by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
Last night’s “feature” was Rocketman, the 2019 sort-of biopic of Elton John (the
distributors, Paramount, called it “a musical fantasy about the fantastical
human story of Elton John‘s breakthrough years,” which warned me not to expect
a literal depiction of the story), directed by Dexter Fletcher from a script by
Lee Hall. The film opens with Elton John (Taron Egerton, a straight actor who
predictably gave interviews in which he said the hardest part of his role was
having to kiss men on screen to portray the Gay Elton John) walking into a
rehab group in New York in a burnt-orange costume designed to make him look
like the Devil. We later learn that he bailed out on a sold-out concert at
Madison Square Garden to seek rehab for his various addictions — alcohol,
cocaine, sex and shopping — though the real-life Elton John not only played
that concert in 1974 but invited John Lennon to join him for the encores. (John
had played on Lennon’s solo single “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and
had dared him to perform with him at the Garden. Lennon, petrified of
performing live again, said, “I’ll only do it if ‘Whatever Gets You Through the
Night’ hits number one on the U.S. charts” — which it did. It was Lennon’s last
live performance ever, even though he had six more years to live.) The obvious
inspiration for this film, both in subject matter and structure, was Beyond
the Sea, the stunning 2004 biopic
of Bobby Darin directed and co-written by and starring Kevin Spacey, but
virtually none of the publicity surrounding Rocketman mentioned Beyond the Sea because, thanks to the accusations of Spacey
making sexual advances on teenagers, Spacey has fallen afoul of the “#MeToo”
witchhunters and become an Orwellian “unperson” in Hollywood: “He does not
exist. He never existed.” (In Beyond the Sea a Gay man, Kevin Spacey, played a straight man,
Bobby Darin; in Rocketman a straight man, Taron Egerton, played a Gay man, Elton John.) Rocketman borrows quite a few devices from Beyond the Sea, including having Elton John as a boy (Matthew
Illesley) — called “Young Reggie” after Elton’s real name, Reginald Kenneth
Dwight — not only appear in scenes of Elton’s childhood but interact on screen
with Egerton as the adult Elton John. Like Rocketman, Beyond the Sea is framed as its subject taking stock of his life
and looking back on it — in Beyond the Sea the gimmick was that Bobby Darin was preparing to direct and star in a
biopic of himself — and both films present their subjects’ songs not as
straightforward performances but as musical production numbers.
The scene
showing Elton John’s U.S. debut at Doug Weston’s (Tate Donovan) Troubadour
nightclub in Los Angeles shows him literally levitating not only himself but his audience as
well — many of them members of rock royalty themselves, including Neil Young
and “half the Beach Boys.” (In his 1982 autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice? Brian Wilson recalled a young, scared Elton John
showing up at an L.A. hotel to meet him and play him his songs. Elton played
most of what became his first two U.S. album releases, Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection, and the quality of Elton’s material freaked Brian
Wilson out and helped convince him that he was burned out as an artist and the
future belonged to younger performers like Elton John.) I’ve had a lot of
conflicted feelings about Elton John over the years: when he first came on the
scene I thought he was good but incredibly overrated (the Down Beat reviewer of the Elton John album said he’d received more “hype” on him than
any other artist he’d written about — literally pounds of press releases and other publicity from his
record label). It didn’t help with me that his first U.S. hit was “Your Song,”
a drearily sappy romantic ballad that remains my least favorite Elton John song
— and given that Elton famously writes only the music to his songs I joked that
the lyric should be, “I hope you don’t mind/That my friend Bernie/really wrote
the words” — though I liked some of his other early pieces, including “Border
Song” (triumphantly covered by Aretha Franklin, who not surprisingly made far
more of its Black-gospel rip-offs than Elton did!), “Take Me to the Pilot” and
“Burn Down the Mission,” a lot better. I was put off by the Tumbleweed
Connection album because it took
feints at the country-music tradition (the movie depicts John and Bernie
Taupin, played by Jamie Bell and depicted as the voice of reason in John’s
life, as country-music fans at a time when country music was considered
hopelessly retro — when Dick James, played by Stephen Graham as a cigar-chomping
stereotype of a music industry profiteer, auditions Elton John he says he hopes
he doesn’t play “Streets of Laredo,” and later John and Taupin jokingly sing a
duet of that song) but totally misunderstood it.
Besides, in the early 1970’s my hero was David Bowie, who was openly Bisexual and
presented as such while Elton John was still playing the coy Liberace game —
“I’ll act so blatantly like one that no one will believe I could actually be one!” (One of the few touches of irony in Lee
Hall’s script is that Elton calls to come out to his mother while she’s
watching a TV show featuring Liberace.) Ironically, John later definitively
came out as Gay while Bowie edged away from the Gay world — Bowie ended up in a
long-term relationship with a woman (his second wife, the supermodel Iman) and
John in a long-term relationship with a man (his husband David Furnish, who’s
listed as one of the four “executive producers” of this film). Rocketman is a good movie that had the potential to be a
great one — it’s entertaining as it stands but a lot more could have been made of the conflicts between
Elton John’s celebrity and his sexual identity. The real Elton John came out as
Bisexual in a Rolling Stone interview in 1976 — and his record sales plummeted immediately and
didn’t recover until a year and a half later, when he married a woman: his
sound engineer, Renate Mueller. (Their relationship is depicted in the film but
only in one scene in which she’s helping mix one of his albums.) After cranking
out best-selling records at a breakneck pace in the early 1970’s (according to
this movie, his initial contract with Dick James’ record label called for three
albums per year — more than almost anyone, especially a singer-songwriter, did in that time!) Elton John released
nothing between early 1976 and
late 1978, when he put out a single co-written with Bernie Taupin, “Ego,” and
then worked with other lyricists (Gary Osborne and openly Gay British rocker
Tom Robinson) on a 12-inch EP produced in disco style by Philadelphia soul
master Thom Bell and then a full-length album that at least started to rebuild his commercial standing, even though
his sales never again reached the heights they had in the mid-1970’s.
My
favorite Elton John song of this period — indeed, of all time — was “Flinstone
Boy,” a song he sneaked out as the B-side of the “Ego” single and which not
only directly and unmistakably depicted the Gay lifestyle but was unusually
personal in that Elton John wrote it entirely himself, words as well as music. I
wish a film that dealt with Elton John’s growing awareness of his own sexuality
— in the movie he gets his first male-to-male kiss from a Black soul singer his
early band, Bluesology, is backing up on a British tour, and his first serious
affair is with his manager, John Reid (Richard Madden), with whom he abruptly
breaks up with after catching him getting a blow job from someone else at a
party — would have included “Flinstone Boy.” As it is, Rocketman emerges as a “Behind the Music” special stretched
out to feature length with big production numbers — it’s still the story of
popular but alienated rock star drinking, drugging and screwing himself to
near-oblivion before he finally sees the light, sobers up and finds true love,
or at least a stable relationship — and though Taron Egerton does his own
singing well enough he doesn’t have the unearthly falsetto Elton John had in
the early days. Then again, Elton John doesn’t have it either: I joked to
Charles after we watched the movie that Egerton doesn’t sing as well as the
young Elton John but is
considerably better than the current one, whose voice we hear over the closing
credits in the new song John and Taupin contributed to the film, “I’m Gonna
Love Me Again” — the old Hollywood dodge of dragging a new song into a film so
they’ll have a piece eligible for the Academy Award for Best Song (which it
won).
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
92nd Annual Academy Awards (ABC-TV, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aired February 9, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 92nd annual Academy Awards was most notable for the surprise Best Picture win for the South Korean movie Parasite, which I’ve been hearing a lot of “buzz” about — mostly from film critics outraged that it didn’t sweep the previous awards shows. The Golden Globes had given their two Best Pictures to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood for “Best Comedy/Musical” even though it’s neither a comedy nor a musical, and Sam Mendes’ 1917 for “Best Drama.” I had assumed the Academy would give the Best Picture Oscar to one of those two, even though Quentin Tarantino is still considered one of the Bad Boys of Hollywood for the excessive violence in his movies and the liberties he takes with history (in Inglourious Basterds — the only fllm of his I’ve actually seen — he brought World War II to a decidedly different ending than the one history supplied, and my understanding is that in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood he has an over-the-hill Western movie star and his stunt double kill off Charles Manson and his gang before they have a chance to kill Sharon Tate and her friends) and his reputation has not mellowed with age the way Martin Scorsese’s has. Instead they gave the award to Parasite, a movie I suspect not that many Americans outside the Academy membership have actually seen, for what might be the same reasons they gave it to Moonlight instead of La La Land two years ago in what still stands as one of the most infamous snafus in Academy history. (At the start of the show Tom Hanks joked that there won’t be any similar mistakes this year because they’ve adopted the Iowa caucus system of reporting the results.)
Instead the director of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho (who, in accordance with the Asian system of putting the family name first and the given names last, was referred to as “Mr. Bong” and some people got a good laugh out of that), kept getting called for award after award when all he wanted to do was go out and celebrate his win in the “Best International Film” category (name-changed this year from “Best Foreign-Language Film”) by getting drunk on whatever it is he drinks (I asked Charles what Koreans drink, and he said Soju — the Korean version of sake — though he also is sure they have all the major Western spirits just like other Asian countries do: remember that in the film Lost in Translation the company that flew aging, over-the-hill Western star Bill Murray to Japan to do an endorsement commercial was a real company called Suntory which makes whiskey), and instead he kept getting called back to the stage for award after award after award until he, his film and a dumpy-looking older woman who was apparently one of its multiple producers (Charles joked that there were more Koreans on that stage than there are in the K-Pop boy band BTS) and who made me joke, “I didn’t know they had Jewish mothers in Korea,” all won the big one. Lorraine Ali, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, published a rather pissy instant review of the show lamenting that since virtually all the nominees were white people — and mostly white men, at that (the biggest snub of the year was the good old boys in the Directors’ Guild of America refusing to nominate Greta Gerwig for the latest version of Little Women) — the show filled the performance sections with as many people of color as they could find, starting with Janelle Monáe and Billy Porter in an entertaining but somewhat overblown song about the people and movies that didn’t get nominated.
The high point of the show was the spectacular performance of the song “Stand Up” from Harriet, the biopic about Harriet Tubman, by the film’s star, Cynthia Erivo (even though it turns out she’s not African-American but African-British), who also co-wrote the song. Though we’ve heard a million of these stand-up-to-oppression songs before, Erivo and the Black choir who accompanied her delivered a riveting, emotion-filled performance that made me think Erivo would be the perfect person to star in a biopic of Nina Simone. Alas, as Charles pointed out, Harriet didn’t do well enough at the box office to make that likely — that will probably lie on the ash heap of my dream biopics along with one about Sister Rosetta Tharpe starring Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, and one about Janis Joplin starring Maren Morris (though one of the biopics I dreamed about actually did get made — Queen Latifah playing Bessie Smith — and, aside from the phony and counter-factual ending, it was quite good). The low point of the show was a horrible rap number featuring Eminem — Lorraine Ali ridiculed the Academy for dredging up a performer who had his 15 minutes 18 years ago, while all I could think during the performance was, “I hope I live long enough to see rap cease to be popular.” About midway through them was the “In Memoriam” segment, which was up to date enough to include the recently departed (at 103!) Kirk Douglas and was accompanied by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas performing the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” (If I were keeping a list of the artists I thought were least likely ever to do a Beatles cover, Billie Eilish would have been on it.) Charles also commented that the win for the film Ford vs. Ferrari in Best Sound Editing was the confirmation of my late roommate/home-care client John Primavera’s theory that the sound categories function as consolation prizes for films that don’t win anything else. (There used to be only one sound category, Sound Recording; now there are two, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, and the Sound Mixing category went to 1917 in what I thought was a warm-up for it winning Best Picture … well, I’ve been wrong many times before.)
The multiple announcers — for the second year in a row the Academy decided to do without a host, and I have mixed feelings about that (a great host like Bob Hope or Billy Crystal can really tie the show together, but there aren’t that many people left at that talent level) — ultimately pointed out that Parasite was the first Best Picture ever in a language other than English, which provoked Charles and some of his Twitter friends to point out that the very first Academy Award for Best Picture went to William Wellman’s Wings, a World War I aviation drama that was a silent film. (Then again, I would count Wings as an English-language film because most of the Academy voters would have seen it with intertitles in English.) I reminded him that in 1927 the Academy gave two Best Picture winners, Wings for “Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production,” and quite frankly I wish the Academy would adopt that again. That way they could give Best Picture awards to the movies people actually go see, like Star Wars 9: The Rise of Skywalker, which got relegated to one nomination in one of the effects categories even though it was easily the most popular film of 2019, while the indies like Moonlight and Parasite could get the Artistic Quality award. (This is essentially the reverse of the Academy’s short-lived proposal to give a special award to “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film,” which was widely laughed at and not pursued.) The acting awards were a mixed bag, with Best Actor going to Joaquin Phoenix for Joker (making him the second actor, after the late Heath Ledger, to win for playing the Joker!); Best Actress to Renée Zellwegger for playing Judy Garland in Judy (and to her credit she gave the Academy the dissing it deserved for never having given the real Judy Garland an award … though that’s not quite true since she won a short-lived miniature Oscar for “Best Performance by a Juvenile” for The Wizard of Oz); Best Supporting Actor to Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Best Supporting Actress to Laura Dern for Marriage Story (and among the people she thanked were her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd).
The 92nd annual Academy Awards show moved at a pretty decent clip — though it still lasted three hours and 40 minutes — and perhaps the most disappointing aspect of it was how lame the writing was, including a long gag sequence between two women dressed in red who made jokes that supposedly lampooned the industry’s sexism but just kept landing with dull thuds. There’s a lot to kid about #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale (though I liked the fact that they brought on a woman conductor to lead the orchestra in the excerpts from the nominated scores — and a woman composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, won for her score for Joker — the first woman to win in 20 years) and the Oscar writers took the easiest and cheapest shots. There were also quite a few political comments that made it clear that in America’s Great Divide most of its creative filmmakers are on the anti-Trump, pro-diversity, pro-cosmopolitan (I’m still reeling from the shock I felt when I read an interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” as an insult!), pro-immigrant and pro-environmentalist side. Joaquin Phoenix used his acceptance speech for a long political tirade which alternately annoyed and bored me even though I agreed with most of what he was saying; he sounded more like he was running for President than accepting an acting award, and any moment I expected to hear an announcement that he was the real winner of the Iowa caucuses. The fact that the mavens of America’s movie industry talk a much better and more pr wogressive political game than they actually play is just another of the many contradictions of capitalism in general and entertainment capitalism in particular — along with the irony that while most of the celebrities who speak out politically are more or less Left of center, the ones that have actually got elected to office (Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono) have generally been men of the Right.
The 92nd annual Academy Awards was most notable for the surprise Best Picture win for the South Korean movie Parasite, which I’ve been hearing a lot of “buzz” about — mostly from film critics outraged that it didn’t sweep the previous awards shows. The Golden Globes had given their two Best Pictures to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood for “Best Comedy/Musical” even though it’s neither a comedy nor a musical, and Sam Mendes’ 1917 for “Best Drama.” I had assumed the Academy would give the Best Picture Oscar to one of those two, even though Quentin Tarantino is still considered one of the Bad Boys of Hollywood for the excessive violence in his movies and the liberties he takes with history (in Inglourious Basterds — the only fllm of his I’ve actually seen — he brought World War II to a decidedly different ending than the one history supplied, and my understanding is that in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood he has an over-the-hill Western movie star and his stunt double kill off Charles Manson and his gang before they have a chance to kill Sharon Tate and her friends) and his reputation has not mellowed with age the way Martin Scorsese’s has. Instead they gave the award to Parasite, a movie I suspect not that many Americans outside the Academy membership have actually seen, for what might be the same reasons they gave it to Moonlight instead of La La Land two years ago in what still stands as one of the most infamous snafus in Academy history. (At the start of the show Tom Hanks joked that there won’t be any similar mistakes this year because they’ve adopted the Iowa caucus system of reporting the results.)
Instead the director of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho (who, in accordance with the Asian system of putting the family name first and the given names last, was referred to as “Mr. Bong” and some people got a good laugh out of that), kept getting called for award after award when all he wanted to do was go out and celebrate his win in the “Best International Film” category (name-changed this year from “Best Foreign-Language Film”) by getting drunk on whatever it is he drinks (I asked Charles what Koreans drink, and he said Soju — the Korean version of sake — though he also is sure they have all the major Western spirits just like other Asian countries do: remember that in the film Lost in Translation the company that flew aging, over-the-hill Western star Bill Murray to Japan to do an endorsement commercial was a real company called Suntory which makes whiskey), and instead he kept getting called back to the stage for award after award after award until he, his film and a dumpy-looking older woman who was apparently one of its multiple producers (Charles joked that there were more Koreans on that stage than there are in the K-Pop boy band BTS) and who made me joke, “I didn’t know they had Jewish mothers in Korea,” all won the big one. Lorraine Ali, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, published a rather pissy instant review of the show lamenting that since virtually all the nominees were white people — and mostly white men, at that (the biggest snub of the year was the good old boys in the Directors’ Guild of America refusing to nominate Greta Gerwig for the latest version of Little Women) — the show filled the performance sections with as many people of color as they could find, starting with Janelle Monáe and Billy Porter in an entertaining but somewhat overblown song about the people and movies that didn’t get nominated.
The high point of the show was the spectacular performance of the song “Stand Up” from Harriet, the biopic about Harriet Tubman, by the film’s star, Cynthia Erivo (even though it turns out she’s not African-American but African-British), who also co-wrote the song. Though we’ve heard a million of these stand-up-to-oppression songs before, Erivo and the Black choir who accompanied her delivered a riveting, emotion-filled performance that made me think Erivo would be the perfect person to star in a biopic of Nina Simone. Alas, as Charles pointed out, Harriet didn’t do well enough at the box office to make that likely — that will probably lie on the ash heap of my dream biopics along with one about Sister Rosetta Tharpe starring Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, and one about Janis Joplin starring Maren Morris (though one of the biopics I dreamed about actually did get made — Queen Latifah playing Bessie Smith — and, aside from the phony and counter-factual ending, it was quite good). The low point of the show was a horrible rap number featuring Eminem — Lorraine Ali ridiculed the Academy for dredging up a performer who had his 15 minutes 18 years ago, while all I could think during the performance was, “I hope I live long enough to see rap cease to be popular.” About midway through them was the “In Memoriam” segment, which was up to date enough to include the recently departed (at 103!) Kirk Douglas and was accompanied by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas performing the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” (If I were keeping a list of the artists I thought were least likely ever to do a Beatles cover, Billie Eilish would have been on it.) Charles also commented that the win for the film Ford vs. Ferrari in Best Sound Editing was the confirmation of my late roommate/home-care client John Primavera’s theory that the sound categories function as consolation prizes for films that don’t win anything else. (There used to be only one sound category, Sound Recording; now there are two, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing, and the Sound Mixing category went to 1917 in what I thought was a warm-up for it winning Best Picture … well, I’ve been wrong many times before.)
The multiple announcers — for the second year in a row the Academy decided to do without a host, and I have mixed feelings about that (a great host like Bob Hope or Billy Crystal can really tie the show together, but there aren’t that many people left at that talent level) — ultimately pointed out that Parasite was the first Best Picture ever in a language other than English, which provoked Charles and some of his Twitter friends to point out that the very first Academy Award for Best Picture went to William Wellman’s Wings, a World War I aviation drama that was a silent film. (Then again, I would count Wings as an English-language film because most of the Academy voters would have seen it with intertitles in English.) I reminded him that in 1927 the Academy gave two Best Picture winners, Wings for “Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production,” and quite frankly I wish the Academy would adopt that again. That way they could give Best Picture awards to the movies people actually go see, like Star Wars 9: The Rise of Skywalker, which got relegated to one nomination in one of the effects categories even though it was easily the most popular film of 2019, while the indies like Moonlight and Parasite could get the Artistic Quality award. (This is essentially the reverse of the Academy’s short-lived proposal to give a special award to “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film,” which was widely laughed at and not pursued.) The acting awards were a mixed bag, with Best Actor going to Joaquin Phoenix for Joker (making him the second actor, after the late Heath Ledger, to win for playing the Joker!); Best Actress to Renée Zellwegger for playing Judy Garland in Judy (and to her credit she gave the Academy the dissing it deserved for never having given the real Judy Garland an award … though that’s not quite true since she won a short-lived miniature Oscar for “Best Performance by a Juvenile” for The Wizard of Oz); Best Supporting Actor to Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Best Supporting Actress to Laura Dern for Marriage Story (and among the people she thanked were her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd).
The 92nd annual Academy Awards show moved at a pretty decent clip — though it still lasted three hours and 40 minutes — and perhaps the most disappointing aspect of it was how lame the writing was, including a long gag sequence between two women dressed in red who made jokes that supposedly lampooned the industry’s sexism but just kept landing with dull thuds. There’s a lot to kid about #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale (though I liked the fact that they brought on a woman conductor to lead the orchestra in the excerpts from the nominated scores — and a woman composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, won for her score for Joker — the first woman to win in 20 years) and the Oscar writers took the easiest and cheapest shots. There were also quite a few political comments that made it clear that in America’s Great Divide most of its creative filmmakers are on the anti-Trump, pro-diversity, pro-cosmopolitan (I’m still reeling from the shock I felt when I read an interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” as an insult!), pro-immigrant and pro-environmentalist side. Joaquin Phoenix used his acceptance speech for a long political tirade which alternately annoyed and bored me even though I agreed with most of what he was saying; he sounded more like he was running for President than accepting an acting award, and any moment I expected to hear an announcement that he was the real winner of the Iowa caucuses. The fact that the mavens of America’s movie industry talk a much better and more pr wogressive political game than they actually play is just another of the many contradictions of capitalism in general and entertainment capitalism in particular — along with the irony that while most of the celebrities who speak out politically are more or less Left of center, the ones that have actually got elected to office (Ronald Reagan, George Murphy, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono) have generally been men of the Right.
Johnny Allegro (Columbia, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Academy Awards Charles and I had time to watch another movie, and it was Johnny Allegro, an oddball 1949 film noir from Columbia directed by Ted Tetzlaff (who’d risen from cinematographer to director on the strength of his camerawork for Hitchcock’s Notorious) from a script by Karen DeWolf and Guy Endore based on a story by James Edward Grant — best known in Hollywood as John Wayne’s favorite writer: if you signed the Duke for your movie one of his conditions was that you had to put Grant on the payroll to rewrite the script for him. The star was George Raft and the movie was an indication of the downward trajectory Raft had sent his career on with his stupid decisions to turn down the Warner Bros. vehicles High Sierra in 1940 and The Maltese Falcon in 1941. Both those movies went to Humphrey Bogart, who used their unusually complex leading roles to ride out of the ghetto of cookie-cutter gangster parts and into Casablanca and superstardom. By 1949 their positions in the movie industry had reversed: instead of Bogart being the actor you got if you couldn’t get Raft, now Raft was the actor you got if you couldn’t get Bogart — and with that in mind I couldn’t help not only noticing all the elements of Johnny Allegro the writers ripped off of Bogart vehicles (The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Key Largo in particular) but wondering how much better it might have been with Bogart in the male lead. The film has a highly convoluted plot: Johnny Allegro (George Raft) owns and runs the flower concession in the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel when he’s accosted by two familiar film noir figures: a morally ambiguous woman named Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and a cop named Schultzy (Will Geer, who puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Waltons) who recognizes Johnny Allegro as former Mafia hit man Johnny Rock. “Allegro” was his original family name (and the writers couldn’t resist the obvious joke about it: when he’s cruising Nina Foch’s character and she complains she’s going too fast, he says, “That’s what my name means”) and he got into gangster life when he was called upon to supply the big bouquets common at Mob funerals and he decided he wanted the easy life of a gangster — only he drew a 10-year prison sentence at Sing Sing. But he escaped and, when World War II happened, he went into the Office of Strategic Services (since the Army wouldn’t take him because of his lowlife associations) and did an heroic parachute jump in the Pacific Theatre that saved the lives of an entire detail. Got that? Basically good guy with a criminal past who’s redeemed by being a war hero — just like Casablanca, though the writers of Bogart’s masterpiece were a good deal more subtle about it.
Anyway, Glenda asks Allegro for help escaping the hotel, and in the basement they’re cornered by Schultzy and two other cops; Allegro shoots it out with them and Schultzy dies — only he doesn’t really die: Schultzy is a U.S. Treasury agent on the trail of a ring of crooks passing counterfeit money in Florida (counterfeit actually printed up by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, who intended to flood California with it and thus destabilize the U.S. economy) and the whole shoot-out was a setup, staged with blank cartridges in Allegro’s gun. The idea is to encourage Glenda to recruit Allegro into the gang, which is headed by one of the most interesting film noir villains: Morgan Vallin (George Macready), a man of culture and a hunter quite like General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game who regards guns as uncouth and messy and shoots his prey with a bow and arrow instead. Allegro flies cross-country with Glenda and ends up on an island off the coast of Florida which contains a large mansion that looks like the one in which Bela Lugosi was trying to transplant Lou Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Vallin lives on this island but every so often goes to the Florida mainland to dump his counterfeit currency at the racetrack (presumably Hialeah, though that’s not specified) and gets a bundle of real green in exchange from a gang member who works for the track. Vallin, who confiscated Allegro’s gun at the beginning of his stay with him, ultimately discovers that Allegro’s gun is loaded with blanks, realizes that Allegro is a law-enforcement undercover agent, and tries to kill him on the island with his trademark longbow but ends up being pushed off a cliff and falling to his death below.
Thanks to a phone conversation between the two picked up on a phone line Allegro had deliberately left open so the Coast Guard and the Treasury agents he was reporting to could hear it, Schultzy says he’s willing to recommend clemency for both of them. The End. Johnny Allegro is an O.K. movie from a time when film noir was a mature enough genre it was already hardening into cliché, and I got the impression that the final two-thirds were set in Florida only because Bogart and Lauren Bacall had just made Key Largo, set in Florida. Its best parts are some almost textbook noir compositions from Tetzlaff and cinematographer Joseph Biroc (doing Tetzlaff’s old job!) and Macready playing a quirky villain role pretty obviously derived from his previous role in the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (one imdb.com contributor noted the similarity in character names — Macready was “Ballin Mundson” in Gilda and “Morgan Vallin” here). Its weaknesses are in the script, which is not only convoluted but depends on our believing that a sophisticated criminal enterprise like Vallin’s (and the two sinisterly-accented people who are his bosses in it and have someone even higher in an unnamed sinister foreign power they report to!) would be so sloppy in their recruitment strategies that they’d let Allegro basically walk in — though Charles gave the film points for having the counterfeit $500 million stored in an entire shack. One of the things that rub him the wrong way about a lot of movies is they assume a large sum of cash is far more compact than it is; showing a movie in which people are walking around with half a million dollars in cash in a small attaché case and he’ll lose the suspension of disbelief instantly.
After the Academy Awards Charles and I had time to watch another movie, and it was Johnny Allegro, an oddball 1949 film noir from Columbia directed by Ted Tetzlaff (who’d risen from cinematographer to director on the strength of his camerawork for Hitchcock’s Notorious) from a script by Karen DeWolf and Guy Endore based on a story by James Edward Grant — best known in Hollywood as John Wayne’s favorite writer: if you signed the Duke for your movie one of his conditions was that you had to put Grant on the payroll to rewrite the script for him. The star was George Raft and the movie was an indication of the downward trajectory Raft had sent his career on with his stupid decisions to turn down the Warner Bros. vehicles High Sierra in 1940 and The Maltese Falcon in 1941. Both those movies went to Humphrey Bogart, who used their unusually complex leading roles to ride out of the ghetto of cookie-cutter gangster parts and into Casablanca and superstardom. By 1949 their positions in the movie industry had reversed: instead of Bogart being the actor you got if you couldn’t get Raft, now Raft was the actor you got if you couldn’t get Bogart — and with that in mind I couldn’t help not only noticing all the elements of Johnny Allegro the writers ripped off of Bogart vehicles (The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Key Largo in particular) but wondering how much better it might have been with Bogart in the male lead. The film has a highly convoluted plot: Johnny Allegro (George Raft) owns and runs the flower concession in the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel when he’s accosted by two familiar film noir figures: a morally ambiguous woman named Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and a cop named Schultzy (Will Geer, who puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Waltons) who recognizes Johnny Allegro as former Mafia hit man Johnny Rock. “Allegro” was his original family name (and the writers couldn’t resist the obvious joke about it: when he’s cruising Nina Foch’s character and she complains she’s going too fast, he says, “That’s what my name means”) and he got into gangster life when he was called upon to supply the big bouquets common at Mob funerals and he decided he wanted the easy life of a gangster — only he drew a 10-year prison sentence at Sing Sing. But he escaped and, when World War II happened, he went into the Office of Strategic Services (since the Army wouldn’t take him because of his lowlife associations) and did an heroic parachute jump in the Pacific Theatre that saved the lives of an entire detail. Got that? Basically good guy with a criminal past who’s redeemed by being a war hero — just like Casablanca, though the writers of Bogart’s masterpiece were a good deal more subtle about it.
Anyway, Glenda asks Allegro for help escaping the hotel, and in the basement they’re cornered by Schultzy and two other cops; Allegro shoots it out with them and Schultzy dies — only he doesn’t really die: Schultzy is a U.S. Treasury agent on the trail of a ring of crooks passing counterfeit money in Florida (counterfeit actually printed up by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, who intended to flood California with it and thus destabilize the U.S. economy) and the whole shoot-out was a setup, staged with blank cartridges in Allegro’s gun. The idea is to encourage Glenda to recruit Allegro into the gang, which is headed by one of the most interesting film noir villains: Morgan Vallin (George Macready), a man of culture and a hunter quite like General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game who regards guns as uncouth and messy and shoots his prey with a bow and arrow instead. Allegro flies cross-country with Glenda and ends up on an island off the coast of Florida which contains a large mansion that looks like the one in which Bela Lugosi was trying to transplant Lou Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Vallin lives on this island but every so often goes to the Florida mainland to dump his counterfeit currency at the racetrack (presumably Hialeah, though that’s not specified) and gets a bundle of real green in exchange from a gang member who works for the track. Vallin, who confiscated Allegro’s gun at the beginning of his stay with him, ultimately discovers that Allegro’s gun is loaded with blanks, realizes that Allegro is a law-enforcement undercover agent, and tries to kill him on the island with his trademark longbow but ends up being pushed off a cliff and falling to his death below.
Thanks to a phone conversation between the two picked up on a phone line Allegro had deliberately left open so the Coast Guard and the Treasury agents he was reporting to could hear it, Schultzy says he’s willing to recommend clemency for both of them. The End. Johnny Allegro is an O.K. movie from a time when film noir was a mature enough genre it was already hardening into cliché, and I got the impression that the final two-thirds were set in Florida only because Bogart and Lauren Bacall had just made Key Largo, set in Florida. Its best parts are some almost textbook noir compositions from Tetzlaff and cinematographer Joseph Biroc (doing Tetzlaff’s old job!) and Macready playing a quirky villain role pretty obviously derived from his previous role in the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (one imdb.com contributor noted the similarity in character names — Macready was “Ballin Mundson” in Gilda and “Morgan Vallin” here). Its weaknesses are in the script, which is not only convoluted but depends on our believing that a sophisticated criminal enterprise like Vallin’s (and the two sinisterly-accented people who are his bosses in it and have someone even higher in an unnamed sinister foreign power they report to!) would be so sloppy in their recruitment strategies that they’d let Allegro basically walk in — though Charles gave the film points for having the counterfeit $500 million stored in an entire shack. One of the things that rub him the wrong way about a lot of movies is they assume a large sum of cash is far more compact than it is; showing a movie in which people are walking around with half a million dollars in cash in a small attaché case and he’ll lose the suspension of disbelief instantly.
Sunday, February 9, 2020
The Neighbor in the Window (A&E Studios, Front Street Productions, Lifetime, 2020)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines” movie called The Neighbor in the Window, though it was somewhat different from most of the ones we’ve seen lately in that, though it was based on a true story and a book written by the person it really happened to, the real person, Kathie Truitt, changed both her own name (to “Karen Morgan”) and the name of her victimizer (to “Lisa Beasley”), and she also moved the story from Washington, D.C. (where it actually happened) to Seattle. The story as it’s told in the movie (with its rather clunky title, which kept reminding me of Fritz Lang’s noir classic The Woman in the Window; Truitt called her book False Victim, which I think would have been a better title as well as being the official name of her stalker’s mental illness, “False Victim Syndrome”) is that Karen Morgan (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), her husband Scott (Geoff Gustafson, stocky, of medium height and with black hair instead of the tall, lanky brown-haired “type” that usually gets cast as Lifetime’s innocent husbands) and their grade-school age son Miles (Azriel Dalman) relocate from Salt Lake City to Seattle when the engineering company Scott works for offers him a promotion but requires him to move. They end up buying a large house on a cul-de-sac but Karen is originally surprised that the previous owners not only left a surprising amount of stuff behind, they hung dark black curtains over the big picture windows in the living room, and she can’t imagine why they would have denied themselves all that wonderful natural light.
Almost as soon as they move in, the Morgans make two new friends among their neighbors, Lisa Beasley (Jean Lyon) and Susie (Carmel Amit). Susie is cool and normal; Lisa is anything but cool. She’s given to spying on the Morgans from a vantage point on the top story of her own house through which she can see into those big picture windows. She also has her own son befriend Miles, and soon the two kids are happily playing together in the big back yard the houses share, and Karen agrees to hire Lisa’s older child, a daughter named Allie (Hannah Zirkey) whom Lisa describes as “13, going on 40,” a chance to earn some extra money baby-sitting Miles. Only the budding friendship begins to go haywire when Lisa, Karen and Susie go shopping together, Karen buys a short red dress on Lisa’s advice — and the next day, when they have a meeting with the officials at the prestigious and ridiculously named Dorothy Peacock Elementary School where both boys will be attending, Lisa wears an identical (though larger because she takes a bigger size) red dress and Karen is miffed. The style-swiping gets worse when Karen makes a tearful confession to Lisa one night that the silver necklace she wears is a gift from her husband to commemorate their earlier child, Rose, who died one month after she was born of sudden infant death syndrome — whereupon Lisa says that she, too, had a child who died of SIDS. The next time Karen sees Lisa, Lisa is wearing exactly the same necklace with exactly the same design. At a bit outdoor cookout in that common back yard, Lisa’s husband Dan — a good-natured schlub (the actor who plays him, Alistair Abell, looks like the guy you would have called 30 years ago if you couldn’t get Danny DeVito) who’s obviously exasperated by the trouble his wife has caused him over the years — tells Karen’s husband Scott that it was Lisa’s sister, not Lisa herself, who lost a child to SIDS. Karen confronts Lisa and Lisa tells her that she’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — she even shows Lisa a little notebook with various colored tags sticking from some of the pages, ostensibly so she can remember medical appointments — and that’s why she misremembered having had a child with SIDS herself because Parkinson’s gets you confused about the details.
Lisa also shows up at the Morgans’ place on Hallowe’en when Scott Morgan is on duty to distribute candy to the trick-or-treaters, wearing a skin-tight black pants and matching shirt with a big oval-shaped hole in the middle of the front of the shirt so it shows off the wearer’s cleavage. The only other time I’ve seen this peculiar garment was on the ghastly March 21, 2016 show on Fox, The Passion, where it was worn by Trisha Yearwood — an even odder costume than it was here given that she was supposed to be playing Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, while Jenn Lyon here is playing a typical nosy neighbor who’s hoping to screw up the Morgans’ marriage by seducing Scott, or at least by making enough of a play for him that she can later claim he came on to her. The breaking point comes when Lisa asks Karen to lend her $5,000, saying she and her husband Dan need the money immediately because Dan has lost his job. Karen says no, and Lisa basically declares war, dragging her son out of the Morgan home where he’d been playing with Miles and cutting off contact between the two families. Lisa also makes an anonymous phone call to the principal of Dorothy Peacock Elementary, claiming that the Morgans are neglecting their son Miles (ya remember Miles?) and costing Karen her cherished volunteer stint reading to the kids in her son’s class. Karen sees Lisa in the parking lot of Dorothy Peacock — driving a silver Mercedes identical to her own, which since she’s just bought it blows the credibility of Lisa having told her that she and her husband were broke — and Karen angrily confronts Lisa with Lisa’s son present. Lisa goes to court and swears out a restraining order against Karen — which, among other things, means Miles can no longer play in that big cool backyard for reasons neither Karen nor his dad Scott bother to explain to him. Lisa also fills the Web page of the real-estate company Karen has gone back to work for — she got bored hanging around the house all day and figured Miles was old enough she could go back to work — with negative reviews of Karen’s performance, so Karen’s otherwise sympathetic boss is forced to give her a temporary layoff.
The film reaches its climax when Karen goes out to get her family fast food, only as she’s coming home — and driving unusually slowly because she’s got soft drinks in the car and doesn’t want them to spill — Lisa hurls herself in front of Karen’s car and claims that Karen deliberately tried to run her over. Karen is arrested and charged with attempted murder — Karen is confident that her other neighbor Susie (ya remember Susie?), who was watching the whole thing from her window, can exonerate her — but Susie refuses to testify, obviously because she doesn’t want to get on Lisa’s bad side and make herself the next subject of Lisa’s abuse. The case goes to trial with a peculiar courtroom procedure; though Karen is being charged with a crime, and therefore we would expect her to be prosecuted by an assistant district attorney who would make his opening statement first and go first with his witnesses, including Lisa, what we see is more like a civil case, with the prosecutor identified as Lisa’s (not the state’s!) attorney and getting to make his opening statement and examine the witnesses after Karen’s lawyer do so. The case seems to be running against Karen until Lisa’s daughter Allie refuses to lie under oath for her mom: she tells them that she and Lisa had been waiting outside the Morgans’ home for 20 minutes until Karen returned so Lisa could throw herself under Karen’s car and claim Karen tried to run her over. Karen gets acquitted but they can’t do anything about Lisa — the police won’t prosecute her (even though she perjured herself in the trial) and she’s still living in That House — so at the end the Morgans move out and the final shot is of Lisa, still looking out that window, watching the house’s new owners move in and plotting her campaign against them.
There was a 10-minute mini-documentary after the fiction film explaining the history of anti-stalking legislation — no such laws existed until the early 1980’s (before that cops told people that they couldn’t do anything about people who followed them around and harassed them until they physically struck them), when my state, California, passed the first one — and also the premises of “false victim syndrome,” a characteristic mental illness of borderline personalities who invent elaborate histories of their own victimization and constantly suck for pity to extract favors (including money) from the people around them. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is part of Donald Trump’s mental illness — no matter how many good things happen to him (including his recent acquittal in the impeachment trial because all but one Republican Senator stood loyal to him rather than to the Constitution), Trump can’t let go of his sense that he is a victim, as witness the public pity party he staged to celebrate his acquittal and his adding three more heads to the pikes of all the people he feels have “wronged” him. (That was the metaphor an unnamed Trump White House associate used to communicate a warning to any wavering Republican Senators that “their heads would be on a pike” if they had the lèse-majesté to vote against Trump.) I had begun to make that connection even during the movie — when Susie refused to testify for Karen I thought, “Just like a Republican Senator!” — and though the one weakness I found in the story was that nobody in it was fully honest with each other (in particular, Karen never told anybody in the story, including her husband and their son, that Lisa’s campaign against them really started when Karen refused to give her $5,000), otherwise this was a marvelous movie, chillingly directed by Menhai Huda, with a tough, no-nonsense script by Karen Stillman and excellent performances from the two female leads.
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime “Ripped from the Headlines” movie called The Neighbor in the Window, though it was somewhat different from most of the ones we’ve seen lately in that, though it was based on a true story and a book written by the person it really happened to, the real person, Kathie Truitt, changed both her own name (to “Karen Morgan”) and the name of her victimizer (to “Lisa Beasley”), and she also moved the story from Washington, D.C. (where it actually happened) to Seattle. The story as it’s told in the movie (with its rather clunky title, which kept reminding me of Fritz Lang’s noir classic The Woman in the Window; Truitt called her book False Victim, which I think would have been a better title as well as being the official name of her stalker’s mental illness, “False Victim Syndrome”) is that Karen Morgan (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), her husband Scott (Geoff Gustafson, stocky, of medium height and with black hair instead of the tall, lanky brown-haired “type” that usually gets cast as Lifetime’s innocent husbands) and their grade-school age son Miles (Azriel Dalman) relocate from Salt Lake City to Seattle when the engineering company Scott works for offers him a promotion but requires him to move. They end up buying a large house on a cul-de-sac but Karen is originally surprised that the previous owners not only left a surprising amount of stuff behind, they hung dark black curtains over the big picture windows in the living room, and she can’t imagine why they would have denied themselves all that wonderful natural light.
Almost as soon as they move in, the Morgans make two new friends among their neighbors, Lisa Beasley (Jean Lyon) and Susie (Carmel Amit). Susie is cool and normal; Lisa is anything but cool. She’s given to spying on the Morgans from a vantage point on the top story of her own house through which she can see into those big picture windows. She also has her own son befriend Miles, and soon the two kids are happily playing together in the big back yard the houses share, and Karen agrees to hire Lisa’s older child, a daughter named Allie (Hannah Zirkey) whom Lisa describes as “13, going on 40,” a chance to earn some extra money baby-sitting Miles. Only the budding friendship begins to go haywire when Lisa, Karen and Susie go shopping together, Karen buys a short red dress on Lisa’s advice — and the next day, when they have a meeting with the officials at the prestigious and ridiculously named Dorothy Peacock Elementary School where both boys will be attending, Lisa wears an identical (though larger because she takes a bigger size) red dress and Karen is miffed. The style-swiping gets worse when Karen makes a tearful confession to Lisa one night that the silver necklace she wears is a gift from her husband to commemorate their earlier child, Rose, who died one month after she was born of sudden infant death syndrome — whereupon Lisa says that she, too, had a child who died of SIDS. The next time Karen sees Lisa, Lisa is wearing exactly the same necklace with exactly the same design. At a bit outdoor cookout in that common back yard, Lisa’s husband Dan — a good-natured schlub (the actor who plays him, Alistair Abell, looks like the guy you would have called 30 years ago if you couldn’t get Danny DeVito) who’s obviously exasperated by the trouble his wife has caused him over the years — tells Karen’s husband Scott that it was Lisa’s sister, not Lisa herself, who lost a child to SIDS. Karen confronts Lisa and Lisa tells her that she’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — she even shows Lisa a little notebook with various colored tags sticking from some of the pages, ostensibly so she can remember medical appointments — and that’s why she misremembered having had a child with SIDS herself because Parkinson’s gets you confused about the details.
Lisa also shows up at the Morgans’ place on Hallowe’en when Scott Morgan is on duty to distribute candy to the trick-or-treaters, wearing a skin-tight black pants and matching shirt with a big oval-shaped hole in the middle of the front of the shirt so it shows off the wearer’s cleavage. The only other time I’ve seen this peculiar garment was on the ghastly March 21, 2016 show on Fox, The Passion, where it was worn by Trisha Yearwood — an even odder costume than it was here given that she was supposed to be playing Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, while Jenn Lyon here is playing a typical nosy neighbor who’s hoping to screw up the Morgans’ marriage by seducing Scott, or at least by making enough of a play for him that she can later claim he came on to her. The breaking point comes when Lisa asks Karen to lend her $5,000, saying she and her husband Dan need the money immediately because Dan has lost his job. Karen says no, and Lisa basically declares war, dragging her son out of the Morgan home where he’d been playing with Miles and cutting off contact between the two families. Lisa also makes an anonymous phone call to the principal of Dorothy Peacock Elementary, claiming that the Morgans are neglecting their son Miles (ya remember Miles?) and costing Karen her cherished volunteer stint reading to the kids in her son’s class. Karen sees Lisa in the parking lot of Dorothy Peacock — driving a silver Mercedes identical to her own, which since she’s just bought it blows the credibility of Lisa having told her that she and her husband were broke — and Karen angrily confronts Lisa with Lisa’s son present. Lisa goes to court and swears out a restraining order against Karen — which, among other things, means Miles can no longer play in that big cool backyard for reasons neither Karen nor his dad Scott bother to explain to him. Lisa also fills the Web page of the real-estate company Karen has gone back to work for — she got bored hanging around the house all day and figured Miles was old enough she could go back to work — with negative reviews of Karen’s performance, so Karen’s otherwise sympathetic boss is forced to give her a temporary layoff.
The film reaches its climax when Karen goes out to get her family fast food, only as she’s coming home — and driving unusually slowly because she’s got soft drinks in the car and doesn’t want them to spill — Lisa hurls herself in front of Karen’s car and claims that Karen deliberately tried to run her over. Karen is arrested and charged with attempted murder — Karen is confident that her other neighbor Susie (ya remember Susie?), who was watching the whole thing from her window, can exonerate her — but Susie refuses to testify, obviously because she doesn’t want to get on Lisa’s bad side and make herself the next subject of Lisa’s abuse. The case goes to trial with a peculiar courtroom procedure; though Karen is being charged with a crime, and therefore we would expect her to be prosecuted by an assistant district attorney who would make his opening statement first and go first with his witnesses, including Lisa, what we see is more like a civil case, with the prosecutor identified as Lisa’s (not the state’s!) attorney and getting to make his opening statement and examine the witnesses after Karen’s lawyer do so. The case seems to be running against Karen until Lisa’s daughter Allie refuses to lie under oath for her mom: she tells them that she and Lisa had been waiting outside the Morgans’ home for 20 minutes until Karen returned so Lisa could throw herself under Karen’s car and claim Karen tried to run her over. Karen gets acquitted but they can’t do anything about Lisa — the police won’t prosecute her (even though she perjured herself in the trial) and she’s still living in That House — so at the end the Morgans move out and the final shot is of Lisa, still looking out that window, watching the house’s new owners move in and plotting her campaign against them.
There was a 10-minute mini-documentary after the fiction film explaining the history of anti-stalking legislation — no such laws existed until the early 1980’s (before that cops told people that they couldn’t do anything about people who followed them around and harassed them until they physically struck them), when my state, California, passed the first one — and also the premises of “false victim syndrome,” a characteristic mental illness of borderline personalities who invent elaborate histories of their own victimization and constantly suck for pity to extract favors (including money) from the people around them. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is part of Donald Trump’s mental illness — no matter how many good things happen to him (including his recent acquittal in the impeachment trial because all but one Republican Senator stood loyal to him rather than to the Constitution), Trump can’t let go of his sense that he is a victim, as witness the public pity party he staged to celebrate his acquittal and his adding three more heads to the pikes of all the people he feels have “wronged” him. (That was the metaphor an unnamed Trump White House associate used to communicate a warning to any wavering Republican Senators that “their heads would be on a pike” if they had the lèse-majesté to vote against Trump.) I had begun to make that connection even during the movie — when Susie refused to testify for Karen I thought, “Just like a Republican Senator!” — and though the one weakness I found in the story was that nobody in it was fully honest with each other (in particular, Karen never told anybody in the story, including her husband and their son, that Lisa’s campaign against them really started when Karen refused to give her $5,000), otherwise this was a marvelous movie, chillingly directed by Menhai Huda, with a tough, no-nonsense script by Karen Stillman and excellent performances from the two female leads.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Aquaman (DC Comics,DC Entertainment, Panoramic Pictures, Warner Bros., 2018)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Cbarles the Blu-Ray disc of the 2018 movie Aquaman, which turned out to be a spectacular movie visually — the five “executive producers” (Jon Berg, Walter Hamada, Geoff Johns, and Zack and Deborah Snyder) and the director they hired — James Wan, whose previous credits include The Conjuring and Annabelle horror series and number seven in the Fast and Furious series — enlisted apparently half the CGI technicians in the world to create a series of stunning effects, particularly the seahorses, sharks and aquatic lizards and the like that inhabit the underwater world of Atlantis and provide the Atlanteans their main means of transportation. Where it goes wrong is the plot; it not only draws extensively from just about every “quest” legend in history (particularly the tales of King Arthur — just to make sure we get the point, Aquaman’s non-hero name is “Arthur Curry” — but also Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, The Lord of the Rings (and a brief reference to Wagner’s Ring as well in the scene in which Aquaman’s weapon, called a “trident” but really a quindent since it has five tines instead of just three, is broken in two by the bad guy’s) and the Star Wars cycle — but it’s really (as I said of Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was new) just a Republic serial with a budget several orders of magnitude larger.
The film’s committee-written script (Geoff Johns, James Wan and Will Beall, story; and Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McCormick, script[1]) was structured, if you can call it that, like a Republic serial script, with ponderous scenes of exposition there just to set up the next action highlight. The Aquaman comic book debuted in November 1941 as a part of a magazine called More Fun Comics, but he didn’t get his own stand-alone comic book until the 1960’s, when he was just a guy in tight swim trunks and nothing else. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the parts of him you could see looked like a mannequin, with virtually no musculature or physical definition. At the height of my brief comic-book reading phase in the 1960’s (which had its apex when my mom, my brother and I spent three months in the summer in the fishing village of Ajijic, Mexico and I bought a lot of comic books because they were just about the only reading material available in English), I encountered Aquaman but thought he was just about the most boring character in the DC stable and I was much more interested in Marvel’s equivalent, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who like Aquaman came equipped with both lungs and gills so he could breathe either water or air, but unlike Aquaman came equipped with long ears with pointy tops (I’ve never seen this confirmed but I’ve long since been convinced that Gene Roddenberry ripped off the appearance of Mr. Spock from Prince Namor) as well as a compelling backstory in which he was the rightful ruler of Atlantis with a long-time agenda of regaining his throne.
Well, starting in 2016 DC rebooted the Aquaman character to look more muscular and butch — he was still topless but now his chest was ripped, and instead of just a swimsuit he wore tight green pants with scales and fins to make him look more fish-like. It was apparently this version that supplied the plot line for the 2018 film — to the extent it has a plot line — in which Aquaman (played as a three-year-old by Tainui and Tamor Kirkwood —the old dodge around the rules of how long children can work by casting identical twins as the same character — Kaan Guldur at nine, Otis Dhanji at 13, Kekoa Kekumano at 16 and Jason Momoa as an adult) is really Arthur Curry. He’s the product of a love-match between his father Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison), a lighthouse keeper on a New England shore, and his mother, Princess Alanna of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), who fled the undersea realm of Atlantis to escape an arranged marriage. She lasted long enough on Earth to marry Tom and bear Arthur before an Atlantean goon squad recaptured her and she agreed to go with them and marry the asshole the Atlantean ruling family wanted her to so they wouldn’t kill Tom. Got all that? While Tom was raising Arthur as a single parent, Arthur was frequently getting visits from Vulko (Willem Dafoe), who trains him to fight underwater and tap into his heritage as an Atlantean royal. Meanwhile, Atlantis is being (mis)ruled by King Orm (Patrick Wilson), who’s determined to start an all-out war on the surface world. In a bit of mildly pro-environmentalist social commentary, he explains his determination to wipe out the surface-dwelling population of Earth as being justified by the sheer amount of pollution we’re dumping into the ocean and the way we’re threatening the existence of Atlantis by underwater nuclear tests and other things we’re doing to fight our wars with each other. So he uses Atlantis’s energy technology to cause a series of tsunamis that washed up old warships and human garbage from the ocean floor.
Meanwhile, the now grown-up and Jason Momoa-played Aquaman makes his superhero “bones” when he rescues the crew of a super-secret U.S. submarine from a father-and-son team of Black pirates (Black as in African-descended, just to be clear) pirates named Jesse (Michael Beach) and David (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) Kane. Though he’s unable to salvage the sub as a seaworthy vessel, he is able to make sure all the nice white crew members get in their life rafts and he lets Jesse drown as the wrecked sub sinks. David, of course, will never forgive Aquaman for letting his father die, and ultimately he hooks up with King Orm to rat out Aquaman and his girlfriend, red-haired Princess Mera (Amber Heard), for 30 pieces, not of silver but gold (inflation strikes again!), and a black, armored diving suit that turns him into a super-villain, Black Manta. Aquaman and Mera get a cylindrical recording that supposedly contains a message left behind by King Atlan, founder of Atlantis thousands of years before, and the two go on a chase across the world — including the Sahara Desert and Sicily, where remnants of the Atlantean race apparently ended up before dying out because they could no longer survive on the surface — for a playback machine that will play the record. They plugged it into one such device and it didn’t work — Charles joked at this point, “Sorry, but you need to upgrade to System 7” — until Mera realizes that it needs to be moistened, whereupon she manages to condense a bead of sweat from Aquaman’s forehead (Aquaman, in one of his few good lines in the film, says, “Show-off! I could have just peed on the thing!”). The record says, “Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my on-” — oops, wrong movie. The actual message is a flashback narrated by King Atlan that makes this whole movie seem like a sequel to George Pal’s 1961 film Atlantis, the Lost Continent: the Atlanteans lived on the surface and had access to a limitless energy source, but they ultimately got greedy and as a result their technology backfired and sank their entire community into the ocean, forcing them to evolve and learn to breathe water to survive.
The gimmick is that the good guys have to reunite the seven kingdoms of the former Atlantis and find the original golden trident King Atlan cast as his magic, invincible weapon — O.K., his Excalibur or Nothung — that will enable Aquaman to defeat King Orm in hand-to-hand combat, something he previously tried with the weapon his mother left for him, which is referred to as a trident but is more accurately a “quindent,” since it has five tines instead of three. Only in their first battle Orm broke Aquaman’s weapon in half with the shaft of his own, so Vulko called Aquaman back for more training. Meanwhile, the other kings of Atlantis — at least the ones who are still ruling viable underwater kingdoms — including Mera’s father, King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), reluctantly go along with Orm’s proposed war out of fear of what he’ll do to them if they don’t, sort of like Republican Senators with Donald Trump. The big climax — at least the first one — takes place in a realm of ice and water in which the long-thought-dead Queen Atlanna (ya remember Queen Atlanna?), the part played by Nicole Kidman (ya remember Nicole Kidman?), turns out to be alive. To retrieve King Atlan’s magic trident Aquaman has to defeat a giant eel-like monster called the Karathen (whose voice is supplied by Julie Andrews, of all people — or is that another Julie Andrews? No, it is indeed she, our beloved Eliza Doolittle on stage and Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp on film; I guess in this film the seas are alive with the sound of music), though instead of the duel-to-the-death we expect Aquaman talks the Karathen into believing he’s the one true ruler of Atlantis and the Karathen lets him take the trident, with which he returns to Atlantis Central and overcomes King Orm in their duel — only Queen Atlanna stops Aquaman from killing Orm on the understandable ground that she doesn’t want one of her sons murdering the other. The film ends with everybody reconciled and Aquaman and Mera getting together to rule Atlantis — only a Marvelesque sequence in the middle of the credits roll lets us know that Black Manta (ya remember Black Manta?) is still alive, still has his strength amplified by Atlantean technology, and still wants to kill Aquaman (can you say sequel?).
So much of this story sounds familiar — not only from old quest legends but more recent films from the comic-book universe — that when I first heard of Aquaman and got a précis of what the story was, I thought, “It’s like the writers decided, ‘Hey, let’s do Black Panther with white people — and let’s do it under water!’” The Black Panther parallels are pretty obvious — the rival claimants to the throne, one from the outside world and the other (the villain) raised indigenously; the quest to unite the seven kingdoms of a lost empire; the limitless energy source and the political and moral dilemma of what to do with it — but they only serve to illustrate the distinction between a work of power and beauty and a piece of entertaining trash. Within the context of the superhero genre, Black Panther dealt with serious social and moral issues — how does a community handle a limitless energy source, and what are its moral responsibilities? Does it stay aloof from the rest of the world, or does it share what it has and thereby risk being corrupted, especially when they’re part of an historically oppressed race and isolation was the only thing that kept them from being colonized? But these themes, which were at the heart of Black Panther director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, couldn’t have been of less interest to the makers of Aquaman. The big problem with Aquaman is the gulf between the physical imagination — particularly the sea creatures the Atlanteans use as transport and beast of burden (including one remarkable scene in which an Atlantean band’s drummer is an octopus, playing a super-sized drum set with all eight limbs) and the lovely use of color, including the contrasts between blue and red (there’s quite a lot of red in the film since it’s established early on that Atlanteans have fire — no, the filmmakers don’t ask us to believe anything can burn underwater, but there sure seem to be a lot of underwater volcanoes in this film) — and the dramatic lack of imagination, the sense that we’ve seen (and heard) all this before as well as the sense that this film’s “story” is as pretextual as it was in the old Republic serials: just a lot of ponderous exposition to set up the next action highlight.
I ran Cbarles the Blu-Ray disc of the 2018 movie Aquaman, which turned out to be a spectacular movie visually — the five “executive producers” (Jon Berg, Walter Hamada, Geoff Johns, and Zack and Deborah Snyder) and the director they hired — James Wan, whose previous credits include The Conjuring and Annabelle horror series and number seven in the Fast and Furious series — enlisted apparently half the CGI technicians in the world to create a series of stunning effects, particularly the seahorses, sharks and aquatic lizards and the like that inhabit the underwater world of Atlantis and provide the Atlanteans their main means of transportation. Where it goes wrong is the plot; it not only draws extensively from just about every “quest” legend in history (particularly the tales of King Arthur — just to make sure we get the point, Aquaman’s non-hero name is “Arthur Curry” — but also Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, The Lord of the Rings (and a brief reference to Wagner’s Ring as well in the scene in which Aquaman’s weapon, called a “trident” but really a quindent since it has five tines instead of just three, is broken in two by the bad guy’s) and the Star Wars cycle — but it’s really (as I said of Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was new) just a Republic serial with a budget several orders of magnitude larger.
The film’s committee-written script (Geoff Johns, James Wan and Will Beall, story; and Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McCormick, script[1]) was structured, if you can call it that, like a Republic serial script, with ponderous scenes of exposition there just to set up the next action highlight. The Aquaman comic book debuted in November 1941 as a part of a magazine called More Fun Comics, but he didn’t get his own stand-alone comic book until the 1960’s, when he was just a guy in tight swim trunks and nothing else. That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the parts of him you could see looked like a mannequin, with virtually no musculature or physical definition. At the height of my brief comic-book reading phase in the 1960’s (which had its apex when my mom, my brother and I spent three months in the summer in the fishing village of Ajijic, Mexico and I bought a lot of comic books because they were just about the only reading material available in English), I encountered Aquaman but thought he was just about the most boring character in the DC stable and I was much more interested in Marvel’s equivalent, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who like Aquaman came equipped with both lungs and gills so he could breathe either water or air, but unlike Aquaman came equipped with long ears with pointy tops (I’ve never seen this confirmed but I’ve long since been convinced that Gene Roddenberry ripped off the appearance of Mr. Spock from Prince Namor) as well as a compelling backstory in which he was the rightful ruler of Atlantis with a long-time agenda of regaining his throne.
Well, starting in 2016 DC rebooted the Aquaman character to look more muscular and butch — he was still topless but now his chest was ripped, and instead of just a swimsuit he wore tight green pants with scales and fins to make him look more fish-like. It was apparently this version that supplied the plot line for the 2018 film — to the extent it has a plot line — in which Aquaman (played as a three-year-old by Tainui and Tamor Kirkwood —the old dodge around the rules of how long children can work by casting identical twins as the same character — Kaan Guldur at nine, Otis Dhanji at 13, Kekoa Kekumano at 16 and Jason Momoa as an adult) is really Arthur Curry. He’s the product of a love-match between his father Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison), a lighthouse keeper on a New England shore, and his mother, Princess Alanna of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman), who fled the undersea realm of Atlantis to escape an arranged marriage. She lasted long enough on Earth to marry Tom and bear Arthur before an Atlantean goon squad recaptured her and she agreed to go with them and marry the asshole the Atlantean ruling family wanted her to so they wouldn’t kill Tom. Got all that? While Tom was raising Arthur as a single parent, Arthur was frequently getting visits from Vulko (Willem Dafoe), who trains him to fight underwater and tap into his heritage as an Atlantean royal. Meanwhile, Atlantis is being (mis)ruled by King Orm (Patrick Wilson), who’s determined to start an all-out war on the surface world. In a bit of mildly pro-environmentalist social commentary, he explains his determination to wipe out the surface-dwelling population of Earth as being justified by the sheer amount of pollution we’re dumping into the ocean and the way we’re threatening the existence of Atlantis by underwater nuclear tests and other things we’re doing to fight our wars with each other. So he uses Atlantis’s energy technology to cause a series of tsunamis that washed up old warships and human garbage from the ocean floor.
Meanwhile, the now grown-up and Jason Momoa-played Aquaman makes his superhero “bones” when he rescues the crew of a super-secret U.S. submarine from a father-and-son team of Black pirates (Black as in African-descended, just to be clear) pirates named Jesse (Michael Beach) and David (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) Kane. Though he’s unable to salvage the sub as a seaworthy vessel, he is able to make sure all the nice white crew members get in their life rafts and he lets Jesse drown as the wrecked sub sinks. David, of course, will never forgive Aquaman for letting his father die, and ultimately he hooks up with King Orm to rat out Aquaman and his girlfriend, red-haired Princess Mera (Amber Heard), for 30 pieces, not of silver but gold (inflation strikes again!), and a black, armored diving suit that turns him into a super-villain, Black Manta. Aquaman and Mera get a cylindrical recording that supposedly contains a message left behind by King Atlan, founder of Atlantis thousands of years before, and the two go on a chase across the world — including the Sahara Desert and Sicily, where remnants of the Atlantean race apparently ended up before dying out because they could no longer survive on the surface — for a playback machine that will play the record. They plugged it into one such device and it didn’t work — Charles joked at this point, “Sorry, but you need to upgrade to System 7” — until Mera realizes that it needs to be moistened, whereupon she manages to condense a bead of sweat from Aquaman’s forehead (Aquaman, in one of his few good lines in the film, says, “Show-off! I could have just peed on the thing!”). The record says, “Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my on-” — oops, wrong movie. The actual message is a flashback narrated by King Atlan that makes this whole movie seem like a sequel to George Pal’s 1961 film Atlantis, the Lost Continent: the Atlanteans lived on the surface and had access to a limitless energy source, but they ultimately got greedy and as a result their technology backfired and sank their entire community into the ocean, forcing them to evolve and learn to breathe water to survive.
The gimmick is that the good guys have to reunite the seven kingdoms of the former Atlantis and find the original golden trident King Atlan cast as his magic, invincible weapon — O.K., his Excalibur or Nothung — that will enable Aquaman to defeat King Orm in hand-to-hand combat, something he previously tried with the weapon his mother left for him, which is referred to as a trident but is more accurately a “quindent,” since it has five tines instead of three. Only in their first battle Orm broke Aquaman’s weapon in half with the shaft of his own, so Vulko called Aquaman back for more training. Meanwhile, the other kings of Atlantis — at least the ones who are still ruling viable underwater kingdoms — including Mera’s father, King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), reluctantly go along with Orm’s proposed war out of fear of what he’ll do to them if they don’t, sort of like Republican Senators with Donald Trump. The big climax — at least the first one — takes place in a realm of ice and water in which the long-thought-dead Queen Atlanna (ya remember Queen Atlanna?), the part played by Nicole Kidman (ya remember Nicole Kidman?), turns out to be alive. To retrieve King Atlan’s magic trident Aquaman has to defeat a giant eel-like monster called the Karathen (whose voice is supplied by Julie Andrews, of all people — or is that another Julie Andrews? No, it is indeed she, our beloved Eliza Doolittle on stage and Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp on film; I guess in this film the seas are alive with the sound of music), though instead of the duel-to-the-death we expect Aquaman talks the Karathen into believing he’s the one true ruler of Atlantis and the Karathen lets him take the trident, with which he returns to Atlantis Central and overcomes King Orm in their duel — only Queen Atlanna stops Aquaman from killing Orm on the understandable ground that she doesn’t want one of her sons murdering the other. The film ends with everybody reconciled and Aquaman and Mera getting together to rule Atlantis — only a Marvelesque sequence in the middle of the credits roll lets us know that Black Manta (ya remember Black Manta?) is still alive, still has his strength amplified by Atlantean technology, and still wants to kill Aquaman (can you say sequel?).
So much of this story sounds familiar — not only from old quest legends but more recent films from the comic-book universe — that when I first heard of Aquaman and got a précis of what the story was, I thought, “It’s like the writers decided, ‘Hey, let’s do Black Panther with white people — and let’s do it under water!’” The Black Panther parallels are pretty obvious — the rival claimants to the throne, one from the outside world and the other (the villain) raised indigenously; the quest to unite the seven kingdoms of a lost empire; the limitless energy source and the political and moral dilemma of what to do with it — but they only serve to illustrate the distinction between a work of power and beauty and a piece of entertaining trash. Within the context of the superhero genre, Black Panther dealt with serious social and moral issues — how does a community handle a limitless energy source, and what are its moral responsibilities? Does it stay aloof from the rest of the world, or does it share what it has and thereby risk being corrupted, especially when they’re part of an historically oppressed race and isolation was the only thing that kept them from being colonized? But these themes, which were at the heart of Black Panther director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, couldn’t have been of less interest to the makers of Aquaman. The big problem with Aquaman is the gulf between the physical imagination — particularly the sea creatures the Atlanteans use as transport and beast of burden (including one remarkable scene in which an Atlantean band’s drummer is an octopus, playing a super-sized drum set with all eight limbs) and the lovely use of color, including the contrasts between blue and red (there’s quite a lot of red in the film since it’s established early on that Atlanteans have fire — no, the filmmakers don’t ask us to believe anything can burn underwater, but there sure seem to be a lot of underwater volcanoes in this film) — and the dramatic lack of imagination, the sense that we’ve seen (and heard) all this before as well as the sense that this film’s “story” is as pretextual as it was in the old Republic serials: just a lot of ponderous exposition to set up the next action highlight.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Variety Lights (Capitoline Films, FinFilm, Lux Studios, Janus Films, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a DVD I had checked out of the San Diego Central Library of a film I’ve heard and been curious about for years but had never had a chance to see. The film was Variety Lights, produced in Italy in 1950 (that’s the date on the DVD box and also on imdb.com, though other sources have said 1951) and co-directed by the already established Alberto Lattauada and a young man named Federico Fellini. Fellini had broken into the movie business in 1945, as World War II was winding down, as one of the screenwriters on Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, the catch-as-catch-can production (Rossellini “borrowed” his cameras from the Italian Cinecittá — “Cinema City” — studio and shot on so-called “short-ends” of film, unexposed stock at the end of rolls too short to be usable in a high-level studio production) that launched the movement in European films in general, and Italian films in particular, called “Neorealism.” “Neorealism” meant just that — Charles noted a parallel between it and the “verismo” (“truth-telling”) movement in Italian opera at the end of the 19th century. Neorealist films told stories of ordinary people, often working-class or poor people struggling to survive (indeed, in most neorealist films, including this one, the struggle to survive economically is the basis of the entire plot!), and they were shot outside the studio in real locations. By chance I’d just read a New Yorker review of a new biography of Fellini which mentioned that as his career progressed he moved away from neorealism and made his films more artificial and studio-bound. (In the 1980’s he made a film called È la Nave Va — “And the Ship Sails On” — that took place entirely at sea but was shot totally inside a Cinecittá sound stage, with old-fashioned and surprisingly obvious painted backdrops representing sky and sea.) It’s one of those ironies history likes to throw up that a studio complex commissioned in 1937 by Benito Mussolini became most famous as the playground of a director who’d grown up under Mussolini’s regime, hated it, hated authoritarian regimes in general and hated the Roman Catholic Church in particular. (If Fellini ever made a movie that didn’t have a scene ridiculing the church — aside from Satyricon, set in ancient Rome before the church as an institution existed — I’ve never seen it.) Fellini worked in the late 1940’s as a screenwriter on other people’s projects and in 1950 he wrote a story about struggling vaudevillians called Luce di Varietà which established director Alberto Lattuada bought. Lattuada collaborated with Fellini on the final script (along with Tullio Pinelli, who would work on a lot of Fellini’s later films, and an uncredited Ennio Flaiano).
Lattuada knew that Fellini was anxious to “graduate” from merely writing films to directing them, and so he hired Fellini as co-director — though there aren’t a lot of accounts of how this film was made and we really don’t know which director contributed what. It’s indicative of the changing fortunes that so often rule the movie industry that the film’s actual credit for director reads “Lattuada è Fellini” but Fellini’s name is listed first on the DVD box (from Janus Films, which also was the film’s original U.S. distributor) and also on imdb.com. The producers included Bianca Lattuada, while Felice Lattuada worked on the music, and Lattuada wasn’t the only person who got family members involved in this movie: Fellini got his wife, Giulietta Masina, the part of the second female lead, a performer who calls herself “Melina Amore” and who when the film opens is the sort-of fiancée of the male lead, small-time comic Checco Dal Monte (Peppino de Filippo). She’s conscientiously saving as much money as they can so they can retire from the stage and buy a roadside restaurant and convenience store (the original meaning of the Italian word traittoria — later I would be amused when there was a fad for high-end Italian restaurants in the U.S. calling themselves traittorias when I’d seen enough Italian movies to know that in Italy a traittoria was basically what we in the U.S. would call a “diner”). The film opens with Checco’s troupe giving a successful performance — the film highlights the contrast between the exotic high-end fantasies the act is selling and the decidedly low-rent status of its participants and production values — only the entire box-office receipts are attached by an old creditor who has an outstanding two-year-old bill against them. So they have to scrounge enough money to get on the train to the next town they’re engaged to perform in, and it looks like they’ll have to walk all the way from the train station to the theatre when they’re bailed out by Liliana “Lily” Antonelli (Carla Del Poggio), an aspiring performer whom Checco had previously met on the train and tried to seduce. Lily has rented a carriage and offers the troupe a ride in it, and she manages to talk her way into the act even though she can’t dance and can barely sing. (Her song, “El Muchacho,” features one of the least convincing voice-doubling scenes ever seen in a film — and midway through the song Charles was startled to realize she, or her double, was singing in Spanish rather than Italian.)
Checco essentially dumps Melina for Lily, only to realize that her ambitions are far higher than he can possibly help her with, and she’s what Nunnally Johnson in his script for the 1954 Black Widow called a “purpose girl” — one who’s willing to have sex with whomever she has to in order to get ahead. In one scene the owner of a castle outside the town offers to put up and feed the entire company for the night — only he invites Lily to his room, she accepts, a jealous Checco bursts in and makes a scene, and the castle owner responds by throwing everybody out in the middle of the night. Ultimately the actors arrive in Rome — Charles was surprised by how relatively unscathed by World War II the city was, but it’s my understanding that the two sides in the war had an unspoken understanding to keep Rome an “open city” and not risk alienating the world’s Roman Catholics by accidentally bombing the Vatican. Checco is determined to mount his own touring production with Lily as the star — only his former partners won’t work for him again because they know he has no money and they likely won’t get paid. So he scouts new talent on the streets, including an African-American trumpet player (John Kitzmiller) — we know he’s African-American because he’s Black and speaks at least some of his lines in idiomatic English — and a “cowboy” who’s a trick shot that can fire a pistol at someone and blow a cigarette out of their outstretched hand. Checco gets far enough with this production that he invites a potential backer to a rehearsal — only Lily doesn’t show, and he realizes that she’s bailed and signed on for a dance role in a major production with an established producer. In the final scene, Lattuada and Fellini stress the irony that Lily’s company has major bookings in Italian cities people outside Italy have actually heard of — Florence, Bologna, Milan — while Checco’s troupe is stuck playing nowhere towns almost no one who doesn’t live there has heard of, including one so small and out-of-the-way that one of the troupe members says the local theatre only shows movies, not live entertainment.
Variety Lights is a marvelous movie, and though it’s not one of those European productions that found an audience in the U.S. because it pushed the envelope of sexuality past what American filmmakers, hamstrung by the Production Code, could, it’s a refreshing contrast to U.S. films of the period in deglamorizing its principal players and making the sets, locations and costumes as endearingly tacky as their real-life equivalents. It’s this kind of knowing depiction of the shabbiness of human existence, and the frailties of human beings, that led to the explosion of U.S. audience interest in European movies and the rise of so-called “art-house cinemas” that showed them (and that could show them because they weren’t signatories to the Production Code) after World War II. In fact, I first heard of Variety Lights in my childhood from the elaborate film schedules put out by an art-house theatre in Berkeley, which not only listed the films they were showing but contained lengthy and charmingly opinionated commentaries on them — which, I later found out, were written by a then-unknown film critic named Pauline Kael. For the most part, Variety Lights fits neatly into Fellini’s 1950’s oeuvre: it’s about entertainers, its characters are living a marginal existence (not until La Dolce Vita in 1960 would Fellini start skewering the upper classes), and he uses his wife as a sort of voice-of-reason character: alone among the dramatis personae Melina is looking towards the future and saving her money to establish a steady existence outside the theatre. One of the surprises of Variety Lights is how attractive Giulietta Masina is. Fellini is about the only filmmaker I can think of who purposely deglamorized an actor with whom he was personally involved; though Masina in Variety Lights isn’t exactly drop-dead gorgeous she’s quite easy on the eyes, and there are only a couple of close-ups in which she’s recognizable as the same actress from Fellini’s next big film with her, La Strada (“The Road”), in which she played a homely gamine almost literally purchased from her family by the traveling srongman Zampanó (Anthony Quinn — Fellini’s use of American stars Quinn and Richard Basehart in this movie was what first turned on American filmgoers outside the art-houses to him).
The other surprise about Variety Lights is that one could easily imagine an American studio making it: though there are intimations of sex in the film there’s nothing so out-front about it that it would have run up against the Production Code, and indeed there are a number of 1930’s U.S. movies that almost eerily anticipate it, including one we’d seen recently — George White’s Scandals of 1935, in which Alice Faye is a small-town performer plucked from obscurity and put on Broadway; and The Old-Fashioned Way (1934), in which W. C. Fields is the head of a traveling acting company always struggling financially as it moves from one town to the next (though in that one Fields wasn’t playing a letch like Peppino de Filippo is here; his main emotional interest is his daughter, and his ambition is to see her well married, settled down and happy away from the marginal existence of provincial theatre people). Certainly one could well imagine Fields or Groucho Marx playing some of de Filippo’s scenes here — notably the one in which, in order to introduce Lily to the big producer he hopes will bankroll his show (and who instead takes her away from him, contractually, financially and sexually), he takes her to an expensive nightclub and runs up a bill he has no money for and no idea how to pay. All in all, Variety Lights is a marvelous movie, maybe not as spectacular a debut for a major director as Citizen Kane but still a solid first effort and one that, despite the unknowable question of which director contributed what, a film that fits neatly into Fellini’s canon.
I ran a DVD I had checked out of the San Diego Central Library of a film I’ve heard and been curious about for years but had never had a chance to see. The film was Variety Lights, produced in Italy in 1950 (that’s the date on the DVD box and also on imdb.com, though other sources have said 1951) and co-directed by the already established Alberto Lattauada and a young man named Federico Fellini. Fellini had broken into the movie business in 1945, as World War II was winding down, as one of the screenwriters on Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, the catch-as-catch-can production (Rossellini “borrowed” his cameras from the Italian Cinecittá — “Cinema City” — studio and shot on so-called “short-ends” of film, unexposed stock at the end of rolls too short to be usable in a high-level studio production) that launched the movement in European films in general, and Italian films in particular, called “Neorealism.” “Neorealism” meant just that — Charles noted a parallel between it and the “verismo” (“truth-telling”) movement in Italian opera at the end of the 19th century. Neorealist films told stories of ordinary people, often working-class or poor people struggling to survive (indeed, in most neorealist films, including this one, the struggle to survive economically is the basis of the entire plot!), and they were shot outside the studio in real locations. By chance I’d just read a New Yorker review of a new biography of Fellini which mentioned that as his career progressed he moved away from neorealism and made his films more artificial and studio-bound. (In the 1980’s he made a film called È la Nave Va — “And the Ship Sails On” — that took place entirely at sea but was shot totally inside a Cinecittá sound stage, with old-fashioned and surprisingly obvious painted backdrops representing sky and sea.) It’s one of those ironies history likes to throw up that a studio complex commissioned in 1937 by Benito Mussolini became most famous as the playground of a director who’d grown up under Mussolini’s regime, hated it, hated authoritarian regimes in general and hated the Roman Catholic Church in particular. (If Fellini ever made a movie that didn’t have a scene ridiculing the church — aside from Satyricon, set in ancient Rome before the church as an institution existed — I’ve never seen it.) Fellini worked in the late 1940’s as a screenwriter on other people’s projects and in 1950 he wrote a story about struggling vaudevillians called Luce di Varietà which established director Alberto Lattuada bought. Lattuada collaborated with Fellini on the final script (along with Tullio Pinelli, who would work on a lot of Fellini’s later films, and an uncredited Ennio Flaiano).
Lattuada knew that Fellini was anxious to “graduate” from merely writing films to directing them, and so he hired Fellini as co-director — though there aren’t a lot of accounts of how this film was made and we really don’t know which director contributed what. It’s indicative of the changing fortunes that so often rule the movie industry that the film’s actual credit for director reads “Lattuada è Fellini” but Fellini’s name is listed first on the DVD box (from Janus Films, which also was the film’s original U.S. distributor) and also on imdb.com. The producers included Bianca Lattuada, while Felice Lattuada worked on the music, and Lattuada wasn’t the only person who got family members involved in this movie: Fellini got his wife, Giulietta Masina, the part of the second female lead, a performer who calls herself “Melina Amore” and who when the film opens is the sort-of fiancée of the male lead, small-time comic Checco Dal Monte (Peppino de Filippo). She’s conscientiously saving as much money as they can so they can retire from the stage and buy a roadside restaurant and convenience store (the original meaning of the Italian word traittoria — later I would be amused when there was a fad for high-end Italian restaurants in the U.S. calling themselves traittorias when I’d seen enough Italian movies to know that in Italy a traittoria was basically what we in the U.S. would call a “diner”). The film opens with Checco’s troupe giving a successful performance — the film highlights the contrast between the exotic high-end fantasies the act is selling and the decidedly low-rent status of its participants and production values — only the entire box-office receipts are attached by an old creditor who has an outstanding two-year-old bill against them. So they have to scrounge enough money to get on the train to the next town they’re engaged to perform in, and it looks like they’ll have to walk all the way from the train station to the theatre when they’re bailed out by Liliana “Lily” Antonelli (Carla Del Poggio), an aspiring performer whom Checco had previously met on the train and tried to seduce. Lily has rented a carriage and offers the troupe a ride in it, and she manages to talk her way into the act even though she can’t dance and can barely sing. (Her song, “El Muchacho,” features one of the least convincing voice-doubling scenes ever seen in a film — and midway through the song Charles was startled to realize she, or her double, was singing in Spanish rather than Italian.)
Checco essentially dumps Melina for Lily, only to realize that her ambitions are far higher than he can possibly help her with, and she’s what Nunnally Johnson in his script for the 1954 Black Widow called a “purpose girl” — one who’s willing to have sex with whomever she has to in order to get ahead. In one scene the owner of a castle outside the town offers to put up and feed the entire company for the night — only he invites Lily to his room, she accepts, a jealous Checco bursts in and makes a scene, and the castle owner responds by throwing everybody out in the middle of the night. Ultimately the actors arrive in Rome — Charles was surprised by how relatively unscathed by World War II the city was, but it’s my understanding that the two sides in the war had an unspoken understanding to keep Rome an “open city” and not risk alienating the world’s Roman Catholics by accidentally bombing the Vatican. Checco is determined to mount his own touring production with Lily as the star — only his former partners won’t work for him again because they know he has no money and they likely won’t get paid. So he scouts new talent on the streets, including an African-American trumpet player (John Kitzmiller) — we know he’s African-American because he’s Black and speaks at least some of his lines in idiomatic English — and a “cowboy” who’s a trick shot that can fire a pistol at someone and blow a cigarette out of their outstretched hand. Checco gets far enough with this production that he invites a potential backer to a rehearsal — only Lily doesn’t show, and he realizes that she’s bailed and signed on for a dance role in a major production with an established producer. In the final scene, Lattuada and Fellini stress the irony that Lily’s company has major bookings in Italian cities people outside Italy have actually heard of — Florence, Bologna, Milan — while Checco’s troupe is stuck playing nowhere towns almost no one who doesn’t live there has heard of, including one so small and out-of-the-way that one of the troupe members says the local theatre only shows movies, not live entertainment.
Variety Lights is a marvelous movie, and though it’s not one of those European productions that found an audience in the U.S. because it pushed the envelope of sexuality past what American filmmakers, hamstrung by the Production Code, could, it’s a refreshing contrast to U.S. films of the period in deglamorizing its principal players and making the sets, locations and costumes as endearingly tacky as their real-life equivalents. It’s this kind of knowing depiction of the shabbiness of human existence, and the frailties of human beings, that led to the explosion of U.S. audience interest in European movies and the rise of so-called “art-house cinemas” that showed them (and that could show them because they weren’t signatories to the Production Code) after World War II. In fact, I first heard of Variety Lights in my childhood from the elaborate film schedules put out by an art-house theatre in Berkeley, which not only listed the films they were showing but contained lengthy and charmingly opinionated commentaries on them — which, I later found out, were written by a then-unknown film critic named Pauline Kael. For the most part, Variety Lights fits neatly into Fellini’s 1950’s oeuvre: it’s about entertainers, its characters are living a marginal existence (not until La Dolce Vita in 1960 would Fellini start skewering the upper classes), and he uses his wife as a sort of voice-of-reason character: alone among the dramatis personae Melina is looking towards the future and saving her money to establish a steady existence outside the theatre. One of the surprises of Variety Lights is how attractive Giulietta Masina is. Fellini is about the only filmmaker I can think of who purposely deglamorized an actor with whom he was personally involved; though Masina in Variety Lights isn’t exactly drop-dead gorgeous she’s quite easy on the eyes, and there are only a couple of close-ups in which she’s recognizable as the same actress from Fellini’s next big film with her, La Strada (“The Road”), in which she played a homely gamine almost literally purchased from her family by the traveling srongman Zampanó (Anthony Quinn — Fellini’s use of American stars Quinn and Richard Basehart in this movie was what first turned on American filmgoers outside the art-houses to him).
The other surprise about Variety Lights is that one could easily imagine an American studio making it: though there are intimations of sex in the film there’s nothing so out-front about it that it would have run up against the Production Code, and indeed there are a number of 1930’s U.S. movies that almost eerily anticipate it, including one we’d seen recently — George White’s Scandals of 1935, in which Alice Faye is a small-town performer plucked from obscurity and put on Broadway; and The Old-Fashioned Way (1934), in which W. C. Fields is the head of a traveling acting company always struggling financially as it moves from one town to the next (though in that one Fields wasn’t playing a letch like Peppino de Filippo is here; his main emotional interest is his daughter, and his ambition is to see her well married, settled down and happy away from the marginal existence of provincial theatre people). Certainly one could well imagine Fields or Groucho Marx playing some of de Filippo’s scenes here — notably the one in which, in order to introduce Lily to the big producer he hopes will bankroll his show (and who instead takes her away from him, contractually, financially and sexually), he takes her to an expensive nightclub and runs up a bill he has no money for and no idea how to pay. All in all, Variety Lights is a marvelous movie, maybe not as spectacular a debut for a major director as Citizen Kane but still a solid first effort and one that, despite the unknowable question of which director contributed what, a film that fits neatly into Fellini’s canon.
The Raven (Universal, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had enough time together last night to fit in a second movie after Variety Lights, and it was the leftover film from our recent night of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired movies that began on Poe’s birthday with Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). This was the 1935 Universal horror “B” The Raven, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (billed only by their last names in their above-the-title credit card: this was the era in which Universal was putting out trailers billing Karloff as “Karloff — The Uncanny!,” suggesting he was an actual monster or freak instead of an ordinary human actor just particularly good at playing such roles). The Raven was eiter the second or third movie to co-star Karloff and Lugosi, depending on whether you count their guest appearance as themselves in the 1934 Universal movie Gift of Gab (a typical rubes-crash-Hollywood story and the one Karloff-Lugosi film I’ve never seen; when Universal Home Video put out a DVD boxed set called Universal Rarities, Volume 1 consisting exclusively of Paramount films Universal’s TV subsidiary Revue had bought in the 1950’s, I expressed the hope that there would be a Universal Rarities, Volume 2 of films Universal had produced itself, and Gift of Gab was one of the movies I wished they’d include along with Night World, The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head — a macabre anti-war masterpiece with Claude Rains and Lionel Atwill — and The Crimson Canary).
In essence it followed a similar plot template to their first one, 1934’s The Black Cat (a really quirky movie directed by Edgar G. Ulmer) but with the Karloff and Lugosi characters reversed. The film opens on the typical dark and stormy night (I was watching it with my mother one night and she said, “Doesn’t anyone ever commit murder on a sunny day?” — she also noticed how old Karloff looked on screen and said, “Wasn’t Boris Karloff ever young?,” to which I replied, “Not when we saw him, he wasn’t; he was 42 when he made Frankenstein”) in which dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is involved in a car accident when she misses a detour sign and drives off the road. She suffers from a pinched nerve in the back of her neck which will either paralyze or kill her unless her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), and the doctors attending her (including Jerry Halden, played by Lester Matthews, who’s also her fiancé) can persuade the eminent super-surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) to come out of retirement and use his skills to relieve the nerve. Dr. Vollin shows up and performs the operation but is instantly smitten with Jean and determined to marry her even though she already has an age-peer boyfriend and her dad (whose first name we never learn) doesn’t want to see her tie herself down to a much older man. Dr. Vollin is also a huge devotee of Edgar Allan Poe; he possesses the largest privately-held collection of Poe memorabilia in the world, he has a Maltese falcon-like black statuette of a raven on his desk, he’s fond of reciting “The Raven” every time he has an even remotely interested listener (like the museum official who comes to his home to bid on his Poe collection), and he has a secret basement room in which he’s built life-size working models of torture devices from “The Pit and the Pendulum” and other Poe stories.
In a film that lasts only 61 minutes and was directed by Louis Friedlander — who later shortened his name to Lew Landers and cranked out a lot of watchable (and sometimes unwatchable) trash (including another film with Lugosi, The Return of the Vampire) in the late 1930’s and 1940’s before he ended up doing series TV in the 1950’s — the action moves quickly as Dr. Vollin encounters Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff), an escaped criminal from San Quentin who burned up a bank guard’s face with an acetylene torch while robbing a bank in Arizona after his escape and is now wanted nationwide. He’s heard from an underworld contact that Dr. Vollin can remodel his face and make him a) unrecognizable and b) better-looking, because in the one true bit of Karloff pathos in an otherwise nothing role (a barely articulate gangster similar to the roles he’d been playing in the early 1930’s before Frankenstein revitalized his career and “typed” him as a horror actor), Bateman tells Dr. Vollin, “Maybe, when a man is ugly, that makes him do ugly things.” Alas, Dr. Vollin says he’ll only do the operation if Bateman does him a favor, though; the favor he has in mind is to kidnap Jean Thatcher and murder both her father and her inconvenient fiancé. He also double-crosses Bateman and makes him look uglier, not better. There are two scenes in which the now even more monstrous-looking Bateman breaks into Jean’s room to carry her off — an obvious cop from the big scene in Frankenstein in which Karloff similarly grabbed Mae Clarke, which itself was ripped off from a similar scene with Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — and a scene in which Jean’s boyfriend tries to rescue her, not realizing that her room is actually an elevator and Vollin has lowered it so anyone trying to enter it from the level it was on will fall to his death through the shaft. (The scene in which Lester Matthews pulls himself away from the shaft and back to safety got unintended laughs when The Raven was previewed, but they kept it in anyway.)
Vollin locks Judge Thatcher onto the slab for the pit-and-the-pendulum torture (which is staged effectively but not as chillingly as Roger Corman and Vincent Price did it in their 1960 film of Poe’s original story, or something resembling it) and puts Jean and her boyfriend into a room whose walls will come together and crush them — only the good guys manage to turn the tables and it’s Vollin himself who’s crushed to death in that room. The Raven manages to be haunting despite a somewhat silly script by David Boehm that gives Lugosi all too many tempting opportunities to overact — notably his climactic line, “Poe, you are avenged!,” as his sinister schemes to off his enemies seem to be working — and gives Karloff surprisingly little to do at all. Apparently Lugosi resented that, though his was clearly the lead role, Karloff got first billing and twice as much money ($10,000 to Lugosi’s $5,000). Still, The Raven is a surprisingly stylish film — one doesn’t expect a Lew Landers movie in which his direction is better than the script, but here it is — and a fun little romp through Hollywood’s version of the macabre even though better writing and more sensitive direction (like Lugosi had got from Barry Beranger and Ray Taylor in the quite remarkable serial The Return of Chandu in 1934, in which he was actually the romantic lead!) could have made Vollin a more rich and complex character instead of a cardboard mad villain.
Charles and I had enough time together last night to fit in a second movie after Variety Lights, and it was the leftover film from our recent night of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired movies that began on Poe’s birthday with Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). This was the 1935 Universal horror “B” The Raven, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (billed only by their last names in their above-the-title credit card: this was the era in which Universal was putting out trailers billing Karloff as “Karloff — The Uncanny!,” suggesting he was an actual monster or freak instead of an ordinary human actor just particularly good at playing such roles). The Raven was eiter the second or third movie to co-star Karloff and Lugosi, depending on whether you count their guest appearance as themselves in the 1934 Universal movie Gift of Gab (a typical rubes-crash-Hollywood story and the one Karloff-Lugosi film I’ve never seen; when Universal Home Video put out a DVD boxed set called Universal Rarities, Volume 1 consisting exclusively of Paramount films Universal’s TV subsidiary Revue had bought in the 1950’s, I expressed the hope that there would be a Universal Rarities, Volume 2 of films Universal had produced itself, and Gift of Gab was one of the movies I wished they’d include along with Night World, The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head — a macabre anti-war masterpiece with Claude Rains and Lionel Atwill — and The Crimson Canary).
In essence it followed a similar plot template to their first one, 1934’s The Black Cat (a really quirky movie directed by Edgar G. Ulmer) but with the Karloff and Lugosi characters reversed. The film opens on the typical dark and stormy night (I was watching it with my mother one night and she said, “Doesn’t anyone ever commit murder on a sunny day?” — she also noticed how old Karloff looked on screen and said, “Wasn’t Boris Karloff ever young?,” to which I replied, “Not when we saw him, he wasn’t; he was 42 when he made Frankenstein”) in which dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is involved in a car accident when she misses a detour sign and drives off the road. She suffers from a pinched nerve in the back of her neck which will either paralyze or kill her unless her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), and the doctors attending her (including Jerry Halden, played by Lester Matthews, who’s also her fiancé) can persuade the eminent super-surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) to come out of retirement and use his skills to relieve the nerve. Dr. Vollin shows up and performs the operation but is instantly smitten with Jean and determined to marry her even though she already has an age-peer boyfriend and her dad (whose first name we never learn) doesn’t want to see her tie herself down to a much older man. Dr. Vollin is also a huge devotee of Edgar Allan Poe; he possesses the largest privately-held collection of Poe memorabilia in the world, he has a Maltese falcon-like black statuette of a raven on his desk, he’s fond of reciting “The Raven” every time he has an even remotely interested listener (like the museum official who comes to his home to bid on his Poe collection), and he has a secret basement room in which he’s built life-size working models of torture devices from “The Pit and the Pendulum” and other Poe stories.
In a film that lasts only 61 minutes and was directed by Louis Friedlander — who later shortened his name to Lew Landers and cranked out a lot of watchable (and sometimes unwatchable) trash (including another film with Lugosi, The Return of the Vampire) in the late 1930’s and 1940’s before he ended up doing series TV in the 1950’s — the action moves quickly as Dr. Vollin encounters Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff), an escaped criminal from San Quentin who burned up a bank guard’s face with an acetylene torch while robbing a bank in Arizona after his escape and is now wanted nationwide. He’s heard from an underworld contact that Dr. Vollin can remodel his face and make him a) unrecognizable and b) better-looking, because in the one true bit of Karloff pathos in an otherwise nothing role (a barely articulate gangster similar to the roles he’d been playing in the early 1930’s before Frankenstein revitalized his career and “typed” him as a horror actor), Bateman tells Dr. Vollin, “Maybe, when a man is ugly, that makes him do ugly things.” Alas, Dr. Vollin says he’ll only do the operation if Bateman does him a favor, though; the favor he has in mind is to kidnap Jean Thatcher and murder both her father and her inconvenient fiancé. He also double-crosses Bateman and makes him look uglier, not better. There are two scenes in which the now even more monstrous-looking Bateman breaks into Jean’s room to carry her off — an obvious cop from the big scene in Frankenstein in which Karloff similarly grabbed Mae Clarke, which itself was ripped off from a similar scene with Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — and a scene in which Jean’s boyfriend tries to rescue her, not realizing that her room is actually an elevator and Vollin has lowered it so anyone trying to enter it from the level it was on will fall to his death through the shaft. (The scene in which Lester Matthews pulls himself away from the shaft and back to safety got unintended laughs when The Raven was previewed, but they kept it in anyway.)
Vollin locks Judge Thatcher onto the slab for the pit-and-the-pendulum torture (which is staged effectively but not as chillingly as Roger Corman and Vincent Price did it in their 1960 film of Poe’s original story, or something resembling it) and puts Jean and her boyfriend into a room whose walls will come together and crush them — only the good guys manage to turn the tables and it’s Vollin himself who’s crushed to death in that room. The Raven manages to be haunting despite a somewhat silly script by David Boehm that gives Lugosi all too many tempting opportunities to overact — notably his climactic line, “Poe, you are avenged!,” as his sinister schemes to off his enemies seem to be working — and gives Karloff surprisingly little to do at all. Apparently Lugosi resented that, though his was clearly the lead role, Karloff got first billing and twice as much money ($10,000 to Lugosi’s $5,000). Still, The Raven is a surprisingly stylish film — one doesn’t expect a Lew Landers movie in which his direction is better than the script, but here it is — and a fun little romp through Hollywood’s version of the macabre even though better writing and more sensitive direction (like Lugosi had got from Barry Beranger and Ray Taylor in the quite remarkable serial The Return of Chandu in 1934, in which he was actually the romantic lead!) could have made Vollin a more rich and complex character instead of a cardboard mad villain.
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