The Selfish Giant (Potterton Productions, Reader’s Digest, Pyramid Productions, Arrow Entertainment, 1971. released 1972)

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

Last night (Wednesday, December 24) my husband Charles suggested we watch a YouTube post of the 1971 TV short The Selfish Giant, based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. It was produced by Reader’s Digest, not exactly a company known for progressive politics, and it featured the King Sisters vocal group (or whatever their incarnation was in 1971, three decades after they’d made their professional debut with Alvino Rey’s band; one wonders if they kept themselves going like the Carter Family or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, by recruiting descendants of the originals as the first members retired or died). What makes that particularly interesting and jarring is that the basic story itself is a socialist parable (Wilde did write “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” after all). A group of children have got into the habit of playing in the garden of the titular giant while the giant himself has been away for seven years hanging out with an ogre. While the kids have been in the garden, the trees have borne fruit regularly in autumn and the flowers have bloomed in spring and summer. The garden has become beautiful thanks to the good energy brought to it by the children who play in it. Then the giant returns from his trip and has a hissy-fit about all those children playing in “his” garden. He builds a wall around his castle and garden to keep the children out, and without them the Snow, Frost, North Wind, and Hail came to the giant’s castle and stayed there, making it winter all year round in the garden in what seemed to me to be a quite eerie anticipation of the plot of the recent animated film Frozen. The Hail in particular danced across the roof of the castle and kept the giant awake all night every night. One day the giant heard the sound of music in his garden, which turned out to come from a little linnet bird that had flown in. He also spotted the children, whom he’d walled out of the garden but who’d found an opening to come in anyway. In the presence of the children Spring, Summer, and Autumn had returned to the garden and restored it to its former beauty and bloom.

The giant saw one particular child in front of a tree, which he tried to climb but was too short to reach the branches. The giant lifted him up to the tree and, in gratitude, the little boy kissed him. The giant was so overcome by this display of affection that he decided then and there to tear down his wall and let the children have the run of his garden. But the little boy he’d helped into the tree never returned, and the giant’s heart was broken at his absence. Decades passed and the giant got old and feeble. He still longed for the return of the mystery boy, which didn’t happen until the giant was very old and about to die. When the boy finally did return he had marks on his hands and feet representing wounds he had got when nails were driven through them. “Who hath dared to wound thee?” said the giant. “Tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.” The boy answered, “Nay, but these are the wounds of love.” “Who art thou?” said the giant, and the boy replied, “You let me play once in your garden. Today you shall come with me in my garden, which is Paradise.” Wilde’s story, which until then the adaptation by Peter Sander (who also directed) had followed surprisingly faithfully, ends, “And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the giant lying dead under the tree, all covered in white blossoms.” In the film, the giant and the boy walk off together, presumably to enter Heaven. Maybe it was this rather ham-handed Jesus parallel in the ending that made this socialist parable acceptable to Reader’s Digest and its executives, for until that The Selfish Giant is a pretty obvious denunciation of the whole idea of private property and the concept of building walls to “protect” what one claims as one’s own.

Narrated by Paul Hecht and produced in Canada (there’s apparently an alternate version in French in which the narrator was the great French singer/songwriter/actor Charles Aznavour), The Selfish Giant is surprisingly well done and at 26 minutes doesn’t overstay its welcome. According to imdb.com, the first film adaptation of The Selfish Giant was a British short produced in 1939. The second was an episode of the TV series Jackanory in 1967. The third was this one, and then there was a Soviet 10-minute adaptation in 1982, additional shorts in 2003 and 2022, and a British feature from 2013 that apparently expanded the story significantly, since imdb.com’s synopsis reads, “Two thirteen-year-old working-class friends in Bradford seek fortune by getting involved with a local scrap dealer and criminal,” though Oscar Wilde is still credited as “inspiring” the film. It’s not surprising that Charles, who remembered seeing this fairly regularly on TV in his childhood, had fond memories of it and wanted to share it with me, and I notice from the moviemagg.blogspot.com back files that we’d already watched it in 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton.html) and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton-productions.html). I closed my 2023 post with the words, “The Selfish Giant was acceptable entertainment, though it seemed to be an odd thing to watch in an era in which Donald Trump is poised to regain the Presidency in the 2024 election with a promise to ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill.’ Alas, Trump is such a total psychopath it’s impossible to imagine the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Cindy-Lou Who or a fairy-tale child who turns out to be the resurrected Jesus opening him up and turning him into a normal, compassionate human being!” And in 2013 I wrote, “I couldn’t help imagine the story as Ayn ‘Virtue of Selfishness’ Rand would have written it; in her version, of course, the giant’s brilliant entrepreneurial spirit would have ensured that his garden blossomed while everyone else’s stayed stuck in winter, and at the end he would emerge from behind the wall and say, ‘If you want to play in my garden, you will have to do so on my terms.’”

Sweetie (Paramount, 1929)

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

On Wednesday, December 24, Christmas eve, my husband Charles and I followed up The Selfish Giant with a quirky 1929 musical called Sweetie to which YouTube’s algorithm had directed me. The leads of Sweetie were Nancy Carroll, Helen Kane, and Jack Oakie, and it was directed by Frank Tuttle from a script by Lloyd Corrigan and George Marion, Jr. Marion also wrote the lyrics to all but one of the songs, with Richard Whiting as composer. (Whiting’s daughter Margaret became a singing star in her own right in the 1940’s, and when I did a CD compilation of Richard Whiting’s songs I deliberately included Margaret Whiting’s rendition of his “Ain’t We Got Fun?” in a 1950’s duet with Bob Hope.) I was interested in Sweetie mainly because of Helen Kane’s presence in the cast. She’d just been brought to my mind for a quirky reason: on an earlier YouTube run I’d stumbled on a record by the great singer Annette Hanshaw of a song called “Is There Anything Wrong with That?” which she sang in Kane’s boop-boop-a-doop style. Hanshaw’s record was originally issued on the cheap Diva label, a subsidiary of Columbia, under the pseudonym “Dot Dare.” Executives at Victor, Kane’s label, threatened to sue Kane because they were sure it was Kane using a pseudonym to break her contract with them, and Kane and Hanshaw, who were actually good friends, laughed about the lawsuit over a lunch date. (Maybe for that reason the record was reissued under Warren’s own name on another cheap subsidiary of Columbia, Velvetone, and that was the one posted to YouTube.)

Broadway star Barbara Pell (Nancy Carroll) is dating Pelham University’s football star, Biff Bentley (Stanley Smith, who’s pretty nondescript as singer, actor, and screen personality except for a couple of longshots in which he looks eerily like James Dean, who hadn’t been born yet when Sweetie was made). Pelham, located in the town of that name in North Carolina, is an all-male college located next to an all-female finishing school in which the one class we see is an outdoor session on the correct way to pour a cup of tea. Alas, on the eve of Pelham’s big football game against their cross-town rival, Oglethorpe University, Biff Bentley threatens to quit school to marry Barbara. Biff’s teammates, including Axel, talk him out of quitting the team, and Biff accordingly tells Barbara that he won’t be able to marry her for eight more months until the school term ends. Barbara isn’t happy about that, especially since she’s already quit her job and doesn’t think she’ll be able to get another one. (Sweetie was released November 2, 1929, just weeks after the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression, and the whole business of Barbara’s employment anxieties seems much more like a plot turn from a 1930’s than a 1920’s movie.) Fortunately she doesn’t have to worry about making a living because just then her uncle dies and she inherits Pelham University – Barbara’s original last name was “Pelham” but she shortened it to “Pell” as a stage name – and she determines to take over the college, run it directly, and use her control to get revenge on the football team for talking Biff out of marrying her. Barbara’s idea of revenge is to give the entire football team a snap quiz in English and disqualify anyone who fails it from the Big Game between Pelham and Oglethorpe. Her objective is to keep Biff from playing, though the team member who’s most concerned about failing the test is Axel. As for Helen Kane, she plays a local student at the women’s school called “Helen Fry” who has the hots for tackle Axel Bronstrup (Stuart Erwin, even more annoyingly whiny than he was as the nominal romantic lead in International House three years later). Her way of courting him is to aim a BB rifle and shoot pellets at him.

There’s a big campus dance on the eve of the Big Game, at which Helen Kane performs songs called “I Think You’ll LIke It” and “Prep Step” and the King’s Men male vocal group (whom we’d just heard in a Fibber McGee and Molly Christmas episode from December 6, 1949, 20 years after the film was made) do the Pelham school song, following which a member of the cast of Barbara’s Broadway show, “Tip-Tap” Thompson (Jack Oakie, who’s actually not bad-looking and pretty good), does a jazz improv on it that turns into a song called “Alma Mammy” in which Oakie does a quite good impression of Al Jolson. (Fortunately, the filmmakers did not have him do it in blackface.) For inexplicable reasons, Thompson has enrolled at Pelham as a student, maybe to date Helen, though she ends up with Axel at the end. Barbara is so disgusted by the whole business of running a men’s college that she agrees to sell the campus to the head of its hated rival, Dr. Oglethorpe (Charles Sellon), who intends to close Pelham and tear it down. Impulsively Barbara makes a bet with Oglethorpe, who insists that she can’t back out of the deal once she’s agreed to it, that the future of the college will rest on the big game’s outcome: if Pelham wins it stays independent and if it loses Oglethorpe will take it over and destroy it. Unfortunately Biff Bentley, who requalified for the team by passing a makeup exam the morning of the Big Game, learns of Barbara’s bet and he’s so demoralized he deliberately plays wretchedly during the first half. During halftime Barbara gives him a pep talk and it energizes him to play well and ultimately win the game for Pelham. I know that a late-1920’s musical is hardly the place you should look for plot or character consistency, but Sweetie is unusually lame in those departments even for the genre and the time. The writers never explain to us just why Barbara is so bitter about Biff’s betrayal (at least as she sees it) that she’s willing to destroy her whole inheritance just to get back at him. Nor do they explain why Biff is so bitter about Barbara’s wager that he deliberately plays badly to throw the game to Oglethorpe.

Watching Sweetie I couldn’t help but think of better movies involving the principals and these plot devices – including the Marx Brothers’ screamingly funny Horse Feathers (1932), also about a college which is in danger of going out of business because its football team hasn’t won a game in decades (and which I think was shot on some of the same college sets as Sweetie), but has it all over this film for thrills as well as comedy. As I noted above, Stuart Erwin got to be in International House, though his whininess wasn’t as oppressive in that movie because of the rest of the cast: W. C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Bela Lugosi in an unexpectedly fine comic performance as a Russian general determined to buy a new TV invention. There’s also a surprise scene of the Broadway show being rehearsed in which Charles noticed that the proscenium wasn’t centered in the frame (a dead giveaway that Sweetie was originally shot in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was redone for sound-on-film, instead of letterboxing the image the people at the film lab just sliced off one-ninth of the image from the side to make room for a film soundtrack), and a great scene in which Helen Kane sings the song “He’s So Unusual.” This was not written by Richard Whiting and George Marion, Jr., like the other songs in the film, but by Abner Silver and Al Sherman (music) and Al Lewis (lyrics). It’s an odd song in that Cyndi Lauper did a cover of it on her first album, and even tweaked the song’s title for the name of her album: She’s So Unusual.

It was also done on Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, one of the Columbia “Art Deco” series of CD’s devoted to the unwitting genderfuck committed by music publishers, who insisted that the pronouns in a lyric could not be changed even if a woman was singing a song clearly written for a man, or vice versa. (That’s one reason why Irving Berlin advised aspiring songwriters not to use the words “he” and “she,” but use “you” and “I” instead, so the songs could be sung by either mainstream gender without change.) On Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man “He’s So Unusual” is performed by Fred Rich and His Orchestra, with an all-male group called The Rollickers doing the vocal. But the big “plug” song from this movie was “My Sweeter Than Sweet,” which I’d heard before on Frank Trumbauer’s recording from 1929 with Smith Ballew on vocal. It’s performed here by Nancy Carroll (who for some reason doesn’t get to dance in this film even though dancing was one of her strengths as a performer), as well as by Stanley Smith and a chorus. As a film, Sweetie has a certain charm, and there’s less of the usual early-sound clunkiness than usual (though the actors are still pausing between hearing their cue lines and delivering their own), but though the songs are generally good for the time the overall plot is even more meaningless than usual and Nancy Carroll has a few quite powerful closeups (she’d been a star in late silents and had got to work with Gary Cooper in the part-talkie The Shopworn Angel, later remade in 1940 with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) but for the most part she’s pretty blah, albeit in an underwritten role playing a character who does a lot of scummy things for very unclear motivations.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Argosy Pictures, RKO, 1949)

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

Last night (Sunday, December 21) my husband Charles and I watched two of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: Gold Diggers of 1933 and the awesome “pre-Code” masterpiece Call Her Savage (see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/gold-diggers-of-1933-warner-bros-1933.html for Gold Diggers of 1933, and for Call Her Savage https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html). Then I ran Charles a DVD of the third film in John Ford’s so-called “Cavalry Trilogy,” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). I like John Ford but I have a peculiar relationship with his work: the Ford films I tend to like best are the outliers in the cinema history consensus, notably the incredible Three Bad Men (1926) – a precursor of the so-called “psychological Westerns” of a quarter-century later which I once named on my list of the 10 most unjustly neglected films by great directors (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html) – along with Pilgrimage (1933), The Lost Patrol (1934), and The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which despite the clunky title that makes it sound like a horror film is actually a riveting dramatization of the true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who because he did an emergency setting of John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth assassinated President Lincoln was unjustly convicted of being part of the conspiracy to kill him. I’m also quite partial to one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), mainly because of its theme of how the historical memory of events is quite different from what “really” happened; it’s the source of the line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!,” which one Ford biographer actually used as the title of his book. But there are a lot of films that are generally considered the major works of Ford’s canon that I’ve never really warmed to, including The Informer (1935) – for which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences inexplicably gave Ford the first of his five Best Director Oscars, given that he let his star, Victor McLaglen, overact relentlessly and abysmally throughout the film. (If anyone deserved the Academy Award for Best Director in 1935, it was James Whale for The Bride of Frankenstein.) McLaglen is in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, too, and he overacts just as shamelessly even though he’s more tolerable this time just because he’s only a supporting character (John Wayne’s second-in-command). I recently caught the much-ballyhooed The Searchers (1956) on TCM and thought it was a major disappointment, especially given the hype surrounding it over the years; that was one film for which the original reviewers, who were generally lukewarm about it, were right and the later hagiographers were wrong.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon takes place in 1876, just as word of Col. George Armstrong Custer’s catastrophic defeat at the Little Big Horn is spreading throughout the U.S. Army. The leading character is Col. Nathan Cutting Brittles (John Wayne), who leads the Second Cavalry and is literally counting off the days until he retires. Alas, the Native commanders who led the battle at the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse (neither of whom appears as a character), have convened the various Native tribes in the Southwest (just where in the Southwest this takes place is unclear in the script by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings based on two short stories, “The Big Hunt” and “War Party,” by James Warner Bellah, but Ford shot it in his familiar stamping grounds of Monument Valley, Utah) and are getting them to settle their old quarrels and join them in a big campaign to get rid of the white settlers once and for all. Brittles, who’s supposed to be in his 60’s (though John Wayne was 41 when he made this film and was given a lot of grey hair dye to make him look older – ironically he’s better looking here than in the films he actually made in his 60’s, when he was far more bloated), also has to deal with two rival commanders who are jockeying to be the one who takes command of the regiment once Brittles retires: Lt. Flint Cohill (John Ireland) and Second Lt. Ross Pennell (Harry Carey, Jr., whose father had also been a favorite of Ford’s). The antagonism between Cohill and Pennell is not only a result of their having fought in the Civil War on opposite sides (Cohill for the Union and Pennell for the Confederacy) but also because they’re rivals for the hand of Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru, who had just become Mrs. John Ireland for real after her previous husband, Dick Haymes, broke up with her), niece of Brittles’s commanding officer, Major Mac Allshard (George O’Brien, who’d played the male lead in Ford’s masterpiece Three Bad Men 23 years earlier). Allshard orders Brittles to use his regiment to escort a wagon containing Olivia and Allshard’s wife Abby (a marvelous tough-edged performance by Mildred Natwick). Olivia insists on riding with the cavalry regiment even though she’s a woman, wearing a blue dress with a jacket that matches the cavalrymen’s uniforms,even though this means she has to ride side-saddle. At one point she complains about the sheer amount of time they have to spend walking their horses instead of actually riding them and says they might as well be in the infantry. (Her point that it seems silly to bring their horses along when they’re doing so little riding was a problem I was having with the film, too.)

Needless to say, this being a John Ford Western, the Natives are presented as total savages who charge the white men in hordes and are out to kill them all – I remember when Charles and I watched The Lord of the Rings cycle I told him that Peter Jackson staged the Orcs’ charges the way Ford had staged the Natives’ ones. It’s long surprised me that as progressive as he was in other respects, including some quite barbed jabs against capitalism, Ford’s depiction of so-called “Indians” was utterly wretched (at least until his second-to-last film, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn, in which he attempted to depict Native Americans sympathetically but sabotaged himself with a leaden script and the idiotic casting of Sal Mineo as one of the braves). There’s a marvelous scene towards the end in which Brittles gets to visit his one Native friend, Pony That Walks (Chief John Big Tree), in which the two old men lament the insistence that the young people on both sides are thirsting for war and will insist on having it even though the two old guys bemoan the meaningless slaughter their younger, testosterone-fueled brethren will insist on. There’s also a bizarre comic-relief “Indian” character (who, blessedly, appears in just one scene) that reminded both Charles and I of the “Indian” character Mel Brooks played as one of his multiple roles in the Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974).

Photographed in full three-strip Technicolor by Ford stalwart Winton Hoch, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is stunning to look at (all those deep-red sunsets just making the Monument Valley exteriors glow!) but it’s an oddly dull film in which we keep waiting for a big action sequence and never get one. The two big battles between whites and Natives (in which the Natives win the first one and the whites win the second) both fizzle out and we’re denied the all-out pitched combat we’ve been expecting all movie. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is one of the most highly regarded Ford films by his cult, but I found it relatively slow and draggy (even though it’s only 108 minutes long), though with some finely honed moments, including the one in which the cavalry column’s doctor, Dr. O’Laughlin (Arthur Shields, the old Irish guy you got when you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), pleads with Brittles to stop the troop movement long enough for him to operate on Private John Smith, a.k.a. Rome Clay (Rudy Bowman, easily hunkier than either John Ireland or Harry Carey, Jr.!) to remove a bullet he got from a Native attack. It’s clearly a conscientiously made film involving major talents, but it’s also not more than just reasonably entertaining.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "A Real Page-Turner" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, aired November 19, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 19) my husband Charles and I watched yet another episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that very interesting crime show both made and set in New Zealand dealing with the much-married detective inspector Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea); his current police partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland); an associate detective with his squad, Sam Breen (the very handsome Nic Simpson); and a Maori friend of theirs, Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor), who’s a wine grower and lingers around most of the episodes, though in this one he’s actually a witness that can disprove one of the suspect’s alibi. This one was called “A Real Page-Turner” and deals with successful mystery writer Jack Rudd (Matt Whelan, who vividly captures both the character’s sex appeal and his utter egomaniac self-centeredness). He comes to the tiny New Zealand town of Brokenwood to read at a small bookstore called “Slim Volume” owned by Maxine (Anna Baird), who’s been carrying on an online flirtation with him which she hopes to consummate with him as part of her paying him for the appearance. Also on his list of comps is a free, almost palatial Air B’n’B rental with a swimming pool on the property. It seems that Maxine isn’t the only local woman Jack is involved with; he also invites someone else – Mike Shepherd’s ex Petra Conway (Lucy Wigmore) – to trick with him, including a hot scene in that elongated rectangular pool. Jack came from the area originally and was a creative writing student of K. L. Carnaby (John Callen), a local professor whose own novels are psychologically complex and sell only a fraction of what Rudd’s do. Carnaby also had another student, Hamish, whom he regarded as a much better novelist; Hamish and Rudd were friends and Hamish actually introduced Rudd to a potential publisher for both writers, but once they read Rudd’s book they decided to publish it instead of Hamish’s. Hamish also teaches creative writing at the local high school and has a star pupil, 16-year-old Lindy (Lily Powell), whom he’s interested in mentoring. We get distinct hints that he’s interested in being more than just her mentor, especially when we learn that Hamish was fired from a previous teaching job for dating a student. Hamish protested that the woman was 18 and he didn’t start their affair until after she finished his class, but the scandal was strong enough to force him to resign and look for another teaching job elsewhere.

The mystery portion kicks off when Jack Rudd is cornered on a staircase at the Slim Volume and stabbed to death during a break from his book event at which he was reading from his latest thriller, not coincidentally called Knife in the Back. The writers of “A Real Page-Turner” (Rachel Lang, story; Fiona Samuel, script) followed some of the oldest rules of writing whodunits, including making the murder victim such an asshole he’s left behind a number of people who all hate him enough to be capable of murdering him. Among them are Professor Carnaby, who claims Rudd stole the plot of his first (highly successful, and about to become a movie – I’ve written in these pages before that the real money for a commercial author comes in selling the movie rights, which is why so many modern entertainment novels come off as screenplays in prose) novel from a plot he’d outlined in class as an exercise; Maxine, who wanted a commitment from Jack; his alternate girlfriend; Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda), Shepherd’s medical examiner, who sent Jack an analysis of what was wrong with the forensic science in his latest manuscript and then saw her notes incorporated verbatim into the final published version of the book; Rev. Lucas Greene (Roy Ward), who gave Rudd his only copy of a handwritten novel of his own and asked the famous author for advice (and overheard Rudd reading some of it to Petra in the pool and both of them laughing at how bad it was), and who it’s also hinted had a Gay crush on Rudd; and Lindy’s mother, who worked as a barista at an on-campus coffeehouse and had had an affair with Rudd when Rudd and Hamish were both students at the local college.

It turns out that Lindy is actually Rudd’s daughter – Lindy’s mom stole his shaver from his rental house so she could have his hairs tested for DNA and definitively establish Lindy’s parentage – but Rudd left her alone to raise the child as a single mother and never gave her any child-support money or even any acknowledgement that the child was his. When Lindy showed up at Rudd’s event to get her book signed, he curtly dismissed her and wrote nothing on the book but his name. Both Lindy and her mother are suspected of Rudd’s murder, but the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Hamish, who confronted Rudd in the bookstore and demanded that he acknowledge Lindy as his daughter and help her financially. Rudd, of course, refused to do anything of the sort, so Hamish stabbed him on the staircase with a knife owned by bookstore owner Maxine (and because she owned the murder weapon the cops suspected her for a while) and killed him, knowing that this meant Lindy, as his next of kin, would inherit his estate, including the money he could have made from the film version of his novel. While I’m sorry that as The Brokenwood Mysteries evolved the characters, Shepherd in particular, lost some of their “edginess” (Shepherd drives a marginally nicer car these days and he doesn’t play local New Zealand country music as incessantly as he did before in the show’s first year or two – who knew there was an extensive local country-music scene in New Zealand) – and the show has a quite nice ending gimmick in which Shepherd goes to the wedding of his ex Petra and her current fiancé, who comes across like an old guy who’s trying to provide her with an affluent and super-cool lifestyle. I’ve basically liked The Brokenwood Mysteries, and this was one of the better episodes I’ve seen, with enough suspects (with enough interesting motives) that the ending was genuinely suspenseful and also legitimately surprising.

American Masters: "Starring Dick Van Dyke" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2025)

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

On Monday, December 15 PBS broadcast an American Masters documentary called “Starring Dick Van Dyke” in celebration of his 100th birthday just two days before that. It was a fascinating look at a performer whose image is pretty much frozen in time from the early 1960’s as the star of The Dick Van Dyke Show from 1961 to 1966, though he’s had a quite extensive career since – including a second long-running TV series called Diagnosis: Murder which actually lasted eight seasons, three more than The Dick Van Dyke Show. Dick Van Dyke was born December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri and he was one of those kids who seemed destined for show business as his life’s work from the time he was old enough for anyone to notice him. In 1944 Dick Van Dyke tried to enlist in the United States Army Air Corps (which in 1955 was spun off into a separate service and has since been known as the United States Air Force). Rejected for combat duty for being underweight, he was finally admitted to the service as a radio announcer and assigned to Special Services to give shows for troops in the U.S. before they were sent overseas. He was discharged in 1946 and the following year he and fellow comedian Phil Erickson teamed up for an act called “The Merry Mutes,” in which they mimed to records. They settled first in Hollywood and, in the early 1950’s, moved to Atlanta, Georgia where they made their TV debut. Van Dyke broke up his professional association with Erickson when CBS offered to put him under contract. The problem was that CBS really didn’t know what to do with him. They cast him as a sidekick to game-show host Dennis James, as a sidekick to singer Pat Boone on his variety program, and briefly as an early morning news anchor with Walter Cronkite, of all people, as his assistant. Unhappy with the way his career was going and already married to Marjorie Ann Terrell and with several children to raise, Van Dyke looked for steadier work and tried to make it as a stage actor on Broadway.

After playing in a plotless revue called The Girls Against the Boys, Van Dyke achieved stage stardom in the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie, a spoof of Elvis Presley’s induction into the U.S. Army. He played Albert Peterson, manager of newly drafted rock star Conrad Birdie, with Chita Rivera cast as his secretary and assistant. During rehearsals director Gower Champion took one of the songs, “Put On a Happy Face,” away from Rivera and gave it to Van Dyke, and largely on the basis of his plaintive performance of it Van Dyke became a stage star. Meanwhile, over at CBS writer-producer-director Carl Reiner had developed an idea for a half-hour TV situation comedy called Head of the Family in which he would play the head comedy writer of a TV variety show who lived in a New York suburb with his wife and son. Reiner paid for a pilot episode out of his own pocket, and CBS liked the overall premise but didn’t like Reiner’s performance in the lead. Instead they looked for another person to star and settled on Van Dyke, and though the documentary (written and directed by John Scheinfeld) didn’t go into the reasons why the network didn’t buy the show with Reiner as the star, I suspect it was because they assumed Reiner was too Jewish and the show would only work with someone more “Anglo” in the lead. Producers Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard assembled a top-notch supporting cast: Mary Tyler Moore as Rob Petrie’s (Van Dyke) long-suffering wife Laura; Larry Mathews as their pre-pubescent son Ritchie; Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie as Rob’s colleagues in the writers’ room of variety-show host Alan Brady (played by Carl Reiner himself in a marvelous inversion of their actual roles; it was really Reiner who was running the writers’ room for the show); Richard Deacon as Mel, Brady’s manager and the writers’ main point of contact with their ultimate boss; and Jerry Paris as Rob’s next-door neighbor and best friend.

The Dick Van Dyke Show bombed in its first year (it was sponsored by Procter and Gamble and the writers built the commercials into the show, especially with scenes in which Laura Petrie would be shown washing the family’s dishes and rhapsodizing about the wonders of Procter and Gamble’s detergent, Joy) and Van Dyke was convinced it was because the show was on too early in the evening (8 p.m.). Van Dyke and the writers wanted to show more displays of physical affection between him and Mary Tyler Moore than had been the norm in previous sitcoms – even I Love Lucy and Burns and Allen, in which the co-stars actually were married to each other – and there’s a fascinating interview clip in the documentary in which Van Dyke and Moore jokingly complained that they’d got dirty looks from hotel desk clerks when they tried to register with their real-life spouses and the clerks assumed they were fooling around with people other than their TV spouses. Starting with the second season, the show was moved to a different day and a later time, and it took off and became a huge hit and won several Emmy Awards until Van Dyke and Reiner suddenly decided to take it off the air after five years because they thought if it continued they’d grow stale and start repeating themselves. Meanwhile, Van Dyke had appeared in the 1963 film of Bye Bye Birdie, and though he’d been reluctant to make the film at first because he thought the script departed too much from the stage version, he repeated his stage role in the film and got good notices. In 1965 Van Dyke got another film role that generated one of the biggest hits of the decade; Mary Poppins, a Walt Disney production that freely mixed live-action and animation and cast Julie Andrews in the title role, as a governess who loosens up a strait-laced bankers’ family by taking care of their two children. Van Dyke played Bert, Mary Poppins’s chimney-sweep boyfriend, and in his most spectacular sequence he leads a chorus line of fellow chimney sweeps in a dance on the London rooftops to the song “Step in Time.”

After Van Dyke left The Dick Van Dyke Show his career went into the doldrums, though he’d make some amusing movies. He’d had a hit with the 1967 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, based on a children’s novel by James Bond creator Ian Fleming (though the filmmakers radically reshaped the material and kept little from Fleming’s book beyond the central premise of a crackpot inventor who develops a car that can fly) and made a quite good dark comedy called Fitzwilly in which he played a butler who’s really a super-crook who commits his crimes to bolster the illusion of his once-wealthy owner that she still has money. Then in 1969 Van Dyke and Carl Reiner teamed up again for a dark film called The Comic, in which he played a silent-film comedian whose career is doomed by the advent of sound films and his own egomania. The Comic bombed at the box office, much to Van Dyke’s disappointment since he’d seen it as a tribute to the great real-life silent comedians who had influenced him: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Stan Laurel. (Van Dyke had become a close friend of Stan Laurel’s in Laurel’s later years, and Laurel told his biographer, John McCabe, “If they ever make a movie of my life – and I hope they don’t – I’d like Dick to play me.”) In 1974 Van Dyke showed off his chops as a serious actor with a TV-movie about alcoholism called The Morning After, which led him to confront his own drinking problem. Van Dyke also returned to series TV in the early 1970’s with The New Dick Van Dyke Show, in which he played a local TV talk-show host with Hope Lange as his wife. Though the show was produced and developed by Carl Reiner, lightning didn’t strike twice and The New Dick Van Dyke Show was canceled after three seasons.

Van Dyke made a comeback in character roles and TV guest appearances in the 1980’s, including a few appearances on Carol Burnett’s variety show (Burnett and her producer/husband Joe Hamilton were looking for a replacement for Harvey Korman). The documentary showed a fascinating clip in which Van Dyke and Burnett pantomimed a fight scene in slow motion, and my husband Charles, who was watching the show with me, wondered just how many people younger than we are would “get” that they were spoofing the infamous slow-motion bloodbaths of Sam Peckinpah’s action movies. In the 1990’s, after a stint as a corrupt district attorney in Warren Beatty’s movie Dick Tracy, Van Dyke got another TV series in a vein quite different from his previous ones, as a crime-solving doctor in Diagnosis: Murder. Van Dyke insisted that the producers cast African-American actress Victoria Rowell as his principal co-star, and when they protested, “She’s Black,” Van Dyke put his foot down and said, “She’s good!” (The show had previously mentioned a rally in L.A. in 1964 in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had spoken and Van Dyke had been one of his opening acts, delivering a pro-civil rights speech written for him by Twilight Zone and Night Gallery producer Rod Serling.) Along the way Van Dyke and his long-time wife Margie came to an amicable parting of the ways in 1984 and, after he was briefly involved with Lee Marvin’s ex, Michelle Triola (who had sued him and won a settlement even though they were never formally married, which established a precedent for so-called “palimony” suits), he married producer Arlene Silver in 2012 and Van Dyke credits her with saving his life. “Starring Dick Van Dyke” is an engaging portrait of a survivor in a frequently unforgiving business who’s kept his good humor over the years and managed to remain both a major star and a decent human being.

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (Cornerstone Studios, English National Ballet, 2024)

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

On Tuesday, December 16 PBS showed a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker staged by the English National Ballet in 2024 that was at once fascinating and frustrating. It took me a while to find out information on this program because the PBS Web site is now more aimed at facilitating viewers who want to “stream” the program itself than in publishing information about it, including credits for the cast and crew. I managed to pull together a cast and crew list by transcribing it from the closing credits of the stream, and I also found an online site that gave the history of the English National Ballet’s involvement with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is by far the most popular ballet ever created, and ballet companies all around the world regularly put it on during the December holiday season. They use it as a cash cow and virtually all ballet companies depend on a holiday production of The Nutcracker for at least half of their annual revenue. The Nutcracker started life as an 1816 story by the German fantasy writer and musical composer E. T. A. Hoffmann called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which was first published in a multi-author book called Kinder-Mährchen (“Children’s Stories”) that also featured stories by Carl Wilhelm Contessa and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Hoffmann republished in a collection entirely by him called The Serapion Brethren, published in several volumes between 1819 and 1821. The story was first published in English in London in 1833. In 1892, looking for a follow-up to their successful fairy-tale ballet Sleeping Beauty, Russian composer Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa decided to do a ballet adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale. The original story was about a young girl variously called Marie or Masha Stahlbaum who, along with her siblings, receives a nutcracker as a Christmas present. Alas, one of her brothers breaks it and Marie tries as best she can to mend it with a ribbon. Their home is invaded by an army of mice led by the Mouse King, but the nutcracker magically comes to life and leads an army of toy soldiers, expanded to normal human size, to defeat them. Then the vivified nutcracker takes Marie to a magical country which in this production is called the “Land of Sweets and Delights” (“Land der Süßigkeiten und Köstlichkeiten” in the original German), where they mostly sit and watch while the corps de ballet and various soloists do a succession of national dances.

Most listeners know The Nutcracker from the famous suite Tchaikovsky assembled from the complete ballet, with two selections from act one (the “Miniature Overture” and the children’s march) and six from act two (the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Trepak – Russian Dance – Arabian Dance, Chinese Dance, Dance of the Mirlitons, which means “reed flutes,” and the Waltz of the Flowers), but if you only know the suite you’re missing a lot of the ballet’s best music. A number of later productions changed Marie’s name to “Clara” and made her a teenager so she could dance and do a pas de deux with the Nutcracker. This production did both; Clara was played in the first act by pre-pubescent Delilah Wiggins and in the second act by young adult Ivana Bueno. Likewise they cast two people as the Nutcracker: Rhys Antoni Yeomans as the doll version in act one and Francesco Gabriele Frola as the full-grown version and Clara’s dance partner in act two. This production was choreographed by Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith, and instead of setting the framing sequence either in medieval Germany (as in Hoffmann’s original) or in 19th century Russia (as Tchaikovsky and Petipa had), they staged it in late 19th century London. We can tell it’s late 19th century because there are two suffragists carrying picket signs reading “Votes for Women,” and there are also two chimney sweeps who are costumed identically to the ones in the 1965 film Mary Poppins, which made it ironic that I was watching this just one night after my husband Charles and I had seen a PBS documentary on Dick Van Dyke which featured a clip of the dance he did with a chorus line of chimney sweeps in that movie.

The first act gets more than a bit cutesy-poo, but once the action shifts from late 19th-century London to the Land of Sweets and Delights – transported there on Clara’s bed, which thanks to the Nutcracker’s magic becomes a giant translucent sleigh that flies through the air like Santa’s sled – things get a lot more interesting even though the ballet pretty much abandons the pretense of any kind of plot. One of the most spectacular numbers is the Russian Dance, performed by five male dancers who are costumed in all-over tights with black-and-white spiral designs on them. I also liked the way they staged the Waltz of the Flowers (though my mind has been poisoned about that number by a children’s record I heard in my own childhood, which featured a chorus singing incredibly banal lyrics – the ones I remember go, “Dance, flowers, dance/Dance while the music brings romance”) and the dueling dance duets by Clara and the Nutcracker, and the Sugar Plum Fairy (Emma Hawes, who also played Clara’s mother in act one) and her prince consort (Aitor Arrieta, who also played Clara’s father in act one). In the end, of course, the interlude in fairyland turns out to be just Clara’s dream, and as much as I dislike “it was all a dream!” endings, this one was at least tolerable because of a neat psychedelic effect Watkin and Smith did when the bed Clara is sleeping on returns to her home as she wakes up. As a story ballet The Nutcracker tempts silliness, and this production occasionally went over the line, but a lot of it is quite charming and the dancing qua dancing is beautifully executed. The program was copyrighted in 2024 but it struck me as odd that the closing credits listed the English National Ballet’s royal patron as “Her Majesty the Queen” when Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 and her son Charles, the current reigning British monarch, was crowned as her replacement in 2023.

Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 15, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir. The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir, and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon Church’s official name, through a front company called “Intellectual Reserve, Inc.” Previous episodes of this show ran for an hour, but this one went an hour and a half and featured some rather emphatically phrased renditions of both familiar and not-so-familiar Christmas carols. Some were played instrumentally, some sung by the choir, and some were solos featuring Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles (b. 1983). Miles briefly mentioned her background as a church singer in her teens; her mother was music director of a church in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and Ruthie got pressed into service whenever they needed a spare soloist for the church.

Her Wikipedia page indicates a far more Dickensian childhood than the one that got mentioned last night; though she was born in Arizona, her mother was Korean, Esther Wong, and moved them first to Korea and then to Hawai’i, where Ruthie recalled having to train herself to lose her Korean accent. She played Christmas Eve in Avenue Q, Imelda Marcos in Here Lies Love, and Lady Thiang (King Mongkut’s first wife) in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I. Then in 2018 Miles was involved in an accident that killed her daughter and unborn child; she and her husband were crossing a New York street when they were run over by a car. Miles returned to the stage in August 2018, five months after the accident, and she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein (his last name is German for “flower rock”), eventually had another daughter whom they appropriately named Hope Elizabeth. For the first half of the concert it was mainly just music, with Miles singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and a medley of “Spirit of the Season” and “If You Just Believe” from The Polar Express (a 2004 animated film based on a 1985 children’s novel). The other selections were “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “’Twas Midnight in the Stable,” “Welcome Christmas Morning,” and an odd selection called “Gamelan” by Murray Schaefer in which, by singing a cappella without words, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir attempted to duplicate the sound of a Balinese or Javanese gamelan ensemble. Then the orchestra re-entered and the choir started singing words again for “Sing We Now, O Child of Wonder,” though since there was no chyron it was probably just a tag for “Gamelan.”

After that, a pretty standard chorus-and-orchestra rendition of “Joy to the World,” and Ruthie Ann Miles’s The Polar Express medley, came one of the most intriguing bits of the program: a medley of three pieces called “Alleluia.” First was one by Johann Sebastian Bach based on the infamous “Air on the ‘G’ String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3; then was a surprisingly advanced (musically) “Alleluia” from Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) that verged on 12-tone technique and had an engaging celesta solo part that was not at all what you usually think of for that instrument; and last was the all-too-familiar “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah. Next came a real surprise: a jazz version of the carol “Patapan,” also known as “When You Hear the Pipes and Drums,” with an organist contributing jazz licks along with a jazz-style pianist, bassist, and drummer. After that came the expected dramatic portions of the evening performed by African-American actor Dennis Haysbert. One was a tribute to an unusual civic leader from Kenya named Dr. Charles Mulli. He was abandoned by his parents at age six when they fled his native village with their younger children. After unsuccessfully trying to find a relative who would take him in, he spent the next 10 years homeless until he finally emigrated to Nairobi in search of a job. Mulli found one with a woman who hired him at first as a houseboy, then promoted him to supervise her field workers until he was ultimately running her plantation.

He gradually built a fortune selling automobile parts and became a multimillionaire until one day, in 1989, he turned down some street children who were begging for money and/or food. When he returned from work, Mulli found that the kids had stolen his car. He took this as a sign that his life until then had been meaningless and he had a moral obligation to help suffering children who were in the same position he’d been in years before as a homeless child himself. So he went home and told his wife that he was selling all his businesses and devoting the money to turning their home into an orphanage for street kids. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled about that and their own children were less than happy with their rambunctious foster siblings, but eventually Mulli’s combination of grit, determination, and business savvy led him to build a chain of orphanages across Kenya. Haysbert’s account of Mulli’s story included a Tabernacle Choir rendition of “Silent Night” and ended with an instrumental postlude whose title I missed. Afterwards Haysbert narrated the familiar Nativity story and the concert closed with Ruthie Ann Miles, the chorus, and orchestra doing “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” a French carol better known as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” (I suspect the difference is simply a variant translation of the original French.) Though the musical performances got a bit too loud and aggressive at times, it was nonetheless a stunning commemoration of the holiday season. I was a bit depressed at the overall whiteness of the performing forces – aside from the half-Asian Miles, there were a couple of Asian-looking choir singers but no discernible Blacks or Latinos (and there weren’t that many people of color in the audience, either! I just re-read my post about the 2024 telecast and was surprised that that one’s choir had been a lot more racially mixed than this one’s) – but overall it was a nice celebration of Christmas and better than I’d expected from these auspices.