Live at the Belly Up: The Charities (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Death in Paradise I watched a quite good Live at the Belly Up show shot in 2024 at the eponymous club and concert venue in Solana Beach (which is why I’ve never been there: I’m sure I’d like a lot of the music played there, but the transportation difficulties are just insurmountable). The band was a white neo-soul group called The Charities, led by a kind of dorky heavy-set dude named Brock Van Pelt (by coincidence, “Van Pelt” is also the last name of Lucy and Linus in the Peanuts comic strip). Van Pelt is the group’s front person and also was the spokesperson for it in the interstitial interviews. He said that The Charities came together from people who had worked in various bands and wanted to continue their musical careers. A Web site at “Jam in the Van” (https://jaminthevan.com/band/the-charities/) identifies them as “six brothers,” but there are only five of them (or at least that’s how many there were on Live at the Belly Up) and they have multiple last names and radically different appearances, so “brothers” is probably purely metaphorical. The Jam in the Van Web site says, “The exchange of energy between the audience and the band builds into an experience that cannot be expressed in the studio. That is not to imply any distaste for the recording process, however. Wherever they have found themselves dwelling, they have built their own recording studio and utilized their collection of analog equipment to capture their musical adventures. Their latest studio work and first official album, GBLO (Get Blasted, Listen to Oldies), came out of their home studio just outside San Luis Obispo, CA. The good times with The Charities are only just beginning!” Unfortunately, that “album” doesn’t seem to be available on physical media – though they have issued a 45 rpm single. “Bring Your Love” b/w “Angel Eyes,” on Nu-Tone, one of the labels issued by Penrose Records, an intriguing enterprise affiliated with Dap-Tone which I ran into on a recent church convocation in Riverside with my husband Charles. (They played both songs on last night’s Live at the Belly Up program.)

Van Pelt explained in the interview segments that he was originally involved in hip-hop (the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it), only as he explored that genre he got interested in the origins of some of the beats rap D.J.’s “sample” for their songs. Accordingly he started exploring 1960’s soul records in his mother’s collection, and ultimately came up with an infectious band sound that’s at its best when it’s reproducing the quieter, gentler ballad-soul styles of the 1960’s. They opened with “Angel Eyes,” in which Van Pelt sang a falsetto lead (the contrast between his falsetto singing voice and his lower-lying speaking voice in the interviews is dramatic) and soared eloquently over his band. Van Pelt and The Charities stayed in ballad-soul mode with “Can’t Own Love” and “Get Back, Don’t Stop,” though on the latter song they got a bit funkier. Then it was back to balladry with “Movin’ On,” “Comin’ Right Back” (featuring a vocal by their keyboard player,. Mike Butler), “Call for You” and their recent single release, “Bring Your Love.” After “It’s Not Our Time” they got more energetic with “The Plug,” featuring the kind of chicken-scratch guitar by Sage Provins (easily the band’s most physically attractive member) I remember vividly from innumerable local soul bands in the Berkeley-Oakland area in the mid-1970’s. The Charities then kept up the dance grooves with “Mistakes” – a great song in which Van Pelt lamented all the nights he’d partied too heartily – and a medley of “Sugar Sweet” and “Do the Right Thing” before their closing number, “Funk Upon a Time,” which intriguingly opened with “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and created a nice, laid-back dance groove (even though from what I’ve seen of the Belly Up on this show, it’s too crowded to serve as a good dance venue). I quite liked The Charities, though it’s a regrettable sign of the times that almost none of their music can be had on physical media. G.L.B.O. is available only as a download or a stream from Amazon.com and presumably other sources, and it doesn’t contain any of the songs they did on Live at the Belly Up anyway. During the show, instead of promoting a physical CD or LP, Van Pelt kept urging his audience to look up his band’s music on Spotify!

Law and Order: "Truth and Consequences" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 14, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 14) my husband Charles and I watched the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise shows on NBC and then I switched to CBS for Elsbeth, a series I’ve become quite taken with lately. The Law and Order episode was one that attempted to dramatize the ongoing controversies on college campuses over Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza in response to the truly horrific but much less deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Called “Truth and Consequences,” it deals with the sudden and brutal murder of Charles Bennett (Timothy Hull), husband of Judge Madeline Bennett (Michaela Watkins) just a week after someone involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus broke into the Bennetts’ home and stole the Israeli flag they had displayed inside. Ultimately the killer turns out to be law student Thomas Norton (Leon Aiken), who after his third year of law school at Hudson University was offered a clerkship by Judge Bennett – only Judge Bennett withdrew the offer after Norton got involved in the pro-Palestinian protests and the strongly pro-Israel Bennett didn’t approve of his politics. Norton went off the deep end and burst into the Bennett home; unfortunately the judge was out so he accosted her husband, grabbed a golf club, and clubbed him to death with it.

The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), need to get Norton’s girlfriend, Daniela Rojas (Linedy Genao), to testify against him even though that gets her into trouble with the authorities, since her participation in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations violated school policy and her testimony not only gets her expelled but deported to her native Venezuela. Then, after having wrecked Daniela’s life, the prosecutors and their boss, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), go easy on Judge Bennett when they find that for the last six years, since she had a skiing accident, she’s been addicted to opiate painkillers. The city’s mayor, Robert Payne (Bruce Altman) – who you’ll recall pushed for Baxter’s appointment as D.A. in the first place following the eventual resignation of Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) about a year and a half ago – tells Baxter not to call Judge Bennett as a witness because her opiate addiction could lead to the convictions in hundreds of cases she heard being reversed on appeal and lots of criminals going free. (That seems to be a little far-fetched to me.) So the defenseless, unprivileged Venezuelan immigrant gets screwed over by the system and the white judge goes free and gets to continue her career just fine. The prosecutors ultimately cut a deal with Thomas Norton by which he pleads to manslaughter and gets a 10-year sentence – to the understandable disgust of Charles Bennett’s brother Sam (Stephen Kunken), who’d been attending the trial throughout. Though this Law and Order tried to squeeze in too many themes, it was still one of the better ones and proof that there’s still life left in this hoary old show!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tenfold" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 14, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Tenfold,” was also unusually good, mainly because of a quite interesting and multidimensional character, African-American street hooker Wallin Sipes (Ciarin Monique). Wallin prides herself on working without a pimp and when she’s not hooking is studying to get her G.E.D. so she can get a legitimate job. She’s also supporting her mother Yolanda (Tarra Riggs) and is raising a pre-pubescent son, Freddy, who presumably has no idea what his mom does for a living. Alas, she gets raped by a client who wanted anal sex and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The rapist is Miguel Rivera (Miguel Cervantes), who had earlier attracted Wallin; she had got into his car but then got out again when he insisted on fucking her in the ass. So he came by later and took her in the ass anyway, strangling her from behind so she didn’t get to see his face that time around, though she recognized him from their previous encounter that night. Wallin also gave some of her earnings that night to Tiana Rivera (Stephanie Gomérez) so her pimp wouldn’t beat her up for coming up short that night. She’s fond of quoting the lines from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you tenfold.” Alas, Wallin doesn’t really trust the police even though two members of the Special Victims Unit squad, Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), helped find the last john who raped her. There’s also a subplot involving Timothy Cottle (Ari Brand), a pathetic would-be pedophile (he admits he’s sexually attracted to young girls but has never actually seduced or raped one).

In a previous episode Cottle attracted the ire of assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) for cruising his nine-year-old daughter (or was she his stepdaughter? Carisi was married to former SVU detective Amanda Rollins, played by Kelli Giddish, even though she’d already had two daughters by two different fathers, and she and Carisi had another one themselves) on the street. Ultimately Cottle pleads with Carisi and Captain Olivla Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay, daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay, who’s been playing this part for 25 years now and looks it) for help, and much to Carisi’s distaste Benson actually finds him a slot in a rehab program that’s supposedly able to convert his sexual desires to more appropriate outlets. I’ve read some of the literature on pedophiles that takes a quite skeptical attitude towards the general efficacy of such programs; they use some of the same techniques that used to be used in “reparative therapy” programs that were supposed to turn Gay or Lesbian people straight. And while there aren’t that many people left who actually think being Gay is some sort of monstrous sin against humanity – today the political and social prejudices against Queer people are more likely to manifest as Transphobia instead of homophobia (let’s face it, commercial TV these days is full of ads for anti-HIV drugs featuring obviously open Gay male couples, and there are also all those skin-care products ads featuring Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia!) – most people would agree that the sexualization and sexual exploitation of underage children is reprehensible (though I’d argue for lowering the age of consent to about 14 or so on the ground that people ought to be allowed to do what their hormones are pushing them to do anyway). One thing I liked about this Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode is that one of the “women” prostitutes working the streets with Wallin and her friends, Delphine Magnifique, was obviously a man in drag, and played by Easton Michaels.

Elsbeth: "Elsbeth Flips the Bird" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 14, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Elsbeth episode I watched last night (Thursday, November 14) was quite clever and charming, and it helped that it was not a mystery. Instead director Ron Underwood and writers Sarah Beckett and Matthew K. Begbie used the old Alfred Hitchcock trick of letting the audience in on “whodunit” from the get-go and building suspense from how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. The opening scene takes place in the kitchen and dining room of an ultra-high-end restaurant owned and run by Chef Veev, true name Genevieve Hale (Pamela Adlon). Chef Veev is shown as so demanding a person and such a totally evil bitch that at first we assume she’s going to be the murder victim. Instead she’s the killer, and her target is a young kitchen assistant named Jordan Humphries (Aaron Gonner), who’s been going behind her back by selling reservations for her restaurant without her approval or knowledge. One of the parties Jordan got into the restaurant hung out there for so long that Veev had to turn down a hoten bigwig, Mr. Montebello (Drew Moore), from whom she was hoping to get a contract to run the restaurants in a number of his hotels. Veev confronts Jordan in the downstairs kitchen and ultimately bludgeons him to death with a meat tenderizer, then hits herself with it to make it look like they were both victims of an attack by an avocado goon squad. I’m not making this up, you know: the writers explain that the major cartels, having run out of opportunities to make money off drugs, weapons and humans, are moving into produce. We’re told that the avocado cartel is using the same tactics the illegal alcohol distributors did in the 1920’s in gangster movies set then: forcing restaurateurs to buy avocados only from them … or else.

This reminded me of the 1949 movie Thieves’ Highway, which was about gangsters hijacking shipments of apples – when my husband Charles and i watched this one over a decade ago I jokingly retitled it Apples of Doom – but the kingpin of the avocado cartel has an alibi for the night Jordan was killed. He was at a fruit market selling his avocados, seemingly legitimately. Meanwhile the series lead, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston, who’s a lot more grounded and less air-headed than you’d have guessed from the promos for this series), is trying to learn Veev’s recipe for duck cassoulet – hence the episode title, “Elsbeth Flips the Bird,” since the gimmick is that the duck has to be turned in the oven at precisely the right moment to come out right. This is also what ultimately gives Veev away as the murderer: while she was supposedly unconscious after the assault on the kitchen floor, she nonetheless got up at the right time to turn the ducks she was slow-roasting all night. The writers use one of Dick Wolf’s favorite Law and Order tricks of having Veev get arrested at the most embarrassing moment possible: while she’s entertaining Mr. Montebello and seems on the verge of getting the big hotel deal she’s been angling for all episode. Charles said he doesn’t think this show is as good as Law and Order: Organized Crime – and he’s right, but with that one off the air and replaced by something called Found which seems like a preposterous series about a woman who kept a man locked in her basement for 12 years until he escaped and quite understandably vowed revenge against her, I’m having a lot more fun with Elsbeth instead.

M Squad: "The Third Shadow" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved (no copyright claimed for the quoted song lyric)

Last night (Monday, November 11) I watched a couple of reruns of the surprisingly interesting police procedural drama M Squad on YouTube. Both of these luckily contained the show’s closing themes (which had been deleted from the previous episode, “Decoy in White,” due to copyright claims), and the first, “The Third Shadow,” had a quite good musical number in the middle (more on that later). “The Third Shadow” opens with a shoot-out at a factory whose payroll is being robbed. One of the criminals dies on the scene and another, Al Stemple (Richard Benedict), is mortally wounded but lives long enough for police lieutenant Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin, who’s about the only reason people are still interested in this show even though a lot of major stars got key career breaks on it as guests) and his partner to question him. The uniformed police officer who led the enforcement effort, Dave Price (Tony Travis), recovers $10,000 in stolen loot and is acclaimed as a hero – until the next day, when Maxwell (Guy Prescott), head of payroll for the company that got robbed, insists that there was really $30,000 stolen and accuses Officer Price of taking the rest for his own use. Lt. Ballinger is convinced Price is innocent, but the only explanation he can come up with is there must have been a third person involved in the robbery besides the two who were caught and killed. He traces this person and learns that Stemple had actually been an “inside man,” who’d got a job at the company due to a phony reference four weeks before the robbery occurred. Through a friend, Ruth Scanlan (Amy Fields), who works in the club scene in Chicago, where the show took place, Ballinger meets Grace Richards (Monica Lewis), who supplied the phony reference for Stemple at the behest of her boyfriend, Greg Cook (Alfred Shelly). Lt. Ballinger already had a file on Cook from the New Orleans Police Department, who wanted him for two separate armed robberies there.

Ballinger goes to see both Grace Richards and Greg Cook at a local TV studio, where Grace is performing on a local show. We get to hear at least one complete chorus of her song, a quite good blues lament in the then-modern urban style, before Ballinger questions both of them and ultimately tracks Cook to Grace’s apartment. At some point Grace says she gave him a key, though later in the show it turns out he didn’t have one until he stole it from her (a glitch in the continuity from writer Jack Jacobs). Since he doesn’t have probable cause to search Grace’s apartment for Greg’s share of the loot, Ballinger somehow has to trick Greg into grabbing it so he can be caught red-handed with it, and among other things Officer Price can be exonerated. Ultimately there’s a quite good chase sequence down the fire escape of Grace’s building, and in the end Greg is arrested, the loot is recovered and Officer Price can get on with his career. Though this show, like “Decoy in White,” was also scored by Benny Carter with an opening and closing theme from Count Basie, the really remarkable item in its musical content was the featured song Monica Lewis sang. Monica Lewis is one of those musicians, like composers Marius Constant (The Twilight Zone), Alexander Courage (Star Trek) and Henry Vars (Flipper), whom you’ve heard even if you don’t recognize the name. She was the voice of “Chiquita Banana” in the long-running series of commercials that began in 1944, at first as an animated banana and, after 1987, as a woman very much designed to look like Carmen Miranda.

Lewis was born in 1922 to a musical family in Chicago and got what should have been her big break in 1943, when Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman’s female singer, left the band to marry the group’s guitarist, Dave Barbour, and settle in Hollywood. At the time her plan was to retire and just be Mrs. Barbour full-time, but in 1945 Barbour was working on an historical jazz album and they needed a female singer for two songs. “My wife used to sing with Goodman,” Barbour said – so they called in Peggy Lee and ultimately she became a solo singing star. Meanwhile, Monica Lewis got caught in the American Federation of Musicians’ (AFM) strike against the record companies in 1942, which meant she couldn’t record with the Goodman band. After the strike was settled in 1944 she went on a long recording career for Signature (owned by her first husband, record producer Bob Thiele), MGM, Capitol, Decca and Verve. After her brief first marriage to Thiele, in 1956 she married Hollywood agent and producer Jennings Lang (best known in movie trivia history as the man producer Walter Wanger shot at because Wanger thought his wife, Joan Bennett, was having an affair with Lang, her agent at the time) and retired to take care of his children. She stayed with Lang until his death in 1996 and died herself in 2015 at age 93. I had imagined the producers of M Squad would hire a professional singer for this role, and I was right; she sang an odd mixture of blues and cabaret song called “Baby, That Ain’t Right” (not to be confused with “That Ain’t Right,” recorded by the Nat “King” Cole Trio and also performed by “Fats” Waller and singer Ada Brown in the 1943 film Stormy Weather) whose lyrics strike the right note of despair. After the show wraps up, a closing narration delivered by Lee Marvin in character tells us that Lewis’s character, Grace Richards, was so broken up by the fact that the man she’d thought was Mr. Right turned out to be a despicable crook that she literally lost her voice and never sang again. Here are the words of the marvelous song Monica Lewis sings here:

My baby left, and that ain’t right
The days are bad, it’s worse at night
With no warm arms to hold me
The nights are cold, and that ain’t right.

I’m all shook up, can’t eat a bite
I’m like a string without a kite
I thought I had love controlled, it didn’t hold,
Now you know that ain’t right.

Who was right? Who was wrong?
Who told lies all along?
Who was weak, who was strong?
To which one does the blame belong?

There’s nothing left, there’s nothing right,
It’s like someone turned out my light,
I got a feeling you are happy, gay and bright
And that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.

M Squad: "The Teacher" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “The Third Shadow,” I watched the M Squad episode immediately preceding it in the series’s original run, “The Teacher.” It dealt with a group of young punk kids at a wood-crafting school, in which the main bully is Nick “Sharpy” Sharples (Tom Laughlin, who 12 years later would emerge as the title character in the Billy Jack movies). Sharpy terrorizes the other kids into paying him protection money and generally following his orders. The school is run by a typically saintly teacher, Ralph Schnider (Stuart Randall), who like Father Flanagan of Boys’ Town insists that “there’s no such thing as a bad boy.” He vainly tries to get through to Sharpy to deal with his psychopathology and set him on a righteous path, but to no avail. One kid he has more or less successfully reformed is Pete Marashi (the young Burt Reynolds), who’s doing well in school and has a girlfriend, Irene Hanson (Sue George), who works at a music store. When another kid is beaten up by Sharpy and his gang, however, Pete refuses to “rat” and tells Lt. Frank Ballinger of the Chicago Police Department (Lee Marvin, the star of the show) that he knows nothing. Meanwhile, Sharpy confronts Schnider in his office and cruelly and coldly pushes him out of the office window to his death, giggling and calling out, “Write if you find work,” as Schnider dies. The police are stumped and originally write off the death as a suicide – which means Schnider’s widow (Maida Severn) can’t collect on his life insurance policy, so their daughter may not be able to go to college – until Sharpy and his gang, attempting to intimidate Pete into staying silent, beat up Pete’s girlfriend Irene.

Conscious that if he’d spoken out sooner, Schnider would still be alive and Irene wouldn’t be in a hospital recovering from her injuries, Pete finally tells Lt. Ballinger what he knows and Sharpy and the gang are busted. When I first saw the synopsis on imdb.com, “Young hoodlums use a trade school for criminal purposes,” I thought this was going to be a show about a corrupt teacher who had enlisted trade-school students to commit crimes for him, sort of like a 1970’s episode of the TV series Vega$ (that’s how it was initially spelled) in which the bad guy was a corrupt probation officer who got the young women assigned to him to commit crimes on his behalf by threatening to declare them in violation and return them to prison if they didn’t comply. But that wasn’t where writer Frank L. Moss chose to go. What makes this M Squad (which survived in much better visual shape than “The Third Shadow,” by the way) interesting is not only the presence of Reynolds and Laughlin in the cast but the name of the composer. Instead of jazz giant Benny Carter, for this one they got Johnny Williams – who would later abbreviate his first name to “John” and become the most popular film composer of all time thanks to his work on Jaws, Superman, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and all their various spinoffs and sequelae. Williams had previously written for the Playhouse 90 anthology TV series and had made his feature-film debut writing the music for another juvenile delinquency drama (if I may use the term loosely), Daddy-O (1958), which Charles and I watched on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation and thought even the MST3K crew couldn’t make it entertaining. As I wrote of Williams’ contribution, “I had thought Elmer Bernstein’s debut in Cat Women on the Moon was the most embarrassing first credit for a composer that went on to major-budget productions and won Academy Awards, but this one certainly rivals it!”

Foul Play (Shelburne Associates, Miller-Milkis Pictures, Paramount, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 10) my husband Charles and I watched three films in a row on Turner Classic Movies (TCM): the 1978 comedy Foul Play and two 1919 vehicles for Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (the only person of Asian descent to become a major star in Hollywood films until … well, it’s hard to say who was the next one: Nancy Kwan in the 1950’s? Bruce Lee in the 1960’s?), The Dragon Painter and The Tong Man. Foul Play was written and directed by Colin Higgins (1941-1988), a comic genius whose all too brief career was truncated by AIDS, which killed him at age 47. Higgins was born in France to an Australian mother and an American father, and he had an odd life. His dad enlisted in the U.S. Army following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and his mom moved the family to Sydney, Australia, where Higgins grew up. In 1957 Higgins and his family moved to Redwood City, California, where he won a college scholarship to Stanford University but dropped out after one year because he’d become “obsessed” with theatre. He briefly enlisted in the U.S. Army (fortunately before Lyndon Johnson’s drastic escalation of the war in Viet Nam!) and, like Stanley Kubrick before him, worked for Stars and Stripes, the servicemembers’ magazine. Discharged from the Army in 1965, he returned to Stanford and majored in creative writing. Then he visited Expo ’67 in Montréal, Canada and became fascinated by the experimental films shown there. Higgins enrolled in a masters’ program in screenwriting at UCLA, and his masters’ thesis was the screenplay for what became his first film as writer, Harold and Maude (1972), a dark comedy about a young death-obsessed 20-year-old man (Bud Cort) and an 80-year-old woman concentration camp survivor (Ruth Gordon) whom he falls in love with and who gives him a reason to live. Harold and Maude was one of those movies that was a commercial flop on its initial release but eventually acquired a cult audience, and Higgins made more money from a French adaptation of it into a play in the 1970’s.

In 1977 Robert Evans, production chief at Paramount, gave Higgins a chance to make his debut as a director with Foul Play, originally called Killing Lydia, a spoof of spy melodramas in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular starring Goldie Hawn as recently divorced librarian Gloria Mundy and Chevy Chase, star of the first season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live TV show, in his first feature film as San Francisco Police Detective Tony Carlson. Foul Play was a major commercial hit and gave Higgins the chance to make his next film, Nine to Five – his masterpiece – in 1980, only his career came to a screeching halt with the failure of his third film as director, the leaden musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). From then on his only credits were for writing the TV miniseries Out on a Limb, based on actress Shirley MacLaine’s experiences with supernaturalism and spiritualism, and two episodes of a Yugoslav TV series called TV teatar, featuring live transmissions of plays. Foul Play deals with Gloria Mundy and her search for love and commitment following the trauma of her divorce. It begins at a fancy party to which she’s reluctantly been taken by her best friend, Stella (Marilyn Sokol), who warns Our Heroine to be fiercely protective of her virtue and gives her items – a pair of brass knuckles (obviously too big for her), chemical Mace and a portable device that sounds like a burglar alarm – to help her fend off men interested only in “that one thing.” Stella is actually urging Gloria to go out and meet more potential dates despite her warnings about predatory men, and Detective Carlson is also at the party and decides to swoop in on her.

Before that scene we’ve been given a prologue involving the Archbishop of San Francisco, who’s stabbed to death by an intruder in his home right after he’s put on a record of the opening of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado. (There’s a glitch here: though the album cover is of The Mikado, the record label is a grey Columbia Masterworks one listing a Mozart symphony.) Then Gloria goes out for a drive on a winding mountain road in her yellow Volkswagen convertible – depicted by a quite elaborate aerial shot that especially impressed Charles: he pointed out that today a shot like that would be done with a camera-containing drone or even with CGI, but in 1978 the only way would have been to hire a helicopter and follow either Goldie Hawn or her stunt double as they drove). Only she’s flagged down by Bob “Scottie” Scott (Bruce Solomon), whose car has broken down and who asks her for a ride back to San Francisco and sneaks a roll of 127 film (an old camera format in which the film wound itself around a take-up reel; you didn’t have to rewind the film in the camera the way you did with 35 mm because you’d simply seal off the end and use the now-exhausted spool the film had come on to take up your next roll) into a pack of Marlboro cigarettes he gives her. He makes a date with her to meet her at the Nuart Cinema for a revival film showing, but he doesn’t show – and when he does arrive midway through the movie, he’s been mortally wounded. (The marquee on the Nuart announces two films that don’t really exist – Killers Walk Among Us and This Gun Is Mine – but there are also promos for midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and plenty of authentic posters for films that do exist.)

With his dying breath Scottie tells her to beware of the dwarf. When Gloria discovers Scottie’s body she screams – only that happens at a particularly frightening part of the film, so everyone else in the audience screams too. She knocks on the door of the theatre manager’s office – interrupting him in the middle of having sex with an usherette – and begs him to put the house lights up, stop the film and call the cops. The cops duly arrive in the persons of Detective Carlson and his partner, Ferguson (Brian Dennehy, marvelous as usual), but by the time they get there the body is gone and there’s no sign he was ever there, alive or dead. The next day, trying to close up the library after hours, Gloria runs into albino hit man Whitey Jackson (William Frankfather) who tries to incapacitate her with ether. She flees into a straight singles bar called “Twosome” and Stanley Tibbetts (Dudley Moore, who got featured billing) tries to pick her up. Gloria basically throws herself at him just to get his help getting out of the bar, to which Whitey and the gang he’s part of have traced her. She ends up in Tibbetts’s home, which is outfitted as a sure-fire seduction pad à la Jack Lemmon’s living spaces in Under the Yum Yum Tree and How to Murder Your Wife, only to flee again once she sees out the window that Jackson is no longer there stalking the place. When she gets back to her own place she’s assaulted again, this time by Scarface (Don Calfa), who demands the pack of cigarettes Scottie gave her. She’s inadvertently saved by Whitey Jackson, who throws a knife and kills Scarface, but she’s knocked out and when she comes to, once again the body has been taken and there’s no sign that anything untoward ever happened there.

The next day Gloria is attacked again, this time by Turk Farnum (Ion Teodorescu), a bald man (though he sometimes wears wigs) who looks like a mid-1960’s James Bond villain. This time Carlson and Ferguson are assigned to protect Gloria, and Carlson does that by taking her to his houseboat (a living space built by his brother, who abandoned it when he got married) and spending the night in bed with her. Ultimately it turns out that the bad guys are members of an organization called “Tax the Churches” (which really existed, though as far as I know it never resorted to terrorism), and they’re planning to assassinate the (fictitious) Pope Pius XIII when he comes to San Francisco as part of a five-city U.S. tour and attends the gala San Francisco Opera performance of, you guessed it, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The architect of the plot is Delia Darrow (Rachel Roberts), who assumed the name of “Gerda Casswell” and got a job as the Archbishop’s housekeeper – only she killed him and got his twin brother (also Eugene Roche) to impersonate him. Also part of the plot were Whitey Jackson, Scarface, and Rupert Stiltskin (Marc Lawrence), Delia’s second-in-command. Before that there’s a great scene in which Gloria’s home is invaded by a real dwarf, J. J. MacKuen (Billy Barty, who’d had bit parts in classic musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Roman Scandals), who’s a particularly pushy Bible salesman but whom Gloria is freaked out by from the moment he knocks on her door and fools her into thinking he’s full-sized by standing on his sample case. Naturally Gloria assumes he’s an assassin sent to kill her – she was warned, “Beware of the dwarf,” after all – and she pitches him out her window and he falls down a manhole and ends up in traction at a hospital. The climax occurs at the big opera gala, where the Pope is supposed to get killed, only the good guys are able to foil it in time and arrest all the would-be terrorists while Pope Pius XIII is able to sit through the opera and enjoy it without any awareness that he was ever in danger.

While not at the level of Nine to Five, Foul Play is an especially delicious movie that evokes many of Hitchcock’s films (including both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Notorious and a real surprise, Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, which came out two years before Foul Play and also featured a high-ranking clergyman being the victim of a crime and an exciting chase scene down a mountain road) while not being so obvious about it Higgins waves his knowledge of classic cinema in our faces. It also contains at least one anticipation of a famous film that would come later: The Da Vinci Code, which would also feature an albino assassin hired in a plot to bring down the Roman Catholic Church. Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase make an appealing pair of leads; Burgess Meredith, billed third as Gloria’s landlord, is a real charmer, especially when he claims to be an expert on judo, which he was trained in during World War II. There’s a great scene in which he tries to bust a brick with his bare hand, misses, then tries it again and this time he makes it. He also insists on coming along when Carlson gets word that Ferguson is being held for ransom, and the “ransom” in this case is the promise that the cops will back off and let the assassination happen on cue. Only the three are able to escape when there’s a shift change at the massage parlor where Gloria has gone to hide out disguised as a masseuse – and where Stanley Tibbetts has gone expecting sex and getting his personal blue-balls city instead. There’s also one of the great shock cuts of all time when the opera performance is about to open, the conductor strides to the podium – and it’s Stanley. Foul Play is a broadly funny comedy and a weird testament to the gifts of Colin Higgins, a remarkable filmmaker who if he’d lived a while longer could have become the Preston Sturges of our time.