The Lone Wolf Strikes (Columbia, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 10) my husband Charles and I watched a 1940 “B” movie from Columbia called The Lone Wolf Strikes, the fourth in a series of Columbia “B”’s featuring the character of a good-bad reformed jewel thief, Michael Lanyard a.k.a. The Lone Wolf. and the second with Warren William as Lanyard after Columbia tried Melvyn Douglas in the first film in the series, The Lone Wolf Returns, and Francis Lederer in the second, The Lone Wolf in Paris. The third film, and the first with Warren William, was The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt, and it co-starred Ida Lupino with Rita Hayworth in a small supporting role much like her part in Homicide Bureau. The Lone Wolf Strikes was their fourth, made in 1940 and co-starring Joan Perry (true name: Elizabeth Rosiland Miller), who retired from acting in 1941 to marry Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. (One wonders how she handled Cohn’s great penchant for womanizing.) It begins with a homely middle-aged banker type, Phillip Jordan (Roy Gordon), romancing a younger beauty named Binnie Weldon (Astrid Allwyn, who played the “other woman” in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet) and showing her his priceless pearl necklace. Phillip offers Binnie the chance to wear it to a gala event the two are attending, only what he doesn’t realize – though we soon learn – is that Binnie is part of a gang of jewel thieves after the necklace. Her (real) boyfriend Jim Ryder (Alan Baxter) is also part of the gang, as is Ralph Bolton (Robert Wilcox), who’s romanced Phillip’s daughter, Delia Jordan (Joan Perry), on board a ship taking her from Europe to America. She’s in love with him and is prepared to marry him, but he’s only dating her as part of his responsibilities to the gang. Phillip discovers when the clasp on the necklace breaks and he takes it to a legitimate jeweler to have it mended that it’s a worthless imitation; Binnie pocketed the real necklace and substituted a fake during her night out with Phillip.

Worried that Phillip will report them to the police, the gang members kill him and fake it to look like an accident. Michael Lanyard and his valet, Jamison (Eric Blore – so two people from the Astaire-Rogers films were in this one!), get involved when Delia Jordan hires them to get back her late father’s necklace, which she was supposed to get on the day she got married. The gangsters plan to profit from their crime by selling the necklace to international jewel dealer Emil Gorelick (Montagu Love, speaking in a bizarre mishmash of accents – he’s supposed to be Dutch, but what comes out of his mouth sounds like the natural voice of no human on earth), who just happens to be an old friend of Lanyard’s from his days as a jewel thief himself. Lanyard goes to see Gorelick on the afternoon before a big party where Gorelick is supposed to connect with the thieves, but the evening ends with Gorelick bound and tied to a chair by Lanyard. Lanyard proceeds to go to the party, impersonating Gorelick and contacting the gang, only the cops go to Lanyard’s apartment and release the real Gorelick. From then on the rest of the movie consists of a not very engaging round-robin as to who has the real necklace and who has the copy, but in the end Lanyard ends up not only with the real necklace, which he turns over to Delia as its rightful owner, but with at least a perfunctory display of affection for Delia herself.

What makes The Lone Wolf Strikes unusually interesting is that, though it’s nothing more plot-wise than a standard-issue romantic thriller, director Sidney Salkow (a filmmaker named after a figure-skating jump?) and cinematographer Henry Freulich give it a look close to all-out film noir, all dark shadows and sinister angles. The Lone Wolf Strikes could have come even closer to film noir if Binnie had been made more of a femme fatale; as it is, she’s just a stick-figure villainess and she also is genuinely devoted to her lover and partner in crime, Jim Ryder, in ways most femmes fatales weren’t. Still, it’s an engaging movie even though it’s hardly one of Warren William’s great performances; he was at his best either at Warner Bros. before this (including his four quite good films as Perry Mason) or at PRC and Monogram later, including playing the Claudius equivalent in Edgar G. Ulmer’s and Adele Commandini’s fascinating modern-dress rewrite of Hamlet as Strange Illusion, a.k.a. Out of the Dark (and playing him quite well). There’s an intriguing name on the screenplay credits, Dalton Trumbo, though this time he only wrote the original story and two other scribes, Harry Segall and Albert Duffy, cranked out the actual script.

The Last Woman Who Lived Here (CME Spring Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 9) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called The Last Woman Who Lived Here. It began with a prologue in which a woman named Vanessa Miller is fleeing in terror from someone trying to abuse her. She lives in a large house – in later flashbacks it was established that she worked as a waitress at a local night spot, which had Charles briefly wondering how she could afford such a nice house on a waitress’s salary, though writer Leo McGuigan explained that by saying she’d lived there with her grandmother as grandma’s caregiver, and grandma willed her the house – and she gets a lot of frenzied knocks on her various doors. When she makes the mistake of opening one, her killer bursts in, drags her down a hallway, and … we don’t see what happened to her after that, but with the end of a paintbrush she chisels the word “MURDER” on the stairwell wall before she expires. Then there’s a typical Lifetime tag reading, “Four months later,” and four months later a new young couple, Joel (David Chinchilla – apparently that’s really his name) and Charlotte (Tamara Almeida) Wells, buy the house. Trudy, the realtor who sells it to them, tells Joel that there was a suspicious death in the house (though the police ruled it accidental) but doesn’t bother to tell Charlotte. Instead Joel gets a call while the two of them are alone in the house and she overhears him telling the mystery caller that he hasn’t told Charlotte yet.

Ultimately the Wellses get invited to a get-to-know-the-neighbors party hosted by Rick Bridges (Morgan Kelly) and his wife Serena (Cindy Sampson). Rick is the biggest of the big men in town, having just personally endowed a new children’s emergency room at the local hospital. He and Serena are the local power couple, while another couple, Ted (Randal Edwards) and Laurie (Heidi Lynch), are at the party. Laurie, the town gossip, breaks the news to Charlotte that they’re living in the “murder house,” and a furious Charlotte chews out realtor Trudy for not having given her that particular piece of information about the place. One of the reasons Joel, a personal-injury attorney, and Charlotte, a successful interior designer (when she mentions her latest customers, she says they’ve changed their minds so often about how they want their house to look that I joked she’d got Anton Bruckner as a client), wanted to move out of their “cozy” penthouse apartment into a home in the suburbs (the locale is Connecticut) was they wanted to have children. Rick and Serena also want children, but either Rick or Serena is infertile and so they’re planning to adopt so Rick can have a son to continue his family’s illustrious name and inheritance. On the night Vanessa Miller died, Ted’s surveillance camera on his front doorbell caught the arrival of a mystery assailant at her door, but Ted edited the footage before he turned it over to the cops.

Charlotte and Serena sneak into his house while he’s out one evening and get to see the whole recording, which Ted edited to conceal that he was having an affair and the video showed his partner Molly (Natalia Gracious) coming to his place that night. Ted arrives home unexpectedly with Molly in tow, and the two disappear into a back room in Ted’s house for some fun which gives Charlotte and Serena the chance to escape unseen. Later, just to prove that he has nothing to hide, Ted gives them a flash drive containing the unedited version of the video. There are also manila envelopes containing photos of Vanessa Miller with bruises inflicted on her by a mystery man just before she died, and eventually Charlotte sees a fancy watch on the wrist of Vanessa’s assailant in the photo and realizes [spoiler alert!] that it was Rick Bridges who attacked her. She gets ready to confront him about it, only he shows up at her place, overpowers her and takes her back to his home. Then he locks her in a wine cellar made of glass, with his vintages on display from his living room. Serena shows up and Charlotte is sure she’ll rescue her from her psychopathic husband, but [double spoiler alert!] Serena is not only in on her husband’s plot, it was she who killed Vanessa. Apparently Rick was constantly flirting with various young women in and around their country club, but for some reason he got more obsessed with Vanessa than anybody else. He was so determined to have her that he assaulted her and came close to out-and-out rape, then offered her money to keep the whole thing quiet.

Realizing that the scandal surrounding Rick’s attack on Vanessa would destroy their chances to adopt a child, Serena herself eliminated Vanessa and faked it to look like a household accident. Now she plans to kill Charlotte as well by clubbing her over the head with a singularly ugly statuette (had writer McGuigan seen Lady in the Death House?). Fortunately Joel has caught on to where his wife is and comes in to rescue her, and after a multi-character fight scene in which Serena and Charlotte both Reach for the Gun (did I tell you Serena had a gun just in case the proverbial blunt object wasn’t enough to take Charlotte out?), ultimately the police arrive and take both Rick and Serena into custody. Before that there’s been a powerful dialogue exchange between the principals that reminded me very much of the 1946 film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Lewis Milestone from a script by Robert Rossen and starring Barbara Stanwyck as a fanatical woman, born to money, who’s determined to boost her milquetoast husband (Kirk Douglas in his first film) into a legal and political career about which he couldn’t care less. When Cindy Sampson as Serena declaims that behind every strong, powerful man is an even stronger, more powerful woman, and when she bitches to Morgan Kelly that he’s always making messes she has to clean up, one could (I could, anyway) readily imagine Stanwyck declaiming those lines. Capably directed by Samantha MacAdam, The Last Woman Who Lived Here was a quite good vest-pocket thriller that got better as it went along, and it ends in a tag scene set three years after the main action in which Charlotte, visibly pregnant with her and Joel’s first child, reads a newspaper story announcing that both Rick and Serena have finally run out of appeals and are due to begin serving their richly deserved sentences – even though the real world tells us that people at the social level of Rick and Serena Bridges almost never face the legal or social consequences of their crimes.

Homicide Bureau (Columbia, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 9), after my husband Charles and I watched The Last Woman Who Lived Here, I screened us an odd post on YouTube of a 1939 film called Homicide Bureau. Its opening scenes made it look like Dirty Harry 32 years early: a boorish homicide lieutenant named Jim Logan (Bruce Cabot) gets chewed out by his immediate supervisor, Captain Haines (Moroni Olsen), for his blatant disregard of Constitutional rights in his fanatic pursuit of criminals and particularly his resort to dragnet tactics. When he defended his practice of arresting anyone willy-nilly every time a major murder occurs whether there’s any actual evidence against them or not, his dialogue reminded both Charles and I of the famous line from Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” Logan is the sort of police officer who thinks he can solve crimes by browbeating arrestees into confessions, while Haines and a delegate from the city’s Police Commission question whether those tactics do more harm than good even while they acknowledge that the public (represented here by photos of newspaper front pages) demands quick action to solve those crimes. The film opens with a montage of various assaults on law-abiding citizens, including one in which a dairyman’s milk containers are shot to pieces, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do with homicide until a sinister thug enters a pool room and shoots down a seemingly innocent bystander. Logan gets assigned to the case and immediately fastens onto small-time hood Chuck Brown (Marc Lawrence) as the killer. There’s an eyewitness, but a man who’s either representing the Police Commission or Brown’s defense attorney shoots down the I.D. as inherently unreliable because the so-called “witness” never actually saw the killer’s face.

Homicide Bureau got posted to YouTube because Rita Hayworth is in it, and she’s actually billed second under Cabot, but it’s a pretty nothing role. She’s the new forensic technician at the police department, replacing a man who was forced to retire at age 60, and of course screenwriter Earle Snell couldn’t resist the old gag of having Logan, who’s only been given the name “J. G. Bliss,” expect her to be a man and do a shocked double-take when she turns out to be (gasp!) a woman. This film was made during the remodeling campaign Hayworth’s first husband, used-car salesman Edward Judson, put her through. To disguise her Latina origins Judson had her use her Irish-American mother’s last name, Haworth (adding a “y” to make it look classier), instead of her father’s Argentinian name, Cansino. After this film, in which she’s still black-haired and has her original Latina hairline, he subjected her to electrolysis to raise her hairline and dyed her hair red. Like Ava Gardner in her “B” movie Ghosts on the Loose with Bela Lugosi and the Bowery Boys (1943), Hayworth here looks no more than ordinarily attractive as she rather glumly goes about her business of doing lab work to help the cops catch the crooks. There’s a clinch between her and Cabot at the end but it seems pretty perfunctory.

The real interest in Homicide Bureau is in the debate between strong-arm police tactics and more thoughtful methods of law enforcement, and the topicality of the MacGuffin. With World War II looming on the horizon, Snell decided to base his script around a secret shipment of armaments for one of the belligerent sides in the conflict despite America’s official neutrality. The shipments are being organized under the cover of a junk dealers’ “protective association” (really, of course, a racket) and are being loaded directly onto a ship instead of being taken to the docks by land freight as usual. They’re in boxes called “Radio” and “Refrigerator,” but one of the “Radio” boxes breaks open on the pier and reveals high-powered combat rifles. Ultimately, of course, the gangsters running the racket are busted and the good guys win, and Logan even wins a grudging acceptance of his strong-arm tactics from Captain Haines. Homicide Bureau was made by a quite capable director, Charles C. Coleman, and it’s full of loud, exciting action resembling a Warner Bros. gangster “B” from the same period; it just seems like we’ve seen it before, and in the only significant female role Rita Hayworth doesn’t harm the film but she doesn’t do much for it, either. She’s just there, looking reasonably pretty and defying one’s mental image of a forensic scientist, then or now. The explosively sexual Hayworth that launched a million jack-off sessions among American servicemembers during World War II, in which she and Betty Grable were the number one sex queens of American film, was still to come.

The Woman with My Face (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 8) I watched a Lifetime movie from 2024 (one of the ones I suspect they premiered on their premium streaming channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, before they let it out on Lifetime itself) called The Woman with My Face. It’s a rather quirky tale about a young woman named Anya Wilson (Nicole Marie Johnson) who realizes in an unusual way that she has a previously unknown twin sister, Sarah Aubrey (also Nicole Marie Johnson). The way she finds this out is when Sarah’s husband, Joseph Aubrey (Donny Boaz, who’s easy enough on the eyes but not so drop-dead gorgeous we immediately assume based on Lifetime’s usual casting iconography that he’s a villain), walks up to Anya on the street and kisses her, then backs away after she responds in shock. When the two finally meet, they learn that they both have the same birthday and they were both adopted from the same agency in Bayfield, Georgia, where the film takes place. Anya already has a troubled relationship with her teenage daughter Mia (Abbie Minna Abrahams, billed only as “Minna”), who resents Mom’s career as a journalist and blames it for the breakup of Anya’s marriage to Mia’s dad. Directed by Brittany Goodwin from a script by Rosy Deacon, The Woman with My Face proceeds as Anya starts using her skills as an investigative reporter to find the facts about her own background. She receives several notes and texts warning her off the investigation, and also has to deal with a pushy local TV reporter, Harper Hayward (Brey Noelle), who seizes on the story as what could be The One to break her out of local TV news and earn her a shot on a national program. Anya is also harassed by Peter Boyce (Christofher Griffin), a heavy-set African-American who turns out to be yet another adoptee who was one of a pair of twins and has been frustratingly unable to locate his missing twin brother.

Along the way Anya also meets Willa Davison (Victoria Posey), who claims to be Sarah’s estranged adoptive mother. Sarah had told Anya that mom got the family into trouble with writing phony checks, but later it turns out that it was Sarah who got in dutch with the law when Harper uncovers her mug shot and threatens to publish it on the air unless Anya gives up her own investigation and agrees to an interview with Harper. This leads to an immediate falling-out between Anya and Sarah after Anya indignantly refuses to terminate her investigation just for the sake of keeping Sarah’s big secret a secret. Ultimately the villainess of the piece turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Willa Davison, who isn’t Sarah’s adoptive mother after all. Her real name is Linda Davrow, and she cooked up this whole scheme to study the effect on twins of being raised apart from each other. Though she published a book about this, and we see a copy in the Bayfield library where Sarah works (its cover is a painting of the familiar double-helix model of DNA, so we know the book has something to do with genetics), we’re never told just what Davrow’s research discovered or what’s so important about it she’s willing to resort, literally, to murder just to keep her secrets.​​ The person she murdered was Colleen (Carla Cloud), a retired social worker whom Anya tracked down; she had worked on some of the adoptions, and right when Anya was in her living room she got a call from somebody who ordered her not to talk, so Colleen had ordered Anya out of her house immediately, and then was found murdered when first Harper Hayward and then Anya went back to her house to make another run at getting her information. In a flashback, we see that Colleen died when Willa went to see her and spiked her tea with poison.

Ultimately Willa a.k.a. Linda Davrow overpowers Anya, kidnaps Mia, and locks Sarah in a garage and starts a car to kill her with carbon monoxide poisoning. Her price for allowing everyone to live is for Anya to delete all the research information she’s collected on the adoptions. Anya tells Willa that she can’t unlock her laptop without her hands being free, and when Willa does this, Anya wallops her with the laptop, temporarily incapacitating her. But Willa recovers and trains a gun on them, and it’s up to Mia to save her mom by sneaking behind Willa with a heavy glass vase, then knocking her out with it. Ultimately both families are reunited and Mia looks well on her way to getting a new dad, since Anya had along the way fallen for a hot young man, also a divorcé, named Leo Powell (Jonathan Ludwikowski). The Woman with My Face – not to be confused with a previous Lifetime movie, The Man with My Husband’s Face (2023), in which the villain poses as a nonexistent identical twin to drive his wife crazy and thereby grab her fortune – was a competent, workmanlike entry in the Lifetime “pussies in peril” genre (though this time the pussy was in peril from another pussy), no better than most of them but also no worse. At least it was engaging, and while the movie overall had the look and feel of something shot on digital video instead of film (and not too convincing digital video, at that), at least the digital technology probably made it a good deal easier for director Goodwin to show Nicole Marie Johnson as Anya and Nicole Marie Johnson as Sarah in the same frame.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Black Widower" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, March 7) I watched a 2016 episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, a quirky mystery show set in New Zealand featuring a thrice-married, thrice-divorced lead detective named Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), who’s actually been to the altar and back so many times even he’s not sure if he had a fourth marriage and divorce somewhere along the way. He’s in an uneasy partnership with woman detective Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), who’s understandably worried that he’s going to screw up their working relationship by hitting on her; and there’s a third cop in the mix, young, hunky red-headed detective constable Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), who gets assigned by the other two to run around and do the muscle work required. This episode was called “The Black Widower” at centers around a so-called “Lord of the Ringz” tour – note the spelling, precisely to avoid copyright litigation from Warner Bros. and the estate of J. R. R. Tolkien – run by a local pub owner named Ray Nielson (Jason Hoyte). Ray’s “Lord of the Ringz” tour features a re-creation of one of the biggest scare sequences in Peter Jackson’s movie: the tour guests stumble first on a giant spider’s web and then meet the giant spider (a pretty obvious papier-machê mockup thereof) and its alleged victim, Ray’s wife Denise (not listed on imdb.com, though we get quite a few flashbacks showing her even though she’s dead at the start of the main story). One of Denise’s stops on the main part of the tour was to put on a costume that would make it look like she’d been attacked by the giant spider, only she would turn out to be A-O.K. Only this time Denise dies for real while trussed up inside the costume that’s supposed to make her look like a spider has mummified her as prologue to killing her. At first the cops think it was a workplace accident – the diabetic Denise went into shock and couldn’t reach her insulin pen in time to save her life – but when Denise’s body is autopsied it revealed that the real cause of her death was the venom of a Katipō spider, related to a black widow and native to the New Zealand coasts.

A local woman named Chandra Singh (Kalyani Nagarajan) raises Katipō spiders in the area to extract their venom so a New Zealand pharmaceutical company can develop an antidote, while her live-in boyfriend Billy Franks (Dan Veints) is intimidated by spiders but has his own oddball career working with dangerous animals. Billy studies sharks who live on the Brokenwood coast, and he’s got so attached to them he’s named them and attributed personality traits to them, just as Chandra has with her spiders. (At one point the police show Chandra a photograph of a spider they’ve found on Denise’s body and ask her which one it is, and Chandra twice says, “I can’t tell from a photo. I’d have to look at her in person.”) After a lot of red-herring suspects, including Ray Nielson – whom the cops suspect at first partly because of the matter-of-fact way he responds to his wife’s death and partly because in the case of a married murder victim, the cops automatically make the surviving spouse the prime suspect – and a highly dissatisfied German tourist named Hans Zigler (Julian Wilson), who took the “Lord of the Ringz” tour and picked apart its inaccuracies, its deviations from Tolkien and the implication that Peter Jackson filmed The Lord of the Rings movies in Brokenwood, which he didn’t, the police finally solve the crime. The killer is [spoiler alert!] Billy Franks, who killed Denise Nielson because she’s been harvesting his sharks for shark-fin soup, which she used to make the gourmet meal the tourists taking her husband’s trip were promised as part of their ticket price. Billy stole the venom Chandra had painstakingly extracted from the spiders – the gimmick is that one spider doesn’t carry more than a fraction of the venom needed to kill a human, so in order to use it as a murder weapon he needed a large amount of it – and also stole a living spider so he could plant it on the body and make it look like the spider killed her.

Aside from it briefly looking like The Brokenwood Mysteries’ casting director, Annabel Lomas, was adopting the Lifetime practice of making the hunkiest guy in the movie the villain, it’s an O.K. ending to a highly unsatisfying program that almost totally lacks the wit and humor of previous episodes in the series. The closest we come to it is when Mike Shepherd asks his immediate supervisor on the police force, Hughes (Colin Moy), about Hughes’s wife Linda, who’s a diabetic like Debbie Nielson was. Hughes immediately worries that Mike is going to try to seduce Linda away from him and make him Mike’s wife number four (or is it five?), and when Mike seemingly innocently says to Hughes, “Give my love to Linda,” Hughes replies, “Not on your life!”

The Crooked Circle (Ventura, Republic, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 6) my husband Charles and I watched an engaging if overly familiar movie from 1957 about the corruption within the boxing world. It was called The Crooked Circle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-JiiBA7U4Y] (given the fact that boxing matches take place inside a space called a “ring” that, despite its name, is actually a square, The Crooked Ring would have made more sense as a title) and was a co-production between an entity called Ventura and our old friend, Republic Pictures. It was noteworthy for having a director, Joseph Kane, and a star, John Smith, who mostly (like Republic itself) did Westerns. “John Smith” was born Robert Errol Van Orden but had his name changed by his infamous agent, Henry Willson, on the ground that “John Smith” was so ordinary a name no actor had used it before, so his client would be different. Willson’s most famous clients, Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, were both Gay, and even at the height of his fame Willson had a great deal of difficulty signing straight male actors as clients because the scandal-mongers inside Hollywood assumed that all his clients were Gay, and that they’d had to trick with Willson to get him to sign them. Smith was married to actress Luana Patten in 1960 but they divorced after 4 ½ years. He had the brief part of a ship’s doctor in the marvelous farce We’re No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart and Aldo Ray and the last film Bogart made with his Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Smith’s best-known role was as star of the TV Western series Laramie with Robert Fuller, who became a lifelong friend.

The Crooked Circle is an exposé of the corruption inside boxing, and specifically the way syndicates of crooked managers, agents, trainers and gamblers build up young hopefuls by putting them in fights that, unbeknownst to them, are “fixed” by bribes to their opponents to lose. Then the young fighters are told to start throwing bouts themselves when it’s in the interest of their sponsors, who are now betting against them, for them to lose. It starts with a fight sequence in which a boxer named Castro, who’s been told to throw the bout, knocks out his opponent and wins – only later that night his body is found in the street, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run traffic accident. But sports journalist Ken Cooper (Steve Brodie, formidable as ever; he was one actor who deserved better career breaks than he got) suspects he was really murdered because his sponsors had bet against him and had lost a lot of money when he won instead of losing as instructed. A few years before, a promising young boxer named Joe Kelly (Don Kelly) had abruptly quit the ring because he’d been getting demands like this. He fled to the countryside (the script sends conflicting signals as to what U.S. state this takes place in; one of the fights is announced as being held under the auspices of the New York Boxing Commission, but the one auto license plate we see, on a Chrysler, is from Connecticut) and opened a fishing resort, where his younger brother Tom Kelly (John Smith, top-billed) works. Tom has been coached in the basics of boxing by his brother, but only for self-defense purposes. But Tom has been bitten by the prize-fighting bug, and he’s being pushed by his girlfriend, Carol Smith (Fay Spain), towards a career in the ring even though big-brother Joe wants to keep him from that because he fears he’ll fall into the clutches of corrupt sponsors the way Joe himself did.

Tom runs away from the resort and goes to the big, bad city, where he hooks up with his brother’s friend Ken Cooper and asks for help getting into the fight game. Cooper tells him to change his name, and he starts boxing as “Tommy Patrick.” He wins his first professional fight, aided by manager and coach Al Taylor (and I was overjoyed to see the great character actor Robert Armstrong in this role, about the one person in this movie – two if you count Steve Brodie, who’d been a name buried deep in my unconscious – I’d actually heard of before), only the second fight he trains for is abruptly canceled because the syndicate that controls boxing in this city wants a fighter of their own in his place. Tom is told in no uncertain terms that the only way he can get enough matches to build a career is to dump Taylor as his manager and sign with syndicate member Larry Ellis (John Doucette). Ellis is part of the gang along with arena owner Max Maxwell (Philip Van Zandt) and gambler Sam Lattimer (Richard Karlan), and the three of them make clear to “Tommy Patrick” that he can only have a boxing career if he plays along with them. He goes on to win 10 more fights, eight of them by knockouts, only unbeknownst to him eight of them are fixed, with opponents paid to lose to him. Then Tom is told to take a dive in his next fight, and one of the gang members tells him that boxing is just “entertainment,” that the people running the fight game decide who will win and who will lose, and it’s all to keep the millions of viewers watching on TV happy and enthralled with the fake spectacle. (This is an unusual film for the late 1950’s in that it actually acknowledges the existence of television as a medium. At first Hollywood studios had depicted TV as a novelty, then in the early 1950’s they barred TV from films altogether, but by 1956 the major studios started to realize they could make money selling their old films to TV and filming new half-hour and hour programs for the home screen, so TV’s started appearing in movies again. But there were still attacks on the TV medium in major movies like the 1957 satirical farce Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, in which the image suddenly shrinks to a fraction of its size and goes from vivid color to blurry black-and-white, and the lead character played by Tony Randall announces that that’s what the movie would look like if you were watching it on television. Ironically, both the movie itself and Tony Randall would end up on TV.)

Among the people watching Tom’s thrown fight on TV are his brother Joe, who notices he’s not up to his usual standards and correctly guesses he was bribed to lose the match – which he took because he wanted $1,000 to buy an engagement ring for Carol. Despite his latest loss, the syndicate sets him up with a bout that will earn him a shot at the heavyweight championship if he wins, but naturally they want him to lose this match, too. Meanwhile, sportswriter Ken Cooper is determined to expose the syndicate once and for all, and to that end he dresses an impostor in Tommy Patrick’s robe and witnesses an encounter between him and a syndicate member telling him to throw the upcoming match. Tommy wins the fight, but the syndicate goes after him determined to run him over in the street in a faked “accident” the way they did with Castro (ya remember Castro?) in the opening scene. Fortunately, Ken chases them down in his Ford Thunderbird sports car and so do the police, who block the gangsters’ car just as it’s about to run over Tom. Ultimately Ellis, Maxwell and Lattimer are arrested and Tom is determined to stay in the fight game but to do so honestly, with Al Taylor returning as his manager. Movies alleging corruption in prizefighting were nothing new; this film came out a year after one of the best, The Harder They Fall (1956), directed by Mark Robson and with Humphrey Bogart (in his last film) as a press agent hired by a corrupt syndicate to build an imposing but spectacularly untalented boxer as a championship contender through a series of fixed fights. The Harder They Fall was advertised with a slogan that would have fit The Crooked Circle as well: “The only thing that’s on the square is the ring itself.”

In fact, boxing was portrayed not only in movies but in real life as so hopelessly corrupt that by the early 1960’s there were demands for its abolition, especially after two promising young fighters, Benny Paret and Davey Moore, were killed in the ring. What saved the sport was the arrival of Muhammad Ali; progressives who once had denounced boxing as immoral and corrupt now started to follow the sport so they could root for Ali and support his courage in taking on the U.S. government over the war in Viet Nam. When Ali was asked how he could justify claiming status as a conscientious objector when he made his living through violence, he answered effectively, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” The Crooked Circle was well made (Republic had a state-of-the-art studio that was bought by CBS and became Television City when Republic CEO Herbert Yates pulled out of new production in 1958, and their movies generally looked better than other minor companies’ “B”’s) but nothing special, and given that Columbia had told this sort of story a good deal better with “A”-list actors like Bogart and Rod Steiger a year before it’s hard to get excited about this version starring John Smith and Steve Brodie.

Elsbeth: "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening, after I’d put my husband Charles through Jimmy Kimmel’s latest monologue and two Dave Hurwitz videos (one about recently deceased conductors and one about Michael Gielen’s formidable performance of Bartók’s complete ballet The Miraculous Mandarin), we watched the latest episode of Elsbeth, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (a title taken from a Billy Joel song). This one features Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his partner Roy (Hayward Leach) taking a tour of New York City’s most notorious true-crime sites. Among them is Pupetta’s Italian Restaurant, owned by Pupetta Del Monte (Alyssa Milano, who’s important enough that the promos for this show billed her heavily as a guest star), where a young soldier in the Del Monte crime family, Goldie Moresco (Anthony Pyatt), was both stabbed (with a corkscrew) and then shot, ostensibly by rival Mafia family soldier Eddie Nova (Adam Fontana). The killing provoked an all-out war between the Del Monte and Nova crime families that annihilated both of them until Pupetta Del Monte was the only Del Monte left. She has claimed not to be involved in the Mafia and says her sole source of income was as a restaurateur. She married Gene Genetti (Adam Ferrara), a waiter at Pupetta’s who was the only witness to the crime, and the two had a son, Gene Genetti, Jr. (also played by Anthony Pyatt). The incident took place in 1998 and inspired a big-budget crime film, City on a Knife Edge – the title comes from Goldie Moresco’s penchant for eating spaghetti with a knife instead of a fork, which he was in the process of doing when he was killed – which was 3 ½ hours long in the final released version and two hours longer than that in the director’s cut, included as a bonus item when the film finally came out on DVD.

Elsbeth questions the tour guide Henry Fellig (played by a marvelously gender-ambiguous actor named Murray Hill – who for a while I thought was going to turn out to be a woman wearing a fake moustache as part of her FTM drag) about the details of the case, and decides that they don’t add up. Elsbeth connects with the New York police detective who investigated the case when it originally happened, Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes), when Gene Genetti slips her a note asking to meet her later at a secret location – only the “secret location” didn’t stay secret anymore, since Geretti is run down by a hit-and-run driver just before Elsbeth gets there. Elsbeth and Fleming connect the old case with the new one even though the current management of the New York Police Department insists they have nothing to do with each other. A person is finally arrested for the hit-and-run accident, but he turns out to be an accountant who was working for Pupetta. Elsbeth also realizes that Gene Genetti, Jr., who graduated from Wharton Business College in Pennsylvania (also Donald Trump’s alma mater) with a degree in accounting, was being recruited to take over as Pupetta’s accountant, but Gene, Sr. didn’t want him to take the job because he didn’t want Gene, Jr. to get sucked into Pupetta’s lifestyle, which included laundering money for the Mob through her restaurant. Elsbeth and her official police partner, Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) – who’s in line for promotion to plainclothes detective but whose promotion has been held back for either political or racial reasons (Blanke is African-American; so is her immediate supervisor, Captain C. W. Wagner [Wendell Pierce], but there are intimations of racism above them) – also realize that Gene, Jr. is several inches taller than either of his parents.

From this Elsbeth deduces that Gene, Jr. is not Gene, Sr.’s biological son; his real father was Goldie Moresco, and Goldie was actually killed by Pupetta Del Monte in a jealous fit after he refused to marry her. Elsbeth and Blanke finally get the clue they need from an outtake in the film City on a Knife Edge in which the actress playing Pupetta breaks a fingernail, and by faking a confession by which Gene, Sr. says he killed Goldie, they get Goldie’s body exhumed and find a fake fingernail with an emblem embedded inside that Pupetta was known to have worn at the time of Goldie’s murder. This Elsbeth episode had the quirky charm that has endeared this show to me, as well as a charming tag scene in which Teddy and Roy decide to launch a podcast about the so-called “white whales” – cases certain police officers were never able to solve and were haunted by for years – with Goldie Moresco’s murder as episode one. There’s also an intimation that Teddy and Roy will break up because one of them lives in New York, the other in Washington, D.C., and they don’t want to move to the other’s city or attempt a long-distance relationship, though the understanding at the end is they will stay together (and I hope so, if only because they’re an unusually positive depiction of a Gay male couple on TV, and that pleases me as a Gay man married to another man). Elsbeth is a charming show, which owes more than a little to Columbo (particularly the gimmick of having the “sleuth” character basically annoying the murderer into confessing) but which luckily has some of the same appeal as its fabled ancestor. This is also the episode in which Elsbeth gives away that she’s really Icelandic by birth (she gives a long and complicated Scandinavian name as her real one), and her Italian name only came from a long-since dumped ex-husband.