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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Brown: "The Jackdaw's Revenge" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired January 2, 2018)

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

Later last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched a Father Brown episode from 2018 (I was a bit surprised they reached that far back in the archives) called “The Jackdaw’s Revenge.” It opens in a singularly stark set of a noose and a woman being led to it. She is Katherine Corvin (Kate O’Flynn), and she’s about to be hanged for the murder of her husband. (The show is set in the 1950’s, well before Britain abolished capital punishment.) At first she seems to have come to grips with her fate and meekly accepted it, but it turns out she has a trick up her sleeve. A terminally ill woman who used to work for her as a maid has made a deathbed confession to the murder, and so Katherine is released and officially exonerated. Then she moves back to Father Brown’s home town and shows up at the local Roman Catholic church, declaring her intent to take the vows and become a nun. It turns out that the whole thing is part of an elaborate revenge scheme Katherine has hatched to get back at Father Brown for having established her guilt for murdering her husband in the first place. She has an unlikely ally: Robin Gladwell (Paul Cauley), the publisher of the local newspaper, who was her lover way back when and the reason she wanted to knock off her husband. At first Father Brown suspects her accomplice is the young woman reporter for the paper who’s trying to reopen the case from a point of view sympathetic to Katherine, but in the end Katherine entraps Father Brown by kidnapping one of his parishioners and threatening to kill her. She presents Father Brown with a Hobson’s choice: either kill the assailant and thereby commit a mortal sin, or not act and therefore have the death of an innocent person on his conscience. Along the way she reveals how she got the old maid to confess on her behalf: she hired a thug to visit her and bribe her to do so, saying that if she issued the false confession her children and grandchildren would be well taken care of after her death, while if she refused the thug would kill the grandchildren. Ultimately one of Father Brown’s associates grabs the gun from his hand and kills the assailant himself, and the police show up and arrest Katherine. It was an O.K. episode – the titular jackdaw is a bird actually released in the church as Father Brown is preaching, and it’s an emblem of Katherine – though a bit on the twee side.

Drunken Angel, a.k.a. Yoidore tenshi (Toho Studios, 1948)

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

My husband Charles came home from work relatively early last night (Saturday, May 2) and we jointly watched a quite impressive film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” TV series: Drunken Angel (originally Yoidore tenshi), a 1948 Japanese movie directed and co-written (with Keinosuke Uekusa) by the young Akira Kurosawa and co-starring two of Kurosawa’s all-time favorite actors, Takashi Shimura (in their fifth film together) and Toshiro Mifune (in his first of 16 Kurosawa films). It was shot during the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II, and deals with the collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) the entire nation of Japan seems to have experienced after having lost the war. Specifically it’s about an alcoholic doctor, Sanada (Shimura), and Matsunaga (Mifune), a yakuza gangster who comes to Sanada to have a bullet removed from his hand. It also turns out he needs to be treated for a disease which turns out to be tuberculosis. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller explained during his intro that the yakuza were a phenomenon in Japan that started right after World War II. The Japanese government during the war had built up the culture of the samurai and used it to motivate their young men to perform similar feats of bravery during the war, including training to be kamikaze pilots and give their lives in suicide missions against American ships. After the war a lot of young men who’d survived took up crime and organized gangs that operated according to the principles of bushido, the honor code of the samurai – or at least what they thought bushido was. If this is historically accurate, it wouldn’t have been the first time in history a criminal gang started as the result of a war. The Mafia originally began as a resistance movement to Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the 1810’s – the word “Mafia” is an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society” – which turned to crime after Napoleon’s defeat. And Jesse James and his brother Frank started out as Confederate guerrillas under the command of William Quantrill in 1862 and turned to crime once the Confederates lost the Civil War.

The main conflict of this quite remarkable movie is between Sanada and Matsunaga, and between Sanada’s efforts to get him to give up alcohol, sex, and the other accoutrements of his gangster life and take his disease seriously, and Matsunaga’s own conflicts between following Sanada’s advice and avoiding the loss of “face” he fears will befall him if his former associates see him drawing back from drinking and screwing. Also, Sanada has a live-in nurse named Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) – it’s not clear whether they’re romantically involved, but probably not – whose abusive former boyfriend Okada (Reizaburô Yamamoto), is just about to be released from a two-year prison sentence. In a bit of coincidence-mongering Kurosawa and Uekusa should have been ashamed of (it’s the one flaw in an otherwise impeccably constructed film), Okada is also Matsunaga’s former boss in the yakuza, and when he gets out he’s determined both to regain control of his old gang and to force Miyo to come back to him. On several occasions Miyo seriously weighs whether to go back to Okada despite his history of abusing her, and Sanada keeps trying to talk her out of it. On a night out with the gang, Matsunaga at first refuses the offer of a drink because he’s at least briefly trying to stay on Sanada’s program and recover from the TB, but Okada goads him into drinking and Matsunaga ultimately ends up drunk and much the worse for wear. Much of the action centers around a wild nightclub and dance hall called “Number One Cabaret” (the signs are in Roman letters) where the yakuza are “regulars” and one of the entertainers is a singer (Shikuzo Kazagi) who in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s had a brief run of success on the Japanese charts with songs that all had the word “boogie” in the title even though, judging from the example here (“Jungle Boogie,” with music by Ryôichi Hattori and lyrics by Kurosawa himself), they had more to do with rhythm-and-blues than what we Americans think of as boogie-woogie. (One of the quirkier results of the American occupation of Japan was that a lot of young Japanese got exposed to American popular music; there’d been something of a jazz scene in Japan before World War II but the Japanese government banned it during the war as an expression of enemy culture. After the war Japanese musicians took up American pop but put an Asian “spin” on it.)

There are also some fascinating supporting characters, including Dr. Takahama (Eitarô Shindô), a classmate of Sanada’s from medical school who avoided alcoholism and went on to a lucrative, successful career while Sanada got mired in the dregs, only when Matsunaga showed up at Dr. Takahama’s clinic, Takahama X-rayed him, diagnosed him with TB, and sent him to Sanada for treatment because Sanada knew more about that particular disease than he did. And there’s a dirty sump of water that becomes a character in itself; it was apparently a set built for another Toho Studios movie but Kurosawa appropriated it and turned it into a metaphor for the waste and destruction left behind when Japan lost the war. Early on in the movie Dr. Sanada sees a group of young boys about to bathe in the water, and he scares them out of it by telling them they’ll get typhus. And there’s a fascinating fight to the finish at the end between Matsunaga and Okada in which Matsunaga tries to kill Okada but is too weak to do so. They have this fight while covered in spilled white paint, and I wondered if Kurosawa covered them in white as a symbol of their lost innocence. After Matsunaga’s death Sanada encounters a 17-year-old schoolgirl (Yoshiko Kuga) who had earlier been counterpointed to Matsunaga as an example of a responsible TB patient who followed her doctor’s orders and took her treatments seriously. He also runs into Gin (Noriko Sengoku), Matsunaga’s former girlfriend, who took charge of his body and had him cremated. She recalls that she tried to get Matsunaga to move with her out of Tokyo and to her family’s farm in the countryside, where he could have got away from the yakuza and their pressures and recovered in relative peace.

Drunken Angel is a quite remarkable movie, and though I’ve considered myself a movie maven I must say I’m far back of scratch on Kurosawa. When Eddie Muller mentioned that Kurosawa’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Seven Samurai (1954), was the first non-English-language film he ever saw at age 12, I felt ashamed that I’ve never seen it at all. I’ve quite liked the Kurosawa films I have seen, including such modern-dress movies as Scandal (1950) and the awesome High and Low (1963), but I haven’t pursued him the way I have with other directors, and it’s possible one reason is I don’t much like the sound of the Japanese language. It’s harsh, guttural, and considerably less pleasant to the ears (these Western monolingual-English ears, anyway) than Chinese. Also, one oddity is that Kurosawa got stereotyped from the international success of The Seven Samurai as “the samurai director,” when at least half of his films take place in the Japan of his own time. But Drunken Angel – Kurosawa’s eighth film as director and the first one that he felt expressed his personal vision instead of being merely an assignment for hire from Toho – emerges as a masterpiece and a worthy entry into the film noir canon.