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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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