I can’t remember how I spotted the above, nor why I decided to lob a tweet back over the parapet of costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorléac. Elizabeth Taylor, in all her flawed glory, is an idol of mine, not least for her AIDS work. I definitely called Dorléac a has-been, and as I recall, I also asked what he’d ever done for AIDS charity that compared with Elizabeth Taylor. (I did not point out that the clip showed Jean Simmons, whom Dorléac always described as a dear friend.)

I have only one screenshot from his multiple responses over the next two days.

Needless to say, his account stayed on Twitter, until it was nuked a few days before The Hollywood Reporter broke that Jean-Pierre Dorléac died of natural causes. Dorléac had a notable career as a costume designer, and also made a name for himself with a memoir (The Naked Truth: An Irreverent Chronicle of Delirious Escapades), a handful of recent I-Was-There gossip columns at the Daily Mail, and a personal Twitter full of what he claimed were first-hand reports of what went down in Tinseltown.

I lead with our spat as a matter of full disclosure. I’m not hiding that what follows is coming from a person who disliked the man. As you can see, he despised me in return. I make no apologies. Dorléac never held back. He insulted some showbiz figures virtually minutes after their death announcements. On Twitter, he raged in quote tweets if someone called his tweets “gossip” or “tea.” It is truth! said Jean-Pierre Dorléac. People need to know the TRUTH, not PR!

OK. Here’s some other truth.

Dorléac and I blocked each other, but I kept seeing his stuff. Friends sent me direct messages with screenshots of his latest stupefying boast or rant. Together we pondered: Who is this guy? and why does he hate Grace Kelly and gentle Audrey Hepburn the way other people hate air pollution and termites?

Below is one of the first articles I found about him in newspapers-dot-com. I think of this as the Rosetta Stone for what follows, because it unlocked more information than Dorléac could have imagined at the time. The interview with reporter Linda Helser ran on Christmas Day, 1981, in the Arizona Republic.

There’s a lot going on here, but for now let’s start with the third graf: “On a March Tonight Show, Edith Head was asked who, among the up-and- coming costume designers, will carry on in the same tradition that Hollywood is noted for when it comes to authenticity and glamour. Her answer was, ‘Just one designer, and only one—Jean-Pierre Dorléac.’ ”

Edith Head died Oct. 24, 1981, almost exactly two months before this interview. Would it be possible to find a clip from the March 1981 Tonight Show where she praised Dorléac/Jerry Paine to the skies?

No, it would not. So far as I have been able to ascertain, Edith Head did not appear on The Tonight Show in 1981. Or 1980, or 1979, or 1978, or 1977... see for yourself. Where, then, did reporter Helser get the notion that Edith Head, who had long been dying of an incurable bone disease, gave Johnny Carson that effusive quote? Gee whiz. I can’t say for sure. Although I can sure as hell conjecture. For one thing, this other interview has Dorléac citing a different TV show.

In April, Edith Head was still alive. Doesn’t that second interview make it more likely that her compliment is real? Maybe. It was the Fresno paper’s exclusive, not a wire story. Did Edith Head have The Fresno Bee delivered?

Back to our Rosetta Stone, fifth graf: “ ‘I was shocked, absolutely and totally, with her comments. I had lunch a couple of times with her and would see her on the set, [my emphasis] but I never knew that’s how she felt. She was always wonderful to me, and I was very saddened by her death,’ said Dorléac from his boutique in Los Angeles.”

In my estimation, “lunch a couple of times” doesn’t add up to “I was her one and only protégé.”

Dorléac didn’t stop there. As the years went by, he put himself forward as THE expert on Edith Head, the heir to her legacy who had heard her most confidential confidences. He claimed to own the muslin for the black cocktail “Sabrina dress” in the 1954 Billy Wilder film Sabrina, which spawned coast-to-coast knockoffs and has usually been attributed to Hubert de Givenchy. In interviews for costume sites and in memoir excerpts for the Los Angeles Times, Dorléac proclaimed that Edith Head Had Told Him The Real Deal, oh yes Edith told him how that simpering two-faced Audrey Hepburn conspired to give Givenchy credit for Edith’s Sabrina dress and Edith’s embroidered ballgown. “I was the only costume designer she ever mentored,” declared Jean-Pierre Dorléac.

The discrepancy between things Dorléac had said in the past, and things he said now, bothered me. The fact that I couldn’t find a record of Edith Head mentioning Dorléac that didn’t come from the man himself also bothered me. I don’t like unsourced Hollywood stories. They make me itch. Four years ago that itch led me to write “John Wayne and the Six Security Men,” an article that drew some fierce responses (and at least one person who still likes to subtweet me occasionally from behind a block, hello there person). An update to the John Wayne piece will have to wait, but I’ll get to it because I’m even more right now than I was then.

More bluntly, I don’t like liars, and I really don’t like a man elbowing his way into the life story of a famous woman after she’s dead and can neither confirm nor say “Hey, I don’t know you like that.” Another from Dorléac:

And an earlier tweet, next to a screenshot of the scissors in Dial M for Murder.

Things look different on camera, don’t they.

Meanwhile, Dorléac—or Jerry as I began calling him among friends—was still setting fire to Old Hollywood Twitter. And Jerry’s tales had a certain slant, especially when it came to women.

A sample, but you get the idea — the venom, the vulgarity, the indifference to proof. And the seething resentment of women, or do I mean cows, bitches, and (a favorite word whose use as an insult Jerry hotly defended) cunts. And the bottom right Audrey tweet is a doozy—not many people are willing to deny Nazi war crimes just to score a point against a skinny woman. In another tweet, for which I don’t have a screenshot though its infamy lives on, Jerry scoffed at Audrey and the Dutch eating tulip-bulb flour during the Hunger Winter, calling that historical fact “twee." Then the ones below (also about Audrey Hepburn) pulled me up short.

Jerry, as he never disputed, was born April 12, 1943, so what we have here is a claim for Infant Purple Heart status. On top of that, Jerry many times claimed to be related on his French mother’s side to Les Soeurs Dorléac—that is, the divine Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac. Of course we’re related! he snapped, it’s an uncommon name.

My friends and I took to DMs in dismay. Could two such charming women share DNA with this man whose public persona struck us as anti-charm, in the sense of anti-matter?

Short answer: No.

Here’s the long answer.

Return, please, to that first interview. Jerry says his Air Force father’s name was Joseph Paine. He says his mother was French, but she met Joseph when she was in the U.S. visiting her sister (I hope she arrived before 1939). Sometime between late 1942 or early 1943, Joseph’s pregnant wife went home to France. Jerry said Maman had to “pick up some things.” From France. When she was married to an American airman. And could have stayed in sunny bomb-free California.

Jean-Pierre was born in Toulon (according to Wikipedia and his obits), in Vichy France, after which he and his mother were “detained because of the war.” As though their flight was grounded due to wintry mix. In fact, Toulon had the living hell bombed out of it, starting in November 1943. Here is Toulon by August of 1944.1

None of this shit makes any sense, of course. Could I unravel the truth by searching for information about Joseph Paine? You remember, the guy whose wife supposedly said “Bye honey, love you lots, but I can’t function without some of my French things” and took herself and his unborn son to a Nazi-controlled region everyone knew could be invaded at any moment?

Mr. Paine apparently served in the Asia-Pacific theater—not Europe. The third graf lists Jerry under his stage name, misspelled as “Jean Piere Dorleac,” with no hyphen, which probably pissed him off no end. I looked for his mother’s obituary.

“Ruby Mae” doesn’t sound very French, does it? Long story short, I believe this is her despite the small spelling difference. She had a brief first marriage to a man named Bennett, then stayed with Joseph Paine for life. She was no more French than I am, and neither was her son.

And there you are. The newspaper announcement for the birth of Jerome Benson Paine, April 12, 1943—in San Bernardino, California. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a stage name, unless you insist it’s real and claim it means you’re related to a celebrity (or two) when you’re not. I hope someone updates2 Dorléac’s Wikipedia page, his IMDB biography, and especially his IMDB Trivia section.

And if I were a reporter, I would not waste my time pestering Catherine Deneuve for a memorial quote about her late American cousin. Just saying.

I was now more fascinated than outraged. Jerry appears to have invented a detailed personal history, switching anecdotes in and out like seasonal wardrobe items. Plus, no internet in 1981 and for years after. That meant Jerry could say one thing to one newspaper and something else to another, secure in knowing the only way to catch him would be to hit the physical archives in multiple states.

In addition to what his followers thought was inside dish (although Jerry insisted he was a bold teller of truth, not a gossip, how dare you), Jerry shared evocative observations3 about his past life. I don’t want to clutter this up with endless tweet screenshots, though I have receipts. Remember, I can’t link because Jerry’s Twitter account was nuked so fast—can’t imagine why.

Dorléac said he’d been a child actor; that he had acted in many movies and IMDB was wrong in omitting those credits; that he came from “a long line of entertainers and artists;” that Marlene Dietrich was a frequent dinner guest in his childhood home; that before his costume career in Hollywood he had met, befriended and/or worked with Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Francois Truffaut, Givenchy, Dior, Cardin, Edith Piaf, Cary Grant, and last but not least, Marilyn Monroe. As some of us already noticed, several of those names are chronologically implausible for a guy born in 1943.

But as for the education claimed in the first interview—Jerry did probably go to school in England, as I found an item about his father sailing with the family to England in 1949. Jerry also told the truth about high school in Japan. A mention of “Jerrie” Paine in an Itazuke Dependent School history online:

What happened between England and high school? As an Air Force brat, maybe he did spend time in some European countries and learn French there, although I have yet to find a single Youtube clip of him speaking it. In the Rosetta Stone interview, Jerry says breezily that he got his “degree in historic apparel from Les Beaux Arts (University of Paris).” That vague “degree” was enshrined as a doctorate long before Jerry arrived on Twitter, and he waved it around every chance he got.

There’s a problem, however. The École des Beaux-Arts in Paris does not, and never has so far as I can tell, offer a PhD in “historical apparel.”4 Nor do any of Dorléac’s names appear on lists of graduates, such as this one.

But even if I’m wrong, and Les Beaux-Arts did offer a degree in historical apparel, or plain old fashion, I don’t think Jerry would have been able to attain it. Because the record indicates he spent much of the 1960s in the Air Force, stationed in California.

All along I had wondered if Jerry was drafted; his dad was a veteran, and he was the perfect age for Vietnam. None of his names came up in any context for the early 1960s. Finally I found this.

Jerre, with an “e.” When did he join? In 1962, I believe. I found an item in the Biloxi Sun-Herald, Nov. 16, 1962, that said JerrE Paine would be doing a “modern jazz dance” for the Holy Angels Kindergarten Christmas Show. He was appearing with a fellow airman stationed at Keesler Air Force Base. If you’ve seen Biloxi Blues, you know that Keesler was the site of Air Force basic training for many years.

From here through 1966 it seems Jerre was stationed at George AFB in California. A number of notices in the Victorville, Calif., Daily Press show Jerre attending classes at Victor Valley Community College and playing supporting and other small roles in the college’s productions.

After mid-1966, Air Force stories end. In the spring of 1967, Jerre appears in Arizona doing regional theater (including one production with Nick Nolte). How and why he left the service, I don’t know; if I’m right about when he started, his time might have been up. Signs of him are spotty for the rest of the 1960s. The only thing I see for 1968, for example, is a bit part in a January production of Orpheus Descending in Flagstaff.

But 1969 brings a startling development.

How long did the interior design gig last? Not long, though I guess it’s possible this next gig was job-related.

But this next job was not about set design.

“Others in the cast include.” That must have been a phrase Jerre Paine, after years at the bottom of cast lists in community college, was sick of hearing by the end of 1971.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, almost exactly a year later, here we have the debut of Jean-Pierre Dorléac, or at least the first credit I can locate under that name. He was also in the cast — but it’s the costumes that got a nice nod from the critic. And the next year, it was Dorléac’s costumes that won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Award.

Was it hard to change goals? Probably not. He was Jean-Pierre Dorléac from there on out. Had he been willing to tell the true story of how it happened, his path would have been genuinely impressive. This man—with ten Primetime Emmy nominations and two Emmy wins, plus an Oscar nomination—worked steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, often in period costumes. And he was self-trained!

Now that I’ve given some praise at last, here are other good things about Jean-Pierre Dorléac, né Jerome Benson Paine, aka Jerre Paine, aka Jerry Paine. His friendships with Jean Simmons, Olivia Hussey, Marisa Pavan, and Roddy McDowall5 were apparently genuine. Several actresses, including Morgan Fairchild, had warm nostalgic exchanges with him on Twitter. His gowns for Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time were lovely and unique.6 And whatever his real relationship to Edith Head was, there was no more ardent partisan for her work. I have some ideas about what might have made Dorléac so attached to Edith Head, and so vicious toward a lot of actresses, especially Audrey Hepburn. I may write that up too, depending on the response to this exceedingly long post.

For now—when Jean-Pierre Dorléac told people not to believe everything they heard about Hollywood, he was, in that moment, speaking the truth.

A note to readers: This story is free for the moment, but it will probably go behind a paywall by the end of Tuesday. Articles like this take a lot of time and work, and the fact is that right now, I can use all the subscription income I can get. I’m always grateful to every single reader, but I’d be extra grateful to anyone who decides to take out a subscription. Many thanks for reading.

Today is the birthday of Eric Portman, one of British cinema’s most unusual postwar stars, with a potent attraction that was rooted in personal magnetism, not looks. One of Portman’s best roles was in Wanted for Murder (1946), directed by the chronically underrated Lawrence Huntington. It seemed as good a time as any to put my Huntington essay online. It was written for Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945 – 1960, the volume that accompanied the retrospective section at the 78th Locarno Film Festival. The book was edited by the section’s programmer, Ehsan Khoshbakht; here my brief essay is published online for the first and only time.

Lawrence Huntington directed his first film in 1930, at the start of the talkie era, and his career as a genre specialist grew through the 1930s and into the war years. But the best of his work came in the immediate postwar period, starting roughly with the efficient spy thriller Night Boat to Dublin in 1946, and continuing through The Franchise Affair in 1951. Often brushed aside as a workhorse, the movies from this period show Huntington was in fact a highly effective stylist. Within a single film, he could glide from English good manners and drawing-room propriety, to criminality and unsettling violence.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Wanted for Murder, a bland title for a brilliant 1946 yarn. Emeric Pressburger and Rodney Ackland’s script, adapted from a stage play, concerns Victor Colebrooke, played by Eric Portman, British film’s reigning specialist in sinister. Colebrooke is the grandson of Queen Victoria’s chief hangman. Nature (a strangling compulsion present from birth) and nurture (misogyny blamed on his stifling mother—“you’ve always kept him under a glass case,” says a visitor) have turned Colebrooke into a serial killer, to use the modern term. A real serial killer rarely has or needs much explanation, but the seesaw of Colebrooke’s genteel exterior and his dark, vicious soul gives Wanted for Murder its impact.

It’s hard not to conclude that Alfred Hitchcock must have seen Wanted for Murder, given (among other points) the similarities between the fairground climax of Strangers on a Train (1951), and Huntington’s crowded, menacing scenes at a carnival. As Colebrooke slinks around the rides and the tents, it’s obvious that if the movie’s heroine Anne (Dulcie Gray) hadn’t been delayed in the first scene, she would be his next victim: he even picks a woman who resembles Anne.

Huntington’s camera informs with angles and lighting; even Colebrooke’s back, the first time he’s shown, looks psycho. A murder in Regent’s Park happens while Colebrooke’s lovestruck prey has her head in his lap. The camera lingers on Colebrooke’s face looking down, framed by leaves and branches, as he listens to the poor girl sing—until she stops mid-note. These shadowy cold-blooded moments offset the spacious Scotland Yard office and deadpan banter of Chief Inspector Conway (Ronald Culver) and his sidekick Sergeant Sullivan (Stanley Holloway), until the hunt closes in on an island for pleasure boats—another idea Hitchcock may have noted.

The Upturned Glass (1947) is an even more unusual specimen. It starts with a lecture by famed neurosurgeon Michael Joyce (James Mason) on abnormal psychology, then proceeds with the swoony romance between Michael and his young patient’s mother (Rosamond John). Both are married to others—unhappily, of course. All this is filmed with smooth refinement, until the day Michael’s love, in a most suspicious development, falls from an open window in her home. That point marks the arrival of Pamela Kellino (co-screenwriter and Mason’s wife) as Kate, the sister-in-law who probably did it. Here, the look and atmosphere of The Upturned Glass goes delightfully berserk. The surgeon begins to woo the murderess, meeting her first at a posh cocktail party where Huntington’s camera weaves through the crowd with Michael. As a courtship ensues, Kate—who is one snobbish, greedy, overdressed piece of work—is shown in montage against a black background, emphasizing all the reasons Michael wants her dead. (So does the audience, probably.) The inevitable murder finds the camera chasing both Michael and a shrieking Kate—twice, for structural reasons that shouldn’t be spoiled.

Far less flashy, but no less worthwhile, is 1949’s Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, adapted from a 1911 Hugh Walpole novel. Mr. Perrin (Marius Goring) is a long-serving schoolmaster at Banfield, one of those terrifying English boarding schools for boys. He finds himself consumed by jealousy of Mr. Traill, the younger hire played by ever-virile David Farrar. Walpole’s story was brought up to date for the film, with the war over and unspoken resentment lingering between those who went off to fight (Traill) and those who didn’t (Perrin).

Banfield at least is gorgeous, located in Cornwall in a Manderley-like building close by picturesque oceanside cliffs. Still, it’s plain the staff are miserable; Traill is informed by one of them that Banfield is “like a decaying tooth. It doesn’t trouble you much after the nerve goes.” Perrin blames the handsome, athletic (and, for a while, oblivious) Mr. Traill for his troubles, but Perrin’s dreams are really being crushed by headmaster “Moy” Thompson. Silkily played by Raymond Huntley, the headmaster takes evil pleasure in thwarting his underlings at every turn.

For this movie that revolves around jealousy and gossip, Huntington often frames one actor on the side and in the foreground, so as to show the other characters reacting in the back of the shot. Huntington also takes pleasure in high angles whenever Perrin looks out the window in search of Traill’s latest outrage. Huntington often seems to nod toward MGM’s 1939 Goodbye Mr. Chips. Goring, who like Chips star Robert Donat was playing a man much older than himself, is decked out with Donat’s sheepdog mustache, and even adopts some of the other actor’s spluttering mannerisms. But it’s the devastatingly sad fadeout, as direct a Chips reference as possible, that confirms we’ve been watching a rejection of Hollywood sentiment.

Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill wasn’t Lawrence Huntington’s last film, nor his last good one. In 1951 he helmed an adaptation of Josephine Tey’s bestselling The Franchise Affair. In it, a teenage girl accuses two respectable women living in a remote country house of having kidnapped, beaten and starved her in an attempt to force her to become their servant. The movie starts on a remote highway with a wild thunderstorm, and the young girl (Ann Stephens) pops up in the middle of the road in a startling close-up. This vigorous opening, and a sequence where the outraged villagers attack the country house where they believe Betty was held, are the most visually interesting parts of the film. Otherwise, though The Franchise Affair is engrossing, Huntington is letting his cast carry it, treating them at times as though surrounded by a proscenium arch. Perhaps the British studio system was wearing down Huntington as it once had Alberto Cavalcanti and others. In any event, by 1953, Lawrence Huntington was beginning a move into television that would last until the 1960s, and his later films did not match the vivid creativity of the late 1940s.

Happy belated birthday to Edythe Marrener, aka Susan Hayward, born June 30, 1917. In her honor, I’m re-publishing this 2012 essay on the joys of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, one of my favorite Hayward performances. It’s going out with a dedication to my darling friend Steve Hayes, a.k.a. Tired Old Queen at the Movies, the funniest and most charming Youtube movie reviewer you’ll ever encounter. Steve loves Susan Hayward as much as I do. (He’s up to more than 500 reviews now, but alas, none of them appear to include Steve’s virtuoso imitation of Susie’s Irish accent, complete with “Begorrah,” in Untamed.) Here, updated and slightly refined from its original form, is my ode to I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

The Siren has mentioned the previous life she spent behind a jewelry counter. She recalls one slow morning spent poring over a society column. When the Siren spoke with envy of a New York designer and his haute summer doings in the Hamptons, her coworker snorted: “Sweetie, don't let the yacht fool you. He started out pushing racks around the garment district. He's tougher than you and me will ever think about being.”

This nostalgic vignette came to mind when the Siren spent a sick day watching I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the 1951 Twentieth-Century Fox melodrama about the Seventh Avenue rag trade here in Little Old New York. Fashion has doubled, maybe even quintupled its everyday presence since the 1950s. Now we play "who wore it best?" for all the world as though anyone strolling the local mall knows exactly how the latest couture should be draped. But the Siren suspects the industry has stayed as tough as ever. And through a good stretch of its running time, this movie has done the same.

Filmed on location, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has any number of things going for it, but two stand out. First there's the street photography, both night and day, crowds and traffic and windows from Seventh Avenue to Central Park. Director Michael Gordon was, on the evidence of this movie as well as Pillow Talk and Portrait in Black, good, if not quite great; we'll always have a hard time knowing if Gordon had greatness, because his career is bisected by the blacklist. Gordon has a flair for amusing shots, like an errand boy with his hand cradling a dress dummy’s boob, and the camera tracking around a grand dinner-dance to reveal the main characters have been pointedly stuck at a table behind a pillar. And the New York street scenes, via cinematographer Milton Krasner, are sheer bliss.

The second, and primary, thing: Abraham Polonsky’s script (from Vera Caspary’s adaptation), which will put a lover of New York-ese into a euphoric trance. Leads and character actors such as Marvin Kaplan and Charles Lane reel out line after glittering line, from the poignant…

If I had money, could you learn to love me for my money?

to the flowery…

Miss Boyd, you have the simple and astonishing beauty of an old-fashioned straight razor.

to the existentially profound…

A young man needs a bankruptcy. It helps him to mature.

to the profoundly vaudeville.

—Haven't we treated you right?
—You want more money?
—We'll give you a raise.
—You wanna take your wife to Jones Beach? I'll lend you my Buick.
—Take my Cadillac.
—Take my wife!

My beloved auteurist friends, this is why the Siren has been known to roll her eyes when told a great director could direct the phone book or whatever platitude you will. In some cases—like this one—it’s the reverse. You’d have to work at messing up that dialogue. The script sings. At times Gordon is just getting the hell out of the way.

Adding even more authentic New York is Brooklyn’s own Susan Hayward as Harriet Boyd. Harriet is working as a model on Seventh Avenue, and in 1951 the profession was a lot more B-girl than Bundchen. Harriet has had it up to her cute little keister with pawing buyers and slick salesmen, and she is ready to use her design talent. And so she reels in Sam Cooper (Sam Jaffe), the "inside man" who can run the dressmaking end, and salesman Teddy Sherman (Dan Dailey, as good as you will ever see him). Harriet envisions the trio with their own firm, selling frocks at $10.95 in wholesale 1951 dollars (about $145 in today’s money, so these won’t be just any old schmattes). To get what she wants, Harriet will be every bit as tough as that real-life Hamptons-dwelling designer.

For startup funds, Harriet needs the life-insurance money her mother is hoarding. But Ma wants younger sister Marge to have it so she can start a cozy washer-dryer-baby household, despite Harriet’s (sensible) objections:

Harriet: With money she can marry anyone she wants!
Ma: (sarcastic) A nice outlook on life.
Harriet: It's the outlook men taught me.

Ma, whose maternal warmth recalls an Easter Island statue, refuses to fork over, so Harriet manipulates sis into giving her the dough anyway, in a set-up worthy of Scarlett O’Hara. (That’s a part for which Hayward was a contender, by the by, and as she coaxes Marge out of every last dime, you can tell why that's not so far-fetched.) Afterward sister, Ma and brother-in-law obligingly take a powder.

The partners conquer Seventh Avenue, but Teddy has a yen for Harriet, and there lies both Harriet’s and, to a certain extent, the movie’s undoing.

The Siren has written before of her soft spot for Hayward, who isn’t often trotted out these days when people discuss Great Stars of the Past. Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Flatbush, and no matter what the role, Brooklyn swung in her stride and sanded the edges of her husky voice. Like Harriet, Edythe got her start as a teenage New York model, which probably gives extra brush to the brush-offs Hayward delivers in the film. But she was no high-flown Method actress. Hayward was one rock-hard cookie.

When the part fit her, Hayward could play the hell out of it, and in her heyday you can sense how much this actress enjoyed her work. The Siren loves the stars who love their status, whether it’s Hayward signing a gazillion autographs, Bette Davis showing up on 1970s talk shows to blow smoke and imitate her imitators, or Gloria Swanson playing herself in Airport 1975 and wrecking any suspense because face it, nothing and nobody’s gonna kill Gloria Swanson. What’s the appeal of someone who approaches stardom like a teddible, teddible burden? Brother, says the Siren, in her best Brooklyn, you can have that.

Harriet Boyd, in all her gimme-gimme glory, is Susan Hayward at her best. She moves like she knows she’s beautiful, she smiles like she knows what she’s gonna get, she snaps her lines like she knows the odds against her. “Didn't you hear me? I'm proposing to you,” says a flummoxed Teddy. “What do you expect me to do, throw my arms around you?” is Harriet’s tender response.

One more thing: this is a George Sanders movie, too. He shows up about a half-hour in, at a Dressmakers and Buyers’ Ball, where he's seated at the dais. Of course. Did any other man in Hollywood history, or indeed the history of anywhere, ever look so completely right seated at a dais? Sanders plays J.F. Noble, the Bergdorf-esque magnate who wants Harriet to design evening gowns and also wants Harriet for himself, a promising development both ways.

You don’t know how it pains the Siren to reveal that once Sanders appears, we have about 30 minutes before it’s comeuppance time for Harriet. Oh, you still get good stuff and standout Sanders, such as, “It seems to me that you could resign yourself a little more gracefully to being rich and famous.” And Sanders also turns “Good evening, Mr. Sherman” into one of his funniest lines.

But — and it’s so obvious this is where we’re headed, the Siren isn’t even going to call it a spoiler, although if you are allergic to any such revelations, stop here — it’s Time for Harriet to Learn Some Things About Love.

It’s a truth widely acknowledged in Hollywood that a single woman in possession of excess ambition must be in want of a man. That she’ll die without a man, nothing matters without a man, she might as well call in Mario Buatta and have her uterus turned into a breakfast nook without a man. By no means does this apply only to women; many’s the magnate presumed to need love more than money, too. Remember that it’s love—or his attempt at it—that proves the undoing of Charles Foster Kane, and we all know the Siren worships that one. Nor should we blame the era, when Hallmark and Lifetime have made a whole genre out of “woman gives up lucrative career to run cute shop and marry winsome working stiff, which makes total sense because it’s Christmas.”

I Can Get for You Wholesale is based on Jerome Weidman’s Depression-era novel about a man named Harry who, so Wikipedia tells us, gets what’s coming to him and learns to appreciate love. (Later, the story morphed into the Broadway musical debut of Barbra Streisand, which interesting tale can be read here.) Over at Senses of Cinema, Andrew Marsden says Polonsky changed the novel's “antisemitism arising from its treatment of Jewish businessmen into a story about the oppression of women in the world of business,” and adds that Twentieth Century–Fox “softened” the dialogue.

The Siren doesn't know if the softening extended to Harriet's fate. It’s true that Teddy wants Harriet to have a career—but only a career on his salesman-of-the-people terms. It isn’t that the romantic choice boils down to Dan Dailey over George Sanders, which has, shall we say, believability issues for most women. It isn’t even that Harriet going all mushy is about as convincing as when William Makepeace Thackeray abruptly reveals that his fabulous Becky Sharp is (dramatic pause) a murderess. No, the frustration is that what Teddy and Sam pull on Harriet—a dirty trick if ever there was one—is for her own good. Done out of love, you see, which makes it so much more ethical than Harriet's own scheming.

Ah well. Despite her strong dislike of the denouement, the Siren highly recommends the film, which is streaming here and there. It's one of Hollywood's cold little ironies that the lavishly talented Polonsky, himself no bed of roses, also found himself defanged by external forces. The Siren would love to think maybe Polonsky looked back at Harriet Boyd from time to time, and realized she got a raw deal, too.

During the studio era, a few novice directors were handed the keys to the sportscar right away—a brilliant script for the first film, a great cast, a nice budget. John Sturges wasn’t one of them.

Sturges began as an editor at RKO in 1932, working on films such as Garson Kanin’s They Knew What They Wanted (1940), which turned out badly, and (uncredited) on George Stevens’s Gunga Din (1939), which turned out to be brilliant. During World War II, Sturges served with the U.S. Army Signals Corps, later transferring to the Air Force, and spent his time honing his skills on 37 training films and five documentaries, including Thunderbolt, which he co-directed with the great William Wyler.

Sturges left the service in 1946 and found that he didn’t have to search too hard for a job: Wyler had recommended Sturges to the boss of Columbia Pictures, the legendary Harry Cohn. The aspiring director was hired at the entry-level wage of $300 a week, which surely pleased Cohn, a world-class studio tightwad in a town full of them. In Glenn Lovell’s Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges, Sturges says, “This was a time when studios were making 30 to 40 pictures a year. By attrition, if nothing else, you’re going to wind up getting a crack at directing.”

That was true. Unlike the other major studios, the so-called “baby major” Columbia owned no theaters, meaning their films had to consistently appeal to distributors. Cohn sought profits by squeezing costs—such as salaries—and being prolific. As Sturges said, the output was 40 films a year or even more, most of them around 65 minutes, which were then rented to exhibitors for a flat fee. Script-wise these were the kind of stories that would largely move to television by the end of the next decade, watched at home by the same people who had once been happy to spend time in the moviehouse absorbing an hour or so of cheaply made entertainment.

“Hard to believe they even did stuff like that” said Sturges many years later, but they did, and the stuff gave moviegoers plenty of pleasure at the time. For an ambitious fellow like Sturges, there was also the hope of eventually landing one of the few higher-budget films that Columbia made every year, in an effort to ensure its name retained some prestige. In today’s eyes, the biggest virtue of a low-budget Columbia picture is simply the beauty and elegance of film, contrasted with the bright, flat, shadow-free lighting that characterized many TV dramas for many years. And at the studio there was a deep bench of acting talent to draw on. A programmer might give a character actor the chance at a lead and to show off the range he’d developed over years in the business.

Accordingly, Sturges’ first assignment as director came to him after low-budget master William Castle was reassigned: a noir programmer called The Man Who Dared (1946), which starred George Macready. The versatile actor made the top-shelf Gilda for Charles Vidor at Columbia the same year, playing opposite Rita Hayworth, the biggest star on the lot. Macready’s lead role in Sturges’s maiden voyage shows the studio’s habit of shuffling talent around from A pictures to B and back again.

Macready plays a crusading reporter who wants to show the dangers of using circumstantial evidence to get a death-penalty conviction, and because this is Hollywood, he’s doing it by being tried for murder himself. Largely a courtroom drama, the film gives little opportunity for visual panache, even with a more promising set like a wharf. Yet a chase around a hospital and some adjoining rooftops energizes the director. In this and his other films at Columbia, adding an overhead angle always seems to spur some excitement from Sturges, as he films Macready (or the actor’s double) running through shadowed alleys, up and down ladders and around furnaces.

The chance to show off a little bit comes earlier in Shadowed, made the same year, and also a noir-styled programmer, but one where events are frequently played for amusement. Character actor Lloyd Corrigan, who seemed to show up in every B series from Tarzan to Maisie to Boston Blackie, for once has the lead. He plays a businessman whose golf habit finds him playing on an empty course, where he scores a hole-in-one. But his next swing drives the precious ball into the woods, where a criminal couple just happens to be stashing a body near an abandoned train. Corrigan’s eavesdropping on the murderers is nicely staged, with Sturges’s camera peering down through empty trestle tracks to see what’s going on.

Both Sturges and Corrigan did even better with Alias Mr. Twilight, perhaps because Sturges always claimed he’d rewritten virtually every line of the script. This time Corrigan is a con man looking to pull one last big job (aren’t they always!) to provide for his cute little granddaughter. He also needs to keep the child out of the clutches of their relative, Rosalind Ivan—who was so adept at evil women in this era, via films like Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), that she had earned the nickname “Ivan the Terrible.” If Sturges did indeed come up with most of the script, he did a fine job. The dialogue has verve—”I want a place in the country too,” says one character, “but I don’t want a high stone wall around it.” The various swindles are clever, as is the build-up to Sturges’s most vivid scenes, which take place on a dock and in a grungy hotel room.1

By the time he made For the Love of Rusty in 1947, Sturges was acquiring a reputation as someone who brought an added level of quality to his assignments. That did mean that he started to stretch his formerly trim 15-day shooting schedules, which naturally annoyed the studio brass. But it also meant this entry in the Rusty series—Rusty was a dog, and the films concerned a small-town adolescent played by Ted Donaldson—looked and played better than the others. “He treated it as if he was directing an ‘A’ project, a major film,” Donaldson told biographer Lovell. Harry Cohn overcame his chagrin at the extra time and expense and assigned Sturges two literary adaptations: Keeper of the Bees (1947), the third version of Gene Stratton-Porter’s final novel, and Best Man Wins (1948), an expanded and considerably altered version of Mark Twain’s immortal short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Both films got better-than-expected reviews because, said Keeper star Gloria Henry, “Sturges stood out amont the ‘B’ directors. He took his time and went for the nuances.”

In between Keeper and Best Man Wins, Sturges got his first shot at an A picture with The Sign of the Ram (1948), and while Sturges wasn’t fond of the project, it turned out to be one of his best for Columbia, second only to The Walking Hills. The story is set in a big family mansion in Cornwall and concerns Leah St. Aubyn, who years ago was paralyzed in a swimming accident. Now Leah rules the house and the family from her wheelchair, writing hearts-and-flowers poetry for women’s magazines and generally being kind and patient. Or so it seems, until Leah finds that her now-grown stepchildren are ready to get married. Terrified at the thought of an empty house and permanent loneliness, she plots to keep everyone at her side, by any means necessary.

The black-and-white film bears some obvious thematic similarities to the Technicolor Leave Her to Heaven (1945), another tale of a woman’s psychotic abandonment issues. And like John M. Stahl’s film, Sign of the Ram revolves around its lead performer. Susan Peters was coming off an Oscar nomination when, on New Year’s Day 1945, a hunting accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. Determined to continue acting, she had optioned the novel, correctly perceiving Leah as a bravura role that ranges from “angel of the house” to a demonic echo of Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers. Peters keeps her face serene for the most part, but her long, manicured hands tell the real story, as she arranges a sleeve or plays the piano like she plays the people around her.

Sturges later referred to Ram, rather unkindly, as a “talky vanity production,” and he disliked the lead performance. He felt that Peters, at 26, was too young to play Leah and that her acting was, as biographer Lovell put it, “full-blown gorgon.” In truth, Sturges wasn’t known for his facility with women’s performances, much less a women’s picture. Peters’s deep understanding of Leah’s fears failed to register with him. Yet he gives Sign of the Ram some superb atmosphere, undermining the set’s flouncy florals by lowering the camera to get the beamed ceilings in frame—the bars that are holding down Leah and her family. Instead of the “cage” lighting of a typical noir, the shadows suggest webs, particularly in one scene where two lovers plan a future together, quite unaware of the lady plotting their doom.

Sturges’s early years at Columbia amounted to “an extended apprenticeship of a kind that has long ceased to exist,” wrote Philip French in an obituary for the director. By 1949, his contract was almost up, and, writes Lovell, independent producers “Randolph Scott and Harry Joe Brown offered The Walking Hills, which they were developing at Columbia.” It was to be the first time Sturges directed a western, the genre that would encompass much of his best work. It is, however, a modern western, with a set of deceitful and back-biting characters that could easily have fit in a heist-driven noir. The movie’s cinematography, via Charles Lawton Jr., has a distinctly noir vibe, with the strong contrast between the brutal desert sun and the characters scrambling for any kind of shade.

The script was by Alan Le May, who five years later would publish one of the most famous western novels of all time, The Searchers, later to be filmed by John Ford. The Walking Hills is not in that rarefied class, but it shares certain qualities with The Searchers—the desperation in a possibly futile quest, carried out while fighting against a brutal landscape. The “walking hills” are the ever-shifting sand dunes of Death Valley, and for the first time, Sturges rejoiced at being able to get off the backlot and film on location. His cast and crew may not have agreed, as daytime temperatures in the notorious desert rose to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

As the film opens, Shep (William Bishop) is being tailed by the sinister Frazee (John Ireland), and slips into a cantina on the Mexican side of Mexicali. There’s a poker game in the back, where Old Willy (Edgar Buchanan) regales the players with the legend of a wagon train that tried to drag $5 million in gold across the murderous walking hills, and was lost forever. Innocent Johnny (Jerome Courtland) pipes up that he was just in that area and found a wagon wheel. True to the plot of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from the prior year, gold fever infects the group, which includes laconic horse breeder Jim Carey (Randolph Scott) and the twitchy, blatantly untrustworthy Chalk (Arthur Kennedy). Bar owner Russell Collins (who would work again with Sturges in Bad Day at Black Rock) and its entertainer (the splendid blues singer Josh White) are forced to come along—no one must hear of this treasure hunt. But as they reach the spot and begin to dig, Chris (Ella Raines) rides up and cuts herself in; she feels she has a right, as she is the ex- of both Shep and Jim.

Tensions mount; the gang snipe at one another while they dig and chew bad food; Chris is torn between her two former lovers; gentle Johnny is shot. The Walking Hills is in its way just as talky as The Sign of the Ram, but Sturges, working with a milieu he was more in tune with, moves the scenes up and down the dunes and freights each eye-shift and overheard remark with possible betrayal. The climactic sandstorm, with its shovel-fight between Bishop and Ireland, is deservedly famous and must have been quite unpleasant to shoot.

The word was now out on Columbia’s up-and-comer. “This holds the interest throughout,” said the review in an exhibitors’ trade magazine, adding that the film didn’t seem to be something “that would shape up as big box office.” That was a bad prediction. The Walking Hills turned out to be Columbia’s biggest-grossing release for its year. By the fall of 1949, Sturges found himself with a new and far more gilded gig, at MGM.

Much later, nearly two decades after Sturges moved on from Cohn’s kingdom, the Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas attended the premiere of Ice Station Zebra (1968) and remarked on its warm reception. The movie, said Thomas, held “the audience’s attention despite the imagination-stretching adventures on screen. That is a rare kind of film and one in which director John Sturges excels”—and Sturges had readied his skills during his time at Columbia Pictures.

Exactly one hundred years ago today, on June 1, 1926, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles. There was a time twenty years ago, back when I started this blog, when I would have shrugged at most things to do with the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. Sure, I loved some of her movies, but girlfriend got quite enough hoop-la, I thought. She didn’t need any more from me.

Well, there are good things about the aging process, and among those good things is an increased willingness to admit you got it wrong. My big mistake was confusing the Marilyn industry, which is a drag, with Marilyn the artist, who remains unique and wonderful. In my defense, I will say that the Marilyn industry is indeed an authentic pain in the ass. Over on Facebook, a cheerful and well-run classic-movie page has had to put aside posts about Marilyn Monroe for this, her centennial month. The reason being, they said, that in a matter of hours such posts are flooded with various conspiracy theories, several of which were news to me—shellfish poison? six toes? Nobody needs that. Or if you do, we have different reasons for loving movies and movie stars.

So when Sight and Sound approached me to write the June cover story for Marilyn Monroe’s centenary, I was overjoyed. My one request was that I be able to focus entirely on her acting, and it turned out that was just what they wanted, too. Sight and Sound believes in print, god bless ‘em, and the article is not online. (UPDATE: Good news! The full article is now online.) But they tweeted out an excerpt this morning, which I am reproducing below.

I hope you can get a copy, or sign up for a subscription. The layout is gorgeous. The Marilyn tribute includes a beautiful essay on The Misfits by my dear friend Kim Morgan, who does more justice to that movie and Marilyn’s performance than I ever could. And there are two great articles by Hannah McGill, one called “Becoming Marilyn,” on how the photographer Bruno Bernard was “essential to creating the image of Marilyn;” and the other, “Designing Marilyn,” which runs down eight of Marilyn’s most famous costumes. I was delighted that she includes the blue Arran sweater by Dorothy Jeakins that Marilyn wears in Let’s Make Love. Speaking of sweaters, Kim also has a touching piece about Marilyn in this past weekend’s Air Mail. It takes inspiration from one of the photos taken by George Barris during Marilyn’s last photo session, in which she’s wearing a “a wool, hand-knitted Cowichan-style cardigan, an item from her own wardrobe.”

My one slight regret about the Sight and Sound article is that I didn’t have room to mention what’s actually my favorite line from Miss Casswell in All About Eve. I will always have a special place in my heart for Monroe, after a disastrous audition, swanning out of the ladies, shall we say, lounge and murmuring, when George Sanders asks how she feels, "Like I just swam the English Channel." It’s hysterically funny, but if I think about it, the scene takes on a little poignance. Surely Marilyn’s years of knocking around Hollywood’s bottom rungs—auditioning, posing, dealing with (shudder) Hollywood men—are right there in Miss Casswell’s weary strut across the lobby.

In fact, it’s wrong to say that I’ve gained admiration only for Marilyn’s acting. I’ve also grown to love her as a person. Troubled and often sad, yes, aren’t we all. But there was something immensely lovable about Marilyn, and it’s not related to the desire to protect her or rescue her or whatever some (mostly male) writers like to bang on about. Rather, it’s a sense we have that she could be your friend. A good friend who would listen and have your back. That’s the Marilyn that Susan Strasberg and Shelley Winters described. It’s also at least part of what I think Kim means when she calls Marilyn “L.A.’s beloved daughter, our sacred sister.” I love that.

Put in prosaic terms: Marilyn was a good egg. I can think of few better illustrations of that than a passage from Norma Barzman's 2003 memoir, The Red and the Blacklist. I excerpted this passage on my original blog all the way back in 2010, but I have a lot more to say, so here we go again.

Barzman wrote the original stories for the underrated 1946 romantic comedy Never Say Goodbye, as well as the high-wire act of multiple nesting flashbacks in the story for The Locket (also 1946). But Barzman wasn’t able to work on much more than that for many years, for reasons she spends much of her narrative explaining. She was married to left-wing screenwriter Ben (The Boy With Green Hair, Give Us This Day, El Cid) with whom she had seven (!) children. Together they were blacklisted from 1949 to 1976 and lived in exile in Britain and France. Norma Barzman’s book is one of the best personal accounts of the era—an up-close view of how the blacklist began, gained steam, and eventually flattened the Barzmans and most of their friends.

(“Farran,” I hear you say gently, or perhaps quite loudly. “This is a Marilyn post. Did you forget?” I’m getting to it, I promise.)

In a chapter candidly called "The Shit Hits the Electric Fan," Norma talks about an unbearably hot night in Los Angeles in the summer of 1947. The House Un-American Activities Committee had the Hollywood Ten in its sights. The Barzmans’ friends in the Committee for the First Amendment have returned from Washington with little to show but press clippings. The blacklist is on the horizon. Everyone in town can feel it.

Norma has gone out on the lawn in search of a breeze and Ben, sporting a sombrero and a loud print shirt acquired on vacation in Acapulco, joins his wife. They sip gin-and-tonics, but it’s hard to relax. For one thing, cars keep slowing down in front of their house while the occupants take a good long look. It’s odd. The Barzmans are by no means famous.

Neighbor Groucho Marx breezes by, wearing a pith helmet and pushing baby daughter Melinda in a pram. Groucho stops to announce to Norma that it's awfully hot: "Of course, it's doubly hot for you—with two kinds of heat. But don't ask me for anything more than ice cubes, which is as far as my sympathies go."

The Barzmans are still attempting to decode this when an outdated white Cadillac convertible pulls up, top down and “a swirling mass of golden wind-tossed hair” behind the wheel. Out steps a lovely young girl they've never seen before. She shimmers over to the couple and remarks that she's on her way to a party at the Minnellis up the street because her agent said “it would be good for me to show myself.” But then she saw Ben and Norma out on the lawn with their drinks—and gee, the sombrero looked fun. Would somebody get her a drink?

I'd venture to say that even now, a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe could still get a gin and tonic from a random stranger at a moment's notice. Ben leaps up and fetches her the drink (hard not to imagine her responding with a variation of "Thank you, Mr. Fabian"). She takes a sip, pronounces it fine (apparently it was her first G&T). Then she starts to talk. Well, ramble mostly. About the importance in Hollywood of having a signature drink, and did the Barzmans think a gin and tonic would work for her? The girl swerves from this topic to Murphy's Law, which Norma hasn't heard of. The girl says her mother always told her not to be the one to bring bad news, on account of Murphy's Law.

“You were trying to make up your mind whether or not to tell us something unpleasant?” I prompted.

“Don't you know?” she asked hopefully. We shook our heads. She took a deep breath. “There's a deputy sheriff's car with two cops at the bottom of this hill. They’re stopping practically every car coming up the hill. There was this guy in front of me and the deputy stopped him so suddenly I almost hit him. I was really upset. Then I hear the deputy ask the guy where he was going? Was he going to your address by any chance?”

“Our address?” I asked incredulously.

“I heard it loud and clear. The guy said no and the cop waves him on. Then I drove up. ‘You stopped that guy so suddenly I almost crashed into him.’ The cop says in that way I hate—I seem to bring it out in most guys—‘Lady, I wouldn't have stopped you,’ then he grins a big fat grin and says, ‘I sure would’ve, if I’d had an excuse.’ Well, to make a long story short, he leans over me, he’s a really big guy, and says, ‘You don't happen to be going to 1290 Sunset Plaza Drive?’ ”

I gasped.

“ ‘No, I don't,’ she said. “That’s your number, isn't it?” It was. “What's going on? Is there a murder or something?”

The ground had slipped from under me in one of those near Los Angeles land-shifts. I guessed what was coming.

The girl went on. “ ‘The sheriff's office is keeping an eye on the house. Subversive groups are meeting there.’ Well, sir, I really blew. I said, ‘Who the hell is this sheriff of yours? Hitler?’ Gee whiz. Subversive? With that sombrero?”

I moved closer to Ben. “You mean he's told everybody on this hill we’re subversive?”

‘So what did the deputy sheriff do finally?’ Ben asked.

“Oh, he gave me a ticket for obstructing traffic,” the girl said. “My mother was right. There’s no percentage in being the one who brings lousy news.”

“I think I know why the sheriff’s car is doing that,” Ben said. “A bunch of us, screenwriters and directors, were going to meet to discuss what to do to help the Hollywood Ten. The Committee for the First Amendment—the one Humphrey Bogart resigned from? The meeting was called off this morning—”

“Somebody must have forgotten to call off the sheriff,” the girl said. “I bet if you gave it a little thought, you could figure out who that was.”

“Right now I don’t want to know,” I said. “It might be a friend.” The girl rose and stood there in an odd posture.

“My name is Norma,” I said, getting up and extending my hand.

“Gee, my name is Norma, too,” she said, and we shook hands all around. “I’m glad I stopped in on you guys. I mean, I hoped there was somebody kind of behind the scenes worrying about things, not just letting them get away with all the stuff they do to us. A struggling young actress like me knows about that. I’m real glad there’s people like you trying to figure out ways of not getting pushed around. I don’t care what you are. I like it that there’s somebody watching the store. I think I’ll sleep better tonight.” She turned toward her car.

“Thanks,” Ben called after her.

I’ll let the late David Ehrenstein wrap things up. When I posted this tale at the old blogspot, the first comment was his: “Don’t you just love her to teeny little bits?”

Yes, David. I do.

I know exactly what many people thought of the late Rex Reed. Short-tempered, careless with facts, close-minded at times. Took unseemly delight in insulting actors’ appearances. Politically incorrect (to put it politely) to an extreme, at times offensive degree. Hell, he offended me more than once.

So it’s not that I don’t share those views—all of them. It’s just that over the past few years I’ve also realized they’re not the full story of Reed. For one thing, I give him credit for not backing down an inch when it came to his point of view. That may sound like weak praise when applied to a film critic—aren’t we supposed to plant our flags? isn’t that part of the job? Well, yes, but I’ve seen some waffles, especially after a good pasting on social media. Reed—given his temperament, I think wisely—wanted nothing to do with Twitter or anything like it. But there are a lot of examples of him standing his ground elsewhere.

In the 1970s Rex Reed had a column in the Daily News in addition to his reviewing duties. I’ve had occasion to dig through a lot of them, and in addition to his justly famous interviews, those columns are some of his best work. For example: Reed loved Peter Davis’s powerful 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, about the enormous toll of the Vietnam War. Reed proclaimed it the best movie he saw at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, but Hearts and Minds was controversial at the time, and in some quarters remains so to this day.1 Maybe you have to put yourself in the mindset of 1975—the touchiness about the war, the divide between young and old—to appreciate the savage way Rex Reed recapped the Academy Awards where Hearts and Minds won Best Documentary.2 He wrote:

When Peter Davis and [his co-producer] Burt Schneider won their highly-deserved Oscar for the magnificent documentary Hearts and Minds Schneider read a telegram from the Viet Cong as part of his acceptance speech. The audience cheered, but Bob Hope was furious. It was a political film and Mr. Schneider had a democratic right to say anything he felt like saying. It must be remembered that the telegram was a statement of friendship from the Viet Cong, not a statement of war. The next thing we knew, Frank Sinatra was reading aloud an alleged disclaimer from the Academy absolving its members from any guilt by association with any person on the show making a political remark during the telecast. The statement was greeted with boos and hisses and flying fists.3

Backstage, there was pandemonium. Where did Frank Sinatra get such a statement, Shirley MacLaine demanded.4 “I am a member of the Academy and I wasn’t offended by Burt Schneider’s acceptance speech,” she said, “so how can you read anything in the name of the Academy when its members have not approved or ratified the statement?” Sinatra said Bob Hope shoved the statement at him and demanded that he read it. Walter Mirisch, president of the Academy, said he knew nothing about it. It was a Bob Hope production from beginning to end. Hope seized the moment to get his own conservative, right-wing opinions across to 65,000,000 people and used the Academy as a cowardly shield. It was a disgraceful thing to do and the film industry is shocked to its core as a result. It serves them right. What was Bob Hope doing there anyway?

Agree or disagree, to me this is Rex Reed at his best, not giving two hoots in hell about whether he, as a movie writer with an interest in “preserving access” as we say today, was burning bridges. And in 1975, with his fame and money-making at its height, Reed had a lot to lose. The late Cari Beauchamp told me she once tried to get a well-known Oscar writer5 to take up an AMPAS topic that was burning her bacon. The reply was, “Sorry, I like going to the Oscars.”

Part of Reed’s take-no-prisoners attitude was the fact that he was always a man out of time. He cared about the old stars, the old movies, even the old music—the same year he threw down for an anti-war film, he dissed the Beatles in an interview (“you have to listen to other, more talented people interpret the songs before you even know what they mean”) and lamented the fact that no one was listening to Mabel Mercer.6 Friend Steve Hayes, in a memorial post about Reed, recalled the critic holding forth at a party some years back, and announcing, “The most underrated actress in Hollywood was Ava Gardner and the most overrated was Jennifer Jones.” I agree about Ava (although maybe not the most underrated), I emphatically disagree on Jennifer Jones, but such matters were what Reed cared about most deeply. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t identify.

I have only two personal stories about Rex Reed, but I cherish them both. The first is from 2016. I arrived early to a screening of 20th Century Women. I turned around to see if anyone I knew was there. I spotted a good friend about five rows back, and I wanted to catch her eye. Alas, Rex Reed, who was two rows in front of her, had her undivided attention and was declaiming on matters political in a voice that carried to the screen and back. (As my friend said later, “One doesn’t really talk TO Rex, he just talks AT you.”)

The first thing I heard from Reed was “I am not proud of the fact that I am working for a fascist organization.”7 Pause. “But I need the money.” My friend, who was close to someone who had long worked for the Observer, appeared taken aback by the idea that its rates could support anyone’s lifestyle, but Reed swept on. I have no idea if this was continuing a prior topic or introducing a new one, but he said, “The Vice President hates Jews, too.”8 When Reed segued into “I’ve been glued to MSNBC,” I heard a voice from two rows in front of me rumble loudly, “Give us a break. Jesus Christ.”

The voice was a critic who, I am all but positive, voted for Trump, and I won’t identify him further, and I probably don’t need to.

Rex thundered, “DROP DEAD.” My friend began to focus intently on the blank movie screen, as though willing the film to start.

The other critic shot back, “I don’t think I could.”

Rex snapped, “I think you SHOULD.”

It was at this point that the flack came in to announce the film, before the rest of this Noel Coward scene could play out.

In case you’re wondering, I can vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue, because you better believe I took notes. As 20th Century Women started I noted that it was Rex who got the last word. Which probably annoyed the Trumpy critic no end, and I admit did not displease me. At all.

Here’s my other Rex Reed story. It was 2023 and I had missed the NYFF screening of Poor Things, so I signed up to see it at a screening room. I sat next to film critic Joanna Langfield, a lovely and collegial person. In comes Rex to sit on her other side, and he and Joanna began to chat. It’s not, I swear, that I was eavesdropping. Rex Reed’s conversations, as I believe I have demonstrated, were there to be enjoyed by all. Either that, or you put in your earpods and tried to drown him out.

And so I learned why Rex was there. The day of the NYFF Poor Things screening had featured one of those torrential downpours that New York gets in the age of climate change—the subway flooded, sidewalks were treacherous, the crosswalks had become knee-deep wading pools. Rex, whose Dakota apartment was several blocks from the Walter Reade, had ventured out anyway. And, it transpired, he had taken a bad spill on his way. I mean bad. As he explained to Joanna, he slipped, hit his head hard on a window, then startled the Film Lincoln Center staff by arriving in the lobby with blood streaming from a scrape on his head. He praised the staff who cleaned him up. After this ordeal, Rex watched Poor Things anyway!

And he hated it. But when he tried to write up the movie, he found that he was foggy on the details. He figured that circumstances (his throbbing head) might have affected his opinion, and by god, he was there to give Yorgos Lanthimos another chance.

It was at this point that Joanna gestured toward me and said, “Do you two know each other?”

Before I could answer, Rex said “Oh, of course I know Farran.” I nearly fell out of my seat. I’d encountered Rex Reed at least a half-dozen times, at screenings and the NYFCC annual vote and what-not, and hand to god this was the first time he had acknowledged my existence by so much as a nod. We exchanged pleasantries and I reflected that under that flashy, party-dominating demeanor, Rex had spent years observing more than the people around him realized. It was surely part of what made him, in his heyday, such a sharp and at times lethal interviewer.

Post-screening and on the way out, I couldn’t resist asking my new-old pal Rex, “Hey, did it go better this time?”

He growled, “I hated it even more.”

How could I not laugh? The fact that Rex Reed, then 85, was wading through floodwaters to attend screenings was impressive. It adds a little nuance to his reputation for sloppiness with names and plot points.9 Going back to rewatch a movie he hated because the details were fuzzy was conscientious, almost weirdly so considering Rex’s breezy refusal to fact-check when attacking a movie he didn’t like (and lord, in his later years he didn’t like much). Yet he was still putting in the time, even after the big money and fame in being Rex Reed were long gone.

In that 1975 interview, Reed told the reporter that he wanted to be known for “a kind of seriousness that people who quite often read me pass over. I think it’s possible to be serious and also glib and readable. The trouble is that in this country everybody has been brainwashed into thinking if you are serious you are also dull and unreadable. And I’ve tried to change that.”

However else Rex Reed is remembered, I don’t think “dull” will ever be any part of it.

There was I, looking for classic-film stills, as one does on a Sunday night, or any other night, and the one above brought me up short. It isn’t exactly obscure, but I didn’t recall seeing it before. Surely we all recognize Hedy Lamarr, even with a cigarette dangling from her perfect mouth, but what’s that thing she’s holding? Then I remembered—it’s a c…

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At 3:21 a.m. on March 4, 2022, a 911 call was made from a house in a well-to-do suburb outside of Park City, Utah. The caller was Kouri Richins, and her emergency was her husband Eric. She’d been sleeping with one of her three little boys, but returned to the marital bed to find Eric was cold to the touch. He was pale and yellow, and he wasn’t breathing. Paramedics were dispatched, but it was too late. Eric Richins was dead at the age of 39.

Eric, a well-loved man who ran a thriving stonemasonry business, had been in rude good health. He was outdoorsy, he was athletic. In his spare time he enjoyed hunting almost anything that moved. Her husband’s sudden demise was hard on Kouri, so she said. But it was even harder on the boys, all of them under age 10, who adored their father. By way of comfort, Kouri published a children’s book called Are You There?. The book, which came out in March 2023, answers oh yes, Eric is there in spirit, and he’s especially there for holidays and soccer games. Kouri made the promotional rounds to talk of grief and healing. TV hosts thanked her for sharing and said she was brave.

No full and satisfactory explanation, however, had yet emerged for why a healthy and relatively young man just up and died all of a sudden. Well, that’s not entirely true. An autopsy was conducted, and the medical examiner found that Eric ingested fentanyl. A big fat dose of it. Five times the amount that would kill most people, said the ME, and by the way, it was street fentanyl. Not medical grade. So the question remained: how on earth did Eric, a Mormon whose vices were largely confined to social drinking and an occasional THC gummy, get ahold of fentanyl, much less ingest it?

Beats me, said Kouri.1 And, while there had been an initial police investigation that could kindly be termed “desultory,” there the matter remained for some months.

Eric was also survived by his father Eugene and two sisters, Amy and Katie. They thought this situation stank. They were angry at the police. They were angrier at Kouri, for several reasons, the most pressing of which was that Eric had told several people he suspected his wife was trying to poison him. There was an incident in Greece in 2019, and another episode with a breakfast sandwich that Kouri left in Eric’s truck as a sign of wifely affection on Valentine’s Day, 2022—less than three weeks before Eric died. After one bite of that sandwich, Eric, the healthy happy hunter, became alarmingly ill, and recovered only after using his son’s Epipen and swigging some Benadryl. This he did on his own. Kouri was out of the house.

The Richins are important people in Park City and its environs. They are rich. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t mess around with the Richins. Especially sisters Amy and Katie. After nearly a year of what they saw as running in place, the family hired a private investigator. Eric had been rich in his own right, while Kouri’s own house-flipping business was drowning in debt, not much good for anything save an exhibit in some future Museum of Check-Kiting. Kouri’s pre-nup specified that in the event of divorce, she got little or nothing from Eric.

If he died, however…

With Eric now gone, Kouri collected some $1.3 million in life insurance and spent it in three months flat. The PI confirmed that and quite a bit more, such as the fact that Kouri had been having an affair. Information was shared with the cops, who were picking up the pace on their own probe. And in early May 2023, Kouri was arrested.

For the next three years or so, with Kouri in jail (no bail, said the judge), her case trudged toward court. The brass nerve of that picture book was the hook that first drew national interest. But there was so much more. The state alleged Kouri got the fentanyl via her housekeeper, a recovering addict who had a drug record. The widow’s web searches were suggestive, to say the least, including (and this is the merest sample) “what do cops do when they seize electronics” (they retrieve a great big chunk of messages you tried to delete, Kouri); “if someone is poisned [sic] what does it go down on the death certificate as” (haven’t we all googled that at some point); and the internet’s near-universal favorite, “luxury prisons for the rich America.” By the way, that inspirational kiddie book? Was penned by a ghostwriter.

The above synopsis is an intro, the tip of the poisoned iceberg. I’ve listed in-depth sources at the end for anyone who wants more.

I explained once before why I can’t resist poisoning cases. Plus, let’s face it, at the moment the real news is not something most of us can handle without frequent breaks. So as I was cooking or cleaning, I followed the courtroom feed from the trial of Kouri Richins, which began on Feb. 23, and I kept up with some folks on Twitter. Occasionally I retweeted pithy observations from the likes of jaybronious, Lizbethne30 and Smarcie38. The topical swerve puzzled my movie followers, one of whom told me politely that he had no idea what I was on about. I said I thought Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson would see a kindred spirit in Kouri Richins.

And it hit me why I was so obsessed—this case is noir as all hell. Every day, I was reminded of a line, a scene, a character.

This past week, Kouri Richins was convicted on all charges: aggravated murder, attempted murder (that Valentine’s sandwich), two counts of false insurance claims, and one fraud count for good measure. That’s why I feel comfortable expressing my personal point of view, which is that she’s stone cold guilty. Now, as Kouri awaits her May 13 sentencing, I’ve been pondering the many ways she reminds me of one of Eddie Muller’s laws of film noir: “Bad decisions make good stories.”

Film noir, especially from the classic era, is highly stylized. At the time the movies were made, they were mostly called melodramas, and for good reason. They’re exaggerated, bigger than life. No one thought the plots were realistic (the hell with realism anyway). I’m convinced that only noir could do justice to this tale. Film noir—with its doomed victims, its avarice, its jaded view of human nature, its downward spirals and yes, its femmes fatales—is the one genre that can explain a Kouri Richins.

That’s what I think, anyway. You can decide if you agree, or if you think I oughta have my head examined. Here are discussions of three highly noir aspects of the Kouri Richins case.

The Money

When it comes to insurance fraud movies, there’s Double Indemnity, and there’s everything else. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) enlists sleazy insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to help her get rid of a problem—her husband. Madly in lust with Phyllis and intrigued by the challenge of defrauding his own employer, Walter helps forge a life insurance policy for Phyllis’s unloved spouse. Such is the couple’s greed that they plan not only to kill Dietrichson, but to make it look like an accident, thus triggering the double payout of the title.

They don’t get away with it, but they get closer than Kouri did.

Edward G. Robinson plays Barton Keyes, Walter’s boss. Keyes spends much of Double Indemnity pacing around and describing his worries. Keyes says he always knows a bad claim, because of “the little man in here. Every time one of these phonies comes along, it ties knots in my stomach. I can’t eat.”

Enter Brooke Karrington, the forensic accountant who testified on day seven or so. She was a tall, soberly dressed woman with a worried expression that rarely changed. Maybe it was resting accountant face; maybe the very thought of Kouri Richins kept that anxious look in place; or maybe Karrington had her own “little man.” Because Kouri’s finances were well beyond what you might find in a Billy Wilder script. They were like something out of a Safdie movie; neo-noir, you could say.

The situation was complicated, and yet it was not. Debt is debt, after all. Kouri started off well enough—a house flipped here, another house there, nice little profits. But she wanted growth. Five houses, then fifteen. Profits shrank. Some houses didn’t sell. House flippers often rely on loans, explained Karrington, but Kouri’s interlocking debts were spreading like cracks in the ice. She took out one loan to pay the interest on another. In a pinch, Kouri simply bounced another check. Karrington testified that from January 2021 to March 2022, Kouri racked up 236 overdraft transactions totaling more than $300,000 and was hit with $6,000 in fees. She turned to payday outfits, the worst of the worst. By the time Eric died, Kouri was paying $2,100 per day and her debts totaled approximately $7.5 million.2

What could Kouri have done about this looming calamity? asked prosecutor Brad Bloodworth. Nothing, Karrington said. Kouri could sell everything down to her hair clips and still be in debt. Cold, simple mathematics proved she could never dig herself out of the hole.

The implication was clear—that through the fog of her incompetence, Kouri Richins saw the only thing that could save her was a nice lump sum from outside. An inheritance, say. Or an insurance payout.

After Karrington, other witnesses appeared to explain how Kouri took out life insurance that Eric didn’t know about. At one point, a $2 million work-based policy (called a buy/sell) was mysteriously changed online to name Kouri as beneficiary. That was odd, because it belonged to Eric’s business partner Cody Wright, and was meant to benefit Eric. Eric’s name was rapidly put back as beneficiary, suggesting whoever changed it (gee, who could that be) realized the mistake.

Kouri didn’t go for the whole “Double Indemnity” payout (no trains around, I guess), but she bought life insurance like some women buy shoes—only the life insured was Eric’s, and prosecutors said she didn’t tell him. From 2017 to 2019, they alleged, Kouri insured her husband’s life with several policies for a total of about $2 million.

In 2019 Kouri got the bright idea to take out a home equity line of credit for $250,000. Or rather, it might have been a bright idea if the house belonged to Kouri. It did not. Eric bought it before their marriage. When he found out about the HELOC around September 2020, and also saw that Kouri had helped herself to some of his other accounts, Eric was disturbed enough to consult a divorce attorney. Sadly (and probably fatally) he didn’t follow through. What Eric did do was restructure his estate planning. Now, instead of everything going to Kouri, Eric’s assets would go into a trust for their children, said trust to be overseen by sister Katie Richins-Benson. In the event of Eric’s death, Kouri could stay in the house with the children, but she couldn’t (for example) sell it and keep the money. Almost nothing else was bequeathed to Kouri outright. No one told Kouri of the new arrangement, but that seemed fair enough, since she never bothered to mention helping herself to the equity in the house.

Meanwhile, prosecutors said someone who was almost certainly not Eric took out another life insurance policy for $100,000. It went into effect on February 4, 2022, ten days before that Valentine’s Day, and a month before Eric’s death.3

Move now to March 5, 2022, the day after Eric died, when Kouri hosted a rowdy “celebration of life” for friends. Sister Amy was there too. The next morning, Amy woke up, looked out the window, and saw a van emblazoned with “LOCKSMITH.” Down hustled Amy, to find Kouri and the locksmith preparing to break into the household safe.

I needed a copy of Eric’s will, Kouri explained later. I was sure it was right inside that safe. Amy has called that less than convincing, given the fact that the safe also contained about $165,000 cash (estimates vary). The in-laws had a frank exchange of views. Amy told Kouri that the safe was not hers to open. The money inside it wasn’t Kouri’s, either. In fact, the very house they stood in belonged to the trust, and not Kouri.

Once Kouri grasped how completely she was screwed, and that she wasn’t getting that cash today or any other day, she throat-punched Amy Richins.4

“I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t get the woman,” says Walter Neff in the opening minutes of Double Indemnity. Kouri got some of the money from some of the life insurance, but that $1.3 million (probably) vanished into the hands of her creditors. Would Kouri get the woman, or rather the man—the one she wasn’t married to, the one who was still above ground? Not a chance, baby. Remember, I said this is noir.

The Lover

On day eight Robert “Josh” Grossman, the man Kouri was having an affair with at the time of Eric’s death, took the stand for the prosecution. He turned out to have an unnerving resemblance to Eric, and he was as jittery as any witness I’ve ever seen. Josh needed to have the judge explain “the truth, the whole truth” etc.—did the man never watch a cops-and-lawyers show? Maybe not. Josh is an Iraq war veteran who has made his living as an itinerant handyman and construction worker. More than once, he’s wound up living out of his truck. He met Kouri in South Carolina when she was flipping a house out there for some godforsaken reason, and he answered an ad. Sparks did not fly, said Josh, but it was a matter of time. He made his way to Utah to work with Kouri in early 2020, after their attraction turned romantic, then physical.

Kouri got a pretty good deal from Josh. She’d let him stay at this or that house she was flipping, gave him money (although not consistently) and bought two trucks for him. In return he did what he could to help fix up the houses, and fed her ego with his devotion.

He liked her, then he loved her. But despite dreamy texts about a life together, they broke up after Eric died. After he got news of Kouri’s arrest, things Kouri said took on new meaning; “I was looking at them through different goggles.” Such as the day in early January 2022 when Kouri texted to ask if he’d “ever done more than weed.” Hm, why ask him that? On Valentine’s Day Kouri got a text from Eric, who told his wife he felt sick enough to go to the hospital. She said she was at work, and suggested he take a nap. She was, of course, cuddled up with Josh.

Kouri also had a strange idea of pillow talk (technically, parked-truck talk when they were out in the woods together). Some two weeks after Eric died, in a quiet moment with Josh, she asked him if he killed anybody in Iraq. How did it feel? asked Kouri. Josh didn’t have what it takes to shut down nosy questions like a Robert Mitchum character. (“They tell me you killed Ferraro,” says luscious Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman; “How did it feel?” “He didn’t say,” responds Mitchum.)

Josh answered Kouri sincerely—yes, he’d killed someone in Iraq. Only later, when the private investigator told Josh point-blank that Kouri murdered Eric, did it occur to Josh this wasn’t a question most widows would ask. With those different goggles on, Kouri asking how it felt to kill someone was what a poker player would call “a tell.”

He loved Kouri, but he didn’t know her. A lot of film noir men make the same discovery, but the truth comes to them in dimly lit corners, in offices after everyone’s gone, in hotel rooms with the blinds drawn. It seemed like Robert Josh Grossman was confirming all his worst fears, all the secret things he knew in his heart about Kouri, in real time on CourtTV. At one point, as his adoring texts to Kouri scrolled silently across the courtroom’s screen for all to read, Josh put his head down on the witness box and cried.

Cross-examination didn’t exactly soothe his nerves. “Would it be fair to say that the talk of a relationship between you and Kouri was more of a fantasy than an expectation?” defense counsel Wendy Lewis asked. Josh stalled for a minute, then pulled up the answer from his gut. “I’d say yeah…more something that I maybe thought I wanted…I couldn’t picture it in the future, you know.”

How long did Kouri keep up with him after Eric died; was it three or four months? “I thought it was longer,” said Josh.

“What was your feeling about ending the relationship? Were you sad?” “Yeah,” said Josh, as his eyes shifted between Lewis and some distant point beyond her, or Kouri, or the courtroom.

It made me think of the ocean visible behind lovelorn Steve (Burt Lancaster) in Criss-Cross as he finds out Anna (Yvonne DeCarlo) is not who he thought. He says slowly, as if to convince himself, “All those things you said to me…you weren’t lying. You meant it. I know you meant it. You love me.” Anna snaps back, “Love, love! You have to look out for yourself. That’s the way it is, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do, throw away all this money?”

Things could have been worse for Josh, of course. Unlike many a movie femme fatale, Kouri never tried to kill her lover. Right? That brings us to speculation—and that’s all it is, speculation—about a hush puppy. On March 2, 2022, as Eric Richins ticked down the last of his time on earth, Josh texted Kouri, “I sat down to eat that hush puppy thing and that’s all I recall until about 11 pm.” Adverse reactions were something of a risk when you took food from Kouri. Was the hush puppy a chemistry experiment, a dosage test? I wonder, and I wonder if Josh wonders.

I’m still confused about a lot of things, Josh told the court. How many film noir protagonists could have told poor Josh they knew how it felt to be a sap, a patsy. “When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me,” Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) says about meeting Rita Hayworth, aka The Lady From Shanghai. “If I’d known where it would end, I’d never let anything start... if I’d been in my right mind, that is. But once I’d seen her, once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for quite some time.”

OK, if we want to be catty, Kouri is slender and cute, but she’s no Rita Hayworth. Still, to Josh, maybe she kinda was.

The 911 Call

For me, this was the most revealing part of Summit County Prosecutor Brad Bloodworth’s superb closing statement. The defense played Kouri’s 911 call in their opening, with counsel Kathy Nester stating dramatically, “That is the sound of a woman becoming a widow.” At that time, I didn’t think much of the recording as a play for sympathy or anything else. I thought, “Kouri babe, please take it down an octave or two.”

Then came Bloodworth to show the 911 call is also the sound of a woman who couldn’t care less about avoiding widowhood. The prosecutor did that with a clock on the courtroom screen while he played the audio. Now you could watch the precious seconds slip by as that nails-on-a-chalkboard voice keens and wails that no, she can’t possibly pull her husband from the bed to the floor for CPR. The body is cold, Kouri complains, and “it’s dead weight.” (Bloodworth made sure we all noticed that “it.”)

The 911 dispatcher, god bless the woman, does everything short of reaching through the phone to smack Kouri into action. Around the 5:18 mark, Kouri stops dithering and claims to have positioned Eric on the floor. The dispatcher asks Kouri to start chest compressions. “Ok! we’re going to—”

Kouri mews, “One.”

The dispatcher finishes her sentence: “...count one, two, three, four. OK? Let me know when you’re ready.”

Kouri, in the same slow baby voice: “OK. One…”

Dispatcher, still in there trying: “One, two, three—”

Slow-motion Kouri comes back with “Two…”

Dispatcher, and lord only knows what she’s thinking at this point, finishes her own count with “four.” Then, “One, two, three, four. Count out loud so I can hear you. I’m counting with you. One—”

Kouri, like it’s her first day of language class: “One.”

The dispatcher is the only one counting now: “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four…” and so on as this dedicated woman keeps counting to Kouri. There’s a question about opening the door, and Kouri interjects a “three” at some point, maybe to show she’s awake. The timer on the courtroom screen stops. At long and excruciating last, the paramedics are about to arrive.

Can you imagine pulling this shit if you truly wanted your spouse to survive? Ellen Berent wouldn’t buy this act for a red-hot minute. Ellen, played by Gene Tierney in the great color noir Leave Her to Heaven, takes her husband’s teenage brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), out on a lake for a swim. Danny is disabled from polio and swims as physical therapy. But Ellen doesn’t want him around. She wants her husband all to herself.

Danny is eager to swim the width of the lake, and Ellen obligingly follows him in a rowboat. For his safety, you understand. But the long distance is beyond Danny’s strength (as Ellen well knows) and he starts to tire. Ellen urges him, don’t stop now! “You don’t want to give up when you’ve come so far.”

As Danny struggles, Ellen stops rowing. Gene Tierney’s gorgeous, impassive face as she watches the boy go down once_…twice…forever, is something you don’t forget once you’ve seen it. When it’s clearly too late, Ellen dives into the water. To “save” Danny.

If you follow the link above, you’ll see that Danny starts to drown around the two-minute mark. The part where he dies plays out in about a minute and a half. It took Kouri Richins more than three times as long to even pretend to give her husband CPR. This was on top of wild overkill with the fentanyl.

As Bloodworth put it, “Kouri Richins wanted Eric not only dead. She wanted him good and dead.” If that’s not a perfect film noir line, I don’t know what is.

If you’ve also followed the Kouri Richins case, and you’ve read this to the end (bless you), you may feel dismayed at all the things I left out. “What about Kouri stealing the house down payment from her best friend? What about the Midway mansion? How could you leave out the ‘Walk the Dog’ letter and the beautiful Allie Staking and the beautiful Skye Lazaro? And Judge Mrazik with the beautiful deep voice? Farran, what about Bryce’s missing pants?”

Listen, this is 4000 words, already twice my normal post length, and I’m not a true crime writer. I’m a film critic who can’t stop connecting every single thing in life to old movies. Here are some links to people who can tell you much more.

For discussions of the trial, brief clips of interest, and to rewatch testimony in full or in part, I suggest the playlists of:

Emily D. Baker (lawyerly commentary)

Jaybronious (the views of a sardonic observer)

If you like podcasts, Pretty Lies and Alibis offers a “Crash Course on the Murder of Eric Richins,” as well as a complete list of episodes covering the trial.

There’s also Gossip, Rumor and Innuendo’s playlist, where she summarizes events day by day. As Kathy likes to remind people, she’s not a lawyer, she’s a gossip on the internet, but she’s also funny as hell.

For just the testimony (albeit with endless sidebars and objections), there’s always Court TV. Start here and work your way through.

If you prefer reading to watching, KPCW has many articles. Nate Eaton of East Idaho News has been covering the case in depth with both articles and video.

Preface:

This is a slightly edited version of the essay I wrote last year for “World Noir Vol. 3,” a box set put out by the splendid U.K. physical-media company Radiance Films. The limited edition of 3000 copies has now sold out, but the site still has a number of excellent and otherwise hard-to-find releases, and a number of them are region-free. The Lost One is in some sense a thriller, and many people prefer to seee thrillers cold if possible. So I’ve marked the spot where my essay goes into a close and detailed discussion of the whole. Feel free to read the intro and come back for the rest when you have seen it.

Die Verlorene, the only movie directed by actor Peter Lorre, was a film maudit if ever there was one. Even the German production’s English-translated title, The Lost One, seemed to predict its fate after its 1951 release. Lorre stars as Dr. Rothe, a former research scientist working under an assumed name to vaccinate refugees in a displaced-persons camp; there he must confront someone from the darkest part of his past. The screenplay, co-written by Lorre with others both credited and un-, went through at least six versions. Numerous writing sessions occurred in the Bavarian sanatorium where Lorre was undergoing a “rest cure” for his longtime drug addiction (which, by common agreement, didn’t work). Lorre was never satisfied with the script, and pages were often simply tossed aside on set.

Producer Arnold Pressburger died during filming and was replaced by his son Fred. The younger Pressburger was plagued by Lorre’s demands for more money, not to fund the production so much as to feed Lorre’s addictions, including a nonstop supply of costly American cigarettes. Lorre quarreled repeatedly with his assistant director, who eventually quit. A fire destroyed the cutting room, along with the rough cut, which had to be laboriously rebuilt from 30,000 meters of negative stock. That surgery was of necessity done without a script for reference, because a script had never been finished.

At last The Lost One was released to the German public in the fall of 1951, and became a resounding commercial failure. A half-hearted bid for a U.S. release was abandoned. The film went unseen in the States until 1983, when it was greeted by Vincent Canby of the New York Times as “a curiosity.”

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I marked ten years without my mother this past November. She left me with a lot of sayings, a lot of memories, and a lot of her vintage clothing, much of it from when she was a secretary at the Federal Reserve. It was the Kennedy Administration, her own “Mad Men” era. Among a lot of items, including the senior prom dress that my grandmother sewed for her, I have Mom’s chic white linen wedding suit, which she wore with a pillbox hat à la First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy—hell, I even have the hat. To her dying day my mother considered Jackie Kennedy the ultimate in style, grace and glamour. In this, as in many things, Mom was not wrong.

But one legacy she left me I took a long time—much too long—to examine: her collection of 45s. I got her albums years before she died. They’re pretty battered now after my multiple moves, but I still play them sometimes.

A 45-rpm single, however, is a true artifact. Still playable on almost any turntable, these days the format is also a pain in the ass. I’ll explain for the youngsters, such as my kids: a 45 has one song per side, and modern turntables are designed to play one record at a time. To play them on our home setup, I’d have to use plastic inserts that adapt the big hole in the middle. While there are easier adaptors, the one below is the classic.

Then I would either need to pull a tall chair over to the shelf and park myself so everything’s in reach, or I could run across the room to change the record every three or four minutes.

When I was a kid, the 45 single was still a thing, and the industry had a solution to the one-at-a-time problem. They sold record players with a tall spindle in the middle. You stacked the records on it, a special arm held them in place, and the whole contraption was meant to drop another record to play as soon as one finished. This gentleman has a fun demonstration of just such a record changer, albeit done with albums. These players ceased production at least 20 years ago.

They were invented in the 1920s, and the automatic changers were surprisingly common by the mid-1950s when my mother, who was born Dec. 18, 1941, apparently started buying 45s. I remember that my grandparents had a massive cabinet stereo like the one Frank Landry demonstrates in the Youtube video I linked above (although his stereo is from the 1970s). I don’t know when they got it, but it certainly could have been in my grandparents’ living room when my mom was in high school. I am certain, however, that she would not have used it very often, if at all, for her own records. I’ll explain why in a little bit.

There were three kids in the family, and theirs was a small house with just three bedrooms. There was an older sister, and a younger brother. Mom was the middle child. Her name was Jeanne, pronounced, as she would have politely but firmly explained to you, “JEAN-nie.” She spent a lifetime saying “Jean-nie, it’s the Scottish spelling and pronunciation.” But to get back to the bedrooms—aside from the one my grandparents occupied, her brother had the smallest to himself, by virtue of being the only boy, which was annoying but at least made some sense. You’d think that the slightly larger Bedroom No. 3 would have been split more or less down the middle between the two girls. It didn’t work out that way. It was somehow decided that Mom would occupy the room’s main closet. As a walk-in closet, it was big. As a bedroom, it made that term rather literal.

Some time around 1956, when Jeanne began buying 45s for herself, she acquired a portable record player. I know what it looked like from the outside, because I still have the case. I keep old letters, photos and other mementos in it now.

With the lid up and the turntable working, it may have looked something like the one below, because otherwise I can’t figure out where the speaker was. (Jeanne’s player was not a Decca, it was a cheap model.)

I ask you now to imagine Jeanne, 14 for most of 1956, on a single bed that filled most of a walk-in closet in Arlington, Virginia, hand-changing one record after another… and another… and another.

Because when my mother died, here’s something else she left me.

Yes, those boxes contain singles. How many? Well, let’s see. The smaller boxes—they were called “Platter Paks”—on the top row and to the side hold 50, give or take a few extras and also the EPs Jeanne would stuff in the back. The two extra-large Platter Paks hold 75 singles. So that gets us to 350, more or less. I’d say 375 tops. They go from about 1956 (top right hand corner) to sometime in the late 60s, when Jeanne’s 45-single buying slowed to a trickle (the rather Mod box at top left).

Look, I’m not naive. I know record collectors can be bananas and some of them have entire rooms full of 45s, bless their lunatic preservationist hearts. But there’s something special to me about Jeanne playing these one by one in her closet-as-bedroom, filing them in the numbered slots of the Platter Paks and stashing them, I believe she told me, under her bed. In the first place, these records represent her own hard work. According to this blog, a seven-inch 45 single cost 89 cents in 1956. EPs, of which Jeanne had a few, were $1.49. The contents of this box probably cost her at least $45, and that was a lot of money in 1956, about $545 adjusted for inflation. Where, I wondered, did she get the money? The family was middle class with grandmama staying home and my grandad earning a good union living (remember those?). But I can’t imagine them throwing money at Mom for her 45s.

Jeanne must have done a lot of babysitting, I figured, and my sister confirmed that. The teenage babysitter is a vanishing concept now, but in 1956 it was how many a girl earned her pocket money. I think Jeanne also got a small allowance if everything went well, which in that house it often did not. Add in some birthday and Christmas money from Jeanne’s own grandparents, and you have enough to sustain her record habit.

I would never ever have considered throwing out this collection, but I did stash it away and wonder what to do with it. Then I kind of forgot about it. This past year I went on a closet dive and pulled out the boxes.

And when I saw the title of the first 45 that my mother filed, I let out a whoop.

I’m not saying this is the first single Jeanne ever bought; I think she filed them in bunches. But the fact this seminal record, this inspiration to generations of musicians, this rock-and-roll milestone—that this 45-rpm seven-inch piece of vinyl sits at the top of Mom’s first box of singles pleases me no end. Alas, however, it grieves me to tell you that her own copy of the single is either lost, or misfiled. I haven’t been through all 350-some-odd records yet, so I will let you know if it turns up.

As for why the “Blueberry Hill” entry is badly typed, and all but one of the others are handwritten, I have a guess. One of my grandmother’s axioms was if you could type, you’d never starve. Grandmama helped support her family through the Depression as a typist, starting as a teenager. Both her girls had to take typing in high school. Those roster entries are probably an artifact of when Jeanne started her typing course. The card is stiff, it may not have gone easily into an old manual typewriter, and I believe she decided it was more trouble than it was worth. The rest of the card I recognize as different stages of my mother’s handwriting.

I’m amused by the “MFGR’S NO.” on the side, which Mom filled out diligently for as long as she continued to write these cards. What was the practical use of that? She was not a collector, she just bought stuff she wanted to play. But Jeanne was orderly, a follower of rules. There was a space for that number, and she was gonna fill it out.

It’s important to note, though, that if something mattered to her, Jeanne broke the rules. Case in point follows. My grandfather was a Georgia-born Southern racist of the deepest dye. He did not like Black people and he sure as hell did not like Black music. He didn’t want to hear it, he didn’t want to hear anything that sounded like it in his house. That’s why I’m so sure Mom didn’t play her singles in the living room. Grandaddy would have had an aneurysm over her music, which he always referred to with that atomic bomb of a slur.

What did Grandaddy listen to? Country, from what I gather. Some of it good, much of it insipid and lost to time with good reason. Lawrence Welk. Polkas. Wherever Mom got her teenage taste from, it wasn’t him. Then again, maybe in a roundabout way it was. She grew to loathe her father at a pretty early age. There is no doubt—she told me so herself—that Jeanne got a kick out of playing records he thought were trash. She played them after school, before he got home from work. Or she played them in her closet space with the volume low, so he couldn’t hear (early hearing loss runs in my family). I know that she would also bring her records to her friends’ houses, where the parents mostly didn’t like the music but they managed not to fly into a sputtering Lester Maddox fury over it.

In this, my mother was like millions of white teenagers across America, the ones who went to Fats Domino’s shows and danced. “Teens always heard my music with their hearts,” said Domino. “The beat was just happy. It didn’t have color or hidden meaning.” True, Jeanne and her friends had little if anything in the way of political consciousness. At that point they weren’t trying to change the times, they just loved the music. But in a way Fats Domino was also wrong. The beat sure meant something to my grandfather. It meant his time was passing, and his view of the world was losing its grip.

Over time, Jeanne got bolder. The boy next door, whose name was of course Johnny (just a friend, Mom insisted even years later), liked to balance his own record player near his bedroom windowsill. He’d play things loud enough for Mom to hear through her own window, about thirty feet away. Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard. Elvis, who of course was white, but not in the eyes of people like my grandfather. Johnny’s parents shrugged and said kids will be kids, which I hope is how sane older people dealt with this newfangled sound. Fume though he might, Grandaddy liked to maintain a genial front for the neighbors. The old man couldn’t do a thing to a tall athletic boy not his own. Mom was ecstatic. Turn it up, Johnny! After a while, Jeanne took her stuff over to the window and played her own records for her friend, before her father got home.

I find my mother’s collection fascinating not because her taste was flawless (although at times I’m startled by the awesomeness of something she bought). She was an ordinary teenager with no special access to what was hip and happening. I go down the list above and I see some all-time bangers. But I also see “Earth Angel,” and it isn’t the one made immortal by The Penguins. It’s the version by, god help us, the Crew Cuts. Over on AllMusic, Richie Unterberger begins his biography of this Canadian group:

On most informed lists of rock & roll villains, the Crew Cuts would have to rank near the top. They weren’t rock & rollers in the first place: their clean-cut white harmony glee-club approach was really in the style of early and mid-’50s groups such as the Four Aces, the Four Lads, and the Four Freshmen. [Mom has some of those, too. -F.] The Canadian quartet differed from those acts, however, in their concentration upon covers of songs originally recorded by R&B/doo-wop vocal groups…Their strategy of foraging for sources among Black R&B vocal singles was widely imitated throughout the industry, by Pat Boone, the McGuire Sisters, Georgia Gibbs, and numerous others.

Ouch. Accurate. What’s more, my mother, as I knew her when I was grown, would have agreed. But in 1956 she was 14, she was living in a (notoriously segregated) suburb in a walk-in closet with a miserable racist father and a meek mother and siblings who fought all the time. The hell did she know? She bought stuff as soon as she heard it. That year, the Crew Cuts had the bigger hit.

Relatedly, however, when it comes to how she found stuff, I would love to know where she first heard someone like Smiley Lewis. His big hit “I Hear You Knockin’” would be no surprise to find. The terrific “Shame, Shame, Shame” Mom might have heard if she snuck out to see Baby Doll that year (and she has that record further back in the case). But this is what Mom filed at number five, and this record wasn’t a chart-topper.

“Down Yonder We Go Ballin’” is bouncy and fun and I love his voice. “Someday,” the B side (or is it? she got them flipped sometimes) I just plain love.

I’ve been going through these boxes and playing things (mostly online) as I go along, with the ambition of listening to all of them at least once. I’ll see if I have more to say as I move along in this project, for project it is. I’m no music historian, much less a music critic. I’m just going through these songs to see what was happening, in my mother’s life and in “teenage music,” through what she bought. The highs, the ones that sound as good as the day she bought them. And the lows, the drippy stuff that made me wonder if it was a gift and she was just too nice to throw it away.

And hopefully some discoveries for me, too. Johnny Burnette’s Rock ’n Roll Trio, says AllMusic, recorded “a clutch of singles for Decca in 1956 and 1957 that achieved nothing more than regional success.” I guess that region extended from Memphis as far north as Arlington, and included “the first rock & roll version of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” which Jeanne bought. I’ve heard the Yardbirds’ version, who has not, but my god, where has this record been all my life? I know now. It’s been waiting for me, in the back of Mom’s first set of 45s.

Prologue

Hello there, and happy 2026, as I stick my head above the parapet.

There’s a quote from one of John Lennon’s final interviews that occupies a permanent corner of my brain: “I’m really talking to the people who grew up with me and saying, ‘Here I am now. How are you, how’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t the Seventies a drag? Here we are, well, let’s try to make the Eighties good.’”

Lennon, seemingly in a good place at last, didn’t get his chance to fulfill the wish. But for the past decade, every year like clockwork I remember him saying that. I think, last year was a drag, let’s try to make this one good.

And last year was a horrendous drag. To be clear—I’m not talking about personal matters, but public ones. The endless drumbeat of terrible news. It wore me the hell down. I know I’m not alone, to say the least. But in terms of personal results, I powered through my day job and outside assignments, and wound up with (I’m not kidding) at least a half-dozen pieces for this place that I couldn’t get in gear to finish. The writer’s voice in my head had turned nasty and negative. The longer the silence went on, the harder it became to break.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in situational melancholy.

Well, here we are, Mr. Lennon. It’s 2026, and I’m telling my inner voice to shut the fuck up. The fact is, I did work on projects in 2025 that I loved. At Linktree you can see a rundown.

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It was quite a while ago when I realized how long it had been since I saw David Ehrenstein on Facebook, so far as I knew the last redoubt of his online presence. Afterward, over a length of time I’m too ashamed to estimate, sometimes I’d think, “Where is David? Why isn’t he commenting anywhere anymore, this isn’t like him.” I thought about trying to run…

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Lovely, ill-fated Mary Ure was born this day, Feb. 18, in 1933, in Glasgow. Please join me for a moment to recall some of my favorite movie roles for this actress, whose talent deserves a higher profile.

Ure originated the role of Alison in the epochal debut of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on the London stage in 1956, then reprised her performance opposite Richard Burton in the movie version in 1959. To me, Look Back in Anger remains a savage portrait of what we now call “toxic masculinity.” But the problem I’ve always had with the film (and I assume it was the same in the play) is that Osborne’s sympathies are so firmly with Jimmy Porter. It was a self-portrait, and self-portraits always have a breath of self-justification—in Jimmy’s case, the breath is more like a gale. Jimmy’s class resentments have grown more tiresome, since his overblown grudges are so much about his wife coming from a slight bit of privilege. Look Back still has art and truth; it’s jolting to see so clearly what goes on in the mind of a torrentially abusive and above all self-pitying man. But once is possibly enough.

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Nowadays it’s pretty common for a star to demonstrate range by taking on a role as a villain, the more rotten the better. Back in the studio era, though, and even later, it could be a risk for someone to set aside a career full of romanti…

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Tonight, at the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual awards dinner, there will be a Special Award given to the Museum of Modern Art’s annual preservation festival, To Save and Project. The National Society of Film Critics also has given To Save and Project one of this year’s Film Heritage Awards, “for more than two decades of superb restorations and di…

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You can, if you are inclined to hopeless honesty, also think of what follows as “Ten Things to Tell Your Ghostwriter.” Most stars have them, of course, whether credited or un–. Sandford Dody, whose delightful Giving Up the Ghost was a source when the Siren was writing about Elaine Barrie nearly ten years ago, remarked that “the most sensible way to view the stars is from a long way off.” If that’s true, the Siren has been recklessly un-sensible. She cannot resist a good Hollywood as-told-to. Of course, the Siren has company. One of W.H. Auden’s favorite books was, no kidding, The Big Love by Florence Aadland; William Styron was also a big fan. Florence was the mother of Beverly Aadland, the 15-year-old girl whose relationship with Errol Flynn began with statutory rape and ended with Beverly, still only 17, discovering Flynn unconscious and dying on the last night of his life.

The Siren hasn’t read The Big Love, but she’s read an ungodly number of others. And once you read a few of these books—it won’t take many—you realize they consist largely of story beats as regular and dependable as anything in that Save the Cat! guide. As 2024 staggers to a close, the Siren would like to share some of what she’s learned from her years of misspent reading and haphazard book-buying.

The “Aha!” moment

This can take different forms—a childhood incident, a chance meeting, a movie or show that made an impression—but it’s always a seemingly trivial incident that Pointed The Way To The Future. Examples:

Lana Turner, The Lady, The Legend, The Truth:

On Saturdays there were matinees at the local movie house. I’d save a nickel of my lunch money every day to raise the quarter to go. I loved the actresses and the beautiful clothes they wore, especially Kay Francis. I loved her because my mother looked exactly like her. She even wore her hair like Kay Francis. And Norma Shearer … so beautiful, so glamorous. That was real entertainment.

Lana’s passage is typical; rare is the movie star who didn’t fall in love with movies before they got into the busines. If they didn’t, it’s probably because they came along before the rise of Hollywood, like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford.

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Hard Truths (d. Mike Leigh)

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wakes up like the final girl in a slasher movie, flinging herself upright with a shout of horror. It’s so abnormal, and reeks so much of trauma, that the Siren spent the first minutes of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths feeling sympathy for this woman. Is she afraid because she’s alone? or is it that the noises from the pigeons outside sound a bit like distant gunfire? Pansy gets up and stomps through a home devoid of cushions, bric-a-brac, or pictures of any kind. She scrubs down a perfectly clean leather sofa like it’s a racehorse after the Belmont. And the question follows her: What on earth has made Pansy like this?

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What follows are the scripts of two introductions I recently did at Film Forum for their George Stevens retrospective. Since I had the intros written out more or less in complete form, I thought some of you might like to read what I sai…

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This past week marked the 100th birthday of the legendary Lauren Bacall, a big deal and cause for celebration in these parts. But the Siren has also been researching another Classic Hollywood veteran who had a September centenary. Because as you may have noticed, the Siren is slightly obsessed with movie careers that promised great things, but didn’t work out that way. 

Let us then take up the case of smoking-hot Hazel Brooks. Her main source of fame these days seems to be an astounding number of gorgeous photos scattered all over the Internet. It took Hazel a surprisingly long while to be cast as anything other than pretty background material. And her career screeched to a somewhat mysterious halt after just two significant featured roles: Alice in Body and Soul (1947), perhaps the ultimate boxing noir; and as the seductive Daphne in Douglas Sirk’s Sleep My Love (1948). Brooks is wonderful in both, unforgettable in fact, and she got great reviews. What happened? Spoiler alert: The Siren can’t tell you, not exactly. But she’s got some theories. On the way to finding out more about Hazel, the Siren came to like her, very much.

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The Siren is taking the unusual step of publishing another author, or should we say another Siren—the marvelous film historian Angela Aleiss—in order to let her West Coast readers know about a rare opportunity to see some of the work of Myrtle Gonzalez, a pioneering Latina actress in early Hollywood. What follows is from Angela, and this looks like a mu…

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