House of Numbers on its initial release, calling the plot preposterous – which it is, though it’s also quite effectively done and it has an effective resolution when Warden Platt (we’re not told the character’s name, so I can call him that) flat-out tells Bill and Ruth that they need to turn Arnie in before he kills someone else and earns himself a trip to the gas chamber, and [spoiler alert!] Bill does so after realizing that Arnie has become a total psychopath and is likely to kill someone if he isn’t arrested and re-imprisoned first. Once again, there are hints of a more interesting movie here than the one that we actually see; I found myself expecting that Arnie would die in a shoot-out with the police and Bill and Ruth would end up together as a couple. It’s also an interesting story for Jack Finney in that, though it’s quite a different story from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whose first film adaptation, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, is my choice for the first science-fiction film noir), it likewise turns on the whole question of identity and how well we truly know our associates and friends.