High and Low, a.k.a. Tengoku to jigoku (Akira Kurosawa Productions, Toho Studios, 1963)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray disc of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller High and Low. As I’ve mentioned before, Kurosawa got stereotyped as “the samurai director,” probably because his 1954 film The Seven Samurai was the movie that made his international reputation (though the multiple-point-of-view drama Rashomon had begun the process four years earlier), but at least half of his movies, including this one, took place in 20th Century Japan. I’d bought this Blu-Ray after Charles and I had missed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing of it on Turner Classic Movies a few months ago. I first heard of this film in 1975, when I bought William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film partly because it had the most complete chapter on the Sherlock Holmes movies published to that time. Everson wrote about High and Low at the end of a chapter called “The Oriental Detectives” even though he acknowledged that it was a far deeper and richer movie than the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong films he was otherwise profiling. But it wasn’t until the late 1990’s, when Charles and I were watching old movies I was literally recording by the yard onto VHS tapes, that I finally got a chance to see it. High and Low actually began as an American story, King’s Ransom, one of the 87th Precinct mystery novels written by Evan Hunter (true name: Salvatore Albert Lombino) in his “Ed McBain” identity. Like the other 87th Precinct novels, King’s Ransom, published in 1959, is set in a thinly disguised New York City; like the real one, it has five boroughs, but Manhattan is called “Isola” because it’s on an island. Brooklyn is called “Calm’s Point,” Queens “Majesta,” The Bronx “Riverhead,” and Staten Island “Bethtown.” High and Low was made in 1963 after Kurosawa’s employers, Toho Studios, bought the rights in 1961 for $5,000. Kurosawa and three co-writers, Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, and Eijirô Hisaita, transposed the story of King’s Ransom to Japan but kept the basic conflict: a Japanese shoe-company executive, Kingo Gondô (Toshiro Mifune), is about to stage a coup at his employer, National Shoes (the English name is actually used), to drive out both the company’s founder (a stick-in-the-mud conservative who doesn’t believe in updating the company’s products to be more fashionable) and the younger members of the board of directors (who want to reduce the quality of the company’s products in order to cut costs and create planned obsolescence).

He’s amassed 50 million yen to buy a controlling interest in the company and is about to send his assistant Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) out of town to complete the transaction, when suddenly he receives a phone call claiming that his son Jun (Toshio Egi) has been kidnapped, and the ransom is 30 million yen. Just then Jun turns up alive, well, and free after he’d been out playing with Shinichi Aoki (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of Gondô’s chauffeur (Yutaka Sada). It turns out that the kidnappers grabbed Shinichi by mistake, partly because the two boys had switched clothes, but are still holding out for the full 30 million yen ransom. Having mortgaged himself to the hilt to cover the cost of his leveraged buyout, Gondô will be financially ruined if he pays the ransom, but his wife Reiko (Kyôko Kagawa) insists that he has a moral duty to pay it, and ultimately he does so. The kidnappers give detailed instructions as to just how the money is supposed to be packaged and delivered, and the first hour of High and Low is set almost entirely in Gondô’s living room in a series of increasingly anxious phone calls between Gondô, his wife, and his staff. (When we first saw the movie Charles was surprised that Reiko was dressed in traditional Japanese garb, while the men were all in Western business suits.) The kidnappers have given Gondô an elaborate set of instructions on how to pass the ransom to them via a cross-country train before they return the boy. Shinichi is returned an hour into this 143-minute film, and the rest of it deals with the attempts of the Japanese police on the case – chief detectives Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and “Bos’n” Taguchi (Kenjirô Ishiyama); detectives Arai (Isao Kimura) and Nakao (Takeshi Katô); and the chief of the investigation section (Takashi Shimura) – to find the kidnappers and recover as much of the ransom money as they can. Their efforts are complicated by Aoki, who borrows Gondô’s Mercedes car and drives his son Shinichi along the route on which the kidnappers took him to see if anything jogs his memory as to where he was held. Through a series of sound clues, including a trolley whose noise could be heard in the background of some of the recorded phone calls between the kidnappers and Gondô, the police finally trace the kidnappers to a house nearby Gondô’s hilltop villa. But when the cops raid the house, they find the two accomplice kidnappers, a drug-addicted couple, both dead of overdoses of pharmacologically near-pure heroin. (I couldn’t help but remember this was how Janis Joplin died: she had been off the drug for a few weeks making her last album, Pearl, when the night before she was scheduled to record her final vocal she decided to celebrate by having another shot of heroin. Alas, she got an unusually pure sample and it killed her.)

Ultimately the police find out the identity of the main kidnapper: a medical intern named Ginjirô Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who masterminded the whole scheme out of status envy: his little apartment had a bird’s-eye view of Gondô’s villa and he decided to get his class-based revenge on the man by kidnapping his child. The cops lure Takeuchi out of hiding by releasing a false story to the Japanese media that the two drug addicts are still alive, and Takeuchi descends into a Lower Depths-like underworld of Yokohama’s drug scene to pick up a woman in the final stages of addiction and test his latest dose of pharmacologically pure heroin on her. Arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death, Takeuchi refuses to see a prison chaplain and instead demands that Gondô be brought to him so he can tell him personally just why his son was targeted. High and Low is a fascinating film even though it changes tone at the one-hour mark; before that it’s a moral tale and after that it’s the kind of police procedural one expects from an Ed McBain adaptation. William K. Everson acknowledged the American roots of this story and said the film “is not markedly Japanese in theme or action, other than for the value it places on personal honor and integrity.” But he wrote something about the film that doesn’t at all match what I saw in it: “Toshiro Mifune’s ordinary, confused little businessman is a superbly realistic portrait, the bravura style of his samurai roles completely suppressed.” What I saw in Mifune’s performance was exactly the kind of relentless overacting he did in his samurai parts, albeit it’s understandable because the kidnapping happens at a time when he’s bet everything on a big business deal and he loses it all. (There are two later scenes in the film that carry an implicit critique of capitalism. In one, the executives of National Shoes, realizing what a public-relations nightmare they’ve created for themselves by firing Gondô at the height of sympathetic media coverage of him, offer to rehire him for a job but one with no actual responsibilities; and he angrily turns them down. In another, it turns out that even though everything in his home is being auctioned off, he's landed on his feet: the police recovered most of the ransom money and he’s got a job with a smaller shoe company he intends to build up as a rival to National.)

There are also some odd bits about the physical environment, particularly the cars used in the film. Though Japan was still set up on the British system, in which the car’s steering wheel is on the right-hand side and you drive on the left, a number of foreign cars appear in the film, mostly American Chevrolets and (Gondô’s car) a German Mercedes, with their steering wheels on the left. But the only Japanese vehicles seen in the film are Toyotas, which made me wonder if Toho and Toyota had a contract that only Toyota cars would be used in Toho films. (Contracts like that were quite common in the U.S. at the time, especially for TV series.) It’s an interesting look at what Japanese cars looked like just before they started exporting them to the U.S. High and Low is a quite remarkable film, showing that Kurosawa’s genius extended to modern stories as well as tales of Japan’s historic past, and though some of the disjunctures jar (particularly the grim portrayal of the drug underworld towards the end) and the cops aren’t as strongly etched as individual characters the way they are in McBain’s books, all in all it’s a great movie that, as Everson said, “should be given the highest priority rating by any detective devotee whom the film has so far eluded.”

Strangers on a Train (Warner Bros., 1951)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 16) I watched Eddie Muller’s presentation on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” program of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 masterpiece Strangers on a Train, which I first saw at the Surf Interplayers Theatre revival house in 1970 or so (it was on a double bill with John Huston’s Beat the Devil, but I liked the Hitchcock film considerably better). Muller co-hosted it with actress Rosie Perez, who made her feature-film debut for Spike Lee in 1989’s Do the Right Thing. Perez called Strangers on a Train Hitchcock’s best film (I’d rate it along with Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious as my top three, and it’s significant that those were three of the four Hitchcock films Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini and Robert Porfirio included in The Film Noir Encyclopedia; their fourth was The Wrong Man, though I think they should also have included Rear Window and Vertigo and suspect the only reason they left those out is they were in color). Strangers on a Train is a movie I’ve seen many times since, including at a special screening in the early 2010’s at which one of its stars, Farley Granger, appeared to promote his autobiography Include Me Out. I remember that event well because I went with my late home-care client and roommate John Primavera, and because Granger was so out of it mentally that, despite the autobiography being co-credited to him and his partner Robert Patrick, I suspect Patrick really wrote it himself based on his memories of the anecdotes Granger had told him over the years they were together. I asked Granger about the reports that Hitchcock had privately conferred with the film’s co-star, Robert Walker, to play his scenes with Granger as Gay cruises, and Granger vehemently denied it, saying that the Motion Picture Production Code would have strictly forbidden any such thing. (There is an alternate version of the film released in Hitchcock’s native United Kingdom, where the British Board of Film Censors was considerably looser about sex and stricter about violence than their American counterparts, that contains a longer and significantly Gayer version of the first scene between Walker and Granger than the one we got.)

It’s a movie that fires on almost all cylinders; I could quibble about the music score by Dmitri Tiomkin (he’s not one of my favorite film composers and I wish Franz Waxman or Bernard Herrmann would have written it), and at the screening with Granger I suddenly found myself questioning Ruth Roman’s casting. Hitchcock made this film at Warner Bros., and one of Jack Warner’s conditions for allowing Hitchcock to go off lot for casting the men was that the female lead be one of his contractees. But in the great scene in which Roman’s character asks Granger’s, “How did you get him to do it?” – meaning murder his wife so he and she would be free to marry – I found myself wishing that Hitchcock’s great discovery, Grace Kelly, could have played it instead. (In Kelly’s three films with Hitchcock, Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock managed to make Kelly seem sensual and alluring. In all her other eight movies, she’s so icy she could have sunk the Titanic.) Interestingly, TCM showed Dial “M” for Murder right after Strangers on a Train (though my husband Charles, who came home from work two-thirds of the way through Strangers, and I didn’t watch it), and Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor argued that Dial “M" could be seen as a sequel to Strangers, with Ray Milland in Granger’s role as the former tennis player who “married up” and now wants to murder his wife by getting somebody else to do it. The basic story of Strangers on a Train is pretty familiar, but here goes: rising tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is dating Ann Morton (Ruth Roman), daughter of an influential U.S. Senator (Leo G. Carroll), but there’s an obstacle in the way: a previous wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott, true name Kasey Rogers), back in his old home town of Metcalf. On a train from New York to Washington, D.C. Guy runs into Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), spoiled rich son of an indulgent mother (Marion Lorne) and an imperious father (Jonathan Hale). The two start talking, and Bruno suggests to Guy that since they both have inconvenient people in their lives they’d like to get rid of – Guy’s wife and Bruno’s father – they swap murders, with each killing the other’s desired victim so the police would have nothing to go on since each would have no apparent motive. Guy thinks this is all just a macabre joke, until he receives word that Miriam Haines has actually been killed and Bruno keeps calling him demanding that he fulfill his end of their bargain and actually kill Bruno’s father.

Strangers on a Train began life as a novel by Patricia Highsmith published in 1950, a year before Hitchcock made the movie. As in Young and Innocent (1937), Hitchcock’s British adaptation of Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, Hitchcock used only about one-third of the book. He first hired Whitfield Cook to set the basic parameters of an adaptation, and then he hired Raymond Chandler to write the actual script. Hitchcock was dissatisfied with Chandler’s work on the project, and the feeling was mutual; Chandler wrote a letter to a friend lamenting the preposterousness of the opening scene between Guy and Bruno and in particular the way he was supposed to make the audience believe that Bruno thought they had made a binding deal while Guy regarded the whole thing as a macabre joke. Interestingly, Chandler wrote a script that ended with Bruno alive at the end but hopelessly insane, sitting in a mental institution in a straitjacket muttering to himself. Hitchcock did not use that ending in Strangers on a Train but he did in Psycho nine years later – and Strangers on a Train and Psycho have a lot of similarities, notably in how Hitchcock cast the psychos. Both Robert Walker and Anthony Perkins had reputations as boy-next-door “types,” and it was a real revelation when Hitchcock cast them both as villains. (Walker died after making just one more film, Leo McCarey’s anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John – in fact Walker died before My Son John was finished and Hitchcock gave McCarey outtakes from Strangers on a Train to use to complete Walker’s role – but Perkins lived decades later and got saddled with increasingly badly written psycho roles to capitalize on his success in Hitchcock’s film.) Also both Bruno Antony and Norman Bates have mutually destructive psychotic relationships with their mothers, though unlike Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Antony is alive during the film’s story and played onscreen by Marion Lorne. Indeed, there’s one great scene between them in which Mrs. Antony has just painted a grimly Expressionist portrait and Bruno sees it. Immediately he starts laughing his head off and saying she’s captured his father perfectly, and she says, “I meant it to be St. Francis!” Once Hitchcock rejected Chandler’s script and fired him, later telling Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse that he got along better with writers who didn’t specialize in crime fiction, he sought out Ben Hecht for a rewrite. Hecht was too busy to take on the assignment, but he recommended a writer on his staff named Czenzi Ormonde, and in presenting the film Rosie Perez made a big deal about how the film was effectively written by two women, Highsmith and Ormonde. (Later Highsmith would return to the theme of two men, a relatively normal one and a psycho who lures him into a web of intrigue, in her most famous novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as four sequels to it.)

In Highsmith’s original, Guy is an architect who actually kills Bruno’s father and then lives the rest of his life in a fog of guilt until the police finally overhear his confession and arrest him. In the film Guy is a tennis player with aspirations to get into politics (and as the son-in-law of a Senator he'll obviously have a leg up!), which Muller suggested Hitchcock and whichever writer thought of it may have done as a way to butch up Guy’s character. Indeed, Muller made a big deal out of Hitchcock casting the genuinely Gay Farley Granger as a straight man and the genuinely straight Robert Walker as his male seducer. (In his other Hitchcock film, Rope, based on the real-life Leopold-Loeb case, Granger played one-half of a young Gay couple who kill a boyhood friend for thrills; John Dall played his partner, and true to form Hitchcock cast the queenier Dall as the more butch one in Rope.) One of the things I like best about Strangers on a Train is it inverts the standard noir cliché of the femme fatale and makes Bruno Guy’s homme fatal. Another aspect of Strangers that stands out today is Robert Burks’s cinematography, which is all-out noir even during scenes that take place outdoors in daylight. Hitchcock rescued Burks from his role as cinematographer for Warner Bros.’ montage department (where he worked for two people who later became full-fledged feature directors, Don Siegel and Byron Haskin). Strangers on a Train was the first Hitchcock/Burks collaboration, and Burks would go on to shoot all but one of Hitchcock’s subsequent films (the one exception was Psycho, for which Hitchcock used John L. Russell because he’d established a reputation for quick work on another low-budget film by a major director, Orson Welles’s Macbeth) until Burks and his wife died tragically in a house fire right after he’d finished Marnie. Strangers on a Train is a perfectly constructed film (Hitchcock strived for that on all his projects – he was reportedly the first director to storyboard a live-action film, and his early training as a commercial artist enabled him to do that – but he didn’t always achieve it), and it’s full of brilliant scenes but each one contributes to the action instead of just sitting there.

Among the highlights are Bruno’s actual murder of Miriam – Hitchcock said that he thought love scenes should be filmed like murders, and murders like love scenes, and he does just that here (as well as in one of his less-regarded films, Topaz, in which the head of the Cuban secret police murders his mistress for having betrayed him to the U.S. government and once again Hitchcock shoots it like a love scene). There are also neat little touches like the electric boats at the amusement park (itself redolent of the granddaddy of all horror films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which a tale of horror and homicidal madness is played against the backdrop of a carnival). All the boats have five-letter names; the one Miriam and her two boyfriends (Roland Morris and Tommy Farrell) get on is the innocuous “DAISY,” while the one Bruno takes on his way to killing Miriam is named “PLUTO,” after the Roman god of the underworld. The climax takes place at the carnival’s merry-go-round, where Bruno has gone to plant a cigarette lighter inscribed “A to G” (Anne to Guy) and frame Guy for Miriam’s murder. A trigger-happy cop shoots the man running the ride, causing it to spin out of control. Another man (Harry Hines) volunteers to edge his way under the speeding ride to get to the control and turn it off, and Hitchcock shocked both François Truffaut and Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg by telling them that Hines really executed that stunt even though it could have been fatal for him if he’d raised his ass off the ground. “You couldn’t fake it because it was a forward movement,” Hitchcock told Higham and Greenberg. This happens after Guy and Anne have engineered his escape from a tennis match at Forest Hills (where Bob Dylan gave one of his most notorious concerts 14 years later, one of his first appearances playing an electric guitar with a rock band behind him) where he’s had to dispatch his opponent in a hurry and get to Metcalf before dark, and the plainclothes police detectives who’ve been tailing him, Hennessey (Robert Gist) and Hammond (John Doucette), briefly lose him before calling ahead to the authorities in Metcalf. The merry-go-round sequence recalls the train accident that precipitated the climax of Hitchcock’s British film The Secret Agent (1936) in its sense of total chaos amidst a world run amok, and there are neat touches like a boy who’s thrilled by the out-of-control ride while his parents freak out at the danger he’s in. (That reminded me of a real boy I saw at one of the Balboa Park organ concerts when it started to rain; his parents had taken the option of going onstage and sitting outside the rain, and they frantically waved to him to join them. The kid loved being in the rain and stayed where he was.) Strangers on a Train has acquired the reputation of being one of Hitchcock’s greatest films, one it fully deserves, as well as doing some well-oiled variations on the standard noir clichés.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 3 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired March 5, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, May 15) I put on a Death in Paradise rerun (Season 14, episode three, originally broadcast March 5, 2025) that was actually one of the most engaging episodes of this often entertaining, often exasperating program. It dealt with the murder of Susie Montagu (Georgia Maguire), a woman who was born and raised in Britain but moved to the island of Sainte Marie because the British climate was playing havoc with her health. She nursed herself back to good health through the island’s tropical climate and she and her husband Steve (David Mumeni) started a business making and selling health-care products. One of the ingredients in one of their concoctions was snakeskin, though they insisted that they didn’t actually kill snakes to make the product: they just harvested the skins once the snakes shed them naturally. To do this, they had to keep venomous snakes on the company premises, and one of their workers, a white woman named Daisy McCrae (Imogen King) developed a way to extract the snake venom and turn it into a recreational drug which she then sold on the black market. The problem with this is the same one as the real-life drug fentanyl: the dose tolerance is very narrow and too much of the stuff can literally kill you. What complicated the case is that Susie Montagu was also deathly allergic to peanuts, and when she collapses and dies in the middle of an event introducing a new skin cream her company is about to market, everyone on site assumes that she ate or drank something containing peanuts or peanut oil. Carrie Standish (Patricia Allison) even administered an EpiPen, the standard-issue precaution most people with severe allergies carry around with them in case of an emergency, but the EpiPen has no effect even though later tests at the police lab show it did its job: it injected Susie’s body with adrenaline. The medical examiner finds traces of peanut oil around Susie’s mouth but there’s no evidence of how it got there, since she’d been on one of her periodic fasts and had had nothing to eat or drink for at least a day before she died. This was one of the episodes made after Black actor Don Gilet replaced white actor Neville Parker as the lead detective character, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson. It was also made after the introduction of a really bothersome comic-relief character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who gets assigned by Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) to break up a rave on the beach after the party gets noise complaints from residents. Rose is hopelessly unable to do that on his own and finally requests backup.

Mervin Wilson insists on driving the Land-Rover that is the Sainte Marie police force’s principal mode of transportation even though it has a stick shift and he doesn’t know how to drive one. His partner, Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder), suffers through his attempts to drive the car and his repeated backups into a light pole. This gives Wilson the insight he needs to solve the case: he deduces that Susie Montagu actually received two injections, one of snake venom that killed her and one from the EpiPen she received later in a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Wilson is also able to deduce who the murderer was when he learns that Susie Montagu had just filed papers to divorce herself from Steve, and had also fired Carrie Standish from the company’s board of directors less than a month after having hired her. It seems that, after Standish actually invented the skin cream the company was about to market, she and Steve drifted into an affair. Susie caught them at it and determined to rid the company of both of them, and Standish fought back by killing Susie with some of Daisy McCrae’s snake venom. To conceal it, she then injected Susie with the EpiPen in the same part of her body (her upper leg) where she’d earlier injected the poison. At the end the police arrest Carrie Standish and also Daisy McCrae, who though she wasn’t involved in Susie’s murder was running an illegal drug operation using the company as a cover. We also get at least partial resolutions of at least two running subplots on the show. Mervin Wilson has been using police resources to investigate the suspicious death of his mother months before, and he gets a flash drive from Police Commissioner Patterson containing an audio version of Mervin’s mom’s frantic SOS call, which establishes to both Merwin’s satisfaction and ours that his mother’s death was indeed an accident. We also learn that Patterson’s job is in jeopardy from higher-ups in the island’s administration who are threatening to eliminate his position, which is the reason he’s been snapping at all his subordinates on the force instead of being his normal, easy-going self. Death in Paradise is usually a pretty mediocre policier distinguished only by the gorgeous Caribbean scenery and the bright clothes worn by the police (Officer Curtis in particular; just about her entire wardrobe is made up of neon-bright fabrics), but this time it was better than usual and offers a much more engaging and credible solution to the mystery.

Law and Order: "Liberty" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 14) I watched the season-ending shows of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show, “Liberty,” begins in an illegal casino in New York City at which two of the patrons get into an argument with two of the proprietors’ staff over a large sum of money the players owe the management. Then the scene cuts to an outdoor location in which a dead body is found with its head lying in the obligatory pool of blood. The body turns out to be Navy Vice Admiral Wallace Kane (John Churchill), who was in New York for Fleet Week (I’ve lived in San Diego long enough I know all about Fleet Week!) and had been one of the men at the casino trying to bail out two of his crew members by giving the staff the $4,000 his sailors owed them – only the staff had demanded an extra $2,000 and Kane had refused. We assume at first that Kane’s death had to do with his quarrel at the casino, but as the case develops lead detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), along with their commanding officer, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), learn it actually had something to do with the bribes Kane and his commanding officer, Admiral Rusten Garvey (Chance Kelly), were paying to a slimeball pier operator named Frank Mazzeo (Daniel Sauli) for choice docks and slips for Navy vessels during Fleet Week. Then an officious African-American woman authority figure identified in the cast list only as “ADIC” (the most likely meaning I can find online for those initials is “Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Industry Collaboration”) swoops down on the New York Police Department and demands that the investigation of Kane’s killing be transferred to the federal government. Lt. Brady refuses, but the ADIC woman insists that Frank Mazzeo is innocent of the murder, and though Mazzeo doesn’t have the strongest alibi in the world – he says he was at home alone in bed – it checks out. Then the police decide on the basis of a security video recording from a nearby bodega that Garvey, Kane’s immediate superior in the Navy, actually killed him during an argument over the bribe money both of them were paying to Mazzeo. The case becomes a battle royal as Garvey flatly refuses to allow NYPD officers on board his ship, since he declares it is Navy property over which the local government has no jurisdiction. He even summons four sailors to block the officers from coming aboard, and for a moment it looks like he’s threatening a civil war over his territory. The police return with a search warrant, and Garvey concedes they can come aboard and execute their authorized search.

Ultimately prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment against Garvey and bring the case to trial, only the judge, Kenneth Sullivan (Anthony Edwards, whom I remember from the original Top Gun and thought back then he was sexier than Tom Cruise, though he hasn’t weathered the years as well), is blatantly biased against them. First he rules the bodega videotape inadmissible because it was made on substandard equipment. Then he refuses to dismiss three prospective jurors for cause even though they’ve made statements from the jury box that they consider the case against Garvey “fake news.” When Price calls Mazzeo as a witness, Garvey’s slimeball attorney, Charles Banks (Zeljko Ivanek), asks him on cross-examination about a case of domestic abuse his wife filed against him nine years before. Price objects but Judge Sullivan rules it admissible. Price goes to his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), and ultimately to the chief judge of that circuit, Charles Lehman (Ian Blackman). He learns that Judge Sullivan specifically asked to be given the assignment to try Garvey’s case, but without any more evidence of Judge Sullivan’s bias than that, he doesn’t have grounds to demand a recusal. The whole thing angers D.A. Baxter so much that, in the middle of a re-election campaign in which the opponent accuses him of being a typical bleeding-heart liberal who’s “soft on crime,” he’s willing to risk his job and his political future by taking on Judge Sullivan, but eventually Price goes behind Baxter’s back and cuts a plea deal by which Garvey admits only to “criminally negligent homicide” and will get no more than a year in prison, and probably not even that. One thing we’re told is that the reason the net around Garvey to protect him from accountability is so strong is that he’s in line to be the next Secretary of Defense (and it’s nice to hear that term at a time when President Trump and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, are insistent on renaming it the “Department of War”), though I can’t imagine that even in today’s degraded era in which government standards, including simple competence, have been thrown out the window and all Trump requires from his Cabinet appointees is “loyalty” not to the Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump (essentially the Führerprinzip, “leader principle,” under which Nazi Germany was governed), a man who pled guilty to “criminally negligent homicide” against a long-time friend and fellow war hero would get such a prestigious appointment.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Monster" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Monster,” was a pretty good season-ender, maybe not as powerful in its ethical conflicts as the Law and Order show that preceded it May 14 but with its own set of intriguing moral issues. The show begins with a scene in which two young uniformed officers, Frank Rodriguez (Joseph Elliot Rodriguez) and Jess Acosta (Darilyn Castillo), stop a car that’s been involved in a fender-bender and offer to help out the driver. Unfortunately, the driver turns out to be Richard Caine (Daniel London), true name Michael Parker, who tried to wave the cops away until Rodriguez spotted a gun under his front seat. Rodriguez demanded the right to search the car, and in the trunk he found a kidnapped boy, Bobby Deboer (Matthew Anthony Pellicano, Jr.), and returned him to his parents. Unfortunately, in searching the car Rodriguez leaned his head into the open driver’s-side window, and thereby the judge in Caine’s case, Walter Conover (Paul Guilfoyle), ruled the search and all the evidence garnered therefrom inadmissible. The Manhattan Special Victims Unit, led by Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), is incensed by the fact that Caine has been set free and figure it’s only a matter of time before he kidnaps another child and tortures him or her to death for his sick jollies. Benson repeatedly watches the videotaped confession Caine made to her which was ruled inadmissible as “fruit of the poisoned tree,” and her long-time associate and friend, Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), worries for her sanity. Benson also has another issue to deal with, a jihad against her by the newly appointed chief of detectives, an officious African-American woman named Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni), who is bound and determined to get Benson off the NYPD by any legal means necessary. She’s bound up with SVU’s newest assignee, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’s the son of her former police partner. Griffin père was involved in the shooting of an unarmed suspect years before and Tynan has covered for him all these years. Griffin fils launches a sub rosa investigation of his dad’s case and realizes that his father was indeed wrong: he committed cold-blooded murder, and Tynan has covered up for him all these years because she figures the victim he shot was an habitual criminal and by shooting him Griffin’s dad did the world a service.

Meanwhile, SVU gets a visit from a now-retired police detective from Jacksonville, Florida named Donald Torres (Michael J. Harney), who says that before Caine escaped their grasp and moved to New York, he worked in Jacksonville similarly kidnapping and killing kids under the name “Michael Parker.” Since all his victims in Florida were along the route he drove regularly as part of his job, Benson and the other SVU detectives hit on the idea of investigating his current job route to see if there are any missing children belonging to families who live alongside it. They also have the reluctant cooperation of Caine’s ex-wife Jocelyn Fronczak (Monique Gabriela Curnen), a hard-nosed woman who was married to him for only six months but was bitterly traumatized by the experience and just wants to put it all behind her. Ultimately they trace Caine’s burial ground to a local beach just under a pier and send a forensic team to look for bodies. They find plenty of them, including one that they can prosecute him for because, though the victim lived in Pennsylvania, he was buried in New York and therefore the city has jurisdiction. Just when Manhattan SVU seems to have the case wrapped up, in comes Chief of Detectives Tynan once again threatening Benson and saying, “I’ll have your badge,” and while writer Michele Fazekas (an old Law and Order hand) never quite makes it clear just why Tynan hates Benson so, it sufficiently demoralizes Benson that towards the end of the episode (as she did in last week’s show as well) she confides in Fin that she’s not sure it’s worth the trouble anymore and maybe she should just retire. I’m wondering if this means that the real-life Mariska Hargitay is considering stepping down from her role on this show and Dick Wolf’s writers are creating an “out” for her in case she decides not to re-up for another season. Frankly, this show suffered so much from Christopher Meloni’s departure 13 years ago (though Meloni’s career suffered even more, in particular because he didn’t get the role he was born to play: Jack Reacher in the feature-film series based on Lee Child’s novels which instead went to short, shrimpy Tom Cruise, a piece of miscasting so atrocious that to this day I won’t watch a Reacher movie with Cruise) that I’m not sure it could withstand the loss of Hargitay as well.

The Power of the Whistler (Larry Darmour Productions, Columbia, 1945)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 13) I showed my husband Charles a 65-minute movie on YouTube, The Power of the Whistler, third in the series of eight movies Columbia Pictures and their subcontractor, Larry Darmour Productions, made as “B” movies inspired by the popular CBS radio show of that name. Obviously Columbia was hoping for the same level of success as Universal was getting with a “B” movie series based on Inner Sanctum, since they not only adapted the radio show (more or less), they copied Universal’s strategy of using the same actor in each series entry but having him play a different character every time. Universal’s Inner Sanctum star was Lon Chaney, Jr.; Columbia’s for The Whistler series was Richard Dix. By 1945 Dix was definitely in the “on their way down” department, having fallen from his early-1930’s heights as the star of films with major budgets and production values like 1931’s epic Western Cimarron, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. (It was the only one RKO ever won for a film they produced directly, though they won a second Best Picture by proxy as the distributor of Samuel Goldwyn’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives.) Dix had an unusual career trajectory; he broke into films in 1917 after having gone to college to study medicine but ended up in the school’s drama club. Within six years he was appearing in big-budget blockbusters like Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923). That film paired the Biblical story with a modern-dress portion illustrating the immortal moral truths of the Ten Commandments, and Dix appeared in the modern section as John McTavish, “good” brother to Rod LaRocque’s “bad” brother Dan. (I’ve posted about this: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-ten-commandments-paramount-1923.html.) Dix successfully made the silent-to-sound transition in 1929 with a quite good film of Earl Derr Biggers’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, but by the late 1930’s he was on the downgrade. The Whistler series entries were his last films before he suddenly died in 1949 at age 56 of a heart attack. Just before he started making them he’d been in a quite good “B,” Val Lewton’s and Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (1943), but that movie was suppressed for years because RKO lost a plagiarism suit over it to two well-known copyright trolls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-ghost-ship-rko-1943.html).

The first two Whistler films, The Whistler and The Mark of the Whistler (1944), were both directed by up-and-comer William Castle. For this third one Columbia and Darmour replaced him with ancient “B” hand Lew Landers (t/n Louis Friedlander) and commissioned a script by Aubrey Wisberg that [spoiler alert!] cast Dix as a psychopathic killer instead of the sympathetic roles he’d played in the first two series films. The revelation that Dix is a psychopath is supposed to be a shock to the audience, but it’s been revealed in so much of the literature on this film (including the YouTube post on which Charles and I were watching it) that it’s well known even to people who’ve never seen it. The gimmick of the radio show The Whistler was that the narrator (Bill Forman and Bill Johnstone on radio and Otto Forrest here) was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, essentially nagging him as he told the story. The Power of the Whistler begins in the evening in New York City (we know that because the film starts with a stock establishing shot of Times Square, in which William Everest (Richard Dix) is struck by a car and nearly killed. He comes to but has amnesia (amnesia was a frequent plot gimmick in mid-1940’s movie thrillers and I suspect the end of World War II had something to do with that). He walks into a club called The Salt Shaker and meets up with a young couple, Charlie Kent (Loren Tindall) and Francie Lang (a girl named Jeff Donnell, a quite personable actress who was in a number of Columbia “B”’s in the 1940’s). Francie’s sister Jean (Janis Carter, second-billed) does an improvised card reading on Everest and turns up the ace of spades followed by the two of clubs, which is supposed to indicate that he will die within 24 hours. Jean does the card reading again and achieves the same result. Against Francie’s advice, Jean follows Everest out of the club to warn him, and he thinks she’s crazy but ultimately agrees to accompany her on a search for his true identity. They have a number of clues in his pocket, including a drug prescription (which, unlike real-world ones, doesn’t have the patient’s name on it), a receipt for a bouquet of 20 long-stemmed roses, a cigarette lighter with an ornate design, a train schedule with the place name “Woodville” circled on it, and a few other odds and ends.

The two calmly walk into the back seat of a parked car so they’ll have a place to talk in private, and in one of the weirder plot twists to a modern audience, the owner of the car not only doesn’t call the police on them but accepts their explanation and offers them a ride. They ask him to take them to the Civic Theatre where the woman Everest (or whoever) sent the roses to, Constantina Ivaneska (Tala Birell), is performing as a star ballerina. They crash her dressing room and her maid, Flotilda (Nina Mae McKinney, the “bad girl” in King Vidor’s all-Black movie Hallelujah in 1929), tells them to wait for her as soon as she comes off stage. Alas, Constantina denies that she ever knew Everest, who because she doesn’t know his real name Jean insists on calling “George.” They also trace the prescription, but learn through a bookstore owner (John Abbott) and a rare book in his stock that the doctor who allegedly wrote it died in 1895, and through a druggist (the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) that the prescription is for a poison. Jean invites “George” to spend the night at the apartment she shares with Francie, but when the parties wake up they find “George” already up and having made breakfast. Alas, Francie finds her bird has mysteriously died during the night. Later we see “George” alone in a park with a squirrel, whom he’s first feeding out of a bag of nuts and then … we don’t see the altercation, but when Jean joins him later the squirrel is dead and “George”’s hands are bandaged; obviously the squirrel fought back. Ultimately Jean and Francie trace “George” to Woodville, a rural community where the most prominent resident is a retired judge who, unbeknownst to us, originally certified William Everest as crazy and ordered him locked up in a mental institution. William Everest had gone there to kill the judge for revenge, only his plot was temporarily derailed by his amnesia. Thanks to Jean, he’s recovered his full memory (oops!) and he goes out to the judge’s ranch to kill him, but Jean successfully fends him off and at the end she kills him with a farmer’s rake, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of her cards.

The most interesting part of Dix’s performance is the personability with which he plays the psychopath, eerily anticipating by 15 years Anthony Perkins’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Like Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932) and Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Dix gently and even lovingly tries to convince the heroine that by killing her he’s actually doing her a favor, since by taking her out young he's sparing her the fate of growing old and losing her looks. (Dix had also played this game in The Ghost Ship, which contains a scene in which a ship’s junior officer is accusing him of being crazy, but it’s the accuser who’s losing his temper and screaming at the top of his lungs while Dix’s character is staying personable and cool, and even inconveniently points out to his accuser that to any objective observer it would be the accuser who seemed crazy.) It’s also a film that evokes much of the noir look (the cinematographer was L. William O’Connell), including the shots of Venetian-blind shadows over Our Heroine as she sleeps before the day when she will go out with “George” and learn at last who he really is. (Venetian blinds were an all-purpose gimmick for “B” directors seeking a really cheap and easy way to build visual atmosphere; look how often William Nigh, a good candidate for the worst director of all time, used them.) The Power of the Whistler has been called a film noir, which is borderline; Dix’s character is the stuff of noir but everyone else in the movie is too unambiguously nice to qualify as a noir character, and only rarely do we get the chiaroscuro visuals that are also so much a part of the film noir universe.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios, Wendy Finerman Productions, Sunswept Entertainment, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2026)

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

Last night (Tuesday, May 12) I went with the Bears San Diego to the AMC Mission Valley 20 theatre to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2, whose existence is something of a surprise because while I’d been aware that the original The Devil Wears Prada had been a hit, I hadn’t realized it had been a big enough hit to merit a sequel. The Devil Wears Prada began as a novel by Lauren Weisberger from 2003, which was first filmed three years later with Meryl Streep starring as Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine – a thinly disguised portrayal of the real-life Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue. I’d caught up with The Devil Wears Prada on Lifetime, of all places, in early 2023 and posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-devil-wears-prada-fox-2000-pictures.html, and re-reading that was helpful in deciphering last night’s film. Weisberger published a sequel to her novel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, in 2013, and the original producers came sniffing around to her with sequel in their minds. But they couldn’t get the original stars – Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci – to agree. Streep repeatedly turned it down, and Hathaway said she’d like to work with Streep again but on a totally different story. With the rights having passed from 20th Century-Fox to Walt Disney Studios (which bought Rupert Murdoch’s entire movie enterprise so Murdoch would have that many more billions to spend in turning the entire world’s politics Rightward), Disney started work on a sequel in 2024. They hired the original director, David Frankel, and assigned Aline Brosh McKenna to create a new script with no resemblance to Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada. We know that because Weisberger’s credit this time around only says, “Based on characters created by … .”

The story picks up the original characters of The Devil Wears Prada 20 years later and closely recycles the events of the first film. Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has left Runway magazine and built an illustrious career as an investigative reporter for the (fictitious) New York Vanguard, only the Vanguard’s owners have decided print journalism is so 19th century. They suddenly and without advance notice close the paper and send the entire staff layoff notices via text messages, which they receive while they’re at a banquet honoring journalists and Andy Sachs is winning an award for her latest exposé. Meanwhile, Runway magazine is having troubles of its own; they hyped a clothing manufacturer that turned out to make all its goods at a sweatshop in Thailand. Runway’s publisher, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), has the brainstorm to hire Andy to set up an investigative unit at Runway to rehabilitate its credibility. But he doesn’t tell Miranda Priestly about this in advance, so Andy just shows up at the Runway offices, ready to work, and has to face one of Miranda’s celebrated cold rages. Meanwhile, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s rival at Runway in the old days, has switched sides in the fashion industry and is now working at Dior, which holds up Miranda and Runway for the proverbial king’s ransom in exchange for continuing to advertise in Runway. Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s right-hand man in both films, tries to explain to her that virtually nobody reads the print edition of Runway anymore; the real money lays in digital outreach, and that means the editorial content has to be reworked in favor of shorter stories with obvious hooks that will serve as clickbait. One of the old Runway stories was about a high-tech power couple, Benji (Justin Theroux) and Sasha (Lucy Liu) Barnes, who were portrayed as deliriously happy with each other. Since then Benji and Sasha have broken up, and Andy makes her bones at the new Runway by scoring an interview with the famously reclusive Sasha.

Meanwhile, Miranda is lobbying Irv Ravitz for a promotion to run media content for his entire company, Elias-Clarke, only at the big party at which Irv is supposed to announce this he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack instead. Runway and the entire Elias-Clarke enterprise is inherited by Ravitz’s son Jay (B. J. Novak), who couldn’t care less about the fashion world or Runway’s unique role in it. Andy and Emily lobby Benji Barnes to do a white-knight buyout of Runway, only Benji, who’s been dating Emily, intends to double-cross Andy and Miranda, take over Runway, and install Emily as the new editor. He also wants to cut way back on the human role in creating the magazine’s content and rely on AI instead. As soon as Andy learns of this, she organizes her own white-knight buyout with Sasha as her backer. It seems Sasha’s motive is more to double-cross her ex than anything else, but she makes a bid not only for Runway but the entire Elias-Clarke company, and agrees to give Miranda the promotion to worldwide editorial control of the Elias-Clarke enterprise that Irv Ravitz was going to give her when he croaked. All this happens while Runway is hosting a huge fashion event in Milan (the counterpart to the one in Paris in the earlier film), with Lady Gaga (playing herself and really energizing the movie) performing a new song called “Shape of a Woman.” Lady Gaga, who’s one of my favorite current stars because she writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends instead of just barking out a few words over a dance groove and calling it a “song,” also wrote two other pieces for the soundtrack, “Runway” and “Glamorous Life.” She essentially serves the same role Madonna did in the earlier film, though once again the soundtrack contains Madonna’s mega-hit “Vogue.” (Once again, I loved the irony that the film contained a song with the same title as the real magazine on which the fictitious Runway is based.)

One of the film’s greatest gags is about Jay Ravitz’s cost-cutting strategies; he’s forbidden Runway’s staff to travel in private cars or planes, and it’s delicious to watch Miranda have to fly as an ordinary business-class passenger and be told to her fury that the terms of her ticket don’t allow the airline to serve her champagne. There’s also a subplot in which Andy, while shopping for a new apartment in a renovated old building and unwittingly insults the man who redeveloped it, Stuart Simmons (Kenneth Branagh), only to end up falling in love, or at least dating him. There are also nice references to the bodybuilding spree Benji Barnes goes on after his divorce (inspired, I suppose, by the real-life physical trainings high-tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – excuse me, Meta – have gone through, apparently under the belief that if they’re going to be Masters of the Universe they should build up their own bodies so they’ll look more like gods and less like nerds). I liked The Devil Wears Prada 2 but a) it’s not as good as the original (most sequels aren’t, though I can think of at least three that improved on their originals: James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein; Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two; and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part Two) and b) it contains enough “digs” against capitalism to qualify as mildly progressive but not so many as to suggest there are any serious alternatives to a system that lets the super-rich pretty much run the world however they want. The consensus of most of the audience members I overheard after the movie was over was it wasn’t as good as the first one, and it would be almost incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen the original film (which might be overstating it a bit, but just a bit).