Judd Family: Truth Be Told (Propagate Content, Lifetime Entertainment, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 11) at 8 p.m. I wanted to watch the third and fourth episodes of the Lifetime mini-series documentary Judd Family: Truth Be Told, and my husband Charles joined me for most of it as he had the night before. The film was divided into four episodes: the hour-long A Mother’s Smile, Why Not Me?, and Love Can Build a Bridge, and the 90-minute series closer Child of the Light. The story of Naomi and Wynonna Judd, the mother-daughter singing duo who took the world of country music by storm in the early 1980’s, and Ashley Judd (Naomi’s other daughter and Wynonna’s half-sister), who because she didn’t have a singing voice looked for another outlet for her creativity and found it in acting, has the elements of a classic American Gothic tale. Though “Judd” was the name of Naomi’s father, Naomi herself was born Diana Ellen Judd in Ashland, Kentucky on January 11, 1946. After a childhood during which she played piano in church (adding The Judds to the long list of major music talents – not only the great Black rockers who grew up in gospel music but whites like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton – who began their careers as children in church) and got molested by her great-uncle Charlie when she was only 3 ½, Naomi dated a high-school football player named Charlie Jordan when she was just 15. The inevitable happened and she got “with child,” giving birth to Wynonna – or, as she was called at birth, Christina Ciminella (getting the last name from Mike Ciminella, whom Naomi didn’t love but agreed to marry to avoid the intense stigma of being an unwed mother, which had caused Naomi’s own mother to throw her out of the family home) – on May 30, 1964. Almost four years later, on April 19, 1968, Diana Judd and Mike Ciminella had their own child, daughter Ashley.

What’s most fascinating to me about this story is that all three female Judds were molested as children; Wynonna got it from some of her mother’s boyfriends after Diana broke up with Ciminella and moved to Los Angeles, and Ashley was invited at age 14 to enter a modeling contest in which first prize was a year-long stint as a model in Japan. Alas, the “prize” included systematic sexual abuse from the man who was supposedly her agent, as well as similarly unwanted attentions from a number of other males in the entourage, including a Frenchman who out-and-out raped her twice. I couldn’t help but think of the controversy surrounding Sigmund Freud’s publication of a study indicating that 25 percent of all women were sexually abused as children, and his later recantation of that and his statement that women were merely fantasizing that abuse – which led him to the Oedipal theory and a lot of speculation about human sexuality and its effect on behavior that was trendy for quite a while until most of it was finally rejected. Based on stories like this one – and the number of real-life victims of childhood sexual abuse I’ve met (and not all of them women, either!) – I find myself wondering if Freud’s original statistic was in error in the other direction and it’s really more than 25 percent of women who were sexually abused as children. The miniseries was framed by the story of Naomi Judd’s sudden and seemingly inexplicable death by suicide (at least that’s the consensus view) on April 30, 2022 at age 76 just on the eve of The Judds’ induction ceremony into the Country Music Hall of Fame and a major reunion tour Wynonna had planned for them. (Wynonna went ahead with the tour anyway, still calling it “The Judds” and recruiting other, younger women country stars – Martina McBride, Kelsea Ballerini, Ashley McBryde, Faith Hill, Brandi Carlile, Little Big Town, and Trisha Yearwood – to take her mom’s place.)

I remember The Judds as a major phenomenon in 1980’s culture that transcended the bonds of country music, even though I can’t remember ever actually hearing one of The Judds’ songs. Among the people interviewed for the show were Wynonna and Ashley Judd, Naomi’s brother Mark Judd, Naomi’s widower Larry Strickland (whom she’d been dating when The Judds rocketed to stardom in the early 1980’s but who broke up with her when The Judds started getting famous – apparently he didn’t want to be in the position of “Mr. Judd” the spouses of such other famous countrywomen as Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton found themselves in – only to get back together and marry her as The Judds were just starting their inevitable descent in popularity), and various people who knew them, including fellow women country stars Martina McBride and Reba McIntire and Rolling Stone writer Alanna Nash. Alanna Nash had an unusual connection with the story; after having co-written Dolly Parton’s autobiography and while researching what became a series of books about Elvis Presley, she wrote for Rolling Stone because as a native of Kentucky herself, she was considered the magazine’s expert on country music and its performers. She wrote a scathing review of the first of Naomi Judd’s two alleged autobiographies, Love Can Build a Bridge, called “Country Crock.” In it she said that Naomi Judd had actually grown up in the middle class and had exaggerated her girlhood poverty to create a more down-home image for herself and her daughter. Naomi’s book contains an elaborate account of how to make soap from lye – something the real Naomi never did, though she’d been shown doing it (or at least faking it) on a local country-music TV show in Nashville by a host who also saw it as a way to help the Judd family build up a suitably rustic image. One can readily see why Naomi Judd kept up this pretense; she and Wynonna broke through at a time when the biggest women country singers were Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, who proudly proclaimed their statuses as a coal-miner’s daughter (Lynn) or a tobacco-farmer’s daughter (Parton).

One of the interviews with Wynonna contains her complaint that whenever she and Naomi were interviewed together at the height of their fame, Naomi would launch into a series of embellishments of the truth and Wynonna would be forced to go along with her mom’s increasingly outrageous fictions about their past. One of the features of Judd Family: Truth Be Told is the producers were able to access surviving cassette demos Naomi and Wynonna Judd had recorded in the late 1970’s, with just their voices and Wynonna’s guitar. The show featured sequences with Wynonna, Ashley and their uncle Mark listening to these tapes and being astonished by their quality, which was equal to anything The Judds recorded professionally later despite the low-fidelity equipment they were recorded on. The tapes also mostly included songs Naomi had written but were never recorded professionally by The Judds or anyone else, though before The Judds hit it big Naomi had sold a few songs to already famous artists – one of the established ways to break into the field – including a song called “Had a Dream (For the Heart)” which Elvis Presley recorded in 1976 as the “B”-side for his single “Hurt.” (Elvis’s version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYszKu5yE08.) The show also features interviews with both Wynonna and Ashley Judd as well as Naomi’s story mostly told in her own voice reading audiobook versions of her memoirs, Love Can Build a Bridge (1993) and River of Time (2017). The latter was subtitled, with grim irony, My Descent Into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope. I think one could make the case with Naomi Judd that Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder’s biographer, made with Marilyn Monroe: that in their cases therapy might actually have been counterproductive because it awakened long-buried memories both Marilyn and Naomi might have been better off keeping buried.

One of the grimmest tales in 4 ½ hours of documentary television full of them is Naomi’s reaction when Ashley returned from her year-long stay as a sexual commodity in Japan; she read the parts about the Frenchman who raped her twice and derisively referred to him as “your boyfriend.” I briefly wondered how a woman who’d been sexually abused herself (not only by the great-uncle who raped her at 3 ½ but one of her later boyfriends who wouldn’t take no for an answer) could be so monumentally unsupportive of her own daughter’s victimhood, but that’s how the culture of abuse keeps going. Even the women (or men) who survive sexual abuse are all too often told, directly or indirectly, that it was “your fault” and “you were asking for it.” One of the odder things is that not only did Naomi and Wynonna Judd look more like sisters on stage than mother and daughter, but Naomi frequently looked like the younger partner. This was because, instead of using alcohol or drugs to overcome the strain of fame, Wynonna used food. She was always a large woman and her mom looked petite by comparison, especially since mom dressed in a sexually alluring fashion and pranced around the stage while singing his backing vocals, while Wynonna looked frumpier and less attractive. One therapist met Wynonna when she signed up for a rehab program that, unlike most others, didn’t focus on just one sort of rehabilitation but took a come-as-you-are attitude. Wynonna in turn brought in Naomi because one of this therapist’s rules was to meet the immediate family and observe the dynamics between them to see what about their family dynamics was proving toxic to his main client.

Judd Family: Truth Be Told is a sad, bitter story of a monumentally dysfunctional family which sold themselves to America – or at least that large swath of it which listens to country music – as a paragon of mutual love, respect and support. And yet the musicians and others who traveled with The Judds on their tour buses all agreed that, whatever hostility was going on between them offstage, onstage they were not only perfect professionals but exuded a sense of togetherness and camaraderie. Whatever they were arguing about offstage, onstage they were totally on the same wavelength and ideal partners. And Wynonna Judd as a solo artist has had the same problems as the individual Beatles did after their breakup. According to her manager, Wynonna’s first album sold five million copies, her second a bit over half that, and her third a comparatively meager 1.4 million. Just about everything Wynonna did after her mom’s retirement was going to be invidiously compared to what they’d done together, both artistically and commercially, which is why after Naomi’s bout with hepatitis C that forced her out of the act, as soon as she recovered (with massive doses of interferon, then a highly experimental drug), on the rare occasions that The Judds were reunited audiences literally flocked to see them and buy tickets for their shows.

FBI Girl (Jedgar Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

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

On May 11 after Judd Family: Truth Be Told my husband Charles and I huddled in front of the computer and watched an engaging if simple-minded thriller from Lippert Pictures in 1951 called FBI Girl. It’s actually set in a relatively small community called “Central City,” which is apparently its state’s capital, and it begins with an anxious conference between the state’s governor, Owen Grisby (Raymond Greenleaf), and his overall fixer, Blair (Raymond Burr, in a riveting performance that commands the movie). Grisby is concerned that the U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime is coming to Central City, and while publicly he presents a façade of unconcern, privately he’s worried sick over a murder he committed 20 years before under the name “John Williams.” He’s particularly concerned that the FBI has a card with his fingerprints on file in their Washington, D.C. main office, and he wants to make that card, the biggest piece of evidence against him, “disappear.” Blair has a way out of that: he knows a Washington ne’er-do-well named Paul Craig (Don Garner) whose sister Natalie (Margia Dean) just happens to work as a fingerprint file clerk in the FBI’s offices. Paul somehow inveigles Natalie to steal Williams’s fingerprint card from the FBI files, but she’s inadvertently caught doing it by a fellow clerk who bumps into her as she’s extracting the card and wonders why she’s removing a card without a proper permission slip. Natalie gets away, though she doesn’t have the card, and Blair, who isn’t a leaving-loose-ends-lying-around kind of guy, sends out a hit man named George Denning (Alexander Pope) to kill both Natalie and Paul. Denning kills Natalie but Paul is only wounded, though that’s no problem for Denning: he sneaks into the hospital room were Paul is being wounded disguised as a priest, and manages to work his way in despite a nurse and a real priest who just happen to be visiting Paul Craig’s room while Denning was there to kill him. One wonders why neither the D.C. police nor the FBI have bothered to put a security detail on Paul’s room, but that becomes apparent when Denning shows up to make a second attempt on Paul’s life – only the figure in the bed is not Paul but a law-enforcement officer pretending to be him. Various good guys, including the film’s two leads, FBI special agents Glen Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Jeff Donley (George Brent), try to catch Denning, but instead of being taken alive he’s chased to the ledge of a hospital building and ultimately falls to his death.

Anxious to get the fingerprint card neutralized as a piece of evidence, back in Central City Blair hits on the idea of making up a fake FBI fingerprint card with Governor Grisby’s prints on it but allegedly belonging to a “John Williams,” a character they’ll create out of thin air by killing off an alcoholic derelict and passing him off as Williams so the FBI will declare Williams dead and the case against him closed. Only Agents Stedman and Donley get suspicious over the difference between the description they have on file for “Williams” and the one accompanying the prints sent over from Central City. What’s more, Blair now has not just one murder to cover up, but three (plus the more or less accidental death of his hit man Denning), and Governor Grisby (ya remember Governor Grisby?) is getting antsy about the whole thing and tells Blair that maybe, just maybe, the best thing for him to do would be to resign and turn himself in. (No doubt writers Rupert Hughes – Howard Hughes’s uncle – Dwight V. Babcock and Richard H. Landau were channeling Claude Rains’s character from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington here.) And he still doesn’t have Governor Grisby’s incriminating fingerprint card as “John Williams,” though he’s got another ace up his sleeve. Carl Chercourt (Tom Drake) is a lobbyist in the pay of Blair’s organization who’s dating another FBI file clerk, Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter) – who, in a preposterous coincidence the writers should have been ashamed of, is one of three roommates of the late Natalie Craig – and is engaged to marry her. He tries to get her to steal the incriminating “Williams” fingerprint card, but she’s honest enough to report the approach to Stedman and Donley, who make a copy of the “Williams” card to use as a decoy to flush the conspirators out in the open. Chercourt, operating from a palatial apartment decorated in moderne style (I suspect it was the home of one of the film’s producers and was in the L.A. area), pleads with Shirley for her understanding, saying he’s the son of a U.S. Senator who always tried to help other people and died penniless, so he’s determined to be an influence-peddler and make as much money as he can. Ultimately he, Blair and Grisby are all arrested.

FBI Girl is a surprisingly competent thriller despite some wild improbabilities in the plot, and for that we have mostly director William Berke to thank. Berke had risen from independent filmmaking to a stable berth at RKO making the later films in the Falcon detective series in the mid-1940’s, but with RKO’s decision to get out of the “B”-picture business in 1947 and Howard Hughes’s takeover of the studio a year later, Berke was back to working independently; he would film the first two novels in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, Cop Hater (1957) and The Mugger (1958), just before his death in 1958 at the relatively young age of 54. Berke manages to keep FBI Girl moving swiftly and get some relatively creative camera compositions out of his cinematographer, PRC veteran Jack Greenhalgh. It’s a nicely done thriller even though Cesar Romero and George Brent are bizarrely bland as the heroes and Audrey Totter, who in previous films like The Lady in the Lake (1947) was alluring and acted capably, here sinks to an almost porn-star level of incompetence. No wonder Raymond Burr easily takes the acting honors: he’s implacable and almost supernatural in his ability to anticipate the good guys’ plans and thwart them – until he runs out of luck and “juice” by the end. Also one amusing aspect of FBI Girl is the name of the production company set up to make it: “Jedgar Productions,” after the long-time (1924 to 1972) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who during his lifetime insisted on approval rights for every movie and TV show made about the FBI and its agents.

Satan in High Heels (Vega Productions, Cosmic Films, Inc., 1962)

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

Last night (Friday, May 9) my husband Charles and I watched a weird movie from 1962 that I hadn’t heard of before until I got a copy of a two-CD compilation of five 1950’s LP’s by guitarist Mundell Lowe. Actually only four of the five albums actually featured Lowe on guitar; the fifth was his film score for an exploitation movie called Satan in High Heels, directed by Jerald Intrator (which sounds more like a job title in the government of ancient Rome than a modern-day last name) from a script by Harold Bonnett and John T. Chapman. I was interested enough in the music to seek out the film on YouTube, and last night Charles and I watched it with (blessedly) only one commercial interruption instead of the multiple ones we got during Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard. As you might guess from the title, Satan in High Heels is a story about a femme fatale, Stacey Kane (Meg Myles, true name Billie Jean Jones), who when the movie begins is working as a burlesque performer in a carnival somewhere in the Midwest. She’s legally married to Rudy (Earl Hammond), but he’s become addicted to heroin in the backstory. (Actually it’s the Wikipedia page on the film that mentions heroin; the script itself doesn’t say what drug he’s addicted to, but it’s not hard to guess from the way we see him “jonesing” later in the film after he’s relapsed.) When we meet him he’s just got through rehab and he’s received $900 from a magazine for an article about his experiences. But, acting like the paramours of Bessie Smith in St. Louis Blues (1929) and Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black (1935), Stacey steals her husband’s bankroll and uses it to go to New York City. On the flight to New York she’s openly cruised by a much older man, businessman Arnold Kenyon (Mike Keene), and by the time the plane lands she’s agreed to become his mistress in exchange for a place to live in his apartment and a job at a nightclub called Pepe’s.

Pepe’s is run by its namesake, a hard-edged woman named Pepe (Grayson Hall) who’s described in the Wikipedla page as a Lesbian, though that isn’t at all clear in the actual movie. She does have a really butch character, though, and I suspect that the producers of Satan in High Heels, Leonard Burton (who apparently also published fetish magazines like Exotique, High Heels, Bizarre Life, Unique World, and Corporal) and Ben Himmel, were trying to get their movie out in front of the major-studio (Columbia) release of a similarly sordid story, Walk on the Wild Side (also 1962), which featured Barbara Stanwyck as a Lesbian madam (though once again it was only hinted at, notably in her fierce possessiveness towards her “girls”). Meg Myles isn’t much of an actress (though she had a surprisingly long career, including playing supporting roles in the TV soap operas The Edge of Night, All My Children, Search for Tomorrow, Where My Heart Is, and The Doctors), but the moment she opens her mouth and sings “You Walked Out of My Life” during her audition at Pepe’s, it becomes clear what her real talent was. Sure, she broke into both singing and acting after a successful career as a model (according to her Wikipedia page, her measurements were 42-24-36, though oddly costume designers Milton C. Herman and Samuel Robert have her wear tight-fitting bras under her stunning leather outfits and don’t offer her a chance to show off her décolletage), but she recorded at least three LP’s, including one backed by jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles (who also recorded with Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae) and a live album for Mercury called At the Living Room.

To take her into his life Arnold Kenyon has to break up with his previous mistress, Felice (Nolia Chapman, who surprisingly has no other credits on her imdb.com page even though she turns in the best performance in the film despite being in only two scenes; her pathos as she realizes she’s being dumped is unforgettable). Alas, Arnold has competition for Stacey’s rather dubious charms in the person of his own son Lawrence (Robert Yuro), a typical spoiled rich kid who’s smitten with his dad’s new plaything from the get-go and is determined to use his Corvette sports car (a present from Daddy which Daddy tries to get back) to seduce her. (In case you’re wondering where Lawrence’s mother is in all this, Arnold has packed her off for an extended vacation in Europe that could last years so she doesn’t interfere with his extra-relational activity.) While all this romantic byplay is going on, Pepe is supposedly rehearsing a new show at her club which is going to open in two days, and with all Stacey’s gallivanting Pepe is understandably worried about whether she’ll be in shape to perform. So she recruits another singer, the British-born Sabrina (playing herself), to bolster the program and take over from Stacey should she bomb out and be unable to perform. (The credits billed her as “Introducing … SABRINA,” even though she’d been in three previous feature films and two TV shows.) Sabrina was born in 1936 (making her a decade younger than Marilyn Monroe and two years younger than Meg Myles) and, like Myles, she gets to sing two songs in this film. Unfortunately, one has to be heard under the dialogue and the other, “What Have You Done for Me Lately?,” is a blatant knockoff of Monroe’s classic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It also doesn’t help that Sabrina has none of Myles’s talent for phrasing (nowhere near the level of Billie Holiday’s or Patsy Cline’s, but enough to give Myles’s vocals some real interest and musicality) and sings in a bland, cooing voice that’s a pale imitation of Monroe’s.

Matters proceed in this rather strained fashion, with Arnold spying on his son and his girlfriend from the big picture window of his apartment, until a diabolus ex machina enters the picture in the form of Stacey’s ex, Rudy (ya remember Rudy?). It’s no surprise at all that the shock of Stacey both leaving him and ripping him off led Rudy to go back to using heroin, and Rudy attacks Stacey with a knife, intending not to kill her but just to cut her up so badly she’ll no longer be attractive and she won’t be able to keep using and sexually exploiting other men. Only Rudy is jonesing so badly he literally can’t hold on to the knife, and Stacey grabs it from him and either accidentally or intentionally kills him. Then she leaves the body behind for Arnold and Lawrence Kenyon to deal with and walks off into the New York night, presumably to pick up another round of gullible male victims and ruin their lives, too. The main problem with Satan In High Heels is that it’s dull; we get one brief nude scene of Stacey while she’s skinny-dipping with Lawrence at his dad’s country estate, but a) the camera is miles away from her and b) we only get to see a glimpse of her naked back: no “naughty bits.” It reminded me of the similar exploitation films from the 1930’s that seemed aimed at warning people away from the demi-monde by making the demi-monde look too boring to be worth bothering with. And that isn’t just my 2025 opinion, either: the New York Times had a similar reaction when Satan in High Heels was new. “Nobody is likely to be corrupted by Satan in High Heels,” the Times reviewer wrote. “Yesterday's new film entry at the Forum demonstrates once again that vice can be dull. From the first glimpse of Meg Myles as a bumptious carnival entertainer wearing tights to bait the breaths of ogling males, it is clear that she is up to no good. ... If this sort of gutter drama were to be made effective, the title role would require, at the very least, a Brigitte Bardot. Miss Myles, alas, is not the type. Singing a couple of songs with sophisticated professionalism, she seems indisputably feminine but insufficiently fatale. Since this deprives the chronicle of its point, the filmmakers’ objective emerges as nothing more than slick sensationalism.”

There are some surprisingly effective noir-style shots from director Intrator and cinematographer Bernard Hirschensohn, along with two excellent performances: from Nolia Chapman as Felice and 1960’s sub-“B” movie stalwart Del Tenney as Paul, Pepe’s piano player and a pretty obviously drawn Gay stereotype which Tenney manages to fill out and make believable. Also, Mundell Lowe’s music (released as a soundtrack album on the Charlie Parker Records label, an enterprise founded by Doris Sydnor, Parker’s third wife and legal heir, with a business partner to release Parker’s and Lester Young’s old tapes and make new recordings, many of which featured people who’d played with Parker and/or performed his music) is quite exciting and dynamic, though the album suffers from Lowe’s choice not to play on it (the guitarist is Barry Galbraith), and it doesn’t include either of Meg Myles’s songs from the film. (Perhaps conflicting record contracts prevented her from being on the album.) But I wouldn’t say Satan in High Heels is a bad movie with a potentially good movie in it trying to get out: it’s just a mediocre piece of cinematic flotsam whose level of sinning probably wasn’t all that shocking in 1962 and certainly isn’t now!

Law and Order: "Tough Love" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 8, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 8) I watched what I think are the next-to-last episodes of this year’s seasons of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show was called “Tough Love” and it begins with an argument between African-American sports manager Ted Hunter (Stephen A. Smith) and one of his clients, NBA basketball player Jackson Dean (Dushaun Thompson). Hunter tells Jackson he isn’t a major star at the level of LeBron James and he doesn’t have the money to keep paying 11 old friends he’s put on his staff just for companionship. The next scene shows Ted Hunter stabbed to death in a local park. Then, after throwing us that big red herring in the person of Jackson Dean and his protégés, writers Pamela J. Wechsler and Scott Gold show us Hunter’s family. He’s raising two teenage sons, Eric (Dasan Frazier) and Josh (Arthur McAlpine III), to play football since football was Ted’s sport during his days as an athlete himself. (Their mother isn’t in the picture because she died sometime before.) Ted’s rough coaching has built up Eric to the level of a major college-level player and a seemingly sure spot in the NFL, but Josh is so uninterested in a career in football that he’s faked a knee injury as an excuse not to play in high-school practices. Every time Josh flakes out on an exercise routine, Ted pushed him harder until Josh literally started vomiting under the strain.

Josh was scared to death of telling his father he didn’t want to play because, as his brother Eric put it, “In our house football is a religion.” Ultimately it turns out that Josh was the one who stabbed his father Ted to death, and at the trial Josh’s attorney tries to make a case that Josh killed his father in self-defense because, even though he wasn’t in immediate danger from his dad when he killed him, dad’s systematically abusive conduct made Josh think that if his dad lived, the strains dad would put him through would literally kill him. Concerned that Josh’s harrowing account of his father’s abuse on the witness stand might lead the jury to acquit him, prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) subpoenas Josh’s brother Eric to testify against him as a hostile witness, then persuasively argues to the jury that Eric survived their dad’s training regimen and therefore Josh could have, too. As the proverbial kid who never did well in P.E. and hated almost every moment of it, I could readily identify with Josh and his torment. If I’d had a parent who’d tried to make an athlete of me whether I wanted it or not, I’d have been so angry with him I just might have killed him myself. This wasn’t an especially good Law and Order – most of the rest of this season’s episodes have been stronger – but it hit home for me.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Aperture" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 8, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed was called “Aperture” and was one of their more bizarre family-dysfunction stories. A young couple are touring a fancy New York apartment that’s for rent, and the supercilious real-estate agent is going on and on and on about the spectacular views the place offers. It later turns out that the couple can’t afford the place they’re looking at but they like to attend open-houses and pretend they can. Midway through their tour, the man spots a telescope in one of the windows and starts looking at the apartment building across the street à la Rear Window when he sees a young Black man holding a white girl at gunpoint and forcing her to put her clothes on after presumably raping her. He reports this to the police and the case gets referred to the Special Victims Unit. The police investigate the scene of the crime and find that it was an apartment being subletted by its usual tenant, who was out of town on vacation. The Black man was a native of Texas who rented it by stealing the credit-card information of a customer at a store in Houston where he worked. The police on the scene realize that whatever happened in that apartment was filmed by a camera on a tripod. The cops also have a hard time identifying the woman in the scene, though she turns out to be 18-year-old Josephine “Josie” DeWinn, who lives with her mother Natalie (Kate McCluggage) and stepfather Gordon, Jr. (Christian Campbell) in a luxury apartment with a long spiral staircase and a maid (Mila Milosevic) who leads the cops up the stairs when they come to question the DeWinns. Gordon, Jr. and Natalie met as co-workers when they were both married to other people, with whom they had children – Natalie had Josie and Gordon had a 17-year-old son named Atlas (Tristan Spohn) – but even though they were both married, they fell in love, started dating and ultimately divorced their previous partners and married each other.

The Black man who filmed the whole thing turns out to be Jaden Thomas (Mickey Nixon), a Houston native whom Atlas met online as partners in a multi-player video game even though they’d never seen each other in person. It turns out Atlas had formed a crush on Josie and hatched this whole scheme to get together with her: his friend Jaden would steal someone else’s credit card information and use it to rent an apartment in New York City. Then Jaden would pose as a kidnapper, hold a gun on both Atlas and Josie, and force them to have sex with each other – which he wanted (rationalizing it on the basis that they really weren’t biological relatives) and she didn’t. There’s a brief red-herring suspect in Josie’s biological father, who’s eking out a living renting tour boats in the Bahamas and was busted there when Atlas, visiting him along with Josie, dropped his phone in the water. After Atlas got a new phone and left the old one behind, Josie’s dad took Atlas’s original phone to be repaired and to get the data off it. The techs at the service company he used discovered a secret file of pictures of Josie wearing a bikini and nothing else and busted dad for child porn until he was able to prove that he didn’t have anything to do with those images. Ultimately Atlas gets arrested for rape and kidnapping after Jaden decided he wants more money than the $2,000 Atlas offered him and hits up the DeWinns for $5 million, sending them the film and threatening to post it to social media if they don’t pay. SVU has done similar stories before, including one from the Christopher Meloni years (“Families,” season five, episode 15, first aired February 10, 2004) in which a young man unwittingly has sex with a young woman who turns out to be his half-sister, but this one was SVU at its kinkiest and most dysfunctional in terms of the family relationships as well as an object lesson in the possibly adverse consequences of divorce and remarriage, especially when children are involved.

David Harding, Counterspy (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work on May 8 in time to catch the last few minutes of the “Aperture” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and I was originally going to change the channel to watch Elsbeth on CBS until it turned out to be a rerun of an episode we’d already seen, in which one-half of a two-brother team of cutthroat stockbrokers decides he’s tired of the fast life and the meanness that goes with it and is going to give his money away – and his brother kills him over it. Instead we ended up on YouTube watching the first film in Columbia Pictures’ short-lived Counterspy series based on a popular (lasting 15 seasons, 1942-1947) radio show produced by Phillips H. Lord, creator of Gangbusters, Mr. District Attorney and We, the People. Like its successor, Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, this film, David Harding, Counterspy, was made in 1950 and featured not very prepossessing actor Howard St. John as David Harding, leader of the U.S. government’s ultra-secret Counterspy agency. This film actually tells most of its story in a flashback sequence set in 1943, in which the principal enemies of the United States were Germany and Japan. It’s centered around a torpedo factory in a fictitious small town called Malino, New Mexico (at least I’m presuming it’s in New Mexico because, though writers Cliff Johnston and Tom Reed don’t tell us for sure, that’s where the cars’ license plates are from), in which a young Navy officer named Iverson is found dead. Ostensibly he burned himself to death by accident in his apartment, but David Harding is convinced he was really murdered. So is his best friend, Lieutenant Commander Jerry A. Baldwin (Willard Parker), who’s resentful at being called away from his other duties to investigate Iverson’s death and find out who’s responsible for sabotaging the output of the Malino factory so its torpedoes don’t travel accurately to their targets the way they’re supposed to. It also turns out that Baldwin was the boyfriend of Iverson’s widow Betty (Audrey Long) until she jilted him to marry Iverson.

As Baldwin takes the late Iverson’s job and inherits Betty as his secretary, the romance between them rekindles and they start dating each other at a combination nightclub, dance hall and dive bar called the Jade Café. What Baldwin doesn’t know – and neither do we until the writers give us the information about halfway through this 70-minute movie – is that Betty herself is part of the sabotage plot, working for a white-haired old guy named Dr. George Vickers (Raymond Greenleaf) – what was it with the Counterspy writers about making doctors the heads of their villainous plots? The second film, Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, also featured a doctor as the principal villain and a woman secretary as his main contact, though in Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard the woman was just an unwitting spy: the doctor was extracting secret information from her under the guise of giving her hypnotic treatments to combat her post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Vickers realizes that, while she was never in love with Iverson, she’s attracted enough to Baldwin that Betty has become a liability in their plot. Ultimately Betty gets herself shot and killed trying to protect Baldwin from the baddies’ plot – an ending mandated by the Production Code, though I was expecting Betty to survive at the end, turn states’ evidence against the saboteurs, get a light sentence and marry Baldwin when she got out. David Harding, Counterspy didn’t really gain anything from the flashback structure, and though the film could have been stronger if Johnston and Reed had done more to illustrate Betty’s crisis of conscience (go along with her role in the villains’ plot or Confess All to Baldwin out of love for him as well as her country?), as it stands it’s just a pretty ordinary thriller and hardly what I was hoping for when I looked it up on YouTube after Charles and I had quite liked Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard.

The Vanishing (Argos Films, Co-Productiefonds Binnenlandse Omroep, Golden Egg Films, Ingrid Productions, MGS Film, Stichting Produktiefonds voor Nederlandse Films, Televisie Radio Omroep Stichting [TROS], 1988)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 7) I watched a rather grim film on Turner Classic Movies: The Vanishing (1988), a Dutch movie directed and co-written by George Sluizer based on The Golden Egg, a 1984 Dutch novel written by the film’s co-author, Tim Krabbé. The movie’s original Dutch title, Spoorloos, literally translates to “Without a Trace.” The film is partly in Dutch and partly in French (which briefly threw my husband Charles when he finally got home from work half an hour before it ended; I’d told him it was a Dutch movie but he clearly heard French on the soundtrack) and tells the story of a young couple, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege). Though they live in The Netherlands, they are driving through the south of France when their Renault car runs out of gas in the middle of a dark tunnel. Saskia, who’s regularly had dreams of being carried off into space inside a golden egg, freaks out when Rex walks out of the tunnel to go get help. She’s left behind in the car while he returns with a jerry-can full of gas which he puts in the car to refuel it. They drive to the nearest gas station, where Rex playfully gives Saskia the keys because he’s agreed to let her drive for a while. The gas station has a convenience store inside where Rex sends Saskia to buy them a beer and a Coke. Then Saskia totally disappears and it’s not until the end of the movie that we finally find out what happened to her. Meanwhile, we get a few scenes involving Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) – the name means “The Gloomy One.” We learn that as a boy he contemplated leaping off the balcony of his family’s second-floor apartment and, unlike most other boys who have that fantasy, he actually did it. Later on, as an adult chemistry teacher with a wife, Simone (Bernadette Le Saché), and two daughters, he rescues a teenage girl from drowning in a French canal and turns her over to her parents. Raymond keeps the doll the girl was holding in her hand when she nearly drowned as a keepsake, and his daughters acclaim him as a hero.

After Saskia’s disappearance, Rex goes on with his life but still can’t get her out of his mind, even when he finds a new partner, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), who understandably tells him to forget about Saskia and concentrate on building his relationship with her instead. (Quite frankly, Lieneke is the sanest character in the film.) But Rex continues to put up “Missing” posters about Saskia until three years later, when his continued attention to the case (including the large amount of debt he’s running up borrowing money to continue his search for Saskia) attracts the attention of Raymond. Raymond casually and matter-of-factly accosts Rex and tells him he’s a sociopath and that, after he did the good work of rescuing the girl from drowning in the canal, he decided to test his moral worthiness (or lack of same) by doing something equally evil. He lures Rex into his car with the promise of showing him exactly what happened to Saskia, and after Rex first tries to beat him up and then uncertainly reconciles with him and drives off with Raymond at the wheel. They’re heading towards the same spot in the south of France where Raymond kidnapped Saskia in the first place. While they’re on the road we get a flashback scene showing us most of what happened to Saskia: for some time Raymond had been obsessed with the idea of kidnapping a woman in broad daylight and arranging it so no one would have any evidence of her existence. He worked out a plan by which he would pretend to be a motorist in need of help hitching a trailer to his car, a lure with which he would trap his female victim and get her to come running to him. Accordingly he zeroed in on Saskia, knocked her out with a chloroform-soaked rag, and then when she was unconscious …

Rex is torn between the desire to get away from Saskia and his curiosity about just what did happen to her, especially since Raymond insists that the only way he’ll ever find out is if he agrees to undergo the same fate as her. Raymond offers Rex a cup of coffee poured from a thermos which has been spiked with a drug that will render him unconscious 10 minutes after he takes it. Rex at first has the good sense to attempt to walk away from Raymond and his trap, but ultimately curiosity gets the better of him and he drinks the spiked coffee. When he comes to [spoiler alert!] he finds that he’s literally been buried alive. He lights a cigarette lighter (a present from Saskia lo those many years ago) and realizes he’s inside a wooden box with no way to get out or call for help. The film ends with Rex realizing that he’s going to die the same way Saskia did, and then cuts to Raymond at home with his wife and kids, free and with his family none the wiser about his dark, sinister hobby. The film’s last shot is of a newspaper announcing both Saskia’s and Rex’s disappearances three years apart from the same location, with their photos enclosed in egg-shaped ovals. It reminded me of all the 19th century stories in which a pair of star-crossed lovers are “reunited in death,” which used to strike me as romantic when I was a child but now I just find annoying. (This 19th-century Romantic obsession with death was why Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was more popular in the 19th century than it had been when Shakespeare wrote it.)

The Turner Classic Movies showing of The Vanishing was co-hosted by Eddie Muller of the Saturday evening “Noir Alley” and Alicia Malone, who regularly offers their programs of foreign films, and both went into panegyrics over how great it was. They even claimed that Stanley Kubrick had hailed it as the scariest film ever made, and when director Sluizer asked Kubrick about his own horror film The Shining (1979), Kubrick said The Shining was child’s play compared to The Vanishing. Far be it from me to argue with such praise, but I found The Vanishing to be awfully slow going; you had to wait through an hour and a half of plodding, dull exposition before you got to the good stuff in the last half-hour or so. Muller told a story about someone who’d gone to see The Vanishing in a theatre on its initial release, only the projection gear malfunctioned with just 10 minutes left to go in the film. The theatre management offered patrons a rain check to come back and see the movie another time, and Muller’s friend timed it so he’d arrive just 10 minutes or so before the ending. (Something similar happened to me in 1987 when I went to see the film Fatal Attraction with a man I was dating during a brief estrangement from my then-partner, only we took the option we were given of seeing another movie in the same theatre complex, which turned out to be the 1987 Black Widow. So it wasn’t until years later that I finally watched the nihilistic ending of Fatal Attraction on a home-recorded videotape with Charles during the early years of our relationship.) It did occur to me that last night Charles got to see all of The Vanishing he really needed to watch: he walked in at the start of the flashback that showed Raymond’s abduction and overpowering of Saskia and got to see the final scene.

There are some nice touches along the way, including the detail that when Rex and Saskia are seen together in the framing sequences, she smokes but he doesn’t; three years later, under the stress of Saskia’s disappearance, he’s taken up the habit. (I think the makeup department really overdid the artificial aging of Gene Boeverts to play the later Rex; he looks 10 years older, not just three.) There’s also the “planting,” almost literally, of two metal objects (we were told they were rings, though they looked like coins to me) under a tree by Rex and Saskia during their short-lived idyll; and Rex digging them up when Raymond leads him back to the spot three years later. And there’s a neat uncertainty about the nature of Rex’s and Saskia’s relationship; in one scene they describe themselves as a married couple, but mostly they’re not and I presumed they used the “M”-word just to avoid shocking the townspeople in the south of France. The film also reminded me of Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) in that both Albert DeSalvo, the alleged “Boston Strangler,” and Raymond Lemorne are depressingly ordinary family men with wives, children (two each), and good jobs (Raymond is a chemistry teacher in a part of the world where teachers are more respected and better paid than here) who are quite normal when they aren’t actually out killing other people. And there's the grim fact that Raymond gets away with both murders, something that would have been strictly forbidden in classic Hollywood under the old Production Code. Also there’s a scary scene at the very end of the film in which a woman gardener comes to the site of Rex’s premature burial with a watering can, and just when we’re thinking, “O.K., she’s going to discover a freshly dug grave where there shouldn’t be one and either she’s going to dig him out herself or alert the authorities,” she just walks on by and there’s a chilling shot of Raymond’s car, which makes it look like he’s deliberately parked on top of Rex’s grave a) so he can’t get out even if he can dig his way out (the way a similarly interred protagonist – a woman instead of a man – did in the 2024 Lifetime movie Buried Alive and Survived: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/11/buried-alive-and-survived-swirl-films.html), and b) so no one will notice that there’s a grave where one shouldn’t be.

In 1993 George Sluizer was hired by producers at 20th Century-Fox to remake The Vanishing as an American film, but he was required to up the gore quotient and give it a happy ending. Todd Graff, who wrote the American version and also co-produced it, changed the character names from Rex to “Jeff Harriman” (Kiefer Sutherland), Saskia to “Diane Shaver” (Sandra Bullock), the villain Raymond to “Barney Cousins” (Jeff Bridges, top-billed as Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu was in the original), and the replacement girlfriend Lieneke to “Rita Baker” (Nancy Travis). According to the Wikipedia synopsis, after “Jeff” wakes up buried alive in a coffin, “Rita calls home and listens to the changed outgoing message on the answering machine, which had incidentally recorded Barney's voice when he first confronted Jeff. Realizing that Jeff is in danger, she talks with the next door neighbor who witnessed the attack. She learns of Barney’s identity and goes to his home and meets his daughter Denise. Not knowing the circumstances and on her way to meet a boy, Denise rides with Rita and gives her directions to her father's cabin. When Rita arrives, a violent fight ensues with Barney eventually gaining the upper hand. Barney offers Rita the same deal that he offers Jeff, but Rita outsmarts him. She lies to Barney and tells him that she has kidnapped Denise. She gets Barney to drink drugged coffee, but does not realize the drug takes 15 minutes to take effect. She goes in search of Jeff and finds a fresh mound of dirt. Believing that he has been buried alive, she digs him out, but is thwarted at the last minute by Barney. Jeff climbs out of the grave, kills Barney with the shovel, and embraces Rita. He sees another grave and finally accepts Diane’s death. Jeff and Rita reunite as a couple and sell the story as a novel to a publishing company.”

I had initially assumed Turner Classic Movies was showing the 1988 The Vanishing as half of a double bill of European thrillers that were remade in the U.S. – just before The Vanishing they had shown the 1961 French film Purple Noon, the first adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley – though last night’s TCM remit was broader than that and less well defined. But the difference between the Dutch/French 1988 The Vanishing and the American(ized) remake from five years later is that between a flawed but nonetheless honest movie and a hoked-up U.S. version that, if the Wikipedia synopsis is to be believed, stripped all the grim honesty out of the story and substituted the kind of clichéd resolution Lifetime’s writers would have given this tale.