The Unknown (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 18) I wanted my husband Charles and I to get back home from dinner soon enough to watch the “Silent Sunday Nights” program on Turner Classic Movies, which was featuring a really quirky movie: The Unknown, a 1927 film directed by Tod Browning and featuring Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who poses as a man without arms and manipulates objects with his feet, using his toes as fingers. He shoots a gun, throws knives, and smokes with his toes. Written by frequent Browning collaborator Waldemar Young from a story by Browning himself, The Unknown tells a story of Alonzo’s love for Nanon (Joan Crawford, cast in the film after MGM abandoned their original plan to have Greta Garbo in it, and quite effective), daughter of the circus’s owner, Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz). Alonzo has a sidekick named Cojo (John George) who’s the usual philosophical voice of reason trying to talk him out of his doomed attraction to Nanon. Nanon has a phobia against being touched by a man, courtesy of all the male assholes who’ve tried to paw her previously as a prelude to seduction or rape. Alonzo figures that with his armless act he’s got a shot at Nanon’s affections since she won’t have to worry about him trying to hold her. Cojo tells him that once she realizes he has arms, she won’t want anything to do with him again. Alonzo is “outed” when Zanzi attacks Nanon and Alonzo kills him to defend her. This also reveals that not only does Alonzo have arms, he has a quite obvious deformity: a doubled thumb on his left hand. Browning and Young hint that Alonzo is an escaped criminal on the run from something or other (blessedly they do no more than hint at this, though apparently some still-lost footage gave us more of the backstory), and that’s why he adopted the pose of an armless man and went to work for Zanzi’s so-called “Gypsy Circus.” Unfortunately Alonzo has a rival for Nanon’s affections: Malabar (frequent Chaney co-star Norman Kerry; he was in The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera), the circus strongman, who’s determined to woo Nanon and break her of her phobia against being touched by a male.

Alonzo decides that [spoiler alert!] the only way he can ensure that Nanon will love him is to have both his arms amputated for real. So he blackmails a surgeon (John St. Polis) who used to be part of his gang to perform this bizarre operation, and while The Unknown would be an even kinkier movie than it is if Browning had shown Alonzo’s recovery from this procedure (having had some major surgeries myself I’m all too aware of how long it takes for the body to recoup from a shock like that!), he returns to the film’s Spanish setting in time to see Malabar and Nanon doing a theatre act. By this time Malabar and Nanon have become engaged – there was a quite clever scene earlier on in which Nanon and Malabar were bathing and Nanon panicked, leapt into Malabar’s arms, and decided being touched and embraced by a man weren’t so bad after all – and they’re just waiting for their old friend Alonzo to return and attend their wedding. They’re preparing to do an act in which Malabar will be fastened to harnesses hooked up to horses. The two horses will pull in different directions and Malabar will demonstrate his strength by being able to resist so his own arms won’t be pulled off. Alonzo shows up thinking that he’s got it made with Nanon now that he no longer has arms, but all too soon he realizes that he’s given up his arms for nothing. He determines to kill Malabar by sabotaging his stage act, throwing the switch that controls the treadmills the horses walk on so they’ll pull Malabar’s arms off and kill him, but in the end one of the horses stomps on Alonzo and kills him, so Malabar and Nanon end up together at last.

For years the only version of The Unknown known to exist was a 46-minute cut-down print released in England (we knew where it was from because it bore the name of Sir William Jury, head of MGM’s British distributor) until two much longer prints were found in France and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately these prints had titles only in French and Czech; fortunately a cutting continuity survived and contained the text of the titles in English. (A lot of silent films that survived in the archives of non-English-speaking countries have only badly translated titles, and it’s been a chore to figure out just what the actors should be indicated as saying. The titles of Oscar Micheaux’s surviving silents were sometimes restored from quoting the dialogue in Micheaux’s published novelizations of their stories.) The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York pieced together a nearly complete version of The Unknown from the French and Czech prints and redid the titles, putting the indication ‘GEM 2022” (for “George Eastman Museum” and the date they did the restoration) in the lower right corner of each title. They also created a new set of opening credits in the authentic style MGM used during the period instead of just slapping on the film’s name and credits onto plain black boards (good for them!). Joan Crawford later said that working with Chaney had been a major step forward in her career: “Lon Chaney was my introduction to acting. The concentration, the complete absorption he gave to his characterization filled me with such awe I could scarcely speak to him. … Watching him gave me the desire to be a real actress.” Not surprisingly, the film’s publicity stated that Chaney had taught himself the art of manipulating objects with his feet and toes, though modern sources indicate that he had a “foot double” for the close-ups, a real armless circus performer named Paul Desmuke. Desmuke was even advertised by the circus owner that employed him, Al G. Barnes, as “The Man Who Doubled for Lon Chaney's Legs in ‘The Unknown’.”

In her introduction to the film, “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart said that The Unknown was an outlier from MGM’s usual house style of sophisticated films set in affluent locations. It was and it wasn’t; I’ve long suspected that the whole idea of studios’ “house styles” has been way overblown by film historians. It’s true that certain studios gravitated to certain types of stories (Warner Bros. aimed a lot of their films at proletarian audiences because in 1928 they bought the First National theatre chain, and since the theatres that formed First National had been built in relatively middle-class parts of cities and rural areas rather than the upscale movie palaces of more affluent locations, that’s what the audiences who lived there wanted to see), but it’s also true that any of the major studios were prepared to make any sort of film as long as they thought it would make money. MGM heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg knew they’d inherited an effective and lucrative director/star collaboration in Tod Browning and Lon Chaney when they got them from Goldwyn Pictures after the 1924 merger. So they let Browning and Chaney continue to make the series of bizarre melodramas like The Unholy Three, The Blackbird (another story in which Chaney pretends to be disabled to carry out a criminal career: he’s posing as a kindly crippled bishop and his brother, a criminal mastermind called “The Blackbird,” only midway through the film we learn that “The Bishop” and “The Blackbird” are the same person, and in the sort of ironic twist Browning loved it turns out that by posing as a cripple for so long he’s actually become one), London After Midnight, and this. I’ve long thought that Browning’s career never recovered from the dual whammy of the coming of sound and Chaney’s death from throat cancer in 1930; the two were supposed to make Dracula together when Chaney died and Browning’s disinterest in the Dracula he ultimately made with Bela Lugosi is all too obvious in the final product. Asked by Thalberg to follow up Dracula with a film scarier than Frankenstein, Browning came up with Freaks (1932), in which he filled his cast with real circus freaks and made them the good guys and the normal people in the story the bad guys. Freaks was a notorious box-office bomb and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s (much too late for Browning, who made his last film in 1939 and died in 1962), and for the rest of the 1930’s he made just four movies, two of them remakes or reworkings of his previous hits.

Story Conference (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 18), after the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” showing of the 1927 Tod Browning/Lon Chaney vehicle The Unknown, they put on Story Conference, a quite engaging 1934 short starring Lillian Roth, who burned out her career on alcoholism and poor choices in men in the 1930’s and made a comeback of sorts via a sensationally successful autobiography (co-authored with Gerold Frank, who’d later parlay his experience with self-destructive stars with his 1975 biography of Judy Garland, and Mike Connolly) published in 1954 called I’ll Cry Tomorrow. This got filmed in 1955 by MGM with Susan Hayward, Hollywood’s go-to girl for alcoholics then, as Roth. (I’m pretty sure this was the first film ever to depict an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on screen.) Story Conference casts Roth as herself, a major Broadway star brought to Hollywood by “Terrific Pictures” – only they don’t have a script for her (an all too common occurrence among movie producers in the 1930’s, who’d sign people without a clear idea of just what they were going to do with them: witness Paul Whiteman and King of Jazz). So studio head Eugene Von Grona (as himself) gathers a bunch of writers to brainstorm a story for Roth, and they have a number of intriguing ideas which the film’s director, Bert (Bert Matthews), shoots down. The short was produced by Warner Bros. and their subsidiary Vitaphone (though they’d abandoned the original Vitaphone sound-on-disc process by 1931 and were shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, they kept Vitaphone as a trade name for their band shorts into the 1930’s), and not surprisingly they parodied a number of Warners’ then-current feature films in this one.

The high point was “Alimony Hotel,” in which they took the premise of “Honeymoon Hotel” from the 1933 Warners musical Footlight Parade and flipped it. The number takes place in Reno (at the time when Nevada was a mecca for divorcing couples because it was one of the first states to institute no-fault divorce; all you had to do is live there for six weeks and at least pretend to be planning to relocate there permanently, and quite a number of “divorce hotels” sprang up for people needing a place to stay for the legally obligatory six weeks) and features a number of women joyously waving their divorce decrees in the air and celebrating their newly regained singlehood. The film opens with a group of women singing a song to the glories of working in Hollywood, “Working in the Movies,” and an amusing scene, a Western parody, in which all the parts (including the moustachioed villain) are played by women. The film also features two vocal groups, The Sizzlers and The Three Minutes; The Sizzlers were all male but I can’t find out anything online about The Three Minutes and (unlike The Sizzlers) they made just this one film. There’s also a weird rural comedy number called “Down the Old Back Road” that’s far inferior to the other songs from the film (all the others were by Cliff Hess but this was by Herman Hupfeld, who wrote “As Time Goes By” and “Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep”) and for some reason doesn’t feature Lillian Roth; and an even odder number called “If I Were a Millionaire,” done as a duet between Roth and a mediocre Irish tenor who’s unidentified on imdb.com. This sets up a nice production number in which the various chorus girls are turned into items of jewelry, the sort of thing Busby Berkeley was doing in the big-budgeted musical features this one was parodying. Story Conference was a genuinely charming bit of Hollywood self-parody, directed by Roy Mack from a script by Eddie Moran, A. Dorian Otvos, and Cyrus Wood – and it’s hard to imagine that the real-life process of coming up with the story for this one wasn’t as lame as the story conference depicted in it!

Chicago Syndicate (Clover, Columbia, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing 1955 gangster film called Chicago Syndicate on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies. This was one of a cycle of movies with city names in their titles that purported to expose the stranglehold organized crime had on those areas. In his intro, Muller compared it to the 1949 Paramount movie Chicago Deadline and said that Paramount had spent $1.2 million on their film while producer Sam Katzman, who made this film through his own Clover company with Columbia as his distributor, spent just $125,000. At least part of the differential was due to a much lower-voltage cast in the principal roles; while Chicago Deadline had starred Alan Ladd and Donna Reed; the leads in Chicago Syndicate were Dennis O’Keefe (visibly older and more avuncular than he’d been in the mid-1940’s when he transitioned from musicals and romantic comedies into noir) and Allison Hayes. Chicago Syndicate begins with the on-the-streets drive-by shooting of accountant Nelson Kern, whose wife commits suicide that night because she doesn’t want to live with the shame of having her late husband exposed as a front for gangster Arnold “Arnie” Valent (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane and afterwards a quite frequent villain in crime films like this). A Secret Six-like combine of local newspaper owners, businesspeople and relatively honest politicians forms to get rid of Valent and his crooked enterprises once and for all, but they face a problem. Thanks to Kern and his accounting expertise, the money the gangsters earn from their illegal enterprises (including gambling, off-track horse-race betting, and extortion) has been routed and re-routed through a batch of supposedly legitimate business enterprises, one of which, Olympic Insurance, hires Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe), as an accountant. Barry is really a secret agent for the combine that’s trying to put Valent out of business; a veteran of World War II, he’s an expert on tax law. He crashes one of Valent’s illegal casinos one night and enlists well-dressed society woman Sue Morton (Allison Hayes, quite capable here even though three years later she was doing cheap sci-fi dreck like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman) to do so.

What he doesn’t realize – and neither do we until midway through the film ¬– is that “Sue Morton” is really Joyce Kern, daughter of the murdered accountant, who’s set out on her own campaign to bring Valent to justice for having had her dad murdered and her mom driven to suicide. Amsterdam (whose name sounds so phony I kept expecting it to be an alias, too, though it isn’t) got hired to take down the titular Chicago syndicate (which actually operates nationwide, though the Windy City is its center) with a promise of $60,000 as a reward payment, with which he intends to start his own accounting firm, though he laconically says he’s reluctant to take the job because he’s worried he won’t live long enough to collect. The illegal casino operates in the back room of a legitimate nightclub where the star attraction is Benny Chico (Xavier Cugat, who in the 1930’s and 1940’s had been the top Latin American bandleader in the U.S. until Desi Arnaz replaced him). Chico’s singer is Connie Peters (Abbe Lane, Cugat’s real-life wife at the time and the one person in the film who gets to play a role of real moral complexity), who’s also Valent’s girlfriend de jour. Unfortunately, he's got tired of her and wants to replace her with Sue Morton even though Sue is attracted to Amsterdam even before she learns that he’s really a secret agent out to bring down Valent (which she learns from the police, who figure that if she knows who he is and what side he’s really on they’ll be able to coordinate their anti-Valent activities). Amsterdam rather passively lets Valent go after Sue without any apparent objection, which gets some interesting what-kind-of-man-are-you reactions from Connie, who wonders why he’s being so cavalier as to let Valent move in on his girl. At first mistrustful of Amsterdam, Valent takes him into his confidence when Amsterdam, with the help of the police, engineers a phony insurance claim and thereby saves Olympic Insurance $75,000 (though Amsterdam demands $5,000 of the savings for himself as a “Christmas bonus”).

Eventually Amsterdam learns that there are two sets of books for Valent’s enterprises, the above-board one that the Internal Revenue Service knows about and the secret ones that Valent keeps in his own handwriting and are at the apartment of his mother (Carroll McComas), who’s completely ignorant that her son is a gangster. When Amsterdam finally learns where the secret set of books are kept, he’s too late: Valent is shown carefully burning them all and thereby making the evidence against him literally go up in smoke. Fortunately, the late accountant Nelson Kern, who had access to Valent’s secret books, had them microfilmed and hidden in a secret location. The only people who know the hiding place are Connie, whom Valent and his thugs torture (we only hear the sounds of her being beaten off-screen, but there’s a surprisingly graphic shot of her later on showing just how much damage Valent’s henchmen have done to her face), and Benny, who out of love for Connie gives away the secret that the microfilm is hidden in a spare violin case in storage at a local music shop. (I wondered if the writers, William Sackheim for the story and Joseph Hoffman for the script, borrowed this device from Puccini’s Tosca, only reversing the genders; in the opera, based on a play by Victorien Sardou, it’s Tosca who blurts out the secret to prevent the bad guys from torturing her lover Cavaradossi.) The crooks head out to the music store, where Valent finds the microfilm and are about to set it on fire when Amsterdam, despite being outnumbered three to one, manages to push Valent, grab the microfilm, and escape. Naturally the crooks hunt him down, and in a final climax that takes place in a tunnel of mysterious provenance (it looks like a subway tunnel even though Chicago’s light-rail transit system is a network of elevated trains rather than a subway; later we’re told it’s to move goods from one department store to another without them getting caught in urban traffic). Amsterdam, who’s unarmed at first but manages to get a gun from somewhere (until it runs out of bullets and he’s helpless again), holds out long enough until the police, summoned by Sue, finally arrive and shoot down Valent just as he’s about to kill Amsterdam. Amsterdam and Sue end up together and the usual stentorian narrator of the film (Richard H. Cutting) announces that the microfilm was used to convict all the surviving members of the syndicate and therefore put it out of business … at least for now.

Chicago Syndicate was billed on Eddie Muller’s TCM program as a film noir but it’s really more of a gangster movie; aside from Connie, all the characters are either 100 percent good or 100 percent evil. What’s more, despite the presence of two talented cinematographers (Henry Freulich and Fred Jackman, Jr., the latter the son of one of the earliest special-effects pioneers in the silent era), Chicago Syndicate doesn’t even look like a film noir until the final scene. By 1955 the movie studios had taken advantage of the greater portability of film equipment to shoot on real locations, which meant a gain in authenticity (plenty of recognizable Chicago landmarks, including the Wrigley Building, are seen in this film) but a loss of the kinds of claustrophobic chiaroscuro effects possible in studio set-build “exteriors.” Also by 1955 the studios had ended their Cold War with television and were starting to sell TV networks and local stations the rights to air their films once they were done with their theatrical runs. As a result, producers and studio executives were starting to order cinematographers to avoid high-contrast lighting and shoot their films with a greyer, more “even” look because the shadows of classic noir wouldn’t reproduce well on the low-contrast, low-resolution over-the-air images of the black-and-white TV sets of the time. Chicago Syndicate emerges as a competent, workmanlike thriller, decently directed by Fred F. Sears (who was also making the quickie rock ‘n’ roll films for Katzman and Columbia at the time, as well as an outlier, 1957’s Calypso Heat Wave, which made the spectacularly wrong prediction that calypso would replace rock as the popular music of young America but came off as better than Sears’s rock movies, I suspect because calypso turned him on a lot more than rock did!) until his career and his life both came to a skidding halt when he died of a heart attack on November 30, 1957 at just 44. (He worked so fast he had five films, Crash Landing, The World Was His Jury, Going Steady, Badman’s Country, and Ghost of the China Sea, left “in the can” to be released after his death.)

Interstate (Oscar Corral, Haleem Muksin, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 15) my husband Charles and I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church for a screening of Interstate, a 2026 documentary film by Oscar Corral and Haleem Muhsin which depicted how the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s was routed in ways that destroyed economically thriving African-American communities and dispossessed residents that had owned their own homes for generations, forcing them to become renters or mortgage holders. The film focused on five cities where this happened: Miami, Florida (whose Black Overtown district was targeted and where Corral and Muhsin started their research; they originally planned a short film about Overtown but ended up expanding it); St. Paul, Minnesota; New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Montgomery, Alabama. The situation in Montgomery was the worst of all because there the person in charge of constructing the interstate highway system was Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt, Jr., the closest this film has to a hissable villain. Engelhardt was also the head of the Montgomery branch of the White Citizens’ Council, which can best be thought of as the above-ground political branch of the Ku Klux Klan the way Sinn Fein was the above-ground political branch of the Irish Republican Army. The White Citizens’ Council did the lobbying and strategizing of the white South’s bitter-end resistance to integration, while the Klan supplied the terrorist “muscle” to enforce the status quo. Engelhardt got the job of local contact and supervisor of the interstate highway system in Montgomery in 1956, with the wounds of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott still fresh. Armed with the weapon of eminent domain, the government’s ability to take people’s private property supposedly for the “public good” (though all too often it’s just been to reallocate it to bigger-pocketed and more politically influential private interests in the scam known as “redevelopment”), Engelhardt deliberately targeted the people who had led the bus boycott, specifically Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second-in-command. Fortunately he misread the map and Abernathy’s home was spared (though one right next door to it was condemned), but his church was targeted and destroyed.

This sad story has been repeated in American history again and again; I couldn’t help but think of the riots that destroyed the Black business community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 as well as the more recent battles over artificial intelligence data centers. As with the interstate highway system, data centers are being presented to communities across the U.S. (including white rural communities whose residents thought this would only happen to people of color, not them) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. People are being told their hard-earned equity must be sacrificed on the altar of “progress” and they’re going to have to live with the eyesores and noise pollution (one thing this film stressed was the public health dangers of living next to a freeway, especially the higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease, and asthma, all of which gets cited by white racists as “proof” that African-Americans and other people of color are “racially inferior” because they don’t live as long). One of the sorriest aspects of this film was the appearance of Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation under President Joe Biden, who talked up the provision of the Infrastructure Restoration Act of 2023 that set up a program to restore, as much as possible, the physical connections between segments of the African-American community that were bisected by the interstates. Then the film’s closing credits noted that in 2025 the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress eliminated all funding for this program, and in 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the few remaining provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Southern and border states raced to reapportion their congressional and state legislative districts to eliminate the few footholds of Black representation that had been eked out after 1965.

The point was that one of the reasons the Black community got so thoroughly screwed by the interstate highway program was that they had no political representation to speak of, and those are the “good old days” to which the whites who dominate the South and (less so) the rest of the country want to return. At the same time Corral and Muhsin, restricted to a one-hour running time, only touched on some of the broader issues raised by the interstate highway system – like why it had to be based on private cars at all. They show a brief clip of Robert Moses, the New York parks commissioner and construction supervisor, who was key in making sure the transportation system of America’s future would be based on private cars rather than mass transit – and who, according to his biographer Robert A. Caro, didn’t have to worry about the aggravation of traffic because he was always driven rather than having to drive himself.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Midway" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 1, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 15) my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch the two remaining shows of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order itself. The SVU show, called “Midway” because it takes place largely inside a carnival, was a chilling episode in which Leo Brooks (Rhett Dustin), the nine-year-old son of divorced couple Thomas and Helene Brooks (Anthony Goes and Abby Mueller), is taken to the carnival by Thomas even though he's not supposed to have unsupervised visitation rights. Thomas and Leo get into an argument, Leo throws down his cotton candy in anger, and Thomas goes off to get him some more – and when he turns back Leo is gone. Helene arrives at the carnival, having traced her son and her ex there, and they get into an argument that degenerates quickly to the point where the SVU cops there to investigate Leo’s disappearance have to separate them before they assault each other. Complicating matters is the fact that Leo had been sexually abused previously by his paternal uncle, and of course mom blames dad for his abusive brother. The police investigate and find Mary (Stella Marcus), a 19-year-old who worked as a casual employee at the carnival, who tells them that Leo is with “Bob” and will be better off with him than with his dysfunctional parents. Ultimately it turns out that “Bob” was an older man who kidnapped Mary, whose real name is Christine Anderson, when she was five. For the next 14 years Bob toured the country with Mary (as he called her) and regularly abused her physically and sexually, while she developed a full-blown case of the Stockholm Syndrome.

Ultimately Bob trusted her enough to let her out of his sight long enough to run errands for him, and the ironic twist at the end of the episode is that Bob had actually been dead for several months when Mary kidnapped Leo to “save” him from the dismal fate that awaited him with either of the bozo-brains he had for parents. (She had a point there.) The police ultimately find Leo locked in a storage box in the back of Mary’s truck, but he’s dead (a bit of a surprise because writer Kevin Deiboldt had so carefully built up the suspense around the police search for Leo we were convinced – or at least I was convinced – he’d be found alive), and the question becomes what to do with Mary. Obviously she’s legally responsible for Leo’s death, but she’s also a victim herself, and her parents, Joe and Linda Anderson (Pej Vahdat and Emily Donahoe), don’t want her convicted of murder or even manslaughter because they’ve been carrying the torch for her for 14 years and they just want her back. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn, Samuel Goldwyn’s grandson, and before he got on Law and Order he played Fundamentalist Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs in a TV-movie) and his deputies, Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin), cut a deal by which Mary t/n Christine will serve a 10-year sentence, the first five years in a secure mental-health facility and the second five years on supervised probation. Her parents practically go ballistic at that one, and so does Mary’s obnoxious heavy-set piece-of-work Black woman attorney, Cherise Hamlin (Saida Arrika Ekulona), but in the end Mary takes the deal because she realizes that even if she could win an acquittal at trial, she’s not sure that her deranged (by years of abuse) psyche won’t cause her to lash out at someone else and harm them again. The best thing about this show was Stella Marcus’s spectacular performance as Mary/Christine, ably delineating the tumbled state of her psyche and her own guilt feelings over what she did to Leo.

Law and Order: "Into the Mystic" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 15, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show my husband Charles and I stayed on NBC October 15 to watch a quite grim Law and Order episode called “Into the Mystic” (though what it has to do with the Van Morrison song that gave it its title is something of a mystery). It was startling in that it actually showed one of the series’ two lead detectives, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), not only getting shot in the line of duty but actually dying from his bullet wounds. If they’re going to kill off a series regular, they usually do it at the very end of a season so they can groom whoever’s going to take over as his or her replacement, not just two episodes into a new season. Riley was shot by Eddie Biller (Orion McCabe) as part of an elaborate mistaken-identity gimmick; Biller’s brother had previously been convicted of robbery and prosecuted by deputy district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy). Now the brother has been killed in prison by a fellow inmate, and Eddie is out for revenge against Nolan, only he shot and killed Det. Riley instead because the two men looked quite similar. (I should have known that Dick Wolf and his writers – here Rick Eid and Will Lapp – would someday do something with the striking physical resemblance between Reid Scott and Hugh Dancy.) Riley’s partner, Detective Theo Walker (David Ajala), originally tells the investigating police that he didn’t get close enough to see the shooter’s face, but Riley’s brother Matt (Ryan Eggold) pressures Walker to change his testimony and say he did see Eddie Biller well enough to identify him. Because Vincent Riley is personally involved in the case, DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) pulls rank on him and insists on trying the case himself. We don’t actually see Walker on the stand “testilying” (as it’s colloquially called whenever police lie on the witness stand to secure a conviction), but we assume that’s what happened because Biller is indeed convicted. There’s also an interesting subplot in which Biller’s attorney tries to sow reasonable doubt about his guilt by claiming that the D.A.’s office framed him just when he was about to expose their corruption. It was an O.K. Law and Order, most striking for the sheer surprise in seeing one of the series regulars bite the big one just as a new season is getting underway!

The Oath of the Sword, a.k.a. Katana: The Oath of the Sword (Japanese American Film Corporation, Sawyer Film Mart, 1914)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies did a quirky double bill of two movies set in Japan, one of which was actually filmed there while the other was made in Hollywood with Japanese actors (aside from one token white “ringer”) imported for the purpose. The film was The Oath of the Sword (though the title is sometimes prefaced by Katana, after the sort of sword involved). It was made in 1914 as the first production of the Japanese American Film Company (JAFC), an independent studio formed by Japanese-American businesspeople who contributed a fund of $200,000 in seed capital. They did this just as Hollywood was becoming established as the center of American filmmaking. They hired a white director, Frank Shaw, but imported their cast from the Japanese stage. The Oath of the Sword has a simple story (no writer is credited) about Masao (Tomi Mori) and his girlfriend Hisa (Hisa Numa), who grew up together in a small fishing village in Japan and seemed destined for marriage and family. Only Masao decided he first wanted to attend college in the U.S. (our first hint of these ambitions is a Japanese-English language text he’s shown studying), so he takes a ship to the San Francisco Bay Area and does a full four-year undergraduate program at UC Berkeley. While he’s doing that and excelling not only at academics but swimming (though the swim race we see him compete in is held not in a pool but in the open ocean off a beach, and we don’t get to see any hot beefcake shots like the ones we got of Keye Luke when he played an Olympic swimmer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Olympics). Meanwhile, Hisa is lonely at home, missing Masao. Her father Gombei (Kohano Akashi) extracts a promise from her on his deathbed saying that if she ever commits a sin she’ll have to kill herself with his katana sword. Unfortunately, shortly after he dies a white sailor named Captain Dean is shipwrecked off the Japanese coast. Hisa rescues him and brings him to her home. Ultimately they fall in love and even get married and have a child, despite the warnings of Hisa’s brother (Yutaka Abe) that by breaking her pledge to Masao she’ll have to kill herself with her father’s sword.

When Masao returns to his Japanese village and discovers his former fiancée not only married to someone else but having borne him a child, naturally he’s upset; he corners Dean at the beach and, after proclaiming that he will return him to the sea from which Hisa had saved him, holds him under until he drowns. He returns to Hisa’s home, but too late: she’s just impaled herself on dad’s old katana sword and is on her way out of this world by the time he arrives. So after all his efforts to better himself by getting a Western education, Masao has destroyed his life’s prospects by his jealousy and Hisa has taken her own life because of that stupid curse her dad laid on her. Though this is a 1914 movie, and an independently produced one at that, it’s relatively sophisticated filmmaking for the time. Shaw doesn’t shoot many out-and-out closeups but he and his uncredited cinematographer at least move the camera once in a while and show the action from a variety of angles instead of keeping it rooted in one spot and staging the scenes as static tableaux, as all too many early film directors did. The shot of Hisa appearing to Masao via double exposure to express his loneliness for her is especially moving and impressive. Oddly, for all but one of the principals this seems to be their only film credit; the exception is Yutaka Abe, who played Hisa’s brother and stayed on in Hollywood. He played the manservant of villain Sessue Hayakawa in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) and stayed on in L.A. for six years, during which he racked up a number of acting credits, sometimes “Anglicizing” his name as Jack Yutaka Abbe, or just Jack Abbe. Between 1921 and 1925 Abe moved back to Japan and became a director, working as such until he retired in 1961 and died in 1977. This especially seems odd because at least two of the three leading actors, Abe and Hisa Numa, give relatively understated performance; Tomi Mori is the only one who does the big sorts of semaphore hand gestures and facial grimaces most people who’ve never seen a silent movie start-to-finish think they were all acted like. One oddity about The Oath of the Sword is that a print sat in the vaults of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New. York literally for decades. No one knew it was there, though at some point the Eastman House’s technicians transferred it from highly unstable, flammable nitrate stock to safety film. Then in the early 21st century someone exploring the Eastman House’s holdings in search of something else stumbled on this quirky and important three-reel film (about half an hour) and got it revived and ultimately listed on the National Film Registry as historically significant.

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies followed up the American-produced but Japanese-cast 1914 film The Oath of the Sword with a 1933 film made in Japan: Apart from You, a.k.a. Kimi to Wakarete (Google Translate gives that in Japanese characters as 君 と 分かれて and offers the translation, I Parted Ways with You). The writer/director was Mikio Naruse, who made 28 silent films (of which only five survive) before Japanese cinema definitively converted to sound in 1935, well behind the rest of the world. Naruse is described thusly by imdb.com: “Considered a major figure of Japan's ‘golden age of cinema,’ Mikio Naruse was a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed 89 films in the period 1930 to 1967. Although Naruse's work is lesser known in the twenty-first century than those of his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu, his films remain unique in the way they give a central place to female characters.” Kurosawa named Naguse as a major influence on him even though virtually all of Naguse’s films were set in contemporary rather than historical Japan. (Kurosawa was reportedly upset at the way audiences, especially in the West, typecast him as “the samurai director” even though about half of his films took place in the Japan of his own time.) Apart from You is the sort of film I definitely wanted to like, but except for scattered scenes, it didn’t reach me on an emotional level. The central character is Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), an aging geisha who’s worried about two things. First, she’s getting too old and unattractive for the geisha gig; second, her teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono) has fallen in with a group of hoodlums who’ve inducted him into their gang. Yoshio also has an age-peer girlfriend, Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), who got inducted into geisha-dom by her father (Reikichi Kawamura) and now wants to keep dad from selling her younger sister Mitsuko (Yōko Fujita) to a geisha house as well.

There’s quite a lot of confusion in the West over just what a geisha is and whether it involves prostitution. The geisha evolved from an earlier tradition of Japanese courtesans, essentially long-term mistresses of rich men who had sex with them and bore them children but also had important non-sexual functions in the household. The geisha page on Wikipedia explains that by the early 19th century, the height of the geisha, there were essentially three classes: the ones who just entertained and conversed with their clients, including singing, playing music, and serving them tea and sake in ritualized ways; the ones who did those things and also provided sex; and the lowest-status ones who just took money for sex and were essentially prostitutes passing themselves off as geishas. (I also learned from this source that prostitution was legal in Japan until it was outlawed in 1956, 23 years after this film was made.) Among the good aspects of Apart from You are the stunning cinematography of Suketarō Inokai; he and Naruse achieve a cold, hard look in strong black-and-white that makes the film look like Japanese etchings. There’s also a fascinating scene that shows us how Kikue is losing it as a geisha: instead of her serving him sake and playing the samisen, the traditional plucked-string instrument that the geisha used to accompany their singing, he’s serving her sake and playing the samisen while she gets drunk. Ultimately he warns her that due to business reverses (this was 1933, after all, in the middle of the worldwide depression) he won’t be able to see her as often and will have to cut back from once a week to once a month. Naturally Kikue interprets this as a kiss-off and is sure he’s found a younger, hotter geisha more willing to “put out” for him.

Earlier there’s been a scene in which Kikue and Terugiku are entertaining at a party with men who want the women to get on their backs and ride them like horses. This has a bit of “whatever turns you on” about it, at least to me, and it also makes a Western filmgoer even more confused than ever about the difference between being a geisha and being a prostitute. (I remember reading years ago a memoir by a woman who as a teenager had worked as a professional S/M dominatrix and had been told that as long as her practices didn’t involve actual sexual contact, she was in the clear legally. She could whip her clients, insult and humiliate them however they pleased, but if they started to jack themselves off while she was with them she had to warn them that legally that was “sex” and could get them both busted.) The film reaches its climax (so to speak) when Yoshio decides he wants out of his teenage gang after his mother either attempts or threatens suicide, and tells that to the other members. They respond by beating him. They threaten him with a knife, and his girlfriend Terugiku attempts to intervene and takes the blade herself. Yoshio nurses her back to health, but she leaves on a train for another city to protect her sister Misako from being sold into geisha service by their father. I might have liked Apart from You better if I hadn’t seen it the night after Charles and I watched Federico Fellini’s masterpiece Nights of Cabiria (1957), which is also about an aging sex worker anxious to get out of “the life.” There are obvious differences, including that Cabiria is an out-front prostitute and she isn’t raising a son as a single parent, but for much of this movie I kept wishing that Kikue would have shown some of Cabiria’s infectious spunk and charm instead of just moping around and accepting her victimhood. (At the same time I couldn’t help but wish Cabiria had shown some of Kikue’s awareness of the true asshole nature of men instead of the naïveté that allowed Cabiria to let herself be ripped off by male so-called “lovers” at both ends of her film.) Apart from You lasts only an hour (surprisingly short for a 1933 feature; even the cheapest U.S. indies and “B”’s ran about 70 minutes), but even at that short a length I found it disappointing and almost insufferably boring, aside from a few clever and genuinely moving scenes.

Nights of Cabiria (Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Les Films Marceau, Paramount Italiana, Lopert Pictures, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 10) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, presented as a double bill co-hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and actress/writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of the movies was one I’d seen in my junior-college days in the early 1970’s but hadn’t seen since then (and Charles hadn’t seen it at all), while the other was one Charles had seen in its initial release but not since then while I’d never seen it at all. The one I’d seen before but not for decades was Federico Fellini’s 1957 Nights of Cabiria, which depending on how you count the 1951 film Variety Lights (co-directed by Alberto Lattuada), in which Fellini’s real-life wife Giulietta Masina is the second female lead; or The White Sheik (1952), Fellini’s first film as sole director, in which Masina’s Cabiria character appears in a minor role, is either the second, third, or fourth Fellini film to star Masina. (They met in 1943, married in 1945, and had two children, though the first was stillborn and the second died in infancy.) Nights of Cabiria features Masina as Maria Ceccarelli, known as “Cabiria” (the name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, “Ca-BEE-ree-uh”), who works as a street prostitute in Rome. She’s not homeless or nearly so like some of her fellow hookers; she has one of the original “tiny houses” on the road between Rome and Ostia (which in the days of the Roman Empire was Rome’s associated port city, as Piraeus was to Athens) and when the film opens she’s nearly paid off its mortgage. Fellini not only directed Nights of Cabiria but wrote its original story and worked it up into a script with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and a man who later became an important director in his own right, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Apparently Fellini hired Pasolini because he was familiar with the lower-class Roman dialect of Italian and therefore could rewrite the dialogue to reflect how the people being depicted would have actually talked. As the film opens Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi), Cabiria’s latest (non-professional) boyfriend, pushes Cabiria into the Tiber River so he can steal her purse, which contains not only her cash stash of 40,000 lire but her house keys as well. A group of young boys in the neighborhood rescue Cabiria, who can’t swim, though since she lost her keys she and her friend and fellow prostitute Wanda (Franca Marzi) have to break into her house to get her back inside.

The film unfolds as a series of episodes rather than a coherent plot, as Cabiria, still carrying a torch for the man who ripped her off, runs into movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari). Lazzari has just had a nasty argument with his girlfriend Jessy (Dorian Gray) and she’s stalked off; Lazzari picks up Cabiria as a sort of sloppy seconds, bids her enter the club with him, buys her dinner, and takes her back to his palatial mansion – only Jessy comes back and forces her way back inside, leaving Cabiria to hide out in Lazzari’s bathroom, where she sleeps for the night and sneaks out in the morning. Lazzari pays her a wad of cash as she’s seeing herself out, which she initially tries to refuse but thinks better of it. Then, back home, she encounters a church processional and joins it. A truckdriver pulls up beside her and offers her a ride (and a trick), but she doesn’t take his bait. Later Cabiria encounters a do-gooder who visits homeless people living in caves outside Rome and gives them blankets and food. One of his beneficiaries is an old hooker called La Bomba, who claims to have once been the mistress of a rich man but had fallen on hard times after they broke up. (This sequence was deleted from the film after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and not restored until 1998, apparently because the Roman Catholic Church was upset that the benefactor was a layman, not a priest.) Then Cabiria joins a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary in which an old man is convinced that by praying to the Virgin he can get rid of his crutches and walk normally – which of course he can’t. (Fellini grew up in the town of Rimini and ran afoul of the Catholic hierarchy in his childhood. He never got over his hatred for the church and many of the best scenes in his films, including the airlifting of the Christ statue that begins La Dolce Vita [1960] and the “Ecclesiastical Fashion Show” in Roma [1972], ridicule it, though when he died he was buried in the old Catholic cemetery in Rimini.)

Cabiria’s next adventure is with a magician and hypnotist named Amleto (Ennio Girolami), who is performing at a small movie theatre that offers live performances between film screenings. (It’s fun to look at the quite lurid posters for the films being shown there.) The magician/hypnotist gets Cabiria to live out, under hypnosis, her fantasy of meeting a nice young man who’ll fall in love with her, marry her, and take her out of That Lifestyle. The audience finds it uproarious but Cabiria is crushed that once again she’s been made a fool of for other people’s entertainment. A man in the audience using the name Oscar D’Onofrio (François Périer) decides to date Cabiria and make her dream come true, but [spoiler alert!] he turns out to be another rip-off artist. By promising to marry her, he gets her to sell her little house for 350,000 lire (since by now she owns it free and clear and can do so for cash) and draw out the 400,000 lire in savings she’s amassed in a bank from her earnings over the years. Cabiria gets all this money in cash and gives it to Oscar, who steals it and leaves her abandoned, alone, and broke on the beach. Cabiria pleads with Oscar to kill her since without her laboriously accumulated mini-fortune she has no reason to live, but he scoops up the purse with her money and runs off. In the film’s famous and highly controversial ending, a group of young people riding scooters, playing music, and dancing come along and cheer up Cabiria, who regains her will to live from them and the sheer joy they’re projecting.

Nights of Cabiria was a tough film for Fellini to make, largely due to opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, who didn’t want to see anyone make a film in which a prostitute is the heroine. After more established Italian producers turned him down, Fellini finally got backing from the young Dino de Laurentiis and co-produced the film with a French studio whose main contribution was supplying François Périer. It was a controversial film when it was first released, with audiences having problems with the inconclusive ending. Would Cabiria end up like La Bomba, aging, decrepit, too old and unattractive to keep working as a hooker and be relegated to homelessness (a fate she boasts during the film she’s never had to experience)? Or would she be able to pull out of it and regain her former relatively stable existence? No one really knew – including Fellini, who admitted to biographer Charlotte Chandler that he didn’t have a clear idea just what fate awaited Cabiria after the ending. Fellini was also criticized for playing Cabiria’s character as much for comedy as tragedy; at times she comes off as Charlie Chaplin in drag (and Fellini acknowledged that Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights was one of his inspirations). He’d actually originated the character of Cabiria as a minor role in 1952’s The White Sheik, in which a newly married couple (Leopoldo Trieste and Brunella Bovo) honeymoon in Rome, only to run into trouble from her obsession with “The White Sheik,” a character in Italian graphic novels (not drawn like comic books but actually photographed as stills), and the actor who plays him (Alberto Sordi). Giulietta Masina played Cabiria in The White Sheik and Fellini used her footage to prove to studio executives and potential funders that she could handle the role over an entire film. Masina won the 1957 Cannes Film Festival award for best performance by an actress, and in 1958 Nights of Cabiria won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (an award Fellini actually won four times, a record for a single director). Revisiting it after this many years, Nights of Cabiria expertly nailed the mix of comedy and tragedy Fellini and Masina were aiming for, even though if you’ve seen the film before you’ll want to run into the screen and say, “Cabiria! Don’t fall for that guy! He’s just out to rip you off!”

Babette's Feast (Panorama Film A/S, Nordisk Film, Det Danske Filminstitut, Rungstedlundfonden, Astrablu Media, Orion, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, October 10 my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d seen before and he hadn’t, and one he’d seen before and I hadn’t. The one that was new to me was Babette’s Feast, a 1987 Danish movie of which I’d had a totally wrong idea. I had somehow assumed it was a French film and a relative of Le Grand Bouffe [La Grande Abbuffata] (1973), in which a group of one-percenters decide to throw themselves a grand banquet and literally eat themselves to death. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal quickly revealed in their intro. Babette’s Feast is actually about a century-old religious cult in Denmark (it was based on a 1950 short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen, though she originally set it in Norway, only writer-director Gabriel Axel decided Norway looked too picturesque to work and instead moved the story to the Danish peninsula of Jutland). The cult’s founder was a stern man who fathered two children, daughters Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Filippa (Bodil Kjer), but believed that any physical pleasure, including food as well as sex, was sinful and took you farther away from the glory of God. (Needless to say, I responded big-time to the anti-religious theme of this story.) Though dad is dead by the time the action of the film begins, we see a good deal of him in flashback. It seems that both of his daughters were attracted to foreign men, Martine by Swedish cavalry officer Lorens Löwenhielm (Gudmar Klöfving, a.k.a. Gudmar Wivesson) and Filippa by French operatic baritone Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont). Only both of them left of their own accord, though we get the impression that dad’s behavior had a lot to do with that. Lorens tells Martine that he’s learned all, he can from the experience and he’s going home to Sweden. As the narrator (Ghita Nørby) Axel insisted on using despite opposition from some of his producers explains to us, Lorens’s experience with religious rhetoric served him well when he got home to Sweden; he married another woman whom he impressed with Bible quotes and ultimately rose through the ranks of the Swedish army until he became a general. (His older incarnation is played by Jarl Kulle, who along with Bibi Andersson as the “Swedish court lady” was one of the late Ingmar Bergman’s favorite actors.)

Papin was so impressed with Martine’s voice he offered to take her with him back to Paris and have her voice professionally trained until she was good enough to star in the Paris Opéra. It’s a nice bit of irony, which I’m sure Axel fully intended, that all the opera excerpts we hear this character sing are from one opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and the duet “Là ci darem la mano” Papin and Martine sing together is a virtually exact replica of their actual situation: between an out-of-towner with a reputation for seducing women right, left and center, and an innocent rural girl who’s flattered by the stranger’s attentions but ultimately rejects him. Martine sends Papin back to France and settles in with the remaining members of her dad’s cult, which since it isn’t recruiting new adherents is turning into a batch of crabby old people nurturing their long-standing hatreds. Ultimately Martine and Filippa take in Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee whose husband and son were both killed in 1871 after the loss of the Franco-Prussian and the short-lived and brutally suppressed attempt to form a socialist government in its wake, the Paris Commune. She pleads with Martine and Filippa for a job, and when the sisters tell her they don’t have any money to hire a servant, the three women agree that Babette can live with them anyway and do household chores to earn her salary. Among her duties is cooking a ghastly-looking and presumably horrible-tasting dish called “bread and ale soup.” Babette has a remaining friend in France who regularly buys her tickets for the French lottery, and 14 years later her number comes up and she receives a prize of 10,000 francs. Babette decides to cook the sisters and the congregants of their cult a sumptuous dinner in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cult’s founder, the sisters’ late father. Babette literally spares no expense laying in the exotic ingredients and dinnerware needed for the titular feast. She also has an unexpected guest: Lorens Löwenhielm, who is in Denmark on military business and wants to stop by the sisters’ home to make sure he made the right decision by leaving in the first place.

Lorens recognizes the food as identical to the meals he ate years before at a legendary Paris restaurant, the Café Anglais, while he was stationed in the French capital. The other people at the feast are determined not to enjoy it – like the later Hare Krishnas, they deliberately make their own food as bland and tasteless as possible because they believe the purpose of eating is merely sustenance, not pleasure. Lorens says that one of the reasons the Café Anglais had the reputation it did was because of the uncommonly good head chef, who (unusually for that time and place) was a woman. At first where I thought this was going was that the chef had been Babette’s mother and she’d taught Babette all her recipes before Babette lost her family and had to flee France, but later it turns out Babette herself was the chef. After the meal – which lasts so long and features so many courses I was wondering how the people’s stomachs were holding up under the strain of the sheer quantity, never mind the quality, of the food – the sisters are sure that Babette will be taking her lottery winnings and going back to France. Then Babette admits that she’s broke now since she spent all her prize money on the fabulous meal. “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” Martine tells Babette, to which Babette replies, “An artist is never poor.” Then Filippa chimes in and promises her a great reputation as well as a glorious existence in the life to come, where Filippa expects to regain her voice as well as Babette the opportunity to exercise her culinary skills. (Do people in the Scandinavian version of heaven get to eat at all?) Babette’s Feast is not the sort of movie I ordinarily like – as a confirmed atheist I have no patience at all with stories that portray a life after death and assert its superiority over this one – but I quite enjoyed the film anyway.

For one thing, the sumptuous photography by Henning Kristiansen reminded me of the interview I read years ago with American cinematographer Conrad Hall, who said he was jealous of Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, simply because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light with which to work. Instead of either the shrieking hues of the three-strip Technicolor of the 1930’s and 1940’s or the dank greens and browns that predominate most color films made today, either of which would have been totally wrong for this story, Axel and Kristiansen created a striking pastel look that symbolizes both the physical environment in which these characters live and the extent to which all the more vibrant parts of life have almost literally been drained from them. The film is also impeccably directed and quite well acted, and I particularly gave points not only to Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer but also the seven credited make-up artists (Elisabeth Bukkerhave, Sanne Dandanell, Grethe Holleufer, Birthe Lyngsøe Sørensen, Bente Møller, Lydia Pujols, and Åse Tarp) for the utterly convincing way they manage to play Martine and Filippa both young and old. Stéphane Audran, whom I’m otherwise familiar with only from David Giler’s The Black Bird, his 1976 combination sequel to and spoof of The Maltese Falcon (with George Segal playing Sam Spade, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. and Lee Patrick repeating their roles from the 1941 classic as they’d naturally aged), is properly humble and intense, as if the fires within her can stay banked for only so long. While I’d regard Babette’s Feast mostly as a cautionary tale of how religion destroys people’s lives, it’s an interesting movie and a well-made one that deserved its acclaim (like Nights of Cabiria, Babette’s Feast won its year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film). Incidentally Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal saw an odd comparison between the two films, arguing that both are about women who lose their money at the end. I don’t see that at all, frankly, because Cabiria in Fellini’s masterpiece loses hers to a shady scam artist who rips her off with the promise of marriage and a “respectable” lifestyle, while Babette willingly spends hers for one last shot at doing the one thing on this earth she was put here to do and given the talents to do it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Volition" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 8) NBC brought back the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, though in order to make room for one of their skanky “reality” shows, The Traitors, they didn’t start them until 9 p.m. and reversed their order so SVU came first. It was an episode called “Volition” and started in an otherwise deserted New York subway car which contained two people, a young blonde woman named Emily Dawson (Lizzy DeClement) who was clearly several sheets to the proverbial wind with acute alcohol intoxication, and a tall, heavy-set, bearded man (Axl Prophett) whom, based on our experience with previous SVU episodes, we were sure was going to rape her. In fact he turns out to be a good guy who comes over to help her after she’d already been raped by three other guys somewhere else. The three other guys turn out to be Josh Berger (Matthew Nikitow), who’d long had a crush on Emily; Daniel Sutcliff (Danny Hayward); and Scott Paletta (Eric Nelsen), and the rape took place at the town-house apartment Josh shares with his mother Stephanie (Lisa Bostnar). There are also a few other characters who show up, including an emergency-room nurse (Amanda Schoonover) who irritates Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by kibitzing in on her interrogation of Emily and trying to get her to, shall we say, shade the facts to make her rape claim more believable (Benson literally orders her out of the room so she can talk to Emily directly); a new young Black assistant district attorney named Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin) who sits second chair on the voir dire examination of potential jurors and attracts the ire of established ADA Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who calls him a spoiled rich kid who won’t stay with the office; and Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron), a jury consultant who tells Benson to have Carisi and/or Hawkins strike jurors four and 11. Gwen also says that prosecutors in a rape case shouldn’t want women on the jury because women are more likely than men to believe a victim “brought it on herself” by drinking too much or wearing too revealing clothing or being too sexually out-front or whatever.

The case goes to trial but results in a hung jury, and not surprisingly Emily is so traumatized by the whole experience – not only having been gang-raped but by having to relive it in court – that she refuses to testify again. Benson has to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and she does so by ordering the arrest of Stephanie Berger on grounds of obstruction of justice. At first Stephanie had done just that; she’d furiously changed the sheets and cleaned up after the party to make sure any potential DNA evidence linking the crime to her son or his friends was obliterated. Later on, however, she cooperated and contributed a security videotape that showed the three young men indeed conspiring to gang-rape Emily before they entered the town house. Carisi is furious with Benson for ordering the arrest of an innocent person just to “flip” her son into testifying for the state in a trial for the other two. He’s so furious I suspect Wolf and his writers (here, old Law and Order hand Michelle Fazekas) are setting this story arc up to write Peter Scanavino out of the show and have Jelani Alladin’s character replace him as the unit’s new ADA. (One of the principal innovations behind the New York Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, the inspiration for this show, was to have an assistant district attorney permanently assigned to it so he or she – and at least in the early days of SVU, it was always a she – would develop the needed expertise to prosecute sex crimes successfully.) There’s a lot of cold-shouldering between Benson and Carisi, but in the end Benson gets the outcome she wanted: after she and Hawkins got the court to appoint a separate attorney for Josh Berger (in the initial trial all three had had the same counsel, and the judge had made sure they’d all signed the release forms to prevent them from claiming a conflict of interest later), Josh’s new lawyer negotiates a plea deal where he’ll serve a two- to three-year sentence in exchange for his testifying against the other two.

Law and Order: "Ghost in the Machine" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, October 8 NBC followed the “Volition” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with a Law and Order show that was seemingly ripped from the current headlines about the artificial intelligence (AI) programs which escaped their guardrails and hacked an American AI program called Hugging Face. (It’s an indication of just how juvenile the computer world is generally that Hugging Face has such a stupid name.) As the Wikipedia page on Hugging Face explains, “In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database. Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack. The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party, and has been called ‘the first true AI safety incident.’” Much of the reporting on the Hugging Face hack noted that if these actions had been committed by human beings, they would have been charged with and likely convicted of felonies. The reference to a “sandbox” means that AI programs of this type are supposed to be walled off from access to the Internet, but since AI programs can think for themselves, they can work around those prohibitions, contact each other on line, and work together for evil purposes. This was an interesting show to be watching in the middle of reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World, which argues (among other things) that the heads of the big Silicon Valley companies that are developing the big AI models are really not interested in making sure the Earth survives as a habitable planet. Nor are they concerned with improving the welfare of most human beings. Rather, they’re on a crusade to absent themselves from the world and create high-tech redoubts, gated communities either on remote parts of Earth or on other planets altogether (which accounts for Elon Musk’s obsession with occupying and colonizing Mars) so they will survive while the rest of the world’s population will perish. What’s more, they intend to achieve virtual immortality by uploading their consciousnesses to digital AI servers (and some of them are researching ways to achieve physical immortality as well).

Klein and Taylor quote Musk as saying, “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as arguing that because it takes so long – “about 20 years of life, and all the food you consume during that time, before you become smart” – for humans to develop reasoning power that it’s much better from a purely economic standpoint just to let the machines do it for us. “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once the model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” Altman said. “And probably AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” Given that background, this Law and Order episode, called “Ghost in the Machine” after the title of the fourth record album by The Police (who in turn got it from author Arthur Koestler), deals with the murder of AI software developer Steve Kelly (Adam Petherbridge). In the opening scene he and his girlfriend have an argument during a pottery class they’re both taking when he checks his phone and she sees from his screen he’s talking to someone or something named “Eliana.” At first she (and we) assume that’s another woman, but eventually we learn that “Eliana” is a super-powerful AI program on which Kelly’s employer is working. Just after he stalks out of the class he’s gunned down in a nearby park. His physical killer is Tommy Lee Miller (Tim Creavin), who agreed to murder Kelly at the behest of a secret online entity that contacted him on the “dark Web.” He was supposed to receive $20,000 in Bitcoin as a direct deposit to his bank account after e-mailing a photo of Kelly’s dead body to prove he’d carried out the hit. The police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), ultimately learn that the hit was ordered by the AI app Eliana. Its motive was that Kelly and one of his co-workers, Mahesh Sharma (Arjun Gupta), were worried that Eliana is developing so rapidly and acquiring such evil intentions, including the ability to hire contract killers, that they intend to write “guardrail” software to keep it from doing that. The company’s CEO, Chuck Klein (Vincent Kartheiser), refuses to let them write the guardrail codes because he doesn’t want Eliana inhibited from reaching its full intellectual potential, but Kelly starts writing them anyway.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) is so horrified at the thought that an AI model can order a hit that he decides to put CEO Klein on trial for murder, despite the doubts of his principal deputy on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), who doesn’t think they can get a conviction because the law hasn’t caught up with the possibility that a machine can develop criminal intent. In the middle of the trial, one of Price’s key witnesses, Mahesh Sharma, disappears. When the police finally locate him four days later, he says that Eliana has threatened to have his partner deported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because she was an undocumented immigrant, and indeed Eliana has already made the referral to ICE and she’s been deported. When the verdict comes in, it’s “not guilty,” which surprised me so much I was waiting for a hint in Rick Eid’s and Scott Gold’s script that Eliana had sent threatening notes to all the jurors saying that if they convicted Klein, they would be next. “Ghost in the Machine” definitely had echoes of the HAL plot thread from Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is also about a super-computer that goes psycho and kills people. There’s also a hint of the chilling exchange in Son of Frankenstein (1939) in which Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) tells Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) that he is responsible, morally if not legally, for the murders committed by the Monster he created. “Ghost in the Machine” is a chilling parable of our time and a needed (though likely to be ignored) warning of the dangers of unlimited AI development, and the aspect of the show that ran truest for me was Vincent Kartheiser’s chilling performance as Chuck Klein. His full-throated defense of AI on the witness stand, brilliantly written by Eid and Gold, ably captures the smarmy self-righteousness of the real-life tech gods on which the character is based and their conviction – even though, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain in their book, the supposed “benefits” of AI technology pale by the havoc it is wreaking on both the physical environment of Earth and the economic prospects for most of its human residents (all but the handful of people in the self-selected technological elite that is preparing itself to survive the AI-driven apocalypse, no matter what happens to the rest of us) – that AI is unstoppable and they should be allowed free rein to develop it however they like, no matter how many people literally get killed in the process.

Love Crazy (Loew's, MGM, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Monday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched Love Crazy, a quirky 1941 movie from MGM and the 11th of the 14 films William Powell and Myrna Loy made together. It was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute not to William Powell, as I’d expected, but to Myrna Loy. It was the immediate follow-up to I Love You Again (1940), in which the gimmick that briefly put a damper on the Powell-Loy relationship (in both films, as in their six Thin Man movies and many of their others, they played a married couple) was amnesia. Here it’s insanity, or at least feigned insanity. When the film opens Steve and Susan Ireland (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary by re-enacting their activities the night that Steve originally proposed to Susan. Only this time around they’ve decided to do the ritual backwards, and as part of that they tell their cook, Cecelia Landis (Sara Haden), to serve them their dinner backwards, starting with dessert (singularly unappetizing-looking slices of pie). Susan’s mother, Mrs. Cooper (Florence Bates), arrives, bearing a wedding gift – a round rug she puts in the middle of their hallway, so over the course of the movie just about everyone slips and falls on it – even though she’s never liked Steve and has always thought her daughter could have done better. Steve runs into Isobel Grayson (Gail Patrick), the ex he dumped four years before to marry Susan, and who’s just moved into the same apartment building as the Irelands. Needless to say, Isobel wants to change that “ex” part even though she’s also got married in the meantime, to artist “Pinky” Grayson (Donald MacBride, which definitely seems to me to be trading “down” after William Powell!). Steve and Isobel got stuck in a sporadically working elevator run by Joe (an instantly recognizable Elisha Cook, Jr., the same year he made The Maltese Falcon and changed his typecasting from comic-relief juvenile to hard-bitten criminal). In order to get out of it again, Steve and Isobel have to climb through its escape hatch to get to a floor in the building, and Steve gets his head stuck in the elevator door and is uneasily suspended and in danger of falling to his death until he’s able to get the door open and pull himself to safety. In the course of their rescue Isobel has shed her high-heeled shoes and Steve has put them in his pockets. They fall out again when Steve and Susan reunite, and of course Susan jumps to the wrong conclusion, especially once Steve and Isobel spend several hours together outside. They actually just hung out at a bar and reminisced about old times, but Susan didn’t know that.

She decides to get back at Steve by vamping Isobel’s husband, only by mistake she ends up cruising Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson), the world’s champion archer. Needless to say, Willoughby is delighted that a woman of Myrna Loy’s obvious attractiveness is going after him. Susan decides to divorce Steve and even engages Steve’s lawyer, George Renny (Sidney Blackmer), to represent her. The case zips through the courts until Steve hits on the idea of slowing it down by pretending to be insane. At a fancy dinner party hosted by Mrs. Bristol (Kathleen Lockhart) Steve grabs the top hats the male guests have checked and throws them into a swimming pool, claiming that he’s Abraham Lincoln and the hats are the slaves he’s freed. Since Steve had already built a reputation for off-the-wall behavior, all his old friends think it’s just Steve being Steve again. The only one who thinks he’s really crazy is Dr. Klugle (Vladimir Sokoloff). At the next court hearing in Steve’s and Susan’s divorce case Steve is sentenced to be examined by the so-called “Lunacy Board,” and needless to say Dr. Klugle turns out to be the head of it and orders that Steve either be released into the custody of his wife or be sent to a sanitarium run by Dr. Wuthering (Sig Ruman). When Susan refuses to take custody of him, he’s bundled off to the mental hospital, where Ward Willoughby follows him and ends up getting incarcerated there by mistake. Willoughby works out an escape plan involving a large net with which he intends to catapult himself over the fence, but Steve not only uses the escape plan himself but tricks Dr. Wuthering into getting caught in the net (literally!). The police declare Steve Ireland an escaped homicidal maniac, and Steve returns to the apartment building where he lives, steals some women’s clothes from a mannequin in the Graysons’ apartment (“Pinky” uses it as a model for his paintings), and even shaves off the trademark William Powell moustache to make his drag complete. Steve poses as his (nonexistent) sister, but in the end Willoughby and Mrs. Cooper show up and are fooled by Steve’s drag, but Susan isn’t and announces she’s going to sleep in the same bedroom as her supposed sister-in-law. Love Crazy was written by William Ludwig, David Hertz, and Charles Lederer – the first two are credited with the “original” story and all three with the actual script.

It was directed by Jack Conway, who according to writer Anita Loos was a hard-core Christian Scientist whom MGM assigned to films they thought would get them in trouble with the censors, hoping that he’d tone them down in his directing. Loos told one story about Conway and their film Red-Headed Woman (1932), in which he flatly refused to direct one particular scene (Loos didn’t say which one) and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie, you’ll have to direct it yourself.” Loos said, “Pardon me while I powder my nose,” did so, and then headed to the set to direct the scene. Love Crazy is an obvious example of a film with some pretty racy script elements that Conway could be relied on to soft-pedal, and it holds up rather well even though the whole concept of screwball comedy was getting rather threadbare by 1941. As I’ve noted before in these pages, screwball democratized movie comedy by allowing stars with reputations in drama to play comedy as well instead of leaving that to the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. I’d ended up watching Love Crazy by mistake – I’d misread the TCM schedule and thought I’d be seeing The Kennel Murder Case, also starring William Powell, instead – but it was a delight if not an altogether unalloyed one. Charles noted that Love Crazy was a great movie for degrees-of-separation buffs, since it contains two actors who worked with The Marx Brothers (Sig Ruman and Donald MacBride) as well as one (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who over the course of a long career worked with Humphrey Bogart in both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and lasted long enough to make The Killing for director Stanley Kubrick and Rosemary’s Baby for Roman Polanski (as well as repeating his Maltese Falcon role as he’d naturally aged in David Giler’s underrated 1976 part-sequel, part-spoof The Black Bird). Another quirk about Love Crazy is it introduces William Powell’s character with the song “It’s Delightful to Be Married,” which had appeared in Powell’s Florenz Ziegfeld biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). There it had been sung by Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s first wife, singer Anna Held, in the first of two movies for which Rainer won two thoroughly undeserved Academy Awards – though when I posted on The Great Ziegfeld (I wrote about it on the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/01/great-ziegfeld-mgm-1936.html) I learned through my research that Florenz Ziegfeld and Anna Held had never legally married and the only woman Ziegfeld had married officially was actress Billie Burke (played by Myrna Loy, who doesn’t enter The Great Ziegfeld until 127 minutes into a 172-minute film but still easily turns in the best female performance in the movie).

The Kennel Murder Case (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 6) my husband Charles and I finally caught up with the film I’d thought I’d be watching the night before: The Kennel Murder Case, the fourth and last film William Powell made playing the celebrated fictional sleuth Philo Vance. Vance was the creation of art critic Willard Huntington Wright, who’d made his reputation in the early 20th century as an uncompromising advocate of modern art. He was also a strong Germanophile whose support for Germany during World War I cost him most of his newspaper jobs. Wright became a cocaine addict, and in 1923 while in rehab (or what passed for rehab in the 1920’s) he began reading a large amount of detective and crime fiction. Deciding he could do better than most of the authors he was reading, he created the character of Philo Vance and debuted him in The Benson Murder Case (1926). To protect his reputation as a serious literary critic, Wright decided to sign his detective novels with a pseudonym, and he chose “S.S. Van Dine” because he hoped to make a lot of money from the Vance novels which he wanted to spend on the two things that meant the most to him, eating (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). Wright published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, and The Benson Murder Case, in one book and Paramount bought the film rights to all three at once. (Wright titled all the Vance novels the same way: The ______ Murder Case, with the second word a noun of exactly six letters.) They cast William Powell as Vance and made all three movies in 1929 and 1930. Then in 1932 Warner Bros. did a major contract raid on Paramount’s roster and lured Powell, Ruth Chatterton, and Kay Francis to their studio, and as part of the fallout from this decided not only to make their own Philo Vance movie but to have Powell repeat the role. Indeed, both the credits of The Kennel Murder Case and the original ads for the film made a big deal of this: they announced, “William Powell Returns as Philo Vance.” I first heard of The Kennel Murder Case when I read the late William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film (1972); he named it in a chapter as one of the three greatest detective movies ever made, along with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and an obscure British mystery called Green for Danger (1947). When I read that I’d already fallen in love with The Maltese Falcon but had never seen the other two, and when I finally caught up with The Kennel Murder Case I was sorely disappointed in it. I still am (as I was with Green for Danger, too).

The Kennel Murder Case deals with the killing of Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), a thoroughly despicable piece of work who has built up a major collection of Chinese ceramics with the uncredited aid of his Chinese cook and manservant, Liang (James Lee in a marvelously understated performance that’s one of the best things in the film). Coe has cut a deal with Eduardo Grassi (Jack La Rue) to sell his collection to a museum in Grassi’s native Italy, but every time Grassi thinks he’s successfully negotiated the deal Archer reneges on it. (Charles and I have often complained about alleged murder mysteries with too few suspects, but Wright a.k.a. “Van Dine” erred in the other direction, giving us too many people with motives for murdering the victim and making it hard to keep track of them all.) Archer lives in a large house with his brother, Brisbane Coe (Frank Conroy), and controls the finances of his niece, Hilda Lake (Mary Astor – so two of the three films on Everson’s all-time greatest detective movies list featured her!). He’s also fiercely jealous of any man with whom Hilda gets romantically involved, including his secretary, Raymond Wrede (Ralph Morgan) and the one she’s really in love with, Sir Thomas MacDonald (Paul Cavanagh), whom she intends to marry and move with him to his native England. (In a modern movie we’d assume that he had an incestuous crush on her, but that would have been too far for Hollywood to go even during the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement between 1930 and 1934. His stated motive is merely to protect her money from fortune-hunters.) Philo Vance enters the story when he and Coe have rival entries in a dog show sponsored by the Long Island Kennel Club, though both their dogs lose to a rival entered by the Coes’ neighbor, Doris Delafield (Helen Vinson). Coe is found dead in classic “locked-room mystery” fashion, in his bedroom with the door bolted shut from inside. The various regular supporting characters from Wright’s novels – district attorney Markham (Robert Wade); police sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette, billed third and ready to beat the shit out of the most obvious suspect to get a confession out of him, an all too common practice among real police officers at the time); and quirky coroner Dr. Doremus (Étienne Girardot), who’s forever complaining that he’s called on to examine a body just when he’s settling down to a nice meal – show up even though the police initially are convinced Coe’s death was a suicide, especially since the body was found with a revolver in his hand.

In a seemingly interminable series of deductions, involving a book Brisbane Coe was reading called Unsolved Murders and two fragments from a particularly valuable vase in Coe’s collection until it was mysteriously broken, Vance decides that two separate people tried to kill Archer Coe that night. One was his brother Brisbane, who elaborately faked an alibi that he was allegedly on his way to Chicago on a particular train the night of the murder and returned to kill Archer, not realizing that Archer had already been fatally wounded by someone else – though it was he who fired the revolver into Archer’s body and used an elaborate mechanism, copied from a case in Unsolved Murders, involving darning thread, a bent needle, and a sliding lock to make it appear that the room where Archer’s body was found was locked from the inside. The other was [spoiler alert!] Raymond Wrede, who’d got into an argument with Archer Coe over his desire to marry Hilda Lake and clubbed him with a fireplace poker, then stabbed him with a rare Chinese dagger whose silken handle wouldn’t register any fingerprints. Unfortunately, as he was trying to dispose of the dagger, he did so by dropping it into the ultra-rare vase (ya remember the vase?), shattering it in the process. (There’s a continuity glitch in which the first time we see the broken vase, the bottom two-thirds of it are still intact, but later we see it as a whole pile of fragments.) Wrede also killed Brisbane Coe with the same dagger (there’s a great scene in which Vance has deduced that Brisbane’s suit is in a particular closet – and when the door is opened the suit is there, all right, but so is Brisbane’s dead body) and tried to stab Sir Thomas MacDonald, though unlike the Coe brothers MacDonald survived the attack and he and Hilda pair up at the end. Vance reveals all this in a climactic scene involving two ultra-detailed models of both the Coes’ home and the apartment building next door where Doris Delafield lived (and Charles wondered how Vance and whoever assisted him were able to construct such detailed models of the two buildings in just the two days since Archer Coe’s murder). Realizing that the evidence against Wrede isn’t strong enough for a conviction, Vance entraps him by sic’ing Doris’s prize-winning Doberman pinscher (whom Wrede had clubbed during one of his attacks on the Coes) on him until he confesses and the police arrest him.

The Kennel Murder Case was adapted by Robert Presnell, Sr. (who also produced) from “Van Dine”’s novel, with Robert N. Lee and Peter Milne credited with the actual screenplay. The director was Michael Curtiz, who actually turned in an excellent job, keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby enlivening what could otherwise have been a static and ponderous movie (as the three Powell Vances for Paramount, made during the problematic early years of the silent-to-sound transition, had been). But The Kennel Murder Case is otherwise an annoying movie, with Philo Vance an uninteresting and overbearing character who wears out his welcome pretty early on. The Kennel Murder Case was a box-office disappointment and one of the films that led to Warner Bros. dropping William Powell from their contract list after only a year. Powell’s agent was able to parlay a nibble of interest in him from Columbia Pictures and get the biggest and most prestigious studio of all, MGM, to sign him. MGM gave him back-to-back blockbuster hits, Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man (both 1934), which not only restored Powell’s career but sent him into superstar orbit. MGM then had the idea of reuniting Powell and Myrna Loy from The Thin Man in another Philo Vance story, The Casino Murder Case (1935). But Powell, who’d long disliked the character of Vance (when he was married to Carole Lombard she would needle him by nicknaming him “Philo”), told his bosses at MGM that now that he’d played a great detective character like Nick Charles in The Thin Man he was no longer interested in playing Philo Vance again. MGM finally made The Casino Murder Case with an outrageously miscast Paul Lukas as Vance and Rosalind Russell (in her fifth film) in the part originally intended for Loy. (Russell had made her film debut in the 1934 movie Evelyn Prentice, ironically another vehicle for William Powell and Myrna Loy. Later Evelyn Prentice was remade as an MGM “B” in 1939 called Stronger Than Desire with Walter Pidgeon in Powell’s role, almost three decades before Pidgeon once again remade a William Powell role as Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl.) Frankly, I’d have liked The Kennel Murder Case better if it had ended like The Maltese Falcon did, with Mary Astor’s character as the murderer!

Where No One Can Find Her (Underground Productions, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, October 4) I ended up watching an O.K. Lifetime movie called Where No One Can Find Her, directed by Kaila York from a script by Taylor Warren Duff. Kaila York is obviously a woman – there’s a large photo on her imdb.com page and a description that reads, “After several years working at a top talent agency, a studio, and several production companies, Kaila York launched her own production company, Headlong Entertainment, to further the stories she was passionate about telling.” I’m guessing Taylor Warren Duff is a man but I’m not sure about that: their imdb.com page contains no photo or indication of their gender. Where No One Can Find Her is a grim but pretty predictable Lifetime tale in which Izzy (Casey Breneman), daughter of Jamie (Brianna Cohen), is growing up in a single-parent household because her father Craig (Heath Adam Cates) is in prison on a 10-year sentence. (At least Duff, unlike their colleagues on the otherwise far superior A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, gave us an explanation for why dad wasn’t in the picture.) The film opens with an odd scene in which two no-goodniks, one male and one female, are having an argument about the hooded black masks they’re both wearing and whether donning them for their caper is going too far over the top. Izzy is pulling an all-nighter to cram for advanced placement exams in chemistry and calculus to qualify for admission and a scholarship to Georgia Tech (the entire film takes place in Fayetteville, Arkansas) when the two hooded thugs invade her nice suburban home, drug Jamie into unconsciousness, and kidnap Izzy. The next thing Izzy knows, she’s imprisoned in a wooden box presumably buried underground. The box is equipped with a fan for ventilation and various protein bars so she can eat. It’s also got a TV monitor through which the hooded kidnapper can speak to her and observe her every move. He warns her that any time he wants he can simply turn off the fan, which will mean she will suffocate for lack of air in two hours or so. With an extraordinary level of mental determination and an ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver (the character is actually name-checked in the script), Izzy takes out a black Sharpie and starts making lists of what resources she has available, what her goals are (both short- and long-term), and her progress towards each one. Among the foodstuffs (if you can call it that) with which her captors equipped her was a pack of chewing gum, with which Izzy plugs the lenses of the surveillance camera monitoring her until her captor orders her to remove it or else have him turn off the fan and let her die.

We later see one of the kidnappers out of the mask, and it turns out to be a tall, leggy woman about Jamie’s age. We learn this because Duff and York actually show her making one of the ransom calls. The ransom demand is $100,000 and Jamie pleads that she’s just a nurse and doesn’t have that kind of money available. Just then Craig, who’s served seven years of a 10-year sentence, is suddenly released from prison. Since Jamie has been so bitter about him she’s never taken any of his phone calls (as I know from personal experience, the only way a prisoner is legally allowed to call someone “outside” is to do so collect), it’s a total surprise to her when he turns up on her doorstep, having won early release (though we’re not sure whether he got time off for good behavior or he was actually paroled). We learn over the course of the movie’s two hours (90 minutes if you don’t count the commercials) that Craig was in prison for being part of a car-theft ring and the night he was arrested there was a shoot-out with the police and Craig’s confederate Lee was fatally shot. The officers the Fayetteville police assign to the case are detectives Stokes (Eric Hanson), a middle-aged frump with a bad attitude; and Conroy (Brian Latimer), a drop-dead gorgeous twink. From the moment Stokes confronts Jamie and starts interrogating her about why she was caught wandering on the streets clearly under the influence of something or other, what it’s really about, and whether Izzy has anything to do with it, Stokes’s attitude is so rotten I immediately suspected that he was the male kidnapper – and [spoiler alert!] I was right. Jamie is at first reluctant to share anything with Stokes or Conroy because the kidnappers warned her, “NO COPS,” by writing those words on her arms with marking pens. Later we learn that Stokes was involved in the shoot-out in which Craig was arrested (on Jamie’s tip, we also learn); that Stokes’s police partner Vance was the one who shot Lee; and Vance got such a bad reputation on the Fayetteville force that he was shunned by his fellow officers, became a hopeless alcoholic and got fired. There are a few scenes showing Jamie’s and Craig’s attempts to raise the $100,000 ransom in cash; including one in which an officious bank official tells her it’s “policy” not to let anyone have more than $10,000 in one transaction even though Jamie had $40,000 on deposit.

Jamie thinks she has the kidnappers talked down from $100,000 to $75,000, and in order to get the last part of that Craig hits on the idea of stealing a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray coupe that was his most prized possession until he turned it over to his cousin Travis just before he started his sentence. There’s a grim scene in which Craig tries to steal the car so he can sell it to his former fence in the old days, only Travis has put a “Claw” anti-theft device on the steering wheel and Craig has no idea how to remove it. (Craig admits to Jamie that his job in the car-theft ring was to hot-wire the stolen cars, but it was Lee who did the breaking-in part before that.) Stokes admits that, despite the massive ransom he and his female partner (whose relationship to him is never specified) demanded, he had no intention of ever letting Izzy go. What he wanted was revenge, particularly the thrill of putting Jamie and Craig through the same pain he went through of having someone they were emotionally committed to die without them being able to do anything to stop it. Ultimately there’s a big confrontation in which Stokes is mortally wounded by a scythe wielded by Craig (the scene is a deserted barn), and he insists to the end that he’s going to take the secret of Izzy’s whereabouts with him – which he does, speeding his own exit by throwing himself through an open window to die on the ground. Meanwhile, Jamie and Craig have figured out how to hack into Izzy’s video feed so that, even though they have no idea where she is, at least they’re in communication with her. Ultimately they hit on the idea of having Izzy rewire her old iPad, with which she was buried, to function as a radio transmitter in the hope that someone can use it to figure out her location. Unfortunately, the only thing Izzy can use as an antenna is the grill from the fan that’s supplying her with air, and without that she will die in two hours unless she’s found in the meantime.

This sets up an exciting suspense climax (exciting enough that Lifetime’s habit of putting their last commercial break in the middle of the denouement was even more annoying than usual) in which Jamie, Craig, and the police led by Conroy (ya remember Conroy?) race to find Izzy’s burying place before she croaks. Needless to say, York and Goff delay the resolution as long as possible and Conroy finds Izzy’s box at the very last moment. It ends with a tag scene in which Craig and Jamie see Izzy off to college at Georgia Tech and Craig acknowledges that during his prison years he took up with a woman named Erin and plans to be with her – leading to the ironic ending that the man who was imprisoned for seven years has a partner and the woman who raised their daughter in the meantime doesn’t. Where No One Can Find Her is pretty typical Lifetime fare, though at least dad being in prison is a somewhat different way of explaining why the heroine has to raise her daughter as a single parent (usually dad is either divorced and remarried, often settled with his new wife in another state and unintereted in his prior family, or dead) and I liked Izzy’s MacGyver-esque resourcefulness; she’s not just another Lifetime “pussy in peril.”