Father Brown: "The Star of Jacob" (BBC Studios, BBC Worldwide, Albert+ Sustainable, originally aired December 23, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 17) at 8 I watched an intriguing Father Brown rerun on KPBS from relatively early in the show’s run: “The Star of Jacob,” the Christmas-themed episode from the fifth season, originally telecast in Britain on December 23, 2016. This show definitively establishes that Father Brown was a Roman Catholic (though given the early-1950’s time setting of the show, definitely pre-Vatican II, it’s a surprise that Father Brown leads the Christmas service in English instead of Latin!) – for some reason I thought for a while that he was Episcopalian – and the early-1950’s time frame is established by, among other things, a reference to one of the young men in the dramatis personae currently serving in the Korean War. The show’s plot deals with an impending visit by the Duke of Frome, John Langton (Raymond Coulthard), his wife Diana (Zannah Hodson) and their baby son Jacob (played by identical twins Cooper and Austin Curtis, a common dodge to get around legal limits on how long babies are allowed to work), and the hard time Father Brown is getting from church leader Canon Damian Fox (Roger May) that everything has to be just right for the Christmas service. There has to be a real manger, a real donkey and sheep for Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus to ride in on, and a professional-quality choir instead of the usual rag-tag batch of amateurs who have sung the Christmas services in Christmases past. The intrigue begins when the baby is apparently kidnapped, and though he has to deal with an even nastier than usual representative of official law enforcement, Father Brown eventually realizes that the baby was in fact the offspring of two of the Duke’s servants, Hannah Parkin (Maddy Hill) and her husband George (Elliot Jordan). They were legally married but had to conceal that from the Duke because he’d have fired both of them if he’d known they were a couple. Because of the secrecy surrounding their marriage, Hannah Parkin had to give birth to her son in a home for unwed mothers, and Duchess Diana found herself there as well when complications developed that her regular doctors couldn’t handle.

Alas, Diana’s baby was born sickly and died shortly thereafter, and, assuming that Hannah was just going to put her baby up for adoption anyway, Diana and her husband decided to claim Hannah’s baby as their own. Father Brown deduces the truth when he realizes that, though a ladder had been left outside the baby’s bedroom window to make it look like the kidnapper had come in from outside, the soil under the ladder was too wet to support the ladder itself, a person using it and a baby being carried. So he realizes that the baby was actually taken from inside by someone who knew the household’s routine well enough to know that, among other things, the baby’s bedroom window was not locked. When the truth comes out, the Duke admits it and relinquishes control of the baby to his actual parents; he also offers to find them a cottage on his estate where they can live together as an out-front couple and still work for him. There’s a deus ex machina ending I could have lived without in that Diana finds herself pregnant again despite having been told by the doctors at the laying-in hospital that her birth had been so difficult she could never conceive again, but aside from that glitch I found this a surprisingly moving episode once writer Jude Tindall got the unnecessary complications out of the way. The Christmas service itself turns into yet another ramshackle we’re-doing-the-best-we-can effort, with half the choir (including the tenor soloist) coming down with laryngitis and the animals wandering off and having to be tracked down again. There’s also a charmingly scapegrace character named Basil Urquhart (Christos Lawton, easily the hottest guy in the cast!), who’s briefly suspected of the kidnapping because he’d be the next in line for the dukedom if John and Diana Langton die childless – though he’s well aware that he isn’t sufficiently mature to live up to the responsibilities of being a duke and he couldn’t be less interested in the succession. There’s also a homeless man named Michael Negal (Dean Andrews) in the cast, though his main function seems to be to bully the local saloon owner, Mrs. McCarthy (Sorcha Cusack). Despite a slow beginning, this Father Brown episode was a real charmer, and as always on this show it’s made special by the great acting of Mark Williams as Father Brown.

True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs (Cascade Public Media, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home right as the Father Brown episode was ending, and together we watched the next show on KPBS: True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs. First of all, don’t get me started on the horrible name “LGBTQ+ People” our community has stuck itself with in the name of “inclusion” and political correctness. Not only is it ugly (I was about to write “ugly as shit,” but that’s being unfair to shit), but as I’ve written in various posts on the Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog it offers a sham idea of “inclusion” instead of the real thing. My argument is that the Queer movement made a big mistake when it based its entire case for equality and civil-rights protections on the idea that sexual orientation (and, later, gender identity) are as fixed and immutable as race; that “we’re born this way” and there’s nothing we can do to change who and what we are. As the Gay community grew to encompass first Lesbians and then Bisexual people, and finally Trans people, the whole idea that “we’re born this way” became harder to defend. After all, it’s hard to imagine a more “immutable” characteristic people could have than the physical configuration of their body as male or female, but the Trans community has shown us that “gender” as a psychologically lived reality stands apart from physiologically determined “sex.” Also, there are too many stories of people who lived for decades as heterosexuals, got married and had children, and then underwent a relatively sudden transition into a Gay or Lesbian identity – including actress Cynthia Nixon, one of the interviewees on this program, who 11 years ago raised hackles among fellow Queer activists when she told New York Times interviewer Alex Witchel that, having been in both a straight marriage and a Lesbian relationship, she regarded her sexuality as a “choice.”

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a Gay audience, and it included the line, ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been Gay, and Gay is better,’” Nixon told Witchel. “Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was Gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.” I wrote an article in one of the last print editions of Zenger’s Newsmagazine and posted it online at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2012/02/cynthia-nixon-bi-heroine-tells-it-like.html in which I defended Nixon against the attacks of what I called the “Queer Thought Police” and wrote, “Why on earth can’t we acknowledge at least some element of ‘choice’ in how we express our sexual desires? No Gay man is equally attracted to all men, nor is any Lesbian equally attracted to all women, any more than any straight person is attracted to everyone of the opposite sex. If we can pick and choose our partners based on height, weight, age, hair color, tastes in politics or music, or whatever weird and beautiful criteria that guide us, why can’t we pick their gender, too? Why do we have to make some hard-and-fast decision, once we’ve had our first experience with a same-sex partner, that we have to identify as Gay or Lesbian for life?” I also cited social-science data suggesting that women who have same-sex experiences are much less likely than men to think that means they have to identify as Lesbian or Gay for the rest of their lives. In the decade since I came to Cynthia Nixon’s defense (not that she really needed me to!) the whole question of what is a sexual orientation, or what is a gender identity, has become even more complicated. More young people are refusing to define themselves as “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Bisexual” or “Transgender,” preferring to live in the moment and not restrict themselves to one gender identity or sexual orientation.

I wrote this rather long preamble to my comments on True Colors: LGBTQ+ Our Stories, Our Songs not only because I hate, loathe, despise and detest the term “LGBTQ+” (it’s an inhuman designation that even sympathetic people like the newscasters on MS-NBC stumble over) but because the show seemed on the cusp, at once striking out towards a new, less essentialist definition of the Queer community while still unwilling to let go of the older orthodoxy that we’re “born this way” and there’s nothing we can do to change ourselves consciously. It was also disappointing to me because the previews for it had led me to expect it was an all-star concert featuring openly Queer artists instead of what it turned out to be, a mix-and-match assemblage of interview clips with various self-identified community members – many of them in mixed-race relationships – with the musical performances, all accompanied by the American “Pops” Orchestra conducted by Luke Frazier. This ensemble has turned up on a few other PBS shows, including their “United in Song” New Year’s telecasts and an intriguing tribute to Ella Fitzgerald’s 1958 album Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. The singers included a heavy-set man (though I couldn’t say for certain whether he’s male-born or a Transman) named Morgxn singing a song called “Wonder” that, like most of the new songs on the show, was a heart-felt power ballad about love but with both the singer’s and the beloved’s genders carefully unspecified. In fact, one of the points the show made without seemingly meaning to is that love is love, and whether the couple is male-female, female-female or male-male the emotions are still the same. The show contained nine songs by eight artists (Billy Gilman got two, “More Love” and “For Our World”), and a few were oldies from Broadway shows: a trio of drag queens from New York named Peppermint, Jujubee and Alexis Michelle did “A Little More Mascara” from La Cage aux Folles, Breanna Sinclairé (identified on the official PBS Web page as a Transwoman opera singer, which would be interesting to hear!) sang “Somewhere” from West Side Story (with music by Bisexual Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Gay Stephen Sondheim), and Chris Colfer, whom I discovered when one of my last home-care clients was watching streaming reruns of the TV series Glee and he performed a spectacular version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” from Company, came out and did the song that has been described as the Queer national anthem: “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz.

My favorite song of the night was “Hey, Jesus” by Trey Pearson, described in the show’s official Web page as a “celebrated Christian singer” even though I can’t imagine much of the Christian-music audience being able to accept a man with long drop earrings singing a song asking Jesus why don’t you accept me because I’m Gay. It was by far the best song of the evening not only because it was the one most open and out-front about the singer’s own sexuality but because it had qualities like wit and subtlety all too little of the other new songs on the program did. What I found particularly irksome was that even the songs themselves, or some of them, were interrupted by the talking heads – but then that always annoys me in music documentaries. Ironically, some of the talking heads were actually more interesting than the singers, most notably the two young interracial Gay male couples who talked movingly about how they were both called to the ministry despite hearing the usual homohating B.S. about how if they were Gay they were sinners who were going to Hell. Also especially interesting were Cynthia Nixon (even though she didn’t say anything nearly as provocative as what she’d told New York Times reporter Alex Witchel over a decade before!) and Sue Hyde, who recalled her mother asking her, “Are you a feminist? Are you a Lesbian?” Of course she said yes to both, and mom was taken aback briefly but ultimately grew to accept her. The show was hosted bo former Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider and also featured an interview with Jason Collins, former professional basketball player who came out as a Gay man after he retired in 2013, though he returned to professional basketball briefly in 2014 with one of his old teams, the New York Nets. The final performances on the musical side were André de Shields, wearing a preposterous robe that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the bizarrely costumed entourage of outer-space jazz pioneer Sun Ra, singing a song called “Colors of My Life” from the early-1980’s Broadway musical Barnum – it’s a retrospective number and de Shields’ obviously advanced age made it quite credible – and the Indigo Girls doing one of their earlier songs, “Closer to Fine.”

The Indigo Girls are a folk-rock duo consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, who in the middle of their careers both came out as Lesbian (though they’re not a couple; Emily is married to Tristin Chipman and Ray has a longtime partner, Carrie Schrader, with whom she’s raising a daughter) after realizing by their own account that they couldn’t ask their audiences to be honest about themselves if they weren’t willing to do the same. Ray and Saliers have known each other since elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia and have been steadily touring and recording since the 1980’s. “Closer to Fine” was a nice show-closer that ended the proceedings on an optimistic note even though much of the commentary was about the holy war the resurgent radical Right in America today is waging against the Queer community in general and its most obvious social, sexual and gender outlaws – drag queens and Trans people – in particular. I remember watching the 1977 film Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/12/word-is-out-stories-of-some-of-our.html) on Turner Classic Movies and noting how much of it seemed dated while other parts hardly seemed dated at all. As I wrote afterwards, “Word Is Out is an unexpectedly relevant movie for our own time in that, even though we seem to have reached a plateau of acceptance, there are mass social and political forces in this country who aim to take it all away from us.” Some of the interviews in True Colors seemed almost too reminiscent of the ones in Word Is Out – particularly the ones about Queer folk struggling to keep their own spirituality in the face of churches that define us as immoral or amoral monsters – despite the 45 years between the two films and the growing acceptance of Queer folk among majorities of Americans. As Michael A. Cohen wrote on MS-NBC’s site, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/republicans-2023-pride-backlash-polls-bud-light-rcna89564, “A record 71% of Americans now support same-sex marriage. Polling from just last year shows that 8 in 10 Americans oppose anti-Gay discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations (and that includes nearly two-thirds of Republicans)."

Bad Sister (Universal, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night shortly after 10 I ran my husband Charles and I a quite intriguing, even if not very good, movie on YouTube. It was the 1931 film Bad Sister, based on Booth Tarkington’s 1913 novel The Flirt. It’s a film whose main interest today is as Bette Davis’s first movie and Humphrey Bogart’s fourth feature, though as it turned out they both played roles quite different from the sorts of parts that would make them movie legends later. It’s set in the small town of Council City, Ohio and deals with the Madison family: John Madison (Charles Winninger), his wife (Emma Dunn) – if she has a first name we never learn what it is – and their kids: grown daughters Marianne (Sidney Fox), called “Cora” in Tarkington’s novel, and Laura (Bette Davis), their younger son Hedrick (David Durand), as well as Sam (Slim Summerville) and Amy (Helene Chadwick). We never learn whether Sam or Amy is the blood Madison, but they’re sufficiently part of the family that when Sam loses his job as a plumber John Madison invites them to stay with them as their house guests while Amy waits to have her baby. Bad Sister was made at a particularly fraught time in Bette Davis’s career because she was just beginning to establish herself in New York as a stage actress and really didn’t want to have anything to do with films, but Universal’s production head, Carl Laemmle, Jr. (the 20-year-old son of the studio’s founder whom Laemmle, Sr. had just put in charge), lured her to Hollywood with the promise of the starring role in Preston Sturges’ play Strictly Dishonorable as her first film. Only when Davis got to Hollywood Laemmle turned against her and said, “She has as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville!” Laemmle, Jr. gave the lead in Strictly Dishonorable to Sidney Fox, an actress he was apparently dating – at least that’s what Bette Davis thought and said for the rest of her life, including in two autobiographies – and then put Davis in support of Fox in this film.

It’ll be a surprise to audiences familiar with Davis’s later and much better movies that Sidney Fox is the titular “bad sister” and Bette Davis is the “good sister” – essentially she’s playing to Sidney Fox what Olivia De Havilland or Margaret Lindsay played to her in her later star vehicles at Warner Bros. – and it’s Fox who is stringing along her would-be boyfriends, Dr. Dick Lindley (Conrad Nagel, top-billed) and Wade Trumbull (heavy-set Bert Roach). Laura has a hopeless crush on Dr. Lindley – this was during the period when Conrad Nagel had been one of the first leading men to prove he could act with his voice, and he got cast in so many movies by casting directors who said, “Get Nagel; he can talk,” he complained that he and his wife could no longer just go to the movies for their own entertainment because he couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in – and she writes about it in her diary (which she keeps in a notebook with the embossed title, “Lest we forget”), which Hedrick manages to get hold of and make fun of her about it. In fact, all the characters in this movie are so creepy about the only likable people in it are the Madisons’ maid, Minnie (ZaSu Pitts doing her usual voice-of-reason comic schtick; Erich von Stroheim cast her as a dramatic actress in three films, Greed, The Wedding March and Hello, Sister, but the self-destruction of Stroheim’s directorial career also took down Pitts’ serious acting chops as collateral damage) and a newsboy who gives John Madison a paper at the opening and is not seen nor heard from again.

One of Marianne’s dreams is to get out of Council City and make it to New York or Chicago, and she thinks she’s found her ticket to her dreams in the person of Valentine Corliss (Humphrey Bogart – when I wrote about his 1934 film Midnight I said that was his only Universal credit; I’d forgotten about Bad Sister!), who shows up in Council City announcing he’s a representative of the “Electro-Household Company” and he plans to build a factory there that will employ thousands of people and put Council City on the map economically. I’m not sure whether the audiences who saw this film in 1931 “got” that Valentine Corliss was a quite obvious con artist – I was asking myself if we saw him as a crook because in the late 1930’s he played gangsters almost exclusively (he would joke to friends that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” index cards because he spoke the same gangster clichés in each film and the only thing that differed was the order in which he said them), though even in 1931 his fancy sports car, his well-tailored black suit and his supercilious manner probably marked him as no good to the audience even without Bogart’s later history to guide them. One of the fascinating enigmas of Bogart’s early career is that in his first foray at movie acting in the early 1930’s, mostly at Fox but with one film each at Universal (this one) and Columbia (Love Affair, 1932), he made one truly great movie – John Ford’s Up the River, in which he played an ex-con carefully concealing that fact from his family and friends – that showed some of the same world-weariness that would make Bogart a superstar in early-1940’s films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. But his other early roles were just nothing parts and it would take another decade for other filmmakers to get as much out of him as Ford had.

Anyway, Valentine Corliss romances Marianne Madison in some quite beautiful red-filtered twilight exteriors after their bizarre meet-cute – she went on a movie date with Dr. Lindley but, much to her disgust, he’d lent his car to his younger brother so they had to take the bus, and when they missed the bus home Corliss just happened to pull up and take her home while stranding the good doctor – and he tries to get her to get her dad to sign a letter assuring the other townspeople that he’s personally vetted Corliss and Corliss’s proposition is on the up-and-up. John Madison is waiting for a report from people he knows in New York on whether Corliss is to be trusted, but Marianne gets tired of waiting and uses her allowance check from her father to forge his signature on the letter. Then she and Corliss leave Council City to elope, only the no-good rotter leaves Marianne stranded in a hotel room and absconds with the money he’s collected from John Madison’s friends. (There’s no indication that Corliss ever gets caught or has to pay any price for his crime, which more than anything else marks Bad Sister as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era.) John Madison accepts responsibility for the glowing report he gave Corliss and tries to cover for Marianne, who confesses that she forged his signature on Corliss’s letter, but taking moral and economic rectitude to positively masochistic extremes he announces that he will make good on all the money his friends lost on Corliss’s scam as long as they keep his daughter’s name out of it, even if he has to cash in his life insurance policy and sell his family’s home. In the end Dr. Lindley (ya remember Dr. Lindley?) falls for Laura, Marianne ends up with big old Wade on the rebound, and Amy dies in childbirth while the Madison family is stuck raising her son.

Bad Sister was directed by Hobart Henley, who’d made an earlier silent version of the same story under Tarkington’s original title, The Flirt, in 1922, and at least two of the crew members were way overqualified for this assignment: the cinematographer was Karl Freund and the make-up artist was the uncredited Jack P. Pierce. There are a few flashes in which we get glimpses of the characteristics that made Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart movie legends, notably one in which she slaps Marianne so hard she knocks her to the ground and I said, “At last, Bette Davis’s claws came out!” Mostly, though, Bad Sister is a mediocre movie of interest mainly for the superstar careers its second leads had later, and when Davis was asked about it during her later years she had nothing nice to say about it or about Bogart. For all the years their careers overlapped at Warner Bros., they only made two more films together (Marked Woman and Dark Victory; the former is a great movie while the latter is also excellent, but Bogart is preposterously miscast as an Irish jockey with a hopeless crush on Davis), and in later years Davis made clear her displeasure with the whole cult that had grown up around Bogart!

Midsomer Murders: "The Miniature Murders" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, Independent Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched yet another episode of the Midsomer Murders British independent TV series, set in a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and dealing with the two local police detectives, chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). This episode was called “The Miniature Murders” and it opens with a great scene showing off an exhibit of incredibly elaborate doll’s houses, one of which even has a miniature doll’s house inside a doll’s house. The doll’s houses are being donated to the Midsomer Museum by property owner, financier and overall scumbag Alexander Beauvoisin (Roger Barclay), who couldn’t be less interested in doll’s houses but has got stuck with the collection because his late sister accumulated them. Alexander is having an extra-relational affair with an ex-cop named Holly Ackroyd (Joanna Page), who midway through the episode we learn was actually fired from the police for excessive use of force and afterwards re-invented herself as a private detective. Holly was actually hired by Alexander’s estranged wife Fiona (Clare Holman), and assigned to seduce him so Fiona could find where he was hiding the couple’s community assets so he wouldn’t have to share them with her in the final divorce settlement. Alexander is also the subject of a hate campaign by a Black (I suppose I should call them “African-British”) father-son duo named Samuel (Karl Collins) and Finn (Rohan Nedd) Wokoma, who run a storage facility just outside town and are mad at Alexander because Samuel’s daughter – and Finn’s sister – was killed in an apartment she was renting from Alexander when the gas furnace malfunctioned and asphyxiated her.

Alexander is the first murder victim, killed during the ceremony where he’s supposed to be handing over the doll’s house collection by a large gun fired with a silencer from one of the doll’s houses, and later one of the other most interesting characters is also murdered, found stabbed to death with a pen-knife in her home while a bubble machine is going in the background. She is children’s entertainer Jemima Starling (Katy Brand) and she comes off as a bizarre mash-up of Queen Victoria and the Sesame Street character Big Bird. If she has a life outside that bird costume, we never see her that way. But the intrigue turns out to revolve around Maxine Dobson (Eleanor Bron, who played Ahme, high priestess of the Kali-li Death Cult in the film Help! and whose presence here puts the rest of this Midsomer Murders cast one degree of separation from The Beatles), who acquired a gun from the Wokomas, who have ended up doing a black-market business in guns abandoned from their storage customers (since this is Britain and you can’t just go down to the local sporting-goods or convenience store and buy a gun, no questions asked, like you can in the U.S.). She was stealing artifacts from the doll’s houses and selling them on the Internet to collectors after replacing them with fakes of her own manufacture, and her rationale was that it would be better to have these objects in the hands of collectors who would genuinely appreciate them than sitting in a museum – only in at least one case, a jack-in-the-box she advertised as unique, she’d either mistakenly sent her replica to the customer and he spotted it, or he’d just read somewhere that another one existed on display in the Midsomer Museum and assumed that the one he’d been sold was a fake. Either way, he posted a negative review on her Web site accusing Maxine of ripping him off.

Maxine bought a gun to use for self-defense, only a young man came to her door; she assumed he was a prowler out to rob her and shot him to death, only to discover that he’d just been a young, innocent kid. She hid the body in her cellar and covered it in concrete, until Alexander threatened to have her whole shop torn down (since it was on his property) and she worried that as part of the demolition, the young man’s body would be discovered and she’d be accused of murder. But the actual killing of Alexander and Jemima was done by [spoiler alert!] Carys Nicholson (Rosalie Craig), who as far as the rest of the world knows was just an employee of Maxine’s shop. In reality she’d been about to commit suicide when Maxine found and rescued her, and so Carys took it on herself to move Alexander’s body and stash it in the Wokomas’ storage facility, then eliminate Jemima when the bird woman spotted her stashing the corpse at the Wokomas’ garage. There are a couple of red herrings, including the mysterious disappearance of Samuel Wokoma for an evening – it turned out he’d made a promise to his dead daughter that he’d take her to a ballet on her 21st birthday, and though she died of asphyxiation a few months before he felt psychologically compelled to keep his end of the bargain and went to a ballet performance that night – as well as a woman student activist who plans a big demonstration targeting Alexander for the sloppy and dangerous way he runs his student housing, only to call it off at the last minute after a scapegrace ex-boyfriend threatens to post nude photos of her on the Internet if she goes ahead with the action.

This Midsomer Murders episode was directed by Toby Frow from a script by Helen Jenkins, and though the ultimate origins of the series are a set of books by Caroline Graham it’s Jenkins who’s clearly responsible for the rather dreary overplotting of this story – which includes a twist ending in which deputy chief inspector John Barnaby goes off riding in a motorcycle sidecar, the motorcycle being driven by the leader of an all-female motorcycle gang composed entirely of women in, shall we say, their advanced years. The sheer incongruity of Neil Dudgeon in a motorcycle sidecar with the bike’s driver being a woman at least as old as he is was irresistible to the people doing the poster art for this episode, who featured the two-shot of him and her on the motorbike together even though the final shot has virtually nothing to do with the resolution of the story!

The Player (Avenue Pictures, Spelling Entertainment, Addis Wechsler Pictures, Guild Film Distribution, Daro Film Distribution, Fine Line Cinema, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 13) I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, written by Michael Tolkin based on a previously published novel of his. It’s a grim Hollywood tale of a production executive named Griffin “Griff” Mill (Tim Robbins), who starts receiving mysterious death threats from an anonymous writer accusing him of personally destroying the movie industry and threatening his life. Griff is worried for his job – the studio head, Joel Levinson (Brion James), has just hired a young man named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) from a rival company and appears to be grooming him to take over Griff’s job – and he also is having a desultory affair with his assistant, Bonnie Sherrow (Cynthia Stevenson), though she takes it considerably more seriously than he does. We find out what Larry Levy is after from the get-go when he asks Griff for the private phone number of Meg Ryan so he can date her, and when Griff tells Larry that Meg Ryan is married he then asks for the phone number of Winona Ryder. Griff thinks the anonymous death threats and other insulting postcards and faxes are coming from David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), an unsuccessful screenwriter who managed to get a meeting with Griff a few months earlier to talk up a movie idea about his year abroad as an exchange student in Japan. He traces Kahane to his home, where he’s gone out but his live-in girlfriend, June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), is home alone. Griff spies on her through the window and ultimately knocks on her door to find out where David is. He’s at the Rialto, a small art cinema in Pasadena where he’d gone to see a screening of Vittorio de Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thieves (mistakenly listed as The Bicycle Thief, singular, on the marquee).

Griff arrives five minutes before the movie ends and tries to find David in the crowd; his first guess is wrong but his second guess is right. Griff says he’s interested in buying the remake rights to Bicycle Thieves and wants to hire David to write it, but David sees through his game. The two go to a local Japanese-themed bar and David angrily turns down the job offer; later the two get into an altercation outside the bar and Griff loses it completely and drowns David in a pool of red water, killing him. This happens about a third of the way through the movie, and while it’s a pity we lose the story’s potentially most interesting character that early, things get quirkier as the story takes a Last Tycoon-ish turn. Griff’s anxieties over both having killed someone and at least potentially taking the fall for it and the possibility of losing his cushy studio job take their toll on his work performance. He latches on to a scheme to defang the threat from Larry Levy by assigning Levy to produce a project called Habeas Corpus, which the studio has been pitched by a writer-director-producer team including a British filmmaker. It’s a grim tale about how a district attorney, on the night his latest African-American prosecutee is about to be executed, is confronted by the defendant’s mother, who challenges him to be as tough on a white defendant the next time he has one who’s accused of a capital crime. He seizes on a wealthy woman who’s accused of the murder of her husband, and determines to prosecute her and get her convicted and executed even though he’s also fallen in love with her. The plot of Habeas Corpus ends with the D.A. learning – too late – that the husband is still alive and faked his own death, but he only finds this out after the lethal gas pellets have dropped into the San Quentin gas chamber and killed his lover/defendant.

The British director insists on making this movie with no stars and keeping the unhappy ending, and Griff figures that if Larry Levy is executive producer of this movie, it will inevitably bomb and then Griff will come in, reshoot the ending so the D.A. learns the truth in time and he and the woman get together at the end, and he’ll get credit for saving the project from Larry’s flop ending. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long for Griff to realize that he killed the wrong man; though David Kahane is dead (and Griff makes an appearance at his funeral), the insulting notes, faxes and postcards keep coming. What’s more, Griff becomes obsessed with June and courts her aggressively despite having killed her previous partner. The two end up in Desert Hot Springs, where they have sex for the first time (inside a hot tub since Greta Scacchi refused to do the nude scene Altman wanted – good for her!) and end up in mud baths. Only Griff is rudely dragged from the mud bath by his attorney, who tells him the Pasadena police have a witness to David’s murder and want him to come in for a lineup. Altman’s gift for quirky casting is evident in the actors playing the Pasadena police detectives who are assigned to the case: Whoopi Goldberg as Susan Avery (Altman concealed her usual locks under a big Afro wig, though her voice was unmistakable) and Lyle Lovett (who was dating actress Julia Roberts at the time; they married in 1993 but divorced in 1995) as Paul DeLongpre. Lovett’s character becomes a red herring because he’s seen constantly hanging around the movie studio and we initially think he’s the obsessive writer who’s stalking Griff and sending him the postcards and faxes, but he turns out to be a police detective – and in an even more ironic twist, when the witness turns up and does the lineup, she keeps picking Lovett out as the killer. With the sole witness having identified the police detective as the murderer, Griff is home scot-free, and there’s a Lifetime-esque “One Year Later” title in which one year later Griff and June are a couple (and she’s visibly pregnant with his child), the film Habeas Corpus got made but with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts as the stars (remember it wasn’t supposed to have big stars?), and Griff saved the film after a disastrous preview in Canoga Park by reshooting the ending so the Willis character stages a last-minute rescue of the hapless woman he’s convicted and literally saves her from the gas chamber.

The Player was made at a low ebb in Robert Altman’s career during which he was reduced to making either small independent films or movies for television, and according to TCM host Alicia Malone it was a major comeback for him and gave him the money and the clout to put together a personal project, Short Cuts, an anthology film based on several stories by Raymond Carver. I have mixed feelings about Robert Altman; he was obviously a major talent as a filmmaker, but at the same time I suspect he has a lot to do with one of the most regrettable recent trends in moviemaking, the cynical detachment with which all too many filmmakers these days approach their central characters, as if they’re lab rats and we’re supposed to watch them with a sense of lordly distance. Though Alicia Malone quoted Altman as saying he’d pulled his punches and the real Hollywood was even nastier and crueler than he’d depicted it (and Malone also noted that the changes in the movie business in the 31 years since this film was made make the early 1990’s seem like a Golden Age by comparison!), The Player remains a great film even though an awfully disheartening one. Altman’s films for me have run the gamut from masterpieces like Nashville (which used a similar multi-character structure to this film and whose knowing deconstruction of both country music and independent politics made for an enduring classic) to disasters like The Long Goodbye (his wanton attack on Raymond Chandler’s mythos in which he took a great book that could have made a great movie and turned it into garbage). I’d put The Player about midway through his output, with some great aspects like casting Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett as the police detectives and a final “twist” ending in which two writers – one of whom turns out to be Griff’s actual harasser – pitch him a film called The Player which is the story we’ve just seen of how a film executive literally gets away with murder and ends up married to the victim’s girlfriend. There are also lots of celebrities playing themselves in cameo appearances, a characteristic of Altman’s movies, and the ending strikes me as appropriately cynical but also horribly depressing. One wishes Altman and Michael Tolkin could have given us at least one character (with the arguable exception of David Kahane, who exits one-third of the way through) who had some nobility and conviction!

Breath of Freedom (Broadview Films, Hanns Wolters International, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 12) KPBS showed a couple of movies about so-called “buffalo soldiers,” African-Americans who served in segregated military units starting in the Civil War and ending with World War II. They got that nickname from the Native Americans they fought against during the 19th century, who thought the nappy hair on their heads made them look like upright buffaloes, and while I missed the first movie I got to see a quite interesting documentary called Breath of Freedom about the experiences of African-American servicemembers during World War II and its aftermath. It was made in 2014 (one giveaway that it was an older movie was that John Lewis was named as the last surviving speaker at the 1963 March on Washington; he’s died since, though at least two of the musical performers at the March, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, still survive) and was written and directed by Dag Freyer. I suspect it was a German production because the director’s name sounds either German or Scandinavian, and though the production company has the bland Anglo name “Broadview Films,” its imdb.com page designates the “sales representative” as “Hanns Wolters International.” The basic theme of this movie is that the African-American experience in World War II helped kick-start the postwar civil rights movement, at least in part because African-American servicemembers who served in the occupation force in Germany in the late 1940’s (between the fall of Hitler’s regime in 1945 and the establishment of the West German state in 1949) found themselves treated with a surprising level of humanity. During the war a lot of people noted the irony between the principal enemy, Germany, being a racist regime (and a proudly and unashamedly racist regime, at that, with a program of genocide against people considered “racially inferior” by their looney-tunes ideology) and the American armed forces still being racially segregated.

A number of African-American veterans interviewed for the program recalled that, having grown up in the North, they weren’t ready for the openness of Southern racism at its fullest when they were sent to Army bases in the South (many of them still bearing the names of Confederate generals, as if the Civil War either had never ended or had the opposite outcome). One veteran recalled having to stand in a bus for 100 miles rather than take a seat in the front, which were of course reserved for white patrons only. Another said he overheard a white man say, “Here come some of those Pennsylvania niggers. We’re going to have to teach them a lesson to make them properly subservient.” (One thing I applaud Dag Freyer and whoever worked with him on the English-language version of this documentary is that they didn’t censor the so-called “‘N’-word.” Sometimes you have to put the full ugliness of racism on display to make the point against it.) One servicemember recalled being physically beaten, and another who’d been a Black MP remembered an incident in which he and his unit arrested white soldiers – and then a company of white MP’s tried to take custody of the arrestees. When the Black MP’s refused to give them up, a larger group of white MP’s literally fired at them at random. During the actual war, Black units were kept from the front lines because the racist thinking of the time was that Blacks were only suitable for support roles, including making sure the front-line troops were kept supplied. The film mentioned the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, who were reluctantly trained as combat pilots despite a 1925 study supposedly “proving” that Black people weren’t intelligent enough to fly planes. It also mentioned that during the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans’ surprise counter-attack in Belgium in late 1944, Black soldiers supposedly confined to “support” roles actually got to participate in combat and fire at the enemy because they had to; the white commanders needed all the cannon fodder they could muster. Alas, once the battle was won the African-American soldiers who had fought so courageously and had been instrumental in the victory were bounced back to “support” roles again.

One of the most significant interviewees was Charles Evers, civil rights activist since the 1960’s and brother of Medgar Evers, who led the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP in the early 1960’s until he was killed. The Evers brothers were unusually close, and Charles (along with Medgar’s widow, Myrlie Evers) continued the work after Medgar was murdered by a white supremacist fertilizer salesman and White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963. All-white juries deadlocked in De La Beckwith’s first two trials in 1964 and it wasn’t until 30 years later in a third trial that De La Beckwith was finally convicted. Breath of Freedom included archival interviews with Medgar Evers himself in which he talked about the threats on his life he received on an ongoing basis, as well as retrospective interviews with Charles Evers, who talked about how though they served in different theatres in World War II (Medgar served in Germany and Charles in the Pacific), the experience bonded them closer than ever and made them even more determined to push the struggle for racial equality in postwar America. In addition to the African-American interviewees, the film featured at least one African-German, Theodor Michael, who recalled having been born in Germany and living through the Nazi years. The Nazis’ racial policies banned Black people from most job, but Michael made a living as – of all things – an actor in the Nazi-controlled German film industry. They were making big movies about the white man’s burden and the “injustice” done to Germany when they were stripped of their African colonies after World War I, and the Nazi producers needed Black actors to play the “savages” in “darkest Africa” who needed the Germans to redeem and rule them.

Also, a number of African-American servicemembers stationed in postwar occupied Germany started dating German women and had children with them, with various results. Black American servicemember Harold Linton married his German girlfriend Ingrid and lived with her for years in both Germany and the U.S., but Charles Vernon Johnson decided he couldn’t function in a U.S. that still banned interracial marriages in all 50 states, so he left his partner and their daughter behind to return to the U.S. and become an attorney specializing in civil-rights cases. Perhaps the most poignant story of this type in the film was that of Elvira Rypacek, who was abandoned by her Black American servicemember father after the war and didn’t trace him until 2012 (their reunion is shown in the film). The show also featured interviews with the great African-American jazz singer Jon Hendricks and another Black jazz musician, trumpeter Joe McPhee; Hendricks returned to the U.S. and had a major career (including working with two white singers, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross, in the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross vocal trio in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s) while McPhee stayed in Germany and pursued his career there because he didn’t want to have to deal with American racism. The end of the story is familiar: the progress of the civil rights movement through the 1960’s and the 1963 March on Washington (at which one veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen was sitting on top of the Lincoln Memorial as a spotter, tasked with observing the crowd below and radioing for help in case he saw people getting out of line), and the final footage of retired General Colin Powell signing copies of his autobiography – the message that, at least in 2014, anti-Black racism had receded enough that not only had a Black American become head of the entire U.S. military but another African-American, Barack Obama, had become president of the entire country, seemed like a final victory, though as Obama left office and was replaced by the openly and proudly racist Donald Trump the “final victory” this film presents seems neither as victorious nor as final as it’s presented here.

76th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing, White Cherry Entertainment, CBS-TV, aired June 11, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 11) I watched the 76th annual Tony Awards, a fascinating spectacle and not like other awards shows because, while it’s relatively easy to see a movie, watch a TV show or hear a record, it’s considerably more complicated to go to a stage show, especially the big Broadway productions that get nominated for Tony Awards. Either you actually have to travel to New York and somehow score a ticket to a big hit, or you have to wait until the producers start sending out road companies, usually with inferior casts. So for a lot of people the Tony Awards telecast is the only chance to see numbers from Broadway musicals with their original performers and at least a simulacrum of their original staging. According to Rachel Sherman’s New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/theater/tony-award-winners.html), though her byline says she merely “compiled” instead of actually writing it, “This year’s awards ceremony, which was nearly called off amid the Writers’ Guild of America strike, was presented without a script in an agreement reached with the union. (When the screenwriters’ strike last month threatened the broadcast, playwrights banded together to save the telecast.) The ceremony also went without a custom-made opening number and writers were encouraged to pre-record their acceptance speeches,” though I’m not clear just how many did that. Hosted by actor Ariana DeBose, the show began with a spectacular dance sequence consisting of jazz dancers performing to a stunning medley of songs, opening with Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and segueing into Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” the Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil-Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller “On Broadway” (incidentally Cynthia Weil’s death was noted later as part of the show’s “In Memoriam” segment) and a Latin number I didn’t recognize before a reprise of Strayhorn’s jazz classic.

The big winners were Kimberly Akimbo for Best Musical and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt for Best Play. Leopoldstadt – the title is a reference to the Jewish quarter of Vienna – takes place in Vienna between 1899 and 1955, and according to its official online synopsis it deals with a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family who “face the grief of losing a son and nephew in the First World War, navigating the family business through the depression and the rise of Bolshevism, and the onslaught of Nazi invasion.” From what we saw of it, Leopoldstadt appears to be about people who, because of their wealth and influence, think they’ve insulated themselves from the horrors of anti-Jewish prejudice only to find that they haven’t. Tom Stoppard mentioned in his acceptance speech that he won his first Tony Award for Best Play in 1968 for Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – his bold re-telling of the events of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the eyes of its minor characters (though years later I saw Shakespeare’s own Troilus and Cressida and realized Shakespeare had done the same thing to Homer!) – though he didn’t mention that his award for Leopoldstadt is actually his fifth Tony Award for Best Play: the three intervening ones are Travesties (1976), The Real Thing (1984), and The Coast of Utopia (2007). The Best Musical winner, Kimberly Akimbo, is if anything even more of a downer; it was originally a non-musical play by David Lindsay-Abaire premiered in 2001 and 20 years later Lindsay-Abaire worked with composer Jeanine Tesori to turn it into a musical. The plot deals with Kimberly Levaco, a teenage girl afflicted with a (real) disease called “progeria,” which means she ages at about four or five times the normal rate, so she will look like an old woman even when she’s still in her teens, and will almost certainly die shortly after. The number the Kimberly Akimbo cast presented last night was called “Anagram,” in which Kimberly (Victoria Clark) and her sort-of boyfriend Seth Weetis (Justin Cooley) get to know each other by playing anagrams, including one Seth makes up from Kimberly’s name called “Cleverly Akimbo.”

One thing I’ve noticed about awards shows in general is that they generally make clear just what side of America’s cultural divide its creative artists are on – the progressive side that’s perfectly O.K. with people of color, women having control over their own bodies, Queer people and even Trans and non-binary people. The Tony Awards were well ahead of the other big awards shows on this one – dating back to 1984, when Harvey Fierstein’s Gay-themed Torch Song Trilogy swept the Tonys and one of the male members of the producing team thanked “my partner, Lawrence Lane.” As I’ve noted before in these pages, the association of Broadway with Queer people in general and Gay men in particular dates back to the 1920’s, when Lee Shubert, co-owner with his brother Sam of most of Broadway’s biggest theatres, deliberately made it his policy to hire only Gay men both to play the male roles in his shows and to work on the crews because he didn’t want younger, hunkier straight guys around to compete with him for the affections of the women in his casts. The inclusiveness went so far this year that both the Lead Actor in a Musical and the Featured Actor in a Musical awards went to “out” non-binary Trans people, J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell, respectively. Given the obsession of today’s radical Right with Transwomen allegedly having an unfair advantage competing in sporting events with women-born women (that’s actually not true because the hormones given as part of gender transition tend to reduce muscle mass to more like that of genetic females), it struck me as ironic that Transwomen had shut out males in both the “musical actor” categories. It also calls into question why awards shows still sex-segregate the acting categories when they don’t do that for anybody else. At least the show J. Harrison Ghee won for was Some Like It Hot, a musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 film about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 and disguise themselves as women to join an all-girl band, in which Ghee played the part Tony Curtis played in the film, and while I’m not sure how Wilder would have felt about a genuinely Trans person being in a stage adaptation of his film, the film’s star, Marilyn Monroe, probably would have loved the idea. After she finished Some Like It Hot Monroe took a vacation to San Francisco with some friends and specifically wanted to see the famous drag show at Finocchio’s bar, where she went backstage to speak to the drag queen who played her in the show and gave her some pointers on how to do Marilyn’s famous walk better.

Kimberly Akimbo won both the Lead Actress and Featured Actress in a Musical categories; the Lead Actress award went to Victoria Clark and the Featured Actress went to Bonnie Milligan, a “woman of size” who played Kimberly's teacher and whose role includes a bizarre joke about her breast catching fire. The Best Leading Actress in a Play award went to Jodie Comer for Prima Facie, a one-person show in which she plays Tessa, a woman lawyer who specializes in defending men accused of sexual assault whose point of view dramatically changes when she’s sexually assaulted herself. The Best Leading Actor in a Play was Sean Hayes for Good Night, Oscar, in which he played a real-life person: Oscar Levant, a great classical pianist who also became a celebrity for his witty asides on radio shows and in films, and struggled all his life with depression and other mental illnesses. Hayes thanked his husband but then pretended to forget his name – “Scottie, or something like that” – and given that my own husband Charles had come home from work by then, I inevitably joked, “Hi, Carl.” As usual with the Tony Awards, the high points were the performances of numbers from the nominated shows, including Leona Courtney’s absolutely searing performance of the song “Eye of the Tiger,” written in 1982 by the rock band Survivor for the film Rocky III and shoehorned into a new musical called & Juliet, which re-imagines Romeo and Juliet and asks the question, “What would have happened if Juliet hadn’t killed herself?” (Actually it’s not a new idea: when Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents created West Side Story in 1957, transposing the plot of Romeo and Juliet to rival street gangs in New York City, they had Maria, Juliet’s equivalent, live at the end.)

Among the nominees for Best Revival of a Musical were two Stephen Sondheim shows, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd was represented by the opening “Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (regrettably omitted by Tim Burton in his film version) while Into the Woods was represented by a duet, “You’ve Changed/It Takes Two,” by Sara Bareilles and Brian D’Arcy James. But both these shows lost the Best Revival of a Musical award to Parade, about the real-life lynching of Leo Frank, a white Jewish man who was convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913 and murdered by a mob who kidnapped him from prison and lynched him after the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence from execution to life imprisonment. Given how the real story turned out, it was a bit ironic that the show was represented on the Tony Awards by “It Is Not Over Yet,” a song in which Leo Frank thanks his wife for having kept working on his case and unearthed the evidence he hopes will lead to his exoneration. Next to Leona Courtney’s impeccable performance of “Eye of the Tiger,” the most moving song of the night was Jacquina Kalakugo’s singing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from the longest-running Broadway musical of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, which finally closed this year after a 35-year run, and which was used to pay tribute both to the show itself and to accompany the “In Memoriam” segment listing artists, producers and crew members who had died in 2022-2023. I was also quite impressed with Lea Michele’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from the current revival of Funny Girl, especially given how she has the long shadows of both Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand looming over her. Like most awards shows, this year’s Tony Awards was kind of a lumbering beast, but it certainly paid tribute to the continued vitality of live theatre as an art form!