Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film

Revisiting Prior Blog "Journalists Should Follow the Rules--But with Understanding"

by John Aquino on 03/18/13

In a prior blog--"Journalists Should Follow the Rules--But with Understanding" (Oct. 5, 2012)--I recounted something that happened to me as a journalist. When a conference session was unexpectedly decalred "off then record"--I put down my pen, and I later wished that I had handled it differently.

To recap, in the elevator I ran into an association executive who was going to be on the panel in the next conference session, he seemed annoyed that the press had been invited, and when I entered the conference hall I saw the speaker, who was one of several on the panel, arguing with the moderator. The moderator announced that the session was "off the record," obviously responding to the demand of that one speaker. I put my pen down and folded my arms. When the event coordinators, who were hoping my story would give publicity to their new foundation, saw me not writing, they asked why and I told them, "Off the record means no record." The situation became ugly and I was accused of being to ridiculously faithful to mythic rules.

I had played by the rules, but years later I wondered if the smart thing to do, knowing that the "off the record" demand came from one speaker and not the others on the panel, would have been to take notes on the remarks of the other panelists and later ask them to put them back on the record. If they didn't want to I would have destroyed by notes. If they had put their remarks on the record, I would have had a story.

Last week, I found myself in a similar situation. Arguably the most prominent speaker in a session said, "We're all among friends and everything is off the record." I said, "Oh, gosh, it's happening again."

This time I kept taking notes. After the session I saw him and asked if he really meant "off the record." He said, "If you had heard my next sentence you would have heard me say, 'But that's ok because I would have said the same thing if it was on the record.'"

I responded, "That's fine, but you said everything was off the record and it's still off the record. For me to write up the story, I need you to put everything on the record."

He also seemed a little annoyed at my insistence on the magic words but finally agreed that everything was on the record. I made a note of the conversation, dated it and initialed it.

If a journalist publishes someone saying something that was off the record, it affects the integrity of the profession and destroys the trust between those who speak and those who report on what they speak. It is not a trivial matter, although it may seem so.

Anyway, I got to do it again.

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What IP-Related Rights to Ask For

by John Aquino on 03/11/13

There can be no perfect answer to the question, what IP rights should I ask for in a licensing or a purchase situation. It will vary from case to case. But some examples might suggest both the problems and the opportunities.

The musical stage version of Mary Poppins recenntly closed on Broadway after a half a dozen years. It had debuted on the London stage. It is, for those who have not seen it, a musical with half of its songs from the 1964 Walt Disney movie and the other half new songs. The book is totally new and the Disney songs have been shoehorned into the new book.

The reason for the hybrid nature of this situation goes back to the Disney contract with P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, to make a movie based on the books. The contract purchased the film rights. It did not purchase the stage rights. The Disney attorneys were the best in the business. It may have made perfect sense at the time for them not to acquire the stage rights. For one thing, it would have cost more, and Walt Disney was notoriously tight with a dollar. For another, the movement at the time was not to make stage musicals from movies but to make movies from stage musicals.

The 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins came out. It was a big hit, and Julie Andrews won an Academy Award as Mary Poppins. But Travers hated it. She felt the story was too sweet, that Julie Andrews was too sweet, and that American actor Dick Van Dyke had no reason playing a cockney peddler.

Years later, the Disney company rebuilt a Broadway theatre and created stage musicals of their movie musicals. It scored big hits with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. It made sense for the company to do the same with Mary Poppins, but when they went to Travers she said NO! Instead, she sold the stage rights to someone else and Carmen Macintosh, who had produced Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera, comissioned a new book and songs.

The problem was, as Macintosh found out, the audience was expecting to hear the Disney songs, including "Supercalifragilisiticexpialidocious." Disney executives met with Macintosh and worked out the hybrid deal, with a book closer to the original novels as required by Travers. The result received mixed reviews, had a good run on Broadway, but nowhere near Les Miserables and Phantom and none of the non-Disney songs became popular.

Even if Disney's attorneys had asked for the stage rights in the original deal, she might not have granted them. Or, having given them the film rights--and before she saw the movie--she might have.

Another example--when Orson Welles signed his deal for three films with RKO, starting with Citizen Kane, the agreement gave him complete control of the final film. Welles was so "hot" at the time and RKO so anxious to have him that his negotiation path was easy. The released film was controversial, nominated for the best picture Oscar, but otherwise underappreciated at the time. It later became regarded as one of the best if not the best movies ever made.

Years later the Welles contract for Citizen Kane saved its from being colorized by Ted Turner, who was making color films of black and white films using the newly-developed colorization process. Welles' estate objected and even Turner's attorneys agreed that the "complete control" provision probably prevented colorization. Turner gave up on colorizing Kane and later appeared to give up the process altogether.

Asking for the moon can cause the other party to dig in and possibly deny you points you otherwise would have achieved. You need to get what you need, what you can reasonably project you need, and as much else as you agreeably can.

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Actress’ Lawsuit So Far Suggests an Actor’s Performance Is Not Copyrightable

by John Aquino on 02/12/13

Some expressed the hope that a recent court ruling concerning an actress’ performance in a notorious film would answer the question, can an actor’s performance be protected by U.S. copyright. The answer the court provided is not a final one as far as the case is concerned, but it reaffirmed what has been the standard answer, which is no.

This blog has discussed other related questions, such as, can fictional characters be protected by copyright, what is a work-for-hire where copyright is concerned, and what is joint copyright?

The standard approach to the issue of copyright for an actor’s performance has been that a performance is only part of a dramatic work and that a film’s copyright covers the total work and all of its elements. Performers in their roles are typically regarded as doing work-for-hire, and the copyright is consequently owned by the filmmakers, the actors’ employer.

This is an oversimplification. It was generally true when films were produced and owned by Hollywood studios and actors, costume designers, art directors, and all connected with the film were literally employed by the studio or were employees for other studios who were loaned out for a particular film.

Today, many if not most films are produced independently and then purchased by or just distributed by a studio, which can sometimes raise the issue of who the employers is. It is also possible that an element of the film such as the musical score could continue to be owned by the composer who only licenses it to the filmmakers. But even in these arrangements, rights are transferred or are licensed by contract, and the basic work-for-hire concept largely remains operative.

It could even be argued that Congress implicitly decided that actors’ performances should not be protected by copyright. For the first 75 years of the 20^th century, U.S. performers who asserted performance rights claims did so under the common law copyright of particular states. One example is Waring v. WDAS Broadcasting, 127 Pa. 433, 437 (1937), which involved the radio broadcasting of the recordings of Fred Waring’s orchestra that were marked “not licensed for radio broadcast.” At the time, recordings were not protected by U.S. copyright law. The Pennsylvania state court held that Waring, as the “creator” of the work, had a property right in the litigation.

But with the 1976 revision of U.S. copyright law, Congress eliminated common law copyright and so removed these decisions as precedents. Congress could have added actors’ performances under works that are entitled to copyright protection, as it did for recordings, but it did not.

A persistent fear expressed in many law review articles during this period was that protection for an actor’s performance in a particular role would adversely affect the ability of other actors to perform the same role. H. Silverberg asked in his article, “Televising Old Films—Some New Legal Questions About Performers’ and Proprietors’ Rights,” 38 Va. Law Review 615 (1952), “Could John Barrymore have claimed a common law property right in his memorable interpretation of Hamlet?”

Then in 2012, the controversial film Innocence of Muslims had its 13-minute trailer, which portrayed the Muslim religious leader Mohammed as being a fool and a sexual deviant, posted on YouTube. The trailer was then blocked in Egypt, Libya, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia. The film created unrest in the Middle East and was mistakenly credited by the Obama Administration as sparking protests that led to an attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi on Sept. 12, 2012 that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. YouTube refused to remove the trailer in the United States.

Actress Cindy Lee Garcia claimed that the producer of the film misrepresented the project to her, overdubbed her dialogue without her knowledge with lines claiming Mohammed was a child molester, and as a result, she began receiving death threats.

Garcia asked YouTube to take the film down from its site in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but YouTube refused because Garcia did not hold the copyright for the film.

In her federal litigation filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Garcia v. Nakoula, C.D. Cal., No. CV 12-08318-MWF, Garcia argued that she owned a copyright in her own performance. She claimed that her performance was not a work for hire because the producer had not required her to sign the usual release of her rights.

Garcia cited the landmark work-for-hire case, Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989) and argued that the majority of the 13 factors that the Supreme Court instructed courts to use in determining whether a work was a work-for-hire weighed in support of her claim that she was an independent contractor and not an employee.

In ruling on Garcia’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would require YouTube to take the film down, Judge Michael Fitzgerald held that Garcia had not established a likelihood of success on the merits, stating that the nature of her copyright interest was unclear and that it was also not clear that the defendants would be liable for infringement.

Fitzgerald quoted from Aalmnhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9^th Cir. 2000) in ruling that this film too “is a copyrightable work” and it is “undisputed that the movie was intended by everyone involved with it to be a unitary whole.”

Noting that Garcia argued that she owned the copyright in her own performance, Fitzgerald wrote, “Even if this copyright interest were cognizable and proven, by operation of law, Garcia necessarily (if impliedly) would have granted the Film’s author a license to distribute her performance as a contribution incorporated into the indivisible whole of the Film.”

The court’s ruling was only to deny Garcia’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Garcia appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in January 2013, which could overturn the district court’s ruling. If that does not happen, the district court would still have to rule on the merits of Garcia’s claim. But its statements in its preliminary injunction ruling suggest what its decision on the merits might be.

The Garcia case, so far, conforms with the standard approach and suggests that an actor’s performance is still not protected by copyright. The court added that, even if it was, and noted Garcia had not proved that it was protected by copyright as she needed to, performance in a film constituted a license to distribute it.

For me, the situation recalls the case of DeCosta v. Viacom, 981 F.2d 602, 605 (1992), which involved Victor DeCosta, a rodeo performer, who, dressed all in black, told the story of a hired gun named Paladin who had a business card that read, “Have Gun Will Travel.” In 1957, CBS-TV broadcast a show titled “Have Gun Will Travel” about a hired gun named Paladin who was dressed all in black. DeCosta sued for various claims but the nature of his rodeo performance appeared to fall outside of copyright and trademark law. After 30 years of different trials, a federal court ended the case, stating, “Mr. DeCosta’s original legal problem lay in his inability to bring his case within a particular set of protective rules.”

This could be the problem Garcia is experiencing.

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Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lincoln and Fictionalization in Fact-Based Films

by John Aquino on 01/24/13

This post was slighty amended and embellished Feb. 27, 2013.

I have written a book and three articles on the topic of legal issues involving fictionalization in fact-based films. A spate of recent films prompts me to revisit the topic.

Some points from what I've written before. When a living person feels that he or she has been defamed by a movie portrayal, they can file litigation, facing the fact that someone who has been portrayed in a movie is likely to be considered a public figure for defamation litigation purposes and have to prove that the false statements in the movie were made not just with negligence but with absolute malice, which means knowing the statements were false or being indifferent as to whether or not they were true. Courts have tended--although not always--to accept the filmmakers' argument that the fact that the statements were made in a film means there was no absolute malice.

To establish lack of intent to historical accuracy and an exact portrayal of real people, Hollywood filmmakers started in the early 1930s to use disclaimers at the beginning of the film stating, "The persons and events portrayed in his film are fictitious, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental," even if the film was based on historical characters and events like They Died with Their Boots On (1942) about General Custer. As film biographies became more realistic, the disclaimers for fact-based films changed to "some of the persons and events are fictitious..."

If the person portrayed is dead, defamation litigation is not an option since, the saying goes, "the dead cannot sue for libel." Defamation litigation is designed to restore an individual's reputation. The law is framed on the idea that once you are dead you, personally, are beyond the court's help. Family members have pursued other causes of action, with little success.

Whether or not litigation is possible, fictionalization in fact-based films also raises the question of the dilution or corruption of truth.

From the filmmakers' perspective, their job is to tell a good story, which may prompt them to streamline the facts, which they will likely need to do anyway to cram years of history in a two-hour film.

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck with a screenplay by Chris Terrio, tells the fact-based story of the rescue of six U.S. diplomats hiding in the Canadian embassy in Iran during the larger Iran hostage crisis of 1978-1981, in which 52 diplomats were seized from the U.S. Embassy. The movie's story is true: the Central Intelligence Agency did fabricate, with the help of Hollywood professionals, a movie and send agent Tony Mendez into Iran with the plan of having the six Canadian Embassy hostages leave the country as his film crew. The plan worked, the hostages were rescued, and the credit for the rescue was given to the Canadian government so as to not further stir up anti-U.S. sentiments.

For the first half of the film, it appears to stay pretty close to the facts, and it is an exciting premise and a tense situation as the hostages wait for the Iranians to learn that they are there and to break down the door. There are also humorous moments as Mendez works with Hollywood filmmakers to set up the fake movie.

But for the rescue itself, the filmmakers had a problem. According to Mendez, once they were out of the embassy, everything went "as smooth as silk." They went through passport control with their faked passports, they boarded the plane, and left. This was evidently deemed to be not very exciting, and what actually happened is now well known--they got out--so there was already no suspense. So the filmmakers dipped into the box of standard movie tricks and employed virtually all of them to create some measure of suspense.

SPOLER ALERT: The CIA pulls the plug on the operation, Mendez goes anyway, and so when he gets to the airport there are no tickets; meanwhile his boss scrambles to get the tickets reissued. The diplomats' passports are questioned, a soldier calls the fake Hollywood office and, because the CIA pulled the plug on the operation, there is no one to answer the phone, it rings and rings, until the very last moment when one of the "fake" Hollywood producers answers it. The hostages' departure is finally approved, they get on the plane, the Iranians find out they are Americans and pursue them, driving their jeeps alongside the SwissAir plane until it takes off (the pilot doesn't appear to notice).

The thing is, NONE OF THIS HAPPPENED. Everything went as smooth as silk.

As noted earlier, a filmmakers' job is to tell a good story. Affleck and Terrio did that. The film was untrue to some facts in addition to those noted in the preceding paragraph. It streamlined the story to the point that, as the actual Canadian ambassador said about the film, "it turned us into innkeepers" and omitted the active role he and the Canadian government played in the whole scheme. There were objections concerning this when the film was shown at the Toronto film festival, and Affleck added a text epilogue alluding to the Canadian involvement.

But it's an exciting film that is--acknowledging the divergence from the facts--true to the spirit of what happened.

The filmmakers also had to deal with the conflict between promoting that the film as "based on a true story" and acknowledging in a disclaimer that some characters and events were fictionalized. For example, the producer played by Alan Arkin is fictitious. The filmmakers' solution was not to have a disclaimer at the end of the credits as is now the custom but to bury in the middle of the credits the sentence that some characters and events were fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

Zero Dark Thirty is about the 10-year search for Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal needed a dramatic incident to move the story forward. Based on their research, they decided to show that a piece of information elicited during the form of torture known as waterboarding ultimately led to the raid on Bin Laden's hiding place.

After the movie was premiered, CIA officials and others disputed that this had happened. An official who was involved in the questionings acknowledged waterboarding but said it was strategically much more limited than shown. Bigelow and Boal stand by their story.

Both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo carry in the opening credits the phrase "based on a true story." Affleck said in a Sept. 12, 2012 interview in Macleans, "Because we say it's based on a true story, rather than this is a true story, we're allowed to take some dramatic license. There is a spirit of the truth."

In reaction to Zero Dark Thirty, lawmakers and the CIA called on Sony Pictures to put a disclaimer on the film that it is fictitious. Like Argo, which invented cars chasing planes and the like, the film appears to follow the spirit of the truth, employing traditional dramatic elements--the mumbled phrase, what does it mean?--to propel the story.

With Lincoln, since all portrayed are very long dead, there is no defamation worry but instead, the issue is, does it corrupt the truth?

The film carries no disclaimer and just cites that it was partly based on a book by the historian Doris Goodwin, A Team of Rivals. It appears to be fairly close to the book which was said to be close to the fact. Screenwriter Tony Kushner noted that newspaper reporting at the time sumnmarized but did not quote speeches and debate and so he was free to and had to invent them. Some of the liberties he took with facts were criticized. A Connecticut congressman noted that the movie has the Connecticut members of Congress vote against the 13th Amendment when they all voted for it. Kushner responded that he was trying to build up a particular flow of events, that he had changed the names of the congressmen in the movies from those who actually existed so they would not be blamed for what he had them too, and that, by the way, he hoped that no one would be shocked that he invented speeches too.

There was also criticism with the sets. During the debate on the Thirteenth Amendment, the House floor is jammed, and there is not an empty seat. In 1865, there were actually 18 empty seats for the states that had left the Union. In the 1942 film Tennessee Johnson about Lincoln's second vice president Andrew Johnson, during his impeachment trial he alludes to the empty chairs. The filmmakers may have known about the empty chairs but opted instead for the dramatic effect of a jammed chamber.

Lincoln has an otherwise taut script by Tony Kushner and an exceptional performance as Lincoln by Daniel Day Lewis. The direction by Steven Spielberg tends to be "historical-drama paced" rather than propelled with some energy but he captures the period extremely well. And, years after anyone could sue, it appears to be closer to the truth than is usual.

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Re-viewing Two Remembered Films--Carol for Another Christmas and Watch on the Rhine

by John Aquino on 01/10/13

Over the Christmas holidays, I had the opportunity to see two films that I had watched years ago. Of one I had fond memories, of the other, not so much. On re-viewing, the feelings were reversed.

The fondly remembered one was Carol for Another Christmas, which I had seen when it was broadcast in 1964. It was just shown again over Christmas on Turner Classic Movies for the first time in 48 years.

I remember being excited that it represented the pairing of a noted film director, Joseph Mankiewicz, fresh off his frustrating experience directing the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopatra (1963), and Rod Serling, fresh from the CBS tv series, The Twilight Zone (1959-1963), which he had created, wrote for, and hosted. As the title suggests, it was a modern version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

It had an all-star cast: Sterling Hayden as the Scrooge character called Grudge, Pat Hingle as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Steve Lawrence as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Eva Marie Saint as an nurse from Grudge's past, Robert Shaw as the Ghost of Christmas Future, and Peter Fonda, son of Henry Fonda, as Grudge's nephew. Fonda's scenes were cut to just glimpses of him, and in five years he would have an iconic role as a biker in Easy Rider. The actor who received the most press was Peter Sellers, who had debuted his character of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther the year before and then had a heart attack. Carol marked his return to work. He would then co-star with Hayden in Dr. Strangelove.

The filmmakers even went to the trouble of reuniting the Andrew Sisters to re-record their 1942 hit number "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," which is only heard in the film when a record player suddenly starts playing the recording, until Grudge pulls the needle off after a few seconds. And yet the filmmakers also tampered with Serling's script, which had originally given Grudge the first name of Barnaby and shown his name as "B. Grudge," indicating that he was someone who begrudged giving charity. The script was changed so that his name was David, since the filmmakers were fearful that Grudge would be perceived as an attack on the then-Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

On its website, Turner Classic Movies invites you to tell it what little-seen films you would like them to show, and I kept writing in Carol for Another Christmas. Others must have too because they finally broadcasted it.

I guess I was in love with the idea of it in 1964. On re-seeing it, Carol doesn't play well.The idea of pairing Mankiewicz and Serling was not a good one. They both had their preachy sides. Some of the Serling's Twilight Zone scripts represent the most searching and, sometimes, the most disturbing science fiction dramas ever made. But he did use the show to comment on issues such as racism, McCarthyism, and other isms that troubled the 1950s and 1960s, and his characters do seem to like the sounds of their own voices. Serling's screenplay for Seven Days in May the same year as Carol also has long streches of dialogue, but it was propelled forward by director John Frankenheimer, who plays with images within images, especially by showing television monitors all around, and a really top-notch cast.

Mankiewicz loved to hear his characters talk too, as his screenplays for All About Eve, Letter to Three Wives, and certainly the four-hour Cleopatra show. With Serling and Mankiewicz together, Carol goes on and on without seeming to move forward. It ends when the characters stop talking: Grudge, having had some quiet form of conversion, tells his African-American staff that on Christmas morning he will have his coffee in the kitchen. It's evidently supposed to be a big step for him, but his staff simply ignores him and go on about their work.

Part of the problem is the source material. A Christmas Carol has demonstrated that it can be remade and rethought again and again. This version was sponsored by the United Nations, which had its own story to tell about its role in the world. And so Serling had to tell the story not only of a man who hated Christmas but of a man whose war experience--and the death of his nephew on Christmas--caused him to become an isolationist and to resist the idea that nations and peoples can come together by talking. The two different concepts--I hate Christmas because I remember sad Christmases of my past, and I hate Christmas because it reminds me of war and I think our country should just stay to itself--do not really mesh.

The film only comes to life at the end in the apocalyptic world Serling had some familiarity with from the Twlight Zone, with Shaw as a well-spoken spectre and Sellers as a crazy leader of the survivors of nuclear war. But overall, Carol is just a curiosity, a sidenote to the careers of Serling and Sellers.

Interestingly enough, the United Nations also sponsored the 1966 film A Poppy Is Also a Flower, an all-star thriller about the drug trade--starring Yul Brynner, Stephen Boyd, E.G. Marshall, Omar Sharif--that is remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the last film appearance by Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco--and she didn't act in the film but introduced the movie--and the film in which Rita Hayworth's lapses of memory were first evident and considered signs as alcoholism and not the signs of Alzheimer's Disease they really were. The script had a story by Ian Fleming of the James Bond novels, which indicates that the United Nations tried really, really hard to get the best people together to put on a good show. They just weren't the right people.

The other film I re-saw was the 1943 Watch on the Rhine, adapted from the play by Lillian Hellman. I barely remembered it, and what I did remember was that its star Paul Lukas won the Oscar for best actor over Humphrey Bogart in the classic Casablanca. I considered it one of the bad Oscar choices, perhaps evidence of Warner Bros., which produced both Casablanca and Rhine, throwing its Oscar weight to Rhine because it needed the award more than the box office hit Casablanca, just as MGM did in 1939 when it had its employees vote for Robert Donat as best actor in Goodbye Mr. Chips over Clark Gable for Gone with the Wind.

The screenplay was by Dashiel Hammett, who had stopped writing mystery novels because of a terrible case of writer's block that lasted his whole life (I remember reading a great quote from fellow mystery writer Raymond Chandler about Hammett's writer's block that I can no longer find). After the 1931 novel The Thin Man, Hammett wrote the stories for two Thin Man movie sequels in 1936 and 1939, the Rhine screenplay, and then not much else. Rhine is his only credited screenplay. He would not have received screenplay credit if he did not work on it, although Hellman, with whom Hammett was living, is credited with additional dialogue.

The play has one setting, the living room of the Farrellys. a noted Washington family who are visited by the daughter Sarah Muller (Bette Davis, graciously sharing the spotlight with others as she did in Juarez and The Man Who Came to Dinner) who has married Kurt Muller, a European (Lukas). They have been living in Europe for 18 years and obviously are fleeing war-bound Europe with their children. Another European guest of the family (George Coulouris) finds out that Kurt is an anti-Fascist wanted by the Nazis and tries to blackmail him. Kurt kills the blackmailer, convinces the shocked Farrelly family to help him, and returns alone to Europe to resume the fight against the Nazis.

On reseeing it, also on Turner Classic Movies, I was impressed with what a tight screenplay Hammett had written and how smartly he had opened the one-setting play up. The opening scene has the the Muller family--Kurt, Sarah, a daughter and two sons--walking aross the U.S. border from Mexico and boarding a train to cross the country to the Washington, D.C. area where the Farrellys live. We see them talk to their children about America during the train ride, interspersed with other new scenes in the German Embassy in Washington where the blackmailer plays cards with Nazis and embassy staff (including the undervalued Henry Daniel as a Nazi officer). There are more scenes outside of the house with the family's matriarch, Fanny, wonderfully placed by Lucille Watson who had created the part on Broadway, as she shops and visits her son at the firm her husband founded. Later, the blackmailer is taken outside and shot in what appears to be a garage.

The revelation is Lukas. Tired, sick throughout much of the film, he comes to life and violence as he strides over to the blackmailer and knocks him down with one blow, and you then know why the Nazis fear him. He then calmly justifies to Fanny and her son what he is doing and will do. It's a deep and rich performance, and I can actually see why the Academy gave him the Oscar over Bogart.

Watch on the Rhine is a surprise because it is not a well known film, but it's a very good one, better than some that are well known. It should be seen more for its ensemble work, as a part of Hammett's oeuvre, and for Lukas.

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