My Life Is Murder: "The Locked Room" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 17) I watched a PBS showing of the second episode of the intriguing Australian TV series My Life Is Murder, about a young but recently retired Australian police detective, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) – supposedly she got an inheritance and never had to work again, but that hasn’t been stressed in the first two episodes – who keeps getting called in to consult on various cold cases by her sort-of boyfriend Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This time she gets offered a locked-room mystery – literally: “The Locked Room” is the episode title – in which a middle-aged accountant named Alan Gillespie (Clayton Bitaks) was found dead six months previously, shot in the back in a locked room with a chain on the door. The show was directed by Mat Green from a script by Peter Gawler, who made the same mistake his colleague Matt Ford did on “The Boyfriend Experience,” the only My Life Is Murder episode before this one. There are too few suspects and therefore too little suspense as to whodunit, especially since Gawler begins the show with a prologue set five years before the main action in which, while still on the official police force, Alexa busted a big-time drug dealer named Nicole Buttera (Danielle Cormack) and caught her with a large quantity of drugs, more than she would have needed just for her own use. Unfortunately, Nicole got free on a technicality and since then has been leading an apparently above-board life as a nightclub owner under the name Nikki Malone. She’s trying to promote the singing career of her daughter, Cassie Malone (Markella Kavenagh, who judging from what we hear of her is a quite good vocalist in real life). Unfortunately, Nicole also invested in a company called Seraphim that made airbags for Japanese cars, where she met Alan Gillespie because he was the company’s accountant.

Though the scene was set up in a motel room to make it look like Alan had been having an extra-relational affair, down to lipstick on a champagne glass to make it look like the two had been sharing the sparkling wine before he got killed (and the bed in the motel room was still perfectly made, so it hadn’t actually been used during the night), Alexa deduces that Nicole was the killer. She wanted to silence Alan because, as an honest man, he wanted to report to the police that the Seraphim airbags didn’t work and posed a danger to drivers and passengers in a car equipped with them. Nicole stood to lose a great deal of money she had invested in Seraphim stock, so she took the motel room next door and drilled a hole in the wall between them through which she could fire and kill Alan. One wonders (I wonder, anyway) just what the mechanics of this were and in particular how well she was able to aim. The show concludes with Cassie Malone making her performing debut of the club owned by her mother, the murderess –and I wonder what that’s going to do to the rest of her life, especially since real-life American country singer Shelby Lynne never got over watching her dad kill her mom when she was just a child. In fact, she recorded an entire album about that trauma. I liked “The Locked Room” better than “The Boyfriend Experience,” partly because Nicole was a more interesting villainess than the hustler Dylan Giroux (Lindsay Farris) and partly because the music world was a much more interesting background to me than the world of high-end sex workers in which “The Boyfriend Experience” took place. I’ll probably keep watching this one even though it’s a bit disappointing that the writers of My Life Is Murder can’t come up with more interesting and engaging suspects in 45 minutes of running time!

Law and Order: "In Harm's Way" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

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

Yesterday (Thursday, May 16) I watched the season finales of the remaining shows in the Dick Wolf Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order itself, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “In Harm’s Way” and opened at an outdoor charity gala held in front of the New York Public Library at which a prominent baseball player who’s dating a world-famous singer (obviously writers Pamela J. Wechsler and Jennifer Vanderbes were thinking of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift here!) is shot and killed. Only the police, in the persons of detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), deduce that the real intended target was New York District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn, classic-era Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn’s grandson), who before he got appointed D.A. after the previous holder of that office, Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the last remaining holdover from the old Law and Order cast), left under a political cloud and a disagreement with Mayor Robert Payne (Bruce Altman). It seems that before Baxter became New York D.A. he was a federal prosecutor who brought a successful case against a Black street gang called “Cobra-10” and put its leader behind bars. Needless to say, the Cobra-10 leader is anxious for revenge and gets a message to one of the gang’s hit men, Hector Canseco (Ralphy Lopez), to eliminate Baxter – only by pure happenstance, Baxter manages to turn away from the potentially fatal shot in time and the ballplayer is killed instead. Through ballistic tests, the cops learn that the gun used in the shooting was the same one that another crook, Eddie Aguilar (Sylvestre Rasuk), used in a liquor-store robbery two months previously, though it turns out to be a “community gun” passed around from hand to hand to be used in various crimes.

Since Hector Canseco tossed the gun into the river as the cops were chasing him, the only witness who can link him to the gun is Aguilar – and the gang is able to eliminate him the night before he’s scheduled to testify at Canseco’s trial. They even write “SNITCH” on the wall of his apartment in Eddie’s own blood. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) call Nicholas Baxter as a witness to explain Cobra-10’s vendetta against him, but without Eddie the cops also have to call Baxter’s daughter Carrie (played by Tony Goldwyn’s real-life daughter Tess), who saw Canseco staking out their home a week before the fatal shooting. Canseco even asked her who lived there, information the prosecutors need to establish Canseco’s motive and criminal intent. But this means that on cross-examination, Canseco’s aggressive attorney Alan Wallace (Kelly AuCoin) can bring out an incident a few years earlier in which Carrie was driving under the influence and hit a pedestrian whose injuries cost him the use of his left arm. Baxter’s wife Julia (Tara Westwood, who is not Tony Goldwyn’s real-life wife or Tess Goldwyn’s mother) is so appalled that she walks out of the courtroom in mid-trial. The jury returns a guilty verdict against Canseco for both the murder of the ballplayer and the attempted murder of Nicholas Baxter, but there’s a tag scene in which Baxter is behind in the election for district attorney – he was a mid-term mayoral opponent but the race for a full elected term is too close to call (and I suspect the ambiguity of the result is a deliberate tactic on the part of Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners to see whether Tony Goldwyn is or isn’t willing to renew his contract at a price they’re willing to pay). Overall this is a good Law and Order, but I was a bit surprised that Canseco didn’t make a you’re-a-dead-man threat at Nicholas Baxter as he was being led off to prison post-conviction.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Duty to Hope" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed the Law and Order May 16 was called “Duty to Hope” and seemed mainly to have been created so the season could go out literally with a bang – or quite a few bangs, since it ends with a big shoot-out that looked really exciting in the promos. The squad is looking for a serial rapist whose trademarks are that he’s white, in his 20’s, is able to break into their apartments and lie in wait for them, always uses a wire coat hanger to bind his victims’ wrists, wears work gloves so he doesn’t leave fingerprints and rapes his victims not with his dick, but with the barrel of a gun (how Phil Spector!). The script by veteran Law and Order hands David Graziano and Julie Martin introduces a new and thoroughly obnoxious character, Heidi Russell (Kate Loprest), who announces herself as the new head of the trial division of the district attorney’s office and proceeds to second-guess the investigation and demand a quick solution to the case whether it’s the right one or not. Eventually, on the strength of a photo identification from the latest victim, Ariel Bradford (Amber Stonebraker), and a single thumbprint on her sliding glass door, the cops arrest Billy Hedges (Spenser Granese). Only he turns out to be innocent – Ariel’s ID was wrong and Billy’s fingerprint had been on the glass door because he was part of the work crew that installed it – as the cops learn when another rape involving the same M.O. was committed the very next night, while Billy was still in custody. That doesn’t stop Billy’s 12-year-old son Toby (Max Malas) from pulling a gun on Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and shooting him in the shoulder while demanding that Tutuola let go of his father. Not wanting to arrest the kid that was only trying to help his dad, Fin covers up the incident and spends a few embarrassing days around the squad room trying to explain away the incident and lie about why he was injured in the shoulder.

The cops are surrounded not only by Heidi Russell, who’s disinclined to admit that Billy Hedges isn’t guilty even as the rapes keep happening while he’s in custody, but by an equally gung-ho team from a New York police subdivision called ESU (and no, I have no idea what that stands for, except they keep getting in the way and want to do Seventh Cavalry-style charges while the veterans of SVU want to keep things low-keyed) headed by Captain Sasso (Shawn T. Andrew). Ultimately the cops get the clue they need: a leather holster for a handgun marked with a Marine insignia that the real rapist left behind while he committed his latest assault. This enables them to trace the attacks to ex-Marine Glenn Duncan (Eric Olsson), who when the cops show up to arrest him brings out a high-powered rifle and starts shooting at them. He’s in his apartment with his girlfriend, Jane Emery (Katie Housley), whom he’s essentially holding hostage and he ultimately wants them both to die. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) calls him on her cell phone and tries to negotiate with him for a peaceful surrender that will save Jane’s life, but in the end the ESU team goes in, kills Duncan and rescue Jane. Ultimately she tells the cops that she’d been Glenn’s girlfriend since before he went into the military and previously he’d been normal, but once he got dishonorably discharged he freaked out and started committing crimes. That’s how the main part of this episode ends, but there’s an odd tag scene wrapping up the running story of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), the 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a would-be human trafficker in the season’s opening episode. Benson witnessed Maddie and her abductor’s flight but did nothing to stop them and feels guilty about it even though there would have been no probable cause to pull him over. The scene takes place as Benson visits Maddie and her parents, Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray), who have gone through marital troubles over the incident but have reached a sort of modus vivendi, while Maddie herself has been seeing a therapist Benson recommended for her. The ending was a bit too cloying and too Law and Order: The Soap Opera-ish for my taste, and it took me a while to remember who these people were supposed to be and what was going on with them.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Stabler's Lament" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

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

The final show in the Law and Order run from May 16 was an Organized Crime episode that more or less wrapped up the story arc from the last few episodes – I say “more or less” because the principal villain, Julian Emery (Tom Payne), not only escapes relatively unscathed in his private jet at the end, he has Detective Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joe, Jr. (Michael Trotter) with him on the plane. Much of the episode is taken up with the Stablers’ family issues: mom Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn) is suffering from age-related dementia; Elliott’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris) is lurking around the action and we’ve got the impression he’s led a seamy if not openly and blatantly criminal existence; younger brother Joe, Jr. has been working for Emery for four years since he washed out as a Marine in Afghanistan; and Elliott’s son Eli (Nicky Torchia), who’s considerably younger than his other four kids because he was the product of a mercy fuck his wife Kathy (Isobel Gillies) gave him during their extended separation while Christopher Meloni was still on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, has impregnated his African-American girlfriend Becky (Kiaya Scott) and has decided to enter the New York Police Academy. At this plot twist I joked, “What is this – Law and Order: Blue Bloods?,” referencing the CBS-TV series in which the entire New York Police Department seems to be made up of the Reagan family (though they pronounce the last name “REE-gun” instead of the “RAY-gun” pronunciation the late Right-wing Republican President used).

They’re supposed to be having a family get-together (another link to Blue Bloods, whose writers routinely use the Reagan clan’s regular Sunday dinners to give us plot exposition), and towards the end Elliott announces that he’ll have to leave early because he’s got a break in his current case. Eli expresses his discontent at his dad’s disappearance, and Elliott says, “You want to be a cop so bad? This is what happens.” The big break is the impending arrival of a whole series of weapons and other merchandise which Julian Emery is auctioning off to the highest bidder, and midway through the process Emery figures out that his security has been compromised and executes the leaker via a poison chemical developed by scientists in the old Soviet Union and routinely used by the current Russian government (headed by Donald Trump’s dear friend, Vladimir Putin) to eliminate its real or perceived enemies around the world. There are supposedly six grenades of this stuff but there are actually 12, and in the show’s last scene Emery handcuffs Joe Stabler, Jr. to the last case of six because he’s just promoted Joe to be his lieutenant replacing the one he just murdered. Joe, Jr. is also in charge of looking after Emery’s 10-year-old son Giles (Grayson Margolis) – and kudos to writer John Shiban for giving Julian Emery a real, sympathetic human emotion so he becomes more complex instead of just a ruthless, unlikable villain – and when Julian changes the drop point for his deadly cargoes at the last minute Joe, Jr. uses Giles’s video game console to alert the police at the Organized Crime Control Bureau of the switch in plans. The cops raid the new location and seize most of the stuff, though there are still those six troublesome poison-gas grenades out there on Emery’s plane and Joe Stabler, Jr. is still handcuffed to them. One wonders where Dick Wolf, his show runners and his writers will take this fascinating but also maddening plot line when the show resumes come September!

Stranger Things: "The Vanishing of Will Byers" and "The Weirdo on Maple Street" (21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Georgia Film and Television Office, Netflix, 2016)

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

Two nights ago (Wednesday, May 15) my husband Charles and I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix TV series Stranger Things, set in 1983 but actually filmed in 2016. The series was the brainchild of Matt and Ross Duffer, credited merely as “The Duffer Brothers” (which made both Charles and I wonder why they were so eager to boast about their ineptitude at golf, which is what “duffer” really means), and the opening statement on imdb.com’s page about the first episode, “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” confused the hell out of me because it didn’t seem to have any resemblance to what Charles and I had actually watched: “American scientists, working without oversight in an obscure laboratory in a backwater town, have managed to bring about the total destruction of mankind.” The Wikipedia page on the entire series clarifies things a bit, but only a bit: “Set in the 1980’s, the series centers around the residents of the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, as they are plagued by a hostile alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, after a nearby human experimentation facility opens a gateway between Earth and the Upside Down.”

The story centers around Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder, in case you were wondering whatever happened to her) and her two sons, Jonathan (the almost unearthily cute Charlie Heaton) and his younger brother Will (Noah Schnapp). One day Will disappears after he rides his bicycle onto the premises of a sinister secret research laboratory on the outskirts of Hawkins in Roane County. The wreckage of his bike is eventually recovered but Will’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Also in the dramatis personae are Jim Hopper (David Harbour), an irascible local police chief who seems to have wandered in from a Coen Brothers movie; according to the Stranger Things Wikipedia page, he’s supposed to have descended into alcoholism following the death of his teenage daughter from cancer; and a young girl named Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), after the “011” numeral tattooed on her arm the way the Nazis did with the concentration-camp inmates, who wanders into the action. Eleven has no socialization with the norms of actual humanity; in one scene she lifts the loose-fitting dress that is her only garment and flashes herself in front of Will Byers’ friends. Evidently she was preparing to pee, since once the kids realize what was going on they immediately escort her to the nearest bathroom. Eleven has a whole goon squad, headed by a blonde woman who’s disguised as a social worker, who are out to kill her and don’t seem at all concerned about the carnage and collateral damage they leave in their wake.

I found myself pretty much letting Stranger Things wash over me, neither particularly interested in the story nor moved emotionally by it, and I wondered why I wasn’t connecting with it. There are a few things about it I liked, such as the Duffer Brothers’ creative use of music to set the film’s cultural references – though for a film supposedly set in 1983 there were quite a few 1960’s and 1970’s songs, including the Jefferson Airplane’s “She Has Funny Cars” and “White Rabbit,” as well as a genuine early-1980’s song like the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” One reason I bought this in the first place was that though it was a boxed set of DVD’s, it was packaged to look like a VHS tape, complete with the VHS logos. I saw it in a closeout bin at a Target (at least I think it was a Target) and grabbed it because not only was it sale-priced but I was struck by the retro packaging. Alas, it sank into the maw of my collection almost as soon as I got it and I just unearthed it as part of a general cleaning of our living room. I’d heard good reviews of Stranger Things that I don’t think the show – or at least the two episodes Charles and I watched May 15, “The Vanishing of Will Byers” and “The Weirdo on Maple Street” – really lived up to; I should probably watch more of it before I make up my mind, but there are a lot of other things in the backlog I’ll probably want to get to first!

Puccini: Madama Butterfly (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed May 11, 2024, repeated May 15, 2024)

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

Yesterday (Wednesday, May 15) at noon my husband Charles and I left for the AMC 20 theatres in Mission Valley to see the “encore presentation” of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly from the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” series. The performance originally took place on Saturday, May 11 but to see it then Charles and I would have had to get up really early in the morning – and he’d have had to get off work for the day (he’d already arranged to have yesterday off). Before the opera began I said sotto voce to Charles, “Say a prayer for my mother. Madama Butterfly was her all-time favorite opera.” Madama Butterfly began life as “Madame Butterfly,” a short story by American author John Luther Long, which was published in 1898 and was based on stories Long had heard from his sister, Jennie Correll. It was also inspired by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthéme, which became the basis for Leo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. David Belasco read the story and wrote a play based on it in 1900, starring Blanche Bates as the heroine, and he created a famous 18-minute pantomime scene in which Butterfly and her maid Suzuki wait up all night – literally – for her errant husband, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, to return after a three-year absence. Though Puccini didn’t understand any but the simplest English – he caught the play in London when he was there to supervise a production of his immediately previous opera, Tosca – he was knocked out by the play and especially by the long pantomime scene. He created the opera with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, his collaborators on his two previous mega-hits La Bohème and Tosca, and structured it as a 55-minute first act and an 80-minute second act. Puccini’s friend and frequent collaborator Arturo Toscanini, who’d already led the premiere of La Bohème and would conduct two more Puccini premieres, La Fanciulla del West and Turandot, tried to talk him into breaking up the long second act into two shorter ones. Puccini asked him if an 80-minute act was too long, and Toscanini said, “For Wagner, no. For Puccini, yes!”

The premiere was conducted by Cleofonte Campanini after Toscanini had had one of his periodic breaks with La Scala, Milan, where the first performance of Butterfly took place. The event was one of the most famous fiascos in operatic history; audience members shouted down the singers, made animal noises (La Scala had planted people in the audience to blow bird whistles during the long intermezzo for Butterfly’s vigil, and this inspired hostile audience members to start making their own animal noises), threw in a few scatological comments (when the kimono of Rosina Storchio, the first Butterfly, blew over her head, someone called out, “Butterfly is pregnant! Ah, the little Toscanini!” – a reference to the fact that Storchio was actually pregnant with Toscanini’s child, though she had a miscarriage later) and turned the performance into such a mega-flop nobody dared try to take a curtain call at the end. I’ve long suspected the fiasco was engineered by a hostile claque led by fans of Puccini’s rival, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, out to get back at Puccini because they had both written operas of La Bohème, only Puccini’s had been a smash hit while Leoncavallo’s was a flop. (To his credit, Leoncavallo himself denounced the people at the Butterfly premiere who had disrupted it.) La Scala canceled any further performances and Puccini and his publisher, Tito Ricordi, decided he would revise the opera and it would be re-premiered in Brescia, a smaller city near Milan that was also the starting point for the Mille Miglia auto race. It was an appropriate place for a Puccini premiere because he had taken up driving motor vehicles as one of his hobbies, though he crashed one of his cars during the composition of Butterfly and a headline on one of the reviews of the Scala premiere referenced that: “Butterfly Diabetic Opera, Result of an Auto Accident.”

Among the revisions for the Brescia version was Puccini’s acceding to the recommendation that he split the long second act into two shorter ones, though he was still put out enough about the change that he tagged the two parts “Act II, part 1” and “Act II, part 2.” (Ironically, the Met, with its current policy of minimizing the number of intermissions, jammed them back together in this production with only a curtain-down scene change between them.) In 1995 Vox Records released a recording of the original La Scala version of Madama Butterfly as well as excerpts from Puccini’s various revisions, and I remember grabbing this CD as soon as it was available and listening to it with the libretto. The two things that most stunned me about that recording was how much more openly racist Pinkerton was – in one scene he tells Butterfly’s servants that he’s just going to give them numbers because he couldn’t remember their names – and how relatively weak Butterfly’s big scenes were. Though Puccini had said Butterfly had inspired him more than any of his other heroines to date, the major aria “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) was the only one of her big moments he got right the first time. All of her other big moments – her Act I aria “Ieri son salita,” in which she tells Pinkerton that in honor of him and their marriage she sneaked down to the mission and converted to Christianity; her Act II aria “Che tua madre,” in which she announces to the stunned Suzuki and the American consul Sharpless that she and Pinkerton had a son; and her death scene – were extensively rewritten, and in every case the rewrites were far stronger dramatically. The plot of Butterfly is probably mind-numbingly familiar even to non-opera fans, but just in case, here goes: Lt. Pinkerton (Jonathan Tetelman, the great new tenor Charles and I had previously heard in Puccini’s relative rarity La Rondine) is a U.S. naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, Japan. (There was a bit of confusion as to what his name was – “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton” or “Francis Blummy Pinkerton” – and both “B.F.” and “F.B.” ended up in the printed libretto, but in this production the Met used “B.F.” throughout.)

Pinkerton has arranged with local marriage broker Goro to marry Cio-Cio-San, a.k.a. Madame Butterfly (Asmik Grigorian) and to lease a house for them in Nagasaki, but both the house and the marriage are on a 999-year basis but with the man having the opportunity to cancel at any month. Butterfly comes to the marriage obviously taking it a lot more seriously than Pinkerton, even though she’s only 15 years old and therefore is little more than a child bride (something that probably seems even creepier now than it did in 1904). She has a huge bit of baggage in her past; her father had been a favored courtier of the Emperor until he displeased him in some way, and he was forced to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. Butterfly has kept the dagger with which her dad offed himself, and since then she’s made her living as a geisha (a much misunderstood part of Japanese culture; the word literally means “art person” and it denotes a young woman who sings, plays an instrument and dances for the private entertainment of male clients; a geisha is not a prostitute!). Butterfly’s uncle, the Bonze (a priest of Shinto, the national religion of Japan), throws a tantrum when he learns Butterfly has adopted Christianity and orders her relatives and servants to leave immediately, which all but Suzuki (Elizabeth DeShong) do. Left alone, Butterfly and Pinkerton sing a marvelously characterized love duet during which she wants to savor the atmosphere and revel in the moonlight and other aspects of nature, while he just wants to get laid. Then Pinkerton gets called back to his ship, the Abraham Lincoln (a name the U.S. Navy has since used for real-life vessels), and Butterfly is left behind to wait for him to return “when the robins nest again.” Three years later Butterfly is still waiting, and the money Pinkerton left behind to take care of her is now just about gone. Butterfly doggedly insists that Pinkerton will return to her, even though everyone else around her – Suzuki, Goro and American consul Sharpless (Lucas Meachem) – tries to convince her that he won’t. Goro has even lined up a replacement husband for her, well-to-do Prince Yamadori, but she righteously turns him down.

Sharpless has received a letter from Pinkerton saying that the Abraham Lincoln will soon be returning to Nagasaki and he should do what he can to prepare Butterfly for “the blow” – that he has got married to an American woman named Kate and that is the relationship he takes seriously. (He’d already told Sharpless and us this in Act I, where before Butterfly’s entrance he’d boasted that someday he would take a “real American wife” – which led critic Vincent Alfano to note in the May-June 1986 Fanfare, “[H]ow does one react to perhaps the meanest tenor in opera? There he stands, announcing his planned seduction and abandonment of a 15-year-old child, while some of the most beautiful music ever composed for tenor pours out of his mouth.”) But Butterfly refuses to listen, and when she uses a hand telescope to read the name of the American ship that has just come into Nagasaki harbor and it’s the Abraham Lincoln, she triumphantly proclaims that despite all the doubters, Pinkerton has returned and the two will be a happy couple again. When Pinkerton turns up with a strange woman in tow (somehow he was able to get his “real American wife” Kate aboard his Navy ship; real Navy wives have told me that the Navy so rigorously cold-shoulders the wives of sailors that the joke is, “If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one”), Butterfly realizes that she’s lost Pinkerton. She tells Kate Pinkerton that the couple can have her and Pinkerton’s child to raise, but only if Pinkerton comes to get him himself. In an aria that Puccini added in the later revisions, “Addio, fiorito asil,” Pinkerton expresses regret and remorse over what he’s done to Butterfly – an aria I think weakens the drama much the way Verdi’s aria for Macbeth, “Pietà, rispetto, amore,” does in his 1847 opera of Shakespeare’s play. Feeling dishonored, Butterfly uses her father’s old dagger to kill herself after reading its inscription, “To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor.” (The plot of Delibes’ Lakmé is almost identical to that of Madama Butterfly; the only differences are that instead of an American sailor, it’s a British soldier; and instead of Japan, it’s India. Also Lakmé was the Hindu equivalent of a vestal virgin, so she broke her vows by taking up with that British soldier; and she kills herself not with a dagger, but by inhaling the fumes of a poisonous plant.)

The Met’s current production of Butterfly was created by screenwriter and film director Anthony Minghella in 2006, two years before his death in 2008, and it opened the Met’s season that year. It’s an all too typical (for modern opera productions) blend of the stunning and the silly; Minghella and the person in charge of directing it this year, Carolyn Choa, turned the stage into a riot of color (good) but chose to make the members of Butterfly’s household, including her son, Bunraku Japanese puppets (not so good). This meant there had to be a core of black-clad stagehands out at all times to manipulate the puppets on stage and also to move the screens around, since one of the conceits of this production is that Japanese houses at the turn of the last century were made out of infinitely variable screens and shutters which could be used either to form rooms or create outdoor patios. The conductor was Xian Zhang, and though she was called to begin the performance with the usual cry, “Maestro, to the pit!,” she was really a Maestra. It wasn’t easy to tell at first since she was dressed in one of those black uniform things the Chinese Communists once made the near-universal Chinese dress, and she had her hair cut short and close-cropped in a male “do,” but it’s a welcome sign of progress in the classical music world that for the second time in a row we were watching a telecast Met production with a woman conductor. (Once again, it’s about time!)

The singing was stunning throughout, especially from Lithuanian soprano Akmin Grigorian in the title role. Though born in Lithuania, she’s of Armenian ancestry on her father’s side, and her parents – tenor Gegham Grigoryan (that’s how it’s spelled on her Wikipedia page) and soprano Irena Milkeviciuté – were also opera singers. Grigorian commanded the stage from the get-go and sang with total power and authority, and for the most part she was matched by Tetelman, who had impressed me in La Rondine and impressed me again here. Elizabeth DeShong’s Suzuki and Lucas Meachem’s Sharpless were also good as sympathetic voices of reason for the principals. One thing that rubbed me a bit the wrong way about this production was that the singer playing Kate Pinkerton was Black; somehow I was better able to accept a star like Angel Blue in La Rondine than a walk-on player who’s just got five lines, but the racial politics of this opera (as well as its so-called “Orientalism,” its damning the Asian lifestyle and culture with “picturesque” condescension) are already problematic enough that the appearance of a Black singer threw off the racial balance of the show and annoyed me more than it probably should have. Charles and I were both crying big-time during the production – whatever you may want to say about him, one thing Puccini was good at was assaulting the tear ducts, and if anything Madama Butterfly is the sort of story that becomes more tragic, not less, if you know the ending in advance. Despite those silly puppets and the apparently self-propelling walls, Minghella’s staging as realized by Choa was basically strong and did justice to the story (though I’d have liked more physical contact between Butterfly and Pinkerton in the love duet), and overall this Butterfly was a quite charming and entertaining afternoon at the opera!

Daughter of the Dragon (Paramount, 1931)

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

Last night (Monday, May 13) Turner Classic Movies showed a number of films featuring Asian-descended actors as part of their salute to Asian-American Heritage Month and also a “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Sessue Hayakawa, who became a matinée idol in the silent era even though most of the roles he played were the stock racist “yellow peril” crap – including his most famous film, The Cheat (1915, reissued 1918), in which he plays a rich man who bails out a family of British aristocrats in exchange for the wife’s body, and in the film’s most famous scene (then and now) he literally brands her as his property in exchange for the money she and her husband needed to bail themselves out of a bad business deal. In the early 1920’s Hayakawa left the major studios and formed a production company of his own to make films based on Japanese history and legends, and to present a more positive view of Asians and their culture. Predictably, his venture flopped and he kept his career going by retreating to Britain and acting on stage, though in 1957 he made a comeback as the evil but honorable Japanese prison commander in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he got nominated for an Academy Award. TCM showed a whole group of films last night featuring Hayakawa, including one of Humphrey Bogart’s Columbia vehicles, Tokyo Joe (1949) and Jerry Lewis’s The Geisha Boy (1958), before finally getting to the one I wanted to see: Daughter of the Dragon (1931).

Daughter of the Dragon was also the first in a two-film group of movies featuring Anna May Wong, the L.A.-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who became the first Chinese-American movie star, though with only a few exceptions her parts were the usual racist garbage, casting her either as the innocent young flower undone by loving a white guy not wisely but too well, or as the vicious Oriental seductress out to work her wiles on the nice young white boy and steal him away from the nice young white girl. TCM’s Anna May Wong double-bill paired Daughter of the Dragon with Daughter of Shanghai (1937), which I’ve already commented on in this blog after seeing it twice in 2022 and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/06/daughter-of-shanghai-paemount-1937.html). According to TCM host Bob Karger, Daughter of Shanghai was Wong’s first film under a new contract with Paramount in which they promised her a respite from Asian-villainess roles and a few parts which actually depicted Asian characters in a positive light. In Daughter of Shanghai she plays Lan Ying Lin, daughter of a Chinese art dealer who’s murdered by a gang of human traffickers and takes up with Chinese-American FBI agent Kim Lee (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, whom I’ve long wished had been cast as Charlie Chan) to bust the gang that killed her father. My husband Charles came home from work during the last 20 minutes of Daughter of Shanghai and expressed regrets that Paramount didn’t use Wong and Ahn to create an Asian-American version of the MGM Thin Man series.

Alas, to quote James Miller’s review of the 1928 British Columbia Aïda in the January-February 1984 Fanfare (which he invidiously compared with the competing HMV version the same year), “that isn't the [movie] we’re dealing with.” Daughter of the Dragon is the third film in a sequence Paramount made in the early talkie era based on Sax Rohmer’s infamously racist stories of Chinese super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu, with Warner Oland playing him. It was preceded by The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930). Oland also played Fu Manchu in a spoof of detective movies in 1930’s revue film Paramount on Parade before moving on to Fox and his long-running series of films as a sympathetic Chinese, Charlie Chan. In Daughter of the Dragon, Fu Manchu reappears after having been thought killed to continue his revenge against the Petrie family, a line of British aristocrats whom Fu blames for killing his own family during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. When the film opens the Petries have already lost a grandfather and a father to Fu’s revenge campaign, and they’re left with Sir John Petrie (Holmes Herbert) and his son Ronald Petrie (Bramwell Fletcher, a year before he accidentally revived Boris Karloff’s mummy character in The Mummy and went insane when he realized what had happened). Fu Manchu sneaks back and forth between his home and the Petries’, which is conveniently next door, through a secret tunnel and a trap door concealed in a nondescript wall.

The film’s leading character is Chinese dancer Ling Moy (Anna May Wong), who’s become a major success in London and is about to do a tour of South America. Only her plans are altered when her long-lost father, whom she’s never met as an adult, turns up and is, of course, Dr. Fu Manchu. He surprisingly easily enlists her aid in carrying on his revenge plot against the Petries, which includes turning her full quota of sexual wiles on Ronald Petrie and getting him to abandon his white fiancée, Joan Marshall (Frances Dade). Clumsily directed by Lloyd Corrigan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with The Sheik screenwriter Monte Katterjohn and future Mr. Smith Goes to Washington writer and open Communist Sidney Buchman based on a Rohmer novel actually called The Daughter of Fu Manchu (though according to one online source, an article on Fu Manchu movies at https://pulpfictionbook.store/2020/01/18/the-filmography-of-fu-manchu/, Paramount actually didn’t own the rights to The Daughter of Fu Manchu so they cooked up something vaguely like it), Daughter of the Dragon includes a sympathetic Asian character. He is Scotland Yard detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa, a decade after he appeared with Anna May Wong in one of his indies, The First-Born, a now lost film. In The First-Born he was top-billed and she was a bit player, while here she has top billing and he’s billed third under her and Oland), who’s on the trail of Fu Manchu because the people in charge at Scotland Yard obviously think it makes sense to set an Asian to trap an Asian.

Fu Manchu uses that secret tunnel to sneak into the Petrie home and kill Sir John by poisoning his tobacco (I’m not making this up, you know!) before getting killed himself about two-fifths of the way through the movie (though he reappears as a ghostly voice giving Ling Moy instructions from beyond the grave, sort of like Marlon Brando in the later Superman movies in which through leftover footage he continued to play Superman’s father, Jor-El, even after he died). His base of operations is the house next door to the Petrie estate, which is ostensibly occupied by Ling Moy’s manager, Morloff (Nicholas Soussanin) – only Morloff is a key part of Fu Manchu’s plot, though of course the Petries and their friends don’t realize that until the very end. Midway through the film Ling Moy decides to neutralize Ah Kee by seducing him, and there’s a very strange ending sequence in which Ling Moy and Ah Kee literally have a joint death scene while Ronald Petrie gets back together with his boring white girlfriend and the honor of British imperialism is saved … for now. Daughter of the Dragon is relatively naturalistic in terms of the way lines are delivered – though Anna May Wong’s idea of appearing “inscrutable” is to speak very slowly and softly, which worked quite a bit better for her in some of her other films than it does here. But in other respects it suffers from the crudity of early-talkie technique, including the virtual absence of background music. That may seem like a surprising comment from me, since I’ve frequently complained about the overuse of music in much of classic Hollywood’s output in the 1930’s and 1940’s, but here the lack of an action score only makes the film seem dull and the action sequences uninvolving and boring.

Daughter of the Dragon is notable for giving Bramwell Fletcher a chance to act with some power and authority – anyone who’s seen him just in his role in The Mummy is in for a surprise – and it’s also a “doubles” movie in that it features two actors who played Charlie Chan: Warner Oland and George Kuwa, a Japanese actor who played Chan in the very first film using the character, a Pathé serial from 1925 called The House Without a Key and based on the first of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan novels. (The Chan movies have so often been criticized for using white actors in “yellowface” to play the title role – Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Roland Winters – it’s worth noting that in the first two Chan films, The House Without a Key and 1928’s The Chinese Parrot, he was played by Japanese actors George Kuwa and Sôjin Kamiyama, respectively. So they weren’t Chinese but at least they were Asian! Alas, both silent Chans are lost, though Sôjin Kamimaya played a detective in the 1929 MGM early talkie The Unholy Night and that’s probably a good indication of how he played Charlie Chan.) Daughter of the Dragon is pretty worthless as a movie, though it’s at least staged on some engagingly elaborate Paramount sets (some of which I suspect were reused for later films including the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as the Marx Brothers’ 1931 Monkey Business). I’m generally not a fan of judging old movies, songs or books by today’s relatively enlightened standards, but Daughter of the Dragon is so imbued throughout with not only racism but sexism as well (there are more than the usual scenes in which Anna May Wong’s ability to carry out her dad’s revenge plot is questioned because she’s – gasp – a woman!) it was hard for me to find anything in it that entertained me.

The Merry Widow (MGM, 1925)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 12) Turner Classic Movies scheduled on their “Silent Sunday Showcase” one of my all-time favorite films, The Merry Widow (1925), directed by Erich von Stroheim and starring Mae Murray in the title role and John Gilbert as her leading man. TCM host Jacqueline Stewart mentioned the frayed relationships between director and stars during the production, but in fact Stroheim and Gilbert got along famously. According to Stroheim biographer Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Stroheim and Gilbert bonded over their mutual detestation of MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer. On their first meeting, Stroheim told Gilbert that Mayer had instructed him to report on every time Gilbert misbehaved on set, but he didn’t want to have to do that because they both hated Mayer – so Stroheim and Gilbert got along fine. Alas, relations between Stroheim and his female star were anything but smooth. Mae Murray had been built up into a major dancing star – even though films were still silent – by her third husband (of four), director Robert Z. Leonard, after she’d already built a reputation on stage as a partner of dancing legend Vernon Castle (that’s something of a surprise since I hadn’t known Vernon Castle had danced with anyone other than his real-life wife Irene) and star of several stage revues. Murray was born May 10, 1889, which meant that by the time she made The Merry Widow she was already 35 and one can see in her close-ups how MGM’s makeup people (uncredited on imdb.com) plastered her face with the stuff to make sure she’d look like a properly virginal ingénue. At the time she made The Merry Widow Murray had just divorced Leonard and had fallen into the clutches of Prince David Mdivani, one of a trio of Polish gold-digging brothers who all married movie stars and bled them dry financially. (Murray married David Mdivani in 1926, divorced him in 1934 and wisely stayed single for the remaining 31 years of her life.)

The Merry Widow was also made at a breaking point in Stroheim’s career; he’d just made Greed, his epic adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague, under a contract he’d signed with Goldwyn Studios just before it merged with Metro to form MGM. (It’s indicative of Stroheim’s hatred of Mayer that the end credit for The Merry Widow lists it as “A Metro-Goldwyn Picture.”) The story of Greed is almost too well known: Stroheim’s original cut was nine hours long. Later he boiled it down to four hours, and his friend, director Rex Ingram (who’d given Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro their star-making roles and, like Stroheim, hated Louis B. Mayer so much his films went out as “Metro-Goldwyn” productions), created a three-hour version. But that wasn’t short enough for Mayer and his production chief, Irving Thalberg, who further cut it to 100 minutes and released it to almost no promotion, then gave themselves brownie points for being right when it flopped. Stroheim still owed MGM two films on his Goldwyn contract, and Thalberg suggested The Merry Widow as a story for him. The Merry Widow had begun life as Die lustige Witwe, a 1905 Viennese operetta composed by Franz Lehár to a libretto by Viktor Léon and Leo Stein based on an 1861 play by Henri Meilhac (best known as co-librettist for Bizet’s Carmen) called The Embassy Attaché. It was a huge hit in German in Vienna and an even bigger hit on Broadway, where it was brought in 1907 by producer Henry Savage and ran for over 400 performances.

According to Stroheim biographer Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Thalberg told Stroheim that his film of The Merry Widow “could be as free an adaptation as he saw fit, but it must include two scenes: the one in which the widow and the prince waltz at the Paris embassy, and the one at Maxim’s.” Thalberg assigned Stroheim a collaborator, Benjamin Glazer, to work on the script, and the two came up with a screenplay that expanded the backstory of the Léon-Stein book so extensively that the 2-hour-20-minute film is 90 minutes in before the original plot occurs. The Stroheim Merry Widow takes place in the fictional kingdom of Monteblanco (when my husband Charles and I first saw it together he joked, “Why does Monteblanco have such a big army? In case of an invasion from Montenegro?”), where King Nikita I (George Fawcett) and his wife, Queen Milena (Josephine Crowell), reign. Alas, Nikita’s son and heir, Crown Prince Mirko (Roy D’Arcy in a role Stroheim had wanted to play himself, but Thalberg wouldn’t let him because he wanted the option to fire Stroheim as director and he couldn’t do that easily if he were also a major actor in the film), is a vicious, nasty piece of work who in one scene goes out of his way to kick and beat up a defenseless crippled war veteran. (That was Stroheim and Glazer using the principle of Chekhov’s pistol, only instead of a prop it was a character; he reappears at the end to … well, that would be telling.) The capital of Monteblanco is visited by a troupe of Broadway-style players called “The Manhattan Follies” (its producer is “Flo Epstein,” obviously a reference to the real-life Flo Ziegfeld, whose name and presence would later grace at least three more MGM movies), which stars Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray).

In a marvelous scene that to my mind is the best thing in the movie, her performance in the Manhattan Follies is witnessed from the royal box by three people, all of whom train their opera glasses on various parts of her anatomy. Baron Sadoja (Tully Marshall), the richest man in Monteblanco, stares lasciviously at her feet (he’s a foot fetishist); Prince Mirko stares at her crotch (because he just wants to fuck her); and the hero, Mirko’s cousin Prince Danilo (John Gilbert), stares at her face because he’s really in love with her. After the show, the action shifts to a no-holds-barred café called “Francois” (without the cedilla on the “c”) where, as Marian Ainslee’s titles explain, there are private rooms with padded walls where aristocrats can go to drink, drug and debauch without anyone overhearing them. Danilo takes Sally there and tries to seduce her with champagne and caviar, but she resists despite his blandishments, including two blindfolded and barely clad female musicians in the bedchamber with them to provide mood music. I give Stroheim, Glazer and Ainslee a lot of credit for making her fiercely independent and determined to protect her virginity at all costs; somehow this doesn’t come off like the coyness expected from a silent-film heroine – and eventually her resistance prompts Danilo to propose to her legitimately. Unfortunately, as Queen Milena (Danilo’s aunt) explains to him, royals can’t just marry on their own whims or desires. Marriage in a royal family is a political act, and she tells her nephew that she, too, once had a commoner lover but had to give him up for reasons of state. Mirko also goes after Sally, but in the end she’s exiled from Monteblanco immediately. Baron Sadoja, shown as a cripple (Stroheim intended him to be suffering from tertiary syphilis as well as being a foot fetishist), offers to marry Sally himself, and even though he repulses her she agrees because that will mean she’ll be the richest woman in Monteblanco and the courtiers will have to accept her as an equal.

Fortunately for Sally, Baron Sadoja gets a heart attack and dies on their wedding night before he can actually have sex with her, and it’s at that point that the original Lehár/León/Stein operetta plot begins. After spending a year in mourning, Sally re-emerges as “The Merry Widow” and relocates to Paris, where she hangs out at Maxim’s and attracts suitors interested in her money, her body or both. Meanwhile, back in Monteblanco, King Nikita and Queen Milena get anxious about the possibility that Sally will marry a foreigner and the couple will take their money out of Monteblanco and in one stroke destroy the Monteblancan economy. (Charles said, “Haven’t they heard of currency controls?” Actually they hadn’t, because no country was doing them in 1925. The practice of limiting foreign exports of a nation’s currency was dreamed up by Hjalmar Schacht, finance minister of Nazi Germany, in the 1930’s. Schacht was the only member of the Nazi inner circle who survived World War II that was acquitted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.) The king and queen send both Mirko and Danilo to Paris to court Sally with the idea of getting Sadoja’s fortune safely back in Monteblancan hands.

They re-meet her at a big reception at Monteblanco’s embassy in Paris, where Sally dances the famous waltz with Danilo as her partner (John Gilbert didn’t have a reputation as a dancer, but he’s good). There’s another audacious point-of-view shot in which Mirko sees Sally but the only thing he notices is her jewels, which light up to neon brightness while the rest of her fades to black (I suspect either Mae Murray or her stand-in wore a black velvet jumpsuit the way Claude Rains later did in The Invisible Man for the scenes depicting his invisibility). Eventually Danilo and Mirko end up in a fistfight over Sally which leads to Mirko challenging Danilo to a duel. Sally pleads with Danilo to avoid the duel, which leads Danilo to conclude that Sally loves Mirko and doesn’t want him to die. The duel takes place – Stroheim took cast and crew to Griffith Park in the early dawn hours to get the atmosphere he wanted – only Danilo deliberately fires his pistol into the air while Mirko’s shot hits Danilo but only wounds him instead of being fatal. While Danilo is recovering, he and Mirko receive word that King Nikita back home in Monteblanco has died, and Mirko must return home and take the throne – only at the combined funeral and coronation ceremony, the crippled war veteran Mirko earlier beat up for kicks assassinates him, and the film ends happily with Danilo as the new king of Monteblanco and Sally as his queen.

According to TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, Stroheim hated that ending – he wanted to end the film with the duel – and at one showing he ordered the theatre house lights turned on at the point where he’d wanted the film to finish before allowing them to be darkened again so the audience could see the ending he’d shot under protest on studio orders. Various sources have detailed the nasty arguments between Murray and Stroheim, which led to Stroheim nearly being fired from the film after the first day of shooting the big waltz. Murray called Stroheim “you dirty Hun” and, according to film historian Gary Carey, Stroheim questioned Murray’s credentials as an actress and said to her in French, “Actrice? Non, vous faîtes le tapin,” which Carey politely translated as “Your true profession is streetwalking.” (Google Translate even more politely renders it as, “No, you’re just playing the role.”) Word reached Louis B. Mayer when he was meeting with some exhibitors, and Mayer told them, “You are about to witness an historic occasion. I am going to fire von Stroheim here and now.” The next day he sent a hack director named Monta Bell to the set – only to find that the extras, who couldn’t conveniently be replaced because they’d already appeared in the half-finished waltz scene, refused to continue unless Stroheim was rehired. Stroheim and Murray more or less amicably settled their differences – the Los Angeles Record put out a front-page story with a banner headline reading “MAE-VON SIGN PEACE: STROHEIM WINS IN SETTLEMENT,” as if they were two countries having negotiated an end to war – and filming continued, though Stroheim left MGM after shooting stopped and had nothing to do with editing the film.

For the remaining 32 years of his life Stroheim told friends the anecdote of how Irving Thalberg had asked him why Baron Sadoja kept staring frenziedly at Sally’s and other women characters’ feet. “He has a foot fetish,” Stroheim explained, “Well, you have a footage fetish,” Thalberg snapped back – and Stroheim rather self-destructively ridiculed Thalberg, supposedly Hollywood’s most intellectual producer, for not having known what a foot fetish was. The Merry Widow is one of my favorite films – hell, all Stroheim’s extant movies are among my favorites – and I listed it in “10 More Unjustly Neglected Films by Major Directors” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html), an article I wrote in response to a “listicle” piece by Alan Howell called “10 Unjustly Forgotten Films by Major Directors” (http://whatculture.com/film/10-unjustly-forgotten-films-by-famous-directors.php). In that piece I compared Stroheim’s The Merry Widow to the sound remake Ernst Lubitsch did, also at MGM, in 1934 and wrote, “Asked what the difference was between his style and Ernst Lubitsch’s, Erich von Stroheim once said, ‘Lubitsch first shows you the king on his throne, then shows you the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom, so you will know exactly what he is like when you see him on his throne.’ The difference is apparent in this, the only story they both directed.”

While Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow – the fourth and last film co-starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald – is an estimable film in its own right, Stroheim’s is even better – and it was a major box-office hit while the Lubitsch remake was a flop. That didn’t stop MGM from making a third version of The Merry Widow in 1952 with Lana Turner and her then real-life boyfriend Fernando Lamas as stars and Curtis Bernhardt as director, and though it’s considered the weakest of the three artistically, it’s interesting that all three versions had directors who were from Germany (Lubitsch and Bernhardt) or Austria (Stroheim), the cultural milieu which had produced Lehár’s operetta.

Mommy Meanest (Stalking Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 11) my husband Charles came home from work shortly before 9 p.m. while I was watching a quite good Lifetime movie with the rather preposterous title Mommy Meanest. It’s about Mia Keith (Briana Skye), a senior at the exclusive Maplewood Preparatory School in Portland, Oregon; and her neurotic, controlling mother Madelyn, usually called “Maddie” (Lisa Rinna, top-billed). Mia got into Maplewood in the first place only because her mom got a job there as the school’s music teacher – where she leads her class in a cappella vocal versions of 1920’s songs like “Everybody Loves My Baby” and “Ain’t We Got Fun.” (Her rather antediluvian choice of material is explained by a passing dialogue exchange in which she says she can’t pick newer tunes the kids might actually relate to because the ultimate goal is a public performance and they need songs in the public domain so they don’t have to pay music publishing royalties, though given that Maplewood is an ultra-elite school one would think they could afford it.) Three years earlier Mia had a crisis in which all the spoiled rich kids at the school bullied her – in their cruelest prank, they literally threw pennies at her – and Madelyn came to her rescue and stood behind her. Now she’s being bullied again, this time via a barrage of anonymous text messages on her phone. They keep coming – she gets nearly 200 insulting and abusive texts over the course of the story – and by the time the movie is over her school acquaintances are also getting bullying texts in Mia’s name. Mia has acquired a boyfriend, sort of, named Josh Landon (Kyle Clark); she also has an old friend named Eliot (Jonathan Simao) – apparently the only kid at Maplewood besides Mia who doesn’t come from a family with money – who wants to be more than just a friend.

It’s obvious writer Gregg McBride is setting Eliot up as a red herring since his comments to Mia sound suspiciously like some of the nasty texts she’s getting, but half an hour through the movie we learn [spoiler alert! – though it’s not that much of a spoiler since Lifetime gave away the big plot twist in their promos] that Mia’s mom Madelyn is the one sending her daughter the abusive texts. The story opens with a prologue suggesting that Madelyn’s texts have literally driven Mia to suicide, or at least an attempt at it, before it flashes back a month. Mia is giving a speech in the Maplewood auditorium denouncing cyber-bullying as well as the in-person kind, and telling her classmates that though she wouldn’t wish the experience of being bullied on anybody, it made her a stronger person. She boasts that she took the pennies her well-heeled classmates threw at her and used them as seed money to start a non-profit to raise money to care for abused animals, and that’s what drew her and Josh together in the first place. Both of them have set their sights on the University of Northeast Florida (referred to throughout as “UNEF”) because of their especially good program in veterinary medicine (though why, if they want to become vets, they can’t find a school closer to home is something of a mystery; I was once working a temp job at UCSD when I met Robert Redford’s son Drew, who was studying veterinary medicine there, and yes, he looked just like his dad in his younger days). In case you’re wondering where Mia’s dad is in all this, his name is Erik Keeting (Bradley Stryker) and he and Madelyn had an unusually bitter divorce 10 years earlier. There’s some confusion about whether the family name is “Keith” or “Keeting,” but I suspect McBride wanted us to believe the divorce was so acrimonious Madelyn tweaked the name on purpose. Erik reappears on the scene and takes an active part in Madelyn’s and Mia’s lives when Mia starts getting cyber-bullied.

Both Josh and Mia want to go to UNEF, but Josh’s family has money and therefore they can afford to send him there while Mia needs a scholarship. To get it, the school’s principal, Allen (he’s not listed on the film’s imdb.com page but he’s an avuncular African-American authority figure, and though it is 2024 and the racial barriers have at least partially broken down in the U.S., it still seems odd that this ultra-exclusive school for spoiled rich white kids has a Black principal, especially since he seems to be the only Black person on the faculty), has to write a letter of recommendation. Allen, who’s already had words with Madelyn over her teaching style – it seems he thinks she’s getting too close to the students – at first supports Madelyn through Mia’s ordeal but gets suspicious when Madelyn asks him not to write Mia’s letter of recommendation because she doesn’t think Mia is ready to leave home yet. Madelyn wants Mia to attend a community college instead – and it’s that scene that nails down Madelyn’s motive for cyber-bullying her own daughter. At first I thought it would be that she wanted to toughen Mia up to be stronger when she took on the world, but no-o-o-o-o; she really wanted to cling to her daughter as long as possible and not have Mia abandon her the way Mia’s dad did. There also seems to be a bit of Munchhausen-syndrome-by-proxy in Madelyn’s actions, since she gets a lot of sympathy points from her colleagues at Maplewood. The fellow teacher she was dating at the outset, Scot (Jason Tremblay), who had broken up with her earlier on the ground that it wasn’t appropriate for two work colleagues to be romantically involved, returns to her at the end.

In fact, they’re making out at his place when Madelyn gets the word that her daughter has attempted suicide – the set-up scene we saw earlier on – only it turns out to be a trap. Mia has discovered that Madelyn has been sending the bullying texts and she and Eliot have worked out a scheme by which Mia will fake a suicide attempt, complete with a scene in her bathroom with bloody water overflowing from the bathtub. Only when Madelyn opens the curtain, instead of her daughter’s body she sees blood-red letters on the side wall telling her that Mia knows her mom sent the texts. Eventually Madelyn and Mia confront each other, not knowing that police detective Bolton (Katrina Kwan), a dogged, competent investigator who got involved when Mia insisted on reporting the cyber-bullying to the police against Madelyn’s predictable objections, is listening in on Mia’s phone, which was on speaker. Madelyn is arrested, though there’s one more confrontation with Mia in which Madelyn, out on bail thanks to Erik, Scot or someone putting up the money, pleads with Mia not to leave her. At the end Erik agrees to let Mia move in with him for the rest of her term at Maplewood (he is her father, after all!) and also agrees to take out a loan to fund her first semester at UNEF, after which she can apply for a mid-year scholarship.

Though it’s made from some pretty familiar Lifetime materials, and it’s saddled with a ridiculous title (obviously taken from Christina Crawford’s memoir Mommie Dearest, though at least Joan Crawford wasn’t as bonkers as the fictitious Madelyn!), Mommy Meanest is actually quite a good movie, well directed by Greg Beeman. I note that I had two previous moviemagg posts about Lisa Rinna, both from Lifetime showings of films that were nearly a decade old when I first watched them: Another Woman’s Husband (2000) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/06/another-womans-husband-hearst.html) and Sex, Lies and Obsession (2001) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/sex-lies-and-obsession.html). Sex, Lies and Obsession co-starred Rinna and her real-life husband Harry Hamlin; they play a married couple in the film, but he’s a long-term sex addict who ultimately gets busted for cruising a “prostitute” that turns out to be an undercover policewoman. There’s a link on the imdb.com page for Mommy Meanest (https://tvshowsace.com/2024/05/11/lifetime-mommy-meanest-lisa-rinna-somebody-really-crazy/#google_vignette) in which Lisa Rinna, who’s best known for her TV work on the soap operas Days of Our Lives, Melrose Place and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, says she took the role of Madelyn because she’d always wanted to play a crazy person. She also allowed her real-life daughter, Delilah Hamlin, to be in the movie – though not as Mia but as Mia’s friend and confidant Summer – even though before that Delilah and her sister Amelia hadn’t wanted to become actors.

Follow Me Quietly (RKO, 1949)

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

This morning (Sunday, May 12) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for the 7 a.m. rerun of last night’s Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of an unusual 1949 RKO “B”-movie called Follow Me Quietly. The film was unusual in that it ran just 59 minutes at a time when even the shakiest of major studios (as RKO was in that time, especially since Howard Hughes had taken it over the year before) were moving away from “B” production as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount decision forced major studios who also owned theatres to give them up, hastening the demise of the studio system that had already begun with the rise of television after World War II. Follow Me Quietly is really more of a police procedural than a film noir. It was loosely based on a story by Francis Rosenwald and director Anthony Mann that RKO had bought in 1947 after it briefly went through the hands of Jack Wrather, best known for creating the long-running radio show The Lone Ranger. Wrather was going to produce it as part of a multi-picture deal with Allied Artists nèe Monogram, which was trying to move away from its reputation as a cheapie studio who got stars on their way up and on their way down. But it fell through, and Follow Me Quietly ended up at RKO and was given to Sid Rogell, head of their “B” unit. In 1948 Rogell determined to make a police procedural that would capture some of the same essence as He Walked by Night (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/he-walked-by-night-bryan-foy.html), a 1948 Eagle-Lion release directed by Alfred Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann (who took over the film in mid-shoot) and based on a real-life case, a former L.A. fingerprint technician named Erwin Walker who used his inside knowledge of police procedures to commit crimes. Made by yet another company (the former PRC) which was attempting to move away from “B” production and create more prestigious product, He Walked by Night was a blockbuster hit.

Its success inspired Sid Rogell to pull Follow Me Quietly out of his studio’s backfiles and greenlight it. After an unsuccessful attempt to get Mann to return to RKO to direct it, Rogell and his line producer, Herman Schlom, put Richard Fleischer on the movie as director and gave Lillie Hayward the assignment to write a script from the Rosenwald-Mann story. Fleischer was the son of animation pioneer Max Fleischer and he’d made a number of RKO “B”’s, including Bodyguard and The Clay Pigeon, before stepping up into the big leagues with Walt Disney’s 1954 film of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Ironically Disney and Fleischer’s father Max and uncle, Dave Fleischer, had been bitter rivals in the animation business in the 1930’s.) Follow Me Quietly was a 59-minute story about a serial killer who calls himself “The Judge” and sends notes, mostly cut and pasted from newspaper and magazine headlines, to the police announcing that his victims have done something evil and he’s punishing them on his own authority. The police assign the case to Lieutenant Harry Grant (William Lundigan, top-billed) and Sergeant Art Collins (Jeff Corey, a character actor usually cast as villains). Grant and Collins also have to deal with the interference of reporter Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick) from the sleazy Four Star Crime magazine. From the fragmentary clues “The Judge” has left at the scenes of his various murders – all of which take place during driving rainstorms, as if his homicidal madness was triggered by the rain – Grant and Collins commission a modelmaker to build a life-size dummy of the mystery killer. Their reproduction has a blank face but is otherwise anatomically correct and creates a spectacularly spooky effect in several scenes.

After “The Judge” has struck eight times – most recently when Grant was actually on patrol looking for him – the cops finally get the break they need when a copy of Four Star Crime is found at the scene of “The Judge”’s most recent killing. Ann, who’s previously used her “connections” to sneak into Grant’s bedroom – in an unusual Code-bending scene, she stays there while he at least starts to undress before bed, and he agrees to sign her proffered release form just to get rid of her – crashes the crime scene and notices the magazine. She uses her knowledge of the magazine’s business model to explain to Grant that the issue left behind by “The Judge” is a year old but shows no signs of wear, which means it came from a second-hand bookstore and was part of a press run specifically designed for newsstand sales. Grant and Collins canvass all used bookstores that sell back issues of magazines in the vicinity of the killings, and finally a bookstore clerk recognizes the man and tells the cops where he usually eats. A waitress at the diner he frequents (Marlo Dwyer) comes to the police station, sees the dummy posed at a mock-up of a diner table, and recognizes him as Charlie Roy (Edwin Max), a regular customer. She’s also able to tell the police where Charlie Roy lives (which appears to be the same New York brownstone exterior RKO had previously used as the building where Charles Foster Kane is keeping Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane), and the cops stake out the place. In line with the then-current trend of having action-movie climaxes take place at major industrial sites, like the Brooklyn Bridge in The Naked City (1948) and an oil refinery in White Heat (1949), Grant and Collins corner Roy at a waterworks (not a refinery, as erroneously stated on the film’s Wikipedia page). Like innumerable idiotic film villains both before and since, Roy tries to flee the cops by going up into the installation.

Grant eventually corners him and handcuffs Roy to himself, telling him to “follow me quietly” as he leads him down the water company’s stairs to street level to take him into custody. Only a previous attempt by Grant and Collins to stage a shoot-out has caused one of the water pipes to leak, and Roy sees the leak, acts as if it were rain, and freaks out. At one point it looks like he’s going to make a break for it and both he and Grant are going to die together in a fall, but luckily Grant is able to undo his half of the handcuffs and Roy finally falls to his death. Follow Me Quietly is a really quirky film, benefiting from a lot of oddball scenes – including one in which a newspaper editor who’s “The Judge”’s seventh victim insists on dictating a story to one of his staffers even though it literally costs him his life (when the cops discover him he’s badly wounded but not dead, and the police try to get him to use their ambulance and go to a hospital, but he refuses), and several scenes inside a bar called “The Tavern” whose doorman, Benny (Nestor Paiva from the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), is constantly on the phone to one or more bookies to place illegal bets on horse races. It’s also a frustrating movie in that we get the impression that there was a lot more potential in the story than RKO was able to give us on a “B” budget and a 59-minute running time. One wonders, for example, why the cops never bothered to build profiles of the victims to see what they had in common, why “The Judge” had targeted them as “sinners” he needed to eliminate, and what – if anything – might have motivated “The Judge” to target them.

In his outro, Eddie Muller criticized the casting of William Lundigan as the lead investigator, noting that Lundigan had been hired on the basis of a radio broadcast that convinced an agent he’d be salable in Hollywood. Muller faulted Lundigan’s performance as too one-note and dull, and said a better actor like Dana Andrews, Robert Ryan or Lawrence Tierney might have been better able to dramatize the cop’s growing obsession with his quarry. Aside from the fact that the three actors Muller mentioned wouldn’t have been available (Andrews was under contract elsewhere, Ryan was being transitioned to more important films and Tierney was seen exclusively as a villain after his success playing gangster John Dillinger in a 1945 Monogram biopic), I think Lundigan’s taciturnicity actually makes Follow Me Quietly arguably a precursor of 1971’s Dirty Harry, also about an obsessed cop tracking down a serial killer in an urban environment. It’s indicative of how much more seriously stories like this are taken now than they were when Follow Me Quietly was made that the New York Times reviewer lambasted the film ("There is no intelligent reason why anyone should heed the proposal of Follow Me Quietly … [f]or this utterly senseless little thriller is patently nothing more than a convenient one-hour time-killer between performances of the eight-act vaudeville bill”), while modern-day reviewer Gene Triplett of The Oklahoman who saw the film on DVD wrote, “[T]his obscure gem packs a remarkable amount of thrills and dramatic weight into a mere 59 minutes.” Carl Macek, writing about Follow Me Quietly in The Film Noir Encyclopedia, called it “strangely obsessive” and linked it to other Anthony Mann films, even though (contrary to popular belief) Mann didn’t actually direct any of it. Macek said that even within a 59-minute running time, “the special ambience of Mann’s earlier noir films was captured and exploited, including the usual grotesques that inhabit Mann’s noir universe.” It’s also quirky that the opening credit gives the film’s title in cursive script, something a lot more common for romantic melodramas than crime films. Follow Me Quietly is a quite good film as it stands, but it could have been a great deal better at a 90- to 105-minute length that would have given Fleischer and Hayward more time and money to explore the real potentials of this odd but haunting tale.

My Life Is Murder: "The Boyfriend Experience" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 10) I watched an engaging if ultimately not very satisfying PBS telecast of an Australian crime show called My Life Is Murder, featuring Lucy Lawless – an interesting actress best known for playing Xena, the Warrior Princess, though most of her credits are for TV work. She plays Alexa Crowe, a police detective in Adelaide who retired after coming into an inheritance so large she never has to work again. Only she gets sucked into a murder investigation by her former police partner, Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). The death they’re investigating is that of wealthy industrialist Jennifer Chee (Lily Mor), who fell from a 19th floor balcony in the apartment of male escort Dylan Giroux (Lindsay Farris). The police officially ruled it an accident, but Kieran is convinced it was murder and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. My Life Is Murder was created by Rick Maier and Claire Tonkin, though the writer of this episode was Matt Ford. It didn’t help that the running time was just over 45 minutes, or that Ford gave us only two serious suspects: Dylan and Bob Noble (Grant Piro), the security guard in Dylan’s building who comes off as just twitchy enough to be the red herring Matt Ford wanted. To absolutely zero surprise, it turns out that Dylan is the killer; years previously he pushed another inconvenient client off another high-rise apartment balcony in another city. Then he was living under his birth name, David Gazzara, and apparently the reason he killed Jennifer was so she wouldn’t expose his previous crime. I’m not sure if I’ll watch this show again; as with a lot of cop shows on TV these days, the campy and soap opera-ish aspects just get in the way of the thrills. I was amused by the irony that both Bernard Curry and Lindsay Farris are hunks to die for (and we get lots of glimpses of one or the other of them topless, showing off their nipples – yum!), so if you watched this show and were told that one of them was playing a sex worker, they’re both so hot you probably couldn’t tell which one was supposed to be which!

Law and Order: "No Good Deed" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 9) NBC showed the next-to-last episodes of all three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order episode was called “No Good Deed” – as in “goes unpunished,” and the first person for whom her good deed goes very much punished was the opening murder victim, prison psychotherapist Angela Hart (Stephanie Gibson). One night Angela gets a food delivery and tells the delivery person just to leave it in front of her door rather than knock on it and make her open it. The delivery comes through fine and she starts having her meal and drinking a glass of wine when the intercom on her building phone rings again from someone purporting to be the delivery person, pleading with her to let him come up so he can use her phone, since his own has supposedly run out of power. The next thing we know, Angela is a corpse, badly battered and bloodied, on her living-room floor. The investigating detectives, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), initially suspect Angela’s boyfriend, Mark Salerno (Kellan Rhude), because a) he used to work as a bar bouncer and in doing that job was twice arrested (though not convicted) for battery, and b) he sent threatening texts to Angela the day she was murdered. He says he did that only because he was up for an acting role he didn’t get, and his alibi – that he was at a bar that night – apparently checks out. Then the finger of suspicion points to Shawn Payne (Tyler Eliot Burke), a convicted rapist whom Angela treated in prison and became convinced he had a shot at a law-abiding life. Riley and Shaw arrest Payne for Angela’s rape and murder at the halfway house where he’s staying, but they have trouble building a prosecutable case.

It turns out that Payne was eligible for parole because assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) pled out his previous case for the rape (but not murder) of Chelsea Shell (Chloe Lanier), and as a result the newly appointed New York D.A., Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), insists on trying the case himself. Alas, he draws a hyper-cautious judge, Steve Nelson (Sam McMurray), who’s so concerned about being reversed on appeal (especially since he’s secretly up for a potential appeals-court promotion himself) he bends over backwards to favor the defense in his rulings. There are some great shots of Payne and his aggressive no-nonsense African-American woman attorney, Vanessa Carter (Michael Hyatt), who’s got Payne dolled up in court so he looks like a choirboy inexplicably accused of dire crimes. After an ex-girlfriend of Mark Salerno’s testifies for the defense and claims that he struck her and that’s why she broke up with him, Payne testifies in his own defense and the prosecutors are desperate to come up with a way to impeach him. Finally Nolan Price spots something on the photos of both victims: on Chelsea Shell’s leg there’s a wound in the shape of the letter “S” and on the same part of Angela’s dead body there was a similar, but not complete, mark, both made with a knife. Baxter pleads with the judge to allow Chelsea Shell to testify as a witness under the “prior bad acts” exemption – which became unexpectedly controversial when a New York appeals court just reversed Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction on the ground that the judge had erred in allowing testimony from victims of rapes Weinstein was alleged to have committed but for which he wasn’t being tried. In the end Chelsea Shell testifies, and after a lot of hesitation she identifies Payne as her rapist; Payne ends up being convicted but Shell is so overcome by the experience that she attempts suicide and ends up in a hospital emergency room. This is an unusually tough-minded Law and Order show, and while rape cases are ordinarily the province of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, this one became unexpectedly timely because of the Weinstein reversal, far more so than writer Rick Eid (a long-time Law and Order hand) probably imagined when he was working on it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Marauder" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

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

After that NBC showed a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Marauder,” about a peripatetic sexual offender (a man who kidnaps, rapes and kills teenage girls) who works from a defined geographical location but ranges about 100 miles or so in each direction. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who is definitely showing her age these days) gets involved in one of the cases because the original victim from the 1990’s was Crystal Sykes (Stella Bratcher), the younger sister of a member of her squad, Shannah Sykes (Jordana Spiro), who’s on long-term loan from the FBI to the Manhattan SVU and who still bears the trauma of losing her younger sister to a sexual predator. Benson, on her own authority and against Shannah’s pleadings, reopens the case and finds that at least five other missing children disappeared under similar circumstances, including at least one, Renée Markham, who was taken in the Manhattan SVU’s jurisdiction. The squad goes to see Markham’s parents, Lee (John Hillner) and Joanna (Blair Ross), to ask for permission to exhume Renée’s body (at least her they found!) to test for DNA and other forensic evidence in hopes that modern forensic technology could detect evidence the cruder techniques of over two decades ago could not.

But the parents, Lee in particular, refuse, so Renée’s cousin Cal Markham (Gabe Fazio, giving a rather twitchy performance that at least briefly makes us consider that he might have actually killed Renée) gives a false confession to the crime so the police are forced to exhume Renée’s body whether the parents O.K. it or not. They finally trace the killings and abductions to Richard Kincaid (Larry Pine) of Bayonne, New Jersey, and they arrest him at a family gathering that’s the epitome of suburban banality. (I remember when I first read Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, I thought she could have reversed the abstract nouns in her subtitle and called it A Report on the Evil of Banality, since the whole point of her book was that Eichmann, as she portrayed him, was amoral rather than immoral and so totally lacked a sense of moral compass he didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t see that the task the Nazis had entrusted to him – to make sure trains kept moving to Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps – was morally wrong.) The SVU cops arrest Kincaid and he leads them to Crystal Sykes’s body – and there’s a weird scene at the ending in which Shannah stands over the remains of her long-dead sister, not sure whether she wants to look at them to make the I.D. It’s an example of the moral subtlety of Dick Wolf’s universe that makes his cop shows generally far richer and more emotionally complex than the average policiers.

Law and Order: Organized Crime:"Goodnight" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

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

The final show in last Thursday’s (May 9) run of Law and Order episodes was a Law and Order: Organized Crime show called “Goodnight” (spelled as just one word). It begins with a prologue set in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2020, in which Elliott Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) younger brother Joe (Michael Trotter) acquires a heroin habit while serving his tour and is dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. He’s rescued, so to speak, by the mysterious Julian Emery (Tom Payne), an apparently British-born mercenary with a huge private fortune (big enough to afford his own private jet plane), who puts Joe to work on various illegal enterprises in exchange for enough money to keep him supplied with drugs. Flash-forward to 2024, and Joe is kidnapped and forced into detox by Elliot and the oldest Stabler brother, Randall (Dean Norris). Joe gets off heroin for the first time in four years but he insists on remaining part of Emery’s organization. His hope is he can infiltrate it and report to the cops of the Organized Crime Control Bureau where Emery is taking delivery of a mysterious arms shipment and also what’s in it and what Emery is going to do with it. It turns out to be enough munitions to equip a full-scale army and Emery is going to auction it to the highest bidder. Midway through the episode the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s resident computer whiz, Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), nearly loses his whole setup when a laptop recovered in one of the Bureau’s raids turns out to be infected with malware.

Vargas is able to stop the malware invasion in time to save his mainframe back at his home office, but it means the only way he can access the bad guys’ data is to go to their server farm himself, with a police escort, and download it personally. Needless to say, the baddies catch on and send an armed force to kill the police officers, or at least stop them from getting their data, and there’s a bizarre shootout scene among the various server towers (one wonders how many innocent people and companies are losing scads of data from the physical damage to their servers from all the bullets being fired around them) before Vargas finished his download in time. It reminded me of the much-ridiculed ending of John Grisham’s The Firm and the film version thereof, in which the big suspense issue is whether Tom Cruise’s character would finish copying all the Mafia’s secrets in time to get them to the authorities before the Mob caught up to him and killed him. In the end Elliott and Randall plead with Joe to leave the crime-fighting up to the people who are trained for it and know what they’re doing, and Joe insists that he’s going to remain inside Emery’s operation even though he’s risking not only being found out as a “mole” but being recognized as Elliott’s brother. (Frankly, Dean Norris, Christopher Meloni and Michael Trotter don’t really look like brothers, but that bothers me less than usual in this context because they’re all supposed to be hard-bitten people who’ve been aged quicker than normal, both physically and psychologically, by the stresses of their lives and their jobs.)

A Brief History of the Future: "Tomorrows" (Futurific Studios, Untold, DreamCrew, PBS, 2024)

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

I put on PBS last night (May 8) for two of their usual Wednesday night science documentaries, “Tomorrows” – the last episode in their six-part mini-series called A Brief History of the Future – and a NOVA show called “Why Bridges Collapse.” I couldn’t find this show listed under NOVA’s imdb.com page but fortunately there was a separate listing on its own. Though previous installments of A Brief History of the Future had featured some interesting interviewees, including French President François Macron (whom I’d already read another interview with in the current issue of the British magazine The Economist) and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, as the show progressed I got more irritated by it and I don’t think I missed much by skipping the previous episodes. My irritation started with the on-air host, “renowned futurist” Ari Wallach (that alone set my spider-sense off since it’s weird to hear someone described as a “renowned” anything when I’ve never heard of him before), who had the golly-gee-whillikers attitude of previous PBS science-show hosts, only he had it worse than most. It got even worse when Wallach proclaimed that the aim of the show was not to showcase utopian futures or dystopian ones, but what he called “protopian” ones in which we get together and work to build a positive future for ourselves and our planet even though we know in advance we won’t achieve perfection. There were some interesting guests on the program, but I think if my 70 years on this planet have taught me anything, it’s that the natural tendency of human “civilization” is to enrich the already rich even further while simultaneously driving everyone else to the bare minimum needed for their survival. Every technological advance in human history has been used in precisely this fashion, and while on occasion the have-nots have been able through activism and revolution to claw back at least some of the value their labor has produced, for the most part the principle that the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer has been a constant of human history. So it was hard for me to watch a show enthusiastically presenting some quite interesting people doing compelling things and not realize that in the end, all their efforts will be pressed into the service of the ultra-rich as they always have been throughout human history.

Among the more interesting people being interviewed were Sam Teicher, a drop-dead gorgeous young man who works for a company he co-founded called Coral Vita (the last name is pronounced “VEE-tuh,” not “VYE-tuh” as I’d have assumed) in Freeport, The Bahamas. He’s worked on a project to regrow coral reefs after ocean pollution has brought them to within an inch of their destruction. What a lot of people don’t realize is that coral itself is alive. It’s not just a passive substance that accumulates underwater to form reefs. It’s not only a life form but a life form whose continued well-being is crucial to much of the ocean’s ecosystem, including the livelihoods of millions of actual humans who depend for their livelihood on fish and other life forms that are nurtured and protected by the coral. Teicher and his colleagues are shown literally re-culturing the reefs by planting CD-sized discs containing coral they’ve hand-grown in their labs and hoping these will grow to replace and extend the original coral that’s been killed off by pollution. Of course for this to work, the pollution that killed off the coral in the first place will have to stop – and there are few, if any, signs that that is happening. Another person I found particularly interesting was Raya Bidshahri, a woman who runs a so-called “School for Humanity” in Dubai which is yet another attempt to reject the traditional top-down educational model conceived during the Industrial Revolution to train people destined to work in factories. Her basic goal was the same A. S. Neill articulated in the 1950’s when he founded the Summerhill school in Britain: allow students to pick their own courses of study and follow wherever their curiosity leads them.

If anything, modern-day models of education have become even more top-down and authoritarian than the ones Neill was rebelling against; it’s clear today’s ruling classes regard independent thought per se as a threat to their continued power and authority, and are reworking the educational system to suppress it as much as possible. The regime of standardized testing, in which entire schools are judged as “succeeding” or “failing” based on how well their students do on these tests, has only increased the authoritarian tendencies of top-down industrial-era schooling. In George Orwell’s 1984 (the book I would name as the biggest single influence on my own political thinking) he argued that scientific and technological advancement depends on allowing individual freedom of thought, and a highly regimented, stratified society would basically stop advancing technologically because it would deliberately and consciously stifle that kind of freedom of thought. The “Tomorrows” episode of A Brief History of the Future (one wonders if the overall series title was a reference to Stephen Hawking’s book on relativity, A Brief History of Time) also featured Jon Goldstein of the Environmental Defense Fund, who’s working on a project called “MethaneSat” to orbit a satellite that would monitor the world’s releases of methane gas (he stressed how unusual it is for a non-profit corporation to be launching a satellite and one wonders how they’re going to get it in space; I hope they’re not depending on one of Elon Musk’s terrible and unreliable rockets!). And they also featured a segment on a woman named Ella Finer, a trustee of an organization called “Longplayer” that has created a piece of music that will literally last 1,000 years (take that, Wagner, Satie and Scriabin!). It’s a series of Tibetan singing bowls installed inside an abandoned lighthouse where the passing winds will “play” the drum bowls. They installed this at the end of the 20th century (incidentally I was amused at a passage in Ari Wallach’s narration that referred to us as being at the outset of the 21st century; by my math, the 21st century is already almost one-quarter over!) and plan to keep it going until December 31, 2999.

I’d dearly like to share Ari Wallach’s optimism about the human future, but I daresay that given the way human politics are evolving (or devolving), including the near-certainty of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in this year’s election and his pledge to “drill, baby, drill” and reverse all President Biden’s attempts to encourage the transition to electric cars (as Trump told Time magazine interviewer Eric Cortellessa, he doesn’t like electric cars because “[t]hey don't go far. They have problems. They don't work in the cold. They don't work in the heat. There's a lot of problems”) and all other attempts to use government power to encourage a transition to renewable energy, there’s not likely to be a human future for more than 100 to 200 years. Though one of the most interesting segments in “Tomorrows” is about Angelica Kaspatza with ON, a corporation in Iceland that is using geothermal power to produce electricity, that’s something you can get away with in Iceland, which sits on one of the most seismically and volcanically active pieces of Earth. Today Iceland has become one of the few countries in the world that gets virtually all its electric power from renewables, including 60 percent from geothermal – but once again, they have the resources to do that. Iceland is to geothermal what Saudi Arabia is to petroleum, and though there was a brief discussion about the possibility of using old, no-longer-producing oil wells to create artificial geothermal power, that’s not likely to happen given that the leaders of the U.S. (once Trump gets back in) and other authoritarian countries like China, Russia, India, Turkey and Hungary are still jonesing on fossil fuels and either avoiding the renewable transition altogether or, like China, working to monopolize the technology so once Americans get through their thick little skulls that we’re going to have to transition to renewables, China will own all the technology we need to do so and will charge us through the nose for it.

NOVA: "Why Bridges Fail" (Windfall Films, BBC, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 8), after the “Tomorrows” episode of A Brief History of the Future, KPBS showed a NOVA episode called “Why Bridges Fail” that was built around the spectacular collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy. (The bridge was named after its designer, Riccardo Morandi.) Most Americans have either never heard of Genoa, Italy or know it only as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. The Morandi Bridge, also known as Viadotta Polcevera, was built in the 1960’s (according to Wikipedia, from 1963 to 1967) across the Polcevera River on the A10 freeway. On August 14, 2018 a nearly 700-foot segment of the bridge collapsed and fell about 100 feet to the canyon below. The accident killed 43 people, though amazingly some of the drivers on the disintegrated segment survived the fall and two of them were interviewed for this program. Though the bridge didn’t visibly sway during storms like some other famously collapsed bridges, there was enough preliminary concern about how much the increasing flow of traffic was wearing out the bridge that starting in the early 2000’s there was already talk of tearing down the bridge and building a replacement just north of it. Before that there were attempts at patching it and trying as best as possible to reverse the corrosion of the internal metal within the pre-stressed concrete of which the bridge was made. Starting in the 1950’s bridge builders had moved away from suspension bridges as the way to cross large water or canyon barriers and instead were moving towards reinforced concrete blocks with steel rods inside to support them and give them durability. This only worked if the steel rods could be kept absolutely water-tight because water seeping into the concrete through cracks or other imperfections could rust the steel rods, causing them to lose structural strength and, in extreme cases, to collapse altogether.

The show mentioned other bridges that have been in danger of collapse, including one called the Hammersmith Flyover in London, which was successfully kept up by installing new steel barriers along the sides of the bridge and cladding them in watertight coverings. Ironically, according to the Wikipedia page on the Morandi bridge, Morandi himself had suggested a similar fix for his own bridge in 1978, when he wrote, “I think that sooner or later, maybe in a few years, it will be necessary to resort to a treatment consisting of the removal of all traces of rust on the exposure of the reinforcements, to fill the patches with epoxidic-style resins, and finally to cover everything up with elastomers of very high chemical resistance.” One of the odder things the structural engineers in London did with the Hammersmith Flyover was they literally bugged it: they installed 500 microphones under the bridge to record the sound of the concrete supports snapping apart inside. The reason was to document that the bridge would literally collapse without the extensive (and expensive) repairs the engineers were calling for. One of the points made in this documentary, directed by Martin Gorst, was that most of America’s interstate highway system was also built in the 1950’s and 1960’s and therefore all its elaborate bridges – including the ones that crossed, not water, but other freeways in overpasses and cloverleaf intersections – were also subject to the same strains as the ones that collapsed the bridge in Genoa, especially since freeways all over the world are simply carrying far more cars and trucks (and the weight of them) than they were designed for.

Suspension bridges have potentially similar longevity problems, as Gorst showed when he included documentary footage on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge from 1931 to 1936. It showed how the giant suspension cables from which hangs the bridge’s roadway were made: literally thousands of steel rods about an inch thick were woven together, then covered in a now-iconic red waterproof coating that gave the bridge its fabled color. Unfortunately, the waterproof coating was not as waterproof as advertised; over time, especially for a bridge that spans a major and well-traveled waterway (the San Francisco Bay), water has seeped in and started rusting the steel rods from inside. To stop this, engineers worked out an unusual fix: to blow air at very low pressure inside the cables, thereby drying them out. If nothing else, “Why Bridges Fail” was an important and timely lesson in the need to repair and maintain infrastructure continually. You can’t just build it and forget it; you have to take care of it over time and correct both for natural wear and tear and unexpected problems, including the sheer amount of traffic modern life generates. “Why Bridges Fail” ended with a note that Genoa dedicated a new bridge across the Polcevera in August 2020, which made me wonder whether they just replaced the missing part of the Morandi Bridge that collapsed or they tore it down and built a new bridge. According to Wikipedia, they tore it down and built a new bridge, demolishing the old one from February to June 2019 and starting its replacement, the Genoa-Saint George bridge, on June 25, 2019. It was finished by spring and formally opened on August 3, 2020 – surprisingly quick work for we Americans, who are all too used to infrastructure projects stretching out seemingly forever!