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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caged (Warner Bros.-First National, 1950)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 28) my husband Charles and I watched on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies a film I’d long been curious about but had never seen before: Caged, a 1950 women’s prison drama from Warner Bros. Apparently Caged was the fulfillment of a long-held desire on the part of Jack Warner and his executives to do an exposé about conditions in women’s prisons similar to the one they’d done about male institutions in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). Actually they’d already done a women’s prison movie in Ladies They Talk About (1933), based on a play co-written by Dorothy Mackaye, who’d served time in a women’s prison herself, and though I haven’t seen it in years I remember it as being better than Caged. Eddie Muller mentioned the tangled production history of Caged, including that it was first announced as a vehicle for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which fell through because both of them wanted the plum role of Marie Allen (ultimately played by Eleanor Parker), and it didn’t seem to have occurred to either Davis or Crawford that by 1950 they were both way too old to play the part of a naïve 19-year-old who draws a 1-to-15-year sentence because her husband tried to rob a bank, unwittingly pressed her into service to drive the getaway car, and was killed in a police shootout while she was charged as an “accessory” and convicted. The actress it really needed was Barbara Stanwyck at the age she was when she made Ladies They Talk About. Once Marie is incarcerated she ends up caught between a narcissistic, sadistic matron named Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson, a formidable-looking 6’2” actress who had a reasonable career for the next decade until she died of cancer at age 62); another con named Kitty Stark (Betty Garde), who tries to recruit Marie to join her shoplifting gang as soon as she’s released; a surprisingly sympathetic reform-minded warden, Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead), who desperately wants to get rid of Harper but can’t because she’s a political appointee and her sponsors keep her in place; and the overall deadening routine of prison life.

Caged began as a series of articles by Virginia Kellogg, a reporter who actually got herself incarcerated in a women’s jail for two months as part of her research. Kellogg also co-wrote the screenplay with Bernard C. Schoenfeld, and it was directed by John Cromwell, who’s usually not one of my favorite filmmakers (though he gets political points from me as a blacklist victim and as the father of James Cromwell, who played both Prince Philip and George H. W. Bush and also was the human lead in the film Babe; James became a vegetarian after making Babe, and when asked why, he said, “What? Do you think I should eat my co-star?”). John Cromwell gets points from me for casting Agnes Moorehead in a sympathetic role (the only other directors who did were Orson Welles, who’d discovered her, and Douglas Sirk) and for quite effectively dramatizing the soul-deadening aspects of prison life. At one point Warden Benton is shown in close-up staring through the barred windows of her office, and we get the point: prison is as much a source of confinement for those running the place as for those being kept inside it. There’s a great scene in which Marie forgets that during the count routines that are supposed to determine whether all the prisoners are present and accounted for, she’s supposed to respond with her last name first. There’s another beautiful sequence in which Marie finds a cat that had somehow drifted inside the prison (the writers understate but still make the point that the cat can pass in and out of the prison walls whereas the humans can’t) and tries to adopt it, only Matron Harper catches her with it, seizes it, and strangles it while the prisoners start a mini-riot that is quickly shut down by Warden Benton and Matron Harper. One of the gimmicks of Caged is that Kitty is paying Harper what amounts to protection money to be allowed to operate her recruitment scheme inside the prison, only this unravels when Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick from The Maltese Falcon) ends up in the prison as part of an elaborate plan to protect her business as the city’s leading madam. Immediately Matron Harper tells Kitty that she no longer needs her or her friends’ money now that Elvira is in the prison and has a lot more money with which to bribe her as well as a lot more influence “outside.”

Both Charles and I had a similar reaction to the movie’s successful dramatization of going “stir-crazy”; it meant literally freaking out and going insane from the stresses of prison life. One such character is June Roberts (Olive Deering), who’s turned down for parole because she doesn’t have an established job and home to go to if she’s released, and she responds by hanging herself. We’re also told what “dead time” means: the extra months convicts have to serve because, even though they’ve been paroled, the system hasn’t lined up housing and a job for them. Also, early on in the film we learn that Marie Allen is pregnant (though we have to take that on faith because Warner Bros.’s makeup department didn’t do anything to make her look pregnant). She gives birth in the prison infirmary after being told that the child’s birth certificate won’t record anything but the name of the town the prison is in. When she gives birth she’s certain that her mother will take custody of the child (a boy whom she names Tommy, after her late husband and the baby’s father), only mom shocks the hell out of Marie by telling her that her second husband won’t allow her to take the child and raise it until Marie is released. There’s also a singularly joyless Christmas celebration for the convicts, with presents supplied by the Salvation Army, and a carol sing which Marie is encouraged to join, but she refuses. “Why should I have to sing?” she says, and of course I couldn’t help but joke, “Because you’re going to be in The Sound of Music.” (Eleanor Parker was in The Sound of Music, as the rich woman Christopher Plummer dumps for Julie Andrews.) When Marie’s own first parole application is turned down, she responds with a half-hearted escape attempt; later she makes another one and gets as far as grabbing the barbed wire that tops the prison walls before she’s caught, dragged down again, and sentenced to three days in solitary confinement. Matron Harper on her own authority orders the three days stretched to a full month, and before Marie goes into solitary Harper takes her to her own room in the prison (a preposterous locale decorated with a sampler woven by the prisoners reading, “We Love Our Matron” – her demand for virtual worship seems quite Trumpian in today’s political climate) and literally shaves her head bald. Cromwell’s direction and Carl Guthrie’s cinematography make this seem like a weird sort of female castration.

The film also is surprisingly direct about prostitution for a Code-era movie; one of the inmates, Jeta Kovsky a.k.a. “Smoochie” (Jan Sterling, wasted as usual; her terrific performance in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole the next year should have catapulted her into stardom, but since almost no one saw that movie it didn’t), is described as a prostitute, and Elvira Powell’s attempts to recruit Marie to her operation after her release is clearly aimed at “turning her out” and making her a hooker while she’s still young and attractive enough to work as one. The film lurches to a climax when Warden Benton tries to fire Matron Harper, only Harper responds by leaking a story to a tabloid about alleged “immorality” happening in the women’s prison under Benton’s watch. (This is the only sign we’ve seen of any Lesbian goings-on, though they were stock in trade among women’s prison films both earlier – Ladies They Talk About and other 1930’s films had featured surprisingly butch-looking inmates and left the audiences to draw their own conclusions – and later: Eddie Muller recalled a whole sub-genre of women’s prison films from the 1970’s that were aimed at titillating straight male audiences with lots of scenes of partially undressed women having at each other, albeit in R-rated ways.) Benton’s male bosses come to the prison and demand her resignation; she insists that if they try to fire her she’ll demand her legal right to a public hearing; and the matter is left unresolved with both Benton and Harper employed. Only Harper isn’t around for long because the put-upon Kitty grabs a fork from a mess tray and stabs Harper to death in the back. Kitty, who’d already been serving a life sentence for murder, is sent to Death Row.

Meanwhile, Marie gets her second parole hearing and actually is set for release – only Warden Benton sees through her scheme. Marie hooked up with Elvira Powell and agreed to a phony job offer as a “cashier” which will lead ultimately to her working as a whore in one of Elvira’s well-established bordellos. Warden Benton tries to talk Marie out of accepting parole under these circumstances, and pleads with her to stay in for two more months until Benton can arrange for her to get a legitimate job offer. Marie turns her down, and at the end Benton’s secretary is going through the prisoner files and asks Benton what to do with Marie’s. “Keep it active,” Benton says. “She’ll be back.” I really didn’t like the ending of Caged (whose title, like Who Killed Teddy Bear, didn’t have an exclamation point in the credits but did in the posters); it flashed me back to the ending of the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth and the remarks made about it at the time by an anonymous reviewer for FilmInk: “You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served.” I would argue that Marie Allen did not deserve the unjust ending she got in Caged. It’s possible that Eleanor Parker wasn’t a good enough actress to make us believe that just 10 months in prison had turned her from a nice, morally innocent young girl into a hardened criminal (I suspect the Barbara Stanwyck of 1933 could have done it perfectly), or maybe the fault lay with writers Kellogg and Schoenfeld for not giving her enough material to work with. How I would have wanted it to end was that Warden Barton would get her public hearing and use it to expose the corruption within the women’s prison, with Marie Allen as her star witness.

In Eddie Muller’s outro he claimed that one of the things that had most surprised Virginia Kellogg when she researched women’s prisons for this film was how easy it was for the inmates to obtain drugs. Naturally she wanted to write that into her script, but the Production Code Administration and its chief enforcer, Joseph Breen, vetoed it and held fast to the Production Code’s flat prohibition on all depictions of recreational drug abuse in American movies. Six years later, Otto Preminger would film Nelson Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm, about a card dealer in an illegal casino who’s addicted to heroin. He released the film without a Production Code seal of approval and had a major hit anyway, Ironically, Eleanor Parker was in The Man with the Golden Arm as well, playing the wheelchair-bound and neurotically possessive wife of the drug-addicted character (Frank Sinatra) who tries to keep him hooked, while his alternate girlfriend (Kim Novak) wants to help him recover. Muller also mentioned that just about every previous film about a women’s prison, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl (1928), Ladies They Talk About, and the surprisingly good 1938 RKO “B” Condemned Women, had ended with a sympathetic male character falling genuinely in love with the female lead and helping her achieve redemption. It’s probably just as well the makers of Caged avoided that particular set of clichés, but the ending they came up with was so depressing and nihilistic I found it even less satisfying.

Roxie Hart (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 26) my husband Charles and I watched a 1942 20th Century-Fox film called Roxie Hart, based on a story better known as Chicago. The original play Chicago was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was born in Louisville or Lexington, Kentucky in July 1896. Watkins’s original ambition was to be a classic Greek scholar, but she changed when, while attending Radcliffe College, she took a workshop in playwriting from Harvard professor George Pierce Baker. He urged his students to work in some other job that would give them experience of the real world before they knuckled down and became playwrights, and accordingly Watkins took a job as reporter for the Chicago Tribune and worked there for eight months. During that time she became known as one of the “sob sisters,” women reporters who wrote tear-jerking stories about women who’d drifted from the straight and narrow and become involved in scandals. Among the women she wrote about were two showgirls, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan, who were accused of murder. Thanks at least in part due to Watkins’s favorable stories about them, they were both acquitted even though Watkins herself was convinced they were guilty. When she quit the Tribune she wrote a play called Chicago in which Gaertner and Annan were fused into Roxie Hart, aspiring musical star who when a man is shot dead in her apartment hits on the idea of falsely confessing to his murder, on the grounds that no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Chicago before and going through with a trial and her subsequent acquittal will be a boost to her show-business career. Chicago was produced on Broadway in 1926, with George Abbott directing and Francine Larrimore as Roxie, and a year later it was filmed as a silent with Phyllis Haver as Roxie.

In 1942 20th Century-Fox bought the remake rights and filmed it as Roxie Hart, with William K. Wellman directing, Ginger Rogers as Roxie, and Adolphe Menjou as her high-powered attorney, Billy Flynn. After 1941 Watkins, who’d retired from writing and moved from Hollywood to Florida after the death of her father, became an intensely committed Christian and donated most of her money to establish Greek and Latin courses at Bible colleges. In the 1960’s Bob Fosse approached Watkins for the rights to do Chicago as a Broadway musical, only Watkins turned him down because she still felt guilty that her role in the original stories had led to two murderesses going free. After Watkins died in 1969, her estate agreed to let Fosse buy the rights, and the resulting stage musical opened in 1975, with Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon as Roxie and Chita Rivera as her stage partner Velma Kelly. The story’s film rights lingered in development hell for a quarter-century and various projected versions were floated, including one which would have co-starred Liza Minnelli as Roxie and her half-sister Lorna Luft as Velma, before the movie was finally made in 2002, with Rob Marshall directing, Bill Condon writing, Renée Zellwegger as Roxie, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma, and Richard Gere as the slimy attorney Billy Flynn. The 2002 Chicago film was the surprise winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. The 1942 film opens in that year, with bartender O’Malley (William Frawley, best known today as Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and reporter Homer Howard (George Montgomery, annoying as usual), reminiscing about the good old days of the 1920’s and the notorious case of Roxie Hart (Ginger Rogers, wearing a dark wig that was supposed to make her look like a redhead; ironically her natural hair color was brown but she’d been bleaching herself blonde for a decade) in particular.

We then see the outside of Roxie’s apartment with two bullet holes appearing in the door and four shots being heard on the soundtrack. The murder victim is a would-be producer who was trying to seduce Roxie with promises of stardom even though Roxie already had a husband, Amos (George Chandler), though as part of his pre-trial strategy Billy Flynn tells them to divorce. Though Roxie didn’t shoot the victim (and the script by Nunnally Johnson and an uncredited Ben Hecht never for sure tells us who did, though Amos Hart is arrested for the crime at the end after Roxie’s acquittal – oh, did I spoil it?), she decides to confess to the crime anyway but claim she did so in self-defense. A hanger-on named Jake Callahan (Lynne Overman) who claims to be Roxie’s agent arranges for the famous defense counsel Billy Flynn (Adolphe Menjou) to represent her, and Flynn carefully coaches her in her self-defense claim. While Roxie is still in jail awaiting trial, another woman, Gertie “Two-Gun” Baxter (Iris Adrian, who looks amazingly butch for a woman in a 1942 movie and shows up wearing a man’s shirt and blue jeans at a time when almost nobody in movies, aside from actors playing farmers, wore jeans), is suddenly arrested after committing murder in the course of a bank robbery. Roxie feels that the all-important tabloid publicity is slipping away from her and moving to Gertie, so she cooks up the lie that she’s pregnant and thus regains the media spotlight. The trial begins and prosecutor Martin Harrison (Morris Ankrum) amasses enough evidence against Roxie she gets worried that she’s going to hang anyway despite all the pre-trial assurances that the state of Illinois doesn’t execute women. Then Roxie takes the stand herself (something she was initially unwilling to do until Flynn tells her that legendary Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld is in the courtroom) and recites the story she and Flynn have carefully rehearsed – and for some reason Wellman, Johnson, and Hecht didn’t include any scenes of Martin Harrison cross-examining her.

Instead the film cuts to Flynn’s closing argument to the jury, during which Flynn has told her to cry, only he has to tell her to back off when she overdoes it. The moment Flynn takes the bouquet of flowers Roxie has been holding in court, throws it on the ground, and literally crushes it underfoot as he reaches the climactic line in his speech pleading with the jury not to crush both Roxie’s life and that of her unborn (and really nonexistent) baby, he has the jury (who’d already been ogling Roxie through the trial; the jury is all-male, and given that the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote had only been in effect for seven years when this story takes place, that’s not surprising) in the palm of his hands. There’s a cut to two sets of newspapers outside the courtroom, one headlined “ROXIE GUILTY!” and the other “ROXIE FREED!,” and when the acquittal comes through, there’s a hand signal out the courtroom window to signal the paper’s delivery people to release the one with “ROXIE FREED!” as the headline. Only just when Roxie Hart is expecting to bask in the publicity of her new-found freedom, another tabloid-hot case breaks out in the courthouse building and the reporters who’d been following Roxie’s trial suddenly break off and ignore her in favor of the latest headline story. The film ends in 1942, when reporter Homer Howard is being picked up at O’Malley’s bar by a woman in a car. It’s Roxie, of course, and after the trial she married Howard and they’ve been steadily cranking out kids all that time, with another on their way (she tells us that indirectly by saying to Homer that pretty soon they’ll have to get a bigger car).

Roxie Hart also has some other mordant scenes, including ones in which the trial is being photographed by Babe (the young Phil Silvers) and a gang of newspaper guys, who periodically demand at every dramatic moment that the trial pause so they can get a meticulously staged photo of the Big Scene. (You watch these scenes and think it’s no wonder that photographers were banned from trials for many years – and in federal trials, they still are.) There’s also a scene in which Roxie (temporarily) jilts Howard for O’Malley when O’Malley boasts that he has a Packard car – and in the 1942 framing scenes Howard asks O’Malley what happened to that Packard, and O’Malley said he lost it in the 1929 stock-market crash and ensuing Great Depression like everything else he owned. Though it’s not a great film the way the 2002 Chicago is, Roxie Hart has plenty of mordant comments to make about tabloid culture and the transitory nature of fame, especially unearned fame. Ginger Rogers’s performance is sprightly, even though at first my husband Charles mistook her for Barbara Stanwyck (and, as with so many other films of the classic era, it might have been better with Stanwyck as Roxie; a year later Stanwyck and Wellman worked together in Lady of Burlesque, another entertaining tale about the dark side of show business), and her high point is the black-bottom dance she and several other women prisoners perform impromptu in the jail. Though one can fantasize this movie with Fred Astaire playing Billy Flynn and the two of them ending up dancing together on the screen, Rogers’s dancing is first-rate on her own (her and Astaire’s choreographer, Hermes Pan, designed the dances), and this scene may have inspired Fosse and his collaborators on the musical, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, to stage the spectacular jailhouse production numbers in the 1975 Chicago musical.