The Chairman (APJAC Productions, 20th Century-Fox, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 4) my husband Charles and I watched two movies, a Blu-Ray disc of The Chairman (1969) and a DVD of Crimson Tide (1995). I’d ordered these discs because I’ve been assigned to review their soundtrack albums for the May-June 2026 issue of Fanfare magazine, and they made an interesting double bill because both of them are about rivalries between the U.S. and nominally Communist or ex-Communist powers, China in The Chairman and Russia in Crimson Tide. Charles pronounced The Chairman as “a real relic of the Cold War,” and that it is, though the MacGuffin isn’t a nuclear secret but an artificial enzyme that will allow plants to grow even in ordinarily inhospitable soil and climate conditions. The enzyme was invented by Chinese scientist Soong Li (Keye Luke, a welcome sight). The American and British secret services hatch a plot to send Nobel Prize-winning American agronomist, scientist, and professor John Hathaway (Gregory Peck, top-billed) to infiltrate China and steal the formula for the enzyme. Hathaway is a widower who has an alternate Anglo love interest, British scientist and teacher Kay Hanna (Anne Heywood), but she’s only in two scenes: an early one in which she invites Hathaway to her class as a guest lecturer, and a tag scene in which they reunite after his Big Chinese Adventure. Since the film was made in 1969, Hathaway arrives in China just as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was being launched by Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung, as he was known then in the West), a movement Mao arbitrarily started in 1966 to upend all of Chinese society and keep the country going on the One True Path to socialism and eventually communism. As a result of this event, university professors were pulled out of their classrooms and forced to work in the fields doing farm labor, and gangs of free-lance thugs known as the Red Guards roamed through the streets beating up people who weren’t considered sufficiently devoted to the Chairman and his ideology. Mao published the so-called “Little Red Book,” whose full title was Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, which was issued to virtually all Chinese and also printed worldwide in many different languages to advance the ideology of “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought.” In 1969 I remember buying a copy of a pamphlet Mao had published in 1930 called “Oppose Book Worship!,” and with my sense of humor I’d wave it in the air like more orthodox Maoists were doing with the “Little Red Book” and scream, “Oppose book worship!” (Also that summer I met a 15-year-old named Chris Morton who had lived in China and introduced himself as the only white American Red Guard.)

When Hathaway meets Professor Soong, he turns out to be in a wheelchair and his caregiver is his daughter Soong Chu (Francesca Li), who judging from her amount of screen time compared to Anne Heywood’s is the true female lead of this film. She’s also the most morally ambiguous character in the movie, wearing a Red Guard armband and seemingly colluding in the capture and kidnapping of her father by the Red Guards and the looting of his office and his papers. At the same time Hathaway is forced to trust her because she’s his only link to her dad. One of the Red Guards who capture Soong Li intones with grim fanaticism that they’re trashing his lab and disposing of him (they don’t actually kill him, but they leave him prone in the middle of the street and destroy his wheelchair so he’s helpless) because “your usefulness as a scientist is done.” Before Hathaway leaves on his mission he’s briefed by U.S. official Lt. General Shelby (Arthur Hill) who for some reason wears bi-colored glasses, one lens clear while the other is dark green. (Was he supposed to be missing one eye and the opaque lens was to cover that up?) Shelby orders him to undergo an operation that will implant a radio transmitter in his head just below his ear, which will allow him to talk to Shelby and his other U.S. and British controllers any time he wants. In fact the transmitter is being used to monitor him 24/7, so Mission Control will know where he is and what he’s doing at all times. Unbeknownst to Hathaway – at least until midway through the movie – the device also contains an explosive that will allow his mission controllers to blow him up any time they so choose, though there’s some ambiguity as to whether the explosive (literally a “kill switch”) actually exists or Hathaway was just told that to keep him in line. For me the most surprising and interesting scene in the movie is the one in which Hathaway has an audience with Mao (Conrad Yama), though he’s referred to in the credits only as “The Chairman,” in which Mao insists that he and his government want to share the super-enzyme with the world. Unfortunately, Lt. General Shelby is listening in and he toys with the idea of detonating the explosive in Hathaway’s head and killing both him and “The Chairman.” Soong Li ultimately dies, though before he croaks he gives Hathaway a copy of the “Little Red Book” in which he’s inserted code containing the formula for the enzyme. The film ultimately turns into a long chase scene as Hathaway desperately tries to escape the Chinese and slip under an electrified border fence that will kill him instantly if his body makes contact with it. (Gregory Peck’s stunt double must have had quite a workout on this film.)

Shelby toys with the idea of setting off the bomb in Hathaway’s head lest he be captured and tortured by the Chinese, but at the last minute Russian border guards (the Russians are actually on the side of good in this one, which is unusual for a Cold War movie; apparently Jay Richard Kennedy, who wrote the source novel, and Ben Maddow, who did the script, were aware of the tensions between Russia and China in the real world and did not lump them together as “the Communist bloc”) take Hathaway across the border after blowing out the Chinese fence with mortars. The scene of Hathaway escaping through mountainous countryside reminded me so much of The Sound of Music I started singing, “The hills are alive … oops, wrong movie.” Once Hathaway is back home he decodes the formula for the enzyme – which is just eight letters, representing the three key amino acids in it, though the models of the enzyme’s molecules look fearsomely complicated – in the pages of Soong Li’s copy of the “Little Red Book.” Shelby tells Hathaway that the U.S. government wants to keep the enzyme a state secret and not allow any other country’s farmers to use it, but Hathaway insists that the formula should belong to the world and he intends to contact journalists and release it to the press. (Presumably the bomb inside his head has been removed by then, since if it hadn’t been one could imagine a nihilistic ending in which Shelby would blow up Hathaway to keep him from releasing the formula.) Hathaway and Kay (ya remember Kay?) have their romantic reunion as the film draws to a close, fortunately without the seemingly endless roll of closing credits we’ve become all too used to in subsequent movies. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, an all-arounder whose best-known credit is probably the original 1962 Cape Fear with Peck and Robert Mitchum, The Chairman is a reasonably exciting thriller, though it has its longueurs. Gregory Peck, who was born April 5, 1916 and was therefore 53 years old when he made this movie, must have felt a certain dèja vu about this movie since he’d made his film debut a quarter-century earlier in a similar role in Days of Glory (1944), described on imdb.com as “An heroic guerrilla group fights back against impossible odds during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.” Later he’d make The Guns of Navarone (1961), in which he played the leader of a commando team sent to blow up the titular super-weapons. Through much of the movie I was looking at Peck and wondering, “Has he fathered the Antichrist yet?” (He hadn’t: The Omen wouldn’t come in his filmography until 1976, seven years later.) And to briefly mention the reason I was watching this movie – the musical score by Jerry Goldsmith – it’s quite effective when he isn’t drowning it with plucked strings (the lead instrument in the Main Title theme sounded like a koto to me; it’s true that’s Japanese instead of Chinese, but the Chinese may have something similar) and whole-tone scales to denote “Asianicity.” (I remember my surprise when I heard Jessie Matthews’s 1930 record of Rodgers and Hart’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” – written for her for the stage and film musical Evergreen – and in the middle of the piece her arranger inserted a cornball “Asian” motif, obviously because Rodgers had written a whole-tone scale into the release and it was a Pavlovian conditioned response to arrangers back then that whole-tone scales signaled “Asia.”)

Crimson Tide (Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Hollywood Pictures, Buena Vista Distribution, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other movie my husband Charles and I watched on Sunday, January 4 was considerably better than The Chairman: Crimson Tide, a 1995 military thriller about the crew of a nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Alabama, who are faced with the dilemma of whether to carry out a nuclear strike against a Russian port or hold off on doing so. Crimson Tide was produced by the late Don Simpson – a real Hollywood basket case with an insatiable appetite for women and drugs (one of his weirdest eccentricities was the only pants he ever wore were black jeans, and he would only wear each pair once because once they were laundered, he didn’t think they were black enough for him) and his still-living partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. After a falling-out with Paramount, where they’d made Top Gun (1985), the two Beverly Hills Cop movies, Flashdance and other major hits, they decamped to Hollywood Pictures, a sub-label of Disney. Crimson Tide was their third and last film for Disney (though they’d go on to make one more, The Rock, for Columbia before Bruckheimer broke up their partnership in 1995 and Simpson died of a drug overdose a year later) and was another major hit for them, especially since they got their Top Gun director, Tony Scott, to make it. The plot deals with an extended months-long cruise of the U.S.S. Alabama under crusty old captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) and his executive officer, or “XO,” Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington, top-billed), a last-minute replacement for a colleague with appendicitis, as they undertake a cross-Pacific cruise to confront and, if necessary, attack a group of Russian rebels led by Vladimir Radchenko (Daniel von Bargan). Radchenko’s forces have captured the city of Vladivostok on Russia’s east coast and with it a fleet of nuclear submarines and a land-based missile base with which they could attack the United States or Japan. At first the U.S. wasn’t particularly worried about this since the launch codes for the missiles were safely in the hands of the Russian government in Moscow (this was during the period between the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev and the rise of Vladimir Putin, which I sometimes refer to as “The Modern Time of Troubles,” an allusion to the unsettled decade or two in Russian history between the death of Ivan the Terrible and the takeover of General Mikhail Romanov, whose dynasty lasted 300 years until the 1917 revolution). Later they learn that Radchenko’s people have hacked the launch codes, so his threats to attack the West with nuclear weapons are real.

The Alabama submerges to cross the Pacific to meet this threat, and composer Hans Zimmer deploys a pre-existing religious work for orchestra and chorus, John B. Dykes’s “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (lyrics by William Whiting), which gives the impression that a sub actually submerging is a religious ritual. In their first scene together Ramsey forces Hunter to smoke a cigar – Scott’s straight-on shot of Gene Hackman with a cigar in his mouth couldn’t help but remind me of Stanley Kubrick’s introduction of Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove, another movie about the world hurtling to the brink of nuclear war. The conflict between them starts seeming awfully like The Caine Mutiny, starting with a fire in the mess (the ship’s kitchen) caused by a heavy-set Black cook, Rono (Mark Christopher Lawrence), of whom Ramsey had joked as he was boarding the sub, “How can they fit all of him in?” While Hunter is busy leading the firefighting crew, Ramsey suddenly calls an attack drill and orders Hunter to leave the mess and come to the bridge even though the fire might still be burning. Ramsey justifies this by saying that a real attack could come at any time and the crew members need to be ready and able to drop whatever they’re doing to respond to it. Just after that Rono suffers a heart attack, is taken to the sick bay, and dies. Later the sub is attacked by a Russian rebel Akula-class sub, and though the sub is able to make most of the torpedoes miss through so-called “countermeasures” (bits of metal launched from the sub under attack to divert the sonar-controlled torpedoes to hit the countermeasures instead of the main ship), one torpedo hits and knocks out both the Alabama’s nuclear motors and its communications with the outside world. Before the torpedo hit the crew received an Emergency Action Message (EAM) ordering the sub to fire its nuclear missiles at the Vladivostok base as a pre-emptive strike against Radchenko’s nuclear capability. As the torpedo hit the Alabama was in the process of receiving a second EAM, but only the heading had come in when the ship was hit and its communication devices went down. Acting like Lt. Tom Keefer in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny (played by Fred MacMurray in the 1954 film), Hunter first refuses to give his necessary consent to the attack and then orders Ramsey confined to quarters and takes over the ship under Navy regulations. Ultimately, however, Ramsey is able to stage a counter-mutiny, retake command, and confine Hunter to his quarters. In the end both Ramsey and Hunter end up on the bridge, with each of their followers pointing guns at the others.

Racing to fix the ship’s radio, Russell Vossler (Lillo Brancato) gets the second EAM, which turned out to be an order canceling the first attack order because the Russian government had attacked Radchenko’s forces and retaken the missile base. There’s a follow-up scene at the Board of Inquiry at Pearl Harbor (which gives us a welcome return to the outdoors after we’ve spent most of that movie trapped inside that sub!), where Rear Admiral Anderson (Jason Robards, Jr. – an ironic presence since the night before Charles and I had watched The Second Woman, in which Jason Robards, Sr. had had a small role) rules that both men were right and both were wrong. Ultimately Anderson decides to allow Ramsey to “retire” from the Navy with full honors and pay, and promises Hunter a sub command of his own the next time one becomes available. Though it’s not a ground-breaking movie in any way, Crimson Tide is an excellent thriller, well written by Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, with plenty of suspense points to keep us in doubt as to the outcome. One issue that arises is that without power the sub is in danger of sinking below 1,850 feet, the so-called “crush depth” at which the water pressure will literally crush the hull, sink the sub, and kill everyone on board. Another is the scene in which Hunter has to decide whether to seal the bilge tank, ruptured during the Akula attack, to save the ship even though doing so means killing the sailors still inside it. Crimson Tide is an excellent action film, and I write this as someone who usually doesn’t like military thrillers and I’d probably never have watched it if I hadn’t been assigned to review the soundtrack album (which is quite stunning; for all the nasty jokes I’ve made about Hans Zimmer, whom I call “the room man” because Zimmer is the German word for “room,” he was on top of his game here and he was able to make the score sound unified enough that we don’t get the “a little bit of this, a little bit of that” impression we all too often get from albums of film scores), but I’m glad I got the chance to see it. It’s certainly a much better movie than my memory of Top Gun, largely because the characters have real depth and complexity and the outcome is far from predictable. Charles made the comment that at least we knew in advance the missiles wouldn’t be launched because we don’t live in a post-nuclear war apocalyptic world, and we thought for a while about movies that actually end with the destruction of the earth by nuclear weapons. We could come up with only two: Dr. Strangelove and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the first Planet of the Apes sequel (and later we stumbled on a YouTube video about Beneath the Planet of the Apes which revealed that Charlton Heston’s non-negotiable demand for his participation was that it have an apocalyptic ending that would make sure there wasn’t a third film in the series … though there was), though there were certainly a number of films (Five, On the Beach, The Day After, Testament) about the handful of survivors that would be left after a nuclear war.

The Second Woman (Harry M. Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures, United Artists, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 3) was the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of a fascinating but not altogether great film from 1950, The Second Woman. It was produced by Harry M. Popkin and his brother Leo for United Artists release, and it was directed by James V. Kern from a script by Mort Briskin and Robert Smith. My husband Charles and I watched it together, and we’d already seen it in 2005 because we both remembered important details about the plot. The one I remembered is the scene in which the male lead, architect Jeffrey Cohalan (Robert Young), loses an important commission for a hospital because his plans were submitted without any drawings representing the interior. The one Charles remembered was the revelation late in the movie that in the opening scene, in which heroine Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake, then Mrs. Cary Grant, which suggested to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller that the Popkin brothers might have wanted Grant to play Jeff) breaks into a garage where Jeff is supposedly attempting suicide, that Jeff had drained the gas tanks in his car before he turned on the motor so he wouldn’t really die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Instead he’d become convinced someone close to him was trying to kill him and he wanted to fake his own death so whoever it was would stop trying. Muller’s intro mentioned that the film was largely a ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s (and David Selznick’s) Rebecca – an influence also copped to by imdb.com’s page (whose heading reads, “In flashback from a Rebecca-style beginning: Ellen Foster, visiting her aunt on the California coast, meets neighbor Jeff Cohalan and his ultramodern clifftop house”) – with admixtures of two other Hitchcock films, Suspicion and Spellbound. In fact the opening narration by Betsy Drake is so close to the opening of Rebecca, lamenting the destruction by fire of Jeff’s dream house on the Monterey cliffs (much of the film was shot on location in Monterey and Salinas with a crew left over from a previous Howard Welsch production, Woman on the Run, filmed largely in the San Francisco Bay Area), it’s a wonder Daphne Du Maurier, author of the Rebecca novel, didn’t sue for plagiarism.

There are various non-Hitchcock films also referenced here; the 1934 film The Black Cat had proved it was possible to do a sinister film in a new dark house, built to state-of-the-art design by a master architect who’s also a villain, just as well as you could in a crumbling old manse; and the year before The Second Woman Fritz Lang had made a film called Secret Beyond the Door (not one of his better movies) about a psycho architect living in a house of his own design and terrorizing the hapless heroine who’s married him. One thing Kern, Briskin, and Smith did right was have the heroine living with her aunt Amelia (Florence Bates) in an old Victorian home right next to Jeff’s new one, and the clash between their architectural styles (the Fosters’ home warm and cosy, Jeff’s cold and austere) becomes an important visual point in the film. Ellen meets Jeff when he’s visiting the Fosters and is simultaneously drawn to him as a potential romantic partner and skeptical of getting too close to him because he just seems too weird. In one of the many parties Amelia Foster hosts, Ellen is hit on by a ne’er-do-well “roo” type named Keith Ferris (John Sutton), who’s the office manager for Jeff’s patron and sponsor Ben Sheppard (Henry O’Neill). It looks like Keith is about to rape her when Jeff crashes the proceedings and saves her and her honor. Keith is also recently divorced from Dodo Ferris (Jean Rogers), who boasts that she’s just returned home from Reno, Nevada where she’s finally untied the knot with him. But the two still seem to be doing a lot of hanging out together even though they’re no longer legally a couple. For the last year Jeff has been haunted by the accidental death of his fiancée, Ben Sheppard’s daughter Vivian (played in flashbacks by Shirley Ballard), literally on the eve of their wedding. She was out driving in a car with a man, presumably Jeff, when they were involved in an accident with another car and she was killed. Ever since then Jeff has had a string of bad incidents he at first attributes to just bad luck – his prize matador rose bush is poisoned, his dog is also poisoned, his state-of-the-art home is burned down with gasoline carried in cans Jeff had purchased (the makers of this film had the catastrophic fire occur about three-fifths of the way through instead of saving it for the end à la Rebecca), his architectural plans go out without the 17 blueprint pages of interiors he’d designed and drawn, and at one point Ellen is nearly run down by a car and killed near the so-called “12-Mile Drive” where Vivian also had her fatal accident.

On the advice of Jeff’s doctor, Hartley (Morris Carnovsky), Ellen is led to believe that Jeff is paranoid and is doing all these terrible things to himself to atone for his sense of guilt over Vivian’s death. Ultimately both we and Jeff learn that the actual man who meant to murder him was [spoiler alert!] Ben Sheppard, who hated Jeff and wanted revenge against him for his daughter Vivian’s death. We also learn through a deus ex machina – another driver who witnessed the accident – and through Jeff’s own recollection of the truth that the man who was at the wheel when Vivian was killed was not Jeff but [second spoiler alert!] Keith Ferris, who was in love with Vivian (and she with him) but couldn’t marry her because Dodo wasn’t ready to divorce him yet. The revelation that Vivian was planning to run off with Keith on the eve of her marriage to Jeff was yet one more plot point of this movie ripped off from Rebecca – the revelation that the late heroine was a “bad” woman after all (Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s writers, Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison, were considerably more circumspect as to just what sorts of evil Rebecca was doing, though they certainly involved extra-relational sexual activities) – though the makers of The Second Woman fell into a trap Selznick had talked Hitchcock out of: actually showing the “bad” woman as an on-screen character. (She’s much more chilling as an unseen presence.) The Second Woman was an interesting but also rather unsatisfying film, despite an odd technique James M. Kern used to the max, which Muller pointed out in his intro: he’d let the camera linger on the various actors after a scene’s dialogue had concluded, and each time the actor would be giving the camera a sinister glance implying that they were up to no good whether they were or not. Muller also noted that it was odd that John Sutton didn’t play the principal villain, as he did in most of his movies (he had the pencil-thin “roo” moustache that, except on Ronald Colman, generally denoted that the character was at least unscrupulous and at worst downright evil), but at least he played a villain if not the main one. And I was a bit startled when Kern, Briskin, and Smith left Ben Sheppard alive at the end; from the way he was waving a gun around during the final confrontation I was thinking they’d have Ben shoot himself à la Spellbound, but that was one Hitchcock ripoff from which they drew back.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Dead and Buried" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 2) I watched the fourth and last 2019 episode of the fascinating detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries, both set and shot in New Zealand and featuring Brokenwood police detectives Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), and Sam Breen (red-headed hottie Nic Sampson), along with medical examiner and Russian émigré Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda) and Native hanger-on Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor). This episode was called “Dead and Buried” and centers around the Brokenwood Women’s Prison, which is being run by a private company under contract to the local government. It’s a sort of locked-room mystery in which the victim, Corina Dawes (Romy Hooper), is found alone in her cell with a wound from an unidentified weapon. No one knows who could have got in or out, so the authorities at first assume Corina committed suicide until Gina conducts a test with a slab of beef in the police station. The point of Gina’s test is to prove you couldn’t stab yourself to death with a pencil, as Corina is supposed to have done, without breaking off either the lead tip or the whole pencil. Gina also figures out, after a long process of elimination, that the murder weapon was actually the sharpened tip of a stiletto heel and whoever killed Corina stamped her to death with the point of her heel after first leaving a bruise in the shape of a toe. The suspects include the prison’s resident Jesus freak, Rayleen Hogg (Yvette Parsons), who constantly reads the Bible and pretends to have overcome the bad stuff that got her in prison in the first place. Her Biblical literacy is a bit shaky – she attributes the Ten Commandments and the Parting of the Red Sea to Christ instead of Moses – along with Brenda White (Amanda Billing), Trudy Neilson (Tracy Lee Gray), who has a brother named Ray(Jason Hoyte) who owns a bar in the area; and other tough-as-nails women named Angela (Teuila Blakely) and Kasey (Michelle Leuthart). There’s a charming mid-episode sequence detailing how these women got into prison in the first place: one stabbed both her boyfriend and his paramour after she caught them in flagrante delicto; one killed a prominent woman country singer by plunging a live electric guitar into her bathtub as she was taking a bath; and Corina killed her physically abusive husband, which was why she got a relatively light seven-year sentence instead of life in prison.

She also buried his body and has refused to tell anyone exactly where, which means his family (who judging from the two members we actually meet – his mother and a brother who literally lost his power of speech when he got into a bar fight and tore his larynx – are just as nasty as he was) can’t recover the body themselves and find “closure.” The prison warden is Kimberly Mason (Zara Cormack), who within the limited budget she has to work with is actually trying to make inmate conditions look as good as possible, including allowing them to dress in either yellow or purple tops, while she herself parades around as the epitome of fashion, or at least as someone in her social position sees it. It wasn’t at all surprising to me that the murderer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Denise (Aurora Rawson) a heavy-set woman who was one of the guards – and her motive was that she was having a Lesbian affair with Trudy Nielson and was worried that Corina was going to seduce Trudy away from her. There’s also a subplot involving a map Corina supposedly drew before she was killed showing where she had buried her late husband’s body. Brenda claims to have it – and wins a provisional deal to be released from prison early if her info pans out – but when the police assemble Brenda, her attorney (who also represents Trudy), and the late husband’s family to exhume him, Gina comes along and says, “I smell something fishy.” It turns out the map showed the location of an actual fish buried there as part of a plan by a woman prisoner named Miranda Temple (Laura Hill), who got Trudy to tell her brother to catch a fish, put a crystal in its mouth, and bury it at a precise location to give her good vibrations while in prison. (I’m not making this up, you know!) Later Trudy reveals that she has Corine’s real map and the cops – sans the relatives, since Mike Shepherd doesn’t want to take them on a second wild-goose chase – find the remains. Trudy gets an early release from prison only to be re-arrested on suspicion of helping Denise with her plot to murder Corine – only the prosecutors decide there isn’t enough evidence to charge her and let her go, so the final scene shows her drinking away in her brother’s bar. I liked the fact that the Lesbian relationships between inmates and inmates, and between inmates and guards, were drawn with a certain level of sympathy and an indication of real affection between the participants, but overall I liked this Brokenwood Mysteries episode a good deal less than the immediately previous one, “Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks,” a brilliant skewering of hunting culture in which the murder victim is an animal-rights activist determined to sabotage the local duck hunt by distracting the ducks and driving them away. (I especially liked the irony that one of her ways of doing that was to bring a boombox to her boat and play the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre, appropriate since Wagner was an animal-rights activist himself.)

Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert 2026 (Wiener Philharmoniker, ORF, WETA Group, PBS, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the annual PBS telecast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert – or at least the second half thereof, the only part PBS ever shows us. It was conducted by Yannet Nézet-Séguin, a Canadian conductor who in line with the common practice of today (former Fanfare contributor Roger Dettmer lamented in the 1980’s that “death has depleted the ranks of great conductors without life having replaced them in kind”) holds three, count ‘em, three major musical directorships: the Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, Canada. (Dave Hurwitz has complained many times that the ranks of the world’s great conductors are being stretched so thin these days, with too few maestros chasing too many jobs.) He’s also 50 years old and is married to a man, Métropolitain Orchestra violinist Pierre Tourville. (I wonder if the other violinists in the orchestra ever get jealous of Tourville for the reason Joan Crawford was jealous of Norma Shearer when they were both under contract to MGM: “How can I compete with her? She sleeps with the boss!”) What I liked about this year’s New Year’s concert was that Nézet-Séguin actually seemed to be having fun; he showed his delight when he was obliged to blow train whistles during one of the selections, Hans-Christian Lumbye’s “Copenhagen Railway Steam Galop,” and for the final “encore,” Johann Strauss I’s “Radetzky March,” he not only turned around and started conducting the audience instead of the orchestra (something I’ve seen other conductors do), he went one step further and actually walked into the audience as he conducted. I joked to Charles that any moment I expected to see the audience surround him in the classical-music equivalent of a mosh pit.

The concert – or at least the one we got to see – began with a Franz von Suppé overture to his operetta The Beautiful Galatea (Suppé was a major pioneer in operetta but virtually none of his works survive in the repertory; the only things of his that get played anymore are his overtures). Then we got a piece by the woman who founded the Vienna Girls’ Orchestra in the 1860’s, Josephine Weinlich (the Vienna Philharmonic was the last orchestra in Europe to break down its official sexism and start hiring women musicians – though it was gratifying to watch how many of them there were in the orchestra last night – and until then women musicians had to content themselves with playing in separate and highly unequal bands like Weinlich’s). The piece was a polka called “Sirens’ Song” and fitted in perfectly with the overall light-music program. So did the piece two items down on the program (with Johann Strauss II’s “Diplomats’ Polka” in between), an even bigger departure from Viennese orthodoxy: “Rainbow Waltz” by African-American woman composer Florence Price. I’ve come to quite like Florence Price; she composed four symphonies, of which three survive, and a number of chamber works that strike me as more emotionally intense and powerful than the orchestral pieces. “Rainbow Waltz” sounded professionally competent even though nothing in it gave away that the composer was either American or Black (though in the scherzos of her surviving symphonies Price went back into her Black heritage and composed them as Jubas, after one of the dances native to Africa).

Then, after the Lumbye piece (a tribute to a newly constructed rail system in Copenhagen), came two pieces by Johann Strauss II: the familiar waltz “Roses from the South”and the lesser-known “Egyptian Polka” – inspired, according to narrator Hugh Bonneville (an excruciatingly boring actor who achieved stardom of sorts on the long-running PBS soap opera Downton Abbey, which I never watched because stories about the class divisions in British society don’t really interest me), by the opening of the Suez Canal, which apparently sparked a Europe-wide fad for Egyptian history comparable to that started by the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb 50 years later. The last piece on the official program was a waltz variously called “Palms of Peace” (the title announced last night) and “Olive Branch” (the title listed on the Vienna Philharmonic’s Web site) by Johann II’s brother Josef Strauss. A number of critics actually consider Josef the greatest composer of the Strauss family because his music is more harmonically advanced than his brother’s, and this peace (composed after Austria lost a war with Prussia and Italy in 1869 and had to give up territory) did have a lighter, more delicate feeling than the works of Strauss Brüder. Then came time for the so-called “encores,” a misnomer if there ever was one because a) there are always three of them, and b) the final two – Johann II’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube and Johann I’s Radetzky March – are stipulated by “tradition” (namely the concert rules laid down by conductor Clemens Krauss when he launched the Vienna New Year’s concerts in 1939 when he figured the Austrian people needed an “upper” after the sever “downer” of having had their country taken over by Hitler and the Nazis), so only the first one is the conductor’s choice.

Nézet-Séguin chose a piece called “Circus Polka” by Phillip Fahrbach (I’m not sure whether this was Sr., who lived from 1815-1885; or Jr., whose dates were 1843-1894), of which the online sources I’ve seen stressed the irony that someone else wrote a “Circus Polka” decades before Stravinsky’s famous one. I’ve sometimes criticized Nézet-Séguin’s opera performances at the Met for being too slow, but last night that was a problem only for the “Blue Danube” (I noticed the concert’s organizers did not have dancers perform to it as they have in previous years, probably because dancers would have had a hard time sustaining their lines at Nézet-Séguin’s slow tempi!). Most of the concert he conducted with ample vim and vigor and gave this light but not trivial music the élan it needs. Overall this was one of the most enjoyable Vienna New Year’s concert telecasts I’ve seen. I was amused by the final credits, especially the listings for an entirely separate crew just to film Hugh Bonneville’s host segments – but I was infuriated by KPBS’s decision to block off the bottom one-quarter of the screen throughout the entire concert for their advertising plug and plea for people to donate to the station. That was already annoying when they did it to the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute the night before and blocked off one of the chyrons identifying what the song was, what show it was from, and who was performing it. This time they did that to the entire concert and sent me scrambling to my computer to look up the Vienna Philharmonic’s Web site and get the information there. The concert thereby turned into an extended 90-minute “pledge break,” and I’m sure that’s the sort of barbarism we can expect more of as various PBS stations get more and more desperate financially from the sudden and abrupt cut-off of all Federal funding for PBS under a so-called “budget rescission” bill passed on a strict party-line vote in both houses of Congress last year before grass-roots opposition had a chance to mobilize as it had to block previous Republican attempts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: another petty triumph of Trump 2.0 against the American people and the common good.

My Favourite Things: The Rodgers & Hammerstein 80th Anniversary Concert (Stage 2 View Productions, Concord Originals, Concord Theatrical, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 31) PBS ran a couple of big music shows that were actually from a year or two ago. One had the awkward title My Favourite Things: The Rodgers and Hammerstein 80th Anniversary Concert, taped in 2024 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, which is now owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lloyd Webber co-produced the show and even appeared on it, whereupon he declared that the song “Some Enchanted Evening” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific was the greatest song ever written. (I’d disagree: though I think the whole concept of naming one song as “the greatest ever written” is silly, if I were pressed I’d probably name the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg masterpiece “Over the Rainbow” as the greatest song ever in that genre.) My Favourite Things (the British spelling of “Favorite” is appropriate for a concert that took place in London) combined stars of contemporary Broadway and London’s West End, and the only problem with it is the long shadows being cast over their performances by the greats who introduced these songs or have performed them over the years. There was also a whopping bit of “first-itis” in the narration in that it proclaimed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show as collaborators, Oklahoma! (1943), as the first musical that ever tackled the darker sides of human existence. As I so often do, I yelled back at the TV and said, “Does the name Show Boat mean anything to you?” In fact, both Rodgers and Hammerstein had pushed the limits of the musical form separately well before they started doing it together, Hammerstein in Show Boat (1927) with Jerome Kern and Rodgers in Pal Joey (1939) with Lorenz Hart.

I’ve often thought of the odd critic who said that the proof that Rodgers and Hart were a better team than Rodgers and Hammerstein lay in the fact that far more great jazz records have been made of the Rodgers/Hart songs than the Rodgers/Hammerstein ones. This writer argued that the only truly great jazz record of a Rodgers and Hammerstein song was John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” I’d disagree with that – there’s another “My Favorite Things” by J. J. Johnson, which while hardly at the level of Coltrane’s is a great jazz record in its own right, and others I’d name include Nat “King” Cole’s “The Surrey with the Fringe On Top” and Cecil Taylor’s awesome “This Nearly Was Mine” (but then don’t get me started on the chronic underrating of Cecil Taylor generally!) – but it’s true that the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs are generally more sentimental than the Rodgers and Hart ones. (One exception is “The Gentleman Is a Dope” from a Rodgers and Hammerstein flop called Allegro from 1947, a minor blip between Carousel and South Pacific, which was largely a follow-up to the Rodgers and Hart song “The Lady Is a Tramp” and was quite good and properly acerbic.) I actually grew up on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals – either I, my mother, or my friends had the original Broadway cast albums or film soundtracks to Oklahoma!, The King and I, Flower Drum Song (a show oddly unrepresented on last night’s show, despite the presence of at least one card-carrying Asian on the talent roster, Daniel Dae Kim), and The Sound of Music – and though the heavy-duty sentimentality of the material was getting to me in the first segment (like all too many PBS music shows, this was divided into four acts with those interminable “pledge breaks” in between, and we can expect PBS’s ongoing begging for money to get even worse now that Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans have finally achieved their long-term goal of totally eliminating federal funding for PBS), beginning with the second I was hooked.

The talent list included Daniel Dae Kim (who seems to have been the first genuinely Asian performer to play King Mongkut in The King and I); Maria Friedman, who co-starred with him in that production; the mega-talented Audra McDonald; the quite remarkable Marisha Wallace (I wasn’t sure whether she was African-American or African-British, and it turns out from her Wikipedia page that she’s both; she was born in North Carolina but now lives permanently in London); Josh Lakey, whose spirited tap dancing in “Kansas City” from Oklahoma! was one of the highlights of the show; along with Aaron Tveit, Lucy St. Louis, Julian Ovenden, and Joanna Ampil, a decent-looking woman with a quite nice voice for the ingénue parts. The show featured between 21 and 23 songs, depending on whether you count the instrumental introductions and outroductions as separate songs, though we were told that the two-CD set we were being offered as a promotional thank-you for PBS donations contained 42 tracks. It’s become one of the most annoying aspects of PBS’s eternal money-begging to boast that if you give them money you’ll get to hear songs you won’t see on TV, but twice as many is getting to be a bit too much even for them. That appears to be what happened to the Allegro material, since we were promised songs from this very interesting show (it was Rodgers’s attempt to do a full-length musical telling the story of one man’s life literally from birth to death, though since Hammerstein was getting tired of writing scripts in which the protagonist died the final show only took him into his late 30’s) but none was delivered.

The show’s highlights included Audra McDonald’s stentorian renditions of “My Favorite Things” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music; Marisha Wallace’s quite cheeky versions of “I Cain’t Say No” from Oklahoma! and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” from South Pacific; Aaron Tveit’s well-phrased renditions of “Carefully Taught” and “Younger Than Springtime” from South Pacific (“Carefully Taught” was prefaced with a brief segment on how much heat Rodgers and Hammerstein took for writing so specifically anti-racist a song, to the point where they had to threaten to pull the entire show if that song were not included; but anyone who’s seen Show Boat will know that Oscar Hammerstein II was anti-racist well before anti-racism was cool); and Joanna Ampil’s versions of “If I Loved You” from Carousel (in duet with Tveit, I think) and “We Kiss in a Shadow” and “I Have Dreamed” from The King and I. In the middle were Michael Ball’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel and “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific; Julian Ovenden’s version of “This Nearly Wasn’t Mine” from South Pacific (just as McDonald’s “My Favorite Things” had me thinking, “Well, you’re not Julie and you’re not John,” so Ovenden’s “This Nearly Was Mine” had me thinking, “Well, you’re not Ezio and you’re not Cecil”); and Lucy St. Louis’s renditions of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific and the title song of The Sound of Music. (St. Louis sang them well enough but with little of the spunk they need to work.) The evening’s lowest point came with Maria Friedman’s version of “Hello, Young Lovers” from The King and I; she sang most of it decently but for some strange and inexplicable reason, when she got to the last eight bars of the chorus she decided to belt it out fortissimo à la Ethel Merman instead of singing the last high note diminuendo as Rodgers wanted – and got from Gertrude Lawrence in the original cast album (you can hear it for yourself on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEDLiAcR4w&list=RD8JEDLiAcR4w&start_radio=1). Overall My Favourite Things was a quite nice tribute to two of the most famous and influential figures in the Broadway musical theatre, though ironically one of the songs performed was by Rodgers but not Hammerstein. It was Maria Friedman’s “Something Good” from the movie version of The Sound of Music, written at the behest of the film’s producers (who wanted a replacement for “An Ordinary Couple” from the stage version), and since Hammerstein had died right after the stage musical premiered, Rodgers wrote both words and music himself.

Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (Ken Ehrlich Productions, Library of Congress, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute My Favourite Things on Wednesday, December 31, PBS then showed Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. My husband Charles, who had returned home from work during the last set of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute, joined me to watch the Joni Mitchell tribute. Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson, by the way) is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter and the kind of artist I’ve respected rather than loved. I acknowledge that she’s written some of the greatest songs of the last half of the 20th century, but I’ve never been more than a sporadic fan. Ironically, the music of Joni Mitchell I like best was what she was doing in the middle to late 1970’s, beginning with Court and Spark (1974) and ending with Mingus (1979), when she started working with jazz musicians and incorporating jazz elements into her mostly folk-driven style. I remember grabbing the Mingus album as soon as it came out, and while I was a bit disappointed that she’d used an electric bassist (Jaco Pastorius) instead of an acoustic one given that the album was a tribute to one of the greatest acoustic bassists of all time, I still loved the album even though it wasn’t the direct collaboration both Mitchell and Mingus had intended. Mitchell and Mingus planned to make an album together, and they got as far as co-writing three songs for it (“A Chair in the Sky,” “Sweet Sucker Dance,” and “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”) before Mingus died. The final album consisted of those three songs, one old Mingus piece to which Mitchell added new lyrics (“Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat,” Mingus’s tribute to Lester Young), and two new songs Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, “God Must Be a Boogie Man” (taken from the opening lines of Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog) and “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.” “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey” remains my all-time favorite Joni Mitchell song even though it’s pretty elliptical – more so than many of Mitchell’s songs.

It was ironic that PBS ran a tribute to Joni Mitchell just after they showed one to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that had included a sound clip from an archival interview with Hammerstein in which he said that the lyrics of a song need to be as clear-cut and obvious as possible because the listener only gets one chance to hear them and you can’t go back and re-read them the way you can with a printed poem. If there were any great songwriters who proved that you can write deathless songs while keeping the imagery obscure and oblique, Joni Mitchell would be Exhibit B (Bob Dylan would be Exhibit A). Charles noticed that the show was probably a few years old because a surprising number of the audience members were wearing face masks, and the age of the show became quite apparent when the politicians presenting the award to Mitchell were presented – and they included Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House before McCarthy was removed from that position in a palace rebellion in the House Republican Caucus and replaced with Mike Johnson. As it turned out, we could date the show precisely when one of the announcers during the interstitial segments said it had occurred the day before the death of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who worked with Mitchell on some of her more jazz-influenced albums. Since Shorter died on March 2, 2023, that would date the concert as March 1, 2023. (There’s a clip from Mitchell here inexplicably claiming that Wayne Shorter was the greatest saxophonist who ever lived. He was certainly a great one, but the greatest who ever lived? Not in a universe that included Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane.) Many of the songs were from Mitchell’s album Blue (1971) – of the 12 songs included, five (“Carey,” “California,” “Blue,” “A Case of You,” and “River”) were from Blue. Mitchell’s songs were frequently about her romantic relationships, including affairs with Graham Nash (whom she’d just broken up with when she recorded Blue) and James Taylor (whom she caught on the rebound after she and Nash split), though there was a brief vacation in Europe she took in early 1970’s. During that trip she met a man named Carey Raditz, who was living in a cave on the southern Greek island of Crete. Raditz taught her to play the four-stringed dulcimer, and she wrote “Carey” as a tribute to him and to show off her skill on that instrument.

“Carey” led off the Gershwin Prize tribute concert, performed by Marcus Mumford of the folk-rock band Mumford and Sons. After that Annie Lennox, looking even more like death warmed over than Mitchell does (Mitchell had a life-threatening brain aneurysm in 2008 and she’s now considerably more heavy-set and less mobile than she was in her glory days, though she fought back and at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival she performed a 13-song set), played Mitchell’s biggest hit, “Both Sides Now.” Actually Judy Collins had the hit version in 1968, and by the time Mitchell herself recorded it on an album called Clouds, it sounded like she was saying, “O.K., you know I wrote this song so I’m going to record it, but I’m pretty bored with it by now.” Lennox slowed it way down and made it sound even more like a dirge for lost years than it did in the late 1960’s, but then time has had that effect on a lot of Mitchell’s age-related musings from her 20’s. After that Angélique Kidjo did a stunning version of “Help Me,” the lead track on Court and Spark and one of Mitchell’s at once exuberant and doubtful love songs. Then James Taylor came out to do a plaintive version of “California” from Blue, and Brandi Carlile – one of my favorite modern-day singers – not only MC’d the show but did a quite beautiful version of “Shine,” the title track from Mitchell’s last studio album of new material in 2007. Its politics were a bit confusing – Mitchell’s lyrics asked us to shine a light on both creative and destructive phenomena – but then, aside from a handful of songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” Mitchell was not known as a political songwriter the way Joan Baez was. Speaking of “Big Yellow Taxi” – a song which will always remind me of the gig at which I interviewed Anne E. DeChant for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, which took place at the big Borders bookstore in the Gaslamp District; I loved the audacity of DeChant singing Mitchell’s anti-gentrification song in the middle of a monument to gentrification! – it was the next item on the program, performed by Ledisi with help from Lennox, Carlile, Cyndi Lauper, and others. Ledisi introduced it as the sort of song that makes you want to sing along. Then Lauper came on solo for her rendition of “Blue.” Afterwards Graham Nash came out with an acoustic guitar doing, ironically, the song Mitchell wrote about their breakup, “A Case of You,” with the video screens on the backdrop showing photos of them taken during their relationship.

The next artist up was jazz pianist Herbie Hancock playing “River,” another Blue song and the title track of the 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, which he made as a tribute to Mitchell (it consisted entirely of Mitchell’s songs except for Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” which he and Hancock had played with Miles Davis in the so-called “Second Great Quintet” of 1964-1968). Hancock played it with singer Corinne Bailey Rae on the River album (with beautiful soprano sax interjections by Shorter), and with Ledisi on the Gershwin prize tribute. Then Diana Krall came out and played the title track from Mitchell’s 1972 album For the Roses, which I remember largely from the argument I had about it with my old high-school friend Michael Goldberg. I thought it was deathly dull, while he acclaimed it as the best album of 1972 (an honor I thought should have gone to David Bowie’s career-making masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). Creem magazine published a loathsome review of For the Roses which was basically an attempt on the basis of each song to guess which L.A. rock scene male Mitchell had been having an affair with when she wrote it. (Later they printed a caricature record label of an alleged Mitchell LP in which each song was called “Crosby,” “Stills,” “Nash,” and “Young,” reflecting the rumor that she’d had sex with all of them, and the label logo was an ejaculating penis.) I’m not sure what I’d think of For the Roses today – fortunately, after it Mitchell made one of her best albums, Court and Spark – but Krall’s creep through its title track made me guess I’d find it as boring in 2026 as I did in 1972. After that it was time for Joni Mitchell to take the stage – I was about to write “in her own defense” – and she startled me by singing, not one of her own songs, but a masterpiece by the namesakes of the award she was there to receive.

The song was “Summertime,” from the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward (author of the novel and play Porgy on which the opera was based), and Ira Gershwin, and she did a beautiful version closely modeled on the famous one Miles Davis recorded in the late 1950’s for a Porgy and Bess album stunningly arranged by Gil Evans. After that Mitchell joined the other singers on stage for “The Circle Game,” another song of mock world-weariness Mitchell wrote in her early 20’s and which, like “Both Sides Now,” comes off quite differently when she’s 79 (her age when this show was taped). Overall, the Joni Mitchell tribute on her winning the Gershwin prize (the other honorees are Paul Simon in 2007, Stevie Wonder in 2008, Paul McCartney in 2009 – nice to know that it’s not limited to Americans – Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 2011, Carole King in 2012, Billy Joel in 2014, Willie Nelson in 2015, Smokey Robinson in 2016, Tony Bennett in 2017 – even though he was a singer and not a songwriter – Gloria and Emilio Estefan in 2019, Garth Brooks in 2020, Lionel Richie – hand me my barf bag – in 2022, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin in 2024 – and why, oh why, has Bob Dylan not won? Do they think his Nobel Prize for Literature is honor enough? And what about Bruce Springsteen?) was stronger than most of these shows, at least partly because her songs are ambiguous enough both musically and lyrically they lend themselves to different interpretations and aren’t tied to their creators’ renditions the way most singer-songwriters’ songs are.