Leadbelly (Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V., Brownstone Productions, David Paradine Productions, Paramount, 1976)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 4) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies that was part of a night of films about the blues (more or less). The first one we watched was Leadbelly, a 1976 biopic of the great African-American blues singer, born Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949), written by Ernest Kinoy – who’d later address the Black American experience from a different perspective as the principal screenwriter for the TV mini-series Roots – and directed, stunningly, by Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a still photographer for Life magazine (the first African-American to hold that job) who branched out into film direction in 1969 with an adaptation of his own autobiographical novel The Learning Tree. In 1971 he got the plum assignment to direct the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft, an enormous hit. One of the ironies behind Shaft is that the communal apartment lived in by the Black militant group “The Lummumbas” has a living room dominated by a giant poster of Malcolm X – printed from a photo Parks had shot of him for Life. When Charles and I saw Shaft I noted that most of the Blaxploitation films seemed to have been directed by people who didn’t know a camera from a dildo. Parks was the great exception; scene after scene of Shaft was planned and executed by a director who was a master of photography. Parks later directed the immediate sequel, Shaft’s Big Score, and another movie called The Super Cops co-written by Shaft’s creator, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. He looked set for a major career as a filmmaker when he took on Leadbelly’s story for Paramount and a bizarre array of “independent” production companies including one with the African-sounding name “Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V.” There was also a credit to Paradine Productions, the company owned by British-born TV host David Frost, who actually co-produced the film. Alas, Leadbelly ran into political troubles at Paramount; the studio management that green-lighted it was fired while Parks was still in post-production and the new people in charge gave the film limited promotion and didn’t leave it in theatres long. The fiasco seems to have derailed Parks’s directorial career; his only subsequent credits as director on imdb.com were an episode of PBS’s drama series American Playhouse and Moments Without Proper Names, a documentary about Parks himself.

It’s a pity, because though the film has one major flaw (more on that later), Leadbelly is a stunning piece of work. Parks and his cinematographer, Bruce Surtees, manage to make the past-is-brown look work even with a mostly Black cast; I’ve previously complained that the past-is-brown look is particularly annoying when the protagonists are Black because their brown skins tend to blend into the brown backgrounds and make them difficult to see. That wasn’t a problem with this film, in which Parks and Surtees manage the feat of making the Texas countryside (Leadbelly was a Louisiana native but the film was entirely shot in Texas, where Leadbelly led much of his pre-stardom life and got a long sentence to a chain gang under the name “Walter Boyd”) glow with beauty while Kinoy’s script didn’t short-change the perpetual burden Southern Blacks lived under the region’s racism. Black Southerners lived their lives in the all too vivid awareness that not only their liberties and livelihoods but even their lives were lived under the suffrage and tolerance of whites. Lynch mobs could and often did literally kill Blacks any time they wanted to, with total impunity. They’d even boast about it afterwards, saying they had a “great barbecue” the night before when they’d hanged a Black person from a tree and set the corpse on fire, often after cutting off pieces of the body and trading them as grisly souvenirs. Incidentally there’s continuing confusion as to both Leadbelly’s stage name and his real one; he didn’t like the name “Leadbelly” and insisted when he played live on being introduced as “Huddie Ledbetter.” Also the name “Lead Belly” was usually spelled as two words during his lifetime but the spelling “Leadbelly” became more common after his death. And I’d always assumed his real first name was pronounced “Huddie,” as it’s spelled, but the actors in the film use “Hoodie,” with the double-o pronounced in the long style, as in “smooth.” Kinoy’s script for Leadbelly tells the legend of Leadbelly’s life and in particular his involvements with prostitutes (one of his guitars is a present from Miss Eula, played by Madge Sinclair, madam of a whorehouse on Fannin Street in the red-light district of Shreveport, Louisiana, who takes him as her lover after she catches him grabbing a freebie from one of her women) and lowlifes in general. Leadbelly is shown making his living mostly from playing for tips in bars and challenging all comers to guitar-picking duels. One of them beats him with a 12-string guitar (until then Leadbelly had played only six-stringed guitars but later he buys the man’s 12-string and becomes a master of that instrument).

The film also features another legendary blues musician besides Leadbelly (Roger E. Mosely, voiced by HiTide Harris; there was some controversy at the time about Parks’s use of an actor who needed a voice double, which may account for Ryan Coogler’s insistence when he made the film Sinners that all the actors playing blues musicians either be able to sing and play for themselves, or be willing to learn): Blind Lemon Jefferson (Art Evans), who barnstorms with Leadbelly through the South. (The real Leadbelly recorded a song called “Blind Lemon,” and in his spoken introduction he says he traveled with Blind Lemon for 18 years and used to lead him around.) They buy a Model “T” Ford from a white man and are so preposterously ignorant of how it works that the white guy they bought it from has to hand-crank it for them to get it to start. Blind Lemon at first insists on driving, saying that he’s not totally blind, but Leadbelly pushes him out of the driver’s seat and takes over even though he’s never driven before in his life either. Blind Lemon keeps talking about his ambition to go to a Northern city like New York or Chicago and make records – which the real Blind Lemon Jefferson did. He became one of Paramount Records’ two biggest Black stars (along with Ma Rainey) and he was so popular that when he died in 1929 Paramount hired impersonators so they could keep cranking out “new” Blind Lemon Jefferson records even after he’d passed. The film depicts Leadbelly as a troublesome prisoner who’s always clashing with authorities and getting either whipped or locked in “the hole.” It’s also relatively accurate in depicting how he got out of prison: in 1925 Texas Governor Pat Hare (John Henry Faulk, one of the most regrettable victims of Hollywood blacklisting, who fought back and had something of a comeback in the 1970’s) ordered Leadbelly to be work-furloughed to play at a fancy whites-only party he was hosting. Hare was so impressed by Leadbelly’s performance, especially of a song he’d written pleading to be let out of prison, that Hare promised to draft pardon papers and sign them on his way out of office – which he actually did. Hare was succeeded by “Ma” Ferguson, who’d run for governor for the first time when her husband was impeached and removed from office by the Texas legislature, and both Fergusons were so famous for pardoning people (including Clyde Barrow of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame) Charles was startled by a story about a well-known prisoner being set free from a Texas prison by a governor other than one of the Fergusons.

Later Leadbelly got re-arrested in Louisiana and also sentenced to a chain gang, where in 1933 he was visited by a folk-music researcher named John Lomax (James Brodhead). Lomax was traveling through the South collecting songs with a portable recording machine, and he visited Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison. In an earlier scene Leadbelly’s father, Wes Ledbetter (Paul Benjamin), had shown up at the prison intending to bribe the captain of the guards to set his son free. Wes had got the money by selling 15 acres of prime bottom farmland his family had owned since the end of the Civil War (in the movie the farm was in Louisiana; it was really in Texas), and when the captain tells Wes that he can’t buy his son’s freedom, Wes asks if he can at least have the money put in Huddie’s prison account. He’s told he can’t do that either, but then he asks the captain at least to take the money and use it to buy Huddie a 12-string guitar, which the captain does. Ultimately Leadbelly serves his time and is released, though the Lomaxes (John and his son Alan, who joined his father in his folk-song collecting activities and kept on after John died in 1948) put out the story that once again Leadbelly had sung for a governor (O. K. Allen, who ran in 1932 as the imposición stooge for the termed-out Huey Long) and had so moved him he won a pardon. The one flaw in Leadbelly is that it ends just when it’s getting interesting: as good as it is, it could have been even greater if Parks and Kinoy had dramatized the culture shock this unlettered Black blues musician would have faced suddenly plunged into the big white cities of New York and Chicago and confronted with the music establishments there. One of the quirkier parts of Leadbelly’s story was that he actually got convicted a third time in New York in 1939 of stabbing a man in a bar fight, and the judge was blatantly prejudiced against him because of his prior criminal record. Leadbelly served a year in Riker’s Island but managed to continue his career after his release, including making an album in 1940 for RCA Victor (then America’s biggest record company) called The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. (This was in the days of 78 rpm records, made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay, and an “album” meant just that: a group of records packaged in hard cardboard sleeves and bound together like a photo album.) The story of Leadbelly’s encounters with the white-controlled music industry and his later tours, including post-World War II appearances in Europe (the first Black American folksinger to tour there), could have made an even more interesting movie than the one we have – but the one we have is quite good, thank you, beautifully photographed, handsomely directed, sensitively written, and with an excellent performance by Roger E. Mosley as Leadbelly (even though he didn’t do his own singing for the role).

Blues in the Night (Warner Bros./First National, 1941)

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

The second “blues” film my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies Thursday, June 4 was Blues in the Night, a real weirdie from Warner Bros./First National in 1941. The title song by Harold Arlen (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song but lost to “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1941 MGM musical Lady Be Good, at least partly due to World War II-inspired patriotic reasons (even though the U.S. wasn’t in the war yet when it was filmed). Blues in the Night is a combination gangster film and musical which began life as an unproduced play called Hot Nocturne by Edwin Gilbert. A young actor with directing aspirations named Elia Kazan bought the rights with the intent of tweaking it and opening it on Broadway, but he was sidetracked by Warner Bros., which bought the film rights and assigned the young Robert Rossen to do the screenplay. It starts in a nightclub where Nickie Haroyan (Elia Kazan, who not only sold Warner Bros. the screen rights but got to be in it as well) is hanging out with a piano player named Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf, another actor who went on to a directorial career). Nickie’s father and four older brothers are all big-shot lawyers and dad is expecting Nickie to follow suit, but he’d much rather play clarinet in a jazz band than add to the surfeit of attorneys in his family. They encounter a hot-shot trumpet player named Leo Powell (Jack Carson), but they end up in a bar fight after Jigger punches out a customer that demands he play “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” They end up in jail and Nickie has to shame-facedly call his mother to bail them out. Leo is married to a young singer with the preposterous name “Character” (Priscilla Lane, top-billed) and the quartet, along with a bassist and drummer, end up literally riding freight cars all over the city. While in jail they heard a Black prisoner (William Gillespie, whose real career ambition was to try for the Paul Robeson niche as a Black concert singer and who would later appear as Porgy in the Porgy and Bess sequences of Warners’ 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue) sing “Blues in the Night.” They immediately assume it is an African-American folk blues (the preposterousness of thinking this well thought-out three-strain composition by a Jewish-American songwriter is a Black folk song bothered me when Charles and I first saw this film in the 1990’s) and go to New Orleans in search of the inspiration behind it.

While they’re hopping the freights they run into a gangster named Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors even though he entered wearing so much facial hair I didn’t recognize him until he spoke). They protect him from the railroad detectives and he repays them by holding a gun on them and sticking them up for the $6 they have between them. Then, when Our Heroes have a chance to rat out Del to the railroad bulls but they don’t, he tips them that they may have a job opportunity at a club called “The Jungle” in New Jersey across the river from New York City. There were quite a few movies around this time about the rise of a struggling jazz band, including Birth of the Blues (1941), with Bing Crosby as a jazz singer and Brian Donlevy in the role Carson plays here as a scapegrace trumpet player; and the 1942 RKO film Syncopation. There were even more than a few that combined jazz music and the gangster world, but not to the extent seen here. Del Davis is an escaped convict who went to prison after being part of a heist that also involved the club’s owner, Sam Paryas (Howard da Silva), and its star attraction, singer Kay Grant (Betty Field). Kay is a typical film noir femme fatale, though like Ann Savage’s role in Detour the character isn’t drawn as evil, just as having long ago concluded that conventional morality is a luxury she can’t afford. Accordingly she bee-lines first for Leo, even though he's married, and when he turns her down she goes after Jigger instead. Meanwhile Character has learned she’s pregnant, and the doctor she sees insists that she stop work for at least a month before the baby’s due date. Jigger insists on training Kay to be the replacement singer for however long Character is out, and the middle reels turn essentially into a jazz version of the Susan Alexander sequences of Citizen Kane, with Jigger futilely trying to hammer some vocal talent into the scratchy-voiced singer while her self-hating disabled accompanist, Brad Ames (Wallace Ford), gambles and steadily loses at the illegal craps tables Del has installed in the upper floor of The Jungle.

Ultimately Kay persuades Jigger to abandon the band and flee with her to New York, where he can get a job with a commercial band and play popular novelty tunes even though this means giving up his ambition to play jazz. Kay makes the transactional state of her affections clear when one night, as Jigger is being featured with “Guy Heiser” (played by real-life bandleader Will Osborne, who must have been quite resistant to vanity, and/or quite addicted to money, to allow himself and his band to be used in a film that ridicules their style of music), Kay walks out with two obviously more affluent men in the audience. When Jigger confronts her she says that Del is the only man she’s ever really loved, even though earlier in the film she considered Sam’s suggestion that she get from under Del’s shadow by reporting him to the police and getting him arrested and returned to prison in California. Kay actually tells Del that Sam tried to get her to turn him in, but instead of applauding Kay’s loyalty Del brings in two thugs to make Sam “disappear” permanently and tells Kay to leave The Jungle – which is why she fled for New York and took Jigger with her. When Kay leaves Jigger he becomes an alcoholic and drinks himself into a perpetual stupor for three months. When the other members of Jigger’s former band track him down, he pretends he’s been working on a symphonic composition based on “Blues in the Night,” but he turns out to be unable to play it. He’s diagnosed with nervous disorder and is detoxed at a hospital, where he has a nightmare – vividly dramatized by another future director, Don Siegel, in a montage sequence in which, among other things, the piano keys melt into a mass of white goo as he tries to play them. The band returns to The Jungle but Kay tracks Jigger down there and tries to get him to run away with her again. Jigger pretends to go along, and Kay shoots Del five times with a gun and leaves him for dead. Then Brad (ya remember Brad?) tells Kay that he’s arranged with Jigger to take her away, though he really intends to drive their car off the road and take both of them out in a murder/suicide. This duly happens, meeting the solemn obligations of the Production Code that the criminals must be punished, and in the final scene the bandmates are back together, still riding freight cars as they pursue that One Big Break. They have the option of being fancy free again because Character’s baby was stillborn. It’s a rather strange ending for this sort of musical, in which we expect to see the leading band finally hit it big at the finish.

Blues in the Night has sometimes been called a film noir, which it is mainly in Anatole Litvak’s overdirection (Charles was especially amused by one shot of Jigger playing piano in which Litvak and cinematographer Ernest Haller pick a point-of-view angle from the piano keys) and Betty Field’s character. Birth of the Blues is also noteworthy as the only film ever to feature Jimmie Lunceford and His Orchestra (though his first name is given the more familiar “Jimmy” spelling in the credits). Lunceford’s was a Black band which, if not quite matching the crossover appeal to white audiences of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, at least came close. They’re not terribly well used here; they’re cast as “A Barnstorming Band” and only shown in one scene, in which Leo picks up his trumpet and starts jamming with them in the middle of their show. (One of Lunceford’s trumpeters, Eugene “Snooky” Young, was one of Jack Carson’s trumpet doubles in the movie; Frankie Zinzer was the other.) Elsewhere they’re heard on the soundtrack playing about a minute of “Blues in the Night,” a record that turned up on the two-CD set Hollywood Swing and Jazz, which Lunceford also recorded in a two-part version (taking six minutes, both sides of a 10-inch 78) featuring a vocal by alto saxophonist Willie Smith and the band. (Lunceford’s was one of those bands that didn’t carry singers but had the instrumentalists in the band double on vocals.) My favorite versions of “Blues in the Night” from the time it was written are Johnny Mercer’s own recording for a label he called Capitol Criterion (later he shortened it merely to Capitol) with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers vocal group, and a stunning version by Artie Shaw on Victor in which arranger Bill Challis artfully combined Shaw’s clarinet, a string section, and the Armstrong-esque singing and trumpet playing of the great Oran “Hot Lips” Page. Blues in the Night is one of those frustrating movies that doesn’t quite jell but it achieves an hallucinatory appeal in its very wrongness, in the inability of the filmmakers to get the various ingredients (musical, gangster story, film noir) to come together into a coherent and entertaining story.

Strike (Kinostudiya, Imeni M. Gorkogo, 1-ya Goskino Fabrika, Goskino, Proletkult, filmed 1924, released 1925)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 31) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” presentation of Sergei Eisenstein’s first film, Strike (filmed 1924, released 1925). Strike was the one extant Eisenstein film I’d never seen before in any form, and it’s become the stepchild among his politically themed movies of the 1920’s. Eisenstein’s next two films, Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October, a.k.a. Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), are considerably better known today even though Strike is at least their equal, and in some ways considerably more experimental. I suspect that’s because Strike has a grimly unhappy ending – the striking workers are victims of a massacre that kills all, or virtually all, of them – rather than the happy (at least in the context in which all these films were made) ones of Battleship Potemkin (the sailors on other vessels in the Russian Navy refuse to fire on the mutineers of the Potemkin and instead join their cause) or October (the Bolsheviks win the Revolution). TCM “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American whom I’ve long respected because she proves that you don’t necessarily have to be either white or male to be a film nerd) introduced the film as the most audacious and ground-breaking cinematic debut in film history (the only one I can think of that comes close is Orson Welles’s classic Citizen Kane from 1941). Eisenstein came to this film after having briefly studied architecture and engineering, the latter his father’s profession. In 1918 he left school and joined the Red Army, fighting on the Communist side in Russia’s civil war while his brother Mikhail fought on the opposing White side for the restoration of the Czars. In 1920, after a brief stint in Minsk following the Red Army’s final victory, Eisenstein settled in Moscow and joined the Proletkult (“Proletarian Culture”) theatre.

One of his last Proletkult productions was a play called Gas Masks (1923) which he staged in an actual gas factory, with audience members being required to follow the actors around the factory as they witnessed various scenes. This, plus Eisenstein’s experience making a short film called Glumov’s Diary that was incorporated into the Proletkult’s production of a live play, convinced him that cinema was the right medium for what he wanted to do artistically. (Ironically, before Citizen Kane Orson Welles also directed a short film designed to be shown as part of a live play, William Gillette’s Too Much Johnson.) Eisenstein worked out a number of theories about how to make his movies, including what he called “the montage of attractions.” The French word “montage” originally just meant editing, but it came to mean specifically the rapid-fire style Eisenstein and his Russian colleagues (Dziga Vertov, Veslovod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and others) developed. Set alternately in 1903 and 1912 (I’ve seen sources reference both dates) but definitely before the Revolution, Strike deals with a factory whose workers are being brutally treated by their bosses. Among other ways to keep the workers in line, the bosses have created a force of secret police to watch over them and report whenever any of them start trying to organize a union or do any other thing that might fight back against the bosses’ control. The various secret agents are given the code names of animals – Monkey, Owl, Bulldog, Bear – and Eisenstein intercuts sequences of them with their animal namesakes to show their real natures. The strike is triggered when one of the workers, Yakov Strongin (Mikhail Gomorov) – the only character that actually has a name, Eisenstein and his co-writers (Grigory Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s lifelong assistant and, according to some sources, his Gay lover, along with Ilya Kravchunovsky and Valerian Pletnev) having carried to the max the idea that the characters are supposed to represent class archetypes and we’re not supposed to be concerned about them as individuals – is falsely accused of stealing a micrometer, a measuring device which costs 25 rubles. Knowing that he’ll be docked that amount – three weeks’ pay – for stealing the micrometer, and he won’t be given the chance to prove that he didn’t do it, Strongin commits suicide by hanging himself from one of the belts that move the giant machines that do the factory’s work. (We never find out just what the factory makes, but as with Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, we really don’t need to know.)

Another Eisenstein technique that he used in Strike and his other silent films was “typage,” casting people in the principal roles who’d acted either slightly or not at all because they resembled, physically and/or in terms of their work experience, the people they were supposed to be playing. Most of his actors were either actual factory workers or members of his casts at the Proletkult Theatre. At the same time he reached back to American cinema, D. W. Griffith in particular, for the intercuts between the impoverished masses literally hanging on for dear life in the face of starvation and the 1-percenters living it up at a party and indulging themselves on champagne and caviar. Griffith had pioneered both this cinematic technique and the political message behind it in his 1912 short A Corner in Wheat, in which he cut back and forth between the speculators who have “cornered” – monopolized – the wheat market and the ordinary people who are suffering and starving from their actions. Like just about every other Soviet director in the 1920’s, Eisenstein did the same thing here, including heart-rending shots of one of the workers’ children begging his parents futilely for dinner and another tugging helplessly at a samovar (a Russian teapot). The workers have a secret printing press in a basement room of the factory which puts out leaflets urging the locals to support them; the bosses have goon squads and guns, as well as high-tech gadgets like a spy camera. (Charles suspected this was the first time one was ever shown in a film.) The bosses’ hired police use images shot with the spy camera to identify the leader of the workers’ struggle so they can gang up on him and beat him within an inch of his life, while a “woman of the streets” looks on and enjoys the spectacle with sadistic glee. Later on, as the workers’ common-sense demands for decent pay and an eight-hour day are summarily rejected, the bosses hire yet more goons, recruiting them from members of the Russian underground who literally live in holes in the ground. They’re ruled by the so-called “King and Queen of Thieves” (Boris Yurtsev and Yudif Glizer) and they add muscle and firepower to the bosses’ side of the equation.

Ultimately the strike is suppressed after members of the King and Queen of Thieves’ ragtag army burn down a state liquor store and the authorities blame the workers for it. After the workers survive having firehoses turned on them – the workers called the fire brigade hoping they’d put out the fire at the liquor store but instead they got high-powered hoses used as a weapon – the final scene shows members of the Russian military charging at the strikers, who are of course unarmed, and massacring them en masse. Strike is a major movie but also a quite depressing one, and seeing this over 100 years after it was made one of the most saddening things about it is how little the tactics the ruling classes use to repress social action against them and their privileges have changed over the years. I couldn’t watch the scenes of peaceful strikers being hosed down by the police without thinking of the similar scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when racist Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered fire hoses turned on peaceful civil-rights demonstrators. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Connor “a racist who prided himself on knowing how to handle the Negro and keep him in his ‘place’.” Of course I couldn’t also help but be reminded of the similar tactics used by Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents during their occupation of Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this year. Strike ends with a title urging audiences to “remember” the abuses strikers and activists in general suffered under the Czars – which is ironic given that the Soviet Union also repressed dissent in many ways similar to the ones in this movie, including summary executions, long stints in the Gulag, and the use of spies to report on any workers who tried to organize against the regime.

Confessions of a Co-Ed (Paramount, 1931)

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

After watching Strike on Sunday, May 31 my husband Charles and I wanted something at least a bit lighter, and we got it – sort of – with a film called Confessions of a Co-Ed, made by Paramount in 1931 which we discovered from a YouTube film clip featuring Bing Crosby and the other two members of the Rhythm Boys vocal trio, Harry Barris and Al Rinker (singer Mildred Bailey’s brother) performing live at a college party (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yib17tXwxj4). Confessions of a Co-Ed was co-directed by David Burton and Dudley Murphy; Burton is a name I’m not familiar with but I’m quite fond of Murphy, mainly for the three films he made featuring African-American performers: the shorts St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith and Black and Tan with Duke Ellington (both 1929) and the feature The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson, loosely based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. Murphy had also proven in his 1932 film The Sport Parade that he could make an effective movie without Black principals, though that was a “serious” exposé of the college athletic scandals of the early 1930’s the Marx Brothers vividly parodied in Horse Feathers (1932). One odd thing about Confessions of a Co-Ed is that there are no writing credits, either on the film itself or on its imdb.com page; I’m guessing Burton and Murphy also wrote the script, though it’s possible Paramount didn’t credit any writers because the conceit behind the film is it’s based on a diary written by its central character, Patricia Harper (Sylvia Sidney), during and after her days as a co-ed at “Stafford College” in California. (I suspect we were supposed to read it as the real-life Stanford University.) Patricia gets caught in a romantic triangle between fraternity brothers and roommates Dan Carter (Phillips Holmes) and Hal Evans (Norman Foster, who would later become a director and co-direct the 1942 thriller Journey into Fear with Orson Welles).

The romantic triangle turns into a romantic quadrilateral with the arrival of Peggy Wilson (Claudia Dell, who a year later played opposite Tom Mix in the first version of Destry Rides Again), Pat’s sorority sister and Dan’s former girlfriend. The scene with Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys occurs early on at a fraternity party at which various couples are dancing, and Bing is enough in the action that Dan addresses him by name and briefly interrupts his singing of “Out of Nowhere” while he’s dancing by. (Later the Rhythm Boys do a joint performance of the song “Ya Got Love.”) Peggy warns Pat off Dan by claiming that it’s wrong for a sorority sister to steal one of her sisters’ boyfriends, and Peggy also tells Pat about Dan’s various pickup lines, including, “You’re the first girl I’ve met whom I’d rather talk to than kiss.” Of course Pat fell for that one; it’s already been established that she’s a serious student when she was shown inside a chemistry lab after Hal, the son of a big-shot attorney who’s also a Stafford trustee (as was his father before him), pulled rank and got her into the class in the first place. (It was nice to see at least one scene acknowledging the “education” part of higher education; most collegiate movies from this period totally ignored it.) Pat is well enough aware that she’s not the equal of Peggy or some of the other, hotter sorority babes in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex; she even asks why Dan would be interested in her instead of one of the more conventionally attractive people. The plot heats up one night when Dan takes Peggy out to Lovers’ Lane in Hal’s car, which he's borrowed for the occasion. Of course by then any residual affection between Dan and Peggy has died out, at least on his part, and he’s just going through the motions.

The college administration has declared Lovers’ Lane off limits and there’s a police officer on a motorcycle ready to bust the errant students just for being there (though I couldn’t help but wonder what the charge would be). Dan and Peggy are the last ones to get away, the motorcycle cop gives chase, and just as I was beginning to wonder how the chase would end – either Dan would crash the car or the cop would crash his motorcycle – the anonymous writers made both happen. Dan’s car has a front-wheel blowout, which causes him to lose control and crash into the bike cop. Dan and Peggy desert the scene, but Peggy is caught when her vanity case is found in the wrecked car. Confronted by the college dean of women, she admits it was hers and is expelled from school and forced to work as a coffee-shop hostess to stay in town. Two months pass, and Pat, Dan, and the other remaining students take a ski trip to Lake Tahoe (the only clue we get as to the film’s overall geography), whereupon Dan and Pat sneak out for the night and manage to have sex in a deserted cabin usually occupied by the park ranger. Of course, this being a 1931 movie, this inevitably leads to the “inevitable pregnancy at a single contact” producer David O. Selznick liked to ridicule. Pat realizes she is pregnant, and Peggy, who’s briefly returned to the Stafford campus to pick up her belongings, Hal is still interested in marrying Pat, but Pat is not only not in love with Hal but she’s unable to tell Dan that she’s about to have his child because in the meantime Hal, out of jealousy over Pat’s attachment to Dan, has ratted out Dan to the college authorities and he’s been expelled, too. He gets away in a cab just before Pat goes out to confront him, and he spends the next three years in South America and returns home to find Pat and Hal in an uncertain marriage built on the lie that Pat’s child, a son played by veteran child actor Dickie Moore, is Hal’s. At Peggy’s urging, the night Dan left Pat had written Hal a letter explaining the whole situation; Pat asked Peggy to give Hal the letter but Peggy, after having told her to write it in the first place, ostentatiously burned it instead.

Three years later, Dan and Hal reconnect and Dan tells Hal he’s returned to the U.S. to pick up where he left off with the woman he really loves, and Hal of course has no idea that Dan’s dream girl is Hal’s wife. When Dan confronts Hal and demands that Hal give up Pat so they can get back together and their son can be raised by both his biological parents, Hal at first angrily refuses but then accepts the inevitable and Dan and Pat get back together and take the boy with them. The End. Confessions of a Co-Ed is a rather strange movie in that the first third is incredibly creatively directed; Burton, Murphy, and cinematographer Lee Garmes (who for some reason is credited as the film’s editor on its Wikipedia page; John Leipold, actually the film’s composer, is given the cinematography credit) keep the camera in almost constant motion as it dollies through the halls and pathways of the Stafford campus and discovers the characters along the way. Alas, the latter two-thirds turns conventional in terms of both the plot situations (let’s face it, even in the so-called “pre-Code” era there weren’t many alternatives as to how to present a situation in which a sympathetic character becomes pregnant without marriage) and the directorial style. I remember reading in James Curtiss’s biography of James Whale that in the early 1930’s there was a rather strange cold war in Hollywood between directors who wanted to do more moving-camera shots and cinematographers who rebelled because they took longer to light. Though Lee Garmes was known as one of the more creative and innovative cameramen in the business, it’s possible even he put his foot down and told Murphy and Burton to knock it off with the moving-camera shots. Confessions of a Co-Ed lurches to a conclusion that we’re supposed to read as a happy ending even though it seems like Pat is trading an affluent, albeit unhappy, existence for a more hand-to-mouth one.

Charles likes Phillips Holmes as an actor considerably more than I do (I think he finds him physically attractive), but like John Gilbert in his talkies Holmes seems to have only the barest idea of how to act with his voice, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. He didn’t even have the excuse of having started in silent films that Gilbert did, and after Holmes’s film career petered out in 1938 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force only to be killed when his transport plane crashed. I know Charles used to get irritated with me when I’d do thought experiments like this, but think of this movie with the young Cary Grant (who showed his mature acting chops just a year later with his first feature, This Is the Night, also for Paramount) in Holmes’s role. Sylvia Sidney went on to a long and storied career into the 1980’s, when she played the grandmother of a Gay AIDS patient in the first TV-movie about the syndrome, An Early Frost. But of all the people in this movie it was Bing Crosby who went on to the longest and most legendary career. Indeed, just a year after this film was made, Paramount would sign Crosby, whose Cremo Cigars radio show had made him a nationwide star, to a term contract that would last a quarter-century and make both of them tons of money. This morning both Charles and I were joking, “Who else recorded with both Paul Whiteman and David Bowie?” One thing that’s quite apparent in this film is how early in his life Crosby got male pattern baldness; one can see his high hairline in his closeups, and in later movies and most public appearances thereafter he’d wear a toupée (or, as he called it, his “brain doily”). Frank Capra recalled that in the two films he and Crosby made together, Riding High (1950) and Here Comes the Groom (1951), Crosby was insanely picky over his toupée and refused to emerge from his dressing room until he had it on just right.

House of Numbers (MGM, 1957)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 30) I watched an intriguing film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show hosted by Eddie Muller: House of Numbers (1957), a truly weird semi-noir that cast Jack Palance in a dual role as Bill and Arnie Judlow, and Barbara Lang (who got an “introducing” credit but was hardly heard from again; she got a supporting role in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl a year later but most of her subsequent credits were for series TV) as Arnie’s wife Ruth. The big gimmick is that Arnie, who was sentenced to a life term in San Quentin for beating up and nearly killing a man in a bar because he thought he was making a pass at Ruth, has hatched an elaborate escape plot that requires Bill’s participation. The gimmick is that Bill will break into San Quentin and take Arnie’s place while Arnie digs a tunnel to escape, and since the two look exactly alike (though Palance was a good enough actor he differentiated between the characters by giving Arnie more tousled hair and a different, more whispery voice), then can switch places inside the prison and no one, including the guards, will be the wiser. House of Numbers began as a novel, serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine before it was published as a book, by Jack Finney, who also wrote the source novel for Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was turned into a movie in 1957 by director Russell Rouse, who also co-wrote the script with Don M. Mankewicz. Rouse was always looking for “different” stories. In 1952 he’d made a film called The Thief, starring Ray Milland, and had made it without any dialogue, reverting not so much to the silent cinema as to what Sergei Eisenstein called “the sound film,” which would not use dialogue but would incorporate sound effects and recorded music to heighten the emotion. Though House of Numbers contains dialogue, it does have long wordless scenes featuring Jack Palance in one of his incarnations that are among the best parts of the film.

The film opens with a spectacular scene in which a prisoner pushes a guard off a balcony railing to the floor three stories below, and though we don’t know who these people are until much later, it turns out that the prisoner was Arnie Judlow and the guard was an anonymous drone who’s lying in a coma after the assault and it’s touch and go whether he’ll survive. Arnie is in a rush to escape after this incident because he knows that if the guard dies, it’ll mean an automatic death sentence for him. So he hatches the scheme in which his brother Bill and his wife Ruth will pose as a married couple and rent a house nearby San Quentin, only their next-door neighbor, Henry Nova (Harold J. Stone), is a guard at the prison and rather quickly figures it out when he catches Bill, impersonating Arnie, lighting a cigarette after a meal in the prison mess hall despite the prohibition against smoking, which Arnie would have known about but of which Bill was totally ignorant. Nova is actually the film’s most interesting character; he begins as just a hail-fellow-well-met sort of annoying neighbor, whom Bill and Ruth try to fend off because his innocent getting-to-know-you gestures might blow the whistle on the whole plot. Later he turns bad and attempts to blackmail Bill and Ruth after he figures out what they’re up to. House of Numbers, which my husband Charles and I had seen before in the 1990’s when I was still able to record TCM by the yard onto VHS tapes, is a quirky movie which seems to hold within it the seeds of a much stronger and more interesting film than the one we get. We’re told that Bill built an elaborate tree house for himself and Arnie when they were boys and Bill always wanted to be an architect but the family didn’t have the money to send both boys to college. So Arnie went instead, only to drop out after two years because he was good enough at boxing he wanted to try for a career as a professional prizefighter – only he flamed out after eight bouts, six of which he lost. That was one reason why he got a life sentence for a bar fight even though his opponent survived; since he’d fought professionally, the judge in his case ruled that his fists were “a deadly weapon” under the law.

We’re not sure just what Bill did for a living before Arnie recruited him to be his patsy, though it was presumably low-status enough that Bill was willing to give up whatever job he had to follow Arnie to California and join his escape plot. We also assume that Bill and Arnie are identical twins (after all, the same actor is playing both), though the dialogue tells us that Arnie is a year younger than Bill. According to Eddie Muller, House of Numbers was a major money-loser for MGM, though that’s hard to believe since the total budget was just over $1 million and it grossed $1.1 million. One of the things MGM did right was get permission to film the prison scenes inside the real San Quentin. The closing credits acknowledge California Corrections Department head Richard McGee and San Quentin warden Harley O. Teets (which sounds like a really silly name for someone in that job) for the rights to film there, while the on-screen warden is played by Edward Platt, billed third even though he’s barely in the movie until the end. Platt’s casting fits right in with his most famous roles as social worker Ray Framek in Rebel Without a Cause and the head of CONTROL in the TV James Bond spoof Get Smart. There’s also an incredible supporting performance by Timothy Carey as Arnie’s cellmate “Frenchy,” whose twitchy manner could well inspire someone to knock him off even if they hadn’t had to share the confined space of a prison cell with him. Eddie Muller also paid special tribute to the film’s veteran cinematographer, George Folsey, who’s part of the Academy’s Dishonor Roll in that he was nominated 13 times for Best Cinematography but never won a competitive Oscar (though he did win an Emmy Award for a TV special in 1958). He began as an errand boy for the Famous Players-Lasky studio (later Paramount) in 1913, got his first cinematography credit in 1919 for His Bridal Night, continued to shoot movies until 1972 (his iast credit is for Bone), and died in 1988.

Critics savaged House of Numbers on its initial release, calling the plot preposterous – which it is, though it’s also quite effectively done and it has an effective resolution when Warden Platt (we’re not told the character’s name, so I can call him that) flat-out tells Bill and Ruth that they need to turn Arnie in before he kills someone else and earns himself a trip to the gas chamber, and [spoiler alert!] Bill does so after realizing that Arnie has become a total psychopath and is likely to kill someone if he isn’t arrested and re-imprisoned first. Once again, there are hints of a more interesting movie here than the one that we actually see; I found myself expecting that Arnie would die in a shoot-out with the police and Bill and Ruth would end up together as a couple. It’s also an interesting story for Jack Finney in that, though it’s quite a different story from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whose first film adaptation, directed by Don Siegel in 1956, is my choice for the first science-fiction film noir), it likewise turns on the whole question of identity and how well we truly know our associates and friends.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 5 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired March 19, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, May 29) I watched an engaging if somewhat frustrating episode of Death in Paradise, the charming mystery series set on the fictional Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism board is one of the show’s producers because apparently they hope it will encourage people to vacation in Guadeloupe; I guess they’re thinking would-be tourists will fall for all the luscious scenery shot in vibrant color and ignore the fictional death toll). This episode, the fifth of season 14, showcases the cast as it stood at the time, with the white detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) having been replaced by a Black one, Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). This episode takes place at a soccer game between Sainte Marie and its hated rivals from a neighboring island, Sainte Antoine, and the principal victim (the only murder victim, in fact), is Ines Mercedes (Nkechi Simms), star goalie for the Sainte Antoine team. She’s found shot to death with a bullet wound in her thigh at the halfway point of the game after she’s played deliberately badly and been red-carded (ejected from the game) just 10 minutes in. Ines had pleaded with the coach of her team, Curtly Lewis (Patrick Regis, a strikingly handsome middle-aged Black man who had my Lust-O-Meter registering off the charts), not to have to play at all, but Lewis insisted because a scout for an American soccer program was in the audience and his multi-million dollar contract with the American college soccer industry was riding on the success of his team in general and Ines’s performance in particular.

Directed by Carys Lewis and written by Joe Ainsworth, the episode turned into an intriguing variant of the locked-room mystery, in which the three principal suspects – Coach Lewis; his daughter Brigitte (Chantelle Alie), the team’s second-string goalkeeper who got sidelined by her dad in favor of Ines; and Grace Devon (Rita Bernard-Shaw), a player on the Sainte Marie team who turns out to have been Ines’s Lesbian lover. Grace had smuggled a gun to Ines because she’d been receiving death-threat texts from an anonymous source who turned out to be Brigitte, who also [spoiler alert!] was her killer, though Ines was shot accidentally when she and Brigitte had a fight and – say it with me now – They Both Reached for the Gun. Ines was wounded in the thigh before the game but tried to bandage herself up anyway so she could play, only when she was red-carded and returned to the locker room the open would bled out and she ultimately died from a wound that otherwise wouldn’t have been fatal. Ainsworth burdened his script with way too many soap-operaish complications, including Emmanuel Warner (Bobby Gordon), an ex-boyfriend of detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), who broke up with her after four years because they couldn’t decide which island to live on and it seems to both her and us like he’s coming on to her again, only he isn’t because he’s got engaged to someone else (whom we never see). There’s also the continuing anxiety from Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), whose job is being ended in a week despite the efforts of various Sainte Marieians to circulate a petition to the colonial authorites to save his job. And there’s Mervin Wilson’s ongoing private investigation of the mysterious death of his mother in a boating “accident” a year or two before. My husband Charles, who walked in about three-fifths of the way through, was a bit confused as to exactly how the police solved the crime, and frankly I’m not sure either. But it was a reasonably entertaining episode despite the running plot lines that only got in the way and the continuing aggravation of the comic-relief character they introduced this season, the disarmingly bungling junior officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), whom I find incredibly annoying.

PBS FRONTLINE, May 26, 2026: "The War Cabinet" (WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2026)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“The powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” That’s how David Sanger of The New York Times summed up Donald Trump’s philosophy of the world and humanity’s role in it in an interview for a recent episode of PBS’s long-running TV documentary series Frontline, “The War Cabinet,” aired Tuesday, May 26. Directed and co-written by Michael Kirk, with the familiar dulcet tones of Will Lyman as narrator, “The War Cabinet” was an attempt to show how a man who sold himself during all three of his Presidential campaigns as a “peacemaker” morphed into an all-out war leader after he regained the White House in 2024.

Another reporter interviewed for the program, Eric Cortellessa of Time, said, “Part of the appeal with President Trump is that he is going to reshape the world in a way that outlasts him. That there will be a pre- and post-Trump world. Part of what he wants his legacy to be is to be able to say, ‘I did what nobody else could.’” I’d long suspected that Trump wants to be so profoundly transformative a U.S. President – more so than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan – that the history of America will be divided into B.T. and A.T.: “Before Trump” and “After Trump.” Now Cortellessa, who’s done at least two major interview features with Trump for Time, suggests that that ambition extends to the entire world.

“When I talk about [Trump’s] foreign policy doctrine, it’s the ‘me, me, me’ foreign policy doctrine,” said The New Yorker reporter and essayist Susan Glasser. “For Donald Trump there’s another factor, and that is the glory of Donald Trump. It seems so incredible that a great nation of 350 million people could actually be acting in the world because of the whims and interests of one guy who wants to pursue his self-aggrandizement.” Not that it hasn’t happened before. Do the names “Alexander the Great,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Joseph Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” and “Adolf Hitler” mean anything to you?

The idea that a President of the United States is comporting himself under the philosophy that “the powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must” is chilling enough, especially in this 250th anniversary year of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s exactly the opposite of the belief that “all men are created equal.” Even though when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he effectively meant, “All white male landowners are created equal,” it was still a philosophy that definitively rejected the idea that a handful of people are destined to rule, and everybody else is supposed to accept, meekly, humbly, and gratefully, whatever crumbs their overlords are willing to dole out to them.

The Frontline documentary began with a montage of clips from Trump’s three Presidential campaigns in which he repeatedly declared himself an anti-war candidate. That was the claim he made in his second-term inaugural address on January 20, 2025, in which he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.”

That got a lot of horselaughs from people all too aware that Trump’s whole strategy as a politician has been to seize on the divisions within the American people and exploit them for votes. Trump’s rhetoric began to change with a bizarre series of demands to acquire territory held by other countries. He insisted that Canada become “the 51st state.” He threatened to attack Panama in order to retake the Panama Canal, which had been U.S. territory until it was returned to Panama by a treaty negotiated by the Carter administration in 1978. Trump also threatened to attack a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Denmark, to seize control of Greenland.

And though thus far he hasn’t attacked Canada (except for starting a massive trade war with them), Panama, or Greenland, Trump has ordered bombing raids in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela. The Frontline show actually began with an account of Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on February 28, which went off the rails when Vice-President J. D. Vance upbraided Zelensky for not wearing a suit and tie to the meeting.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. Have you said ‘thank you’ once in this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said, ‘Thank you’? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country – and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”

“Vance brought that righteous indignation to that meeting,” Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative and one of a number of true Trump believers who agreed to participate in the Frontline telecast, said. “For a lot of the people on the so-called New Right, who are the national populist or the hard-core MAGA base or people who really want to see change in American foreign policy, and I’m one of them, it was the coup de grâce of a new generation of approach. In some ways it was the high-water mark of Vance’s political career to that point.”

The program also discussed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran for President against Trump in 2016. The Frontline documentary included some of the bizarre posturing between Rubio and Trump over the relative size of their “hands” (presumably a metaphor for a body part just below the waist) as well as a clip from a campaign debate in which Rubio endorsed George W. Bush’s war against Iraq – and Trump said, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Trump overwhelmingly defeated Rubio in the 2016 primaries, including in Rubio’s home state of Florida.

“I think Marco Rubio spent a couple years after that defeat wavering over what course to take,” said Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. “He believed Donald Trump was a dangerous force in the world. He believed what he was doing was antithetical to American interests. But then he looked at what happened to those Republicans who spoke out against Donald Trump and essentially ended their own political careers, and Marco Rubio’s political career – he didn’t want it to be over.”

So Rubio wrote a book, Decades of Decadence, in which he basically reinvented himself as a Trump-style phony “populist,” and by the 2024 Republican National Convention he was giving full-throated endorsements of Trump’s re-election as “the only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again.” Rubio’s conversion was so complete that long-term Trump ally Steve Bannon appeared on the Frontline show and said that when he read Decades of Decadence, he had a hard time believing Rubio wrote it.

A number of interviewees for the Frontline program made the point that Trump, during his first term, had had a number of Cabinet members and other high officials who tried to talk him out of some of his nastier initiatives. Trump had wanted to bomb Mexico to deal with the drug cartels, and to send U.S. military troops into the streets of American cities to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. In his second term, as Cortellessa of Time explained, his goal was “to remove people who saw themselves as guardrails, to eradicate any possibility of having people who were going to act as brakes on his desires.”

One of Trump’s key appointees in that campaign was Pete Hegseth, Iraq combat veteran and co-host of a weekend program on Fox News, whom Trump chose as his Secretary of Defense – or, as Trump and Hegseth have unilaterally renamed him, “Secretary of War.” The Frontline depiction of Hegseth began with a speech from one of Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings in which he demands fulsome praise from all his appointees. It’s a ritual Trump started in his first term and has continued in this one. “From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time, thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength,” Hegseth told Trump. “We’re in the strength business, that’s our job.”

Among Hegseth’s priorities was a housecleaning of America’s top military leadership, targeting anyone who’d been promoted by the Biden administration, anyone who wasn’t a white male, and, as Hegseth himself put it, “any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] woke shit.” Hegseth particularly targeted the Judge Advocates General (JAG’s). Among their responsibilities are to warn commanders whether the orders they are about to give are illegal.

In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth recalled one JAG officer told his company it was illegal to shoot somebody just because they were carrying a weapon. Once the lawyer walked away, Hegseth told his troops, “I will not allow this nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth called the entire U.S. officer corps to an in-person meeting at Quantico, Virginia and laid down the message: either get with the program of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” or leave.

The new Trump doctrine would face its first test in dealing with the Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. The Houthis were attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea, and Trump’s war Cabinet called a remote meeting to discuss what to do about it. Amazingly, they not only used a commercial messaging app, Signal, they inadvertently invited a journalist, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, to join the chat. At first, Goldberg told Frontline, “I thought it was a disinformation operation or some elaborate spoof. … The senior-most officials of the United States government were using Signal to talk about upcoming bombing campaigns, and inadvertently invited a journalist. I’ve never been involved in anything this absurd or surreal.”

As a result, Goldberg ¬– and, ultimately, the entire world – got a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the current U.S. government decides issues of life and death. Vance was reticent about ordering a bomb strike against the Houthis, calling it a bailout of Europe since almost all the ships the Houthis had targeted were European. Hegseth was gung-ho to do it. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s most controversial aide and one who’s been a continuous part of both Trump Presidencies, entered the chat with the message, “The President was clear: green-light.” At that moment, all debate ceased and the conversation turned to planning the details of when and where the attacks would take place, itself a serious breach of security protocol.

After the attack, Trump, as is his wont, declared it a complete and total victory. “It’s not even close to true,” said Jamie McIntyre, reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner. “That war went on for 52 days. Achieved almost nothing, except the expenditure of billions of dollars. The Houthis are still there.” Meanwhile, Trump and his administration needed a scapegoat for the security breach of allowing a journalist onto a top-secret chat planning military actions, and they found him in National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Trump fired him and gave the post to Rubio, the first person since Henry Kissinger to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time.

“Donald Trump treats even the most senior officials of the U.S. government as courtiers,” Susan Glasser told Frontline. “It’s the sort of Trump 2.0 version of the adults in the room. People like [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio essentially have a sort of shoulder-shrugged, you know, ‘what-can-you-do’ kind of version of playing the adults in the room. Maybe they have different opinions than the president, but in the end they’re not going to really do anything to stop him from doing whatever he wants.”

Trump’s next attack on a foreign country came about in June 2025, two months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House to discuss a coordinated U.S./Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Rubio made statements to the effect that the U.S. would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Vance, who like Hegseth served in the Iraq war, said an attack on Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” But Trump went ahead and ordered the strikes anyway, then claimed they had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Right-wing activists like podcaster Steve Bannon and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills saw the parallels between Trump’s attack on Iran and George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – and they didn’t like them. Bannon said, “This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – you have to get it. So they understand one thing: They think the playbook works. This could suck us into a war that make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about a major country, an ancient civilization, 90 million people, the Persians. These are the same folks the Romans fought, and the Greeks.”

Another person within the Trump administration who argued against the attack on Iran was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted based on the intelligence agencies that reported to her that Iran was nowhere near developing either a nuclear weapon or the capability of delivering one. But after Israel launched the attack on Iran, and Trump joined in with American forces, he bluntly told a reporter who asked about Gabbard’s comment, “She’s wrong.” As a result, Gabbard became persona non grata in the Trump administration. Members of Trump’s staff joked that the initials of her title, “DNI,” now stood for “Do Not Invite,” as she was frozen out of key meetings. More recently, she has resigned, ostensibly to take care of her husband, diagnosed with advanced cancer.

Trump’s next aggressive campaign against another country’s leadership targeted Venezuela, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the Florida-born son of Cuban expatriates – heartily supported. “He has very strongly held beliefs, from a very young age, about left-leaning dictatorships in Latin America,” said Ashley Parker of The Atlantic. “And there is also a sense that if Venezuela can fall, and there can be regime change in Venezuela, then Cuba might be next.”

Knowing that Trump couldn’t care less about free and fair elections, either in Venezuela or in the U.S., in order to get Trump to authorize an attack on Venezuela he needed an ally. He found one in Stephen Miller, and the two decided to use drugs as the issue to persuade Trump to attack Venezuela, “They changed the argument to drugs – that was a big deal,” said American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “The president is undoubtedly prudish about drugs. He is a teetotaler himself. I think it’s a very underexplored element of his psyche. His older brother died of alcoholism. That was a richer vein to persuade the president.”

Trump began the campaign against Venezuela by ordering air strikes against small boats in the open seas off the Venezuelan coast. The claim was that the boats were being used to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S., even though Venezuela does not produce fentanyl at all. Not only did they target the boats and destroy them, Trump posted on his Truth Social Web site, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. Beware!” Eventually the boat strikes killed 110 civilians, including two sailors who were the victims of a so-called “second tap” attack, illegal under international law because once you have rendered your enemies helpless, you’re supposed to take them alive.

When Venezuelan President Maduro continued to defy Trump – even mocking him by dancing at a rally the way Trump does – Trump ordered a U.S. ground invasion of Venezuela to capture Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for a so-called “trial” on drug charges. Rubio was hoping that the successful capture of Maduro would restore democracy to Venezuela. Trump wanted no such thing; instead he allowed Delci Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice-president, to take formal control of the country on condition that she sign over Venezuela’s vast oil resources to U.S. companies. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said of Venezuela’s oil industry, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will be paid for by the oil companies directly.”

“If I were Marco Rubio, I would be deeply pained and distressed by the course of events in Venezuela,” said Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. “You have to wonder what rationalizations he’s telling himself to justify what’s just happened. He’s finally now gotten the results he wants in removing Maduro from power, but none of the reasons why he believes Maduro should be removed from power are actually being respected on the merits. The Maduro regime persists. There’s this explicit claim made about the value of extracting oil from the country. You basically have now the [same] Chavista regime in power in Venezuela, but answering to the Americans. I mean, it’s a pretty tangled situation for somebody like Rubio, on the ideological merits, to defend.”

New Yorker and former New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins believes that the quick and easy success in Venezuela emboldened Trump to do another all-out assault on Iran, either at Netanyahu’s behest or with his help. “Trump is on a roll, and I think he knows he’s on a roll. He believes he’s on a roll,” Filkins told Frontline. “I think the Venezuela operation emboldened Trump to believe that he could do these very effective one-shot missions. Go in, do what you need to do, destroy what you need to destroy, get out, done. No consequences.”

“One factor that people don’t talk about enough is luck,” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic told Frontline. “So far Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people in the history of the planet. He sends American troops into the middle of Venezuela. Pulls it off. He practically destroys the Iranian nuclear program without losing a plane or a pilot. Luck is a factor, and momentum is a factor in all this. It’s luck, it’s roll of the dice, it’s the pure expression of power.”

In February 2026 Netanyahu came to the White House for another visit with Trump. This time there was no official ceremony, no joint press conference, no fanfare. This was when Netanyahu allegedly talked Trump into an all-out air campaign against Iran involving killing the long-time Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to American Conservative editor Curt Mills, “Netanyahu is pretty canny at saying, ‘You’ll be one of the great presidents. You’ll be like Reagan or Lincoln or Roosevelt if you do something substantial. No other president has been able to handle the Iran portfolio – Carter, Reagan, H.W., Clinton, Obama, W., Biden. And you can just solve it.’”

Instead Trump’s war against Iran – launched without any Congressional approval, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which states only Congress can start a war – has lasted four months so far and produced exactly the sort of quagmire Trump used to criticize George W. Bush for getting us into in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also upended the global economy and raised U.S. gasoline prices by 50 percent. And it has sent Trump’s already negative poll numbers into dismal territory, with just 33 to 37 percent of Americans surveyed saying they approve of the job Trump is doing.

Not that Trump really cares about all that. It’s become clear that Trump has no intention of allowing himself or the Republican Congress ever to be voted out of power. His total dominance of the Republican primary electorate has enabled him to destroy the political careers of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) as well as Congressmember Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). These, along with the other metaphorical trophy heads on Trump’s wall – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and many others – successfully intimidate any Republicans in either house of Congress who might otherwise stand up to him.

Trump has also launched an aggressive campaign to redraw Congressional districts to make sure Republicans keep their House majority in 2026 despite the growing unpopularity of their policies. He was aided in this by the Right-wing revolutionary (often mistakenly called “conservative”) majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May hammered the final nails into the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Trump is on a roll to make sure not only that he transforms the American Republic into the American Empire, but that he does so without any chance of being reversed, either in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 Presidential election. Either he will declare an “emergency” that allegedly requires him to suspend the 2028 election and remain in power indefinitely, or he will run what the Latin Americans call an imposición candidate: a totally loyal stooge who will allow him to maintain effective control of the U.S. government even though he won’t technically hold the title, “President of the United States of America.”