The Pagan (MGM, 1929)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” offering of a film on the cusp of the silent-sound transition: The Pagan, made in 1929 by MGM as a vehicle for their big silent star, Ramon Novarro. It was a follow-up to their highly successful film from one year before, White Shadows in the South Seas, which had begun as a project for the legendary documentarian Robert Flaherty. White Shadows was the first of Van Dyke’s “expeditionary films,” not only taking place in exotic locales but actually shot there, that later included Trader Horn (1931), Cuban Love Song (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), and Eskimo (1933). Van Dyke, whose full name was Woodbridge (not Woodrow, as a lot of people assumed) Strong Van Dyke, made The Pagan as the immediate follow-up to White Shadows and got assigned Novarro, who had become a star mainly because director Rex Ingram had drafted him as Rudolph Valentino’s replacement after Valentino left Metro and went to Paramount following the successes of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Conquering Power (both 1921). Ingram cast Novarro in The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche (both 1922), and they did well enough that though Ingram departed Hollywood after the merger that formed MGM (he set up his own production company and made his films in Europe at the Vittorine Studio in Nice, France), Novarro became a big enough star that he was tapped to play the lead in the 1926 silent version of Ben-Hur. (I still think that’s a better film than the 1959 remake, and one of the reasons it’s better is that Novarro’s rather nellie persona actually works better for the character than Charlton Heston’s outright machismo in the remake.)

By the time Van Dyke and crew returned home from having shot The Pagan in Tahiti (the opening credits announce that the film was “Produced and photographed in the Paumotu Islands of the South Seas,” but the “Paumoto Islands” don’t actually exist and the film’s imdb.com page suggests it was a pseudonym for the Tuamotos, which were part of French Polynesia and whose most prominent island was Tahiti, where the film was actually made), sound had come to motion pictures and a silent movie was unreleasable without some sort of soundtrack. So MGM’s executives went to work, commissioning Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed to write a theme song for the film, “Pagan Love Song,” and have Novarro and co-star Dorothy Janis sing it on screen – sort of. It’s obvious that Van Dyke and crew merely pre-recorded the song and dubbed it onto the soundtrack more or less in synch with silent footage of Novarro singing, or doing something resembling singing. There are a couple of brief scenes in which Novarro’s lip movements come close enough to matching his voice to be credible, but for the most part it’s all too obvious that they tried as best they could to match footage of Novarro moving his lips in vague synchronization to his recorded voice. (One wonders why they didn’t send a crew out to Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose double for the South Seas, and shoot Novarro’s big musical number properly. But then they wouldn’t have been able to advertise the film as photographed entirely in the South Seas.) The Pagan had a weird set of trifurcated writing credits: John Russell got credit for the story, Dorothy Farnum for the scenario (which usually in the silent era meant a list of scenes that briefly described what would be occurring when and in what order), and John Howard Lawson for the titles. Lawson’s Left-wing politics were readily apparent in some of them, especially one in which the boom town that’s risen on the previously pristine island is described as “six barrooms and a bank.”

Plot-wise, The Pagan is a mixture of the beautiful and the silly: the two leads, Henry Shoesmith, Jr. (Ramon Novarro) and Tito (Dorothy Janis), are both mixed-race products of liaisons between white fathers and Polynesian mothers. Only they grew up quite differently: Henry was raised by his Polynesian mother basically to lay around all day and loaf, while Tito ended up in the custody of the film’s villain, Roger Slater (Donald Crisp). Slater was determined to raise her to be a white woman, forcing her to attend the local Christian church (where there’s a marvelous sequence of the mostly Polynesian congregation singing the hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in Tahitian), dress in white people’s clothes, study white people’s concept of sin, and get horrifically punished whenever she slips and starts acting like a Polynesian. Slater is also determined to grab the coconut plantation Henry inherited from his white father and profiteer off it. He approaches Henry for the right to work the plantation and harvest the coconuts for copra (which is what coconut meat becomes when it dries; it’s useful for extracting soap and oil) “at a fair price,” and just when we’re bracing ourselves for the evil Slater to offer Henry a low-ball deal, Henry gives him the rights to his coconut crop for nothing at all, saying, “If I try to eat too many, I get sick.” Henry’s appalling naïveté about financial matters is the most annoying thing about this movie; later, after being lectured by Slater that he needs to restock the store his dad left him by borrowing money, expanding his inventory, and ultimately making money, Henry borrows the money and sells the goods, all right, but he makes all his sales on credit and doesn’t even try to collect. Instead he just writes how much he’s theoretically owed in a ledger book and then borrows more money – until Slater, who to no one’s surprise turns out to be the owner of Henry’s debt, calls in his loans and forecloses on him, taking the store.

Along the way we’re introduced to a fourth character, an island prostitute named Madge, played by an actress with the grandly phony screen name “Renée Adorée.” (I’d always assumed that name was a Hollywood concoction, but it was actually her own idea; she was born Jeanne de la Fonte, but she decided to name herself after the French words for “reborn” and “adored.”) We know Madge is a prostitute because Slater throws her off his ship and grandly thunders, “We don’t want your kind of woman around here.” Madge hooks up platonically with Henry – who has eyes only for Tito – and where I thought this was going was that Madge would become Henry’s partner in the store and teach him viable business practices. Instead Madge just hangs around the fringes of the action. Henry and Tito have an innocent flirtation that consists mostly of them chasing each other around the gorgeous Polynesian scenery and throwing water at each other. But that’s all too nasty for Slater, whom we realize after a brief scene of him stroking Tito’s hair is interested in her not only socially but sexually. Slater forces Tito to marry him at the local church, and Henry responds by grabbing her and trying to swim to shore with her. Just then we see shark fins in the water and we think, “Oh, sharks ex machina.” Slater tries to chase them down in his boat, Henry and Tito try to get on it, Slater pushes them away … and just then, as Slater is flailing at Henry with a convenient cutlass he brought with him from the ship, Slater loses his balance and falls into the sea, where he becomes shark food and is conveniently eliminated so Henry and Tito can escape and settle down together in Henry’s mother’s old house in Tahiti’s native quarter.

If nothing else, The Pagan shows off the influence of Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) on just about every movie Hollywood made about Polynesia after that; not only is the visual quality similar – with heavy use of red filters and panchromatic film stock – there’s even a cop of Flaherty’s famous panning shot of a young boy climbing a coconut tree with a knife to cut the coconuts down. (Just about every movie made for the next several decades about a part of the world that grows coconuts contained that shot.) At times the movie looks wondrous – especially in the scenes in which Henry and Tito are having innocent fun together – and at times the scenes between Slater and the half-native characters get oppressive and dark. We’re already shown from a brief shot of Slater stroking Tito’s hair that his interest in her is more than to give her moral instruction and train her to live as a white woman. He’s also interested in her body – no surprise there! Both Charles and I were reminded of the famous play Rain, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson,” about a minister who tries to “reform” a woman of proverbially loose morals and ends up lustfully falling for her himself. In fact, in The Pagan Slater forces Tito to go through a marriage ceremony, and Henry actually arrives too late to stop the wedding (anticipating The Graduate by 38 years!), though in the end that doesn’t matter because the sharks ex machina devour Slater before he can rape Tito and consummate the marriage. It’s also ironic that in 1934 the same director, W. S. Van Dyke, and the same star, Ramon Novarro, teamed up again for Laughing Boy, which is essentially the same plot as The Pagan only in this one Novarro’s character is a Native American, a Navajo, who falls in love with a Navajo girl (played by actress Lupe Velez, who like Novarro was Mexican by birth) who’d been raised by whites and taught to reject her own culture.

The Big Street (RKO, 1942)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 4) I watched a film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic movies a film that really isn’t noir at all, though it is a great movie: The Big Street, made at RKO in 1942 and produced by Damon Runyon, who also supplied the 1940 Collier’s magazine story “Little Pinks” on which it was based. Runyon also took his director, Irving Reis (pronounced “reese,” not “rice,” by the way), away from the low-budget Falcon detective series (where he’d just made The Falcon Takes Over, the first and quite good adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, though it was remade in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet, which I’d name as the definitive film noir if I had to pick just one). There are a lot of great aspects to The Big Street, but the one that has put it on my list of all-time personal favorites is the casting of the female lead: Lucille Ball. Just about everybody who knows Lucille Ball at all knows her from I Love Lucy and the various spinoffs of it she made over the years, but her film work in the 1940’s proves that she was a considerably rangier actress than she got to show on TV. Indeed, one of the things she did best was spoiled gold-digging diva bitch, which she’d already done two years before in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance and repeated to perfection here. Ball was a graduate of the same acting school in New York, run by John Murray Anderson (director of most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage and the stunning 1930 musical King of Jazz), that also taught Bette Davis. There’s a lot of La Davis in Ball’s performance here, and though the “suits” at RKO wanted a bigger “name” for the role (like Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur), Runyon, to his credit, insisted on Ball. The male lead, “Little Pinks,” a busboy who works at the club where Gloria Lyons (Lucille Ball), whom he nicknames “Your Highness,” entertains, is played by Henry Fonda on loan from 20th Century-Fox. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” item, Fonda had briefly dated Ball and Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, often showed up on set to make sure the two weren’t approaching intimacy again.

Eddie Muller showed The Big Street on “Noir Alley,” he explained, because though Runyon wasn’t really a noir writer, the pulp-magazine writers whose works formed the basis for most film noir copied Runyon’s unique style of language in making their crooks talk. The story portrays Gloria Lyons as an out-and-out gold-digger, already engaged to her employer, nightclub owner Case Ables (Barton MacLane at his Barton MacLaniest) but openly cruising besotted young rich kid Decatur Reed (William Orr) because he’s both wealthier and cuter than Ables. Half an hour into the movie, Ables gets rough with Gloria and knocks her down a flight of stairs in his club. The injury doesn’t look serious enough on screen to cause much damage, but we’re told that it’s permanently paralyzed her below the waist and put her life in imminent danger. Little Pinks, whose real last name is given as “Pinkard” at one point and “Pinkerton” thereafter, had already lost one busboy job at “Mindy’s” (read: Lindy’s) for breaking his concentration during an eating contest at Mindy’s to rescue Gloria’s dog, the only living creature of any species to whom she shows any genuine affection. Even before her accident Pinks has shown a devotion towards Gloria whose intensity verges on masochism. Afterwards he appoints himself as her caregiver, assisted in that regard by his friend Violette Shumberg (Agnes Moorehead), who’s dating Nicely Nicely Johnson (Eugene Pallette in a marvelously droll performance). When Nicely Nicely and Violette get married and relocate to Florida to open a barbecue restaurant and snack stand (where they sell, among other things, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” candies, a real food item of the time), Pinks is determined to take Gloria there even though he’s broke and has no way to take the trip except by walking. A group of typical Runyon characters, headed by Horsethief (Sam Levene) and “Professor B” (Ray Collins – so two Citizen Kane cast members are in this film!), club together to raise the money for them to take the train, but blow it all on a bad horse-racing bet.

In the scene I particularly remembered from the last time I saw this film, Pinks tries to take the wheelchair-bound Gloria through New York’s Holland Tunnel and gets into an argument with the people at the toll booth because the tunnel is supposed to be reserved for vehicles. “A wheelchair is a vehicle, ain’t it? It’s got wheels!” Pinks insists, and five uniformed officers of the Manhattan Transit Authority get into an argument over whether a wheelchair is a “vehicle.” Meanwhile, a number of truck drivers who are being held up by the argument angrily demand to be let into the tunnel, and one of them offers to pick up Pinks and Gloria and give them a ride as far as Baltimore. The film then turns into an oddball rehash of Fonda’s role in The Grapes of Wrath, as Pinks and Gloria make their way to Florida partly by hitching and partly by walking. When they finally make it to Florida they find that not only have Nicely Nicely and Violette made their way down there, so have most of the rest of the principals. Case Ables has opened a swanky new nightclub in Miami Beach and is also the mastermind of a jewel-thief ring in which the crooks steal valuable jewelry and then offer them back to the insurance companies that wrote the policies on them. Decatur Reed is there spending time on the beach and canoodling with non-disabled girls. Pinks stumbles onto the jewel-thief ring, learns of Ables’ involvement with it, and uses that knowledge to blackmail Ables into hosting a grand private party for Gloria at the club. Some of the Runyonesque crew even kidnap Decatur Reed and force him to attend the party. At the party, Gloria is fêted by guests who think she’s an Eastern European countess, and though she’s seated at a table she gets to sing a reprise of her big song from New York, “Who Knows?” (Ball’s voice was dubbed by Martha Mears, and to the filmmakers’ credit, instead of using the same pre-recording for both performances, they had Mears do separate ones, a self-assured reading for the New York scene pre-disability and a more nervous rendition for the Miami club.)

Ultimately Gloria demands to dance with Pinks, though the scene between them didn’t look convincing as an able-bodied man carrying a disabled woman (I spent decades of my life doing home care for people with disabilities, so I know something about this!). The scene reaches a climax when Gloria demands that Pinks take her up the club stairs to the big bay windows so she can look at the beach. She literally dies in his arms as he’s carrying her up the stairs. The End. The Big Street got great reviews at the time; James Agee said in Time that Ball “was born for the parts Ginger Rogers sweats over” and “tackles her ‘emotional’ role as if it were sirloin and she didn’t care who was looking.” Alas, it was Lucille Ball’s last role at RKO; shortly thereafter she turned down a proffered loanout to 20th Century-Fox and instead decamped to MGM, where her very next film, DuBarry Was a Lady, also cast her as a spoiled-brat gold-digging diva bitch with a proletarian boy (Red Skelton this time) hopelessly infatuated with her. DuBarry Was a Lady was also Ball’s first film in color, and it was for this one that MGM hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff had the idea to dye Ball’s hair flaming red because, as he put it, “Her soul is on fire.” Ball soldiered on at MGM for seven years and spent a lot of time hanging out with Buster Keaton, former MGM star who’d been hired back as a gagman for Red Skelton, and his old director, Edward Sedgwick. Keaton pleaded with the “suits” at MGM to give Ball roles in slapstick comedy, and their attitude was, “He’s just a burned-out old silent-era has-been – what does he know?” Then Ball scored I Love Lucy with Desi Arnaz producing as well as co-starring and became a TV superstar … as a slapstick comedienne.

Live at the Belly Up: The Fabulous Thunderbirds (Belly Up Productions, Peaks and Valleys Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, October 3) I took advantage of my husband Charles’s relatively late work call (1 to 10 p.m.) to watch the latest installment of Live at the Belly Up on KPBS featuring a blues band called The Fabulous Thunderbirds. They’ve existed since 1974 and came as close as they ever got to the brass ring of stardom in 1986 with a song called “Tuff Enuff” [sic] that was featured in a movie called Gung Ho. Their Wikipedia page tells a rather sad tale of record contracts signed and then canceled as the band’s personnel changed over the years. The original lineup included Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s older brother, on guitar, but last night’s lineup was a simple four-piece: vocal, guitar, electric bass, drums. I’ve often judged Live at the Belly Up episodes by the number of songs the band crowds into their one-hour (less intro, outro and the inevitable interstitial interview segments) time slot. That would have been deceptive with The Fabulous Thunderbirds because for the first half of the show they played six concise, tightly arranged songs – “Wrap It Up,” “Don’t Make No Sense” (which they played in a zydeco rhythm that was a nice contrast to the straight-ahead blues of the rest of their program), “Early in the Morning,” “I’m a Good Man,” “Tear It Up,” and a cover of Slim Harpo’s “Baby, Scratch My Back.” Then they segued from “Scratch My Back” into an extended instrumental jam that lasted 10 minutes and totally defeated the Live at the Belly Up chyron writers. After that the band brought up two guest artists, guitarists Lena Chavez and Joey Delgado, for “Wait On Time” and “Give Me All Your Lovin’,” before closing with “Tuff Enuff.”

The Fabulous Thunderbirds are a great blues band, though I got tired of the foghorn vocals of their leader (and the only member who’s been with the band throughout), Kim Wilson. Indeed, when he was bringing out two guests, one of them a woman, I was hoping one of them would sing because I would have liked the respite from Wilson’s strong but monochromatic voice. He’s the sort of singer for whom the term “blues shouter” was coined, and one of the virtues of that 10-minute instrumental jam was that instead of having to endure more of Wilson’s voice, we got to hear him play harmonica, at which he’s great. The piece interpolated a bit of “You Are My Sunshine,” but otherwise it was your typical blues jam. I also quite liked Lena Chavez; she’s a heavy-set Latina and her playing is quite lyrical and a welcome rest from the fireworks of the other two guitarists, including the Thunderbirds’ regular member as well as Joey Delgado. (I haven’t been able to find the names of the other members of the current Fabulous Thunderbirds online; their Wikipedia page lists a lineup that doesn’t match the one that played on Live at the Belly Up.) I suspect I’d have liked The Fabulous Thunderbirds better if I hadn’t just interviewed neo-blues musician Al Basile for Fanfare magazine and heard his most recent CD, Blues in Hand. It helps that Basile has a more flexible voice that Wilson (even though it’s no great shakes in terms of sheer beauty; he cites Louis Armstrong as his model both instrumetally and vocally) and also that instead of harmonica or guitar, Basile plays cornet – and plays it quite lyrically in the manner of a turn-of-the-last-century band player. It also helps that Basile is a much more inventive songwriter who’s able to deploy the standard blues clichés in fresh and original ways, whereas Kim Wilson just churns out common blues lines and strings them into songs.

I don’t want to make The Fabulous Thunderbirds sound worse than they are; I quite enjoyed their music for what it was, and I loved Wilson’s account of how he wrote “Tuff Enuff” on a plane making the half-hour flight from Dallas to Austin, Texas (did I mention that he’s Texan?). He scribbled out the lyrics on an air sickness bag, which reminded me of Art Blakey’s account during a 1954 live performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” that “I was there when Dizzy wrote that song – in Texas, on the bottom of a garbage can.” It’s just that I couldn’t help but wonder what they would have sounded like with a more flexible, more emotionally varied singer.

Law and Order: "Hindsight" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 2, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 2) I watched a run of three consecutive shows in the Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “Hindsight” and was directed by David Grossman from a script by Scott Gold and Will Lapp. It was a chilling tale that begins with a confrontation at an elite private high school between two 15-year-olds, Todd Feldman (Cade Tropeano) and Nora Coleman (Noa Leach), over who gets to play the big trumpet solo in that weekend’s marching-band competition. The band director (whom we never see) awarded the solo to Todd, and Nora was quite put out about it. In the next scene we see Todd Feldman lying dead on a deserted stretch of Central Park, and obviously Nora is suspect number one, but she turns out to be a red herring – as does Dylan Colavecchio (Atticus Elsass), who sold Todd illegal Adderall because Todd didn’t have a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) but thought the drug would help him get through his rough schedule of college prep classes, extracurricular activities, and band practices. His killer turns out to be Cassie Moore (Abigail Rhyne), who’d been his friend since kindergarten – only she’d texted him a photo of herself in a red two-piece swimsuit. Todd had used artificial-intelligence software to turn the photo into a nude, and had sent it to all his friends along with a note that said he’d taken it the night they had sex. They hadn’t – Cassie was still a virgin and determined to remain that way for a while – but the effect on her was predictable. She lost all her friends and got slut-shamed by her fellow students. Cassie demanded that Todd take down the photo and send a note to all and sundry admitting that it was an AI fake, but he refused and she ambushed him. She waited for him in that corner of the park because it was a route they’d taken together often on their way back home from school and stabbed him in the back three times with a pocket knife that’s made to look like a credit card; it opens to reveal a blade and was marketed mainly to women needing “protection” when they’re out alone at night. (This business of women needing “protection” when they go out alone reminds me of the late Susan Brownmiller’s assertion that “rapists are the shock troops of the patriarchy” – that men instill the fear of rape in women to circumscribe their activities and tell them where they can and cannot be, and how they should and shouldn’t dress.)

Where the script turns odd is it features the assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) dating a woman psychotherapist, Grace Hall (Kerry Bishé), who just happened to have Cassie Moore as one of her patients. District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) insists that Price prosecute Cassie as an adult even though she’s only 15, and much to Nolan’s obvious discomfiture Grace gets called as a witness by the defense, where she testifies as part of the hearing to determine whether to try Cassie as a juvenile or an adult that 15-year-olds in general aren’t as well developed mentally as adults, and Cassie in particular is a “young 15” because she’s still getting over the trauma of having lost her mother to COVID-19 in 2020. Indeed, on the night of the murder, September 4 (it was a little disconcerting to me to have the date of the murder be my birthday!), Grace was actually out on a date with Nolan when Cassie called and announced that she was about to kill Todd. Grace told her to calm down, think it over, and promised her a special therapy session (either in person or by phone) the next morning. The title “Hindsight” refers to Grace’s own sense of guilt that she didn’t take the threat seriously enough to report it to the police under the “duty to warn” exception to doctor-patient omertà. Instead she went ahead with her date with Nolan while Cassie went to the park, lied in wait for Todd, and killed him. What’s more, Cassie’s lawyer decides to base her case on self-defense, and Cassie herself is a terrific witness who seems to have the jury persuaded that she was literally in fear of her life and the only reason she killed Todd was that Todd was strangling her and would have killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. In order to refute this, Nolan has to call his girlfriend Grace as a witness and force her to testify to the secret Instagram account on which Cassie had messaged her that she did fully intend to kill Todd. Cassie is duly convicted and the case becomes just a minor hiccup in Nolan’s relationship with Grace; the last scene shows him waiting for her at a fancy restaurant and blowing off the waiter who wants him to order something besides drinks. At first we think she’s decided not to see him anymore, but eventually she shows up – she was just late for normal human reasons – and they give each other at least a guarded embrace at the fade-out. This was a quite powerful Law and Order, though I could have done without the coincidence-mongering of having the prosecutor’s girlfriend turn out to be the key witness in his case.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Waiver of Consent" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 2, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed Law and Order’s “Hindsight” on October 2 was also a pretty chilling one: “A Waiver of Consent,” dealing with a high-end sex club called “Sensate” run by a thorough scumbag named Derek Simpson (Michael Cassidy). Derek has tried to start several other clubs in New York City before scoring big with Sensate, which is disguised as a New Age health spa but secretly runs hookup parties. The episode’s title refers to a bizarre consent form Sensate’s members all have to sign in which they literally give up the right to say no; the form claims to set up a legal contract that means every woman there has to submit to whatever sort of sex to which any man there wants to subject her. The existence of Sensate comes to the attention of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit after one of its members, a successful stockbroker named Maya Moretti (Molly Griggs), is found wandering the streets obviously drugged out of her mind. Fortunately she’s rescued in time before an accident can happen to her, and she’s taken to a hospital, where she tests positive for what one doctor calls the “alphabet soup” of drugs: GHB, MDMA, and LSD. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and the SVU’s newest member, a quite sexy young man named Jake Griffin (Corey Cott, who’s frankly the sexiest man on the SVU cast since Christopher Meloni left), interrogate her. Griffin, a go-it-alone cop who on his previous assignment to a robbery detail got nicknamed “Batman,” notices a QR code tattooed on her wrist which links to the Sensate Web page – he secretly photographs it and finds the link – though even after Maya becomes coherent enough to talk, she doesn’t want to give the police any information because the knowledge that she was a member of a private club that charges $50,000 per year to give its members the opportunity to have anonymous sex with each other would kill her career.

Benson sets up an undercover operation in which she and Griffin pose as would-be Sensate members, though after they’ve left the club Griffin goes in there alone and locates another woman (Emilia Suárez) who works there. This woman recalls that she went to New York at the urging of her sister, who said well-paying jobs for young, attractive females would be easy to come by in the city. The woman tells the SVU detectives that she got an above-board job at Sensate and Derek and the other people running it gave her all the drugs she wanted – until the moment of truth arrived. Once she was well and truly addicted, they cut off her supply and ordered her to turn tricks with the male customers if she wanted any more. Based on her information, the police raid Sensate but all the customers, by prearrangement with the management, give the arresting officers the name and business card of attorney Dan Olin (Glenn Fleshler). Derek has arranged for Olin to represent anyone who’s arrested or contacted by the police. Olin is also Derek’s personal attorney, and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) tries to have him thrown off the case due to his obvious conflicts of interest, but fails. Ultimately Captain Benson talks Maya into testifying at Derek’s trial and he’s convicted of soliciting for prostitution, facilitating rape, and dealing drugs. Along the way we get Benson lecturing Griffin about the need for the SVU detectives to work together as a team instead of showboating, and some stern talk from Carisi about how that so-called “waiver of consent” form was actually illegal.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Dante's Inferno" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 2, 2025; originally streamed on Peacock April 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 2) the third and last in the series of Law and Order shows was a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Dante’s Inferno.” This was the second in the series that started streaming on April 17, 2025 as NBC, in its finite non-wisdom, took this compelling series off the airwaves and relegated it to their “streaming” service, Peacock. Interestingly, Christopher Meloni not only starred in this one as a grizzled, much older and considerably sadder version of Elliott Stabler, he also co-wrote the script with John Shiban. The director was old Law and Order hand Jean de Segonzac. One of my ongoing dissatisfactions with Law and Order: Organized Crime is the way Dick Wolf has embraced the Great God SERIAL and made each episode just one link in a continuing story arc, with classic serial-style cliffhanger endings. “Dante’s Inferno” was a sequel to “Lost Highway,” which they showed last April as a loss leader to get people to subscribe to Peacock to see the rest of it (needless to say, I didn’t take the bait). Also the immediately preceding Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Waiver of Consent,” had a direct tie-in to this one in that “Waiver of Consent” ended with Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) taking a phone call in her office to learn that her old friend and former police partner Elliott Stabler was in the hospital recovering from an accident he’d sustained when Vic Kingman (Blake DeLong) deliberately rammed him with the cab section of a truck. Stabler had been trying to rescue Bunny (Maggie Toomey), a precocious 14-year-old con woman who was living on the fringes of Vic’s and his brothers’ Steve (Erik Fellows) and Mark (Dov Davidoff) “Three Kings” independent trucking operation. The “Three Kings” don’t just drive trucks carrying above-board cargoes; they also move drugs for a particularly ruthless group of Canadian gangsters and they run a motel that’s a thinly disguised whorehouse for long-haul truckers seeking sexual relief.

Bunny dies from the injuries she sustained in the crash (which was a disappointment because she was such an interesting character it was a pity to lose her), but Stabler is trying to honor his promise to Bunny’s mother to rescue a coerced prostitute called “Sad Eyes” (Sofia Insua) from the clutches of the “Three Kings” gang. Benson agrees to help him, and we get to see the old SVU partners working together again on a sex crime. Ultimately, after the cops raid the “Three Kings” trucking yard and Vic Kingman shoots himself rather than allow himself to get arrested, they learn of a so-called “Swap Meet” which is really a free-for-all where truckers can assemble and help themselves to drugs, women, and whatever other amusements they might want to fortify themselves for long days on the road. “Sad Eyes,” whose real name is Laura Diaz (or something like that), has been passed around the various truckers who have nicknames like “Lug Nut” (Chris Jaymes) and “Sloppy Joe” (Michael David Hammond), the latter a bloated and truly repulsive low-life specimen of inhumanity whom Stabler justifiably kills in the process of rescuing Sad Eyes. Also at the “Swap Meet” is fellow Organized Crime Unit staffer Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), who you’ll recall originally signed to the unit as a computer expert to hack the bad guys’ computers and get leads on their latest schemes. She showed up at the “Swap Meet” disguised as one of the hookers, only she was so appalled by the things she was expected to do and the people she was expected to do them with that she freaked out and had an immediate case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Of course Stabler has an even worse case of PTSD – throughout this episode he’s shown having both hallucinations and bad dreams (in some of which Bunny makes a welcome reappearance), and there’s a sequence in which he tries to escape from the hospital while still connected to an IV and collapses in the hallway. Later he actually does leave the hospital, sneaking out against medical advice, though in his real escape he at least remembers to pull out his own IV before he makes it out and crashes the room of one of the other gang members, who ended up in the hospital three floors below Stabler’s room. Stabler is told he can’t just walk into the room to give the man a teddy bear, ostensibly from Bunny, but he can give it to his nurse and the nurse can take it to him – and Stabler follows him to find out where he is, then puts his hand in front of the crook’s face and threatens him into talking. It’s nice to be back in touch with Law and Order: Organized Crime even though my old flame Christopher Meloni has not aged well, though at least he looks appropriately weatherbeaten for his role.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (Warner Bros., 1990)

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

Last night (Tuesday, September 30) my husband Charles and I watched the 1990 movie The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma based on a script by Michael Cristofer (who made his bones from a 1977 play called The Shadow Box, about three terminally ill people who are the subjects of a psychological experiment on how they handle immediately impending mortality) from the 650-plus page novel by Tom Wolfe. Aside from a handful of short stories, this was Wolfe’s first entirely fictional work, and I got interested in both the book and the movie from a used copy I’d bought at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles of The Devil’s Candy, a book by Julie Salamon published in 1991 (just a year after the release of the film) about the making of the film. That got me interested both in reading the novel (which I finished a few days ago) and seeing the movie. I wanted to do both because Cristofer made some rather annoying changes to the story. The basic plot of both book and film is super-bond trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) and his mistress Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) are driving home from LaGuardia International Airport one night when they lose their way and end up in the South Bronx, where they’re confronted by two young Black men who seem to be out either to hijack their car or assault, rob. and, in her case, rape them. While Sherman gets out to move the tire they’ve laid down across the street to blockade them, Maria gets behind the wheel and calls to Sherman to get back in. When he finally does so, they feel a thump as their car hits the younger and more vulnerable of the Black men. They briefly debate whether to stop and call the police, but decide not to and instead just speed off and ultimately find their way back to Manhattan. The boy they hit finds his way to a local hospital in the Bronx, where the emergency room doctors treat him for a sprained wrist and send him home. The next day he drifts into a coma from the concussion he got during the accident, though before he lost consciousness he told his mother Annie Lamb (Mary Alice) that the car that hit him was a Mercedes, that two white people – a man and a woman – were in it, and the first letter of its license plate was “R” while the second was either “P” or “E.”

The case becomes a cause célèbre when Rev. Nathaniel Bacon (John Hancock), whom Wolfe intended as a combined caricature of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, grabs hold of it and builds it into a story of racial discrimination. Rev. Bacon stages big civil-rights demonstrations in front of the hospital saying that the shabby treatment the kid, Henry Lamb (credited as Patrick Malone even though all we get to see of him is a comatose body in a hospital bed), got was an example of institutionalized racism and an indication that to the people who run America’s health-care system Black lives don’t matter. The story gets tipped to Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis – in the book the character is a British expat but he became an American in the film after the producers tried and failed to get John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame to play him), a drunken, dissolute reporter for a tabloid called City Light owned by a Brit named Gerald Moore (Robert Stephens), called “Steiner” in the book. After interviewing an old high-school teacher of Henry Lamb’s who says Lamb was one of the few kids who wasn’t trying to assault him or literally piss on him, Fallow in his articles on the case starts calling Lamb an “honor student,” and that mischaracterization further inflames the racial politics surrounding the case. The case gets assigned to police detectives Goldberg (Norman Parker) and Martin (Barton Heyman), who on a routine stop at Sherman McCoy’s apartment (they’re checking out all registered owners of Mercedes cars in New York City with the right start to their license numbers) get him so flustered that he demands to speak to an attorney – and the cops become convinced he’s the guilty party. The case falls to Bronx district attorney Abe Weiss (F. Murray Abraham, who at his own request was uncredited because if he were to be credited, he wanted equal billing to Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis), who in the book was just running for re-election as D.A. but in the film is running for Mayor. He sees the McCoy case as his meal ticket to higher office, proof that the Bronx criminal-justice system isn’t racist and will therefore prosecute a white defendant as eagerly and thoroughly as a Black or Latino one, if not more so.

Weiss assigns the case to junior prosecutor Jed Kramer (Saul Rubinek) – in the book he was called “Lawrence Kramer” but they changed his name for the film, possibly to avoid having him confused with real-life Gay author and AIDS activist Larry Kramer – though Cristofer’s script leaves out the delicious scenes in the novel in which Kramer is shown cruising hot-looking female jurors in his cases and eventually bedding one of them. He also left out the even more marvelous scenes showing point by point how Sherman McCoy is dragged down from his “Master of the Universe” persona and systematically humiliated by the routine of being jailed after Weiss reneges on his promise to Killian to let McCoy turn himself in without actually being incarcerated. McCoy is hoping Maria Ruskin will surface and exonerate him, since she was actually driving the car when it hit Henry Lamb, but she’s off in Italy canoodling with another of her paramours, artist Filippo Cherazzi (Emmanuel Xuereb). When she returns at last McCoy arranges to meet her but wears a wire to the meeting at Killian’s suggestion. She immediately wants to have sex with him, until she feels under his clothes, uncovers the tape recorder, and immediately gets furious with him and tells Jed Kramer and the grand jury a version of the night’s events that implicates McCoy. McCoy is indicted and taken before the judge in the case, Leonard White (Morgan Freeman), but he has a secret weapon. He and Maria were meeting for their trysts in a rent-controlled apartment she was subletting from another woman, and the landlord, anxious to eject his rent-controlled tenant so he could rent the apartment to someone else at full market rate, bugged the place. Killian gets the tape, which includes a discussion of the case in which Maria acknowledged she was driving when the accident occurred and said the prosecutors had tried to get her to lie against him. Judge White immediately throws out the indictment after McCoy assures him that he recorded the tape (which he didn’t, but if he had it would be admissible as evidence whereas if a third party made it, it wouldn’t be) and plays it in court. Then he makes a big speech complaining that just about every party in the case had behaved badly, and when Rev. Bacon accuses him of being a racist, Judge White stands up in all his tall African-Americanness and thunders, “Me? A racist?”

In Tom Wolfe’s original novel the judge was Jewish and was named Kovitsky, and he was based on a real-life Jewish New York judge named Burton Roberts. Judge Roberts was flattered by his portrayal in the book and actually asked to play the part in the movie, but De Palma decided he didn’t want to risk casting an amateur and having to do multiple takes of his scenes. He sought out Walter Matthau for the role, but Matthau demanded $1 million and Warner Bros. said no. They then signed Alan Arkin for $125,000, but midway through the movie De Palma decided to make the judge Black instead of Jewish because he was worried there weren’t any sympathetic Black characters in the movie. (There weren’t any sympathetic white characters, either: Tom Wolfe was an equal-opportunity cynic.) Even Annie Lamb, whom we’re led to believe was an honestly grieving mother, lit up when an attorney suggested she sue the hospital for $12 million and immediately started on a shopping spree for new clothes. So they got Morgan Freeman, who cost them $650,000, while under Arkin’s “pay or play” contract they had to pay him, too, whether he was in the film or not. Also, Wolfe had written the “decency” speech for the novel’s initial publication as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, but by the time he assembled the serial chapters into a novel he decided he didn’t want it in the story and took it out. Michael Cristofer put it back in and therefore included a scene Wolfe had specifically decided should not be in the story. The filmmakers had a lot of trouble with the ending because Cristofer had written a bizarre climax in which McCoy, fleeing the courtroom after the indictment is dismissed, stumbles over a statue of justice, knocks over its metal sword, picks it up, and starts wielding it as a weapon against Fallow and everybody else he thinks tormented him. (I had assumed based on The Devil’s Candy that Wolfe had written the scene for the novel, but it wasn’t in there.) After a series of previews, the “suits” at Warner Bros. decided to leave in the “decency” speech and take out the scene of McCoy wielding the sword – and, alas, the Blu-Ray disc Charles and I were watching the film on did not contain a “Deleted Scenes” section, which I was hoping for because I wanted to see the sword scene.

Also, the book ended with Henry Lamb dying in the hospital and the district attorney re-indicting McCoy and putting him on trial for manslaughter – after he’d already lost his job, his apartment, his money (all his assets were confiscated by the court when Annie Lamb won her $12 million wrongful-death lawsuit against him), and his family – wife Judy (Kim Cattrall) having left him and taken their daughter Campbell (Kirsten Dunst in her first live-action role) with her. And while the novel was narrated in the third person, the film is an extended flashback told in the first person by Peter Fallow on the night he accepts the Pulitzer Prize for his true-crime book on the case, The Real McCoy and the Forgotten Lamb. One thing De Palma and Cristofer did do right was preserve Wolfe’s cynical view of human nature; just about every character in the story is after either money, sex, or both, and they don’t care who they hurt in the pursuit of those goals. One bizarre decision of Cristofer’s that we were thankfully spared was a tag scene in which Henry Lamb recovers from his coma and walks out of the hospital, totally ignored and utterly oblivious to the hubbub that’s gone on around him. That one got blown when for some reason Spike Lee, who had nothing whatever to do with the making of this movie, blurted it out at a press conference about one of his own projects. The Bonfire of the Vanities became one of Hollywood’s legendary flops, thanks largely to Julie Salamon’s black-comic account of its making, but it’s not a bad movie. It does suffer from the impossibility of taking a 659-page novel and boiling it down to a 125-minute movie. Really the only way to do justice to Wolfe’s story would have been to shoot it as a modern-style 10-hour TV miniseries for “streaming” so audiences could either watch it in one-hour segments or “binge” it all in one go the way they can with normal-length novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Big Little Lies. (I’ve often fantasized about Erich von Stroheim looking down from heaven, seeing that modern audiences will sit through a 10-hour movie, and thinking, “I was right all along! Now is when I should have been alive! Technology has finally caught up with me.”) But it’s actually a well-made movie that holds the audience’s interest (well, mine and Charles’s, anyway) and, though the casting is problematic (producer Peter Guber developed the project at Warners before he and his business partner Jon Peters decamped to run Columbia, and it was his decision to cast Tom Hanks in the lead because he wanted a likable actor to soften the character’s detestability), it’s a good, solidly entertaining film even though it’s not what it could have been.

Rush Hour (New Line Cinema, Roger Birnbaum Productions, Warner Bros., 1998)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 28) there were a couple of films I wanted to watch. Turner Classic Movies was doing a “Silent Sunday Showcase” of a 1921 film called Too Wise Wives, which I was interested in partly because the director was Lois Weber – one of the pioneering women filmmakers in the early days and someone whom I’ve quite liked in her previous films – and partly because the male lead was the young Louis Calhern. Alas, the film wasn’t scheduled until 9:45 p.m. so I wanted something to fill in the time before it. The film I wanted to watch was the DVD of Rush Hour, a 1998 part police procedural, part comedy and part martial-arts film directed by Brett Ratner and co-starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. I’d got interested in Rush Hour in a quirky way: when Charles and I did our day trip to Los Angeles a while back he insisted we eat lunch at the Foo Chow restaurant in L.A.’s Chinatown because it had been featured in this film. That immediately put Rush Hour on my list of films that I wanted to see sometime, and I ordered a DVD from Amazon.com that also included the two sequelae. Alas, Charles couldn’t join me for most of the film because he was working on an assignment for an online class in business management from Cerritos College, so he sat at the computer for most of the movie and missed a lot of Jackie Chan’s amazing martial-arts moves that are virtually the only reason anyone would want to watch this film. It was made in 1998, a year after the British government returned control of Hong Kong to the Chinese, which is a key element in the plot. Jackie Chan plays a Chinese detective named Lee of the Hong Kong Royal Police Force, who in the opening scene, set in Hong Kong harbor, is after a master criminal named Juntao. Lee is unable to find Juntao but does track down his second-in-command, Sang (Ken Leung), and retrieves a major stash of stolen Chinese art treasures. Alas, Sang escapes in a boat.

The scene then shifts to the actual hand-over of Hong Kong to China, headed by Chinese consul Solon Han (Tzi Ma) and British police commander Thomas Griffin (Tom Wilkinson). After the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, Han is reassigned to staff the Chinese consulate in L.A. and brings his pre-pubescent daughter Soo Yung (Julia Hsu) with him. Alas, agents of Juntao kidnap the girl in a chilling sequence in which two young Asian men disguised as L.A. police officers ambush the car containing her, shoot her bodyguards, and then a man riding a motorcycle picks her up and takes her heaven knows where. The only clue we get as to why the film is called Rush Hour is when the two pretend cops answer Soo Yung’s chauffeur’s question as to why they’re being stopped. “It’s rush hour,” the mock cop says just before he kills the chauffeur and the other adult male in the car. The FBI agents called in on the case, Russ (Mark Rolston) and Whitney (Rex Linn), hear that the Chinese are sending in one of their own policemen to look for Soo Yung and decide they need to assign him a “babysitter.” Not wanting to waste one of their own agents for the job, they request someone from the Los Angeles Police Department, and the LAPD sends them Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker), a self-centered egomaniac who’s on the verge of being suspended and who refuses to work with a partner even though he’s been assigned one, a short-haired woman named Tania Johnson (Elizabeth Peña) with whom he either had or tried to have an affair (the signals from writers Ross LaManna and Jim Kouf are contradictory). Though Charles was too busy with his online course work to watch most of the movie with me, he instantly recognized Tucker’s character as a rehash of Eddie Murphy’s role in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) – a movie my late partner John Gabrish and I watched together and hated so much we nicknamed it Beverly Hills Crap. (The next night after John and I watched Beverly Hills Cop I showed him a VHS tape of Don Siegel’s 1968 film Madigan, with Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda, just to offer him an example of a good police procedural.)

Even before the main intrigue, we’ve seen Carter blow a major sting operation involving a crooked arms dealer and a trunk full of C4 explosive which resulted in the C4 detonating and wiping out an entire city block. Sang phones the Chinese consulate to issue his demand for Soo Yung’s safe return – $50 million in cash, later upped to $70 million after Carter’s antics blow the first proposed drop site at Foo Chow – and Carter picks up the call and of course makes an ass of himself. Frankly, one wonders why the owners and staff of Foo Chow make such a big deal of their association with Rush Hour, since the sequence involving the restaurant is 20 minutes long (out of a total 98-minute running time) and depicts it as having a secret upstairs room where the crooks hide out and from which they run their operations. The climax occurs at a major art exhibit in L.A.’s Chinatown sponsored by the consulate, and from the moment the consul announces that the items on display are priceless heirlooms from China’s entire recorded history, we just know that a lot of them are going to end up in smithereens by the time the film is over. There’s also a major surprise twist [spoiler alert!] in which Thomas Griffin, the British diplomat who oversaw the handover of Hong Kong to China in the opening scene, is the mysterious crime lord Juntao. His motive was that in his years in service to Her Majesty’s government he’d secretly been stealing and stashing $70 million worth of priceless Chinese art objects, only once Hong Kong was returned to China the two governments seized his entire collection and gave it back to the Chinese.

I might have enjoyed Rush Hour more if Charles had been able to watch it with me, but as it stands it’s an O.K. movie rather than a great one. Though Jackie Chan gets to show his agility in several scenes (including one in which Carter handcuffs Lee to the steering wheel of his fancy black Corvette sports car – and Lee gets away by stealing the entire steering wheel, forcing Carter to call a tow truck to move a car he can no longer drive), there aren’t any real martial-arts showpieces. It does contain an entertaining blooper reel shown during the closing credits – a Jackie Chan specialty. There’s also a fun scene in which Lee and Carter keep stealing each other’s guns, rather like Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins pickpocketing each other in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 comedy masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, while in one scene Carter ends up holding the gun on himself and I couldn’t help thinking of Cleavon Little’s similar, but much funnier, scene in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, a movie that would be outrageously politically incorrect today because of its frequent use of the “N-word,” though as Brooks has pointed out, every time that word is used the joke is on the racist characters who take it all too seriously!

Too Wise Wives (Lois Weber Productions, Paramount, 1921)

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

Later on Sunday, September 28 my husband Charles joined me to watch the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, Too Wise Wives, made in 1921 by studio owner, producer, director, and co-writer Lois Weber. Lois Weber is one of the great forgotten names in early movie history, at least partially because early movie history was consciously written to slight the major contributions made by women in the early days. The first woman whose immense contributions to early cinema were flushed down the memory hole was Alice Guy-Blaché, the French-born director who appears to have been the first person to realize that movies could be made to tell a fictional story instead of just recording everyday reality. (Turner Classic Movies showed a documentary about Alice Guy-Blaché which I wrote about; my review appears on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/be-natural-untold-story-of-alice-guy.html.) Though she had got her start working for the French Gaumont studio (the oldest movie company in continuous existence; it was founded in 1895, a year before the second oldest, another French company, Pathé), the official history of Gaumont didn’t mention her. Lois Weber had a direct connection to Alice Guy-Blaché; she was briefly involved in an affair with Guy-Blaché’s husband, Herbert Blaché, when she was an actress working at Solax, the company the Blachés founded. Weber gradually worked her way up through the movie ranks from acting to directing, and by 1916 she was an established director at the level of D. W. Griffith. The first Lois Weber film Charles and I saw was Where Are My Children? (1916), made for Universal and a problem for modern-day feminists because it was both a great film (the male lead was Tyrone Power, father of the Tyrone Power who became a major star in the 1930’s and continued until his death in 1958) and a stern propaganda piece against abortion. I had forgot that Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley (who was listed as her assistant on many of her films; the two were collaborators but it was clear who “wore the pants” in that family) had also directed The Dumb Girl of Portici, based on Daniel-François Auber’s 1828 opera Masaniello and starring ballet star Anna Pavlova in her only feature-length film. TCM showed this on a previous “Silent Sunday Showcase” and I wrote about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-dumb-girl-of-portici-universal-1916.html.

By 1921 Weber had founded her own studio, Lois Weber Productions, and was releasing her films through Paramount. Too Wise Wives was a surprisingly compelling drama about two married couples: Mr. and Mrs. David Graham, Jr. (Louis Calhern and Claire Windsor) and Mr. and Mrs. John Daly (Phillips Smalley – Weber’s real-life husband – and an actress billed as “Mona Lisa” – if she had another name besides that preposterous one, imdb.com doesn’t list it, but she’s quite good). David Graham had briefly dated Mrs. Daly – whose first name, we learn first from an intertitle in which her husband addresses her and then from a note she writes, is Sara – before he married his current wife. (The Wikipedia page on Too Wise Wives lists Mrs. Graham’s first name as “Marie,” but I don’t recall that from the film itself.) Then Sara married John, partly because she needed money to help her mother and partly because she just wanted a sugar daddy. But she doesn’t really love him and spends a lot of her spare time going to meetings of the “Women’s Social and Political Club” (remember that this movie was made in 1921, just one year after the 19th amendment went into effect and women won the right to vote nationwide, and when this film was made the League of Women Voters was organizing to give newly empowered female voters the information needed to use the franchise wisely) and also going on shopping trips with her women friends, all of whom except Mrs. Graham seem to be married to rich, indulgent husbands. Too Wise Wives is a surprisingly class-conscious film, though the classes are the middle and upper classes rather than anyone more proletarian. There’s a great scene in which everyone else who went to the Women’s Social and Political Club meeting is being driven home in a fancy car by a chauffeur, and poor Mrs. Graham has to get in her own dowdy-looking vehicle and drive herself home. There’s also a marvelous sequence in which Mrs. Graham and Mrs. Daly are in a clothing store, and Mrs. Graham buys a dress she really can’t afford on her husband’s allowance. But she doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of Mrs. Daly, so she buys the dress, alters the price tag so her husband will think it’s cheaper than it is, and swears she’ll earn the difference herself “some way”!

Though the Grahams are supposed to be the middle-class family, they still have two servants (a cook and a housekeeper) compared to the Dalys’ one. Sara cheerily admits she’s hopeless as both a housewife and a cook, while Mrs. Graham is proud of her own skills in the kitchen. She’s also good about doing things she thinks will please her husband whether they will or not, like knitting him a pair of slippers when he thinks knitted slippers are “an abomination.” Mrs. Graham’s devotion to David approaches masochism, and as with Weber’s stance on abortion in Where Are My Children?, it’s hard to reconcile her portrait of wifely duty and submission here with her own life, in which she insisted on using her maiden name professionally and wouldn’t have thought for one minute to bill herself as “Mrs. Phillips Smalley.” Ironically, one fault I found with The Dumb Girl of Portici was the highly stylized, stagy quality of the acting. As I wrote about Dumb Girl, “Moving their arms like semaphore signals and heaving their bodies around to register rage or disgust, the actors in this movie perform in the sort of heavily stylized, flamboyantly unrealistic acting style a lot of people who’ve never seen a silent movie start to finish assume they were all acted like.” In the five years between Dumb Girl and Too Wise Wives, Lois Weber had got the message, because one of the things I liked best about Too Wise Wives is both the subtlety of Weber’s writing and the understated performances she got from her cast. Both the story and the acting are remarkably free of typical silent-era hamminess.

The climax of Too Wise Wives comes when Sara Daly invites both Mr. and Mrs. Graham to the Dalys’ home for a weekend during which she intends to seduce Graham. She’s picked that particular weekend because Mr. Daly is leaving town for a business trip (it’s not clear just how these people make their livings, but we know David Graham works for his father in a white-collar job and dad’s company is facing financial issues, which was one of the reasons why Mrs. Graham wasn’t sure about whether he could afford the dress she wanted to buy), and while it seems a bit raw by today’s standards for Sara to be making her move on David while his wife was a guest in the same house, she’s hoping to get him alone. She’s written him a note to that effect and even doused it with perfume, but the messenger entrusted to deliver it to David’s office missed him and instead took it to the Grahams’ house and gave it to his wife. She was tempted to open the letter but ultimately didn’t. While all this is going on, John Daly arrives at the train station to take the train for wherever he’s going on his business trip, only the train is delayed for an hour. Where I thought this was going was that John would return home and catch his wife in flagrante delicto, or as close thereof as a 1921 movie could allow, with David Graham. Much to their credit, Weber and her co-writer, Marion Orth, avoided anything so tacky and melodramatic. John does indeed bail on his trip and return home, but the film ends with Mrs. Graham saying that from now on she’s going to do what her husband really wants instead of what she thinks he should want, and both the Grahams and the Dalys reconcile.

Though, among other things, Too Wise Wives is a propaganda piece for traditional morality, it’s also a fascinating film for its time and an indication of Weber’s formidable skills as writer, director, and producer. According to TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, Weber divorced Phillips Smalley a year after making this film, and that started the unraveling of her career and her previous power position in Hollywood. Charles was struck by the fact that Too Wise Wives obviously took place in California; even before the return address on Sara’s letter nailed it, he’d guessed it from the big picture windows in the houses and other architectural features you wouldn’t put in homes in locations that actually have hard-core winters. Too Wise Wives is another compelling film from Lois Weber (whose studio logo was an Aladdin-style lamp, an emblem later used by the spectacularly misnamed Educational Pictures, a 1930’s indie which didn’t make educational pictures but specialized in two-reel comedy and musical shorts and billed its products as “The Spice of the Program”) and another indication of how good she was as a director and how unfairly neglected she’s been in the historiography of film. Also I was interested in Too Wise Wives because I wanted to see how Louis Calhern had looked young – surprisingly good, it turned out. He had a William Powell-esque quality (though this film was made a year before Powell made his screen debut as a crook turned good guy in the John Barrymore Sherlock Holmes from 1922), and it was a pleasant surprise to see how good he was as a leading man when the films of his I’m most familiar with are his role as the rival ambassador in the Marx Brothers’ political satire Duck Soup (1933), the shady lawyer and mastermind of the heist in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the title character in Julius Caesar (1953).

Berlin Express (RKO, 1948)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 27) I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of what he called a “rubble movie,” Berlin Express (1948). It was billed as the first American film shot as well as set in occupied Germany after World War II, beating Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair into theatres by four months. It’s also not that good a movie, despite the presence of some major talents both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Jacques Tourneur; the original story was by Curt Siodmak (Robert’s brother and author of Donovan’s Brain and the script for the 1941 The Wolf Man); the script was by Harold Medford; and the cinematographer was Lucien Ballard (then husband of the film’s leading lady, Merle Oberon, and one she particularly wanted to use because he’d developed a way of lighting her that covered up the facial scars she’d got from a 1937 car crash that led her previous husband, Alexander Korda, to pull the plug on Josef von Sternberg’s film of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius). According to Muller, RKO producer Bert Granet got carte blanche on this one. Having just cast the ordinarily sympathetic Laraine Day as a psychotic villainness in The Locket (1946) and had a surprise hit, Granet cast Oberon as Lucienne Mirbeau, a Frenchwoman who fled the Occupation and ended up as secretary to an influential German refugee, Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lukas – when I saw his name in the cast list I was momentarily unsure whether he was going to be playing a Nazi, as in Confessions of a Nazi Spy and The Lady Vanishes, or an anti-Nazi, as he was in Watch on the Rhine; it turned out he was an anti-Nazi). Dr. Bernhardt is being sent back to Germany to lead a postwar conference in occupied Berlin to see if there’s a way to reunite Germany as one country under civilian anti-Nazi rule, only unrepentant Nazis are out to kill him before they can do that.

The film features a third-person narration by Paul Stewart, best known as Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane, after Granet decided all the radio announcers he voice-tested sounded wrong. He briefly considered using Robert Ryan, but that proved unsuitable because Ryan was also in the film as the male lead, U.S. agronomist Robert Lindley, and while it might have been a good idea to rewrite the narration so it was being delivered in the first person by Ryan’s character, Granet decided not to go there and instead hired Stewart as narrator. Stewart’s main function seems to be to outline the political situation in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II and also to give us the full names of the characters, who are identified in the credits by one name alone (usually their last, but sometimes the first). The film actually starts out in Paris and puts the main characters onto a train bound first for Frankfurt and then for Berlin (one wonders why the roundabout route). They are Lindley; Britisher James Sterling (Robert Coote); Frenchman Henri Perrot (Charles Korvin); and Russian Lt. Maxim Viroshilov (Roman Toporow, an odd actor who was a refugee from Poland; according to Muller, Granet and Tourneur had to get him a special visa to be able to travel to Germany to make Berlin Express, and he only got to do two more movies, The Red Danube and MGM’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as a vehicle for Errol Flynn, though he lived until 1993). On the train to Frankfurt a bomb goes off in Dr. Bernhardt’s train compartment and he’s presumed dead, but it turns out he wasn’t killed: a decoy, a heavy-set bodyguard who looked nothing like Paul Lukas, died in the explosion instead. Lukas’s character then “outs” himself as the real Dr. Bernhardt, and the struggle becomes to find out, apprehend and arrest the neo-Nazis who tried to kill him on the train and are presumably still gunning for him.

Berlin Express is a well-done chase-and-pursuit film but it has its flaws. For one thing, most of it takes place amidst the ruins of Frankfurt – it’s not until the closing reel that the train, and the action, actually finally get to Berlin. Granet joked that using the actual German ruins saved him $65 million in set-building costs, and the bombed-out rubble we see on screen today looks way too much like the actual ruins we see on the news every day from Ukraine and Gaza. The film becomes a series of barely connected action scenes in which the characters try to avoid the diehard Nazi assassins (they are referred to as the “Underground,” a bit jarring for audiences who are used to hearing the word “Underground” in a World War II movie in a positive context to mean partisan resisters against the Nazis) out to kill Bernhardt. Among the places they look is an underground cabaret that’s been declared off limits to U.S. servicemembers. The cabaret features two strong men and two clowns, one of whom is part of the Nazi ring while another (at least it seemed to me) to be on the side of good. It also features a woman (Marie Hayden) who not only performs as a mind reader but also sings a song written by Frederick Hollander, t/n Friedrich Holländer, German composer and songwriter whom Marlene Dietrich brought to the U.S. after the success of her role and his songs in the 1930 film The Blue Angel. Originally there was also supposed to be a dance number in the cabaret, but it wasn’t used in the final cut even though Charles O’Curran still got credit for directing it. The good guys trace the bad guys to a brewery in Frankfurt and Lindley ends up trapped inside a beer barrel (though we’re not sure whether the liquid in it is water, beer, or something even more noxious), where he fights and chokes to death one of the bad guys. There’s also a sequence in which Dr. Bernhardt is lured out of hiding by his old friend Prof. Walther (Reinhold Schünzel), only it’s a trap. Walther had actually been talked into betraying his best friend by the neo-Nazi bad guys, one of whom had promised Walther a reunion with his long-“disappeared” wife if he ratted out Bernhardt. When Walther learns that his wife had been dead all along, he hangs himself.

When the principals finally get on the train from Frankfurt to Berlin, Lindley deduces that the supposed Frenchman Perrot is the real assassin. The facts that lead Lindley to that conclusion include Perrot’s knowledge that the bomb used to kill Bernhardt’s decoy had been rewired from a hand grenade, and the fact that Perrot had pretended not to know Frankfurt and not to speak German, when he did. Lindley sees a reflection from another train’s window of Perrot attempting to strangle Bernhardt in his compartment – which briefly confused me because it looked like it was happening on another train and I wondered how Lindley was going to get from one train to the other, especially when they were both moving, to rescue Herr Professor. Ultimately Lindley breaks up Perrot’s attempted assassination of Bernhardt, the police of the various occupying authorities duly arrest Perrot, and there’s a weird tag scene that marks this movie as a product of the brief period between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War when it looked like collaboration between the World War II allies might still be possible. Among the things that happen in this brief, bittersweet sequence is Lindley offering Viroshilov his phone number (written on a slip of paper, as everyone had to do it in the days before cell phones) and the Russian at first throws it away, then thinks better of it and picks it up again.

Berlin Express is an O.K. movie; Wilder’s A Foreign Affair is better (I watched it with Charles in 2010 and wrote about it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/05/foreign-affair-paramount-1948.html), especially in the superb casting of Marlene Dietrich as the former mistress of a Nazi bigwig who’s in hiding and the Allies are trying to use his jealousy to flush him out in the open. Where A Foreign Affair went wrong is the inept casting of John Lund in the male lead; Wilder essentially wrote a Jack Lemmon role before Lemmon was around to play it. The film Eddie Muller had shown the previous week, the German-made The Murderers Are Among Us, reviewed by me on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-murderers-are-among-us-deutsche.html, was better than either of its American-made counterparts: a rich exploration of war guilt and the survivors’ traumas, though the best-known of what Muller called the “rubble movies” is The Third Man (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-third-man-alexander-korda.html) even though the ruins it was set among were those of Vienna instead of Berlin or Frankfurt. (A year after shooting The Third Man and winning an Academy Award for it, cinematographer Robert Krasker was assigned to do the British-made Another Man’s Poison, a thriller co-starring Bette Davis and her last husband, Gary Merrill. Davis was not happy with the way Krasker was making her look, and at one point she asked just what Krasker had won his Oscar for. “For shooting ruins!” she was told.) I’d seen Berlin Express before – indeed, I believe I’d had a VHS pre-record on it – and unlike some movies, it didn’t look any better to me this time around than it had before. It’s a deeply flawed movie whose main attraction now, as I’m sure it was then as well, is seeing the rubble Allied bombing had left behind after multiple air raids on German cities.

Live at the Belly Up: Back to the Garden (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, September 26) I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode on KPBS which attracted my attention not only because it was a new one featuring a band I hadn’t heard of, but the band was a group called Back to the Garden that does covers of 1960’s rock songs. It seemed odd that Live at the Belly Up was presenting a cover band, though the band’s Web site is rather defensive about their status. Their Facebook page insists, “This is not a ‘tribute band’ impersonating the looks/costumes of famous musicians. Instead, Back To The Garden puts their focus entirely on the music.” They also insist that they’re not just presenting the music but incorporating it as part of a “theatrical experience.” As such, one of their band members is a self-proclaimed “storyteller” named Robert John Hughes who delivers historical lectures between some of the songs to offer the context in which they were first created and performed. Maybe I’m a bit more hostile to the concept than someone younger than I who didn’t have living memories of these songs when they were new would be, but Hughes’s mini-lectures had the air of a “music appreciation” teacher speaking to a class between playing records of the original songs. The basic band lineup is a five-piece: Marc Intravaia and Jim Soldi, guitars and vocals; Sharon Whyte, keyboards and vocals; Rick Nash, bass; and Larry Grano, drums. To this performance they added a three-piece horn section – trumpeter Brad Steinway, trombonist Kevin Esposito, and a tenor saxophonist whose name I didn’t catch – along with guest vocalist Lauren Leigh. My husband Charles, who watched the show with me, and I have both heard her before as part of “Organism,” the ad hoc band that joins San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez for the annual rock tribute concerts that end the Summer Organ Festivals.

Leigh was enlisted any time the band was doing a song that involved a woman: Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Comin’,” Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain” and “Piece of My Heart” (yes, I know she was not the original artist on either of those songs – “Ball and Chain” was introduced by the great woman blues singer who wrote it, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, and “Piece of My Heart” was written by white songwriters Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy and first recorded by Erma Franklin, Aretha’s sister), Grace Slick’s and the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Sly Stone’s sister Rose Stone’s original part on the closing song, Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.” (I’ve never found out why, when Sly Stone’s career was self-destructing over drug use and his blowing off concert dates, Rose Stone didn’t cut out and pursue the solo soul career she deserved. I always thought her contributions were the best aspect of “I Want to Take You Higher.”) Charles joked that he’d never heard of Laura Nyro (whose last name was pronounced “KNEE-row,” not “NYE-row” as I’d assumed for years). I remember Nyro mainly as a great songwriter who never had hits of her own but a lot of her songs did become hits for other artists: “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Wedding Bell Blues” by the Fifth Dimension, “Eli’s Comin’” by Three Dog Night, and “And When I Die” by Blood, Sweat, and Tears. (In his first autobiography Clive Davis wrote of his frustration when he was running Columbia Records that Nyro’s records weren’t selling but other artists were raiding them and basically treating them as demos.)

The show began with Stephen Stills’s song “For What It’s Worth,” which was the result of a bet Stills and another songwriter had made. The other songwriter challenged him, “I’ll bet you can’t write a song called ‘For What It’s Worth.’” Stills stuck that title on a song he’d just finished, and when the other writer protested that the words “For What It’s Worth” didn’t appear anywhere in the song itself, Stills said, “You just said I had to write a song called ‘For What It’s Worth,’ which I did. You didn’t say that those words had to be in it!” Then they did “Eli’s Comin’,” prefaced by a long introduction by Hughes in his “storyteller” guise saying that when Nyro played the Monterey Pop Festival it was only her second “major” gig, but she went on to influence other songwriters including Elton John and Joni Mitchell. (He’d been playing coy about who he was talking about, and until he mentioned Mitchell as one of the artists his mystery woman had influenced, I’d assumed the “mystery artist” was Joni Mitchell.) The next song was a wretched cover of Otis Redding’s version of Harry Woods’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” The song was first written in 1932 and the most famous version before Redding’s was a ballad recording by Frank Sinatra for his 1946 album The Voice. Sinatra’s version was quiet and prayerful in the manner of most of his early ballads. In 1966 Otis Redding decided to revamp the song as gospel-soul, and though he made one change in the lyrics that sounds creepy today (he changed “Women do get weary” to “Young girls, they do get weary”), he created a wrenching masterpiece that was the highlight of his 1967 Live in Europe LP. Redding died in a private plane crash in late 1967 with most of his band, and in 1969 Three Dog Night covered Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” on their first album. A critic for a rock magazine said, “It’s lifted straight from Otis. All the notes without any of the soul or magic.” That writer could easily have been describing Back to the Garden’s version!

After that was Lauren Leigh doing her Janis Joplin impression on “Ball and Chain,” a song that has another weird backstory. Thornton wrote it in the early 1960’s and originally recorded it for a tiny San Francisco-based label called Bay-Tone. She made it as part of a four-song session but Bay-Tone never released it. Janis Joplin heard Thornton do the song “live” and learned it from that, then performed it at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and on her second album (and first for a major label, Columbia), Cheap Thrills. Though they hadn’t released Thornton’s recording, Bay-Tone still claimed publishing rights on the song – frustrating Joplin, who wanted to make sure Thornton got royalties from her version as composer. The record usually cited as “Big Mama Thornton’s original ‘Ball and Chain’” was actually produced by Chris Stachwitz of Arhoolie Records in 1969, one year after Janis’s version came out. After “Ball and Chain” came a song that really surprised me: Johnny Rivers’s theme song “Secret Agent Man,” written for the U.S. release of the 1960’s British TV series starring Patrick McGoohan (third of the actors short-listed for the first James Bond movie, after Sean Connery and Roger Moore) in what was essentially a Bond knock-off. I hadn’t realized that Johnny Rivers had not only played at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival but had been one of the organizers, but his song – though it got one of the better performances of Back to the Garden’s show – seemed to have wandered in from a different musical world, that of the pop-rock of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Next up was the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” sung effectively by Lauren Leigh even though her voice didn’t have the spooky power of Grace Slick’s. (Slick had actually written “White Rabbit” for The Great Society, a band she co-led with her then brother-in-law Darby Slick. A Great Society performance of “White Rabbit” was eventually released on Columbia Records prefaced with a John Coltrane-style sax solo by Darby Slick. Darby Slick also wrote the song “Somebody to Love” for The Great Society, and Grace took that with her when she joined the Airplane and those two songs became the Airplane’s biggest hits.)

Then the Woodstock portion of the band’s tribute concert began with Canned Heat’s “Goin’ Up the Country,” though I’m sure that song was a studio recording and not a live performance from the Woodstock Festival. (It was used as the theme song for the 1970 Woodstock movie.) The singer didn’t duplicate the hauntingly whiny voice of Alan Wilson, who sang on Canned Heat’s original record and was the first major 1960’s rock star to die young (in early 1969, before Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison), but the reed player did an excellent rendition of the original recording’s flute part. (At the time it was rare to hear a solo flute on a rock record; little did we know then that Ian Anderson of the British rock band Jethro Tull would not only play the flute but become a major rock star playing so non-rock an instrument.) Then they did a version of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears song “Spinning Wheel” (mostly the band did covers, but “Spinning Wheel” was an original by their lead vocalist, David Clayton-Thomas) and then Lauren Leigh came back for “Piece of My Heart.” (Incidentally Janis Joplin had thought her performance at Woodstock had been terrible – and the surviving recordings bear her out – and successfully made sure she was not included in the Woodstock movie. Later, after she was dead and therefore no longer able to stop it, she was included in later editions of the film.) After that the band did the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song “Helplessly Hoping” and did a remarkably good job of duplicating the original group’s vocal harmonies.

Then they played an absolutely wretched song I would dearly hope I would never have to hear again: The Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” heard not in The Beatles’ original arrangement but in the ghastly 1968 cover version by Joe Cocker. I first heard this as part of the Woodstock movie in 1970 and hated it (I also hated Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice,” but that one has since grown on me while Cocker’s horrific assault on one of the Beatles’ best songs has not). I thought, “Ah, another white guy who thinks he’s Ray Charles,” and later when Charles and I watched the Woodstock movie together and Cocker got to the line, “I’ll try not to sing out of key,” Charles joked, “Try harder” – which really says it all. While I wouldn’t say Joe Cocker’s “A Little Help from My Friends” is the all-time worst Beatles cover by a major artist (if pressed, I’d have to say it was Elvis Presley’s live version of “Something,” featuring Kathy Westmoreland’s wordless “vapor voice” and a trombone part that sounded like a fart), it’s certainly right up there on the Dishonor Roll of Bad Beatles covers. Oddly, Charles and I had seen it performed at the last Monday night organ concert at Balboa Park in 2025; though the show was billed as a Beatles tribute to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ concert at Balboa Stadium (the only time The Beatles played in San Diego; they didn’t sell out the venue and for 1966 they decided to bypass us), Raúl Prieto Ramírez and “Organism” likewise did the Cocker abomination of “With a Little Help from My Friends” instead of The Beatles’ original. Luckily they had one more song on their set list: “I Want to Take You Higher,” for which they caught all the different vocal registers of the original and played in the same infectious funk spirit. It was a good way to end a sometimes exalting, sometimes disheartening mini-concert!

Law and Order: "Street Justice" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 25, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 25) I watched the season openers of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law and Order: Organized Crime – though the Organized Crime episode turned out to be “Lost Highway,” a rerun of an episode first shown on April 17, 2025 as a loss leader for the rest of the show, which they immediately sequestered onto their premium “streaming” service, Peacock. I reviewed it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/04/law-and-order-organized-crime-lost.html. The Law and Order episode was “Street Justice,” a sequel to “Look the Other Way,” originally aired May 15, 2025 and covered by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/law-and-order-look-other-way-dick-wolf.html. In “Look the Other Way,” Carter Mills (Jordan M. Cox) was able to get away with rape after the police identified him as a suspect by finding a “familial match” to his DNA: an aunt of his had sent in her sample to a commercial DNA testing service and the two were close enough that the cops were able to identify him. Alas, the judge in Mills’s case, Erica Foster (Joy Lynn Jacobs), threw out both the DNA evidence and whatever the police had found based on it as inadmissible (returning Law and Order to its roots: when this show began in the 1990’s its running theme was the ability of criminals to use the “due process” requirements to evade justice), and Mills’s jury acquits him. Then he’s found dead on the street – according to my blog post on “Look the Other Way” he was strangled, but in “Street Justice” he was definitely shot (though it’s possible that I merely misremembered the ending of “Look the Other Way,” which I didn’t post about until two days after it aired, an unusually long lapse for me) – and as in the previous episode in the sequence, assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) suspected his prosecuting partner, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), of knocking off Mills herself because among the previous victims the investigation uncovered was the murder of Maroun’s sister under the same M.O. 12 years earlier.

It looks bad for Samantha when the cops obtain a search warrant for her apartment to check for her gun, a .38 she bought for “protection” years before, and it’s missing from its locked case. It turns out that she threw the gun in the East River (reminding me of the similar bit of stupidity Teresa Wright’s character pulled in Don Siegel’s 1953 film noir Count the Hours), not because she actually shot Mills but because she feared she would. The police build a case from a surveillance video showing the murder (the killer was dressed in a black hoodie that concealed their gender – how Lifetime!) and from two witnesses, one of whom heard a woman’s voice say just before the gunshot, “You deserve this.” One of the witnesses says the killer bumped into him as she fled and he says she was the same height as he, 5’9”, which lets the 5’3” Samantha off the hook. Ultimately the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Julia Keaton (Christine Spang), Mills’s former girlfriend (and an attorney herself), who sat with him throughout his trial and believed in his innocence until she broke up with him a few days before he was acquitted. Mills, whom we already knew was a guy who did not take rejection very well, responded by physically beating and raping her. So she bought a gun just six hours before Mills was shot and confronted him on the street, though her Black woman attorney does such a good job presenting her self-defense case on direct examination that Nolan Price decides to offer her a manslaughter plea which will net her at most five years. Then Julia blurts out to Samantha that she didn’t just “happen” to run into Mills on the street. She deliberately lay in wait for him, which means she’s guilty of murder, but after anguished talks with Samantha and their boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), they decide to go ahead with the manslaughter plea deal anyway. It was a pretty good Law and Order, though the ethical conflicts behind this episode have been done better on previous shows in this series.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "In the Wind" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 25, 2025)

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

After the “Street Justice” episode of Law and Order on Thursday, September 25, NBC showed a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “In the Wind,” about a young woman named Ella Parsons (Audrey Corso) who’s raped by a secret nocturnal visitor in her apartment in New York City. It turns out her assailant is actually her landlord, Eric Burnett (Cayleb Long), who’s had a history of letting himself into his tenants’ apartments with his pass key and having his wicked, wicked way with them. This time the SVU writer, Michele Fazekas, was drawing on current news events in the classic “Ripped from the Headlines!” tradition of everyone from Warner Bros. in the 1930’s (whose marketers actually coined that phrase) to Lifetime today. The key witness against Burnett is Jorge Ruíz (Juan Francisco Villa), an undocumented immigrant who’s naturally fearful of any involvement with the criminal justice system for fear that it will earn him a trip to El Salvador, Sudan, or some other out-of-the-way location from Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. Jorge especially has reason to fear deportation (or worse) because there’s an arrest on his record, even though he was caught up in a drug sting with $100 in cash on him but he didn’t have anything to do with drugs or their sale. Naturally agents of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which almost no Americans had ever heard of until Trump started using it as part of his fascistic crackdown on so-called “illegals” (HSI was actually started as a task force dealing with cross-border white-collar crime, but they’ve supplied most – though not all – of Trump’s masked, unidentified secret police making random arrests on the streets as well as apprehending and deporting people who were following the law and showing up in immigration courts as they were supposed to), are waiting in the courtroom to arrest and deport Jorge as soon as he testifies. Indeed, their arrogance is such that they threaten to arrest the SVU detectives for “harboring” undocumented immigrants.

There are actually three plot lines to this episode, which is centered around the memorial for the late Captain Don Cragen (Dann Florek, who by the way was born in 1950 and is still alive) and gave Fazekas, director Brenna Malloy, and executive producer Dick Wolf to write in cameo appearances by SVU cast members past and present. Not only does Christopher Meloni show up, so do B. D. Wong, Dean Winters, and Michael Park. There’s a third plot strand in which Sgt. Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T – the man who got denounced by police departments all over the country for recording the song “Cop Killer” in his previous career as a rap artist has been playing a police officer for almost 25 years now, and his successful career transition seems to have inspired fellow rapper L. L. Cool J. to take his role on the CBS crime drama NCIS Los Angeles) sees a man (Salah Ghajar) and a woman (Ashley Michelle Pynn) in a park and thinks that he’s raping her. In fact the two are working together posing as a sexual assaulter and a victim so they can mug anyone who tries to help and rob them for drug money. Though when they targeted Tutuola they had no idea he was a cop, they nonetheless stole not only his wallet but his gun – and anyone who’s seen Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller Stray Dog or its quasi-remake, Coogan’s Bluff (1968, and Clint Eastwood’s first modern-dress role in an American film after he returned from making Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” in Italy) knows that to have a crook steal a cop’s gun is a humiliating event in his career as well as an obvious castration symbol. “Fin” is hospitalized for his injuries and he never reports that the crooks who jumped him stole his gun (a big bozo no-no in copworld), though it’s recovered and brought back to him when the bad guys are arrested. Ultimately the New York police are able to grab Jorge back from the clutches of HSI and win him an “S” visa (“the snitch visa,” one of them derisively calls it), which allows him to stay in the U.S. indefinitely for having given evidence in a criminal case. The feds are shown ultimately as compassionate, unlike their real-life counterparts in the Trump Reich.

Rififi (Pathé Consortium Cinema, Indusfilms, Societé Nouvelle Pathé Cinema, Primafilm, Gaumont, 1955)

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