Secrets Between Sisters (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 3) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of unusually interesting Lifetime movies. The first was called Secrets Between Sisters and was directed by Linden Ashby (a male, best known as an actor for playing Wyatt Earp’s brother Morgan Earp in the 1994 Wyatt Earp movie starring Kevin Costner and directed and co-written by Lawrence Kasdan) from a script by Rib Hillis and Jessica Morgan. Set in Atlanta, Georgia (though nobody in the cast seems to speak with any hint of a Southern accent), Secrets Between Sisters centers around Cassie Wolcott (Jessica Morris) and her scapegrace siblings, sister Miranda (Brey Noelle) and brother Kevin (William McKinney). Miranda has fallen into an abusive relationship with Rufus Connor (the attractive hunk Michael Bonini), and when we first see her he’s just punched her in the face and she’s understandably fled him. She turns up on Cassie’s doorstep and Cassie announces that she’s going to stay with her for as long as she needs to until Rufus gets the message that she’s finally breaking up with him. Cassie has a husband, Steven (Daniel Stine), who’s an assistant district attorney in Atlanta. She also has an ex, Lyle (John Castle), who fathered her now-teenage daughter Ariel (Brianna Abruzzo), and Ariel is upset and acting out from her upset over losing her dad’s presence in her life. As for Kevin, he’s a compulsive gambling addict who’s in hock to the sorts of people you especially don’t want to owe money to, and he’s constantly begging his sisters for his share of the inheritance he’s owed from the recent death of their mother. Both Cassie and Miranda are determined not to give him the money because they’re afraid he’d just waste it on more gambling. Instead they’re using it as a pressure point to get him into rehab. Needless to say, Kevin is not happy about this and on two separate occasions he grabs Cassie’s wrist in anger.

A half-hour into this two-hour (less commercials) movie, Miranda disappears and is later found murdered outside an abandoned warehouse being used as a sex club. We actually get to see the murder (a strangulation) in progress, though Linden Ashby keeps Robert Vardaros’s camera far enough away that we don’t see whodunit. Charles gave this movie points for being a whodunit with a wide pool of suspects for Miranda’s murder: Rufus Connor, her abusive boyfriend; Kevin, her brother; Lyle, Cassie’s ex; and various hangers-on she might have met at that sex club (which is depicted in the rather sorry way that was common for 1930’s filmmakers to depict dens of iniquity: by making the demi-monde look so boring people would be discouraged from taking part in it). Acting against the solemn warnings from her husband Steven, who tells her the police are investigating Miranda’s murder just fine and her amateur crime-solving efforts would just get in their way, Cassie sneaks out of bed while her husband is sleeping, dons a leather coat and high heels, and heads for the sex club as soon as she’s found an online portal to register for their next party. Alas, the police raid the joint the very night she’s there, and she’s busted and held overnight until Steven bails her out. Cassie receives a text message from Rufus, whom the cops have decided was Miranda’s killer, saying he didn’t kill Miranda but knows who did and will tell her if she meets him in an hour. Any even moderately hardened Lifetime watcher will guess what happens next: Cassie goes to Rufus’s meeting place and finds him dead, fatally stabbed. Next Cassie makes arrangements to meet Rufus’s lawyer, Jeffrey Solerno (John Algeo), with equally dire results: Cassie finds him fatally stabbed in his office and has to flee from a standard-issue Lifetime hoodie-clad killer.

Also, Cassie discovers from the medical examiner handling Miranda’s case, Dr. Golding (Charles Christopher), that Miranda was pregnant when she was killed. Naturally she wants an autopsy done to find out who the father was, but the official police detective on the case, Andrews (Sharonne Lanier), shows Cassie a form, ostensibly signed by her, requesting that the autopsy results not be released. Eventually Cassie finds that no autopsy was done at all, so she and her friend Robin (Christie Leverette) – who seemed at the start to be destined to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but is blessedly spared that fate and is alive at the end – are determined to get one done on the Q.T. by a pathologist at the hospital where Robin works. Ultimately the paternity test reveals that [spoiler alert!] Cassie’s husband Steven was Miranda’s, Rufus’s and Solerno’s killer. It seems he’d gone to the same sex club as Miranda and had had a hot-’n’-heavy quickie there, only because she was wearing a mask at first (a house rule, though at least as far as the male members were concerned honored as much in the breach as the observance) he didn’t know until afterwards that he’d just fucked his sister-in-law. What made it worse for him was that Miranda got pregnant from it and was determined to have the baby. The two argued about it and Steven lost his cool and strangled her on the spot, then killed the others to divert suspicion. Ultimately Steven is arrested after Cassie’s daughter Ariel saves her mom’s life by clubbing him over the head with a frying pan just as he’s about to shoot her. There’s an epilogue, “Three Months Later,” in which the surviving principals are One Big Happy Family again – Cassie, Ariel, Robin and Cassie’s ex Kyle, with whom it looks like she’s going to reconcile. Secrets Between Sisters was a slightly better-than-average Lifetime movie, with enough meat on the bones to give the director, writers and actors something solid with which to work; it didn’t break any new ground, though I’m a bit embarrassed that Charles guessed the ending well before I did!

My Child Has My Doctor's Face (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After that Lifetime showed a movie I liked better, though my husband didn’t: My Child Has My Doctor’s Face, a title from which you could practically write it yourself. The film opens with a shot of a stuck-up, self-righteous medico – someone who epitomizes the old joke, “What do you call a person who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows he’s God? A doctor” – named Dr. Prescott Bellamy (Daniel O’Reilly) filming a video. Dr. Bellamy heads a fertility clinic called Pure Cell to which hundreds of women patients have come for help having their husbands’ children – only Dr. Bellamy, who we’re told was one of the inventors of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which some anti-abortion zealots want to ban because it creates fertilized embryos and then disposes of the ones that aren’t implanted, hasn’t been using their husbands’ semen. Instead he’s been using his own, a course he apparently embarked on when his own normally conceived son was killed in an accident. (Initially we’re told that Dr. Bellamy’s late wife was also killed in the same accident, but later we see a shot of the boy being run over by a car without any trace of the wife.) He’s determined to breed a super-race from his own sperm, spreading it as widely as possible and recruiting mothers themselves smart enough to give his super-kids a decent education to make the most of the genetic bounty Dr. Bellamy has bestowed on them. Dr. Bellamy is making the video because he’s been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that will either kill him in three months or deprive him of his intellect and turn him into a hopeless vegetable.

We then meet the couple who get enmeshed in Dr. Bellamy’s scheme: Jessica Graff (Natalie Polisson) and her husband Dylan (Jason Tobias). The two have just got married and they’re having an argument over her desiring a child while his sperm haven’t been strong enough to impregnate her. At one point Dylan even tells Jessica he’s willing to divorce her so she can marry someone who can get her pregnant, but she says no, he’s the only man with whom she wants to have a baby. They go to Dr. Bellamy’s clinic and scrape together whatever money they can find to afford his treatments, and the baby, a boy named Henry (Viron Sage Weaver) is duly born – only both Graffs notice that their kid doesn’t much resemble either of them. Later Jessica is stalked by a woman named Sarah Larson (Kelsey Fordham), whose son Emmett (Jax Binkert) strongly resembles Henry, just a year or two older. Sarah’s husband Connor (Justin Powell) has left her because he’s convinced she had extra-relational sex to get pregnant and he won’t hang around enough for her to tell him the truth – not that she quite knows it herself. (Later Dylan Graff briefly leaves Jessica because he’s had his own paternity test done, it determined that Henry was not his biological child, and he immediately jumped to the conclusion that Jessica had had extra-relational activity to fulfill her long-held desire for a kid.) Sarah is going after Dr. Bellamy and enlists Jessica’s aid in doing so.

Unable to see him in his office, they crash his latest appearance on a book tour (he’s writing a tome on the wonders of IVF), but he weasels out of taking their questions from the audience. So they hit on the idea of breaking into his house to grab samples of anything with his DNA on it: a toothbrush, a drinking glass, whatever. Jessica insists on doing the actual B&E herself and not only grabs the items but also steals a flash drive from Bellamy’s laptop containing his videotaped confession. Unfortunately, Dr. Bellamy has flown home from his book tour in Seattle because he dreaded being stuck there in winter, and there’s a nicely done suspense sequence over whether Jessica will be caught before she can make it out of there free and clear. In the end she delivers the evidence to Sarah but Bellamy sees them; they make a plan to take the evidence to the police the next morning, but Bellamy somehow gets word of it and knocks off Sarah with an overdose of Fentanyl he’s able to pass off as “accidental.” Later Bellamy kidnaps Dylan Groff and holds him in his basement, which also happens to have been his first consulting room, and he ties Dylan to his exam table and calls Jessica to explain his ransom terms. She’s to bring over all the evidence she has against him, and she’s to sign a paper giving control of her son Henry’s education to Dr. Bellamy and, after he passes, his estate because Bellamy has decided Dylan is too stupid to give Henry the kind of education he needs for his genetic gifts to shine. Fortunately, both Graffs are able to escape and call the police on her cell phone, which Bellamy stole from her but she recovered, and ultimately the Graffs are rescued and Bellamy is arrested and charged with 27 counts of “fertility fraud.” (The fact that he’s also committed murder – at least once that we know about, probably more – is discreetly unmentioned.)

I was hoping that his aneurysm would blow and that would be the deus ex machina that saved our nice young couple from his machinations, but no-o-o-o-o. There’s a reunion of sorts in that Henry and his older half-brother Emmett are shown playing together, and with Sarah’s death Connor is endorsing the friendship between their kids. Charles said he liked Secrets Between Sisters because it was a whodunit with a large suspect pool, while in My Child Has My Doctor’s Face we knew from the beginning who the villain was and what he was up to, but I liked this one better precisely for that reason. I remembered St. Alfred Hitchcock’s distaste for whodunits (he never made one after his fascinating 1930 British film Murder!) and his preference for letting the audience in on the truth right away and building suspense from what would happen when the characters learned what we’d known all along. Besides, it features one of the better Lifetime villains: as the mad doctor Daniel O’Reilly is magnificent, hitting just the right notes of self-righteousness and absolute conviction that his outrageous conduct is morally justified. If they ever do a biopic of Donald Trump’s years in the White House (both his first term and his second, should he win tomorrow’s election), O’Reilly would be quite good casting for it!

Father Brown: "The Word of the Condemned" (BBC Studios, Britbox, American Public Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, November 2) I watched the next episodes in sequence of Father Brown and Sister Boniface Mysteries on KPBS. The Father Brown show, “The Word of the Condemned,” begins with Father Brown (Mark Williams) visiting condemned murderer William Harrow (Paul McEwan) on the eve of his execution for the so-called “Bride Murders.” In these killings, the victim (always a young but recently married woman) was dressed in a white wedding gown and laid out outdoors with a white rose clutched in her hands. Harrow admits he was justly convicted for the first three “Bride Murders” but insists he didn’t kill the fourth victim, Mrs. Sophie Blackthorn (unidentified on imdb.com though she’s seen in a flashback). The late Mrs. Blackthorn’s sister, Lady Felicia (Nancy Devine), also is convinced that Harrow didn’t kill her sister. Sophie’s widower, Ralph Blackthorn (David Burnett), works in the criminology lab of Professor Alexander Pritchard (Silas Carson), a narcissistic egomaniac who was instrumental in convicting Harrow of the murders in the first place. For a while I thought the writer, Dominique Moloney, was going to make Pritchard the murderer, with his motive being a secret sexual affair between him and Sophie Blackburn and jealousy over her refusal to leave Ralph for him. Indeed, Father Brown toys with just that suspicion before Pritchard convinces him he has an airtight alibi. It turns out the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Ralph Blackburn’s foster sister Ella (Kate Bracken). It seems that Ella was a blood Blackburn while Ralph was a lower-class kid from London whom the Blackburn parents adopted. Since they weren’t biologically related, Ella formed a crush on Ralph and thought he should reciprocate, but he saw her as his sister and was revolted by the whole idea of having a sexual relationship with her. So when Ralph married Sophie, Ella became insanely jealous and determined to eliminate the competition, faking it to look like one of Harrow’s killings. Ironically, one of her slip-ups was buying a white rose from a florist; Harrow’s roses had come from his mother’s garden and he’d cut them himself. This was one of the better Father Brown shows and avoided the silliness of some of them (particularly the recent one that engaged him in a conspiracy to commit burglary), though I missed the sequence in a recent Father Brown show of him officiating at a church funeral. The gimmick in that one was that the death had originally been ruled a suicide, which disqualified him from a church funeral since the Roman Catholic Church regards suicide as a mortal sin, but once Father Brown’s investigation proved that he had been killed by someone else, then he could have one.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "A Beautiful World" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the Father Brown episode on November 2, KPBS showed a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “A Beautiful World” which centered around Minerva, an Avon-like multi-level marketing makeup company that came to the town of Great Slaughter in central England and started pushing their wares. The boss is Jean Pettifer (Crystal Wu – and yes, the actress is visibly Asian but there’s no clue as to why the character should be or how she got such a blandly Anglo name) and her star saleswoman is Mary Flint (Bianca Bardoe). Minerva is sponsoring a competition among the saleswomen (who all wear pink uniforms; at one point I joked, “What is this, British Barbie?”) in which the person who sells the most products within a week will win a box of cosmetics (from a different company, which says a lot about Minerva’s estimate of its own stuff!) and the person who sells the least will be fired. The likely victim of the purge is Iris Gould (Beth Lilly), whose sales have fallen off because Mary has set out to take over many of her customers. She can do this because she has a secret weapon: a remarkable aphrodisiac called Cupid which was a hot seller for Minerva until the government discovered it contained strychnine and had it taken off the market. Only Jean Pettifer had just ordered a large amount of Cupid and decided to sell it as quickly as possible before word of the ban reached Great Slaughter, and it became Mary’s wedge to peel away most of Iris’s customers. Mary even hand-wrote a ledger of her customers with little red hearts drawn next to the ones who were buying Cupid.

Alas, the whole story unravels when Mary falls down dead, poisoned at one of the Minerva sales meetings. Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) gets the clue when a homeless person steals a jar of Cupid pills from a trash can (a “bin,” they’d call it in Britain), gobbles them down and becomes incredibly horny, hitting on virtually every woman (aside from Sister Boniface; there are limits, after all!) in sight. Ultimately, just as writer Dan Muirden has carefully set us up to believe that Iris is an innocent victim, she’s revealed [spoiler alert!] as Mary’s killer; she took some rat poison and spiked Mary’s drink with it, causing her to start foaming at the mouth just before she expired in full view of all the other Minerva girls. There’s also a comic-relief plot in which an ancient townswoman named Mrs. Clam (Belinda Lang) agrees to apply to Minerva as Mary’s replacement. She’s really been recruited by Father Brown and official police detective Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) to infiltrate Minerva’s operation looking for clues as to who could have killed Mary, but she knows the other Great Slaughter residents so well she’s able to sell them effectively and she wins the cosmetics gift bag that was the first prize in the sales contest (ya remember the sales contest?). I’ve come to like these British mysteries a great deal even though they’re pretty unexciting by American standards – or maybe because they’re pretty unexciting by American standards: they offer a charming gloss on the whole idea of homicide whereas U.S. mysteries (especially recent ones) really throw the gory details in our faces.

Nobody Lives Forever (Warner Bros., 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) “Noir Alley” presentation at 9:30 p.m. Saturday, November 2, which I had expected to be an odd-looking 1947 fugitive drama called Deep Valley, directed by Jean Negulesco at Warner Bros. in 1947 and starring Dane Clark as a fugitive from justice and Ida Lupino as the woman he falls for on the way. Instead they showed something considerably more interesting: Nobody Lives Forever, a 1946 noir melodrama set in Los Angeles and starring John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald, also directed by Negulesco and based on a story by W. R. Burnett. W. R. Burnett became famous for his 1929 novel Little Caesar, famously filmed by Warner Bros. as Little Caesar in 1930 (a movie that made a star of Edward G. Robinson, who played the title character). Burnett was frequently lumped in as one of the creators of noir fiction along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, but there was a difference. As his Wikipedia page explains, “Burnett was similar to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but contrasting the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for. He portrayed characters who, for one reason or another, fell into a life of crime and were unable to climb out. They typically get one last shot at salvation but the oppressive system closes in and denies redemption.” John Huston once said that Burnett had revolutionized the depiction of crime on screen three times, each at a decade-long interval, with Little Caesar in 1930; High Sierra in 1940; and The Asphalt Jungle in 1950 – and Huston was involved in two of those movies, as screenwriter for High Sierra and director of The Asphalt Jungle.

Burnett was as much of a hustler off the page as his characters were on it; for Nobody Lives Forever he managed to get paid no fewer than five times for the same story. First Burnett cut a deal with Warner Bros. in 1943 for an original screen story to star Humphrey Bogart. Only Burnett and/or his agent got a clause into his contract that if the studio didn’t put the film into production by a certain date, the rights to the story would revert to him. Warners missed the deadline, so Burnett wrote the story as a serial and placed it with Collier’s Magazine (sale two!), then sold the serial text as a novel to Alfred A. Knopf’s publishing house (sale three!), then sold it back to Warner Bros. as a film story property (sale four!), and got himself hired to write the actual screenplay as well (sale five!). By the time Nobody Lives Forever was ready for filming, Bogart was unavailable – he and his new (fourth) wife, Lauren Bacall, were getting ready to make The Big Sleep – so Jack Warner cast John Garfield as the story’s male lead, Nick Blake, a con artist and petty criminal who’d fought in World War II, been wounded in battle and received a medical discharge. Once he gets out, he attempts to re-establish himself in New York City, where he grew up, but he finds that his ex-girlfriend, Toni Blackburn (Faye Emerson, who at the time was literally the President’s daughter-in-law; she had married one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons), has lost all the money he gave her to hold for him and is now involved with nightclub owner Chet King (Robert Shayne). Blake manages to intimidate King into making good his losses on Toni’s failed nightclub venture, and Blake and his partner-in-crime Al Doyle (George Tobias) head out for L.A. with the bankroll, intending to use it to look for a high-class setup they could use to pull a con.

The first person they run into is an old friend, Pop Gruber (Walter Brennan in what is definitely a “with” performance; Brennan was famous for asking his directors, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” Brennan said, “Teeth” – in this part he’s definitely wearing his dentures because you can see them in his mouth). Gruber is running a telescope concession on a carnival boardwalk and picking the pockets of the people who pay him a dime to see the stars. Gruber also has a line on a gang of crooks who are planning to swindle a young widow, Gladys Halvorsen (Geraldine Fitzgerald), of some of the money she inherited from her late husband. The gang is headed by Doc Ganson (George Coulouris) and its other members include such similarly colorfully named henchmen as Shake Thomas (James Flavin) and Windy Mather (Ralph Peters). Nick joins this motley crew with the assignment to meet-cute and seduce the young widow, who’s traveling with her business manager, Charles Manning (Richard Gaines), who’s assigned himself precisely to protect her and her fortune from gold-digging men like Nick. Only Nick and Gladys have their meet-cute on the beach at Malibu and before long they’re in love for real, and Nick has second thoughts about swindling her. He hatches a plan to pay off the other crooks with $10,000 each from his remaining bankroll and return to New York broke, but the crooks have other plans; they demand he go through with the swindle. The climax takes place at an offshore oil drilling rig (remember that during the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s L.A. was a major center for oil production in the U.S.; it was how Raymond Chandler made his living until the Depression collapsed his oil business and he decided to keep himself going by teaching himself to write the sorts of hard-boiled detective stories he’d been reading for fun in the pulps), in which Pop Gruber is fatally wounded but manages to shoot down Ganson before he expires. “Nobody lives forever,” Blake tells him as he goes, and with Ganson dead and Shake and Windy on their way to prison for murder and fraud, Blake and Gladys are left alone to live happily ever after on her fortune.

Nobody Lives Forever is actually a pretty good movie, but it’s not what it could have been. John Garfield and Walter Brennan are top-notch – and I think Garfield is better in the role than Bogart would have been; Bogart could credibly play a certain kind of romantic figure but not a con artist who could sweep a woman off her feet. But the rest of the casting is rather “off.” Geraldine Fitzgerald was a first-rate character actress but one who rarely got romantic leads, and there’s more to Gladys’s character than she could have plumbed and I kept wishing Warners had given the role to Ida Lupino, who’d played a similar Burnett heroine so well in High Sierra. (Oddly, Eddie Muller said Geraldine Fitzgerald was John Huston’s first choice for Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, which I’d never heard before; the only actress besides Mary Astor who was considered for it was Lupino, and in a major blow to Bogart’s feelings she turned it down because she didn’t want to work with him again.) George Coulouris was so good as the personification of capitalist evil in Citizen Kane it’s hard to take him seriously as the low-level sort of villain he’s playing here. And Faye Emerson is good as the sort of femme fatale-lite she’s playing but it’s not her fault that Doris Dowling did this character so much better in The Blue Dahlia – and when she turns up in L.A. towards the end of the movie without much in the way of explanation, both Charles and I wondered, “What the hell is she doing here?” Jean Negulesco’s direction is richly atmospheric, especially in the final confrontation at the oil field, and the cinematography by Arthur Edeson is great (Edeson had also shot The Maltese Falcon, and at least one other member of the crew from that film turned up in this one, composer Adolph Deutsch), but like his cast he isn’t always fully alive to the story’s potential. Overall, Nobody Lives Forever is an O.K. movie but there’s virtually nothing in it that wasn’t done better by other filmmakers on other projects.

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.5 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Friday, November 1 I watched the latest episode of Death in Paradise and then a quite good Live at the Belly Up episode featuring singer-songwriter Tim Flannery and his band, The Lunatic Fringe. The Death in Paradise episode, which as usual in the later stages of this show didn’t have a title (just a designation as episode five of season 13), deals with the murder of Ray Saunders (Guy Henry), a local criminal leader, and the two principal suspects: his hot-headed son Max (Mark Strepan) and Booker St. Jean (Kevin “KG” Garry), his second-in-command. Both Ray Saunders and his son Max are white; Booker St. Jean is Black, and as usual in this show the racial politics are interesting and don’t always follow as you’d expect them to. The lead detective is a white man, Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), but he reports to a Black commissioner, Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), and just about all the other police officers on the (fictitious) Caribbean island of Saint-Marie (“played” by the very real island of Guadeloupe, though oddly in this episode the real Guadeloupe is name-checked as a place one of the suspects might have escaped to) are also Black. The challenge for Neville Parker is that of the two suspects, Max has no apparent reason to want his father dead but also no alibi, while Booker St. Jean is dripping with reasons to want the old guy dead but what seems like a rock-solid alibi: he was meeting with his probation officer between 6 and 6:30 p.m., when the police believe the murder took place. Eventually it turns out that they were both in on it, and they faked the time of the murder to make it look like it took place between 6 and 6:30 when it really happened at 7, after Booker’s meeting with his probation officer had finished. Ultimately Booker is arrested for murder and Max is arrested for fraud – or something like that, since I remember both of them being taken into custody but I can only dimly recollect who got busted for what. For its spectacular Caribbean scenery, its devil-may-care insouciance and the overall clash between the natural beauty and the sordid intrigues going on around it, Death in Paradise is an excellent show, but the writers (here there was only one, James Hall) aren’t always that great about tying up the loose ends in their plots.

Live at the Belly Up: Tim Flannery and the Lunatic Fringe (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After Death in Paradise on November 1 Charles and I watched the Live at the Belly Up show featuring singer/songwriter Tim Flannery, who in this episode led a band called The Lunatic Fringe. The members of the band are people he’s known for years – as he says on his Web site, “Jeff Berkley, Shawn Rohlf, Chris Grant, and when we can get him, Doug Pettibone" – and on the show he joked that they’d gone through several names, including “That Damn Band.” Flannery said he’d adopted that one when his wife Donna called him out for spending so much time with “that damn band,” and the name stuck for a while until he went through several alternatives and ended up with “The Lunatic Fringe.” Flannery has had careers in both music and professional baseball; he was drafted by the San Diego Padres in 1978 and called up to play major league baseball with the Padres the following year. Flannery spent the next few seasons bouncing back and forth between the Padres and their main minor-league team, but he was on the roster full-time by 1982 and played on the Padres team that got on their one World Series in 1984. He was with the Padres until he retired from active playing in 1989 and subsequently became a broadcaster for the team.

Flannery was born in 1957 and his Web site lists “family, baseball and music” as the three constants in his life and career. Flannery’s Web site lists 15 albums he’s recorded over the years, most recently Waiting on a Dream (2022), inspired by a near-death experience he went through when he was hospitalized for a staph infection in 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to his Web site, “After nearly two months in the hospital, where he faced some of his darkest moments, he was released to the care of his ever-loving family who nursed him back to health over the next six months.” Given that he’s no spring chicken, it’s not surprising that his music is redolent with themes of loss, especially the second song on his Live at the Belly Up program, “Last Man Standing,” which is about how it feels when your friends die one by one and leave you alone and bereft. My husband Charles and I have lost enough near and dear friends and family members over the last few years, we could certainly identify with this one! Flannery played 13 songs on his Live at the Belly Up show; as I’ve said in previous posts on this series, I often gauge a Live at the Belly Up episode by the number of songs the solo artist or group perform, and 13 is close to the high end, indicating that Flannery is a highly disciplined performer and a tight song structuralist who doesn’t indulge himself in long jam sessions or the kinds of pre-song announcements and anecdotes the previous week’s performer, Jack Tempchin (whom Flannery singled out for praise in his closing rap), had done.

Flannery also has a better voice than Tempchin’s; while neither one is one of the golden throats of the age, Tempchin’s is a serviceable vehicle for his songs (it’s not surprising he’s had so many hits for other people, including – blessedly – “Peaceful Easy Feeling” for The Eagles) but Flannery’s is more than that. His show opened with “Arkansas Line,” one of many alluding to country origins (though his Web site doesn’t say exactly where he was born, it seems like it must have been somewhere in the South) and then went through a number of songs, most of them relatively quiet and thoughtful but some of which ventured into rock. He did “Arkansas Line,” “Last Man Standing,” “River of Time,” “This Kind of Love,” “Hillbilly Rain,” “Memory of Old Magazine,” “Don’t Let the Devil Take Your Mind” (one of the hardest rockers on his song list), “Working on a Miracle,” “Spanish Town” (an original and not the oldie “In a Little Spanish Town,” which I was kind of expecting), and “I Still Believe in You,” the first song in which he was joined by female singer Eve Salis. Then Flannery played “Last of My Kind” and “Is the Restless Kind” before being rejoined by Salis for his last song, “Hickory Wind” – in which his excellent guitarist, heavy-set Jeff Berkley, also joined in and sang a solo chorus.

Tim Flannery’s appearance on Live at the Belly Up was especially welcome since, like Jack Tempchin’s, his songs sounded different from each other, sometimes dramatically so. All too often this show has featured jam bands that started out with an infectious groove – and then stayed in it all night until they reached a point of no return in which grooves that had started out as “infectious” gradually became boring and annoying. (Most of the dance-music acts that play the Belly Up are of this type, and I figure that’s one sort of entertainment for which “you really have to be there,” live and in the moment, to enjoy it as the musicians intend you to.) Not this time: Tim Flannery sings with an infectious power, drive and sense of drama, and like Jack Tempchin he writes a wide variety of songs so his sets don’t get monotonous.

Law and Order: "Report Card" (Dick Wolf Enterprises, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 31) I put on the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode, “Report Card,” was unexpectedly good, and until a regrettable surprise twist at the end from writers Ajani Jackson and Pamela J. Wechsler it came as close as this show ever has to a story in which none of the characters are demonstrable heroes or villains, but rather legitimately complicated human beings with mixed motives who do even criminal things for understandable reasons. The episode opens with a young straight Black couple getting into a ride-share vehicle being driven by another Black man, Walter Rhoades (Brian Simmons). The two passengers get into an argument with each other and Rhoades threatens to call the police on them, but the male passenger pulls out a gun and shoots out the driver’s dashboard camera. Then the driver is found murdered about half an hour later. It turns out he was a middle-school teacher and a Gay man married to another man, investment broker Terry Clausen (Mike Doyle), who had been after him for years to join him in the finance industry and not waste his time on a job so unremunerative as teaching that forced him to drive ride-shares on nights and weekends.

Police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) run through the usual set of red herrings, including the man in the car that night – who turns out to be a rapper about to leave on a major European tour – and also Lawrence French (Markuann Smith), who had reported Rhoades to the school board for allegedly molesting his son Justin (Chance K. Smith) and “turning him Gay.” His evidence for this was a meeting Justin had at the school with Rhoades in which Rhoades broke school policy by closing the door while he was alone with Justin – but Justin himself tells the cops that nothing sexual happened between him and Rhoades. He was just seeking the teacher’s help because he’d already realized he was Gay and thought Rhoades could give him some advice on how to come out to his dad. Then the cops trace a rap track online dissing Rhoades and threatening to “hammer” (i.e., shoot) him. They find the man who made the beats for it and he explains he just records beat tracks and sells them to people who want to rap lyrics over them, and it turns out the lyrics were by 13-year-old Anthony Turner (Colton Osorio), who’s been in and out of multiple foster homes and has already started building up a criminal record when he made the track. Ultimately Turner confesses to the cops that he shot and killed Rhoades so Rhoades wouldn’t report him to juvenile authorities and get him sent back to a detention facility, and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) decide to try him as an adult.

Later they change their strategy when they discover that the school’s principal (Rockmore Dunbar) had intercepted Turner in the school hallway while he was carrying the gun in his backpack – the gun itself was a so-called “community gun” left lying around in an abandoned building to be picked up by anyone who wanted to use it – but had done nothing. Price and Maroun decide to put the principal on trial and give Turner a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony against him. Terry Clausen, Rhoades’s widower, is understandably upset that Turner won’t be punished to the full extent of the law and instead the prosecutors are going to use him to nail someone else who wasn’t the shooter. But the trial proceeds and Turner testifies, among other things, that he didn’t know the gun was loaded when he picked it up – “Bullets are expensive,” he says – and just took it to threaten Rhoades, not kill him. Then, in the unfortunate plot twist I mentioned above, the cops do fingerprint testing on the remaining bullets in the gun and find Turner’s fingerprints on them, indicating that he did too intend to kill Rhoades and bought and loaded bullets for the gun for that purpose. Ultimately the prosecutors get a plea bargain from the principal – who had earlier testified in court that he didn’t intervene because he’d previously been investigated and threatened with being fired for physically searching a student and he didn’t want to do that again – and refile the full adult murder case against Turner because he lied under oath on the witness stand. Among other things, this had me thinking of just my reaction would be if Charles were murdered for no particular reason – just as I remember reacting to real-life mass shootings in grocery stores with particular fear and hurt because that could have been my husband getting shot – and it also had me feeling sorry for the principal, who was literally damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In order to keep his job, he bypassed the chance to stop a homicidally inclined student who’d already targeted someone with a rap track the principal knew about – and lost not only his job but several years of freedom for having not reacted.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Economics of Shame" (Dick Wolf Enterprises, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Economics of Shame,” wasn’t as good as the Law and Order “Report Card” but it was marvelous in its own way. It begins with a young, attractive female New York newscaster, Kelsey Sommers (Elizabeth Aldefers), on a hot date with a young man she’s met at a bar after months of cruising him online. The man is – or at least calls himself – “Tyler Camden” (Jessie Allen Hitner), and they rent a room together and have wild, intense sex both that night and the following morning before Kelsey has to put the same dress she was wearing the night before so she can make it to work on time. That day, Kelsey gets an extortion demand for $50,000 and is told that a video clip of them having sex will be released and sent to her bosses and all her phone contacts unless she pays up. It turns out she’s fallen victim to a well-organized “sextortion” scam run by Greek immigrant brothers Basil (Mark DiConzo) and Constantine (Leo Georgallis) Koutris. The cops set up a sting operation to trap the gang by having Kelsey pay the money (or a mockup thereof, we’re not sure which) as per her instructions, which are to put it in a rental car parked in a city park. The man who picks it up is not the man whom she had sex with that fatal night, but a schlub named Neil Marsh (Travis Przybylski) who was entrapped by the gang himself and, since he didn’t have the money to pay them, was told he could “work it off” by running errands for them.

The cops ultimately nail the Koutris brothers by having SVU Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano) impersonate a rich man and go undercover to entrap them, since they’re equal-opportunity extorters who go after rich people of both (mainstream) genders. They arrest Basil Koutris at the airport and are able, since he’s clearly a flight risk, to have him held without bail. There’s also one other victim, a college student who was extorted out of the $50,000 she’d received from a settlement for the accident in which both her parents died. She was entrapped by a man who posed online as a grieving widower whose wife had died of cancer, and she’s wasting her life away because she’d intended to use the money to go to college. When the case breaks Kelsey Sommers’s first reaction is to attempt suicide – Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) blocks her from doing so in a transparently phony sequence that had both my husband Charles and I thinking that if this had been real life, both would have fallen off the roof of Kelsey’s building – and even after the case breaks, when Kelsey whines to Benson, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?,” I joked, “You’re going to get a six-figure book deal and write a sleazy tell-all memoir that will be a best-seller.” I was almost right; the real way writers Julie Martin, David Graziano and Brendan Feeney ended it was to have Kelsey go on air pretending that she’d only got involved with the “sextortion” ring as an undercover reporter to expose them.

Elsbeth: “Devil's Night” (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the two Law and Order shows I’d briefly considered showing something from the Universal horror collection as a celebration of Hallowe’en, but instead I switched channels from NBC to CBS for the latest episode of Elsbeth, a quite good mystery show also set in the New York Police Department, or at least a precinct thereof. This was a Hallowe’en-themed episode called “Devil’s Night,” about a former child TV star named Mackenzie Altman (Brittany O’Grady), a young Black woman who along with three other Black girls played on a recently cancelled TV sitcom about a white guy raising four Black female foster children. She’s accused of murdering a drug dealer named Sonny Miller (Geronimo Frias, also known as Geronimo Ambert) who’d been having an affair with her when they were both doing drugs. Now, under the influence of her maniacal and controlling manager, Danny Beck (Ryan Spahn) – who’s also her agent and her attorney, both in civil court and her likely criminal trial – she was secretly slipped scopolamine during a Hallowe’en party and sent off to kill Miller while under the influence of scopolamine, colloquially known as “devil’s night.” I’ve heard a lot about scopolamine over the years, ranging from Edward G. Robinson saying in his 1973 autobiography that his wife’s doctors had used it in the 1930’s as an anesthetic to ease the pain of her giving birth to their son; its use as a so-called “truth serum” in the 1940’s and 1950’s; its use as a recreational drug more recently and, as here, its use by an unscrupulous villain to get an enemy killed by someone else via remote control and leave the killer with no memory of having done the deed (and, of course, no legal responsibility).

Altman comes back from a wild Hallowe’en night with a tattoo on her shoulder with the names of two people she’s never heard of before, and with her gun missing from the lockbox where she kept it. To no particular surprise, the drugged-out killer is Mackenzie Altman herself; the victim is her former drug dealer and lover; and the man who slipped her scopolamine so she’d kill on cue for him is [no surprise here!] Danny Beck, who had been embezzling from her by claiming he was investing her money to build a super-resort on an island off the coast of Africa when he was really stealing it for himself. Sonny Miller found out about this when Mackenzie offered to loan him the island as the setting for a rap video he wanted to shoot, only when Sonny checked it out he found that the so-called “resort” actually didn’t exist. Sonny threatened to tell Mackenzie that Danny was ripping her off, but Danny figured out a way to eliminate him and frame her for the crime by having Mackenzie shoot him and have no memory of this. The plot is unraveled by Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), the show’s leading character, a former attorney turned consultant to the New York police, who solves the case while dressed in the famous black costume and designer straw hat Audrey Hepburn wore in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (It is Hallowe’en, after all.) I’d avoided Elsbeth in the first season because the promos for it made the character of Elsbeth seem all too annoyingly scatterbrained, but I’ve seen two episodes of it so far and I’m really enjoying it. I was also wondering if this story was similar to the 1947 film Fear in the Night, a “B” noir from Paramount based on a story by Cornell Woolrich in which a young man is hypnotized into actually committing a murder but believing he only dreamed the crime. It was later remade in 1956 as Night World with Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the hypnotized killer, but in the 1947 version he was played by the young DeForest Kelley, who rather ruefully noted that after Fear in the Night all he got offered to play were young psycho killers – until Gene Roddenberry cast him as Dr. McCoy on the original 1960’s Star Trek series, whereupon all he got after that were roles as doctors!