Death in Paradise: Season 13, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, April 24) I watched an unusually engaging episode of the Caribbean-set mystery and policier Death in Paradise, the eighth and last episode of season 13 and the one in which they were basically attempting to write off Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), the one white person on the police force of the fictitious Caribbean island of “Saint-Marie.” He’s on a chartered plane flight from Saint-Marie to Dominica, only he’s feeling a bit under the weather from the hard night of partying he did the night before and also a couple of antihistamines he took just before he got on the plane. While waiting at the airport Parker makes the acquaintance of Raphaël Coty (Jules Miesch), a tall, skinny Frenchman who works for a travel site. This means he gets to travel to various exotic locations throughout the world but does not get paid much, so his ability to enjoy himself in these wonderful spots is severely limited. Parker also meets a Black man named Kurt Henderson (Calvin Demba), only shortly after the plane takes off Parker falls asleep from the booze and drugs and doesn’t wake up until the plane has arrived at Dominica. There he wakes up and finds that Kurt Henderson is gone and the other passengers, Coty and the married couple Taylor (Richard Fleeshman) and Chelsea (Emma Naomi) Fielding, and also the plane’s crew, pilot Peter Holcroft (Richard Lintern) and co-pilot Catherine Bordey (Elizabeth Bourgine) insist he never got on the plane at all. Parker is summoned back to Saint-Marie after the body of Kurt Henderson is found on a local beach, shot to death.

The police eventually learn that Henderson was living as a house guest with Taylor and Chelsea Fielding, only Henderson started an extra-relational affair with Chelsea and Taylor, not surprisingly, was not happy about this. They also learn that pilot Holcroft was under investigation by United States authorities for flying smuggled drugs into the U.S., though the Americans couldn’t make the charges stick. Ultimately the police search Holcroft’s plane and find a compartment to hide drug money in, and eventually Chelsea Fielding gives Parker and the others on the Saint-Marie police force a confession claiming that she killed Henderson out of anger that Henderson wanted her to leave her husband for him. Only Parker is convinced that not only is Chelsea lying but he really did see Henderson on the plane, even though he wasn’t on it when the flight arrived in Dominica. Ultimately writer James Hall lets us in on the truth: a combination of Murder on the Orient Express and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Henderson got on the plane, all right, only he left it again when he realized his life was in danger. Chelsea Fielding thought she’d killed Henderson, but it was actually her husband Taylor who shot the man. Taylor had grabbed the same gun Chelsea fired at Henderson but missed, clapped a silencer on it, shot Henderson dead and left him behind. The Fieldings bribed the others with $50,000 apiece in drug money to keep quiet and lie about Henderson having ever been on the plane. Eventually everyone who was on the plane (aside from Parker) is arrested and Parker is sidetracked into returning, though it’s unclear whether he aborted his plan to leave Saint-Marie or just decided to travel to London with his Black Saint-Marian girlfriend Monette Gilbert (Rachel Adedeji) in tow instead of leaving her behind on the island. It seems that Ralf Little left the show after all for season 14 because his role leading the Saint-Marie police force has been taken over by a Black man, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), and the producers chose to add an annoying and often infuriating “comic relief” character, a young Black police trainee named Sebastian Rose (Shaquille All-Yebuah) whose incompetence quickly stopped being amusing and just got awful.

International Jazz Day: April 30, 2025 (Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, recorded 2025, copyrighted 2026)

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

Last night (Friday, April 24), after the Death in Paradise episode, my husband Charles (who’d come home from work right as the Death in Paradise show was wrapping up) and I watched a program whose title had intrigued me since I saw it listed on the KPBS Web site: International Jazz Day. It was a show to commemorate International Jazz Day, which for the past 20 years has been celebrated on April 30 (though I’d never heard of it before), and it turned out to be an hour-long concert special from a Frank Gehry-designed auditorium in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. Given what little I’ve been able to find out about it online, I suspect the show, though it carried a 2026 copyright date, was actually filmed on April 30, 2025, partly because April 30, 2026 is a few days away from now and partly because Abu Dhabi, as a member state of the United Arab Emirates (so called because it’s a coalition of Persian Gulf countries who call their leaders “emirs”), is currently under attack by Iranians as retaliation for the U.S. assaults on Iran. The show was sponsored by the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, which until 2019 was known as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until it renamed itself after its long-time director (which seems a bit churlish to me). I quite liked the program even though, as often happens in all-star spectacles like this, their definition of “jazz” was rather elastic. Not only did the program include non-jazz songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Rolling Stones’s “Miss You,” virtually all the (quite good) vocalists – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Ruthie Foster – sang in all-out rhythm-and-blues or soul styles that had little to do with jazz singing as I understand it. (One of my major wishes for this program would have been the inclusion of Samara Joy, whose CD Linger Awhile won the Best New Artist Grammy Award for 2023. Though she’s not an outright copyist of Ella Fitzgerald, she has enough similarities I’d like to see her star in a Fitzgerald biopic, and her more delicate style of singing would have been a welcome respite from all the R&B/soul howling.)

The program began with “The Thrill Is Gone,” originally written and recorded by obscure blues singer Roy Hawkins in 1951 but which became B. B. King’s signature song when his cover became a mega-hit in 1969. It was sung here by Dee Dee Bridgewater with a succession of three electric guitarists taking solos: John McLaughlin, Leonard Brown, and John Pizzarelli. McLaughlin in particular was a welcome sight; a lot older and decidedly more grey-haired than he was when he emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and became acclaimed as “the white Hendrix,” he was nonetheless in fine form and his chops were quite intact. The next song was George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and though Dianne Reeves’s vocal was excellent on its own terms, she did rather overpower this delicate, wistful romantic ballad. Still, she had some good players in her band, including alto saxophonist Tia Fuller and bassist Linda May Oh. (There were quite a few women musicians in the various ensembles, which was nice; it seems that the glass ceiling in jazz is shattering, or at least cracking, at last. The days when a genius like Mary Lou Williams could be relegated to novelty status because she was a non-singing woman jazz musician are fortunately gone.) The third song was “Voyage,” featuring tenor saxophonist David Sánchez, pianist Kenny Barron (misspelled “Baron” on his chyron), trumpeter Eldred Scott (at least that’s how I scribbled his name in my notes; I take full responsibility for any mistakes in my ID’s), bassist John Pattitucci, and drummer Kendrick Scott.

The fourth song was led by trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, a native of Cuba whose defection to the U.S. was arranged by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie when he was on tour in Cuba with the United Nations Orchestra in 1977. In obvious gratitude, the song he chose to play was Dizzy’s Latin-inflected “Tin Tin Deo,” for which Sandoval sang in Spanish as well as playing a spectacular trumpet solo. The song also included an excellent flute part by a first-rate woman player whose name was too long, convoluted, and Hispanic for me to take down, and the pianist was Danilo Pérez. The next song was “As the Spirit Sings,” a welcome vehicle for John McLaughlin with David Sánchez returning on tenor sax and Marcus Miller on piano. Then there were a couple of numbers celebrating the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s educational mission – among their other activities, they run programs to train the next generation of jazz musicians – including a drum circle on Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” (the song that Carlos Santana covered and had his first major hit on in 1969) and a jazz history presentation that included the Dixieland standard “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The next song was “Take It Easy,” sung by Ruthie Foster with Nasseer Shanne (please don’t hold me to that spelling) playing a bulbous Arab stringed instrument which I think was an oud. (I looked up the oud online and it certainly looks like the instrument I saw on last night’s show; it was also the ancestor of the European lute and the Iranian/Persian “tar,” which later became the guitar and got imported into Spain when the Muslim Moors ruled it from the 800’s to the 1400’s.) What followed was a unique two-piano version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played as a duet by A Bu and Hélène Mercier; it was rather heavily edited (but then Leonard Bernstein once said of the Rhapsody in Blue, “You can cut it any way you like and it will do nothing to the piece except make it shorter”) but the two pianists played the piece with the appropriate swagger. I noticed that A Bu was playing a Fazioli piano and Hélène Mercier was playing a Steinway, exactly the same division that Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig used in their two-piano recording of Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, which I reviewed for Fanfare magazine. Sandberg explained in the liner notes to that CD (OUR Recordings 8.226923) that they split the work between two pianos (Nielsen had done the original as a so-called “piano four-hands” score, which means two people sitting at one piano and playing it simultaneously), a Fazioli and a Steinway, because the Fazioli “has an incredibly rich and round bass.”

After the Rhapsody in Blue came one of the most pleasant surprises of the evening: an infectious version by singer and rapper José Jones of the Rolling Stones’s song “Miss You.” I’ve never been that big a fan of that song – the Stones put out their version at the height of the disco craze and it was clearly the work of a aging band trying desperately to keep up with the times – and oddly I liked Jones’s laid-back version, complete with a genuinely witty rap section, better. Jones was backed with a band that included Emmett Cohen on keyboards, Nils Lundgren on trombone, and an unidentified Black electric bass players that delivered one of the most exciting and stirring solos of the night. Then Herbie Hancock came on and did his song “Chameleon” on an instrument called the “keytar,” which allows keyboard players to stand in front of a band and bop around like guitarists do. Only Hancock’s right hand activated the keys of the “keytar,” though with his left hand he was able to manipulate a series of electronic controls on the neck that altered the sound and created an infectious slide-guitar effect as well as an echo of the all-electronic instrument, the theremin. The finale was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and while it was a bit disappointing that they didn’t try to treat this song in jazz style, they had a succession of singers as well as Herbie Hancock leading the accompaniment from an old-fashioned standard acoustic piano. The singers included Dianne Reeves, Janis Siegel, Dee Dee Bridgewater (who sang her contribution in French), Kendrick Young, Varijashree Venugopal (a singer from India who sang in her native tongue; I’m guessing it was Hindi but it might have been another of India’s indigenous languages), John Pizzarelli (who also contributed some tasty acoustic guitar), and another name I can’t make out from my scrawl. Arturo Sandoval also came out with a quite good trumpet solo. It was a very nice program and a welcome acknowledgement of jazz’s importance in the world’s musical history over the last 125 years, and my only criticism was that too much of the singing was strident and didn’t have the subtlety of true jazz vocalism as practiced by the late greats like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Ivie Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, or Chris Connor. But given how much righteous soul the people who did sing projected, that was at best a minor quibble.

Inspector George Gently: "Goodbye, China" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, originally aired September 11, 2011)

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

My husband Charles and I finally got home last night (Thursday, April 23) shortly before 10 p.m. and I took the opportunity to watch an episode of Inspector George Gently, yet another British mystery series. This one takes place in the mid-1960’s in Durham, England. The episode we watched was called “Goodbye, China” and dealt with an informant Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw) developed during his days with the London police before some sort of scandal led to him being demoted to run the force in Durham. He had a more normal name (which I can’t recall right now) but he was nicknamed “China” (George Rohr), and Gently had been trying to get him to leave the world of petty crime and sober up, find himself a place, and look for honest work. To that end he’d given China a large sum of cash, and while most people in China’s place would have blown a large cash infusion on alcohol and/or drugs, China took it seriously enough that he settled in a village near Durham called Brattleboro, landed a place to live, and was working at making himself presentable to future employers. Only the local police officer in Brattleboro, Sgt. Molloy (Dean Lennox Kelly); his wife Terri (Christine Bottomley); a local coroner’s official, Lafferty (Shaun Prendergast); and a local official named Alan Shepherd (Neil Pearson); were all involved in a massive conspiracy to fake China’s death to make it look like an accident caused by over-consumption of alcohol. In the very opening scenes of the episode, we find out why even though we don’t realize the importance of them at first. A local home for mentally challenged kids is invaded by two local young psychopaths, brothers Devin (Jay Miller) and John (Niek Versteig) Blackburn, sons of local pig farmer Geoff Blackburn (Mark Denton). They abduct Alan Shepherd’s autistic son Danny (James Acton) and literally tie him to a merry-go-round outside, not a full-scale one but the sort of thing you find on children’s playgrounds that’s just a metal wheel on the ground pushed from outside handles. Then they disappear, and though they’ve been ostensibly arrested several times for delinquency or hooliganism their names never appeared on local police records. It turns out the reason for that is that instead of reporting their apprehensions to the proper authorities, Alan Shepherd and Sgt. Molloy worked out a way of “breaking” the Blackburn brothers by beating them up themselves.

At one point Devin gets arrested for public drunkenness and hooliganism by Gently and his assistant, detective sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingolby), who it’s been established in previous episodes that despite his Beatle-ish haircut (Lee Ingolby actually looks like he’d have been good casting for a biopic of John Lennon if one had been filmed at this time, 2011), he’s actually a straitlaced conservative who rejects the burgeoning counterculture. (Did I tell you this show takes place in the mid-1960’s? Oh, I did.) But Devin Blackburn resists all their attempts to interrogate him and ultimately gets released overnight. The two cases turn out to be interlinked when we learn that China (ya remember China?) had used Gently’s money to rent himself an apartment in Brattleboro which had a view of the playground at the home where the Blackburns were tormenting Danny Shepherd. China attempted to intervene but the Blackburns killed him for his pains, and the authorities locally decided to make it look like he was a homeless person who just accidentally died in an alcoholic stupor. Inspector Gently figures it out when he notices that China’s corpse was found wearing darned socks; he claims that homeless people never bother to darn their socks. (The homeless people I’ve known, including the ones who do their laundry at the University and Texas Street laundromat 2 ½ blocks away from my home, might well be people fastidious enough about day-to-day comfort they may take the trouble to darn their socks.) The show comes to a weird and not altogether satisfying ending (though I did a fair amount of nodding off while it was on and there were certain details I might have missed), including what happened to the Blackburn brothers – Devin is never seen again after he’s released from his overnight arrest and John is never seen at all after the opening sequence in which he’s shown tormenting Danny. Did Alan Shepherd kill them? If so, he did such a good job of hiding their bodies that they were never found, and when Gently and Bacchus arrest him at the end they guess he’s only going to be liable for a three- to four-year sentence for interfering with a police investigation, not the penalty for a murder charge. (One of the quirks of Inspector George Gently is that the show takes place during the period when the British government was considering, and finally deciding, to abolish capital punishment once and for all. The show’s scripts, mostly by creator Peter Flannery based on novels by Alan Hunter, incorporated that change as it happened historically.) Alan’s motive turns out to be to protect his son Danny from being institutionalized and subjected to substandard care (or none at all). The story is an object lesson in how tragedies can snowball and how one unfortunate event (like Danny being born with or developing autism) can create a whole series of others that ultimately end up sucking basically decent people into criminal or quasi-criminal acts.

Four Sided Triangle (Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1953)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 22) my husband Charles and I watched a 1953 film from Hammer Films (under their alternate “Exclusive Films” identity) that turned out to be surprisingly good: a science-fiction thriller called Four Sided Triangle. (Note the punctuation: no “The” in front of it and no hyphen between “Four” and “Sided,” though the 1949 novel by British science-fiction writer William F. Temple on which it was based was published as Four-Sided Triangle and at the start of the print we were watching was a British Board of Film Censors certificate giving the film’s title as The Four Sided Triangle, without the hyphen but with the article.) It’s set in a small village in central England and is narrated, as is the novel, by Dr. Harvey (James Hayter, who bears a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill), the town physician. The central characters are two BFF’s, Bill (Glyn Dearman as a teenager, Stephen Murray as an adult) and Robin (Sean Barrett as a teenager, John Van Eyssen as an adult), and the woman they’re both interested in, Lena (Jennifer Dearman as a teenager, American import Barbara Payton as an adult – and the studio’s casting department deserves credit for finding a girl actress who looked like she could grow up to be Barbara Payton). There’s a prologue in which the two boys are playing at being knights, Robin wins their pretend joust, and Lena crowns Robin with a crown of laurel and gives Bill a crown of thorns. When the two grow up to be of college age they both go to Cambridge and study science, though Robin is merely being groomed by his father, Sir Walter (Percy Marmont, who in the 1930’s had acted in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s better British films, Rich and Strange and The Secret Agent), to take over the family’s plastics business. Lena returns from a long stay in the U.S. (obviously screenwriters Terence Fisher, who also directed, and Paul Tabori intended that to cover for Barbara Payton’s lack of a British accent) depressed and suicidal – she confesses to Dr. Harvey that she no longer wants to live. But she finds a purpose in life when Bill and Robin, who are pursuing some sort of major experiment in an old barn outside the center of town, draft her as their assistant in their research. What they’ve invented is a so-called “duplicator,” a machine that can make an exact copy of any physical object by drawing energy from a power source and converting it into matter. (Essentially Bill and Robin have invented the 3-D printer decades ahead of time.)

They first test it out on the doctor’s pocket watch, and Dr. Harvey is astonished that the copy is so perfect it even contains the bent chain link of the original. Then they try making a copy of a check written by Robin’s father, though they’ve left the amount and payee spaces blank. (Charles joked they should have tested it on a five-pound note, which leaves open the question of how a machine like this, if it actually existed, could be used for counterfeiting and forgery.) Using a 1,000-pound investment from Robin’s dad, he and Bill develop the machine to the point where it can duplicate not only inanimate objects but also living things, though the duplicate of the first animal Bill tries it on, a guinea pig, dies almost immediately. Bill realizes that what’s gone wrong is that the duplicate animal’s heart didn’t know how to start pumping so the animal could breathe, so he has to invent what amounts to a heart defibrillator to keep the cloned animal alive long enough so its heart starts beating normally. In the meantime Bill has developed a romantic crush on Lena (ya remember Lena?) but is too shy to tell her directly, and he’s thunderstruck when Lena announces her intention to marry Robin instead. Having already worked out the kinks on duplicating living things, Bill determines to use his duplicator to create a clone of Lena so he can make love to the duplicate while Robin is married to the original. Bill successfully creates Lena’s clone, whom he names “Helen” because it’s reasonably close to “Lena,” and takes her on a beachfront holiday, only Helen is upset and takes her sailboat out far beyond safety until Bill has to rescue her. When they get back to their rooms, Helen confesses that, since she has all Lena’s memories and emotions as well as her physical shape, she too is in love with Robin and not Bill. Accordingly Bill takes her back to the lab in their village and does another experiment with her to try to erase all her memories so she’ll forget she’s in love with Robin, only a short-circuit in the lab equipment causes a catastrophic fire and Robin and Dr. Harvey arrive too late to save anybody. Bill and one of the two Barbara Paytons are killed in the blaze, while Robin ends up with the survivor – only which one is it, Lena or Helen? There’s talk of two scars on either side of the clone’s neck, put there by Bill as part of the memory-burning experiment, though the scar we actually see is on the back of her neck – though the implication is that Robin ended up with the cloned Helen while the real Lena died in the fire.

What’s most amazing about Four Sided Triangle is its remarkable understatement; Charles called it “the anti-Frankenstein,” and certainly I too had noticed and registered the difference between Colin Clive’s manic performances in the two James Whale Frankenstein movies from the 1930’s and Stephen Murray’s chillingly matter-of-fact acting as Bill. It helps that he’s motivated not by some mad-scientist desire to rule the world but by simple human jealousy: he wants his best friend’s girl and if he can’t have the original, he’ll use his super-machine to clone her. This is especially surprising since Terence Fisher remained a Hammer mainstay for years and basically focused on recasting the whole Universal monster stable into films both sexier and gorier than the originals. Four Sided Triangle is a quite challenging film whose moral (and it does have one!) strikes at the heart of the whole concept of identity, of who we are and how we learn about that. It also raises the question Alfred Hitchcock had when he planned to film Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose, a haunting post-World War I fantasy about a woman who periodically disappears and then returns the same age even while everyone she left behind has aged normally, about what would happen if the dead did start coming back to life en masse and what would we do with them. Four Sided Triangle is a film whose understatement makes it seem all too relevant today (as does the accuracy of its scientific predictions, even though we luckily have not yet invented a machine that can clone living things) and is especially surprising given the kind of filmmaking Hammer would become famous for later in the 1950’s.

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

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

Last night (Sunday, April 19) my husband Charles and I made it through the third installment of Dmitri Tchneriakov’s misbegotten production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Berlin Oper Unter den Linden in 2022. The Berlin Oper Unter den Linden was officially the state opera company of East Germany during the partition from 1945 to 1990. Last night’s opera was Siegfried, designated by Wagner as the “Second Day” of the cycle, since he regarded the first of the four Ring operas, Das Rheingold, as merely a “Vorabend” (“prologue”). Tcherniakov was hired to direct and design the Ring by the company’s former music director, Daniel Barenboim, before he stepped down as conductor of the Ring in 2022 and retired altogether the next year. The directorship was taken over by Christian Thielemann, who assumed the post of music director for the entire company in 2023 on top of his directorship of the Bayreuth Festival. Tcherniakov’s whole conception of the Ring was to have it take place in a giant scientific research lab called E.S.C.H.E. (the word is the German for “ash,” as in “ash tree,” from which the Norse god Odin, whom the Germans called Wotan, cut a twig to form a spear, onto which he carved runes expressing the knowledge for which he’d given up one of his eyes, though E.S.C.H.E. is spelled like an acronym but we’re never given a clue as to what the acronym stands for) in which various behavioral experiments are going on with both animal and human subjects. This meant, among other things, that Tcherniakov filled up the stage with a lot of silent characters as well as the speaking (or singing) ones Wagner created, and frequently had some of the named characters appear in enclosed catwalks as they looked down on the action in scenes in which Wagner had not called for their participation. Siegfried suffered from Tcherniakov’s bone-headed conception less than the two previous operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, had, but that’s praising with faint damnation.

Tcherniakov set the first act of Siegfried, like the first act of Die Walküre, inside the frame of a modern-day house, though without side walls so the audience could see what was going on inside. The opera actually begins during the orchestral prologue (during which Wagner expected audience members to be filing into their seats as the music played) with extreme close-ups of a rather sullen-looking child who we assumed will grow up to be the young Siegfried (Andreas Schager) playing with giant-sized Lego blocks. (One movie idea the world really didn’t need: The Lego Siegfried.) When the curtain rises we see Mime (Stephan Rügamer), brother of Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) and Siegfried’s foster-father, even though Siegfried can’t stand him. (Mime and Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are the two characters in Wagner in whom his anti-Semitism gets in the way of appreciation even for a diehard Wagnerphile like me.) Mime got to be Siegfried’s foster-father after the events of Die Walküre, in which Siegmund (Robert Watson) met his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė) and had a one-night stand with her even though, as Anna Russell put it, “she’s married to someone else, which is immoral; and she’s his own sister, which is illegal.” The next day Siegmund got killed in a duel with Sieglinde’s husband Hunding, and Sieglinde was ready to kill herself until the Valkyrie Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe) persuaded her that she needed to keep herself alive for at least the next nine months so she could give birth to her and Siegmund’s child Siegfried. Brünnhilde told Sieglinde she should hide out in the forest where the giant Fafner (Peter Rose) had turned himself into a dragon and was guarding the treasure the Nibelungs had accumulated for Alberich in Rheingold. Sieglinde did as instructed but died in childbirth as Siegfried was born, and Mime took the baby in, deciding to raise him and use him as an instrument of vengeance against his brother Alberich. Siegfried also inherited the fragments of Nothung (“Needful”), the sword his dad had used in his duel with Hunding until Wotan, secretly intervening on Hunding’s side, had broken it with his spear.

Mime, who as a metalsmith had created the magical ring from the gold Alberich had stolen from the Rhinemaidens in Rheingold, tries in vain to create a sword Siegfried couldn’t break. Mime also has been fending off various questions from Siegfried about who he really is and where he came from, including telling him, “I am both your father and your mother.” Siegfried has spent enough time out in nature to know that that’s nonsense; he’s noticed that animals pair off with each other and produce offspring that resemble them, and he assumes that he must have had both a father and mother and Mime wasn’t either of them. At one point Siegfried runs off into the woods to get away from Mime, and while he’s out the god Wotan shows up in the guise of “The Wanderer.” Together they go through one of the maddening recitations of the backstory that plague the Ring and remind us that Wagner originally planned a stand-alone opera called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), then decided it needed a prologue called Der Junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), and by the time he finished writing the texts he’d written all four in reverse order and never went back to eliminate the now-superfluous parts giving the backstory. Wotan leaves Mime hanging, almost literally (the rules of the contest allowed the winner to kill the loser once he got a question wrong), over who will reforge Nothung and use it to kill Fafner. Then Siegfried returns and decides that rather than attempt to piece the old Nothung back together, he must file it down to shavings and melt it down completely, making a new sword of the old metal. He does this to the accompaniment of some of the greatest music Wagner (or anybody) ever wrote, the “Forging Scene” and “Hammer Scene,” and at the end of the scene Siegfried tests the power of his newly forged sword by splitting the anvil on which he shaped it. At least that’s the scene as Wagner wrote it, but Tcherniakov had other, worse ideas; Siegfried celebrates his forging of the sword (which we never see in restored form) by taking his hammer and smashing to smithereens just about all of Mime’s furniture as well as his Lego set and the rest of his boyhood toys (putting away childish things, get it?). The second act is supposed to take place in Neidhöhle, the forest where Fafner is hiding out, and Mime takes Siegfried there ostensibly to teach him fear. Tcherniakov presents this wonderful act as a series of six steps in a research assignment:

Phase 1 – Relaxation (Forest Murmurs)
Phase 2 – Immersion in Meditation
Phase 3 – Search for the Inner Helper
Phase 4 – Contacting the Inner Helper
Phase 5 – Confrontation with Conflict. Reaction to Danger.
Phase 6 – Realisation of an Unconscious Desire

The “Inner Helper” turns out to be Wagner’s Woodbird, who in the original sang in incomprehensible birdsong until Siegfried literally tasted Fafner’s blood after killing him (did I spoil it for you?), after which she sang in comprehensible German and warned Siegfried not to trust Mime (Mime had prepared a poisoned drink to knock off Siegfried after Siegfried killed Fafner) and also told him that there was a woman waiting for him sleeping on a rock surrounded by a wall of fire only a hero who had never known fear could go through. Tcherniakov turned the Woodbird into a Black (should I call her “African-German”?) lab assistant (Victoria Randem) who manipulates a toy bird to be Siegfried’s “Inner Helper.” My husband Charles had been wondering how Tcherniakov would stage Fafner in dragon form, and the answer was he didn’t try; instead he had two orderlies bring out Fafner, strait-jacketed and wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask but still recognizably human (and later in the act Siegfried also tries on the Lecter mask for some reason). The third act takes place in various locations in the already established lab sets, and Siegfried has his big confrontation with Wotan in which he’s supposed to break Wotan’s spear with his sword and thereby end what little power the gods have left before he makes it through the flames, finds the sleeping Brünnhilde, says, “Das ist kein Mann!” (“That’s not a man!”) – which has been called one of the silliest lines in all opera – and sings a 35-minute duet with her. The big scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, in which he feels fear for the first time, was supposed to take place on her fire-encircled rock; instead Tcherniakov set it inside a sterile white room labeled “Schlaf Labor” (“Sleep Lab”), and preceded it by having Brünnhilde escorted by Wotan, who lays her on the lab table and even gives her a fatherly kiss. (In Wagner’s original he hasn’t had any contact with her at all since she defied him over Siegmund’s fate in the Walküre duel.) Wotan shows up along with some other extraneous characters watching from a catwalk as Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the final phrases of their duet and pledge their love to each other for eternity [spoiler alert! It doesn’t work out that way in Götterdämmerung]. In the Siegfried/Brünnhilde duet the man who lets the side down is not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann, who slows down some of the most intensely erotic music of all time to a virtual crawl. Listening to this sort of Wagner performance, one can understand Arturo Toscanini’s famous jibe about the similarly extended length of the love duet in Act II of Tristan und Isolde: “If they were Italians, they’d have had seven kids by now!”

I haven’t yet mentioned the quality of the singing, which I would describe as serviceable. Andreas Schager as Siegfried is obliged to spend the entire opera (except for a brief scene in which he’s allowed to doff his jacket and wear a white T-shirt under it) in a powder-blue sweat outfit that doesn’t do much to show off his masculine charms. My dream image of an ideal Siegfried would be one who looked like Paul Richter (who played Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s 1923 film, based not on Wagner but the original Norse myths Wagner had also used) and sounded like Lauritz Melchior; Melchior was vocally incomparable in the part but he fully lived up to Jonathan Tolins’ jibe in the play Twilight of the Golds that “you’re supposed to believe this guy is a superhero when he looks like Ed Asner in a loincloth and a blond wig.” (In the 1930’s, when Melchior was at his peak, the joke would have been “like Eugene Pallette in a loincloth and a blond wig.”) I give Schager credit for sheer stamina; his voice sounded as strong at the end of Act III as at the beginning of Act I, which hasn’t been true of a lot of live-performance Siegfrieds. He doesn’t get to wear a loincloth or a blond wig, and he’s attractive enough he doesn’t look like Ed Asner but he’s hardly a hunk to die for either. Stephan Rügamer is properly annoying as Mime and Michael Volle is strong as the Wanderer a.k.a. Wotan, though I still think his best performance in the cycle came in Walküre because he got to play a genuinely conflicted character. In Rheingold he was a Trump-like con artist and here he’s portrayed on an unrelieved level of world-weariness. Peter Rose as Fafner got to do little but get dragged on in his straitjacket and get stabbed (in the back, though Wagner clearly wrote the text to say Siegfried stabbed Fafner in the heart, and in the hero quotient it makes a big difference whether you kill your adversary in the front or in the back). As Erda the Earth Goddess, with whom Wotan has a dialogue after he wakes her up (three characters – Fafner, Erda, and Brünnhilde – are all awakened from powerful, dream-filled sleeps) and with whom he’s already produced 12 children (the nine Valkyries and the three Norns, whom we will hear from at the beginning of episode four, Götterdämmerung, though we’ve already seen them doing a lot of lurking around in one of Tcherniakov’s many bad ideas) – Anna Kissjudit looks as strong as she could given the shapeless light blue dress outfit Tcherniakov has her wear throughout. I for one would much rather have seen her as “a green-faced torso that pops out of the ground,” as Anna Russell described her in her infamous spoof of the Ring. But then that would have required a special effect, something Tcherniakov avoids like the proverbial plague. The Brünnhilde, Anja Kampe, sang with real power and authority but her appearance in a light blue top and skin-tight black jeans was hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

I actually liked the one Tcherniakov production I’d seen before this, Borodin’s opera Prince Igor at the Met, but it’s possible that since Borodin was Russian and so is Tcherniakov, he was more respectful of an opera from the home-town team. It also helped that Borodin died before he finished Prince Igor, and the standard edition was put together by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov from Borodin’s notes and their memories of parts of the opera Borodin played them before he croaked. This gave Tchneriakov the latitude he thought he needed to rewrite the opera and use bits from other Borodin pieces to create an ending gloomier than the one Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov had supplied. In 2015 Tchneriakov staged a Canadian production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in which he decided to make all the characters part of Donna Anna’s extended family and, instead of having the statue of the dead Commendatore come to life and drag Don Giovanni to hell at the end, he had Don Giovanni’s family stage an intervention at the end with an actor made up to look like the Commendatore. Tcherniakov did this because he hates supernatural plot twists in opera, which made him a strange choice to direct Wagner’s Ring because so much of its plot is dependent on the supernatural. The singing in this Siegfried was strong enough it overcame Tcherniakov’s silly staging ideas most of the time, but it’s a real pity that since the passing of Birgit Nilsson the world has been singularly bereft of the kinds of heroic voices needed to make Wagner work. The best era for Wagner singing was between the two world wars, when you had sopranos like Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann, Helen Traubel, and Astrid Varnay; tenors like Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, and Franz Völker; baritones like Friedrich Schorr, Rudolf Böckelmann, and Josef Herrmann; and basses like Alexander Kipnis, Eduard Habich, and Emanuel List. There’s no one here who stands out the way Jonas Kaufmann (the world’s greatest living Wagner tenor) did as Parsifal in the Met’s 2013 staging, though that production by François Girard was so atrocious Tcherniakov’s hatchet job on the Ring seemed respectful by comparison. In my moviemagg review, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/03/wagner-parsifal-live-from-met-in-hd.html, I wrote an account of how much I disliked the production: the singing was spectacular throughout (far better than what Thielemann got from his cast here!) but the staging was even sillier.

His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 18) I watched an unusually long (two hours even) 1951 film noir, sort of, called His Kind of Woman, executive-produced by Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) for RKO during the troubled seven years (1948 to 1955) in which he owned the company outright. The film began life as an unpublished story by Gerald Drayson Adams called Star Sapphire (though no sapphire, or any other sort of jewelry, appears as a plot element in the finished film). John Farrow, Mia Farrow’s father and a sporadically interesting director with two all-time great noirs on his résumé, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (both made at Paramount in 1948), was assigned to direct and Robert Mitchum, then RKO’s biggest leading man, was set to star. The originally assigned writers, Frank Fenton and Jack Douglas, turned in a script with comic-relief elements, and when Hughes took over the project as a personal production he not only assigned his biggest female lead, Jane Russell, to be Mitchum’s co-star, he ordered the writers to build up the character of ham actor and movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). He also not only ordered them to insert a sadistic Nazi refugee plastic surgeon, Martin Krafft (John Mylong, who two years after this film would appear as “The Professor” in Phil Tucker’s legendarily awful Robot Monster) but wrote the dialogue for this character himself and even recorded tapes of the character’s lines so Mylong would deliver them as Hughes wanted them. (The character appears in the film as an uncanny premonition of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece about nuclear war from 13 years later.) John Farrow, who had worked well with Mitchum on Where Danger Lives the year before and expected an untroubled shoot, was appalled when he turned in what he thought was a fully finished film and Hughes demanded extensive changes. Hughes persuaded Richard Fleischer to take over the project and direct the reshoots by offering Fleischer the chance to remake his already completed film, The Narrow Margin (one of the better “B” noirs of the period), with a bigger budget and “A”-list stars. When Fleischer said he was satisfied with The Narrow Margin as it was, Hughes threatened to scrap the movie altogether and not release it unless Fleischer did the retakes on His Kind of Woman.

Hughes also supplied a new writer, Earl Felton, and summoned Fleischer and Felton for story conferences either at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the office he rented at Samuel Goldwyn Studios (amazingly, during the entire seven years he owned RKO he never set foot in the studio at all; instead he rented an office from Goldwyn and ran it from there). Much to Felton’s irritation, Hughes supplied him only with milk, and an occasional half a sandwich, instead of the steady supply of Scotch Felton was used to having by his side as he worked. What resulted from all this taking and retaking was an odd and quirky tale of a mystery man, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum), who’s recruited by some equally mysterious crooks for a job assignment. They’re willing to pay him $50,000 total and $5,000 in advance, for which he’s told to go to a resort town in Baja California, Mexico and stay at a high-end resort called Morro’s, run by José Morro (Philip Van Zandt). Milner doesn’t know what the job is and neither do we until halfway through the movie. It seems that a gangster named Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr, though the mercurial Hughes used two other actors, Lee Van Cleef – later a star in Italian “spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960’s – and Robert J. Wilke, in the role and shot all their scenes before throwing out all that expensive shooting and having Burr take over the role: a good move, actually, as Burr steals the film in every scene he’s in) was expelled from the U.S. and deported to his native Italy by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before its name was changed to the now-notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ferraro’s gang had hit on the idea of finding a no-account drifter with no living relatives, no significant others, and no one who would miss him if he disappeared and recruiting him to serve as a model for Dr. Krafft to use to alter Ferraro’s face with plastic surgery. Then Ferraro would be able to return to the U.S. in the patsy’s identity while the patsy would be quietly murdered and his body dumped somewhere.

Milner learns all this from INS agent Bill Lusk (Tim Holt) just before Lusk is killed by Ferraro’s gang. In a scene Fenton, Leonard, and/or Felton seem to have ripped off from Casablanca, Milner comes to the aid of a young couple, Milton (Richard Bergren) and Jennie (Leslye Banning) Stone, who’ve been cheated at cards by investment broker Myron Winton (Jim Backus), by rigging the game until the Stones have made back their money. And where does Jane Russell fit into all this? She plays an adventuress named Lenore Brent who poses as a millionaire heiress even though she doesn’t have a dime to her name. She’s hoping to “marry up” to movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price) despite the inconvenient detail that Cardigan already has a wife, Helen (Marjorie Reynolds). Helen went to Reno to obtain a no-fault Nevada divorce, but then changed her mind and decided to stay married to Mark. Lenore and Milner meet when they’re the only passengers on a chartered plane that takes them to Morro’s resort in Mexico, and they hit it off immediately even though in real life Mitchum and Russell were never more than good friends. Most of the troubles with the film came from the final sequence, which Hughes kept expanding past all sense, either dramatic or financial. It takes place on Ferraro’s yacht, which is moored just off the Baja coast. Hughes kept adding so many scenes to this sequence that the yacht set had to rebuilt and vastly expanded; it had started out as a relatively simple set involving just the ship’s bridge, but as Hughes’s vision for the film grew so did the set until it was as big as a real yacht and took up most of the tank in RKO’s Stage 22. When Fleischer turned in a rough cut of the sequence, it lasted 80 minutes and Hughes said he loved every minute of it except for the scenes involving Nick Ferraro, whom he demanded be replaced. By the time Hughes finished fussing with His Kind of Woman, over a year had passed and the film lost $850,000, which as Fleischer inconveniently pointed out was exactly what Hughes had spent on the retakes.

I remember getting into an argument with my late friend Chris Schneider about His Kind of Woman because he absolutely loved the movie, especially the camp scenes involving Vincent Price’s character, whereas one of my all-time pet peeves is a film that tries to be both a serious genre piece and a spoof. All too often such a movie with a mixed mission tries to be both and achieves neither. Vincent Price flames out in his role with his camp amplifier turned up to, or even past, 11; it’s the sort of playing he’d used to liven up many of the awful horror movies he got shunted into after the success of House of Wax (1953) “typed” him as a horror actor, but it’s relentlessly out of place here, resulting in an audaciously stupid scene in which he sets out to confront the bad guys on a small rowboat, only it literally sinks under the weight of the crew Price’s character has recruited to sail with him. Shortly after His Kind of Woman, Howard Hughes assigned Mitchum and Russell to co-star in another thriller, Macao, which I haven’t seen since my husband Charles and I ran a VHS tape in the 1990’s to commemorate Portugal having finally relinquished their control of Macao and handed it back to China. I remember Macao as quite a bit better than His Kind of Woman, even though it was also a film in which Hughes fired the director. Josef von Sternberg started the movie and Nicholas Ray finished it, and unlike in a lot of such instances it’s really easy to tell who directed what. Sternberg tried to get Jane Russell to play the same sort of “woman of mystery” Marlene Dietrich had portrayed in their seven films together between 1930 and 1934, while Ray saw Russell – who was always surprisingly masculine despite those famously large breasts; when she and Marilyn Monroe co-starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953 they came off as a Lesbian couple, with Russell the butch and Monroe the femme – as “just one of the boys” and directed her accordingly.

With more sensitive writing – especially for Price’s character (he could have become a real figure of pathos as he realized his career as an actor had been mired in make-believe heroics and now he had the chance to show real guts) – and following the Hitchcock formula of letting the audience know from the get-go who the villains are and what they’re after instead of shrouding it all in mystery, His Kind of Woman could have been a much better movie than it is. But as it stands it’s just another movie that takes a serviceable noir plotline and drowns it in quirks. The one person involved with His Kind of Woman who actually got good reviews at the time was the cinematographer, Harry J. Wild, who’d shot RKO’s quintessential film noir Murder, My Sweet seven years earlier and brought the same chiaroscuro style to this much less convincing film. But I was quite struck by the line with which Eddie Muller closed his outro; after telling the weird stories about how Howard Hughes got directly involved in the production and the endless changes he dictated to his cast and crew, Muller said, “How does someone so erratic, incompetent, and delusional end up in charge?” In today’s political situation, it came off as a thinly veiled critique of Donald Trump – and with Trump’s good buddies Larry and David Ellison set to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner Classic Movies’ parent company, and CNN on top of Paramount and CBS, Eddie Muller might be in trouble over that remark!

Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)

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

Last night (Friday, April 17) when my husband Charles actually did get home shortly after 11 p.m., I ran him an oddball item off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHc0rxm628&t=6s): the 1929 short Black and Tan, starring Duke Ellington (in his film debut) and light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington in a film written, directed, and probably produced by Dudley Murphy. Dudley Murphy (1897-1968) had a quirky career; according to his imdb.com page, his “output varied wildly from modernist avant-garde to routine studio programmers.” He’s best known for three films he made featuring major African-American performers: this one, St. Louis Blues (1929) – another short, and the one film we have of the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith – and the feature The Emperor Jones, made in New York City in 1933 and preserving Paul Robeson’s performance as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play (though Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward worked on the script and “opened up” the play to show how Brutus Jones got to be a Caribbean dictator in the first place). I’d seen Black and Tan several times before, usually in pretty grungy and beat-up prints presented on programs about jazz in films. This version from the Cult Cinema Classics YouTube page was ballyhooed as a major restoration: “The source material used includes a 35mm print from the collection of KAVI (a film archive in Finland) and a 16mm duplicate negative from the collection of Blackhawk Films.” The restoration was a big improvement over any version of the film I’d seen before. The plot of Black and Tan is simple: Duke Ellington and his trumpet player, Artie Whetsol, are shown rehearsing the title song, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (actually co-composed by Ellington and his earlier trumpet star, James “Bubber” Miley, but it’s possible that Miley had already drunk his way out of Ellington’s band by the time this film was made) in a grungy Harlem apartment.

Two men (Edgar Connor and Alec Lovejoy) come over to repossess Ellington’s piano, but Ellington’s girlfriend, dancer Fredi Washington, arrives with the seemingly good news that their financial troubles are over. “I've just landed a job in a nightclub. And I’m going to dance and you’re going to play. Isn’t that wonderful?” Ellington reminds Fredi that her doctor had just diagnosed her with heart disease and told her she shouldn’t dance anymore, but Fredi ignores his warning and takes the job anyway. We then cut to the band’s and Fredi’s debut performance at the club, which is probably as close as we’re going to get to what Ellington’s actual performances at the Cotton Club, the prestige nightclub in Harlem that featured Black performers but didn’t let any Blacks in the audience, looked like. Among the acts are a group of five Black male dancers who move in a staggeringly perfect unison to Ellington’s composition “Black Beauty” while Fredi waits to do her number. Murphy gives us “Black Beauty” first filmed normally and then through a point-of-view shot showing how Fredi sees the number in a series of fragmented, kaleidoscopic vistas that let us know without stressing it just how sick she is and how dangerous it is for her to be working there. Then Fredi does her big number to Ellington’s “Cotton Club Stomp,” flails her arms and legs around big-time, and Murphy gives us an astonishing angle shooting up at her legs and her crotch. As the dance number stops Fredi literally collapses on stage, and the club’s manager tells Ellington to keep playing. He does so until someone comes up to him on the bandstand and gives him word that Fredi is literally on her deathbed, whereupon he orders his band members to stop playing and pack up so he and they can be with Fredi as she dies. They all end up in Fredi’s bedroom, where she makes her last request: “Duke, play me the ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’” The Hall Johnson Choir turns up and sings a version of the song (all other renditions I’m aware of present it as an instrumental), and we get a final point-of-view shot from Fredi’s perspective as Ellington’s face gets blurrier until Murphy and cinematographer Dal Clawson cut to a more conventional angle as Fredi finally dies. The restoration definitely improved the picture quality and seems to have helped the sound as well, though it’s still awfully difficult to make out the words the Hall Johnson Choir is singing to “Black and Tan Fantasy.” (The Hall Johnson Choir also appeared in the 1929 St. Louis Blues, but there they just seemed to get in the way.)

One thing I hadn’t realized until last night is that Black and Tan is actually at least loosely based on a true story; Fredi Washington’s character is based on Florence Mills, a spectacularly successful and tragically short-lived African-American entertainer. Born in 1896, Mills made her New York stage debut in the all-Black revue Shuffle Along, which was such a huge hit it convinced white promoters there was a market among white audiences for Black entertainers. White producer Lew Leslie hired Mills and other Black stars for the Plantation Club and later developed a Broadway show out of the club’s roster, the Plantation Revue. Alas, Mills’s rise to stardom ended abruptly when she caught tuberculosis after 300 performances of a show called Blackbirds in London. She made it home but died at a hospital in New York City on November 1, 1927. More than 10,000 people attended her funeral; Black poet James Weldon Johnson was one of them, and Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee, all of whom had performed with Mills, were honorary pallbearers. One giveaway that the plot of Black and Tan was inspired by the real-life death of Florence Mills was that the film includes “Black Beauty,” a song composed by Ellington specifically as a memorial tribute to her. The connection between Fredi Washington’s fate in the movie and Florence Mills’s in real life gives Black and Tan a poignancy most 1920’s and 1930’s band shorts don’t have, while Murphy’s amazingly creative visual direction (at a time when most Hollywood musical features were still being filmed from straightforward angles, in which dancers were seen cavorting on big sets from far away and looking like ants on a wedding cake) also makes this film really special – though Ellington’s later band shorts, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller at Paramount before he left to invent Cinerama, are also unusually creative visually. I’ve long suspected that Ellington, who began as a painter and showed off his visual flair by (among other things) naming so many of his songs after colors, had a lot to do with the unusually rich visual “looks” of his band shorts.