Wagner: Das Rheingold (Unitel, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Aret, RBB, CNC, 2022)

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

Last night (Friday, April 10) my husband Charles and I watched a truly weird production on Blu-Ray of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, first episode in the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). I’d been sent a boxed set of Blu-Rays of the complete Ring by Fanfare magazine for review purposes, and I was a little (or more than a little) nervous when I noticed that the conductor was Christian Thielemann and the stage director and scenic designer was Dmitri Tcherniakov. Though Thielemann is the current musical director at the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, Germany, I had watched his performance at the Wagner 200th birthday tribute concert at Bayreuth on May 22, 2013 and been unimpressed. In my moviemagg review of it (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/06/wagner-200th-birthday-concert-bayreuth.html), I’d written, “The odd thing is that Thielemann talks good performances but all too often delivers competent run-throughs; I found myself thinking of him as an Erich Leinsdorf of our time — his performances are always tight and well organized but almost never emotionally driven, compelling renditions of the music. This makes him an odd choice indeed to be music director at Bayreuth, a festival devoted to the music of perhaps the most ’out-there’ Romantic in the history of composition; Wagner’s music demands passion, commitment and drive, and from Thielemann it gets polite accuracy.” I was even more nervous about Tcherniakov’s participation because I’ve read that he hates having supernatural elements in his opera productions and frequently rewrites works containing them to eliminate them. When he did Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, he cut out the final appearance of the ghost of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father and victim of the murder Don Giovanni commits in the opening scene, and instead made the opera a sort of intervention pulled on Don Giovanni by the Commendatore’s family. So that made him an odd choice indeed for a cycle that is largely driven by the supernatural. The American composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote an article about Wagner which called Die Meistersinger “the perfect fairy-tale opera,” which always seemed odd to me because Meistersinger is the only one of the 10 Wagner operas in the Bayreuth canon that does not contain any supernatural elements in its plotting.

Tcherniakov’s “solution” to his non-problem was to relocate the Ring to 1970’s Germany and set it inside an elaborate multi-level medical lab (in the immortal words of the great Wagner satirist Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”). In the opening scene, in which Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) is supposed to be swimming around inside the Rhine river chasing after the three Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelyn Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapkovskaja), in this production he’s strapped to a chair inside a lab with a headdress of electrodes stuck on him. The Rhinemaidens are nurses, and though Wagner wrote the scene with just the Rhinemaidens and Alberich on stage (and in his premiere production at Bayreuth in 1876 he had the Rhinemaidens lying on their stomachs inside a merry-go-round device to create the illusion that they were swimming), Tcherniakov filled the stage with others, including other males, who stood around and did their best to look busy. Indeed, the appearance on stage of people who weren’t supposed to be there, including three women who hang out in the facility’s waiting room and, like most of the other characters, smoke like chimneys (as I’ve written before, it’s fascinating to watch movies from the 1930’s, 1950’s, and even the 1970’s showing doctors, nurses, and patients alike puffing away in what today are strictly enforced no-smoking environments) – I suspect they’re going to turn out to be the Norns in Götterdämmerung – is a hallmark of this relentlessly silly production. When the Rhinemaidens helpfully explain to Alberich (and us) the curse on the Rheingold – it will make its owner master of the world, but only if he first renounces love – Alberich responds by pulling apart all the antique computer equipment in the room before he breaks the glass enclosure with a medical standard and escapes. When scene two begins, we’re in the middle of an otherwise empty lecture hall in which Wotan (Michael Volle) is sprawled out asleep on one of the audience chairs, looking for all the world like Donald Trump nodding out at a Cabinet meeting. His wife Fricka (Claudia Mahnke) strolls in and wakes him up, and the two ultimately adjourn to an Apprentice-style board room to discuss the plight of the gods. It seems that Wotan rashly promised his sister-in-law Freia (Anett Fritsch) to the giants Fasolt (Mika Kares) and Fafner (Peter Rose – Charles chuckled about his name in the credits given that the other Pete Rose is famous for being first a baseball player and then a disgraced retiree from his involvement in sports gambling, not that that’s considered such a big deal anymore) in exchange for building him a new palace which he names Valhalla.

Now Wotan, again like Trump (I can’t help but think this production, made during the blessed four-year Biden interregnum between Trump’s two Presidencies, is filled with on-purpose references to him), wants to figure out a way to renege on the deal. He calls in the trickster god Loge (Rolando Villazón, a Mexican-born lyric tenor who’s the only person in this cast I’d heard of before) to advise him, and Loge sings a beautiful narration explaining how all the world loves love except for Alberich, who stole the Rheingold from the Rhinemaidens and renounced love in exchange for power. Fasolt and Fafner enter, not alone as in Wagner’s original libretto, but with four enforcers who look like a drug cartel’s hired thugs. It turns out they have an ulterior motive for taking Freia; without her, the gods will lose the golden apples they eat regularly to remain immortal. Without her unique knowledge of how to tend the tree on which the golden apples grow, the gods will get old and die. Wotan and Loge promise the giants that they’ll come up with an alternate form of payment – incidentally Fasolt is dressed in a lime-green jacket and purple pants like the Joker in the Batman comic books, and once again I’m assuming that’s an intended reference on Tcherniakov’s part – but the giants take Freia as hostage until Wotan does that. Wotan and Loge descend to Alberich’s realm, Nibelheim, and in textually accurate productions that’s an elaborate descent down caves. In this production all they have to do is take an elevator to a basement lab that’s labeled, “Investigation of Human Behavior Models in a Test Group.” The Nibelungs, who in Wagner’s original were a race of dwarves but here look like standard-issue proletarians, lament that they used to make jewelry just for fun but now they have to do it under Alberich’s lash (literally in Wagner’s original; here Alberich wields what looks like a nightstick or club) in what Tcherniakov obviously thinks is a metaphor for the primitive accumulation under early capitalism. (George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite, a book he originally published in the 1890’s and reissued with revisions in the 1920’s, is an analysis of the Ring in anti-capitalist terms, and I suspect it’s led a lot of modern stage directors to re-imagine the Ring in a 19th or 20th century setting.)

The Nibelung Alberich is hardest on is his own brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer), who makes him a Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that will allow the wearer to become invisible and also to shape-shift. Mime was hoping to use this gimcrack to escape Alberich’s domination, but Alberich catches him, confiscates the Tarnhelm, and uses it to make himself invisible so his domination can be even more total. (For some reason Tcherniakov made the Tarnhelm look like the monitoring device Alberich was wearing in scene one.) Wotan and Loge descend into Nibelheim and trick Alberich into turning himself first into a serpent, then a toad, and when he’s in toad form Wotan and Loge capture and bind him, then take him back to the gods’ headquarters. Amazingly, Tcherniakov doesn’t actually try to dramatize any of this; when he’s supposed to be invisible, a serpent, or a toad, his Alberich looks exactly the same. In the opera’s fourth and final scene, when Alberich is supposed to be bidding his minions to ascend with the treasure they’ve accumulated for him, there is no treasure and, indeed, no activity of any kind. We’re just supposed to take on faith that all this is happening. The way Wagner wrote the scene, Wotan is forced to give up first the treasure, then the Tarnhelm, and then the ring when Fasolt laments that he can still see a glint of Freia’s blonde hair through a crack in the pile of treasure (needless to say, this Freia is dark-haired – were the Berlin wig shops out of blonde wigs that week?) – only we don’t see any of that. Thielemann’s professionally competent but rather mopey conducting matches Tcherniakov’s idiotic modern-dress production, which systematically destroys any chance of creating the sense of wonder Wagner kept trying to create with his music. For the last scene, Tcherniakov has Loge and Froh (the Black singer Siyabonga Maqungo; I’m O.K. with him being Black but not so much with them picking a singer who looks so much like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) do simple ordinary sleight-of-hand tricks any stage magician can do.

This Rheingold was so abominably produced I didn’t notice much about the singing, except that none of the cast members managed the kinds of authority mustered by their counterparts in Georg Solti’s 1958 studio recording of Rheingold – arguably the best ever. Solti’s and producer John Culshaw’s cast – particularly Kirsten Flagstad as Fricka (in the last professional work of her career), George London as Wotan, Set Svanholm as Loge, and the remarkable Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich – is unsurpassable. Most defenders of this modern-dress Regietheater approach to opera production say it’s needed to make the old works “relevant” to a modern audience. That’s just a bunch of B.S.; anyone looking at the box-office profits from Peter Jackson’s film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (a work which owes a great deal to Wagner’s Ring, both structurally – they’re both in four parts, a shorter introductory work and three extended episodes – and thematically) can see the evidence, literally in black and white, that a modern audience can cherish a work set in legendary times without demanding that it be remodeled into the appearance of today. While there have been modern-dress productions of classic operas I actually liked – Frank Corsaro’s 1983 version of Bizet’s Carmen from the New York City Opera, which reset the piece to take place during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and actually worked the war into the plot; Peter Sellars’s edition of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (decidedly not his Don Giovanni or Cosi fan Tutte!); Michael Mayer’s staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Met in 2013 (which relocated the action to Las Vegas c. 1960 and made the Duke of Mantua Frank Sinatra and his courtiers the Rat Pack) – those have taken care to find modern (or recent) equivalents for the class conflicts within the original material. It’s all too clear that Dmitri Tcherniakov couldn’t have been bothered with that kind of faithful translation; his Rheingold (and, I fear, the rest of his Ring) is a bizarre fantasy of his own to which only he holds the key.

Law and Order: "Beyond Measure" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 9, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 9) I watched successive episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “Beyond Measure” and began with an encounter between the two leading police officers on the “Law” section of the series, Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), and Roman Catholic Archbishop Keane (Michael O’Keefe). The two cops were passing a Catholic church while it was in the middle of hosting a service and Riley is confessing to Walker that he grew up in the church but became disillusioned with it and sought spiritual answers elsewhere. Just then the two detectives see a crowd of people fleeing in panic, and my first thought was that there was a gunman doing a mass shooting in the church. Instead the targeted building was an art museum and the people with the guns were garden-variety robbers after a particularly important relic, an emerald-encrusted golden crown from Colombia that had been made by indigenous workers back in the day. The Catholic church in Colombia had seized the crown 100 years before, and it was now on display in that museum. The typical red-herring suspect is indigenous Colombian activist Amaru Yupanqui (Mario Golden), who’d put out online messages demanding that the Church return the crown to the Native Colombians, but he insists that he’d never do something as stupid as hire people to steal it. The actual crooks turn out to be two Afghanistan war veterans, one of whom gets killed in a shoot-out with police, along with a museum staffer whom they blackmailed into helping them but who turns state’s evidence in exchange for a reduced sentence. The police and prosecutors investigate it as a murder case because a security guard named Carbo was shot and killed during the robbery, and Carbo’s wife Valentina (Betzaida Landín) and daughter Luna (Isabella Miranda) are naturally upset and demand justice.

At first the prosecution loses a ruling before Judge Evelyn Boyd (Diane Ciesla), who rules that because the defendant, Luis Salazar (Shawn Mintz), had already checked his suitcase with the airline he was going to fly out of the country on when the cops arrested him at the airport, the phone pager he and his fellow crooks had been using to communicate is inadmissible. Needing more evidence against Salazar, the police learn that a man using crutches had been the last one to flee the museum when the gunfire started. They interview him and learn that Salazar had said during the robbery, “I hope Leo comes through for us.” “Leo” turns out to be Leonard Hawkins (Julio Perrilán), who was briefly married to Salazar’s aunt, who testifies against Salazar and makes it clear that now that he and Salazar’s aunt are divorced, he has no family feeling towards him and had no intention of handling the stolen item anyway. The case appears headed for a slam-dunk guilty verdict when Archbishop Keane intervenes, appearing before district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) with Salazar’s lawyer, Max Wood (an oddly Anglo character name for a character that looks Asian and is played by Rob Yang). The three are demanding that prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) accept a plea bargain in which, in exchange for a reduced sentence, Salazar will reveal the whereabouts of the crown (ya remember the crown?) and it will be returned to the museum from whence it was stolen. Price suspects that Baxter wants him to cut the deal because Baxter will be running for re-election and he doesn’t want to alienate the estimated 2.5 million Roman Catholic voters in New York City, but the deal is done, the crown is returned to the museum, and predictably Valentina and Luna Carbo aren’t happy that Salazar, even if he serves the full 15 years he’ll be sentenced to, will be out before he’s 40 while Valentina’s husband and Luna’s dad will still be dead. “It’s complicated,” Price tells the Carbos, who understandably intuit that he doesn’t personally believe what he’s saying. Of course, “It’s complicated” has also entered the language as code for Facebook users who are cruising the site for partners for extra-relational activity!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Deep Under" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 9, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Deep Under,” marked a welcome return to the series for actor Octavio Pisano, who to my mind was the sexiest guy in the cast once Christopher Meloni moved on. As before, he was playing Joe Velasco, who left the Special Victims Unit to go to work for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was assigned to go undercover and infiltrate a Mexican-formed drug cartel being run out of San Diego, but the gang was branching out both geographically to the East Coast and business-wise into human trafficking. Velasco phoned in an anonymous tip to his old colleagues at the Manhattan Special Victims Unit to alert them that the gang was bringing in a shipment of young women, most of whom were already prostitutes, to be trafficked. Among the victims, whom the SVU is able to rescue, is Madison Cleary (Abi Lieff), whose sister Brittany (Emily Rose DeMartino) is still being held captive and is scheduled to be in the second shipment of young women being handled as merchandise. The issue becomes Velasco’s divided loyalties, as he’s formally arrested by SVU at the original drop point and he pleads with his former colleagues not to do anything that would blow his cover with the gang. His handler at the DEA is Black woman agent Maggie Weber (Jerrika Hinton), with whom he’s unhappy. Velasco has also fallen in love with one of the women he met through the gang, Eliana Castillo (Carmela Zumbado), even though she was the girlfriend of gang member Manuel Rojas (Fernando Gamarra). He started out by pumping her for information, but soon graduated to more literal “pumping” of her, while the gang’s leader realizes that his operation is being compromised and is willing to kill all three of the suspected leakers if that’s what it takes to stop the losses. Ultimately Velasco and Eliana both get shot as suspected leakers, though they’re both rescued by the SVU squad and brought back to health in the hospital. There’s a bittersweet ending as SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and DEA agent Weber cut a deal by which Eliana will testify against the gang in federal court and then be relocated in witness protection, though this means she and Velasco will never be able to see each other again. Otherwise this is a pretty ordinary divided-loyalties tale that was O.K. entertainment but not much more.

Elsbeth: "Otherwise Enraged" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 9, 2026)

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

Things lightened up considerably when I switched from NBC to CBS and watched an April 9 episode of Elsbeth in which, following the Columbo trajectory of the show in general we first got to see the actual murder go down, know from the get-go whodunit, and then be entertained as Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her official colleagues on the New York Police Department unravel the killer’s attempts to cover it up. In this case the killer is one of the most engaging, if also infuriating, characters in this show’s quirky history: Rachel Withers (Beanie Feldstein), an avocational party planner who’s literally “always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” She’s planned and attended at least 30 bridal showers and gender-reveal parties without ever having a boyfriend, let alone getting married herself. As the episode, called “Otherwise Enraged,” opens, Rachel is alone at a huge party she’s catered for herself to celebrate her inheritance of a large house in the south of France to which she intends to relocate now that her aunt, who owned it, has died and left it to her. Only nobody shows up to her big party, and Rachel eventually realizes that her big “do” was sabotaged by her supposed best friend, Kimberly Brooks (Ali Fumiko Whitney), who’s just reconciled with her previously estranged third husband (of course Rachel hosted all her bridal showers!) Howard Brooks (Lionel Leede). Rachel is so incensed at Kimberly’s sabotage of her big party that she goes over to Kimberly’s apartment, lets herself in (it’s been established that she has the key), confronts her and ultimately wallops her with a designer pan. Then she puts the pan in the dishwasher to wipe off Kimberly’s blood, only just then Howard stumbles home drunk from someone else’s party and collapses in a drunken stupor on the couch. Rachel sees this as an opportunity to frame Howard for Kimberly’s murder, and she takes a similar pot, plants it on him, and leaves him to wake up the next morning and become convinced he killed his wife in a drunken rage.

Also, between the party fiasco and Rachel’s confrontation with Kimberly, she ran into a bike-riding barista named Carson Rogers (Pierre Marais) who thought she was about to commit suicide, saved her from doing so (even though she insisted she wasn’t), and instantly became infatuated with her and took the card he’d offered her with his phone number. This became important later when Rachel decided she needed an alibi for the murder, so she called his number and offered to buy him a Tesla cybertruck if he’d testify that she was at his place literally all night. Though the official police detective on the case, Jackie Donnelly (Molly Price), remains convinced that Howard killed his wife, Elsbeth eventually brings her around and extracts Rachel’s confession. There’s also a subplot about Elsbeth’s boss on the police department, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), hosting a party to celebrate his own 30th wedding anniversary. He’s invited not only his daughter Julia (Brittany Inge) but her ex on the the force, Detective Rivers (Brandon De La Garza) – only Julia gives her dad an ultimatum: either disinvite Rivers or she’s not showing up to her parents’ celebration of the longevity of their marriage. Rivers tries to lie his way out of it by saying his aunt has just died and he’s in no mood to party. It fools Captain Wagner but not Julia, who recalls during the time she and Rivers were dating that he lost his one and only aunt when he was 12 and it was a major trauma for him then. This Elsbeth was a charming show and a welcome departure from the gloom and doom Dick Wolf’s atelier had brought us earlier in the evening, and though she’s playing an exasperating bitch here Beanie Feldstein – who achieved stardom on Broadway playing Fanny Brice in Funny Girl in 2022 even though Feldstein, unlike Barbra Streisand (who created the role), is very definitely a “woman of size” – is quite engaging and I’d love to see more of her.

Kidnapping My Own Daughter (Fireside Pictures, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 5), with Turner Classic Movies occupying itself with the special Easter presentation of the 1961 Jesus biopic King of Kings, which I watched around Eastertime in 2022 and wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/king-of-kings-samuel-bronston.html. Instead I went to Lifetime for a really quirky movie called Kidnapping My Own Daughter, directed by Max McGuire (whom I’d never heard of before) and written by Shawn Riopelle (whom I had). It’s about a child protective services worker named Fay Walden (Kathryn Kohut) who’s alone in bed with her not particularly attractive husband Paul (Chris Violette) – though, this being Lifetime, his very homeliness marks him as a good guy. Suddenly they hear the sounds of their house being broken into, and the intruders turn out to be Tess Donnelly (Catherine Saindon) and her boyfriend de jour Harlow (Nate Colitto). Three years earlier Tess, a single mother at age 19 after her baby’s father died on her, lost her child to the local “protective” agency, and now she’s come to the Waldens’ home with a knife (later revealed to be a prop knife made of rubber, but of course the Waldens don’t know that!) to demand to learn the whereabouts of her daughter Amelia. Tess lost custody of Amelia after an incident at a Fourth of July fireworks show in which the girl was burned by an ember from one of the fireworks, but the social worker assigned to her case, Margaret (Debra Hale), insisted that Tess had burned Amelia with a cigarette and took the child away from her. The local police arrive in response to Fay’s 911 call and Paul subdues Harlow, so he’s arrested, but Tess escapes. Later on Fay investigates the case of Amelia on her own and learns that just about all the documents in her file were heavily redacted.

Just then we see by far the hottest, hunkiest guy in the cast, Jacob Ashford (Jesse Collin), frantically calling Margaret to set up a meeting with her. This being Lifetime, we immediately know that Jacob is a villain and there was something untoward about the way Tess’s case went down that Jacob is worried Fay’s investigation will expose. Margaret had retired two years earlier after having mentored Fay and just about everyone else currently working in the department, but she had a dark side. She retired in the first place because her husband George had got terminal cancer and she wanted to be with him in his last months. Jacob is a super-rich man who’s been through various fertility treatments with his wife Clara (Esther Viessing) to have a child, including IVF and even surrogacy. Since nothing worked to get them a kid au naturel, Jacob cut a deal with Margaret to obtain a child he could adopt in exchange for him providing round-the-clock home care for her dying husband George. So Margaret framed Tess as an unfit parent and filed away the paperwork, redacting most of the details (when we were first shown the files with all the heavy black cross-outs I joked, “Who’s running this office, anyway? Pam Bondi? I guess she needed a new job after Trump fired her”), though she let one document slip through with only hand redactions that enabled Fay to figure out most of its hidden contents. Jacob proves to be a typically ruthless Lifetime villain, grabbing hold of the flash drive that could have proven Tess innocent of the charge of deliberately burning her daughter and also murdering Margaret by grabbing her desperately needed heart medication and spilling it on her floor. (Both Charles and I caught the reference to The Little Foxes and Bette Davis’s similar murder of her now-inconvenient husband, Herbert Marshall, by denying him his badly needed heart medication and letting him expire on their staircase.) Ultimately Jacob decides to take himself, his wife Clara and their adoptive daughter “Mindy” (who of course is really Tess’s daughter Amelia) out of the country and hide out in the Maldives, an independent island nation off the coast of Sri Lanka which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. (This is why a lot of Russian yacht owners berthed their vessels in the Maldives after Russia invaded Ukraine and the Biden administration in the U.S. announced a program of seizing Russian yachts, selling them, and using the proceeds to fund military aid to Ukraine.)

Clara, who seems unaware that Mindy isn’t her biological child, resents being made to pull up stakes right when Mindy is looking forward to starting school, but Jacob insists. Jacob deliberately crashes into Fay’s car to steal the flash drive she and Tess got from Margaret that would prove Tess innocent of burning her daughter. He also breaks into the Weldons’ home (they must have the worst security system in their neighborhood!) and stabs Fay’s husband Paul (ya remember Fay’s husband Paul?) in the chest, and it’s touch and go as to whether he’s going to live. In fact, Fay keeps missing text alerts from the hospital about Paul’s condition because she’s traveling with Tess to try to undo the wrong that was done her. The climax occurs when Fay learns Jacob’s and Clara’s address and goes out there with Tess, who has an uncertain reunion with a girl who has no idea Tess is her biological mother. Of course Jacob is out to kill Fay, Tess, or both, but the police intervene in time, arrest Jacob, and there’s an interesting tag scene in which Tess and Clara, whose husband is out of the picture due to all the criminal things he’s done, guardedly agree to co-parent Amelia a.k.a. Mindy. Meanwhile Fay shows up visibly pregnant – though there was an interesting scene earlier in which she was shown rejecting Paul’s entreaties that they have a child of their own on the understandable ground that in her work she sees every day how even the most well-meaning parents can go off the rails, and she’s not all that enthusiastic about becoming a parent herself. Kidnapping My Own Daughter is a pretty good Lifetime movie; I give Shawn Riopelle credit for trying to make his characters multidimensional, but they still come off as stereotypes and Charles questioned how easily Tess avoided legal jeopardy for her crimes. He pointed out that kidnapping is a federal offense, but my understanding is it isn’t and becomes one only if the kidnappers transport their victim across a state line. One thing I’m hoping for as a result of this movie is to get a chance to see drop-dead gorgeous Jesse Collin in a sympathetic role instead of as a Lifetime villain, just as the day after my husband Charles and I watched the 1997 Titanic I bought a used VHS copy of the film The Phantom so I could see Billy Zane, who’d done a lot more for me as a personality than Leonardo Di Caprio even though he was playing the villain, in a superhero role!

Battling Butler (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Buster Keaton Productions, MGM, 1926)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 5) the featured film just before Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”, 1961’s King of Kings, ran so long that by switching channels right after the Lifetime movie ended I was able to catch all of Buster Keaton’s 1926 film Battling Butler. As with the Keaton film two movies earlier in his filmography, Seven Chances, Battling Butler was based on a hit play, a musical by Stanley Brightman and Austin Melford. The credits for the movie Battling Butler list Keaton as sole director (usually he took co-director credit with Eddie Cline or Clyde Bruckman, but on his silent films, at least, he was the auteur) and no fewer than four writers for the “adaptation” of the play: Paul Gerard Smith, Al Boasberg (who worked with Keaton again on his very next film, The General, and also wrote the stateroom scene for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera), Charles Henry Smith, and Lex Neal. Plot-wise, Battling Butler is the old chestnut about the impossibly spoiled upper-class twit – I’ve long suspected Keaton often cast himself as a rich kid to place himself at the clear other end of the socioeconomic scale from Charlie Chaplin and his lower-class “Tramp” – who falls hard for an unassuming woman who doesn’t buy his superior act. Ultimately, to prove himself worthy of her, he has to climb down off his pedestal and do something butch so he can “become a man.” The film’s opening scenes are in some ways the best: Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) is told by his father (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com) that he needs to go out to the country and rough it for a while to prove his inner masculinity. Alfred is so ludicrously un-self-reliant he’s dependent on his valet (Snitz Edwards) for everything, including removing his cigarette from his mouth, flicking off its ashes in an ashtray, and then returning it to Alfred’s mouth.

Needless to say, Alfred’s idea of “roughing it” is to set up a huge tent in the middle of the mountain country, equip it with a fancy bed and all modern conveniences, and even mount a radio on one side of the entrance and a record player on the other. Alfred tries to go out hunting, but he can’t see any game to shoot (though we can see plenty of huntable animals, from ducks to deer). When he fires his shotgun he holds it the wrong way around and it tears holes in the handkerchief of “The Mountain Girl” (Sally O’Neil). Needless to say, she’s not happy at having almost been shot by this insufferable upper-class twit. And just in case her disapproval isn’t enough to make the point, Alfred also has to contend with her father (Walter James) and brother (Budd Fine), who make it clear to him that they don’t want a spoiled milquetoast marrying into their family. There’s a great scene in which Alfred invites the girl for dinner, only the table has been mounted on soft soil and it sinks ever lower as the meal progresses to the point where they’re literally trying to eat off ground level. Alas, from there the plot turns into typical rom-com stuff; Alfred learns (from the newspapers being regularly delivered to him even in the middle of the country) that there’s another Alfred Butler (Francis McDonald), a contender for the lightweight boxing championship who’s nicknamed “Battling Butler.” Alfred’s valet hits on the idea of having his Alfred pose as “Battling Butler” and convince the girl and her relatives that he’s really a prizefighter so they’ll let him marry her. The valet assumes that “Battling Butler” will lose his upcoming championship fight and therefore no one will ever hear of him again, but “Battling Butler” actually wins the bout and there’s a great scene in which Alfred and his valet sink lower and lower into their seats in the boxing arena until they’re the only two people left there.

As if that weren’t enough, Alfred and the mountain girl are having a date at an outdoor café when “Battling Butler” shows up with his wife (Mary O’Brien), and the fighter gets jealous when he thinks Alfred has made a pass at his wife. He concocts a scheme to disappear from the next bout, in which he’s supposed to defend his title against a fighter billed as the “Alabama Murderer,” and let Alfred fight in his place. Accordingly both Alfred’s valet and “Battling Butler”’s manager try pathetically to get Alfred in shape for a serious prizefight, while Alfred does things like sneak onto the running board of the car that’s supposed to be pacing him for his road work. On the night of the big fight the real “Battling Butler” turns up and makes quick work of the “Alabama Murderer” – he explains later that they shouldn’t have thought he’d give up a championship bout just to get revenge against Alfred. Then “Battling Butler” picks a fight of his own against Alfred in the dressing room, only Alfred finds his courage and manages to hold his own and keeps pummeling the helpless “Battling Butler” until the real fighter’s manager and trainer pull him off. The final shot shows Alfred, wearing a top hat and carrying a cane but still in his boxer’s shorts, walking the girl for a night on the town. Battling Butler was made at an odd juncture in Keaton’s career; his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, was worried about whether Keaton’s films were getting too adventurous for mass audiences. With Schenck as his business partner, Keaton had made such audacious masterpieces as Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator, but after those Schenck decided that Keaton could best be showcased in adaptations of already popular plays. So he bought the farce Seven Chances, about a man who has to find a willing bride that very day to claim an inheritance, and the film laid an egg in its initial previews. About the only thing the preview audience for Seven Chances found funny was a brief scene in which, fleeing a crowd of women who’ve heard about his situation, he tripped over three rocks. Stuck with an unreleasable movie, Keaton decided to create one of the most audacious and ground-breaking comic sequences of all time. Instead of just three rocks, he’d have his hero threatened with an avalanche of hundreds of rocks (mostly made of papier-machê to make the sequence less risky).

After one more movie, Go West, in which Keaton played a cowboy who leads a herd of cattle through the L.A. streets, Schenck green-lighted Battling Butler as Keaton’s next film – and though it’s cleverly staged, it’s not at the level of his previous masterpieces and one spends much of the movie wondering, “Why did they put Buster Keaton in a rom-com?” Relations between Keaton and Schenck would get even chancier after that; Battling Butler was the last film they would release under MGM’s distribution. Shortly after that Schenck would get an offer to assume the presidency of United Artists, the independent distributor formed by Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, and he would move the releases of Keaton’s films to United Artists. This happened just when Keaton was at work in Oregon making what’s generally considered his greatest film, The General (1926), based on a real-life drama of the Civil War. He spent over $1 million on it – the most expensive comedy to date – and shot it in Oregon because it was the only place he could find that still ran railroads with the narrow track gauges used during the Civil War. The General was a box-office flop and Schenck then put Keaton into College, a stone ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. After one more independent production, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Schenck closed the company he’d run with Keaton and arranged for Keaton to sign directly with MGM, where Schenck’s brother Nicholas was company president. Alas, Nicholas Schenck was based in New York and had nothing to do with the studio’s creative end; the people who did, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, were notoriously intolerant of independent-minded directors like Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Rex Ingram, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton. To add to Keaton’s troubles, just as he was signing on to MGM sound came to motion pictures. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton actually welcomed this, but he’d wanted to use dialogue the way he’d used intertitles in his silents: to set up a basic situation he could then embroider with gags, many of them improvised on the spot. Keaton was also an incipient alcoholic who responded to the strains on his career and his marriage with drink, and a spendthrift who ran through his money almost as fast as he made it. I’ve often thought that if Keaton had been as compulsively frugal as Chaplin and Lloyd, he could have bought out Joseph Schenck’s share in their production company and continued to make his films independently. Be that as it may, Battling Butler is a genuinely amusing film but hardly at the level of the Keaton masterworks on either side of it in his filmography.

The Great Race (Warner Bros., Patricia-Jalem-Reynard Productions, 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 4) Turner Classic Movies ran a double bill of both the films Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis made together, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Blake Edwards’s The Great Race. Alas, since my husband Charles and I were late getting home from a meal, we missed the start of Some Like It Hot but caught all of The Great Race. The Great Race was based on a real-life event: a 1908 cross-country auto race from New York to Paris. The route traveled westward across the United States, up the coast of Canada to the Bering Strait, over which the cars would be transported 130 miles on a ferryboat. (At least that was the original plan; ultimately the route from San Francisco to Alaska was traversed by ship, as was the journey across the Pacific to Japan.) Then the cars made it across Russia through the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, after which they went through Europe and finally ended up in Paris. As the Wikipedia page on the real race notes, “Ahead of the competitors were very few paved roads, and in many parts of the world no roads at all. Often, the teams resorted to straddling locomotive rails with their cars riding tie to tie on balloon tires for hundreds of miles when no roads could be found.” Blake Edwards and his co-writer, Arthur Ross, loosely based their story on the real race and even made the “Leslie Special,” the car driven by the film’s hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis), visually resemble the Thomas Flyer that won the actual race, though unlike the Thomas Flyer it was painted white with gold trim and even its tires were white instead of the regulation black. Edwards’s film details the long-standing rivalry between the heroic Great Leslie and the villainous Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), whose repeated attempts to assassinate Leslie, including shooting an arrow through Leslie’s hot-air balloon and torpedoing Leslie’s speedboat with which he’s trying to set a world water speed record, all end in spectacularly comic reversals. (One of the film’s anachronisms is that Leslie’s speedboat has a deep-dish steering wheel from the 1960’s rather than 1908. Another one is the appearance in a scene set in 1908 of a phonograph playing the title song of Sigmund Romberg’s and Oscar Hammerstein’s operetta The Desert Song, which wasn’t written until 1926.)

The Great Race had a 160-minute running time, one of a number of hyperthyroid slapstick comedies for which there was a brief vogue kicked off by the mega-success of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Into its running time Edwards and Ross threw in a lot of comedy elements, including a barroom brawl in Boracho, Arizona (a town to which the various drivers repair to get gasoline); a scene in which both Leslie and Professor Fate, along with Maggie DuBois (Natalie Wood), the film’s heroine, and Fate’s sidekick Maximilian Meen (Peter Falk, in a role quite different from his iconic one as police lieutenant Columbo), and their cars are trapped on an iceberg across the Bering Strait; an extended spoof of the classic story The Prisoner of Zenda in which, trapped in the Ruritanian kingdom of Carpania, whose capital is Pottsdorf, Professor Fate is forced into substituting for the alcoholic crown prince, Frederick Hoepnick (also Jack Lemmon), in the coronation ceremony; a duel, first with foils and then with sabers, between Leslie and the villainous Carpainian official Baron Rolfe von Stuppe (Ross Martin); and a giant pie fight in the kitchen of the Pottsdorfian palace that lasts four minutes on screen but took five days to shoot. Edwards made the mistake of using real cream pies for the scene instead of fakes made of shaving lotion (the usual on-screen expedient), and compounded his error by not having the mess cleaned up after the first day of shooting. Needless to say, the cream in the pies spoiled and the set had to be aired out to get rid of the stink before shooting could resume the next day.

There’s also an engaging subplot in that Maggie DuBois is an aspiring reporter seeking to land a job with the New York Sentinel and also a militant feminist determined to cover the great race start to finish. To do that, she buys a car of her own, a Stanley Steamer, and enters the race herself, though her car burns out in the southwestern U.S. desert and Leslie rescues her, very reluctantly. Leslie tries to seduce her with some of the lamest lines Edwards and Ross could think of. Maggie gets her revenge by handcuffing Leslie’s sidekick Hezekiah Sturdy (Keenan Wynn) to a post inside a Southern Pacific railroad car – Leslie and Hezekiah don’t reunite until the race reaches Russia – and ultimately she and Leslie have an even more extended than usual of the standard hate-turns-into-love courtship so common in movie rom-coms. Also along the way the performers stop to do two songs written by Henry Mancini (Edwards’s long-time collaborator since the 1950’s TV series Peter Gunn, which Edwards created and for which Mancini wrote the iconic main theme) with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. One is “The Sweetheart Tree,” a sappy romantic ballad which Edwards was clearly hoping would become an enormous hit at the level of “Moon River,” a previous Mancini/Mercer song from an earlier Edwards film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It didn’t, though surprisingly both songs were sung on screen by female movie stars who had barely acceptable but reasonably pleasant voices: Audrey Hepburn for “Moon River” and Natalie Wood for “The Sweetheart Tree.” (To add to the irony, both women played the leads in major musical films – Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Wood in West Side Story – but in both those roles, Marni Nixon was their voice double.)

The other big song is the awkwardly titled “He Shouldn’t-A, Hadn’t-A, Oughtn’t-A Swang on Me!,” a denunciation of domestic violence that sits rather oddly in a film set in 1908, when men still had the legal right to beat and even rape their wives. Like Buddy and Ella Johnson’s great late-1940’s R&B hit “Hittin’ on Me,” it’s a song in which a woman singer – Lily Olay (Dorothy Provine, star of a short-lived TV series called The Roaring Twenties) – boldly asserts her right not to be beaten by her man. I can’t help but wonder if Mel Brooks, who made Blazing Saddles nine years later at the same studio (Warner Bros.), deliberately mashed up the character names “Lily Olay” and “Baron von Stuppe” to create “Lili von Schtupp,” the spoof of Marlene Dietrich played by Madeline Kahn (brilliantly) in Blazing Saddles. (“Schtupp” is also the Yiddish word for “fuck.”) Another set of running gags in the film is the built-in cannon in Professor Fate’s car, the “Hannibal-8” (whose name is explained in the novelization of the film, though not in the movie itself, as a reference to the historical Hannibal, who successfully conquered the mountains of northern Italy by having his army travel by elephants), which goes off at the most inopportune moments. It regularly blows apart Professor Fate’s garage, and at the very end of the film – after Professor Fate has technically won the race, but only because Leslie threw it by stopping inches before the finish line to kiss Maggie and thereby convince her that he really loves her – it knocks down the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen The Great Race quite often, and I remember attending an auto show in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s that exhibited the prop cars used in the film (whose tires had treads that spelled out the words “NON SKID”), and despite the rather arch nature of much of the humor, I still enjoy it.