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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin Express (RKO, 1948)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story (Studio TF1 America, FYI, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, September 21) I watched two Lifetime movies in quick succession: the previous night’s “premiere,” The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story; and last night’s “premiere,” No One Believed Me. The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story was a movie I had high hopes for because it was based on a true story – model photographer William Bradford (Steve Byers) hangs out at group photo shoots, attracts young women to pose for him as a way of gaining exposure as potential models, and then kills them – and because Christine Conradt wrote the script. I’ve long been a particular fan of Conradt’s because usually she gives her characters, especially her villains, genuine complexity and multidimensionality. Not this time, alas. While other Lifetime writers who take on fact-based stories are disciplined by the real details of the case to avoid melodramatic excesses, Conradt seemed limited by the actual case and unable to provide any convincing explanation (or any explanation at all, really) for What Made William Run. One would have thought, based not only on Lifetime’s conventions but the way real-world crimes like Bradford’s usually go down, that Bradford would have raped or sexually assaulted his victims before he killed them. No such luck: in the opening we see him pick up a nice young woman at a bar (the bar is simply called “Bar,” which couldn’t help but remind me of the similarly anonymous “Bar” in the 1960 film The Leech Woman, which the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew ridiculed by saying, “Hey, let’s go to Bar, order Sandwich, and have Drink!”), take her outside, take a few photos of her, and then club her to death with his tripod.

Bradford’s principal target in this story is Alina Thompson (Brielle Robillard), who’s just about to finish high school. She’s a good student but she’s also interested in a modeling career, as is her Black best friend Nathalie (Bukola Ayoka), and she’s chafing under the dictates of her overprotective parents Carl (Sam Trammell) and Nancy (Ashley Jones). Alina gets screwed over by just about everyone in her life; she catches her boyfriend Nicholas (Mark Ballantyne, a quite hot hunk of man-meat who was setting off my Lust-O-Meter big-time even though I usually don’t like ’em that young) out at the local mall with another girl. Later Nathalie, who pretends to comfort her after the incident with Nicholas (who not only went out with someone else but pretended not to know her), screws Alina out of the chance to participate in a “trunk show” by falsely telling her it was canceled. Meanwhile we’ve seen Bill Bradford at work on several other women, including the woman who’s the bartender at “Bar” as well as Tracey (Laura Provenzano), a fellow high-school student whose family just moved to the L.A. area (where this is set) from Missoula, Montana and are in such an uncertain position they don’t even have a phone installed yet. We already knew the film was a period piece set in the recent past instead of the present when in the opening scene the girl who was Bill’s first victim (or at least the first one we see) offered him her phone number by writing it down on a notepad page instead of inputting it into his cell phone. We got the year nailed down when on one of their dates before Nicholas dumped her for someone else (probably someone more willing to have sex with him than Alina was, since that had been a major point of conflict between them), they went to the movie theatre at the local mall to see Flashdance, which would date this as 1983. For most of the movie we see Bradford stalk Alina at various mass photo shoots sponsored by a Southern California modeling magazine (the story takes place in the L.A. area) but never actually get her alone.

On one mass shoot his nefarious plans for Alina are actually interrupted by her father, who enters the shoot with a camera of his own and starts taking his daughter’s photo while she’s supposedly on a shoot with Bradford. Bradford gets upset at the interloper who spoiled his private shoot, and Carl Thompson tells him he’s actually Alina’s dad. Ultimately, with all her friends seemingly having abandoned her – Nicholas jilted her for that other girl and Nathalie screwed her out of the “trunk show” opportunity – Alina hangs out at the school library. Bradford runs into her there and invites her to do a solo shoot at the same locale – a natural rock quarry in one of the local parks. They agree to meet outside the library the next morning, but he doesn’t show. Where I thought this was going was that the two police detectives, a white guy named Nat Cole (Alex Gravenstein) and an Asian named Mitchell (Russell Yuen) – it’s indicative of Hollywood’s unconscious racism that the white cop gets a first name and the Asian doesn’t – would figure out where Bradford was going and arrive there in time to rescue Alina. Instead we see the cops raid Bradford’s home – they’ve been able to trace him through the lab where he has his film developed, where in one scene the man who runs it noticed Bradford literally chewing the negatives of the shots of his latest victim – and then there’s a sudden freeze-frame of Alina waiting for Bradford in vain and thinking he’s just another supposed “friend” who’s screwed her over. The freeze-frame cuts to a title reading “22 Years Later,” and 22 years later Alina is a world-famous model (obviously somewhere along the way she got more responsible professional help) whose mind is flashed back to the Bradford case by a magazine that runs a photo spread of all Bradford’s victims, including Tracey, whom she recognizes. (The older Alina is played by Kristen Kurnik and both her parents and the cops return as the same actors in heavy “age” makeup.)

The cops show up to tell her that the reason Bradford didn’t make their date that morning way back when is the cops had arrested him first, and there was a where-are-they-now end credit that Bradford was convicted and sentenced to death, but this being California where the death penalty is pretty nominal, he died in prison on Death Row without actually being executed. The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story suffers from a lot of problems, including the absence of a Big Action Scene towards the end in which the cops would clearly and unambiguously rescue her just in time from the lethal photographer. It also doesn’t help that, like Jon McLaren in A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story the week before, Steve Byers was a disappointingly nondescript actor to be playing a Lifetime villain. Though we get a lot of crotch shots of him and he’s got a nice enough if not that impressive a basket, frankly Sam Trammell as Alina’s dad Carl is the sexiest guy in the film. The Girl Who Survived was directed acceptably by Michelle Ouelette, a woman director on the Lifetime list whom I’ve had pretty good things to say about in two previous posts on her movies, Danger in the House (2022) and Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (2023), in which her good work was undone by silly scripts. I wouldn’t call Christine Conradt’s work on The Girl Who Survived silly, but it was certainly well below her usual reputation!

No One Believed Me (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

After The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story on September 21 Lifetime ran a movie so wretchedly inept The Girl Who Survived looked like a deathless masterpiece by comparison! It was called No One Believed Me and was directed by Dave Thomas. No writer is credited on imdb.com, though the film is ostensibly based on a novel by Claire Smith whose publicity blurbs said she grew up in a small town and drew on some of her own experiences. She didn’t say if she’d actually been kidnapped by a romantically obsessed weirdo the way the film’s central character, Amy Welsh (Megan Carrasquillo), is, but if I’d come up with this farrago of nonsense I’m not sure I’d want people to know who I was, either! The first act shows Amy being kidnapped by a mysterious, hooded, masked figure dressed in black (black hoodies have become de rigueur wear for Lifetime attackers so you can’t tell at first what gender they are). Like Alina Thompson, Amy has been lured to Kentucky by the promise of a photo shoot that might help her have a career as a model; the message of the two films taken together is, to paraphrase the old Willie Nelson song, “Mamas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be models.” She’s taken to an old cabin in the middle of the woods in a Kentucky town identified in the script as “Alving Crossing” (there is no such town, though a Google search turned up a genuine Alvin Crossing, Kentucky), where she’s held until she manages to escape. With her kidnapper chasing her, she flees by throwing herself down a waterfall and ultimately she returns to her home town of Sonne, Georgia (at least “Sonne” is what it says on the decal of the local police force), where she lives with her older sister Jane Walsh Ingre (Jessica Morris), her husband Dan Ingre (John Castle), and their daughter Sophie (Ellie Rose Sawyer). Just what a 25-year-old woman who owns her own business (a beauty shop with the improbable name “Deja Du”) is doing living with her older sister and the sister’s family is never explained, nor is what happened to Amy’s and Jane’s parents.

When Amy returns home from her ordeal in Kentucky, no one believes her (got that?). Apparently she had a history in her childhood of making up stories about herself, though we’re never given examples of what they were. She calls the local paper, the Sun-Times, and asks them to send a reporter to interview her. The guy who shows up is Tim Cook (Daniel Di Amante), who finds her story as unbelievable as her sister, brother-in-law, and everyone else does. Amy calls the Sun-Times to complain about how Tim Cook treated her, and she’s told that no one by that name works there. (Later Tim admits that he was never formally employed by the Sun-Times, but he said he worked for them because he was a free-lancer hoping to sell the Sun-Times a story about Amy.) The next time Amy sees Tim Cook, she accosts him on the street and he attacks her, only an apparent stranger named Paul Riggs (William McKinney) comes along and rescues her. Then Tim ends up after hours inside Amy’s salon, and she complains to Paul, who walks into the salon and, after a few minutes, walks out again and says, “He’ll never bother you anymore.” We don’t know whether that means Paul merely roughed up Tim so badly or he actually killed him, but we’ve figured out within about a nanosecond that it’s really Paul who was her mystery kidnapper. Amy is sufficiently naïve that she buys Paul’s knight-in-shining armor act and starts dating him, but ultimately Paul kidnaps her again and takes her to that same cabin in Kentucky where he held her the first time. This time he reveals his true identity, but he gives her a story that her real kidnapper is a mystery man named Adam who kidnapped Paul’s son Spencer (he shows Amy a photo of the alleged “Spencer” on his phone, but Amy guesses that he could have just got a stock shot of a young boy from anywhere) and who ordered Paul to kidnap Amy or he would kill Spencer.

His cabin is equipped with a sound system that plays a loud thumping bass beat all night so his captive can’t get any sleep, though Paul says the mysterious “Adam” is making him use it on Amy. Gradually Amy either bargains her way into relative freedom or starts having the Stockholm syndrome, because Paul eventually not only releases her from the handcuffs he’s had on her that chained her to a stair railing but the two of them have sex in a surprisingly lovely soft-core porn scene, especially considering the circumstances that brought them together. Meanwhile, her sister Jane and brother-in-law Dan have figured out where she’s been taken, and Jane insists on driving to Kentucky to rescue her. Tim Cook, who complains that since his recent arrival in town he’s been arrested, held in jail on suspicion of kidnapping Amy, and beaten up by Paul, comes with Jane while Dan stays behind, takes his daughter Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) to her school dance recital. Through much of the later three-fifths of the movie I was thinking that “Tim,” whose name was already suspicious because the real-life Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple and it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that a no-good schemer in Georgia might have appropriated his name, was the mysterious “Adam” and Amy’s first kidnapper. In the end, though, it’s Paul who turns out to be the bad guy after all – the story about “Adam” and “Spencer” was just more B.S. to lure Amy into his trap – and the film ends with Paul pleading with Amy to join him down that one last jump over the waterfall fountain. Naturally she refuses (though we’ve seen her make the jump before when it was her life at stake, not his!), and the film ends with an ambiguous shot of the river below. Maybe he died as a result of the fall or drowned at the base, maybe he got away and producers Luis Peraza, Ken Sanders, and John J. Tierney are saving him for a sequel. (I hope not!) No One Believed Me was decently directed by Dave Thomas, but as so often happens with Lifetime movies the script defeated his best efforts and turned into a farrago of sensationalist nonsense.

The Long, Long Trailer (MGM, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 20) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, including one quite famous one I’d never seen before. It was The Long, Long Trailer, made by director Vincente Minnelli (who turns in a quite respectable job even though his presence here virtually defines “overqualified”) at MGM from a script by husband-and-wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on a novel by Clayton Twiss, a writer of whom I’ve otherwise never heard. This was a vehicle for Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, at a time when they were the biggest stars on television through their pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy. Lucy and Desi shot it in 1954 during their summer hiatus from the second to the third season of I Love Lucy, and according to Todd S. Purdum, who just published a book called Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television (not literally true, of course, but Arnaz was the first producer who shot a scripted TV show in the three-camera format – Ralph Edwards had done it before with his game show Truth or Consequences – and the first to do a scripted show on film, so it could be re-run and I Love Lucy is still entertaining audience members who weren’t yet alive when Lucy and Desi died), there was some trepidation among MGM’s executives about green-lighting the film. The thinking was, “Why would audiences pay to see Lucy and Desi on screen when they can see them every week on TV for free?” Ironically, one Hollywood producer who knew better was David O. Selznick, who in the mid-1930’s as an MGM executive had been involved in films featuring major radio stars like Ed Wynn and Jack Pearl. In 1954 Selznick wrote one of his famous memos, saying that a feature-film version of I Love Lucy would be a potential hit as long as it had a different plot from the ones that had already been filmed for TV. But by then he had fallen from his former heights and no longer had the clout to set up a project.

MGM didn’t exactly cast Lucy and Desi in a feature-film version of I Love Lucy, but they came as close as they could. They’re called “Taci” and “Nicky” instead of “Lucy” and “Ricky,” and instead of a small-time bandleader in a seedy Florida nightclub “Nicky” (full name: “Nicholas Carlos Collini,” which suggests writers Hackett and Goodrich intended to explain Desi’s ineradicable Cuban accent by passing him off as Italian) is a globe-trotting engineer. Also Taci and Nicky are merely engaged to each other at the beginning of the film, though their wedding is an important plot point. The Long, Long Trailer actually begins in a torrential rainstorm as Desi – oops, I mean “Nicky” – returns to the relative safety and comfort of the office of a trailer park while the trailer he and Taci bought at the start of the film is parked outside with a “For Sale” sign. Nicky recounts the events that led them there and the film becomes an extended flashback starting two months earlier. Nicky and Taci were planning their wedding and debating where they were going to live as soon as they tied the knot. Taci has seen a brochure for a trailer company and hits on the idea that they should buy a trailer so they can move it wherever Nicky is working at the moment and still have a home they can call their own. They can also save the money they’d otherwise spend on rent, hotel rooms, and dinners “out.” (Given how astronomical housing prices have become since 1954, to the point where a lot of young couples today have resigned themselves to being lifelong renters, this part of The Long, Long Trailer rings surprisingly true today.) Nicky and Taci go to a trailer sales convention and see the model they originally saw in an advertising brochure, the “Bungalette,” but Nicky decides it’s way too “-ette” for their purposes. Then they spy a huge model across the hall made by a company called New Moon, and Taci instantly falls in love with it. (My husband Charles came home about two-thirds of the way through the movie and told me his mother used to work for that company. They were not only not paying for a product placement, they understandably disliked the way their trailer was portrayed in the movie.)

The bills mount up as Nicky and Taci find they also have to buy a new car because their current one isn’t powerful enough to pull the trailer, and they have to spend even more money on having a trailer hitch welded to the new car. Nicky also needs a crash course in how to drive a car with a trailer attached, and the person teaching him warns him to think of it as a 50-foot train bearing down on him at all times. He also says that to pull a trailer you have to remember to use the trailer’s separate brakes before the car’s brakes in case you have to slow down or stop. Having to so radically re-educate himself on something he’s been doing – driving without the encumbrance of a trailer – naturally drives him nuts. Once they pull out onto the open road from California to Nicky’s next job site in Colorado, they cause a traffic jam as tens of cars get stuck behind them because they have to slow down to handle the weight of the trailer. On their first night in a trailer park, where at least they can connect to electricity and running water, they also get intimidated by the Big Brother-ish announcements that constantly crackle through the park’s P. A. system. (Marjorie Main, as a woman who welcomes Nicky and Taci to the great community of trailer dwellers, has a great role in this scene; a pity Hackett and Goodrich couldn’t have figured out a way to make her role run through the entire movie!) Taci gets so pissed off at the incessant announcements that she has the idea that they spend the next night literally on the open road, and there’s a great sequence in which Nicky tries to maneuver the car-and-trailer over a rather bumpy country road in, you guessed it, a torrential rainstorm. Eventually car and trailer stall out with the trailer listing to one side, and Taci tries to cook a meal (they have a gas stove and propane tanks to fuel it) but the eggs she tries to fry literally slide off the pan and end up in her lap or on the floor.

Their next stop is at the ancestral home of Taci’s family, where her Aunt Anastacia (Madge Blake) and Taci’s homely niece “Poor Grace” (Connie Van) end up in arms against Nicky and Taci because Nicki, trying to park the trailer at the entrance to the family’s garage, has wiped out Anastacia’s precious prize-winning rose bush and much of the rest of her garden as well. Nicky has even taken the back end of the trailer and smashed it into her gazebo, turning it into kindling. Taci makes another attempt to cook inside the trailer while it’s actually moving – and another predictable fiasco that leaves most of the food Taci was trying to prepare on the floor (she even smashes Nicky in the face with some sort of bread dough as he comes in to check out what’s going on). The climax occurs on an ultra-narrow highway leading to their final redoubt in Colorado. Nicky demands that in order to make it up the 8,000-foot elevation, the collection of boulders Taci has picked up along the way – all carefully labeled with tags on where she got them – and also the cases of home-canned raspberry preserves Taci bought along the way must be thrown away before he’ll attempt the trip. Taci ostensibly goes along with her husband’s common-sense edict but secretly hides both the rocks and the preserves. They face the predictable hazards going up the narrow mountain road, including a car coming in the other direction. When they’re at the summit Nicky pulls rank on Taci and they throw out all the boulders and preserve jars that were weighing them down on the way up. Then the film cuts to the opening framing scene, in which Nicky says he doesn’t know how they got back down off the mountain (no doubt Vincente Minnelli, Albert Hackett, and Frances Goodrich didn’t want to figure that one out either!) and Taci, who’s the legal owner of the trailer since Nicki deeded it to her earlier as an act of love, is finally willing to sell it. Only the sympathetic trailer-park manager, who along with his wife is interested in buying the trailer himself, tells Nicky that he can patch things up with his wife with just two magic words – “I’m sorry.” The film ends with Nicky and Taci apologizing to each other and repairing to the trailer, with the philosophical manager lamenting the fact that by giving Nicky that good advice he’s done himself out of the trailer he wanted.

The Long, Long Trailer was shot in the Anscocolor process, and there are scenes in the movie in which we miss the vibrancy of Technicolor (notably in the outdoor scenes shot at Yosemite; the National Park Service gets an acknowledgement in the closing credits), but on the whole it’s a charming and entertaining movie even though it does seem surprising that Desi gets more and funnier slapstick gags than Lucy does. It’s a testament to how well they worked together as a comedy team even though it does at times seem like a batch of I Love Lucy episodes spliced together to the length of a feature film. “The simple truth is that neither Lucy nor Desi ever achieved anything alone that approached the artistic achievement they enjoyed together,” Purdum wrote in his book. “Their collaboration was lightning in a bottle, a once-in-a-lifetime combination that could never be recaptured but has been preserved forever, thanks to Desi’s insistence on putting I Love Lucy on high-quality film.”

The Murderers Are Among Us (Deutsche Film [DEFA], Herzog-Filmverleth, Donau-Filmgesellschaft, 1946)

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

After The Long, Long Trailer on September 20 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for a film I was particularly interested in: The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), the first film made in Germany after World War II. Eddie Muller showed it as part of his “Noir Alley” series, and it turned out to be fascinating historically as well as quite good as entertainment. The Murderers Are Among Us was written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who unlike most of the geniuses who worked in the German film industry during the Weimar Republic (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder et al.) stayed in Germany and worked throughout the Nazi era. According to Muller’s introduction, Staudte originally rationalized that he was serving German art and culture by remaining in Nazi Germany and continuing to make films for it, but eventually he decided he’d just been used by the regime as one of their in-house propagandists. (During the first five years of the Nazi regime, 1933 to 1937, there was still a surprising level of freedom for German filmmakers because the biggest German studio, UFA, was owned by Alfred Hugenberg, a Right-winger but a monarchist instead of a Nazi. Then in 1938 Joseph Goebbels decided to nationalize UFA and put all German filmmaking under his personal control. This is what led Detlef Sierck to flee and ultimately settle in the U.S., where he made great films as Douglas Sirk.) Staudte apparently started writing the script for The Murderers Are Among Us while the Nazis were still in power – in secret, since he knew he could have been arrested or even executed if the Nazis had found out what he was writing. He constructed a powerful, if somewhat didactic, story about two survivors, Dr. Hans Mertens (Wilhelm Borchert) and Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef, who later got a contract offer from David O. Selznick, who told her to “Americanize” her last name to “Neff” and tell people she was from Austria, not Germany. “Hitler was Austrian,” she reminded Selznick as she refused).

Dr. Mertens was a retired surgeon who tells us he quit practicing medicine because after the war he could no longer stand the sight of blood or the sounds of people in pain. Later we find out that he personally participated in the summary execution of over 120 civilian men, women, and children. Susanne Wallner was just released from a concentration camp. The two fight over an apartment, which Mertens is squatting in and Susanne lived in before the war started and she and her father were arrested. Susanne insists on moving in and Mertens stays there because he has nowhere else to go, so the two end up living together. At first there’s an arm’s-length relationship between them, but ultimately they end up falling in love. Mertens is out to kill a major industrialist, Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen), because Brückner was his commanding officer during the war and gave him the order for the extermination of civilians. There’s also Susanne’s grandfather, an elderly man who makes his living fixing other people’s glasses, and a letter supposedly written by Susanne’s father and sent to his family with instructions that it only be opened after his death. One of the film’s major plot points is that it’s uncertain whether Susanne’s father is alive or dead; at one point someone gives the letter to a phony medium who claims to be able, from the psychic emanations of the letter, to tell whether its author is alive or dead and where he is in either state. Only the false medium is able to cop out when someone cries out at his séance and he says the communication was broken. There’s a powerful scene midway through the movie in which Mertens flashes back to his experiences during the war, but though we hear the sounds of combat on the soundtrack the only thing we see is Mertens’s face registering fear and revulsion. At first I wondered if Staudte had staged the scene because he couldn’t afford to create a visual scene of combat, but later in the movie he does give us a visual flashback to the mass murder Mertens committed on Brückner’s orders.

Staudte had a great deal of difficulty getting his film green-lighted because he wanted to shoot it in Berlin, which in 1946 was still being administered by an uneasy coalition between the victorious Allied powers – the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Part of the problem was the original ending of Staudte’s script: he wanted the film to end with Mertens actually killing Brückner and then standing trial, and the case would be submitted to the jury. The film would stop there, challenging the audience to decide whether Mertens killing Brückner was justifiable either legally or morally. But the American, British, and French authorities didn’t want that version filmed, not only because it appeared to condone vigilante justice but because Germany had not yet re-established a functioning judicial system. So Staudte went to the Soviets, who had established a film company called DEFA that took over the old UFA studios in Neubabelsberg because they happened to be located in East Berlin. Staudte shot the film for DEFA, but either the DEFA executives or their Soviet overlords demanded that he change the ending, so in the film as it stands Mertens is about to kill Brückner when Susanne discovers him and stops him. Then there’s an uncertain but powerfully shot sequence in which either Brückner is put on trial for war crimes or we’re just supposed to think that’s a possibility, and the film ends on a row of crosses meant to represent Brückner’s victims and all the innocent victims of Nazism in general. The ending is actually prefigured with a great sequence in which Mertens supposedly is taking Brückner nightclubbing (one of the most interesting parts of the film is the extent to which the pre-war German cabaret scene survived both Nazism and the loss of the war; unlike Donald Trump and his minions going after late-night TV comedians, Joseph Goebbels was savvy enough as a propagandist to realize that giving people harmless outlets to laugh was a great contributor to social stability) but really plans to kill him. Only he’s interrupted by a middle-aged woman (Elly Burgmer) who needs his professional help as a doctor to treat her sick child.

When The Murderers Are Among Us started I noticed the high-contrast chiaroscuro cinematography (by Freidl Ben-Grund and Eugen Klagemann) and felt that the film noir style had come home to the country that invented it. Film noir was largely the creation of expatriate German directors and cinematographers who realized that the conventions of German Expressionist filmmaking – dark shadows, oblique angles, high-contrast lighting and an overall use of chiaroscuro imagery to suggest menace – were an appropriate way to film the “hard–boiled” crime fiction of Black Mask writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Charles said early on in the film that he couldn’t recall us watching anything so relentlessly grim – and I said I could: 1920’s German films like G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street and Diary of a Lost Girl, which expressed the traumas Germany had gone through the last time it had lost a world war. At times during The Murderers Are Among Us it seems as if Germany itself was going through a nationwide case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s amazing to think that within a few years Germany – West Germany, anyway – would not only have become a functioning democracy (belying the widely held theory of people in the Allied countries that Germans were naturally authoritarian and would always gravitate to tyrannical rulers) but have so completely rebuilt its economy, in what the Germans called the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”), that when The Beatles went from the largely still war-ruined Liverpool to the restored Hamburg (Liverpool and Hamburg had been major bombing targets during the war because they were both major ports), they kept asking themselves, “Isn’t this the country that lost the war?” I also wondered if Wolfgang Staudte had chosen his title deliberately because Murderers Among Us had also been Fritz Lang’s working title for his 1931 masterpiece M – only his producer, Seymour Nebenzal, had made him change it because he thought it would be too much of an in-your-face challenge to the Nazis. (In 1931 the Nazis weren’t in power yet, but they were already known for organizing mobs to disrupt plays or movies they objected to ideologically.)

Despite the compromised ending – and I’m not sure whether I’d have liked the film better with Staudte’s original ending, which might have seemed too didactic and openly propagandistic (a danger the film flirts with but without going over) – The Murderers Are Among Us is a quite impressive film that deserves to be far better known. Staudte also cast it effectively; though he was sufficiently concerned about Wilhelm Borchert’s well-documented support of the Nazis when they were in power that he listed him just as “W. Borchert” and billed him eighth in the credits even though he’s the male lead, he went ahead and used him anyway. I’m guessing that Borchert used the part to express his own misgivings about his role during the Nazi years. Hildegard Knef is also a stunning on-screen presence, showing a strong face that reminded me of the young Garbo. By coincidence (or maybe not), Knef would go on to play a role created by Garbo in the 1954 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, based on Garbo’s 1939 film Ninotchka – she and Don Ameche played the roles later portrayed in the 1957 film version by Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire.

The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth Productions, Aurora, MGM/United Artists, 1982)

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

Last night (Friday, September 19) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an odd movie from 1982 called The Secret of NIMH, which I’d ordered as a Blu-Ray disc from Amazon.com even though it was a home-burned disc rather than a pressed one. (Charles and I realized that when, instead of shutting itself off when the movie ended, the disc started playing the film all over again.) I had ordered this because I was sent a copy of the new Intrada Records CD of Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack music for review in Fanfare, and in that regard the movie was a success. Goldsmith’s score was absolutely stunning, appropriately heroic and spooky when the film’s plot called for it. Unlike John Debney in his score for Luck, Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to write truly terrifying music when scenes in the film demanded it. I also loved the fact that The Secret of NIMH was an old-fashioned drawn-animation movie instead of one of those horrible computer-animated things. I don’t like the overall look of computer animation, though there have been a few films in the process, like Ratatouille and Soul, that were so cleverly written and directed they overcame my distaste for computer animation in general. And I also enjoyed the color scheme; the closing credits announced that the film was in Technicolor, and though this was made in 1982, long after the demise of the classic three-strip process, director Don Bluth and his animators achieved some of the same vibrancy. This is a rare modern-day color film that is actually colorful; instead of relying on the murky greens and browns that dominate all too many color films today (especially live-action ones), The Secret of NIMH is a feast for the eyes. It also had an unusually strong cast of voice actors, though it was pretty much the over-the-hill gang even in 1982: Hermione Baddeley, John Carradine, Derek Jacobi, Dom DeLuise, Shannen Doherty, Peter Strauss, Paul Shenar, Aldo Ray.

The film’s biggest defect was its plot, or rather its lack thereof. It was based on a 1971 children’s novel called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (true name: Robert Leslie Carroll Conly), and adapted into a screenplay by Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman, and Will Finn. It’s the sort of story that because it’s a fantasy, the writers figured they could make anything happen, whether or not it made any narrative or dramatic sense. The central character is Mrs. Brisby (the writing committee changed her name so she wouldn’t be confused with the Frisbee toy, whose makers, Wham-O, actually threatened to sue if the name “Frisby” was used), voiced by Elizabeth Hartman in her last film. She was a stunning young actress who made her screen debut with Sidney Poitier in the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, in which she played a blind girl who falls in love with Poitier’s character without knowing he’s Black – though, to her credit, she stays in love with him even after her racist mother (Shelley Winters) “outs” him. Alas, Hartman’s life was marked by severe depression – which seems to have worked her way into her career as well; among her stage roles were the clinically depressed Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, and she named the famously introverted Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer. In 1987, five years after making The Secret of NIMH, she committed suicide by throwing herself out of the fifth-floor window of her apartment. Unlike the real-life actress playing her, Mrs. Brisby is indomitable, driven to do whatever she needs in order to protect the four children she had with her late husband. Oh, did I tell you she’s also a field mouse living on a farm belonging to a guy named Fitzgibbons (Tom Hatten)?

One of her kids, Timmy, has developed a fever and so Mrs. Brisby goes to see another mouse, Mr. Ages (Arthur Malet), to get a diagnosis and treatment. Mr. Ages gives her an envelope containing a medicine and instructs her to dose Timmy with it every day for three weeks. He also tells her that she must keep Timmy absolutely immobile for the three-week course of the treatment, which is a problem because “Moving Day” is fast approaching. Mrs. Brisby and her children live in a small concrete enclosure in the middle of a farm, and the farmer is about to do his spring planting and that process will destroy their home and force Mrs. Brisby and her kids to relocate. Fortunately, Mrs. Brisby’s Auntie Shrew (Hermione Baddeley) is able to give her a temporary reprieve by sabotaging Farmer Fitzgibbons’s tractor. Along the way back home Mrs. Brisby meets Jeremy (Dom DeLuise), a crow who’s trying to build himself a nest out of variously colored strings to serve as a love nest for himself and whatever girl crow he meets along the way. On the way home Jeremy saves Mrs. Brisby from a gigantic but not particularly active cat named Dragon and rescues the crucial envelope containing Timmy’s medicine. Jeremy also urges Mrs. Brisby to get advice on her housing situation from The Great Owl (John Carradine). Mrs. Brisby protests on the ground that owls eat mice, but she goes anyway and the owl in turn tells her to visit a colony of rats living on the Fitzgibbons farm. The rat colony is led by Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi), whom we saw in a prologue dictating a memoir. It turns out the rats were part of a secret experiment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in which they were genetically modified to become smarter and live longer, only they escaped and NIMH is sending out goon squads either to recapture or kill them. (Casting NIMH agents as the principal villains seems all too timely these days, when President Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are systematically destroying America’s entire public health infrastructure.)

One problem with the rats is that the genetic modifications make them dependent on modern technology for their own survival – which explains the marvelous scene in which they’re running a bootleg power cord to the Fitzgibbons home to steal power for their colony, much the way a lot of Third World people who can’t afford electricity themselves steal it from those better off. Eventually Mrs. Brisby and the NIMH rats conceive of the idea of levitating her house off its foundation, for which they first have to drug the cat Dragon so it won’t interfere. Jenner (Paul Shenar), a NIMH rat villain, sabotages the process and the house falls and kills Nicodemus. Justin (Peter Strauss), the friendly captain of the rats’ guard, and Sullivan (Aldo Ray), who was Jenner’s accomplice until he saw what he was doing was wrong and switched sides, take out Jenner. Just then the entire ground under the Fitzgibbons’ home starts sinking and turning into mud, but Mrs. Brisby is able to save the day with the help of a magic amulet that automatically activates itself whenever its wearer shows courage. Ultimately the house is saved, Mrs. Brisby nurses her son Timmy to health, and Jeremy the clumsy crow finally finds a girlfriend of his own species. The Secret of NIMH’s plot is so preposterously complicated and filled with unbelievable incidents I literally had a hard time staying awake for it, despite the sheer physical beauty of the animation and the power of Jerry Goldsmith’s music. The score contains a song, “Flying Dreams,” composed by Goldsmith to lyrics by 1970’s singer-songwriter Paul Williams, which is heard twice: sung by Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Sally Stevens because Elizabeth Hartman couldn’t sing) as a lullaby to her sick child Timmy and again during the closing credits by Williams himself. I had been under the impression that The Secret of NIMH was a financial flop, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page it made $15 million on a $7 million investment and did well enough at the box office that they were able to make a sequel, The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue, though that was produced in-house by the animation division of MGM/United Artists without Don Bluth’s involvement and with only two of the original voice actors (Dom DeLuise and Arthur Malet) repeating their roles. It flopped.

Inside the Mafia (Premium Pictures, United Artists, 1959)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 18) my husband Charles came home from work about a half-hour earlier than usual given his 1 to 10 p.m. work shift and demanded that we watch a movie instead of staying on the MS-NBC news channel. The only one I could find on YouTube that was short enough we could watch it and still catch Stephen Colbert’s show later on was Inside the Mafia, a 1959 “ripped from the headlines” drama done in semi-documentary fashion by our old friend, producer Robert E. “Baseball” Kent (I’ve nicknamed him that because of the anecdote that as a writer he was able to chatter away about the ballgame he’d been to the night before while simultaneously writing the latest pile of clichés that constituted his new script), directed by Edward L. Cahn from a script by Orville H. Hampton. The real-life event this film was based on was a 1957 conference of America’s organized crime leaders in a remote village called Apalachin, New York (called “Apple Lake” in the movie). Officers of the New York State Police noticed all those middle-aged men in black suits converging on this tiny town and wondered why, and in their investigation they stumbled on a major meeting of America’s crime bosses and busted it. From that screenwriter Hampton developed a story about a bitter rivalry for control of America’s crime syndicate between Augie Martello (Ted de Corsia) and his lieutenant, Tony Ledo (Cameron Mitchell, top-billed), on one side and Dan Regent (Edward Platt, unusually cast in an unsympathetic role; we know him as the understanding social worker in Rebel Without a Cause and the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond TV spoof Get Smart!) and his men on the other. The two factions converge on a tiny general-aviation airport in Apple Lake and take hostage the family who run it: Rod Balcom (Louis Jean Heydt) and his daughters Anne (Elaine Edwards) and Sandy (Carol Nugent). Both the women have boyfriends: Anne’s is New York State Police Captain Doug Blair (Jim Brown) and Sandy’s is a clueless young blond who stumbles into the action when he shows up with the airport’s station wagon, which he had borrowed so he could fix it.

Narrated in the usual sententious voice-of-God tones by William Woodson, Inside the Mafia is basically a surprisingly dull drama set mostly inside Rod Balcom’s living room (with occasional cutaways to the airport’s control room, which seems to be located above the living space). The gangsters are waiting for the arrival of the overall head of the syndicate, “Johnny Lucero” (Grant Richards) – think Lucky Luciano – who fled to Naples when he was wanted for too many things in the U.S. but is willing to risk a return for one day only because the syndicate’s meeting is too important to miss. Tony Ledo plots to assassinate Lucero as soon as he gets off the plane, only his plans change when Augie Martello finally dies in a secret nursing home of the bullet wounds he sustained in the opening scene. Now he wants Lucero alive so he can be appointed to take over Augie’s wing of the Mafia now that Augie is dead. Having Lucero’s exile be in Naples instead of Sicily (where the real Luciano hid out during his exile) was a major mistake on Orville Hampton’s part; the Neapolitan gangsters called themselves the Camorra, after the bandit bands that beset central Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The term Mafia – originally an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society,” since it began as a resistance movement against Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the early 1800’s and turned to crime once Napoleon was defeated – was Sicilian, and the later phrase “La Cosa Nostra” (“This Thing of Ours”) was concocted so members of the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia could work together instead of fighting each other. Another mistake was having Lucero fly across the Atlantic in a small private plane that didn’t look big enough to get him that far.

After a brief attempt to take on one of the gangsters that gets foiled easily, Rod Balcom (ya remember Rod Balcom?) and Captain Blair (ya remember Captain Blair?) manage to sneak into the air control tower and send a message in Morse code that alerts the state police to what’s going on in Apple Lake, though by the time the cops arrive most of the gangsters have killed each other in a bloodbath and the police show up to arrest the survivors. Charles questioned the ending, noting that even if the police hadn’t arrived there wouldn’t have been enough Mafiosi to continue the syndicate as a going concern now that so many of them had killed each other. Another oddity about this movie is the plethora of non-Italian names among the gangsters; one of the major plot points of the script Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi worked into their script for Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) was that only full-blooded Sicilians or Italians could become Mafia members. The plot of GoodFellas was largely driven by gangster Henry Hill’s (Ray Liotta) frustration that because he had an Irish father he could never become a “made man”; his mom was Sicilian, but half-breeds didn’t count. Inside the Mafia has some well-done moments of genuine terror as the Balcoms and their significant others realize that once the gangsters are done with their business, they’ll slaughter them all because they won’t want to leave behind any witnesses. Other than that, though, it’s a mediocre movie, one of a chain of gangster films produced by Robert E. Kent and directed by Edward L. Cahn, and lacking the sick thrills of The Music Box Kid (1960), a 1920’s-set period piece they came up with that featured a truly great performance by Ron Foster as the psychotic hit man who nicknamed his Thompson submachine gun his “music box.” Inside the Mafia is a mixed movie, too good to be entirely dismissable but nowhere near classic status, though at the very least it’s an interesting benchmark in the history of the depiction of organized crime in film and one of the first films that actually used the “M”-word to describe it. Still, Charles was struck by the fact that the script made much of the fact that the climax takes place on September 18 – the very date on which we were watching it!