My Life Is Murder: "The Locked Room" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 17) I watched a PBS showing of the second episode of the intriguing Australian TV series My Life Is Murder, about a young but recently retired Australian police detective, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) – supposedly she got an inheritance and never had to work again, but that hasn’t been stressed in the first two episodes – who keeps getting called in to consult on various cold cases by her sort-of boyfriend Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This time she gets offered a locked-room mystery – literally: “The Locked Room” is the episode title – in which a middle-aged accountant named Alan Gillespie (Clayton Bitaks) was found dead six months previously, shot in the back in a locked room with a chain on the door. The show was directed by Mat Green from a script by Peter Gawler, who made the same mistake his colleague Matt Ford did on “The Boyfriend Experience,” the only My Life Is Murder episode before this one. There are too few suspects and therefore too little suspense as to whodunit, especially since Gawler begins the show with a prologue set five years before the main action in which, while still on the official police force, Alexa busted a big-time drug dealer named Nicole Buttera (Danielle Cormack) and caught her with a large quantity of drugs, more than she would have needed just for her own use. Unfortunately, Nicole got free on a technicality and since then has been leading an apparently above-board life as a nightclub owner under the name Nikki Malone. She’s trying to promote the singing career of her daughter, Cassie Malone (Markella Kavenagh, who judging from what we hear of her is a quite good vocalist in real life). Unfortunately, Nicole also invested in a company called Seraphim that made airbags for Japanese cars, where she met Alan Gillespie because he was the company’s accountant.

Though the scene was set up in a motel room to make it look like Alan had been having an extra-relational affair, down to lipstick on a champagne glass to make it look like the two had been sharing the sparkling wine before he got killed (and the bed in the motel room was still perfectly made, so it hadn’t actually been used during the night), Alexa deduces that Nicole was the killer. She wanted to silence Alan because, as an honest man, he wanted to report to the police that the Seraphim airbags didn’t work and posed a danger to drivers and passengers in a car equipped with them. Nicole stood to lose a great deal of money she had invested in Seraphim stock, so she took the motel room next door and drilled a hole in the wall between them through which she could fire and kill Alan. One wonders (I wonder, anyway) just what the mechanics of this were and in particular how well she was able to aim. The show concludes with Cassie Malone making her performing debut of the club owned by her mother, the murderess –and I wonder what that’s going to do to the rest of her life, especially since real-life American country singer Shelby Lynne never got over watching her dad kill her mom when she was just a child. In fact, she recorded an entire album about that trauma. I liked “The Locked Room” better than “The Boyfriend Experience,” partly because Nicole was a more interesting villainess than the hustler Dylan Giroux (Lindsay Farris) and partly because the music world was a much more interesting background to me than the world of high-end sex workers in which “The Boyfriend Experience” took place. I’ll probably keep watching this one even though it’s a bit disappointing that the writers of My Life Is Murder can’t come up with more interesting and engaging suspects in 45 minutes of running time!

Law and Order: "In Harm's Way" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Thursday, May 16) I watched the season finales of the remaining shows in the Dick Wolf Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order itself, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “In Harm’s Way” and opened at an outdoor charity gala held in front of the New York Public Library at which a prominent baseball player who’s dating a world-famous singer (obviously writers Pamela J. Wechsler and Jennifer Vanderbes were thinking of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift here!) is shot and killed. Only the police, in the persons of detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), deduce that the real intended target was New York District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn, classic-era Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn’s grandson), who before he got appointed D.A. after the previous holder of that office, Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the last remaining holdover from the old Law and Order cast), left under a political cloud and a disagreement with Mayor Robert Payne (Bruce Altman). It seems that before Baxter became New York D.A. he was a federal prosecutor who brought a successful case against a Black street gang called “Cobra-10” and put its leader behind bars. Needless to say, the Cobra-10 leader is anxious for revenge and gets a message to one of the gang’s hit men, Hector Canseco (Ralphy Lopez), to eliminate Baxter – only by pure happenstance, Baxter manages to turn away from the potentially fatal shot in time and the ballplayer is killed instead. Through ballistic tests, the cops learn that the gun used in the shooting was the same one that another crook, Eddie Aguilar (Sylvestre Rasuk), used in a liquor-store robbery two months previously, though it turns out to be a “community gun” passed around from hand to hand to be used in various crimes.

Since Hector Canseco tossed the gun into the river as the cops were chasing him, the only witness who can link him to the gun is Aguilar – and the gang is able to eliminate him the night before he’s scheduled to testify at Canseco’s trial. They even write “SNITCH” on the wall of his apartment in Eddie’s own blood. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) call Nicholas Baxter as a witness to explain Cobra-10’s vendetta against him, but without Eddie the cops also have to call Baxter’s daughter Carrie (played by Tony Goldwyn’s real-life daughter Tess), who saw Canseco staking out their home a week before the fatal shooting. Canseco even asked her who lived there, information the prosecutors need to establish Canseco’s motive and criminal intent. But this means that on cross-examination, Canseco’s aggressive attorney Alan Wallace (Kelly AuCoin) can bring out an incident a few years earlier in which Carrie was driving under the influence and hit a pedestrian whose injuries cost him the use of his left arm. Baxter’s wife Julia (Tara Westwood, who is not Tony Goldwyn’s real-life wife or Tess Goldwyn’s mother) is so appalled that she walks out of the courtroom in mid-trial. The jury returns a guilty verdict against Canseco for both the murder of the ballplayer and the attempted murder of Nicholas Baxter, but there’s a tag scene in which Baxter is behind in the election for district attorney – he was a mid-term mayoral opponent but the race for a full elected term is too close to call (and I suspect the ambiguity of the result is a deliberate tactic on the part of Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners to see whether Tony Goldwyn is or isn’t willing to renew his contract at a price they’re willing to pay). Overall this is a good Law and Order, but I was a bit surprised that Canseco didn’t make a you’re-a-dead-man threat at Nicholas Baxter as he was being led off to prison post-conviction.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Duty to Hope" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed the Law and Order May 16 was called “Duty to Hope” and seemed mainly to have been created so the season could go out literally with a bang – or quite a few bangs, since it ends with a big shoot-out that looked really exciting in the promos. The squad is looking for a serial rapist whose trademarks are that he’s white, in his 20’s, is able to break into their apartments and lie in wait for them, always uses a wire coat hanger to bind his victims’ wrists, wears work gloves so he doesn’t leave fingerprints and rapes his victims not with his dick, but with the barrel of a gun (how Phil Spector!). The script by veteran Law and Order hands David Graziano and Julie Martin introduces a new and thoroughly obnoxious character, Heidi Russell (Kate Loprest), who announces herself as the new head of the trial division of the district attorney’s office and proceeds to second-guess the investigation and demand a quick solution to the case whether it’s the right one or not. Eventually, on the strength of a photo identification from the latest victim, Ariel Bradford (Amber Stonebraker), and a single thumbprint on her sliding glass door, the cops arrest Billy Hedges (Spenser Granese). Only he turns out to be innocent – Ariel’s ID was wrong and Billy’s fingerprint had been on the glass door because he was part of the work crew that installed it – as the cops learn when another rape involving the same M.O. was committed the very next night, while Billy was still in custody. That doesn’t stop Billy’s 12-year-old son Toby (Max Malas) from pulling a gun on Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and shooting him in the shoulder while demanding that Tutuola let go of his father. Not wanting to arrest the kid that was only trying to help his dad, Fin covers up the incident and spends a few embarrassing days around the squad room trying to explain away the incident and lie about why he was injured in the shoulder.

The cops are surrounded not only by Heidi Russell, who’s disinclined to admit that Billy Hedges isn’t guilty even as the rapes keep happening while he’s in custody, but by an equally gung-ho team from a New York police subdivision called ESU (and no, I have no idea what that stands for, except they keep getting in the way and want to do Seventh Cavalry-style charges while the veterans of SVU want to keep things low-keyed) headed by Captain Sasso (Shawn T. Andrew). Ultimately the cops get the clue they need: a leather holster for a handgun marked with a Marine insignia that the real rapist left behind while he committed his latest assault. This enables them to trace the attacks to ex-Marine Glenn Duncan (Eric Olsson), who when the cops show up to arrest him brings out a high-powered rifle and starts shooting at them. He’s in his apartment with his girlfriend, Jane Emery (Katie Housley), whom he’s essentially holding hostage and he ultimately wants them both to die. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) calls him on her cell phone and tries to negotiate with him for a peaceful surrender that will save Jane’s life, but in the end the ESU team goes in, kills Duncan and rescue Jane. Ultimately she tells the cops that she’d been Glenn’s girlfriend since before he went into the military and previously he’d been normal, but once he got dishonorably discharged he freaked out and started committing crimes. That’s how the main part of this episode ends, but there’s an odd tag scene wrapping up the running story of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), the 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a would-be human trafficker in the season’s opening episode. Benson witnessed Maddie and her abductor’s flight but did nothing to stop them and feels guilty about it even though there would have been no probable cause to pull him over. The scene takes place as Benson visits Maddie and her parents, Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray), who have gone through marital troubles over the incident but have reached a sort of modus vivendi, while Maddie herself has been seeing a therapist Benson recommended for her. The ending was a bit too cloying and too Law and Order: The Soap Opera-ish for my taste, and it took me a while to remember who these people were supposed to be and what was going on with them.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Stabler's Lament" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The final show in the Law and Order run from May 16 was an Organized Crime episode that more or less wrapped up the story arc from the last few episodes – I say “more or less” because the principal villain, Julian Emery (Tom Payne), not only escapes relatively unscathed in his private jet at the end, he has Detective Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joe, Jr. (Michael Trotter) with him on the plane. Much of the episode is taken up with the Stablers’ family issues: mom Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn) is suffering from age-related dementia; Elliott’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris) is lurking around the action and we’ve got the impression he’s led a seamy if not openly and blatantly criminal existence; younger brother Joe, Jr. has been working for Emery for four years since he washed out as a Marine in Afghanistan; and Elliott’s son Eli (Nicky Torchia), who’s considerably younger than his other four kids because he was the product of a mercy fuck his wife Kathy (Isobel Gillies) gave him during their extended separation while Christopher Meloni was still on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, has impregnated his African-American girlfriend Becky (Kiaya Scott) and has decided to enter the New York Police Academy. At this plot twist I joked, “What is this – Law and Order: Blue Bloods?,” referencing the CBS-TV series in which the entire New York Police Department seems to be made up of the Reagan family (though they pronounce the last name “REE-gun” instead of the “RAY-gun” pronunciation the late Right-wing Republican President used).

They’re supposed to be having a family get-together (another link to Blue Bloods, whose writers routinely use the Reagan clan’s regular Sunday dinners to give us plot exposition), and towards the end Elliott announces that he’ll have to leave early because he’s got a break in his current case. Eli expresses his discontent at his dad’s disappearance, and Elliott says, “You want to be a cop so bad? This is what happens.” The big break is the impending arrival of a whole series of weapons and other merchandise which Julian Emery is auctioning off to the highest bidder, and midway through the process Emery figures out that his security has been compromised and executes the leaker via a poison chemical developed by scientists in the old Soviet Union and routinely used by the current Russian government (headed by Donald Trump’s dear friend, Vladimir Putin) to eliminate its real or perceived enemies around the world. There are supposedly six grenades of this stuff but there are actually 12, and in the show’s last scene Emery handcuffs Joe Stabler, Jr. to the last case of six because he’s just promoted Joe to be his lieutenant replacing the one he just murdered. Joe, Jr. is also in charge of looking after Emery’s 10-year-old son Giles (Grayson Margolis) – and kudos to writer John Shiban for giving Julian Emery a real, sympathetic human emotion so he becomes more complex instead of just a ruthless, unlikable villain – and when Julian changes the drop point for his deadly cargoes at the last minute Joe, Jr. uses Giles’s video game console to alert the police at the Organized Crime Control Bureau of the switch in plans. The cops raid the new location and seize most of the stuff, though there are still those six troublesome poison-gas grenades out there on Emery’s plane and Joe Stabler, Jr. is still handcuffed to them. One wonders where Dick Wolf, his show runners and his writers will take this fascinating but also maddening plot line when the show resumes come September!

Stranger Things: "The Vanishing of Will Byers" and "The Weirdo on Maple Street" (21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Georgia Film and Television Office, Netflix, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, May 15) my husband Charles and I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix TV series Stranger Things, set in 1983 but actually filmed in 2016. The series was the brainchild of Matt and Ross Duffer, credited merely as “The Duffer Brothers” (which made both Charles and I wonder why they were so eager to boast about their ineptitude at golf, which is what “duffer” really means), and the opening statement on imdb.com’s page about the first episode, “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” confused the hell out of me because it didn’t seem to have any resemblance to what Charles and I had actually watched: “American scientists, working without oversight in an obscure laboratory in a backwater town, have managed to bring about the total destruction of mankind.” The Wikipedia page on the entire series clarifies things a bit, but only a bit: “Set in the 1980’s, the series centers around the residents of the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, as they are plagued by a hostile alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, after a nearby human experimentation facility opens a gateway between Earth and the Upside Down.”

The story centers around Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder, in case you were wondering whatever happened to her) and her two sons, Jonathan (the almost unearthily cute Charlie Heaton) and his younger brother Will (Noah Schnapp). One day Will disappears after he rides his bicycle onto the premises of a sinister secret research laboratory on the outskirts of Hawkins in Roane County. The wreckage of his bike is eventually recovered but Will’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Also in the dramatis personae are Jim Hopper (David Harbour), an irascible local police chief who seems to have wandered in from a Coen Brothers movie; according to the Stranger Things Wikipedia page, he’s supposed to have descended into alcoholism following the death of his teenage daughter from cancer; and a young girl named Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), after the “011” numeral tattooed on her arm the way the Nazis did with the concentration-camp inmates, who wanders into the action. Eleven has no socialization with the norms of actual humanity; in one scene she lifts the loose-fitting dress that is her only garment and flashes herself in front of Will Byers’ friends. Evidently she was preparing to pee, since once the kids realize what was going on they immediately escort her to the nearest bathroom. Eleven has a whole goon squad, headed by a blonde woman who’s disguised as a social worker, who are out to kill her and don’t seem at all concerned about the carnage and collateral damage they leave in their wake.

I found myself pretty much letting Stranger Things wash over me, neither particularly interested in the story nor moved emotionally by it, and I wondered why I wasn’t connecting with it. There are a few things about it I liked, such as the Duffer Brothers’ creative use of music to set the film’s cultural references – though for a film supposedly set in 1983 there were quite a few 1960’s and 1970’s songs, including the Jefferson Airplane’s “She Has Funny Cars” and “White Rabbit,” as well as a genuine early-1980’s song like the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” One reason I bought this in the first place was that though it was a boxed set of DVD’s, it was packaged to look like a VHS tape, complete with the VHS logos. I saw it in a closeout bin at a Target (at least I think it was a Target) and grabbed it because not only was it sale-priced but I was struck by the retro packaging. Alas, it sank into the maw of my collection almost as soon as I got it and I just unearthed it as part of a general cleaning of our living room. I’d heard good reviews of Stranger Things that I don’t think the show – or at least the two episodes Charles and I watched May 15, “The Vanishing of Will Byers” and “The Weirdo on Maple Street” – really lived up to; I should probably watch more of it before I make up my mind, but there are a lot of other things in the backlog I’ll probably want to get to first!

Puccini: Madama Butterfly (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed May 11, 2024, repeated May 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, May 15) at noon my husband Charles and I left for the AMC 20 theatres in Mission Valley to see the “encore presentation” of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly from the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” series. The performance originally took place on Saturday, May 11 but to see it then Charles and I would have had to get up really early in the morning – and he’d have had to get off work for the day (he’d already arranged to have yesterday off). Before the opera began I said sotto voce to Charles, “Say a prayer for my mother. Madama Butterfly was her all-time favorite opera.” Madama Butterfly began life as “Madame Butterfly,” a short story by American author John Luther Long, which was published in 1898 and was based on stories Long had heard from his sister, Jennie Correll. It was also inspired by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthéme, which became the basis for Leo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. David Belasco read the story and wrote a play based on it in 1900, starring Blanche Bates as the heroine, and he created a famous 18-minute pantomime scene in which Butterfly and her maid Suzuki wait up all night – literally – for her errant husband, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, to return after a three-year absence. Though Puccini didn’t understand any but the simplest English – he caught the play in London when he was there to supervise a production of his immediately previous opera, Tosca – he was knocked out by the play and especially by the long pantomime scene. He created the opera with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, his collaborators on his two previous mega-hits La Bohème and Tosca, and structured it as a 55-minute first act and an 80-minute second act. Puccini’s friend and frequent collaborator Arturo Toscanini, who’d already led the premiere of La Bohème and would conduct two more Puccini premieres, La Fanciulla del West and Turandot, tried to talk him into breaking up the long second act into two shorter ones. Puccini asked him if an 80-minute act was too long, and Toscanini said, “For Wagner, no. For Puccini, yes!”

The premiere was conducted by Cleofonte Campanini after Toscanini had had one of his periodic breaks with La Scala, Milan, where the first performance of Butterfly took place. The event was one of the most famous fiascos in operatic history; audience members shouted down the singers, made animal noises (La Scala had planted people in the audience to blow bird whistles during the long intermezzo for Butterfly’s vigil, and this inspired hostile audience members to start making their own animal noises), threw in a few scatological comments (when the kimono of Rosina Storchio, the first Butterfly, blew over her head, someone called out, “Butterfly is pregnant! Ah, the little Toscanini!” – a reference to the fact that Storchio was actually pregnant with Toscanini’s child, though she had a miscarriage later) and turned the performance into such a mega-flop nobody dared try to take a curtain call at the end. I’ve long suspected the fiasco was engineered by a hostile claque led by fans of Puccini’s rival, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, out to get back at Puccini because they had both written operas of La Bohème, only Puccini’s had been a smash hit while Leoncavallo’s was a flop. (To his credit, Leoncavallo himself denounced the people at the Butterfly premiere who had disrupted it.) La Scala canceled any further performances and Puccini and his publisher, Tito Ricordi, decided he would revise the opera and it would be re-premiered in Brescia, a smaller city near Milan that was also the starting point for the Mille Miglia auto race. It was an appropriate place for a Puccini premiere because he had taken up driving motor vehicles as one of his hobbies, though he crashed one of his cars during the composition of Butterfly and a headline on one of the reviews of the Scala premiere referenced that: “Butterfly Diabetic Opera, Result of an Auto Accident.”

Among the revisions for the Brescia version was Puccini’s acceding to the recommendation that he split the long second act into two shorter ones, though he was still put out enough about the change that he tagged the two parts “Act II, part 1” and “Act II, part 2.” (Ironically, the Met, with its current policy of minimizing the number of intermissions, jammed them back together in this production with only a curtain-down scene change between them.) In 1995 Vox Records released a recording of the original La Scala version of Madama Butterfly as well as excerpts from Puccini’s various revisions, and I remember grabbing this CD as soon as it was available and listening to it with the libretto. The two things that most stunned me about that recording was how much more openly racist Pinkerton was – in one scene he tells Butterfly’s servants that he’s just going to give them numbers because he couldn’t remember their names – and how relatively weak Butterfly’s big scenes were. Though Puccini had said Butterfly had inspired him more than any of his other heroines to date, the major aria “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) was the only one of her big moments he got right the first time. All of her other big moments – her Act I aria “Ieri son salita,” in which she tells Pinkerton that in honor of him and their marriage she sneaked down to the mission and converted to Christianity; her Act II aria “Che tua madre,” in which she announces to the stunned Suzuki and the American consul Sharpless that she and Pinkerton had a son; and her death scene – were extensively rewritten, and in every case the rewrites were far stronger dramatically. The plot of Butterfly is probably mind-numbingly familiar even to non-opera fans, but just in case, here goes: Lt. Pinkerton (Jonathan Tetelman, the great new tenor Charles and I had previously heard in Puccini’s relative rarity La Rondine) is a U.S. naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, Japan. (There was a bit of confusion as to what his name was – “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton” or “Francis Blummy Pinkerton” – and both “B.F.” and “F.B.” ended up in the printed libretto, but in this production the Met used “B.F.” throughout.)

Pinkerton has arranged with local marriage broker Goro to marry Cio-Cio-San, a.k.a. Madame Butterfly (Asmik Grigorian) and to lease a house for them in Nagasaki, but both the house and the marriage are on a 999-year basis but with the man having the opportunity to cancel at any month. Butterfly comes to the marriage obviously taking it a lot more seriously than Pinkerton, even though she’s only 15 years old and therefore is little more than a child bride (something that probably seems even creepier now than it did in 1904). She has a huge bit of baggage in her past; her father had been a favored courtier of the Emperor until he displeased him in some way, and he was forced to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. Butterfly has kept the dagger with which her dad offed himself, and since then she’s made her living as a geisha (a much misunderstood part of Japanese culture; the word literally means “art person” and it denotes a young woman who sings, plays an instrument and dances for the private entertainment of male clients; a geisha is not a prostitute!). Butterfly’s uncle, the Bonze (a priest of Shinto, the national religion of Japan), throws a tantrum when he learns Butterfly has adopted Christianity and orders her relatives and servants to leave immediately, which all but Suzuki (Elizabeth DeShong) do. Left alone, Butterfly and Pinkerton sing a marvelously characterized love duet during which she wants to savor the atmosphere and revel in the moonlight and other aspects of nature, while he just wants to get laid. Then Pinkerton gets called back to his ship, the Abraham Lincoln (a name the U.S. Navy has since used for real-life vessels), and Butterfly is left behind to wait for him to return “when the robins nest again.” Three years later Butterfly is still waiting, and the money Pinkerton left behind to take care of her is now just about gone. Butterfly doggedly insists that Pinkerton will return to her, even though everyone else around her – Suzuki, Goro and American consul Sharpless (Lucas Meachem) – tries to convince her that he won’t. Goro has even lined up a replacement husband for her, well-to-do Prince Yamadori, but she righteously turns him down.

Sharpless has received a letter from Pinkerton saying that the Abraham Lincoln will soon be returning to Nagasaki and he should do what he can to prepare Butterfly for “the blow” – that he has got married to an American woman named Kate and that is the relationship he takes seriously. (He’d already told Sharpless and us this in Act I, where before Butterfly’s entrance he’d boasted that someday he would take a “real American wife” – which led critic Vincent Alfano to note in the May-June 1986 Fanfare, “[H]ow does one react to perhaps the meanest tenor in opera? There he stands, announcing his planned seduction and abandonment of a 15-year-old child, while some of the most beautiful music ever composed for tenor pours out of his mouth.”) But Butterfly refuses to listen, and when she uses a hand telescope to read the name of the American ship that has just come into Nagasaki harbor and it’s the Abraham Lincoln, she triumphantly proclaims that despite all the doubters, Pinkerton has returned and the two will be a happy couple again. When Pinkerton turns up with a strange woman in tow (somehow he was able to get his “real American wife” Kate aboard his Navy ship; real Navy wives have told me that the Navy so rigorously cold-shoulders the wives of sailors that the joke is, “If the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one”), Butterfly realizes that she’s lost Pinkerton. She tells Kate Pinkerton that the couple can have her and Pinkerton’s child to raise, but only if Pinkerton comes to get him himself. In an aria that Puccini added in the later revisions, “Addio, fiorito asil,” Pinkerton expresses regret and remorse over what he’s done to Butterfly – an aria I think weakens the drama much the way Verdi’s aria for Macbeth, “Pietà, rispetto, amore,” does in his 1847 opera of Shakespeare’s play. Feeling dishonored, Butterfly uses her father’s old dagger to kill herself after reading its inscription, “To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor.” (The plot of Delibes’ Lakmé is almost identical to that of Madama Butterfly; the only differences are that instead of an American sailor, it’s a British soldier; and instead of Japan, it’s India. Also Lakmé was the Hindu equivalent of a vestal virgin, so she broke her vows by taking up with that British soldier; and she kills herself not with a dagger, but by inhaling the fumes of a poisonous plant.)

The Met’s current production of Butterfly was created by screenwriter and film director Anthony Minghella in 2006, two years before his death in 2008, and it opened the Met’s season that year. It’s an all too typical (for modern opera productions) blend of the stunning and the silly; Minghella and the person in charge of directing it this year, Carolyn Choa, turned the stage into a riot of color (good) but chose to make the members of Butterfly’s household, including her son, Bunraku Japanese puppets (not so good). This meant there had to be a core of black-clad stagehands out at all times to manipulate the puppets on stage and also to move the screens around, since one of the conceits of this production is that Japanese houses at the turn of the last century were made out of infinitely variable screens and shutters which could be used either to form rooms or create outdoor patios. The conductor was Xian Zhang, and though she was called to begin the performance with the usual cry, “Maestro, to the pit!,” she was really a Maestra. It wasn’t easy to tell at first since she was dressed in one of those black uniform things the Chinese Communists once made the near-universal Chinese dress, and she had her hair cut short and close-cropped in a male “do,” but it’s a welcome sign of progress in the classical music world that for the second time in a row we were watching a telecast Met production with a woman conductor. (Once again, it’s about time!)

The singing was stunning throughout, especially from Lithuanian soprano Akmin Grigorian in the title role. Though born in Lithuania, she’s of Armenian ancestry on her father’s side, and her parents – tenor Gegham Grigoryan (that’s how it’s spelled on her Wikipedia page) and soprano Irena Milkeviciuté – were also opera singers. Grigorian commanded the stage from the get-go and sang with total power and authority, and for the most part she was matched by Tetelman, who had impressed me in La Rondine and impressed me again here. Elizabeth DeShong’s Suzuki and Lucas Meachem’s Sharpless were also good as sympathetic voices of reason for the principals. One thing that rubbed me a bit the wrong way about this production was that the singer playing Kate Pinkerton was Black; somehow I was better able to accept a star like Angel Blue in La Rondine than a walk-on player who’s just got five lines, but the racial politics of this opera (as well as its so-called “Orientalism,” its damning the Asian lifestyle and culture with “picturesque” condescension) are already problematic enough that the appearance of a Black singer threw off the racial balance of the show and annoyed me more than it probably should have. Charles and I were both crying big-time during the production – whatever you may want to say about him, one thing Puccini was good at was assaulting the tear ducts, and if anything Madama Butterfly is the sort of story that becomes more tragic, not less, if you know the ending in advance. Despite those silly puppets and the apparently self-propelling walls, Minghella’s staging as realized by Choa was basically strong and did justice to the story (though I’d have liked more physical contact between Butterfly and Pinkerton in the love duet), and overall this Butterfly was a quite charming and entertaining afternoon at the opera!

Daughter of the Dragon (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 13) Turner Classic Movies showed a number of films featuring Asian-descended actors as part of their salute to Asian-American Heritage Month and also a “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Sessue Hayakawa, who became a matinée idol in the silent era even though most of the roles he played were the stock racist “yellow peril” crap – including his most famous film, The Cheat (1915, reissued 1918), in which he plays a rich man who bails out a family of British aristocrats in exchange for the wife’s body, and in the film’s most famous scene (then and now) he literally brands her as his property in exchange for the money she and her husband needed to bail themselves out of a bad business deal. In the early 1920’s Hayakawa left the major studios and formed a production company of his own to make films based on Japanese history and legends, and to present a more positive view of Asians and their culture. Predictably, his venture flopped and he kept his career going by retreating to Britain and acting on stage, though in 1957 he made a comeback as the evil but honorable Japanese prison commander in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he got nominated for an Academy Award. TCM showed a whole group of films last night featuring Hayakawa, including one of Humphrey Bogart’s Columbia vehicles, Tokyo Joe (1949) and Jerry Lewis’s The Geisha Boy (1958), before finally getting to the one I wanted to see: Daughter of the Dragon (1931).

Daughter of the Dragon was also the first in a two-film group of movies featuring Anna May Wong, the L.A.-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who became the first Chinese-American movie star, though with only a few exceptions her parts were the usual racist garbage, casting her either as the innocent young flower undone by loving a white guy not wisely but too well, or as the vicious Oriental seductress out to work her wiles on the nice young white boy and steal him away from the nice young white girl. TCM’s Anna May Wong double-bill paired Daughter of the Dragon with Daughter of Shanghai (1937), which I’ve already commented on in this blog after seeing it twice in 2022 and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/06/daughter-of-shanghai-paemount-1937.html). According to TCM host Bob Karger, Daughter of Shanghai was Wong’s first film under a new contract with Paramount in which they promised her a respite from Asian-villainess roles and a few parts which actually depicted Asian characters in a positive light. In Daughter of Shanghai she plays Lan Ying Lin, daughter of a Chinese art dealer who’s murdered by a gang of human traffickers and takes up with Chinese-American FBI agent Kim Lee (Korean-American actor Philip Ahn, whom I’ve long wished had been cast as Charlie Chan) to bust the gang that killed her father. My husband Charles came home from work during the last 20 minutes of Daughter of Shanghai and expressed regrets that Paramount didn’t use Wong and Ahn to create an Asian-American version of the MGM Thin Man series.

Alas, to quote James Miller’s review of the 1928 British Columbia Aïda in the January-February 1984 Fanfare (which he invidiously compared with the competing HMV version the same year), “that isn't the [movie] we’re dealing with.” Daughter of the Dragon is the third film in a sequence Paramount made in the early talkie era based on Sax Rohmer’s infamously racist stories of Chinese super-villain Dr. Fu Manchu, with Warner Oland playing him. It was preceded by The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930). Oland also played Fu Manchu in a spoof of detective movies in 1930’s revue film Paramount on Parade before moving on to Fox and his long-running series of films as a sympathetic Chinese, Charlie Chan. In Daughter of the Dragon, Fu Manchu reappears after having been thought killed to continue his revenge against the Petrie family, a line of British aristocrats whom Fu blames for killing his own family during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. When the film opens the Petries have already lost a grandfather and a father to Fu’s revenge campaign, and they’re left with Sir John Petrie (Holmes Herbert) and his son Ronald Petrie (Bramwell Fletcher, a year before he accidentally revived Boris Karloff’s mummy character in The Mummy and went insane when he realized what had happened). Fu Manchu sneaks back and forth between his home and the Petries’, which is conveniently next door, through a secret tunnel and a trap door concealed in a nondescript wall.

The film’s leading character is Chinese dancer Ling Moy (Anna May Wong), who’s become a major success in London and is about to do a tour of South America. Only her plans are altered when her long-lost father, whom she’s never met as an adult, turns up and is, of course, Dr. Fu Manchu. He surprisingly easily enlists her aid in carrying on his revenge plot against the Petries, which includes turning her full quota of sexual wiles on Ronald Petrie and getting him to abandon his white fiancée, Joan Marshall (Frances Dade). Clumsily directed by Lloyd Corrigan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with The Sheik screenwriter Monte Katterjohn and future Mr. Smith Goes to Washington writer and open Communist Sidney Buchman based on a Rohmer novel actually called The Daughter of Fu Manchu (though according to one online source, an article on Fu Manchu movies at https://pulpfictionbook.store/2020/01/18/the-filmography-of-fu-manchu/, Paramount actually didn’t own the rights to The Daughter of Fu Manchu so they cooked up something vaguely like it), Daughter of the Dragon includes a sympathetic Asian character. He is Scotland Yard detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa, a decade after he appeared with Anna May Wong in one of his indies, The First-Born, a now lost film. In The First-Born he was top-billed and she was a bit player, while here she has top billing and he’s billed third under her and Oland), who’s on the trail of Fu Manchu because the people in charge at Scotland Yard obviously think it makes sense to set an Asian to trap an Asian.

Fu Manchu uses that secret tunnel to sneak into the Petrie home and kill Sir John by poisoning his tobacco (I’m not making this up, you know!) before getting killed himself about two-fifths of the way through the movie (though he reappears as a ghostly voice giving Ling Moy instructions from beyond the grave, sort of like Marlon Brando in the later Superman movies in which through leftover footage he continued to play Superman’s father, Jor-El, even after he died). His base of operations is the house next door to the Petrie estate, which is ostensibly occupied by Ling Moy’s manager, Morloff (Nicholas Soussanin) – only Morloff is a key part of Fu Manchu’s plot, though of course the Petries and their friends don’t realize that until the very end. Midway through the film Ling Moy decides to neutralize Ah Kee by seducing him, and there’s a very strange ending sequence in which Ling Moy and Ah Kee literally have a joint death scene while Ronald Petrie gets back together with his boring white girlfriend and the honor of British imperialism is saved … for now. Daughter of the Dragon is relatively naturalistic in terms of the way lines are delivered – though Anna May Wong’s idea of appearing “inscrutable” is to speak very slowly and softly, which worked quite a bit better for her in some of her other films than it does here. But in other respects it suffers from the crudity of early-talkie technique, including the virtual absence of background music. That may seem like a surprising comment from me, since I’ve frequently complained about the overuse of music in much of classic Hollywood’s output in the 1930’s and 1940’s, but here the lack of an action score only makes the film seem dull and the action sequences uninvolving and boring.

Daughter of the Dragon is notable for giving Bramwell Fletcher a chance to act with some power and authority – anyone who’s seen him just in his role in The Mummy is in for a surprise – and it’s also a “doubles” movie in that it features two actors who played Charlie Chan: Warner Oland and George Kuwa, a Japanese actor who played Chan in the very first film using the character, a Pathé serial from 1925 called The House Without a Key and based on the first of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan novels. (The Chan movies have so often been criticized for using white actors in “yellowface” to play the title role – Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Roland Winters – it’s worth noting that in the first two Chan films, The House Without a Key and 1928’s The Chinese Parrot, he was played by Japanese actors George Kuwa and Sôjin Kamiyama, respectively. So they weren’t Chinese but at least they were Asian! Alas, both silent Chans are lost, though Sôjin Kamimaya played a detective in the 1929 MGM early talkie The Unholy Night and that’s probably a good indication of how he played Charlie Chan.) Daughter of the Dragon is pretty worthless as a movie, though it’s at least staged on some engagingly elaborate Paramount sets (some of which I suspect were reused for later films including the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as the Marx Brothers’ 1931 Monkey Business). I’m generally not a fan of judging old movies, songs or books by today’s relatively enlightened standards, but Daughter of the Dragon is so imbued throughout with not only racism but sexism as well (there are more than the usual scenes in which Anna May Wong’s ability to carry out her dad’s revenge plot is questioned because she’s – gasp – a woman!) it was hard for me to find anything in it that entertained me.