Meet Nero Wolfe (Columbia,1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Nero Wolfe TV pilot my husband Charles and I watched the very first attempt to put Nero Wolfe on film, the 1936 Columbia “B” Meet Nero Wolfe, based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance. The title refers to a particularly deadly snake found only in South America, and when I read the book I assumed the name was pronounced in French style as “fair-de-launce,” but the characters in the movie Anglicize it and say “fur-duh-lance.” The plot starts out on a golf course, where E. J. Kimball (Walter Kingsford) and his son Manuel (Russell Hardie) show up to play, only to be told by the course management that because it’s Sunday they only allow foursomes to play. The club official offers to pair up the Kimballs with two other players, Professor Edwin Barstow (Boyd Irwin, Sr.) and Claude Roberts (Victor Jory), only Professor Barstow borrows E. J. Kimball’s driver and immediately keels over dead of an apparent heart attack as soon as he takes his tee shot. Nero Wolfe (Edward Arnold) gets involved in the case when his favorite bootlegger during the Prohibition era, Maria Maringola (the young Rita Hayworth, then still wearing her hair dark and using her birth name, Rita Cansino), whose beer remains Wolfe’s favorite, seeks his help in finding her brother Carlo. When Kimball’s chauffeur is also murdered, Wolfe deduces that the elder Kimball is the murderer’s real target. It seems that E. J. Kimball spent 15 years in South America, most of them in Argentina, where he met and married Manuel Kimball’s mother. Unfortunately, Mrs. Kimball died suddenly and unexpectedly, and E. J. was tried for her murder but was acquitted. But that didn’t stop Manuel from seeing his father as his mother’s murderer and hatching an elaborate plot to kill his dad for revenge.

Meet Nero Wolfe was scripted by Joseph Anthony, Howard J. Green and Bruce Manning (the last of whom had a curious career; after winning a contract with Columbia on the strength of a 1933 suspense novel called The Ninth Guest, he quickly moved to Universal and became best known as Deanna Durbin’s favorite writer) and directed by Herbert J. Biberman. Biberman was a casualty of the Hollywood blacklist – as was his wife, actress Gale Sondergaard; and one cast member from this film, Lionel Stander, who played Archie Goidwin. Biberman made his directorial debut in 1935 with a prison drama called One-Way Ticket, then made Meet Nero Wolfe, and after that racked up a few credits as a writer, returned to directing with the anti-Nazi film The Master Race (1944), and after he was blacklisted shot the legendary film Salt of the Earth (1954), about a real-life mining strike led by the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union after they were thrown out of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for refusing to require their leaders to take the anti-Communist loyalty oaths demanded by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The union actually put up the money to make this film, and the leading actress, Mexican up-and-comer Rosaura Revueltas, was herself blacklisted and didn’t work in films again until 1976. (Other blacklistees involved ini Salt of the Earth were writer Michael Wllson and actor Will Geer.)

My husband Charles actually liked the TV pilot better than the feature film, but I didn't. Aafter the relative weakness of William Shatner as Archie it was a real treat to see the authority with which Lionel Stander grabbed the role and never let go. Arnold’s Nero Wolfe is above average – though it’s a real pity that Rex Stout’s long-running distaste for the movie business and what they had done with his character deprived us of seeing a Nero Wolfe film with the best imaginable actor playing him, Sydney Greenstreet. (I remember while reading a Rex Stout Wolfe novel that Greenstreet would have been the perfect actor to play Wolfe because Wolfe is Greenstreet’s Maltese Falcon character, Casper Gutman, only on the right side of the law.) It turned out Sydney Greenstreet did get to play Nero Wolfe on radio – but, alas, never got to do a Wolfe movie, partly because of Stout’s persnicketiness and partly because he was under contract to Warner Bros., which wasn’t big on series mystery films the way MGM, 20th Century-Fox, RKO and Columbia were. Still, aside from Greenstreet (who wouldn’t make his film debut until 1941, five years after Meet Nero Wolfe was made), it’s hard to imagine a better actor for Rex Stout’s character at the time as Arnold.

My main annoyance with Meet Nero Wolfe is the comedy aspect, especially the truly annoying character of Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore), Archie Goodwin’s fiancée. She’s constantly nagging him about when they are going to get married – Nero Wolfe is always giving him some assignment or other that keeps him away from the altar – and she’s also perpetually nagging him to give up his job with Wolfe and become a furniture salesman. Much to my surprise, at the end ofM< i>Meet Nero Wolfe the writing committee pulled a surprise I wasn’t expecting – they actually had Archie Goodwin and Mazie Gray get married and leave on a honeymoon – only Wolfe, who treats them to the tickets for a steamship and a honeymoon suite in Paris, insists that Archie tail a man on board the ship and report all his movements back to Wolfe in New York. Quite frankly I felt sorry for Archie sticking himself with this horribiy annoying woman for the rest of his life!

Rifftrax: "Plan Nine from Outer Space" (Districutors' Corporation of America, 1957, released 1959; Rifftrax version, 2008 or 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually I wanted to watch something a bit on the lighter side than all the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) of the news, and I found it in a “Rifftrax” presentation on YouTube of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s 1959 messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space. I first watched this notorious film in about 1976 or so (while Wood was still alive, by the way) after having read about it in two biographies of its more-or-less “star,” Bela Lugosi: The Count, by Arthur Lennig (1972, republished in 2007 as The Immortal Count); and Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape, by Robert Cremer (1976). I had checked both books out of the Oakland Public Library, and one thing I was fascinated by was the final chapter of Lugosi’s life: his association with Ed Wood and the three films they amde together, Glen or Glenda? (1953), a pioneering work about Transgender people loosely based on the Christine Jorgensen story; Bride of the Monster (1956), yet another non-epic starring Lugosi (in his final speaking role) as a mad scientist who builds his own nuclear reactor and use ot to rule the world; and Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959, though copyrighted 1957).

Wood had originally planned to make a Dracula knock-off with Lugosi called Tomb of the Vampire, and for it Lugosi once more put on the familiar cape and weht through his undead schtick for a series of test scenes, including one in which he lurks sinisterly next to a tree. Then Lugosi died of a heart attack at age 72, and Ed Wood was left with a few minutes of footage of him. When a group of Baptists hired Wood, ostensibly to make religious films, Wood suggested that they first make a movie in a proven genre like science fiction and then use the profits from that to finance their spiritual movies. (The first time my husband Charles and I watched the bizarre film Hill Number One, a Roman Catholic production in which James Dean made his film debut as the Apostle John in a would-be drama about the two days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, he joked that if the Baptists had made religious movies with Ed Wood, this is what they would have looked like.) Wood wrote a totally new script that would incorporate his unused Lugosi footage into a completely different story about an interplanetary invasion, and for the central issue of his plot he ripped off the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (directed by Robert Wise and written by Edmund H. North based more or less on a magazine story, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates).

The plot deals with Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee, who after a brief career as an actress in dreck like this and The Brain Eaters turned to writing and scripted some of the best TV-movies of the early 1970’s), two officers in a fleet of flying saucers, and their commander, “The Great One” (John Brekenridge, who plays the role as a screaming queen). They are supposed to conquer the Earth to keep us pesky humans from developing something called the “Solarbonite Bomb” (at least that’s what the actors playing aliens call it; the humans in the film call it “Solaronite,” without the “b”), which uses particles of sunlight to create a super-explosion that, if it is ever used, will blow up all the stars and explode the universe. To do this they have invoked the dreaded “Plan Nine,” which consists of reviving recently dead humans and turning them into mindless zombies who will kill on command and are controlled by “electrode guns” that look like toy ray-guns (and probably were, given Wood’s budgetary limitations). One of the characters revived by the aliens’ technology after he’s been killed is Inspector Clay of the Los Angeles Police Department, played by ex-wrestler Tor Johnson, who was a frequent house guest of the Woods even though Mrs. Wood got upset when Johnson tried to use their toilet and his sheer weight cracked the bowl.

Johnson was actually in some quite good movies, including The Man on the Flying Trapeze with W. C. Fields in 1935 (in which Johnson played Tosoff, one of the wrestlers Fields’ character tries to get away from work to see), Lost in a Harem and In the Foreign Legion with Abbott and Costello, and The Lemon Drop Kid with Bob Hope. Unfortunately, his huge size (the “Rifftrax” crew compared him to a bull elephant), ultra-slow mobility and fractured delivery of English dialogue (he was Swedish and, like Lugosi, never learned much English) make him more pitiable than frightening. The other two recently dead humans revived by Eros and Tanna are “The Ghoul Man” (Bela Lugosi, hilariously doubled by Tom Mason even though Mason was six inches taller than Lugosi and considerably thinner; he was either Wood’s or Wood’s wife’s chiropractor – the sources differ and maybe he was treating both of them – and he agreed to forgive some of the money they owed him professionally if he could be in the movie) and “The Vampire Woman” (Maila Nurmi, professionally known as “Vampira,” hostess of a TV show aired in the L.A. area in 1954; in the 1980’s she unsuccessfully sued Elvira for stealing her act), who were supposed to have been husband and wife, with her dying and then him.

“I had to kill off his character earlier than I’d planned because he really died,” Wood told Robert Cremer in an interview for Cremer’s Lugosi biography (which he gave partly because Arthur Lennig’s Lugosi book had called Wood the worst director of all time and partly because Cremer agreed to pay him) that was extensively used in Rudolph Grey’s book on Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy, the prime source for the Scott Alexander-Larry Karaszewski script for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic, in which Johnny Depp played him and Martin Landau won an Academy Award for playing Lugosi. (Ironically, Depp bought Bela Lugosi’s old house.) I remember seeing Plan Nine for the first time in 1976 on the old “Creature Features” show on local TV in the San Francisco Bay Area (which means I saw it when Ed Wood was still alive; he died in 1978), and I’ve seen it many times since; it’s a film I’ve long had an affection for as a sort of camp classic, a so-bad-it’s-good movie that mixes up a relatively serious sci-fi premise with a lot of milling around in a cemetery (where the grave markers and the mausoleum were obviously made of plywood or cardboard), and some pretty good cinematography (by William C. Thompson, who like Lugosi and supporting player Lyle Talbot – who had once made movies with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis – had worked at major studios; Thompson’s career with big companies ended when he went blind in one eye, though he could still light effectively with the other) marred by one of the chronic problems with Wood’s work: his inability to pay for the conversion of so-called “day-for-night” shots, so the film cuts willy-nilly from darkness to light and back again. Despite the crudity and ineptitude of his films, Ed Wood had real talent as a director – which I learned when I watched The Violent Years and Orgy of the Dead, both written by Wood but directed by others. His films have a rough, crude energy to them that actually makes them entertaining, while the ones he merely wrote and others directed are deadly dull.

“Rifftrax” was a project of the last cast of the popular TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000 after their series ended on the Sci-Fi Channel. It consisted of lousy movies the cast – impersonating a spaceship commander and his two robots – spoofed with a running commentary spoken over the dialogue. (I remember watching an early-1980’s version of the same concept in San Diego called Schlock Theatre, which had even lower production values than Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and which differed in that the snarky comments about the film were delivered as subtitles instead of on top of the dialogue.) The final crew – Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett – decided to record similar commentaries on various films, ranging from the same type they had spoofed on MST3K (as their show had been abbreviated) to major-studio productions they would never have been able to license for their original show. The idea was you would buy the standard DVD of the movie and purchase the “Rifftrax” commentary as a computer download, then hopefully synch them so the snarky comments would play over the movie. They also did live screenings where they appeared in person (and one surprise was that Kevin Murphy, who had done the voice of the scrawny little robot Tom Servo, was a big, heavy-set bear type) and talked over an in-person showing of the film.

The “Rifftrax” version of Plan Nine was genuinely funny but could have been better. I could have lost the flatulence jokes (especially since they don’t relate to anything in the original movie), and thge references to Lugosi's heroin addiction seemed gratuitous and unfair snce Lugosi had actually kicked the habit in the last year os hif life. (The late L:eny Bruce. who himself died of a heroin overdose in 1966, 10 years after Lugosi, joked that Lugosi was the worst advertisement for rehab because he'd been an addict for years, and then "he cleaned up and, boom! He dropped dead.") But the overall ridicule – especially targeting the queeny actors who play the male aliens; when I watched this with my then-girlfriend in the early 1980’s we both fell in love with Dudley Manlove’s lines, explaining why his race has to deal with those pesky Earthlings and stop them from inventing a weapon of universal destruction, “You see? You see? Your stupid minds, stupid, stupid, stupid!” – was reasonably well done.

Endeavour: :Terminus" (Independent Television Service, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I returned home from the neighbors’ barbecue at 9 p.m. for an intriguing episode of the British Independent Television series Endeavour, a prequel to their long-running (1987-2000) Inspector Morse series. Inspector Morse depicted its central character as a veteran police inspector in the town of Oxford, England, famous as the locale of England’s premier university. He was also a recovering alcoholic and a huge fan of classical music in general and Wagner in particular. In the Inspector Morse series he was played by John Thaw and his partner, detective sergeant Robert Lewis, was played by Kevin Whatley, who later got a spinoff series of his own. \

Endeavour – Morse’s first name – was a depiction of Morse’s early years on the Oxford police force, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and in those days he was an active alcoholic whose principal commanding officer, detective chief inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam). The young Morse was played by the genuinely hot Shaun Evans, and one running theme of his relationship with Thursday was that Thursday kept trying to get Morse into rehab,and Morse did the usual alcoholic’s or drug addict’s thing of saying, “I don’t have a problem … “. This particular episode was called “Terminus” after the Chipping Compton terminus where the #33 bus disgorges its last remaining passengers and then continues in the other direction. (An imdb.com “Trivia” poster noted that this was the 33rd episode of Endeavour and that’s why they used the #33 bus, while a “Goofs” poster said that the bus seen on the show was a double-decker that is regualrdly used in London but not in Oxford.)

“Terminus” deals with the murder of a college professor while on a previous run of the #33 bus, to which Morse was a witness but he was too drunk to notice anything. On a subsequent run of the #33 two nights later, the bus breaks down and is forced to stop at an old hotel that has been closed for eight years, ever since a recently escaped mental patient went there during a ballroom dance and massacred at least eight people, then was rearrested, sent back to the institution, and committed suicide in his cell. What’s fascinating about this episode of Endeavour was its twist into Gothic horror – it is about an old dark house with a sinister past, after all – and director Kate Saxon and writer Russell Lewis give us some nice frissons of fright. But the resolution of the mystery is a bit on the disappointing side: it turns out that the professor and the killers were all part of a betting pool on British football (i.e., soccer) games who were relying on a teenage math wizard to predict the teams they should bet on. D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” in which a child would sit on a rocking horse, rocking back and forth, and somehow gain from that information that he “knew” the outcome of a particular horse race,so his family would bet accordingly, not only was a clear inspiration but is actually name-checked in Lewis’s script.

Alas, like the boy in Lawrence’s story (who dies while still a child), life didn’t end happily for the math protégé whose predictions were key to the soccer bets: he went crazy, was institutionalized and escaped to commit the mass murder at the hotel. In order to safeguard their winnings, the members of the soccer pool decided to put the money in a safe at the hotel and split the combination between them so none of them could get at the money without the others – only the members of the pool murder the professor, who figuired out the scheme in the first place, stabbing him all at once like the killers of Julius Caesar (though the parallel that occurred most commonly to the imdb.com reviewers was to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express). Detective Sergeant Morse figures out the scheme when he remembers his drunken stumble out of the bus just as the professor was also getting off, and he remembers the number 37 on the professor’s cufflinks, which he realizes was part of the combination to the safe. Anyone who’d read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club or Sir Arthor Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four would have known in advance that this scheme of splitting the combination to a secret and (at least in those cases) ill-gotten treasure was not going to end well.

Meanwhile, detective chief inspector Fred Thursday is genuinely concerned about the whereabouts of his son, who is in the British Army but has been reported absent without leave – he got a weekend pass but never returned – and his wife Win (Caroline O’Neill) is even more worried about their son than he is, while their daughter Joan (Safa Vickers) couldn’t care less about her brother. This plot line ends with a maddening inconclusiveness that suggests the worship of the Great God SERIAL has regrettably crossed the pond: Thursday’s son never turns up and we don’t find out what happened to him. The result was a reasonably entertaining Endeavour but also one that was stronger on atmosphere than plot, and it’s hard to believe that the young, intuitive detective who periodically pulls himself from his alcoholic haze just long enough to gain insights that enable him to solve the crime and ten sinks back in we see here is going to grow up to be the cranky, dyspeptic Morse we all know and sort-of love from the later series.

Jailbreak Lovers (Novus Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Jailbreak Lovers, based on a true story that happened in Kansas in 2006. Bored housewife Toby Lynn Young (Catherine Bell), whose husband Pat puts her through some of the indicia of domineering masculinity – at least he fetches his own beer from their refrigerator instead of making her do it for him, but he watches sports on TV and couldn’t be less interested when she attempts to strike up a conversation with him – loses her job and sets up a volunteer dog rescue operation. The warden of the local prison seeks her out to lead a course in dog training for the prisoners, in hopes that this will help rehabilitate both the dogs and the prisoners. Up until then Toby has been totally straight-arrow: she never smoked, never drank, married the first (and only) man she ever dated, has been with him for 30 years (they have a grown son, Adam, who’s a senior at college, and we get the impression that Adam’s conception marked the last time she ahd hubby Pat ever had sex), and has never been in any trouble with the law. All that changes when she meets John Maynard (Tom Stevens), who’s serving a life sentence for murder. He was involved in a car-jacking in which the owner of the car was actually sleeping in it, and according to his own account his accomplice actually killed the owner, but since he was part of the commission of a crime that involved murder, he was convicted too.

John and Toby “meet cute” when he saves her from another prisoner who’s upset with Toby because she had promised to let his sister adopt one of the dogs, but she wasn’t able to reach the sister and the dog ultimately ended up on the open market. John sneaks up behind the other prisoner and gets him in a headlock, and confronted with John’s headlong masculinity – especially as compared to her husband, who has a job as captain of a firefighting company, which keeps him away from home for long hours and wears him out so much their nights in bed consist of both of them lying on their backs looking bored – she gets a crush on him. They start grabbing every chance they have to touch, even as minimally as locking fingers together, and ultimately graduate to a few frantic open-mouthed kisses. The story is backgrounded by serious illnesses in the family of both Toby and her Black best friend and partner in the dog rescue operation: Toby’s father gets cancer and goes through an arduous regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, while her Black friend’s mother has diverticulitis that’s getting worse, which forces her to stop going to the prison with Toby and thereby facilitates the growing attraction between her and John. (Incidentally John’s last name is spelled “Maynard” in the movie but “Manard” in real life.)

Eventually the two plot John’s escape from prison, which they accomplish by having John lose 20 pounds so he can fit into a box, which he then sneaks into a carrying case meant for a large dog, and Toby loads the case along with other, smaller containers that actually contain dogs. There’s some nail-biting suspense as she drives out of the prison with John in the back of her van (which reminded me of how Lauren Bacall helped the unjustly imprisoned Humphrey Bogart escape in the 1947 film Dark Passage) before the two of them successfully evade the police and guards and hit the open road. Following a pre-arranged plan, they ditch the dog rescue van in a storage garage she rented because it had no security cameras (when the police interrogate the garage owner afterwards, he rather ruefully said he’d intended to install the cameras the next month), and drive off in a grey SUV she bought by cashing out both her and her husband’s 401(k)’s. She and John drive out to a cabin in Tennessee and spend what the real Toby Young (now Toby Dorr because she remarried following her 27-month prison term for facilitating John’s escape) later described as “12 wonder-filled days” during which they had a lot of sex and did a lot of errands, including a trip to a guitar store in Nashville because John was an amateur guitarist – the first thing John does once he’s out of prison is grab a ukulele he had “inside” and serenade Toby with “It Had to Be You,” theme song from the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, also a crime movie.

The two of them are able to move about surprisingly well despite the sheer size of the manhunt (and womanhunt) local police, Kansas state troopers and U.S. marshals have organized to find them. Then they’re successfully traced to the remote cabin in the woods because Toby made a mistake: she had the registration papers for the SUV sent not to a mail drop, but to her own address in the cabin. The police report on them calls them “armed and dangerous” because among the possessions they have with them are two handguns which John stole from Toby’s husband Pat after he let himself in to the home while Toby wasn’t looking. Ultimately they are caught when the police and various authorities set up a blockade of the road, and while the real John Manard lost control of the truck he was driving at 100 miles an hour and crashed into a tree, the fictional John Maynard (as in “Keynes”?) pulls to a stop and gives himself up. Ultimately John is re-incarcerated for 10 more years and put into a so-called “supermax” prison that is supposed to be escape-proof, while Toby serves her 27 months, is released and ultimately remarries – as does her ex-husband Pat. (Ya remember Pat?)

That aspect of the story reminded me of the “Flitcraft” tale in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, in which Sam Spade reminisces about an earlier case involving a man named Flitcraft, who disappeared one day, leaving his wife behind but well cared for. When Spade finally traced him, Flitcraft explains that one day as he was on his way to work he was almost struck dead by a piece of wall falling from a building. This convinced him of the impermanence of life and the need to get the most out of it while you still can, only by the time Spade found him he’d drifted back into his old routine, resumed his career in a different city, married a similar-looking woman and settled back into the life he’d led before. “He accustomed himself to buildings falling, and then he accustomed himself to buildings not falling,” Spade says. Likewise Toby Young Dorr accustomed herself to living on the dark side and having a flaming affair with a dangerous convict, and then when it ended it seems she pretty much went back to the sort of life she’d led before. “I white-knuckled my life until desperation coerced a change,” she wrote in her essay. “The wiser choice would have been to courageously and intentionally change before my life imploded. However, life’s beauty is not destroyed by tragedy; contrarily, it is enhanced by our perseverance through hardships.”

The makers of Jailbreak Lovers – screenwriters Anne-Marie Hess and Jodie Burke, and director Katie Boland – made one mistake that I found annoying: they periodically cut into the story to show scenes of Toby, John and Toby’s Black friend being interviewed retrospectively about the experience. That wasn’t necessarily a bad dramatic device, but it seemed to me really pointless and dull. They also cast both Toby and John with considerably hotter-looking actors than the real-life characters (whom we got to see in a Behind the Headlines mini-documentary after the film), but that’s all too typical of movies that allegedly dramatize real stories. Aside from that, Jailbreak Lovers is an effective piece of entertainment; it’s true that it’s not until 85 minutes into this two-hour (including commercials) TV movie that we finally get a soft-core porn sex scene between the principals, but the frustration of waiting is actually part of the plot. All too much of the movie is about the sheer torment of feeling a sexual attraction for someone and at the same time being hopelessly unable to fulfill it – though before John’s escape Toby smuggles in a cell phone for him and he says he wants it to hear her voice before he goes to sleep, and I was a bit surprised that director Boland didn’t do anything to suggest he was jacking off to the sound of her voice. (That could have been done even within the restrictions of basic cable.)

One welcome irony is that even though their relationship lasts only 12 days of connubial bliss, it’s not all bliss: not surprisingly, especially given what he was in prison for in the first place, John turns out to be hot-tempered and domineering, able to turn on a dime from hot, sexy lover to vicious bastard and back. I quite like Jailbreak Lovers; it delivers some of the lubricious titillation we expected from the promos but it also had some of the real depth Lifetime and its producers tend to let creep into their movies, especially when they’re more or less based on true stories.

Torchy Blane in Panama (Warner Bros., 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles came home from work at around 10:45 p.m. and at 11 I ran him another YouTube video: Torchy Blane in Panama, fifth in Warner Bros.’ series of nine and one of the two that regrettably did not feature Glenda Farrell as Torchy Blane. The Torchy Blane movies were based on a series of detective novels by author Frederick Nebel called McBride and Kennedy, which featured Lieutenant Steve McBride of the New York Police Department and a male reporter named Kennedy. For the films, however, the “suits” at Warners decided to change the character of Kennedy into a woman, Theresa “Torchy” Blane, and for seven of the nine series entries cast Glenda Farrell as Torchy and Barton MacLane as McBride. The writers of the Blane films set up a romance between Torchy and McBride, but as William K. Everson noted in his 1972 book The Detective in Film, “Like the Bulldog Drummond films, their delayed marriage was used as a plot gimmick, but fortunately the idea was not stressed and they were such an ill-matched couple that audiences were hardly holding their breath awaiting the union.” This was also the book in which Everson wrote – in a line I quoted from memory the last time I wrote about a Torchy Blane movie (the very next in the series,Torchy Gets Her Man, in which Glenda Farrell blessedly returned to the role) but now I have the book in front of me – “Barton MacLane’s main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum.”

The Wikipedia page on the Torchy Blane series says that Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster based the character of Lois Lane on Torchy Blane, and while the page claims that they modeled her on Glenda Farrell’s portrayal, I suspect that it was actually Lola Lane’s performance here that was their model, not only because of the similarity in names between the real Lola Lane and the fictional Lois Lane, but because Lois in the Superman comics is dark-haired, like Lola Lane and unlike the famously blonde Glenda Farrell. It’s a pity Farrell wasn’t in Torchy Blane in Panama, because in all other respects it’s one of the better entries in the series, a mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously and a comedy with one of the great camp openings in movie history. Dumb-cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor who was in all nine Torchy Blane films) is marching in a big New York street parade, in a contingent representing a lodge-type organization called the Leopards (an obvious takeoff of the real-life Elks or Moose). Just as his contingent is walking past the Hayward National Bank (which seems like an odd name for a bank in New York City), he hears two shots from inside.

Still wearing his leopard-skin costume from the parade, he breaks ranks and summons his fellow Leopards to come in and back him up. When he gets inside the bank – in a nice touch, he is wearing his (genuine) police badge pinned inside his Leopard suit – he finds that the bank has been robbed of $90,000 in cash and one of the tellers was shot and killed. Gahagan immediately takes charge of the investigation until Steve McBride (played in this film by Paul Kelly, a far less obnoxious character actor than Barton MacLane; a pity he didn’t get to do the role with Farrell!) shows up – with a male reporter, Bill Canby (Larry Williams), in tow. McBride decides to give Canby the story just because he’s tired of being accused of favoring Torchy because they’re lovers. Only Torchy arrives on the scene and, furious about being scooped on the robbery itself, finds a Leopard lodge pin from someone in the Los Angeles branch. It turns out that the L.A. Leopard lodge brother actually died three years before, but Torchy deduces that someone stole his pin and is using it to impersonate a Leopard. She’s also convinced that this person is the bank robber.

Midway through the movie – there isn’t much of a whodunit angle, just as there wasn't in Torchy Gets Her Man – we learn that the robber and killer is Stanley Crafton (Anthony Averill), and he’s on his way to Panama to fence the loot. McBride, Gahagan and Canby end up on an ocean liner to Los Angeles via Panama (and of course we get some nice stock shots of the Panama Canal in operation) and deliberately don’t extend the invitation to Torchy Blane. No problem: though Torchy has never sky-dived in her life before, she charters a plane (an ordinary land aircraft because a seaplane would be too conspicuous and make it too obvious what she was doing) and bails out. Torchy doesn’t land on the actual deck of the ship – I was rather hoping she would, but that might have been too big a special effect for Warner Bros. to pull off with the budget of an hour-long “B” – but she’s picked up by a rescue crew from the ship. Fortunately her cash stash has survived intact and dry, and she uses it to pay her passage for the voyage and also to buy herself some clothes at the ship’s onboard store, including a surprisingly sexy pair of lounge pajamas that Torchy, much to Steve’s discomfiture, insists on wearing outdoors.

Meanwhile, Stanley has decided to hide the stolen $90,000 inside the mock leopard the Leopards carry around as their trademark, and there’s a nice bit in which Torchy, stuck with the dreary burden of carrying the stuffed leopard around, wants to throw it overboard but Stanley panics and stops her. One would have thought this would arouse her suspicions sooner than it does – ironically, it’s Gahagan who first figures out that Stanley isn’t who he says he hs because when they shook hands, Stanley did so normally instead of using the secret Leopards’ handshake. McBride and his fellow cops are searching for the NN-series of bills that represent the stolen money, but they can’;t find any on board because Stanley is paying for his tabs with out-of-sequence cash and saving the loot for Gomez, his fence (George Regas), who demands 50 percent of the take for laundering it. Ultimately, after the ship passes Havana, it docks at Panama and Torchy tries to shadow the crooks. In fact, she succeeds too well – she ends up captured – but she successfully outwits the bad guys by demanding to be allowed to change out of her wet clothes. She hangs the pajamas over a balcony and the cops see them and know where she is. Stanley tries to take Torchy as a hostage, but the cops are able to get behind him and overpower him.

Torchy Blane in Panama, written by George Bricker from a story by Anthony Coldewey and directed by the serviceable William Clemens (who for decades was stuck in the Warner Bros. “B” unit doing titles like Missing Witnesses, Talent Scout, King of the Lumberjacks and Down the Stretch), is actually a quite fun movie, relatively sophisticated for its time and its budget, and though one aches for what Glenda Farrell would have done with the female lead, in all other respects Torchy Blane in Panama is a quite capable entry in the series.

Boston Legal: "Head Cases," "Still Crazy After All These Years" (David E. Kelley Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last evening my husband Charles asked me if we could watch a DVD from the backlog rather than sitting at the computer watching YouTube. I obliged by breaking out the boxed set of the first (2004-2005) session of David E. Kelley’s series Boston Legal (which lasted five seasons on ABC), described on imdb.com as “a spin-off of the long-running David E. Kelley series The Practice (1997), following the exploits of former Practice character Alan Shore (James Spader) at the legal firm of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt.” Kelley had a quite long résumé as a TV producer and writer, including such shows as Doogie Howser, M.D. and Ally McBeal, but he was best known for his legal series: L.A. Law (his first credit, debuted 1986), The Practice and Boston Legal. The main difference between The Practice and Boston Legal is that, while both are set in Boston, the firm in The Practice was a criminal defense firm while the one in Boston Legal dealt exclusively in civil litigation. Also, like Steven Bochco, Kelley was a faithful worshiper at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, and one of the things L.A. Law, The Practice and Bostonb Legal became known for is the infuriating inconclusiveness of the episodes’ endings.

L.A. Law had largely set the template for modern-dal legal shows, including two or three intersecting plot lines in each episode and so much sexual cruising goinig on between the members of the firm we’d be forgiven for wondering whether this was a law firm or a straight bathhouse. The central characters are Alan Shore (James Spader), who has been hired by the nationwide company that owns the firm (you didn’t think there were nationwide chains of law firms under the same ownership? Neither did I) to see if he can ease the firm’s principal lead partner, Denny Crane (William Shatner), into retirement. If he can’t ease Denny Crane out quickly and easily, he’s willing to play hardball (though given that Shatner was in all the series’ 101 episodes, it’s not that anything he tried actually worked). Meanwhile, there’s another member of the firm, Brad Chase (Mark Valley), who’s having an office romance with Sally Heep (Lake Bell). Among the other women in the law film are Tara Miller (Rhona Mitra), who like Sally has long auburn hair but unlike her has a vaguely British or British-influenced accent, and Lori Colson (Monica Potter), a blonde whose main function seems to be to stand around Brad and cast disapproving glances at the way he’s screwing through the hired help.

In the opening episode, “Head Cases,” one of the firm’s senior partners, Edwin Poole (Larry Miller), shows up for work totally naked between his suit jacket and his shoes (he does have a nice ass, or at least as much of it as we get to see) and is immediately whisked off to a mental hospital to recover from his latest “attack.” The main intrigues are a case dealing with Ernie Dell (Philip Baker Hall), who wants his marriage of six months annulled because he’s convinced his wife is having extra-relational activities on him; and Sarah (Jadzia Pittman), a young Black girl with a typically domineering stage mother, who was passed over for the lead role in the musical Annie because she’s Black and the producers wanted a white girl. What Ernie Dell doesn’t realize is that super-attorney Denny Crane, his friend since childhood, is also the man who’s having the affair with Dell’s wife. At one point Dell wants the law firm to hire private investigators to find out who the other man in Mrs. Dell’s life is, and when Crane and others in the firm keep putting him off. Later he hires his own private investigators, learns the truth and goes to the Boston Legal offices to threaten Denny with a gun – only Denny realizes that the “gun” Ernie is holding is just a blank-loaded starter’s pistol and therefore harmless.

Meanwhile, one of the other attorneys entraps the ex-husband of a client with a prostitute in order to blackmail him into letting her move to New York with their children so she can take a job as a medical resident. I was expecting that the Annie plot line would resolve either with the girl deciding that she didn’t want to be a child star (the writers, Scott Kaufer and Jeff Rake, dropped a hint early on that stardom is really her mom’s ambition, not hers) or the Solomon-like one of the judge ordering the two girls to split the role, The latter is essentially what happens, albeit with the Black girl just as understudy and being able to play three matinees, but only after Reverend Al Sharpton (as himself) makes a guest appearance in the courtroom and delivers an impassioned sermon-like speech riffing off the most famous song from Annie, “Tomorrow,” and insisting that the Black community in general and Sharon in particular want the sun to come out today.

The second episode, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” deals with a former attorney and girlfriend of Brad Chase, Christine Pauley (Elizabeth Mitchell), who once tried to kill him and ended up in a mental institution. Now Brad is actually trying to win her release, to the understandable discomfiture of Sally, the co-worker who’s also his current girlfriend. In one of the great scenes in this episode, the doctors at the hearing board considering her release declare that the only reason for her apparent improvement is the medications they’ve put her on – whereupon Christine reveals that she hasn’t actually been taking them. Instead she’s been accumulating them for weeks, and as the pills keep coming out of her pockets the way cutlery kept coming out of Harpo Marx’s raincoat, we get the point that Christne has got better on her own and not due to any meds. Only has she truly got better? For the second half of the episode,.Christine starts almost literally stalking Brad, turning up in the combination restaurant/cocktail lounge where he’s taken Sally (this show has more scenes in barrooms than it does in courtrooms), presumably because it was a place Brad took her during their affair. Later Christine turns up at a fancy office party being given by the firm, and when Brad confronts her and asks her why she hasn’t gone back to her parents in Chicago the way she told everyone at the institution she would when they agreed to release her, she says instead that she’s got her old job in Boston back and she intends to stay there. For Brad this is terrible news, even apart from Sally’s jealousy; it means that instead of being her legal guardian just long enough to get her to the train station to put her on the train to Chicago, he’s stuck with her indefinitely … and that’s the cliff-hanger on which the episode ends.

Also in the story is a deposition taken by Denny Crane of Martha Silver (Penelope Windust, daughter of the late director Bretaigne Windust, who did some of Bette Davis’s last movies as a contract player at Warner Bros.), a widow who’s suing her late husband’s cardiologist for “loss of consortium” because her husband died on the operating table. Denny viciously cross-examines her about her current sex life to establish that just because she’s lost her husband doesn’t mean she hasn’t been able to find “consortium” in the arms (and other parts) of living men. Her attorney brings Denny up on charges before the state bar, but Denny wins the case and not only avoids disbarment but settles the case for a low-ball figure by scaring the opposing attorney into avoiding a trial, which he might lose and get absolutely nothing either for his client or himself. In a bittersweet scene between Denny and managing partner Paul Lewiston (René Auberjonois, in one of the few roles of his career in which he wasn’t a screaming queen), the two of us reminisce about having seen Muhammad Ali’s laqst fignt, in which Larry Holmes pounded him into oblivion. “He could still box,” Paul says; “he just wasn’t Ali.” This is supposed to give Denny the message that though he’s still a competent attorney, he’s not the killer lawyer he used to be and maybe it’s time for him to retire.

I hadn’t realized that William Shatner not only was in Boston Legal, he was one of the major principals, and unlike stars like Errol Flynn, Robert Taylor and Tom Selleck, Shatner actually became less talented as an actor when he lost the hunky good looks everyone remembers him for on the original Star Trek. (At one point I even made a Star Trek joke about him; I had him saying to one of his adversaries in the firm, “I’ve fought Denebian slime devils! I can hold my own against you.”) I liked Boston Legal but I didn’t watch it at the time, at least partly because the seriam gimmick of ending each episode inconclusively bothered me (as it still does, though that’s less of a problem on DVD when you have the next episode right there instead of having to wait a week before it airs), and coming to it now what surprises me most is how much of a comedy it was. David E. Kelley and his writers put so many jokes into each episode this almost qualified as a “dramedy” (to use that horrible 1990’s concoction), and though the show holds up pretty well it’s certainly no match for Law and Order and its spinoffs and sequelae.

The Upturned Glass (Sidney Box Productions, Gainsborough, Riverside, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night Charles and I watched a YouTube movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good: The Upturned Glass, a 1947 British thriller starring James Mason in what at first appears to be two roles – a college professor and a surgeon – in which Mason the professor tells his lecture audience that he will be talking to them about the case of a renowned doctor whom he will call “Michael Joyce” as an example of how a perfectly normal and previously law-abiding citizen can commit a rationally planned murder for readily understandable reasons. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that Mason’s character is really talking about himself. He tells the story of how he met a married woman, Emma Wright (Rosamond John), when she brought her 12-year-old daughter Ann (Ann Stephens) in for eye surgery to keep her from going blind. As Joyce stays involved in the Wrights’ lives during Ann’s long recovery period, he starts falling for Emma even though both of them are married. He’s already told us that his marriage was unhappy, and Emma has had to endure long absences from her husband Philip because he’s a geologist and goes on years-long expeditions. Their relationship goes as far as a couple of long, lingering kisses before Joyce abruptly breaks it off – which makes me wonder if the writers, John P. Monaghan and Pamela Kellino (more on her later), were influenced by Noël Coward’s play Brief Encounter and the highly successful British movie made of it just two years earlier, since that story also turns on a love affair between people married to others which likewise stops short of actual sex.

Shortly after their breakup, Joyce learns that Emma is dead – she fell from a second-story window of her country home in what the coroner’s jury officially ruled an accident, but Joyce is convinced that Emma was actually murdered by her sister-in-law, Katherine “Kate” Howard (Pamela Kellino) – yes, that’s right: the co-writer of this movie is also in it, and behind the scenes she was then Mrs. James Mason. She was born Pamela Ostrer, daughter of Isidore Ostrer, one of the family that controlled Gaumont-British studios, and “Kellino” was the name of her first husband, director Ray Kellino. She met James Mason on the set of I Met a Murderer, a 1939 film Ray Kellino directed, and while making the film together she and Mason had an affair. She subsequently divorced Kellino and married Mason; he would divorce her in 1964, but his two children, son Morgan and daughter Portland, were both with her. Joyce drives up to Emma’s old house and literally breaks in; he’s found out by the caretaker, Clay (Morland Graham), but eventually Clay decides that Joyce is no ordinary burglar. Once he visits Emma’s room he’s more convinced than ever that she was murdered and her sister-in-law Kate did it, and we even get a flashback showing just how Kate did in Emma. Joyce starts dating Kate, but it’s clear he’s only worming his way into her confidence so he can figure out a way to kill her, preferably by pushing her out the same window from which Kate pushed Emma to her death. Ultimately he does so, but the pesky caretaker who turns up earlier than expected forces him to pick up the body (substantially easier than it would be for real – apparently the writers and director Lawrence Huntington had never heard of “dead weight”) and load it into his car.

While he’s driving away from the scene he’s sidetracked by two people, including a fellow doctor who’s on his way to treat a patient, a 12-year-old girl living with her grandmother ini an out–of-the-way location. It doesn’t take us loing to realize that the girl is Ann Wright – though like the fact that the murderer and the professor lecturing about him are the same person, this isn’t stressed the way it would have been in an American film – and even in the most adverse conditions imaginable, operating in a private home and needing a basin of hot water to sterilize his instruments, Joyce is able to save Ann again. Alas, the doctor who recruited him on the case, Dr. Farrell (Brefni O’Rorke, an astonishingly close “type” to George Zucco), has correctly diagnosed Joyce as mentally ill, a paranoiac, and even though Farrell goes out to Joyce’s car and either doesn’t see or doesn’t recognize Kate Howard’s body (Joyce sent him there to get an emergency medication he needed for Ann’s surgery), Joyce is guilt-ridden enough that he drives his car to the side of a cliff and, rather than throw Kate’s body off it (as I was expecting), or driving his car off the cliff and thereby making it look like they both died in an accident (also one of the alternate possibilities I was predicting), he stands on the side of the cliff and ultimately goes over. The End.

The Upturned Glass is quite a good movie and an artistic triumph for both Mr. and Mrs. Mason; between her acting and the script she co-wrote, she easily matches him and etches an indelible portrait of a “bad” but not totally evil woman, outrageously self-centered (during the film she tries to grab custody of Ann just to screw Emma’s mother and her own husband out of it, especially since she has no intention of trying to raise Ann herself and wants to farm her out to a boarding school instead) but falling short of out-and-out psychopathy. I’ve often criticized movies (especially recent ones) for not having any central characters we actually like, but though that’s true of The Upturned Glass it’s not a film that suffers from that. Aside from Emma, who’s really too good to be true, the characters here are memorable for their human combinations of good and bad points, and this film achieves a moral complexity relatively unusual for a thriller. It’s also interesting in that the second-billed actress actually gets killed relatively early on – though she does reappear in a flashback – much the way James Whale did with Gloria Stuart in the woefully underrated The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) and Mason’s future director, Alfred Hitchcock, did wit Janet Leigh in Psycho in 1960, 13 years later.