by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an unusually good
thriller on Lifetime, the “world premiere” of something called Text to Kill, originally shot under the considerably more
evocative title Truth & Lies. The central character is Taylor (Emily Tennant), a high-school student
who’s been raised by her mom Allison (Dina Meyer, who frankly looks way hotter than the girl playing her daughter!), a
police detective, as a single parent since the death of Taylor’s father in a
car accident. The accident is shown at the beginning of the movie even though
its significance doesn’t come clear until about two-thirds of the way through.
It seems that Taylor’s dad was to blame for the accident and two other people
were also killed in it. After that the film jumps forward two years; Taylor’s former “best friend
forever,” Hannah (Stephanie Bennett), has not only cut her dead but has wooed
and won Taylor’s former boyfriend, Zach (Matt Mazur, whose imdb.com head shot
shows him with a head of dark hair and an uncanny resemblance to the young
Elvis, but in the actual movie is tousled-haired and blond — though come to think
of it the real Elvis was blond; the
famous jet-black mane was a lifelong dye job!). The intrigue begins when Taylor
starts receiving mysterious messages on every computer or Internet-linked
device she owns, including her cell phone, threatening her with exposure of her
(unlisted) crimes, sins or whatever.
The messages are signed “Truth&Lies”
and they gradually get aimed not only at Taylor but at Hannah, Zach, and a
couple of new friends Taylor makes after she’s been ostracized by Hannah’s
in-crowd: Barb (Sarah Desjardins) and Cody (Keenan Tracey). Cody is one of a
group of three campus nerds, headed by Brandon (Kurt Ostlund) and also
including a Black kid (the only one we see, though needless to say, this being
a Lifetime movie, Allison’s police partner is an avuncular African-American)
named Jason (Alex Barima), who we only see lurking sinisterly around Brandon
and Cody and wearing a grey hoodie with a few dreadlocks poking around the
hood’s front rim. For the first hour or so of the film Taylor is determined to
honor the code of omertà that seemingly surrounds all high-school students and not breathe a word
of this to the police in general and her mom in particular, but as the circle
of recipients widens and the posts grow more graphic — Taylor gets a video of
her and Zach having sex in the back of a van; Hannah gets one of her mother,
the town slut, getting it on with a strange guy in their home; and Barb, who’s
come to realize she’s a Lesbian but hasn’t breathed a word of it to anyone, one
of her lip-locking with another girl at a party. Barb is found hanged in her
home and by coincidence Allison and her partner, Detective Marco (Kwesi
Ameyaw), are assigned to investigate. Allison and Marco deduce that Barb was
really murdered and the scene faked to look like suicide, and in the course of their own
investigation the kids focus on Brandon as their principal suspect because he’s
a genius hacker who’s so good with computers the high school hired him to set
up their computer lab. Brandon, it turns out, has wired the entire high school
with surveillance cameras so from his secret lair inside the computer lab — a
separate room controlled with a combination lock so theoretically only he knows
how to get in, though the students learn the combination absurdly easily — he
can watch, listen to and otherwise eavesdrop on virtually anything that goes on
there, including the women’s locker room. On the evidence of her daughter and
the daughter’s friends, Allison and Marco arrest Brandon — only it turns out [spoiler
alert!] the real culprit is Cody
(well, I should have known — he’s by far the cutest male in the dramatis
personae — and indeed the only
reason I didn’t guess it was he was I
didn’t think writers Jeffrey Barmash, Barbara Fixx and Kley Weber were going to
be that obvious about it!).
It
turns out that the other two people killed in that accident in the opening few
minutes were Cody’s parents, and he concocted an elaborate revenge plot against
not only Taylor but her mom as well, first killing the innocent Barb so Taylor
would experience what it was like to lose someone she cared about, then dating Taylor so he could lure
her to a deserted home (actually where Cody has been living with his aunt,
who’s been raising him since his folks were killed but whom we never see),
ambush Taylor’s mom Allison when she came to rescue her, and then slowly kill
Taylor in order to make her suffer as much as possible. Cody’s plot works to
the point where he’s able to surprise Allison, knock her down with a blunt
instrument and take her gun, but Taylor figures out a way to escape from Cody’s
bondage — she knocks down a clay vase and uses the jagged edge of one of the
fragments to saw through the duct tape with which he held her. Cody shoots
Allison and Allison falls, but Taylor sneaks up from behind him with another
pipe or something (the house seems to be full of them!) and clubs him, and in
the fight between them Allison — who wasn’t killed by Taylor’s shot because she
was wearing a bulletproof vest (“You should have aimed higher,” she laconically
tells him) recovers her gun and shoots Cody dead before Cody can kill Taylor.
It’s hard to say what makes Text to Kill so much better than the many other Lifetime thrillers that have had the
same basic plot lines, but it helps that the writing committee created
characters we understand and care about — even though for the first hour we
want to walk into the screen to shake some sense into Taylor and tell her,
“Tell your mom already!” — and director George Erschbamer turned in a nice job
of suspense direction that keeps us riveted to the screen wondering what’s
going to happen next. There are a few of the typical Lifetime “cheats” — like Allison getting the call
that Cody is the real killer just after her daughter has got into a car with
him — but for the most part this is riveting suspense and it has the advantage
of having a theme that rings all too true today. Just this morning the Los
Angeles Times published an article about
the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and the potential for their abuse (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0411-cameras-everywhere-20150412-story.html#page=1)
— something Americans are particularly primed for because we’ve been so
extensively warned about potential abuses by the government but we tend to
assume that this sort of power in private hands is benign and somehow
counterbalanced by the power in other private hands that cancel it out
according to “The Market.” Though it’s mainly a thriller, Text to Kill is also a warning of just how easy it is for
people to gain access to other people’s secrets, document them visually and use
them to cause harm.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
The Judge (Warner Bros., Big Kid Pictures, Team Downey, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched one of the most remarkable recent movies I’ve seen in some time: The Judge, a 2014 film that was pulled off the so-called “Blacklist” — an annual report of the best-liked unproduced screenplays kicking around Hollywood — in 2012 and became the first production of “Team Downey,” a company formed by actor Robert Downey, Jr. and his wife Susan. The credits list David Dobkin and Nick Schenk as authors of the story, and Schenk and Bill Dubuque as writers of the screenplay; Dobkin also directed. The Judge is one of those curious films that is compounded from familiar plot elements but manages to put enough unique “spins” on them that the result doesn’t feel clichéd, but fresh and legitimately entertaining. Downey has a tour de force role as aggressive defense attorney Hank Palmer, who’s wrenched out of his comfortable if cutthroat existence as a well-heeled defender in Chicago by a sudden call from his older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio, who looks so much older than Downey at first I thought he was playing his uncle, not his brother) that their mother has died and he’s expected back home in Carlinville, Indiana for the funeral. (According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, there is a town called Carlinville but it’s really in Illinois.) That means Hank is going to have to see his father, cantankerous old Judge Joseph Palmer (Robert Duvall), whom he’s avoided for 20 years for reasons Dobkin, Schenk and Dubuque take their own sweet time revealing but ultimately let us know. Hank and Glen have a third brother, Dale (Jeremy Strong), the youngest of the three and a learning-disabled (is that still the au courant euphemism?) man whose avocation is filming the rest of the clan with an old-fashioned wind-up home movie camera. (At first I thought the camera was merely a blind, but later we get to see some of Dale’s films — which made me wonder how, in the 21st century, Dale obtains film for the camera and how he gets it developed.) Hank suffers through his mom’s funeral and a reunion with his dad neither one of them wanted, and he’s on the plane on his way back to Chicago when he gets word that his dad has been arrested for murder; the night of his wife’s funeral Judge Palmer allegedly ran down a man riding a bicycle after the two of them left a 7-Eleven store. The man is Mark Blackwell (viewed in one flashback scene and chillingly played by Mark Kiely), who 20 years earlier had a fight with his girlfriend and shot up her home. His case came before Judge Palmer, who took pity on him and gave him a 30-day sentence — only six months later Mark returned to his ex-girlfriend’s home, kidnapped her and drowned her. Now he’s just been released from prison for his crime and has come back to Carlinville just as Judge Palmer’s wife died, only to get himself run over by the prized 1961 Cadillac Judge Palmer owns and doesn’t let anyone else drive. Judge Palmer insists on hiring an incompetent but friendly local attorney named C. P. Kennedy (Dax Shepard) to handle his case, but when Kennedy bungles the preliminary hearing Hank insists on taking over his dad’s representation and relegates Kennedy (who throws up on the courthouse lawn before every session) to second chair.
At first Hank is utterly convinced of his father’s innocence, but the out-of-town prosecutor, Dwight Dickham (Billy Bob Thornton in a remarkably restrained performance, at least by his standards), discovers a surveillance tape from the 7-Eleven that proves that Judge Palmer turned around and followed Mark in his car. (The surveillance in that place is well above what one would expect from a real 7-Eleven and made me wonder who wired it for them — the NSA?) While all that is going on Hank also reunites, sort of, with his ex-girlfriend Samantha Powell (Vera Farmiga), who’s ready and anxious to have another round with him in bed (or wherever). She’s the proprietor of the local watering hole, the Firefly, and she’s got a daughter, Carla (Leighton Meester) who may or may not be Hank’s daughter — which doesn’t stop Hank from making a brief pass at her, since she’s an attractive college-age young woman with an ambition to go to law school. Hank has a wife back home in Chicago, Lisa (Sarah Lancaster), but they’re in the process of splitting up after she got tired of him never being around and had an affair. They also have a daughter, Lauren (Emma Tremblay), who Hank keeps home on his first trip to Carlinville but who accompanies him when he returns to defend Judge Palmer in court, though Hank first briefs her on what to expect from this grandfather she’s never met before: “Grandpa Schneider is kind of, you know, nice and affable. He’d maybe take you for ice cream, maybe read to you. Grandpa Palmer doesn’t wanna do any of that. If you ask him to read, he might throw the book at you.” Throughout the film, the writers reveal the true relations of the characters in often unexpected but always logical ways; Glen, Hank’s older brother, was a star baseball player in high school with a pro career seemingly ahead of him until he was involved in a car accident; Hank was driving and escaped unscathed but Glen’s arm was crushed — and Dale somehow was there with his camera filming the whole thing. Also it turns out that whether Judge Palmer gets convicted of the murder or not is virtually academic because he has stage 4 colon cancer (there’s a scene in which he craps on his bathroom floor and Hank has to go into caregiver mode and clean it up — Robert Duvall didn’t want to film that scene but director Dobkin talked him into it) and he’s been secretly meeting his doctor at a beach house, ostensibly so the two men could play chess (a game Judge Palmer never liked) but actually so the doctor can give the judge chemotherapy without anyone in the town finding out about it.
I’ve often written in these pages that the modern movies I like tend to be the ones that have the same qualities as the older movies I like, and The Judge is a good example; though there are plenty of scenes that indicate this is a modern film — the characters, the two male leads in particular, drop so many “F”-bombs I wondered if David Mamet had worked on it as a script doctor, and after a few expository shots the first big scene takes place in a huge men’s room in a Chicago courthouse where Hank deliberately pees on the shoes of an opposing prosecutor and then claims it was an accident — it has some of the same values as older ones, including a well-constructed screenplay and characters we generally like and want to see prevail despite their flaws. Janusz Kaminski is the cinematographer, and while that’s usually a bad sign — in previous films he’s worshiped all too faithfully at the past-is-brown shrine of the late St. Gordon Willis — here his work is naturalistic, taking full advantage of the exteriors (even though both Massachusetts and British Columbia took turns “playing” Indiana) and offering a wide-ranging spectrum instead of turning the whole film into dirty greens and browns. It did occur to me about two-thirds of the way through that The Judge has similarities to Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, written in 1955 and filmed three years later by director Richard Brooks with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor — Cat is also about a prodigal son who returns home to his family and a patriarchal father who has terminal cancer but is keeping that a deep, dark secret, and it’s also a story about a school athlete who never realized his potential (though in Williams’ play it’s the prodigal, not the brother who stayed home, who’s the burned-out ex-athlete reliving past glories) — but I liked The Judge considerably better than the film of Cat, mainly because I don’t like Tennessee Williams’ writing (he kept trying for poetry and realized only pretentious prose, and the vast gulf between how Williams’ characters talk and how real people talk always irritates me); the characters in The Judge speak dialogue that sounds believable coming from the mouths of the people the writers tell us they are. And they speak it quite well; this is probably Downey’s finest film since The Singing Detective — certainly it stretches him more than playing Tony Stark or the revamped Sherlock Holmes did (I haven’t seen either of Downey’s two Holmes films because the reviews put me off; they basically revamped Holmes as exclusively an action hero and one of the filmmakers, obviously proud of himself, gave an interview in which he said they had to do that because the original Holmes character was “out of date” and needed a makeover for modern audiences) — and Duvall matches him as the old pro that he is: in their scenes together we forget they’re acting and “read” them as father and son locked in an old antagonism and forced into a mutually unwelcome association.
The film is also full of wry in-jokes; at one point Hank explains his cynical attitude towards his profession by saying, “Everyone wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in a bathtub” (To Kill a Mockingbird was Robert Duvall’s first film), and in court Hank asks prospective jurors if they have bumper stickers on their cars, and if so, what they say. One juror says his is “Willie Nelson for President,” and after a bit of badinage about whether Willie Nelson would accept a presidential nomination Hank accepts him as a juror on the case. That primes us to hear Willie Nelson’s voice during the closing credits — which we do, though the song he sings is an unexpected one (the beautiful ballad “The Scientist” by Coldplay) and Nelson’s voice, even though by now it’s only a thin thread of its former self, is welcome even though the makers of Brokeback Mountain ended their film, too, with Willie Nelson singing an unlikely cover (“He Was a Friend of Mine” by Bob Dylan). I’m not sure I’d go as far as imdb.com reviewer Kristen Czewski, who said The Judge “will prove to be a classic,” but it is a first-rate film, the sort of human drama one doesn’t expect to see coming from a major studio (Warner Bros.) these days, and though I was originally a bit worried it might be padded at its 142-minute running time (all too many hyperthyroid films released these days could have been really better if the filmmakers had made them 20 to 30 minutes shorter), as things turned out director Dobkin and his writing partners created a film that used the extra length to add depth and richness to the story they had to tell. The Judge is one of the best recent films I’ve seen and a quite impressive work that deserved a better fate at the box office (it fell just short of making back its production cost, which in the movie business is generally considered a flop because the general rule is a film has to make back twice what it cost to make to turn a profit — the extra is in advertising and marketing costs, which given how many spots I saw for The Judge on TV were probably pretty substantial) and hopefully on DVD will find the audience it richly deserves.
Last night Charles and I watched one of the most remarkable recent movies I’ve seen in some time: The Judge, a 2014 film that was pulled off the so-called “Blacklist” — an annual report of the best-liked unproduced screenplays kicking around Hollywood — in 2012 and became the first production of “Team Downey,” a company formed by actor Robert Downey, Jr. and his wife Susan. The credits list David Dobkin and Nick Schenk as authors of the story, and Schenk and Bill Dubuque as writers of the screenplay; Dobkin also directed. The Judge is one of those curious films that is compounded from familiar plot elements but manages to put enough unique “spins” on them that the result doesn’t feel clichéd, but fresh and legitimately entertaining. Downey has a tour de force role as aggressive defense attorney Hank Palmer, who’s wrenched out of his comfortable if cutthroat existence as a well-heeled defender in Chicago by a sudden call from his older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio, who looks so much older than Downey at first I thought he was playing his uncle, not his brother) that their mother has died and he’s expected back home in Carlinville, Indiana for the funeral. (According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, there is a town called Carlinville but it’s really in Illinois.) That means Hank is going to have to see his father, cantankerous old Judge Joseph Palmer (Robert Duvall), whom he’s avoided for 20 years for reasons Dobkin, Schenk and Dubuque take their own sweet time revealing but ultimately let us know. Hank and Glen have a third brother, Dale (Jeremy Strong), the youngest of the three and a learning-disabled (is that still the au courant euphemism?) man whose avocation is filming the rest of the clan with an old-fashioned wind-up home movie camera. (At first I thought the camera was merely a blind, but later we get to see some of Dale’s films — which made me wonder how, in the 21st century, Dale obtains film for the camera and how he gets it developed.) Hank suffers through his mom’s funeral and a reunion with his dad neither one of them wanted, and he’s on the plane on his way back to Chicago when he gets word that his dad has been arrested for murder; the night of his wife’s funeral Judge Palmer allegedly ran down a man riding a bicycle after the two of them left a 7-Eleven store. The man is Mark Blackwell (viewed in one flashback scene and chillingly played by Mark Kiely), who 20 years earlier had a fight with his girlfriend and shot up her home. His case came before Judge Palmer, who took pity on him and gave him a 30-day sentence — only six months later Mark returned to his ex-girlfriend’s home, kidnapped her and drowned her. Now he’s just been released from prison for his crime and has come back to Carlinville just as Judge Palmer’s wife died, only to get himself run over by the prized 1961 Cadillac Judge Palmer owns and doesn’t let anyone else drive. Judge Palmer insists on hiring an incompetent but friendly local attorney named C. P. Kennedy (Dax Shepard) to handle his case, but when Kennedy bungles the preliminary hearing Hank insists on taking over his dad’s representation and relegates Kennedy (who throws up on the courthouse lawn before every session) to second chair.
At first Hank is utterly convinced of his father’s innocence, but the out-of-town prosecutor, Dwight Dickham (Billy Bob Thornton in a remarkably restrained performance, at least by his standards), discovers a surveillance tape from the 7-Eleven that proves that Judge Palmer turned around and followed Mark in his car. (The surveillance in that place is well above what one would expect from a real 7-Eleven and made me wonder who wired it for them — the NSA?) While all that is going on Hank also reunites, sort of, with his ex-girlfriend Samantha Powell (Vera Farmiga), who’s ready and anxious to have another round with him in bed (or wherever). She’s the proprietor of the local watering hole, the Firefly, and she’s got a daughter, Carla (Leighton Meester) who may or may not be Hank’s daughter — which doesn’t stop Hank from making a brief pass at her, since she’s an attractive college-age young woman with an ambition to go to law school. Hank has a wife back home in Chicago, Lisa (Sarah Lancaster), but they’re in the process of splitting up after she got tired of him never being around and had an affair. They also have a daughter, Lauren (Emma Tremblay), who Hank keeps home on his first trip to Carlinville but who accompanies him when he returns to defend Judge Palmer in court, though Hank first briefs her on what to expect from this grandfather she’s never met before: “Grandpa Schneider is kind of, you know, nice and affable. He’d maybe take you for ice cream, maybe read to you. Grandpa Palmer doesn’t wanna do any of that. If you ask him to read, he might throw the book at you.” Throughout the film, the writers reveal the true relations of the characters in often unexpected but always logical ways; Glen, Hank’s older brother, was a star baseball player in high school with a pro career seemingly ahead of him until he was involved in a car accident; Hank was driving and escaped unscathed but Glen’s arm was crushed — and Dale somehow was there with his camera filming the whole thing. Also it turns out that whether Judge Palmer gets convicted of the murder or not is virtually academic because he has stage 4 colon cancer (there’s a scene in which he craps on his bathroom floor and Hank has to go into caregiver mode and clean it up — Robert Duvall didn’t want to film that scene but director Dobkin talked him into it) and he’s been secretly meeting his doctor at a beach house, ostensibly so the two men could play chess (a game Judge Palmer never liked) but actually so the doctor can give the judge chemotherapy without anyone in the town finding out about it.
I’ve often written in these pages that the modern movies I like tend to be the ones that have the same qualities as the older movies I like, and The Judge is a good example; though there are plenty of scenes that indicate this is a modern film — the characters, the two male leads in particular, drop so many “F”-bombs I wondered if David Mamet had worked on it as a script doctor, and after a few expository shots the first big scene takes place in a huge men’s room in a Chicago courthouse where Hank deliberately pees on the shoes of an opposing prosecutor and then claims it was an accident — it has some of the same values as older ones, including a well-constructed screenplay and characters we generally like and want to see prevail despite their flaws. Janusz Kaminski is the cinematographer, and while that’s usually a bad sign — in previous films he’s worshiped all too faithfully at the past-is-brown shrine of the late St. Gordon Willis — here his work is naturalistic, taking full advantage of the exteriors (even though both Massachusetts and British Columbia took turns “playing” Indiana) and offering a wide-ranging spectrum instead of turning the whole film into dirty greens and browns. It did occur to me about two-thirds of the way through that The Judge has similarities to Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, written in 1955 and filmed three years later by director Richard Brooks with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor — Cat is also about a prodigal son who returns home to his family and a patriarchal father who has terminal cancer but is keeping that a deep, dark secret, and it’s also a story about a school athlete who never realized his potential (though in Williams’ play it’s the prodigal, not the brother who stayed home, who’s the burned-out ex-athlete reliving past glories) — but I liked The Judge considerably better than the film of Cat, mainly because I don’t like Tennessee Williams’ writing (he kept trying for poetry and realized only pretentious prose, and the vast gulf between how Williams’ characters talk and how real people talk always irritates me); the characters in The Judge speak dialogue that sounds believable coming from the mouths of the people the writers tell us they are. And they speak it quite well; this is probably Downey’s finest film since The Singing Detective — certainly it stretches him more than playing Tony Stark or the revamped Sherlock Holmes did (I haven’t seen either of Downey’s two Holmes films because the reviews put me off; they basically revamped Holmes as exclusively an action hero and one of the filmmakers, obviously proud of himself, gave an interview in which he said they had to do that because the original Holmes character was “out of date” and needed a makeover for modern audiences) — and Duvall matches him as the old pro that he is: in their scenes together we forget they’re acting and “read” them as father and son locked in an old antagonism and forced into a mutually unwelcome association.
The film is also full of wry in-jokes; at one point Hank explains his cynical attitude towards his profession by saying, “Everyone wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in a bathtub” (To Kill a Mockingbird was Robert Duvall’s first film), and in court Hank asks prospective jurors if they have bumper stickers on their cars, and if so, what they say. One juror says his is “Willie Nelson for President,” and after a bit of badinage about whether Willie Nelson would accept a presidential nomination Hank accepts him as a juror on the case. That primes us to hear Willie Nelson’s voice during the closing credits — which we do, though the song he sings is an unexpected one (the beautiful ballad “The Scientist” by Coldplay) and Nelson’s voice, even though by now it’s only a thin thread of its former self, is welcome even though the makers of Brokeback Mountain ended their film, too, with Willie Nelson singing an unlikely cover (“He Was a Friend of Mine” by Bob Dylan). I’m not sure I’d go as far as imdb.com reviewer Kristen Czewski, who said The Judge “will prove to be a classic,” but it is a first-rate film, the sort of human drama one doesn’t expect to see coming from a major studio (Warner Bros.) these days, and though I was originally a bit worried it might be padded at its 142-minute running time (all too many hyperthyroid films released these days could have been really better if the filmmakers had made them 20 to 30 minutes shorter), as things turned out director Dobkin and his writing partners created a film that used the extra length to add depth and richness to the story they had to tell. The Judge is one of the best recent films I’ve seen and a quite impressive work that deserved a better fate at the box office (it fell just short of making back its production cost, which in the movie business is generally considered a flop because the general rule is a film has to make back twice what it cost to make to turn a profit — the extra is in advertising and marketing costs, which given how many spots I saw for The Judge on TV were probably pretty substantial) and hopefully on DVD will find the audience it richly deserves.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Killer Crush (NB Thrilling Films 3/Lifetime, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a “world premiere” TV-movie on Lifetime called Killer Crush — well, at least that’s the title they finally gave it after they considered Obsessed on Campus and Girl Obsessed (were they hoping viewers would remember Girl, Interrupted?), a pretty by-the-numbers Lifetime tale written by Corbin Mezner and John Serge and directed by Anthony Lefresne, with Lefresne’s former directorial partner, Curtis James Crawford, named as one of the legion of “producers.” It’s all about Paige York (Daviegh Chase, whose head shot on imdb.com shows her with dark hair but who went blonde for this role), a medical student at Riverton (not Whittendale!) University, who decides that her surgery teacher, Dr. Lucas Emery (Rick Roberts — and do I need to tell you he’s tall and lanky? That’s the de rigueur look for Lifetime leading men, though he has a bit more grey in his otherwise sandy-brown hair than usual), is the great love of her life. There’s one minor problem: the doc is married, and his wife Gabby (Sydney Penny) is in a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. So Paige wangles a job as Gabby’s caregiver through the school’s student employment office and gets the Emerys’ daughter Amy (Grace Zanichkowsky) to fall in love with her as the big sister she never had.
Wanting to get rid of the inconvenient wife — watching Paige take care of Gabby and have to haul her back into the wheelchair after she overexerts herself was a busman’s holiday for me, and it occurred to me a better title for the film might have been Killer Caregiver — Paige learns how when, in one of his lectures, Dr. Emery helpfully explains that to do a graft to replace a broken artery he first administers potassium chloride “to stop the heart from beating — temporarily,” he adds, though this has given Paige the information she needs to stop Gabby’s heart from beating … permanently. She does this by sneaking into the Emerys’ home while the doc is out jogging — oddly, he calls Gabby on his cell while he’s running but doesn’t seem perturbed that she doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t bother to check in on her until the next morning (and when he does see her he seems totally clueless — one would think a doctor would know what death looked like!) — and there’s a nice little suspense scene when he comes home while Paige is still there and she has to sneak out again without him catching her wearing medical gloves and with a needle in her hand. Messrs. Mezner and Serge try to make Paige an understandable, if not sympathetic, character by the usual Lifetime strategy of burdening her with plenty of dysfunction in her own family: her dad was a con artist who was arrested and served four years, her mom committed suicide after dad’s arrest, and when dad finally got out he asked Paige and her alcoholic sister Tayler (Melanie Scrofano) for thousands of dollars to launch his latest Ponzi scheme, and then himself committed suicide when Paige turned him down. Tayler starts the movie as such a basket case she’s fired from her job as a bartender for consuming too much of the stock personally, though midway through the movie she disappears into rehab and comes back clean, sober and ultimately smart enough to see through her sister’s scheme.
Eventually Paige decides that the doc is ready for her, and during a sleepover at his home she undresses (at least as much as Lifetime’s standards-and-practices department would allow) and gets into his bed — whereupon he angrily rejects her and says that as appreciative as he is of her work with his wife and his daughter, he’s never thought of her “that way.” Like a true Lifetime villain, Paige decides she wants revenge — and her idea of revenge is to frame Dr. Emery and get him convicted of murdering his wife. It takes an avuncular African-American police detective (not another avuncular African-American police detective!) named Detective Cullen (Andrew Moodie) to figure it all out, and meanwhile Paige kills her sister Tayler by clubbing her over the head with a heavy candle holder (a pity, since Tayler was by far the most sympathetic member of the dramatis personae and the one I most wanted to see alive at the end) before the cops finally come and arrest her. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Killer Crush but there’s nothing particularly right with it either; it’s a to-the-pattern Lifetime movie by writers and director who are totally familiar with the formula and apply it to near-perfection — though one at least faintly innovative element was to have the presumably more-grounded Paige, not her self-destructive sister, be the one with the “killer crush.” Daveigh Chase acts her part with the sort of self-satisfied half-pout, half-smirk common to Lifetime’s young villainesses — I used to be far more impressed by these performances before I realized how similar they are to each other — and the rest of the cast is likewise competent in roles that (with the possible exception of Tayler) really don’t stretch them that much. I enjoyed Killer Crush for what it was but it’s really not much of a movie — various Lifetime films have transcended the limits of their formula but this isn’t one of them!
Two nights ago I watched a “world premiere” TV-movie on Lifetime called Killer Crush — well, at least that’s the title they finally gave it after they considered Obsessed on Campus and Girl Obsessed (were they hoping viewers would remember Girl, Interrupted?), a pretty by-the-numbers Lifetime tale written by Corbin Mezner and John Serge and directed by Anthony Lefresne, with Lefresne’s former directorial partner, Curtis James Crawford, named as one of the legion of “producers.” It’s all about Paige York (Daviegh Chase, whose head shot on imdb.com shows her with dark hair but who went blonde for this role), a medical student at Riverton (not Whittendale!) University, who decides that her surgery teacher, Dr. Lucas Emery (Rick Roberts — and do I need to tell you he’s tall and lanky? That’s the de rigueur look for Lifetime leading men, though he has a bit more grey in his otherwise sandy-brown hair than usual), is the great love of her life. There’s one minor problem: the doc is married, and his wife Gabby (Sydney Penny) is in a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. So Paige wangles a job as Gabby’s caregiver through the school’s student employment office and gets the Emerys’ daughter Amy (Grace Zanichkowsky) to fall in love with her as the big sister she never had.
Wanting to get rid of the inconvenient wife — watching Paige take care of Gabby and have to haul her back into the wheelchair after she overexerts herself was a busman’s holiday for me, and it occurred to me a better title for the film might have been Killer Caregiver — Paige learns how when, in one of his lectures, Dr. Emery helpfully explains that to do a graft to replace a broken artery he first administers potassium chloride “to stop the heart from beating — temporarily,” he adds, though this has given Paige the information she needs to stop Gabby’s heart from beating … permanently. She does this by sneaking into the Emerys’ home while the doc is out jogging — oddly, he calls Gabby on his cell while he’s running but doesn’t seem perturbed that she doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t bother to check in on her until the next morning (and when he does see her he seems totally clueless — one would think a doctor would know what death looked like!) — and there’s a nice little suspense scene when he comes home while Paige is still there and she has to sneak out again without him catching her wearing medical gloves and with a needle in her hand. Messrs. Mezner and Serge try to make Paige an understandable, if not sympathetic, character by the usual Lifetime strategy of burdening her with plenty of dysfunction in her own family: her dad was a con artist who was arrested and served four years, her mom committed suicide after dad’s arrest, and when dad finally got out he asked Paige and her alcoholic sister Tayler (Melanie Scrofano) for thousands of dollars to launch his latest Ponzi scheme, and then himself committed suicide when Paige turned him down. Tayler starts the movie as such a basket case she’s fired from her job as a bartender for consuming too much of the stock personally, though midway through the movie she disappears into rehab and comes back clean, sober and ultimately smart enough to see through her sister’s scheme.
Eventually Paige decides that the doc is ready for her, and during a sleepover at his home she undresses (at least as much as Lifetime’s standards-and-practices department would allow) and gets into his bed — whereupon he angrily rejects her and says that as appreciative as he is of her work with his wife and his daughter, he’s never thought of her “that way.” Like a true Lifetime villain, Paige decides she wants revenge — and her idea of revenge is to frame Dr. Emery and get him convicted of murdering his wife. It takes an avuncular African-American police detective (not another avuncular African-American police detective!) named Detective Cullen (Andrew Moodie) to figure it all out, and meanwhile Paige kills her sister Tayler by clubbing her over the head with a heavy candle holder (a pity, since Tayler was by far the most sympathetic member of the dramatis personae and the one I most wanted to see alive at the end) before the cops finally come and arrest her. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Killer Crush but there’s nothing particularly right with it either; it’s a to-the-pattern Lifetime movie by writers and director who are totally familiar with the formula and apply it to near-perfection — though one at least faintly innovative element was to have the presumably more-grounded Paige, not her self-destructive sister, be the one with the “killer crush.” Daveigh Chase acts her part with the sort of self-satisfied half-pout, half-smirk common to Lifetime’s young villainesses — I used to be far more impressed by these performances before I realized how similar they are to each other — and the rest of the cast is likewise competent in roles that (with the possible exception of Tayler) really don’t stretch them that much. I enjoyed Killer Crush for what it was but it’s really not much of a movie — various Lifetime films have transcended the limits of their formula but this isn’t one of them!
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Broadway Melody of 1936 (MGM, 1935/1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed Charles the movie Broadway Melody of 1936, which I’d just recorded off Turner Classic Movies and which I think was the only one in the series I hadn’t previously seen. Though it suffered from the typical flaws of MGM musicals in the 1930’s — they were good but the most creative films in the form were the Busby Berkeley extravaganzae at Warners and the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicles at RKO (a problem MGM eventually rectified by luring both Berkeley and Astaire with the promise of bigger budgets) — Broadway Melody of 1936 turned out to be a messy but generally entertaining film with a higher dose of genuinely funny comic dialogue than usual in a 1930’s musical. True, the plot is virtually incomprehensible — gossip columnist Bert Keeler (Jack Benny at the start of his radio career, top-billed but still below the title), under pressure from his editor (Paul Harvey) to make his column more scandalous, seizes on young Broadway hotshot Robert Gordon (Robert Taylor), who’s rehearsing a show called Broadway Rhythm and dating wealthy widow Lillian Brent (June Knight), who as a sign of her affections agrees to provide the backing for the show and hopes her boyfriend will engage her as the show’s star as well. (The gigolo-ish aspects of their relationship are drawn surprisingly explicitly for a post-Code film — and were probably embarrassing to Taylor, who was all too used to critics who didn’t like him calling him a gigolo-type.) In the middle of his cattle-call auditions, Gordon’s old high-school girlfriend from Albany, Irene Foster (Eleanor Powell), comes a-calling and hopes to land a part in his show based on their old-school ties (in a weird glitch in the continuity she shows off the fraternity pin he gave her — did Albany high schools have fraternities in 1935?), but he doesn’t recognize her until later, when he finds the pin in his office where she lost it and then asks Bert Keeler to put it in his column that he’s trying to find his old friend.
Keeler does so but “spins” the item to make it look like Gordon is two-timing his horny widow backer with his old high-school flame, and Lillian’s revenge is to threaten to pull her backing from the show unless Gordon casts her as star. Gordon wangles a promise out of her to give him two weeks to find a legitimate star, in return for which he’ll cast her after all if he doesn’t find one by the deadline. Keeler, in order to rag him still further, plants an entirely fictitious story that a French entertainer named “Mademoiselle La Belle Arlette” is in New York looking for a vehicle for her American debut (he got the phony name from a box of cheap cigars). He goes so far as to dress his assistant, Snoop (Sid Silvers, who in a bit of unusual doubling for a 1930’s movies also got screen credit as one of the film’s writers: he and Jack McGowan worked up the script from an original story by Moss Hart, and Harry Conn, one of Jack Benny’s radio writers, contributed additional dialogue), in drag to attempt to pass him off as Arlette, but when he’s unable to produce the required falsetto voice Snoop instead assumes the guise of Arlette’s secretary, fending off all callers by playing a recording of the song “All I Do Is Dream of You” in French (the singer was unidentified but it sounded like Fifi D’Orsay to me) and telling them in a bad French accent that “Madame ees bee-zee rehearsing!” Alas, during one phone call from Gordon’s secretary, Kitty Corbett (Una Merkel), Snoop lets slip his real identity — and Kitty hatches a plot to get Irene Foster the starring role in Gordon’s show by passing her off as Arlette. (I could think of at least three other movies — Mae West’s Every Day’s a Holiday, the Groucho Marx-Carmen Miranda Copacabaña and Douglas Sirk’s Slightly French — in which an unknown non-French actress is passed off as French to get a career break.) Then Keeler’s paper receives a notice from a real French entertainer named Arlette threatening to sue if the items about her aren’t retracted, but in the end Irene attends the big promotional party Gordon is throwing at the rooftop nightclub where much of this film’s singing and dancing takes place and does a spectacular dance number to the “Broadway Rhythm” song that wins her the part — and Gordon’s love — in her own identity.
I showed Charles the movie Broadway Melody of 1936, which I’d just recorded off Turner Classic Movies and which I think was the only one in the series I hadn’t previously seen. Though it suffered from the typical flaws of MGM musicals in the 1930’s — they were good but the most creative films in the form were the Busby Berkeley extravaganzae at Warners and the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicles at RKO (a problem MGM eventually rectified by luring both Berkeley and Astaire with the promise of bigger budgets) — Broadway Melody of 1936 turned out to be a messy but generally entertaining film with a higher dose of genuinely funny comic dialogue than usual in a 1930’s musical. True, the plot is virtually incomprehensible — gossip columnist Bert Keeler (Jack Benny at the start of his radio career, top-billed but still below the title), under pressure from his editor (Paul Harvey) to make his column more scandalous, seizes on young Broadway hotshot Robert Gordon (Robert Taylor), who’s rehearsing a show called Broadway Rhythm and dating wealthy widow Lillian Brent (June Knight), who as a sign of her affections agrees to provide the backing for the show and hopes her boyfriend will engage her as the show’s star as well. (The gigolo-ish aspects of their relationship are drawn surprisingly explicitly for a post-Code film — and were probably embarrassing to Taylor, who was all too used to critics who didn’t like him calling him a gigolo-type.) In the middle of his cattle-call auditions, Gordon’s old high-school girlfriend from Albany, Irene Foster (Eleanor Powell), comes a-calling and hopes to land a part in his show based on their old-school ties (in a weird glitch in the continuity she shows off the fraternity pin he gave her — did Albany high schools have fraternities in 1935?), but he doesn’t recognize her until later, when he finds the pin in his office where she lost it and then asks Bert Keeler to put it in his column that he’s trying to find his old friend.
Keeler does so but “spins” the item to make it look like Gordon is two-timing his horny widow backer with his old high-school flame, and Lillian’s revenge is to threaten to pull her backing from the show unless Gordon casts her as star. Gordon wangles a promise out of her to give him two weeks to find a legitimate star, in return for which he’ll cast her after all if he doesn’t find one by the deadline. Keeler, in order to rag him still further, plants an entirely fictitious story that a French entertainer named “Mademoiselle La Belle Arlette” is in New York looking for a vehicle for her American debut (he got the phony name from a box of cheap cigars). He goes so far as to dress his assistant, Snoop (Sid Silvers, who in a bit of unusual doubling for a 1930’s movies also got screen credit as one of the film’s writers: he and Jack McGowan worked up the script from an original story by Moss Hart, and Harry Conn, one of Jack Benny’s radio writers, contributed additional dialogue), in drag to attempt to pass him off as Arlette, but when he’s unable to produce the required falsetto voice Snoop instead assumes the guise of Arlette’s secretary, fending off all callers by playing a recording of the song “All I Do Is Dream of You” in French (the singer was unidentified but it sounded like Fifi D’Orsay to me) and telling them in a bad French accent that “Madame ees bee-zee rehearsing!” Alas, during one phone call from Gordon’s secretary, Kitty Corbett (Una Merkel), Snoop lets slip his real identity — and Kitty hatches a plot to get Irene Foster the starring role in Gordon’s show by passing her off as Arlette. (I could think of at least three other movies — Mae West’s Every Day’s a Holiday, the Groucho Marx-Carmen Miranda Copacabaña and Douglas Sirk’s Slightly French — in which an unknown non-French actress is passed off as French to get a career break.) Then Keeler’s paper receives a notice from a real French entertainer named Arlette threatening to sue if the items about her aren’t retracted, but in the end Irene attends the big promotional party Gordon is throwing at the rooftop nightclub where much of this film’s singing and dancing takes place and does a spectacular dance number to the “Broadway Rhythm” song that wins her the part — and Gordon’s love — in her own identity.
Despite a convoluted plot line even for a 1930’s musical, Broadway
Melody of 1936 is full of wonderful things.
It generated at least three hit songs for the writing team of Nacio Herb Brown
(composer) and future MGM musical producer Arthur Freed (lyricist), “Broadway
Rhythm,” “I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling” and “You Are My Lucky Star,” and
though Dave Gould, the film’s choreographer (and a refugee from the first two
Astaire-Rogers musicals at RKO) didn’t have either Berkeley’s demented
imagination or his sense of structure, the numbers are dazzlingly creative.
They include a marvelous staging of “Fooling” at the rooftop nightclub, with
Robert Taylor and Jean Harvey strolling through the club’s floor as pianos,
tables and the like pop out from under the floor and assemble themselves
(Thayer, a real stage magician, was a consultant on the number and helped
produce these effects) — and Taylor sings the song himself in a surprisingly
good voice, not one that would have kept Bing Crosby or Dick Powell awake
worrying about the competition but still an appealing one (and far better than
the rather croaking sounds Cary Grant and James Stewart made in other MGM
musicals of the period — Stewart joked in the film That’s
Entertainment! that Cole Porter’s song
“Easy to Love” was so good it even survived him introducing it!); a lovely dream sequence to “You
Are My Lucky Star” in which Eleanor Powell sits in the empty theatre dreaming that she is the star of a big show and is leading a
dance with Albertina Rasch’s ballet troupe (and Powell’s work on point here is
quite spectacular and belies the stereotype about her that all she could do was tap); and the “Broadway Rhythm”
extravaganza at the end, which suffers by comparison with the even better
staging of that song in Singin’ in the Rain but still showcases not only the virtuoso tapping of
Eleanor Powell but also the appealing eccentric dancing of Buddy Ebsen and his
sister Velma. The two were making their first film here (and in Velma’s case
her last as well) after having risen through the ranks as a brother-and-sister
dance team (as I’ve pointed out earlier, it’s interesting how many major movie
dancers started in sibling acts: Fred Astaire with his sister Adele and Gene
Kelly with his brother Fred) in
vaudeville and, eventually, on Broadway: Louis B. Mayer offered them both contracts
and Buddy accepted but Velma refused. (Velma Ebsen died just recently — on
March 12; the Los Angeles Times
ran her obituary March 20 — and so watching this film right now was at least in
part an envoi.) Mayer supposedly
told her she could be the next Myrna Loy, and she said, “I’m not Myrna Loy, I’m
Velma Ebsen” — though the real reason she turned down his contract offer was
her husband, Robert Emmett Dolan, was already established as a Broadway
conductor and she didn’t want either to live apart from him or ask him to
relocate.
The Ebsens are cast
as a brother-and-sister dance team, and they’re very good — especially in the
early number, “Sing Before Breakfast,” which they do with Powell on their own,
proletarian rooftop (and which Judy Garland later interpolated in her
performance of “Everybody Sing”) — and add a lot to the movie. So do the
comedians; though Jack Benny here has the same problem as he did in a lot of
his movies — whereas his radio writers managed to steer a balance between
curmudgeonliness and lovability in his character that kept him a major
broadcasting star for 30 years, his movie writers (except in his two greatest
films, To Be or Not to Be and —
despite its box-office failure and all his jokes about it — The Horn
Blows at Midnight) tended to lose the
balance and make him too unsympathetic. (He’s also the only one of the film’s
principals who isn’t given a love
interest; even Snoop and Kitty are paired off at the end.) Benny is more a foil
for the richly amusing Sid Silvers than a laugh-getter in his own right, but
that’s O.K. — and there are some nice comic sight-gags, like the papers blowing
every which way throughout the newspaper office as Bob Gordon comes in to seek
revenge on Keeler and Snoop for the latest outrageous comments about him in
Keeler’s column. There’s also another comic-relief character, Robert Wildhack
as “The Snorer,” with one of the weirdest acts in movie history: he imitates
various types of snores, complete with commentary to differentiate them
according to types, and fortunately director Roy Del Ruth and the writers keep
his scenes short enough so they remain amusing instead of annoying. Though Broadway
Melody of 1936 is a pretty obvious chip off
the 42nd Street tree
with admixtures of every newspaper film made to that time, and it had such a
long, elaborate and convoluted production history MGM had to change the title
from their original Broadway Melody of 1935, it’s still a lot of fun and also
a good-looking movie, with Roy Del Ruth offering typically snappy-paced
direction and cinematographer Charles Rosher (best known for convincingly
making Mary Pickford look 12 even when she was actually 32) contributes
absolutely luscious work that led Charles to comment afterwards that after all
the cheap detective “B”’s from Columbia we’ve been watching lately, it was nice
to be reminded how beautiful black-and-white could look in the hands of a
master cameraman working on a major budget. — 3/30/07
•••••
The film was Broadway Melody of 1936, which was MGM’s attempt to take their original The
Broadway Melody from 1929 — a blockbuster
hit and the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture — and build
a franchise around it on the order of the Gold Diggers films at Warner Bros. and the Big
Broadcast movies at Paramount. They even
got Jack Benny from Paramount to star, making Benny the only person I can think
of who appeared in more than one studio’s musical franchise series (actually Benny
didn’t appear in any of Paramount’s Big Broadcast movies but he did play parts in both Artists and Models movies, Paramount’s attempt to construct a second
musical franchise but one which only lasted two films, as opposed to the five Gold
Diggers, four Big Broadcasts and four Broadway Melodies) — and cast him as Broadway columnist “Bert Keeler”
(the appropriation of the last name of Warner Bros.’ big musical star Ruby
Keeler is just one of the cheeky gestures towards the competition in which this
film abounds), obviously
patterned on Walter Winchell, who in the opening scene is told by his irascible
editor (Paul Harvey) — was there ever a 1930’s movie involving a newspaper
editor in which he wasn’t
irascible? — to lay off on the announcements of “blessed events” and other
euphemisms both “Keeler” and the real Winchell to announce impending births,
and instead give his readers the real “Broadway Thru a Keyhole” (a favorite
slogan of the real Winchell and the title of a movie featuring a Winchell
avatar for which Winchell actually wrote the story) gossip they’ll pay to read.
Keeler fixates on producer Robert Gordon (Robert Taylor), and when he looks
down from his newspaper office on the rooftop garden of Gordon’s penthouse
suite and sees the producer canoodling with millionaire heiress Lillian Brent
(June Knight), he immediately leaps to the conclusion that Gordon is romancing
Brent just to get her to put up
the money for his new show, Broadway Rhythm.
We see Gordon and Brent twirling on the penthouse
roof’s dance floor to the Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown song “I’ve Got a
Feeling You’re Fooling” and as Gordon waves his hand over a rose bush, it
suddenly blossoms and Gordon pulls off one of the roses and gives it to Brent.
Chairs and tables appear from the floor, seemingly out of nowhere, as Gordon
ushers Brent to a seat and the two of them have a tête-à -tête supper, and when a troupe of chorus girls joins in
the song after Gordon and Brent have finished with it, with a wave of Gordon’s
hands the black dresses the chorines are dancing in suddenly dissolve and
change to white ones (a reversal of the magical effect in Lubitsch’s 1934 MGM
film of The Merry Widow, in which
to signal her coming out of mourning not only do Jeanette MacDonald’s black
dresses turn into white ones but even her black lapdog becomes a white dog);
though David Gould was credited with staging the film’s dance numbers, on this
one he had uncredited help from stage entertainer Thayer the Magician. The next
thing we see is Gordon sweeping into Keeler’s office to protest the item and
demand a retraction — and as he walks through the hallway papers lift
themselves off other people’s desks and blow by him in his wake (this film has
more physically impossible gags than just about any supposedly realistic film
of its time except the later Laurel and Hardy movies, in which Laurel indulged
his love of the sorts of impossible gags his producer, Hal Roach, hated).
Gordon belts Keeler in the jaw, sending him tumbling over his own desk (though
I’m sure Jack Benny had a stunt double to do the actual pratfall), and Keeler
and his sidekick “Snoop” (Sid Silvers) vow revenge. Their way of getting it is
to keep up a barrage of items about the relationship (such as it is) between
Gordon and his sugar mama, and when they learn that Gordon has promised Lillian
Brent the lead in his show if he can’t find another star in two weeks (the
script tells us she’s totally untalented, but from what we’ve seen of June
Knight’s singing and dancing we
get the impression she’d be perfectly fine in the part), they concoct an
elaborate hoax and build up a nonexistent French chanteuse named “Mademoiselle
Arletty” so Gordon will offer her the part. Of course, as we know well before the characters do, the right person
for the lead has been under Gordon’s nose (and other parts) the entire movie:
Irene Foster (Eleanor Powell, whose only previous film appearance had been an
uncredited bit in the 1935 film George White’s Scandals), an old girlfriend of Gordon’s from their mutual
home town, Albany, only Gordon didn’t recognize her when she came to his office
looking for work in his show, and when he did recognize her he rather patronizingly told her to
return to Albany before the Big Bad City corrupted her.
Needless to say, a plot
is hatched by Keeper, “Snoop” and Gordon’s secretary, Kitty Corbett (Una Merkel
in a blazingly funny performance that virtually steals the movie) to pass
Foster off as the nonexistent “Arlette” — only a real French performer named Arlette materializes and
threatens to sue. At the big party on Gordon’s penthouse roof Foster, as
herself, dons a black sequined pantsuit and performs an elaborate routine to
the song “Broadway Rhythm” which proves her worthiness both for Gordon’s show
and his arms. The odd thing about Broadway Melody of 1936 is that unlike most musicals of its time and place,
it’s at least as entertaining when the characters are not singing and dancing; it’s actually a fusion of
musical and screwball comedies and the screwball elements are as much fun, if
not more so, than the songs. Though it was written by a committee — “original”
story by Moss Hart (probably something he just tossed off in an afternoon),
script by Jack McGowan and Sid Silvers, “additional dialogue” by Harry W. Conn
and uncredited “script polishing” by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Edwin J. Burke —
somehow the writers manage to come together and give off a mordant sensibility
much like that of Hart’s former collaborator, George S. Kaufman, and the
wisecracks and weird comic bits (like the character of “The Snorer,” played by
Robert Wildhack, who has not only done an in-depth study of the various types
of snores but can imitate any one of them on cue) make this one mid-1930’s
musical that’s fun all the way through — even though it’s obvious MGM’s people
were looking over their collective shoulders at other studios for inspiration,
not only assembling chorus girls and maneuvering them in Berkeley-like
formations but bringing on June Knight and Gordon’s dance director (Nick Long,
Jr., played — like virtually all dance directors in movies back then — as a
screaming queen) to do an Astaire-and-Rogers style dance duet in the second
version of “I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling.” Directed by Roy Del Ruth from
the Warners machine, with retakes by MGM’s own resident speed demon W. S.
“One-Take Woody” Van Dyke, Broadway Melody of 1936 ran way
over schedule and budget (it was scheduled for four weeks, it actually took
four months, and the film took so long its original title, Broadway
Melody of 1935, had to be updated), but it
was worth it: it made Eleanor Powell a superstar of musicals (despite the
handicap of not having a singing voice — Marjorie Lane dubbed her here) and was
a blockbuster relaunch of the Broadway Melody series that rained money into MGM’s coffers. —
4/4/15
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (Florentine Films/PBS, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The last three nights I’ve been following an interesting if sometimes frustrating mini-series on PBS called Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, produced under the auspices of Ken Burns and his production company, Florentine Films, even though Burns actually had nothing to do with making it. The people who did were veteran movie producer Laura Ziskin, who acquired the film rights to a book by cancer researcher and clinician Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee called The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer; and Barak Goodman, who actually wrote and directed the resulting film. A movie about cancer — documentary or dramatic — would seem one of the chanciest projects a filmmaker could take on, mainly because the subject virtually invites tear-jerking, and also there are so many vested interests in the “cancer industry,” including pharmaceutical companies (Genentech, one of the leading enterprises working on molecularly elaborate and outrageously expensive cancer drugs, is one of the principal sponsors), dedicated clinics (the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which makes enough money it advertises regularly and extensively on commercial TV, is the other lead sponsor), nonprofits like the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Association and Stand Up to Cancer (all also present on this show’s ultra-extensive sponsor list) and individual clinicians and researchers, it’s hard to imagine a treatment of the subject that won’t step on some people’s toes. Needless to say, this being PBS, the history of cancer presented by Cancer is an exclusively mainstream one — even though the Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s own TV ads stress that they offer “complementary” therapies in addition to the Big Three of mainstream cancer treatment (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy), no hint of any alternative therapies is shown on this program.
The film, narrated by Edward Herrmann (a final credit dedicating the film to people no longer living — presumably after cancer-related deaths — lists both Herrmann and producer Ziskin among the in memoriams), stretches out the history of cancer over six hours and intersperses the historical information with stories of modern-day cancer patients and their families (and as one who’s worked with and for people with disabilities for over 30 years now some of these scenes seemed all too familiar to me, particularly those anxious moments as the family members and significant others wait in the waiting room for the doctors’ pronouncements and then, once the doctors speak, parse out what they had to say and what that means in terms of whether, and how long, the person they care about who’s undergoing this excruciating crisis is going to live), which is pretty much where the tear-jerking comes in. I had a number of observations about the show, of which the first and most obvious is that cancer is our modern age’s version of the Big Scare, taking the social role that plague, smallpox, tuberculosis and polio had for previous generations — indeed, as one doctor on the show mentions in passing, an observation I’ve heard elsewhere as well, it’s because modern medicine has been so good at either eradicating or controlling these ancient horrors that more people have lived long enough to get cancer. The film traces the history of cancer as a medical issue back to the ancient Egyptians — it showed a papyrus manuscript in hieroglyphics that lists various human afflictions and their appropriate treatments, and it includes a clinically accurate description of cancer and under “treatment” the heartbreaking words, “There is none.” It’s also an interesting story in that it showcases not only the way overall fashions in the medical industry in general shape the treatments for a particular disease. In the 19th century the inventions of antisepsis and anesthesia expanded the repertoire of surgical operations possible, and as a result surgery became the cutting edge of medical treatment and just about anything was thought to be curable by some sort of operation or other (even mental illness; a friend of Sigmund Freud named Dr. Wilhelm Fliess was convinced that mental illness was caused by an abnormally shaped nose, and so he performed plastic surgery on mentally ill patients hoping that by adjusting the shapes of their noses, he could bring them back to sanity). At the end of the 19th century, when radioactivity was discovered, it was considered a cure-all and elaborate machines to beam X-rays and other nuclear beams into cancer patients were devised, hoping this would cure their cancers. Later, in the 20th century, the emphasis in medical practice shifted to prescription drugs, and so starting in the 1940’s cancer researchers and oncologists started looking at chemicals that would poison cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone.
The other point this film makes especially eloquently is that cancer is maddening precisely because it’s a disease of such contradictions: it originates not from outside the body but inside it, when a group of ordinary cells somehow goes haywire and reproduces with maddening speed, causing illness, pain and death; and all too many of the treatments for cancer, including both radiation and chemo, can themselves cause cancer. The film gives surprisingly short shrift to environmental causes of cancer — they’re not mentioned at all in episode one, “Magic Bullets” (named after Dr. Paul Ehrlich and his famous statement that the key to curing disease lay in developing drugs whose molecules would act as “magic bullets” against the agents causing disease), and they’re brought up in episode two, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” mainly as one of the three potential causes of cancer (along with viruses and genes) which oncologists were arguing about in the mid-20th century, literally in opposite camps — one cancer researcher recalls that in the 1960’s at cancer conventions the environmentalists, the virologists and the geneticists would be in separate rooms and would never talk to each other. I’ve long believed that cancer would turn out to be one of those “all of the above” chronic diseases Western medicine, with its foci on the ideas that every illness has one and only one cause; that disease comes in from outside the body rather than within it; and the appropriate way to treat it is therefore to wipe out the outside agent either by poisoning it with drugs, burning it out with radiation or cutting it out with surgery, is singularly ill-equipped to deal with. (I feel the same way about AIDS, despite the AIDS mainstream’s “success” in following what is essentially Pat Paulson’s strategy for ending the Viet Nam War: declare victory and get out. From the moment I first heard about AIDS and started learning about it, I was convinced the various diseases lumped together under the “AIDS” label had more than one cause and that real treatment would have to be tailored to each individual and what was making them, personally, sick. Now, given regimens of drugs that are either more effective or simply less toxic than the original ones from the 1980’s and 1990’s, the pharmaceutical industry and the AIDS establishment have proclaimed AIDS — or rather, “HIV disease,” as they self-referentially call it — a “chronic, manageable illness” that can never be outright “cured” but can be “managed” with regular doses of toxic and frightfully expensive drugs. Of course, since they now “diagnose” “HIV disease” just as a positive result on an antibody test for the presumed virus, a lot of people on these drug regimens aren’t actually sick at all, so of course they live longer than patients in the late 1980’s who weren’t given drugs until they were actually ill.)
Perhaps the most interesting part of the “Magic Bullets” episode was the account of how cancer activists pioneered the whole idea of marketing a disease — though they had an example before cancer became a major national concern, a road map laid out by Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues in the March of Dimes against polio (obviously a personal issue for Eleanor Roosevelt since her husband had it!). The American Cancer Society was organized largely by a philanthropist named Mary Lasker, and her portrayal here drips with irony — her husband, Albert Lasker, was 18 years her senior and had made his money as an advertising executive masterminding, among other things, the successful ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes; he later died of cancer, and Mary Lasker is shown here being interviewed on the Person to Person TV show by Edward R. Murrow, cigarette in hand — Murrow contracted smoking-related lung cancer and died in 1965. Lasker and the doctors she consulted with realized they needed to put a human face on the disease to open the wallets of America, and so they identified a patient with childhood leukemia and changed his awkward immigrant name, Einar Gustafsson, to “Jimmy,” featuring him prominently in their promo films and even naming the cancer research and treatment hospital they built in Boston “The Jimmy Fund Clinic.” (The Jimmy Fund Clinic building still exists and “Jimmy” himself lived to be 65, a rare success story in the early days of cancer treatment.) The second episode, “The Blind Men and the Elephant” — a reference to the famous poem by 19th century British writer John Godfrey Saxe about the blind men who felt different parts of the elephant and thereby came up with very different ideas of what an elephant was like (a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, a rope) when “each was partly in the right/And all were in the wrong” — dealt in part with the dispute over whether cancer’s “true” cause was environmental, viral or genetic. The show portrays the “War on Cancer” launched by President Nixon with a funding bill passed by sweeping bipartisan margins in the U.S. Congress (before our modern days when the two major parties are so riven by ideological splits — though, as Eric Alterman notes in the current Nation, that’s largely because the Republicans have a coherent ideology and the Democrats don’t — it’s virtually impossible to get bipartisan agreement on anything, except maybe military spending), and though the program doesn’t make the point as explicitly as I would have liked, it was basically the viral faction of the cancer establishment that got to spend the money under this bill … and came up with a lot of exciting lab discoveries on how to cause cancer but almost no advances in how to treat it.
By the end of the “War on Cancer” (or at least the initial funding push for it, which dried up in 1986) the focus began to shift to gene-related explanations for cancer, which had a certain “Well, duh!” aspect to it — if you have a disease whose hallmark is the uncontrolled division of cells whose control mechanisms have gone haywire, it’s logical to think that genes, which after all are what give instructions to the cells on how to behave and what to become, including when and how often to divide, would have something to do with it. Ironically, the first two episodes of the program deal with the expectations raised by groups like the American Cancer Society and researchers (whose own papers are frequently far more qualified and uncertain than the versions that get filtered through the mass media and end up in the public consciousness) that the breakthrough which will “cure” cancer (itself a misnomer because “cancer” is a catch-all name for a multitude of different phenomena and it’s almost infinitesimally unlikely that there will ever be a definitive one-size-fits-all “cure” for it — a fact that the scientists interviewed in this film seem sporadically aware of and then appear to forget) is just around the corner, and only give us a few years and a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars more and we’ll end cancer once and for all — when the end of this movie seems to be heading in that very direction, with the rise of gene therapy and immunotherapy as the cutting-edge treatments for cancer and some audible concern that a Republican-led Congress intent on cutting back all non-military spending is going to lead to lower funding for cancer research just when we’re on the one-yard line. (What makes this especially ironic is that one of the show’s principal sponsors is David Koch, who when he isn’t buying PBS sponsorships and thereby insulating himself from criticism on public television — the New York PBS affiliate did a documentary critical of him and he was able to use his membership on the PBS board and his financial influence to have it quashed — he’s giving money to the very political candidates who are defunding domestic spending in general and scientific research funding in particular because they see scientists as a bunch of atheistic crazies propounding dangerous, heretical notions like the theories of evolution and human-caused climate change.)
The big problem with using the human immune system as a front-line defense against cancer, of course — and like many of the scientific complexities, it’s touched on here but not really engaged — is that the whole point of the immune system is to determine “self” (this is part of me, and therefore I will defend it) from “non-self” (this is something from outside of me, and therefore I will hunt it down and kill it), and since cancer cells are by definition “self” (they come from your own body and are like all your other cells except for the mutation that makes them cancerous) an immune-based cancer therapy is only going to work if it can somehow fool the immune system into thinking your cancer tumors are “non-self.” The day before PBS started airing this show, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a laudatory episode about researchers who are deliberately infecting cancer patients with polio virus (genetically modified so it supposedly no longer has the ability to cause polio) in hopes they can get the tumors sufficiently ridden with polio that the immune system will read the polio-infected tumors as “non-self” and kill them. Transplant patients, of course, have the other problem; their bodies’ immune systems read the transplanted organs as “non-self” — as essentially a gigantic infection — and therefore the doctors treating them have to give them drugs that deliberately suppress the immune system; this would not ordinarily seem to be a problem in cancer therapy, but this show depicted one young patient who was given a new immune system grown from his sister’s bone marrow, and despite their genetic similarities his body rejected it big-time and they had to give him massive doses of a drug called interleukin-6 to get his body to stabilize and stop attacking itself.
If there were any people in this show whom I would consider heroes, in episode two it was Dr. Bernard Fisher, who in the 1960’s challenged the medical orthodoxy that the only way to treat breast cancer was with a “radical mastectomy” — removing not only the entire breast but also the lymph nodes and the muscles supporting them — my mom has told me she remembers from her own work as a nurse seeing women who’d had this operation and their arms hung limply on their sides because there were no muscles there to hold them up — and he insisted that for most women a simple “lumpectomy,” removing just the tumor instead of the whole breast, would be sufficient. He got trashed by his colleagues and virtually read out of the cancer establishment (like so many of my other scientific heroes, including nuclear physicist John Gofman, read out of his profession for insisting that nuclear power plants were inherently unsafe; and cancer researcher Peter Duesberg, who was a key figure in the discovery and identification of oncogenes — cancer-causing genes — in the 1970’s until he first questioned whether oncogenes were a significant factor in human cancers and then got definitively anathemized for daring to suggest that the retrovirus HIV was not the cause of AIDS) until his work was discovered by women activists in the nascent second-wave feminist movement in the early 1970’s and they pushed the cancer establishment to reconsider and stop unnecessarily mutilating women in the name of a crack-brained theory about how cancer spread that was being disconfirmed by the facts. In episode three it was Dr. Suzanne Cole, who fascinated me if only because she continued to work the experimental oncology wards while she was visibly pregnant — which fascinated me because there she was, showing off the beginnings of a human life while dealing with people who were very likely at the ends of theirs.
Among the fascinations of Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies were the political pressures brought to bear on researchers, clinicians and especially pharmaceutical companies — the third episode shows footage of demonstrations led by ACT UP, a group formed to agitate for people with AIDS who turned their attention to cancer (especially once the Lesbian community fixated on breast cancer as “their” disease and claimed that Lesbians were at higher risk for it than heterosexual women — which turned out to be true, at least to an extent, though less because there was something inherent in Queer women that made them more vulnerable to breast cancer; rather, it was that medical care for women was focused almost exclusively on their role in reproduction, so women who by nature or choice weren’t engaging in potentially procreative sex didn’t get the kinds of screenings that would have allowed for early detection of breast, cervical or ovarian cancer) and targeted drug companies that were pricing cancer treatments out of the financial reach of most patients. (There’s an interesting aside on this program about just what a financial catastrophe cancer can be, especially in the United States, with our much-vaunted “freedom” from a government that guarantees health care as a human right and pays for it collectively with tax money, while people in developing countries who get cancer often don’t have access to treatments at all.) What’s also interesting about it is that, precisely because the social expectation is that cancer is virtually always fatal, doctors feel entitled to experiment on their patients and give them incredibly toxic and unproven drugs on the ground that if the drugs don’t work they’re just going to die at about the same time they would have otherwise, while if they do there’s always a chance of establishing for future patients that they work. Though hampered by the “official” auspices under which it was produced — as Celia Farber noted, journalists reporting on science tend to be far more deferential to their sources than ones writing about other things, mainly because science journalists seem all too aware that the people they’re writing about are Big Experts in the field and they themselves know comparatively little about it — Cancer nonetheless raises interesting questions about how we know what we think we know about health and disease, and whether a multifactorial phenomenon like cancer will ever yield to the mainstream allopathic paradigm of one disease, one cure, one treatment.
The last three nights I’ve been following an interesting if sometimes frustrating mini-series on PBS called Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, produced under the auspices of Ken Burns and his production company, Florentine Films, even though Burns actually had nothing to do with making it. The people who did were veteran movie producer Laura Ziskin, who acquired the film rights to a book by cancer researcher and clinician Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee called The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer; and Barak Goodman, who actually wrote and directed the resulting film. A movie about cancer — documentary or dramatic — would seem one of the chanciest projects a filmmaker could take on, mainly because the subject virtually invites tear-jerking, and also there are so many vested interests in the “cancer industry,” including pharmaceutical companies (Genentech, one of the leading enterprises working on molecularly elaborate and outrageously expensive cancer drugs, is one of the principal sponsors), dedicated clinics (the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which makes enough money it advertises regularly and extensively on commercial TV, is the other lead sponsor), nonprofits like the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Association and Stand Up to Cancer (all also present on this show’s ultra-extensive sponsor list) and individual clinicians and researchers, it’s hard to imagine a treatment of the subject that won’t step on some people’s toes. Needless to say, this being PBS, the history of cancer presented by Cancer is an exclusively mainstream one — even though the Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s own TV ads stress that they offer “complementary” therapies in addition to the Big Three of mainstream cancer treatment (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy), no hint of any alternative therapies is shown on this program.
The film, narrated by Edward Herrmann (a final credit dedicating the film to people no longer living — presumably after cancer-related deaths — lists both Herrmann and producer Ziskin among the in memoriams), stretches out the history of cancer over six hours and intersperses the historical information with stories of modern-day cancer patients and their families (and as one who’s worked with and for people with disabilities for over 30 years now some of these scenes seemed all too familiar to me, particularly those anxious moments as the family members and significant others wait in the waiting room for the doctors’ pronouncements and then, once the doctors speak, parse out what they had to say and what that means in terms of whether, and how long, the person they care about who’s undergoing this excruciating crisis is going to live), which is pretty much where the tear-jerking comes in. I had a number of observations about the show, of which the first and most obvious is that cancer is our modern age’s version of the Big Scare, taking the social role that plague, smallpox, tuberculosis and polio had for previous generations — indeed, as one doctor on the show mentions in passing, an observation I’ve heard elsewhere as well, it’s because modern medicine has been so good at either eradicating or controlling these ancient horrors that more people have lived long enough to get cancer. The film traces the history of cancer as a medical issue back to the ancient Egyptians — it showed a papyrus manuscript in hieroglyphics that lists various human afflictions and their appropriate treatments, and it includes a clinically accurate description of cancer and under “treatment” the heartbreaking words, “There is none.” It’s also an interesting story in that it showcases not only the way overall fashions in the medical industry in general shape the treatments for a particular disease. In the 19th century the inventions of antisepsis and anesthesia expanded the repertoire of surgical operations possible, and as a result surgery became the cutting edge of medical treatment and just about anything was thought to be curable by some sort of operation or other (even mental illness; a friend of Sigmund Freud named Dr. Wilhelm Fliess was convinced that mental illness was caused by an abnormally shaped nose, and so he performed plastic surgery on mentally ill patients hoping that by adjusting the shapes of their noses, he could bring them back to sanity). At the end of the 19th century, when radioactivity was discovered, it was considered a cure-all and elaborate machines to beam X-rays and other nuclear beams into cancer patients were devised, hoping this would cure their cancers. Later, in the 20th century, the emphasis in medical practice shifted to prescription drugs, and so starting in the 1940’s cancer researchers and oncologists started looking at chemicals that would poison cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone.
The other point this film makes especially eloquently is that cancer is maddening precisely because it’s a disease of such contradictions: it originates not from outside the body but inside it, when a group of ordinary cells somehow goes haywire and reproduces with maddening speed, causing illness, pain and death; and all too many of the treatments for cancer, including both radiation and chemo, can themselves cause cancer. The film gives surprisingly short shrift to environmental causes of cancer — they’re not mentioned at all in episode one, “Magic Bullets” (named after Dr. Paul Ehrlich and his famous statement that the key to curing disease lay in developing drugs whose molecules would act as “magic bullets” against the agents causing disease), and they’re brought up in episode two, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” mainly as one of the three potential causes of cancer (along with viruses and genes) which oncologists were arguing about in the mid-20th century, literally in opposite camps — one cancer researcher recalls that in the 1960’s at cancer conventions the environmentalists, the virologists and the geneticists would be in separate rooms and would never talk to each other. I’ve long believed that cancer would turn out to be one of those “all of the above” chronic diseases Western medicine, with its foci on the ideas that every illness has one and only one cause; that disease comes in from outside the body rather than within it; and the appropriate way to treat it is therefore to wipe out the outside agent either by poisoning it with drugs, burning it out with radiation or cutting it out with surgery, is singularly ill-equipped to deal with. (I feel the same way about AIDS, despite the AIDS mainstream’s “success” in following what is essentially Pat Paulson’s strategy for ending the Viet Nam War: declare victory and get out. From the moment I first heard about AIDS and started learning about it, I was convinced the various diseases lumped together under the “AIDS” label had more than one cause and that real treatment would have to be tailored to each individual and what was making them, personally, sick. Now, given regimens of drugs that are either more effective or simply less toxic than the original ones from the 1980’s and 1990’s, the pharmaceutical industry and the AIDS establishment have proclaimed AIDS — or rather, “HIV disease,” as they self-referentially call it — a “chronic, manageable illness” that can never be outright “cured” but can be “managed” with regular doses of toxic and frightfully expensive drugs. Of course, since they now “diagnose” “HIV disease” just as a positive result on an antibody test for the presumed virus, a lot of people on these drug regimens aren’t actually sick at all, so of course they live longer than patients in the late 1980’s who weren’t given drugs until they were actually ill.)
Perhaps the most interesting part of the “Magic Bullets” episode was the account of how cancer activists pioneered the whole idea of marketing a disease — though they had an example before cancer became a major national concern, a road map laid out by Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues in the March of Dimes against polio (obviously a personal issue for Eleanor Roosevelt since her husband had it!). The American Cancer Society was organized largely by a philanthropist named Mary Lasker, and her portrayal here drips with irony — her husband, Albert Lasker, was 18 years her senior and had made his money as an advertising executive masterminding, among other things, the successful ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes; he later died of cancer, and Mary Lasker is shown here being interviewed on the Person to Person TV show by Edward R. Murrow, cigarette in hand — Murrow contracted smoking-related lung cancer and died in 1965. Lasker and the doctors she consulted with realized they needed to put a human face on the disease to open the wallets of America, and so they identified a patient with childhood leukemia and changed his awkward immigrant name, Einar Gustafsson, to “Jimmy,” featuring him prominently in their promo films and even naming the cancer research and treatment hospital they built in Boston “The Jimmy Fund Clinic.” (The Jimmy Fund Clinic building still exists and “Jimmy” himself lived to be 65, a rare success story in the early days of cancer treatment.) The second episode, “The Blind Men and the Elephant” — a reference to the famous poem by 19th century British writer John Godfrey Saxe about the blind men who felt different parts of the elephant and thereby came up with very different ideas of what an elephant was like (a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, a rope) when “each was partly in the right/And all were in the wrong” — dealt in part with the dispute over whether cancer’s “true” cause was environmental, viral or genetic. The show portrays the “War on Cancer” launched by President Nixon with a funding bill passed by sweeping bipartisan margins in the U.S. Congress (before our modern days when the two major parties are so riven by ideological splits — though, as Eric Alterman notes in the current Nation, that’s largely because the Republicans have a coherent ideology and the Democrats don’t — it’s virtually impossible to get bipartisan agreement on anything, except maybe military spending), and though the program doesn’t make the point as explicitly as I would have liked, it was basically the viral faction of the cancer establishment that got to spend the money under this bill … and came up with a lot of exciting lab discoveries on how to cause cancer but almost no advances in how to treat it.
By the end of the “War on Cancer” (or at least the initial funding push for it, which dried up in 1986) the focus began to shift to gene-related explanations for cancer, which had a certain “Well, duh!” aspect to it — if you have a disease whose hallmark is the uncontrolled division of cells whose control mechanisms have gone haywire, it’s logical to think that genes, which after all are what give instructions to the cells on how to behave and what to become, including when and how often to divide, would have something to do with it. Ironically, the first two episodes of the program deal with the expectations raised by groups like the American Cancer Society and researchers (whose own papers are frequently far more qualified and uncertain than the versions that get filtered through the mass media and end up in the public consciousness) that the breakthrough which will “cure” cancer (itself a misnomer because “cancer” is a catch-all name for a multitude of different phenomena and it’s almost infinitesimally unlikely that there will ever be a definitive one-size-fits-all “cure” for it — a fact that the scientists interviewed in this film seem sporadically aware of and then appear to forget) is just around the corner, and only give us a few years and a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars more and we’ll end cancer once and for all — when the end of this movie seems to be heading in that very direction, with the rise of gene therapy and immunotherapy as the cutting-edge treatments for cancer and some audible concern that a Republican-led Congress intent on cutting back all non-military spending is going to lead to lower funding for cancer research just when we’re on the one-yard line. (What makes this especially ironic is that one of the show’s principal sponsors is David Koch, who when he isn’t buying PBS sponsorships and thereby insulating himself from criticism on public television — the New York PBS affiliate did a documentary critical of him and he was able to use his membership on the PBS board and his financial influence to have it quashed — he’s giving money to the very political candidates who are defunding domestic spending in general and scientific research funding in particular because they see scientists as a bunch of atheistic crazies propounding dangerous, heretical notions like the theories of evolution and human-caused climate change.)
The big problem with using the human immune system as a front-line defense against cancer, of course — and like many of the scientific complexities, it’s touched on here but not really engaged — is that the whole point of the immune system is to determine “self” (this is part of me, and therefore I will defend it) from “non-self” (this is something from outside of me, and therefore I will hunt it down and kill it), and since cancer cells are by definition “self” (they come from your own body and are like all your other cells except for the mutation that makes them cancerous) an immune-based cancer therapy is only going to work if it can somehow fool the immune system into thinking your cancer tumors are “non-self.” The day before PBS started airing this show, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a laudatory episode about researchers who are deliberately infecting cancer patients with polio virus (genetically modified so it supposedly no longer has the ability to cause polio) in hopes they can get the tumors sufficiently ridden with polio that the immune system will read the polio-infected tumors as “non-self” and kill them. Transplant patients, of course, have the other problem; their bodies’ immune systems read the transplanted organs as “non-self” — as essentially a gigantic infection — and therefore the doctors treating them have to give them drugs that deliberately suppress the immune system; this would not ordinarily seem to be a problem in cancer therapy, but this show depicted one young patient who was given a new immune system grown from his sister’s bone marrow, and despite their genetic similarities his body rejected it big-time and they had to give him massive doses of a drug called interleukin-6 to get his body to stabilize and stop attacking itself.
If there were any people in this show whom I would consider heroes, in episode two it was Dr. Bernard Fisher, who in the 1960’s challenged the medical orthodoxy that the only way to treat breast cancer was with a “radical mastectomy” — removing not only the entire breast but also the lymph nodes and the muscles supporting them — my mom has told me she remembers from her own work as a nurse seeing women who’d had this operation and their arms hung limply on their sides because there were no muscles there to hold them up — and he insisted that for most women a simple “lumpectomy,” removing just the tumor instead of the whole breast, would be sufficient. He got trashed by his colleagues and virtually read out of the cancer establishment (like so many of my other scientific heroes, including nuclear physicist John Gofman, read out of his profession for insisting that nuclear power plants were inherently unsafe; and cancer researcher Peter Duesberg, who was a key figure in the discovery and identification of oncogenes — cancer-causing genes — in the 1970’s until he first questioned whether oncogenes were a significant factor in human cancers and then got definitively anathemized for daring to suggest that the retrovirus HIV was not the cause of AIDS) until his work was discovered by women activists in the nascent second-wave feminist movement in the early 1970’s and they pushed the cancer establishment to reconsider and stop unnecessarily mutilating women in the name of a crack-brained theory about how cancer spread that was being disconfirmed by the facts. In episode three it was Dr. Suzanne Cole, who fascinated me if only because she continued to work the experimental oncology wards while she was visibly pregnant — which fascinated me because there she was, showing off the beginnings of a human life while dealing with people who were very likely at the ends of theirs.
Among the fascinations of Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies were the political pressures brought to bear on researchers, clinicians and especially pharmaceutical companies — the third episode shows footage of demonstrations led by ACT UP, a group formed to agitate for people with AIDS who turned their attention to cancer (especially once the Lesbian community fixated on breast cancer as “their” disease and claimed that Lesbians were at higher risk for it than heterosexual women — which turned out to be true, at least to an extent, though less because there was something inherent in Queer women that made them more vulnerable to breast cancer; rather, it was that medical care for women was focused almost exclusively on their role in reproduction, so women who by nature or choice weren’t engaging in potentially procreative sex didn’t get the kinds of screenings that would have allowed for early detection of breast, cervical or ovarian cancer) and targeted drug companies that were pricing cancer treatments out of the financial reach of most patients. (There’s an interesting aside on this program about just what a financial catastrophe cancer can be, especially in the United States, with our much-vaunted “freedom” from a government that guarantees health care as a human right and pays for it collectively with tax money, while people in developing countries who get cancer often don’t have access to treatments at all.) What’s also interesting about it is that, precisely because the social expectation is that cancer is virtually always fatal, doctors feel entitled to experiment on their patients and give them incredibly toxic and unproven drugs on the ground that if the drugs don’t work they’re just going to die at about the same time they would have otherwise, while if they do there’s always a chance of establishing for future patients that they work. Though hampered by the “official” auspices under which it was produced — as Celia Farber noted, journalists reporting on science tend to be far more deferential to their sources than ones writing about other things, mainly because science journalists seem all too aware that the people they’re writing about are Big Experts in the field and they themselves know comparatively little about it — Cancer nonetheless raises interesting questions about how we know what we think we know about health and disease, and whether a multifactorial phenomenon like cancer will ever yield to the mainstream allopathic paradigm of one disease, one cure, one treatment.
Monday, March 30, 2015
The Red Danube (MGM, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran a rather odd movie two nights ago: The Red Danube, produced by MGM in 1949 and set mostly in Vienna during the Allied occupation after World War II, when Austria — like Germany — was divided into four zones, each run by one of the great powers that had ended up on the winning side in the war: the U.S., Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The premise of the film, based on a novel called Vespers in Vienna by Bruce Marshall and adapted by Gina Kaus, Arthur Wimperis and an uncredited Carey Wilson, centers around the agreement between the occupying powers that any one of their citizens in another power’s occupying zone would be returned to their own zone on request — or rather, demand, since the intrigue of the film centers around Russian Col. Piniev (Louis Calhern, essentially playing seriously the sinister foreign leader he spoofed so memorably in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup) attempting to grab every Soviet citizen he can identify from the British zone and the growing awareness of the British commander, Col. Michael S. “Hooky” Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon, top-billed), that if he yields to these demands he’s essentially sentencing everyone he “repatriates” to a slave-labor camp or a one-way ticket to the gulag in Siberia. The film actually begins in Rome, where we’re quickly introduced to Nicobar (the risibility of the names Bruce Marshall gave these characters really gets tiresome after a while) and his two key staff members, ladies’ man Major John “Twinko” McPhimister (Peter Lawford at the height of his boyish good looks and charm) and secretary Audrey Quail (Angela Lansbury, wasted at MGM as she usually was after her early roles in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray), and some grim bits of humor as all the Italians they meet try to convince them that they were really believers in democracy and secretly hated Mussolini all the time he was in power. Among them is an Italian countess (played by Audrey Young, later Mrs. Billy Wilder) who’s Twinko’s latest squeeze. The trio get transferred to Vienna (to a brief snatch of the inevitable “The Blue Danube” on the soundtrack — earlier in Rome we’d heard a not-bad jazz version of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in the background as Twinko romances his countess) and it’s not until 40 minutes into this 119-minute movie that anything like a plot emerges. Nicobar, much to his dismay, finds that the only billet available for himself and his staff to stay is a convent, run by a mother superior named Auxilia (Ethel Barrymore, who more than usual looks like one of her brothers in drag), and they get to do a lot of boring arguing not only about the war but also about God, whom Nicobar hasn’t believe in since World War I cost him not only his left arm (though undoubtedly Pidgeon’s real left arm was merely pinned behind him under his jacket, he’s reasonably convincing as an amputee — even though I couldn’t help but joke, “So that’s why he wanted to go to Altair-4! He thought the Krell technology would help him grow a new arm!”) but also the life of his son, an airman who was shot down over Germany just one day after he had written his dad saying that the experiences of the war had led him and the other members of his unit to convert to Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular.
What’s amazing is that, except for one scene in which Nicobar takes delivery of a group of old, sick, decrepit refugees on a train — they’re Soviet citizens but the Soviets have sent them back and dumped them on the British because they’re too weak to be useful as slave laborers — there isn’t any real attempt to dramatize why so many people who are technically Soviet nationals would so desperately want not to go back there. We’re told that a lot of the people involved are ethnic Germans, part of a pre-war enclave of Germans in Russia but technically citizens of the Soviet Union since they were born on Russian soil, and early on in the movie one of them, Professor Serge Bruloff (Konstantin Shayne), shoots himself rather than go back after extracting a promise from Nicobar to protect Bruloff’s wife, Helena Nagard (played by Konstantin Shayne’s real-life wife Tamara, who played Al Jolson’s mother in The Jolson Story) from deportation — though in the event Helena is deported, then returned on that train from hell. Apparently the filmmakers, including director George Sidney (who got quite a lot of plum assignments from the influence of his father, MGM executive L. K. Sidney, and usually was an uninteresting hack filmmaker but here, with Charlie Rosher as his cinematographer, actually gets in a few semi-noir compositions, with dark shadows and oblique angles, though the script was just too banal to allow for any moral complexities to go along with the visual fireworks), had been looking at Josef von Sternberg for inspiration, since there are similar (but much more moving) sequences in his films The Last Command and Shanghai Express. The main intrigue has to do with Maria Buhlen (Janet Leigh, before she learned how to act), a dancer in the chorus of the Vienna State Opera — their theatre had been bombed by the Allies in 1945 and at the time this movie was made still hadn’t been rebuilt (it wouldn’t reopen until 1955), but the opera itself was staging performances in whatever makeshift venues they could find — who turns out really to be former Moscow Ballet star Olga Alexandrova, hiding out in the chorus because she knows that if she’s ever returned to the Soviet Union she’ll be put on trial for “subversive activities” (a phrase that sits oddly on the lips of Russians when we’re used to hearing it from McCarthyite Americans in the same era!) and given some sort of Fate Worse than Death.
Twinko falls genuinely in love with Maria, a.k.a. Olga, and the combination of the power of their love and the dedication of Mother Auxilia to protecting her and the others who have come to the convent for sanctuary leads Nicobar first to lobby the United Nations to demand a change in the policy requiring the wartime allies to repatriate each other’s nationals, then to defy a direct order from his superior (identified in the character list only as “The General” and played by Batman’s butler, Alan Napier), demanding the immediate repatriation of Maria and ordering him to turn her over to Russian Col. Piniev. Nicobar’s resistance is futile, it turns out, because he’s immediately relieved of his command and arrested, and his replacement, Col. Humphrey “Blinker” Omicron (Francis L. Sullivan), turns Maria over to the Russians — only before they can take her she hurls herself out of a convenient window, thereby becoming the second person we’ve seen to commit suicide rather than go back to the U.S. The Red Danube is one of those frustrating bad movies with a good movie in it struggling to get to freedom against the Col. Pinievs in the MGM executive office shoe-horning it into the usual formulae; it reflects the influence of then-MGM production head Dore Schary — a New Deal liberal at a time when New Deal liberalism had become decidedly passé, with a penchant for inserting social commentary into films, which wouldn’t have been a problem except he did it so ham-handedly, with characters going on and on and on about their political, social, economic and religious beliefs. (One wag said when Schary was finally fired in 1956 that he had “sold MGM’s birthright for a pot of message.”) It doesn’t help that just after The Red Danube a British film crew went into the real occupied Vienna (The Red Danube’s final credit proclaims it was “Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A.,” though there was quite obviously a lot of second-unit work in Rome and Vienna — including one intriguing side trip on which Nicobar, disgused as a general since he “inadvertently” took one’s coat, takes Mother Auxilia to Rome and we see a nice stock shot of the Pope addressing the multitudes in the courtyard of Vatican City) and made a masterpiece, The Third Man, whose plot was straightforward thriller with no political or religious connotations but which nonetheless did a far better job than The Red Danube of portraying an occupied city as a hotbed of amorality and greed. The Red Danube is that most frustrating sort of bad movie, one that had the seeds of a good movie in it but which fell so far short in the execution it’s little more than a ponderous two-hour bore.
Charles and I ran a rather odd movie two nights ago: The Red Danube, produced by MGM in 1949 and set mostly in Vienna during the Allied occupation after World War II, when Austria — like Germany — was divided into four zones, each run by one of the great powers that had ended up on the winning side in the war: the U.S., Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The premise of the film, based on a novel called Vespers in Vienna by Bruce Marshall and adapted by Gina Kaus, Arthur Wimperis and an uncredited Carey Wilson, centers around the agreement between the occupying powers that any one of their citizens in another power’s occupying zone would be returned to their own zone on request — or rather, demand, since the intrigue of the film centers around Russian Col. Piniev (Louis Calhern, essentially playing seriously the sinister foreign leader he spoofed so memorably in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup) attempting to grab every Soviet citizen he can identify from the British zone and the growing awareness of the British commander, Col. Michael S. “Hooky” Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon, top-billed), that if he yields to these demands he’s essentially sentencing everyone he “repatriates” to a slave-labor camp or a one-way ticket to the gulag in Siberia. The film actually begins in Rome, where we’re quickly introduced to Nicobar (the risibility of the names Bruce Marshall gave these characters really gets tiresome after a while) and his two key staff members, ladies’ man Major John “Twinko” McPhimister (Peter Lawford at the height of his boyish good looks and charm) and secretary Audrey Quail (Angela Lansbury, wasted at MGM as she usually was after her early roles in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray), and some grim bits of humor as all the Italians they meet try to convince them that they were really believers in democracy and secretly hated Mussolini all the time he was in power. Among them is an Italian countess (played by Audrey Young, later Mrs. Billy Wilder) who’s Twinko’s latest squeeze. The trio get transferred to Vienna (to a brief snatch of the inevitable “The Blue Danube” on the soundtrack — earlier in Rome we’d heard a not-bad jazz version of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in the background as Twinko romances his countess) and it’s not until 40 minutes into this 119-minute movie that anything like a plot emerges. Nicobar, much to his dismay, finds that the only billet available for himself and his staff to stay is a convent, run by a mother superior named Auxilia (Ethel Barrymore, who more than usual looks like one of her brothers in drag), and they get to do a lot of boring arguing not only about the war but also about God, whom Nicobar hasn’t believe in since World War I cost him not only his left arm (though undoubtedly Pidgeon’s real left arm was merely pinned behind him under his jacket, he’s reasonably convincing as an amputee — even though I couldn’t help but joke, “So that’s why he wanted to go to Altair-4! He thought the Krell technology would help him grow a new arm!”) but also the life of his son, an airman who was shot down over Germany just one day after he had written his dad saying that the experiences of the war had led him and the other members of his unit to convert to Christianity in general and Roman Catholicism in particular.
What’s amazing is that, except for one scene in which Nicobar takes delivery of a group of old, sick, decrepit refugees on a train — they’re Soviet citizens but the Soviets have sent them back and dumped them on the British because they’re too weak to be useful as slave laborers — there isn’t any real attempt to dramatize why so many people who are technically Soviet nationals would so desperately want not to go back there. We’re told that a lot of the people involved are ethnic Germans, part of a pre-war enclave of Germans in Russia but technically citizens of the Soviet Union since they were born on Russian soil, and early on in the movie one of them, Professor Serge Bruloff (Konstantin Shayne), shoots himself rather than go back after extracting a promise from Nicobar to protect Bruloff’s wife, Helena Nagard (played by Konstantin Shayne’s real-life wife Tamara, who played Al Jolson’s mother in The Jolson Story) from deportation — though in the event Helena is deported, then returned on that train from hell. Apparently the filmmakers, including director George Sidney (who got quite a lot of plum assignments from the influence of his father, MGM executive L. K. Sidney, and usually was an uninteresting hack filmmaker but here, with Charlie Rosher as his cinematographer, actually gets in a few semi-noir compositions, with dark shadows and oblique angles, though the script was just too banal to allow for any moral complexities to go along with the visual fireworks), had been looking at Josef von Sternberg for inspiration, since there are similar (but much more moving) sequences in his films The Last Command and Shanghai Express. The main intrigue has to do with Maria Buhlen (Janet Leigh, before she learned how to act), a dancer in the chorus of the Vienna State Opera — their theatre had been bombed by the Allies in 1945 and at the time this movie was made still hadn’t been rebuilt (it wouldn’t reopen until 1955), but the opera itself was staging performances in whatever makeshift venues they could find — who turns out really to be former Moscow Ballet star Olga Alexandrova, hiding out in the chorus because she knows that if she’s ever returned to the Soviet Union she’ll be put on trial for “subversive activities” (a phrase that sits oddly on the lips of Russians when we’re used to hearing it from McCarthyite Americans in the same era!) and given some sort of Fate Worse than Death.
Twinko falls genuinely in love with Maria, a.k.a. Olga, and the combination of the power of their love and the dedication of Mother Auxilia to protecting her and the others who have come to the convent for sanctuary leads Nicobar first to lobby the United Nations to demand a change in the policy requiring the wartime allies to repatriate each other’s nationals, then to defy a direct order from his superior (identified in the character list only as “The General” and played by Batman’s butler, Alan Napier), demanding the immediate repatriation of Maria and ordering him to turn her over to Russian Col. Piniev. Nicobar’s resistance is futile, it turns out, because he’s immediately relieved of his command and arrested, and his replacement, Col. Humphrey “Blinker” Omicron (Francis L. Sullivan), turns Maria over to the Russians — only before they can take her she hurls herself out of a convenient window, thereby becoming the second person we’ve seen to commit suicide rather than go back to the U.S. The Red Danube is one of those frustrating bad movies with a good movie in it struggling to get to freedom against the Col. Pinievs in the MGM executive office shoe-horning it into the usual formulae; it reflects the influence of then-MGM production head Dore Schary — a New Deal liberal at a time when New Deal liberalism had become decidedly passé, with a penchant for inserting social commentary into films, which wouldn’t have been a problem except he did it so ham-handedly, with characters going on and on and on about their political, social, economic and religious beliefs. (One wag said when Schary was finally fired in 1956 that he had “sold MGM’s birthright for a pot of message.”) It doesn’t help that just after The Red Danube a British film crew went into the real occupied Vienna (The Red Danube’s final credit proclaims it was “Filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A.,” though there was quite obviously a lot of second-unit work in Rome and Vienna — including one intriguing side trip on which Nicobar, disgused as a general since he “inadvertently” took one’s coat, takes Mother Auxilia to Rome and we see a nice stock shot of the Pope addressing the multitudes in the courtyard of Vatican City) and made a masterpiece, The Third Man, whose plot was straightforward thriller with no political or religious connotations but which nonetheless did a far better job than The Red Danube of portraying an occupied city as a hotbed of amorality and greed. The Red Danube is that most frustrating sort of bad movie, one that had the seeds of a good movie in it but which fell so far short in the execution it’s little more than a ponderous two-hour bore.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (20th Century-Fox, TSG Entertainment, Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a title legendary in the annals of short-story writing because it was written by James Thurber and was an instant hit when it was first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939. The Wikipedia page on the story summarizes it thusly: “The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a deadly assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. As the story ends, Mitty imagines himself facing a firing squad, ‘inscrutable to the last.’” The story became legendary not only for its basic concept — a milquetoast middle-aged man with a nagging wife and a nothing job fulfills himself in his daydreams, in which he fantasizes himself as a great hero — but also for the onomatopoeic device Thurber used of having various machines in Mitty’s daydreams make the sound “ta-pocketa-pocketa” (or, in one case, “ta-pocketa-pocketa-queep” when the machine is about to break down before Mitty keeps it going by jamming his ballpoint pen into it). The story was a big enough hit to attract the attention of Hollywood — in this case, producer Sam Goldwyn, who bought the film rights and in 1947 turned it into a vehicle for Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff, but Goldwyn and the people he put on the project, director Norman Z. McLeod and writers Ken Englund, Everett Freeman and an uncredited Philip Rapp, made a basic change in the material: in their version Mitty (young and unmarried instead of middle-aged and hitched as in Thurber’s story) meets a “mystery woman” and gets involved in a real-life intrigue as wild and fantastic as anything he’s ever daydreamed about. The 2013 version of Mitty was a co-production between what was left of Goldwyn’s company by then and 20th-Century Fox, along with something called “TSG Entertainment,” after previous attempts to set up a modern remake at Paramount fell through. It starred Ben Stiller, who also directed, and was clearly an attempt on his part to do a quieter, more subtle sort of comedy and transform his image the way Will Ferrell had with the masterpiece Stranger Than Fiction (2006), and while hardly as good as Stranger Than Fiction it’s a nicely entertaining film even though it’s more wryly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny.
Like the 1947 version, the 2013 Mitty makes Walter Mitty an employee of a publishing house (Thurber didn’t specify exactly what Mitty did for a living except it was a white-collar job in an office and was excruciatingly boring), only while in 1947 Mitty worked as a proofreader for a pulp-fiction publisher, in 2013 he worked in the Time & Life building for Life magazine — and in the opening scenes an officious asshole named Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott with a gravity-defying hairdo) announces that Life has just been “acquired” — he doesn’t say by whom — and within a month will be publishing its last print edition, after which it will only be a Web site: “Life online.” Mitty works as a “negative assets manager,” which sounds like an accountant who chronicles how much money the enterprise is losing but turns out to mean “negative” as in photography — he literally keeps track of the negatives of all the photos Life has run or is considering. He’s had a long correspondence relationship with the legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (played by Sean Penn and, I suspect, deliberately given the same first name as the actor), who trusts him with his negatives more than he does anyone else in the enterprise even though the two have never met, and the plot gets underway when Mitty’s department receives a roll of developed but unprinted negatives from O’Connell, wherever he happens to be in the world, only the one O’Connell says is the best of the lot, the “quintessence” of his work (a word Ted Hendricks has never heard before and, when someone tries to explain to him what it means, he hilariously mangles it), number 25, is missing from the negative roll. Without authorization or a travel budget, Mitty sets out across the world to find O’Connell, with the help of the woman at Life with whom he’s in unrequited love, Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), who helps him interpret mysterious clues O’Connell has left on a wrapper of Clementine cake (I’d never heard of it before but it’s apparently Mitty’s favorite sort of cake, regularly baked for him by his mom — played by Shirley MacLaine, of all people) that leads him to Greenland, Iceland (where Mitty and his guide drive through a huge smoke cloud sent up by a volcano in the process of erupting) and the Himalayas (where Mitty finally finds O’Connell taking a photo of the elusive snow leopard — or, rather, not taking it, since like a true Sean Penn character O’Connell decides not to spoil the moment by photographing it). O’Connell has also sent Mitty a wallet embossed with the motto Henry Luce wrote for Life magazine when he founded it in 1936: “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.” We get about an hour before anyone in the film does that O’Connell has concealed negative #25 in the wallet, but Mitty carries the damned thing around with him for half the world (including dunking it in the Pacific Ocean when he leaps from a helicopter into the water so he can be picked up by a ship O’Connell may be on … but isn’t) and then casually throws it away in his mom’s trash can — though mom saves the day by retrieving it from the trash (Mater ex machina) and the photo turns out to be one of Mitty himself.
Also in the cast is Tim Naughton (Jon Daly), who works the tech support line at the e-Harmony dating service where Mitty has posted a profile and paid the $500 fee but hasn’t been able to attract any “winks” — e-Harmony’s version of a “like” on Facebook, I guess (I haven’t had to use it and fortunately one of the nice things about Charles and I having been together as long as we have — nearly 20 years — is that neither of us have had to deal with the perils and frustrations of Internet dating) — while his own computer or e-Harmony’s software or whatever have blocked him from posting a “wink” on Cheryl’s. Tim and Mitty talk by phone all across the world, including all those remote places Mitty goes to search for O’Connell, yet Mitty’s cell phone continues to work for weeks on end even though he’s in locations without electrical power and therefore has no way to recharge it. (Mitty is fired from his job midway through the movie and he wasn’t making much to begin with, and writer Conrad never bothers to tell us how he finances his trip[1] any more than he bothers to tell us how Mitty keeps his phone charged — indeed, these plot holes were so blatant and annoying I was waiting for a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style payoff in which the entire movie would turn out to be just another one of Mitty’s daydreams.) Though I had some disaffections with it, all in all I liked The Secret Life of Walter Mitty — though it didn’t do justice to the original Thurber tale any more than the 1947 version had (but then I don’t think a mere movie could do justice to the story — the individual incidents Thurber described are all filmable but the totality of what he was writing about would fall apart if his story were filmed come scritto), on its own it was a lovely film, quietly and unobtrusively funny (a surprise from a film talent as notorious for pushing the bad-taste envelope as Ben Stiller), with a fascinating “take” on corporate America and an unexpected (maybe not that unexpected, given the anti-globalization satire Stiller and his collaborators worked into Zoolander) social comment about how people’s jobs are determined by machinations among giant corporations thousands of miles away and therefore just because you’re doing your job satisfactorily, or even superlatively, well today doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll still have it tomorrow. And for all Stiller’s reputation as a zany, envelope-pushing comedian, he’s quite restrained (and therefore, at least to me, more funny) here than usual, and both he and Kristen Wiig are more appropriate casting than Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo were 66 years earlier!
The film was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a title legendary in the annals of short-story writing because it was written by James Thurber and was an instant hit when it was first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939. The Wikipedia page on the story summarizes it thusly: “The short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut, with his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife's visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a deadly assassin testifying in a courtroom, and then as a Royal Air Force pilot volunteering for a daring, secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. As the story ends, Mitty imagines himself facing a firing squad, ‘inscrutable to the last.’” The story became legendary not only for its basic concept — a milquetoast middle-aged man with a nagging wife and a nothing job fulfills himself in his daydreams, in which he fantasizes himself as a great hero — but also for the onomatopoeic device Thurber used of having various machines in Mitty’s daydreams make the sound “ta-pocketa-pocketa” (or, in one case, “ta-pocketa-pocketa-queep” when the machine is about to break down before Mitty keeps it going by jamming his ballpoint pen into it). The story was a big enough hit to attract the attention of Hollywood — in this case, producer Sam Goldwyn, who bought the film rights and in 1947 turned it into a vehicle for Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff, but Goldwyn and the people he put on the project, director Norman Z. McLeod and writers Ken Englund, Everett Freeman and an uncredited Philip Rapp, made a basic change in the material: in their version Mitty (young and unmarried instead of middle-aged and hitched as in Thurber’s story) meets a “mystery woman” and gets involved in a real-life intrigue as wild and fantastic as anything he’s ever daydreamed about. The 2013 version of Mitty was a co-production between what was left of Goldwyn’s company by then and 20th-Century Fox, along with something called “TSG Entertainment,” after previous attempts to set up a modern remake at Paramount fell through. It starred Ben Stiller, who also directed, and was clearly an attempt on his part to do a quieter, more subtle sort of comedy and transform his image the way Will Ferrell had with the masterpiece Stranger Than Fiction (2006), and while hardly as good as Stranger Than Fiction it’s a nicely entertaining film even though it’s more wryly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny.
Like the 1947 version, the 2013 Mitty makes Walter Mitty an employee of a publishing house (Thurber didn’t specify exactly what Mitty did for a living except it was a white-collar job in an office and was excruciatingly boring), only while in 1947 Mitty worked as a proofreader for a pulp-fiction publisher, in 2013 he worked in the Time & Life building for Life magazine — and in the opening scenes an officious asshole named Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott with a gravity-defying hairdo) announces that Life has just been “acquired” — he doesn’t say by whom — and within a month will be publishing its last print edition, after which it will only be a Web site: “Life online.” Mitty works as a “negative assets manager,” which sounds like an accountant who chronicles how much money the enterprise is losing but turns out to mean “negative” as in photography — he literally keeps track of the negatives of all the photos Life has run or is considering. He’s had a long correspondence relationship with the legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (played by Sean Penn and, I suspect, deliberately given the same first name as the actor), who trusts him with his negatives more than he does anyone else in the enterprise even though the two have never met, and the plot gets underway when Mitty’s department receives a roll of developed but unprinted negatives from O’Connell, wherever he happens to be in the world, only the one O’Connell says is the best of the lot, the “quintessence” of his work (a word Ted Hendricks has never heard before and, when someone tries to explain to him what it means, he hilariously mangles it), number 25, is missing from the negative roll. Without authorization or a travel budget, Mitty sets out across the world to find O’Connell, with the help of the woman at Life with whom he’s in unrequited love, Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), who helps him interpret mysterious clues O’Connell has left on a wrapper of Clementine cake (I’d never heard of it before but it’s apparently Mitty’s favorite sort of cake, regularly baked for him by his mom — played by Shirley MacLaine, of all people) that leads him to Greenland, Iceland (where Mitty and his guide drive through a huge smoke cloud sent up by a volcano in the process of erupting) and the Himalayas (where Mitty finally finds O’Connell taking a photo of the elusive snow leopard — or, rather, not taking it, since like a true Sean Penn character O’Connell decides not to spoil the moment by photographing it). O’Connell has also sent Mitty a wallet embossed with the motto Henry Luce wrote for Life magazine when he founded it in 1936: “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.” We get about an hour before anyone in the film does that O’Connell has concealed negative #25 in the wallet, but Mitty carries the damned thing around with him for half the world (including dunking it in the Pacific Ocean when he leaps from a helicopter into the water so he can be picked up by a ship O’Connell may be on … but isn’t) and then casually throws it away in his mom’s trash can — though mom saves the day by retrieving it from the trash (Mater ex machina) and the photo turns out to be one of Mitty himself.
Also in the cast is Tim Naughton (Jon Daly), who works the tech support line at the e-Harmony dating service where Mitty has posted a profile and paid the $500 fee but hasn’t been able to attract any “winks” — e-Harmony’s version of a “like” on Facebook, I guess (I haven’t had to use it and fortunately one of the nice things about Charles and I having been together as long as we have — nearly 20 years — is that neither of us have had to deal with the perils and frustrations of Internet dating) — while his own computer or e-Harmony’s software or whatever have blocked him from posting a “wink” on Cheryl’s. Tim and Mitty talk by phone all across the world, including all those remote places Mitty goes to search for O’Connell, yet Mitty’s cell phone continues to work for weeks on end even though he’s in locations without electrical power and therefore has no way to recharge it. (Mitty is fired from his job midway through the movie and he wasn’t making much to begin with, and writer Conrad never bothers to tell us how he finances his trip[1] any more than he bothers to tell us how Mitty keeps his phone charged — indeed, these plot holes were so blatant and annoying I was waiting for a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style payoff in which the entire movie would turn out to be just another one of Mitty’s daydreams.) Though I had some disaffections with it, all in all I liked The Secret Life of Walter Mitty — though it didn’t do justice to the original Thurber tale any more than the 1947 version had (but then I don’t think a mere movie could do justice to the story — the individual incidents Thurber described are all filmable but the totality of what he was writing about would fall apart if his story were filmed come scritto), on its own it was a lovely film, quietly and unobtrusively funny (a surprise from a film talent as notorious for pushing the bad-taste envelope as Ben Stiller), with a fascinating “take” on corporate America and an unexpected (maybe not that unexpected, given the anti-globalization satire Stiller and his collaborators worked into Zoolander) social comment about how people’s jobs are determined by machinations among giant corporations thousands of miles away and therefore just because you’re doing your job satisfactorily, or even superlatively, well today doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll still have it tomorrow. And for all Stiller’s reputation as a zany, envelope-pushing comedian, he’s quite restrained (and therefore, at least to me, more funny) here than usual, and both he and Kristen Wiig are more appropriate casting than Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo were 66 years earlier!
[1] — Actually, Charles reminded me that we’re shown shots
of Mitty’s bankbook which indicates he has at least $3,000 saved up even after his trip to Greenland, so I guess we’re supposed to
believe he was financing his trip with his savings. He also pointed out that
Mitty’s mom described him as the “worker bee” and his sister Odessa (Kathryn
Hahn), who’s pursuing a career as an actress, her “performance-art bee.”
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