Michael (Lionsgate, Universal, GK Films, Optimum Productions, 2026)

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

Last night (Tuesday, April 28) my husband Charles and I went to the Plaza Bonita movie theatre in National City to see the 2026 biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua (an African-American filmmaker who got his start in music videos and whose best-known film is Training Day, though I know him best mostly from his action spectacular Olympus Has Fallen, a 2013 thriller starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent who saved the U.S. President from a dastardly terrorist plot hatched by North Koreans; Fuqua took the job partly on condition that the villains not be from the Middle East, and turned down the sequel, London Has Fallen, when the writers of that one insisted on Middle Eastern bad guys) from a script by John Logan. When I heard that someone was making a biopic of Michael Jackson, my first question was, “Who’s going to play him?” I’ve often joked whenever I’ve seen Bruno Mars perform on an awards show that he seems to be in a continual audition for a Michael Jackson biopic, but in the end Fuqua, Logan, and producer Graham King (a lot of other people are listed in the credits as “producers,” “executive producers,” and whatnot, but it was King who put up most of the money and organized the production) went for an audacious choice. His name is Jaafar Jackson, he’d never acted before, but as the son of Jermaine Jackson and therefore Michael’s nephew he’s a blood Jackson, and I’m not sure whether anyone other than a Jackson relative could have pulled it off. I hadn’t realized until we watched the credit roll at the end of the movie (Charles and I are used to being the only audience members who sit through the closing credits, while everyone else treats the last frames of the movie like the starting gun for a 100-yard dash; this time at least half the audience stayed in the theatre during the credits, partly because they were accompanied by “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” with Michael Jackson in full cry) that King, Fuqua, and Logan had used Michael Jackson’s actual recordings for the soundtrack. So all Jaafar Jackson had to do during the musical selections was lip-synch acceptably and execute the dance moves (which he did spectacularly, almost as well as Michael himself had).

We watched this movie the day after I’d played through the soundtrack CD for the 1988 biopic Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker and with Parker’s own records used for the soundtrack. A lot of sources claim that Charles McPherson was Whitaker’s sax double, but he was only used for the opening heads (the parts where the band plays the theme in unison) and bits where Parker was shown playing unaccompanied. Of course the makers of Bird, including director Clint Eastwood, had a bigger challenge doing that with a man who made his great records between 1945 and 1955 than with someone like Michael Jackson whose recording career began in 1969 and ended in 2001 for all intents and purposes. (Jackson actually died in 2009 but he recorded almost nothing during the last eight years of his life aside from a guest vocal on a song by an artist named Akon.) The movie has inevitably been criticized for ending with Michael Jackson on his solo tour for the Bad album and ignoring the scandals that plagued him during the last two decades of his life, including the allegations of child molestation that have largely overshadowed his legacy. According to a New Yorker profile of director Fuqua, that wasn’t his original intention. He actually planned to include in the movie the famously humiliating medical examination Michael Jackson was forced to undergo at the behest of the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old boy Michael was accused of sexually abusing. The Chandlers were suing Michael civilly instead of seeking a criminal prosecution (which makes me suspect they were really after a multi-million dollar payout, which they got when Michael settled the case for $23 million) and as part of the discovery process they got a court to order the examination to see if Michael’s penis matched Jordan’s description of it.

But, according to New Yorker profiler Kelefa Sanneh, “In 2024, after principal photography on Michael was finished, Fuqua got some shocking news from Graham King. Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family turned out to include an agreement that forbade the estate to participate in depictions of the events around Chandler’s allegation.” Since Michael Jackson’s estate was a co-producer of the film – that was the price for being able to use Michael’s songs and his original recordings of them – “The film that Fuqua had made was essentially unreleasable – not because Fuqua was too critical of Jackson but, in a sense, because he was too eager to defend him,” Sanneh wrote. “Fuqua thought about abandoning the project, but ultimately agreed to reconceive it instead. Even if he couldn’t engage with the accusations, he could still defend Jackson, by reminding audiences of all that he endured during his rise from overworked child star to over-worshipped pop phenomenon.” Fuqua also told Sanneh that he’d like to do a sequel to Michael that would include some of the footage he shot for this one but didn’t get to use because of the legal ukase against it, and that desire was borne out by the end credit, which instead of merely saying “The End” (or nothing at all, which ia hoW all too many modern movies end) said “His Story Continues.” (That’s a reference to one of Michael Jackson’s 1990’s projects: HIStory: Past, Present, and Future: Book 1. That began as a greatest-hits collection for which CBS, Jackson’s label, asked him to record two new songs so people who already had Jackson’s other albums would have a reason to buy it. Instead Jackson recorded a whole new album’s worth of material and HIStory came out as a two-CD set, half old material and half new. For some reason, Sony, the current owners of CBS’s record division, reissued it as a single disc with just the old songs, so the second half of HIStory has become the hardest item of Michael Jackson’s adult career to find.)

Instead what Fuqua came up with was essentially a reworking of Gypsy, the legendary stage musical about the childhood of burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee and her bitch-goddess mother (played by Ethel Merman on stage and Rosalind Russell on film). It’s true that in this incarnation it’s Black brothers instead of white sisters, and instead of a crazy stage mother it’s a crazy stage father, but it’s essentially the same dynamic. And Colman Domingo’s performance as Joe Jackson, Michael’s psycho dad, is one of the great etched-in-acid villain roles of all time. In fact, I remember thinking at the height of the popularity of Thriller in the early 1980’s that Michael Jackson might be a modern-day castrato. In the 18th century boy sopranos were frequently castrated so they wouldn’t go through a normal puberty and would retain their high voices into adulthood. Michael Jackson being a castrato would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a normal sex life with either gender and how he could still sing “I Want You Back,” the Jackson 5’s first record, in the original key or quite close to it. And I thought that crazy dad of his could have been willing to have him castrated, figuring his high voice was his stock in trade. Against that we have the testimony of Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley (which had the trappings of a dynastic marriage to me: the self-proclaimed “King of Pop” married the daughter of the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”), who said their sex life was perfectly normal (to the extent that anything to do with Michael Jackson could have been described as “perfectly normal”).

Though Michael ends rather abruptly with the last show of the Victory tour (while Michael was coming off the best-selling album of new material of all time, a record Thriller still holds, he otherwise inexplicably did a reunion tour with his brothers instead of a solo tour), Michael’s onstage announcement that this will be the last time the Jacksons perform together, his dad’s huge hissy-fit about that and a clip from the Bad tour, at least some audience members will remember the real-life sequel. Jimmy Kimmel’s comical movie critic, Yahya, joked that the film doesn’t show Michael Jackson ending up as a rich, crabby, old white woman living in a deserted amusement park, which is at least sort of what happened to him in real life. One thing that I give Fuqua and his cinematographer, Dion Beebe, credit for is shooting virtually the entire film in neon-bright colors instead of relegating it all to the dirty browns and greens that predominate in most modern films. That’s a look that’s annoying enough with a film where the protagonists are white but it’s even worse when they’re Black: the actors’ brown skins tend to blend in with the brown backgrounds and turn everything to murk. It’s true that Fuqua and Beebe were virtually forced to do that; everyone who’d seen a Michael Jackson video would be expecting the rich, vibrant colors with which they were filmed (on 35 mm film rather than video because Jackson insisted he wanted the better image quality; it’s why he called his videos “short films,” which writer John Logan got right in the script for Michael). Michael is an overwhelming movie that should be seen by virtually anybody who remembers the pop culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and because of the lawyers’ edicts I’m O.K. with it leaving out the rest of Michael Jackson’s sorry story.

When I posted about HIStory on Film: Volume II, the video compilation released in 1997 in tandem with the HIStory two-CD set, I wrote about the Michael Jackson enigma (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-jackson-history-on-film-volume.html): “[T]he portrait we get from it is of Michael Jackson the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It’s why Michael Jackson remains endlessly fascinating despite the scandals that threatened to unravel his career when he died; as Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “[I]t’s much harder to stop listening to Jackson’s songs than it is to stop watching Woody Allen’s films or The Cosby Show. Part of the problem is that his influence is so huge; the Canadian singer known as the Weeknd has become one of the most popular performers in the world with his moody, artful update of Jackson’s music. On Broadway, MJ the Musical has been running for more than four years, encouraging theatregoers to let their love of Jackson’s hits outweigh concerns about his life. And, though his songs have been mainly absent from television ads, the animated film The Bad Guys 2 used “Bad” in a trailer last year. The legal fights aren’t over; a case against Jackson’s estate, filed by the two primary accusers from Leaving Neverland, is scheduled to go to trial this fall. But it has now been more than fifteen years since Jackson’s death, and the public outrage seems to be fading, perhaps because Jackson is increasingly viewed as a troubled figure from the past, rather than a troublesome figure in the present.”

I was annoyed by a few omissions and mistakes in the film; they had the group billed as “The Jackson 5” while they’re still kids in Gary, Indiana (it was actually either Suzanne DePasse or someone else from Motown who had the idea to change the group’s name from “The Jackson Five” to the version with the numeral); they had Off the Wall, Michael Jackson’s first solo album for Epic Records, be his first solo recording (in fact Michael had recorded four solo albums at Motown); and not only is Janet Jackson not in the dramatis personae (at her own insistence; she refused to allow herself to be portrayed and after the film came out issued a press statement blasting its alleged inaccuracies, which seemed to me to be trying to have it both ways), neither is Diana Ross. It was actually Ross who first scouted the Jacksons and brought them to Motown, and their first album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. I’d also have liked to see more scenes of Michael and Quincy Jones actually in the studio together working out the febrile dance grooves that made Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad such great hits; as it is, all we see is Michael adding his final vocals to already pre-recorded tapes. I did like the way they portrayed the famous accident that happened to Michael Jackson in 1984, in which he received third-degree burns on his scalp while filming a commercial for Pepsi-Cola and as a result developed an addiction to painkillers that lasted the rest of his life. And I remember reading a review of a biography of 1940’s and 1950’s opera star Jussi Björling and being struck by the similarities between his life and Michael Jackson’s: both started their careers as children in singing groups with their brothers, both were known for high-lying lyrical voices, both had major addiction issues (Björling to alcohol and Jackson to prescription drugs), and both died at age 49. As we were leaving the theatre I pronounced Michael the movie as “overwhelming,” and Charles agreed – though he’d also found it “overwhelming” in a quite different way, put off by the ear-splitting volume of the IMAX presentation we had watched.

711 Ocean Drive (Frank Seltzer Productions, Essaness Pictures Corporation, Columbia, 1950)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 25) I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies: 711 Ocean Drive, directed by Joseph M. Newman (quite effectively) from a script by Richard English and Francis Swann, and starring Edmond O’Brien in what Eddle Muller said was his first starring role. (It wasn’t; that was D.O.A., made a year earlier and an even better movie than this one as well as one closer to the noir world.) The publicity for 711 Ocean Drive (an address I don’t remember hearing in the film itself, though it was presumably the headquarters of “Liberty Finance,” the above-board business the ring of bookmakers at the center of the story use as cover) emphasized the actual danger the filmmakers were in – or at least said they were in – by exposing secrets of gangland the gangsters didn’t want you to know. The opening prologue of 711 Ocean Drive expresses this: “Because of the disclosures made in this film, powerful underworld interests tried to halt production with threats of violence and reprisal. It was only through the armed protection provided by members of the Police Department in the locales where the picture was filmed, that this story was able to reach the screen. To these men, and to the U.S. Rangers at Boulder Dam, we are deeply grateful.” The film starts with its protagonist, Mal Granger (Edmond O’Brien), being chased by police detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Gangster Squad (which frequently used extra-legal tactics of their own to keep organized criminals, especially ones from other cities, out of town). One of the cops, Lt. Pete Wright (Howard St. John), tells his partner, who’s asked what Granger is wanted for, “Murder,” leaving us in suspense as to whom Granger is supposed to have killed, let alone why.

Then all is explained in a flashback that takes up the bulk of the film: when the story began Granger was just a lowly proletarian at the local telephone company. But he’d served in World War II and thereby gained an impressive knowledge of electronics. Granger also likes to place a few small-scale bets with the local bookies, one of whom recruits him for the gang. Using his knowledge of electronic gear, Granger sets up a system that vastly improves the gang’s ability to collect horse-racing results from tracks all over the country, including a marvelous rig that essentially turns the gang representative’s body and the fence surrounding the track into a transmitter. The boss of the gang is Vince Walters (Barry Kelley), until he makes the mistake of putting too strong a strong-arm on one of the bookies. The bookie shoots him dead and then kills himself, and Granger takes advantage of this opportunity to take over the bookmaking racket. Meanwhile, members of a national crime syndicate based in Cleveland notice how much money Granger’s operation is making while they’re not getting a dime from it. They decide to remedy this situation by moving out to California, setting up their own operation, and either bribing or intimidating Granger to sell out to them. Granger is all too willing to sell out his old comrades, especially once he meets the Mob’s point man for the deal, Larry Mason (Don Porter). Granger has also been working himself up in the sex-partner department, first dumping his honest proletarian girlfriend who wanted him to marry her and make a decent, industrious living at the phone company even though neither of them would have much money or any dreams of making any. He briefly takes up with Trudy Maxwell (Dorothy Patrick), business manager for his gang, before dumping her and forming an extra-relational crush on Mason’s hot young trophy wife, Gail Mason (Joanne Dru, who reportedly loved making this movie because until then she’d only played sympathetic roles and she loved getting her first crack at a villainess).

Most of the film takes place in the L.A. area, but there were a few run-ins to Palm Springs and a finale that takes place at the gigantic structure alternately called Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam. (Hoover Dam was originally authorized in 1931, when its namesake, Herbert Hoover, was President. It was finished in 1937, during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and Roosevelt insisted on unilaterally renaming it Boulder Dam. In 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death and with the Republicans in control of Congress for the first time since 1929, they passed a law re-renaming it Hoover Dam, though this film, made three years after that, still calls it “Boulder Dam.”) Granger gets into big trouble when he first hires a hit man, Gizzi (Robert Osterloh, who apparently made a specialty of slimy subordinate villains like this), to knock off Gail’s inconvenient husband, then has to kill Gizzi himself by ramming him off the Santa Monica Pier after Gizzi tries to blackmail Granger into a percentage of his operation. The film’s climax takes place at the Hoover/Boulder Dam, where there’s an exciting chase scene between Granger and the L.A. police, who have an extradition agreement with the state of Nevada but not with Arizona. The idea is if Granger can escape, either with or without Gail, from Nevada to Arizona they’ll be able to take a plane to Guatemala, which doesn’t (or at least didn’t in 1950) have an extradition treaty with the U.S. at all, and enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace. Only the police track down Granger as soon as he breaks free from the tour group that’s being led around the dam, and shoot and apparently kill him before he can make it to Arizona.

711 Ocean Drive isn’t really a film noir: the good guys are all good, the bad guys are all bad, and only Joanne Dru’s character is genuinely conflicted between the two. But it is a well-structured crime thriller and it often seemed to me like an updated version of Little Caesar from 20 years earlier. Remember that in his autobiography, Edward G. Robinson described his character of Enrico Caesar Bandello as a striver, a young man on the make trying to get ahead and finding by a combination of personal quirks and economic circumstances that the only route for advancement available to him is crime. Like Little Caesar, Mal Granger is a basically decent, hard-working sort at first who’s tempted by the riches and social position offered by the criminal lifestyle. The film is well structured in showing off Mal’s gradual moral deterioration until he’s literally knocking off other people to fulfill his own survival as well as his romantic/sexual desires. Eddie Muller said he met Joseph M. Newman at a screening of 711 Ocean Drive he organized, and he said Newman was a down-to-earth guy who probably never made it to the upper echelons of directing precisely because he wasn’t a pushy blow-your-own-horn type. Muller also disparaged what’s probably Newman’s best-known film, the 1955 science-fiction thriller This Island Earth, as “campy” – which disappointed Charles and I because both of us like the film considerably better than that. Despite its flaws, This Island Earth is a quite good movie and, ironically, considerably more progressive politically than Raymond F. Jones’s source novel. Jones wrote what was essentially a Cold War parable in science-fiction terms while the screenwriters, Franklin Coen and George Callahan, turned it into a surprisingly radical (for 1955) anti-war film.

Bashful (Hal Roach Productions, Rolin Films, Pathé, 1917)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 26) my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring two films by Harold Lloyd: the early short Bashful (1917) and the mature feature Girl Shy (1924). Charles and I had already seen Girl Shy at least twice on previous “Silent Sunday Showcases” in 2022 and 2025. I posted about it to moviemagg after the 2022 screening at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/01/girl-shy-harold-lloyd-corporation-pathe.html, and I have little to add about it except that Lloyd played a character who stuttered – and through a lot of extreme close-ups of his mouth visibly repeating the same motions again and again, Lloyd and his directors, Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, were able to suggest stuttering quite effectively in a silent film. (Remember that during the 1920’s a lot of moviegoers got quite good at lip-reading, and often realizes that what the actors had actually said on set was often quite different from what the dialogue titles said they were saying. When Fox filmed Leonard Stallings’s World War I play What Price Glory? in 1926, they got deluged with complaints that the actors had uttered the expletives in Stallings’s original dialogue – even though by today’s standards they were relatively mild ones like “damn,” “hell,” and “son of a bitch” – though the titles had been appropriately bowdlerized.) Bashful was a surprise in that it was a 15-minute short featuring Harold Lloyd, already wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that became his trademark (actually just the frames because he didn’t need glasses in real life), and playing a man farther up on the socioeconomic scale than he usually did. Generally all five of the biggest male stars in silent comedy had well-established niches into which they fi their characters: Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle working-class, Harold Lloyd middle-class, Buster Keaton upper-class, and Harry Langdon a child-man seemingly out of the normal economic strata altogether.

This time Lloyd crossed over into Keaton’s territory (though when Lloyd made Bashful Keaton was still just a supporting player in Arbuckle’s unit and he didn’t start making two-reel vehicles on his own for another three years) and played an upper-class twit who’s in line to receive an inheritance from a recently deceased aunt if only he can prove he has both a wife and a baby. Eight years after Bashful Keaton would make a feature-length masterpiece on the same premise, Seven Chances, though in Keaton’s film (based on a play by David Belasco, who’s best known today for having written the plays on which Puccini based his operas Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West) he only needed a wife, not a child, to claim the inheritance. One imdb.com reviewer said that Oliver Hardy, before he teamed with Stan Laurel, had made a similarly themed short called One Too Many (1916). Bashful contains a gag that Laurel and Hardy repeated in their 1932 feature Pack Up Your Troubles: Lloyd and his girlfriend (Bebe Daniels) agree to pass themselves off as husband and wife, but the first baby they try to claim is their kid is Black. Lloyd’s butler, “Snub” Pollard (billed here under his actual first name, Harry), essentially rounds up all the babies in the near vicinity and manages to convince Lloyd’s uncle (William Blaisdell) that he deserved the inheritance because he’s got so many mouths to feed – even though the real mothers of all those babies are understandably upset that their children have literally been kidnapped. Bashful was directed by Alf Goulding, who years before had hired Charlie Chaplin to star in Fred Karno’s comedy troupe in the British music halls before either Goulding or Chaplin set foot in front of (or behind) a movie camera. It’s a minor makeweight in Lloyd’s career, but it is charming and funny, and it’s also nice to see Lloyd when he still had his full complement of fingers, before he lost two fingers on his right hand in 1919 when a prop bomb exploded as he was holding it. Lloyd made a prosthetic glove so his injury wouldn’t be noticeable on screen, and later in 1924, when he married his leading lady Mildred Davis, he had a matching glove made for his left hand so he could play a single man without having to take off his wedding ring.

Death in Paradise: Season 13, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, April 24) I watched an unusually engaging episode of the Caribbean-set mystery and policier Death in Paradise, the eighth and last episode of season 13 and the one in which they were basically attempting to write off Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), the one white person on the police force of the fictitious Caribbean island of “Saint-Marie.” He’s on a chartered plane flight from Saint-Marie to Dominica, only he’s feeling a bit under the weather from the hard night of partying he did the night before and also a couple of antihistamines he took just before he got on the plane. While waiting at the airport Parker makes the acquaintance of Raphaël Coty (Jules Miesch), a tall, skinny Frenchman who works for a travel site. This means he gets to travel to various exotic locations throughout the world but does not get paid much, so his ability to enjoy himself in these wonderful spots is severely limited. Parker also meets a Black man named Kurt Henderson (Calvin Demba), only shortly after the plane takes off Parker falls asleep from the booze and drugs and doesn’t wake up until the plane has arrived at Dominica. There he wakes up and finds that Kurt Henderson is gone and the other passengers, Coty and the married couple Taylor (Richard Fleeshman) and Chelsea (Emma Naomi) Fielding, and also the plane’s crew, pilot Peter Holcroft (Richard Lintern) and co-pilot Catherine Bordey (Elizabeth Bourgine) insist he never got on the plane at all. Parker is summoned back to Saint-Marie after the body of Kurt Henderson is found on a local beach, shot to death.

The police eventually learn that Henderson was living as a house guest with Taylor and Chelsea Fielding, only Henderson started an extra-relational affair with Chelsea and Taylor, not surprisingly, was not happy about this. They also learn that pilot Holcroft was under investigation by United States authorities for flying smuggled drugs into the U.S., though the Americans couldn’t make the charges stick. Ultimately the police search Holcroft’s plane and find a compartment to hide drug money in, and eventually Chelsea Fielding gives Parker and the others on the Saint-Marie police force a confession claiming that she killed Henderson out of anger that Henderson wanted her to leave her husband for him. Only Parker is convinced that not only is Chelsea lying but he really did see Henderson on the plane, even though he wasn’t on it when the flight arrived in Dominica. Ultimately writer James Hall lets us in on the truth: a combination of Murder on the Orient Express and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Henderson got on the plane, all right, only he left it again when he realized his life was in danger. Chelsea Fielding thought she’d killed Henderson, but it was actually her husband Taylor who shot the man. Taylor had grabbed the same gun Chelsea fired at Henderson but missed, clapped a silencer on it, shot Henderson dead and left him behind. The Fieldings bribed the others with $50,000 apiece in drug money to keep quiet and lie about Henderson having ever been on the plane. Eventually everyone who was on the plane (aside from Parker) is arrested and Parker is sidetracked into returning, though it’s unclear whether he aborted his plan to leave Saint-Marie or just decided to travel to London with his Black Saint-Marian girlfriend Monette Gilbert (Rachel Adedeji) in tow instead of leaving her behind on the island. It seems that Ralf Little left the show after all for season 14 because his role leading the Saint-Marie police force has been taken over by a Black man, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), and the producers chose to add an annoying and often infuriating “comic relief” character, a young Black police trainee named Sebastian Rose (Shaquille All-Yebuah) whose incompetence quickly stopped being amusing and just got awful.

International Jazz Day: April 30, 2025 (Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, recorded 2025, copyrighted 2026)

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

Last night (Friday, April 24), after the Death in Paradise episode, my husband Charles (who’d come home from work right as the Death in Paradise show was wrapping up) and I watched a program whose title had intrigued me since I saw it listed on the KPBS Web site: International Jazz Day. It was a show to commemorate International Jazz Day, which for the past 20 years has been celebrated on April 30 (though I’d never heard of it before), and it turned out to be an hour-long concert special from a Frank Gehry-designed auditorium in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. Given what little I’ve been able to find out about it online, I suspect the show, though it carried a 2026 copyright date, was actually filmed on April 30, 2025, partly because April 30, 2026 is a few days away from now and partly because Abu Dhabi, as a member state of the United Arab Emirates (so called because it’s a coalition of Persian Gulf countries who call their leaders “emirs”), is currently under attack by Iranians as retaliation for the U.S. assaults on Iran. The show was sponsored by the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, which until 2019 was known as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until it renamed itself after its long-time director (which seems a bit churlish to me). I quite liked the program even though, as often happens in all-star spectacles like this, their definition of “jazz” was rather elastic. Not only did the program include non-jazz songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Rolling Stones’s “Miss You,” virtually all the (quite good) vocalists – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Ruthie Foster – sang in all-out rhythm-and-blues or soul styles that had little to do with jazz singing as I understand it. (One of my major wishes for this program would have been the inclusion of Samara Joy, whose CD Linger Awhile won the Best New Artist Grammy Award for 2023. Though she’s not an outright copyist of Ella Fitzgerald, she has enough similarities I’d like to see her star in a Fitzgerald biopic, and her more delicate style of singing would have been a welcome respite from all the R&B/soul howling.)

The program began with “The Thrill Is Gone,” originally written and recorded by obscure blues singer Roy Hawkins in 1951 but which became B. B. King’s signature song when his cover became a mega-hit in 1969. It was sung here by Dee Dee Bridgewater with a succession of three electric guitarists taking solos: John McLaughlin, Leonard Brown, and John Pizzarelli. McLaughlin in particular was a welcome sight; a lot older and decidedly more grey-haired than he was when he emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and became acclaimed as “the white Hendrix,” he was nonetheless in fine form and his chops were quite intact. The next song was George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and though Dianne Reeves’s vocal was excellent on its own terms, she did rather overpower this delicate, wistful romantic ballad. Still, she had some good players in her band, including alto saxophonist Tia Fuller and bassist Linda May Oh. (There were quite a few women musicians in the various ensembles, which was nice; it seems that the glass ceiling in jazz is shattering, or at least cracking, at last. The days when a genius like Mary Lou Williams could be relegated to novelty status because she was a non-singing woman jazz musician are fortunately gone.) The third song was “Voyage,” featuring tenor saxophonist David Sánchez, pianist Kenny Barron (misspelled “Baron” on his chyron), trumpeter Eldred Scott (at least that’s how I scribbled his name in my notes; I take full responsibility for any mistakes in my ID’s), bassist John Pattitucci, and drummer Kendrick Scott.

The fourth song was led by trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, a native of Cuba whose defection to the U.S. was arranged by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie when he was on tour in Cuba with the United Nations Orchestra in 1977. In obvious gratitude, the song he chose to play was Dizzy’s Latin-inflected “Tin Tin Deo,” for which Sandoval sang in Spanish as well as playing a spectacular trumpet solo. The song also included an excellent flute part by a first-rate woman player whose name was too long, convoluted, and Hispanic for me to take down, and the pianist was Danilo Pérez. The next song was “As the Spirit Sings,” a welcome vehicle for John McLaughlin with David Sánchez returning on tenor sax and Marcus Miller on piano. Then there were a couple of numbers celebrating the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s educational mission – among their other activities, they run programs to train the next generation of jazz musicians – including a drum circle on Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” (the song that Carlos Santana covered and had his first major hit on in 1969) and a jazz history presentation that included the Dixieland standard “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The next song was “Take It Easy,” sung by Ruthie Foster with Nasseer Shanne (please don’t hold me to that spelling) playing a bulbous Arab stringed instrument which I think was an oud. (I looked up the oud online and it certainly looks like the instrument I saw on last night’s show; it was also the ancestor of the European lute and the Iranian/Persian “tar,” which later became the guitar and got imported into Spain when the Muslim Moors ruled it from the 800’s to the 1400’s.) What followed was a unique two-piano version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played as a duet by A Bu and Hélène Mercier; it was rather heavily edited (but then Leonard Bernstein once said of the Rhapsody in Blue, “You can cut it any way you like and it will do nothing to the piece except make it shorter”) but the two pianists played the piece with the appropriate swagger. I noticed that A Bu was playing a Fazioli piano and Hélène Mercier was playing a Steinway, exactly the same division that Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig used in their two-piano recording of Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, which I reviewed for Fanfare magazine. Sandberg explained in the liner notes to that CD (OUR Recordings 8.226923) that they split the work between two pianos (Nielsen had done the original as a so-called “piano four-hands” score, which means two people sitting at one piano and playing it simultaneously), a Fazioli and a Steinway, because the Fazioli “has an incredibly rich and round bass.”

After the Rhapsody in Blue came one of the most pleasant surprises of the evening: an infectious version by singer and rapper José Jones of the Rolling Stones’s song “Miss You.” I’ve never been that big a fan of that song – the Stones put out their version at the height of the disco craze and it was clearly the work of a aging band trying desperately to keep up with the times – and oddly I liked Jones’s laid-back version, complete with a genuinely witty rap section, better. Jones was backed with a band that included Emmett Cohen on keyboards, Nils Lundgren on trombone, and an unidentified Black electric bass players that delivered one of the most exciting and stirring solos of the night. Then Herbie Hancock came on and did his song “Chameleon” on an instrument called the “keytar,” which allows keyboard players to stand in front of a band and bop around like guitarists do. Only Hancock’s right hand activated the keys of the “keytar,” though with his left hand he was able to manipulate a series of electronic controls on the neck that altered the sound and created an infectious slide-guitar effect as well as an echo of the all-electronic instrument, the theremin. The finale was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and while it was a bit disappointing that they didn’t try to treat this song in jazz style, they had a succession of singers as well as Herbie Hancock leading the accompaniment from an old-fashioned standard acoustic piano. The singers included Dianne Reeves, Janis Siegel, Dee Dee Bridgewater (who sang her contribution in French), Kendrick Young, Varijashree Venugopal (a singer from India who sang in her native tongue; I’m guessing it was Hindi but it might have been another of India’s indigenous languages), John Pizzarelli (who also contributed some tasty acoustic guitar), and another name I can’t make out from my scrawl. Arturo Sandoval also came out with a quite good trumpet solo. It was a very nice program and a welcome acknowledgement of jazz’s importance in the world’s musical history over the last 125 years, and my only criticism was that too much of the singing was strident and didn’t have the subtlety of true jazz vocalism as practiced by the late greats like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Ivie Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, or Chris Connor. But given how much righteous soul the people who did sing projected, that was at best a minor quibble.

Inspector George Gently: "Goodbye, China" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, originally aired September 11, 2011)

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

My husband Charles and I finally got home last night (Thursday, April 23) shortly before 10 p.m. and I took the opportunity to watch an episode of Inspector George Gently, yet another British mystery series. This one takes place in the mid-1960’s in Durham, England. The episode we watched was called “Goodbye, China” and dealt with an informant Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw) developed during his days with the London police before some sort of scandal led to him being demoted to run the force in Durham. He had a more normal name (which I can’t recall right now) but he was nicknamed “China” (George Rohr), and Gently had been trying to get him to leave the world of petty crime and sober up, find himself a place, and look for honest work. To that end he’d given China a large sum of cash, and while most people in China’s place would have blown a large cash infusion on alcohol and/or drugs, China took it seriously enough that he settled in a village near Durham called Brattleboro, landed a place to live, and was working at making himself presentable to future employers. Only the local police officer in Brattleboro, Sgt. Molloy (Dean Lennox Kelly); his wife Terri (Christine Bottomley); a local coroner’s official, Lafferty (Shaun Prendergast); and a local official named Alan Shepherd (Neil Pearson); were all involved in a massive conspiracy to fake China’s death to make it look like an accident caused by over-consumption of alcohol. In the very opening scenes of the episode, we find out why even though we don’t realize the importance of them at first. A local home for mentally challenged kids is invaded by two local young psychopaths, brothers Devin (Jay Miller) and John (Niek Versteig) Blackburn, sons of local pig farmer Geoff Blackburn (Mark Denton). They abduct Alan Shepherd’s autistic son Danny (James Acton) and literally tie him to a merry-go-round outside, not a full-scale one but the sort of thing you find on children’s playgrounds that’s just a metal wheel on the ground pushed from outside handles. Then they disappear, and though they’ve been ostensibly arrested several times for delinquency or hooliganism their names never appeared on local police records. It turns out the reason for that is that instead of reporting their apprehensions to the proper authorities, Alan Shepherd and Sgt. Molloy worked out a way of “breaking” the Blackburn brothers by beating them up themselves.

At one point Devin gets arrested for public drunkenness and hooliganism by Gently and his assistant, detective sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingolby), who it’s been established in previous episodes that despite his Beatle-ish haircut (Lee Ingolby actually looks like he’d have been good casting for a biopic of John Lennon if one had been filmed at this time, 2011), he’s actually a straitlaced conservative who rejects the burgeoning counterculture. (Did I tell you this show takes place in the mid-1960’s? Oh, I did.) But Devin Blackburn resists all their attempts to interrogate him and ultimately gets released overnight. The two cases turn out to be interlinked when we learn that China (ya remember China?) had used Gently’s money to rent himself an apartment in Brattleboro which had a view of the playground at the home where the Blackburns were tormenting Danny Shepherd. China attempted to intervene but the Blackburns killed him for his pains, and the authorities locally decided to make it look like he was a homeless person who just accidentally died in an alcoholic stupor. Inspector Gently figures it out when he notices that China’s corpse was found wearing darned socks; he claims that homeless people never bother to darn their socks. (The homeless people I’ve known, including the ones who do their laundry at the University and Texas Street laundromat 2 ½ blocks away from my home, might well be people fastidious enough about day-to-day comfort they may take the trouble to darn their socks.) The show comes to a weird and not altogether satisfying ending (though I did a fair amount of nodding off while it was on and there were certain details I might have missed), including what happened to the Blackburn brothers – Devin is never seen again after he’s released from his overnight arrest and John is never seen at all after the opening sequence in which he’s shown tormenting Danny. Did Alan Shepherd kill them? If so, he did such a good job of hiding their bodies that they were never found, and when Gently and Bacchus arrest him at the end they guess he’s only going to be liable for a three- to four-year sentence for interfering with a police investigation, not the penalty for a murder charge. (One of the quirks of Inspector George Gently is that the show takes place during the period when the British government was considering, and finally deciding, to abolish capital punishment once and for all. The show’s scripts, mostly by creator Peter Flannery based on novels by Alan Hunter, incorporated that change as it happened historically.) Alan’s motive turns out to be to protect his son Danny from being institutionalized and subjected to substandard care (or none at all). The story is an object lesson in how tragedies can snowball and how one unfortunate event (like Danny being born with or developing autism) can create a whole series of others that ultimately end up sucking basically decent people into criminal or quasi-criminal acts.

Four Sided Triangle (Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1953)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 22) my husband Charles and I watched a 1953 film from Hammer Films (under their alternate “Exclusive Films” identity) that turned out to be surprisingly good: a science-fiction thriller called Four Sided Triangle. (Note the punctuation: no “The” in front of it and no hyphen between “Four” and “Sided,” though the 1949 novel by British science-fiction writer William F. Temple on which it was based was published as Four-Sided Triangle and at the start of the print we were watching was a British Board of Film Censors certificate giving the film’s title as The Four Sided Triangle, without the hyphen but with the article.) It’s set in a small village in central England and is narrated, as is the novel, by Dr. Harvey (James Hayter, who bears a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill), the town physician. The central characters are two BFF’s, Bill (Glyn Dearman as a teenager, Stephen Murray as an adult) and Robin (Sean Barrett as a teenager, John Van Eyssen as an adult), and the woman they’re both interested in, Lena (Jennifer Dearman as a teenager, American import Barbara Payton as an adult – and the studio’s casting department deserves credit for finding a girl actress who looked like she could grow up to be Barbara Payton). There’s a prologue in which the two boys are playing at being knights, Robin wins their pretend joust, and Lena crowns Robin with a crown of laurel and gives Bill a crown of thorns. When the two grow up to be of college age they both go to Cambridge and study science, though Robin is merely being groomed by his father, Sir Walter (Percy Marmont, who in the 1930’s had acted in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s better British films, Rich and Strange and The Secret Agent), to take over the family’s plastics business. Lena returns from a long stay in the U.S. (obviously screenwriters Terence Fisher, who also directed, and Paul Tabori intended that to cover for Barbara Payton’s lack of a British accent) depressed and suicidal – she confesses to Dr. Harvey that she no longer wants to live. But she finds a purpose in life when Bill and Robin, who are pursuing some sort of major experiment in an old barn outside the center of town, draft her as their assistant in their research. What they’ve invented is a so-called “duplicator,” a machine that can make an exact copy of any physical object by drawing energy from a power source and converting it into matter. (Essentially Bill and Robin have invented the 3-D printer decades ahead of time.)

They first test it out on the doctor’s pocket watch, and Dr. Harvey is astonished that the copy is so perfect it even contains the bent chain link of the original. Then they try making a copy of a check written by Robin’s father, though they’ve left the amount and payee spaces blank. (Charles joked they should have tested it on a five-pound note, which leaves open the question of how a machine like this, if it actually existed, could be used for counterfeiting and forgery.) Using a 1,000-pound investment from Robin’s dad, he and Bill develop the machine to the point where it can duplicate not only inanimate objects but also living things, though the duplicate of the first animal Bill tries it on, a guinea pig, dies almost immediately. Bill realizes that what’s gone wrong is that the duplicate animal’s heart didn’t know how to start pumping so the animal could breathe, so he has to invent what amounts to a heart defibrillator to keep the cloned animal alive long enough so its heart starts beating normally. In the meantime Bill has developed a romantic crush on Lena (ya remember Lena?) but is too shy to tell her directly, and he’s thunderstruck when Lena announces her intention to marry Robin instead. Having already worked out the kinks on duplicating living things, Bill determines to use his duplicator to create a clone of Lena so he can make love to the duplicate while Robin is married to the original. Bill successfully creates Lena’s clone, whom he names “Helen” because it’s reasonably close to “Lena,” and takes her on a beachfront holiday, only Helen is upset and takes her sailboat out far beyond safety until Bill has to rescue her. When they get back to their rooms, Helen confesses that, since she has all Lena’s memories and emotions as well as her physical shape, she too is in love with Robin and not Bill. Accordingly Bill takes her back to the lab in their village and does another experiment with her to try to erase all her memories so she’ll forget she’s in love with Robin, only a short-circuit in the lab equipment causes a catastrophic fire and Robin and Dr. Harvey arrive too late to save anybody. Bill and one of the two Barbara Paytons are killed in the blaze, while Robin ends up with the survivor – only which one is it, Lena or Helen? There’s talk of two scars on either side of the clone’s neck, put there by Bill as part of the memory-burning experiment, though the scar we actually see is on the back of her neck – though the implication is that Robin ended up with the cloned Helen while the real Lena died in the fire.

What’s most amazing about Four Sided Triangle is its remarkable understatement; Charles called it “the anti-Frankenstein,” and certainly I too had noticed and registered the difference between Colin Clive’s manic performances in the two James Whale Frankenstein movies from the 1930’s and Stephen Murray’s chillingly matter-of-fact acting as Bill. It helps that he’s motivated not by some mad-scientist desire to rule the world but by simple human jealousy: he wants his best friend’s girl and if he can’t have the original, he’ll use his super-machine to clone her. This is especially surprising since Terence Fisher remained a Hammer mainstay for years and basically focused on recasting the whole Universal monster stable into films both sexier and gorier than the originals. Four Sided Triangle is a quite challenging film whose moral (and it does have one!) strikes at the heart of the whole concept of identity, of who we are and how we learn about that. It also raises the question Alfred Hitchcock had when he planned to film Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose, a haunting post-World War I fantasy about a woman who periodically disappears and then returns the same age even while everyone she left behind has aged normally, about what would happen if the dead did start coming back to life en masse and what would we do with them. Four Sided Triangle is a film whose understatement makes it seem all too relevant today (as does the accuracy of its scientific predictions, even though we luckily have not yet invented a machine that can clone living things) and is especially surprising given the kind of filmmaking Hammer would become famous for later in the 1950’s.