The Dragon Painter (Haworth Pictures Corporation, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that TCM showed two silent films from 1919 featuring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, born Kintarō Hayakawa in Nanaura (now Chikura), Chiba Prefecture, Japan on June 10, 1886. Hayakawa’s family wanted him to become an officer in the Japanese Navy, but he ruptured his eardrum in a diving accident at 18 and failed the Navy physical. Hayakawa was so convinced he’d dishonored his father that he attempted suicide. His dad rescued him in time but Hayakawa decided to leave Japan and emigrate to the U.S. He went to the University of Chicago, where he studied economics and played on the football team, where he was once penalized for using a jiu-jitsu move on an opposing player. At least that’s the story he told in his autobiography, though other researchers have disputed it. Hayakawa got into acting in 1914 when he joined a stage company producing a play called The Typhoon. There he met actress Tsuru Aoki, whom he later married. Aoki got the legendary Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince to see the play, and Ince liked it so much he bought the movie rights and filmed it with the identical cast. Hayakawa’s darkly handsome looks, his wiry athletic physique, and his relatively restrained acting style (what he called muga, meaning “the absence of doing”) made him an instant sensation. Ince produced two more films with him, The Wrath of the Gods (with his wife Aoki) and The Sacrifice. Then Hayakawa jumped ship to Paramount and for his second film there made The Cheat for director Cecil B. DeMille (reviewed on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/05/cheat-paramount-19151918.html).

This was a wild, sexually driven melodrama in which stage actress Fannie Ward played the wife of a wealthy stockbroker who embezzles $10,000 from her husband that was intended for a charity. Needing to replace the money immediately, she finds that the only person who will help her is a well-to-do Asian (Sessue Hayakawa) – he was Japanese in the 1915 version but was changed to a Burmese in the 1918 reissue after Japanese-American groups complained about the racism – who insists that he’ll give her the money only if she’ll have sex with him. When she goes for their fateful meeting, he literally brands her on the shoulder to claim her as his personal property – and she kills him, is put on trial but acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Hayakawa understandably got upset that, while he was a major star, all he got offered was roles as a dastardly sexual villain. In 1919, in an extraordinarily racially aware remark for the era, he told an interviewer, “Such roles are not true to our Japanese nature. ... They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are." Accordingly he teamed up with director William Worthington and investor William Joseph Connery, whom Hayakawa meant when they were both students at the University of Chicago, to form Haworth Pictures, taking the company’s name from the first syllables of Hayakawa’s and Worthington’s last name and designing a logo strikingly reminiscent of the Rising Sun Japanese flag. They cut a distribution deal with Robertson-Cole and made 23 films over the next four years, until business disputes with Robertson-Cole led to the dissolution of the company and Hayakawa’s departure from Hollywood. He went to France and made a film there (ironically also for Robertson-Cole), returning to America in 1926 for Broadway and vaudeville appearances, and not making another U.S. film until Daughter of the Dragon (1931) – ironically as yet another stereotypical Asian villain.

TCM showed two surviving examples of Haworth’s output, The Dragon Painter and The Tong Man, both from 1919, both directed by Worthington, written by Richard Schayer and photographed by Frank D. Williams. The Dragon Painter, based on a novel by Mary McNeil Fenollosa, turned out to be a gem, a quite beautiful and haunting movie about an aging painter, Kano Indara (Edward Pell), who’s worried that the long generation of painters named Indara is going to die with him because he hasn’t had a son and he hasn’t found an apprentice good enough to train. A friend named Uchida (Toyo Fujita) finds a series of drawings in the mountains; they’ve been made by a “wild,” untrained artist named Tatsu (Sessue Hayakawa). Tatsu is convinced that a thousand years previously a stunningly attractive young woman was turned into a dragon by a wicked sorcerer, but he believes that if he keeps drawing mountain scenes, sooner or later the dragon woman will appear, change into a normal human female and be his partner and companion. Uchida and two of his friends decide to go into the mountains, bring Tatsu back, introduce him to Indara and make him the apprentice that will continue the Indara painting tradition. They do this by convincing Tatsu that Indara’s daughter, Ume-Ko (Tsuru Aoki), is the legendary dragon woman of Tatsu’s dreams. Ume-Ko had earlier auditioned to be her father’s apprentice herself, but he predictably dismissed her work as “good – for a woman – but I need a son.” Tatsu and Ume-Ko duly get married, but marital happiness proves fatal to his talent as an artist; he does only mediocre work from then on. Then Ume-Ko dies, and Tatsu’s grief at losing her leads him to a series of utterly brilliant paintings that are exhibited in a one-man show and become a huge success. The unhappy Tatsu starts seeing visions of Ume-Ko, or her ghost, or something, and eventually it turns out that Ume-Ko is alive after all – she and her dad faked her death so Tatsu could regain his painter’s mojo – and they have a long, happy and artistically successful life together.

What struck me most about The Dragon Painter is the overall visual look: Frank D. Williams’s cinematography really made the movie look like Japanese art, and though there were a few modest color tints they didn’t distract or call attention to themselves the way they sometimes do. There have been two major restoration jobs on The Dragon Painter, in 1988 and 2005, and given what they had to work with, the film as it stands holds up quite well. There were two surviving copies of the movie, one from The Netherlands in the original American cut, and one from France of an alternate European version. The restorers, including the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and a Dutch company called EYE, worked from both those sources to produce as complete a version as possible. When scenes appeared in both versions, they went with the Dutch one because it was of better picture quality. This left the problem of intertitles, since the two extant prints had them in Dutch or French. They came up with new English titles drawn from the ones in the Dutch and French versions, and also by reference to Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s source novel. They used surviving English-language versions of other Haworth films as references to make sure the titles matched the era typographically (a consideration that’s often been ignored in silent restorations). And they hired Mark Izu to do a new musical score for the film; that’s often a source of dread for me, but Izu’s score, evocative not only of traditional Japanese music but 1960’s jazz as well (Izu’s band was a four-piece jazz ensemble including a soprano saxophone played very much in the style of John Coltrane, especially in his forays into “Eastern” music), was evocative and very much suited the mood of the film. The Dragon Painter was a quite beautiful mood piece and, despite the predictable melodramatic nature of the plot, definitely fulfilled Hayakawa’s desire for a role in a story that “shall reveal us as we really are.”

The Tong Man (Haworth Pictures Corporation, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the second film on TCM’s November 10 salute to Sessue Hayakawa, The Tong Man, was nowhere nearly as good. Based on a 1912 novel by Clyde Westover called The Dragon’s Daughter, The Tong Man was an all too predictable story of the tongs, the Chinese gangs that allegedly terrorized Chinatowns in American cities with large Chinese populations in the early years of the 20th century. Predictably, racist propaganda made them seem considerably deadlier and more dangerous than they really were. Ironically given that one of Sessue Hayakawa’s stated aims in starting Haworth Pictures was to challenge the racist stereotypes against Japanese people, The Tong Man played up many of the racist stereotypes against Chinese people – so much so that Chinese consul-general C. H. Chu and the Chinese Six Companies, the most powerful Chinese-American organization in the U.S. at the time, unsuccessfully sued to have the film banned in San Francisco, where it takes place. Clyde Westover insisted that the film was based on his own observations of tong criminality when he worked as a reporter in San Francisco, and one Hayakawa biographer, Daisuke Miyao, has argued that Hayakawa deliberately wanted to take attention away from alleged Japanese villainy by playing bad guys from other Asian countries – which didn’t work because they all blended together into a Hollywood image of “The Yellow Peril.”

My husband Charles noted the similarities between this story and The Ace of Hearts (1921), a Goldwyn Pictures film based on a magazine serial and novel by Gouverneur Morris, and it’s not clear which came first. Westover’s novel came out in 1912 and Morris’s in 1917, while The Tong Man was made in 1919 and The Ace of Hearts in 1921, so The Tong Man seems to have been first – though the situation, a basically decent man forced by his membership in an evil organization to murder someone he loves, had probably been used plenty of times before. Hayakawa plays Luk Chan, member of the tong run by Ming Tai (Mark Robbins) and boyfriend of Sen Chee (Helen Jerome Eddy). Alas, Sen Chee’s father, opium dealer Louie Toy (Toyo Fujita), has run afoul of the tong by refusing their demands for protection money. Ming Tai has fallen in love – or at least lust – with Sen Chee, and he insists as part of his demands on Toy that he be given Sen Chee’s hand in marriage. Naturally, Sen Chee wants nothing to do with him, especially in the bedroom. So Ming Tai convenes a meeting of the tong leadership to decide whether to kill Louie Toy for defying them – and once they give the go-code to kill him, they draw lots to see who will actually commit the murder. Of course Luk Chan gets the assignment to kill Louie Toy, and he’s saved from having to do so only through the intervention of his friend Lucero (Yutaka Abe), a so-called “lascar” (defined on Wikipedia as “a sailor or militiaman from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Arab world, British Somaliland or other lands east of the Cape of Good Hope who was employed on European ships from the 16th century until the mid-20th century”) who works out a way to fake Louie Toy’s assassination by hiding him inside a secret panel that looks like a dragon’s head. Alas, Ming Tai emerges from the dragon’s head and claims Sen Chee as his bride.

At one point she tries to commit suicide with a packet of poisoned incense she got from her father’s stash, and for a while (especially since the titles had name-checked Romeo and Juliet) I thought that Luk Chan was going to join her, inhale the deadly incense (which my husband Charles compared to the fumes of the poisonous Datura plant with which the title character of Leo Delibes’s opera Lakmé offs herself), and die with her. Instead, along with Lucero, she and Luk Chan get on an ocean liner and escape to China. The Tong Man is an awkward movie, surprisingly racist given Hayakawa’s stated motives in founding Haworth in the first place, and with weak direction by Worthington – who’d acquitted himself marvelously in the more fable-like The Dragon Painter. The film is dull as dishwater and doesn’t really start to move until the final scenes representing the tong on the march against their recalcitrant member. While at least this one survived with the original English intertitles and didn’t have to be pieced together from multiple prints from other countries, it’s mostly a curio and Hayakawa’s acting is the only good thing about it. Critics both then and now have also attacked it for the many white actors in “yellowface” playing Asian characters. Helen Jerome Eddy must have had some box-office appeal then, since she’s billed under Hayakawa on his title card, but today one wonders why he didn’t cast his wife Tsuru Aoki as Sen Chee instead!

Buried Alive and Survived (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 9) I watched a couple of Lifetime movies in quick succession, Buried Alive and Survived and Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story. Buried Alive and Survived is one of Lifetime’s “race movies,” in which all but one of the characters and the actors playing them are Black. The central characters are Alicia (Eva Marcille) – I thought I heard a mention in the dialogue that her last name was “Silverstein,” an odd but not impossible name for an African-American – and her ex-husband Victor (Tyler Lepley). Victor has just been released from prison after serving eight years because the prisons were full. It’s not that clear from the script by Nigel Campbell (story), Gregory Small and Richard Blaney (screenplay) just what crime Victor had committed, but it involved an accomplice named Stevie G. (Lamar K. Cheston) whom Victor protected by not turning state’s evidence and naming his co-conspirators. In the intervening years Stevie has built up a legal business restoring old trucks, and in a scene that suggests someone on the writing committee saw the 1948 film I Walk Alone (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/10/i-walk-alone-hal-wallis-productions.html), Victor shows up at Stevie’s garage to demand his share of the profits from their criminal enterprise. When Stevie says he doesn’t have it – he spent it all, though he pleads with Victor to wait a while until he earns back the money and can pay him – Victor is impatient and gets his revenge by smashing the window of a truck Stevie has just painstakingly restored. Then Victor spots a new black truck Stevie has just bought for himself and says he’ll accept it as payment.

Victor drives off in the truck and seeks out Alicia, who’s living as a single parent and raising their son Malcolm (Jaeden White). She has a support network consisting of her sister Kamlyn (Christie Leverette) and their all-wise Aunt Jo (Cocoa Brown). Victor shows up at Alicia’s place, all smiles and on his best behavior, but making it clear that he intends to retake his place at the head of their family whether she likes it or not. Then Victor leaves, and Alicia immediately decides to move, taking as much stuff as she and Malcolm can carry and staying with a friend or relative until she can re-establish herself and find her own place. Malcolm is understandably perturbed – he’s overjoyed that he finally has a real father instead of the ghostly image of one – but Alicia insists. Only as soon as she’s packed and ready to go, she opens her front door – and Victor is still there. He overpowers her and forces her into the truck, takes her to the motel room where he’s staying, and ties her up in the bathroom, then heads back to Alicia’s place to pick up their son Malcolm. This all happens half an hour into the movie, though it isn’t until half an hour later that Alicia gets literally buried alive. Victor finds an old wooden box made of slats and decides to bury Alicia in it because, as he tells her, “When I was in prison I felt like I was buried alive. Now I’m going to give you that same feeling.” Victor blames Alicia for his incarceration since she was the one who ratted him out to the police in the first place.

The second half of the movie consists of elaborate chase sequences, as Victor shoots a redneck – the only white person we see in the entire movie – who owns the property on which he buried Alicia alive. The guy came after Victor with a long gun, but Victor was able to wrestle it away from him and shoot him with it, killing him. Meanwhile Alicia is able at great effort to dig herself out of her premature grave; she has some sort of tool containing a flashlight and some keys with which she’s able to make a hole in one of the slats. Fortunately for her, it was heavily raining that night, which turned the earth in which Victor had buried her into mud. There are some nicely done suspense scenes from director Manu Boyer (a man, and mostly known as an actor; he directed some previous Lifetime movies, including one called Secrets of a Marine’s Wife [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/secrets-of-marines-wife-2021.html], in which the titular secret was she was married to one Marine but having extra-relational activity with another) as she slowly digs her way through both the box and the mud before finally getting out. Alicia finds the redneck’s truck and uses it to escape to civilization – fortunately, its headlights were still on after all that time (wouldn’t they have run down, rendering the battery dead and the truck undrivable?). At first she stops by her house, where she finds Kamlyn knocked out by Victor, who has kidnapped Malcolm and driven him off heaven knows were.

But the good guys have another stroke of good luck: Malcolm thought to take along the electronic tracker with which Alicia had outfitted the new pair of shoes she’d bought him for his birthday. Alicia and Aunt Jo are able to track him with the device on Jo’s computer, and though Victor discovers the device and smashes it, they’re able to fix his location before that. Jo sensibly asks Alicia to let her call 911 and get the police involved, but Alicia, like so many stupid Lifetime heroines before her, insists on driving off in her own car to confront the villain herself. Ultimately the film ends in a church – conveniently open even though no one from its staff is there – in which Victor corners Alicia with the long gun and fires at her every chance he gets, insisting that he’s going to fulfill the marriage vow, “‘Til Death Do Us Part.” Only just as he’s about to knock her off, his gun turns out to have run out of bullets, and ultimately the police arrive and Victor decides to commit “suicide by cop,” walking out with the empty gun and getting himself shot fatally. The first half-hour was pretty slow going and the rest verged all too often on the silly, but Buried Alive and Survived had two saving graces: the performances of Tyler Lepley and Eva Marcille. Lepley is tall and drop-dead gorgeous – he flashes a very nice basket both in the light brown pants he wears to the confrontation with Stevie and the blue jeans he wears thereafter – and he’s an expert actor at playing the rapid-fire mood shifts of his character. Victor is a psychopath who can make himself genuinely charming, and for once in a Lifetime movie we aren’t shaking our heads wondering what on earth attracted this woman to that man. And Marcille matches him, nailing the character’s desperation and also her resourcefulness. Their performances and Boyer’s tough, no-nonsense suspense direction help Buried Alive and Survived overcome a silly, plot hole-filled script as well as a title that is itself a “spoiler.”

Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story (Howard Braustein Films, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 9), just after the Lifetime movie Buried Alive and Survived, I kept Lifetime on for Searching for a Serial Killer: The Regina Smith Story. I’d really wanted to see this one based on the promos, which featured a Black woman cop talking to prostitutes on the streets of Dallas, Texas (in Oak Cliff, Dallas’s lowest-status neighborhood and the birthplace of blues giant Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who on his first records in 1929 was actually billed as “Oak Cliff T-Bone”), with them pleading with her to catch the serial killer that was terrorizing the neighborhood and killing them off. The film, directed by Wendy Ord from a script by Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson, is actually a good deal deeper and richer than that. It begins with Regina Smith (Karrueche Tran) struggling to raise herself and her daughter Nikki (Ella Quashie) as a single mother in Dallas, Texas following the breakup of her relationship with the girl’s father. One evening she sees a TV ad asking people to join the Dallas Police Department, and she immediately responds because she’s tired of feeding herself and Nikki macaroni and cheese for dinner every night and could use a steady job. She immediately enrolls in the Dallas Police Academy, where she’s put through a tough regime of training following an embarrassing incident in which she’s advised to wear something nice on her first day – and she puts on a faux fur coat and high heels. Then her car breaks down on the way and she’s forced to take off her shoes and carry them as she runs to her first day of classes. She’s put through a rigorous physical exercise regimen under a brutal, no-nonsense captain who predictably isn’t about to cut her any slack just because she’s both the only woman and the only African-American in the class.

Ultimately Smith makes it through the Academy and gets sworn in as a uniformed police officer. As such she’s assigned the graveyard shift and given a white male partner, James Rudolph (Paul Vos), where they drive through Oak Park every night and keep an eye on the prostitutes. They’re also supposed to be on the lookout for crack cocaine users and dealers, this being 1990 at the height of the crack epidemic. (Today the biggest drug issue for beat cops would be fentanyl.) Regina Smith heard the lectures about “community policing” at the Academy and, unlike most cops then or now, took them seriously. She decided it was part of her remit to get to know the regular street hookers and ultimately befriend them – much to the consternation of her partner, who’s one of those old-line cops that divides the world into people who live within the law and people who break it – and prostitutes are by definition lawbreakers. Then one of the hookers Smith befriended, Mary Pratt (Hannah Krostewitz), is found murdered, shot to death and dumped in a vacant yard. Though the police don’t release this detail to the media, Mary’s body is missing her eyeballs. Shortly thereafter another white prostitute, Susan Peterson (Lauren Jackson), is also found dead with her eyeballs removed. Officer Smith longs to investigate the cases herself, but her partner warns that that’s above her pay grade and she’s supposed to refer all her evidence to plainclothes detective Silva (Roark Critchlow), in charge of the investigation, who doesn’t want her help and makes that clear to her. Rudolph warns her that she could get fired if she tries to investigate the case herself. She’s also having to deal with complaints from the relative she’s paying to look after Nikki on her long nights out.

Regina Smith’s life looks up when she meets and starts dating Norm (Christopher Russell), a SWAT officer. She makes it clear that putting up with a daughter at the edge of teenagerhood is part of the deal, and when he says he’s O.K. with that they go on dinner dates. Things go well enough between them that they actually get married – and presumably Nikki is O.K. with suddenly having a white stepfather – but then Norm gets killed in the line of duty and Smith learns about it pretty much by accident. Undaunted, Smith continues her patrols around Oak Park and the prostitutes she’s befriended desperately plead with her to catch the man who’s been killing them – even while they also remain guarded around her. Smith’s patrols also attract the ire of Deshaun (Dallas Blake), a Black pimp who runs several of the “girls” of all races. We know who the killer is well before Smith or any of the other characters do when we see him driving a big old Cadillac, cruising the neighborhood and then coming home to his live-in girlfriend and doing the full-blown banality-of-evil number with her. He’s Charles Albright (Ted Cole), and in a scene with his girlfriend as he’s painting a replica eye, he explains why he’s doing the murders. It seems that his mother left home and became a prostitute herself; he’s never forgiven her for leaving him, and he’s painted her but without eyes. So he takes out his revenge by picking up hookers, driving them to deserted spots and killing them, then harvesting their eyes with skills he learned from his adoptive parents, who taught him taxidermy. Ironically, the one murder the real Albright was actually convicted of was his third, of a Black hooker named Shirley Williams who was 45 years old, considerably older than the two previous white victims. I’m not sure what the factual basis for this is, but the film depicts Williams ending up as the target just because the white hooker she was next to when Albright’s car pulled up decided she wanted to call it quits for the evening and sent Williams instead. When Williams’s body was found, her eyeballs were removed but more sloppily than those of the other two.

Regina Smith herself recounted how she identified Albright as the killer in an interview with A&E’s crime blog (https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/regina-smith-eyeball-killer): “We had been telling homicide since the night after Mary Pratt’s murder, [witness] Veronica Rodriguez had a big scar on her head and neck. We were about to arrest her for prostitution, and she said, ‘You know I saw Mary get killed.’ Some prostitutes lie to avoid getting arrested. We arrested her many times before, but I took notes on everything she was saying, and [my partner] and I immediately relayed that information to the homicide division. When Susan Peterson was killed, we let them know [again] what Veronica had said because she never deviated from her story. I made another arrest with her that was significant because she was with a [customer] in a truck. She told me, ‘Don’t arrest him, he’s the one that saved me the night Mary got killed.’ I took his information and relayed it to the homicide division. After the third murder [of Williams], I laid this out in front of homicide. I had taken copious notes of other girls telling us the different experiences they had. We had one prostitute, Brenda White, who told me she had a trick who went bad on her and she Maced him to get out of the car. She described him to me, and I went to the jail with that description and the information from Veronica Rodriguez. I put the information into the jail system and got Charles Albright’s criminal record and a photograph that fit who Brenda White said she had to Mace. We’d been telling homicide over and over, and they did not listen to us. So we went in person, and I showed them my notes.”

The detectives ultimately tracked down Albright and allowed Smith and her partner actually to make the arrest. Though Albright was charged with all three murders, he was just convicted of killing Williams because, as Smith explained to A&E, “The only reason he was convicted is because of the evidence I found in the field: a yellow raincoat Shirley was last seen wearing by another prostitute who gave it to her. [The other prostitute] saw her get in the car with her regular, whom she called ‘Pappy.’ I found that raincoat in the field where they said they did their tricks. That raincoat contained a squirrel tail hair – the same type found in a vacuum cleaner in Charles Albright’s home after his arrest.” Smith went on to a 26-year career with the Dallas Police Department before she retired at the rank of lieutenant, but she never forgot the Albright case. After he was convicted in 1991 he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the John Montfort Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas, where he remained until he died in 2020. Before that Smith tried to get in to see Albright to ask him what he did with the victims’ missing eyes, but by the time she got there he was in hospice care and she wasn’t allowed to see him. Smith told A&E, “I wanted to ask him, ‘Why did you do it? What did you do with those girls’ eyes?’ We will never know because he took that secret to his grave.” Lifetime’s dramatization of this grim story is pitch-perfect, especially in the dogged performance of Karrueche Tran as Regina Smith. Wendy Ord’s direction is vivid and dramatic, and the script betrays no hint of the “No Humans Involved” attitude police officers all too frequently betray when faced with crimes in which the victims were prostitutes. Searching for a Serial Killer is a dark tale, but it’s told eloquently well and this film is Lifetime at its infrequent best.

The Fatal Witness (Republic, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 8), in order to fill time before KPBS showed the latest episode of Death in Paradise, I looked on YouTube for a movie just under an hour long and found it in The Fatal Witness, a 1945 would-be thriller from Republic Pictures directed by Lesley Selander from a script by Cleve F. Adams and Jerry Sackheim based on a short story by Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903-1979) called “The Marsh Light.” That same story was adapted considerably better in 1959 for an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show, “Banquo’s Chair,” with Hitchcock directing it himself. (Hitchcock personally directed about 20 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including the season openers and whichever other ones caught his fancy.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen “Banquo’s Chair” but the combination of a shorter (half-hour, less commercials) running time and an infinitely better director would probably make it more interesting than The Fatal Witness. Though Evelyn Ankers and Richard Fraser are top-billed, the real central character of The Fatal Witness is John Bedford (George Leigh), scapegrace nephew of Lady Elizabeth Ferguson (Barbara Everest), who keeps threatening to disinherit him. (In “The Marsh Light” it was an uncle, not an aunt, who stood between John and an inheritance.) Another relative, ingénue Priscilla Ames (Evelyn Ankers), tries to get Aunt Elizabeth to lighten up on John – the hint is she’s in love with him, which would mean they aren’t close enough on the family tree for it to be incest – but Aunt Elizabeth is convinced John stole her jeweled brooch. Later the brooch turns up and Priscilla tells Aunt Elizabeth she was just being paranoid – only still later we learn that John did steal the brooch, stripped it of its jewels, substituted paste copies and sold the real ones to get more money with which to gamble.

Ultimately Aunt Elizabeth is found murdered, strangled in her own home, and while John is suspect number one, he has what appears to be an ironclad alibi: he was arrested that night for disorderly conduct at a low-class bar he frequents. Actually, though, he bribed the jail guard (called a “turnkey” in Britain, at least in this film), Scoggins (Barry Bernard), to trade places with him for an hour so he could go home, kill Aunt Elizabeth, then make it back to the jail with no one but Scoggins the wiser. Later Scoggins tries to blackmail him, but John has an answer for that, too: he lures Scoggins to a meeting place outside and kills him, but sets up an alibi with a record of an orchestrated version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. At least according to the writers, there were recording services in London in which you could overdub your own vocal, humming, whistling or what have you onto a record, so you’d end up with two copies: the original and the one with your added part. John had a record made like that and used it to dub his whistling over the treacly orchestral version of the “Moonlight” Sonata the family had in their collection, so it would seem like he was still home when in fact he went out and killed Scoggins. The official police officer on the case is Inspector William “Bill” Trent (Richard Fraser, dull as usual; how did producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson get that marvelous performance of him in the 1946 film Bedlam when in all his other movies he comes across as so dummy-like you expect there to be a stagehand pushing him around on wheels?), who’s sure John killed both Aunt Elizabeth and Scoggins despite his seemingly unbreakable alibis. He asks Priscilla for their copy of the “Moonlight” Sonata record, but Priscilla previously bumped into John and the records fell and broke as a result – and when she and Trent realize what happened, John has already thrown the pieces of the record out with the trash.

In addition to whatever his relationship is with Priscilla, John is also dating a music-hall entertainer, Gracie Hallet (Peggy Jackson), who protests when John takes her to the same low-life bar where he takes everybody (maybe it’s a Republic picture and they could only afford one bar set). She sings an O.K. song called “From Here On In” which I’ve been unable to find out any information about online (all my searches took me to a much later song of that title by the punk-rock band The Living End in 1996). There are also scenes of a bar fight and a horse race; the horse race is obviously supposed to represent John’s gambling addiction but both it and the bar fight seem also to be there just because it’s a Republic movie and therefore horses and bar fights have to be in there somewhere. Realizing that the only way he can nail John is to entrap him into confessing in front of everyone in the household, Trent hits on the idea of hiring older actress Vera Cavanaugh to impersonate Aunt Elizabeth’s ghost and have her appear at a party. (Wisely, Republic’s casting director chose the same actress, Barbara Everest, to play both Aunt Elizabeth and Vera Cavanaugh.) He solemnly instructs the other guests to pretend they don’t see Vera in Aunt Elizabeth drag so John will think it’s her ghost come back to haunt him into confessing, which he does. Then, in the twist ending that’s become by far the most famous aspect of this story, Trent gets a letter from Vera Cavanaugh apologizing that because of a bad case of flu she wasn’t able to show up at the event, and both Trent and we are left wondering just who that woman was and whether she was really Aunt Elizabeth’s ghost. One of the nine online reviewers for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents show “Banquo’s Chair” attributed this (maybe) supernatural twist to the Hitchcock show’s writer, Francis M. Cockerell (who’d previously worked on One Step Beyond, also a show famous for its supernatural twist endings), but it was there in the original story and in The False Witness. That’s really about the only good thing in this movie, however; otherwise it’s a leadenly-paced would-be thriller and one wonders whether Alfred Hitchcock saw this film and, if so, said to himself, “I could do this better than that!”

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.6 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards the Death in Paradise episode I watched was pretty lame. It was simply designated as “13.6” (the sixth show in season 13) and was about a middle-aged white couple, Joe and Cora Blyth (John Gordon Sinclair and Gabrielle Glaister) who are visiting Sainte-Marie with their daughter Holly (Elise Chappell) and son-in-law, Sam Portlake (Ali Ariale). Cora Blyth is found stabbed to death inside an elevator car at the fancy Arawak Hotel. She was seen very much alive going into the elevator (the “lift,” as the Brits call it) – a fellow tourist had just taken a Polaroid photo of the two of them moments before – but she’s found stabbed to death inside the elevator. It’s an intriguing variation on the locked-room mystery, but the local cops investigating the crime – detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) and his Black partner (on the police, not in life!), detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) – figure out a way someone could have sneaked into the elevator from the safety skylight door on top of the car, killed Cora and got out again. The problem is they’d only have 15 seconds to do all this, and obviously it would take someone young, agile and lithe to pull it off. The someone turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Sam Portlake, Cora’s son-in-law, who’d been having an affair with one of his exes and who was scared that Cora, who’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness and didn’t have much longer to live anyway, would disown him and/or force him to divorce Ellie if Cora found out about the affair. Meanwhile, Neville Parker is having an affair with one of his exes, which convinces them that whatever spark they had together is gone, but she tells him that he hasn’t found his soulmate yet and he should leave the island so he can travel other places and have a better shot at meeting the woman of his dreams. There’s also another annoying subplot in the return of one of the other cops, Officer Dwayne Myers (Danny John-Jules), to duty in Sainte-Marie after he’d been temporarily reassigned elsewhere, and the disgust Naomi feels towards him because he’s always hitting on her in the grossest imaginable ways. This Death in Paradise creeps to a close at the pace of a drunken snail – it was definitely not one of the better entries in the series – and it lost me when the subplots got more interesting than the main intrigue.

M Squad: "Decoy in White" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final thing I watched overnight was at 2:30 a.m. November 9: a YouTube post of an episode in an unexpectedly fascinating police procedural TV showed called M Squad (for “murders,” I guess). It was an attempt to do their own Dragnet, though set in Chicago instead of L.A., and the closed-off nature of much of Chicago’s land is a key dramatic point. The episode was called “Decoy in White,” and the bad guys are John Spicer (Mike Road), a disbarred attorney and gangster who’s been using the bank owned, or at least run, by Paul Maitland (James Flavin), to launder his ill-gotten gains; and his associate Coskie (the great Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet and the 1945 RKO Dick Tracy). Spicer, who himself is reporting to a higher-up with bigger gangland credentials and an Italian-sounding name, uses Coskie as his designated hit man because Coskie is a devoté of karate and therefore can kill people without making the sound of a firearm. The gangsters are after Maitland and one of his employees, who received a “hot” $20 bill and immediately recognized its serial number from a list of bills used to pay a ransom from a kidnapping a year before. To lure Maitland, the gang hires a 21-year-old prostitute (at least that’s what’s hinted at by writer Robert Tallman) and hard-bitten blonde named Kitty Osborne (a nice femme fatale performance by Judy Bamber), who bused from her native South Dakota to Chicago to make it as … well, something-or-other. The lead cop, detective lieutenant Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin, whose presence as star is probably the only reason anyone is still interested in this show), interrogates Kitty and gradually worms out of her that she was hired to meet up with this guy, intoxicate him with the promise of sex (or at least veiled hints thereof) and plenty of alcohol, and then turn him over to Spicer and Coskie so they could kill him.

Later the two baddies catch up to Wiles, the bank clerk in Maitland’s payroll department who noticed the “hot” bill in the first place, and off him as well; they don’t bother to bait him with a honey trap because they don’t need to; he’s convinced that Spicer is an FBI agent after counterfeiters (a mistake because the agency that tracks counterfeiters is actually the Secret Service) and is thus willing to go to a meeting where Coskie is lying in wait to knock him off. The crooks and the cops both realize at about the same time that the key to nailing the gang is one of the “hot” $20 bills that Kitty grabbed and kept at the scene of Maitland’s murder. She originally kept it to take it somewhere and break it into smaller bills, but never got around actually to doing that. The crooks come to her apartment first and ransack it while she’s out, then the cops come by and she admits she still has the bill and turns it over to them. Ultimately a narration delivered by Lee Marvin, Dragnet-style, explains that Spicer, Coskie and the guy they worked for are all serving long prison sentences after conviction. What makes this show still interesting 55 years after it was made is Lee Marvins’ tough-as-nails performance; the quite good acting of Judy Bamber (who ultimately returns home to her parents in South Dakota in an ending ripped off by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in Taxi Driver 16 years later); and the show’s musical score. Both the opening and closing themes were written and played by Count Basie (though because of YouTube copyright restrictions the closing theme had to be left off this post), while the background score was by another jazz giant, Benny Carter. Though my husband Charles says he’s tired of watching crime shows that glorify the police (which is the main reason I didn’t wait to share this one with him), I found M Squad to be quite well done, pretty obviously shot on film rather than live or on early videotape because of the sheer dimensionality and quality of the images. It’s a quite good show and I’d like to watch more of it!