Wicked: One Wonderful Night (Fulwell Entertainment, Universal, NBC, aired November 6, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 6) NBC aired a two-hour special called Wicked: One Wonderful Night, aimed at promoting the November 21 release of the Wicked movie’s sequel, Wicked: For Good. The show was actually a live concert of songs from both Wickeds held at the Dolby Theatre, formerly the Kodak Theatre, in Hollywood. It was a typically lumbering spectacle with so much jabbering between the songs and so many unfunny skits (the low point was when they showed a segment that was supposedly audition tapes from would-be cast members trying out for roles in the Wicked movies, but the joke was the sheer unlikelihood of some of the auditionees and it got old almost as soon as it began) the two-hour show had room for only 10 songs. Most of them were sung by the two leads from the movie, Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba the Wicked Witch and Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch. One problem is the Wicked songs by Stephen Schwartz are simply not that memorable; the only two that have had any life outside the show are “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” and even those are hardly on the level of the great songs Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg wrote for the 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie. The songs they performed were an interminable opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked”; Erivo’s first number, “The Wizard and I”; a duet between Erivo and Grande called “What Is This Feeling?”; Grande doing “Popular” with someone or something called Remington, a pre-pubescent Black child of vaguely indeterminate gender; a nice bit where Stephen Schwartz showed up with Grande, Erivo and the original Glinda from Broadway, Kristen Chenoweth, along with an unidentified woman doing “For Good”: Erivo singing “I’m Not That Girl”; Bowen Yang, openly Gay comedian and podcaster, duetting on “Dancing Through Life” with a young man I presume is his podcasting partner; Grande doing “We Couldn’t Be Happier”; Erivo doing “No Place Like Home”; Grande singing “The Girl in the Bubble”; Erivo singing “Defying Gravity”; and for a finale, the two women doing a song that had almost nothing to do with Wicked.

They reproduced the famous medley of Jack Yellen’s and Milton Ager’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Harold Arlen’s and Ted Koehler’s “Get Happy” that Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand had sung on Streisand’s guest appearance on Judy’s short-lived (one season, 1963-1964) CBS-TV variety program. For once the two star singers, among the better baby-divas in the modern music scene, had material worthy of them, and they came through in ways that didn’t match the incandescence of the Garland/Streisand original but came awfully close. Of course Judy Garland was intimately connected to Oz and the world of Wicked through having starred in the 1939 film of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and having introduced “Over the Rainbow” in the opening Kansas-set scenes of the movie. Ariana Grande also had a pre-Wicked Oz connection because when her concert in Manchester, England on May 22, 2017 was attacked by a terrorist suicide bomber, killing 22 people and injuring over 1,000, rather than either calling off her tour or proceeding as if nothing had happened, she performed a benefit concert for the victims and their families on June 4, two weeks later. At the end of the concert she sang “Over the Rainbow,” and as I wrote in my moviemagg blog post on ABC’s heavily truncated TV special on the concert, “She sang eloquently and tapped into the song’s wistful messages of happy little bluebirds flying to (in the words of the spoken introduction to the song in The Wizard of Oz) ‘a place where there isn’t any trouble’ — if there is such a place and Judy Garland’s spirit ended up there, I think she approves.” At the same time the decision to end the show with two imperishably classic songs only made Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked score seem even more mediocre than it is. Cynthia Erivo’s hit “Defying Gravity,” which provided a stunning close to the first Wicked movie, seemed comparatively limp here. Deprived of the ability to pre-record it, and lifted up midway through the song on wires all too visible (director Paul Dugdale and cinematographer Keyan Safyari really muffed the lighting on this one), she sounded oddly nervous, a far cry from the self-assurance of Pink when she gets whirled around above the stage on wires and interacts with Cirque du Soleil-type performers in mid-air. Maybe Grande’s just not used to singing while hovering in space without CGI to help her!

Elsbeth: "Poetic Justice" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 6, 2025)

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

Fortunately, last night’s (Thursday, November 6) NBC-TV special Wicked: One Wonderful Night ended after two hours instead of three (which I feared), so I was able to switch to CBS and watch another episode of the comedy-mystery series Elsbeth. This was called “Poetic Justice” and was the rather sad tale of Gary Pidgeon (William Jackson Harper), a tall, strikingly handsome African-American who’s publishing a monthly poetry magazine called The Pidgeon Print and hoping that an elderly woman, Delores Feinn (Lois Smith), will bail his publication out of its ongoing financial difficulties, either through a contribution while she’s still alive or a major bequest in her will. He’s facing rivalry from another publisher with a poetry magazine called Tumbleweed. Delores writes excruciatingly bad poetry (one of her poems begins with a line containing “cerulean azure,” which as most of the people who read it point out are just two words for the color blue) which reminded me of the great spoof of Gertrude Stein in the W. C. Fields movie The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935): “Up is down, and down is out/I was down and out.”

In the opening scene, Pidgeon works out a way of murdering Delores and making it look like an accident: he unhooks her oxygen tank, leaves her alone for hours, then calls her to encourage her to write something. Knowing that one of Delores’s many quirks is that she always has to smoke while she writes, he knows that just before she starts, Delores will light a cigarette – and that will cause an explosion from the oxygen and kill her on the spot. He feels he needs to do this in a hurry so Delores can’t change her will and leave her presumed fortune to Tumbleweed’s publisher instead. So, as in the old Columbo series, we know who the killer is from the get-go and the suspense is in finding out how he (or she) will be brought to book. In fact, through most of this episode, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her official police officer partner, Detective Rivers (Braeden De La Garza, who is hot!), make such nuisances of themselves to try to extract a confession from Pidgeon that Elsbeth looks even more like Columbo in drag than she has before. Ultimately they trick Pidgeon into confessing by saying that the oxygen that came out of the hose he pulled out of Delores’s tank would have discolored his jacket, and they confront him at his dry cleaners’ and goad him into confessing while Rivers records it all on his phone. Also it turns out that Delores Feinn didn’t really have any money at all, nor did she really need oxygen; she just pretended she did so she could get invitations to dine at fancy restaurants at other people’s expense, and she used the oxygen setup as an excuse to get the best tables. This Elsbeth was a quite charming episode and a welcome send-up of the pretensions of the literary world and how they will essentially prostitute themselves for money even while claiming they are above all considerations of filthy lucre.

Just Wright (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Flavor Unit Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2010)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies, both romantic comedies featuring mostly African-American casts. The first was called Just Wright, made for theatrical release by Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2010 and starring Queen Latifah and Common in a film directed by Sanaa Hamri (a Black woman, by the way) from a script by Michael Elliot. Hamri actually has 62 directorial credits on imdb.com, though most are for TV episodes or music videos. Physical trainer and therapist Leslie Wright (Queen Latifah) falls in love with NBA basketball star Scott McKnight (Common, who looks surprisingly credible as an athlete). Leslie has a job at a local hospital in New Jersey and is a huge fan of the New Jersey Nets (who relocated to New York City and became the Brooklyn Nets in 2012, two years after this film was made). She’s living with her parents Lloyd (James Pickens, Jr.) and Janice (the marvelous Pam Grier, the Blaxploitation queen of the 1970’s who’s more heavy-set than she was in her glory days but still is an authoritative actress) and also with her lifelong friend Morgan Alexander (Paula Patton). The two are described as “god-sisters” and friends since childhood, and Leslie is putting Morgan up, presumably rent-free, in the guest room of her parents’ home. Leslie is determined to see Morgan get a normal job, but instead Morgan is intent on landing a well-to-do athlete as a sort of trophy husband who will take care of her the rest of their lives. Leslie thinks she has her chance when Scott McKnight invites both her and Morgan to a party at his palatial home, and Morgan makes a bee-line for Scott. Leslie and Scott had met at a gas station when Leslie, driving home in her beat-up off-orange 1960’s Ford Mustang she nicknamed “Eleanor” after her late grandmother, whose car it had been, pulls in for gas and spots Scott nonplussed when he can’t find the gas cap on the brand-new sleek black car he’d just bought.

Leslie figures out where it would be and the two bond over a Joni Mitchell CD she spotted on the seat of Scott’s car. The two praise the record Mitchell made with jazz great Charles Mingus (actually, as I pointed out in posts on a 2009 Lifetime movie that mentioned this project, The Party Never Stops [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/party-never-stops-jaffebraunstein-films.html], Mitchell and Mingus never recorded together; they had planned an album together and even collaborated on writing songs for it, but Mingus died before the project could be made and the resulting Mingus album contained three songs they wrote together, one – “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” – a Mitchell lyric to a pre-existing Mingus composition, and two others Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, one of which was a tribute to him), and ultimately Queen Latifah and Common get to sing a nice short duet on the Harry Warren song “The More I See You” from the 1945 movie Diamond Horseshoe. (The gimmick is that Scott has a secret room in his house, and just when we’re thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle here, it turns out that the big secret is the room contains a piano on which he secretly practices – and it’s lovely to hear two people who started out as rappers turn out to have quite lovely singing voices.) The film turns when Scott’s ankle gets seriously injured during the NBA All-Star Game, and Morgan, his fiancée, gets jealous of the white therapist, Bella Goldsmith (Kim Strother), whom Scott has hired on the recommendation of the NBA but who seems to be interested in getting a lot more intimately physical with Scott than her job requires. Morgan asks Leslie to take over as Scott’s therapist, and Leslie puts Scott through an eight-week regimen after warning him, “You’re going to hate me by the time this is over.”

When the sports shows on TV start reporting rumors that the Nets won’t re-sign Scott after his current contract ends with the current season because they don’t think he’ll be able to play at his former standard, Morgan sends Scott a letter breaking up with him. Leslie gets Scott rehabilitated enough to start the seventh game of the East Coast round of the playoffs, and he performs miserably until Leslie gets him a pep talk at halftime and it rouses his self-confidence until he plays at his old level again. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.) The Nets win the playoff game and advance to the championship round, and Scott goes on sports TV and gives an interview in which he gives Leslie credit for his rehabilitation. This starts a bidding war between the Nets and several other NBA teams for her services as a trainer. Just then, with Scott seemingly on the road back to a major recovery and a lucrative contract, Morgan (ya remember Morgan?) comes slamming back into his life and offers to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile, Scott and Leslie have had sex, albeit just once, though when Morgan returns Leslie feels she’s going to be demoted to the “friend zone.” Ultimately, though, Scott sees through Morgan’s gold-digging antics and decides that Leslie is the woman he really loves, and he swoops down on her while she’s in Philadelphia interviewing for the 76’ers. The two get married, and there’s a Lifetime-style title reading “One Year Later.” One year later they’re in the middle of a Nets game in which Scott is playing, Leslie is sitting with the team as their trainer, and Morgan, by Leslie’s special dispensation, is sitting in the area of the arena usually reserved for the players’ wives. Just Wright is a pretty typical romantic comedy, and Lifetime appears to have been showing it (after another Queen Latifah theatrical feature, Beauty Shop), to promote the fact that they’ve recently acquired rerun rights to her CBS-TV action series, The Equalizer (in which she repeated a role originally written for Denzel Washington in a theatrical film). But within the confines of the genre it was a nice theatrical romp.

His, Hers, and Ours (The Ninth House, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

After Just Wright Lifetime showed one of their own movies, also a rom-com with (mostly) Black actors, which they’d been promoting quite extensively of late: His, Hers, and Ours. This one, directed by Patricia Cuffie-Jones from a script by Bart Baker, interlocks two plot lines. In the first, successful Black restaurateur Kelly Pellman (Lesley-Ann Brandt) has a best-seller that appears to be part cookbook and part memoir. She’s growing her business, a small chain called Soul Pasta (in the opening scene we see her making her own pasta) and is anxious about whether she can keep her business going on the larger scale. She’s also worried about the scapegrace antics of her teenage son Isaiah (Tyler Lofton), whom she’s steering towards a college application to Howard (the most prestigious of the historically Black colleges and universities and the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris). Kelly has raised Isaiah as a single parent since his father Arthur (Curtis Hamilton) abandoned her about a decade earlier and forced Kelly and Isaiah to stay in roach-infested room-shares until she gradually made enough money to be able to afford their own apartment. The second story deals with Black entrepreneur Darius Stone (Taye Diggs), who built a fortune on an app showing working women how to organize their time. Alas, his investors have just forced him to sell the company to a larger white-owned firm, and though they offered him the chance to stay on in a figurehead position, he turned them down. We learn later that the idea for the app was actually that of Darius’s wife, only she got leukemia and died just before it became a major success. Darius catches his daughter Kai (Chloe Flowers) in bed with a young man, screams at her, and tells her her mom would be ashamed of her if she were still alive. The link between the two stories turns out to be that the young man Darius caught his daughter in bed with was Isaiah Pellman, and though they hadn’t reached the stage of actual penetration, they’d got as far as him dry-humping her in the guise of “studying.” Much to Darius’s disgust, his mother has arranged to get Kai birth-control pills, on the ground that she’s probably going to have sex anyway and it’s better if she’s protected.

Isaiah and Kai end up in trouble with school, and the officious assistant principal says he won’t suspend them, but only if they show up the next Saturday and clean up the school cafeteria – and they’re required to bring their parents. Ultimately the parents show up, but Darius and Kelly are so attracted to each other they blow off the school cleanup session and go on a lunch date instead. This poses a problem for them because Isaiah and Kai both strongly disapprove of their parents getting romantically involved with each other – especially after a classmate goes all paparazzo on them and shoots secret photos of Darius and Kelly making out in a public park. She posts the photos on social media and they go viral at the school Isaiah and Kai attend, and the merciless students taunt them both for having an affair when they’re brother and sister. (They’re not, at least biologically, but they would have the same parental figures if their single parents got together and got married.) Bart Baker throws in an ironic scene in which Darius and Kelly are having sex with each other at Kelly’s home when suddenly her son Isaiah comes in, and Darius literally has to hide from him – a nice, ironic contrast to the earlier scene in which Darius had come home unexpectedly and found Isaiah and Kai making out in her room in his house. I also liked the soft-core porn scene between Darius and Kelly, which was a lot more graphic and exciting than the similar one in Just Wright – especially since, though both Taye Diggs and Lesley-Ann Brandt are Black, she’s so much lighter-skinned than he is I got some of the same thrill of the color contrast I get from interracial porn. (I’ve told my husband Charles that an interracial porn scene in which the Black participant was Barack Obama’s color would do little for me.) We also got some delectable close-ups of Taye Diggs’s bare chest, with his nipples very much in evidence.

Bart Baker throws us a curveball when Kelly, on the advice of her assistant Sofia (Aimee Garcia), throws a “Grand Opening” party for her restaurant (even though it’s been operating for three months now), and Kai overindulges on the sauces and bolts for the bathroom. Kelly immediately assumes that she’s got pregnant by Isaiah, though the pregnancy test she gives Kai turns out to be negative (all of us, including the audience, heave a sigh of relief over that!). There’s also a weird turn in the plot in which Isaiah becomes estranged from his mom and goes off to live with his dad Arthur, who’s reconnected with him after seven years, only the place is a mess, the meal is mashed-potato mix in a frying pan (a sharp contrast to his gourmand mother!), and it turns out the only reason Arthur wanted to take in his son is so he could bill his mom $3,000 per month in child support. And there’s another subplot in which it turns out that Darius has secretly been brewing his own whiskey in the basement of a bar owned by a friend of his, and when the friend decides to sell out, Darius secretly buys the place so he can preserve it as it is instead of having it taken over by a white buyer who’d turn it into another high-end pub. Ultimately all the plot lines resolve: Darius presents Kelly a bottle of his homemade whiskey, Kelly uses it to make a sauce that becomes so sensationally popular a white guy who represents a grocery chain offers to sell it, and both Darius and Kelly realize that it’s going to take the combination of his business expertise and her culinary skills to make the sauce a success and produce enough of it to satisfy the chain’s orders. Frankly, I was hoping the film would end with a double wedding – Darius marrying Kelly and Isaiah marrying Kai – though even in what was already a pretty nervy movie Patricia Cuffie-Jones and Bart Baker weren’t about to go that far! His, Hers, and Ours was a nice enough movie that delivered the rom-com goods, though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Just Wright.

The Great Jewel Robber (Warner Bros., 1950)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: The Great Jewel Robber (1950). Note that the title is The Great Jewel Robber, not The Great Jewel Robbery, because instead of being centered around a single crime it’s based on the true-life exploits and multiple crimes of jewel thief Gerard Graham Dennis (David Brian), who got his start in crime in his native Ontario, Canada. As a youth he was arrested for house-breaking and other petty crimes, until in Montreal he grabbed the opportunity to break into the home of a gold-mine heiress and casually pocket $75,000 worth of jewels. Dennis got arrested but escaped from a prison work detail and ultimately fled across the border, settling in New Rochelle, New York (famed to fans of the Dick Van Dyke TV show as the place from which Van Dyke’s character commuted to his job as a TV comedy writer in New York City) and hitting up wealthy victims. He only stole jewels and furs, and when the father of one of his many girlfriends caught on to the fact that he was a thief, he reported Dennis to the cops while Dennis was actually living in his home as a boarder. The woman helped Dennis escape and gave him $300, but no sooner had he done so than he took up with a new girlfriend whom he exploited for more getaway money. Ultimately he wounded a reluctant man who refused to part with his wife’s engagement ring because it was a family heirloom, and Dennis shot him in the shoulder, though he survived. Dennis then fled to California on a cross-country train and while on board met yet another woman, heiress to a fortune in California oil, and seduced her. Then he established himself in Hollywood and started stealing from major movie stars (the ones mentioned in the film are Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, and Dennis Morgan – all Warner Bros. contractees) as well as anyone else with money. When the cops finally caught up with him he was extradited to New York and stood trial for the crimes he’d committed in New Rochelle.

Written by Borden Chase (whose real name Eddie Muller gave as Frank Fowler, though according to his Wikipedia page he was born Devin Borden) and directed by Peter Godfrey, The Great Jewel Robber was produced by Bryan Foy. As a child he’d been one of “The Seven Little Foys,” offspring of vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, who incorporated his kids into his act. When he grew up he decided to make his career behind the camera and became a “B”-movie producer for various studios, including Warner Bros. and 20th-Century Fox. While at Fox in 1944 he green-lighted a film called Roger Touhy, Gangster, defying the Production Code Administration’s ban on biopics of real-life gangsters on the ground that they’d tend to glorify crime. Foy continued to produce films about actual criminals, and in 1949 he negotiated with the real Gerard Dennis for the rights to his life story. Chase concocted a script in which the first-person narration was told by Dennis himself. The Great Jewel Robber was only tangentially film noir – Eddie Muller has been progressively looser as to his definition of what constitutes a film noir – but it was a quite entertaining film that sent my estimation of Peter Godfrey’s directorial talents several ticks up. Godfrey’s best-known film is the original 1945 version of Christmas in Connecticut starring Barbara Stanwyck as a magazine columnist who’s pretending to be a Martha Stewart-esque domestic diva when she can’t cook at all. I got a bad taste in my mouth about him when I saw The Two Mrs. Carrolls, made two years later, a perfectly dreadful film about an artist with a psychological compulsion to murder his models that thoroughly wasted the talents of Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart. I remember watching this film and then downloading the archive.org post of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard to experience one occasion when the “A”-listers muffed a promising story premise and the “B”-listers did it magnificently. I also had a bad taste when I read about another 1947 Godfrey film, That Hagen Girl, which co-starred Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple. Though I’ve never seen it, I’ve read about it in the book The 50 Worst Films of All Time by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss, which quoted Reagan’s autobiography as saying he particularly disliked the ending. The film’s basic plot was about a rumor that Temple was Reagan’s illegitimate daughter, and once it was proven that she wasn’t, she and Reagan got together as a couple on-screen. Reagan protested that no one would believe this ending because he was so much older than Temple, but Godfrey insisted on keeping it because his wife was also much younger than he.

With The Great Jewel Robber Godfrey was able to make a quite interesting movie despite the handicap of a rather dull and thug-like leading man. David Brian was O.K.-looking and appropriately hunky for the role – though he was blond and the real Gerard Dennis was dark-haired – but at least part of his appeal was his debonair sexual charm (the real Dennis was nicknamed “the American Raffles” after the famous gentleman-thief character created by E. W. Hornung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law), and it’s hard to believe David Brian as the man no woman can resist when his seduction technique, as we see it on screen, consists of merely glowering at his targets until they yield to him. Obviously the perfect person for this role c. 1950 would have been Cary Grant – who actually did play a similar character in Alfred Hitchcock’s marvelous To Catch a Thief four years later – but by 1950 Grant would have been way beyond Bryan Foy’s budget. Ironically, the biggest thing about Dennis we dislike in Chase’s script is not his thievery but his callousness towards women – including Martha Rollins (Marjorie Reynolds from Holiday Inn and Ministry of Fear), whom Dennis meets when she’s working as a nurse in the hospital where he’s being treated for the wounds his would-be victim inflicted on him (his real name was Tulloch but he’s called “Tom Creel” in the movie and played by Charles Cane). Dennis gets her to leave her job for him, flee with him, and even marry him. When he abandons her later she’s understandably pissed and by the end of the movie she turns him in to the police, giving them a shot of the two of them together on their honeymoon in (where else?) Niagara Falls so the authorities finally have a photo of him they can use to trace him. The Great Jewel Robber was a quite good movie that could have been even better with a stronger, sexier actor in the lead, and though it’s not really film noir it was quite watchable.

Law and Order: "Brotherly Love" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 30) I watched the usual sequence of three Law and Order shows on NBC – they’re pre-empted the next week because of a big special, Wicked Above All, which looks like a concert performance of the musical Wicked to promote the upcoming release of the sequel, Wicked for Good, by Universal, which like NBC is a Comcast company. The flagship Law and Order episode was one called “Brotherly Love” in which police detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) became the latest cop in the Law and Order franchise to be given a scapegrace sibling: brother Matt Riley (Ryan Eggold), who when the episode opens has just been released from prison and has got a job as a waiter at a restaurant owned by Declan Dell (Neil Dawson). Unfortunately, Declan Dell is also a playboy and a compulsive gambler with a “thing” for white married women (Dell himself is Black), and no sooner do both we and Vincent meet him than he gets himself killed on the street. Vincent gets assigned to investigate the case along with his direct supervisor, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), who’s partnering him until they find him another person with whom to work. Dell, it turns out, had just left a high-stakes poker game run by another Black man, Shane Willis (Tobias Truvillion), which was attended by a high-profile set of influentials including a major film director, a judge, and NBA basketball star André Walker (Jerimiyah Dunbar), who broke up an incipient fight between Willis and Chaney.

None of them wanted to testify, so the only witness prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) can use is Matt Riley even though in the previous case against him that led to his being sentenced to prison in the first place, perjury was one of the crimes he was charged with (though he wasn’t convicted of it). Despite both his reluctance and Price’s skepticism about using him as a credible witness, Matt agrees to testify – only the day he’s supposed to appear in court he’s knifed on the street in a nearly fatal attack by a Black guard who works at the jail where Matt was being held in supposedly “protective custody.” Not surprisingly, Matt is pissed off as all hell that someone tried to kill him to keep him from testifying, but because he’s caught a bacterial infection along the way he’s unable to appear in court, so they arrange for him to testify via video link from his hospital bed. Matt gives the jury in Willis’s case the information they need to convict him – he was at the poker party and saw Willis threaten Dell and say he was going to kill him if he didn’t at once come out with the money he owed Willis for losses in previous games – though afterwards his condition takes a turn for the worse and his doctors put him in a medically induced coma. As the show ends it’s touch-and-go whether Matt Riley will survive, but the implication is that by coming forward in the present case he’s redeemed himself for all the bad things he did earlier. My husband Charles was working at the computer on an online course while this was going on and he only got to see the last 10 minutes or so, though he joined me for the next two episodes in the various Law and Order franchises and quite liked the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that immediately followed it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Under the Influence" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown Thursday, October 30 immediately after the “Brotherly Love” episode of Law and Order was called “Under the Influence” and was a quite good tale of spoiled, pampered 1-percenters who actually get called to account for their crimes – unlike what usually happens in the real world. At first I thought from the promos that they were doing yet another offtake on the Jeffrey Epstein case, but in this case the three principal bad guys come off as more like the Trumps. Super-rich venture capitalist Raymond Ellis (Randall Newsome) and his two sons (by different mothers), real-estate developers Nathan (Chris Webster) and Paul (Drew Garrett), have worked out a plan. The Ellis brothers build a new high-end building and recruit young women who’ve established themselves online as “influencers.” When they’ve picked out someone they especially like, Paul, who’s more comfortable interacting with women than Nathan, seduces her and gets her into a bedroom in the unit where they’re doing the open house – and then Nathan crashes the bedroom and literally rapes her. The Special Victims Unit gets involved when Grace (Audrey Trullinger), a hot-looking blonde influencer who later tells the SVU squad and us that she’s asexual (no doubt most of the horny straight guys watching this were thinking, “What a waste!”), spots a woman at the Ellis brother’s latest open house obviously under the influence of various substances being dragged into an open bedroom by a rather nasty-looking guy. The woman is Skylar Wright (Shereen Ahmed), and though the nasty-looking guy was not one of the Ellises, she reports being raped to the SVU and issues a rather confused description of the assault that suggests her assailant had the ability to be in two places at once. A DNA search of the remains from the apartment’s bathroom drain reveals that three people were present: Skylar and two men whose DNA had a 25 percent overlap, meaning they were half-brothers. No sooner have the SVU detectives arrest the Ellises that their father comes storming into the precinct room, threatening Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) with the destruction of her police career if she dares proceed against his sons. He even demands her badge number, and she gives it to him.

Later the cops run down a previous victim of the Ellises, Carly Wilson (Harley Renault), who was working as a bartender when Paul Ellis chatted her up and took her home with him, only to get subjected to the same rapist double-teaming that Skylar went through: Nathan doing the dirty deed while forcing Paul to watch. Still later the cops find out about a previous case in Newark, New Jersey in which the victim was actually killed, though the Ellises covered it up by putting her dead body in a car, deliberately crashing it, and claiming she died of the injuries sustained in the accident. This happened eight years previously, and the African-American police detective who investigated the case, Mike Feldman (Benjamin Brown), got stripped of his detective status, put back in uniform and assigned parking enforcement because he got too close to the truth for the Ellises’ comfort. When Nathan and Paul Ellis go on trial, prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) notes that Paul keeps looking over at Nathan for signals as to what to do and what to say on the witness stand. Carisi decides that Paul is so totally under Nathan’s influence that he will ask the judge in the case to appoint a so-called “shadow counsel,” an attorney who will secretly represent Paul and his interests and will sit in the courtroom with no apparent connection to the case. He makes this request after the woman attorney representing both Nathan and Paul makes an offer to plead Paul guilty on all counts if Nathan is allowed to go free. Carisi uses that piece of information – which the attorney never bothered to tell Paul before she approached Carisi with the offer – to get Paul to turn against both his brother and his father at long last, including telling the police and prosecution that it was actually the father who killed the woman in New Jersey. Eventually we get to see the wish-fulfillment fantasy of seeing all three Ellises – father Raymond as well as brothers Nathan and Paul (who gets a lighter sentence in exchange for his evidence) – either already convicted or in handcuffs being led away to that probable fate, when of course in real life the prototype for Raymond Ellis got elected President of the United States twice and put his business in the hands of his scapegrace sons.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Red, White, Black, and Blue" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed May 15, 2025; aired October 30, 2025)

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

Following this quite good Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode on Thursday, October 30, NBC showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime show called “Red, White, Black, and Blue” in which the principal villain is Miguel Olivas (Emilio Rivera), who’s risen so high in the Sinaloa drug cartel he’s known as “El Diablo.” Olivas has made an offer to turn state’s evidence, and to that end he’s being interrogated by assistant district attorney Anne Frazier (Wendy Moriz), only it’s a trap. Working through a Black veteran police officer named Tommy Da Silva (Peter Macon) who’s working for him as a bodyguard for a second job, Olivas is able to hire a squad of hit men to crash the hotel room and kill the people in law enforcement who were trying to take him down. He personally shoots Officer Da Silva and pistol-whips Anne Frazier to death after she pleads with him not to shoot her, and he says, “I won’t shoot you, but … .” The police investigation attracts not only the Organized Crime unit but also a detective named Tim McKenna (the older, heftier but still not bad-looking Jason Patric) who’s like Captain Ahab, with Olivas as his Moby Dick. Though he didn’t actually kill them himself, McKenna admits he was responsible for getting Olivas’s wife and child murdered. McKenna also angrily confronts Da Silva’s (white) widow Mary (Michelle Pruiett) with allegations that he was a dirty cop, and at first she throws both McKenna and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) out of her home before ultimately admitting that he was dirty and she knew about it.

She said the reason he went to the Dark Side was that after over 20 years of service, the New York Police Department was getting rid of their pension program and so he would have been left with nothing to retire on, so he started working for Olivas and the Sinaloa cartel and protecting one of their safe houses. Other detectives on the Organized Crime squad, including Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), have traced four Sinaloa drug distribution centers but there’s a fifth one that they haven’t been able to nail because it’s actively being “protected” by corrupt cops. McKenna and Stabler deduce that Olivas was hiding out at the mysterious address and get Reyes to tell them where it is, and after a quite effective suspense sequence in which Stabler hunts down Olivas through an elaborate set of tunnels under the house (kudos to director Eriq La Salle here!), he finally finds Olivas, or what’s left of him, gurgling to his death after fellow cartel members have knifed him in the tub in the hideout’s secret bathroom – though it’s left ambiguous as to whether he’s really going to die immediately or be able to recover to a modicum of health. Though this episode is obviously setting us up for yet another long-term story arc in Dick Wolf’s obeisance to the Great God SERIAL, at least it had a convincing and reasonably conclusive ending. Though it wasn’t as good as the two other Law and Order shows that preceded it – especially the “Under the Influence” SVU – this Organized Crime episode was reasonably convincing and quite solid entertainment, and Jason Patric was able to make his obsessed Ahab-like character utterly convincing.

The Divorcée (MGM, 1930)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 28), as soon as my husband Charles got back home from work, I turned off the news and switched the TV to Turner Classic Movies, which was doing a night of films made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history from 1930 to 1934. The term “pre-Code” is a spectacular misnomer because the Motion Picture Production Code was actually promulgated in March 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association (MPPDA), and therefore pre-dated the “pre-Code” era. The Code was instituted to ward off both government censorship of the motion picture industry (which was perfectly legal because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that movies were just “a business” and therefore films were not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment; the Court eventually reversed this, but not until 1953) and the efforts of private pressure groups to drive certain forms of content off the screen. But for the first four years of its existence the Production Code was enforced more loosely than it was thereafter, and a surprising number of films made it to the screen that dealt with sexual relationships in a relatively honest and open fashion. One of those was the film Charles and I watched last night, The Divorcée, made at MGM in 1930 and based on a racy novel called Ex-Wife, published in 1929, whose content was so controversial that its author, Ursula Parrott, originally did not put her name on the book. The MPPDA ordered MGM to change the film’s title to something less offensive and in-your-face, so MGM obliged with The Divorcée. When MGM production chief Irving Thalberg bought the rights for $20,000 (a high price for a story property then), he intended to cast Joan Crawford in the title role, but Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, had other ideas. She announced to her husband that she wanted to play the female lead, and eventually she got her wish – leading to a bitter enmity between her and Crawford that lasted until their one film together, The Women (1939), and even beyond. Crawford complained to her friends, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!” Thalberg was originally uncertain about casting Shearer because she’d carefully been built up as a “good girl,” though at least two of her silent films, Lady of the Night (1925) – in which she played two parts, one good and one bad – and A Lady of Chance (1928), had showcased her in less than sympathetic roles.

The Divorcée casts Shearer as Jerry, who’s in love with Ted Martin (Chester Morris, a highly talented actor who got a number of good parts in great films but never quite achieved the brass ring of stardom his talents deserved), even though Jerry is a successful businesswoman (though we’re never told just what business she’s in) and Ted is a struggling newspaperman. Ted and Jerry talk a good game about wanting a truly equal relationship and avoiding the pitfalls of traditional jealousy, but not long after they’re married Ted is confronted at one of the film’s many parties by Janice (Mary Doran), one of his exes who wants to get rid of the “ex” part. One of the parties ends with a sequence in which the Martins’ friend Paul (Conrad Nagel, a dubious actor who got a lot of parts he didn’t deserve in the early days of sound because he was one of the first actors who proved he had a recordable speaking voice; it got so bad that in an interview Nagel complained that he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in) gets roaring drunk and insists on driving while very much under the influence. The inevitable happens and Paul’s car crashes, leaving his girlfriend Dorothy (Judith Wood, billed as “Helen Johnson”) severely injured and disfigured. There’s a neat contrast between the wedding of Ted and Jerry in a church with Wagner’s Lohengrin march and a minister performing the ceremony, and the sordid coupling of Paul and Dorothy in Dorothy’s hospital room, since Paul doesn’t love Dorothy but feels compelled to marry her out of guilt.

At yet another party Janice successfully seduces Ted, and Jerry, figuring that what’s sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose, yields to the advances of another one of their friends, Don (the young Robert Montgomery, who’s so callow-looking we get the impression he’s just graduated from high school). Director Robert Z. Leonard (who’s not credited as such, though the opening title lists The Divorcée as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production”), who was ordinarily a hack (though he has one truly great film on his résumé, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical Maytime), shows a rare bit of subtlety when he works around the Code’s limitations by staging the sex scene between Jerry and Don from outside, with just the camera on the window of their apartment as its drapes slowly close. Leonard also scores with the immediately preceding scene, in which Ted, called out of town on a business trip (though once again we’re not told what sort of business or why he can’t take Jerry along, as Charles invariably does with me whenever he has to go out of town), tries to call home during a six-minute layover of his train. Only it takes nearly the whole six minutes just for him to put through the call, and we get a chilling scene of the Martins’ phone ringing unanswered because Jerry has just that minute yielded to Don’s advances and left home with him. When Ted finally returns from his trip, Jerry announces that she has “paid your account in full,” and Ted immediately demands to know who her extra-relational lover was – while she, quite understandably, refuses to tell him.

Ted and Jerry divorce, and Jerry announces that from then on she’s going to be as wanton as circumstances will allow and have as many men in her life as she wants. Among the men after her is Paul (ya remember Paul?), who’s never forgiven Ted because he married Jerry after Paul wanted her. He catches up with her on a train and pulls her away from her latest boy-toy, a phony European “prince,” then offers to marry her as soon as he can divorce Dorothy, to whom he’s offered a large financial settlement in exchange for his freedom. Only, just as Jerry and Paul are in Jerry’s apartment settling the details of their new life together, Dorothy shows up wearing what after an earlier viewing of the film (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/divorcee-mgm-1930.html) I described as “an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman.” Naturally Jerry is too overcome by guilt to go through with her plan to marry Paul, and instead she leaves for Paris, where Ted (ya remember Ted?) is working as a free-lance journalist after having been fired from his job. He’s also drinking a lot and making an ass of himself, something he was already well on his way to doing in the U.S. when he disrupted the wedding party of two of their friends and even smashed their wedding cake. It all ends in Paris at a New Year’s Eve party where Jerry and Ted finally reconcile and pledge that this time around they’ll take the marriage vows more seriously than they did last time. TCM showed The Divorcée October 28 as part of a night of so-called “pre-Code” films in connection with a new book on the 1930-34 era called Pre-Code Essentials: Must-See Cinema from Hollywood’s Untamed Era 1930-1934 by Kim Luperi and Danny Reid, which featured The Divorcée in its opening chapter.

And yet both Charles and I could think of much better movies from the 1930-34 period that pushed the envelope far more audaciously than this rather staid film, which at least partly because of Shearer’s usual image is hard to take seriously. You just know that Jerry isn’t a truly bad or wanton woman, just a good woman playing at being bad – and playing at being bad in a transparently phony way. Shearer would go on to make a few more films that pushed the envelope of traditional morality, including Private Lives (1931) – in which, given a better story source (by Noël Coward instead of Ursula Parrott) and a more artful director (Sidney Franklin), she and Robert Montgomery play the basic situation of The Divorcée as sophisticated comedy instead of chest-thumping melodrama – and A Free Soul (also 1931), in which she plays the daughter of attorney Lionel Barrymore who’s engaged to Leslie Howard but is turned on sexually by brutal gangster Clark Gable. (I’ve sometimes described A Free Soul as the beta version of Gone With the Wind because, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War, it is a two-man-one-woman triangle with Gable and Howard as the two men.) And other studios and other stars also made far more Code-pushing films in the early 1930’s than this one. To name but a few, there are Three Smart Girls (1932), Virtue (1932), the awesome Call Her Savage (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932) – to my mind the best movie musical ever made – Safe in Hell (1933), Sensation Hunters (1933), and Mae West’s masterpieces She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933). West’s films in particular sparked the reaction from the Roman Catholic pressure group, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!), that ended the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era and forced the MPPDA to get super-serious about enforcing the Code. They put a single individual – first Jason Joy, then Joseph Breen, then Geoffrey Shurlock (who held the job until the Code finally broke down in the late 1960’s and was replaced by the ratings system in place today) – in charge and gave him the power to vet films twice, first when they were in script form and then after they were shot. The Divorcée is a frustrating movie that seems hopelessly dated in some respects and au courant in others, and Shearer won the Academy Award for her performance, which like the film itself is powerful and luminous in some scenes and staid and stiff in others.

Haunted Spooks (Hal Roach Productions, Pathé, 1920)

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

Last Sunday, October 26, Turner Classic Movies followed up the main feature on their “Silent Sunday Showcase,” The Monster (1925), with a quite amusing Harold Lloyd short from 1920 called Haunted Spooks. Co-directed by Lloyd’s producer, Hal Roach, and Alf Goulding (who had managed Fred Karno’s on-stage comedy troupe in Britain when both Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel were in it), and written by H. M. “Beanie” Walker (mostly a silent-film title writer who was one of the few people in that job who was able to graduate to screenplays when sound came in), Haunted Spooks features Lloyd as “The Boy” (in most of his short films he was nameless) who’s trying to attract the attentions of a wealthy girl (Marie Mosquini). When he definitively loses her to a man of her own affluence and social standing, Lloyd sets out to kill himself. His failed suicide attempts are by far the funniest parts of this film. First he tries to shoot himself with a gun he found on the street, but it turns out to be just a water pistol. Then he tries to get run over by a streetcar, but it switches to another track just in time to miss him. In his next attempt, he ties a boulder to himself and leaps off a bridge into the water below – but the water is only a few inches deep. He tries to throw himself off another bridge, but he lands in a rower’s boat. Then he tries to throw himself into the path of an oncoming car – but the driver, an attorney (William Gillespie), not only stops in time to avoid hitting him but drafts him into a scheme he’s got going to protect the inheritance of a character listed in the credits only as “The Girl” (Mildred Davis) but later named via a package sent to her as “Mildred Hillary.” It seems that Mildred is in line for an inheritance of a house and a plantation, but only if she and her husband live there for a year. That poses a problem for her since she is unmarried, but the attorney has the plan to recruit Lloyd’s character to marry her and for the two of them to move into the plantation house together and live there for the requisite year.

Only the film’s villains, Mildred’s uncle (Wallace Howe) and his wife, are determined to make sure Harold and Mildred aren’t there the required year by scaring them off. As Harold and Mildred drive to the house, they’re in a car with a cage full of chickens in the back seat, and the chickens keep pecking Harold in the back of his neck until he puts a cushion between him and the cage. He’s also beset with a driver in front of him who puts out hand signals first to the left, then the right, and so on so Lloyd can’t pass him. When they finally get to the mansion, Uncle’s Black servants don white sheets and pose as ghosts. A pair of trousers seem to move by themselves – really because there’s a young Black boy (Ernest Morrison) inside – which causes Harold’s hair literally to stand on end. Then Morrison gets covered in flour and convinces Harold he’s a white ghost, an interesting reversal of the gag we’ve seen before of white performers getting covered in fire ash and appearing in blackface. “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself (and I admire her for proving by example that not all film geeks are white males) apologized for the stereotyped “humor” of the Black characters – though at least one Black actor in this film, Blue Washington, cuts a very distinguished look in his face and overall bearing even though Walker’s titles make him and the other Black characters speak in the usual abysmal dialect. (The more I see what other directors did to Black actors, the more I admire Willliam Wellman for telling his Black actors in Safe in Hell, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to ignore the dialect the film’s writers had scripted for them and instead deliver their lines in normal English.) Though the haunted-spooks parts of Haunted Spooks don’t match the sheer joy of Lloyd’s failed suicide attempts earlier on (one of Lloyd’s rare flirtations into black comedy that came to fruition seven years later in the marvelous 1927 feature The Kid Brother, a surprisingly dark film for such a mundane title, and seven years after that in one of Lloyd’s talkies, The Cat’s-Paw), overall it’s a bright, enjoyable movie that shows how ready Lloyd was to make feature-length films, which he started with the four-reel “streamliner” A Sailor-Made Man (1921) and then his first true feature, Grandma’s Boy (1922).

Secrets of the Surgeon's Wife (Goodflix, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 26) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good Lifetime movie called Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife, though in this case the “secret” was not that the surgeon’s wife was having an affair, but the surgeon (a dental surgeon, actually) was. The wife is Julia Morgan, nèe Maxwell (Gina Vitori), and her dental-surgeon husband is Peter Morgan (Justin Berti). Julia apparently came from a family with money, and before she married Peter she was a local TV newscaster. Then she and Peter got married and Julia set up a foundation to recruit her husband and other dental surgeons to donate free operations to low-income people. Besides the Morgans, the main person involved in the foundation is Leslie Wells (Chelsea Rose Cook), and the film opens with a meeting with a representative from a potential funder who decides not to donate to the foundation. Julia, Peter, and Leslie decide to go ahead with the celebratory dinner at an ultra-exclusive restaurant they’d booked when they were sure they’d get the donation, and while there Julia has a jealous hissy-fit when Peter seems to be flirting with their waitress. It turns out that Peter is doing a lot more than flirting; he and Leslie are having a full-blown extra-relational affair. One night Peter leaves home at midnight, saying he has an emergency appointment for surgery, but of course Julia sees through this preposterous excuse at once and follows him as he drives to a high-end hotel and stops at the desk. Julia runs into Leslie’s husband Mark (Gabe Pranter) outside the hotel. Mark tries to crash the place and is thrown out because he’s not a guest at the hotel, but he and Julia run into each other and discuss their mutual suspicions about what their spouses are doing. Neither of them want to divorce their cheating spouses, Julia because Peter would likely get all her assets, including those she donated to the foundation; and Mark because Leslie would probably insist on keeping the house they’ve been living in, which had been in Mark’s family for four generations. They conclude that the only way they can get a fair shake in any divorce proceedings is if they can prove that their spouses are being unfaithful. They decide to stalk them and ultimately hire a private detective, Sherman Miles (Paul Rose), to get photographic evidence of the affair between Peter and Leslie. Sherman gets the goods on them when they go to a dental hygiene conference and meet for some hot times between sessions. But Peter and Leslie spot him outside their room, realize he’s been filming them with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens, and decide they need to get to him, grab his video, and drug him before he can meet with Julia and Mark to give them the file. Unfortunately, the injection Peter gives Sherman to incapacitate him works too well and actually kills him. (As Peter muses to Leslie, either he gave him a too-high dose that was lethal or he had some other pre-existing medical condition that made the drug fatal.)

Once they’ve already killed, albeit inadvertently, Peter and Leslie decide to go whole-hog and eliminate their inconvenient spouses as well. Julia and Mark enter Leslie’s home (which Mark has the keys for since it’s his home, too) to play the computer file they extracted on a thumb drive from Sherman’s home when they went there, ostensibly to meet him only he was already dead. Leslie sneaked into the home’s backyard and disabled its wi-fi connection, so Julia and Mark could watch Sherman’s surveillance video of Peter and Leslie fucking but couldn’t upload it and mail it to themselves. Then Peter catches Julia there and gives both her and Mark knockout injections (presumably more carefully calibrating the dose this time), and Peter and Leslie hit on the idea of driving Mark and Julia to an old garbage dump and digging a grave for all three of them, including Sherman’s corpse as well as burying Mark and Julia alive. Only they run out of energy to dig a deep enough grave for three people, so they hit on the idea of putting the unconscious Julia into an abandoned deep freezer and letting her suffocate while they go ahead and bury Mark alive. Julia comes to and realizes what’s happened to her, and because the freezer’s door latches were long gone, Leslie bound the doors shut with yellow plastic ribbons – only Julia figures out a way to cut through the ribbons with a convenient packet of dental floss Peter had previously given her as part of his instructions to take better care of her teeth. (She’d also been shown forgetting to use her night guard, a piece of plastic worn over the teeth while you sleep to make sure you don’t grind them, and this I responded to because for as long as we’ve been together, which is more than 30 years now, my husband Charles has worn night guards, which I jokingly called “tooth condoms.”) Julia escapes and unburies Mark, who in the meantime has become her lover – or at least they had sex together that night in Mark’s and Leslie’s home just before Peter and Leslie came by – and there’s a final confrontation as Mark is determined to murder Peter, Julia tries to dissuade him, Julia steals an SUV from a nonplussed local guy to race to stop him from killing Peter, and ultimately there’s a fight almost to the finish in which the four leads try to kill each other before the police arrive, arrest Peter and Leslie, and Julia and Mark have a bittersweet parting in which they leave the possibility of a future relationship between them open.

Secrets of a Surgeon’s Wife was directed by Yoonhee Ye, a woman born December 12, 1987 in South Korea who’s studied at the American Film Institute. I’d never heard of her before but I had heard of this film’s writer, Shawn Riopelle, whose previous Lifetime credits include Burned by Love (2023), Murder in a Lighthouse (2025), Ice Road Killer (2022), Maid for Revenge (2023), The Evil Twin (2021), and Stalked by a Prince (2022). Riopelle’s previous scripts share some interesting commonalities with this one, including the use of computer files as MacGuffins and the spectacular incompetence of his murderers (in a post on one of his earlier movies I noted the number of people the principal villainess had attempted to kill who were still alive and well at the end). The part of Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife I liked best was the subtle way Peter and Leslie turn from just illicit lovers into first accidental and then intentional killers. The imdb.com synopsis had made it look like Peter and Leslie deliberately intended to kill Julia and Mark from the get-go, but the actual film is more morally complex than that. Once they inadvertently kill Sherman that sends them totally off the moral rails, to the point where they think the only way out of their predicament is to knock off both their spouses and do it as unobtrusively as possible. Their stratagem for getting away with it is to make it look like Mark and Julia were the cheating couple and they abandoned everything and ran off to be together in an unknown location. Other than that, though, Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife is a better-than-average but not particularly special Lifetime movie, not quite the slice of delicious neo-noir I was expecting from the online synopsis but well enough staged by director Ye from a capable if not exactly ground-breaking script by Riopelle (whose gender is definitely male, though in some of my previous posts about him I used they/them pronouns because I wasn’t sure).

The Monster (Roland West Productions, Tec-Art, MGM, 1925)

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

After the Lifetime movie Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife on October 26 I turned the TV off for an hour (I played through an odd 1968 album by an obscure band called Autosalvage) and then my husband Charles and I watched a truly odd film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”: The Monster, a 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, Sr. as a mad scientist named Dr. Ziska who takes over a mental hospital formerly run by Dr. Edwards (Herbert Prior). Ziska was formerly a famous surgeon until he went crazy and ended up in Edwards’ sanitarium, whereupon he and three fellow patients – Caliban (Walter James), Rigo (George Austin), and Daffy Dan (Knute Erickson) – help him take over the asylum and imprison Edwards while running the place themselves. The Monster began life as a 1922 stage play by Crane Wilbur (1886-1973), who was the male lead in the 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline but was best known as a writer for both stage and screen. I had seen The Monster before in the 1970’s on a previous silent-film TV revival show and hadn’t liked it – it was a blend between horror and comedy, and most of the “comedy” struck me as relentlessly unfunny – but I decided to give it another chance because of the director. For some reason I had thought the director was either William Beaudine or William Nigh – both of whom had “A”-list careers in the silent era but were forced by the Depression and the coming of sound to make some of the sleaziest movies of all time for cheap studios like Monogram and PRC. Instead it was Roland West, a quite interesting figure whom William K. Everson described in The Detective in Film (1972) as one of the most creative directors of the silent-to-sound transition. “One director who used sound intelligently in his crime films was Roland West, although his ideas – intelligent and advanced then – were so quickly absorbed into the overall lexicon of film sound that these aspects of his films no longer impress,” Everson wrote. “Fortunately, he was also an extremely visual director, most of whose work was done in the silent period, and whose trademark … was a flair for striking, highly stylized, and often deliberately unreal physical composition.” West made his first film as director, A Woman’s Honor, in 1916, and his last, a stunning film about gangsters, bootleggers, and pirates called Corsair, in 1931. In 1935 West’s live-in partner, actress Thelma Todd, was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage on the estate she and West shared. West was widely suspected of having murdered her, especially since the garage where she was found was on a part of the estate being used by West’s ex-wife, Jewel Carmen. No one was formally charged with the crime and the police ruled it an accident, but the modern consensus is that Todd was knocked off by people from the Mafia because they were after the highly successful restaurant she operated on Catalina Island. Nonetheless, the shadow of Todd’s mysterious murder hung over West during the remaining 17 years of his own life.

In addition to directing The Monster, West also co-wrote the script with Willard Mack and Albert Kenyon, and contemporary reviews praised the film for its able juxtaposition of comedy and horror. Sorry, but that juxtaposition looks considerably less able now than it did then. After a powerful opening scene in which local farmer John Bowman (uncredited) is kidnapped outside the asylum – his car went off the road after Ziska and his men lowered a mirror in front of the road and Bowman, thinking another car was bearing down on him, turned off the road and his car overturned – we get a lot of dreary small-town romantic comedy. Amos Rugg (Hallam Cooley) and Johnny Goodlittle (Johnny Arthur, who was big enough then he’s second-billed after Chaney) both work as clerks in the general store owned by Luke Watson (Edward McWade). They’re both interested in Watson’s daughter Betty (Gertrude Olmstead), though they act in such nellie fashion it seems more likely they’d be after each other. Amos has the advantage over Johnny in that he owns a car, which Johnny doesn’t, and Johnny laments that Betty no longer goes on dates with him since Amos got an automobile. Johnny is also taking a correspondence course in how to be a detective, and he carries around a textbook from it and boasts about using his "ingenuity" to solve crimes. The “How to Be a Detective” book couldn’t help but remind me of Buster Keaton’s dream-movie masterpiece in 1924, Sherlock, Jr., and I found myself wishing Keaton had played Johnny Arthur’s part. Then two investigators from the life insurance company that had insured John Bowman come to the small town where this film is set in hopes of finding Bowman alive so the company won’t have to pay off on his claim. Johnny has found a slip of paper bearing the name of Edwards’ sanitarium and, on the back side, the word “help” written in mirror-image, but the official investigators and the local police insist it’s meaningless because Edwards closed the sanitarium months ago and is now on sabbatical in Britain. Eventually Amos gets Betty to elope with him, only their car is sidetracked the same way Bowman’s was and they’re kidnapped and held inside Edwards’s sanitarium by Ziska and his men. Johnny ends up being imprisoned inside the sanitarium, too – he’s dumped there through a long slide, a gimmick West used again in his next film, The Bat (1926) – also based on a stage play, this time by Mary Roberts Rinehart. The rest of the movie is a lot of stalking and skulking around West’s old-dark-house set with results that are neither all that funny nor all that scary until a dramatic design of sorts emerges: Ziska has worked out a way of extracting a human’s soul and transplanting it into another body. The soul donor is put into something that looks a lot like a standard electric chair, and the recipient is strapped to a hospital bed. For some reason the recipient has to be a woman, and Ziska spends much of the movie frustrated that until they grab Betty his gang has given him only males.

Ultimately Ziska is killed when Caliban, thinking it’s Amos in the electric chair, throws the switch on the soul-exchange machine, and without another body on the bed Ziska’s soul is sucked out into the air, and he dies. Johnny trusses up Caliban and suspends him from a winch, which also left the fake boulder that concealed the underground cell in which the real Edwards, John Bowman (ya remember John Bowman?), and a third person whose identity we were not sure of were being held captive. The police and insurance investigators finally break into the sanitarium, take custody of Caliban and the other two sidekicks, and Johnny is offered a job as an insurance investigator and also wins Betty’s hand at the end. The Monster is one of those frustrating films in which the visual distinction can’t make up for the mind-numbing banality of the story. Though it appears to be the only time Lon Chaney played a mad scientist, it’s hardly a patch on the marvelous mad-scientist roles Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lionel Atwill played in the early sound era. In the end The Monster is the sort of movie you want to like better than you actually do, and I found myself wondering about the similarities between The Monster and The House of Dr. Edwardes, a British mystery novel from 1927 which was also about a madman taking over an insane asylum and using his inmates to run it for him. The book was by John Palmer and Hillary A. Saunders under the pseudonym “Francis Beeding,” and the movie rights were bought by David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock. The film they finally made from it was Spellbound (1945), though Hitchcock and his writers, Angus McPhail and Ben Hecht, changed the plot so extensively the movie had little to do with the book aside from the starting point of a mysterious impostor taking over a mental hospital. Even the character name “Edwards” appears in both, which makes me wonder whether Palmer and Saunders borrowed (or stole) their plot from Crane Wilbur’s!

Rosemary's Baby (Willian Castle Productions, Paramount, 1968)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 25) Turner Classic Movies showed the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby as part of an oddball double bill, co-introduced by TCM host Ben Mankiewicz and actor Paul Giamatti, that also featured the 1962 independent movie Carnival of Souls, reviewed on moviemagg: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=carnival+of+souls). I’d seen Rosemary’s Baby only once before, on a poor-quality black-and-white TV with an over-the-air signal on an ordinary commercial broadcast. In fact, I had vivid memories of that TV; it was the one I had in 1975, it was a present from my grandfather, and due to a weird glitch in the picture tube the bottom part of the image folded in on itself so when I watched some of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies on it their feet were above their ankles. I was hoping I’d like it better on a modern color TV with a clear and undistorted image, but no-o-o-o-o. Rosemary’s Baby began life in 1967 as a novel by Ira Levin, who’s described on his Wikipedia page as a “Jewish atheist.” The movie rights were purchased by old-line schlockmeister William Castle, who made a deal with Robert Evans, then the studio head at Paramount, to make the film on a major budget and with a prestigious cast. Evans flatly insisted that Castle not direct the film himself – obviously he didn’t want it associated with such previous Castle films as The House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959). Castle went looking for another director and originally offered it to Alfred Hitchcock, who turned it down – and it’s easy to see why. HItchcock’s one foray into horror, Psycho (1960), had carefully avoided the supernatural; indeed, Hitchcock had been so concerned to make sure the events of Psycho were physically possible he even sent the script to the UCLA psychology department to make sure everything in it comported to the realities of mental illness as they were known then. The director who ultimately got hired was Roman Polanski, who also wrote the script from Levin’s novel.

Rosemary’s Baby deals with a young married couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her aspiring-actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes, who got the part only after both Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson turned it down). They rent an apartment in the Bramford Building (based on the real-life Dakota, a cooperative building whose exterior is used in the film; it’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived together and in front of which Lennon was murdered in 1980) whose previous occupant, an old woman, just died suddenly and left behind all her furniture. Guy suddenly gets a major part in a play when the actor previously cast, Donald Baumgart (who’s never seen onscreen but whose voice is heard when Guy calls him, and it’s an uncredited Tony Curtis), suddenly and mysteriously goes blind. Rosemary befriends a woman while the two are in the building’s spooky laundry room, only the day after they met Rosemary’s new-found friend falls out of a window to her death. Rosemary and Guy befriend a senior-citizen couple, Roman and Minnie Castavet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon – Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her part). Rosemary is determined to get pregnant; she’s even used the rhythm method in reverse to figure out when she will be at her most fertile, and she demands that Guy have sex with her that night. She seduces him by playing a soft-jazz record on their stereo and lighting a fire in their fireplace – which causes them a bit of an embarrassment because she’d forgot to open the flue, so the apartment fills with smoke until he’s able to reach into the fireplace and open it without burning his arm. When Rosemary and Guy finally have sex, she dreams that she’s on a yacht with various well-to-do-looking people, and through the walls of their apartment they hear strange music that sounds like Latin chants played backwards. Ultimately, after two hours of long, boring, ponderous exposition, Rosemary realizes that the father of her baby-to-be is not Guy but Satan. Roman Castavet is actually the son of a practicing witch who decades earlier killed himself inside the Bramford, and he, Minnie, and just about everyone around them is part of a Satanist plot which self-described “Jewish atheist” Ira Levin seems to have constructed as a deliberate parody and mockery of the Christian concept of the birth of Jesus. Like the Biblical Mary, Rosemary is told that she is the most beloved of all women because she has been chosen to be the mother of the Chosen One, the Redeemer, only in her case her child has been chosen not to save the world but to damn it.

Rosemary’s Baby could have been the basis for a quite good vest-pocket horror thriller in the Val Lewton mold (though Lewton and his people would have got it on and off the screen in half the time Castle and Polanski took); instead it runs a full two hours and 17 minutes. We get the point pretty early on – these horrific happenings are occurring in the lives of people who are otherwise banal and not very interesting – but there’s only so much we can take of the boring relationship between Guy and Rosemary before being bored ourselves. One thing I liked about Rosemary’s Baby is the sheer number of Hollywood and Broadway veterans who got parts in it, including Elisha Cook, Jr. (as the landlord who shows the Woodhouses the apartment literally from hell), Maurice Evans (as the Woodhouses’s former landlord), Patsy Kelly (as a member of the Satanist cult who at first appears to be playing her usual voice of reason from her 1930’s films), and Ralph Bellamy (as the pediatrician whom the Castavets insist that Rosemary use and who is, of course, part of their cult – as is Dr. Hill, played by the young Charles Grodin, whom Rosemary futilely turns to for help when she realizes what she’s up against).But for the most part Rosemary’s Baby is a dull, plodding film which gets interesting only in the last 20 minutes or so, as Rosemary is finally confronted with her destiny to bear and raise Satan’s child and agrees to take on the task. (One thing Polanski got right is we never actually see Rosemary’s baby; we’re told how ferociously ugly it is, but its actual appearance is left to our imaginations, Lewton-style.) But the biggest single weakness of this film is Mia Farrow’s stupid, annoying performance as the female lead. It’s true that the character is supposed to be something of an airhead, but Farrow really overdoes it.

She’s also victimized by the infamous ultra-short hairdo she was given during the course of the shoot; for the first third of the film she has a Sydney Guilaroff haircut that makes her look like a normal white female, but then she goes to Vidal Sassoon’s studio (Sassoon is actually name-checked in the film’s dialogue as well as given a credit for the horrible abomination he inflicted on Farrow’s head) and ends up with hair that would have been unusually short even for a male. Farrow was married to Frank Sinatra at the time, and the best comment on her awful haircut came from Sinatra’s ex, Ava Gardner, who said, “I always knew Frank would marry a boy someday, and now he has.” (Did she know something about Sinatra that the rest of the world didn’t?) I used to say that the ultra-short hairdo Mariska Hargitay wore during her first few seasons on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was one of the worst haircuts ever inflicted on a basically attractive woman, but it pales by comparison to the atrocity Sassoon wreaked on Farrow here. I’ve compared Farrow to Grace Kelly: both were blonde actresses who had one director who could get far more out of them than anyone else. In Kelly’s case it was Alfred Hitchcock; though Hitchcock was hardly known as an actors’ director, in their three films together he managed to make Kelly seem sensual and alluring, whereas in all her other movies she’s so cold and icy she could have sunk the Titanic. In Farrow’s case it was Woody Allen, and while all the world knows about the bitter events that ended both their professional and personal relationships, the fact remains that under Allen’s guidance Farrow gave the most full-blooded and emotionally complex performances of her career. Ira Levin said in 2002 that he regretted writing Rosemary’s Baby because its popularity had led to a whole cycle of films about Satanism and demonic possession: “I feel guilty that Rosemary's Baby led to The Exorcist, The Omen. A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don't believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong Fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn’t been so many of these books. … Of course, I didn’t send back any of the royalty checks.” Levin’s cunning parable equating the birth of Rosemary’s baby with the birth of Jesus could be considered an example of the Manichean heresy: the idea that God and Satan are equally powerful and the universe is the site of an eternal struggle between good and evil represented by two all-powerful gods. But that’s giving a fundamentally silly movie way too much credit for reshaping American politics and the likely history of the world.

Southside 1-1000 (King Brothers Productions, Allied Artists, 1950)

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

After Rosemary’s Baby Turner Classic Movies showed as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” a quite engaging if not wholly satisfying movie: Southside 1-1000 (1950). Muller cited other movies made around the same time that contained phone numbers in their titles, like Call Northside 777 and Dial 1119 (though he didn’t mention the most famous one of all, Butterfield “8”, made a decade later in 1960), though oddly the titular phone number is never once referenced in the script for Southside 1-1000. It’s a pseudo-documentary about the U.S. Treasury Department and the importance of its role in catching counterfeiters and taking their phony money out of circulation, and it was obviously green-lighted by Frank and Maurice King (they were brothers, though their last name had originally been Kozinsky) and the folks at Allied Artists nèe Monogram by the huge success of the film T-Men, made in 1947 by Eagle-Lion, which was what the former PRC (Producers’ Releasing Corporation) studio had morphed into when British film entrepreneur J. Arthur Rank put it to ensure a U.S. outlet for his British films. T-Men set the template for these supposedly torn-from-the-headlines stories about counterfeiters and the Secret Service agents who go after them, though one thing Eagle-Lion did that Allied Artists didn’t was cut a deal with the U.S. Treasury to allow them to show genuine U.S. currency on the screen. The supposedly “legit” money we see in Southside 1-1000 is laughably phony and looks more like Monopoly money than anything accepted in the real world. Eddie Muller outlined the unusual production history behind Southside 1-1000; the King brothers originally intended it as a follow-up to their major hit Gun Crazy (1949), one of the masterpieces of the film noir era. They counted on being able to use Gun Crazy’s director, Joseph H. Lewis, but Lewis had signed a contract with MGM on the strength of the success of Gun Crazy and was currently working on A Lady Without Passport, a surprisingly leaden would-be thriller with only hints of film noir.

Instead the director they ended up with was Boris Ingster, a native of Latvia who’d been an assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union. He came to the U.S. in 1930 and by the end of the decade was doing uncredited rewriting on movies like The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. In 1940 Ingster got the chance to make a quite good crime “B” called Stranger on the Third Floor at RKO about a young reporter (John McGuire) who covers a murder trial, becomes convinced the defendant is innocent, and ultimately ends up suspected of a similar murder himself. Stranger on the Third Floor has sometimes been called the first film noir, and while that ignores some early-1930’s noir precursors like Safe in Hell and Sensation Hunters, it’s an arguable case. It helped that Stranger on the Third Floor was co-written by the great novelist Nathaniel West, though it was hurt by the fact that [spoiler alert!] Peter Lorre’s character was too obviously guilty of both murders. Alas, though Stranger on the Third Floor was a success, it didn’t lead to a major directorial career for Ingster. In fact, his imdb.com page doesn’t list him as a director at all – just a writer and producer (his most famous production credit was on the 1960’s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) – and he only made three films as director: this one, Stranger on the Third Floor, and a romantic comedy called The Judge Steps Out in 1948. Southside 1-1000 hardly has the mythic or dreamlike quality of Stranger on the Third Floor, and it’s saddled by not one but two prologues, both narrated in the usual stentorian tones by Gerald Mohr. One attempts to tie the work of the United States Treasury Department and its Secret Service (founded during the Lincoln administration when the U.S. first started printing paper currency, and Lincoln and Congressional leaders realized that if the U.S. could print paper bills, other people could too, and there needed to be an enforcement mechanism to stop people from doing that and keep unauthorized bills out of circulation; the business of protecting the President and others in the administration was added later, after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901) with the Cold War and the recently begun so-called “police action” in Korea. The other is a straightforward account of the importance of money to the U.S. economy (well, duh!) and the myriad ways counterfeiters can pass their phony-baloney “money” through casinos, racetracks, and other venues in which a lot of cash changes hands.

The main Secret Service agent we see is John Riggs (Don DeFore, who’s best known today for TV sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Hazel), who’s hot on the trail of a counterfeit bill that got passed at a racetrack. It turns out that the bill was stolen by a small-time thief named Nimble Willie (John Harron), whom the police arrest and who probably wonders why he’s being so extensively browbeaten not only by the people who actually arrested him but the Secret Service as well. The plates to print the counterfeit $10 bills were made by Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), who’s continued to work making phony plates even after he’s been incarcerated. We’re told that Deane had a relatively lucrative career as an artist and legitimate engraver until he decided to freelance and use those skills as a counterfeiter. The Secret Service goes to see him in prison and find that by all appearances he’s been a model prisoner, incessantly studying the Bible and occasionally besting the prison chaplain on Bible trivia. He’s also terminally ill, and refuses the Secret Service’s offers of leniency if he reveals where his plates are. Deane has arranged to smuggle a newly engraved set of plates hidden inside a hollowed-out Bible, with the chaplain serving as his unwitting “mule.” The gang’s contact is Bill Evans (Barry Kelley), a traveling salesman who’s used that identity as a front to pass the phony money across the country. Chillingly, Evans has a wife, Clara, and a son who have no idea how he’s actually making a living. Unfortunately, the gang realize that Evans is being tailed by the Secret Service and they decide he’s a liability they need to get rid of, so Reggie (George Tobias) and another gang member dispose of him by pitching him out of the window of a tall building. The Secret Service sends Riggs out as an undercover agent, using the name “Nick Starnes,” and by tracing where Evans had his suits custom-made (unlike a lot of movie crooks, Evans didn’t rip out the labels of the clothes), he traces the gang to a Los Angeles hotel run by Nora Craig (Andrea King). At first she seems merely to be a desk clerk, but eventually we learn [spoiler alert!] that she’s really the mastermind of the counterfeiting ring.

What’s more, she’s the daughter of Eugene Deane; we figure that out when she brings Riggs as “Starnes” to her apartment (in a surprisingly explicit sexual invitation for a Production Code-era movie) and shows him a painting on the wall that she says is the work of her father. Riggs, in his “Starnes” identity, poses as a buyer of counterfeit currency and all seems to be going well for him until Deane himself escapes from prison and shows up at the gang’s headquarters, though he dies of his long-term illness before he can alert Nora that “Starnes” is really a T-man. But “Starnes” gets outed anyway when Nora is given a sketchbook that belonged to Deane by the people who buried him. Riggs tries to extricate himself from the situation by making an excuse to go to the corner convenience store for food, which he pays for with a bill telling whoever finds it to call the Secret Service and get him rescued. After the first two-thirds of the film was shot pretty plainly and in full light, it suddenly becomes all-out noir in the last third; cinematographer Russell Harlan starts shooting everything in chiaroscuro shadows and, when both the Secret Service and the L.A. cops get the message, there’s a bloody shoot-out that ends with a baroque chase scene through the L.A. rail yards. (Charles and I both chuckled at the scene at the entrance to Los Angeles’s Union Station – both the exterior and the information desk inside look the same now as they did in 1950, though the storage lockers have been removed – and also the Angel’s Flight railway, which Charles and I not only got to see but actually got to ride during our recent day trip to L.A. Most films noir only show the Angel’s Flight moving in the background, but in Southside 1-1000 the famous angular railway is actually being used on screen to move people.) The film reaches a truly bizarre ending when Riggs and Nora find themselves hanging for dear life to the sides of a concrete bridge over some train tracks at exactly the time that a train ex machina is passing under them. The two struggle on the ledge and, of course, it’s Nora who falls to her death and then gets run over by the passing train. Southside 1-1000 is a pretty good movie overall that gets better as it progresses (so does Rosemary’s Baby, come to think of it!), and there’s a neat in-joke: one of the opening montage sequences shows the marquee of a movie theatre showing Howard Hawks’s Western masterpiece, Red River (1948). Both Red River and Southside 1-1000 were shot by Russell Harlan and edited by Christian Nyby, and the assumption in film-history circles seems to be that Nyby inserted that shot as an elaborate in-joke referencing another film on which he and Harlan had both worked.

Law and Order: "Bend the Knee" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 23, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 23) I watched the three NBC-TV Law and Order showings in order, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Bend the Knee.” It starts at a contentious meeting of the board of a prestigious law firm at which the partners are arguing whether to take an agreement with the Donald Trump administration to steer clear of clients Trump doesn’t like and donate $80 million worth of free legal services to ones Trump does like or face exclusion from all federal buildings, which will cost them about 30 percent of their business. Trump has put a number of real-life law firms in just this dilemma – play ball with us, or else. One partner named Roger Wallace (Trent Stone), who’s just completed a major merger-and-acquisitions deal that’s going to put a lot of people out of work (so he’s not entirely one of the angels) is dead-set against the deal. Needless to say, he’s found murdered in his own home shortly thereafter, and without him to argue against it the law firm makes the deal with the Devil – oops, with Trump. Various members of the firm’s upper echelon are suspected of the crime, including managing partner Kevin Bradley (Joshua Malina), but it turns out the killer was Nasser Al-Quasimi (Afsheen Misaghi), who worked for the firm but was also the son of the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S. Because he’s the son of an ambassador, his attorney, Eric Ferguson (Hill Harper), claims he has absolute diplomatic immunity and can’t be prosecuted. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) gets a visit from an old friend from the federal government, Jack Drell (Toby Leonard Moore), who insists that he must drop the murder prosecution against Al-Quasimi because the United Arab Emirates are working closely in the U.S. in a region of the world where the U.S. doesn’t have any friends. Drell tells Baxter that if he insists on prosecuting Al-Quasimi for murder, the UAE will cancel a $40 million deal to buy fighter jets from the U.S. and thousands of Americans who were supposed to build those planes will be put out of work.

At first Baxter and his assigned prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), go full-steam ahead on the case. After all, they have a seemingly solid witness, Robbie Chilton (Tom Coiner), who ran into Al-Quasimi fleeing the scene of the crime, got a good look at his bloody face and body, and even helped fetch his cell phone, which Al-Quasimi dropped in his flight. But Chilton wimps out when it’s his time to testify, and Baxter and Price soon learn why: Drell sent an agent, a disbarred former attorney, to bribe him not to testify against Al-Quasimi. What’s more, though the next election for district attorney is two years away, Baxter has already set up a fundraiser for his campaign, to be held in a park location, and lined up some major donors to attend it and give him a major infusion of money. Only the case ends with a plea deal – Al-Quasimi pleads guilty to manslaughter and draws a 12-year sentence, which is likely to be only five to seven years of incarceration – which naturally doesn’t make Wallace’s girlfriend feel like justice has been done. What’s more, Jack Drell warns Baxter about the consequences of his insistence on prosecuting Al-Quasimi at all in the thug-like terms we’ve got used to from actual Trump administration figures – and Baxter learns that most of the donors who were supposed to attend his fundraiser have pulled out, and the National Park Service has canceled his lease on the venue. This was a quite good Law and Order and an effective dramatization of just how Trump’s authoritarian (actually totalitarian) tactics are warping the norms of American politics and jurisprudence. It also raises the fascinating question of just how far diplomatic immunity extends; can a protected diplomat literally get away with murder? Usually in the pre-Trump era a diplomat who killed someone would be declared persona non grata and, though not prosecuted for his or her crime, at least be thrown out of the U.S., probably forever. But in the Brave New World of Führer Trump, who boasted during his 2016 campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and it wouldn’t affect his poll numbers any, if you’re on the right side of the administration you almost certainly can get away with murder if the Führer O.K.’s it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Feed the Craving" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aored October 23, 2025)

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

The next Law and Order show on October 23, a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Feed the Craving,” also – like the “Bend the Knee” episode of Law and Order that preceded it – ends in a plea deal that provides a modicum of justice even though it doesn’t satisfy the victims. The protagonist is a heavy-set 30-something woman named Natalie Tanzillo (Danielle Macdonald) who at the start of the show is living with another woman. Natalie claims to be pregnant as the result of a rape, and the woman, Andrea Vargas (Lindsay Mendez), is not her Lesbian partner, as I’d initially assumed, but her doula – a term quite frankly I’d never heard before. According to Wikipedia, a doula is “a non-medical professional who provides guidance for the service of others and who supports another person (the doula's client) through a significant health-related experience, such as childbirth, miscarriage, induced abortion or stillbirth, as well as non-reproductive experiences such as dying.” Ironically, the term derives from the Greek for “female slave.” At first we’re led to believe that Natalie is a) pregnant and b) a victim, and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tries to get her to report the assailant and go on the record with her assault. Benson also tries to get Natalie to go to a hospital and have her upcoming childbirth seen to professionally – we’re told that she’s been in labor for three days when the episode opens. Midway through the show writer Roxanne Paredes and director Brenna Malloy pull the big switcheroo on us: Natalie isn’t a victim at all, but a predator. She’s never actually been pregnant, either through rape or consensual sex. Instead she’s had a series of self-induced hysterical pregnancies (ones in which you get all the symptoms of pregnancy without an actual embryo or fetus inside you), and her twisted goal in all this has been not only to win the affections of her doulas but literally to be sexually gratified by them. She even scored an ultrasound image from somewhere to bolster her illusion that she’s actually pregnant.

We learn this when the SVU squad room is suddenly inundated by a number of women – at least 20 – who all claim to be Natalie’s victims. This clip was shown on the promos for this episode and had led me to assume that SVU was doing yet another offtake on Jeffrey Epstein, and in particular the way his victims have been savaged yet again by the Trump administration and its clear favoritism towards Epstein’s surviving co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, and refusal to release Epstein’s files or client lists. The person I felt sorriest for in this show was Danielle Macdonald, who turns in a truly astonishing performance as Natalie – and the reason I felt sorry for her is that there aren’t going to be that many roles for a woman of her physique that will truly showcase her the way this one did. During Natalie’s trial, her attorney calls an expert witness named Dr. Damian Oshiro (Kurt Yue), who claims that Natalie is suffering from a mental illness, but prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is able to eviscerate her diminished-capacity defense during a blistering cross-examination. Ultimately Natalie’s attorney offers a plea deal through which Natalie will plead guilty to all the fraud charges against her in exchange for the sexual abuse charges being dropped – meaning she’ll draw a five- to seven-year sentence and won’t have to be listed on the national sex offenders’ registry when she’s released. As she’s taken away to serve her sentence, Benson is sure she’ll re-offend as soon as she’s released. “I’ll see you back here,” she says to Natalie. There’s also a nice plot twist in that one of the men Natalie accuses of having raped her and fathered her (nonexistent) child is her former supervisor at a nonprofit for which she used to volunteer – only this man, Eduardo Perreira (Marcus Raye Pérez), convinces the cops that he couldn’t have raped a woman because he’s Gay and married to a man.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Lago d'Averno" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed May 8, 2025, aired October 23, 2025)

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

After these two excellent episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit aired Thursday, October 23, the Law and Order: Organized Crime show that aired immediately afterwards (though it premiered May 8 on NBC’s “streaming” service, Peacock) was more disappointing than usual. It was called “Lago D’Averno” (“Lake Avernus”) and more or less completed the story arc about the Camorra, the gang of bandits from Naples that morphed into a major organized crime syndicate. As I’ve mentioned before, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia came over to the U.S. at the same time through Italian immigrants in the 19th century, and carried over their bitter, sometimes bloody rivalries from back home into the U.S. streets. They made an uneasy alliance so the Neapolitan and Sicilian gangsters could work together instead of killing each other, and picked a name, La Cosa Nostra (usually translated by the gangsters themselves as “This Thing of Ours”), which would represent them both. In this storyline, the Neapolitan Camorra are in a bitter gang war against a group called Los Santos from the Dominican Republic, though the main intrigue is within a Camorra family called the Spezzanos. Matriarch Lucia Spezzano (Dorothy Lyman) is running the whole show through her grandsons Rocco (Anthony Skordi), Roman (Alberto Frezza), and Pietro (Luca Richman). Their mother, Isabella Spezzano (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), was actually recruited as an informant by Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) during the 12 years he spent in Italy between his departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the start of Law and Order: Organized Crime.

Pietro was shot dead at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Promesse Infrante” (“Broken Promises”), by Eli Stabler, Elliott’s son, who was just admitted to the New York Police Department from the police academy three weeks earlier. Now he’s being hounded by an Internal Affairs officer, Moses Warren (Malcolm Goodwin), who’d always had it in for Elliott and figured he could get back at him through busting or disciplining his son. Rocco Spezzano is supposedly in prison, but he escapes by bribing another prisoner to take his place in his cell, and he comes out looking for vengeance against both Roman and Isabella. In a truly horrifying sequence, he cuts off Isabella’s finger and then puts the lit end of a cigarette against the severed end. By the time the police arrive at Isabella’s lavish country estate, complete with horses for her to ride as her main form of recreation, Isabella has been tortured to death. Also involved in the intrigue is the local church the Spezzanos attend, where in addition to a priest who’s shown as decent but largely ineffectual, there’s also a nun who’s part of the Spezzano gang and is disguising herself behind her habit. The episode lurches to an unsatisfying close as Eli Stabler confesses to his dad that he isn’t sure he really wants to be a police officer after all; he just did it because both his grandfather and his father served as New York cops, and previous episodes proved that Elliott’s dad was actually corrupt. Elliott’s mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn, whose presence here practically defines “overqualified”) asks Eli point-blank which kind of cop he’s going to be: a bad one like his grandfather or a good one like his father. It was an O.K. episode but rather clunky, and of course it’s handicapped by the fact that unlike in the other Law and Order shows, Organized Crime is worshiping at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL and doing those convoluted “story arcs” that add little to its appeal, at least for me. (Other, younger viewers may disagree; the late Gerry Williams told me that young people today had a hard time with the original Star Trek precisely because each episode was complete in itself and there weren’t continuing story lines, as there have been in the series’s more recent incarnations.)