by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran Charles a movie, Alice Through the
Looking Glass, the 2016 sequel to Tim
Burton’s marvelous 2010 (sort-of) adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a sufficiently dull and disappointing movie both Charles and I found ourselves nodding off through
bits of it. The 2010 Alice in Wonderland departed considerably from the Urtext of Lewis Carroll’s (t/n Samuel Dodgson) original
books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which may have motivated Burton and his writer,
Linda Woolverton, to insist that the name of the magical place Alice visits is
really “Underland” and she got it wrong in the first place) and Through
the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
— and like most Alice in Wonderland
movies it freely mixed and matched between the two books instead of just doing
one or the other. Woolverton did a few things in the first Alice movie that really annoyed me, notably giving Alice
and her parents the last name “Kingsleigh” (an homage to another British fantasy writer, Charles Kingsley,
whose 1867 book The Water-Babies
might itself be worth filming even though the Wikipedia page on it says it fell
from popularity because of its anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Black
aspects) when it’s well known the real-life Alice who inspired the books was
named Alice Liddell. (Someone traced her in England in 1924 and did an
interview with her, though by then she’d been married and went by the name
Alice Liddell Hart.) Apparently Carroll saw the real Alice laying under a tree,
having fallen asleep while reading, and that inspired him — though there are
some reports that Carroll was really a pedophile who had a crush on the
11-year-old Alice Liddell. Alice Through the Looking Glass begins with what turns out to be its best scenes: it
opens in the Straits of Malacca in 1864, where the Kingsleigh family ship, the Wonder, is being chased by pirates and is also about to tip
over and sink in a storm. The anxious officers and crew members want to turn
back, but Alice, the ship’s captain, insists on pressing on and adding more
sail until the ship passes safely through the storm while the three pirate
ships that were chasing her run aground on reefs. The scene then cuts to
London, one year later, and Alice crashes a party being given by her former
fiancé Hamish (Leo Bill) to commemorate his assumption of the title of Lord
Ascot following the death of her father, who was also the business partner of
Alice’s late father.
In Alice in Wonderland Hamish was merely an insufferable upper-class twit,
but in Alice Through the Looking Glass he’s an out-and-out villain who’s bought out the Kingsleighs’ 10
percent interest in the company his father and Alice’s co-ran and is
threatening to evict Alice’s mother from her home unless she signs over the
papers for the Wonder. That means
Alice will no longer have a ship at her disposal for her explorations, but
Hamish offers her a job as a clerk and says she’ll be able gradually to work
her way up through his organization. He stresses this will be a rare
opportunity for her because almost no other company in Britain hires women as
clerks. Needless to say, Alice finds this a fate almost as bad as death, and
she hides in a study of Hamish’s home during his party and comes across a
looking-glass through which she enters and crosses back into Wonderland, or
Underland, or whatever it’s called. Linda Woolverton misses Alice’s discovery
of the backwards looking-glass world in the marvelous opening chapter of Through
the Looking-Glass, including the bit that
she can’t read the books on the other side of the looking-glass because they’re
all printed backwards, but that’s not the biggest problem with Woolverton’s
script. Once she actually gets Alice back to Wonderland (or Underland, or
whatever it’s called) her writing turns flat, ordinary and just plain dull as,
instead of working out clever variations on Lewis Carroll’s themes, Woolverton
comes up with an annoying and ponderous tale of her own based on some of the
Carroll characters as well as some new ones she invented. The schtick this time around is, instead of the manic character
he was in Alice in Wonderland (both
book and the previous film), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has gone into a
heavy-duty depressed phase because he’s found the first hat he ever made — a
tiny blue toy hat made of paper which he made for his parents before they were
killed by the Jabberwock in the first film’s backstory. This indicates that his
parents may have survived the attack after all, and for some reason instead of
lifting his spirits and giving him a sense of hope, it plunges him deeply into
depression.
He summons Alice in the hope that she can work out a solution to
his problem; he also briefs her that Time is actually an animate being (played
by Sacha Baron Cohen with his usual insufferability — I briefly thought Depp
might be doubling the roles of the Mad Hatter and Time, but he wasn’t and this
film might have been better if he had been) and he’s in possession of something
called the “chronosphere,” which controls the flow of time. If Alice can steal
the chronosphere and use it to reverse time so the Mad Hatter’s family aren’t killed after all, his depression will be lifted and
he’ll be happy again. Alice crashes Time’s castle and steals the chronosphere —
despite the efforts of Time’s minions, a bunch of clockwork gadgets reminiscent
of the animated sidekicks in previous Disney productions like The
Little Mermaid and Beauty and the
Beast, to stop her — and once she has it it
instantly expands from a round crystal atop the center of a giant clock to a
round vehicle, sort of like the ones used in the Jurassic World movies, in which Alice can go through both space and
time. The vehicle’s controls seem an awful lot like the ones that ran the
TARDIS on the Doctor Who TV show
— a reference score composer Danny Elfman caught and exploited by quoting the Doctor
Who theme in his music — only the
chronosphere is stolen by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to
use it to start a genocidal war against the other denizens of Wonderland
because she’s still pissed off at her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway),
for some transgression from their joint childhoods. This part of the plot seems
like Woolverton was ripping off Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch were
estranged sisters and had tongue-twisting names — in Alice Through
the Looking Glass the White Queen is called
“Mirana” and the Red Queen “Iracebeth” (or is it the other way around?).
Anyway, the Red Queen steals the chronosphere and uses it to screw up time,
only since time can’t really change everything ultimately reverts to what it
was before. The Red Queen grows a heart (like the Grinch) and the Mad Hatter
finds his family, alive but in suspended animation and miniaturized, in the
molding of a picture frame. He’s able to bring them back not only to life but
to normal size via a cake with a label, “Eat Me” (ya remember the cake? The drink labeled “Drink Me” which shrunk Alice,
and the cake labeled “Eat Me” that expanded her again, were both in Lewis
Carroll’s first book and Tim Burton’s first Alice movie, but bringing the cake back this way did have a certain degree of charm), though they seem so
dull and oppressive one wonders why the Mad Hatter wanted them back. (Then again, traumatic relationships with
their parents are a specialty of Tim Burton’s leading characters; remember the
odd backstory he gave Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, filling out the character from
what Roald Dahl had written and making Wonka’s father a crazy dentist who not
only forbade his son any
chocolate but encased him in a helmet-like tooth brace which Tim Burton said
was something like the one his real-life father had made him where when he was
a kid.) In the end Alice says a sad farewell to the Mad Hatter and returns to
Britain (a scene very reminiscent
of the ending of the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz — the Burton-Woolverton conception of Alice
in Wonderland is very much influenced by Wizard, not only in giving her these tearful farewells but
also in making Alice a far more assertive and self-actualizing character than
Lewis Carroll did), where her mom reneges on the deal she made with Hamish and
risks eviction to keep the Wonder
in the family so Alice can captain her in another voyage.
Alice
Through the Looking Glass has enough charming
moments it can’t be dismissed completely, but it’s a weird fantasy indeed in
which the opening and closing framing scenes set in the normal world seem far
more moving and dramatically coherent than the fantastic bulk of the film.
Besides, Woolverton makes one of the basic mistakes of fantasy writers: because
she’s dealing with a genre in
which anything can happen, she
makes anything she can think of happen whether or not it makes any sense or
follows the internal logic of her story. Tim Burton didn’t personally direct Alice
Through the Looking Glass — someone named
James Bobin did, though Burton is listed as one of the producers and he’s
clearly the auteur (and Bobin’s
chief qualification for the job of directing this movie seems to have been that
he’d worked with Sasha Baron Cohen before on his TV series Da Ali G
Show) — but the problem with this movie
isn’t that Tim Burton didn’t direct it, it’s that Linda Woolverton did but brought far less imagination to creating her
original story than she had in adapting Lewis Carroll for the first film. There
are a lot of scenes here that achieve some of the charm of the earlier movie —
notably the one in which Humpty Dumpty (Wally Wingert) gets knocked off his
perch and realizes as he’s in free fall, “Oh no, not again” (though even here Wingert is up against the
competition of W. C. Fields’ marvelous and incomparable voicing of Humpty
Dumpty in Paramount’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland film) — but on the whole this is a disappointment,
especially since the first Tim Burton Alice was so good. It was a disappointment at the box
office, too, though according to imdb.com the poor returns were attributed to
Johnny Depp going through an unpleasant and well-covered divorce from Amber
Heard — though I suspect word got around that it simply wasn’t that good a movie and was a far cry from its predecessor.
I should mention that Alice Through the Looking Glass is a “doubles” movie since it features two actors
who’ve played Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, Rhys Ifans (Zanik Hightopp) in
the TV series Elementary and
Stephen Fry (who voiced the Cheshire Cat) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game
of Shadows (the 2012 sequel to the first
Holmes film starring Robert Downey, Jr.).
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Friday, October 11, 2019
Sensations of 1945 (Andrew Stone Productions, United Artists, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Sensations of 1945, a semi-major musical produced and directed by Andrew Stone for United Artists release and the last starring role for super-dancer Eleanor Powell (and her only film for a studio other than MGM). Powell was getting tired and was also in a troubled marriage with Glenn Ford, who didn’t want her to work, and after this she confined herself to guest appearances. Sensations of 1945 is also the last film W. C. Fields made before his death on Christmas Day, 1946, though he appears only in one brief scene as himself and in another in which he performs a stage skit in which he plays a U.S. traveler in England crashing a train compartment reserved for “Lord Robert R. Roberts.” We were watching a DVD from the same grey-label source as our DVD of the 1941 Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin’ — though the print wasn’t in as good shape: this was the Astor Pictures TV reissue that shortened the title merely to Sensations, and there was a bad scratch through the first few minutes and occasional other scarring during the film. The opening scene reminded me of the scandal a couple of years back involving the Gay Black actor Jussie Smollett, who hired a couple of friends to beat him up and then claimed he’d been Gay-bashed by two homophobic Nigerian immigrants, all to win more money and a more prominent role on the TV show he was then appearing on. Instead he got fired and the Chicago police and prosecutors went ballistic, at one point indicting him on 16 charges before a Chicago judge threw the case out — whereupon the police and prosecutors denounced her as corrupt. It was ironic that when we watched the newest episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit after the movie, it also did a riff on the Smollett case: a Black rapper who’s about to be “outed” as Gay on the TMZ Web site has his brother assault him on the street and sodomize him with a beer bottle, copying a real-life Gay-basher who’s been doing the same thing to Black Bisexuals on the “down low,” confident that his victims won’t report the crimes to police because they don’t want their wives and kids to know they go to Gay bars and pick up men for sex.
The Smollett parallel in Sensations occurs during the opening scene, representing a performance of the current Broadway show featuring ace dancer Virginia “Ginny” Walker (Eleanor Powell), which is interrupted by a black-clad woman who rises up from a theatre box with a gun, points it at the stage, yells out at Walker, “You’ll never steal another man from his wife again!” and fires at her. Later it turns out that Walker set up the whole thing: the supposedly wronged wife is a friend of hers, a circus markswoman whom Ginny could hire to shoot at her, confident that she would (deliberately) miss. Ginny’s publicity stunt shames her P.R. people, an agency run by the father-and-son team of Gus Crane (Eugene Pallette) and his son, identified only as “Junior” (Dennis O’Keefe). The Cranes have been arguing since “Junior” got out of the army after World War II and took a job co-running the agency with his dad. Dad loves flamboyant publicity stunts while “Junior” thinks they’re embarrassing and counterproductive — so dad demotes his son and gets Ginny to run the agency in his place. Not surprisingly, the movie’s plot is merely a pretext to showcase various acts, including the big bands of Woody Herman (they’re supposedly the pit band for Ginny’s show, which she continues to perform in for eight shows a week while co-running the P.R. firm as well) and Cab Calloway. Herman’s band was on the cusp of becoming the famous “First Herd” and I spent some time and mental energy trying to figure out who his drummer was: he was too stocky and heavy-set to be Dave Tough (who drove the First Herd during its early years and was a superb Dixieland and swing drummer who adapted surprisingly well to Herman’s bebop-influenced style; like a lot of the musicians of his generation, he was also an alcoholic and would drink himself out of the Herman band in 1946 and die two years later), I didn’t think it was Frankie Carlson (who’d been Herman’s drummer through the band’s origins in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) and it didn’t look like Buddy Rich (who took over for Tough on a few gigs and one recording session before the bop drummer Don Lamond got the job on an ongoing basis).
Calloway is featured in one number, but it’s a doozy: Ginny has arranged to promote the Plantation Club where Calloway is appearing by projecting his show on the side of the New York Times building in Times Square, and a huge crowd gathers in Times Square and has a great jitterbug party as Calloway does a song called “The Hepster’s Dictionary” (Calloway actually wrote and published a book called The Hepster’s Dictionary, a dictionary of Harlem slang) and classically-trained Black jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan does a spectacular rendition of one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie, after which it turns into a piano duel between Donegan and the band’s regular pianist, Bennie Payne, who’d previously done this sort of thing with his former employer, Fats Waller. (Their joint feature was George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which Waller recorded with his full band instead of the cut-down “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” he usually recorded with, but the record was only issued in Switzerland, apparently because Waller didn’t think he’d outplayed Payne enough to want his American fans to hear it.) The high point of the film comes towards the end, in which the stage of Ginny’s show turns into a giant pinball machine, with the Herman band as the back display and Powell as a pinball dancing between the various cushions and scoring points appropriately. (I had remembered that she did this dance to the Mexican song “Las Chiapanecas,” but she didn’t — though Herman had recorded that song and he does play it in the film.)
The show ends with Ginny and “Junior” pairing up even though he’s got so discouraged by the complications in their relationship that he’s re-enlisted (their final clinch features him in Army uniform) and him sneaking behind her back and giving a 10 percent interest in a new 1890’s-themed nightclub to Dan Lindsay (C. Aubrey Smith) because his contacts have recruited such genuine stars of the period as W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker (doing a weird song called “You Can’t Sew a Button on a Heart”) to perform on the club’s opening night, only Ginny was prepared to welch on the deal and cut him out once the club had its big opening and its success was assured. (A New Yorker who welches on deals and exploits people to make herself richer — gee, with a background like that she could run for President!) Sensations is a fun movie, though as Charles pointed out afterwards there were plenty of similar —but much better — movies like it being made in the early 1930’s (when W. C. Fields’ routines were screamingly funny, whereas here his sketch is entertaining but only moderately amusing). Andrew Stone’s most famous movie was probably The Last Voyage (1960), a story about a shipwreck at sea for which, instead of building sets, he actually bought an ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, brought his cast, crew and equipment onto the liner and sank it for real for his final scene. That’s an example of his heavy-handedness as a director, which is somewhat in evidence here, but a film featuring Eleanor Powell, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman can’t help but be entertaining!
Last night’s “feature” was Sensations of 1945, a semi-major musical produced and directed by Andrew Stone for United Artists release and the last starring role for super-dancer Eleanor Powell (and her only film for a studio other than MGM). Powell was getting tired and was also in a troubled marriage with Glenn Ford, who didn’t want her to work, and after this she confined herself to guest appearances. Sensations of 1945 is also the last film W. C. Fields made before his death on Christmas Day, 1946, though he appears only in one brief scene as himself and in another in which he performs a stage skit in which he plays a U.S. traveler in England crashing a train compartment reserved for “Lord Robert R. Roberts.” We were watching a DVD from the same grey-label source as our DVD of the 1941 Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin’ — though the print wasn’t in as good shape: this was the Astor Pictures TV reissue that shortened the title merely to Sensations, and there was a bad scratch through the first few minutes and occasional other scarring during the film. The opening scene reminded me of the scandal a couple of years back involving the Gay Black actor Jussie Smollett, who hired a couple of friends to beat him up and then claimed he’d been Gay-bashed by two homophobic Nigerian immigrants, all to win more money and a more prominent role on the TV show he was then appearing on. Instead he got fired and the Chicago police and prosecutors went ballistic, at one point indicting him on 16 charges before a Chicago judge threw the case out — whereupon the police and prosecutors denounced her as corrupt. It was ironic that when we watched the newest episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit after the movie, it also did a riff on the Smollett case: a Black rapper who’s about to be “outed” as Gay on the TMZ Web site has his brother assault him on the street and sodomize him with a beer bottle, copying a real-life Gay-basher who’s been doing the same thing to Black Bisexuals on the “down low,” confident that his victims won’t report the crimes to police because they don’t want their wives and kids to know they go to Gay bars and pick up men for sex.
The Smollett parallel in Sensations occurs during the opening scene, representing a performance of the current Broadway show featuring ace dancer Virginia “Ginny” Walker (Eleanor Powell), which is interrupted by a black-clad woman who rises up from a theatre box with a gun, points it at the stage, yells out at Walker, “You’ll never steal another man from his wife again!” and fires at her. Later it turns out that Walker set up the whole thing: the supposedly wronged wife is a friend of hers, a circus markswoman whom Ginny could hire to shoot at her, confident that she would (deliberately) miss. Ginny’s publicity stunt shames her P.R. people, an agency run by the father-and-son team of Gus Crane (Eugene Pallette) and his son, identified only as “Junior” (Dennis O’Keefe). The Cranes have been arguing since “Junior” got out of the army after World War II and took a job co-running the agency with his dad. Dad loves flamboyant publicity stunts while “Junior” thinks they’re embarrassing and counterproductive — so dad demotes his son and gets Ginny to run the agency in his place. Not surprisingly, the movie’s plot is merely a pretext to showcase various acts, including the big bands of Woody Herman (they’re supposedly the pit band for Ginny’s show, which she continues to perform in for eight shows a week while co-running the P.R. firm as well) and Cab Calloway. Herman’s band was on the cusp of becoming the famous “First Herd” and I spent some time and mental energy trying to figure out who his drummer was: he was too stocky and heavy-set to be Dave Tough (who drove the First Herd during its early years and was a superb Dixieland and swing drummer who adapted surprisingly well to Herman’s bebop-influenced style; like a lot of the musicians of his generation, he was also an alcoholic and would drink himself out of the Herman band in 1946 and die two years later), I didn’t think it was Frankie Carlson (who’d been Herman’s drummer through the band’s origins in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) and it didn’t look like Buddy Rich (who took over for Tough on a few gigs and one recording session before the bop drummer Don Lamond got the job on an ongoing basis).
Calloway is featured in one number, but it’s a doozy: Ginny has arranged to promote the Plantation Club where Calloway is appearing by projecting his show on the side of the New York Times building in Times Square, and a huge crowd gathers in Times Square and has a great jitterbug party as Calloway does a song called “The Hepster’s Dictionary” (Calloway actually wrote and published a book called The Hepster’s Dictionary, a dictionary of Harlem slang) and classically-trained Black jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan does a spectacular rendition of one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie, after which it turns into a piano duel between Donegan and the band’s regular pianist, Bennie Payne, who’d previously done this sort of thing with his former employer, Fats Waller. (Their joint feature was George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which Waller recorded with his full band instead of the cut-down “Fats Waller and His Rhythm” he usually recorded with, but the record was only issued in Switzerland, apparently because Waller didn’t think he’d outplayed Payne enough to want his American fans to hear it.) The high point of the film comes towards the end, in which the stage of Ginny’s show turns into a giant pinball machine, with the Herman band as the back display and Powell as a pinball dancing between the various cushions and scoring points appropriately. (I had remembered that she did this dance to the Mexican song “Las Chiapanecas,” but she didn’t — though Herman had recorded that song and he does play it in the film.)
The show ends with Ginny and “Junior” pairing up even though he’s got so discouraged by the complications in their relationship that he’s re-enlisted (their final clinch features him in Army uniform) and him sneaking behind her back and giving a 10 percent interest in a new 1890’s-themed nightclub to Dan Lindsay (C. Aubrey Smith) because his contacts have recruited such genuine stars of the period as W. C. Fields and Sophie Tucker (doing a weird song called “You Can’t Sew a Button on a Heart”) to perform on the club’s opening night, only Ginny was prepared to welch on the deal and cut him out once the club had its big opening and its success was assured. (A New Yorker who welches on deals and exploits people to make herself richer — gee, with a background like that she could run for President!) Sensations is a fun movie, though as Charles pointed out afterwards there were plenty of similar —but much better — movies like it being made in the early 1930’s (when W. C. Fields’ routines were screamingly funny, whereas here his sketch is entertaining but only moderately amusing). Andrew Stone’s most famous movie was probably The Last Voyage (1960), a story about a shipwreck at sea for which, instead of building sets, he actually bought an ocean liner that was about to be scrapped, brought his cast, crew and equipment onto the liner and sank it for real for his final scene. That’s an example of his heavy-handedness as a director, which is somewhat in evidence here, but a film featuring Eleanor Powell, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman can’t help but be entertaining!
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures, Roth Films, Team Todd, Zanuck Company, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I a movie we somehow missed when it was new (and when I still had two eyes good enough that I could have enjoyed it in the original 3-D) in 2010: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, produced in 2010 for Walt Disney Studios and starring Johnny Depp (whom one imdb.com reviewer persisted in calling “Johnny Deep” — next time turn your auto-correct feature off!) as the Mad Hatter. There was some debate on the film’s imdb.com page whether this film counted as a remake of Alice in Wonderland or a sequel, since in this version Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is 19, she has dim recollections of the dream in which she previously visited Wonderland (actually in this script by Linda Woolverton it’s really called “Underland” and “Wonderland” is a mistake Alice made the first time she was there) and she’s about to marry an upper-class twit named Hamish (Leo Bill) for no better reason than he’s the son of Lord Ascot (Tim Pigott-Smith), the business partner of Alice’s late father, Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Czokas), who dreamed of expanding his trading company’s reach to the Far East before he died under mysterious circumstances. Apparently Burton and Woolverton decided to give Alice the last name “Kingsleigh” and call her father Charles after Charles Kingsley, who in the 1860’s wrote a book called The Water-Babies that was sort of precursor to Alice in Wonderland and would probably make a good basis for a Tim Burton film if anyone out there in the modern audience had heard of it. (I only heard of it because one of my grade-school classes read it.) But given that it’s a well-known fact that the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a 11-year-old girl named Alice Liddell (she later married a man named Hart, lived until 1924 and naturally got sought out by fans of Carroll’s Alice books eager to meet “the real Alice”) I found it jarring that she had a different last name. I thought the movie wasn’t really either a sequel or a remake so much as a set of variations, much the way composers have written variations on other composers’ themes and presented them as original works.
The opening of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is surprisingly close to the book — though Charles gave him and Woolverton points for putting Alice into Wonderland far more cinematically than Carroll did in the novel (in which she simply falls asleep while reading a book which bores her because “it has no pictures or quotations — and what use is a book without pictures or quotations?”); she plunges picturesquely through a long tunnel in a sequence pretty obviously inspired by the cyclone that picked up Dorothy’s house and deposited her in Oz in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, an obvious inspiration through much of this one. I remember reading an article on The Wizard of Oz in a Reader’s Digest in the 1970’s which made the point that it and Alice in Wonderland reflected the different social attitudes of Americans and British even towards childhood fantasies: Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandered politely through Wonderland without bothering to try to change anything, while L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy got actively involved in Oz’s politics and social order and organized the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion to seek out the qualities they always wanted. The Burton/Woolverton Alice is considerably closer to Baum’s Dorothy than Carroll’s Alice in this regard: she not only gets involved in the war between the good (but rather pallid-looking) White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, who’s also Mrs. Tim Burton — one wonders what their breakfast-table conversations are like: “O.K., darling, what villainess do you want me to play in your next movie?”) and ends up a Lancelot- or Parsifal-like quest figure, slaying the evil Jabberwock (there’s some confusion in the movie whether the monster is called “Jabberwock” or “Jabberwocky” — in the original Through the Looking-Glass “Jabberwock” is the name of the monster and “Jabberwocky” the title of the poem that tells its story) with the magic Vorpal Sword only she can wield.
There are also bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, notably a scroll called the “Oraculum” that predicts the future events of the story — at one point when the characters unrolled it to read what was going to happen next I couldn’t help but joke, “The Book of the Film.” Also, like just about all previous adaptations of the Alice books, Woolverton’s script freely mixes elements of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass instead of just sticking to one or the other (and Disney did make a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, in 2016 which Burton produced but did not direct). Nonetheless, I found Burton’s Alice in Wonderland thoroughly charming, a dazzling movie in which the computer-generated visual effects were there to tell a strong and powerful story and not just to dazzle us for their own sake. It’s also a film that is well paced, though it doesn’t offer many moments of repose; the images just come right after each other, but they’re cleverly designed (wisely Burton and his designers stuck pretty closely to John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original publications of the novels) and I might have got upset that the Mad Hatter’s role was vastly expanded over the original, except that a) that’s a star prerogative and b) Johnny Depp turns it into a tour de force, yet another entry in the gallery of engaging weirdos Burton has given Depp to play in a long-term director/star collaboration that rivals John Ford/John Wayne, John Huston/Humphrey Bogart and Rock Hudson/Douglas Sirk.
I ran Charles and I a movie we somehow missed when it was new (and when I still had two eyes good enough that I could have enjoyed it in the original 3-D) in 2010: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, produced in 2010 for Walt Disney Studios and starring Johnny Depp (whom one imdb.com reviewer persisted in calling “Johnny Deep” — next time turn your auto-correct feature off!) as the Mad Hatter. There was some debate on the film’s imdb.com page whether this film counted as a remake of Alice in Wonderland or a sequel, since in this version Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is 19, she has dim recollections of the dream in which she previously visited Wonderland (actually in this script by Linda Woolverton it’s really called “Underland” and “Wonderland” is a mistake Alice made the first time she was there) and she’s about to marry an upper-class twit named Hamish (Leo Bill) for no better reason than he’s the son of Lord Ascot (Tim Pigott-Smith), the business partner of Alice’s late father, Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Czokas), who dreamed of expanding his trading company’s reach to the Far East before he died under mysterious circumstances. Apparently Burton and Woolverton decided to give Alice the last name “Kingsleigh” and call her father Charles after Charles Kingsley, who in the 1860’s wrote a book called The Water-Babies that was sort of precursor to Alice in Wonderland and would probably make a good basis for a Tim Burton film if anyone out there in the modern audience had heard of it. (I only heard of it because one of my grade-school classes read it.) But given that it’s a well-known fact that the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was a 11-year-old girl named Alice Liddell (she later married a man named Hart, lived until 1924 and naturally got sought out by fans of Carroll’s Alice books eager to meet “the real Alice”) I found it jarring that she had a different last name. I thought the movie wasn’t really either a sequel or a remake so much as a set of variations, much the way composers have written variations on other composers’ themes and presented them as original works.
The opening of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is surprisingly close to the book — though Charles gave him and Woolverton points for putting Alice into Wonderland far more cinematically than Carroll did in the novel (in which she simply falls asleep while reading a book which bores her because “it has no pictures or quotations — and what use is a book without pictures or quotations?”); she plunges picturesquely through a long tunnel in a sequence pretty obviously inspired by the cyclone that picked up Dorothy’s house and deposited her in Oz in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, an obvious inspiration through much of this one. I remember reading an article on The Wizard of Oz in a Reader’s Digest in the 1970’s which made the point that it and Alice in Wonderland reflected the different social attitudes of Americans and British even towards childhood fantasies: Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandered politely through Wonderland without bothering to try to change anything, while L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy got actively involved in Oz’s politics and social order and organized the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion to seek out the qualities they always wanted. The Burton/Woolverton Alice is considerably closer to Baum’s Dorothy than Carroll’s Alice in this regard: she not only gets involved in the war between the good (but rather pallid-looking) White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, who’s also Mrs. Tim Burton — one wonders what their breakfast-table conversations are like: “O.K., darling, what villainess do you want me to play in your next movie?”) and ends up a Lancelot- or Parsifal-like quest figure, slaying the evil Jabberwock (there’s some confusion in the movie whether the monster is called “Jabberwock” or “Jabberwocky” — in the original Through the Looking-Glass “Jabberwock” is the name of the monster and “Jabberwocky” the title of the poem that tells its story) with the magic Vorpal Sword only she can wield.
There are also bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, notably a scroll called the “Oraculum” that predicts the future events of the story — at one point when the characters unrolled it to read what was going to happen next I couldn’t help but joke, “The Book of the Film.” Also, like just about all previous adaptations of the Alice books, Woolverton’s script freely mixes elements of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass instead of just sticking to one or the other (and Disney did make a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, in 2016 which Burton produced but did not direct). Nonetheless, I found Burton’s Alice in Wonderland thoroughly charming, a dazzling movie in which the computer-generated visual effects were there to tell a strong and powerful story and not just to dazzle us for their own sake. It’s also a film that is well paced, though it doesn’t offer many moments of repose; the images just come right after each other, but they’re cleverly designed (wisely Burton and his designers stuck pretty closely to John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original publications of the novels) and I might have got upset that the Mad Hatter’s role was vastly expanded over the original, except that a) that’s a star prerogative and b) Johnny Depp turns it into a tour de force, yet another entry in the gallery of engaging weirdos Burton has given Depp to play in a long-term director/star collaboration that rivals John Ford/John Wayne, John Huston/Humphrey Bogart and Rock Hudson/Douglas Sirk.
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Mozart: Don Giovanni (Akademie der Kunst Archiv, Progress Filmverein, Arthaus Musik, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I the second item in the Arthaus Musik set of Walter Felsenstein’s opera videos from the Komische Oper in East Berlin back when East Germany (officially the “Deutsche Democratische Republik” — “German Democratic Republic”) was still a going concern. I don’t recall what order the videos were originally sequenced in when I got the box but I refiled them in chronological order by date of composition, so after the first item we’d watched previously — Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro from 1976 — the next one was the next opera by Mozart and ace librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Alas, the video was from 1966, 10 years earlier than the version of The Marriage of Figaro, and therefore was in black-and-white — East German TV hadn’t adopted color yet — and the image was blurry around the edges and had the lack of definition common to even the best-preserved videotapes of its vintage. There were some other strikes against this Don Giovanni: it was performed not in librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s original Italian but in a German translation by Walter Felsenstein and Horst Seeger (which, like Felsenstein’s translation of da Ponte’s Marriage of Figaro, sounded quite good in the ensemble scenes and the recitatives, but the big lyrical arias suffered — still, perhaps because Mozart was Austrian and therefore German was his native tongue, Mozart in German sounds better than Verdi in German), and it stuck to the original 1786 Prague version of the score. Mozart composed Don Giovanni for the Prague opera — which made it appropriate that Felsenstein used a Czech conductor, Zdenek Kosler, for this production — and later tweaked the score for Vienna, replacing Don Ottavio’s original aria “Il mio tesoro” with “Dalla sua pace,” and adding a comic scene between Donna Elvira and Leporello, “Restati qua,” that ended with Elvira singing a new aria, “Mi tradi,” in which she laments that she’s still attracted to Don Giovanni despite the shabby (to say the least!) way he’s treated her.
Most modern productions follow a conflated version that leaves out the “Restati qua” scene but includes “Mi tradi” and gives Don Ottavio both arias — but Felsenstein followed the original Prague text and therefore deprived his Elvira, Anny Schlemm (one of only two singers in this cast I’d heard of before), of her big lyrical moment. Now for the good news: this Don Giovanni is one of the most exciting, committed, passionate opera videos I’ve ever seen of anything. There’s been an ongoing debate in the opera world for almost a century now (ever since international transportation became fast and efficient enough that singers could fly all over the world instead of remaining attached to only a few opera houses their entire careers) about the merits of international casts with the best voices available for the roles versus local casts whose voices may not be as “major” but who have the advantage of regularly working together and relating to each other dramatically. This video is a souvenir of a time when East Germany, and the Eastern bloc in general, were still largely cut off from the rest of the world artistically: occasionally an Eastern-bloc singer like the Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff would be so good opera managers would defy the political roadblocks to hire him (though when Rudolf Bing was hired to manage the Met in 1950 and wanted Christoff for King Philip in Verdi’s Don Carlos, bureaucrats at the State Department yielded to McCarthyite pressure and denied him a visa, so Christoff didn’t sing at the Met until 1956), but Western stars almost never performed in Eastern theatres. The downside was that Eastern Bloc opera fans didn’t get the biggest names from the West; the upside was that the singers they did get were used to performing with each other and could play off each other dramatically in ways considerably more difficult for an international cast who fly in for a specific production and then fly away again to different parts of the world. There are other good things about this Don Giovanni: conductor Kosler, whom I’d known mainly for his recordings of Dvorák symphonies and other Czech orchestral music back home with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague, tears through the score and plays it as drama, not a cute comic farce.
The singers are all excellent in their roles — though I was startled at how tall the tenor singing Ottavio, John Moulson, was; he didn’t have the melting sweetness in his voice one expects (I expect, anyway) from this part (and the German translation didn’t help) but he looked convincingly butch and a reasonable alterative to Don Giovanni (Györgi Melis, the other singer here I’d heard of before) for the affections of Donna Anna (Klara Barlow). Barlow’s Anna was the best performance in the cast; though costume designer Sylka-Maria Busse made her look way too much like Morticia Addams for my taste (yes, I know she’s supposed to dress in black because she’s in mourning for her father, the Commendatore [Herbert Rössler], whom Don Giovanni kills in the opening scene, but she didn’t have to look like she just emerged from a swamp!), her acting was visceral and she managed to make Anna’s single-minded determination to avenge her father’s death and her own near-ruination at Giovanni’s hands believable. Anny Schlemm was almost as good as Elvira, and Melis as Don Giovanni was appropriately hunky and hot-looking even though one wonders how his rather lame seduction lines ever worked on anybody, let alone the 2,065 women he’s previously bedded in the backstory. One problem with the production was Rudolf Asmus’s Leporello, Giovanni’s faithful servant and butt of some of Giovanni’s nastiest practical jokes: he sings acceptably but not at the level of the rest of the cast, and he’s considerably shorter and stouter than Melis — which makes hash of the scene in which Don Giovanni and Leporello switch clothes and impersonate each other to facilitate Giovanni’s attempted seduction of Donna Elvira’s housemaid. The other principals are Eva-Marie Baum as Zerlina, the peasant girl Giovanni attempts to seduce in the duet “La ci darem la mano” (which became a favorite of 19th century composers — Chopin and Liszt both composed variations on it for piano), and Fritz Hübner as her fiancé Masetto. Baum sang well enough but it’s odd that this, not either of the Donnas, was 19th-century superstar Adelina Patti’s preferred role in this opera, and she and Hübner did the best they could with the “Batti, batti” duet in which Zerlina offers to let Masetto beat her up as his revenge for her almost having yielded to the Don’s seductions.
That’s inevitably going to be a problem for modern audiences, but in a lot of ways the politics of Don Giovanni seem awfully au courant in the age of the #MeToo movement. Giovanni himself comes off — especially the way Felsenstein staged it — as a sort of combination Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, convinced that because he was born into money he therefore has a God-given right to have any woman he wants and throw his money around on lavish parties. His invitation to the dead Commendatore, represented by a giant statue in a cemetery, to come to his place for dinner comes off as a marvelous bit of cheekiness, well within the Don’s character — and Charles was surprised that in a regime devoted to materialism Felsenstein was able to keep Mozart’s and da Ponte’s original supernatural ending (the statue of the Commendatore comes to life and literally drags Don Giovanni down to hell) instead of fudging it (as Russian director Dimitri Tcherniakov did in a recent production in which the Commendatore was an actor hired to impersonate the dead man and therefore get the Don to confess his crimes and/or go totally crazy). Interestingly Don Giovanni is one of only two Mozart operas in which he used trombones, both times to signal supernatural interventions in his plots — here where the statue speaks and accepts Giovanni’s dinner invitation, and earlier in Idomeneo when the god Poseidon literally functions as a deus ex machina and lets Idomeneo off the hook, allowing him not to sacrifice his son Idamante as he had previously pledged. Also among the pluses of this Don Giovanni are the sets by Reinhard Zimmermann, which are solid, unstylized and actually look like the late 18th century; it’s a real pleasure to see the old-fashioned realistic approach in an era in which so many opera productions are set in junkyards or among bits of stylized hangings of cloth, metal or glass that look like they came from junkyards!
I ran Charles and I the second item in the Arthaus Musik set of Walter Felsenstein’s opera videos from the Komische Oper in East Berlin back when East Germany (officially the “Deutsche Democratische Republik” — “German Democratic Republic”) was still a going concern. I don’t recall what order the videos were originally sequenced in when I got the box but I refiled them in chronological order by date of composition, so after the first item we’d watched previously — Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro from 1976 — the next one was the next opera by Mozart and ace librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Alas, the video was from 1966, 10 years earlier than the version of The Marriage of Figaro, and therefore was in black-and-white — East German TV hadn’t adopted color yet — and the image was blurry around the edges and had the lack of definition common to even the best-preserved videotapes of its vintage. There were some other strikes against this Don Giovanni: it was performed not in librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s original Italian but in a German translation by Walter Felsenstein and Horst Seeger (which, like Felsenstein’s translation of da Ponte’s Marriage of Figaro, sounded quite good in the ensemble scenes and the recitatives, but the big lyrical arias suffered — still, perhaps because Mozart was Austrian and therefore German was his native tongue, Mozart in German sounds better than Verdi in German), and it stuck to the original 1786 Prague version of the score. Mozart composed Don Giovanni for the Prague opera — which made it appropriate that Felsenstein used a Czech conductor, Zdenek Kosler, for this production — and later tweaked the score for Vienna, replacing Don Ottavio’s original aria “Il mio tesoro” with “Dalla sua pace,” and adding a comic scene between Donna Elvira and Leporello, “Restati qua,” that ended with Elvira singing a new aria, “Mi tradi,” in which she laments that she’s still attracted to Don Giovanni despite the shabby (to say the least!) way he’s treated her.
Most modern productions follow a conflated version that leaves out the “Restati qua” scene but includes “Mi tradi” and gives Don Ottavio both arias — but Felsenstein followed the original Prague text and therefore deprived his Elvira, Anny Schlemm (one of only two singers in this cast I’d heard of before), of her big lyrical moment. Now for the good news: this Don Giovanni is one of the most exciting, committed, passionate opera videos I’ve ever seen of anything. There’s been an ongoing debate in the opera world for almost a century now (ever since international transportation became fast and efficient enough that singers could fly all over the world instead of remaining attached to only a few opera houses their entire careers) about the merits of international casts with the best voices available for the roles versus local casts whose voices may not be as “major” but who have the advantage of regularly working together and relating to each other dramatically. This video is a souvenir of a time when East Germany, and the Eastern bloc in general, were still largely cut off from the rest of the world artistically: occasionally an Eastern-bloc singer like the Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff would be so good opera managers would defy the political roadblocks to hire him (though when Rudolf Bing was hired to manage the Met in 1950 and wanted Christoff for King Philip in Verdi’s Don Carlos, bureaucrats at the State Department yielded to McCarthyite pressure and denied him a visa, so Christoff didn’t sing at the Met until 1956), but Western stars almost never performed in Eastern theatres. The downside was that Eastern Bloc opera fans didn’t get the biggest names from the West; the upside was that the singers they did get were used to performing with each other and could play off each other dramatically in ways considerably more difficult for an international cast who fly in for a specific production and then fly away again to different parts of the world. There are other good things about this Don Giovanni: conductor Kosler, whom I’d known mainly for his recordings of Dvorák symphonies and other Czech orchestral music back home with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague, tears through the score and plays it as drama, not a cute comic farce.
The singers are all excellent in their roles — though I was startled at how tall the tenor singing Ottavio, John Moulson, was; he didn’t have the melting sweetness in his voice one expects (I expect, anyway) from this part (and the German translation didn’t help) but he looked convincingly butch and a reasonable alterative to Don Giovanni (Györgi Melis, the other singer here I’d heard of before) for the affections of Donna Anna (Klara Barlow). Barlow’s Anna was the best performance in the cast; though costume designer Sylka-Maria Busse made her look way too much like Morticia Addams for my taste (yes, I know she’s supposed to dress in black because she’s in mourning for her father, the Commendatore [Herbert Rössler], whom Don Giovanni kills in the opening scene, but she didn’t have to look like she just emerged from a swamp!), her acting was visceral and she managed to make Anna’s single-minded determination to avenge her father’s death and her own near-ruination at Giovanni’s hands believable. Anny Schlemm was almost as good as Elvira, and Melis as Don Giovanni was appropriately hunky and hot-looking even though one wonders how his rather lame seduction lines ever worked on anybody, let alone the 2,065 women he’s previously bedded in the backstory. One problem with the production was Rudolf Asmus’s Leporello, Giovanni’s faithful servant and butt of some of Giovanni’s nastiest practical jokes: he sings acceptably but not at the level of the rest of the cast, and he’s considerably shorter and stouter than Melis — which makes hash of the scene in which Don Giovanni and Leporello switch clothes and impersonate each other to facilitate Giovanni’s attempted seduction of Donna Elvira’s housemaid. The other principals are Eva-Marie Baum as Zerlina, the peasant girl Giovanni attempts to seduce in the duet “La ci darem la mano” (which became a favorite of 19th century composers — Chopin and Liszt both composed variations on it for piano), and Fritz Hübner as her fiancé Masetto. Baum sang well enough but it’s odd that this, not either of the Donnas, was 19th-century superstar Adelina Patti’s preferred role in this opera, and she and Hübner did the best they could with the “Batti, batti” duet in which Zerlina offers to let Masetto beat her up as his revenge for her almost having yielded to the Don’s seductions.
That’s inevitably going to be a problem for modern audiences, but in a lot of ways the politics of Don Giovanni seem awfully au courant in the age of the #MeToo movement. Giovanni himself comes off — especially the way Felsenstein staged it — as a sort of combination Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, convinced that because he was born into money he therefore has a God-given right to have any woman he wants and throw his money around on lavish parties. His invitation to the dead Commendatore, represented by a giant statue in a cemetery, to come to his place for dinner comes off as a marvelous bit of cheekiness, well within the Don’s character — and Charles was surprised that in a regime devoted to materialism Felsenstein was able to keep Mozart’s and da Ponte’s original supernatural ending (the statue of the Commendatore comes to life and literally drags Don Giovanni down to hell) instead of fudging it (as Russian director Dimitri Tcherniakov did in a recent production in which the Commendatore was an actor hired to impersonate the dead man and therefore get the Don to confess his crimes and/or go totally crazy). Interestingly Don Giovanni is one of only two Mozart operas in which he used trombones, both times to signal supernatural interventions in his plots — here where the statue speaks and accepts Giovanni’s dinner invitation, and earlier in Idomeneo when the god Poseidon literally functions as a deus ex machina and lets Idomeneo off the hook, allowing him not to sacrifice his son Idamante as he had previously pledged. Also among the pluses of this Don Giovanni are the sets by Reinhard Zimmermann, which are solid, unstylized and actually look like the late 18th century; it’s a real pleasure to see the old-fashioned realistic approach in an era in which so many opera productions are set in junkyards or among bits of stylized hangings of cloth, metal or glass that look like they came from junkyards!
Monday, October 7, 2019
My Wife’s Secret Life (My Life Productions, Corus, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was O.K. but a major letdown in the quality department after the previous night’s one, Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story. (So far all the Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines!” movies have been especially good, and the previous week’s entry, Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story, about a Lesbian teenager whose Mormon parents send her to a “rehabilitation” center for eight months, already has over 1,000 hits on moviemagg. Thank you to all those wonderful people out there in the dark … or on their smartphones.) The film was called My Wife’s Secret Life, an obvious pun on the previous Lifetime titles My Husband’s Secret Life (though in that one the husband’s secret — that he was really a Russian spy — was given away by the opening credits, in which the letter “r” in the word “Secret” was printed backwards to make it look Cyrillic) and My Husband’s Secret Wife, though it really wasn’t about a woman with a dirty little secret (or a dirty big secret, like being a spy for a foreign country — gee, with a credential like that she could go to work for the Trump re-election campaign!). It seems that even on a network that began by advertising itself as “Television for Women,” women still aren’t allowed to be independent, self-actualizing agents but have to be either tools or scapegoats in some male villain’s scheme.
The heroine of My Wife’s Secret Life, Laurel Briggs (Kate Villanova), is one member of one of those bizarre screen couples whose work schedules are so overwhelming, and clash so frequently, they literally never have any time together. She’s a sort of lobbying consultant who helps big corporations evade government regulations, and her husband James (Jason Cermak, medium-height and with the sandy hair obligatory in an innocent Lifetime husband but at least a bit sexier than the norm) is an attorney apparently specializing in divorce cases. They have two kids, Daniela (Zoë Noelle Baker) and Joshua (Calix Fraser), but one wonders how they came to exist because the two adult Briggses are both such workaholics one can’t imagine them finding the time to have sex. Years earlier James had a one-night stand with another woman, and though we’re never told how they got together or why (the writer is Zachary Valenti, whom I’ve never heard of before, though the director, Jason Bourque — not Bourne! — is an old Lifetime hand), James’s affair partner makes a brief appearance early on to serve as a red herring. Laurel is scheduled to go to some sort of convention related to her work, which involves her in a punishing weekend schedule of meetings, and she leaves for this event right after she and James have had an argument over where they’re going to take their next vacation — to visit theme parks in Southern California, which is what their kids want them to do, or to take off on a weekend getaway in a mountain resort, just the two of them, with Laurel’s sister Angela (Marnie Mahannah) looking after the kids while they’re gone. When Laurel arrives at the convention she learns that someone called in and cancelled her room reservation, but there’s an open room at the motel two blocks down. At the convention she “accidentally” bumps into Kent Anderson (Matthew MacCaull), who isn’t that much hunkier than her husband but who’s hot enough a) Lifetime’s iconography marks him as the villain and b) she falls for his well-oiled seduction routine (at first I thought Laurel’s husband had sneaked behind her back and canceled her room reservation to get her to bail on the convention and come home for the weekend, but it turns out Kent did it to get her away from the main hotel and into a motel where he just “happened” to have rented the room next door to hers).
The two have a hot soft-core porn scene that’s easily the most entertaining part of the movie (and even after MacCaull’s character is revealed to be the villain we still get a lot of hot, sexy mid-shots of him topless and flashing an impressive basket that moved this old queen’s Lust-O-Meter, though he’s not actually the sexiest guy in this movie — more on that later), only like the American adulterous couple Mike Nichols and Elaine May joked about back in 1960 she immediately feels horrendously guilty about having given in to her gonads and accepted a hot fuck from an unscrupulous man simply because he was good-looking and, unlike her husband, at least there. Laurel wants nothing more to do with Kent but he keeps pursuing her not only during the convention but when she gets home as well — he sends her one red rose along with a note with a stanza of a poem by Lord Byron, and Laurel’s husband James immediately figures out who his wife’s mysterious lover was. Years before he had represented a woman trapped in a marriage with a physically and psychologically abusive husband, and one of his trademarks was that immediately after beating the shit out of her he’d bring her a red rose and a note with a stanza from Byron. Unable to get him prosecuted for spousal abuse, James had done the next best thing and taken the woman’s abusive husband to the cleaners financially. Alas, that had also left him nursing a long-term grievance that hardened into a determination to destroy James. My friend Garry, who was watching this with me, said it reminded him of the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy — though in that movie the abused wife, played by Julia Roberts, escaped her husband not by divorcing him but faking her own death, and when the husband realized his wife was still alive he focused his revenge plot against her (and the new, nicer boyfriend she’d taken up with) instead of someone as peripheral to his case as his wife’s lawyer.
Kent sends an assailant to accost James outside his home — the plot is to goad James into taking a swing at the guy, thereby getting himself arrested — and James has Laurel call Paul Scheffler (Zak Santiago, a hotter-looking piece of man-meat than either Matthew MacCaull or Jason Cermak), a private detective who works with his law firm (essentially his Paul Drake) to investigate Kent Anderson … who turns out to be a man named Ray Peterson who as a kid witnessed his dad go after his mom with a knife and apparently determinedf from then on that that’s how men were supposed to treat women. Ray a.k.a. Kent posed as an executive to crash Laurel’s convention even though he’s been unemployed for a year and a half. He also romances Laurel’s sister Angela — who, it’s already established, has an absolutely wretched taste in men — and his plan appears to be to knock off both James and Laurel and marry Angela so he’ll be the “father” of James’ and Laurel’s kids. He eventually kidnaps Laurel and takes her to a deserted mountain cabin (another deserted mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie? This is getting to be one of their most annoying conventions!) to which Laurel’s husband James and his investigator Paul just happen to have the address to because it was part of the community property in the divorce case and was one of the few assets Ray’s ex actually allowed him to keep. Rather than have the cops come in on the case and start shooting everyone, James and Paul decide to trace Ray a.k.a. Kent on their own and find the cabin; Kent has been wielding a gun and gets the drop on Paul surprisingly easily (especially since we’ve been told he’s an ex-cop and therefore one would expect him to be harder to ambush than he is) but James hits Kent with a shovel from behind, the two collapse to the ground and fight, Kent lets go of his gun and Laurel grabs it and puts Kent out with two shots straight to his heart. (For someone who as far as we know has never handled a gun before, she’s sure an awfully good shot. At least Alfred Hitchcock, in the opening of the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, established that Edna Best’s character was an accomplished markswoman so we could believe that at the end of the film she was able to pick off the gunman who was holding her daughter hostage without harming the daughter.)
James and Laurel end up back together and forgive each other their transgressions against the sacred vow of monogamy that’s supposed to be part of the marriage contract, which reminded me of Andrew Sullivan’s prediction in his 1990’s book on same-sex marriage that the social acceptance of Gay couples marrying each other would break down the expectation of sexual exclusivity that he felt hamstrung many straight couples in their marriages. Instead, the opposite has happened; Gay men in relationships have faced the same expectations of sexual exclusivity that has been the stated norm (though honored more in the breach than the observance!) for straight couples, and Gay people like San Diego school board member Kevin Beiser who present themselves as married and with (adopted) kids but really trick around get publicly pilloried for it. My Wife’s Secret Life isn’t really the movie we might have expected from the title (Lifetime had already done Secrets of a Sex Addict, which was closer to what I expected from this title — a woman who, like the heroine of Anaïs Nin’s marvelous novel A Spy in the House of Love, had a series of extra-relational sex partners and rigidly separated that part of her life from her existence with her husband and family) and the affair isn’t much of a “secret” since she confesses it to her husband about one-third of the way through the film — it’s decent Lifetime fun and thrills but not what it could have been if writer Valenti and director Bourque had brought a little more imagination to it!
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was O.K. but a major letdown in the quality department after the previous night’s one, Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story. (So far all the Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines!” movies have been especially good, and the previous week’s entry, Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story, about a Lesbian teenager whose Mormon parents send her to a “rehabilitation” center for eight months, already has over 1,000 hits on moviemagg. Thank you to all those wonderful people out there in the dark … or on their smartphones.) The film was called My Wife’s Secret Life, an obvious pun on the previous Lifetime titles My Husband’s Secret Life (though in that one the husband’s secret — that he was really a Russian spy — was given away by the opening credits, in which the letter “r” in the word “Secret” was printed backwards to make it look Cyrillic) and My Husband’s Secret Wife, though it really wasn’t about a woman with a dirty little secret (or a dirty big secret, like being a spy for a foreign country — gee, with a credential like that she could go to work for the Trump re-election campaign!). It seems that even on a network that began by advertising itself as “Television for Women,” women still aren’t allowed to be independent, self-actualizing agents but have to be either tools or scapegoats in some male villain’s scheme.
The heroine of My Wife’s Secret Life, Laurel Briggs (Kate Villanova), is one member of one of those bizarre screen couples whose work schedules are so overwhelming, and clash so frequently, they literally never have any time together. She’s a sort of lobbying consultant who helps big corporations evade government regulations, and her husband James (Jason Cermak, medium-height and with the sandy hair obligatory in an innocent Lifetime husband but at least a bit sexier than the norm) is an attorney apparently specializing in divorce cases. They have two kids, Daniela (Zoë Noelle Baker) and Joshua (Calix Fraser), but one wonders how they came to exist because the two adult Briggses are both such workaholics one can’t imagine them finding the time to have sex. Years earlier James had a one-night stand with another woman, and though we’re never told how they got together or why (the writer is Zachary Valenti, whom I’ve never heard of before, though the director, Jason Bourque — not Bourne! — is an old Lifetime hand), James’s affair partner makes a brief appearance early on to serve as a red herring. Laurel is scheduled to go to some sort of convention related to her work, which involves her in a punishing weekend schedule of meetings, and she leaves for this event right after she and James have had an argument over where they’re going to take their next vacation — to visit theme parks in Southern California, which is what their kids want them to do, or to take off on a weekend getaway in a mountain resort, just the two of them, with Laurel’s sister Angela (Marnie Mahannah) looking after the kids while they’re gone. When Laurel arrives at the convention she learns that someone called in and cancelled her room reservation, but there’s an open room at the motel two blocks down. At the convention she “accidentally” bumps into Kent Anderson (Matthew MacCaull), who isn’t that much hunkier than her husband but who’s hot enough a) Lifetime’s iconography marks him as the villain and b) she falls for his well-oiled seduction routine (at first I thought Laurel’s husband had sneaked behind her back and canceled her room reservation to get her to bail on the convention and come home for the weekend, but it turns out Kent did it to get her away from the main hotel and into a motel where he just “happened” to have rented the room next door to hers).
The two have a hot soft-core porn scene that’s easily the most entertaining part of the movie (and even after MacCaull’s character is revealed to be the villain we still get a lot of hot, sexy mid-shots of him topless and flashing an impressive basket that moved this old queen’s Lust-O-Meter, though he’s not actually the sexiest guy in this movie — more on that later), only like the American adulterous couple Mike Nichols and Elaine May joked about back in 1960 she immediately feels horrendously guilty about having given in to her gonads and accepted a hot fuck from an unscrupulous man simply because he was good-looking and, unlike her husband, at least there. Laurel wants nothing more to do with Kent but he keeps pursuing her not only during the convention but when she gets home as well — he sends her one red rose along with a note with a stanza of a poem by Lord Byron, and Laurel’s husband James immediately figures out who his wife’s mysterious lover was. Years before he had represented a woman trapped in a marriage with a physically and psychologically abusive husband, and one of his trademarks was that immediately after beating the shit out of her he’d bring her a red rose and a note with a stanza from Byron. Unable to get him prosecuted for spousal abuse, James had done the next best thing and taken the woman’s abusive husband to the cleaners financially. Alas, that had also left him nursing a long-term grievance that hardened into a determination to destroy James. My friend Garry, who was watching this with me, said it reminded him of the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy — though in that movie the abused wife, played by Julia Roberts, escaped her husband not by divorcing him but faking her own death, and when the husband realized his wife was still alive he focused his revenge plot against her (and the new, nicer boyfriend she’d taken up with) instead of someone as peripheral to his case as his wife’s lawyer.
Kent sends an assailant to accost James outside his home — the plot is to goad James into taking a swing at the guy, thereby getting himself arrested — and James has Laurel call Paul Scheffler (Zak Santiago, a hotter-looking piece of man-meat than either Matthew MacCaull or Jason Cermak), a private detective who works with his law firm (essentially his Paul Drake) to investigate Kent Anderson … who turns out to be a man named Ray Peterson who as a kid witnessed his dad go after his mom with a knife and apparently determinedf from then on that that’s how men were supposed to treat women. Ray a.k.a. Kent posed as an executive to crash Laurel’s convention even though he’s been unemployed for a year and a half. He also romances Laurel’s sister Angela — who, it’s already established, has an absolutely wretched taste in men — and his plan appears to be to knock off both James and Laurel and marry Angela so he’ll be the “father” of James’ and Laurel’s kids. He eventually kidnaps Laurel and takes her to a deserted mountain cabin (another deserted mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie? This is getting to be one of their most annoying conventions!) to which Laurel’s husband James and his investigator Paul just happen to have the address to because it was part of the community property in the divorce case and was one of the few assets Ray’s ex actually allowed him to keep. Rather than have the cops come in on the case and start shooting everyone, James and Paul decide to trace Ray a.k.a. Kent on their own and find the cabin; Kent has been wielding a gun and gets the drop on Paul surprisingly easily (especially since we’ve been told he’s an ex-cop and therefore one would expect him to be harder to ambush than he is) but James hits Kent with a shovel from behind, the two collapse to the ground and fight, Kent lets go of his gun and Laurel grabs it and puts Kent out with two shots straight to his heart. (For someone who as far as we know has never handled a gun before, she’s sure an awfully good shot. At least Alfred Hitchcock, in the opening of the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much, established that Edna Best’s character was an accomplished markswoman so we could believe that at the end of the film she was able to pick off the gunman who was holding her daughter hostage without harming the daughter.)
James and Laurel end up back together and forgive each other their transgressions against the sacred vow of monogamy that’s supposed to be part of the marriage contract, which reminded me of Andrew Sullivan’s prediction in his 1990’s book on same-sex marriage that the social acceptance of Gay couples marrying each other would break down the expectation of sexual exclusivity that he felt hamstrung many straight couples in their marriages. Instead, the opposite has happened; Gay men in relationships have faced the same expectations of sexual exclusivity that has been the stated norm (though honored more in the breach than the observance!) for straight couples, and Gay people like San Diego school board member Kevin Beiser who present themselves as married and with (adopted) kids but really trick around get publicly pilloried for it. My Wife’s Secret Life isn’t really the movie we might have expected from the title (Lifetime had already done Secrets of a Sex Addict, which was closer to what I expected from this title — a woman who, like the heroine of Anaïs Nin’s marvelous novel A Spy in the House of Love, had a series of extra-relational sex partners and rigidly separated that part of her life from her existence with her husband and family) and the affair isn’t much of a “secret” since she confesses it to her husband about one-third of the way through the film — it’s decent Lifetime fun and thrills but not what it could have been if writer Valenti and director Bourque had brought a little more imagination to it!
Sunday, October 6, 2019
The Bunker (Société Production de Française, France 2, Time-Life Television Productions, 1981)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday afternoon’s “feature” was The Bunker, an intriguing movie dealing with the last three months or so in the life of Adolf Hitler, which he lived in the so-called Führerbunker, built in the sub-basement of the Reich’s Chancellery, the seat of power in Nazi Germany and the only one of the monumental buildings Hitler’s pet architect, Albert Speer, designed for him that actually got built and used. The Bunker was a TV-movie made in 1980 and released in 1981, and Hitler was played by Anthony Hopkins — who gave a Los Angeles Times interview to promote it in which he said his biggest acting challenge was to work out a voice for the private Adolf Hitler. Plenty of films exist of the public Hitler — footage of his (in)famous party rallies in which he cultivated a carefully built-up speaking style (he described it in Mein Kampf) starting with a slow rumble and gradually building in intensity into the full-throated screaming and frantic arm gestures we’ve all seen in the Nazi newsreels and the clips from them included in just about every documentary on Hitler, the Nazis or World War Two. But Hopkins decided that Hitler wouldn’t have talked that way in offices or small rooms with just his friends, his aides or his girlfriend Eva Braun, and his big challenge was to work out a voice for the more private, intimate Hitler. According to reports on the film’s imdb.com page, Hopkins got so immersed in the role of Hitler he started being very domineering arouud the house and treating his wife as if she were a errant Gauleiter instead of his partner and equal. Hopkins’ voice as the private Hitler was mostly believable — I liked the way Hopkins, presumably supported by director George Schaefer, lapsed into the public Hitler voice and gestures whenever he got angry with someone — though occasionally he sounded surprisingly like the rather mincing voice Charlie Chaplin used in his Hitler parody, as “Adenoid Hynkel, the Pfui of Tomania,” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator.
The film ends with a red-orange flame
consuming Hitler’s dead body after his murder-suicide with his wife (of several
hours — on his last day Hitler decided he wanted to marry Eva Braun at last,
and they had to scrounge up a civil clerk who had the power under Nazi law to
marry people — and there’s a grimly funny bit in the marriage ceremony in
which, according to the Nazis’ racist legislation, the clerk asks both Hitler
and Braun to certify that they are of pure Aryan blood and they have no
hereditary diseases), because he wanted to be cremated to make sure his body
would not be found by Soviet troops … only they found it anyway: the Germans
tried to burn Hitler in an open pit and they didn’t have enough gasoline to
heat the body to the temperature needed to cremate it, so Hitler’s corpse was
charred but enough of it survived that the Soviets took it back to Russia and
autopsied it (and incidentally confirmed that Hitler had only one testicle). I
hadn’t thought about The Bunker in years but it was an interesting movie even though it was a bit of a
slog — let’s face it, one can only take so much of a movie about a homicidal
maniac, especially one who’s losing whatever level of sanity he ever had
(though my reading of the historical record is that up until 1942 Hitler was a
rational, though evil, person and it was only around then, probably provoked by
the German defeat at Stalingrad, that he went totally off the rails and turned
from being a rational man pursuing an irrational agenda effectively to someone
totally insane, until at the end he was insisting that a miracle would save
Germany and the war could still be won, and calling on his generals to send in
huge divisions to defend Berlin that either had been significantly reduced by
war casualties, couldn’t get to the home front in time or no longer existed at
all) — and of course in 2019 it’s impossible to watch a movie about Adolf
Hitler (or Stalin, or Mao, or any other dastardly dictator) without
cherry-picking the dialogue for any bits the screenwriter inserted that seem
now to presage Donald Trump. There were certainly plenty of those, including
Hitler’s incessant demands for “loyalty” from his staff members (though Hitler
actually looks pretty good in his willingness to return that loyalty; unlike Stalin or Trump, he did not
suddenly banish people from the inner circle for trivial reasons) and the
repetitiveness of his speech (at one point he denounces Hermann Göring as “a
drug addict” again and again and again — he’s pissed off at both Göring and Heinrich Himmler for having
offered the Allies peace deals behind Hitler’s back), though the most relevant
aspect of The Bunker today is
its whole exposure of what unlimited power does to the people who wield it,
especially if they do so in a state of total secrecy and isolation from the
population they are supposedly serving. It’s a chilling reminder of how
dictatorships rot from the inside and yet more confirmation that Hitler’s great
enemy Winston Churchill was right when he said, “Democracy is the worst form of
government — except for all the others.”
Yesterday afternoon’s “feature” was The Bunker, an intriguing movie dealing with the last three months or so in the life of Adolf Hitler, which he lived in the so-called Führerbunker, built in the sub-basement of the Reich’s Chancellery, the seat of power in Nazi Germany and the only one of the monumental buildings Hitler’s pet architect, Albert Speer, designed for him that actually got built and used. The Bunker was a TV-movie made in 1980 and released in 1981, and Hitler was played by Anthony Hopkins — who gave a Los Angeles Times interview to promote it in which he said his biggest acting challenge was to work out a voice for the private Adolf Hitler. Plenty of films exist of the public Hitler — footage of his (in)famous party rallies in which he cultivated a carefully built-up speaking style (he described it in Mein Kampf) starting with a slow rumble and gradually building in intensity into the full-throated screaming and frantic arm gestures we’ve all seen in the Nazi newsreels and the clips from them included in just about every documentary on Hitler, the Nazis or World War Two. But Hopkins decided that Hitler wouldn’t have talked that way in offices or small rooms with just his friends, his aides or his girlfriend Eva Braun, and his big challenge was to work out a voice for the more private, intimate Hitler. According to reports on the film’s imdb.com page, Hopkins got so immersed in the role of Hitler he started being very domineering arouud the house and treating his wife as if she were a errant Gauleiter instead of his partner and equal. Hopkins’ voice as the private Hitler was mostly believable — I liked the way Hopkins, presumably supported by director George Schaefer, lapsed into the public Hitler voice and gestures whenever he got angry with someone — though occasionally he sounded surprisingly like the rather mincing voice Charlie Chaplin used in his Hitler parody, as “Adenoid Hynkel, the Pfui of Tomania,” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator.
I hadn’t seen The Bunker
since it first aired on TV in 1981, when another TV station almost immediately
followed it with the 1962 biopic Hitler (with Richard Basehart, of all people, as der Führer), a rather silly movie that was more about Hitler’s
love life (in particular his 1920’s affair with his niece, Geli Raubal, whom he
reportedly had killed when he thought she was getting too clingy) than his
crimes against humanity. The Bunker
was surprisingly effective drama even though it had its problems, notably its
treatment of Albert Speer (Richard Jordan), who became an “in” figure worldwide
once he finished the 20-year prison sentence he received at the Nuremberg
trials and published his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, soon after his release. Speer had a major
late-in-life career as a sort of Hitler-explainer in the seemingly endless
series of documentaries about the Third Reich, partly because he was one of
only two figures close to Hitler who wrote first-hand about his experiences
(Joseph Goebbels, in his posthumously published diaries, was the other) and
partly because he was the only important Nazi who had ever expressed any degree of remorse about his conduct or his support
of this barbaric regime. The Bunker
was made at or pretty near the height of “Speer-mania,” which explains why
screenwriter John Gay (adapting a history by James P. O’Donnell) went out of
his way to portray Speer as the voice of reason in the Nazi inner circle.
Speer
not only levels with Hitler about the sorry state of what was left of German
war production — including the fact that, especially once the Allies had cut
off the Ruhr district from the rest of Germany, even if they could get planes
and tanks to the front they had little or no fuel for them — he also directly
tries to talk Hitler out of his plan to destroy the entire German
infrastructure, including entire cities and towns as well as factories and
farms, on the ground that by losing the war the German people had proven
themselves unworthy to survive. In fact Speer knew better than to try to talk
Hitler out of anything; the real
Speer agreed to Hitler’s face to carry out the scorched-earth policy but then
sabotaged it behind the scenes — which is the main reason why at Nuremberg he
got a 20-year prison term instead of a death sentence. (More recent historians
have exposed Speer as just as rotten and inhumane as the rest of the top Nazis;
one documentary shown on YouTube pointed out that the remodeling plans for
Auschwitz that turned it from just another concentration camp into a death
machine were in Speer’s own hand — and had that been known when the Nuremberg trials occurred, he
would almost certainly have been executed.) The Bunker is at its saddest depicting the decision by Joseph
Goebbels (Cliff Gorman, almost totally miscast — unlike the other principals he
makes no attempt at a German accent) and his wife Magda (Piper Laurie — did
that poor woman ever make a movie
in which her character didn’t
kill herself at the end?) decided not only on a murder-suicide themselves but
also to kill their six children by feeding them poisoned sweets. Apparently
Goebbels’ suicide, like Hitler’s, was motivated by his determination not to let
himself or anyone in his family be captured by the Allies — especially the
Russians (a number of the lesser figures in the bunker spent a lot of time and
energy trying to figure out how to sneak out of Berlin and get behind the
British or American lines, figuring that at least the Americans and British
would treat them as prisoners of war while the Russians would just summarily
kill them — this is one aspect of the script for The Bunker that is
historically accurate) — and exhibited publicly, alive or dead, as a war
trophy.
Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story (Stalking Productions/Lifetime, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere” and the latest in their “Ripped from the Headlines!” sequence of TV-movies. Actually, if this one was “Ripped from the Headlines” it was ripped from the headlines of old, yellowing slabs of newsprint because the original event dramatized here happened in 1980, but it was a good story nonetheless. It was called Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story, though it was originally shot as 55 Days: The Abduction of Mary Stauffer, which somewhat gives away the ending given that a lot of the suspense around the plot is about just how long the ordeal of Mary Stauffer (Alyson Hannigan) and her eight-year old daughter Beth (an excellent performance by child actor Daphne Hoskins that should mark her for biggers and betters) will last and whether and under what circumstances they’ll be rescued. Mary Stauffer is the wife of a minister, Irv Stauffer (Daniel Nemes, a considerably more handsome actor than usually gets cast as the innocent husband in a Lifetime movie and also someone I’d like to see more of), and they have two kids, Beth — whom they persist in calling “Bethy” for some reason (I can readily imagine her confronting her parents and saying, “No more of this ‘Bethy’ garbage! My name’s Beth,” much the way my husband Charles told his mother he never wanted to be called “Charlie,” “Chuck” or anything but “Charles”) — and Steven (Miles Phoenix Foley). The location is Roseville, Minnesota and the time is June 1980; school has just let out and, much to the irritation of their kids, the adult Stauffers have decided to take the family on a missionary trip to the Philippines. Alas, just as they’re deep into planning and packing for their trip Mary and Beth Stauffer are held at gunpoint by a mysterious stranger neither of them immediately recognizes. The young man, who looks vaguely Asian under his big glasses (not that different, ironically, from the ones Mary Stauffer herself wears), isn’t quite as much of a stranger as the Stauffers think. Mary Stauffer has been a high-school teacher in the neighborhood for about 20 years, and it seems that 15 years before their kidnapper, Ming Sen Shiue (Howie Lai) got a bad grade in Mary’s freshman English class, and one presumes his overall GPA was on such a thin edge of eligibility he lost the college scholarship he was hoping for. It’s hard to tell whether he’s more motivated by the bad grade that sandbagged his chances for college or the sexual crush he also developed on Mary Stauffer back then, but he’s brutal about it: he forces both female Stauffers into their own car and tells Mary, at gunpoint, to drive to a deserted location.
He intends to abandon their car and switch to his own, a white minivan, but on the way he forces the Stauffers into the trunk of their car and a couple of kids riding their bikes through the woods spot him. The kids are Jason Wilkman and his sister, and when Jason spots Ming putting the Stauffers into their car trunk he innocently asks him, “You having car trouble?” That gets him kidnapped along with them and eventually killed as Ming decides it’s too risky to have a potential witness — though the cops are already aware that something is going on because the sister escaped Ming’s notice, survives and told her parents what happened to her brother. Indeed, ironically the cops blow off Irv Stauffer’s attempts to report his wife and daughter missing because they’re too concerned about finding Jason Wilkman’s kidnapper. Meanwhile, Ming moves the Stauffers into his own home, which he’s tricked up with curtains, boards, soundproofing and locks to make sure they can’t get away. He locks them in a closet with only a slop bucket for them to use to relieve themselves — though Mary eventually talks him into letting them use the bathroom normally — and for nearly two months he holds them hostage, going back and forth between punishing them with more locks and restraints when they try to escape or summon help and letting his boot at least a bit off their faces when they behave. The best aspect of this film is that writer Vickerman and director Jim Donovan make Ming Sen Shiue a multidimensional character, neither the nostril-flaring, shrieking psycho of pre-1960 movies nor the disarmingly gentle boy-next-door psycho Anthony Perkins played in Hitchcock’s Psycho and who’s been copied in countless movies since. He’s also rather attractive — one could readily imagine him attracting somebody (female or male) if he tried courting normally, especially since in the scenes where he’s only wearing one of those skimpy T-shirts ironically called a “wife-beater” above the waist he’s enviably muscular and even genuinely hunky.
One quirk of the story is that Ming was not only a psychopathic killer (it’s only towards the end of the film that we realize he killed that poor kid Jason Wilkman just for being in the wrong place and the wrong time, but we assume he did, and had director Donovan put in the sound of a single gunshot in the distance over the scene of the Stauffers’ cowering in the trunk of their car while Ming is killing Jason, this already chilling movie would be even more so) but also one of the early pioneers in making and selling personal computers. He’s shown in a speech about how computers will soon be routine appliances in ordinary people’s homes, and his electronic skills are such that well before he actually kidnapped Mary Stauffer, he bugged their bedroom and heard just what Irv and Mary Stauffer sounded like when they made love. So when he demands that Mary Stauffer “make love” to him just like she did with her husband, instead of submitting to rape out of resignation and fear for her (and her daughter’s) life, he’s got the knowledge base on which to judge her performance. Had Wickerman and Donovan included some kinky soft-core porn scenes between the two — with Ming eagerly having his way with her and Mary having somehow to convince her assailant that she’s enjoying the whole thing — this would have been an even stronger movie, and though this didn’t really happen I found myself wondering how Mary would have reacted if Ming had got her pregnant. Though the denomination of the Stauffers’ church is not mentioned, I found myself pretty much assuming they were some sort of evangelical sect who, among other things, would be passionately against abortion — and how a minister with those leanings would handle his wife coming home from a two-month ordeal at the hands of a sexual sadist bearing his child, and how he would have handled the dilemma of his church teachings telling him he needed to help raise and support his wife’s rapist’s child, would itself have made for an interesting movie even though it would no longer have qualified as “Ripped from the Headlines!”
I was also impressed by the way Wickerman and Donovan shifted the balance in the mother-daughter relationship: at the start Beth was almost screaming at her mother to defy their kidnapper and get the two of them home as soon as possible, but about midway through the movie Beth stopped resisting (a bit of Stockholm syndrome, perhaps?) and urged her mom against any escape attempts, while mom kept resisting until she finally found a chink in Ming’s armor: a loose pin in a door hinge that, even though restrained, she was able to work loose and get the door to fall down so they could pull loose from the restraints and escape. The filmmakers were also skillful in working in what already seems like antediluvian technology into their plot: not only are the cars driven both by the Stauffers and the cops the sort of big, hulking beasts (as opposed to the tank-like SUV’s all too many modern-day drivers indulge in) but the phone Mary Stauffer uses to alert the police that they’re free and where they are has a rotary dial (and she has to dlal a lot more numbers than just “911” to reach the cops). The only aspect of Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story that rubbed me the wrong way was the infuriating piety of it all: throughout it all Mary Stauffer’s voiceover narration tells us again and again and again that her faith in God sustained her through her ordeal and gave her comfort that somehow this horrible thing that had happened to her and her daughter was nonetheless part of God’s plan for them and they would emerge stronger. I found myself wondering how a committed atheist would handle a similar ordeal — and indeed whether the filmmakers actually wanted to communicate the message, “You’d better believe in God, because if you don’t you’ll have no source of hope to fall back and rely on in case a psycho kidnapper gets you into his clutches and keeps you in captivity for almost two months.”
There was a brief (about 10 minutes) epilogue in the form of a mini-Behind the Headlines episode of Mary and Beth Stauffer — the real ones — as they appear now, including mentioning the bizarre epilogue to the story that while he was on trial for kidnapping the Stauffers and (a separate proceeding) the murder of Jason Wilkman — for which he ultimately received a life sentence but with the possibility of parole, which means the Stauffers and the Wilkmans have to keep trooping into parole board meetings to persuade them not to let the S.O.B. out, much the way the families of Charles Manson’s victims had to keep coming to his parole hearings until Manson’s death finally relieved them of that burden — at one point in the proceedings Ming somehow got access to a pocket knife and slashed Mary Stauffer’s face with it, leaving a scar that was quite obvious in the photos of the time even though it’s receded (although it’s still visible) over time. Apparently Ming Sei Shiue is still obsessed with Mary Stauffer and is planning to kill her if he ever gets out — or, if she’s already dead, to kill her relatives (of which there are quite a few because both Beth and Steven Stauffer are married and have kids of their own). Just what made Ming go so far off the rails and fasten so intently to the Stauffers, Mary in particular, is never quite explained by Vickerman’s script, but it really doesn’t need to be; Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story is a powerful, well-staged, well-acted drama even though it literally gets too preachy a lot of the time!
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere” and the latest in their “Ripped from the Headlines!” sequence of TV-movies. Actually, if this one was “Ripped from the Headlines” it was ripped from the headlines of old, yellowing slabs of newsprint because the original event dramatized here happened in 1980, but it was a good story nonetheless. It was called Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story, though it was originally shot as 55 Days: The Abduction of Mary Stauffer, which somewhat gives away the ending given that a lot of the suspense around the plot is about just how long the ordeal of Mary Stauffer (Alyson Hannigan) and her eight-year old daughter Beth (an excellent performance by child actor Daphne Hoskins that should mark her for biggers and betters) will last and whether and under what circumstances they’ll be rescued. Mary Stauffer is the wife of a minister, Irv Stauffer (Daniel Nemes, a considerably more handsome actor than usually gets cast as the innocent husband in a Lifetime movie and also someone I’d like to see more of), and they have two kids, Beth — whom they persist in calling “Bethy” for some reason (I can readily imagine her confronting her parents and saying, “No more of this ‘Bethy’ garbage! My name’s Beth,” much the way my husband Charles told his mother he never wanted to be called “Charlie,” “Chuck” or anything but “Charles”) — and Steven (Miles Phoenix Foley). The location is Roseville, Minnesota and the time is June 1980; school has just let out and, much to the irritation of their kids, the adult Stauffers have decided to take the family on a missionary trip to the Philippines. Alas, just as they’re deep into planning and packing for their trip Mary and Beth Stauffer are held at gunpoint by a mysterious stranger neither of them immediately recognizes. The young man, who looks vaguely Asian under his big glasses (not that different, ironically, from the ones Mary Stauffer herself wears), isn’t quite as much of a stranger as the Stauffers think. Mary Stauffer has been a high-school teacher in the neighborhood for about 20 years, and it seems that 15 years before their kidnapper, Ming Sen Shiue (Howie Lai) got a bad grade in Mary’s freshman English class, and one presumes his overall GPA was on such a thin edge of eligibility he lost the college scholarship he was hoping for. It’s hard to tell whether he’s more motivated by the bad grade that sandbagged his chances for college or the sexual crush he also developed on Mary Stauffer back then, but he’s brutal about it: he forces both female Stauffers into their own car and tells Mary, at gunpoint, to drive to a deserted location.
He intends to abandon their car and switch to his own, a white minivan, but on the way he forces the Stauffers into the trunk of their car and a couple of kids riding their bikes through the woods spot him. The kids are Jason Wilkman and his sister, and when Jason spots Ming putting the Stauffers into their car trunk he innocently asks him, “You having car trouble?” That gets him kidnapped along with them and eventually killed as Ming decides it’s too risky to have a potential witness — though the cops are already aware that something is going on because the sister escaped Ming’s notice, survives and told her parents what happened to her brother. Indeed, ironically the cops blow off Irv Stauffer’s attempts to report his wife and daughter missing because they’re too concerned about finding Jason Wilkman’s kidnapper. Meanwhile, Ming moves the Stauffers into his own home, which he’s tricked up with curtains, boards, soundproofing and locks to make sure they can’t get away. He locks them in a closet with only a slop bucket for them to use to relieve themselves — though Mary eventually talks him into letting them use the bathroom normally — and for nearly two months he holds them hostage, going back and forth between punishing them with more locks and restraints when they try to escape or summon help and letting his boot at least a bit off their faces when they behave. The best aspect of this film is that writer Vickerman and director Jim Donovan make Ming Sen Shiue a multidimensional character, neither the nostril-flaring, shrieking psycho of pre-1960 movies nor the disarmingly gentle boy-next-door psycho Anthony Perkins played in Hitchcock’s Psycho and who’s been copied in countless movies since. He’s also rather attractive — one could readily imagine him attracting somebody (female or male) if he tried courting normally, especially since in the scenes where he’s only wearing one of those skimpy T-shirts ironically called a “wife-beater” above the waist he’s enviably muscular and even genuinely hunky.
One quirk of the story is that Ming was not only a psychopathic killer (it’s only towards the end of the film that we realize he killed that poor kid Jason Wilkman just for being in the wrong place and the wrong time, but we assume he did, and had director Donovan put in the sound of a single gunshot in the distance over the scene of the Stauffers’ cowering in the trunk of their car while Ming is killing Jason, this already chilling movie would be even more so) but also one of the early pioneers in making and selling personal computers. He’s shown in a speech about how computers will soon be routine appliances in ordinary people’s homes, and his electronic skills are such that well before he actually kidnapped Mary Stauffer, he bugged their bedroom and heard just what Irv and Mary Stauffer sounded like when they made love. So when he demands that Mary Stauffer “make love” to him just like she did with her husband, instead of submitting to rape out of resignation and fear for her (and her daughter’s) life, he’s got the knowledge base on which to judge her performance. Had Wickerman and Donovan included some kinky soft-core porn scenes between the two — with Ming eagerly having his way with her and Mary having somehow to convince her assailant that she’s enjoying the whole thing — this would have been an even stronger movie, and though this didn’t really happen I found myself wondering how Mary would have reacted if Ming had got her pregnant. Though the denomination of the Stauffers’ church is not mentioned, I found myself pretty much assuming they were some sort of evangelical sect who, among other things, would be passionately against abortion — and how a minister with those leanings would handle his wife coming home from a two-month ordeal at the hands of a sexual sadist bearing his child, and how he would have handled the dilemma of his church teachings telling him he needed to help raise and support his wife’s rapist’s child, would itself have made for an interesting movie even though it would no longer have qualified as “Ripped from the Headlines!”
I was also impressed by the way Wickerman and Donovan shifted the balance in the mother-daughter relationship: at the start Beth was almost screaming at her mother to defy their kidnapper and get the two of them home as soon as possible, but about midway through the movie Beth stopped resisting (a bit of Stockholm syndrome, perhaps?) and urged her mom against any escape attempts, while mom kept resisting until she finally found a chink in Ming’s armor: a loose pin in a door hinge that, even though restrained, she was able to work loose and get the door to fall down so they could pull loose from the restraints and escape. The filmmakers were also skillful in working in what already seems like antediluvian technology into their plot: not only are the cars driven both by the Stauffers and the cops the sort of big, hulking beasts (as opposed to the tank-like SUV’s all too many modern-day drivers indulge in) but the phone Mary Stauffer uses to alert the police that they’re free and where they are has a rotary dial (and she has to dlal a lot more numbers than just “911” to reach the cops). The only aspect of Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story that rubbed me the wrong way was the infuriating piety of it all: throughout it all Mary Stauffer’s voiceover narration tells us again and again and again that her faith in God sustained her through her ordeal and gave her comfort that somehow this horrible thing that had happened to her and her daughter was nonetheless part of God’s plan for them and they would emerge stronger. I found myself wondering how a committed atheist would handle a similar ordeal — and indeed whether the filmmakers actually wanted to communicate the message, “You’d better believe in God, because if you don’t you’ll have no source of hope to fall back and rely on in case a psycho kidnapper gets you into his clutches and keeps you in captivity for almost two months.”
There was a brief (about 10 minutes) epilogue in the form of a mini-Behind the Headlines episode of Mary and Beth Stauffer — the real ones — as they appear now, including mentioning the bizarre epilogue to the story that while he was on trial for kidnapping the Stauffers and (a separate proceeding) the murder of Jason Wilkman — for which he ultimately received a life sentence but with the possibility of parole, which means the Stauffers and the Wilkmans have to keep trooping into parole board meetings to persuade them not to let the S.O.B. out, much the way the families of Charles Manson’s victims had to keep coming to his parole hearings until Manson’s death finally relieved them of that burden — at one point in the proceedings Ming somehow got access to a pocket knife and slashed Mary Stauffer’s face with it, leaving a scar that was quite obvious in the photos of the time even though it’s receded (although it’s still visible) over time. Apparently Ming Sei Shiue is still obsessed with Mary Stauffer and is planning to kill her if he ever gets out — or, if she’s already dead, to kill her relatives (of which there are quite a few because both Beth and Steven Stauffer are married and have kids of their own). Just what made Ming go so far off the rails and fasten so intently to the Stauffers, Mary in particular, is never quite explained by Vickerman’s script, but it really doesn’t need to be; Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story is a powerful, well-staged, well-acted drama even though it literally gets too preachy a lot of the time!
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