Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville (BBC-TV, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday I watched the Sherlock episode on PBS, a rerun from the second season of Mark Gatiss’s rather quirky show (he created it as well as playing Mycroft Holmes on-screen) called The Hounds of Baskerville, which like the other shows in the Sherlock series grabs a story from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon but twists and turns it into unrecognizable shapes and forms. In this version, “Baskerville” is the name, not of a family and its ancestral mansion in Dartmoor, but a British military research laboratory working on genetically engineering animals to serve as military weapons. The script by Gatiss and Steven Moffatt centers around Henry Knight (Russell Tovey), a 20-something man who’s never recovered from the shock of seeing his father suffer a sudden heart attack, collapse and die on the moor, and incorporates the classic exchange from the Conan Doyle original in which the young man says he saw footprints near the body and, when asked if they were a man’s or a woman’s, says, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Holmes is struck, less by the tale itself than by the young man’s use of the word “hound” rather than “dog” to describe a canine creature — he regards the word “hound” as an archaic term no one in early 21^st century England would use (of course this is a modern-dress version of the Holmes saga). Holmes and Watson travel to Dartmoor together to investigate (in the original book they went there separately) and the script incorporates quite a few elements from the original, including the lights on the moor — in this version they seem to be signaling in Morse code, but the code when deciphered is simply a set of initials — and there are some odd bits reflecting the 21^st century’s mores (as opposed to the late-Victorian era when Conan Doyle wrote the original stories) in which Watson’s attempts to cruise girls in Dartmoor keep getting undone by the widely held belief that he and Holmes are a Gay couple.

The story incorporates some of the character names from the original, though both Stapleton and Mortimer are sex-changed — Mortimer (Sasha Behar) is Henry Knight’s therapist and Stapleton (Amelia Bullmore) is a researcher at the Baskerville lab — and Dr. Frankland (Clive Mantle), a minor character in the book, is the director of the lab (and also a rather queeny Gay man who openly cruises Watson). Even more so than the other Sherlock episodes I’ve seen, this one is long on atmosphere but short on plot coherence, and in an O.K. final twist it turns out that the “hound” is simply an illusion and what the lab has actually developed (or, more accurately, refined from a product previously produced by the U.S. military in Liberty, Indiana) is a drug that when surreptitiously slipped to its victim makes the person think they’re being chased by a gigantic hound from hell. (Holmes deduces that the drug exists, and it’s being administered via sugar, when he realizes that the only people who’ve seen the hound are those who’ve taken sugar-sweetened coffee in the local diner; Watson, who drinks his coffee without sugar, was therefore not exposed.) I’m not sure why this show has the reputation it does — to me the CBS-TV series Elementary seems a much better translation of the Holmes mythos to the modern day, at least in part because it’s not trying to insert all these cutesy-poo twists on the canon — the episodes I’ve seen are clever but all have suffered from their writers thinking themselves far more clever than they really are, and the show also suffers from Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes, since he emphasizes the neurotic, driven aspects of the character and not the supremely logical ones.

The Conspirators (Warner Bros., 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched The Conspirators, a 1944 film from Warner Bros. that was obviously trying to be another Casablanca — just about every studio in Hollywood tried to make their own Casablanca and Warners, having made the real one, did more of them than anybody else (including a little-known one called To the Victor that attempted to keep the cycle going after World War II was over). TCM showed this as part of their July “Star of the Month” tribute to Paul Henried — though, in an intriguing coincidence I didn’t notice but Charles did, they also showed this film, in which Henried plays a fictional Dutchman named Vincent Van der Luyn, right after Lust for Life, in which Kirk Douglas played a real Dutchman named Vincent Van Gogh. The Conspirators began life as a novel by Frederic Prokosch and got turned into a screenplay by Vladimir Pozner and Leo Rosten, with additional dialogue by Jack Moffitt — of these writers Rosten is the only one I’d otherwise heard of — and was directed by a hot new up-and-coming director on the Warners lot, Jean Negulesco. The film reunited three members of the Casablanca cast — Henried as freedom fighter Vincent Van der Luyn (and this time, unlike in Casablanca, we actually get to see him blowing up things and otherwise engaging in resistance-type action — in Casablanca we rather had to take it on faith that this somewhat prissy, stuck-up actor was supposed to be an action hero), Sydney Greenstreet as retired romance novelist turned underground leader Ricardo Quintanilla, and Peter Lorre as underground go-fer Jan Bernazsky.

The plot is very convoluted and takes place in Lisbon (where, you’ll remember, all the characters in Casablanca were trying to get to), where Vincent has come on some sort of secret mission to contact a resistance agent named Jennings (Monte Blue) — only on his way to his rendezvous he’s sidetracked at the Café Imperio by another sort of rendezvous with drop-dead gorgeous woman of mystery Irene Von Mohr (Hedy Lamarr, top-billed — Warners had tried to get her for Casablanca but her home studio, MGM, didn’t loan her out; I guess MGM wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice!), who joins him at his table and then just as mysteriously disappears on him. Vincent car-jacks her and drives her around the Lisbon coastline (“played,” as usual in a Hollywood film then, by Malibu), and eventually learns that she spent six months in Dachau and was rescued by a German official, Hugo von Mohr (Victor Francen), who got her released and married her. (So this time it’s Paul Henried who’s playing the “other man.”) Unfortunately the Germans are one step ahead of the rest and murder not only Jennings’ contact but Jennings himself — and they set it up so Vincent looks guilty. Eventually the plot does the one-of-the-resistance-fighters-is-really-a-traitor number, and Quintanilla is convinced it’s Vincent until Vincent mentions something about an eagle — which turns out to be a rare Dutch coin that Jennings was supposed to present to his handlers once they smuggled him into the Netherlands. To no one’s surprise it turns out that Victor Van Horn, who’s a Nazi posing as a resistance fighter posing as a Nazi, is the traitor, and there’s a grim final shootout staged in relentless chiaroscuro darkness in which Vincent finally dispatches Victor — only to say a tearful goodbye to Irene because he’s going to have to go to the Netherlands to take Jennings’ place in the underground. The Conspirators has the air of a factory product about it — the writers were all too consciously rechanneling the elements that had made Casablanca a great film as well as an enormous box-office success — but overall, despite its ridiculously complicated and confusing plot line, it’s a triumph of style over substance, with Casablanca cinematographer Arthur Edeson showing his marvelous mastery of dark atmosphere and Henried turning in an acceptable performance even if he can’t bring Bogart’s complexity to the role (but then, who could?).

Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert (PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I screened an intriguing PBS concert special, the annual summer night concert of the Vienna Philharmonic (the actual German name, emblazoned in white letters on black in front of the orchestra, is Wiener Philharmoniker), which was a sort-of tribute to Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, arguably the two greatest opera composers of all time, since 2013 is the bicentennial of both their birthdates. The concert was held in the outdoor garden of Schönbrunn, the big palace of the Austro-Hungarian Emperors way back when, though it was held in a fierce drizzle and a lot of the audience members brought (and needed) umbrellas. The concert was conducted by Lorin Maazel, a 70-something American who began his conducting career as a five-year-old child prodigy and, it’s estimated, had conducted 7,000 performances of symphonies and operas in his career. Like Erich Leinsdorf, Maazel is a competent but not particularly inspired conductor; he gets the musicians to play well and stay together but one misses the power and emotion this music can have in greater hands. It also didn’t help that the concert featured only one vocal soloist, tenor Michael Schade, or that he sang on only two of the nine pieces performed (at least on the PBS telecast; the actual concert could have been longer). The program began with the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aïda — not a piece that works that well out of context — and then the Act I prelude from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (as one critic remarked, Wagner filled Meistersinger with good old German counterpoint just to prove he could — he was commonly written off in his day as an autodidact composer who had never mastered the fundamentals and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously as a composer like his great contemporary rivals, first Schumann and then Brahms). Then Michael Schade came on for the aria “La mia letizia infondere” from Verdi’s I Lombardi, which he sang decently enough but rather raggedly until the final, beautifully floated high note. The orchestra then played the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde — alas, without a soprano to do the vocal part in the Liebestod. Instrumental arrangements of the piece bother me — especially towards the end, when the arrangements generally leave out Isolde’s part and therefore avoid the stunning dissonances between the vocal and orchestral lines that give the piece much of its power. (The best instrumental version of the Liebestod I’ve heard was Franz Waxman’s arrangement for the film Humoresque, in which Isaac Stern as John Garfield’s violin double played the soprano line and turned the piece into a quite effective concerto movement for violin, piano and orchestra.)

Then Schade came on for the high point of the evening, “In fernem Land” from Lohengrin (the standard short version, alas), which he sang magisterially; perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that as a German singer he’d be more comfortable in German than Italian opera, but he sang the aria beautifully, keeping mostly in head tones until the big climax and managing to portray the complex emotions of the character and the scene: the mystical connection to the Grail order, the longing for human companionship and contact, the hurt at Elsa’s betrayal of his trust. (He did the piece well enough I’d like to hear him in a complete Lohengrin sometime.) The remaining selections were the overture from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino (and the comparison between Verdi’s overtures and Wagner’s proved how much more bombastic Verdi was; Verdi fans often argue that his operas were warmer and more humanistic since they dealt with real people and not spiritual or quasi-spiritual beings, but as an orchestral composer Wagner ran rings around Verdi, possibly at least in part because the Germans had so much more of a symphonic tradition than the Italians) and what were announced as encores: the “Ride of the Valkyries” and two pieces by Johann Strauss, Jr. — the well-known Wiener Blut waltz (given a rather bowdlerized translation as “Vienna Spirit” when the title is really “Vienna Blood”) and a lesser-known light piece called Long Live the Magic: A Quick Polka. I could have done without the Strauss pieces — just before the first one, the unctuous announcer said, “What’s a concert in Vienna without a Strauss waltz?” (though I’m sure there are many times the Vienna Philharmonic plays in concert in which it does not play anything by the waltz-writing Strausses!) — and gone for more Wagner and Verdi instead, like the prelude to Lohengrin for the former and the Act I and III preludes to La Traviata for the latter — and I also wished they’d got another vocal soloist (like a soprano for the Liebestod who could also have joined Schade in a Verdi soprano-tenor duet) and a stronger conductor than Maazel — who exemplifies the usual rule that long-lived conductors tend to get slower as they age (though some, like Mengelberg and Toscanini, got faster); Wiener Blut was taken so slowly it lost all its passion and drive, and only one couple tried waltzing to it on camera! Still, this was an enjoyable concert, and as Charles pointed out, here, as in the Vienna Philharmonic’s fabled New Year’s concerts (which are quite popularly devoted to light music in general and the Johann Strauss family in particular), both the musicians and the audience seem to be having fun. There isn’t the deadly-dull way classical music usually gets presented in the U.S., as what Charles called a sort of musical castor oil: “Here, listen to this, it’s good for you!”

Pearl Jam 20 (Tremolo Productions, Vinyl Films, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched a quite different music show from the Vienna Philharmonic concert we’d recorded a week before: Pearl Jam 20, an odd 2011 documentary on the Seattle-based rock band Pearl Jam whose title is a pun on the fact that they’d been together 20 years as a band when the film was made and their first album was called Pearl Jam 10. (Their second album was called Vs. and sometimes the title was expressed as “Two Fives” — i.e., 10 — though in the film the band members refer to the album as “Versus.”) The film was directed by Cameron Crowe, former rock critic turned film director, and he recalled that he had moved to Seattle in the early 1980’s and found the music scene dramatically different than what he’d been used to in L.A., where the bands were fiercely competitive and tried to elbow each other out of potential “discovery” by the music business. In Seattle, unlike in L.A. or New York, Crowe said, the members of various bands were often good friends and helped each other. Crowe seemed to think that was unique in rock scenes, though the history of music is full of city-based “scenes” in which there was a lot of mentoring and mutual support going on: in New Orleans in the first two decades of the 20^th century (despite the fabled “cutting contests” in which bands competed on the street, there was also quite a lot of support, as witness the way Louis Armstrong was mentored by King Oliver and Kid Ory), in Liverpool in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (before the Beatles broke and the rest of the British music biz descended on Liverpool like locusts) and definitely in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s (before he had a record deal himself, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead came to L.A. to participate in the Jefferson Airplane’s sessions for their second — and commercial breakthrough — album, Surrealistic Pillow, and even suggested the title).

Pearl Jam grew out of an earlier band called Mother Love Bone, featuring a charismatic blond singer named Andrew Wood who had a major drug problem — he was coming out of rehab when he joined the band, which the other members should have taken as a warning. Mother Love Bone lasted long enough to make one album (for Mercury, in 1989) before Wood died of a heroin overdose — what I hadn’t known was that he lingered on two days on life support, kept alive just long enough so his family and friends could see him one last time before they pulled the plug, which made a macabre impression on the other two key members of Mother Love Bone, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament. Rather than attempt to continue Mother Love Bone with a replacement singer, Gossard and Ament briefly went their separate ways and Gossard started organizing another band, which Ament joined. They also participated in a side project called Temple of the Dog organized by Chris Cornell, leader of Soundgarden (actually the first of the late-1980’s/early-1990’s bands from Seattle to sign with a major label, though since “alternative” or “grunge” weren’t established as musical categories yet Soundgarden was marketed by their label, A&M, as heavy metal) and Andrew Wood’s former roommate, which Gossard and Ament in their interviews in the film seem to regard as a sort of transition project between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam. (I bought the Mother Love Bone album on CD in the early 1990’s and was startled and rather disappointed, mainly because Wood’s voice was a typical heavy-metal screech and seemed far less flexible and dramatic than Eddie Vedder’s.) Eddie Vedder, who would become Pearl Jam’s singer, was living in San Diego when the band sent him, along with several other candidates, an instrumental demo tape to which they wanted prospective singers to add a vocal; they seem to have been impressed with him largely because he was the only person they were considering who sang in his own style and did not try to imitate Andrew Wood. They were expecting a long, slow career buildup, years of playing in clubs and touring as bigger artists’ opening acts until they developed an independent following and slowly built up their reputation and their record sales; instead their first album, 10, exploded onto the charts thanks largely to their explosive performances on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. The story is familiar: an early career peak, a gradual drop-off in record sales — though their concerts consistently drew well (largely, one suspects, to the hair-raising stage act they did; Vedder in particular became known for scaling the stage machinery and then leaping from it into the audience, and throughout those tours the other band members were worried he’d injure, incapacitate or kill himself) until they picked a (losing) battle with the Ticketmaster combine, which had grown from a ticket broker to a giant promoter with exclusive contracts with so many venues it became almost impossible for a rock band, even one at Pearl Jam’s level of commercial success, to do a tour without them.

Some of the most grimly amusing parts of the movie show the mutual incomprehension between Pearl Jam and the people in the U.S. government when they came to Washington, D.C. to testify that Ticketmaster was an antitrust-violating monopoly; in one sequence, one of the people interrogating them asks, “Don’t you have an exclusive recording contract?,” and one of the band members says that’s an irrelevant question — alas, missing the chance to make the obvious point: when Pearl Jam wanted to record, they had several companies offering them contracts and they were able to choose between them, but when they wanted to do live tours in major venues, it was Ticketmaster or nothing (or, as the film depicts, shows in out-of-the-way locations, including an outdoor venue where the show got rained out; perhaps they should have followed Bessie Smith’s example and rented a tent). The show also hit other high and low points of Pearl Jam’s career — including probably the grimmest day in the band’s history, the 2000 rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark, in which nine people were trampled to death and three others severely injured when fans crowded too close to the stage and started stepping on and over each other. (The band members saw what was happening and tried to get the fans to move back, but too late.) Crowe directs this film in a nervy, energetic style that seems to be an attempt to reproduce the energy of Pearl Jam’s music on film, even though he indulges in one of the most annoying habits of music documentary directors: until the very end he never lets us see Pearl Jam perform one single song, start to finish. He does avoid another one of the traps of films like this: he doesn’t include the usual plethora of talking heads going on and on and on about his subject’s importance; besides the members of Pearl Jam themselves, the only person extensively interviewed on camera is Chris Cornell, their longtime associate and friend. Instead there are some quite amusing clips from people commenting on Pearl Jam in the early 1990’s, in the flush times of their success — including a couple of excerpts from the late Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes commentary on the grunge scene, in which he said he was tired of hearing 20-something girls say they liked bands like Pearl Jam because they agreed with them that life was hopeless, and he’d gladly trade ages with them.

Clashes between the younger generation that likes contemporary music and older people that look askance on it and can’t understand why anyone would want to listen to it have become axiomatic (I’ll never forget reading Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations and learning that for a music-loving German teenager in the late 1890’s the generation gap was over Wagner — Walter and his generation loved him, his parents and their generation hated him, though the older Germans generally conceded that Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were great operas and reserved their scorn for everything Wagner wrote after that). One recalls the oddball video issued as part of the complete Buddy Holly boxed set on the European label Purple Chick, a weird appearance by Holly and his band, the Crickets, on a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Pearl Jam 20 scores in ways a more conventional music-doc wouldn’t have — Cameron Crowe’s affection for his subjects and their music is quite obvious — though there are parts of the movie you’d have to be pretty well up on Pearl Jam trivia to understand (the film didn’t make it clear that while Pearl Jam recorded an album backing Neil Young, Mirror Ball, they were not allowed to take credit for it as “Neil Young and Pearl Jam”; instead all the Pearl Jam members were credited merely as individuals, because they and Young were under contract to different record companies) and a more conventional presentation might have made part of the history clearer. Still, as an example of a rock band that has lasted over 20 years with four of the five original members still on board (the only one they’ve rotated was the drummer; like Bruce Springsteen and, for that matter, the Beatles, they had to go through several drummers before they found the right one long-term) and survived a skyrocketing career upswing and the seemingly inevitable fall, Pearl Jam are worth treasuring — especially as a reminder that 20 years ago it was still possible to become sensationally popular in the music business while still writing emotionally sophisticated, impassioned songs about the darker aspects of human existence. Today all that sells are boy bands, dance divas and ultra-materialistic rappers!

Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret (City Entertainment, PeaceOut Productions, Silver Screen Pictures, Lifetime, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret, and while I felt a bit guilty about watching it (especially after one speaker at the recent rally in San Diego protesting Bradley Manning’s conviction said that publicizing the Jodi Arias trial was a typical mainstream media ploy to take people’s minds off serious political issues and distract them with sex — the speaker said that in a society that really cared about what mattered it would have been the Manning trial that had gavel-to-gavel live coverage), it turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. “Everybody knows the Jodi Arias story,” said the opening line of the review that came up when I looked the film up on imdb.com; well, I didn’t — I’d ignored it when it was in the news — and so I was able to come to the film de novo, with no prejudices one way or the other (the way I had when Lifetime broadcast Prosecuting Casey Anthony — a project they obviously commissioned before the jury verdict came in, whose writers clearly assumed Casey Anthony would be convicted of murder, and who had to do a fast and awkward rewrite of the ending when she wasn’t; personally I thought the jury got it right and Ms. Anthony was guilty of nothing more than a clumsy and ham-handed attempt to cover up the accidental death of her baby daughter). The film was surprisingly well written (by Richard Blaney and Gregory Small), directed (by Jace Alexander) and acted (especially by the two stars, Tania Raymonde as Arias and the very sexy Jesse Lee Soffer as her lover and, later, victim, Travis Alexander). In their hands the Jodi Arias story came off as a weird mix of Madama Butterfly and Fatal Attraction (though Fatal Attraction was itself based loosely on Madama Butterfly and the connection would have been clearer if the film had been released with the original ending — the Glenn Close character commits suicide but frames the scene to make it look like the Michael Douglas character murdered her — instead of the bloodbath scene shot later and spliced on after disappointing previews of the original).

Travis Alexander is one of those obnoxious “motivational speakers” who gives high-priced “success” seminars at fancy resorts. Jodi Arias is an attendee at one of those seminars who thinks he’s so hot she’s willing to throw herself at him the very night she first lays eyes on him — but he’s a bit too reticent to go for her offer. She invites him to her room for “coffee” — and he says he’s a Mormon and therefore he’s not allowed to drink coffee — whereupon she says actually she wanted him for “bed-splintering sex,” and though he turns down her invitation that night, eventually he succumbs. The Butterfly parallels are intriguing — the Mormon Church is to Travis Alexander what the U.S. Navy was to B. F. Pinkerton, though like a lot of males he isn’t about to let the strictures of the church get in the way of his satisfying the demands of his dick, especially when a hot, sexy blonde woman is literally throwing herself at him. Like Butterfly and Pinkerton, they have diametrically opposed conceptions of their relationship; she thinks of him as The One and he thinks of her as a convenient fuck buddy with whom he can get his rocks off until he finishes the wild-oat sowing and settles down and marries a Mormon girl. In fact, one day he flat-out tells her, “Someday I’m going to marry a Mormon girl” — evoking Pinkerton’s comment in Butterfly (though at least Pinkerton doesn’t say it with Butterfly present!) that Butterfly is only a convenience while he’s in port in Nagasaki and someday he’ll marry a “real American wife.” Arias’ response to Alexander saying he wants to marry a Mormon girl is to convert (like Butterfly’s conversion to Christianity in hopes that would bridge the gap between her and her man!), and her response to his complaint that they can’t sustain a long-distance relationship is to move to his home town, Mesa, Arizona, and look for work there. Eventually Travis finds his “real Mormon girl,” Katie (Leah Pipes) — though in violation of the strictures of his church he engages her in premarital sex as well — and he dumps Jodi, who slinks back to her home base in southern California but eventually returns to Mesa after she learns of a (temporary) estrangement between Travis and Katie. Jodi — who’s since darkened her hair and taken on the rather restrained appearance she had in her trial — manages to push her way not only back into Travis’s home but back into his bed, and they have a hot sex scene which she photographs extensively with her new digital camera. They’re about to do a home-made porn film with the video feature on her camera when Travis decides to take a shower first, and while he’s doing that his cell phone beeps to indicate a text from Katie offering to reconcile with Travis. Jodi goes ballistic with jealousy and starts stabbing Travis with a knife, inflicting 27 to 29 stab wounds on him (the script gives both numbers) and then shooting him with a gun she stole from her grandmother’s house — not that it mattered because she’d already killed him with the knife by the time she shot him.

Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret (the title comes not from anything said at her trial but from Travis’s own description of her as his “dirty little secret” he had to conceal from his Mormon friends and members of his church) is quite a good movie, better than an exploitation quickie like this has a right to be, and what’s especially good about it is the exploration of Travis Alexander’s hypocrisy and the sense it gives of how Mormonism really is like a small town. Mormons, especially in communities where they’re the majority, actually do make it their business to know everybody else’s business (as I’ve heard from the ex-Mormons I’ve interviewed, mostly ones who were either thrown out of the church or left voluntarily because they were Gay), and the most vividly realized aspect of Travis’s character as depicted here is his fear that the Mormon busybodies would expose his clandestine affair with Jodi and he’d be ostracized at best and “disfellowshipped” — thrown out of the church — at worst. The pull between Travis’s Mormon community and his outside sex life is vividly dramatized — and so is the obsession of Jodi Arias, who once she had fastened on to this man wasn’t about to let him go and who ultimately became his stalker and posted a whole wall full of photos of him crudely clipped out of snapshots (she’s established as a camera buff and aspiring professional photographer at the start) in what’s become almost a cliché movie scene to depict someone’s unhealthy (to say the least!) obsession with someone else. The tie between the sexually rambunctious but morally repressed Travis and the sexually open but emotionally oppressive Jodi was obviously a relationship made in hell even before she killed him, and the combination of his religious repression and her sexual obsession was essentially what killed him. And if the religious hypocrisy angle wasn’t enough, for this movie Lifetime returned to the hot old days when their “pussies in peril” movies (though this one was more “pussy imperiling”!) featured lots of soft-core porn; though he’s considerably slenderer and more boyish than the real Travis Alexander, Jesse Lee Soffer has a great bod and it was certainly exciting to see as much of it as we did!

Sherlock! A Scandal in Belgravia (BBC-TV, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was a Masterpiece Mystery showing on PBS of an episode in the intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying BBC-TV updating of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock! These programs — they only film about three or four per year — have generally got better reviews than the U.S. attempt to rework Holmes in a modern-day setting, Elementary, but I simply don’t find them as entertaining and I suspect Charles doesn’t, either. Both shows make Holmes a good deal more anti-social than he was in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories — Conan Doyle was too much the good Victorian to have Holmes openly outrage conventional morality (in last night’s Sherlock!, “A Scandal in Belgravia” — each Sherlock! episode riffs off the canon for its title — he shows up naked, except for a strategically placed bedsheet, for a meeting at the Royal Palace); Conan Doyle’s Holmes, for all his fabled eccentricities, usually followed ordinary norms and when he didn’t it wasn’t to be outrageous but simply because he got too wrapped up in whatever he was thinking about at the moment to care. Ironically, the Sherlock! writers’ decision to come closer to the canon and use not only character names but also (altered) titles and situations from Conan Doyle only makes their stories more irritating when they do diverge from the original.

“A Scandal in Belgravia,” like the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia” from which it takes its title, centers around Irene Adler (Lara Pulver), only in this version she’s not an opera singer but a professional dominatrix who in the course of her employment has learned a lot of government and corporate secrets and stores them all on a smartphone that becomes the MacGuffin. Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), Watson (Martin Freeman) and Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Mark Gattis, who doesn’t look at all like Benedict Cumberbatch, the series’ star, and plays Mycroft considerably more prissily than I’d imagined him from Conan Doyle’s original) get involved in a race for the smartphone that includes agents of the CIA (no Anglo-American cooperation for these writers!) and others, including two characters named Neilson (Todd Boyce) and Jeanette (Oona Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter) — an in-joke reference from writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald? — that also involves the British secret service loading up an airliner with dead people because they’ve received word that terrorists are going to blow it up over the Atlantic and they don’t want the terrorists to know they’re on to them but they also don’t want still-living people to die when the bomb goes off — only the plane-of-the-dead doesn’t fly after all because Holmes let the plan slip to Adler inadvertently when he e-mailed or texted her.

 Sherlock! is engaging and generally does a good job of incorporating modern technology, particularly modern communications (Watson’s tales of Holmes’ adventures are published not in the Strand magazine but on a blog) into the Holmes mythos, but it’s also frustrating and annoyingly complicated plot-wise. Also, Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t my idea of a great Holmes: he’s too short, too wimpy-looking — like a guy in his late 20’s you’d see at a Gay bar still desperately trying to pass himself off as a twink — and as annoying as Jonny Lee Miller sometimes gets on Elementary! he’s a much more authoritative performer and more believable as Holmes. Elementary! got criticized by Holmesians even before it aired for making Watson a woman — but Miller and Lucy Liu have real chemistry together, which Cumberbatch and Freeman don’t. (And whose dorky idea was it to have Holmes address Watson as “John”? In the Conan Doyle stories he never used Watson’s first name!) Charles seemed a bit put out that Gatiss and Moffat didn’t keep Irene Adler a singer — and it occurred to me that even if they hadn’t wanted to make her an opera singer they could have had her be a Madonna-style entertainer who plays sexual dominatrix both on stage as part of her act and off-stage for real.

Lust for Life (MGM, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Lust for Life, one of those classics that’s been in my range of vision for some time (TCM has shown it fairly often) but I’d never got around actually to seeing until now. It began as an historical novel by Irving Stone about the legendary painter Vincent Van Gogh, who’s become one of the superstar artists even though during his lifetime he only sold one painting; today the few works of his that enter the private market (most are in musea, some of which are credited in this film for allowing their Van Goghs to be photographed for it) sell for eight- or nine-figure sums and the musea lucky enough to have substantial Van Gogh holdings — including the largest one of all, appropriately enough in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in Van Gogh’s ancestral homeland, the Netherlands — organize touring exhibitions of them and make tons of money showing them. I’d never seen this film before, nor have I seen Robert Altman’s Van Gogh biopic, Dear Theo, and seen today Lust for Life is a movie that overwhelms with the sheer relentless power of Van Gogh’s art and Kirk Douglas’s portrayal of him. Lust for Life was directed by Vincente Minnelli, for whom this film was a personal project he deeply wanted to do — though he had a squabble with MGM over it and, much to his disgust, they forced him first to film the hit musical Kismet. As he explained to interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse, “I had to finish [Kismet] in a hurry and get on a plane and go to Europe and start Lust for Life: they were keeping a field of sunflowers alive for me artificially in the south of France until I got there!”

Lust for Life was pretty obviously influenced by John Huston’s marvelous biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, made four years earlier (1952) and noted for the determination of its director and cinematographer (Oswald Morris) not only to make a movie about a famous artist but to reproduce, as much as possible, the visual style of the artist they were depicting in the movie’s images, framing and (especially) color design. Minnelli and his cinematographers, Russell Harlan and Freddie Young, managed not only to shoot in some of the same locations where Van Gogh had actually lived and painted, but to a quite remarkable extent to capture the look of Van Gogh’s art in the film: the dramatically etched images, the off-kilter framing, the blazing (and sometimes surprisingly subdued) colors — usually Van Gogh went to town color-wise on his landscapes but muted his palette considerably when depicting people, which may itself be a comment on his mental state and his troubled relations with the rest of the human race — to the point where even on the (blessedly few) occasions the film stops to give us what amounts to a slide show of Van Gogh’s paintings, the visual style remains strikingly the same. Scripted by Norman Corwin (one of the most interesting and sensitive writers from the golden age of radio drama) from Stone’s novel, Lust for Life often falls back on typical Hollywood cliché (especially in the scripting of Van Gogh’s relationships — such as they were — with women and some rather obvious cues in Miklós Rósza’s score), but the Faustian energy of Minnelli’s direction, Corwin’s writing, Douglas’s acting and the overall success in evoking the “look” of Van Gogh’s art all come together for a quite remarkable movie.

There is one big weakness in the film, and that is the horrendously miscast Anthony Quinn as Van Gogh’s friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin; it seems totally unbelievable that the Academy Awards should have overlooked Kirk Douglas’s monumental portrayal of Van Gogh (unlike his son Michael, Kirk Douglas never won a competitive Oscar) and given Quinn a supporting award for one of the schtickiest performances I’ve ever seen in my life (rivaling, among misplaced and undeserving Oscar-winners, Luise Rainer’s in The Great Ziegfeld and Al Pacino’s in Scent of a Woman). Not only are we supposed to believe the half-Irish, half-Mexican Quinn as a French painter (who, after Van Gogh’s death, relocated to the South Seas), he’s playing Van Gogh’s sidekick almost exactly the way he played Tyrone Power’s sidekick in the marvelous 1941 remake of Blood and Sand (directed by Rouben Mamoulian, who started the trick imitated by Minnelli here of spray-painting great swaths of nature to make them look more like the work of a famous artist), only this particular Quinn schtick is much more believable when he’s playing a bullfighter than when he’s playing an artist. I couldn’t help but wish for George Sanders in the role; though he was a bit on the seedy side by 1956, Sanders had already played a character based on Gauguin in the 1942 film The Moon and Sixpence and his ice would have been a much better counterpoint to Douglas’s fire.

As for Kirk Douglas, one imdb.com reviewer on this film quoted his son Michael as saying “his father isn’t considered a great actor because the style back then in the types of roles he played has changed.” Like his friend and frequent co-star, Burt Lancaster, Douglas made his initial reputation playing villains — he’s galvanic in films like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Out of the Past and Detective Story (he’s a cop in the last, but a morally corrupt and underhanded one) — but soon got to be too big a star to be cast as anything but a hero. Vincent Van Gogh as portrayed here isn’t really a villain, but he is a literally larger-than-life character, an emotional sponge who sacrificed virtually everything — material success, friendship, romance — for his art, and went through life blithely obsessed only with his own struggle, convinced that the world owed him a living (though Corwin’s script also — with the complexity of life rather than the neatness of fiction — shows Van Gogh as a workaholic with a profound sense of guilt that he couldn’t make a living from his painting even while he had no inclination, desire or even ability to change his style to make his work more salable) and reminding me a great deal about what jazz musician Jackie McLean had to say about a similarly obsessed, unreliable, irresponsible artistic genius (who also died young), Charlie Parker: after detailing how often Parker hit up his friends for money, drugs, instruments (he was often hocking his for drug money and would need to borrow a saxophone to work) and whatever, McLean said, “Which of us could afford him? And I mean that the other way, too: which of us could afford to pay him what we owed him?”

One odd thing about Lust for Life is how homoerotic it is; though it doesn’t depict Van Gogh as outright Gay (and the biographical evidence doesn’t suggest he was), the film really revolves around the two closest relationships of his life, both with men and the sort of things that would be called “bromances” today. One was with his actual brother Theo (James Donald, giving the sort of marvelously understated performance we often get from British actors; if anyone in the supporting cast deserved an Oscar, it was he, not Quinn! — and intriguingly, when the soundtrack gives us the “Dear Theo” letters that are the primary source for Van Gogh’s life, we hear Donald’s voice, not Douglas’s, reading them), on whom he relied for financial support as well as what little promotion his art got to potential buyers. The other is with Gauguin, and the depiction of their time together in Arles shows them as a bitchy Gay couple with virtually diametrically opposed views on how to paint and how to live — Van Gogh still dreams of a committed relationship with a woman whole Gauguin’s attitude towards women is about picking pretty and dumb ones and exploiting them sexually, more like the stereotype of a Gay man than any way straight men are expected to behave — who get increasingly on each other’s nerves until they finally part. Van Gogh’s biographers insist that the infamous incident in which the painter cut off part of his ear was over a breakup with a prostitute he’d been dating (non-professionally — such a relationship is depicted in the film, but considerably earlier), but in Corwin’s script it’s the final quarrel with Gauguin that precipitates it. (In Michael Douglas’s TCM interview, he recalls seeing an early screening of Lust for Life and freaking out over this scene, even though in the tactful way of a Code-era movie we’re spared any shots of bloodletting or gore; Kirk Douglas had to show his son both sides of his face to assure him that, whatever he’d seen on screen, in real life both his ears were still on his face where nature put them.)

Lust for Life may be compromised in some of the details — like the careful “planting” of hints about suicide in the early scenes (when Van Gogh as a would-be minister lectures his working-poor parishioners that suicide is a sin, Norman Corwin obviously means us to see that as ironic coming from one of the most famous suicides of all time) — but at base it’s a galvanic movie, filled with the energy and passion of its subject, a worthy portrayal of the thin line between genius and insanity, told with the grimness and exaltation its story deserves and convincing us not only that Kirk Douglas is Vincent Van Gogh, but that this individual could have lived no other way: his peculiar combination of artistic genius and utter lack of social skills — and his inability to compromise, which made him a great artist and a terrible person — set him up for precisely this fate. Another oddity of this movie, especially for one made in the socially content 1950’s, is the interesting streak of social comment in it; when Van Gogh, as an aspiring minister, gets sent to the poorest part of the Netherlands to preach to the coal miners and finds that nothing in the establishment Christianity he was taught to teach has anything to offer people living on the edge, he starts going down into the mines and ends up living in a hovel, which makes it seem like he’s going to become a self-consciously social artist doing paintings as political commentary (like Millet, whom in the course of their arguments Van Gogh idolizes and Gauguin excoriates) until his arrival in France in the middle of the Impressionist revolution turns his art into a very different direction. Charles told me he’s seen Van Gogh’s paintings in the Rijksmuseum and nothing you’ve seen of them in reproductions prepares you for the real thing — especially the almost three-dimensional effect created by his famous impasto style, the thicknesses of paint he applied to his canvases (and though Kirk Douglas looks relatively convincing in the scenes in which he’s actually shown painting, he’s not seen applying paint directly from the tube without a brush, one of the real Van Gogh’s trademarks) — and he seemed as impressed by the movie as I was!