The Invisible Ray (Universal, 1936)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch a film, which turned out to be The Invisible Ray, made at Universal in 1936, directed by Lambert Hillyer from a script by Rain adapter John Colton based on an “original” story by Howard Higgin and Douglas Hodges. The stars were Boris Karloff – billed simply by his last name, in an era in which Universal was promoting him as “Karloff the Uncanny,” as if he actually were a scientifically or supernaturally created monster instead of merely an actor uncommonly good at playing them – and Bela Lugosi. The film was being shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of a night featuring the Karloff/Lugosi films, and the host, Alicia Malone, made an odd comment to the effect that the script cast Karloff as a psychopathic villain and Lugosi in a sympathetic role as the basically good, if tormented, man who tries to stop him. The reason that was an odd comment was that she said they usually weren’t cast that way, but they had been in their very first film together, The Black Cat (1934), in which Karloff was an even more florid villain than he is here and Lugosi a basically decent but discombobulated man who tries to stop his mad schemes. The Invisible Ray also anticipates the recent Black Panther Marvel comic books and movies in that they both posit that in ancient times a meteor landed in the middle of Africa that contained a super-powerful mineral (“Radium X” here, “Vibranium” in Black Panther) that can be used either for good or evil purposes. Karloff plays Dr. Janos Rukh, a super-scientist who lives and works in a crumbling old castle in the Carpathians (the last time Charles and I watched this movie I posted an imdb.com “Trivia” item which noted the irony that Karloff, actually an Englishman named William Henry Pratt, played a Hungarian, while Lugosi, who actually was Hungarian, played a Frenchman). He’s used his own telescope to track the progress of a meteor that left the Andromeda galaxy millions of years before and landed in Africa, and proposes an expedition to find it and recover the super-mineral it contained. There’s a major plot hole in that the animated scene which shows the meteor landing on Earth hitting land on the southwest corner of the continent in modern-day Angola or Namibia, but when the intrepid explorers – including Rukh’s reluctant wife Diana (Frances Drake), Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingsford), his wife Lady Arabella – a ditzy mystery writer (Beulah Bondi), and Lady Arabella’s secretary, Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton) – actually land in Africa it’s to the country of Nigeria, over 1,000 miles north of where we saw the meteor hit. Dr. Rukh leaves the camp of the others to go search for the meteor, taking along as his bearers a lot of hot-looking Black men from the casting directories of whom we get to see a lot of yummy topless shots, and he finds it. He dons a protective suit and is lowered into the pit where the meteor is wedged into a stone wall, and he uses archaeological tools to extract it. (This sequence was later used in a 1939 Universal serial, The Phantom Creeps, where Karloff essentially “doubled” for Lugosi since in The Phantom Creeps it was Lugosi’s character who was being lowered into the pit.)

Then he demonstrates the power of Radium X by fashioning a ray from it that literally melts a solid boulder overlooking the camp. Alas, one of his protective gloves tears and allows Rukh to be exposed to the full power of Radium X, which causes his face and arms to glow whenever he’s in the dark. He finds out how deadly this power is when he reaches out to pet his dog, and the dog dies instantly. Meanwhile, Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi), who’s come along on the trip to continue his researches in “astro-chemistry” and his belief that the rays of the sun can heal anything (he demonstrates this on a severely ill baby whom he cures, much to its mother’s joy), examines Rukh. Benet tells Rukh that the only thing that can keep him alive is a counter-serum made from Radium X the way an actual cure for radium poisoning had (at least according to this film) been made from radium itself. But Rukh has to take the counter-serum as an injection several times a day or his body will literally flame out and he’ll turn into a pile of dust as he dies. (It’s grimly ironic to see Lugosi handle the packet of syringes and ampules he gives Karloff given Lugosi’s own later history of morphine addiction.) In order to make Karloff appear properly fluorescent, Universal makeup genius Jack P. Pierce devised a phosphorescent makeup, but the special-effects cameraman, John P. Fulton (the man who’d made Claude Rains invisible in The Invisible Man), had a better idea. He insisted on doing it with special lighting alone, and it works surprisingly well even though there are moments in which the lights on Karloff’s arms go on or off split seconds either before or after the room lights change positions. Meanwhile, during Rukh’s long absences, his wife Diana has fallen in love with Ronald Drake (and Frank Lawton is surprisingly powerful in the role, especially given his performance in a similar part in James Whale’s Galsworthy adaptation One More River in 1934 – though I liked him better in that than the critics of the time; in my moviemagg post on it I said, “Critics generally praised it except for Frank Lawton, who was considered too young and immature for his role – though I think he’s just right for the part: a more charismatic, sexier performer like Cary Grant or Errol Flynn would have thrown off the balance of the story”). The other members of the expedition decide to go to a scientific conference in Paris to present Radium X to the world, while Rukh becomes more and more bitter about losing both his wife and credit for his discovery. He denounces them as thieves, and after he’s stopped back in Carpathia long enough to cure his mother (Violet Kemble Cooper in a beautifully honed performance) of blindness he suffered during one of Rukh’s father’s experiments – in essence he’s invented laser cataract surgery, and given that in 2023 I had successive laser cataract operations in both eyes and my vision dramatically improved, this part of the movie rang true for me! – he heads for Paris.

Rukh establishes himself in the French capital by renting a room from a Cockney woman – she explains her British accent by saying she moved to Paris with a Frenchman she married, who then died and left her the house – and when Benet announces a major reception after midnight during which he will demonstrate the miracle cures he’s achieved from Radium X, Rukhknow is determined to crash the reception. Of course, it’s all a trap to lure Rukh out in the open so they can capture or kill him, especially since he’s already murdered both Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens. Benet is convinced that Sir Francis’s eyes retained an image of the man who murdered him, which he can recover if he can get an ultraviolet camera – which the people just happen to have on the premises. He shoots a plate containing an image of Rukh’s face, which is something of a surprise given that Rukh is supposed to be dead. In fact he murdered a homeless person and then planted his clothes and papers on the body to make it appear Rukh died. But Benet drops and breaks the plate before he can show it to anyone else. Rukh crashes the invitation-only reception by accosting a fellow scientist named Meiklejohn (Frank Reicher) and giving him a knockout drug so he can purloin his invitation. Once inside he rather casually kills Benet with his lethal touch and plans to do the same to Diana, but despite their rather empty marriage (we get the impression that they’ve never had sex with each other, and she married him only because her father was working as Rukh’s assistant and on his deathbed he asked her to do so) he can’t bring himself to kill her. Along the way Diana and Ronald have married each other in the so-called “Church of the Six Saints” in Paris (actually the old set of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral Universal had built 13 years earlier for Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame), and Rukh has used the Radium X ray to melt down each of the six statues along the cathedral’s roof as he’s murdered the corresponding individual. I’m not sure how the filmmakers got the Production Code Administration to agree to a bigamous marriage, even though the parties don’t know they’re bigamists since Diana’s husband faked his own death. I suspect this is what got the Legion of Decency, the enforcement arm of the Roman Catholic Church in America, to slap the film with a “B” rating – “morally objectionable in part for all” – especially since the two leads not only made a bigamous marriage, they did so in a Catholic church. (Actually in a previous viewing Charles spotted a mistake in the wedding scene; they’re supposed to be in a Catholic cathedral but the text of the service, beginning with “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” is from the Protestant Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer.) Realizing that Rukh has become an uncontrollable monster, Rukh’s mother confronts him at the reception and uses her walking stick to smash Rukh’s last remaining supplies of the counter-serum. Without it, Rukh literally bursts into flames, crashes out of a window, and ends up as a pile of dust on the street below.

One enterprising Los Angeles theatre owner decided to add to the realism of this scene by setting off a smoke bomb and flash grenade off at the precise moment Rukh falls through the window, anticipating William Castle’s “Emergo” and “Percepto” gimmicks by over two decades. The Invisible Ray is a great movie, quietly and powerfully understated; as Charles noted, it’s also one without any supernatural elements. It’s pure science fiction, and Hillyer’s direction is quite subtle and restrained, a far cry from the several tops Edgar G. Ulmer went over in the 1934 The Black Cat. The Invisible Ray got Hillyer the chance to direct Dracula’s Daughter, which was originally supposed to star Bela Lugosi repeating his role in Dracula until the “suits” at Universal revamped the project and decided not to have Dracula appear at all. Hillyer would go on to direct the 1943 Batman serial, the first time the Caped Crusader made it onto the big screen and one of the two best Bat-movies ever made (along with Tim Burton’s near-masterpiece from 1989) and would end up in the graveyard of most “B” directors – series television, retiring in 1956 even though he lived until 1969.

The Lost World (Watterson R. Rothacker Productions, First National, 1925)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 19) my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of one of the most historically important films ever made – and one of the best. The film was The Lost World (1925), based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel about an eccentric man named Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) who is convinced that there’s a plateau near the Amazon river in Brazil where the dinosaurs never died out and are still alive to this day. He’s discovered an old diary from an American explorer named Maple White which contains his crude drawings of the prehistoric life forms White discovered there. Challenger insists that he personally saw the living dinosaurs, but all his records were lost when his canoe overturned in the Amazon on his way back. Naturally the other professors and members of his lecture audience scoff at him. Challenger insists that if he can mount another expedition to his Brazilian redoubt he can offer proof positive that there are living dinosaurs there. He gets financial backing from an unlikely source: the London Record-Herald, one of the newspapers that most eagerly discredited him. Record-Herald reporter Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes) has crashed Challenger’s lecture despite his ban on members of the media because his girlfriend, Gladys Hungerford (Alma Bennett), refuses to marry him until he goes on some sort of life-threatening adventure. Determined to get an interview with Challenger and a berth on his expedition, Malone follows him home and there’s a bizarre fight between them that verges on slapstick comedy. (Remember that Wallace Beery had got his start in films at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio.) When Malone discovers that Maple White’s daughter Paula (Bessie Love) is living in Challenger’s home and is eager to make the trip to Brazil to find her missing father (did Conan Doyle rip this off from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines?), Malone is able to sell his editors on the idea of financing the trip as a human-interest story. The crew also includes Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone), a veteran explorer with a May-December crush on Paula White; Prof. Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt), an expert on insects; Austin (Frank Fitch Smiles), Prof. Challenger’s butler; and a native bearer, Zambo (Jules Cowles), who’s depicted with the typical racism of the era. The expedition’s progress is illustrated by a cartoon of a model boat setting off from Liverpool to Brazil and a dark line showing the expedition’s progress up the Amazon – the sort of thing later parodied vividly by Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Victor Schertzinger in the Road movies.

When Challenger and crew finally get to the lost mesa, it’s a narrow promontory with a slope they can climb and a wide rock formation with a gorge between them. The explorers find a tree on the top of the promontory and chop it down so they can have a log bridge to walk across. Even before they make the crossing, they’ve already seen a Pteranodon (a flying dinosaur) in the skies above them, and once they cross they see a Brontosaurus lazily munching on the leaves of the trees. They’re also followed by an ape-man (Bull Montana) in singularly unconvincing makeup, who drops a rock on the party and comes close to killing one or more of them. Unfortunately, the Brontosaurus dislodges the log bridge, stranding the human party on the big mesa with no apparent way of escape. They witness the predatory Allosaurus (the Jurassic precursor to Tyrannosaurus rex, who lived later in the Cretaceous period) prey on various other dinosaurs, including Trachodons, Triceratopses, Monocloniuses, and Stegosaurs. The humans flee and take refuge in some convenient caves, in one of which Roxton finds the skeleton of Maple White, which he identifies from his pocket watch which is engraved with the initials “M.W.” and contains a locket with a photo of Paula. Ironically, Paula and Ed are confessing their love for each other just before Roxton arrives with the bad news. The Allosaurus knocks the Brontosaurus off the mesa and into a quagmire below. Then it turns out that the entire mesa is an active volcano, which blows just as all this is happening. In the film’s most thrilling sequence, there’s a stampede of Brontosauri as they try to flee from the eruption, unsuccessfully. The people find a network of hollows inside the mesa that allow them to escape, and Prof. Challenger hits on the idea of saving the Brontosaurus and building a raft with which to tow him back to London as proof positive that dinosaurs still exist. Unfortunately, the chains holding the Brontosaurus in place as it’s off-loaded from the raft break and the prehistoric creature wanders through the streets of London, causing the predictable havoc before it finally swims out to sea (remember that the original Brontosauri were amphibious). Paula White insists that Ed Malone must go through with his commitment to Gladys Hungerford, but it turns out he doesn’t have to because in the meantime Gladys has married a thoroughly milquetoast London accountant named Percy Potts (Leo White, later a frequent supporting player in The Three Stooges’ shorts) who looks like a contestant in the Monty Python “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition. So Ed and Paula get together after all and Roxton looks on sadly as a passer-by comments, “There goes Sir John Roxton – sportsman.”

Though Harry Hoyt is credited with “dramatic direction,” the real auteur behind The Lost World is its special-effects genius, Willis H. O’Brien. Born in Oakland, California in 1886, O’Brien caught the moviemaking bug early, though in a special and unique way. He pioneered the art of stop-motion animation, a way of making models appear to move on screen by taking one frame of film, moving the model slightly, taking another frame, and so on until a convincing illusion of life was achieved. O’Brien begun by making clay models of boxers in a variation of the process that is now called Claymation, but soon he took an interest in bringing the dinosaurs and other prehistoric life forms back to life with his model process. Harold Wobber, an exhibitor in San Francisco, saw a 90-second test O’Brien made with this process and hired him to make a novelty short called The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915), which proved so successful that the Edison company hired him to make similar novelty reels with titles like R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. and Prehistoric Poultry. In 1918 O’Brien connected with producer Herbert M. Dawley to make a three-reel short called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, but Dawley tried to take credit for inventing the stop-motion process himself. O’Brien next hooked up with another independent producer, Watterson R. Rothacker, who had bought the screen rights to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and figured O’Brien’s technique was good enough to dramatize the dinosaurs as part of a feature-length film. In 1922 Rothacker and O’Brien had completed a 10-minute test reel which was shown to an audience in New York with Conan Doyle introducing it from the stage. “These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic, because everything that emanates from the human brain or the human spirit is psychic,” said Conan Doyle – who was already getting ridiculed for his belief in spiritualism and psychic phenomena. “It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I must say, comes from me – the materializing power from elsewhere.” A New York Times reporter wrote that Conan Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.” After Conan Doyle read that article, he issued another statement acknowledging what the images were – and O’Brien’s former producer, Herbert Dawley, announced he was going to sue O’Brien for stealing a process Dawley had invented.

Watterson Rothacker cut a deal with First National Pictures to co-produce The Lost World – an unusual arrangement in 1925, though it would become the way most major films were made once the all-inclusive studio system gradually met its demise in the early 1950’s. First National’s publicity claimed that the film had taken seven years to make and cost over $1 million. This included building a set representing two blocks of London that was one-eighth of a mile long. Bessie Love, in an unpublished autobiography called Love from Hollywood, recalled that the “Amazon” was played by an open-air Los Angeles sewer that predictably stank to high heaven. She also recalled the then-new experience of having to flee in terror from a menace that didn’t exist because it would be added later in post-production. She praised the patience of Harry Hoyt: “In place of yelling, ‘Run!,’ when the prehistoric animals started chasing us, Mr. Hoyt explained in detail why we should run; namely, the tyrannosaurus [sic] was a carnivorous dinosaur. The animals were not actually on stage … it was double exposure. It didn’t really matter if you called them Joe, Gus, and Heimie as long as you looked terrified and scampered.” To create the effect of the Brontosaurus rampaging through the London streets, O’Brien and his technicians animated it against a stark white background so that both a negative and a positive could be made. The negative, which showed the beast as a clear hole against a black background, was used to mask out the parts of the image in which the dinosaur would appear in the finished film. In their book The Making of King Kong, Orville Goldner and George M. Turner wrote that in 1925, “Audiences and critics were so wild about the dinosaurs they were willing to tolerate the long and unexciting portions dealing with a standard romantic situation.” The original running time was nearly two hours, but for years the only prints of The Lost World in existence were of an hour-long cut-down version produced by Eastman Kodak under license from First National for home-movie showings. Various attempts were made to restore The Lost World, including a laserdisc version produced by the George Eastman House in 1997 with production stills used to fill in the missing scenes.

Charles and I had previously seen the hour-long version, but when we watched The Lost World on October 19, 2025 it was in a 100-minute cut created by Lobster Films in association with Flicker Alley and Blackhawk Films. This restoration was completed in 2016 and involved no fewer than 11 film archives, each contributing scenes from partially extant prints to fuse into a whole that came as close as possible to what 1925 audiences saw. Though the film was saddled with a rather anemic score by Robert Israel – when the audience assembled to watch Professor Challenger give his triumphant lecture announcing the arrival of a living Brontosaurus in London, Charles said he wished we were hearing the march from O’Brien’s next project, King Kong (1933), instead – the extra footage made The Lost World a much better movie than the cut-down one we’d seen before. O’Brien’s triumph in bringing The Lost World and its dinosaurs to life should have led him to a much happier career than he had. The rest of his résumé would be filled with unrealized projects, including a Lost World sequel; a version of Frankenstein in which the Monster would have been played by a stop-motion model; an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods; a partially shot 1930 project called Creation which would have reunited him with Harry Hoyt; a 1942 film called Gwangi in which prehistoric monsters would have been discovered on an Argentine plateau (later filmed in 1969 as The Valley of Gwangi with effects by O’Brien’s great disciple, Ray Harryhausen, and the setting moved to Mexico); and a potentially fascinating story called War Eagles in which an expedition to the Arctic discovers giant eagles that, because they’re living beings instead of metallic creations, prove useful when the U.S. is attacked by an enemy that has an infernal device that instantly fatigues metal. In 1930 O’Brien was working on Creation when David O. Selznick, newly appointed production head at RKO, hired documentary filmmaker Merian C. Cooper as his assistant. Cooper was assigned to review all the projects RKO was then involved with and make recommendations to Selznick as to which should be continued and which scrapped. Cooper nixed Creation as “just a bunch of animals walking around,” but he ordered O’Brien and his crew kept on salary because Cooper had had in mind a story about a giant ape running loose on the streets of New York City. Cooper saw O’Brien’s stop-motion process as a financially viable way to film his giant-ape story, and the result was King Kong (1933), a timeless classic, one of the most iconic movies ever made, and the film on which Willis O’Brien’s reputation rests.

Black Tuesday (Leonard Goldstein Productons, United Artists, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 18) I watched an unexpectedly interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” featuring Eddie Muller as host: Black Tuesday, a 1954 “B” from Leonard Goldstein Productions, released through United Artists. Before the film Muller explained that its star, Edward G. Robinson, had become disgusted with the one-dimensional gangster roles he got again and again at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s. He’d wanted roles with more depth, and he got them at Warners when he took over the biopics after Paul Muni left the studio and got to play pioneering microbiologist Paul Ehrlich and news-service founder Julius Reuter. Then in the 1940’s he entered the noir universe with his good-guy role in Double Indemnity and then made a series of films noir in which he got to play milquetoast middle-aged men led into the noir underworld by femmes fatales, mostly played by Joan Bennett: notably Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. By the early 1950’s Robinson had got caught up in the Hollywood blacklist, and though he’d testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and gone through the humiliating ritual of naming names of other Leftists in Hollywood to be fed into the HUAC maw, he still was on a “greylist.” He was no longer up for major roles and had to revert to playing the stereotypical gangster parts he’d tired of in films like this one, though just as Black Tuesday was wrapping Cecil B. DeMille, one of Hollywood’s most prominent Right-wingers, got Robinson taken off the greylist so he could play Dathan in The Ten Commandments. Black Tuesday was an engaging film directed by Hugo Fregonese (who was born in Argentina, had come to Hollywood in 1950, worked here for five years and left to direct in Europe after Black Tuesday was finished) from a script by Sydney Boehm, best known for The Big Heat and Rogue Cop.

The central premise is certainly unique and different: Vincent Canelli (Edward G. Robinson) and Peter Manning (a surprisingly authoritative Peter Graves) are both scheduled to be executed the same night. Canelli is to be put to death for orchestrating 17 murders in his role as a gang boss (both the city and state are carefully unmentioned, though we know it’s not California because the electric chair is being used instead of California’s usual method, lethal gas; still, the exterior shots of the prison look an awful lot like San Quentin), while Manning is a bank robber who killed someone in the course of a robbery. Before he was arrested he stashed the $200,000 he stole in an undisclosed location. The governor’s office makes him an offer of a 10-day reprieve if he’ll tell them where the money is, but he refuses and won’t do it for anything less than a full commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment. The gimmick is that on the night they’re both supposed to be executed, they escape through a well thought-out plan led by Canelli’s girlfriend, Hatti Combest (Jean Parker, who a decade earlier had been in an even better Death Row movie, Lady in the Death House). One of the prison guards learns that his daughter has been kidnapped on the eve of the execution, and the ransom for her safe return is letting one of the crooks in Canelli’s employ impersonate him on execution night. Another execution attendee, local reporter Frank Carson (Jack Kelly), is also waylaid by the gang, who force him to give them the ticket admitting him to watch and cover the execution so one of them can go in his place. (There’s a plot hole here: the impersonation wouldn’t have worked if the paper had sent their regular reporter in, but the editor had decided just by coincidence to send a younger man in instead to get a fresh perspective on the execution.) The crooks take out their guns and get not only Canelli and Manning out but three other Death Row inmates, including a Black man who opens the movie singing a song by Robert Parrish called “Black Tuesday Blues,” but Canelli orders his getaway car stopped in the middle of nowhere and pushes them out to almost certain recapture and/or death. The crooks have arranged to hide out in a storage warehouse, and as a precaution they’ve taken five prison staff members, including Dr. Hart (Vic Perrin) and Father Slocum (Milburn Stone), as hostages. The cops trace them to the warehouse and the second half of the movie is an extended shoot-out sequence in which the crooks threaten to murder the hostages at half-hour intervals unless the cops allow them to get away.

One thing is that Manning was wounded in the original shoot-out at the prison and Canelli is worried that he’ll die without telling Canelli where he stashed the bank loot, which Canelli is counting on to finance their ultimate flight out of the U.S. So Canelli orders the doctor to operate on Manning, telling him to use whatever medical equipment was stashed away in the storage warehouse by medical professionals who’d used it before. The kidnapped daughter of the guard, Ellen Norris (Sylvia Findley), is also among the captives. Thematically Black Tuesday is an old-fashioned gangster movie without the moral complexity of a true noir – the closest it comes is a haunting close-up of Canelli reacting as his girlfriend Hatti is shot to death by the cops, and Robinson’s skill as an actor is good enough to let us know that he really loved this woman and wasn’t just using her as a sexual convenience the way most movie gangsters do with their “molls.” Visually, however, Black Tuesday is as noir as all get-out; Stanley Cortez is the cinematographer (he went on from this movie to the monumentally overrated The Night of the Hunter), and he shoots it all in chiaroscuro shadows and oblique camera angles. According to Eddie Muller, Black Tuesday was the first movie shot with Kodak’s new Tri-X black-and-white film, which had just been introduced and gave higher-contrast images at lower levels of light. Director Hugo Fregonese, who three years earlier had made Val Lewton’s last film (and only one in color), Apache Drums (1951), keeps the tension going and turns in a riveting movie that one of Eddie Muller’s friends described as “a kick straight into the solar plexus.” The original ads for the film said that Edward G. Robinson was tougher and nastier than audiences had ever seen him before, which is largely true; the film is summed up, in a way, in a late dialogue exchange in which Father Slocum tells him, “I thought there was some good in you I could awaken, but there isn’t. You’re pure evil!” Black Tuesday is a genuinely tough movie that is thrilling to watch even though it offers none of the moral complexity basic to film noir, and it was surprisingly good given when it was made in Robinson’s career and what was happening to him in his personal life, mostly in an expensive divorce settlement that had forced him to sell his prized collection of Impressionist art as well as the career barriers from the HUAC inquisitors. It shows that he was still a good enough professional to play this sort of snarling gangster stereotype even though he’d got disgusted with these roles long before, and to play it with an extra soupçon of menace; though the films aren’t really comparable, one could make the case that Black Tuesday did for Robinson what White Heat did for James Cagney: push his usual gangster stereotype into new heights of psychopathology.

Andrew Young: The Dirty Work (Surprise Inside Films, Left/Right Productions, MS-NBC Films, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched the premiere of a documentary on Andrew Young called Andrew Young: The Dirty Work. Andrew Young was born in New Orleans on March 12, 1932, went to Howard University (the most significant of the historically Black colleges and universities; among its many illustrious graduates were Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris), got a doctorate of divinity from a Northern seminary named Dillard in Connecticut, and was assigned to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama. He’d grown up admiring Jesse Owens and had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete himself, but the leaders of his church told him that either he took the assignment to pastor the church in Marion or they’d have to close it. While in Marion he met his first wife, Jean Childs (they stayed together until she died of cancer in 1994 and he remarried to Carolyn McClain two years later), and became interested in Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of achieving social change without resorting to violence. In 1960 Young joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization formed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to advance the cause of civil rights and equality for African-Americans without violence. Young became a personal assistant to King, and the title of this documentary came from the way King assigned him to do the “dirty work” of keeping the movement going administratively. Young was often criticized for not participating in civil disobedience and getting himself arrested along with King and the other SCLC leaders, to which he responded that someone had to stay outside and be a liaison between the leaders who had been arrested and the supporters outside as well as the media. Young finally lost his arrest virginity in Saint Augustine, Florida, when he tried to intervene between police and a group of Black children who were doing a pretend protest march. The police went ahead and arrested the kids, and took Young into custody as well.

Young was active in the 1963 confrontation in Birmingham, Alabama in which racist police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor turned fire hoses on nonviolent Black protesters and created images that shocked the world. He also took part in the protests in Selma, Alabama in 1965 that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Blacks to participate in the electoral process relatively equally until its gradual step-by-step dismantlement by the radical-Right revolutionary majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court. And Young was with King when he was killed; they’d literally had a pillow fight in King’s room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee just minutes before King stepped out on the balcony and got shot to death. King’s murder derailed his plans for a “Poor People’s Campaign” which involved a mule train traveling by wagon to Washington, D.C. and staging a camp-out to create a so-called “Resurrection City.” This was King’s idea to bring back the Black and white constituencies that had won the great victories of the civil rights movement only to splinter under the influence of so-called “Black Power” activists like Stokely Carmichael (seen here in archival clips), who not only rejected the doctrine of nonviolence but actively discouraged white participation in the movement. They took overly seriously the writing of Martinique-born pan-African activist Frantz Fanon, who said, “The liberation of oppressed people must be the work of the oppressed people themselves.” The Black Power advocates seized on this idea and declared that the liberation of oppressed people must only be the work of oppressed people themselves, which sounded good in theory but ignored the reality that African-Americans are an oppressed minority and their only hope for equality was, among other things, winning the goodwill of sympathetic white people.

As King got older he became convinced that African-American oppression was just a part of a broader system of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign was to dramatize this and build a coalition of poor people of all colors. After King’s death the Poor People’s Campaign went ahead as scheduled but without his charismatic leadership and appeal to white Americans, and it soon degenerated into a rather squalid campground whose political point was largely lost. (In a way the Poor People’s Campaign was a forerunner of the Occupy movement of the early 2010’s.) After King’s death, Young drifted for a bit until singer and activist Harry Belafonte convinced him that the next logical step for the movement and its staff was to start running for elective office themselves. Accordingly he ran for Congress in 1970 and lost, largely due to a bizarre statement he made on camera that he wouldn’t mind seeing the destruction of Western civilization if that would mean a better replacement that would achieve true equality for all people. He tried again in 1972 and won, serving until 1977 when newly elected President Jimmy Carter appointed Young ambassador to the United Nations. Young helped broker Carter’s effort to get Israel and Egypt to recognize each other and arranged a transfer to Black rule in Zimbabwe, nèe Rhodesia. But he touched the third rail of American politics when in 1979 he met secretly with Zuhdi Labib Terzi, who’d been appointed U.N. representative of a putative Palestinian state, and thereby alienated Israel. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance gave Carter an ultimatum – either Young would resign or Vance would – and Carter, apparently to his later regret, chose Vance over Young. In 1981, on the urging of many of his associates, including Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta, Young ran for Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia on a platform of increasing investment in Atlanta, making the city a banking center, and ensuring that women and people of color were given a fair chance at the income these investments would generate.

In 1990 Young, after losing a Democratic primary for the governorship of Georgia (a story not told in this documentary), headed the Atlanta Olympic Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games, which Atlanta won over the early favorite, Athens, Greece (the sentimental choice because Athens had been the site of the first modern Olympics in 1896, 100 years earlier). Young headed the Olympic Committee and was in that job when a terrorist planted a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park which went off, killing two people and injuring about 100 others. Young had just left Centennial Park when the bomb exploded, along with most of the crowd that had attended a concert there, and the incident became notorious because Richard Jewell, a security guard who had spotted the bomb just before it went off, was accused of planting it. The actual bomber turned out to be Eric Rudolph, a white terrorist who set off three subsequent bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham before he was finally caught in North Carolina in 2003. Former FBI executive Chris Swecker, who participated in the case, recalled that Rudolph’s motives were what’s become the all too typical rag-bag of Right-wing terrorists: “He had borrowed ideas from a lot of different places and formed his own personal ideology. He clearly was anti-government and anti-abortion, anti-Gay, ‘anti’-a lot of things. The bombings really sprang from his own unique biases and prejudices. He had his own way of looking at the world and didn’t get along with a lot of people.”

Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was an unusual documentary about this sort of person because it didn’t feature any talking heads speaking about Young: just a steady narration by Young himself and various archival clips of people who featured prominently in his life, including Martin Luther King. It was divided into two sections; the first hour dealt with his work with King and ended with King’s assassination, and the second started with the 1996 Atlanta bombing and proceeded backwards to tell the story of Young’s political career. It avoided any depiction of what Young did after the 1996 Olympics, including serving as president of the National Council of Churches from 2000 to 2001, and working with a controversial group that attempted to whitewash Wal-Mart’s image and encourage Black people to shop there, Confronted by activists who accused Wal-Mart and other big chains of driving independent stores out of business, Young responded bitterly in a Los Angeles Times interview, “You see those are the people who have been overcharging us, and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, and now it's Arabs.” Andrew Young: The Dirty Work was a well-made documentary even though it told mostly the “white legend” of Young’s career.

Live at the Belly Up: Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2025)

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

Later last night (Friday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an entertaining Live at the Belly Up episode featuring local musician Sue Palmer and her Motel Swing Orchestra: Sue Palmer on a Korg electric keyboard; Liz Ajuzie, lead vocals; April West, trombone and second vocals; Jonny Viau, tenor and baritone saxophones; Steve Wilcox, electric guitar; Pete Harrison, upright acoustic bass (he was previously a bass guitarist and he learned the stand-up bass specifically for this band); and Sharon Shufelt, drums, who also suggested the band’s name. They played 11 songs during the course of the one-hour set, and while I was a bit disappointed that only the opener, Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk,” was an instrumental, Ajuzie is an excellent blues shouter and a far subtler singer than Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, who’d played the show two weeks ago. She’s also a Black woman who dyes her hair blonde, and while I usually don’t like that look (the only Black women who I thought looked attractive as blondes were Beyoncé and my sister-in-law Taun), she pulled it off well enough and her looks certainly didn’t take away from the legitimate power of her singing. Palmer’s repertoire was an appealing mix of old blues covers and originals in the jump-blues style. After “Blues Walk” she did “Roll ’Em,” which didn’t sound like Mary Lou Williams’s famous 1937 song of that title but was an appealing boogie blues with a strong vocal by Ajuzie. Then they did “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” a song with an unusual history; it was originally a country lament by Dale Robertson and Jack Rollins that was recorded by Hank Snow in 1954 and became the number one country song of that year. Then Dinah Washington got hold of it and turned it into hard-core blues, and not surprisingly that was the version on which Palmer and her band based their cover.

After that they did a song called “Reelin’ and Rockin’” by late 1940’s singer, songwriter, bandleader, and drummer Roy Milton. Milton was one of the pioneers in the transition of Black music in the late 1940’s from rhythm-and-blues into rock ‘n’ roll, and Palmer announced she was doing it as a tribute not only to Milton but his piano player, Camille Howard (a woman who had a hit on her own with a 1948 instrumental called “X-Temporaneous Boogie”). Her next song was “I Put a Hex on You,” an original by Palmer’s former musical associate, the late Candye Kane. While it was hardly in the same league as the song that was clearly its inspiration, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” it was a fun number and a nice tribute to Kane. Then we got some Palmer originals, including “Swango” (which Palmer explained was a combination of “swing” and “tango” and therefore would not be easy to dance to), “Looking for a Parking Place” (an ironic number that ends with the punchline that the Belly Up Tavern in San Marcos is actually an easy place to find a parking space), “Have Yourself a Ball,” “Do I Move You?,” and the closer, “Ooh Wee Sweet Daddy.” Between “Swango” and “Looking for a Parking Place” they played a song which Palmer announced as a medley of George Gershwin and Thomas “Fats” Waller. The Gershwin song turned out to be “I Got Rhythm” and the Waller piece was neither “Ain’t Misbehavin’” nor “Honeysuckle Rose,” his biggest hits, but “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” a great ditty about a house party being raided by the police. Palmer said in her interstitial interviews that the purpose of a Motel Swing Orchestra show is to give the audience a fun time and a chance to dance. She recalled that during the swing-music revival of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s she drew a lot of so-called “swing kids” to her audiences because she played the kind of music they could dance to – though what the “swing kids” were listening to had little to do with the music of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or Les Brown, as Brown himself complained about in an interview in his later years. It actually sounded more like the “jump blues” style popularized by Louis Jordan in the mid-1940’s and an important benchmark in the transition of Black popular music from jazz to rhythm-and-blues and the forerunners of rock ‘n’ roll (which Jordan bitterly denounced as “just rhythm-and-blues played by white people”).

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Clickbait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, October 16) I watched three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows in a row, including a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “Clickbait,” that turned out to be one of their very best recent episodes. It begins with a scene in which a school bus full of kids out for a field trip is hit by a car and crashes. One of the girls on the bus, Penny Wilson (Vaughan Riley), starts hemorrhaging in the hospital and nearly dies from her injuries. Later it turns out that she was eight months pregnant until the shock of the accident caused her to have a miscarriage. The SVU detectives find that sexually explicit photos of their victim have been circulating among her schoolmates, many of which show her in compromising positions with the school’s music teacher, a 32-year-old who was driven out of a previous school assignment by accusations that he was sexually inappropriate with a student. Of course the cops suspect Huxley is up to his old tricks again (in more ways than one), but he protests his innocence – and the medical examiner orders DNA tests that prove that Huxley was not the father of Penny’s unborn child. The actual father was Bryce Cole (Jon Martens), a schoolmate who broke up with Penny shortly after he knocked her up, and his new girlfriend, Haley (Alayna Martus), put him up to downloading an AI program to generate fake images of Penny exposing herself and having sex with her music teacher in order to humiliate her. The cops decide to prosecute the creator of the AI program Bryce used, Daniel Huxley (Matias de la Flor), for producing child pornography and allowing its dissemination. They actually win a jury verdict against him after his former business partner, Samit Junger (Owais Ahmed), agrees to break the non-disclosure agreement Huxley got out of him when he quit the company out of his disgust that Huxley was deliberately advertising his AI platform as one which could be used to create sexually explicit images. One particularly demeaning ad for the site showed a hot young woman, and the slogan was, in effect, why bother to date her when you can just undress her with AI and fantasize about her to your heart’s content? But the judge in the case uses the rarely employed power of judges to set aside a jury verdict, in this case because even though Huxley’s conduct was reprehensible, it’s not illegal under the laws as they currently stand. The judge announces that if the state’s prosecutors want a remedy, they need to persuade the legislators in Albany to change the law – and I immediately thought, “Good luck with that.” The tech entrepreneurs have become the biggest spenders on lobbying efforts of anyone in the U.S., and they’re using that money to ensure that they can do whatever they want to do with implementing AI, including facilitating the creation and distribution of fake child porn that implicates real people. Donald Trump regularly hosts big-tech CEO’s like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, Tim Cook of Apple, and Sundar Pichai of Google, to the White House, and he’s made it clear to them that as long as they play ball with him and don’t do anything to threaten his authority (like take down Right-wing hate speech off their platforms), he’ll give them total control to implement AI however they want.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Promesse Infrante" ("Broken Promises") (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

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

Alas, the next Law and Order episode, an Organized Crime show called “Promesse Infrante” (“Broken Promises”), was nowhere near as good as the SVU show it followed. It was about a gang war in the New York streets between members of the Spezzano family – grandmother Isabella (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her grandsons Roman (Alberto Frezza), Rocco (Anthony Skordi), and Pietro (Luca Richman) – and an unseen Dominican gang boss. The Spezzanos are members of the Camorra, a centuries-old criminal enterprise based in Naples which I’ve read about before, notably in Peter Maas’s book The Valachi Papers. Maas explained that there were two major criminal organizations in Italy: the Camorra from Naples and the Mafia from Sicily. Members of both groups emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries and fought vicious wars against each other in the streets of American cities until a few level-headed people at the top of both groups decided it would make more sense if they settled their differences peaceably and worked together. So the term “La Cosa Nostra” (literally “Our Thing,” though the Italians involved in it usually rendered it as “This Thing of Ours”) was coined to allow members of the Camorra and the Mafia to work as one. The main dramatic issue is the ambiguity of the loyalties among the Spezzano family members with whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) interacts. He thought he had recruited Isabella as an informant when he was stationed in Italy during the 12-year interregnum between Meloni’s departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the debut of Law and Order: Organized Crime. Isabella is running a legal brewery in New York but Stabler suspects it’s really a front for the Camorra. Of Isabella’s three grandchildren, Roman and Rocco are hard-core Camorra members but Pietro, at 14 the youngest of them, is torn between loyalty to his Camorra brothers and a basically decent nature that more or less turns him off to the criminal lifestyle. The climax occurs at the Spezzano brewery, which Stabler is visiting to talk both Isabella and Pietro out of their involvements with the Camorra. Just as he’s trying to talk to them, the Spezzano brewery is attacked by gun-toting motorcycle-riding members of the Dominican gang. Stabler activates an electronic device he’s been issued by the police department to alert them to a crime in progress, and in the climactic scene 14-year-old Pietro Spezzano is holding a gun on Stabler. Just as Stabler thinks he’s talked Pietro into giving up and giving him the gun, Stabler’s hot-shot son Eli (Nicky Torchia) sees Pietro holding a gun on his dad and shoots him in the back. Pietro dies, much to daddy Stabler’s discomfort since he’d had hopes of talking him out of the gang life. It was an O.K. Organized Crime, though the sheer intensity of the body count started to get to me after a while, and frankly I liked the version of Elliott Stabler Meloni played on SVU – legitimately tough but also fair-minded and not bearing the unresolved burden of grief brought on by the assassination of his wife in the first episode of Organized Crime – better than what he’s become on this show.