Nightmare PTA Moms (Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday at 8 p.m. I put on a couple of movies on Lifetime, including one very much to their usual formulae called Nightmare PTA Moms (now why do I get the impression Lifetime’s writers sit around and brainstorm, “Just what’s the absolutely silliest title for a Lifetime movie we can dream up?”) and then the first part of a five-part, 10-hour miniseries called Flowers in the Attic: The Origin. Nightmare PTA Moms, both written and directed by men (Dave Thomas was the director and Adam Balsam the writer), hews pretty close to the usual Lifetime formula, though it has at least one slight deviation: to play Rick Gardner, the innocent young husband and father, casting director Ricki Maslar got an unusually hunky guy, Jonathan Stoddard. Not only do we get a lot of yummy shots of him topless and showing off a great pair of pecs, Stoddard is so sexy he’s the kind of guy Lifetime usually casts as a villain. As the film begins Rick has uprooted his family, wife Gail (Brianna Cohen) and middle school-age daughter Chloe (Madison Paige), to take a promotion in his job for Jackie Z, a fashion retailer that seems to specialize in middle-end clothes, not too fancy but not totally plain, either. Instead of just running one Jackie Z store, Rick will be regional manager and responsible for at least 12 outlets. Rick is excited at the new job and the extra money he’ll be making, even though Gail is unhappy because she’s built up a catering business, Gail’s Goodies, and she’ll have to start from scratch in a new town, Clearwater, Florida. (The locale isn’t identified until well into the movie, but from the stock shots of causeways we get in the opening I was already thinking Fl;orida.)

The film actually begins with a black-ahd-white prologue set five years before the main action (though Lifetime doesn’t give us their usual chyron to tell how much time has elapsed between the prologue and the main body of the film), in which a man goes down a flight of stairs in search of a malfunctioning electrical circuit and either falls or is pushed down a long flight of stairs in the dark. Only later do we learn that this man is financial adviser Bill Vanderberg, and his widow Vanessa (Alissa Filoramo) runs the local PTA (the initials stand for “Parent-Teacher Association” but there don’t seem to be any teachers involved) with all the sympathy and understanding of a Mob boss. Over the summer Vanessa lost her re-election bid for PTA president to a woman named Lexie Wilson, only just a week after the election (like Donald Trump, Vanessa refused to accept her loss and insisted on a ballot recount, which produced exactly the same vote as the first coult) Lexie apparently committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. Vanessa re-assumed the PTA presidency at the exclusive Bellhaven Academy and blackmailed the remaining PTA members to cover for her and lie to the police investigating Lexie’s death. Gail Gardner joins the local PTA, hoping for (among other things) networking opportunities to build up her catering business, and immediately runs afoul of Vanessa’s iron control.

When Vanessa’s daughter Serena (Gracie Silva) falls behind in soliciting contributions for the PTA’s walkathon, she pressures a Black woman on the PTA whose husband gave only $10 to give more so Serena will be on top again. Later she goes ballistic when at the PTA’s annual Hallowe’en costume party, Vanessa’s sorceress costume loses the top prize to Gail Gardner’s outfit as Marie Antoinette (with Rick in the audience, dressed as Louis XVI, cheering her on). While she’s at the party she gets word from an Asian-American PTA member named Sunny (Hana Liu) who tells her that Vanessa definitely murdered her husband (though since Vanessa and Bill were alone in the house when she killed him, one wonders how she would know) and blackmailed Sunny into giving her a false alibi. She was able to do this because Sunny had been the treasurer of the PTA when Vanessa was president, and Vanessa threatened to lie and accuse her of embezzling the group’s funds. According to Sunny, Vanessa’s motive for murdering Bill was jealousy: she was convinced he was having an affair with Lexie Wilson and wanted to put a stop to it even if it meant making herself a widow (which status she of course uses for maximum social sympathy). Vanessa has also decided to seduce Rick, and to that end she shows up at Jackie Z to buy a very sexy-looking skin-tight black-and-white yoga outfit and asks Rick to help her in the fitting room. Rick is already under suspicion from Gail because he earlier carried on an online flirtation with a woman, though it stopped short of even a face-to-face meeting, much less anything down-’n’-dirty. Gail is convinced that Rick’s 25-year-old assistant Sissy (Hedy Nasser) has the hots for him – which is believable judging from what we see of the body language between them – and once Gail learns that Rick left his phone in the dressing room while helping Vanessa, she’s immediately convinced that the two of them are, if not yet having an affair, at least on their way to one.

Gail goes to Jackie Z and buys the same spectacular yoga outfit Vanessa did (and it looks equally hot on both of them), and she happens to be wearing it when, after a call ostensibly from a Bellhaven alumni association but actually from Vanessa – who in the meantime has also launched a campaign to sabotage Gail’s business by posting negative reviews online and spiking her cookies with a mild food poison, not enough to kill but enough to make six people sick. Thinking it’s going to be her last chance at a big order before Vanessa’s sabotage wrecks her reputation. Gail frantically cranks up her oven and produces several boxes worth of cookies and cupcakes, only of course it’s a trap and Vanessa and Gail end up on the balcony at Bellhaven. Gail’s husband Rick shows up and gets into the school absurdly easily given that we’ve been led to believe it’s after hours and all the entrances have been locked, but in the end it’s Gail herself who pushes Vanessa off the balcony rail. Just when we’ve thought Vanessa is dead, we get a typical Lifetime chyron, “Three Months Later,” and three months later Gail chairs the election meeting of the PTA, which elects Sunny the new president – while Vanessa is in prison, alive but injured from the fall, where she gets a visit from her daughter Serena, asks how Serena’s grandmother is treating her, and boasts that she’s just been elected chair of her cell-block’s inmates’ association. (Do they have such things in Florida prisons? Just asking.) Nightmare PTA Moms – a bit of a misnomer because there’s only one true “nightmare PTA mom” in the dramatis personae – is actually a fun romp through the usual Lifetime clichés, and it benefits from a full-bodied bitch performance from Alissa Filorama as Vanessa. It’s true the role is simply a stock Lifetime villainess without the dimension Christine Conradt might have given her if she’d been writing this, but Filorama plays the part with a kind of spunky intensity – and though Jonathan Stoddard is no great shakes as an actor, he’s fun enough to look at it doesn’t really matter if he can act!

Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, part 1:The Marriage (A&E Studios, Lifetime, 2o22_

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

Alas, the next Lifetime movie on the channel last night, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin: Part 1: The Marriage, was a piece of overblown garbage that makes one wonder why they bothered. It was based on a novel called Garden of Shadows, attributed to “V. C. Andrews,” a hack writer of romantic fiction with Gothic twists who died in 1986, one year before Garden of Shadows was published. No matter: deciding that the name “V. C. Andrews” was too valuable a property to be allowed to die with its original owner, her publishers simply hired another writer, Andrew Neiderman, to keep cranking out “V. C. Andrews” novels, some of them based on outlines she’d left behind, some (especially later on, after he ran out of Andrews’ own material) his own inventions in her style. Garden of Shadows was the fifth and last book in the Flowers in the Attic cycle, in which a crazy old woman named Olivia Foxworth (played in Lifetime’s earlier adaptation of Flowers in the Attic by Ellen Burstyn, in one of those performances in which an old pro seems to be pushing aside the younger actors and saying, “Here, let me show you how it’s done”) locks her grandson and granddaughter in the attic of her old, crumbling Southern mansion in Charlottesville, Virginia. The two reach sexual maturity and become incestuous lovers simply because they’re both horny and there ls literally no one else. (I'm tempted to argue that among stories of brother-sister incest, at the top is Wagner's Die Walküreand at the bottom is Flowers inth8e Attic.)

Flowers in the Attic kicked off a string of three other sequels plus a prequel, Garden of Shadows, which was supposed to show how Olivia got so crazy she would do such a thing. In this version, set between 1918 and 1920 (we know that because the end of World War I and the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote happen during the show). Olivia Winfield (Jemima Rooper – a white girl named Jemima?) works in an office as a business assistant to her father. He’s determined to find her a husband, while she is reluctant until she meets Malcolm Foxworth (Buck Braithwaite), eligible bachelor from a super-rich family in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though she wonders what the darkly handsome bachelor could see in her – her idea of love and marriage has come from reading books like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, and she hopes Malcolm will be her real-life Darcy or Rochester – they ultimately marry. Only it turns out that Malcolm is almost literally a monster: he’s constantly tearing off on mysterious “business” trips, and when he finally has sex with his new wife, instead of giving her any sort of thrill he merely rapes her. They conceive two children in this manner, both boys – much to Malcolm’s disgust because he really wants a girl whom he wants to name Corinne, after his mother, who abandoned the family when Malcolm was five and didn’t return to his life until years later, just before she died.

Malcolm’s long-lost father Garland (Kelsey Grammer, of all people) shows up with a young bride named Alicia who's about Olivia’s age, and the two of them have another child – also a son instead of a daughter. Malcolm, bound and determined to father a girl, rapes his stepmother Alicia, and when his dad catches him in the act, Malcolm strangles and kills him. Malcolm justifies this by saying that Olivia failed in her duty to give him a daughter – she was told by Dr. Curtis (Peter Bramhill) after the birth of her second son that she could not bear any more children – and therefore this gives him the “right” to force h himself on any available woman. There are at least two servants in the Foxworth household, a white battle-axe whose family has been there for generations and who makes Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (a tale this one owes quite a lot to, as it does to The Heiress and the British 19th century classics it name-checks) seem warm and fuzzy by comparison; and Nelly, a Black woman whom Olivia makes her confidante until Malcolm decides they’ve gotten too close and fires her. In the final scene Olivia agrees to keep quiet about Malcolm murdering his dad, in exchange for several conditions: she demands that Malcolm set up a $2 million trust fund for both their sons; that Alicia be allowed to stay in the house until her second baby is born, whereupon Malcolm and Olivia will raise it as their own; and that Nelly be rehired – despite the reluctance of Nelly’s mother Celia (Evelyn Miller) to let her go back to Foxworth Hall. (Nelly and Celia essentially become the Lifetime stereotypes: the voice-of-reason Black characters who try to talk the white people in the story out of doing the stupid, obnoxious or evil things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.)

Amazingly, Lifetime is doing Flowers in the Attic: The Origin as a five-part miniseries, which means there’ll be four more two-hour movies on this theme to suffer through running every Saturday night until the cycle ends. It reminds me of the way Peter Jackson and his writers squeezed three movies out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit – not at all a long book – to create a cycle that would match the earlier one he made from the three books in The Lord of the Rings, each of which is at least twice as long as The Hobbit. I remember when Charles and I got the boxed set of all six of Jackson’s Tolkien movies I more or less suffered through the three Hobbit films – they seemed relentlessly overblown and inflated (but then this is the man who expanded the Beatles’ Let It Be from 90 minutes to six hours, and also made a 190-minute remake of King Kong when the 1933 original was near-perfect at 100 minutes).

I’m not sure whether I’m going to keep watching the rest of the installments of Flowers in the Attic: The Origin; I liked bits and pieces of this first episode but for the most part it was pretty much an endurance test, with the characters speaking ultra-stilted dialogue that was the screenwriters’ attempt to make this sound like it was taking place at the start of the 1920’s, and the cinematographers making it look like they were shooting it through Vaseline to give a similarly “distant” gauzy air of the past. It also doesn’t help that, though Jemima Rooper is appealingly spunky (but then she never convinces us that a woman this feisty and independent would want to get married, especially to such a creep), Buck Braithwaite as the villain is simply a drip. I had thought while watching Alissa Filoramo in Nightmare PTA Moms that she was going through the motions of playing a Lifetime villainess, but compared to Braithwaite she was electrifying. Whether he’s being superficially charming or unleashing the beast within, Braithwaite is simply boring: he’s dull and has no charm whatsoever, and one doesn’t have to go back to Laurence Olivier, Colin Clive or Orson Welles as the characters Olivia name-checks to see what could be done with a character like this. One only has to go back to any number of previous Lifetime dramas which featured far more magnetic and intense performances by actors playing villains than this!

Blowup (Carlo Ponti Productions, MGM, 1966)

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

I’d checked out the movie listings for Turner Classic Movies earlier in the day and at 7 p.m. decided to watch Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (the title is usually spelled as two separate words, hyphenated – Blow-Up – but,though the hyphenated version appears on the poster art, the spelling on the actual credits is one word, Blowup), an experimental film from 1966 that was Antonioni’s first work for a British or American studio (MGM) and his first film in English. TCM was presenting it under unusual auspices: this film and the one they showed immediately before it, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, were presented as part of a tribute to costume design in films based on an exhibit at the Costume Institute of New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Naturally, when I hear the syllable “Met” in connection with the arts in New York I immediately think of opera instead of fashion, but the Met hosts an annual fashion gala which I’ve read about and seen footage of on TV. The event looks like one of the most preposterous phenomena on earth, complete with what the costume designer that was one of TCM’s on-air hosts admitted were what he called “exercise clothes” – not clothes designed to be worn while exercising but clothes designed only for fashion shows with no particular expectation that anyone will actually wear these God-awful contraptions in normal life. The two hosts stressed that Blowup was very much a film of its time, and it’s hard to argue with that.

Its original inspiration was a short story by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (though he was actually born in Belgium) called “Las Babas del Diablo” (the word babas translates as “spit,” “dribble,” “drool” or “slime”), which I remember reading in a collection of Cortázar’s stories that also included “Axolotl” (a pretty obvious knockoff of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” but told in the first person – an axolotl, in case you didn’t know, is the larval stage of a salamander) and “The Pursuer” (a short novel that’s a roman à clef about Charlie Parker – he’s called “Johnny Carter” in the story but it’s obvious not only from the story itself but from Cortázar’s dedication at the outset to “Ch. P.” – and one of the best treatments I’ve ever read on this giant of music). Cortázar’s story is actually a work of supernatural fiction in which every time the central character, a photographer, prints a negative of a particular picture he’s shot of a couple in a park, it changes.

Antonioni and his usual collaborator, co-writer Tonino Guerra – as well as Edward Bond, who’s credited with the English dialogue – used this tale to create a movie that, to the extent it’s about anything at all, is about photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) – I didn’t get a last name for him but this is an Antonioni movie and one of the things he couldn’t have cared less about is giving his characters full names. He’s obviously successful since he drives a Rolls-Royce convertible, and he’s mostly a fashion photographer but he occasionally drives out and shoots candids as well. The first thing we see in the movie is a bunch of what we assume were teenage kids speeding through the streets of London in a black Land-Rover (the car which for many years was the symbol of British imperialism, especially in Africa, since it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle, essentially their equivalent of the Jeep, and it was frequently used by British colonists to patrol the countryside and move supplies around), which establishes the film’s theme – to the extent it has one – of subversion and the clash of generations between staid old Britain and modern-day “Swinging London.”

For the first half-hour of the film we pretty much see Thomas in his studio, cavorting with various female models – first just one woman, played by Sarah Miles and wearing a nice knit dress that looks damned good, especially compared to the self-consciously “mod” clothes every other female wears in this film; then five women at once; and after that a pair of women (Jane Birkin as “The Blonde” and Gillian Hills as “The Brunette”) who come over expecting to have an appointment with him but he tells them to come back the next day. One odd thing about Blowup is how decorous it is: though Thomas comes close to having sex with his models – or with a woman who arrives later in the action – he never actually does so. Antonioni manages to capture the inherent sexuality of model fashion photography – though Thomas’s camera doesn’t have a particularly long lens (indeed, I should say cameras, plural, since he has quite a collection, mostly Leica-style 35 mm but also a Pentax SLR 35 mm, a square-format Hasselblad and even an old press-style camera that takes photographic plates instead of film), he nonetheless aggressively charges towards his models and it does start to look like he’s raping them.

Then he takes his trip to a local park, where he’s fascinated by a couple, a young woman named Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) and her older male lover, and Thomas takes clandestine photos of them until Jane catches him and demands that he give her the film. He immediately gets suspicious, thinking at first that there was a third person in the park and he nearly killed the other two. Jane comes over to Thomas’s home – it’s not clear just how she found out where he lived, but once again, this is an Antonioni movie and he was never a good one for explaining plot points. The two undress and it looks like they’re about to have sex when once again Thomas is distracted – this time by the two women who wanted him to photograph them. Thomas makes a series of blow-ups of the photos from the park, after he palmed Jane off with another roll of film instead of the one he’d actually shot and she palmed him off with a phony phone number, and he sees a hand that appears to belong to a corpse. He even takes a picture of his own picture using his press camera, which seems odd since one would think a photo of a photo would have lower resolution than the original, but eventually he becomes so convinced that someone was murdered during his impromptu photo shoot that he goes back to the park after nightfall. For some reason he doesn’t take his camera this time, so he actually finds the corpse but has no way of proving it later – and when he returns to the park the next morning with a camera, the corpse has vanished.

In between all this, Thomas is shown either driving or walking the streets of London, at one point driving his fancy car past a peace demonstration (judging from the drawing of a mushroom cloud on one of the placards, I assumed it was against nuclear war, though the slogan “Get Out!” suggests it might have been against the Viet Nam war instead, or as well). One of the demonstrators throws a sign into Thomas’s open car and he drives past a couple of police officers who look askance at him, but the sign falls out of hls car shortly thereafter and gets run over by a passing truck. Later he goes for a walk at night past a club where the Yardbirds are performing (the Yardbirds were the hugely successful British blues-rock band from the 1960’s that launched the careers of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and the lineup seen here is Beck and Page on guitars, Keith Relf on vocals, Chris Dreja on bass and Jim McCarty on drums), and for some reason while the Yardbirds song “Stroll On” the club audience stands so stock still one begins to wonder whether the band is performing for a room full of mannequins. Then Jeff Beck smashes his guitar on stage – a trick originated by Pete Townshend of The Who and brought to full fruition by Jimi Hendrix in his infamous performance at Monterey, later lampooned by John Hiatt in his song “Perfectly Good Guitar” – and judging from the overall flimsiness of its construction, including a body apparently made of plywood, it seems to have been made deliberately so it could be smashed up during a performance, especially since he grabs another guitar almost immediately and continues the song.

Beck’s destruction of his instrument finally brings that stock-still crowd to life: they form what amounts to a mosh pit a quarter-century early and fight each other to retrieve the guitar’s neck with all the hunger of an old-time burlesque audience fighting over a stripper’s pair of underpants. Just then Our Alienated Hero leaves the club and spies the neck of Beck’s guitar, abandoned by whoever retrieved it from the mosh pit and then quickly picked up and abandoned again (is that Antonioni’s idea of a social comment on the transitory nature of fame?). Once Thomas goes back to the park the next morning and finds the body gone – and his photo-book editor, Ron (Peter Bowles), who’s the closest thing this movie has to a voice of reason, refuses to believe without photographic evidence that a murder happened at all. Then a disconsolate Thomas walks through the park, where he spots a tennis court and the black Land-Rover we saw in the opening scene (ya remember the black Land-Rover?) pulls up. This time we see that the young people in it are all wearing the white face makeup of mimes, and the two lead mimes (Julian and Charles Chagrin) play a pantomimed tennis game without rackets or balls. One of them hits the “ball” outside the court, and Thomas, getting into the spirit of the thing, picks up an imaginary ball and throws it back into the court. Then the film abruptly ends.

Blowup is a film very much of its time in its sheer meaninglessness and its careful avoidance of a through-line – one could have made an exciting suspense thriller out of this plot, especially given once the photographer realized that his own life was in danger from the unseen killer, but that was precisely the sort of conventional Hollywood storyline Antonioni was famously disinterested in. I’ve seen only two other Antonioni films in my life; in the early 1970’s I watched a TV showing of L’Avventura (“The Adventure”), about a group of rich people who go for a vacation on a yacht, only one of the women disappears – true to form for an Antonioni film, we never find out what happened to her and the other characters couldn’t be less interested. Then a few months ago my husband Charles and I watched an early Antonioni film, La Signora Senza Camelie (“The Lady Without Camelias,” a pun on Alexandre Dumas fils’ famous novel The Lady With the Camellias, which inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata and at least two great films called Camille, the 1921 version with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino and the even better 1936 remake with Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor). The story is about a young woman who’s literally plucked out of nowhere to become a movie star, then attracts the personal and professional attentions of a producer who casts her as Joan of Arc, only the film flops and takes down both their careers, and she finally resigns herself to a career trading on her looks and ignoring her lack of acting talent. That film was everything L’Avventura and Blowup weren’t; it was grounded in real emotion, had a plot that made sense, and didn’t feature the appalling number of loose ends Antonioni not only left hanging in his later works but actually made into his style.

High Tide (Jack Wrather Productions, Monogram, 1947)

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

After Blowup TCM showed a surprisingly interesting movie on their “Noir Alley” presentation, hosted by Eddie Muller, who not only talked about how much he liked the movie but actually had been involved in its restoration. The film was High Tide, the second of a series of movies made at the ultra-cheap Monogram studio by producer Jack Wrather, an oil millionaire who used his money to buy the rights to The Lone Ranger, Lassie and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. That made him an instant Hollywood success story, and he came out to try his luck in films with his second wife, former child star Bonita Granville (which explains how she landed the adult lead in Wrather’s previous production, The Guilty), anbd his close friend, actor Don Castle. High Tide was based on an old story, "Inside Job" by Raoul Whitfield, from the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask, which launched the “hard-boiled” detective genre and helped jump-start the careers of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. Raoul Whitfield remains a man of mystery even though he published over 300 stories in his career (making him far more prolific than Hammett, Cain and Chandler put together!), as well as a handful of novels.

From the online synopsis of High Tide I hadn’t been sure I’d want to watch it because it sounded like a disaster film – Los Angeles Dispatch city editor Hugh Fresney (Lee Tracy, older and seedier than he’d been in his early-1930’s heyday at MGM, which abruptly ended when he literally pissed away his career; on a location trip to Mexico to make the film ¡Viva Villa! in 1934, he got drunk one night and the next morning urinated on a parade of Mexican soldiers, thereby getting the entire company thrown out of Mexico and Tracy and the film’s director, Howard Hawks, fired) and former police officer turned reporter turned private investigator Tim Slade (Don Castle) miss a turn while being chased on a road outside Malibu. Their car goes off a cliff and comes to rest on the Malibu beach, where both men are pinned in place – Slade with his leg under the vehicle, unable to move, while Fresney is paralyzed in the back. Then the film goes into flashback and we finally get the stuff of classic noir: it turns out the Dispatch is owned by Clinton Vaughn (Douglas Walton, looking more than three years older than he had in his marvelous turn as Lindsay Marriott in the film noir ciasslc Murder, My Sweet in 1944), who doesn’t approve of the hard-line anti-gangster exposés Fresney is printing but allows them to go on because they increase the paper’s circulation.

Fresney gets a visit in his office by Mrs. Cresser (Argentina Brunetti), wife – widow, actually – of one of the alleged gang leaders the Dispatch exposed. She protests her husband’s innocence even as the switches are pulled that will execute him, and Fresney adds insult to injury by having a Dispatch photographer take her picture so he can publish it in the paper. Having dispatched (pun intended) Cresser, Fresney’s next target is Nick Dyke (Anthony Warde, who bears a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn in his early villain roles), who shows up at the Dispatch’s offices to deliver his threats in person. Sex also rears its ugly head – this is a film noir, after all, so extra-relational activities have to be part of the storyline. It turns out that Clinton Vaughn’s more-or-less estranged wife Julie (Julie Bishop, who under her original name of Jacqueline Wells was the female romantic lead opposite David Manners in Edgar G. Ulmer’s marvelously subversive 1934 film The Black Cat, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their first film together) had been having affairs with both Fresney and Slade. What’s more, when Clinton Vaughn is murdered – in a sequence director John Reinhardt (who was born in Vienna but does not appear to have been a relative of Max Reinhardt and his family) shoots artfully as a series of indistinct shadows – Julie has just written an incriminating letter to Fresney sayiing that once her husband is out of the way, the two of them can get together.

The note falls into the hands of police inspector O’Haffey (Regis Toomey) – ironically “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller admitted that the first time he saw the movie he got the inspector’s name as “O’Happy,” and indeed that’s what it sounds like the actors are saying – and after a retired Dispatch editor named Pop Garrow (Francis Ford, John Ford’s older brother and a director in his own right until his career flamed out in the silent era while his brother John survived and prospered into the 1960’s) is also killed, Siade and we realize the truth [spoiler alert!]: Hugh Fresney is a gang leader himself, using his power as the city editor of the Dispatch to eliminate his rivals so he can have absolute power over L.A.’s underworld. The scene cuts back to the wreck below the Malibu cliffs where the film started, though there’s yet another surprise twist: Fresney turns out to have a concealed sword in his cane, and he gives it to Slade so Slade can get out his leg from under the wrecked car and make his escape. High Tide is a fascinating and well-made film which piques my curiosity about the other movies Jack Wrather and John Reinhardt made at Monogram in the late 1940’s. Reinhardt had an unusual career: he was born in Vienna and got his start directing foreign-language versions of American films, since one of the reasons the studios had been reluctant to adopt sound was fear of losing the foreign market due to the language barrier.

So in the early days of the talkies, separate casts and crews would come in after dark and shoot different versions of the same movie, using the same blocking as the original director so they didn’t have to redo the marks, and though the stars would sometimes repeat the roles in the foreign versions (Jeanette MacDonald was proud that her French was so good they let her play opposite Maurice Chevalier in both the English and French versions of their films together), more often they would replace the entire cast. Most of these films are lost today, though the Spanish-language Dracula survives and at least one important film from 1930, Charlie Chan Carries On, exists only in its Spanish version, Eran Trece (“There Were Thirteen”), with Manuel Arbó replacing Warner Oland (in his role debut) as Charlie Chan. In 1936 Reinhardt got to make one of my off-the-wall favorites, Captain Calamity, a pirate comedy-thriller from the plucky independent Grand National company, shot in color (“Hirlicolor,” named after Grand National studio head George Hirliman) and a sheer delight Reinhardt shot in both English and Spanish versions. (The Spanish one was called El Capitan Tormenta.) Reinhardt worked in military intelligence as a photographic analyzer during World War II and then returned to Hollywood for a brief but promising career as a film noir director until his death in 1953 at just 52. High Tide is a remarkable gem of a film that makes me curious to see Reinhardt’s other post-war noirs, including The Guilty, For You I Die (a marvelous title that just sums up film noir), Sofia and Chicago Calling before he returned to Germany for his final two films, Man nennt es Liebe (“It’s Called Love”) and Briefträger Müller (“Mailman Müller”).

The League of Frightened Men (Columbia, 1937)

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

Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched The League of Frightened Men, the second and last of the Nero Wolfe mystery films Columbia Pictures made in 1936 and 1937. The 1936 film was called Meet Nero Wolfe, it was based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel Fer-de-Lance (which introduced the characters of Nero Wolfe and his sidekick and go-fer, Archie Goodwin) and was one of only five films ever directed by Herbert J. Biberman, whose career was destroyed by the Hollywood blacklist. The League of Frightened Men was directed by a journeyman hack, Alfred E. Green, and though the three-person writing committee included some scribes with spectacular credits – Guy Endore, Eugene Solow and Edward Chodorov – it was reasonably faithful to Stout’s story but quite a bit less so to his character. The biggest single mistake Columbia and its producer, Edward Chodorov, made in this film was recasting Nero Wolfe: instead of having Edward Arnold reprise the role from Meet Nero Wolfe, they signed Walter Connolly – which allegedly so incensed Rex Stout that he pulled the rights to the character and never allowed another Nero Wolfe film to be made during his lifetime. (At least that’s the print-the-legend version; YouTube also contains an intriguing 1959 pilot for a proposed Nero Wolfe TV series, with Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and the young William Shatner as Archie, and that was made 16 years before Stout’s death in 1975.) William K. Everson,in his book The Detective in Film, sums up what went wrong with the cast change: “Connolly was an excellent actor, particularly in exasperated comedy, but he was not the right personality to attempt Nero Wolfe.”

Granted that in 1937 the perfect actor for Wolfe, Sydney Greenstreet, was still exclusively a stage actor – he wouldn’t make his film debut until 1941, as the villainous Casper Gutman in the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon (and one of the reasons I think Greenstreet, who actually got to play Nero Wolfe on radio, would have been the perfect Wolfe for film is that Wolfe is essentially Casper Gutman on the right side of the law), it still seems strange that the “suits” at Columbia went with a comic actor for Wolfe in The League of Frightened Men instead of using Arnold again. The mistake was compounded by the writing committee, which violated the integrity of Stout’s Wolfe by frequently having him leave his home and do normal things like getting into and out of cabs, and in the final scene even inviting Archie (Liolen Stander again) to go to a bar with him for a beer. While Stout’s Wolfe was not totally home-bound, on the rare occasions when he went out in the novels, Archie and the rest of Wolfe’s staff had to do as much pre-planning as a major invasion just to prepare the world for Wolfe’s coming. It’s a real pity that the producer and writers screwed up so badly on the casting of Wolfe and letting him go out and about like a normal person, because the rest of The League of Frightened Men is quite good and had the makings of a much better film than Meet Neroi Wolfe.

The plot is quite a bit better: 19 years before the main action, a group of 10 college students put one of their colleagues, Paul Chapin (Eduardo Ciannelli, who usually played all-powerful Mob bosses like his role in Marked Woman), which left Chapin permanently disabled. He can walk, but only with crutches, and the 10 people responsible for his hazing have got together to form an organization, which is called the “League of Atonement” in Stout’s novel but has no name in the film (at least until Wolfe dubs it “The League of Frightened Men,” hence the title), to heip him financially. They did so until a year before the movie starts, when after a series of false tries Paul Chapin finally publishes a novel, it becomes a best-seller and he no longer needs his classmates’ money. Unfortunately, two of the members of the League of Atonement are mysteriously killed and a third one disappears, and just before each victim was killed or disappeared a doggerel poem was sent to him, vowing revenge. The members of the League naturally assume that Paul Chapin is sending the letters and he’s responsible for the killings. Nero Wolfe summons all the surviving members of the League to his home and has them sign contracts by which they will employ him to find the killer, whether it be Chapin or someone else. He has researched all their finances and on that basis has decided how much each will pay (a common theme in Stout’s stories).

The surviving members of the League are cabdriver Pitney Scott (Victor Killian), financial advisor Ferdinand Bowen (Walter Kingsford, who was also in Meet Nero Wolfe), Michael Ayres (Jameson Thomas), Dr. Burton (Kenneth Hunter), Nicholas Cabot (Ian Wolf), Alexander Drummond (Jonathan Hale), and Augustus Farrell (Charles Wilson) – not counting Andrew Hibbard, the one who disappeared mysteriously and was presumed dead but turns up later in the film, disguised as a homeless person, so he can shadow Chapin. Wolfe ultimately deduces that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Ferdinand Bowen, who had embezzled money from the other members of the League until two of them caught him at it, whereupon he killed them and hit on the idea of framing Chapin. There are also a few red herrings along the way, including Hibbard’s wife Evelyn (Irene Hervey) and Burton’s daughter Agnes (Nana Bryant), who’s dating a young man to whom her family strongly objects. It also turns out that Chapin has a wife, Dora (Rafaela Ottario), who drugs Archie Goodwin. When he comes to, Archie reports to Wolfe, who has broken his usual rule against ever leaving home to question Chapin and eventually invites Chapin to his brownstone apartment for the big reveal that Bowen is the murderer. There’s also an attempt to determine who wrote the threats from tracing the typewriter on which they were written, which turns out to be a public typewriter at a university club to which all the suspects had access. As a film, The League of Frightened Men is blessedly free of the campy “comic relief” content that so marred Meet Nero Wolfe. One element from the earlier film blessedly not included this time is Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore), Archie Goodwiin’s incredibly obnoxious girlfriend – though moviegoers who recalled that they’d actually got married at the end of Meet Nero Wolfe probably wondered what happened to her ahd why she wasn’t in this one. The League of Frightened Men (a title I absolutely love, by the way) is a frustrating movie because it had the potential makings of a great film, and with a bit more care in the scripting and a stronger actor as Wolfe it might have indeed become a classic – but as it stands it only encouraged Rex Stout to eliminate screen versions of his famous character almost totally!

42nd Annual "A Capitol Fourth" (Michael Colbert Productions,Capital Concerts, WETA, PBS, aired July 4, 2022)

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

Two nights ago at about 8:45 p.m. I put on the streaming program of last Monday night’s 42nd annual A Capitol Fourth, the big Fourth of July all-star concert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and the first shcu concert since 2019 held without COVID-19 restrictions in place. The concert was hosted by Mickey Guyton, African-American singer who for some reason is billed as a country artist even though her voice sounds much more like a gospel or soul voice to me. I’m glad to see the world of country music open to Black performers – I’m old enough to remember what Charley Pride (who did have a true country voice) had to go through, from his record company’s reluctance until his third or fourth album to print his photo on the cover to the shocked reactions of audiences at his show when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride!,” and a Black man came out. And don’t get me wrong> I love Mickey Guyton’s voice. I just don’t hear it as particularly “country,” and the only thing about her records that sounds country is the use of a pedal steel guitar in her band. Guyton opened the show with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a notorious voice-killer which she negotiated about as well as anybody does (I’ve heard better versions but I’ve also heard far, far worse), and then gave a spoken introduction to the concert while the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who took over the “pops” duties of Washington, D.C.’s symphony after the death of Erich Kunzek in 2009), played John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” – the first of three times Sousa’s most famous march was heard on the program.

The next singer to perform was a young cutie named Darren Criss, who did pleasant but surprisingly emotion-less versions of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” (the latter from their spectacularly mistitled 1978 album Jazz, which contained nothing that even remotely resembled jazz). When he went from one to the other I thought, “O.K., so you’ve proven you’re no John Lennon. You’re no Freddie Mercury, either.” Next the National Symphony Orchestra played the songs “This Is My Country” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” under some more Mickey Guyton commentary, and after that Jake Owen, who unlike Guyton is a) white and b) definitely a country singer, did two of his hits, “American Country Love Song” and “I’ll Be Down to the Honky-Tonk.” (in the latter he quoted Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places,” an ill-advised move since, while he’s pleasant enough, he’s no Garth Brooks.) Next up was a vaguely country-ish, vaguely Christian-rockish song by Andy Grammer called “I Found Joy in My LIfe” – he didn’t use the “G”-word but it was pretty obvious the joy he was singing about was spiritual rather than carnal. Then came easily the most overwhelming performance of the night: just as two years earlier Lauren Alaina had electrified the show with her impassioned rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” this time it was gospel singer Yolanda Adams’ turn to shed a blinding new light on an old song, in this case “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Adams gave this song the full-out gospel treatment and reminded us of the life-or-death struggle of the U.S. Civil War. As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, America was “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Today we face almost as severe a test as to whether the American constitutional republic can long endure – and Yolanda Adams’ performance of the classic Union song was precisely the inspiration we needed right now to believe in the resiliency of America’s republic government and the ideals for which it stands (even though the Founding Fathers didn’t always live up to their stated ideals; 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, and like most African-Americans Yolanda Adams is descended from slaves).

Anything would have been anticlimactic after Adams’ withering performance, and the person who tried to follow her was Rachel Platten doing a pretty standard inspirational song called “Stand by You” as a tribute to wounded veterans, though Platten rose to some genuinely emotional singing as the song built to a climax. Then modern-blues musician Keb’ Mo’ did a cover of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” – he didn’t have Withers’ quiet intensity but he still did the song justice. Next up was a quite remarkable young pianist named Emily Barr who performed a solo version of “Stars and Stripes Forever” somewhat in the vein of how a ragtime piano player would have performed it in the early days of the 20th century. Her version was intensely phrased and managed to shed new light on this way overdone piece, and I especially liked the ritard at the end that made the piece sound oddly lyrical. After that Andy Grammer returned for another vaguely spiritual song called “You Saved My Life,” and Lauren Allred came out with “Never Enough,” one of the big power ballads from the P. T. Barnum biopic The Greatest Showman (which I quite liked, especially Hugh Jackman’s performance as Barnum, but I hated the way they used this song as the piece Jenny Lind performed when Barnum presented her in New York; as I wrote in my blog post on The Greatest Showman, instead of an actual opera aria of the kind Lind sang). The next segment was a tribute to the Broadway musical West Side Story on the 65th anniversary of its debut, which was hosted by Chita Rivera, the Anita of the original stage production (though the clips that accompanied the tribute were from the 1961 film in which Rita Moreno played the role), and featured Cynthia Erivo doing a haunting version of the show’s song “Somewhere.”

After that Mickey Guyton got to sing two of her own songs, “All American” (a laudable attempt to compose a song with the message that despite our deepening political and cultural divides, we’re still all Americans and we should be proud of our country) and “I Still Pray.” Then they brought on Gloria Gaynor, of all people, and the commentary tried to transform her one big hit, “I Will Survive,” from a feminist kiss-off of an abusive man to a hymn to survival in the face of adversity. The big fireworks display started before Gaynor had finished her song – my husband Charles, who had come home from work while I was watching the show, joked, “This is much better than a mirrored ball” – and continued through the inevitable closers: the last 4 ½ minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (which by coincidence I’d just seen referenced on a Jeopardy! episode in which the clue was about how much Tchaikovsky hated it), Lauren Allred making it through Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the U.S. Army Band doing a medley of “The Caisson Song,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” Yolanda Adams singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” and blessedly performing all three verses (though her rendition was hardly as scorching as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), the National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus doing “America, the Beautiful,” and as the finale the National Symphony Orchestra cranking out yet another version of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” All in all, it was an acceptable concert, lots of fun and with searing performances from Yolanda Adams and Emily Barr that made the evening great.

Nero Wolfe: "Count the Man Down" (Nero Wolfe Pruductiions, CBS,1959)

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

Eventually Charles and I watched a couple of videos on YouTube last night, both featuring Rex Stout’s detective character Nero Wolfe. As I’ve argued in these pages before, Nero Wolfe is what the Sherlock Holmes stories would have been if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made Sherlock’s sedentary older brother Mycroft Holmes his central character. Nero Wolfe is a recluse who never (or almost never) leaves his New York City brownstone home, and his main interests besides crime-fighting are food (of which he eats a lot, and has the weight to prove it), orchids (he has an in-house greenhouse) and beer. To do his legwork he has a manservant named Archie Goodwin – sort of Watson to Wolfe’s Holmes – who lives in a room of Wolfe’s apartment and is an overall factotum. The first Nero Wolfe we watched last night was a pilot for a 1959 TV series featuring the character – itself something of a surprise because the print-the-legend version of the history of Nero Wolfe on film is that after two “B”-movies featuring the character in the late 1930’s at Columbia – Meet Nero Wolfe in 1936, based on the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (the title refers to a particularly poisonous South American snake whose venom is used as a murder weapon); and League of Frightened Men, based on Stout’s second Wolfe novel, in 1937. Unfortunately, though Columbia cast Edward Arnold as Wolfe in the first film – and Stout liked him – he did not like Walter Connolly, the comic character actor who replaced Arnold in League of Frightened Men. Stout was so incensed he withdrew the rights to Wolfe’s character, and supposedly decided never to allow Nero Wolfe to be filmed again. Director Frank D. Gilroy bought the rights from Stout’s estate in 1979, four years after the author’s death, for a TV-movie, and Paramount Television followed with a short-lived (just one season) TV series in 1981-82.

Yet here was an unsold TV pilot from 1959, while Res Stout was not only still alive but still working (the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, was published in 1934 and the last, A Family Affair, in 1975), with Swiss-born character actor Kurt Kasznar as Wolfe and a young, almost unrecognizable William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. What’s more, the story, “Count the Man Down,” directly ties Shatner into the science-fiction realm which would make him famous as Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek seven years later because, though it’s set in (or at least near) the present day rather than five centuries into the future, it’s about space travel. It starts at Cape Canaveral, Florida, a location which has a romantic fascination for anyone old enough to have grown up with America’s space program (all the major U.S. launches in the 1960’s took place there), where four top space scientists are hunched over a set of very tacky-looking computer boards (but then the real ones at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where the ground control for the actual manned moon missions look almost as tacky by modern standards) to supervise the launch of the seventh moon probe. Only one of the scientists, Dr. Christian Lowenberg (Rene Paul), drops dead of an apparent heart attack just as the countdown reaches zero and the rocket lifts off. The authorities rule his death an accidental heart attack, but in New York City Nero Wolfe announces that he believes Dr. Lowenberg was murdered, and he says he can prove it.

Wolfe, through Goodwin, gathers together the five principal suspects – aircraft manufacturer Jerry Belson (Alexander Scourby, principal villain in Fritz Lang’s 1953 thriller The Big Heat and narrator of a tribute record to John F. Kennedy after his assassination), for whom Lowenberg designed the moon rocket; Lowenberg’s widow (Eva Seregni); and the other three scientists on the scene: Dr. Wohlgang (George Voskovec, who would have a recurring role as Nero Wolfe’s chef in the 1981-82 series), Professor Adams (John McLiam), and Ernest Petchen (Frank Marth). Though the script is an original by Sidney Carroll rather than one based on a Stout story, it fits Stout’s formula by having Wolfe solve the crime based on some pretty recherché evidence. Wolfe just happens to have read an old book about the Nazi space program, for whcih Dr. Wohlgang worked with Dr. Lowenberg as his assistant, and it mentioned a Nazi death device that involved building a needle into a hearing aid and rigging it to send an ultrasound signal so the intended victim would trigger a sonic blast that would kill him. (In an earlier version of the post I said that the hearing aid contained a poison via a needle, which was how the opening murder in the 1936 film Meet Nero Wolfe was done.) From this he deduces that Dr. Wohlgang was Dr. Lowenberg’s killer – he never forgave Lowenberg for having a better-paying and more prestigious career in the U.S. – and his co-conspirator was Dr. Lowenberg’s mistress and Belson’s secretary, Leslie Gear (Phyllis Hill), though writer Carroll never quite explains her motive for wanting her lover dead. It’s a pretty charming half-hour show (CBS purportedly commissioned it as a follow-up to the huge success of Perry Mason, but that was an hour-long show), though one wonders why an author who had come down so strongly against Columbia for casting Walter Connolly as Wolfe would be willing to accept the equally comedic Kasznar. As for Shatner, one espectred more authority from him, especially in an early example of the genre that would make him famous – but it’s still a good mystery, decently directed by Tom Donovan from Carroll’s script, which is very much in the Rex Stout manner.