The Invaders (Kay-Bee Productions, Mutual Film Corporation, 1912)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart. They were both Westerns, a three-reeler (about 40 minutes) from 1912 called The Invaders and William S. Hart’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925). They were being paired, Stewart explained, because they both had the same screenwriter, C. Gardner Sullivan, who wrote an original “scenario” for The Invaders and adapted a magazine serial by Hal Evarts for Tumbleweeds. (Remember that in the silent era a “scenario” simply meant an overall account of the story and a series of descriptions of how the director could visualize it on screen. Screenwriting became more important once sound came in and producers actually had to have written dialogue to give to the actors.) The Invaders was directed by Francis Ford, who also starred in it as Col. James Bryson; Francis Ford was the older brother of John Ford (their family name back in Ireland was “O’Fearna” and what got written down at Ellis Island was “Feeney”). Francis helped John get his start in the film industry, only for reasons that still are unclear to me Francis’s star fell as John’s rose, and ultimately Francis was given minor roles in John’s films just to keep him alive. The film opens with Col. Bryson signing a treaty with a Native American Sioux chief (played by an actual Native American, William Eagle Shirt) setting aside a stretch of land as a permanent reservation in exchange for the Sioux giving up other land to settlers. As with just about every real-life treaty white Americans ever made with Natives, though, this one is broken – in this case by the builders of the Transcontinental Railroad, who send out a survey team headed by two young men. U.S. Army Lieutenant White (Ray Myers) falls for Col. Branson’s daughter (Ethel Grandin), while a member of the Transcontinental Railroad survey team falls equally hard for the Native chief’s daughter, Sky Star (Ann Little). Unfortunately, Sky Star takes a bad fall off a horse into a ravine and is seriously injured; Branson’s daughter has her taken to the army camp and tries her best to keep her alive, but ultimately she dies.

Meanwhile, the Sioux chief considers the invasion of the Transcontinental Railroad surveyors as either an actual act of war or the precursor to one. He mobilizes his own tribe to attack the fort and cuts a deal with the Sioux’ historic enemies, the Cheyenne, to mount a joint attack on the white fort. The Natives are actually doing pretty well in the battle when Col. Bryson hits on the idea of telling the Sioux chief that they’re holding his daughter hostage and will kill her unless the Native chief calls off the attack, but just as they’ve pretty well convinced, the Sioux chief’s daughter dies anyway. There’s a pitched battle in which a lot of people die, and the outcome is a bit uncertain until Lt. White arrives with the reinforcements he rode to fetch from another white Army fort after the Natives burned the telegraph pole so Col. Bryson’s telegraph operator (Art Acord, who also stunt-doubled for Ann Little in her fatal fall from a horse; men in drag doubling for women was a common practice in Hollywood until 1953, when Doris Day insisted for the film Calamity Jane that her stunt double be a woman, Donna Hall) couldn’t get word to the outside that they were under siege. The Invaders is actually a pretty good movie for 1912, but it was still a 1912 movie and there was virtually no cross-cutting, camera movement, or any of the other ways filmmakers would soon develop to ratchet up the excitement and suspense of action scenes. The Invaders was produced and co-directed by Thomas H. Ince, the man who did more than anyone else to invent the Hollywood studio system in which the producers were the real powers and directors, writers, actors, and everyone else were under contract to major studios and had little say over the artistic decisions of their projects. Ince even built the largest and most grandiose of the early studio complexes, the big lot in Culver City that would be the home of MGM during its glory years in the 1930’s and 1940’s and ultimately would become the property of Sony when it bought Columbia.

Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart Productions, United Artists, 1925; reissued with sound by Astor Pictures, 1939)

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

The 1925 Tumbleweeds, which Turner Classic Movies showed right after the 1912 The Invaders on Sunday, January 25, was something else again. Made when silent-era filmmaking had reached its artistic peak, Tumbleweeds was a technically assured movie in which all the techniques of cinema as they had matured were brought to bear on a story of the real-life Oklahoma land rush. The U.S. had originally set aside what is now the state of Oklahoma as “Indian Territory,” only as the 19th century went on they cut various portions of it off and made them available to whites. At first, at least according to C. Gardner Sullivan’s script for this film, the U.S. government had allowed the Native tribes in what was called the “Cherokee Strip” (though most of the Native inhabitants were Creeks and Seminoles) to lease their land to white cattle ranchers, but prior to the 1889 land rush Congress and President Benjamin Harrison ordered all the cattle ranchers to move their herds off the land so it could be taken over by homesteaders and converted into farms. Tumbleweeds is about the Box K Ranch (named after the brand it put on its cattle to distinguish them from other ranchers’ herds) and the drifter who worked there, Don Carver (William S. Hart), who proudly proclaimed himself and the other cowboys (in the most literal sense; a “cowboy” was a man who helped drive cattle herds, and they still exist, only today instead of riding horses they drive trucks or SUV’s) “tumbleweeds.” That meant that instead of settling down in one place, they drifted from one frontier community to another. In the version we were watching, a sound reissue from 1939 to which the long-retired Hart added a talking prologue and Arthur Gutman contributed a musical score (a rather hackneyed one drawing on well-known songs, including “Home on the Range” heard whenever one of the characters thought about settling down and building a home of their own), two songs about these nomadic cowboys were actually sung on the soundtrack.

Carver and his comic-relief sidekick, Joe Hinman (James Gordon), are playing around in the local saloon in Caldwell, Oklahoma, from which the Land Rush is supposed to start on April 22, 1889. As a joke, Carver attempts to lasso Hinman but actually catches Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) in what is got to be one of the oddest “meet-cutes” in Hollywood history. Earlier Carver has shown his sense of justice when he protected a boy and his dog from being beaten by an obnoxious town bully who turns out to be both Molly’s and the boy’s half-brother, Noll Lassiter (J. Gordon Russell). Carver literally waterboards Noll to force him to apologize to both the boy, Bart Lassiter (Jack Murphy), and the dog. Noll is in cahoots with Bill Freel a.k.a. Bryson (Richard Neill) to appropriate the Box K ranch in the Land Rush and keep Carver from getting it. Carver in turn wants to grab the Box K and settle there with Molly because he’s getting tired of being a tumbleweed and wants a place to settle down. Noll Lassiter and Freel trick Carver into going back to the Box K the night before the Land Rush, allegedly to fetch some stray cattle that had been left behind there. Once he crosses into the Strip, Noll and Freel have the U.S. Army arrest him as a “Sooner” (actually a major part of Oklahoma’s mythology; it meant someone who jumped the gun – literally; the Land Rush was signaled by a cannon shot – and grabbed a choice piece of land by cheating; the state motto of Oklahoma became and remains “The Sooner State”) and hold him in a stockade until the Rush is over. But Carver manages to escape and, in a beautifully staged suspense sequence, he rides across the range in time to claim the Box K land for himself and Molly to live on and farm. There’s a bit of a disagreement between Carver and Molly and it briefly looks like he’s going to hit the range and become a tumbleweed again, but ultimately Carver and Molly pair up, as do Hinman and a widow with kids he’s met in Caldwell, and an elderly couple also looking for a homestead (George F. Marion – the actor whose terrible fake Swedish accent helped weaken Greta Garbo’s 1930 talkie debut, Anna Christie – it would have sounded bad enough on its own but was especially disgusting by comparison with Garbo’s real one – and Gertrude Claire) who provide the film a bit of much-needed pathos.

William S. Hart (1864-1946) had been a “tumbleweed” himself, a Western drifter who’d seen much of the lifestyle his films were depicting before he went into acting. As film historian Richard Kozarski put it, “Demanding realism in his [film] settings, Hart knew that it was not merely his physical presence, but the entire design of his films that audiences recognized. They knew a Bill Hart film from a Broncho Billy through the integration of landscape and action, the characteristic dilemmas of the protagonists, and the gritty realism of the studio interiors. Hart was obsessed with all these details, and made sure they dominated the screen 100 per cent of the time.” Unfortunately, by 1925 Hart was 50 years old and was starting to look decidedly careworn on screen. He was also facing competition from younger Western stars like Tom Mix and Buck Jones who weren’t so obsessively concerned with realism, but were giving the Western audience what it wanted: unambiguous good-guy heroes and bad-guy villains in plots that were easy to follow and didn’t present either their characters or their audiences with moral dilemmas. So Hart decided to hang it up after Tumbleweeds, though he thought enough of this film to reissue it as a sound film 14 years later and shoot a speaking prologue for it. Judging from the prologue, it’s probably just as well Hart never attempted a talkie; his voice recorded well but he veered back and forth between natural speech and oratorical boominess, and even seemed to be crying at the end over the passing of both the West itself and his career. It was ironic that one of the things Hart said he missed about filmmaking was the cry of a director telling him after a shot that it had gone well, when Hart mostly directed or co-directed his own films. Tumbleweeds was co-directed by Hart and King Baggott, and produced by Hart through his own company, though for the sound version (actually surprisingly well synchronized and edited by James C. Bradford) he licensed the film to a cheap-jack studio called Astor Pictures. It still holds up surprisingly well, with Hart delivering an understated performance that reminded me of Gary Cooper (so much so that I was mentally adding Cooper’s voice during the film instead of Hart’s own as we’d heard it in the prologue) and the other actors also reasonably capable. It doesn’t help that John Ford would stage an even more exciting land rush on screen in his woefully ignored masterpiece Three Bad Men just the next year, or that the Oklahoma Land Rush would appear on screen again in films like Wesley Ruggles’s Cimarron (1931) and Lloyd Bacon’s The Oklahoma Kid (1939), the latter of which film historian and programmer Tom Luddy called “a gangster movie in Western drag” since it was made at Warner Bros. and James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were the leads.

Shield for Murder (Camden Productions, United Artists, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, January 24) I watched an intriguing and surprisingly good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show: Shield for Murder, produced by Aubrey Schenck in 1954 and starring Edmond O’Brien, who also co-directed with Howard W. Koch (not the writer who, along with the Epstein brothers and an uncredited Casey Robinson, wrote Casablanca but one who went on to a less illustrious career churning out “B” horror films in the 1950’s). In a film based on a novel of the same title by William P. McGivern (whose other stories about corrupt or morally dubious cops that got filmed around the same time included The Big Heat and Rogue Cop) and scripted by Richard Allan Simmons and John C. Higgins, O’Brien plays Los Angeles police detective Barney Nolan. He’s been on the force for 16 years but he’s edging closer to outright corruption. As the film opens, he accosts a courier for the bookmaking ring led by Packy Reed (Hugh Sanders), shoots and kills him in the back with a silencer-equipped gun, then fires two more shots without the silencer into the air to make it appear that there was a gun battle between the two, and lifts the $2,500 the victim was carrying to Reed’s gang. Nolan works out of a precinct whose captain is Gunnarson (Emile Meyer, an amateur actor in New Orleans Elia Kazan had discovered when he shot the 1950 plague drama Panic in the Streets there and cast in his movie, after which he got a low-level career in Hollywood mostly playing character villains) and his partner is Mark Brewster (John Agar, better than usual), who like Howard Duff’s role in Don Siegel’s very similar Private Hell 36 that year is the honest cop to O’Brien’s corrupt one. There’s also a press reporter named Cabot (Herb Butterfield) hanging around the police station hoping to get the real story of the shooting; he’s convinced Nolan may be guilty because there were rumors of two previous officer-involved shootings that may have been extra-judicial executions by Nolan.

Unfortunately for Nolan, Ernst Sternmueller (David Hillary Hughes), a deaf-mute who lived in the neighborhood of the shooting, literally saw the whole thing and wrote down a description of how it went that would incriminate Nolan. So Nolan pays him a visit and, not knowing the man is deaf, accosts him, beats him and accidentally kills him, then throws him down the flight of stairs leading up to his apartment to make it look like he died in an accident. But he doesn’t get the written description of the crime the man put down in his notepad. Investigating the suspicious death, Mark Brewster recovers the notebook and leaves it with the police in the precinct office. Then he goes to arrest Nolan, who pistol-whips Brewster but hasn’t fallen so far morally as to be willing to shoot his partner in cold blood. Before that we’ve seen Nolan take his girlfriend, Patty Winters (Marla English), to an open house in a new suburban development (according to Eddie Muller’s outro, it was a real one going up in the rapidly sprawling L.A. suburbs), where he buries the $2,500 loot behind a sideboard outside the house. Also complicating Nolan’s life are a couple of private detectives, Fat Michaels (Claude Akins) and Laddie O’Neal (Lawrence Ryle), sent by Packy Reed to recover his money, who turn up in odd places and demand it from him. When they assault Patty, Nolan confronts them in a bar and pistol-whips both of them. Nolan gets into an argument with Patty and hits her, knocking her over, then goes to a combination Italian restaurant and bar and hits on a woman named Beth (Carolyn Jones in an electric blonde wig), who notices how much he’s drinking and orders him something to eat – which he’s too out of it to touch.

Realizing that his fellow officers are now on to him – Gunnarson is particularly upset because a criminal cop discredits police officers everywhere – he plots to flee to Argentina and demands that Patty leave with him, which she refuses to do because she’ll need time to think about uprooting herself from the only life she’s ever known. He cuts a deal with a couple of other crooks, one of whom, “The Professor,” is played by Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show), to buy a ticket to Argentina and a U.S. passport for $18,000, but tries to palm them off with a fake envelope containing clipped newspapers in the size of U.S. currency. The crooks confront him at a public swimming pool, where there are a lot of both male and female bystanders wearing swimming outfits (so we get a lot of cheesecake and beefcake in this movie!) who are forced to flee for their lives to avoid becoming collateral damage in the shootout between Nolan, Michaels, and O’Neal. Ultimately the real police deduce where Nolan hid the money and corner him at the site of the model home, where in scenes that indicate O’Brien and Koch had seen the 1940 High Sierra and were ripping off some of its setups, Nolan futilely tries to resist the police dragnet and commits what today is called “suicide by cop.”

Shield for Murder is a surprisingly well-constructed film, and the biggest triumph of Messrs. McGivern, Simmons, and Higgins is the care with which they depict Nolan’s gradual descent into outright criminality and psychopathology. He starts out as a basically decent and competent cop in the backstory, though by the time we see him he’s already sank so low in his morality that he’s willing to kill a crook in cold blood for his loot, and when his crime unravels he becomes a rage-filled unscrupulous monster. While Orson Welles, likewise as both director and star, would write the book on corrupt-cop movies four years later with Touch of Evil, Shield for Murder is quite a good one. We know from Don Siegel’s account of working with O’Brien on the 1953 film China Venture that by then O’Brien suffered from cataracts that had rendered him nearly blind; he’d have his wife read him the script pages he was supposed to shoot the next day and he’d memorize them from that. It’s a testament to both O’Brien’s skill and determination that he was able, despite his rotten eyesight, not only to act in a film that had so many strenuous action scenes but to co-direct it as well. Before the film, Eddie Muller said the part had originally been offered to Dana Andrews, who’d turned it down – possibly, Muller suggested, because of its similarities to the 1950 film Where the Sidewalk Ends – though to my mind the only other actor around in 1954 who could have played it as well was Bogart. Muller also joked about how many of O’Brien’s films – including his greatest noir, the original 1949 film D.O.A. and this one – show him sweating big-time. He wondered if O’Brien just sweated that much normally or if there was an assistant with a spray bottle of water on set spritzing him before each take to make him look that sweaty.

Sinners (Warner Bros., Domain Entertainment, Proximity Media, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 23) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC Mission Valley 20 movie theatres to catch Ryan Coogler’s latest film, Sinners. This was the day after the 2026 Academy Award nominations were announced, and Sinners had broken the record for total nominations for a film with 16. I wanted to see Sinners partly because Ryan Coogler is one of the most amazing living filmmaking talents and partly because its subject interests me: Black American culture in general and the blues in particular. AMC obviously viewed Sinners as a straight-out horror film, because the 25 minutes of previews they showed before it were all for standard-issue modern-day horror films, full of blood and gore, whereas Sinners transcended the horror genre much the way Coogler’s Black Panther transcended the conventions of movies based on comic-book superheroes. The film is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi (probably not coincidentally, where Bessie Smith died and John Lee Hooker was born) in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression. It’s centered around three main characters: twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s favorite actor; he’s been in all Coogler’s previous films), and their cousin Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). Smoke and Stack left Mississippi in the teens, fought as infantrymen in World War I, and acquired skills with guns that served them well in Chicago in the 1920’s. Coogler, who wrote his own script as well as directing, isn’t altogether clear what happened to them between 1918 and 1932, but they performed together as a blues-singing duo and also committed crimes, either for themselves or as part of Al Capone’s gang (or both). Now in 1932 they’ve returned home to Clarksdale with a major stash of cash with which they intend to buy a deserted cotton mill and play to turn it into a juke joint.

The film actually starts with a narrated scene explaining the West African concept of the griot (though they pronounce it “GREE-ott” instead of what I’d always assumed it was, “GREE-oh”), the traveling singers who made up their own songs and kept alive the memories and consciousness of the members of the tribe. They buy the old mill from a white creep named Hogwood (Dave Maldonado), who insists on spitting out his chewing tobacco on the floor and leaving them to clean it up. Smoke and Stack ask if there are any members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Hogwood insists that the Klan no longer exists – though we suspect he’s lying because on his bed we see a pile of sheets that looks like a Klan outfit, and much later in the film we learn that there is a Klan chapter in Clarksdale and Hogwood is the leader of it. We also learn that the racial politics of Clarksdale are a bit more complicated than the usual “Black and white” stereotype: the local general store is owned by a Chinese couple, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and there’s also at least one Native American (Mark L. Patrick) who tries to warn a local poor-white couple against inviting Remmick (Jack O’Connell) into their home. Alas, they get the warning too late: Remmick shows up looking like a badly burned white guy but he’s really a vampire, and he vampirizes the couple by literally putting the bite on them. The three vampires decide to attack the juke joint, which is having a spectacular grand opening featuring piano player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and Sammie Moore, who has ignored the warnings of his preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams, who judging from his imdb.com head shot looks like he’d be good casting for a biopic of Miles Davis) to avoid playing blues because it’s supposedly the music of the devil. Sammie’s extraordinary playing (Coogler required all the actors cast as musicians to do their own singing and playing, and judging from his performance here Miles Caton has a major career ahead of him as both singer and actor) literally summons up spirits of the Black race past, present, and future. We are told this via an amazing sequence set inside the juke joint that flashes us both backwards to the griots we saw in the prologue and forwards to a modern-day D.J. turntable setup as used in traditional rap.

The opening night, at which Smoke’s wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) serves as cook when she isn’t running her store selling voodoo charms and remedies, attracts Stack’s former girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), whom he broke up with because she’s only one-quarter Black and presents as white, so he arranged for her to marry a rich white landowner in another town to protect her from the local racists. Mary makes it clear she wants to get back with Stack, while Sammie and Pearline have sex in one of the back rooms of the club and Smoke butt-fucks Annie. Remmick and the Hogwoods show up at the club and demand admittance – as in the 1987 Joel Schumacher film The Lost Boys, the vampires cannot enter the home of a normal human unless they’ve specifically been invited. At first they’re kept out by Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), a local sharecropper whom Smoke and Stack have hired as their bouncer, but when Cornbread has to go outside to pee the vampires attack him and convert him into one of them. Remmick and the other vampires try their damnedest to get into the club, including staging their own mini-concert outside with white folk songs like “The Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Rocky Road to Dublin,” and “Old Corn Liquor.” (I remember most of those songs from my father’s collection of folk-music records.) Ultimately Mary leaves the club, where she’d be safe, and goes outside – where the vampires turn her. Mary attacks and transforms Stack when he lets her in in a vain attempt to save her. Annie makes the people still inside the club eat solid cloves of garlic to make sure none of them have been vampirized. Remmick makes the holdouts an offer he thinks they can’t refuse: they can all become vampires and therefore join a community of absolute equality and zero racism. He really wants Sammie because the unique power of Sammie’s music can summon spirits from the past whom Remmick could add to his cult. Remmick also reveals that Hogwood, the head of the local Ku Klux Klan, plans to attack the juke joint and destroy it. Sammie hits Remmick over the head with his National guitar (supposedly a souvenir of the great Charley Patton but actually the property of Smoke’s and Stack’s father), and the metal plate detaches itself from the body and bisects Remmick’s head.

Smoke gets out a collection of rifles and a Thompson submachine gun and successfully holds off the Klan’s raiding party, though he’s fatally wounded himself. Smoke is able to keep the vampires occupied until sunrise, which incinerates them immediately, and as he’s dying Smoke tells Sammie to return to his father’s church. In a scene that was prefigured in the second half of the prologue (between the griot scene and the ones at the juke joint), Jedediah tells Sammie to drop the broken neck of his guitar, thereby renouncing the evil of the blues and returning to the good fold of Black Christianity. Sammie heads to Chicago and literally becomes Buddy Guy – Coogler cast the veteran blues musician as Sammie’s older incarnation. (I’d seen Buddy Guy’s name on the imdb.com cast list for this film and wondered where and how he’d turn up; I presumed he’d be an older musician either busking on the streets of Clarksdale or playing at the juke joint, but instead Coogler cast him much more creatively than that.) As they’re wrapping up a late-night club set in 1992, the elder Sammie is visited by Stack and Mary, who because they’re vampires have not visibly aged. Once again they offer him immortality and freedom if he’ll consent to become a vampire, and once again he turns them down. The film has a lot of post-credits sequences – anyone who bolted from the theatre as if the onset of the credits were the starting gun of a sprint race missed more than usual – and it ends with a marvelous performance of the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine” played by Miles Caton as the young Sammie on bottleneck guitar. Sinners is an extraordinary movie, beset by the blood and gore typical of the horror genre as well as a few too many abrupt sound cuts, but mostly quite well made and thematically rich. It occurred to me that had Smoke gone to Jedidiah and mobilized the churchgoers to join him in vanquishing the vampire threat the film could have been even better than it is – then we would have seen the “good” Christian Blacks using the power of their version of African-American music to vanquish both the blues and the white vampires’ version of folk music – though maybe that would have been too much like The Jazz Singer to suit Coogler’s taste.

At first I worried whether I’d be able to accept this film given its seemingly uneasy mix of Black culture and white horror, but (as it had with Black Panther as well), Coogler’s filmmaking mastery overcame whatever reservations I might have had and I was swept along with the sheer energy and thematic richness of his film. I even applauded his name in the closing credits, and a few others in the audience joined me. I also found myself wondering if Coogler had based his script at least in part on the experience of Robert Wilkins, a stunningly talented blues musician of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s who abruptly quit the blues after a mass fight broke out at a juke joint where he was performing. Deciding that the evil of his music had caused the people to riot, Wilkins abruptly quit his blues career and became an itinerant preacher and faith healer. When he returned to music in the early 1960’s it was as a gospel singer, though he rewrote one of his old blues songs, “That’s No Way to Get Along,” to reflect the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son – and in that form the Rolling Stones covered it. There was also the case of Son House (also from Clarksdale, Mississippi), who went in the other direction; at age 25, having already trained for the ministry and pastored churches, he discovered the blues. Within a few years he had fallen so low down the moral totem pole he was serving time at the state’s notorious Parchman Farm prison after he shot and killed another man who was shooting at him in a juke joint. (Had House been white he probably could have successfully pleaded self-defense.) There was also the notorious case of Walter Barnes, who along with virtually his entire band lost his life in a catastrophic ballroom fire in Natchez, Mississippi in 1940 after the band kept playing to keep the rest of the people from panicking. (This incident inspired the invention of crash-bar doors that could be more easily opened in an emergency.)

Coogler himself said that the inspiration for the film came from Willie Dixon’s blues classic “Wang Dang Doodle,” an ode to the juke joints Dixon wrote for blues legend Howlin’ Wolf (true name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett) in 1960. Dixon once said the title “meant a good time, especially if the guy came in from the South. A wang dang meant having a ball and a lot of dancing, they called it a rocking style so that's what it meant to wang dang doodle.” This explains why there’s the anachronistic performance of “Wang Dang Doodle” early in the juke-joint sequences of Sinners, played by Cedric Burnside, Tierinii Jackson and Sharde Thomas-Mallory in the all-out electric blues style created in the early 1950’s when musicians like Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James left Mississippi for Chicago and started playing amplified guitars. But this performance was technologically impossible in 1932, when even if the current had been available to power them (one of the cleverest scenes in Sinners shows a man from the club climbing a power pole and plugging in their own cord to turn the lights on), electric guitars as we know them today simply didn’t exist yet. (There’s an ironic reflection of this in the 1992 postlude, in which the vampire couple tell Buddy Guy that they want to hear him play acoustic because they consider that purer.) I could go on and on and on about Sinners and the depths of Ryan Coogler’s imagination – and also my hope that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives Sinners the Best Picture award Coogler deserved for Black Panther seven years ago. The Golden Globes palmed off Sinners with the so-called “Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” award, while giving the Best Motion Picture-Drama award to Hamnet (Chloe Zhao’s “safe” take on the real or imagined life of William Shakespeare) and the Best Motion Picture-Comedy or Musical to One Battle After Another. I haven’t seen either of those films (I have seen Green Book, the film that beat Black Panther for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture, and it was a good movie but a typical socially-conscious slice of Hollywood liberalism in which the Black characters exist only to morally redeem the white ones, instead of a film like Black Panther in which the Black characters had real independence and agency), but it’s hard to believe that either of them were made with the depth of imagination, insight, and artistry Ryan Coogler brought to Sinners.

Law and Order: "The Enemy of All Women" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, January 22) my husband Charles and I watched the usual Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes on NBC and another Midsomer Murders show on PBS. The Law and Order was called “The Enemy of All Women” – though it’s a good thing they don’t flash the episode titles in advance because that would have been a giveaway of the entire plot. It begins with a long tracking shot that follows a young woman, Amelia Hardage (Ren Montero), through New York City as she heads home, and is told from the point of view of all the surveillance cameras that are recording her on her walk, including her own as she enters the townhouse in which she lives. Then a shadowy figure we don’t get a good look at points a gun at her and kills her with one shot to the head. After the corpse is discovered, the detectives of the New York Police Department routinely order copies of all the surveillance footage as well as Hardage’s e-mails – only to find them all literally disappearing as they attempt to load them. From this, and from what Hardage did for a living – she worked for a company that amassed huge amounts of surveillance data on every individual in the area and then sold those data caches to the highest bidder – detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their boss, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) deduce that the culprit is a person with an ultra-high level of expertise in computerized record-keeping and major hacker skills to erase all recorded data that might implicate him. This leads them to the victim’s boss, Marius Cole (Ennis Esmer), and also to her best friend, Vanessa Barrett (Virginia Kull), who had helped her get her current job and then had quit the same company and gone to work as information technology specialist for a women’s health care clinic. It turns out from an interview with Hardage’s psychological consultant, Sean Morris (Mathais Goldstein), that she had been raped one month previously. Sean had been trying to persuade her to report the crime to the police, which she’d been unwilling to do, until the day before she was killed, when her rapist returned to finish her off forever and thereby escape accountability. The cops briefly suspect Sean of murdering Hardage until he convinces them that he’s too ethical to do that and also that he’s Gay. (Presumably, since he’s not a licensed therapist, he’s not bound by the confidentiality regulations that would likely have been invoked by a professionally licensed person even though their client was dead.)

The cops take Marius Cole to trial before a tough woman judge, Angela Dillow (Eileen Galindo), only even before the trial begins Marius’s attorney makes a motion to dismiss the case because Marius has used elaborate AI software to manufacture himself an alibi. (This is one of my main concerns with the future of politics in this country; the use of AI to manipulate video footage so it no longer shows what actually happened, but what the government wants people to think happened. It won’t surprise me at all if the next time ICE agents kill an innocent bystander like they did with Renée Good, the authorities not only tell people they didn’t see what they actually saw in the video, they use the raw footage to create an AI version in which the victim actually was threatening to kill the ICE agent and he shot her in self-defense.) Marius, who like Harvey Weinstein has made a lot of big donations to women’s rights organizations to cover his tracks as a sexual abuser, presents a sympathetic figure and seems to be on his way to acquittal until the cops and the prosecutors – District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his associates on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) – guess that Vanessa Barrett was also raped by Marius Cole, only she signed a non-disclosure agreement and didn’t come forward. The prosecutors point out that NDA’s can’t be used to cover up a crime, but she still doesn’t want to come forward and testify because she’s afraid that her career in women’s health will be over if people find out she was a rape victim and did nothing about it. Then Nolan Price works out a stratagem; at first he offers Marius and his attorney a plea deal, which they turn down. Then he brings Virginia into court, and the mere sight of her seemingly about to testify scares Marius into agreeing to cop a plea after all and accept a 20-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. DA Baxter asks Nolan what he would have done if his trick hadn’t scared Marius into a cop-out – would he have risked destroying Virginia psychologically by making her testify? I suspect Ennis Esmer as Marius Cole is too good a villain for the Law and Order writing crew to let disappear; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he manages to engineer an escape by hacking into the prison’s computers and generating AI footage of himself in his cell while he’s really outside. While this was more like a Special Victims Unit story than one for the flagship show, it still worked really well even though in the real world people like Marius Cole don’t get held accountable for their crimes; they get themselves elected U.S. President and all the charges against them magically disappear.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Career Psychopath" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown on January 22 after the “Enemy of All Women” episode of Law and Order, “Career Psychopath,” trod over more familiar ground but had some interesting things to say about the bizarre cults that form around serial killers. During his long stretch in prison Charles Manson got a number of marriage proposals (one of which he actually accepted and went through a wedding ceremony via remote control) and innumerable requests for autographed photos. My husband Charles once read a report that Manson had actually farmed out the task of autographing some of these photos to fellow inmates. He seemed really put out by that until I reminded him that the reason Manson was in prison in the first place was not for killing people personally, but for getting other people to do it for him. Anyway, the “Career Psychopath” in this story is Henry Mesner (Ethan Cutkosky), who committed rape as a juvenile, served his sentence, then not only raped and murdered someone else but killed his parents too. His sister Ruby (Maxine Wanderer) survived and was taken in by foster parents, only they eventually cut her off because she was demanding too much money from them and using most of it to buy drugs. The show opened with assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and his wife, SVU detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), coming home from a dinner date. Rollins sees that their home has been broken into, and shortly thereafter the culprit, whom we don’t see enough of to get a recognizable image, is holding a knife to Carisi’s neck and ordering Rollins to toss him her gun. There’s a scuffle in which Carisi regains control of the situation, though his wrist is slashed and the assailant escapes despite Rollins’s attempt to track him down.

It turns out that the assailant is Phillip Wingate (Kimball Farley), who formed a sick attachment to Henry Mesner even though the real Mesner is safely in Sing Sing prison. Wingate goes as far as to date Ruby Mesner and enlist her as an accomplice in his assaults, including killing a Black woman court reporter who’d taken the transcript of the case and later retired. There are two confrontations between SVU detectives and Henry Mesner in prison; in the first of which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is the interviewing officer. Henry makes it clear he only wants to talk to Detective Rollins, even though Benson has taken her off the case because she’s too close to it and she came on too strong in the interview room when the SVU cops busted Ruby Mesner and get her to reveal Wingate’s current location. Nonetheless, Rollins goes to Sing Sing without formal authorization from Benson, her boss, and gets Henry to give her the fan letters he got from Wingate, which he was so contemptuous of he never even opened any of them. From these the SVU detectives are able to figure out where Wingate is living and arrest him. Once again, this show had a particularly interesting villain; Ethan Cutkosky’s chilling matter-of-fact performance as the titular career psychopath Henry Mesner is scary precisely because he doesn’t underline. He seems like jes’ plain folks and we have to keep reminding ourselves of what the character is supposed to have done. And unlike Manson and some other real-life psychopaths who served long prison terms, Henry if anything seems rather embarrassed at the cult that’s formed around him and certainly wishes that his admirers “outside” would get over it and get a life.

Midsomer Murders: "Claws Out" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 18, 2023)

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

Last Thursday, January 22, after the two Law and Order episodes I watched with Charles, I briefly lighted on CBS for what I hoped would be another Elsbeth episode but it was another Matlock show instead. So instead I went on to PBS for another rerun of Midsomer Murders, this one an episode called “Claws Out” that begins with the murder of Frank Bailey (Nathan Sussex). Frank Bailey formed a major tech company and then sold it and retired, but when he settled in Midsomer County he found a number of people complaining about the mysterious disappearances of their pet cats and dogs. So he started investigating and soon formed a business as literally a pet detective. He’s currently on the trail of a large dog named “Storm,” a Czechoslovakian variant of a German shepherd, whose owners are Aden Hughes (Adam Scarborough) and his wife Eshani (Mina Anwar). We first meet Eshani at an Indian restaurant called Tandoor (no “i”), where she’s predictably upset when a waiter spills food all over her tight-fitting red dress. We also learn that Andrew’s ex-wife is now the wife of the owner of Tandoor, only they had the occasional fuck for old time’s sake. While all this is going on Sarah Barnaby (Fiona Dolman), wife of the show’s central “sleuth” character Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon, who’s also listed as executive producer), is trying to train her dog for an upcoming “Dog Agility Contest” sponsored by Madeleine Saunders (Josette Simons), a tall, rail-thin African-British woman whose son Edison died years before while he was in medical school and seemingly headed for a stellar career as a doctor. Edison left instructions that on his death his organs were to be donated for transplants, and Madeleine gave Edison’s heart to Reece Fleming (Joe Edgar), either the younger son or the grandson of crusty, irascible old landowner William Fleming (Duncan Preston). Fleming also has a son named Perry (Charlie Condou), who works locally as a gardener and who’s supposedly Gay, though as with the Gay character on last night’s Law and Order and all too many “movie Gays,” we never see him either emotionally, romantically, or sexually involved with another man. There’s also a real young cutie named Tai Yang (Tom Moya), who’s more or less the boyfriend of Madeleine’s daughter Danielle (Tia May Watts) – we’re introduced to both him and Reese Fleming in Danielle’s bedroom, though when Madeleine walks in on them everything appears to be innocent.

Madeleine is determined to send Danielle to medical school to fulfill her ambition, frustrated by Edison’s death, to have a doctor in the family, but Danielle couldn’t be less interested in it. Instead she wants to take at least a year off her education and tour the world with Tai, starting with Canada. Tai is the nephew of Frank Bailey, and he’s living in a trailer (a “caravan,” they call it in Britain even though it’s just one unit) on William Fleming’s land. But when Frank Bailey is killed, and his body stuffed inside the kennel formerly occupied by the Hughes’s dog Storm, his will is read and it leaves Tai one-half of his estate. Needless to say, his widow Kim (Catherine Tyldesley) isn’t happy about this, and when Tai is himself murdered a week before his 21st birthday Kim heaves a sigh of relief that now she’s going to get all her husband’s fortune. (At the end she takes down the sign that said, “Frank Bailey/Pet Detective” and puts one up with her own name.) A third victim emerges: Lorna McIntosh (Josie Lawrence), who at first appears to be a dotty old lady, well out of it mentally, who’s collected other people’s cats and is raising them herself. Later she turns out to be a retired information technology professor (there’s a nice bit of dialogue where Barnaby’s associate, detective sergeant Jamie Winter – played by red-headed hunk Nick Hendrix – realizes that they’d been assuming that she was the widow of Professor McIntosh and now they know she was Professor McIntosh). Alas, Lorna gets strangled by an unseen assailant wielding a dog trapping device with which she’s dispatched to cat heaven. In the end [spoiler alert!] Perry Fleming turns out to have been the killer of both Frank and Tai, though he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer already (given that I lived through the 1980’s, once I heard a Gay man had been diagnosed with a terminal disease I immediately assumed it was AIDS!). The real villain turns out to be [double spoiler alert!] Madeleine Saunders, who for reasons that escape me at the moment (one of Charles’s complaints about this particular episode is how weak writer Helen Jenkins was in terms of giving people actual motives) wanted to target Tai for having allegedly led her daughter astray, though on her orders Perry killed Frank by mistake before she aimed him correctly at Tai because they were both wearing similar motorcycle outfits. Then Madeleine dispatched Lorna herself after she realized Lorna might be a witness. After the previous Midsomer Murders episode shown one week earlier, “Book of the Dead” – a well-constructed thriller with a plot that made sense – “Claws Out” was a real disappointment, and it’s hard to believe that Madeleine could get Perry to commit murders for her by threatening him with an allegedly “cancer-sniffing dog” that could “out” him as terminally ill.