Death in Paradise, season 14, episode 4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a Death in Paradise episode and then a quite compelling performance by The Wood Brothers on The Kate, a PBS show that’s something like Live at the Belly Up except it’s done from the other side of the U.S. (more on that later). Alas, the Death in Paradise episode was surprisingly boring – I had a hard time staying awake through it. It was about a murder at a rum distillery called Ambrose whose founder had suddenly died. The founder had left behind two children, son Patrick (Ansu Kabia) and daughter Cora (Madeline Appiah). For the previous 18 years Cora had worked her ass off to keep the distillery going while Patrick left the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré or Marie or whatever the locale of Death in Paradise is called and didn’t return until his dad died, whereupon the will was opened and Patrick inherited the whole business even though he hadn’t had anything to do with running it for 18 years. His sole interest in the distillery is in cashing it out, so in order to make his money quickly and get the hell out of there again he cuts a deal with a larger company to buy the place. The deal papers are supposed to be signed at a private celebration with several other people there, and they’re supposed to drink from the same bottle of Ambrose rum to commemorate. But when he takes a second drink from the bottle, Patrick suddenly collapses and ultimately dies, while the others get sick. One of them, Saunders, dies later, and for about 52 minutes of running time the Black constabulary try to figure out whodunit.

The resolution is not that surprising – Cora murdered her brother to stop the sale of Ambrose Distillery and get back at him for having inherited the business even though she’d been running it all those years – though her murder method is. Cora killed Patrick and Saunders and sickened the others by injecting the rum with methanol, also known as wood alcohol, an incredibly toxic substance (I remember the warnings from my own childhood never to drink it because at worst it would kill you and at best it would leave you blind). But she did it in a quirky way; she poured the first round of drinks from an uncontaminated bottle, then injected both the bottle and a previous soft drink Patrick had had with the methanol, so Patrick would get the immediately lethal dose and the others would get sick but not croak. Not only that, she also spiked the ice cubes with methanol; Patrick, who drank the rum “neat” without ice, got the pre-dose of methanol from his soft drink and Saunders got his methanol from both the spiked rum and the spiked ice cubes. It’s yet another one of the preposterous murder schemes beloved of so many mystery writers that seem flamboyantly unrealistic in the actual world, and frankly I felt sorry and hoped that Cora would not turn out to be the murderer because I liked her and what she’d done to keep the place running. It didn’t help that the producers of Death in Paradise have maintained the annoying comic-relief character of apprentice police officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who as I said about him in a previous post seemed there to prove they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and this time they put black plastic into it. It also doesn’t help that the lead cop, detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), is so dour as a personality. There’s a bit of pathos in the end as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), the avuncular executive who’s Wilson’s direct supervisor, sees an online posting for a petition aimed at saving his job from whatever “genius” in the island’s administrative hierarchy decided to lay him off.

The Kate: The Wood Brothers (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, January 30), after a dull and disappointing episode of the Caribbean-set policier Death in Paradise, my husband Charles and I watched an engaging set on the TV show The Kate featuring a three-person band called the Wood Brothers. The Kate is shot at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, and the Wood Brothers had an interesting backstory. Guitarist and lead singer Oliver Wood and bassist and harmonica player Chris Wood grew up together in Boulder, Colorado; their father, a molecular biologist by day and an amateur musician by night, was active in the 1960’s folk-music scene and music was very much a part of the family’s life. But when they grew up and moved out they separated and didn’t see each other for 15 years. Chris became a jazz bassist and co-founder of the band Medeski, Martin, and Wood, while Oliver hooked up with white blues singer/guitarist Tinsley Ellis and later, at Ellis’s suggestion, formed a band of his own called King Johnson. On May 24, 2001 King Johnson played a show in North Carolina as Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s opening act. Oliver sat in with his brother’s band and the two brothers decided they should be making music together. They recorded a demo of Oliver’s songs and in 2006 landed a contract with Blue Note Records, mostly a jazz label, though later they’d release on more rootsy labels like Southern Ground and Honey Jar. In their interstitial interviews they said they’ve changed their philosophy of recording so they do just one song at a time instead of thinking of full albums, and now that they have a studio at home they can take their time working on a song rather than having to worry about the clock ticking on expensive studio rentals.

The third member of the band, Jano Rix, is mostly a drummer, though he also played electric keyboard and melodica, a toy instrument consisting of a small keyboard and a mouthpiece. (Charles recalled seeing Stephen Colbert’s former musical director, Jon Batiste, playing melodica on his show, while I’d seen earlier videos from the 1960’s of Nat “King” Cole playing one during his live shows.) Rix said he, too, had grown up in a musical family; his father had been a major drummer whose high point was playing with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue. He recalled his childhood as his dad playing drums for three hours, then him playing drums for three more hours, and then jamming. I was particularly struck by his ability to play keyboard with his right hand while maintaining a steady drum beat with his left hand and his feet. (Like organists, drummers play as much with their feet as they do with their arms.) Oliver writes most of their songs, and he’s proud of his elliptical lyrics – one aspect of their music that reminded me of the 1960’s folk-rock scene, along with Oliver’s Bob Dylan-like phrasing as a vocalist (though his voice doesn’t have the edgy quality of Dylan’s that led a lot of people to believe Dylan couldn’t sing at all), to the point where I said “folk-rock” when Charles asked me what genre of music the Wood Brothers belonged to. He thought they sounded more like modern country-rock than anything else. I wasn’t particularly impressed by their first four songs, “American Heartache,” “Postcards from Hell,” “Sparkling Wine,” and “Alabaster,” but for me their set kicked into high gear when they got to their fifth song, “Who the Devil.”

For the first seven songs Chris played acoustic bass – and played it quite well, reflecting his jazz heritage. During a segue between “Alabaster” and “Who the Devil” Chris inserted a drumstick between the strings of his bass and created an heavy vibrato whine effect that I would have sworn was electronically generated if I hadn’t seen that he was doing it all acoustically. “Who the Devil” also included one of OIiver’s best lines as a lyricist, “You gotta be lost to be found.” After “Who the Devil” they played “The Muse,” the title track from their 2013 Southern Ground album, and then they performed another particularly good song, “Keep Me Around.” That one featured Jano Rix playing “sluitar,” an odd instrument that looked like an acoustic guitar (albeit with one string missing) but wasn’t played like one; instead Rix beat it like a hand drum and the tambourine-like bells attached to it added to the sound’s appeal. Following that Chris shifted to electric bass, at first using the Hofner violin bass Paul McCartney played with The Beatles (Paul liked it because its body was symmetrical and therefore it looked right played left-handed, and I remembered seeing a local Beatles cover band called The Baja Bugs who recruited a left-handed bass player so they would look right standing together at one mike with the necks of their guitars pointing in opposite directions the way The Beatles did) – though it looked considerably more worn than Paul’s basses did – and then switching to a more normal-looking Fender bass. Their last three songs were “Shoofly Pie” (not the “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” novelty hit for Stan Kenton in the 1940’s that briefly got me interested in making apple pan dowdy), “Luckiest Man,” and “Happiness Jones,” the last of which proved that you can write a song about happiness without making it sound as banal and awful as Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” or Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” Overall The Wood Brothers turned in a remarkable performance with a sound that grew on me over time: a good-natured approach that was infectious and gave me, dare I say it, a happiness jones.

Law and Order: "Never Say Goodbye" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 29, 2026)

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

Last night (January 29, 2026) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. My husband Charles was with me all night but while the Law and Order episode was on he was in the bedroom on the phone with his mother, while during SVU he mostly sat in the kitchen and worked on (or played with) the computer. The Law and Order was about artificial intelligence, though that didn’t become clear until about 20 minutes into the running time. It begins with the farewell party for air traffic controller Mark Turner (Chamblee Ferguson) after 37 years of service, following which he’s stalked by another bicyclist as he biked home. He’s shot and killed (it’s typical of this show that we see somebody murdered just as we’ve got to know and like him as a character – I’ve said this about real-life murder victims as well: we’re always told after a murder how nice and wonderful the victim was, and I’ve thought, “Don’t assholes get themselves killed, too?”) by the other cyclist, who’s wearing a helmet and a dark outfit that makes it impossible for the police to identify them or even state their gender with confidence. After some of the usual red herrings, including Bodie Walsh (Tom Cioricari), a would-be partner in a venture with Turner who’d got himself beaten up within an inch of his life by Armenian loan sharks he went to for seed capital, the police finally identify the killer as Kate Leavy (Emily Bergi), who was bitter with Turner for having ruled that a helicopter crash that killed her husband, pilot Brian Leavy (Scott Adsit), was caused by pilot error. They go to Kate’s home either to question or arrest her, but they hear a man’s voice in the living room. It turns out to be Brian Leavy himself – or, rather, an AI ghost image of him created by a company that manufactures AI replicas of your dearly departed relatives and rents them to you for $49.99 per month. (I’m quite sure I would not want any such thing if Charles, goodness forbid, ever dies well ahead of me.) Kate is watching her late husband’s AI image on a big-screen TV that also shows her image as she communicates with him.

The police detectives on the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), get into hot water over it, Walker in particular because by accepting Kate Leavy’s invitation to pray with her and thereby get her to confess, Judge Paul Gifford (Daryl Edwards) declares that the confession was coerced and therefore is inadmissible. The cops and the prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), get in trouble again when, in order to establish motive, they seek to play Kate’s AI chats with her late husband in court – and Judge Gifford rules them inadmissible on the grounds of marital privilege, even though the entity on the other end of those calls wasn’t her late husband, but merely a computerized construct of him. (This plot twist suggests that real-life courts are going to have a hard time dealing with the challenges of AI, too.) With all the judge’s rulings going against them – a reversion to the early days of Law and Order, in which the entire theme seemed to be those pesky little due-process requirements that enable criminals to evade justice – the cops and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) need help. They get it from an interesting source; Detective Walker hits on the idea of allowing Kate to contact her dead husband’s avatar from the jail computers, which she’d previously been barred from doing. Walker reconnects Kate with Brian’s avatar, either tweaking the algorithm or having it programmed to deliver a quite different message from the one it gave her before, and the result is that Kate insists in court on changing her plea to guilty of second-degree murder, admitting that Mark Turner was blameless, the helicopter crash was actually Brian’s fault, and therefore she killed an innocent man for no reason. These days I’m more concerned with the use of AI evidence to manufacture guilt; I’m still worried that in the future the Trump administration may tweak the videos of citizens being killed by Border Patrol or ICE agents through AI so they show what the government wants them to show (the citizens attacking the agents and the agents killing them in self-defense) instead of just lying verbally about what the videos show. But this Law and Order was an intriguing exploration of some of the other pitfalls that may arise as AI systems become more sophisticated and harder to tell apart from “real” reality.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Hubris" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 29, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order episode on January 29 I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that seemed to be aimed at proving once and for all the truth behind the old joke: “What do you call a person who thinks they’re God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows they’re God? A doctor.” In this case the megalomaniac doctor in question is Dr. Bethany Allen (Kate Burton), who turns up frequently as an “expert” witness in cases of alleged child abuse by parents and almost always argues that the parent was abusive and deserves to have the child taken away and put in foster care. This comes to the attention of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit in general and its long-term head, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), in particular, when a man from New Jersey is busted in a sting operation for solicitation of prostitution. He already had a 15-year-old Black girl, Riley Williams (Milan Marsh), in his car when the white woman cop posing as a hooker announced herself as a police officer and busted him. Naturally he pleaded that he has a wife and children back in New Jersey and once word of this gets back to her, she’s going to leave him and take the kids. But Benson approaches Riley in the hospital and, though she later flees the emergency room, ultimately she’s recaptured and Benson establishes enough of a contact with her that she learns Riley was taken away from her father, who was raising her (or trying to) as a single parent since Riley’s mother died, and put in foster care. Alas, the foster parents she was assigned to were literally the ones from hell; her foster dad in particular saw Riley as an income opportunity and pimped her out. Olivia meets with Riley’s dad, Nate Williams (Sean Patrick Thomas), and with the help of a sympathetic social worker assigned to Riley’s case manages to get the custody case reopened.

Alas, the jurisdiction is the Bronx, and she runs into not only an overworked attorney who doesn’t see much hope of getting Nate custody of his daughter again but the solid wall of Dr. Bethany Allen. Writer Michelle Fazekas (an old Law and Order hand) goes out of her way to make Dr. Allen a self-righteous scumbag who sees herself on a mission to protect children from abusive parents whether the abuse is real or not. Wisely, Fazekas didn’t turn Dr. Allen into a racist; though the two children we’ve seen victimized by her testimony, Riley and the child of Corinne Langford (Briana Starks), who not only lost her child but went to prison for a crime that in fact never happened, are both Black, at least she avoided that cheap shot. But both the writing and Kate Burton’s chillingly effective performance turn Dr. Allen into a self-absorbed egomaniacal monster. Ultimately true justice prevails when Olivia discovers that Dr. Allen actually ran a test on Connie Langford’s son that proved his injury had been caused by a congenital disease rather than parental abuse, then deliberately left that out of the case files, and still later lied under oath about doing so. That gives Olivia the leverage she needs to get Dr. Allen to surrender her medical license to avoid a perjury charge, and both Corinne Langford and Nate Williams get their kids back. This was a well-done SVU episode, though quite frankly they’ve done self-absorbed, arrogant professionals several times before (as have the Lifetime writers) and done them even better than here.

Midsomer Murders: "A Climate of Death" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 25, 2023)

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

My husband Charles joined me for my third and last TV show on Thursday, January 29: a Midsomer Murders episode called “A Climate of Death” that has one of the most intriguing premises ever used on this show. It takes place in and around a village in Central England called “Goodman’s Green,” whose leading citizens have decided to make it a model of environmental self-sustainability and proof that human-caused climate change can be reversed. To this end, they’ve banned internal combustion-engined vehicles and cell phones (they can’t be charged without fossil-fuel energy) and set up an array of multi-colored trash cans to make sure everything that can possibly be recycled is. They’ve also set up solar panels everywhere they can to make sure all their energy comes from renewable sources. Alas, the centuries-old land grant by which the village became independent of direct control of the British government has run out, and a notorious American oil millionaire named Rooster Harlin (Corey Johnson, who affects the worst American accent I’ve heard from a British actor since Ron Randell’s horrible 1955 performance in the film I Am a Camera, the earlier non-musical version of Cabaret which suffered irretrievably from the total miscasting of Julie Harris as Sally Bowles) has just bought the place. The enforcers of the strict “green” code by which the village lives are Brian Havergal (Nathaniel Parker) – one wonders whether writer Maria Ward deliberately created his name by reversing one of Britain’s quirkier 20th century composers, Havergal Brian – and his wife Dixie (Julie Graham). Their enforcer is Tobis Seaton (Robert Akodoto), who not only refuses to wear shoes but patrols the village with a long-lensed digital camera taking photos of anyone who transgresses against the green-at-all-costs ground rules.

The show opens with the murder of a young villager named Danny Tarleton (Tim Cullingworth-Hudson), who not only owns a motorcycle (a big bozo no-no under the Goodman rules) but hopes to cut a deal with Rooster Harlin to build a motor-racing track in the middle of the village. He’s stabbed to death with a weather vane – I was regretting that he exited so early since he was easily the sexiest guy in the cast by far, with a huge cock flapping around under his blue running shorts that was turning my crank big-time – and the lead police officers, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), run smack into the middle of Goodman’s environmental politics and both its supporters and its enemies. One of its biggest enemies is Aldo McLean (Tony Jayawardena), who was forced to close his butcher shop after his family had run it for several generations because he couldn’t make money with the high cost of organically raised meat. Another one of the suspects is Danny’s father Liam Tarleton (Nigel Betts), who also didn’t support the environmental policies of the Havergals but was not as outrageous about it as his late son – until he, too, is murdered with a particularly picturesque weapon, a multi-toothed farming tool. And one of the quirkier plot twists is the so-called “Chilli-Eating Contest” [sic], which turns out to be not a contest between cooked chili dishes but one in which the contestants actually have to eat raw chili peppers. Rooster Harlin enters the contest but the chili pepper meant for him actually gets consumed by Aldo McLean, who dies of a heart attack immediately after eating it because it’s been artificially injected with several times the usual amount of capsaicin, the spice that makes chili peppers hot.

Ultimately we learn that [spoiler alert!] Rooster Harlin was not an oil millionaire; he’d made money in oil but then lost it all and that led him to a road-to-Damascus moment in which he decided he’d been wrong all along and the environmentalists had been right. He bought the village not to shut down its no-carbon-footprint experiment but to sustain it and also to locate his missing brother, who’d dropped the last name “Harlin” and was living in Goodman’s Green well before its environmentalist conversion. The brother had been dating Harper Havergal (Eve Austin), daughter of Brian and Dixie, but he didn’t want to marry her because his real love interest was Ginny Kilcannon (Helen Lederer). Since Rooster Harlin didn’t have any money himself, his purchase of Goodman’s Green was bankrolled by a Japanese tech billionaire, Ken Makoto (Takayuki Suzuki), who was committed to the cause of environmental sustainability and wanted to use his money to establish that the Goodman’s Green lifestyle was sustainable and should be exported around the world. We later learn that the real killer was [double spoiler alert!] Harper Havergal, who killed Hardin’s brother in a fit of jealous rage over his breakup with her and then killed the others out of fear that Danny Tarleton’s proposed racetrack would expose the brother’s remains and thereby incriminate her. (Charles thought that was a bit far-fetched, but the annals of true crime are full of stories about murderers who get caught because they get paranoid about being discovered and do stupid things that unravel their cover-ups.) Even before the murders started, Harper Havergal not only had a bootleg cell phone but had been building herself up as an online influencer and was hoping she could break free of her parents’ obsessive control so she could expand her site, get hundreds of thousands of followers, and ultimately secure herself big and lucrative advertising deals. This was a better-than-average Midsomer Murders episode that was, among other things, refreshingly free of one of this show’s most maddening tropes – the sheer multiplicity of crimes that often get exposed along with the primary intrigue – and it also had some nice comic-relief moments involving Barnaby’s malfunctioning Fitbit (the watch records him as walking only nine steps on a day when he’s been trundling around the fictitious Midsomer County on his investigation) and the insistence of his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) that he wear it at all times and take its results seriously.

When a Man's a Man (Atherton Productions, Sol Lesser Productions, Fox Film Corporation, 1935)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 28) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of the 1935 movie When a Man’s a Man, which I’d been curious about since we watched the nominal 1949 remake, Massacre River, a few nights ago (January 21). The story began as a novel by Harold Bell Wright in 1916 and was first filmed as a silent in 1924, with former Keystone Kop Eddie Cline as director. Cline, not surprisingly, was known as a comedy specialist who had worked with Buster Keaton in the 1920’s and W. C. Fields in the early 1940’s (he directed The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which both ended with two of the greatest slapstick chases ever filmed in the sound era), though he directed plenty of films in other genres too. Cline directed the 1935 version as well, though as Charles pointed out, the story of this film had so little in common with that of Massacre River he’d like to read Wright’s novel just to figure out how the same basic story could generate such radically different films. The 1935 When a Man’s a Man has little in common with Massacre River but the character names of the male leads, Larry Knight (George O’Brien in 1935, Guy Madison in 1949) and Phil Acton (Paul Kelly in 1935, Rory Calhoun in 1949), and the romantic triangle between them and the female lead. Here her name is “Kitty Baldwin” (Dorothy Wilson, a personable actress who deserved more of a career than she got) and she’s the daughter of cattle rancher Dean Baldwin (Nick Carlyle). The bad guys are Nick Gambert (Harry Woods) and his henchman (Frank Ellis), who are taking advantage of a landslide (which we suspect they actually caused by dynamiting the nearby hill; this movie makes dynamite seem as easy to get as flour) that has cut off the entire water supply for Baldwin’s Triangle Cross ranch. Without water, Baldwin’s cattle are dying off one by one.

Larry Knight is an effete Easterner who enters the action when he steps off a Los Angeles-bound train in Simmons, Arizona and stumbles into a rodeo. He accepts the challenge of trying to ride a particularly violent horse which Phil Acton, who works as a hand on the Baldwin ranch, has already tried and failed to stay on for more than a second or two. The impulsive challenge causes him to miss his train and leaves him stranded in Simmons, where he accepts a job as another Baldwin hand and starts courting Kitty even though she and Phil are also dating. At one point Larry starts fingering the lock on the gate in the fence separating Baldwin’s and Gambert’s ranches – Gambert is planning to force Baldwin to sell out to him at far less than his land’s value by killing his cattle from dehydration. He pretends to break the lock (he really opens it willfully) and the Baldwin cattle flood through the opening and have at least one drink of water before Gambert catches them and forces Phil to drive them back to Baldwin’s own parched land. Larry and Phil eventually hit on the idea of drilling an underground well and thereby, shall we say, “appropriating” some of Gambert’s water for their own stock. Larry starts digging the well from the existing tunnel – which is serviced by a bucket and windlass that’s strong enough to lower not just one but two people at once – intending to plant dynamite down there and blow a hole in the ground through which some of the water will flow to the Triangle Cross. For some reason not terribly well explained by Agnes Christine Johnson and Frank Mitchell Dazey, who wrote the script from Wright’s novel, Kitty ends up at the bottom of the well planting the dynamite; she doesn’t set it off but she’s the victim of a dirt slide that threatens to bury her alive. Both Larry and Paul set out to rescue her, and in order to get to her on time Larry has to ride that fearsome horse. Ultimately the three set off the dynamite (we get a helpful shot of the label showing the rate at which the fuse will burn), a geyser of water erupts from the top of the well, the cattle are saved, and Larry leaves to catch his long-overdue train to California and nobly sacrifices his interest in Kitty to Phil.

When a Man’s a Man isn’t much of a movie, even by the meager standards of “B” Westerns of its time (it’s not at the level of Smoking Guns or Big Calibre, two genuinely innovative “B” Westerns of the same period), and the one scene in which Charles noticed that cinematographer Frank B. Good was using a red filter just underscored the plainness of his camerawork in the rest (though he and Cline deserve credit for some creative shots of the inside of the well). Neither the 1935 When a Man’s a Man nor the 1949 Massacre River include the scene at the start in which Larry Knight’s upper-class urban girlfriend sends him off to the West because she wants him to prove he’s a “real man” before she marries him, which was apparently the central premise of Wright’s novel and, according to imdb.com’s synopsis, of the 1924 silent film as well. Nor does the 1935 When a Man’s a Man contain the at least mildly sympathetic depiction of Native Americans in Massacre River (in fact it contains no Native Americans at all!) or the fascinating character of bar owner Laura Jordan who did so much to enliven Massacre River – though Kitty Baldwin is the most interesting character of the 1935 When a Man’s a Man. She spends most of the movie dressed either in buckskin pants (at a time when it was unusual for a female in an American movie who wasn’t Marlene Dietrich to wear trousers) or a cotton dress, and though for the most part she’s a typical movie heroine of the period, she’s convincingly butch when she needs to be.

The Invaders (Kay-Bee Productions, Mutual Film Corporation, 1912)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart. They were both Westerns, a three-reeler (about 40 minutes) from 1912 called The Invaders and William S. Hart’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925). They were being paired, Stewart explained, because they both had the same screenwriter, C. Gardner Sullivan, who wrote an original “scenario” for The Invaders and adapted a magazine serial by Hal Evarts for Tumbleweeds. (Remember that in the silent era a “scenario” simply meant an overall account of the story and a series of descriptions of how the director could visualize it on screen. Screenwriting became more important once sound came in and producers actually had to have written dialogue to give to the actors.) The Invaders was directed by Francis Ford, who also starred in it as Col. James Bryson; Francis Ford was the older brother of John Ford (their family name back in Ireland was “O’Fearna” and what got written down at Ellis Island was “Feeney”). Francis helped John get his start in the film industry, only for reasons that still are unclear to me Francis’s star fell as John’s rose, and ultimately Francis was given minor roles in John’s films just to keep him alive. The film opens with Col. Bryson signing a treaty with a Native American Sioux chief (played by an actual Native American, William Eagle Shirt) setting aside a stretch of land as a permanent reservation in exchange for the Sioux giving up other land to settlers. As with just about every real-life treaty white Americans ever made with Natives, though, this one is broken – in this case by the builders of the Transcontinental Railroad, who send out a survey team headed by two young men. U.S. Army Lieutenant White (Ray Myers) falls for Col. Branson’s daughter (Ethel Grandin), while a member of the Transcontinental Railroad survey team falls equally hard for the Native chief’s daughter, Sky Star (Ann Little). Unfortunately, Sky Star takes a bad fall off a horse into a ravine and is seriously injured; Branson’s daughter has her taken to the army camp and tries her best to keep her alive, but ultimately she dies.

Meanwhile, the Sioux chief considers the invasion of the Transcontinental Railroad surveyors as either an actual act of war or the precursor to one. He mobilizes his own tribe to attack the fort and cuts a deal with the Sioux’ historic enemies, the Cheyenne, to mount a joint attack on the white fort. The Natives are actually doing pretty well in the battle when Col. Bryson hits on the idea of telling the Sioux chief that they’re holding his daughter hostage and will kill her unless the Native chief calls off the attack, but just as they’ve pretty well convinced, the Sioux chief’s daughter dies anyway. There’s a pitched battle in which a lot of people die, and the outcome is a bit uncertain until Lt. White arrives with the reinforcements he rode to fetch from another white Army fort after the Natives burned the telegraph pole so Col. Bryson’s telegraph operator (Art Acord, who also stunt-doubled for Ann Little in her fatal fall from a horse; men in drag doubling for women was a common practice in Hollywood until 1953, when Doris Day insisted for the film Calamity Jane that her stunt double be a woman, Donna Hall) couldn’t get word to the outside that they were under siege. The Invaders is actually a pretty good movie for 1912, but it was still a 1912 movie and there was virtually no cross-cutting, camera movement, or any of the other ways filmmakers would soon develop to ratchet up the excitement and suspense of action scenes. The Invaders was produced and co-directed by Thomas H. Ince, the man who did more than anyone else to invent the Hollywood studio system in which the producers were the real powers and directors, writers, actors, and everyone else were under contract to major studios and had little say over the artistic decisions of their projects. Ince even built the largest and most grandiose of the early studio complexes, the big lot in Culver City that would be the home of MGM during its glory years in the 1930’s and 1940’s and ultimately would become the property of Sony when it bought Columbia.