The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 2: "Yearning to Breathe Free" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBs, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched “Yearning to Breathe Free,” the second of Ken Burns’ three-part mini-series The U.S. and the Holocaust, dealing with the years 1938 to 1942. Burns co-directed it with his partner, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, and like the first part, “The Golden Door” (aired on Sunday. Usually PBS has shown Burns’ mega-documentaries several nights running, but we had to wait two days between parts one and two of this one because Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral took place on Monday and PBS devoted its whole schedule to it, airing the full event – all 10–plus hours of it – live, followed by a two-hour edited version prepared by the BBC, thus living up to the joke first made in the 1970’s that PBS was simply “BBC West.” The U.S. and the Holocauist remains a frightening documentary, at least partly because so little has changed; though the original Nazis are history and they inoculated the world against the virus of racism for two generations or so, our immunity has worn off and we are once again seeing and hearing people in the streets of the U.S. as well as other countries literally hailing what Hitler and his band of thugs tried to do and calling for a return to it. Some of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 were wearing T-shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Arbeit Macht Frei” (the notorious inscription on the gates of the original Auschwitz, which means “Work Makes You Free”) and the most horrifying one to me, “6MWE” – which stands for “Six Million Weren’t Enough.”

The story of the U.S.’s response to the Holocaust has its heroes and its villains, and they don’t always turn up where you’d expect. Among the heroes were Varian Fry, an American Protestant Christian who, along with his colleague Homer Bingham (son of a wildly racist U.S. Congressmember), traveled to Vichy in unoccupied France to get out as many Jews as he possibly could. His initial purpose was to rescue Jews who are well known artists, musicians, filmmakers and intellectuals – among the people he helped to get out were Hannah Arendt (author of the later book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which in addition to its controversial portrayal of Adolf Eichmann as essentially amoral rather than immoral is also a concise one-volume history of the Holocaust and how officials in the various occupied nations did their best either to facilitate the Holocaust or to monkey-wrench it), Max Ernst, Max Ophuls (a Belgian/German Jewish film director whose son, Marcel Ophuls, would become a documentarian famous for mega-movies about the Holocaust and the Nazi occupations like The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice and Hotel Terminus), sculptor Jazques Lipschitz and avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp. But Fry and Bingham expanded their task and sought to help Jews who weren’t prominent intellectuals or artists get out, too, and eventually Fry was given the Righteous Among the Nations medal by the government of Israel (the same award the Israeli government gave to Oskar Schindler).

Among the villains was Breckenridge Long, whom President Roosevelt inexplicably put in charge of European immigration during the war – his first name alone, also the last name of a famous Confederate general, should have alerted the President and anyone else to his lack of commitment to equal rights – and who used his authority not to open the golden door but to shut it ever tighter. The film tells the story of the St. Louis, the German-owned ocean liner which set sail from Hamburg in 1939 with 1,200 Jews aboard bound for Havana, Cuba, only while the ship was in mid-ocean the Cuban government revoked the visas of everyone on board and refused to let the ship dock in Havana harbor. Eventually the ship returned to Europe; its captain, an anti-Nazi German who had agreed to take down the legally required portrait of Hitler when the Jewish passengers were using the big communal space for Sabath services, had briefly considered deliberately running it aground on the shores of some neutral country so its government would have to take in his passengers according to the laws of the sea, but in the end he made arrangements with various European governments to take in his passengers so at least he wouldn’t have to return them to Germany. The cruel irony is that many of the countries in which he placed them – notably Denmark and The Netherlands – were themselves conquered by the Nazis. In fact, over and over again Burns, Novick, Botstein and their writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, made the point that as Nazi Germany expanded, so did its Jewish population.

The crisis reached its peak when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and quickly overran western Russia as well as Ukraine and moch of the territory that are now post-Soviet “independent” states. (I put the word “independent” in quotation marks because, as the Ukrainians are learning to their horror, the current government of Russia will not allow any countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and the Czarist Empire before that, to be truly independent.) Having trusted Hitler and Germany to live up to the non-aggression pact signed between the two countries in August 1939, under which the Nazis and the Soviets had combined to conquer and divvy up Poland between them (a cruel echo of the various partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 19th and 19th centuries), Russia had left its western border undefended and allowed the Nazis to advance quickly. It was when Hitler and his troops invaded Russia and easily conquered moch oif its territory that Hitler decided the old ways of getting rid of the German Jews – driving them intostarvation, penury and exile (at one point, according to this program, 25 percent of the German government’s budget was coming from wealth and property expropriated from Jews) weren’t efficient enough.

It was in the summer and fall of 1941 that tne Nazis made it their policy not just to punish the Jews and officially declare them non-citizens, but actually to kill them en masse. Their first thought was to organize squads called the Einsatzgrüppen to shoot them. Later they set up vans with the exhaust fumes reworked to pump carbon monoxide into the vans’ cargo space, thus killing everyone inside. Finally they hit on the idea of mass-producing the slaughter (one of Hitler’s personal heroes was Henry Ford, not only because he was a master of more and more efficient methods of production but because he was himself a notorious anti-Semite whose book, The International Jew, Hitler cited as a source) by building giant gas chambers and filling them, first with carbon monoxide and then, when German companies couldn’t manufacture that gas in sufficient quantities, with a new chemical called Zyklon-B. This episode of The U.S. and the Holocaust ends with an account of how the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park figured out, based on the secret dispatches they were reading from the German codes they had broken, that the Holocaust was going on – but Winston Churchill and the other British government and military leaders decided to let it keep happening because any attempts to target the killilng centers or anywhere else in the Nazis’ elaborate death machinery would reveal to the Germans that the Allies had broken their codes.

I’ve read in other sources about the war and the Holocaust that the Allied military commanders decided early on not to divert military resources to tro to stop the Holocaust because they felt they needed to concentrate on winning the war, and once they did that they could stop the mass murder of Jews and other Nazi targets (Communists, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, political dissidents and Queers). Meanwhile the Nazis were hurting their own war effort by diverting so many resources from the war to carry out the mass murders, so their inhumanity was not only evil but counterproductive to their own goals. And inevitably the film focuses a great deal on Anne Frank, the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, and her father Otto Frank, who thought he and his family would be safe in the Netherlands because the Dutch had stayed neutral douring World War I and he figured they would be able to do that again in World War II. At one onint toe Franks had actually scored visas to emigrate to the U.S. – only a Nazi air raid on the port of Rotterdam destroyed the American consulate and, with it, the Franks’ legal papers that at least might have enabled them to make their escape.

The Flight That Disappeared (Harvard Productions, United Artists, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Holocaust documentary my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of a 1961 movie called The Flight That Disappeared, made under the production auspices of Robert E. Kent (the man who could rattle off a description of the baseball game he’d been to the night before while he typed away on the latest pile of old movie clichés he would bind together and call a “script”) for a company called “Harvard Productions,” releasing through United Artists. The Flight That Disappeared was made in 1961 and directed by Reginald LeBorg (a former Universal horror director; he’d begun his career working w ith Arnold Schönberg and later directed band shorts for Universal before graduating to feature films; he was also a Gay man, though when L leanred that about him I joked, “As Gay Universal horror directors went, he was no James Whale”). It’s basically yet another dull knock-off of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, only for the first hour or soi we wait patiently (or not-so-patiently) for something to happen to take our minds off the dull aviation story about a Lockheed Constellation propeller-driven airliner, United Airlines Flight 60, whose routine flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. is sidetracked by a mysterious force.

Until then LeBorg and screenwriters Orville H. Hampton and Ralph and Judith Hart (I’m assuming the last two were a straight couple) have introduced us to the dullest set of characters imaginable. The leads are nuclear scientist Dr. Carl Morris (Dayton Lummis, who speaks his lines with a vaguely foreign accent to suggest he’s a refugee from another country, though Hampton and the Harts don’t tell us exactly from where); rocket designer Tom Endicott (Craig Hill, top-billed); and Marcia Paxton (Paula Raymond, virtually the only actor in this I’ve heard of before), a woman who’s Dr. Morris’s assistant even though her main function is to do data entry for him on his computer. The plane is being flown by captain Hank Morton (John Bryant), who’s looking forward to making this his last flight in a propeller-driven aircraft because he’s eagerly antipitating the change to the then-new jets, and co-pilot Jack Peters (Brad Trumbull); Jack is engaged to one of the stewardesses (it was a bit of a shock to hear that term on the soundtrack when for decades it’s been replaced by “flight attendants”), Joan Agnew (bernadette Hale), while Hank is trying to talk him out of it and Marcia is fiercely declaring her independence from this marriage business altogether even while Tom is chatting her up. The pilots pull the flight up ini order to go above a storm – only the plane keeps going up and up and they no longer can control it. They’re still in touch with ground control – one of the air traffic controllers is named George Manson (Franco De Sales), and yes, it’s hard to avoid a weird sort of thrill at hearing names like “Agnew” and “Manson” that have more sinister connotations now than they did when this movie was made. Then the radio conks out and they lose touch with the ground.

As the air in the plane thins out and the pilots realize that no known engine can be functioning at the altitude they’ve attained, one of the passengers, Walter Cooper (Harvey Stephens), starts to freak out. He’s already waylaid Dr. Martin and told him the U.S. should go anead and use the Beta Bomb,” a super-nuclear device Dr. Martin has designed, utterly to destroy the unnamed Cold War enemy (though 1961 audiences would have had no trouble identifying it as the Soviet Union), so we know he’s just a bit unhinged. Now he totally loses it in mid-air and abandons his blind wife Helen (Meg Wyllis), flings open the emergency exit, and jumps out of the plane, nearly taking one of the other men ini the cast with him. (Charles noted that by doing that, he’s depressurized the cabin and therefore made it even harder for his fellow passengers to breathe.) Ultimately Dr. Martin, Tom and Marcia realize that they’re the only three people on the plane who are still conscious – the others are in a state of suspended animation in which time literally has stopped for them – and though they notice they don’t have heartbeats teny are still sensitive to auditory stimuli.

Ultimately they’re confronted by “The Guardian” (Gregory Morton), who explains to them that they’re being judged by the people of the future because whether or not they get to exist at all will be determined by whether or not Dr. Morris builds his Beta bomb and Tom builds the rocket that can deliver it. Both Charles and I noted this film’s similarities to Ed Wood’s messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space – also about an alien figure who tries to stop the human race from building a super-weapon that will destroy the world (in Plan Nine it was the entire universe), and we noticed the use of stock footage from the aftermath of World War II bombing raids to illustrate what one use of the Beta bomb would make the entire earth look like. We both decided that though The Flight That Disappeared is a far more technically assured piece of filmmaking than Plan Nine, it’s also a lot less fun. Ultimately “The Guardian” lets Flight 60 go after he figures he’s served his purpose, and Dr. Morris ends the movie by tearing up the notes for his Beta bomb and throwiing the pieces into the nearest trash can. I was haunted by the notion of someone – maybe a Russian spy – fishing them out of the trash and reassembling them. Oh, how I wish he’d burned them at the end!

Larceny in Her Heart (P?RC/Pathé. 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 I ran my husband Charles and I the second of the five movies the cheap little PRC studio (the initials officially stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation” but such was the low quality of most of their films Hollywood jokesters said they meant “Pretty Rotten Crap”) made in 1946 and 1947 featuring the character of Michael Shayne. Michael Shayne was a private detective, originally based in and around Miami, Florida but moved to southern California for the films about him, created in 1938 by pulp author Davis Dresser. Dresser wrote in all the established pulp-magazine genres and adopted a different pseudonym for each one, but he became most famous as a mystery writer and therefore the alias that became best known was the one he used on the Shayne books, “Brett Halliday.” (Maybe he should have called his hard-boiled character “Brett Halliday” and signed the books “Michael Shayne.”) After 20th Century-Fox had closed its seven-film Shayne series in 1942, with character actor Lloyd Nolan expertly cast as Shayne, with a quite good adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window called Time to Kill – screenwriter Clarence Upson Young changed Philip Marlowe to Michael Shayne but kept the rest of the character names the same and crowded as much of Chandler’s novel as he could fit into a script for a movie lasting slightly over an hour – PRC picked up the rights to “Michael Shayne” and made a series of five films with Hugh Beaumont (mostly a comic actor best known as the father on the TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver) playing him.

Alas, instead of putting their best people in charge of the Shayne movies (one wonders what director Edgar G. Ulmer could have done with the character), they gave the films – at least the first two – to the bizarre family of producer Sigmund Neufeld, director Sam Newfield (Sigmund’s brother, though he Anglicized the name) and assistant director Stanley Neufeld (Sigmund’s son and Sam’s nephew). Sam Newfield was an all-purpose hack who made some better-than-average horror films for PRC – The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Monster Maker – but he was hopeless as a thriller director. The present film was called Larceny in Her Heart and was written by Raymond L. Schrock as a screen “original” – though in general the Shayne films that were originals rather than adaptations of either “Halliday’s” or other people’s stories weren’t as interesting – but it’s an odd title indeed because the central female character isn’t a criminal but a victim. She’s Helen Stallings (Marie Hannon), stepdaughter of Burton Stallings (Gordon Richards, a quite good character actor with a similar authority and style to Lionel Atwill). Burton Stallings shows up at Michael Shayne’s office (a storefront that apparently is a live-work space on a single floor) with a check for $500 and a job for Shayne to find his missing stepdaughter Helen. Burton gives Shayne a photo of Helen and tells him she’s disappeared and he wants Shayne to find her. There’s a catch: Shayne was about to take his long-suffering secretary and girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Cheryl Walker, repeating the role from the first PRC Shayne, Murder Is My Business, but used much less effectively here) on a vacation to San Francisco, and she was willing to accompany him not only to get out of town for a while but in hopes that he’d marry her.

There are some nice shots of Hugh Beaumont fingering Burton Stallings’ check and trying to decide whether to tear it up, send it back to him in the mail, or cash it and take the job. Eventually, he takes the job (of course!) and sends Phyllis off on their trip alone while he settles in and starts looking for the mystery woman. Then the mystery woman shows up in Shayne’s storefront office, obviously under the influence of something or other (writer Schrock couldn’t get too specific about what it was because of the Production Code ban on drug use in films. but it was a lot more potent than alcohol). She collapses unconscious on Shayen’s office couch, and then Shayne closes his door to admit several members of official law enforcement, including detecdtive sergeant Pete Rafferty (Ralph Dunn , also repeating his character from Murder Is My Business), who’s convinced that private detectives are crooks and Michael Shayne is the biggest crook of all. Once Shayne gets rid of the cops (at least temporarily) and checks on Helen again, he finds out she’s dead. Shayne is able to trace Helen to a sanitarium for alcoholics run by Doc Patterson (Douglas Fowley, who mostly played villains for PRC – though he’s the male lead, an executioner who’s obliged to put his girlfriend to death when she’s convicted of a murder she did not commit, in one of PRC’s few truly great films, Steve Sekely’s 1944 Lady in the Death House, and he occasionally played a minor role in a major film: he’s the director in the 1952 musical classic Singin’ ini the Rain).

It turns out that Burton Stalllings is the villain – he’s holding Helen there under lock and key in a room with bed restraints, and in order to supply a corpse so he can declare Helen “dead” and grab her fortune (presumably from her biological dad), he’s induced another woman patient at the sanitarium, Barbrar Brett (whose resemblance to Helen is so remarkable they’re both played by Marie Hennon) to come out with him so he could kill her, pass her off as Helen, and grab Helen’s fortune for himself. Shayne deduces all this and gets himself admitted to Patterson’s sanitarium by posing as an alcoholic, drenching himself with cheap booze to make it convincing, and he’s duly taken to the place and put through a series of harsh regimens, including being bathed in ice water. Eventually he traces Helen to the locked room where she’s being held, somehow gets in absurdly easily, and signals to his friend, reporter Tim Rourke (Paul Bryan) – we also saw that character in Murder Is My Business, though in that film he was played by a different actor, Richard Keene, and he’s a lot more important here – as well as his faithful girifriend/secretary Phyllis, who it turns out didn’t leave on her vacation without him, where she is. Eventually the cops show up and Dr. Patterson tries to get them to arrest Shayne, but instead Shayne is able to convince Rafferty’s superiors that the sanitarium owner and the stepfather are the real bad guys and they are duly arrested instead.

The finale features Shayne and Phyllis about to leave when a large guard at the sanitarium punches out Shayne for having insulted him earlier, and Phyllis takes advantage of Shayne’s unconsciousness to drive off on their joint vacation and proclaims their destination as “Niagara.” (Given that we’re in the L.A. area and Niagara Falls is in upstate New York, that would be quite a drive!) Charles liked Larceny in Her Heart better than he had Murder Is My Business, though he acknowledged the sheer preposterousness of Schrock’s plotline – particuloarly the coincidence that Barbara Brett just happens to show up at Shayne’s live-work space just in time for Burton Stallings to kill her and frame Shayne for it. I found it excruciatingly dull and lamented that someone with a greater sense of excitement and suspense than Sam Newfield hadn’t directed it (though, let’s face it, PRC could probably have hired one of the homeless guys off Sunset Boulevard and had a director with more of a sense of excitement and suspense than Sam Newfield!). Also, Hugh Beaumont, who had seemed at least partially credible as a tough guy in Mirder Is My Business, seemed just too lightweight this time around, and I would have liked to see more use made of Cheryl Walker’s character than just having her in the background for most of the film, whining that she can’t get Michael Shayne to take her on that long-planned and oft-delayed vacation.

The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 1: "The Golden Door" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 8 p.m. I watched the first of three episodes of Ken Burns’ latest PBS documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust. The titles of the individual episodes – “The Golden Door,” “Yearning to Breathe Free,” and “The Homeless, the Tempest-Tossed” – were taken from Emma Lazarus’s poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which as you may recall was the subject of a previous Ken Burns documentary back when his projects were still one-offs rather than mega-series. The three episodes ae 2 hours 9 minutes, 2 hours 18 minutes, and 2 hours 11 minutes, respectively: not easy to schedule in a TV marketplace that is used to programs ending in time for half-hour, hour or 90-minute segments. “The Golden Door” is actually a portrayal of America’s and Americans’ harder-edged views on immigration, which began in the late 1870’s (though he wasn’t mentioned on this show, one of the most fascinating political figures in U.S. history is San Francisco labor leader Daniel Kearney, who in the 1870’s founded the Workingmen’s Party and whose speeches have an oddly schizoid air in the current political context: when he denounced the growing power of corporations he sounded like Bernie Sanders, and when he denounced the alleged tides of immigrants – particularly Chinese – he sounded like Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump).

In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which as its name suggests banned all immigration from China for 10 years. It was regularly renewed and made permanent as part of the loathsome 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration bill, which overwhelmingly passed Congress, was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. The Johnson-Reed Act, which remained law for 41 years and was cited as a model by Donald Trump and some of the most notorious anti-immigration hard-liners in his circle, like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, not only made the anti-Chinese exclusion permanent, it applied it to all other Asians as well. What’s more, it set up “quotas” for immigration and specified how many people would be let into the U.S. from each country – and, not surprisingly given the openly racist motivations of the law’s authors and speakers, the highest quotas were set for “white” Northern European countries: Britain, Germany, France and the Scandinavian nations. (One thing that’s long amused me is the number of modern-day white supremacists in the U.S. with Italian or Slavic names. The original white supremacists of the early 19th century considered only British, German and Scandinavian people “white.”) This was echoed in the White House meeting in which then-President Trump asked why we got so many immigrants from “shithole countries” like Nigeria and Haiti and so few from Norway. (My husband Charles’s response to that was, “I’ve been to Norway, and they have free education, free health care and their streets aren’t full of potholes. Why would a Norwegian want to come here?”)

Most of “the Golden Door” consists of parallel histories of the U.S. and Germany during the aftermath of World War I, with particular emphasis on their racial attitudes and the ways they handled the legacy of the “Great War.” Much of this is familiar to regular readers of history, including the humiliating peace imposed on Germany at Versailles in 1919 that forced Germany to give up 10 percent of its territory as well as all its overseas colonies, forbade them from rebuilding their military and, worst of all, imposed crushing reparations payments on them, mostly at the behest of France, where most of the damage from the war on the Western Front had occurred. Meanwhile, in the U.S. there had been a major revival of racist ideology – though Burns and his collaborators, Lynn Novick and Saran Botstein, don’t make this point, the 1920’s revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its transformation from a Southern vigilante group aimed mainly at terrorizing Black people to a nationwise organization targeting Jews and Catholics as well as Blacks came about through the inspiration of D. W. Griffith’s racist cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The combination of an increasingly isolationist citizenry, including many people who had determined that the “dirty Hun” atrocity stories with which we had been led into World War I had been lies invented by British propagandists, a rising tide of racism and the increasing power and influence of groups like the Klan encouraged U.S. authorities, especially in the State Department (which remained dominated by racist white elitists throughout this period), to make immigration into the U.S., especially from southern and eastern European countries whose citizens were considered “racially inferior” like Italians, Slavs and Jews, as difficult as possible.

The advent of the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and didn’t really end until World War II-related war production stimulated the economy, slammed the golden door even more tightly shut as there were so few jobs and so many unemployed workers that among the demands of the American people were severe bans on immigration so U.S.-born workers didn’t have to worry about foreign competition for the few jobs that were still available. President Herbert Hoover encouraged the formation of private militias in California and other states on the southwest border to drive Mexican farmworkers back across the border into Mexico – even though estimates are that up to 65 percent of those deported in this fashion had actually been born on this side of la linea and were therefore U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, the Great Depression devastated the European economies, especially Germany’s. In the 1928 German elections tne Nazis garnered about three percent of the vote nationwide; by 1930 they were the largest single party in the Reichstag, the German legislature. Adolf Hitler’s talking points were that all the economic misfortunes visited on Germany were the fault of something called “international Jewry,” which translated into calls to ban Jews from various professions and slowly take away their civil and human rights. The Nazis essentially pulled the boiled-frog experiment on the Jews of Germany (and, once they started World War II and ended up ruling many of the countries German Jews had fled to, including Austria and The Netherlands, Jews elsewhere in Europe as well), slowly ratcheting up the heat pf persecution.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President and took office on March 4, 1933 (the last President to have to wait that long; afterwards a constitutional amendment moving up the date to January 20 took effect). His mandate was to do something, anything to end the Depression and its toll on the American people, and he was at first relatively uninterested in foreign affairs. Word about what the new Nazi government iin Germany was doing to its Jewish people started trickling in to the U.S., mostly due to courageous reporters like Dorothy Thompson (who was thrown out of Germany in 1934 under Hitler’s personal orders, but continued to write and speak out against Nazism from elsewhere). But there were still lingering suspicions that the tales of Nazi atrocities against the Jews were being made up by British propagandists like the tales of “dirty Huns” which had been largely instrumental in getting the U.S. involved in World War I. One of the points Burns, Novick and Botstein make in their film is the widespread difference of opinion among American Jews as to how aggressive they should be against the Nazis and how they should respond. The most famous rabbi in the U.S., Stephen Wise, urged large public demonstrations against Nazi Germany and helped organize the 1933 rally at Madison Square Garden, where he was the closing speaker. But other Jewish leaders feared that speaking out too forcefully against the Nazis would not only antagonise them and lead them to retaliate with even harsher measures against German Jews, but would jeopardize the decades of hard work American Jews had done to build acceptance in this country.

Many of the stories in the film were told by people whose parents managed to navigate the abysmal U.S. immigration non-system and get them to relative safety in the U.S., including one young man (obviously quite old now; he said he was born in 1922, which would make him 100 years old if he’s still alive) named Günther Stern,whose parents sent him to the U.S. at age 15. The missioni they sent him with was to live with his aunt and uncle in St. Louis, where he was supposed to look for other people who could sponsor the rest of the family to emigrate since his aunt and uncle could afford to sponsor only him. “The Golden Door” ends in 1938, with Hitler’s annexation of his native Austria into the Greater German Reich, his swallowing up of neighboring Czechoslovakia and the peace conference at Munich in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French president Édouard Daladier basically gaveHither everything he wanted. One of the most important points made by this movie is how much Hitler was influenced by American racism; not only did Hitler regard the U.S. as a model for how nations with supposedly “racially superior” populations should treat “inferior” tribes – in 1940 he famously told Edward R. Murrow, “I’m just doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians” – he had read the books of American “scientific” racist author Madison Grant in German translation and been inspired by them. He also studied the American Jim Crow laws that had relegated Blacks to a second-class existence and used them as a model for drafting the 1935 Nuremberg laws that turned Jews from “citizens” to “subjects” of the German Reich and severely limited their opportunities, including making marriage or any sexual relatioins between Jews and so-called “Aryans” illegal.

Hitler had bought into the racist theories of Madison Grant and others that the superior “Nordic” race had fallen from its rightful place on top of the world through interbreeding with “inferior” races, and he wanted to make sure that didn’t happen not only by obliterating the Jewish people from the earth but preventing the production of so-called “mongrelized” children. What’s most frightening about “The Golden Door” is how little the manifestations of this sort of hatred have changed over the years; in the 1930’s President Roosevelt’s political enemies claimed he was a Jew named “Rosenfeld” (compare to the most recent attacks on Obama for allegedly being a Muslim; in both cases the message is “he’s not one of us” and therefore unworthy to lead this country). A century ago one staple of racist propaganda in the U.S. and Europe was that Jews would reproduce so rapidly they would “replace” white Gentiles – a cry we hear all too often today as well. The film even mentions the ridiculous pseudo-science of eugenics, which sought to “improve” the human race by barring allegedly “inferior” people, including ones with physical disabilities or mental illnesses, from having children, while encouraging the so-called “superior” people to reproduce as much as possible. Eugenics had a lot of prestigious supporters, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who wrote an official opinion upholding the forced sterilization of a so-called “feeble-minded” woman by writing, “Three generations of idiots is enough”), Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (an uncomfortable fact opponents of abortion, including Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in his opinion overruling Roe v. Wade, love to bring up), and Helen Keller. Only the horrors of Nazism brought an end to eugenics’ reputation as a legitimate “science.”

Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein (Liberation Entertainment, Multicom Entertainment, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “The Golden Door” my husband Charles and I rented from Amazon.com a 2007 documentary on the history of “Soundies,” the three-minute short films (over 1,000 were produced during the seven years of the company’s existence, 1940 to 1947) that were meant to be viewed on coin-operated machines called “Panorams.” “Soundies” were about three minutes long and were shown on a screen that was part of a unit that looked very much like the console televisions of a few years later; the screen itself was made of ground glass and the films were carried on an endless loop, with a brief bit of metal separating each of the eight films on a reel to tell the machine to shut itself off after showing a single film. It was essentially the principle of the eight-track cartridge well before eight-track cartridges existed. One problem with “Soundies” was that, unlike the audio jukeboxes after which they were patterned, there was no way the consumer could select a particular “Soundie” to watch; once you put your dime in the “Panoram,” it showed the next film up on the endless loop. If you wanted to see a particular film over again, you had to keep putting dimes into the machine until the reel cycled back to it. The documentary on “Soundies” Charles and I watched was made in 2007 and was officially called Soundies: A Musical History.

It was directed by Chris Lamson and hosted by Michael Feinstein, who also got to sing a song at the end as part of the closing credits. The Panorams were manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, and once they had got them into locations like nightclubs, bars, train stations, airports and everywhere else large numbers of people gathered and spent large amounts of time waiting, their next task was to make movies that could be shown on them. To do this, Mills Novelty and other producers ultimately opened three studios, in the centers of the music business in the U.S.: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Soundies were not just filmed performances; like the music videos of the 1980’s and since, they were essentially miniature movies inspired by the songs they presented. Indeed, when I ordered three videotapes containing Soundies in the 1980’s, I would show them to people and say, “This is what MTV would have looked like if it had existed in the 1940’s.” Soundies: A Musical History featured some rather curious “talking heads,” including interviews with people like Kay Starr and singer-songwriter Hugh Martin who actually made them, as well as cultural commentators like Hugh Hefner (who already looked like death warmed over in 2007) and Stan Ridgway, whom Charles was surprised to see because he’d remembered Ridgway as the leader of the 1980’s band Wall of Voodoo. Their biggest hit was a song called “Mexican Radio,” and Charles remembered hearing it quite often on 91X because it was a Mexican radio station (though aimed at the U.S. – aside from some home-based Spanish-language programming insisted upon by the Mexican equivalent of the FCC, most of its content was in English) and they would play it right after their obligatory weekly playing of the Mexican national anthem.

The documentary really didn’t get into much of the business history of Soundies as an enterprise – and Charles wondered how they handled the Mafia influence that essentially controlled the jukebox industry in the early- to mid-1940’s. Most of the focus was on the artistic content of them, and in particular the surprising degree of sexually explicit content. Many of the Soundies featured scantily clad girls standing around while the male musicians performed – sometimes they danced and sometimes their function was just decorative, notably in the clip of Liberace (then billed as “Walter Liberace,” a legitimate Anglicization of his full name, Wladziu Valentino Liberace) doing “Tiger Rag” with two girls standing in front of his piano, performing basically the same function that his candelabrum did later. Most of the truly interesting performances were, not surprisingly, of the big-band swing units that dominated popular music during the Soundies years, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Gene Krupa (whose Soundies, “Let Me Off Uptown” and, unseen here, “Thanks for the Boogie Ride,” featured Black singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge and white singer Anita O’Day doing a vocal duet; Krupa had been part of the Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet, the first racially mixed band to perform live in the U.S. for a popular audience, and by 1941 he was leading his own band and when his white trumpet soloist, Shorty Sherock, left the band and took his wife, singer Irene Daye, with him, Krupa hired Eldridge and O’Day to replace them), Louis Armstrong, and others, including a magnificent all-woman band called the International Sweethearts of Rhythm whose surviving recordings on Soundies, broadcast airchecksw and their one commercial session show then the equals of any make ensemble of the period.

There were also country acts, notably a great singer and yodeler named Carolina Cotton (as you might suspect, that wasn’t her real name – her real name was Helen Hagstrom and she was born in Cash, Arkansas) doing a great duet with Merle Travis (who as a singer was a great guitar player) on a song called “Why Did I Fall for Abner?” Some of the most fascinating clips were by vocal groups like the Mel-Tones (though for some reason the leader of the Mel-Tones, Mel Tormé, was not allowed to appear in their Soundies even though his voice is unmistakable on the soundtrack; instead he’s being mimed to by a tall, blond man who looks nothing like him aside from their both being white men) and the Martins. One can draw a direct line of influence from the multi-part harmony vocals of the Mel-Tones and the Martins to the Four Freshmen, Four Aces, Four Lads and the Brothers Four in the 1950’s and then to the Beach Boys in the 1960’s. (Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson said, “Take a Chuck Berry song, add Four Freshmen harmonies on top of it, and you’ve got the Beach Boys”.)

One musical phenomenon that gets mentioned in the film is the bizarre strike against the record companies called by American Federation of Musicians president James Caesar Petrillo in 1942, which lasted over two years. Officially it was called a “ban” instead of a “strike” because Congress had passed a law declaring strikes illegal for the duration of World War II. But its effect was the same: union musicians were not allowed to make records for the period of the “ban” (1942 to 1944, with a second, shorter “ban” in 1948). The talking heads in this documentary credit that with ending the big-band era and enshrining singers at the top of the music business, which is arguable – since singers weren’t part of the AFM they were still allowed to record, nd there were a few attempts to record singers with choruses instead of orchestras backing them. But it wasn’t only that: it was also the tax on dance floors the U.S. government imposed as a war financing measure, and an equally bizarre conflict between the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) and the radio industry from 1940 to 1942. ASCAP triggered the battle when they unilaterally doubled the fees radio stations had to pay to play ASCAP members’ songs on the air. As a result, radio stations formed their own music licensing company, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI), and because ASCAP had most of the Broadway and Hollywood songwriters locked up, radio stations started playing music in genres the mavens of ASCAP had considered beneath them: Black rhythm-and-blues and white country music. The cumulative effect was to keep big bands from either playing live (due to the tax on dance floors that put a lot of their former venues out of business), getting their music on the radio (due to the ASCAP-BMI imbroglio) or making records, and that triple whammy was a good way of putting the big bands out of existence. (So was the trend towards even larger bands, started by Stan Kenton – other bandleaders complained that with Kenton’s success, their audiences were demanding ever-larger bands as well, and most of the jobs that were still available didn’t offer enough money to support such outsized orchestras.)

There were some surprises on this show, including Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail” (one of a series of five Soundies he made with the cast of his pioneering 1941 musical Jump for Joy, which was his attempt to create a show that would destroy the racist stereotypes of what Black performers were expected to do on stage; these Soundies are the only evidence we have of what Jump for Joy looked like) and jazz numbers by Kay Starr and Doris Day. Both of them had real potential chops as jazz singers in the 1940’s (Starr made a quite beautiful series of broadcast transcription records – made to be played by radio stations rather than sold directly to consumers – and a great side for Capitol, “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” on which she was backed by a band led by pianist Nat “King” Cole; alas, he and Starr didn’t sing together on it!) who had to mothball their jazz skills to sell pop records in the 1950’s. (Rosemary Clooney also had to do that, but she got to make a jazz comeback for the Concord label in the 1970’s and 1980’s.) There are also Soundies of Cole himself, showing off his brilliant skills as a jazz pianist which he had to put on the back burner when his singing, not his piano playing, became the focus of his career. Cole made some charming Soundies in which he sits in the audience at a club, while he also performs on a Panoram, winking at himself.

Girl ini Room 13 (Motel Productions, Inc., Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched one of the better Lifetime movies I’ve seen lately, Girn in Room 13, about a typical suburban family, the Atkinsons: mother Janie (Anne Heche), father Burt (Matt Hamilton) – though in fact he’s just the stepfather: the actual father is not part of the picture and it’s not clear whether Janie divorced him or he died – and daughters Grace (Larissa Dias) and Toni (Erica Brusi). Toni is cultivating a career as an online “influencer” and is shooting a TikTok video when she complains that Burt is playing with Grace’s dog and it’s barking all over her soundtrack, ruining it. But the focus oif the film is on the other Daughter, Grace, who’s had a drug problem and been in and out of rehab three times. She’s landed a job waitressing at a coffee shop (i.e., a cheap restaurant as opposed to a coffeehouse) whose owner is a strikingly handsome young blond man who, screenwriter Maria Nation hints, is himself a sort of blood relative of Grace’s mom. It’s not clear whether he’s her older son, her younger brother or some other connection. Grace’s latest downfall starts when a co-worker named Brett gives her a bundle of cash and tells her to deliver it to Ritchie (Max Montesi, who just because he’;s drop-dead gorgeous and director Elisabeth Röhm – best known as assistant district attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order from 2001 to 2005 – gives us plenty of crotch shots showing off his quite impressive basket we know early on he must be a villain).

Ritchie (incidentally his name is spelled “Richie” on the imdb.com page for this film but it’s “Ritchie” on a note we see in the film itself) has set it u p with Brett to lure Grace into delivering the cash for him, saying he needs ot for medical care for his son Toby whose mother is threatening to take him back and demand sole custody. When Grace borrows her mother’s car and drives out to the proverbial deserted location with her dog in tow, Ritchie grabs her and presses his cock against her in the parking lot,then takes control and throws her in his car. He drives off and holds her captive in the titular Room !3 of the Garden State Parkway Motel – though it’s not until the end of this movie that we find out the venue’s name. Ritchie intends to hold her there for about 10 days or so until he can break her will to resist, whereupon he’s going to sell her to a human trafficker. It’s not exactly the freshest of dramatic material – the first feature film made by Universal in 1912, Traffic in Souls, was about human trafficking (or “white slavery,” as it was called then, a term that speaks volumes about the social prejudices against trafficking victims then and now; in Girl in Room 13 a sympatehtic cop tells the Atkinsons that it’s not just runaways and people of color that get traficked; 83 percent of trafficking victims are living at home when they’re abducted and the Atkinsons shouldn’t think their child is immune from being trafficked simply because she’s white), but director Röhm and writer Nation stage it effectively and create a real sense of terror.

Like most such dramas, the film alternates between the terrorized abductee and the grieving parents, and as with Liam Neeson’s role in Taken (a fil to which this one owes a great deal), Anne Heche’s character becomes an avenging angel, utterly impatient with the authorities – she tells ome cop who’s trying to explain to her how little they can do, especially since Grace is legally an adult, “How would you feel if it was your own daughter?” – and determined to track down Grace if it’s the last thing she ever does. Burt is skeptical and is convinced that Grace relapsed into drug use again (incidentally the imdb.com synopsis says Grace got hooked on drugs in the first place when she injured herself playing sports and was prescribed opioid painkillers; it’s established that Grace was a champion diver in high school but gave it up for mysterious reasons, but the film itself does not link her drug use to a sports injury). He’s even more skeptical when he tells Janie to look up Grace’s credit card records (which they can legally do since they’re co-signers on her account) and they learn that Grace’s card has been suspended because she’s been pulling a “refund scam”: buying items and then immediately returning them and demanding refunds in cash. Fortunately, a Black woman cashier at a store where Grace,under Ritchie’s orders, pulled this scam remembered her, and when Janie questions her she gives her the clue she needs to find her daughter at last. Tracing her to the garden State Parkway Motel,

Janie finds Grace literally in the nick of time as the buyer whom Ritchie has lined up for her insists on “trying the merchandise” before he closes the deal, and though Grace has routinely been raped by Ritchie during the 10 days he’s held her captive – the usual time, we’re told, it takes for a human trafficker to “break” his victim and overcome her will to resist the new life he’s chosen for her – Maria Nation is a subtle enough writer she drops hints of even more sordid fares that might be in store for oor heroine. In one chilling scene Ritchie has lined up a middle-aged, vaguely Asian-looking man to be Grace’s first “john,” and he asks the customer if he can film it and post the video on the Internet as advertising. Yes, the man tells Ritchle, only please don’t show my face because I wouldn’t want my kids to see this. Later on, as Janie is hunting through the motel for the room in which Grace is being held, she comes upon another room in which three half’naked young women are frolicking on a bed, and we’re not sure whether they’re Lesbians having a three-way or more trafficking victims being readied for their next customers (or maybe both). The film begins and ends with voiceovers from Grace herself, and at the end we see her in the swimming pool again doing her trademark 2 ½-turn backwards dive. She tells us she’s still clean and getting her life back together after her ordeal.

A final credit that surprised me said that the film was “dedicated to the memory of Anne Heche,” who died August 11, 2022 at the age of 53. I must say I was long prejudiced against Anne Heche because of her bizarre role in Ellen De Generes’s coming-out – years later, long after they’d broken up, Ellen said she would have handied it better if her partner at the time had been an actual Lesbian instead of a basically straight woman exploring her Gay side – and for the craziness she indulged in after that, inclu9ding her claim that she’d been visited by space aliens. Though imdb.com lists six other Anne Heche movies after this one as well as an ongoing role in a TV mini-series, The Idol, Girl in Room 13 would be a great credit for Anne Heche to end her career on; she plays the role with life and sinew and puts lots of flesh on the bones of what would otherwise have been a tiresoomely stereotyped vengeful-mom character. Despite its hackneyed elements, Girl in Room 13 is an excellent thriller and Anne Hecne’s powerful, authoritative performance really “makes” this movie (and kudos to Elisabeth Röhm as a director for getting it out of her!).

Inventions That Shook the World: The 1970's (Proper Television, Questar Entertainment, The History Channel, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday night my husband Charl.es and I watched an interesting YouTube video called Inventions that Shook the World: The 1970’s, which was actually poart of a 10-episode mini-series from Canadian TV that detailed, decade by decade, the most socially important and transformative inventions of the 20th century. Ironically, the two inventions that did most to transform life in the 20th century were actually products of the late 19th century: home electricity and the automobile. The show featured much of the annoying golly-gee-whillikers tone of all too many TV programs dealing with science and technology, but at least it was reasonably well done, It touched on a number of interesting inventions, from the first human-powered aircraft to o9ther technological odds and ends, but the five inventions they mostly focused on, and the principal creators, were these:

_In 1972, in Schaumburg, Illinois, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper is assigned by his employers to beat rival AT&T to invent a practical car phone. He comes up with a device that would allow people to make and receive calls anywhere they are, without wires: the first cell phone.

_In 1972, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two engineers at 3M, Art Fry and Spencer Silver, teamed up to invent a sticky substance that would adhere to paper and turn it into a self-sticking adhesive. The result was the Post-It note pad, which made millions for 3M and became an indispensable part of modern offices – though neither Fry nor Spencer ever saw any of the additional revenue the company earned from it.

_In 1972 in England, Lt. Col. Peter Miller invented a self-propelled lawn mower to cut his own grass. He soon realized that the basic principle of this gadget – a self-propelled vehicle guided by tethered ropes so it could travel far from the people controlling it – could be used by bomb disposal teams to do their dangerous job from a safe distance, and he developed what amounted to a surface drone that could tow a car bomb, like the ones the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was successfully using aganst British occupiers during the “Time of Troubles,” so it could either be disarmed or be detonated at a safe distance.

–In 1974 Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, was given the task to create an electronic camera out of an old movie camera and a computer chip. He created the first digital camera, then had to contend with a lack of interest among his bosses at Eastman Kodak because selling film and developing services had been their mainstay for over 135 years. Not until a quarter-century later did digital cameras, shrunk considerably in size from Sasson’s 20-pound prototype, take off and become ubiquitous.

–In 1970, in New Jersey, Bronx-born engineer Victor Wouk became convinced that the way to solve the air pollution problem from gasoline-powered cars was to build an automobile that combined a gas engine for long trips and an electric motor for shorter ranges. His idea was to use the waste heat created when a driver uses their brakes to recharge the batteries to keep down the need for outside electrical power. He entered a contest sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to come up with a more fuel-efficient car. Then, after the 1973 energy crisis ended, the EPA canceled the program after gas was once again relatively cheap and American auto buyers lost their interest in fuel efficiency. Not until 1997 was the first hybrid gas/electric car actually marketed – in Japan, the Toyota Prius – and though Wouk died in 1999, he actually bought one of the first Priuses sold in the U.S. and saw it as a vindication of his technology.

There was a certain sadness to the program in that so many of the actual technical creators of these world-changing inventions were screwed over by the capitalist system, including the companies that employed them at the time as well as government bureaucrats and the winds of politics. The show featured actual interviews with Art Fry, Spencer Silver and Steve Sasson, as well as the son of Victor Wouk, who recalled how his dad felt vindicated when he could finally buy a Toyota Prius and feel it had vindicated hs technology even though by then his prototype (based on an old Buick) had literally been gathering dust for two decades. It’s yet another indication of how the giant corporations screw over the individuals who actually create the technologies that enrich them, and it seemed to add insult to injury to see Fry and Silver win official recognition from a society of engineers without any actual share of the profits their invention generated to their employers. Most engineers and other technological innovators work under contracts that give their employers absolute rights over anything they invent on the job, and the result is they generally don’t see a penny from the profits their employers make on the strength of their ideas – exactly the opposite of the Libertarian myth of how capitalism supposedly works.