Harlen Coben's Final Twist: Episode 1 (CBS-TV, aired January 7, 2026)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 7) I watched a rather grim opening episode of the new true-crime series on CBS, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, in which the well-known writer of mystery fiction will be telling true-crime stories every week. Of course there was the usual hype around Coben’s name – he was hailed as the best crime fiction writer in the world today, which he isn’t (I’d rate Jonathan Kellerman, Michael Connelly, and Lee Child ahead of him; I think Kellerman and Connelly are the best modern writers at keeping the noir fiction world alive, though I lost a lot of respect for Child when he agreed to let Tom Cruise star in the Jack Reacher movies even though Reacher was described as overpoweringly tall and Cruise, of course, is not). It was also ironic that the story Coben and his staff, including director Jeff Zimbalist, chose to tell for their first episode was already one that ABC’s 20/20 had done virtually two years ago (April 5, 2024). Nonetheless, it was a pretty grim tale: the murder in January 2012 of two young Tennessee lovebirds, Billy Payne, Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth, in the small town of Mountain View, where the crime rate is so low people routinely leave their front doors unlocked. The 37-year-old Payne and the 23-year-old Hayworth had met when they both worked for the same employer, and they moved in together and had a son named Tyler. The mastermind of their murder was a young woman named Janelle Potter, who had been in love with Payne and had never reconciled herself to losing him to Hayworth, especially once Payne and Hayworth proved the seriousness of their relationship by having a child together. CBS’s hype (as well as ABC’s two years ago) stressed the fact that Janelle Potter set up the whole thing through a series of increasingly hateful posts on social media, including ones she posted herself under the stolen identity of a mystery man named “Chris” who claimed to work for the CIA. “Chris” turned out to be Chris Tjaden, a man from out of town who’d worked as a local police officer but had never been with the CIA. He was an old high-school classmate of Janelle’s and that seems to have been how she chose his identity to steal and use to “catfish” her own parents, Marvin “Buddy” and Barbara Potter, into killing Payne and Hayworth. She also impersonated Hayworth on line and posted mock threats to her own life in Hayworth’s name.

This was presented as a story about the unique dangers of social media, yet I can readily imagine how the great noir writers of old could have told similar stories in a pre-social media age through anonymous letters or phone calls assuming someone else’s identities. One of the things that fascinated me about the show was its inclusion of actual interrogation footage, featuring an African-American Tennessee state investigator who for some reason looked a lot skinner and scrawnier in the interview footage shot by Coben’s crew in which he recounted the case than he did in the actual interrogation videos. Either he had a catastrophic health issue that drastically lowered his weight, or (as I suspect) the camera really did add 10 pounds (more than 10 pounds, judging by the looks of things) to his apparent weight. Also the Potters recruited Payne’s cousin Jamie Curd, whom Payne and Hayworth had tried to set up as an alternate boyfriend for Janelle, as a lookout and to help with the murder in case Buddy Potter, a Marine veteran who’d suffered from mobility issues, couldn’t do it all himself. Jamie eventually turned state’s evidence and got a sweetheart plea deal, while the three Potters were ultimately convicted and given double life sentences (though Barbara’s was later reversed on appeal and he agreed to plead guilty to “facilitation of murder” and have her sentence reduced to 15 years). To me the story was an object lesson in the evils of jealousy and the true tragedy lay in Janelle Potter’s inability to come to terms with having been rejected. There was also a twist in that the Potters were originally from Pennsylvania and had just moved to Mountain View, Tennessee two years before (though, oddly, Janelle in her interrogations had just as thick a Southern accent as anyone else in the case; she must have picked it up really quickly and thoroughly), and another twist in that Janelle Potter’s IQ was only 72, though given what she was able to do (to steal other people’s identities and mount this elaborate catfishing plot to get her parents and a young man who was genuinely in love with her to kill her rejected ex and his new partner while sparing their baby, who’s now being raised by a grandmother) it’s hard to believe she’s that unintelligent.

Bombshell (American Experience Films, PBS Western Reserve, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, January 6) I watched a fascinating special on PBS, an American Experience episode called “Bombshell” about how the U.S. government not only kept the existence of the Manhattan Engineering District (the official name of the World War II atomic bomb program, though it’s become colloquially known to history as the “Manhattan Project” even though none of the work took place in Manhattan or anywhere near New York City) a secret during the war but worked furiously to shape the public’s view of the bomb project after the war. The show was produced under rather odd auspices because, while its credits have the familiar American Experience logo, it’s not listed under either imdb.com or PBS’s own Web site. It turned out it was produced under the rubric “PBS Western Reserve,” apparently a sub-network of which I’d never heard before. The first half-hour is a capsule history of the origins of the Manhattan Project, including the discovery of atomic fission in Germany in the 1930’s that, at least according to director and co-writer Ben Lofterman, gave the Nazis an automatic head start in building a nuclear weapon. Actually the Nazis frittered away that advantage because of Adolf Hitler’s racism: he denounced nuclear science as “Jewish physics” and drove out a lot of Germany’s top nuclear researchers because they were Jewish. The show hits all the high points of this familiar story: the letter Leo Szilard wrote to Albert Einstein in 1938 expressing the fear that the Nazis would build an atomic weapon and imploring him to use his prestige to get President Franklin Roosevelt to authorize a crash program to build an A-bomb before the Germans did; the formation of the Manhattan Project in 1942 and the appointment of General Leslie Groves, who had just finished construction of the Pentagon and had brought the project in ahead of schedule and under budget, to administer it; Groves’s choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer to run the project’s scientific end; and the successful detonation of Trinity, the first working atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. Along the way Groves hired a New York Times reporter named William L. Laurence to handle public relations for the project, even though the public wasn’t supposed to know about it until the bomb was successfully deployed. Laurence was a fascinating character: he’d studied philosophy and law at Harvard and Boston University, but he never received a degree at Harvard because he kept defaulting on his student loans. (Lofterman says he was expelled for cheating; he took an exam in elementary German for a student he was tutoring.)

Laurence got a job on the New York World in 1926 and effectively invented the job of science journalist. Ultimately the New York Times hired him away from the World, and in 1940 he wrote a Times article, which the paper put on its front page, about the potential use of atomic energy in creating a super-weapon. Laurence was apparently hoping that his article would spark the creation of a U.S. atom-bomb program, but it didn’t. A copy did find its way to the Soviet Union, which took the hint and launched their own atom bomb program in 1942. (So much for the still widely believed myth that the Soviets couldn’t have made their own A-bomb and had to “steal” the secret from us!) In 1942 Groves hired Laurence and gave him carte blanche to stay at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was being developed. The price for Laurence’s access was total secrecy; he had to promise not to write anything about the bomb until it was actually used, and he kept his promise. Another condition of Laurence’s access was that he had to allow Groves’s censors to review any dispatches he did publish, and in particular to toe the official line that the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first two (and so far the only) cities in the world ever attacked with atomic weapons, came mostly or totally from the blast effects and not from the radioactivity released by the bombs, which as we now know turned into a “silent killer” that continued to strike down the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades afterwards due to increasing their risks of cancer and other long-term toxicities of nuclear radiation. This remained the U.S. government’s official line for decades afterwards, including those insane A-bomb drills in Nevada in the 1950’s in which U.S. soldiers were marched into A-bomb test sites right after the bombs had been detonated to show that nuclear weapons could be used tactically without any significant harm to the people marching in after they were used. (In fact the death rates among those soldiers from cancer and other radiation-related chronic diseases were well above the average for people of their ages, backgrounds, and overall health conditions.)

The crusading journalist who broke the myth was a young war correspondent named John Hersey, who was born in China to American missionary parents. He referred to himself and his fellow children of missionaries as “mish kids” and said they either excelled in whatever fields they entered or became hard-core alcoholics (nothing in between). In 1945 Hersey was already known as a World War II correspondent and author of the novel A Bell for Adano (1944), about an Italian-American major in Sicily who wins the admiration and affection of the townspeople of Adano. In 1945 he was approached by New Yorker publisher Wallace Shawn and editor Harold Ross to do a profile story on the Hiroshima bombing for the magazine. Hersey was skeptical at first, especially after the world’s fourth atomic weapon was successfully tested by the U.S. at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, but Ross and Shawn told him to go ahead with it and scheduled the publication for the first anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Hersey decided to focus on six Japanese survivors of the attack: Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, who ran a private hospital; Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, German-born Jesuit pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Roman Catholic church; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki of the local Red Cross hospital; and Rev. Kiyoshi Tanamoto, pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Methodist church. When Hersey started writing it, he thought it would be the average 7,500-word length of a typical New Yorker profile. Instead he kept on working until it was 30,000 words, long enough for a book, and to their credit Shawn and Ross not only decided to print it in full but to make it the sole content of the August 31, 1946 issue. It created a sensation when it first came out, largely because American readers had heretofore known about the atomic bomb and its results only from the sanitized version they’d got from William Laurence and other journalists approved by the government. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club premium selection when it was published in book form, and reportedly Albert Einstein tried to buy 1,000 copies from the publisher to use as warnings of the dangers of atomic warfare – only The New Yorker couldn’t sell him any copies because the issue had completely sold out. Hersey’s Hiroshima bothered the U.S. government enough that they directly commissioned a counter-narrative, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, credited to then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson but co-written with Harvard University president James Conant and others, including physicists who’d actually worked on the Manhattan Project.

Ben Lofterman’s Bombshell also profiled various other people who tried to get the truth out to the American people about how destructive the A-bomb really was, including Japanese-American photographer and reporter Yoshito Matsushige, who when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred on December 7, 1941 had been in Japan visiting his parents. Matsushige had continued working as a journalist in Japan and just happened to be in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 when the first A-bomb was used. He said he was so horrified at what he was seeing that he could take only a few photos of the devastation, and his pictures were confiscated after the war by the U.S. occupation forces and not released until the U.S. ended its formal occupation of Japan in 1952. Then he got his photos back and sold them to Life magazine, which published them as a major spread. Another one of Lofterman’s heroes was Charles Loeb, an African-American who worked for a Black newspaper in Cleveland and got unfiltered accounts of the destruction of Hiroshima from Black servicemembers who’d been ordered into the city to clean it up. Lofterman explains that one of the reasons General Groves and others in the U.S. military were so determined to downplay the radiation effects of the bomb was that they were worried it would be considered a chemical weapon, similar to the poison gas attacks that had been used to devastating effect by both sides in World War I and had thereafter been banned by the Geneva Conventions. (It’s ironic that Adolf Hitler, who had been wounded by a gas attack as a corporal in World War I, had no problem using gas against helpless civilians in the Holocaust, but firmly forbade the German military from using it in wartime.)

KPBS followed this up with an intriguing half-hour documentary called The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero – and Nuclear Peril Today, narrated by Peter Coyote (who’s familiar as the narrator of virtually all the Ken Burns documentaries since David McCullough gave up the gig) and telling the bizarre story of an all-star two-handed touch football game played in Nagasaki, Japan on January 1, 1946. This was a morale-builder for the Second Division of the U.S. Marine Corps, who were stationed in Nagasaki as occupation troops, and was held on the site of an old middle school which had been near Ground Zero whose athletic field could be adapted for the purpose. The Marines cleared the field and erected goalposts and bleachers out of scrap wood. They decided to make the game two-hand touch instead of tackle because the field was full of glass shards that couldn’t be removed to make a tackle game safe. That wasn’t the only tweak in the usual rules; they also specified that a team would have to gain 15 yards for a first down instead of the usual 10. The two teams were the “Isahaya Tigers” and the “Nagasaki Bears,” and both had former football stars as their captains: Angelo Bertelli, 1943 Heisman Trophy winner for Notre Dame, for the Bears, and professional star “Bullet” Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears for the Tigers. At the time Japanese athletes had already taken up baseball, but American football was terra incognita, and one of the motives behind the game appears to have been to introduce the locals to America’s other pastime. Young Japanese women were recruited to be cheerleaders, and a U.S. Marine band played during halftime. American servicemembers sat in the bleachers or stood alongside the field, while the Japanese watched from afar on hilltops.

The movie got into the “why” of the Nagasaki bombing, and gave me a piece of information I hadn’t known before: it’s the only time in U.S. history the use of an atomic weapon has been authorized at a lower level of command than the President of the United States. There was a lot of criticism, even at the time, that the use of one atomic bomb could be justified as a means of getting the Japanese to surrender but two bombs were beyond the pale. After that, President Harry S. Truman decreed that the U.S. would never again use nuclear weapons without the President’s specific authorization. For the rest of his life Truman would defend his use of the bomb against Hiroshima and would frequently get testy or even angry when it was questioned. He maintained that by using the bomb America had spared itself the need for a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland, which would have meant many times the death toll of the atomic raids. Ben Lofterman in Bombshell and the director of The Atom Bowl both questioned that and said the U.S. government had originally planned to keep dropping as many A-bombs on Japan as American factories could make, not to induce the Japanese to surrender but to soften them up and undermine their ability to resist a U.S. invasion. Also a number of Lofterman’s interviewees argued that the bombs weren’t the last weapons of World War II, but the first of the Cold War: they were used to show the Soviet Union that we were the new world hegemon and they shouldn’t even try to resist as the U.S. took suzerainty over the entire world. That didn’t happen only because the Russians developed their own bomb in 1949 – and I’ve long savored the irony that both J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, who headed the bomb programs for their respective countries, ran afoul of their nations’ political police forces and were officially disgraced.

Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames (Danny Gold Productions, 2024)

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

Two nights ago (Monday, January 5) I watched a PBS American Masters program on the late writer, director and (briefly) actor Blake Edwards called Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames. It was made in 2024, 14 years after Edwards died, and director Danny Gold chose to focus it mostly on the long-term relationship between Edwards and his second wife, Julie Andrews, whom he started dating in 1968 (after the breakup of their first marriages, Edwards to actress Patricia Walker and Andrews to set designer Tony Walton), married a year later, and stayed with for 41 years until his death. Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 26, 1922, and reportedly his father left his mother even before he was born. His mom, Lillian Grommet Crump, remarried to Jack McEdward, son of important silent-film director J. Gordon Edwards, and in 1925 McEdward moved his family to L.A. to work in the movie business. Blake Edwards recalled sneaking onto movie lots and playing amongst the false-front exteriors. He graduated from high school in 1941 and went for a career as a movie actor, of which he said later, “I worked with the best directors – Ford, Wyler, Preminger – and learned a lot from them. But I wasn't a very cooperative actor. I was a spunky, smart-assed kid. Maybe even I was indicating that I wanted to give, not take, direction.” I wrote about one of these credits, Frank Wisbar’s PRC “B” horror film Strangler of the Swamp (1945), and liked the film overall but said of Edwards, “Blake Edwards is a competent leading man, though he offers nothing here that would lead us to question the wisdom of his subsequent career change to writing and, ultimately, direction (and his presence here puts Rosemary La Planche one degree of separation from Peter Sellers!).” In between acting stints Edwards served briefly in the U.S. Coast Guard and injured his back, which put him in pain for years afterwards.

Edwards then decided to take up writing and made his reputation on the network radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, a vehicle for Dick Powell after his sensational success as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet. Richard Diamond, Private Detective ran from 1949 to 1953. Later Edwards developed a similar show for TV, Peter Gunn, which ran from 1958 to 1961 and spawned the iconic main theme by Henry Mancini. Edwards recalled that he wanted to work with Mancini after hearing his score for the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil (1968), and they worked together for decades after that. Mancini asked Edwards for permission to write the Peter Gunn score in jazz style, and Edwards happily obliged. Edwards also broke into feature-film direction with two of Columbia Pictures’ attempts to make stocky singer Frankie Laine into a movie star, Bring Your Smile Along (1954) and He Laughed Last (1955), but in 1959 he got his first foray into “A”-list filmmaking with Operation Petticoat, a World War II service comedy starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Edwards was mostly known as a comedy director, including the 1962 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. It generated the legendary hit song “Moon River” (which Hepburn sings in the film in her own voice; she’s not a great singer but her voice is right for the context and the song), though it also features an obnoxiously racist stereotype of an Asian landlord played (wretchedly) by Mickey Rooney. (Edwards later apologized for this.) In the early 1960’s he took forays into darker material like the Hitchcockian thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and the alcoholism drama Days of Wine and Roses (also 1962) with Jack Lemmon in one of his rare serious roles.

In 1963 he made The Pink Panther, which started out as a comedy about jewel robbery starring David Niven in a retread of the Raffles character he’d played a quarter-century earlier, but the character audiences remembered and wanted more of was the comically inept French Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers). Edwards and the Mirisch brothers, who’d produced the film for United Artists, spun off a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, also featuring Sellers as Clouseau. Later Edwards made a particular favorite of mine: The Great Race (1965), starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood in a light-hearted spoof of a real-life 1908 auto race from New York to Paris – westbound across the U.S., north through Canada and Alaska, over the Bering Strait’s natural ice bridge, then through Russia on the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway and finally across Europe to Paris. (I like to think of this as the “other” Jack Lemmon-Tony Curtis movie, after Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.) Oddly, The Great Race is referenced here only through brief clips of the famous pie-fight scene Edwards, a devotée of silent comedy in general and Laurel and Hardy in particular, inserted into an elaborate spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda as the race takes the central characters through Ruritania on the final leg of their drive to Paris. Edwards worked with Sellers again in The Party (1968), which took its lumps then and now for the “yellowface” casting of Sellers as an (East) Indian who crashes a Hollywood party. In 1969 Edwards’s career took a major nosedive with his film Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews (in their first direct collaboration) as a British music-hall entertainer in World War I who’s really a German spy. Danny Gold hails this film as a forgotten masterpiece (I haven’t seen it since it came out and I’m not sure what I’d think of it now) and particularly enthused over the opening shot, which shows Julie Andrews’s face as a pinprick on an otherwise black screen until the camera pulls closer and her face expands to fill the screen. Gold hailed that as hugely innovative when it was obviously a ripoff of the opening of the “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935.

Co-starring Rock Hudson, Darling Lili was a commercial bomb, and so was Edwards’s next movie, Wild Rovers (1971), a light-hearted Western with William Holden, Ryan O’Neal, and Karl Malden – which ran into a chainsaw when liquor tycoon Edgar Bronfman bought MGM. Bronfman hired James Aubrey, who’d previously had a rocky tenure as program director for CBS, to run MGM, and Aubrey set up his own cutting room and proceeded to re-edit most of the films being made at the lot, including Wild Rovers. After a few more financial disappointments, including The Carey Treatment and The Tamarind Seed, Edwards decided that his way back to bankability would be to revive the Inspector Clouseau character and make Pink Panther sequels: The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). Then he hit the jackpot with “10” (1979), starring Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, and Bo Derek as the perfect “10” woman over whom Moore’s character obsesses. Edwards and Andrews again collaborated on S.O.B. (1981), in which Andrews plays an over-the-hill actress whose director (William Holden) insists that she go topless in one scene. Their next film together, Victor/Victoria (1982), was another transgressive comedy, based on the German film Viktor und Viktoria (1933) and its British remake, First a Girl (1935), in which a woman (Julie Andrews) is picked up by a Gay man (Robert Preston) and trained to work as a female impersonator: a woman playing a man playing a woman. She attracts the attention of gangster James Garner, who falls in love with Victoria a.k.a. Victor even though he’s informed by his fellow gangsters that “the Mob don’t consider homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle.” Edwards confessed that he’d fudged things a bit by showing Garner’s character seeing Andrews’s fully frontal in a shower and therefore he knew all along that she was a woman. When he redid Victor/Victoria as a Broadway musical in 1995, with Andrews repeating her role, he took out this compromise.

I’ll give Danny Gold points for one aspect of this movie: he shows all of the Edwards/Andrews children – two (son Geoffrey and daughter Jennifer) his by Patricia Walker, one (Emma Walton Hamilton) hers by Tony Walton, and two Viet Namese girls they adopted after they found they couldn’t have children together – making a surprising degree of success out of being a “blended family.” He even includes some of the many home movies the couple took, though ironically they had two cameras at their wedding (a video camera up close and a film camera farther away on a hilltop) and both malfunctioned. Edwards even called on the officiant to do a retake of their marriage, but the second take didn’t come out any better than the first. I’ve enjoyed a number of Blake Edwards’s films over the years even though I don’t really consider him a great filmmaker, but I still liked this tribute to him even though there was a bit of special pleading about it as if Danny Gold were deliberately trying to raise Edwards higher in the pantheon of filmmakers than he strictly deserves.

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

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

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

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

Shelby toys with the idea of setting off the bomb in Hathaway’s head lest he be captured and tortured by the Chinese, but at the last minute Russian border guards (the Russians are actually on the side of good in this one, which is unusual for a Cold War movie; apparently Jay Richard Kennedy, who wrote the source novel, and Ben Maddow, who did the script, were aware of the tensions between Russia and China in the real world and did not lump them together as “the Communist bloc”) take Hathaway across the border after blowing out the Chinese fence with mortars. The scene of Hathaway escaping through mountainous countryside reminded me so much of The Sound of Music I started singing, “The hills are alive … oops, wrong movie.” Once Hathaway is back home he decodes the formula for the enzyme – which is just eight letters, representing the three key amino acids in it, though the models of the enzyme’s molecules look fearsomely complicated – in the pages of Soong Li’s copy of the “Little Red Book.” Shelby tells Hathaway that the U.S. government wants to keep the enzyme a state secret and not allow any other country’s farmers to use it, but Hathaway insists that the formula should belong to the world and he intends to contact journalists and release it to the press. (Presumably the bomb inside his head has been removed by then, since if it hadn’t been one could imagine a nihilistic ending in which Shelby would blow up Hathaway to keep him from releasing the formula.) Hathaway and Kay (ya remember Kay?) have their romantic reunion as the film draws to a close, fortunately without the seemingly endless roll of closing credits we’ve become all too used to in subsequent movies.

Directed by J. Lee Thompson, an all-arounder whose best-known credit is probably the original 1962 Cape Fear with Peck and Robert Mitchum, The Chairman is a reasonably exciting thriller, though it has its longueurs. Gregory Peck, who was born April 5, 1916 and was therefore 53 years old when he made this movie, must have felt a certain dèja vu about this movie since he’d made his film debut a quarter-century earlier in a similar role in Days of Glory (1944), described on imdb.com as “An heroic guerrilla group fights back against impossible odds during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.” Later he’d make The Guns of Navarone (1961), in which he played the leader of a commando team sent to blow up the titular super-weapons. Through much of the movie I was looking at Peck and wondering, “Has he fathered the Antichrist yet?” (He hadn’t: The Omen wouldn’t come in his filmography until 1976, seven years later.) And to briefly mention the reason I was watching this movie – the musical score by Jerry Goldsmith – it’s quite effective when he isn’t drowning it with plucked strings (the lead instrument in the Main Title theme sounded like a koto to me; it’s true that’s Japanese instead of Chinese, but the Chinese may have something similar) and whole-tone scales to denote “Asianicity.” (I remember my surprise when I heard Jessie Matthews’s 1930 record of Rodgers and Hart’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” – written for her for the stage and film musical Evergreen – and in the middle of the piece her arranger inserted a cornball “Asian” motif, obviously because Rodgers had written a whole-tone scale into the release and it was a Pavlovian conditioned response to arrangers back then that whole-tone scales signaled “Asia.”)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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