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 awkwardly 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.

T-Men (Edward Small Productions, Bryan Foy Productions, Eagle-Lion, Reliance Pictures, Pathé Industries, 1947)

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

After The Great Race on Saturday, April 4, Turner Classic Movies had an episode of their “Noir Alley” series in which they featured the 1947 film T-Men, directed by Anthony Mann from a script by Virginia Kellogg (story) and John C. Higgins (screenplay). It was made at Eagle-Lion Pictures, the studio formed when British film producer and distributor J. Arthur Rank bought the old Producers’ Releasing Corporation (PRC) to guarantee himself an American outlet for his British productions. He’d previously been selling them on a one-off basis to various U.S. studios, mostly Universal, but he wanted his own company in the U.S. and he chose the name to symbolize the union of American (eagle) and British (lion) interests in the new company. Eagle-Lion would have its first blockbuster “A”-list film, The Red Shoes, in 1948, but a year before they made this one and it also did sensationally well at the box office. T-Men – the title is short for “Treasury Men” and dealt with agents of the U.S. Secret Service, which was originally founded during the Civil War to enforce the laws against counterfeiting (the business of protecting the President and a number of other federal officials would come later, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901) – is noteworthy as the first U.S. film that was actually allowed, by special dispensation of the Treasury Department, to show real U.S. money on screen. Previously the government had insisted that all movie money be singularly obvious props – one of the best gags in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is when a movie character steps off the screen into the real world and finds his prop money isn’t accepted here – but since the whole plot of T-Men dealt with the differences between counterfeit money and the real federal deal, producers Aubrey Schenck and Edward Small got the government to allow them to show “real green” on screen. In his introduction, “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller described T-Men as a really schizophrenic film, part police procedural, part semi-documentary, and part film noir.

T-Men begins with a two-minute narration by a real (albeit retired by then) Treasury agent, Elmer Lincoln Irey, announcing that the film is a composite story called “The Shanghai Paper Case” mashed together from various real cases in which the Treasury Department was involved. Eddie Muller was scathing about Irey’s narration (fortunately, he was sidelined and another narrator, Reed Hadley, filled in key bits of exposition later on, though frankly the film would have been stronger without narration at all. There were a number of semidocumentaries that used narrators, beginning with 1945’s The House on 92nd Street, that were doing well at the box office at the time, but Muller singled out the shot in which Moxie (Charles McGraw), hired killer for a gang of counterfeiters, looms out of a chiaroscuro darkness to knock off a would-be informer and T-Men suddenly looks like a noir. Muller credited the shot to the film’s cinematographer, John Alton, who once wrote a textbook for aspiring directors of photography called Painting with Light and described this sort of shot as “criminal lighting.” This was the first of five films Mann and Alton would work on jointly, and the visuals on this one are consistently stunning and a real testament to the skill of both director and cinematographer to do quality work on a low budget. (T-Men cost $425,000 to make and grossed over $3 million.) The head of the Secret Service in Los Angeles notes that three agents so far have been unable to get the goods on the L.A.-based counterfeiting ring, so he’s going to recruit two new agents to infiltrate the gang’s criminal associates in Detroit because a stray piece of evidence has linked the gang to the old Vantucci mob in Detroit. Among the tools they have at their disposal are a set of hand-engraved plates for making phony $10 bills captured from a former counterfeiter named Bremer, who’s now safely locked away in prison in Atlanta. The L.A. gang has cheaper photo-engraved plates but a much superior supply of bill paper being smuggled into them from China.

The two agents who get assigned to infiltrate the Vantucci mob in Detroit are Dennis O’Brien (Dennis O’Keefe, who’d previously been known for comedies and musicals but was seeking the same transition into film noir Dick Powell had pulled off superlatively in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet) and Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder). O’Brien is single but Genaro has been married for two years; Genaro also speaks Italian, which will be useful in infiltrating an Italian gang. The two T-men arrive in Detroit and prep for their roles as mobsters by reading back issues of Detroit newspapers. They decide to pose as the last two surviving members of “The River Gang” and O’Brien takes the name “Vannie Harrigan” while Genaro becomes “Tony Galvani.” They successfully persuade mob boss Carlo Vantucci (Anton Kosta) of their criminal bona fides and get sent back to L.A. to contact the counterfeiters there, who are making not only phony U.S. bills but also phony alcohol tax stamps, which the gang uses to get liquor to the bars they control without having to pay taxes on it. The gang’s L.A. activities center around a dive called the “Club Trinidad,” whose photographer gets her photos developed at a lab controlled by the counterfeiters. While in Detroit, O’Brien and Genaro obtained a uniform used by one of the gang members, “Schemer” (Wallace Ford) – if he had a normal name, we never learn it – and send it back to the Treasury crime lab in D.C. for analysis. The lab reveals that the uniform’s owner is 5’ 9”, weighs about 190 pounds, smokes cigars, and chews medicinal herbs from China. That last bit of information gives O’Brien and Genaro the lead they need; they learn from the herbalist Schemer used that he likes steam baths, and they check out all the steam baths in the vicinity of L.A.’s Chinatown until they finally locate him. Armed with one of the gang’s phony bills, O’Brien crashes an illegal back-room craps game at which Schemer is a “regular” and tries to pass the bill, but he’s caught and Schemer and other gang members beat him up.

Ultimately O’Brien in his “Harrigan” identity gets Vantucci from Detroit to vouch for him, and he proposes that the two gangs go into business together, since they have a superior source of bill paper while he has better plates. O’Brien gives the gang the back half of the plates but says he’ll keep the front half until the deal is set and he meets the boss of the whole operation. Meanwhile, Genaro is “outed” when his wife, who’s been visiting a woman friend in San Francisco, goes with her to L.A. The friend immediately recognizes Genaro and calls him by his real name, alerting the gang that he’s not who he said he was. Genaro heatedly denies that he has a wife, and there’s a chilling close-up of Mrs. Genaro (June Lockhart) with a hostile expression on her face that tells her friend (and us), “You’ve just signed my husband’s death warrant.” Genaro is duly executed by the mob – they kill him with O’Brien watching but helpless to intervene – and so is Schemer, who’s locked inside a steam bath while his killer turns up the steam to scalding hot and leaves him to die from it. (One wonders if Don Siegel saw this film and got the idea for a similar steam-bath murder in his 1964 film The Killers.) But before he died, Schemer told O’Brien that he had a secret notebook stashed away that revealed, in code, all the gang’s nastiest activities. O’Brien is able to recover the notebook via a claim check for a storage locker Schemer hid in his apartment, and when he gets the book to D.C. his bosses announce that it contains all sorts of juicy information that will keep law enforcement busy for years to come. The final confrontation takes place aboard a ship, the Don Anselmo (though I was tempted to joke, based on The Maltese Falcon, that it was really La Paloma), where the counterfeiters have their printing press in operation. O’Brien has got a tip from his colleagues that Miller, the gang’s technical expert, is a former associate of Bauman, the now-incarcerated counterfeiter who engraved the super-plates in the first place, and could recognize them and “out” him. Miller tells the gang members he has no idea where the plates came from, then takes O’Brien aside and tells him he does know where the plates came from, he’s figured out that O’Brien is a T-man, but he vouched for him in hopes of getting a reduced sentence and becoming a cooperating witness. Alas for Miller, his gangland associates shoot him down and he dies. O’Brien is also shot, but his fellow Treasury agents in association with the Los Angeles Police Department raid the boat, arrest the crooks, and rescue the injured T-man.

The complexity of that plot summary reflects why I didn’t care for T-Men the first time I saw it in the early 1970’s; it was a hard movie to follow and all the welter of plots and counter-plots got awfully confusing after a while. Fortunately I’ve seen it at least twice since, and it’s grown on me. One unusual aspect about T-Men is that it’s not all that easy to tell the cops and the crooks apart; they’re all dressed similarly in fedora hats and baggy suits (on seeing O’Brien in the pin-striped suit the Secret Service got for him, my husband Charles said it was the worst-fitting suit he’d ever seen in a film), and if nothing else this film makes the point that both the criminals and the cops are parts of well-heeled organizations and there’s little room for individual heroics on either side. I also liked the idea that the ultimate boss’s immediate lieutenant was a woman. T-Men is an effective melodrama, uneasily perched between semi-documentary, police procedural and film noir, but Mann’s direction and Alton’s cinematography make this one something special. As for Dennis O’Keefe, he turns in a quite good performance that accomplished the Dick Powell-style transformation of his image for which both he and Edward Small (who was not only co-producer of the film but also O’Keefe’s agent) were hoping. Ironically, the film was actually produced by a gangster, the star-struck Johnny Roselli, who had come to Hollywood to take control of the corrupt International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) union. They were in the middle of a jurisdictional battle with the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) over who would organize the construction crews who built sets, and one key element in Ronald Reagan’s political transformation from New Deal liberal to rock-ribbed Right-winger was when he found out that the CSU was controlled by the Communist Party. So he shifted his support in the jurisdictional battle to IATSE because he decided that, compared with the Communists, the Mafia were clearly the lesser of two evils. Roselli had formed a film producing partnership with, of all people, Hollywood’s chief censor, Production Code enforcer Joseph Breen, and though Aubrey Schenck (whose father, Joseph Schenck, had served a six-month prison sentence for his involvement in Roselli’s corrupt business and union dealings) and Edward Small were the named producers, it was really Roselli and Breen who called the shots and came up with the money to make this ostensibly anti-crime film.

Law and Order: "Fate's Cruel Joke" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 2, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 2) I watched the most recent episodes of the two remaining shows of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode was a really quirky one, “Fate’s Cruel Joke,” in which a young woman’s body is found rotting in a suitcase in a new condo building whose units are mostly owned by absentee landlords who are holding them for speculation and don’t live in the city – or, in some cases, even in the United States. The police, led by Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), have the devil’s own time just identifying the corpse, especially since the medical examiner’s estimate as to the time of death was several months before the body was found (by a homeless person who had sneaked into the storage garage looking for a place to sleep, and his dog who actually sniffed out where the body was hidden). Ultimately they learn that the victim was a young girl in her late teens or early 20’s and a potentially star gymnast who had actually been adopted by her coach once her mother died when the victim was nine. The police trace the coach and he turns out to be a merciless dictator who drives his athletes relentlessly. He explains that the dead girl was someone who’d had a promising career as a gymnast until she tore a shoulder muscle during practice and therefore could not continue in the sport – but she was still legally the coach’s “family,” so she had to suffer the indignity of watching from the sidelines as he continued his career with other promising young gymnasts training for the life she’d hoped to lead. She responded by running away from home a lot, and hooking up with less than savory boyfriends – including the one who actually did her in: Benjamin Hoffman (Declan Eells), who though he’s only 17 is already a star influencer on the Internet with $7 million in savings and a major podcast for which he films himself on the streets of New York doing skateboarding tricks.

The plot complications heat up when, while tracing this young man whom he recognizes by the unique design of sparkled-colored shoes he wears, Detective Riley runs down a bystander named Crosby and severely injures him. Crosby is taken to a hospital and it’s touch and go as to whether he’s going to survive. Meanwhile, when the cops finally track down Hoffman after Riley’s wild-goose chase, he’s already got a hot-shot attorney, Cordelia Travers (Jane Lynch), in tow when the cops arrest him, and she warns him to say absolutely nothing to them. The case goes to trial with a fair amount of evidence against Benjamin, including his partial fingerprints on the suitcase that turned out to be the victim’s coffin and a receipt for buying the suitcase made out to Benjamin’s friend and drug dealer, Cory Mason (Raye “Rain” Hollitt). Midway through the trial Cordelia actually makes prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, who like former Fantastic Four star Ioan Gruffudd is actually Welsh-born but has done an excellent job suppressing his native Welsh accent and learning to speak American English) a plea deal that in exchange for a much lighter sentence he’ll plead guilty to a lesser charge and tell Price exactly what happened to the girl. Meanwhile, especially once Crosby dies – he survives the operation but ends up brain-dead and his wife Sandra (Molly Samson) agrees to pull the plug and let him die – detective Riley falls off the wagon and goes on a drinking binge out of guilt. We get to meet his wife in this episode and she urges him to go to “a meeting” – if it was ever established before that Riley is a recovering alcoholic and an Alcoholics Anonymous member, I’d forgotten about it – but instead he drank and emerged quite a bit worn and disheveled. Price had decided that he needed Riley’s testimony to establish that Benjamin had fled the scene rather than allow the police to take him in for questioning, but when he sees Riley in the shape he’s in he realizes he can’t count on the jury believing him as a witness. So he decides to accept Cordelia’s plea deal as long as another charge can be added to it.

In exchange Cordelia presents Benjamin for a proffer meeting in which he says that the girl died at a drunken, drug-fueled party for which Cory had supplied an extensive amount of cocaine. The girl was showing off some of her old gymnastics moves on Benjamin’s bed when she suddenly fell and hit her head on the floor so hard it fatally injured her, and rather than risk calling in the authorities and getting busted for all the drugs at their party, Benjamin sent out Cory to buy the suitcase and leave it in the storage unit assigned to his apartment and thereby cover it up. It was a quirky ending and the real tragedy was Riley’s spectacular fall off his own wagon – as often happens in Law and Order, the actual murder victim kind of gets lost in the circumstances – but at least it’s a chilling tale of youth irresponsibility and the kinds of trouble young people can get into when they’ve already made huge fortunes but haven’t lived long enough to accept the responsibility that comes with major amounts of money. (Then again, a lot of rich people grow to advanced ages and still behave with the maturity, or lack thereof, of teenagers or even younger people – does the name “Donald Trump” mean anything to you?)

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Vivid" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 2, 2026)

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

By chance, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Vivid,” that followed Law and Order’s “Fate’s Cruel Joke” on Thursday, April 2 was also about a podcaster who’s attained a major following on the Internet. She uses a cartoon avatar as well as a screen name online but she’s really April Deieso (Sarah Desjardins), and the Special Victims Unit gets interested in her when she narrates a recovered memory of a rape that supposedly happened to her five years previously. So does a free-lance group of vigilantes that are sort of #MeToo on steroids, led by an argumentative and incredibly self-righteous woman named Elaine Marquez (Annette Arnold) and her self-effacing to the point of neuterdom partner, Harrison Kuo (Zack Palombo). They and two other people literally gang up on a middle-aged man who they believe was April’s rapist, who actually had nothing to do with the crime. It turns out April is a patient in a long-term study of the effects of psychedelic drugs in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. The research is being funded by a minor drug company whose CEO, Rosalie Fuentes (Jamie Ann Romero), is hoping to steer the company to major status on the basis of the success rate with a particular psychedelic. The doctors in charge of the study are Jonah Catmull (John Schwab) and Austin Severson (Breckin Meyer), and as part of the protocol they’re both supposed to be in the same room with the patient for as long as the effects of the drug last. We eventually learn that April was indeed raped, but not five years ago; she was raped during one of the psychedelic “therapy” sessions, and her rapist was Dr. Severson. He had sent Dr. Catmull out of the room on some pretext and was alone with April, whom he had blindfolded on the ground that the lack of distracting visual stimuli would make the treatment more effective. Supposedly each session was video-recorded, but it turns out Dr. Fuentes never bothered to look at the recordings, and neither did anyone else at the drug company.

When Dr. Severson is found out, he shocks prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) by immediately pleading guilty to all charges and meekly accepting a 15-year prison sentence and the loss of his medical license. Carisi suspects he’s essentially falling on his sword to protect the drug company for which he worked and the whole idea of psychedelic drugs as a valid treatment for mental illness. Carisi becomes determined to shut down the entire company as an illegal and dangerous enterprise, and he gets the go-ahead from New York state attorney general Philip Esquivel (it was a bit of a shock to see a male New York attorney general when it’s well known that the real New York attorney general is a woman, Letitia James, who because she dared to prosecute Donald Trump on civil fraud charges is now in the cross-hairs of his Justice Department revenge machine; the real reason Trump just fired Attorney General Pam Bondi is she was unable to make charges stick against James, former FBI director James Comey, California Senator Adam Schiff, and the six Senators and Congressmembers who jointly posted an online video reminding American servicemembers that they not only have the right but the duty to refuse to obey illegal orders) to serve as a special prosecutor against the company. Only the judge in the case wimps out and allows the company to remain in business as long as Rosalie Fuentes steps down as CEO. Screenwriter Roxanne Paredes seems to be presenting this as a “victory” for the enlightened use of psychedelic drugs as mental therapies, but as a child of the 1960’s who saw all too many of my peers literally or figuratively destroy their lives on those drugs (I didn’t personally know anybody who jumped out of a multi-story window under the LSD-induced delusion that they could fly, but I heard enough stories about that happening I believed them), I’m horrified at the blithe acceptance of those drugs as anything but monstrous harms to anyone of the human race who takes them.

Elsbeth: "Deadutante" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 2, 2026)

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

After two rather dark episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on Thursday, April 2, the Elsbeth show I watched afterwards (on a different network, CBS), “Deadutante,” was a slice of campy relief. The episode centered around the annual New York Empire City Debutantes’ Ball, hosted by an imperious middle-aged woman named Isadora “Izzy” Langford (J. Smith Cameron), who makes Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s character in the two The Devil Wears Prada movies, seem all sweetness and light by comparison. Izzy is insistent that Plum Barlowe (Danielle Kotch), daughter of the thrice-married tycoon Sterling Barlowe (John Bedford Lloyd) – though it’s not clear which of Barlowe’s wives is Plum’s mother; his current wife is Gwen (Katie Ross Clarke); his embittered first wife is Paulina (Anna Holbrook), whom we see rejoicing at his death; and we don’t get to see or hear from the woman he was married to between them – will not be allowed to make her début at Izzy’s ball. Only a $2 million check donated to Izzy’s favorite charities changes her mind, or seems to. Plum accordingly is named one of the honorees at the next year’s ball, only Izzy has a plot up her bejeweled silver sleeve. She’s worked out a scheme to murder Sterling with a sword – swords used to be a routine part of the ball’s accoutrements, as were fires in fireplaces, but they were eliminated out of safety concerns until Izzy decided to bring them back – and to frame Brando Wild (Jordyn Owens), son of a famous movie star and the sort of man who seems to think with his dick rather than his brains, for the crime. (I wonder if writer Erica Larson deliberately purloined his name from actor Brandon DeWilde, who was a child star in the 1950’s and went on to a brief young-adult career in the 1960’s; he was the obnoxious kid who kept calling, “Come back, Shane!” in the 1953 film Shane.)

Under the cover of photographing Plum and Gwen with Plum’s phone, Izzy sends a text to Brando offering to meet him for some sexual shenanigans in a private room at the hotel. The text tells Brando to strip completely and wait for her in the nude, only Plum never shows up and instead Izzy uses the opportunity to steal Brando’s sword and kill Sebastian with it, then returns it to Brando’s outfit so Brando will have the sword with Sebastian’s blood on it. Though we see Izzy kill Sebastian on screen (as I’ve noted before, Elsbeth follows the formula of the 1970’s/1980’s TV cop show Columbo, both in letting us the audience know who the killer is from the get-go and in having Elsbeth use Columbo’s strategy of annoying the murderer into confessing), it’s not until midway through the show that we learn her motive. It seems that in 1982 she was heading for a début of her own at the same ball, only she couldn’t afford a gown for the big event. So she stole a credit card from her father and bought a sale gown at 50 percent off the retail price – only Sebastian saw the “Half Off” sales tag on the gown, cut its straps off to humiliate her, and ever afterwards referred to Izzy by the nickname “Half Off.” What’s more, when her dad drove to the store where she’d bought the gown with his credit card to return it the next day, dad had a fatal heart attack on the way and Izzy blamed Sebastian for her father’s death.

There’s an intriguing subplot about Izzy’s theft of a pair of gloves belonging to someone’s “Aunt Jackie,” which she wears when she kills Sebastian and then burns – though the pearls on the trims of the gloves survive the fire and it later turns out that “Aunt Jackie” was in fact Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the legendary Presidential widow and all-around do-gooding pain in the ass. There’s also the episode’s most fascinating character, Izzy’s husband Haydn Langford (Don Stephenson), an endearing child-man of appalling immaturity who spends all his time in the basement with a model train set. The irony is that his family made its fortune in the first place running a real railroad, only too much wealth and too little responsibility over too many generations has reduced them from running real trains to playing with electric models. Ultimately Elsbeth and the official New York police arrest Izzy after Izzy keeps threatening to have Elsbeth arrested for allegedly stealing the priceless “Jackie O.” gloves, much to the continuing irritation of Elsbeth’s direct superior on the New York force, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce). While I missed Elsbeth’s Gay son and his partner, who’ve figured in previous episodes and have helped make the show even more watchable, this Elsbeth was a nice, campy piece of entertainment – and it helped that there wasn’t an Internet podcaster or influencer anywhere near the dramatis personae!

Project Hail Mary (Amazon MGM Studios, General Admission, Lord Miller, MGM, Open Invite Entertainment, Pascal Pictures, Waypoint Entertainment, 2026)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 1) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC 18 movie theatres in Fashion Valley to see Project Hail Mary, which turned out to be a quite compelling if sometimes flawed movie. It was also an ironic reflection of the current Zeitgeist because, in an age when the U.S. population is being conditioned by our government to hate and fear undocumented immigrants as so-called “illegal aliens,” it’s basically a friendship story between a human, molecular biologist turned middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a literal alien, Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz). The science-fictional premise is that a microorganism from space called an “astrophage” is menacing life on a large number of solar systems, including ours and that of Rocky’s home planet, Erid. The way it does that is it sets up a line, called a “Petrova line” after the person who discovered it, between the star it’s targeting and a nearby planet with an atmosphere mostly of carbon dioxide, where it can breed and ultimately eat up the star. An international scientific team led by a German woman, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, who looks like she’s from the previous generation to Grace but is actually just two years older than Ryan Gosling), recruits Grace to their research division because he’s an expert microbiologist, even though his one big theory aroused a lot of opposition and he turned out to be wrong. Grace figures out that the astrophage is a single-celled organism that literally lives off light, and as it consumes light and destroys the star source it’s feeding off of, it also releases a burst of energy that represents its, shall we say, “excreta.” The team has discovered that one star in the known universe, Tau Ceti, is immune from consumption by astrophages, though they don’t know how or why. To find out, they recruit a team consisting of a commander, engineer, and scientist to travel to Tau Ceti on a spaceship literally powered by astrophage shit, that precisely because the astrophages store so much energy will be able to travel at near-light speeds.

Only just before the ship is supposed to depart, some of the astrophages being studied at the base camp cause an explosion that kills the scientist on the crew, and after asking for permission and not getting it, Stratt and her crew decide that Grace will replace the scientist on the ship. They give Grace an injection that puts him into a medically induced coma, and when he comes to he’s already on board the ship on a one-way mission to Tau Ceti since the ship is large enough to carry enough astrophage fuel to get there but not to return. When the ship arrives at Tau Ceti Grace sees a giant spacecraft already in orbit around it. It turns out the spaceship is from Erid and, like Grace’s own craft, is inhabited by just one living crew member; the other 20 who left with it all died under mysterious circumstances, as did the other two crew members of Grace’s Earth ship, pilot Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and engineer Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub). From that point the film becomes a quite moving tale owing a lot to Robinson Crusoe (indeed, it’s a considerably better movie than the actual 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, with which it shares some of the same tropes; I wrote about that one at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/12/robinson-crusoe-on-mars-aubrey-schenck.html), as Grace and Rocky (the latter a name Grace gives the Eridian because he resembles a pile of animate rocks, sort of like The Thing in the Fantastic Four comics only considerably smaller) form an uncertain bond, overcome their problems – including that each breathes an atmosphere totally toxic to the other, as well as how to communicate with each other (to human ears, Rocky’s native language sounds like wind noises) – and finally realize they have to make common cause to save both their planets. The friendship between Grace and Rocky (all the more moving because of the sheer weight of the barriers between them) and the extent to which Grace has to learn navigating skills and the ability to do space walks to obtain the all-important samples of the bacteria, native to Tau Ceti’s fifth planet, which neutralize and kill the astrophages is the core of this movie and more than makes up for its problems.

For one thing, the movie is too damned loud; instead of the long stretches of silence that punctuated Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (still the best science-fiction film ever made, and arguably the best film ever made, period), we get a continual din from Daniel Pemberton’s music score and Erik Aadahl’s oppressive sound design. The one time directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (who previously have been known only for animated comedies and camp-fests like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who wrote the script for The Martian, the last major movie based on a novel by Andy Weir) let us have a moment of silence to symbolize the vastness of space, it got ruined by a sonic bleed-through from a movie being shown in the adjoining theatre. (That’s one of the eternal down sides of watching films in multiplex theatres.) There’s also the unlikelihood of representatives from the world’s nations coming together to deal with the astrophage threat; Justin Chang’s review of Project Hail Mary in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review) lampooned this. “One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international cooperation and competent leadership,” Chang wrote. “Talk about science fiction.” If an astrophage invasion actually happened and caused the sun to cool down to an extent that would threaten to annihilate all life on earth within 30 years, Donald Trump would probably say, “Great! Now all those environmentalist wackos will stop bothering me about global warming!” (With his total self-absorption, he’d probably also figure that at age 79 he’d be dead before it actually became a problem.) I also had a problem with the film’s sheer length, 156 minutes, though some of the younger members of our audience actually were sorry that the film wasn’t even longer. (This is the generation that binge-watches a 10-hour TV miniseries in a single “streaming” sitting, which has led me to joke that 1920’s director Erich von Stroheim, who got ridiculed for wanting an audience to sit through a 10-hour movie, is in heaven thinking, “Now is when I should be alive! Technology has finally caught up with me!”)

There are also those jarring flashbacks to Grace’s life pre-launch; the film actually opens with scenes of Grace coming to inside the spacecraft with a full growth of beard that makes him look like the Unabomber, and the idea, at least according to Chang, is that his memory of past events is coming back to him in dribs and drabs that just happen to flash back to him in chronological sequence. (I’d have liked it better if he’d had one long flashback giving us the full exposition in one go.) Rocky and Grace name the planet from which they harvested the astrophage-killing bacteria “Adrian,” after Rocky’s partner back home on Erid – which made me wonder briefly whether Eridians have a gender binary at all, and if so is Rocky female or are Rocky and Adrian a same-sex couple. Ultimately Rocky is able to restock Grace’s ship with enough astrophage to get him back to Earth – the scenes in which Rocky talks Grace out of meekly accepting his death en route are among the most poignant and moving of the film – only there’s another wrinkle in the plot. Grace realizes that xenonite, the mineral out of which Rocky’s ship is made (on Earth xenon is a gas, but apparently on Erid it’s a solid), is vulnerable to the astrophage-eating bacteria which Rocky and Grace have loaded onto the spacecraft. So Grace has to detour back from his route back to Earth to save Rocky’s spacecraft and enable Rocky to save Erid. Before he turns back and heads for Erid he sends the bacteria that will save Earth in four pods labeled “Ringo,” “George,” “John,” and “Paul” (and in case we didn’t get the point, the soundtrack blasts us with The Beatles’ song “Two of Us”). Ultimately Grace ends up stranded on Erid, teaching science to a bunch of young Eridians, while Eva Stratt (ya remember Eva Stratt?) celebrates Earth’s redemption by leading her crew in a karaoke performance of Harry Styles’s song “Sign of the Times.” (It’s not her fault that Harry Styles has to compete with The Beatles – even a lesser song from their catalog – and inevitably loses.) But the elements I found oppressive about Project Hail Mary pale beside the ones I liked about it, particularly the friendship between Grace and Rocky. It’s particularly ironic given that Project Hail Mary was produced by Amazon MGM Studios, the same enterprise that gave us Melania, the $75 million ($40 million in production costs, including $18 million in rights payment to Melania Trump herself) ego-suck to Donald and Melania Trump. Now it looks like Jeff Bezos is going to make back all the money he sunk into Melania with a bona fide commercial hit that runs against everything the Trumps stand for: love between species, self-sacrifice, international cooperation, and an overall breakdown of the barriers between people and, in this case, other sentient life forms as well.

Nanook of the North (Northern Productions, Révillon Frères, Pathé, Film Preservation Associates, 1922)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 29) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies three-film triple bill featuring W. C. Fields and then saw a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a quite different sort of film: Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty’s pioneering non-fiction (sort of) movie about the Inuit of the Ungava Peninsula in northern Canada in general and one Inuk (“Inuk” is just the singular form of “Inuit”) in particular, the hunter Nanook. The 36-year-old Flaherty had been an explorer for years, specializing in northern Canada and working for mining companies interested in locating and exploring iron deposits for extraction and conversion into industrial steel. Over the years he had got to know a lot about Inuit culture, and on one of his expeditions he packed a movie camera and used it to film the Inuit’s lives, especially the hunts on which they tracked down the animals that were their sole source of food. Flaherty actually edited some of his footage into a travelogue and sent a positive print to Harvard University for a special screening, but later he accidentally burned either part or all of his negative. Flaherty later decided it wasn’t much of a loss because the film wasn’t very good anyway. As Flaherty said later, “It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this and that, no relation, no thread of a story or continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me.” Flaherty talked it over with his wife Frances and hit on the idea of making another movie, and this time centering it around one Inuit family and their struggle to survive in what he called “the bitter climate of the North, the bitterest climate in the world.” In 1920 he met Thierry Mallett, an executive with the French company Révillon Frères, at a cocktail party and outlined his idea for a film about Inuit life. Révillon Frères had chafed for years that their principal competitor for outfitting Arctic explorers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, had the huge advantage of free advertising in every atlas that showed “Hudson Bay.” Mallett introduced Flaherty to John Révillon, who agreed to finance the film if it could be credited as “Révillon Frères Present.” In the meantime makers of cinematic equipment had improved the panoramic tripod so a camera could be moved both horizontally and vertically with a single arm, an innovation that became basic to Flaherty’s filmmaking technique.

Flaherty decided not only to shoot Nanook on location but to develop the film on site and show it to the Inuit who were playing the principal roles. “The showing of the rushes to the actors was a deliberate part of a philosophy of filmmaking which Flaherty had evolved during his years of waiting,” said Flaherty biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall. “Nanook was to be a film of the Inuit by the Inuit, ‘of the people, by the people,” insofar as that was possible.” Flaherty was helped by the fact that the standard film of the time was orthochromatic, which was insensitive to red light, so it could be developed relatively easily under red safelights. (Later, with his next film Moana, Flaherty pioneered the use of panchromatic film, which produced deeper, richer, and more varied greyscales but needed to be developed and fixed in total darkness.) Flaherty also discovered the Akeley camera, which he chose for Nanook because it was lubricated with solid graphite instead of oil, which would have frozen on the Arctic locations. To cast his film he hired an Inuk hunter named Allakarillak, though he renamed him “Nanook” after the Ungava Inuit word for “bear.” To play Nanook’s wife, or at least his domestic partner (whatever arrangements the Inuit had for recognizing relationships is unclear from the film), Flaherty chose a woman named Alice Nevalinga or Maggie Nujarluktuk (sources differ) and named her character “Nyla.” (The Wikipedia page on Nanook of the North quotes people associated with the filming of a 1988 documentary called Nanook Revisited and claims that both Alice and Cunayou, who plays Nanook’s and Nyla’s daughter, were “common-law wives” of Robert Flaherty, and Alice/Maggie had actually had Flaherty’s son.)

The version of Nanook Turner Classic Movies showed was a 1998 reissue prepared by David Shepard for a company called Film Preservation Associates, and it featured a new musical accompaniment by Timothy Brock. It contained a written prologue Flaherty almost certainly added after the original release, which made the claim that two years after the film was made Nanook t/n Allakarillak had died of starvation in Ungava while hunting for deer. Modern sources have questioned this and said he really died more prosaically of tuberculosis. The film has been criticized for showing the Inuit as living at a lower level of technology than they actually did. According to Calder-Marshall, “Flaherty found that Nanook and the rest weren’t really dressed in Inuit clothes and he had to go to great trouble and expense to procure for them the clothes which they should be wearing if they were to appear on the screen as genuinely Inuit as they in fact were.” Flaherty also showed the Inuit hunting for walruses and seals with harpoons when by 1920 they had access to firearms. Returning to New York after spending 1920 shooting Nanook in the Arctic environment of Ungava, Flaherty spent 1921 editing it and getting Carl Stearns Clancy to write the intertitles. He had done all the other technical work himself, writing, directing, photographing, and editing the film, and had trained Inuit people to do the grunt work of actually developing the film on site. Flaherty showed the finished movie to various American studios looking for a distribution deal, which he didn’t get. The studio that finally accepted the film for release was Pathé, which like Révillon Frères was French-owned. Fortunately for Flaherty, Madame Brunet, wife of the president of Pathé, loved the film and insisted that her husband buy it. Flaherty was able to place the film with Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel by using a stratagem of packing the audience for the screening with carefully selected friends who would applaud at the critical moments, “The plan succeeded,” Calder-Marshall wrote. “When the lights went up in the Capitol projection room, Roxy babbled words like ‘epic’ and ‘masterpiece.’ He booked it.”

Later Pathé decided to ensure the success of Nanook by block-booking it, a system of coercion all the major studios engaged in until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it illegal in the late 1940’s. Pathé had just accepted Harold Lloyd’s first feature, Grandma’s Boy, for release, and the studio told theatre owners they couldn’t get Grandma’s Boy unless they took Nanook along with it as a double-bill partner. On its release, Nanook got great reviews at a time when film criticism was still in its infancy. As Robert Sherwood wrote in The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-1923, Nanook “came from a hitherto unheard-of source, and it was entirely original in form. … Here was drama rendered far more vital than any trumped-up drama could ever be by the fact that it was all real. Nanook was no playboy enacting a part which could be forgotten as soon as the greasepaint had been rubbed off; he was himself an Eskimo struggling to survive. The North was no mechanical affair of wind-machines and paper snow; it was the North, cruel and terribly strong.” Other critics were less kind; Iris Barry, who would become curator of film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and do more than any other person to establish that films were a legitimate art form and museums should preserve them as they would artworks in other media, had previously worked as a secretary for Vilhjalmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson), a Canadian explorer and professor of Icelandic descent, who had reportedly called Nanook “a most inexact picture of Eskimo life.” Barry sneered that “Nanook was actually taken in the latitude of Edinburgh and acted by extremely sophisticated Eskimos.” Nanook’s defenders pointed out that, while Ungava was at the same latitude as Edinburgh, its climate was considerably colder and more bitter. Flaherty conceded that he’d had to fake some shots, notably the ones showing Nanook and his family inside an igloo. First he’d had Nanook build an igloo that was considerably larger than the 12-foot ones traditionally used by the Inuit. Then, when Nanook couldn’t build an igloo large enough for Flaherty’s purposes (he needed one larger than normal to accommodate the heavy, bulky cameras of the period) without its roof collapsing, Flaherty agreed to cut away part of the igloo, so in the film you can see Nanook and his family breathing with steamy breaths and exposed to the cold climate as they wouldn’t have been in a normal igloo.

What comes off most strongly about Nanook of the North today is how vividly Flaherty dramatized Nanook’s and his family’s constant struggle to survive. Once they kill the walrus in an early scene, they don’t wait to drag the beast back to base camp, let alone cook it; they cut its flesh open (using knives made of whalebone, which they wet down with their spit to lubricate them because otherwise the knives would become brittle and shatter in the Arctic cold) and eat it raw on the spot. Later, when they kill a seal, along with eating it themselves they also throw bits of its meat to their dogs (I’d been wondering how they fed the dogs), which they use as beasts of burden to carry their sleds. They also carefully preserve the hides of these creatures because those are the main items they have to offer at the white-run trading post which is their only interface with Western civilization. There’s a famous scene in the trading post in which Nanook and his family marvel at a phonograph, try to wrap their minds around the fact that whites have figured out how to record their voices on shellac and clay discs, and Nanook tries to nibble at one of the records. Nanook of the North has often been called the world’s first true documentary film (though it would be in reviewing Flaherty’s next film, Moana, that British film critic John Grierson, later a director himself, would write that the film “has documentary value,” thereby establishing the word “documentary” as the genre name for non-fiction films in general), though it’s also been called an example of “salvage ethnography,” an attempt by using survivors of a lost culture to dramatize what that culture was like before white people “discovered” it and frequently loused it up. Nanook of the North remains a haunting film today, and one that makes its effect by its very simplicity. It doesn’t have a plot as such, merely the actions of a family living constantly on the thin edge of starvation and matter-of-factly doing what they have to do to survive.