FRONTLINE: “A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians” (Top Hat Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired October 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The complete Frontline documentary A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians can be viewed online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/

Last night (Wednesday, October 15) I watched a quite good documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disgusting Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and the massive retaliation ordered by the Israeli government and its Trump-like prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The show was called A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, though the title was a bit ironic because there have been literally thousands of years of war between the Israelites and whoever else happened to be occupying that narrow strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean. I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a new recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1751), about an incident in Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges depicting a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites in which Jephtha promises God to sacrifice the first being he sees when he returns victorious – only the first person he sees when he gets back is his own daughter. A Year of War was produced, directed and photographed by Robin Barnwell – whose Web site doesn’t specify their gender, but who has an impressive list of credits including a film about the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which he happened to be shooting when the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas happened. Barnwell gave an interview for the PBS Web site at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/year-of-war-filmmaker-humanity-israelis-palestinians/ in which he said that as soon as he heard of the attacks, “I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected,” Barnwell said. “The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.”

Barnwell made a couple of basic decisions early on that ensured he would end up with a great and genuinely emotionally moving film. First, he decided not to use a narrator – “The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events,” he said in the PBS interview – and second, he decided not to shoot in Gaza due to the Israeli governments’ severe restrictions on foreign journalists attempting to cover their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere). “[M]ore than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media,” Barnwell explained. “Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak Internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas. We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.”

Barnwell mostly achieved his goal of being even-handed to both sides – an extraordinarily difficult task given the intensity of feeling on both ends of the conflict and the bizarre competing victim narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians (for Israelis it’s the Holocaust and for Palestinians it’s the Nakba, the forced removal from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers after World War II and the formal creation of the state of Israel) – and among other things his film is a testament to the fundamental evil of war itself. Through most of human history war was something that involved only a handful of professional soldiers on both sides, and most people weren’t directly involved until the war ended, one way or the other, and they had to figure out how to live with the outcome. There were exceptions, of course, and many of them involved the ancestors of modern-day Jews; the Old Testament is full of genocidal wars fought by the Israelites against their real or perceived enemies, and God Himself keeps giving the Israelites permission for their genocidal activities. But it was only with the development of modern-day weapons – first the long-range cannons of the 19th century, then machine guns and airplanes capable of dropping bombs on large numbers of people at once in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and guided missiles in the mid-20th century – that war became a total assault on an enemy’s population and the line between “military” and “civilian” first became blurred and then ended completely.

Also, one of the regrettable results of both the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel and the resulting Israeli overreaction has been it’s hardened attitudes on both sides and made people who previously supported peaceful solutions to the Israel/Palestine crisis much more bitter. Barnwell’s rather anodyne statement that “some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict” is rather at odds with the actual content of the film. People, both Israelis and Palestinians, who once supported a two-state solution have backed away from that, and in particular Palestinians who once prided themselves on being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Israelis now proudly proclaim themselves not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. At the same time the film also underlines the absurdity of Zionism, and particularly their belief that by plunking themselves into the middle of an already occupied country and displacing its inhabitants by force, they could create a “safe space” for the world’s Jews to come together and avoid being the victims of another Holocaust. A heavy-set woman named Gali told Barnwell’s interviewers that both her father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and she had settled in Israel precisely because she and her family saw it as a “safe space” – only her husband Tsachi was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and their teenage daughter Ma’ayan was killed. Not surprisingly, Gali said the experience of her family’s victimization has turned her against the two-state solution and hardened her heart against all Palestinians – just as the Palestinians whom Barnwell included in his film, including a quite compelling young man named Ibrahim and Dr. Mohammed El-Ran, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital and then at another medical facility until both were destroyed by Israeli bombing raids, are far more bitter against Israelis and Jews in general than they used to be.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to decades – or even centuries – of war, especially when the atrocities committed against both sides lead to eons of bitterness between them. One recalls grimly how long (30 years) the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland continued – and that was between two groups who shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and were of different sects within the same religion. Some of the Palestinian interviewees recall joining in the cheers in the streets of Gaza’s cities after the Hamas attacks, often before the true horror of what Hamas’s fighters had done reached them, and one young Palestinian noted that since Hamas took control of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal of military occupation in 2005 (in a free and fair election, by the way, though in the nearly two decades since they haven’t allowed another one that might vote them out of power), they’ve set up a dictatorship of their own in which no public criticism of Hamas, its leaders or its policies, has been allowed. It also remains maddeningly unclear just why Hamas ordered the attacks on Israel when they did and what they hoped to achieve by them (just as the world, or at least this individual in it, remains stumped by what Osama bin Laden and his minions at al-Qaeda hoped to accomplish with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).

I suspect that part of the motivation was the leaders of Hamas were worried that as more and more Arab countries normalized relations with Israel and signed the so-called “Abraham Accords,” the Palestinian cause would lose support from moderate Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves would be left without any allies in the region (aside from Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in northern Palestine and southern Lebanon which the Israelis are also now targeting). So they staged the attacks on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Muslim terrorists in particular are big on anniversaries; the September 11, 2001 attacks took place on the anniversary of an earlier 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center which failed dismally) to get the world to take notice and say, “We are still here.” Along with Barnwell’s interview, another article on the PBS Web site by Patrice Taddonio (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/gaza-israel-october-7-israeli-palestinian-hamas-war-documentary-excerpt/) uses material from the film to profile two young women caught up in the conflict on each side. “I’ve forgotten who Ghada was and how I used to live,” says a 23-year-old Palestinian woman named Ghada. “If I want to remind myself, I go back to my phone and look at photos. My dream was to start a solar energy company. To be honest, my dream now is for my family and I to make it out alive.” Another woman, a 17-year-old Israeli hostage named Agam, said, “I can only remember a sort of sigh of relief as I was about to die. After five hours of being scared to death, it’s finally happening. I certainly didn’t think they would kidnap us. It didn’t cross my mind. … I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my life is now in the hands of a terrorist organization: From now on, I have to rely on Hamas. Of course, I didn’t trust them. I was dying from fear. Their control over me was total.” Agam told Taddonio, “I thought, in another universe, we might live together,” but now she believes “the gap is so deep” and “the opportunity is gone.” Likewise Ghada said, “My family, or I, could die at any moment. There’s no future at all.”

Mystery Street (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 14) I watched an intriguing 1950 MGM production called Mystery Street, a film gris largely shot on location in Boston, Massachusetts and starring Ricardo Montalban (the first time he’d ever got top billing in an American film) as Dan Morales (or, as the credits oddly spell it, “Moralas”), a Latino detective with the district attorney’s office of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which is where Boston is located. He gets involved in a murder investigation when a birdwatcher (Walker Burke) finds a skeleton on the beach at Cape Cod (and for all the ballyhoo about this film having been shot on location in Massachusetts, the scene on the beach is obviously a studio “exterior” with a projected backdrop of sky and a beach surface sculpted from sand and artificial plants). Mystery Street was directed by John Sturges, written by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks from a story by Leonard Spigelgass, and photographed by the great John Alton. It opens with a great scene that’s the stuff of real film noir: a woman named Vivian Helton (played by the great Jan Sterling, who’s just as good here as she’d be a year later in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole except she gets killed in the first reel), who works as a B-girl at a lowlife bar called the Grass Skirt, is shown making a series of increasingly frantic and desperate phone calls to the rich man she’s been dating and with whom she’s been having an extra-relational affair. The implication is he’s got her pregnant and she’s expecting him to pony up to get her an illegal abortion, though this isn’t that clear in the film itself (nor could it have been with the Production Code and its Jesuit enforcers in full power over American filmmaking). Vivian gets in a yellow Ford driven by Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), a rather hapless young married man who’s lonely because his wife just lost their first child to a miscarriage and she hasn’t been released from the hospital yet.

Vivian takes the wheel of the car and commandeers it to go to the home of her married lover, shipbuilder James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), in Cape Cod. When Henry demands that she stop the car so he can take over the wheel and drive back to Boston to see his wife in the hospital, Vivian abandons him in front of an out-of-the-way beachfront diner called “The Dunes” and then she’s met by an unseen assailant whom she argues with, and who pulls out a gun and shoots her. Then he takes her body (surprisingly light given how heavy a dead human body can be) and buries her in the sand, where she rests for four months until she becomes skeletal as her flesh and muscles rot away. Enter Dan Morales/Moralas and his associate, Harvard University medical law professor Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), who has the intriguing and then-novel task of figuring out who she was from a bunch of bones and therefore getting a lead as to who might have killed her. From the condition of her bones Morales and McAdoo are able to deduce that she was a woman, between 20 and 24 years of age, that she worked as a toe dancer (from the development of her foot bones) and she was killed with a gun (from the cracked rib where the fatal bullet entered her body). Ultimately they’re able to identify her by taking photos of missing young women – Vivian was reported missing by her roommate, Jackie Elcott (Betsy Blair in her feature-film debut) – printing them on clear slide film and superimposing them over an image of the dead girl’s skull. From then on it’s only a matter of police legwork to trace Vivian’s whereabouts and learn that Henry Shanway is the last known person to see her alive. Morales has the unenviable task of “outing” Shanway to his wife Grace (Sally Forrest, second-billed) as having been out with another woman while she was in hospital recovering from a miscarriage. Shanway actually is indicted for Vivian’s murder and is about to be tried for the crime when Morales has his doubts; he’s found Harkley’s phone number.

Harkley had served in World War II and not turned in his gun after he was discharged, but he no longer has the gun because it’s been stolen by Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester in one of her half-entertaining, half-annoying ditz performances; she did a much better job as an eccentric artist in a film considerably better than this one, John Farrow’s The Big Clock), Vivian’s and Jackie’s landlady. Mrs. Smerrling hoped to blackmail Harkley with the gun, but he strangles her instead in the living room of her boarding house, then steals the baggage claim check for the rail-station locker where she stashed the gun. Fortunately Morales and McAdoo are able through independent evidence to deduce the location of the locker, and the surviving parties converge on the train station and Harkley is duly arrested. Mystery Street is a quite good movie – I’d seen it before but I liked it better this time around – even though it’s perched quite uncertainly between police procedural and film noir. I liked the scene in which Mrs. Smerrling is being questioned by the cops and among the questions she’s asked is, “Are you married?,” to which she replies, “Sort of.” (Reflecting Elsa Lanchester’s real-life marriage to Charles Laughton, I joked that she could have said, “Well, I was technically married to a famous actor, but he wouldn’t have sex with me because he was Gay.”) I also liked Ricardo Montalban even though it was never quite clear which Latino ethnicity he was supposed to be from; there was a brief mention that hinted he was actually from the Portuguese fishing community in Boston, which may have been why the credits spelled his last name “Moralas” instead of “Morales.” And there was a great scene, timely today, in which Harkley boasts about how generations of his family had lived in Massachusetts well before there was a United States and makes a rather snippy comment about how much he resents being interrogated by a police officer who isn’t a blue-blooded white American. Overall, though, Mystery Street is the sort of movie I call film gris (“grey movie”) because it attempts film noir but doesn’t quite achieve it – except in John Alton’s stunning visuals, especially in the scenes taking place in the city at night, where we’re in true film noir territory both thematically and visually.

The Killer I Picked Up (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 13) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called The Killer I Picked Up, about a 30-something African-American woman named Angela Turner (Patrice Goodman) whose husband died two years back and left her a teenage daughter, Brianna (Eden Cupid). She’s attempting to raise Brianna as a single parent and save enough money to send her to college, and in order to achieve enough money to pay her bills she takes a second job – a “side hustle,” as she calls it (the film’s working title was Side Hustle Nightmare) – as a ride-share driver. As she does this Angela meets the usual assorted group of people, including a nice-seeming Black guy named Aaron (David D’Lancy Wilson) and a white weirdo named John (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) who shows up in her car wearing a wig and fake beard that make him look like a taller Charles Manson. John declares himself Angela’s God-destined soulmate and grabs her arm when she won’t take his telephone number, and suddenly Aaron comes along and rescues Angela from John’s unwelcome attentions. I thought Aaron would be Angela’s Black savior from John’s stalking, and Charles guessed Aaron would be the titular killer. As it turned out, we were both right; Aaron had actually hired John to harass Angela and come on to her so Aaron could come along and look like a hero saving her from John. But John was so instantly smitten with Angela that he decided he wanted her for himself, and demanded more money from Aaron as his price for leaving Angela alone.

Aaron lives in a large house with his sister Whitney (Raven Dauda) and Whitney’s son Jason (Kolton Stewart), who predictably falls for Brianna and has no idea that Aaron is actually a serial killer. It turns out towards the end that Aaron started by killing his wife and daughter by overpowering them and locking them in the trunk of his car until they expired, then put on the grieving-widower act for his sister and hired a number of private detectives (or at least saying he was doing so) to find them. What’s more, he began targeting 30-something Black women raising teenage daughters as single mothers and killing them, in an apparent attempt to reproduce the family dynamics behind his original crime. Angela seems genuinely taken with Aaron (though the two stop short of actually having sex with each other), until her blond white friend and co-worker D. J. (Joanne Boland) suddenly and mysteriously disappears. Given that the leads in this movie are Black, it had to be a white woman in the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Secret but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but that duly happens and she keeps receiving D. J.’s texts (Aaron stole D. J.’s phone) but hears nothing back from her vocally. This worries her because Angela and D. J. have always made it a point to call each other and talk, even on days when they show each other together on their job five days a week. The people who actually rescue Angela eventually are her daughter Brianna and her boyfriend Jason, even though Jason’s uncle is the person Angela is in danger from.

Angela gets a call from Aaron to meet her at a particularly out-of-the-way location. Angela agrees to go despite her misgivings because she sees it as an opportunity to break up their relationship at long last. Aaron, of course, sees it as an opportunity to get her to a remote spot with uncertain cell-phone service so he can do her in. Brianna and Jason break into Aaron’s room – he has a combination lock but she’s a good enough lock-picker she’s able to get it open regardless – and discover a file containing photos of all Aaron’s previous victims in manila envelopes on which he’s thoughtfully written their names with marking pens. They’re luckily able to deduce the remote location where Aaron has taken Angela – and Angela has been running away from Aaron, at which she’s surprisingly effective even though she’s a slightly built woman and he’s a beefy, athletic-looking man. Ultimately Angela is able to sneak up behind Aaron with a tree branch and knock him out cold long enough for Brianna’s 911 call to go through and the police to arrest him at the end. I’d have rather seen Aaron either die in a shoot-out with the cops or escape for the sake of a sequel. Director Annie Bradley and writer Tyler Richardson (Annie has 30 previous credits on imdb.com but this is the first one for Tyler, and there’s no certain indication as to whether they’re male or female) come up with some striking bits, and the ending is actually quite good suspense filmmaking, but the story is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese and after the high quality of last week’s Lifetime premiere, The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, this is a return to Lifetime’s usual slovenly form.

Father Brown: "The Hermit of Hazelnut Cottage" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, October 5 I watched a Father Brown episode on PBS called “The Hermit of Hazelnut Cottage,” set in the early 1950’s with the aftermath of World War II very much a part of the plot. The titular hermit of Hazelnut Cottage is Dr. Angus McClurgy (Sylvester McCoy), who lost his wife during the war and ever since then has been living very much alone. During the war he took in a war orphan, an African-British girl named Brenda Palmer (Paris Froggatt), only to send her away again and dump her into a county orphanage for reasons he never bothered to explain. All this is shown in a flashback sequence shot in sepia; when we return to full color Brenda is a young woman (played by Ruby-May Martinwood, and the two are totally convincing as the same person at different ages) and she’s just received a letter, ostensibly from Dr. McClurgy, saying he’s on the point of death and would like to see her again before he croaks. Only he didn’t write the letter himself: his caregiver wrote it and sent it to Brenda. By chance, Brenda is working in Father Brown’s church and he organizes a trip to Hazelnut Cottage to reunite her with Dr. McClurgy, who’s in the midst of a nasty battle with the local landowner, St. John Sprockett (Owen Brenman), and a London developer he’s hired named Edward Wainbody (Nick Blakeley) to tear down all the cottages on his property and replace them with a brand spanking-new development. Only Dr. McClurgy doesn’t want to sell the cottage, and without his consent Sprockett and Wainbody decided to move the development over and build it on the local meadow.

This freaks out a lot of the locals, including Susan Payne (Jasmine Bayes), a young Asian-looking woman who was settled in the region at the same time as Brenda was, who’s become a staff artist for a British government agency documenting rare plants, flowers and birds. She’s upset that the development would mean destroying rare habitats and threatening the survival of several species, and Wainbody – the sort of character in mystery fiction who’s especially good at making himself hated and giving lots of people reasons to want him dead – snippily says, “They can just fly away.” Ultimately Wainbody is found dead, buried in a shallow grave. A subplot develops concerning a German flyer who was shot down over the area during World War II and Dotty Finglesham (Melanie Walters), a local woman who lost her own husband when he was shot down over Germany during World War I. The German, Friedrich von Bach (Aron von Adrian), got stuck in a tree with his parachute after he bailed out of his plane, and Dotty cut him down, hid him in her house, and tied him to her bed so he couldn’t escape. Since he’d also suffered a wound in his foot, she got Dr. McClurgy to treat him, only Susan stumbled upon him, untied him and, to Dotty’s horror, he escaped and had some nasty things to say about her husband and what would happen to all the Brits when Germany finally won the war. A furious Dotty clubbed him to death from behind and buried him in a grave she dug in the meadow, and that’s where things rested until Wainbody announced that they were going to build their new development on the meadow and Dotty freaked out, worried that the German pilot’s remains would be discovered and she’d be linked to his death. So she clubbed Wainbody and buried him on top of Friedrich in the same grave. It all ends relatively happily, with Dr. McClurgy finally seeing the point after Brenda and Father Brown’s factota Mrs. Devine (Claudie Blakely) get him to realize that the accumulated dust and mold is only making his various illnesses worse, and if he gets a new cottage out of the deal he’ll be better off, so he agrees to sell to Lord Sprockett and the new developer Sprockett brings in (whom we never meet).

The Girl Who Wasn't Dead (NSM Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, October 5, after the Father Brown episode and after my husband Charles returned from work, he and I saw a quite good Lifetime movie called The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead (2024), directed quite sensitively by Simone Stock from a script by Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner. The film was supposedly “inspired” by a true story, though it also carried a this-is-fiction disclaimer. The central character is 15-year-old Erica Christine Bennett (Emma Tremblay), who’s being raised by her mother Carrie O’Brien (Lyndsy Fonseca, a familiar name to Lifetime viewers) – only while at her local high-school library in Novato, California (the story may be fictional but the locale really exists, and both Charles and I were startled by a real place name). Unfortunately, since Daniel Bennett (Paul du Toit), Erica’s dad, divorced her, Carrie has become far stricter as a disciplinarian – and when Daniel visits after a bit of passing dialogue mentions that he’s already involved with another woman and has fathered a baby with her, he chews her out for not being strict enough with Erica. Carrie replies, “I’ve made up so many rules for her I can’t remember them all myself!” Erica sees her escape from her mom in a 21-year-old man named Andrew Jensen (Kyle Clark), whom she met at the school library when they bonded in the stacks for a particularly popular young-adult science-fiction book series. They’ve started to date and even, it’s strongly hinted, have become intimate. When the film opens, the two lovebirds are hiding from Erica’s mom in a motel that otherwise looks like Hooker Central. When Erica sneaks out of the room because she’s hungry and wants to hit one of the vending machines for a snack, the motel manager upbraids her, thinks she’s a teenage runaway who’s become a prostitute and urges her to go home before it’s too late. She’s a runaway but she’s also very much in love with Andrew, but her little errand gets them reported to the cops.

Detective Richards (Bronwen Smith), a heavy-set, no-nonsense woman, arrives at the scene, arrests Andrew and holds him in jail overnight after giving him a warning that if he continues to see Erica, she’ll arrest him for statutory rape. Andrew tearfully breaks up with Erica the next day, but she’s still very much in love with him – much to the consternation of her long-time best friend, Liam Wilson (alas the imdb.com page does not give the name of the quite good actor playing him), who himself seems to have a crush on Erica, though both Charles and I wondered (especially after a chat he has in the high-school hallway with another male student) if he were supposed to be Gay. Liam jokingly calls Erica “bitch,” and after they go on a date at a bowling alley and she orders a huge amount of food and sticks him with the tab, he jokingly threatens her life. Alas, a heavy-set young man who works at the bowling alley reports this months later and briefly gets Liam in trouble with the cops as a suspect in Erica’s murder. Erica is able to lie low in Andrew’s house for three years – his parents raised him in Novato until they moved to Oregon when he was 12, but they kept their Novato home and “sold” it to him (presumably at a nominal price) when he turned 18, whereupon he moved back there and found a job doing deliveries for a local store called Hunter Electronics. But the cops become convinced that Erica is dead, murdered by a serial killer who’s been plaguing the local area and has already offed a teenage girl named Ana Martinez. Ana’s mother, Martina Martinez (Isa Sanchez), meets Carrie and offers her support, and the police give a press conference asking for information about Erica, Ana and two or three other young women who also disappeared mysteriously. Carrie’s church even holds a memorial service for Erica after the serial killer is caught and gives a laundry list of confessions, including to Erica’s “murder.”

Meanwhile, the real Erica is holed up in Andrew’s house, where she’s afraid to leave because she’s worried that if she’s found, Andrew will be arrested, until the announcement that someone else has been convicted and is about to be sentenced for her “murder.” She makes a dramatic courtroom appearance and announces to the world that she’s alive and therefore, whatever the defendant might have done to other girls, he shouldn’t be punished for killing her because she’s still very much alive. The cops swoop down on Andrew’s home and he is finally arrested, though he’s only sentenced for a year after it dawns on Carrie that Erica is still genuinely in love with this young man and therefore she drops most of her charges against him. Only public opinion in Novato runs strongly against Erica, and though she and Andrew reunite after he does his year in prison, they’re sued for the $110,000 the city spent looking for her during her disappearance and supposed “death.” Erica also loses the support of Liam and her brother Joey (played by Logan Pierce as a boy and Everett Anders as a young man). Charles thought the story was too predictable, but that was actually one of the things I liked about it; instead of ramping up the melodrama, writers Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner carefully crafted a story in which there are no villains and there are no heroes, merely understandable and relatable human beings caught in an impossible situation and trying to make the best of it.

Charles also saw a parallel between it and Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose (1920), even though the young woman in Mary Rose disappears supernaturally. In both Mary Rose and The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, a young woman disappears and then reappears and wonders why her family is so upset with her when she comes back. I remember being curious about Mary Rose for years because Alfred Hitchcock had seen the play in its initial run in London and for decades had wanted to make a movie of it – and though he didn’t get to film Mary Rose, there are elements of it in the plots of some of Hitchcock’s films, notably Vertigo and Marnie. When I first read Mary Rose, I thought of Barrie’s by far most famous play, Peter Pan, and conjectured that he was probably tired of people asking him, “But what about the parents of the Lost Boys – what did they go through?” So he wrote Mary Rose as an answer to that question. I quite liked The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead; it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on Lifetime, a far subtler and gentler story than we’re used to seeing on this channel, with genuinely complex and multidimensional characters and a refreshing absence of the usual melodramatic Lifetime tropes.

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.1 (Red Planet Productions, BBC Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 4) I watched the 100th episode of the BBC-TV series Death in Paradise, a murder mystery set on the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré (“played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe), in which local police commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) is being given a 50th anniversary party. (There’s a charming little prologue set 50 years before the main action, in which young Selwyn, played by Marson Francisco, shows up late for his first class at the police academy because he stopped his bike on the way to help an old woman stranded on the road, and while he had his bike parked a driver came along and ran over his front wheel.) Selwyn is a down-to-earth guy who’s getting impatient and utterly bored with the testimonials to him at the event, so he goes out to walk down a jetty and collect his thoughts while getting some fresh air. Suddenly a man walks up behind him and he gets shot and falls in the water. Fortunately he’s rescued by a party attendee who heard a shot and went to see what was the matter, so he’s merely injured but not dead – though he continues to run the investigation from his hospital bed and gets impatient with his investigators, Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little) – an import from London and the only white person on the Saint-Honoré police force – and his police partner, detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), over their slowness at apprehending his assailant. There’s another, seemingly unrelated case of a man who ran the local yacht club until he disappeared, ostensibly on a year-long around-the-world cruise. But of course Parker and Thomas discover that the cases are closely related after all: though witnesses saw a local Black guy named Alton Garvey (Mensah Bediako) shoot Selwyn, it turns out that the actual killer was [spoiler alert!] Marlon Collins (Sean Maguire), a local white ne’er-do-well and the only other white person in the cast besides Ralf Little as Parker.

Garvey approached Selwyn standing on the jetty and sneaked up behind him with the gun but drew back from actually firing it – until Collins sneaked up behind him and grabbed the gun, squeezing Alton’s hand so Alton actually pulled the trigger but it was Collins who intentionally fired the shot. Collins had calculated it so that Alton’s small-caliber gun wouldn’t be heard at the party, but because Alton drove an old, decrepit truck which always backfired when it started, the people at Selwyn’s party would hear it and assume that was the near-fatal shot at Selwyn. Midway through the episode Alton calls the police station from a pay phone (wow, a location in the world still remote enough it actually has pay phones!) and admits to shooting Selwyn but can’t explain why – something that baffled writers Tom Nash and James Hall, too. Fortunately, while Collins was squeezing Alton’s arm to get him to fire at Selwyn, one of his yacht club cufflinks fell off – and that enabled the police not only to tie him to the murder but even to explain his motive. It seems that he had previously killed the yacht-club president because the man was blackmailing him over his affair with Jacqueline St. Clair (Cathy Tyson), wife of Lincoln St. Clair (Leon Herbert), only because of the investigation surrounding the attempted murder of Selwyn, the police were trying to reach the yacht-club president Collins had actually killed, then scuttled his boat at sea, and left everyone to assume he was still on his round-the-world cruise. It was an O.K. episode and an excuse to show some of the drop-dead gorgeous scenery of Guadeloupe, and given that Sean Maguire was easily the most attractive man in the cast, it seems like the 13 producers – notably Robert Thorogood, who also is credited with “creating” the show – and director Steve Hughes were following Lifetime’s stereotype of making the sexiest guy on the show the villain. My husband Charles arrived home for the second half of the program and, like me, he was baffled by the listing of a “Rome Unit” in the closing credits. Did they actually shoot scenes in the Eternal City? Did they do some of the editing or sound mixing there? Or is there another “Rome” somewhere in the Caribbean?

Live at the Belly Up: Sabrosas Latin Orchestra (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that intriguing Death in Paradise episode, KPBS showed a Live at the Belly Up program, blessedly from 2024 instead of a rerun from previous years (they’ve been doing reruns so long we’ve got to see performers like local blues queen Candye Kane who have long since died) featuring the Sabrosas Latin Orchestra. They are the first all-woman salsa band in the San Diego area and they consist of 12 musicians, all of them excellent. The band’s designated spokeswoman for the interstitial interviews was Monica Saenz, who plays timbales (the two standing drums, which look like snare drums without the snares, that are basic to Latin music). She said the women had known each other for years but hadn’t played together until one day, when one of them said, “Let’s start a band” – and they all loved the idea and joined in. LIke a lot of bands that appear on Live at the Belly Up, Sabrosas Latin Orchestra are quite infectious, though as the show progressed I started to feel just a bit oppressed at the sameness of the material. It seemed every song had to get into a dance groove and stay there – even the last song, “Vivir mi Vida,” which began with some nice group singing, soon sped up and churned out the same basic salsa rhythms as everything else they played. I often measure a Live at the Belly Up episode by how many songs the band is able to perform in the show’s time slot (nominally an hour, usually 52 minutes, though I believe this one ran overtime and clocked in at 55 to 57 minutes). Sabrosas performed 11, on the small end and indicating that they spent a lot of time jamming and stretching out the songs into long dance grooves.

Monica Saenz said during one of the interviews that the band plays in the traditional clavé rhythm of Cuban music but also adds bits of the jazz influence that came when many Cuban musicians relocated to New York and started picking up on the jazz scene there. Their pianist, Tomo Osako (she was playing an electric keyboard but it was set to sound like a normal piano), threw in some tasteful but impactful bebop licks into their sound. I tried to pick out the sexiest members of the band and decided it was between their conga drummer, Monette Marino, who showed up in a beautiful red sequined gown; and one of their two trombonists, Rebecca McKinley, who had her hair cut short and wore a red sequined top similar to Monette’s whole dress but what appeared to be a tasseled short blue skirt below the waist. The band has three lead singers and they’re all sisters: Yadisley Vásquez Fuentes, Mariela Contreras and Iliana Ortiz. Iliana came out about two-thirds of the way through the show, and until then Vásquez Fuentes and Contreras had amazed me with their skill at dancing while wearing stiletto high heels. Ortiz also had on high heels, though at least hers were thicker than those of her sisters’, and she was wearing a stunning red wig that made me think of Lucille Ball. The 11 songs they played were “La Rebelión” (which threw the Belly Up’s usually reliable chyron writers; no title appeared on screen for it and I literally had to Google it to find out the song’s name), “Cali Pochanguera,” “Pira Pira,” “Amica es Safiurente,” “Moliendo Cufé,” “I Like It Like That” (a song they introduced as their concession to American soul music; they based theirs on Cardi B’s version, though there have been previous recordings by Latin stars like Tito Puente), “Toro Mata” (which they introduced with the drummers banging away on various African-derived percussion instruments to illustrate the song’s beginnings from Africa via Peru; it was one of the most exciting moments on the program), “Carnaval,” “Llordás,” and the closer, “Vivir mi Vida.”