Obsessed to Death (1Department Entertainment Services, Neshama Entertainment, Neshama Releasing, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022, "premiered" 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After that Charles and I watched another Lifetime movie, Obsessed to Death, which was billed as a “premiere” even though the date on its imdb.com page was 2022. I give it points for having fooled me – through the first half of the running time I thought that the central character, Cassandra “Cassie” Collins (Holland Roden), was an innocent victim whose rotter boyfriend Austin (a hot Black stud played by Colton Royce) had dumped her for fitness instructor Summer Ray (Kathryn Kohut) even though Summer was playing around on him with an equally studly white guy whom Cassie spied her with at a high-end coffeehouse. Then we learn that Cassie is actually a crazy bitch who latched onto Austin for three dates before he got tired of her clinging nature and “ghosted” her, later hooking up with Summer because she was altogether far more normal. The plot of Obsessed to Death concerns Cassie’s attempts to get on Summer’s livestream from her “Levitate 360” fitness center (I joked to Charles that he’d probably call it “false advertising” because they don’t actually teach you to levitate), including beating up previous Lifetime 360 staff member Stella (Rowen Barnes) and temporarily disabling her to get Stella’s slot as the one-a-month newbie Summer puts on the program, then ignoring Summer’s instructions that the newbie is only supposed to do low-impact exercises on the program and going all out with dumbbells on camera. From then on the film, made under the auspices of a large eenumber of production companies (1Department Entertainment Services, Neshama Entertainment, Neshama Releasing, MarVista Entertainment and Lifetime itself) and directed by Stefan Brogren from a script by Jessica Landry and Rowan Wheeler, turns into a pretty typical Lifetime 101 crazy-woman thriller, as Cassie befriends Summer and ultimately gets invited to her home.

Then Cassie goes on a double date with Summer and Austin – who diplomatically pretends not to have known Cassie before. Cassie’s own partner for the date is Kevin (Bradley Hamilton), a male “escort” she’s hired for the evening – and whom she later has sex with, albeit behind closed doors (“at your place, not mine,” she insists) so we don’t get the expected soft-core porn scene between them. Kevin agrees to fuck her on the basis that she’s already paid him his going rate, so she might as well get his, uh, “full service.” Cassie attracts the instant ire of Gage (Jesse Reynolds), yet another hot (white) stud who may or may not be the man Cassie saw Summer with in the coffeehouse (through its street windows) and who plays his part in such a screaming-queen manner it’s obvious he’s supposed to be Gay. Alas, he’s one of those annoying “movie Gays” whom we never actually see displaying physical affection of any sort towards another male, nor do we hear him mention a partner – just a quick reference to a bar he likes to frequent. Gage is immediately suspicious of Cassie’s true intentions, so Cassie dispatches him by drugging his omnipresent bottle of Gatorade (or some amber-orange fluid he drinks regularly to keep hydrated) until he gets very sick and collapses on camera during one of Summer’s live-streamed workout sessions. He’s ultimately hospitalized, though he recovers and I think he’s still alive at the end even though in the final bloodbath sequence … well, I’m jumping ahead. Cassie has done such a great job worming her way into Summer’s life and affections she challenges Summer and Austin to a three-way, including shooting selfies of herself and Summer making out and giving each other open-mouthed kisses. Then Cassie publishes these to her social-media page (the story is driven by social media and one of Cassie’s big points of jealousy is how many more orders of magnitude followers Summer has than she does) and Summer demands that she delete the post, not because she’s shown in a provocative sexual pose with another woman but because she’s shown drinking wine, and consuming any sort of alcohol is not her “brand.”

Later Cassie comes over to Summer’s place with another wine bottle she says is a “peace offering,” only she drugs it first and puts them both under. Then she tries to rape Austin, only he comes to earlier than she was expecting and she stabs him to death with a corkscrew, then claims she did so in self-defense to avoid him raping her. Cassie also eliminates Stella (ya remember Stella?) by smothering her to death with an exercise ball (my husband Charles wondered whether that would be possible, given how much “give” those things have) and left her body in the Levitate 360 basement, then lures both Summer and Gage down there. She first leads an exercise class in Summer’s stead and then leaves Summer and Gage bloodied and on their way out – her goal seems to be to take over Summer’s identity completely, and to this end she calls herself “Cassandra Day” (while along the way we’ve discovered that “Summer Ray”’s real last name is Barker) – which makes it something of a surprise that Gage is still alive at the end. The movie ends with Cassie taken into custody – this is set in Chicago, by the way, though we don’t know that for sure until we’re told it’s the Chicago Police Department that’s arresting her – and a title reading “Six Months Later,” with Summer back on the air (or at least live-streaming her classes again) with most of the survivors in tow. Obsessed to Death is a pretty mediocre movie that could have been a good deal better; director Brogren has a knack for Gothic atmosphere but he’s hamstrung by the stupid Landry-Wheeler script, which once Cassie is revealed as a villainess instead of a naïve heroine timidly goes where thousands of Lifetime movies have gone before. Casting directors Lindsay Chag and Ilona Smyth deserve credit at least for picking two actresses for the female leads who resemble each other enough that it’s believable one could try to pass herself off as the other – it’s not always easy to tell Holland Roden and Kathryn Kohut apart, which is why the conceit of the story that Cassie wants to take over Summer’s identity actually works. Overall, though, Obsessed to Death is a pretty workmanlike Lifetime semi-thriller that really loses steam midway through when it’s revealed Cassie is actually a psycho villainess – exactly the opposite of what happened in Maid for Revenge, which gains added strength and power from the revelation of who the villain was and what was her motive.

Abandoned (Universal-International, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 4) I watched a quite good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show, hosted by Eddie Muller: Abandoned, a 1949 Universal-International production by director Joseph H. Newman based on a script by Irwin Gielgud (presumably no relation to John) with “additional dialogue” by William Bowers. Eddie Muller’s intro recalled that he showed the film to director Newman, who hadn’t seen it since he signed off on his final cut in 1949, and Newman credited Bowers with the mordant wisecracks that add a great deal to this film’s appeal. The one line from the film quoted on its imdb.com page was one from Kerric (Raymond Burr), chief enforcer to the illegal adoption agency run by heavy-set apparent do-gooder Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), who expressed his discontent with his current line of work by saying, “I was just thinking how nice life used to be when I stuck to blackmail and petty larceny.” That’s almost certainly a William Bowers line! In Muller’s outro he said that the story of Abandoned was based on a real-life case from Memphis, Tennessee, in which a woman named Georgia Tann from Philadelphia, Mississippi who’d trained as a social worker grabbed control of the Shelby County branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and ultimately gained control of the entire state’s organization. She started trafficking illegitimate children as early as 1924 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Tann) and she had powerful friends in high places that protected her, including long-time Memphis Mayor, U.S. Congressmember and political boss Edward Hall “Boss” Crump (a footnote in blues history since W. C. Handy wrote the original version of his first hit, “Memphis Blues,” as a campaign song for Crump in 1910) and Shelby County Family Court Judge Camille Kelley.

Though it wasn’t until 1950, one year after Abandoned was filmed, that formal legal charges were brought against the Tennessee Children’s Home Society – and Tann herself died of uterine cancer in 1950 just before she was about to be indicted – the story had begun to come to light as early as 1947. Among the celebrity couples who used Tann’s services to obtain black-market babies were Joan Crawford and her third husband, Phillip Terry; and Dick Powell and his second wife, June Allyson. (At the time it was common for female stars who wanted children to adopt because they didn’t want to have to take the months off their careers to have children au naturel. In her autobiography, Ingrid Bergman recalled how startled other women in Hollywood were when they realized her daughter Pia was her natural offspring.) Abandoned begins with a young woman named Paula Considine (Gale Storm, turning in a surprisingly good dramatic performance from someone primarily identified as a comedienne) showing up at the Los Angeles Police Department to find out what happened to her sister Mary. This was in the days when the Police Department operated out of the Los Angeles City Hall instead of having a building of their own. Paula meets reporter Mark Sitko (Dennis O’Keefe) outside the building and he notices that she’s being followed by Kerric (Raymond Burr), whom Mark recognizes as a corrupt private detective. It seems that Mary’s and Paula’s parents hired Kerric to find Mary, who’d disappeared in L.A. (though the film is prefaced by a narration that assures us the story could be happening anywhere, there are all too many familiar L.A. locations to allow this story to seem universal) after conceiving a baby out of wedlock. (We never learn just how this happened or who the father was; in Muller’s narration he claimed that Gielgud’s original script had made it clear that Mary’s own father had molested her and the baby was therefore the product of incest, but the Production Code Administration vetoed that plot twist in a hurry.)

Eventually Mark and Paula learn that Mary is dead, victim of carbon monoxide poisoning; the cops have officially ruled it suicide, but Paula insists her sister wouldn’t have killed herself and she’s convinced Mary was murdered. The film cuts back and forth between Our Heroes and the bad guys: human trafficking queen Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau); Decola (Will Kuluva); Hoppe (Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet), the gang’s muscle; and Harry (David Clarke). Kerric gradually realizes the rest of the gang considers him expendable, and he’s in a panic to get together enough money to flee to another city and presumably get out of their reach. In the years before Raymond Burr got the role of Perry Mason in the long-running TV series based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s legal-procedural novels, he played an awful lot of slimy villains, but this one really takes the cake: he doesn’t care whom he double-crosses or how as long as he gets whatever he wants and escapes the gang’s reach. There’s a surprisingly violent scene for a Code-era movie between Kerric and Hoppe in which we get to see how relatively short Mike Mazurki really was (he was six-foot-three and for his classic role as ex-wrestler Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet – my choice for the greatest film noir ever – they had to put him on risers or build the sets asymmetrically so he would loom over Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe even though Powell was only three inches shorter; this time he was only about a head taller than Raymond Burr). Mark and Paula hook up with the local district attorney’s office in the person of McRae (Jeff Chandler, whom I didn’t recognize at first because he still had dark hair; he hadn’t gone prematurely grey yet, though I recognized him from his voice), who’s been aware that there was a ring trafficking babies in L.A. but hadn’t got the evidence he needed to bust them. Mark and Paula continue their own investigation while also cooperating with McRae, and they find out where Mary was staying while she had her baby.

One of Mary’s roommates was Dottie Jensen (Meg Randall, who gives a marvelous performance that should have marked her for biggers and betters), who hasn’t given birth yet and who’s in the hospital where Mary had been. Dottie agrees to serve as a decoy for both the D.A.’s office and the police, and sure enough, Mrs. Donner approaches her with a gooey-sweet pitch, saying she’s from a “religious organization” and even offering her a pocket Bible. Then Mrs. Donner zooms in for the kill and offers Dottie the chance to move into a much nicer facility in which all her expenses will be paid and she’ll have better food and more comforts if only she’ll give up her baby once it’s born. Fortunately, the police have hidden microphones in place and record the whole conversation – on a disc recorder instead of wire or tape, which really dates this movie. Meanwhile Mark and Paula trace Mary’s baby to one of five adoptive parents from a list they get from McRae; the baby is in the hands of adoptive mother Mrs. Spence (Ruth Sanderson), a genuinely pathetic (in the good sense) woman who has no idea of “her” baby’s provenance and who understandably wants to keep the girl. Only Kerric, having failed to raise his getaway money any other way, hits on the idea of kidnapping Mary’s daughter and then selling her to Paula. He completes the deal, but the other members of the gang worm out of him where he stashed Paula and Mary’s baby. They kill him and then recover the kid, taking both her and Paula to the unfinished “Paradise Hills Country Club” development where they knocked off Mary in the first place. They plan to get rid of Paula and the baby in the same way, but fortunately Mark suggests to the police that they’ve probably taken Paula to the same place where they knocked off her sister Mary, and the good guys arrive just in time to revive Paula and save the baby, with the intimation that Mark and Paula (who have predictably fallen in love during the course of their investigation, and have already posed as a married couple looking to buy one of Mrs. Donner’s black-market babies) will get married and raise the child as their own.

Abandoned isn’t much of a film noir either visually (though there are some stunning noir-esque compositions from cinematographer William Daniels, who’d just graduated from his years as Greta Garbo’s favorite cameraman to shooting films noir for Universal-International, including 1948’s The Naked City, for which he won an Academy Award) or thematically (the good guys are all good and the bad guys are mostly all bad; Raymond Burr’s character is the only one with any emotional or moral complexity), but it’s a capable, compelling drama and well worth watching despite occasional bits of over-the-topness. It’s also unusually violent for a 1949 movie – the fight scene in which Mazurki kills Burr is especially graphic for a Code-era film and still packs a wallop today – and one could readily see a modern-day remake, especially now that the radical Right has stripped away women’s control of their own bodies and made having to bear an unwanted baby a live issue again.

The Mallorca Files: "The Ex-Factor" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission, first shown November 25, 2019, copyrighted 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 3) my husband Charles and I watched an unusually interesting episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files – a quite good police procedural with a long list of contributing production companies (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, Baleares Film Commission) about a British woman, Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), and a German man, Max Winter (Julian Looman), teamed up as police detectives on the Spanish island of Mallorca and forced to work under a rather intense local, Inéz Villegas (Maria Fernández Ache). Max is dating a local barmaid named Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo) and has just asked her to marry him – which makes him more impatient than usual with all the people who just assume that since he and Miranda work together, they must be lovers. The main intrigue on this one is that Max and Miranda have been called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of some valuable recording and film production equipment at the home of Jürgen Kuhl (Tobias Licht), producer and host of the popular German TV talent show Deutsche Musik. Jürgen is such an arrogant bastard he boasts at one point, “I invented Deutsche Musik” – which of course had me thinking of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and some other pretty good Deutsche musicians who preceded him by at least a century. (This show was first aired in 2019 but its copyright date was 2020 – odd; I’ve seen shows that were copyrighted before they were shown publicly, but almost never the other way around.)

But the equipment thefts, if they occurred at all, were simply a blind to get Max and Miranda to the “Jürgen Kuhl Boot Camp” so they could witness a confrontation between Jürgen and Jens Schmidt (Victor von Schirach), a large and homely man with a singing voice that can best be described as mediocre. Jürgen has allowed him to be a contestant on Deutsche Musik because he really wants a schlub on the show audiences can laugh at, though he lured Jens to the cast in the first place by promising him the chance to sing an original song he wrote to his ex-girlfriend, Lena. Then Jürgen insisted that Jens sing “Amazing Grace” (which it’s implied that he’s claiming to have written it – “Who is he, the German George Santos?” I joked) and/or something by Gershwin instead of Jens’ original. Miranda accidentally flips on the switch to the intercom between Jürgen’s control room and Jens’ main studio, thereby allowing Jens to hear that Jürgen is allowing him on the show only to be the butt of audience laughter. Jens then grabs Max’s gun and takes Miranda hostage, threatening to kill her if his demands aren’t met. His demand, not surprisingly, is that he get to sing his take-me-back song to Lena on a worldwide livestream, with the other Deutsche Musik contestants playing and singing backup for him. The keyboard player has a panic attack and Miranda fills in for him – the song is only three chords and Miranda knows enough to get by – while the guitar player claims he needs to pee and Jens tells him he can do that in the swimming pool, which provokes Jürgen to yet another hissy-fit. When Jens’ command performance (literally!) happens, a crowd gathers outside Jürgen’s compound with signs hailing Jens as the next great rock star, and they start singing along with his song.

Meanwhile, Max gets let out of the building and sneaks back in with the intention of rescuing Miranda and getting the gun away from Jens. Eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that the whole thing was a set-up between Jürgen and Jens; Jürgen allowed Jens to take Miranda hostage to create an exciting new story arc for his show – and the cops ultimately arrest both Jens and Jürgen, while the new-found fans still hang out outside Jürgen’s compound singing Jens’ song. There’s also a Black woman police commissioner from London, Abbey Palmer (Tanya Moodie), who’s there to take Miranda back to London to resume her regular duties with the London PD, but at the end Miranda chooses to stay in Mallorca while Max is still uncertain as to where he stands with Carmen because – like Prosper Merimée’s and Georges Bizet’s Carmen, who refused to commit to one man at a time because “love is like a rebellious bird/And it has never heard of law” – she’s answering him noncommittally, neither saying yes or no to his genuinely heartfelt proposal. This Mallorca Files episode had me from the get-go – I’d say it’s the best show we’ve seen on this series – and I especially liked its implied satire of so-called “reality television” and the absurd notion that what we see on shows like this, Survivor or American Idol has anything to do with normal notions of “reality” – though Donald Trump somehow rode the success of The Apprentice to the Presidency of the U.S. (and has an excellent chance of becoming President again, goodness knows why) largely by selling American voters that he was the most intelligent, sagacious and successful capitalist of all time … because that was the character he played on The Apprentice.

Midsomer Murders: "For Death Prepare" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, ITV [Independent Television], American Public Television, PBS, copyright 2021, released 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 I watched a recent (first aired May 28, 2023, though the copyright date is 2021) episode of Midsomer Murders on KPBS: “For Death Prepare,” in which the murders (there are three, two actual and one attempted, but pretty widely spaced during the show) take place in and around a local amateur operetta company doing Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. The corpse of the first victim turns up in a mock treasure chest representing the Pirate King’s treasure in the operetta, and at first no one in the company has any idea who he was. Neither do the lead investigators for local law enforcement, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his partner, Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). It turns out well into the show’s 90-minute running time (it was originally segmented to allow for a two-hour time slot with commercials, but fortunately this was KPBS and they were showing it straight through) that the victim was a real-estate developer who wanted to buy the old mill land on which the theatre stood, but Katisha Empson (Jane Bertish) was dead set against selling even though her niece and heir, Phyllis Cuttle (Samantha Spiro), desperately wanted to sell and thought she could use the money to build a state-of-the-art theatre on what was left of the property. Katisha is being attended to by a so-called “concierge doctor” – meaning one who doesn’t accept any sort of health insurance and practices only on people who can afford to pay him in cash. The “concierge doctor” is Simon Charteris (Rajat M. Bose, also known as Mathew Bose), who has got Katisha to change her will so if anything happens to her – as indeed it does when she becomes the second victim, taking a tumble down the stairs of her great mansion while under the influence of opium which someone disguised as her sleeping tablets – he stands to inherit a lot of her money. This understandably upsets her niece, who stood to inherit most of her estate before she changed her will, and for a while Barnaby and Winter regard both of them as potential suspects.

There are a lot of the usual red herrings, including local pub owner Marcus Dunlow (Alexander Hanson), who’s been hitting on his barmaid, Phoebe Whittingdale (Tessa Wong) to the understandable disgust of his wife Faith (Jenna Russell); Marcus’s son Luke (Dylan Wood, easily the cutest member of the cast), who’s just won admission to a prestigious conservatory in London even though that’s his dad’s dream, not his – he’s dating Phoebe and wants to take off with her back to Australia, where she was living until she recently returned to Midsomer County to reconcile with her father, Jeremy Whittingdale (Kevin Whatley), only she can’t stand him and wants to return after she does some aimless traveling around the world, including a visit to Goa (India’s smallest state by area and fourth smallest in population; I heard of it from an archive.org download of a concert by Goa’s amateur symphony), and wants Luke to accompany her. Also in the mix is the irascible estate manager, the thug-like Graham Handsworth (David Rubin) and his long-suffering wife Shaila (Shobna Gulati), who’s responded to Graham’s physical abuse by drifting into a Lesbian affair with Katisha’s niece Phyllis. There’s also a heavy-set Black man named Derek Sharrow (Clive Rowe) who’s the sole caregiver of his disabled father, and among the dark secrets in the various characters’ past is the scandal that led Jeremy Whittingdale to get fired from his former job as a private-school teacher (the scandal didn’t involve him molesting the students but fixing their grades; he was allowed to leave quietly and avoid prosecution) and the fact that Phoebe Whittingdale was the result of a brief affair Marcus Dunlow had with Jeremy’s wife, which means that she and Luke are half-siblings (which suggests to me that instead of giving The Pirates of Penzance the local opera company should have been staging Die Walküre).

In the end Barnaby and Winter uncover quite a few crimes; they have Simon Charteris (whose name I suspect writer Julia Gilbert got from Leslie Charteris, creator of the character “The Saint,” as well as “Simon Templar,” The Saint’s real name) arrested for “grooming” various wealthy women into giving him their inheritances, and they discover Derek Sharrow is the real killer from misspellings in the quotes from Gilbert’s libretto to The Pirates of Penzance which he painted on the walls of Jeremy Whittingdale’s dressing room, since he was playing “the modern Major-General” in the production. Apparently this wasn’t the first time the Midsomer Murders crew did an episode involving an opera production; there was an earlier one called “Death of a Hollow Man” in which the opera being produced was one by Mozart (which would have turned me on a lot more than Gilbert and Sullivan), though I give Julia Gilbert and director Toby Frow credit for effectively using quotes from The Pirates of Penzance in the show, including having lines from the operetta carved into the wooden prop coins representing the pirate’s treasure. But I quite liked “For Death Prepare” and thought it was very entertaining within this show’s overall quirkiness.

Super Fly (Sig Shore Productions, Superfly, Warner Bros., 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, November 1) Turner Classic Movies ran a whole night of Black-themed films with Ben Mankiewicz co-hosting with Black film critic, historian and author Donald Bogle, who’s written six books about African-Americans in film and TV but was particularly talking about Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. The film I wanted to watch was Super Fly (1972), an example of the short-lived “Blaxploitation” craze of the early 1970’s, directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (whose father, Gordon Parks, Sr., had directed the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft the year before) from a script by Phillip Fenty. Basically it’s your standard-issue gangster film about the disillusioned crook who wants to make that One Big Score that will make him so much money he will be able to leave the criminal life forever – only it never works out quite the way the good-bad guy intended. In this version the good-bad guy is cocaine dealer Priest (Ron O’Neal, who oddly doesn’t look particularly Black; he’s relatively light-skinned and has long straight hair, and only the shape of his nose gives him away as Black), and he’s navigating a landscape of accommodating women (he has at least two girlfriends that we see, one Black and one white), fellow Black drug dealers, Black militants (though we get the impression that the so-called “militants” who hit him up for money are just scammers; apparently there was a sequel, Super Fly TNT, in which Priest essentially joined the revolution) and corrupt white cops.

Part of the Blaxploitation formula was to get a major Black music artist to write the score for your film; Parks, Sr. had done that quite successfully with Isaac Hayes in Shaft, other Blaxploitation films employed major soul names like Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man) and James Brown (Disco Godfather), and in Super Fly the major soul name was Curtis Mayfield. Mayfield’s score is by far the best thing about this film; though I was irked that his backup band was called “The Curtis Mayfield Experience” (I think “Experience” as a band name should have been retired with the death of Jimi Hendrix, but it turned up in all sorts of other places after that: I have a live album by Jimmy Cliff in which his act is announced as the “Jamaica Experience,” and one by Bob Marley in which he’s called the “Trenchtown Experience”), his music has a febrile quality that the rest of the film sadly lacks. Sure, there’s a great soft-core porn scene between Priest and his Black girlfriend Georgia (Shiela Frazier) making love in a bathtub, and there’s a quite good ending in which not only are the white police officers corrupt, they’re essentially running the drug trade in Harlem and the deputy police commissioner, Riordan (played in a weird bit of plantation-style paternalism by the film’s producer, Sig Shore, billed as “Mike Richards”), is the proverbial “Big Man” in charge of the whole thing. In their final confrontation Riordan tells Priest, “I own you,” and given that the whole reason African-Americans exist was their ancestors were brought here as slaves, that phrase “I own you” understandably sets Priest off and he lashes out in the big fight scene.

Alas, Gordon Parks, Jr. decided to shoot the big fight scene in slow motion, which after Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch had become trendy but only takes the edge off a film that, for all Blaxploitation’s reputation as a genre filled with action, is surprisingly dull. Most of this film is just Ron O’Neal as Priest walking through the streets of Harlem, interacting with his Black sometimes-comrades, sometimes-rivals like Scatter (Julius W. Harris) and Fat Freddie (Charles MacGregor) – Fat Freddie is the most genuinely pathetic, in the good sense, character in the film; alas, he’s busted by the corrupt white cops for beating up a man who came on to his wife (Yvonne Delaine) and both he and Scatter end up ratting out Priest to the cops – hanging out with the various girlfriends and ultimately having an existential crisis because, while he wants to get out of drug dealing, he doesn’t know what else he could do with his life. (At least two other characters warn him about that, and Priest himself says that he doesn’t want the sort of low-paying dead-end job that is his only other real alternative.) Also, Priest not only sells cocaine he uses it himself, and in most stories about drug dealers the central character’s downfall comes when he starts getting hooked on his own product and appropriates too much of the stuff for his own use. I’d heard of Super Fly for decades, and now that I’ve finally seen it it’s a major disappointment, lacking neither the overall interest and excitement of Shaft nor the sheer campy incoherence of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown – which are terrible movies by any normal standards, but Grier’s riveting performances and the sheer perfection of her bad-ass attitude make them watchable and entertaining. If I’d been reviewing Super Fly when it was new, I’d probably have recommended that people avoid the movie and buy Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack album instead, much like the movie Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was pretty useless except for the great soundtrack songs by k. d. lang.

Over the Counter (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after Super Fly I kept Turner Classic Movies on for a really engaging 20-minute musical short by MGM, Over the Counter, directed by future MGM musical producer Jack Cummings and advertised as “A Colortone Musical” because it was filmed entirely in two-strip Technicolor. For some reason the credits listed “Color by Technicolor Process” but did not credit an actual cinematographer – a real pity because the camerawork is quite good, avoiding the over-bright reds and greens the process was partial to in lesser hands and giving the film an overall salmon and turquoise color scheme that was very appealing. (Two-strip Technicolor had one major limit – it could not photograph blue, though it could come close with colors like teal – but I often find it quite harmonious, painterly and more pleasant than the often shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it.) Over the Counter takes place in the Drake Department Store, whose owner, Mr. Drake (Sidney Toler in one of his rare non-Asian roles; though he was American-born he had a natural slant to his eyes that is readily apparent here and helped make him credible as the screen’s replacement Charlie Chan), is dealing with open rebellion from his staff, including Franklin Pangborn at his most prissily exasperated. The rebellion is over the new policies Drake’s son Freddy (Emerson Treacy) is instituting, including laying off the sales clerks and replacing them with the “MGM Dancing Girls.”

Freddy has also instituted a system called “Check Your Husband,” by which women shopping at the Drake store can literally check their husbands and then go through the store and spend all their husbands’ money without them being around to say no. One husband (Jack “Tiny” Lipson) tears up his number, which of course is 13, in hopes that means his wife can never reclaim him – but the MGM dancing girl who checked him in replaces his tag, and his wife (Tiny Schwartz) grabs him back with a parody of the “Check Your Husband” song called “De-Check My Husband.” There’s also a bizarre sequence in which the store literally offers babies for sale, and the nurse who offers them is wearing a white uniform emblazoned with a red cross on her chest whose broken arms make it look like a swastika. (The young Betty Grable is in this movie as the woman who tries to talk her husband into buying one of the babies, though he begs off.) Obviously MGM thought they could get away with this a year before Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and, among other things, made the swastika “politically incorrect” big-time in U.S. films. Even American directors who wanted to dramatize the horrors of Nazism were frequently told not to show swastikas until German refugee Fritz Lang made Man Hunt in 1941 and laid down the law to producer Darryl F. Zanuck and told him, “You can’t expect me to make an anti-Nazi movie without showing swastikas.” I suspect the baby-selling sequence in Over the Counter was inspired by the vending-machine babies in the science-fiction musical Just Imagine only two years earlier. With songs by a virtually unknown writer named George Frank Rubens (I’d certainly never heard of him before!), appealingly sung by Eleanor Thatcher and Maurene Marseilles, as well as a couple of acrobatic male dancers who do break-dancing well before break-dancing became a “thing,” Over the Counter is a genuinely charming vest-pocket musical, and the well-used two-strip Technicolor only adds to its appeal.

FRONTLINE: "Mitch McConnell, the G.O.P. and the Courts" (Kirk Documentary Group, WGBH Educational Foundation, GBH, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 31) I watched a PBS Frontline show called “McConnell, the G.O.P. and the Courts,” dealing with U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his successful fight to remake the U.S. judiciary – not just the Supreme Court but the whole ball of wax, from the lowliest district courts on up to the Supremes – in a direction writers Michael Kirk (who also directed) and Mike Wiser persisted in calling “conservative” even though it’s nothing of the sort. It’s actually a movement of Right-wing revolutionaries bound and determined to remake America in their own image, at once shrinking government when it comes to regulating the economy in general and corporations in particular and vastly increasing the size and scope of government in terms of its power over individual’s private lives, especially how they can have sex, with whom, under what circumstances and how they may deal with the consequences therefrom, both good and bad. Kirk and Wiser portrayed McConnell as a man deeply shaped by a childhood disability; he contracted polio at 2 and spent the next few years almost completely confined to his bedroom, with his mom as his caregiver. When he finally emerged from his medical cocoon and started going to school like the other kids, McConnell soon gravitated to student politics, running for campus president in his high school – since his dad was an Army officer, the family moved a lot and it wasn’t until his freshman year in high school that the McConnells settled in Louisville, Kentucky – and winning after he put together a list of endorsers that included the most popular people on campus. Much of the show is narrated by McConnell himself via excerpts from his autobiography, The Long Game (itself a good description of his political strategy!), and the audiobook version of it he read himself. In it he described the exhilaration he felt on his election as high-school student council president and how he decided from that point he would make electoral politics his life’s work. After a stint in President Gerald Ford’s Department of Justice, where he served alongside such leading lights of the Right-wing judicial movement as Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, McConnell returned home and mounted his first campaign for professional elective office when he ran for judge/executive of Jefferson County, Kentucky (which contains Louisville), the top leadership position in county government.

At the time McConnell was still seen as a moderate Republican – in 1964 he’d co-authored an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal endorsing the proposed Civil Rights Act and criticizing fellow Republicans who opposed it, including Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s 1964 Presidential nominee, who as a Senator from Arizona had voted against it. He got the Courier-Journal’s endorsement at a time when the paper almost never endorsed Republicans. According to Keith Runyon, who was then on the Courier-Journal’s editorial board, “He came into the editorial board room at the Courier-Journal, where I worked, for his endorsement interview, and he sat down and he answered our questions. He came off as being enlightened, thoroughly honest. And he did a very, very good job in his interview.” After two terms as judge/executive, McConnell decided to run for U.S. Senate in 1984 against two-term Democratic incumbent Dee Huddleston. McConnell brought in Roger Ailes, already legendary for having run Richard Nixon’s TV campaign for U.S. President in 1968 and ultimately the founding news director of Fox News, to run his campaign. Ailes demanded that McConnell authorize a scorched-earth negative campaign against Huddleson, including a famous TV commercial showing a bloodhound allegedly trying to track down Huddleston for doing paid speaking engagements instead of showing up at the Senate for key votes. McConnell squeaked through by 5,000 votes in a year in which Ronald Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid and carried Kentucky by 300,000 votes. After his Senate campaign, McConnell had breakfast with his old friend Keith Runyon from the Louisville Courier-Journal and, according to Runyon, “[H]e said, ‘Keith, I don’t know that you all will ever endorse me again.’ And I said, ‘Well, why is that?’ He said, ‘Because I’m going to have to become much more conservative to be re-elected, much more conservative than you all are.’ And so he became.”

The next key step in McConnell’s political devolution came in 1987, when Reagan nominated McConnell’s old Justice Department colleague Robert Bork to an open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Bork had accumulated a long record of stating openly his opposition to abortion, women’s rights in general, and Queer rights. As an appeals court justice he’d written an opinion upholding the constitutionality of anti-Queer sodomy laws that the U.S. Supreme Court later upheld. Liberal and progressive groups mounted a full-court press, lobbying people to call their Senators and demand that Bork not be confirmed to the Supreme Court, and the tactic worked – Bork’s confirmation was voted down 42 to 58. But McConnell left the controversy over Bork literally vowing revenge and saying the Democrats’ victory over Bork would come back to haunt them. It did. The documentary shows footage of McConnell declaiming about the Bork defeat, “And so to Robert Bork, you happen to be the one who set the new Senate standard that will be applied, in my judgement, by a majority of the Senate prospectively. Unfortunately, it got set over your dead body, so to speak, politically. … We’re going to do it when we want to. And when we want to is going to be when the president, whoever he may be, sends up somebody we don’t like.” McConnell got his revenge when Antonin Scalia, yet another former colleague of his from Gerald Ford’s Justice Department, died suddenly in February 2016. Almost immediately, McConnell, then the Senate’s majority leader, announced that he would personally block any attempt by Democratic President Barack Obama to appoint a successor to Scalia, on the ground that there would be a Presidential election in nine months and the voters should therefore get to decide who would get to fill that vacancy on the Court. New York Times reporter Peter Baker recalled, “Mitch McConnell doesn’t even wait for the day to end after Antonin Scalia dies to put out a statement saying, in effect, we’re not going to let President Obama replace him. That it’s an election year, we’re going to wait for the next president to nominate somebody.”

In late March, Obama went ahead and nominated then-Appeals Court judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat – but McConnell was able to make sure the Senate, with a Republican majority, wouldn’t even meet with Garland, much less consider him. McConnell said bluntly, “The right-of-center world, it does not want this vacancy filled by this president. … [W]e're not giving a lifetime appointment to this president on the way out the door to change the Supreme Court for the next 25 or 30 years.” According to PBS Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, when one Republican Senator – Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) – threatened to break ranks and meet with Garland, McConnell immediately said if he did, McConnell would personally recruit an opponent to run against Moran in the Republican primary. Moran caved. “It was outrageous at the time, and it’s still outrageous,” said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “They kept the seat open for nearly a year, refusing to give Merrick Garland even a hearing, even the courtesy of being rejected. But he did it. He had the power to do it, and so he did.” When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election, McConnell got his Right-wing replacement for Scalia – Neil Gorsuch, son of President Reagan’s controversial appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch. Trump would go on to make two more Supreme Court appointments – Brett Kavanugh, who replaced Anthony Kennedy (the judge Reagan had appointed after the Bork defeat, who was mostly a solid Right-wing vote but differed with the Right on two major issues, juvenile justice and Queer rights: it was Kennedy who wrote the opinions invalidating sodomy laws and bans on same-sex marriage); and Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she died of cancer less than two months before the 2020 election. McConnell used his power as Senate leader to rush through Barrett’s confirmation – and when he was confronted about his obvious hypocrisy in denying a Democratic President in his last year in office the chance to replace a Republican Justice, while rushing through a Republican appointee just two months before a Presidential election, McConnell said, “I can only repeat that we have an obligation under the Constitution, should we choose to take advantage of it, to fill the vacancy, and I assure you that’s very likely to happen.” According to former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes, McConnell not only told Trump to rush through an appointment to replace Ginsburg, he said to Trump that Barrett – a long-standing anti-abortion, anti-choice activist – should be the nominee. Barrett was confirmed as Senate Democrats watched helplessly while McConnell steamrollered the nomination.

The Frontline show also detailed McConnell’s other compromises to stay in Trump’s good graces, including going along with Trump’s racist comments about Mexican and Muslim immigrants and his statement that there were “very good people – on both sides” in the 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which neo-Nazi protesters and anti-racist counter-protesters clashed in the streets, violence ensued and one person was deliberately run over by a racist driving a Dodge Challenger (an iconic vehicle for the racist Right since the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, whose central characters drove a Dodge Challenger painted to look like the Confederate flag). According to Kirk and Wiser, McConnell never believed in President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him (or “stollen,” as Trump has been spelling it in his recent Truth Social posts), and he was aghast at the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The night of January 6, with the official Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump delayed for several hours by the mob’s onslaught, McConnell said, “We’re not going to let these people keep us from finishing our business, so we need you to get the building cleared, give us the O.K. so we can go back in session and finish up the people’s business as soon as possible.” McConnell’s original reaction to the second impeachment of President Trump over his role in allegedly inciting the January 6, 2021 riot was supposedly to tell two advisors that if what Trump had done wasn’t an impeachable offense, he didn’t know what was. But when push came to shove he voted to acquit Trump, and though there were 57 Senate votes to convict Trump, the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict, and they were 10 short. “He is not the idealistic young man he had been back at home,” Right-wing columnist Mona Charen told Frontline. “Being in power had changed him. He had become too in love with power, and so he was willing to make too many compromises in the name of holding onto power.”

The Frontline documentary began and ended with clips of the two recent press appearances in which McConnell literally froze up and found himself unable to talk, and the second one came – ironically enough – in a press conference just as McConnell was being asked whether he would run for re-election to an eighth term in 2026. This led me to ponder the bizarre gerontocracy American government has become; I remember joking that for all the talk about the 2020 Democratic Presidential field having an unprecedented range of people of all ages, genders and colors, the final choice was between two seventy-something white men, Donald Trump and Joe Biden (three if you count Bernie Sanders, Biden’s last-standing opponent for the nomination). I remember thinking when Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election that I had passed an important generational milestone – finally there was a President younger than me – but there hasn’t been one since: Trump broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest President ever and now Biden has broken Trump’s. McConnell has said that reshaping the federal courts – not just the Supreme Court but the entire U.S. judiciary – in a Right-wing direction has become his legacy accomplishment, and it’s hard to deny that. Under McConnell and Trump, the Supreme Court has a solid and seemingly impregnable 6-3 Right-wing majority that has thrown its weight around, most notably in reversing Roe v. Wade and destroying the whole idea that the Constitution guarantees women autonomy over their own bodies. It’s also vastly expanded the reach of the Second Amendment, including throwing out a century-old New York law restricting the concealed carrying of weapons (you see what I mean when I say that whatever these people are, they are not “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination), invalidating President Biden’s attempts to forgive student-loan debts and block the spread of COVID-19, and severely restricting the right of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to do its job of protecting the environment.

McConnell’s legacy will be an America in which women have no right to say no to pregnancy and forced birth, Queers once again are illegal and same-sex marriage is a distant memory, people have no right to be protected against crazies among them who stage mass shootings, and corporations have the right to pollute as much as they damned well please and work their employees, including children, to death – but not the right to speak out against politicians enacting an “anti-woke” agenda, as the Walt Disney Corporation found out to its cost when it dared oppose Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As Edward Luce wrote in the May 3, 2023 Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/f2a34faa-9ef7-4e11-9ea1-ef65e6c1d4ae), the closest analogue anywhere in the world to the U.S. Supreme Court Trump and McConnell have created “sits in Tehran. Iran’s Council of Guardians is unelected, regulates women’s bodies, cannot be removed and is impervious to public opinion. They answer to a higher power. The more America’s Supreme Court resembles a theocratic body, the more it imperils itself.”