Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When I finally did get to Charles’ place I ran yet another pre-recorded tape we hadn’t got around to watching yet: Forbidden Planet, an MGM production from 1956 that was one of the rare major-studio forays into science-fiction at the time. This was generally considered the most intellectually sophisticated science-fiction movie made to that time (and indeed it retained that reputation until the release of 2001, also an MGM film, 12 years later), though it’s hardly the best sci-fi movie of the 1950’s — The Day the Earth Stood Still and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers both hold up better. I hadn’t seen Forbidden Planet since the early 1970’s (and then only on a black-and-white TV; this for a film whose color design is one of its chief sources of appeal!); Charles had seen it more recently (recently enough that he’d seen it on a color TV); and neither of us had seen it letterboxed (a welcome innovation but, though the film was originally in CinemaScope, it didn’t use the width of the screen as extensively as, say, the 1954 Black Widow or 1955 East of Eden and therefore less was lost in the pan-and-scan version). Afterwards Charles said he hadn’t remembered how great a movie it was or how silly it was, and that about summed up my reaction to it. On the plus side were the special effects — which have dated a bit (the flying saucer commander Leslie Nielsen — with his current reputation it’s hard these days to watch him in anything without laughing! — and his crew fly to meet up with reclusive scientist Walter Pidgeon on planet Altair-IV bobbed up and down on its strings against the painted backdrops of Cedric Gibbons’ and Arthur Lonergan’s spacescapes almost as much as the cigar-shaped ships of Flash Gordon and his adversaries had done in the Universal serials two decades earlier) but some of which remain stunning (particular the tracks of the monster and its appearance in red silhouette as it attacks the crew of the spaceship). Also on the plus side was much of the acting, notably Walter Pidgeon’s — who was surprisingly good as the reclusive Morbius, sole survivor of the previous expedition to Altair-IV, portraying an irascibility somewhat surprising to anyone who thinks of that nice Walter Pidgeon who was married to Greer Garson in so many soppy melodramae. (It’s hardly a slam on Pidgeon to note that, as good as he was, Boris Karloff could have played his part far better — though Karloff’s name on the credits would have “typed” it as a horror film, he was a much subtler and broader-ranging actor who would have made the final scenes, in which he immolates himself and the entire planet to save the universe from the monster his own id has created, truly heartbreaking instead of just conclusive.) Also on the plus side were the production values, the spare-no-expense set designs that reproduced the scientific achievements of the Krell, the long-forgotten indigenous civilization of Altair-IV, who invented self-perpetuating machines and worked out a scientific innovation that allowed them to do without bodies altogether — only to find, too late, that this made them vulnerable to the monsters from their own ids (even in a sci-fi genre piece, Hollywood’s fascination with Freudian psychology couldn’t help but come out!).

On the minus side were some overly campy plot devices — like Robby the Robot, who’s cute and charming but really cuts down this film’s thrill quotient — and another one in which Pidgeon’s daughter (Anne Francis of Bad Day at Black Rock and The Scarlet Coat, here playing an almost impossible role and playing it quite well — judging from the three films of hers I’ve seen she clearly could act and deserved major stardom; what happened?) has been insulated from all other humans for her entire life (her mother died when the daughter was still an infant and all the other humans on Pidgeon’s crew had passed even before that), and so she reacts naïvely when the other humans (all male) attempt to kiss her. It’s the same gag W. C. Fields had done 15 years before with Susan Miller’s character in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, but at least Fields intended it to be funny! Also on the minus side was some clunky dialogue — noting the basis of the plot in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest (which really incensed Jon Douglas Eames in his entry on this film in The MGM Story — he seemed almost viscerally angry that writers Irving Block and Allen Adler took credit for writing an “original” story Cyril Hume then adapted into a screenplay), a 1977 New Yorker writer said sourly, “It’s a pity they didn’t lift some of Shakespeare’s language.” (At least two of the most interesting works of the 1930’s lifted their titles from The Tempest: Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World and Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rich and Strange.) And the biggest minus was the sluggish direction of Fred McLeod Wilcox (as he was billed — I’ve seen other credits of his list him simply as “Fred M. Wilcox”), who seemed so conscious of the Importance of this production (with a capital “I”) that he moved it along like an historical pageant instead of the crackling-tough action picture it could have been. Oddly, the climax is quite exciting — Wilcox finally gets the lead out of his cameras and turns in an exciting suspense sequence as the monster stalks Pidgeon, Nielsen and Francis through the strongest defenses Krell technology (or at least what little Pidgeon has been able to learn of it) can muster — but the earlier part of the film drags badly. And Carlos Clarens didn’t like the design of the monster; in his Illustrated History of the Horror Film he wrote:

Direction does not count for much that is essential in films of this genre, where themes can be put across successfully by the art director, the special effects department, even by the sensuousness of the color or the quality of the sound track. [Forbidden Planet is especially good in the last department, thanks to Louis and Bebe Barron’s “electronic tonalities” in lieu of a conventional musical score.] Yet, in spite of its electronic tonalities and endearing, well-bred robot, it has to fall back, for its climax, on the most conventional monster fiction. Once materialized, the Monster of the Mind looks like a panther silhouetted in red (the work of cartoon designers from the Walt Disney studios), and this denouement is as incongruous as if Spencer Tracy’s Mr. Hyde had strayed aboard Gemini X.

Oddly, the monster didn’t bother me that much — it looked astonishingly credible (it’s one of the best visual effects in the film!) and its rather prosaic contours can be explained because it’s supposed to be the projection of Morbius’ own “dark side” and therefore would look like a familiar image of terror to a human being. More bothersome was the lack of any external detailing on the flying saucer (one of the most welcome innovations of 2001 was that the spaceships in it looked like real mechanical devices and not child’s toys, and while it undoubtedly made the actual manufacture of the models used to represent them much more difficult and expensive, it also added a lot to the verisimilitude). On the whole, Forbidden Planet holds up as a surprisingly good excursion into science fiction, a bit too conscious of its Shakespearean pedigree in Wilcox’s slow-paced direction and Pidgeon’s performance (no one else in the movie, except Francis as his daughter, really distinguishes himself — non-inclusive pronoun justified because Francis’ character is the only woman in the dramatis personae) and variable in the effects department, but oddly moving, especially in the ending (in which Pidgeon, his monster alter ego and the entire remnants of the Krell super-civilization go up in an atomic explosion he has deliberately set — like the lab in The Bride of Frankenstein, the Krell installation came equipped with a self-destruct mechanism) and distinguished as one of the few big-budget, major-studio excursions into hard-core science-fiction until the successes of 2001 and Star Wars established the genre once and for all. — 11/9/98

•••••

I also finished reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I’d wanted to go through to see if Forbidden Planet is really as similar to it as Jon Douglas Eames and other writers have claimed. Yes and no. The screenwriters of Forbidden Planet (Irving Block, Allen Adler and Cyril Hume) took the basic situation of The Tempest — sort of (their spacecraft didn’t land on the planet by accident after a storm, but went there deliberately) and six of the characters — Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Miranda, Ferdinand and the drunken butler Stephano — but significantly altered the story. In The Tempest Prospero is a dethroned duke of Milan and he deliberately causes the shipwreck which entraps all his enemies (including Antonio, his brother, who dethroned him; and Alonso, the King of Naples, who put Antonio up to it and recognized him) on his island.

Also, Prospero intends his daughter Miranda and Ferdinand (son of Alonso) to get together from the start — and Caliban isn’t a “monster of the id,” but a genuine person, described in the dramatis personae as “a savage and deformed slave” with a witch, Sycorax, for a mother (we’re never told who his father is, which might lead some enterprising scholar or producer to “read” the play in a way that would make Prospero himself the father, thereby establishing a sibling relationship between the good Miranda and the evil Caliban and also explaining why Prospero feels responsible for Caliban — much the way Schickaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute is sometimes read to make Sarastro Pamina’s father and the Queen of the Night’s ex-lover), while Ariel commands a whole crew of spirits and puts them at Prospero’s service. What seemed oddest about The Tempest is how undramatic it really is. After that savage shipwreck in the opening act, virtually nothing else happens. Ferdinand and Miranda have a nice pastoral idyll on the island (while Prospero is getting his revenge by carefully leading Alonso, Ferdinand’s father, into thinking his son is dead). Two separate plots are hatched against Prospero’s life (one by Alonso and Antonio and one by Stephano, another servant on the ship, and Caliban), but because Prospero’s network of nymphs, fairies, spirits and whatnot lets him know about them almost as soon as they are planned, they don’t become dramatic issues either. What makes The Tempest a worthy Shakespearean masterwork is the eloquence of the language — perhaps more so than in his earlier plays precisely because it doesn’t have to drive a dramatic plot; and it’s hard, knowing that this is one of Shakespeare’s last works and he was about to retire, not to read something autobiographical in the figure of Prospero in general (an old man whose entire power lay in his books!) and in this great speech from Act IV, scene 1 in particular:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.

Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

If you be pleased, retire into my cell

And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk

To still my beating mind. — 11/13/98

•••••

Last night Charles and I had an interesting experience at the ConDor science-fiction convention in San Diego we’ve just attended for the third (me) and fifth (him) year in a row: we got to see presentations by Robert Welch, grandson of the MGM special-effects head Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, on the effects work in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Forbidden Planet (1956). Welch was there to give the presentations and also promote a large-format book he just published on his grandfather, The Wizard of MGM, and according to his presentation it seems as if Gillespie coined the term “special effects” when he asked for and received permission to set up a department specifically devoted to them at MGM in the 1930’s. (Before that they had been given the rather dismissive name “trick shots,” and when David O. Selznick tried to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give a special award to Willis O’Brien for the still extraordinary effects shots in the 1933 King Kong, he got the dismissive answer, “We have no intention of giving awards for trick work.” The Academy didn’t inaugurate an award for special effects until 1939.) Welch began both presentations by emphasizing that MGM was a self-contained community that had all the physical facilities to make a movie completely on its own lot — and all the people, divided into an almost militarily precise layout of departments, with all the skills they needed — though the studio system and the guaranteed revenues that had made this possible, coming both from the big studios’ monopolistic control of the largest and most profitable theatres (broken with the consent decree in the U.S. v. Paramount antitrust case in 1948) and their general monopoly on audio-visual entertainment until the development of commercial television after World War II, were on their way out by 1956. Indeed, one imdb.com “trivia” poster on Forbidden Planet noted that the script required animation effects — and to create them MGM had to borrow animator Joshua Meador from Walt Disney Studios because they had just closed their own animation department and laid off all the people it had employed. (Among them were its heads, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who continued their own careers by forming their own studio and producing crude but incredibly popular cartoons for TV.) Fortunately, Gerry Williams, who runs showings of science-fiction movies in San Diego the third weekend of every month, decided to show Forbidden Planet as the Saturday night movie at ConDor (he actually double-billed it with an atrocious Hammer production called Moon Zero Two, a boring film that basically transposed a standard Western plot to the moon), and it was an extraordinary opportunity to see a film just after we’d watched a live presentation on how some of the effects were achieved. Forbidden Planet was a 1956 science-fiction film from MGM, given a production budget of $1 million (which they actually blew just on building the sets — it cost them another $900,000 on top of that to shoot the movie itself) and a full major-studio production, including wide-screen, color and Perspecta stereo sound (though I’m not sure a Perspecta print still exists). This was at a time when science-fiction movies were mostly cheap “B” productions, shot on black-and-white with low budgets, non-star casts and hack directors (two exceptions to the latter: Robert Wise on the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Howard Hawks on the 1951 version of The Thing — Hawks was credited only as producer, with his long-time editor Christian Nyby listed as director, but according to modern accounts they co-directed), and usually aimed at children.

Forbidden Planet was one of the periodic attempts by a major studio to do a science-fiction film with all the sophistication and intellectual understanding of the best science-fiction writing, and while MGM would do a far better job 12 years later with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which benefited immensely not only from Kubrick’s own imagination but his use of a “name” sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke, for his basic story and script) Forbidden Planet is quite a good try. I’d seen it at least twice before — in the 1970’s on an over-the-air TV in black-and-white and in the late 1990’s with Charles on a VHS tape I bought at the late, lamented Sam Goody’s downtown one afternoon and we screened that evening — but last night I liked it better than I have before even though it remains a film I respect more than I actually love. (At ConDor there was a brief parlor game in which people were challenged to come up with their five favorite science-fiction films of all time — I left the fifth slot open on my list but my first four would be 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky’s original Solaris, Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman on the Moon and the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, in that order.) Forbidden Planet was produced by Nicholas Nayfack, directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox (whose previous claim to fame had been directing most of MGM’s Lassie movies) and written by Cyril Hume from an “original” story by Irving Block and Allen Adler that owed more than a little to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The crew of a spaceship (designed to look like a pristine flying saucer and awfully dated-looking after we’ve become used to the carefully crafted space vehicles of Star Trek, 2001 and Star Wars) led by Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen, whose part is absolutely serious but whose presence, especially his voice, makes the film hopelessly risible to anyone who knows him just from the Police Squad/Naked Gun and Airplane spoofs) receives orders to stop by the planet Altair-4 to see what became of the spacecraft Bellerophon, which went to Altair-4 20 years earlier and was never heard from again. When Adams and his crew (all male, all white — especially noticeable seeing this movie during a science-fiction convention one of whose workshops had dealt with sexism in the genre!) arrive at Altair-4 and start orbiting the planet in preparation for landing, they get a radio message from Professor Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon, top-billed), sole survivor of the Bellerophon expedition. Morbius warns them not to land because everyone else on the Bellerophon was killed by a mysterious force unleashed on the planet — he doesn’t get any more specific than that — and the only survivors were Morbius himself and a female crew member (so they did have at least one woman in space!) whom he married in a ceremony performed on board the Bellerophon by its captain.

The two survived the mysterious catastrophe that killed the rest of the crew (and vaporized the Bellerophon itself when crew members who hadn’t been killed on the planet’s surface tried to escape in it) and conceived a daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis, a wonderful actress wasted, as usual, in a role that didn’t offer her much), only shortly after that Mrs. Morbius died (in childbirth, we get the impression, though that’s not specified in the script itself) and the good doctor has raised Altaira as a single parent and the only other human she has ever known. When he hasn’t been rearing her he’s been exploring the secrets of the Krell, Altair-4’s indigenous inhabitants, who developed both technology and morality far beyond what Earth has been able to achieve — only 20,000 years ago their entire population self-destructed in a single day. Morbius has been trying to figure out why, and also how much of the Krell’s technology can safely be entrusted to Earthlings, and needless to say he doesn’t want those creepy people from Earth invading his technological paradise. In particular he doesn’t want all those horny space sailors invading his daughter and taking away her carefully protected virginity. This plot line is another aspect of Forbidden Planet that comes awfully close to camp; 15 years earlier W. C. Fields had made the comedy Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, in which in order to protect her daughter’s virtue, socialite Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont in her best performance in a non-Marx Brothers film) has hidden them both away on a mountaintop and carefully concealed from her the very existence of men — and though the writers and director of Forbidden Planet weren’t trying for comedy, the portrayal of Anne Francis’ total sexual naïveté comes awfully close to unintentional laughs. To run his establishment, including acting as a manservant (though actually carefully specified as not having a gender), Morbius early on used the first bits of Krell technology he could understand to build Robby the Robot (voiced by actor Marvin Miller, though apparently there were various stunt doubles actually in the robot suit, including its creator, Robert Kinoshita), which can duplicate any human foodstuff (there’s a quite amusing comic-relief scene in which the spaceship’s cook asks it to make him some whiskey, and the robot says, “Will 60 gallons suffice?”) and do just about anything, though it draws the line at actually attacking another human being. (I doubt if the writers had heard of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but they came up with something pretty similar.) So the dramatis personae on Altair-4 include a Prospero, a Miranda and an Ariel (the robot), but the Caliban (Shakespeare’s brooding, brutish villain) isn’t revealed until nearly the end of the movie.

It turns out that the Krell had managed to create a perfect society with no scarcity, no hatred, no conflict and no war, but that wasn’t enough for them; they tried to harness their own mental energies and combine them with their super-computer system (fueled by nuclear reactions deep under their planet so they would never have to worry about running out of energy) to gain the power to materialize anything they wanted out of pure thought. Only the process also unlocked the more sordid aspects of both human and Krell nature — greed, meanness, viciousness, revenge — all associated with the Id, which Morbius denounces as an obsolete term for the human subconscious (ironically, one of the best predictions in Forbidden Planet, made at a time when Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the mind and the formation of human nature were practically a religion, was that eventually virtually the whole apparatus of Freud’s theories would drop out of both public discourse and actual treatment of mental illness!) and which emerges as a lion-like invisible (except when being bombarded by electricity or radiation) creature that was responsible for the destruction of the Bellerophon and most of its crew and is now wreaking havoc on Commander Adams’ crew members as well. Eventually Morbius realizes that he’s created a Krell-like monster out of his own Id and the only way he can spare both his daughter and the rest of the human race from the Krell’s fate is to trick Adams into pushing the self-destruct button on the floor of his laboratory that will cause the Krell reactors to go super-critical and blow up Altair-4 (odd that they would rip off the laboratory self-destruct mechanism from The Bride of Frankenstein!), so he sends his daughter off with Adams and the surviving crew members of Adams’ ship take off while Morbius, his planet and the Krell technology (except for Robby, who ends up aboard the ship with Adams and Altaira) explode in space. The Id creature was created by Joshua Meador and acted by Robert Dix, who also doubled as one of the crew on Adams’ ship — Meador traced over Dix’s actions as filmed on an empty stage, making Dix arguably the first motion-capture actor in film history. Another aspect of Forbidden Planet the film pioneered is in its score, which was made up exclusively of electronic burbles by husband-and-wife composers Louis and Bebe Barron — though since they were not members of the musicians’ union they could not be credited as musicians or composers. So their burbling all-electronic score (which mostly works well even though there are a few cues that sound like computers farting) was credited as “electronic tonalities.” (This is the same kind of treatment one of the great names in movie effects, German cinematographer Eugen Schufftan — who invented the process screen in the 1920’s for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis — got; when he fled the Nazis and came to the U.S. the cinematographers’ union wouldn’t allow him in, so the only studio that would hire him was the cheap PRC outfit, and instead of crediting him with cinematography or photographic effects they had to give him nebulous credits like “supervisor of production design.”)

Forbidden Planet is a great movie, though there’s still an air of bookishness about it (Jon Douglas Eames’ book The MGM Story said that as long as Cyril Hume was ripping off his plot from Shakespeare’s The Tempest he should have stolen Shakespeare’s dialogue as well), a sense of potentials in the story unrealized in the film we actually have. It was certainly a major influence on later science-fiction film in general and on Star Trek in particular (Gene Roddenberry admitted it); plenty of episodes in the various Star Trek franchises ripped off Forbidden Planet to one extent or another, and the very first Star Trek pilot, “The Cage” (later revamped and aired in a tweaked version as “The Menagerie”), is also about a starship crew that gets into trouble when they land on a planet whose inhabitants have overdeveloped their brain power to a reckless and dangerous extent. Forbidden Planet is beautiful (though all too many of the backdrops look like the matte paintings they were), it benefits from color and a major-studio infrastructure, and it’s quite well acted — though through much of its running time I found myself wishing Boris Karloff had been playing Walter Pidgeon’s role. Not only would it have provided Karloff a career boost in a serious film comparable to what he got from Frankenstein in 1931 and Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher in 1945, and would have likely spared him a good deal of the dreck he had to do in his last 13 years, but Karloff could have made Morbius, torn between his love for his daughter and his intoxicated fascination with the Krell technology, a genuinely pathetic and even tragic figure instead of a man who, for all his super-intelligence (artificially boosted by a Krell education machine), seems all too befuddled by what’s going on around him. At the same time I realize the problems that would have been created by casting Karloff: the audience would have expected him from the get-go to be creating a monster (even if inadvertently) and the appearance of the Id creature wouldn’t have had the surprise and shock the filmmakers wanted. Forbidden Planet (originally shot under the working title Fatal Planet until someone at MGM realized that would make it seem too dire and likely turn off audiences instead of attracting them) is an important milestone in the generally dire history of sci-fi on film, and this time around I enjoyed it more than I have before, but my reactions still come with a lot of “Yes, but … ” — 3/15/15

Morals for Women (Tiffany, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I ran a 1931 film called Morals for Women, made by the short-lived Tiffany studio (it had begun in the late 1920’s as a production company owned by director John M. Stahl and attempted to crack the ranks of the majors in 1929 — alas, just as the Depression was hitting and making it difficult for any business, especially one dealing in non-necessities, to survive) and a pretty obvious knockoff of The Easiest Way, filmed at MGM the same year. Like The Easiest Way, Morals for Women deals with a woman from a proletarian background — though in this film she comes to New York City from a small town instead of living in New York all along — who essentially makes it in the Big Apple by becoming a rich man’s mistress, then has to confront the guy from her previous lifestyle who comes back to her and wants to marry her but still thinks she’s a “good woman” by 1931 standards. Directed by Mort Blumenstock from a script by Frances Hyland (she’s only credited with “story” but since no other writer is credited I presume she wrote the actual screenplay too), it begins with a typically sententious foreword; “BROADWAY blazes through the cross currents of the breaking dusk. Its night with the shadows of its menace and cruel sword sweeps down unrelentlessly [sic] and swiftly on helpless souls, They, who lie before her, with their jewelled crowns, its night plunders and turns to flee when welcome dawn comes in across a sleeping sea.” Then we get a stock shot of the New York skyline, after which we start meeting our principals: “bad girl” Helen Huston (Bessie Love, just two years after her amazing performance in the 1929 MGM musical The Broadway Melody), her sugar daddy Van Dyne (Conway Tearle — who else?) and Paul Cooper, the nice young man who wants to marry her but still thinks she’s “pure” (John Holland). Before she came to New York Helen and Paul dated, but decided not to marry when they were both poor but to wait until they’d become more financially successful. One difference between this and the Easiest Way template is that in Morals for Women Paul Cooper has become more financially successful — enough to take Helen on a date through various New York nightclubs, depicted by a Dudley Murphy-style montage sequence in which an image of them sitting at a table appears in a circle in the middle of the screen while the rest is divided by diagonal lines into three or four sections representing the floor shows at the nightclubs they’re going to.

Morals for Women got mentioned on the Bix Beiderbecke Web site not long ago because one contributor theorized that Bix might have played on the soundtrack — which is not entirely impossible (the film wasn’t released until October 1931, two months after Bix died, but the recording could have been made months before that) but is highly unlikely. The montage is accompanied by Maceo Pinkard’s “I’ll Be a Friend ‘With Pleasure’,” one of the three songs Bix recorded on his last date as a leader (New York, September 8, 1930), but the version on the soundtrack is by George Olsen’s band and there’s no evidence of a hot cornet solo (nor is the movie mentioned on the label of Bix’s record, as is the case with “Deep Down South,” one of the other songs recorded at that session, whose label proclaims it as being from the 1930 film Pardon My Gun). On the technical level, Morals for Women is quite good — Tiffany had considerably higher production standards than most of the cheap independent studios from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, and Blumenstock’s direction (though with that name I can’t help but wonder if he socked Tiffany’s investors for 25,000 percent of the production budget, made a deliberately bad movie and then absconded) is full of close-ups and shot-reverse shot cuts, standard techniques of major-studio productions at the time but ones the indies usually eschewed because close-ups cost too much to set up and every time a camera angle got changed, that was “down time” that also cost the company money. Hyland’s script is also genuinely witty and well constructed, and it differs from The Easiest Way in presenting Helen’s proletarian family not as a rock of stability that will be left for her to fall back on and be renewed after she dumps the man who’s keeping her and the man who’s in love with her dumps her in disgust after finding out she’s been That Kind of Woman. Rather, they’re shown as either incompetents or nags; Edmund Breese and Emma Dunn play her nagging parents and David Rollins and June Clyde her conniving brother and sister. The big thing that happens is that she goes back to her small town for a visit, a guy she knew in New York makes a slighting comment about her reputation, her brother starts a fight with the guy, is arrested and fined $1,000, and in order to come up with the money Helen has to return to her sugar daddy. Then her whole family comes to New York to see her, taking her by surprise just as she’s about to host a “wild” party (though like a lot of other 1930’s movies, the party is so decorous the point seems to be to scare viewers away from the demi-monde by making it look too terminally boring to bother with) featuring her sugar daddy and several other guests involved in mistress relationships.

Eventually, of course, traditional morality wins out and she returns home to that horrible family and to Paul Cooper, who agrees to marry her even after he learns the truth about her — a happy ending far less powerful than the bittersweet one of The Easiest Way, a film I haven’t seen for a while but which I’ve been in mind of recently because two recent Lifetime productions, Sugar Daddies and Babysitter’s Black Book, both reminded me of it, not only in their presentation of young women essentially whoring themselves out to rich men to get money to advance in the world (in Babysitter’s Black Book they were high-school students turning tricks to get the money for college; in Sugar Daddies they were college undergraduates becoming mistresses to earn the money for law school) but in their heroines being torn between their need for, and enjoyment of, the money they were making from sex with older men and their guilt feelings about living that way — only in 1931 the writers did a better job presenting their dilemmas and Constance Bennett, who played the central character in The Easiest Way, was far stronger as an actress than either Taylor Gildersleeve in Sugar Daddies or Spencer Locke in Babysitter’s Black Book. Still, it’s fascinating that stories like this (or the current box-office champ, Fifty Shades of Grey, also about a not-rich young girl willing essentially to sell herself to a super-rich man for all the kinky and potentially hurtful things he wants to do with her) are making a major comeback just now, with the rich getting ever richer, the not-so-rich falling ever farther behind, and young, attractive women in the 2010’s facing the same dilemma as their foresisters did in the 1930’s: make presumably “easy” (but actually quite difficult) money by selling themselves sexually or stay out of the whole sordid mess and suffer in poverty and unpaid student loan debt instead. I remember how incensed Molly Ivins was when she broke the story of women who had gone to business school and got degrees in investment and finance, but because those professions had heavy-duty glass ceilings and were as fiercely protective of their testosterone-fueled male-only environments as the video game industry, they were reduced to prostituting themselves — literally — for the men working the jobs, and making the fortunes, they had gone to school in hopes of achieving for themselves. These stories hook so many nasty social prejudices, including both market worship and sexism, it’s no wonder they are still being made and, if the evidence of Lifetime’s movie schedule is to be believed, actually making a comeback!

Sugar Daddies (Johnson Production Group, Shadowland, Lifetime, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Sugar Daddies, a 2014 production from Johnson Production Group and Shadowland which Lifetime showed right after their “world premiere” of Babysitter’s Black Book since they were thematically similar — Babysitter’s Black Book is about high-school girls who turn to prostitution to raise the money to go to college, and Sugar Daddies is about college girls who become mistresses of rich men to raise the money to go to law school. From the moment I saw the fictional “Whittendale University” referenced on screen I knew we were in the same universe as Lifetime’s previous productions The Surrogate and Dirty Teacher — like those movies, Sugar Daddies was directed by Doug Campbell and written by Barbara Kymlicka (though this time Ken Sanders, Kymlicka’s writing partner on the previous films, is listed only as one of the four producers along with Robert Ballo, Timothy O. Johnson and Marianne C. Wunch), and again like them it takes a situation that could have stayed good clean dirty fun and ramps up the melodrama to insane lengths. Our Heroine (so to speak) is Kara Jones (Taylor Gildersleeve), an ambitious young Whittendale co-ed who wants to get into a good law school. She’s working her way through college as a bartender and of course fending off the drunken advances of the male Whittendale students who frequent the bar, though she has a steady boyfriend named Justin (Griffin Freeman). There’s the obligatory he-wants-to-have-sex-but-she-puts-him-off scene that makes us wonder if they’ve ever done the down ’n’ dirty even though they’re both past the age of consent, though Kymlicka (has she ever considered changing her name? Given the sort of stuff she writes, “cum licker” seems an excruciatingly inappropriate moniker) does a bit of a change-up and has that scene happen only after Kara has got involved with the titular (probably also an unfortunate term here) sugar daddy, investment broker and/or hedge-fund manager Grant Zager (Peter Strauss, with enough of his good looks left that the thought of sex with him wouldn’t seem totally repulsive — even though casting director Jeff Hardwick didn’t make the mistake of his opposite number in Babysitter’s Black Book of making the older man the heroine was supposedly prostituting herself to considerably hotter than her twerpy-looking age-peer boyfriend).

Kara gets into the gold-digger business (I’m so used to hearing the terms “sugar daddy” and “gold-digger” in 1930’s movies they jar in a modern-day context) at the behest of her roommate Shawna, who invites her to a party whose sole purpose is to put some fresh college-age meat in front of the old rich guys who can make all their dreams come true with their pocketbooks and for whom writing a check for $100,000 is like giving away a quarter to the rest of us. If they don’t do anything else, films like Babysitter’s Black Book and Sugar Daddies certainly express at least a tacit criticism of America’s class system and how — though the growing inequality of wealth and income is a worldwide trend — it’s especially severe in this country because we’ve made the collective political decision we want to be “free” of any social obligations to each other, including making both health care and education basic human rights. Kara is in the pickle she’s in financially because her dad Barry (James C. Burns) is a mere auto mechanic (there’s a nicely ironic scene in which she asks him to fix the Mercedes Grant has just given her and he discovers the registration in Grant’s name, which clues him in as to her daughter’s real relationship with this man) and whatever savings he had to help put her through school got wiped out when he was in an auto accident and his health insurer declined his claims. Grant picks out Kara at that pick-up party and offers her a regular monthly check, plus covering her tuition to law school and a promise to pay off her dad’s medical bills if she’ll perform “special services” for him — he’s careful enough to keep within the letter of the law by not making it explicitly a money-for-sex deal but that’s what it is — and his “enforcer” is his butler and chauffeur Peter (Timothy Brennen), who looked so much like Ted Cassidy in The Addams Family I started calling him “Lurch.” Apparently, judging from the bits of backstory Kymlicka throws into her script, Grant actually worked himself up from a background as financially challenged as Kara’s (one can’t help but wonder if he, like Jay Gatsby, had a Gay “sugar daddy” of his own!) and served in a war with Peter (judging from their apparent ages, it was probably Viet Nam), where they became fast friends and combat buddies and swore that each would have the other’s back from then on. For most of its running time Sugar Daddies is basically a modern rehash of the 1931 film The Easiest Way — also about a young woman from an impoverished family who becomes the mistress of a rich man but is laden with guilt feelings about it (a parallel that occurred to me while watching Babysitter’s Black Book as well), though Taylor Gildersleeve is hardly in Constance Bennett’s league as an actress and her qualms of conscience become quite tiresome after a while.

But Kymlicka can’t avoid throwing the film into high-octane melodrama for the last third: it turns out that the “special service” for which Grant is willing to pay the medical bills of Kara’s father is erotic asphyxiation — he likes both choking and being choked while having sex — and after he and Kara have a falling-out, his price for taking her back and reopening his wallet is that she recruit her friend Lea (Samantha Robinson) for a three-way. Lea couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the prospect — no boring qualms of conscience for her! — and she slips Kara a pill to help her get through whatever Grant has in mind for them. What Grant has in mind for them is to kiss each other, a prospect that has Kara literally get sick to her stomach, so between her revulsion at having to play at Lesbianism for her sugar daddy and the effects of whatever was in that pill, she’s in the bathroom retching while Grant is in bed strangling Lea and ultimately killing her. When Grant realizes what’s happened he has Peter take the body out of the house and dump it, and when Kara comes to he tells her Lea just got sick and he sent her home in a taxi because he didn’t want her puking all over one of his fancy cars. But Kara saw enough of what was going on — she saw Lea non compos mentis in Grant’s bed before Peter hauled her out of there — to realize that was B.S., and the film ends with a confrontation between Grant and Kara’s dad Barry, following which the police get involved and arrest Grant just as he was about to flee the country in his private plane. Like The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom, Sugar Daddies seems at least in part an attempt by Lifetime to do their own quickie version of Fifty Shades of Grey before the “official” movie of Fifty Shades came out — it seems that from now on it’s going to be de rigueur in movies about poor girls being sexually exploited and dominated by super-rich guys to show scenes in which the rich guys take them up in their private planes — and I couldn’t help but think that the basic plot of Sugar Daddies could have made a good Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode (of course their version would have started out with someone finding Lea’s body where Peter had dumped it and the cops would have worked backwards to piece together the story) and been twice as entertaining in half the running time.

Watch Your Back (Cover Productions/Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “world premiere” movie was something called Watch Your Back, apparently shot under the working title Killer Photo — a head-scratcher of a name if there ever was one — directed by Jason Furukawa from a script by Rolfe Kanefsky. It begins with its most chilling scene; a young blonde woman showers, gets dressed and finds an orange balloon with a neatly printed note — obviously computer-generated — signed “Robert,” saying, “You didn’t think I’d forget our anniversary, did you?” She walks through her house to the accompaniment of the sort of treacly piano-and-strings music Lifetime filmmakers usually use to accompany scenes of domestic contentment, and she sees a whole row of orange balloons (at this point I started singing the famous song from The Wizard of Oz with the lyrics tweaked to the context: “Follow the orange balloons, follow the orange balloons, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the orange balloons”), one of which does indeed contain an instruction to her to follow the orange balloons. They lead to her back patio, which contains a swimming pool that is steaming in the night air, and a whole forest of orange balloons, including one shaped like a heart. Throughout this sequence our only suspense has been will the dire fate writer Kanefsky obviously has in store for this woman happen now or an act or two from now. Now, it turns out, as the heart-shaped balloon contains a note in the same sort of printing saying, “Sorry — Robert couldn’t make it,” and just as she’s absorbing that information a shadowy figure wielding a gun comes on the scene and shoots her dead. The scene dissolves into a police photo of the crime scene, and then Lifetime gives us a title, “Two years later.”

Two years later we meet Sarah Goodall Miller (AnnaLynne McCord), an executive at a struggling ad agency who can’t stand her boss, Mr. Solomon (Michael Kopsa) — she hates him so much that during one interminable business meeting she draws a caricature of him and later posts it on a dartboard in her office so she can throw darts at him, which she does with unerring aim, though she has to get rid of both drawing and darts in a hurry when he crashes her office for a quick meeting. Sarah is the wife of aspiring novelist Kurt Miller (Mark Ghanimé, the sort of O.K.-looking but almost terminally nerdy sort of actor Lifetime likes in roles like this when they’re not going for tall, lanky and sandy-haired), who was married previously and has a daughter, Teri (Gracyn Shinyei), by his earlier wife Victoria. Though he doesn’t seem to have any gainful employment and the three seem to be living entirely on Sarah’s earnings at the ad agency, Kurt has nonetheless won sole custody of Teri because Victoria went crazy and ended up in a mental institution, though she’s out now and is threatening to sue for custody now that she’s free and has inherited a fortune from a relative, which she seems to think makes her a more appropriate custodial parent than a shiftless writer who’s living off his (current) wife. We see a series of flashes on the screen that indicate Sarah is being stalked and photographed by someone unknown, and shortly after that the someone unknown sends Sarah a hard copy of one of his surveillance photos and also sends others to her cell phone via a “flash” application that makes them appear momentarily and then disappear untraceably. (One imdb.com message board contributor had the same question about this plot device that I did: why didn’t Sarah just delete that app?) The movie continues in that vein, as the stalking of Sarah gets more intense, her mysterious assailant disguises himself as a nonexistent postal worker and then a nonexistent police officer, and in the middle of all this we get a scene in which a middle-aged man who looks like a cross between Leonard Nimoy (rest in peace, Mr. Spock!) and Richard Belzer rather avuncularly chats on the phone with a hired assassin for whom he serves as a sort of agent, contracting killing jobs and assigning hit people to do them. There are all sorts of suspects as to who should be stalking Sarah, including Victoria; her next-door neighbor Louise (Jody Thompson), a twice-divorced woman whom she suspects of having designs on Kurt; Jackson Carpenter (Kyle Cassie), a colleague at work who’s bitter that Sarah got a promotion Jackson thought should have been his; and even Sarah’s long-suffering secretary and assistant Julie (Darla Taylor), whom she suspects of being in league with Jackson to do her in — figuratively — at work.

Eventually Sarah traces the man who seems to have the lead role in stalking her, Vincent Strurup (Brent Stait), who impersonated the police officer and the postman and was also responsible for planting a mysterious package in her mailbox that Kurt assumed was a bomb; he got Teri into his car in a hurry, bade her fasten her seat belt, drove away from their home like the proverbial bat out of hell, then called it into the police department — only the “bomb” was a fake and Kurt got read the riot act by the cops, saying that phoning in a fake bomb threat is itself a crime and the next time he does it they’re going to arrest him. Eventually the middle-aged murder contractor gets cornered by the police in the ordinary office building in which he works and commits the proverbial “suicide by cop” — he fires at the police, who vastly outnumber and outgun him, and they take him down permanently — and before he’s killed he calls his assassin to tell him all contracts are off. Vincent angrily snarls, “This ends tonight,” and the stage is set for a final confrontation at the Millers’ home between our ordinary suburban couple and the professional killer. Only [BIG-TIME SPOILER ALERT!!!!!] it turns out that it’s Sarah who’s the professional killer and Vincent is the brother of the woman who was killed amidst the orange balloons in the opening scene (ya remember the woman who was killed amidst the orange balloons in the opening scene?) and who was a police officer when that killing took place but, barred from investigating it himself because of his family tie to the victim, quit the force and determined to find the person who had killed his sister and get revenge. Sarah, it turns out, only married Kurt as a blind (I thought, “His first wife went crazy and his second wife’s a professional assassin — boy, this guy can sure pick ’em!”) so she could continue her real work with the triple cover of businesswoman, wife and (step)mother, and at the end Sarah subdues Vincent with a taser gun, Kurt threatens to shoot her, Sarah says, “You don’t have the guts,” and Julie the long-suffering secretary (ya remember the long-suffering secretary?) grabs the other gun on the scene and it turns out she does have the guts to kill Sarah.

For most of its running time Watch Your Back is a better-than-O.K. thriller — director Furukawa obviously has suspense chops and he manages to make some pretty preposterous scenes believable even though writer Kanefsky keeps the motives of the characters maddeningly elusive and obscure until he springs his mega-reversal on us 15 minutes before the end. That weird trick ending — though “planted” by a few clues (including the opening, in which Sarah, wearing only a bra and skin-tight pants, is shown working out and keeping herself in excellent physical shape — it seems weird she’s willing to do this at the breakfast table and ignore the demands of both her husband and her stepdaughter for food — and also a mysterious closet in which Teri keeps trying to hide out and her stepmom keeps chewing her out and forbidding her to go in there) — really poisons the whole movie, for a reason director Fritz Lang mentioned in his interview in the 1969 oral history The Celluloid Muse. Lang signed to do his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), in hopes of making a “message” picture against capital punishment. The story is about a reporter, played by Dana Andrews, who works with his publisher (who’s also the father of Andrews’ fiancée) to frame himself for a murder so he can show how easily a person can be convicted and executed based on circumstantial evidence; then, at the last minute, the publisher will come forth with the evidence that it was a frame. Only the producer, Bert Friedlob, insisted on a trick ending similar to that of Watch Your Back in which Andrews’ character really did kill the person he supposedly framed himself for killing and used his future father-in-law as a pawn in his attempt to get away with murder. Lang protested; “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and 38 minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke.” And if a great director like Fritz Lang couldn’t do it with Dana Andrews, certainly a journeyman (though promising) director like Jason Furukawa can’t do it with AnnaLynne McCord here!

A Lady’s Morals (MGM, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was A Lady’s Morals, an oddly titled MGM production from 1930 directed by Sidney Franklin (MGM studio head Irving Thalberg’s choice when he wanted a “class” directorial effort, and an excellent filmmaker who’s largely been ignored by the auteur crowd) from a script by the usual committee — Dorothy Farnum (story), Hans Kräly and Claudine West (scenario), John Meehan and Arthur Richman (dialogue) — in a story that’s at least ostensibly a biopic of 19^th century opera and concert diva Jenny Lind. The script comes at least within hailing distance of some of the facts of Lind’s life — she was born in Sweden (and nicknamed the “Swedish Nightingale,” which got used as the title of another biopic, made in 1941 in Germany), had an early stellar career in opera, went through a vocal crisis, got out of it but decided to concentrate on a concert and recital career after that, and was presented in the U.S. in 1850 by none other than circus impresario P. T. Barnum — but most of the movie is an artfully done soap opera in which Lind (played by real-life opera star Grace Moore in her film debut) meets and ultimately falls in love with struggling composer Paul Brandt (Reginald Denny, totally undercast in a role that demanded Ronald Colman or Leslie Howard). Alas, when Lind’s voice cracks during a performance of Bellini’s Norma (“at the end of a long and grueling tour,” a silent movie-style intertitle tells us — and the presence of an intertitle in what’s otherwise a quite sophisticated and technically well-made early talkie is itself startling) there’s a riot in the theatre started by partisans of the city’s reigning diva, Rosatti (Judith Vosselli), during which Paul is beaten and his eyes are so badly injured he ends up blind. No matter, though; while she continues her career Jenny also ends up with Paul as his companion and his caregiver. The film was conceived as a vehicle for Moore, who had a totally different sort of voice from the real Jenny Lind — Lind never recorded (she died in 1887, just missing the improvement of the phonograph to the point where it could at least kinda-sorta do justice to music and the human singing voice) but from the existing reviews and the music written for her (including one of Verdi’s less regarded operas, I Masnadieri) it’s clear that she was a light-voiced coloratura soprano, whereas Moore was a lyric soprano whose most famous roles were in operas that weren’t written yet when Lind was active (or, for that matter, alive): Puccini’s “Big Three” (La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly), Massenet’s Manon and Charpentier’s Louise (the last of which she made a film of in France in 1939 that was considered good enough its soundtrack was eventually issued on CD).

Moore gets to sing two excerpts from genuine operas, “Rataplan” from Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment (which she performs in the original French — this is one of those operas written by an Italian composer for a French theatre and therefore originally in French but later translated, usually badly, into Italian) and “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Her voice suits the “Rataplan!” beautifully — and it’s helped by an infectiously amusing staging in which Paul goes on stage as one of the supers and stays on well past his appointed exit so he can get close to her — but “Casta Diva,” the aria on which her voice cracks when she’s forced to encore it, is way over her head. (At least I give the filmmakers credit for using two operas that did exist during Jenny Lind’s career.) Moore was the sort of singer Maria Callas would largely put out of business, with a glorious, well-trained and evenly-produced voice but almost no sense of drama. In her most famous film, One Night of Love (Columbia, 1934) she sings “Un bel dì” from Butterfly beautifully from a sheer vocal point of view, but she omits the breathless anticipation any modern singer would bring to the line “Chi sarà? Chi sarà?” and completely fails to bring the aria to dramatic life. “Casta Diva” was an aria even less suited to Moore’s gifts than “Un bel dì”; when Bellini wrote Norma for Giuditta Pasta he was writing a role that demanded a soprano with dramatic power and volume and coloratura skill — what the Italians call a soprano drammatica d’agilità — and there’ve been damned few of those in operatic history and only two, Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas, who recorded extensively enough that we can judge their voices (though Zinka Milanov did surprisingly well in her surviving Met broadcasts of Norma — she didn’t bring to the role the myriad dramatic subtleties that Callas did, but she acted the part far more effectively and multidimensionally than one might expect from the famous anecdote of her telling a director who was trying to guide her through a performance, “This is where I stand, this is where I sit, this is where I sing”). Moore sings it the way she sang “Un bel dì” in One Night of Love three years later, savoring the sheer beauty of the music but doing nothing with it dramatically — one wouldn’t guess from hearing her that this is an opera about a Druid high priestess who’s trying to talk her people out of mounting a fruitless revolution against their Roman occupiers, and who’s also trying to conceal that she broke her vows by having sex with the Roman proconsul and bearing him two children.

Oddly, A Lady’s Morals (a strange title for a film about an opera singer — it was called Jenny Lind for the U.K. release and in the French-language version Moore filmed with a different, and otherwise all-French, cast) seems stronger when the heroine isn’t singing; the dialogue is light and witty, Franklin’s direction assured and without the glacial immobility so many early talkies suffered from, and while the romantic intrigue and soap-opera complications may have relatively little to do with Lind’s actual life they are presented effectively and even movingly — and, praise be, Franklin and the writing committee avoided the horrible old cliché of having Paul regain his sight at the end. Moore had a checkered career in films; she started out as a musical and operetta singer, made her operatic debut in Bohème in 1928, then in 1930 was lured to Hollywood by Irving Thalberg and cast in A Lady’s Morals and then opposite another real-life opera star, Lawrence Tibbett, in New Moon. Both films flopped and Moore went back to the opera stage; in 1934 she was offered the female lead opposite Maurice Chevalier in the sound remake of The Merry Widow, but she demanded equal billing with him, he refused, so Jeanette MacDonald got the part and Moore got passed down to Columbia, who put her in the film One Night of Love — in which she plays an aspiring diva who falls in love with her imperious voice teacher (Tullio Carminati). One Night of Love was a surprise hit — the most successful film about opera ever made until The Great Caruso (1951) — and Columbia made four more films with her before dwindling box-office returns led to the end of their association. She went on to make the Louise film in France (with Abel Gance directing and equally illustrious singers, Georges Thill and André Pernet, in the key male roles) and performed mostly in concerts until her tragic death in a plane crash in 1947.

Babysitter’s Black Book (Johnson Production Group, Shadowlands, Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Babysitter’s Black Book, the much-ballyhooed Lifetime “world premiere” from the weekend before the one that concluded yesterday, and it was a production I’d wanted to watch because I thought it would offer some good clean dirty fun. It did, sort of, but whereas Kept Woman was better than I expected Babysitter’s Black Book wasn’t as good, and it’s hard to put my finger (no pun intended) on why. The premise: Ashley (Spencer Locke) is a fiercely ambitious high-school senior in southern California who’s determined to get into business school either at UC Berkeley or the prestigious (and very expensive) private Pressman University (fictitious, though I suspect it’s supposed to be Stanford). She’s already started a business of her own, a combination babysitting and tutoring service called “Family Buddies,” and has enlisted several of her classmates including Rachel (Angeline Appel), Janet (Lauren York) and Gilli (pronounced “Jillie”) (Steffani Brass). Only Ashley discovers that because of their own financial problems, including the closure of the store her mom used to run, her parents have wiped out her college fund and she has no way to afford to go to a prestigious university even if she gets admitted to one. Rachel mentions to her that one of Family Buddies’ clients — the male member of a couple whose kids she sits and tutors — offered her $350 to have sex with him, and with Ashley’s teachers telling her that she should grow her business by offering additional services, Rachel enlists the other members of Family Buddies to turn tricks and thereby get the money to put themselves through college.

Janet takes to prostitution like the proverbial duck to water, Gilli stays out of the whole thing (she’s an aspiring artist who’s trying to raise the money to go to art school) and Ashley finds herself not so much a prostitute as a mistress; Mark (Ryan McPartlin), a trial attorney and the husband of one of her best Family Buddies clients, offers to pay her way into Pressman (he’s an alumnus) if she’ll have an affair with him. She feels a little guilty because she gets along with Mark’s wife Linda (Perrey Reeves), but ultimately she goes along with the whole deal and they have a hot weekend together which director Lee Friedlander (any relation to Louis Friedlander, a.k.a. Lew Landers, who launched a thousand tacky “B” movies during the 1930’s and 1940’s?) shoots in full-out soft-core porn style that’s by far the most interesting part of this movie. Then Ashley has an attack of conscience and wants to break it off, but Mark sends her a threatening text saying he’ll “out” her to her parents if she doesn’t continue to see him. Rachel gives her the word that she’s organizing a weekend pool party at which rich men will pay up to $1,000 for their sexual services, and Ashley is willing to go along — but when it comes time to do the down ’n’ dirty with Walker (Jeff L. Williams), she walks out. Later she arranges another tryst with Walker on her own, but bolts when Walker brings in another woman, Tiffany (Paula Roman), and wants to photograph the two girls kissing each other and getting it on in the sort of mock version of Lesbianism that seems to turn some straight guys on. (The actual Lesbians I’ve talked to on the subject assure me that what passes for girl-on-girl action in porn aimed at straight men has virtually nothing in common with what Lesbians really do in bed together.) The whole thing comes crashing down when Harper (Ashley Dulaney), a 1-percent girl (but then what’s she doing in a public high school?) who thought her admission to Pressman was guaranteed until Ashley came along and aced her on grades and essays, gets her revenge — it seems that Walker is her uncle and she saw Ashley at her uncle’s place, put two and two together, and used that to blackmail Ashley: either withdraw from Pressman and open Harper’s place back up or Harper will “out” her prostitution ring to the police, the school authorities and the media. The local paper publishes a story (front-page but below the fold) called “High School Hookers?” and the excrement strikes the air conditioning big-time; a hatchet-faced assistant district attorney (Natalie Salins) throws the book at the girls in general and Rachel in particular — Rachel gets sentenced to 10 months in prison, the other girls get probation and the customers, including Mark, are forced to register as sex offenders and take parenting classes if they ever expect to see their kids again.

There’s a certain degree of social commentary in this movie — the 1-percenters pretty much get away with it (Harper, the whistleblower, not only gets into Pressman but wins the spot as class valedictorian that had originally gone to Ashley until the scandal broke) and the not-so-rich girls end up back where America’s increasingly inflexible class system says they belong — a tag scene introduced by a title “Eight Months Later” shows Ashley working as a coffeehouse barista and going to community college, a fate she had once dreaded — but writers Richard Kletter and Michelle Samit aren’t interested in parlaying their sex story into an exposé of the class war the makers of the brilliant Lifetime movie Restless Virgins did. If anything, Babysitter’s Black Book affected me in bringing to the fore my decidedly mixed feelings about sex for money — why shouldn’t it be legal? Mark’s actions with Ashley got him into trouble only because she was just 17; had she been a year older his actions might have been reprehensible but at least they would have been legal, and if a woman can sell her sexual services to one man wholesale (which, as the second-wave feminists of the 1970’s noted, is what traditional marriage basically is), why shouldn’t she have the right to sell them to several men retail? Instead the writers and director Friedlander go for the tawdriest, most exploitative angles of their story, giving us (or at least any straight guys who might stumble onto this show) delectable glimpses of all that jail bait in scanty bikinis and tawdry outfits that, as one of the characters jokes in the movie, makes it look like they raided Rihanna’s wardrobe. Babysitter’s Black Book skims over the moral and class-struggle aspects of the tale to offer some choice titillation that isn’t all that titillating — especially when the men the Family Buddies girls are selling themselves to look so much hotter than the high-school kids they’re expected to date; Doug Noble, who plays Danny — Ashley’s would-be high-school boyfriend (she’s tutoring him, he wants to fuck her but she won’t let him) — looks cute enough and in about 10 years or so he’ll probably be really sexy, but right now Ryan McPartlin has it all over him in the looks department and there’s no doubt which of them I would pick if I had the chance!

Kept Woman (Incendo/Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Kept Woman, whose subject matter I had no idea of and wasn’t able to find out because there wasn’t a clickable link on the title on the Lifetime Web site, though given how many films they’ve been showing lately on the theme of hot young women in more or less exploitative relationships with older and considerably richer men I had assumed the title was “kept” in the Easiest Way sense of a man-mistress relationship. No, it turned out this movie, directed by Michel Poulette (“it was directed by a little chicken?” I couldn’t resist joking) from a script by Doug Barber and James Taylor Phillips, was literally about a woman being “kept” — i.e., kidnapped and held in a crazy man’s basement against her will. The woman is Jessica Crowder (Courtney Ford), who lives with her fiancé Evan (Andrew W. Walker, younger and considerably cuter than the common run of Lifetime leading men) in a New York City apartment until they come home from a night on the town and find their apartment has been burglarized. Worse yet, the burglar (Matt Enos) is still there and forces them at gunpoint to give up the cash they have on hand, the engagement ring Evan gave Jessica and the contents of Jessica’s purse. Feeling so violated she can never be at ease in that apartment again, Jessica insists that she and Evan move — only, this being a Lifetime movie, they’re going from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. The fire is Simon (marvelously portrayed by Shaun Benson, who pulls off the difficult challenge in playing a crazy man to make the audience believes that he thinks he’s not only normal but perfectly sane), the supercilious next-door neighbor who looks harmless enough — he’s a scrawny little thing wearing glasses and a neatly trimmed beard and effecting a milquetoast manner. He says he’s a professor of “men’s studies” at a local university — actually the name of the course he teaches is “Men and Masculinities” (“You mean there’s more than one?” asks the innocent Jessica, obviously not familiar with academic Newspeak) — and he lives alone even though Jessica and/or Evan notice that he’s coming home from the grocery store with enough food for at least two people.

Simon reaches out to Evan and Jessica by presenting them a bottle of wine from his cellar — the label on the bottle is “Chateau Poulette,” an in-joke on the director’s name — and it’s only until half an hour into the movie that his real agenda is revealed. (Actually it’s revealed in the promo they showed just before the movie begins, creating essentially a built-in spoiler.) Simon is a retro guy who believes that a man should be the master of his own house and his women should be subservient to him, and since he can’t get any women to behave that way in 2015 if he meets and courts them in the normal fashion, he’s taken to kidnapping them and holding them in his basement, with a security code on the door (which he changes often) and a full 1950’s décor in the living room and kitchen he’s set up so the women he’s kidnapped can cook for him, fuss over him, dress in 1950’s housewife’s clothes and, of course, give him sex without resistance any time he wants it. He’s got his house wired with state-of-the-art 21^st century surveillance cameras but, true to form, he watches the output from these videos on an old-fashioned 1950’s black-and-white TV. He has at least one other victim, Robin Simmons (Rachel Wilson), a former graduate student (Charles wondered why a men’s studies professor would have a female graduate student, and I thought that was a clue Barber and Phillips had planted in his script that would start getting Evan and the other characters wise to Simon when they realized the inconsistency) whom he started an affair with while she was still his student, coaxed into the basement and now has a big-time case of the Stockholm Syndrome, totally identifying with Evan and his needs and coaxing Jessica to accept that from now on Simon and that basement are going to be her life. She even stops Jessica from attacking Simon in one quite well-done and gripping scene. Simon forces Jessica to give him her e-mail address and password so he can write Evan an e-mail, ostensibly from her, stating that she’s found a better man and has left Evan for him — which Evan doesn’t believe because Jessica left without taking her cell phone and she would never leave home voluntarily without her phone.

Evan has help tracing Jessica from two unlikely sources. One is Oscar Garrett (Jesse Camacho), a heavy-set, queeny and gender-ambiguous person with whom Jessica had maintained contact via computer because they were both interested in investigating missing-person cases, and to whom in their last contact Jessica had let slip her suspicions about Simon and his intentions — Oscar offered to investigate Simon for Jessica, but alas she didn’t take him up on it. The other is Tyler Haynes (Troy Blundell), a police officer (in what jurisdiction, one wonders?) who’s a friend of Evan’s (and who’s played by an actor who, to my mind, is even hunkier than Andrew W. Walker — this is certainly the movie to watch if you’re as upset at I am by the deficient beefcake quotas of recent Lifetime films compared to the procession of hot guys they used to show in the 1990’s!), who interviewed Oscar as part of his initial investigation into Jessica’s disappearance and received from Oscar a full dossier on Simon, including that he was fired from a previous teaching job in Connecticut for inappropriate sexual contact with a student but was allowed to resign rather than put the school through the embarrassment of firing him. The student he was fired for having inappropriate sexual contact with was Robin Simmons — and there was an earlier incident in which he also had sex with a student who subsequently disappeared; her name was Megan, and we’ve already been told in previous dialogue between Simon and Jessica that he murdered her when she got out of line. While Jessica is down in the basement with Simon, Robin, who for all her identification with Simon gets downright jealous the first night Simon decides he wants Jessica for sex instead of her, says to him that Jessica is only pretending to be in love with him and she’s really still in love with Evan and anxious to escape. Simon responds by murdering … Robin, whom he’s convinced is lying out of jealousy and he insists he won’t tolerate lies. Officer Tyler comes out to Simon’s case to ask about the items in Oscar’s dossier, and Simon responds by being polite until Tyler turns his back, whereupon Simon clubs him twice with a cast-iron frying pan, killing him.

Then there’s a suspense climax in which Evan breaks into Simon’s house, Jessica figures out the combination to the security lock by seeing Simon’s bloody fingers on certain of the keys, the three of them confront each other in the upstairs part of the house, Jessica raises a fire extinguisher about to club … and then there’s a commercial break, after which we see Jessica in jail and we immediately assume she had genuinely fallen in love with Simon and had killed Evan to stay with him. Only it turns out she’s not an inmate, just a visitor, and she’s there to torment Simon, rubbing it in that because he didn’t get the death penalty he’ll be imprisoned for the rest of his life the way he was hoping to do with her, and also showing her the book she’s just written (called Kept Women — plural) about her experience in his basement. Kept Woman could have been considerably better but even as it is it’s better than the common run of Lifetime movies; director Poulette and editor Benjamin Duffield do some marvelous suspense cutting, and Poulette also gets a marvelous performance out of Shaun Benson as the crazy Simon, properly edgy but also nice enough you can readily understand how he was able to trick those women into coming into his basement, while at the same time his idea of male-female relationships is stuck in the 1950’s and it’s clear that’s why he commits his crimes. I’d still love to see someone make a movie of Emma Donoghue’s Room sometime — it strikes me as the best of these woman-held-captive-by-a-sex-fiend stories and it’s intriguingly told from the point of view of the child she has by her captor, who literally has known no other environment than the room in the shed in which he held them since he was born there (home-delivered by his mom without anyone else’s knowledge or help, since a previous pregnancy ended in disaster when the captor tried to help deliver the baby and failed miserably, causing its death) and has never been outside (and when I looked Donoghue up on Wikipedia I wasn’t at all surprised to find she’s a Lesbian, given the quite sour view of men and heterosexuality in her book) — but Kept Woman is actually a pretty good one, maybe not in absolute standards but quite a bit better than the common run of “pussies-in-peril” movies from Lifetime.