A Modern Musketeer (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, Artcraft Pictures, 1917)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 14) Turner Classic Movies showed on its “Silent Sunday Nights” feature a film I’d long been curious about: A Modern Musketeer, made in 1917 by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. after he’d only been in Hollywood for two years. In that time he’d acquired such a following that when he told Adolph Zukor at Paramount that he wanted to film E. P. Lyle’s short story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” and he wanted to shoot the second half of it on location at the Grand Canyon, he got the green light without any apparent difficulty. Made by the Douglas Fairbanks Picture Company and released through Paramount’s higher-end label, Artcraft Pictures (which would also release the films of Fairbanks’s wife-to-be, Mary Pickford), A Modern Musketeer was directed by Allan Dwan (the fifth of his 11 films with Fairbanks) and also written and edited by him. The film actually starts with an elaborate prologue showing Fairbanks playing D’Artagnan, and it’s clear that playing this sequence gave Fairbanks the idea to make a full-fledged adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers, which he would do four years later and definitively transition his career from modern-dressed romantic comedies to costumed period pieces. Once the dry run is out of the way, Fairbanks’s modern-day character is revealed as Ned Thacker, a young man from Kansas who’s obsessed with D’Artagnan and the whole mythos of The Three Musketeers. A later flashback sequence explains why: Ned’s mother (Edythe Chapman) was reading the novel incessantly while she was pregnant with him, and we’re supposed to assume that her obsession with Dumas penetrated the womb and got transmitted to her as-yet unborn baby. When Ned grows up he lasts six months at college (an intertitle tells us “he finished four years of college in six months … by request”) and gets into a lot of trouble, as when he pulls on an older man on a trolley and demands he give up his seat for two women. The man turns out to be the town police chief and Ned ends up serving a brief sentence in jail. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge (Kathleen Kirkham) is deeply in debt and decides she can get out of it by essentially selling her daughter Elsie (Marjorie Daw) to Forrest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), “the richest man in Yonkers.” Forrest suggests that Elsie and her mother take a road trip in Forrest’s chauffeur-driven car, while Thacker’s father sends him out of town by giving him a car (a Model T Ford, of course!) the way D’Artagnan’s father gave him a horse. The two cars meet in Arizona, where Forrest’s car stalls out at the edge of a precipice and Ned is quite taken with the chauffeur because he’s from France, the country of which Ned dreams.

Of course Ned is also quite taken with Elsie Dodge, but he’s got at least two rivals for her. One is Forrest Vandeteer and the other is Chin-de-dah (Frank Campeau), a Native chief who lives in one of the stone dwellings built into the side of the Grand Canyon and offers refuge to various outlaws and crooks. Among the residents of his compound are James Brown (Tully Marshall) and an unidentified bandit (Jim Mason). Surprisingly, especially since Tully Marshall (best known for his creepy villain roles in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly) is playing him, James Brown turns out to be a sympathetic character, a man who was swindled out of a fortune and who became an outlaw only when his family accused him of being the swindler. Another surprise is that midway through the film, Mrs. Dodge has an attack of conscience and realizes that she shouldn’t essentially sell her daughter to the rich guy but should let her pair up with Ned instead. Of course Chin-de-dah wants to kidnap Elsie and turn her into his sex slave – and we get a flashback sequence that shows what happened to the last woman he kidnapped for that purpose: she got a knife and used it to commit suicide. It’s obvious what’s going to happen: Ned is going to rescue Elsie from Chin-de-dah and also gallantly save the life of Forrest, who ends up dangling over a gorge on a rope that Ned pulls up to rescue him. Thereby Ned will fulfill his lifelong ambition of being a real-life D’Artagnan. I liked the first half of A Modern Musketeer a lot better than the second. Fairbanks designed his films largely to show off his athletic skills, including elaborate “trajectory” gags that reminded me of Buster Keaton. (Later I recalled that Keaton’s first feature, The Saphead, had been based on a play Fairbanks had performed on the Broadway stage before entering films. So the similarities between them are not accidental.) The second half is considerably less interesting, despite the stunning Grand Canyon scenery which must have wowed movie audiences in 1917. One of my problems with the film is the frankly racist depiction of Native Americans, particularly the whole idea that the chief is willing to kidnap and enslave a white woman simply because he's bored with the Native women available to him more or less consensually. The action scenes are also surprisingly dull, especially by comparison with what Fairbanks and Dwan would achieve just five years later in their joint masterpiece, Robin Hood (1922). They’re shot with the camera miles away and little suspense editing. A Modern Musketeer is an O.K. film that obviously delivered the goods for its 1917 audiences, and it’s a welcome preservation today (the existing print was restored by the Danish Film Archive, which preserved a surprising number of silent films that would have otherwise been lost, and outfitted with a score in 2006 by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra that was O.K.; I’m surprised they didn’t use Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite for some of the underscoring, but I believe that would still have been under copyright protection in 2006) but an acceptable entertainment rather than a truly great film.

Somewhat Secret (MGM, 1939)

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

After A Modern Musketeer on June 14 Turner Classic Movies squeezed in a quite charming half-hour 1939 short called Somewhat Secret, directed by Sammy Lee (one of the relatively unimaginative dance directors hired by the studios en masse during the early sound era that lost their gigs when Busby Berkeley arrived) from a script by Richard English (“original” story), Julian Hochfelder, and Mort Greene (screenplay). It’s a satire on the attitude of 1930’s elders towards swing music, which they argue is corrupting the youth of America and undermining their morals. (That’s what older people have had to say about every sort of music young folks like, from 1920’s jazz to modern-day hip-hop. Indeed, when I read Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations I was surprised to read that when he was growing up in Germany in the 1890’s there was a similar generation gap in musical tastes over Wagner, whom the young people liked and their parents couldn’t stand.) It takes place at the Dimsdale Hall Finishing School, where assistant dean Emily Godsall (Mary Howard) is giving a lecture telling the women students at Dimsdale that anyone caught listening to swing music will be disciplined for it. Emily is in love with the school’s chemistry professor, Benjamin Barnes (Tom Collins, who’s first shown wearing one of the most blatantly fake moustaches and beards in movie history, though eventually we learn why it’s so fake), who also doubles as the school’s music director and plays piano while Emily sings a sappy song called “You and I Were Made for Love.” Needless to say, the students, led by “Alice, the Tattletale” (Mary Bovard), have no intention of obeying Emily’s anti-swing edicts; they’ve already discovered an off-campus boîte called “Nick’s Nook” where a jukebox blasts away with swing, and they’re laying down plans to escape the campus and go to a major swing festival at the “Billion Dollar Pier” in Atlantic City. (There really was a big ballroom in Atlantic City called the Million Dollar Pier.)

Two gangster types lay in wait outside the Dimsdale campus one night; one of them (Billy Wayne) carries a violin case and we instantly assume it’s concealing a submachine gun, while the other (Benny Rubin) is armed with a pair of drumsticks and hammers away at any available surface. It turns out they aren’t crooks, though; they’re members of a major big band called the “Swingopators” and they’re at Dimsdale to kidnap their former pianist, Benny “Barrelhouse” Barnes, to reunite the Swingopators for the big Atlantic City gig. It turns out Barnes fled the band after an altercation in which he struck one of the band’s piccolo players and thought he had killed him, but when the two interlopers assure Barnes that the man survived and therefore he isn’t facing a murder rap, he agrees to rejoin. That means he blows off the engagement party at which Emily planned to announce that she and that nice young chemistry teacher (who’s shown in a sequence of him frantically pouring chemicals out of one container into another in a way that makes it look like he’s about to construct the Frankenstein Monster) are to be married. Emily traces Barnes to Nick’s Nook and then to Atlantic City, where to absolutely no one’s surprise she finds herself actually liking swing, tapping her feet to the music and then sort-of dancing to it. She realizes that the band’s pianist is her fiancé when a vandal draws a fake beard on the poster advertising him and she herself supplies the moustache and Harold Lloyd-style glasses he wore on campus at Dimsdale. Though I’m surprised the writers missed the gimmick of having Elsie sing a swing song herself at the finish, Somewhat Secret is still an imaginative little movie that at once acknowledges the clichés and plays fast and loose with them.

Blackout, a.k.a. Murder by Proxy (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” episode, a really quirky 1954 film alternately called Murder by Proxy in its native Great Britain and Blackout in the U.S. Like Four-Sided Triangle and “X” the Unknown, which Charles and I had watched recently, it was made under a co-production deal between Robert Lippert’s company in the U.S. and Exclusive Films (which both before and after this was known as Hammer Films, and within a few years would make The Curse of Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula and thereby take over from Universal as the world’s main purveyor of Gothic horror on film) in the U.K. The deal was that Hammer would supply the production staff and supporting actors, while Lippert would offer American stars to boost the films’ appeal to U.S. audiences. Alas, Lippert couldn’t afford the biggest names in Hollywood, so he had to settle for Dane Clark, who’d had a fair-to-middling career as a Warner Bros. contract star (he was Jewish and his real name was Bernard Zanville, but as they had previously with Edward G. Robinson nèe Emmanuel Goldenberg and John Garfield nèe Julius Garfinkel, Warners gave him an Anglo name). Warners were hoping that Clark could take over from Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, but he was too much a thug type for that to work. Blackout was based on a novel by Helen Nielsen, who would never again have a novel directly adapted to the screen, though she would sell a number of scripts to TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason. Blackout is a convoluted story in which a former U.S. World War II soldier named Casimir (Dane Clark) has rechristened himself “Casey Morrow” and is bumming around Europe. He's in London at a swanky nightclub (as swanky as a Hammer production budget could make it, anyway) listening to British jazz singer Cleo Laine do a quite nice version of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Then an electrifying-looking woman named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee, who was just 19 when she made this; she worked steadily for the next six years until dying suddenly in an auto accident at age 25) sidles up to his table and offers to pay for his drinks. Eventually she offers him 500 pounds if he’ll marry her that very night, and he accepts, only to wake up the next morning with blood on his overcoat and no memory of what happened to him the night before.

He awakens in a flat occupied by Phyllis’s slightly older roommate Margaret “Maggie” Doone (Eleanor Summerfield), where the first thing he sees is a large portrait Maggie has painted of Phyllis. With only the vaguest memories of what happened to him the night before, Casey goes out for a walk and runs into a news agent selling copies of the Daily Mail, whose lead story is of the sudden murder of Phyllis’s father that night. At Maggie’s urging, Casey starts investigating the case himself, fearful that if he goes to the police he’ll be arrested for the crime, especially since with her dad and mom having separated, Phyllis will be next in line to inherit her dad’s fortune and therefore Casey will have had an enormous motive for knocking him off. Casey learns that Phyllis was engaged to marry the Brunner family’s lawyer, Lance Gordon (Andrew Osborn), who turns out to be an egotistical creep. He also finds out from Phyllis’s mother Alicia (Betty Ann Davies) that Gordon was scamming the family by soliciting phony “contributions” to an alleged charity called “Green Pastures.” This was supposedly an outreach to set up homes for children left orphaned by World War II, but it was really a scam sucking money from the Brunner family fortune to buy houses that didn’t exist. At one point after visiting Gordon, Casey is tailed by the driver of another car who attempts to run him down. Later he traces the recipient of the check Alicia Brunner cut to buy the phony property for “Green Pastures” and it’s Victor Vanno (Harold Lang), who was also Travis, the driver who tried to kill Casey earlier. There are three main suspects, including Phyllis herself; attorney Gordon; and the actual killer [spoiler alert!], Alicia Brunner, who knocked off her husband because he was allowing Gordon to swindle him out of large chunks of the family fortune. Also Phyllis at first insists that she married Casey, then denies it, then acknowledges it again after her mom has been popped for murdering her dad. The film ends with Casey and Phyllis committing to each other and deciding to make their marriage work, which will be a lot easier than it would be otherwise because with her father dead and her mother on the way to the gallows for killing him, Phyllis is going to inherit the Brunner fortune.

“Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller classified Blackout as part of a sub-genre called “blackout noir,” of which the most famous examples are Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) and Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), both made at Universal in the U.S. and both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Black Angel is arguably the most intriguing example of the genre because the lead character, Dan Duryea, is suspected of murder, works with his wife (June Vincent) to clear himself, and ultimately realizes that he’s the killer after all. Muller also faulted the script of Blackout by Richard H. Landau for containing too many extended passages of expository dialogue which the director, Terence Fisher (who’d later work on most of Hammer’s horrors), shot quickly and in single takes. He pointed out one scene in which Dane Clark blew his line and said, “I know,” when he was supposed to say, “You know,” then corrected himself immediately – and Fisher left it in the final cut. He also mentioned the problems the film’s script supervisor (they used to be called “script girls” and now are called “continuity people,” and their job is to make sure that scenes match and you don’t see an actor with a hat on in one shot and without it in another shot supposedly taking place at the same time), Renée Glynne, had with Belinda Lee. As the Wikipedia page on the film explains, “Script supervisor Renee Glynne later recalled that Belinda Lee ‘was still very inexperienced at that time and I had to watch her quite carefully. She’d cross her legs the wrong way or turn her head at the wrong moment or come out with the wrong line, so I'd have to correct her and try to help her out. Dane [Clark] obviously fancied her and got very cross with my professional interference. He got quite nasty and was actually pushing me away from her.’ Glynne says she had to take medication ‘in order to survive the rest of the film. After that I had to give all my instructions to him through the director, Terry Fisher ... after some shots he'd have to put his head under cold water because he was so enraged that I was even there. Eventually he realized how silly it all was and went down on his knees, tears streaming down his face, begging me to forgive him. But I still asked [Hammer producer] Tony Hinds to take me off the next film he was in.’” Blackout a.k.a. Murder by Proxy is only tangentially a film noir, and the ending is really a cheat; Eddie Muller joked about how unlikely it seemed that Casey and Phyllis would be able to make their marriage work, and I had thought it would end with Casey and Maggie getting together because she seemed like a much better, more down-to-earth match for him even though they would have both been broke financially.

A Night to Remember (The Rank Organisation, 1958)

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

Last night (Wednesday, June 10) my husband Charles and I watched the 1958 British film A Night to Remember on Turner Classic Movies as part of a night of films about both real and fictional shipwrecks. We’d watched the film together in the late 1990’s on a pre-recorded VHS tape in the wake of the mega-success of James Cameron’s Titanic, and I had quickly decided it was my all-time favorite movie about the Titanic disaster. My main reason was it had no fictional characters: everyone in the dramatis personae had actually lived and been involved with the Titanic as either a crew member or passenger, one of the dignitaries wishing it good luck as it set off on its first (and, as it turned out, last) voyage, or a crew member on the two ships in the vicinity of the Titanic as it sank on April 15, 1912: the Californian (which ignored Titanic’s distress calls for reasons that became important plot points in the movie) and the Carpathia (which actually rescued most of the Titanic’s survivors). A Night to Remember began as a book on the Titanic disaster by Walter Lord, and the screenplay for the film was by Eric Ambler – a surprising name because he was usually known for fictional crime stories and spy thrillers. (It would have been like James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, writing a nonfiction book about the Bermuda Triangle.) The director was Roy Ward Baker (credited as just Roy Baker), who six years earlier had made the 1952 Hollywood film Don’t Bother to Knock starring Marilyn Monroe (in her first top-billed role) as a psychotic babysitter (and reportedly Monroe had been freaked out by being directed by a man with her real last name in a tale about childhood and the loss of innocence). There were some other prestigious names behind the camera: the cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, who a decade later would shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey for Stanley Kubrick; and the art director was Alex Vetchinsky, who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on his 1938 British film The Lady Vanishes. The cast was quite large, and virtually all of it was drawn from that remarkable pool of British (and British-trained) character actors.

Kenneth More, who a year later would star in the 1959 remake of Hitchcock’s 1935 masterpiece The 39 Steps, played the lead role of Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on board the Titanic and the highest-ranking officer to survive the disaster. The real Lightoller led a quite interesting and movie-worthy life (you should look him up on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lightoller) and was already 38 years old when he set sail on the Titanic on April 10, 1912. (Later, in retirement, he would sail his private yacht across the English Channel in 1940 as a volunteer in the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, and the movie Dunkirk includes a character based on him.) More turns in an authoritative performance even though, like the real Lightoller, he gets quite annoying when he rigidly enforces the women-and-children-first policy to determine who gets on the lifeboats in spite of the pleas of couples not to be separated from each other or their kids. Incidentally the real Lightoller preferred to be addressed by his middle name, Herbert, or his nickname, “Lights.” A Night to Remember is a well-crafted movie, beautifully directed by Baker and photographed by Unsworth in high-contrast black-and-white (it’s one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies needed color) and vividly acted. I especially liked Tucker McGuire as the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, and as an American (born in Winchester, Virginia on January 29, 1913) she had no problem with the character’s U.S. accent. She certainly holds her own against the formidable competition of Debbie Reynolds (in The Unsinkable Molly Brown on both stage and film) and Kathy Bates (in James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic), especially when she grabs command of her lifeboat from the nominal sailor who’s supposed to be running it and orders her crewwomen to row in the direction of other survivors.

Some of this film’s footage comes not only from surviving newsreel clips of the actual Titanic setting off on its maiden voyage but the 1943 German film Titanic, one of the most fascinating movies about the disaster because it ran headlong into political winds from its Nazi sponsors. The original director of the 1943 Titanic, Herbert Selpin, was arrested during the production for allegedly having made disparaging comments about the ability of Germany to win the war, and he was ultimately found hanging in his cell while his replacement director, Werner Klingler, finished the film but was not credited. Selpin and his co-writer, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius, had concocted a fictional German officer, Petersen (Hans Nielsen), to serve aboard the Titanic and try to talk the British officers out of steaming full speed ahead through the ice fields, and when Joseph Goebbels green-lighted this film it’s obvious he wasn’t seeing beyond “German good – British bad.” In fact, as Charles and I realized years ago when we watched the Kino DVD of Titanic, it’s about a hierarchical organization which puts demands on people that border on the insane and lead to a predictable catastrophe. Once Goebbels watched the finished film he insisted that it only be released in occupied France, not Germany itself; it wasn’t released in Germany until 1949, well after the war, when the Allied occupiers were desperate to find any German-language films that didn’t carry too much of the taint of Nazism. But the German Titanic was the biggest-budgeted film made in Germany to that date, and four clips from it were used in A Night to Remember: two of the Titanic sailing in calm waters before the catastrophe, and two of the engine room flooding after the collision.

It’s interesting to note that Ambler’s script for the film contains various legends about the Titanic that have since been debunked. Modern research notes that the Titanic may have been doomed from the start by its very size; when it was launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast where it was built (and where James Cameron discovered the original plans and used them to construct the replica Titanic for his 1997 film), the undertow from it pulled the docking pier close to it. This suggests that the iceberg that caused the Titanic to sink might also have been pulled close to it by the draft of the ship (as the mine that sank the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic, when it was being used as a hospital ship in December 1916 off the coast of Turkey during World War I). It’s also been guessed that the iceberg (which is really just a giant ice cube in the middle of the sea) had a spur on it that sliced open the ship’s watertight compartments (which were supposed to render it “unsinkable”) like a can opener. One thing we do know about the Titanic that wasn’t known then was that the ship actually broke in two as it sank. Some survivors said it had, some said it hadn’t, and here (as in all previous films about the Titanic) it sinks in one piece. It wasn’t until 1985, when improvements in diving equipment, including unmanned submersible craft that allow objects under thousands of feet of water to be photographed, had been made, that the wreckage of the Titanic was photographed for the first time. The footage confirmed that the Titanic had indeed broken in two as it sank, and Cameron became the first director of a dramatic film about the Titanic to incorporate that information. Another myth about the Titanic that this film perpetuated was that the last song heard aboard the vessel as it sank was the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” This was disconfirmed partly from the recollections of survivors, who named the last song as a French piece called “Autumn Dream,” and partly from a 1909 magazine interview with the man who became bandmaster for the Titanic. He told the interviewer that he’d never play a depressing song during a shipwreck, but would keep the music lively to keep up the passengers’ spirits. (Alas, even James Cameron couldn’t resist putting “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on his soundtrack as the last song the Titanic passengers heard before it sank.)

This time around Charles faulted the film for the cleanliness of the engine room, which reminded me of Duke Ellington’s 1935 short film Symphony in Black, with its stokers shoveling coal into a boiler from a perfectly clean, pristine soundstage floor. Overall, though, both of us liked the movie and its ability to generate enough drama to hold the interest with just the real people who’d been on board the Titanic instead of dragging in fictional characters (as the Titanic films of 1943, 1953, and 1997 did; I’ll never forget when Charles and I watched the 1953 20th Century-Fox Titanic and he was so appalled when Robert Wagner started to sing the song “Vive la Compagnie!” he turned to me and said, “I’m rooting for the iceberg”). Incidentally this version of A Night to Remember underwent a major restoration job courtesy of ITV, Britain’s private commercial TV channel, and while I hadn’t found anything particularly wrong with the picture quality the last time I’d seen it, the film’s visual appeal was excellent and really did justice to the chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography and the whole approach to the film. Though it didn’t go anywhere nearly as far as the 1943 German Titanic (which is actually about the stock speculation White Star Line CEO J. Bruce Ismay was doing in connection with the ship’s maiden voyage), there are certainly anti-rich and anti-capitalist elements in A Night to Remember, including the horrific scenes of steerage passengers being locked out of the upper decks and thereby being trapped like rats as they try to escape (one of them takes an ax to break apart the wood to which the metal gate is latched and is upbraided by a White Star sailor for destroying the line’s property) and the complaints of the upper-class passengers that all this bother about an iceberg and an evacuation is totally spoiling their lunches, tea breaks, and other diversions. There’s also a great running gag about a card sharp who inveigled his fellow passengers into a high-stakes poker game that goes on until literally the last minute; a large metal covered food tray that slides around in the ship’s evacuated restaurant; and the final desperation as many passengers literally jump off what’s left of the ship in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves despite the frigid cold of the Arctic waters. A Night to Remember is the Titanic movie to watch if you’re going to see just one (though I’d also recommend the German Titanic of 1943 as well as James Cameron’s, which for all its bits of silliness does have some first-rate elements; I especially liked Gloria Stuart, who played the old version of Kate Winslet’s character and in a letter to the Los Angeles Times acclaimed Cameron one of the three best directors she’d ever worked for, alongside James Whale and John Ford).

Bubbles (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1930)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 7) my husband Charles and I watched a 1930 Warner Bros. short called Bubbles that was filmed in two-strip Technicolor but now only exists in black-and-white. What makes this one interesting is it was one of three short films made featuring Judy Garland (though she was still using her birth name, Frances Gumm), and apparently the only one that survives with both picture and sound intact. The first one, The Big Revue of 1929, is totally lost, and for the second, Blue Butterfly, we have the Vitaphone soundtrack record but not the film itself. In Bubbles Judy sang a song called “The Land of Let’s Pretend,” and she’s not very good: her voice was still that of a little girl and her intonation was all over the place. I was amused that one of the other songs in the film contained the word “rainbow,” since even though Judy (or Frances) didn’t sing it here the word “rainbow” would become crucial to her later career. Not only did she sing “Over the Rainbow” in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, two years later MGM dredged up the 1920’s song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” for her and also commissioned a song for her called “The End of the Rainbow” (you get the idea?). Somehow in the five years between 1930 and 1935, for which we have the next surviving recording of Judy’s voice – a broadcast aircheck of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” from a show in which the announcer broke the news that Judy had just signed a seven-year contract with MGM – her voice developed into that of a fully mature woman and gained the artistry and precision that would ultimately make her a star, albeit a highly troubled one.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 6 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe; TV series episode, aired March 26, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, June 5) I watched another Death in Paradise episode, number six of season 14, which was ballyhooed as a story about the dangers of Internet dating. It’s actually about a rather silly Englishwoman, Danielle Bailey (Charlotte Spencer), who flies out to the Caribbean island of Sainte Marie (“played” by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose tourism board co-produces the show, obviously thinking that the gorgeous island scenery depicted in vivid color will attract visitors despite the morbid nature of the plots) to meet a man she’s been in an online relationship with for a month or so but hasn’t previously met. She knows the man as “Kristion Butler” and he’s a tall, strikingly handsome Black man (Danielle herself is white). Unfortunately, when she flies in on the private plane that’s the only way you can get onto or off of Sainte Marie by air (the island isn’t big enough for anything bigger than a general-aviation airport) and calls Kristion to let him know she’s arrived, she watches a scene on her video phone in which he’s accosted and attacked by an unknown male assailant. She goes out to his home, a villa on the outskirts of the island, and finds him dead. The police have four suspects for the murder: Danielle herself; her white Anglo ex-boyfriend Gary Baines (Alexander Cobb), who was convinced that “Kristion” was a scam artist out to rip her off financially; Delmar Lloyd (Tony Marshall), the driver who picked her up at the airport and was there when she got the fatal phone call; and Kelly Herbert (Tala Gouveia), one of “Kristion”’s former victims. It doesn’t take the police long enough to realize that “Kristion” was a professional con artist whose racket was seducing women online over long distances and scamming them out of their money, then dumping them after he’d milked them dry. The cops learn this when amongst his belongings they find five passports and five drivers’ licenses, all in different names but with his same photo on all of them, and also four cell phones, each of which has a texting history with all women as his recipients. They also learn that his real name is Adam Carter.

There’s a great scene in which Kelly Herbert pushes the unfunny “comic relief” character, Officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), off a pier as he’s trying to question her. Interspersed in all of this are two subplots, one about the continuing efforts of Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) to solve the mysterious disappearance and death of his mother; and another about Wilson’s immediate supervisor, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who’s being removed from that job by the governing authorities in Kingston, Jamaica and replaced by an insufferably snobbish and maddening young man, Sterling Fox (Trieve Blackwood-Cambridge). Ultimately the main intrigue is solved by writer James Hall in one of those absurdly contrived mystery resolutions that might have made Agatha Christie blush: it seems that the apparent murder scene Danielle saw on her phone was a staged video Adam Carter had created himself to convince his pigeons that he needed money immediately to pay off some particularly violent creditors. Adam was actually killed after Danielle saw the video on her phone, and the killer was [spoiler alert!] Delmar Lloyd, who was involved with Adam in a criminal scheme that gave him access to Adam’s considerable stash of rolls of large-denomination bills. Alas, Lloyd was ripping Adam off by substituting counterfeit money for Adam’s real deal (though how he made enough convincing counterfeit money to pull off the scheme, writer Hall never quite explained), and apparently it was to keep Adam from finding him out that Delmar determined to bring a pistol with a silencer to Adam’s villa (which, true to form, he merely rented even though he told his “pigeons” that he owned it) and kill him after he brought Danielle there while Danielle was still slowly making her way through Adam’s house before coming on his dead body. I had a hard time with the ending as well as the not particularly amusing confrontations between retiring Commissioner Patterson and his rather ludicrous replacement, who said he'd been sent out by the authorities in Kingston to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the Sainte Marie police department (he starts to sound like a Black version of Elon Musk after a while!), but this was still a fun show and worth watching if only for the gorgeous Caribbean scenery against whose backdrop the skullduggery takes place!

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).