Swindler Seduction (Muse Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, Swindler Seduction, was as bad as Let’s Get Physical was good, a compendium of all the ways in which a Lifetime movie can go wrong: a preposterous plot concocted by one of those writers (Liz Lake) who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, seems determined to write at least six impossible things before breakfast every day; a level of naïveté in the leading characters verging on imbecility; neck-snapping reversals; and an overall air of unbelievability. It’s actually more or less (I suspect less) based on a true story, that of Jordan and Simon Gann, identical twins born into a well-to-do family in Methuen, Massachusetts in 1980, who as they were growing up did such a good job ripping off their parents that in 1999 both mom and dad disowned them. They eventually adopted a modus operandi in which they contacted well-to-do (or not so well-to-do) victims, mostly (though not exclusively) women, and would pose as super-rich investment bankers or venture capitalists. Their marks would accept their offer for a lavish dinner, only when it came time to pay the bill one or the other Gann would say they had “lost” their wallet with all their credit cards, and as pay-by-phone systems became more common they would say they lost their phone as well. Gradually the women realized they had been “taken” and ripped off of an expensive dinner tab, and in some cases more than that. In one instance Simon threatened a woman who had filed a complaint against him that he would reveal details of her sex life if she didn’t agree not to testify against him – though she ended up reporting that threat to the police and they added it to the charges against him.

There had already been a Discovery Channel documentary episode about the Ganns, “Evil Twins,” as part pf a series called The Family Curse, which aired in 2018 In this film the principal victim is Louisa Russell (Gabrielle Graham), a Black woman who works as a medical executive and goes on a weekend convention with her close friend and co-worker, Brooke Gomez (Tanisha Thammavongsa, who according to her imdb.com page is half-Asian and half-Canadian; she certainly looks like a person of color on screen, but it's hard to tell what color even though her on-screen boyfriend, Daniel Jun as “Alex,” is Asian: Korean, to be exact). Brooke is committed to Alex but Louisa is single and all too eager to let hot, hunky young Steve Johnson (Colton Haynes) has his way with her, especially after he’s told her (and somehow got her to believe) that he’s an investment banker and venture capitalist with several homes all across the country and a personal friendship with rapper 50 Cent. Louisa falls for his charms hook, line and sinker, and the two spend much of the weekend having hot soft-core porn sex (nicely staged by director Jonathan Wright, though other Lfetime directors have given us hotter sex scenes within the strictures of basic cable). It takes a while for Louisa to realize that Steve has stuck her with a lot of debt, that his promise to buy her and her friends cars was hogwash, and that she’s out quite a bit of money which she really couldn’t afford to lose. At one point we see Steve in a heated phone conversation/argument with his identical twin brother Mitch (also played by Colton Haynes) which lets us know that he has a brother, though at this point it’s not certain whether Steve and Mitch are partners in crime or Mitch is the proverbial “good brother” that is tired of bailing out (figuratively and literally) Steve from his antics.

What’s more, Louisa finds out that she’s pregnant by Steve – or is it Mitch? That becomes an issue later on in the movie. Unable at first to get the local police interested in doing anything about the case, Louisa takes so much time off work she jeopardizes her employment to track down Steve. She ultimately starts a blog about Steve and his crimes, and gets a lot of followers posting “me, too” accounts of their own interactions with him. We also see one of the brothers going after Holly Stokes (Megan Hutchings), a successful realtor; since Holly is white, instead of bragging about knowing 50 Cent he claims to have been Matt Damon’s stunt double in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. Thanks to Louisa’s good works Steve is ultimately convicted, but Mitch is still out there, free and clear, waiting to destroy Louisa’s life out of revenge and take her son Hal away. Mitch claims that he, not Steve, is Hal’s father, and he’s going to sue her for custody and take Hal away from her. Hal, meanwhile, is no great prize; he was born prematurely and brain-damaged, and Louisa and her mother had to hire a full-time nurse-therapist for him. The denouement takes so long for the story to arrive that they needed two kids to play Hal, Baeyan Hoffman as a baby and Jo Sias as an eight-year-old, and eventually Holly and Louisa get together to trap Mitch after Louisa has mistakenly given him her address and phone number, thinking he was another victim who wanted to meet with her. Holly takes over a so-called “show house” and lures Mitch to meet them there, but Mitch sees through the imposture when he notices that the cupboards are all empty.

He’s furious,and of course Louisa, like so many other stupid heroines in Lifetime movies, tries to escape him by fleeing upstairs. Mitch corners Louisa in the master bedroom and is in the process of strangling her to death when the police fortuitously arrive in time to save her, and the whole film has been narrated by Louisa herself as the interviewee on a true-crime podcast. In the end Steve and Mitch end up in adjoining cells of the same prison – what real-life corrections official would do something like have co-conspirators who are also identical twins in cells next door to each other in the same prison? – and Steve gets a couple of years added to his sentence for assaulting his brother, but the implication is that they’re going to get out while they’re still relatively young and attractive and will continue their lives of crime, jointly and severally. (That’s what’s happened to the real Gann brothers, too, according to a Cinemaholic blog post put up in 2021, three years after the Discovery documentary aired in 2018, https://thecinemaholic.com/where-are-jordan-and-simon-gann-now/; according to that post, “neither of their current whereabouts are known as of today.”) There are some good aspects to Swindler Seduction, notably Colton Haynes’ skill in differentiating between the two brothers’ personalities; he really draws a believable distinction between the easy-going con-artist Steve and the psychopathic Mitch, even though it’s a bit hard to believe that con artists would turn as violent as Mitch does at the end. But for the most part, Swindler Seduction is pretty silly, and given that Lifetime’s writers and directors are usually more subtle and multidimensional than usual when they’re telling a true story, or something with its roots in one, this stood as a major disappointment from them.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Michael White Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was looking for a relatively light movie that my husband Charles and I could watch to get our minds off the dreadful political news surrounding the 2022 midterm elections and preferably one with a Hallowe’en theme. I found it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s musical The Rocky Horror Show, a Queer-themed spoof of Frankenstein that premiered in London in 1973 and then played Broadway before 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights. They assigned it to director Jim Sharman and told him to recruit a cast of major American rock-music stars for the roles, but Sharman insisted that at least for the (more or less) British principals he wanted to use the players from the British stage version: Tim Curry as mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (well, it’s a better name for a Frankenstein spoof than “Frankenweenie”!, Richard O’Brien himself as his servant Riff Raff (who actually turns out to be the master, not the servant, at the end in a twist O’Brien might have borrowed from Harry Bates’ “Farewell to the Master,” the basis of The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which at the end the robot Gnut explains to the people he’s leaving behind that instead of the humanoid Klaatu being Gnut’s master, “I am the Master”), Patricia Quinn as the maid Magenta, “Little Nell” (true name: Nell Campbell) as the groupie Columbia, Jonathan Adams as rival scientist Dr. Everett Scott, and Peter Hinwood as Rocky Horror, the bionic stud muffin Dr. Frank N. Furter created to be his animate boy toy. To get the cast he wanted, Sharman had to agree to a lower production budget and to cast American actors as the juvenile leads: Barry Bostwick (who’s quite cute in a sort of nerd-chic way) as Brad Majors and Susan Sarandon as his fiancée, Janet Weiss. (According to director Sharman, Bostwick and Sarandon were actually dating when the movie was shot, though eventually she entered a long-term relationship with actor Tim Robbins.)

The Rocky Horror Show premiered in London in 1973 at the height of the so-called “glitter-rock” craze, in which androgynous artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan became major stars and their success spawned the usual crop of imitators, including David Essex and Gary Glitter. The film actually flopped on its initial release – it was promoted with a poster spoofing the then-current hit Jaws, with the flaming red “Lips” logo and the slogan, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show – a different set of jaws” – but it became a huge and ongoing hit later in the 1970’s, when a bizarre cult built up around it. Theatres would screen the film at midnight on Saturday after the regular Friday night screening of something else, and audience members would come dressed as the movie’s characters, repeat lines from the film as it ran, and make humorous interjections and out-loud comments during the action. They would also throw things, including rice at the scene early on when Brad’s and Janet’s best friends get married (which inspires Brad to propose to Janet) and toast during the banquet scene when Dr. Frank says, “Let’s toast,” to celebrate the successful vivification of Rocky Horror. I first saw The Rocky Horror P:icture Show in the 1980’s at the late, lamented Ken Cinema in Kensington, in an ordinarily non-midnight showing because I wanted to experience the movie at least once before I saw a version with the audience participation. Later, when the film first aired on TV, the Fox network simultaneously showed the film and hired a theatre to film the audience reaction and alternate between the two on screen (and apparently the DVD I have includes an option to watch the 1993 TV version, though Charles and I didn’t watch it that way last night).

I could have seen it even earlier than that – when my then-girlfriend Cat and I lived together in San Francisco in the late 1970’s a theatre that showed it was within walking distance, but just as we were about to take the plunge someone was murdered coming out of a screening and we decided to pass. Eventually, long after we broke up as a couple (but have remained friends to this day), Cat started going on her own to the midnight showings at the Guild Theatre in San Diego’s Hillcrest (which also, alas, no longer exists)/ Charles sister Kat also became a Rocky Horror devotée, and this morning Charles told me that their mother Edi went to see the film herself to see if it was something she should let her daughter watch. It’s to her credit tiat it passed muster with her. Charles went a few times with her but never became part of the cult, and the first time we watched it together was when I got the DVD and double-billed it with the 1935 horror masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein (made by more or less openly Gay director James Whale) as the two Gayest films ever based on the Frankenstein mythos. I’ve also been to a live production of The Rocky Horror Show at the San Diego Repertory Theatre – whose management had to warn audiences not to yell things at the actors the way they did during film screenings because that would throw off the actors’ timings – and whoever was in charge of the production made a great decision that energized the production a lot. Instead of having the opening song, “Science Fiction (Double Feature),” sung by the onscreen pair of lips with their owner in shadow (according to the imdb.com page on the film the vocal was done by Richard O’Brien himself, singing in falsetto), they hired a Black woman with a great soul voice to belt it out à la Aretha Franklin.

This time around The Rocky Horror Picture Show came off as a moderately entertaining movie instead of a great one – it’s really one movie that needs to be seen live with the audience joining in – and as mid-1970’s spoofs of Frankenstein go it’s hardly in the same league as Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, made the same year in the same country (Great Britain) for the same studio but a much more loving lampoon of the monster tale. Also in 2016 there was a made-for-TV remake called The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (which I reviewed on my moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-rocky-horror-picture-show-lets-do.html) which had the innovation of having real-life Transwoman actress Laverne Cox play Dr. Frank N. Furter, which certainly put quite a different “spin” on the role. But overall I found the cast in 2016 inferior to the one from 1975, and though part of me wonders what the late David Bowie might have done with the role in 1975, Tim Curry is so absolutely right for the part I applauded his name in the credits at the end even though Charles and I were the only ones present. In its celebration of polymorphous perversity and sexual experimentation this is very much a pre-AIDS film as well as a movie dating back well before the political ambitions of Queer people shifted from an overall assault on sex and gender norms to a desire to show that we could live the same dull, boring lives as straight people, including getting married and having children. For all its crudity and the obviousness of some of its jokes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show holds up as a real period piece – and I mean that as a compliment. It represents a Queer community very much in its adolescence, still feeling its wild oats, and it’s indicative of how well the movie mirrored the Zeitgeist of the time that slogans from the film, like “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” and “Don’t dream it, be it,” became familiar slogans in the Queer community in the early 1980’s before the long, dark night of AIDS fell.

Making Black America: "Through the Grapevine" (McGee Media, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I put on KPBS for two fascinating documentaries, one on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Making Black America series called “Through the Grapevine,” and one a Frontline show called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War.” The official PBS description of Making Black America says the series “chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people – beyond the reach of the ‘white gaze.’ Professor Gates sits with noted scholars, politicians, cultural leaders, and old friends to discuss this world behind the color line and what it looks like today.” One of the most interesting aspects of the show is how it dramatizes how integration was a double-edged sword for the Black community. Gates’s thesis is that, out of necessity, Black communities built up their own institutions and professional networks – there were Black bankers lawyers, doctors, realtors and the like serving an exclusively Black clientele, and despite the ruinously low-paying jobs to which Black people were relegated to, they nonetheless funded Black-owned businesses and created something of a Black middle class. Gates discusses the importance of rent parties not only as a way of raising the money to pay one’s rent that month but as what we now call networking opportunities for Black businesspeople.

I hadn’t realized that rent parties were sufficiently well established that they were sometimes advertised in Black newspapers (the fact that there were Black newspapers, and enough Black businesses to support them, is an often overlooked fact of the history of African-American culture), and the entertainers featured would include huge stars like James P. Johnson and Thomas “Fats” Waller. Gates even included a scene dramatizing a rent party and had a Black pianist playing a quite credible version of Johnson’s “Carolina Shout,” which Gates explained was the competitive piece for pianists working the rent-party circuit, the piece you had to prove you could play to be taken seriously as a musician. Johnson himself did an interview with Tom Davis that was published in Jazz Review magazine (albeit a few years after his death, since he passed in 1955 and Jazz Review didn’t start publishing until 1959) in which he said, “In the years before World War I there was a piano in almost every home, colored or white, The piano makers had a slogan, ‘What is home without a piano?’ It was like having a radio or TV today, Phonographs were feeble and scratchy. Most people who had pianos couldn’t play them, so a piano player was important socially. There were so many of them visiting and socializing that some people would have their pianos going day and night all day long.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the Henry Louis Gates documentary on Black life in America in the decades between the start of the Great Depression in 1929 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 was its discussion of the gambling game, called either “numbers” or “policy,” that originated in the Black community and became a najor source of income for the people who ran it. Among the numbers kings Gates profiled was William “Gus” Greenlee, who ran the game in Pittsburgh and parlayed his earnings from it into a lavish lifestyle that impressed many Black Americans into thinking that they too could live the American dream and become rich through hard work. Greenlee started a jazz club called the Crawford Grill which featured many top artists, including Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell and white pianist Bill Evans. He also endowed a basebal team in one of the two Negro Leagues (even for someone of my age who remembers when the word “Negro” was the principal non-racist, non-pejorative way to refer to Black people, it’s still shocking to hear that term used seriously the way it is in archival clips) called the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and built a ballpark for them to play in.

Greenlee also rented a white baseball field, Comiskey Park in Chicago, for the first all-star game featuring exclusively Black players, and the event drew a sell-out crowd from people all over the country. Alas, the Negro Leagues were a casualty of initegration; once African-Americans could see Jackie Robinson and other players who looked like them in the major (white) leagues, the Negro Leagyes lost their audience as well as thier raison d’etre, and they folded almost overnight. Ironically, baseball was the first of the big-ticket sports to integrate but now has the smallest following among African-Americans; as football took over from baseball as “America’s national pastime,” most young Black athletes sought to excel in football or basketball rather than baseball.

The film also profiled one of my personal heroes, Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the law school at the historically Black Howard University (named after Oliver Otis Howard, who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was supposed to help newly freed slaves become full Americans but was plagued from the get-go by budgetary limitations and the racially motivated opposition of Andrew Johnson, who took over as President once Lincoln was shot and killed) in the 1930’s. Most of the lawyers who worked on Brown v. Board of Education, including Thurgood Marshall, Spottswood Robinson and Robert Carter, trained at Howard. Houston and his successor, William Hastie, turned Howard’s law school into a sort of clinic for civil-rights litigation. I know about Charles Houston from Rockard Kluger’s Simple Justice, his magisterial history of Brown and the other cases that were attached to it as they moved through the lower courts and to the Supreme Court.

Gates also told the story of the attempts by the Communist Party, U.S.A. to organize sharecroppers in the South, and mentioned that one of the volunteers and activist in that movement was a woman named Rusa McCauley, who would later take the name Rosa Parks and kick off the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott that launched the grass-roots civil rights movement and started the career of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was picked as the community point person for the action because as a minister he would have clout in the Black community. Rosa Parks is usually portrayed as an accidental heroine who just happened to be in the right (wrong) place at the right time, but when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the Black section of a bus to a white passenger, she was 42 years old and already a veteran civil-rights activist.

I remember when I saw the 1959 film Imitation of Life, one of the most moving parts of the movie occurs after the faithful Black servant of the white protagonists dies, and when they go to her funeral they meet a whole group of Black Americans that were part of her social circle, but the whites who employed her had no idea they existed. That is what Gates was getting at in this documentary; in order to support their community and each other through the ordeal of being Black in America, they created their own parallel institutions that flew under the white radar and gave African-Americans a rich and deeply fulfilling social life and sense of community. It’s nice to be reminded that Black people were not just victims; they had a deep, moving and powerful cultural heritage of their own and one that has become part of the world’s community, especially via music. Just about all the popular music of the 20th century and since has its roots in the African-American community – and especially in the Afridan-American church. If you don’t believe me, just listen to on2e of the great gospel singers – Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Cassietta George or, in the modern day, Mandisa – and you will hear the roots of all blues, jazz, R&B, soul and rock ‘n’ roll.

Frontline: "Michael Flynn's Holy War" (Midnight Films GBH, PBS, 2022)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Alas, just after showing Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exalting episode of his Making Black America series on October 18, KPGS showed a swary Frontline documentary called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” about the fascinating history of retired general Michael Flynn, Sr. Flynn was raised in Rhode Island by a hard-core Roman Catholic family who began as Democrats but switched ideological sides because of the Catholic church’s opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party’s eventual embrace of the pro-choice position. Flynn remembers hos mother running for local office in Rhode Island (unsuccessfully) and drafting him to be part of her campaign – as my mother drafted me in activism at a tender age, albeit on the other ideological side – and the woman who reported and narrated this documentary, Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press, managed to get at least the semblance of an interview with Flynn himself as well as lengthier conversations with Flynn’s brother Joe, who’s fully on board with Michael’s politics. “When I first saw Michael Flynn speak to an audience, it was hard to reconcile who he once was with who he had become,” Smith said at the outset of the program. “A retired three-star general once hailed as an intelligence genius. Today, he’s touring the country as a leader in a far-right movement trying to put its brand of Christianity at the center of civic life and institutions.”

Joe Flynn is quoted in the program as saying, “This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values” though it’s all too clear, especially from their endorsement of extreme Right-wing Christinas’ “end-times” prediction that as soon as Christ returns the remaining Jews will be given the option – either convert immediately to Chritianity or end up doomed for all eternity to Hell – they regard Jews as at best junior partners and at worst the scum of the earth. Joe Flynn continued, “I think [their mother] Helen would be proud of the activities that we're involved in. I think Christians are very involved in the conservative movement. It's no different than it was 30, 40 years ago, especially with Reagan.”

Michael Flynn started out as a member of the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne unit of paratroopers giving aid and comfort to the Right-wing contras Reagan funded during the 1980’s in Nicaragua and other countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Then during George W. Bush’s so-called “global war on terrorism,” Flynn becams a commander in Iraq and did intelligence for the the so-called Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), which targeted raids on civilian homes in search of suspected terrorists, The problem was that Flynn insisted on ordering and carrying out the raids so quickly he didn’t stop to vet the intelligence on which they were based – which meant, inevitably, that the raids netted and often killed a lot of innocent civilians.

As Flynn got involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called “radical Islam” replaced Communism as the all-embracing enemy America faced abroad, while Flynn’s always strong belief in a radical-Right version of Christianity led him to believe that America is full of domestic enemies who need to be fought to the death, if need be, to redeem the U.S. for God and a peculiar interpretation of the Constitution that countenances events like the January 6, 2021 riots which were quite obviously an attempt to disrupt and prevent the peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election. In fact, one of the peculiarities of the modern American Right is the Orwellian doublethink that allows them to pose as defenders of the Constitution while participating in frankly unconstitutional attempts to reverse the outcome of an election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, and to resort to violence when their efforts politically and judicially met with failure. Michael Flynn doesn’t come right out and say that Democrats are the agents of Satan, but he does say things like, “The enemy of 1984 is 1776!” It’s also clear he and his followers think the Democratic Party, if left in power, will turn America into Venezuela or Nicaragua, a failed state witn an increasingly miserable and impoverished population – which makes it ironic that among the demands the Republican Party’s candidates for the House and Senate are currently making include big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Michael Flynn’s America would be a Christian theocracy in which secular lawmakers would be ruled by his sort of Right-wing faith, including an end to women’s bodily autonomy (ironically, Iranian women are putting their lives on the line for just this right, while the American Right, which claims to be against Iranian-style “radical Islam,” wants to impose the same sort of faith-based regime on U.S. women!) and, of course, an end to Queer rights as well (even though nothing Flynn himself said in the Frontline documentary mentioned Queer people one way or the other, but being anti-Queer comes with the territory)and mayve even an Iranian-style “morality police” force to punish men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and women who seek, let alone get, abortions. While the Black church has its own set of problems – it, too, is anti-Queer and years ago I attended a service at a Black church in which a well-known minister preached against the theory of evolution and said it had destroyed all morality – nonetheless the Black church has been a leading voice of liberation, especially for Black people themselves, while Michael Flynn’s white church is an instrument of authoritarianism and domination.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Gainsborough Pictures, Carlyle Blackwell Productions, Gaumont-British, filmed 1926, released 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” was the 1927 version of The Lodger (I believe it was actually shot in 1926 but released in 1927 in Great Britain, where it was made, and in 1928 in the U.S.), the third film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and the first in the mystery-suspense thriller genre in which he would eventually specialize. (Not at first; of his first 17 British films only four – The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder! and Number 17 – were thrillers.) Hitchcock trained as a commercial artist and got his first job in films in 1922, when he applied to design title cards for a short-lived attempt by Paramount to start a studio in London. That folded, but Hitch landed a job with Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British (so named because it was a U.K. subsidiary of a French company) and gradually worked his way up the ladder to assistant director on two films, The Rat and The Triumph of the Rat, featuring the company’s biggest star, Ivor Novello. Ivor Novello was a singer, songwriter and musical star who also had matinée-idol looks. Like Noël Coward, he was also a Gay man and, my husband Charles tells me, a legend in the British Gay community into the 1980’s even though he had died in 1951. Novello’s two Rat films were directed by Graham “Jack” Cutts, whom most Hitchcock biographers dismiss as a man who drank and womanized his way out of his career – people who worked with Cutts at the time said that part of the job of being one of his assistants was keeping his various girlfriends away from each other – though when I finally saw a Graham Cutts film, the 1932 Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four, I was quite impressed and wrote on my blog, “Cutts was a major talent with a flair for just the sort of film his former assistant specialized in.”

Apparently, Cutts was sufficiently unreliable that Balcon thought he’d better develop another director, and he set up a two-film co-production deal with a small German studio called Emelka to produce Hitchcock’s first two films as a director, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle. (The Mountain Eagle, a story set in Kentucky but filmed in the Tyrol because the people at Emelka figured, “Mountains are mountains,” is the one Hitchcock film that is lost, though when Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor asked him about it, Hitch said, “No great loss – the film was terrible!”) The Lodger – originally released with the subtitle A Story of the London Fog – was Hitchcock’s third film and the first he was truly proud of, though he had trouble with Balcon and his superior, C. M. Woolf, over the experimental nature of his movie. The Lodger was based on a novel by writer Marie Belloc Lowndes (though she’s credited only as “Mrs. Belloc Lowndes”) which in turn was inspired by an incident at a dinner party she attended in which one of the other guests said, “I think I had Jack the Ripper as one of the guests at my lodging house.” Belloc Lowndes thought about that for a while and finally decided to write a novel (and, later, a play) about a middle-aged couple who run a lodging house and start thinking that the mysterious guest who has taken the upstairs room might be a serial killer. Apparently Belloc Lowndes left it ambiguous as to whether the mystery lodger was really Jack the Ripper (or “The Avenger,” as he’s called in the film).

When he took on the story Hitchcock wanted to make Novello’s character “The Avenger,” but Balcom and the other executives at the company said that an actor as lovable in his other films as Ivor Novello couldn’t be revealed as a serial killer. (Hitchcock had the same problem at RKO 15 years later when he cast Cary Grant as a murderer in Suspicion; once again the studio bosses decided that Grant was too lovable to be a killer, so Hitchcock and his writers had to come up with a transparently phony “happy ending” that weakens, though it doesn’t destroy, the appeal of the film.) The gimmick Hitchcock and his writer, Elliot Stannard, came up with was to have the Lodger be the brother of the Avenger’s first victim. They wrote a preposterous flashback sequence in which Novello’s character literally has to swear to his mother on her deathbed that he will never rest until he finds the Avenger and brings him to justice. Nonetheless, The Lodger is a first-rate film in which Hitchcock really strutted his stuff, including shooting a scene from below a plate of glass on which Ivor Novello nervously paced up and down. The studio executives questioned that scene and Hitchcock himself criticized it later, saying he could have made the same point just by showing the light fixture on the ceiling just below Novello’s room shake without actually showing his footfalls.

The Lodger looks very much like a German film of the period; Hitchcock’s co-production deal with Emelka had allowed him to shoot scenes at the UFA studio, the largest and best equipped film factory in Europe, and he got to watch the great UFA directors, Friedrich Murnau and Fritz Lang, at work on their early masterpieces. (In 1928 Lang made a film at UFA called Spies from which Hitchcock borrowed liberally for his mid-1930’s films The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, so much so that British critics reviewing those films called Hitchcock “our Fritz Lang.”) Though it was made well over a decade before film noir emerged as a genre, The Lodger definitely qualifies as noir: Hitchcock and his cinematographer, Baron Ventimiglia, shot much of it at oblique angles and gave the spare sets effectively shadowy lighting. When the folks running Gaumont-British first got a look at The Lodger, they decided that Hitchcock’s experiments had made the film decidedly uncommercial, so they called in a consultant to help re-edit it. Fortunately, the man they called in was Ivor Montagu, an intellectual critic who loved the film and considered it the only British film to that time that could compete with the best films from the U.S. or Germany. Montagu cut the number of intertitles from about 300 to 72, and it’s easy to see from watching the film exactly where the cuts took place: there are important dialogue exchanges that in most films would have been communicated with endless titles but here are shown far economically with just enough titles for the audience to understand the scenes. Montagu also brought in E. McKnight Kauffer to design the opening credits and various titles during the film; Kauffer’s unique style would also be on display 20 years later when he did the cover for the first edition of African-American writer Ralph Ellison’s anti-racist novel Invisible Man.

The Lodger certainly contains plenty of scenes that anticipate Hitchcock’s later films; not only is the heroine blonde – her name is Daisy and she’s played by an actress billed merely as “June” (her full name was June Tripp) – but she’s attracted to the mysterious lodger even though she already has a boyfriend, Joe (Malcolm Keen), and he’s the police detective assigned to catch “The Avenger.” (The film therefore anticipates the hero-heroine-villain love triangles Hitchcock would do later in Blackmail, The Secret Agent, Notorious, North by Northwest and other movies.) Daisy also works in a fashion show called Golden Curls, which puts her in the cross-hairs of “The Avenger,” whom we learn only kills blonde women and commits his murders only on Tuesday nights. In a scene director Edgar G. Ulmer and writer Pierre Gendron later copied for the 1944 film Bluebeard, also a movie about a serial killer of women, at least two of the women in Golden Curls put on black hairpieces or wigs as they leave the show to go home so they won’t attract “The Avenger”’s homicidal attractions. One of them even says she’s swearing off peroxide until “The Avenger” is caught. The film ends with a chase through the London streets in which various townspeople (one of whom is apparently played by Alfred Hitchcock in the first of his famous cameo appearances, though I didn’t recognize him and during his British years he only appeared sporadically; it was only when he came to the U.S. to make Rebecca in 1940 that he started doing a brief appearance in every film he made) chase Novello’s character after Joe has handcuffed him. Daisy tries to help him but he’s spotted and various Londoners give chase.

Fortunately, the real Avenger is caught that very night somewhere else in the city, and Joe learns this and sets off to rescue the lodger, but the lodger is nearly lynched and there’s a fascinating scene in which he is caught by his handcuffs as he tries to climb over a fence and Hitchcock seems to be evoking the Crucifixion here. (Years later Hitchcock would stage a similar scene at the end of one of his most underrated films, I Confess, in which Montgomery Clift played a Catholic priest who’s wrongly accused of murder. It seems the real killer confessed the crime to the priest, but because of the secrecy of the confessional, the priest can’t use any evidence he got from the killer to exonerate himself.) Seen today, The Lodger is a great film, not only full of anticipations of what Hitchcock would do later but marvelous in its own right. The print we were watching was a recent restoration from the British Film Archive, and Charles and I both liked the movie but think they way overdid the color tinting. Tinting (giving the black-and-white image an overall color tint) and toning (highlighting one part of the image so it was a different color than the rest) were basic effects in the silent era. They pretty much died out in the early sound era because they interfered with the sound quality of an optical soundtrack (though they were revived quite spectacularly for The Death Kiss in 1933 and the orphanage fire in Mighty Joe Young in 1949), but the tints in the “restored” version of The Lodger forced us to watch much of the film through a red or amber murk and both Charles and I decided we’d liked the film better in plain black-and-white in our previous viewings of it.

Too Many Winners (PRC, Pathé, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before The Lodger Charles and I dug out a DVD of the five Michael Shayne movies made by PRC in 1946 and 1947 and watched the final one in the sequence, Too Many Winners. I was surprised when the opening credits announced this as a production of “The New PRC” – I assume that got stuck on as a reference to the recently completed sale of PRC to British film mogul J. Arthur Rank, who bought the company as a guaranteed outlet for his British productions and changed its name to Eagle-Lion to reflect its coming together of U.S. and British enterprise. Too Many Winners was produced and directed by different people than the previous PRC Shaynes – John Sutherland instead of Sigmund Neufeld as producer and William Beaudine instead of Sam Newfield as director – and there were a few cast changes, too, notably in the recasting of Phyllis Hamilton, Shayne’s secretary and girlfriend. The new Phyllis, Trudy Marshall, is quite a bit spunkier and feistier than her predecessors, Cheryl Walker and Kathryn Adams, as she determines to keep herself and Shayne on track to take their long-planned vacation (they’re going to visit a couple who have a house on a lake where shayne and Phyllis intend to go duck hunting, and the film opens with a quite amusing scene in which Shayne and Phyllis are practicing on duck callers). First a mysterious heavy-set man walks into Shayne’s office to offer him a #2,000 bribe not to take a certain case – but when Shayne tells him they’re going on vacation anyway, the guy walks out, apparently thinking that if they’re not going to be in town anyway, he can save himself the money he was going to bribe them with.

The next contact Shayne and Phyllis have with the outside world is with Albert Payson (John Hamilton), president of the Santa Rosita racetrack. But Shayne is out when Payson calls, and Phyllis takes the message but doesn’t pass it on for fear it would derail their vacation plans. When Shayne retuirns he gets a phone call, not from Payson but from femme fatale Mayme (pronounced “Mame”) Martin (Cl;aire Carleton, who delivers a hard-edged performance but exits the movie way too early), who offers to sell him sone unspecified information, which he refuses. Later Mayme gets an unexpected visit from Albert Payson, with whom she had a brief affair; it ended some time before, but Payson wrote her some steamy love letters which she’s been using to blackmail him. Payson pays Mayme $1,500 to regain the letters and leaves with them. As Shayne is leaving Mayme’s apartment, he’s kidnapped by two thugs who beat him up to get whatever it was Mayme told him, which was nothing, and when they can’t get any information out of him they dump his body – literally – in the city dump. When we see Mayme again she’s been killed; Shayne sent his friend, reporter Tim Rourke (Charles Mitchell), to Mayme’s apartment to see if he could get the information out of her, but Rourke arrives to find her dead and the place crawling with cops, including Shayne’s nemesis, police detective Peter Rafferty (Ralph Dunn), investigating the crime.

Shayne finally gets contacted by a representative of the Santa Rosita track, John Hardeman (Grandon Rhodes), who hires him to get to the bottom of a scheme to counterfeit winning tickets and thereby threaten to bankrupt the track. Hardeman gives Shayne an elaborate explanation of the security procedures the track maintains to keep that from happening, but writers Fred Myton and W. Scott Darling (the latter a name I’ve seen on Monogram’s Charlie Chan and Mr. Wong movies) never bother to explain just how the crooks are evading the protections. Maybe the Production Code Administration told them they couldn’t include what they called “imitable details of crime” in their script (a prohibition some of the films based on Raymond Chandler’s novels had trouble with). Snayne eventually traces the counterfeit tickets to a couple of hoods, Ben Edwards (Byron Foulger) and Gil Madden (Ben Welden), who years before were convicted of counterfeiting tickets for the Irish Sweepstakes. Madden was given a light sentence but Edwards got 20 to 50 years, though he later escaped and tried to go straight. He married and fathered a child, and he also invented a new sort of camera with which he hoped to make a legitimate fortune, but John Hardeman – the man who hired Shayne in the first place, remember? – discovered his past and used it to blackmail Edwards and Madden (who was the crook who tried to bribe Shayne to stay out of the case in the opening scene) to print the counterfeit racing tickets. Edwards kills Hardeman, but one of Hardeman’s thugs, Joe (Frank Hagney), kills Edwards. As the police close in, another member of Hardeman’s gang kills Joe and the police agree not to tell Mrs. Edwards and their child of his criminal past.

Like most of the PRC Shaynes with Hugh Beaumont, Too Many Winners seems to have the makings of a great film in its basic story premise, but the plot is way too convoluted and has too many red herrings and unexplained detours. As soon as Claire Carleton enters we seem to be in the world of classic film noir, but, alas, she’s killed almost as soon as she enters, sort of like Jerome Cowan in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon. Once again it’s a pity that, as long as they were changing directors, they didn’t get Edgar G. Ulmer, by far PRC’s finest filmmaker and one who could have really made something special out of this story instead of the farrago of nonsense it is.

The Argyle Secrets (Eronel Productions, Film Classics, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I had watched a TCM screening of a quirky and fascinating movie called The Argyle Secrets, a dorky title for what turned out to be a really good film. It was made in eight days for $125,000 by a filmmaker named Cy Endfield (his full name was Cyril Raker Endfield), who was driven out of Hollywood by the blacklist and fled to Britain, where he worked for years and because of the grandiloquence of his name aq lot of people just assumed he was a native Brit. Written as well as directed by Endfield, and adapted by him from a play he’d already done on radio, The Argyle Secrets is at once a knock-off of The Maltese Falcon and a spoof of it. This time the MacGuffin is the so-called “Argyle Papers,” a notebook with an elaborate cover showing a two-headed eagle, which supposedly lists all the American politicians and business leaders who were secretly in the payroll of Nazi Germany and continued to do their German masters’ bidding even after the U.S. entered World War II. The central character is reporter Harry Mitchell (William Gargan, older and considerably stouter than he was when he starred as a police detective in Universal’s 1939 film The House of Fear and then played Ellery Queen in the second run of Queen films at Columbia), who goes to a Washington, D.C. hospital to visit his old friend and mentor, Allen Pierce (George Anderson). Only Pierce, who claims to have the Argyle papers and is announcing that he was going to start a series exposing the Nazis’ secret network of American agents, dies in his hospital bed, and it turns out he’s the victim of a fake doctor who murdered him by giving him a drug that induced a heart attack. He was also stabbed with a scalpel, but only after he was already dead. Mitchell gives himself 24 hours to find Pierce’s killer and keep police lieutenant Samuel Samson (Ralph Byrd, who’d played Dick Tracy in four Republic serials and two RKO “B”’s but here is a much less capable and gifted lawman) from arresting him for the crime.

He’s set upon by a wide variety of crooks, including femme fatale Maria (Marjorie Lord, who would later play Danny Thomas’s wife on Make Room for Daddy); Winter (John Banner), an effeminate thug who invades Mitchell’s office and tries to stick him up, only to be easily overpowered by the much more butch Mitchell, in yet another ripoff of the great confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon; Scanlon (Peter Brocco), the muscle behind the gang; Jor McBrod (Alex Frazer), who briefly got the Argyle papers in his capacity as a fence, with a supposedly legitimate salvage business as his cover; and a number of other assorted lowlifes. Mitchell eventually deduces that there are two different gangs after the Argyle papers, each working on behalf of a prominent individual or group named as Nazi collaborators in the papers. After over an hour’s worth of running time it turns out that the Argyle papers have all along been in the possession of Pierce’s secretary, Elizabeth Court (Barbara Billingsley – later Mrs. Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, so both she and her on-screen husband on that show, Hugh Beaumont, played in films noir, or in Beaumont’s case at least films gris, my joking term for movies that attempt film noir but don’t quite achieve it), and after a final attempt by one of the crooks to grab the briefcase containing them, Mitchell walks off with the Argyle papers, seemingly about to write the stories based on them that Pierce was planning when he died. The film is so close to The Maltese Falcon I was frankly expecting a scene in which Mitchell would open the briefcase supposedly containing the papers and they’d turn out to be blank pages bound in a fancy cover, but Endfield didn’t go there. The film is narrated throughout by William Gargan’s character – probably reflecting its origins in a radio play – and as TCM’s “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller said, the narration itself is so convoluted and surreal it only hints at any degree of sense. Muller was part of a team that did a major restoration on The Argyle Secrets, and it’s a welcome rediscovery of a film that has real charm and manages the difficult feat of exploiting the conventions of a genre and lampooning them at the same time.