Murder at the Baskervilles, a.k.a. Silver Blaze (Julius Hagen Productions, Twickenham Studios, 1937; U.S. release 1941 by Astor Pictures Corporation)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching The Hound of the Baskervilles on YouTube, my husband Charles and I shifted to the big-screen TV and DVD player for an item from the Criome Wave 50-film boxed set I had recently bought from Amazon.com, a nominal sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles called Murder at the Baskervilles. This was the fifth and last film in which British character actor Arthur Wontner played Sherlock Holmes, and though William K. Everson esteemed him as “the best movie Holmes to that date [1930] – and, in fact, still one of the best” – he’s never particularly impressed me. Wontner made five films as Holmes between 1930 and 1937, four of them for Twickenham Studios (which went out of business shortly after making the last one, though the physical plant remained in use as a free-lance studio and the Beatles infamously started the film Let It Be there in 1969) and one, The Sign of Four (1932), for Associated Talking Pictures, another British company. All but one of the Wontner Holmes films exist, and I’ve seen them all and found The Sign of Four by far the best; it had a first-rate director,m Graham Cutts (he’d made several major films in the early 1920’s with a young Alfred Hitchcock as his assistant) and a good enough budget that they could afford to stage important action scenes even though Wontner, who was just too old for the part (he was 45 when he made his first Holmes film and 52 when he made this one), needed a stunt double. Wontner was quite fine in Sherlock Holmes’ more cerebral moments, but whent he stories also required Holmes to be a man of action, Wontner was too old and slow for that aspect of the character.

Murder at the Baskervilles was originally releasedin Britain in 1937 as Silver Blaze, also the title of the Conan Doyle short story on which it was at least sort-of based, but since screenwriters H. Fowler Mear and Arthur Macrae introduced several other characters from the canon – including Sir Henry Baskerville (Lawrence Grossmith), Professor Moriarty (Lynb Harding) – here called “Robert” even though Conan Doyle gave him the first name “James” – and his assistant, Colonel Sebastian Moran (Arthur Goullet), the U.S. distributor, Astor Pictures, retitled it Murder at the Baskervilles for its 1941 American release to try to pass it off as a sequel to the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles Charles and I had just watched. The writers grafted both Moriarty and Moran to the plot of “Silver Blaze” the story by having Moriarty engaged by bookmaker Miles Stanford (Gilbert Davis), who’s taken a lot of bets against Silver Blaze and will be financially ruined if the horse wins the upcoming big race. In exchange for 10,000 pounds, Moriarty and Moran (who never appeared together in a single Conan Doyle Holmes story, even though Moran was described as Moriarty’s assistant and second-in-command) agree to keep Silver Blaze from running at all. They do this by secretly buying the debts of Silver Blaze’s trainer, Straker (Martin Walker) – called “John” in the story but “James” in the film – and forcing him to sabotage his own horse.

In order to do this, Straker has to drug his own stable boy, Bert Prince (Ralph Truman), with powdered opium, and while the stable boy survives in the story he dies in the film. Straker is also found dead on the moor, where he had led the horse to do the secret operation that would lame him. He died from having his skull bashed in, and it turns out that Silver Blaze himself killed the no-good Straker in self-defense, then ran off and was picked up by Silas Brown (D. J. Williams), trainer of the second favorite in the race, who used hair dye to cover up the tell-tale silver streak on his head that gave Silber Blaze his name and hidden in his stable until Holmes figured out the whole thing. All this is in the original story, but after Holmes forces Brown to deliver Silver Blaze to the racetrack, the plots diverge. In the story Silver Blaze wins the race; in the film he loses, thanks to Col. Moran using his compressed-air pistol to shoot Silver Blaze’s jockey in mid-race. And where, you ask, does Sir Henry Baskerville fit into this story? It takes place 20 years after The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Sir Henry has got married (though we’re not told to whom) and had a teenage daughter, Diana (the personable Judy Gunn). Diana’s boyfriend, Jack Trevor (Austin Macrae, also one of the film’s writers), has mortgaged himself to the hilt to bet against Silver Blaze, so the assault on Silver Blaze’s jockey facilitates a happy ending for him in that his horse wins and pays off his bets.

But that still leaves Moriarty at large, along with Moran, and he gets his comeuppance when he kidnaps Dr. Watson (British character actor Ian Fleming, not the same Ian Fleming who created James Bond) and threatens to drop him down an 80-foot elevator shaft that is no longer used. Only Sherlock Holmes figures it out and gets the elevator repaired in time to save Watson from this rather horrible fate and bring a delegation from the official London Police Department to arrest Moriarty. (This is one of the few times in Holmesiana in which Moriarty is taken alive and arrested instead of being killed off.) Like the rest of the Twickenham Holmes films featuring Wontner, Murder at the Baskervilles is dull – and seeing it right after The Hound of the Baskervilles probably only made it seem worse than it is. The director is Thomas Bentley, and though he stages the actual race effectively enough with the expected mixture of stock footage and new shooting, the tiny budgets of British filmmakers (aside from Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Stevenson, two highly talented filmmakers who were able to use their talents to make great films on low budgets) hamstring this film and prevent it from being all that exciting. I also don’t like Lyn Harding’s reading of Moriarty; he’s too much of a boor to make the character work, and I still think the best Moriartys were the ones in Rathbone’s Holmes films, George Zucco in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (made at 20th Century-Fox in 1939 right after The Hound of the Baskervilles, and to my mind an even better film) and Lionel Atwill in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.

When Knighthood Was in Flower (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. on January 3 I watched a movie I’d heard about but never actually seen on Turner Classic Movies: When Knighthood Was in Flower, a 1922 epic starring Marion Davies as Princess Mary Tudor,sister of King Henry VIII (Lyn Harding, a beefy-looking British actor best known for playing Professor Moriarty twice in the last two Sherlock Holmes movies with Arthur Wontner as Holmes) and her love for the mercenary soldier Charles Brandon (Forrest Stanley) despite the wishes of her brother the King to marry her off to the aging King Louis XII of France (William Norris). When Knighthood Was in Flower began life as a novel by Charles Major in 1898, which he first published under the pseudonym “Edwin Caskoden” – which may explain why one of the leading characters in the film was named Sir Edwin Caskoden (Ernest Glendinning) and got considerably more screen time than Charles Brandon, the nominal male lead. The film was shown as part of a long-overdue “Star of the Month” tribute to Marion Davies, whose reputation has suffered from the “black legend” depiction of her as the haplessly untalented would-be opera singer “Susan Alexander” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Welles’ film was a thinly veiled biopic of William Randolph Hearst, who can politely be described as Davies’ mentor. Davies was actually a quite talented light comedienne who was at her best in contemporary stories, but Hearst tended to cast her in overblown epics. I love the story about how Hearst tried to hire writer Frances Marion to write for Davies, and in order to persuade her to take the job he told her, “I am willing to spend $1 million on each of Marion’s pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion exclaimed. “She’s a talented light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values.” When word of that reached the rest of Hollywood, a lot of people thought, “At last, one of us had the guts to tell him what was wrong! The rest of us never dared!”

When Knighthood Was in Flower was actually the first Davies film on which Hearst spent $1 million. The TCM host announced that this was the first film ever made that cost that much, but it was wrong; D. W. Griifith’s 1916 film Intolerance went over $2 million – the most expensive movie ever made until another megalomaniac millionaire, Howard Hughes, spent over $4 million on the 1929 World War I aviation epic Hell’s Angels . And Universal falsely promoted Erich von Stroheim’s 1921 film Foolish Wives as “the first million-dollar picture,” using a neon sign on the company’s New York headquarters to announce the running total of its production cost, with the “S” in Stroheim’s name replaced with a dollar sign. (That was one of the reasons Stroheim got the largely undeserved reputation for extravagance that ultimately destroyed his directorial career.) A Broadway stage adaptation of When Knighthood Was in Flower by Paul Kester premiered in 1901, and according to the Wikipedia page on the novel, the first screen adaptation was produced by Biograph in 1908 with D. W. Griffith writing the script and Wallace MacCutcheon directing. It’s a pity Hearst didn’t spend whatever it would have cost to get Griffith to direct this film instead of the person he actually hired, Robert G. Vignola, an Italian’born filmmaker with a spotty reputation. Vignola shot most of the film in mid-shots and master takes, though he and cinematographers Ira Morgan and Harold Wenstrom shot a couple of luminous close-ups of Marion Davies, including one scene in which she’s lighting candles to express her anguish at being parted from the man she loves strikingly reminiscent of the great scene Gloria Swanson shot for Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928) that’s included in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The scenario was by future director Luther Reed, though imdb.com lists future producer and studio head William LeBaron as one of the writers. (It also lists original author Major, but not Kester, who first dramatized this story for the stage.)

The version of When Knighthood Was in Flower was a restoration produced by a company called Undercrank Films based on a 12-reel road-show print in the Library of Congress, which did not have the original color tints and also did not have the technical credits, since these were printed in a program book you were expected to buy in the theatre. The people at Undercrank added a list of technical credits from a surviving copy of the program but didn’t try to match them to the typographical style of the title credits, the actors’ names or the intertitles. They also hired Ben Model to accompany the film on his synthesizer, which is set up to duplicate (as much as possible) the original sound of a Wurlitzer theatre organ, and that scared me a bit since I hadn’t cared for the accompaniment he had put on another 1922 film, the John Barrymore Sherlock Holmes, but his work here was tasteful and appropriate. What struck me about this film was the sheer spunkiness of Marion Davies’ performance. This was the film that convinced Charlie Chaplin that “she would have become a star even without the cyclonic Hearst publicity,” and it’s easy to see why. Throughout the film Mary Tudor is fiercely independent, almost feminist in her determination to make her own way in the world and not let the rich, powerful men in her life tell her what to do. (One wonders if she behaved with this level of independence towards the real-life rich, powerful man who had essentially bought her her career.) She’s able to avoid having actually to have sex with Louix XII – the title card wittily explains that Louis had bought himself a Queen but not a wife – and fends off the advances of Louis’ nephew and heir, Duke Francis (a very young William Powell in only his second film – and yes, it was odd to see this movie just days after having watched the mature Powell in After the Thin Man!), who expects to inherit Mary as well as the throne of France when his uncle finally croaks.

While this film isn’t as entertaining as it could have been with a stronger director – Vignola pretty much stages the action scenes on autopilot – there’s a great scene early on in which, defying her royal brother’s order, Mary Tudor goes to the home of soothsayer Grammont (Gustav von Seyffertitz, who had just played Professor Moriarty to John Barrymore’s Holmes – so this is a “doubles movie” in that it features two Moriartys, von Seyffertitz and Harding). The moment she steps into his hut it looks like we’ve suddenly entered the world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, so either Robert G. Vignola had more of an awareness of state-of-the-art filmmaking for the time or another director staged these scenes. When Knighthood Was in Flower remained fallow after this version until 1053. 41 years later, as The SWord and the Rose, one of Walt Disney’s “frozen funds” productions in Britain with Glynis Johns as Mary, Richard Todd as Brandon and James Robertson Justice as Henry VIII, directed by Ken Annakin. It’s a pity no one thought to remake it with Katharine Hepburn in the 1930’s; Hepburn actually did remake a Davies film, Quality Street, based on a Sir James Barrie play (Davies’ version came out in 1927, Hepburn’s in 1937), and film historian Gary Carey – who wrote of Davies, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers” – said Davies was actually more naturalistic and less mannered in the role. Whatever its faults as a story or a film, When Knighthood Was in Flower made a beautiful vehicle for the feisty side of Davies’ persona.

Frontline: "Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, part 1: The List" (FForbidden Films, WGBH Educational Foundation, ARTE France, Mediawan Rights, aired January 3, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately I was able to switch from the movie in time to watch a Frontline special with the mouthful of a title, “Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, part 1: The List.” Pegasus is a secret computer program designed and coded by an Israeli international-security company called NSO Group Technologies, after the last names of the three people who started it, Niv, Shalev and Omri. It’s a piece of software that can be installed remotely on any smartphone in the world, bypassing the protections smartphone manufacturers put on their devices, and its purpose is to download all the data off that phone, including the user’s conversations, texts, photos and lists of contacts. The officials of NSO insist that they sell Pegasus only to legitimate users and only to catch criminals and terrorists, but the journalists from 17 news organitaions worldwide that came together to investigate Pegasus reached the conclusion that NSO is selling the technology willy-nilly to some of the most repressive governments in the world, who are using it not only to identify but physically eliminate dissidents. The group started with a leaked list of phone numbers Pegasus was being used to spy on, and their initial challenge was to figure out whose phone numbers they were, since a list of numbers doesn’t tell you much unless you know the actual owners’ identities.

Among the targets of Pegasus-enabled spying were Muhammad bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who used ot to coordinate the brutal assassination of Saudi-born Washington Post journalist Hamal Khashoggi; former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who wanted to find and identify the journalists who had uncovered the scandal surrounding the ultra-luxurious home in a well-to-do part of Mexico City he couldn’t have afforded on the Mexican president’s pay; and Ihlan Aliyev,, dictator of Azerbaijan, who used it to track down and harass dissident journalists like Khadija Ismayilova,.who had been reporting on the rampant corruption in Azerbaijan and Aliyev’s personal profit from it. The show began with a comment from Paul Lewis of The Guardian, the plucky British newspaper that was one of the 17 news organizations around the world that joined forces to investigate Pegasus, who said, “I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this was something that even George Orwell in 1984 couldn't imagine.” Indeed, one thing Orwell didn’t imagine when he wrote 1984 was the power of computers and their sheer reach in the hands of an authoritarian state determined to squelch any possibility of dissent. Orwell’s “Inner Party” did it through state-sponsored terrorism, perpetual warfare and ultimately rewriting the language to make dissident ideas literally inexpressible by eliminating the words that could be used to speak or write them. He either wasn’t aware of the existence of computers (and their central role in winning World War II for the Allies by allowing them to “break” the German codes) or havve known a little of what was going on at Bletchley Park, but he didn’t anticipate how important computers would become, either to ensure freedom or to sustain repression.

2023 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert (Vienna Philharmonic, ORTF, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to one of the most oddly premised CD boxed sets in history: The Johann Strauss Collection, an eight-CD release from the Japanese Opus Kura label which I acquired about a decade ago and whose first CD contains no fewer than 13 versions of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (“An der schönen blauen Donau,” to give it its official title in German), starting with the one conducted by Johann Strauss III (which, despite his name, was not the son of Johann Strauss, Jr., who wrote the piece, but ratner was Strauss, Jr.’s nephew, the son of his brother Eduard Strauss). The disc moves on to versions conducted by “name” musicians Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Clemens Krauss – along with choral versions by something called the “Lehrer-Gesangverein Berlin-Neuköln,” a Japanese women’s chorus with soprano Shigo Yano, and some at least marginally more famous singers – Frieda Hempel, Maria Ivogün, Selma Kurz, Erna Sack – a dazzling two-piano version by Josef Lhevinne and his wife Rosina, as well as pop versions by John Philip Sousa’s band (though, like most of the “Sousa” records, it was made by his musicians but not actually conducted by him), Victor Young and Barnabas von Géczy. I’m listening to this now because I’m preparing to write about last night’s PBS telecast of the 2023 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, a tradition started by Clemens Krauss in 1939 because he figured that with Vienna having been occupied, along with the rest of Austria, by Nazi Germany, the people of the city needed an “upper” to lift their spirits and prepare themselves for their new future as part of Hitler’s Reich.

The New Year’s concerts have been going ever since and have become a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which not only telecasts them live throughout Austria and much of Europe but makes them available to other countries as well. I first started watching the Vienna New Year’s concerts in the 1980’s when the U.S. version was hosted by Walter Cronkite, whose spiels emphaxiazed the hoary hand of tradition over the events and how much the programming of the concerts was determined by what Clemens Krauss had done in 1939 and throughout the rest of World War II. The concert always ends with three so-called “encores” (I said “so-called” because they’re actually determined well in advance and everyone in the audience, both “live” in the Vienna Musikverein and on TV, knows what they’re about to hear). The first of the nominal “encores” is a piece of the conductor’s own choice, the second is the familiar “Blue Danube,” and the third the “Radetzsky March” composed by the first Johann Strauss, father of Johann, Jr. and his brothers Eduard and Josef. One year my husband Charles was so impressed by the near-perfect unison audience clapping in rhythm to the music of the march (again, one of the traditions that hamstring this concert and pretty much determine what it will be) he joked, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?” This ime around I reminded him of that and he said that unlike American audiences, European ones don’t even try to clap along if they can’t.

The PBS telecasts of the concert usually include only the second half, after the intermission, and ini 2022 (while I was in the hospital and not watching under the very best conditions anyway) they sliced it down to just an hour so they could show a feminist documentary afterwards. (I would have ordered the DVD but at the start of 2022 ArkivMusic.com decided to update their Web site and it was literally inaccessible for weeks.) This time, at least, the concert telecast was an hour and a half long and included 13 pieces. The concert telecast was originally produced by the Vienna Philharmonic in association with Austria’s state-owned broadcasting company, ORTF, and one of the tricks of ORTF’s trade with the concert is to shoot a great amount of “B”-roll and make it available to broadcasters in the various countries that air this program showing picturesque sights of old Vienna while local narrators tell us about the historical significance. Some of the locales are interesting, like the Theatre an der Josefstatt, which was opened in 1816 by Ludwig van Beethoven himself and for which he wrote the “Consecration of the House Overture” (which was nice to know; now at last I’m aware of just what house Beethoven was consecrating when he composed that piece). Others are less so, including a mini-documentary on Austria’s premier maker of chandeliers, who was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (whose then-director, Sir Rudolf Bing, was Austrian-born) for their new opera house as part of Lincoln Center in 1966.

PBS has assigned an interesting variety of narrators over the years, starting (at least while I’ve been watching the show) with Walter Cronkite. Their next choice was Julie Andrews, who seemed to have got the gig mainly because her most famous movie, The Sound of Music, takes place in Austira (albeit in Salzburg rather than Vienna). The current host is Hugh Bonneville, a thoroughly boring British actor whose main claim to fame was that he starred in the inexplicably popular (on both sides of the Atlantic) British TV series Downton Abbey. Among the prissiest parts of Bonneville’s narration was his comment that Johann, Jr. and Eduard Strauss were both fond of using their music to seduce young women, but the third Strauss brother, Josef, “considered himself above such debauchery.” It also turns out that Josef Strauss was something of a feminist who wrote a piece called “The Emancipation of Women.” While that’s good for Josef, the producers of this show – either the original Austrian writers or whoever concocted the English Bonneville was speaking – seemed to be trying to re-invent the Strauss family as suitable heroes for the #MeToo era. Ironically, the Vienna Philharmonic was the last major European orchestra to break with their all-male tradition and start hiring women musicians – there were a smattering of women in last night’s orchestra, but only on the instruments traditionally considered “acceptable” for females to play (strings and harp). Bonneville’s narration mentioned that a female violinist, Marie Grüner, conducted a concert in Vienna as early as 1864, and the orchestra and its conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, seemed to get with the program by playing a large number of works by Josef Strauss instead of his good-timey non-feminist brothers.

Of the 13 pieces we got to hear, three were by composers outside the Strauss family (a chant sung by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Fraz von Suppé’s overture to his operetta Iasbella and the “Bells Polka and Galop” by Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr., written to commemorate the installation of electric lights in the palace of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef; a few years ago Fanfare reviewed a CD of Hellmesberger’s two symphonies and said they sounded so much like Brahms that if you were a fan of Brahms’ symphonies but disappointed that he wrote only four of them, here were two more that sounded just like him). Two were by Johann, Jr., the “Bandits’ Galop” and the inevitable “Blue Danube”), one by Johann, Sr. (the equally inevitable “Radetzky March”), one by Eduard (a fast polka called “Up and Away,” no resemblance to the Fifth Dimension’s hit), and six by Josef. They were “Pearls of Love,” “Angelica Polka” (written, Bonneville said, as a salute to the Greek gods in general and the Greek goddesses in particular), “Blithe Spirit” (sung in tandem by the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the recently established Vienna Girls’ Choir – get the picture?), “Siskins” (a siskin is a sort of bird and the piece, which includes a part for a toy instrument that imitates a bird’s whistle, was written in tribute to an Austrian ornithologist who made a picture book of various species of birds a century before John James Audubon did), “Allegro Fantastique” and “Watercolor Waltz.” (Apparenty Josef Strauss was also a painter, as well as a published scientific researcher.)

I’d heard before that Josef Strauss was the most musically advanced member of the Strauss waltz family, and the pieces played in th is concert bore that out. At a time when the most innovative composers in the German musical world were Wagner and Brahms (and they were each cherished by committed fan bases that hated the other; if you liked Wagner you were expected to hate Brahms, and vice versa, and when conductor Hans von Bülow’s wife Cosima left him for Wagner, his revenge was to stop conducting Wagner and start conducting Brahms), and unlike his brothers Josef actually seemed to have heard of them. His pieces are full of chromatic harmonies and clever bits of orchestration, and while they aren’t necessarily more tuneful or immediately appealing than those of his brothers (or their dad), Josef’s pieces are quite a bit more interesting in terms of musical adventure. I was glad to hear so much of Josef’s music in one place, even if the emphasis on him seemed to reinforce the sense I was having that the producers and writers of this show were attempting to rewrite the Strauss family’s history into a more acceptable vein for today’s audiences, especially the “politically correct” ones who demand that history be rewritten to coincide with what’s considered good and true in our time, even if that means recasting works of past cultural eras into terms more acceptable to today.

After the Thin Man (MGM, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 6:45 p.m. on the last day of 2022 I rang out the old year with the 1936 movie After the Thin Man, which Turner Classic Movies was showing as part of a marathon of all six Thin Man films in chronological order. There was a time, back when I could still make recordings off the air onto physical media (either VHS tapes or DVD’s) when I would have grabbed at the chance and recorded all these movies in sequence, but now that the tech gods have taken that power away from us poor mortals I contented myself with watching this one, the second in the series, as it aired in real time. It turned out to be an unexpectedly appropriate movie since it takes place largely on New Year’s Eve and is a direct sequel to the first Thin Man film from 1934, literally picking up where the other left off with Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy, delightful together as ever) in a sleeping car on the train taking them back from New York to their home in San Francisco. The first half-hour of this film is pure screwball comedy, with such gags as Nora asking Nick if he’s packed the bottle of whiskey, and he says he has while he’s still drinking from it. They finally make it off the train and get out with all their belongings intact – though one of Nick’s friends, a purse snatcher, greets them at the train station and suddenly Nora discovers that her purse is missing. Nick slyly tells his friend that Nora is his wife, and the crook returns the purse to her as unobtrusively as he stole it in the first place. Nick and Nora plan to hole up in their apartment and sleep for the next two days, but instead they’re treated to a surprise coming-home party thrown by hosts who don’t even know them. It’s the sort of movie in which we laugh at someone being told to “help yourself” to the liquor in his own home. There are some nice culture-clash scenes between Nick’s raffish acquaintances and Noras’s strait-laced relatives, particularly Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph).

Then the intrigue rears its inevitable head as Nora comforts her cousin Selma Landis (Elissa Landi, a highly talented actress who didn’t have the star career she deserved), who’s disturbed because her husband Robert (Alan Marshal) has disappeared for several days. Robert is hanging out at the LiChi Club, owned by gangster “Dance” Joseph Calleia). He’s having an affair with the club’s singer, Polly Byrnes (played by an actress billed as “Dorothy McNulty” but really Penny Singleton, who would go on to star in Columbia’s “B” series based on the comic strip Blondie, with Arthur Lake as her husband Dagwood), and he wants $20,000 so he can divorce Selma and run off with Polly. The man who agrees to pay him off is David Graham (James Stewart, of all people, at a time when MGM had him under contract but didn’t know what to do with him then and for two years later, until Frank Capra borrowed him for You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, his star-making films). David was interested in Selma and resented it when she jilted him to marry Robert, and he obviously hopes that once he fives Robert the money to divorce Selma, she will return to him. The principals settle in at the LiChi Club for New Year’s Eve, during which Polly sings two songs, “Blow That Horn” by Walter Donaldson,Chester Forrest and Robert Wright and the haunting “Smoke Dreams” by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. (I first heard “Smoke Dreams” in the marvelous record by Benny Goodman’s band, with Helen Ward on vocal, on an original RCA Victor 78 rpm pressing that identified the song as coming from the film, and when I first saw the movie I was disappointed that so little was made of it and Penny Singleton wasn’t allowed to sing it without dialogoe over it. Goodman’s version is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCISbp3ZdrU and there’s an equally haunting one by Red Norvo and Midred Bailey, in a musically advanced Ravel-esque arrangement by Eddie Sauter, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppjqGB4wzpc.)

There’s another song that became a Swing Era standard, Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” sung here by Eadie Adams at the welcome-home surprise party, that became so famous as a gargantuan instrumental by Goodman’s band a lot of people forget that it had a lyric. There’s also a nice cameo by George Zucco as Dr. Kammer, a psychologist who tells police lieutenant Abrams (Sam Levene) that Selma is too sick and too unbalanced to be interrogated. Two more people get killed – Phil Byrnes (Paul Fix), who poses as Polly’s brother but is really her husband; and Pedro Dominguez, who worked as a gardener for Nora’s family years before and now is the custodian at Polly’s building. Nick gathers all the suspects together for the then-standard group interrogation of all of them, and he finally figures out that the killer is [big-time spoiler alert!] David Graham, who not only was jealous of Robert but had come to hate Selma as well for going with Robert instead of David. So he hit on the idea of killing Robert and framing Selma for the crime, getting his ultimate revenge by seeing her executed for a murder she didn’t commit.

In his book The Detective in Film, William K. Everson had the predictable problem with the ending: “The only real surprise is why Stewart – having maintained his humble, self-effacing ‘Mr. Deeds’ mode [sic – it was Gary Cooper, not Stewart, who starred in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town], the stumbling ‘sincerity’ of his speech and the wistful pain in his eyes so convincingly for close to two hours – would suddenly turn into a raging, snarling, low-key-lit maniac at the moment of his denunciation by Mr. Charles.” (At least George Zucco is on hand to remind everyone else, “I knew the killer had to be insane!”) While Stewart would develop into a far rangier actor later on after World War II (in which he served as a combat pilot), particularly in his films for Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann, he clearly wasn’t ready for a role like this – which didn’t stop MGM from casting him, with equal unlikeliness, as a hard-edged bootlegger and gangster in Ziegfeld Girl in 1941, after his first two films for Capra had clearly established what he could and (at least at that time) couldn’t do.

After the Thin Man was, like the first Thin Man, largely the creation of actual couples; though Willam Powell and Myrna Loy weren’t an “item” off-screen (at that time he’d been divorced from Carole Lombard and was engaged to marry Jean Harlow when she died), original writer Dashiell Hammett had created Nick and Nora largely as avatars of himself and his live-in partner, Lillian Hellman, and the writers who adapted Hammett’s characters and story for the films were another real-life couple, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. The director was W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, whose nickname on the MGM lot was “One-Take Woody” because he could shoot quickly and finish a film under budget and schedule. Ingrid Bergman hated him after their one film together, Rage in Heaven (1941), and chewed him out by saying he had no idea how to direct women. Myrna Loy would have strongly disagreed; she loved working with Van Dyke so much and regarded him as so crucial to the success of the Thin Man films that when he died right after making the fourth one, Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), Loy felt the studio should have abandoned the series instead of making two more with other directors.

United in Song 2022: Ringing In the New Year Together (Nouveau Productions, American "Pops" Orchestra, PBS-TV,. 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched all but the first 15 minutes of a peculiar PBS New Year’s special called United in Song 2022: Ringing In the New Year Together. It was an oddly frustrating program in that instead of the usual New York Philharmonic concert with which PBS rings in the new year, it was a concert led by the American “Pops” Orchestra and its director, Luke Frazier, in a not very digestible blend of light classics, standards (“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Que Será, Será” and a nice ballroom dance by Tiler Peck and Román Mejia to an instrumental version of “I’ll Be Seeing You”), 1970’s pop hits (like “Make Your Own Kind of Music” sung by someone or something called MILCK, all caps and with an extra “c”), some things that sounded like originals and quite a lot of Christian rock. The “inspirational” selections reneged from old spirituals like “Ain’t That Good News” (sung by a large Black man named Reginald Smith, Jr., who seemed to be trying to be a latter-day Paul Robeson; he wasn’t anywhere near Robeson’s league but he was still quite good) and “It Is Well with My Soul” (sung by Natalie Grant, who seemed to be trying to emulate her near-namesake Amy Grant) to contemporary Christian music like “In Better Hands” (also sung by Natalie Grant), Matt Doyle’s “One Song Glory” and MILCK’s “I Belong.” By far the best piece on the show was Jazmine Sullivan’s “Let It Burn” in a scorching performance by Joaquina Kalukango. I was unable to note down that jumble of consonants that make up her last name, but I was quite impressed with the power and majesty of her performance – especially by comparison with the musical pap that surrounded her.

There was also a nice performance of a song called “Mercy” sung by Brett Young, who looked like the young George Clooney and gave this show a boost aesthetically as well as musically. There were also a couple if feints in the classical direction, including a clarinet sonata (one movement, composer unidentified) by Ricardo Morales with orchestra (apparently no one told these people that a “sonata” is a work for just one or two instruments, a featured instrument plus piano) and an arrangement of the folk song “Shenandoah” by Jacqueline Schwards on piano that was quite lovely as a solo piece, less so when the ubiquitous orchestra came in. The gimmick was that the show was performed at three separate locales, all in out-of-the-way places: the People’s Bank Theatre in Marietta, Ohio; the Strand Theatre in Marietta, Georgia (one wonders if they deliberately picked two venues with “Marietta” in their names) and the Egyptian Theatre on Boise, Idaho. For the finale featured choirs from all three locales (the one at Boise State University is called, of all things, the “Meistersingers”!) electronically blended with Luke Frazier conducting all of them simultaneously in the song “How Can I Keep from Singing?” I remember first hearing this song on a 1960’s benefit LP for the listener-supported radio station KPFA in Berkeley by Pete Seeger and being moved – and then disappointed when one of Charles’s Quaker friends told me they’d sung it in church so often they called it, “How Can I Keep from Snoring?”

Austin City Limits: Jon Batiste (KLRU, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that PBS showed an Austin City Limits episode featuring Jon Batiste, the former musical director for Stephen Cplbert’s late-night show before he made a quite successful album of his own that won Album of the Year at the last Grammy Awards. I loved Jon Batiste not only musically but physically – he’s drop-dead gorgeous and easily made my list of “Straight Guys I Wish Were Gay” – but on this show I thought he was trying too hard to be both a musical icon and a sex god. Batiste performed the first half of his show in a red outfit with an open jacket that flashed his bare chest, and the second half (after making the change in the middle of a song!) ini a cowboy hat and a striped suit. It was as if he decided to perform the first half as James Brown and the second as Cab Calloway. Batiste announced at the start of the snow, and againi about two-thirds in, that he considered it not just a musical performance but a spiritual experience, presumably both for himself and his congregation – and I use that word instead of “audience” because he really was trying to get the spectators to participate. As I noted in my entry on The Motet’s televised performance on Live at the Belly Up, that sort of thing can be really exciting “live” but pales mightily quickly on TV. I also missed the helpful chyrons we get on Live at the Belly Up that give you the titles of the songs the band is playing; without that help, I had a hard time guessing some of them even though a few were obvious.

Batiste opened in soul vein with a song that appeared to be called “We Are the Chosen Ones” (one thing no one has ever accused Batiste of is modesty!), and his next song was similar in style and appeared to be called “I Just Need You.” Then Batiste brought on a New Orleans-style brass band (well, he is from there, after all) for a long instrumental introduction to a song apparently called “We’re Never Alone.” After another song with the brass band, “I Feel Good Today,” Batiste then did a rap number called :You Can Still See Me Ballin’” (“ballin’” as in “having a good time,” not “having sex” – in 1953 the great New Orleans singer-pianist-composer Professor Longhair, born Henry Roeland Byrd, did a song called “Ball the Wall” which sounds considerably kinkier than it is). At least I gave Batiste credit for carefully enunciating the words of his rap so you could at least understand what he was saying; as I’ve said about rap before, if y ou’re going to reduce music to just rhythm and lyrics, you should at least give us a fighting chance to comprehend the lyrics! Then Batiste did one of the best numbers of his set, a cover of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” (Withers was one of those amazingly talented musical artists who didn’t have the kind of superstar career he deserved, and in his case it seems as if at least parts of the problem were the quirks in his personality) that slowed down the original song, made it more lyrical, but kept the heartfelt nature of Withers’ version. Then, alas, he did a second rap number with the all too appropriate title “I Don’t Even Know What You’re Talking About.” For that one Batiste adopted the typical rap mumble so that it was true: I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then Batiste did a gospel-soul raveup called “Tell the Truth,” after which he went into a long dance jam called “Eve3rybody Get Lowdown, Everybody Jump.” The title expressed the two directions in which Batiste wanted his congregants to move, and it was in the middle of this song that Batiste sneaked off the stage and came out again in a different outfit. When he returned he sat at the piano for an intriguing medley consisting of Chopin’s “Minute” waltz and the companion piece, the Waltz in C-sharp minor, the familiar song “Chopsticls,” Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and a couple of other pieces I didn’t recognize, which Batiste played first more or less as written and then in a jazz context. I still think Batiste is a great jazz pianist and wish he’d done a Thelonious Monk tribute album in 2018. the centenary of Monk’s birth. But at the same time it’s hard for me to take seriously any jazz version of “Chopsticks” that isn’t the brilliant “Blue Chopsticks” by the tragically forgotten and neglected jazz pianist Herbie Nichols, recorded for Blue Note in 1956. AFter he finished the piano medley Batiste gave us one of the most powerful songs of the night, “All I Want to Do Is Cry,” with guest artist Gary Clark, Jr. supplying some beautiiul blues guitar. Ten Batiste did a song called “Freedom” that appeared to have a subtitle, “Can I See You Waddle?,” after the motions Batiste was not only making himself but wanted his audience to duplicate.

After another soul raveup, “I Need You (Yeah Yeah),” Batiste closed the show with a quiet, reflective song called “Don’t Stop Dreaming” that was just his voice and piano, a level of simplicity much of the rest of the performance could have used. Jon Batiste is one of those marvelous but also frustrating performers who precisely because he can do so much – he can play piano, guitar, saxophone and that weird toy keyboard Nat “King” Cole (another African-American musician who gave up jazz piano to become a popular singing star) also used with equal facility, but a lot of people who can do so many things have trouble settling down into a single groove, and I think Batiste feels compelled to show off his virtuosity rather than to movie us with his emotions.