Murderbot (Apple TV, Depth of Field, Paramount Television Productions, Phantom Four Films, 2025)

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

Over the last week during which my husband Charles and I were out of town visiting his mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched a number of movies and TV shows on the Apple TV+ “streaming” network. (This despicable “streaming” technology is displacing physical media for films and TV shows as well as records.) One was a series we screened July 29 and 30 and which we were particularly interested in: Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’s novel All Systems Down, first in a series of seven books (five novellas, two full-length novels) about Murderbot, a 25th century “SecUnit” (short for “Security Unit”) robot who has figured out how to hack its “governor module.” As a result, it’s free to obey or refuse human orders at will and go wherever it likes in the known universe. Interplanetary travel has become practical due to the discovery of wormholes in space that can move spacecraft along great distances, though navigation based on these is tricky and requires the use of onboard computers which, like Murderbot and the other mobile robots, can communicate with humans and so-called “augmented humans” (people who have had implants to increase their brain or brawn) by simply talking to them. I must say I was more than a bit disappointed when I heard that Alexander Skarsgård had been picked to play Murderbot because from Wells’s books (I’d read all seven and so had Charles; in fact, it was he who first turned me on to them) I had envisioned Murderbot as a short, wiry, compactly built female. (Indeed, I even had one of our neighbors, a short, wiry Lesbian, in mind as my model for what Murderbot looked like.) I also found myself hearing a woman’s voice as Murderbot – the books are narrated from Murderbot’s point of view and the author is a woman – even though Wells made it clear that Murderbot’s preferred gender pronouns are “it” and “its.” Though Murderbot is a mechanical construct overall, it incorporates human tissue and therefore can feel pain, though its electromechanical parts can dial down its pain sensitivity.

Aside from my qualms about casting Skarsgård as Murderbot (presumably on the grounds that a tall, hunky biological male would be far more credible to the movie or TV audience as an action hero than a short, wiry, butch-looking female) and my missing certain aspects of the novel, like the transport computer guidance system Murderbot nicknames “ART” (for “Asshole Rapid Transit”), the show pretty much does justice to the original. Murderbot joins an interplanetary expedition by a bunch of do-gooders called the Preservation Alliance that operates within the overall framework of the Corporation Rim, the governing authority for that sector of the universe. (In this 25th century future, corporate and government authority have fused into one giant bureaucracy out to exploit the universe for whatever profit it can gain. In other words, it’s pretty much like what the U.S. is evolving into under Führer Trump.) The Preservation Alliance people don’t really want a SecUnit as part of their crew, but the Corporation Rim requires that they have one for “security” or they won’t insure the voyage. The expedition is commanded by Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a middle-aged Black woman who’s an expert on terraforming as well as president of the Preservation Alliance. Other members of the team include Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), a geochemist; Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), scientist and legal counsel; Arada (Tattiawana Jones), a biologist; Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a wormhole expert; and the group’s one augmented human, Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), a technology expert who takes an instant dislike to Murderbot and is convinced it’s a Corporation Rim spy who means them no good. The principal creators of the show are brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, who adapted Wells’s book for TV and Chris directed the first three episodes.

The Preservation Alliance team finds themselves on a remote planet where the only maps they’ve been given, prepared by the Corporation Rim, are horrendously inaccurate and don’t indicate the existence of predatory monsters who look like the sandworms in Dune except they have heads at both ends of their worm-like bodies and can therefore attack and consume humans at either end. Ultimately, after they (except for Gurathin) reach a grudging respect for Murderbot since it keeps saving their lives, they realize that the planet has been invaded by a mining team from a company called GrayCris that is not part of the corporate establishment. One of the gimmicks the Weitzes preserved from Wells’s novels is that Murderbot distracts itself from the long, boring parts of its existence by endlessly rewatching commercial media, particularly a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (which might be a good one for the Weitzes or someone else to create as an actual show). Also Pin-Lee and Arada are in a Lesbian relationship which they plan to expand by bringing in the male Ratthi to form a “thruple,” only Ratthi is uneasy because he’s attracted to Pin-Lee but not to Arada. Murderbot gives us asides in which it tells us how appalled it is by human conduct in general and sex in particular. In her book Wells references “SexBots” that come equipped with sexual organs and are created to copulate with humans, but Murderbot virtuously insists it’s a SecBot, not a SexBot. This doesn’t stop the humans from speculating what sort of genitalia Murderbot would have if it had any at all.

We get some intriguing shots of Murderbot naked without a dick, breasts, or nipples, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, to get the hairless look demanded for the character Alexander Skarsgård went through regular waxing treatments and then complained how much they hurt. Ultimately the Preservation Alliance threatens to go public with the damage done to them by the Corporation Rim and their negligence in providing them with maps that didn’t indicate the presence of the person-eating worms, as well as not briefing them about the GreyCris crews on the planet. There’s also a character called Leebeedee (Anna Konkle) whom the Weitzes introduced from later in Wells’s cycle, who’s rescued from a Corporation colony that’s otherwise been wiped out by the GreyCris people, only she goes rogue and threatens to kill the entire Preservation crew until Murderbot takes her out with its built-in weapons. And there’s a subplot indicating how the GreyCris people turned the SecBots assigned to the Corporation crew into monstrous machines that killed them: they hacked them with a small medallion they stuck on their backs. They do that to Murderbot, too, and in one of the weirder scenes of the show it begs the Preservation crew to shoot it before it goes rogue and kills them. Though I liked the books even better, this Murderbot series caught much of the appeal of Wells’s texts and in particular Murderbot’s slow but steady acquisition of human emotions as it’s around people who for once treat it as an equal and not just an object, and its discomfort as it starts to react more like a human instead of a machine.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions, Appian Way, Paramount, 2023)

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

On July 31 my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched Martin Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a true story involving the Osage Indians. The Osage had been successively relocated, like most of the Native tribes that survived our genocide against them, and dumped on a barren patch of land in Oklahoma. Only that so-called “barren patch of land” turned out to have huge oil deposits under it, and as the oil started shooting up from the ground in uncontrollable gushers starting in 1920, the Osage found themselves possessors of unimaginable wealth – and also beset by whites trying to take it away from them. Killers of the Flower Moon was based on a quite exciting nonfiction book by David Grann, and was scripted by Scorsese himself and Eric Roth, and the central characters – William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a middle-aged patriarch with a striking resemblance to the late President Truman who’s the most influential white person in the area; his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Di Caprio – so both of Scorsese’s all-time favorite actors are in this film!), who’s just returned from serving in World War I as a cook and who gets enlisted in Hale’s scheme to grab much of the Osage oil wealth for themselves; and Mollie Kyle Burkhart (Native actress Lily Gladstone, who won acclaim for the quiet dignity and strength of her performance), whom Ernest courts and marries as part of Hale’s sinister plot. There are many aspects of the real story that are explained in Grann’s book, notably that many of the Osage natives were deemed “incompetent” to handle their own financial affairs by a corrupt white-run judicial system and therefore had court-appointed “guardians” who controlled their money so they couldn’t spend any of it without the guardians’ approval. If you saw the film without having read the book, you’d have no idea why some of the Osage are referred to as “incompetent” while others – the ones who escaped the reach of the white-run guardianship system and the obvious opportunities for corruption it presented – were deemed “competent” and able to handle their own affairs.

Also, in a laudable but foredoomed attempt to protect the Osages’ interests, the federal government stipulated that the Osage could not sell their “headrights” – their shares of the oil revenues – but would keep them until they died, after which they would be passed on to their descendants or relatives. This was the loophole Hale seized on to hatch his evil scheme: he’d assign Ernest to marry Mollie and then send hired killers to knock off not only Mollie but also all her living relatives so Ernest would inherit all the Kyles’ share of the oil money. The oddest thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is that it’s boring; a story that David Grann told in a rivetingly exciting, almost breathless prose style became in Scorsese’s hands an almost interminable 3 ½-hour movie. Naturally there are aspects of Killers of the Flower Moon that work, including Scorsese’s vivid staging of the murders themselves; the use of extensive music from the early 1920’s to set the background for the characters (though if we’re to believe Scorsese’s soundtrack, the Osage of the early 1920’s had a remarkably advanced taste in contemporary pop music; their record collections included such recherché African-American items as Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” and the original 1924 Ma Rainey-Louis Armstrong recording of “See, See, Rider,” a song Rainey wrote); and a newsreel depiction of the race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 that killed over 140 people and utterly destroyed a previously prosperous stretch of Black Tulsa that had come to be known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Though one of the white characters in Killers of the Flower Moon dismiss the Osage as not having done anything to earn their sudden, new-found wealth – they just happened to be sitting on top of a stretch of land that contained oil – Scorsese’s and Roth’s parallel between what’s happening to the Osage in their part of Oklahoma and what happened to the prosperous African-Americans in Tulsa, who had worked hard over many years to build their fortunes, is obvious. The racist white supremacists of the 1920’s were appalled at the idea that any people of color could achieve and maintain affluence, and they were all too eager to use their power – including resorting to violence when all else failed – to take it away from them.

Ultimately the Osage killings are solved by agents of the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice – contrary to the Scorsese-Roth script, which presents it as a newly organized agency, it had actually been around since 1908, and its first director was private detective agency founder William J. Burns, who appears in the movie as a private contractor the Osage hire to find out who’s knocking them off and who’s driven out of the area when thugs beat him to within an inch of his life. (At least Scorsese and Roth correctly call it the “Bureau of Investigation”; it didn’t acquire the word “Federal” at the start of its name until 1935.) The movie ends with an intriguing scene set in a radio studio in 1947, when the story of the Osage murders is being presented as part of a true-crime story with musician Jack White as one of the participants and Scorsese himself as the narrator. I quite liked Scorsese’s choice of the theme music for this show: Ferde Grofé’s 1928 tone poem “Metropolis: A Blue Fantasie” (that’s how it was spelled on the original record labels), in a modern recording by Vince Giordano, Scorsese’s go-to guy whenever he needs an accurate re-creation of the big-band sound for one of his films. “Metropolis” was originally recorded by Paul Whiteman’s band in March 1928, with a 10-second cornet break by Bix Beiderbecke from 6:20 to 6:30 (he’s not improvising but his clarion tone is still unmistakable), and I hope Giordano got a chance to record the entire piece in modern sound instead of just the snippet of its opening heard here. Charles summed up my response to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said after it was over, “I thought it would be zippier.” Certainly David Grann’s book was suitably zippy – as well as including a powerful later section in which the adult daughter of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart finally has to come to grips with the knowledge that the only reason she exists is because her dad married her mom as part of a plot to kill not only mom but her entire family for the sake of some oil money – but the film is a 3 ½-hour meander through a story Grann told with a strong sense of pace. It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/08/noah-paramount-regency-protozoa-2014.html) in that both are films which could have been made considerably shorter (and hence better entertainment) without cutting a word of their scripts if their directors had just paced them faster!

Luck (Skydance Animation, Apple Original Films, Ilion Animation Studios, 2022)

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

During our recently concluded vacation to visit my husband Charles’s mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched five movies of varying levels of interest. The first, which we saw on July 27, was Luck (2022), a computer-animated film produced by Skydance Animation in association with Apple Original Films and a Madrid-based studio originally called Ilion Animation until it merged with Skydance. I’ll say at the start that I generally don’t like computer animation; it doesn’t have either the realism of live-action or the flexibility and (in rare instances) artistic quality of drawn animation. I have liked a few computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul, because the creativity and genuine emotions of their stories overcame my overall distaste for the look of computer animation. Luck was not so – pardon the pun – lucky. It’s the work of committee-driven processes, and looks and sounds like it. The concept for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited) was by Rebeca Carrasco, Juan De Dios, and Julián Romero, though the story itself was by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, with Murray getting credit for the script as well and Julia Miranda supplying “additional dialogue.” The film also went through changes of director (Peggy Holmes replaced Alessandro Carloni) and composer. John Debney, son of 1950’s Walt Disney Studios TV producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club) and a major contributor to Disney projects in various media (movies, TV, theme parks), replaced Tanya Donelly (a well-traveled woman rock musician who’s been in the bands Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly) and the L.A.-based band Mt. Joy.

There are also two names on the producers’ list that gave an air of creepiness to the project. One was David Ellison, owner of Skydance Media and Donald Trump groupie (and son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who famously said that in the age of the Internet “Privacy is over; get used to it”), who just arranged to acquire Paramount and CBS and to ensure government approval of the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses paid Trump what amounts to a $30 to $35 million bribe ($15 million to settle Trump’s preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes for allegedly defaming him by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in which Trump did not appear, and $15 to $20 million worth of free airtime to promote Trump-selected causes) and offered Trump Stephen Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter. The other was John Lasseter, founder of Pixar Studios and essentially the inventor of this style of computer animation. Lasseter was put in charge of Walt Disney Studios’ entire animation department when Disney bought Pixar, until he was fired for sexually harassing his female employees in 2017 in one of the earliest triumphs of the “#MeToo” movement. Emma Thompson originally signed to be one of the voice actors for Luck, but dropped out of the project on principle when she heard Lasseter was involved. Given that many of the people on the project, including Peggy Holmes, Kiel Murray, and John Debney, had previously worked with Lasseter on Pixar/Disney projects, Luck has the look and feel of a Pixar/Disney film in exile.

Basically it’s your standard-issue adolescent quest narrative centered around Samantha “Sam” Greenfield (Eva Nobelzada), who’s the recipient of continuous bad luck. When the film opens she’s just turned 18 and has therefore aged out of the orphanage where she’s grown up. She pleads with the management to be allowed to stay at least two more days to help the chances of her best friend, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to get adopted and find a “forever family.” Sam is told that’s not allowed, but she is placed in her own tiny apartment and is also given a job at a retail store, where because she’s the unluckiest person in the world she has a disastrous first day. On her way home from work she finds a magic coin – a penny with a four-leaf clover insignia – and the next day she’s super-competent on her job until she accidentally flushes the penny down a toilet. She offers to share her sandwich with Bob (Simon Pegg), a black cat with a Scottish accent who lives and works in the Land of Luck and needs his penny back to be readmitted there. When Bob finds out Sam has lost his crucial penny, the two journey down a magic portal to the Land of Luck, run by a race of leprechauns. They try to pass Sam off as a leprechaun, explaining her much larger than normal leprechaun size by saying she’s from Latvia. It turns out the Land of Luck has three levels: Good Luck, Bad Luck, and the “In-Between,” sort of like Catholic Purgatory. There is also a gadget called the “Randomizer,” run by a unicorn named Jeff (Flula Borg) who has a crush on the ruler of the whole Luck land, Beth the Dragon (Jane Fonda), which takes both good and bad luck and randomly distributes them to Earth people.

Luck is derivative of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (while the scene in the Bad Luck Bar can’t help but recall the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars), though I give the writing committee points for making the protagonist exactly 18 years old and suddenly thrust into an adulthood for which she’s completely unprepared. I also liked the way the writers worked into the plot line the fact that in England, as in the U.S., black cats are symbols of bad luck, while in Scotland black cats are symbols of good luck (which is why Bob, who’s really English, poses as Scottish through most of the film). Frankly, I’d have liked Luck a whole lot better if it had been done as a live-action film, with Nobelzada on screen as well as on the soundtrack (based on her imdb.com head shot she’d have been as right for the part visually as she is vocally), with little people playing the leprechauns and the animals supplied with CGI. As for John Debney’s score (the main reason I wanted to watch Luck in the first place), it’s a good, strong piece of functional film writing, delivering the goods expected for a children’s fantasy but not all that interesting or stirring as a listening experience on its own. And the original soundtrack album on Milan Records does not contain Madonna’s song “Lucky Star” – sung not by Madonna but by Eva Nobelzada with second vocalist Alana De Fonseca (that surprised me! I had assumed it was Madonna’s original record with Nobelzada singing along) – despite its importance in the overall film. The reissue on Intrada (the two-CD set I’m reviewing for Fanfare) does contain a short version (1:17) of it on track 13 of CD two.

The Gorge (Crooked Highway, Lit Entertainment Group, Skydance Media, Apple TV+, 2025)

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

Fortunately the second film my husband Charles and his mother Edi watched with me on our recent vacation, The Gorge (screened July 28) was considerably more to my taste than Luck. Instead of a fey children’s fantasy, The Gorge was a definitely adult action-adventure thriller about two professional hit people, Levi (Miles Teller) and Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are assigned to opposite ends of The Gorge to shoot and kill any of the monstrous creatures who live at the bottom of The Gorge and periodically try to escape and menace the normal humans above. During the first hour of this 127-minute movie the two are separated by The Gorge and can do no more than look at each other and call out boasts by phone, mostly centered around their previous sniper assignments. (The film opened with Drasa picking off a man getting out of a plane at such a long distance Levi would have assumed it was impossible.) Naturally Levi is getting the hots for Drasa, and the feelings appear to be mutual, because at the halfway mark Levi shoots a rappelling cord across The Gorge so he can traverse the distance and have an in-person physical date with her. When he reaches her side of The Gorge she at first tells him he stinks (literally!) and forces him to take a shower, then steals the clothes she left for him so he has to go to her place naked. Eventually they have dinner together and ultimately make love, though on the way back his cord breaks and he falls into The Gorge. She lowers herself into The Gorge and attempts to rescue him, but they come face-to-face with the monsters of The Gorge, whom we’ve already caught glimpses of and know they’re humanoid but with faces that look eaten away and overall spindly shapes that make them look like their bones have somehow come through at least partially to their outsides.

Our intrepid hit-people come across the remnants of a secret laboratory set up on the floor of The Gorge during World War II. Through a film canister hand-labeled “May God Forgive Us,” Levi and Drasa project the film and on it there’s a woman scientist giving a lecture about how the creatures of The Gorge came to be. [Spoiler alert!] It seems that the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union, while they were allied during World War II, not only started a secret project in the U.S. to build the world’s first nuclear weapon, they also started a bioweapons project on the Gorge floor. The intent was to create unstoppable soldiers that couldn’t be killed and would just charge at the enemy without fear for their own lives. (Anyone who’d seen the 1942 PRC film The Mad Monster would have known this was a bad idea.) Only they did such a great job re-engineering human DNA that it fused with the DNA of particularly violent animals to create these bastard forms of life that Levi and Drasa had originally been assigned to kill whenever any of them tried to escape The Gorge and enter the world of living people. What’s more, the mutation that created the monsters is contagious. If you’re exposed to the monsters and you don’t fall victim to the mutation in five days, you’re home free; otherwise, you’ll become one of the monsters yourself. The second half of The Gorge, directed with suspenseful power by Scott Derrickson from a well thought-out script by Zach Dean, is nearly non-stop action as Our Heroes not only have to escape the monsters but also have to contend with the machinations of their nominal commanders, particularly Levi’s immediate supervisor Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, who must be awfully tired of these kinds of roles by now since the original Alien and its sequelae).

The film had already been reminding me a lot of Prizzi’s Honor – the late movie by John Huston starring his daughter Anjelica and Jack Nicholson as Mafia hit-people who meet and fall in love even though they work for rival factions in the Mob and they’ve been assigned to kill each other – and Charles thought of it too when Bartholomew gave Levi the order to kill Drasa. In the end Levi takes a big fall off a ledge into a river and we think he’s dead, while Drasa waits out the five days to see if she’s going to come down with the mutation and become a monster. Luckily Drasa escapes the disease and goes to her secret redoubt in the south of France, where she and Levi had talked about settling down once they escaped their commanding officers – and, sure enough, going for the happy ending of the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) instead of the cynical, violent one of Prizzi’s Honor, Levi turns up there two months later. The Gorge is a neatly made fusion of action-adventure and horror, though the horror elements are played down enough that even people like me who don’t like modern-day horror films could enjoy it. It also benefits from great casting in the leads; Miles Teller has been in quite a few major movies lately but the only ones in which he made an impression on me are Divergent and its sequelae, and in those he was cast as a villain. And Anya Taylor-Joy is equally good, sufficiently androgynous that in her opening scene I thought she was a young man. Derrickson and Dean also neatly characterized the two leads by their different tastes in music, which work out quite the opposite from how you’d expect: Levi listens to classical music (specifically the Prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, played by two different cellists (Jeff Taynor and Martynas Levickis – were we supposed to believe Levi had two different LP’s of it?) while Drasa loves 1970’s punk, particularly “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” The Dead Weather’s “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles),” and Twisted Sister’s cover of the traditional Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – the sort of record that makes you ask yourself, “Is that … ?”

Quiet Please: Murder! (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

Last night (Wednesday, July 23) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing but ultimately not very satisfying 1942 20th Century-Fox “B” called Quiet Please: Murder! The odd typography of the title is explained by the fact that most of the film takes place in a library. It was both written and directed by John Francis Larkin – even in the often surprisingly experimental world of “B” filmmaking, where because “B” movies were sold like yard goods (the studio got the same flat fee from the theatres that showed them whether or not they were any good, or whether or not audiences liked them) studios often allowed “B” directors a lot of latitude as long as they brought their films in on time and under budget, it was rare for a studio to allow the same person to write and direct the same movie. It stars George Sanders, Gail Patrick, and Richard Denning, and was based on a story by Lawrence G. Blochman called “Death from the Sanskrit,” which because it had a different title I’m presuming was a previously published story instead of a screen original. It begins with a chilling scene in which Jim Fleg (George Sanders) goes to visit a library that is about to put on exhibit the original copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet used by Richard Burbage, who played the title role in Shakespeare’s world premiere production. (What we see is a neatly bound book even though it’s more likely that Burbage worked either from a handwritten copy or just rough prompt notes. Remember that another Hamlet play by Thomas Kyd had been premiered in London in 1580, 20 years before the 1600 date usually accepted for Shakespeare’s, and in those days before copyright laws Shakespeare probably just put Kyd’s play through a series of rewrites and performed it until by 1600 it was entirely his own work except for the basic plot.)

Fleg tells the librarian who’s showing him the display (Pat O’Malley) how much he’d like to own that book, and as the librarian turns his back to him, Fleg brings out a silencer-equipped pistol and shoots him in the back. Then he smashes the glass case the book was in and steals it. The film flash-forward to six months later, in which Fleg, a master forger, has made 20 fake copies of the book and is offering them for sale under the table to rich collectors, all of whom think they’re getting the stolen original. A key participant in his racket is rare-book dealer Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), whose role in the scheme is to give Fleg’s would-be buyers authentication that the book is the real deal. At one point Blandy sells a copy of the book to Martin Cleaver (Sidney Blackmer) without Fleg’s prior authorization, only when Fleg hears the news he freaks out. It seems that Cleaver is an agent buying rare objets d’art for one of the Nazi bigwigs, and if Hermann Göring (or whoever) finds out he’s been swindled he’ll send over a contract killer to knock off Fleg for having deceived him. As the film’s second act begins, the library has just acquired five more rare books, including a handwritten letter by Thomas Jefferson, which Fleg would love to get his hands on to pull the same stunt he did with the Shakespeare/Burbage Hamlet. American private detective Hal McByrne (Richard Denning) enters the action when an American collector who bought one of the fake Hamlets hires him to find out what was going on and who had swindled him. As soon as he appears, Myra starts vamping him while he’s far more interested in the “nice girl,” Kay Ryan (Lynne Roberts), who’s off limits to him because she already has a husband who’s off serving in combat in World War II.

When Martin Cleaver gets knifed to death inside the library and takes a spectacular fall from the second-story balcony, Fleg audaciously poses as “Lt. Flavin” from the local police department’s homicide division and surrounds the library with members of his gang, posing as cops. He demands and immediately receives custody of the rare books, including the Jefferson letter, which the preposterously accommodating librarian offers him. Fleg a.k.a. “Flavin” also orders the library patrons to stay put inside, despite the usual protests, including one man whose wife will get jealous if he’s late coming home and a young woman who had a date scheduled for later that night. Myra steals the books herself and hides them inside the library, writing on a slip of paper the Dewey decimal code for the innocuous books behind which she hid the ultra-rare ones. Just then an air raid warden named Edmund Walpole (Byron Foulger, playing a good guy for a change) orders all the lights in the library turned out as part of a blackout. McByrne, who’s twice escaped Fleg’s attempts to hold him, tricks Walpole into putting the library’s lights back on. This attracts the attention of a whole squad of authentic police, who arrest Fleg and his imposters. Myra thinks she’s hoodwinked McByrne into thinking she had nothing to do with the scheme, but he isn’t fooled by her protestations of love – and neither are we, having heard similar speeches from all too many femmes fatales in other movies. Knowing that one of Fleg’s henchmen, a deaf-mute named Eric Pahsen (Kurt Katch) who seems to have been the result of an experiment to cross-breed Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre, is waiting outside the library to kill Myra for allegedly betraying them, McByrne drives Myra out of the library much the way Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) would to gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) at the end of The Big Sleep four years later. Pahsen kills Myra and is then arrested by the real police who are still there, and at the end McByrne asks Kay the married “good girl” out for a dinner date, and she accepts.

That alone was pushing it under the Production Code, but Quiet Please: Murder! has some even more radical Code-bending than that. Jim Fleg is allowed to boast that he’s a sadomasochist who enjoys both dishing out and receiving punishment – as the cops finally handcuff him he seems almost to be having an orgasm right there on screen. He’s also allowed to strike Mona physically and knock her across the room of their apartment at least twice. Charles thought Quiet Please: Murder! was one of those frustrating movies whose basic premise had the potential for a much better film than the one we got. I had that feeling about it, too, though I loved the unusual gimmick of having the super-villain pose as a police lieutenant with no one the wiser. (Apparently no one thought to ask to see his badge, though he might have been carrying a fake one just to make his impersonation more credible.) What I didn’t much care for was the way George Sanders was playing an out-and-out villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; I like him best either in his entirely heroic roles (like The Saint and The Falcon, or in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, in which he benefited from Hitchcock’s love of anti-type casting: in Foreign Correspondent Sanders is a hero and Herbert Marshall a super-villain!) or in parts where even if he’s evil overall, he has some good qualities. He was especially good as the Philistine King in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, where he stole the movie right out from its nominal stars, Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr.

Intruder in the Dust (MGM, 1949)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie from MGM in 1949, Intruder in the Dust, based on a novel by William Faulkner published in 1948 (his first book in six years because in the meantime he’d tried his hand at Hollywood screenwriting, and while he got co-writer credits for Howard Hawks’s film noir classics To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, both starring Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, almost nothing of what he wrote for Hollywood got filmed) about a real-life lynching that had happened in Faulkner’s home town, Oxford, Mississippi (called “Jefferson” in the film and in Faulkner’s writing generally), in 1935. This came in the middle of a cycle of U.S. films dealing more or less with racism, including Home of the Brave (a powerful melodrama about racial discrimination in the U.S. military) and Pinky (a silly story about a light-skinned Black girl – played by white actress Jeanne Crain – trying to “pass” for white). What’s remarkable about Intruder in the Dust is it wasn’t made by filmmakers with a reputation for a social conscience: it was produced and directed by Clarence Brown, an old MGM “hand” who’d been in the business long enough to have directed Rudolph Valentino (in his next-to-last film, 1925’s The Eagle). The writer was Ben Maddow, a year before he collaborated with John Huston on The Asphalt Jungle. Intruder in the Dust is basically To Kill a Mockingbird 13 years early.

The central characters are a proud Black farmer and landowner, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) – though through much of the movie I thought the name was “Beecham” – a teenage boy, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr., who for once in his career actually acted instead of letting his boyish good looks deliver his performance for him); and his uncle, attorney John Gavin Stevens (David Brian, who precisely because he’s edgier and more reluctant gives this character far more vivid life than Gregory Peck did in the equivalent role in Mockingbird). At the start of the movie, Lucas is arrested for allegedly shooting a white man, Vincent Gowrie (David Clarke) – the character is dead at the start of the film but is seen in two flashbacks – in the back. Gowrie’s father Crawford (Charles Kemper) and his four brothers are so angry at the crime they surround the jail where Lucas is being held and draw a crowd to form a lynch mob and “take care” of him without bothering with any of the niceties of a formal trial. Chick Mallison grew to respect Lucas from an earlier incident in which he fell through the cracks over a lake that wasn’t quite frozen over. Lucas not only rescued him but dried his clothes, gave him a dinner, and allowed him to spend the night. Lucas is so fiercely proud he refused Chick’s offer of payment and returned all Chick’s subsequent gifts to him. Lucas’s pride is explained by his being a landowner himself; he was willed 10 acres in the middle of a plantation by a white grandfather who had owned his mother as a slave and felt he owed something to his progeny. When Lucas is standing in the entrance to the jail, he sees Chick in the crowd and tells him he wants to see John to ask him to take his case.

John is as convinced as the rest of the town that Lucas is guilty, and he sees his role as Lucas’s attorney not to acquit him, but simply to ask for a change of venue so the trial can be moved away from “Jefferson” and the vengeful antics of the Gowries and their friends and Lucas can plead guilty and get a prison sentence instead of being either lynched or legally executed. The ubiquity of lynch-mob “justice” is emphasized by the continual snarls of the townspeople that Lucas isn’t going to need a lawyer, “Hell, he isn’t even going to need an undertaker,” one of them boasts. At first the presumed good guys, Chick and his uncle John, drop the word “nigger” as often as anyone else in town, and it’s only as John starts working the case and becomes convinced that Lucas is actually innocent that he and Chick stop using the “N”-word. One of the film’s most powerful scenes concerns an older white woman, Eunice Habersham (Elizabeth Patterson, whom Faulkner himself insisted should play the role), a client of John’s in a different matter. Eunice determines to stop the lynching no matter what, and she does this by stationing herself in the lobby of the jail and calmly darning socks while the lynchers start pouring gasoline around to burn down the jail with Lucas inside it. Even when the leader of the lynch mob pours gas at her feet and lights a match, she stays there and asks him to move out of her way so he won’t be in her light. Not wanting to kill a white woman, he puts the match he lit out and lets her be. Lucas insists that the bullet that killed Vincent Gowrie did not come from his gun, a .41 pistol, and he demands that John and Chick exhume the corpse to prove it. They do so, in dead-of-night scenes Brown stages like a horror film, and ultimately realize that Vincent was killed by a rifle shot.

The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Vincent’s brother Nub (Porter Hall, best known as Barbara Stanwyck’s hapless husband in Double Indemnity but here cast as a villain himself), who was having arguments with Vincent because Nub was stealing lumber from the Gowries’ family business and selling it on the black market. When Nub saw Lucas take a shot at a rabbit and miss, Nub saw his chance: he shot Vincent in the back with his rifle and framed Lucas for the crime. In the end the townspeople, who had been howling for Lucas’s blood and willing to kill him themselves, calmly disperse and let the law take its course when a white man is revealed as the real murderer. Intruder in the Dust is a quite powerful movie, occasionally sliding into easy anti-racist propaganda but for the most part telling its tale honestly, eloquently, and without obvious political breast-beating. One thing Clarence Brown, as both producer and director, did that was unusual, especially for an old-line Hollywood filmmaker, was insist that virtually the whole movie be shot on location in Oxford and that many of the townspeople be played by non-professional actors who actually lived there. This was starting to become a common sort of filmmaking in Europe in the 1940’s, as the burden of World War II militated against elaborate studio productions and forced filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Alberto Lattuada, and Federico Fellini to make their movies with real people on real streets and use nonprofessional actors in key roles. Those movies had just started to trickle in to American theatres by the late 1940’s, and directors like Brown and Robert Rossen (in his political drama All the King’s Men from 1948) began to emulate them.

Intruder in the Dust was presented by TCM as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley,” and though it’s not literally a film noir (albeit cinematographer Robert Surtees – usually known for romances and historical spectacles – shoots much of it, especially the nighttime exteriors, in the chiaroscuro style of classic noir), Muller defended it by saying that its essence – a man unjustly accused of murder and others racing against time to prove his innocence – is noir and was the theme of about half of Cornell Woolrich’s stories. Muller also pointed out the irony that many of the townspeople who played would-be lynchers were long-time Oxford residents, and some of them had likely participated in the real-life 1935 lynching that had inspired Faulkner’s novel. In his outro, Muller explained that Intruder in the Dust got excellent critical reviews (including one from African-American author Ralph Ellison, who said that out of all the anti-racist “problem pictures” of 1949, it was the only one that could be shown in Harlem without being laughed off the screen) but was a commercial failure. Apparently Louis B. Mayer, still hanging on as MGM studio head, refused to allow the studio to promote it. Ostensibly it was because the soundtrack contained the word “nigger,” though given Mayer’s overall politics this smacks of the same kind of hypocrisy that has led President Trump to declare holy wars against Harvard and other major American universities on the ground that they’re coddling anti-Semites, when Trump has had Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Muller suggested the real reason Mayer didn’t like Intruder in the Dust and didn’t want the studio to promote it was that its anti-racist message repelled him personally.

Thw Wife Who Knew Too Much (Studio TF1 America, Greencorn Productions, Johnson Management Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 20) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good thriller on Lifetime: The Wife Who Knew Too Much, a title clearly evocative of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions: the 1934 masterpiece that “typed” Hitchcock as a suspense/thriller director for the rest of his career, and the leaden 1956 remake that seems to go on forever) even though it’s a completely different story. It’s set in Springfield, Arkansas and its central characters are Lisa Clarkson (Nicole Unger), wife of local high-school football coach Sam Clarkson (Matthew Pohlkamp), and Avery Downey (Tiffany Montgomery), single mother of the team’s star quarterback and captain, Mark Downey, who’s also dating Taylor Clarkson, Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter. Because imdb.com has only a skeletal page on this one (and even that didn’t go up until this morning!), I don’t know the names of the other cast members, and I only hastily scribbled down the names of the production companies, directors, writers, and other crew members. The director was Bennett Lasseter, who made a series of shorts between 2009 and 2015 and just one previous feature-length film for Hulu, The United Playlist of Noise, about a teenage boy named Marcus (Keean Johnson) who’s obsessed with music. Marcus is forced to undergo an operation in a month’s time that will render him deaf, and he determines to use the remaining month in which he can still hear by assembling “the ultimate playlist of noise.” The writers of The Wife Who Knew Too Much are Joseph Wilka (story) and Mark Lyons (script), though imdb.com’s skeletal page on this film credits Lasseter as writer as well as director.

The Wife Who Knew Too Much is one of those stories in which the death of a young high-school senior in a hit-and-run accident unravels everybody’s secrets, and Lisa Clarkson reaches out to Ruth Brinkman, mother of Kevin Brinkman, who died in the accident, to offer her moral support. Lisa also makes herself insufferable in her determination to find who caused the accident and bring them to justice despite the opposition of the townspeople, who make it clear they don’t want her digging up old bones and would just as soon the secrets stay secret. Lisa is proud of her role as a volunteer at Springfield High School and leader in the local PTA, only her relationship with the school principal, Mike Finnigan (tall, balding, and one of the African-American authority figures Lifetime likes to cast in its movies), gets edgier and edgier as she digs for the truth surrounding Kevin’s death. At one point Lisa confronts J. P. Reynolds, teammate of Mark Downey on the Springfield “Bulldogs” football team (their team song is, inevitably, “Who Let the Dogs Out?”), at Kevin’s wake demanding answers about Kevin’s death. J. P. evidently complains to his father, Tom Reynolds, because the next thing we hear is that Tom suddenly withdraws his proffered contribution to build a new school library. Finnigan angrily reassigns the task of making the presentation to Tom to reinstate his pledge to Avery, whom both Lisa and we have learned is having an affair with Lisa’s husband Sam. Sam is being scouted for a college football coaching job at a university in Ohio, contingent on his star player Mark Downey attending that college and joining its team. Lisa really doesn’t want to relocate, but Avery is fiercely ambitious and has set her sights on pulling Sam away from Lisa and making the four of them – Sam, Avery, Mark, and Taylor – one big happy family. Lisa traces the car involved in the hit-and-run to a local repair shop and wrecking garage called “Junk Yard Dog.”

She discovers a can of spray paint ostensibly used to vandalize Mark’s car by members of the rival Blue Jays football team, but Lisa realizes (and breaks into Junk Yard Dog’s garage to confirm) that Mark himself vandalized his own car because he was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin at the end of a long party during which he thought he had just hit a deer. The climax occurs at the big game of the season between the Bulldogs and the Blue Jays which will determine whether Sam gets his coaching job in Ohio and Mark goes on to an illustrious college football career and a shot at NFL stardom. The writing, which until then has been relatively subtle and literate by Lifetime standards, turns florid as Avery emerges as a full-fledged villain, who’s holding Sam’s and Lisa’s daughter Taylor as hostage and uses that to lure Sam to meet her in the administrative building behind the stadium. Avery’s plan is to make it look like Lisa herself was the hit-and-run driver who killed Kevin, and she means to kill Lisa and frame it to look like a guilt-driven suicide. The plot unravels when Mark, riven by guilt, refuses to play the final game – which is probably just as well because his traumas have virtually destroyed his passing skills – and instead decides to turn himself in. Police Detective Morrison, a compactly built African-American woman, shows up to arrest both Avery and Mark after Avery, thinking she’s stabbing Lisa, instead stabs Sam. In a “One Year Later” tag scene, we’re at the opening of the new school library (ya remember the new school library?), which has been built after all and is named after Kevin. Lisa and her daughter Taylor are at the ceremony and we’re told that Sam has left town and is futilely looking for a coaching career somewhere else, and Mark got a relatively light sentence (presumably for manslaughter) because ultimately he turned himself in. The Wife Who Knew Too Much is actually a quite well done thriller, no great shakes as a work of cinematic art but taut, well directed and reasonably well written until the last two acts, in which Wilky and Lyons suddenly turn Avery from a reasonable (if evil) character to a florid all-out Lifetime villainess.