Defense Watch Watch: treason is a strong term

But: https://archive.ph/Q8K1W

quote:

A new report paints Canada’s military police leadership as shutting down complaints, ignoring parliamentary-mandated civilian oversight and bungling investigations to the point where a criminal convicted of attempted murder almost went free.

The report by the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian watchdog created by Parliament, outlines a deteriorating situation in which the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal has been resisting independent oversight. “The situation escalated from resistance to outright refusal to respect the oversight regime mandated by Parliament,” commission chairperson Tammy Tremblay wrote in her annual report released Tuesday. At times the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, or CFPM, has shut down complaints into police actions before they could be heard, the MPCC report noted. The CFPM has also refused to provide information needed for the commission to carry out its oversight function and has declined to follow recommendations on improving how it functions, according to the report. Among the recommendations the CFPM refused to accept was a request to remind military police officers of the importance of keeping evidence on file.

So I've read as far as I've posted and this might be one of those things where I could just bold the whole article, it is so bad.

having just read the next paragraph, jesus hogfucking christ:

quote:

The CFPM commands all military police, including the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service or CFNIS.

The report also outlined how a bungled investigation by the CFNIS nearly allowed a person, eventually convicted of attempted murder, to escape justice. In that case, the CFNIS had been brought in to investigate a CFB Edmonton house fire in which a soldier was suspected of trying to kill her children. But the MPCC report pointed out that military police decided not to lay charges despite conclusions by the insurance company and the fire marshal’s office that the fire had been deliberately set as well as the discovery of an apparent suicide note from the soldier.

The Military Police Complaints Commission reviewed the case and determined there was evidence of a crime that ought to be reinvestigated. The soldier was found guilty in 2023 of trying to kill her three children by setting their house on fire.

Canadian Forces Provost Marshal Brig.-Gen. Vanessa Hanrahan provided the Ottawa Citizen with [lies][omitted]

The commission report issued Tuesday, however, pointed out that the MPCC made nine recommendations to the provost marshal in 2024 and 44 per cent of those were rejected. The MPCC report pointed out that in 2022 the provost marshal had accepted 100 per cent of the watchdog’s recommendations.

Recent court cases have raised concerns about the lack of professionalism of the CFNIS and military police.

In January, an Ontario Superior Court judge stayed assault and sexual assault charges against a Canadian Forces member after determining that military police had tampered with evidence and showed bias in their investigation. Ontario Superior Court Justice Cynthia Petersen noted in her written decision that the misconduct by the CFNIS “in this case is so egregious and systemic that it shocks the community’s conscience.”

Tremblay warned that continued refusal to accept civilian oversight would only harm military police in the end as public trust in the institution would be eroded. She noted that most of the problems in holding military police accountable could be fixed through legislative reforms proposed to the Liberal government in 2023. The government has not acted on those proposed reforms.

I watch it so you don't have to: 1970s Disaster movies

Due to extremely unpleasant life events, lately I've been into...emotionally sterile movies? And somehow this has lead me to seeing a few 1970s disaster movies. (Also movies Bruce Willis was in during the 1990s, but anyway---)

Good news is that I've discovered that there are good ones. The one that popularized the genre and codified a few things about it, Airport (1970) isn't bad, but it is pretty unspectacular. I think established a few things about the genre: 1) large cast of established actors, 2) buncha little interconnected stories following groups of same, 3) an attempt to open a window into the day to day of concerned groups, like the people who operate airports, or a cruise ship, 4) a disaster to drive drama. Airport was also fairly cheap, but made 12x that at the box office. I suspect this is the other thing: 5) they were super easy to adapt to TV, which by that point for Airport was pure profit.

The framing disaster in Airport is not quite on, say, 2012's (2009) level of catastrophe: the disaster is there's a big winter storm. That's it, really. A 707 took a off runway excursion and is stuck, there's a nice old lady who's really mastered the art of flying without a ticket, Dean Martin is cheating on his wife and so is Burt Lancaster, presumably lots of flights are delayed or cancelled and it's just playing hell with the schedule. George Kennedy is a senior engineer at the airport, and the danger he's in is the strain he's putting on his marriage having to drive his gigantic 70s station wagon out to the airport to unfuck this stuck airliner. Compared to the disaster movies that would follow, (even other movies in the Airport series) Airport aims much more at melodrama and a slice of life rather than danger. The climax of the whole thing is when a veteran with mental health problems, played by Van Helflin in his final movie role, attempts...well, to kill himself (and quite possibly an entire airliner) with a bomb he made, having bought tons of insurance for himself first. You can see the technical literacy at work in that explosive decompression is really bad, but not instant death.

If y'all are curious, go ahead, though if you want an aviation related disaster film from the period, I'd recommend Skyjacked (1972) instead, starring Charlton Heston. It opens with the completely correct process one takes off in a 707, and is filled with period flying details I now find surreal (like not only there being a first class, there being some sort of goddamn first class lounge in from of the aircraft). Heston, in my opinion, is excellent as the Captain of the airliner, and the villain is James Brolin as a mentally damaged highjacker, and if we forget how it ends you can pretend this is the third worst thing a young GW Bush did in the 1970s. There's a lot of negative portrayals of the mentally ill in the 70s disaster films for some reason; Skyjacked gets a pass simply because I think they add a lot of depth to the Brolin character, and appeared to have actually given his character a plausible, thought out mental illness.

The Poseidon Adventure follows the Airport formula to a T, but I've never been able to get through it. I think it's because all the things that I like in it are things that leave the movie post-disaster. It starts with excellent model work (ships in particular work well for models, because if you slow down the wave action sometimes it takes a sharp eye to tell the difference) and Leslie Nielsen is the captain of the ship, and he's so great in the role it annoys me that he dies. Not only that, he made me laugh with his deadpan delivery of a weird throwaway line, which is more than the rest of the movie can do. The other thing I like is the late great Gene Hackman plays a role that starts off promisingly weird: a priest of some denomination who has decided Nietzsche was right, or similar. They of course do not run with this, despite the idea of a Nietzschian priest mocking people's faith during a disaster film being an amazing idea, and instead boil his character down to completely generic hero.

So the movie loses those things, and I'm left with the fact that the disaster makes no sense. Nielsen as captain is sailing the old-ass Poseidon to the breakers (in Israel?) and this already throws a lot of logic errors, like 'guys ships literally going to the breakers don't carry passengers' and the owner of the ship being onboard, needling Nielsen to do unsafe things to save money, when Nielsen as Captain has total authority to tell the owner to eat shit, especially as the only leverage the owner has over Nielsen is firing him, when this is Nielsen's last voyage with the Poseidon and quite possibly with the owner regardless. The thing that flips over the Poseidon is a tsunami, and guys, tsunamis are only big waves near the shore. They would pass unnoticed by Poseidon on the open ocean. With that sort of attitude to facts, the surviving characters, all one note, can't do anything entertaining, and I switch off.

Got an alternative rec here, too: The Last Voyage (1960) starring Robert Stack. It's short, the drama is good, and to film it they actually got a real ocean liner going to the breakers to use. This allowed them to do things you couldn't otherwise, like having bulkheads rupture by putting thousands of tons of water pressure on them, and otherwise get a nicely authentic performance by exposing the cast to situations OSHA would later object to.

Earthquake (1974) hews to the same structure, but in contrast, I think is actually pretty good. It stars Charlton Heston, with a screenplay co-wrote by Mario Puzo, and it does something clever: in a film called Earthquake we know what is going to happen, and we know it is going to happen after the characters get introduced. With the disaster itself out of the way, the film is driven by all the various consequences to that disaster, with a further disaster hanging over everyone, the collapse of a dam that overlooks LA. It's a storytelling gambit that works, since post earthquake there's an almost infinite amount of ways to kill off the cast. Speaking of, there's a lot of entertaining deaths to go around, too: the one that makes me laugh the most is the end of the LA geology and seismology office, which for no reason has the WORST earthquake proofing of anyplace in the movie. There's also the confusing appearance of phosgene gas in an office building. (For those that don't know, phosgene is a gas that in World War 1 was used as a chemical weapon.) Lorene Green is shouting to his staff to block up the air vents, which have an irritating white gas pouring out of them, and I am triply confused. First, Green calls phosgene by name. Second, if that is phosgene then I think your post-Earthquake adventures are going to be brief. Third, why is phosgene pouring from the vents?!

Doing a little digging, The script actually had a sort-of logical rationale as to how the gas was created, [the overcrowded elevator crashes into the basement, starting a fire next to a ruptured Freon tank, and fire plus freon does equal phosgene] but in context you might think Office buildings of the 1970s just had schedule three chemical weapons in the walls.

The characters, of course, are more thumbnail sketches than anything, and I can't say I was rooting for the survival of anyone, or indeed will Heston leave his wife for Yvette Mimieux (yes, she's in this, too) or not. I think compared to our previous movies, at least, our thumbnail sketches attempt to contribute to the story instead of add melodrama – at least for the male characters. Richard Roundtree is a daredevil on a motorbike (now there's a career that I'm not sure ever existed), and so he gets to experience the earthquake while on a motorcycle on a rickety wooden ramp. Walter Matteau has a cameo as a drunk in a LA bar at 9:30 in the morning, and I believe his character survives just on the strength of his outfit.

eliable acting horse George Kennedy is here, too, playing a cop, and he even gets a scene where he reminds us he's actually quite a good actor and just just Uncle George. Richard Roundtree is a daredevil who's stunt is actually interrupted by the big one, and Victoria Principal is....a young hot woman in a wig? It strikes me now I don't think any of the women characters achieve the bechdel orbit, and one of them is Ava Gardner, who screams so loudly at one point I think she might've given Charlton Heston tinnitus. The only negative is the character who's message seems to be “look out for people with mental health problems, because in a disaster they will start murdering people who slighted them”, and who attempts to rape the bewigged Victoria Principal even though he is introduced as a closeted gay man, real economy of prejudice at work there.

Finally, the The Towering Inferno, (1974) which is, in my opinion, the best of these movies. I think it is the movie that has aged the best as well, as it keeps up a strong pace, has two leads who make being a leading man look easy, the cat lives, and it seems to be the hardest to track down if you want to see it. The movie was a collaboration between Fox and Warner Bros, who were going to produce separate yet similar disaster films, based on two different yet similar books until the producer, Irwin Allen suggest they combine them. (Allen was also the producer for The Poseidon Adventure, and both movies both share a writer: Stirling Silliphant.) I don't know if that dual ownership of The Towering Inferno being harder to find; maybe the September 11th terror attacks have made it play a bit different. One more shared production staff member is John Williams who scored this movie and Earthquake, and also the Poseidon Adventure. There are bits in Inferno that would remind me of bits in the original Star Wars. Next year he'd do the soundtrack for Jaws (1975), so the man was doing pretty well.

The plot is Newman has finished the World's tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, and the developer is having a party of (presumably) super-wealthy and important people. The Developer has a shitty son in law, Richard Burton, who cut corners in the electrical system, which will, of course, spark fire. The developer, of course, doesn't really care that some sort of fire alarm was triggered many stories below, which of course traps most of our ensemble characters. Heading the cast are Paul Newman as the architect of the building-to-burn, and Steve McQueen, veteran San Francisco Fire Chief. Both are seemingly effortless at being the serious, sympathetic center of the film. Unlike the other films here, the approach is a lot more modern – melodrama gets replaced by just seeing how the characters act in a disaster. The other thing that is more modern, is that most of the ensemble cast is going to die horribly, one way or another. This cold blooded hand with actors we recognize means events feel like they have a real weight to them; if In fact, lots of people die in the fire in ways that sometimes seem odd but also realistic, like at least one of the novel authors actually did some research on real fire deaths.

The tower itself is decorated as the most mid-70s thing imaginable, and the decor and clothing are all mid 1970s plastics and artificial fabrics and whatnot - which to my eye looks about as fire resistant as a rusty can of turpentine. The blame for the disaster is on Richard Burton, shitty electrical engineer who tried to save money by building everything 'to code' instead of as specified, who is basically there to be the bad guy who we want to see horribly killed.



The way the fire actually starts is IMO hysterical: it's like a fire inspector's stress dream.

Inferno also does a good job at keeping the peril up, as some of the methods of rescue are alarming, especially if you've any fear of heights. The end you'd be forgiven for thinking the story was all about how America got modern fire codes, but that's good for a laugh, too.

Anyway, this has been Long Day's Journey into Emotional Sterility. I can opine on The Last Boy Scout [1991] upon request-----

I saw it so you don't have to: The Happening (1967)

So the first surprise is that the frankly awful title "The Happening" was used for a movie before the 2008 version. The second is that the movie is still weird and not great: the tone is “what if the Monkees committed capital crimes on a whim.” This was a catch from PVRing weird stuff on late at night, and I got it because it stars Anthony Quinn and Faye Dunaway, and was produced partially by Sam Spiegel?! Spiegal produced On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, that last of which is one of my all time favorite movies, where Quinn in that plays one of the all time movie badasses, Auda Abi Tayi. Of course, the next movie Spiegal produced was the it-stinks-out-loud The Chase (1966), which I'd recommend if you've ever said to yourself "I want to see an eye-rollingly pompous mid-century American Novel boringly told," with Marlon Brando doing a southern accent I'd characterize as "Steven Segal-esque", if I didn't think Segal is too lazy to attempt accents. The Chase was directed by Arthur Penn, who would prove he was better than the Chase in his next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which turned Faye Dunaway into a star, among other things. For that matter, The Happening was directed by Elliot Silverstein, who's previous movie, Cat Ballou (1965), won Lee Marvin his academy award. Cat Ballou stars a young Jane Fonda, and has Nat King Cole functioning as a kind of Greek Chorus.



She-bangs, you say...?

My point is that The Happening is a bizarre stop for a bunch of people who had just done great things, were going on to do great things, or both. If the Chase clearly had a budget and eye-rolling pretension, then The Happening lacks the pretension but also the effort, making a comedy that in the end borders on nihilism.

Those are harsh words, and I don't know, maybe Silverstein is a genius for showing off the emptiness of the idle rich. Maybe my harsh words are for the era, instead. My contempt for the whole lot can start on the Wikipedia page, who cite period reviews dismissing Faye Dunaway as "another Jane Fonda type." What? What was that, 1967? Your world is so full of blondes so beautiful they border on the surreal that you are bored when they show up? Check your fucking privilege!



Our heroes, who are together because they fled on the same motor boat.

And that could be directed at our four idle rich characters, who are the Faye Dunaway character, Sandy, and three others who I think of as “three actors who were on popular tv shows at the time.” Sandy wakes up and says she is hungry to some guy she's met and may or may not have banged. (Note: Dunaway and the three boring guys are, I guess, some sort of hippies despite all being idle rich – they have the affect and the drugs, but none of the politics or dirt of the hippies.) She's not so much jaded as an actual solid jade statue; she hates her friends and has woken up in Florida everglades after an amazing party too many times. Although, Dunaway gives us early on a line of such legendary sadness I am compelled to link it here:

https://youtu.be/luc7zhO2yf0?t=601



Neolithic Rudger Hauer?

Sandy suggests robbing a house “to feel something”, which I think is the background to Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! But before she can murder Moondoggie and pump Gidgit full of smack, they find some kids playing war. While playing with the kids, a hit song plays (and man, these kids have some toys) and our party accidentally invade a startlingly ugly house (and there's a reason for that we'll get back to), and meet the Anthony Quinn character in his pajamas, who decides he's being kidnapped.



“I'm being kidnapped!” Quinn shouts. I'm not sure "second degree kidnapping" is a thing

Taurus (red shirt, manwhore) loves the idea, the other three think it a fun notion. They immediately get stopped by a cop, and Taurus prepares his .45 in case he has to murder the cop Fargo style. This is somewhat softened when one of the dudes causes wacky chaos by insisting the cop give him the ticket for running the red light.

Our gang takes the mobster to a burned out shell of a Miami mansion that they know, and with some actual violence Taurus gets $8000 ransom out of our hapless mobster. Buddy realizes this is in danger of getting boring, and after checking to see that Sandy doesn't have anything till Tuesday, manages to get the price up to $200,000, which is most definitely that long green Varla was looking for.

This sets up a real weird dynamic because Quinn is taking this totally seriously, and his kidnappers really are not. This is also where Quinn takes over the movie, since his character is the relatable one, and Quinn is absolutely acting the shit out of the role. Quinn says “yeah this is a capital crime, kids, what the hell” and buddy gives him a spiel about oedipal urges which he then admits is complete bullshit. They then run from the cops (wacky music cue) where they get away because there happens to be another...Chrysler Imperial[?] That is identical to theirs.



Quinn's mob associates. I don't know what this is, nor do I want to

Quinn then turns the movie into practically a one man show, as he calls on a payphone everybody in his life to get the random payment, and everybody he calls has the money, but decide it's easier to just write him off instead. Starting with his wife. This is obviously totally crushing, while our hippie characters can only stand back, aghast. It's hilarious, simply because I think this is completely unintentional on the part of the filmmakers, but that's what you get when you have Anthony Quinn. This also makes the divide between the kids and Quinn even stronger; even at the start they might as well be four adorable Pomeranian dogs kidnapping a wolverine. Now the wolverine has existential despair and the four poms can only look on with sympathy. This act ends in a shack in the Florida swamps that I think both the Dreadnoks inhabit, and Rockstar games protagonists would end up sleeping in to save their game. There is a take where Quinn disassociates and stares at nothing unblinkingly for like three minutes. Somehow this movie has found a bridge between a late sixties silly comedy, and a early 1960s grim existentialist play.



Ugly, ugly house.

The third act is Quinn saying 'fuck it' and deciding to not only lean back into a kidnapping plot, he leverages everything he can to get a big of a payoff as possible. “First we're gonna get a new car. That lemon of my wife's is a whore's dream of paradise!” Then through a barrage of blackmail and extortion, he expertly frames his wife for murder. (She tries to get her son to tell the police about the hippie kidnapping, but he's still playing soldier and will only give them name, rank, and serial number.) This leads to a scene of “our marriage is bullshit” and a trashing of Quinn's house to wacky music.



Huh, maybe Sandy can hear the wacky music?

This leads to a quite funny scene where on the one hand, the Mob assumes Quinn's wife is part of this blackmail scheme and promises revenge, and on the other hand the police are completely convinced Quinn's wife murdered her husband and is now liquidating all his asserts to flee to Bermuda. The gang does a Jackie Brown style bag swap at the airport, just in time for Quinn's wife to be arrested for murder, (and presumably suspected by the mob of stealing a suitcase full of cash and later killed.) The gang does this at the Miami Airpot as it has appallingly shit security, with the gang fleeing in a stolen police car.

Quinn then turns the tables on the gang, first basically breaking the heart of Taurus by demonstrating he's still nothing and nobody as a criminal. He then lights the million dollars or similar on fire, so the kids don't make “the same mistakes he did.” He then disappears into the black swampy night, dead to all. Sandy says she is hungry. Wacky music outro!

So one man is completely crushed by random chance, and these doofuses have learned absolutely nothing. Sandy is gonna start eyeing up the kids at the beach...

I have offended the podcaster Danielle Henderson

For context: in the final episode of the I saw what you did podcast, the two movies chosen were Alien and Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! Danielle did Alien, and if you know the movie, it is a rich text. Danielle didn't know what a warrant officer was (Ripley's rank) saying "she was in charge of warrants" and also generally wasn't too clear on the merchant ship structure going on in the Nostromo. After checking the wiki (because I wasn't sure, myself, and it turns out what a warrant officer is can be described as "variable" throughout history) I wrote in. Danielle also didn't mention any of the meta-narrative stuff, which I think is very important in Alien, as it is an important part as to how the movie works, but that's a rich text for you.

--------------------------------------

So I just listened to the final episode (who will I send unusable emails to now?!? [...] Probably Millie's future podcast.) So while I could potentially have a lot to say to y'all about Alien, or your lovely podcast which I will dearly miss, I'm instead just gonna focus on one small aspect that Danielle was not entirely clear on? It's a petty note to go out on, but welp.

So, one aspect of Alien's narrative is that it plays a hard meta-narrative game. I think the people who made Alien were initially inspired by Star Wars, most particularly its brilliant production design. Much as Star Wars works hard to create an 'old Future' aesthetic, Alien aims hard, especially in its first act, to establish a hard nosed, working class realism to space. It has an old crew (I think Tom Skerritt was 50 at the time) who early in the film speak in the overlapping audio montage of 1970s films. Time and money are constant topics, with Parker especially having some sort of grievance as to how the voyage shares are being split. You can even see it in the descent to the planet: the decent starts with Dallas saying "the money's safe" [IE the giant ore refinery the Nostromo is towing is parked in a safe orbit] and ends with a damage assessment that takes way too long to do, and has Parker eventually reporting heavily that some of this is going to require drydock time to fix - the implication being that this somehow impacts the crew's pay. At appropriate times there are squealing sounds in the foley work, which is the sound you get when air is leaking through a seal of some sort -  All of this, of course, is to put us in the crew's POV, so we can put ourselves in their shoes when John Hurt's chest explodes and they discover they are not in a realistic scifi film, they are in a space nightmare. The other major meta-narrative leg in this footstool of horror is the cast: Sigorney Weaver was arguably the LEAST famous of the otherwise quite distinguished cast, and as the rational one, [and Danielle can correct me here, my knowledge of horror movies isn't great] is coded by genre convention to be the first to die. The script of course gets flipped, with the first one to die is the most famous actor, John Hurt, who the movie starts with as aside from the ship, he's the first cast member we see. I could go on, but boats are callin'----

https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/

So the Nostromo has a command structure like a merchant ship. Dallas is the Captain, and Kane is his executive officer [in the parlance, the XO.] In ships currently, the Captain is in charge of the overall running of the ship, while the XO is his right hand man, typically attending to all the details, especially any sort of problems with the crew. In Alien for writing reasons the XO jobs have been given to Ellen Ripley, warrant officer. You can see that in the early scene where the engineers are sandbagging a job, possibly just to annoy Ripley, and a bit later, when she is up in Ash's face for breaking quarantine and her express orders as officer of the deck. (If this was not Alien, I imagine this would be a career ending mistake for Ash once Nostromo returned to port.)

What a warrant officer is varies between military services and nations; in Alien Ripley seems to be the junior command officer, beneath Dallas and Kane in rank but superior to everybody else. That makes sense, since the rest of the cast has very clear jobs and titles. This also makes sense for training: if the space merchant marine is anything like the terrestrial one, Kane can do the Captain's job and hoped to be a captain himself someday; Ripley is presumably also hoping to follow this career path. Parker is the head of engineering, with Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) under him. Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) is the pilot, and Ash of course (Ian Holm) is the Science officer. This rank also fits Ripley in that I think Weaver was the youngest cast member - I'm not sure how old she was, but I believe she was in her late '20s.

Boats. In conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNFNlSp8hLw

Anyway, Alien is one of those movies that I watched within the last two years, having possibly not seen it as an adult, because there was a vast amount of detail in it that I never noticed or appreciated before, ending with Ripley trying to disassociate herself by singing the old showtune "Lucky Star" before blowing a motherfucking alien out of an airlock.

-Neb

---------------------------------

This email is not only smug, but extraordinarily condescending. No thanks, Danielle

Spooky Halloween: the horror movie The Devil Doll (1936)

The movie opens with two Frenchmen in a swamp who've just escaped prison. One is played by Lionel Barrymore, and for readers of these words he is Drew Barrymore's Grandfather? Great-Grandfather? A famous actor of the day, most seen today in It's a Wonderful Life (1947) where he plays Mr. Potter, and if you want to pretend Paul Lavond is Mr. Potter a bit earlier in life, be my guest.

Anyway, Frenchmen escaping swamp prison. Paul spent 17 years in that hell, done in by shitty business partners who framed him. Paul also makes it clear he is fueled by hate. He might literally say that; he spent 17 years in Prison, and he's out for vengeance. His accomplice, Marcel, stayed alive with the hope of continuing some nonspecific work.

Cut to: a swamp

There's a line slipped in that they've given the police the slip 'for weeks' but you could be forgiven for thinking this was the same swamp. It could be the same swamp.

Paul and Marcel get to Marcel's swamp shack, where his lame (in the literal sense) wife (ditto) greets him. Marcel and family have a lot of dogs, and a "inbred peasant halfwit" (his words) servant girl, who is clearly some pretty dancer putting on a she-gor act. Mrs. Marcel explains she kidnapped the girl because "she didn't want a servant with whole wits". Marcel then opens a door and there is a mad scientist lab, right there. And despite the fact he's literally just returned from escaping from Prison he's all "Come on, Marie, we must resume our great work!!" (Mrs. Marcel kinda looks like "what if Marie Curie was in Bride of Frankenstein", so I'll call her Marie.)  

Paul knows nothing about what this great work is. So both men go into the lab and Marcel starts handing Paul small toy dogs. Only Paul comments on how they are curiously warm? See, they are not toys. Marcel is a scientist. And he has developed technology that can shrink people. And dogs. Any sort of animal really, to toy size. He has done this to solve world hunger, because you could raise toy pigs on 1/6th the normal diet, then enbiggen them and eat them. Marcel also proposes just shrinking everyone in the world, so there's 6x the space. Once again, Marcel just got back from escaping prison. The tiny dancers, pigs, etc have a drawback: their brains shrink with the rest of them. But fully grown people can use their thought-rays to not only make them animate, but also control them. Marcel demonstrates with the "toy" dogs. 

Then, without like, some wine and cheese, a cup of tea, anything, he seizes Heidi, the maidservant, to fix her brain and render it perfect while small. It's unclear if that works, but Marcel then dies, of a Heart attack or stroke or similar, understandable considering the pace he's set in this scene. Marie is distraught because who will continue this crazy work now?!? Paul, seeing the setup, says "I WILL - But we have to relocate to Paris for my revenge." Marie agrees. 

SMASH CUT

The Police are looking for Paul Lavond. God knows why. Like they seem to be hip to Lavond's motive, but it seems like his big crime is bank embezzlement? None the less, there are posters of Paul everywhere. The posters and police activity are witnessed by a little old lady...and when I say little, I mean she's hunched over but seems pretty big. This is Lionel Barrymore, Paul Lavond, in drag as a little old lady which he will be for about 80% of the film's runtime. Anyway, Mrs. Lavond is a toymaker, new to Paris, and visits the three bankers he's gonna visit Nemesis on. 

One is named Toto, he has a mustache. Mrs. Barrymore wants a bank loan to expand her business. Toto isn't interested in Toys, but Mrs. Barrymore breaks out a most lifelike Horse,  who she puts on Toto's desk and gets to come to life and prance around. Now if Toto had what we'd call a modern education he'd run from the room screaming, but this is France in some modern but not really modern time, so Toto finds this shit fascinating, and agrees to stop by the toy store.

Later, the large Mrs. Lavond is showing Toto eerie, lifelike toy dogs. So, Toto is then shown a doll's stiletto, which Mrs. Lavond stabs him with. This causes Toto to freeze, like he's been given a dose of fish tranquilizer, and he sort of has been? Apparently Marie has worked up a poison that freezes you but keeps you conscious forever. Toto is then shrank. Revenge 1 complete.

So then Mrs. Barrymore goes to the laundry where his daughter is working. His daughter, Lorraine, HATES Lavond. She was like 4 when he was imprisoned, her and her mom's life really went to shit. First, her mom died, and then, thanks to the Hayes Code, unspecified bad stuff happened, which in context sounds like Lorraine did sex work to keep herself and her grandmother alive. Naturally, Paul uses his Mrs. Lavond disguise to get Mrs. Doubtfire up in this bitch, IE using his little old lady persona to covertly spend time with his daughter, the laundress and former sex worker. Very much like Mrs. Doubtfire, if Mrs. Doubtfire was also riffing on the Count of Monte Cristo and using thought controlled dolls to enact terrible revenge on those that wronged him.

Anyway

Mrs. Doubtfire Lavond visits his mom, (IE Lorraine's grandmother) who his daughter lives with and his Mom knows her son, but is also blind, so she doesn't know Lavond is dressing like a little old lady.  Lorraine comes home, and is glad kindly, large Mrs. Lavond somebody is looking in on her old grandma. Lorraine also has a suitor, a guy who's just bought his second Taxicab. He's handsome and nice so naturally the daughter wants him to forget her, because she's doomed, doomed I tell you! It's a bit strange. 

BACK TO DEVIL DOLLS

Mrs. Lavond then takes a doll (this time, Heidi) to the wife of Evil Frenchman #2. Once again after doing the "they come to life" bit again, she makes a sale. Evil Frenchman #2 is fat and comes in all worried that Toto has vanished. Now the Wife of Evil Frenchman #2 gives this doll to her four year old daughter, and thank fucking god we don't think about that too much. Heidi is shrunk, but still human, and can feel like a human, so this daughter could have inadvertently crippled her or broke her neck or something. 

Nonetheless, that night Old Mrs. Lavond at like three AM arrives outside Evil Frenchman #2's house with a picnic basket. Broadcasting his thought waves (which go through walls, duh) he has Heidi escape the child, go to the Wife's room, and steal her fantastically expensive jewelry, dropping it to Mrs. Lavond outside. Movie fans will find this whole sequence hilarious because to do them they just constructed a lot of really big furniture, and then had the actors clamber about on them. The Jewelry theft ends with Heidi escaping into Mrs. Barrymore's pick-anic basket, a double theft. This was for seed money to continue the shop front. Presumably Heidi has done a lot of theft since being shrank I don't remember if this was combined or this is another theft.

Paul then gets Toto, now shrunk, to break into Evil Frenchman #2's house with a drug stiletto. Toto, controlled by thought waves by Mrs. Lavond,  creeps up on the bed and manages to stab evil Frenchman #2, but not before #2 wakes up, and sees his old friend, Toto, shrank to doll size and coming at him with a knife. Evil Frenchman #2 now is frozen with a look of bewildered terror on his face. Paul makes a comment like "Well, he'll be imprisoned in his own mind, unable to do anything for the rest of his life. I guess that's good enough for my lost 17 years."

The vanishing of Toto and the strange fate of Evil Frenchman #2 convinces the Final Evil Frenchman that Paul is out there, somewhere, and behind these events. Paul sends the final Evil Frenchman a note, that he's gonna kill him at [a given date] at midnight unless he confesses his crime against Paul.

Come the night, Police and hired goons are guarding Final Evil Frenchman in his upscale townhouse. Again, Kindly old Mrs. Lavond and her picnic basket appear outside, and Lavond sends Toto in with the poison stiletto. For about 10 minutes, this movie becomes Tom Thumb, hired assassin. But just as Toto is in a good position to stab, Final Evil Frenchman breaks and confesses all to the police. Paul's name is cleared!

But here is where it gets a bit weird. Marie and Paul have a satisfying moment where they are like "We did it! Let's send our two dolls to the chief of police." You know, Heidi and Toto, who are still alive, and one who is literally an innocent kidnap victim. Also at least once when showing off Heidi, the "doll", Mrs. Lavond points out "her lifelike tears" which must be Heidi weeping as a doll - they move on from that. Then Marie says, "OK, now we continue the work to shrink the world" and Paul is not down, saying "no, that's a dumb idea." Marie takes this poorly, gets a little Murderous, and Paul manipulates her just enough to start a fire in the lab, and then shoves Marie into the fire. The toy shop burns down. Good thing Police Forensics isn't a thing, the bones of all those little dogs, horses, etc would be deeply confusing to a potential ME.

So now, Paul confesses to Handsome Cabbie, and tells him that "Paul freed himself from being falsely accused, but to do that I really did do a bunch more crimes, so now Lorraine will hate me for that. Listen, marry that girl already, here's some money" and a new plan is hatched.

Paul blames the new crimes, strange events etc on the now "dead" Mrs. Lavond, who has vanished but conveniently there's a female corpse in this toy store fire. Then he goes to the Eiffel Tower, with handsome cabbie and meets Lorraine. Lorraine doesn't recognize her dad, but also doesn't hate her dad now that she knows he was innocent (of bank embezzlement, a crime that is pretty pedestrian compared to what Paul was subsequently up to) Paul expresses all those feelings he has for his daughter, saying he's a friend of Paul's. He then leaves, wishing Lorraine a happy life, and here's some money. 

The End

A thing I saw, or am I off my meds? You, the reader, decide

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 26

Jason is walking away from Mary-Anne's apartment, high on life and mesclane/an unknown drug's after effects. After living a PKD grade nightmare for most of the book, he's gotten everything back. He hails a johnnycab to go to Heather Hart's apartment. As the fliterbug flies, Jason reflects on Alys's death (I can't get involved, scandal rags would have a field day) the benefits of status (never having to sweat a police checkpoint) and the unimpeachable identity that 30 million viewers every week gives you. They exist, and thus so does Jason. Ratings ero sum, or something, Jason thinks as he falls asleep. The drugs (to say nothing of not sleeping at all over his two day nightmare) have made him sleepy.

Heather Hart's posh apartment complex is suspended by air jets, which rock to create the sensation of an infant falling asleep. Jason finds Hart is out shopping, but her maid, who he knows well lets him in. He's just gonna crash on the couch and listen to music, Jason says, as he squeezes the maid's firm right boob. "You're horny today" the maid says, pleased, before saying Jason is too tall for her. So, Hart has a top flight record player, and obviously a large collection of LPs, as well as some sort of CD-cassette changer, but for records? The maid said Hart would be back around fiveish, and it is around four pm now. Jason places the gift of Mary-Anne's beautiful pot on the center of the coffee table, then loads up the music player.

Jason comes to much later. He'd fallen asleep again. The apartment is dark, empty, and cold; Jason is amazed that he slept through several hours worth of records. His watch says it is 10:30 PM. Where was Heather?

The door flies open, and in walks an ashen-faced Heather, who has a newspaper. It reads:

TV PERSONALITY SOUGHT IN CONNECTION WITH DEATH OF POLICE GENERAL'S SISTER

and some stuff about how Jason Taverner murdered Alys. Heather asks him first if he murdered Alys, and then gets the Alys-themed part of Jason's adventure, including the discovery of Alys's thousand year old skeleton, while Jason wonders, again, if his good life is just some sort of drug-induced fantasy for losers. Heather wants Jason to turn himself in, because the LAPD is honest, so if you are innocent you have nothing to fear. Jason's two day odyssey makes him wise to what bullshit this is.

Hart wants to know if Jason murdered Alys, and then confesses her affair with Alys, which is a complete surprise to Jason. Reading the article, Jason notices that Herb and Felix back-dated Alys's death a few--

Heather tells him to shut up. And then turn to the back page, where Heather Hart is mentioned, and her affair with Alys is mentioned as possibly the trigger to Taverner's vengeful spree. Which is the first Jason knew of the affair, and, in spite of everything else, deeply confusing. Jason asks if the affair happened, and Hart hits Jason in the face, really, really, hard.

"Hit me back" Hart says. Jason is tempted, but doesn't, saying Hart is lucky. "Yeah I guess, if you killed Alys you could kill me too, huh? Might as well. They will gas you anyway." Hart, who you may understand now is incarnadine with rage, doesn't give a shit if Jason murdered Alys or not, because he's for some reason missing the big picture: Hart's career is over. Taverner's career is over. Hart is flipping between physically attacking Jason and dipping into emotional cryo-freeze.

quote:

"Do whatever you want." Her voice had sunk to a blunted whisper. "I don't care. Just go away. I don't want to have anything more to do with you. I wish you were both dead, you and her. That skinny bitch - all she ever meant to me was trouble. Finally I had to throw her bodily out; she clung to me like a leech."

So it turns out Alys was the one with motive, and to go back to chapter one, it is not a coincidence that Hart and Taverner together on NBC was how this book started, as we will see.

Taverner is looking for his shoes. The fact that he literally just learned about Heather's affair with Alys is having zero impact on Hart. "For you", Jason says, tossing Heather the box with the pot inside. Heather lets it drop to the floor. Fortunately Mary-Ann has a tight packing game, and the pot is undamaged. Heather, despite everything, says the pot is beautiful and thanks Jason for it.

Jason says "What can I do but go?" as Hart puts the pot on her mantle shelf.

Hart suggests turning himself in. Jason calls the operator and tells him to call the police general, it is Jason Taverner.

quote:

"You can dial that direct, sir."

"I want you to do it" Jason said.

"But sir---"

"Please" he said.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapters 23-25

Chapter 23

So Jason has his identity and fame back. Mary and Jason arrive at her apartment, and her living room is arresting in its use of color, and has several vases on display. Turns out Mary is pretty darn talented. Jason immediately starts scheming to get Mary on his show, dreaming up musical-pottery related numbers and whatnot, and drops the vase he is holding as he's so besotted with his dreams of the future.

To break the tension there Mary launches into a story about her mother, who was always saying she was at death's door with kidney problems, and when I die it'll be your fault, etc. Once Mary leaves home she forgets about this. A few years later her mom comes to visit, and it's the same complaining sphiel until she says "I have to go grocery shopping". Once there, her mom confesses her kidnies are done and she's getting an artifical replacement but she may die. So Mary goes to the deli counter and asks for a steak and kidney pie.

This doesn't make much impact on Jason, who is first thinking up lies to promote Mary, and then brushing off her concerns about "truth" because he is the arbiter of all truth. He pays for the vase, and Mary gives him another - one of her best pieces. Jason leaves business cards, but Mary isn't really into the idea of fame.  

Chapter 24

We're back at Alys Buckman, dead in a bathroom. The book plays coy, but I suspect it's a fairly mundane dead body and not a 1000 year old skeleton. Felix is there, with the coroner, who tells Felix she died of an overdose.

Felix is obviously grief-stricken, but with a guy who abstracts his emotions like he does, there's a lot of looking away from that grief. His underling, Herb Maime, suggests arresting Taverner. Both men know Taverner had nothing to do with Alys' OD, but it's something. Felix touches his face and is suprised to discover he is weeping. Felix's instinct is to punish someone: Taverner, the people who made the drug, the people currently operating the phone-sex line...

Herb drives Felix back to the police HQ, and then while alone with Felix, broaches a sensitive subject. The sister fucking is a problem, now that Alys is dead. Some of the Grand Marshalls above Felix really hate him, and will leak to the media about the sister fucking, and say that Alys killed herself to attack General Buckman. A salacious story like this would be damaging to Felix. So, Herb suggests a counter move: order the coroner to find Alys' death a murder. Take control of the narrative by suggesting Alys died to spite Felix's kinder, gentler police oppression. Some of Buckman's Marshall enemies behind it, of course. While Felix can see the show trial and execution of some random patsy, Herb urges an upgrade to the actual murderer: somebody a) famous, b) involved in degeneracy, like those marshalls, especially drugs and phone sex, and c) already entwined with the case. So no prizes guessing who this is.

Felix thinks about it, and realizes Herb is right: the way out of this is to make up a bigger scandal than his enemies can insinuate, and well, sister-fucking is some scandal.

 

Chapter 25

(Coming back to this, one thing I noticed about the previous chapter is that Jason Taverener has recovered his celebrity status according to the police. While it is narrated by the grief-stricken and shattered mind of Police General Felix, who accords Jason the status of a six, that slips into Taverener being the perfect celebrity to hang the crime of Alys's "murder" on.)

General Felix and his aide Herb are attending to the dull details of the conspiracy they hatched to frame Jason for the death of Alys. Then a secretary brings the General the Jason Taverner file.

Of course the whole reason the police and General Felix were interested is that there was no Jason Taverner file.

It contains not only files, but mentions Taverner's hit TV show on NBC. Felix and Herb are baffled. Felix puts a call into the local NBC affiliate and gets a VP to confirm that it is a show, it is three years old and has every Tuesday thirty million viewers. Felix hangs up. Herb has never heard of Jason or his TV show. The General hasn't either, and he apparently watches two hours of TV every night, between 8 and 10, IE when the Jason Taverner show is broadcast. It is just inconceivably weird that previously Jason Taverner was expunged from all police records and having to get false papers in Watts, but at the same time was not only famous, but as famous as celebrities get. Taverner's back catalog goes back nineteen years, for fuck's sake. His latest .45, Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-Up, sold over two million copies. And so on.

Herb is trying to rationalize, and gets about as far as "the computer for reasons unknown was slow in getting back to us." That's logically possible, but the rest of the story sticks out like somebody trying to mash a platypus into a undersized Tupperware container. Fleix's mind does suss a connection - Alys was "fond" of sixes and had an affair with Heather Hart for about six months. Herb takes this bit of info and adds it as motive to the collage of lies they've been gluing together, a motive for the murder. This last detail is not only enough to get Hart and Taverner brought in, it is enough to get Taverner an APB. Ultimately Felix answers the question "why Taverner" with "it has to be somebody."