Law and Order: "In God We Trust" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 20) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “In God We Trust” and deals with the mysterious murder of an up-and-coming 26-year-old attorney with a penchant for taking on pro bono cases involving government support of religious institutions, always taking the side of First Amendment absolutists like me who argue that any governmental support for a particular religion violates the “no establishment” clause. When he’s found murdered, his head slammed against the marble countertop of the sink in his apartment, the investigating detectives, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), are able to trace his law-school education to Fordham University but are unable to find any information about where he went to school before that. The reason was that he was raised in an ultra-strict religious commune, which broke off from the Mennonites about a century earlier because they didn’t think the Mennonites were strict enough for them. The victim had fallen in love with a woman from his community, Amelia Penner (Laura Heisler), daughter of the church’s leader, Horace Penner (Peter Hans Benson), and even though he’d been ostracized and shunned for leaving the faith, she continued to see him clandestinely and eventually got pregnant by him. The killer turns out to be her former boyfriend, John Albrecht (Michael Devine), who confronted the victim in his apartment, lost his temper and murdered him. The cops learn this through Albrecht’s own confession to Amelia in the police station, but the confession is legally thrown out because under the community’s rules, Amelia was acting as a priest and therefore whatever John told her is protected by priest-penitent confidentiality. No one in the church community, not even the victim’s mother, will testify in court.

While all this is going on there’s a subplot concerning new district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his interest in supporting alternative forms of punishment to prison. In the episode’s opening scene he’s shown presenting a speech by Martha Fairchild (Ashlyn Maddox) advocating for prison alternatives, and Fairchild turns up in Baxter’s office to support the church’s position that they can punish John more effectively and surely than the secular authorities. The church offers a plea deal by which John will plead to a misdemeanor and get probation, which the church itself will administer. Baxter is horrified at the idea that he should let a murderer walk out of some twisted sense of religious freedom and social justice, especially since his support of Fairchild’s efforts had been predicated on the idea that it would apply to nonviolent crimes only. But his prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), is intrigued by the idea, especially since with none of the church members being willing to testify in court against John, his chances of getting a conviction aren’t looking all that great anyway. Amelia returns to the church community and John offers to marry her, which she accepts because, among other things, that will give her baby a father. Ultimately John himself has a crisis of conscience and agrees to plead to second-degree murder, with a sentence of up to 15 years, on the understanding that whenever he’s released he’ll be welcomed back into the religious community with open arms. This was a much better Law and Order than one could tell from my synopsis, touching not only on issues of faith, morality and the First Amendment but also our whole ritual incantation of “In God We Trust” as the basis of our legal and political systems when we pay at best lip service to it in practice. The episode closes with a lingering close-up on the words “In God We Trust” on the courtroom wall, raising the question of how much do we trust God and whether the members of this religious community are the only ones being honest and above-board about the level of trust they place in God.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Extinguished" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Extinguished,” was in its own way pretty good. It starts with a young straight couple going through a park in their neighborhood, Washington Square, looking for rock specimens for their high-school class. (The young man playing the boy in this couple is quite haunting-looking and would be good casting for a biopic of Michael J. Fox if anyone makes one.) Suddenly they’re set upon by an unseen assailant; he’s knocked out and she’s tied with a yellow lamp cord and raped. The central issue in the story is the overall distrust residents of Washington Square have for the police, especially since many of them are immigrants who came from highly repressive countries where the police are feared as agents of doom. As it so happens, one of the SVU detectives, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), has just moved to Washington Heights four months before, and he’s already crossed swords with Danny Rocha (Ethan Jones Romero). Danny is being raised by his grandfather, a retired New York police officer, and he has ambitions to become a cop himself – only he’s written three application letters and none of them have got a response. On the basis of a sketch drawing made by the female victim’s description of her rapist, Danny and a vigilante gang of which he’s a member target a suspect and beat him – but later it turns out he was innocent.

The cops (the real ones) then identify another suspect, James Aquino (Glen Llanes), after the woman victim says her assailant looked “more Asian” than the person in the police sketch. But they have to act fast to catch him before the vigilantes at best rough him up and at worst lynch him. Ultimately the police arrest Aquino before the vigilantes get to him, and Danny makes a plea deal by which he’ll plead to a misdemeanor and still be eligible for the police. Velasco even arranges for Danny to join a police auxiliary unit that, though it’s not allowed to do the work of sworn officers, can participate in crowd control and other “soft” police tasks. The lesson Octavio learns is to be more outgoing towards his neighbors instead of adopting the typical New York attitude of mostly ignoring them. There’s a marvelous scene early on in which Octavio is walking through the neighborhood posting leaflets showing the suspect’s face as shown in the police drawing, and a man shows his basic hostility to the police by ripping down the poster and crumpling it up. Octavio even threatens to arrest him for littering before he thinks better of it. And there’s an odd meet-cute between him and Danny in that Danny lives in the building just above Octavio’s apartment, he’s just got a new Bluetooth speaker and he’s blasting obnoxious music (the dialogue identified it as heavy metal but it sounded more like rap to me) and keeping Octavio awake with the volume. Later at the end Danny is once again playing music that’s once again disturbing Octavio (though not only is the music considerably better – something Latin, reflecting Danny’s origins – he’s playing it softer than whatever it was, metal or rap, he was playing earlier), though this time the encounter between them is much more neighborly and comradely.

Elsbeth: "Foiled Again" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 20, 2025)

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

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I switched to CBS for another episode of Elsbeth, which I’ve come to like a great deal even though its debt to Columbo – the elaborate schemes used by the murderers to escape being caught, and the tactics of the lead “sleuth” character essentially to annoy the culprits into confessing – is quite obvious. The show was called “Foiled Again” in a bad pun on the fact that fencing plays an important role in the plot. Once again, as on the Columbo show and in most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies even before that, we in the audience know from the get-go who the killer is and what the motives are. The victim is Ethan Brooks (Rob McClure), director of admissions for the upscale elite Bodle College, and his killer is admissions counselor Lawrence Gray (Matthew Broderick). Years before Lawrence Gray had counseled Ethan Brooks and his parents to get him into an elite Ivy League school even though Ethan’s own ambitions were to go to a non-elite college and prepare for a career in theatre arts. Among the sports Lawrence insisted on teaching Ethan so his college application would be more impressive to the Ivy League schools was fencing. As our story begins, Ethan has just been appointed admissions director for Bodle and he’s so appalled at Lawrence’s tactics that he’s decided to blackball all Lawrence’s application clients no matter how qualified they might have otherwise seemed. I was amused that for the second week in a row I was watching a TV show in which a college admissions counselor was the villain; a week ago the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode had been about a college admissions counselor who sets up a side hustle by sending out texts to his student clients, ostensibly from people they know in high school, to extract nude photos of them that he in turn sells to online pedophiles. Lawrence worked out an elaborate plan to knock off Ethan that involves challenging him to a fencing duel for old times’ sake and triggering his long-term chronic asthma by lining the inside of his protective helmet with cat dander, which Lawrence extracted from his daughter’s pet cat, Veritas. (These are the sorts of people who would give their cats names like “Veritas” and “Quadcat,” the latter being one whose front paws have only four toes instead of the usual five.)

As Ethan goes into anaphylactic shock and expires – courtesy of a red string with which Lawrence has tied the back of Ethan’s helmet so he can’t just slip it off – Lawrence puts his foot on Ethan’s chest and says a line about how his application has been denied. Lawrence’s alibi is that he was administering a preparatory exam for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) to a client while Ethan died, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) buys a copy of the LSAT prep test herself to time it to see if Lawrence could have slipped out and committed the murder while the student he was prepping was so engrossed in the test he didn’t notice the sudden disappearance of his proctor. There’s also a subplot involving Elsbeth’s son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), who’s coming to visit her and whom Elsbeth invokes for preliminary discussions with Lawrence about hiring him to coach her putative grandson, who hasn’t yet been born or even conceived, in getting into a top college because, as Lawrence likes to say, “it’s never too soon.” One of the things that makes this a great gag is that Teddy is pretty obviously Gay – he has a partner, Rudy (Louis McWilliams), whom Elsbeth waylays and interrogates in the police station for an hour and a half, obviously checking him out as potential son-in-law material – and therefore won’t have to worry about getting his kid into a high-end college unless he and Rudy adopt. There’s also a gag about Teddy’s relatively low level of ambition – he went to college, all right, but at the University of Illinois (remember that Elsbeth used to live in Chicago and practice law there until he got involved with a messy high-end divorce case), and after he graduated he went to work for a nonprofit – and another gag about Lawrence’s own daughter Melanie (Madia Hill Scott), who likewise rejected dad’s remorseless ambitions for her and took a “gap year” instead. She left her cat in Lawrence’s charge and when she returns, Lawrence tells her the cat is dead – but he’s actually just got rid of it out of fear that the living cat would blow his alibi. I really like Elsbeth – and I’ll readily admit that the initial promos for it turned me off because it made the show seem too cute – but I think writers Robert and Michelle King have got the right “sweet spot” between thrills and campy humor and the show is really engaging to me.

Match Point (BBC Film, Thema Productions, Jada Productions, Kudu Films, Dreamworks, 2005)

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

Last night (Wednesday, February 19) I screened for my husband Charles the DVD of a movie we’d started to watch a few weeks ago on the Tubi free-streaming service: Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005). We had given up on it then partly because it lasts two hours and four minutes (usually Woody Allen is famous for keeping his films at a 90- to 95-minute running time) and also because it was being streamed with commercials. The latter we could have lived with except that the commercials were almost twice as loud as the movie, which judging from how loudly I had to play the DVD was an intrinsic fault in the film and particularly in Allen’s sound mix. Match Point was made in Britain and takes place there; the central characters are Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Myers), Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), his sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson), an American actress from Colorado who’s come to London to make it in the theatre community. Tom and Nola met at a party they were both crashing and instantly fell in love, or at least lust. They became engaged, disappointing Tom’s ferociously ambitious mother Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), though Tom’s dad Alec (Brian Cox) finds her refreshingly frank. Chris begins the film with a bit of voice-over narration saying that sometimes it’s more important to be lucky than good. He’s a former world-league tennis player who realized he wasn’t going to be as good as the top professionals, and hired himself out to the Hewett family as a tennis teacher. The opening scene between Chris and Tom is easily the best part of the film – though Allen quickly establishes that both characters are straight it still comes off as a Gay cruise, especially when they realize they’re both opera fans and Tom tells Chris the Hewetts have a box at Covent Garden and Chris is welcome to share it every time there’s an empty seat, which is often.

Chris also starts dating Chloe, and when he declares that he’s ambitious and doesn’t want to be a tennis bum all his life, Chloe sees her chance. She talks her father into giving Chris an office job with his company, and the two get married and move into a preposterously large apartment with giant picture windows that Chris’s father-in-law is obviously paying for. Only Chris has also got the hots for Nola, and even though Chris is married and Nola is engaged to Chris’s brother-in-law, they have sex for the first time outdoors in a pouring rainstorm. (As I joked to Charles, I’ve never had outdoor sex in the rain and I’ve never wondered what it would be like.) Ultimately Chris rises through the corporate ladder and gets a chance to set up a potentially profitable co-venture with a Japanese company, but he’s also ditching his responsibilities at the office and stopping by Nola’s flat every chance he gets. When Tom and Nola break up, Chris considers that a green light to pursue his affair with Nola big-time, taking calls from her even while he’s spending weekends at the Hewett estate. Chloe is also anxious to have sex with Chris, not because she’s all that interested in him physically but because she’s determined to have children. Needless to say, that just turns Chris off; he denounces the sex he gets from Chloe as “routine” and spends more time with Nola. Ultimately, to no one’s surprise (no one’s in the audience, at least), Nola gets pregnant with Chris’s child and insists that she’s going to have the baby and expects Chris to help raise it. Chloe also gets pregnant with Chris’s child (until then I was expecting this film to tread the path of the 1941 Warner Bros. melodrama The Great Lie, in which Bette Davis’s boyfriend, played by George Brent, briefly marries concert pianist Mary Astor, gets her pregnant, but then has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis, and the titular “great lie” occurs when Davis and Astor pair up for a tense few months in the desert so that Astor can have Brent’s baby and Davis can pass it off as hers), and just when you’re wondering how in his finite wisdom Woody Allen can resolve this conflict, [spoiler alert!] he has Chris get a shotgun from his father-in-law’s gun collection, dismantle it, pack it in his tennis bag, break into Nola’s apartment building, and shoot and kill first Nola’s landlady, Mrs. Eastby (Margaret Tyzack), and then Nola herself.

This happens about 90 minutes into this 124-minute film and of course completely changes its tone. The cops assigned to investigate the case are Inspector Dowd (Ewen Bremmer), who aside from his rather grizzled five-o’clock-shadow resembles Donald Trump advisor Stephen Miller; and Detective Banner (James Nesbitt). Dowd and Banner both assume the killer was a drug addict who killed Mrs. Eastby to steal her jewelry and her meds, and Nola just happened to walk in to the wrong place at the wrong time. Later Inspector Dowd has a dream which reveals to him the actual sequence of events and gives Chris away as the killer, but Detective Banner talks him out of it, saying that Chris has an alibi – his wife and his in-laws all can vouch that he was at a party with them all weekend – and there’s no evidence against him. (One imdb.com “Goofs” contributor said Chris would be a prime suspect as soon as DNA tests on Nola’s fetus revealed that Chris was its father – unless we were supposed to believe that Nola wasn’t pregnant at all but was merely faking pregnancy to get Chris to divorce Chloe and marry her.) The film ends with Chris wracked with guilt but seemingly on his way to a long, prosperous and reasonably comfortable life as a Hewett in-law and father to a third generation of Hewetts. In a “Trivia” post on imdb.com, someone claimed that Match Point is Woody Allen’s favorite of his own films, which quite frankly is hard to believe – especially just days after Charles and I had re-seen Annie Hall after years and had enjoyed it a lot more than Match Point. Of course it helped that Woody Allen was actually in Annie Hall – in fact, he was one of the romantic leads – but the main difference was that in Annie Hall Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) are genuinely lovable characters. Even their flaws make them recognizably human, while as Match Point progresses (like a disease) I was starting to complain that it was like a modern movie in that there was no one truly likable even before Allen took his story down the rabbit hole of murder.

The film I thought it was most similar to was Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1958), another movie set in Britain about a young proletarian trying to crash the office world and torn between his boss’s daughter and another woman with whom he’s having an affair. Clayton and his writers (Neil Paterson and Mordecai Richter, adapting a novel by John Braine) resolved it by having the other woman (Simone Signoret) commit suicide after the protagonist (Laurence Harvey) rejects her, while he goes ahead and marries the boss’s daughter he’s impregnated. Charles mentioned another Woody Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), also involving a romantic triangle (two romantic triangles, in fact), which he liked better than Match Point. Allen lets Chris off the hook for the murder via a “plant” he inserted in his script in which Chris was musing in his voiceover about how sometimes a tennis ball hits the net and bounces forwards, in which case you win, and sometimes it bounces back, in which case you lose. The ending features Chris throwing the jewelry he stole in his fake “robbery” in the Thames, but Mrs. Eastby’s wedding ring falls short of the river and ends up on the sidewalk. At first we’re sure that the police are going to find it and use it to unravel Chris’s elaborate cover story and nail him for the crime, but later on it has just the opposite effect: a longtime drug addict who committed another robbery-murder to get the money to buy drugs is found with the ring, which he picked up off the sidewalk, and the cops assume he did both sets of killings. It’s interesting to see Woody Allen use such an outrageously set-up “plant” for his resolution, but the upshot is that just as we’ve decided we hate Chris, he gets away with murder, though at least one possible reading of the ending is that (like the protagonist of Room at the Top) he’s going to be punished in essence by having to live all his life with the knowledge and guilt over what he’s done.

Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, February 18) I went to the Bears San Diego movie night at the Mission Valley AMC 20 theatres to see the latest Marvel Comics movie, Captain America: Brave New World. The two big things I knew in advance about this film from the TV ads were that it features a Black Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and a red Incredible Hulk. The Black Captain America apparently took over from the original white one, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), after he was killed in the last Avengers movie (though since I’ve never seen any of the Avengers movies I’m just taking it on faith that that happened). The film starts with the re-inauguration of President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, looking considerably older and more grizzled than he did as the hunky young Prince Charming type in the 1988 film Working Girl), who won re-election despite the big event in the Avengers series in which half the Earth’s human population was wiped out in a catastrophe instigated by the Avengers’ principal villain, Thanos. Since then a mysterious “mass” has arisen out of the Indian Ocean and turns out to be made of adamantium (which I’d previously heard of only as the metal Wolverine’s claws are made of in the X-Men movies), a substance even more powerful than vibranium (the MacGuffin of the Black Panther movies). There’s a passing line of dialogue in this committee-written script (Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman and Dalan Musson get credit for the original story and they along with Peter Glanz and Julius Onah, who also directed, for the screenplay) that at last the world has access to a super-metal that isn’t controlled by an isolationist country like Wakanda.

President Ross has laboriously negotiated an international treaty that gives all countries in the world equal access to the adamantium in this newly formed island – though the only actual world leaders we see are Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki (Takehiro Hira) and the French President (Rick Espaillat), along with a prime minister from one of the Arab countries, Kapur (Harsh Nayyar). Unfortunately, the plans are foiled by the film’s principal villain, Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who was kidnapped by President Ross in his earlier role as a U.S. Army (or was it Air Force?) general, held hostage for 16 years and subjected to experiments that vastly increased his brain capacity but also drove him paranoid. Sterns is determined to break the adamantium treaty and get the nations of the world to fight a war over it. (I wonder if someone on the writing committee had read R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon falls to earth and lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, precipitating a world war over the moon’s resources that ends in the destruction of almost all human and animal life on earth; I’ve long hoped that someone would film Sherriff’s novel even though they’d obviously have to change that dorky title!) To accomplish that he’s developed a system of mind control that he’s able to impose on people by remote control via their smartphones, with the old Fleetwoods doo-wop hit “Mister Blue” serving as the same sort of trigger the queen of diamonds playing card did in The Manchurian Candidate.

Among the people he’s manipulating are President Ross, who has a heart condition and is being kept alive by a medication Sterns has invented – at first I thought they were just nitroglycerine tablets but they contain compounds created by the same gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the original Incredible Hulk in the first place. What’s more, unbeknownst to Ross, Sterns has upped the gamma-ray dosage of his meds so he’s in danger of turning into a new Hulk, this one red instead of green. Sterns also brainwashes five U.S. soldiers, including Captain America’s friend Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), into an assassination attempt against Ross just as he and the assembled world leaders are meeting in the Oval Office to sign the adamantium treaty (ya remember the adamantium treaty?). Bradley had just got out of a 30-year prison sentence and is scared shitless of going back in, and is even more scared when he’s put in solitary confinement after another Sterns-controlled goon squad guns down the other four men who participated in the attack on the President. The woman who orders him placed in solitary is Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), who’s ostensibly head of President Ross’s security detail but is really a secret agent for “The Widows,” an Israeli-based commando team whose representative, Black Widow (who was played by Scarlett Johannson in a 2021 film I saw on a previous Bears San Diego movie night), had an important role in the Avengers cycle and was one of the characters who sacrificed their lives to save humanity from Thanos’s dastardly plot. (I remember being thrown by the post-credits sequence for the 2021 Black Widow featuring people visiting her grave, since she’d survived the events of the 2021 movie.)

Apparently the original (white) Captain America was also one of the people who got killed in that cycle, passing the mantle of Captain Americahood to Sam Wilson – though Wilson, unlike Rogers, declined taking the super-serum that had given the original Captain America his powers in the first place. This Captain America and his partner, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), have whatever powers they have via winged suits made of vibranium and the overall power of Captain America’s shield, which he can hurl like a combination boomerang and Frisbie as well as use as armor against bullets. (I can still remember the opening lines of the song commissioned by Grantray Lawrence Animation for their 1960’s cartoons based on Captain America and other Marvel characters: “When Captain America throws his mighty shield/All those who chose to oppose his shield must yield.” I still love the triple internal rhyme there!) Not surprisingly, the above plot, such as it is, is only pretext for some amazing action scenes, including a sequence early on in which Captain America recovers an adamantium sample sent to the U.S. by Japan and which Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki accuses the U.S. of stealing. Later on there’s a fight scene in the Indian Ocean and the skies above it in which Captain America and Joaquin try to stop two rogue U.S. pilots from attacking a Japanese carrier fleet outside the adamantium island, and Joaquin ends up nearly drowning in the ocean and so badly wounded he requires hospitalization. The film’s big action climax occurs when President Ross, goaded by Sterns’s promptings via phone, [spoiler alert!] literally turns into the red Hulk at a public event in the Rose Garden to reaffirm the treaty (once again, folks, ya remember the treaty?) and does a surprisingly good job of wrecking the White House before Captain America is able to subdue him.

The film ends with President Ross resigning, admitting responsibility for his actions, and being incarcerated in a super-secure prison literally built under the ocean floor, while the White House is being rebuilt and the treaty implemented – though there’s no indication of who took over as President. (I was hoping it would be a part-Black, part-Asian woman.) The post-credits sequence consists of Samuel Sterns returned to his own secure prison cell and Ruth Bat-Seraph visiting him there, either because she’s part of his dastardly plots (unlikely) or to keep an eye on him (more likely). I’m a bit surprised that the Right-wing weirdos who attacked the 2017 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as being anti-Trump propaganda (and even claimed that after Donald Trump won the 2016 election the film was withdrawn and reshoots were made to make the film even more anti-Trump) haven’t jumped on this one, because at least to me the relationship between President Ross and Samuel Sterns had a lot of Trump and Elon Musk about it: the hot-headed President and the secret (or not-so-secret) manipulation of him by a reclusive multi-billionaire with huge intellectual capacities and almost no social skills. Aside from that, Captain America: Brave New World is a quite good action movie in the modern manner, with just enough plot to give the sense that this film is about things and isn’t just an excuse for one highly stylized, digitally assisted action sequence after another – though the action scenes are, of course, the reasons anyone goes to see movies like this in the first place. The poor actors are pretty much just along for the ride – though I’d give Anthony Mackie points for being properly heroic and disarmingly charming in the lead, and as his sidekick Danny Ramirez is sexy enough I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.

West Side Story (Beta Productions, The Mirisch Corporation, Seven Arts, United Artists, 1961)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 16) Turner Classic Movies (TCM) reached the midpoint of their “31 Days of Oscar” commemoration during which they devote the entire month of February, plus the first three days of March, to movies that either won or at least were nominated for Academy Awards. Last night’s theme was movies set in or around New York City, and the first on their agenda (at least the earliest my husband Charles and I watched) was the 1961 version of West Side Story. It was based on the 1957 mega-hit musical composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents adapted fairly loosely from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. (I remember a great comment the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen published when Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet came out. A teenage girl coming out of the theatre told him, “It was great – but they stole the plot from West Side Story!”) I was eight when the 1961 West Side Story came out and I immediately hailed it as the greatest movie ever made, and when the 1962 Academy Awards came around I wrote down the winners (for the first, but not the last, time in my life!) and was gratified that West Side Story won 10 of the 11 awards for which it was nominated. I saw it three times on its initial theatrical run and twice more when it was reissued in 1970, but that time around the bloom was decidedly off the rose and I noticed flaws that had eluded me eight years before, notably the weak casting of the leads.

As almost all the world certainly knows by now, West Side Story tells of the rivalry between two New York street gangs, the largely ethnic white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Tony (Richard Beymer) is a former Jet who’s retired from the gang life and taken a job as a stock boy at Doc’s (Ned Glass) candy store, but Riff (Russ Tamblyn), the Jets’ leader, wants him back for a battle royal with the Sharks. Riff and the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo (George Chakiris), arrange a meeting at a dance at the local gym – proclaimed “neutral territory” by the rival gangs – to hold a war council to plan the upcoming rumble. Tony is practically dragged there by Riff, but once there he meets Bernardo’s sister Maria (Natalie Wood, top-billed) and is instantly smitten with her. The problems are not only that the Sharks and the Jets are bitter enemies but Maria already has a Puerto Rican boyfriend, Chino (Jose De Vega, whom Charles thought looked oddly Asian; he wondered whether Chino was from a Filipino family who had emigrated to Puerto Rico), who’s a lot more important to this story than the equivalent Paris is in Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless Tony and Maria agree to meet later that night on a fire escape (the closest Arthur Laurents and screenwriter Ernest Lehman – the one contributor to West Side Story who got nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win – could get to a balcony). Tony thinks he’s neutralized the threat by negotiating so that the rumble will consist only of a fistfight between a champion from each gang, but when the event finally occurs both sides sneak in switchblades. Bernardo kills Riff and Tony, out of revenge and hurt, kills Bernardo. Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita (Rita Moreno) is understandably angry that Maria is still swearing her love for Tony even though Tony killed her brother, and in the end – instead of the famous suicides that end Shakespeare’s play – Chino kills Tony with a gun he’s got from somewhere and Maria grabs the gun from him and forces the surviving members of both gangs to declare peace. A lot of critics faulted the ending of West Side Story for allowing Maria, unlike Juliet, to live, but that’s not the biggest problem.

One major problem with the movie is the filmmakers, directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (Robbins had directed the stage version solo and the filmmakers brought him in for the movie with the idea that he would direct the big dance numbers, as he had on stage, and Wise would do the plot parts, but midway through the production Robbins was fired after they’d shot most of the numbers), made the same mistake that producer Arthur Freed and directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen had made with the last big film of a Leonard Bernstein musical, On the Town (1949). They shot the opening sequence in New York City (on abandoned tenement blocks that were about to be torn down to make room for Lincoln Center) and created a spectacularly authentic scene that only made the rest of the film look more “fake” than usual because it was all studio-bound. At least one set, the outside window of Doc’s store, gets seen so often we want to wave to it and say hello. The other problem with the movie is the strangeness of the casting. Natalie Wood is spectacularly miscast as a Puerto Rican and it seems amazing to me that the most famous movies about juvenile delinquency, this one and Rebel Without a Cause, both featured her even though that wasn’t her image at all. Richard Beymer is almost totally inert; after West Side Story he got to do one other major movie, playing Nick Adams in a film awkwardly titled Ernest Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, before he sneaked back to the maw from which he’d been pulled: television. What’s more, of the five principals only George Chakiris did his own singing: Wood was dubbed by Marni Nixon (voice double to the stars; she’d already doubled for Deborah Kerr in The King and I and would go on to sub for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady), Beymer by Jimmy Bryant, Tamblyn by Tucker Smith and Moreno (who’d sung for herself in The King and I) by Betty Wand.

Now for the good news: Bernstein’s score, orchestrated by Irwin Kostal and conducted to the nines by Johnny Green, remains imperishably beautiful. Its characteristic combination of soaring quasi-operatic lyricism (which was why Rita Moreno didn’t get to do her own singing as she had in previous musicals) and driving percussion-driven energy. What’s more, the people behind the camera – cinematographer Daniel L. Fapp, production designer Boris Leven, and set decorator Victor A. Gangelin – allowed the backgrounds actually to be colorful. They didn’t decide to represent urban poverty by making everything all dank greens and browns the way a modern version of the story would do it; scene after scene is literally a feast for the eyes, dazzling us with ultra-bright colors. Sondheim’s lyrics match the brilliance of Bernstein’s music and come close to what he would later do on his own as composer as well as lyric writer, and his acid-tinged jibes in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” look forward to similar satires in his own big shows, like “A Little Priest” in Sweeney Todd and “It’s Hot Up Here” in Sunday in the Park with George. The film is also impeccably paced, with number following number with freight-train regularity – though, as with most musicals, the story gets considerably talkier as it progresses. And while the stars may be weak, the supporting players are powerful and thoroughly consistent: there’s a reason why George Chakiris and Rita Moreno both won Academy Awards for their performances while Wood and Beymer didn’t even get nominated. They just stand out that much better – as does Russ Tamblyn, the true unsung hero of this movie.

Dwight Macdonald faulted the film on its initial release for, among other things, having cast the big fight scenes, including the final rumble, in a partly realistic and partly stylized version which he called “nonart.” But while the confrontations in West Side Story may bear little resemblance to actual teen street violence then or now (of course now the gangs would be dealing drugs and be armed with better guns than the police trying to catch them – represented in West Side Story by two cops, Simon Oakland as plainclothes detective Schrank and William Bramley as uniformed officer Krupke, of almost Keystone-esque incompetence), they work on their own terms as half turf battles and half choreography. West Side Story is strangely moving almost in spite of itself – Chino’s murder of Tony seems almost like an afterthought and Maria’s final speech doesn’t have the wallop of Friar Laurence’s in Shakespeare, in which he finally brings the warring families together after the deaths of both their star-crossed heirs – but the combination of Bernstein’s music and the dazzling cinematography make it hold up surprisingly well. One thing I hadn’t remembered was how tight the actors’ pants were; they showed off much bigger baskets than were common in 1961 movies, which no doubt pleased Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents and all the other Gay or Bisexual men who’d been instrumental in creating West Side Story in the first place. And I loved the bizarre character of “Anybody’s” (Susan Oakes), the androgynous female who tries to join the Jets and participate in the gang fights, even though she keeps getting snubbed by the male members of the gang. I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, and I’m sorry he missed what I thought would be the most workable way to update it to the present: make the Jets Black, so it would be a war between Black and Puerto Rican street gangs much like the Black vs. Latino wars that have plagued all too many modern U.S. cities.

Annie Hall (Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Productions, United Artists, 1977)

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

Next up on Turner Classic Movies’ February 16 night of Academy Award-winning films set in or around New York City was Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen’s Best Picture winner and also a movie I saw on its initial theatrical release and absolutely loved. I don’t need to rehash all the publicity Woody Allen has received since, both good and bad; he’s been hailed as the greatest comedy genius in cinema since Charlie Chaplin and reviled (mostly by his ex-partner, Mia Farrow) as literally a child molester. Allen famously announced in advance that he wouldn’t be attending the Academy Awards ceremony the year Annie Hall was nominated because he’d be playing his usual gig as a jazz clarinetist in a New York nightclub on Monday nights. (The Academy Awards were held on Mondays then; later they moved them to Sundays, where they are now: the next one will be March 2, 2025.) That was either a well-intended or unintended fuck-you to Hollywood and the entire movie industry, not all that surprising given that Annie Hall itself is largely about the clash of cultures between New York and Los Angeles. The film’s two central characters are mid-level stand-up comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and his girlfriend, aspiring (but not too aspiring) nightclub singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). They meet in New York and bond over a shared love of the arts and intellectual pursuits – though many of the movie’s laughs come from our realization that Alvy and Annie are as pretentious and surface-driven as the pseudo-intellectual acquaintances of whom they make fun.

Perhaps more than any of his other movies, Annie Hall is a compendium of Woody Allen’s Greatest Hits: during the scene in which he does stand-up in front of a largely student crowd at the University of Wisconsin, his jokes come almost completely from a comedy album he’d recorded for United Artists Records (United Artists was also the co-producer and distributor for Annie Hall) a decade earlier, including his marvelous line, “I was expelled from NYU during my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” Basically Annie Hall is about the culture clash not only between New York and L.A. but between crankily Jewish Alvy and white-bread shiksa Annie, who refers to her grandmother as “Grammy Hall” (“I’m dating a woman from a Norman Rockwell painting!” Alvy cracks). When Alvy spends a weekend with Annie’s family they’re accompanied by Annie’s ex, Duane Hall (a marvelous early performance by Christopher Walken back when he was still young and relatively cute), a thoroughgoing weirdo but one in “safe” Anglo-Protestant ways. When Annie spends a weekend with Alvy’s family they reminisce about how they were literally living in a house built into the Coney Island roller coaster when Alvy was born. The film periodically flashes back to sequences showing the prepubescent Alvy at school – the adult Alvy alternately sits back from the kids and takes his old place in the classroom – and in one of the film’s funniest moments he has the kids in class bark out about the careers they’re going to undertake as grown people. A number of them declare they’ll be financially successful in investment banking or finance. One boy says, “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict,” and an impossibly sweet-looking girl says, “I’m into leather.”

Alvy and Annie have something of a sex life together, though it runs into trouble when Annie insists on smoking pot before they make love and Alvy thinks his own masculinity (remember this is Woody Allen we’re talking about, hardly anyone’s idea – except maybe Allen’s own – of a sex god) ought to be enough to turn her on without chemical stimuli. Ultimately they drift apart and Annie takes up with rock musician Tony Lacey (Paul Simon) and moves to L.A. with him. Alvy flies there, ostensibly to appear as a presenter on an awards show (a gig he misses by oversleeping) but really to try to win Annie back. There’s a great scene at a party in which, this being the late 1970’s, the guests are all taking hits of a fairly large supply of cocaine. Rob (Tony Roberts), Alvy’s old childhood friend, is now a star on a terrible TV sitcom (Alvy visits him while in the mixing room where they’re adding laugh tracks to the show to make the lame gag lines sound funny; I’ve seen enough TV shows like that in real life I’d like to take the laugh-track machine aside and ask it, “What the hell do you think is so funny?”), and he brings along the coke supply and tells a thunderstruck Alvy the stuff costs $2,000 per ounce. “Two thousand dollars an ounce?” Alvy asks incredulously before he puts some up his nostril – and he sneezes, blowing the precious powder all over everything and everybody. Also at the party is a panicked young man who’s on the phone speaking his one line in the film, “I forgot my mantra!” I’d remembered that line – a spoof of the Maharishi and his whole meditation cult – but hadn’t realized until last night that the actor who delivered it was the very young Jeff Goldblum.

Annie Hall has become the archetypal Woody Allen movie, so much so that in 2004 writers Randy Mack and Zack Ordynans and director Van Flesher made a weird spoof of it called Burning Annie, filmed entirely at Marshall University in West Virginia and starring Gary Lundy as Max, a college student whose obsession with Annie Hall is ruining his love life because he insists on showing it to every woman he’s interested in, and they break up with him in similar ways to what Annie and Alvy go through in Annie Hall. The film even named its central character “Max” in imitation of Annie’s pet name for Alvy, and it features a punk band called “Anhedonia.” (Anhedonia – a psychological term meaning the inability to be happy – was Woody Allen’s original working title for Annie Hall.) I hadn’t seen Annie Hall in quite a while, but I had fond memories of it and this time around one of the pleasant surprises is Diane Keaton’s voice. No, she wasn’t one of the golden throats of the 20th century, but she wrapped her voice around a couple of 1920’s and 1930’s standards, “Seems Like Old Times” by Carmen Lombardo (Guy Lombardo’s brother) and John Jacob Loeb, and “It Had to Be You” by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn. She sang in a pleasant, earnest way that reminded me very much of Judy Holliday, while the use of old songs like that offered harbingers of Allen’s marvelous use of music in later films to establish who in the dramatis personae is romantically or sexually compatible with whom. Annie Hall is also the movie that started a short-lived fad for women wearing men’s neckties (Diane Keaton sports one in several sequences) and for adding the words “lah-dee-dah” to the language, reflecting Annie’s devil-may-care attitude about the world that Alvy first finds charming and then finds totally repulsive – especially when Annie gets behind the wheel of her yellow Volkswagen convertible and drives as if watching the road and looking where you’re going were strictly optional. While Annie Hall seems dated in many ways – it’s as old now as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was when producer Bob Evans, director Jack Clayton, screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and stars Robert Redford and Mia Farrow made an excruciatingly boring movie of it in 1974 – it also holds up surprisingly well and is a testament to the enduring power of Woody Allen’s cinematic genius, whatever you think about the more sordid aspects of his life.