Midsomer Murders: "The Stitcher Society" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 25) I watched a KPBS-TV rerun of a 2021 episode of the series Midsomer Murders, about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England where a lot of people get murdered – which has prompted my husband Charles to make the same jokes about it he used to make about Cabot Cove, Maine on the TV show Murder, She Wrote: how long is it going to take before everyone in town is either a murder victim or in prison for killing them? This show was called “The Stitcher Society,” and judging from the title I’d expected it to be about murder in a sewing circle. That’s actually a plot point, as Gideon Tooms (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who inherits the Stitcher Society when his father Rueben Tooms (Silas Carson) becomes the first murder victim, wants to change the society’s name for precisely that reason. He’s also got a woman financial backer willing to invest in a major expansion of the group, whose real mission is to reach out to people who’ve had heart bypass surgery and get them involved in athletics and social work to give them a reason to live and stimulate their healing so they don’t just sit around feeling sorry for themselves. I had a heart bypass operation in December 2021 and I could identify with it, especially when the police department’s medical examiner, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland), refers to the surgical scar left behind on the chest as a “zipper,” to the brief confusion of the principal investigators, detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his partner, detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). (When I told a friend of mine who worked as a nurse about my bypass operation, he joked, “Oh, you’ve joined the zipper brigade.”)

The intrigue gets started when Toby Winter (Peter De Jersey), who five years previously was accused of murder and got off on a technicality. He shows up at a meeting of the Stitcher Society and the rest of the members are shocked that he was willing to show his face in town again even five years later. Julia Steinem (Nimmy March) is Toby’s sister and is convinced he didn’t kill anybody; to exonerate him she brings in private detective Mack McInally (Michael Nardone), but he uncovers evidence that she was at the scene of the murder five years before and tries to use that to blackmail her. Rueben had announced to the town that he had definitive evidence establishing Toby’s innocence, but he also turns out to be having an affair with Julia and planning to run away with her even though his wife Alberta (Lizzy McInnerny) carefully and conscientiously nursed him back to health after his operation. (My husband Charles did the same thing with me.) The real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Mimi Dagmar (Hannah Waddingham), a local realtor who sold John Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) their house – there’s a nice running gag in which she can never remember the cop’s wife’s name, though all her guesses begin with “S” – and was the sister of the original murder victim. Mimi actually was the initial killer – the two sisters got into an argument and Mimi picked up a nearby rock and bludgeoned her with it – and she also killed the other three victims (Rueben, McInally and a woman whom Gideon was about to throw out of the club because she, too, was convinced Toby Winter was innocent) because she was worried that Mack’s re-investigation of the case would point to her even though Mack had nothing. As he arrests Mimi at the end, Barnaby tells her, “You killed three people for nothing.” It was an unusually strong and chilling Midsomer Murders episode and a welcome relief from some of this show’s usual tropes, including the annoying habit of some of its writers to have multiple crimes uncovered in the middle of the investigation so it seems like half the town is being arrested at the conclusion.

The Card, a.k.a. The Promoter (Ealing Studios, Pinewood Studios, British Film-Makers, Ronald Neame Productions, J. Arthur Rank, Universal-International [U.S.], 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, April 23) I watched an oddball British film on Turner Classic Movies: The Card, an oddball 1952 movie made by the Ealing Studios in Britain, based on a novel by Arnold Bennett published in 1911 – which is when the film is set (there was a silent version in the 1920’s as well). It was directed by Ronald Neame, who’s also credited as one of the producers (at first I had a prejudice against him because the first film of his I ever saw was The Poseidon Adventure, but later I got to see some of his British films and quite liked him), and the script was by Eric Ambler, who was much better known for his spy thrillers and crime novels than a light comedy like this. It’s about a young man from the (fictitious, though based on a real place) town of Bursley in central England, one of the so-called “Five Towns” that make most of the nation’s plates and bowls for food. The young man is Edward Henry Machin (Alec Guinness, showing why this early in his career he was frequently compared to Stan Laurel even though his character here is resourceful instead of lovably dumb), whose first name is usually abbreviated “Denry.” He’s been raised by his mother (Veronica Turleigh), a widow who provides for them as a washerwoman. As a prank he sneaks into his teacher’s desk, forges better grades for himself than the ones he’s earned, and as he laconically explains in a voice-over he’s rewarded with a scholarship to college, where he’s relentlessly teased by the boys from wealthier families for being a washerwoman’s son. When it comes time for him to look for his first job, he gets it by returning a wallet a local lawyer named Herbert Duncalf (Edward Chapman, who in 1930 had starred in an adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock directed by, of all people, Alfred Hitchcock) dropped in the street.

He’s rewarded with a job as Duncalf’s clerk, and as a result he’s given the assignment of making out the invitations for a major ball hosted by the Countess of Chell (Valerie Hobson, older but still the same incandescent beauty she was in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein). He forges one for himself and another two for the tailor who he talks into making him a dress suit and the woman, Ruth Earp (Glynis Johns), from whom he takes dancing lessons. Denry gets noticed when he, dared by his friends, asks for and gets a dance from the Countess herself. Denry also gets a job collecting rents for local landlord H. Calvert (George Devine), and within a few reels this gig has made him, if not surpassingly wealthy, at least successful enough he can afford to take girlfriend Nellie Cotterell (the young Petula Clark) on an all-day trip to a vacation town. Alas, while out with both Nellie and Ruth, he gets worried about how long his money will hold out in the face of the extravagant purchases both Nellie and Ruth are making with his money. At one point one of them demands he buy them a glass paperweight, and out of sheer frustration he tells the merchant to send it to “Rockefeller” at “Buckingham Palace.” Ruth feels insulted by that remark and walks off, where she eventually marries a rich man. Denry is saved when the captain of a Norwegian fishing boat gets caught in a storm; the boat is salvaged but the captain is inclined to write it off until Denry offers to buy it from him and make it available for tourists interested in going out on the supposedly doomed boat.

Denry ends up with quite a lot of coins and uses them to launch a savings club for local residents at 15 percent interest. He also saves the local football club (that’s “football” as in “soccer,” though it’s a lot more accurately named than American football because it is, after all, about moving a ball with one’s feet) by recruiting a star player, Cregeen (Lyn Evans), who dramatically improves Bursley’s win-loss record. When Cotterell’s parents are ruined by a financial swindler and are emigrating to Canada via the steerage section, Denry rushes to the dock where their ship is about to sail and pays to upgrade their tickets to first class. The film ends with Denry being elected Mayor of Bursley, with Nellie as his first lady since he pulled her off the boat on which she was supposed to go with her parents to Canada and married her instead. During the parade to celebrate his inauguration, Ruth meets another elderly rich man who’s immediately attracted to her, and the two go off together. When it was released in America (by Universal-International even though J. Arthur Rank was the British distributor), the title was changed to The Promoter because The Card wouldn’t have made sense to American audiences in this context. (When I saw this film on the TCM Web page, at first I thought it was a film about gambling à la Pushkin’s novel and Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and thought the titular “card” was a playing card, not a person aggressively seeking financial and social advancement.)

What interested me most about this film was that it featured an upwardly mobile central character in a society that’s supposed to be more highly stratified than ours and where it’s considered virtually impossible to advance on one’s own merits. What’s even more ironic is that in the 1930’s the U.S. made quite a few films like this about determined men exploiting the opportunities the U.S. offered for financial and social advancement, but in the American movies along this line like Other Men’s Women and Dante’s Inferno, the nouveau riche protagonists always over-extended themselves and ended up precisely where they’d started out. These British filmmakers took what was essentially an American-style character, plopped him into the middle of Britain’s highly stratified, rigid class system, and had him not only rise to a position of influence and power but had him stay there at the end of the story. I also liked the subtlety with which Neame and Ambler depicted Denry’s rise, from the donkey-drawn dogcart he drives in the early scenes to a much fancier horse-drawn carriage and, eventually, a car. Though Ealing made funnier movies than this, including Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and the woefully underrated Passport to Pimlico, The Card is quite good on its own merits and I loved the fact that at least three strong and highly characterized women are in the dramatis personae.

Puccini: La Rondine (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed April 20, 2024, repeated April 24, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, April 24) my husband Charles and I went to see the rerun of last Saturday’s final performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Puccini’s La Rondine (“The Swallow,” as in the bird) on their “Live in HD” series. La Rondine is something of a stepchild in Puccini’s catalog; he composed it in 1913 or thereabouts (which slots it in between the stunning La Fanciulla del West and Il Trittico, the trilogy of three one-act operas he composed for the Met, which premiered it in 1918) under a commission from the Carltheater in Vienna, Austria. I’d known that for years and had always assumed the piece contained spoken dialogue and was in German, and it wasn’t until the San Francisco Opera did it in the 1970’s (not as part of their main international season but in a lower-cost, both production budget and ticket price, series) that I realized it was a through-sung opera with recitatives instead of dialogue, and (like all of Puccini’s other operas) it was in Italian. It was only in the last few days that I looked up La Rondine on Wikipedia and found that two of Puccini’s non-negotiable demands for this production were that it be through-composed and in Italian. (Verdi was tri-lingual in Italian, French and German, but as far as I know Puccini was mono-lingual in Italian.) Unfortunately, the production ran into a snag called “The Great War” (as World War I was known before there was a World War II), on which Austria and Italy were on opposite sides. Arranging a production involving two countries that were at war with each other proved to be much too complicated, so the opera was finally premiered on March 17, 1917 in Monte Carlo because Monaco was neutral. Italian opera stars Gilda dalla Rizza and Tito Schipa sang the lead roles.

Also, Puccini’s usual publisher, Tito Ricordi, rejected La Rondine as “bad Lehár” (whatever might be wrong with it, it certainly doesn’t sound like Franz Lehár, good or bad!), so Puccini placed it with Ricordi’s great rival, Sonzogno (who already had Mascagni and Leoncavallo under contract but were furious at having missed out on both Verdi himself and Verdi’s successor!), whose offices were bombed in World War II, resulting in the destruction of some of the orchestral score for Puccini’s later revisions of the piece. (In his zeal to revise his old work, Puccini was essentially the George Lucas of his time; in a New Yorker profile Lucas was once asked when he would be done revising the Star Wars movies, and he said, “When I die.”) Basically La Rondine is a mash-up of Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s own La Bohème, though without the tragic underpinnings (i.e., the heroine is not dying of tuberculosis as the female leads of both Traviata and Bohème are) that gave those earlier operas much of their dramatic power. La Rondine is set in Paris in the mid-19th century (though the Met’s production by Nicolas Joël moved it up to the 1920’s) and the leading lady is Magda de Civry (Angel Blue), a high-class “courtesan” (the 19th century French euphemism for prostitute, much the way “escort” is today) who’s kept by a much older rich man named Rambaldo Fernandez (Alfred Walker). Act I takes place at a party at Magda’s home that is attended by the poet Prunier (Bekhzod Davronov, Uzbek tenor making his Met debut), who’s dating Magda’s maid Lisette (Emily Pogorelc). Magda is bored with life as a high-class hooker and is hoping for a man to Take Her Away from All That, and he duly arrives in the person of Ruggero Lastouc (Jonathan Tetelman, whom I’ve heard good things about which he fully lived up to).

Magda’s party breaks up when her guests collectively decide to go to the night spot Bullier’s, and she follows (the Met’s synopsis says she’s “disguised as a shop girl,” but all that changes is she takes off one lavish wrap and puts on another). At Bullier’s (in Puccini’s second act, though as usual for them these days the Met mashed the first two acts into one), Magda meets Ruggero again when he sits at her table. The two fall in love and decide to make a go of it. Act III takes place at a resort on the French Riviera, though they’re starting to run out of money (like Rodolfo in La Bohème, Prunier is a journalist and poet, but it’s not clear how Ruggero makes his living – unless we’re meant to believe he’s living off a well-to-do family and doesn’t have to work) and the hotel officials are suspiciously eyeing them and wondering when they’re going to start paying their bills. Ruggero tells Magda he wants to marry her as soon as his parents give permission, but Magda – who has kept her past secret from Ruggero – already has second thoughts. Those thoughts just become more serious and bitter when Ruggero gets a letter back from his mother, giving him permission to marry Magda but only if she’s a virtuous woman. Magda then tells all, confessing to Ruggero that she isn’t virtuous – at least in the sense Ruggero’s mom means – and at the end Rambaldo shows up and she goes off with him, leaving Ruggero bereft. Musically, La Rondine is gorgeous; though there’s only one aria in it that’s become famous out of context (Magda’s “Che il bel sogno di Doretta,” based on a poem Prunier reads at Magda’s party in Act I; he sings the first stanza but then Magda takes it up), the entire opera is a wash of glorious sound.

The problem with La Rondine is that none of the characters are dramatically interesting: Magda has neither the vulnerability of Violetta in La Traviata nor the pathos of Mimì in La Bohème. Ruggero is pretty much a dramatic cipher, and because his parents aren’t depicted onstage we don’t get anything like the dramatic conflict between Violetta and Giorgio, her beloved Alfredo’s father, nor the worm-turning climax as Giorgio realizes that even though she’s flouted the conventional moral norms, Violetta has been a “good woman” all along in the sense of being true to her own values and living by the Golden Rule. Prunier and Lisette are basically the comic-relief characters, and even as such they’re well below Marcello and Musetta in Bohème – though Charles thought the plot of La Rondine would have worked as a 1930’s screwball comedy and it’s interesting to imagine the story that way (with the inevitable punch-pulling that would have been required under the Production Code). The production was conducted by a woman, Speranza Scappucci (her first name means “Hope” in Italian), the first time I’ve ever seen a Met telecast with a female conductor (in the “it’s about time!” department), and she led the score with passion and authority even though I was perplexed by some of her comments in the pre-recorded intermission interview. She praised the score for its transparency and careful delineation of instrumental voices, where I’d been enjoying it for a glorious overall wash of sound. When I first saw the previews for this production, I’d wondered why Angel Blue, an African-American “woman of size,” was dressed in a gown that made her strongly resemble Bessie Smith. I don’t mind them casting singers of color in roles that don’t necessarily correspond to their real-life races – that’s a battle we won long ago when Leontyne Price regularly appeared as the Japanese heroine of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – and indeed I loved the irony that a white singer was playing the servant of a Black one (and Rambaldo, Magda’s sugar daddy to whom she returns at the end of the opera, was also cast as a Black singer here).

I noticed that when the Met hosts, Julia Bullock, was introducing Angel Blue she mentioned that she made her initial mark as the Ethiopian princess in Verdi’s Aïda – a role I hope she doesn’t get “typed” in the way Price did because the character is supposed to be Black. Angel Blue has also sung Violetta in La Traviata, and I’d love to hear her do that because, though the two are alike in that they’re both high-end prostitutes who fall genuinely in love with attractive and rich young men but then lose them to family conventions, Violetta is simply a deeper and richer character than Magda, and would give Angel Blue much more to work with as a vocal and dramatic actress. It also doesn’t help that Puccini chose to make both Ruggero and Prunier tenors, and the Met compounded his mistake by casting them both with singers whose voices are quite similar to each other’s. (That was a mistake Mozart made in Idomeneo, too, though that’s a bit more understandable because in the original version of Idomeneo, Idomeneo was a tenor and his son, Idamante, a castrato. Later Mozart had to adapt the opera for a production in a city that, for the obvious reason of public disgust, had already banned the castrati – so in that version he made Idamante a tenor but kept Idomeneo a tenor, too. I’ve long thought Mozart should have rewritten Idomeneo as a baritone so there’d still be a father-and-son distinction between the two voices.) I quite liked La Rondine, despite its flaws, and wish it were better known; for some reason British critic Spike Hughes didn’t include it in his book Puccini’s Great Operas, and it’s the only one of Puccini’s mature operas Renata Tebaldi never recorded (though she would have been great in it!). But still it’s an opera that cries out for glorious singing and expert staging, both of which it got from the Met on April 20.

Love Letters (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 21) I watched a couple of films I’d never seen before on Turner Classic Movies, the 1945 romantic drama Love Letters and the 1926 silent film La Bohème. Love Letters was one of Hal B. Wallis’s first productions after he left Warner Bros. in 1943 over a battle with Jack Warner on the production credits of the film Casablanca (when Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jack Warner as studio head bolted from his chair and grabbed the award before Wallis, the actual producer, could get it) and set up a semi-independent company to make his films with Paramount as the releasing studio. For his story he bought a novel called Pity My Simplicity by British author Christopher Massie whose plot seems to be pieced together, Frankenstein Monster-style, from Édmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, James Hilton’s Random Harvest (with the genders reversed) and Vera Caspary’s Laura. To adapt Massie’s novel into a film script Wallis hired Ayn Rand, of all people, though blessedly this film is free from her political, economic and sexual obsessions. (I told that to my husband Charles when he emerged from the bedroom about 20 minutes into it, and he said, “So Ayn Rand was just another hack!”) He also picked William (nè Wilhelm) Dieterle as director and went to David O. Selznick’s contract list for his two stars, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.

The plot begins in Italy during the last days of World War II, when Roger Morland (Robert Sully) asks one of his fellow soldiers, Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten), to write letters in his name to his girlfriend Victoria Remington (Jennifer Jones) in the small village of Longreach in central England. Victoria falls in love with Roger but only through the letters Alan actually wrote, and though we don’t see any of this happening until a flashback at the very end, the boorish Roger turns Victoria off and she can’t reconcile the haunting, romantic tone of “Roger”’s letters with his crude, nasty reality. Then the war ends and Alan returns home to England and his parents (Lumsden Hare and Winifred Harris). He learns that his Aunt Dagmar (whom we never see as an on-screen character, though there’s a still photo of her) has just died and left him her country estate, which is filled with his boyhood possessions as well as 10 gold sovereigns Dagmar told him to give to his wife if and when he marries. Alan has a sort-of fiancée, Helen Wentworth (Anita Louise), but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that Alan is no longer in love with her because he’s haunted by the memory of Victoria. Alan meets Victoria’s friend Dilly Carson (Ann Richards, whom both MGM and Paramount tried to give a star buildup to that didn’t take; she’s a fine actress but not one with star quality) and blurts out the story of himself, Roger, Victoria and the letters when he gets drunk and starts talking to himself for half an hour. Unbeknownst to Alan, Victoria is actually at the party, though she’s caught amnesia and has totally forgotten everything about herself, including her identity and the fact that she and Roger actually did get married and then he died, not in the war but in an “accident.” Later Alan hears that Victoria is also dead and he starts dating a woman named “Singleton” – no other name. We know that “Singleton” is really Victoria, but Alan is clueless (he’d never seen a photo of Victoria, so he had no idea what she looked like – one would have thought she’d have sent a picture of herself to Roger, but no-o-o-o-o).

Alan goes through a wedding ceremony with Singleton, but during the ceremony she slips and calls him “Roger” for reasons of which she has no idea. The two move into the home Alan inherited from the dead Aunt Dagmar, and the film – which up until then has been so dull both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake – suddenly becomes more interesting as Alan patiently works with Singleton to try to jog her memory and help her regain awareness of who and what she is. Alan even buys Singleton an MG sports car (and I admired Paramount’s technical staff for remembering that the British drive on the left side of the road and their cars come with steering wheels on the right side; once I encountered a British tourist on a bus who said he could drive but didn’t want to in the U.S. because it would have been too difficult for him to accommodate to driving on the “wrong” side of the road and then go back to left-hand driving when he got back home), though he drives it because he has no idea whether or not she can drive. One day the two are driving through the British countryside when Singleton sees a road sign pointing to Longreach and demands Alan take her there. When they get there, the house she grew up in turns out to be occupied by two British rustics who work for Singleton’s adoptive mother, Beatrice Remington (Gladys Cooper in one of her delightfully vicious old-lady characterizations).

Alan takes Singleton on a picnic and she spills some sort of red fruit juice on her hand. She wipes it on her white dress, and this immediately flashes her back to how her late husband Roger really died: he was knifed to death and she picked up the knife and got his blood on her hands. Because of this, the police arrested her and she was tried for the murder, though all we get of this are a few fragmentary flashbacks showing her under police custody during a break in the trial. Then Beatrice Remington tells her the whole story of how Roger died: they had a confrontation in which Roger burned all of the letters Alan had written Victoria in Roger’s name, telling her he was tired of living in another man’s shadow. Victoria had a hissy-fit over their destruction and tried to save the letters from the fireplace. Roger came up from behind her with murderous intent, but Beatrice saved her life by coming up from behind Roger and stabbing him. Later, though, Victoria handled the knife and got blood on her hands from it, and that’s why the cops suspected her of Roger’s murder. Alan happens to come on the scene while Beatrice is telling this story, and he finally realizes that he married Victoria after all and the two return to Alan’s home and presumably live happily ever after.

For some reason the Wikipedia page on Love Letters describes it as a film noir, which it definitely is not – though it does have a few nicely Gothic shots of all those old, decaying British manses from ace cinematographer Lee Garmes. It’s just a creepy (in both senses of the word) romantic melodrama set in an unbelievable rendition of the British countryside, and Dieterle directs dutifully but dully. Jennifer Jones seems way too young for her part – Alan decides that she’s 23 but she came off much more like a teenager to me – and during the movie I joked to Charles that if Ayn Rand had had her head she’d have had Alan restore Victoria’s memories by raping her. (All of Ayn Rand’s sex scenes involve a strong, dominating woman being raped into psychological and sexual submission by an even stronger, more dominating man. It’s obvious that was a personal fantasy for her.) Love Letters was both a commercial and a critical success at the time, though I think the latter was because Hal Wallis was obviously going for Quality with a capital “Q,” arranging for major stars and a top-flight director as well as a story that would impress Academy voters (which it did; Love Letters was up for four Oscars, including Jennifer Jones’ third consecutive Best Actress nomination, though it didn’t win any). It doesn’t age very well, though, and I think it’s because the whole conception of the mystery woman as flotsam in the hands of the strong, powerful man seems unbearably sexist and just icky today. The main theme from Victor Young’s score for Love Letters was turned into a pop song to promote the film (with lyrics by the “Body and Soul” guy, Edward Heyman), and in 1957 Nat “King” Cole and Gordon Jenkins made an incomparable recording of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy4jDt6bkG8) for Cole’s album Love Is the Thing that’s a good deal better than the movie itself! There’s also a gospel-soul version by another African-American artist, Ketty Lester, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz91zXh30sE.

La Bohème (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Love Letters, TCM showed a much better movie: La Bohème, a 1926 silent movie based on Henri Murger’s 1851 novel, which in the film’s credits is called Life in the Latin Quarter but its original French title was Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”). Murger started writing the book in 1846 and it was published piecemeal in French newspapers, notably Le Corsaire, between 1846 and 1849 before Murger collected his stories as a novel and published them in 1851. The book is best known today as the basis for Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème, but though TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Jacqueline Stewart both claimed the film was based on Puccini’s opera (for which Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa wrote the libretto; in opera, librettists are to composers what screenwriters are to directors in movies), it really wasn’t. In 1897 Ruggiero Leoncavallo had written his own La Bohème opera, with Leoncavallo writing his own libretto (as he had for his one major hit, Pagliacci), but his was a flop while Puccini’s was a smash success. The credited screenwriter, Fred De Gresac, took his version from Murger rather than Illica and Giacosa, though I was surprised he didn’t include the most famous scene from Murger that isn’t in the Puccini opera: finally evicted by their landlord, Benôit (Karl Dane in the movie) on the eve of a major party, the Bohemians go through with their party anyway but hold it outdoors in their building’s courtyard, where Benôit has dumped all their stuff. (Leoncavallo included that in his Bohème opera; Illica and Giacosa wrote it for their libretto but Puccini decided not to use it.)

The story should be familiar to Puccini buffs, but in case you aren’t one, here goes: four starving, struggling Bohemian artists – journalist and playwright Rodolphe (John Gilbert), painter Marcel (Gino Corrado), musician Schaunard (George Hassell) and hanger-on Colline (Edward Everett Horton – who would have guessed that out of all the cast members he would have the most enduring career when sound came in?) – are sharing a flat in Paris’s Latin Quarter. They have a monumental struggle on the first of every month to come up with the rent, though so far they’ve done it by a series of stratagems, most recently Rodolphe doing a quick draft of an article on dogs and cats for his irascible editor (Agostino Borato) and lengthening the piece on the spot when the editor says it’s too short. Also living in the neighborhood, in a building across the courtyard, is Mimì (Lillian Gish), a seamstress who makes her living working at home. Mimì and Rodolphe meet by chance and are immediately smitten with each other even though Mimì has another, wealthier suitor, Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy). Paul has placed a big order with Mimì for frilly lace garments he can wear at upper-class functions, and he’s made it clear that Mimì’s body is part of the deal. Mimì has no intention of yielding to Paul’s slimy advances but the two of them get physically close enough – even though all Mimì is doing is presenting Paul with the clothes she’s made for him – that Rodolphe, looking through Mimì’s window, sees them and gets entirely the wrong impression. Eventually they get back together and Rodolphe and Mimì go on a picnic (beautifully photographed by Henri Sartov in a way that evokes French pastoral painting of the 19th century just before the advent of Impressionism), but disaster strikes when Rodolphe’s editor, pissed off at him for missing his deadline by four weeks, fires him.

He doesn’t tell Rodolphe; he tells Mimì instead when she’s there to drop off the piece, and Mimì decides not to tell Rodolphe because he’s busy writing a play inspired by her and she doesn’t want to take his attention away from it. So she redoubles her efforts as a seamstress and works herself to the bone, keeping the lights on in her apartment so she can literally work day and night. (The film takes place in 1830 – we know that because in two different scenes we see wall calendars – and back then she would have still been working by candlelight.) Meanwhile Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Renée Adorée) is dating rich men on the side and getting spectacular outfits from them which she shares with Mimì. Unfortunately, Mimì’s workload has aggravated her tuberculosis; she’s taken a job at a clothing factory but becomes too weak to handle the big bolts of cloth involved, and ultimately she’s let go from her job. She retreats to her little apartment, staggering home and barely making it, and in the end she dies quietly and alone while the rest of the Bohemians are celebrating the success of Rodolphe’s play – which got put on thanks to the promotion of Vicomte Paul and his “friends in high places.” La Bohème was Lillian Gish’s first MGM film after years of working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith and playing the delicate, winsome “good girls” in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Then she retreated to Europe and worked there for two years before returning to the U.S. Gish sought a contract at a major studio and finally signed with MGM after production chief Irving Thalberg gave her a deal that included everything she wanted. She could choose her own stories and had approval of her director and co-stars.

Having worked in Europe for two years and therefore not being familiar with the current Hollywood talent, she asked Thalberg for advice; Thalberg showed her two reels of MGM’s latest production, The Big Parade – a love story set against the backdrop of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) – and Gish immediately demanded that she make La Bohème with The Big Parade’s director, King Vidor, and stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée. Gish also laid down the law that she didn’t want her and Gilbert actually to be shown kissing on screen. She thought their love would be more powerfully shown if it were understated and didn’t involve visible physical affection. Unfortunately, preview audiences were audibly disappointed when the film didn’t contain any of the heavy-breathing kissing scenes for which John Gilbert was famous, and so the film was put back into production so scenes of Gilbert almost slobbering over Gish could be added. Frankly, I think Lillian Gish was right and MGM and the preview audiences were wrong – and I suspect the additional scenes were directed by someone other than King Vidor (as a fill-in director, George Hill, had shot scenes for The Big Parade depicting the actual war). In his scenes for both The Big Parade and La Bohème Vidor had got a remarkable degree of subtlety from Gilbert, whereas he’s almost totally unrestrained in the La Bohème retakes and one wants to put a leash on him.

Nonetheless, despite those rather tacky love scenes, La Bohème is a quite remarkable movie. Gish literally starved herself for three days before shooting her death scene, wanting to look as emaciated as possible on camera. The film is quite haunting and benefits from Vidor’s quiet direction and excellent Paris atmosphere – kudos to art directors Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie for remembering that a film set in France should have road signs and other public postings in French (though an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor noticed one mistake: the sign outside Mimì’s front door says “Melle.” instead of “Mlle.,” the correct French abbreviation for “Mademoiselle”) – as well as the finely honed acting of Gish and the supporting characters. (John Gilbert is a special case, for both good and ill.) Unfortunately, TCM chose to show it with an odd musical accompaniment, mostly featuring solo piano with an occasional violin part – and the bits with the violin were the most appropriate because they’re the only ones that drew on Puccini’s music for this story. The lowest point in the problematic accompaniment was a ragtime theme that was played under one of the sequences of Lillian Gish slinking home to die of TB – but La Bohème is a strong enough work of art it survived even the tacky playing of the unnamed pianist and the wrong-headed nature of much of the score.

The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time (Enliven Entertainment, Maritime Productions, Sony Music Entertainment, originally aired April 14, 2024; rebroadcast April 19, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 19) CBS-TV re-ran The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, the Billy Joel concert special filmed on March 28, 2024 representing his 100th performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Joel had performed at least one concert per month there since 2010 and he’d become such a “regular” that the arena’s technical crew quickly set up the venue for a music concert just as easily as they could for a sports event. The show was originally aired on Sunday, April 14 but, on my husband Charles’s advice, I bypassed it and instead watched the Lifetime movies Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. It was rebroadcast on Friday for a rather strange reason: viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones had to watch the concert half an hour later than it was scheduled because the Masters golf tournament lasted a half-hour longer than it was supposed to, and at the end of the show CBS affiliates on the East and Midwest cut it off in the middle of the last song – Joel’s star-making hit, “Piano Man” – to broadcast their local news. If I’d watched it here in California it would not have been affected by this sort of petty vandalism, but once again, even on those rare occasions when the time-zone differences work in our favor, the East Coast-centric media mavens can’t stand it and make it sound like the world is coming to an end. There’s one post on Entertainment Weekly (https://ew.com/billy-joel-100th-residency-special-cut-short-cbs-8631580) that quoted three tweets (or do we need to call them “X”’s now?), including one by Kevin Connolly that read, “You couldn’t produce a worse product than CBS just did on the Billy Joel special. Way too many commercials, didn’t play some of his best songs, went extremely out of order in his set list, and then cuts away to the local news in the middle of ‘Piano Man’?!? A total flop by CBS.”

I certainly didn’t think it was a total flop; I’ve been a Billy Joel fan at least since the late 1970’s (when he released two back-to-back mega-hit albums on Columbia, The Stranger and 52nd Street, which raised him from medium-level music star to pop icon and superstar) and I enjoyed the show thoroughly. I agree with Connolly that there were “way too many commercials,” though that’s part of the price you have to pay for all privately-owned television, and also with Connolly’s comment that he “didn’t play some of his best songs.” His set list didn’t include the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” which was the iconic Billy Joel song from the late 1970’s. Like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” it was heard everywhere – there was even a piano-roll version which the late John Gabrish and I heard at a visit to San Diego’s Old Town in the late 1980’s – and I remember liking it at first, then getting thoroughly sick of it (both from incessant airings of Joel’s version and the equally incessant covers), and after it faded off the airwaves hearing it again in a few years and saying to myself, “You know, that’s a really nice song.” (I had the same reaction to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” as well.) There were some other Billy Joel songs I’d have liked to have heard on the show – including “Big Shot,” “Zanzibar” (a curious knock-off of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabaña”: the Copacabaña and Zanzibar were both major nightclubs in New York City in the 1940’s), “Allentown,” “Pressure,” “Uptown Girl” and his infamous history lesson, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” – but the songs he did include were quite fine. Joel began his set with “Lights Out on Broadway” and then played an intro based on the “Ode to Joy” finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to his song “Anthony’s Song (Movin’ Out).”

Then, after a lesser-known song from The Stranger called “Vienna” (I wondered if Joel placed that there because Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from which he’d just quoted, was composed and premiered in Vienna in 1824) and a brief speech by Jerry Seinfeld, Joel did “New York State of Mind” and then brought on a guest star, Sting, to sing with him on “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” Sting came out in a powder-blue suit and did what amounted to a Sinatra impression, less vocally than physically – and he was so immaculately turned out Joel’s basic-black outfit seemed blah by comparison. Then Joel confessed to some uncertainty as to whether he could still hit the high notes on the next song he was about to sing – “An Innocent Man,” the title of a quite good Joel album of the early 1980’s in which he paid tribute to doo-wop in general and the Four Seasons in particular. Despite his disclaimer, Joel actually did quite well with “An Innocent Man.” He not only still has those high notes, they rang out clearly and strongly even though without the sheer ethereal power they had in the 1980’s. I couldn’t help but compare Joel to Elton John, whose current voice simply doesn’t have the killer falsetto it had in his prime – something that became painfully apparent when he appeared on a late-night TV show with Miley Cyrus a few years back. He let Miley Cyrus pick whatever song from his catalog she wanted to do, and she chose “Tiny Dancer” – which mercilessly exposed the deterioration in the upper register of John’s voice. After that there was a commercial break and then a gag segment in which people in the audience were allegedly asked what they wanted to hear Joel sing next – and all but one of them said they would like to hear his new song, “Turn the Lights Back On” (was it Joel’s belated answer record to his own “Lights Out on Broadway”?). Joel dutifully performed “Turn the Lights Back On” and then went into the title track from Joel’s final (1993) pop-rock album, River of Dreams.

During this song Joel gave one of his backup singers and musicians, Crystal Taliaferro – a Black woman who wore a considerably flasher and more flamboyant costume than Joel’s (most stars don’t let their backup singers upstage them in the costume department) and variously played saxophone, timbales (the stand-up drums used in Latin bands) and triangle – a chance to sing solo. Taliaferro responded to the challenge by belting out the first two choruses of “River Deep – Mountain High” with more ferocity and power than anyone since the first recording by Tina Turner with Phil Spector’s backup band. Then Joel came back and reprised “River of Dreams” with an intriguing interpolation of The Cadillacs’ 1954 hit “Gloria” towards the end. (There are quite a few songs called “Gloria,” including Van Morrison’s star-making 1964 hit with the band Them and the 1982 dance-pop hit for the late Laura Branigan.) After “River of Dreams” Joel came back with “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” – an enigmatic song with a fast middle section about the unhappy relationship of former prom queen and king Brenda and Eddie – and “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” from the 1980 album Glass Houses (which may feature the sexiest photo of Billy Joel ever published), for which once again Joel got out from behind the piano, stood in front of the band and sang. Then Joel played what is probably my favorite song of his, “Only the Good Die Young,” which despite its title is actually a blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church and especially what its teachings do to teenage women unlucky enough to be brought up in it. After that Joel played the first track on Glass Houses, “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy),” during which director Paul Dugdale cut to a man and woman in the audience, both of them wearing black T-shirts, with hers reading “You May Be Right” and his reading “I May Be Crazy.” This song, too, contained an interpolation; Billy Joel’s lead guitarist took the vocal mike and belted out some of Led Zeppelin’s song “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The final piece on the program was “Piano Man,” the title song from Joel’s second album (and first for Columbia Records; before that he’d made a little-known album called Cold Spring Harbor for Ampex, the short-lived label started by a well-known company that made tape recorders) and his first major-label hit. It was Joel’s breakthrough song and it’s become part of American culture; I knew one cocktail-lounge pianist who would always make a point of playing it every Saturday at 9 p.m. because the song’s opening line is, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday.” That was the song that for some reason got cut off in the East and Midwest time zones when this show originally aired on April 14 so CBS decided to rebroadcast it five days later. It was also a song on which Joel took the omnipresent demand of modern pop-rock performers for audiences to sing along to the extreme of not actually singing the final chorus at all, convinced that his audience will sit shame-facedly through the song’s melody and join it so well the crowd sang it perfectly and without apparent guidance from Joel himself. The song featured Joel simultaneously singing, playing piano and playing harmonica from a Bob Dylan-style rack (which looked constructed to hold a much larger harmonica than the one Joel was playing) and was a worthy close to a quite remarkable evening.

One thing I admired about the telecast was the sheer power of Joel’s band – even though he inexplicably fired Liberty DeVitto, the great drummer on most of his records, just before his 2006 tour (DeVitto sued Joel in 2009 claiming, among other things, that he’d co-written many of Joel’s songs, but the suit was settled out of court in 2010 and DeVitto ended up starting what amounts to a Billy Joel tribute band called The Lords of 52nd Street) – and another thing was the extent to which Joel’s music has been influenced by jazz. Not only does he carry a three-piece horn section (trumpet, trombone, saxophone) but Joel’s own piano playing sounds considerably jazzier “live” than it did on his records. Also, like James Taylor, Joel has long since lost the exciting mane of hair he showcased on his early album covers and he’s now totally bald (either that or he’s responded to male pattern baldness by shaving his head completely). The show was rather awkwardly labeled The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, but it was well worth watching and a showcase for one of the most interesting pop-song catalogues of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Law and Order: "Inconvenient Truth" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 18) I watched the usual trifecta of Law and Order shows on NBC – though they’re doing yet another hiatus next Thursday and won’t be back until May 2. The flagship Law and Order episode, “Inconvenient Truth” (though it had nothing to do with climate change or Al Gore!) was O.K. It featured Jordan Bryant (Apollo Levine), an African-American who 12 years earlier was convicted of raping a white woman, and while he was in prison he defended himself as best he could. He also worked in the prison kitchen and determined to have an above-board legal career as a chef when he got out, which he did thanks to the efforts of attorney Keith Palmer (Paul Schultze). Keith Palmer also filed a lawsuit against the city on Jordan’s behalf and won a settlement of $10 million, but Palmer not only took 55 percent of the settlement as his fee (the standard is one-third) but billed Jordan for all his expenses in researching the case, including his paralegals, deposition expenses and the like. Jordan determined to open his own restaurant with the $1 million he had left (less $100,000 he gave to his estranged daughter, with which she was able to pay off her student loans) but got into arguments with his (white) business partner over money.

Then Jordan is knifed to death outside the restaurant after briefly having an argument with someone inside, and the police and prosecutors come to the conclusion that Keith Palmer deliberately murdered Jordan because Palmer was in line for a judicial appointment and the suit Jordan was threatening to file against Palmer could have derailed it. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) actually take Jordan to trial, but in the middle of the trial he whips out a document that gives him an unshakable alibi: he was in his car receiving an automated traffic ticket at the time of the murder, and he was photographed in the act. Ultimately it turns out that Jordan was actually killed by Palmer’s wife Amanda (Jodi Stevens), who resented him for potentially destroying her husband’s career and his opportunity for a judgeship. There’s a potentially fascinating sequel to this one in which Keith Palmer represents his wife in court and manages to get her acquitted by savaging the prosecution and arguing, “A few weeks ago you were equally certain I committed this crime!” But as things stand, despite the attempt of writers Gia Gordon and Pamela Wechsler to make some social comments about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony (their whole case against Keith rested on a rather twitchy waiter who more or less placed him at the scene of the crime), ultimately it was one of the less satisfying recent Law and Orders and the wife ex machina gimmick really bothered me.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Combat Fatigue" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode was a good deal better and finally wrapped up (we hope!) the story arc of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), her parents Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray), and George Brouchard (Patrick Carroll), the man who abducted her and ultimately sold her to another pedophile, a Fate Worse Than Death from which she was saved only by the timely intervention of the Special Victims Unit. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) felt personally responsible for Maddie’s fate because she spotted both Maddie and Brouchard in an energy-drink van Brouchard had stolen, but instead of stopping them she let them go on their way. The episode opens with Brouchard’s trial, in which the jury deadlocks 11 to 1 for conviction because one of the jurors literally has a crush on Brouchard and thinks they’re going to get together as soon as he’s acquitted and set free. The judge declares a mistrial, which means Maddie and her parents have to go through the whole ordeal over again. At one point Brouchard claims that Elaine is in love with him; she isn’t, but she’s been texting him because she wants to get him alone, confront him and, if necessary, shoot him herself to make sure he doesn’t do this to anyone else. Brouchard ratchets up his psychological pressure on the Flynns by firing his attorney in mid-trial and demanding to represent himself – and he does a surprisingly good job.

An FBI profiler on loan to the SVU testifies that Brouchard is “a narcissistic sociopath” (gee, with credentials like that he could run for President if he weren’t ineligible because he was Canadian-born) who gets off on psychologically manipulating people. When Brouchard is tried again he’s facing additional charges of sexual abuse because Maddie has come clean about what he did to her sexually while he held her captive – he didn’t actually do the dirty deed but he gave her a bath, including washing her private parts, and looked like he was having a good time. At one point Elaine actually lures Brouchard to a confrontation in the motel room where he’s living and holds a gun on him, and it takes all of Benson’s considerable communications skills to talk Elaine out of shooting Brouchard and eliminating him and his threat once and for all. Eventually the jury in the case finds Brouchard guilty (which makes us heave the proverbial sigh of relief) and Benson takes Maddie to her own psychiatrist even though Maddie pleads that she’s already been in therapy and it hasn’t helped. “Not this kind of therapy,” Benson insists, making me wonder just how Benson’s therapist is different from all others, especially in ways supposed to help her suffer and get over the multiple traumas of being yanked from her home, psychologically dominated not only by Bouchard but his vexing organization of routinieres and leeches he had around him. This was a better-than-average SVU, and Patrick Carroll’s performance as the villain is really remarkable – he plays it like he’s auditioning for The Donald Trump Story – but, like Benson, I’m getting pretty damned tired of having this guy around!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Crossroads" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last show on last Thursday’s (April 18) trifecta of Law and Orders is an Organized Crime episode, “Crossroads,” which was actually pretty good except it suffers from Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, which would make a good deal of it incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following the storyline from its inception several episodes ago. It’s about an organic honey farm run by Mama Boone (Lois Smith) and her son Angus (Stephen Lang), who hit on the idea of keeping the failing honey business going by using it as a cover to distribute fentanyl (whatever its status as a real-life scourge, fentanyl has become a favorite of crime-fiction writers in all media over the last few years!). Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) has infiltrated the gang as an undercover informant, and so had another detective on the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sam Bashir. Only the gang “outed” him and killed him, leaving Stabler to bury the body – something he communicated to the unit via a support-group meeting that’s part of the gang’s cover, though the person running it is a wheelchair-using vet named Darian Morse (Tobias Forrest) who may or may not be aware that the support group he organized is a front for drug distribution. He becomes aware of that when a crazed young man shows up looking haggard and confesses to having shot and killed his wife and their two sons, in what’s the most powerful scene on this episode even though it’s only peripherally connected to the main intrigue. Ultimately Angus realizes that even he is simply a front for a higher-up criminal whose name he knows but whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret – so this interminable story arc is going to last at least one more episode before Dick Wolf and his show runners, directors and writers finally put it, and us, out of our miseries!

Bend of the River (Universal-International, copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 17) my husband Charles and I watched the third of the six movies in the James Stewart Westerns collection on Universal DVD’s: Bend of the River. The omens were pretty good on this one: the director was Anthony Mann, who had previously made Winchester ‘73 with some of the same cast members (James Stewart, Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen), and the writer was Borden Chase (adapting a novel called Bend of the Snake by one William Gulick), who’d written Winchester ‘73 as well as Red River, two of the all-time greatest Western films. Alas, the magic didn’t gel this time around, and it’s hard to tell what went wrong. Bend of the River is about a wagon train of prospective homesteaders en route to Oregon to set up farms. Their guide is Glyn McLyntock (James Stewart) – one wonders why his name is spelled so pretentiously when throughout the movie I’d assumed it was “Glenn McLintock” – and on the way there he rescues an outlaw named Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) from a lynch mob who are trying to hang him for stealing a horse. (One wonders if the horse he rides off on in Glyn’s company is the horse he was accused of stealing.) The two team up despite the misgivings of the paterfamilias, Jeremy Baile (Jay C. Flippen), and his two daughters, Laura (Julie Adams) and Marjie (Lori Nelson, in her first film). Ironically, Julie Adams was the female lead in the first Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lori Nelson was the female lead in its sequel, Revenge of the Creature.

The would-be homesteaders make a deal with steamboat owner Tom Hendricks (Howard Petrie) to hold their belongings in Portland until September 1, when Hendricks will ship them to their camp. Among the items they are expecting are food supplies they will need to get them through the winter until they can start growing their own in the spring. The homesteaders cut down enough trees to establish a clearing and build their houses, and they wait for the supplies to arrive … and they wait … and they wait. Now it’s the middle of October, they’re running out of flour and bacon, and they will starve unless the supplies arrive. Glyn volunteers to ride to Portland to find out what happened, and when he gets to Portland he finds it’s a wide-open town full of gunfighting, drinking, gambling and the other Western vices. Hendricks explains that there’s been a gold rush – I’ve been unable to find out when this film takes place, and Google was no help because there were at least three Oregon gold rushes, one in 1850 before the big one in California, one from 1861 to 1870 and one in the 1890’s just before the big one in Alaska. He’s decided to renege on his deal with the settlers because he can get a lot more for his flour and whatnot by selling it to the miners at the inflated prices typical of resource rushes. Glyn makes vague promises to some of the locals, led by Shorty (the young Harry Morgan), to help him steal the stuff from Hendricks – only they decide midway through the journey that they’d rather divert the stuff to the gold miners who will pay inflated prices for it. About all Glyn has going for him in keeping the shipment on its way to the homesteaders is gambler Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson) and Emerson Cole – who switches sides in mid-journey and aligns with the renegades until Glyn and he have a big fight in the middle of the river that ends with Glyn drowning Emerson. (At this point we’re thinking that it would have been better if Glyn had let the lynchers hang Emerson in the first reel. But then again we wouldn’t have the fun of watching Arthur Kennedy’s great performance in the role; he practically steals the movie.)

Ultimately Bend of the River is entertaining but nothing special, and I’m not sure where it went wrong. Part of the problem may have been that it’s in color: after the mega-success of Winchester ‘73 in black-and-white Universal-International made another percentage deal with James Stewart (reportedly he’d made $600,000 off his share of Winchester ‘73 and $750,000 off his share in this one) and decided to ramp up the budget by shooting it at the tail end of the three-strip Technicolor era. But, quite frankly, the color works against the values of this story; it needed the cool, dark beauty of red-filtered black-and-white. Part of it also might be that, as Charles said afterwards, aside from a brief run-in between the settlers and a few Shoshone Indians early on whose only plot significance is that Julie Adams’ character gets an arrowhead stuck in her shoulder (and the main woman on the wagon train, Mrs. Prentiss, played by Frances Bavier, insists that they drive as gently as possible for the next month until she heals), Bend of the River doesn’t really seem that much like a Western. Charles said it was basically an exploration film about colonization and imperialism, and it could have been set in Africa or the South Seas or anywhere else in the world where whites were lording it over people of color. Bend of the River is a good movie rather than a great one, and while it’s indicative of the way James Stewart was trying to keep his career going by hardening his image – there’s a clip from the film included in the trailer in which, reacting to Emerson’s change of sides, Glyn gives him a low-keyed threat that he’ll be looking over Emerson’s shoulder wherever he goes until he finally catches up with him, and he sounds amazingly like his long-time friend and occasional co-star John Wayne – he’d already proven he could act a Western tough guy in Winchester ‘73 and he didn’t need to do it again. The trailer also references Julie Adams’s character as a woman who “made the mistake of falling in love with two men” – though that’s only sequentially, not simultaneously (she takes up with Emerson in wide-open Portland and then ends up with Glyn after Emerson’s death) – and when it then mentioned Rock Hudson I couldn’t help but joke, “He also made the mistake of falling in love with men.”

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, part 3: “Ides of March,” (GBH Educational Foundation, WGBH, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 16) PBS showed “Ides of March,” the last in a three-part mini-series on the life and career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’ve long suspected the producers of this show (the BBC in association with PBS and various other companies) were deliberately out to make a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Both Caesar and Trump essentially slammed their way into absolute political power and overthrew long-established republics (500 years in Caesar’s case, 250 years in Trump’s) by total unscrupulousness and utter indifference to social norms, as well as direct appeals to “the people” against the “elites” who were supposedly ham-stringing the political system so it could not deliver what “the people” really wanted. Of course, Caesar’s playbook has been used time and time again by both Right-wing and Left-wing demagogues in various countries ever since: in France by Robespierre and later Napoleon, in Germany by the Kaiser (whose title, like “Czar,” derives from “Caesar”) and then by Hitler, in Russia by Lenin, Stalin and eventually Putin, along with other modern-day tyrants like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (until he lost power seeking re-election and, like Trump, claimed that the election had been “stolen” from him and staged a coup to try to retain power), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (representing a party that’s the lineal descendant of the first Fascists led by Benito Mussolini in 1922) and others around the world. The PBS.org home page for “Ides of March,” https://www.pbs.org/video/ides-of-march-xkgyxs/, describes it thusly: “As Caesar takes control of Rome and consolidates his grip over the Republic, his ambition turns to tyranny. A handful of senators plot to end his rule in the only way they can: by taking his life. But will it be enough to save the Republic?”

The first two episodes, “High Priest” and “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” his slogan upon winning the war in Gaul – modern-day France – that cemented his position as the most powerful man in Rome), told a story of how a man with no particular sense of morality made and then broke alliances with others to pursue his own path to power. I remember a history book I studied from in grade school which presented Caesar as an altogether positive figure – it had chapter headings reading “The Sickness of Rome” and “The Physician: Julius Caesar” – but that’s decidedly not how this show, produced and directed by Emma Frank, sees him. The ancient Roman constitution (which, like the current British constitution, was unwritten and relied mostly on an agreed-upon set of political and social norms which Caesar deliberately upended) provided for an office called Dictator in which the Roman Senate could appoint someone and give them absolute power. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time, at most six months. The Dictator was only appointed in case of a national emergency – usually an attack from an enemy – and was supposed to relinquish power and hand it back to the elected officials as soon as the emergency was over. Not for Caesar: he first demanded an appointment as Dictator for ten years – which the Senate reluctantly gave him with the proviso that it would have to come up for renewal every year – and then he demanded to be made Dictator for life. Caesar also demanded that he sit at the head of the Senate, between the two elected Consuls that were the Roman heads of state – essentially declaring himself above the law and the ultimate authority over Rome. Among the powers he took for himself was the ability to appoint the magistrates, who served under the consuls and essentially ran the Senate, instead of allowing them to be elected directly. Caesar also had made for himself a gold version of the laurel wreath Roman consuls traditionally wore around their heads as a symbol of their authority, and to many observers it looked like a crown.

This was an especially sore point among many Romans because originally Rome had been ruled by kings, only the seventh and last one, Tyrannus Superbus (whose name has entered the language as the word “tyrant,” meaning an unscrupulous and evil absolute ruler) was deposed in a coup led by a direct ancestor of Brutus, who in 44 B.C. had wormed his way into Caesar’s inner circle. “It's a quite extraordinary thing, a really, really explicit contravention of Roman customary practice,” says retired history professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on the program about Caesar’s demand to be made dictator for life. “The entire idea of the non-monarchical state is that no one has power in perpetuity.” Another historian interviewed for the program, Tom Holland, says, “Caesar's preponderance has made the traditional function of the Senate, the role of the helmsman guiding the ship of state, essentially irrelevant. Caesar is too impatient, too unsubtle not to let his fellow senators know that he knows this.” Holland mentions Brutus’s role in the plot to kill Caesar. The Roman Senators who want to get rid of him know they have to do that by March 15 – the so-called “Ides of March” holiday – because right after that Caesar is scheduled to leave on another military campaign against the Parthian empire (mostly in modern-day Iran, though at its height it stretched from Turkey to Afghanistan and Pakistan and encompassed the so-called “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq as well). Caesar, says Holland, “sees Brutus as if he's a son who he's looked after, cherished, and promoted. Now, Caesar promises Brutus fantastic things. He's gonna get a key appointment this year, and this will all put him on track for a consulship in the future as well. It’s a really bittersweet moment for Brutus. On the one hand, he is climbing that ladder of offices. The consulship is in reach. But at the same time, he doesn't like the fact that Caesar is centralizing all of this power around himself. But in the end, he's able to shrug it off because at the moment, he's benefiting from the system.”

Caesar tests the waters of whether the Roman people are ready to accept him as, essentially, a king by staging an elaborate ceremony in which his loyal and trusted assistant, Mark Antony, will offer him a diadem – essentially a crown – instead of the gold replica of a laurel wreath he’s been wearing. But when he notices that the audience reacts negatively at the sight of Caesar being offered a crown, he gets the message and pushes the damned thing away. Caesar gets at least two warnings of his impending assassination, one from a priest named Spurinna and one from his wife, Calpurnia, who’s had a dream about him being assassinated in the Senate and pleads with him not to go. But one of the conspirators against him, Decimus – a long-standing ally of Caesar but one who, like Brutus and fellow conspirators Cassius and Cicero, has got disillusioned with him – goes to Caesar to convince him to attend the latest session of the Senate after all. “Decimus says to Caesar, ‘This is behavior unbecoming of you,’” Holland explains. “‘What – what am I supposed to go and tell the Senate? That you're scared of shadows, that you're obedient to a woman's importunities? This is not behavior appropriate to Caesar.’” So Caesar goes to the Senate and gets knifed to death by 20 to 30 people, each of whom decided to take a role in the assassination so it could not be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, the death of Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic; after yet another Roman civil war Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian takes absolute power and declares himself Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire, like the Republic, lasts for 500 years in the West (and another 1,000 in the East as the Byzantine Empire, which splits off from its parent and holds out until 1453, when it’s conquered by the Ottoman Turks), and Rome becomes the paradigmatic historical example of a self-governing society that collapsed through the greed and hunger for power of a single determined individual.

The historians interviewed for the “Ides of March” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator make this point explicitly in the closing minutes of the documentary. Tom Holland says, “I think the tragedy of the Roman Republic is that its greatest man, the man who in so many ways exemplified all its qualities to an absolute pitch of achievement, those achievements brought the Roman Republic crashing down into rubble.” Classics professor Jeffrey Tatum says, “When Julius Caesar commenced his political career, he could never have imagined that the Roman Republic would come to an end, and he certainly couldn't have imagined that he would be the agent that brought that about. And yet, that's what happened in a very short time. What are the lessons for modern representational systems that are not nearly so old? Could modern democracy collapse? Perhaps we simply take our political norms for granted.” Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet member, says, “There was a moment where the Roman Republic seemed the most perfect political state on earth. Then it had got itself into trouble. And this reminds us a bit of our own period. From about 1989, democracy was on the rise. The number of democracies in the world doubled, and then a period of deep, deep uncertainty began, including the rise of populism. And it's in that environment authoritarianism thrives, that strong men come forward to challenge democracy.” British constitutional lawyer and scholar Shami Chakrabarti says, “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call. Democracy has to be constantly fought for. If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.” And it seems quite likely, given his ability to overcome obstacles that would have sunk the political careers of lesser men and the almost god-like adulation he receives from millions of Americans, that the new Caesar has indeed arrived and his name is Donald Trump.

PBS "Frontline," April 16, 2024: "Children of Ukraine" (GBH Educational Foundation, WGBH, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the third and last part of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS showed a new episode of its long-running Frontline documentary series called “Children of Ukraine,” about how up to 150,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken out of Ukraine into Russia. There they’re sent into “camps” and essentially brainwashed into denying or forgetting their former identity as Ukrainians and accepting a new one as Russians, including being forced to sing patriotic songs about Russia and ultimately being adopted by Russian families. “Basically, they try to erase our identity as Ukrainians,” said one of the parents of these children. “They try to impose their distorted version of history. We're still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.” Some of the “children” involved are actually teenage boys who are worrying that they may soon be drafted in the Russian Army and forced to fight against their countrymen. “Russia has said it's been relocating Ukrainian children as part of a mass humanitarian effort,” said Frontline’s familiar narrator, Will Lyman. “A year into the war, President Vladimir Putin held a televised rally featuring children thanking Russian soldiers for rescuing them. … In a statement, the Russian government told us that Ukrainian children have been relocated to ensure their safety and to provide medical care and education.” The relocation effort to move Ukrainian children to Russia is under the direction of Maria Lvova-Belova, who’s shown in the documentary. She says she has adopted five children herself, including one from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was gutted and essentially destroyed by Russian attacks.

The “Children of Ukraine” documentary opens with a scene at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands in which arrest warrants were sworn out against Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges the Russian government called “outrageous.” “A team of Ukrainian investigators is now collecting evidence they are hoping will be used for the International Criminal Court case,” Lyman explained. “They work for a human rights group, the IPHR [International Partnership for Human Rights], and are traveling through recently liberated territories across Ukraine.” IPHR’s Web site is https://iphronline.org, and though they claim to have “cooperated with civil society groups in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus,” virtually all the Web tabs linked to on IPHR’s home page are for sites in the former Soviet Union. “Our mission is to find families whose children are missing till this day,” an IPHR spokesperson told Frontline. “And we're trying to collect all the evidence and information about such cases so that our lawyers could qualify it after, whether it was a war crime or a crime against humanity.” They’re shown in the documentary working with another group called Save Ukraine (https://www.saveukraineua.org), and their Web page includes a link to a CBS-TV 60 Minutes story from November 19, 2023, also about the alleged abductions of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian identity and culture before they’re adopted by Russian parents (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/).

One of the cases shown in the documentary is Maxim, a four-year-old boy whose grandmother tried to place him with older relatives after his mom was killed in a Russian attack on their car. Maxim’s mother was killed in the assault, but his two older siblings – a brother and a sister – survived. But Maxim was taken and later his surviving relatives saw a photo of someone who looked like him in a Russian catalog of young children available for adoption. A teenage boy named Arkem had a particularly harrowing experience in Russian custody, According to the show, he was taken to the Perevalsk Special Correctional Boarding School in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine. There his cell phone was confiscated so he couldn’t call his parents and tell them where he was, and he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and wear uniforms with the letter “Z,” a symbol of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “The Russian government said in its statement that Artem and his fellow students had been relocated to protect them from Ukrainian shelling, and that Russia had tried to contact the children’s families,” narrator Lyman explained. “They said it’s ‘hardly surprising’ that a Russian school would have ‘due regard for national symbols, including the country's flag and anthem.’” Six months after he was captured, Artem – who in the meantime was scared he would be drafted into Russia’s military and forced to fight against his fellow Ukrainians – was reunited with his mother after she took a long, circuitous journey through Poland and Belarus before finally rendezvousing with her son in Crimea in Russian-occupied south Ukraine.

Among the ironies of this show was the sheer number of people in it who were wearing T-shirts with English logos and other writing, including the sporting-goods maker The North Face; and the fact that the U.S. and Canada did something similar in the 1890’s and for decades afterwards. After major Native American resistance to U.S. occupation ended with the December 29, 1890 Native defeat at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. government adopted a policy called “forced assimilation.” Native children were rounded up and sent to special “Indian schools” where they were forcibly indoctrinated into the ways of white American culture and, like the Ukrainian children held hostage by Russians, were punished severely if they spoke their native language or tried to hold on to their people’s traditional customs. In another PBS documentary (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/buffy-saintemarie-carry-it-on-eagle.html), Canadian Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie recalled being subjected to this abuse, including being kidnapped from her parents and adopted by a white family where she was subjected to physical, including sexual, abuse that lasted until she was old enough to go to college. The stated rationale behind this program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.”

Sounds and Swells 2024 (Hausmann Quartet, Art of Elan, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 15) I went to the San Diego Public Library for an unusual, to say the least, event called Sounds and Swells, which combined live string quartet music by the Hausmann Quartet (whom my husband Charles and I had seen earlier just before Easter performing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross at Verbatim Books with interspersed readings by local writers) with surfing films. The Hausmann Quartet’s Web site explained the program thusly: “Join us for the return of Sounds and Swells! As part of this season’s San Diego Central Library Cinema & Sounds series, this collaboration between the Hausmann Quartet and Art of Elan at the Library’s Neil Morgan Auditorium features live music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert accompanying local surfing footage from McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography. This concert is free and open to the public.” Art of Elan is a local nonprofit that describes its mission as follows: “Known for its collaborative spirit, Art of Elan has been pioneering unique events and bringing exciting classical music to diverse audiences for over 16 years through innovative partnerships and bi-national initiatives that have cultivated curious audiences on both sides of the border.” The concert was curated (whatever that means in this context; I’m guessing he selected both the film clips and the live pieces that accompanied them) by Dr. Eric Starr, a tall, rail-thin man who’s boyishly handsome even though he’s also visibly getting on in years. He looks like an aging surfer who still likes to hang out at the beach even though he probably doesn’t do much surfing anymore. Dr. Starr is listed on the San Diego State University Web site as “Studio Artist Teacher of Trombone and Euphonium; Lecturer of Music: Brass Chamber Music Program Advisor – Music, Entrepreneurship and Business Degree, Brass Area Coordinator, Internship Coordinator,” a quite impressive set of credentials.

The program featured professionally shot footage of 10 surfing sites around the world (though the clips were grouped into just six segments) accompanied by the Hausmann Quartet’s performances of music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Josef Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Lou Harrison and Franz Schubert. The surfing footage was mostly quite good and showed the amazing skill of the surfers involved as they were seen mostly “shooting the curl” – surfing under the crest of a breaking wave. The opening sequence, shot at Teahupo’o, Tahiti, was quite the best; set to the last movement (“Trés moderé; trés animé”) of Debussy’s String Quartet, Op. 10, it featured spectacular footage of excellent surfers, some of it in real time and some in slow motion. It was a bit disorienting to watch surfing footage without actually hearing the sounds of surf, but I soon got used to it after a while and the combination of the surfing and the music assumed a kind of balletic grace. Next came a predictably gloomier segment headlined “Alaska and Norway,” shot in the dead of winter where daylight is only an hour and a half long (the titles helpfully explained to us that sunrise in that part of the world begins at 10 a.m. and sunset is at 11:30 a.m.). The filmmakers, whoever they were (only the San Diego and Half Moon Bay sequences had any onscreen credits either to the people who shot them or the ones who appeared), managed to grab all their shots during the 1 ½-hour time window, and the music, Terry Riley’s “‘G’ Song,” provided an appropriately dark and doleful accompaniment. Next came the comic-relief segment of the program, so to speak: “The Wedge” at Newport Beach, California, a set of short, choppy waves virtually nobody seemed to be able to surf without wiping out. Set to two “Presto” finales of quartets by Franz Josef Haydn (Op. 9, no. 3; and Op. 33, no. 2), this footage evoked quite a lot of audience laughter. In fact, the Op. 33, no. 2 finale had one of Haydn’s notorious trick endings in which the audience started applauding after one of the long pauses in the finale – and then the quartet came back for two notes more.

After that came the local footage, photographed by McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography; reportedly McCracken and Taylor were in the audience last night and the beginning announcement made it sound like they were going to do a question-and-answer session at the end of the program, but they didn’t. It helped that the locations where this footage was shot – La Jolla, Ocean Beach (only briefly) and Sunset Cliffs off Point Loma – were familiar to me, including some brief spots of surfers slaloming around the columns that hold up the Ocean Beach Pier. Not only is this sort of surfing incredibly dangerous (you can easily hurt or even kill yourself by crashing into the pilings that hold up the pier), the Ocean Beach Pier itself is currently closed to visitors. So far the city of San Diego is holding hearings on what to do about it and whether to try to fix it or tear it down altogether and build heaven knows what to replace it (probably some kind of “multi-use development” with tacky retail on the ground floor and towers of expensive housing above). This gives the footage important historic value, at least! The local footage was accompanied by the last “Presto” movement of the Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, by Mendelssohn. Next came one of the most interesting segments, though I wasn’t able to take notes on the various people credited; it seemed like the filmmaker was either Dave or Dan Healy and he seemed to be out to give each of the surfers on-screen credits, too, as they first appeared. It was called “Mavericks One” and took place at Half Moon Bay, California (though the only film listed on imdb.com even remotely close to that title is something called Sea Rising: Mavericks, written and directed by James Nguyen and scheduled for release in 2025), and though not all the surfers in it were able to surf their waves to completion, enough of them did it was a welcome relief after all the wipeouts in the Newport Beach sequence.

The program ended with some more creative geography, footage that mashed up the Banzai Pipeline in Oahu, Hawai’i with Skeleton Bay in Namibia, of all places. It was nice to see some footage of Hawai’i, where after all surfing was invented (in the early 1920’s by lifeguards not as sport or entertainment, but as a way to get people they’d rescued from drowning back to dry land as soon as possible), but the cutbacks between Hawai’i and Namibia were confusing, at least partly because aside from one Black man, all the spectators seemed to be white. The accompaniment was the “Presto” movement from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (so called because he based it on a song called “Death and the Maiden” Schubert had written earlier) and it worked pretty well, creating a nicely somber mood despite the ultra-fast movement title. All in all, Sounds and Swells was a quite nice evening, expertly bringing together two sorts of art – classical music and scenes of surfing – into an engaging whole even though it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. One wonders why the music didn’t have more to do with the ocean: the piece I’d like to have heard is Debussy’s La Mer, probably the most famous piece of classical “surf music” ever written; it’s for a full orchestra but I’m guessing there’s an arrangement out there for string quartet, and if there isn’t the Hausmanns could probably make one!

Killer Fortune Teller (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 14) I gave my husband Charles a choice as to what TV shows we’d watch next: the much-hyped Billy Joel concert special on CBS (featuring his 100th and final show at Madison Square Garden) or two Lifetime movies. Charles surprised me with his choice: he said, “If it was Billy Joel from 30 years ago I’d be interested, but not with his voice as it is now.” (He also said that Billy Joel had been a favorite of his mother’s when he was growing up.) So we watched the two Lifetime movies, Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love. Killer Fortune Teller turned out to be an O.K. melodrama about a brother and sister, Shane (Jonathan Stoddard) and Olivia (Sarah Murphree) Settel, who inherited the multinational Settel Pharmaceuticals company on the death of their father a few months before. It opens with one of those maddening prologues Lifetime and its producers are very big on these days, in which a woman we don’t know is wheeled into a hospital emergency room and, despite their best efforts (including intubating her – i.e., putting her on a ventilator – which happened to me during my health crisis in December 2021), she dies. Then the film flashes forward 20 years and initially focuses on the rivalry between the Settel siblings, and in particular Olivia’s resentment that the company’s board gave Shane the CEO title even though Olivia got better grades in business school and was all-around more qualified, simply because Shane had a dick. Shane is negotiating a big merger deal with a rival drug company whose founding CEO is still very much alive, in charge and determined not to sell.

Because his dad was big into mysticism in general and fortune-tellers and Tarot card readers in particular, Shane decides to check out well-known “intuitive” Arabella Prescott (Avis Wrentmore) – imdb.com lists her first name as “Arabelle” but I’m quite sure what I heard the actors say was “Arabella” – at her roadside Tarot stand. Arabella is not in when Shane arrives, but he’s read by her staff member, Maya Priestley (Natalie Daniels), who handles the Tarot cards herself. (I’ve heard from actual Tarot readers that the person being read is supposed to handle the cards, but Charles said he’s heard of it both ways.) With Maya’s encouragement, Shane pushes through his big deal and, at a dull business party to celebrate it, he “accidentally” runs into Natalie King (Caina Summer Field) when he bumps into her (or she into him) and his drink spills all over her. The two start dating – Natalie introduces herself as a “journalist” even though she’s only a blogger specializing in stories about real estate (she covers something called “Proposition 28,” and while we never quite learn what that is it seems to have something to do with expanding opportunities for affordable housing). Shane tells Natalie he ultimately wants eight children, and Natalie says, “Then we’d better get started on that right away” – though, alas, writer/director Peter Sullivan and his writing colleagues, Jeffrey Schenck and Adam Rockoff (the Usual Suspects in the Johnson Production Group’s films), don’t give us the hot soft-core porn scene between them Danny J. Boyle and Ashley O’Neil did in Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife.

As the film progresses (like a disease), it becomes more and more apparent to us, if not to the Settels, that Maya Priestley and Natalie King are working together in some sort of criminal scheme, including spiking a drink with poison to dispatch Shane’s assistant Tyler Armstrong (Kenny Resch, who looked so much like Jonathan Stoddard I began to wonder if he was a third Settel sibling) which the police later rule was an “accidental” drug overdose. Olivia is suspicious enough of Natalie King that she grabs a wine glass with her fingerprints on it and gives it to her friend, African-American police detective Rita Halsey (Jessica A. Caesar), to run her prints. Rita tells Olivia that “Natalie King”’s real name is Janice Augustine, and when Olivia passes the information on to Shane he recognizes the last name as that of a family who sued Settel Pharmaceuticals for wrongful death in connection with a woman who died of cancer while on the company’s supposed “miracle drug,” Tranquilify (though sometimes the name is spelled “Traquilify,” without the “n”). Later on we learn that “Maya Priestley” is really Lizzie Augustine, Janice’s sister, and the two women hatched this plot in which one would pose as a Tarot card reader (we eventually learn from Arabella Prescott herself that Maya had been with her only a few months and had not got her licensing credentials from the national Tarot card readers’ association, which made me wonder if there really is such a thing and, if there is, what test do they give aspiring Tarot card readers to prove themselves worthy of a license the way aspiring cosmetologists have to prove themselves by doing haircuts) while the other seduced Shane, got him to marry her, then the two would kill both Shane and Olivia and inherit the Settel Pharmaceuticals fortune. Of course it all works out in the end, and Shane gallantly agrees to resign the CEO position in favor of his more highly qualified sister. Killer Fortune Teller was an O.K. Lifetime movie, not as wildly outrageous or as melodramatic as some I’ve seen but not as genuinely moving as a handful of the others I’ve seen either.

Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, a.k.a. Prisoner of Love (Almost Never Films, RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Much the same could be said of Trapped by My Sugar Daddy, which was originally filmed in 2022 as Prisoner of Love. Like Killer Fortune Teller, Trapped by My Sugar Daddy begins with a mysterious prologue set 20 years before the main story and its connection to the main plot remains defiantly obscure. A young woman is flying on a private plane with a man she thinks is her sugar-daddy boyfriend, but he turns out to be Peter Coleman (Ryan Francis), who overpowers her on the plane, puts a hood over her head, and … Then we cut to the main action, set in Greenwich, Connecticut (Killer Fortune Teller was definitely set in Los Angeles), in which mother Sarah Bragg (Tiffany Montgomery) and her 18-year-old daughter Carly (Katie Kelly, top-billed) are budding interior designers. When the house across the street from theirs is bought by a wealthy 50-something named Kyle Smithford (James Hyde), the Braggs offer themselves for the job as their decorator, insulting rival designer Amanda James (played by Lindsay Hartley, who also directed from a script by Dave Hickey and Casey Bose). Naturally, Kyle has the hots for Carly and vice versa, even though (as she keeps being reminded by her mom and the other characters) he’s old enough to be her father. Incidentally, Carly’s real father, Michael Bragg, is in the dramatis personae and he’s being played by Michael Wagemann, whom I thought was the sexiest actor in the film. It is clear that the three Braggs live together – Michael is not a divorced dad who’s sort-of in her daughter’s life – though it’s not clear what, if anything, Michael does for a living. Carly is attending design school in New York, and her best friend there is a young Black woman named Melanie Bradley (Heather Lynn Harris), nicknamed “Mel.”

At first I thought Hickey and Bose were setting Mel up to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but Mel has her own bad boyfriend. He calls himself “Brent Cundey” (Ryan Francis) but he’s really “Peter Coleman” (though neither of those names are his real one), the man whom we saw in the prologue doing whatever was done to that young woman two decades earlier. Midway through the movie a mystery woman crashes Kyle’s home while he and Carly are there making out; she holds a gun on him and threatens to kill him over the mysterious disappearance of her daughter years before. Ultimately we realize that this is the mother of the young woman in the prologue to whom Peter, Brent or whatever his name is did whatever to her; we’ve assumed all along he killed her and dumped her body out of the plane in mid-flight. It turns out that Kyle and “Brent” are high-end human traffickers who specialize in seducing naïve teenage girls who are disaffected with their parents; they romance them for a while and then pack them off in a private plane to their ultimate destinations with rich creeps around the world who want them as permanent sex slaves (or at least until the rich clients tire of them and kill them, which they can do because they’re part of the world’s 0.001 percent and therefore have actual, if not legal, immunity from any criminal or civil prosecution whatsoever). Ultimately Sarah and Michael cotton to what’s going on, and there’s a neat climax in which both grown Braggs rescue Carly and Mel from the clutches of the evil traffickers, including crashing their car into the open gate of Kyle’s plane, thereby disabling it long enough for the police to arrive and arrest Kyle and “Brent.” (Fortunately, this is one Lifetime movie that ends with the villains being arrested instead of dying in a bloodbath.)

There’s a neat tag scene in which Carly is shown deciding to change her college major from interior design to psychiatry because she wants to help other naïve young women avoid being ensnared by older well-to-do scumbags like she was. There are also some other characters, including Carly’s age-peer boyfriend Ben (Hunter Hobbs), who’s appropriately homely and makes it credible that Carly would think she was trading up for an older man who, besides his fortune, looked considerably sexier; and Bob (Ben Richardson), owner of a New York City bar for which Carly and Mel work – apparently there’s a quirk in New York’s liquor laws in which you have to be 21 to drink legally but you can work in a bar at 18. Bob gives Carly a job as a server but it’s obvious (at least to us) that he’s really trying to get into her pants; Carly holds down the job until $600 in cash mysteriously goes missing from his safe. He’s convinced Carly stole it and fires Mel, too, when Mel tries to defend her – of course the real culprits are Ben and two heavy-set thugs who work for him, who stole the money and then framed Carly for the crime. I wish they’d kept the original, more ambiguous title Prisoner of Love for this one, and I kept flashing back to a much better 1949 movie on this same theme, Caught, directed by Max Ophuls and an uncredited John Berry and featuring Barbara Bel Geddes as a naïve young woman who dreams of marrying a rich man; Robert Ryan as the rich man she marries but then finds him pathologically jealous and possessive; and James Mason as the nice young doctor she goes to work for (and falls in love with) once she’s walked out on her husband’s money and stifling environment. I was surprised when I looked up my moviemagg review on Caught and found it oddly lukewarm (it’s on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/03/caught-enterprise-mgm-1949.html), but it’s still a damned sight better than Trapped by My Sugar Daddy a.k.a. Prisoner of Love!

Secret Life of a Pastor's Wife (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 13) Lifetime showed a movie called Secret Life of a Pastor’s Wife, and the title and the Lifetime synopsis (“Angie, the wife of a charismatic pastor who extols family values yet maintains an icy demeanor toward his own, seeks solace from her marital woes in the arms of her recently hired pool boy, a fling which quickly upsets the idyllic façade of the community, reigniting old jealousies, and leaving no one's secrets safe”) had me wondering if writer Ashley O’Neil had based her script on the recent (2020-2022) scandal involving Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jr., his wife and their pool boy, Giancarlo Granda. Granda said he would have sex with Mrs. Falwell while Mr. Falwell watched, and Mr. Falwell said he knew about the affair, stumbled in on them one time and said he was “traumatized” by the sight. O’Neil threw a couple of mild hints in the direction of the alleged Falwell affair (in both senses) but mostly stuck to the Lifetime formula, except for one big surprise twist about 50 minutes into the movie’s running time (including commercials; the reveal would come considerably earlier on a “streaming” viewing without them). In this case, the pastor is Jim Martin (Andrew Fultz), who’s written a book called Learning to Be a Godly Wife and whose sermons are so sex-obsessed I’d forgive his parishioners for wondering if he could ever talk about anything else. His wife is Angie Martin (Jennings Rice, top-billed), and the pool boy is Jason Rich (Mike Manning). Jason has taken over as their pool boy by either buying out or murdering the previous one, Rodney, and taking over his business, “Bottom Feeders” (a name which evokes Ashley O’Neil’s rather obvious sense of irony and cynicism). It’s lust at first sight between Angie and Jason, and before long they’re having at each other in a typically hot soft-core porn scene from director Danny J. Boyle (not the Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but a capable filmmaker in his own right even though all I’ve seen from him is Lifetime movies and he’s all too faithful to their tropes).

Jim and Angie have a daughter, Leila (whose name is pronounced “LAY-luh,” like the “Layla” in Eric Clapton’s song; my stepgrandmother’s name was Leila, but she pronounced it “LEE-luh”), who turns out [spoiler alert!] biologically to be Angie’s daughter but not Jim’s. Angie conceived Leila during a one-night stand with an anonymous man and Jim offered to marry her and act as a father to her child, but he’s too cold and forbidding to offer much emotional support either to Angie or Leila. Midway through the movie Jason is actually murdered at the motel where he lives, and the story becomes a whodunit with a number of suspects: Jim himself (the police have surveillance footage of him skulking around outside the motel on the night Jason was killed); Jim’s friend Nathan (Nick Checket), who once approached Jim after a sermon and offered to do anything for him in what definitely sounded, at least to me, like a homosexual advance (or was I just reading too much into it after noting the Falwell connection?); Nathan’s wife Desirée (Janet Carter), who’s also having an affair with Jason and who’s writing a manuscript, Peyton Place-style, about the small-town secrets of fictional “Eastbridge” (probably in California, since the license plates on the cars look at least vaguely Californian) where all this takes place; and Angie’s confidante Sarah (Harley Bronwyn), who’s been sort of the voice of reason through all this. My mind was running along two tracks, at least after the character of Angie’s sister Catherine, generally called “Cath” (McKensie Lane), is suddenly introduced two-thirds of the way through. Cath is older than Angie and is – or at least says she is – genuinely perturbed at the way Jim has driven a wedge between her and Angie and forbidden Angie from being in touch with the rest of her family. Part of me was thinking Jim murdered Jason out of jealousy, not only because Jason was having an affair with Angie but because Jim wanted him himself (as I said, I was probably reading way more Gay connections into this story than Ashley O’Neil intended!); part of me was thinking O’Neil was going to make Cath the killer, driven by jealousy and hatred of the ultra-religious Eastbridge community.

The idea that the killings – not only Jason but Desirée, who’s found dead, an apparent suicide from an overdose of Ambien (a prescription-only sleep medication) that it’s been revealed in a previous scene that Jim is taking – are some sort of retribution for the community’s religious hypocrisy is reinforced by the anonymous notes various people in the town have been getting, all handwritten on a two-toned brown card stock with messages about sin and retribution and hints that the writer knows about all the sinning that’s going on in the town, particularly the extra-relational sexual activity. Cath gives Angie an old photo of Jim and Jason together when they were both college students – which seemed like a plot hole to me because Mike Manning looked young enough to be Andrew Fultz’s son and the two did not look like they could have been college students together (although Jim Martin could have gone back to school as an adult to get his divinity degree). There’s a woman in the photo who turns out to be the late Victoria Edgerton. She was the wife of one of Jim’s and Jason’s professors, Matthew Edgerton. She was having affairs with both Jim and Jason simultaneously; Matthew found out about it and supposedly killed her out of jealousy. He was convicted and is still in prison for the crime, but he’s maintained his innocence and it turns out at the end [second spoiler alert!] that Jim killed her and drowned her in the Edgertons’ swimming pool (action we saw at the beginning of the film in a prologue which we didn’t understand because we didn’t know who either of these people were),then killed both Jason and Desirée to cover his tracks. Cath misses a date with Angie at a local bar simply called “BAR” (which reminded me of the similarly named establishment in the 1960 film The Leech Woman, which when it was parodied on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 one of the cast members joked, “Let’s go to BAR, order SANDWICH and have DRINK!”) and she turns out to have been in a car accident.

At least that’s what we think happened to her; later she escapes from the hospital wearing a surgical gown and unplugs her own IV, which had me wondering if she was going to turn out to be the villain after all and had merely been faking that her injuries were worse than they were. But no-o-o-o-o; with the aid of a police detective in another city that also happened to be an ex-boyfriend, Cath had got Jim’s DNA tested from a hair sample Angie had collected for her, and that had matched Jim to the scene of Victoria’s murder. (There’s a brief flashback scene showing Jim actually killing her, in which she’s played by Mackenzie Hughes.) At the end, after Angie has killed Jim in self-defense, she, Cath and their mother (unidentified on imdb.com) reunite and celebrate the reunification of their family. Secret Life of the Pastor’s Wife is one of those frustrating Lifetime films that could have been a good deal better than it is, especially if O’Neil had followed up on the hints she dropped that Jim was actually Bisexual and involved sexually with both Jason and Nathan. Even without going that far, she could have made a stronger story with the material she had if she hadn’t kept falling back on Lifetime clichés to help her out of awkward story situations. O’Neil and director Danny J. Boyle both deserved better than a potentially provocative and exciting story premise that devolves into a not-very-interesting whodunit.