by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening
(http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted
of two films of quite different levels of artistic interest and quality. The
first was a 1967 production from Hammer Films called … well, in its native
Britain it was called Quatermass and the Pit, but in the U.S. it was retitled Five Million
Years to Earth. The reason for the title
change was it was actually based on the third of four British TV miniseries
written by Nigel Kneale and based on the character of Professor Bernard
Quatermass (Andrew Keir), an annoying know-it-all who specializes in
investigating whatsis’s and whatnots from outer space. The series began with The
Quatermass Experiment in 1955 and that got
turned into a film — as did its immediate sequel — with U.S. actor Brian
Donlevy as Quatermass. Though Kneale had to wait nine years for this set of TV
scripts to be turned into a movie (the first two Quatermass serials had been
filmed within a year or two after the TV versions), he said it was the first
film he’d actually liked because he though Andrew Keir a far better Quatermass
than Donlevy, whom he described as an old U.S. character actor who was a
hopeless alcoholic by the time the Quatermass films were made. (Incidentally
I’d always assumed the name was pronounced like the word “quarter” with the
first “r” removed, but the people in the movie pronounce the first two
syllables to rhyme with “crater” — to my mind a much less attractive sound.) I
must admit to a certain prejudice against this movie because of the
circumstances under which I first saw it — it was double-billed with another
Hammer production, a pretty standard sword-and-sandals film called The
Viking Queen (which I liked better then
but probably wouldn’t now), and my mom, my brother and I walked in on Five
Million Years to Earth in the
middle, tried to make heads or tails of what was going on, and ultimately tried
the old trick of staying long enough through the next showing at least to see
what we’d missed — and this is decidedly not a film that works seen out of sequence.
In
sequence, it seems a mixed bag, a surprising attempt given Hammer’s usual
orientation (which was to take the old Universal monster movies and up both the
sex and the gore) to do a Val Lewton-style chiller in which, at least until the
end, the menace is unseen. The plot is about a group of workers at the Hobbs
Lane subway station in London who are digging tunnels for an extension of the
line until they uncover what look like human remains — only they’re not human: they’re ape-men who inhabited the planet
five million years previously and they have much larger skulls than any known
hominids, living or fossil, which presumably means they had bigger brains. The
subway workers keep digging until they find a solid object that at first they
believe — and the authorities concur — is a leftover bomb from World War II.
But eventually they realize that it’s actually a spaceship and the ape-men were
either the inhabitants of the ship from another planet or the aliens
jump-started evolution and we’re the result. This is classed as a Mars movie
because that’s supposedly where the aliens came from originally — the theory
being that they could transport themselves between the planets but lacked the
technology to make it here from another solar system — and while much of it is
just people arguing either at the site of the excavation or in offices
(Quatermass’s particular bane is British army colonel Breen, played by Julian
Glover, who insists on treating the site as a bomb threat even when it’s
apparent to virtually everyone else in the movie that it’s more than that),
there are some quite good effects in which the evil energy lurking around the
site makes the walls shake, blows crockery off shelves (in one scene a
bartender serves Quatermass a whiskey in a coffee cup and apologizes, saying
that the whatsit has broken all his good glasses) and in general menaces the
surrounding population while itself remaining invisible.
Unfortunately, though
Kneale wrote the script himself and Roy Ward Baker (whose presence puts
everyone in this cast one degree of separation from Marilyn Monroe; her first
top-billed movie, 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock, was directed by Baker) directed (quite
effectively, given how much of this film takes place in tightly enclosed
spaces), the “suits” at Hammer couldn’t resist a full-bore visible monster in
the final reel, something which looks like a piece of cotton candy floating in
mid-air and which is annihilated by one of the film’s leads, anthropologist Dr.
Matthew Roney (James Donald, top-billed), when he smashes a construction crane
into it, though apparently at the cost of his own life. Five Million Years
to Earth is a difficult film to
evaluate because it’s obviously trying so hard to be subtle, to be different,
to be something beyond Hammer’s normal fare at the time — but at the same time
it’s awfully dull through much of the running time and the human conflicts are
pretty stock for this sort of drama (science vs. duty, and also the sexual
conflicts involved since there’s one token woman in the dramatis personae, Barbara Judd, played by Barbara Shelley, though
she comes off pretty much as just “one of the boys” instead of a possible
romantic or sexual crush object). It’s a movie that still doesn’t work for me
even though I liked it a lot better than I had the first time around!
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Friday, May 18, 2018
Hitler’s England (British and American Public Television, 2017)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a fascinating British documentary from their History series, “Hitler’s England,” about the German occupation of the British Channel Islands, a small archipelago about 14 miles from the British coast across the English Channel (and therefore actually closer, geographically, to France than Britain, which may explain why a lot of the Channel Islanders have French-sounding names — including Bob Le Sueur, the principal interviewee). In 1940 the Nazis landed troops on the Channel Islands — Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Aldoney — which then, as now, had an anomalous status politically: though they were under the direct sovereignty of the British Crown they were not officially part of the United Kingdom. Even someone as stalwart as Winston Churchill realized early on that the Channel Islands were indefensible and allowed the German armies to march in there (or fly in on transport planes small enough for the Jersey and Guernsey airports to accommodate them) and take over. For the first two years, 1940 to 1942, the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was actually relatively humane — the Germans put a decent and sympathetic general in charge, life on the islands (best known for their farm products and the famous Jersey and Guernsey cattle) went on pretty much as before, and the 18 Jews left on the islands after most of them were evacuated to Britain itself were mostly left alone — but in 1942 Hitler and his crew turned up the screws on the islanders.
One young Jewish woman named Theresa Schmidt suffered the wretched luck of being on Guernsey when the occupation started; she was working as a nanny for a well-to-do British couple and they fled on one of the last boats from the islands back to the official U.K., but Theresa was ineligible because she was Austrian, and since the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 the British had considered Austria legally part of Germany, so poor Theresa was declared an “enemy alien” and marked for deportation. She ended up in Auschwitz and survived about a year there before disappearing from the records, presumably worked to death as a slave laborer and then dumped in one of the infamous ovens. The Nazis’ change of attitude towards the Channel Islanders was fallout from Hitler’s decision in 1941 to invade the Soviet Union and seek Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Germans by expropriating and slaughtering the supposedly genetically inferior Slavs — though it’s not mentioned in this program, Hitler never wanted to be at war with Britain because he regarded the Brits, along with Germans and Scandinavians, as part of his mythical Aryan “master race” — while at the same time he ordered the creation of the Atlantic Wall, a network of mass fortifications stretching across the coast from Denmark to the border between France and Spain. Since there weren’t enough physical resources or willing workers to build the giant forts Hitler had in mind, he impressed Russian prisoners of war into service as slave laborers and shipped them to, among other places, the Channel Islands, where because of their proximity to France he intended to make them one of the bulwarks of his defense against an Allied invasion. It was the arrival of the Russians — near-death, many wearing rags on their feet instead of shoes in a cold English Channel winter, and forced to labor on these insane fortifications through which Hitler, like other dictators before and since, thought he could permanently wall himself off from his enemies — that awoke the Channel Islanders to what the war and the Nazis were really like.
The show, hosted by Midsomer Murders star John Nettles — who’s also an historian who’s written a book about the Channel Islands occupation, Jewels and Jackboots, and who got interested in the history of the Channel Islands because his previous detective series, Bergerac (1981-1991), was set there (and the program showed a still of him from 1991 that made him look quite sexy and hot, far from the rumpled “British Columbo” he appeared as in Midsomer Murders) — interviewed quite a number of survivors from the occupation days, including Molly Bihet (who wrote her own memoir called A Child’s War), Thomas Renfrey (among a number of Channel Islanders who were forcibly taken to Germany and interned there, where they remained for about two years until the Allies won the overall war and liberated them) and Werner and Phyllis Rung — she was a nurse on the island and he was a German medic; they met when he had to treat her for tonsillitis and after the war they re-met in 1947 and eventually married (and they’re both still alive, still together and were jointly interviewed even though he, despite having been married to a British woman for 70 years, still barely knows English and had to be interviewed in German with a voice-over translation). To say this is a little-known chapter in the history of World War II would be an understatement — I’d never heard of it before and even Charles had known that the tiny island of Sark had been occupied but hadn’t known that about the relatively larger Jersey and Guernsey — yet it’s also a fascinating one and shows how it really was a world war, reaching into even the remotest places where people were used to just being left alone!
Last night at 10 p.m. I watched a fascinating British documentary from their History series, “Hitler’s England,” about the German occupation of the British Channel Islands, a small archipelago about 14 miles from the British coast across the English Channel (and therefore actually closer, geographically, to France than Britain, which may explain why a lot of the Channel Islanders have French-sounding names — including Bob Le Sueur, the principal interviewee). In 1940 the Nazis landed troops on the Channel Islands — Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Aldoney — which then, as now, had an anomalous status politically: though they were under the direct sovereignty of the British Crown they were not officially part of the United Kingdom. Even someone as stalwart as Winston Churchill realized early on that the Channel Islands were indefensible and allowed the German armies to march in there (or fly in on transport planes small enough for the Jersey and Guernsey airports to accommodate them) and take over. For the first two years, 1940 to 1942, the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was actually relatively humane — the Germans put a decent and sympathetic general in charge, life on the islands (best known for their farm products and the famous Jersey and Guernsey cattle) went on pretty much as before, and the 18 Jews left on the islands after most of them were evacuated to Britain itself were mostly left alone — but in 1942 Hitler and his crew turned up the screws on the islanders.
One young Jewish woman named Theresa Schmidt suffered the wretched luck of being on Guernsey when the occupation started; she was working as a nanny for a well-to-do British couple and they fled on one of the last boats from the islands back to the official U.K., but Theresa was ineligible because she was Austrian, and since the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 the British had considered Austria legally part of Germany, so poor Theresa was declared an “enemy alien” and marked for deportation. She ended up in Auschwitz and survived about a year there before disappearing from the records, presumably worked to death as a slave laborer and then dumped in one of the infamous ovens. The Nazis’ change of attitude towards the Channel Islanders was fallout from Hitler’s decision in 1941 to invade the Soviet Union and seek Lebensraum (“living space”) for the Germans by expropriating and slaughtering the supposedly genetically inferior Slavs — though it’s not mentioned in this program, Hitler never wanted to be at war with Britain because he regarded the Brits, along with Germans and Scandinavians, as part of his mythical Aryan “master race” — while at the same time he ordered the creation of the Atlantic Wall, a network of mass fortifications stretching across the coast from Denmark to the border between France and Spain. Since there weren’t enough physical resources or willing workers to build the giant forts Hitler had in mind, he impressed Russian prisoners of war into service as slave laborers and shipped them to, among other places, the Channel Islands, where because of their proximity to France he intended to make them one of the bulwarks of his defense against an Allied invasion. It was the arrival of the Russians — near-death, many wearing rags on their feet instead of shoes in a cold English Channel winter, and forced to labor on these insane fortifications through which Hitler, like other dictators before and since, thought he could permanently wall himself off from his enemies — that awoke the Channel Islanders to what the war and the Nazis were really like.
The show, hosted by Midsomer Murders star John Nettles — who’s also an historian who’s written a book about the Channel Islands occupation, Jewels and Jackboots, and who got interested in the history of the Channel Islands because his previous detective series, Bergerac (1981-1991), was set there (and the program showed a still of him from 1991 that made him look quite sexy and hot, far from the rumpled “British Columbo” he appeared as in Midsomer Murders) — interviewed quite a number of survivors from the occupation days, including Molly Bihet (who wrote her own memoir called A Child’s War), Thomas Renfrey (among a number of Channel Islanders who were forcibly taken to Germany and interned there, where they remained for about two years until the Allies won the overall war and liberated them) and Werner and Phyllis Rung — she was a nurse on the island and he was a German medic; they met when he had to treat her for tonsillitis and after the war they re-met in 1947 and eventually married (and they’re both still alive, still together and were jointly interviewed even though he, despite having been married to a British woman for 70 years, still barely knows English and had to be interviewed in German with a voice-over translation). To say this is a little-known chapter in the history of World War II would be an understatement — I’d never heard of it before and even Charles had known that the tiny island of Sark had been occupied but hadn’t known that about the relatively larger Jersey and Guernsey — yet it’s also a fascinating one and shows how it really was a world war, reaching into even the remotest places where people were used to just being left alone!
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Wanted (Universal, Spyglass Pictures, Relativity Media, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Wanted is a 2008 thriller from Universal and its partners, Spyglass Pictures and Relativity Media, based on a series of comic books published in 2004 and created by writer Mark Millar and artist J. G. Jones. Last night my husband Charles went through our extensive backlog of recent but not current DVD’s we’ve accumulated over the years and picked out seven, from which he wanted me to pick the fare we would experience. I went for Wanted largely because the plot synopsis on imdb.com — “A young man finds out his long-lost father is an assassin. When his father is murdered, the son is recruited into his father’s old organization and trained by a man named Sloan to follow in his dad’s footsteps” — made it seem like a modern-day film noir, especially since I didn’t read the synopsis too closely and thought the hero would be a police officer and his goal would be to infiltrate the assassins’ organization in an attempt to bring it down legally. In fact Wanted stemmed from a childhood fantasy about writer Millar about a comic-book world without superheroes because super-villains would have killed them all — and the original models he and Jones had in mind for how the characters should look were rapper Eminem for the central protagonist (you can’t really call him a “hero”!) and Halle Berry for the mysterious woman who recruits him to the assassination bureau, who quite frankly would have been better choices for the movie than the ones the filmmakers (director Timur Bekmambetov and writers Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan) ultimately came up with, James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie.
The opening scene shows Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy, who’s made one truly great movie — Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, in which he played the defense attorney for Mary Surratt, accused and ultimately executed for having been part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln — and appeared as the younger version of Patrick Stewart’s character in some of the X-Men films; he deserves a better fate than an endless string of movies based on comic books!) in bed dreaming a cosmic dream in which he’s an action hero vanquishing his foes in physically impossible ways. Then he wakes up in bed next to a girlfriend who can’t care less about him — he laconically notes that his best friend regularly has sex with her as we see the best friend doing so — and gets ready for a boring accounting job in which he’s being hounded by boss-from-hell Janice (Lorna Scott), a heavy-set woman with candy-colored hair and a big cleavage, to stop having Walter Mitty-esque fantasies and get out the long-overdue billing report already … or else. Then his father — or at least the man he thinks is his father, though there’s no indication that they ever had a parental relationship — is gunned down by a member of the Fraternity of Assassins, an organization we are supposed to believe has been in existence for 1,000 years without registering on the radar screen of normal humanity. A mystery woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) tells Wesley that the only way he can avenge his father is to join the Fraternity, take their Assassination 101 training course (which is probably not that different from the way the CIA trains its agents) and kill his father’s killer, Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) — only midway through the movie we get the predictable Big Switcheroo: Cross is Wesley’s father (we never get an explanation for who the other guy was or what Cross’s relationship to him was like), and while the long-lost-father schtick is probably as old as the ancient Greeks it’s almost certain the writing committee on this project ripped it off from Darth Vader telling Luke Skywalker, “I am your father,” in the original Star Wars trilogy.
It’s never made clear how the Fraternity of Assassins selects its victims or what is the central authority ordering the hits — all we learn is that the original founders a millennium ago were weavers in their spare time and the Fraternity still gives its members instructions via a code woven on cloth samples — but we are told that the current U.S. headquarters of the Fraternity (there’s an international headquarters, too) is in a converted textile mill that offers cover. There are action sequences galore, including one — a train wreck in Switzerland (at least I think it was Switzerland) in which the engineer’s precipitate action in pulling the emergency brake while the train is midway across the bridge leads to its derailment and the collapse of most of the cars off the bridge (“There go a lot of extras as collateral damage the filmmakers don’t care about,” I rather grimly joked), and the big confrontation between Cross and Wesley in which Cross reveals he’s Wesley’s real father takes place while they’re both suspended inside a railroad car that’s about to fall in the abyss … though they both survive. Indeed, the most irritating thing about Wanted is that, though the screenwriters eliminated any supernatural or super-powerful characters from the plot, they also constructed their story with a cheery indifference to the normal laws of physics: we see bullets turn and change course in mid-air (apparently we’re supposed to believe that among the skills the Fraternity teaches its trainees is to make bullets bend in mid-air), we see bullets hit each other in space and knock each other out, we see characters take tumbles over precipices and live to tell the tale with no account of how that happened; and indeed there are so many lapses from conventional reality that I expected the entire film to turn out to be a dream at the end, The Wizard of Oz-style, perhaps with a tag borrowed from Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window in which, having dreamed himself into a film noir situation involving Joan Bennett as a femme fatale, Edward G. Robinson sees a girl who looks just like her and runs away, I would have delighted in seeing the waking Wesley encounter Angelina Jolie as a new worker in his office and get away from her as fast as he could.
The film’s big switcheroo in the middle at least means that Morgan Freeman as Sloan, the head of training at Fraternity Central and the one who first orders Wesley trained as an assassin and then receives an order to kill him, starts out as his usual éminence noir character and ends up a villain, determined to take over the Fraternity and offer its services to the highest bidder. As I noted above, it’s not all that clear who was selecting the victims before that, or why — though there’s a hint that the writers intended something of a religious metaphor and the Fraternity members are simply the instruments of fate, killing people who are about to die (or are destined to die) anyway. Our biggest clue in that direction is when Sloan, at the film’s final climax, orders Fox to shoot Wesley and says, “Let us take our Fraternity of assassins to heights reserved only for the gods of men! You choose.” (She chooses, in yet another one of this film’s incredibly annoying contraventions of the laws of physics, to shoot a bullet that spirals around the room and kills everyone there except Wesley, including herself.) Wanted is a frustrating movie that wastes an excellent cast and a potentially compelling premise (though from what I’ve read about the original comics, which is only the Wikipedia page about them, they may have been even sillier: among the super-villains the screenwriters decided to omit was “Shithead, a monster made with the feces of 666 of the most evil people on Earth, including Hitler”), and when Wesley asked at the end of the movie the rhetorical question, “What the fuck have you done lately?,” I couldn’t resist the answer, “Well, I just wasted two hours of my life watching a really stupid movie.” Indeed, this is the sort of film that seems to invite Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style jokes; when Wesley asked Angelina Jolie’s character if she’d ever done anything normal, I was tempted to say, “Well, I tried marrying Brad Pitt, but that didn’t work out … ”
Wanted is a 2008 thriller from Universal and its partners, Spyglass Pictures and Relativity Media, based on a series of comic books published in 2004 and created by writer Mark Millar and artist J. G. Jones. Last night my husband Charles went through our extensive backlog of recent but not current DVD’s we’ve accumulated over the years and picked out seven, from which he wanted me to pick the fare we would experience. I went for Wanted largely because the plot synopsis on imdb.com — “A young man finds out his long-lost father is an assassin. When his father is murdered, the son is recruited into his father’s old organization and trained by a man named Sloan to follow in his dad’s footsteps” — made it seem like a modern-day film noir, especially since I didn’t read the synopsis too closely and thought the hero would be a police officer and his goal would be to infiltrate the assassins’ organization in an attempt to bring it down legally. In fact Wanted stemmed from a childhood fantasy about writer Millar about a comic-book world without superheroes because super-villains would have killed them all — and the original models he and Jones had in mind for how the characters should look were rapper Eminem for the central protagonist (you can’t really call him a “hero”!) and Halle Berry for the mysterious woman who recruits him to the assassination bureau, who quite frankly would have been better choices for the movie than the ones the filmmakers (director Timur Bekmambetov and writers Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan) ultimately came up with, James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie.
The opening scene shows Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy, who’s made one truly great movie — Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, in which he played the defense attorney for Mary Surratt, accused and ultimately executed for having been part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln — and appeared as the younger version of Patrick Stewart’s character in some of the X-Men films; he deserves a better fate than an endless string of movies based on comic books!) in bed dreaming a cosmic dream in which he’s an action hero vanquishing his foes in physically impossible ways. Then he wakes up in bed next to a girlfriend who can’t care less about him — he laconically notes that his best friend regularly has sex with her as we see the best friend doing so — and gets ready for a boring accounting job in which he’s being hounded by boss-from-hell Janice (Lorna Scott), a heavy-set woman with candy-colored hair and a big cleavage, to stop having Walter Mitty-esque fantasies and get out the long-overdue billing report already … or else. Then his father — or at least the man he thinks is his father, though there’s no indication that they ever had a parental relationship — is gunned down by a member of the Fraternity of Assassins, an organization we are supposed to believe has been in existence for 1,000 years without registering on the radar screen of normal humanity. A mystery woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) tells Wesley that the only way he can avenge his father is to join the Fraternity, take their Assassination 101 training course (which is probably not that different from the way the CIA trains its agents) and kill his father’s killer, Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) — only midway through the movie we get the predictable Big Switcheroo: Cross is Wesley’s father (we never get an explanation for who the other guy was or what Cross’s relationship to him was like), and while the long-lost-father schtick is probably as old as the ancient Greeks it’s almost certain the writing committee on this project ripped it off from Darth Vader telling Luke Skywalker, “I am your father,” in the original Star Wars trilogy.
It’s never made clear how the Fraternity of Assassins selects its victims or what is the central authority ordering the hits — all we learn is that the original founders a millennium ago were weavers in their spare time and the Fraternity still gives its members instructions via a code woven on cloth samples — but we are told that the current U.S. headquarters of the Fraternity (there’s an international headquarters, too) is in a converted textile mill that offers cover. There are action sequences galore, including one — a train wreck in Switzerland (at least I think it was Switzerland) in which the engineer’s precipitate action in pulling the emergency brake while the train is midway across the bridge leads to its derailment and the collapse of most of the cars off the bridge (“There go a lot of extras as collateral damage the filmmakers don’t care about,” I rather grimly joked), and the big confrontation between Cross and Wesley in which Cross reveals he’s Wesley’s real father takes place while they’re both suspended inside a railroad car that’s about to fall in the abyss … though they both survive. Indeed, the most irritating thing about Wanted is that, though the screenwriters eliminated any supernatural or super-powerful characters from the plot, they also constructed their story with a cheery indifference to the normal laws of physics: we see bullets turn and change course in mid-air (apparently we’re supposed to believe that among the skills the Fraternity teaches its trainees is to make bullets bend in mid-air), we see bullets hit each other in space and knock each other out, we see characters take tumbles over precipices and live to tell the tale with no account of how that happened; and indeed there are so many lapses from conventional reality that I expected the entire film to turn out to be a dream at the end, The Wizard of Oz-style, perhaps with a tag borrowed from Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window in which, having dreamed himself into a film noir situation involving Joan Bennett as a femme fatale, Edward G. Robinson sees a girl who looks just like her and runs away, I would have delighted in seeing the waking Wesley encounter Angelina Jolie as a new worker in his office and get away from her as fast as he could.
The film’s big switcheroo in the middle at least means that Morgan Freeman as Sloan, the head of training at Fraternity Central and the one who first orders Wesley trained as an assassin and then receives an order to kill him, starts out as his usual éminence noir character and ends up a villain, determined to take over the Fraternity and offer its services to the highest bidder. As I noted above, it’s not all that clear who was selecting the victims before that, or why — though there’s a hint that the writers intended something of a religious metaphor and the Fraternity members are simply the instruments of fate, killing people who are about to die (or are destined to die) anyway. Our biggest clue in that direction is when Sloan, at the film’s final climax, orders Fox to shoot Wesley and says, “Let us take our Fraternity of assassins to heights reserved only for the gods of men! You choose.” (She chooses, in yet another one of this film’s incredibly annoying contraventions of the laws of physics, to shoot a bullet that spirals around the room and kills everyone there except Wesley, including herself.) Wanted is a frustrating movie that wastes an excellent cast and a potentially compelling premise (though from what I’ve read about the original comics, which is only the Wikipedia page about them, they may have been even sillier: among the super-villains the screenwriters decided to omit was “Shithead, a monster made with the feces of 666 of the most evil people on Earth, including Hitler”), and when Wesley asked at the end of the movie the rhetorical question, “What the fuck have you done lately?,” I couldn’t resist the answer, “Well, I just wasted two hours of my life watching a really stupid movie.” Indeed, this is the sort of film that seems to invite Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style jokes; when Wesley asked Angelina Jolie’s character if she’d ever done anything normal, I was tempted to say, “Well, I tried marrying Brad Pitt, but that didn’t work out … ”
Monday, May 14, 2018
Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance (Crown Productions, Silver Screen Pictures, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched Lifetime’s highly hyped — indeed, over-hyped — instant biopic Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance, directed by Menhaj Huda (the name sounds East Indian but he was actually born in Bangladesh — still the same subcontinent! — and that makes it rather nice that a country Britain formerly colonized has contributed a director dramatizing the doings and misdoings of the British royals) from a script by Scarlett Lacey and Terrence Coll (was it a stipulation of the producers that both the screenwriters had to have pretentiously spelled first names?) ripped from the headlines virtually everyone has been following lately. Not me, though; I generally have little or no interest in the royal family or the British upper classes in general (though I found Princess Diana fascinating enough I read Andrew Morton’s biography of her while she was still alive) — despite all my friends telling me how good it was I never watched a single episode of Downton Abbey — and my feeling was that if the guy who’s about fifth or sixth in line for the British throne (his father Charles, his elder brother William and William’s kids are all ahead of him) wants to marry an American actress who became a star on Canadian television (she was apparently in the USA Network series Suits, which I watched occasionally but never particularly noticed her) who’s a divorcée and also half-Black, that’s nobody’s business but theirs.
As things turned out, Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance turned out to be acceptable entertainment and something of a relief — hemmed in by the real events they couldn’t make one of the lovers psychopathic (I can see it now: Psycho Prince, The Perfect Prince, The Wrong Prince, Devious Prince, or The Prince She Met Online). Writers Lacey and Coll sprinkle their script with some wicked wit — I loved the scene of their first blind date when Meghan and Harry ask each other what they do for a living. “I’m sort of an actress,” Meghan says, to which Harry replies, “I’m sort of a Prince of England.” The writers manage to shoehorn the real story into the clichés of romantic fiction, complete with a couple of obligatory misunderstandings between the lovers that temporarily derail their relationship (including one in which Harry puts out a blistering statement criticizing the paparazzi for going after Meghan’s family — paparazzi are a particularly sore point with him because he buys into the common view that paparazzi effectively killed his mom — only instead of being proud of him, Meghan tears into him for treating her like a fairy-tale “damsel in distress” that needs his protection) and the final hurdle in which, thanks to a Royal Marriages Act passed by Parliament in 1772 (if I’m recalling the date correctly), in order to marry Harry and Meghan need the permission of the current monarch. Oddly, the actress playing Queen Elizabeth isn’t listed on the imdb.com page for this film, but she’s first-rate and manages to humanize the character while still making her seem properly forbidding.
During the week Lifetime has been showing promos for this movie, including an interview with the casting director talking about how difficult it was to find actors to play the leads, and in Murray Fraser they found a perfect Prince Harry: drop-dead gorgeous (he could be my prince any time!), infectiously charming and a radiant personality one could imagine any straight woman or Gay man falling for instantly even if he didn’t come from one of the world’s most famous (and richest!) families. Parisa Fitz-Henley as Meghan isn’t quite as brilliant a personality but she’s thoroughly believable in the role. Also interesting is that at least at first, Prince William (Burgess Abernethy) and his wife Kate Middleton (Laura Mitchell) are cast as the villains of the piece: William is shown as almost as stuck-up as his famously stuck-up dad Prince Charles (Steve Coulter) and, despite the precedent-breaking nature of their own marriage (because Kate was a commoner when she and William tied the knot), they’re nervous about Harry marrying someone who’s a) an American, b) a divorcée and c) half-Black. Wallis Simpson naturally gets mentioned twice in the dialogue — a reference to the fooforaw in 1936 over King Edward VIII’s intent on marrying her even though she was American, divorced and had lived in China for a while, during which (it was rumored) she had worked as a high-class prostitute servicing Chinese men with the hots for white women. Harry and Meghan (the Lifetime movie) is a charming piece of entertainment, with lots of engaging soft-core porn between the leads, and some good supporting performances (notably Bonnie Soper as Princess Diana, even though she’s only seen briefly in flashbacks), and it was a nice, harmless 2 ½ hours (a half-hour longer than your typical Lifetime movie) entertainment.
I watched Lifetime’s highly hyped — indeed, over-hyped — instant biopic Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance, directed by Menhaj Huda (the name sounds East Indian but he was actually born in Bangladesh — still the same subcontinent! — and that makes it rather nice that a country Britain formerly colonized has contributed a director dramatizing the doings and misdoings of the British royals) from a script by Scarlett Lacey and Terrence Coll (was it a stipulation of the producers that both the screenwriters had to have pretentiously spelled first names?) ripped from the headlines virtually everyone has been following lately. Not me, though; I generally have little or no interest in the royal family or the British upper classes in general (though I found Princess Diana fascinating enough I read Andrew Morton’s biography of her while she was still alive) — despite all my friends telling me how good it was I never watched a single episode of Downton Abbey — and my feeling was that if the guy who’s about fifth or sixth in line for the British throne (his father Charles, his elder brother William and William’s kids are all ahead of him) wants to marry an American actress who became a star on Canadian television (she was apparently in the USA Network series Suits, which I watched occasionally but never particularly noticed her) who’s a divorcée and also half-Black, that’s nobody’s business but theirs.
As things turned out, Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance turned out to be acceptable entertainment and something of a relief — hemmed in by the real events they couldn’t make one of the lovers psychopathic (I can see it now: Psycho Prince, The Perfect Prince, The Wrong Prince, Devious Prince, or The Prince She Met Online). Writers Lacey and Coll sprinkle their script with some wicked wit — I loved the scene of their first blind date when Meghan and Harry ask each other what they do for a living. “I’m sort of an actress,” Meghan says, to which Harry replies, “I’m sort of a Prince of England.” The writers manage to shoehorn the real story into the clichés of romantic fiction, complete with a couple of obligatory misunderstandings between the lovers that temporarily derail their relationship (including one in which Harry puts out a blistering statement criticizing the paparazzi for going after Meghan’s family — paparazzi are a particularly sore point with him because he buys into the common view that paparazzi effectively killed his mom — only instead of being proud of him, Meghan tears into him for treating her like a fairy-tale “damsel in distress” that needs his protection) and the final hurdle in which, thanks to a Royal Marriages Act passed by Parliament in 1772 (if I’m recalling the date correctly), in order to marry Harry and Meghan need the permission of the current monarch. Oddly, the actress playing Queen Elizabeth isn’t listed on the imdb.com page for this film, but she’s first-rate and manages to humanize the character while still making her seem properly forbidding.
During the week Lifetime has been showing promos for this movie, including an interview with the casting director talking about how difficult it was to find actors to play the leads, and in Murray Fraser they found a perfect Prince Harry: drop-dead gorgeous (he could be my prince any time!), infectiously charming and a radiant personality one could imagine any straight woman or Gay man falling for instantly even if he didn’t come from one of the world’s most famous (and richest!) families. Parisa Fitz-Henley as Meghan isn’t quite as brilliant a personality but she’s thoroughly believable in the role. Also interesting is that at least at first, Prince William (Burgess Abernethy) and his wife Kate Middleton (Laura Mitchell) are cast as the villains of the piece: William is shown as almost as stuck-up as his famously stuck-up dad Prince Charles (Steve Coulter) and, despite the precedent-breaking nature of their own marriage (because Kate was a commoner when she and William tied the knot), they’re nervous about Harry marrying someone who’s a) an American, b) a divorcée and c) half-Black. Wallis Simpson naturally gets mentioned twice in the dialogue — a reference to the fooforaw in 1936 over King Edward VIII’s intent on marrying her even though she was American, divorced and had lived in China for a while, during which (it was rumored) she had worked as a high-class prostitute servicing Chinese men with the hots for white women. Harry and Meghan (the Lifetime movie) is a charming piece of entertainment, with lots of engaging soft-core porn between the leads, and some good supporting performances (notably Bonnie Soper as Princess Diana, even though she’s only seen briefly in flashbacks), and it was a nice, harmless 2 ½ hours (a half-hour longer than your typical Lifetime movie) entertainment.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Devious Nanny (MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the latest Lifetime movie, Devious Nanny, originally run last March (they’ve moved the night of their “premieres” from Saturday to Sunday and tonight they’re running an instant biopic of Prince Harry of Britain and his bride-to-be, divorced American actress Meghan Markle). I had to check my back files to make sure I hadn’t watched this one before — this has been a frequent Lifetime trope since 2000, when Christine Conradt made her writing debut for them with a script called The Perfect Nanny, and they’ve also done Psycho Nanny and Nanny Killer (though in that one the nanny was the good girl and the bad girl was a Mrs. Danvers-esque servant who also lived in the big house where she worked) as well as a few nasty stories about men doing that sort of job (the inelegant term is “manny,” which flummoxed Microsoft Word’s auto-correction system). Devious Nanny begins with an odd sequence in which a nubile young blonde is murdered by a mysterious assailant who strangles her on the kitchen floor; then the credits come up without giving us any idea of who these people are or why one of them is killing the other, though we assume that the murderess is the devious nanny, Amber Duchanel (Olesya Rulin), who will figure in the main plot. The main plot consists of advertising agent Brian Simon (Antonio Cupo, considerably hotter than the norm for a Lifetime husband) and his wife Elise (Michelle Borth, top-billed), who are in the market for a nanny — an “au pair,” as they call her (obviously we’re supposed to look askance at these people’s pretensions in using the French term!) — to be a household servant and also look after their son Cody (Matteo Oropeza).
Brian has just landed his agency an account potentially worth $25 million a year, a huge step up, and he and his co-worker Vance Lipton (Michael Roark) whoop it up so enthusiastically at the news that it looks like the mysterious indiscretion Elise is still trying to forgive Brian for is not an affair with a woman but a secret Gay relationship with Vance. Actually, though, Vance is the sort of Duke of Mantua type who’ll have sex with anything as long as it’s alive, human and female, and he tries to get Brian to join him for a night on the town in which they’ll hang out at bars, drink a lot and pick up women for one-night stands — only Brian is too attentive to his marriage to take Vance up on it. Instead he heads home, though later there’s a party Brian and Elise throw to celebrate the new account, and there Vance makes some crude passes at Amber. Later the boss of his agency, Parsons — a woman Brian calls the “ice queen” because of her formidable demeanor — takes the account away from Brian and gives it to Vance. She says it’s because the client wants just one person responsible for the account, but later Brian learns that the real reason Vance got the account is he and Parsons are having an affair. This doesn’t stop Vance from tom-catting around, though, and the next time we see him he’s in a cheap motel room waiting for the prostitute he’s ordered — she shows up in an outrageously phony red wig, sort of like the shade Cyndi Lauper is wearing in those current commercials advertising a psoriasis treatment, and when he answers her knock she whips out a knife and stabs him in the chest. Later the art gallery Elise Simon owns is vandalized by a greedy developer, George Dutros (Nicholas Guest), who wants to cancel her lease so he can build condos on the site — only he gets his too, also from a knife to the chest, when he’s scouting a junkyard as another possible redevelopment site.
The cops, in the person of African-American woman Detective Bennett (Erika Ringor) and her partner, white male Detective Scalise (Andrew Pagana) — if either of these characters had first names I don’t recall them being mentioned in Adam Rockoff’s script — target Brian Simon as their principal suspect in these murders, since he stood to gain the account back from eliminating Vance and his wife stood to gain by the death of Dutros — but we’re carefully led to believe that the Devious Nanny Amber Duchanel is the real culprit, especially after the wife traces Amber to the home of her friend and confidant Jax (Skyler Wright). Later she visits Jax and learns that Amber and Jax met at a group home for orphans — Amber’s parents died in a car crash when Amber was 10 — and were never adopted, and Amber faked her résumé to get the nanny job at the Simons’. After that, though, Jax also gets the mysterious knock on her door that admits a disguised assailant who fatally stabs her in the chest. The police by this time have decided Brian didn’t commit the murders and fasten on Amber as the likeliest suspect, and when Amber gets home she and Elise get into one of the nastiest and most bruising fistfights ever filmed between two women — judging from the way Elise handles herself, we get the impression she was a professional woman boxer before the married Brian and started the art gallery — and Elise looks like she’s about to strangle Amber to death when Brian gets back home and pulls his wife off her. This gives Amber a chance to escape, and then we get the big switcheroo [big-time spoiler alert!]: the real killer was Elise, who hired Amber because her husband had cheated with their previous nanny (and had once during the course of the film had sex with Amber himself in a nice soft-core porn scene of the type Lifetime used to do more of than they do now) and she decided that the way to win him back was knock off the previous nanny and then eliminate anyone who was in the way of either Brian’s or Elise’s economic well-being.
Brian is horrified by the news and is ready to call the police to report his wife, but she says that if he does so he’ll lose his job, his house and his reputation and he’ll have to work menial jobs to support himself and Cody as a single father, while if he keeps quiet and stays with her no one will know and they’ll be able to go on with their successful lifestyle. Brian wavers a moment, in a scene that’s the only major acting challenge for Antonio Cupo in this film (otherwise he’s just been called on to walk around in various stages of scanty dress and flash an enviably large basket at the straight female and Gay male viewers), but he ultimately yields to his wife and they form an uneasy peace for six months, sort of like the Macbeths, until a deus ex machina arrives in the form of a flash drive containing a video from Amber, who has sent two copies — one to the Simons and one to the police — explaining the whole thing. The last scene shows Brian and Elise alone in their living room as we hear sirens from the cars of the police who are about to arrest them both. Devious Nanny is an O.K. Lifetime movie — Olesya Rulin doesn’t play perky-psycho anywhere nearly as well as Sydney Sweeney did in The Wrong Daughter (which they re-ran right after this), though perhaps that’s explicable because she’s supposed to be a decent, if rather twitchy, girl at the end, and the acting generally is a bit better than the Lifetime norm. But it’s still a melodramatic and overwrought melodrama, co-directed by Devon Downs and Kenny Gage in all-out neo-Gothic style and with a script by Adam Rockoff (“Rockoff” is almost as embarrassing a name for a Lifetime writer as “Kymlicka”!) that pushes the melodrama and sets us up for a “surprise” ending that’s really not that much of a surprise — maybe if they’d gone for the Lifetime set of clichés in which the husband and the nanny are having an affair and conspiring to frame the wife to get her money, it might have worked better.
I watched the latest Lifetime movie, Devious Nanny, originally run last March (they’ve moved the night of their “premieres” from Saturday to Sunday and tonight they’re running an instant biopic of Prince Harry of Britain and his bride-to-be, divorced American actress Meghan Markle). I had to check my back files to make sure I hadn’t watched this one before — this has been a frequent Lifetime trope since 2000, when Christine Conradt made her writing debut for them with a script called The Perfect Nanny, and they’ve also done Psycho Nanny and Nanny Killer (though in that one the nanny was the good girl and the bad girl was a Mrs. Danvers-esque servant who also lived in the big house where she worked) as well as a few nasty stories about men doing that sort of job (the inelegant term is “manny,” which flummoxed Microsoft Word’s auto-correction system). Devious Nanny begins with an odd sequence in which a nubile young blonde is murdered by a mysterious assailant who strangles her on the kitchen floor; then the credits come up without giving us any idea of who these people are or why one of them is killing the other, though we assume that the murderess is the devious nanny, Amber Duchanel (Olesya Rulin), who will figure in the main plot. The main plot consists of advertising agent Brian Simon (Antonio Cupo, considerably hotter than the norm for a Lifetime husband) and his wife Elise (Michelle Borth, top-billed), who are in the market for a nanny — an “au pair,” as they call her (obviously we’re supposed to look askance at these people’s pretensions in using the French term!) — to be a household servant and also look after their son Cody (Matteo Oropeza).
Brian has just landed his agency an account potentially worth $25 million a year, a huge step up, and he and his co-worker Vance Lipton (Michael Roark) whoop it up so enthusiastically at the news that it looks like the mysterious indiscretion Elise is still trying to forgive Brian for is not an affair with a woman but a secret Gay relationship with Vance. Actually, though, Vance is the sort of Duke of Mantua type who’ll have sex with anything as long as it’s alive, human and female, and he tries to get Brian to join him for a night on the town in which they’ll hang out at bars, drink a lot and pick up women for one-night stands — only Brian is too attentive to his marriage to take Vance up on it. Instead he heads home, though later there’s a party Brian and Elise throw to celebrate the new account, and there Vance makes some crude passes at Amber. Later the boss of his agency, Parsons — a woman Brian calls the “ice queen” because of her formidable demeanor — takes the account away from Brian and gives it to Vance. She says it’s because the client wants just one person responsible for the account, but later Brian learns that the real reason Vance got the account is he and Parsons are having an affair. This doesn’t stop Vance from tom-catting around, though, and the next time we see him he’s in a cheap motel room waiting for the prostitute he’s ordered — she shows up in an outrageously phony red wig, sort of like the shade Cyndi Lauper is wearing in those current commercials advertising a psoriasis treatment, and when he answers her knock she whips out a knife and stabs him in the chest. Later the art gallery Elise Simon owns is vandalized by a greedy developer, George Dutros (Nicholas Guest), who wants to cancel her lease so he can build condos on the site — only he gets his too, also from a knife to the chest, when he’s scouting a junkyard as another possible redevelopment site.
The cops, in the person of African-American woman Detective Bennett (Erika Ringor) and her partner, white male Detective Scalise (Andrew Pagana) — if either of these characters had first names I don’t recall them being mentioned in Adam Rockoff’s script — target Brian Simon as their principal suspect in these murders, since he stood to gain the account back from eliminating Vance and his wife stood to gain by the death of Dutros — but we’re carefully led to believe that the Devious Nanny Amber Duchanel is the real culprit, especially after the wife traces Amber to the home of her friend and confidant Jax (Skyler Wright). Later she visits Jax and learns that Amber and Jax met at a group home for orphans — Amber’s parents died in a car crash when Amber was 10 — and were never adopted, and Amber faked her résumé to get the nanny job at the Simons’. After that, though, Jax also gets the mysterious knock on her door that admits a disguised assailant who fatally stabs her in the chest. The police by this time have decided Brian didn’t commit the murders and fasten on Amber as the likeliest suspect, and when Amber gets home she and Elise get into one of the nastiest and most bruising fistfights ever filmed between two women — judging from the way Elise handles herself, we get the impression she was a professional woman boxer before the married Brian and started the art gallery — and Elise looks like she’s about to strangle Amber to death when Brian gets back home and pulls his wife off her. This gives Amber a chance to escape, and then we get the big switcheroo [big-time spoiler alert!]: the real killer was Elise, who hired Amber because her husband had cheated with their previous nanny (and had once during the course of the film had sex with Amber himself in a nice soft-core porn scene of the type Lifetime used to do more of than they do now) and she decided that the way to win him back was knock off the previous nanny and then eliminate anyone who was in the way of either Brian’s or Elise’s economic well-being.
Brian is horrified by the news and is ready to call the police to report his wife, but she says that if he does so he’ll lose his job, his house and his reputation and he’ll have to work menial jobs to support himself and Cody as a single father, while if he keeps quiet and stays with her no one will know and they’ll be able to go on with their successful lifestyle. Brian wavers a moment, in a scene that’s the only major acting challenge for Antonio Cupo in this film (otherwise he’s just been called on to walk around in various stages of scanty dress and flash an enviably large basket at the straight female and Gay male viewers), but he ultimately yields to his wife and they form an uneasy peace for six months, sort of like the Macbeths, until a deus ex machina arrives in the form of a flash drive containing a video from Amber, who has sent two copies — one to the Simons and one to the police — explaining the whole thing. The last scene shows Brian and Elise alone in their living room as we hear sirens from the cars of the police who are about to arrest them both. Devious Nanny is an O.K. Lifetime movie — Olesya Rulin doesn’t play perky-psycho anywhere nearly as well as Sydney Sweeney did in The Wrong Daughter (which they re-ran right after this), though perhaps that’s explicable because she’s supposed to be a decent, if rather twitchy, girl at the end, and the acting generally is a bit better than the Lifetime norm. But it’s still a melodramatic and overwrought melodrama, co-directed by Devon Downs and Kenny Gage in all-out neo-Gothic style and with a script by Adam Rockoff (“Rockoff” is almost as embarrassing a name for a Lifetime writer as “Kymlicka”!) that pushes the melodrama and sets us up for a “surprise” ending that’s really not that much of a surprise — maybe if they’d gone for the Lifetime set of clichés in which the husband and the nanny are having an affair and conspiring to frame the wife to get her money, it might have worked better.
Robert Montgomery Presents: “Harvest” (NBC-TV, Neptune Productions, November 23, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Devious Nanny I screened Charles the next item in sequence from the boxed set of most of James Dean’s surviving TV appearances: Harvest, in a series called Robert Montgomery Presents that was sponsored in alternate weeks by Johnson’s Wax (who did this episode) and Lucky Strike cigarettes. (Cigarette advertising has been banned from TV for so long it’s startling to see shows from when it was still permitted!) Harvest is a rather downbeat story about a farm family from Minnesota who as the show starts are about to harvest the year’s wheat crop. The family consists of the grandfather (Vaughn Taylor) who originally homesteaded the farm decades earlier and now is waiting for his 100th birthday; his son Karl Zalinka (Ed Begley) and daughter-in-law Ellen (Dorothy Gish, Lillian’s sister and a major stage star who was the main selling point for this show); and their three sons, Joe (John Dennis), Chuck (John Connell) and Paul (James Dean, who according to imdb.com was put in at the last minute after the originally cast Dick Van Patten was drafted — though Van Patten was later classified 4-F; for anyone like me whose main memory of Dick Van Patten is as the father on Eight Is Enough, in which he was so large and doughy he looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread, the idea that he was ever up for a role eventually played by James Dean is pretty bizarre).
At the time the story opens Joe and Chuck have long since left the farm, and Paul is on his way out too; he’s determined to take off as soon as the crop is harvested and has an affair going with a city girl named Arlene (Rebecca Welles — no relation). Only the harvest doesn’t come in because the night before they’re supposed to cut the wheat and start bringing in the year’s crop, a freak hailstorm (powerfully suggested, Val Lewton-style, with sound effects and just a few white spots falling in front of the cameras) ruins it and leaves the Zalinkas broke and with nothing to show for a whole year’s work. Paul takes off for the city to visit Arlene and her family, only there he runs into her other boyfriend Kip (Tommy Taylor), who since he’s from her economic and social background has the inside track for her affections. Paul slinks off and walks by a recruiting poster for the U.S. Navy, which he immediately decides to join (ironically he’d played a sailor in one of his tiny film roles to that point, the 1952 Martin and Lewis service vehicle Sailor Beware). Grandpa predictably dies just two weeks shy of his 100th birthday (by coincidence I had just read Jonathan Kellerman’s Heartbreak Hotel, also about a person — a woman in Kellerman’s book — who dies just shy of her 100th birthday) and Karl demands that the rest of his family join them for Thanksgiving dinner to give Grandpa a proper send-off.
Joe is working in a store and has to ask his boss for time off; Paul, as a servicemember, has to ask his commanding officer for leave; Chuck is “between jobs” and ultimately decides to stay behind and take over the farm after Karl croaks, so both he and we are relieved that the homestead will continue in the Zelinka family. Harvest is a simple and oddly moving drama by writer Sandra Mitchell that’s hampered by an overwrought production, including Robert Montgomery himself narrating the story and offering superfluous explanations of what’s going on, as well as a God-awful Abbey Rents chorus intoning “America, the Beautiful,” “Bless This House,” the Albert Hay Mallotte setting of “The Lord’s Prayer” (those last two selections led me to joke, “Where’s Mahalia Jackson when we need her?”) and other supposedly “inspirational” selections. Though Harvest would have been considerably stronger if the producers and director James Sheldon had trusted Mitchell’s story structure and dialogue to tell her story without the excrescences, it’s still a surprisingly good program and one of the few times in his career that James Dean fitted himself into an ensemble cast instead of standing out like an alienated sore thumb. Not only did the story provide Dean with a role close to his own past — he’d grown up on the Indiana farm of his uncle and aunt, Marcus and Ortense Winslow — Harvest is an almost uncanny anticipation of Dean’s first starring film, East of Eden, which also cast him as the son of a farmer who’s ruined financially by bad luck. According to Marcus Winslow, Jr., Dean’s cousin, who was chosen to introduce the shows in this box, director Sheldon got along with Dean considerably better than most of his TV directors; Sheldon remembered Dean as outgoing and fully cooperative, not the introverted troublemaker most Dean directors described. Perhaps the similarities of the story to his own life made him more at ease and more understanding of the character, the story and the overall work situation.
After Devious Nanny I screened Charles the next item in sequence from the boxed set of most of James Dean’s surviving TV appearances: Harvest, in a series called Robert Montgomery Presents that was sponsored in alternate weeks by Johnson’s Wax (who did this episode) and Lucky Strike cigarettes. (Cigarette advertising has been banned from TV for so long it’s startling to see shows from when it was still permitted!) Harvest is a rather downbeat story about a farm family from Minnesota who as the show starts are about to harvest the year’s wheat crop. The family consists of the grandfather (Vaughn Taylor) who originally homesteaded the farm decades earlier and now is waiting for his 100th birthday; his son Karl Zalinka (Ed Begley) and daughter-in-law Ellen (Dorothy Gish, Lillian’s sister and a major stage star who was the main selling point for this show); and their three sons, Joe (John Dennis), Chuck (John Connell) and Paul (James Dean, who according to imdb.com was put in at the last minute after the originally cast Dick Van Patten was drafted — though Van Patten was later classified 4-F; for anyone like me whose main memory of Dick Van Patten is as the father on Eight Is Enough, in which he was so large and doughy he looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread, the idea that he was ever up for a role eventually played by James Dean is pretty bizarre).
At the time the story opens Joe and Chuck have long since left the farm, and Paul is on his way out too; he’s determined to take off as soon as the crop is harvested and has an affair going with a city girl named Arlene (Rebecca Welles — no relation). Only the harvest doesn’t come in because the night before they’re supposed to cut the wheat and start bringing in the year’s crop, a freak hailstorm (powerfully suggested, Val Lewton-style, with sound effects and just a few white spots falling in front of the cameras) ruins it and leaves the Zalinkas broke and with nothing to show for a whole year’s work. Paul takes off for the city to visit Arlene and her family, only there he runs into her other boyfriend Kip (Tommy Taylor), who since he’s from her economic and social background has the inside track for her affections. Paul slinks off and walks by a recruiting poster for the U.S. Navy, which he immediately decides to join (ironically he’d played a sailor in one of his tiny film roles to that point, the 1952 Martin and Lewis service vehicle Sailor Beware). Grandpa predictably dies just two weeks shy of his 100th birthday (by coincidence I had just read Jonathan Kellerman’s Heartbreak Hotel, also about a person — a woman in Kellerman’s book — who dies just shy of her 100th birthday) and Karl demands that the rest of his family join them for Thanksgiving dinner to give Grandpa a proper send-off.
Joe is working in a store and has to ask his boss for time off; Paul, as a servicemember, has to ask his commanding officer for leave; Chuck is “between jobs” and ultimately decides to stay behind and take over the farm after Karl croaks, so both he and we are relieved that the homestead will continue in the Zelinka family. Harvest is a simple and oddly moving drama by writer Sandra Mitchell that’s hampered by an overwrought production, including Robert Montgomery himself narrating the story and offering superfluous explanations of what’s going on, as well as a God-awful Abbey Rents chorus intoning “America, the Beautiful,” “Bless This House,” the Albert Hay Mallotte setting of “The Lord’s Prayer” (those last two selections led me to joke, “Where’s Mahalia Jackson when we need her?”) and other supposedly “inspirational” selections. Though Harvest would have been considerably stronger if the producers and director James Sheldon had trusted Mitchell’s story structure and dialogue to tell her story without the excrescences, it’s still a surprisingly good program and one of the few times in his career that James Dean fitted himself into an ensemble cast instead of standing out like an alienated sore thumb. Not only did the story provide Dean with a role close to his own past — he’d grown up on the Indiana farm of his uncle and aunt, Marcus and Ortense Winslow — Harvest is an almost uncanny anticipation of Dean’s first starring film, East of Eden, which also cast him as the son of a farmer who’s ruined financially by bad luck. According to Marcus Winslow, Jr., Dean’s cousin, who was chosen to introduce the shows in this box, director Sheldon got along with Dean considerably better than most of his TV directors; Sheldon remembered Dean as outgoing and fully cooperative, not the introverted troublemaker most Dean directors described. Perhaps the similarities of the story to his own life made him more at ease and more understanding of the character, the story and the overall work situation.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
State Fair (20th Century-Fox, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles joined me at 9 p.m. and I ran us the 1945 musical film State Fair, which I’d been interested in since we’d just seen a stage adaptation by the amateur Looking Glass Theatre at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego and wanted to go back to the source … sort of. I wrote some of the background information about State Fair in my journal for May 5, the day after Charles and I saw the stage version, so I’ll quote it here: State Fair was the only Rodgers and Hammerstein show that was actually first written as a movie and only later adapted for the stage. It began life as a 1932 novel by an author named Phil Stong which critic Thomas Leslie describes as “a surprisingly dark coming-of-age story that took as its major plot device the effects of the ‘worldly temptations’ of the Iowa State Fair on a local farming family,” and whose climax is an automobile race which Wayne Frake, the son of a farming family who have come up from rural Iowa to Des Moines to see and compete in the Iowa State Fair, and also features both Wayne and his sister Margy having sex with people they’ve met at the fair: Wayne with a woman entertainer who turns down his marriage proposal because she doesn’t want the life of a farmer’s wife, and Margy with a reporter who’s there to cover the fair. Stong’s novel was a best-seller and the Fox Film Corporation bought the movie rights, and in 1933 they filmed State Fair as a non-musical with Janet Gaynor as Margy, Will Rogers as her father Abel, Louise Dresser as her mom Melissa, Lew Ayres as the reporter Pat, Norman Foster as Wayne and Sally Eilers (a talented actress who should have had a bigger career than she did) as Emily, the entertainer Wayne falls for, though the film had a considerably happier ending than the book. (Margy returns to the farm and her dull rural boyfriend Harry in the novel; she leaves rural Iowa and marries Pat in the 1933 film and virtually all the subsequent adaptations.) It would probably be an interesting movie, especially since the director was Henry King and he was especially noted for getting understated performances from his casts, but what made the story enduringly popular was the second film, which I have seen. By then Fox had merged with Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures and the combined studio was noted for big, splashy musicals in Technicolor. Noting the box-office success of the first Rodgers and Hammerstein stage show, Oklahoma!, Zanuck and his lieutenants decided to hire them to turn State Fair into a similarly themed agricultural musical, with Hammerstein writing the script as well as the song lyrics.
They cast Jeanne Crain as Margy, Dana Andrews as reporter Pat (and Hammerstein had them pair up at the end instead of letting Margy go back to her farm life and the hayseed boyfriend who wants to keep her rural), Dick Haymes as Wayne, Charles Winninger taking over Will Rogers’ role as the father (later Winninger would play a former Rogers character again in The Sun Shines Bright, a 1953 sequel made by John Ford to his 1934 Rogers vehicle Judge Priest) and some glorious songs like “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” and “It Might As Well Be Spring,” sung early on by Margy to lament her staid life as a farm girl and her “wishing I were somewhere else” — in other words, it’s her “Over the Rainbow.” Obviously 20th Century-Fox hired Rodgers and Hammerstein to “musicalize” State Fair after the smash success of their first professional collaboration, 1943’s stage musical Oklahoma! and also MGM’s 1944 blockbuster Meet Me in St. Louis, and what was most surprising about the 1945 film was how closely the later stage adaptation tracks it. The 1945 State Fair featured Oscar Hammerstein II as screenwriter as well as lyricist, though the credits list Sonya Levien and Paul Green as “adapting” Phil Stong’s original novel because they wrote the script for the 1933 film, including its altered and much less bittersweet ending. (Frankly, I think Stong’s original ending makes more dramatic sense: the piece would be a lot more powerful if both the Frake children returned to the farm and their romantic pair-ups at the State Fair remained only bittersweet memories.) I was a bit surprised that I’d misremembered at least one key detail of the 1945 film: I had thought the beautiful romantic ballad “That’s for Me” was sung by Dick Haymes. It wasn’t; instead it was sung by Vivian Blaine in her role as Emily, who in this version was not a free-lance entertainer but a band singer with a group led by “Tommy Thomas” (the actor’s name isn’t listed on imdb.com even though other players with more miniscule roles are), and Haymes’ big vocal feature is a duet with Blaine on a song called “Isn’t It Kind of Fun?” that a song-plugger tricks Wayne into placing with Thomas’s band. Blaine sings “That’s for Me” acceptably but with the sort of disinterested air of most female band singers both in movies and in real life — to hear this song done right, one has to go to the record Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars made in 1950. Armstrong may not be the first person you’d think of for a romantic ballad, but his vocal musicianship and especially his phrasing are superb and unbeatable. (That’s what comes from being a genius instrumentalist as well as a singer.)
There were some obvious differences between what a theatre company (especially an amateur one) could do with this story and what major-studio filmmakers could (albeit with a weak director like Walter Lang, 20th Century-Fox’s go-to guy for a lot of their big musicals in the 1940’s and 1950’s; his work is acceptable but one really misses the beauty and style Vincente Minnelli brought to a similar story in Meet Me in St. Louis): we actually get some vertiginous shots of the roller-coaster and other thrill rides reporter Pat (played by Dana Andrews with a sort of bored hauteur as if he were thinking, “I’ve proved I can act in The Ox-Bow Incident and Laura — why are they still giving me shit like this?”) takes farm-girl Margy on, as if his way of seducing her is literally agitating her, and we also get to see as on-screen characters the Frakes’ prize-winning hog, Blue Boy, as well as his chief competitor Whirlwind and his girlfriend Esmeralda, a brown Duroc pig (I remembered “Durocs” as the nom de groupe of Ron Nagle and his songwriting partner Scott Matthews — the liner notes of the LP explained that the band name came from a sort of pig, and the cover was a cartoon of a big-assed pig, but I’d never heard of a Duroc in context before) whose mere presence lightens up the nervous Blue Boy and enables him to win the hog-raising contest. State Fair suffers from one lead who couldn’t sing and one who wasn’t allowed to; Dana Andrews had a professional-quality baritone voice but no one told the “suits” at 20th Century-Fox that, so they hired Ben Gage (briefly the husband of Esther Williams) to dub him; and Jeanne Crain really couldn’t sing, so her vocals — including the best song from this score, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” which won the Academy Award for Best Song — were dubbed by Louanne Hogan, who performs the great song credibly even though she’s no match for Sarah Vaughan, who recorded it at least twice (1946 with John Kirby and 1950 with Miles Davis) and sang it better than anyone else.
Indeed, I couldn’t help but wish Fox could have got Judy Garland to play Margy — not only because she could sing but also she was a far credible actress who could have made Margy’s mixed-up emotions more believable — and Doris Day as Emily, but Garland would have required an expensive loan-out deal with MGM and Day was still toiling in the vineyards of Les Brown’s band and wouldn’t make her first movie for another three years. I also wish they would have got W. C. Fields to play the crooked carnival barker whose rigged ring-toss game Wayne is determined to beat — in 1945 Fields had only a year left to live and was too sick to do anything more than short roles, but the character only appears in one scene and Fields could have handled it magnificently. Instead the part went to the young Henry Morgan — referencing his long run on the TV series M*A*S*H, I joked, “Now we know what he did before he went to Korea!” (“And also,” I added, “before he became Glenn Miller’s piano player,” the role he played in the biopic The Glenn Miller Story.) All in all, the 1945 State Fair is a quite enjoyable movie — though it might have come off better if Charles and I hadn’t just seen the stage version, which copied much of Hammerstein’s script almost word for word — maybe not the film it could have been (and suffering from two pairs of leads who look an awful lot like each other — at times the only way you can tell Jeanne Crain and Vivian Blaine apart is Crain’s hair is black and Blaine’s is red, and Dana Andrews and Dick Haymes likewise look enough alike that if the script said they were brothers, you’d believe it) but a glorious Technicolor showcase for some fine Rodgers and Hammerstein songs and probably far better than the ill-reviewed 1962 remake, which I’ve never seen mainly because I’ve been scared off by the cast: Tom Ewell and Alice Faye (coming out of retirement) as the Frake parents, Bobby Darin and Pat Boone as the male leads and Ann-Margret turning up the heat as Emily.
Charles joined me at 9 p.m. and I ran us the 1945 musical film State Fair, which I’d been interested in since we’d just seen a stage adaptation by the amateur Looking Glass Theatre at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego and wanted to go back to the source … sort of. I wrote some of the background information about State Fair in my journal for May 5, the day after Charles and I saw the stage version, so I’ll quote it here: State Fair was the only Rodgers and Hammerstein show that was actually first written as a movie and only later adapted for the stage. It began life as a 1932 novel by an author named Phil Stong which critic Thomas Leslie describes as “a surprisingly dark coming-of-age story that took as its major plot device the effects of the ‘worldly temptations’ of the Iowa State Fair on a local farming family,” and whose climax is an automobile race which Wayne Frake, the son of a farming family who have come up from rural Iowa to Des Moines to see and compete in the Iowa State Fair, and also features both Wayne and his sister Margy having sex with people they’ve met at the fair: Wayne with a woman entertainer who turns down his marriage proposal because she doesn’t want the life of a farmer’s wife, and Margy with a reporter who’s there to cover the fair. Stong’s novel was a best-seller and the Fox Film Corporation bought the movie rights, and in 1933 they filmed State Fair as a non-musical with Janet Gaynor as Margy, Will Rogers as her father Abel, Louise Dresser as her mom Melissa, Lew Ayres as the reporter Pat, Norman Foster as Wayne and Sally Eilers (a talented actress who should have had a bigger career than she did) as Emily, the entertainer Wayne falls for, though the film had a considerably happier ending than the book. (Margy returns to the farm and her dull rural boyfriend Harry in the novel; she leaves rural Iowa and marries Pat in the 1933 film and virtually all the subsequent adaptations.) It would probably be an interesting movie, especially since the director was Henry King and he was especially noted for getting understated performances from his casts, but what made the story enduringly popular was the second film, which I have seen. By then Fox had merged with Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures and the combined studio was noted for big, splashy musicals in Technicolor. Noting the box-office success of the first Rodgers and Hammerstein stage show, Oklahoma!, Zanuck and his lieutenants decided to hire them to turn State Fair into a similarly themed agricultural musical, with Hammerstein writing the script as well as the song lyrics.
They cast Jeanne Crain as Margy, Dana Andrews as reporter Pat (and Hammerstein had them pair up at the end instead of letting Margy go back to her farm life and the hayseed boyfriend who wants to keep her rural), Dick Haymes as Wayne, Charles Winninger taking over Will Rogers’ role as the father (later Winninger would play a former Rogers character again in The Sun Shines Bright, a 1953 sequel made by John Ford to his 1934 Rogers vehicle Judge Priest) and some glorious songs like “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” and “It Might As Well Be Spring,” sung early on by Margy to lament her staid life as a farm girl and her “wishing I were somewhere else” — in other words, it’s her “Over the Rainbow.” Obviously 20th Century-Fox hired Rodgers and Hammerstein to “musicalize” State Fair after the smash success of their first professional collaboration, 1943’s stage musical Oklahoma! and also MGM’s 1944 blockbuster Meet Me in St. Louis, and what was most surprising about the 1945 film was how closely the later stage adaptation tracks it. The 1945 State Fair featured Oscar Hammerstein II as screenwriter as well as lyricist, though the credits list Sonya Levien and Paul Green as “adapting” Phil Stong’s original novel because they wrote the script for the 1933 film, including its altered and much less bittersweet ending. (Frankly, I think Stong’s original ending makes more dramatic sense: the piece would be a lot more powerful if both the Frake children returned to the farm and their romantic pair-ups at the State Fair remained only bittersweet memories.) I was a bit surprised that I’d misremembered at least one key detail of the 1945 film: I had thought the beautiful romantic ballad “That’s for Me” was sung by Dick Haymes. It wasn’t; instead it was sung by Vivian Blaine in her role as Emily, who in this version was not a free-lance entertainer but a band singer with a group led by “Tommy Thomas” (the actor’s name isn’t listed on imdb.com even though other players with more miniscule roles are), and Haymes’ big vocal feature is a duet with Blaine on a song called “Isn’t It Kind of Fun?” that a song-plugger tricks Wayne into placing with Thomas’s band. Blaine sings “That’s for Me” acceptably but with the sort of disinterested air of most female band singers both in movies and in real life — to hear this song done right, one has to go to the record Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars made in 1950. Armstrong may not be the first person you’d think of for a romantic ballad, but his vocal musicianship and especially his phrasing are superb and unbeatable. (That’s what comes from being a genius instrumentalist as well as a singer.)
There were some obvious differences between what a theatre company (especially an amateur one) could do with this story and what major-studio filmmakers could (albeit with a weak director like Walter Lang, 20th Century-Fox’s go-to guy for a lot of their big musicals in the 1940’s and 1950’s; his work is acceptable but one really misses the beauty and style Vincente Minnelli brought to a similar story in Meet Me in St. Louis): we actually get some vertiginous shots of the roller-coaster and other thrill rides reporter Pat (played by Dana Andrews with a sort of bored hauteur as if he were thinking, “I’ve proved I can act in The Ox-Bow Incident and Laura — why are they still giving me shit like this?”) takes farm-girl Margy on, as if his way of seducing her is literally agitating her, and we also get to see as on-screen characters the Frakes’ prize-winning hog, Blue Boy, as well as his chief competitor Whirlwind and his girlfriend Esmeralda, a brown Duroc pig (I remembered “Durocs” as the nom de groupe of Ron Nagle and his songwriting partner Scott Matthews — the liner notes of the LP explained that the band name came from a sort of pig, and the cover was a cartoon of a big-assed pig, but I’d never heard of a Duroc in context before) whose mere presence lightens up the nervous Blue Boy and enables him to win the hog-raising contest. State Fair suffers from one lead who couldn’t sing and one who wasn’t allowed to; Dana Andrews had a professional-quality baritone voice but no one told the “suits” at 20th Century-Fox that, so they hired Ben Gage (briefly the husband of Esther Williams) to dub him; and Jeanne Crain really couldn’t sing, so her vocals — including the best song from this score, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” which won the Academy Award for Best Song — were dubbed by Louanne Hogan, who performs the great song credibly even though she’s no match for Sarah Vaughan, who recorded it at least twice (1946 with John Kirby and 1950 with Miles Davis) and sang it better than anyone else.
Indeed, I couldn’t help but wish Fox could have got Judy Garland to play Margy — not only because she could sing but also she was a far credible actress who could have made Margy’s mixed-up emotions more believable — and Doris Day as Emily, but Garland would have required an expensive loan-out deal with MGM and Day was still toiling in the vineyards of Les Brown’s band and wouldn’t make her first movie for another three years. I also wish they would have got W. C. Fields to play the crooked carnival barker whose rigged ring-toss game Wayne is determined to beat — in 1945 Fields had only a year left to live and was too sick to do anything more than short roles, but the character only appears in one scene and Fields could have handled it magnificently. Instead the part went to the young Henry Morgan — referencing his long run on the TV series M*A*S*H, I joked, “Now we know what he did before he went to Korea!” (“And also,” I added, “before he became Glenn Miller’s piano player,” the role he played in the biopic The Glenn Miller Story.) All in all, the 1945 State Fair is a quite enjoyable movie — though it might have come off better if Charles and I hadn’t just seen the stage version, which copied much of Hammerstein’s script almost word for word — maybe not the film it could have been (and suffering from two pairs of leads who look an awful lot like each other — at times the only way you can tell Jeanne Crain and Vivian Blaine apart is Crain’s hair is black and Blaine’s is red, and Dana Andrews and Dick Haymes likewise look enough alike that if the script said they were brothers, you’d believe it) but a glorious Technicolor showcase for some fine Rodgers and Hammerstein songs and probably far better than the ill-reviewed 1962 remake, which I’ve never seen mainly because I’ve been scared off by the cast: Tom Ewell and Alice Faye (coming out of retirement) as the Frake parents, Bobby Darin and Pat Boone as the male leads and Ann-Margret turning up the heat as Emily.
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