Habeas Corpus (Hal Roach Studios, MGM, 1928)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 10) Turner Classic Movies did a “Silent Sunday Showcase” night featuring four two-reel comedy shorts by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Habeas Corpus, Putting Pants on Philip, Two Tars, and You’re Darn Tootin’. The last three are acknowledged comedy masterpieces and I’d looked forward to seeing them again. They’re also movies I’ve previously posted about on moviemagg, so I was surprised when I looked online for a previous Habeas Corpus review and found one: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/10/dr-pyckle-and-mr-pryde-joe-rock.html. My husband Charles and I had seen it before at a 2021 event at the San Diego Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, the year that due to the gradual wind-down of the COVID-19 lockdowns the summer organ festival, including its annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” took place in September and October instead of the usual July and August. That year’s “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” took place on Saturday, October 30, the day before Hallowe’en, and was partially Hallowe’en-themed. Along with Habeas Corpus it contained a film by Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925), a spoof of the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore in the title role(s); and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1922). In my previous post I gave special praise to the organist, Mark Herman, for (among other things) his real flair for jazz. I wasn’t that impressed by the films themselves, and Habeas Corpus is still an O.K. movie rather than a truly great one. It starts at the home of mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle), who is lamenting to his butler and assistant Ledoux (Charley Rogers) that he needs a freshly dead human body for his latest experiment to prove his theory that, as the intertitle claims, “the human brain has a level surface – in some instances perfectly flat.”

Laurel and Hardy show up at Padilla’s door begging for food – in Laurel’s case, particularly buttered toast – and instead get offered $500 (jointly or severally?) to go to the local graveyard and steal a recently deceased body. The remaining 15 minutes of this 20-minute movie drag predictably as Laurel and Hardy go through a series of repetitive gags as they try to break into the cemetery and steal a body while Ledoux, who’s really an undercover police officer trying to get the goods on Padilla, follows them there wearing a white sheet disguised as a ghost. Habeas Corpus is only mildly effective and funny, though even at less than full strength Laurel and Hardy are great clowns. Incidentally the film was originally released with a synchronized soundtrack, and that version is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWleZnEN_w. The version TCM showed last night had a fresh (well, 2013 anyway) soundtrack by Robert Israel which, like the movie itself, was O.K. but wasn’t much. It ends with Laurel and Hardy carrying a bag with Ledoux inside and being predictably startled when Ledoux’s feet start sticking out of the bag and he tries to walk until he and Hardy fall into a giant manhole (the same one used to much greater comic effect at the end of Putting Pants on Philip) and Laurel helplessly trying to get them out of there. Habeas Corpus is credited to director James Parrott (brother of Charley Chase, three of whose shorts were last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature) but with Leo McCarey, a comic genius at the level of Laurel and Hardy themselves, credited as “supervising director.” It was apparently McCarey’s idea to lift Laurel and Hardy from the amorphous ranks of Hal Roach’s “Comedy All-Stars” and feature them as leads, and it was also he who invented the “tit-for-tat” style of comic fighting in which, instead of having at each other willy-nilly as in most movie fights, the two combatants each take turns and patiently wait for the other’s retaliation. He made enough good movies – including the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – I can forgive him this lapse (as well as his truly rancid politics: he was a supporter of the Hollywood blacklist and director of the 1952 anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John, with Robert Walker in his last film as a naïve young rich kid who gets swept into joining the Communist Party).

Kanał (Zespol Filmowy “Kadr,” 1957)

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

The first film I watched last night on Turner Classic Movies was a 1957 Polish production called Kanał (notice the diacritical slash through the terminal “l”), whose title is the Polish word for “Sewer.” It was the second film directed by Andrzej Wajda, and also the second in his “World War II Trilogy” after A Generation and followed by the movie that really made his international reputation, Ashes and Diamonds. It’s loosely based on a true story: in August 1944 citizens of Warsaw decided to rise up against their Nazi occupiers and mounted a futile two-month resistance campaign which ended, all too predictably, with their mass slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. The campaign had been O.K.’d by the provisional Polish government in exile in London, but had not been cleared with the Soviet Union, Britain’s nominal allies and the country that would essentially take over Poland after the war ended. Kanał takes place in late September, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, and deals with a unit of 43 soldiers and civilian volunteers commanded, more or less (the unspeakable conditions under which they were fighting made it virtually impossible for the nominal authorities to maintain discipline), by Lieutenant Zadra (Wienszyslaw Gliniski). By then the Uprising has been crushed in most of the districts of Warsaw and the rebels are down to just three neighborhoods, including one called Mokotów. The unit in the movie has received orders to evacuate Mokotów and retreat to downtown, the last part of Warsaw that has not yet been recaptured by the Nazi occupiers. But only 27 of Zadra’s 43 men are fit to travel. Among the troops are Ensign Korab (Tadeusz Janczar); Lieutenant Madry (Emil Karewicz); Daisy (Teresa Izewska), the blonde-haired guide with whom he’s fallen in love in what has got to be the most bizarre “meet-cute” in movie history; Halinka (Teresa Berezowska), the other woman in the dramatis personae, who’s butch and dark-haired; and the man I thought was the film’s most interesting character, a would-be composer named Michal (Wladyslaw Sheybal).

A narrator (Tadeusz Lomnicki) who introduces the characters off-screen and fortunately isn’t heard from again matter-of-factly informs us that none of these people will still be alive by the end of the day, though quite frankly that’s not that big a surprise. The sense of doom that hangs over the film is its most palpable aspect; that and how vividly Wajda dramatizes the truly awful conditions under which the insurgents have to make their escape attempt. They literally have to wade through shit to get through the sewers and hopefully find an opening, only every time they do either their way is barred by a grille or German soldiers are waiting for them when they come out. In one chilling scene we see some of the escapees emerge and get confronted by a man in a uniform, and just when we’re wondering, “Friend or foe?,” Wajda shows us the SS logo on his arm and we know he’s foe and they’re in for an on-the-spot execution. Kanał is a grim film, as befits the subject matter, and in one scene Smukly (Stanislaw Mikulski), one of the insurgents, successfully disarms two German hand grenades hanging from the ceiling as booby traps but is blown to bits by a third one. It ends with Zadra shooting one of his own men, Sergeant Kula (Tadeuz Gwiadowski), for having lied to him; he said the others were right behind them and not, as the truth was, that they’d left them behind hours before. After Zadra kills Kula, he descends back into the sewers to look for his men ¬– and the film abruptly ends.

Kanał began life as a story called “They Loved Life” by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, a real-life survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, and it was released (no surprise here!) in the middle of a fraught political climate in Poland. Wajda had previously released his first film, A Generation, also about the Polish experience during World War II but one with a considerably more sympathetic depiction of the Russians than this one. In between the two movies, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had personally denounced his predecessor, Josef Stalin, at the 1956 Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Suddenly it was now safe for writers and filmmakers in Eastern Bloc countries to mount less than hagiographic depictions of the Russians in general and Stalin in particular in stories set during World War II. A Polish critic named Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz acknowledged the political tightrope Wajda was walking with this movie: “Like all artists approaching this subject, Wajda has succumbed to certain pressures. On the one hand there was the rational pressure against delivering an apologia for the Rising and, on the other hand, the emotional pressure against taking a merciless criticism of the Rising. The film stopped halfway.” Though the Soviet-backed government of Poland didn’t allow direct criticism of Russia’s role in the war, one critic said, “They could not censor the silence” – the chilling moment in the film in which the partisan rebels expect to be rescued by the Soviet army, and instead they hear only silence as the Soviet forces stop firing. Wajda originally wanted to begin the film with a montage of similar doomed attempts at resistance throughout Polish history, including the Napoleonic era’s Battle of Samosierra, the Charge of Rokitna in World War I, and the legend of the Charge at Krojanty, reputedly on German tanks in 1939. While he abandoned that plan, I suspect because including all those scenes would have blown his budget, Wajda’s biographer, Boleslaw Michalek, wrote, “Wajda’s treatment of the Warsaw Rising and the retreat through the sewers had a definite and deliberate historical and social edge.”

The result was a movie that frequently reminded me of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” another testament to individual heroism within the context of an absolutely stupid, hopeless, and pointless battle. It’s not surprising that on its initial release Kanał was unpopular with Polish audiences and critics because it depicted presumed national heroes literally wading through shit. Kanał is an impressive movie but also a quite grim one, and one of the most chilling sets of scenes occur when the Polish would-be escapees are convinced that the Germans are flooding the sewer tunnels with poison gas, but it turns out to be just the natural by-products of the decay of the human waste and other garbage in the sewer tunnels. One of the weirder parts of World War II was that Adolf Hitler, who himself had been the victim of a poison gas attack during World War I, strictly forbade the German armed forces from using it in World War II. Of course he had no problem using gas to kill millions of innocent and helpless civilians in the extermination centers as part of the Holocaust, but Hitler didn’t want any of his troops to suffer the way he had in the preceding war. Another neat part of the movie is Michal’s quoting passages from Dante’s Inferno describing the descent into hell as the partisans make their own descent into the sewers – a reference Wajda acknowledged was deliberate on his part. As biographer Michalek wrote, “Kanał is permeated by a virtually unrelieved mood of despair, bitterness and resignation. The whole structure is pivoted on the idea that there is no way out, no hope, no chance of deliverance. As in Dante, there is only a succession of narrowing circles of torment.” This makes it ironic in the extreme that both this and the next film shown on Turner Classic Movies May 9, the Italian film Salvatore Giuliano, were intense dramas with no (or virtually no) comic-relief elements – and yet the showings were co-hosted by TCM regular Ben Mankiewicz and Bill Hader, who’s prlmarily known as a comedian. The ironies got even more intense when Hader acknowledged that he’d ripped off Kanał for the opening of the second season of one of his comedy mini-series!

Salvatore Giuliano (Galatea Film, Lux Film, Vides Cinematografica, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 9) the second film on Turner Classic Movies’ program with guest host Bill Hader was a movie I’d been curious about for quite some time: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), an Italian film directed and co-written by Francesco Rosi about a real-life bandit who terrorized and caused a lot of discomfort for law-enforcement authorities in Sicily in the five years between the end of World War II and his murder in 1950. I’d first heard of this film under unusual auspices: in 1972 I received a mailing from a film distributor in my capacity as part of the student government at College of Marin. The letter said that they had just acquired the U.S. rights to this movie after it had previously been released in this country only in a brutally cut and mutilated version, and now that I’ve seen it I’m guessing that the reason for the re-edits was to put the film’s non-linear narrative sequence into a more normal chronological one. Born in 1922, the real Salvatore Giuliano (Pietro Cammarata) got onto law enforcement’s radar screen in 1943, when at a time when it was virtually impossible to get food in Italy without resorting to the black market. On September 2, 1943 he was caught by the Italian Carabinieri (a national police force similar to America’s FBI, though with broader duties; until 2000 they were actually a part of the Italian Army, though that year they were spun off into a separate part of the Italian armed forces) transporting two sacks of black-market grain. He ended up killing one of the Carabinieri who’d been trying to arrest him. Giuliano fled back to his native village, Montelepre, where he held out until 1945, when the ending of World War II seemed to open up new opportunities for him.

When the war ended the Movement for the Independence of Sicily (MIS), which wanted Sicily to separate from Italy and become its own country, saw an opportunity and hired Giuliano to help set up a military wing called EVIS (Italian initials for “Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily”), which related to MIS much the way the Irish Republican Army did to its political wing, Sinn Fein. MIS promised Giuliano and his fellow banditti not only payment but full pardons for any crimes they’d committed previously. Giuliano recruited 40 to 60 young men in addition to his previous associates, including a man named Gaspare Pisciotta (Frank Wolff) who became his best friend. Giuliano assigned them military ranks and trained them in how to use weapons (not very well, if the movie is to be believed). He launched his war on December 27, 1945 with an attack on a Carabinieri outpost in Montelepre, to which the Italian government (still under the control of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had deposed Benito Mussolini in 1943 and been recognized by Mussolini’s Allied enemies as the rightful ruler) responded by sending 500 Carabinieri and declaring martial law. In 1947 Giuliano staged his next campaign: an attack on a May Day rally held by the Italian Communist Party at Portella della Ginestra. It’s not clear from the historical record why Giuliano targeted the Communists, who were ostensibly seeking the same goals he was – developing the local economy and in particular providing the remote villages of Sicily with electricity and running water – though part of the explanation may be that in 1947 Giuliano gave an interview to anti-Communist American journalist Michael Stern, who recruited him to fight the Communists and did the interview wearing a U.S. Army uniform, which gave Giuliano the impression that he was an official representative of the American government.

Giuliano’s attack led to the deaths of 11 children (including a woman and three children) and between 24 and 36 people wounded. The attack shocked the country and led to public demands for the capture and/or killing of Giuliano. It also turned the local Mafia, which had previously supported Giuliano and given his men tactical support in exchange for a cut of their profits, against Giuliano. Like the organized criminals in Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931), who mounted their own campaign to find a psychopath who was murdering children because the official police’s efforts were disrupting their activities, the Mafia now saw Giuliano as a threat, though instead of starting their own manhunt they teamed up with the police and ratted Giuliano out to the Carabinieri. Giuliano was ultimately killed on July 5, 1950 in the town of Castelvetrano. The authorities set up an elaborate cover-up to make it look like he’d been killed in a shoot-out with authorities, but in fact he was killed by his best friend Gaspare Pisciotta after Giuliano had received an anonymous letter saying that Pisciotta had become an informant and was ratting out the members of Giuliano’s gang to the authorities. Rosi’s film took a non-linear approach to the material, starting the movie on July 5, 1950 with a shot of Giuliano’s corpse laid out in an outside courtyard even though, as we learn only much later, he was really killed in his bedroom. Rosi cuts back and forth between time frames, including an elaborately staged account of the Portella della Ginestra massacre that made it look like he’d seen and learned from Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps massacre in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the trial of Pisciotta and the other participants in the massacre, which took place in 1952, two years after Giuliano’s death.

It also shows Pisciotta being poisoned in prison, presumably by the authorities to maintain their cover-up, in 1954. The final shot of the film takes place in 1960, just two years before it was made, in which the Mafioso who ratted Giuliano out to the authorities is himself shot dead in a public square. Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films; he’s said it influenced him when he made Taxi Driver (1975), though that’s something of a surprise because one of Rosi’s trademarks as a director is to avoid the direct depiction of violence. We don’t see Giuliano get shot, and we don’t see most of the other victims get killed either. Salvatore Giuliano is also a brilliantly photographed film; Rosi used Federico Fellini’s favorite cameraman, Gianni di Venanzo, and was rewarded with stunning chiaroscuro nighttime compositions that looked like film noir as well as stirring daytime scenes in the bright Sicilian sun. Rosi kept us in tune as to the two biggest questions with a non-linear film, not only “Where are we?” but “When are we?,” by sprinkling bits of narration throughout the movie which he delivered himself. Rosi also followed the non-traditional casting strategy of Italian neo-realist directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, shooting the film in the locations where the real-life events took place and using non-professional actors without major reputations. (Though Pietro Cammarata is playing the title role – and he’s a magnetic screen personality – we hardly see him.) Salvatore Giuliano is a quite remarkable movie that deserves to be better known, even though when my husband Charles (who returned from work with about 25 minutes left to go in the film) read the Wikipedia page on the real Giuliano he said an entire mini-series could be made from his life.

Law and Order: "Once Burned" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 7) my husband Charles and I watched episodes in sequence of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Inspector George Gently. The Law and Order show was “Once Burned,” and it begins with a sequence in which New York Fire Department Captain Clint Braddock (Chad Knorr), a 25-year department veteran who became a legend as one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, peremptorily ordering a younger firefighter away from a doorway in a burning apartment where the fire is sucking in smoke. Braddock barks out an explanation that that’s a backdraft and would suck his younger colleague into the burning room and incinerate him. The next see Braddock he's dead, killed by a Halligan (a common firefighting tool that looks like a pickaxe on one end and a hoe on the other) outside on the sidewalk. The investigating police, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), cycle through various red herrings, including a fellow firefighter named Steven Delvecchio (Max Cassella) whom Braddock had been friends with for decades until Braddock found out that Delvecchio was wrongly claiming money from the fund set up after 9/11 to compensate its victims and pay benefits to their families. The cops also investigate Braddock’s wife Candace (Catherine Eaton), from whom he’d filed for divorce just a week or so ago.

Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Diego Peralta (Bobby Soto), another firefighter and the man Braddock rescued from being burned alive in the opening scene. The two got into an argument when an elaborate necklace disappeared from the scene of a fire which Braddock’s company had worked, with Peralta as part of the crew. Because his own claim from the 9/11 compensation fund had been turned down after the insurance industry representatives determined that Braddock’s multiple sclerosis couldn’t be traced definitively to 9/11, Braddock first stole the valuable item to pay for his health-care treatments and then tried to frame Peralta for it, knowing that as a twice-convicted felon (first for assault and then for burglary) Peralta’s denials wouldn’t be believed. According to Peralta’s own account, Braddock got so worked up at Peralta he attacked him and Peralta killed him in self-defense. Peralta testifies to that effect at his murder trial and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), though not convinced of Peralta’s innocence, has enough doubts about his guilt he considers dismissing the case. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) talks him out of it and Price delivers a cross-examination replete with photo evidence of the victim of Peralta’s assault. The jury finds Peralta guilty but the open-ended script by old Law and Order hands Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson and Michael Smith’s powerful direction leave us in considerable doubt as to whether justice was done. It’s the kind of thoughtful writing that has made Dick Wolf’s Law and Order shows my all-time favorite policiers.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order show on May 7, my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit program featuring an episode called “Old Friends,” in which the Manhattan Special Victims Unit detectives respond to a 911 call from a woman named Angela (Christina Brucato) who’s just awakened from a drink-induced slumber at an all-night party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her college graduation. She’s stayed in touch with quite a lot of people she knew from her days at Columbia University, including the party’s host, Preston Winthrop (John Skelley), a spoiled-brat trust-fund kid with a long history of drinking, drug abuse, failed stints in rehab, and sexually obnoxious behavior towards women. The 911 call was occasioned by Angela’s discovery of her friend Nora Pontius (Izzie Steele) lying unconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Usually, at least on Law and Order and other crime shows, that means the victim is a-goner, but thanks to Angela’s quick action a team of paramedics is able to get her to a hospital in time to save her life. Needless to say, she turns out to have been the victim of a sexual assault. Other people at the party were Ryan (Mishka Thébaud); Adam (James William O’Halloran), his wife Sophie (Julia Yorks) – who’s from the Bay Area, attended Stanford instead of Columbia, but was there only to make sure Adam didn’t get into anything extra-relational with any of the other women – and Josh Ortega (Benny Elledge), who because he was the only one of the gang who didn’t spend the night and who has the biggest chip on his shoulder of any of the attendees is clearly being set up by writer Justine Ferrara to be the prime red-herring suspect.

Though she was indefinitely suspended at the end of the previous week’s episode by an African-American woman chief of detectives who obviously hates her, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gets to investigate the case anyway after her suspension is itself suspended pending her appeal. (Ferrara drops a big hint in the middle of the show when she has Benson tell one of the detectives on her squad that after 25 years she’s no longer sure the Special Victims Unit is the right place for her. It’s possible Mariska Hargitay wants to move on with her life and is stepping down from the show; we’ll see in next week’s episode, which is the last of the current season.) Midway through the show, I turned to Charles and said I thought this was one of the weaker SVU’s for the simple reason that there was no one in the cast we actually liked. As it kept going, it kept reminding me of all those mysteries I’ve read in which the clue to the current crime was a secret concealed in one or more of the characters’ pasts, including the sub-genre invented (I think) by Ross Macdonald in The Galton Case in which the lead detective character has to solve a 20-year-old cold case to get the clue needed to figure out the more recent crime(s). But Ferrara was hardly at the level of Macdonald or other writers that have used this gimmick. It turns out that Josh Ortega stole a gold ring from Nora, but only because she owed him money. Adam and Nora had been having a long-term “friends with benefits” relationship, sneaking off together for casual sex whenever they had the opportunity, and they’d done so that night even though Adam’s wife Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) was in the same apartment at the same time. The real culprit turned out to be [spoiler alert!] Ryan, who’d had a long-standing and decidedly unrequited crush on Nora from their college days to the present. He found her in an unconscious state and took advantage of it to rape her. After the excellence of the Law and Order episode that had preceded it, this one really rubbed me the wrong way and made me felt slimy not only for having watched it myself but having subjected Charles to it.

Inspector George Gently: "The Burning Man" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired July 13, 2008)

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

Later in the evening (Thursday, May 7) I switched channels from NBC to PBS to catch a rerun of Inspector George Gently, a BBC-TV policier that ran from 2008 to 2017. Its central character, Detective Chief Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw), was a crabby middle-aged man who as the series began had just suffered two big-time blows, one personal and one professional. The personal blow was the death of his wife at the hands of one of the criminals he’d been after, and the professional one was losing his prestigious job at New Scotland Yard in London and being reassigned to the small town of Durham in Northumberland in the north of England. Gently’s new professional partner is Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby), who in 1964 (when the series was set at first) is wearing his hair Beatle-length (as I’ve noted in previous entries in the series, he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic of John Lennon) but other than that is a quite stuck-up conservative personally, if not politically, The Gently character was created by author Alan Hunter and brought to the small screen by Peter Flannery, who’s listed as the show’s creator and also wrote this particular episode, “The Burning Man.” Only the second episode of the series, “The Burning Man” begins with Gently and Bacchus finding the corpse of a man that has not only been killed (with a single gunshot to the forehead) but soaked in a flammable liquid so he would be burned beyond immediate recognition. The only clue as to his identity is a gold ring which he swallowed just before he was killed, and emerged intact even though the rest of his body was utterly consumed and only his skeleton remained. The ring has an inscription to “Wanda,” and the cops trace it to Wanda Lane (Pooky Quesnel), a barmaid at a local tavern called The Rook.

The Rook markets itself to the local Irish community, including hosting bands playing traditional Irish folk music (with, shall we say, more enthusiasm than talent) and playing host to various operatives with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The show’s 1964 setting puts it well ahead of the so-called “Time of Troubles” which rocked the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, which stayed part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland, and Wales after the remaining 26 Irish counties at last gained independence, but the seeds of doubt are already brewing. Gently and Bacchus find themselves investigating two cases at once: the murder of the burned-out mystery corpse and the disappearance of O’Shaughnessy (Deka Walmsley), a middle-aged man whose (barely) adult daughter Carmel (Charlotte Riley) is looking for him and entreating the police to take more care of the case than they might otherwise. Their task is complicated by the appearance of Empton (Robert Glenister) from London’s Special Branch, which as its Wikipedia page explains “was a unit of London's Metropolitan Police formed in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name became Special Branch [it was originally Special Irish Branch] as the unit's remit widened to include more than just Irish Republican-related counter-espionage.” When he’s not trying to recruit John Bacchus to leave the police force in Durham and join the Special Branch, Empton is pushing his weight around and getting in the way of the investigation big-time. Eventually we learn – or think we learn – that the burned-out corpse was Ruairi O’Connell (Finbar Lynch), a gunman for the IRA. O’Connell was having a casual sexual affair with Wanda, who is, shall we say, quite free with her affections (at one point she tries to seduce Gently and even undresses to her underwear, but Gently, whose only interest in her is to take her down to the police station and get her information, calmly tells her to put her clothes back on so he can do that).

The true villain of the piece turns out to be Doyle (John Kavanagh), who runs a local trucking company for which O’Connell drove.Through an inside connection at the local British military base, O’Connell had acquired a large collection of guns which he intended to smuggle into Northern Ireland to continue the struggle for full Irish independence. Only O’Connell had been recruited by Empton as an informer, and his murder was an IRA execution as revenge for his having given Empton the names of his colleagues. O’Shaughnessy is in turn killed by a hit squad led by Doyle as Gently, Bacchus, and O’Shaughnessy’s daughter Carmel look on helplessly. Ultimately Empton turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, willing to let the shipment of stolen guns make its way to the IRA in exchange for having Doyle, who’s really his agent, win a place on the IRA’s governing council so Empton can gain intelligence on the group from the source. In the end Doyle is picked off by a well-aimed shot from Gently as he’s attempting to save himself by holding Wanda Lane hostage, Empton is disgraced, and fortunately both the women we’ve come to like, Wanda and Carmel, are alive at the end (though we get the impression Wanda has been chastened by the experience and won’t be anywhere nearly as man-hungry as she was before). I like Inspector George Gently because it almost totally lacks the campy levity of a lot of the other British policiers, especially the ones like Midsomer Murders set in central England instead of London, Manchester, or Liverpool. Instead it virtually qualified as neo-noir, and I particularly liked this episode because it had a political background but luckily didn’t hit us over the head with it.

X the Unknown (Sol Lesser Productions, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, Warner Bros., 1956)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 7) I showed my husband Charles a film I’d got in the same container as Four Sided Triangle: X the Unknown (the official poster had a three-dot ellipsis between “X” and “the,” but the film’s own opening credits did not), a strange little story by future Hammer director Jimmy Sangster about a menace, not from outer space this time, but from inside the Earth’s crust. As explained in the exposition by Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger, an American actor imported to star in the film by producer Sol Lesser, a long-time Hollywood bottom-feeder who got his name on the copyright), as the earth’s crust expanded and took up more of the volume of the planet, agencies inside the crust started feeling squeezed and eventually rebelled, breaking open the crust in certain places to grab the energy they needed as their source of food. (Some critics at the time praised Sangster’s script as at least not being yet another tale of an alien invasion from outer space.) The film is set in Scotland, where the British army is doing tests to train their troops in the proper use of Geiger counters to detect underground radiation, only one of the servicemembers detects radiation in a location other than where the atomic materials have been planted as part of the exercise. The army orders the suspicious site cordoned off, but two young boys, Ian Osborn (Fraser Hines) and Willie Harding (Michael Brooks), investigate the site on a dare. Ian emerges unscathed but Willie is badly burned and eventually dies in the hospital of his wounds, much to the understandable displeasure of his parents Jack (Jameson Clark) and Vi (Jane Aird). Later the great whatsit kills a doctor in the hospital where the boy was being treated (when we saw his flesh literally melt on screen I joked to Charles, “Now this looks like a Hammer movie”). It also opens a deep fissure in the ground and kills two soldiers stationed outside the perimeter to guard it. Royston’s colleague Peter Elliott (William Lucas) volunteers to be lowered into the fissure to investigate it first-hand, taking a Geiger counter with him and saying he’ll asked to be raised out of the pit immediately once it starts registering radiation. He gets his (and our) first clue about the mysterious menace when an oddly animate patch of mud fastens itself to his hand. Royston and Elliott have a frosty relationship with Inspector “Mac” McGill (Leo McKern, who later played Clang, the High Priest of Kalili, in Help! and thus put the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Beatles) of the local police. The cops insist on trying to blow up the monster while Royston says that it feeds on energy and therefore supplying it with more energy will only help it.

Ultimately the mud-monster emerges from its cave and starts menacing everyone in the vicinity in search of the radioactive cobalt core from a nearby nuclear reactor, which coincidentally has been removed as part of a shutdown of the reactor instituted by Royston. The scientists finally figure out a way to kill the thing using the cobalt core as a lure, on the theory that by bombarding it with out-of-synch radio waves they can neutralize it and keep it from feeding on the surrounding energy. Just as the scientists think they have killed it with their first explosion, it explodes a second time, leaving it uncertain at the film’s rather abrupt ending if they’ve really killed the whatsit or just put it to sleep for a while. I remembered that both Charles and I had seen this movie before because I’d joked about a sequel to it and even come up with a title: X2: Killer Mud Strikes Again! According to the film’s Wikipedia page, the originally assigned director was American expatriate and blacklist victim Joseph Losey, but he was let go when Dean Jagger refused to work with him, probably fearful for his own future if he made a film with a blacklisted director like Losey. Instead they assigned the film to Leslie Norman, best known as a comedy director for Ealing Studios and rather out of place in a science-fiction/horror film. The page also says that Sol Lesser had a deal to release the film in the U.S. through RKO, but at the time that studio was in its death throes during the three-year interregnum between Howard Hughes’s selling it in 1955 and its eventual closure three years later. During that time RKO seemed to be going through a corporate version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and by the time its owners bowed to the inevitable in 1958 they’d begun placing their unreleased films with other studios, mainly Warner Bros. and Columbia. X the Unknown ended up at Warners, which released it on a double bill with Hammer’s first foray into classical monster-movie making, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The page also explains that Hammer’s producer, Anthony Hinds, had originally wanted to call Dean Jagger’s character “Bernard Quatermass,” but the creator of the Quatermass character, Nigel Kneale, refused to give permission. There’s at least one other quirky credit in the film besides Leo McKern’s: Anthony Newley appears briefly as one of the servicemembers killed by the monster early on in the Hammer equivalent of a Star Trek “red shirt.” X the Unknown is an O.K. entry into the alien-monster sweepstakes, surprisingly dull for most of its running time (for which I’m inclined to blame Sangster rather than Norman) and with a woefully unscary monster. It’s basically the same concept as The Blob, made in the U.S. two years later, but The Blob, while no great shakes as a movie either, at least was made with a cheery awareness of its camp aspects that pretty much eluded the makers of X the Unknown.