Blackwell's Island (Warner Bros./First National, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, November 18, after my husband Charles and I watched part three of The American Revolution, I showed him a film we’d watched together from an old VHS tape from Turner Classic Movies back when I used to record the channel almost literally by the yard: Blackwell’s Island, a 1939 gangster movie from Warner Bros. (though at least partially in “First National” drag). This was a 71-minute movie, essentially a “B” picture, and it was the third feature-length film starring John Garfield. Garfield had begun his career in New York on the stage as a member of the Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. According to its Wikipedia page, “It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in – a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry.” The Group Theatre became famous for importing the “Method of Physical Actions” derived from the writings and teachings of Russian director and drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, though when Stanislavsky himself visited the U.S. and saw the Group Theatre in action he said they had misunderstood most of what he had taught. Though at least one major actor from the Group Theatre, Franchot Tone, came to Hollywood well before Garfield did, Garfield became a star basically as the first true Method actor to achieve starring roles in films. As a result, even when he was cast as a gangster (Warner Bros. obviously thought they could wreak the same transformation on Garfield, t/n Julius Garfinkel, they had on Edward G. Robinson, t/n Emmanuel Goldenberg), Garfield played in a quietly sinister style far removed from the snarling way Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart had in similar roles. Garfield made his movie debut in a quite good thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a 1938 remake of a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. vehicle from 1933 called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he played a boxer who accidentally kills his corrupt manager and then has to flee to the country to escape prosecution. The director was, of all people, Busby Berkeley, who took a break from his usual mega-production numbers in musicals and turned out to be a quite effective director of suspense and action.

Garfield’s next film was an enormous breakthrough: Four Daughters (1938), adapted from a Fannie Hurst story called Sister Act and featuring Claude Rains as a music teacher whose titular four daughters (real-life sisters Rosemary, Lola, and Priscilla Lane, with Gale Page as the fourth daughter) get involved in various romantic complications. John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn played rivals for the hand of Priscilla Lane’s character; she marries Garfield’s but they have a hard life together and ultimately, realizing she’s still in love with the other man, he commits suicide by deliberately crashing his car. Blackwell’s Island was Garfield’s third film, and it was advertised with footage of a ceremony hosted by a trade association that proclaimed Garfield “the new dramatic star of the year.” I wanted to see it again mainly because one of its major plot issues concerns gang leader Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), who runs the “Waterfront Protective Association” and intimidates boat owners to pay him money so he doesn’t wreck their boats or injure or kill them. The hero is crusading reporter Tim Haydon (John Garfield), who is determined to expose Bransom’s gang. He gets fired from the New York Times-Dispatch but gets a new job with the Star-Sentinel and has his meet-cute with Sunny Walsh (Rosemary Lane) when she’s a nurse at the hospital where Bransom’s latest victim, Captain Pederson (Wade Boteler), is recuperating and he shows up demanding an interview. He doesn’t get one, but two members of Bransom’s gang break in via an outside window (back when hospitals still had openable outside windows) and finish the job they’d started on him. Bransom and three of his thugs go on trial (a bench rather than a jury trial, for some reason) and are sentenced to six months on the titular Blackwell’s Island prison, but because they have so much political clout with the corrupt machine running New York City they’re able to live the life of Riley even while ostensibly incarcerated.

They get to take over the prison’s hospital ward and set it up as a palatial private residence. They have special privileges including the opportunity to have Bransom’s dogs live with them and even eat Bransom’s specially cooked steak meals while the rest of the prisoners starve (one wonders what the prisoners who are genuinely sick have to do). They get to gamble through poker games with each other and horse-racing bets they place outside, and they organize a protection racket of their own to extort money from fellow convicts without their political pull. Haydon decides that the only way he’ll get the goods on Bransom and end his reign of terror inside Blackwell’s Island is if he gets sent there himself as an inmate, so he punches out a prosecutor named Ballinger (Leon Ames: the one degree of separation between Bela Lugosi and Judy Garland!) and ends up in Blackwell’s. The main reason I wanted to see this movie again right now is the similar level of insane privilege being granted to Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker and abuser of underage girls herself in partnership with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, like the fictional Bransom, is allowed to have her dogs in her current prison and have catered meals specially cooked for her, and if any fellow inmates complain about the cushy kid-glove treatment she’s getting, they get disciplined. Bransom also has arranged to get out of prison any time he likes through a private boat he has concealed on the titular island, and he uses this to do in one of his gang’s enemies personally. He can get away with all this because the hapless warden, Stuart Granger (Granville Bates), is scared shitless that if he doesn’t give Bransom everything he wants, Bransom will use his connections to fire the warden and deny him the retirement pension he’s counting on to sustain him in his old age. The other guards are also mostly on Bransom’s payroll, and when Haydon ends up inside Blackwell’s, Bransom bluntly tells him that if Bransom says Haydon can eat, he’ll eat; if he doesn’t, Haydon will starve.

They warn Sunny Walsh’s family off doing anything by killing Sunny’s police-officer brother Terry (Dick Purcell, later the screen’s first Captain America in a 1942 Republic serial), trussing up his body (in a manner that makes it look like the crooks have seen 1931’s The Public Enemy, James Cagney’s star-making film), and leaving it in the Walshes’ home with a bomb attached that’s designed to blow all of them up. Luckily, while he was there having dinner with the Walshes, Haydon spotted the bomb and threw it out the window, so it exploded harmlessly outside. Ultimately Bransom sets up Haydon by promising to help him “escape” disguised as a guard, then tells the prison authorities that a prisoner dressed as a guard will attempt a breakout and should be shot on sight. Haydon keeps alive by hiding out in a barrel and then, when Bransom tries to get away on his speedboat, Haydon commandeers a police boat and gives chase. Ultimately, thanks to a new special prosecutor, Thomas McNair (Victor Jory), appointed by the New York state government and therefore not subject to control from the local political machine that Bransom controls, Bransom is arrested by the state police and will serve a 99-year sentence in a state facility over which he and his political friends have no influence. Blackwell’s Island is a pretty much by-the-numbers Warner Bros. gangster movie, though Stanley Fields as Bransom is a merely annoying villain thanks to his juvenile penchant for playing practical jokes. He’s got a whole lot of cigars that explode in people’s faces shortly after they’re lit (in one quirkily amusing scene, Bransom is about to give one of his exploding cigars to a person he wants to impress; he thinks better of it and reaches into his other coat pocket for a normal cigar). He also has a flower pinned to his lapel that shoots a faceful of powder into his intended victim, and he does this to his girlfriend Pearl Murray (Peggy Shannon, on her way down from the ethereal beauty she’d been in the 1933 disaster film Deluge; she was a chronic alcoholic and would die of a heart attack just two years later). All this business with the practical jokes makes Bransom come off as more of an annoyance than a genuinely sinister villain, and for that we can blame the writers (Lee Katz and Crane Wilbur) rather than Stanley Fields, John Garfield, or director McGann (who according to imdb.com had help from a much more prestigious “name,” Michael Curtiz, on some retakes). Blackwell’s Island wouldn’t be especially memorable (though it was based on a real-life scandal that took place on New York’s Welfare Island in 1934) if it weren’t for the striking parallel between the fictional Bull Bransom and the all too real Ghislaine Maxwell in terms of the super-cushy treatment both got even when they were nominally in prison!

The American Revolution, part 2: "Asylum for All Mankind" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 17, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 17) I watched “An Asylum for Mankind,” the second installment in Ken Burns’s six-part TV mega-documentary The American Revolution. This one depicted how the attitude of the Colonists towards Great Britain hardened over time, from the willingness to live within the British Empire as a largely self-governing outpost while still remaining technically subject to the Crown (the arrangement under which Britain later devolved its empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, or the Irish Free State it allowed the Irish to form in between the two world wars before Ireland finally gained outright independence) to the demand for all-out independence. While not as contentious politically as the first episode, this one made the point that African-Americans and Native Americans fought on both sides of the Revolution. At least one of the main reasons fence-sitting Americans ultimately declared for independence was the decision of British commanders actively recruit both natives and enslaved Blacks for their side of the struggle. One of the most interesting stories told in “An Asylum for Mankind” was the effort of the British-appointed governor of Virginia, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, to recruit Black slaves to the British cause by promising them freedom if they deserted their masters and fought for the British (in segregated units, as did the Blacks on the American side – the U.S. military wasn’t racially integrated until Harry Truman did it by executive order in 1948, and until then all America’s wars featured Black troops only in segregated units under white commanders).

Alas, the Black slaves who answered Dunmore’s call met a sad fate, mostly dying of smallpox in the camps Dunmore set up to train them. In fact, the American Revolution coincided with a severe smallpox epidemic throughout the country, at least partly because the war provided excellent conditions for the spread of a contagious and often fatal disease. Just as World War I triggered the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919 by creating ideal conditions for the flu virus to spread (and also continually renewing the supply of victims; normally viruses that kill off their hosts end up killing themselves when they can’t find enough new victims to remain alive, but the war generated an almost unending supply of victims), so the American Revolution, with its soldiers marching long distances from town to town and spreading whatever disease they had everywhere they went, turbo-charged a smallpox epidemic. At the time, according to Geoffrey C. Ward’s script, there were only two ways to stop smallpox from spreading: isolating the victims and keeping them from infecting anyone else, or inoculating people who hadn’t got it yet with reduced doses on purpose in hopes that they’d develop immunity rather than get the full-scale disease. George Washington was advised to have his entire army inoculated, but he declined on the basis that the troops who were inoculated would have to wait several weeks before they were sufficiently healthy to fight again. (At the time of the American Revolution, British scientists and doctors were just starting to explore injecting people with cowpox, a related disease that can cross over to humans, after discovering that milkmaids almost never got smallpox because their work had exposed them to cowpox. This was the start of vaccination, a term that derives from the Latin word for “cow,” vaca. But it wasn’t until 1796 that Edward Jenner demonstrated the first effective smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus.) Instead Washington insisted on isolating anyone in his army who caught smallpox and built prison-like hospitals, surrounded by armed guards, to maintain security.

The show also told the sad tale of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to invade and conquer Canada for the Americans; he and another American general, Robert Montgomery, successfully conquered and occupied Montréal but were stymied, and Montgomery killed, in an unsuccessful attempt to scale the fortress of Québec. (Not until Donald Trump regained the Presidency and talked about annexing Canada as “the 51st state” were any other Americans nuts enough to talk about taking over Canada.) I’ve read other sources that said Arnold blamed his failure to conquer Canada on George Washington not sending him enough troops and supplies to win the battles – Ward argued that part of the problem was that the Americans were relying on an old British map that showed the distance between Montréal and Québec as two-fifths of what it actually was – and this, along with falling in love with and marrying a Loyalist woman after his first wife had died while they were separated because he was off trying to conquer Canada, that led Arnold to switch sides and become America’s most infamous traitor. Needless to say, the show not only depicted the drafting of the Declaration of Independence but couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of a white man writing, “All men are created equal,” when he owned hundreds of slaves himself. I used to joke that Jefferson ordered one of his slaves, “Here, boy, sharpen my quill pen so I can write a declaration about how all men are created equal,” and it turns out my joke wasn’t far from the truth. Jefferson did bring a slave with him to Philadelphia when he went there to write the Declaration: Robert Hemings, teenage brother of Jefferson’s long-time slave mistress (and second cousin and half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife) Sally Hemings.

According to an historical post on the Associated Press’s Web site, written and published by Hillel Italie in 2020, https://www.cbs42.com/news/national/remembering-the-slave-who-joined-jefferson-in-philadelphia/, “The eldest of six children, Robert Hemings was born in 1762 into bondage, contradiction and entanglement. His father was the slave owner John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s future father-in-law; his mother was a slave, Elizabeth Hemings. Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered several children, was Robert Hemings’ sister, and Jefferson’s future wife, Martha Wayles, was his half-sister. Robert Hemings himself would become both Jefferson’s in-law and his property. The Hemings siblings were brought to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, not long after the 1773 death of Wayles. Within the plantation hierarchy, Robert Hemings held a high position and was described once by a friend of Jefferson’s as having ‘behaved exceeding well.’ He was just 12 when Jefferson chose him to replace the 31-year-old Jupiter Evans as his personal attendant. He was dressed more formally than other slaves, was permitted to read and write [most slaves weren’t, and if one tried to learn it was considered a whipping offense], travel on his own and to learn a craft, as a barber.” I’ve read some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings about slavery and they reminded me of George Soros’s writings about capitalism: both the work of intelligent men who realize that their wealth has been built on a fundamentally unjust system that has benefited them personally.

I think the ultimate comment on the Declaration of Independence and the contradiction between its promise of human equality and the reality of enormous human inequality that still persists in the U.S. today was made by Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pennsylvania) in 1865 after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Stevens said in essence that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was fully sound, but the existence of slavery in the U.S. had prevented it from being completely realized. Of course it still hasn’t been completely realized, and in the yin and yang of American history today we’re in a period of at best retrenchment and at worst outright reaction. One of the ironies of Ken Burns’s series The American Revolution is that it’s being shown at a time when the second Trump administration is reproducing many of the injustices that brought rise to the American Revolution in the first place, including sending the military into American cities to intimidate the people into not protesting the authoritarian thuggery practiced by agents of whatever agencies Trump and his minions choose to send into large cities run by Democratic mayors to round up so-called “illegal” immigrants. Another irony is that funding for the production is still credited to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), billed for years as “a private corporation funded by the American people” (a wording that’s chilled me for years with its casual equation of “private” and “free”), when the Trump administration has demolished CPB by taking away its funding in a so-called “rescission” bill that was barely debated in Congress at all.

The American Revolution, part 1: "In Order to Be Free" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 16. 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched the first of six two-hour episodes of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution. It was probably inevitable that a director who “made his bones” with an even longer mega-documentary on the Civil War would take on the American Revolution, though an event from the 18th century was harder for him to dramatize than one from the 19th century because the American Revolution happened before the invention of photography and therefore a lot less visual material existed from the era. Burns and his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, had to work with the covers of the famous pamphlets that promoted the patriots’ cause, and a few of the equally famous cartoons of the period like “Live Free or Die.” The directors and their writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, didn’t pussyfoot around the seamier aspects of the Revolution, including the fact (as British people and British-sympathizing Americans pointed out at the time) that the Revolutionaries prattled on about the British tax restrictions somehow “enslaving” the Colonists when many of the Colonists owned actual slaves themselves. It’s long been an historical quirk I’m well aware of that the slavery apologists of Thomas Jefferson’s time (including Jefferson himself) defended it as basically a necessary evil – someone had to get the work done, and white indentured servants weren’t going to do it after their indentures expired – while a generation or two later the aristocrats whose livelihoods depended on slave labor regarded it as a positive good. John C. Calhoun argued that the experience of Athens in ancient Greece proved that you couldn’t make a democracy work without a permanent servant class, and given that the American republic was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” (which in practice really meant “all white male landowners”), the permanent servant class couldn’t be white.

One of the points made in Ward’s script was that immigrants continued to come in a steady stream from Britain to the Colonies despite the growing unrest in the period between 1754 and 1775 covered in the first episode, “In Order to Be Free,” many of them either tenant farmers or workers for hire who had no claim to any land of their own. Land was the big demand of the American Colonists, and at least one of the provocations for the Revolution was that Britain was trying to restrain the Colonies from expanding westward and actually set up a line by which all the North American continent west of the Appalachians was supposed to be reserved for Native Americans. For the settlers, Natives were an impediment to be got rid of by any means necessary so they could help themselves to the vast land of the Great Plains and other points west. That’s why, to the extent Native Americans participated in the Revolution at all, they mostly fought on the side of the British. (Natives allied with Britain during the War of 1812, too, and one of the most fascinating articles I read about that conflict was about the Native chief Tecumseh, a British ally in the War of 1812 who had to deal with the blithering incompetence of the British generals sent to fight it. Most of them were the worst in the British armed forces because the most capable ones were in Europe fighting the war against Napoleon that was an existential conflict for the British, which the War of 1812 was not.) Ward’s writing also highlighted the importance of women in the battle for American independence, especially the ones who organized mass spinning bees to protest the taxes the British Parliament was imposing on cloth exported from Britain (an interesting anticipation of how Mahatma Gandhi would make home-spinning an iconic tactic in India’s successful campaign to end British colonization).

Other than that, this documentary hits all the expected high points of the American Revolution, including the Stamp Act of 1764 (which was supposed to tax the colonies to pay for the British defense of them against French incursions in the so-called French and Indian Wars, which were only one struggle in an ongoing conflict between Britain and France that burst out into the Seven Years’ War between them); the Boston Massacre of 1770; the odd role of British General Thomas Gage (who was married to an American woman and wasn’t necessarily in favor of the hard-line policies of the British Crown and Parliament, but he followed orders); and the battles at Lexington and Concord that kicked off the Revolutionary War itself. There are brief mentions of Edmund Burke, the British politician who actually favored the American Revolution even though that amounted to treason (later he would become the founder of modern conservative political ideology from his horror of the Revolution in France), and Phyllis Wheatley, who despite being a slave was allowed by her owner to publish her own books of poetry and essays and was therefore, at least according to Geoffrey Ward, the first African-American published author of either gender.

But the biggest irony about PBS producing a documentary about the American Revolution in 2025 is how many of the abuses the British government inflicted on the Americans are being done today by the Trump administration and their handmaidens in Congress and the Supreme Court. One of the big complaints about British rule was that they were sending soldiers into American cities and marching them through the streets, to “keep order” according to the British, to intimidate the local population and keep them from rebelling according to the Americans, Trump and his administration is, of course, doing the same thing. The 1700’s were a period of increasing inequalities of wealth and income; so are the 2000’s, in which technological company owners and founders have assumed the role of the giant landowners in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Britain. Like the landed gentry of Britain, today’s “tech bros” are using their economic power to decide how we shall live and what we will be allowed to do, including using their control over artificial intelligence to displace millions of people and leave them to starve. As I’ve lived all these years I’ve become more despairing of any attempts to challenge the powers that be in the hope of actually improving the lives of ordinary people; while acts of resistance are sometimes necessary, ultimately what passes for human “civilization” always seems to end up with a handful of rich and privileged people ruling over everybody else. It’s what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said, “Anybody who’s 20 and isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone who’s 40 and is a socialist has no head” – and what Pete Townshend meant when he sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

First Blood (Anabasis N.V., Cinema ’84, Elcajo Productions, Orion, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching “In Order to Be Free,” the first episode of Ken Burns’s mega-documentary on the American Revolution, I ran my husband Charles the 1982 film First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone in his first performance as John Rambo, ex-Special Forces fighter in Viet Nam who returns stateside and gets into huge amounts of trouble. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone near First Blood or anything else featuring Stallone, especially Stallone as Rambo, but I’m on assignment from Fanfare magazine to review a new recording of the soundtrack music by Jerry Goldsmith, who seems to have done especially well with war movies: Patton, MacArthur, and his amazing score for the 1981 film Inchon despite its horrible reputation as a movie. (The horrible reputation is not altogether deserved; though it was executive produced by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, it’s a mediocre movie rather than a terrible one, and Goldsmith’s score is one of its best aspects. I actually got to see Inchon and review it: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/inchon-one-way-productions-unification.html.) First Blood began life as a novel by David Morrell and was turned into a screenplay by Michael Kozoli and William Sackheim, though after they were done Stallone himself rewrote it and did enough work he was entitled to co-writer credit. First Blood takes place in the small town of Hope in Washington state (though it was “played” by British Columbia, Canada, just across the border), whose name seems to be the writers’ idea of irony. John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) arrives in Hope to pay his respects to an African-American member of his company who was the only other soldier in his unit to survive the war – only he learns from the man’s widow that he didn’t survive the war after all. He died years later of cancer from exposure to all the Agent Orange the U.S. forces in Viet Nam sprayed hither and yon as a defoliant.

Rambo is accosted by the town sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy, whose authority helps make up for Stallone’s embarrassing non-acting in the lead), who for some reason doesn’t want him in town and will do just about anything to get rid of him. For a while I was wondering if Teasle and his deputies – including a young David Caruso as Mitch Rogers (and of course Charles couldn’t help but mention Caruso’s boneheaded decision to leave the cast of the high-rated TV series NYPD Blue after its first season to pursue a film career that never took off) – were involved in some horrific scheme of corruption that they were worried Rambo would uncover, but no-o-o-o-o: they just don’t like seedy-looking, scruffy guys with three days’ worth of facial hair and an overall hostile disposition. After Teasle tries to give Rambo a ride out of town and Rambo manages to get out of the car, Teasle has him arrested. Jailing Rambo has little or no effect on him; he refuses to be fingerprinted and they have to turn a hose on him to get him to shower. Throughout his incarceration he flashes back to incidents that happened to him in Viet Nam, including being held by North Viet Namese who literally dumped shit on him (an interesting anticipation of Donald Trump’s response to the last “No Kings” protests October 18, which was to make an AI-generated video in which he played an Air Force pilot bombing the protesters with shit). Rambo escapes absurdly easily and the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game in which the mouse is a highly trained ex-Green Beret skilled at both using ready-made weapons (including a super-sharp knife he brought into the jail with him and a rifle he scores from a helicopter pilot who flies into the mountain country to apprehend him, only he loses control when Rambo throws a rock at the chopper’s windshield) and making his own. Among his home-made weapons are a series of stakes with which he impales one of the deputies looking for him, and another one in which he impales a boar (the credits actually list Hugh Oaks as “boar handler”) and roasts it for dinner. The movie’s whole schtick is that Rambo is so good at jungle survival and one-person fighting he’s able to take out virtually all the deputies who try to catch him – including Sheriff Teasle’s best friend, deputy sergeant Arthur Galt (Jack Starrett), whose death at Rambo’s hands makes it personal for Teasle. (Watching this movie it’s easy to see why Stallone was considered for the role of Superman in the late-1970’s franchise, though Christopher Reeve got the part instead.)

A deus ex machina arrives in the person of Col. Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna, who like Dennehy was a great actor who helps make up for Stallone’s incompetence), Rambo’s former commander in Viet Nam. Trautman explains to Teasle that Rambo is a first-rate combat fighter and survivalist, and the only way they’ll be able to stop him is if they can persuade him to turn himself in voluntarily and without bloodshed. This Rambo is unwilling to do, especially since (as he explains), “They drew first blood” – the only explanation we get for the film’s title and the reason Rambo turned from just hostile to homicidal. Ultimately Trautman talks Rambo into giving himself up for him after telling him, “You did everything to make this private war happen. You've done enough damage. This mission is over, Rambo. Do you understand me? This mission is over! Look at them out there! Look at them! If you won't end this now, they will kill you. Is that what you want? It's over, Johnny. It's over!” Rambo replies, in a speech that could have been quite moving if delivered by an actor with any skill at all (imagine it from John Garfield in the 1940’s), “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about! … Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!”

I’m not sure I’d call First Blood a bad movie with a good one trapped inside it trying to get out, but certainly there was more potential in this story – a man with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders trying in vain to adjust to civilian life, while his Special Forces training keeps kicking in and turning him into an antisocial monster – than got realized in the film we have. I remember an episode of the radio show The Shadow, with Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston and Agnes Moorehead as Margo Lane, called “The Silent Avenger” (aired March 13, 1938), in which the killer was a former World War I soldier whose bitterness over how he’d been treated led him to do freelance random murders. That show succeeded where First Blood failed in humanizing the villain and also implicitly condemning war itself as something that turns ordinary human beings into barely controllable (and sometimes uncontrollable) monsters. First Blood did well enough at the box office to merit a sequel, Rambo (1985), which became one of the biggest hits and most iconic Right-wing films of the Reagan era; in it, Trautman sets Rambo free to return to Viet Nam and find American prisoners still being held as “missing in action” by the victorious North Viet Namese. While First Blood was made by a quirky but fascinating director, Ted Kotcheff, whose previous credits had mostly been for whimsical comedies like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and the anti-capitalist satire Fun with Dick and Jane, Rambo was directed by one George P. Cosmatos, who was so slovenly as a filmmaker Fanfare critic Royal S. Brown joked that his last name should have been “Comatos.”

A Salute to Vienna (Interspot Film GMBH, Attila Giatz Concert Producitons, PBS, c. 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 15) I watched a rather odd show on KPBS called A Salute to Vienna, which is apparently a revue-type show that has been touring the world for 25 years even though I’d never heard of it before. I’d seen the promos for it on KPBS previously and it seemed mildly interesting, and since there was nothing else on I wanted to watch (Lifetime is showing Terry McMillan-produced romantic dramas and Turner Classic Movies was running an absolute masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film noir High and Low – recently remade by Spike Lee – but my husband Charles was scheduled for a 1 to 10 p.m. shift, he’d be getting home in the middle of it, so instead of watching it last night I chose to order the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray so he and I can watch it together) I decided to take my chances with it. It became clear early on that this show’s “salute to Vienna” wouldn’t be about the truly great music that was composed there by people like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, and Brahms. Instead it would be about the schlocky side of Vienna’s musical heritage: mostly Johann Strauss, Jr. and the operetta composers like Franz Lehár, Robert Stolz, Ralph Benatzky, and Emmerich Kálmán who followed in his wake. The show opened with Strauss’s “Thunder and Lightning Polka,” played as an instrumental but with plenty of athletic male dancers bounding around on stage during it. The moment the second song came out, an aria from something called The Bird Seller by someone named Rudolf Ziehrer (whom I’d only vaguely heard of before) sung by a woman dressed in the red-and-white uniform of a postal messenger, I knew I was in the wrong place. I talked back to the TV, “Would someone please turn off the Schlag already?” (Schlag, in case you didn’t know, is German for “whipped cream.”)

The third song was a quite nice performance of “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince (I hadn’t realized Romberg was born in Hungary in 1887, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still a going concern, and his birth name was Siegmund Rosenberg; he emigrated to the U.S. as a young adult in 1909) by tenor Russell Watson. Alas, he was laboring under the shadow of a previous generation’s performer who had sung the song far more soulfully than he. In this case, the long shadow Watson was singing under was Mario Lanza’s; he recorded songs from The Student Prince twice, in 1951 and 1959 (the remake was so his label, RCA Victor, would have a stereo version). In fact he did the score three times; in 1953 he made a set of pre-recordings for an MGM film of the operetta, only he was fired from the movie after then-MGM studio head Dore Schary decided he was way too hard to work with, and Schary hired actor Edmund Purdom to play the title role and mime to Lanza’s pre-recordings. (Lanza sued but, according to Schary’s memoir, his complaint was so full of obscenities and non sequiturs the judge threw it out of court.) Whatever his failings as a human being, though, Lanza poured his heart out in “Serenade” and no one since has come close to matching his intensity. Then the show trotted out more operetta excerpts: the “My dear Count” song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus (literally “The Flying Mouse,” but usually rendered as “The Bat”); “Let’s Go to Vienna” from Emmerich Kálmán’s Countess Maritza; and another bit of Die Fledermaus, a choral number called “Little Brothers and Sisters.” The orchestra was that of the Vienna Volksoper, the city’s principal theatre for operetta (as opposed to the Staatsoper, Vienna’s main opera theatre), and for most of the evening the conductor was a white-haired man named (as nearly as I could make it out in the quickly barked introduction) Peter Gut. But for the Countess Maritza and second Die Fledermaus excerpt he was replaced by a young, hunky Venezuelan conductor named Manuel Lopez Garcia, and I found myself wishing he can find asylum somewhere else and doesn’t have to go back to Venezuela.

The show was hosted by two veterans, opera star Frederica von Stade (an American, despite her German-sounding name) and veteran actor Maximilian Schell. Von Stade opened the second of the show’s five parts (yes, it was broken up by those damnable “pledge breaks” which are almost as long as the segments of the actual program, and now that the Trump administration has ended all federal funding to PBS we can expect the network to become even more insistent in its begging than ever) with a lovely rendition of “Vilia” from Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Once again she was singing under long shadows; in this case, from Jeanette MacDonald’s magical performance in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1934 film of the operetta. Still, von Stade was quite fine and I was impressed with how much voice she still has even in her late 60’s, which she was when this show was filmed (she was born June 1, 1945). After that she and Russell Watson sang a rather odd duet to the tune of the waltz from Lehár’s operetta, and the reason it was odd was that she sang her part in English and he sang in German. Then there were two more excerpts from The Merry Widow, “Come to the Pavilion” and “How to Handle a Woman,” with the song “Meine Lippen sie Küssen so heiss” (“My Lips Kiss So Hot”) from another Lehár operetta, Giuditta (which was his longest and most “serious” work with a plot reminiscent of Bizet’s Carmen) in between. The Giuditta excerpt was sung by mezzo Alexandra Ruprecht, who wasn’t in von Stade’s league but was quite good and appropriately sexy for the Carmen-like character she’s playing. “How to Handle a Woman” was the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the Lubitsch film of The Merry Widow as “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” and once again the shadow of a long-dead performer hung heavy over the live ones (six men with O.K. chorus voices) heard here.

After the second pledge break, the next piece up was “The Woods of Vienna Are Calling” from an operetta by Robert Stolz called The Viennese Song, and this time around it wasn’t the singers (the Vienna Boys’ Choir, who were surprisingly racially integrated; among the boys were a few Blacks and Asians) who were under a long shadow, but the composer. One of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous and beloved waltzes was “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and compared to that I think Stolz should have left the Vienna woods alone. After that there was an odd interlude, the “Song of the Emperor” from Ralph Benatzky’s The White Horse Inn, sung – in a manner of speaking – by Maximilian Schell, who died in 2014 right after making this appearance. (I hadn’t realized how old this show was.) He sort of talk-sang through the number much the way Walter Huston did with Kurt Weill’s “September Song” in Knickerbocker Holiday or Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady. Then Manuel Lopez Garcia returned as conductor and Russell Watson as tenor for “You Are My Heart’s Delight” from another Lehár operetta, The Land of Smiles. (The titular “land of smiles” is China, by the way.) After that the troupe performed “Yes, My Brothers” from Kálmán’s Countess Maritza and a tenor named Dmitry Korchuk – supposedly a star in France despite his Russian-sounding name, and dressed in a really stupid red-and-white striped shirt – sang the Gondolier’s Song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s A Night in Venice. After yet another pledge break, the concert resumed with Johann Strauss, Jr.’s most famous piece, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, in a truncated version featuring totally unnecessary singing from the Vienna Choir Boys. I’ll never forget the galvanic experience I had when I first heard this piece in the full nine-minute length Strauss intended. It was on an RCA Victor 78 by the Philadelphia Orchestra (though I don’t recall if the conductor was Leopold Stokowski or Eugene Ormandy), and after hearing the shortened and often popped-up versions that had crossed my path before it was a revelation to hear the full original. Later I heard Herbert von Karajan’s equally sweeping and symphonic version – the one used on the soundtrack to the cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey – and those remain my favorite performances of it. The only vocal version that’s ever worked for me was an RCA Victor 12-inch 78 featuring coloratura soprano Lily Pons chirping away with André Kostelanetz (her husband) leading the orchestra behind her. Since it was on just one side of the record, that meant it was a cut version, but that didn’t bother me in this context.

Then they did another bit from Ziehrer’s The Bird Seller, “Roses in Tyrol” (it was a duet and the male singer went onstage with a bouquet of roses and gave them, one by one, to audience members), and another number from Die Fledermaus, “Champagne Is King.” This time the choristers drank what was obviously supposed to be champagne (but was more likely the usual on-stage substitute, ginger ale) from rather tacky-looking glasses. After yet another pledge break, the show cut to the final number, Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March,” complete with audience clapping. The clapping wasn’t quite in as perfect unison as it is when the Vienna Philharmonic invariably closes with this during their New Year’s Eve concert – I remember one year in which Charles and I watched that together and he turned to me and said, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?” – but it was fun enough and the orchestra’s snare drummer really had a blast. I was startled at the number of women in the orchestra – the Vienna Philharmonic was notorious for years as the last major orchestra in Europe to gender-integrate, but I guess the Vienna Volksoper was ahead of the game on this – and I was a bit surprised at how informally much of the audience was dressed. One woman came in an electrifyingly red pantsuit that looked like it was made of velvet. The pledge breaks were heavily promoting the performance the Salute to Vienna troupe is going to be giving in San Diego on January 1, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. in the Jacobs Music Center, 720 “B” Street in San Diego (formerly the Fox Theatre, where I saw Lou Reed perform in 1983 before the San Diego Symphony took it over). They kept reiterating that for a $300 donation to KPBS, two tickets to this event could be yours, though they were giving them out on a first-come, first-served basis and so the sooner you called, the better your seats would be. I have no idea how many people took them up on their offer, but I wish them all the best even though I’ve never given to public television in my life.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Bride Not to Be" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 14) my husband Charles, who came home from work relatively early (shortly before 10 p.m.), and I watched an episode of the New Zealand-based detective series The Brokenwood Mysteries. This was called “Bride Not to Be” and was originally aired November 4, 2018 as the second episode from the show’s fifth season. The central characters are police inspector Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) and his reluctant female partner (professional, decidedly not personal!), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland). I remember a few KPBS showings of episodes from the first season of this series, in which Shepherd was explained as a huge fan of country music (both American and Antipodian – who knew Australia and New Zealand had major country-music scenes of their own?) and also a sexist pig who’s been married three or four times (even he can’t remember how many times, exactly). In the opening episode he made the obligatory pass at Kristin, who turned him down flat, and from then on they’ve had a guarded but still effective professional relationship. “Bride Not to Be” told the story of Ophelia (Anne-Marie Thomas), who on the eve of her wedding is found dead, floating in the Brokenwood River, by a local tourist boat captain whose real name is James Cook (not named on imdb.com, though inevitably there are plenty of jokes made about his name being the same as the legendary 18th century British captain who discovered Australia in the first place – just as there are the inevitable name-checks to Shakespeare’s Ophelia from Hamlet, since both Ophelias ended up floating dead in rivers, though Shakespeare’s committed suicide and this one, written by Tim Balme and Pip Hall, was murdered).

Ophelia was a major international tennis star who was in Brokenwood to recuperate from an on-court injury and to mourn the death of her father two months earlier (yet another parallel with Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whose father Polonius is killed by Hamlet by mistake). Ophelia’s fiancé was fellow tennis player Scotty (Dan Musgrave), who’d previously been having a non-serious “friends with benefits” affair with a friend of Ophelia’s, Chontelle (Cian Elyse White). Only on the eve of his wedding to Ophelia, Scotty learned from Chontelle that she was pregnant with his child – they had taken the usual “precautions” but that didn’t work – and Scotty had chosen to break his engagement to Ophelia so he could marry Chontelle and raise their child together. Writers Balme and Hall delivered a solidly constructed whodunit with plenty of suspects to choose from, and though they didn’t write in the quirks that made the earlier episodes unusually appealing (like having Shepherd blast country music in his car while he and Kristin are driving to interview various potential witnesses, or the ongoing sexual tension between them – he’s the sort of man willing to stick his dick into anything as long as it’s alive, human, and female, and she has utterly no interest in him “that way”), they did create a fascinating character named Darryn (Leon Wadham). Darryn is a deaf-mute, or at least a mute, since at one point he mentions having “listened” to a conversation (or was he close enough to the speakers to read their lips?), and in order to interview him the police need a sign-language interpreter.

They call on Zoe Fuller (Amanda Tito) even though Zoe has a potential conflict of interest in that she and Ophelia are friends, or at least acquaintances. Kristin Sims has some knowledge of the New Zealand version of sign language (my husband Charles told me that the government of New Zealand actually recognizes New Zealand Sign as one of the country’s official languages) and therefore can check up at least partly on the accuracy of Zoe’s translations. Ophelia and Zoe had kept up the pretense of being friends, but when Ophelia saw Zoe at her “hen party” (what we call a bridal shower), Ophelia took Zoe aside and whispered something insulting in her ear. Ophelia’s killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Zoe’s father, Alex Fuller (Stephen Lovatt), a quite unusual character. Though he’s pushing 54, he was hired as the stripper for Ophelia’s hen party – his act is posing as a police officer – and he’s also a physical therapist and personal trainer who was working on Ophelia to prepare her to return to competitive tennis. (Earlier in the investigation the police had found that Ophelia had a one-way plane ticket to San Francisco, and they had wondered whether Scotty had killed her when he learned that she was about to run out on him just two days after their wedding. Scotty explains that solo absences are just part of the life of a competitive tennis player, and he’d been O.K. with that.) Apparently Ophelia had regularly insulted Zoe during their days at school together, and when Alex heard about Ophelia’s latest insult, he decided she hadn’t changed and he would confront her on the local dock. He says he didn’t mean to kill her, but he did. “Bride Not to Be” was a well-crafted whodunit which was decently entertaining without breaking any new, or even unusual, ground – and somehow I’d expected more from The Brokenwood Mysteries based on the previous episodes I’d seen.

Law and Order: "Guardian" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 13, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 13) I watched my usual cycle of three TV shows in the Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order; Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “Guardian,” and it began with a shot of a middle-aged Black busker singing W. C. Handy’s “Beale Street Blues” a cappella. After the wax-lined paper cup in which he was collecting contributions from passers-by gets knocked over, a nice-looking young Black man named Omari Kemp (Robert Brown) comes along, picks up the cup, and puts a $100 bill in it. Naturally, any hardened Law and Order watcher will instantly know that this nice young man (only 15, we learn later, but already better off financially than most of his brethren because he’s a star high-school basketball player and he’s already receiving scouting money from various colleges anxious to recruit him) is not long for this world, and we’d be right. Minutes after he turns the corner on the busker, there are noises and it turns out that Omari was beaten to death by an unknown assailant with a conveniently available metal pipe. The busker is the only witness, and at first he tells the cops he can’t be sure what color the killer was or whether it was a man or a woman, but ultimately the police in charge of the investigation, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and a new character, Theo Walker (David Ajala), who’s just been transferred from narcotics enforcement and is summarily told by his new boss, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), to wear a tie in the squad room, learn that Omari was a hot-shot basketball prospect.

Among their suspects are his coach, his girlfriend Tamara Wise (Deja Unique), and a rapper named “Hollow Point” (true name: Creston Reeves, and played by Michael Lynche, a regrettable name for an African-American actor; maybe that’s why he added “e” to the end of it!) who’s branching out into sports management and looked at Omari as a potential client. It turns out he was actually killed by his adoptive father, Jim Pickett (Ryan Nan); though white, Pickett adopted Omari after his birth father was killed in an accident. Pickett and his wife Kate (Lindsey Broad) have a biological child as well, Tyler (Payton Michael), who’s a hauntingly beautiful presence but also sits to one side as the cops interview his parents. There’s no doubt that Jim Pickett killed Omari, but at trial his attorney, Sanford Rems (Dylan Baker), claims he did so in self-defense. As disgusted prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) glumly notes, in making his case Rems trots out every nasty stereotype white people have against Black people, including that they’re all crooks and violent psychopaths. It turns out Pickett’s motive was that Omari was about to fire him as his manager and sign with Hollow Point, and Pickett was appalled by that, especially since he’d been looking on Omari’s likely NBA success as his meal ticket. It was an O.K. Law and Order, and in some ways the most haunting (and haunted) characters were the ones on the periphery: Kate and Tyler Pickett and Tamara Wise. Ultimately the jury finds Jim guilty and don’t fall for his self-defense act, but overall this isn’t as good a story as a previous Law and Order in which a white-supremacist couple marry and adopt a Black child just to kill him for the life insurance policy they’ve taken out on him, thus getting a double whammy: a massive payout and one less n****r in the world.