Just Wright (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Flavor Unit Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies, both romantic comedies featuring mostly African-American casts. The first was called Just Wright, made for theatrical release by Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2010 and starring Queen Latifah and Common in a film directed by Sanaa Hamri (a Black woman, by the way) from a script by Michael Elliot. Hamri actually has 62 directorial credits on imdb.com, though most are for TV episodes or music videos. Physical trainer and therapist Leslie Wright (Queen Latifah) falls in love with NBA basketball star Scott McKnight (Common, who looks surprisingly credible as an athlete). Leslie has a job at a local hospital in New Jersey and is a huge fan of the New Jersey Nets (who relocated to New York City and became the Brooklyn Nets in 2012, two years after this film was made). She’s living with her parents Lloyd (James Pickens, Jr.) and Janice (the marvelous Pam Grier, the Blaxploitation queen of the 1970’s who’s more heavy-set than she was in her glory days but still is an authoritative actress) and also with her lifelong friend Morgan Alexander (Paula Patton). The two are described as “god-sisters” and friends since childhood, and Leslie is putting Morgan up, presumably rent-free, in the guest room of her parents’ home. Leslie is determined to see Morgan get a normal job, but instead Morgan is intent on landing a well-to-do athlete as a sort of trophy husband who will take care of her the rest of their lives. Leslie thinks she has her chance when Scott McKnight invites both her and Morgan to a party at his palatial home, and Morgan makes a bee-line for Scott. Leslie and Scott had met at a gas station when Leslie, driving home in her beat-up off-orange 1960’s Ford Mustang she nicknamed “Eleanor” after her late grandmother, whose car it had been, pulls in for gas and spots Scott nonplussed when he can’t find the gas cap on the brand-new sleek black car he’d just bought.

Leslie figures out where it would be and the two bond over a Joni Mitchell CD she spotted on the seat of Scott’s car. The two praise the record Mitchell made with jazz great Charles Mingus (actually, as I pointed out in posts on a 2009 Lifetime movie that mentioned this project, The Party Never Stops [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/party-never-stops-jaffebraunstein-films.html], Mitchell and Mingus never recorded together; they had planned an album together and even collaborated on writing songs for it, but Mingus died before the project could be made and the resulting Mingus album contained three songs they wrote together, one – “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” – a Mitchell lyric to a pre-existing Mingus composition, and two others Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, one of which was a tribute to him), and ultimately Queen Latifah and Common get to sing a nice short duet on the Harry Warren song “The More I See You” from the 1945 movie Diamond Horseshoe. (The gimmick is that Scott has a secret room in his house, and just when we’re thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle here, it turns out that the big secret is the room contains a piano on which he secretly practices – and it’s lovely to hear two people who started out as rappers turn out to have quite lovely singing voices.) The film turns when Scott’s ankle gets seriously injured during the NBA All-Star Game, and Morgan, his fiancée, gets jealous of the white therapist, Bella Goldsmith (Kim Strother), whom Scott has hired on the recommendation of the NBA but who seems to be interested in getting a lot more intimately physical with Scott than her job requires. Morgan asks Leslie to take over as Scott’s therapist, and Leslie puts Scott through an eight-week regimen after warning him, “You’re going to hate me by the time this is over.”

When the sports shows on TV start reporting rumors that the Nets won’t re-sign Scott after his current contract ends with the current season because they don’t think he’ll be able to play at his former standard, Morgan sends Scott a letter breaking up with him. Leslie gets Scott rehabilitated enough to start the seventh game of the East Coast round of the playoffs, and he performs miserably until Leslie gets him a pep talk at halftime and it rouses his self-confidence until he plays at his old level again. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.) The Nets win the playoff game and advance to the championship round, and Scott goes on sports TV and gives an interview in which he gives Leslie credit for his rehabilitation. This starts a bidding war between the Nets and several other NBA teams for her services as a trainer. Just then, with Scott seemingly on the road back to a major recovery and a lucrative contract, Morgan (ya remember Morgan?) comes slamming back into his life and offers to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile, Scott and Leslie have had sex, albeit just once, though when Morgan returns Leslie feels she’s going to be demoted to the “friend zone.” Ultimately, though, Scott sees through Morgan’s gold-digging antics and decides that Leslie is the woman he really loves, and he swoops down on her while she’s in Philadelphia interviewing for the 76’ers. The two get married, and there’s a Lifetime-style title reading “One Year Later.” One year later they’re in the middle of a Nets game in which Scott is playing, Leslie is sitting with the team as their trainer, and Morgan, by Leslie’s special dispensation, is sitting in the area of the arena usually reserved for the players’ wives. Just Wright is a pretty typical romantic comedy, and Lifetime appears to have been showing it (after another Queen Latifah theatrical feature, Beauty Shop), to promote the fact that they’ve recently acquired rerun rights to her CBS-TV action series, The Equalizer (in which she repeated a role originally written for Denzel Washington in a theatrical film). But within the confines of the genre it was a nice theatrical romp.

His, Hers, and Ours (The Ninth House, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Just Wright Lifetime showed one of their own movies, also a rom-com with (mostly) Black actors, which they’d been promoting quite extensively of late: His, Hers, and Ours. This one, directed by Patricia Cuffie-Jones from a script by Bart Baker, interlocks two plot lines. In the first, successful Black restaurateur Kelly Pellman (Lesley-Ann Brandt) has a best-seller that appears to be part cookbook and part memoir. She’s growing her business, a small chain called Soul Pasta (in the opening scene we see her making her own pasta) and is anxious about whether she can keep her business going on the larger scale. She’s also worried about the scapegrace antics of her teenage son Isaiah (Tyler Lofton), whom she’s steering towards a college application to Howard (the most prestigious of the historically Black colleges and universities and the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris). Kelly has raised Isaiah as a single parent since his father Arthur (Curtis Hamilton) abandoned her about a decade earlier and forced Kelly and Isaiah to stay in roach-infested room-shares until she gradually made enough money to be able to afford their own apartment. The second story deals with Black entrepreneur Darius Stone (Taye Diggs), who built a fortune on an app showing working women how to organize their time. Alas, his investors have just forced him to sell the company to a larger white-owned firm, and though they offered him the chance to stay on in a figurehead position, he turned them down. We learn later that the idea for the app was actually that of Darius’s wife, only she got leukemia and died just before it became a major success. Darius catches his daughter Kai (Chloe Flowers) in bed with a young man, screams at her, and tells her her mom would be ashamed of her if she were still alive. The link between the two stories turns out to be that the young man Darius caught his daughter in bed with was Isaiah Pellman, and though they hadn’t reached the stage of actual penetration, they’d got as far as him dry-humping her in the guise of “studying.” Much to Darius’s disgust, his mother has arranged to get Kai birth-control pills, on the ground that she’s probably going to have sex anyway and it’s better if she’s protected.

Isaiah and Kai end up in trouble with school, and the officious assistant principal says he won’t suspend them, but only if they show up the next Saturday and clean up the school cafeteria – and they’re required to bring their parents. Ultimately the parents show up, but Darius and Kelly are so attracted to each other they blow off the school cleanup session and go on a lunch date instead. This poses a problem for them because Isaiah and Kai both strongly disapprove of their parents getting romantically involved with each other – especially after a classmate goes all paparazzo on them and shoots secret photos of Darius and Kelly making out in a public park. She posts the photos on social media and they go viral at the school Isaiah and Kai attend, and the merciless students taunt them both for having an affair when they’re brother and sister. (They’re not, at least biologically, but they would have the same parental figures if their single parents got together and got married.) Bart Baker throws in an ironic scene in which Darius and Kelly are having sex with each other at Kelly’s home when suddenly her son Isaiah comes in, and Darius literally has to hide from him – a nice, ironic contrast to the earlier scene in which Darius had come home unexpectedly and found Isaiah and Kai making out in her room in his house. I also liked the soft-core porn scene between Darius and Kelly, which was a lot more graphic and exciting than the similar one in Just Wright – especially since, though both Taye Diggs and Lesley-Ann Brandt are Black, she’s so much lighter-skinned than he is I got some of the same thrill of the color contrast I get from interracial porn. (I’ve told my husband Charles that an interracial porn scene in which the Black participant was Barack Obama’s color would do little for me.) We also got some delectable close-ups of Taye Diggs’s bare chest, with his nipples very much in evidence.

Bart Baker throws us a curveball when Kelly, on the advice of her assistant Sofia (Aimee Garcia), throws a “Grand Opening” party for her restaurant (even though it’s been operating for three months now), and Kai overindulges on the sauces and bolts for the bathroom. Kelly immediately assumes that she’s got pregnant by Isaiah, though the pregnancy test she gives Kai turns out to be negative (all of us, including the audience, heave a sigh of relief over that!). There’s also a weird turn in the plot in which Isaiah becomes estranged from his mom and goes off to live with his dad Arthur, who’s reconnected with him after seven years, only the place is a mess, the meal is mashed-potato mix in a frying pan (a sharp contrast to his gourmand mother!), and it turns out the only reason Arthur wanted to take in his son is so he could bill his mom $3,000 per month in child support. And there’s another subplot in which it turns out that Darius has secretly been brewing his own whiskey in the basement of a bar owned by a friend of his, and when the friend decides to sell out, Darius secretly buys the place so he can preserve it as it is instead of having it taken over by a white buyer who’d turn it into another high-end pub. Ultimately all the plot lines resolve: Darius presents Kelly a bottle of his homemade whiskey, Kelly uses it to make a sauce that becomes so sensationally popular a white guy who represents a grocery chain offers to sell it, and both Darius and Kelly realize that it’s going to take the combination of his business expertise and her culinary skills to make the sauce a success and produce enough of it to satisfy the chain’s orders. Frankly, I was hoping the film would end with a double wedding – Darius marrying Kelly and Isaiah marrying Kai – though even in what was already a pretty nervy movie Patricia Cuffie-Jones and Bart Baker weren’t about to go that far! His, Hers, and Ours was a nice enough movie that delivered the rom-com goods, though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Just Wright.

The Great Jewel Robber (Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: The Great Jewel Robber (1950). Note that the title is The Great Jewel Robber, not The Great Jewel Robbery, because instead of being centered around a single crime it’s based on the true-life exploits and multiple crimes of jewel thief Gerard Graham Dennis (David Brian), who got his start in crime in his native Ontario, Canada. As a youth he was arrested for house-breaking and other petty crimes, until in Montreal he grabbed the opportunity to break into the home of a gold-mine heiress and casually pocket $75,000 worth of jewels. Dennis got arrested but escaped from a prison work detail and ultimately fled across the border, settling in New Rochelle, New York (famed to fans of the Dick Van Dyke TV show as the place from which Van Dyke’s character commuted to his job as a TV comedy writer in New York City) and hitting up wealthy victims. He only stole jewels and furs, and when the father of one of his many girlfriends caught on to the fact that he was a thief, he reported Dennis to the cops while Dennis was actually living in his home as a boarder. The woman helped Dennis escape and gave him $300, but no sooner had he done so than he took up with a new girlfriend whom he exploited for more getaway money. Ultimately he wounded a reluctant man who refused to part with his wife’s engagement ring because it was a family heirloom, and Dennis shot him in the shoulder, though he survived. Dennis then fled to California on a cross-country train and while on board met yet another woman, heiress to a fortune in California oil, and seduced her. Then he established himself in Hollywood and started stealing from major movie stars (the ones mentioned in the film are Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, and Dennis Morgan – all Warner Bros. contractees) as well as anyone else with money. When the cops finally caught up with him he was extradited to New York and stood trial for the crimes he’d committed in New Rochelle.

Written by Borden Chase (whose real name Eddie Muller gave as Frank Fowler, though according to his Wikipedia page he was born Devin Borden) and directed by Peter Godfrey, The Great Jewel Robber was produced by Bryan Foy. As a child he’d been one of “The Seven Little Foys,” offspring of vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, who incorporated his kids into his act. When he grew up he decided to make his career behind the camera and became a “B”-movie producer for various studios, including Warner Bros. and 20th-Century Fox. While at Fox in 1944 he green-lighted a film called Roger Touhy, Gangster, defying the Production Code Administration’s ban on biopics of real-life gangsters on the ground that they’d tend to glorify crime. Foy continued to produce films about actual criminals, and in 1949 he negotiated with the real Gerard Dennis for the rights to his life story. Chase concocted a script in which the first-person narration was told by Dennis himself. The Great Jewel Robber was only tangentially film noir – Eddie Muller has been progressively looser as to his definition of what constitutes a film noir – but it was a quite entertaining film that sent my estimation of Peter Godfrey’s directorial talents several ticks up. Godfrey’s best-known film is the original 1945 version of Christmas in Connecticut starring Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine columnist who’s pretending to be a Martha Stewart-esque domestic diva when she can’t cook at all. I got a bad taste in my mouth about him when I saw The Two Mrs. Carrolls, made two years later, a perfectly dreadful film about an artist with a psychological compulsion to murder his models that thoroughly wasted the talents of Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart. I remember watching this film and then downloading the archive.org post of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard to experience one occasion when the “A”-listers muffed a promising story premise and the “B”-listers did it magnificently. I also had a bad taste when I read about another 1947 Godfrey film, That Hagen Girl, which co-starred Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple. Though I’ve never seen it, I’ve read about it in the book The 50 Worst Films of All Time by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, which quoted Reagan’s autobiography as saying he particularly disliked the ending. The film’s basic plot was about a rumor that Temple was Reagan’s illegitimate daughter, and once it was proven that she wasn’t, she and Reagan got together as a couple on-screen. Reagan protested that no one would believe this ending because he was so much older than Temple, but Godfrey insisted on keeping it because his wife was also much younger than he.

With The Great Jewel Robber Godfrey was able to make a quite interesting movie despite the handicap of a rather dull and thug-like leading man. David Brian was O.K.-looking and appropriately hunky for the role – though he was blond and the real Gerard Dennis was dark-haired – but at least part of his appeal was his debonair sexual charm (the real Dennis was nicknamed “the American Raffles” after the famous gentleman-thief character created by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law), and it’s hard to believe David Brian as the man no woman can resist when his seduction technique, as we see it on screen, consists of merely glowering at his targets until they yield to him. Obviously the perfect person for this role c. 1950 would have been Cary Grant – who actually did play a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s marvelous To Catch a Thief four years later – but by 1950 Grant would have been way beyond Bryan Foy’s budget. Ironically, the biggest thing about Dennis we dislike in Chase’s script is not his thievery but his callousness towards women – including Martha Rollins (Marjorie Reynolds from Holiday Inn and Ministry of Fear), whom Dennis meets when she’s working as a nurse in the hospital where he’s being treated for the wounds his would-be victim inflicted on him (his real name was Tulloch but he’s called “Tom Creel” in the movie and played by Charles Cane). Dennis gets her to leave her job for him, flee with him, and even marry him. When he abandons her later she’s understandably pissed and by the end of the movie she turns him in to the police, giving them a shot of the two of them together on their honeymoon in (where else?) Niagara Falls so the authorities finally have a photo of him they can use to trace him. The Great Jewel Robber was a quite good movie that could have been even better with a stronger, sexier actor in the lead, and though it’s not really film noir it was quite watchable.

Law and Order: "Brotherly Love" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 30) I watched the usual sequence of three Law and Order shows on NBC – they’re pre-empted the next week because of a big special, Wicked Above All, which looks like a concert performance of the musical Wicked to promote the upcoming release of the sequel, Wicked for Good, by Universal, which like NBC is a Comcast company. The flagship Law and Order episode was one called “Brotherly Love” in which police detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) became the latest cop in the Law and Order franchise to be given a scapegrace sibling: brother Matt Riley (Ryan Eggold), who when the episode opens has just been released from prison and has got a job as a waiter at a restaurant owned by Declan Dell (Neil Dawson). Unfortunately, Declan Dell is also a playboy and a compulsive gambler with a “thing” for white married women (Dell himself is Black), and no sooner do both we and Vincent meet him than he gets himself killed on the street. Vincent gets assigned to investigate the case along with his direct supervisor, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), who’s partnering him until they find him another person with whom to work. Dell, it turns out, had just left a high-stakes poker game run by another Black man, Shane Willis (Tobias Truvillion), which was attended by a high-profile set of influentials including a major film director, a judge, and NBA basketball star André Walker (Jerimiyah Dunbar), who broke up an incipient fight between Willis and Chaney.

None of them wanted to testify, so the only witness prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) can use is Matt Riley even though in the previous case against him that led to his being sentenced to prison in the first place, perjury was one of the crimes he was charged with (though he wasn’t convicted of it). Despite both his reluctance and Price’s skepticism about using him as a credible witness, Matt agrees to testify – only the day he’s supposed to appear in court he’s knifed on the street in a nearly fatal attack by a Black guard who works at the jail where Matt was being held in supposedly “protective custody.” Not surprisingly, Matt is pissed off as all hell that someone tried to kill him to keep him from testifying, but because he’s caught a bacterial infection along the way he’s unable to appear in court, so they arrange for him to testify via video link from his hospital bed. Matt gives the jury in Willis’s case the information they need to convict him – he was at the poker party and saw Willis threaten Dell and say he was going to kill him if he didn’t at once come out with the money he owed Willis for losses in previous games – though afterwards his condition takes a turn for the worse and his doctors put him in a medically induced coma. As the show ends it’s touch-and-go whether Matt Riley will survive, but the implication is that by coming forward in the present case he’s redeemed himself for all the bad things he did earlier. My husband Charles was working at the computer on an online course while this was going on and he only got to see the last 10 minutes or so, though he joined me for the next two episodes in the various Law and Order franchises and quite liked the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that immediately followed it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Under the Influence" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown Thursday, October 30 immediately after the “Brotherly Love” episode of Law and Order was called “Under the Influence” and was a quite good tale of spoiled, pampered 1-percenters who actually get called to account for their crimes – unlike what usually happens in the real world. At first I thought from the promos that they were doing yet another offtake on the Jeffrey Epstein case, but in this case the three principal bad guys come off as more like the Trumps. Super-rich venture capitalist Raymond Ellis (Randall Newsome) and his two sons (by different mothers), real-estate developers Nathan (Chris Webster) and Paul (Drew Garrett), have worked out a plan. The Ellis brothers build a new high-end building and recruit young women who’ve established themselves online as “influencers.” When they’ve picked out someone they especially like, Paul, who’s more comfortable interacting with women than Nathan, seduces her and gets her into a bedroom in the unit where they’re doing the open house – and then Nathan crashes the bedroom and literally rapes her. The Special Victims Unit gets involved when Grace (Audrey Trullinger), a hot-looking blonde influencer who later tells the SVU squad and us that she’s asexual (no doubt most of the horny straight guys watching this were thinking, “What a waste!”), spots a woman at the Ellis brother’s latest open house obviously under the influence of various substances being dragged into an open bedroom by a rather nasty-looking guy. The woman is Skylar Wright (Shereen Ahmed), and though the nasty-looking guy was not one of the Ellises, she reports being raped to the SVU and issues a rather confused description of the assault that suggests her assailant had the ability to be in two places at once. A DNA search of the remains from the apartment’s bathroom drain reveals that three people were present: Skylar and two men whose DNA had a 25 percent overlap, meaning they were half-brothers. No sooner have the SVU detectives arrest the Ellises that their father comes storming into the precinct room, threatening Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) with the destruction of her police career if she dares proceed against his sons. He even demands her badge number, and she gives it to him.

Later the cops run down a previous victim of the Ellises, Carly Wilson (Harley Renault), who was working as a bartender when Paul Ellis chatted her up and took her home with him, only to get subjected to the same rapist double-teaming that Skylar went through: Nathan doing the dirty deed while forcing Paul to watch. Still later the cops find out about a previous case in Newark, New Jersey in which the victim was actually killed, though the Ellises covered it up by putting her dead body in a car, deliberately crashing it, and claiming she died of the injuries sustained in the accident. This happened eight years previously, and the African-American police detective who investigated the case, Mike Feldman (Benjamin Brown), got stripped of his detective status, put back in uniform and assigned parking enforcement because he got too close to the truth for the Ellises’ comfort. When Nathan and Paul Ellis go on trial, prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) notes that Paul keeps looking over at Nathan for signals as to what to do and what to say on the witness stand. Carisi decides that Paul is so totally under Nathan’s influence that he will ask the judge in the case to appoint a so-called “shadow counsel,” an attorney who will secretly represent Paul and his interests and will sit in the courtroom with no apparent connection to the case. He makes this request after the woman attorney representing both Nathan and Paul makes an offer to plead Paul guilty on all counts if Nathan is allowed to go free. Carisi uses that piece of information – which the attorney never bothered to tell Paul before she approached Carisi with the offer – to get Paul to turn against both his brother and his father at long last, including telling the police and prosecution that it was actually the father who killed the woman in New Jersey. Eventually we get to see the wish-fulfillment fantasy of seeing all three Ellises – father Raymond as well as brothers Nathan and Paul (who gets a lighter sentence in exchange for his evidence) – either already convicted or in handcuffs being led away to that probable fate, when of course in real life the prototype for Raymond Ellis got elected President of the United States twice and put his business in the hands of his scapegrace sons.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Red, White, Black, and Blue" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed May 15, 2025; aired October 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following this quite good Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode on Thursday, October 30, NBC showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime show called “Red, White, Black, and Blue” in which the principal villain is Miguel Olivas (Emilio Rivera), who’s risen so high in the Sinaloa drug cartel he’s known as “El Diablo.” Olivas has made an offer to turn state’s evidence, and to that end he’s being interrogated by assistant district attorney Anne Frazier (Wendy Moriz), only it’s a trap. Working through a Black veteran police officer named Tommy Da Silva (Peter Macon) who’s working for him as a bodyguard for a second job, Olivas is able to hire a squad of hit men to crash the hotel room and kill the people in law enforcement who were trying to take him down. He personally shoots Officer Da Silva and pistol-whips Anne Frazier to death after she pleads with him not to shoot her, and he says, “I won’t shoot you, but … .” The police investigation attracts not only the Organized Crime unit but also a detective named Tim McKenna (the older, heftier but still not bad-looking Jason Patric) who’s like Captain Ahab, with Olivas as his Moby Dick. Though he didn’t actually kill them himself, McKenna admits he was responsible for getting Olivas’s wife and child murdered. McKenna also angrily confronts Da Silva’s (white) widow Mary (Michelle Pruiett) with allegations that he was a dirty cop, and at first she throws both McKenna and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) out of her home before ultimately admitting that he was dirty and she knew about it.

She said the reason he went to the Dark Side was that after over 20 years of service, the New York Police Department was getting rid of their pension program and so he would have been left with nothing to retire on, so he started working for Olivas and the Sinaloa cartel and protecting one of their safe houses. Other detectives on the Organized Crime squad, including Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), have traced four Sinaloa drug distribution centers but there’s a fifth one that they haven’t been able to nail because it’s actively being “protected” by corrupt cops. McKenna and Stabler deduce that Olivas was hiding out at the mysterious address and get Reyes to tell them where it is, and after a quite effective suspense sequence in which Stabler hunts down Olivas through an elaborate set of tunnels under the house (kudos to director Eriq La Salle here!), he finally finds Olivas, or what’s left of him, gurgling to his death after fellow cartel members have knifed him in the tub in the hideout’s secret bathroom – though it’s left ambiguous as to whether he’s really going to die immediately or be able to recover to a modicum of health. Though this episode is obviously setting us up for yet another long-term story arc in Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, at least it had a convincing and reasonably conclusive ending. Though it wasn’t as good as the two other Law and Order shows that preceded it – especially the “Under the Influence” SVU – this Organized Crime episode was reasonably convincing and quite solid entertainment, and Jason Patric was able to make his obsessed Ahab-like character utterly convincing.

The Divorcée (MGM, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 28), as soon as my husband Charles got back home from work, I turned off the news and switched the TV to Turner Classic Movies, which was doing a night of films made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history from 1930 to 1934. The term “pre-Code” is a spectacular misnomer because the Motion Picture Production Code was actually promulgated in March 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association (MPPDA), and therefore pre-dated the “pre-Code” era. The Code was instituted to ward off both government censorship of the motion picture industry (which was perfectly legal because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that movies were just “a business” and therefore films were not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment; the Court eventually reversed this, but not until 1953) and the efforts of private pressure groups to drive certain forms of content off the screen. But for the first four years of its existence the Production Code was enforced more loosely than it was thereafter, and a surprising number of films made it to the screen that dealt with sexual relationships in a relatively honest and open fashion. One of those was the film Charles and I watched last night, The Divorcée, made at MGM in 1930 and based on a racy novel called Ex-Wife, published in 1929, whose content was so controversial that its author, Ursula Parrott, originally did not put her name on the book. The MPPDA ordered MGM to change the film’s title to something less offensive and in-your-face, so MGM obliged with The Divorcée. When MGM production chief Irving Thalberg bought the rights for $20,000 (a high price for a story property then), he intended to cast Joan Crawford in the title role, but Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, had other ideas. She announced to her husband that she wanted to play the female lead, and eventually she got her wish – leading to a bitter enmity between her and Crawford that lasted until their one film together, The Women (1939), and even beyond. Crawford complained to her friends, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!” Thalberg was originally uncertain about casting Shearer because she’d carefully been built up as a “good girl,” though at least two of her silent films, Lady of the Night (1925) – in which she played two parts, one good and one bad – and A Lady of Chance (1928), had showcased her in less than sympathetic roles.

The Divorcée casts Shearer as Jerry, who’s in love with Ted Martin (Chester Morris, a highly talented actor who got a number of good parts in great films but never quite achieved the brass ring of stardom his talents deserved), even though Jerry is a successful businesswoman (though we’re never told just what business she’s in) and Ted is a struggling newspaperman. Ted and Jerry talk a good game about wanting a truly equal relationship and avoiding the pitfalls of traditional jealousy, but not long after they’re married Ted is confronted at one of the film’s many parties by Janice (Mary Doran), one of his exes who wants to get rid of the “ex” part. One of the parties ends with a sequence in which the Martins’ friend Paul (Conrad Nagel, a dubious actor who got a lot of parts he didn’t deserve in the early days of sound because he was one of the first actors who proved he had a recordable speaking voice; it got so bad that in an interview Nagel complained that he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in) gets roaring drunk and insists on driving while very much under the influence. The inevitable happens and Paul’s car crashes, leaving his girlfriend Dorothy (Judith Wood, billed as “Helen Johnson”) severely injured and disfigured. There’s a neat contrast between the wedding of Ted and Jerry in a church with Wagner’s Lohengrin march and a minister performing the ceremony, and the sordid coupling of Paul and Dorothy in Dorothy’s hospital room, since Paul doesn’t love Dorothy but feels compelled to marry her out of guilt.

At yet another party Janice successfully seduces Ted, and Jerry, figuring that what’s sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose, yields to the advances of another one of their friends, Don (the young Robert Montgomery, who’s so callow-looking we get the impression he’s just graduated from high school). Director Robert Z. Leonard (who’s not credited as such, though the opening title lists The Divorcée as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production”), who was ordinarily a hack (though he has one truly great film on his résumé, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical Maytime), shows a rare bit of subtlety when he works around the Code’s limitations by staging the sex scene between Jerry and Don from outside, with just the camera on the window of their apartment as its drapes slowly close. Leonard also scores with the immediately preceding scene, in which Ted, called out of town on a business trip (though once again we’re not told what sort of business or why he can’t take Jerry along, as Charles invariably does with me whenever he has to go out of town), tries to call home during a six-minute layover of his train. Only it takes nearly the whole six minutes just for him to put through the call, and we get a chilling scene of the Martins’ phone ringing unanswered because Jerry has just that minute yielded to Don’s advances and left home with him. When Ted finally returns from his trip, Jerry announces that she has “paid your account in full,” and Ted immediately demands to know who her extra-relational lover was – while she, quite understandably, refuses to tell him.

Ted and Jerry divorce, and Jerry announces that from then on she’s going to be as wanton as circumstances will allow and have as many men in her life as she wants. Among the men after her is Paul (ya remember Paul?), who’s never forgiven Ted because he married Jerry after Paul wanted her. He catches up with her on a train and pulls her away from her latest boy-toy, a phony European “prince,” then offers to marry her as soon as he can divorce Dorothy, to whom he’s offered a large financial settlement in exchange for his freedom. Only, just as Jerry and Paul are in Jerry’s apartment settling the details of their new life together, Dorothy shows up wearing what after an earlier viewing of the film (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/divorcee-mgm-1930.html) I described as “an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman.” Naturally Jerry is too overcome by guilt to go through with her plan to marry Paul, and instead she leaves for Paris, where Ted (ya remember Ted?) is working as a free-lance journalist after having been fired from his job. He’s also drinking a lot and making an ass of himself, something he was already well on his way to doing in the U.S. when he disrupted the wedding party of two of their friends and even smashed their wedding cake. It all ends in Paris at a New Year’s Eve party where Jerry and Ted finally reconcile and pledge that this time around they’ll take the marriage vows more seriously than they did last time. TCM showed The Divorcée October 28 as part of a night of so-called “pre-Code” films in connection with a new book on the 1930-34 era called Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934 by Kim Luperi and Danny Reid, which featured The Divorcée in its opening chapter.

And yet both Charles and I could think of much better movies from the 1930-34 period that pushed the envelope far more audaciously than this rather staid film, which at least partly because of Shearer’s usual image is hard to take seriously. You just know that Jerry isn’t a truly bad or wanton woman, just a good woman playing at being bad – and playing at being bad in a transparently phony way. Shearer would go on to make a few more films that pushed the envelope of traditional morality, including Private Lives (1931) – in which, given a better story source (by Noël Coward instead of Ursula Parrott) and a more artful director (Sidney Franklin), she and Robert Montgomery play the basic situation of The Divorcée as sophisticated comedy instead of chest-thumping melodrama – and A Free Soul (also 1931), in which she plays the daughter of attorney Lionel Barrymore who’s engaged to Leslie Howard but is turned on sexually by brutal gangster Clark Gable. (I’ve sometimes described A Free Soul as the beta version of Gone With the Wind because, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War, it is a two-man-one-woman triangle with Gable and Howard as the two men.) And other studios and other stars also made far more Code-pushing films in the early 1930’s than this one. To name but a few, there are Three Smart Girls (1932), Virtue (1932), the awesome Call Her Savage (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932) – to my mind the best movie musical ever made – Safe in Hell (1933), Sensation Hunters (1933), and Mae West’s masterpieces She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). West’s films in particular sparked the reaction from the Roman Catholic pressure group, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!), that ended the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era and forced the MPPDA to get super-serious about enforcing the Code. They put a single individual – first Jason Joy, then Joseph Breen, then Geoffrey Shurlock (who held the job until the Code finally broke down in the late 1960’s and was replaced by the ratings system in place today) – in charge and gave him the power to vet films twice, first when they were in script form and then after they were shot. The Divorcée is a frustrating movie that seems hopelessly dated in some respects and au courant in others, and Shearer won the Academy Award for her performance, which like the film itself is powerful and luminous in some scenes and staid and stiff in others.