The House on Telegraph Hill (20th Century-Fox, 1951)

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

Last night (October 24, 2026) my husband Charles and I watched a bizarre and ultimately unsatisfying film from 1951 called The House on Telegraph Hill on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, though for some reason they didn’t show Muller’s usual intro and outro but went right into the film itself, and right out of it again once it ended. Directed by Robert Wise and written by Elick Moll and Frank Partos from a 1948 novel called The Frightened Child by Dana Lyon (her full name was Mabel Dana Lyon but she dropped her first name professionally, sort of like James Paul McCartney). It’s really much more of a Gothic melodrama than a film noir, and it got quite good reviews when it was released (New York Times reviewer wrote that it was “an effective tale of evil intent that adds up to good entertainment”) but doesn’t hold up that well today. It begins with a brief bit of narration by the central character, Polish internee Victoria Kowalska (Italian actress Valentina Cortese, playing a Pole on Hollywood’s usual assumption that one foreign accent was as good as another), showing off two houses. One is the titular house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, which has a “For Sale” sign in front while Victoria explains it’s the house she thought would be a refuge for her. The other is her own house in Warsaw, which was bombed by Nazi German forces at the start of World War II, where her husband and her entire family were killed. Then we catch up to Victoria in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany, where she befriends a fellow prisoner named Karin Demakova (Natasha Lytess, best known as Marilyn Monroe’s early dramatic coach and, it’s rumored, her Lesbian lover). Karin tells Victoria that she has an aunt who lives in San Francisco who’s raising her son Chris (Gordon Gebert), and is hoping to rejoin her after the Allies finally liberate the camp and let everyone go. Unfortunately, Karin dies just a few days before the Allies liberate Belsen and Victoria steals her ID papers and decides to pass herself off as Karin, get sent to San Francisco, and escape the round-robin of refugee camps through which most concentration-camp survivors went. Along the way she’s interviewed by two Allied officers, one of whom addresses her in German while the other, Major Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), speaks to her in English after she reveals she learned it in school.

Alas, when she gets to New York she receives a cable dated May 31, 1945 that says her (or Karin’s) Aunt Sophia is dead. In New York she meets Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), a distant relative of Sophia’s, and arranges with him to get the documents making her an heir to Aunt Sophia’s estate and the legal guardian of 11-year-old Chris. While she’s in New York Alan starts dating her and, at least partially because it will be easier for her to stay in the U.S. if she marries an American citizen, they get hitched and move to San Francisco to the big house on Telegraph Hill. Once she settles into the house she meets Margaret (Fay Baker), Chris’s governess, who takes an instant Mrs. Danvers-esque dislike to her. She manages to break the ice with Chris by offering him ice cream and cake just before he goes to bed – though Margaret says that’s against house rules and pressures Chris to decline the snack – and playing catch with him on the grounds of the estate. Only one afternoon she misses the ball and discovers an old playhouse where Chris used to play until a fire severely damaged it. Chris tells Victoria that the playhouse caught fire after he inadvertently caused an explosion with a chemistry set. Both Chris and Margaret tell Victoria not to tell Alan about the fire, but Alan already knows about it. Later Victoria goes back to the ruined playhouse to explore it (and Charles laughed out loud that she did this while wearing high heels), only she loses her footing and is about to plunge through the burned-out floor when Alan rescues her in time. At one point Alan offers to take her to dinner and a movie, and I joked that the movie was going to be a double bill of Rebecca and Gaslight, two earlier (and much better!) movies of which this one was reminding me. Then Victoria is scheduled to take Chris to an afternoon baseball game, only at the last minute she bails out on the mission and Margaret takes him instead. Victoria goes off in the family car to do some grocery shopping, only in the middle of her drive the brakes to her car suddenly stop working – an especially dangerous situation in a notoriously hilly city like San Francisco – and though she’s relatively unharmed, the car crashes onto a dirt embankment made by a construction crew. The mechanic who fixes the car suspects that the brake fluid line was cut deliberately.

Meanwhile, Marc Bennett has moved to San Francisco and set up a law practice in the city. He makes no secret of his attraction to Victoria, though they don’t act on it (this being a Production Code-era movie), and she confesses to him that she’s not really Karin Dernakova even though she’s living in Karin’s identity. Gradually Victoria becomes convinced that Alan is deliberately trying to kill her; she attempts to reach out to Marc for advice, but Alan continually shows up and/or answers his attempts to return her panicked phone calls. Victoria breaks the lock on an elaborate scrapbook that contains a newspaper clipping which establishes the date of Sophia’s death as June 3, 1945 – three days after Alan sent the cable announcing that she was dead already. From this Victoria deduces that Alan murdered Sophia to grab her fortune, only his plan was complicated by her sudden appearance as “Karin.” Ultimately Alan, who’s after Sophia’s fortune (he’s bitter at having literally been the black sheep of the family, the one who had no money) and is determined to kill everyone in between him and inheriting it, attempts to kill Victoria by feeding her a glass of poisoned orange juice, but Victoria tricks him into drinking the poisoned glass himself. Margaret is arrested by police for not having helped save Alan, and at the end Victoria hooks up with Marc and the two of them, along with Chris, leave San Francisco to start a new life as a family. The House on Telegraph Hill is one of those movies that seems to have been assembled, Frankenstein’s monster-style, from bits and pieces of older and considerably better films. Early on Charles joked that it looked like The Old Dark House, and while it has little in common with James Whale’s 1932 horror-comedy masterpiece there are plenty of films it does evoke, notably the aforementioned Rebecca and Gaslight. Even the business with the heroine tricking the villain into drinking the poison intended for her was done 19 years earlier and considerably better by director Clarence Brown, writers Marie Belloc Lowndes, John Meehan, and Wanda Tuchock, and star Joan Crawford in the recently rediscovered film Letty Lynton.

Oddly, the first half of The House on Telegraph Hill is considerably better than the second; the opening looks like an Italian neo-realist film and the Rebecca-ish intrigues in the early scenes in San Francisco, especially between Valentina Cortese and Fay Baker, are considerably more interesting than the rest. Once the writers start dropping hints that Alan Spender is not the solicitous husband he seemed but a cold-hearted killer, the films turns a lot flatter and more ordinary and dreary. It also doesn’t help that Richard Basehart and William Lundigan look so much alike; through much of the movie it’s unclear which of the two men in Victoria’s life is solicitous and wants to help her, and which wants to kill her. It’s also amazing that Robert Wise made this incredibly lame movie in the same year, and for the same studio (20th Century-Fox), as his quiet, understated science-fiction masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still. Early on in the scenes in the concentration camp I joked to Charles, “This film started at 11, and it’s already up to 20 by now.” The House on Telegraph Hill isn’t thematically a film noir – at least once we know which ones are which, the good guys are 100 percent good, the bad guys are 100 percent bad, and Margaret is the only truly conflicted character (not that Fay Baker has much of a chance to show that!). Despite beautiful Gothic cinematography by Lucien Ballard, it’s not that much of a film noir visually either; the atmosphere is too much Gothic horror and too little noir. Like Wise’s later The Haunting, The House on Telegraph Hill has a stiffness in its approach that takes away from the thrills. Incidentally, and ironically given that they were making a film in which he tries to kill her, Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese fell in love with each other, started dating, and married as soon as the film wrapped. At her insistence the couple moved to Italy, where they lived the next eight years. By relocating to his wife’s home country Basehart pretty much killed his career in American films, but he got the role of his lifetime as the second (and less sympathetic) male lead in Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), probably his best-known credit. Basehart ultimately returned to the U.S. and did his best to re-establish his American “rep” after he and Cortese broke up in 1960.

Black Eye (Pat Rooney Productions, Jerry Buss Presentations, Warner Bros., 1974)

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

Last night (Friday, October 23) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good 1974 “Blaxploitation” movie called Black Eye, the first of two collaborations between director Jack Arnold and star Fred Williamson. I somehow missed this on Turner Classic Movies during their night of showing films featuring real-life Black athletes, including the Harlem Globetrotters, Muhammad Ali (who played himself in a 1977 biopic called The Greatest, for which the song “The Greatest Love of All,” later a hit for Whitney Houston, was written), and 1950’s tennis star Althea Gibson (in the John Ford/John Wayne/William Holden Civil War vehicle The Horse Soldiers, which we actually watched together as it aired on TCM at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-horse-soldiers-mirisch-corporation.html). Williamson was a defensive back for the American Football League before its 1970 merger with the National Football League; he played for the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs (as well as one season with the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers). As a Chiefs player he was in the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967, though his team lost to the Green Bay Packers 35-10. Williamson made his film debut in 1972 with a Blaxploitation Western called The Legend of Nigger Charley (the “N-word” featured prominently in many of Williamson’s film’s titles), and by 1974 he was a well-established attraction for Blaxploitation audiences. (“Blaxploitation” was the genre terms for films, mostly cheap exploitation movies with low budgets and schedules, aimed at the Black audiences after changing patterns of urban settlement had left many of the great movie palaces of the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s in neighborhoods whose populations were now mostly Black. The new residents of these areas naturally wanted to see films about people who looked like them.)

I was interested in Black Eye – a punning title signifying that the male lead was an African-American private investigator – mainly because of its director, Jack Arnold. He’d been a contractee at Universal-International in the 1950’s and had made a number of quite good films, including the first two movies in the Creature from the Black Lagoon sequence as well as It Came from Outer Space (a quite chilling flying-saucer adventure based on an outline and suggested dialogue by Ray Bradbury), This Island Earth and the flawed but haunting The Space Children. Fortunately, Arnold was also no stranger to film noir, as he’d done noirs at Universal like The Glass Web and The Tattered Dress (not The Tattooed Stranger, a film I’ve mistakenly attributed to Arnold even though Edward Montagne was the actual director). Later that year Arnold and Williamson would team up again for a Blaxploitation Western called Boss Nigger – a title that raised some hackles then and even more now. Barbara Leigh, who played the film’s main white role, schoolteacher Miss Pruitt, insisted on calling the film Bossman and when it was issued on VHS and then on DVD the title was abbreviated just to Boss. The plot of Boss Nigger has been compared to that of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles – a straight-shooting Black sheriff comes to tame a lawless Western town – only Arnold and Williamson (who wrote the script as well as starring) intended it seriously.

Black Eye was written by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin based on a novel by Jeff Jacks called Murder on the Wild Side, and though the pioneering Blaxploitation film, Gordon Parks’s Shaft, had also featured a Black private eye, John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), the concept was still relatively novel (Walter Mosley’s first Black detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, wouldn’t be published until 1990). The film opens with a weird prologue featuring a clip from a (fictional) silent film from the late 1920’s in which a woman and her extra-relational lover are surprised by the husband; he takes out a gun to shoot him, but she stands between them and takes the bullet originally meant for her boyfriend. Then we cut to the 1974 present and the funeral of the legendary star of this film, who was famous for always carrying around a silver-handled cane. Only a woman shows up at the gravesite and steals the cane just before the star’s coffin is laid in the ground. She turns out to be a prostitute, Vera Brownmiller (Nancy Fisher), who regularly serviced the star as one of her tricks. Vera stole the cane at the behest of Chess (Frank Stell, later known as Frank Ashmore), only Chess, who’s easily the hottest, hunkiest male in the film of either color (methinks Williamson, Arnold, producer Jerry Buss – who as longtime owner of the Los Angeles Lakers also had a major association with Black athletes – and their casting directors were blazing the trail later followed by the Lifetime producers of having the hunkiest man be the villain), breaks into Vera’s apartment, kills her and steals the cane. Black Eye has a rambling plot line featuring Shepherd Stone (Fred Williamson), a chronically broke Black P.I. who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for being too hot-headed; his former LAPD commanding officer, Lt. Bill Bowen (Richard X. Slattery); his Black girlfriend, Cynthia (Teresa Graves); her Lesbian affair partner, Miss Francis (Rosemary Forsyth), who’s so polymorphously perverse she not only has a man she’s married to but also has the hots for Stone when they meet; and Dole (Richard Anderson), who hires Stone to find a runaway teenager he says is his daughter Amy (Susan Arnold).

Stone traces Amy to a religious cult led by Rev. Avery (Larry D. Mann), who takes young runaways off the street and converts them to Jesus-freak Christianity. In one of the film’s most grimly amusing sequences, Amy accosts a middle-aged Jewish woman on the beach where the cult is doing mass baptisms and tries to convert her on the spot – and she couldn’t be less interested. Gradually it dawns on Stone that there must be something in that cane that has attracted the attention of a lot of nasty crooks, though when he takes the top off and opens it he realizes it’s just a hollow tube of metal. Stone chases a young white male dope dealer up a tree – literally – to get the information about Amy’s whereabouts (beating and roughing up drug dealers was one of the offenses that got him fired from the LAPD). There’s a quite amusing sequence in which Stone and Cynthia are on the beach together in what looks like a playful date; he’s dressed in loose-fitting white pattern swim trunks (which show off a quite impressive basket) and she’s in a two-piece swimsuit and is carrying a lime-green toy football in the film’s one reference to Williamson’s former career. There’s also a sequence in which Stone is trapped inside an elevator shaft by people he met at a party being thrown by Miss Francis (who once again makes a play for Stone) at which he’s assailed by four men who want to kill him for the cane (ya remember the cane?). And there’s a plot digression involving a character called Talbot Talbot (Cyril Delavanti), a psychic and Tarot card reader who was supposed to perform at Miss Francis’s party, only someone killed him before he could do so. There’s also a scene in which Stone is in his favorite bar, whose owner has comped him to the point where he’s run up a $200 tab, only the bar owner is roughed up by a team of four thugs in search of the whereabouts of that mysterious cane.

Eventually it turns out that the cane once contained $500,000 worth of pharmacologically pure heroin; that the drugs were provided by a smuggling ring who reached out to various people, including the silent-era film star, got them addicted to drugs and then forced them into being the gang’s mules in exchange for continued supplies; and the mastermind of all this is Dole. Stone brings Amy to the beach where the cult is doing the mass baptism and introduces her to Dole, who says he’s her father. “You’re not my father! Jesus is my father!” she insists, and just as we’re about to write her off as a typically brainwashed cult member, we realize that Dole isn’t Amy’s father. He was just posing as her dad so Stone would find her; he’s really the man behind the drug ring, and he’s after Amy because she and her cult boyfriend previously discovered the heroin hidden in the cane, stole it, and planned to sell it on the streets to raise money for the cult. Ultimately Stone corners Dole on a pier and, as the official police led by Lt. Bowen arrive ready to arrest Dole, Stone pushes him off the pier and tells Bowen, “You’re going to have to do some swimming to get him.” Then he and Cynthia run off together to the strains of a pop-soul ballad sung by a quite good woman singer which we heard earlier in the scene of Stone and Cynthia cavorting on the beach. This song isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page and the only online information I’ve been able to find about the music is about the background score composer, Mort Garson, a pioneer of electronic synthesizers. Though it suffers from the oddly disjointed plot and also from the cartoon-ish violence Blaxploitation producers and audiences insisted on – in one fight scene set in Cynthia’s apartment Charles joked that all her furniture was breakaway – Black Eye is actually pretty good neo-noir. Like The Horse Soldiers, it’s not a masterpiece but it’s a genuinely entertaining film that holds audience interest (it held mine, anyway). It also benefits from having been shot exclusively on L.A. locations (featuring glimpses of the city a half-century ago, including neighborhoods that have radically changed as well as ones that are pretty much the same) and from Fred Williamson’s highly personable and surprisingly credible acting.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Anonymity" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 22, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 22) my husband Charles and I watched the next episodes in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the flagship Law and Order itself. These days they’re showing SVU before Law and Order because at 8 p.m. they’re running a typical piece of so-called “reality” crap called Traitors, set in a Scottish castle and hosted by Alan Cumming (an actor I used to like until he took this awful job), so I watched SVU at 9 p.m. and Law and Order at 10. The SVU episode was called “Anonymity,” and it opened with the sudden appearance of John DeMarco (Alejandro Hernandez), a typical proletarian-type for national TV, at the Special Victims Manhattan squadroom with his son Michael (Sebastian Albuquerque) in tow. It seems that John was giving Michael (whose age is given at five but he looked more like eight to me) a bath, only while washing him between his asscheeks Michael cried out in pain. John immediately assumed that Michael had been sexually molested and anally raped, and dragged his kid along to SVU to demand immediate action to apprehend the perpetrator. In the manner of all too many previous parents of child sex abuse victims on SVU, John’s overbearing demeanor is counterproductive in Captain Olivia Benson’s (series star Mariska Hargitay) ability to interrogate Michael and find out just what did happen to him and who was responsible. It turns out that Michael’s abuser was his babysitter, Brandon Klein (Giuseppe DiDomenico), who realized he had pedophilic attractions and went on a “dark Web” site called “The Gate” catering specifically to pedophiles attracted to children five years old or younger. Klein had previously kept his hands off Michael until the previous evening, when he was effectively blackmailed by another “The Gate” member, a realtor, to bring Michael to a location (a condo the man was trying to sell as part of his job) so he could be stripped, photographed for child porn, and raped by the other man. The SVU detectives arrest the realtor while he’s in the middle of showing the condo that was the scene of the crime, and through his computer they’re able to hack into the site. They download all the sick images and, much to Captain Benson’s dismay, Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) goes through the entire file in an all-nighter.

Through this they’re able to track down 26 other victims, some of whom go to an exclusive private pre-school. Ultimately they’re able to set up a meeting with the elusive manager of the site, only when Bruno shows up the people he’s meeting with turn out to be two FBI agents, white man Craig Lynch (Jeremy Landon Hays) and Asian woman Lauren Fei (Nanrisa Lee). The FBI agents have known all along about “The Gate” but they’ve been letting it operate in search of the individuals behind it, who they say are part of an international human-trafficking ring that not only kidnaps kids but sells them into sexual slavery abroad. The most vividly intense parts of the show are the confrontations between Benson and Fei, two women who seem to have OD’d on testosterone in an attempt to out-butch each other. Fei insists that whatever collateral damage is being done by “The Gate”’s current users is acceptable if it helps them bust the trafficking ring. Benson, thundering back in Mariska Hargitay’s toughest tones, says she’s more concerned with the crimes that are happening now rather than ones that may (or may not) occur in the future. The SVU detectives manage to trace down the operator of “The Gate,” a typical nerd type named Sam Caldwell (Quinn Blades), who’s been running the site from the spare bedroom of his sister Bernadette (Clare Latham), whom he was staying with and who was aware that he spent hours on his laptop without any idea of what he was doing on that computer all that time. Without Sam around to give “the canary,” the signal to “The Gate”’s users that everything was still all clear, SVU detectives stage a series of raids and bust the users. This happens in a grim scene that reveals how pervasive the pedophile community is and in particular how these sickos come from all walks of life, from a man who runs a pizza place to a high-end financial services executive.

Ultimately Agent Fei shows up at SVU to denounce Benson and threaten her with retaliation for having blown their long-term sting, while Sam had already been transferred from state to federal custody, albeit only after the SVU detectives got all the information they needed out of him. This was a pretty somber SVU episode whose message that child sex abuse is ubiquitous (despite the inability of those of us who aren’t sexually attracted to kids to understand the why of this crime; as I’ve written before, many people who would never commit murder or robbery at least understand the impulses that led people to commit such crimes, but the sexual abuse of children is unfathomable to most of us, including most lesser criminals, which is why sexual abusers of children are referred to in prison slang as “short eyes” and are often in danger of being murdered by fellow inmates who are as disgusted by them and what they did as the rest of us) just got reinforced by the lead story on the local NBC affiliates. It was about a 35-year-old man who was just busted for allegedly molesting three girls whom his mother, whom he lived with, was taking care of in a day-care center she ran out of her home.

Law and Order: "Bad News" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 22, 2026)

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

The Law and Order episode that followed SVU’s “Anonymity” last night (Thursday, October 22) starts out with some footage of Alexander West (Robert Lee Harvey) nervously pacing around “The Ramble,” a well-known Gay men’s cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. The next time we see him his body is being pushed off a land bridge in the park, where he falls on his head and dies almost immediately. New York police detective Theo Walker (David Alaja) arrives on the scene late to find his new partner, Detective Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale – with a middle name like that he would be playing a cop!), who replaced his old one when the former partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), was unexpectedly killed during last week’s episode (usually when they’re going to replace a leading actor on a show like this, they do so at the end of a season), has already beat him there. The two find out from the victim’s wallet and cell phone, both of which were left behind by whoever killed him, that Alexander West was married and had the obligatory three children (for a while I was wondering if every Hollywood actor playing a Gay man had to have exactly three children, like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, to establish his real-life hetero bona fides). He was also the news editor of the New York Ledger (a fictional paper that’s been part of Law and Order from its beginnings and is quite obviously based on the real-life New York Post). Among the people who might have had a motive to kill him was Zayne Hassim (Ahmad Kamal), who ran a legitimate taxi company in New York who lamented the good old days when a taxi medallion (the official license to drive a cab in New York City) was worth $1.2 million before the successive competition from ride-shares and Waymos made it virtually worthless. So he’s reduced himself to hiring undocumented immigrants to drive for him, which is illegal, and that was the story Alexander West and the Ledger was working on to expose. The use of an illegally run taxi company as the MacGuffin hearkens back to one of the very first Law and Order episodes from the early 1990’s, which was loosely based on the 1986 suicide of then-Queens borough president Donald Manes after he was exposed for his role in a scandal involving the New York City Parking Violations Bureau and his steering city contracts for collecting parking ticket fees to a company he co-owned.

But eventually Hassim turns out to be a red herring and the real killer is [spoiler alert!] West’s associate on the Ledger staff and close friend Mark Lancer (Derek Webster). Lancer turned against West partly because the Ledger’s publisher gave him an ultimatum to cut the newsroom staff by 40 percent as part of a plan to rely mostly on artificial intelligence to write most of the paper’s stories and keep humans on only to “tweak” the AI copy to make it seem more credible as coming from real people. They also crossed swords over a piece the Ledger was doing about Tanner Hunt (Andrew Burnap), a surprisingly competitive young Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina. Hunt’s chief of staff, Brandon Rex (Patrick K. Dooley), was leaking information about an alleged sexual abuse scandal involving Hunt and a woman from 10 years earlier that, if exposed, would sink his campaign. (That’s one difference between the two major parties for you; a Republican politician exposed as a sexual abuser not only doesn’t have to worry about his voters turning against him, there’s a strong chance it will establish his credentials as a “real man” and actually help him with base voters, as it did for Donald Trump.) The biggest surprise for me is that Hunt’s alleged victim was a woman; Andrew Burnap played him as so Gay-presenting I thought the big secret would be that Hunt was Gay, that he was in the Ramble for sexual satisfaction, and this was what Rex was alternately covering up and finally becoming ready to “out” him in both senses of the term. Rex had agreed to become a confidential source for the Ledger and Lancer wanted to go ahead with the story even though it would destroy Hunt’s chances at the South Carolina ballot box. But West wanted to maintain the cover-up because he and the Ledger management believed that Hunt’s election to the Senate would be a good thing for the country. Between those two things, Lancer got so mad at West he pushed him off the bridge, then oddly confessed to it in open court during his trial under cross-examination by prosecutor Nolan Price (series regular Hugh Dancy).

That almost never happens in real life; real defendants, even guilty ones, under cross-examination usually spin an increasingly complicated web of lies that ultimately undermines their credibility with jurors. It’s a leftover of the old Perry Mason myth in which defense attorney Mason was regularly shown cross-examining the real perpetrator of the crime his client was on trial for and ultimately wresting a confession out of them. (This was one of the quirkier aspects of Perry Mason; it convinced a lot of people, including my late ex-roommate and ex-home care client, that the job of a defense attorney was not only to exonerate their clients but figure out who did commit the crime. In reality, most defense attorneys know their clients are guilty and their task is to mitigate their punishment, often in plea negotiations with prosecutors before the cases even get to trial.) The script for “Bad News,” written by old Law and Order hand Art Alamo, raised a lot more questions than the show could answer in a 45-minute running time (an hour time slot less commercials), including what happens to our general awareness of the world we live in when great chunks of what we think we know about it are being secretly fed to us by computer algorithms and written by robots. It also dramatizes the dilemma journalists often face: do we print everything we know about someone or hang back and protect them against revealing information that could trash them and hurt our overall interests in seeing good triumph over evil?

The Horse Soldiers (Mirisch Corporation, Mahin-Rackin, United Artists, 1959)

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

Last night (Wednesday, October 21) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies called The Horse Soldiers, made by the Mirisch Corporation and various other concerns for United Artists release. It was a Civil War-era action film directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and William Holden, based on a 1956 novel of the same title by Harold Sinclair which in turn was based on actual events. In April and May 1863 Union Col. Benjamin Grierson led a cavalry company from La Grange, Tennessee deep into Confederate territory to support General Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to take the port of Vicksburg, Mississippi. His initial target was the railroad depot at Newton’s Station, Mississippi, through which the Confederates were sending supplies to support Vicksburg. (Ironically, the film’s script by John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin already depicts Grant as overall commander of the Union forces. In fact he wasn’t yet; it was Grant’s success at taking Vicksburg that convinced President Abraham Lincoln to hire him for that role.) Grierson’s ultimate destination was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the film Grierson is renamed “John Marlowe,” his civilian job is changed from music teacher to railroad construction foreman, and he’s played by John Wayne. After the previous Wayne/Ford collaboration The Searchers, in which he’d played a former Confederate officer who solemnly declares that the only oath he ever took was to the Confederacy, it was nice to see him on the Union side! The other male lead was named Dr. Erastus Dean Yule in real life but he’s called “Hank Kendall” in the movie and is played by William Holden. Marlowe is ordered to take Kendall on his mission because Union army regulations require that a doctor be along to treat anyone who gets wounded in combat. Marlowe is immediately antagonistic towards Kendall and it’s only about two-thirds into the movie before we’re told why: Marlowe delivers a long monologue about how years before his young wife was diagnosed by two doctors with a tumor. After they opened her up and subjected her to the inevitable pain associated with surgery in those pre-anesthetic days, they realized they had misdiagnosed her and she hadn’t had a tumor – only she died from the shock effects of the unnecessary operation. That led Marlowe to an insane prejudice against all doctors.

Part of the problem with this operation is that its success depends on complete surprise, to the point that when Marlowe’s troops encounter Confederate resistance, instead of fighting a pitched battle against it they’re supposed to lie low so no Confederates get to report to their high command that Union troops are operating in the area, heading towards Vicksburg and obviously up to no good (for the Confederate cause; given that the Confederates were fighting for their “right” to own Black people as slaves, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for them!). Along the way they take over Greenbriar Plantation and there encounter a young Confederate widow, Hannah Hunter (played by a truly awful “actress” named Constance Towers; obviously producers Mahin, Rackin, and Walter Mirisch had blown their casting budget on Wayne and Holden and therefore couldn’t afford a woman who could actually act!), and her Black slave Lukey (Althea Gibson, who in the 1950’s had been a star tennis player and won the women’s divisions at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in both 1957 and 1958). Realizing that they could compromise the security of the mission, Marlowe orders both of them to be taken prisoner and forced to travel with his unit. Midway through the march Dr. Kendall peels off the company in order to attend the birth of a new Black baby, and Marlowe puts him under arrest, allowing him to keep marching with the unit but forbidding him from treating anyone who isn’t part of it. Marlowe makes Hannah pledge on her honor (despite her belief that “Yankees” have no honor) not to run away from his column to warn the Confederates that they’re coming, but when the unit is stationed across the river from a Confederate one, she calls out to them and Marlowe grabs hold of her and stuffs his hand in her mouth. Of course she bites him. Also along for the ride are blowhard Lt. Col. Phil Secord (Willis Bouchey), who’s hoping he’ll win enough glory from the operation to run for public office in his native Michigan; and Corporal Wilkie (Ken Curtis), who’s badly wounded in the leg in one of the skirmishes. Kendall prescribes a homemade ointment made from tree mold, which he says he learned from the Cheyenne tribe, but Wilkie takes the stuff off as soon as it starts itching (later an angry Kendall said that itching was the first indication that the treatment was actually working) and he ends up dying from surgical shock after Kendall, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, amputates his leg.

The Union soldiers take Newton’s Station and, after first using the cotton bales they find there as impromptu shields against a Confederate counterattack, they burn them and also uproot the train tracks, not only burning the crossties but bending the metal rails so they can’t be re-laid. Naturally Marlowe muses on the irony that before the war his job was to build rail lines for trains, and now here he is destroying one. Throughout the movie the name “Andersonville” is used as a dire warning of the fate awaiting any Union soldiers who were taken as prisoners of war, even though in fact the real prison at Andersonville, Georgia didn’t open until February 1864, almost a year after the events of this film take place. The film ends with Marlowe and his remaining troops marching on to Baton Rouge while Kendall agrees to stay behind and take care of the wounded even though that means they’ll probably all become Confederate prisoners of war. One of the movie’s most chilling scenes is one in which a batch of boys from the Jefferson Military Academy in Mississippi mobilize to fight the Union troops. This actually happened, though not as part of the same true-life story as the Garrison raid that inspired the overall plot; it was part of the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia a year later. The film features one boy who’s eager to fight in the war and brings along a drum; his mother, who’s already lost every other male in the family to the conflict, grabs him out of the line, much to his displeasure. When I saw his drum roll away from him I was thinking Ford, Mahin, and Rackin would have that be the signal to learn that the Southerners were on the march against them and knew where they were, but no-o-o-o-o. The film oddly peters out with the destruction of a bridge Marlowe and his men have just crossed; Marlowe and his men have lined up gunpowder along the route to destroy the bridge before the Confederates can use it to chase them. Originally it was supposed to end with Marlowe’s unit actually arriving in Baton Rouge, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page, quoting Ford biographer Joseph Malham, Ford was so upset when his stunt person Fred Kennedy broke his neck on set in an accident that he ended the film inconclusively. Also Althea Gibson’s biographer noted that when she got the script she was appalled that her lines were written in the usual stupid “Black” dialect, and (like William Wellman with Clarence Muse and Nina Mae McKinney in his proto-noir masterpiece from 1931, Safe in Hell) Ford let her speak her lines in normal English.

The Horse Soldiers today is dismissed as a minor work in the Ford canon, largely because no fewer than six production companies, including ones owned by Wayne and Holden, were involved and key decisions were being made essentially by committee. (According to an imbd.com “Trivia” item, the contracts to make this film ran 250 pages, twice as long as the actual script.) But I quite liked it; it’s certainly not a masterpiece (though in the remaining seven years of Ford’s career he’d rack up one more masterpiece, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also with John Wayne!), but it is solid, relatively unpretentious entertainment and it came off a lot better than more highly regarded items in the Wayne/Ford canon as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956). There are a few hints of a critique of war that, if expanded on, could have made The Horse Soldiers a richer and deeper film than it is, but though it has its flaws (including a non-performance by Constance Towers in a role that really needed the Barbara Stanwyck of three decades earlier – the real-life model for Hannah was in her 60’s and Stanwyck could have played that incarnation of the character – and John Wayne looking prematurely embalmed, as he did in most of his later films) it’s solid, unpretentious entertainment. It benefits from Ford’s lifelong love of the military’s rituals and his effective use of music, particularly popular songs from the period (we get to hear both “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the Union side and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” on the Confederate side, as well as a new Union anthem composed by Stan Jones for the film that hails “Ulysses Simpson Grant” as the top commander of the Union army months before Lincoln appointed him as such). The Horse Soldiers is no world-beater, but it’s a pleasant surprise.

The Great Lie (Warner Bros., 1941)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 20) my husband Charles and I watched the 1941 film The Great Lie, directed by Edmund Goulding and written by Lenore J. Coffee based on a novel, January Heights, by Polan Banks (a man, by the way, whose other movie credits include the 1932 Warner Bros. “B” Street of Women and the 1952 film My Forbidden Past, based on a novel of his called Carriage Entrance). The film stars Bette Davis as Maggie Patterson, long-time girlfriend of fellow Maryland native Peter Van Allen (George Brent), only on a trip to New York City Van Allen has spontaneously met, fallen for, and married world-renowned concert pianist Sandra Kovak (Mary Astor). I gave Charles a heads-up that The Great Lie is one of my “doubles” movies, since both Davis and Astor played the female lead in versions of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (Davis in a highly tweaked rewrite from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady that turned Hammett’s mystery into more of a screwball comedy, and Astor in the classic version from 1941 with John Huston directing and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade). And it turned out that Astor was not the only Maltese Falcon cast member who turned up in The Great Lie: Jerome Cowan, who played Spade’s hapless partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon (and got killed in the first reel!), is here as Jock Thompson, Van Allen’s long-suffering attorney. In the opening reel Thompson informs Van Allen that his marriage to Sandra Kovak is not legal – she married him too soon, before her divorce from her previous husband had become final. But in the meantime he and Sandra have already had sex and Sandra has got pregnant, and in the days when abortion was illegal nationwide Sandra has no interest in putting her career on hold to have a baby, especially a baby whose father is not legally her husband. (One wonders how Warner Bros. and producers Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke got this situation past the Production Code Administration.)

Van Allen responds by flying his private plane back to Maryland and the home of Maggie and her family. They start dating and ultimately get married themselves, only they decide to honeymoon in New York. They’re at a fancy nightclub when Sandra confronts Maggie and announces that she’s going to have Peter’s baby. Maggie hits on the idea of booking a remote cabin in Arizona (where you’ve got a lot of fuller’s earth blowing past the door in dust storms and Bette Davis might have been reminded of the previous movie she made with that setting, The Petrified Forest) where she and Sandra will stay together until Sandra gives birth, after which Maggie will pass off the baby as hers. Ultimately the ruse works, only in the meantime Peter, who on Maggie’s advice has gone to work for the government as a consultant on aviation (one wonders what he was doing before), has crashed his plane in the interior of Brazil and just about everyone in the movie assumes he’s dead. The baby is born and Maggie names him Peter Van Allen, Jr., after his presumably deceased dad. Then a rescue party finds Peter Van Allen, Sr. and brings him back from the interior of Brazil to the U.S. Sandra shows up at the grand reunion of Peter and Maggie and demands that Maggie tell Peter the truth about who the baby’s mother is. Sandra also demands custody of the boy even though the reasons she agreed to the “great lie” deal with Maggie in the first place – she’s an internationally famous concert pianist and also a “woman of the world” – still apply. Maggie does indeed level with Peter that the boy is Sandra’s biological child, and eventually Sandra realizes that the boy is better off with Peter and Maggie. I’d seen The Great Lie only once before, at my father’s home in the early 1970’s, and I’d remembered much of it but not the fact that the George Brent character was supposedly dead through most of the middle section.

I’d also forgotten how relentlessly over-the-top the film is; a stronger director like William Wyler might have toned down Bette Davis’s overacting and got a better, more believable performance out of her, but Goulding at best seemed disinclined to do so and at worst let her open up to full throttle and let ’er rip. I give Goulding credit for keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby giving cinematic life to what could have otherwise been a really stagy and dull story. Tony Gaudio was the cinematographer, and he used red filters on so many of the exteriors one expects John Wayne and a troupe of cowboys to ride in at any moment. Max Steiner did the music, basing most of it on the famous opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which not only is played by Sandra Kovak in her concert sequences but is tweaked in various ways. I especially loved the version with sleazy saxophones heard in an early sequence in which the newly married Peter and Sandra are waking up from an all-night party during which a lot of records got strewn about the floor and presumably broken, since this was the era in which records were made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay. The Great Lie also suffers from George Brent’s terminal weakness as a leading man; through much of the film I was wishing Warners had cast Errol Flynn in the role (despite his and Davis’s well-known dislike for each other in the two previous films they’d made together, The Sisters and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex). Quite a few people who knew Brent, including Bette Davis herself, said he was almost irresistibly sexy in person, but on screen he comes off as an acceptably attractive man but hardly a male sex magnet. (Compare that to the accounts of people who knew Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, who were no more than reasonably attractive in person but they lit up the screen when photographed for film.)

Among the things I liked about The Great Lie is that Gaudio didn’t go out of his way to make Bette Davis look sexy; as the plainer woman in Peter’s life she spends much of the movie wearing slacks and her makeup by Perc Westmore is rather harsh, though this is not one of those movies (like the post-scarring scenes of Marked Woman or the whole of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) in which Davis was willing to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it, which is one of the big things I like about her. The scenes with Bette Davis and Mary Astor alone together in their Arizona redoubt were the ones I remembered most vividly, and they’re still the high points of the movie. Sandra resents that the cabin they’re sharing is lit only by lamps, she bitches that Maggie should at least have found them a place with electricity, and Maggie points out that places with electricity also have other people, some of whom are reporters who’d love to grab hold of the scandal surrounding a major celebrity like Sandra. I particularly liked the scene in which Maggie has sent for a couple of piano-and-orchestra records so Sandra can listen to her kind of music on the wind-up phonograph with which the place is equipped – and Sandra takes a look at who the pianist is on the label and denounces him as nonmusical. (Charles asked me if she meant Vladimir Ashkenazy – whose star career didn’t start until 1962, over two decades after the film was made. The principal real-life male rivals to Sandra’s character in 1941 would have been Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz.) Mary Astor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film, and she credited Bette Davis for much of that because Davis had let Astor dominate the screen again and again.

Unlike most of the women who worked with Davis as co-stars, Astor liked her and got along with her just fine. Davis also actively lobbied with Warner Bros. to get Astor the part because, among other reasons, Astor could actually play piano and therefore they could shoot her with her fingers actually touching the keyboard even though the music on the soundtrack would be played by someone else. (The film’s imdb.com page lists Max Rabinowitz as Astor’s piano double and says she also had a hand double, Norma Drury.) The Great Lie holds up surprisingly well as a movie, even though it was first and foremost a ”women’s picture” (though billed third, Mary Astor gets a lot more screen time than George Brent!), and I found myself imagining a modern remake/sequel with a framing scene set 20 years after the main story in which Peter Van Allen, Jr., now a young adult, gets his DNA tested and learns from that that the woman who’s raised him all his life isn’t in fact his mother. A tastefully done modern treatment of this story premise could be a quite interesting and effective movie for any modern-day filmmakers who want to take the barnacles off this story and reimagine it for today.

The Unknown (MGM, 1927)

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

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

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

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

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

Story Conference (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

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

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

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

Chicago Syndicate (Clover, Columbia, 1955)

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

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

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

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

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

Interstate (Oscar Corral, Haleem Muksin, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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