by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the poor print quality of the UCSD channel’s showing of Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo, Lewis’ Gun Crazy was a refreshing change, not only because it was shown in an excellent print — the images of cinematographer Russell Harlan clear and bright, the sound (excitingly and creatively designed by Tom Lambert, who could have given Michael Cimino lessons in how to use sound effects lavishly and intelligently without rendering key dialogue inaudible!) crisp and the dialogue easily audible — but also because it was a far better movie. Lewis’ direction this time is taut and energetic, with unflagging intensity; the script by MacKinlay Kantor (an odd name indeed to find on the credits of a film noir, but he wrote the source story published in the Saturday Evening Post) and Millard Kaufman (The Film Noir Encyclopedia credits the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo with a contribution as well) is far richer and better structured than Philip Yordan’s for The Big Combo; and the acting in this one is superb.
Basically it’s a story about a husband-and-wife team who meet in a circus sideshow, work together as markspeople and then turn their skills with guns into armed robbery — Annie Oakley and Frank Butler meet (or, rather, become) Bonnie and Clyde. What makes this one work so superbly is a marvelous combination of elements: Lewis’ direction (years later he boasted that all the shots of the hero and heroine — if you can call them that — fleeing the scenes of their robberies in getaway cars were shot on real streets, with no process work, and with actual bystanders and drivers on the streets as well as Lewis’ actors), a well-characterized script (even though the Freudian symbolism of gun = penis and violence = sex gets a bit heavy-handed at times) and marvelous performances by the leads, Peggy Cummins and John Dall. Dall is, if anything, even more effective as the passive member of a straight criminal couple than he was as the active member of a Gay one in Hitchcock’s Rope; and Cummins is even better in her evocation of the sheer visceral (and erotic) thrill she gets out of violence and crime.
The film also evokes White Heat (made the same year) in its intriguing contrast between the rugged individualism of the criminals and the heavily organized, corporate structure of the police apparatus seeking to catch them (one reason for the fascination of this film — to the extent that 11 years after it was made it was quoted in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless, whose protagonist, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, actually watches it and takes the criminal characters as role models! — is that the crooks seem so much more whole, so much more truly alive, than the cops), and Kantor gives it an air of genuine tragedy by having the couple finally caught because they do something sympathetic and painfully human: they go back to the town where Dall’s character grew up to see his family, and are ultimately discovered and killed by his childhood friends (one of whom just happens to have become the town sheriff). Gun Crazy is a work of surprising dignity as well as richness, in which the sex-violence interchange powers the entire plot instead of seeming an afterthought (as it did in The Big Combo) and the lovers on the run retain a surprising degree of sympathy even though the acts they do are unquestionably horrible (a balancing act the later Bonnie and Clyde also tried, though Gun Crazy pulls it off even better). — 2/28/99
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Directed by Joseph H. Lewis from a Saturday Evening Post short story by MacKinlay Kantor, author of Glory for Me (the basis for The Best Years of Our Lives) and Andersonville and a far more prestigious literary “name” than usually turns up on a film noir, Gun Crazy was scripted by Kantor and “Millard Kaufman” (though according to imdb.com “Kaufman” was a front for Dalton Trumbo!) and tells the story of Bart Tare, a small-town boy who grows up with a pathological obsession with guns. It’s not that he actually wants to shoot any human or animal — as an early flashback shows, he once shot a BB gun into a chicken and her chicks, killed one of the chicks and never got over it — he just likes the feel of a gun, and while the Production Code allowed the writers to do no more than hint as to why, it’s incredibly obvious to anyone with a mental age above about five that his gun obsession is sexual, an elaborate Freudian displacement of his anxieties about his own sexuality.
Tare is played by Rusty Tamblyn (later Russ Tamblyn, the second male lead in the film of West Side Story who totally out-acted the bland Richard Beymer in the lead) at age 14, and in the first scene this incarnation of the character throws a rock through a hardware store window, steals a gun, then slips and falls in the street (all this is happening in a driving rainstorm) and picks up the gun, then looks up and sees that it fell at the feet of a sheriff’s deputy and he is so caught. He’s then shown in his juvenile court hearing, where we learn that his parents are dead and he’s been raised by his older sister Ruby (Anabel Shaw), and she and his friends Dave Allister and Clyde Boston (Paul Frison) testify on his behalf — Dave and Clyde recall a camping trip the three took as seven-year-olds (they’re played, of course, by a different set of actors in the flashback, including Mickey Little as Bart and David Bair as Dave) in which, asked by the other boys to kill a mountain lion, Bart froze because he couldn’t bear the thought of killing anything. Despite all the hearts-and-flowers testimony on Bart’s behalf, the judge sentences him to reform school -— and the film suddenly leaps ahead eight years.
Bart has spent half of those years in reform school and half in the army — where they kept him stateside and had him teach other people how to shoot — and when he gets out he’s played by one of Hollywood’s most famous screaming queens, John Dall. The actor lived with his mother — they were jokingly called “The Dalls” around Hollywood — and he was reportedly so nellie that Bette Davis tried to get him fired from her 1945 film The Corn Is Green; not that she minded him being Gay, but he was so queeny she didn’t think he was suitable for his role as the son of a Welsh miner whose chance to leave the mining village and get a college education is temporarily derailed by the fact that he’s got a local girl pregnant. Anyway, when Bart gets out of the army and returns to his home town he has little money and no job prospects, and he meets his old friends Dave (Nedrick Young) and Clyde (Harry Lewis) — Dave now edits the town paper and Clyde is the town sheriff — and they go to a traveling carnival run by Packett (Berry Kroeger). The carnival’s star attraction is markswoman Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins, top-billed), who in an obvious imitation of the real Annie Oakley is billed as “direct from London,” and the moment Bart sees Annie and the way she handles her guns, he’s smitten big-time. The only problem is that Annie is more or less the girlfriend of Packett, who’s blackmailed her into the relationship because they once held up a man in St. Louis and Annie shot and killed him.
Packett hires Bart to travel with the carnival and makes him room with Bluey-Bluey (Stanley Prager), a philosophical clown (aren’t all movie clowns philosophical?) who warns him that he’s “dumb with women” and tries to alert him that Packett considers Laurie (the part of her name she goes by off-stage) his property and will resent it if anyone horns in on him. Bart tries to visit Laurie in her living quarters, sees Packett there making a drunken advance on her, and shoots the mirror of the room — getting both Bart and Laurie fired. They flee and decide to make their living as criminals — at least Laurie, who definitely wears the pants in their relationship, makes that decision and tells Bart to go along with it or she’s leaving him — with Bart pulling various holdups and eventually the two of them graduating up to bank robbery. They get the money but the robbery turns messy and the two have to lay low for a while, re-emerging with an elaborate plan to rob the payroll of the Armour meat-packing plant (one surprise in this 1949 movie is the use of a real company name rather than a made-up one!) by first working their way in as employees and then springing the trap and doing the job at just the right moment.
The robbery goes per plan except for one old woman who trips the burglar alarm, forcing Laurie to shoot her and a security guard, and the two bandits to flee in a panic; later, when they start spending the proceeds from the job, they find that the bills’ serial numbers have been recorded and they are found out. Eventually — after a grimly amusing scene in which Dave as the local editor boasts that the most famous fugitives in the country are among their town’s native sons and he’s going to write an article about them (what’s he going to headline it, one wonders — “Local Boy Makes Bad”?)— Bart and Laurie turn up at the home of Bart’s sister, now married to a decent guy, Ira, and obviously torn between her family ties to Bart and her loathing of what he has become. Bart takes Laurie into the mountains, but his old camping buddy Clyde knows the mountains as well as he does and finds him. In a desperate panic, Bart shoots Laurie before expiring himself from a policeman’s shot.
Gun Crazy — originally titled Deadly Is the Female, which hints at far less of the plot than Gun Crazy — is the masterpiece of its sporadically interesting director, Joseph H. Lewis, who had started out making lousy East Side Kids and Bela Lugosi movies at Monogram and slowly worked his way up; though the plot is pretty obviously inspired by the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the movie is driven by obsessions far beyond those documentable in the lives of any real crooks. The film is pretty obviously powered by Freudian symbolism — particularly the oft-quoted metaphor between the penis and the gun that points out their similar shapes (they’re both long, cylindrical and shoot out things) and opposite functions (a penis shoots out things which create life, a gun shoots out things which destroy it) — and also by the reverse dynamics of the sexual relationship between Bart and Laurie.
John Dall’s queeniness and his rather odd appearance made him problematic to cast, but they’re precisely right for Bart (much the way Macaulay Culkin was so perfect as Michael Alig in Party Monster) — and instead of playing the femme fatale in the approved growling fashion of Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Savage, Peggy Cummins affects an almost kewpie-doll appearance and a high, rather squeaky voice to match, creating a fascinating clash of images with her butch persona and her obvious use of firearms as a strategy to overcome her own penis envy (part of her stage act consists of her bending over with her legs spread and firing a gun between them just below crotch level — and Lewis and cinematographer Russell Harlan naturally shoot this from an angle that emphasizes the phallic symbolism).
Though it’s not a film big on chiaroscuro visuals, Gun Crazy qualifies as film noir because of the complexity of the characterizations, the moral reversal we as audience members are kept in through much of the film (as in the most famous later version of this story, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, we’re generally rooting for the crooks over the cops) and the combination of symbolism and relentless action; it’s not surprising that this was the movie that inspired Godard to make Breathless (indeed he even used a clip from Gun Crazy in Breathless as a film that the male lead sees and takes as a role model), and the story’s circular structure, with the criminal couple returning to the male member’s home town and seeking refuge in the familiar locations already established as important to him in his boyhood, makes the ending — he’s eventually shot by his boyhood friend turned sheriff — far more intense and moving than a simple Production Code-mandated bad-guy-must-die shootout.
Gun Crazy is a richly complex work that taps into a far wider range of dramatic issues than most films in the genre and manages to understate the sexual symbolism as well as other dramatic points like the contrast between the high life Bart and Laurie expect to live off their ill-gotten gains and the grungy existence they actually do end up with. Gun Crazy is almost a textbook example of the effect the Production Code had on films for good and ill; it may have made it almost impossible to be honest about sex or violence on screen, but it also provoked talented filmmakers like Lewis, the King Brothers (who produced) and their writers to an imaginative treatment far subtler than the way all the gory details — all the bloodletting and the screwing — of a tale like this would be hurled in our faces by a modern filmmaker. (There was a recent — 1992 — remake, with the title mashed together into one word, Guncrazy, with James LeGros and Drew Barrymore in the leads and someone named Tamra Davis directing.) Gun Crazy is one of the thematically richest noirs and a triumph for Joseph H. Lewis, who for once got to direct a movie with both a script and a cast worthy of him. — 6/15/09
Monday, June 15, 2009
Night of the Demon (Sabre/Columbia, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was Night of the Demon, a 1961 British production that reunited director Jacques Tourneur and star Dana Andrews from The Fearmakers but turned out to be a much better movie — even though it was badly compromised by the producers’ insistence on showing the titular demon whereas Tourneur, having learned his less-is-more lessons from Val Lewton on the three films they made together (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man), had wanted to suggest its presence with sound alone.
Based on a short story by British writer Montague R. James called “Casting the Runes,” and written by Charles Bennett (who wrote six Alfred Hitchcock films — seven if you count Blackmail, which Bennett didn’t work on but which was based on his play — and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra) and Hal E. Chester (who also produced), Night of the Demon is a quite good horror mystery whose villain is Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a superbly oily character who has somehow extracted the world’s only extant copy of a medieval book on demons and demonology from the British Museum, figured out how to read it (more difficult than it sounds because the entire thing was written in code), used one of its formulae to conjure up a demon whenever he’s got an enemy he wants to get rid of, and also organized a Satanic cult in the English countryside. In the opening scene he receives a visit from professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), who is about to expose him at an upcoming scientific convention in London; Karswell takes care of Harrington by summoning up the demon to kill him, which the demon does by toppling a pole covering a power line on top of Harrington’s car, thus electrocuting him.
Karswell has another threat to his authority and public image in the person of American professor Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), an internationally famous debunker of psychic and spiritualist claims. On the plane coming over (seemingly represented by the same stock shot of an airliner that transported Andrews’ character in The Fearmakers!) he runs into Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins, the butch psychopath from Joseph Lewis’s masterpiece Gun Crazy), the dead scientist’s niece, and the two of them join forces to investigate Karswell. There are several neat scenes, in which Karswell confronts Holden in the reading room of the British Museum (looking almost exactly as it had when Hitchcock showed it in his film of Bennett’s Blackmail 42 years earlier!) and hands him a card that contains a threat to his life that materializes only momentarily before the thing reverts to being a similarly normal business card again; and one lead into the inner workings of a Satanic cult in the person of farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), a member who went homicidally crazy one day and, though apprehended before he got around actually to killing anybody, has been in a mental institution ever since.
Despite the two visible demon attacks, one at the beginning (which really defies the conventions of Horror Filmmaking 101, one of which is not to show the monster until you’ve already finished the exposition!) and one at the end — and the general tackiness of the demon’s appearance — most of Night of the Demon is done subtly, the horror suggested rather than shown and the two leads on a sort of intellectual quest for clues to the menace not unlike the structure of the recent hit The Da Vinci Code. The film has its flaws — it’s too long and slow-moving (the U.S. distributor, Columbia, recut the film, shrinking it from 95 to 83 minutes and retitling it Curse of the Demon — though the print we were watching was the British version as shown on TCM) and would probably have profited from being kept to the usual 70-to-80 minute length of one of the Lewton productions — but on the whole it’s a marvelous piece of work, with plenty of shadowy, atmospheric shots from Tourneur and cinematographer Edward Scaife and an overall plot construction that goes for literate horror instead of blood and guts. Dana Andrews is a perfectly acceptable lead — he’s not great but he’s certainly better than he was in The Fearmakers — and Peggy Cummins is a disappointment because her role is too normal, too “nice,” to play to her strengths as an actress; but Niall McGinnis is absolutely superb as the villain, unctuously nice on the surface and presenting himself in a matter-of-fact way that only makes his real activities and agenda that much scarier.
Our “feature” was Night of the Demon, a 1961 British production that reunited director Jacques Tourneur and star Dana Andrews from The Fearmakers but turned out to be a much better movie — even though it was badly compromised by the producers’ insistence on showing the titular demon whereas Tourneur, having learned his less-is-more lessons from Val Lewton on the three films they made together (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man), had wanted to suggest its presence with sound alone.
Based on a short story by British writer Montague R. James called “Casting the Runes,” and written by Charles Bennett (who wrote six Alfred Hitchcock films — seven if you count Blackmail, which Bennett didn’t work on but which was based on his play — and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra) and Hal E. Chester (who also produced), Night of the Demon is a quite good horror mystery whose villain is Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a superbly oily character who has somehow extracted the world’s only extant copy of a medieval book on demons and demonology from the British Museum, figured out how to read it (more difficult than it sounds because the entire thing was written in code), used one of its formulae to conjure up a demon whenever he’s got an enemy he wants to get rid of, and also organized a Satanic cult in the English countryside. In the opening scene he receives a visit from professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), who is about to expose him at an upcoming scientific convention in London; Karswell takes care of Harrington by summoning up the demon to kill him, which the demon does by toppling a pole covering a power line on top of Harrington’s car, thus electrocuting him.
Karswell has another threat to his authority and public image in the person of American professor Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), an internationally famous debunker of psychic and spiritualist claims. On the plane coming over (seemingly represented by the same stock shot of an airliner that transported Andrews’ character in The Fearmakers!) he runs into Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins, the butch psychopath from Joseph Lewis’s masterpiece Gun Crazy), the dead scientist’s niece, and the two of them join forces to investigate Karswell. There are several neat scenes, in which Karswell confronts Holden in the reading room of the British Museum (looking almost exactly as it had when Hitchcock showed it in his film of Bennett’s Blackmail 42 years earlier!) and hands him a card that contains a threat to his life that materializes only momentarily before the thing reverts to being a similarly normal business card again; and one lead into the inner workings of a Satanic cult in the person of farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), a member who went homicidally crazy one day and, though apprehended before he got around actually to killing anybody, has been in a mental institution ever since.
Despite the two visible demon attacks, one at the beginning (which really defies the conventions of Horror Filmmaking 101, one of which is not to show the monster until you’ve already finished the exposition!) and one at the end — and the general tackiness of the demon’s appearance — most of Night of the Demon is done subtly, the horror suggested rather than shown and the two leads on a sort of intellectual quest for clues to the menace not unlike the structure of the recent hit The Da Vinci Code. The film has its flaws — it’s too long and slow-moving (the U.S. distributor, Columbia, recut the film, shrinking it from 95 to 83 minutes and retitling it Curse of the Demon — though the print we were watching was the British version as shown on TCM) and would probably have profited from being kept to the usual 70-to-80 minute length of one of the Lewton productions — but on the whole it’s a marvelous piece of work, with plenty of shadowy, atmospheric shots from Tourneur and cinematographer Edward Scaife and an overall plot construction that goes for literate horror instead of blood and guts. Dana Andrews is a perfectly acceptable lead — he’s not great but he’s certainly better than he was in The Fearmakers — and Peggy Cummins is a disappointment because her role is too normal, too “nice,” to play to her strengths as an actress; but Niall McGinnis is absolutely superb as the villain, unctuously nice on the surface and presenting himself in a matter-of-fact way that only makes his real activities and agenda that much scarier.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The Fearmakers (Pacemaker/United Artists, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1958 film The Fearmakers, a curious anti-Communist propaganda piece disguised as a film noir shown by TCM as part of a tribute to Jacques Tourneur (this month they’re saluting one or two famous directors every day), who made it for a company called “Pacemaker” releasing through United Artists. Written by Chris Appley and Elliot West from a novel by one Darwin L. Teilhet, The Fearmakers stars Dana Andrews as Alan Eaton, co-founder of the Eaton and Clark public-relations firm in Washington, D.C. until as an Army reservist he was re-activated to serve in Korea, captured, held in a Chinese POW camp for two years, repeatedly beaten and tortured and falsely reported as dead.
When he’s finally released he flies back to D.C. and expects to resume his old job as head of the agency — only he shows up to find that another man, Jim McGinnis (an almost unrecognizable — and surprisingly authoritative — Dick Foran), now owns the place, having bought out Clark the day before he was killed in an auto accident, run down by a hit-and-run driver. While on the plane to D.C. Eaton had run into Dr. Gregory Jessup (Oliver Blake), a nuclear physicist who tried to recruit him to a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and also referred him to a boarding house in D.C. in case he needed a place to stay. The boarding house turns out to be owned by a couple, Harold “Hal” and Vivian “Viv” Loder (Kelly Thordsen and the marvelous Veda Ann Borg) — he’s a heavy-set blowhard who claims a World War II background and, of course, has none; she’s a middle-aged blonde who’s still trying to play the slut and getting her husband jealous over it — and all of these people, plus the agency’s chief statistician, Barney Bond (Mel Tormé — and would someone please tell me why so many Hollywood casting directors in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s thought Mel Tormé could act? He was one of the best, and most superbly musical, male jazz singers of all time, and he was also a talented composer and arranger of music, but he was a mediocre actor who seemingly couldn’t get a line out of his mouth without making it sound like a song cue), are part of a Communist plot (though interestingly the C-word is never used in the film) to use public relations to subvert the American people and get them to accept a “peace” plan that will bring about their unilateral disarmament and conquest by a sinister foreign power.
The Fearmakers was a somewhat interesting attempt to harness noir situations and imagery in the service of Right-wing propaganda, and Tourneur actually got a few atmospheric shots into it, but for the most part it’s just another movie, in which Our Hero, his secretary Lorraine Dennis (Marilee Earle) and Walder (Roy Gordon), a Senator who used to be a client of the agency but dropped it after Eaton left, get together and stop the sinister plot from going forward — though not before some interesting reversals and a plot device by which Eaton suffers incapacitating flashbacks to his days as a POW being beaten and tortured whenever he’s under stress — including one grim scene in which an ill-timed attack allows the villains to wrest away the gun he’d been holding on them. The Fearmakers is a damned sight better than The Red Menace, Big Jim McLain and most of the other better-known Red-baiting movies — not that that’s saying much for it — and at least there’s a talented director and star at the helm, though working well below both their potentials — and, though Foran and Borg are capable, the rest of the supporting cast is nothing to write home about either. What’s most interesting about it is that through much of the dialogue we hear much of the progressive critique of P.R. — that it’s being used to manipulate people without their knowing it and turn them into unthinking drones — albeit from people who are denouncing the Left for exploiting the P.R. industry in that way.
I ran the 1958 film The Fearmakers, a curious anti-Communist propaganda piece disguised as a film noir shown by TCM as part of a tribute to Jacques Tourneur (this month they’re saluting one or two famous directors every day), who made it for a company called “Pacemaker” releasing through United Artists. Written by Chris Appley and Elliot West from a novel by one Darwin L. Teilhet, The Fearmakers stars Dana Andrews as Alan Eaton, co-founder of the Eaton and Clark public-relations firm in Washington, D.C. until as an Army reservist he was re-activated to serve in Korea, captured, held in a Chinese POW camp for two years, repeatedly beaten and tortured and falsely reported as dead.
When he’s finally released he flies back to D.C. and expects to resume his old job as head of the agency — only he shows up to find that another man, Jim McGinnis (an almost unrecognizable — and surprisingly authoritative — Dick Foran), now owns the place, having bought out Clark the day before he was killed in an auto accident, run down by a hit-and-run driver. While on the plane to D.C. Eaton had run into Dr. Gregory Jessup (Oliver Blake), a nuclear physicist who tried to recruit him to a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and also referred him to a boarding house in D.C. in case he needed a place to stay. The boarding house turns out to be owned by a couple, Harold “Hal” and Vivian “Viv” Loder (Kelly Thordsen and the marvelous Veda Ann Borg) — he’s a heavy-set blowhard who claims a World War II background and, of course, has none; she’s a middle-aged blonde who’s still trying to play the slut and getting her husband jealous over it — and all of these people, plus the agency’s chief statistician, Barney Bond (Mel Tormé — and would someone please tell me why so many Hollywood casting directors in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s thought Mel Tormé could act? He was one of the best, and most superbly musical, male jazz singers of all time, and he was also a talented composer and arranger of music, but he was a mediocre actor who seemingly couldn’t get a line out of his mouth without making it sound like a song cue), are part of a Communist plot (though interestingly the C-word is never used in the film) to use public relations to subvert the American people and get them to accept a “peace” plan that will bring about their unilateral disarmament and conquest by a sinister foreign power.
The Fearmakers was a somewhat interesting attempt to harness noir situations and imagery in the service of Right-wing propaganda, and Tourneur actually got a few atmospheric shots into it, but for the most part it’s just another movie, in which Our Hero, his secretary Lorraine Dennis (Marilee Earle) and Walder (Roy Gordon), a Senator who used to be a client of the agency but dropped it after Eaton left, get together and stop the sinister plot from going forward — though not before some interesting reversals and a plot device by which Eaton suffers incapacitating flashbacks to his days as a POW being beaten and tortured whenever he’s under stress — including one grim scene in which an ill-timed attack allows the villains to wrest away the gun he’d been holding on them. The Fearmakers is a damned sight better than The Red Menace, Big Jim McLain and most of the other better-known Red-baiting movies — not that that’s saying much for it — and at least there’s a talented director and star at the helm, though working well below both their potentials — and, though Foran and Borg are capable, the rest of the supporting cast is nothing to write home about either. What’s most interesting about it is that through much of the dialogue we hear much of the progressive critique of P.R. — that it’s being used to manipulate people without their knowing it and turn them into unthinking drones — albeit from people who are denouncing the Left for exploiting the P.R. industry in that way.
Cheaters’ Club (Chesler/Perlmutter Productions/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the movie Cheaters’ Club, a 2006 production that seemed to promise a lot of soft-core porn and other sleazy fun. The central premise: a woman psychiatrist, Roberta “Bobbie” Adler (Wendy Anderson), runs both a private practice and a group-therapy session open exclusively to married women with problems with their relationships. She also hosts a local talk-radio show that’s growing in popularity, and the message of both her talk show and her therapy is that a woman has the absolute right to a fulfilling sex life, and if she can’t get that from her husband she not only has the right but the duty to herself to find alternate partners who can satisfy her.
There are three patients in her group: high-powered attorney Meredith Glass (Krista Bridges), who’s basically turned her spouse Eric (Jeff Pangman) into an emasculated house-husband since he lost his job and she became the family’s sole breadwinner; real estate broker Cindy Hartford (Katya Gardner), blonde (the only one of the four female principals who isn’t dark-haired) and seemingly the most level-headed of the bunch; and Linda Stern (the improbably named Charisma Carpenter), who as the film opens announces to the group that she’s just yielded to their social pressure and had her first affair, with a man named Kyle (Andrew Kraulis) who’s easily the hottest guy in the movie — slightly built, wiry, butch, with a page-boy haircut and a short beard. Certainly he’s better looking than the paramours of the others: Paolo Abruzzi (Chris Violette) is a blankly handsome young graduate student who’s the fuck buddy first of Meredith and then of Bobbie; Tony Armstrong (Rogue Johnston) is the vaguely racially mixed escort Meredith hires after Bobbie seduces Paolo away from her; and the man we see Cindy with, her high-school sweetheart Alex (or at least we think it’s him), who jilted her after he got her pregnant, forcing her to marry her husband David just so her kid would have a father, is as typical a Lifetime “type” — sandy-haired, lanky, decent-looking but nothing special — as you could imagine, much like the actors playing the other husbands, Eric, Benny Stern (Luke Murdoch) and Robert Adler (James Gilpin).
The film opens with its title scratched out in letters, as if written with a key on the side of a car door, against a backdrop of surveillance photos; and for the first 20 minutes it’s the sort of raunchy fun its synopsis advertised. Then it takes a turn into thriller-dom as both Bobbie and Paolo are murdered — she stabbed 20 times, he once, indicating that the killer was more pissed off at her than him — and the case is assigned to Detective Rollins (Kate Trotter), a bull-dyke who doesn’t seem to have a first name and comes off as so strongly Lesbian one expects her to make passes at the members of the Cheaters’ Club and convince them that all the trouble they’re in is the result of their dating (or marrying) men. Meredith is dead set against the members of the club having anything to do with Rollins or anyone else from the police — she’s fearful of being exposed and having her emasculated house-husband (whom we see in only one scene but who comes off more like a character in a Faith Baldwin story from the 1930’s than someone we’d expect to see in a modern movie!) leave her and take their kids with them — but Linda ultimately levels with Rollins after Meredith has a hissy-fit at one of the three women’s lunch dates and threatens to kill either of the others if they cooperate with the law.
Meredith gets fired after a videotape of her and Tony having at it gets e-mailed to everyone in her law firm and every potential client and every judge in the court system, and as if that wasn’t a bad enough day for her, she also gets arrested for the murders (by then Tony has also been found dead — he had been approached online by the killer to plant a camera in his bedroom and film one of Meredith’s trysts, only when the killer came back for the tape, Tony got stabbed as well). Meanwhile, Linda — who had Dr. Adler’s PDA on her when the doctor was killed (the doc had mistakenly slipped it into Linda’s purse instead of her own) — has been reading Dr. Adler’s therapy notes and realizes that Cindy is the real killer: she made up the story about Alex.
Eventually we learn not only Cindy’s guilt but her motive: “Kyle,” the man Linda was having her affair with, was really David Hartford, Cindy’s husband, and Cindy — an unbalanced woman with a previous history of mental hospitalizations — decided to take revenge by killing not only Linda but everyone connected with the group, starting with the doctor who had encouraged Linda to have the affair with Cindy’s husband in the first place. Though no great shakes as drama and marred by the usual improbabilities, Cheaters’ Club is actually a quite good thriller, suspensefully directed by Steve DiMarco (who’s several cuts above the usual Lifetime directors in his flair for exciting action) from a difficult-to-believe but otherwise good script by Kevin Commins and Camilla Carr and maintaining its excitement until a climax that’s action-packed but at least (within the context of this story) believable — and there’s quite a lot of Lifetime’s usually hot soft-core porn as well!
I ran the movie Cheaters’ Club, a 2006 production that seemed to promise a lot of soft-core porn and other sleazy fun. The central premise: a woman psychiatrist, Roberta “Bobbie” Adler (Wendy Anderson), runs both a private practice and a group-therapy session open exclusively to married women with problems with their relationships. She also hosts a local talk-radio show that’s growing in popularity, and the message of both her talk show and her therapy is that a woman has the absolute right to a fulfilling sex life, and if she can’t get that from her husband she not only has the right but the duty to herself to find alternate partners who can satisfy her.
There are three patients in her group: high-powered attorney Meredith Glass (Krista Bridges), who’s basically turned her spouse Eric (Jeff Pangman) into an emasculated house-husband since he lost his job and she became the family’s sole breadwinner; real estate broker Cindy Hartford (Katya Gardner), blonde (the only one of the four female principals who isn’t dark-haired) and seemingly the most level-headed of the bunch; and Linda Stern (the improbably named Charisma Carpenter), who as the film opens announces to the group that she’s just yielded to their social pressure and had her first affair, with a man named Kyle (Andrew Kraulis) who’s easily the hottest guy in the movie — slightly built, wiry, butch, with a page-boy haircut and a short beard. Certainly he’s better looking than the paramours of the others: Paolo Abruzzi (Chris Violette) is a blankly handsome young graduate student who’s the fuck buddy first of Meredith and then of Bobbie; Tony Armstrong (Rogue Johnston) is the vaguely racially mixed escort Meredith hires after Bobbie seduces Paolo away from her; and the man we see Cindy with, her high-school sweetheart Alex (or at least we think it’s him), who jilted her after he got her pregnant, forcing her to marry her husband David just so her kid would have a father, is as typical a Lifetime “type” — sandy-haired, lanky, decent-looking but nothing special — as you could imagine, much like the actors playing the other husbands, Eric, Benny Stern (Luke Murdoch) and Robert Adler (James Gilpin).
The film opens with its title scratched out in letters, as if written with a key on the side of a car door, against a backdrop of surveillance photos; and for the first 20 minutes it’s the sort of raunchy fun its synopsis advertised. Then it takes a turn into thriller-dom as both Bobbie and Paolo are murdered — she stabbed 20 times, he once, indicating that the killer was more pissed off at her than him — and the case is assigned to Detective Rollins (Kate Trotter), a bull-dyke who doesn’t seem to have a first name and comes off as so strongly Lesbian one expects her to make passes at the members of the Cheaters’ Club and convince them that all the trouble they’re in is the result of their dating (or marrying) men. Meredith is dead set against the members of the club having anything to do with Rollins or anyone else from the police — she’s fearful of being exposed and having her emasculated house-husband (whom we see in only one scene but who comes off more like a character in a Faith Baldwin story from the 1930’s than someone we’d expect to see in a modern movie!) leave her and take their kids with them — but Linda ultimately levels with Rollins after Meredith has a hissy-fit at one of the three women’s lunch dates and threatens to kill either of the others if they cooperate with the law.
Meredith gets fired after a videotape of her and Tony having at it gets e-mailed to everyone in her law firm and every potential client and every judge in the court system, and as if that wasn’t a bad enough day for her, she also gets arrested for the murders (by then Tony has also been found dead — he had been approached online by the killer to plant a camera in his bedroom and film one of Meredith’s trysts, only when the killer came back for the tape, Tony got stabbed as well). Meanwhile, Linda — who had Dr. Adler’s PDA on her when the doctor was killed (the doc had mistakenly slipped it into Linda’s purse instead of her own) — has been reading Dr. Adler’s therapy notes and realizes that Cindy is the real killer: she made up the story about Alex.
Eventually we learn not only Cindy’s guilt but her motive: “Kyle,” the man Linda was having her affair with, was really David Hartford, Cindy’s husband, and Cindy — an unbalanced woman with a previous history of mental hospitalizations — decided to take revenge by killing not only Linda but everyone connected with the group, starting with the doctor who had encouraged Linda to have the affair with Cindy’s husband in the first place. Though no great shakes as drama and marred by the usual improbabilities, Cheaters’ Club is actually a quite good thriller, suspensefully directed by Steve DiMarco (who’s several cuts above the usual Lifetime directors in his flair for exciting action) from a difficult-to-believe but otherwise good script by Kevin Commins and Camilla Carr and maintaining its excitement until a climax that’s action-packed but at least (within the context of this story) believable — and there’s quite a lot of Lifetime’s usually hot soft-core porn as well!
Friday, June 12, 2009
Emilio (Landmark Films, 2008)
Familiar but Moving Immigrant Tale
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Emilio Luna (Walter Perez) is a 19-year-old man living on the outskirts of Guadalajara in central Mexico whose 14-year-old sister Maria (Lauren Torres), a girl with the habit of hanging out in bars and coming off as sexually precocious for her age, has been kidnapped by a middle-aged man named Manuel Ortega (Alexandre DeMesquita) and taken to Los Angeles. So, armed with a thousand pesos, a few belongings in a backpack and a much-folded black-and-white photo of Ortega, he flies to Tijuana, crosses the border, makes it to L.A. and starts looking for his sister and the man who took her away. This central premise of writer-director Kim Jorgensen’s new movie, called simply Emilio and produced by the Landmark Theatres chain (which Jorgensen founded and which is showing it locally even though he no longer owns it), isn’t exactly the freshest idea for a movie, but it’s told with a great deal of warmth that gets and keeps us emotionally involved with its hero and makes it well worth seeing.
A lot of things happen to the central character in Emilio. He gets ripped off early on by a couple of Latino gangstas. He meets a philosophical African-American street person, identified in the cast list only as “Bearded Bum” (Wendell Wright), with a taste for decadent French writers like the Marquis de Sade and Céline. He falls in with a couple of other Latinos, José (Danny Martinez) and Fausto (Alejandro Patino), and ends up sharing their apartment in a grungy old residence hotel and working with them on a job for a bottled-water company called Strasbourg — the grim joke being that the “company” is actually the back room of a garage in which they stick the bottles under a regular tap, fill them and seal new caps on them to pass them off as healthy bottled water.
Emilio, who until the very end of the movie seems to have no romantic or sexual interests of his own — though it’s made clear early on that he’s straight — gets cruised by Zack (Ryan McTavish), aspiring (but not too aspiring) actor and scapegrace son of a rich family that bought him a Porsche. They meet on the Venice Beach pier and Zack takes the unsuspecting Emilio to a hot dance club called Rage (“There don’t seem to be too many women here,” says our cluelessly naïve hero) and then to his place — where there’s a party going on with Gay men of all ages, levels of butchness and drug habits. An exhausted Emilio falls asleep in Zack’s bed and they spend the night together — though, again, we’re clearly told that no physical contact occurred between them other than Zack’s arm across Emilio’s chest — and Emilio makes the mistake of accepting a ride home from Zack. As soon as one of his roommates sees him getting out of a fancy car being driven by a Gay gringo, they toss Emilio’s clothes in a bag and throw him out. The joke in this sequence is on both Emilio and the Gays who think he's available “fresh meat,” and though the sequence doesn’t come off as homophobic the Richard Glatzer/Wash Westmoreland film Quinceañera (2006) did a better job of dramatizing the clash between Latino traditions and the Gay culture.
While nothing in Emilio is exactly fresh storytelling, the film is sensitively written and doesn’t have the damnable detachment that wrecks a lot of attempts at serious drama in modern movies. Kim Jorgensen clearly likes and feels for his character, and wants us to as well. Walter Perez is perfectly cast as Emilio, attractive in an understated way and delivering a matter-of-fact performance that makes the character credible and moving. The kid’s guilelessness does get to be a bit unbelievable after a while, but instead of maintaining the literally demented optimism of the woman at the center of Happy-Go-Lucky, Emilio remains a well-grounded character, capable of understanding evil and learning from the bad things that happen to him. Certainly the film sometimes conveys the impression of a deliberate attempt to do a domestic version of Slumdog Millionaire — though it doesn’t have the fable-like plotting, the fairy-tale coincidences or the triumphal ending of Slumdog; instead Jorgensen dares a bittersweet resolution of his plot and leaves Emilio with one dream dashed but with a good shot at the fulfillment of another.
Jorgensen’s background is unusual, to say the least, for a first-time director. He’s been involved in the movie business, in one capacity or another, for over three decades. He’s credited as “executive producer” — a catch-all title that can mean almost anything (including once having had the rights to a story even if he had nothing to do with the version that got made) — on an acknowledged classic, Out of Africa (1985), and also had credits on three typically dumb comedies of the period: Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Growing Pains (1984) and Mortuary Academy (1988). None of those credits hint at the nervy, deliberately low-tech look he cultivates as the director of Emilio, including some dizzying hand-held pans in the early L.A. scenes that suggest a six-year-old who just got a video camera for his birthday. Fortunately, Jorgensen’s direction later settles into a more conventional groove, giving us plenty to watch and allowing us to watch it.
Emilio is being presented as one of Landmark’s experiments in digital projection. There’ve been several others, including The Architect (2006), a digitally shot film that came across on screen with vivid clarity — too vivid clarity, it seemed in some sequences that could have benefited from the delicate shadings of a filmed image instead of the maddening crispness of high-definition video. Emilio, at least as presented at the June 11 preview screening — presumably the folks at Landmark Hillcrest will have the bugs out of the system before they present it to paying customers — was technically a mess. The projectionist was unable to get the film in the right aspect ratio, thereby cutting off the English subtitles and leaving non-Spanish speakers in the audience at sea during the sequences in which only Latinos appear on screen. Also, much of the sound was distorted — Tree Adams’ simple but evocative musical score suffered in particular — and sometimes the sound effects drowned out the dialogue.
Nonetheless, the quality of Emilio emerged even through a less than optimal presentation — and once the folks at Landmark get the technical glitches taken care of and show this film the way the founder of their company meant it to be seen, it’ll be well worth watching.
Emilio is now playing at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Emilio Luna (Walter Perez) is a 19-year-old man living on the outskirts of Guadalajara in central Mexico whose 14-year-old sister Maria (Lauren Torres), a girl with the habit of hanging out in bars and coming off as sexually precocious for her age, has been kidnapped by a middle-aged man named Manuel Ortega (Alexandre DeMesquita) and taken to Los Angeles. So, armed with a thousand pesos, a few belongings in a backpack and a much-folded black-and-white photo of Ortega, he flies to Tijuana, crosses the border, makes it to L.A. and starts looking for his sister and the man who took her away. This central premise of writer-director Kim Jorgensen’s new movie, called simply Emilio and produced by the Landmark Theatres chain (which Jorgensen founded and which is showing it locally even though he no longer owns it), isn’t exactly the freshest idea for a movie, but it’s told with a great deal of warmth that gets and keeps us emotionally involved with its hero and makes it well worth seeing.
A lot of things happen to the central character in Emilio. He gets ripped off early on by a couple of Latino gangstas. He meets a philosophical African-American street person, identified in the cast list only as “Bearded Bum” (Wendell Wright), with a taste for decadent French writers like the Marquis de Sade and Céline. He falls in with a couple of other Latinos, José (Danny Martinez) and Fausto (Alejandro Patino), and ends up sharing their apartment in a grungy old residence hotel and working with them on a job for a bottled-water company called Strasbourg — the grim joke being that the “company” is actually the back room of a garage in which they stick the bottles under a regular tap, fill them and seal new caps on them to pass them off as healthy bottled water.
Emilio, who until the very end of the movie seems to have no romantic or sexual interests of his own — though it’s made clear early on that he’s straight — gets cruised by Zack (Ryan McTavish), aspiring (but not too aspiring) actor and scapegrace son of a rich family that bought him a Porsche. They meet on the Venice Beach pier and Zack takes the unsuspecting Emilio to a hot dance club called Rage (“There don’t seem to be too many women here,” says our cluelessly naïve hero) and then to his place — where there’s a party going on with Gay men of all ages, levels of butchness and drug habits. An exhausted Emilio falls asleep in Zack’s bed and they spend the night together — though, again, we’re clearly told that no physical contact occurred between them other than Zack’s arm across Emilio’s chest — and Emilio makes the mistake of accepting a ride home from Zack. As soon as one of his roommates sees him getting out of a fancy car being driven by a Gay gringo, they toss Emilio’s clothes in a bag and throw him out. The joke in this sequence is on both Emilio and the Gays who think he's available “fresh meat,” and though the sequence doesn’t come off as homophobic the Richard Glatzer/Wash Westmoreland film Quinceañera (2006) did a better job of dramatizing the clash between Latino traditions and the Gay culture.
While nothing in Emilio is exactly fresh storytelling, the film is sensitively written and doesn’t have the damnable detachment that wrecks a lot of attempts at serious drama in modern movies. Kim Jorgensen clearly likes and feels for his character, and wants us to as well. Walter Perez is perfectly cast as Emilio, attractive in an understated way and delivering a matter-of-fact performance that makes the character credible and moving. The kid’s guilelessness does get to be a bit unbelievable after a while, but instead of maintaining the literally demented optimism of the woman at the center of Happy-Go-Lucky, Emilio remains a well-grounded character, capable of understanding evil and learning from the bad things that happen to him. Certainly the film sometimes conveys the impression of a deliberate attempt to do a domestic version of Slumdog Millionaire — though it doesn’t have the fable-like plotting, the fairy-tale coincidences or the triumphal ending of Slumdog; instead Jorgensen dares a bittersweet resolution of his plot and leaves Emilio with one dream dashed but with a good shot at the fulfillment of another.
Jorgensen’s background is unusual, to say the least, for a first-time director. He’s been involved in the movie business, in one capacity or another, for over three decades. He’s credited as “executive producer” — a catch-all title that can mean almost anything (including once having had the rights to a story even if he had nothing to do with the version that got made) — on an acknowledged classic, Out of Africa (1985), and also had credits on three typically dumb comedies of the period: Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Growing Pains (1984) and Mortuary Academy (1988). None of those credits hint at the nervy, deliberately low-tech look he cultivates as the director of Emilio, including some dizzying hand-held pans in the early L.A. scenes that suggest a six-year-old who just got a video camera for his birthday. Fortunately, Jorgensen’s direction later settles into a more conventional groove, giving us plenty to watch and allowing us to watch it.
Emilio is being presented as one of Landmark’s experiments in digital projection. There’ve been several others, including The Architect (2006), a digitally shot film that came across on screen with vivid clarity — too vivid clarity, it seemed in some sequences that could have benefited from the delicate shadings of a filmed image instead of the maddening crispness of high-definition video. Emilio, at least as presented at the June 11 preview screening — presumably the folks at Landmark Hillcrest will have the bugs out of the system before they present it to paying customers — was technically a mess. The projectionist was unable to get the film in the right aspect ratio, thereby cutting off the English subtitles and leaving non-Spanish speakers in the audience at sea during the sequences in which only Latinos appear on screen. Also, much of the sound was distorted — Tree Adams’ simple but evocative musical score suffered in particular — and sometimes the sound effects drowned out the dialogue.
Nonetheless, the quality of Emilio emerged even through a less than optimal presentation — and once the folks at Landmark get the technical glitches taken care of and show this film the way the founder of their company meant it to be seen, it’ll be well worth watching.
Emilio is now playing at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement (PBS)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles duly arrived I showed him a pledge program I’d just recorded from KPBS which I thought he’d be interested in: Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement, which I’d assumed would be a documentary about the actual “Freedom” groups of the period (like Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Freedom Singers) but instead turned out to be a broader account of the interchange between African-American popular music of the late 1950’s and 1960’s and the civil rights movement. The program made the point that the civil rights movement was started in churches whose members had sung the classic spirituals, but not in the formal style of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and H. T. Burleigh’s arrangements (the ones just about every major opera singer of African-American descent, from Marian Anderson to Denyce Graves, has had to suffer through); rather in the (far more moving, to me) gospel style exemplified by Mahalia Jackson.
It paralleled both obscure and well-known Black hits of the period — including the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” (which, with its explicit references to the Lord, really qualifies as a gospel song), James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (which they presented not in Cooke’s original version but in the freer, more ornamented cover by Otis Redding), Otis Redding’s “Respect” (which they presented in the far better-known version by Aretha Franklin — one commentator even attributed the part in which the singer spells out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” to Redding without realizing that had been added by Aretha in her arrangement), Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (which was presented as a complete performance clip from 1960’s TV while Aretha’s “Respect” was presented only as an excerpt, from what appeared to be a contemporary music video in which Aretha danced in the street to her own record), Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (presented in a quite beautiful live performance in which Gaye sat at a piano and played as well as sang — and he remodeled his own melody quite extensively and, if anything, made the song even more yearning and questioning than it had been on his record) — with the events of the period, the nonviolent early days of the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power (it’s still impossible for me to watch a clip of Stokely Carmichael in full rhetorical cry and not hate him, though for all its talk about taking up the gun the Black Power movement wasn’t particularly violent in practice — the violence involving it came almost entirely from the police, FBI and other authorities against it!) and the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (and RFK was presented in a series of carefully edited film clips that made him seem a good deal more liberal than he was!).
It was a moving show and an important, evocative slice of both American political and cultural history, though if it had a flaw it was that it was too self-consciously drenched in nostalgia and offered nary a clue as to how the lessons of the civil rights movement could be drawn upon by both activists and artists interested in social change today.
When Charles duly arrived I showed him a pledge program I’d just recorded from KPBS which I thought he’d be interested in: Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement, which I’d assumed would be a documentary about the actual “Freedom” groups of the period (like Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Freedom Singers) but instead turned out to be a broader account of the interchange between African-American popular music of the late 1950’s and 1960’s and the civil rights movement. The program made the point that the civil rights movement was started in churches whose members had sung the classic spirituals, but not in the formal style of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and H. T. Burleigh’s arrangements (the ones just about every major opera singer of African-American descent, from Marian Anderson to Denyce Graves, has had to suffer through); rather in the (far more moving, to me) gospel style exemplified by Mahalia Jackson.
It paralleled both obscure and well-known Black hits of the period — including the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” (which, with its explicit references to the Lord, really qualifies as a gospel song), James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (which they presented not in Cooke’s original version but in the freer, more ornamented cover by Otis Redding), Otis Redding’s “Respect” (which they presented in the far better-known version by Aretha Franklin — one commentator even attributed the part in which the singer spells out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” to Redding without realizing that had been added by Aretha in her arrangement), Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (which was presented as a complete performance clip from 1960’s TV while Aretha’s “Respect” was presented only as an excerpt, from what appeared to be a contemporary music video in which Aretha danced in the street to her own record), Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (presented in a quite beautiful live performance in which Gaye sat at a piano and played as well as sang — and he remodeled his own melody quite extensively and, if anything, made the song even more yearning and questioning than it had been on his record) — with the events of the period, the nonviolent early days of the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power (it’s still impossible for me to watch a clip of Stokely Carmichael in full rhetorical cry and not hate him, though for all its talk about taking up the gun the Black Power movement wasn’t particularly violent in practice — the violence involving it came almost entirely from the police, FBI and other authorities against it!) and the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (and RFK was presented in a series of carefully edited film clips that made him seem a good deal more liberal than he was!).
It was a moving show and an important, evocative slice of both American political and cultural history, though if it had a flaw it was that it was too self-consciously drenched in nostalgia and offered nary a clue as to how the lessons of the civil rights movement could be drawn upon by both activists and artists interested in social change today.
Lady Be Good (MGM, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Eventually we watched the movie Lady Be Good, a 1941 MGM musical produced by Arthur Freed at a time when Freed’s productions were still pretty much standardized items from the musical cliché mill. Lady Be Good began on Broadway in the 1920’s as a musical by George and Ira Gershwin, but Freed and his writers — Jack McGowan, “original” story; McGowan, Kay Van Riper and John McClain, script; and Ralph Spence, Arnold Auerbach, Herman Wouk (! — so now we know what he wrote before World War II!), Robert McGunigle and Vincente Minnelli, uncredited script doctors — threw out all but two of the Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” They also threw out the original story and substituted an excessively lame, boring one about husband-and-wife songwriters Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan (Ann Sothern) who divorce, get back together and then split up again, only the judge who heard their first divorce case (Lionel Barrymore, playing his whole role seated behind the bench to conceal that he could no longer walk and needed a wheelchair) refuses to divorce them again and so they more or less reconcile at the finish.
The show was laden down with mediocre new songs by Roger Edens, “You’ll Never Know” (definitely not the Harry Warren song for the film of that title at 20th Century-Fox that won the Academy Award two years later) and “Your Words and My Music” (the latter with lyrics by, you guessed it, Arthur Freed himself), and a quite beautiful song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” performed by Ann Sothern in a nightclub in which she and Young are being fêted as songwriters of the year for “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to express his traumatic reaction when Paris fell to the Nazis, and though at the time he was working on a show with Sigmund Romberg he knew that Kern and only Kern would be the right composer for his special song (one of the few times Hammerstein and Kern ever wrote a song that was conceived on its own instead of as part of a show); the song won the Academy Award for 1941 —though Kern, a good sport as usual, said he thought Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” (introduced far less effectively in its film) should have won — largely due to its moving presentation here, in which the second chorus is accompanied on screen by stock footage of pre-war Paris: a rare moment of raw emotion in a movie otherwise content to stay on well-blazed trails of clichés.
One of the most frustrating things about Lady Be Good is that we’re constantly being cut away from the more interesting characters in the movie — Eleanor Powell (bizarrely billed first even though she’s really playing a second lead) as Marilyn Marsh, ace tap dancer (though it’s not until 74 minutes into this 111-minute movie that we finally get to see her dance), star of the show the feuding songwriters eventually stay together long enough to write, and roommate of Dixie’s when she and her now-and-again husband are apart; and Red Skelton (billed seventh and deserving better both in cast order and in being given something to do), playing the Cranes’ song-plugger and taking some marvelous pratfalls that make us a) laugh and b) wish he had a much bigger part in the film — to focus on the boring parts played by Young and Sothern. Given how many great comedies Hollywood was making just then about divorced couples who couldn’t let each other go and ultimately reconciled at the fade-out — obscure ones like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring William Powell and Jean Arthur, as well as famous ones like The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story — it seems really disappointing that Arthur Freed, director Norman Z. McLeod (whose best credits are films with zany comedians as his stars — Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) and the writing committee didn’t bring some more imagination and flair to this story.
There are some nice one-liners in the film — notably the one in which Eleanor Powell says to Red Skelton, whose antics are getting on her nerves, “Why don’t you go back into the clock and close the little door behind you?” — and a couple of hot dance numbers by the Berry Brothers, a Black group of tap dancers who are rather like the Nicholas Brothers except that there are three of them and they’re equally spectacular in their combination of tap and acrobatics. There’s also a nice performance by Tom Conway as Dixie’s divorce lawyer and a forgettable minor role for Dan Dailey — and, on the “down” side, there’s the execrable John Carroll as Eddie’s rival for Dixie’s hand. Carroll is ostensibly the radio singer who introduces the Cranes’ songs and makes hits of them, but his voice is so drearily stentorian one gets the impression the songs are becoming popular in spite of him.
Among the other good stuff in this movie are the montage sequence that shows the song “Oh, Lady Be Good” becoming a hit, with piles of sheet music and records (the record we see is on the Victor label — a rare use of a real record label in a film of the period — but the label is white with black lettering, not the black with gold lettering Victor actually used for their pop records at the time) mounting to vertiginous heights as the song inches its way up the charts — and the spectacular dance number to “Fascinating Rhythm” that climaxes the film, with the Berry Brothers joining Eleanor Powell when they’re not seated at three pianos that are themselves dancing — and at the end Powell is shown dancing out of a giant chiffon curtain that is billowing out behind and above her. According to Hugh Fordin, Arthur Freed’s biographer — who made it clear throughout his book that he couldn’t stand Busby Berkeley — this was an arduous number to film, largely because of the sheer amount of time Berkeley took on it. “Freed gave Berkeley an ultimatum: ‘You’ve got three days to rehearse and one day to shoot,’” Fordin wrote. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set. Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” (The scenes in Berkeley’s Footlight Parade of James Cagney as the maniacal dance director locking his cast and crew inside a rehearsal hall for three days straight, moving in cots so they could cat-nap between rehearsals and having sandwiches delivered so they could eat, are a pretty good illustration of Berkeley’s actual working methods.)
The resulting number isn’t quite as demented as the extravaganzae Berkeley had previously created at Goldwyn and Warners, but it’s still easily the best thing (along with “The Last Time I Saw Paris”) in the movie. (Powell’s only other dance sequence takes place in her apartment — which, Charles noted, is the exact same set that was used for the Cranes’ apartment, only re-dressed, a bit of cheapness one expected more from Monogram than MGM — in which she does quite a clever routine with a dancing dog named Buttons; I have no idea how he was trained or by whom — they didn’t give credits for “dog wranglers” then — but he’s quite good.) Lady Be Good is an example of one of those frustratingly mediocre films that could have been good: with more of the Gershwin score kept intact (besides “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm” we hear a snatch of “So Am I” played by Robert Young to impress the society friends he loves and Ann Sothern can’t stand, and an even smaller bit of “Hang On to Me” in the background score), a more stylish director, snappier writing and, above all, a starrier cast — like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who’d played together brilliantly in The Awful Truth and would have been a damned sight better in this movie than Robert Young and Ann Sothern (not only were they far more charismatic personalities and funnier comedians but Dunne had a much better singing voice than Sothern’s) — this could have been a real gem instead of a mediocre film made while the Freed Unit was still groping towards the genuinely stylish masterpieces of its maturity: Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, et al.
Eventually we watched the movie Lady Be Good, a 1941 MGM musical produced by Arthur Freed at a time when Freed’s productions were still pretty much standardized items from the musical cliché mill. Lady Be Good began on Broadway in the 1920’s as a musical by George and Ira Gershwin, but Freed and his writers — Jack McGowan, “original” story; McGowan, Kay Van Riper and John McClain, script; and Ralph Spence, Arnold Auerbach, Herman Wouk (! — so now we know what he wrote before World War II!), Robert McGunigle and Vincente Minnelli, uncredited script doctors — threw out all but two of the Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” They also threw out the original story and substituted an excessively lame, boring one about husband-and-wife songwriters Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan (Ann Sothern) who divorce, get back together and then split up again, only the judge who heard their first divorce case (Lionel Barrymore, playing his whole role seated behind the bench to conceal that he could no longer walk and needed a wheelchair) refuses to divorce them again and so they more or less reconcile at the finish.
The show was laden down with mediocre new songs by Roger Edens, “You’ll Never Know” (definitely not the Harry Warren song for the film of that title at 20th Century-Fox that won the Academy Award two years later) and “Your Words and My Music” (the latter with lyrics by, you guessed it, Arthur Freed himself), and a quite beautiful song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” performed by Ann Sothern in a nightclub in which she and Young are being fêted as songwriters of the year for “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to express his traumatic reaction when Paris fell to the Nazis, and though at the time he was working on a show with Sigmund Romberg he knew that Kern and only Kern would be the right composer for his special song (one of the few times Hammerstein and Kern ever wrote a song that was conceived on its own instead of as part of a show); the song won the Academy Award for 1941 —though Kern, a good sport as usual, said he thought Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” (introduced far less effectively in its film) should have won — largely due to its moving presentation here, in which the second chorus is accompanied on screen by stock footage of pre-war Paris: a rare moment of raw emotion in a movie otherwise content to stay on well-blazed trails of clichés.
One of the most frustrating things about Lady Be Good is that we’re constantly being cut away from the more interesting characters in the movie — Eleanor Powell (bizarrely billed first even though she’s really playing a second lead) as Marilyn Marsh, ace tap dancer (though it’s not until 74 minutes into this 111-minute movie that we finally get to see her dance), star of the show the feuding songwriters eventually stay together long enough to write, and roommate of Dixie’s when she and her now-and-again husband are apart; and Red Skelton (billed seventh and deserving better both in cast order and in being given something to do), playing the Cranes’ song-plugger and taking some marvelous pratfalls that make us a) laugh and b) wish he had a much bigger part in the film — to focus on the boring parts played by Young and Sothern. Given how many great comedies Hollywood was making just then about divorced couples who couldn’t let each other go and ultimately reconciled at the fade-out — obscure ones like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring William Powell and Jean Arthur, as well as famous ones like The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story — it seems really disappointing that Arthur Freed, director Norman Z. McLeod (whose best credits are films with zany comedians as his stars — Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) and the writing committee didn’t bring some more imagination and flair to this story.
There are some nice one-liners in the film — notably the one in which Eleanor Powell says to Red Skelton, whose antics are getting on her nerves, “Why don’t you go back into the clock and close the little door behind you?” — and a couple of hot dance numbers by the Berry Brothers, a Black group of tap dancers who are rather like the Nicholas Brothers except that there are three of them and they’re equally spectacular in their combination of tap and acrobatics. There’s also a nice performance by Tom Conway as Dixie’s divorce lawyer and a forgettable minor role for Dan Dailey — and, on the “down” side, there’s the execrable John Carroll as Eddie’s rival for Dixie’s hand. Carroll is ostensibly the radio singer who introduces the Cranes’ songs and makes hits of them, but his voice is so drearily stentorian one gets the impression the songs are becoming popular in spite of him.
Among the other good stuff in this movie are the montage sequence that shows the song “Oh, Lady Be Good” becoming a hit, with piles of sheet music and records (the record we see is on the Victor label — a rare use of a real record label in a film of the period — but the label is white with black lettering, not the black with gold lettering Victor actually used for their pop records at the time) mounting to vertiginous heights as the song inches its way up the charts — and the spectacular dance number to “Fascinating Rhythm” that climaxes the film, with the Berry Brothers joining Eleanor Powell when they’re not seated at three pianos that are themselves dancing — and at the end Powell is shown dancing out of a giant chiffon curtain that is billowing out behind and above her. According to Hugh Fordin, Arthur Freed’s biographer — who made it clear throughout his book that he couldn’t stand Busby Berkeley — this was an arduous number to film, largely because of the sheer amount of time Berkeley took on it. “Freed gave Berkeley an ultimatum: ‘You’ve got three days to rehearse and one day to shoot,’” Fordin wrote. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set. Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” (The scenes in Berkeley’s Footlight Parade of James Cagney as the maniacal dance director locking his cast and crew inside a rehearsal hall for three days straight, moving in cots so they could cat-nap between rehearsals and having sandwiches delivered so they could eat, are a pretty good illustration of Berkeley’s actual working methods.)
The resulting number isn’t quite as demented as the extravaganzae Berkeley had previously created at Goldwyn and Warners, but it’s still easily the best thing (along with “The Last Time I Saw Paris”) in the movie. (Powell’s only other dance sequence takes place in her apartment — which, Charles noted, is the exact same set that was used for the Cranes’ apartment, only re-dressed, a bit of cheapness one expected more from Monogram than MGM — in which she does quite a clever routine with a dancing dog named Buttons; I have no idea how he was trained or by whom — they didn’t give credits for “dog wranglers” then — but he’s quite good.) Lady Be Good is an example of one of those frustratingly mediocre films that could have been good: with more of the Gershwin score kept intact (besides “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm” we hear a snatch of “So Am I” played by Robert Young to impress the society friends he loves and Ann Sothern can’t stand, and an even smaller bit of “Hang On to Me” in the background score), a more stylish director, snappier writing and, above all, a starrier cast — like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who’d played together brilliantly in The Awful Truth and would have been a damned sight better in this movie than Robert Young and Ann Sothern (not only were they far more charismatic personalities and funnier comedians but Dunne had a much better singing voice than Sothern’s) — this could have been a real gem instead of a mediocre film made while the Freed Unit was still groping towards the genuinely stylish masterpieces of its maturity: Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, et al.
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