Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)

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

Last night (Friday, April 17) when my husband Charles actually did get home shortly after 11 p.m., I ran him an oddball item off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHc0rxm628&t=6s): the 1929 short Black and Tan, starring Duke Ellington (in his film debut) and light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington in a film written, directed, and probably produced by Dudley Murphy. Dudley Murphy (1897-1968) had a quirky career; according to his imdb.com page, his “output varied wildly from modernist avant-garde to routine studio programmers.” He’s best known for three films he made featuring major African-American performers: this one, St. Louis Blues (1929) – another short, and the one film we have of the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith – and the feature The Emperor Jones, made in New York City in 1933 and preserving Paul Robeson’s performance as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play (though Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward worked on the script and “opened up” the play to show how Brutus Jones got to be a Caribbean dictator in the first place). I’d seen Black and Tan several times before, usually in pretty grungy and beat-up prints presented on programs about jazz in films. This version from the Cult Cinema Classics YouTube page was ballyhooed as a major restoration: “The source material used includes a 35mm print from the collection of KAVI (a film archive in Finland) and a 16mm duplicate negative from the collection of Blackhawk Films.” The restoration was a big improvement over any version of the film I’d seen before. The plot of Black and Tan is simple: Duke Ellington and his trumpet player, Artie Whetsol, are shown rehearsing the title song, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (actually co-composed by Ellington and his earlier trumpet star, James “Bubber” Miley, but it’s possible that Miley had already drunk his way out of Ellington’s band by the time this film was made) in a grungy Harlem apartment.

Two men (Edgar Connor and Alec Lovejoy) come over to repossess Ellington’s piano, but Ellington’s girlfriend, dancer Fredi Washington, arrives with the seemingly good news that their financial troubles are over. “I've just landed a job in a nightclub. And I’m going to dance and you’re going to play. Isn’t that wonderful?” Ellington reminds Fredi that her doctor had just diagnosed her with heart disease and told her she shouldn’t dance anymore, but Fredi ignores his warning and takes the job anyway. We then cut to the band’s and Fredi’s debut performance at the club, which is probably as close as we’re going to get to what Ellington’s actual performances at the Cotton Club, the prestige nightclub in Harlem that featured Black performers but didn’t let any Blacks in the audience, looked like. Among the acts are a group of five Black male dancers who move in a staggeringly perfect unison to Ellington’s composition “Black Beauty” while Fredi waits to do her number. Murphy gives us “Black Beauty” first filmed normally and then through a point-of-view shot showing how Fredi sees the number in a series of fragmented, kaleidoscopic vistas that let us know without stressing it just how sick she is and how dangerous it is for her to be working there. Then Fredi does her big number to Ellington’s “Cotton Club Stomp,” flails her arms and legs around big-time, and Murphy gives us an astonishing angle shooting up at her legs and her crotch. As the dance number stops Fredi literally collapses on stage, and the club’s manager tells Ellington to keep playing. He does so until someone comes up to him on the bandstand and gives him word that Fredi is literally on her deathbed, whereupon he orders his band members to stop playing and pack up so he and they can be with Fredi as she dies. They all end up in Fredi’s bedroom, where she makes her last request: “Duke, play me the ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’” The Hall Johnson Choir turns up and sings a version of the song (all other renditions I’m aware of present it as an instrumental), and we get a final point-of-view shot from Fredi’s perspective as Ellington’s face gets blurrier until Murphy and cinematographer Dal Clawson cut to a more conventional angle as Fredi finally dies. The restoration definitely improved the picture quality and seems to have helped the sound as well, though it’s still awfully difficult to make out the words the Hall Johnson Choir is singing to “Black and Tan Fantasy.” (The Hall Johnson Choir also appeared in the 1929 St. Louis Blues, but there they just seemed to get in the way.)

One thing I hadn’t realized until last night is that Black and Tan is actually at least loosely based on a true story; Fredi Washington’s character is based on Florence Mills, a spectacularly successful and tragically short-lived African-American entertainer. Born in 1896, Mills made her New York stage debut in the all-Black revue Shuffle Along, which was such a huge hit it convinced white promoters there was a market among white audiences for Black entertainers. White producer Lew Leslie hired Mills and other Black stars for the Plantation Club and later developed a Broadway show out of the club’s roster, the Plantation Revue. Alas, Mills’s rise to stardom ended abruptly when she caught tuberculosis after 300 performances of a show called Blackbirds in London. She made it home but died at a hospital in New York City on November 1, 1927. More than 10,000 people attended her funeral; Black poet James Weldon Johnson was one of them, and Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee, all of whom had performed with Mills, were honorary pallbearers. One giveaway that the plot of Black and Tan was inspired by the real-life death of Florence Mills was that the film includes “Black Beauty,” a song composed by Ellington specifically as a memorial tribute to her. The connection between Fredi Washington’s fate in the movie and Florence Mills’s in real life gives Black and Tan a poignancy most 1920’s and 1930’s band shorts don’t have, while Murphy’s amazingly creative visual direction (at a time when most Hollywood musical features were still being filmed from straightforward angles, in which dancers were seen cavorting on big sets from far away and looking like ants on a wedding cake) also makes this film really special – though Ellington’s later band shorts, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller at Paramount before he left to invent Cinerama, are also unusually creative visually. I’ve long suspected that Ellington, who began as a painter and showed off his visual flair by (among other things) naming so many of his songs after colors, had a lot to do with the unusually rich visual “looks” of his band shorts.

Elsbeth: "Murder, He Wrote" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount; TV episode, aired April 16, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 16) I watched a new episode of Elsbeth after bypassing Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit because they were doing reruns. The Elsbeth was called “Murder, He Wrote” as an obvious pun on the name of the old TV series Murder, She Wrote, which starred Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a murder mystery writer who got involved in solving real-life crimes in her home town of Cabot Cove, Maine. (Charles said he didn’t like the show because so many people in Cabot Cove got themselves killed he thought the entire town would have quickly been depopulated – and I suspect the people behind Murder, She Wrote felt that way, too, because in later years they had Jessica Fletcher get out more and solve crimes in other locales.) This Elsbeth show starred Griffin Dunne, whom I remembered as the cute young man who was Madonna’s co-star in the 1987 film Who’s That Girl?, which I thought was quite better than its reputation even though the two earlier films it was reworked from, 1938’s Bringing Up Baby and 1971’s What’s Up, Doc?, were even better. Getting back to Elsbeth, it was disheartening to see Griffin Dunne turned into a grizzled old man (but just consider how different I look now from what I did in 1987!), but he still acted with authority as Elliott Pope, a mystery writer who grew up in Massapequa, New York and became successful with a series of books containing such hot and steamy sex scenes they verged on pornography. (Was writer Jonathan Tolins thinking Mickey Spillane here?) Ultimately Pope started writing more ambitious mysteries and broke out of the neo-porn confines into the world of “serious” literature, though he always drew on people he’d known from Massapequa and wrote thinly disguised paraphrases of them into his novels. One such person was Barney Corman (Mark Linn-Baker), who grew up in Massapequa alongside Pope and then moved to New York City, opened a small bookstore called Barney’s Books, and also supplemented his income by writing book reviews for tiny publications. Corman never reviewed Pope’s books publicly because of their former friendship, which has remained strong enough that Pope regularly does book events at Corman’s shop.

In the opening scene Pope entrusts Corman with the handwritten manuscript of his latest novel, Troubled Pants, because Corman wants to read it. Since it’s the only extant copy of the work, and would remain so until Pope has it typed and it becomes a computer file, Pope threatens to murder Corman if the manuscript disappears. A year and a half later, Pope shows up at Barney’s Books upset that the manuscript of Troubled Pants is still missing, and he kills Corman by shoving a series of bookshelves onto him until they crush him. The police, of course, assume it was an accident, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) reopens the case a year and a half later after Pope publishes a new novel, Snow Keeps Falling, in which Pope’s usual alter ego, “Henry Bishop” (so named because his creator’s name is “Pope”), goes on a skiing trip with a friend who resembles Barney Corman who dies in an avalanche while Pope’s character is having an affair with his wife. One of the things we quickly learn about is that, like quite a few politicians, Pope has an insatiable appetite for sex, so much so that his publisher stopped paying him to hire young, comely female college students as “interns” because he was continually trying to seduce them, and they were filing too many human-resources complaints against him. Elsbeth’s B.S. detector is triggered by a passage in Pope’s book that says he and his late friend locked eyes and stared at each other just before the avalanche killed the friend. Elsbeth reasons that any such avalanche would have killed Pope’s character, too, if the two men had been close together enough to lock eyes. There’s a subplot in which Elsbeth’s friend Alec Bloom (Ivan Hernandez) actually wins the election for mayor of New York, only Elsbeth jilts him as soon as the results are in. There are also some engaging character performances by middle-aged women, including Sarah Steele as Marissa Gold, Alec’s campaign manager, and Joanna Gleason as Barney Corman’s widow Beverly, who took over the store after his death and seems to have built it back up into a going concern again.

Barney had been worried he’d have to close since the landlord had jacked up the rent on him, and to that end he had a first edition of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End in a copy supposedly once owned by Henry James that he was reluctantly going to have to sell to keep the store open. Elsbeth ultimately discovers that Pope went through a bitter divorce from Maura Davidoff (Didi Conn), and that Barney Corman had been sending her bitterly negative reviews of each of Pope’s books as they came out. Elsbeth goes to see Maura and finds that Barney sent her a review of Troubled Pants, even though it was never published, only Pope had recovered his handwritten manuscript from the store’s files the night he killed Barney and it’s sitting in his apartment until, worried that its existence would give him away, he burns it and reports it to the fire department as a house fire. Ultimately Elsbeth is able to tie Pope to the crime through his habit of licking his fingers before he turns the pages of a book, which gives the police enough of his DNA to test it and find a match between the residue on the footstool Pope pushed out of the way to make sure that the shelves would crush Barney and the saliva Pope left on the pages of Howard’s End as he turned the pages on the book. Like a Law and Order writer, Jonathan Tolins has Pope arrested at the most publicly embarrassing moment, right when he’s about to do a public reading from Snow Kept Falling and take questions at a book signing. Mention should be made of this episode’s director, Robin Givens, who entered the celebriati in 1988 by marrying boxer Mike Tyson. Her imdb.com bio is a sad tale of multiple relationships with male athletes that all seem to have ended badly, two of which produced children whom she raised as a single mother. She turned in a perfectly professional job of directing here. I also liked the scene in which Elsbeth is out walking with her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), and as is common in real-life friendships between straight women and Gay men, they’re both commiserating about how awful it is to date men!

Rope of Sand (Wallis-Hazen Productions, Paramount, 1949)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched Rope of Sand, a 1949 film gris (my term for a movie that attempts film noir but doesn’t quite make it) produced by Hal B. Wallis for his independent unit at Paramount, directed by William nè Wilhelm Dieterle, and written by Walter Doniger with additional dialogue by John Paxton (the quite talented writer who adapted Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely into the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet, to my mind the quintessential film noir). It’s essentially a knock-off of the film Casablanca, also produced by Hal Wallis and with three of the same actors: Paul Henried, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. (The trailer even ballyhooed the resemblance; it mentioned that Hal B. Wallis had also produced Casablanca.) The best thing about Rope of Sand is the title, a description of the South African desert and the way it serves to keep most of South Africa’s diamond wealth safe from potential smugglers. Otherwise it’s a melodrama about post-war intrigue that needed Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and got Burt Lancaster and Corinne Calvet. Lancaster was capable of strong performances under directors who knew what to do with him, but Dieterle didn’t; time and again throughout this movie Lancaster bellows and bullies his way through scenes that in the hands of a subtler actor like Bogart or John Garfield might actually have been moving. Calvet, a French import who had a brief vogue in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, has little to do but look pretty and sultrily alluring in her role as a former “dancer” (in the days when that was a Production Code-safe euphemism for “prostitute”) posing as the daughter of a major shareholder in Colonial to seduce Mike Davis (Burt Lancaster) into revealing the secret location of his diamond stash. The biggest surprise about this movie is Paul Henried’s casting as a totally black-hearted villain, Commandant Paul G. Vogel of the Colonial Diamond Company in South Africa (the name “Colonial Diamond Company” says all you need to know about the ethics, or lack thereof, of the people running it). In the opening scene he’s driving a half-track through the desert (half-tracks, which had normal car wheels in the front and tank treads in the back, were major vehicles used on all sides in World War II because of their off-road capabilities). In the opening scene Vogel is shown using his half-track to hunt down a Black native who worked at the mine until his attempt to escape. Both Charles and I guessed that he’d be the only Black person we’d see in the whole movie, but we were wrong; there were several other Black characters, including John (Kenny Washington), on whom Vogel dumps a large cargo of trunks. Davis helps him out and gives him first aid, in return for which John becomes Davis’s personal servant and all-around factotum.

For the first 15 minutes of the film we don’t see Burt Lancaster’s character until he shows up at the diamond company’s town, slightly the worse for wear, and we learn that he was there before. While in the so-called “Prohibited Area” near the South Africa/Angola border Mike Davis stumbled on a major stash of diamonds on a previous trip, and naturally Vogel wants to worm the information out of him through what then would have been called “tortures” but now would be “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Claude Rains plays Arthur Martingale, Vogel’s immediate superior in Colonial and a man who literally blackballs Vogel’s application to join the local rich white men’s social club. He’s essentially the same character he played in Casablanca, a man not actively evil but also not giving a damn about traditional morality – and the script for Rope of Sand doesn’t give Martingale much of a chance to regain his integrity the way the one for Casablanca did. There’s also a small role for Sam Jaffe as Dr. Francis Hunter, an alcoholic who’s drunk his way out of any established practice but hasn’t quite been de-licensed yet. Rope of Sand lurches to a climax in which Davis actually scores his diamond haul, thanks largely to his having literally held Vogel at gunpoint and forced him to call off all the security details. But Vogel has accidentally killed Dr. Hunter and framed Suzanne to take the fall. Davis, who has come genuinely to love Suzanne, agrees to turn over the diamonds to Martingale if he undoes Vogel’s frame-up against Suzanne, and in a nice bit of worm-turning gratitude Martingale throws Davis a small bag of three of the uncut diamonds, one of which Davis gives to John, one of which goes to a comic-relief character named Thompson (John Bromfield), and one of which Davis keeps to finance his and Suzanne’s escape to Angola.

There are a lot of problems with Rope of Sand, including the shooting of the desert scenes in Yuma, Arizona, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for sandy deserts (when Vogel was chasing the anonymous Black man through the desert in his half-track, Charles joked, “It’s really Arizona,” and he was right) and the ill-use of Peter Lorre. He’s only in two scenes (well, in Casablanca he was only in one scene, but it was such a strong and powerful scene it became indelible), and aside from him claiming connections that will allow Davis to fence the diamonds and turn them into cash, it’s not at all clear what he’s there for aside from to make obvious and banal pseudo-philosophical observations about diamonds. (Lorre would do much better in that regard five years later when he philosophizes about time in Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and written by Truman Capote from a novel by Claud Cockburn.) Rope of Sand is the sort of mediocre movie that gets made because the filmmakers, Hal Wallis in particular, wanted to re-create their older and considerably better movies. I only got this one so I could see Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; Amazon.com had either a $15 DVD with Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye alone or a $25 Blu-Ray box from Kino Lorber with two other movies. I chose the two other movies (the third is a 1958 potboiler called Never Love a Stranger, based on a best-selling 1948 novel by Harold Robbins, his first of many), but after watching Rope of Sand I’m not sure that was a wise move after all.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (William Cagney Productions, Warner Bros., 1950)

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

Last night (Tuesday, April 14) my husband Charles and I watched Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a really strange 1950 crime drama/film noir directed by Gordon Douglas from an adaptation by Harry Brown of a similarly titled 1948 novel by Horace McCoy. The name Horace McCoy was familiar to me largely as the author of the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a grim tale about the marathon dance contests that were all the rage in the early 1930’s which McCoy was inspired to write after having briefly worked as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier. McCoy was living in Hollywood at the time and actually tried to make it as an actor, then as a screenwriter, and he apparently did some uncredited polishing on the classic King Kong (1933), though his imdb.com page doesn’t list that as one of his credits. Most of his credits were for “B” gangster movies, though there’s a rather intriguing one from late in his life (he died on December 15, 1955 at age 57 of a heart attack) was Bad for Each Other (1953), which he didn’t write for the screen but was based on his novel Scalpel (1952). I had a lukewarm response to Bad for Each Other at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/bad-for-each-other-columbia-1953.html when I saw it in 2023. Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye (note the hyphenated spelling) began life as a novel McCoy published in 1948 and was filmed two years later as a co-production between Warner Bros. and William Cagney Productions. William Cagney was James Cagney’s brother and production partner on a number of his films made between 1943 and 1948, when James had successfully run out his contract with Warner Bros. and was working independently, including Johnny Come Lately (1943), Blood on the Sun (1945), and The Time of Your Life (1948).

When James Cagney returned to Warners and made one of his best films, White Heat (1949), with Louis Edelman producing and Raoul Walsh directing, William reorganized his production company and both Cagneys made this film as a William Cagney Productions/Warner Bros. co-credit. William Cagney also supplied the leading lady for the film, Barbara Payton, who’d already made her movie debut in Trapped (1949), about which I’d written approvingly in a previous post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/rby-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2023.html): “It also has one of the best-written characterizations for a woman in the entire noir canon; Barbara Payton is not a femme fatale leading an innocent hero to destruction, nor is she the standard-issue ‘gangster’s moll,’ but a tough, no-nonsense woman living her life on her own terms and expressing her sexuality as she sees fit. Her only real fault is an unwise (to say the least!) attraction to a no-good man.” I’m not sure if William Cagney was physically attracted to Barbara Payton, but he signed her to an unusual contract that obligated her to William Cagney Productions and Warner Bros. simultaneously. One major difference between McCoy’s novel and the film is that, according to Brian Greene (https://www.criminalelement.com/lost-classics-of-noir-kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-horacemccoy-brian-greene/), the book is narrated by the central character, gangster and escaped convict Ralph Cotter (James Cagney). In the film, Cotter is dead at the start of the action and the story is told in flashbacks by the prosecution’s witnesses in the trial of his seven key accomplices (John Halloran plays the prosecutor, Peter Cobbett). Once the preliminaries are over, the film begins with Ralph Cotter and Frank Carleton (an uncredited Neville Brand) escaping from a work-farm prison run by guard Byers (William Frawley, whose presence here seemed odd given that his best-known role is as Fred Mertz in all seven original seasons of I Love Lucy, though we’ve seen him playing official police detectives quite credibly in a number of “B” private-eye series films).

The escaping convicts are expecting to be picked up by a car containing Frank’s sister Holiday (Barbara Payton) and a driver called “Rushie” (an uncredited King Donovan), only before the escape was effected Frank was shot, ostensibly in a shoot-out with guards but really by Ralph because he didn’t want to carry the burden of a wounded colleague. Needless to say, Holiday is not happy that her brother was killed in the escape attempt, but by a combination of intimidation and star power Ralph is able to talk her into not only letting him use the apartment in her building she’d rented for Frank but becoming her lover. Needing money in a hurry, Ralph decides to stick up a local supermarket, only during the robbery he pistol-whips the store’s owner, who lingers in a coma for a few days before ultimately expiring. The police track down the supermarket robbers in a hurry, but fortunately for Our Anti-Heroes the cops who answer the call are corrupt: Inspector Charles Weber (Ward Bond) and Lieutenant John Reece (Barton MacLane), an intriguing reunion of the official police officers from The Maltese Falcon, show up but only to demand the loot from the robbery rather than to arrest the participants. Ralph hits on the idea of buying (or stealing?) a disc recording machine and using it to entrap the cops into a criminal scheme so he can then use the threat of exposure to blackmail them into going along with whatever big caper he cooks up. Ralph also decides he needs to line up an equally corrupt attorney to represent him in the scheme, and he looks for one in an unlikely source: a spiritualists’ meeting led by Darius “Doc” Green (Frank Reicher), who was a racketeer until two years previously, when he got out of the crime game and reinvented himself as a supposedly legitimate religious leader. Green’s assistant is Margaret Dobson (Helena Carter, whose name I remember seeing in a number of RKO “B” cast lists from the 1930’s and, since Charles and I were watching them at the height of the fame of Helena Bonham Carter, I jokingly called her “Helena Non-Bonham Carter”), daughter of the richest man in town, former governor and senator Ezra Dobson (Herbert Heyes). Naturally, even though he already has a girlfriend, Ralph is attracted to Margaret, and the two go for a thrill-seeking ride at 120 miles per hour in her sports car (whose right-handed drive indicates she’s a woman who has more money than she knows what to do with). There’s a nicely ironic sequence in which two motorcycle cops stop them for speeding but don’t recognize Ralph as the escaped con half the police in town are after.

The attorney Ralph finally recruits via Green’s tip is Keith “Cherokee” Mandon (Luther Adler), with whom he insists on using the pseudonym “Paul Murphy” (as Holiday calls herself “Caldwell” through most of the film, though why she didn’t change her distinctive first name as well is something of a mystery). Mandon warns Ralph against tangling with the Dobsons, whose far-reaching influence would destroy anyone who crosses Ezra about anything. Mandon says he’ll withdraw from Ralph’s case if he has anything to do with the Dobsons, but Ralph ignores it and not only continues to date Margaret (pissing off Holiday, of course) but even secretly marries her, taking her to another state for the wedding, ostensibly so they don’t have to endure the three-day waiting period their own state (whatever it is) imposes but really because they needed to avoid Ezra’s influence. When Ezra catches Ralph in Margaret’s bedroom (they’re supposed to be married to each other but they still have to sleep in the Production Code-obligatory twin beds!), Ezra demands that Ralph agree to file for an annulment on the spot. Ralph does so but later Ezra thinks better of it and decides not to file the annulment papers because he’s decided Ralph is just the right man to tame his wayward daughter. Meanwhile Ralph has settled on his next big crime: to hijack the receipts of the town’s leading bookie, Romer (Larry J. Blake). His plan is to stick up Romer’s three collection agents, then kill them and hide their cars in a convenient quarry, so Romer will think his agents absconded with the money themselves and disappeared. The plan succeeds and the crooks meet at Holiday’s apartment to divide the loot, only Holiday sees Ralph canoodling with Margaret, realizes she’s about to be dumped, and shoots Ralph dead. There’s a neat gag scene in which her revolver fails to fire, Ralph reminds her that he once told her never to trust a revolver but insist on an automatic, then she finds a bullet in her gun after all and kills him with the second shot. Before she fires at Ralph she shows him a bullet which she says is the one with which he killed her brother Frank. (How did she know? Did she have access to the police’s ballistics tests?)

I’d seen Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye only once before, in the mid-1970’s courtesy of a late-night TV airing, and I hadn’t cared for it, especially since it was a major letdown following the incandescent energy of White Heat (still my favorite James Cagney film). One thing I didn’t like about it then was the sheer complexity of the plot; there are so many intrigues, acting at cross-purposes with each other, including the one in which the town’s (honest) police chief Sam Tolgate (John Litel) gives the corrupt plainclothesmen 48 hours to find the real crooks who robbed the supermarket and killed its owner. (The bad cops hadn’t known until that moment that the owner had died and therefore they were now liable for a murder charge.) I found it a bit better this time around but it’s still not a great movie. Part of the problem is Gordon Douglas’s direction: like most of his films it’s competent and workmanlike but never rises to the sheer energy level both the plot and the stars deserved. (Imagine this film with Fritz Lang directing it; in 1953 Lang would get a somewhat similar script and make a masterpiece, The Big Heat.) Also, though I was watching this movie largely as part of a Barbara Payton tribute (her excellent performance in the otherwise rather sorry The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde had made me curious about her other work, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is generally considered her best film), the most interesting character this time around was the other female lead. Margaret Dobson is a fascinatingly drawn woman who’s much more a femme fatale than Holiday Carleton, and since she’s not only alive at the end but is not ensnared in Ralph’s crimes it’s interesting to imagine whatever future she might have. Helena Non-Bonham Carter plays her with a cool efficiency that actually makes her considerably more chilling than Barbara Payton’s role, and though she’s dark-haired she has something of the affect of the “Hitchcock blonde,” the woman of class and breeding whose well-damped sexual fires are just waiting for the right sort of wrong man to set them off again. Unsurprisingly the original trailer for the film (included as a bonus on our Blu-Ray disc from Kino Lorber as well as on imdb.com, and the imdb.com transfer was noticeably better in visual quality) emphasized James Cagney’s action credentials – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye has been called Cagney’s last major gangster movie – but through much of the movie he seemed bored, as if he’d gone to the well too often with these particular character tropes and saw the diminishing returns, both artistically and commercially, of these story tropes.

Wagner: Die Walküre (Unitel, Bel Air Media, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Arte, RBB, CNC, C Major, 2022)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 12) my husband Charles and I watched the second episode in that rather odd production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen from the Berlin Staatsoper at Unter den Linden, Die Walküre. The production was staged in October 2022 and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, a Russian Regietheater guy who among other things has an utter hatred of the supernatural in opera, which makes him a strange person indeed to stage a work so heavily reliant on supernatural plot elements as Wagner’s Ring. Tcherniakov’s conceit was to set the entire Ring in a giant medical laboratory in 1970’s Germany, with the various characters either experimenters or subjects. For the first episode, Das Rheingold, this resulted in a lot of silly vistas of cells dividing, brains mutating, and the like projected on a giant video screen that hung over the action, while Alberich became a lab rat (which suggests that Tcherniakov might be a better director for Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, in which the title character literally is a human guinea pig for various medical professionals). For Die Walküre, at least the first half thereof, Tcherniakov used a more “normal” setting; Act I and the first half of Act II take place inside a large frame set representing a house, albeit a house without any walls, windows, or doors. This is supposed to be the residence of Hunding (Mika Kares, who also played the giant Fasolt in Das Rheingold), who lives there with Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), a woman he kidnapped and forced to marry him. In Tcherniakov’s production, Hunding is dressed as a German police officer (though his greatcoat and his line of military decorations across his chest make him look more like a minor officer under the Nazis) and Siegmund (Robert Watson), Sieglinde’s long-lost twin brother and eventually her lover, is depicted as a fugitive from justice who escaped police custody when the transport van he was in had a collision with another vehicle. Hunding’s home has a water faucet that actually works – we see Hunding wash his hands under it – and also a toilet in front of which Mika Kares had to mime the action of peeing, though fortunately having the toilet actually flush (and the singer really piss) was beyond even Tcherniakov’s demented imagination.

The action more or less follows Wagner’s original dramatic plan: Siegmund collapses on Sieglinde’s doorstep (though at that time he calls himself “Wehwalt” – “Woeful” – because he’s had a life of misery since his father, who unbeknownst to him is the god Wotan, disappeared and his mother died when enemies burned down her house), asks for a drink of water, tells Sieglinde his tale of woe – he was surrounded by enemies when he tried to save a woman from being forced into marriage with a barbarian man she didn’t love and barely knew – and says that in the fight he lost both his spear and shield and is now weaponless. Hunding arrives and recognizes Siegmund as the leader of his sworn enemies; he pledges to give him shelter for the night but then says in the morning they will fight a duel to the death. Siegmund laments that his father hasn’t come through on his pledge to provide him a sword when he needs one. Fortunately the sword is right there; in Wagner’s original it’s stuck in an ash tree growing through Hunding’s living-room floor, but in this version it’s just stuck on the upper part of a framework that’s supposed to represent a wall just under Hunding’s ceiling. As Siegmund and Sieglinde are getting the hots for each other, Siegmund spots the hilt of the sword and pulls it out (this is the sort of symbolism that has led some writers to call Wagner an intellectual ancestor of Freud) while Sieglinde is spiking Hunding’s nightly drink so the two can get it on without Hunding noticing. Oddly, the man who let the side down on Act I was not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann (who stepped in at the last minute to replace Daniel Barenboim, artistic director of the Berlin Oper unter den Linden, who’s in his 80’s and is pulling back from the arduous work of actually conducting). He plodded through an act that’s one of the most stunning and intensely romantic scenes in all opera, making it sound almost boring. At least he had good singers: Robert Watson isn’t exactly going to efface memories of Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, or Franz Völker (the greatest Siegmunds of the period between the two world wars, which was the acme of great Wagner singing on records even though the only recordings we have from it are studio excerpts and live broadcasts) but he has the right tonal qualities for the role. Vida Miknevičiūtė isn’t exactly in Lotte Lehmann’s league, either, but she’s equally strong as Sieglinde despite a tendency to overact, which becomes worse in Act II and Sieglinde’s brief appearance in Act III.

Tcherniakov chose to have the first half of Act II take place inside the same frame house as Act I, and we see Siegmund and Sieglinde hurriedly packing as they prepare to flee and presumably live in the woods together. Siegmund carelessly packs in one of those large and flimsy plastic bags they sell you in supermarkets, and he even more carelessly treats his precious sword “Nothung” (“Needful”), throwing it around the room and waving it around like it were a baseball bat. There Tcherniakov stages the great confrontation between Wotan (Michael Volle); Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), (one of the nine Valkyries, product of an extra-relational liaison between Wotan and the earth goddess Erda whom he’s pressed into service to recruit dead heroes as a palace guard for Valhalla against any attempt to conquer it, which Wotan expects to come from the dwarf leader Alberich); and Fricka (Claudia Mahnke), Wotan’s wife. (Both Volle and Mahnke repeated their roles from Das Rheingold.) At first Wotan assigns Brünnhilde the task of protecting Siegmund in his duel with Hunding, since Siegmund’s very existence is part of an elaborate plot by Wotan to get back the ring of the Nibelung, the magic object that can make its owner the master of the universe if he first renounces love. Alas, Fricka sees through the deception immediately; Siegmund is not an independent actor but merely a tool of Wotan to get back the ring from the giant Fafner, who grabbed it from his brother Fasolt after killing him, turned himself into a dragon, and now guards the Nibelung treasure. She orders Wotan to side with Hunding not only because Hunding is the aggrieved-upon spouse whose wife is having extra-relational activity with her own brother (thereby committing both adultery and incest) but because part of her job in the Norse pantheon is to protect traditional morality and punish sin. Unfortunately, when Siegmund and Sieglinde reappear in flight from Hunding’s wrath, they turn up in the same animal research lab that served as Alberich’s underground realm Nibelheim in Das Rheingold.

Matters plummet from there as we don’t even get to see the big fight at the end, in which Brünnhilde, impressed by Siegmund’s refusal to accompany her to Valhalla after Hunding kills him because he loves Sieglinde and won’t leave her behind, intervenes for Siegmund. Wotan in turn honors his commitment to Fricka and thrusts his spear, made from the world-ash tree and for which in normal Ring productions he gave up an eye for the wisdom engraved on it, in the way of Siegmund’s sword, shattering it. Alas, we don’t get to see any of that happen; we hear it entirely from Sieglinde’s point of view until the absolute end of the sequence, in which Wotan, disgusted by the whole situation, literally orders Hunding dead with a brief arm gesture. He does this while Siegmund is standing up and looking on (in Wagner’s original Siegmund is already dead by then), and later Siegmund is dispatched not by Hunding himself but by five anonymous thugs from his gang set. Matters get even worse in Act III, which for some reason Tcherniakov set in the same lecture hall in which scene two of Rheingold took place. The Valkyries mill in to the famous music Wagner used to abstract the “Ride of the Valkyries” for concert performance (in order to raise money to premiere the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, he gave fund-raising concerts all over Europe of orchestral excerpts from the Ring – “his Kickstarter campaign,” Charles once called it), and it’s momentarily uncertain as to how many of them there are. There are supposed to be nine, including Brünnhilde (eight without her), but at various points I counted two, four, six, and nine without Brünnhilde. The Valkyries are all dressed in black pantsuits and none of them are riding horses (though of course Wagner’s original libretto says they are). Some of them are listening to music on portable players and some of them are carrying around things that look like briefcases. At least one of them has short, dark hair and looks decidedly butch, though I suspect that wasn’t Tcherniakov’s intention.

Wotan enters the scene snarling with rage at Brünnhilde for having defied him, Brünnhilde pleads with her sister Valkyries to defend her, of course they want nothing to do with her, but one of them suggests that she take Sieglinde, who has fled with Brünnhilde even though with Siegmund dead she just wants to kill herself, to Fafner’s realm in the East because it’s the one place in the universe to which Wotan does not dare go. Brünnhilde sends Sieglinde on her way after telling her she can’t die for at least another nine months yet, since not only is she pregnant by Siegmund but the child is going to grow up to be the great hero Siegfried, who will kill Fafner and recover the ring. (Siegfried will also grow up to be Brünnhilde’s boyfriend even though she’s his aunt.) Wotan sentenced her to be stripped of her godhood and the immortality it conveys, and left alone on a rock to be the property of whichever man claims her first. Brünnhilde pleads that this would be way too humiliating, and ultimately she gets Wotan to compromise: he’ll surround the rock with a ring of magic fire so only the bravest of heroes, one who has not known fear, can penetrate it and win Brünnhilde’s love. Properly produced, this scene is one of the most stunning in all opera, but Dmitri Tcherniakov can’t be bothered. While Wotan and Brünnhilde are arguing they’re both throwing the chairs around the lecture hall and then picking them up again, to no effect, and when it comes time for Brünnhilde to be put to sleep and surrounded with the magic fire, all Tcherniakov can think of doing is to have poor Anja Kampe draw jagged lines on the chairs with a red Sharpie to indicate that there’s a fire surrounding her (and it only gets worse when Brünnhilde, instead of lying down, is standing up on one the chairs). Both Charles and I started laughing out loud when Brünnhilde got out the Sharpie and started making lines on the chairs.

The most frustrating thing about this entire Ring, or at least the first half of it, is the infuriating contrast between the grandeur of Wagner’s music and the banality of Tcherniakov’s modern-dress settings. It occurred to me that an opera originally set in the time and place where it was composed is a better candidate for this sort of modern-dress updating than one set in historical, legendary, or mythical times. That’s the conclusion I came to when I wrote my review of Das Rheingold and listed modern-dress opera productions that had especially impressed me (Peter Sellars’s The Marriage of Figaro, Frank Corsaro’s 1983 Carmen from the New York City Opera, Michael Mayer’s 2013 Rigoletto from the Met). At least the singing this time around seemed better than it had in Rheingold, which is partly because in Michael Volle’s case he was dealing with a stronger, more complex and dramatically interesting version of Wotan. In Rheingold, especially as Tcherniakov re-imagined it, he was an unscrupulous Trump-like schemer throughout; here, especially in his unexpected veerings between anger and support for Brünnhilde, Volle found more to work with and turned in a much more intense and moving performance. Robert Watson was a quite good Siegmund – he didn’t efface memories of past greats in the role, but Volle didn’t either – and Vida Miknevičiūtė, despite her mouthful of a last name, was a capable Sieglinde even though she overacted relentlessly in the last two acts. (I hadn’t realized until last night that Wagner, as much as he upended the operatic conventions of the 19th century, still couldn’t resist writing a mad scene for his soprano.) Anja Kampe was properly authoritative as Brünnhilde, and she made at least a stab at doing the notated trills in her entrance at the start of Act Two (that’s been a sore point with me since I reviewed Laila Andersson-Palme’s 1987 Walküre for Fanfare and she made a big to-do about singing the notated trills, which most Brünnhildes either only approximate or ignore altogether), but I’ll have to wait for the two other operas in the series (especially Götterdämmerung, in which her role is considerably longer) to judge her fairly. I liked Mika Kares’s Hunding; for the most part he avoided the outright piggish villainy with which this part is usually played (Hunding is a brief role and lots of basses snarl through it at what the makers of This Is Spinal Tap would have called 11), and Tcherniakov deserves at least some credit for trying to make the other eight Valkyries come off as individuals instead of a mass opera chorus. Once again, though, this was a frustrating production that failed to satisfy, largely because of Tcherniakov’s relentless prejudice against anything that might even remotely qualify as a special effect.

The Ferguson Boy, a.k.a. Bad Blonde (Hammer Films, Lippert Films, Exclusive Films, 1953)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 11) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ (mostly) weekly “Noir Alley,” hosted by Eddie Muller. It was made in England by Exclusive Films, which later changed its name to Hammer and specialized in horror movies (mostly reworkings of the Universal classics from the 1930’s which amped up the sex and gore quotients), and distributed in the U.S. by Lippert Pictures. It was called The Ferguson Boy in Britain but for the U.S. the title was changed to Bad Blonde to take advantage of the notoriety of its female star, Barbara Payton. Barbara Payton was a notoriously rambunctious young woman who was born in 1927 and by 1938, when her parents moved her from Minnesota to Texas, “Payton gained attention in the community for her appearance, even among middle-aged men,” according to her Wikipedia page. “Her mother encouraged this type of attention due to her pride in her daughter's looks.” At 16 Payton got married for the first time to a high-school boyfriend, but her parents insisted that the marriage be annulled. At 18 she married her second husband, Army Air Force pilot John Payton, and though he wanted her to be just a housewife, she was bored and sought out a career either in modeling or acting. She got jobs as a clothes model in advertising layouts, and that led her to a movie contract at Universal-International in 1949. Payton made her film debut in an independent production called Trapped, a movie about counterfeiting with Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who tricks the Secret Service into letting him escape from prison. She subsequently tested for the part of Louis Calhern’s high-maintenance mistress in The Asphalt Jungle but lost it to a fellow model-turned-actress, Marilyn Monroe. In 1950 Payton signed a dual contract with Warner Bros. and William Cagney Productions, and Bill Cagney was so taken with her he gave her a featured role in the 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a vehicle for William’s superstar brother, James Cagney. Alas, her next two films, both Westerns – Dallas, with Gary Cooper; and Only the Valiant – were only middling successes. Just then Payton got involved in a scandal that made her toxic to Hollywood’s official guardians of morality: in 1951, while engaged to actor Franchot Tone, she was also dating “B” lead Tom Neal. Neal, a former boxer, confronted Tone about this; fisticuffs ensued, and Tone ended up in a hospital in a coma for 18 hours with a smashed cheekbone, a broken nose, and a concussion. Payton went ahead with the marriage to Tone but continued to see Neal on the side, and in 1952 Tone divorced her and she and Neal broke up a year later. By this time only “B” producers would deal with Payton, and after a not-bad role in the U.S. production Bride of the Gorilla she moved to Britain and signed a two-film contract with Exclusive. The two films were Four-Sided Triangle (1952), in which she played a woman who comes between two boyhood friends who jointly invent a cloning machine; and this one.

The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde was directed by Reginald Le Borg, an Austrian native whose birth name was Harry Gröbel (“Le Borg” was just “Gröbel spelled backwards). He was the son of a Viennese banker and financier who in 1927 put him in charge of his firm’s U.S. operations. Unfortunately, the 1929 stock market crash wiped out the entire Gröbel fortune, and Le Borg decided to stay in the U.S. and pursue his first love, theatre. He’d already studied music in Vienna under Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920’s, and after working in Austria as a student of Max Reinhardt and directing operas in provincial theatres, Le Borg moved to the U.S. permanently and did second-unit direction for operatic scenes in Grace Moore’s vehicles One Night of Love (1934) and Love Me Forever (1935). Ultimately he signed with Universal for band shorts, and after a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II he went back to Universal and started directing features. Unfortunately, the features he got stuck with were strictly “B” productions like The Mummy’s Ghost and Jungle Woman, of the latter of which Le Borg said, “It was an atrocious script, and a silly idea anyway. But, again, I was under contract. If I had refused it, I would have been suspended without pay, and I wouldn't have gotten anything good anymore. You had to play ball with the front office.” I’d long assumed Le Borg was Gay based on Stuart Timmons’s biography The Trouble with Harry Hay, which named Le Borg as one of Hay’s boyfriends (which led me to joke, “As Gay Universal horror directors went, Le Borg was no James Whale”), but his imdb.com page lists him as having married a woman, Delores Keith Ferguson, in 1945 and having stayed with her until her death (though the page doesn’t mention when she died). The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde begins at an arcade, at which Charlie Sullivan (John Slater) and Sharkey (Sidney James) are running a boxing concession. They charge audience members to see if they can last three rounds with one of their fighters, only newcomer Johnny Ferguson (the drop-dead gorgeous Tony Wright in his first feature for theatres) turns out to be a skilled and well-trained boxer already who more than holds his own with his arcade opponent. Sullivan and Sharkey think they have the makings of a champion, and to that end they trick old-line boxing promoter Giuseppe Vecchi (Frederick Valk in one of the most offensively awful character-acting performances in movie history) to come out of retirement and be Ferguson’s agent. Unfortunately, Vecchi’s American trophy wife Lorna (Barbara Payton) immediately gets the hots for Johnny. At one point Johnny demands that Lorna leave the gym when he’s training, and Lorna says, “Maybe he doesn't like women” – a surprisingly direct Gay reference for a 1953 film from an English-speaking country.

Alas, we’ve already learned that women are Johnny’s great contention when he cruised the barmaid at a club where he, Sullivan, and Sharkey went for beer. Though she’s married to Giuseppe, Lorna starts cruising Johnny and ultimately gets him to have sex with her. Lorna starts telling Johnny how unhappy she is being married to Giuseppe, and once she’s groomed him well enough she tells him the only way they can be happy is if they team up to kill Giuseppe. Ultimately Johnny does so by drowning Giuseppe in the lake and then faking it to look like an accident. All this happens right after Johnny has lost the big fight that was supposed to make him a championship contender because, after she stayed away for the first round, Lorna showed up for the second and her presence unhinged him completely. Alas for Johnny, Lorna couldn’t be less interested in him until she announces to all and sundry that she’s going to have a baby and Johnny is the dad. The writers – Guy Elmes and Richard Landau, adapting a novel by Max Catto – could have taken the They Knew What They Wanted route and had Giuseppe, who is still alive at this point, raise the child and accept it as his own. (The Wikipedia page on the film says that Lorna was merely faking a pregnancy, but I read it as real.) Instead they followed the route of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, only with the woman instead of the man as the ultimate victim. Having escaped responsibility for the murder she in fact was involved in, she tries to poison Johnny by sneaking toxic pills into his soup. He eats it and croaks (though the writers aren’t specific as to whether he knew the soup was spiked and ate it anyway to commit suicide), and just then Sullivan and Sharkey, out to destroy this despicable woman who ruined and ultimately killed their potential meal ticket, call the cops on her. After she frantically searches for the poison pills so she can throw the remaining ones away, Lorna collapses just as when we see where they were hidden – inside the high heel of her shoe – and just then the cops arrive to take her into custody. The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde is a film noir thematically but not visually – there are only two sequences that have the chiaroscuro lighting of classic noir – and as a movie it’s O.K. but all too familiar and redolent of tropes we’ve seen before in other, better films.

One gets the impression the filmmakers were trading on Barbara Payton’s real-life notoriety and casting her as someone similar to her public image: as a wanton wastrel who delighted in playing the men in her life off each other and ruining their lives. She couldn’t act for shit (though I’ve noticed in previous moviemagg posts about her that I’ve hailed her as someone who could have been quite good if properly handled and given a chance to develop acting skills), and through most of this film she’s obviously letting her looks do her acting for her. That’s also true of Tony Wright, though it pains me to say it because he’s got a chest to die for (his nipples are especially deliciously prominent) and one wishes that he, too, had the acting skills to go with his physical beauty. As for the rest of the cast, Frederick Valk turns in one of the most annoying acting jobs in cinema history and John Slater and Sidney James (who went on to a long career in the British Carry On series of comedies in the 1960’s and 1970’s) aren’t much better. The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde had the potential to be first-rate film noir, but it got muffed at almost every point in its execution. And as for Barbara Payton, what, one wonders, were Mary Beth Hughes, Audrey Totter, Ann Savage, or Jan Sterling, any of whom could have played this part far better, doing that week?

Wagner: Das Rheingold (Unitel, Bel Air Media, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Arte, RBB, CNC, C Major, 2022)

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

Last night (Friday, April 10) my husband Charles and I watched a truly weird production on Blu-Ray of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, first episode in the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). I’d been sent a boxed set of Blu-Rays of the complete Ring by Fanfare magazine for review purposes, and I was a little (or more than a little) nervous when I noticed that the conductor was Christian Thielemann and the stage director and scenic designer was Dmitri Tcherniakov. Though Thielemann is the current musical director at the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, Germany, I had watched his performance at the Wagner 200th birthday tribute concert at Bayreuth on May 22, 2013 and been unimpressed. In my moviemagg review of it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/wagner-200th-birthday-concert-bayreuth.html), I’d written, “The odd thing is that Thielemann talks good performances but all too often delivers competent run-throughs; I found myself thinking of him as an Erich Leinsdorf of our time — his performances are always tight and well organized but almost never emotionally driven, compelling renditions of the music. This makes him an odd choice indeed to be music director at Bayreuth, a festival devoted to the music of perhaps the most ’out-there’ Romantic in the history of composition; Wagner’s music demands passion, commitment and drive, and from Thielemann it gets polite accuracy.” I was even more nervous about Tcherniakov’s participation because I’ve read that he hates having supernatural elements in his opera productions and frequently rewrites works containing them to eliminate them. When he did Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, he cut out the final appearance of the ghost of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father and victim of the murder Don Giovanni commits in the opening scene, and instead made the opera a sort of intervention pulled on Don Giovanni by the Commendatore’s family. So that made him an odd choice indeed for a cycle that is largely driven by the supernatural. The American composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote an article about Wagner which called Die Meistersinger “the perfect fairy-tale opera,” which always seemed odd to me because Meistersinger is the only one of the 10 Wagner operas in the Bayreuth canon that does not contain any supernatural elements in its plotting.

Tcherniakov’s “solution” to his non-problem was to relocate the Ring to 1970’s Germany and set it inside an elaborate multi-level medical lab (in the immortal words of the great Wagner satirist Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”). In the opening scene, in which Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) is supposed to be swimming around inside the Rhine river chasing after the three Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelyn Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapkovskaja), in this production he’s strapped to a chair inside a lab with a headdress of electrodes stuck on him. The Rhinemaidens are nurses, and though Wagner wrote the scene with just the Rhinemaidens and Alberich on stage (and in his premiere production at Bayreuth in 1876 he had the Rhinemaidens lying on their stomachs inside a merry-go-round device to create the illusion that they were swimming), Tcherniakov filled the stage with others, including other males, who stood around and did their best to look busy. Indeed, the appearance on stage of people who weren’t supposed to be there, including three women who hang out in the facility’s waiting room and, like most of the other characters, smoke like chimneys (as I’ve written before, it’s fascinating to watch movies from the 1930’s, 1950’s, and even the 1970’s showing doctors, nurses, and patients alike puffing away in what today are strictly enforced no-smoking environments) – I suspect they’re going to turn out to be the Norns in Götterdämmerung – is a hallmark of this relentlessly silly production. When the Rhinemaidens helpfully explain to Alberich (and us) the curse on the Rheingold – it will make its owner master of the world, but only if he first renounces love – Alberich responds by pulling apart all the antique computer equipment in the room before he breaks the glass enclosure with a medical standard and escapes. When scene two begins, we’re in the middle of an otherwise empty lecture hall in which Wotan (Michael Volle) is sprawled out asleep on one of the audience chairs, looking for all the world like Donald Trump nodding out at a Cabinet meeting. His wife Fricka (Claudia Mahnke) strolls in and wakes him up, and the two ultimately adjourn to an Apprentice-style board room to discuss the plight of the gods. It seems that Wotan rashly promised his sister-in-law Freia (Anett Fritsch) to the giants Fasolt (Mika Kares) and Fafner (Peter Rose – Charles chuckled about his name in the credits given that the other Pete Rose is famous for being first a baseball player and then a disgraced retiree from his involvement in sports gambling, not that that’s considered such a big deal anymore) in exchange for building him a new palace which he names Valhalla.

Now Wotan, again like Trump (I can’t help but think this production, made during the blessed four-year Biden interregnum between Trump’s two Presidencies, is filled with on-purpose references to him), wants to figure out a way to renege on the deal. He calls in the trickster god Loge (Rolando Villazón, a Mexican-born lyric tenor who’s the only person in this cast I’d heard of before) to advise him, and Loge sings a beautiful narration explaining how all the world loves love except for Alberich, who stole the Rheingold from the Rhinemaidens and renounced love in exchange for power. Fasolt and Fafner enter, not alone as in Wagner’s original libretto, but with four enforcers who look like a drug cartel’s hired thugs. It turns out they have an ulterior motive for taking Freia; without her, the gods will lose the golden apples they eat regularly to remain immortal. Without her unique knowledge of how to tend the tree on which the golden apples grow, the gods will get old and die. Wotan and Loge promise the giants that they’ll come up with an alternate form of payment – incidentally Fasolt is dressed in a lime-green jacket and purple pants like the Joker in the Batman comic books, and once again I’m assuming that’s an intended reference on Tcherniakov’s part – but the giants take Freia as hostage until Wotan does that. Wotan and Loge descend to Alberich’s realm, Nibelheim, and in textually accurate productions that’s an elaborate descent down caves. In this production all they have to do is take an elevator to a basement lab that’s labeled, “Investigation of Human Behavior Models in a Test Group.” The Nibelungs, who in Wagner’s original were a race of dwarves but here look like standard-issue proletarians, lament that they used to make jewelry just for fun but now they have to do it under Alberich’s lash (literally in Wagner’s original; here Alberich wields what looks like a nightstick or club) in what Tcherniakov obviously thinks is a metaphor for the primitive accumulation under early capitalism. (George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite, a book he originally published in the 1890’s and reissued with revisions in the 1920’s, is an analysis of the Ring in anti-capitalist terms, and I suspect it’s led a lot of modern stage directors to re-imagine the Ring in a 19th or 20th century setting.)

The Nibelung Alberich is hardest on is his own brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer), who makes him a Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that will allow the wearer to become invisible and also to shape-shift. Mime was hoping to use this gimcrack to escape Alberich’s domination, but Alberich catches him, confiscates the Tarnhelm, and uses it to make himself invisible so his domination can be even more total. (For some reason Tcherniakov made the Tarnhelm look like the monitoring device Alberich was wearing in scene one.) Wotan and Loge descend into Nibelheim and trick Alberich into turning himself first into a serpent, then a toad, and when he’s in toad form Wotan and Loge capture and bind him, then take him back to the gods’ headquarters. Amazingly, Tcherniakov doesn’t actually try to dramatize any of this; when he’s supposed to be invisible, a serpent, or a toad, his Alberich looks exactly the same. In the opera’s fourth and final scene, when Alberich is supposed to be bidding his minions to ascend with the treasure they’ve accumulated for him, there is no treasure and, indeed, no activity of any kind. We’re just supposed to take on faith that all this is happening. The way Wagner wrote the scene, Wotan is forced to give up first the treasure, then the Tarnhelm, and then the ring when Fasolt laments that he can still see a glint of Freia’s blonde hair through a crack in the pile of treasure (needless to say, this Freia is dark-haired – were the Berlin wig shops out of blonde wigs that week?) – only we don’t see any of that. Thielemann’s professionally competent but rather mopey conducting matches Tcherniakov’s idiotic modern-dress production, which systematically destroys any chance of creating the sense of wonder Wagner kept trying to create with his music. For the last scene, Tcherniakov has Loge and Froh (the Black singer Siyabonga Maqungo; I’m O.K. with him being Black but not so much with them picking a singer who looks so much like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) do simple ordinary sleight-of-hand tricks any stage magician can do.

This Rheingold was so abominably produced I didn’t notice much about the singing, except that none of the cast members managed the kinds of authority mustered by their counterparts in Georg Solti’s 1958 studio recording of Rheingold – arguably the best ever. Solti’s and producer John Culshaw’s cast – particularly Kirsten Flagstad as Fricka (in the last professional work of her career), George London as Wotan, Set Svanholm as Loge, and the remarkable Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich – is unsurpassable. Most defenders of this modern-dress Regietheater approach to opera production say it’s needed to make the old works “relevant” to a modern audience. That’s just a bunch of B.S.; anyone looking at the box-office profits from Peter Jackson’s film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (a work which owes a great deal to Wagner’s Ring, both structurally – they’re both in four parts, a shorter introductory work and three extended episodes – and thematically) can see the evidence, literally in black and white, that a modern audience can cherish a work set in legendary times without demanding that it be remodeled into the appearance of today. While there have been modern-dress productions of classic operas I actually liked – Frank Corsaro’s 1983 version of Bizet’s Carmen from the New York City Opera, which reset the piece to take place during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and actually worked the war into the plot; Peter Sellars’s edition of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (decidedly not his Don Giovanni or Cosi fan Tutte!); Michael Mayer’s staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Met in 2013 (which relocated the action to Las Vegas c. 1960 and made the Duke of Mantua Frank Sinatra and his courtiers the Rat Pack) – those have taken care to find modern (or recent) equivalents for the class conflicts within the original material. It’s all too clear that Dmitri Tcherniakov couldn’t have been bothered with that kind of faithful translation; his Rheingold (and, I fear, the rest of his Ring) is a bizarre fantasy of his own to which only he holds the key.

Law and Order: "Beyond Measure" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 9, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 9) I watched successive episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “Beyond Measure” and began with an encounter between the two leading police officers on the “Law” section of the series, Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), and Roman Catholic Archbishop Keane (Michael O’Keefe). The two cops were passing a Catholic church while it was in the middle of hosting a service and Riley is confessing to Walker that he grew up in the church but became disillusioned with it and sought spiritual answers elsewhere. Just then the two detectives see a crowd of people fleeing in panic, and my first thought was that there was a gunman doing a mass shooting in the church. Instead the targeted building was an art museum and the people with the guns were garden-variety robbers after a particularly important relic, an emerald-encrusted golden crown from Colombia that had been made by indigenous workers back in the day. The Catholic church in Colombia had seized the crown 100 years before, and it was now on display in that museum. The typical red-herring suspect is indigenous Colombian activist Amaru Yupanqui (Mario Golden), who’d put out online messages demanding that the Church return the crown to the Native Colombians, but he insists that he’d never do something as stupid as hire people to steal it. The actual crooks turn out to be two Afghanistan war veterans, one of whom gets killed in a shoot-out with police, along with a museum staffer whom they blackmailed into helping them but who turns state’s evidence in exchange for a reduced sentence. The police and prosecutors investigate it as a murder case because a security guard named Carbo was shot and killed during the robbery, and Carbo’s wife Valentina (Betzaida Landín) and daughter Luna (Isabella Miranda) are naturally upset and demand justice.

At first the prosecution loses a ruling before Judge Evelyn Boyd (Diane Ciesla), who rules that because the defendant, Luis Salazar (Shawn Mintz), had already checked his suitcase with the airline he was going to fly out of the country on when the cops arrested him at the airport, the phone pager he and his fellow crooks had been using to communicate is inadmissible. Needing more evidence against Salazar, the police learn that a man using crutches had been the last one to flee the museum when the gunfire started. They interview him and learn that Salazar had said during the robbery, “I hope Leo comes through for us.” “Leo” turns out to be Leonard Hawkins (Julio Perrilán), who was briefly married to Salazar’s aunt, who testifies against Salazar and makes it clear that now that he and Salazar’s aunt are divorced, he has no family feeling towards him and had no intention of handling the stolen item anyway. The case appears headed for a slam-dunk guilty verdict when Archbishop Keane intervenes, appearing before district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) with Salazar’s lawyer, Max Wood (an oddly Anglo character name for a character that looks Asian and is played by Rob Yang). The three are demanding that prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) accept a plea bargain in which, in exchange for a reduced sentence, Salazar will reveal the whereabouts of the crown (ya remember the crown?) and it will be returned to the museum from whence it was stolen. Price suspects that Baxter wants him to cut the deal because Baxter will be running for re-election and he doesn’t want to alienate the estimated 2.5 million Roman Catholic voters in New York City, but the deal is done, the crown is returned to the museum, and predictably Valentina and Luna Carbo aren’t happy that Salazar, even if he serves the full 15 years he’ll be sentenced to, will be out before he’s 40 while Valentina’s husband and Luna’s dad will still be dead. “It’s complicated,” Price tells the Carbos, who understandably intuit that he doesn’t personally believe what he’s saying. Of course, “It’s complicated” has also entered the language as code for Facebook users who are cruising the site for partners for extra-relational activity!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Deep Under" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 9, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Deep Under,” marked a welcome return to the series for actor Octavio Pisano, who to my mind was the sexiest guy in the cast once Christopher Meloni moved on. As before, he was playing Joe Velasco, who left the Special Victims Unit to go to work for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was assigned to go undercover and infiltrate a Mexican-formed drug cartel being run out of San Diego, but the gang was branching out both geographically to the East Coast and business-wise into human trafficking. Velasco phoned in an anonymous tip to his old colleagues at the Manhattan Special Victims Unit to alert them that the gang was bringing in a shipment of young women, most of whom were already prostitutes, to be trafficked. Among the victims, whom the SVU is able to rescue, is Madison Cleary (Abi Lieff), whose sister Brittany (Emily Rose DeMartino) is still being held captive and is scheduled to be in the second shipment of young women being handled as merchandise. The issue becomes Velasco’s divided loyalties, as he’s formally arrested by SVU at the original drop point and he pleads with his former colleagues not to do anything that would blow his cover with the gang. His handler at the DEA is Black woman agent Maggie Weber (Jerrika Hinton), with whom he’s unhappy. Velasco has also fallen in love with one of the women he met through the gang, Eliana Castillo (Carmela Zumbado), even though she was the girlfriend of gang member Manuel Rojas (Fernando Gamarra). He started out by pumping her for information, but soon graduated to more literal “pumping” of her, while the gang’s leader realizes that his operation is being compromised and is willing to kill all three of the suspected leakers if that’s what it takes to stop the losses. Ultimately Velasco and Eliana both get shot as suspected leakers, though they’re both rescued by the SVU squad and brought back to health in the hospital. There’s a bittersweet ending as SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and DEA agent Weber cut a deal by which Eliana will testify against the gang in federal court and then be relocated in witness protection, though this means she and Velasco will never be able to see each other again. Otherwise this is a pretty ordinary divided-loyalties tale that was O.K. entertainment but not much more.

Elsbeth: "Otherwise Enraged" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 9, 2026)

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

Things lightened up considerably when I switched from NBC to CBS and watched an April 9 episode of Elsbeth in which, following the Columbo trajectory of the show in general we first got to see the actual murder go down, know from the get-go whodunit, and then be entertained as Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her official colleagues on the New York Police Department unravel the killer’s attempts to cover it up. In this case the killer is one of the most engaging, if also infuriating, characters in this show’s quirky history: Rachel Withers (Beanie Feldstein), an avocational party planner who’s literally “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” She’s planned and attended at least 30 bridal showers and gender-reveal parties without ever having a boyfriend, let alone getting married herself. As the episode, called “Otherwise Enraged,” opens, Rachel is alone at a huge party she’s catered for herself to celebrate her inheritance of a large house in the south of France to which she intends to relocate now that her aunt, who owned it, has died and left it to her. Only nobody shows up to her big party, and Rachel eventually realizes that her big “do” was sabotaged by her supposed best friend, Kimberly Brooks (Ali Fumiko Whitney), who’s just reconciled with her previously estranged third husband (of course Rachel hosted all her bridal showers!) Howard Brooks (Lionel Leede). Rachel is so incensed at Kimberly’s sabotage of her big party that she goes over to Kimberly’s apartment, lets herself in (it’s been established that she has the key), confronts her and ultimately wallops her with a designer pan. Then she puts the pan in the dishwasher to wipe off Kimberly’s blood, only just then Howard stumbles home drunk from someone else’s party and collapses in a drunken stupor on the couch. Rachel sees this as an opportunity to frame Howard for Kimberly’s murder, and she takes a similar pot, plants it on him, and leaves him to wake up the next morning and become convinced he killed his wife in a drunken rage.

Also, between the party fiasco and Rachel’s confrontation with Kimberly, she ran into a bike-riding barista named Carson Rogers (Pierre Marais) who thought she was about to commit suicide, saved her from doing so (even though she insisted she wasn’t), and instantly became infatuated with her and took the card he’d offered her with his phone number. This became important later when Rachel decided she needed an alibi for the murder, so she called his number and offered to buy him a Tesla cybertruck if he’d testify that she was at his place literally all night. Though the official police detective on the case, Jackie Donnelly (Molly Price), remains convinced that Howard killed his wife, Elsbeth eventually brings her around and extracts Rachel’s confession. There’s also a subplot about Elsbeth’s boss on the police department, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), hosting a party to celebrate his own 30th wedding anniversary. He’s invited not only his daughter Julia (Brittany Inge) but her ex on the the force, Detective Rivers (Brandon De La Garza) – only Julia gives her dad an ultimatum: either disinvite Rivers or she’s not showing up to her parents’ celebration of the longevity of their marriage. Rivers tries to lie his way out of it by saying his aunt has just died and he’s in no mood to party. It fools Captain Wagner but not Julia, who recalls during the time she and Rivers were dating that he lost his one and only aunt when he was 12 and it was a major trauma for him then. This Elsbeth was a charming show and a welcome departure from the gloom and doom Dick Wolf’s atelier had brought us earlier in the evening, and though she’s playing an exasperating bitch here Beanie Feldstein – who achieved stardom on Broadway playing Fanny Brice in Funny Girl in 2022 even though Feldstein, unlike Barbra Streisand (who created the role), is very definitely a “woman of size” – is quite engaging and I’d love to see more of her.

Kidnapping My Own Daughter (Fireside Pictures, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 5), with Turner Classic Movies occupying itself with the special Easter presentation of the 1961 Jesus biopic King of Kings, which I watched around Eastertime in 2022 and wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/king-of-kings-samuel-bronston.html. Instead I went to Lifetime for a really quirky movie called Kidnapping My Own Daughter, directed by Max McGuire (whom I’d never heard of before) and written by Shawn Riopelle (whom I had). It’s about a child protective services worker named Fay Walden (Kathryn Kohut) who’s alone in bed with her not particularly attractive husband Paul (Chris Violette) – though, this being Lifetime, his very homeliness marks him as a good guy. Suddenly they hear the sounds of their house being broken into, and the intruders turn out to be Tess Donnelly (Catherine Saindon) and her boyfriend de jour Harlow (Nate Colitto). Three years earlier Tess, a single mother at age 19 after her baby’s father died on her, lost her child to the local “protective” agency, and now she’s come to the Waldens’ home with a knife (later revealed to be a prop knife made of rubber, but of course the Waldens don’t know that!) to demand to learn the whereabouts of her daughter Amelia. Tess lost custody of Amelia after an incident at a Fourth of July fireworks show in which the girl was burned by an ember from one of the fireworks, but the social worker assigned to her case, Margaret (Debra Hale), insisted that Tess had burned Amelia with a cigarette and took the child away from her. The local police arrive in response to Fay’s 911 call and Paul subdues Harlow, so he’s arrested, but Tess escapes. Later on Fay investigates the case of Amelia on her own and learns that just about all the documents in her file were heavily redacted.

Just then we see by far the hottest, hunkiest guy in the cast, Jacob Ashford (Jesse Collin), frantically calling Margaret to set up a meeting with her. This being Lifetime, we immediately know that Jacob is a villain and there was something untoward about the way Tess’s case went down that Jacob is worried Fay’s investigation will expose. Margaret had retired two years earlier after having mentored Fay and just about everyone else currently working in the department, but she had a dark side. She retired in the first place because her husband George had got terminal cancer and she wanted to be with him in his last months. Jacob is a super-rich man who’s been through various fertility treatments with his wife Clara (Esther Viessing) to have a child, including IVF and even surrogacy. Since nothing worked to get them a kid au naturel, Jacob cut a deal with Margaret to obtain a child he could adopt in exchange for him providing round-the-clock home care for her dying husband George. So Margaret framed Tess as an unfit parent and filed away the paperwork, redacting most of the details (when we were first shown the files with all the heavy black cross-outs I joked, “Who’s running this office, anyway? Pam Bondi? I guess she needed a new job after Trump fired her”), though she let one document slip through with only hand redactions that enabled Fay to figure out most of its hidden contents. Jacob proves to be a typically ruthless Lifetime villain, grabbing hold of the flash drive that could have proven Tess innocent of the charge of deliberately burning her daughter and also murdering Margaret by grabbing her desperately needed heart medication and spilling it on her floor. (Both Charles and I caught the reference to The Little Foxes and Bette Davis’s similar murder of her now-inconvenient husband, Herbert Marshall, by denying him his badly needed heart medication and letting him expire on their staircase.) Ultimately Jacob decides to take himself, his wife Clara and their adoptive daughter “Mindy” (who of course is really Tess’s daughter Amelia) out of the country and hide out in the Maldives, an independent island nation off the coast of Sri Lanka which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. (This is why a lot of Russian yacht owners berthed their vessels in the Maldives after Russia invaded Ukraine and the Biden administration in the U.S. announced a program of seizing Russian yachts, selling them, and using the proceeds to fund military aid to Ukraine.)

Clara, who seems unaware that Mindy isn’t her biological child, resents being made to pull up stakes right when Mindy is looking forward to starting school, but Jacob insists. Jacob deliberately crashes into Fay’s car to steal the flash drive she and Tess got from Margaret that would prove Tess innocent of burning her daughter. He also breaks into the Weldons’ home (they must have the worst security system in their neighborhood!) and stabs Fay’s husband Paul (ya remember Fay’s husband Paul?) in the chest, and it’s touch and go as to whether he’s going to live. In fact, Fay keeps missing text alerts from the hospital about Paul’s condition because she’s traveling with Tess to try to undo the wrong that was done her. The climax occurs when Fay learns Jacob’s and Clara’s address and goes out there with Tess, who has an uncertain reunion with a girl who has no idea Tess is her biological mother. Of course Jacob is out to kill Fay, Tess, or both, but the police intervene in time, arrest Jacob, and there’s an interesting tag scene in which Tess and Clara, whose husband is out of the picture due to all the criminal things he’s done, guardedly agree to co-parent Amelia a.k.a. Mindy. Meanwhile Fay shows up visibly pregnant – though there was an interesting scene earlier in which she was shown rejecting Paul’s entreaties that they have a child of their own on the understandable ground that in her work she sees every day how even the most well-meaning parents can go off the rails, and she’s not all that enthusiastic about becoming a parent herself. Kidnapping My Own Daughter is a pretty good Lifetime movie; I give Shawn Riopelle credit for trying to make his characters multidimensional, but they still come off as stereotypes and Charles questioned how easily Tess avoided legal jeopardy for her crimes. He pointed out that kidnapping is a federal offense, but my understanding is it isn’t and becomes one only if the kidnappers transport their victim across a state line. One thing I’m hoping for as a result of this movie is to get a chance to see drop-dead gorgeous Jesse Collin in a sympathetic role instead of as a Lifetime villain, just as the day after my husband Charles and I watched the 1997 Titanic I bought a used VHS copy of the film The Phantom so I could see Billy Zane, who’d done a lot more for me as a personality than Leonardo Di Caprio even though he was playing the villain, in a superhero role!

Battling Butler (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Buster Keaton Productions, MGM, 1926)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 5) the featured film just before Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”, 1961’s King of Kings, ran so long that by switching channels right after the Lifetime movie ended I was able to catch all of Buster Keaton’s 1926 film Battling Butler. As with the Keaton film two movies earlier in his filmography, Seven Chances, Battling Butler was based on a hit play, a musical by Stanley Brightman and Austin Melford. The credits for the movie Battling Butler list Keaton as sole director (usually he took co-director credit with Eddie Cline or Clyde Bruckman, but on his silent films, at least, he was the auteur) and no fewer than four writers for the “adaptation” of the play: Paul Gerard Smith, Al Boasberg (who worked with Keaton again on his very next film, The General, and also wrote the stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera), Charles Henry Smith, and Lex Neal. Plot-wise, Battling Butler is the old chestnut about the impossibly spoiled upper-class twit – I’ve long suspected Keaton often cast himself as a rich kid to place himself at the clear other end of the socioeconomic scale from Charlie Chaplin and his lower-class “Tramp” – who falls hard for an unassuming woman who doesn’t buy his superior act. Ultimately, to prove himself worthy of her, he has to climb down off his pedestal and do something butch so he can “become a man.” The film’s opening scenes are in some ways the best: Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) is told by his father (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com) that he needs to go out to the country and rough it for a while to prove his inner masculinity. Alfred is so ludicrously un-self-reliant he’s dependent on his valet (Snitz Edwards) for everything, including removing his cigarette from his mouth, flicking off its ashes in an ashtray, and then returning it to Alfred’s mouth.

Needless to say, Alfred’s idea of “roughing it” is to set up a huge tent in the middle of the mountain country, equip it with a fancy bed and all modern conveniences, and even mount a radio on one side of the entrance and a record player on the other. Alfred tries to go out hunting, but he can’t see any game to shoot (though we can see plenty of huntable animals, from ducks to deer). When he fires his shotgun he holds it the wrong way around and it tears holes in the handkerchief of “The Mountain Girl” (Sally O’Neil). Needless to say, she’s not happy at having almost been shot by this insufferable upper-class twit. And just in case her disapproval isn’t enough to make the point, Alfred also has to contend with her father (Walter James) and brother (Budd Fine), who make it clear to him that they don’t want a spoiled milquetoast marrying into their family. There’s a great scene in which Alfred invites the girl for dinner, only the table has been mounted on soft soil and it sinks ever lower as the meal progresses to the point where they’re literally trying to eat off ground level. Alas, from there the plot turns into typical rom-com stuff; Alfred learns (from the newspapers being regularly delivered to him even in the middle of the country) that there’s another Alfred Butler (Francis McDonald), a contender for the lightweight boxing championship who’s nicknamed “Battling Butler.” Alfred’s valet hits on the idea of having his Alfred pose as “Battling Butler” and convince the girl and her relatives that he’s really a prizefighter so they’ll let him marry her. The valet assumes that “Battling Butler” will lose his upcoming championship fight and therefore no one will ever hear of him again, but “Battling Butler” actually wins the bout and there’s a great scene in which Alfred and his valet sink lower and lower into their seats in the boxing arena until they’re the only two people left there.

As if that weren’t enough, Alfred and the mountain girl are having a date at an outdoor café when “Battling Butler” shows up with his wife (Mary O’Brien), and the fighter gets jealous when he thinks Alfred has made a pass at his wife. He concocts a scheme to disappear from the next bout, in which he’s supposed to defend his title against a fighter billed as the “Alabama Murderer,” and let Alfred fight in his place. Accordingly both Alfred’s valet and “Battling Butler”’s manager try pathetically to get Alfred in shape for a serious prizefight, while Alfred does things like sneak onto the running board of the car that’s supposed to be pacing him for his road work. On the night of the big fight the real “Battling Butler” turns up and makes quick work of the “Alabama Murderer” – he explains later that they shouldn’t have thought he’d give up a championship bout just to get revenge against Alfred. Then “Battling Butler” picks a fight of his own against Alfred in the dressing room, only Alfred finds his courage and manages to hold his own and keeps pummeling the helpless “Battling Butler” until the real fighter’s manager and trainer pull him off. The final shot shows Alfred, wearing a top hat and carrying a cane but still in his boxer’s shorts, walking the girl for a night on the town. Battling Butler was made at an odd juncture in Keaton’s career; his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, was worried about whether Keaton’s films were getting too adventurous for mass audiences. With Schenck as his business partner, Keaton had made such audacious masterpieces as Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator, but after those Schenck decided that Keaton could best be showcased in adaptations of already popular plays. So he bought the farce Seven Chances, about a man who has to find a willing bride that very day to claim an inheritance, and the film laid an egg in its initial previews. About the only thing the preview audience for Seven Chances found funny was a brief scene in which, fleeing a crowd of women who’ve heard about his situation, he tripped over three rocks. Stuck with an unreleasable movie, Keaton decided to create one of the most audacious and ground-breaking comic sequences of all time. Instead of just three rocks, he’d have his hero threatened with an avalanche of hundreds of rocks (mostly made of papier-machê to make the sequence less risky).

After one more movie, Go West, in which Keaton played a cowboy who leads a herd of cattle through the L.A. streets, Schenck green-lighted Battling Butler as Keaton’s next film – and though it’s cleverly staged, it’s not at the level of his previous masterpieces and one spends much of the movie wondering, “Why did they put Buster Keaton in a rom-com?” Relations between Keaton and Schenck would get even chancier after that; Battling Butler was the last film they would release under MGM’s distribution. Shortly after that Schenck would get an offer to assume the presidency of United Artists, the independent distributor formed by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, and he would move the releases of Keaton’s films to United Artists. This happened just when Keaton was at work in Oregon making what’s generally considered his greatest film, The General (1926), based on a real-life drama of the Civil War. He spent over $1 million on it – the most expensive comedy to date – and shot it in Oregon because it was the only place he could find that still ran railroads with the narrow track gauges used during the Civil War. The General was a box-office flop and Schenck then put Keaton into College, a stone ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. After one more independent production, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Schenck closed the company he’d run with Keaton and arranged for Keaton to sign directly with MGM, where Schenck’s brother Nicholas was company president. Alas, Nicholas Schenck was based in New York and had nothing to do with the studio’s creative end; the people who did, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, were notoriously intolerant of independent-minded directors like Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Rex Ingram, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton. To add to Keaton’s troubles, just as he was signing on to MGM sound came to motion pictures. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton actually welcomed this, but he’d wanted to use dialogue the way he’d used intertitles in his silents: to set up a basic situation he could then embroider with gags, many of them improvised on the spot. Keaton was also an incipient alcoholic who responded to the strains on his career and his marriage with drink, and a spendthrift who ran through his money almost as fast as he made it. I’ve often thought that if Keaton had been as compulsively frugal as Chaplin and Lloyd, he could have bought out Joseph Schenck’s share in their production company and continued to make his films independently. Be that as it may, Battling Butler is a genuinely amusing film but hardly at the level of the Keaton masterworks on either side of it in his filmography.

The Great Race (Warner Bros., Patricia-Jalem-Reynard Productions, 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 4) Turner Classic Movies ran a double bill of both the films Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis made together, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Blake Edwards’s The Great Race. Alas, since my husband Charles and I were late getting home from a meal, we missed the start of Some Like It Hot but caught all of The Great Race. The Great Race was based on a real-life event: a 1908 cross-country auto race from New York to Paris. The route traveled westward across the United States, up the coast of Canada to the Bering Strait, over which the cars would be transported 130 miles on a ferryboat. (At least that was the original plan; ultimately the route from San Francisco to Alaska was traversed by ship, as was the journey across the Pacific to Japan.) Then the cars made it across Russia through the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, after which they went through Europe and finally ended up in Paris. As the Wikipedia page on the real race notes, “Ahead of the competitors were very few paved roads, and in many parts of the world no roads at all. Often, the teams resorted to straddling locomotive rails with their cars riding tie to tie on balloon tires for hundreds of miles when no roads could be found.” Blake Edwards and his co-writer, Arthur Ross, loosely based their story on the real race and even made the “Leslie Special,” the car driven by the film’s hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), visually resemble the Thomas Flyer that won the actual race, though unlike the Thomas Flyer it was painted white with gold trim and even its tires were white instead of the regulation black. Edwards’s film details the long-standing rivalry between the heroic Great Leslie and the villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), whose repeated attempts to assassinate Leslie, including shooting an arrow through Leslie’s hot-air balloon and torpedoing Leslie’s speedboat with which he’s trying to set a world water speed record, all end in spectacularly comic reversals. (One of the film’s anachronisms is that Leslie’s speedboat has a deep-dish steering wheel from the 1960’s rather than 1908. Another one is the appearance in a scene set in 1908 of a phonograph playing the title song of Sigmund Romberg’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s operetta The Desert Song, which wasn’t written until 1926.)

The Great Race had a 160-minute running time, one of a number of hyperthyroid slapstick comedies for which there was a brief vogue kicked off by the mega-success of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Into its running time Edwards and Ross threw in a lot of comedy elements, including a barroom brawl in Boracho, Arizona (a town to which the various drivers repair to get gasoline); a scene in which both Leslie and Professor Fate, along with Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), the film’s heroine, and Fate’s sidekick Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk, in a role quite different from his iconic one as police lieutenant Columbo), and their cars are trapped on an iceberg across the Bering Strait; an extended spoof of the classic story The Prisoner of Zenda in which, trapped in the Ruritanian kingdom of Carpania, whose capital is Pottsdorf, Professor Fate is forced into substituting for the alcoholic crown prince, Frederick Hoepnick (also Jack Lemmon), in the coronation ceremony; a duel, first with foils and then with sabers, between Leslie and the villainous Carpainian official Baron Rolfe von Stuppe (Ross Martin); and a giant pie fight in the kitchen of the Pottsdorfian palace that lasts four minutes on screen but took five days to shoot. Edwards made the mistake of using real cream pies for the scene instead of fakes made of shaving lotion (the usual on-screen expedient), and compounded his error by not having the mess cleaned up after the first day of shooting. Needless to say, the cream in the pies spoiled and the set had to be aired out to get rid of the stink before shooting could resume the next day.

There’s also an engaging subplot in that Maggie DuBois is an aspiring reporter seeking to land a job with the New York Sentinel and also a militant feminist determined to cover the great race start to finish. To do that, she buys a car of her own, a Stanley Steamer, and enters the race herself, though her car burns out in the southwestern U.S. desert and Leslie rescues her, very reluctantly. Leslie tries to seduce her with some of the lamest lines Edwards and Ross could think of. Maggie gets her revenge by handcuffing Leslie’s sidekick Hezekiah Sturdy (Keenan Wynn) to a post inside a Southern Pacific railroad car – Leslie and Hezekiah don’t reunite until the race reaches Russia – and ultimately she and Leslie have an even more extended than usual of the standard hate-turns-into-love courtship so common in movie rom-coms. Also along the way the performers stop to do two songs written by Henry Mancini (Edwards’s long-time collaborator since the 1950’s TV series Peter Gunn, which Edwards created and for which Mancini wrote the iconic main theme) with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. One is “The Sweetheart Tree,” a sappy romantic ballad which Edwards was clearly hoping would become an enormous hit at the level of “Moon River,” a previous Mancini/Mercer song from an earlier Edwards film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It didn’t, though surprisingly both songs were sung on screen by female movie stars who had barely acceptable but reasonably pleasant voices: Audrey Hepburn for “Moon River” and Natalie Wood for “The Sweetheart Tree.” (To add to the irony, both women played the leads in major musical films – Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Wood in West Side Story – but in both those roles, Marni Nixon was their voice double.)

The other big song is the awkwardly titled “He Shouldn’t-A, Hadn’t-A, Oughtn’t-A Swang on Me!,” a denunciation of domestic violence that sits rather oddly in a film set in 1908, when men still had the legal right to beat and even rape their wives. Like Buddy and Ella Johnson’s great late-1940’s R&B hit “Hittin’ on Me,” it’s a song in which a woman singer – Lily Olay (Dorothy Provine, star of a short-lived TV series called The Roaring Twenties) – boldly asserts her right not to be beaten by her man. I can’t help but wonder if Mel Brooks, who made Blazing Saddles nine years later at the same studio (Warner Bros.), deliberately mashed up the character names “Lily Olay” and “Baron von Stuppe” to create “Lili von Schtupp,” the spoof of Marlene Dietrich played by Madeline Kahn (brilliantly) in Blazing Saddles. (“Schtupp” is also the Yiddish word for “fuck.”) Another set of running gags in the film is the built-in cannon in Professor Fate’s car, the “Hannibal-8” (whose name is explained in the novelization of the film, though not in the movie itself, as a reference to the historical Hannibal, who successfully conquered the mountains of northern Italy by having his army travel by elephants), which goes off at the most inopportune moments. It regularly blows apart Professor Fate’s garage, and at the very end of the film – after Professor Fate has technically won the race, but only because Leslie threw it by stopping inches before the finish line to kiss Maggie and thereby convince her that he really loves her – it knocks down the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen The Great Race quite often, and I remember attending an auto show in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s that exhibited the prop cars used in the film (whose tires had treads that spelled out the words “NON SKID”), and despite the rather arch nature of much of the humor, I still enjoy it.