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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackwell's Island (Warner Bros./First National, 1939)

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

On Tuesday, November 18, after my husband Charles and I watched part three of The American Revolution, I showed him a film we’d watched together from an old VHS tape from Turner Classic Movies back when I used to record the channel almost literally by the yard: Blackwell’s Island, a 1939 gangster movie from Warner Bros. (though at least partially in “First National” drag). This was a 71-minute movie, essentially a “B” picture, and it was the third feature-length film starring John Garfield. Garfield had begun his career in New York on the stage as a member of the Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. According to its Wikipedia page, “It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in – a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry.” The Group Theatre became famous for importing the “Method of Physical Actions” derived from the writings and teachings of Russian director and drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, though when Stanislavsky himself visited the U.S. and saw the Group Theatre in action he said they had misunderstood most of what he had taught. Though at least one major actor from the Group Theatre, Franchot Tone, came to Hollywood well before Garfield did, Garfield became a star basically as the first true Method actor to achieve starring roles in films. As a result, even when he was cast as a gangster (Warner Bros. obviously thought they could wreak the same transformation on Garfield, t/n Julius Garfinkel, they had on Edward G. Robinson, t/n Emmanuel Goldenberg), Garfield played in a quietly sinister style far removed from the snarling way Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart had in similar roles. Garfield made his movie debut in a quite good thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a 1938 remake of a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. vehicle from 1933 called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he played a boxer who accidentally kills his corrupt manager and then has to flee to the country to escape prosecution. The director was, of all people, Busby Berkeley, who took a break from his usual mega-production numbers in musicals and turned out to be a quite effective director of suspense and action.

Garfield’s next film was an enormous breakthrough: Four Daughters (1938), adapted from a Fannie Hurst story called Sister Act and featuring Claude Rains as a music teacher whose titular four daughters (real-life sisters Rosemary, Lola, and Priscilla Lane, with Gale Page as the fourth daughter) get involved in various romantic complications. John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn played rivals for the hand of Priscilla Lane’s character; she marries Garfield’s but they have a hard life together and ultimately, realizing she’s still in love with the other man, he commits suicide by deliberately crashing his car. Blackwell’s Island was Garfield’s third film, and it was advertised with footage of a ceremony hosted by a trade association that proclaimed Garfield “the new dramatic star of the year.” I wanted to see it again mainly because one of its major plot issues concerns gang leader Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), who runs the “Waterfront Protective Association” and intimidates boat owners to pay him money so he doesn’t wreck their boats or injure or kill them. The hero is crusading reporter Tim Haydon (John Garfield), who is determined to expose Bransom’s gang. He gets fired from the New York Times-Dispatch but gets a new job with the Star-Sentinel and has his meet-cute with Sunny Walsh (Rosemary Lane) when she’s a nurse at the hospital where Bransom’s latest victim, Captain Pederson (Wade Boteler), is recuperating and he shows up demanding an interview. He doesn’t get one, but two members of Bransom’s gang break in via an outside window (back when hospitals still had openable outside windows) and finish the job they’d started on him. Bransom and three of his thugs go on trial (a bench rather than a jury trial, for some reason) and are sentenced to six months on the titular Blackwell’s Island prison, but because they have so much political clout with the corrupt machine running New York City they’re able to live the life of Riley even while ostensibly incarcerated.

They get to take over the prison’s hospital ward and set it up as a palatial private residence. They have special privileges including the opportunity to have Bransom’s dogs live with them and even eat Bransom’s specially cooked steak meals while the rest of the prisoners starve (one wonders what the prisoners who are genuinely sick have to do). They get to gamble through poker games with each other and horse-racing bets they place outside, and they organize a protection racket of their own to extort money from fellow convicts without their political pull. Haydon decides that the only way he’ll get the goods on Bransom and end his reign of terror inside Blackwell’s Island is if he gets sent there himself as an inmate, so he punches out a prosecutor named Ballinger (Leon Ames: the one degree of separation between Bela Lugosi and Judy Garland!) and ends up in Blackwell’s. The main reason I wanted to see this movie again right now is the similar level of insane privilege being granted to Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker and abuser of underage girls herself in partnership with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, like the fictional Bransom, is allowed to have her dogs in her current prison and have catered meals specially cooked for her, and if any fellow inmates complain about the cushy kid-glove treatment she’s getting, they get disciplined. Bransom also has arranged to get out of prison any time he likes through a private boat he has concealed on the titular island, and he uses this to do in one of his gang’s enemies personally. He can get away with all this because the hapless warden, Stuart Granger (Granville Bates), is scared shitless that if he doesn’t give Bransom everything he wants, Bransom will use his connections to fire the warden and deny him the retirement pension he’s counting on to sustain him in his old age. The other guards are also mostly on Bransom’s payroll, and when Haydon ends up inside Blackwell’s, Bransom bluntly tells him that if Bransom says Haydon can eat, he’ll eat; if he doesn’t, Haydon will starve.

They warn Sunny Walsh’s family off doing anything by killing Sunny’s police-officer brother Terry (Dick Purcell, later the screen’s first Captain America in a 1942 Republic serial), trussing up his body (in a manner that makes it look like the crooks have seen 1931’s The Public Enemy, James Cagney’s star-making film), and leaving it in the Walshes’ home with a bomb attached that’s designed to blow all of them up. Luckily, while he was there having dinner with the Walshes, Haydon spotted the bomb and threw it out the window, so it exploded harmlessly outside. Ultimately Bransom sets up Haydon by promising to help him “escape” disguised as a guard, then tells the prison authorities that a prisoner dressed as a guard will attempt a breakout and should be shot on sight. Haydon keeps alive by hiding out in a barrel and then, when Bransom tries to get away on his speedboat, Haydon commandeers a police boat and gives chase. Ultimately, thanks to a new special prosecutor, Thomas McNair (Victor Jory), appointed by the New York state government and therefore not subject to control from the local political machine that Bransom controls, Bransom is arrested by the state police and will serve a 99-year sentence in a state facility over which he and his political friends have no influence. Blackwell’s Island is a pretty much by-the-numbers Warner Bros. gangster movie, though Stanley Fields as Bransom is a merely annoying villain thanks to his juvenile penchant for playing practical jokes. He’s got a whole lot of cigars that explode in people’s faces shortly after they’re lit (in one quirkily amusing scene, Bransom is about to give one of his exploding cigars to a person he wants to impress; he thinks better of it and reaches into his other coat pocket for a normal cigar). He also has a flower pinned to his lapel that shoots a faceful of powder into his intended victim, and he does this to his girlfriend Pearl Murray (Peggy Shannon, on her way down from the ethereal beauty she’d been in the 1933 disaster film Deluge; she was a chronic alcoholic and would die of a heart attack just two years later). All this business with the practical jokes makes Bransom come off as more of an annoyance than a genuinely sinister villain, and for that we can blame the writers (Lee Katz and Crane Wilbur) rather than Stanley Fields, John Garfield, or director McGann (who according to imdb.com had help from a much more prestigious “name,” Michael Curtiz, on some retakes). Blackwell’s Island wouldn’t be especially memorable (though it was based on a real-life scandal that took place on New York’s Welfare Island in 1934) if it weren’t for the striking parallel between the fictional Bull Bransom and the all too real Ghislaine Maxwell in terms of the super-cushy treatment both got even when they were nominally in prison!

The American Revolution, part 2: "Asylum for All Mankind" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, November 17) I watched “An Asylum for Mankind,” the second installment in Ken Burns’s six-part TV mega-documentary The American Revolution. This one depicted how the attitude of the Colonists towards Great Britain hardened over time, from the willingness to live within the British Empire as a largely self-governing outpost while still remaining technically subject to the Crown (the arrangement under which Britain later devolved its empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, or the Irish Free State it allowed the Irish to form in between the two world wars before Ireland finally gained outright independence) to the demand for all-out independence. While not as contentious politically as the first episode, this one made the point that African-Americans and Native Americans fought on both sides of the Revolution. At least one of the main reasons fence-sitting Americans ultimately declared for independence was the decision of British commanders actively recruit both natives and enslaved Blacks for their side of the struggle. One of the most interesting stories told in “An Asylum for Mankind” was the effort of the British-appointed governor of Virginia, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, to recruit Black slaves to the British cause by promising them freedom if they deserted their masters and fought for the British (in segregated units, as did the Blacks on the American side – the U.S. military wasn’t racially integrated until Harry Truman did it by executive order in 1948, and until then all America’s wars featured Black troops only in segregated units under white commanders).

Alas, the Black slaves who answered Dunmore’s call met a sad fate, mostly dying of smallpox in the camps Dunmore set up to train them. In fact, the American Revolution coincided with a severe smallpox epidemic throughout the country, at least partly because the war provided excellent conditions for the spread of a contagious and often fatal disease. Just as World War I triggered the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919 by creating ideal conditions for the flu virus to spread (and also continually renewing the supply of victims; normally viruses that kill off their hosts end up killing themselves when they can’t find enough new victims to remain alive, but the war generated an almost unending supply of victims), so the American Revolution, with its soldiers marching long distances from town to town and spreading whatever disease they had everywhere they went, turbo-charged a smallpox epidemic. At the time, according to Geoffrey C. Ward’s script, there were only two ways to stop smallpox from spreading: isolating the victims and keeping them from infecting anyone else, or inoculating people who hadn’t got it yet with reduced doses on purpose in hopes that they’d develop immunity rather than get the full-scale disease. George Washington was advised to have his entire army inoculated, but he declined on the basis that the troops who were inoculated would have to wait several weeks before they were sufficiently healthy to fight again. (At the time of the American Revolution, British scientists and doctors were just starting to explore injecting people with cowpox, a related disease that can cross over to humans, after discovering that milkmaids almost never got smallpox because their work had exposed them to cowpox. This was the start of vaccination, a term that derives from the Latin word for “cow,” vaca. But it wasn’t until 1796 that Edward Jenner demonstrated the first effective smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus.) Instead Washington insisted on isolating anyone in his army who caught smallpox and built prison-like hospitals, surrounded by armed guards, to maintain security.

The show also told the sad tale of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to invade and conquer Canada for the Americans; he and another American general, Robert Montgomery, successfully conquered and occupied Montréal but were stymied, and Montgomery killed, in an unsuccessful attempt to scale the fortress of Québec. (Not until Donald Trump regained the Presidency and talked about annexing Canada as “the 51st state” were any other Americans nuts enough to talk about taking over Canada.) I’ve read other sources that said Arnold blamed his failure to conquer Canada on George Washington not sending him enough troops and supplies to win the battles – Ward argued that part of the problem was that the Americans were relying on an old British map that showed the distance between Montréal and Québec as two-fifths of what it actually was – and this, along with falling in love with and marrying a Loyalist woman after his first wife had died while they were separated because he was off trying to conquer Canada, that led Arnold to switch sides and become America’s most infamous traitor. Needless to say, the show not only depicted the drafting of the Declaration of Independence but couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of a white man writing, “All men are created equal,” when he owned hundreds of slaves himself. I used to joke that Jefferson ordered one of his slaves, “Here, boy, sharpen my quill pen so I can write a declaration about how all men are created equal,” and it turns out my joke wasn’t far from the truth. Jefferson did bring a slave with him to Philadelphia when he went there to write the Declaration: Robert Hemings, teenage brother of Jefferson’s long-time slave mistress (and second cousin and half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife) Sally Hemings.

According to an historical post on the Associated Press’s Web site, written and published by Hillel Italie in 2020, https://www.cbs42.com/news/national/remembering-the-slave-who-joined-jefferson-in-philadelphia/, “The eldest of six children, Robert Hemings was born in 1762 into bondage, contradiction and entanglement. His father was the slave owner John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s future father-in-law; his mother was a slave, Elizabeth Hemings. Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered several children, was Robert Hemings’ sister, and Jefferson’s future wife, Martha Wayles, was his half-sister. Robert Hemings himself would become both Jefferson’s in-law and his property. The Hemings siblings were brought to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, not long after the 1773 death of Wayles. Within the plantation hierarchy, Robert Hemings held a high position and was described once by a friend of Jefferson’s as having ‘behaved exceeding well.’ He was just 12 when Jefferson chose him to replace the 31-year-old Jupiter Evans as his personal attendant. He was dressed more formally than other slaves, was permitted to read and write [most slaves weren’t, and if one tried to learn it was considered a whipping offense], travel on his own and to learn a craft, as a barber.” I’ve read some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings about slavery and they reminded me of George Soros’s writings about capitalism: both the work of intelligent men who realize that their wealth has been built on a fundamentally unjust system that has benefited them personally.

I think the ultimate comment on the Declaration of Independence and the contradiction between its promise of human equality and the reality of enormous human inequality that still persists in the U.S. today was made by Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pennsylvania) in 1865 after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Stevens said in essence that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was fully sound, but the existence of slavery in the U.S. had prevented it from being completely realized. Of course it still hasn’t been completely realized, and in the yin and yang of American history today we’re in a period of at best retrenchment and at worst outright reaction. One of the ironies of Ken Burns’s series The American Revolution is that it’s being shown at a time when the second Trump administration is reproducing many of the injustices that brought rise to the American Revolution in the first place, including sending the military into American cities to intimidate the people into not protesting the authoritarian thuggery practiced by agents of whatever agencies Trump and his minions choose to send into large cities run by Democratic mayors to round up so-called “illegal” immigrants. Another irony is that funding for the production is still credited to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), billed for years as “a private corporation funded by the American people” (a wording that’s chilled me for years with its casual equation of “private” and “free”), when the Trump administration has demolished CPB by taking away its funding in a so-called “rescission” bill that was barely debated in Congress at all.

The American Revolution, part 1: "In Order to Be Free" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 16. 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched the first of six two-hour episodes of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution. It was probably inevitable that a director who “made his bones” with an even longer mega-documentary on the Civil War would take on the American Revolution, though an event from the 18th century was harder for him to dramatize than one from the 19th century because the American Revolution happened before the invention of photography and therefore a lot less visual material existed from the era. Burns and his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, had to work with the covers of the famous pamphlets that promoted the patriots’ cause, and a few of the equally famous cartoons of the period like “Live Free or Die.” The directors and their writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, didn’t pussyfoot around the seamier aspects of the Revolution, including the fact (as British people and British-sympathizing Americans pointed out at the time) that the Revolutionaries prattled on about the British tax restrictions somehow “enslaving” the Colonists when many of the Colonists owned actual slaves themselves. It’s long been an historical quirk I’m well aware of that the slavery apologists of Thomas Jefferson’s time (including Jefferson himself) defended it as basically a necessary evil – someone had to get the work done, and white indentured servants weren’t going to do it after their indentures expired – while a generation or two later the aristocrats whose livelihoods depended on slave labor regarded it as a positive good. John C. Calhoun argued that the experience of Athens in ancient Greece proved that you couldn’t make a democracy work without a permanent servant class, and given that the American republic was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” (which in practice really meant “all white male landowners”), the permanent servant class couldn’t be white.

One of the points made in Ward’s script was that immigrants continued to come in a steady stream from Britain to the Colonies despite the growing unrest in the period between 1754 and 1775 covered in the first episode, “In Order to Be Free,” many of them either tenant farmers or workers for hire who had no claim to any land of their own. Land was the big demand of the American Colonists, and at least one of the provocations for the Revolution was that Britain was trying to restrain the Colonies from expanding westward and actually set up a line by which all the North American continent west of the Appalachians was supposed to be reserved for Native Americans. For the settlers, Natives were an impediment to be got rid of by any means necessary so they could help themselves to the vast land of the Great Plains and other points west. That’s why, to the extent Native Americans participated in the Revolution at all, they mostly fought on the side of the British. (Natives allied with Britain during the War of 1812, too, and one of the most fascinating articles I read about that conflict was about the Native chief Tecumseh, a British ally in the War of 1812 who had to deal with the blithering incompetence of the British generals sent to fight it. Most of them were the worst in the British armed forces because the most capable ones were in Europe fighting the war against Napoleon that was an existential conflict for the British, which the War of 1812 was not.) Ward’s writing also highlighted the importance of women in the battle for American independence, especially the ones who organized mass spinning bees to protest the taxes the British Parliament was imposing on cloth exported from Britain (an interesting anticipation of how Mahatma Gandhi would make home-spinning an iconic tactic in India’s successful campaign to end British colonization).

Other than that, this documentary hits all the expected high points of the American Revolution, including the Stamp Act of 1764 (which was supposed to tax the colonies to pay for the British defense of them against French incursions in the so-called French and Indian Wars, which were only one struggle in an ongoing conflict between Britain and France that burst out into the Seven Years’ War between them); the Boston Massacre of 1770; the odd role of British General Thomas Gage (who was married to an American woman and wasn’t necessarily in favor of the hard-line policies of the British Crown and Parliament, but he followed orders); and the battles at Lexington and Concord that kicked off the Revolutionary War itself. There are brief mentions of Edmund Burke, the British politician who actually favored the American Revolution even though that amounted to treason (later he would become the founder of modern conservative political ideology from his horror of the Revolution in France), and Phyllis Wheatley, who despite being a slave was allowed by her owner to publish her own books of poetry and essays and was therefore, at least according to Geoffrey Ward, the first African-American published author of either gender.

But the biggest irony about PBS producing a documentary about the American Revolution in 2025 is how many of the abuses the British government inflicted on the Americans are being done today by the Trump administration and their handmaidens in Congress and the Supreme Court. One of the big complaints about British rule was that they were sending soldiers into American cities and marching them through the streets, to “keep order” according to the British, to intimidate the local population and keep them from rebelling according to the Americans, Trump and his administration is, of course, doing the same thing. The 1700’s were a period of increasing inequalities of wealth and income; so are the 2000’s, in which technological company owners and founders have assumed the role of the giant landowners in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Britain. Like the landed gentry of Britain, today’s “tech bros” are using their economic power to decide how we shall live and what we will be allowed to do, including using their control over artificial intelligence to displace millions of people and leave them to starve. As I’ve lived all these years I’ve become more despairing of any attempts to challenge the powers that be in the hope of actually improving the lives of ordinary people; while acts of resistance are sometimes necessary, ultimately what passes for human “civilization” always seems to end up with a handful of rich and privileged people ruling over everybody else. It’s what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said, “Anybody who’s 20 and isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone who’s 40 and is a socialist has no head” – and what Pete Townshend meant when he sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

First Blood (Anabasis N.V., Cinema ’84, Elcajo Productions, Orion, 1982)

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

After watching “In Order to Be Free,” the first episode of Ken Burns’s mega-documentary on the American Revolution, I ran my husband Charles the 1982 film First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone in his first performance as John Rambo, ex-Special Forces fighter in Viet Nam who returns stateside and gets into huge amounts of trouble. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone near First Blood or anything else featuring Stallone, especially Stallone as Rambo, but I’m on assignment from Fanfare magazine to review a new recording of the soundtrack music by Jerry Goldsmith, who seems to have done especially well with war movies: Patton, MacArthur, and his amazing score for the 1981 film Inchon despite its horrible reputation as a movie. (The horrible reputation is not altogether deserved; though it was executive produced by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, it’s a mediocre movie rather than a terrible one, and Goldsmith’s score is one of its best aspects. I actually got to see Inchon and review it: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/inchon-one-way-productions-unification.html.) First Blood began life as a novel by David Morrell and was turned into a screenplay by Michael Kozoli and William Sackheim, though after they were done Stallone himself rewrote it and did enough work he was entitled to co-writer credit. First Blood takes place in the small town of Hope in Washington state (though it was “played” by British Columbia, Canada, just across the border), whose name seems to be the writers’ idea of irony. John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) arrives in Hope to pay his respects to an African-American member of his company who was the only other soldier in his unit to survive the war – only he learns from the man’s widow that he didn’t survive the war after all. He died years later of cancer from exposure to all the Agent Orange the U.S. forces in Viet Nam sprayed hither and yon as a defoliant.

Rambo is accosted by the town sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy, whose authority helps make up for Stallone’s embarrassing non-acting in the lead), who for some reason doesn’t want him in town and will do just about anything to get rid of him. For a while I was wondering if Teasle and his deputies – including a young David Caruso as Mitch Rogers (and of course Charles couldn’t help but mention Caruso’s boneheaded decision to leave the cast of the high-rated TV series NYPD Blue after its first season to pursue a film career that never took off) – were involved in some horrific scheme of corruption that they were worried Rambo would uncover, but no-o-o-o-o: they just don’t like seedy-looking, scruffy guys with three days’ worth of facial hair and an overall hostile disposition. After Teasle tries to give Rambo a ride out of town and Rambo manages to get out of the car, Teasle has him arrested. Jailing Rambo has little or no effect on him; he refuses to be fingerprinted and they have to turn a hose on him to get him to shower. Throughout his incarceration he flashes back to incidents that happened to him in Viet Nam, including being held by North Viet Namese who literally dumped shit on him (an interesting anticipation of Donald Trump’s response to the last “No Kings” protests October 18, which was to make an AI-generated video in which he played an Air Force pilot bombing the protesters with shit). Rambo escapes absurdly easily and the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game in which the mouse is a highly trained ex-Green Beret skilled at both using ready-made weapons (including a super-sharp knife he brought into the jail with him and a rifle he scores from a helicopter pilot who flies into the mountain country to apprehend him, only he loses control when Rambo throws a rock at the chopper’s windshield) and making his own. Among his home-made weapons are a series of stakes with which he impales one of the deputies looking for him, and another one in which he impales a boar (the credits actually list Hugh Oaks as “boar handler”) and roasts it for dinner. The movie’s whole schtick is that Rambo is so good at jungle survival and one-person fighting he’s able to take out virtually all the deputies who try to catch him – including Sheriff Teasle’s best friend, deputy sergeant Arthur Galt (Jack Starrett), whose death at Rambo’s hands makes it personal for Teasle. (Watching this movie it’s easy to see why Stallone was considered for the role of Superman in the late-1970’s franchise, though Christopher Reeve got the part instead.)

A deus ex machina arrives in the person of Col. Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna, who like Dennehy was a great actor who helps make up for Stallone’s incompetence), Rambo’s former commander in Viet Nam. Trautman explains to Teasle that Rambo is a first-rate combat fighter and survivalist, and the only way they’ll be able to stop him is if they can persuade him to turn himself in voluntarily and without bloodshed. This Rambo is unwilling to do, especially since (as he explains), “They drew first blood” – the only explanation we get for the film’s title and the reason Rambo turned from just hostile to homicidal. Ultimately Trautman talks Rambo into giving himself up for him after telling him, “You did everything to make this private war happen. You've done enough damage. This mission is over, Rambo. Do you understand me? This mission is over! Look at them out there! Look at them! If you won't end this now, they will kill you. Is that what you want? It's over, Johnny. It's over!” Rambo replies, in a speech that could have been quite moving if delivered by an actor with any skill at all (imagine it from John Garfield in the 1940’s), “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about! … Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!”

I’m not sure I’d call First Blood a bad movie with a good one trapped inside it trying to get out, but certainly there was more potential in this story – a man with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders trying in vain to adjust to civilian life, while his Special Forces training keeps kicking in and turning him into an antisocial monster – than got realized in the film we have. I remember an episode of the radio show The Shadow, with Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston and Agnes Moorehead as Margo Lane, called “The Silent Avenger” (aired March 13, 1938), in which the killer was a former World War I soldier whose bitterness over how he’d been treated led him to do freelance random murders. That show succeeded where First Blood failed in humanizing the villain and also implicitly condemning war itself as something that turns ordinary human beings into barely controllable (and sometimes uncontrollable) monsters. First Blood did well enough at the box office to merit a sequel, Rambo (1985), which became one of the biggest hits and most iconic Right-wing films of the Reagan era; in it, Trautman sets Rambo free to return to Viet Nam and find American prisoners still being held as “missing in action” by the victorious North Viet Namese. While First Blood was made by a quirky but fascinating director, Ted Kotcheff, whose previous credits had mostly been for whimsical comedies like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and the anti-capitalist satire Fun with Dick and Jane, Rambo was directed by one George P. Cosmatos, who was so slovenly as a filmmaker Fanfare critic Royal S. Brown joked that his last name should have been “Comatos.”

A Salute to Vienna (Interspot Film GMBH, Attila Giatz Concert Producitons, PBS, c. 2014)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 15) I watched a rather odd show on KPBS called A Salute to Vienna, which is apparently a revue-type show that has been touring the world for 25 years even though I’d never heard of it before. I’d seen the promos for it on KPBS previously and it seemed mildly interesting, and since there was nothing else on I wanted to watch (Lifetime is showing Terry McMillan-produced romantic dramas and Turner Classic Movies was running an absolute masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film noir High and Low – recently remade by Spike Lee – but my husband Charles was scheduled for a 1 to 10 p.m. shift, he’d be getting home in the middle of it, so instead of watching it last night I chose to order the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray so he and I can watch it together) I decided to take my chances with it. It became clear early on that this show’s “salute to Vienna” wouldn’t be about the truly great music that was composed there by people like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, and Brahms. Instead it would be about the schlocky side of Vienna’s musical heritage: mostly Johann Strauss, Jr. and the operetta composers like Franz Lehár, Robert Stolz, Ralph Benatzky, and Emmerich Kálmán who followed in his wake. The show opened with Strauss’s “Thunder and Lightning Polka,” played as an instrumental but with plenty of athletic male dancers bounding around on stage during it. The moment the second song came out, an aria from something called The Bird Seller by someone named Rudolf Ziehrer (whom I’d only vaguely heard of before) sung by a woman dressed in the red-and-white uniform of a postal messenger, I knew I was in the wrong place. I talked back to the TV, “Would someone please turn off the Schlag already?” (Schlag, in case you didn’t know, is German for “whipped cream.”)

The third song was a quite nice performance of “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince (I hadn’t realized Romberg was born in Hungary in 1887, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still a going concern, and his birth name was Siegmund Rosenberg; he emigrated to the U.S. as a young adult in 1909) by tenor Russell Watson. Alas, he was laboring under the shadow of a previous generation’s performer who had sung the song far more soulfully than he. In this case, the long shadow Watson was singing under was Mario Lanza’s; he recorded songs from The Student Prince twice, in 1951 and 1959 (the remake was so his label, RCA Victor, would have a stereo version). In fact he did the score three times; in 1953 he made a set of pre-recordings for an MGM film of the operetta, only he was fired from the movie after then-MGM studio head Dore Schary decided he was way too hard to work with, and Schary hired actor Edmund Purdom to play the title role and mime to Lanza’s pre-recordings. (Lanza sued but, according to Schary’s memoir, his complaint was so full of obscenities and non sequiturs the judge threw it out of court.) Whatever his failings as a human being, though, Lanza poured his heart out in “Serenade” and no one since has come close to matching his intensity. Then the show trotted out more operetta excerpts: the “My dear Count” song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus (literally “The Flying Mouse,” but usually rendered as “The Bat”); “Let’s Go to Vienna” from Emmerich Kálmán’s Countess Maritza; and another bit of Die Fledermaus, a choral number called “Little Brothers and Sisters.” The orchestra was that of the Vienna Volksoper, the city’s principal theatre for operetta (as opposed to the Staatsoper, Vienna’s main opera theatre), and for most of the evening the conductor was a white-haired man named (as nearly as I could make it out in the quickly barked introduction) Peter Gut. But for the Countess Maritza and second Die Fledermaus excerpt he was replaced by a young, hunky Venezuelan conductor named Manuel Lopez Garcia, and I found myself wishing he can find asylum somewhere else and doesn’t have to go back to Venezuela.

The show was hosted by two veterans, opera star Frederica von Stade (an American, despite her German-sounding name) and veteran actor Maximilian Schell. Von Stade opened the second of the show’s five parts (yes, it was broken up by those damnable “pledge breaks” which are almost as long as the segments of the actual program, and now that the Trump administration has ended all federal funding to PBS we can expect the network to become even more insistent in its begging than ever) with a lovely rendition of “Vilia” from Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Once again she was singing under long shadows; in this case, from Jeanette MacDonald’s magical performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1934 film of the operetta. Still, von Stade was quite fine and I was impressed with how much voice she still has even in her late 60’s, which she was when this show was filmed (she was born June 1, 1945). After that she and Russell Watson sang a rather odd duet to the tune of the waltz from Lehár’s operetta, and the reason it was odd was that she sang her part in English and he sang in German. Then there were two more excerpts from The Merry Widow, “Come to the Pavilion” and “How to Handle a Woman,” with the song “Meine Lippen sie Küssen so heiss” (“My Lips Kiss So Hot”) from another Lehár operetta, Giuditta (which was his longest and most “serious” work with a plot reminiscent of Bizet’s Carmen) in between. The Giuditta excerpt was sung by mezzo Alexandra Ruprecht, who wasn’t in von Stade’s league but was quite good and appropriately sexy for the Carmen-like character she’s playing. “How to Handle a Woman” was the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the Lubitsch film of The Merry Widow as “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” and once again the shadow of a long-dead performer hung heavy over the live ones (six men with O.K. chorus voices) heard here.

After the second pledge break, the next piece up was “The Woods of Vienna Are Calling” from an operetta by Robert Stolz called The Viennese Song, and this time around it wasn’t the singers (the Vienna Boys’ Choir, who were surprisingly racially integrated; among the boys were a few Blacks and Asians) who were under a long shadow, but the composer. One of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous and beloved waltzes was “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and compared to that I think Stolz should have left the Vienna woods alone. After that there was an odd interlude, the “Song of the Emperor” from Ralph Benatzky’s The White Horse Inn, sung – in a manner of speaking – by Maximilian Schell, who died in 2014 right after making this appearance. (I hadn’t realized how old this show was.) He sort of talk-sang through the number much the way Walter Huston did with Kurt Weill’s “September Song” in Knickerbocker Holiday or Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady. Then Manuel Lopez Garcia returned as conductor and Russell Watson as tenor for “You Are My Heart’s Delight” from another Lehár operetta, The Land of Smiles. (The titular “land of smiles” is China, by the way.) After that the troupe performed “Yes, My Brothers” from Kálmán’s Countess Maritza and a tenor named Dmitry Korchuk – supposedly a star in France despite his Russian-sounding name, and dressed in a really stupid red-and-white striped shirt – sang the Gondolier’s Song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s A Night in Venice. After yet another pledge break, the concert resumed with Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous piece, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, in a truncated version featuring totally unnecessary singing from the Vienna Choir Boys. I’ll never forget the galvanic experience I had when I first heard this piece in the full nine-minute length Strauss intended. It was on an RCA Victor 78 by the Philadelphia Orchestra (though I don’t recall if the conductor was Leopold Stokowski or Eugene Ormandy), and after hearing the shortened and often popped-up versions that had crossed my path before it was a revelation to hear the full original. Later I heard Herbert von Karajan’s equally sweeping and symphonic version – the one used on the soundtrack to the cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey – and those remain my favorite performances of it. The only vocal version that’s ever worked for me was an RCA Victor 12-inch 78 featuring coloratura soprano Lily Pons chirping away with André Kostelanetz (her husband) leading the orchestra behind her. Since it was on just one side of the record, that meant it was a cut version, but that didn’t bother me in this context.

Then they did another bit from Ziehrer’s The Bird Seller, “Roses in Tyrol” (it was a duet and the male singer went onstage with a bouquet of roses and gave them, one by one, to audience members), and another number from Die Fledermaus, “Champagne Is King.” This time the choristers drank what was obviously supposed to be champagne (but was more likely the usual on-stage substitute, ginger ale) from rather tacky-looking glasses. After yet another pledge break, the show cut to the final number, Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March,” complete with audience clapping. The clapping wasn’t quite in as perfect unison as it is when the Vienna Philharmonic invariably closes with this during their New Year’s Eve concert – I remember one year in which Charles and I watched that together and he turned to me and said, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?” – but it was fun enough and the orchestra’s snare drummer really had a blast. I was startled at the number of women in the orchestra – the Vienna Philharmonic was notorious for years as the last major orchestra in Europe to gender-integrate, but I guess the Vienna Volksoper was ahead of the game on this – and I was a bit surprised at how informally much of the audience was dressed. One woman came in an electrifyingly red pantsuit that looked like it was made of velvet. The pledge breaks were heavily promoting the performance the Salute to Vienna troupe is going to be giving in San Diego on January 1, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. in the Jacobs Music Center, 720 “B” Street in San Diego (formerly the Fox Theatre, where I saw Lou Reed perform in 1983 before the San Diego Symphony took it over). They kept reiterating that for a $300 donation to KPBS, two tickets to this event could be yours, though they were giving them out on a first-come, first-served basis and so the sooner you called, the better your seats would be. I have no idea how many people took them up on their offer, but I wish them all the best even though I’ve never given to public television in my life.