Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The Steps We Cannot Take" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 13, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “The Steps We Cannot Take,” was in ots own way equally chilling. The cops are investigating the attempted murder of a couple from India, Ray and Nisha Singh (Rock Kohli and Anjaly Bihmani) who are shot as th ey’re trying to remodel it. Since Ray is shot on the restaurant floor and Nisha is shot in her shower upstairs, the building is obviously a live-work space. Their 15-year-old daughter Priya (Aditi Nayav) is kidnapped and the SVU officers realize that she was the real target. They’re able to identify the kidnapper and attempted murderer, a welder named Elias Olsen (Adam Petchel), but when they raid his house they find at least three other girls besides Priya being held captive – Nadine Chavez (Paola Sanchez Abreu), Gillian Moore (Jess Gabor) and Gillian’s daughter Bella (Dalya Knapp). They also learn that the mastermind of the kidnappings is not Elias Olsen but his father Søren – only when they search the premises they find Søren’s remains and also the dead body of an infant son. At first the cops suspect that Elias murdered his father, but because of the trahectory of the fatal bullet they deduce, based on the medical examiner’s report, that the real killer had to have been someone considerably shorter. Both Gillian and Nadine confess to murdering Søren, but it’s clear they’re covering up for the real killer, Bella, who is also Søren’s daughter and therefore is Elias’s half-sister. While this isn’t as good as an SVU episode I remember from the years Christopher Meloni was on the show in which two identical twins confess to the same crime, and they both get away with it because the prosecutors realize they can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that one of them did it, t his was still a chilling little show and a nice frisson-filled exercise in the sort of sick, quirky kinkiness this show has specialized in during its 24-year run on the air, longest of any scripted prime-time drama or comedy series.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Spirit in the Sky" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 13, 2022)

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

Alas, the third show in the sequence, Law and Order: Organized Crime, was the weakest of the three. The episode was called “Spirit in the Sky,” though I’m not sure I understood why unless it’s because this, like the others in the show’s current story arc (once again one of the reasoning I don’t like this show as much as the others in Dick Wolf’s franchiswe is that it pays obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and therefore its shows are not complete stories in themselves, though I understand younger viewers than I actually like that and have a hard time relating to shows like the original 1960’s run of Star Trek because they don’t have continuing story arcs and are not serials). This one deals with the attempts of the cops, particularly Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but still sexy – he’s only two years younger than I, though he’s in considerably better shape) and his boss, Black Lesbian Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), to get information out of hired killer Kenny Kyle (Michael Drayer) before the people who hired him off him themselves to keep him from talking to the cops. To do this, they plant an informant in the jail where he’s being held, Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzales), to worm the information out of him. Ultimately Reyes gets Kyle to spill that the hit on an old B;lack man whose stubborn refusal to leave his b building was holding up the Majestic Casino project, ostensibly being developed by Robert Silas (John Dornan) and his son Teddy (Gus Halper) but actually, it’s hinted at here, really fronts for the Mafia. By promising to relocate him to a prison in Florida so his sister can visit him, the cops get Kyle to tell them that he was hired to kill the old Black man by Vicnent Bishop (Kevin Corrigan) and Dominic Russo (Wass Stephens),who run a local of a Mobbed-up construction workers’ union that regularly pad their fees by requiring their clients to hire “workers” who do not in fact show up – and which they use so they can tell the parole officers of the Mob’s foot soldiers that they have legitimate jobs when they don’t. Somehow Kenny Kyle still is alive at the end of the episode – though Russo and Bishop are both dead, presumably knocked off by their bosses so they can’t talk – and much of this episode is shot in the murky half-light that the late Gordin Willis made de rigueur as the style for Mafia movies when he used it to shoot The Godfather back in 1971. There’s even a quasi-romantic musical theme in Mike Post’s background score that reminded me of “Speak Softly, Love,” the big theme from the score for The Godfather.

Performance (Goodtimes Entertainment, Warner Bros., 1970)

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

Last night I ran my husband Charles two Blu-Ray discs I had ordered from Amazon.com and announced them as “a Mick Jagger double feature” since he’s in both of them. The first was Performance, made in 1970 (or at least released then: for some reason I had been under the impression that it was filmed in 1968 but not released for two years, but there’s a reference in the film’s dialogue to 1969 as if this were a recently passed year) and co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. The credits specify that Cammell wrote the script solo, Roeg was the cinematographer, and the two directed together. The plot of Performance, to the extent it has one, deals with Chas (James Fox), an enforcer for a gang of London extortionists who have decided that his services are no longer required. It seems that his bosses have gone into a major rebranding of their operations, so instead of running a classic “protection” racket and extorting money from small shop owners and trashing their businesses if they don’t pay up, they will present themselves as entrepreneurs bringing about “mergers” between themselves and smaller businesses in the name of economic efficiency. Chas’s old-fashioned methods are jeopardizing their attempt to rebrand themselves, though, so they send a crew of four enforcers of their own to smash up Chas’s flat and torture and kill him. Among the things they do to his apartment is bring a can of red spray paint and spray “Poof!” on his wall. “Poof” is the British equivalent of the American term “fag” – a vicious and insulting slor against Gay men – and though we know that Chas is not literally Gay (the first thing we saw him do in this film is have sex with a woman, who spends the night at his place and tries to get him breakfast – which he angrily refuses and throws her out),

it sets up a curious anticipation of perversity which Cammell deposits ini his cliché bank for later. Chas manages to escape, and following a lead given to him by a Black street musician he runs into, he shows up at the home of Turner (Mick Jagger), a reclusive former rock star who retired and hid out in his house because he had lost his inspiration and now doesn’t even like music anymore. Though Jagger gets second billing in the film itself and top billing on the original trailer, he doesn’t appear until the film is over an h our into its 108-minute running time. Turner is living in his palatial apartment with two women, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg, then the girlfriend of Jagger’s fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards) and Lucy (Michèle Breton). When Turner is initially reluctant to rent Chas the room, Chas tells Turner that he is an artist himself, a juggler named “John Dean” (not to be confused with the real-life John Dean who became the whistle-blower who brought down Richard Nixon over Watergate). Pherber feeds Chas a mushroom, which Chas at first assumes is just an ordinary mushroom but we are well aware is actually a psychedelic one which will get him high. The three of them play with each other, with Turner performing a cover version of Robert Johnson’s “Cone On in My Kitchen” on vocal and acoustic guitar. But in order to get it to his contacts, Chas has arranged with an intermediary to get on a secret flight to the United States, but in order to do that he needs a passport photo – and Turner and his crew take one for him. Alas, the whole scheme is being masterminded by the gangsters who are still out to kill Chas, and at the end of the movie he gets into a white Rolls-Royce with them and Chas faces his imminent death with the stoicism of The Swede in Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Killers” or James Cagney’s character at theend of the 1934 film He Was Her Man.

Before that happens, Chas has found himself in bed with Lucy – just after we’ve seen Lucy and Pherber having some Lesbian goings-on of hteir own. When Chas complained about hwo flat-chested “lucy” was I immediately thought that Donald Cammell was going to have Turner sneak into Chas’s bed and start making out with him – thereby turning him into what his gangland assailants had accused him of being in the fiurst place – only even for a film this audacious, obviously having Mick Jagger, of all people, in a sex scene with another man was too mich even for Cammell and Roeg. At the end, just before he leaves,Chas fires his gun and either shoots Turner or just shoots out a painting of him – Roeg’s camera doesn’t linger long enough for us to tell which, and Cammell’s script hasn’t bothered to give us a motive for Chas to kill Turner, assuming that’s what he did. When I looked up Performance on imdb.com the review that came up was a five-paragraph rave by someone who bought into the idea that because this film was deliberately and maddeningly obscure, therefore it most have been a profound parable on the meaning of human existence. The film’s poster art made it look like James Fox and Mick Jagger literally traded appearances – which they sort-of do: Fox dons a long-haired wig as part of his escape plan and Jagger slicks down his hair and, for a music-video sequence of a song called “Memo from Turner,” he briefly appears as the chair of a corporate board meeting. I’m wondering if this was intended as a what-if sequence showing how Jagger’s life might have gone if he’d stayed in the London School of Economics (John Maynard Keynes’ alma mater), graduated there and gone into the London business world.

Performance is very much a film of its time, and though it’s nice to see Mick Jagger back when he was still relatively attractive, there’s an irony in which one of the women says, “I wonder what he’ll be like when he’s 50.” Now we know, and it isn’t pretty. There are some nice bits in Performance, including the musical score – mostly Ry Cooder’s acoustic slide guitar in a remarkably good imitation of the Delta blues style, along with a couple of good soul performances by Black singer Merry Clayton (who sang the scorching second vocal on the Stones’ original recording of “Gimmie Shelter” and was screwed out of the major soul career she should have had because of a dispute over her contract between Columbia and Lou Adler’s Ode Records). But mostly Performance os a maddening film that seems to revel in its own obscurity and meaninglessness.

The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus (London Weekend Television, ABKCO Films, filmed 1968, released 1996)

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

After Performance I screened Charloes a fascinating performance film called The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, which was originally shot over two days – December 11 and 12, 1968 – at a TV studio in the Wembley district of London. According to at least one “Trivia” poster on imdb.com, Rock and Roll Circus was originally the result of a plan by the Rolling Stones and the Who to mount a tour of Great Britain using a circus tent, which they would set up in various locations and perform in. Part of the plan was to have actual circus performers on the bill alternating with the rock bands. In the end the plans were scaled back, and instead of doing a whole tour with a circus motif the Rolling Stones decided to do a one-off TV special to promote their newly completed album, Beggars’ Banquet. This explains why, out of the six songs the Stones performed on the program, four were from Beggars’ Banquet – “Sympathy for the Devil,” “No Expectations,” “Parachute Woman” and “Salt of the Earth” – along with the opener, “Jumping Jack Flash,” which they would actually release as a non-LP single after Beggars’ Banquet. For me, when I first saw this show in 1996 – after 28 years during which the Stones kept it in the vaults, reportedly because they were dissatisfied with their own performance – the biggest surprise was the sixth song in the Stones’ bill. It was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the reason it was such a surprise was I had always assumed this beautiful death-haunted song had been written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as a memorial for the Stones’ original second guitarist, Brian Jones, whom they had fired from the band about a month before his drug-related death on July 3, 1969. Only here it was performed live well before Brian Jones’ death, and indeed with him there as part of the band!

The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus became the stuff of legend when a few tracks of it were bootlegged, including the two contributions by “The Dirty Mac,” a rough jam band formed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and featuring Lennon on guitar and vocals, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, the Stones’ Keith Richards on bass and Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell. They do the Beatles’ song “Yer Blues” and one of Yoko’s typical excursions into what’s commonly called “extended vocal,” featuring Ivry Gitlis – usually a classical violinist who was born in 1922 and was therefore a generation older than most of the people on this bill. Gitlis was mostly known as a classical violinist who recorded traditional repertoire like concerti by Paganini, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, as well as more advanced music by Bartók and Stravinsky. But here he managed to enter Yoko Ono’s sound world and play a long opening solo almost totally in double stops (which means playing more than an octave above where the string is tuned) that perfectly sets the stage for Yoko Ono (whose music I actually love; I didn’t at first but eventually I realized that she was imitating avant-garde jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, the last of whom she actually recorded with).

After an opening sequence featuring Julius Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators” – you’ve probably never heard of it but you know it if you’ve ever seen any movie about circuses – the first band we see is Jethro Tull, a group I’ve always admired if only because of the sheer chutzpah of their leader, Ian Anderson, achieving rock-star status despite playing so un-rock an instrument as the flute. They do a piece called “Song for Jeffrey” and this is a souvenir of the few weeks in which Tony Iommi, later the founder of Black Sabbath, was Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist. This is the only time he ever appeared with thenm im public, and during his close-ups you can see his shortened middle finger on his left hand; Iommi lost part of that finger in an industrial accident and briefly thought he’d have to give up playing guitar until someone told him about Django Reinhardt, the legendary French-Belgian Gypsy guitarist who became a jazz legend despite losing the use of three fingers on his left hand in a household fire.

The next band up was The Who, witl all four of their original members (Roger Daltrey, vocals; Pete Townshend, guitar; John Entwistle, bass; and Keith Moon, drums) all alive and reasonably well, though the song they perform is one of my least favorite of theirs. It’s called “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” and it’s an eight-minute opus which Townshend described as a “mini-opera.” It’s all about a woman whose husband has left her for an extended “business” trip and, when he doesn’t show up as scheduled, she’s tempted by “Ivor, the Engine Driver” to engage in some extra-relational activity. Fortunately (or not), her husband finally arrives home just in time to stop her and Ivor from doing the dirty deed, and he forgives her (no doubt because on that “business” trip he’s been doing some sexual shenanigans of his own). The Who gave it a lot more energy on this occasion than they did in the recording studio, but it’s still not onie of their better songs and it’s hard to believe the claim some historians have made that the reason the Rolling Stones sat on this film for 28 years was they thought The Who had outplayed and outclassed them.

The next performer was Taj Mahal, the Harlem-born African-American blues musician whose real name was Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr. and who played his song, “Ain’t That a Lot of Love,” with an all-white backing band: Jesse Ed Davis (electric guitar), Gary Gilmore (electric bass), and Chuck Blackwell (drums). After a brief middle-of-the-road interval featuring Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s then-girlfriend, doing a song called “Something Better” by Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin (without their usual distaff collaborators, Cynthia Weil and Carole King), it’s time for “The Dirty Mac” and then for the Stones. One treat from this show is it’s nice to see Mick Jagger when he was still lithe and moved smoothly on stage – even though my mother, who never particularly liked the Stones, reacted to them when they played the Dick Cavett Show in 1969 by saying, “He doesn’t even dance! He just jumps!” (Obviously mom was expecting Jagger to be a white James Brown, which he never was, and the gulf between them in terms of stage presence was unwittingly demonstrated by the 1965 TV special The T.A.M.I. Show, in which the Stones had to follow the real James Brown.)

Though the Stones’ opening number, “Jumping Jack Flash,” doesn’t have the energy it did on the studio record or in some of the later live versions, all in all they do a quite energetic set and the song “No Expectations,” featuring Brian Jones’ haunting slide guitar behind Mick Jagger’s heart-felt vocal and acoustic guitar, is especially beautiful. Rock and Roll Circus has been processed at least twice, once in 1996 and again in 2018, and there’s a two-CD version containing the original soundtrack on disc one (though without the glitch on Lennon’s “Yer Blues” in which his voice drops out on the final chorus) and outtakes on disc two. The main reason to want this is the much more energetic playing of Taj Mahal – especially on “Leaving Trunk,” which led off his first album and is, as far as I’m concerned, the best song he ever recorded. There’s also John Lennon and company performing a regrettably incomplete version of the Beatles’ “Revolution” as well as another take of “Yer Blues.” For those of us who grew up in the 1960’s, Rock and Roll Circus is indeed the time capsule David Dalton said it was on his printed foreword, in which he wrote that “for a brief moment it seemed that rock ‘n’ roll would inherit the earth.”

They Live (Alive Films, Larry Franco Pruductions, Universal, Carolco, 1988)

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

Two nighyts ago my husband Charles and I ran They Live, a 1988 film from director John Carpenter, who also wrote the script under the pseudonym “Frank Armitage” based on a 1963 science-fiction short story by Ray Faraday Nelson called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.” (The story is available online at https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o’clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf.) I first encountered this remarkable movie a year after it was made, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I rented a VHS tape of it and were stunned by it. (This was a year before John’s long-standing alcoholism finally killed him.) When the Wachowski siblings released the first Matrix movie in 1999 and followed it up with two sequelae, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003), Charles and I watched them together and I came to the conclusion that John Carpemter, a cisgender heterosexual, had done more with the central premise – that the world we think we live in is a comforting illusion created by all-powerful intelligences from outside humanity (aliens from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy in They Live, our own machines who have conquered and enslaved us in the Matrices) – in one 95-minute movie than the Wachowskis (whose status as Transgender people who went through gender reassignment – Larry became Lana and Andy became Lilly – has added to the aura of weirdness surrounding their movies) were able to do in three 135-minute movies (plus a fourth 150-minute movie in the sequence, The Matrix: Resurrections, released in 2021). Even the names of the central characters are similar: “Nada” (Roddy Piper) in They Live and “Neo” (Keanu Reeves) in the Matrices. (In Ray Nelson’s story Nada has a first name, “George,” but he doesn’t in the film.)

I didn’t realize until now that he was mostly a professional wrestler (he died in 2015 at the age of 61) who was known as “Rowdy Roddy Piper,” which explains why Carpenter stretched out the fight scene between Nada and his Black buddy Frank (Keith David) to five minutes when it makes its dramatic point in 20 seconds – it’s the one part of this movie I’ve never cared for. Otherwise I love this movie. It begins in Los Angeles in 1988, in a society where the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. The middle class is rapidly disappearing and the factories that once provided good-paying jobs to people with strong bodies and a willingness to work have closed up. In other words, it’s the world we were living in in 1988 and still are. Nada gets a construction job (and it’s a delight to see Roddy Piper’s great pecs with his shirt off; I got a crush on him the first time I saw this movie and he’s still a physical wonder) after having traveled to L.A. from Denver, but after his first day he’s told by the boss not to sleep on the job site and tht he won’t be paid until Thursday. Frank, a former auto worker who left his wife and two sons back home in Detroit to come to California in search of work, hooks up with Nada and takes him to a camp run by an Episcopal church. The people running the camp ask Nada to help rebuild their shower room, whose ceiling is in imminent danger of collapsing, but just when Nada and Frank have settled in for the night, the camp is raided by police, who come in with bulldozers and destroy the place. In the wreckage,. Nada stumbles on a box full of sunglasses which, when he tries on a pair, reveals the black-and-white subliminal messages being beamed to the rest of humanity to tell them, “OBEY,” “CONSUME,” “STAY ASLEEP,” “MARRY AND REPRODUCE,” “CONFORM” and other similar messages of control.

He also learns that the streets are literally full of alien beings, who through their technology have mass-hypnotized the human population into supporting a political agenda of laissez-faire capitalism. In one scene Nada hijacks the car of Holly Thompson (Med Foster, the one significant female character in this movie) and insists she drive him to her house, where he holds her hostage until she calls the police on him. Later Holly turns up at a meeting of the organized resistance, which periodically cuts in on TV broadcasts to feature a professor-type explaining that the world is being secretly controlled by the aliens and their human allies, who have been recruited to their side with promises of great wealth and power. Only Holly, who works as a program executive for cable channel 54 – the source of the alien mind-control signal – is really one of the aliens’ human allies, and she alerts the police t raid the meeting and force Nada and Frank to flee again. When I first saw They Live I assumed the impirationi for it had been the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose director, Don Siegel, always said he interpreted the story as a psychological rather than a political allegory. Siegel said he meant the film, based on a novel by Jack Finney published in 1954 – two years before the film was made – as a critique of people who had literally turned off their emotions and willed themselves into a state of blind conformity.

Others, though, tried to read both Right-wing and Left-wing political metaphors into the film – in fact I first hears of Invasion of the Body Snatchers through an article in Ramparts magazine calling the film a Right-wing propaganda piece and taking its central metaphor (in which people are taken over by malevolent creatures from outer space who take the form of seed pods) as a reference to what the American Left was trying to do: brainwash the American population en masse into accepting Communist domination. Carpenter quite literally took the Invasion of the Body Snatchers metaphor and used it explicitly for a Left-wing agenda. The aliens are influencing the world’s politics to push an aggressive laissez-faire capitalist agenda because this will mean that the earth’s environment will become so polluted that its atmosphere will ultimately resemble their home planet’s, so they can colonize it. In one scene, a spokesperson for the aliens’ human allies (the counterpart to the scene in Siegel’s film in which a pod psychiatrist tries to recruit the central character to join voluntarily by convincing him that the human race is better off without emotions) explains that the alien-human alliance is the way to go because everybody wants to be rich. He even tells Nada that to the aliens, Earth is “their Third World” – an interesting conceit from Raymond F. Jones’ novel This Island Earth (though not used in the film version) in which a spokesperson for the aliens exlplains that just as Earth corporations have offshored their industrial production to various islands where labor is cheaper, so the aliens have announced their production to other planets and Earth is literally their “island,” sort of like Saipan.

There’s even one scene in which Nada puts on his sunglasses during a speech by then-President Ronald Reagan using his familiar “morning in America” lines. Through the glasses he sees that “Reagan” is a space alien, and he mutters to himself, “I should have known he’d be une.” (This scene was cut from the film when They Live was shown on broadcast TV.) Though it’s not a perfect film – like Blade Runner, They Live wouldn’t make my list of the top five science-fiction movies ever made, but it might crack the Top Ten – They Live holds up surprisingly well. I hadn’t remembered how violent the movie is – Nada uses his stolen guns to massacre the aliens en masse, though with one exception he spares their human allies – and I did remember a great gag towards the end once Nada shoots out the tube that is broadcasting the aliens’ mind-control signals, a woman who’s been in the throes of a hot sexual enncounter with one of the males suddenly turns off and finds him repulsive once the signal dies out and she can see what he really looks like.

Mexican Spitfire (RKO, 1940)

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

Last night at 5 Turner Classic Movies showed two films witn Latin American themes, both of them from 1940 and both starring chariasmatic performers who met tragic early ends. I watched the first half-hour of the second film, Down Argentine Way, which I’d already commented on on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/05/down-argentine-way-20th-century-fox-1940.html), and which began with a lovely scene of Carmen Minranda doing “South American Way” in Portuguese (she had it in her contract that she would get to sing at least one song per film in Portuguese), after which it quickly degenerates into a rather dull farce comedy featuring Don Ameche – he’s supposed to be an Argentinian but he has one of the worst Latin American accents in the history of American film – and Betty Grable, who took over the female lead in this film after Alice Faye either had a heart attack or got pregnant (sources differ). The only reasons to watch Down Argentine Way are Carmen Miranda, the Nicholas Brothers (who do a truly spectacular routine to the title song) and the typically neon-bright three-strip Technicolor, especially as used by 20th Century-Fox.

The film they showed earlier was Mexican Spitfire, also from 1940 and a “B” movie from RKO which was actually a direct sequel to a film the studio had made the previous year, The Girl from Mexico. In that movie, Lupe Velez played Carmelita Fuentes, a girl from Mexico (natch) who manages to meet and marry an American executive, Dennis Lindsay (Donald Woods, as boring at another studio as he was at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s), despite the opposition of his ferocious Aunt Delia (Elizabeth Risdon) and the Anglo girl Delia wanted him to marry instead of the girl from Mexico, Elizabeth Price (Linda Hayes). On Carmelita’s side is Aunt Delia’s long-suffering husband, Matt Linsday (Leon Errol, the Australian-born comedian who was a good friend of W. C. Fields and got to be in Fielts’ last starring movie, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break). The film was hosted by TCM’s Alicia Malone and Luis I. Reyes, author of a new book called Viva Hollywood about the contributions of Latin Americans to movie history in the classic era, and they both tried personfully to recast Lupe Velez’s role here as a free and independent woman instead of a particularly obnoxious stereotype, but she remains a particularly obnoxious stereotype, a hot-tempered Mexican given to outbursts of rapid-fire Spanish which she refuses to translate because the original dialogue was probably pushing the Production Code.

Mexican Spitfire deals with Dennis Lindsay’s attempts to sign the imperious, eccentric Lord Epping (also Leon Errol, who in 1951 would do a short called Lord Epping Returns, not that we really wanted him to) to a contract for a Mexican-themed radio show. Dennis invites Lord Epping to his home for dinner, at which he hopes to finalize the contract and get Epping to sign it, but when Epping cancels on the dinner Carmelida gets Uncle Matt to impersonate him (hence the dual role for Leon Errol). Only the real Lord Epping has a change of heart and, without calling ahead, decides to have dinner with the Lindsays after al and just shows u p at their home. From there the film devolves into a French farce, with the two Lords Epping just missing each other all night. In an earlier scene Carmelita showed up at Dennis’s office and Dennis passed her off as his secretary – which leads to a nice dictation scene as Carmeiita is supposed to be taking notes on the contract but is actually doing a devastating caricature of Epping (fortunately Dennis remencers enough of what’s supposed to be in the contract to reconstruct it), and when Dennis shows up at his home he’s got two copies of the contract. Only Carmelita, having no idea that the real Lord Epping is in the apartment, thinks she has to keep Epping (who, she believes, is really Uncle Matt in “Epping” drag) from signing the contract for fear he’ll be prosecuted for fraud. So she spills ink on one of the contracts ahd sets fire to the other with a lighter she’s used to light Epping’s cigar. There’s also a not particularly funny running gag in which the real Epping wants roast beef for duinner, while Uncle Matt can’t stand roast beef and keeps asking the Lindsays’ butler to make him poached eggs instead.

After the disastrous dinner party Carmelita and Matt go to Mexico, where they both obtain divorces from a crooked promoter named Henry Sharpe (Earle Hodgkins), only the real Mexican authorities arrest Sharpe as a fraudster who’s selling phony “divorces.” Not knowing this, Dennis prepares to marry Elizabeth even though he’s still in love with Carmelita, and the film’s climax takes place at Mexican Pete’s restaurant, where Carmelita has gone to get a job as a nightclub singer now that she’s a single woman again – only she gets the telegram from the Mexican cops who busted Sharpe that tells her she and Dennis are still married after all. She goes to confront him and Elizabeth at the restaurant, and the various characters end up in a food fight that’s about the only truly amusing thing in this so-called “comedy.” Carrying on their defense of Lupe Velez after the film ended, Malone and Reyes said she was a genuinely talented singer and actress even though in Mexican Spitfire (unlike its predecessor, The Girl from Mexico) she doesn’t get to sing at all (and a song or two from the star would have dramatically helped this iflm’s entertainment value). Velez was the daughter of a Mexican colonel and an opera singer, only her dad was killed in the Mexican Revolution and she had to go to work on stage to support the family. She came to Hollywood in 1927 to star opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. in his film The Gaucho (Malone and Reyes made two major mistakes about this film: they said it was a vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was just 17 when it was made; they also claimed Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Sr.’s real-life wife at the time, was a co-star when in fact she just made a cameo appearance at the end).

Later Velez appeared in D. W. Griifith’’s Lady of the Pavements, a part-talkie from 1928 in whcih she made her vocal debut on screen. In 1929 she did another part-talkie, Wolf Song, opposite Gary Cooper, and the two had a torrid affair that made headlines during its brief duration before it expired. Though Cooper wasn’t married at the time (as he was when he had a similarly flaming affair with the young Patricia Neal when the two were making The Fountainhead together in 1948),he still caught a lot of flak for dating a Mexican, and Velez apparently never got over himi dumping her. Later she married MGM’s Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, but that only lasted five years – ironically, she played Jane in the MGM spoof Hollywood Party with Jimmy Durante as “Scharzan.” Velez was at first known as a dramatic actress who starred in a 1931 film of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which was made in both English and Spanish versions, but in 1932 she was cast as Pepper in a film called Hot Pepper and that established her as a comedienne doing the “Mexican spitfire” schtick well before this series. In 1944 Velez had an affair with a little-known actor named Harald Maresch, who got her pregnant and then refused to marry her. Not wanting the ignominy of having a baby out of wedlock, Velez committed suicide at age 36 with an overdose of sleeping pills – exactly the same age as a later Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe (though I remain convinced that Monroe’s death was neither suicide nor murder; she died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, and the only reason anyone ever thought differently was we didn’t know anywhere nearly as much about prescription drug abuse then as we do now). Luis Reyes even weirdly suggested that if Lupe Velez had lived into the 1950’s, she’d have done TV and instead of L Love Lucy, it would have been I Love Lupe – which quite frankly would have been ludicrous. The only way I Love Lupe would have worked is if they had switched the genders and given Velez a white co-star – preferably one with a sense of humor in his own right, which Donald Woods definitely did not have.

Speedy (Harold Lloyd Productions, Paramount, 1928)

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

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” featured two Harold Lloyd movies, Hot Water (1924) and Speedy (1928), and thought I skipped Hot Water – I had a fairly recent moviemagg blog post on it from a screening at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in 2012 with Dennis James providing live organ accompaniment (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/hot-water-harold-lloydpathe-1924.html) – I went ahead and watched Speedy. It was Harold Lloyd’s last silent film – unlike Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who hit rough patches with the transition (Chaplin because of his aesthetic opposition to the whole idea of sound films and Keaton because his professional, marital and alcohol problems combined to destroy his career right at the transition point), Lloyd made the transition to sound smoothly and without seeming discomfort. Lloyd made it through his own company,distributed by Paramount (incidentally the opening studio logo said, not “A Paramount Picture,” but “A Paramount Release,” a circumlocution I hadn’t realized they were using before the 1950’s, when the studio system l broke down and it became the most common way for films to be made: by “independent” companies organized by their stars or directors, in collaboration with major-studio distributors) with Ted Wilde as nominal director – though Lloyd was the auteur of all his own films, especially after he broke through to major stardom. (One of the associates on the credits of Speedy was Lloyd’s brother Gaylord, who had attempted an on-screen career, got nowhere but ended up, like James Cagney’s brother William, in the organization of his far more famous brother.)

It’s ironic that Speedy was Lloyd’s last silent film because the whole plot deals with the human cost of technological change: Pop Dillon (Barry Woodruff) owns the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York City. He’s living with and raising his granddaughter Jane (Ann Christy, a personable young actress who kooks like a flapper but ls really a sedate “good girl” at heart). Jane’s boyfriend is Harold “Speedy” Swift (Harold Lloyd), who can’t keep a job because it’s so interested in baseball that he loses job after job because he’s so determined to follow the New York Yankees. This was at the time when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the Yankees’ big stars, and Ruth actually has a small but important role in this film. He’s billed fourth and plays himself, and his big scene occurs when Lloyd’s character has been hired as a cab driver by the “One Time Cab Company,” whose one cab is a dilapidated contraption that reminded me of the “Fresh Air Cab Company” on the Amos and Andy show. Ruth tells “Speedy” to get him to Yankee Stadium for a game, “and hurry!” Speedy takes that all too literally and drives the cab with Ruth in it at close to warp speed, bouncing the baseball great around in the back seat. At one pont Speedy tells Ruth how much he admires his skills on the diamond \– “Even when you strike out, you miss ‘em close” – and Ruth, commenting on Speedy’s driving, says, “Not as close as you’re missing ‘em.” When Ruth finallmmakes it to Yankee Stadium, he says, “Whenever I want to commit suicide, I’ll let you know.” Ruth invites Speedy to see the game, but as bad luck would have it, the guy who had hired him to drive the cab is sitting in the same section just two rows down, and the boss tells Speedy to give bacn the cab and everything he’s taken in – and Speedy gives him everything,including the two tickets he got for speeding.

Earlier he’s had a job as a soda jerk, but lost that one too when he stopped by an animated scoreboard of the baseball game in progress and as a result lost the bouquet his boss had told him to deliver to his wife to make up with her for the extra-relational activity she’d caught him doing. But the hard-core intrigue in the plot of Speedy concerns a group of monopolists who want to gain control of New York’s entire streetcar system – only to do that, they need to buy out or force out Pop Dillon. Since his contract with the city requires him to run the streetcar at least once every 24 hours on its assigned track, the evil monopolists figure that by hiring a gang of thugs to steal the car and move it to the other end of the city, they can put Pop Dillon out of business. Only Speedy happens to overhear their plans while hiding in a phone booth at Yankee Stadium, and in a thrilling, suspenseful sequence Speedy, with the aid of a group of Civil War veterans (remember this was 1928 and there were still some Civil War veterans left, though Lloyd wisely cast them with actors who looked old enough to have fought in the Civil War and still been alive in 1928), takes back the car from the thugs and drives it across town. When the car hits a manhole and its front wheel is shattered, Speedy resourcefully replaces it with the cover of the manhole and eventually makes it back to the track on time. Pop holds out ofr $100,000 as his price for selling his contract, and the boy, the girl and the grandfather presumably live happily ever after.

Speedy is a quite remarkable film, though when my husband Charles and I watched it for the first time it was in a sequence of Lloyd films being shown on TCM in sequence and it was a bit of a disappointment after the two films immediately preceding it in Lloyd’s canon, For Heaven’s Sake and The Kid Brother – one of which contains a bizarre sequence that seems to have been intended as a parody of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Still, despite its New York City setting (and Lloyd actually shot a lot of it there, unusual for a comedy filmmaker in the late 1920’s, though Buster Keaton had taken a whole company to Oregon to shoot The General because there he had found a railroad that still used the narrow-gauge track in use during the Civil War), there’s an oddly pastoral feeling to Speedy, especially in the scene in which Speedy takes Jane to Coney Island to celebrate the loss of his soda-jerk job, and it would be interesting to compare this sequence to the similar one in Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, made the same year.