Chinatown (Paramount, Penthouse Video, Long Road Productions, Robert Evans Company, 1974)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 22) Turner Classic Movies showed one of their double bills co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and actor Nathan Lane. They picked two films noir, the 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by him and Raymond Chandler from a source novel by James M. Cain) and the 1974 neo-noir Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne which Polanski heavily rewrote). I’ve long appreciated Double Indemnity but I hadn’t seen Chinatown since my mother took me to see it in its original theatrical release. I didn’t like it then and I still don’t. The publicity for Chinatown said that it had revived the spirit of classic noir, which it decidedly didn’t. I had a sense of The Emperor’s New Clothes when both Mankiewicz and Lane prattled on both before and after the movie about how great it was – Lane even called it “perhaps the perfect movie” – when I didn’t like it when it first came out and I don’t like it any better now. Chinatown is a vaguely comprehensible tale about how the super-rich villain, Noah Cross (John Huston in a great man-you-love-to-hate performance that’s easily the best thing about the film, even though his presence inevitably had me thinking it would have been a much better film if he’d directed it as well, especially since he probably would have dispatched the story in two-thirds of Polanski’s bloated and ponderous 130-minute running time), has hatched a scheme to take over the San Fernando Valley and make millions of dollars off it on top of the millions he’s already accumulated. His plan involves cutting off the irrigation water that the orange growers in the Valley desperately need to grow their crops, then persuading the citizens of Los Angeles County to approve an $8 million dam project. Ostensibly the dam is to provide the residents of Los Angeles with water, but Cross really wants it to go to the Valley so the housing developments he plans to build there will have water.

The hero, to the extent this film has one, is private investigator J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, top-billed), who like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer specializes in “divorce work” – in documenting extra-relational affairs being carried on by his clients’ spouses and using those photos either as grounds for divorce or ways to cut down on the amount of settlement money his well-to-do clients have to pay. (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed such work as inherently unethical.) Gittes gets involved when he’s hired by a woman who claims to be Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), wife of Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who’s opposed to the dam project because he thinks the porous shale bedrock they want to build it on top of won’t withstand the weight and the dam will eventually collapse and flood the city. (The character was supposedly based on the real-life William Mulholland, who ran the Department of Water and Power and ensured that Los Angeles would have an ample water supply even though its natural climate is desert.) Gittes’s photographer captures clandestine pictures of Hollis Mulwray apparently frolicking with a young girl, and the photos end up on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper. Then Gittes gets an office visit from the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him for the way he framed her husband. Ultimately Gittes learns that the woman who posed as Mrs. Mulwray was aspiring actress Ida Sessions (an early role for Diane Ladd), though in the meantime the case spirals out of control when Hollis Mulwray is found dead in a reservoir. Later Ida Sessions is also found dead in her apartment after she and Gittes had an appointment in which she was supposed to Tell Him All She Knows. While all this has been going on, Gittes has drifted into an affair with Evelyn Mulwray and been shot at by a number of people, including angry orange growers who think he’s with the Department of Water and Power. Gittes has also discovered that a secret financier, who of course turns out to be Noah Cross, has been buying up the orange ranches and using the names of residents of a local nursing home as fronts.

We also learn that the “other woman” with whom Hollis Mulwray was apparently having an affair with was actually Evelyn’s daughter Katherine (Belinda Palmer), and both Evelyn and Katherine were fathered by, you guessed it, Noah Cross. This piece of information – Evelyn insisting to Gittes, “She’s my daughter and my sister” – so angers Gittes that he slaps her repeatedly, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, for the first few takes Jack Nicholson pulled the blow so as not to hurt Faye Dunaway for real. But director Polanski didn’t think the result looked convincing, so at Dunaway’s suggestion Nicholson slapped her for real, at full force – and that’s the take that ended up in the final cut. The film’s title gets explained in the final scene, in which two hit men hired by Noah Cross murder Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown just as Gittes is getting ready to drive her and Katherine to Mexico to hide out from dad’s vengeance. Noah then swoops up Katherine, strongly suggesting that the cycle of incest is going to continue and he’s going to deflower her, too. This was the ending Polanski insisted on, overruling Robert Towne’s desire to have the escape to Mexico be successful. One of the two official police detectives who’d been harassing Gittes all movie tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” – a closing line that’s become iconic. (It got recycled in the part-live, part-animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Toontown.”)

I first saw Chinatown as I was making my acquaintance with the classic films noir of the 1940’s, and while the critics who reviewed Chinatown when it was new acclaimed it as a successful recreation of that style, I strongly disagreed (and still do). First of all, Jack Nicholson – an actor I usually dislike, though I loved him as The Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman because the shark-like smile and the vulpine laugh, which usually put me off, were exactly right for that character – is all wrong to play a noir lead. He doesn’t have the world-weariness and depth of the great 1940’s noir stars (Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd). There were some battles between Polanski and the film’s producer, former Paramount studio head Robert Evans; Evans wanted the film shot in black-and-white and he also wanted Jane Fonda to play the female lead. I don’t know about the first (a black-and-white Chinatown would have looked like an even more inept attempt to reproduce classic film noir than the one we have) and I’m with Polanski on the second: Jane Fonda would have been too tough, too independent, too powerful. Faye Dunaway was just right even though she was a limited actress with only two truly great films on her résumé (Bonnie and Clyde and Network). The long early establishing shots of Hollis Mulwray soulfully looking out at the city’s various reservoirs struck me then, and still do, as the sensibility of the 1970’s uneasily grafted on to a film nominally set in the 1930’s. It also doesn’t help that Nicholson as Gittes wears a silly-looking bandage covering his nose through the middle third of the film. That bandage was put there after Gittes was accosted by two thugs, one of whom – the one who actually slashed his nose, and told him that unless he laid off the Mulwray case, next time he’d cut off the nose completely – was played by Roman Polanski himself. This time around I couldn’t help but be reminded of the equally silly-looking bandage Donald Trump wore throughout the 2024 Republican National Convention days after his ear was supposedly grazed by an assassin’s bullet (though I’ve long believed both the alleged assassination attempts on Trump were Sensations of 1945-style gimmicks faked for publicity and sympathy). Of course this time around I couldn’t help but think of Trump when I watched John Huston as Noah Cross, dominating the screen as well as his character dominates the lives of everyone else in the film. Though there’s no evidence that Trump ever actually had incestuous sex with his daughter Ivanka, much less fathered a child with her, Trump did say during the 2016 campaign, “If she weren’t my daughter, I’d date her.” Certainly both the fictitious Noah Cross and the all too real Donald Trump are case studies in the ability of the super-rich to buy their way out of any accountability for their myriad crimes!

The Strip (MGM, 1951)

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

After Roman Polanski’s dull, ponderous attempt to re-create the classic world of film noir in Chinatown, the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ November 22 schedule was a much better film that was shown on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program even though it isn’t really film noir at all. It was The Strip, made by Mickey Rooney on his old stamping ground, MGM Studios, even though he’d asked for a release from his contract after Words and Music in 1948 and was then free-lancing. (For some reason, TCM cut off the studio logo usually shown at the start of MGM’s films even though a shrunken version of the logo is clearly visible on the main title card.) The Strip begins with an aerial shot of a police car speeding down the Sunset Strip at 4:30 a.m. (though it’s already daylight) while a stentorian narrator explains that because the Sunset Strip is not technically part of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office has jurisdiction. The police car comes to a stop in front of an apartment building, where they find 25-year-old dancer, cigarette girl, and aspiring actress Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest) badly wounded but still alive. The sheriff’s deputies pick up Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) on suspicion of having assaulted Jane, and when he references Jane’s other boyfriend, gangster Delwyn “Sonny” Johnson (James Craig, one of the many actors MGM tried out as would-be Clark Gables while the real one was fighting in World War II and didn’t know what to do with once the genuine Gable returned in 1944), and says he’d like to kill him, the sheriff’s deputies announce that Johnson was himself killed that night in his palatial beachfront home. The rest of the film is a flashback narrated by Maxton (though we don’t hear Mickey Rooney deliver a voice-over) which tells his story.

Maxton had served in the Korean War and ended up in a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Kansas City recovering from unspecified injuries, either physical or mental. (Today they’d be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, but MGM and screenwriter Allan Rivkin were probably well aware of the danger in stories about veterans with PTSD from the experience Raymond Chandler had put Paramount through on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. Chandler had wanted the killer in that film to be William Bendix’s character, severely damaged psychologically as well as physically from a brain injury he suffered in World War II, but when the Department of the Navy got word that Chandler had written that, they immediately threatened Paramount with withdrawal of their cooperation from any subsequent Paramount film – so Chandler had to write an abysmally unconvincing alternate ending.) Maxton has announced that upon discharge he intends to travel to Los Angeles and seek out a career as a jazz drummer, and to this end his buddies at the VA hospital have bought him a set of drums, which he tries out in a jam on Bob Carleton’s 1920’s song “Ja-Da.” Unfortunately, while he’s on the road to L.A. he and his car are run off the road by Sonny Johnson and his girlfriend de jour, and both the car and (more importantly for Maxton at the moment) his new drum set are totaled. No problem, Sonny insists to Maxton: he can give him a job in his enterprise, which he tells Maxton is an insurance business but it’s really a bookie joint. When the joint is raided by police (who break in through an absurdly flimsy door that looks like it was made of balsa wood). Maxton flees and gets into a car being driven by Jane. She takes him to her workplace, Fluff’s Dixie Land club on the Strip, where she introduces him to her boss, Fluff (William Demarest), who’s also its piano player. Eddie Muller said ordinarily this part would have gone to Jimmy Durante or Hoagy Carmichael, both of whom could really play piano, but Demarest had to fake it as best he could.

The house band is Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars (mistakenly billed as “Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra” in the opening credits, even though he’d broken up his big band four years before he made this movie) back when they really lived up to that name. Besides Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, they included Barney Bigard on clarinet, Jack Teagarden on trombone and vocals, Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass, and William “Cozy” Cole on drums. (For some racist reason, though MGM allowed Armstrong and Hines to show their Black faces on camera because they were stars, Shaw and Cole both had white guys doubling for them on screen. The same year MGM did the same thing to Charles Mingus, who played bass for Red Norvo’s trio in the Red Skelton/Ann Miller musical Texas Carnival, but when their number was filmed a white bassist doubled for Mingus on screen.) As luck would have it, Fluff’s previous drummer was just drafted to serve in Korea (the same war Maxton was just discharged from) and he needs a replacement in a hurry. At first glance playing drums for Louis Armstrong would seem like the sort of dream gig any musician would die for, but Maxton, who’s been working for Johnson for over a year and making twice as much money as Fluff can afford to pay him, hesitates. The next day he changes his mind and takes the gig so he can cruise Jane at Fluff’s, though Jane isn’t interested in him “that way” and tells Fluff to tell Maxton he has approval over any guy who wants to date a woman on his staff. Eventually Maxton and Jane do start dating, only she complains that what she really wants is a break to get into pictures. Maxton accordingly introduces her to Sonny, thinking he hosts enough parties for Hollywood bigwigs he can introduce her to someone who can jump-start her career. Actually Sonny has no intention of doing any such thing; he’s just stringing her along until he can get in her pants. Sonny takes Jane to such real-life clubs on Sunset Strip as Ciro’s and The Mocambo, while Maxton follows them around and is essentially stalking them.

Fortunately, along the way we get to hear a lot of great music from Armstrong and the All-Stars, including a marvelous medley of the pop-gospel song “Shadrack” (about the three Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to worship the Babylonian gods and were threatened to be thrown into a fiery furnace by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego actually survived the furnace because God protected them; the song had previously been recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1938, but that version had only featured Armstrong as singer with the Lyn Murray Chorus) and the traditional song “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When my husband Charles (who came home last night in the middle of the film) and I had watched it before, I had marveled at the remarkable trombone solo Jack Teagarden played on “Shadrack” in which he didn’t move his slide at all and controlled pitch only with his lips. I had misremembered the sequence; it occurs after the band has segued into “When the Saints Go Marching In” and it lasts for just one phrase. Even so, Teagarden was famous for never pushing his slide past the fourth of the seven standard positions (according to Teagarden himself, that was because he’d learned trombone as a child, when his arms were still too short to reach past the fourth position). The big featured song from the film was “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” which is actually introduced with William Demarest croak-singing it in a duet with Mickey Rooney (much the way the song “Silver Bells” from the movie The Lemon Drop Kid, also made in 1951, was introduced in a croak-sung version by Willliam Frawley!) and is then performed by Kay Brown as a singer at Fluff’s before Armstrong and company finally give it to us beautifully in the final scene.

After we’ve heard the story, the film cuts back to the sheriff’s station, where Maxton impulsively confesses to Sonny’s murder to save Jane from taking the fall, only he’s spared by a deathbed confession from Jane herself, who dictated her own account – she confronted Sonny at his place, they wrestled for his gun (not another “they both reached for the gun” gimmick!) and both got shot, him fatally; she managed to get back to her own apartment before she lost consciousness) – and lasted long enough to sign it before she finally expired from her wounds. It was this surprisingly downbeat ending that led Eddie Muller to call The Strip film noir even though until then there’s been nothing particularly noir about it either thematically or visually. Rivkin’s script was given serviceable direction by Laszlo Kardos (an Old Country friend of producer Joe Pasternack), though he “Anglicized” his first name to “Leslie” and that’s how he’s billed here. The Strip is quite a genre-bender, at once crime drama, whodunit, romantic comedy, and musical, with the musical elements consistently the best parts. Besides Armstrong and his All-Stars, the film features Monica Lewis, a blonde who doesn’t look at all Latina, singing a Spanish-language ballad called “La Bota,” and Vic Damone singing “Don’t Blame Me” by Jimmy McHugh (melody) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics). Vic Damone had a hit with the 1949 song “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” but it was also recorded by the incomparable Mel Tormé – and likewise on “Don’t Blame Me” he was competing with Sarah Vaughan’s record on Musicraft, which was far better and more sensitively phrased. I quite liked this movie even though there’s nothing truly great about it; still it worked a lot better for me than the far more highly regarded Chinatown did!

The American Revolution, part 5: "The Soul of All America" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, November 20) I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the major documentary Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt, The American Revolution: “The Soul of All America.” This episode covered the years 1778 and 1779 and covered the catastrophic winter George Washington and his army spent in the freezing cold of an abandoned ironworks at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania as well as the long-sought alliance between the U.S. and France. The French entry into the war on the American side (and the likelihood that Spain and The Netherlands would soon join them, Spain in hopes of regaining their former colonies in the West Indies they’d lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, and The Netherlands may have dreamed of retaking New York, formerly New Amsterdam, from the British) turned the American Revolution into a European conflict. The French sent a fleet of ships too big for American harbors and gave its command to Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who proved spectacularly incompetent. Defeated by the British Navy in their first sea battle off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed for the West Indies, where he tried and failed to conquer the British-held islands of St. Lucia and Grenada. Ultimately he was recalled to France after a coordinated attack by the French and American navies on the British position at Savannah, Georgia in 1780 also failed. D’Estaing was replaced by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who led the French participation in the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 that finally won the war for the U.S., and when he returned to France he was targeted by its own revolutionaries after 1789 and guillotined in 1794 largely due to his friendship with the deposed Queen Marie Antoinette. “The Soul of All America” also featured a segment on U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones, who sailed a barely seaworthy ship called the Bonhomme Richard (after the French title for Benjamin Franklin’s book Poor Richard’s Almanack) and staged a series of successful raids on British ships sailing to bring supplies to their embattled armies in America.

Most guerrilla campaigns by rebels seeking to regain control of their countries by foreign forces work by wearing down the willingness of the government of the occupying country to resist – the collapse of public support for the U.S. war in Viet Nam was the most obvious modern example – and the American Revolution was no exception. As the war dragged on and the British Parliament started to realize that the Americans wouldn’t be the pushovers they’d thought originally (much as the modern-day Russians have gradually realized that the Ukrainians won’t going to be the pushovers they originally thought), a number of Members of Parliament started to wonder just why they were putting so much money and resources into what was beginning to look like an unwinnable war. What’s more, the American Revolution was one that was dragging other European countries into alliance against the British, and it was threatening important parts of the British Empire, including not only the West Indies but also the port of Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile, the Americans were able to retake Philadelphia and return the Continental Congress there after its exile to an old meeting house in York, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most moving part of this episode was the sequence which depicted the roller-coaster ride the population of Philadelphia went through as the city went from American to British control and then back, and when Philadelphia finally went back to the Americans a number of the Loyalists that had sought refuge there fled to New York, which remained under British control until the war finally ended and the British withdrew. There was also a segment about the American campaign against the Native Americans throughout what later became known as the American Midwest, where American raiders got as far as modern-day Illinois before they were stopped by Native resistance and the anxieties of Colonial commanders who called them back to the main front. This part of the documentary reinforces the critique of Left-wing historians who point out that the rise of the United States was inexorably tied in with genocide against the Native Americans and the economic prosperity of a nation built on the labor of enslaved African-Americans.

The American Revolution, part 6: “The Most Sacred Thing” (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 21, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, November 21) my husband Charles and I watched “The Most Sacred Thing,” the sixth and last episode of the mega-documentary mini-series The American Revolution directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. “The Most Sacred Thing” dealt with the years 1778 to 1781 (when combat in the American Revolution effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia) and beyond, well beyond. Ken Burns and company chose to make The American Revolution at a time in our history when the whole question of whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerate into tyranny the way Plato said all democracies would is frighteningly open. Among the many events that call into question America’s future as a republic that happened during the six days PBS was airing this program were Donald Trump hosting Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, at the White House with full honors; him giving Ukraine an ultimatum that they must effectively accept his terms (which are basically the same as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s) for an end to the war or face the total withdrawal of American support; and his extraordinary threat to six sitting Democratic members of Congress (Senators Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and House of Representatives members Jason Crow, D-Colorado; Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio, D-Pennsylvania; and Maggie Goodlander, D-New Hampshire) that they should be tried, convicted, and executed for “seditious behaviour at the highest level.” The “crime” for which Trump wants them put to death was making a social-media video telling U.S. servicemembers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and indeed they have a legal obligation to resist them. Already I’ve received texts from Slotkin and Kelly asking me to respond by – guess what? – donating to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I’m sure Trump envies the power Putin and MBS (as the Saudi crown prince is universally called) of simply having their political enemies put to death without bothering with such niceties as due process and a criminal justice system.

The “Most Sacred Thing” episode of The American Revolution covered the period during which George Washington fiercely sought to coordinate his operations with those of the French officers and troops sent to bail out the Revolution despite the fact that they literally didn’t know each other’s languages – most of the Frenchmen sent to aid the American Revolution spoke no English and almost none of the Americans knew French. He also brought in the German Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to train his troops and give them a sense of real discipline. Von Steuben (who’s become so much of a hero to German-Americans they even hold “Steuben Day parades” in cities with large German-descended populations; one figures prominently in John Hughes’s teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) had been driven out of Europe for having seduced underage boys, and while I’m not sure whether his sexual activities would have been considered part of a Gay identity today, he was definitely attracted to his own gender. Steuben was bilingual in German and French, but the only English word he knew when he arrived was “Goddamn!” So he would swear colorfully in the languages he did know until the troops got the message that he disapproved of their screw-ups. Also the French expeditionary force sent to aid the Americans, the Expédition Particulière, was led by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and like the French officers assigned to command the navy (Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who had the job until 1780; and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who replaced him after d’Estaing bombed badly in a naval battle with the British on the open seas outside Virginia in 1780), he spoke barely any English. The person brought along to interpret for him was a Swedish diplomat named Axel von Fersen, who later became friends (and possibly more than that) with French queen Marie Antoinette. Unlike most of the French officers who helped win the American Revolution, Rochambeau narrowly escaped the guillotine when his own country erupted into revolt in 1789. He was actually scheduled to be executed when the so-called “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 abruptly brought an end to the Reign of Terror and saved his life, and he was rehabilitated by Napoleon, allowed to retire with honors, and died quietly in 1807 at age 81.

One of the fascinating stories about the American Revolution is that the cause was nearly lost because the U.S. Congress had no money to pay the troops, and therefore a number of them mutinied. Washington ended one mutiny by negotiating with the mutineers and getting them to re-enlist; he ended another by hanging the two ringleaders in full view of their followers and thus scaring the rest of the men into submission (which may be what Trump meant when he said of the six sitting U.S. Senators and House members he’s accused of “seditious behavior,” “Hang them! George Washington would”). The immediate crisis ended when the French arrived and paid off the restive American troops in silver coins instead of worthless Continental paper money, but even after the Revolution ended (with a 1783 treaty that, though it was negotiated in Paris, involved direct talks between the Americans and British that did not include the French, despite their decisive role in winning the Revolution in the first place), there were still mutinies. One of the most famous was Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 and was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. It was ultimately put down by a militia force led by another Revolutionary War commander, Benjamin Lincoln, but the spectre of civil war on top of what had already largely been a civil war (a number of battles in the Revolution featured Loyalist Americans fighting in support of the British Crown against their fellow Americans on the Patriot side, including some instances of brother against brother) led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Originally called just to revise the Articles of Confederation of 1778, which had created a federal government but a surprisingly weak one with no independent taxing authority, the Convention decided early on to write an entirely new founding document which became the Constitution of the United States. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention, and one reason the President was given such extensive authority was everyone at the Convention assumed Washington would be the first one. At the same time some of the people who later became the nucleus of the Federalist Party wanted an even more powerful executive: Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be elected for life (it was the biggest battle he lost at the Convention) and John Adams wanted a more royal-sounding title for the chief executive, which Washington successfully stopped. (At the same time I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the United States didn’t become a monarchy was Washington’s low sperm count. Washington never had children of his own, though one of his wife Martha’s sons by her late first husband called himself “George Washington, Jr.,” and you can’t very well start an hereditary monarchy with someone who can’t produce heirs.)

The saddest part of The American Revolution’s final episode was the treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans who had fought in the war on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides. A number of Black slaves who had joined the British army lured by promises of freedom after the war if the British won were ordered returned to their owners, and some fled to Canada rather than allow that to happen. As for the Natives, long-standing tribal alliances split over the question of which side would be better for them to ally with, and as I’ve noted in discussing previous episodes of the series, even while the war was still going on Washington and the other officers running the American army were promising soldiers “Indian land” in areas where there were still self-governing Native nations and which white Americans hadn’t conquered yet. At the same time, The American Revolution also challenged some of my ideas about the history of warfare, especially on the American continent. Some of the fighting forces in the American Revolution on the Patriot side included Black and white troops fighting alongside each other – a distinction that wasn’t repeated again in U.S. history until 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered an end to the segregation of the U.S. military that had required Black soldiers to participate only in all-Black units (under white commanders). The American Revolution was also the first war that involved trench warfare; I’d long assumed that Ulysses S. Grant and his fellow Union commanders in the American Civil War invented trench warfare, but not only were there American commanders in the Revolution who ordered their men to dig trenches, the final victory at Yorktown was achieved in part through two long trenches by which the American forces and their French allies were able to surround the British general, Charles Cornwallis, and force him to surrender.

Overall, The American Revolution was a fascinating program and aired at a particularly fraught time in U.S. history, when the nation is led by a rogue President who longs to be a dictator; the separation-of-powers scheme by which the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep that from happening has almost completely broken down (Trump essentially owns both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court, and they meekly do his bidding at least 90 percent of the time); he’s doing the classic dictator thing of ruling by decree through a seemingly unending series of “executive orders”; and by pardoning all the rioters who fought to keep him in power on January 6, 2021 even though he’d lost the 2020 Presidential election (and in some cases pardoning them again for crimes they’ve committed since his last pardon of them), he’s created a cadre of people who’ve already proven themselves willing to commit political violence on his behalf and proclaimed on social media their willingness to do so again. Reason enough that the six Democratic Senators and House members Trump directly threatened have had their security details increased, lest some maniac pro-Trumpers try to do themselves what Trump has so far been unable to do on his own, namely kill his so-called political “enemies.”

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "He Was a Stabler" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed June 12, 2025; aired November 20, 2025)

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

After The American Revolution episode “The Soul of All America,” I watched a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “He Was a Stabler” that rehabilitated the memory of Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joey (Michael Trotter), who’d been killed at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Off the Books,” by Julian Emery (Tom Payne), British-born psychopath and leader of a smuggling operation linked to a drug cartel from Syria. The Syrians are planning to fly in a shipment of a new, highly dangerous drug (were writers Edgar Castillo and Matt Olmstead thinking of the so-called “C-Fentanyl,” even more deadly than original fentanyl, here?) on a plane and are counting on Emery’s organization to be their American distributors. At the end of “Off the Books” Stabler and another cop skating on the thin edge of the law, Stabler’s old Police Academy buddy Detective Tim McKenna (Jason Patric), captured one of Emery’s right-hand men, Vincent Mathis (Paul Gorvin). They quickly debated whether to turn him in to their superiors for proper booking or kidnap him and subject him to what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture. At the beginning of “He Was a Stabler” they hold him in a secret location and Elliott pours lighter fluid over him and threatens to set him on fire if he doesn’t reveal the secret locations where Emery might be hiding. Mathis gets scared enough to give Elliott a list of 21 possible locations where Emery might be staying, and then Elliott turns that list over to his colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau. They’re able to whittle it down to one, but when the police raid it Emery had left just 15 minutes before – they can tell because he ordered a dinner delivered and then fled while it was still warm, and the delivery bag contained a receipt with a time stamp. There’s an odd scene in which Elliott visited his wife and child in New York and threatened to have the child taken away from them if she didn’t yield up Emery’s whereabouts, and needless to say she’s upset, calls his bluff, and throws him out of her apartment. Ultimately the police finally capture Emery after a gun battle between the cops on one side and Emery, his associates, and the Syrians on the other at the airport where the Syrians have flown in their drug cargo.

Elliott is ready to shoot down Emery on sight, but his nominal superior, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), an African-American (in the earlier episodes she was established as an “out” Lesbian, but we haven’t seen her romantically involved with anybody since her wife broke up with her in the second or third season, I forget which), talked him out of it and allowed Emery to be arrested normally instead. Then Emery boasts that he’ll be able to retire to his estate in Devonshire, England after his arrest, and an FBI agent comes in and announces that the federal anti-terrorism unit has cut a deal with Emery. In exchange for information that will allow the U.S. and its Israeli allies to bust the three top leaders of the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah, he’ll be allowed to return to England and serve out his sentence, whatever it is, under house arrest at, you guessed it, his estate in Devonshire. Elliott is predictably mega-upset at this turn in the case, and fortunately he’s able to stop it from happening via evidence in the form of a flash drive his brother Joey mailed to his family’s home before Emery killed him. The writing in “Off the Books” had made it seem like Joey had gone permanently to the Dark Side and been lured by Emery into taking part in his drug enterprise, but it turns out at the end of “He Was a Stabler” (explaining the rather clunky episode title) that he remained on the side of law and order after all. In fact, among Joey’s effects Elliott finds an uncompleted application to join the New York Police Department just like his big brother, which Joey abandoned when he realized his history of drug abuse would disqualify him. But he also carefully collected enough damning evidence against Emery that the FBI abandons its sweetheart deal with him (though we never find out just what the evidence is or why it’s so terrible the feds agree to let Emery be punished by New York’s authorities instead of protecting him), and in the end Emery is marched off to the untender mercies of New York’s criminal justice system and his story arc blessedly ends. I still don’t like the way the writers of Law and Order: Organized Crime have moved Elliott Stabler’s character from one willing to skirt the thin edge of the law to one whose quest for revenge (for the killing of his wife in the very first episode of Organized Crime to the killing of his younger brother in “Off the Books”) leads him to break it outright. Overall, though, this was a good episode and benefited from an especially sleazy and at the same time powerfully understated villain.

The American Revolution, part 4: "Conquer by a Drawn Game" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 19, 2025)

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

Last night (Wednesday, November 19) I watched the fourth episode of Ken Burns’s (and Sarah Botstein’s and David P. Schmidt’s) mega-documentary (12 hours over six straight nights on PBS-TV) The American Revolution. The episode was called “Conquer by a Drawn Game,” a title that comes from one of Thomas Paine’s later Revolutionary War essays, the same one in which he denounced ‘the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” who turned their backs on the war and walked out on it. (They had a perfect right to do that since most of them were militiamen who had enlisted for a limited time, usually one year, and were free to go once their term expired.) Paine was arguing basically the guerrilla war strategy before the term “guerrilla warfare” existed: wear down your enemy, avoid engaging in pitched all-out battles unless absolutely compelled to, fight skirmishes all over the place, and ultimately cause their country to lose the will to win so they withdraw and give you back peace. At the same time the Americans were in the sort of quandary that would later befall the British, our enemies in the Revolution and the War of 1812 and our solid (to the extent that any American alliance can be considered “solid” under the wild, mercurial, mistrustful leadership of Führer Donald Trump) allies since. While Winston Churchill was bravely carrying on about how the British would fight to the bitter end, he was secretly in communication with Franklin Roosevelt over whether and how the Americans would enter the war on his side, which he was well aware was the only way he could conceivably withstand Nazi Germany’s assaults long-term. Likewise the Colonial Americans in the 1770’s were aware that their only hope for a victory lay in winning one of the European powers to enter the war on their side – and the logical one to go after as an ally was Britain’s centuries-old enemy, France. The French were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Britain in the Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian War that cost the French their own North American colonies in Canada had been just a part of what amounted to a world (or at least a Western-world) war. They were anxious to strike back however they could against their traditional enemies, Britain and Russia, and one way to do that would be to help the Americans win their war of independence against Britain. But the French proceeded cautiously, understandably reluctant to go all-in to help an insurgency which seemed to be losing steadily as the Americans retreated from Fort Ticonderoga and its neighboring Fort Independence on either side of Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The French first opened their ports to U.S. merchants and then carefully provided arms to the Americans on an arrangement that anticipated the Lend-Lease program President Franklin Roosevelt would initiate, on shaky legal ground, to help the British in World War II while still maintaining America’s official neutrality. The battle that turned the tide for the Americans was one, ironically, on which British General John Burgoyne had pinned his hopes for ending the war altogether and forcing the Colonials to surrender: a three-pronged assault on Albany, New York. Unfortunately for Burgoyne, his three-pronged assault only was a two-pronged one in fact because General William Howe decided not to march on Albany but to send his forces south to conquer the rebel capital, Philadelphia. The narration, delivered by Peter Coyote from a script by Geoffrey C. Ward, noted that most European wars at the time ended when one country captured the other’s capital. Howe successfully took Philadelphia, forcing the Continental Congress and what there was of a national American government to retreat to a small town north of the city, largely due to George Washington making some of the same mistakes he’d made earlier in the battle of Long Island and the defense of New York. He overestimated the depth of the river separating the city from the British forces, and the British army was able to ford the river where the water was waist-high, sneak up behind the Americans, and catch them in a pincer movement on both sides. Meanwhile, Burgoyne’s strategy was to capture Albany and use it to isolate the New England colonies, which the British considered the heart of the rebellion, from the rest of the American territories. One thing the British didn’t realize was that their actions of offering enslaved African-Americans their freedom if they fought for the British and also enlisting the support of Native Americans backfired and solidified the support for American independence throughout the 13 colonies. It scared slaveowners and white settlers anxious to grab Native lands and made them more, not less, willing to support the Patriot cause.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the American Revolution was that it broke apart the Six Nations Confederacy of six Native nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora – in upstate New York that the framers of the Constitution would later cite as an example of how to make a confederation of independent states work. As explained here in Ward’s narration, the Six Nations Confederation was a forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Each nation would continue to govern itself as it always had, but they would regard an attack on one nation as an attack on all of them and mobilize to defend each other. The Oneida and Tuscarora aligned themselves with the Americans while the rest of the nations sided with the British. The Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, also known by his British name Joseph Brant, was the most aggressively pro-British member of the Confederation and recruited his own raiding parties to help the British in their battles. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Lafayette, the well-to-do heir of a major French noble family, decided on his own to help the Americans and use some of his family fortune to do so. He arrived in the U.S. on a ship he’d paid for himself – and, naturally, he was quick to point that out. He also helped pay for arms and uniforms for the American soldiers. Ultimately the Americans won a major victory at Saratoga in upstate New York, where in a battle in which Benedict Arnold was one of the key commanders (his later treachery to the American cause has so far eclipsed his earlier successes in the war on the U.S. side he’s basically been “unpersonned” in U.S. histories of the Revolution and his importance in battle after battle has been ignored) the Patriot forces seized Saratoga and surrounded Burgoyne and his men. The overall U.S. commander at Saratoga, Horatio Gates, was promoted after his victory and put in charge of the Continental Army in the South (where he led it to a major defeat at Camden, South Carolina in 1780 and never commanded it again even though after his victory at Saratoga he’d been talked about as a possible replacement for George Washington). He cut a deal with Burgoyne and the German general who had led troops in the battle, Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, to allow them to leave the U.S. and never return in exchange for their freedom, but the Continental Congress reneged on the deal and forced the defeated British and German armies on a long march stretching all the way to Virginia, where they were incarcerated as prisoners of war.

Saratoga was in many ways the turning point of the American Revolution; one British officer is quoted as saying, “The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone, and we now became fully convinced that they are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them, incapable of standing a regular engagement and that they would only fight behind strong and powerful works.” Word of the sweeping American victory reached France about seven weeks later – that’s how long it took for information to travel in an age before electronic communications of any kind – and it helped America’s ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, in convincing the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, that the American cause was a worthy investment for France. (Vergennes’ career is fascinating; before he was recalled to Versailles as foreign minister he’d been an ambassador to Sweden and Ottoman Turkey. He was recalled from his Turkish posting because he married his long-time mistress without King Louis XV’s consent and he hadn’t done enough to provoke the war between Turkey and Russia his boss, the Duc de Choiseul, had wanted. When Louis XV died and his son Louis XVI became king, Vergennes was rehabilitated and served first as foreign minister and then also as prime minister until his death in 1787.) Actually the Americans had sent two ambassadors to France, Franklin and John Adams, but the French were put off by the strait-laced Puritan Adams while they eagerly embraced Franklin, with his love of fine wines and women, as one of their own. In Ken Burns’s previous documentary on Franklin, he showed how Franklin became a celebrity, the most well-known American in the world at the time, and essentially charmed the French court into accepting his plea for an alliance with the nascent United States to help them win their revolution.

This episode also narrates how George Washington changed his mind about requiring his troops to be inoculated against smallpox when the Continental Army was so swamped with troops, many unknowingly carrying the disease with them. Before he’d hung back from requiring inoculations because he’d been concerned that the process would put the men out of action for weeks. It’s fascinating to note how far back the tradition of requiring American military enlistees to get inoculated or vaccinated runs, especially given the absurd accusations of various Right-wing conspiracy theorists (including, alas, Trump’s appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) that this was part of some sinister plot against the lives and health of American citizens. And it also mentioned how, when Washington finally realized that he couldn’t rely on a volunteer army consisting of militiamen and he would need to pay his troops something to keep them in the field, among the promises he made to them was the offer of “Indian land” – in parts of the country where the Natives still ruled and weren’t yet under the control of the American government. This is yet another indication (as is the official name of Washington’s force, the “Continental Army”) that the American Revolution was intended from the get-go as an imperialist struggle to build an empire across the entire American continent, not just a struggle about “taxation without representation.” One of the major ironies of the American Revolution is what it did to the French government whose support was crucial to its success; it drained the French treasury so dry that the French regime raised taxes on its own people so high that eventually they rebelled, overthrew the King and his royal government, and did so using the same sort of high-falutin’ rhetoric about “liberty, equality, fraternity” the Americans had used in their struggle.

The American Revolution, part 3: "The Times That Try Men's Souls" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 18, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, November 18) my husband Charles and I watched the third episode of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution, which he co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt from a script by Burns’s usual collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward. This was actually more than the first two episodes had been about the nitty-gritty of the war itself, particularly the battles in and around New York City that resulted in New York becoming the bastion of Loyalist (anti-Revolutionary) support for the rest of the war. Ward’s script was quite out front about the strategic mistakes George Washington made during the battle for Long Island and New York itself (though at the time “New York” was just a village of one square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan Island), including not guarding the Jamaica pass that the British were able to use to encircle the American forces, and moving most of his army to repel the attacks the British meant just as feints. The troops of the Continental Army started grumbling about how good they were getting at retreats, since the British had them on the run and gradually forced them out of New York City, New York state, and New Jersey until they reached Trenton, on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. About the only thing that saved Washington’s army was his successful mobilization of a fleet of whatever boats he could solicit, requisition or just plain grab to ferry his men across one of the rivers in an operation both Charles and I compared to the fabled British retreat at Dunkirk, France in 1940. When he finally got his men to safety it was already December 1776, and most of the troops under his command were militiamen whose enlistments were due to expire at the end of the year. This was one of the issues that bedeviled the American side throughout the Revolution; the Americans were relying on militias that didn’t consider themselves bound by military discipline and considered themselves loyal to their individual states rather than the entire U.S. Through two stirring speeches, Washington managed to convince most of his troops to stick it out for three months more.

The show also touched on the debate over the Articles of Confederation, which are usually dated from 1778 but which were actually discussed and fought over two years earlier. As it happened, the Articles of Confederation were being drafted and debated by the Continental Congress in the same building as the Pennsylvania legislature was drafting its own state’s constitution – and the radicalism of the Pennsylvania document, which among other things contained a Bill of Rights and guaranteed the right to vote to all adult white men whether they owned property or not, put off a lot of the delegates to the Continental Congress. (This probably reflects the view of the most famous Founding Father from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, who once joked that if a man owns a donkey, that’s considered “property” and he has the right to vote. Then, if his donkey dies, he loses his vote – so who held the franchise originally, the man or the donkey?) The Founding Fathers were in no way democrats: they equated democracy with anarchy and were quite specific that what they wanted the new nation to be was a republic governed by an elite political class. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, “[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

In the same document, Madison wrote that one of the benefits of a representative republic rather than a pure democracy was “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” (Ironically, one of the major anti-democratic provisions the Founders put into the Constitution – the Electoral College for electing the President – had exactly the opposite result from the one the Framers were seeking: the election of a pseudo-populist demagogue who lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral College and proceeded to govern in so wretched a way as to fulfill Madison’s dire predictions about the fate of democracies as well as Plato’s belief that democracy would always degenerate into tyranny because a democracy “will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.”) Regrettably, though the imdb.com pages on The American Revolution name the voice-over actors featured in the series (including major stars like Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Michael Keaton, Edward Nortun, David Oyelowo, and Liev Schreiber), they don’t identify them as to who voiced whom. And the talking heads (mostly historians, among them a few African-Americans and Native Americans to make sure their sides of the story are included) aren’t identified at all, which is a shame because many of them tell compelling stories.

I was especially struck by Friedericke Baer, a woman historian from Germany who mentioned that a lot of the German troops who fought in the Revolution on the side of King George III (himself of German ancestry, by the way; he’d succeeded his grandfather George II and was the first of the Hanoverian kings who actually could speak English) were themselves conscripts who resented being drafted to fight in a war in which they had no personal stake in the outcome. Indeed, the show pointed out that a lot of the Germans (many of whom were from the state of Hesse, which led to all the German troops being nicknamed “Hessians” whether they were from Hesse or not) ultimately stayed behind or returned to America and became immigrants, and eventually citizens, of the United States. The American Revolution is turning out at its midway point to be a quite interesting and surprisingly relevant look at both the founding myth of our nation and the reality as it was lived on the ground by those who fought (on both sides) as well as those who just stood by and waited for the dust to settle and the conflict to finish one way or the other. I recently reviewed an Intrada Records re-release of John Williams’s soundtrack music for Roland Emmerich’s film about the American Revolution, The Patriot, in which I wrote, “In a sense, The Patriot is about an old order dying and a new one being born – but not necessarily in the way you’d think. One of the recurring themes is the death of the old chivalric ideal of warfare, where both sides were led by gentlemen whose senses of honor put limits on what they could do to each other, and its replacement by the modern free-for-all in which anything literally goes and the distinction between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian’ essentially disappears.” Certainly the American Revolution featured war crimes, or what today would be considered war crimes, committed by both sides, as well as instances of what amounted to blacklisting by Patriot committees of people who were, rightly or wrongly, suspected of Royalist sympathies. People who’d been victimized by this process emigrated en masse to New York once the British solidified their hold over it and spent the rest of the war there.