Something for an Empty Briefcase (NBC, 7/17/53)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The “feature” was a half-hour episode of the Campbell’s SoundStage (that spelling, with a capital letter in the middle of a compound word, anticipates the nomenclature of computer programs by at least three decades!) drama anthology from July 17, 1953 called “Something for an Empty Briefcase,” notable mainly for the identity of the male lead: James Dean. As I’ve already mentioned in these pages, it seems bizarre to me that no one has ever sought to do a full inventory of all of James Dean’s TV appearances, collect them and make them available in a single package; instead probably some of them have been totally lost, while others have drifted into the public domain and been made available piecemeal (this and the 1957 documentary The James Dean Story seem to have been the only Dean items that have made it to archive.org; virtually everything else that comes up when you search the site for “James Dean” is rock bands doing tribute songs about him). Dean’s death at age 24 was a real tragedy, but he did leave behind considerably more work than just three starring films and it’s a cultural tragedy that it’s been so hard to see so much of it.

The show is introduced by a narrator that recommends that in addition to buying Campbell’s soup, you should also buy the book Joe (the Dean character) purchased to put in his briefcase — and given the heavy-duty religiosity of the period (this show aired just one year before the U.S. government, eager to define itself as “God-fearing” in opposition not only to communism but “Godless Communism,” defaced our coins and currency with “in God we trust” and defaced the Pledge of Allegiance with “under God” — and yes, I do resent that for all but a few months of my life my country has told me that I can’t be fully a part of its polity unless I subscribe to a belief in God, and the monotheistic Abrahamic “sky god,” as Gore Vidal called it, at that) it’s no surprise that the book turns out to be the Bible. Directed by Don Medford (whom I’d heard of) based on a script by S. Lee Pogostin (whom I hadn’t), “Something for an Empty Briefcase” casts Dean as Joe, a thief recently released from a two-year prison sentence for petty larceny. He sees a man walking down the street carrying a briefcase, and instantly the briefcase becomes a symbol for Joe of the kind of non-criminal life he’d rather lead — only he’s broke (he only has $1.37 to his name) and his old pal Mickey (Don Hanmer) is trying to get him to do the proverbial “one last job” for their former criminal boss, Sloane (Robert Middleton, looking surprisingly different from the way he’d been made up in his role on the right side of the law as the title character in the 1959 Columbia TV pilot The Fat Man).

Desperate to get enough money to buy a briefcase, Joe makes an inept attempt to hold up Noli (Susan Douglas) — she’s innocent and guileless enough to believe his story about needing her money for a sick mother — but when a motorcycle cop (Pete Gumeny) drives by the site of the holdup (a construction site with a sign reading “Century Construction Company” — I joked that they build only one building every hundred years) Joe makes it look like he and Noli are a couple and are just hanging out together (at 2 a.m.!) talking. Joe is astonished by Noli because she’s literally a totally different sort of person from anyone he’s ever known before — she’s in New York City to study dance and is willing to live an economically poor life to make sure she has money for her lessons; when he questions why she wants such an odd ambition for her life, she calls him a “Philistine.” Later he comes to her apartment (he got her address when she gave it to the cop that had stopped them earlier) and she lends him a dictionary until he can buy one on his own. She also yields to his diffident advances — which makes the story seem like an eerie presentiment of that case a few years ago in which a woman calmed down a multiple murderer by reading to him from Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life. Later he wins the money to buy his briefcase by hustling his friend Mickey at pool (as William K. Everson pointed out in his book The Detective in Film, pool halls had been identified with movie criminals ever since D. W. Griffith made what was virtually the first gangster movie, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) and buys not only a briefcase and a dictionary but a Bible as well, only he’s confronted in his apartment by Sloane, who insists he do the crime he has planned for that night or else. Joe’s moral dilemma gets even worse when he finds out that the crime is a series of robberies, and the first one is targeting a drugstore where Joe and Noli had planned to meet on a date.

Sloane beats the shit out of Joe to get him to participate in the robberies (hurting him so badly as to render him pretty useless even if he changed his mind and did join Sloane and Mickey in the crimes!) and then the two of them abandon him. He and Noli join each other and she nurses him back to health while they read the Bible together. It’s certainly ironic that Dean is shown here doing a Biblical allegory two years before he became a movie star in East of Eden, another Biblical allegory, and while he’s still unformed as an actor (he alternates between speaking in a normal tone of voice and adopting the Brando-esque mumble he used through much of Eden and, less so, in his two subsequent films) one thing that’s immediately impressive about him is his physical control of his body. Indeed, though it’s Susan Douglas that’s supposed to be playing a dancer, it’s Dean, with his extraordinarily fluid movements (his body language gives more of his performance than either his voice or his gestures), that looks more like one. The other noteworthy aspect of “Something for an Empty Briefcase” is that it indicates how at least some of 1950’s TV had genuine intellectual aspirations: it’s a show that grapples with Big Issues of morality and faith, and while its presentation of them approaches silliness and sometimes goes over, it’s a marvelous attempt and way beyond virtually anything being done in TV, especially commercial TV, today!

Sea Hunt: Mark of the Octopus (Ziv TV, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the very interesting “Something for an Empty Briefcase” I picked out a much less exalted program for the rest of the evening: “Mark of the Octopus,” fourth episode in the first season of Sea Hunt, a famous vehicle for Lloyd Bridges as deep-sea diver Mike Nelson whose attraction was mainly the relatively novelty of SCUBA equipment (the name is an acronym for “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus”) and the quite good underwater photography. (The many shots of Bridges without anything on above his waist don’t hurt either, and he was a hot-looking guy with an impressive basket even though he didn’t have much in the nipple department.) When the episode opens we see a shot of an offshore oil-drilling platform and the voice of Mike Nelson on the soundtrack (Charles seemed more amused that his namesake later hosted Mystery Science Theatre 3000 than by the similarity in their own names!) telling us that it’s due to him that we have that wonderful installation tapping the riches of underwater energy — and I couldn’t help but think, “We’re supposed to think this is a good thing?” Then Mike starts giving us the flashback that four months ago a survey boat belonging to the company that drilled the well (oddly referred to as a mining company in Arthur Weiss’s script) was found abandoned, all except for a crazy guy on board who kept eating flies and spiders … oops, wrong movie. The boat had actually sailed with two men on board, geologists for the mining company looking for potential undersea oil deposits, only both had disappeared — and it turns out one of them, Wilkes (Steve Mitchell), killed the other and made off with the survey information.

The Coast Guard, whose personnel are depicted the way official policemen are in most private-detective fiction (as idiots who need the help of the amateur to solve the crime and avoid leaping to the most obvious conclusion about it), decide that the dead diver was killed by an octopus because markings similar to those left by an octopus’s tentacles were found on his body — but Mike and his assistant/girlfriend Dr. Kate Marlow (Mari Aldon) realize that octopi don’t attack humans and therefore some skullduggery is involved — and sure enough, it turns out that Wilkes used a plastic cord with suction cups on it that left marks resembling those of an octopus. Mike goes out — after telling Kate to stay out of the final climax (in that annoying sexism common to 1950’s movies and TV shows) — with Bennett (Peter Hanson), official of the mining company and Wilkes’ nominal supervisor, only Bennett turns out to be in on Wilkes’ conspiracy and the two of them try to ambush Mike underwater. Of course they fail, and all ends happily (except for the environment and the atmosphere). The show was directed by action specialist Andrew Marton and was well done, especially the underwater photography — Monroe Askins is the overall director of photography but apparently someone else, Lamar Boren, did the underwater shots — while the executive producer was Ivan Tors, who’d already made a name for himself with the movies The Magnetic Monster and Gog and would later achieve the heights of his peculiar fame with the Flipper movies and TV series, so it’s not surprising that a good chunk of this film was shot at Marineland of the Pacific (essentially the beta version of Sea World; the original Marineland was in Florida and was used as a location in Revenge of the Creature in 1955) and offers a glimpse of the aquatic theme park and the kinds of performances it would offer in their infancy.

Milton Berle Show with Elvis Presley, Esther Williams, Harry James, Buddy Rich (NBC, 4/3/56)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The evening’s entertainment was an old episode of the Milton Berle Show from the last year of its original run (1956), shot from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hancock as it was docked in San Diego (though given the murky quality of the black-and-white kinescope it was hard to make out much of the scenery or anything else that would look like San Diego visually. Originally aired on April 3, 1956, it’s a Berle show that has become particularly famous because Elvis Presley was one of the guests, though he was just thrown into the mix of personnel that otherwise represented a much earlier generation of entertainment: Esther Williams (seen first in a gown, lowered from a platform that made it look like she was going to execute one of her famous dives into San Diego harbor; she didn’t, though — at the time she was moving away from swimming roles and was about to make a film at Universal called The Unguarded Moment, playing a high-school teacher being sexually harassed by a male student: the film was a flop and pretty much killed her big-screen career), Harry James and Buddy Rich. Rich appeared just as Harry James’ drummer, and James played “You Made Me Love You” and then “Two O’Clock Jump,” his infamous knockoff of Count Basie’s hit “One O’Clock Jump,” which at least gave Rich the chance to shine (it opened with a long drum solo and then featured Rich superbly driving James and the band). Williams got to do a later segment in a bathing suit, and there was a nerdy guy identified only as “Francis” who supposedly was a sailor on board the Hancock who had just won a contest for a date with Williams — and who made a joke about Berle being in unrequited love with him, which (along with the lines about sailors being self-sufficient on their long voyages and therefore not needing girls) plays quite a bit differently now than it no doubt did in 1956! (Berle doesn’t appear in drag in this episode, but he did do a surprising amount of gender-bending on his show overall.) One of the most obnoxious characteristics of the Milton Berle program was his insistence on horning into everything — he didn’t just introduce people like Ed Sullivan did, he insisted on performing with them whether he had anything to add to their act or not. With Williams he did an engaging if sometimes arch parody duet on the song “Memories Are Made of This,” purporting to detail the memories sailors brought back with them on long deployments (and of course they couldn’t resist a final joke about them throwing up due to the awfulness of Navy food!) and with Elvis … well, therein hangs a tale.

The show opened with brief snippets of the stars introducing themselves and their acts, and Elvis, backed (for one of the few times in his career) only by his own (acoustic) guitar, sang a couple of lines of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” — a song I wished he’d done “complete” later on in the show. Instead, looking ill at ease, he stood with his legendary Sun Records band (Scotty Moore, lead guitar; Bill Black, upright bass; and D. J. Fontana, drums) and ground out “Heartbreak Hotel” and the song he identified as his newest RCA Victor release (he did not say “my latest RCA Victor escape — I mean, release,” as he did on some of his other early TV appearances), Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes.” The ironies are really heavy-duty on that one; when Sun owner Sam Phillips sold Elvis’s contract to RCA Victor, Perkins was the artist he was hoping would replace Elvis at the top of the music world, and Perkins’ Sun record of “Blue Suede Shoes” was the song he thought would accomplish that — only on his way to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, Perkins and his band were involved in a serious auto accident and, while Perkins himself was only slightly injured, his brother Jay was laid up for six months. In later years, Perkins was philosophical about it, figuring that even without the accident he wouldn’t have been able to compete with Elvis: “The girls were going for him for more reasons than music. Elvis was hitting them with sideburns, flashy clothes and no ring on that finger. I had three kids.” Elvis’s performance on the Berle show (which has turned up in several documentaries and compilation films) is O.K. but hardly seems electrifying; even his moves, which wowed ’em back in 1956 (and got him denounced as obscene), seem stiff and wooden, a far cry from the African-American performers like Cab Calloway who had pioneered this sort of act. (James Brown launched his career the same year Elvis did — 1956 — and there’s no contest in terms of who more impressively commanded a stage; though the charts of the time prove that Blacks as well as whites were buying Elvis’s records, any African-American who actually saw him perform in those early years probably shook his or her head and thought, “Pretty good for a white guy.”)

The weirdest part of the Elvis segment occurs afterwards, when Berle comes on in Elvis drag and represents himself as “Elvis’s twin brother, Melvin Presley” (one wonders what on earth Elvis thought of that, especially since he had had a real twin brother, Jesse, who had died in infancy: a psychological blow that according to his biographers haunted him all his life), smashing his guitar as part of a rock ’n’ roll parody that looks astonishingly like the footage of Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix practicing aggression on their guitars in the film Monterey Pop 11 years later. Elvis seems really flummoxed by the whole gag — he can’t remember either the name of Milton Berle’s character or his own name — whereas Esther Williams had taken having to participate in a parody with the show’s star with consummate professionalism. The imdb.com synopsis of this show describes a Berle parody with Harry James as well — “As James, Rich, and the orchestra play ‘Tiger Rag,’ Berle attempts to join them on trumpet … ,” but that number is missing from the archive.org download of this show. (Probably just as well.) Frankly, Milton Berle’s act dates badly — his insistence to his writers that his jokes be “lappy” (i.e., that they be so simple and unsophisticated that they landed right in the laps of his audience) means that they don’t wear well (other 1950’s TV comedians like Sid Caesar, less popular at the time, wear better — but then his writers’ room gave us Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen!) — though one appreciates his sheer energy and the grim determination with which he built from a middling movie career as a character comedian to be one of TV’s first superstars (as Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball also managed to rise from mediocre big-screen careers to TV mega-stardom).

Hot Water (Harold Lloyd/Pathé, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s concert at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion in San Diego was a typically well-attended “Movie Night” featuring the 1924 Harold Lloyd comedy Hot Water, with live organ accompaniment by the irrepressible Dennis James. The show followed the usual format of these appearances: the first set (as the sun is in the final stages of going down and rendering the outdoor Organ Pavilion dark enough to screen a movie) is a mini-concert of theatre organ music by James and the second half is the film showing. James played a few familiar pieces at the start of his program — Harry Warren’s “Hooray for Hollywood!” from the 1937 film Hollywood Hotel (the first of two collaborations between Busby Berkeley and Benny Goodman — The Gang’s All Here from 1943 was the other — and a song that’s become a sort of all-purpose tribute to Hollywood’s glory days), Felix Arndt’s “Nola” (a piece that he said intimidated him when he was an amateur pianist at age 14 trying to learn to play ragtime from watching the woman pianist, Jo Ann Castle, who played on the Lawrence Welk Show) and Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” which inevitably got presented as a tribute to the recently deceased Marvin Hamlisch, who arranged “The Entertainer” and several other Joplin rags as the soundtrack music for the film The Sting, and apparently composed several themes for the movie himself and had to write in Joplin’s style so they would blend in. Incidentally, Dennis James credited Hamlisch with having the idea to use Joplin’s music as the soundtrack score for The Sting —which was not the version of the story I’d heard before: the story I’d heard was that the son of George Roy Hill, the film’s director, had bought a copy of Joshua Rifkin’s revelatory 1971 album Piano Rags of Scott Joplin, which slowed down the tempi and played without “prepared” pianos or the other sonic gimmicks that had been used in previous ragtime recordings (especially in the 1950’s when the last ragtime revival had taken place). Hill Sr. came home while his son was playing this record and asked him what it was. His son told him and then, inevitably, said, “Dad, why did you want to know?” Hill said, “Because I’m preparing a movie called The Sting, and I think this music would be perfect for its score” — and only then did Hill hire Hamlisch to arrange the Joplin music for the film. (Hamlisch did a beautiful job; aside from a prominent piano part his arrangements are quite close to those put out by Stark, Joplin’s publisher, in the so-called “Red Back Book” published while Joplin was alive, and Hamlisch’s version of “The Entertainer” became a number one singles hit.)

Then James started dredging up the rarities: Zez Confrey’s “Dizzy Fingers” (James stood in for the audience’s mock disbelief that anybody could be named “Zez” — his real name was Edward Elzear Confrey and “Zez” was his own invention, a coinage that seems to capture the insouciant spirit of early-1920’s culture in general and his music in particular), Louis Claude Daquin’s “The Cuckoo” (Daquin was a Baroque composer, a contemporary of J. S. Bach, but “The Cuckoo” was a novelty piece — James joked about Daquin dedicating it to his wife and later used it effectively during the movie whenever the cuckoo clock on the wall of Harold Lloyd’s living room went off), a medley of something called “Mice on the Keys” (an offtake of Confrey’s biggest hit, “Kitten on the Keys,” by a Dutch composer whose name I wrote down as Johann Leong) and something else (considerably more rambunctious) called “Bahama Buggy Ride” by someone named (again, if I was able to transcribe what Dennis James was saying with any degree of accuracy) Johnny Staguola, and as his finale a piece called “The Midnight Fire Alarm” by Henry J. Lincoln, a specialist in composing stock scores for silent films that went out to theatres so their resident musicians (the most expensive theatres had full orchestras, the next rung down had theatre organs, the next rung down from that usually had piano trios and the cheapest theatres had a single piano) could patch them into the live accompaniments with (one hoped) some degree of appropriateness. James announced that there was a scene in the movie in which a fire truck (an old-fashioned one drawn by horses) appeared and he was going to use that as the music for that sequence — which he did, though frankly “The Midnight Fire Alarm” was a rollicking march that to me would have seemed more appropriate for a circus than a fire truck. (At least there was no actual fire shown in the film; if there had been, the accompanists “in the day” might have used something else — perhaps, given their penchant for borrowing from the classics as needed, the Magic Fire Music from Wagner’s Die Walküre.)

Dennis James also gave a Robert Osborne-ish introduction to Hot Water, saying that it was made in 1924, when Harold Lloyd was still new to features and apparently had been criticized for having made his last films too “serious” and not put enough laughs in them (a criticism another bespectacled comedian, Woody Allen, would have to deal with as well). He had come out in a loud white suit and a straw hat as well as a pair of glasses, the idea being to make him look like Lloyd — though he joked that the glasses were “not even my prescription,” and I pointed out to Charles that Lloyd’s weren’t, either: once we got to see the movie it was clear that Lloyd’s trademark “glasses” were just empty frames so that during interior scenes light wouldn’t reflect off them and black out Lloyd’s eyes. James said that Lloyd was unsure whether he would be able to succeed in a feature, so he made Hot Water an episodic story so that, though it had the same characters throughout, if it didn’t work as a feature it could be cut up into three two-reelers and released that way. This rang false to me: Lloyd had made his feature debut in Grandma’s Boy in 1922 and it had been a blockbuster hit, the year after that he’d made Safety Last (still his most popular film; the archetypal image of Lloyd in that movie, hanging off the arms of a clock that is detaching itself from its niche atop a skyscraper under the gravity from Lloyd’s weight, is the one that immediately comes to mind when Lloyd’s name is mentioned), and Hot Water was his fifth feature. James also said that in terms of the amount of money he made, Lloyd was the most popular comedian of the silent era — which was contrary to what I’d heard before: sources I’d read previously said that Charlie Chaplin was the most popular silent comedian and second was Fatty Arbuckle, despite the scandal that foreshortened his career in 1922. (Both could be right: Chaplin could have made more money than Lloyd on each film, and Lloyd could have made more money overall, simply because he made so many more films: once Chaplin went into features he only released one movie about every three to five years, where Lloyd put out at least one a year and sometimes two in one year.)

Hot Water begins with a printed title expressing a surprisingly cynical view about marriage: “Marriage is like dandruff — it falls heavily upon your shoulders — you get a lot of free advice about it — but up to date nothing has been found to cure it.” (Judging from this and the overall theme of the film, it would be hard to believe that the year before he made it Lloyd had married his former leading lady, Mildred Davis — a marriage that would last until her death in 1969, two years before he died. Out of the legendary male silent comedians — Chaplin, Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon — Lloyd was the only one who married just once.) Then we see a scene at a church where the bride-to-be, her family and the minister are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the groom — and [surprise!] the groom is not Harold Lloyd; Lloyd is the best man, spouting more cynical wisecracks about matrimony and wondering why his friend is literally rushing into it. He swears he’ll never let a woman entrap him with “soft-egg eyes,” and then he trips over the outstretched leg of a young woman (played by Jobyna Ralston, who took over as his leading lady once Mildred Davis retired to marry him; as I’ve noted previously on the Lloyd films, it worked out both personally and professionally because he and Davis had a long, happy marriage, and Ralston was a much better actress). In the next scene Lloyd and Ralston (they’re referred to in the credits only as “Hubby” and “Wifey”) are already married and ensconced in a comfortable suburban home — only “Wifey” calls “Hubby” while he’s at work and asks him to pick up “just a few” items for dinner before he comes home.

Our Hero suddenly finds himself inundated with a long list of things that pops up, one item after another, on the intertitle (Chaplin and Keaton seemed to regard intertitles as a necessary evil of silent film but Lloyd tried to make his genuinely funny in their own right) — and he’s next seen at the grocer, his arms visibly weighed down as he tries to figure out how to carry all the stuff his wife told him to buy. The burden gets even worse when the grocer announces that he’s bought so much he’s entitled to a free raffle ticket on a live turkey — which, of course, he wins and has to figure out a way to bring home on the streetcar (the fact that this film was made when Los Angeles, where it takes place, had streetcars is enough of a nostalgic wrench in itself!) — only his packages get in so many people’s way and he has to lure the turkey out from between the legs of the woman under which it’s hid that he ends up getting thrown off the streetcar and having to walk home. Then, in a film that does seem rather like three episodes of a TV sitcom loosely stacked together, it’s established that he’s about to take delivery of a new car — only he’s also taken delivery of three singularly obnoxious members of his wife’s family: her dragon-lady mother-in-law (Josephine Crowell), her older brother (Charles Stevenson) — described in the titles as someone who gets up at 4 a.m. so he’ll have more time to loaf — and her younger brother (Mickey McBan) who uses his pea-shooter to create as much havoc as possible. Harold wants to take his wife for a spin in the new car once it arrives, only the Terrible Trio horn in and insist on joining them, and by the time they’re finished they’ve had some hair’s-breath escapes (the closest this film comes to the “thrill” comedy for which Lloyd was famous), only the car ends up a wreck and has to be towed back to the Lloyd home. (When his next-door neighbor presents him with a photo he took of the family in the spanking-new car just before they left, Lloyd tears up the print in disgust.)

The third, and by far the funniest, part of the film occurs when the neighbor gives Lloyd a flask and offers it to him to give him the “courage” to throw his mother-in-law and her two sons out of his house — and when Lloyd takes a short swallow the neighbor says that’s not enough to give him any courage and he should have more. Lloyd accordingly drains almost the entire flask — causing the neighbor to say, “You know what the upkeep is on a flask like that?” — and his facial contortions as the booze goes down his throat may well have been intended as a deliberate parody of John Barrymore’s in the 1920 Paramount film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Of all the great silent comedians, Lloyd seems to have been the most inveterate watcher of other people’s movies; one of his darkest films, The Kid Brother from 1927, contains a long scene on a ship that seems to be a parody of Murnau’s sinister Nosferatu.) This is right after mother-in-law has returned from delivering a public lecture on the evils of drink and the need for strict enforcement of Prohibition, and she solemnly informs her daughter that she should divorce her husband if he shows any signs of imbibing the Demon Rum — and it leads to a loony scene in which Lloyd gets a bottle of chloroform the kid brother had been using to pull pranks and soaks his mother-in-law’s handkerchief with it, intending merely to put her under and shut her up for a while — only he freaks out and thinks he’s killed her. He overhears the older brother, who’d previously offered to fix the three traffic tickets he got on his wild ride in the now-wrecked car, say, “There’s nothing that can be done? He’ll just have to take what’s coming to him.” When the mother-in-law revives, she’s actually walking in her sleep (it’s previously been established that she’s a somnambulist) but she’s dressed in a white nightgown and has her hand in front of her, and Lloyd — who’s just been looking at a magazine cover advertising an article called, “Do the Dead Return?” (remember that the early 1920’s were a really “in” time for spiritualism, rivaling the 1970’s in that regard, with Rudolph Valentino publicizing spiritualist and what would later be called New Age beliefs much the way Shirley MacLaine did in the 1970’s), and he’s become convinced that he killed her and she’s a ghost haunting him for it. This part of the film is shot by Walter Lundin in a rich, chiaroscuro, almost Gothic style anticipating film noir and adding to rather than taking away from the comedy — and here Lloyd shows the lost art even the most mediocre silent comics had of building one gag on top of another, carefully taking the audience through the various steps of laughter until they’re almost literally screaming on the floor. As it builds, Hot Water changes from a nice, amusing spoof of marriage and in-laws into a bizarrely macabre movie that manages at once to create some surprisingly dark images and situations and get laughs from them.

It’s also an indication of how the people usually acknowledged as the three great geniuses of silent comedy — Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd (though some critics, including me, would add Langdon to that list) — all demarcated themselves in very different places in the class structure: Chaplin as the lower-class “Tramp,” Keaton (in many, though not all, of his films) as the upper-class twit redeemed by contact with the proletariat and being put into situations in which he had to use his wits to survive; and Lloyd very solidly in the middle class — we don’t find out what he does for a living but he evidently has a job, and a well-paying enough one that he can afford a nice house and a car (“Just 59 more payments and it’s ours!” he informs his wife when it’s delivered, thereby setting up a fate for it we know in advance but it’s still outrageously funny and a bit pathetic to see work out on screen). His work here anticipates the TV sitcoms of the 1950’s — at least the ones that starred people who were not only effective comic actors but brilliant physical comedians in their own right (like Lucille Ball and Red Skelton)— but it’s also outrageously funny in a way today’s so-called “comedies” are not. Watching a great silent comedy like Hot Water it’s evident that, while there have been tradeoffs in the evolution of movie dramas (between the subtlety enforced by the Production Code on classic-era filmmakers and the greater frankness with which sexual relationships in particular can now be treated on screen), when it comes to comparing classic and modern comedies, there’s no contest at all: the art of making movie audiences laugh seems almost totally gone (except for occasional freaks like Little Miss Sunshine, Stranger than Fiction or Kabluey) and the art of making movie audiences laugh without reference to sex or involuntary body functions is totally gone.

And Then There Were None (Popkin/Clair/20th Century-Fox, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” last night was the 1945 film And Then There Were None, the first of at least four films directly based on Agatha Christie’s variously titled suspense novel (originally Ten Little Niggers, then changed to Ten Little Indians and after that to Ten Little Soldiers as the P.C. police came down on the previous titles) and her own adaptation of it for the stage. Charles had read the play but not the novel; I’d read the novel but not the play; and apparently they’re not identical, so maybe it was Christie’s idea and maybe it was screenwriter Dudley Nichols’ to change the ending from the dark one of the book to a much lighter one that spares the lives of the two ingénues and allows them to leave Indian Island alive and live happily ever after. In case you didn’t know, the story deals with 10 people from various backgrounds and walks of life who are invited to a weekend party on Indian Island off the British coast — so named because the cliff that dominates it is said to look like the head of an American Indian — by a mysterious host named “U. N. Owen.” Among them are Judge Francis J. Quincannon (Barry Fitzgerald, top-billed), a notorious hanging judge who let an innocent man get convicted and hanged because he didn’t like the man’s attorney (in the novel the man was actually guilty, but that was only definitively established when new evidence was discovered after his execution); alcoholic doctor Edward G. Armstrong (Walter Huston); young veteran Philip Lombard (Louis Hayward), who allegedly caused the deaths of 23 natives in one of Britain’s colonial battles when the British Empire was still a going concern; private detective William Henry Blore (a marvelously droll performance by Roland Young); Vera Claythorne (June Duprez, playing her part with a restrained sensuality and power that should have marked her for biggers and betters, but didn’t), who in the book was accused of letting her obnoxious nephew drown but whose crime was changed for the film; Prince Nikita Staroff (Mischa Auer) — he was a British adventurer in Christie’s book — who casually ran down two children and killed them in a hit-and-run auto accident; General Sir John Mandrake (C. Aubrey Smith); Emily Brent (a marvelously sinister performance by Judith Anderson rivaling her work in Rebecca); and servant couple Thomas and Ethel Rogers (Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard).

They soon learn that “U. N. Owen” is simply code for “unknown” and that the mystery man (or woman) who’s invited them is going to kill them for various crimes he believes they committed in such a way that the law couldn’t touch them. When I first saw this movie I was disappointed in it because it seemed way too campy — though it was blessed with major talent both behind and in front of the camera (the director was René Clair), it seemed too comic, too broadly funny to capture the sinister terror of Christie’s story. Also I found myself bothered by Barry Fitzgerald’s performance as the judge, who turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the mystery killer. He explains at the end (after Vera has faked shooting Lombard and returned to the house on the island, where the judge has set up a noose with which he expects her to hang herself as in the end of the “Ten Little Indians” rhyme — a gimmick done much more effectively in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim the year before) that over his years as a judge he had run across many people who had essentially committed murder but had done so in a way the law couldn’t punish, and when he was diagnosed with cancer and forced to retire from the bench he had decided to avenge himself against 10 such people and do it in sequence according to the nursery rhyme. This time around I liked the film a lot better; it’s still a bit too comical in the opening sequences but once the original cast has been cut in half by the sequence of murders, Clair’s direction and Lucien Andriot’s cinematography turn appropriately Gothic and almost noir, and while Fitzgerald still seems to be miscast as the villain, the more “right” candidates who would have been available at the time, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, would have given the game away, whereas Fitzgerald was just coming off his star-making role as the priest in Going My Way with Bing Crosby and so having him turn out to be a multiple murderer (albeit out of a twisted sense of “justice”) was a genuine surprise for the audience of 1945.

This film was produced independently by Clair and Harry M. Popkin but picked up by 20th Century-Fox for release (at a time when it was quite unusual for major studios to buy and release independent films — however common that is now!) and it must have done well enough at the box office, though the basic gimmick had been used at least twice in films before Christie’s novel was first published in 1939: in The Ninth Guest, made by Columbia in 1934 and based on a 1930 novel by Bruce Manning and his wife, Gwen Bristow (and one wouldn’t get the impression from such a macabre movie that when Manning finally made it as a movie writer, it was cranking out vehicles for Deanna Durbin at Universal!); and in A Study in Scarlet (1933), ostensibly an adaptation of the first Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but actually a screen original by Robert Florey (though using the Holmes character and a few bits of Conan Doyle’s dialogue) because the Conan Doyle estate charged less just to license the character than for the rights to the story itself. Both these films actually used the “Ten Little Indians” rhyme as a model for the killings, and both also included a plot turn Christie later used — the actual killer fakes his own death midway through his spree so he can watch the other survivors turn against each other and hasten the success of his plot. But it’s Christie’s version that has not only been filmed directly four times (plus an impending fifth version, just called Ten, slated to star Arnold Schwarzenegger) but has been recycled again and again, including Neil Simon’s spoof Murder by Death (in which the victims are famous fictional detectives) and — though I hadn’t realized this until this latest viewing of the 1945 film — The Hunger Games. It’s an effective gimmick for a thriller, though it suffers from the usual fault of Christie’s writing — her lack of interest in creating really deep, multidimensional characters (Raymond Chandler, who couldn’t stand Christie’s writing, said he thought it was totally false to think that a judge, someone who’d devoted his life to enforcing the justice system and trying alleged criminals according to the rules, would suddenly go off the rails and turn himself into a private avenger/vigilante) — and Clair, a first-rate comic director, really wasn’t the right choice for a suspense piece (just think of what Hitchcock, Lang or Whale might have done with this story!), but it’s still a fun if rather mild chiller and it benefits from first-rate acting, Walter Huston and the woefully little-known June Duprez in particular, as well as Andriot’s marvelously atmospheric cinematography and Ernest Fegté’s Gothic set design.

Mr. Terrific (original TV pilot) (Universal, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

One item we watched last night was a really weird thing I got from archive.org, a download of the first, rejected pilot for a short-lived 1967 TV show on NBC called Mr. Terrific (a similar show called Captain Nice aired right after it on CBS and you could watch both if you changed the channel at the right moment), a superhero spoof in which a nebbish named Stanley Beamish turned out to be the only person in the entire U.S. who could take a special pill invented by a secret government agency to give its user super-powers. The show actually lasted 17 episodes, but before that they shot a rejected pilot starring Alan Young, the actor who’d played the human companion of the equine title character in Mr. Ed, and Edward Andrews (in what was basically the counterpart to Edward Platt’s character on Get Smart!), before deciding they wanted young and nerdy in the title role rather than middle-aged and nebbishy. It was a pretty silly show — obviously NBC and Universal were going after the audience that had made the 1966 Batman TV series, with its blatantly campy approach, a smash hit — and the plot, to the extent there was one, featured the chief of the secret agency being kidnapped by a bunch of Russian agents disguised as an ice-skating troupe. I found that the 17 episodes that were actually aired in 1967-68 were collected on a four-DVD boxed set and issued by a company called — I’m not making this up, you know! — “Old Westerns for Cancer” because they ostensibly sell these old movies and TV shows to raise money for people with cancer who need help covering the ghastly expense of treatment in the U.S.

The Fat Man: The 32 Friends of Gina Lardelli (Screen Gems, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was able to find Charles and I a relatively short movie to watch: an intriguing hour-long 1959 production from the Columbia TV subsidiary Screen Gems, with the awkward title The Fat Man: The 32 Friends of Gina Lardelli. The “Fat Man” character actually began with the long series of short stories Dashiell Hammett wrote for Black Mask magazine in the 1920’s dealing with an unnamed private detective called the “Continental Op,” working for the fictitious Continental Detective Agency and rooted in Hammett’s own history as a private detective with the Pinkerton agency. Somehow, when the character ended up on radio in the late 1940’s, he had morphed into a solo private eye called “The Fat Man,” played by an actor named J. Scott Smart, though Hammett was still given creator’s royalties (and since he’d been blacklisted in Hollywood and drunk himself out of every other available sort of employment, his royalties from this and the Thin Man radio show were what was keeping him alive), and a version of this was filmed by Universal in 1950 with Smart repeating his radio characterization and Rock Hudson playing a reluctant young man who, just outside the chapel where he’s about to be married to Jayne Meadows (real-life wife of Steve Allen), says, “Before we go through with this, there’s something I’ve got to tell you about myself … ” In the plot he means that he’s an ex-con, but given what we now know about Hudson’s real-life sexual orientation (and given what was rumored about it even then) it’s one of the most unintentionally funny lines in movie history. In 1959 Columbia’s Screen Gems subsidiary shot this as a pilot for a proposed TV version that, alas, never got sold, and though it’s in black-and-white it looks and sounds otherwise much like one of the crime shows Universal was doing in the early 1970’s. 

Gina Lardelli (Rita Moreno) is a model who’s found dead in her own apartment; the police are certain she killed herself but an old friend of her family, Mario Caravello (Jan Arvan), is convinced she was really murdered. He and 31 other relatives and friends of Gina’s pool their resources to raise $300 to hire private eye Lucius Crane (Robert Middleton, about as good casting as they could come up with for an overweight detective in 1959 given that the actor who would have been ideal in the role, Raymond Burr, was still occupied doing Perry Mason) and his go-fer assistant, Bill Gregory (Tony Travis) — who’s sort of Watson to Crane’s Holmes, though perhaps Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin is a closer parallel. What Mario wants is for Crane to prove that Gina was murdered — and to do it within three days, so when she has her funeral she can be buried in consecrated ground, which according to the family’s Roman Catholic beliefs is allowable if she was murdered but not if she killed herself. The plot twists and turns in several directions, though writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts seem to be building up Gina’s boyfriend Larry Scott (John Bryant), a lower-level gangster, as their prime suspect. The story also encompasses gangster Freddie Martell — whom we don’t see as a live character but we do see him getting fished out of a watery grave off the Santa Monica Pier (where my late partner John Gabrish and I visited — he particularly liked the place for its merry-go-round, which his parents had ridden on one of their early dates; though the merry-go-round is not shown in this film, the old sign at the front of it which I recognized from our visits was) — and wealthy, Mob-connected Royal Millican (Leslie Bradley), who wants to hire Crane to find a super-valuable Van Gogh original which he bought in Europe but the sellers double-crossed him and sent him a copy rather than the authentic one.

Also in the dramatis personae is Gina’s twin sister Maria — though in the end, as the three plot strands converge unexpectedly neatly, it turns out that Maria was the murder victim, Gina is caught attempting to flee at the end — and the killer is Royal Millican, who targeted Gina and killed her sister by mistake because Gina witnessed Millican killing Freddie Martell. This show was directed by Joseph H. Lewis, and while it’s pretty plainly shot visually (only at the end is there a scene that shows off Lewis’ flair for the atmospherics of film noir) it’s effectively staged, but the real kudos go to the writers for being able to cram a lot of plot into an hour’s running time without making the show seem padded (as all too many of today’s hour-long TV policiers do), and for keeping the camp quotient down (the campiest scene occurs early on when Crane is showing the chef at his favorite restaurant how to make Marie Antoinette salad dressing) and turning Robert Middleton into a believable, if somewhat unlikely, action figure. It’s a real pity this didn’t get picked up as a series!