The Mallorca Files: "The Maestro" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC Studios, Britbox, France Télévisions, ZDFNeo, 2021)

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

Last night (Friday, November 17) at 9:45 p.m. I switched on PBS for the latest rerun of The Mallorca Files, a short-lived (16 episodes from 2020 and 2021) but quite charming British policier set on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. The principal leads are Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys), a British-born detective, and her police partner, German-born Max Winter (Julian Looman). This episode, called “The Maestro,” kicks off with a long scene of a woman walking into the water at one of Mallorca’s beaches and drowning herself, and then cuts to an odd opera performance being held in an underground grotto with water inside. Two singers are doing the scene “La ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and they’re singing from matching gondolas floating on the lake while the audience – which includes Miranda, Max and Max’s local girlfriend Carmen (Tábata Cerezo) – sits amphitheatre-style on stands of chairs in front of them. Don Giovanni is being played by José Castaña (Carlos Magnusson), who’s a star of the local opera, though writer Dan Sefton wasn’t able to make up his mind just what sort of opera singer he was. In the opening José Castaña is shown singing the baritone role of Don Giovanni, but later in the show, after he’s been murdered with a single stab wound through the voice box, one of his old records is heard and it’s “Dalla sua pace,” an aria from Don Giovanni but sung by Don Ottavio, the tenor. (He’s also name-checked as a tenor in the dialogue.)

Since they’re already on the scene, Max and Miranda are assigned to investigate the case by their boss, Inés Villegas (María Fernandéz Ache), and the first person they suspect is Castaña’s widow Domenica (Cristina Castaño). They think Domenica killed her husband for his money, but she protests that José signed a will that disinherited her and gave all his money, including royalty income from future record sales, to a local charity. But Max and Miranda realize that the supposedly authentic will was signed by an autopen and was therefore almost certainly forged. Later Max and Miranda figure out that the young woman who killed herself in the opening scene was the daughter of José Castaña by one of his many extra-relational partners and Castaña was killed by the girl’s mother (who’s also the trustee for the charity to which José supposedly left his fortune) for revenge and because José never did anything – physically, emotionally or financially – for the girl he fathered by her. Only when they arrest her and she gives a signed confession, the widow also submits a signed confession – and so, in a plot twist Sefton obviously stole from the real-life “#MeToo” movement, do 25 or so other women, all of whom claim to have been seduced and abandoned by the beloved singer. Apparently José was as much of a Don Juan in real life as he was on stage, and he left all these women with a motive to want him dead. Inéz essentially gives up on the case, announcing that she’ll keep the investigation open and reassign it to other detectives but also that she can’t prosecute based on the multiple confessions and the lack of any forensic evidence to tell which of the women actually killed José and which are lying to cover for the real murderer.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (Charles H. Schneer Productions, Sam Katzman Productions, Columbia, 1955)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 16) I watched an unexpectedly good movie on Turner Classic Movies: It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), made at Columbia Pictures by Sam Katzman’s “B” unit, produced by Charles H. Schneer, directed by Robert Gordon and written by George Worthing Yates and Harold Jacob Smith. What made this more interesting than your standard giant-monster fest from the mid-1950’s is the special-effects person, Ray Harryhausen. In his intro Ben Mankiewicz mentioned that Harryhausen as a child had seen the 1933 King Kong in its initial release and had decided then and there that that’s what he wanted to do: to use the same technique of stop-motion animation to bring monstrous creatures to cinematic life. In 1949 Harryhausen got to work as assistant to the creator of King Kong, Willis O’Brien, on the film Mighty Joe Young – O’Brien even gave him one of the original metal armatures he had used for King Kong, and Harryhausen ultimately reused it for the Cyclops in Jason and the Argonauts after he and producer Schneer (who worked together from this film in 1955 to the original Clash of the Titans in 1981) turned their attention from black-and-white monster movies with contemporary settings to color fantasies set in ancient times. Alas, the beginning of Harryhausen’s career with Schneer was marred by the same sorts of budget-driven compromises as the end; just as Schneer didn’t allow Harryhausen to depict the legendary three-headed dog Cerberus that guarded the entrance to Hades (he had to content himself with just two heads) in Clash of the Titans, in this film Schneer vetoed the giant octopus Harryhausen wanted to create as the film’s menace and said it could have only six limbs, not the regulation eight (which led Ben Mankiewicz to joke, rather lamely, that it was really a “sexapus”).

It Came from Beneath the Sea opens on board America’s first nuclear-powered submarine (it’s unnamed in the film but in real life it was called the Nautilus, after the fictional super-submarine in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), commanded by Pete Mathews (Kenneth Tobey, who’d previously fought monsters in the Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby The Thing in 1951 and another Harryhausen creation, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in 1953). The sub gets caught on something very far underwater, and a piece of the great whatsit lodges itself onto the sub’s stabilizer fin. When they get back to shore they realize that the fragment is radioactive, and the Navy calls in two scientists, Dr. John Carter (Donald Curtis) – coincidentally also the name of the human hero in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books – and Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue). At first both Mathews and the Navy brass are uncertain, to say the least, about having a woman on the crew (and seeing this movie in the middle of reading Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman made me all too aware of the institutionalized sexism women with this level of scientific expertise had to face in the real world as well). There’s also a rather strange romantic triangle between Joyce, Mathews and Carter – it’s established that she and Carter have been sort-of dating but their interest in each other is more professional than romantic, whereas Mathews just wants to get in her pants (and her lab coats). It Came from Beneath the Sea is a pretty straightforward giant-monster tale in which it’s established that the giant octopus was artificially enlarged by hydrogen-bomb tests in the vicinity of the Mindanao Trench, the deepest ocean in the world, though there’s an oddball scene in which the writers attempt to establish that there have been similar monsters loosed on the world before (including a woodcut of a scene supposedly from the days of the Roman Empire, depicting a giant sea monster attacking a square-rigged sailing ship of a type that didn’t exist in the days of the Roman Empire).

At first the Navy doesn’t believe the monster exists – indeed, there’s a great sequence in which the survivors of a ship that was captured by the monster, and all but four members of the crew were eaten by it, are afraid to tell Professor Joyce what they know for fear they will be declared mentally ill and institutionalized – but Joyce knows enough about how to handle men that she’s able to come on to one of the sailors and get the truth out of him. Ultimately the giant octopus makes its way to San Francisco and literally attacks the Golden Gate Bridge – the scenes of the monster literally tearing apart pieces of the bridge and the Ferry Building are utterly convincing and even now evoke a “How did they do that?” reaction – before the Navy fires a super-torpedo at it and ultimately kills it. There’s an elaborate explanation of how the mechanism works (by setting off miniature harpoons that essentially make hash of the monster’s brain) and an implication that only one of these weapons exists. What makes It Came from Beneath the Sea not only worth watching but genuinely frightening even now is not only the utter credibility of Harryhausen’s effects work but the precision direction of Robert Gordon, who manages to interweave stock footage into the main narrative without the credibility-destroying lacunae all too common in cheap 1950’s films. Gordon manages to make the usual pachydermous exposition at least somewhat interesting, and the monster itself (thank you, Ray Harryhausen!) is utterly convincing as a life form. The only lapses in the effects work are the two shots of model watercraft – the fishing ship the monster attacks midway through the film and the sub, which it latches onto at the end and forces both Carter and Mathews to do deep-sea SCUBA dives (back when SCUBA gear was a major novelty!) to explode harpoons into the monster to get it to release the sub. In both sequences, the model work is way too obvious and gets in the way of an otherwise entertaining movie. One mild surprise at the end is that both Mathews and Carter live – I was expecting the writers to take out one of their male characters so they could pair off Professor Joyce with the survivor – and though 1955 audiences wouldn’t have seen it that way, to a modern viewer they look headed for thruple-dom at the end.

NOVA: "The Battle to Beat Malaria" (Wingspan Productions, GBH, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Wednesday, November 15) I watched a couple of the science shows PBS regularly airs Wednesday nights, a NOVA show called “The Battle to Beat Malaria” and a Secrets of the Dead episode titled “Hidden in the Amazon.” “The Battle to Beat Malaria” centered around a proposed malaria vaccine called R21/Matrix M developed at Oxford University by a team of scientists including Adrian Hill, who talked about the scientific challenges of designing a malaria vaccine and why the previous candidates hadn’t worked. Malaria is an infectious disease spread by the bites of a female Anopheles mosquito; when a female Anopheles has sex, she literally puts the bite on the nearest warm-blooded animal she can find. She inserts a built-in sucking tube into the victim and secretes an anti-coagulant chemical to keep the blood from clotting so she can offer the blood as nourishment for her babies-to-be. It’s that clear anti-coagulant that contains the Plasmodium parasites that actually cause malaria, of which there are five known species. The most deadly ones are Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivex. Ironically, malaria is virtually unknown in the temperate climates of the world because of a major campaign to eradicate the mosquitoes that transmit it, staged during World War II after the U.S. and the other Allied governments realized that as many of their soldiers were being killed or incapacitated by malaria as were being killed or wounded in combat. Among the weapons used to end malaria in the developed world was an insecticide called DDT, which also did so much collateral damage it was ultimately banned during the first heady flush of the modern environmental movement, but while it was widely used it did the job. It successfully curtailed the spread of malaria in the United States and through Europe, but malaria remained a threat in the tropics – especially in Africa, South America and India – in nations that had large mosquito populations, didn’t have the resources to mount major mosquito extermination campaigns and weren’t sufficiently on the world’s radar for most people to care.

Research to develop vaccines against malaria has been going on for decades. There are several impediments, however; not only is malaria caused by a parasite (not a bacterium or a virus, like most diseases that have been successfully controlled by vaccination), the parasite has a coating that enables it to enter a cell and infect it. The secret behind R21 – and an earlier, less effective malaria vaccine called RTS,S – is to take a harmless virus, coat it with the same protein coat as the malaria parasite, and inject it into humans in hopes that the vaccine will teach the human immune system to recognize the parasite’s coating and form defenses (antibodies) against it. The first half of the program is a good, though necessarily short, explanation of how malaria works and how the parasite starts the infection in the bloodstream, where it spreads from; the second half talked about the elaborate testing regimen needed to determine whether R21 actually works. The tests were authorized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and followed the rules set forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA): a Phase I trial to determine the drug’s safety, a Phase II trial to determine its efficacy, and a longer-term Phase III trial to test the drug in large numbers of people to determine whether it worked well enough long-term to be worth administering. The last time scientists tried to develop a malaria vaccine, RTS,S, it had reached only 40 percent efficacy – better than nothing but not the 75 percent the scientists were hoping for because that was the WHO’s criteria for licensing the vaccine and getting public and private donors to pay for it. R21 reached 70 to 80 percent efficacy, which the scientists considered good enough for a “win” even though that still leaves 20 to 30 percent of the target populations vulnerable to malaria.

Secrets of the Dead: "Hidden in the Amazon" (3BM Television, Channel 4, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, WNET, PBS, 2022)

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

The Secrets of the Dead episode that followed, “Hidden in the Amazon,” was about the growing evidence that, contrary to the popular myth that the Amazon rainforest was “untouched by man” until white people came to the Western Hemisphere in the late 15th century, there were actually quite advanced human cultures and civilizations there. Modern scientists estimate that there were between 8 and 10 million people living in the Amazon rainforests in 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World and started the process of white colonization. The discoveries that led to this conclusion were made possible by improved technology – and, ironically, by the deforestation program of various Brazilian governments, notably the recently defeated President Jair Bolsonaro, which by cutting down and destroying great swaths of the rainforest also exposed the evidence of extensive human habitation in the pre-Columbian era. Among the technological improvements were the development of aerial surveys using laser beams to detect differences in vegetation in various parts of the Amazon, which the researchers attribute to active human involvement in reshaping the notoriously acidic soil of the Amazon to something in which food crops could be grown. The key indication of human involvement is the existence of something called terra preta (Portuguese for “black earth”) in certain regions of the Amazon.

Indigenous Amazonians mixed charcoal and human waste into the ground to leach out the soil’s impurities and make it fertile for crops people could actually eat. They would set up villages in the middle of the rainforest and then build rings around each village where they purified the soil into terra preta and then did their farming – and though the Amazonians died out in the 1600’s, largely because the white Europeans introduced infectious diseases to which the native populations’ immune systems offered no resistance, they left traces behind: stands of unique vegetation unlike that which prevailed elsewhere in the rainforest where humans hadn’t settled. Most of the research was done in a border region between Brazil and French Guiana – which probably explains why many of the interviews for this show were conducted in French rather than English or Portuguese. Among the most spectacular sites were cave paintings rivaling the famous ones in Lascaux, France – which we were told are under threat from colonies of highly dangerous wasps which like to build their nests on the walls that the indigenous people painted over 10,000 years ago. Given that the stings from these wasps can be deadly, I was surprised that the scientists researching the cave paintings were wearing normal clothes rather than the apiary costumes worn by beekeepers.

Also found among the Amazon cave dwellings were elaborately decorated pottery urns which seem to have been made to house the remains of their dead. The indigenous Amazonians had figured out how to make ceramics – including how to fire them so they became watertight and permanent – at least as early as Asians and Europeans started doing that. “Hidden in the Amazon” was a remarkable episode that showed that we don’t always know as much as we think we do, and in particular about an area of the earth that had long been considered “unspoiled by man” until modern technologies and the discoveries made with it showed that it wasn’t so “unspoiled” after all and it was the invasion by white people and their diseases that so utterly wiped out the indigenous people of the Amazon that for centuries they were assumed never to have existed at all.

The Show (MGM, 1927)

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

Last night (Monday, November 13) I ran my husband Charles a couple of unusually interesting films on YouTube posts. One of them, The Argyle Secrets, I’d seen before on Turner Classic Movies via Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show; the other, The Show, had been on TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” a week ago Sunday but I hadn’t watched it. The Show was a 1927 late-silent production directed by Tod Browning – indeed, his name was considered enough of a “draw” he got two credits, “A Tod Browning Production” and “Directed by Tod Browning” – starring John Gilbert, French actress “Renée Adorée” (one of the most ridiculously phony screen names of all time, though she was actually French and was born either Jeanne de la Fonte or Jeanne de la Fontein, sources differ) and Lionel Barrymore in a script by frequent Browning collaborator Waldemar Young based on a novel from 1910 called The Day of Souls (which would have been a better title for the movie, too!) by Charles Tenney Jackson. It’s set in Hungary, apparently during World War I (there’s a reference in one of Joseph Farnham’s intertitles to a soldier allegedly receiving the Emperor’s Cross, and during World War I Hungary was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and it opens at a carnival where Cock Robin (John Gilbert) is a barker – as Tod Browning had been himself before he got into filmmaking. But he’s more than a barker: he’s also a participant in the acts, including a re-enactment of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils in which he plays Jokanaan (a.k.a. John the Baptist). Renée Adorée plays the girl who portrays Salomé – if she has another name, it’s not given in the credits – and she’s got a crush on Cock Robin, while “The Greek” (Lionel Barrymore, when he was still relatively young and could walk) has a crush on her and is jealous of any other guy who pays attention to her.

“The Greek” is also a robber, and in the opening scene he watched a country shepherd named Konrad Driskai (Russ Powell) being paid a substantial cash bankroll for a flock of sheep he’s driven to Budapest. Naturally “The Greek” is after that money, and he kills Driskai for it – only the money isn’t there. It turns out Driskai left the money with his daughter Lena (Gertrude Short), who’s not bad-looking but is heavy-set. Cock Robin has been courting her, though less out of any real interest and more after her money; they go on at least two dinner dates in which she pays (and he’s quite blunt about it: he asks her, “Where will you pay to feed me tonight?”), and when he learns that her dad is dead and there are a lot more sheep in his herds than just the one he sold already, Cock Robin determines to marry Lena to get his hands on the sheep and the money he can make from them. There’s also a subplot dealing with the carnival’s freak show, including an exhibit that includes a poisonous lizard and a liniment supposedly made from its oils and advertised as a cure-all. Only the lizard gets loose during one of the shows and kills a patron; at first both Charles and I assumed this was a fake – a Miracle Man-style sham in which the victim only faked death so the super-liniment could revive him – but no-o-o-o-o, he’s really, most sincerely dead. The cops are pretty clueless and don’t make any sort of connection between Driskai’s murder and the “accident” at the carnival. Cock Robin absconds with Lena’s money after Lena flees the scene, having been warned by Salomé that Cock Robin was only after her money.

Then an old blind man identified in the cast list only as “The Soldier” (Edward Connelly), who lives in the same building as Cock Robin and Salomé, turns up and asks Salomé to read him a letter, ostensibly from his son. Salomé makes up an heroic story about the son, who’s supposedly been awarded the Emperor’s Cross for his heroism in the war, but is actually in prison less than 50 feet away and is scheduled to be hanged the next morning. (We’re not told for what crime, but it really doesn’t matter.) The next morning the blind soldier is awakened by the sound of marching-band music from the street below – he thinks it’s the army returning victorious and his son is with them, but it’s really just the annual St. Stephen’s Day parade (acceptably dramatized here but vividly brought to life in Erich von Stroheim’s contemporary film The Wedding March) – and just after his son is hanged, the old man (who's also Salomé's father) has a heart attack and dies as well. Meanwhile, “The Greek,” who’s already attempted to murder Cock Robin by using a real sword instead of the fake one with which he’s supposed to sever Jokanaan’s head in the act (Salomé realizes it and stops him in time) has stolen the poisonous lizard (ya remember the poisonous lizard?), intending to sic it on Salomé as revenge for her disinterest in him. But the lizard ends up biting “The Greek” and sending him to his grave just before the cops empty four bullets into it, blessedly killing it before it can take out any more cast members. Cock Robin assumes he’s going to be arrested for stealing Lena’s father’s money – there’s even a tearful parting scene between him and Salomé reprising the ending from two years before of Browning’s silent version of The Unholy Three with Lon Chaney, Sr. and Mae Busch – but in the end, since he returned the money to Lena, he isn’t prosecuted and he and Adorée return to their gigs in the carnival, with this time her surreptitiously kissing his supposedly severed head at the end.

Though The Show might have been even better with Lon Chaney in Gilbert’s role (Gilbert would later replace Chaney after the latter’s death in a 1931 MGM film called The Phantom of Paris, which MGM developed for Chaney since it was based on a story by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, which had been one of Chaney’s biggest hits), it’s quite a movie. The high points are Browning’s direction and John Arnold’s cinematography, which though The Show isn’t a horror film is appropriately Gothic and darkly atmospheric. Indeed, Charles suggested that The Show was a film noir before film noir became a “thing,” and it certainly deals with the dark side of human nature and is presented in an appropriately shadowy manner. Gilbert’s rambunctiousness got annoying under lesser directors, but Browning successfully tames him the way King Vidor and George Hill had in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim had in The Merry Widow (both from 1925, and unquestionably John Gilbert’s finest films). Renée Adorée is merely serviceable as usual – and I’m surprised MGM’s promotion didn’t make more of the fact that this film reunited her and Gilbert from The Big Parade, the second highest-grossing silent film of all time (after The Birth of a Nation) – but Lionel Barrymore is excellent and doesn’t try to inflate his character from a petty crook to some sort of symbol of evil. (Boris Karloff worked with both John and Lionel Barrymore and said he thought Lionel was by far the better actor.) Though I had my doubts about whether The Show would be watching without Lon Chaney in it, it turned out to be a great movie and an important precursor of both horror and noir – and there’s a marvelously ironic title in which the carnival manager chews out the people playing in his freak show and says, “You’re supposed to be freaks, not vampires!” I was struck by the irony that in effect this title referenced Browning’s two most famous films to modern audiences (though both weren’t made until after The Show), Dracula and Freaks!

The Argyle Secrets (Eronel Productions, Film Classics, 1948)

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

After The Show I wanted to run my husband Charles The Argyle Secrets because, even though I’d seen it myself over a year ago on the TCM “Noir Alley” series hosted by Eddle Muller (who apparently co-produced a major restoration of this film), I’d been reminded of it again by reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel. When I’d seen The Argyle Secrets I had pretty much written it off as an inferior, though still intriguing, knockoff of The Maltese Falcon. What I hadn’t realized was that the film’s MacGuffin, “The Argyle Album,” really existed – or at least something like it did. It was a legal report written by O. John Rogge, the prosecutor who took over the 1942 sedition case in New York City against over 30 Nazi and fascist sympathizers after the first prosecutor, William Maloney, was fired under pressure from secretly pro-Nazi members of Congress. The sedition trial lasted over a year, partly because the 33 defendants and their attorneys did everything they could to slow down the proceedings, and finally ended in a mistrial after the judge presiding over the case suddenly died. By then it was 1944 and the government decided not to pursue a retrial, figuring that by then World War II was pretty much over, but Rogge was permitted to write a report. Alas, President Harry Truman and his attorney general, Tom Clark (Ramsey Clark’s father), decided to suppress the report, and when Rogge gave lectures about the case to various college political science classes, they threatened Rogge with prosecution himself for leaking government secrets. Despite one major lapse – in the Rosenberg espionage case, Rogge represented Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, and arranged the plea deal with the government that led to the death sentence against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – for the most part Rogge post-war was an effective advocate against Red-baiting and for civil rights, including representing African-American clients on appeals after white prosecutors, judges and juries had railroaded them. In 1946 Rogge gave a speech in which he reflected on the extent to which the American “line” had changed from anti-fascism to anti-Communism; he said, “The removal of Hitler and Mussolini and a few of their collaborators does not mean that fascism is dead. Now the fascists can take a more subtle disguise; they can come forward and simply say, 'I am anti-Communist.’”

Written and directed by Cy Endfield, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who was forced to continue his career in Britain to escape the House Un-American Activities Committee and its inquisition-like tactics against Left-leaning filmmakers, The Argyle Secrets is a quite effective action melodrama in which the titular “Argyle Papers” are encased in an elaborately bound book with a red leather cover and an insignia of a two-headed eagle (also the emblem of Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the way). The central character of The Argyle Secrets is Los Angeles Herald reporter Harry Mitchell (William Gargan, considerably more heavy-set than he’d been a decade earlier in Universal’s The House of Fear (1939) and the later Columbia Ellery Queen movies), who learns of the existence of the Argyle Papers from fellow reporter Allen Pierce (George Anderson), whom Mitchell encounters when he visits the dying Pierce in the hospital. Later Pierce is found dead – he was stabbed with a scalpel but only after his death, which was faked to look like heart failure but was really poison fed him by a phony doctor who really meant to kill him – and Mitchell realizes that the cops suspect him of killing Pierce. So he launches his own investigation to find the Argyle Papers and also clear his name. One of the ironies about The Argyle Secrets is that at least two women in the cast went on to achieve at least minor stardom in 1950’s TV sitcoms: Marjorie Lord, who was Danny Thomas’s wife on the series Make Room for Daddy, plays Pierce’s secretary (who turns out to have had the Argyle Album in her possession all along after all the violent goings-on between the various criminal organizations seeking to recover it); and the femme fatale role of “Merle” (essentially the Brigid O’Shaughnessy of this tale) is Barbara Billingsley, June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver. And the first time I saw this film it seemed so much like The Maltese Falcon that I expected the Argyle Album to be just that – blank pieces of paper in an elaborately bound notebook!

Rooming with Danger (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 12) I subjected my husband Charles to a couple more Lifetime movies, Rooming with Danger and A Roommate to Die For. I was interested in Rooming with Danger because it was directed by one of my favorite Lifetime writers, Christine Conradt, but alas she didn’t write this one. John F. Hayes did, and he didn’t follow Conradt’s example of making the villain morally complex and giving her (and this time it is a her; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once described the Lifetime formula as “Pussies in Peril,” and this is one of the sub-genre in which the pussy is in peril from another pussy) some dimension and an understandable and even relatable motivation. Oh, he tried, but it didn’t really work. The central character – the pussy in peril, as it were – of Rooming with Danger is Angelina Ayerson (Camila Senna), who works as a suicide prevention counselor at a youth center and as the story opens is in the process of leaving a monumentally abusive boyfriend, emergency ambulance driver Marco (Adrian Quiñonez). Since they’d been living together, Angelina needs a new place to stay, and her friend Gaby (Emily Roslyn Villareal), who works for an advertising agency, helps her move out and brings along her friend from work, hotshot ad executive Diego (Christopher Millan). Immediately Marco assumes that Diego is Angelina’s new lover, which he isn’t – at least, not yet, though Gaby is industriously working to set them up with each other (and Christopher Millan is hot enough that in most Lifetime movies he’d be playing the villain). Gaby invites Angelina to stay with her, but Angelina doesn’t want to because she figures Marco already knows where Gaby lives. Instead she just stays there for a few days – during which Marco comes over in the middle of the night, hammers on the door and leaves a brick outside – until she answers an ad from Bianca Hernandez (Daniela Rivera) for a roommate.

Bianca lives in a stunning beach house – she works as a free-lance fashion designer and one wonders how she could afford it, even with someone else to share the rent – with an outdoor swimming pool (though, contrary to the principle of Chekhov’s pistol, no one drowns in it). Alas, by moving in with Bianca after leaving Marco, Angelina has leaped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Bianca first keeps casting Angelina looks that make her seem like the Cheshire Cat. Then she turns monumentally possessive, insisting on tagging along on Angelina’s girl-dates with Gaby and at one point calling Angelina “Alicia.” Alicia, it turns out, is Bianca’s now-dead younger sister, a troubled teen who killed herself one night after sending Bianca out on a dinner date with their parents. So Bianca keeps bringing in new roommates, trying to make them over into a replacement for Alicia, and knocking them off when they resist. There’s a marvelously ironic moment in which director Conradt cuts from Angelina telling Gaby, “I’m so 100 percent over psychos,” to a shot of Bianca tossing her immediately previous roommate’s body into a lake in a black leather body bag which Bianca, with her fashion skills, has custom-made. There’s also some business over an heirloom ring with which Angelina’s grandfather proposed to her grandmother, which Angelina’s mother sent to Marco, not realizing that they’d broken up. Angelina calls Marco to ask if she can come over and get back the ring, only Marco won’t give it to her unless she agrees to marry him. When she refuses, Marco pulls a gun on both her and Bianca, who’d tagged along ostensibly to offer moral support. As they flee for their lives, Bianca asks Angelina if she had any idea Marco owned a gun, and Angelina says she didn’t – though this is the United States of America, after all, where guns are as easy to get as chewing gum.

Later Bianca goes over to Marco’s place and kills him, dumping his body over the same railing onto the same lake she used for her previous roommate (and encasing it in an identical black leather body bag), after which she presents Angelina the ring and says she had a lawyer friend who helped her recover it legally. The climax occurs at Bianca’s home, in which she’s gone totally off the rails and threatens Gaby – only Angelina is able to sneak up behind Bianca and take her out with the proverbial blunt object. Before that Bianca has stabbed Diego (ya remember Diego?), who came out in order to help (when she killed Marco she also stole his cell phone, and used it to send phony texts to Angelina posing as Marco) but got assaulted with a stiletto (and having just watched Cry Terror! I was well aware of how sharp stilettos are, since writer Andrew Stone had helpfully inserted an explanation). Fortunately Diego is rescued and taken to the emergency room in time, and the film ends with Angelina moving in with Gaby while also dating Diego. Rooming with Danger is an O.K. Lifetime movie, not as good as it could have been with Christine Conradt writing as well as directing (she surely would have made much more of Bianca’s backstory and made us feel truly sorry for her!), and it has one of those annoying open-ended endings Lifetime has become partial to, with Bianca in a women’s jail obsessing about her cellmate and doing a drawing of her, posting it on the wall of their cell, to indicate that she’ll be the next object of Bianca’s sick obsessions. (A Roomnmate to Die For also has an open-ended ending like that: in this one, the bad guy turns up in San Francisco, 500 miles away from his previous target in Los Angeles, running the same scam on another woman.)