Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 3 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired March 5, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, May 15) I put on a Death in Paradise rerun (Season 14, episode three, originally broadcast March 5, 2025) that was actually one of the most engaging episodes of this often entertaining, often exasperating program. It dealt with the murder of Susie Montagu (Georgia Maguire), a woman who was born and raised in Britain but moved to the island of Sainte Marie because the British climate was playing havoc with her health. She nursed herself back to good health through the island’s tropical climate and she and her husband Steve (David Mumeni) started a business making and selling health-care products. One of the ingredients in one of their concoctions was snakeskin, though they insisted that they didn’t actually kill snakes to make the product: they just harvested the skins once the snakes shed them naturally. To do this, they had to keep venomous snakes on the company premises, and one of their workers, a white woman named Daisy McCrae (Imogen King) developed a way to extract the snake venom and turn it into a recreational drug which she then sold on the black market. The problem with this is the same one as the real-life drug fentanyl: the dose tolerance is very narrow and too much of the stuff can literally kill you. What complicated the case is that Susie Montagu was also deathly allergic to peanuts, and when she collapses and dies in the middle of an event introducing a new skin cream her company is about to market, everyone on site assumes that she ate or drank something containing peanuts or peanut oil. Carrie Standish (Patricia Allison) even administered an EpiPen, the standard-issue precaution most people with severe allergies carry around with them in case of an emergency, but the EpiPen has no effect even though later tests at the police lab show it did its job: it injected Susie’s body with adrenaline. The medical examiner finds traces of peanut oil around Susie’s mouth but there’s no evidence of how it got there, since she’d been on one of her periodic fasts and had had nothing to eat or drink for at least a day before she died. This was one of the episodes made after Black actor Don Gilet replaced white actor Neville Parker as the lead detective character, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson. It was also made after the introduction of a really bothersome comic-relief character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who gets assigned by Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) to break up a rave on the beach after the party gets noise complaints from residents. Rose is hopelessly unable to do that on his own and finally requests backup.

Mervin Wilson insists on driving the Land-Rover that is the Sainte Marie police force’s principal mode of transportation even though it has a stick shift and he doesn’t know how to drive one. His partner, Officer Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder), suffers through his attempts to drive the car and his repeated backups into a light pole. This gives Wilson the insight he needs to solve the case: he deduces that Susie Montagu actually received two injections, one of snake venom that killed her and one from the EpiPen she received later in a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Wilson is also able to deduce who the murderer was when he learns that Susie Montagu had just filed papers to divorce herself from Steve, and had also fired Carrie Standish from the company’s board of directors less than a month after having hired her. It seems that, after Standish actually invented the skin cream the company was about to market, she and Steve drifted into an affair. Susie caught them at it and determined to rid the company of both of them, and Standish fought back by killing Susie with some of Daisy McCrae’s snake venom. To conceal it, she then injected Susie with the EpiPen in the same part of her body (her upper leg) where she’d earlier injected the poison. At the end the police arrest Carrie Standish and also Daisy McCrae, who though she wasn’t involved in Susie’s murder was running an illegal drug operation using the company as a cover. We also get at least partial resolutions of at least two running subplots on the show. Mervin Wilson has been using police resources to investigate the suspicious death of his mother months before, and he gets a flash drive from Police Commissioner Patterson containing an audio version of Mervin’s mom’s frantic SOS call, which establishes to both Merwin’s satisfaction and ours that his mother’s death was indeed an accident. We also learn that Patterson’s job is in jeopardy from higher-ups in the island’s administration who are threatening to eliminate his position, which is the reason he’s been snapping at all his subordinates on the force instead of being his normal, easy-going self. Death in Paradise is usually a pretty mediocre policier distinguished only by the gorgeous Caribbean scenery and the bright clothes worn by the police (Officer Curtis in particular; just about her entire wardrobe is made up of neon-bright fabrics), but this time it was better than usual and offers a much more engaging and credible solution to the mystery.

Law and Order: "Liberty" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 14) I watched the season-ending shows of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show, “Liberty,” begins in an illegal casino in New York City at which two of the patrons get into an argument with two of the proprietors’ staff over a large sum of money the players owe the management. Then the scene cuts to an outdoor location in which a dead body is found with its head lying in the obligatory pool of blood. The body turns out to be Navy Vice Admiral Wallace Kane (John Churchill), who was in New York for Fleet Week (I’ve lived in San Diego long enough I know all about Fleet Week!) and had been one of the men at the casino trying to bail out two of his crew members by giving the staff the $4,000 his sailors owed them – only the staff had demanded an extra $2,000 and Kane had refused. We assume at first that Kane’s death had to do with his quarrel at the casino, but as the case develops lead detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), along with their commanding officer, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), learn it actually had something to do with the bribes Kane and his commanding officer, Admiral Rusten Garvey (Chance Kelly), were paying to a slimeball pier operator named Frank Mazzeo (Daniel Sauli) for choice docks and slips for Navy vessels during Fleet Week. Then an officious African-American woman authority figure identified in the cast list only as “ADIC” (the most likely meaning I can find online for those initials is “Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Industry Collaboration”) swoops down on the New York Police Department and demands that the investigation of Kane’s killing be transferred to the federal government. Lt. Brady refuses, but the ADIC woman insists that Frank Mazzeo is innocent of the murder, and though Mazzeo doesn’t have the strongest alibi in the world – he says he was at home alone in bed – it checks out. Then the police decide on the basis of a security video recording from a nearby bodega that Garvey, Kane’s immediate superior in the Navy, actually killed him during an argument over the bribe money both of them were paying to Mazzeo. The case becomes a battle royal as Garvey flatly refuses to allow NYPD officers on board his ship, since he declares it is Navy property over which the local government has no jurisdiction. He even summons four sailors to block the officers from coming aboard, and for a moment it looks like he’s threatening a civil war over his territory. The police return with a search warrant, and Garvey concedes they can come aboard and execute their authorized search.

Ultimately prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment against Garvey and bring the case to trial, only the judge, Kenneth Sullivan (Anthony Edwards, whom I remember from the original Top Gun and thought back then he was sexier than Tom Cruise, though he hasn’t weathered the years as well), is blatantly biased against them. First he rules the bodega videotape inadmissible because it was made on substandard equipment. Then he refuses to dismiss three prospective jurors for cause even though they’ve made statements from the jury box that they consider the case against Garvey “fake news.” When Price calls Mazzeo as a witness, Garvey’s slimeball attorney, Charles Banks (Zeljko Ivanek), asks him on cross-examination about a case of domestic abuse his wife filed against him nine years before. Price objects but Judge Sullivan rules it admissible. Price goes to his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), and ultimately to the chief judge of that circuit, Charles Lehman (Ian Blackman). He learns that Judge Sullivan specifically asked to be given the assignment to try Garvey’s case, but without any more evidence of Judge Sullivan’s bias than that, he doesn’t have grounds to demand a recusal. The whole thing angers D.A. Baxter so much that, in the middle of a re-election campaign in which the opponent accuses him of being a typical bleeding-heart liberal who’s “soft on crime,” he’s willing to risk his job and his political future by taking on Judge Sullivan, but eventually Price goes behind Baxter’s back and cuts a plea deal by which Garvey admits only to “criminally negligent homicide” and will get no more than a year in prison, and probably not even that. One thing we’re told is that the reason the net around Garvey to protect him from accountability is so strong is that he’s in line to be the next Secretary of Defense (and it’s nice to hear that term at a time when President Trump and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, are insistent on renaming it the “Department of War”), though I can’t imagine that even in today’s degraded era in which government standards, including simple competence, have been thrown out the window and all Trump requires from his Cabinet appointees is “loyalty” not to the Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump (essentially the Führerprinzip, “leader principle,” under which Nazi Germany was governed), a man who pled guilty to “criminally negligent homicide” against a long-time friend and fellow war hero would get such a prestigious appointment.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Monster" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Monster,” was a pretty good season-ender, maybe not as powerful in its ethical conflicts as the Law and Order show that preceded it May 14 but with its own set of intriguing moral issues. The show begins with a scene in which two young uniformed officers, Frank Rodriguez (Joseph Elliot Rodriguez) and Jess Acosta (Darilyn Castillo), stop a car that’s been involved in a fender-bender and offer to help out the driver. Unfortunately, the driver turns out to be Richard Caine (Daniel London), true name Michael Parker, who tried to wave the cops away until Rodriguez spotted a gun under his front seat. Rodriguez demanded the right to search the car, and in the trunk he found a kidnapped boy, Bobby Deboer (Matthew Anthony Pellicano, Jr.), and returned him to his parents. Unfortunately, in searching the car Rodriguez leaned his head into the open driver’s-side window, and thereby the judge in Caine’s case, Walter Conover (Paul Guilfoyle), ruled the search and all the evidence garnered therefrom inadmissible. The Manhattan Special Victims Unit, led by Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), is incensed by the fact that Caine has been set free and figure it’s only a matter of time before he kidnaps another child and tortures him or her to death for his sick jollies. Benson repeatedly watches the videotaped confession Caine made to her which was ruled inadmissible as “fruit of the poisoned tree,” and her long-time associate and friend, Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), worries for her sanity. Benson also has another issue to deal with, a jihad against her by the newly appointed chief of detectives, an officious African-American woman named Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni), who is bound and determined to get Benson off the NYPD by any legal means necessary. She’s bound up with SVU’s newest assignee, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’s the son of her former police partner. Griffin père was involved in the shooting of an unarmed suspect years before and Tynan has covered for him all these years. Griffin fils launches a sub rosa investigation of his dad’s case and realizes that his father was indeed wrong: he committed cold-blooded murder, and Tynan has covered up for him all these years because she figures the victim he shot was an habitual criminal and by shooting him Griffin’s dad did the world a service.

Meanwhile, SVU gets a visit from a now-retired police detective from Jacksonville, Florida named Donald Torres (Michael J. Harney), who says that before Caine escaped their grasp and moved to New York, he worked in Jacksonville similarly kidnapping and killing kids under the name “Michael Parker.” Since all his victims in Florida were along the route he drove regularly as part of his job, Benson and the other SVU detectives hit on the idea of investigating his current job route to see if there are any missing children belonging to families who live alongside it. They also have the reluctant cooperation of Caine’s ex-wife Jocelyn Fronczak (Monique Gabriela Curnen), a hard-nosed woman who was married to him for only six months but was bitterly traumatized by the experience and just wants to put it all behind her. Ultimately they trace Caine’s burial ground to a local beach just under a pier and send a forensic team to look for bodies. They find plenty of them, including one that they can prosecute him for because, though the victim lived in Pennsylvania, he was buried in New York and therefore the city has jurisdiction. Just when Manhattan SVU seems to have the case wrapped up, in comes Chief of Detectives Tynan once again threatening Benson and saying, “I’ll have your badge,” and while writer Michele Fazekas (an old Law and Order hand) never quite makes it clear just why Tynan hates Benson so, it sufficiently demoralizes Benson that towards the end of the episode (as she did in last week’s show as well) she confides in Fin that she’s not sure it’s worth the trouble anymore and maybe she should just retire. I’m wondering if this means that the real-life Mariska Hargitay is considering stepping down from her role on this show and Dick Wolf’s writers are creating an “out” for her in case she decides not to re-up for another season. Frankly, this show suffered so much from Christopher Meloni’s departure 13 years ago (though Meloni’s career suffered even more, in particular because he didn’t get the role he was born to play: Jack Reacher in the feature-film series based on Lee Child’s novels which instead went to short, shrimpy Tom Cruise, a piece of miscasting so atrocious that to this day I won’t watch a Reacher movie with Cruise) that I’m not sure it could withstand the loss of Hargitay as well.

The Power of the Whistler (Larry Darmour Productions, Columbia, 1945)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 13) I showed my husband Charles a 65-minute movie on YouTube, The Power of the Whistler, third in the series of eight movies Columbia Pictures and their subcontractor, Larry Darmour Productions, made as “B” movies inspired by the popular CBS radio show of that name. Obviously Columbia was hoping for the same level of success as Universal was getting with a “B” movie series based on Inner Sanctum, since they not only adapted the radio show (more or less), they copied Universal’s strategy of using the same actor in each series entry but having him play a different character every time. Universal’s Inner Sanctum star was Lon Chaney, Jr.; Columbia’s for The Whistler series was Richard Dix. By 1945 Dix was definitely in the “on their way down” department, having fallen from his early-1930’s heights as the star of films with major budgets and production values like 1931’s epic Western Cimarron, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. (It was the only one RKO ever won for a film they produced directly, though they won a second Best Picture by proxy as the distributor of Samuel Goldwyn’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives.) Dix had an unusual career trajectory; he broke into films in 1917 after having gone to college to study medicine but ended up in the school’s drama club. Within six years he was appearing in big-budget blockbusters like Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923). That film paired the Biblical story with a modern-dress portion illustrating the immortal moral truths of the Ten Commandments, and Dix appeared in the modern section as John McTavish, “good” brother to Rod LaRocque’s “bad” brother Dan. (I’ve posted about this: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-ten-commandments-paramount-1923.html.) Dix successfully made the silent-to-sound transition in 1929 with a quite good film of Earl Derr Biggers’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, but by the late 1930’s he was on the downgrade. The Whistler series entries were his last films before he suddenly died in 1949 at age 56 of a heart attack. Just before he started making them he’d been in a quite good “B,” Val Lewton’s and Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (1943), but that movie was suppressed for years because RKO lost a plagiarism suit over it to two well-known copyright trolls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-ghost-ship-rko-1943.html).

The first two Whistler films, The Whistler and The Mark of the Whistler (1944), were both directed by up-and-comer William Castle. For this third one Columbia and Darmour replaced him with ancient “B” hand Lew Landers (t/n Louis Friedlander) and commissioned a script by Aubrey Wisberg that [spoiler alert!] cast Dix as a psychopathic killer instead of the sympathetic roles he’d played in the first two series films. The revelation that Dix is a psychopath is supposed to be a shock to the audience, but it’s been revealed in so much of the literature on this film (including the YouTube post on which Charles and I were watching it) that it’s well known even to people who’ve never seen it. The gimmick of the radio show The Whistler was that the narrator (Bill Forman and Bill Johnstone on radio and Otto Forrest here) was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, essentially nagging him as he told the story. The Power of the Whistler begins in the evening in New York City (we know that because the film starts with a stock establishing shot of Times Square, in which William Everest (Richard Dix) is struck by a car and nearly killed. He comes to but has amnesia (amnesia was a frequent plot gimmick in mid-1940’s movie thrillers and I suspect the end of World War II had something to do with that). He walks into a club called The Salt Shaker and meets up with a young couple, Charlie Kent (Loren Tindall) and Francie Lang (a girl named Jeff Donnell, a quite personable actress who was in a number of Columbia “B”’s in the 1940’s). Francie’s sister Jean (Janis Carter, second-billed) does an improvised card reading on Everest and turns up the ace of spades followed by the two of clubs, which is supposed to indicate that he will die within 24 hours. Jean does the card reading again and achieves the same result. Against Francie’s advice, Jean follows Everest out of the club to warn him, and he thinks she’s crazy but ultimately agrees to accompany her on a search for his true identity. They have a number of clues in his pocket, including a drug prescription (which, unlike real-world ones, doesn’t have the patient’s name on it), a receipt for a bouquet of 20 long-stemmed roses, a cigarette lighter with an ornate design, a train schedule with the place name “Woodville” circled on it, and a few other odds and ends.

The two calmly walk into the back seat of a parked car so they’ll have a place to talk in private, and in one of the weirder plot twists to a modern audience, the owner of the car not only doesn’t call the police on them but accepts their explanation and offers them a ride. They ask him to take them to the Civic Theatre where the woman Everest (or whoever) sent the roses to, Constantina Ivaneska (Tala Birell), is performing as a star ballerina. They crash her dressing room and her maid, Flotilda (Nina Mae McKinney, the “bad girl” in King Vidor’s all-Black movie Hallelujah in 1929), tells them to wait for her as soon as she comes off stage. Alas, Constantina denies that she ever knew Everest, who because she doesn’t know his real name Jean insists on calling “George.” They also trace the prescription, but learn through a bookstore owner (John Abbott) and a rare book in his stock that the doctor who allegedly wrote it died in 1895, and through a druggist (the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) that the prescription is for a poison. Jean invites “George” to spend the night at the apartment she shares with Francie, but when the parties wake up they find “George” already up and having made breakfast. Alas, Francie finds her bird has mysteriously died during the night. Later we see “George” alone in a park with a squirrel, whom he’s first feeding out of a bag of nuts and then … we don’t see the altercation, but when Jean joins him later the squirrel is dead and “George”’s hands are bandaged; obviously the squirrel fought back. Ultimately Jean and Francie trace “George” to Woodville, a rural community where the most prominent resident is a retired judge who, unbeknownst to us, originally certified William Everest as crazy and ordered him locked up in a mental institution. William Everest had gone there to kill the judge for revenge, only his plot was temporarily derailed by his amnesia. Thanks to Jean, he’s recovered his full memory (oops!) and he goes out to the judge’s ranch to kill him, but Jean successfully fends him off and at the end she kills him with a farmer’s rake, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of her cards.

The most interesting part of Dix’s performance is the personability with which he plays the psychopath, eerily anticipating by 15 years Anthony Perkins’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Like Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932) and Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Dix gently and even lovingly tries to convince the heroine that by killing her he’s actually doing her a favor, since by taking her out young he's sparing her the fate of growing old and losing her looks. (Dix had also played this game in The Ghost Ship, which contains a scene in which a ship’s junior officer is accusing him of being crazy, but it’s the accuser who’s losing his temper and screaming at the top of his lungs while Dix’s character is staying personable and cool, and even inconveniently points out to his accuser that to any objective observer it would be the accuser who seemed crazy.) It’s also a film that evokes much of the noir look (the cinematographer was L. William O’Connell), including the shots of Venetian-blind shadows over Our Heroine as she sleeps before the day when she will go out with “George” and learn at last who he really is. (Venetian blinds were an all-purpose gimmick for “B” directors seeking a really cheap and easy way to build visual atmosphere; look how often William Nigh, a good candidate for the worst director of all time, used them.) The Power of the Whistler has been called a film noir, which is borderline; Dix’s character is the stuff of noir but everyone else in the movie is too unambiguously nice to qualify as a noir character, and only rarely do we get the chiaroscuro visuals that are also so much a part of the film noir universe.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios, Wendy Finerman Productions, Sunswept Entertainment, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2026)

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

Last night (Tuesday, May 12) I went with the Bears San Diego to the AMC Mission Valley 20 theatre to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2, whose existence is something of a surprise because while I’d been aware that the original The Devil Wears Prada had been a hit, I hadn’t realized it had been a big enough hit to merit a sequel. The Devil Wears Prada began as a novel by Lauren Weisberger from 2003, which was first filmed three years later with Meryl Streep starring as Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine – a thinly disguised portrayal of the real-life Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue. I’d caught up with The Devil Wears Prada on Lifetime, of all places, in early 2023 and posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-devil-wears-prada-fox-2000-pictures.html, and re-reading that was helpful in deciphering last night’s film. Weisberger published a sequel to her novel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, in 2013, and the original producers came sniffing around to her with sequel in their minds. But they couldn’t get the original stars – Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci – to agree. Streep repeatedly turned it down, and Hathaway said she’d like to work with Streep again but on a totally different story. With the rights having passed from 20th Century-Fox to Walt Disney Studios (which bought Rupert Murdoch’s entire movie enterprise so Murdoch would have that many more billions to spend in turning the entire world’s politics Rightward), Disney started work on a sequel in 2024. They hired the original director, David Frankel, and assigned Aline Brosh McKenna to create a new script with no resemblance to Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada. We know that because Weisberger’s credit this time around only says, “Based on characters created by … .”

The story picks up the original characters of The Devil Wears Prada 20 years later and closely recycles the events of the first film. Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has left Runway magazine and built an illustrious career as an investigative reporter for the (fictitious) New York Vanguard, only the Vanguard’s owners have decided print journalism is so 19th century. They suddenly and without advance notice close the paper and send the entire staff layoff notices via text messages, which they receive while they’re at a banquet honoring journalists and Andy Sachs is winning an award for her latest exposé. Meanwhile, Runway magazine is having troubles of its own; they hyped a clothing manufacturer that turned out to make all its goods at a sweatshop in Thailand. Runway’s publisher, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), has the brainstorm to hire Andy to set up an investigative unit at Runway to rehabilitate its credibility. But he doesn’t tell Miranda Priestly about this in advance, so Andy just shows up at the Runway offices, ready to work, and has to face one of Miranda’s celebrated cold rages. Meanwhile, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s rival at Runway in the old days, has switched sides in the fashion industry and is now working at Dior, which holds up Miranda and Runway for the proverbial king’s ransom in exchange for continuing to advertise in Runway. Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s right-hand man in both films, tries to explain to her that virtually nobody reads the print edition of Runway anymore; the real money lays in digital outreach, and that means the editorial content has to be reworked in favor of shorter stories with obvious hooks that will serve as clickbait. One of the old Runway stories was about a high-tech power couple, Benji (Justin Theroux) and Sasha (Lucy Liu) Barnes, who were portrayed as deliriously happy with each other. Since then Benji and Sasha have broken up, and Andy makes her bones at the new Runway by scoring an interview with the famously reclusive Sasha.

Meanwhile, Miranda is lobbying Irv Ravitz for a promotion to run media content for his entire company, Elias-Clarke, only at the big party at which Irv is supposed to announce this he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack instead. Runway and the entire Elias-Clarke enterprise is inherited by Ravitz’s son Jay (B. J. Novak), who couldn’t care less about the fashion world or Runway’s unique role in it. Andy and Emily lobby Benji Barnes to do a white-knight buyout of Runway, only Benji, who’s been dating Emily, intends to double-cross Andy and Miranda, take over Runway, and install Emily as the new editor. He also wants to cut way back on the human role in creating the magazine’s content and rely on AI instead. As soon as Andy learns of this, she organizes her own white-knight buyout with Sasha as her backer. It seems Sasha’s motive is more to double-cross her ex than anything else, but she makes a bid not only for Runway but the entire Elias-Clarke company, and agrees to give Miranda the promotion to worldwide editorial control of the Elias-Clarke enterprise that Irv Ravitz was going to give her when he croaked. All this happens while Runway is hosting a huge fashion event in Milan (the counterpart to the one in Paris in the earlier film), with Lady Gaga (playing herself and really energizing the movie) performing a new song called “Shape of a Woman.” Lady Gaga, who’s one of my favorite current stars because she writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends instead of just barking out a few words over a dance groove and calling it a “song,” also wrote two other pieces for the soundtrack, “Runway” and “Glamorous Life.” She essentially serves the same role Madonna did in the earlier film, though once again the soundtrack contains Madonna’s mega-hit “Vogue.” (Once again, I loved the irony that the film contained a song with the same title as the real magazine on which the fictitious Runway is based.)

One of the film’s greatest gags is about Jay Ravitz’s cost-cutting strategies; he’s forbidden Runway’s staff to travel in private cars or planes, and it’s delicious to watch Miranda have to fly as an ordinary business-class passenger and be told to her fury that the terms of her ticket don’t allow the airline to serve her champagne. There’s also a subplot in which Andy, while shopping for a new apartment in a renovated old building and unwittingly insults the man who redeveloped it, Stuart Simmons (Kenneth Branagh), only to end up falling in love, or at least dating him. There are also nice references to the bodybuilding spree Benji Barnes goes on after his divorce (inspired, I suppose, by the real-life physical trainings high-tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – excuse me, Meta – have gone through, apparently under the belief that if they’re going to be Masters of the Universe they should build up their own bodies so they’ll look more like gods and less like nerds). I liked The Devil Wears Prada 2 but a) it’s not as good as the original (most sequels aren’t, though I can think of at least three that improved on their originals: James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein; Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two; and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part Two) and b) it contains enough “digs” against capitalism to qualify as mildly progressive but not so many as to suggest there are any serious alternatives to a system that lets the super-rich pretty much run the world however they want. The consensus of most of the audience members I overheard after the movie was over was it wasn’t as good as the first one, and it would be almost incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen the original film (which might be overstating it a bit, but just a bit).

Habeas Corpus (Hal Roach Studios, MGM, 1928)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 10) Turner Classic Movies did a “Silent Sunday Showcase” night featuring four two-reel comedy shorts by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Habeas Corpus, Putting Pants on Philip, Two Tars, and You’re Darn Tootin’. The last three are acknowledged comedy masterpieces and I’d looked forward to seeing them again. They’re also movies I’ve previously posted about on moviemagg, so I was surprised when I looked online for a previous Habeas Corpus review and found one: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/10/dr-pyckle-and-mr-pryde-joe-rock.html. My husband Charles and I had seen it before at a 2021 event at the San Diego Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, the year that due to the gradual wind-down of the COVID-19 lockdowns the summer organ festival, including its annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” took place in September and October instead of the usual July and August. That year’s “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” took place on Saturday, October 30, the day before Hallowe’en, and was partially Hallowe’en-themed. Along with Habeas Corpus it contained a film by Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925), a spoof of the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore in the title role(s); and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1922). In my previous post I gave special praise to the organist, Mark Herman, for (among other things) his real flair for jazz. I wasn’t that impressed by the films themselves, and Habeas Corpus is still an O.K. movie rather than a truly great one. It starts at the home of mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle), who is lamenting to his butler and assistant Ledoux (Charley Rogers) that he needs a freshly dead human body for his latest experiment to prove his theory that, as the intertitle claims, “the human brain has a level surface – in some instances perfectly flat.”

Laurel and Hardy show up at Padilla’s door begging for food – in Laurel’s case, particularly buttered toast – and instead get offered $500 (jointly or severally?) to go to the local graveyard and steal a recently deceased body. The remaining 15 minutes of this 20-minute movie drag predictably as Laurel and Hardy go through a series of repetitive gags as they try to break into the cemetery and steal a body while Ledoux, who’s really an undercover police officer trying to get the goods on Padilla, follows them there wearing a white sheet disguised as a ghost. Habeas Corpus is only mildly effective and funny, though even at less than full strength Laurel and Hardy are great clowns. Incidentally the film was originally released with a synchronized soundtrack, and that version is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWleZnEN_w. The version TCM showed last night had a fresh (well, 2013 anyway) soundtrack by Robert Israel which, like the movie itself, was O.K. but wasn’t much. It ends with Laurel and Hardy carrying a bag with Ledoux inside and being predictably startled when Ledoux’s feet start sticking out of the bag and he tries to walk until he and Hardy fall into a giant manhole (the same one used to much greater comic effect at the end of Putting Pants on Philip) and Laurel helplessly trying to get them out of there. Habeas Corpus is credited to director James Parrott (brother of Charley Chase, three of whose shorts were last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature) but with Leo McCarey, a comic genius at the level of Laurel and Hardy themselves, credited as “supervising director.” It was apparently McCarey’s idea to lift Laurel and Hardy from the amorphous ranks of Hal Roach’s “Comedy All-Stars” and feature them as leads, and it was also he who invented the “tit-for-tat” style of comic fighting in which, instead of having at each other willy-nilly as in most movie fights, the two combatants each take turns and patiently wait for the other’s retaliation. He made enough good movies – including the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – I can forgive him this lapse (as well as his truly rancid politics: he was a supporter of the Hollywood blacklist and director of the 1952 anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John, with Robert Walker in his last film as a naïve young rich kid who gets swept into joining the Communist Party).

Kanał (Zespol Filmowy “Kadr,” 1957)

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

The first film I watched last night on Turner Classic Movies was a 1957 Polish production called Kanał (notice the diacritical slash through the terminal “l”), whose title is the Polish word for “Sewer.” It was the second film directed by Andrzej Wajda, and also the second in his “World War II Trilogy” after A Generation and followed by the movie that really made his international reputation, Ashes and Diamonds. It’s loosely based on a true story: in August 1944 citizens of Warsaw decided to rise up against their Nazi occupiers and mounted a futile two-month resistance campaign which ended, all too predictably, with their mass slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. The campaign had been O.K.’d by the provisional Polish government in exile in London, but had not been cleared with the Soviet Union, Britain’s nominal allies and the country that would essentially take over Poland after the war ended. Kanał takes place in late September, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, and deals with a unit of 43 soldiers and civilian volunteers commanded, more or less (the unspeakable conditions under which they were fighting made it virtually impossible for the nominal authorities to maintain discipline), by Lieutenant Zadra (Wienszyslaw Gliniski). By then the Uprising has been crushed in most of the districts of Warsaw and the rebels are down to just three neighborhoods, including one called Mokotów. The unit in the movie has received orders to evacuate Mokotów and retreat to downtown, the last part of Warsaw that has not yet been recaptured by the Nazi occupiers. But only 27 of Zadra’s 43 men are fit to travel. Among the troops are Ensign Korab (Tadeusz Janczar); Lieutenant Madry (Emil Karewicz); Daisy (Teresa Izewska), the blonde-haired guide with whom he’s fallen in love in what has got to be the most bizarre “meet-cute” in movie history; Halinka (Teresa Berezowska), the other woman in the dramatis personae, who’s butch and dark-haired; and the man I thought was the film’s most interesting character, a would-be composer named Michal (Wladyslaw Sheybal).

A narrator (Tadeusz Lomnicki) who introduces the characters off-screen and fortunately isn’t heard from again matter-of-factly informs us that none of these people will still be alive by the end of the day, though quite frankly that’s not that big a surprise. The sense of doom that hangs over the film is its most palpable aspect; that and how vividly Wajda dramatizes the truly awful conditions under which the insurgents have to make their escape attempt. They literally have to wade through shit to get through the sewers and hopefully find an opening, only every time they do either their way is barred by a grille or German soldiers are waiting for them when they come out. In one chilling scene we see some of the escapees emerge and get confronted by a man in a uniform, and just when we’re wondering, “Friend or foe?,” Wajda shows us the SS logo on his arm and we know he’s foe and they’re in for an on-the-spot execution. Kanał is a grim film, as befits the subject matter, and in one scene Smukly (Stanislaw Mikulski), one of the insurgents, successfully disarms two German hand grenades hanging from the ceiling as booby traps but is blown to bits by a third one. It ends with Zadra shooting one of his own men, Sergeant Kula (Tadeuz Gwiadowski), for having lied to him; he said the others were right behind them and not, as the truth was, that they’d left them behind hours before. After Zadra kills Kula, he descends back into the sewers to look for his men ¬– and the film abruptly ends.

Kanał began life as a story called “They Loved Life” by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, a real-life survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, and it was released (no surprise here!) in the middle of a fraught political climate in Poland. Wajda had previously released his first film, A Generation, also about the Polish experience during World War II but one with a considerably more sympathetic depiction of the Russians than this one. In between the two movies, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had personally denounced his predecessor, Josef Stalin, at the 1956 Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Suddenly it was now safe for writers and filmmakers in Eastern Bloc countries to mount less than hagiographic depictions of the Russians in general and Stalin in particular in stories set during World War II. A Polish critic named Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz acknowledged the political tightrope Wajda was walking with this movie: “Like all artists approaching this subject, Wajda has succumbed to certain pressures. On the one hand there was the rational pressure against delivering an apologia for the Rising and, on the other hand, the emotional pressure against taking a merciless criticism of the Rising. The film stopped halfway.” Though the Soviet-backed government of Poland didn’t allow direct criticism of Russia’s role in the war, one critic said, “They could not censor the silence” – the chilling moment in the film in which the partisan rebels expect to be rescued by the Soviet army, and instead they hear only silence as the Soviet forces stop firing. Wajda originally wanted to begin the film with a montage of similar doomed attempts at resistance throughout Polish history, including the Napoleonic era’s Battle of Samosierra, the Charge of Rokitna in World War I, and the legend of the Charge at Krojanty, reputedly on German tanks in 1939. While he abandoned that plan, I suspect because including all those scenes would have blown his budget, Wajda’s biographer, Boleslaw Michalek, wrote, “Wajda’s treatment of the Warsaw Rising and the retreat through the sewers had a definite and deliberate historical and social edge.”

The result was a movie that frequently reminded me of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” another testament to individual heroism within the context of an absolutely stupid, hopeless, and pointless battle. It’s not surprising that on its initial release Kanał was unpopular with Polish audiences and critics because it depicted presumed national heroes literally wading through shit. Kanał is an impressive movie but also a quite grim one, and one of the most chilling sets of scenes occur when the Polish would-be escapees are convinced that the Germans are flooding the sewer tunnels with poison gas, but it turns out to be just the natural by-products of the decay of the human waste and other garbage in the sewer tunnels. One of the weirder parts of World War II was that Adolf Hitler, who himself had been the victim of a poison gas attack during World War I, strictly forbade the German armed forces from using it in World War II. Of course he had no problem using gas to kill millions of innocent and helpless civilians in the extermination centers as part of the Holocaust, but Hitler didn’t want any of his troops to suffer the way he had in the preceding war. Another neat part of the movie is Michal’s quoting passages from Dante’s Inferno describing the descent into hell as the partisans make their own descent into the sewers – a reference Wajda acknowledged was deliberate on his part. As biographer Michalek wrote, “Kanał is permeated by a virtually unrelieved mood of despair, bitterness and resignation. The whole structure is pivoted on the idea that there is no way out, no hope, no chance of deliverance. As in Dante, there is only a succession of narrowing circles of torment.” This makes it ironic in the extreme that both this and the next film shown on Turner Classic Movies May 9, the Italian film Salvatore Giuliano, were intense dramas with no (or virtually no) comic-relief elements – and yet the showings were co-hosted by TCM regular Ben Mankiewicz and Bill Hader, who’s prlmarily known as a comedian. The ironies got even more intense when Hader acknowledged that he’d ripped off Kanał for the opening of the second season of one of his comedy mini-series!

Salvatore Giuliano (Galatea Film, Lux Film, Vides Cinematografica, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 9) the second film on Turner Classic Movies’ program with guest host Bill Hader was a movie I’d been curious about for quite some time: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), an Italian film directed and co-written by Francesco Rosi about a real-life bandit who terrorized and caused a lot of discomfort for law-enforcement authorities in Sicily in the five years between the end of World War II and his murder in 1950. I’d first heard of this film under unusual auspices: in 1972 I received a mailing from a film distributor in my capacity as part of the student government at College of Marin. The letter said that they had just acquired the U.S. rights to this movie after it had previously been released in this country only in a brutally cut and mutilated version, and now that I’ve seen it I’m guessing that the reason for the re-edits was to put the film’s non-linear narrative sequence into a more normal chronological one. Born in 1922, the real Salvatore Giuliano (Pietro Cammarata) got onto law enforcement’s radar screen in 1943, when at a time when it was virtually impossible to get food in Italy without resorting to the black market. On September 2, 1943 he was caught by the Italian Carabinieri (a national police force similar to America’s FBI, though with broader duties; until 2000 they were actually a part of the Italian Army, though that year they were spun off into a separate part of the Italian armed forces) transporting two sacks of black-market grain. He ended up killing one of the Carabinieri who’d been trying to arrest him. Giuliano fled back to his native village, Montelepre, where he held out until 1945, when the ending of World War II seemed to open up new opportunities for him.

When the war ended the Movement for the Independence of Sicily (MIS), which wanted Sicily to separate from Italy and become its own country, saw an opportunity and hired Giuliano to help set up a military wing called EVIS (Italian initials for “Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily”), which related to MIS much the way the Irish Republican Army did to its political wing, Sinn Fein. MIS promised Giuliano and his fellow banditti not only payment but full pardons for any crimes they’d committed previously. Giuliano recruited 40 to 60 young men in addition to his previous associates, including a man named Gaspare Pisciotta (Frank Wolff) who became his best friend. Giuliano assigned them military ranks and trained them in how to use weapons (not very well, if the movie is to be believed). He launched his war on December 27, 1945 with an attack on a Carabinieri outpost in Montelepre, to which the Italian government (still under the control of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had deposed Benito Mussolini in 1943 and been recognized by Mussolini’s Allied enemies as the rightful ruler) responded by sending 500 Carabinieri and declaring martial law. In 1947 Giuliano staged his next campaign: an attack on a May Day rally held by the Italian Communist Party at Portella della Ginestra. It’s not clear from the historical record why Giuliano targeted the Communists, who were ostensibly seeking the same goals he was – developing the local economy and in particular providing the remote villages of Sicily with electricity and running water – though part of the explanation may be that in 1947 Giuliano gave an interview to anti-Communist American journalist Michael Stern, who recruited him to fight the Communists and did the interview wearing a U.S. Army uniform, which gave Giuliano the impression that he was an official representative of the American government.

Giuliano’s attack led to the deaths of 11 children (including a woman and three children) and between 24 and 36 people wounded. The attack shocked the country and led to public demands for the capture and/or killing of Giuliano. It also turned the local Mafia, which had previously supported Giuliano and given his men tactical support in exchange for a cut of their profits, against Giuliano. Like the organized criminals in Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931), who mounted their own campaign to find a psychopath who was murdering children because the official police’s efforts were disrupting their activities, the Mafia now saw Giuliano as a threat, though instead of starting their own manhunt they teamed up with the police and ratted Giuliano out to the Carabinieri. Giuliano was ultimately killed on July 5, 1950 in the town of Castelvetrano. The authorities set up an elaborate cover-up to make it look like he’d been killed in a shoot-out with authorities, but in fact he was killed by his best friend Gaspare Pisciotta after Giuliano had received an anonymous letter saying that Pisciotta had become an informant and was ratting out the members of Giuliano’s gang to the authorities. Rosi’s film took a non-linear approach to the material, starting the movie on July 5, 1950 with a shot of Giuliano’s corpse laid out in an outside courtyard even though, as we learn only much later, he was really killed in his bedroom. Rosi cuts back and forth between time frames, including an elaborately staged account of the Portella della Ginestra massacre that made it look like he’d seen and learned from Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps massacre in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the trial of Pisciotta and the other participants in the massacre, which took place in 1952, two years after Giuliano’s death.

It also shows Pisciotta being poisoned in prison, presumably by the authorities to maintain their cover-up, in 1954. The final shot of the film takes place in 1960, just two years before it was made, in which the Mafioso who ratted Giuliano out to the authorities is himself shot dead in a public square. Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films; he’s said it influenced him when he made Taxi Driver (1975), though that’s something of a surprise because one of Rosi’s trademarks as a director is to avoid the direct depiction of violence. We don’t see Giuliano get shot, and we don’t see most of the other victims get killed either. Salvatore Giuliano is also a brilliantly photographed film; Rosi used Federico Fellini’s favorite cameraman, Gianni di Venanzo, and was rewarded with stunning chiaroscuro nighttime compositions that looked like film noir as well as stirring daytime scenes in the bright Sicilian sun. Rosi kept us in tune as to the two biggest questions with a non-linear film, not only “Where are we?” but “When are we?,” by sprinkling bits of narration throughout the movie which he delivered himself. Rosi also followed the non-traditional casting strategy of Italian neo-realist directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, shooting the film in the locations where the real-life events took place and using non-professional actors without major reputations. (Though Pietro Cammarata is playing the title role – and he’s a magnetic screen personality – we hardly see him.) Salvatore Giuliano is a quite remarkable movie that deserves to be better known, even though when my husband Charles (who returned from work with about 25 minutes left to go in the film) read the Wikipedia page on the real Giuliano he said an entire mini-series could be made from his life.

Law and Order: "Once Burned" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 7) my husband Charles and I watched episodes in sequence of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Inspector George Gently. The Law and Order show was “Once Burned,” and it begins with a sequence in which New York Fire Department Captain Clint Braddock (Chad Knorr), a 25-year department veteran who became a legend as one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, peremptorily ordering a younger firefighter away from a doorway in a burning apartment where the fire is sucking in smoke. Braddock barks out an explanation that that’s a backdraft and would suck his younger colleague into the burning room and incinerate him. The next see Braddock he's dead, killed by a Halligan (a common firefighting tool that looks like a pickaxe on one end and a hoe on the other) outside on the sidewalk. The investigating police, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), cycle through various red herrings, including a fellow firefighter named Steven Delvecchio (Max Cassella) whom Braddock had been friends with for decades until Braddock found out that Delvecchio was wrongly claiming money from the fund set up after 9/11 to compensate its victims and pay benefits to their families. The cops also investigate Braddock’s wife Candace (Catherine Eaton), from whom he’d filed for divorce just a week or so ago.

Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Diego Peralta (Bobby Soto), another firefighter and the man Braddock rescued from being burned alive in the opening scene. The two got into an argument when an elaborate necklace disappeared from the scene of a fire which Braddock’s company had worked, with Peralta as part of the crew. Because his own claim from the 9/11 compensation fund had been turned down after the insurance industry representatives determined that Braddock’s multiple sclerosis couldn’t be traced definitively to 9/11, Braddock first stole the valuable item to pay for his health-care treatments and then tried to frame Peralta for it, knowing that as a twice-convicted felon (first for assault and then for burglary) Peralta’s denials wouldn’t be believed. According to Peralta’s own account, Braddock got so worked up at Peralta he attacked him and Peralta killed him in self-defense. Peralta testifies to that effect at his murder trial and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), though not convinced of Peralta’s innocence, has enough doubts about his guilt he considers dismissing the case. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) talks him out of it and Price delivers a cross-examination replete with photo evidence of the victim of Peralta’s assault. The jury finds Peralta guilty but the open-ended script by old Law and Order hands Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson and Michael Smith’s powerful direction leave us in considerable doubt as to whether justice was done. It’s the kind of thoughtful writing that has made Dick Wolf’s Law and Order shows my all-time favorite policiers.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order show on May 7, my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit program featuring an episode called “Old Friends,” in which the Manhattan Special Victims Unit detectives respond to a 911 call from a woman named Angela (Christina Brucato) who’s just awakened from a drink-induced slumber at an all-night party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her college graduation. She’s stayed in touch with quite a lot of people she knew from her days at Columbia University, including the party’s host, Preston Winthrop (John Skelley), a spoiled-brat trust-fund kid with a long history of drinking, drug abuse, failed stints in rehab, and sexually obnoxious behavior towards women. The 911 call was occasioned by Angela’s discovery of her friend Nora Pontius (Izzie Steele) lying unconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Usually, at least on Law and Order and other crime shows, that means the victim is a-goner, but thanks to Angela’s quick action a team of paramedics is able to get her to a hospital in time to save her life. Needless to say, she turns out to have been the victim of a sexual assault. Other people at the party were Ryan (Mishka Thébaud); Adam (James William O’Halloran), his wife Sophie (Julia Yorks) – who’s from the Bay Area, attended Stanford instead of Columbia, but was there only to make sure Adam didn’t get into anything extra-relational with any of the other women – and Josh Ortega (Benny Elledge), who because he was the only one of the gang who didn’t spend the night and who has the biggest chip on his shoulder of any of the attendees is clearly being set up by writer Justine Ferrara to be the prime red-herring suspect.

Though she was indefinitely suspended at the end of the previous week’s episode by an African-American woman chief of detectives who obviously hates her, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gets to investigate the case anyway after her suspension is itself suspended pending her appeal. (Ferrara drops a big hint in the middle of the show when she has Benson tell one of the detectives on her squad that after 25 years she’s no longer sure the Special Victims Unit is the right place for her. It’s possible Mariska Hargitay wants to move on with her life and is stepping down from the show; we’ll see in next week’s episode, which is the last of the current season.) Midway through the show, I turned to Charles and said I thought this was one of the weaker SVU’s for the simple reason that there was no one in the cast we actually liked. As it kept going, it kept reminding me of all those mysteries I’ve read in which the clue to the current crime was a secret concealed in one or more of the characters’ pasts, including the sub-genre invented (I think) by Ross Macdonald in The Galton Case in which the lead detective character has to solve a 20-year-old cold case to get the clue needed to figure out the more recent crime(s). But Ferrara was hardly at the level of Macdonald or other writers that have used this gimmick. It turns out that Josh Ortega stole a gold ring from Nora, but only because she owed him money. Adam and Nora had been having a long-term “friends with benefits” relationship, sneaking off together for casual sex whenever they had the opportunity, and they’d done so that night even though Adam’s wife Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) was in the same apartment at the same time. The real culprit turned out to be [spoiler alert!] Ryan, who’d had a long-standing and decidedly unrequited crush on Nora from their college days to the present. He found her in an unconscious state and took advantage of it to rape her. After the excellence of the Law and Order episode that had preceded it, this one really rubbed me the wrong way and made me felt slimy not only for having watched it myself but having subjected Charles to it.

Inspector George Gently: "The Burning Man" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired July 13, 2008)

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

Later in the evening (Thursday, May 7) I switched channels from NBC to PBS to catch a rerun of Inspector George Gently, a BBC-TV policier that ran from 2008 to 2017. Its central character, Detective Chief Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw), was a crabby middle-aged man who as the series began had just suffered two big-time blows, one personal and one professional. The personal blow was the death of his wife at the hands of one of the criminals he’d been after, and the professional one was losing his prestigious job at New Scotland Yard in London and being reassigned to the small town of Durham in Northumberland in the north of England. Gently’s new professional partner is Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby), who in 1964 (when the series was set at first) is wearing his hair Beatle-length (as I’ve noted in previous entries in the series, he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic of John Lennon) but other than that is a quite stuck-up conservative personally, if not politically, The Gently character was created by author Alan Hunter and brought to the small screen by Peter Flannery, who’s listed as the show’s creator and also wrote this particular episode, “The Burning Man.” Only the second episode of the series, “The Burning Man” begins with Gently and Bacchus finding the corpse of a man that has not only been killed (with a single gunshot to the forehead) but soaked in a flammable liquid so he would be burned beyond immediate recognition. The only clue as to his identity is a gold ring which he swallowed just before he was killed, and emerged intact even though the rest of his body was utterly consumed and only his skeleton remained. The ring has an inscription to “Wanda,” and the cops trace it to Wanda Lane (Pooky Quesnel), a barmaid at a local tavern called The Rook.

The Rook markets itself to the local Irish community, including hosting bands playing traditional Irish folk music (with, shall we say, more enthusiasm than talent) and playing host to various operatives with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The show’s 1964 setting puts it well ahead of the so-called “Time of Troubles” which rocked the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, which stayed part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland, and Wales after the remaining 26 Irish counties at last gained independence, but the seeds of doubt are already brewing. Gently and Bacchus find themselves investigating two cases at once: the murder of the burned-out mystery corpse and the disappearance of O’Shaughnessy (Deka Walmsley), a middle-aged man whose (barely) adult daughter Carmel (Charlotte Riley) is looking for him and entreating the police to take more care of the case than they might otherwise. Their task is complicated by the appearance of Empton (Robert Glenister) from London’s Special Branch, which as its Wikipedia page explains “was a unit of London's Metropolitan Police formed in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name became Special Branch [it was originally Special Irish Branch] as the unit's remit widened to include more than just Irish Republican-related counter-espionage.” When he’s not trying to recruit John Bacchus to leave the police force in Durham and join the Special Branch, Empton is pushing his weight around and getting in the way of the investigation big-time. Eventually we learn – or think we learn – that the burned-out corpse was Ruairi O’Connell (Finbar Lynch), a gunman for the IRA. O’Connell was having a casual sexual affair with Wanda, who is, shall we say, quite free with her affections (at one point she tries to seduce Gently and even undresses to her underwear, but Gently, whose only interest in her is to take her down to the police station and get her information, calmly tells her to put her clothes back on so he can do that).

The true villain of the piece turns out to be Doyle (John Kavanagh), who runs a local trucking company for which O’Connell drove.Through an inside connection at the local British military base, O’Connell had acquired a large collection of guns which he intended to smuggle into Northern Ireland to continue the struggle for full Irish independence. Only O’Connell had been recruited by Empton as an informer, and his murder was an IRA execution as revenge for his having given Empton the names of his colleagues. O’Shaughnessy is in turn killed by a hit squad led by Doyle as Gently, Bacchus, and O’Shaughnessy’s daughter Carmel look on helplessly. Ultimately Empton turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, willing to let the shipment of stolen guns make its way to the IRA in exchange for having Doyle, who’s really his agent, win a place on the IRA’s governing council so Empton can gain intelligence on the group from the source. In the end Doyle is picked off by a well-aimed shot from Gently as he’s attempting to save himself by holding Wanda Lane hostage, Empton is disgraced, and fortunately both the women we’ve come to like, Wanda and Carmel, are alive at the end (though we get the impression Wanda has been chastened by the experience and won’t be anywhere nearly as man-hungry as she was before). I like Inspector George Gently because it almost totally lacks the campy levity of a lot of the other British policiers, especially the ones like Midsomer Murders set in central England instead of London, Manchester, or Liverpool. Instead it virtually qualified as neo-noir, and I particularly liked this episode because it had a political background but luckily didn’t hit us over the head with it.

X the Unknown (Sol Lesser Productions, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, Warner Bros., 1956)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 7) I showed my husband Charles a film I’d got in the same container as Four Sided Triangle: X the Unknown (the official poster had a three-dot ellipsis between “X” and “the,” but the film’s own opening credits did not), a strange little story by future Hammer director Jimmy Sangster about a menace, not from outer space this time, but from inside the Earth’s crust. As explained in the exposition by Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger, an American actor imported to star in the film by producer Sol Lesser, a long-time Hollywood bottom-feeder who got his name on the copyright), as the earth’s crust expanded and took up more of the volume of the planet, agencies inside the crust started feeling squeezed and eventually rebelled, breaking open the crust in certain places to grab the energy they needed as their source of food. (Some critics at the time praised Sangster’s script as at least not being yet another tale of an alien invasion from outer space.) The film is set in Scotland, where the British army is doing tests to train their troops in the proper use of Geiger counters to detect underground radiation, only one of the servicemembers detects radiation in a location other than where the atomic materials have been planted as part of the exercise. The army orders the suspicious site cordoned off, but two young boys, Ian Osborn (Fraser Hines) and Willie Harding (Michael Brooks), investigate the site on a dare. Ian emerges unscathed but Willie is badly burned and eventually dies in the hospital of his wounds, much to the understandable displeasure of his parents Jack (Jameson Clark) and Vi (Jane Aird). Later the great whatsit kills a doctor in the hospital where the boy was being treated (when we saw his flesh literally melt on screen I joked to Charles, “Now this looks like a Hammer movie”). It also opens a deep fissure in the ground and kills two soldiers stationed outside the perimeter to guard it. Royston’s colleague Peter Elliott (William Lucas) volunteers to be lowered into the fissure to investigate it first-hand, taking a Geiger counter with him and saying he’ll asked to be raised out of the pit immediately once it starts registering radiation. He gets his (and our) first clue about the mysterious menace when an oddly animate patch of mud fastens itself to his hand. Royston and Elliott have a frosty relationship with Inspector “Mac” McGill (Leo McKern, who later played Clang, the High Priest of Kalili, in Help! and thus put the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Beatles) of the local police. The cops insist on trying to blow up the monster while Royston says that it feeds on energy and therefore supplying it with more energy will only help it.

Ultimately the mud-monster emerges from its cave and starts menacing everyone in the vicinity in search of the radioactive cobalt core from a nearby nuclear reactor, which coincidentally has been removed as part of a shutdown of the reactor instituted by Royston. The scientists finally figure out a way to kill the thing using the cobalt core as a lure, on the theory that by bombarding it with out-of-synch radio waves they can neutralize it and keep it from feeding on the surrounding energy. Just as the scientists think they have killed it with their first explosion, it explodes a second time, leaving it uncertain at the film’s rather abrupt ending if they’ve really killed the whatsit or just put it to sleep for a while. I remembered that both Charles and I had seen this movie before because I’d joked about a sequel to it and even come up with a title: X2: Killer Mud Strikes Again! According to the film’s Wikipedia page, the originally assigned director was American expatriate and blacklist victim Joseph Losey, but he was let go when Dean Jagger refused to work with him, probably fearful for his own future if he made a film with a blacklisted director like Losey. Instead they assigned the film to Leslie Norman, best known as a comedy director for Ealing Studios and rather out of place in a science-fiction/horror film. The page also says that Sol Lesser had a deal to release the film in the U.S. through RKO, but at the time that studio was in its death throes during the three-year interregnum between Howard Hughes’s selling it in 1955 and its eventual closure three years later. During that time RKO seemed to be going through a corporate version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and by the time its owners bowed to the inevitable in 1958 they’d begun placing their unreleased films with other studios, mainly Warner Bros. and Columbia. X the Unknown ended up at Warners, which released it on a double bill with Hammer’s first foray into classical monster-movie making, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The page also explains that Hammer’s producer, Anthony Hinds, had originally wanted to call Dean Jagger’s character “Bernard Quatermass,” but the creator of the Quatermass character, Nigel Kneale, refused to give permission. There’s at least one other quirky credit in the film besides Leo McKern’s: Anthony Newley appears briefly as one of the servicemembers killed by the monster early on in the Hammer equivalent of a Star Trek “red shirt.” X the Unknown is an O.K. entry into the alien-monster sweepstakes, surprisingly dull for most of its running time (for which I’m inclined to blame Sangster rather than Norman) and with a woefully unscary monster. It’s basically the same concept as The Blob, made in the U.S. two years later, but The Blob, while no great shakes as a movie either, at least was made with a cheery awareness of its camp aspects that pretty much eluded the makers of X the Unknown.

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

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

Last night (Monday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, fourth installment in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”), in a frustrating staging by the Berlin Oper Under den Linden (the last part of the name refers to its location, and during the split of Germany between 1947 and 1990 it was in East Berlin) conducted by Christian Thielemann (after the original conductor, Daniel Barenboim, withdrew for health reasons – he is in his 80’s, after all!) and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Dmitri Tcherniakov is a youngish (born 1970, which would make him 55) Russian stage director with a terrible reputation for making hash out of great operas. Among his problems as an opera director are an aversion to supernatural plot elements (which makes me wonder whose idea it was to have him direct Wagner’s Ring, which is full of supernatural plot elements!) and an acute allergy to anything resembling a special effect. Before watching this Ring as part of a Fanfare review assignment, I’d seen only one Tcherniakov production before, a Metropolitan Opera staging of Borodin’s Prince Igor from 2014 which I actually liked. I suspect one of the reasons I liked his Prince Igor is that, though he updated the story, he didn’t do so obtrusively. He also was working with a Russian opera, and he’s Russian, so he might have had a home-field advantage. It also helped that Prince Igor is an unfinished opera; Alexander Borodin was a chemical researcher by profession and composed as a hobby, and he didn’t have time to create a final shape for his opera before he died. The standard version of Prince Igor was created by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov after Borodin’s death based on the fragments he’d left behind and things he'd told them about his plans for the piece, and Tcherniakov took parts of the Prince Igor manuscript Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov hadn’t used in their version as well as some of Borodin’s instrumental music, notably a piece called “The River Don Floods,” to give the opera a more downbeat ending than the standard version’s.

Alas, in Wagner’s Ring Tchneriakov was working with a well-established text whose composer (who was also his own librettist) not only lived to finish it but actually directed the premiere. Tchnerniakov had the looney-tunes idea to stage the Ring in a giant medical research complex called E.S.C.H.E.; he never specified what the initials stood for but it was clearly a reference to the World-Ash Tree (“Esche” is the German word for “ash,” as in a species of tree) where the characters are being watched 24/7 by a group of mad researchers who manipulate them in ways designed to test their … well, Tchneriakov isn’t very specific as to who these people are or what they’re testing the subjects for. Götterdämmerung opens in the corridors of the establishment, where the three Norns, the Norse equivalents to the Fates in Greco-Roman mythology (Noa Beinart, Kristina Stanek, and Anna Samuil), are spinning the rope of destiny – only there is, of course, no rope. All the Norns are mobility-impaired; two are using canes (one has a four-legged extension so it can stand up, one doesn’t) and one has a portable chair that doubles as a walker. The Norns are watching Siegfried (Andreas Schager) and Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), who united at the end of the immediately previous opera, Siegfried, in bed together, only Brünnhilde gets up before Siegfried does and starts making them coffee. Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the so-called “Dawn Duet” in which she calls out to him to go forth and do new heroic deeds in her honor. Then they exchange presents: Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the Ring of the Nibelung and in exchange Brünnhilde gives Siegfried Grane, the magic flying horse she used to ride into battle during her days as a Valkyrie until she lost that job at the end of Die Walküre by siding with Siegfried’s father Siegmund (Robert Watson) in a duel over Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), Siegmund’s long-lost twin sister as well as his girlfriend and Siegfried’s mother. Grane is one of Tcherniakov’s worst ideas; instead of either a real horse or a mock-up of same, he’s a plush toy horse less than a foot long, even though Siegfried and Brünnhilde pass it back and forth and address it as if it were a real horse either of them could ride. Then Siegfried takes off on the Rhine Journey, which Wagner composed as an instrumental interlude and Tchneriakov and his TV director, Andy Sommer, gave it to us as precisely that, shooting the orchestra in the pit rather than sticking some stupid visual sequence before our eyes.

He arrives at the castle of the Gibichungs, ruled by brother Gunther (Lauri Vasar) and his sister Gutrune (Mandy Fredrich) and their half-brother Hagen (the formidable Mika Kares, who’d already sung two roles in this Ring cycle before, as Fasolt the giant in Das Rheingold and Hunding, Sieglinde’s cuckolded husband, in Die Walküre). All three of the characters had Gibich’s wife Grimhilde as their mother, but whereas Gunther and Gutrune were sired by King Gibich, Hagen’s father was Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle in all three operas in which he appears), the dwarf who stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens in the first part and thereby set the entire plot in motion. Hagen has the idea that Siegfried would make a good husband for Gutrune and Brünnhilde an equally good wife for Gunther, only Gunther is too fearful to make it across the barrier of flames (which, of course, doesn’t exist in Tchneriakov’s production; the closest we get is a series of jagged red lines drawn with a scarlet Sharpie to suggest fire). So Siegfried agrees to use the Tarnhelm, the shape-shifting and teleportation device Alberich’s brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer) invented in Rheingold, to impersonate Gunther and kidnap Brünnhilde on his behalf. In Wagner’s original, Siegfried is induced to do this by being given a magic potion that makes him lose his memory and fall instantly in love with Gutrune, but in Tcheriakov’s rewrite the “potion” is an ordinary bottle (or series of bottles) of white wine and Siegfried is the only one of the party who doesn’t drink any – which makes his immediate forsaking of his vows to Brünnhilde and near-rape of Gutrune even more inexplicable than it was in Wagner’s original. I was also bothered by the way in which the characters smoked cigarettes; in Siegfried Siegfried smoked twice, once in the first act and once in the third, and in Götterdämmerung not only does Siegfried smoke, so do Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen. This suggests that Tcherniakov has reset the story in the 1970’s, when it was still common for health-care workers to smoke on the job, but a later scene in which the characters all display modern-style cell phones marks it as 21st century.

There’s also a confrontation scene between Brünnhilde and her sister, fellow Valkyrie Waltraute (Violeta Urmana, one of the few people in this cast I’d heard of before; she played Aïda in a 2009 Met production that was telecast, and she did so quite well) in which Waltraute brings her up to speed on what’s been happening in Valhalla while Brünnhilde has been in exile. Apparently Wotan (Michael Volle), the head of the gods, has lost his will to live and has stopped eating the golden apples that make the gods immortal. Instead he’s ordered the world-ash tree to be chopped down and the twigs stacked around Valhalla waiting for a spark to start a conflagration and burn down Valhalla and all the gods with it. Waltraute wants Brünnhilde to give the ring back to the Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelin Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapovskaya), from whom Alberich stole the gold to make it in Rheingold, in hopes that can lift the curse on it and get Wotan and the other gods interested in life again. But Brünnhilde refuses to part with the ring because it was Siegfried’s love token. Then Siegfried shows up in Gunther drag and kidnaps Brünnhilde. In Act II, Siegfried brings Brünnhilde back to Gibich Land, only Brünnhilde catches on that he’s betrayed her and immediately plots with Gunther and Hagen to kill him. They take the famous Oath on the Spear, which in this production is the Oath on a Bunch of Cell Phones. In Act III Siegfried is wandering around and meets the Rhinemaidens, though in Tcherniakov’s production this happens in the so-called “Stress Laboratory” where they work as nurses or something. They ask Siegfried to give them back the ring, but he refuses. Instead he keeps walking into a basketball court (in the immortal words of Anna Russell, who vividly parodied the Ring in one of her most famous routines, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) where Hagen is leading a game.

In Wagner’s original, Siegfried, Hagen,and the Gibichung vassals (Götterdämmerung is the only one of the Ring operas to contain a chorus, and they do the usual opera-chorus things, commenting on action we’ve just seen and therefore don’t need to have explained to us) are on an outdoor hunting trip, and Hagen first gives Siegfried an antidote to the potion he took in Act I that enables him to remember the whole story about how he killed Fafner the dragon (Peter Rose) and crossed the magic flames to rescue Brünnhilde. Then, just as Siegfried is remembering his whole backstory, Hagen kills him with a spear. In Tcherniakov’s production, once again Siegfried doesn’t drink the bottled water that supposedly contains the potion, and Hagen has no spear since he’s playing basketball (the team are wearing matching green polo shirts and dark blue shorts) instead of hunting. Just as I was beginning to wonder how Tcherniakov was going to have Hagen kill Siegfried, he had Hagen pick up a standard with a flag on the end of it and stab Siegfried in the back with it. (I wondered if Tcherniakov had got the idea from the use of flagstaffs as weapons by some of the January 6, 2021 rioters who staged an action at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to keep Congress from certifying the 2020 election so Donald Trump could stay in power. Remember that this Ring was staged in 2022, during the Joe Biden interregnum between Donald Trump’s two Presidential terms.) Siegfried’s corpse gets put on a hospital gurney and pushed back from the basketball court to the stress laboratory next door. Gutrune gets her big mad scene as she anxiously awaits the return of her beloved Siegfried, not realizing until she actually sees his corpse that he’s been killed by her half-brother Hagen. Brünnhilde sings the famous Immolation Scene, which in Wagner’s original is supposed to set off a fire that spreads from the Gibichung territory to engulf all Valhalla and kill off the gods once and for all, only once again Tcherniakov, in one of his most stupid ideas, dispensed with a flame and had Brünnhilde survive the incident; as the orchestra plays the grand postlude that was supposed to accompany the fire that took out Valhalla and the gods, she stands stage center as the text for one of the earlier versions of the Immolation Scene scrolls behind her. Wagner actually wrote no fewer than seven versions of the text for this scene as his philosophical views grew and changed, and the version Tcherniakov picked for his big crawl was the one in which Brünnhilde said, “I saw the world end.” Then the white text on a black background crumbles into dust and blows away, in what Tcherniakov with his fabled allergy to special effects came as close as he was going to get to one.

Götterdämmerung is a schizoid opera anyway because Wagner wrote the text over two decades before he composed the music. He originally planned it in 1848 as a stand-alone work called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), and had it not been for his involvement in the 1848 Dresden revolution he probably would have composed it right after Lohengrin and in much the same style. When the revolution failed Wagner had literally to flee for his life; he spent the next 16 years mostly in Switzerland and decided that Siegfrieds Tod needed a prologue, Der junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), to explain how Siegfried came into the world in the first place. Then he decided that needed another prelude to explain how Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, got together and conceived him. Finally he decided he needed a prologue to the whole work to explain who Wotan and the gods were, who Alberich was, and all about the Rhinegold and the Rhinemaidens who had custody of it until Alberich stole it, renounced love, and used its power to try to take over the world until Wotan tricked him into giving it up, only to lose it again to the giants who built Valhalla for him. By the time he finished composing the Ring, Wagner was stuck with a text that really didn’t fit his operatic ideal as it had evolved over the years, and especially since he’d broken off midway through the third act of Siegfried to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, two operas he rather naïvely thought would be easier to produce and make him some money, and didn’t resume composing the Ring for 12 years.

I don’t automatically dislike modern-dress permutations of classic operas, but I suspect that a work set in or near the time it was written and dealing with realistic situations and emotions is a better candidate for updating than a work like the Ring with a mythological or legendary setting. Among the modern-dress opera productions I’ve liked are Peter Sellars’s version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which worked because he found modern-day equivalents to the social and class conflicts of the original characters (his Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte didn’t work for me because he was just trying too hard to be “different” and not taking the same kind of care he had with The Marriage of Figaro); a stunning 1983 New York City Opera production of Bizet’s Carmen that not only moved the setting to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s but (unlike the Met with a later production) actually incorporated the war into the plot (Carmen and her gang were smuggling guns to the Loyalists, and the army from which Don José deserted was Franco’s); and Michael Mayer’s 2013 Met production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that moved the setting to 1960’s Las Vegas and made the characters Frank Sinatra and the “Rat Pack.” Tcherniakov’s Ring was full of absolutely silly ideas (like the toy Grane and the Hannibal Lecter mask Fafner wore in Siegfried), and its biggest sin was it did absolutely nothing to illuminate the character conflicts in Wagner’s original. Even Sam Goodyear, who successively reviewed the four operas as they were originally presented “live” and liked the production considerably better than I did, admitted at the end, “I’m just still not very sure how they add up to a whole and say anything profound. An experiment, if you like, with a hypothesis, a method, and some results, but to me, no real conclusions.”

Three by Charley Chase: "Are Brunettes Safe?," "Forgotten Sweeties," and "Bigger and Better Blondes" (Hal Ruach Studios, Pathé, 1927)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 3) the “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies consisted of three short films by comedian Charley Chase. His real name was Charley Parrott and the movies – Are Brunettes Safe?, Forgotten Sweeties, and Bigger and Better Blondes – were all made in 1927 by Hal Roach Studios for distribution by Pathé just before Roach switched his distribution contract to MGM. They were also all directed by Chase’s brother, James Parrott (later on Charley would start directing his own films and would take his directorial credit as “Charley Parrott” and his acting credit as “Charley Chase,” much the way later singer-songwriters like McKinley Morganfield, Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, and Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus did: you know them better as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elvis Costello, respectively) and written by H. M. “Beanie” Walker, one of the few title writers in the silent era who successfully converted to writing screenplays for talkies. Chase is often considered the father of situation comedy, though an even earlier star, John Bunny, probably deserves the honor: like such later sitcom stars as Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, he worked with his real-life spouse and was employed by Vitagraph, and since Mr. and Mrs. Bunny were both rather heavy-set the two couldn’t have done the kind of knockabout slapstick specialized by Mack Sennett’s Keystone crew. So they did a more sedate, genteel sort of movie humor that Vitagraph sold audiences as a kinder, gentler alternative. The three Chase films were shown in descending order of visual quality; the first, Are Brunettes Safe?, contained a closing credit thanking archives in Germany and Austria for supplying prints and for the most part the Boris Faquality was excellent, probably quite close to what 1927 audiences saw. Alas, the other two were considerably blurrier.

Are Brunettes Safe? Is an engaging little farce about “Helping Hand” (Charley Chase), an advice columnist at a big-city newspaper who receives a letter from a small-town woman asking for his help in finding her long-lost son. She enclosed a photo of him, and damned if he doesn’t look just like Charley Chase. On the advice of his editor, who thinks there’s a great human-interest story in it, Chase goes to the small town and impersonates the brother, not realizing that the brother is in fact Bud Gordon, notorious bank robber and criminal. There’s a tearful reunion between mother and (supposed) son in which she tells him all the crimes he’s accused of in the hopes that he can prove his innocence. He meets Bud Gordon’s sister (Lorraine Eason) and falls for her, only there’s the little problem that he’s supposed to be her brother even though he really isn’t. Ultimately it all turns out well as the real brother comes back to town and is duly arrested, while Chase and Bud’s sister get together after all once it’s established that Chase isn’t her brother. Forgotten Sweeties is a more off-the-wall comedy about two young couples, Thurston and Lillian (Charley Chase and the marvelous Anita Garvin, who played comic bitches brilliantly for Roach but never got the feature-film break she deserved) and Ira and his wife (Mitchell Lewis and Shirley Palmer), who literally can’t get away from each other. Lillian sees her husband getting cruised by the other woman and demands that they move somewhere else – only every place they try to move, first to a rental house and then to an apartment building, the other couple follows and rents either the same house (courtesy of an intrepid realtor who seems to think the place is vacant even though it isn’t) or another unit in the same apartment building.

Bigger and Better Blondes – a truly misnomered movie since there are no blondes of any size in the film – casts Chase as an employee of a jewelry store that has just been robbed. The jeweler who owned the store had luckily kept the VanDeusen jewels at his home, preparing to clean them, and he assigns Chase to return them. But Chase runs into Ramona VanDeusen (the young Jean Arthur, who’d become a blonde later in her career but was still dark-haired here) at a restaurant and cruises her. In order to impress her he puts on one of her rings, but she recognizes it as hers and thinks Chase is one of the jewel thieves. Chase loses the ring in a pot of soup and grabs the pot, serving himself the whole supply of soup in an effort to find the ring, but he has to reckon with another customer (Sammy Brooks) who just happened to get the serving containing the ring. There’s some nice slapstick as Chase tries to get the ring away from Brooks before he swallows it, thinking it’s just part of the soup. The diner is also inhabited by the real thieves, Boris Fantomas (Mario Carillo) – the name comes from a then-popular French serial about a master thief who’s a good/bad guy like Raffles and The Saint – and his sidekick (Edgar Dearing). Ultimately it ends the way it’s supposed to, with the crooks being arrested, the VanDeusens getting their jewels back, and Charley getting Ramona. Charley Chase was not exactly one of the greats of silent comedy (and judging from the films of his I’ve seen I’d say he got better when sound came in), but these films were charming and welcome diversions.

The Wedding in Monaco (Loew’s, Compagnie Française de Films, Citel Monaco, MGM, 1956)

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

After the three Charley Chase films on “Silent Sunday Showcase” Sunday, May 4 Turner Classic Movies showed an engaging if somewhat disappointing half-hour short called The Wedding in Monaco from 1956. It’s not hard to guess just what wedding in Monaco they were referring to: the real-life marriage of actress Grace Kelly to His Serene Highness, Prince Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi of Monaco. The two met when Kelly was filming her third and last movie with Alfred Hitchcock directing, To Catch a Thief (1955), and ironically the last film Grace Kelly made before she retired from acting to become the Princess of Monaco was The Swan (1956), in which she played a young woman who renounced her worldly ambitions to marry into royalty. (It was a remake of a silent film featuring actress Frances Howard, who after it was finished quit acting to marry producer Sam Goldwyn.) The film was directed and written by a Frenchman named Jean Masson, and was originally in French with Masson narrating himself. For the American release by MGM, Masson’s French narration was replaced with one by José Ferrer (whose voice I’m ashamed to say I didn’t recognize) in English. The narration claimed that Monaco was the tiniest sovereign state in Europe (which I rather doubt: what about Liechtenstein? Andorra? San Marino?). My husband Charles was amused that the film contained three languages: English, French, and Latin. Masson did quite a few aerial shots, including one of Kelly’s ship, the U.S.S. Constitution, arriving in the harbor of Monte Carlo and delivering her directly to Prince Rainier’s yacht. He was also startled to see Aristotle Onassis in the wedding party looking like the couple’s usher (Onassis was then heavily invested in Monaco, though later he and Rainier had a bitter falling-out and Onassis angrily pulled his investments).

The film showcased the two wedding ceremonies of Rainier and Kelly: a civil ceremony which we didn’t get to hear (all we heard was Ferrer describing it as it was going on) and a religious one which we did. There were also some intriguing credits, including ballet companies from both Paris and London, and the London one was supposed to be dancing to music by, of all people, Stan Kenton. That piqued my curiosity, and indeed the Kenton music turned out to be a ballet that mixed in modern dance steps and was performed to an elaborate re-arrangement of Kenton’s Ravel-derived theme song, “Artistry in Rhythm.” (Before there was progressive rock, there was progressive jazz – a term Stan Kenton actually coined – and like the later prog-rockers, the prog-jazzers were denounced as pretentious and provoked a back-to-basics reaction: “hard bop” or “soul jazz” in the jazz community, especially its Black members since most of the prog-jazzers had been white; and punk in the case of prog-rock.) Other than the big dance sequences, The Wedding in Monaco did tend to drag, and the print TCM had was not in the best condition, but it was an interesting curio even though one senses the desperation from the “suits” at MGM: “Quick! Let’s get one more movie out of Grace Kelly before she retires to be with this guy.” Grace Kelly actually considered an acting comeback in 1963, when Alfred Hitchcock offered her the title role in Marnie. But some busybody in Monaco read the book, realized that their princess would be playing a kleptomaniac, and started a referendum asking the citizens of Monaco if they thought it was appropriate that the wife of their hereditary ruler make a film playing such a vile and disgusting character. The people overwhelmingly voted against her, and she obediently gave the role up and spent the rest of her life, until a car crash ended her life in 1982, playing the role of a princess and mostly waving at crowds from the balcony of hers and Rainier’s palace.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "How to Murder a Tune" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, aired May 8, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched the KPBS showings of episodes of two consecutive British crime series, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Father Brown. Father Brown began as a series of detective stories involving a Roman Catholic priest written by G. K. Chesterton from 1910 to 1936 (when Chesterton died), and apparently the character was based on a real-life priest, Right Rev. Monsignor John O’Connor of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, who was instrumental in converting Chesterton from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. Sister Boniface Mysteries was in turn an offshoot of the long-running Father Brown TV series in which the title character was not only a nun but one with a greater understanding of forensic medicine than anyone else in England (or at least in her fictional central England community, “Great Slaughter”), including anyone connected with official law enforcement. Sister Boniface Mysteries is set in the 1960’s and this particular episode, originally aired on May 8, 2024, was called “How to Murder a Tune.” Written by Lisa McMullin and directed by Diana Patrick, it was built around a fictional TV series called Glory Be that was about contests for various church choir soloists. The winner would get a scholarship and national exposure for a potential singing career in either sacred or secular music. The contest was originally thought up by Barry Gold (Jason Pennybrooke), an African-British man, but eventually Donald Merriweather (Michael Spicer) aced Gold out of control of the contest. Merriweather is portrayed as so much of an asshole with a lot of people enraged at his no-holds-barred efforts to get what he wants, including a long-term sexual relationship with Marion Kane (Victoria Broom), for whom he’s rigged the contest so she will win, that it’s not at all surprising that he was the murder victim. He collapses at the organ keyboard of the convent while rehearsing the show, and it turns out he was killed by cyanide but, since he neither ate nor drank anything prior to his sudden death, it’s a mystery how the poison was administered to him. Needless to say, Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) figures it out.

The cyanide was from the sheet music he was playing from, each page had been soaked in a solution containing it, and whenever Merriweather moistened his fingers to turn a page in the score, the residue collected on them and transferred itself to his body when he licked his fingers to turn the pages again. (It’s not that different from the death of the legendary real-life French organist and composer Louis Vierne, who was the regular organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris until June 2, 1937, when at the end of his 1,750th recital on the great organ he was scheduled to play two improvisations on submitted themes; he opened the envelope containing one of them, selected the registrations he would use, and then had a heart attack and died while his hands and feet still rested on the organ, producing a low note E from his foot on the pedal. But at least Vierne was not deliberately poisoned.) The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Oliver Potts (Tristan Whincup), whose mother was a lover of Donald Merriweather when they were both attending the same music college, until she decided to leave him. Merriweather’s revenge was to frame her for allegedly cheating on the school-wide exams by stealing the answers in advance. In reality, he stole the answers himself and planted them on her, but this ruined her reputation, she never recovered from it, and ultimately committed suicide over her ongoing shame. We also get a hint, though writer McMullin keeps it from becoming more than a hint, that Donald Merriweather is the young man’s father. There’s a moment of pathos as the official police arrest Oliver, whose boy-band rock-star good looks are impressive in and of themselves, and tell him that by killing Merriweather he’s ruined his own life – and he solemnly tells them that it’s worth it because at least Merriweather’s death means he can’t ruin anybody else’s lives. There are also a couple of amusing subplots, including Marion’s decision after the contest (which she wins because Oliver’s arrest has eliminated her principal competitor) to devote herself to God and sing only sacred music from now on; and the rehearsals for the nuns’ choir, which go terribly until they decide to let their hair down, rehearse at a local pub, and sing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” and other similarly ribald material. The gag is they sound terrible when singing hymns but great at the profane (in both senses) songs. I also liked the way the show kept shifting from color to black-and-white and back, reflecting whether the scenes were real or part of the Glory Be telecast, after I remembered that in the 1960’s British TV had not yet adopted color.