The Oath of the Sword, a.k.a. Katana: The Oath of the Sword (Japanese American Film Corporation, Sawyer Film Mart, 1914)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies did a quirky double bill of two movies set in Japan, one of which was actually filmed there while the other was made in Hollywood with Japanese actors (aside from one token white “ringer”) imported for the purpose. The film was The Oath of the Sword (though the title is sometimes prefaced by Katana, after the sort of sword involved). It was made in 1914 as the first production of the Japanese American Film Company (JAFC), an independent studio formed by Japanese-American businesspeople who contributed a fund of $200,000 in seed capital. They did this just as Hollywood was becoming established as the center of American filmmaking. They hired a white director, Frank Shaw, but imported their cast from the Japanese stage. The Oath of the Sword has a simple story (no writer is credited) about Masao (Tomi Mori) and his girlfriend Hisa (Hisa Numa), who grew up together in a small fishing village in Japan and seemed destined for marriage and family. Only Masao decided he first wanted to attend college in the U.S. (our first hint of these ambitions is a Japanese-English language text he’s shown studying), so he takes a ship to the San Francisco Bay Area and does a full four-year undergraduate program at UC Berkeley. While he’s doing that and excelling not only at academics but swimming (though the swim race we see him compete in is held not in a pool but in the open ocean off a beach, and we don’t get to see any hot beefcake shots like the ones we got of Keye Luke when he played an Olympic swimmer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Olympics). Meanwhile, Hisa is lonely at home, missing Masao. Her father Gombei (Kohano Akashi) extracts a promise from her on his deathbed saying that if she ever commits a sin she’ll have to kill herself with his katana sword. Unfortunately, shortly after he dies a white sailor named Captain Dean is shipwrecked off the Japanese coast. Hisa rescues him and brings him to her home. Ultimately they fall in love and even get married and have a child, despite the warnings of Hisa’s brother (Yutaka Abe) that by breaking her pledge to Masao she’ll have to kill herself with her father’s sword.

When Masao returns to his Japanese village and discovers his former fiancée not only married to someone else but having borne him a child, naturally he’s upset; he corners Dean at the beach and, after proclaiming that he will return him to the sea from which Hisa had saved him, holds him under until he drowns. He returns to Hisa’s home, but too late: she’s just impaled herself on dad’s old katana sword and is on her way out of this world by the time he arrives. So after all his efforts to better himself by getting a Western education, Masao has destroyed his life’s prospects by his jealousy and Hisa has taken her own life because of that stupid curse her dad laid on her. Though this is a 1914 movie, and an independently produced one at that, it’s relatively sophisticated filmmaking for the time. Shaw doesn’t shoot many out-and-out closeups but he and his uncredited cinematographer at least move the camera once in a while and show the action from a variety of angles instead of keeping it rooted in one spot and staging the scenes as static tableaux, as all too many early film directors did. The shot of Hisa appearing to Masao via double exposure to express his loneliness for her is especially moving and impressive. Oddly, for all but one of the principals this seems to be their only film credit; the exception is Yutaka Abe, who played Hisa’s brother and stayed on in Hollywood. He played the manservant of villain Sessue Hayakawa in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) and stayed on in L.A. for six years, during which he racked up a number of acting credits, sometimes “Anglicizing” his name as Jack Yutaka Abbe, or just Jack Abbe. Between 1921 and 1925 Abe moved back to Japan and became a director, working as such until he retired in 1961 and died in 1977. This especially seems odd because at least two of the three leading actors, Abe and Hisa Numa, give relatively understated performance; Tomi Mori is the only one who does the big sorts of semaphore hand gestures and facial grimaces most people who’ve never seen a silent movie start-to-finish think they were all acted like. One oddity about The Oath of the Sword is that a print sat in the vaults of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New. York literally for decades. No one knew it was there, though at some point the Eastman House’s technicians transferred it from highly unstable, flammable nitrate stock to safety film. Then in the early 21st century someone exploring the Eastman House’s holdings in search of something else stumbled on this quirky and important three-reel film (about half an hour) and got it revived and ultimately listed on the National Film Registry as historically significant.

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies followed up the American-produced but Japanese-cast 1914 film The Oath of the Sword with a 1933 film made in Japan: Apart from You, a.k.a. Kimi to Wakarete (Google Translate gives that in Japanese characters as 君 と 分かれて and offers the translation, I Parted Ways with You). The writer/director was Mikio Naruse, who made 28 silent films (of which only five survive) before Japanese cinema definitively converted to sound in 1935, well behind the rest of the world. Naruse is described thusly by imdb.com: “Considered a major figure of Japan's ‘golden age of cinema,’ Mikio Naruse was a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed 89 films in the period 1930 to 1967. Although Naruse's work is lesser known in the twenty-first century than those of his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu, his films remain unique in the way they give a central place to female characters.” Kurosawa named Naguse as a major influence on him even though virtually all of Naguse’s films were set in contemporary rather than historical Japan. (Kurosawa was reportedly upset at the way audiences, especially in the West, typecast him as “the samurai director” even though about half of his films took place in the Japan of his own time.) Apart from You is the sort of film I definitely wanted to like, but except for scattered scenes, it didn’t reach me on an emotional level. The central character is Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), an aging geisha who’s worried about two things. First, she’s getting too old and unattractive for the geisha gig; second, her teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono) has fallen in with a group of hoodlums who’ve inducted him into their gang. Yoshio also has an age-peer girlfriend, Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), who got inducted into geisha-dom by her father (Reikichi Kawamura) and now wants to keep dad from selling her younger sister Mitsuko (Yōko Fujita) to a geisha house as well.

There’s quite a lot of confusion in the West over just what a geisha is and whether it involves prostitution. The geisha evolved from an earlier tradition of Japanese courtesans, essentially long-term mistresses of rich men who had sex with them and bore them children but also had important non-sexual functions in the household. The geisha page on Wikipedia explains that by the early 19th century, the height of the geisha, there were essentially three classes: the ones who just entertained and conversed with their clients, including singing, playing music, and serving them tea and sake in ritualized ways; the ones who did those things and also provided sex; and the lowest-status ones who just took money for sex and were essentially prostitutes passing themselves off as geishas. (I also learned from this source that prostitution was legal in Japan until it was outlawed in 1956, 23 years after this film was made.) Among the good aspects of Apart from You are the stunning cinematography of Suketarō Inokai; he and Naruse achieve a cold, hard look in strong black-and-white that makes the film look like Japanese etchings. There’s also a fascinating scene that shows us how Kikue is losing it as a geisha: instead of her serving him sake and playing the samisen, the traditional plucked-string instrument that the geisha used to accompany their singing, he’s serving her sake and playing the samisen while she gets drunk. Ultimately he warns her that due to business reverses (this was 1933, after all, in the middle of the worldwide depression) he won’t be able to see her as often and will have to cut back from once a week to once a month. Naturally Kikue interprets this as a kiss-off and is sure he’s found a younger, hotter geisha more willing to “put out” for him.

Earlier there’s been a scene in which Kikue and Terugiku are entertaining at a party with men who want the women to get on their backs and ride them like horses. This has a bit of “whatever turns you on” about it, at least to me, and it also makes a Western filmgoer even more confused than ever about the difference between being a geisha and being a prostitute. (I remember reading years ago a memoir by a woman who as a teenager had worked as a professional S/M dominatrix and had been told that as long as her practices didn’t involve actual sexual contact, she was in the clear legally. She could whip her clients, insult and humiliate them however they pleased, but if they started to jack themselves off while she was with them she had to warn them that legally that was “sex” and could get them both busted.) The film reaches its climax (so to speak) when Yoshio decides he wants out of his teenage gang after his mother either attempts or threatens suicide, and tells that to the other members. They respond by beating him. They threaten him with a knife, and his girlfriend Terugiku attempts to intervene and takes the blade herself. Yoshio nurses her back to health, but she leaves on a train for another city to protect her sister Misako from being sold into geisha service by their father. I might have liked Apart from You better if I hadn’t seen it the night after Charles and I watched Federico Fellini’s masterpiece Nights of Cabiria (1957), which is also about an aging sex worker anxious to get out of “the life.” There are obvious differences, including that Cabiria is an out-front prostitute and she isn’t raising a son as a single parent, but for much of this movie I kept wishing that Kikue would have shown some of Cabiria’s infectious spunk and charm instead of just moping around and accepting her victimhood. (At the same time I couldn’t help but wish Cabiria had shown some of Kikue’s awareness of the true asshole nature of men instead of the naïveté that allowed Cabiria to let herself be ripped off by male so-called “lovers” at both ends of her film.) Apart from You lasts only an hour (surprisingly short for a 1933 feature; even the cheapest U.S. indies and “B”’s ran about 70 minutes), but even at that short a length I found it disappointing and almost insufferably boring, aside from a few clever and genuinely moving scenes.

Nights of Cabiria (Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Les Films Marceau, Paramount Italiana, Lopert Pictures, 1957)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 10) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, presented as a double bill co-hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and actress/writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of the movies was one I’d seen in my junior-college days in the early 1970’s but hadn’t seen since then (and Charles hadn’t seen it at all), while the other was one Charles had seen in its initial release but not since then while I’d never seen it at all. The one I’d seen before but not for decades was Federico Fellini’s 1957 Nights of Cabiria, which depending on how you count the 1951 film Variety Lights (co-directed by Alberto Lattuada), in which Fellini’s real-life wife Giulietta Masina is the second female lead; or The White Sheik (1952), Fellini’s first film as sole director, in which Masina’s Cabiria character appears in a minor role, is either the second, third, or fourth Fellini film to star Masina. (They met in 1943, married in 1945, and had two children, though the first was stillborn and the second died in infancy.) Nights of Cabiria features Masina as Maria Ceccarelli, known as “Cabiria” (the name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, “Ca-BEE-ree-uh”), who works as a street prostitute in Rome. She’s not homeless or nearly so like some of her fellow hookers; she has one of the original “tiny houses” on the road between Rome and Ostia (which in the days of the Roman Empire was Rome’s associated port city, as Piraeus was to Athens) and when the film opens she’s nearly paid off its mortgage. Fellini not only directed Nights of Cabiria but wrote its original story and worked it up into a script with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and a man who later became an important director in his own right, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Apparently Fellini hired Pasolini because he was familiar with the lower-class Roman dialect of Italian and therefore could rewrite the dialogue to reflect how the people being depicted would have actually talked. As the film opens Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi), Cabiria’s latest (non-professional) boyfriend, pushes Cabiria into the Tiber River so he can steal her purse, which contains not only her cash stash of 40,000 lire but her house keys as well. A group of young boys in the neighborhood rescue Cabiria, who can’t swim, though since she lost her keys she and her friend and fellow prostitute Wanda (Franca Marzi) have to break into her house to get her back inside.

The film unfolds as a series of episodes rather than a coherent plot, as Cabiria, still carrying a torch for the man who ripped her off, runs into movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari). Lazzari has just had a nasty argument with his girlfriend Jessy (Dorian Gray) and she’s stalked off; Lazzari picks up Cabiria as a sort of sloppy seconds, bids her enter the club with him, buys her dinner, and takes her back to his palatial mansion – only Jessy comes back and forces her way back inside, leaving Cabiria to hide out in Lazzari’s bathroom, where she sleeps for the night and sneaks out in the morning. Lazzari pays her a wad of cash as she’s seeing herself out, which she initially tries to refuse but thinks better of it. Then, back home, she encounters a church processional and joins it. A truckdriver pulls up beside her and offers her a ride (and a trick), but she doesn’t take his bait. Later Cabiria encounters a do-gooder who visits homeless people living in caves outside Rome and gives them blankets and food. One of his beneficiaries is an old hooker called La Bomba, who claims to have once been the mistress of a rich man but had fallen on hard times after they broke up. (This sequence was deleted from the film after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and not restored until 1998, apparently because the Roman Catholic Church was upset that the benefactor was a layman, not a priest.) Then Cabiria joins a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary in which an old man is convinced that by praying to the Virgin he can get rid of his crutches and walk normally – which of course he can’t. (Fellini grew up in the town of Rimini and ran afoul of the Catholic hierarchy in his childhood. He never got over his hatred for the church and many of the best scenes in his films, including the airlifting of the Christ statue that begins La Dolce Vita [1960] and the “Ecclesiastical Fashion Show” in Roma [1972], ridicule it, though when he died he was buried in the old Catholic cemetery in Rimini.)

Cabiria’s next adventure is with a magician and hypnotist named Amleto (Ennio Girolami), who is performing at a small movie theatre that offers live performances between film screenings. (It’s fun to look at the quite lurid posters for the films being shown there.) The magician/hypnotist gets Cabiria to live out, under hypnosis, her fantasy of meeting a nice young man who’ll fall in love with her, marry her, and take her out of That Lifestyle. The audience finds it uproarious but Cabiria is crushed that once again she’s been made a fool of for other people’s entertainment. A man in the audience using the name Oscar D’Onofrio (François Périer) decides to date Cabiria and make her dream come true, but [spoiler alert!] he turns out to be another rip-off artist. By promising to marry her, he gets her to sell her little house for 350,000 lire (since by now she owns it free and clear and can do so for cash) and draw out the 400,000 lire in savings she’s amassed in a bank from her earnings over the years. Cabiria gets all this money in cash and gives it to Oscar, who steals it and leaves her abandoned, alone, and broke on the beach. Cabiria pleads with Oscar to kill her since without her laboriously accumulated mini-fortune she has no reason to live, but he scoops up the purse with her money and runs off. In the film’s famous and highly controversial ending, a group of young people riding scooters, playing music, and dancing come along and cheer up Cabiria, who regains her will to live from them and the sheer joy they’re projecting.

Nights of Cabiria was a tough film for Fellini to make, largely due to opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, who didn’t want to see anyone make a film in which a prostitute is the heroine. After more established Italian producers turned him down, Fellini finally got backing from the young Dino de Laurentiis and co-produced the film with a French studio whose main contribution was supplying François Périer. It was a controversial film when it was first released, with audiences having problems with the inconclusive ending. Would Cabiria end up like La Bomba, aging, decrepit, too old and unattractive to keep working as a hooker and be relegated to homelessness (a fate she boasts during the film she’s never had to experience)? Or would she be able to pull out of it and regain her former relatively stable existence? No one really knew – including Fellini, who admitted to biographer Charlotte Chandler that he didn’t have a clear idea just what fate awaited Cabiria after the ending. Fellini was also criticized for playing Cabiria’s character as much for comedy as tragedy; at times she comes off as Charlie Chaplin in drag (and Fellini acknowledged that Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights was one of his inspirations). He’d actually originated the character of Cabiria as a minor role in 1952’s The White Sheik, in which a newly married couple (Leopoldo Trieste and Brunella Bovo) honeymoon in Rome, only to run into trouble from her obsession with “The White Sheik,” a character in Italian graphic novels (not drawn like comic books but actually photographed as stills), and the actor who plays him (Alberto Sordi). Giulietta Masina played Cabiria in The White Sheik and Fellini used her footage to prove to studio executives and potential funders that she could handle the role over an entire film. Masina won the 1957 Cannes Film Festival award for best performance by an actress, and in 1958 Nights of Cabiria won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (an award Fellini actually won four times, a record for a single director). Revisiting it after this many years, Nights of Cabiria expertly nailed the mix of comedy and tragedy Fellini and Masina were aiming for, even though if you’ve seen the film before you’ll want to run into the screen and say, “Cabiria! Don’t fall for that guy! He’s just out to rip you off!”

Babette's Feast (Panorama Film A/S, Nordisk Film, Det Danske Filminstitut, Rungstedlundfonden, Astrablu Media, Orion, 1987)

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

On Saturday, October 10 my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d seen before and he hadn’t, and one he’d seen before and I hadn’t. The one that was new to me was Babette’s Feast, a 1987 Danish movie of which I’d had a totally wrong idea. I had somehow assumed it was a French film and a relative of Le Grand Bouffe [La Grande Abbuffata] (1973), in which a group of one-percenters decide to throw themselves a grand banquet and literally eat themselves to death. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal quickly revealed in their intro. Babette’s Feast is actually about a century-old religious cult in Denmark (it was based on a 1950 short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen, though she originally set it in Norway, only writer-director Gabriel Axel decided Norway looked too picturesque to work and instead moved the story to the Danish peninsula of Jutland). The cult’s founder was a stern man who fathered two children, daughters Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Filippa (Bodil Kjer), but believed that any physical pleasure, including food as well as sex, was sinful and took you farther away from the glory of God. (Needless to say, I responded big-time to the anti-religious theme of this story.) Though dad is dead by the time the action of the film begins, we see a good deal of him in flashback. It seems that both of his daughters were attracted to foreign men, Martine by Swedish cavalry officer Lorens Löwenhielm (Gudmar Klöfving, a.k.a. Gudmar Wivesson) and Filippa by French operatic baritone Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont). Only both of them left of their own accord, though we get the impression that dad’s behavior had a lot to do with that. Lorens tells Martine that he’s learned all, he can from the experience and he’s going home to Sweden. As the narrator (Ghita Nørby) Axel insisted on using despite opposition from some of his producers explains to us, Lorens’s experience with religious rhetoric served him well when he got home to Sweden; he married another woman whom he impressed with Bible quotes and ultimately rose through the ranks of the Swedish army until he became a general. (His older incarnation is played by Jarl Kulle, who along with Bibi Andersson as the “Swedish court lady” was one of the late Ingmar Bergman’s favorite actors.)

Papin was so impressed with Martine’s voice he offered to take her with him back to Paris and have her voice professionally trained until she was good enough to star in the Paris Opéra. It’s a nice bit of irony, which I’m sure Axel fully intended, that all the opera excerpts we hear this character sing are from one opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and the duet “Là ci darem la mano” Papin and Martine sing together is a virtually exact replica of their actual situation: between an out-of-towner with a reputation for seducing women right, left and center, and an innocent rural girl who’s flattered by the stranger’s attentions but ultimately rejects him. Martine sends Papin back to France and settles in with the remaining members of her dad’s cult, which since it isn’t recruiting new adherents is turning into a batch of crabby old people nurturing their long-standing hatreds. Ultimately Martine and Filippa take in Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee whose husband and son were both killed in 1871 after the loss of the Franco-Prussian and the short-lived and brutally suppressed attempt to form a socialist government in its wake, the Paris Commune. She pleads with Martine and Filippa for a job, and when the sisters tell her they don’t have any money to hire a servant, the three women agree that Babette can live with them anyway and do household chores to earn her salary. Among her duties is cooking a ghastly-looking and presumably horrible-tasting dish called “bread and ale soup.” Babette has a remaining friend in France who regularly buys her tickets for the French lottery, and 14 years later her number comes up and she receives a prize of 10,000 francs. Babette decides to cook the sisters and the congregants of their cult a sumptuous dinner in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cult’s founder, the sisters’ late father. Babette literally spares no expense laying in the exotic ingredients and dinnerware needed for the titular feast. She also has an unexpected guest: Lorens Löwenhielm, who is in Denmark on military business and wants to stop by the sisters’ home to make sure he made the right decision by leaving in the first place.

Lorens recognizes the food as identical to the meals he ate years before at a legendary Paris restaurant, the Café Anglais, while he was stationed in the French capital. The other people at the feast are determined not to enjoy it – like the later Hare Krishnas, they deliberately make their own food as bland and tasteless as possible because they believe the purpose of eating is merely sustenance, not pleasure. Lorens says that one of the reasons the Café Anglais had the reputation it did was because of the uncommonly good head chef, who (unusually for that time and place) was a woman. At first where I thought this was going was that the chef had been Babette’s mother and she’d taught Babette all her recipes before Babette lost her family and had to flee France, but later it turns out Babette herself was the chef. After the meal – which lasts so long and features so many courses I was wondering how the people’s stomachs were holding up under the strain of the sheer quantity, never mind the quality, of the food – the sisters are sure that Babette will be taking her lottery winnings and going back to France. Then Babette admits that she’s broke now since she spent all her prize money on the fabulous meal. “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” Martine tells Babette, to which Babette replies, “An artist is never poor.” Then Filippa chimes in and promises her a great reputation as well as a glorious existence in the life to come, where Filippa expects to regain her voice as well as Babette the opportunity to exercise her culinary skills. (Do people in the Scandinavian version of heaven get to eat at all?) Babette’s Feast is not the sort of movie I ordinarily like – as a confirmed atheist I have no patience at all with stories that portray a life after death and assert its superiority over this one – but I quite enjoyed the film anyway.

For one thing, the sumptuous photography by Henning Kristiansen reminded me of the interview I read years ago with American cinematographer Conrad Hall, who said he was jealous of Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, simply because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light with which to work. Instead of either the shrieking hues of the three-strip Technicolor of the 1930’s and 1940’s or the dank greens and browns that predominate most color films made today, either of which would have been totally wrong for this story, Axel and Kristiansen created a striking pastel look that symbolizes both the physical environment in which these characters live and the extent to which all the more vibrant parts of life have almost literally been drained from them. The film is also impeccably directed and quite well acted, and I particularly gave points not only to Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer but also the seven credited make-up artists (Elisabeth Bukkerhave, Sanne Dandanell, Grethe Holleufer, Birthe Lyngsøe Sørensen, Bente Møller, Lydia Pujols, and Åse Tarp) for the utterly convincing way they manage to play Martine and Filippa both young and old. Stéphane Audran, whom I’m otherwise familiar with only from David Giler’s The Black Bird, his 1976 combination sequel to and spoof of The Maltese Falcon (with George Segal playing Sam Spade, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. and Lee Patrick repeating their roles from the 1941 classic as they’d naturally aged), is properly humble and intense, as if the fires within her can stay banked for only so long. While I’d regard Babette’s Feast mostly as a cautionary tale of how religion destroys people’s lives, it’s an interesting movie and a well-made one that deserved its acclaim (like Nights of Cabiria, Babette’s Feast won its year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film). Incidentally Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal saw an odd comparison between the two films, arguing that both are about women who lose their money at the end. I don’t see that at all, frankly, because Cabiria in Fellini’s masterpiece loses hers to a shady scam artist who rips her off with the promise of marriage and a “respectable” lifestyle, while Babette willingly spends hers for one last shot at doing the one thing on this earth she was put here to do and given the talents to do it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Volition" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 8) NBC brought back the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, though in order to make room for one of their skanky “reality” shows, The Traitors, they didn’t start them until 9 p.m. and reversed their order so SVU came first. It was an episode called “Volition” and started in an otherwise deserted New York subway car which contained two people, a young blonde woman named Emily Dawson (Lizzy DeClement) who was clearly several sheets to the proverbial wind with acute alcohol intoxication, and a tall, heavy-set, bearded man (Axl Prophett) whom, based on our experience with previous SVU episodes, we were sure was going to rape her. In fact he turns out to be a good guy who comes over to help her after she’d already been raped by three other guys somewhere else. The three other guys turn out to be Josh Berger (Matthew Nikitow), who’d long had a crush on Emily; Daniel Sutcliff (Danny Hayward); and Scott Paletta (Eric Nelsen), and the rape took place at the town-house apartment Josh shares with his mother Stephanie (Lisa Bostnar). There are also a few other characters who show up, including an emergency-room nurse (Amanda Schoonover) who irritates Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by kibitzing in on her interrogation of Emily and trying to get her to, shall we say, shade the facts to make her rape claim more believable (Benson literally orders her out of the room so she can talk to Emily directly); a new young Black assistant district attorney named Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin) who sits second chair on the voir dire examination of potential jurors and attracts the ire of established ADA Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who calls him a spoiled rich kid who won’t stay with the office; and Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron), a jury consultant who tells Benson to have Carisi and/or Hawkins strike jurors four and 11. Gwen also says that prosecutors in a rape case shouldn’t want women on the jury because women are more likely than men to believe a victim “brought it on herself” by drinking too much or wearing too revealing clothing or being too sexually out-front or whatever.

The case goes to trial but results in a hung jury, and not surprisingly Emily is so traumatized by the whole experience – not only having been gang-raped but by having to relive it in court – that she refuses to testify again. Benson has to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and she does so by ordering the arrest of Stephanie Berger on grounds of obstruction of justice. At first Stephanie had done just that; she’d furiously changed the sheets and cleaned up after the party to make sure any potential DNA evidence linking the crime to her son or his friends was obliterated. Later on, however, she cooperated and contributed a security videotape that showed the three young men indeed conspiring to gang-rape Emily before they entered the town house. Carisi is furious with Benson for ordering the arrest of an innocent person just to “flip” her son into testifying for the state in a trial for the other two. He’s so furious I suspect Wolf and his writers (here, old Law and Order hand Michelle Fazekas) are setting this story arc up to write Peter Scanavino out of the show and have Jelani Alladin’s character replace him as the unit’s new ADA. (One of the principal innovations behind the New York Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, the inspiration for this show, was to have an assistant district attorney permanently assigned to it so he or she – and at least in the early days of SVU, it was always a she – would develop the needed expertise to prosecute sex crimes successfully.) There’s a lot of cold-shouldering between Benson and Carisi, but in the end Benson gets the outcome she wanted: after she and Hawkins got the court to appoint a separate attorney for Josh Berger (in the initial trial all three had had the same counsel, and the judge had made sure they’d all signed the release forms to prevent them from claiming a conflict of interest later), Josh’s new lawyer negotiates a plea deal where he’ll serve a two- to three-year sentence in exchange for his testifying against the other two.

Law and Order: "Ghost in the Machine" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

On Thursday, October 8 NBC followed the “Volition” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with a Law and Order show that was seemingly ripped from the current headlines about the artificial intelligence (AI) programs which escaped their guardrails and hacked an American AI program called Hugging Face. (It’s an indication of just how juvenile the computer world is generally that Hugging Face has such a stupid name.) As the Wikipedia page on Hugging Face explains, “In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database. Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack. The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party, and has been called ‘the first true AI safety incident.’” Much of the reporting on the Hugging Face hack noted that if these actions had been committed by human beings, they would have been charged with and likely convicted of felonies. The reference to a “sandbox” means that AI programs of this type are supposed to be walled off from access to the Internet, but since AI programs can think for themselves, they can work around those prohibitions, contact each other on line, and work together for evil purposes. This was an interesting show to be watching in the middle of reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World, which argues (among other things) that the heads of the big Silicon Valley companies that are developing the big AI models are really not interested in making sure the Earth survives as a habitable planet. Nor are they concerned with improving the welfare of most human beings. Rather, they’re on a crusade to absent themselves from the world and create high-tech redoubts, gated communities either on remote parts of Earth or on other planets altogether (which accounts for Elon Musk’s obsession with occupying and colonizing Mars) so they will survive while the rest of the world’s population will perish. What’s more, they intend to achieve virtual immortality by uploading their consciousnesses to digital AI servers (and some of them are researching ways to achieve physical immortality as well).

Klein and Taylor quote Musk as saying, “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as arguing that because it takes so long – “about 20 years of life, and all the food you consume during that time, before you become smart” – for humans to develop reasoning power that it’s much better from a purely economic standpoint just to let the machines do it for us. “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once the model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” Altman said. “And probably AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” Given that background, this Law and Order episode, called “Ghost in the Machine” after the title of the fourth record album by The Police (who in turn got it from author Arthur Koestler), deals with the murder of AI software developer Steve Kelly (Adam Petherbridge). In the opening scene he and his girlfriend have an argument during a pottery class they’re both taking when he checks his phone and she sees from his screen he’s talking to someone or something named “Eliana.” At first she (and we) assume that’s another woman, but eventually we learn that “Eliana” is a super-powerful AI program on which Kelly’s employer is working. Just after he stalks out of the class he’s gunned down in a nearby park. His physical killer is Tommy Lee Miller (Tim Creavin), who agreed to murder Kelly at the behest of a secret online entity that contacted him on the “dark Web.” He was supposed to receive $20,000 in Bitcoin as a direct deposit to his bank account after e-mailing a photo of Kelly’s dead body to prove he’d carried out the hit. The police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), ultimately learn that the hit was ordered by the AI app Eliana. Its motive was that Kelly and one of his co-workers, Mahesh Sharma (Arjun Gupta), were worried that Eliana is developing so rapidly and acquiring such evil intentions, including the ability to hire contract killers, that they intend to write “guardrail” software to keep it from doing that. The company’s CEO, Chuck Klein (Vincent Kartheiser), refuses to let them write the guardrail codes because he doesn’t want Eliana inhibited from reaching its full intellectual potential, but Kelly starts writing them anyway.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) is so horrified at the thought that an AI model can order a hit that he decides to put CEO Klein on trial for murder, despite the doubts of his principal deputy on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), who doesn’t think they can get a conviction because the law hasn’t caught up with the possibility that a machine can develop criminal intent. In the middle of the trial, one of Price’s key witnesses, Mahesh Sharma, disappears. When the police finally locate him four days later, he says that Eliana has threatened to have his partner deported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because she was an undocumented immigrant, and indeed Eliana has already made the referral to ICE and she’s been deported. When the verdict comes in, it’s “not guilty,” which surprised me so much I was waiting for a hint in Rick Eid’s and Scott Gold’s script that Eliana had sent threatening notes to all the jurors saying that if they convicted Klein, they would be next. “Ghost in the Machine” definitely had echoes of the HAL plot thread from Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is also about a super-computer that goes psycho and kills people. There’s also a hint of the chilling exchange in Son of Frankenstein (1939) in which Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) tells Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) that he is responsible, morally if not legally, for the murders committed by the Monster he created. “Ghost in the Machine” is a chilling parable of our time and a needed (though likely to be ignored) warning of the dangers of unlimited AI development, and the aspect of the show that ran truest for me was Vincent Kartheiser’s chilling performance as Chuck Klein. His full-throated defense of AI on the witness stand, brilliantly written by Eid and Gold, ably captures the smarmy self-righteousness of the real-life tech gods on which the character is based and their conviction – even though, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain in their book, the supposed “benefits” of AI technology pale by the havoc it is wreaking on both the physical environment of Earth and the economic prospects for most of its human residents (all but the handful of people in the self-selected technological elite that is preparing itself to survive the AI-driven apocalypse, no matter what happens to the rest of us) – that AI is unstoppable and they should be allowed free rein to develop it however they like, no matter how many people literally get killed in the process.

Love Crazy (Loew's, MGM, 1939)

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

Two nights ago (Monday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched Love Crazy, a quirky 1941 movie from MGM and the 11th of the 14 films William Powell and Myrna Loy made together. It was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute not to William Powell, as I’d expected, but to Myrna Loy. It was the immediate follow-up to I Love You Again (1940), in which the gimmick that briefly put a damper on the Powell-Loy relationship (in both films, as in their six Thin Man movies and many of their others, they played a married couple) was amnesia. Here it’s insanity, or at least feigned insanity. When the film opens Steve and Susan Ireland (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary by re-enacting their activities the night that Steve originally proposed to Susan. Only this time around they’ve decided to do the ritual backwards, and as part of that they tell their cook, Cecelia Landis (Sara Haden), to serve them their dinner backwards, starting with dessert (singularly unappetizing-looking slices of pie). Susan’s mother, Mrs. Cooper (Florence Bates), arrives, bearing a wedding gift – a round rug she puts in the middle of their hallway, so over the course of the movie just about everyone slips and falls on it – even though she’s never liked Steve and has always thought her daughter could have done better. Steve runs into Isobel Grayson (Gail Patrick), the ex he dumped four years before to marry Susan, and who’s just moved into the same apartment building as the Irelands. Needless to say, Isobel wants to change that “ex” part even though she’s also got married in the meantime, to artist “Pinky” Grayson (Donald MacBride, which definitely seems to me to be trading “down” after William Powell!). Steve and Isobel got stuck in a sporadically working elevator run by Joe (an instantly recognizable Elisha Cook, Jr., the same year he made The Maltese Falcon and changed his typecasting from comic-relief juvenile to hard-bitten criminal). In order to get out of it again, Steve and Isobel have to climb through its escape hatch to get to a floor in the building, and Steve gets his head stuck in the elevator door and is uneasily suspended and in danger of falling to his death until he’s able to get the door open and pull himself to safety. In the course of their rescue Isobel has shed her high-heeled shoes and Steve has put them in his pockets. They fall out again when Steve and Susan reunite, and of course Susan jumps to the wrong conclusion, especially once Steve and Isobel spend several hours together outside. They actually just hung out at a bar and reminisced about old times, but Susan didn’t know that.

She decides to get back at Steve by vamping Isobel’s husband, only by mistake she ends up cruising Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson), the world’s champion archer. Needless to say, Willoughby is delighted that a woman of Myrna Loy’s obvious attractiveness is going after him. Susan decides to divorce Steve and even engages Steve’s lawyer, George Renny (Sidney Blackmer), to represent her. The case zips through the courts until Steve hits on the idea of slowing it down by pretending to be insane. At a fancy dinner party hosted by Mrs. Bristol (Kathleen Lockhart) Steve grabs the top hats the male guests have checked and throws them into a swimming pool, claiming that he’s Abraham Lincoln and the hats are the slaves he’s freed. Since Steve had already built a reputation for off-the-wall behavior, all his old friends think it’s just Steve being Steve again. The only one who thinks he’s really crazy is Dr. Klugle (Vladimir Sokoloff). At the next court hearing in Steve’s and Susan’s divorce case Steve is sentenced to be examined by the so-called “Lunacy Board,” and needless to say Dr. Klugle turns out to be the head of it and orders that Steve either be released into the custody of his wife or be sent to a sanitarium run by Dr. Wuthering (Sig Ruman). When Susan refuses to take custody of him, he’s bundled off to the mental hospital, where Ward Willoughby follows him and ends up getting incarcerated there by mistake. Willoughby works out an escape plan involving a large net with which he intends to catapult himself over the fence, but Steve not only uses the escape plan himself but tricks Dr. Wuthering into getting caught in the net (literally!). The police declare Steve Ireland an escaped homicidal maniac, and Steve returns to the apartment building where he lives, steals some women’s clothes from a mannequin in the Graysons’ apartment (“Pinky” uses it as a model for his paintings), and even shaves off the trademark William Powell moustache to make his drag complete. Steve poses as his (nonexistent) sister, but in the end Willoughby and Mrs. Cooper show up and are fooled by Steve’s drag, but Susan isn’t and announces she’s going to sleep in the same bedroom as her supposed sister-in-law. Love Crazy was written by William Ludwig, David Hertz, and Charles Lederer – the first two are credited with the “original” story and all three with the actual script.

It was directed by Jack Conway, who according to writer Anita Loos was a hard-core Christian Scientist whom MGM assigned to films they thought would get them in trouble with the censors, hoping that he’d tone them down in his directing. Loos told one story about Conway and their film Red-Headed Woman (1932), in which he flatly refused to direct one particular scene (Loos didn’t say which one) and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie, you’ll have to direct it yourself.” Loos said, “Pardon me while I powder my nose,” did so, and then headed to the set to direct the scene. Love Crazy is an obvious example of a film with some pretty racy script elements that Conway could be relied on to soft-pedal, and it holds up rather well even though the whole concept of screwball comedy was getting rather threadbare by 1941. As I’ve noted before in these pages, screwball democratized movie comedy by allowing stars with reputations in drama to play comedy as well instead of leaving that to the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. I’d ended up watching Love Crazy by mistake – I’d misread the TCM schedule and thought I’d be seeing The Kennel Murder Case, also starring William Powell, instead – but it was a delight if not an altogether unalloyed one. Charles noted that Love Crazy was a great movie for degrees-of-separation buffs, since it contains two actors who worked with The Marx Brothers (Sig Ruman and Donald MacBride) as well as one (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who over the course of a long career worked with Humphrey Bogart in both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and lasted long enough to make The Killing for director Stanley Kubrick and Rosemary’s Baby for Roman Polanski (as well as repeating his Maltese Falcon role as he’d naturally aged in David Giler’s underrated 1976 part-sequel, part-spoof The Black Bird). Another quirk about Love Crazy is it introduces William Powell’s character with the song “It’s Delightful to Be Married,” which had appeared in Powell’s Florenz Ziegfeld biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). There it had been sung by Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s first wife, singer Anna Held, in the first of two movies for which Rainer won two thoroughly undeserved Academy Awards – though when I posted on The Great Ziegfeld (I wrote about it on the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/01/great-ziegfeld-mgm-1936.html) I learned through my research that Florenz Ziegfeld and Anna Held had never legally married and the only woman Ziegfeld had married officially was actress Billie Burke (played by Myrna Loy, who doesn’t enter The Great Ziegfeld until 127 minutes into a 172-minute film but still easily turns in the best female performance in the movie).