Somewhere in Dreamland (Fleischer Brothers Studio, Paramount,1035)

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

After the 1935 Scrooge my husband Charles and I watched the next film on the disc, also from 1936, a color cartoon from the Fleishcer Brothers’ studio called Somewhere In Dreamland. It was produced at the Florida-based Fleischer studios under contract to Paramount, which funded construction of the studio but then took it paver in 1942 and froze the Fleischer brothers, producer Max and director Dave, out of the company they had built. It was shot in color, though precisely what color process remains a mystery: Walt Disney had cut a deal with the Technicolor company in 1932 that his would be the only animation studio allowed to use the new three-strip Technicolor process until 1935, and from the appearance of this film it seems the Fleischers used the competing Cinecolor process. The film itself is a charming fantasy about a poor single mother (voiced by Mae Quetzal, the second Betty Boop after singer Helen Kane departed the role, and designed to look a lot like Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl, not surprisingly since the Popeye cartoons were the Fleischers’ biggest hits at the time) who can afford to feed her two boys only bread and milk. The kids dream their way into a magic land where all the sweets they can handle are there for the picking off fromthe trees. When they wake up they find that three local merchants have felt sorry enough for them to donate a huge feast, including a big turkey – only, as Charles noted, the boys fulfill the ultimate childhood fantasy by grabbing the dessert course first. It’s a clever,charming film and a welcome relief from the Disney conventions – it’s actually about human beings instead of anthropomorphized animals – though the song “:Somewhere in Dreamland,” credited to Murray Mencher (music) and Charles Newman (lyrics), seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to a 1909 hit, “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” by Leo Friedman (music) and Beth Slater Whitson (lyrics), so much so it’s a wonder the publishers of “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” didn’t sue Paramount for plagiarism.

The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille Pictures, Producers' Distributing Corporation, Pathé Exchange, 1927)

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

Last night at 9 I watched a special Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 film The King of Kings, the biopic of Jesus Christ (H. B. Warner) that was his first film set entirely in Biblical times. DeMille had actually moved into Biblical subject matter with some trepidation because he wasn’t sure genuinely religious audience members would think it was appropriate for the great Bible stories to be dramatized in such a disreputable medium as film. In 1923 he’d directed the original silent version of The Ten Commandments at Paramount (a studio he’d helped found) but hedged his bets by making only the first two-fifths of the film out of the actual story of Moses, the Exodus and the Ten Commandments. The rest of the film was a 1923-set morality tale about the McTavishes, good brother John (Richard Dix) and bad brother Dan (Rod LaRocque), and the horrible things that happen when Dan systematically breaks the Ten Commandments. DeMille shot most of the Biblical prologue in two-strip Technicolor and the modern portion in black-ahd-white, and when I got a VHS tape of The Ten Commandments in the 1980’s the color scenes were retained (though they hadn’t survived the years well and were ill-preserved, the Red Sea still parted more convincingly in 1923 than it did when DeMille did his all-Biblical remake in 1956), but when I bought the DVD of the 1956 version largely because it promised the 1923 film as a bonus, the 1923 Ten Commandments was all in black-and-white. (Bummer.)

I remember being stunned when I saw a screening of the 1927 The King of Kings in a semi-public theatre and the Resurrection scene was in two-strip Technicolor (an early version of the process that had one major limitation – it could not photograph blue, though it could approximate it with turquoise and teal – but at its best had a quiet, painterly elegance missing from the often garish hues of the three-step process which replaced it in the early 1930’s). This time around I was in for even more of a surprise: in the TCM version the famous opening scene, showing the court of Mary Magdalene (a stunning performance by Jacqueline Logan) and her hissy-fit because her boyfriend de jour, Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut), has abandoned her to follow a cult led by a wayward carpenter’s son through the back country of Judea, was also in two-strip Technicolor, and vividly preserved two-strip at that. This famous scene shows Mary Magdalene snuggling with a leopard while one of her rejected lovers complains, “You give your kisses to beasts – why not me?” Later on she delivers one of the campiest intertitles of the entire silent era as she orders her servants, “Harness my zebras, gift of the Nubian king!” (Actually, like most movie “zebras,” they’re just horses painted to look like zebras – a biological incongruity because zebras are closer to goats than horses.)

Cecil B. DeMille shot The King of Kings for his own studip, Producers’ Distributing Corporation [PDC] (not to be confused with the cheap 1940’s company Producers’ Releasing Corporation), evidently thinking that he’d already been present at the creation of one major studio and he could do it again. Unfortunately, just as he began shooting The King of Kings his financial backers sold the company out from under him and merged it with Pathé, whose parent company in France was one of the world’s most successful studios but their American subsidiary had limped along for years and just lost its greatest attraction, Harold Lloyd, ironically to Paramount. Producers’ Distributing Corporation actually released 50 films in the four years it existed, though DeMille personally directed just four. The King of Kings originally ran 155 minutes in its first-run showings, but was cut down for key-run and subsequent-run theatres to 117 minutes (easy enough to do with a silent film because you didn’t have to worry about matching soundtracks or dialogue). In 1929 Pathé had been taken over by RKO and the studio dubbed in a soundtrack in their new Photophone sound process, which quickly replaced both Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone (sound on disc records that were played along with the film( and Fox’s Movietone (a sound-on-film system like Photophone but one with lower fidelity); no new scenes were shot for the sound version (as happened with DeMille’s last PDC film, The Godless Girl), but in addition to an orchestral music soundtrack RKO-Pathé dubbed in “wild” crowd noises for the sequences showing the mob in Jerusalem howling for Jesus’s blood and demanding the release of Barabbas (variously described as a thief, a political revolutionary or, in this version, a murderer) instead. The version TCM showed ran the full 155 minutes and had a modern soundtrack, though there were no restoration credits and so I have no idea who composed it or whether it was based on the original 1929 sound version or was a new composition.

When I first saw the 1927 The King of Kings I thought it was a totally outrageous, over-the-top camp-fest. At least part of my negative reaction – I thought the film was great fun but not at all to be taken seriously – was my acute negativity towards religion in general. In the late 1970’s I was a hard-core atheist and so were most of my friends. I still don’t consider myself a religious believer, but I’ve become considerably more mellow on the subject, and the fact that my last three romantic partners (including Charles, my husband of 14 years and my partner for 13 years before that), have been committed Christians and have taken me to church for Communion had a lot to do with that. Today The King of Kings seems like a much better movie than it did in the early 1970’s, even though it suffers from the usual problem with DeMille: scenes of great dramatic and visual creativity and power alternate with scenes that are just silly (albeit gloriously silly in campily entertaining ways). The film was written by DeMille’s long-time collaborator, Jeanie Macpherson (she even gets a mention on the main title card, “The King of Kings, by Jeanie Macpherson”), with major assists from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the four-and-fifty scholars appointed to create the King James Bible (a majestic work of English-language literature in its own right, whatever its failings as a translation of the Hebrew and Koine Greek the Old and New Testaments, respectively, were written in). About two-thirds of the intertitles in this film directly reference or quote from Bible verses, and the Biblical citations are given in the lower right-hand corner of each title card containing one.

The story of Jesus in general and his last days in particular (and when The King of Kings starts Jesus has already established his reputation as a miracle worker who can help the lame walk and the blind see, so it’s really a more appropriate film for Easter than for Christmas) are a social and political nightmare for adapters, and it’s interesting how Dwight Macdonald’s criticism of the Biblical movies of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (the 1959 Ben-Hur, the 1961 King of Kings – not really a remake of this one but a separate adaptation of the same story – and 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told in particular) don’t apply to this one. DeMille includes Jesus’s prediction to Peter, “Before the cock shall crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice” – which Peter did – which Macdonald faulted the makers of The Greatest Story Ever Told for fudging and actually having Jesus tell Peter, “You are the rock on which my church shall be founded.” The most problematical aspect of the story of the trial and death of Jesus faced by a modern-day reteller of the story is the role of the Jews in Christ’s crucifixion, which Macdonald faulted the makers of Ben-Hur for toning way down (“Ain’t nobody here but us Romans,” he joked about that film’s crucifixion scene).

This is understandably a sore point because for millennia Christians have used it as an excuse to persecute Jews as “The Ones Who Killed Our Lord,” and the 1927 The King of Kings – made well before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and ordered the Holocaust – fully embraces the it’s-all-the-Jews’-fault version of the Crucifixion. Not only did he cast both Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Temple, and Judas with Jewish actors, he made them father and son: Caiaphas is played by veteran Jewish actor Rudolph Schildkraut and Judas by his real-life son, Joseph. What’s more, DeMille plays up the role of Caiaphas in ordering the Crucifixion and plays down the role of Pontius Pilate (Victor Varconi, who would later play a Russian nobleman in exile in Paris after the Revolution in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Roberta, and when I first saw The King of Kings I thought he looked like the young Marlon Brando). DeMille has Pilate tell Caiaphas, “I find no fault in this man,” a line from the Bible Macdonald faulted the makers of Ben-Hur for omitting (though he later admitted that the writers of the Gospels may have deliberately played down the Romans’ responsibility for Jesus’s crucifixion and played up that of the Jews, probably because when the Gospels were written Rome was still a major imperial power and whatever geopolitical leverage the Jews still had was ended when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D.).

Indeed, one of the characters who makes a brief but fascinating appearance in The King of Kings is Mrs. Pilate, Procula (Majel Coleman), who not only adds her voice to Pilate’s own doubts about green-lighting the Crucifixion but seems even more against it than her husband. And one of the real surprises in the dramaturgy of The King of Kings is the way it turns into a female buddy-movie towards the end, as the two Marys – Jesus’s mother (Dorothy Cumming) and Mary Magdalene – spend a lot of time together commiserating about Jesus’s fate both pre- and post-Crucifixion. On the same day I’d earlier gone to a church service with Charles and the woman minister had preached that as a girl she was told by her church never to wear red because “red is the color of the Devil,” I was more struck than I might have been otherwise by the fact that in the two-strip Technicolor Resurrection scene, the post-conversion Mary Magdalene was wearing red as she greeted the newly risen Jesus.

Overall, The King of Kings is a mightily impressive movie, well ahead of its time in its special effects (especially the scene in which the Seven Deadly Sins come to life in a fantasy sequence to tempt Mary Magdalene to stay on the side of evil, the hauntingly beautiful point-of-view shots as Jesus’s miracle helps a young blind girl see for the first time, and the spectacular earthquake with which God expresses his anger at the Crucifixion) and overall quite striking visually. DeMille’s skills as a director actually deteriorated over his long career; when he started out he made sophisticated romantic farces including 1920’s The Affairs of Anatol (starring Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid and Bebe Daniels and a marvelous movie far better than the similarly plotted Eyes Wide Shut, Stankey Kubrick’s last film, though both were based on writings by turn–of-the-last-century Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler), before he literally went up on the mountaintop with Moses and started thundering “Thou Shalt Not”’s at the audience. In his later films he’s surprisingly slovenly, as if he were letting his “casts of thousands” make his movies for him, but like the 1923 The Ten Commandments, the 1927 The King of Kings shows just why Cecil B. DeMille was admired and imitated by so many filmmakers, including the Soviet greats like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko who were ideologically and politically at the opposite end of the scale from him.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "Sister Town" (Britbox, BBC-TV, PBS, 2022_

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

Last night at 8 I got done with my writing in time to watch the latest episode of the engaging British TV series Sister Boniface Mysteries, “Sister Town,” dealing with World War II and its aftermath. The plot synopsis on imdb.com reads, “When a German mayor visits Great Slaughter to partake in a war memorial ceremony, tragedy strikes; Sister Boniface investigates whether it's a terrible accident or a malicious plan.” The action kicks off when a townsperson is killed at the so-called “twnning” ceremony when a plaque falls off the wall and strikes him. Sister Boniface deduces that the “twinning” ceremony – a sort of sister-city relationship between the British town of Great Slaughter and a similarly sized German community that the British government is pushing in an effort to let bygones be bygones and help rebuild a trade relationship between the two countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and the real target was Kurt Fischer (Andy Henderson), a German military officer and war veteran who’s there representing Germany in the ceremony. (It’s not clear just when this show takes place, though it appears to be about 1947 or so, with the war over but the wounds from it fresh in the minds of the people of both Britain and Germany.) After participating in the bonbing of Coventry, for which he was awarded an Iron Cross, Kurt was shot down by the Royal Air Force on a subsequent mission and spent the rest of the war n a prisoner of war camp near Great Slaughter.There he fell in love, or at least had an affair, with EIris Heartley (Ellie Piercy), who was denounced for it at the time and told she was “sleeping with the enemy” (a phrase I had thought was much later in its origins than World War II: I’d attributed it to late-1960’s Lesbian feminists who used ot to denouncing women who claimed to be feminists but still had sex with men).

Today, or at least in this story’s present tense, Kurt is married to a German woman, Elsa Fischer (Alix Dunsmore), who’s so much richer than he is he’s accused oif being a gold-digger and one of his big concerns is that Elsa will decide he just married her for her money and will dump him. Sister Boniface has a couple of friends on the local police force, series regular Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and African-British junior officer Ferry Livingstone (Jerry Iwu), and unlike the official law-enforcement representatives on the Father Brown series (based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton) Gillespie and Livingstone actually welcome Sister Boniface’s assistance, especially since she’s developed a level of forensic science that didn’t become common in law enforcement until decades after this show is set. Among her deductions is that the killer was diabetic, which leads her to ask the local police to have all the suspects submit to urine tests to determine which of them has the elevated levels of sugar in their urine that would indicate diabetes. The actual killer disguises himself by taking hogh-dose vitamin C before he submits his sample, thereby lowering the sugar amount in his piss to a level that doesn’t indicate diabetes. There’s a fascinating scene in which a local resident pulls a gun on Kurt and the other German officer who’s on the scene, General Udo vin Stark (Chriustopher Sherwood) because his wife, their children and his parents were all in Coventry when it was raided by the Luftwaffe and he returned to find his home a ruin and all his immediate family killed.

He’s particularly furious with Kurt because Kurt was given a medal for it, though Kurt explains that he didn’t want the decoration and didn’t think there was anything honorable about slaughtering innocent civilians. The script by Oliver Frampton actually preaches a strong anti-war message, though it seems a bit anachronistic for a show set 75 years ago when the wounds of the war were still fresh. But then the message that war is evil can’t be taught often enough, even though I’m haunted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s statement in the preface to Slaughterhouse-Five that, when he was working on the book and told somebody he was working on an anti-war book, the person’s reply was, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book?” The cruel irony was that Vonnegut’s acquaintance was saying that war is as eternal as glaciers, but now with glaciers disappearing as human-caused climate change reaches an irreversible level, war actually seems as if it’s going to be around longer than glaciers!

Mr. Soft Touch (Columbia, 1949)

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

After the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode I watched a truly weird movie on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” series, a 1949 film from Columbia called Mr. Soft Touch, the sixth and last film to co-star Glenn Ford and Evelyn Keyes. The film was co-directed by Gordon Douglas and Henry Levin, and judging from their previous credits Eddie Muller guessed that Douglas did the film’s big action set-pieces and Levin shot the rest of the film. Muller’s intro discussed the constant sexual harassment and threats Keyes faced at the hands of Columbia studio president Harry Cohn, who was essentially the Harvey Weinstein of his time/ Like Weimstein, Cohn regarded every reasonably attractive woman he employed as fodder for his lust, and Keyes was one of his prime targets. As a result of her turning down his advances, Cohn determined to ruin Keyes’ career, and for this movie he deliberately toned down her blonde good looks and cast her as Jenny Jones, the rather mousy leader of the Borden Street Settlement House in San Francisco, to which Joe Miracle (Glenn Ford) is essentially sentenced by a judge whose wife is a big supproter of the mission. Joe was once the co-owner of the River Club casino with a partner named Leo Christopher, only while he was off fighting the Germans in World War II the Mob decided to take over the casino, forced Leo to sell to him, and ultimately killed him and buried his body under a construction site. Joe holds up the River Club, though he insists he’s only taking back the money he’s legally owed for the forced sale, and when the film opens he’s trying to maneuver his way past the toll booths at the Golden Gate Bridge. The toll then was only 25¢, but they demanded exact change – and the toll was still that amount when I grew up in the 1960’s, and they were still insisting on exact payment.

Joe escapes both the mobsters and the cops by deliberately crashing his (stolen) car, parking it in a car lot and stealing another one. He makes his way to the home of Victor Christoper (Ray Mayer), his late partner’s brother, and Victor’s wife Clara (Angela Clarke). Victor is a wanna-be composer who gets off on ringing a hand bell at night, thereby keeping his neighbors awake, and he also beats his wife, though we’re clearly meant to believe that’s an understandable eccentricity instead of a loathsome aspect of his character. Joe poses as Victor when he’s arrested, not for sticking up a casino but disturbing the peace with his bell, and he actually pleads with the cops to put him in jail for a night until the ship on which he’s booked passage sails for Yokohama. (He’s going there because it was the destination of the next passenger liner that was scheduled to depart from San Francisco.) Instead of jail, however, Joe is remanded to the custody of Jenny Jones at the mission and he keeps hitting on her, much to her irritation because he’s posing as a married man even though he isn’t. There are a bunch of oddballs at the mission, including a pack of Dead End Kids wanna-bes whom Joe takes for the fund to buy a Christmas tree, and a loon played by Percy Kilbride who keeps orating incessantly bout what’s woring with the world and how he proposes to fix it.

One of the most interesting aspects of Mr. Soft Touch is it was made a year before the smash success of the 1950 Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, yet its plot is strikingly similar: both involve a gambler and a missionary who fall for each other, and the plot takes another turn into Damon Runyon territory when Joe is helped in the final sequence by no fewer than five people dressed as Santa Claus (yes, this is, among other things, a Christmas movie, though for some reason Columbia released it it August 1949 instead of holding it back until December) much the way a similar squad of Santas bais out Bob Hope as the title character of the Runyon-based The Lemon Drop Kid in 1951, two years later. In the end the mobsters not only ambush Joe and shoot him three times in the back, they also set fire to the mission after they find out that Joe has hidden the money they were trying to recover in the doll of one of the girls at the mission. The film’s finale shows Jenny leading the mission’s Christmas party in the burned-out hulk of its building under a big sign on which the word “Vacation” has been crossed out of the slogan “Vacation Fund” and “Building” has been written in.

Apparently the film’s original ending was that Joe would die from the Mob hit people’s wounds, but someone at Columbia decided at the last minute that this would be too downbeat an ending for what is basically a light-hearted romantic comedy with just a few hints of noir. In both his intro and his outro, Eddie Muller attributed the film’s character to its writer, Milton Holmes, who in 1943 had made his breakthrough into the film business by selling RKO the script for Mr. Lucky, which starred Cary Grant as a gambler and Laraine Day as the decent woman who reforms him. Holmes would return to this plot line again and again in films like Johnny O’Clock (1947), directed by Robert Rossen and starring Dick Powell as the gambler and Evelyn Keyes (again) as the decent woman who redeems him,, and Boots Malone (1952), with William Holden as the gambler and Ann Lee, billed ninth, as the woman. In Mr. Soft Touch Holmes wrote only the “original” story – Orin Jannings wrote the actual screenplay – but the trademarks of Holmes’ writing style are clear, including the oddball names he gave his male leads: Miracle, O’Clock, Boots. It occurred to me while watching Mr. Soft Touch that Dick Powell might have been a better choice for the male lead than Glenn Ford – Powell was better able to play world-weariness; when Ford tries it, he just looks angry – but as it stands, Mr. Soft Touch is an oddball movie that stands or falls (sometimes both in the same scene!) on its sheer quirkiness.

La Ronde (Films Sasha Gordine, Janus Films, 1950)

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

Yesterday at 9:15 p.m. I turned on a film from Turner Classic Movies that I’d been curious about for decades, literally: La Ronde, made in 1950 by director Max Ophuls (a German expat who’d fled the Nazis, ended up in France,then in the U.S. and finally back in France for the last seven years of his career). The source of the story was a turn-of-the-last-century play called Reigen by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, and Ophuls and his co-writer, Jacques Natanson, kept the original setting of 1900 Vienna – though I had to keep reminding myself of that because it was a French film in more ways than one. Not only was all the dialogue in French, but the whole sexual sophistication of the piece seems more French than German or Austrian, and I had to keep reminding myself that this story wasn’t taking place in Paris. It begins with a character identified as “Raconteur” (which means storyteller or narrator), played by Anton Walbrook (who, like Ophuls, was a German-born refugee from the horrors of Nazism), who walks us through a series of sets that may be intended to represent a stage production, a film or real life. Then we meet the characters who will enact the titular merry-go-round of love, sex, romance and seduction: prostitute Léocadie (the young Simone Signoret) accosts a young cavalry officer named Franz (Serge Reggiani), telling him that she has sex for money with civilians but does servicemembers for free as a way of thanking them for their service.

Unable to find any more normal location for their tryst, they make out on a waterfront quay before Léocadie accuses Franz of rushing things just because it’s free and Franz next moves on to Marie (Simone Simon, returning to her native land and [playing a very different sort of role than her films for Val Lewton). Marie then has an affair-lette with Alfred (Daniel Gélin), who in turn seduces a married woman named Emma Breitkopf (Danielle Darrieux, another cast member who achieved at least a decent level of stardom on both sides of the Atlantic). The scene between her and her husband Charles (Fernand Gravey, who as Fernand Gravet had starred in MGM’s 1936 biopic of the Strauss waltz family, The Great Waltz) in bed together after her fling is one of the best parts of the movie. Ophuls films it looking through a clock that’s an assortment of phallic symbols (remember that Schnitzler lived in the same city at the same time as Sigmund Freud), including spread legs through which he and cinematographer, Christian Matras, point their camera lens, and an endlessly swinging pendulum obviously symbolizing a dick. Of course he sounds off on the immorality of extra-relational activities and warns his wife not to befriend any woman who does such things – and then, of course, in the next sequence he picks up a shopgirl, Anna (Odette Joyeux, whose name is the most obviously phony one since “Renée Adorée” in the silent days) and offers to make her his mistress.

Immediately after he’s set her up in an apartment he’s paying for, she brings home a man whom she thinks is a penniless poet but is actually a well-established dramatist named Robert Kuhlenkampf (Jean-Louis Barrault). Kuhlenkampf takes her to a performance of his latest hit play (without telling her he actually wrote it) and there strikes up a dalliance with one of the actresses in the cast, Charlotte (Isa Miranda, the actress critics loved to hate in her roles in the Fascist Italian spectacle Scipio Africanus and the U.S. remake of Hotel Imperial, but she turns out to be pretty good). Of course Charlotte is in turn having an affair with a count (Gérard Philipe), who shows up in a uniform so outrageously campy that my husband Charles, who arrived during the last few minutes of the film, asked whether it was set in Ruritania or in France. (Neither, I told him.) La Ronde is the sort of film that’s better in its parts than as a whole, but not only is it refreshingly (if a bit Continentally) cynical about the very idea of human monogamy, it’s full of odd bits of phallic symbolism. In the opening scene Franz has to return to the scene of his tryst with Marie because he’s left his sword behind, but as soon as the cavalry officer who upbraided him for this dereliction of duty has his own affair with the same woman, he too leave his sword behind – and so does the count in the final scene with Charlotte.

Ophuls and Natanson tried to link the stories together by having Anton Walbrook’s character walk through the entire movie, and sometimes interact with the other characters, notably when he turns up as the waiter in the high-class restaurant to which Alfred has taken Emma to seduce her in a private room. In his outro TCM hist Ben Mankiewicz said he thought Walbrook’s character made the movie,but I found him awfully intrusive and thought his presence turned the movie into a higher-class version of Where’s Waldo? Overall, La Ronde is a weirdly mixed movie, obviously done with style and wit but in some ways a dry run for Ophuls’ final film, Lola Montes (also with Walbrook), in which the idea of a narrator who’s also a characters is done better than it is here.

The Lady and the Monster (Republic, 1944)

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

On Thursday, December 15 I ran my husband Charles a double bill of two movies from Republic Studios in 1944, The Lady and the Monster and Storm Over Lisbon. Both were vehicles created by Republic CEO Herbert J. Yates for the benefit of the woman he’d fallen in love – or at lost lust – with, Czech Olympic figure skater Vera Hruba. Yates met her when she signed with Republic for two movies to show off her skating skills – Sonja Henie had just become a star at 20th Century-Fox and other studios were looking for similarly talented skates they could turn into major attractions. These two films both billed Vera Hruba Ralston (the last name was Yates’s idea to “Americanize” her) above the title and their male leads, Richard Arlen and Erich von Stroheim, below it. They were both directed by George Sherman, co-written by Dane Lussier, and photographed by John Alton, who despite his unquestionable credentials as an atmospheric noir specialist proved less than equal to the challenge of making Vera Hruba Ralston sexy to anyone not named Herbert J. Yates. In a post from 2019 on the MacMcManus blog (https://maxmcmanus.com/2018/09/01/the-worst-actress-in-hollywood-queen-of-repubic-vera-hruba-ralston/), Charles Davis describes Vera Hruba Ralston as the real-life equivalent of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, stating that unlike the ostensible model, Marion Davies, who had genuine talent for light comedy, “the personable and intelligent Miss Ralston still came across as forcefully chipper but leaden on screen.”

The Lady and the Monster began life as Donovan's Brain, a 1939 novel by Curt Siodmak, screenwriter (best known for The Wolf-Man) and wanna-be director – he was upset that his brother Robert Siodmak won the director’s chair and he hadn’t. The story was a science-fiction thriller about a scientist named Dr. Patrick Cory who steals the brain of tycoon Warren H. Donovan after Donovan’s private plane crashes in the Arizona desert, and keeps Donovan’s brain alive artificially until it becomes so powerful it takes over his personality and uses him to fulfill Donovan’s pre-mortem wishes. Curt Siodmak wanted to make it a condition of selling the movie rights that he’d get to direct the film himself, but he got screwed out of it. According to Tom Weaver’s Poverty Row Horrors!. Humphrey Bogart tried to get Jack Warner to buy the rights for him, and while Bogart’s previous excursion into sci-fi, The Return of Doctor X, was one of his lamest movies, it’s fascinating to think of how he could have handled the role of a basically decent but weak scientist who gets trapped by the power of his own experiment. Alas, instead of Warner Bros. or another major studio, the rights ended up at Republic, where Yates and Sherman decided to make Dr. Cory (Richard Arlen) simply the assistant of a floridly mad scientist, Dr. Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim). He has an assistant of his own, Janice Farrell (Vera Hruba Ralston), and the two are in love but their attempts to date each other are continually being thwarted by Dr. Mueller, who keeps calling them back to the lab for one experiment or another. There’s a great scene which sums up their relationship in which Cory dons a lab coat oliver the evening-dress suit in which he’d planned to take Janice to a fancy party.

The Lady and the Monster proved that Republic was monumentally unable to make a convincing horror film; it’s a schizoid movie which mixes scenes taking place in “The Castle,” the old dark hose where Dr. Mueller lives and has his lab equipment, and scenes taken more or less from Siodmak’s novel in which Dr. Cory is trying to fulfill Donovan’s wishes in winning freedom for convicted murderer Roger Collins (Bill Henry). Collins is on death row for killing his stepfather, who had been Donovan’s private secretary, though we eventually learn that Donovan himself had killed him to suppress a book the secretary had written about him. There’s a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Cory’s double persona, as Alton shoots Arlen’s face to look craggier when he’s under the influence of Donovan’s brain, and Charles wondered if Alton used the same trick Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer Karl Struss had used in the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film of using color-sensitive makeup and colored lighting to have Fredric March transition from one to the other on screen without double exposures or cuts. Independent producer Felix Feist made a much better film of Donovan’s Brain in 1953 with Lew Ayres as Cory and Nancy Davis (a year after she married Ronald Reagan) as his wife – and when I first saw The Lady and the Monster it was well after I’d seen the 1953 Donovan’s Brain and I was shocked to find it was an earlier version of the story. Later I ran down a copy of Curt Siodmak’s novel (a British import since it was then out of print in the U.S.) and found it a good deal better than either film.

Storm Over Lisbon (Republic, 1944)

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

I hadn’t seen Storm Over Lisbon since the late 1980’s, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I watched it together as I recorded it on videotape over the air. It struck me then as it strikes me now, as an oddball knock-off of Casablanca – partly a remake and partly a sequel, as if this set of writers (Elizabeth Meehan, story; Dane Lussier and Doris Gilbert, script) were tapping the scribes of Casablanca (Julius and Philip Epstein, Howard Koch and an uncredited Casey Robinson) and saying, “You thought your characters were home free once they got to Lisbon” Think again.” Storm Over Lisbon casts Erich von Strohem as Deresco, owner of a snazzy nightclub and attached hotel in Lisbon (I couldn’t help but joke, “Everybody comes to Deresco’s”) which is really a front for his espionage ring. In an early scene Deresco gets ticked off by a German agent who was out to buy from him a stolen Allied secret and orders his bodyguard/hit person to kill him, Then, just as we’re beginning to think Stroheim’s character is actually going to be a good guy this time around, he makes the same deal to sell the same secret to an Anglo man representing the Japanese government. The real good guys are U.S. war correspondent John Craig (Richard Arlen), who’s trying to get out of Lisbon on the Pan American Clipper plane and return to the U.S.; and its pilot, Bill Flanagan (Robert Livingston, an original member of Republic’s “Three Mesquiteers” Western series characters until he was replaced by John Wayne, then returned to the series after Wayne’s sensational success on loan to Walter Wanger for John Ford’s Stagecoach made him too valuable a property for Republic to waste in “B” movies).

Craig is a sort of combination of the Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henried characters in Casablanca, and Deresco is a combination of Sydney Greenstreet’s and Conrad Veidt’s characters in that film. The Ingrid Bergman character is a dancer named Maritza (Vera Hruba Ralston), who takes a job at Deresco’s but says she wants to go to the U.S. on the Clipper to continue her dance career in a country that isn’t a battlefield in the war. We get to see her in two big dance numbers at Daresco’s club, in the first of which she dances to the “Polovestian Dances” from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor nine years before one of them became the basis for the mega-hit song “Stranger in Paradise” by Roibert Wright and George Forrest from the 1953 musical Kismet (though in 1940, four years before this film was made, Artie Shaw had taken that same melody and used it for a song of his own called “My Fantasy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFrskrQz5Ec) while Deresco stays in his office and watches her on a closed-circuit TV monitor. (This device had already been used in several Bela Lugosi films at Monogram and would later appear in the 1946 film noir classic Gilda.)

The MacGuffin turns out to be a film of U.S. military forces training in China – we never really learn what’s so important about it, but as Alfred Hitchcick continually explained, we don’t really need to either. Deresco holds Craig prisoner in his lavish club/hotel and Craig makes a half-hearted attempt to escape before he’s foiled by Dresco’s agents. Then the French secret police come in and rescue everybody, and we learn that Maritza – true name Maria Mazarek – is not only a Czech refugee but also an agent of the Surété. In a final scene that’s supposed to evoke the unforgettable parting of Bogart and Bergman from Casablanca but falls far short of its model, Craig is about to leave on the Clipper and asks Maritza to join him, but she refuses for reasons the writers never quite make clear. Storm Over Lisbon is the sort of mediocre film that begins with great promise and fritters it away, and it doesn’t help that Richard Arlen and Ropbert Livingston so closely resemble each other it’s hard to keep track of which overacted cornball American we’re watching. It’s an O.K. movie and Vera Hruba Ralston had noticeably improved as an actress since The Lady and the Monster – her dance steps are fun to watch, especially a set of pirouettes that end her first big number and are the sorts of moves she was used to doing on skates – but she was still learning her English dialogue phonetically and she still has zero personality as a “type.” (Bela Lugosi also never learned more than the simplest English and learned his lines phonetically, but he had personality to burn.) Of course Storm Over Lisbon would have been considerably better with Bogart and Bergman in the Arlen and Ralston roles, but this was Republic and you did pretty much the best they could with the talent they had.