by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent a good chunk of the morning watching TV shows I’d recorded recently, including screening a Lifetime TV-movie that was shown over a Saturday that was billed as “Whole Lotta Love!” even though virtually all the relationships represented were sordid in some way. This film was no exception: it was a 1997 production (though watching it I had no idea it was that old!) with the awkward title Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder. It’s based on a true story — the murder of 16-year-old Texas high-school student Adrianne “A.J.” Jones (Cassidy Rae) by David Graham (David Lipper) and Diane Zamora (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) over a jealous fit Diane had when she found out that, after David had taken her virginity, he had had sex with A.J. as well. The film was apparently made before either David or Diane had been put on trial (they were tried separately and got life sentences) and based primarily on David’s typewritten confession once he was apprehended and given a polygraph test that purportedly showed he was lying when he denied all knowledge of the crime.
What’s fascinating about this movie is how the writers, Skip Hollandsworth (whose article on the case was the basis for the film) and Steve Johnson, and director Richard A. Colla, muff as many opportunities as they live up to in a story that’s full of fascinating issues and twists — but it ends up being a powerful movie anyway. What made the case especially shocking is that both David and Diane seemed to have so much to live for — though they attended different high schools they’d become a (mostly) inseparable couple; they were both high achievers, honor students, and headed for careers as military officers, he in the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs and she in the Navy at Annapolis (the film shows both of them receiving their acceptance letters to those institutions). Early on in the film David is shown necking with Diane and clearly getting a bad case of blue balls; he’s keyed up and wants to take their physical relationship to the highest level and she’s equally insistent that she doesn’t want to give up her virginity, even to the man she insists she’s in love with and wants to stay with forever, but eventually after turning away from him she yields — and so it’s an intense shock to her when she learns that David had a sexual quickie with A.J., who’s on the women’s cross-country team at their school (he’s on the men’s track team, of course!); while on the bus on the way back from a meet, he massaged her injured knee and it led from there to a mutual seduction under the camper shell of a pickup truck in the rain.
Diane worms the secret out of David and then insists that A.J. “must suffer the consequences” of messing around with another woman’s man — and she makes it clear to David that the “consequences” she has in mind involve them luring A.J. out of her home, taking her to a secluded spot and killing her. They don’t seem all that interested in covering their tracks because they seem to think they’re such superior people (sort of like Leopold and Loeb) that by sheer force of will they’ll be able to keep their crime a secret — and indeed it seems to work for a while, as the police investigating the case reject both David and Diane as suspects (despite the testimony of A.J.’s parents and brother that she was lured out of the house by “some guy named David on the track team,” and there’s only one guy named David on the track team) because of their impeccable school records and interest in the military. Instead they focus on Bryan McMillin (Chad Carlberg, a tall, rather gangly blond actor less conventionally handsome than David Lipper but one who did considerably more for me, if only because he was playing the part on the thin edge of effeminacy that suggested his dorky, self-doubting approach to A.J. was in his mind his last hope of getting a girlfriend before he had to reconcile himself to being Gay), who’d cruised A.J. (to her disgust) and had mixed alcohol with his anti-depressants on the night of the murder so he really didn’t know where he was or whether or not he was at the murder scene, though he whiningly insists he didn’t kill anybody; and his father Jimmy (Randell Haynes, a considerably shorter and stockier man who doesn’t look like he could have fathered this person) rails at the cops and finally gets them to release Bryan for lack of evidence.
The case molders in the cold-case files for several months — we’ve seen a Christmas tree in the background during the murder sequence (powerfully staged in neo-noir style by director Colla, whose résumé is almost completely TV work; David lures A.J. into his white pickup truck, Diane is hiding in the back à la Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity — a film this reminded me of quite a bit if only because Diane seems a Stanwyck-esque femme fatale in training — and the original plan is for Diane to strangle A.J., only A.J. escapes and tries to get away and David is forced to follow her and shoot her twice with a handgun, held chillingly with both hands the way they would have taught him to do small-arms fire in R.O.T.C.), later we see David and Diane apparently in the clear attending the school prom, and it’s only after both of them have gone off to their respective military academies that Diane boasts about the murder to her roommates, one of whom takes her seriously enough to turn her in; and the cops back in Texas question David’s friend Ben, who admits that David and Diane came by his place afterwards, used his bathroom to wash off the blood, and asked him to lend them clean clothes, which he did.
The fact that the film was based on David’s police confession makes Diane seem more of a villain than he is — they both received life sentences and, not surprisingly, each blamed the other for the situation escalating to murder — and indeed, in his confession (the parts of it we see on screen as he’s typing it into a computer, and hear on the soundtrack as voice-over narration) he makes himself out as an innocent noir hero lured into a dirty deed by an evil woman.
The film is full of rich themes Colla and Johnson seem more to stumble over than actually depict, including the obvious clash between the two leads’ ostensible commitment to the military “code of honor” and they’re having killed someone in cold blood and industriously covered up for that (though the military authorities come off well in the story; they’re the ones who insist, again as a matter of “honor,” that David take the “lie detector” test that ultimately does him in), the whole extent to which Diane’s own exaggerated sense of her own “honor” as a woman leads her to get her boyfriend to “atone” for having had sex with someone else after he did so with her by killing the other woman, and the mephitic small-town atmosphere where the military and its values of order, authority and discipline (ironically reflected in the killers’ assumption that if they can just maintain their own self-discipline they can get away with the crime forever) rule so powerfully the police don’t want to believe, even as the evidence grows against David and Diane, that two such nice young people, the very model of what they want their youths to be, could be capable of murder. It’s a chilling movie despite the rather flat treatment it gets here — and the nice soft-core porn shots of David Lipper making hot, passionate love with both the women in his life (the one he will kill and the one who will help him do so and, indeed — at least according to this telling of the story — put him up to it) just adds to the film’s appeal.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Firefly (MGM, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was The Firefly, a 1937 mega-production from MGM that came from an attempt to split Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy after the success of Maytime and have each do a film without the other. Eddy’s without MacDonald was the mega-musical Rosalie, with Eleanor Powell as the female lead, a plot largely set in a mythical European kingdom, and a miscast Cole Porter doing his best to write stentorian songs suitable for the Eddy baritone, (“In the Still of the Night” was his only song from the score that became a standard.)
The Firefly, MacDonald’s film without Eddy, was a far better movie, based on a 1912 operetta by Rudolf Friml and Otto Harbach that in turn drew its inspiration from history: Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in the early 1810’s and his imprisonment of the rightful heir to the Spanish throne, Ferdinand VII. Reuniting MacDonald with the director (Robert Z. Leonard) and cinematographer (Oliver T. Marsh) of her favorite film, Maytime (the one true masterpiece — or at least near-masterpiece; the horribly sexist ending still rankles me — of the MacDonald-Eddy cycle), The Firefly cast her as entertainer Nina Maria, who’s actually billed as “La Mosca de Fuego” and who’s really a spy for the Spanish government; she attracts French officers as stage-door johnnies, romances them, gets vital military secrets out of them and passes the information along to her contact, the Marquis de Melito (Douglass Dumbrille, playing a sympathetic role for a change!).
In order to get rid of a particularly pesky French officer whose store of information she’s exhausted, Étienne (Leonard Penn), she plays up to a mysterious stranger named Don Diego (Allan Jones, taking Eddy’s place as MacDonald’s leading man), with the result that Don Diego falls instantly in love with her and follows her around the country, catching up to her carriage on his horse and singing the film’s hit song, “The Donkey Serenade” — actually adapted by MGM’s contract songwriters, Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, from an instrumental called “Chansonette” Friml had written for the original 1912 version of The Firefly. General Savary (Henry Daniell), an emissary from Napoleon, arrives in Madrid with an invitation for Ferdinand to come to Bayonne, just across the border between Spain and France, for a talk to settle the differences between their two countries. We know it’s a trap, and so do the Marquis and Nina Maria — but the guileless Ferdinand accepts the invitation, so the Marquis arranges with Nina Maria to play a gig in Bayonne as a cover for infiltrating the French general staff, finding out what’s really going on, and using carrier pigeons to relay the message to Ferdinand, who’s waiting at the Spanish town of Vitoria just across the border from Bayonne.
Only after a lot of romantic byplay between her and Don Diego, Nina Maria finally catches on when she realizes the markings on her pigeons have changed; someone has swapped her own pigeons for ones that would fly to the French court and give them the evidence they need to charge her with espionage and have her executed. (In the real world, they’d have shot her on sight without bothering with waiting for evidence, but that’s the movies for you.) Eventually she realizes that Don Diego is actually an agent of French intelligence and he’s been romancing her under cover to find out her secrets — an irony of which the film’s writers, Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett, could have made more of — and she’s turned over to Major de Rouchemont (Warren William), her latest sexual target in the French officer corps, to be put to death, only Don Diego, who makes the usual movie protestation that he’s been in love with her all the time, helps her to escape.
Ferdinand VII walks into the French trap, he’s taken prisoner, Napoleon installs his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain and there’s a series of increasingly bloodthirsty posters — including one that threatens to destroy any town where a Spaniard kills a French soldier — that anticipate the ones that would go up in cities under Nazi occupation in movies made during World War II. Nina Maria goes underground to aid the resistance and poses as a camp follower to the French armies, which overrun most of Spain until the British send forces to aid the Spaniards, the tide of the war turns and the entire outcome hinges on a battle at Vitoria — where through sending out phony information Nina Maria gets the French to screw up their battle formation so the British and Spanish forces can win the battle, and with the war over she and Don Diego — under his real name, André François — can get back together and hit the road to the tunes of “The Donkey Serenade” and the big love duet from the film, “Giannina Mia.”
The Firefly is an example of what I like to call the portmanteau movie — the sort of film Hollywood often made during the classic era in which they sought out to include some element every potential member of the audience would like — romance and glorious operetta singing to appeal to women, spy-thriller scenes and spectacular battle sequences to appeal to men. It’s a refreshing change to watch a movie like this in an era in which the film industry’s marketing strategy is quite the opposite — to fashion every film so totally to the tastes of a market niche that anyone outside that niche almost certainly won’t like it — but it also doesn’t do much to make the work of art a coherent drama. The business of a spy getting into trouble when she falls in love with someone on the other side wasn’t particularly fresh in 1937 (or, probably, in 1912 either!), and Josef von Sternberg had pulled it off a good deal better (and with a real sense of the tragic, one element MGM’s people weren’t interested in even though the tragic elements of Maytime had contributed to its artistic success, and probably to its commercial success as well!) in his 1931 Marlene Dietrich vehicle Dishonored.
The strengths of The Firefly are some of the most gorgeous MacDonald singing ever put on film (the film doesn’t make her pretend to be an opera singer the way Rose-Marie and Maytime did; all the songs here are operetta, the music she sang best, and written by a master of the genre), magnificent sets (just about every set in this movie looks like it could house a musical production number, whether it actually does or not!), the witty screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett (based on an adaptation of Harbach’s original book by Ogden Nash, of all people!) that gives MacDonald a chance to show off her skills as a comedienne, and Marsh’s magnificent cinematography, notably the Sternbergian shadows he throws over the faces of MacDonald and Jones during their big scenes together. Allan Jones is a personable hero, certainly a better actor than Nelson Eddy could have dreamed of being, and as a tenor (Eddy was a baritone), his voice blends considerably better with MacDonald’s from a technical point of view — but somehow, though they work well together, Jones just doesn’t ignite the charismatic sparks with MacDonald that Eddy did.
The Firefly was one of those frustrating (at least to the studio that made it!) movies because it attracted a lot of ticket buyers but had cost so much to make it ended up losing $300,000 — and Louis B. Mayer blamed the failure on Allan Jones, deciding that The Firefly would have turned a profit if Nelson Eddy had been in it and relegating Jones to “B” movies and second leads thereafter — ironically, since Jones had been the studio’s first choice for MacDonald’s leading man in Naughty Marietta, had dropped out of it at the last minute, Eddy had replaced him and the film had been an enormous hit and launched the MacDonald-Eddy team. Jones eventually ended up at Universal, where he made even clunkier movies than his later, lesser MGM films (including reprising “The Donkey Serenade” as a guest star in the 1943 Olsen and Johnson comedy Crazy House), and still later he fathered 1960’s singing star Jack Jones; today Allan Jones is known, if at all, as the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ films A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, and maybe as Gaylord Ravenal in the 1936 James Whale-directed Show Boat from Universal.
Our “feature” was The Firefly, a 1937 mega-production from MGM that came from an attempt to split Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy after the success of Maytime and have each do a film without the other. Eddy’s without MacDonald was the mega-musical Rosalie, with Eleanor Powell as the female lead, a plot largely set in a mythical European kingdom, and a miscast Cole Porter doing his best to write stentorian songs suitable for the Eddy baritone, (“In the Still of the Night” was his only song from the score that became a standard.)
The Firefly, MacDonald’s film without Eddy, was a far better movie, based on a 1912 operetta by Rudolf Friml and Otto Harbach that in turn drew its inspiration from history: Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in the early 1810’s and his imprisonment of the rightful heir to the Spanish throne, Ferdinand VII. Reuniting MacDonald with the director (Robert Z. Leonard) and cinematographer (Oliver T. Marsh) of her favorite film, Maytime (the one true masterpiece — or at least near-masterpiece; the horribly sexist ending still rankles me — of the MacDonald-Eddy cycle), The Firefly cast her as entertainer Nina Maria, who’s actually billed as “La Mosca de Fuego” and who’s really a spy for the Spanish government; she attracts French officers as stage-door johnnies, romances them, gets vital military secrets out of them and passes the information along to her contact, the Marquis de Melito (Douglass Dumbrille, playing a sympathetic role for a change!).
In order to get rid of a particularly pesky French officer whose store of information she’s exhausted, Étienne (Leonard Penn), she plays up to a mysterious stranger named Don Diego (Allan Jones, taking Eddy’s place as MacDonald’s leading man), with the result that Don Diego falls instantly in love with her and follows her around the country, catching up to her carriage on his horse and singing the film’s hit song, “The Donkey Serenade” — actually adapted by MGM’s contract songwriters, Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, from an instrumental called “Chansonette” Friml had written for the original 1912 version of The Firefly. General Savary (Henry Daniell), an emissary from Napoleon, arrives in Madrid with an invitation for Ferdinand to come to Bayonne, just across the border between Spain and France, for a talk to settle the differences between their two countries. We know it’s a trap, and so do the Marquis and Nina Maria — but the guileless Ferdinand accepts the invitation, so the Marquis arranges with Nina Maria to play a gig in Bayonne as a cover for infiltrating the French general staff, finding out what’s really going on, and using carrier pigeons to relay the message to Ferdinand, who’s waiting at the Spanish town of Vitoria just across the border from Bayonne.
Only after a lot of romantic byplay between her and Don Diego, Nina Maria finally catches on when she realizes the markings on her pigeons have changed; someone has swapped her own pigeons for ones that would fly to the French court and give them the evidence they need to charge her with espionage and have her executed. (In the real world, they’d have shot her on sight without bothering with waiting for evidence, but that’s the movies for you.) Eventually she realizes that Don Diego is actually an agent of French intelligence and he’s been romancing her under cover to find out her secrets — an irony of which the film’s writers, Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett, could have made more of — and she’s turned over to Major de Rouchemont (Warren William), her latest sexual target in the French officer corps, to be put to death, only Don Diego, who makes the usual movie protestation that he’s been in love with her all the time, helps her to escape.
Ferdinand VII walks into the French trap, he’s taken prisoner, Napoleon installs his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the throne of Spain and there’s a series of increasingly bloodthirsty posters — including one that threatens to destroy any town where a Spaniard kills a French soldier — that anticipate the ones that would go up in cities under Nazi occupation in movies made during World War II. Nina Maria goes underground to aid the resistance and poses as a camp follower to the French armies, which overrun most of Spain until the British send forces to aid the Spaniards, the tide of the war turns and the entire outcome hinges on a battle at Vitoria — where through sending out phony information Nina Maria gets the French to screw up their battle formation so the British and Spanish forces can win the battle, and with the war over she and Don Diego — under his real name, André François — can get back together and hit the road to the tunes of “The Donkey Serenade” and the big love duet from the film, “Giannina Mia.”
The Firefly is an example of what I like to call the portmanteau movie — the sort of film Hollywood often made during the classic era in which they sought out to include some element every potential member of the audience would like — romance and glorious operetta singing to appeal to women, spy-thriller scenes and spectacular battle sequences to appeal to men. It’s a refreshing change to watch a movie like this in an era in which the film industry’s marketing strategy is quite the opposite — to fashion every film so totally to the tastes of a market niche that anyone outside that niche almost certainly won’t like it — but it also doesn’t do much to make the work of art a coherent drama. The business of a spy getting into trouble when she falls in love with someone on the other side wasn’t particularly fresh in 1937 (or, probably, in 1912 either!), and Josef von Sternberg had pulled it off a good deal better (and with a real sense of the tragic, one element MGM’s people weren’t interested in even though the tragic elements of Maytime had contributed to its artistic success, and probably to its commercial success as well!) in his 1931 Marlene Dietrich vehicle Dishonored.
The strengths of The Firefly are some of the most gorgeous MacDonald singing ever put on film (the film doesn’t make her pretend to be an opera singer the way Rose-Marie and Maytime did; all the songs here are operetta, the music she sang best, and written by a master of the genre), magnificent sets (just about every set in this movie looks like it could house a musical production number, whether it actually does or not!), the witty screenplay by Goodrich and Hackett (based on an adaptation of Harbach’s original book by Ogden Nash, of all people!) that gives MacDonald a chance to show off her skills as a comedienne, and Marsh’s magnificent cinematography, notably the Sternbergian shadows he throws over the faces of MacDonald and Jones during their big scenes together. Allan Jones is a personable hero, certainly a better actor than Nelson Eddy could have dreamed of being, and as a tenor (Eddy was a baritone), his voice blends considerably better with MacDonald’s from a technical point of view — but somehow, though they work well together, Jones just doesn’t ignite the charismatic sparks with MacDonald that Eddy did.
The Firefly was one of those frustrating (at least to the studio that made it!) movies because it attracted a lot of ticket buyers but had cost so much to make it ended up losing $300,000 — and Louis B. Mayer blamed the failure on Allan Jones, deciding that The Firefly would have turned a profit if Nelson Eddy had been in it and relegating Jones to “B” movies and second leads thereafter — ironically, since Jones had been the studio’s first choice for MacDonald’s leading man in Naughty Marietta, had dropped out of it at the last minute, Eddy had replaced him and the film had been an enormous hit and launched the MacDonald-Eddy team. Jones eventually ended up at Universal, where he made even clunkier movies than his later, lesser MGM films (including reprising “The Donkey Serenade” as a guest star in the 1943 Olsen and Johnson comedy Crazy House), and still later he fathered 1960’s singing star Jack Jones; today Allan Jones is known, if at all, as the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ films A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, and maybe as Gaylord Ravenal in the 1936 James Whale-directed Show Boat from Universal.
Holiday from Rules (Portafilms, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I settled in with Charles for a night of movie-watching that included a couple of oddball shorts, one an “educational” film from 1958 called Holiday from Rules, made in Walled Lake, Michigan by a company called Portafilms (which I inevitably jokingly renamed “Port-a-Pottie Films”) about a group of four kids — two boys and two girls — who complain about the rules that govern their lives and get transported by an omniscient narrator to a fantasy island where they can live on their own, without rules. It starts out as an Ayn Rand wet dream and turns into Lord of the Flies as the kids find that without rules the strongest of their number, or the ones who simply get to a resource first, can hog it all and keep the other people from getting any. One wonders how this potentially dangerous piece of socialist propaganda actually got made and shown to schoolkids!
I settled in with Charles for a night of movie-watching that included a couple of oddball shorts, one an “educational” film from 1958 called Holiday from Rules, made in Walled Lake, Michigan by a company called Portafilms (which I inevitably jokingly renamed “Port-a-Pottie Films”) about a group of four kids — two boys and two girls — who complain about the rules that govern their lives and get transported by an omniscient narrator to a fantasy island where they can live on their own, without rules. It starts out as an Ayn Rand wet dream and turns into Lord of the Flies as the kids find that without rules the strongest of their number, or the ones who simply get to a resource first, can hog it all and keep the other people from getting any. One wonders how this potentially dangerous piece of socialist propaganda actually got made and shown to schoolkids!
The Opry House (Vitaphone/Warner Brothers, 1929)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other short was a Vitaphone number from 1929 called The Opry House (an interesting anticipation of the Grand Ole Opry’s nomenclature by about eight years or so; there was also another short called The Opry House from 1929, a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the nascent Disney studio) in which the manager of a rural vaudeville theatre (Lew Hearn) announces that his name act from out-of-town won’t be able to perform, so in their stead he’s going to put on local talent. “It’s the policy of this here opry house not to make refunds,” he says, “so sit back and enjoy the show the best you can.” What follows is mostly a performance by the pioneering jazz novelty act the Mound City Blue Blowers — Red McKenzie, vocals and a variety of kazoos (including one made out of a tin can); Jack Bland, banjo (incidentally he plays a solo by tapping on the strings along the fretboard — 60 years later Stanley Jordan would be considered a major innovator when he did that); Carl Kress, guitar (not Eddie Lang, who usually played with the band but was also a much in-demand session musician and might have had another, better-paying gig that afternoon; Lang died in 1933 but did get to be in a film, The Big Broadcast, as Bing Crosby’s accompanist); and Frank “Josh” Billings, playing an upturned suitcase with whiskbrooms in lieu of a drum set. (They got their name from McKenzie’s home town, St. Louis, which at the time dumped its trash in giant garbage piles on the outskirts of the city and then covered them with dirt in a vain attempt at making them sanitary; the residents thought they looked like mounds and so “Mound City” became a nickname for St. Louis.) They play hot versions of “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Tiger Rag,” with McKenzie proving (as Louis Armstrong was also doing at the time) that if you understood the nature of jazz and could phrase like an instrumentalist, you could record great jazz vocals even if you didn’t have much of a voice per se. The only letdown in the film is the middle number, a dull version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” by singer Emma Perkins, whose childlike mannerisms and cutesy voice make her seem like Shirley Temple’s older sister.
The other short was a Vitaphone number from 1929 called The Opry House (an interesting anticipation of the Grand Ole Opry’s nomenclature by about eight years or so; there was also another short called The Opry House from 1929, a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the nascent Disney studio) in which the manager of a rural vaudeville theatre (Lew Hearn) announces that his name act from out-of-town won’t be able to perform, so in their stead he’s going to put on local talent. “It’s the policy of this here opry house not to make refunds,” he says, “so sit back and enjoy the show the best you can.” What follows is mostly a performance by the pioneering jazz novelty act the Mound City Blue Blowers — Red McKenzie, vocals and a variety of kazoos (including one made out of a tin can); Jack Bland, banjo (incidentally he plays a solo by tapping on the strings along the fretboard — 60 years later Stanley Jordan would be considered a major innovator when he did that); Carl Kress, guitar (not Eddie Lang, who usually played with the band but was also a much in-demand session musician and might have had another, better-paying gig that afternoon; Lang died in 1933 but did get to be in a film, The Big Broadcast, as Bing Crosby’s accompanist); and Frank “Josh” Billings, playing an upturned suitcase with whiskbrooms in lieu of a drum set. (They got their name from McKenzie’s home town, St. Louis, which at the time dumped its trash in giant garbage piles on the outskirts of the city and then covered them with dirt in a vain attempt at making them sanitary; the residents thought they looked like mounds and so “Mound City” became a nickname for St. Louis.) They play hot versions of “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Tiger Rag,” with McKenzie proving (as Louis Armstrong was also doing at the time) that if you understood the nature of jazz and could phrase like an instrumentalist, you could record great jazz vocals even if you didn’t have much of a voice per se. The only letdown in the film is the middle number, a dull version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” by singer Emma Perkins, whose childlike mannerisms and cutesy voice make her seem like Shirley Temple’s older sister.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Judicial Indiscretion (Ambitious/Insight/Lifetime, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before, which was billed as its premiere on the network even though imdb.com claims April 9, 2007 as its release date. The film was Judicial Indiscretion, and it seems to have germinated in the mind of its writer-director, George Mendeluk, as a sort of challenge to himself as to just how far he could push the usual Lifetime “pussy in peril” trope, since it has one of the most outrageous premises ever invented for a film: Monica Barrett (Anne Archer) is a highly respected judge on the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. federal courts (Mendeluk made a mistake in his script here because the “circuits” are actually appeals courts, yet Monica is shown functioning as a first-instance trial judge, presiding over trials and handing out sentences) who’s up for consideration for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just before she’s scheduled to receive word of whether the President (carefully unnamed, and played by Sean Allan in a manner and makeup suggesting that Mendeluk was anticipating that John Edwards would win the 2008 election) is really going to appoint her, she takes a vacation in San Francisco. Her adult daughter Jennifer (Erin Karpluk) is supposed to take the trip with her, but at the last minute Jennifer has to make a big presentation at work and cancels, leaving widow Monica (her husband Paul, Jennifer’s father, died three years before) alone in a strange city and vulnerable to male attractions. Male attractions dutifully appear in the person of a man calling himself “Jack Sullivan” (Michael Shanks), who speaks with a charming Irish brogue, claims to be a writer with a first novel about to come out and an advance on a second, takes her to dinner, drugs her drink, takes her back to her hotel room and rapes her. She comes to naked in her room, and instead of reporting it to the police and preserving the evidence she does what all the stupid rape victims on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit do: she washes herself, practically scrapes off a layer of skin, then sneaks out of town and rejoins her daughter at their home, telling no one about it except her mother and lifelong mentor Victoria (Anna Hagan).
Monica actually gets the Supreme Court appointment and, much to her surprise, wins the support of opposing-party senator Garland Wolf (William B. Davis) even though one of her rulings previously cost him $8 million. She also finds that “Sullivan” is stalking her, and getting into places that indicate he has high-level connections, including getting her cell phone number after she has it changed and turning up in the White House at the press appearance announcing her appointment with a media credential. (Well, the real George W. Bush administration let a male hustler in because he was part of a Republican blog and could be counted on to ask softball questions.) Meanwhile, the White House schedules a nationwide media tour to introduce her to the country and prepare the groundwork for her confirmation, and she’s assigned a minder, Martin Murphy (Matthew Harrison), who picks out her wardrobe (one wonders whether male Supreme Court appointees have to go through this!), coaches her on how to deal with the media and the proper non-answers to give when she’s asked her stands on judicial issues, and generally handles her on her tour.
Inevitably (at least by George Mendeluk’s fiat), her tour takes her to San Francisco, where because of the city’s reputation as being filled with “fruits and nuts” the federal marshals’ office offers her additional protection — and “Sullivan” turns up and claims to have a video of the two of them having sex, which he intends to release to the Internet unless she withdraws immediately. He sends her a DVD copy of the video and she insists that she will not be blackmailed, and then the open question we’ve been wondering about all movie — is he just a free-lance blackmailer or is he doing this as part of a plot masterminded by someone else, and if so, who? — gets answered at last: the whole plot was the handiwork of Senator Wolf, who really wanted the court appointment for someone else but figured that by pretending to support Monica while really hiring someone to ruin her, he could get his revenge against her by driving her from office with scandal and then get his man on the Court.
Wolf’s plan derails when “Sullivan” confronts him in a parked car, tries to blackmail him for more money, then takes away the gun Wolf pulls on him and shoots the Senator, faking the scene to make it look like suicide. Then he invades the hotel where Monica is staying, crashes her room by knocking out her room-service waiter, holds a gun with a silencer on her and demands $100,000 per year from her for life as the price of his silence. The federal marshals who are supposed to be guarding her catch on and break into the room, shooting down the bad guy and in the process obliterating the DVD copy, though the mini-DV original of “Sullivan’s” surreptitiously filmed rape tape survives — and there’s a coda in which Monica says she’s going to resign her appointment anyway rather than participate in a cover-up, her mom persuades her to stay in the fight, and months later she’s survived her confirmation, gets sworn in and presents the whole affair as a “teachable moment” on just how far some people will go to affect the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Despite the risibility of its plot premise and the melodramatic gyrations Mendeluk has to put both his characters and the actors playing them through for his story to work, Judicial Indiscretion is actually a decent piece of filmmaking; Mendeluk manages the wrenching changes in atmosphere quite well and he’s got a better star than usual in Archer, who’s probably most famous as the wife Michael Douglas cheated on with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and who’s still quite attractive even 22 years later in a role which frankly doesn’t offer her much of a challenge as an actress: all she has to do is look like a woman who’s putting on a composed, collected front while she’s seething with anxiety inside, and maintain that one emotion from the rape scene on to the end.
I watched a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before, which was billed as its premiere on the network even though imdb.com claims April 9, 2007 as its release date. The film was Judicial Indiscretion, and it seems to have germinated in the mind of its writer-director, George Mendeluk, as a sort of challenge to himself as to just how far he could push the usual Lifetime “pussy in peril” trope, since it has one of the most outrageous premises ever invented for a film: Monica Barrett (Anne Archer) is a highly respected judge on the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. federal courts (Mendeluk made a mistake in his script here because the “circuits” are actually appeals courts, yet Monica is shown functioning as a first-instance trial judge, presiding over trials and handing out sentences) who’s up for consideration for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just before she’s scheduled to receive word of whether the President (carefully unnamed, and played by Sean Allan in a manner and makeup suggesting that Mendeluk was anticipating that John Edwards would win the 2008 election) is really going to appoint her, she takes a vacation in San Francisco. Her adult daughter Jennifer (Erin Karpluk) is supposed to take the trip with her, but at the last minute Jennifer has to make a big presentation at work and cancels, leaving widow Monica (her husband Paul, Jennifer’s father, died three years before) alone in a strange city and vulnerable to male attractions. Male attractions dutifully appear in the person of a man calling himself “Jack Sullivan” (Michael Shanks), who speaks with a charming Irish brogue, claims to be a writer with a first novel about to come out and an advance on a second, takes her to dinner, drugs her drink, takes her back to her hotel room and rapes her. She comes to naked in her room, and instead of reporting it to the police and preserving the evidence she does what all the stupid rape victims on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit do: she washes herself, practically scrapes off a layer of skin, then sneaks out of town and rejoins her daughter at their home, telling no one about it except her mother and lifelong mentor Victoria (Anna Hagan).
Monica actually gets the Supreme Court appointment and, much to her surprise, wins the support of opposing-party senator Garland Wolf (William B. Davis) even though one of her rulings previously cost him $8 million. She also finds that “Sullivan” is stalking her, and getting into places that indicate he has high-level connections, including getting her cell phone number after she has it changed and turning up in the White House at the press appearance announcing her appointment with a media credential. (Well, the real George W. Bush administration let a male hustler in because he was part of a Republican blog and could be counted on to ask softball questions.) Meanwhile, the White House schedules a nationwide media tour to introduce her to the country and prepare the groundwork for her confirmation, and she’s assigned a minder, Martin Murphy (Matthew Harrison), who picks out her wardrobe (one wonders whether male Supreme Court appointees have to go through this!), coaches her on how to deal with the media and the proper non-answers to give when she’s asked her stands on judicial issues, and generally handles her on her tour.
Inevitably (at least by George Mendeluk’s fiat), her tour takes her to San Francisco, where because of the city’s reputation as being filled with “fruits and nuts” the federal marshals’ office offers her additional protection — and “Sullivan” turns up and claims to have a video of the two of them having sex, which he intends to release to the Internet unless she withdraws immediately. He sends her a DVD copy of the video and she insists that she will not be blackmailed, and then the open question we’ve been wondering about all movie — is he just a free-lance blackmailer or is he doing this as part of a plot masterminded by someone else, and if so, who? — gets answered at last: the whole plot was the handiwork of Senator Wolf, who really wanted the court appointment for someone else but figured that by pretending to support Monica while really hiring someone to ruin her, he could get his revenge against her by driving her from office with scandal and then get his man on the Court.
Wolf’s plan derails when “Sullivan” confronts him in a parked car, tries to blackmail him for more money, then takes away the gun Wolf pulls on him and shoots the Senator, faking the scene to make it look like suicide. Then he invades the hotel where Monica is staying, crashes her room by knocking out her room-service waiter, holds a gun with a silencer on her and demands $100,000 per year from her for life as the price of his silence. The federal marshals who are supposed to be guarding her catch on and break into the room, shooting down the bad guy and in the process obliterating the DVD copy, though the mini-DV original of “Sullivan’s” surreptitiously filmed rape tape survives — and there’s a coda in which Monica says she’s going to resign her appointment anyway rather than participate in a cover-up, her mom persuades her to stay in the fight, and months later she’s survived her confirmation, gets sworn in and presents the whole affair as a “teachable moment” on just how far some people will go to affect the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Despite the risibility of its plot premise and the melodramatic gyrations Mendeluk has to put both his characters and the actors playing them through for his story to work, Judicial Indiscretion is actually a decent piece of filmmaking; Mendeluk manages the wrenching changes in atmosphere quite well and he’s got a better star than usual in Archer, who’s probably most famous as the wife Michael Douglas cheated on with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and who’s still quite attractive even 22 years later in a role which frankly doesn’t offer her much of a challenge as an actress: all she has to do is look like a woman who’s putting on a composed, collected front while she’s seething with anxiety inside, and maintain that one emotion from the rape scene on to the end.
Attorney for the Defense (Columbia, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was a 1932 Columbia “B” called Attorney for the Defense, which I’d recorded on the same disc as The Good Bad Girl and proved to be a far, far better movie even with a weaker director, Irving Cummings (best known for the historically important but not especially good films In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain with Warner Baxter for Fox in 1929). The script was by Jo Swerling (again), based on an original story by James Kevin McGuinness, and it not only allowed for Swerling’s marvelous wit but also provided Cummings and a good but (with two exceptions, Evelyn Brent and — in a brief role — Dwight Frye) not especially scintillating cast with a strong, suspenseful melodrama, not especially innovative but at least artful and unusual in its deployment of the standard movie clichés.
It opens with a premise that seems all too topical today, in the era of the Innocence Project and exoneration through DNA evidence (though of course DNA evidence was unknown in 1932): district attorney William J. Barton (Edmund Lowe, top-billed) wins a murder case against James Wallace (Dwight Frye) based totally on circumstantial evidence. Ruth Barry (Constance Cummings), Burton’s secretary, who’s also his assistant and has an unrequited crush on him that we notice immediately even though he remains oblivious until the very last reel, has misgivings about the conviction and the evidence, but Burton presses ahead and actually gets Wallace the death penalty. Wallace is led out of the courtroom screaming that he’s innocent (and Frye plays the scene much the way he played Renfield’s maddest moments in Dracula), and only after his execution is Wallace finally exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime (and, though we’re not shown this, presumably the police check it out and find the later confession accurate), and the conscience-stricken Burton resigns as D.A. and opens a defense practice.
He also reaches out to Wallace’s widow (Dorothy Peterson) and son Paul (Douglas Haig) and offers them financial help — which she takes though Paul angrily demands that she refuse it — and Paul stays bitter even as Burton's largesse pays for his education, which leads him to the Thomas Jefferson College of Law, where he becomes a star on the football team as well as being groomed by Burton to join his practice once he passes the bar. This happens during a cut in which the film leaps forward 12 years or so — though most of the actors look about the same as they did playing their decade-younger selves and the only change is that Paul is now played by Donald Dillaway (with whom Columbia’s casting department scored a real coup because they actually found a young actor who looked believable as the offspring of Dwight Frye). Burton receives a visit from his former mistress, Val Lorraine (Evelyn Brent) — whom he dumped while he was still D.A., when he found she was two-timing him with gangster Nick Quinn (Bradley Page) — who’s ostensibly interested in getting back together with him but is actually trying to steal back a packet of letters by Quinn implicating him in the city’s corruption, which Burton is working with a citizens’ committee to try to break — and when she can’t seduce Burton himself she and Quinn decide to get back at him by sending her after Paul.
In the space of a couple more jump-cuts we find that Paul has fallen for her hook, line and sinker, enough so that he’s breaking football training with all-night drinking bouts at her apartment and he agrees to steal the letters from Burton’s office — whereupon he takes them to Val’s apartment and throws them in the fire, assuming she only wanted them because they implicated her. She retrieves them because she really wanted them for Quinn, who needs them intact — and when the drunken Paul awakes from his stupor long enough to hear Val on the phone to Quinn and realize how he’s been used, he approaches her with anger and murderous hatred in his eyes and … fadeout to Val lying dead on the floor near her bed, Paul passed out again and unaware of what happened, and Burton arriving on the scene and being discovered by the building’s Black elevator operator (Clarence Muse). The rest of the film is a courtroom melodrama as Burton is himself arrested for Val’s murder and put on trial, he refuses to offer a defense thinking that by so doing he’s shielding Paul, but ultimately he proves in court that Quinn really killed Val (why?), both he and Paul are off the hook, and he finally realizes Barry loves him and the two get together at the fadeout.
Though it’s made up of familiar elements, Attorney for the Defense is actually a quite good movie (even though one could wish for a stronger actor, like Warren William, in the male lead); Evelyn Brent is chilling in her restraint in a role that would have sent most actresses of the day to the scenery with their teeth bared (she has some of the same understatement as her fellow Josef von Sternberg “discovery,” Marlene Dietrich), and though most of it is pretty straightforwardly photographed cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (a more prestigious “name” than one usually got in a picture like this) gets a few proto-noir atmospherics into it. Indeed, the plot is sufficiently rich in moral ambiguities it’s a wonder Columbia didn’t remake it in the noir era (especially in the late 1940’s, when two actors who would have been superb in the lead, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, were both working there) unless the Production Code Administration nixed it the way they did Columbia’s plans to remake The Good Bad Girl in 1937 for its frank treatment of extramarital sexual relationships (including one involving the hero); it’s a quite literate, well-written movie at a time when Hollywood wasn’t making that many good crime films outside the gangster genre.
The film I picked out was a 1932 Columbia “B” called Attorney for the Defense, which I’d recorded on the same disc as The Good Bad Girl and proved to be a far, far better movie even with a weaker director, Irving Cummings (best known for the historically important but not especially good films In Old Arizona and Behind That Curtain with Warner Baxter for Fox in 1929). The script was by Jo Swerling (again), based on an original story by James Kevin McGuinness, and it not only allowed for Swerling’s marvelous wit but also provided Cummings and a good but (with two exceptions, Evelyn Brent and — in a brief role — Dwight Frye) not especially scintillating cast with a strong, suspenseful melodrama, not especially innovative but at least artful and unusual in its deployment of the standard movie clichés.
It opens with a premise that seems all too topical today, in the era of the Innocence Project and exoneration through DNA evidence (though of course DNA evidence was unknown in 1932): district attorney William J. Barton (Edmund Lowe, top-billed) wins a murder case against James Wallace (Dwight Frye) based totally on circumstantial evidence. Ruth Barry (Constance Cummings), Burton’s secretary, who’s also his assistant and has an unrequited crush on him that we notice immediately even though he remains oblivious until the very last reel, has misgivings about the conviction and the evidence, but Burton presses ahead and actually gets Wallace the death penalty. Wallace is led out of the courtroom screaming that he’s innocent (and Frye plays the scene much the way he played Renfield’s maddest moments in Dracula), and only after his execution is Wallace finally exonerated when someone else confesses to the crime (and, though we’re not shown this, presumably the police check it out and find the later confession accurate), and the conscience-stricken Burton resigns as D.A. and opens a defense practice.
He also reaches out to Wallace’s widow (Dorothy Peterson) and son Paul (Douglas Haig) and offers them financial help — which she takes though Paul angrily demands that she refuse it — and Paul stays bitter even as Burton's largesse pays for his education, which leads him to the Thomas Jefferson College of Law, where he becomes a star on the football team as well as being groomed by Burton to join his practice once he passes the bar. This happens during a cut in which the film leaps forward 12 years or so — though most of the actors look about the same as they did playing their decade-younger selves and the only change is that Paul is now played by Donald Dillaway (with whom Columbia’s casting department scored a real coup because they actually found a young actor who looked believable as the offspring of Dwight Frye). Burton receives a visit from his former mistress, Val Lorraine (Evelyn Brent) — whom he dumped while he was still D.A., when he found she was two-timing him with gangster Nick Quinn (Bradley Page) — who’s ostensibly interested in getting back together with him but is actually trying to steal back a packet of letters by Quinn implicating him in the city’s corruption, which Burton is working with a citizens’ committee to try to break — and when she can’t seduce Burton himself she and Quinn decide to get back at him by sending her after Paul.
In the space of a couple more jump-cuts we find that Paul has fallen for her hook, line and sinker, enough so that he’s breaking football training with all-night drinking bouts at her apartment and he agrees to steal the letters from Burton’s office — whereupon he takes them to Val’s apartment and throws them in the fire, assuming she only wanted them because they implicated her. She retrieves them because she really wanted them for Quinn, who needs them intact — and when the drunken Paul awakes from his stupor long enough to hear Val on the phone to Quinn and realize how he’s been used, he approaches her with anger and murderous hatred in his eyes and … fadeout to Val lying dead on the floor near her bed, Paul passed out again and unaware of what happened, and Burton arriving on the scene and being discovered by the building’s Black elevator operator (Clarence Muse). The rest of the film is a courtroom melodrama as Burton is himself arrested for Val’s murder and put on trial, he refuses to offer a defense thinking that by so doing he’s shielding Paul, but ultimately he proves in court that Quinn really killed Val (why?), both he and Paul are off the hook, and he finally realizes Barry loves him and the two get together at the fadeout.
Though it’s made up of familiar elements, Attorney for the Defense is actually a quite good movie (even though one could wish for a stronger actor, like Warren William, in the male lead); Evelyn Brent is chilling in her restraint in a role that would have sent most actresses of the day to the scenery with their teeth bared (she has some of the same understatement as her fellow Josef von Sternberg “discovery,” Marlene Dietrich), and though most of it is pretty straightforwardly photographed cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (a more prestigious “name” than one usually got in a picture like this) gets a few proto-noir atmospherics into it. Indeed, the plot is sufficiently rich in moral ambiguities it’s a wonder Columbia didn’t remake it in the noir era (especially in the late 1940’s, when two actors who would have been superb in the lead, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, were both working there) unless the Production Code Administration nixed it the way they did Columbia’s plans to remake The Good Bad Girl in 1937 for its frank treatment of extramarital sexual relationships (including one involving the hero); it’s a quite literate, well-written movie at a time when Hollywood wasn’t making that many good crime films outside the gangster genre.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
The Good Bad Girl (Columbia, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Good Bad Girl was a 1931 “B” from Columbia (with that delightfully cheesy early-Columbia logo with a cartoon Statue of Liberty and the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc over its head) based on a 1926 novel of the same title by one Winifred Van Duzer. It was essentially gangster movie meets soap opera, but with the soap opera elements much stronger than the gangster ones: Marcia Cameron (Mae Clarke, top-billed), is the mistress of gang boss Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis), but is disgusted with his criminal involvement and wants to leave him. Dan, in turn, threatens to kill her if she leaves — and also to murder any other man she might be involved with. Said other man is Bob Henderson (James Hall), whom she’s been seeing so secretly they’ve agreed not even to tell each other their names, sort of like Last Tango in Paris. When Dan asks Marcia to provide him an alibi for his latest murder, she refuses, and as a result he ends up in prison.
Marcia accepts Bob’s marriage proposal and the two stay together long enough that Marcia gets pregnant (which in movies usually happens the first time two people have sex!), but when she’s “outed” by the reporters covering Tyler’s trial Bob’s snooty society parents (Edmund Breese and Nance O’Neil) demand that they break up. Obediently, Bob puts his tail between his legs and heads off to Paris for a divorce, and the Hendersons then set their sights on Marcia and demand that she turn over her child to them. At first she refuses, but when Marcia’s friend and roommate Trixie (Marie Prevost in a marvelous comic-relief performance that’s the best thing in the film) shows up from the restaurant above which they live, and where they both work, with two bottles in her hand and a goodly supply of alcohol already in her body, an embarrassed Marcia decides that giving up the kid is for the best. Meanwhile, Tyler escapes from prison, determined to gun down both Marcia and Bob — only the police catch up to him in Marcia’s apartment, there’s a gun battle in which the police shoot down Tyler while miraculously both Marcia and her son escape unscathed, and Marcia attempts to hide out but her husband, having returned from France still legally married to her, catches up to her on the street and they reconcile.
The Good Bad Girl had real potential — especially with Roy William Neill directing and Jo Swerling writing the script — but there are only sporadic flare-ups of Swerling’s usual comic brilliance (notably one line in which, commenting on the news that Tyler has fled to Philadelphia to avoid arrest, Trixie says, “Nobody goes to Philadelphia unless they have to”) and Neill’s direction includes a few atmospheric shots — some of the gangland scenes are shot as just flashes of light in otherwise intense darkness, and for the final clinch Neill takes his camera above the reunited couple and ends with an odd three-quarter closeup of Mae Clarke from an odd angle above her. But most of the movie’s potential entertainment value is drowned by the relentless soapiness of the material, which is played to the max by all hands, and though unquestionably a product of the “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost (in 1937 the Production Code Administration refused to allow Columbia to remake it because it dealt with “two illicit sexual relationships”) it’s also a really dull movie that never quite builds up the ferocious energy it needed (imagine it made at Warners with one of their speedfreak directors and Bette Davis in the female lead!).
The Good Bad Girl was a 1931 “B” from Columbia (with that delightfully cheesy early-Columbia logo with a cartoon Statue of Liberty and the words “A Columbia Production” in an arc over its head) based on a 1926 novel of the same title by one Winifred Van Duzer. It was essentially gangster movie meets soap opera, but with the soap opera elements much stronger than the gangster ones: Marcia Cameron (Mae Clarke, top-billed), is the mistress of gang boss Dan Tyler (Robert Ellis), but is disgusted with his criminal involvement and wants to leave him. Dan, in turn, threatens to kill her if she leaves — and also to murder any other man she might be involved with. Said other man is Bob Henderson (James Hall), whom she’s been seeing so secretly they’ve agreed not even to tell each other their names, sort of like Last Tango in Paris. When Dan asks Marcia to provide him an alibi for his latest murder, she refuses, and as a result he ends up in prison.
Marcia accepts Bob’s marriage proposal and the two stay together long enough that Marcia gets pregnant (which in movies usually happens the first time two people have sex!), but when she’s “outed” by the reporters covering Tyler’s trial Bob’s snooty society parents (Edmund Breese and Nance O’Neil) demand that they break up. Obediently, Bob puts his tail between his legs and heads off to Paris for a divorce, and the Hendersons then set their sights on Marcia and demand that she turn over her child to them. At first she refuses, but when Marcia’s friend and roommate Trixie (Marie Prevost in a marvelous comic-relief performance that’s the best thing in the film) shows up from the restaurant above which they live, and where they both work, with two bottles in her hand and a goodly supply of alcohol already in her body, an embarrassed Marcia decides that giving up the kid is for the best. Meanwhile, Tyler escapes from prison, determined to gun down both Marcia and Bob — only the police catch up to him in Marcia’s apartment, there’s a gun battle in which the police shoot down Tyler while miraculously both Marcia and her son escape unscathed, and Marcia attempts to hide out but her husband, having returned from France still legally married to her, catches up to her on the street and they reconcile.
The Good Bad Girl had real potential — especially with Roy William Neill directing and Jo Swerling writing the script — but there are only sporadic flare-ups of Swerling’s usual comic brilliance (notably one line in which, commenting on the news that Tyler has fled to Philadelphia to avoid arrest, Trixie says, “Nobody goes to Philadelphia unless they have to”) and Neill’s direction includes a few atmospheric shots — some of the gangland scenes are shot as just flashes of light in otherwise intense darkness, and for the final clinch Neill takes his camera above the reunited couple and ends with an odd three-quarter closeup of Mae Clarke from an odd angle above her. But most of the movie’s potential entertainment value is drowned by the relentless soapiness of the material, which is played to the max by all hands, and though unquestionably a product of the “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost (in 1937 the Production Code Administration refused to allow Columbia to remake it because it dealt with “two illicit sexual relationships”) it’s also a really dull movie that never quite builds up the ferocious energy it needed (imagine it made at Warners with one of their speedfreak directors and Bette Davis in the female lead!).
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