by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles got home he and I joined each other for a movie that turned out to be as perfect an antidote to the pretensions of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee as I could have hoped for: Scott of the Antarctic, a 1947 (released 1948) production of Ealing Studios in London based on the ill-fated 1911-12 expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. Scott attempted to be the first person to reach the South Pole but was beaten by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen — who had originally planned an expedition to the North Pole but, when American Robert Peary beat him there (at least so Peary claimed; scientists and explorer buffs are still arguing over whether Peary actually got to the North Pole on April 6, 1909 as he said), Amundsen switched to an expedition to the South Pole and beat Scott there sometime between 1910 and 1912. (According to Amundsen’s Wikipedia page, “On December 14, 1911, the team of six, with 16 dogs, arrived at the Pole [90°00'S]. They arrived 35 days before Scott’s group.”)
Though its historical accuracy has been questioned (despite the presence of survivors of Scott’s expedition as technical advisers and the use of some of the actual objects carried by Scott’s crew as props), Scott of the Antarctic emerged as an awesome film. Yes, there’s a certain air of machismo about it (particularly in the relationship of Scott to his scientist friend and fellow expeditioner Dr. E. A. Wilson, played by Harold Warrenden; Scott is obsessed with being the first to get to the South Pole whereas Wilson is interested in the scientific knowledge to be gained from the expedition and couldn’t care less whether someone else reaches the geographic pole before they do), but it was also a breath of fresh air after The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Robert Flaherty said he intended Nanook of the North at least in part as a deliberate contrast to most of the movie fare of its time — he wanted his stark tale of survival and potential starvation in an Arctic environment to make the romantic drivel of most movies then (and now) seem stupid and trivial by comparison — and likewise the makers of Scott of the Antarctic, screenwriters Walter Meade and Ivor Montagu and director Charles Frend, seemed in their dramatic film to want to present a set of conflicts so basic, so elemental, that compared to it other movies would look trivial and stupid.
Scott of the Antarctic had both the advantage and disadvantage of telling a story that was already well known (especially to the audiences in Britain), and though most people who saw the movie on its first release — especially in its home country — already knew the ending (Scott and three of his men actually made it to the South Pole, albeit after Amundsen — who left them a marker to let them know they’d lost the race to the Pole — but never made it back to base camp; they died of starvation and frostbite just 11 miles away from one of the caches where they’d buried food and fuel to retrieve on the way back to base), Scott of the Antarctic remains a gripping tale, told with a stiff-upper-lip understatement that might well have been the attitude of Scott and his actual crew and certainly avoided the melodramatic excesses of earlier U.S. movies like The Lost Zeppelin and Frank Capra’s Dirigible that had also dealt with polar exploration and the tragic deaths of at least some of the men who attempted it.
The film was uniformly well acted by one of those fine ensemble casts of great British actors — John Mills played Scott (and his wife, Mary Hayley Bell — now we know where their daughter, Hayley Mills, got that first name! — was an uncredited additional dialogue writer on the project) and was the only person billed over the title; some of the actors became better known later, notably Kenneth More and Christopher Lee (whose presence puts the cast of Scott of the Antarctic one degree of separation from the cast of The Lord of the Rings!); but it’s the sort of film where the actors really lose themselves in the characters and relate to each other in a cool, matter-of-fact way that to my mind makes them far more credible as real people than all the heavings and strainings of the Method crowd that has dominated acting in the U.S. for the last 50 years or so.
We were watching Scott of the Antarctic on a public-domain DVD that was in fine shape visually — one remarkable thing about this movie is that it’s in color, and Technicolor at that (with Natalie “Make it brighter!” Kalmus herself as the Technicolor consultant), at a time when color was considered a distraction and almost never used for a downbeat story like this; but the remarkable trio of cinematographers (Jack Cardiff, documentarian Osmond Borradaile and future 2001 D.P,. Geoffrey Unsworth) manage to use color to make the piece just seem colder (literally and figuratively) and more forbidding (the contrast between the relative realism of the establishing scenes in England, the warm brown-toned interiors of the explorers’ camp and the cool whites and blues of the Antarctic landscapes themselves — actually filmed, ironically enough, in Norway) — but had a nasty low-level distortion in the soundtrack, a real pity because one of the film’s most famous aspects is its awesome musical score by Ralph Vaughan Williams, rivaling Prokofieff’s scores for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible as major works by classical composers for the film medium.
Vaughan Williams was inspired by the assignment even though director Frend used his music surprisingly sparingly — less than 500 of the 1,000 bars composed for the film were used — so Vaughan Williams recycled and expanded on his themes for the film to create a concert work, his Sinfonia Antarctica, which premiered in Britain in 1952. (Hearing the Sinfonia Antarctica after seeing the film, it’s evident why he wanted to keep working on these themes and expand their development and musical context.) Also there’s a marvelous confrontation scene between Scott and Norwegian explorer Frijtof Nansen — whom they visit before they go and who tries to talk Scott out of his decision to use motorized sleds, ponies and sled dogs to pull their cargo sleds across the Antarctic ice. “I would use dogs, dogs and dogs,” Nansen tells Scott — and as the motorized sleds break down and the ponies prove a drag on the expedition and have to be slaughtered (with no evidence that Scott and his crew thought of using them for meat — even though it would have been easy enough to preserve their flesh in the subzero Antarctic ice; let’s face it, virtually the entire continent is a giant outdoor refrigerator!), it’s obvious that Meade and Montagu mean that as their film’s “Rosebud” moment and accept that Scott’s expedition failed because he ignored the good advice of people who lived their entire lives around snow and thought he could do it differently; as it was, he had to resort to “manhauling,” which is simply explorer-speak for pulling your sleds yourselves, which wore out his men and contributed to the deaths of Scott and his team.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Miss Pinkerton (Warners as “First National,” 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was Miss Pinkerton, a 1932 Warners (in “First National” drag) programmer starring Joan Blondell (at her wisecracking best) as Miss Adams, a nurse who’s bored with the routine at her hospital (where she and her colleagues live in — an arrangement that, judging from how often it appears in early-1930’s movies, must have been fairly common then) and who gets assigned to take care of the venerable Julia Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), an 80-something (at least by her physical appearance) woman who discovers the dead body of her nephew, Herbert Wynne (Allan Lane), at the Mitchells’ old residence. Nurse Adams is really there at the behest of police detective Patten (George Brent), who hopes she’ll be able to turn up evidence to solve the crime. There’s a whole slew of sinister-looking people skulking around the old Mitchell house — this is based on a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel and features the same old-dark-house atmospherics as her previous The Bat — and it’s not all that easy to figure out who is doing what to whom, but at the end it all turns out to have been an insurance scam hatched by the family’s attorney, Arthur Glenn (Holmes Herbert), whose idea was for Wynne to marry Paula Brent (Ruth Hall) and fake his own death so Paula could collect on a life-insurance policy Wynne had bought — only Wynne and Paula fell in love for real and he decided he wanted to stick around, so Glenn actually killed him and put suspicion on Paula’s former boyfriend, Charles Elliott (Donald Dilloway).
Director Lloyd Bacon gets a few pleasing compositions and proto-noir effects but nothing like what Roland West or James Whale might have accomplished with this story, and the mystery angle is surprisingly uninteresting and unsuspenseful. I’d long wanted to see this movie because William K. Everson raved about it in The Detective in Film (“a lively adaptation of the Mary Roberts Reinhart story which managed to pack a surprising amount of ‘old house’ chills … into a more up-to-date mystery about the murder that everybody [except the heroine] wants to dismiss as suicide … Although no world-beater at the box office, Miss Pinkerton had the stuff for a sustaining series, and presumably only the monetary obstacle of paying for the story and character rights prevented this”), and Everson was usually right about his “sleeper” picks, but not this time; though it has its moments, about the only really entertaining aspect of Miss Pinkerton is Blondell’s hard-as-nails performance and vivid delivery of the wisecracks writers Niven Busch, Lillie Hayward and Robert Tasker gave her — and one can see those aspects of Blondell’s characters (as well as nice shots of her in lingerie) in plenty of other, better films. — 3/20/05
•••••
Last night’s “feature” was Miss Pinkerton, a 1932 Warners production based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart whose full title was Miss Pinkerton: Adventures of a Nurse Detective. For some reason I had thought this book was originally published in 1922 but it was actually from the same year the film was made — it was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from January 2 through February 12, 1932, and the movie (released by Warners in “First National” drag) came out on July 7, 1932, a fascinating comment on how fast the movie business moved in those days versus how many years even popular stories by “name” writers spend in “development” today. Miss Pinkerton has been called the first fiction ever written about a woman detective, which is not true (Charles has dug up plenty of examples on the Internet dating as far back as the 1890’s) — indeed, she’s not even that much of a detective.
She’s Nurse Adams (the film doesn’t give her a first name and writers Niven Busch and Lillie Heyward never give any other characters the chance to address her by one), who’s bored with the routine at the hospital where she works and eagerly accepts a request by police inspector Patten (George Brent, considerably more animated than usual; he actually delivers a credible performance as an action hero instead of looking limp as some woman’s boy toy) to meet him at the home of wealthy woman Julia Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), who fainted at the sight of her dead nephew Herbert Wynne (who isn’t played by an actor because he’s never seen alive, not even in flashbacks). The plot throws a lot of potential suspects at us even though it’s not altogether sure Herbert was murdered — the police originally suspect either an accident or suicide — and among the possible murderers (once it’s finally established Herbert was murdered) are his girlfriend, Paula Brent; her other boyfriend, Charles Elliott (Donald Dilloway); Florence Lenz (Mary Doran), stenographer; Florence’s employer, attorney Arthur Glenn (Holmes Herbert); and a few other assorted hangers-on.
The plus sides of Miss Pinkerton are Barney McGill’s and Kenneth Green’s amazing proto-noir cinematography — as a sheer piece of visual atmospherics this rivals James Whale’s amazing The Old Dark House (shot by Arthur Edeson and released in October 1932, three months after Miss Pinkerton) — and the surprising energy in the direction by the usually hacky Lloyd Bacon, who moves the action around the old-dark-house set with quite welcome pace and verve. The down side is Rinehart’s plot, which creaks along and doesn’t give us anyone other than Patten and Nurse Adams we can really root for or like — indeed, the whodunit aspect is so uninviting that by the time this film creaks to a close (it seems a lot longer than its actual 66 minutes) we really don’t care who murdered that rich guy we never got to see anyway.
What’s appealing about the movie besides the visual atmospherics is the performance by Joan Blondell, who really isn’t much of a detective but manages to get off some good lines — at one point she compares working in the hospital to “looking for wisecracks in an algebra textbook,” which will give you an idea of what this film is like — and the surprisingly good chemistry between her and Brent, maybe not that surprisingly since there’s virtually nobody else in the movie we actually like (Charles and Paula get together at the end, after it’s revealed that she was secretly married to Herbert and that big, cracking motive was one of the reasons Charles briefly topped Our Heroes’ suspect list, but we really don’t care any more than we cared who killed Herbert), especially once Aunt Julia is murdered — she had regular injections of amyl nitrate (“poppers,” they’re called now) only the killer substituted arsenic tablets for the amyl, and so Nurse Adams unknowingly prepared a lethal shot and gave it to Dr. Stewart (C. Henry Gordon) to administer — and he immediately threatens to have her prosecuted. Rinehart’s stories generally worked better on paper — she tended towards the confusing and it’s harder to follow her plots when you can’t roll back and re-read an especially hard-to-figure-out section — though the idea of a nurse-detective got used by Warners again and again, in the late 1930’s as the basis of a couple of hour-long “B”’s based on stories by Mignon G. Eberhardt and in 1941 when Miss Pinkerton was remade as The Nurse’s Secret (in the original version, at least, the nurse and her policeman boyfriend were virtually the only characters who didn’t have secrets!) with Lee Patrick and Regis Toomey in the leads. — 4/5/10
The film I picked out was Miss Pinkerton, a 1932 Warners (in “First National” drag) programmer starring Joan Blondell (at her wisecracking best) as Miss Adams, a nurse who’s bored with the routine at her hospital (where she and her colleagues live in — an arrangement that, judging from how often it appears in early-1930’s movies, must have been fairly common then) and who gets assigned to take care of the venerable Julia Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), an 80-something (at least by her physical appearance) woman who discovers the dead body of her nephew, Herbert Wynne (Allan Lane), at the Mitchells’ old residence. Nurse Adams is really there at the behest of police detective Patten (George Brent), who hopes she’ll be able to turn up evidence to solve the crime. There’s a whole slew of sinister-looking people skulking around the old Mitchell house — this is based on a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel and features the same old-dark-house atmospherics as her previous The Bat — and it’s not all that easy to figure out who is doing what to whom, but at the end it all turns out to have been an insurance scam hatched by the family’s attorney, Arthur Glenn (Holmes Herbert), whose idea was for Wynne to marry Paula Brent (Ruth Hall) and fake his own death so Paula could collect on a life-insurance policy Wynne had bought — only Wynne and Paula fell in love for real and he decided he wanted to stick around, so Glenn actually killed him and put suspicion on Paula’s former boyfriend, Charles Elliott (Donald Dilloway).
Director Lloyd Bacon gets a few pleasing compositions and proto-noir effects but nothing like what Roland West or James Whale might have accomplished with this story, and the mystery angle is surprisingly uninteresting and unsuspenseful. I’d long wanted to see this movie because William K. Everson raved about it in The Detective in Film (“a lively adaptation of the Mary Roberts Reinhart story which managed to pack a surprising amount of ‘old house’ chills … into a more up-to-date mystery about the murder that everybody [except the heroine] wants to dismiss as suicide … Although no world-beater at the box office, Miss Pinkerton had the stuff for a sustaining series, and presumably only the monetary obstacle of paying for the story and character rights prevented this”), and Everson was usually right about his “sleeper” picks, but not this time; though it has its moments, about the only really entertaining aspect of Miss Pinkerton is Blondell’s hard-as-nails performance and vivid delivery of the wisecracks writers Niven Busch, Lillie Hayward and Robert Tasker gave her — and one can see those aspects of Blondell’s characters (as well as nice shots of her in lingerie) in plenty of other, better films. — 3/20/05
•••••
Last night’s “feature” was Miss Pinkerton, a 1932 Warners production based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart whose full title was Miss Pinkerton: Adventures of a Nurse Detective. For some reason I had thought this book was originally published in 1922 but it was actually from the same year the film was made — it was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from January 2 through February 12, 1932, and the movie (released by Warners in “First National” drag) came out on July 7, 1932, a fascinating comment on how fast the movie business moved in those days versus how many years even popular stories by “name” writers spend in “development” today. Miss Pinkerton has been called the first fiction ever written about a woman detective, which is not true (Charles has dug up plenty of examples on the Internet dating as far back as the 1890’s) — indeed, she’s not even that much of a detective.
She’s Nurse Adams (the film doesn’t give her a first name and writers Niven Busch and Lillie Heyward never give any other characters the chance to address her by one), who’s bored with the routine at the hospital where she works and eagerly accepts a request by police inspector Patten (George Brent, considerably more animated than usual; he actually delivers a credible performance as an action hero instead of looking limp as some woman’s boy toy) to meet him at the home of wealthy woman Julia Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), who fainted at the sight of her dead nephew Herbert Wynne (who isn’t played by an actor because he’s never seen alive, not even in flashbacks). The plot throws a lot of potential suspects at us even though it’s not altogether sure Herbert was murdered — the police originally suspect either an accident or suicide — and among the possible murderers (once it’s finally established Herbert was murdered) are his girlfriend, Paula Brent; her other boyfriend, Charles Elliott (Donald Dilloway); Florence Lenz (Mary Doran), stenographer; Florence’s employer, attorney Arthur Glenn (Holmes Herbert); and a few other assorted hangers-on.
The plus sides of Miss Pinkerton are Barney McGill’s and Kenneth Green’s amazing proto-noir cinematography — as a sheer piece of visual atmospherics this rivals James Whale’s amazing The Old Dark House (shot by Arthur Edeson and released in October 1932, three months after Miss Pinkerton) — and the surprising energy in the direction by the usually hacky Lloyd Bacon, who moves the action around the old-dark-house set with quite welcome pace and verve. The down side is Rinehart’s plot, which creaks along and doesn’t give us anyone other than Patten and Nurse Adams we can really root for or like — indeed, the whodunit aspect is so uninviting that by the time this film creaks to a close (it seems a lot longer than its actual 66 minutes) we really don’t care who murdered that rich guy we never got to see anyway.
What’s appealing about the movie besides the visual atmospherics is the performance by Joan Blondell, who really isn’t much of a detective but manages to get off some good lines — at one point she compares working in the hospital to “looking for wisecracks in an algebra textbook,” which will give you an idea of what this film is like — and the surprisingly good chemistry between her and Brent, maybe not that surprisingly since there’s virtually nobody else in the movie we actually like (Charles and Paula get together at the end, after it’s revealed that she was secretly married to Herbert and that big, cracking motive was one of the reasons Charles briefly topped Our Heroes’ suspect list, but we really don’t care any more than we cared who killed Herbert), especially once Aunt Julia is murdered — she had regular injections of amyl nitrate (“poppers,” they’re called now) only the killer substituted arsenic tablets for the amyl, and so Nurse Adams unknowingly prepared a lethal shot and gave it to Dr. Stewart (C. Henry Gordon) to administer — and he immediately threatens to have her prosecuted. Rinehart’s stories generally worked better on paper — she tended towards the confusing and it’s harder to follow her plots when you can’t roll back and re-read an especially hard-to-figure-out section — though the idea of a nurse-detective got used by Warners again and again, in the late 1930’s as the basis of a couple of hour-long “B”’s based on stories by Mignon G. Eberhardt and in 1941 when Miss Pinkerton was remade as The Nurse’s Secret (in the original version, at least, the nurse and her policeman boyfriend were virtually the only characters who didn’t have secrets!) with Lee Patrick and Regis Toomey in the leads. — 4/5/10
cyber seduction: His Secret Life (Jaffe-Braunstein/Lifetime, 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conla • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a feature I’d encountered when I recorded it from Lifetime yesterday: cyber seduction: His Secret Life (the use of lower-case for the first two words obviously inspired by the conventions of computer nomenclature), which is basically your standard-issue high-school kid’s addiction movie except for the novelty of what he’s addicted to: Internet porn. Justin Petersen (Jeremy Sumpter) is a sophomore at a high school in the typically unnamed generic Lifetime suburban neighborhood, and he’s enough of a star swimmer (one of the few branches of athletics we’d actually believe a kid as scrawny as the tow-headed twinkie Sumpter would be good at) to have made All-State (I’m not sure exactly what it means but it’s obviously supposed to indicate that he’s good) when one of his friends sends him an e-mail directing him to the “Monica’s Web” site.
Justin has been dating a good little church-going girl named Amy (Lyndsy Fonseca) but he’s getting a bad case of blue balls because, though Amy isn’t exactly saying that she’s not going to give up her virginity until the wedding night, she does insist that the first time she has sex it has to be “special.” Meanwhile Monica, the school’s “fast” girl (played by an actress with the rather appropriate name Nicole Dicker), is going with the B.M.O.C., Nolan Mitchell (Michael Seater, who quite frankly did a good deal more for me aesthetically than the rather twerpy hero!) but is also giving Justin the eye — and once he sees her Web site (this is a Lifetime movie so naturally we’re not going to see much, but we get enough — and hear about the rest in the dialogue — that we get the idea) he’s hooked not only on her site but Internet porn in general, finding sites with names like Big Breasted Women and Teen Age Sluts (and even going far enough afield from these rather vanilla sites to get on one called Latex Bondage, which eventually earns him the unwanted nickname “Leatherboy” from his classmates).
In the space of a commercial break or two he’s on the computer every waking moment he can steal away and avoid the seemingly constant surveillance of his parents Diane (Kelly Lynch, hot as ever and looking like she could give all the actresses playing high-school girls here lessons in “sexy”) and Richard, as well as his younger (10 years old) brother Alex (Jake Scott). These people, especially his folks, are so good at spying on him and popping into his room at the most embarrassing possible moment that when the parents start complaining about financial difficulties and how they’re working too hard on their jobs, one’s tempted to suggest that they could solve all their money worries simply by applying for jobs with the CIA. Anyway, cyber seduction timidly goes where thousands of addiction stories have gone before, as Justin’s all-nighters at the Internet porn sites (and the dietary regimen of energy drinks — which for a while seem to be the only sustenance he has) plunge not only his academic grades but his performance in the pool deeper into the abyss, though ironically director Tom McLoughlin (best known for Friday the 13th, Part 6: Jason Lives, though he’s done a number of relatively interesting Lifetime movies including Odd Girl Out, The Staircase Murders and Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal) and writers Wesley Bishop and Richard Kletter keep Justin at least technically a virgin through to the end of the film: he tries with Amy while they’re supposedly doing homework together and she repulses his move, leading him to flee in disgust; then he wangles a date with Monica (by then his parents have cut him off from Internet access but he’s got on the porn sites anyway, first by hacking into the school library’s computer and disabling its blocking software and then by stealing his mom’s credit card number — whose first block of digits has five instead of four, obviously so they wouldn’t risk using someone’s real credit card number — and logging on at a convenience store’s public computer) and comes over to her place — only he decides that he wants to lose his virginity in a “special” context rather than with someone so readily, shall we say, “accessible” — and when he leaves her place he pushes her away and injures her (we’re not sure what happens but we see her bleeding from a cut in her forehead).
He gets into a confrontation with his parents — he was supposed to be at Amy’s studying and he got “outed” when she called his home to ask where he was — and eventually Nolan and a friend of his beat him up and he goes to the high school, prepared to drown himself in the swimming pool — only he sees his entire life, including the good (pre-porn addiction) parts, flash before his eyes, and he decides to live, seek therapy and give us the obligatory happy endings. There are a lot of felicitous touches in cyber seduction — from the fade-outs to blue (both the color of the swimming pool’s water and the color of an unused computer screen) and the point-of-view shots of Justin’s female classmates to indicate he's starting to objectify them and see them like he sees the Internet porn models, to the clever scene in which Diane Petersen is trying to install the “BLOXXX” software program on Justin’s computer, she can’t figure out the instructions and Alex has to help her. I also liked the scene when Justin arrives at Monica’s place and is surprised at the elaborate décor — to which she replies, “I’ll bet you thought I was just a cheap slut from a low-rent district.” (I came up with a comeback for him: “No, I thought you were a cheap slut from a high-rent district.”) But those occasional moments of creativity couldn’t make up for the well-worn paths trod by most of this movie — even though at least McLoughlin’s direction was straightforward and avoided the digital “flanging” and other cheap tricks with which other Lifetime directors have marred their works — and there wasn’t even any interesting soft-core porn to offer us bits of the titillation Justin was supposedly jeopardizing his grades, his athletics, his family, his girlfriend and ultimately his life to seek on the Net!
I ran a feature I’d encountered when I recorded it from Lifetime yesterday: cyber seduction: His Secret Life (the use of lower-case for the first two words obviously inspired by the conventions of computer nomenclature), which is basically your standard-issue high-school kid’s addiction movie except for the novelty of what he’s addicted to: Internet porn. Justin Petersen (Jeremy Sumpter) is a sophomore at a high school in the typically unnamed generic Lifetime suburban neighborhood, and he’s enough of a star swimmer (one of the few branches of athletics we’d actually believe a kid as scrawny as the tow-headed twinkie Sumpter would be good at) to have made All-State (I’m not sure exactly what it means but it’s obviously supposed to indicate that he’s good) when one of his friends sends him an e-mail directing him to the “Monica’s Web” site.
Justin has been dating a good little church-going girl named Amy (Lyndsy Fonseca) but he’s getting a bad case of blue balls because, though Amy isn’t exactly saying that she’s not going to give up her virginity until the wedding night, she does insist that the first time she has sex it has to be “special.” Meanwhile Monica, the school’s “fast” girl (played by an actress with the rather appropriate name Nicole Dicker), is going with the B.M.O.C., Nolan Mitchell (Michael Seater, who quite frankly did a good deal more for me aesthetically than the rather twerpy hero!) but is also giving Justin the eye — and once he sees her Web site (this is a Lifetime movie so naturally we’re not going to see much, but we get enough — and hear about the rest in the dialogue — that we get the idea) he’s hooked not only on her site but Internet porn in general, finding sites with names like Big Breasted Women and Teen Age Sluts (and even going far enough afield from these rather vanilla sites to get on one called Latex Bondage, which eventually earns him the unwanted nickname “Leatherboy” from his classmates).
In the space of a commercial break or two he’s on the computer every waking moment he can steal away and avoid the seemingly constant surveillance of his parents Diane (Kelly Lynch, hot as ever and looking like she could give all the actresses playing high-school girls here lessons in “sexy”) and Richard, as well as his younger (10 years old) brother Alex (Jake Scott). These people, especially his folks, are so good at spying on him and popping into his room at the most embarrassing possible moment that when the parents start complaining about financial difficulties and how they’re working too hard on their jobs, one’s tempted to suggest that they could solve all their money worries simply by applying for jobs with the CIA. Anyway, cyber seduction timidly goes where thousands of addiction stories have gone before, as Justin’s all-nighters at the Internet porn sites (and the dietary regimen of energy drinks — which for a while seem to be the only sustenance he has) plunge not only his academic grades but his performance in the pool deeper into the abyss, though ironically director Tom McLoughlin (best known for Friday the 13th, Part 6: Jason Lives, though he’s done a number of relatively interesting Lifetime movies including Odd Girl Out, The Staircase Murders and Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal) and writers Wesley Bishop and Richard Kletter keep Justin at least technically a virgin through to the end of the film: he tries with Amy while they’re supposedly doing homework together and she repulses his move, leading him to flee in disgust; then he wangles a date with Monica (by then his parents have cut him off from Internet access but he’s got on the porn sites anyway, first by hacking into the school library’s computer and disabling its blocking software and then by stealing his mom’s credit card number — whose first block of digits has five instead of four, obviously so they wouldn’t risk using someone’s real credit card number — and logging on at a convenience store’s public computer) and comes over to her place — only he decides that he wants to lose his virginity in a “special” context rather than with someone so readily, shall we say, “accessible” — and when he leaves her place he pushes her away and injures her (we’re not sure what happens but we see her bleeding from a cut in her forehead).
He gets into a confrontation with his parents — he was supposed to be at Amy’s studying and he got “outed” when she called his home to ask where he was — and eventually Nolan and a friend of his beat him up and he goes to the high school, prepared to drown himself in the swimming pool — only he sees his entire life, including the good (pre-porn addiction) parts, flash before his eyes, and he decides to live, seek therapy and give us the obligatory happy endings. There are a lot of felicitous touches in cyber seduction — from the fade-outs to blue (both the color of the swimming pool’s water and the color of an unused computer screen) and the point-of-view shots of Justin’s female classmates to indicate he's starting to objectify them and see them like he sees the Internet porn models, to the clever scene in which Diane Petersen is trying to install the “BLOXXX” software program on Justin’s computer, she can’t figure out the instructions and Alex has to help her. I also liked the scene when Justin arrives at Monica’s place and is surprised at the elaborate décor — to which she replies, “I’ll bet you thought I was just a cheap slut from a low-rent district.” (I came up with a comeback for him: “No, I thought you were a cheap slut from a high-rent district.”) But those occasional moments of creativity couldn’t make up for the well-worn paths trod by most of this movie — even though at least McLoughlin’s direction was straightforward and avoided the digital “flanging” and other cheap tricks with which other Lifetime directors have marred their works — and there wasn’t even any interesting soft-core porn to offer us bits of the titillation Justin was supposedly jeopardizing his grades, his athletics, his family, his girlfriend and ultimately his life to seek on the Net!
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Tight Spot (Columbia, 1955)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran an interesting if flawed movie I’d recorded at the tail end of the recent Ginger Rogers festival on TCM: Tight Spot, a 1955 Columbia production whose plot synopsis in the TCM program guide — “A district attorney tries to get a hardboiled woman to testify against the Mob” — made me chuckle if only because I could readily have imagined the same stars, Rogers and Edward G. Robinson, making a movie with the same basic premise when they were both at Warners in 1932-33. The 1955 version features Rogers as Sherry Conley, an inmate of a New York state women’s prison (for crimes the script by William Bowers, based on a play called Dead Pigeon by Leonard Kantor, keeps ambiguous) whose credo is, “Don’t volunteer!” — don’t let the authorities talk you into pulling extra duty and, when they order you to do something, do nothing more than exactly what they ordered (what unionists call “working to rule”).
The opening scene shows three men in a car — all of them look like gangsters (one of the good things about this movie is the marvelous ambiguity about who are the cops, who are the crooks and whether or not there’s really all that meaningful a difference in the way they operate) but only one of them is. The gangster of the bunch is Tonelli (Alfred Linder), who’s on his way to the Manhattan courthouse to testify against crime boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene, pre-Bonanza and playing the head of a very different kind of “family”) but isn’t all that confident about the ability of his police escorts to get him to the courtroom in one piece. His suspicions are all too well founded; while he’s walking up the long set of steps leading to the building he’s mowed down by two Costain-hired snipers hiding out in buildings across the street (didn’t the New York City courts have a back entrance in 1955? They do on Law and Order!), and all of a sudden prosecutor Lloyd Hallett (Edward G. Robinson) is without his star witness.
The only other person who can put Costain away, it turns out, is Our Anti-Heroine, Sherry Conley, who before she went to prison four years earlier briefly dated Tonelli and took a yacht trip with him and Costain, during which she saw Costain engage in criminal activity as the yacht stopped on various Caribbean islands, which will give federal prosecutor Hallett the grounds to have him deported as an undesirable alien (to where, Scotland?) and thereby break up his 30-year crime ring. Accordingly, Hallett gets Sherry out of prison, accompanied by police officer Vince Striker (Brian Keith) and Mrs. Willoughby (Katherine Anderson), a matron at the prison whose task is to guard Sherry and make sure she doesn’t try to escape. Virtually the whole rest of the movie takes place inside the hotel room where Hallett is holding Sherry and trying to talk her into testifying — a single-set device that betrays this movie’s origins as a play and makes the whole thing more than a bit dull — and where Hallett is convinced he’s been able to hide her from Costain’s gang, only two people from the gang learn her whereabouts, take a couple on another floor of the hotel hostage and use them to gain access to the fire escape and get into Sherry’s room. Sherry and Vince are both shot but survive; Mrs. Willoughby is not so lucky — determined not to report her own injuries until the hotel doctor has treated Sherry’s, she gets sick and is taken to a hospital, where her condition is touch-and-go for two days. (One gimmick of the plot is that the story starts on a Friday and Costain’s trial is scheduled to resume on Monday, so Hallett has only three days to convince her to testify and if he can’t get her to do so, he’ll have to dismiss his case.)
Vince leaves the hotel room and is seemingly kidnapped by Costain’s minions, until [spoiler alert!] in a dramatic plot reversal that works mainly because it’s the only one in the script (Kantor and Bowers don’t pile reversal on top of reversal the way Tony Gilroy and other irresponsible writers of thriller movies do now!), it turns out that Vince, whom we’ve seen up until then as an incorruptible, unscrupulous Dirty Harry prototype, is actually on Costain’s payroll and he’s been the one who fingered both Tonelli and Sherry for the previous attacks. He’s instructed to unlock the window in the bathroom of Sherry’s hotel room at 8 that night, just before she’s transferred out of the room and moved to the city jail, to admit Costain’s latest hit man — but in the event he has a change of heart (the fact that he’s fallen in love with Sherry in the meantime had something to do with that!) and shields her with his own body, so he and the hit man kill each other and Sherry is moved by Mrs. Willoughby’s death (earlier the two women had formed a bond after Sherry learned that Mr. Willoughby died in the Normandy invasion and Mrs. Willoughby has been working as a prison guard to raise enough money to support her daughter) to testify after all.
Tight Spot is a movie that could have been better — the director, Phil Karlson (a usually underrated thriller and noir specialist), is clearly more inspired once he can get himself, his actors and his cameras out of that damned hotel room and shoot scenes taking place out of doors; and by 1955 Ginger Rogers had been playing respectable women so long she had a hard time reverting back to the proletarian character, surviving by her wits, she’d done so well in her early days at Warners and RKO pre-Astaire. (Robinson was also a bit too avuncular by 1955 to play his character as well as he conceivably could have in 1932.) But it’s also got some quite intriguing touches, including the annoying TV show by country-fried entertainer “Mississippi Mac” (Doye O’Dell) that seems to be the only thing on during the Weekend From Hell Sherry is obliged to stay in that hotel room — later it’s explained that it’s a telethon — and the marvelous shot of Sherry and Vince dancing after she gets him to turn off the TV and put on a radio (which is broadcasting a quite beautiful ballad called “Forbidden Love” whose singer, unidentified on imdb.com, is a very good Eckstine-style baritone) and he pushes his gun belt farther back on his waist so she doesn’t grab the gun away from him and use it to escape. (After Ginger Rogers quit musicals, just about any shot of her dancing was welcome.)
Tight Spot was a good movie that could have been even better — though I can see why William Bowers did only minimal “opening up” (the tension of having most of it take place in one room was pretty basic to the structure of Kantor’s source play, even though it risks monotony — and sometimes achieves it — on screen) — and Rogers’ performance, superficial at first, gains power and force as the film goes on and she’s able to make her transformation (almost a female version of the Bogart character) from disinterested, apathetic prisoner to raging figure of anti-Mob vengeance completely believable.
I ran an interesting if flawed movie I’d recorded at the tail end of the recent Ginger Rogers festival on TCM: Tight Spot, a 1955 Columbia production whose plot synopsis in the TCM program guide — “A district attorney tries to get a hardboiled woman to testify against the Mob” — made me chuckle if only because I could readily have imagined the same stars, Rogers and Edward G. Robinson, making a movie with the same basic premise when they were both at Warners in 1932-33. The 1955 version features Rogers as Sherry Conley, an inmate of a New York state women’s prison (for crimes the script by William Bowers, based on a play called Dead Pigeon by Leonard Kantor, keeps ambiguous) whose credo is, “Don’t volunteer!” — don’t let the authorities talk you into pulling extra duty and, when they order you to do something, do nothing more than exactly what they ordered (what unionists call “working to rule”).
The opening scene shows three men in a car — all of them look like gangsters (one of the good things about this movie is the marvelous ambiguity about who are the cops, who are the crooks and whether or not there’s really all that meaningful a difference in the way they operate) but only one of them is. The gangster of the bunch is Tonelli (Alfred Linder), who’s on his way to the Manhattan courthouse to testify against crime boss Benjamin Costain (Lorne Greene, pre-Bonanza and playing the head of a very different kind of “family”) but isn’t all that confident about the ability of his police escorts to get him to the courtroom in one piece. His suspicions are all too well founded; while he’s walking up the long set of steps leading to the building he’s mowed down by two Costain-hired snipers hiding out in buildings across the street (didn’t the New York City courts have a back entrance in 1955? They do on Law and Order!), and all of a sudden prosecutor Lloyd Hallett (Edward G. Robinson) is without his star witness.
The only other person who can put Costain away, it turns out, is Our Anti-Heroine, Sherry Conley, who before she went to prison four years earlier briefly dated Tonelli and took a yacht trip with him and Costain, during which she saw Costain engage in criminal activity as the yacht stopped on various Caribbean islands, which will give federal prosecutor Hallett the grounds to have him deported as an undesirable alien (to where, Scotland?) and thereby break up his 30-year crime ring. Accordingly, Hallett gets Sherry out of prison, accompanied by police officer Vince Striker (Brian Keith) and Mrs. Willoughby (Katherine Anderson), a matron at the prison whose task is to guard Sherry and make sure she doesn’t try to escape. Virtually the whole rest of the movie takes place inside the hotel room where Hallett is holding Sherry and trying to talk her into testifying — a single-set device that betrays this movie’s origins as a play and makes the whole thing more than a bit dull — and where Hallett is convinced he’s been able to hide her from Costain’s gang, only two people from the gang learn her whereabouts, take a couple on another floor of the hotel hostage and use them to gain access to the fire escape and get into Sherry’s room. Sherry and Vince are both shot but survive; Mrs. Willoughby is not so lucky — determined not to report her own injuries until the hotel doctor has treated Sherry’s, she gets sick and is taken to a hospital, where her condition is touch-and-go for two days. (One gimmick of the plot is that the story starts on a Friday and Costain’s trial is scheduled to resume on Monday, so Hallett has only three days to convince her to testify and if he can’t get her to do so, he’ll have to dismiss his case.)
Vince leaves the hotel room and is seemingly kidnapped by Costain’s minions, until [spoiler alert!] in a dramatic plot reversal that works mainly because it’s the only one in the script (Kantor and Bowers don’t pile reversal on top of reversal the way Tony Gilroy and other irresponsible writers of thriller movies do now!), it turns out that Vince, whom we’ve seen up until then as an incorruptible, unscrupulous Dirty Harry prototype, is actually on Costain’s payroll and he’s been the one who fingered both Tonelli and Sherry for the previous attacks. He’s instructed to unlock the window in the bathroom of Sherry’s hotel room at 8 that night, just before she’s transferred out of the room and moved to the city jail, to admit Costain’s latest hit man — but in the event he has a change of heart (the fact that he’s fallen in love with Sherry in the meantime had something to do with that!) and shields her with his own body, so he and the hit man kill each other and Sherry is moved by Mrs. Willoughby’s death (earlier the two women had formed a bond after Sherry learned that Mr. Willoughby died in the Normandy invasion and Mrs. Willoughby has been working as a prison guard to raise enough money to support her daughter) to testify after all.
Tight Spot is a movie that could have been better — the director, Phil Karlson (a usually underrated thriller and noir specialist), is clearly more inspired once he can get himself, his actors and his cameras out of that damned hotel room and shoot scenes taking place out of doors; and by 1955 Ginger Rogers had been playing respectable women so long she had a hard time reverting back to the proletarian character, surviving by her wits, she’d done so well in her early days at Warners and RKO pre-Astaire. (Robinson was also a bit too avuncular by 1955 to play his character as well as he conceivably could have in 1932.) But it’s also got some quite intriguing touches, including the annoying TV show by country-fried entertainer “Mississippi Mac” (Doye O’Dell) that seems to be the only thing on during the Weekend From Hell Sherry is obliged to stay in that hotel room — later it’s explained that it’s a telethon — and the marvelous shot of Sherry and Vince dancing after she gets him to turn off the TV and put on a radio (which is broadcasting a quite beautiful ballad called “Forbidden Love” whose singer, unidentified on imdb.com, is a very good Eckstine-style baritone) and he pushes his gun belt farther back on his waist so she doesn’t grab the gun away from him and use it to escape. (After Ginger Rogers quit musicals, just about any shot of her dancing was welcome.)
Tight Spot was a good movie that could have been even better — though I can see why William Bowers did only minimal “opening up” (the tension of having most of it take place in one room was pretty basic to the structure of Kantor’s source play, even though it risks monotony — and sometimes achieves it — on screen) — and Rogers’ performance, superficial at first, gains power and force as the film goes on and she’s able to make her transformation (almost a female version of the Bogart character) from disinterested, apathetic prisoner to raging figure of anti-Mob vengeance completely believable.
Make It Happen (The Mayhem Project/Weinstein Co., 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a TV-movie on Lifetime called Make It Happen and also the program I recorded just after it, an Austin City Limits episode featuring the band Wilco that turned out to be a rerun that I’d not only recorded but dubbed to CD the last time it was on. Make It Happen was billed as a Lifetime premiere but certainly seemed like something I’d watched before: one imdb.com commentator compared it to the 2000 theatrical film Coyote Ugly (imdb.com also mentions Make It Happen as having had a theatrical release in 2008 — and it’s in a 2.35-1 wide-screen theatrical ratio rather than the 1.33-1 standard TV or 1.78-1 wide-screen TV, which lends credence to the idea that this was shot for theatres), though in that one the heroine was an aspiring songwriter who got a job as a bartender rather than, as here, an aspiring dancer who got a job in a strip club.
I remember an earlier movie I’d seen from Lifetime called Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, which was also about an aspiring performer (an actress rather than a dancer) who got a job in a strip club, and which went through many of the same plot points as this one but was a much more powerful work that got considerably more out of them. Make It Happens begins in a small town in Indiana, where Lauryn Kirk (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) works as the bookkeeper for a garage owned by her brother Joel (John Reardon), who inherited it from their parents — mom died of a lingering illness (presumably cancer, though the script by Duane Adler and Nicole Avril, based on Adler’s so-called “original” story, doesn’t specify) when Lauryn was 10, and their dad croaked of a heart attack after Lauryn returned from a dance session a half-hour too late to save him.
Lauryn has dreamed all her life of becoming a dancer — though she works in a garage instead of a steel mill, the first glimpse we see of her she’s practicing in an attic full of dance equipment and proletarian props that immediately puts us in mind of Flashdance — and she has an audition scheduled for the Chicago School of Music and Dance. She flunks the audition after the supercilious man running it says he’s looking for something “more feminine” — the fact that she’s chosen a bump-and-grind routine to modern-day disco has obviously turned the guy off (though he wasn’t any happier with the previous auditioner, who did ballet) — and he tells her he wants to see something that’s continuously emotional rather than just showing flashes of emotion. Unwilling to give up on her dreams, she decides to stay on in Chicago and is taken in as a roommate by Dana (Tessa Thompson), an African-American woman who works as a bartender at Ruby’s strip club. Dana recommends Lauryn as a bookkeeper, and though she has the usual boring boyfriend from back home Lauryn is instantly attracted to the club’s D.J., Russ (Riley Smith) — who is about a head shorter than John Reardon but otherwise looks almost exactly like him, not surprising since in the establishing scenes in Indiana the bond between Lauryn and Joel has been drawn as so intense and physical it looks like the movie is about to head to Die Walküre territory any moment.
Lauryn practices a dance on the club’s empty stage when she’s taking a break from bookkeeping and thinks the place is otherwise deserted, but Russ spots her and recommends her to the management as potential on-stage talent, and within a few jump cuts she’s being pressed into service à la Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street when one dancer has called in sick and another is late on a night when there are a lot of well-heeled “regulars” in the place. Lauryn becomes a star at the club and she and Russ fall in love — it turns out Russ is a composer (though what he composes is the same neo-disco crap we’ve been hearing all movie) and he once was in a band that had a record deal, only he walked out on it when the “suits” at the record company started telling him how to make music — and things pretty much continue in that vein until, to absolutely no hardened moviegoer’s surprise, Joel walks into Ruby’s one night — having driven up from Indiana to the big bad city to find his sister, and already pissed at her because he checked with the Chicago School of Music and Dance and found she was not enrolled there — and there’s the predictable scene in which he’s shocked, shocked! to find his sister doing primitive dance routines and taking off her clothes for a bunch of … well, normally in movie strip clubs the clientele is a bunch of old horny straight guys, but in this one the men seem to be younger and there are actually a surprising number of women off stage as well as on.
Out of shame as well as a sense of obligation (without her services as a bookkeeper the garage is about to go out of business), Lauryn returns to Indiana and her old job and blows off the promise of a second audition to the Chicago School of Music and Dance (they failed to fill two of their 20 annual slots for new students in the first round) — until Joel has a change of heart and says, “I can’t ask you to give up your dream just to save mine.” Accordingly, she goes back to Chicago, does the audition and nails it — even though her dance routine doesn’t look all that difference from what she performed before (though at least it’s done to Lady Gaga’s song “Just Dance,” by far the best piece of music in the movie and one more indication that the singer/songwriter whose true name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is a much more interesting talent than the common run of “dance music” practitioners, largely because of her ability to write well-structured songs that actually communicate an emotional message instead of just being vehicles for beats).
Though I wasn’t all that impressed by Confessions of a Go-Go Girl either — that tacky exploitation title didn’t help and I wrote that the film had some interesting premises but got “bobbled in the execution” — it’s a far richer film than Make It Happen, mainly because its writers (Jane Morley, source play; Lenore Kletter, script) showed the stripper’s life as itself seductive. Over the course of Confessions, their heroine became more attracted to it and in particular to the power over men she acquired through learning how to manipulate them with her sexuality — a potentially strong and insightful plot point Adler and Avril totally ignored — and the heroine of Confessions goes through the same sequence of a failed audition, a strip-club career, and a second audition that succeeds, and also had the clichéd scene of her family (in Confessions it was her brother and her father and her pre-stripper boyfriend who all caught her at once!) discovering her in performance and being shocked, but its ending was much more moving because it showed her recovering from the wreck she’d made of her life by stripping and using that as the material for the audition piece that finally got her into school to learn the sort of straight-and-narrow performing that was her ambition in the first place.
I guess I was hoping Make It Happen would be an improvement on Confessions of a Go-Go Girl by ducking the stupid clichés and making more of the contrast between the heroine’s two worlds; instead it stuck with the clichés and simply got less out of them, carefully avoiding the potentially dark sides of their story (in Make It Happen we barely meet the strip club owner — in fact, I’m not sure we ever do — and there’s no hint of the drug use real-life women and men who sell their sexuality in this fashion frequently indulge in) and setting itself up as another Flashdance — and that wasn’t the only classic film they rip off; in one sequence Lauryn and two of her colleagues do a dance routine with umbrellas and “rain” (actually sequins dropped from the ceiling, after the filmmakers realized their original idea to use real water would have risked the limbs of the dancers) straight out of Singin’ in the Rain.
I watched a TV-movie on Lifetime called Make It Happen and also the program I recorded just after it, an Austin City Limits episode featuring the band Wilco that turned out to be a rerun that I’d not only recorded but dubbed to CD the last time it was on. Make It Happen was billed as a Lifetime premiere but certainly seemed like something I’d watched before: one imdb.com commentator compared it to the 2000 theatrical film Coyote Ugly (imdb.com also mentions Make It Happen as having had a theatrical release in 2008 — and it’s in a 2.35-1 wide-screen theatrical ratio rather than the 1.33-1 standard TV or 1.78-1 wide-screen TV, which lends credence to the idea that this was shot for theatres), though in that one the heroine was an aspiring songwriter who got a job as a bartender rather than, as here, an aspiring dancer who got a job in a strip club.
I remember an earlier movie I’d seen from Lifetime called Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, which was also about an aspiring performer (an actress rather than a dancer) who got a job in a strip club, and which went through many of the same plot points as this one but was a much more powerful work that got considerably more out of them. Make It Happens begins in a small town in Indiana, where Lauryn Kirk (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) works as the bookkeeper for a garage owned by her brother Joel (John Reardon), who inherited it from their parents — mom died of a lingering illness (presumably cancer, though the script by Duane Adler and Nicole Avril, based on Adler’s so-called “original” story, doesn’t specify) when Lauryn was 10, and their dad croaked of a heart attack after Lauryn returned from a dance session a half-hour too late to save him.
Lauryn has dreamed all her life of becoming a dancer — though she works in a garage instead of a steel mill, the first glimpse we see of her she’s practicing in an attic full of dance equipment and proletarian props that immediately puts us in mind of Flashdance — and she has an audition scheduled for the Chicago School of Music and Dance. She flunks the audition after the supercilious man running it says he’s looking for something “more feminine” — the fact that she’s chosen a bump-and-grind routine to modern-day disco has obviously turned the guy off (though he wasn’t any happier with the previous auditioner, who did ballet) — and he tells her he wants to see something that’s continuously emotional rather than just showing flashes of emotion. Unwilling to give up on her dreams, she decides to stay on in Chicago and is taken in as a roommate by Dana (Tessa Thompson), an African-American woman who works as a bartender at Ruby’s strip club. Dana recommends Lauryn as a bookkeeper, and though she has the usual boring boyfriend from back home Lauryn is instantly attracted to the club’s D.J., Russ (Riley Smith) — who is about a head shorter than John Reardon but otherwise looks almost exactly like him, not surprising since in the establishing scenes in Indiana the bond between Lauryn and Joel has been drawn as so intense and physical it looks like the movie is about to head to Die Walküre territory any moment.
Lauryn practices a dance on the club’s empty stage when she’s taking a break from bookkeeping and thinks the place is otherwise deserted, but Russ spots her and recommends her to the management as potential on-stage talent, and within a few jump cuts she’s being pressed into service à la Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street when one dancer has called in sick and another is late on a night when there are a lot of well-heeled “regulars” in the place. Lauryn becomes a star at the club and she and Russ fall in love — it turns out Russ is a composer (though what he composes is the same neo-disco crap we’ve been hearing all movie) and he once was in a band that had a record deal, only he walked out on it when the “suits” at the record company started telling him how to make music — and things pretty much continue in that vein until, to absolutely no hardened moviegoer’s surprise, Joel walks into Ruby’s one night — having driven up from Indiana to the big bad city to find his sister, and already pissed at her because he checked with the Chicago School of Music and Dance and found she was not enrolled there — and there’s the predictable scene in which he’s shocked, shocked! to find his sister doing primitive dance routines and taking off her clothes for a bunch of … well, normally in movie strip clubs the clientele is a bunch of old horny straight guys, but in this one the men seem to be younger and there are actually a surprising number of women off stage as well as on.
Out of shame as well as a sense of obligation (without her services as a bookkeeper the garage is about to go out of business), Lauryn returns to Indiana and her old job and blows off the promise of a second audition to the Chicago School of Music and Dance (they failed to fill two of their 20 annual slots for new students in the first round) — until Joel has a change of heart and says, “I can’t ask you to give up your dream just to save mine.” Accordingly, she goes back to Chicago, does the audition and nails it — even though her dance routine doesn’t look all that difference from what she performed before (though at least it’s done to Lady Gaga’s song “Just Dance,” by far the best piece of music in the movie and one more indication that the singer/songwriter whose true name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is a much more interesting talent than the common run of “dance music” practitioners, largely because of her ability to write well-structured songs that actually communicate an emotional message instead of just being vehicles for beats).
Though I wasn’t all that impressed by Confessions of a Go-Go Girl either — that tacky exploitation title didn’t help and I wrote that the film had some interesting premises but got “bobbled in the execution” — it’s a far richer film than Make It Happen, mainly because its writers (Jane Morley, source play; Lenore Kletter, script) showed the stripper’s life as itself seductive. Over the course of Confessions, their heroine became more attracted to it and in particular to the power over men she acquired through learning how to manipulate them with her sexuality — a potentially strong and insightful plot point Adler and Avril totally ignored — and the heroine of Confessions goes through the same sequence of a failed audition, a strip-club career, and a second audition that succeeds, and also had the clichéd scene of her family (in Confessions it was her brother and her father and her pre-stripper boyfriend who all caught her at once!) discovering her in performance and being shocked, but its ending was much more moving because it showed her recovering from the wreck she’d made of her life by stripping and using that as the material for the audition piece that finally got her into school to learn the sort of straight-and-narrow performing that was her ambition in the first place.
I guess I was hoping Make It Happen would be an improvement on Confessions of a Go-Go Girl by ducking the stupid clichés and making more of the contrast between the heroine’s two worlds; instead it stuck with the clichés and simply got less out of them, carefully avoiding the potentially dark sides of their story (in Make It Happen we barely meet the strip club owner — in fact, I’m not sure we ever do — and there’s no hint of the drug use real-life women and men who sell their sexuality in this fashion frequently indulge in) and setting itself up as another Flashdance — and that wasn’t the only classic film they rip off; in one sequence Lauryn and two of her colleagues do a dance routine with umbrellas and “rain” (actually sequins dropped from the ceiling, after the filmmakers realized their original idea to use real water would have risked the limbs of the dancers) straight out of Singin’ in the Rain.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Alice in Wonderland (Irwin Allen/Columbia, 1985)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
We started running a feature afterwards, a recent DVD reissue of Alice in Wonderland, but eventually put it on hold after the Mad Hatter scene. I had picked this up because I’d thought it was the charming 1966 Hanna-Barbera cartoon TV-movie based on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, in which Sammy Davis, Jr. voiced the Cheshire Cat and sang a great little novelty song to Alice (voiced by Janet Waldo), “What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” What fooled me was that Davis was listed on the cast list of this one, too, but not in the same role; instead of a cartoon it was a live-action version with the actors in heavy and probably uncomfortable costumes to make them look like the famous John Tenniel drawings that accompanied the original edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
What I also hadn’t realized is that this piece is three hours long, and was originally filmed by Irwin Allen Productions as a two-part TV miniseries that, instead of the usual conflation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, actually filmed both Carroll’s source novels as separate entities and linked them simply as two parts of a miniseries. At first the film promised pure delight: production designers John Bristow, Phillip M. Jefferies and Kenneth Sharp and costume designers John Peacock and Paul Zastupnevich did a fantastic job reproducing Tenniel’s illustrations (Martha Raye — in her final role — as the Duchess was especially convincing), director Harry Harris kept things moving at a good clip, Paul Zindel’s screenplay did justice to the books and Natalie Gregory had a proper winsomeness as Alice (and her sister in the framing sequence was played by Natalie’s real sister, Sharee, a nice touch).
Then the people started singing songs by Steve Allen, which were wildly variable in quality — Charles said the songs were doing to Alice in Wonderland what the songs in The Wiz had done to The Wizard of Oz. Sammy Davis, Jr. played the Caterpillar and got to perform “Father William,” a song for which Allen wisely stuck to Lewis Carroll’s original lyric and allowed Davis to do as rap — it’s certainly the high point of the movie so far. Unfortunately, for most of the rest of the film Allen chose to write his own words as well as music, and his songs achieve a sort of oddly literate banality that jars this fantasy back to earth every time we think the filmmakers have fully caught Lewis Carroll’s imagination on film. We got too tired to follow the movie anymore and turned it off after the Mad Hatter scene (the Hatter was played by Anthony Newley, and though I haven’t seen the current theatrical release by Tim Burton I couldn’t help but compare him with Johnny Depp and find him wanting), a bit disappointed that the Hatter and the March Hare (Roddy McDowall) did not try to put the Dormouse (Arte Johnson from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) into the teapot at the end as Lewis Carroll specified.
Still, I’d like to run the rest of it, if only out of fairness and to follow my rule not to stop reading a book or watching a movie before the end just in case it gets better; my own experience as a writer and publisher has convinced me it’s so difficult to create anything than anybody who goes through the effort to do so at least should have their creation read or viewed start-to-finish before it’s judged. — 4/2/10
•••••
We ended up watching the rest of the 1985 TV-movie Alice in Wonderland, a bit of an endurance test because it was originally shown as a two-part miniseries and it’s three hours and four minutes long in total, and it got a bit better as it went on. The pluses in this one are the marvelous production design (by John Bristow, Phillip M. Jefferies, and Kenneth Sharp , with Ross Bellah and Hub Braden as art directors and Audrey Blasdel-Goddard and Robert de Vestel as set decorators), which do a great job of reproducing the dazzling John Tenniel illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s original novels and bringing them to life in vivid color; the glowing cinematography by Fred J. Koenekamp — how nice to see a film full of rich, vibrant hues instead of the dirty greens and browns that dominate most movies made today! — and an appropriately insouciant, if a bit “precious,” performance by Natalie Gregory in the title role.
The minuses are a set of mediocre songs by Steve Allen (sometimes drawing on the original poems inserted by Carroll for their lyrics, more often not) and a clunky script by Paul Zindel; one gets the impression Zindel would have wanted to stick closely to the original, and through much of the first half the movie and the books (not that I’ve read them in decades!) tracked quite closely, but he also had to provide cues for all those songs and he had to allow for the introduction of a horror element in the form of the Jabberwocky, which in this version isn’t just the name of a poem inserted into the story but an actual on-screen monster (which in Carroll’s text was spelled “Jabberwock” — “Jabberwocky” was the name of the poem, not the creature!) brought in at the end of episode one as a serial-style cliffhanger to menace Alice on the wrong side of the looking glass.
L. Frank Baum may (or may not) have been influenced by Alice in Wonderland when he wrote The Wizard of Oz, but clearly the makers of this movie — Zindel and director Harry Harris, along with producer Irwin Allen (after the 1970’s disaster cycle that had made his reputation had basically petered out) — were influenced by Wizard, less by Baum’s book than the 1939 film version. In this version, Alice is constantly expressing her desire to go home; she and the other characters break into song frequently; there’s a Lion in part two whose costume distinctly resembles Bert Lahr’s in the Wizard film (as does Ringo Starr’s as the Mock Turtle earlier on); and Alice’s killing of the Jabberwock is clearly meant to provide a turning point in the plot comparable to Dorothy’s killing the Wicked Witch of the West (though the ending is so ambiguous it’s not at all clear just how the Jabberwock dies).
I remember a 1960’s Reader’s Digest article that compared Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as fantasies and argued that they reflected their respective countries’ visions of the world: Carroll’s Alice wandered politely through Wonderland and observed it but did nothing to change it or use it to benefit herself; Dorothy pushed her way through Oz like a frontierswoman, organizing the put-upon to help themselves and taking charge of the situation when their hoped-for benefactor, the Wizard, turned out to be a fake. The fact that L. Frank Baum wrote what was essentially a quest narrative for his pre-pubescent heroine while Lewis Carroll contented himself with a series of dazzling vignettes also made Wizard easier to adapt into a film than Alice — the Alice books simply don’t come equipped with a strong through-line the way The Wizard of Oz does.
This seems to have thrown, to some degree, everyone who’s tried to film Alice in Wonderland — and this 1985 attempt probably comes closer to the 1933 Paramount movie (also a live-action Alice and also employing an all-star cast, though in both films some of them are virtually unrecognizable under the heavy makeup used to make them resemble Tenniel’s drawings of Carroll’s characters) than any other version, both in its strengths and its weaknesses. They even cast Jonathan Winters as Humpty Dumpty, probably because in the 1933 version W. C. Fields had played him (though Fields merely wore an egg-shaped mask and dangled his head, with a couple of small prop legs attached, over a wall set, while Winters got a full-body egg costume) and Irwin Allen wanted a similarly legendary comedian for his version.
Anyone familiar (even dimly so) with the Carroll originals is going to be judging a film of Alice in Wonderland based on how close they come — and this one’s pretty close when the burden of the music and the added horror (not only the Jabberwock but also a sort of giant eagle which threatens Alice, and forces her to hide deep inside a forest, earlier in part two) don’t get in Zindel’s way. The quality of the songs improved a bit as the music went on — the Queen of Hearts’ song “Off With Their Heads!” is clever, dark and appropriately Carroll-esque even though the words (except for the title phrase) aren’t his — it’s not composer Steve Allen’s fault that Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did the basic concept even better in Hart’s last song, “To Keep My Love Alive,” from the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — and Alice gets the lovely ballad, “Why Do People … ” — even though as a song it’s as far away from “Over the Rainbow” as Natalie Gregory’s good but still child-like voice is from Judy Garland’s. I also liked Robert Morley as the King of Hearts — yes, he was clearly recycling his performance as Louix XVI in the Norma Shearer Marie Antoinette from 47 years earlier, but he was still a joy to watch — and it was an interesting touch to cast Tweedledum and Tweedledee as opposite genders, and a real-life (straight) married couple, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, at that (though I missed their argument over the rattle).
Some of the other cast members, including Carol Channing as the White Queen, were there for sheer camp value — watching Channing here is being reminded of how much she looked like a drag queen and how accurate the late San Francisco Chronicle critic John Wassermann was when he described Channing as “the world’s only female female impersonator.” (Actually, she’s not the only one; in the 1960’s, well before Victor/Victoria, Robin Tyler famously lived it in real life as a woman participating in an impersonation show whose other impersonators were all men in drag.) It’s an interesting movie, maybe not as entertaining as it could have been — for all the beauty of that Wonderland scenery, all those perfectly colored and trimmed bushes and greener-than-green foliage do get wearing after a while, and there are also technical glitches like the clearly visible cable suspending the Jabberwock (played by actor Tom McLoughlin in a tacky suit that would have embarrassed the Godzilla people) from the studio ceiling when he’s supposed to be flying. It gets to be an endurance test after a while, though the dazzling production design and the sheer depth of Lewis Carroll’s imagination also make it entertaining. — 4/3/10
We started running a feature afterwards, a recent DVD reissue of Alice in Wonderland, but eventually put it on hold after the Mad Hatter scene. I had picked this up because I’d thought it was the charming 1966 Hanna-Barbera cartoon TV-movie based on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, in which Sammy Davis, Jr. voiced the Cheshire Cat and sang a great little novelty song to Alice (voiced by Janet Waldo), “What’s a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” What fooled me was that Davis was listed on the cast list of this one, too, but not in the same role; instead of a cartoon it was a live-action version with the actors in heavy and probably uncomfortable costumes to make them look like the famous John Tenniel drawings that accompanied the original edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
What I also hadn’t realized is that this piece is three hours long, and was originally filmed by Irwin Allen Productions as a two-part TV miniseries that, instead of the usual conflation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, actually filmed both Carroll’s source novels as separate entities and linked them simply as two parts of a miniseries. At first the film promised pure delight: production designers John Bristow, Phillip M. Jefferies and Kenneth Sharp and costume designers John Peacock and Paul Zastupnevich did a fantastic job reproducing Tenniel’s illustrations (Martha Raye — in her final role — as the Duchess was especially convincing), director Harry Harris kept things moving at a good clip, Paul Zindel’s screenplay did justice to the books and Natalie Gregory had a proper winsomeness as Alice (and her sister in the framing sequence was played by Natalie’s real sister, Sharee, a nice touch).
Then the people started singing songs by Steve Allen, which were wildly variable in quality — Charles said the songs were doing to Alice in Wonderland what the songs in The Wiz had done to The Wizard of Oz. Sammy Davis, Jr. played the Caterpillar and got to perform “Father William,” a song for which Allen wisely stuck to Lewis Carroll’s original lyric and allowed Davis to do as rap — it’s certainly the high point of the movie so far. Unfortunately, for most of the rest of the film Allen chose to write his own words as well as music, and his songs achieve a sort of oddly literate banality that jars this fantasy back to earth every time we think the filmmakers have fully caught Lewis Carroll’s imagination on film. We got too tired to follow the movie anymore and turned it off after the Mad Hatter scene (the Hatter was played by Anthony Newley, and though I haven’t seen the current theatrical release by Tim Burton I couldn’t help but compare him with Johnny Depp and find him wanting), a bit disappointed that the Hatter and the March Hare (Roddy McDowall) did not try to put the Dormouse (Arte Johnson from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In) into the teapot at the end as Lewis Carroll specified.
Still, I’d like to run the rest of it, if only out of fairness and to follow my rule not to stop reading a book or watching a movie before the end just in case it gets better; my own experience as a writer and publisher has convinced me it’s so difficult to create anything than anybody who goes through the effort to do so at least should have their creation read or viewed start-to-finish before it’s judged. — 4/2/10
•••••
We ended up watching the rest of the 1985 TV-movie Alice in Wonderland, a bit of an endurance test because it was originally shown as a two-part miniseries and it’s three hours and four minutes long in total, and it got a bit better as it went on. The pluses in this one are the marvelous production design (by John Bristow, Phillip M. Jefferies, and Kenneth Sharp , with Ross Bellah and Hub Braden as art directors and Audrey Blasdel-Goddard and Robert de Vestel as set decorators), which do a great job of reproducing the dazzling John Tenniel illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s original novels and bringing them to life in vivid color; the glowing cinematography by Fred J. Koenekamp — how nice to see a film full of rich, vibrant hues instead of the dirty greens and browns that dominate most movies made today! — and an appropriately insouciant, if a bit “precious,” performance by Natalie Gregory in the title role.
The minuses are a set of mediocre songs by Steve Allen (sometimes drawing on the original poems inserted by Carroll for their lyrics, more often not) and a clunky script by Paul Zindel; one gets the impression Zindel would have wanted to stick closely to the original, and through much of the first half the movie and the books (not that I’ve read them in decades!) tracked quite closely, but he also had to provide cues for all those songs and he had to allow for the introduction of a horror element in the form of the Jabberwocky, which in this version isn’t just the name of a poem inserted into the story but an actual on-screen monster (which in Carroll’s text was spelled “Jabberwock” — “Jabberwocky” was the name of the poem, not the creature!) brought in at the end of episode one as a serial-style cliffhanger to menace Alice on the wrong side of the looking glass.
L. Frank Baum may (or may not) have been influenced by Alice in Wonderland when he wrote The Wizard of Oz, but clearly the makers of this movie — Zindel and director Harry Harris, along with producer Irwin Allen (after the 1970’s disaster cycle that had made his reputation had basically petered out) — were influenced by Wizard, less by Baum’s book than the 1939 film version. In this version, Alice is constantly expressing her desire to go home; she and the other characters break into song frequently; there’s a Lion in part two whose costume distinctly resembles Bert Lahr’s in the Wizard film (as does Ringo Starr’s as the Mock Turtle earlier on); and Alice’s killing of the Jabberwock is clearly meant to provide a turning point in the plot comparable to Dorothy’s killing the Wicked Witch of the West (though the ending is so ambiguous it’s not at all clear just how the Jabberwock dies).
I remember a 1960’s Reader’s Digest article that compared Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as fantasies and argued that they reflected their respective countries’ visions of the world: Carroll’s Alice wandered politely through Wonderland and observed it but did nothing to change it or use it to benefit herself; Dorothy pushed her way through Oz like a frontierswoman, organizing the put-upon to help themselves and taking charge of the situation when their hoped-for benefactor, the Wizard, turned out to be a fake. The fact that L. Frank Baum wrote what was essentially a quest narrative for his pre-pubescent heroine while Lewis Carroll contented himself with a series of dazzling vignettes also made Wizard easier to adapt into a film than Alice — the Alice books simply don’t come equipped with a strong through-line the way The Wizard of Oz does.
This seems to have thrown, to some degree, everyone who’s tried to film Alice in Wonderland — and this 1985 attempt probably comes closer to the 1933 Paramount movie (also a live-action Alice and also employing an all-star cast, though in both films some of them are virtually unrecognizable under the heavy makeup used to make them resemble Tenniel’s drawings of Carroll’s characters) than any other version, both in its strengths and its weaknesses. They even cast Jonathan Winters as Humpty Dumpty, probably because in the 1933 version W. C. Fields had played him (though Fields merely wore an egg-shaped mask and dangled his head, with a couple of small prop legs attached, over a wall set, while Winters got a full-body egg costume) and Irwin Allen wanted a similarly legendary comedian for his version.
Anyone familiar (even dimly so) with the Carroll originals is going to be judging a film of Alice in Wonderland based on how close they come — and this one’s pretty close when the burden of the music and the added horror (not only the Jabberwock but also a sort of giant eagle which threatens Alice, and forces her to hide deep inside a forest, earlier in part two) don’t get in Zindel’s way. The quality of the songs improved a bit as the music went on — the Queen of Hearts’ song “Off With Their Heads!” is clever, dark and appropriately Carroll-esque even though the words (except for the title phrase) aren’t his — it’s not composer Steve Allen’s fault that Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart did the basic concept even better in Hart’s last song, “To Keep My Love Alive,” from the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — and Alice gets the lovely ballad, “Why Do People … ” — even though as a song it’s as far away from “Over the Rainbow” as Natalie Gregory’s good but still child-like voice is from Judy Garland’s. I also liked Robert Morley as the King of Hearts — yes, he was clearly recycling his performance as Louix XVI in the Norma Shearer Marie Antoinette from 47 years earlier, but he was still a joy to watch — and it was an interesting touch to cast Tweedledum and Tweedledee as opposite genders, and a real-life (straight) married couple, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, at that (though I missed their argument over the rattle).
Some of the other cast members, including Carol Channing as the White Queen, were there for sheer camp value — watching Channing here is being reminded of how much she looked like a drag queen and how accurate the late San Francisco Chronicle critic John Wassermann was when he described Channing as “the world’s only female female impersonator.” (Actually, she’s not the only one; in the 1960’s, well before Victor/Victoria, Robin Tyler famously lived it in real life as a woman participating in an impersonation show whose other impersonators were all men in drag.) It’s an interesting movie, maybe not as entertaining as it could have been — for all the beauty of that Wonderland scenery, all those perfectly colored and trimmed bushes and greener-than-green foliage do get wearing after a while, and there are also technical glitches like the clearly visible cable suspending the Jabberwock (played by actor Tom McLoughlin in a tacky suit that would have embarrassed the Godzilla people) from the studio ceiling when he’s supposed to be flying. It gets to be an endurance test after a while, though the dazzling production design and the sheer depth of Lewis Carroll’s imagination also make it entertaining. — 4/3/10
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Last of the Wild Horses (Lippert/Screen Guild, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I squeezed in a movie: Last of the Wild Horses, the last item we hadn’t seen on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archive disc #22 — coming from 1994, the later years of the show’s run on Comedy Central but early in Mike Nelson’s tenure as host. Last of the Wild Horses was a Robert Lippert “Screen Classics” production from 1948 — unusual in that another producer, Carl K. Hittleman, was credited but Lippert directed it himself (with an uncredited assist from Paul Landres, who officially worked on the film as an editor and eventually took over the direction of Sam Katzman’s rock ’n’ roll movies after Fred F. Sears died — Landres was a decent hack but as far as editors-turned-directors go, he was no David Lean!) based on a script by Jack Harvey. The film had a better-than-usual cast for a “B” Western — the lead was James Ellison, who hadn’t had much of a career but he had co-starred with Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here; and one of his two (two?) love interests was Mary Beth Hughes, the marvelous femme fatale of Anthony Mann’s The Great Flamarion), while Douglass Dumbrille (veteran bad guy of two Marx Brothers movies) played a disabled rancher who had the one morally ambiguous part in the entire movie — and given that Dumbrille was almost always “typed” as outwardly respectable, inwardly slimy villains, moral ambiguity was a good thing for him. There’s also Grady Sutton, pretty much wasted in a comedy bit (and not surprisingly the MST3K crew referenced the plot of The Bank Dick in their jokes about him!).
Harvey seemed to have channeled his script out of some memory bank of Western clichés; Ellison plays Duke Barnum, a mystery man who rides into town and rustles up some horse rustlers — we know who’s good and who’s bad because this is literally the sort of movie in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black — forcing them not only to give up the horses they’ve stolen but to walk the three miles back to town without shoes (though their socks look awfully clean and white for people who have supposedly been riding hard for several days). While he’s riding through the country he meets up with Jane Cooper (Jane Frazee, Universal leading lady in the early 1940’s and fill-in for Dale Evans on some of the later Roy Rogers films for Republic) and they have a meet-cute when his horse loses a shoe. She’s the daughter of rancher Charlie Cooper (Douglass Dumbrille), who seems sympathetic when we first meet him but later is revealed to be a tough old bird who insists that all the supposedly “wild” horses in the area (there had to be something that justifies the title!) are his, and is making himself a nuisance enforcing this against other locals.
The real bad guys are Riley Morgan (Reed Hadley) and his henchmen, Rocky Rockford (William Haade) and Hank Davis (Rory Mallinson), who kill Charlie Cooper and frame Duke for the crime by strangling Charlie with an old bandana of Duke’s which they picked up when he dropped it on the range (apparently one of them, or screenwriter Harvey, had read Othello). Duke is sentenced to hang but escapes after the verdict comes in, and while the sheriff (James Millican) wants him taken alive so he can be hanged legally (maybe The Ox-Bow Incident was on Harvey’s reading list, too), but Riley wants to lynch him, especially after the town postmaster (or something), Remedy Williams (Olin Howlin), a more annoying than usual comic-relief character, gets a letter from Hank Davis, who’s quit Riley’s gang and left town, hinting that there’s a truth behind Charlie’s murder that hasn’t been told yet. Riley corners Duke and they have a fight in a barn that’s the kinkiest thing in this whole movie — especially when Riley whips Duke across the face — and indeed that starts the film (after a brief prologue explaining that the film was made in Jacksonville, Oregon, where it takes place, because though 1948-vintage cars roll down its streets it’s otherwise pretty much the way it was in the days of the Old West) and the rest of the story up to that point is then told in flashback — but eventually Riley is dispatched, Duke is exonerated, he and Jane get together and his other girlfriend, Terry Williams (Mary Beth Hughes) — whose connection to the action is never quite explained — loses out (a pity, since she’s a more interesting character and played by a far better actress).
Last of the Wild Horses is a marvelously poetic title that deserves a better movie; as it is, it’s a farrago of Western clichés but at least professionally done and lacking the sheer ineptitude of things like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and some of the other films MST3K lampooned — and frankly, their lampoon of this film wasn’t that good: they got a few funny bits in (notably their comment on seeing the sign at the gate to Charlie Cooper’s “Double C Ranch” and reading the name as “Double Cranch,” which sounds like a breakfast cereal) but their writing for their own interstital segments was a good deal funnier than their ridicule of the film — notably a sequence early on in which by attempting to transfer a matter dematerializer during an ion storm in space, the principals on both sides are sent to a parallel universe in which Mike Nelson is a scantily-clad evil genius and Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV Frank briefly got to ridicule the movie.
I squeezed in a movie: Last of the Wild Horses, the last item we hadn’t seen on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archive disc #22 — coming from 1994, the later years of the show’s run on Comedy Central but early in Mike Nelson’s tenure as host. Last of the Wild Horses was a Robert Lippert “Screen Classics” production from 1948 — unusual in that another producer, Carl K. Hittleman, was credited but Lippert directed it himself (with an uncredited assist from Paul Landres, who officially worked on the film as an editor and eventually took over the direction of Sam Katzman’s rock ’n’ roll movies after Fred F. Sears died — Landres was a decent hack but as far as editors-turned-directors go, he was no David Lean!) based on a script by Jack Harvey. The film had a better-than-usual cast for a “B” Western — the lead was James Ellison, who hadn’t had much of a career but he had co-starred with Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here; and one of his two (two?) love interests was Mary Beth Hughes, the marvelous femme fatale of Anthony Mann’s The Great Flamarion), while Douglass Dumbrille (veteran bad guy of two Marx Brothers movies) played a disabled rancher who had the one morally ambiguous part in the entire movie — and given that Dumbrille was almost always “typed” as outwardly respectable, inwardly slimy villains, moral ambiguity was a good thing for him. There’s also Grady Sutton, pretty much wasted in a comedy bit (and not surprisingly the MST3K crew referenced the plot of The Bank Dick in their jokes about him!).
Harvey seemed to have channeled his script out of some memory bank of Western clichés; Ellison plays Duke Barnum, a mystery man who rides into town and rustles up some horse rustlers — we know who’s good and who’s bad because this is literally the sort of movie in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black — forcing them not only to give up the horses they’ve stolen but to walk the three miles back to town without shoes (though their socks look awfully clean and white for people who have supposedly been riding hard for several days). While he’s riding through the country he meets up with Jane Cooper (Jane Frazee, Universal leading lady in the early 1940’s and fill-in for Dale Evans on some of the later Roy Rogers films for Republic) and they have a meet-cute when his horse loses a shoe. She’s the daughter of rancher Charlie Cooper (Douglass Dumbrille), who seems sympathetic when we first meet him but later is revealed to be a tough old bird who insists that all the supposedly “wild” horses in the area (there had to be something that justifies the title!) are his, and is making himself a nuisance enforcing this against other locals.
The real bad guys are Riley Morgan (Reed Hadley) and his henchmen, Rocky Rockford (William Haade) and Hank Davis (Rory Mallinson), who kill Charlie Cooper and frame Duke for the crime by strangling Charlie with an old bandana of Duke’s which they picked up when he dropped it on the range (apparently one of them, or screenwriter Harvey, had read Othello). Duke is sentenced to hang but escapes after the verdict comes in, and while the sheriff (James Millican) wants him taken alive so he can be hanged legally (maybe The Ox-Bow Incident was on Harvey’s reading list, too), but Riley wants to lynch him, especially after the town postmaster (or something), Remedy Williams (Olin Howlin), a more annoying than usual comic-relief character, gets a letter from Hank Davis, who’s quit Riley’s gang and left town, hinting that there’s a truth behind Charlie’s murder that hasn’t been told yet. Riley corners Duke and they have a fight in a barn that’s the kinkiest thing in this whole movie — especially when Riley whips Duke across the face — and indeed that starts the film (after a brief prologue explaining that the film was made in Jacksonville, Oregon, where it takes place, because though 1948-vintage cars roll down its streets it’s otherwise pretty much the way it was in the days of the Old West) and the rest of the story up to that point is then told in flashback — but eventually Riley is dispatched, Duke is exonerated, he and Jane get together and his other girlfriend, Terry Williams (Mary Beth Hughes) — whose connection to the action is never quite explained — loses out (a pity, since she’s a more interesting character and played by a far better actress).
Last of the Wild Horses is a marvelously poetic title that deserves a better movie; as it is, it’s a farrago of Western clichés but at least professionally done and lacking the sheer ineptitude of things like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and some of the other films MST3K lampooned — and frankly, their lampoon of this film wasn’t that good: they got a few funny bits in (notably their comment on seeing the sign at the gate to Charlie Cooper’s “Double C Ranch” and reading the name as “Double Cranch,” which sounds like a breakfast cereal) but their writing for their own interstital segments was a good deal funnier than their ridicule of the film — notably a sequence early on in which by attempting to transfer a matter dematerializer during an ion storm in space, the principals on both sides are sent to a parallel universe in which Mike Nelson is a scantily-clad evil genius and Dr. Clayton Forrester and TV Frank briefly got to ridicule the movie.
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