by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched I’ll Cry Tomorrow two nights ago as TCM was airing it as part of their current “Star of
the Month” tribute to Susan Hayward — alas, it had a couple of long stretches
during which the picture froze and the sound cut out, and these lengthened the
showing so much that they cut off the film’s ending abruptly (they ran out of
the pre-programmed length of time they had allotted to it) and so I didn’t get
to see the final scene in which Ralph Edwards (playing himself) introduces
Lillian Roth on This Is Your Life
to tell her life story, including the battle with alcoholism that was the
subject of Roth’s memoir I’ll Cry Tomorrow, on which the film was based, and which made it an echt Susan Hayward role. Hayward had been playing women
with too great a love for the bottle ever since her emergence from the pack of
Hollywood starlets in the late 1930’s — and her star-making role from 1947 was
called Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, in which Hayward’s character “smashed up” into alcoholism to deal with
the strain of being married to a compulsive gambler (another addiction). I’m
not sure I’d ever seen I’ll Cry Tomorrow from start to (almost) finish before, but I’d seen a great deal of it
— mostly from the second half, in which real-life singer Lillian Roth (who
appeared in a number of movies in the early sound days, most notably the Marx
Brothers’ second film, Animal Crackers, of which Marx Brothers biographer Joe Adamson wrote, “The more she
mangles her lines, the more we wonder what possessed the Great Playwright
George S. Kaufman to write them”) descends into alcoholism following the death
of her childhood sweetheart David Tredman (Ray Danton) just as she was about to
marry him, and the relentless pressure from her mom Katie (Jo Van Fleet, who in
real life was just three years older than Susan Hayward but who just then was
making a specialty of playing psycho mothers, including James Dean’s in East
of Eden). Katie Roth, a “stage mother” of
such relentless severity she makes Mama Rose in Gypsy seem like Mother Teresa by comparison, drives Lillian
into vaudeville at age eight, and when she catches Lillian crying before she’s
scheduled to go on stage, tells her, “You can cry tomorrow” — hence the title
of both the movie and the book on which it’s based. The screenplay by Helen
Deutsch (who here at least partially redeems herself for the sin of rewriting
Sam Fuller’s script for Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof and taking out most of the weird and kinky elements
of the plot that had made Sirk want to do it) and Jay Richard Kennedy, based on
the memoir Roth wrote in collaboration with Mike Connolly and Gerold Frank
(Frank would later write a big biography of Judy Garland, with whose career
Hayward’s would intersect when Garland bombed out of her last attempt to make a
movie, Valley of the Dolls, and
Hayward replaced her), goes for the tear ducts a lot of the time but is
legitimately tough — and so is the direction by Daniel Mann, who replaced
Charles Walters at Hayward’s insistence after Walters dropped out of the
project when the studio gave the lead to Hayward instead of Walters’ choice,
June Allyson. (Charles Walters, you had to have been kidding.)
Though she’d been dubbed in her previous
biopic, With a Song in My Heart
(20th Century-Fox, 1952), by the singer she was playing, Jane
Froman, for I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Hayward insisted on doing the vocals herself — which upset Lillian Roth, who
hoped the combination of another person playing her and her singing on the
soundtrack would propel her to a comeback the way it had for Al Jolson after The
Jolson Story and Jane Froman after With
a Song in My Heart. Interestingly, Hayward
had a less “good” voice than Froman but a considerably ballsier one; like Doris
Day in another MGM entertainer’s biopic being filmed around the same time, Love
Me or Leave Me (featuring the finest
performance of Day’s career as 1920’s singing star Ruth Etting), Hayward attacked the songs with venom, revealing Lillian Roth’s
self-hatred under the thin guise of happiness and devil-may-care good times.
Compare the pseudo-gospel song “Sing, You Sinners” here to the pseudo-gospel
song “Get Happy” in With a Song in My Heart and you’ll hear the difference between a
strong-voiced professional singer like Froman and an actress determined to inhabit the role — Hayward’s own singing is edgier and far
more emotionally moving. The whole movie is a tour de force for her even though it’s such a serial-like sequence
of damsel-in-distress scenes they might as well have called the movie The
Liabilities of Lillian: after surviving a
career in vaudeville as a child, making it in show business as an adult, losing
that rather twerpy boyfriend early on to a surprisingly fast-acting disease,
she becomes an enormous star in both Broadway and Hollywood. Only when she’s 18
her nurse Ellen (Virginia Grey in a part briefly intended for Hayward’s With
a Song in My Heart co-star, Thelma Ritter,
who would have been superficially “better” but less believable doing something
that socially irresponsible) says she can calm herself and get over the shock
of David’s death if she starts drinking. From there her alcohol habit snowballs
as much as her showbiz career, until as the toast of New York in the early
1930’s she’s living in a space that appears to be a giant bar with a living
room attached. She also gets impulsively married to a sailor named Wallie (Don
Taylor), a man she doesn’t love but got hitched to in a drunken stupor, and
when she finally throws him out she hooks up with an even nastier piece of
work: Tony Bardeman (Richard Conte), for a relationship built on mutual
alcoholism and co-dependency — he says he can stop any time he wants to and he
has a “little policeman” inside him telling him when he’s had enough, but of
course that’s just more alcoholic-rationalization B.S.
Two years after her
final Broadway show (in which she sang superbly but needed a chair on stage to
lean against so she didn’t fall over drunk during her number) she’s living in
L.A. with her mother in a cheap flat, stealing her mom’s purse and pawning her
fur coat to buy booze, and she reaches the obligatory “bottom” until she stumbles
into Alcoholics Anonymous — which I believe was depicted her on film for the
first time. AA and 12-step programs in general have become so numbingly
familiar that sometimes when a major celebrity enters rehab, Hollywood
observers often say, “Good career move,” but in those days it took real courage
for someone of Lillian Roth’s former stature (she’d made films with Cecil B.
DeMille and the Marx Brothers) to
come right out and say in print (albeit heavily ghost-written print), “My name
is Lillian and I’m an alcoholic.” The film is a tour de force for Susan Hayward, who’s in virtually every scene
once she enters, and who got a deserved Academy Award nomination for a part
that shows her off to perfection; she’s absolutely in command of the many moods
of her character, from self-hating victim to high-living star to skid-row
flotsam to her redemption at the hands of AA in general and her sponsor, Burt
McGuire (Eddie Albert), in particular. The real-life ending may not have been
as happily-ever-after as the movie, at least according to an imdb.com “Trivia”
poster, who claims that according to Arthur Laurents McGuire left Roth about
five years after the movie was made to be Gay and move in with a male partner
(and quite frankly one can see that coming from Eddie Albert’s rather queeny
portrayal of him!). It’s one of the most remarkable movies of its type ever
made, far outstripping both With a Song in My Heart and the Neely O’Hara character arc from Valley
of the Dolls — of which I wrote in these
pages that I couldn’t help but think Susan Hayward must have had a sense of dèja
vu about: “You think this piece of shit is great? I did a much better movie on this premise 13 years ago! It was
called I’ll Cry Tomorrow — did
any of you see it?” (And in Valley of the Dolls Hayward was returned to the world of being
voice-doubled; her song, “I’ll Plant My Own Tree,” clearly written around what
was left of Judy Garland’s voice by 1968, was sung on the soundtrack by
Margaret Whiting.)
Saturday, September 19, 2015
American Masters: Pedro E. Guerrero (PBS/American Masters/Voces/Latino Public Broadcasting, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a PBS American Masters program about Pedro Guerrero, a photographer who’s famous mainly for his three long-term collaborations with artists — architect Frank Lloyd Wright, mobile sculptor Alexander Calder and sculptor Louise Nevelson (who, not surprisingly given the sexism of the art world in general — interestingly, Guerrero encountered racist prejudices at home in Arizona when he was growing up but not in the art world the way Nevelson had to deal with entrenched sexism that treated women artists as less “serious” than men — and which may have something to do with the fact that I didn’t recognize her name instantly the way I did with Wright and Calder). Guerrero is shown being interviewed as an old man (he died in 2012, living long enough to appear in the film but not long enough to see the completed version), and among the interviewees was his wife Dixie Legler, who was about half his age and therefore I guessed (correctly) he’d been married before. In some respects the most interesting part of the film was the early scenes with Wright, who hired Guerrero to photograph the school he established in Arizona, Taliesin West, and Guerrero came up with a series of pictures with an almost tactile sense of perspective (both Guerrero and others discussed the difficulty of creating a sense of three-dimensionality in a flat 2-D medium like still photography) as well as some great shots of Guerrero himself (as an old man he was pretty nondescript-looking but as a young man he was a hunk, and there’s one particular shot of him leaning against one of the Taliesin buildings, dressed in a T-shirt and tight blue jeans showing an enviable basket, oddly premonitory of the opening shot of Brokeback Mountain) and the shirtless guys working on building Taliesin West.
That was neat, though the rest of the show was also compelling and made me wonder how many fantastic artists we’ve never heard of because their work, their ethnicity or their gender just put them on the margins of the art world. Guerrero enlisted during World War II (much to the displeasure of Frank Lloyd Wright, an avowed and outspoken pacifist, but though his surrogate father might have been against it Guerrero’s real father insisted it was his duty to serve, not only to his country but also to Mexican-Americans in general to prove their loyalty to the U.S.) and afterwards settled in New York City. With his experience at Taliesin he got lots of assignments to photograph buildings, particularly interiors of houses for House and Garden magazine, a gig which lasted 20 years and was his key source of income until he lost it in a quirky and very 1960’s way. It seems the New Jersey town in which he lived appointed him to their draft board, and Guerrero, who may have served in World War II but though the Viet Nam war stupid and pointless, used that position to get a lot of people conscientious-objector deferments. The New York Times broke the story that there was a pacifist on a New Jersey draft board who was using his position to monkey-wrench the system, and House and Garden abruptly decided they would never again employ Guerrero or publish his photographs. So he forsook the world of commercial photography and concentrated on artistic jobs, including documenting Calder’s 1964 exhibit at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum (thereby combining two of his great mentors in one show) and also working with Nevelson on the considerable challenge of documenting her black-on-black constructions with found materials. While the show tended to drag after a while — at least with the approach they took, there was barely enough material in Guerrero’s life for an hour-long program — it was a quite interesting look at a highly unusual talent and a good co-production for American Masters and Latino Public Broadcasting’s Voces program (and one presumes there’s an alternate version with the narration in Spanish for the Voces-affiliated stations).
I watched a PBS American Masters program about Pedro Guerrero, a photographer who’s famous mainly for his three long-term collaborations with artists — architect Frank Lloyd Wright, mobile sculptor Alexander Calder and sculptor Louise Nevelson (who, not surprisingly given the sexism of the art world in general — interestingly, Guerrero encountered racist prejudices at home in Arizona when he was growing up but not in the art world the way Nevelson had to deal with entrenched sexism that treated women artists as less “serious” than men — and which may have something to do with the fact that I didn’t recognize her name instantly the way I did with Wright and Calder). Guerrero is shown being interviewed as an old man (he died in 2012, living long enough to appear in the film but not long enough to see the completed version), and among the interviewees was his wife Dixie Legler, who was about half his age and therefore I guessed (correctly) he’d been married before. In some respects the most interesting part of the film was the early scenes with Wright, who hired Guerrero to photograph the school he established in Arizona, Taliesin West, and Guerrero came up with a series of pictures with an almost tactile sense of perspective (both Guerrero and others discussed the difficulty of creating a sense of three-dimensionality in a flat 2-D medium like still photography) as well as some great shots of Guerrero himself (as an old man he was pretty nondescript-looking but as a young man he was a hunk, and there’s one particular shot of him leaning against one of the Taliesin buildings, dressed in a T-shirt and tight blue jeans showing an enviable basket, oddly premonitory of the opening shot of Brokeback Mountain) and the shirtless guys working on building Taliesin West.
That was neat, though the rest of the show was also compelling and made me wonder how many fantastic artists we’ve never heard of because their work, their ethnicity or their gender just put them on the margins of the art world. Guerrero enlisted during World War II (much to the displeasure of Frank Lloyd Wright, an avowed and outspoken pacifist, but though his surrogate father might have been against it Guerrero’s real father insisted it was his duty to serve, not only to his country but also to Mexican-Americans in general to prove their loyalty to the U.S.) and afterwards settled in New York City. With his experience at Taliesin he got lots of assignments to photograph buildings, particularly interiors of houses for House and Garden magazine, a gig which lasted 20 years and was his key source of income until he lost it in a quirky and very 1960’s way. It seems the New Jersey town in which he lived appointed him to their draft board, and Guerrero, who may have served in World War II but though the Viet Nam war stupid and pointless, used that position to get a lot of people conscientious-objector deferments. The New York Times broke the story that there was a pacifist on a New Jersey draft board who was using his position to monkey-wrench the system, and House and Garden abruptly decided they would never again employ Guerrero or publish his photographs. So he forsook the world of commercial photography and concentrated on artistic jobs, including documenting Calder’s 1964 exhibit at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum (thereby combining two of his great mentors in one show) and also working with Nevelson on the considerable challenge of documenting her black-on-black constructions with found materials. While the show tended to drag after a while — at least with the approach they took, there was barely enough material in Guerrero’s life for an hour-long program — it was a quite interesting look at a highly unusual talent and a good co-production for American Masters and Latino Public Broadcasting’s Voces program (and one presumes there’s an alternate version with the narration in Spanish for the Voces-affiliated stations).
Thursday, September 17, 2015
The Case of the Frightened Lady (George King Productions/British Lion, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched an archive.org download that attempted to reproduce a double-bill from a relatively cheap movie theatre in the 1940’s, including a Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoon called Acro-Batty Bunny (it was set in a circus and Bugs’ antagonist this time was a lion who wanted him for dinner); a Robert Benchley short called Home Movies; and two features, both whodunit mysteries that were similarly unsatisfying despite their quite different pedigrees and styles. One was a 1940 British movie (obviously made during the brief interregnum between the start of World War II and Winston Churchill’s becoming Prime Minister and shutting down the entire British film industry for two years because he thought movies were using up valuable resources needed for the war effort) called The Case of the Frightened Lady, centering around a well-maintained old estate called “Mark’s Priory” that’s the ancestral home of the thousand-year-old Lebanon family. (From the soundtrack I had guessed the name was something like “Levenham” and just sounded like “Lebanon,” but no-o-o-o-o, “Lebanon” is the name listed on the imdb.com page and makes me wonder how an old English noble family got named after a Middle Eastern country.)
It’s not clear exactly who the frightened lady is, but the plot — by Edgar Wallace, who originally wrote it as a novel, then adapted it for a 1932 film called Criminal at Large and then adapted his own film script into a stage play, which the makers of this version (director George King, producer S. A. Smith and writer Edward Dryhurst) then turned back into a movie. Like a lot of Wallace’s stories, it has a welter of plots that seem way too numerous and convoluted for a mere 81-minute movie to contain. Lady Lebanon (Helen Haye, a then middle-aged British actress not to be confused with the U.S. star Helen Hayes) is a widow who married her first cousin because they were both Lebanons and she and her parents didn’t want to dilute the family’s bloodline by marrying “outside.” This union produced a son, Lord Lebanon (Marius Goring), who comes off as so queeny that when his mom insists that he get married and he pouts that he doesn’t want to — all he really wants to do is play piano and compose pop music — I half-expected him to say, “You mean you want me to marry a woman?” Mom does, and the woman she wants her son to marry is his first cousin, Isla St. John Crane (Penelope Dudley-Ward) — even though she’s uninterested in him and instead wants to marry a commoner, Richard Ferraby (Patrick Ward), who showed up at Mark’s Priory because he’s an architect and Lady Lebanon hired him to renovate the place. There’s also a sinister man named Dr. Amersham (Felix Aylmer, who spent decades playing slimy mini-villains like this), who’s blackmailing the Lebanons and, we learn about two-thirds of the way through, had enough on Mrs. Lebanon that he got her to marry him after her husband died — only her husband, we learn towards the very end, isn’t even dead; instead he went crazy and was locked up in a secret room in the house, one which is never allowed to be unlocked, a plot device Wallace pretty obviously stole from the fate of the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Last night Charles and I watched an archive.org download that attempted to reproduce a double-bill from a relatively cheap movie theatre in the 1940’s, including a Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoon called Acro-Batty Bunny (it was set in a circus and Bugs’ antagonist this time was a lion who wanted him for dinner); a Robert Benchley short called Home Movies; and two features, both whodunit mysteries that were similarly unsatisfying despite their quite different pedigrees and styles. One was a 1940 British movie (obviously made during the brief interregnum between the start of World War II and Winston Churchill’s becoming Prime Minister and shutting down the entire British film industry for two years because he thought movies were using up valuable resources needed for the war effort) called The Case of the Frightened Lady, centering around a well-maintained old estate called “Mark’s Priory” that’s the ancestral home of the thousand-year-old Lebanon family. (From the soundtrack I had guessed the name was something like “Levenham” and just sounded like “Lebanon,” but no-o-o-o-o, “Lebanon” is the name listed on the imdb.com page and makes me wonder how an old English noble family got named after a Middle Eastern country.)
It’s not clear exactly who the frightened lady is, but the plot — by Edgar Wallace, who originally wrote it as a novel, then adapted it for a 1932 film called Criminal at Large and then adapted his own film script into a stage play, which the makers of this version (director George King, producer S. A. Smith and writer Edward Dryhurst) then turned back into a movie. Like a lot of Wallace’s stories, it has a welter of plots that seem way too numerous and convoluted for a mere 81-minute movie to contain. Lady Lebanon (Helen Haye, a then middle-aged British actress not to be confused with the U.S. star Helen Hayes) is a widow who married her first cousin because they were both Lebanons and she and her parents didn’t want to dilute the family’s bloodline by marrying “outside.” This union produced a son, Lord Lebanon (Marius Goring), who comes off as so queeny that when his mom insists that he get married and he pouts that he doesn’t want to — all he really wants to do is play piano and compose pop music — I half-expected him to say, “You mean you want me to marry a woman?” Mom does, and the woman she wants her son to marry is his first cousin, Isla St. John Crane (Penelope Dudley-Ward) — even though she’s uninterested in him and instead wants to marry a commoner, Richard Ferraby (Patrick Ward), who showed up at Mark’s Priory because he’s an architect and Lady Lebanon hired him to renovate the place. There’s also a sinister man named Dr. Amersham (Felix Aylmer, who spent decades playing slimy mini-villains like this), who’s blackmailing the Lebanons and, we learn about two-thirds of the way through, had enough on Mrs. Lebanon that he got her to marry him after her husband died — only her husband, we learn towards the very end, isn’t even dead; instead he went crazy and was locked up in a secret room in the house, one which is never allowed to be unlocked, a plot device Wallace pretty obviously stole from the fate of the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Also in
the dramatis personae are two
footmen who prowl around the house and are far cheekier and much less conscious
of their “place” than most servants in British novels or movies of the period;
a man who served with Dr. Amersham in India decades earlier and supposedly has
some derogatory information about him; a husband-and-wife servant couple in which the wife is supposedly
dating another man; and said other man, who turns up as the first murder
victim, strangled with an elaborate scarf from India which at first we’re
supposed to believe is incredibly rare — until it turns out Amersham imported a
whole bunch of them and they fill Lady Lebanon’s desk drawer. Various people
around the house end up getting strangled with these things, and eventually the
culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Lord Lebanon himself, who’s decided that his entire family must die out
because they’re too crazy to be permitted to live. He alibi’ed himself for the
killings by making records of his piano pieces and playing them while he
committed the murders so people would think he was at the piano practicing the
whole time. The film is actually directed by George King with a superb sense of
atmosphere — he and cinematographer Hone Glendinning get some great noir-ish compositions and frame the action beautifully —
but they’re hamstrung by the convoluted nature of the plot and the sheer obviousness
of whodunit. Both Charles and I correctly pegged Lord Lebanon as the killer
early on, and the only surprise for us was that he used phonograph records
instead of player-piano rolls to fake playing the piano while he was killing
people — records in the 1930’s would have made too much surface noise to sound
like live music, whereas a piano roll would have (at least to a casual
listener) been indistinguishable from a live pianist. It’s surprising how often
this has been filmed — an experimental BBC-TV broadcast in 1938, a 1963
theatrical remake called The Indian Scarf, a 1971 Italian TV-movie called Il Laccio Rosso and a 1983 TV-movie reverting to the title of this
one, The Case of the Frightened Lady
— when it’s simply not a very distinguished story.
Shadows on the Stairs (Warner Bros./First National, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other feature on this archive.org download was Shadows on the Stairs, a 1941 Warner Bros. “B” that couldn’t have been more different stylistically from The Case of the Frightened Lady — fast-moving instead of slow; the director was D. Ross Lederman, who has one truly great film on his résumé (Tim McCoy’s radical 1932 pro-Indian Western, End of the Trail — though clearly McCoy, who had got the inspiration for the story while interviewing Native survivors of the battle at the Little Big Horn for an oral history project in the 1920’s, was the auteur) but was otherwise pretty much an ordinary “B” schlockmeister. It also had a heavy-duty, virtually wall-to-wall musical score by the uncredited Bernhard Kaun — this was one film that met Jack Warner’s demand that the music start when it said “Warner Bros. Pictures Present” and not stop until it said “The End” — whereas The Case of the Frightened Lady had virtually no music other than the piano music by Jack Beaver that represented Marius Goring’s effusions — and it had the rambunctious pacing and fast-paced acting style typical of Warners’ movies even though the only really talented players in it were Frieda Inescort (as the proprietess of the boarding house where virtually all of it took place — it was based on a play called Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper that premiered in 1929), Miles Mander (who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as director, 1925’s The Pleasure Garden, and played the hapless Lewin Lockridge Grayle in Murder, My Sweet) as her mild-mannered chess-fancying husband, and Turhan Bey as an (East) Indian named “Ram Singh” who was clearly up to no good, since he was involved in a plot to smuggle half a million pounds in a large cedar box into the building and who had a knife concealed in his bed post which he apparently used to murder another tenant.
Needless to say, the people start dropping like flies pretty quickly in this production, and the juvenile leads, aspiring playwright Hugh Bromilow (Bruce Lester) and his girlfriend Sylvia (Heather Angel, another person I’d heard of in the cast but who was showcased much better in most of her other films), get perplexed as they attempt to solve the crime. Midway through the story there’s an insert of a letter “Bromilow” has received from his producer that reveals to us he’s actually the well-known playwright Dwight Winston and he’s hiding out in the boarding house for reasons his producer, the author of the letter, can’t fathom — and at the end the killer turns out to be Mr. Armitage, Mander’s character, who knocked off fellow boarding-house resident Joseph Reynolds (Paul Cavanagh) because Reynolds and Mrs. Armitage were having an affair, then kept killing people for reasons Vosper and writer Anthony Coldeway (I’ve seen his name spelled “Coldewey” on some of his other credits) don’t stop the plot long enough to explain. Once again, both Charles and I guessed whodunit — the murder required Mander to don drag as a disguise, which would seem difficult given his moustache, though he explained he merely wore a scarf over his face — but Charles correctly guessed that the story would really end with a metafictional Seven Keys to Baldpate-style fillip in which the entire plot would be Dwight Winston’s latest story and all the boarding-house characters that had been “killed” would turn up, very much alive. It was nice that Warner Bros. picked up this plot device after RKO dropped it in the later “official” remakes of Baldpate, but Shadows on the Stairs remains a rather dull would-be thriller in which Miles Mander’s performance is the only one of any real distinction. After that Charles ran a 2013 New Zealand short called The Shoe Box which also featured sinister shadows on a staircase and a man smuggling in a box to his room — only the box was shoebox-sized. For a while it looked like Warren Philp, who starred, directed and wrote, was ripping off the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (and Emlyn Williams’ play Night Must Fall before it!) and the box contained a human head, but eventually it turns out to be a knockoff of E.T. instead — the box contains a tiny female (Joyce Cocchi) from another planet who just wants to go home!
The other feature on this archive.org download was Shadows on the Stairs, a 1941 Warner Bros. “B” that couldn’t have been more different stylistically from The Case of the Frightened Lady — fast-moving instead of slow; the director was D. Ross Lederman, who has one truly great film on his résumé (Tim McCoy’s radical 1932 pro-Indian Western, End of the Trail — though clearly McCoy, who had got the inspiration for the story while interviewing Native survivors of the battle at the Little Big Horn for an oral history project in the 1920’s, was the auteur) but was otherwise pretty much an ordinary “B” schlockmeister. It also had a heavy-duty, virtually wall-to-wall musical score by the uncredited Bernhard Kaun — this was one film that met Jack Warner’s demand that the music start when it said “Warner Bros. Pictures Present” and not stop until it said “The End” — whereas The Case of the Frightened Lady had virtually no music other than the piano music by Jack Beaver that represented Marius Goring’s effusions — and it had the rambunctious pacing and fast-paced acting style typical of Warners’ movies even though the only really talented players in it were Frieda Inescort (as the proprietess of the boarding house where virtually all of it took place — it was based on a play called Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper that premiered in 1929), Miles Mander (who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as director, 1925’s The Pleasure Garden, and played the hapless Lewin Lockridge Grayle in Murder, My Sweet) as her mild-mannered chess-fancying husband, and Turhan Bey as an (East) Indian named “Ram Singh” who was clearly up to no good, since he was involved in a plot to smuggle half a million pounds in a large cedar box into the building and who had a knife concealed in his bed post which he apparently used to murder another tenant.
Needless to say, the people start dropping like flies pretty quickly in this production, and the juvenile leads, aspiring playwright Hugh Bromilow (Bruce Lester) and his girlfriend Sylvia (Heather Angel, another person I’d heard of in the cast but who was showcased much better in most of her other films), get perplexed as they attempt to solve the crime. Midway through the story there’s an insert of a letter “Bromilow” has received from his producer that reveals to us he’s actually the well-known playwright Dwight Winston and he’s hiding out in the boarding house for reasons his producer, the author of the letter, can’t fathom — and at the end the killer turns out to be Mr. Armitage, Mander’s character, who knocked off fellow boarding-house resident Joseph Reynolds (Paul Cavanagh) because Reynolds and Mrs. Armitage were having an affair, then kept killing people for reasons Vosper and writer Anthony Coldeway (I’ve seen his name spelled “Coldewey” on some of his other credits) don’t stop the plot long enough to explain. Once again, both Charles and I guessed whodunit — the murder required Mander to don drag as a disguise, which would seem difficult given his moustache, though he explained he merely wore a scarf over his face — but Charles correctly guessed that the story would really end with a metafictional Seven Keys to Baldpate-style fillip in which the entire plot would be Dwight Winston’s latest story and all the boarding-house characters that had been “killed” would turn up, very much alive. It was nice that Warner Bros. picked up this plot device after RKO dropped it in the later “official” remakes of Baldpate, but Shadows on the Stairs remains a rather dull would-be thriller in which Miles Mander’s performance is the only one of any real distinction. After that Charles ran a 2013 New Zealand short called The Shoe Box which also featured sinister shadows on a staircase and a man smuggling in a box to his room — only the box was shoebox-sized. For a while it looked like Warren Philp, who starred, directed and wrote, was ripping off the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (and Emlyn Williams’ play Night Must Fall before it!) and the box contained a human head, but eventually it turns out to be a knockoff of E.T. instead — the box contains a tiny female (Joyce Cocchi) from another planet who just wants to go home!
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
American Experience: Walt Disney (WGBH/PBS, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the first part of the much-ballyhooed American Experience documentary on Walt Disney (the distinction between American Experience and American Masters seems maddeningly arbitrary — why does Walt Disney count as an “experience” but not a “master”?), whose makers, Sarah Colt (producer, director and co-writer) and Tom Jennings, managed to get access to the Disney vaults and use their archives without having to pledge to produce a whiter-than-white hagiography. An early line in the narration, delivered by Oliver Platt (one of those even, relatively unmodulated performers PBS prefers in their voiceovers — I’ve joked that if you audition for National Public Radio and show any hint of inflection in your voice, you don’t get the job), argued that Disney was essentially an American Rorschach, a figure that you either admire or detest depending on your overall attitudes to culture (and, at least after Disney emerged as one of Hollywood’s most open and ferocious Right-wingers after World War II, your politics as well), though ironically the Los Angeles Times ran an article on Disney to promote the show last Sunday and noted that a third group of Americans, mostly younger ones, don’t realize Walt Disney was a person at all: like the Warner Brothers, they’ve known “Disney” merely as a brand name and don’t realize that it was founded by an actual human being (several human beings, in fact; the film gives due importance to the role of Walt’s brother Roy, who was to him what Harry Warner was to his brother Jack and Jack Cohn was to his brother Harry at Columbia: the guy who tried to figure out how to pay the bills and cover the costs of his more creative brother’s artistic and marketplace ambitions; as well as Ub Iwerks, the pioneering cartoonist who was instrumental in creating the early Disney cartoons) of that name.
This first episode leaves out some of the most interesting part of the story, including the career trajectory of Iwerks (he got lured away by Pat Powers, distributor of Disney’s earliest sound cartoons, to start his own studio with a character called Flip the Frog; when Iwerks’ company went under in 1933 he returned reluctantly to the Disney fold but was almost literally kept hidden from everyone else even though his inventions, notably the multiplane animation camera that allowed animators to do tracking shots and other effects that had previously only been available to live-action filmmakers and gave an almost tactile feeling of depth to the images, were key to Disney’s later successes) and some of the bizarre details of his relationship with Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini, whom Disney was hoping would finance the massive cost overruns on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Richard Schickel, author of the mid-1970’s “black” biography The Disney Version (and who’s interviewed on this show, with a considerably mellower attitude towards Disney than he had when he wrote the book 40 years ago), told a story about Giannini demanding to see what Disney had finished of Snow White before he decided whether or not to give Disney any more money. Disney, who hated showing unfinished work to anyone outside the studio, sat through the screening and practically freaked out as Giannini watched the movie (or what there was of it) and kept an impassive “poker face” throughout the screening. Finally, after it was over, Giannini turned to Disney and said, “Goodbye. That thing is going to make a hatful of money” — and Disney realized he would get his loan. One odd thing about the show is it presents Disney’s wish to make his studio as self-contained as possible and his vision of his employees as a giant extended family, as if it were unique; actually it hearkened back to the “company towns” of the late 19th century (including George Pullman’s factory — Pullman’s paternalistic attitude towards his employees and his shabby treatment of them in terms of the actual money he paid them anticipated Disney, and so did the long and brutal strikes both men dealt with as a result) and has been reproduced in Berry Gordy’s Motown complex in the 1960’s and more recently in the elaborate “campuses” Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs built to congregate their employees and at the same time limit their ability to have a life outside the work.
he makers of this film chose the 1941 animators’ strike against Disney as the breaking point of their two-part movie, though the change in Disney’s fortunes and his management style can be attributed to other things, including World War II (ironically, the start of the war in 1939 plunged the Disney studio into financial crisis because it cost him the European market, while the U.S.’s entry into the war bailed Disney out because the U.S. government hired his studio to make animated training films for servicemembers — even though the government’s bureaucrats also gave Disney unwelcome advice on how to make the movies and took their own sweet time about paying him, thereby reinforcing Disney’s skepticism about government in general and helping push him from a relatively apolitical stance in the 1930’s to a hard-Right attitude for the rest of his life), the box-office failure of Fantasia (the filmmakers seem to accept Schickel’s view in The Disney Version that Disney thought of what Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor were offering him as “culture” and, when the film flopped, rejected it and became actively anti‑intellectual in his later years) and the cost overruns that led Roy Disney to insist that the company start selling stock to the public — their initial public offering (IPO) in 1940 generated $4 million and the Disneys, rather than taking a big cut for themselves the way most entrepreneurs do today after their IPO, plowed it right back into the company — though as part of the deal Walt Disney had to sign a contract paying him $2,000 a week to make sure he would remain with the company (and Roy got one for $1,000), and the staff members got resentful that Disney was making 100 times more than the average pay of his workers. (Today CEO pay has swollen to such ridiculous extremes I couldn’t help but joke, “Only 100 times as much?”) One of the animators recalled an incident in which he helped some colleagues with the lower-level “in-betweener” and ink-and-paint jobs (master animators made the key drawings for a sequence, in-betweeners made the drawings that would appear in between and ink-and-paint people, usually women, colored and inked in the original drawings on animation cels), and when Disney found out he stripped the poor guy’s office of its drawers, its recliner chair and all the amenities, leaving him just a hard chair and a table — the bare minimum he needed to do his work. (He wouldn’t have been so surprised if he’d known how completely Disney had “un-personned” Ub Iwerks earlier as a punishment for his disloyalty in the early 1930’s.) One point showing Iwerks’ importance in creating the early Disney style, as well as the conventions of animation, impressed Charles when he noted that Mickey Mouse looked an awful lot like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the previous character Disney and Iwerks had created and whose distributor, Charles Mintz, had done him out of the rights — and I reminded Charles that Flip the Frog, some of whose cartoons have turned up on archive.org, followed the same basic design pattern despite the radical differences in appearance between real-life rabbits, mice and frogs.
Whatever can be said against Disney, one thing in his favor is the sheer graphic beauty of the films he created — and with access to the vaults the filmmakers here were able to show clips from Disney’s 1930’s and early 1940’s films in luminous color that did full justice to their extraordinary loveliness purely as art, whatever you think of the Disney style and the sentimental meatgrinder through which he ran story after story. I mentioned having read Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio as a boy (like The Wizard of Oz, I read Pinocchio before I actually saw the film), and the two are actually relatively close except for one major plot point: in the book Pinocchio angrily squashes the cricket in chapter four, while in the movie he has a name (Jiminy Cricket) and appears throughout the film as Pinocchio’s conscience. (Incidentally Jiminy Cricket also provided a big comeback for Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, who voiced him and did the eloquent singing on the film’s theme song, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”) At the same time the film also noted the thinly veiled contempt with which Hollywood viewed cartoons and the people who created them when it pointed out that instead of giving Snow White a Best Picture nomination, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored it in regular competition and instead gave Disney a special award — a full-sized one for himself and seven miniature ones in honor of the dwarfs. The clip of the ceremony shows Disney accepting this award from Shirley Temple and him struggling to keep his cool while inwardly seething inside. The contempt for animation as an art form comes through in the original publicity book for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which promised exhibitors a movie as spectacular as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but with the advantage that it contained live actors — though given what they went through trying to get the effects right, it’s likely Mervyn LeRoy, Arthur Freed and Victor Fleming sometimes envied their colleagues at Disney who could simply draw what they wanted to happen and make it come to life! — 9/15/15
Charles and I watched the first part of the much-ballyhooed American Experience documentary on Walt Disney (the distinction between American Experience and American Masters seems maddeningly arbitrary — why does Walt Disney count as an “experience” but not a “master”?), whose makers, Sarah Colt (producer, director and co-writer) and Tom Jennings, managed to get access to the Disney vaults and use their archives without having to pledge to produce a whiter-than-white hagiography. An early line in the narration, delivered by Oliver Platt (one of those even, relatively unmodulated performers PBS prefers in their voiceovers — I’ve joked that if you audition for National Public Radio and show any hint of inflection in your voice, you don’t get the job), argued that Disney was essentially an American Rorschach, a figure that you either admire or detest depending on your overall attitudes to culture (and, at least after Disney emerged as one of Hollywood’s most open and ferocious Right-wingers after World War II, your politics as well), though ironically the Los Angeles Times ran an article on Disney to promote the show last Sunday and noted that a third group of Americans, mostly younger ones, don’t realize Walt Disney was a person at all: like the Warner Brothers, they’ve known “Disney” merely as a brand name and don’t realize that it was founded by an actual human being (several human beings, in fact; the film gives due importance to the role of Walt’s brother Roy, who was to him what Harry Warner was to his brother Jack and Jack Cohn was to his brother Harry at Columbia: the guy who tried to figure out how to pay the bills and cover the costs of his more creative brother’s artistic and marketplace ambitions; as well as Ub Iwerks, the pioneering cartoonist who was instrumental in creating the early Disney cartoons) of that name.
This first episode leaves out some of the most interesting part of the story, including the career trajectory of Iwerks (he got lured away by Pat Powers, distributor of Disney’s earliest sound cartoons, to start his own studio with a character called Flip the Frog; when Iwerks’ company went under in 1933 he returned reluctantly to the Disney fold but was almost literally kept hidden from everyone else even though his inventions, notably the multiplane animation camera that allowed animators to do tracking shots and other effects that had previously only been available to live-action filmmakers and gave an almost tactile feeling of depth to the images, were key to Disney’s later successes) and some of the bizarre details of his relationship with Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini, whom Disney was hoping would finance the massive cost overruns on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Richard Schickel, author of the mid-1970’s “black” biography The Disney Version (and who’s interviewed on this show, with a considerably mellower attitude towards Disney than he had when he wrote the book 40 years ago), told a story about Giannini demanding to see what Disney had finished of Snow White before he decided whether or not to give Disney any more money. Disney, who hated showing unfinished work to anyone outside the studio, sat through the screening and practically freaked out as Giannini watched the movie (or what there was of it) and kept an impassive “poker face” throughout the screening. Finally, after it was over, Giannini turned to Disney and said, “Goodbye. That thing is going to make a hatful of money” — and Disney realized he would get his loan. One odd thing about the show is it presents Disney’s wish to make his studio as self-contained as possible and his vision of his employees as a giant extended family, as if it were unique; actually it hearkened back to the “company towns” of the late 19th century (including George Pullman’s factory — Pullman’s paternalistic attitude towards his employees and his shabby treatment of them in terms of the actual money he paid them anticipated Disney, and so did the long and brutal strikes both men dealt with as a result) and has been reproduced in Berry Gordy’s Motown complex in the 1960’s and more recently in the elaborate “campuses” Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs built to congregate their employees and at the same time limit their ability to have a life outside the work.
he makers of this film chose the 1941 animators’ strike against Disney as the breaking point of their two-part movie, though the change in Disney’s fortunes and his management style can be attributed to other things, including World War II (ironically, the start of the war in 1939 plunged the Disney studio into financial crisis because it cost him the European market, while the U.S.’s entry into the war bailed Disney out because the U.S. government hired his studio to make animated training films for servicemembers — even though the government’s bureaucrats also gave Disney unwelcome advice on how to make the movies and took their own sweet time about paying him, thereby reinforcing Disney’s skepticism about government in general and helping push him from a relatively apolitical stance in the 1930’s to a hard-Right attitude for the rest of his life), the box-office failure of Fantasia (the filmmakers seem to accept Schickel’s view in The Disney Version that Disney thought of what Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor were offering him as “culture” and, when the film flopped, rejected it and became actively anti‑intellectual in his later years) and the cost overruns that led Roy Disney to insist that the company start selling stock to the public — their initial public offering (IPO) in 1940 generated $4 million and the Disneys, rather than taking a big cut for themselves the way most entrepreneurs do today after their IPO, plowed it right back into the company — though as part of the deal Walt Disney had to sign a contract paying him $2,000 a week to make sure he would remain with the company (and Roy got one for $1,000), and the staff members got resentful that Disney was making 100 times more than the average pay of his workers. (Today CEO pay has swollen to such ridiculous extremes I couldn’t help but joke, “Only 100 times as much?”) One of the animators recalled an incident in which he helped some colleagues with the lower-level “in-betweener” and ink-and-paint jobs (master animators made the key drawings for a sequence, in-betweeners made the drawings that would appear in between and ink-and-paint people, usually women, colored and inked in the original drawings on animation cels), and when Disney found out he stripped the poor guy’s office of its drawers, its recliner chair and all the amenities, leaving him just a hard chair and a table — the bare minimum he needed to do his work. (He wouldn’t have been so surprised if he’d known how completely Disney had “un-personned” Ub Iwerks earlier as a punishment for his disloyalty in the early 1930’s.) One point showing Iwerks’ importance in creating the early Disney style, as well as the conventions of animation, impressed Charles when he noted that Mickey Mouse looked an awful lot like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the previous character Disney and Iwerks had created and whose distributor, Charles Mintz, had done him out of the rights — and I reminded Charles that Flip the Frog, some of whose cartoons have turned up on archive.org, followed the same basic design pattern despite the radical differences in appearance between real-life rabbits, mice and frogs.
Whatever can be said against Disney, one thing in his favor is the sheer graphic beauty of the films he created — and with access to the vaults the filmmakers here were able to show clips from Disney’s 1930’s and early 1940’s films in luminous color that did full justice to their extraordinary loveliness purely as art, whatever you think of the Disney style and the sentimental meatgrinder through which he ran story after story. I mentioned having read Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio as a boy (like The Wizard of Oz, I read Pinocchio before I actually saw the film), and the two are actually relatively close except for one major plot point: in the book Pinocchio angrily squashes the cricket in chapter four, while in the movie he has a name (Jiminy Cricket) and appears throughout the film as Pinocchio’s conscience. (Incidentally Jiminy Cricket also provided a big comeback for Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, who voiced him and did the eloquent singing on the film’s theme song, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”) At the same time the film also noted the thinly veiled contempt with which Hollywood viewed cartoons and the people who created them when it pointed out that instead of giving Snow White a Best Picture nomination, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored it in regular competition and instead gave Disney a special award — a full-sized one for himself and seven miniature ones in honor of the dwarfs. The clip of the ceremony shows Disney accepting this award from Shirley Temple and him struggling to keep his cool while inwardly seething inside. The contempt for animation as an art form comes through in the original publicity book for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, which promised exhibitors a movie as spectacular as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but with the advantage that it contained live actors — though given what they went through trying to get the effects right, it’s likely Mervyn LeRoy, Arthur Freed and Victor Fleming sometimes envied their colleagues at Disney who could simply draw what they wanted to happen and make it come to life! — 9/15/15
•••••
Last night KPBS showed the second half of the American
Experience program about Walt Disney — just
why Disney got to be an American Experience instead of an American Master is a mystery to me — prefaced with a show from a
series called In Their Own Words
about Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. In Their Own Words promises more than it delivers — it promises a show
about a famous person literally told in his or her own words (besides Henson,
so far they’ve done Queen Elizabeth II and Muhammad Ali), but all the “own
words” are titles literally
flashed across the screen, abstracted from interviews the subjects gave over
the years, and otherwise the show is a pretty conventional biography series,
strongly reminiscent of the Arts & Entertainment Biography series of yesteryear (and the half-hour biography
series David Wolper did in the 1960’s well before that!), but the coincidence
of showing a program about Jim Henson right before the second half of the big
four-hour documentary about Walt Disney may have been intentional to draw a
parallel between Disney and Henson as child-men who drew upon their own
fantasies and their own small-town boyhoods (Disney’s in Missouri, Henson’s in
Mississippi) to create entertainments that would appeal to both children and
adults — though Henson was hardly the businessman Disney was (and he didn’t
have a brother to run the business end of the company the way Disney did —
Henson had lost his older brother Paul to an accident while Paul was serving in
the U.S. military in Florida) and he eventually ended up selling his company to
Disney, which since Walt’s death has acted like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking
up virtually every major creator of fantasy entertainment, from Henson’s
company to George Lucas’s enterprise (most importantly including the Star
Wars characters) and Marvel Comics. As for
part two of the Walt Disney film, it was something of a comedown from part one
— inevitably, as the quality of Disney’s movies (especially the animated
features that were its trademark) declined and Disney lost interest in
filmmaking generally to pursue his vision of … whatever. In a TV documentary —
even a four-hour one — it was obviously impossible for the filmmakers (the auteur of the Disney documentary was Sarah Colt, who
produced, directed and co-wrote it, so the “take” on the Disney story it
presents can be assumed to be hers) to cover the entire Disney oeuvre. It doesn’t mention that Walt Disney’s 1941 trip to
South America wasn’t just a vacation to get himself of the cross-hairs of the
conflict between him and the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild (headed by Herbert
Sorrell, whom Disney denounced both then and six years later as a “friendly
witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a Communist — and
as many union activists and just plain liberals in Hollywood (and elsewhere)
were falsely accused of Communism during the so-called McCarthy era (a misnomer
because the inquisitorial spirit of the age began well before Joe McCarthy
himself emerged from back-bench obscurity in the U.S. Senate to become the
public face of the “anti-Communist” crusade), what I’ve read about Sorrell
suggests that he, like John Howard Lawson and Sidney Buchman, was the real Red
deal.
The trip was a working
vacation arranged by Nelson Rockefeller, a major shareholder in RKO, the major
studio that was Walt Disney’s distributor from the mid-1930’s until 1952, when
Disney formed his own distribution company, Buena Vista, and at last became
head of a fully integrated movie studio instead of just an independent producer
releasing through another company. Rockefeller wanted RKO’s major filmmakers,
Disney and Orson Welles, to make movies in South America that would help
promote the Good Neighbor Policy and keep Latin American countries from either
going fascist themselves or selling raw materials to the Axis powers, and
though all Rockefeller got out of Welles was a mess of footage of Brazilian
fishermen and carnivalitos for a
stillborn project called It’s All True, Disney came up with Saludos Amigos and followed it up in 1945 with The Three
Caballeros. The documentary doesn’t mention
the films Disney made after the
so-called “Big Five” fully animated features (Snow White, Pinocchio,
Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo) in the 1940’s, which were comparatively
uninteresting and showed the banality typical of the Disney style at its worst,
but also contained some genuinely creative moments (notably the fireworks
sequence at the end of The Three Caballeros and the number with Benny Goodman’s quartet
performing “After You’ve Gone” in Make Mine Music, which if Disney had been interested in doing it
could have become the basis for a jazz version of Fantasia). Instead it chronicles Disney’s growing disinterest
in filmmaking per se and his
letting the studio run largely without him, not only in the live-action movies
he started making in Great Britain in 1950 (Sarah Colt doesn’t mention that the
genesis of these films was the so-called “frozen funds” policy invented by the
Nazis and copied by the British and other European governments after World War
II, in which foreign companies were prohibited from taking money out of the
country; the idea was to get them to invest in the countries where they had made the money in the
first place and create products they could then export and make their money
back) but even in Cinderella, the
1950 production that was Disney’s return to fully animated features based on
fairy tales and which was a blockbuster hit on its initial release, but which
Disney took very little active role in and, according to Colt, was all too
aware of the corners that had been cut and the short-cuts that had been taken
that kept it from being the masterpiece Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs had been.
The show describes Disney
as becoming obsessed with building model trains — ones big enough to carry
people even though far smaller than their real-life counterparts (something
like the model railroad at the San Diego Zoo) — to the point where in the early
1950’s he seemed more interested in this bizarre hobby than in keeping up with the
competition in animated movies (including the United Productions of America
studio which set up shop nearby Disney’s plant in Burbank, incorporated a lot
of the animators Disney had driven away because of their participation in the
strike against him, pioneered the so-called “limited animation” style and took
its inspiration from 20th century artists rather than the Old
Masters; Disney would refer to the UPA animators as “those Commies down the
river”). He even took a railroading trip with animator Ward Kimball, who
collected toy trains and also played Dixieland jazz (he and some fellow Disney
animators formed a band called the Firehouse Five Plus Two — why not just the
Firehouse Seven? — performed in firefighters’ uniforms and ended up, natch,
with a regular gig at Disneyland), and when he got back he was obsessed with
building his own amusement park. That was an idea no one in his organization — including his brother Roy, who
as usual predicted financial disaster — could understand, since the existing
amusement parks in the U.S. c. 1950 were descendants of the old traveling
carnivals and had the same mix of unpleasant people and “carnie” exploitation.
Even Walt’s wife Lillian didn’t understand why he wanted to be in that business
— “They’re dirty, unsafe and filled with the sorts of people you wouldn’t want
to associate with,” she told him — and Walt had a hard time explaining even to
his wife and his brother, much less the people he was asking for money to
invest in his project, that his
amusement park would be clean, safe and filled with eminently respectable
people and attractions. Walt got his seed capital from an unexpected source,
the ABC-TV network, who wanted a show from him (and got it only after NBC and
CBS both turned him down) and were persuaded into investing in Disneyland in
exchange for the show, which relentlessly cross-promoted the theme park and got
millions of America interested in going to Disneyland even before it existed as
anything more than renderings on Disney’s office walls.
One odd thing was that
Sarah Colt’s clips from the Disney TV program showed them in black-and-white,
as they originally aired, even though Walt Disney ordered them (especially the Davy
Crockett mini-series, which itself became
such an enormous hit Disney released two feature films edited from them) shot
in color — and there was an argument over that between Walt and Roy Disney that to me sums up their
whole relationship. “Why did you waste all that money filming the TV shows in
color? TV isn’t in color!” said Roy — and Walt just smiled one of his gnomic
smiles and said, “It will be.” It’s not surprising that when Disney moved his
show from ABC to NBC precisely because NBC was the first network to go
all-color, he even named it Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and opened it with a set of kaleidoscopic images
over a theme song which literally
sang the praises of color. The show continues with a desultory presentation of
the last years of Disney’s life, when Disneyland had become such a cash cow he
never again had to ask a bank for money to make a film — he had all the capital
he would ever need just from the theme-park revenues — and when decades of
chain-smoking finally caught up with him and he was diagnosed with lung cancer
and died at the end of 1966. Oddly, Sarah Colt mentions some of the stories in
Richard Schickel’s book The Disney Version and even uses him as an on-camera interviewee but doesn’t always tell
them correctly or completely — when Disney had his famous exchange with New
York Times film critic Bosley Crowther over
Crowther’s comment that his movies were “corny,” Disney said, “I like corn” —
but Colt doesn’t mention what Disney said about why he liked corn: “Corn is the golden crop.”
Nonetheless, American Experience: Walt Disney is a fascinating look at an entrepreneur who lived
the American dream, rising from (virtually) nothing to fabulous wealth and
success, and who along the way shaped, for better or worse, the fantasy lives
of billions of people around the world. — 9/16/15
Monday, September 14, 2015
Sherlock: “The Sign of Three” (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre/PBS, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show I picked was a PBS showing of a recent episode of Sherlock, the engaging Sherlock Holmes update from the BBC (the official production credits on imdb.com are to “Hartswood Films,” “BBC Wales” and “Masterpiece Theatre,” the overall PBS rubric on which this and a lot of other British productions receive their U.S. airings on PBS) that’s already in its fourth season at home and its third season here — though it counts as more of a mini-series than a series because only three or four episodes are made each year. The series stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Hamish Watson (the full middle name is actually a key plot point in this episode), and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” posting Holmes’ parents are played by Benedict Cumberbatch’s real parents, and Amanda Abbington, the actress who plays Mary Morstan — Watson’s girlfriend, who became his wife in last night’s show, “The Sign of Three” (like all the Sherlock episode titles, it’s both copied and “twisted” from an original Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four) — really is the life partner of Martin Freeman. “The Sign of Three” is a reworking of one of the quirkiest stories in the canon, a novel-length saga about the Sholto family and their criminal doings and mis-doings in India and attempts to atone for them through their treatment of Mary — and the original Conan Doyle story has been filmed more or less come scritto several times, including an excellent 1932 version from Britain directed by Graham Cutts (a leading British director in the early 1920’s and a mentor to Alfred Hitchcock, who worked as an assistant director on Cutts’ films before getting the chance to direct himself) with Arthur Wontner in the best of his four extant performances as Holmes.
“The Sign of Three” is a quirky presentation in that most of it is built around the planning of John Watson’s and Mary Morstan’s wedding — though a casual piece of dialogue from Cumberbatch as Holmes indicates they’re already living (and presumably sleeping) together and therefore Holmes sees no point in them renting a church for an afternoon and a party hall for an evening. Naturally, Watson has asked Holmes to be his best man, and this requires Holmes to prepare and deliver a speech at the ceremony — during which he can’t help but express his decidedly cynical views about marriage, love and relationships generally (writers Steven Thompson, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss — the latter two also listed as the show’s creators — even incorporate Holmes’ famous comment in one of the Conan Doyle stories that love and sex are important to the criminal investigator as motives for crimes but that he personally isn’t interested in pursuing either — words that should have been emblazoned in the minds of the writers for the American Holmes update Elementary, which has been annoyingly false to Conan Doyle’s characterization of both Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft as essentially asexual, and instead has had them rutting around all over the place) — and for some reason he starts reminiscing about two recent cases he hasn’t been able to solve. One was the near-murder of a guardsman who was locked into a shower stall and stabbed (fortunately, when the body was discovered both Holmes and Watson were on hand, and Watson was able to use his medical skills to save the man’s life, pressing Holmes into service as a reluctant nurse; one thing I like about this Sherlock is Watson is presented as an intelligent character in his own right and not a Nigel Bruce-style doofus!) — and, praise be, director Colm McCarthy gives us some choice glimpses of the guardsman’s bare chest which add to the aesthetic appeal of this show! The other was called “The Mayfly,” and was about a man who had dates with at least five women, taking them to the homes of recently deceased people and leaving them with the distinct impression that they had gone out with a ghost — only it turns out, in keeping with the spirit of Conan Doyle (who occasionally led his late-Victorian readers up the garden path by hinting at a supernatural explanation for the crimes in the Holmes stories but ultimately resolved the stories in a physically possible manner), that this was simply an ordinary human being who was faking being a ghost. It turns out that all five women were part of the service staff of Major James Sholto (Alistair Petrie), who in this version was nothing more than Dr. Watson’s commanding officer when he served in Afghanistan (it’s one of the ironies, made much of by the Sherlock writers, that 120 years after Conan Doyle had Holmes greet Watson with the famous line, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” the U.K. was involved in another war in Afghanistan, so that part of the story didn’t have to be changed!) and a heavily guarded man because of all the terrorists out there who want to kill him. Holmes deduces that there is a murderer out to get Sholto, and he romanced the maids to get information about him and his habits. He also staged the attack on the guardsman as a rehearsal for the murder method he planned to use on Sholto: a spring-loaded dagger blade concealed in the belt buckle of his uniform, so it would go off and he would be stabbed as soon as he unbuckled his belt.
For the first half of “The Sign of Three” (the title seems to refer to Holmes, Watson and Mary Morstan) I fidgeted and wondered, “When is someone going to commit a crime so this episode will be interesting?” Then the criminal intrigue emerged and the show got a lot better! I like Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes — though Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, albeit not as attractive or personable, seems closer to the Holmes Conan Doyle created, with his more imperious manner and crisper diction — and I can see why this show has made him an international star. Indeed, I thought it ironic when a lot of people criticized the most recent Star Trek movie for casting Cumberbatch as a villain when he’d become known for playing Holmes — I pointed out to Charles that the greatest screen Holmes of all, Basil Rathbone, usually played villains when he wasn’t playing Holmes! To me — as I’m fond of paraphrasing the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia” — Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes (his height, his rangy athlete’s build, his aquiline nose and his ramrod-straight posture made him looked like he’d walked out of one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations of Holmes in The Strand Magazine and come to life, and he spoke in the crisp, authoritative tones in which I’d always heard Holmes’ dialogue in my mind’s ear when I read the stories), but Cumberbatch is quite a good one even if not at the level of Rathbone, Robert Stephens or Jeremy Brett (and, as I noted in my comments on the 1922 silent Sherlock Holmes, it’s really a pity we don’t have a talkie with John Barrymore as Holmes — in my dream world of unmade movies, along with a Falstaff with W. C. Fields and a Great Gatsby with Cary Grant, is a 1932 Sherlock Holmes remake with John Barrymore repeating as Holmes and his brother Lionel as Professor Moriarty! — while it occurred to me the last time I saw the 1947 thriller Lured that George Sanders would have made a quite good Holmes if he hadn’t reached his artistic and commercial peak at a time when Rathbone owned Holmes on the big screen).
The show I picked was a PBS showing of a recent episode of Sherlock, the engaging Sherlock Holmes update from the BBC (the official production credits on imdb.com are to “Hartswood Films,” “BBC Wales” and “Masterpiece Theatre,” the overall PBS rubric on which this and a lot of other British productions receive their U.S. airings on PBS) that’s already in its fourth season at home and its third season here — though it counts as more of a mini-series than a series because only three or four episodes are made each year. The series stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Hamish Watson (the full middle name is actually a key plot point in this episode), and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” posting Holmes’ parents are played by Benedict Cumberbatch’s real parents, and Amanda Abbington, the actress who plays Mary Morstan — Watson’s girlfriend, who became his wife in last night’s show, “The Sign of Three” (like all the Sherlock episode titles, it’s both copied and “twisted” from an original Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four) — really is the life partner of Martin Freeman. “The Sign of Three” is a reworking of one of the quirkiest stories in the canon, a novel-length saga about the Sholto family and their criminal doings and mis-doings in India and attempts to atone for them through their treatment of Mary — and the original Conan Doyle story has been filmed more or less come scritto several times, including an excellent 1932 version from Britain directed by Graham Cutts (a leading British director in the early 1920’s and a mentor to Alfred Hitchcock, who worked as an assistant director on Cutts’ films before getting the chance to direct himself) with Arthur Wontner in the best of his four extant performances as Holmes.
“The Sign of Three” is a quirky presentation in that most of it is built around the planning of John Watson’s and Mary Morstan’s wedding — though a casual piece of dialogue from Cumberbatch as Holmes indicates they’re already living (and presumably sleeping) together and therefore Holmes sees no point in them renting a church for an afternoon and a party hall for an evening. Naturally, Watson has asked Holmes to be his best man, and this requires Holmes to prepare and deliver a speech at the ceremony — during which he can’t help but express his decidedly cynical views about marriage, love and relationships generally (writers Steven Thompson, Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss — the latter two also listed as the show’s creators — even incorporate Holmes’ famous comment in one of the Conan Doyle stories that love and sex are important to the criminal investigator as motives for crimes but that he personally isn’t interested in pursuing either — words that should have been emblazoned in the minds of the writers for the American Holmes update Elementary, which has been annoyingly false to Conan Doyle’s characterization of both Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft as essentially asexual, and instead has had them rutting around all over the place) — and for some reason he starts reminiscing about two recent cases he hasn’t been able to solve. One was the near-murder of a guardsman who was locked into a shower stall and stabbed (fortunately, when the body was discovered both Holmes and Watson were on hand, and Watson was able to use his medical skills to save the man’s life, pressing Holmes into service as a reluctant nurse; one thing I like about this Sherlock is Watson is presented as an intelligent character in his own right and not a Nigel Bruce-style doofus!) — and, praise be, director Colm McCarthy gives us some choice glimpses of the guardsman’s bare chest which add to the aesthetic appeal of this show! The other was called “The Mayfly,” and was about a man who had dates with at least five women, taking them to the homes of recently deceased people and leaving them with the distinct impression that they had gone out with a ghost — only it turns out, in keeping with the spirit of Conan Doyle (who occasionally led his late-Victorian readers up the garden path by hinting at a supernatural explanation for the crimes in the Holmes stories but ultimately resolved the stories in a physically possible manner), that this was simply an ordinary human being who was faking being a ghost. It turns out that all five women were part of the service staff of Major James Sholto (Alistair Petrie), who in this version was nothing more than Dr. Watson’s commanding officer when he served in Afghanistan (it’s one of the ironies, made much of by the Sherlock writers, that 120 years after Conan Doyle had Holmes greet Watson with the famous line, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” the U.K. was involved in another war in Afghanistan, so that part of the story didn’t have to be changed!) and a heavily guarded man because of all the terrorists out there who want to kill him. Holmes deduces that there is a murderer out to get Sholto, and he romanced the maids to get information about him and his habits. He also staged the attack on the guardsman as a rehearsal for the murder method he planned to use on Sholto: a spring-loaded dagger blade concealed in the belt buckle of his uniform, so it would go off and he would be stabbed as soon as he unbuckled his belt.
For the first half of “The Sign of Three” (the title seems to refer to Holmes, Watson and Mary Morstan) I fidgeted and wondered, “When is someone going to commit a crime so this episode will be interesting?” Then the criminal intrigue emerged and the show got a lot better! I like Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes — though Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, albeit not as attractive or personable, seems closer to the Holmes Conan Doyle created, with his more imperious manner and crisper diction — and I can see why this show has made him an international star. Indeed, I thought it ironic when a lot of people criticized the most recent Star Trek movie for casting Cumberbatch as a villain when he’d become known for playing Holmes — I pointed out to Charles that the greatest screen Holmes of all, Basil Rathbone, usually played villains when he wasn’t playing Holmes! To me — as I’m fond of paraphrasing the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia” — Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes (his height, his rangy athlete’s build, his aquiline nose and his ramrod-straight posture made him looked like he’d walked out of one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations of Holmes in The Strand Magazine and come to life, and he spoke in the crisp, authoritative tones in which I’d always heard Holmes’ dialogue in my mind’s ear when I read the stories), but Cumberbatch is quite a good one even if not at the level of Rathbone, Robert Stephens or Jeremy Brett (and, as I noted in my comments on the 1922 silent Sherlock Holmes, it’s really a pity we don’t have a talkie with John Barrymore as Holmes — in my dream world of unmade movies, along with a Falstaff with W. C. Fields and a Great Gatsby with Cary Grant, is a 1932 Sherlock Holmes remake with John Barrymore repeating as Holmes and his brother Lionel as Professor Moriarty! — while it occurred to me the last time I saw the 1947 thriller Lured that George Sanders would have made a quite good Holmes if he hadn’t reached his artistic and commercial peak at a time when Rathbone owned Holmes on the big screen).
Sunday, September 13, 2015
The Murder Pact (Synthetic Cinema International, Stargazer Films, Lifetime, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was The Murder Pact, an unusually well done thriller (especially considering the source!) which begins with a nice-looking but rather, shall we say, heavy-set young woman named Camille (Alexa PenaVega — that odd spelling of her last name, with the two words jammed together but with a capital letter in the middle as if she were a computer program, is what both the official credits and imdb.com gave us) belting out a power-rock ballad as an audition piece for some bored Broadway producers who are really looking for an established star to play the lead in their next show and only agreed to see her as a favor to her 1-percenter boyfriend Will LaSalle (Beau Mirchoff). Will seems to have it all — money, social position and good looks — and he never lets anyone forget it; he’s officially engaged to Camille but that doesn’t stop him from bedding any young woman who’ll hold still for him. What’s more, he’s got his bedroom bugged so he can photograph his sexual encounters and relive the experiences any time he wants by playing them on his laptop. The principals are Camilla, Will, Will’s less secure friend Rick (Michael J. Willett, who incidentally has his hair dyed blonde on his imdb.com head shot though he’s dark-haired in this movie) and Annabel (Renée Olstead), a hanger-on and (of course) occasional trick of Will’s who’s also an aspiring dancer and is super-concerned about her weight.
All of them are students at Camden College, a New England university whose most prominent architectural feature is a spectacularly ugly round building that looks like Frank Gehry re-imagined the Capitol Tower. Will has living parents but they almost never see him — a picture of his dad hangs over his mantel as if it’s keeping an eye on him, but we never see his mom at all and his dad (John Heard) only makes a brief surprise appearance towards the end to warn Will that he can do everything he likes as long as he doesn’t besmirch the LaSalle family name. If he does, dad solemnly warns Will, he’ll be disinherited at once. That happens in the middle of an event that has completely discombobulated Will’s carefully constructed life: Heidi (Madeleine Dauer), yet another young co-ed Will has got drunk, drugged and put the make on, takes a tumble off the railing on one of the Camden dorm balconies and falls to her death. It appears to be an accident — director Colin Theys, working from a script by John Doolan, makes it look even to us as if that particular section of the railing was just loose and gave way under Heidi’s weight — but while the altercation on the balcony was going on a student photographer named Lisa (Sara Kapner) happened by and took photos of the whole thing. Lisa contacts Will and his friends and threatens to blackmail them, demanding $4 million for the photos or she’ll take them to the police and Will will get popped for Heidi’s murder. The four principals meet to discuss how they’re going to handle the situation and collectively decide that as members of the financial and social elite they have way too much to live for to let a nobody from “the other side of the tracks” as Lisa get in the way and threaten their futures. So, at Will’s instigation, they decide they’re simply going to kill her.
Will insists that Camille, as the queasiest and most conscience-stricken of the four, commit the actual murder, and so Camille wraps an industrial plastic bag over Lisa’s head and knocks her off. Then Will buries her under the floorboards of his family home’s basement — in a plot twist writer Doolan admitted in the credits he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (he bills it as an “adaptation” of the Poe story, which it really isn’t, though his script invokes several Poe tales, including “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial”) — he says he saw Lisa’s eyes twitch as they were sealing the floorboards back over her, and Camille assures her she did the job right and Lisa is dead. Only the conspirators keep reporting sightings of items of Lisa’s they buried with her but seem to be coming back to life, as if she were still alive and haunting them — and their consciences affect Rick and Annabel to the point where Rick starts doing drugs and gets himself kicked off the school’s rowing team, and Annabel gets lost during a ballet rehearsal in which she and the corps are supposed to be doing a routine to Richard Rodgers’ “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Just when those about him are freaking out — and Rick has become the apparent third victim, falling off his rowboat in a drug-induced stupor and ending up comatose after one of his teammates inadvertently hit him under water with his oar — Will’s dad flies back from Europe (and almost immediately leaves again, as if even he can’t stand being around this self-indulgent, arrogant psycho creep he has somehow fathered) and gives him the warning about being allowed to do anything he wants (was his dad really including murder in that?) as long as he doesn’t besmirch the family name. The film builds to a trick ending [big-time spoiler alert!] in which it turns out Camille and Lisa plotted the whole thing; Camille merely faked killing Lisa and let her out again after Will left the basement, and Lisa set up all the mysterious “appearances” of her stuff — including her camera, whose materialization in Rick’s bedroom was what drove him to his overdose. They did it not only to split the $4 million in blackmail money they finally got Will to pay (Will starts to key in the password to his cell phone to transfer the money to the account Lisa had set up to receive it, then drops his phone and Camille picks it up and completes the transaction) but also to teach Will a lesson in humility and show him he can’t just go through his life treating other people like garbage without facing the consequences.
Writer Doolan even did something I was suspecting he would when Camille’s opening audition scene resulted in her not getting the part because no one had ever heard of her: he ripped off Chicago for a tag scene in which the producer and director (the same ones) call another audition and recognize her instantly as the woman whose photo was shown everywhere in connection with Will’s arrest (though it’s not clear just what Will got arrested for — since Lisa didn’t die and the other two deaths in the story were genuinely accidental, the most he could get popped for was attempted murder). Doolan even created an eccentric character, Detective Dakoulas (Sean Patrick Thomas), an African-American who seems through most of the movie to be doing the Columbo schtick and trying to annoy Will and his (presumed) co-conspirators into confessing, but in the end he turns out to be someone Camille and Lisa recruited from a Camden College acting class (though he’s so much older than the other protagonists it would be more believable if we were told he was an acting teacher) to pose as a cop for their scheme. The Murder Pact is actually well done, a genuinely suspenseful thriller with a legitimate surprise ending, and though some of it seems a bit arbitrary — the climax takes place at a masquerade ball Will is throwing (a family tradition he insists on carrying on even though his folks, who usually host it, are out of town) that seems more to reflect a desire on the part of writer Doolan and director Theys to do a knockoff of Eyes Wide Shut (also a story of decadence among the 1 percent!) than anything else — and the moral about spoiled rich kids thinking they can do literally anything they like because their (or their parents’) money will always be there to buy them out of it is done well here but was done even better in the previous Lifetime movie Restless Virgins — for the most part this is an amazing film, and it’s especially nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which the two male protagonists are definitely exciting, hot young men (Beau Mirchoff as Will even has something of a James Dean quality, though Dean never played a character who was born to this much money), even though inevitably, given Lifetime’s well-established iconography, hot young man = black-hearted villain!
Last night’s Lifetime movie was The Murder Pact, an unusually well done thriller (especially considering the source!) which begins with a nice-looking but rather, shall we say, heavy-set young woman named Camille (Alexa PenaVega — that odd spelling of her last name, with the two words jammed together but with a capital letter in the middle as if she were a computer program, is what both the official credits and imdb.com gave us) belting out a power-rock ballad as an audition piece for some bored Broadway producers who are really looking for an established star to play the lead in their next show and only agreed to see her as a favor to her 1-percenter boyfriend Will LaSalle (Beau Mirchoff). Will seems to have it all — money, social position and good looks — and he never lets anyone forget it; he’s officially engaged to Camille but that doesn’t stop him from bedding any young woman who’ll hold still for him. What’s more, he’s got his bedroom bugged so he can photograph his sexual encounters and relive the experiences any time he wants by playing them on his laptop. The principals are Camilla, Will, Will’s less secure friend Rick (Michael J. Willett, who incidentally has his hair dyed blonde on his imdb.com head shot though he’s dark-haired in this movie) and Annabel (Renée Olstead), a hanger-on and (of course) occasional trick of Will’s who’s also an aspiring dancer and is super-concerned about her weight.
All of them are students at Camden College, a New England university whose most prominent architectural feature is a spectacularly ugly round building that looks like Frank Gehry re-imagined the Capitol Tower. Will has living parents but they almost never see him — a picture of his dad hangs over his mantel as if it’s keeping an eye on him, but we never see his mom at all and his dad (John Heard) only makes a brief surprise appearance towards the end to warn Will that he can do everything he likes as long as he doesn’t besmirch the LaSalle family name. If he does, dad solemnly warns Will, he’ll be disinherited at once. That happens in the middle of an event that has completely discombobulated Will’s carefully constructed life: Heidi (Madeleine Dauer), yet another young co-ed Will has got drunk, drugged and put the make on, takes a tumble off the railing on one of the Camden dorm balconies and falls to her death. It appears to be an accident — director Colin Theys, working from a script by John Doolan, makes it look even to us as if that particular section of the railing was just loose and gave way under Heidi’s weight — but while the altercation on the balcony was going on a student photographer named Lisa (Sara Kapner) happened by and took photos of the whole thing. Lisa contacts Will and his friends and threatens to blackmail them, demanding $4 million for the photos or she’ll take them to the police and Will will get popped for Heidi’s murder. The four principals meet to discuss how they’re going to handle the situation and collectively decide that as members of the financial and social elite they have way too much to live for to let a nobody from “the other side of the tracks” as Lisa get in the way and threaten their futures. So, at Will’s instigation, they decide they’re simply going to kill her.
Will insists that Camille, as the queasiest and most conscience-stricken of the four, commit the actual murder, and so Camille wraps an industrial plastic bag over Lisa’s head and knocks her off. Then Will buries her under the floorboards of his family home’s basement — in a plot twist writer Doolan admitted in the credits he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (he bills it as an “adaptation” of the Poe story, which it really isn’t, though his script invokes several Poe tales, including “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial”) — he says he saw Lisa’s eyes twitch as they were sealing the floorboards back over her, and Camille assures her she did the job right and Lisa is dead. Only the conspirators keep reporting sightings of items of Lisa’s they buried with her but seem to be coming back to life, as if she were still alive and haunting them — and their consciences affect Rick and Annabel to the point where Rick starts doing drugs and gets himself kicked off the school’s rowing team, and Annabel gets lost during a ballet rehearsal in which she and the corps are supposed to be doing a routine to Richard Rodgers’ “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Just when those about him are freaking out — and Rick has become the apparent third victim, falling off his rowboat in a drug-induced stupor and ending up comatose after one of his teammates inadvertently hit him under water with his oar — Will’s dad flies back from Europe (and almost immediately leaves again, as if even he can’t stand being around this self-indulgent, arrogant psycho creep he has somehow fathered) and gives him the warning about being allowed to do anything he wants (was his dad really including murder in that?) as long as he doesn’t besmirch the family name. The film builds to a trick ending [big-time spoiler alert!] in which it turns out Camille and Lisa plotted the whole thing; Camille merely faked killing Lisa and let her out again after Will left the basement, and Lisa set up all the mysterious “appearances” of her stuff — including her camera, whose materialization in Rick’s bedroom was what drove him to his overdose. They did it not only to split the $4 million in blackmail money they finally got Will to pay (Will starts to key in the password to his cell phone to transfer the money to the account Lisa had set up to receive it, then drops his phone and Camille picks it up and completes the transaction) but also to teach Will a lesson in humility and show him he can’t just go through his life treating other people like garbage without facing the consequences.
Writer Doolan even did something I was suspecting he would when Camille’s opening audition scene resulted in her not getting the part because no one had ever heard of her: he ripped off Chicago for a tag scene in which the producer and director (the same ones) call another audition and recognize her instantly as the woman whose photo was shown everywhere in connection with Will’s arrest (though it’s not clear just what Will got arrested for — since Lisa didn’t die and the other two deaths in the story were genuinely accidental, the most he could get popped for was attempted murder). Doolan even created an eccentric character, Detective Dakoulas (Sean Patrick Thomas), an African-American who seems through most of the movie to be doing the Columbo schtick and trying to annoy Will and his (presumed) co-conspirators into confessing, but in the end he turns out to be someone Camille and Lisa recruited from a Camden College acting class (though he’s so much older than the other protagonists it would be more believable if we were told he was an acting teacher) to pose as a cop for their scheme. The Murder Pact is actually well done, a genuinely suspenseful thriller with a legitimate surprise ending, and though some of it seems a bit arbitrary — the climax takes place at a masquerade ball Will is throwing (a family tradition he insists on carrying on even though his folks, who usually host it, are out of town) that seems more to reflect a desire on the part of writer Doolan and director Theys to do a knockoff of Eyes Wide Shut (also a story of decadence among the 1 percent!) than anything else — and the moral about spoiled rich kids thinking they can do literally anything they like because their (or their parents’) money will always be there to buy them out of it is done well here but was done even better in the previous Lifetime movie Restless Virgins — for the most part this is an amazing film, and it’s especially nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which the two male protagonists are definitely exciting, hot young men (Beau Mirchoff as Will even has something of a James Dean quality, though Dean never played a character who was born to this much money), even though inevitably, given Lifetime’s well-established iconography, hot young man = black-hearted villain!
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