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.”

37th Annual National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, National Park Service, Lockheed Martin, PBS, aired May 24, 2026)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 24) I watched the 37th annual Memorial Day “Concert” on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. featuring the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly – who’s been leading these productions since the founding conductor of the pops series of the National Symphony, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009. I used the quotes around the word “Concert” above because it’s less a concert and more a tribute to the heroism shown by various American servicemembers in the country’s wars. Most of the program consists of memoirs of actual servicemembers read aloud by actors, though some of the more recent authors are actually there “in the flesh” and are shown greeting the actors who read the memoirs they wrote. In previous years this format has occasionally become quite oppressive, but this year it seemed to blend together surprisingly well. The concert began with African-American country singer Mickey Guyton (and it’s a sign of our racial progress that “African-American country singer” is no longer a contradiction in terms: thank you, Charley Pride!) pouring her heart out into a spectacular rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after which Andy Grammer lowered the emotional temperature a bit but still excelled in a song called “Don’t Give Up on Me,” which he co-wrote (with Bram Inscore, Jake Torrey, and Sam Farrar) and sang in 2019 for a romantic drama film called Five Feet Apart. Then actor Noah Wylie came out for the first dramatic recitation of the evening, a bit of a memoir by Revolutionary War soldier Joseph Plumb Martin read over the U.S. Army Fife and Bugle Corps (did anyone know the U.S. Army still had a Fife and Bugle Corps?) playing “Yankee Doodle” and other Revolutionary War-era songs. After Laura Osnes did an O.K. version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (the 1833 song in which American writers audaciously took over the national anthem of our enemy, Great Britain, and turned it into our own) the show abruptly shifted forwards several generations. The next memoir was by a Pearl Harbor survivor named Chuck Kohler, read by actor Jonathan Banks (who, though far younger than Kohler, looked old and crusty enough to be believable as a Pearl Harbor survivor). The most interesting aspect of Kohler’s tale was that Pearl Harbor happened on a seemingly bucolic Sunday morning during which he decided to take it easy and read inside an office in one of the Navy buildings in Hawai’i. Suddenly he felt fragments of glass hit him on the back of the neck, his first intimation that the base was under air attack from dive bombers launched from Japanese aircraft carriers. There was a touching moment after the recitation in which the real Chuck Kohler met the actor who’d just played him on stage.

Then there came another song by an artist who somehow has evaded my attention even though he had his first record in 2004: Jamey Johnson. Johnson was born July 14, 1975 in Enterprise, Alabama and was influenced by Alan Jackson, whom he says was the first singer he saw in concert. After graduating from Jefferson Davis High School (that name says it all!) Johnson attended Jacksonville State University for two years before he dropped out to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve for eight years. During his stint in the Marines he started playing country music, and in 2000 he settled in Nashville, Tennessee to make a serious run at country stardom. After hooking up with veteran violinist Greg Perkins, whose credentials included stints with Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker, Johnson landed a recording contract in 2005 with a small label called BNA Records. He recorded a single called “The Dollar” that made it to number 14 on Billboard’s country charts and led to a full-length album, also called The Dollar. But when his second single, “Rebelicious,” failed to chart, BNA dropped him. After a four-year period during which he divorced his wife and wrote songs for other artists, he put out an album of his own called That Lonesome Song. At first he only released it online, but it attracted the attention of executives at Mercury Nashville, which issued it commercially and put him under contract. The first song Johnson played last night, “In Color,” was from That Lonesome Song and was co-written by Johnson, James Otto, and Lee Thomas Miller. It’s told from the point of view of a young man looking at old photos of his family in black-and-white, and his older relatives are saying, “You should have seen it in color!” It got a stunning staging on the Memorial Day Concert telecast: for the first chorus the image was kept in black-and-white, but when the chorus ended the screen erupted into full color. After Johnson’s song there was a tribute to the victims of World War II and then a brief appearance by a man who was identified as the last surviving recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Korean War (though I didn’t catch his name and when I went to search online I found that the last Korean Medal of Honor winner Google lists, Ralph Puckett, Jr., died in 2024). Then there was a brief “Why I Serve” segment featuring Matthew Mays explaining why he enlisted and a tribute to Viet Nam War veterans hosted by Jim Miner and Eric Castvo (and don’t hold me to the spelling of Eric’s last name, since I got it off my carelessly and hastily scribbled notes).

The next actual song on the concert was “Lift Me Up” by Blessing Offor, a Nigerian-born Christian singer/songwriter whose parents emigrated to Connecticut when he was six to get treatment for his glaucoma. He was born blind in one eye and with limited sight in the other, and took up music in his teen years. Offor was a contestant on the series The Voice in 2014 and his best-known song is called “Brighter Days,” written for an album in 2022 to promote the careers of artists with disabilities. After another “Why I Serve” segment by Mauricio Hidalgo, the show cut to a Nashville performance by Alan Jackson, who played his song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” a tribute to the survivors and victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thank goodness they programmed Jackson’s song, which asserts the power of love in the face of unspeakable evil, instead of the late Toby Keith’s bellicose “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” After that there was a tribute to a nurse who was working at the Pentagon that day, narrated by actress Melissa Leo. Then in honor of the 9/11 victims a woman played “Taps,” and I noticed she was playing it on a valved trumpet rather than a bugle (though I don’t recall seeing her actually use the valves). Then Jamey Johnson came back out on stage for another intensely emotional song, “Lead Me Home,” written by Randy Houser and Craig Monday for Johnson’s first album, The Dollar. Once again Johnson impressed me big-time; his voice has the same quiet intensity of Willie Nelson’s (with whom he’s collaborated), and YouTube features a live performance by Johnson at Nelson’s annual FarmAid concert in 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rbW8rbpQ9I&list=RD3rbW8rbpQ9I&start_radio=1). After more “Why I Serve” testimonials, Jack Everly and the National Symphony played the traditional medley of the Armed Forces service songs: the Coast Guard’s “Semper Paratus,” the Space Force’s whatever-it-is (the Space Force is the rump branch of the U.S. military created by Donald Trump through executive order in his first term even though it’s the authority of Congress to create new service branches), the Air Force’s “Wild Blue Yonder,” the Navy’s “Anchors Aweigh,” the Marines’ “Halls of Montezuma,” and the Army’s – well, its original title was “The Caisson Song” but it’s been decades since the Army actually used caissons (little wheeled trailers whose function was to transport artillery balls to the front), so the caissons have been omitted from the current lyric, much to my disappointment.

Following that there was an unwitting tribute to the success of current Defense Secretary (though he insists on being called “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth’s racist and sexist purge of the top ranks of the U.S. military. The seven members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were introduced – and they were all white men. When Hegseth took office after Donald Trump returned to the White House, he immediately fired the head of the Coast Guard because she was a woman and the chair of the Joint Chiefs because he was Black. By chance, Helene Cooper, military correspondent for The New York Times, had just appeared on the PBS news program Washington Week two days before and described Hegseth’s attitude towards women and people of color in the command and control structure of the U.S. military: “I remember one afternoon, these are the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I remember one afternoon standing at the end, because the press hallway, the old press hallway, was near there, and watching as each one Black officer after the other walked down that hallway, and I kept watching, each one pause when he got to Colin Powell. And there was like this moment where you stop, and you're like, oh, yes, and then you keep going. Because at that time, there had only been one Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it had been Colin Powell. And then Lloyd Austin came in. You had a Black Defense Secretary, and not soon after that, President Biden appointed C.Q. Brown as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and you had two Black men leading the military. And I remember a Black Marine saying to me, ‘This is never going to fly.’ And there was this belief that there's no way this military was ready to be led by, and it would've been the same way if you had been two women leading the military. It just wasn't ready for that. And I think what you're seeing in many ways with Pete Hegseth is sort of the embodiment of what – you know, what that Marine was afraid of.” The program introduced General Christopher J. Mahoney, current vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, who introduced the current chair, General Daniel Caine, for the brief obligatory speech on these occasions.

The program closed with Mickey Guyton singing “God Bless America,” and while these shows have a bit of the lumbering beast about them, this one I found unusually moving for the quality of the recitations as well as Jamey Johnson’s beautiful and heartfelt songs. One odd aspect to this program is that, for the second year in a row, Joe Mantegna bailed out on his usual co-hosting duties (with Gary Sinise) for health reasons. His explanation for missing the 2025 concert was an ear infection; this time he announced for the event and then cancelled at the last minute. His statement read, “I truly wish I could be there in person this year, but due to unforeseen circumstances, I need to remain in Los Angeles. I’m looking forward to joining the millions of Americans watching this Sunday’s concert on PBS and continuing to do everything I can to support this important event for years to come. The National Memorial Day Concert, and its mission of remembering those we’ve lost, honoring those who have served, and recognizing the sacrifices made by military families is something I will always hold close to my heart.” Instead Mary McCormick, an actress who became a particular favorite of mine after starring for four seasons (2008-2012) in a TV policier about the Witness Protection Program called In Plain Sight, stepped in as co-host with Sinise, and though she’s a bit more heavy-set than she was during the show’s run (but then think of how much I’ve changed physically in the last 15 years!), hers was a welcome presence and, of course, I wish the 78-year-old Mantegna all the best and hope to see him at the 2027 Memorial Day Concert.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (MGM, 1944)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 23) I watched an installment of Turner Classic Movies’ three-day program of war movies in honor of the Memorial Day holiday, which is officially commemorated tomorrow even though the actual date, May 30, is next Saturday. The film was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, an elaborate 1944 MGM movie based on the Doolittle Raid against Japan on April 18, 1942 in which 16 B-25 twin-engined Mitchell bombers dropped incendiaries on Tokyo, Yokohama, and two other cities on the main Japanese island of Honshu. Doolittle was played in the film by Spencer Tracy, though it was really just a supporting role and he agreed to be in the movie as a morale booster for the American war effort and to support the careers of the young actors actually playing the flight crews, notably pilot Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and gunner David Thatcher (Robert Walker). Lawson had actually co-written a memoir with pop journalist Bob Considine, also called Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was published in 1943 and served as the basis for the movie. The film was produced by Sam Zimbalist, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and written by future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. There are faint traces of Trumbo’s Leftist politics in the script, notably an interlude in which two of the characters express the since dashed hope that this will be the last war of all time. What’s most surprising about Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo today is how sentimental much of it is; Lawson is married to Ellen (Phyllis Thaxter), she’s carrying his child, and the first hour or so of the movie deals largely with their relationship and her insistence that he has to return from the secret combat mission alive so their kid can have two parents. Parallel to this domestic love story is a series of briefings from Doolittle on the need for absolute secrecy about the mission. LeRoy and Trumbo maintain the suspense about just what the mission is and why the flight crews are getting bizarre levels of training for it, including learning how to get a B-25 airborne in 500 feet of runway when they’re used to having three times that. They had to learn that because the planes were to be launched from aircraft carriers; the plan was to get the carriers as close to Japan as possible, fly the planes there, then land them again at presumably safe airfields in China, which was at war with Japan in 1942 (that had started when Japan attacked Manchuria in 1931 and the Chinese mainland six years later) and quite frankly not doing too well against the Rising Sun.

The film basically divides into three acts: the opening training sequences, the Doolittle raid itself, and what quite frankly is its best and most gripping dramatic sequence, the attempts of the stranded pilots and crews to get to safety in China ahead of the Japanese, who seemed to be gobbling one Chinese village after another. Just when the crew members seem to have a safe refuge, the Japanese surround it and attack it again. The Doolittle raid was greenlighted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as early as December 21, 1941, exactly two weeks after Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. It was designed as a morale-booster for the U.S. and a morale-buster for Japan, aimed at shaking the confidence of the Japanese people in their military leadership. The flight crews taking on the assignment are told they will be away from their homes for at least three months, though most of them don’t think of that as a particular hardship since, aside from Lawson and one other participant, they’re all single. They are also repeatedly warned not to talk about the mission, since leaking even the most innocuous details about it could alert the ever-present Japanese spies. (They were nowhere nearly as ever-present as the American propaganda machine made out, but the fear that all Japanese-Americans were potential spies and saboteurs, which turned out to be racist B.S. concocted by U.S. military leaders, was one of the stated reasons for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.) And when they’re not training the American servicemembers are having so many sing-a-longs Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo practically qualifies as a musical. Among the listed songs are not only the service anthems and patriotic songs you’d expect (including a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Chinese by a group of schoolchildren) but also “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” and even “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” which gets sung to Van Johnson and Phyllis Thaxter when Johnson’s colleagues realize they’re going to have a baby. There’s even a few allusions in Herbert Stothart’s background score to the title song of the 1943 musical Oklahoma!, a bit of a surprise given how notoriously protective Richard Rodgers was of his intellectual property.

The actual shots of the Doolittle raid and the havoc it was wreaking on Japan’s industrial base are quite well done model work – the film won that year’s Academy Award for special effects, and deserved it – and there are hints of Trumbo’s politics in his speech for Spencer Tracy as Doolittle when he says they have taken pains to avoid bombing civilian targets, though inevitably civilians will be killed in what today is called “collateral damage.” (Later, under the guidance of General Curtis LeMay, the strategy would shift to large-scale fire bombings of Japanese cities, deliberately targeting civilian populations, in an effort to end the war as quickly as possible. Estimates are that LeMay’s indiscriminate bombing raids on Japanese cities killed 500,000 Japanese civilians and left 5 million homeless. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay later acknowledged.) For me the final third of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was the most interesting part of the film, as all the crew members of the “Ruptured Duck” (the bomber piloted by Johnson’s character) survive their crash-landing off the Chinese coast but all but Thatcher (Walker’s character) are injured. Lawson (Johnson’s character) is severely wounded in his left leg and, not surprisingly, gangrene sets in and the leg eventually has to be amputated. When a group of Asian-looking people approaches the crew, Thatcher at first thinks they’re Japanese and is ready to shoot them, but they turn out to be sympathetic Chinese who lead Our Heroes to a small village, then to another and still another as each village in turn is overrun by the Japanese. The responsibility for their care is assumed by a father-and-son team of Chinese doctors (Hsin Kung and Benson Fong; usually during the war Benson Fong was stuck playing Japanese villains, so it was probably a relief for him to be acting a sympathetic character of his own nationality and true sympathies in the war), though the actual amputation is performed by “Doc” White (Stephen McNally, who like Fong was getting a break from his usual casting as villains), who’s able to score a limited supply of anesthetic, which itself creates a suspense issue as he has to work fast before the stuff wears off and puts Lawson in unendurable pain.

Among the things Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo gets right are the jocular but still real antagonism between the flight crews of the Army Air Corps (the U.S. Air Force didn’t become a separate service branch until 1955) and the sailors on board the Navy carriers that are taking them to launch their mission. There are also some intriguing cameos by Leon Ames as a former U.S. diplomat to Japan who’s brought in to warn the crew members of what’s likely in store for them if they’re captured by the Japanese; and Robert Mitchum as one of the crew members on another plane. Mitchum made this movie just before another war film, The Story of G.I. Joe, which would catapult him to stardom. The film ends with a quite poignant scene between Mr. and Mrs. Lawson; for reasons of personal pride he hadn’t wanted to see her again until he’d been outfitted with an artificial leg, but she had tracked him down and shown up anyway. In their reunion scene Lawson loses his balance and falls forward in a sequence that reminded me of The Big Parade (MGM, 1925) – the second highest grossing silent film of all time (after The Birth of a Nation) – which likewise featured a male lead (John Gilbert) returning home minus one leg. (The effects work to make Van Johnson appear as an amputee is excellent.) Col. Doolittle startles both Lawson and us when he tells Lawson that he has no intention of letting Lawson out of the service just because he’s lost a leg in combat, though just what he intends to have Lawson do to continue to support the war effort is unclear. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is very much a film of its time, what I call the portmanteau movie in which the producers’ strategy appeared to be to put in elements every audience member would like. Such films told you, “You don’t like this? Well, wait a bit and there’ll be something in the movie you will like.” It’s quite different from the way a story like this would be filmed today (though the 2001 Pearl Harbor likewise had a surprising degree of sentimentality – and it ended with the Doolittle raid, which as a New Yorker reviewer joked they probably brought in at the last minute after they realized Pearl Harbor was an American military catastrophe): as more or less straight action with just hints of the characters’ human emotions and drives.