Love Letters (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 21) I watched a couple of films I’d never seen before on Turner Classic Movies, the 1945 romantic drama Love Letters and the 1926 silent film La Bohème. Love Letters was one of Hal B. Wallis’s first productions after he left Warner Bros. in 1943 over a battle with Jack Warner on the production credits of the film Casablanca (when Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jack Warner as studio head bolted from his chair and grabbed the award before Wallis, the actual producer, could get it) and set up a semi-independent company to make his films with Paramount as the releasing studio. For his story he bought a novel called Pity My Simplicity by British author Christopher Massie whose plot seems to be pieced together, Frankenstein Monster-style, from Édmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, James Hilton’s Random Harvest (with the genders reversed) and Vera Caspary’s Laura. To adapt Massie’s novel into a film script Wallis hired Ayn Rand, of all people, though blessedly this film is free from her political, economic and sexual obsessions. (I told that to my husband Charles when he emerged from the bedroom about 20 minutes into it, and he said, “So Ayn Rand was just another hack!”) He also picked William (nè Wilhelm) Dieterle as director and went to David O. Selznick’s contract list for his two stars, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.

The plot begins in Italy during the last days of World War II, when Roger Morland (Robert Sully) asks one of his fellow soldiers, Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten), to write letters in his name to his girlfriend Victoria Remington (Jennifer Jones) in the small village of Longreach in central England. Victoria falls in love with Roger but only through the letters Alan actually wrote, and though we don’t see any of this happening until a flashback at the very end, the boorish Roger turns Victoria off and she can’t reconcile the haunting, romantic tone of “Roger”’s letters with his crude, nasty reality. Then the war ends and Alan returns home to England and his parents (Lumsden Hare and Winifred Harris). He learns that his Aunt Dagmar (whom we never see as an on-screen character, though there’s a still photo of her) has just died and left him her country estate, which is filled with his boyhood possessions as well as 10 gold sovereigns Dagmar told him to give to his wife if and when he marries. Alan has a sort-of fiancée, Helen Wentworth (Anita Louise), but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that Alan is no longer in love with her because he’s haunted by the memory of Victoria. Alan meets Victoria’s friend Dilly Carson (Ann Richards, whom both MGM and Paramount tried to give a star buildup to that didn’t take; she’s a fine actress but not one with star quality) and blurts out the story of himself, Roger, Victoria and the letters when he gets drunk and starts talking to himself for half an hour. Unbeknownst to Alan, Victoria is actually at the party, though she’s caught amnesia and has totally forgotten everything about herself, including her identity and the fact that she and Roger actually did get married and then he died, not in the war but in an “accident.” Later Alan hears that Victoria is also dead and he starts dating a woman named “Singleton” – no other name. We know that “Singleton” is really Victoria, but Alan is clueless (he’d never seen a photo of Victoria, so he had no idea what she looked like – one would have thought she’d have sent a picture of herself to Roger, but no-o-o-o-o).

Alan goes through a wedding ceremony with Singleton, but during the ceremony she slips and calls him “Roger” for reasons of which she has no idea. The two move into the home Alan inherited from the dead Aunt Dagmar, and the film – which up until then has been so dull both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake – suddenly becomes more interesting as Alan patiently works with Singleton to try to jog her memory and help her regain awareness of who and what she is. Alan even buys Singleton an MG sports car (and I admired Paramount’s technical staff for remembering that the British drive on the left side of the road and their cars come with steering wheels on the right side; once I encountered a British tourist on a bus who said he could drive but didn’t want to in the U.S. because it would have been too difficult for him to accommodate to driving on the “wrong” side of the road and then go back to left-hand driving when he got back home), though he drives it because he has no idea whether or not she can drive. One day the two are driving through the British countryside when Singleton sees a road sign pointing to Longreach and demands Alan take her there. When they get there, the house she grew up in turns out to be occupied by two British rustics who work for Singleton’s adoptive mother, Beatrice Remington (Gladys Cooper in one of her delightfully vicious old-lady characterizations).

Alan takes Singleton on a picnic and she spills some sort of red fruit juice on her hand. She wipes it on her white dress, and this immediately flashes her back to how her late husband Roger really died: he was knifed to death and she picked up the knife and got his blood on her hands. Because of this, the police arrested her and she was tried for the murder, though all we get of this are a few fragmentary flashbacks showing her under police custody during a break in the trial. Then Beatrice Remington tells her the whole story of how Roger died: they had a confrontation in which Roger burned all of the letters Alan had written Victoria in Roger’s name, telling her he was tired of living in another man’s shadow. Victoria had a hissy-fit over their destruction and tried to save the letters from the fireplace. Roger came up from behind her with murderous intent, but Beatrice saved her life by coming up from behind Roger and stabbing him. Later, though, Victoria handled the knife and got blood on her hands from it, and that’s why the cops suspected her of Roger’s murder. Alan happens to come on the scene while Beatrice is telling this story, and he finally realizes that he married Victoria after all and the two return to Alan’s home and presumably live happily ever after.

For some reason the Wikipedia page on Love Letters describes it as a film noir, which it definitely is not – though it does have a few nicely Gothic shots of all those old, decaying British manses from ace cinematographer Lee Garmes. It’s just a creepy (in both senses of the word) romantic melodrama set in an unbelievable rendition of the British countryside, and Dieterle directs dutifully but dully. Jennifer Jones seems way too young for her part – Alan decides that she’s 23 but she came off much more like a teenager to me – and during the movie I joked to Charles that if Ayn Rand had had her head she’d have had Alan restore Victoria’s memories by raping her. (All of Ayn Rand’s sex scenes involve a strong, dominating woman being raped into psychological and sexual submission by an even stronger, more dominating man. It’s obvious that was a personal fantasy for her.) Love Letters was both a commercial and a critical success at the time, though I think the latter was because Hal Wallis was obviously going for Quality with a capital “Q,” arranging for major stars and a top-flight director as well as a story that would impress Academy voters (which it did; Love Letters was up for four Oscars, including Jennifer Jones’ third consecutive Best Actress nomination, though it didn’t win any). It doesn’t age very well, though, and I think it’s because the whole conception of the mystery woman as flotsam in the hands of the strong, powerful man seems unbearably sexist and just icky today. The main theme from Victor Young’s score for Love Letters was turned into a pop song to promote the film (with lyrics by the “Body and Soul” guy, Edward Heyman), and in 1957 Nat “King” Cole and Gordon Jenkins made an incomparable recording of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy4jDt6bkG8) for Cole’s album Love Is the Thing that’s a good deal better than the movie itself! There’s also a gospel-soul version by another African-American artist, Ketty Lester, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz91zXh30sE.

La Bohème (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Love Letters, TCM showed a much better movie: La Bohème, a 1926 silent movie based on Henri Murger’s 1851 novel, which in the film’s credits is called Life in the Latin Quarter but its original French title was Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”). Murger started writing the book in 1846 and it was published piecemeal in French newspapers, notably Le Corsaire, between 1846 and 1849 before Murger collected his stories as a novel and published them in 1851. The book is best known today as the basis for Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème, but though TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Jacqueline Stewart both claimed the film was based on Puccini’s opera (for which Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa wrote the libretto; in opera, librettists are to composers what screenwriters are to directors in movies), it really wasn’t. In 1897 Ruggiero Leoncavallo had written his own La Bohème opera, with Leoncavallo writing his own libretto (as he had for his one major hit, Pagliacci), but his was a flop while Puccini’s was a smash success. The credited screenwriter, Fred De Gresac, took his version from Murger rather than Illica and Giacosa, though I was surprised he didn’t include the most famous scene from Murger that isn’t in the Puccini opera: finally evicted by their landlord, Benôit (Karl Dane in the movie) on the eve of a major party, the Bohemians go through with their party anyway but hold it outdoors in their building’s courtyard, where Benôit has dumped all their stuff. (Leoncavallo included that in his Bohème opera; Illica and Giacosa wrote it for their libretto but Puccini decided not to use it.)

The story should be familiar to Puccini buffs, but in case you aren’t one, here goes: four starving, struggling Bohemian artists – journalist and playwright Rodolphe (John Gilbert), painter Marcel (Gino Corrado), musician Schaunard (George Hassell) and hanger-on Colline (Edward Everett Horton – who would have guessed that out of all the cast members he would have the most enduring career when sound came in?) – are sharing a flat in Paris’s Latin Quarter. They have a monumental struggle on the first of every month to come up with the rent, though so far they’ve done it by a series of stratagems, most recently Rodolphe doing a quick draft of an article on dogs and cats for his irascible editor (Agostino Borato) and lengthening the piece on the spot when the editor says it’s too short. Also living in the neighborhood, in a building across the courtyard, is Mimì (Lillian Gish), a seamstress who makes her living working at home. Mimì and Rodolphe meet by chance and are immediately smitten with each other even though Mimì has another, wealthier suitor, Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy). Paul has placed a big order with Mimì for frilly lace garments he can wear at upper-class functions, and he’s made it clear that Mimì’s body is part of the deal. Mimì has no intention of yielding to Paul’s slimy advances but the two of them get physically close enough – even though all Mimì is doing is presenting Paul with the clothes she’s made for him – that Rodolphe, looking through Mimì’s window, sees them and gets entirely the wrong impression. Eventually they get back together and Rodolphe and Mimì go on a picnic (beautifully photographed by Henri Sartov in a way that evokes French pastoral painting of the 19th century just before the advent of Impressionism), but disaster strikes when Rodolphe’s editor, pissed off at him for missing his deadline by four weeks, fires him.

He doesn’t tell Rodolphe; he tells Mimì instead when she’s there to drop off the piece, and Mimì decides not to tell Rodolphe because he’s busy writing a play inspired by her and she doesn’t want to take his attention away from it. So she redoubles her efforts as a seamstress and works herself to the bone, keeping the lights on in her apartment so she can literally work day and night. (The film takes place in 1830 – we know that because in two different scenes we see wall calendars – and back then she would have still been working by candlelight.) Meanwhile Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Renée Adorée) is dating rich men on the side and getting spectacular outfits from them which she shares with Mimì. Unfortunately, Mimì’s workload has aggravated her tuberculosis; she’s taken a job at a clothing factory but becomes too weak to handle the big bolts of cloth involved, and ultimately she’s let go from her job. She retreats to her little apartment, staggering home and barely making it, and in the end she dies quietly and alone while the rest of the Bohemians are celebrating the success of Rodolphe’s play – which got put on thanks to the promotion of Vicomte Paul and his “friends in high places.” La Bohème was Lillian Gish’s first MGM film after years of working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith and playing the delicate, winsome “good girls” in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Then she retreated to Europe and worked there for two years before returning to the U.S. Gish sought a contract at a major studio and finally signed with MGM after production chief Irving Thalberg gave her a deal that included everything she wanted. She could choose her own stories and had approval of her director and co-stars.

Having worked in Europe for two years and therefore not being familiar with the current Hollywood talent, she asked Thalberg for advice; Thalberg showed her two reels of MGM’s latest production, The Big Parade – a love story set against the backdrop of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) – and Gish immediately demanded that she make La Bohème with The Big Parade’s director, King Vidor, and stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée. Gish also laid down the law that she didn’t want her and Gilbert actually to be shown kissing on screen. She thought their love would be more powerfully shown if it were understated and didn’t involve visible physical affection. Unfortunately, preview audiences were audibly disappointed when the film didn’t contain any of the heavy-breathing kissing scenes for which John Gilbert was famous, and so the film was put back into production so scenes of Gilbert almost slobbering over Gish could be added. Frankly, I think Lillian Gish was right and MGM and the preview audiences were wrong – and I suspect the additional scenes were directed by someone other than King Vidor (as a fill-in director, George Hill, had shot scenes for The Big Parade depicting the actual war). In his scenes for both The Big Parade and La Bohème Vidor had got a remarkable degree of subtlety from Gilbert, whereas he’s almost totally unrestrained in the La Bohème retakes and one wants to put a leash on him.

Nonetheless, despite those rather tacky love scenes, La Bohème is a quite remarkable movie. Gish literally starved herself for three days before shooting her death scene, wanting to look as emaciated as possible on camera. The film is quite haunting and benefits from Vidor’s quiet direction and excellent Paris atmosphere – kudos to art directors Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie for remembering that a film set in France should have road signs and other public postings in French (though an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor noticed one mistake: the sign outside Mimì’s front door says “Melle.” instead of “Mlle.,” the correct French abbreviation for “Mademoiselle”) – as well as the finely honed acting of Gish and the supporting characters. (John Gilbert is a special case, for both good and ill.) Unfortunately, TCM chose to show it with an odd musical accompaniment, mostly featuring solo piano with an occasional violin part – and the bits with the violin were the most appropriate because they’re the only ones that drew on Puccini’s music for this story. The lowest point in the problematic accompaniment was a ragtime theme that was played under one of the sequences of Lillian Gish slinking home to die of TB – but La Bohème is a strong enough work of art it survived even the tacky playing of the unnamed pianist and the wrong-headed nature of much of the score.

The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time (Enliven Entertainment, Maritime Productions, Sony Music Entertainment, originally aired April 14, 2024; rebroadcast April 19, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 19) CBS-TV re-ran The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, the Billy Joel concert special filmed on March 28, 2024 representing his 100th performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Joel had performed at least one concert per month there since 2010 and he’d become such a “regular” that the arena’s technical crew quickly set up the venue for a music concert just as easily as they could for a sports event. The show was originally aired on Sunday, April 14 but, on my husband Charles’s advice, I bypassed it and instead watched the Lifetime movies Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. It was rebroadcast on Friday for a rather strange reason: viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones had to watch the concert half an hour later than it was scheduled because the Masters golf tournament lasted a half-hour longer than it was supposed to, and at the end of the show CBS affiliates on the East and Midwest cut it off in the middle of the last song – Joel’s star-making hit, “Piano Man” – to broadcast their local news. If I’d watched it here in California it would not have been affected by this sort of petty vandalism, but once again, even on those rare occasions when the time-zone differences work in our favor, the East Coast-centric media mavens can’t stand it and make it sound like the world is coming to an end. There’s one post on Entertainment Weekly (https://ew.com/billy-joel-100th-residency-special-cut-short-cbs-8631580) that quoted three tweets (or do we need to call them “X”’s now?), including one by Kevin Connolly that read, “You couldn’t produce a worse product than CBS just did on the Billy Joel special. Way too many commercials, didn’t play some of his best songs, went extremely out of order in his set list, and then cuts away to the local news in the middle of ‘Piano Man’?!? A total flop by CBS.”

I certainly didn’t think it was a total flop; I’ve been a Billy Joel fan at least since the late 1970’s (when he released two back-to-back mega-hit albums on Columbia, The Stranger and 52nd Street, which raised him from medium-level music star to pop icon and superstar) and I enjoyed the show thoroughly. I agree with Connolly that there were “way too many commercials,” though that’s part of the price you have to pay for all privately-owned television, and also with Connolly’s comment that he “didn’t play some of his best songs.” His set list didn’t include the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” which was the iconic Billy Joel song from the late 1970’s. Like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” it was heard everywhere – there was even a piano-roll version which the late John Gabrish and I heard at a visit to San Diego’s Old Town in the late 1980’s – and I remember liking it at first, then getting thoroughly sick of it (both from incessant airings of Joel’s version and the equally incessant covers), and after it faded off the airwaves hearing it again in a few years and saying to myself, “You know, that’s a really nice song.” (I had the same reaction to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” as well.) There were some other Billy Joel songs I’d have liked to have heard on the show – including “Big Shot,” “Zanzibar” (a curious knock-off of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabaña”: the Copacabaña and Zanzibar were both major nightclubs in New York City in the 1940’s), “Allentown,” “Pressure,” “Uptown Girl” and his infamous history lesson, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” – but the songs he did include were quite fine. Joel began his set with “Lights Out on Broadway” and then played an intro based on the “Ode to Joy” finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to his song “Anthony’s Song (Movin’ Out).”

Then, after a lesser-known song from The Stranger called “Vienna” (I wondered if Joel placed that there because Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from which he’d just quoted, was composed and premiered in Vienna in 1824) and a brief speech by Jerry Seinfeld, Joel did “New York State of Mind” and then brought on a guest star, Sting, to sing with him on “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” Sting came out in a powder-blue suit and did what amounted to a Sinatra impression, less vocally than physically – and he was so immaculately turned out Joel’s basic-black outfit seemed blah by comparison. Then Joel confessed to some uncertainty as to whether he could still hit the high notes on the next song he was about to sing – “An Innocent Man,” the title of a quite good Joel album of the early 1980’s in which he paid tribute to doo-wop in general and the Four Seasons in particular. Despite his disclaimer, Joel actually did quite well with “An Innocent Man.” He not only still has those high notes, they rang out clearly and strongly even though without the sheer ethereal power they had in the 1980’s. I couldn’t help but compare Joel to Elton John, whose current voice simply doesn’t have the killer falsetto it had in his prime – something that became painfully apparent when he appeared on a late-night TV show with Miley Cyrus a few years back. He let Miley Cyrus pick whatever song from his catalog she wanted to do, and she chose “Tiny Dancer” – which mercilessly exposed the deterioration in the upper register of John’s voice. After that there was a commercial break and then a gag segment in which people in the audience were allegedly asked what they wanted to hear Joel sing next – and all but one of them said they would like to hear his new song, “Turn the Lights Back On” (was it Joel’s belated answer record to his own “Lights Out on Broadway”?). Joel dutifully performed “Turn the Lights Back On” and then went into the title track from Joel’s final (1993) pop-rock album, River of Dreams.

During this song Joel gave one of his backup singers and musicians, Crystal Taliaferro – a Black woman who wore a considerably flasher and more flamboyant costume than Joel’s (most stars don’t let their backup singers upstage them in the costume department) and variously played saxophone, timbales (the stand-up drums used in Latin bands) and triangle – a chance to sing solo. Taliaferro responded to the challenge by belting out the first two choruses of “River Deep – Mountain High” with more ferocity and power than anyone since the first recording by Tina Turner with Phil Spector’s backup band. Then Joel came back and reprised “River of Dreams” with an intriguing interpolation of The Cadillacs’ 1954 hit “Gloria” towards the end. (There are quite a few songs called “Gloria,” including Van Morrison’s star-making 1964 hit with the band Them and the 1982 dance-pop hit for the late Laura Branigan.) After “River of Dreams” Joel came back with “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” – an enigmatic song with a fast middle section about the unhappy relationship of former prom queen and king Brenda and Eddie – and “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” from the 1980 album Glass Houses (which may feature the sexiest photo of Billy Joel ever published), for which once again Joel got out from behind the piano, stood in front of the band and sang. Then Joel played what is probably my favorite song of his, “Only the Good Die Young,” which despite its title is actually a blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church and especially what its teachings do to teenage women unlucky enough to be brought up in it. After that Joel played the first track on Glass Houses, “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy),” during which director Paul Dugdale cut to a man and woman in the audience, both of them wearing black T-shirts, with hers reading “You May Be Right” and his reading “I May Be Crazy.” This song, too, contained an interpolation; Billy Joel’s lead guitarist took the vocal mike and belted out some of Led Zeppelin’s song “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The final piece on the program was “Piano Man,” the title song from Joel’s second album (and first for Columbia Records; before that he’d made a little-known album called Cold Spring Harbor for Ampex, the short-lived label started by a well-known company that made tape recorders) and his first major-label hit. It was Joel’s breakthrough song and it’s become part of American culture; I knew one cocktail-lounge pianist who would always make a point of playing it every Saturday at 9 p.m. because the song’s opening line is, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday.” That was the song that for some reason got cut off in the East and Midwest time zones when this show originally aired on April 14 so CBS decided to rebroadcast it five days later. It was also a song on which Joel took the omnipresent demand of modern pop-rock performers for audiences to sing along to the extreme of not actually singing the final chorus at all, convinced that his audience will sit shame-facedly through the song’s melody and join it so well the crowd sang it perfectly and without apparent guidance from Joel himself. The song featured Joel simultaneously singing, playing piano and playing harmonica from a Bob Dylan-style rack (which looked constructed to hold a much larger harmonica than the one Joel was playing) and was a worthy close to a quite remarkable evening.

One thing I admired about the telecast was the sheer power of Joel’s band – even though he inexplicably fired Liberty DeVitto, the great drummer on most of his records, just before his 2006 tour (DeVitto sued Joel in 2009 claiming, among other things, that he’d co-written many of Joel’s songs, but the suit was settled out of court in 2010 and DeVitto ended up starting what amounts to a Billy Joel tribute band called The Lords of 52nd Street) – and another thing was the extent to which Joel’s music has been influenced by jazz. Not only does he carry a three-piece horn section (trumpet, trombone, saxophone) but Joel’s own piano playing sounds considerably jazzier “live” than it did on his records. Also, like James Taylor, Joel has long since lost the exciting mane of hair he showcased on his early album covers and he’s now totally bald (either that or he’s responded to male pattern baldness by shaving his head completely). The show was rather awkwardly labeled The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, but it was well worth watching and a showcase for one of the most interesting pop-song catalogues of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Law and Order: "Inconvenient Truth" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 18) I watched the usual trifecta of Law and Order shows on NBC – though they’re doing yet another hiatus next Thursday and won’t be back until May 2. The flagship Law and Order episode, “Inconvenient Truth” (though it had nothing to do with climate change or Al Gore!) was O.K. It featured Jordan Bryant (Apollo Levine), an African-American who 12 years earlier was convicted of raping a white woman, and while he was in prison he defended himself as best he could. He also worked in the prison kitchen and determined to have an above-board legal career as a chef when he got out, which he did thanks to the efforts of attorney Keith Palmer (Paul Schultze). Keith Palmer also filed a lawsuit against the city on Jordan’s behalf and won a settlement of $10 million, but Palmer not only took 55 percent of the settlement as his fee (the standard is one-third) but billed Jordan for all his expenses in researching the case, including his paralegals, deposition expenses and the like. Jordan determined to open his own restaurant with the $1 million he had left (less $100,000 he gave to his estranged daughter, with which she was able to pay off her student loans) but got into arguments with his (white) business partner over money.

Then Jordan is knifed to death outside the restaurant after briefly having an argument with someone inside, and the police and prosecutors come to the conclusion that Keith Palmer deliberately murdered Jordan because Palmer was in line for a judicial appointment and the suit Jordan was threatening to file against Palmer could have derailed it. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) actually take Jordan to trial, but in the middle of the trial he whips out a document that gives him an unshakable alibi: he was in his car receiving an automated traffic ticket at the time of the murder, and he was photographed in the act. Ultimately it turns out that Jordan was actually killed by Palmer’s wife Amanda (Jodi Stevens), who resented him for potentially destroying her husband’s career and his opportunity for a judgeship. There’s a potentially fascinating sequel to this one in which Keith Palmer represents his wife in court and manages to get her acquitted by savaging the prosecution and arguing, “A few weeks ago you were equally certain I committed this crime!” But as things stand, despite the attempt of writers Gia Gordon and Pamela Wechsler to make some social comments about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony (their whole case against Keith rested on a rather twitchy waiter who more or less placed him at the scene of the crime), ultimately it was one of the less satisfying recent Law and Orders and the wife ex machina gimmick really bothered me.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Combat Fatigue" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode was a good deal better and finally wrapped up (we hope!) the story arc of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), her parents Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray), and George Brouchard (Patrick Carroll), the man who abducted her and ultimately sold her to another pedophile, a Fate Worse Than Death from which she was saved only by the timely intervention of the Special Victims Unit. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) felt personally responsible for Maddie’s fate because she spotted both Maddie and Brouchard in an energy-drink van Brouchard had stolen, but instead of stopping them she let them go on their way. The episode opens with Brouchard’s trial, in which the jury deadlocks 11 to 1 for conviction because one of the jurors literally has a crush on Brouchard and thinks they’re going to get together as soon as he’s acquitted and set free. The judge declares a mistrial, which means Maddie and her parents have to go through the whole ordeal over again. At one point Brouchard claims that Elaine is in love with him; she isn’t, but she’s been texting him because she wants to get him alone, confront him and, if necessary, shoot him herself to make sure he doesn’t do this to anyone else. Brouchard ratchets up his psychological pressure on the Flynns by firing his attorney in mid-trial and demanding to represent himself – and he does a surprisingly good job.

An FBI profiler on loan to the SVU testifies that Brouchard is “a narcissistic sociopath” (gee, with credentials like that he could run for President if he weren’t ineligible because he was Canadian-born) who gets off on psychologically manipulating people. When Brouchard is tried again he’s facing additional charges of sexual abuse because Maddie has come clean about what he did to her sexually while he held her captive – he didn’t actually do the dirty deed but he gave her a bath, including washing her private parts, and looked like he was having a good time. At one point Elaine actually lures Brouchard to a confrontation in the motel room where he’s living and holds a gun on him, and it takes all of Benson’s considerable communications skills to talk Elaine out of shooting Brouchard and eliminating him and his threat once and for all. Eventually the jury in the case finds Brouchard guilty (which makes us heave the proverbial sigh of relief) and Benson takes Maddie to her own psychiatrist even though Maddie pleads that she’s already been in therapy and it hasn’t helped. “Not this kind of therapy,” Benson insists, making me wonder just how Benson’s therapist is different from all others, especially in ways supposed to help her suffer and get over the multiple traumas of being yanked from her home, psychologically dominated not only by Bouchard but his vexing organization of routinieres and leeches he had around him. This was a better-than-average SVU, and Patrick Carroll’s performance as the villain is really remarkable – he plays it like he’s auditioning for The Donald Trump Story – but, like Benson, I’m getting pretty damned tired of having this guy around!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Crossroads" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last show on last Thursday’s (April 18) trifecta of Law and Orders is an Organized Crime episode, “Crossroads,” which was actually pretty good except it suffers from Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, which would make a good deal of it incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following the storyline from its inception several episodes ago. It’s about an organic honey farm run by Mama Boone (Lois Smith) and her son Angus (Stephen Lang), who hit on the idea of keeping the failing honey business going by using it as a cover to distribute fentanyl (whatever its status as a real-life scourge, fentanyl has become a favorite of crime-fiction writers in all media over the last few years!). Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has infiltrated the gang as an undercover informant, and so had another detective on the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sam Bashir. Only the gang “outed” him and killed him, leaving Stabler to bury the body – something he communicated to the unit via a support-group meeting that’s part of the gang’s cover, though the person running it is a wheelchair-using vet named Darian Morse (Tobias Forrest) who may or may not be aware that the support group he organized is a front for drug distribution. He becomes aware of that when a crazed young man shows up looking haggard and confesses to having shot and killed his wife and their two sons, in what’s the most powerful scene on this episode even though it’s only peripherally connected to the main intrigue. Ultimately Angus realizes that even he is simply a front for a higher-up criminal whose name he knows but whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret – so this interminable story arc is going to last at least one more episode before Dick Wolf and his show runners, directors and writers finally put it, and us, out of our miseries!

Bend of the River (Universal-International, copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 17) my husband Charles and I watched the third of the six movies in the James Stewart Westerns collection on Universal DVD’s: Bend of the River. The omens were pretty good on this one: the director was Anthony Mann, who had previously made Winchester ‘73 with some of the same cast members (James Stewart, Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen), and the writer was Borden Chase (adapting a novel called Bend of the Snake by one William Gulick), who’d written Winchester ‘73 as well as Red River, two of the all-time greatest Western films. Alas, the magic didn’t gel this time around, and it’s hard to tell what went wrong. Bend of the River is about a wagon train of prospective homesteaders en route to Oregon to set up farms. Their guide is Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) – one wonders why his name is spelled so pretentiously when throughout the movie I’d assumed it was “Glenn McLintock” – and on the way there he rescues an outlaw named Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynch mob who are trying to hang him for stealing a horse. (One wonders if the horse he rides off on in Glyn’s company is the horse he was accused of stealing.) The two team up despite the misgivings of the paterfamilias, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), and his two daughters, Laura (Julie Adams) and Marjie (Lori Nelson, in her first film). Ironically, Julie Adams was the female lead in the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lori Nelson was the female lead in its sequel, Revenge of the Creature.

The would-be homesteaders make a deal with steamboat owner Tom Hendricks (Howard Petrie) to hold their belongings in Portland until September 1, when Hendricks will ship them to their camp. Among the items they are expecting are food supplies they will need to get them through the winter until they can start growing their own in the spring. The homesteaders cut down enough trees to establish a clearing and build their houses, and they wait for the supplies to arrive … and they wait … and they wait. Now it’s the middle of October, they’re running out of flour and bacon, and they will starve unless the supplies arrive. Glyn volunteers to ride to Portland to find out what happened, and when he gets to Portland he finds it’s a wide-open town full of gunfighting, drinking, gambling and the other Western vices. Hendricks explains that there’s been a gold rush – I’ve been unable to find out when this film takes place, and Google was no help because there were at least three Oregon gold rushes, one in 1850 before the big one in California, one from 1861 to 1870 and one in the 1890’s just before the big one in Alaska. He’s decided to renege on his deal with the settlers because he can get a lot more for his flour and whatnot by selling it to the miners at the inflated prices typical of resource rushes. Glyn makes vague promises to some of the locals, led by Shorty (the young Harry Morgan), to help him steal the stuff from Hendricks – only they decide midway through the journey that they’d rather divert the stuff to the gold miners who will pay inflated prices for it. About all Glyn has going for him in keeping the shipment on its way to the homesteaders is gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson) and Emerson Cole – who switches sides in mid-journey and aligns with the renegades until Glyn and he have a big fight in the middle of the river that ends with Glyn drowning Emerson. (At this point we’re thinking that it would have been better if Glyn had let the lynchers hang Emerson in the first reel. But then again we wouldn’t have the fun of watching Arthur Kennedy’s great performance in the role; he practically steals the movie.)

Ultimately Bend of the River is entertaining but nothing special, and I’m not sure where it went wrong. Part of the problem may have been that it’s in color: after the mega-success of Winchester ‘73 in black-and-white Universal-International made another percentage deal with James Stewart (reportedly he’d made $600,000 off his share of Winchester ‘73 and $750,000 off his share in this one) and decided to ramp up the budget by shooting it at the tail end of the three-strip Technicolor era. But, quite frankly, the color works against the values of this story; it needed the cool, dark beauty of red-filtered black-and-white. Part of it also might be that, as Charles said afterwards, aside from a brief run-in between the settlers and a few Shoshone Indians early on whose only plot significance is that Julie Adams’ character gets an arrowhead stuck in her shoulder (and the main woman on the wagon train, Mrs. Prentiss, played by Frances Bavier, insists that they drive as gently as possible for the next month until she heals), Bend of the River doesn’t really seem that much like a Western. Charles said it was basically an exploration film about colonization and imperialism, and it could have been set in Africa or the South Seas or anywhere else in the world where whites were lording it over people of color. Bend of the River is a good movie rather than a great one, and while it’s indicative of the way James Stewart was trying to keep his career going by hardening his image – there’s a clip from the film included in the trailer in which, reacting to Emerson’s change of sides, Glyn gives him a low-keyed threat that he’ll be looking over Emerson’s shoulder wherever he goes until he finally catches up with him, and he sounds amazingly like his long-time friend and occasional co-star John Wayne – he’d already proven he could act a Western tough guy in Winchester ‘73 and he didn’t need to do it again. The trailer also references Julie Adams’s character as a woman who “made the mistake of falling in love with two men” – though that’s only sequentially, not simultaneously (she takes up with Emerson in wide-open Portland and then ends up with Glyn after Emerson’s death) – and when it then mentioned Rock Hudson I couldn’t help but joke, “He also made the mistake of falling in love with men.”