Alone in the Dark (The Ninth House, MarVista Entertainment, Tubi, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Alone in the Dark, which was made in 2022 and was not actually shot under Lifetime’s auspices at all. It was made by The Ninth House and our old friends MarVista Entertainment for a streaming service called Tubi (their promos advertise it as free and also without ads, but I suspect there are a lot of catches to that) and was directed by Brant Daugherty from a script he co-wrote with his wife (of 15 years), Kimberly Daugherty. Both Daughertys are white but most of the protagonists in this tale are Black, including the central character, Bri Collins (Novi Brown), pronounced “Brie” like the cheese. Bri Collins has just been sentenced to a year of home confinement for her role in a fraudulent stock scheme engineered by her (white, and short but highly muscular) husband, MIchael Miller (Christopher Bencomo). Supposedly Bri was just the (stereo)typically naïve housewife, signing whatever hubby Michael told her to and not thinking about it, but not only getting caught but actually serving a longer sentence than he, albeit under house arrest instead of in prison. It’s an intriguing “take” on the 1960’s crime dramas like Wait Until Dark and Lady in a Cage in which a woman is helpless to resist the intruders in her home because she’s disabled; Bri isn’t physically disabled but she’s still trapped inside the house and a sitting duck for whatever mischief (or worse) someone outside decides to unleash upon her.

Mischief duly happens, at first in a poltergeist-like way; while she’s in her living room entertaining her former attorney Sofia Aquino (played by Kimberly Daugherty, the director’s wife and co-author of the script) and the two are helping themselves to major swaths of Michael’s leftover wine collection (it’s eventually established that this is a second house for the couple, a beach house, while Michael’s prime residence is elsewhere and he still lives there), a stranger dressed in the obligatory black hoodie starts rattling the doors. Earlier Bri had disabled the house’s built-in alarm system to admit Sofia, and the place is also equipped with one of those horribly obnoxious security systems by which you’re supposed to be able to tell it through voice commands to do anything domestic, from drawing you a bath to making you coffee. Only, as in every other Lifetime (or Lifetime-adjacent) movie that featured such an app, it goes haywire and starts turning on and off Bri’s lights willy-nilly. Bri is convinced that Michael is behind this even though Michael is in prison – only midway through the movie he’s able to pull some strings with the judge in his case and get an early release. Sofia hands Bri the card for a private detective, Xavier Johnson (Terrell Carter), a very hot-looking and highly muscular Black man who starts getting Bri’s sexual juices up and running again even though she hasn’t had sex with anyone since she and Michael got busted and Bri divorced him. She draws back from an affair with him on the Bodyguard-ish notion that she shouldn’t fuck the hired help, but eventually they do make it into the bedroom.

Only Xavier is on a revenge quest of his own because in a prologue, typical of Lifetime’s story construction in that we see what happens but it takes about half the film’s running time before we learn who the people in it were or how it relates to the main action, his sister Cheyenne Clark (Kris Marshall) was abducted by a hoodie-clad stranger while she was out in the woods jogging. Her body was never found and Xavier is determined to find the person responsible for making her disappear and presumably killing her. Bri reports the attempted break-in to police detective Joe Hall (Malcolm Goodwin), another African-American authority figure, only Hall couldn’t be less interested in investigating it. Xavier and Bri discover that Michael left behind a whole set of hidden cameras in Bri’s house and, with the aid of a technical expert named Dex (a woman, played by Megan Davis), they trace the recordings from the cameras to Michael’s house. They organize a break-in at Michael’s after first figuring out a way to hack Bri’s GPS monitor so it registers her phone’s location, not hers. Unfortunately, Michael is at home that night fucking his latest bimbo – earlier Bri discovered a pair of women’s panties that weren’t hers and realized Michael had used the beach house for extra-relational activities – so Bri and Xavier literally have to hide under the bed as Michael and bimbo fuck each other until they finish and Our Heroes can sneak out again.

They steal the hard drive from Michael’s computer and give it to Dex so she can hack into it, and eventually we learn that Michael, like Baron Gruner in one of the later Sherlock Holmes story, is literally a collector of women. Only instead of a paper trail, he records his conquests by storing the videos of his clandestine sexual encounters in folders on that hard drive. Charles was convinced that Sofia was the ultimate villain and responsible for all the torment that Bri was going through, but in the end Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty identify the villain as [spoiler alert!] Detective Joe Hall, or to use his actual name, Joe Marshall. He’s not a detective; he’s a con artist hired to pose as a cop, and in the last few minutes Bri finally realizes [double spoiler alert!] that Sofia is the bad girl after all. It seems that she and Michael began an affair while Bri’s legal case was still pending. Sofia hired Joe to kill Cheyenne Clark (ya remember Cheyenne Clark?), and now Sofia is determined to murder both Xavier and Bri and make it look like a murder-suicide. Fortunately, however, Bri has figured out a way to use her ankle-monitor bracelet as a recorder and record Sofia’s criminal boasts so the police can hear her brag about her crimes in real time. Xavier kills Sofia with her own gun after she and Bri have had the sort of bitch fight famous from the 1939 film Destry Rides Again, with Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel launching into physical combat over James Stewart, and the cops arrest their phony-baloney “comrade,” Joe Marshall. Though Alone in the Dark isn’t a great Lifetime movie, it is a surprisingly entertaining and even gripping one, and a welcome return to form after the horrors (in both senses) of Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge – and at least it ends with the good guys winning and the bad guys (and gal) getting their comeuppance!

Clerks (View Askew Productions, Miramax, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards my husband Charles and I ended up watching a film “streaming” from Amazon Prime: Kevin Smith’s directorial debut, Clerks (1994), set in Leonardo, New Jersey – a short distance from Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen’s home town, which we learn because the protagonist steals a whole bunch of copies of the Asbury Park paper and stuffs him into his store’s newsstand. Clerks is a story of two 20-something slackers, convenience store clerk Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran, who got the part after auditioning for a minor role and then Smith decided to cast him in the lead) and video store clerk Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson as a last-minute replacement for Smith himself, who decided in mid-shoot that directing, writing and starring was too much work for him). The film was co-produced and co-edited by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, and this was the proverbial movie that launched the cliché of an unknown director financing his first film on an ultra-low budget – you could call it a shoestring budget except that would be an insult to shoestrings – by maxxing out his personal credit cards. He ultimately sold the film to Miramax at a time when Harvey Weinstein was still involved with it (the closing credits pay tribute to the Big Bad Harvey for providing “an unforgettable order of potato skins”) and launched a quirky directorial career that included at least two sequelae as well as a spinoff series featuring Jay (Jason Mewes), a drug dealer who hangs outside the Quick Stop Groceries where Dante works, and his partner Silent Bob (Kevin Smith himself). Clerks is a very disconnected movie but the disconnections are a major part of its charm; it’s the sort of film in which things just happen in a sequence of incidents separated by silent-film style intertitles that comment ironically on the action. Woody Allen used the technique to great effect in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and decades earlier Alfred Hitchcock had used “commenting” intertitles equally well in one of his most underrated films, Rich and Strange (1931).

Clerks opens with a sequence in which a customer stands at the counter and starts yelling at the people there to buy cigarettes (which seem to be at least half the store’s business). He’s carrying a shoulder bag which contains a model of a diseased lung – at least that’s what he says it is; to me it looked like a turkey breast well past its sell-by date – and Polaroid snapshots of people in the last stages of lung cancer. He urges the people to buy Chewlies brand gum instead of cigarettes, and ultimately he gets the crowd so riled up at Dante they start literally pelting him with cigarettes. Later the mystery stranger turns out to be a sales representative for the Chewlies gum company. Dante has had a number of girlfriends, of whom he’s been crazy about two of them: Caitlin Bree (Lisa Spoonauer), whom he dated in high school until she went on to college and ultimately became engaged to a Chinese medical student named Sang; and Veronica Loughran (Marilyn Ghigliotti), who tells Dante she’s only had sex with three men in her life while he’s had sex with 12 women. Later it turns out that Veronica makes Bill Clinton’s distinction between giving blow jobs and having “sex”, and admits she’s gone down on at least 36 guys and sometimes “snowflaked” – i.e., given them open-mouthed kisses with their cum still in her mouth. Dante keeps complaining that he’s been called to work on his day off – “I’m not supposed to be here,” he whines – and he agreed to go in only on the assurance that the store’s owner would come in to relieve him by noon so he, Randal and their friends could get together for a street hockey game at 2 p.m.

Unfortunately, when Dante calls the boss he discovers that the boss drove to Vermont for the day and he’ll have to stay at the store until its 11 p.m. closing time. So Dante, Randal and their buddies decide to hold the hockey game on the roof of the store, which works O.K. until one of the neighbor guys demands to join the game and ultimately loses control of their only ball, which goes down a storm drain. Later Dante and Randal decide to crash the funeral of Julie Dwyer, another woman Dante once dated, only they get thrown out after five minutes because Randal tripped and caused the casket, with Julie’s body in it, to fall over and dump her remains on the floor. (We’re not shown any of this because of the expense it would have required to stage the scene, but I thought the film worked better and was funnier without it.) Veronica is carrying on an extended argument with Dante because she wants him to return to college, while he doesn’t want to apply himself to anything that difficult and he’s content being a slacker hanging out with his equally aimless friend Randal. Midway through the action Caitlin finally appears, having determined to break up with her Asian fiancé and return to Dante if he’ll have her, and in her excitement she goes into the store’s restroom and ends up having sex with someone she thinks is Dante. Only it’s really an older man who went into the restroom with a porn magazine he asked Dante to supply him, and he got so worked up over his jack-off session he literally had a heart attack and died. The woman from the local coroner’s office who picks up his body explains that dead men can sometimes hold a hard-on for a couple of hours after they expire, and that’s how the man was able to have sex with Caitlin even after he was dead (and she stressed that he was letting her take the lead and assumed that was Dante being a gentleman about it).

Caitlin ends up in a catatonic trance as she’s taken away from the store in the ambulance that’s also carrying the corpse, and Dante and Veronica seem headed for a reconciliation – only Randal blows his chances with her by telling Veronica that Dante is no longer interested in her. When Veronica explains to Dante that it was Randal who told her that Dante wanted them to break up, Dante is furious with Randal and the two end up in a bar-style fight that wrecks most of the Quick Stop store and then team up to clean the wreckage. There are also whimsical gags along the way, including a lot of jokes about the porn content stocked at Randal’s video store (a mom who came in to rent a kids’ movie for her daughter is predictably shocked at the litany of porn titles Randal reads off on the phone to his distributor) and a scene in which Dante is fined $500 for selling cigarettes to a four-year-old girl. It turns out it wasn’t Dante who did that; it was Randal, briefly staffing the Quick Stop counter, but Dante had to pay the fine anyway and the person who comes to collect it (Ken Clark) stresses that Dante has no option to appeal the case or fight the fine. According to Wikipedia, Kevin Smith’s original plan for Clerks was a nihilistic ending in which Dante would be shot and killed by a street criminal who comes in to rob the store, but after the film premiered at a festival Smith was urged to remove the downer ending and finish the film with the scene of Dante and Randal worn out after the task of cleaning the store.

Clerks is a surprisingly accomplished film – it’s shot in grainy black-and-white but that’s part of its appeal; it seems more realistic that way than it would have in color. It’s also surprisingly well acted; the people in the movie really seem believable as the kinds of people Smith’s script tells us they are. Clerks is a marvelously unpretentious film whose characters win our hearts almost in spite of themselves, and midway through it I asked Charles – who works as a grocery clerk, albeit at a major chain supermarket instead of a grungy little convenience store – if watching it was a busman’s holiday for him. Certainly some of the incidents in this movie reminded me of stories he’s told me over the years about real-life customers from hell!

Single Black Female 2: Simone's Revenge (Swirl Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 2) Lifetime showed a “premiere” sequel called Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge, a follow-up to an O.K. movie called Single Black Female about the rivalry between Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin) and Simone Hicks (Amber Riley), her half-sister (different moms, same dad) who shows up in her life as Monica is fighting to replace the retiring host of an insipid morning TV show called Tea Time on a local station in Houston. I’d caught up with the original Single Black Female on April 24. 2022 and posted about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html, and had found it pretty mediocre and clichéd. This time around Lifetime showed the original Single Black Female just before airing Single Black Female 2, and I liked it even less than I had before. Single Black Female 2 takes place in Seattle three years after the events of the original. Monica Harris and her best friend Bebe Morgan (K. Michelle) have just relocated to Seattle following Monica’s breakup with her boyfriend (whom I presume was Eric, played by Devale Harris, a tech person at the TV station where she worked and who was a truly hot stud!). Monica has got a job hosting an investigative journalism show called Red Alert on a Seattle station, though she has to deal with a very domineering boss, Kendyl Rouse (Christine Horne). Kendyl is another African-American woman, considerably slimmer than either Monica or Simone, with a fierce mien and shaved head. She looks like what Sinéad O’Connor would have if she’d been Black, and midway through the film she turns out to be a Lesbian. Kendyl casually tells Bebe that she was invited to a three-way with a celebrity couple in Hollywood, and when Bebe innocently asks her how she felt being with a woman for the first time, Kendyl actually says it was her first time with a man.

Kendyl has decided to exploit Monica’s real-life history with a stalker as part of her show, in hopes of building up interest in the series and increasing its viewer base. At first we think Monica is doing this on her own and breaking Kendyl’s rule that she read the teleprompter scripts verbatim, but later we learn it was the other way around; Kendyl incorporated Monica’s experience into her script without giving Monica a heads-up that she was doing that. The problem is that the show somehow reaches the convent in Houston where Simone was staying; after the end of the first Single Black Female Simone was presumed dead but was actually taken in by a Black Mother Superior and given the name “Sister Grace” because it was by the grace of God that she survived and found a place in the convent. Along the way she got amnesia and lost any sense of who she’d been before, only seeing Monica on TV telling her story about being stalked by Simone reawakens Simone’s memories about her true identity. She determines to go to Seattle and do what she can to destroy Monica’s life and success. Monica has been having nightmares about Simone but has no idea that Simone is really alive, or that her broadcasts have “outed” her and launched Simone on a new revenge campaign motivated, as it was in the first film, by family jealousies. It seems that Monica’s dad was an outwardly respectable politician and financier, but he had an extra-relational affair with Simone’s mother and she resulted. She never forgave her dad for having abandoned her while obsessing over Monica, and so she killed the father before the first film’s story began and went on a murder spree that carried over into both films. Simone lands a place to live with Layla Clinton (Morgan Alexandria), makeup director for Red Alert, after Layla’s previous roommate left her to move in across the street with her new boyfriend and a loudly barking dog. Immediately Simone confronts the ex-roommate and forces her to cough up the money Layla said she owed her by grabbing the dog and threatening its life.

Then she graduates to human victims, slitting Kendyl’s throat and sending an e-mail Monica had written about her frustrations with Kendyl as a boss to the station’s human resources department so when the cops, in the person of an Asian-American detective named Hudson (John Crow) who’s so focused on the most obvious suspect Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories looks like a model of open-mindness by comparison, get it they immediately assume Monica murdered her troublesome boss. Simone also knocks off Bebe and Monica’s latest boyfriend, Detective Trevor Williams (Kendrick Cross), whom she gets to by donning kinky regalia and bringing a whip and handcuffs to a date he thinks is with Monica. (I’ve often complained about movies that asked us to believe people who don’t look at all alike playing blood relatives, but this time I think they overdid it: Raven Goodwin and Amber Riley look so much alike at times the only way we can tell them apart is by the discreet but noticeable nose ring Riley as Simone wears in one nostril.) Monica hatches a plot to catch Simone literally on camera at the TV station, but it requires the assistance of both Bebe and Layla – only Layla double-crosses Monica and gets killed by Simone for her pains. Ultimately [spoiler alert!], in an utterly nihilistic ending that turned me against writers Tessa Evelyn Scott and Sa’Rah Jones (that’s how her credit is spelled) and director Shari Lynette Carpenter (who all had those jobs on the first Single Black Female as well, though Carpenter’s directorial credit on the first film only had an initial “L.” instead of a middle name), Monica gets arrested and goes to prison for the murders while Simone visits her in prison and gloats.

Then Simone goes back to Houston, returns to the convent (ya remember the convent?) and is welcomed back with open arms – only the Mother Superior introduces her to a woman who claims she’s Simone’s long-lost daughter Joy (Angel Pean). Simone remembered giving birth to Joy but her assumption (and ours) was that she had either been stillborn or died shortly afterwards, and the final closeup is of Joy with a sinister glint in her eyes that suggests she’s as bitter towards Simone as Simone was towards Monica. I really don’t like crime stories in which the criminal gets away with it for the same reason Raymond Chandler didn’t; he wrote a letter in which it was necessary for a good crime story that the criminal gets punished at the end, even if not legally. “It has nothing to do with morality; it’s about the logic of the form,” Chandler wrote (I’m quoting him from memory here). If the criminal isn’t punished, “it leaves a sense of irritation.” That’s what it did here, big-time; it took me about 20 to 25 minutes of the genuinely great film I watched after it before I’d washed the bad taste out of my mouth (and my mind) of the ending of Single Black Female 2.

Sergeant York (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The genuinely great film I watched immediately afterwards was Sergeant York, the 1941 biopic of real-life World War I hero Alvin C. York (Gary Cooper), born in the mountain village of Pall Mall, Tennessee on December 13, 1887. The real Alvin York was whipsawed during his early life between a reverence for God and religion and a desire to get drunk and raise hell, though in the movie (written by a committee – Abem Finkel, Paul Muni’s brother-in-law, and Harry Chandlee did the first draft and Howard Koch and John Huston came in later for a rewrite, with help from an uncredited Sam Cowan – and stunningly directed by Howard Hawks as his first film under a Warner Bros. contract that allowed him more or less to be his own producer) he spends a lot of time trying to raise the money to buy a parcel of bottom land (much easier to farm than the rocky top land the Yorks have owned for generations). York enters a shooting contest to make the final payment, only on the big day he learns that the land’s owner has reneged and sold the parcel to Zeb Andrews (Rob Porterfield), York’s rival for the hand of Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie). York is so angry that he’s lost out on the land that he sets out on his horse to track down and kill the landowner, but midway through his ride a few convenient bolts of lightning rain down from the sky. They knock him to the ground and bend his rifle, making it unusable. York takes this as a sign from God to repent his evil ways, so he becomes born again and starts studying the Bible with Rosier Pile (Walter Brennan, second-billed and giving the second most restrained performance of his career, next to the professor he’d play in Frltz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! two years later), the local general-store owner and part-time minister. (For some reason, all his church services – or at least the two we actually get to see – seem to take place at night, maybe because he has to wait for the store to close.)

Unfortunately, the newly converted York has only been around for a few months when President Woodrow Wilson gets the U.S. Congress to declare war against Germany, and a rather perplexed York finds himself confronted with the legal requirement to register for the draft. Pastor Pile helps York write a letter requesting conscientious objector status, but his application is rejected because he’s not a member of an established religious denomination with a pacifist tradition. In a revelation scene, York hikes into the mountains and sits on a papîer-maché crag and recalls the Bible verse, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That decides him and he determines not only to go into the Army but to fight as best he can. In rifle training – where he’s predictably impressed by the high quality of the military rifle he’s issued – he racks up an impressive record as a sharpshooter (of course we already knew he could shoot from his antics back home, including shooting his initials into a tree that had been previously marked as the site where Daniel Boone had killed a bear in 1760, as well as his victory in the shooting contest). He’s shipped off via an intertitle to France, where he and his unit are sent to the front immediately and put into combat alongside battle-hardened British troops who give York tips on how to survive in the trenches and when to duck when they hear a shell coming in overhead. The film reaches its climax on October 8, 1918 – five weeks before the Armistice – when an Allied offensive is being stymied by a German machine-gun nest alongside a railroad the Allies are trying to secure. York takes command of his unit when its previous head falls victim to one of the German machine guns, and with a combination of rifle and pistol shots manages to kill enough of the German soldiers and goad the rest to surrender to neutralize the threat. Then he has the bothersome necessity of trying to find an Allied authority to whom he can turn over the captured prisoners. York gets fêted by various Allied governments, including Britain’s, France’s and his own. When he returns home he’s presented with a 200-acre bottom land farm, a complete house already built on it to his specifications, and the promise that the Governor of Tennessee will come down to his county and personally conduct the ceremony marrying him and Gracie.

The real Alvin Cullum York was a fascinating figure who seemed little interested in money or fame; what turned him on as a war hero was leveraging his status for causes greater than himself, including improving educational opportunities for rural Tennesseans. York had previously turned down offers from Hollywood studios to make a movie about him, but in 1941 Warner Bros. came a-calling at a time when York badly needed money to endow a Bible college he wanted to set up. York drove a hard bargain when it came to the contract, including demanding the right of approval over the actor who would play him – and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor he would approve. That posed a problem for Warner because Cooper was then under contract to Sam Goldwyn, and in order to get Cooper for Sergeant York he had to loan out his biggest star, Bette Davis, to Goldwyn to star in the film of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz and the Wikipedia pages on York (both his real life and the film) claimed it was the highest-grossing American movie made in 1941, though elsewhere I’ve read that was the Abbott and Costello vehicle Buck Privates. Sergeant York was premiered in New York City on July 2, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into World War II, though the film was inevitably seen through the lens of the political conflict of the period. The interventionists (including York himself, who made a speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in May 1941 in which he said, “We are standing at the crossroads of history. The important capitals of the world in a few years will either be Berlin and Moscow, or Washington and London. I, for one, prefer Congress and Parliament to Hitler's Reichstag and Stalin's Kremlin”) hailed the film and the isolationists predictably denounced it.

The film was immensely popular and won Gary Cooper the Academy Award for Best Actor. Though the cornpone dialogue and affected accents get a bit trying at times, Cooper delivers a performance of subtle strength and nuance; though it’s within the established bounds of his screen personality (in a wartime radio show Cooper kidded himself when he was asked, “Don’t you ever say anything but ‘Yup’?,” and he answered, “Nope”), he’s able with just subtle changes in his facial expressions and his voice and posture to suggest the hellion he is in act one, the devoted believer in act two and the reluctant war hero of act three. Sergeant York runs 134 minutes, unusually long for a 1941 film – especially a black-and-white period piece with just one major star – and though only the last third of the film contains the sort of slam-bang action Howard Hawks was famous for (and Joan Leslie’s part was a typical movie heroine of the period and didn’t give Hawks the chance to play the proto-feminist games he’d already done with Barbara Stanwyck and would do again with Lauren Bacall), it’s quite effectively directed. The writing is a bit more problematic; much of the film’s first half contains scenes of rural life, including a town dance and a fight at the local bar, that seem to be in there as much to tick off a checklist of rural Hollywood clichés than to advance the story. But overall Sergeant York is a work of real sophistication and charm, and I especially liked the character of “Pusher” Ross (George Tobias), a former New York subway conductor whom York meets in the army and tries to explain to the hayseed York just what a subway is and how it functions. We genuinely like “Pusher” and find ourselves rooting for him and hoping he’ll survive the war – so we’re heartbroken when [spoiler alert!] he turns up dead in the final sequence, courtesy of a German officer who threw a hand grenade as he was supposedly surrendering.

Sergeant York is also a vivid collection of picturesquely staged scenes, including an early shot of York actually farming and shot through such heavy-duty red filters, I joked to my husband Charles (who, like me, had never seen the movie before, and who had got back from work about 20 minutes in), “Ah! Socialist realism!” Hawks and his production crew used two directors of photography, Sol Polito for most of the movie and Arthur Edeson for the war scenes (and I suspect they got Edeson because he’d already shot the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and therefore had experience reproducing World War I on film), and though there are some pretty obvious painted backdrops and model shots, for the most part the film is visually convincing. Above all there’s the quiet dignity and strength of Gary Cooper’s performance; though the film might have had a bit more “edge” with a different sort of actor (like Bogart, maybe?), Cooper is so “right” for the role on his own terms it’s easy to see why Alvin York was so dead set that Cooper was the only actor whom he would allow in the role.

Law and Order: "On the Ledge" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 29) I watched the latest episodes of the three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: the original Law and Order itself, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “On the Ledge” and its premise was largely the old one on the February 2, 1943 Suspense radio show called “The Doctor Prescribed Death” (https://archive.org/details/TSP430202), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mad psychologist, Antonio Basile, who works out a theory that a person apparently wanting to commit suicide can under the right circumstances can be induced to kill someone else instead. In “On the Ledge,” the person apparently wanting to commit suicide identifies himself as “Bill Jackson” (Chinaza Uche) and he prepares to leap off a bridge and drown himself until he’s interrupted by Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) of the New York Police Department. “Bill” declares that his life is ruined and he has nothing to live for, and Shaw successfully talks him out of it. Then Shaw and his police partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks), get a call to respond to an active-shooter situation in the emergency room of a local hospital, and we’ve already guessed what it takes writers Jennifer Vanderbes and Pamela J. Wechsler two more acts and 20 minutes to let us know for sure: “Bill Jackson,” the man Jalen Shaw just kept from committing suicide, is the active shooter.

By the time Shaw and Riley arrest him he’s already killed a doctor and severely wounded a nurse, as well as targeting (unsuccessfully) another doctor, and if nothing else this show made me realize why the Kaiser hospital on Alvarado and Zion in San Diego has metal detectors and an airport-style security checkpoint at the doors to their E.R. “Bill”’s real name is Kenneth Cartwright, and the reason he was so pissed off was that his wife just died while being taken care of by the doctor whom he later killed, and since she was pregnant and was in the act of giving birth when her case went sour and both she and the baby died, Kenneth was ultra-angry at the doctor and determined to kill him. Naturally Detective Shaw feels guilty about the whole thing because if he’d just let Kenneth kill himself when he wanted to, that nice young doctor would still be alive and his spouse, Catherine Halpert (Katrina Ferguson), would still be a wife, not a widow. Kenneth’s defense attorney decides to plead diminished capacity and claims that a persistent pattern of racism drove him to do it. Though racism as a cause of mental illness isn’t listed in the fifth (and current) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official scientific authority about what constitutes a mental illness, it turns out there are some authorities who argue that it exists and is legitimately diagnosable.

The show turns into a crisis of conscience for Detective Shaw, who like Kenneth Cartwright is Black and feels a certain degree of sympathy for him even though he’s also appalled at what he did (and Shaw’s perception of his own culpability in it). It turns out that Kenneth told Shaw as Shaw was arresting him that he killed the doctor because of “an eye for an eye,” and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) needs that into evidence to prove that Kenneth was a premeditated murderer who was aware of what he was doing and that it was morally wrong. Only Shaw isn’t sure he wants to rat out a fellow Black man in that fashion, and he threatens to testify that he doesn’t remember hearing Kenneth say that. The writers and director David Grossman build up a quite effective suspense sequence as Detective Shaw takes the witness stand and we’re kept in the dark as to just how he will testify – but ultimately he recounts the “an eye for an eye” remark Kenneth told him and the jury convicts the man. Though much of “On the Ledge” is pretty slow going, in the second half the conflicts heat up quite nicely and the overall message – Shaw’s conflict over should he tell the truth on the witness stand or let a murderer get off leniently (with incarceration in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison) because he feels there was some moral justification for what he did – comes through loud and clear.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Carousel" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next show up on Dick Wolf’s oeuvre was a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Carousel,” that starts out with a scene in a youth hostel, in which two young men, students at the ultra-prestigious Cambridge Institute of Technology (CIT) – obviously read the real-life MIT –are shown cruising two young women. The young men are Hayden Foote (Jesse Anderson) and Frederick Hwang (Alex Fox), and the women they’re cruising are Leah Tan (Anastasia Lyn) and Maura Ramos (Mara Topic). The four go out to a sleazy bar in the neighborhood recommended by the hostel concierge, and the two men both drug Leah’s drink while they couldn’t be less interested in Maura either for legitimate or criminal purposes. It turns out that the guys are into a sick game in which they collect points for bedding women from as many different countries as possible; they “score” the game with push-pins on a map of the world. There are two other people involved in the game: Dustin Renfrow (Jake Murphy), the third and nerdiest of the contestants who begs off the current outing because he claims to have food poisoning; and Keegan Delpino (Alex Bartner), who works in the school’s DNA lab and confirms that the contestants have indeed fucked someone of the nationality they claim through collecting illegally obtained DNA samples the young men give him. Leah reports a rape to the Special Victims Unit, while desperately pleading that her parents back home in Singapore can’t learn that she’s been raped because they’ll condemn her for not being a virgin until her wedding night. Leah also admits that while she didn’t willingly have intercourse, she did give Hayden a blow job because “I’d always wanted to know what it felt like to kiss a man … down there.”

But she also says she didn’t actually complete the act, and that still leaves the mystery of who did penetrate her and when, since her rape kit turned out positive, though there’s none of his semen for DNA testing either because she showered afterwards to get rid of any traces of him or her rapist used a condom. Ultimately the SVU detectives travel to Cambridge and confront Keegan, who more or less willingly gives up the DNA sample he was given to verify who had sex with Leah, and it turns out to be Dustin Renfrow, who was so desperate to get some points on the board that he was willing to violate not only the laws against rape but the rules of the game, which were that the sex had to be more or less consensual. (I write “more or less” because it seemed perfectly acceptable to feed their prospective targets drinks drugged with substances like Rohypnol that would eliminate their ability and/or their inclination to resist.) Ultimately the cops are able to bust the kids after they turn up another woman, a Bulgarian, whom they victimized and who luckily is still in the U.S. and, indeed, still in New York City. There’s a fascinating epilogue in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is reminiscing about how she’s been with the SVU squad for 25 years and she didn’t think it would become the centerpiece of his career – and it occurred to me that this may be how Mariska Hargitay feels about this role. She once told People magazine that the reason she took the role of Benson on SVU in the first place was because it was the only part she was offered that wasn’t a dumb blonde in the mold of Hargitay’s real-life mother, Jayne Mansfield – and now that she’s had a much longer career than Mansfield’s and made a lot more money, it’s clear that the character of Benson has defined her life and her career in a way she probably couldn’t have predicted back in 1999 when the show started its run.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Beyond the Sea" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed SVU February 29 was called “Beyond the Sea” (not to be confused with the great French ballad by Charles Trenet that became a U.S. hit for Bobby Darin) and, in the only Law and Order franchise show in which Dick Wolf worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, it was both a continuation of the previous week’s show, “Missing Persons,” and a setup for the next one, “Original Sin” – which in one of the maddening hiatuses (hiati?) that have beset these series in the season of the writers’ and actors’ strikes we won’t get to see until March 14, almost two weeks from now. The continuing story revolves around Romanian expatriate Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) thought he had successfully rescued from human traffickers who had turned her out as a prostitute, only she somehow got back into “the life” and two years later ended up dead and buried on the beach outside the town of Westbrook in Long Island. Westbrook is ruled as a private fiefdom by retired judge Clayton Bonner (Keith Carradine, who played the President of the United States in the CBS-TV series Madam Secretary from 2014 to 2019 and therefore has some experience portraying an imposing authority figure. Judge Bonner has installed his daughter Meredith (Jennifer Ehle) as Westbrook’s police chief, and his response to the discovery of nine bodies of young women, including Rita’s, buried on his town’s beach is to tell Meredith that it’s more important for her to maintain the town’s upbeat and tourist-safe image than to solve the crime.

In addition to Meredith, Clayton Bonner has a scapegrace son, Eric (Will Janowitz), whom the writers (John Shiban and Will Pascoe) seem to be setting up as a prime suspect. Until midway through this episode, it seemed like the serial killer would turn out to be the local district attorney, Noah Cahill (Reed Diamond), who regularly hosted parties featuring underage female prostitutes whom he essentially offered as party favors for his middle-aged horndog-male “guests.” Then midway through the show Stabler, who’s not only out of his jurisdiction but is under suspension by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and is grilled by a male African-American officer who seems eager to get rid of him and his troublesome ways of stretching the law if not outright breaking it in the interests of justice, and Chief Bonner go to Cahill’s home and discover him dead, shot on the glass roof of his living room. (Were the writers thinking Jeffrey Epstein here?) This run of Organized Crime episodes has been a bit more interesting than usual for this series; these scripts are giving Christopher Meloni the chance to play the same sort of edgy character he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and the show is a lot more fascinating when the bad guys are white people with money than scrungy-looking people of color without much of it (though in its earlier years Organized Crime did some effective story arcs about corrupt upper-class African-Americans that proved that corruption doesn’t discriminate by race).