Mutiny on the Bounty (Arcola Pictures, MGM, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 7) at 7:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty on Turner Classic Movies. It was a film that was savaged at the time, largely due to the public disagreements between director Lewis Milestone and star Marlon Brando, which among other things alienated the other actors and caused the costs to run well over the film’s budget. The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty would have been the 1960’s version of Heaven’s Gate if not for the even more spectacular crash and burn that year of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton-Joseph L. Mankiewicz Cleopatra. Like Heaven’s Gate, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty was a film I’d read trash talk about literally for decades before I finally saw it – and it was actually pretty good. The film began as a medium-budget project, a remake of a successful film from 1935 directed by Frank Lloyd (a specialist in dramas set all or largely at sea) with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as an almost demonic Captain William Bligh. The original plan for the remake was announced in 1958, with John Sturges directing, Burt Lancaster as Christian, and Spencer Tracy as Bligh. When MGM, the producing studio, signed Brando instead, Sturges dropped out. MGM hired British director Carol Reed and commissioned an exact replica of the Bounty based on the surviving plans for the original ship. Their Bounty was 106 feet long, 15 feet longer than the original, because it needed to accommodate the cameras, sound recorders, and film processing equipment, since in a vain attempt to hold down costs producer Aaron Rosenberg had decided not only to shoot on location in Tahiti but develop the film there instead of risking sending it back to Hollywood for processing. (The 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty had been shot entirely in the U.S., with Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for the South Seas, “playing” Tahiti.) Reed was on the film for months, shooting what he could without a Bounty because construction of the replica ship had run over budget and schedule, until he was either fired or quit.

Russian-born American director Lewis Milestone was hired to replace him, and as he told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in an interview for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, “When I came on to Mutiny on the Bounty after Carol Reed left, I felt it would be an easy assignment because they’d been on it for months and there surely couldn’t be much more to do. To my dismay, I discovered that all they’d done was a seven-minute scene just before they land in Papeete, in which Trevor Howard issues instructions about obtaining island breadfruit. Marlon Brando swears he had nothing to do with Carol Reed’s departure; that was a matter between Reed and the producer. However, Carol resigned with full pay, which is not a bad way to go.” According to some reports, Brando was happy to work with Milestone because he’d long been a fan of Milestone’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Milestone told Higham and Greenberg that Brando was actually easy to work with for the first two weeks or so that he was on the project. During that time Milestone enjoyed working with the British actors in the cast, including Trevor Howard and Richard Harris (Milestone and Harris became and remained friends). “Then the trouble started,” Milestone said. “I would say that what basically went wrong with Mutiny on the Bounty was that the producer made a number of promises to Marlon Brando which he subsequently couldn’t keep. It was an impossible situation because, right or wrong, the man simply took charge of everything. You had the option of sitting and watching him or turning your back on him. Neither the producers nor I could do anything about it.” Maybe Brando’s take-charge attitude came from the fact that he came to Bounty right after finishing One-Eyed Jacks, a quirky Western (and another monumentally underrated film) in which he directed himself for the first and only time, and it’s possible that having just served as his own director he had a hard time getting used to working under someone else’s guidance. (Brando had originally started One-Eyed Jacks with Stanley Kubrick as his director, but early on he’d fired Kubrick and taken over the direction himself – which freed Kubrick to take over another troubled production for a producer/star, Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus.) One Brando biographer, Gary Carey, said that Milestone was particularly offended when Brando started wearing cotton earplugs around the set. (A later Brando director, Gillo Pontecorvo, said Brando did that on his film with him, Burn!, but Pontecorvo accepted it because the film was an international production and he could see why Brando might want to cut himself off from the cacophony of various actors from various countries speaking different languages.)

Brando, in turn, blamed the cost overruns on Mutiny on the Bounty on the fact that they didn’t have a completed script when they went into production. Screenwriter Charles Lederer was on the location writing it as they went along, and according to Milestone, Brando and Lederer would have daily meetings in which they would hash out the script without inviting Milestone to participate. By the time those meetings ended, Milestone said, “It was about 2:30 and we hadn’t shot a scene. You had the option of shooting it, but since Marlon Brando was going to supervise it anyway, I waited until someone yelled, ‘Camera!,” and I went off to sit down somewhere and read the paper.” I first saw the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty with my ideas about it largely formed by Milestone’s The Celluloid Muse interview and the widespread criticism of Brando’s performance as being too nellie, almost Gay. I was quite surprised by how effective he was as Christian, and this time around I was also impressed by at least one thing about Lederer’s script. He depicted the clash between Bligh and Christian in class-conscious terms; he wrote Bligh as a self-made man from humble origins who had worked himself up to a command position in the British navy, while Christian was an aristocratic fop who was imposed on Bligh as his second-in-command at the last minute because the previous officer suddenly caught sick on the eve of the voyage. While this is apparently historically inaccurate – in real life both Bligh and Christian came from relatively comfortable but not spectacularly wealthy middle-class families – it creates a powerful motivator for their on-screen conflicts. The conflict is made explicit in a late scene in which Bligh is court-martialed and acquitted by a judge (the great character actor Henry Daniell in an oddly uncredited appearance; I didn’t recognize him immediately but I knew I’d heard that voice somewhere before) who announces that the affair of the Bounty proved the rectitude of the British government’s usual policy of picking its officers from the aristocracy. (That was actually a long-standing problem for Britain; they hired upper-class people to run their military whether they were actually any good at it or not. Occasionally they lucked out and got someone like the Duke of Wellington, who was not only an aristocrat but also a military genius, but most of the time the British fought their wars under unimpressive commanders and it makes one wonder how they were able to conquer as much of the world as they did.)

I found myself wondering if the writers of the 1995 film Crimson Tide, Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, copied this gimmick from the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, since Crimson Tide is also about a mutiny caused by a clash between an older captain (Gene Hackman) and a second-in-command (Denzel Washington) forced upon him when his previous assistant gets sick on the eve of a voyage, and in Crimson Tide the antagonism is not only class-based but race-based as well. And regarding Brando’s reading of Fletcher Christian, he’s certainly nowhere near as butch as Clark Gable (or Errol Flynn, who’d played Christian in a little-known 1933 Australian film called In the Wake of the “Bounty,” which dramatized the mutiny as an historical prologue to a documentary on the survivors of Pitcairn Island; MGM bought the American rights so it wouldn’t be released in competition with the Gable film and sliced off the documentary portions for two “Passing Parade” shorts, Primitive Pitcairn and Pitcairn Island Today), but his portrayal has its own dignity and inner strength. Brando’s voice as Christian is surprisingly strong, with excellent diction, It’s basically the same voice he’d used as Mark Antony in MGM’s film of Julius Caesar nine years earlier, which had surprised a lot of people at the time. When Brando had been announced for Antony, various comedians and impressionists had had a field day doing the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in the voice of Stanley Kowalski, which is not at all how Brando sounded in the actual film. It’s also a fascinating film to watch today, given how Donald Trump is bullying the world, because Bligh’s whole leadership philosophy is very Trumpian: in a speech beautifully delivered by Trevor Howard, who portrays Bligh not as the figure of almost supernatural evil Charles Laughton did but as a man in desperately over his head and forced to maintain discipline in the only way he knows, he explains that the only way to keep order on his ship is through instilling enough fear in the crew members that they obey his orders because of the hugely drastic consequences if they don’t.

It’s also fascinating in that the breadfruit themselves, which the British government was importing as slave food for the captive African populations in Jamaica, become a quite effective MacGuffin. First we’re told by the ship’s botanist, William Brown (Richard Haydn), that the breadfruit have a dormancy period that starts in October and lasts for about five months thereafter. During that time, any attempt to cut or transplant the breadfruit will kill them. In order to make his tight biologically imposed time line, Bligh first orders the crew to take the dangerous westward route to Tahiti via Cape Horn in South America. Then, when the storms on that route make it too dangerous for the voyage to continue, Bligh reverses course (in both senses) and sails east around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, thereby missing the October deadline and leading to the crew’s five-month stay in Tahiti, when the bounds of discipline break down and the crew members have a jolly old time screwing the available and willing Tahitian women. There are some nice bits of dialogue about the mutual incomprehension between the white and Tahitian characters about their sexual mores; in one scene Bligh orders Christian to stop making love to the Tahitian princess Maimiti (Tarita), only to find out that by doing so he’s insulted her father, Chief Hitihiti (Mathairii Tama). As a result the king forbids the Bounty crew to take any breadfruit until Christian makes up for the “insult” by making love to Maimiti after all – which Christian is all too willing to do. (The ancient Polynesians came as close as any human culture ever has to a totally sexually free environment, but they had an enormous advantage that’s impossible to duplicate now: no sexually transmitted diseases. Those microbes didn’t exist in their environment until whites brought them in, and when I first read that I thought, “That’s white people for you. We ruin everything.”) The breadfruit also precipitate the mutiny; when the plants start dying and Brown explains to Bligh that that’s due to the lack of water, Bligh immediately orders the water caskets closed and says that any sailor who wants a drink of water will have to climb the top mast to get the ladle for it. One desperately ill sailor tries this and falls to his death on the Bounty’s deck, and another drinks seawater out of thirst and desperation. It is Christian’s insistence on giving the man the fresh water the ship’s doctor says he needs, along with Bligh’s order that the dead man’s mate be keelhauled (an already illegal punishment that involved tying a man to a rope, throwing him overboard, and letting the ship tow him; it’s a punishment that almost no one survived, and in the film he gets eaten by a shark ex machina) that leads Christian to slap Bligh and start the mutiny.

The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty certainly has its problems, including a 178-minute running time that makes the story seem padded (by contrast, the 1935 version ran 132 minutes, an unusually long film for the time but one which would have left 1962 audiences feeling short-changed); an ultra-slow pace that probably indicates the director’s lack of interest in the project as he went through hell making it; and a wildly fictionalized ending. In the movie Fletcher Christian orders the mutinous crew to set sail from Pitcairn Island (where they’ve settled because it was misidentified on British naval charts and therefore the British Navy couldn’t find them there) to British jurisdiction to turn themselves in and bring Bligh to justice for his actions. The other crew members, unwilling to risk being executed for the mutiny, refuse and burn the Bounty to make it impossible for Christian to return. In reality, Christian was killed by the Tahitian men he’d brought along on the Bounty after the mutiny who resented the way the British were trying to turn them into virtual slaves. In the film, Christian dies in an heroic attempt to rescue the ship’s sextant, and gets a death scene of such extended histrionics – directed, according to imdb.com, by George Seaton rather than Milestone – even an opera composer like Verdi or Puccini would have probably thought it was too long. Nonetheless, despite its longueurs and the Tahitian scenes, which seem racially insensitive today and probably did for at least some viewers in 1962 as well, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty holds up surprisingly well and contains one of Marlon Brando’s better performances (and I say that as a decided non-fan of Brando generally; frankly I think he was at his worst in his most butch performances, like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and when he got his big comeback role in The Godfather I loved the film overall but didn’t care for his schticky overacting). And one irony of this film is that Brando fell in love with Tarita for real, living with her and buying an entire island (Tetiaroa, near Tahiti) to be with her when he wasn’t working; ironically, Brando’s second wife, the Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, had played the equivalent role to Tarita’s in the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty.

Law and Order: "Remedies" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 5) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order episode, called “Remedies,” opens with a successful alternative-health entrepreneur and influencer named Emily Starr (Tess Marshall) leading a seminar and book-signing event at her wellness center. She “made her bones” in the wellness community by claiming she cured herself of cancer through entirely “alternative” methods, including diet, exercise, cleansings, enemas, and the like. Unfortunately for Emily, she’s cornered on the street and shot with a .22 pistol that turns out to have identical ballistics with a gun used in a robbery six years earlier. The police detectives investigating the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commander, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), trace the gun to the original robber, who served his time for the crime but has just been released after a six-year term. Unfortunately, while he was in prison his girlfriend pawned the gun, and the cops trace it first to a gun-store owner who has the usual Second Amendment twitchiness about being questioned by police but then lets them know it was a couple in New Jersey who bought that particular weapon. The police find surveillance footage of the alleged killer but can’t determine how old they are, what color they are, or even what gender they are. The killer turns out to be Mrs. Massey (Stephanie Szostak), whose attorney concedes in court that she did kill Emily Starr but she did so under the “imminent harm” exception to the laws against murder that says you can kill someone if that someone else is about to commit murder themselves or another crime so heinous it justifies terminating their own life to make sure it doesn’t happen. Mrs. Massey claims that Emily Starr was essentially killing her daughter Lauren (Georgia Waehler), who had cancer, by convincing her to cut off the standard treatments (radiation and chemotherapy), putting her on her regimen, and telling her to cut off all communication with her family and anyone else who might offer “negative thoughts” about her condition.

Only after Emily Starr’s death does Lauren return to standard care, where an MRI shows her cancer has spread. Within a month she’s in partial remission from the standard treatments, and in the trial she follows her mom on the witness stand and credits her mother with saving her life by killing Emily. The two prosecutors on the case, series regulars Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), have strong disagreements about how to handle the case, and at one point Price is ready to offer Mrs. Massey a plea deal to a lesser charge because he’s worried that the jury might have so much sympathy for her she might get acquitted. This episode reminded me of a similar one from the years Christopher Meloni was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Retro” from October 28, 2008, which I remember horrified me at the time because it was a slashing attack on the AIDS dissident movement in general and my friend Christine Maggiore in particular. I later talked to her about it and she said there was an organization called “Hollywood and Health” that was lobbying the producers and staff members of TV shows like Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to do episodes that would dramatize public health controversies and propagandize for the mainstream views. Ironically, Maggiore herself died in December 2008 while I was waiting to publish the second half of my interview with her in Zenger’s Newsmagazine (her death, like that of her daughter 3 ½ years earlier, was widely blamed on AIDS and led a lot of AIDS dissidents to turn away from the movement), and I made the second half a memorial to her. “Remedies” also took a strong stand against alternative medicine and for conventional treatments, though if I were confronted with an invasive cancer diagnosis I’m not sure myself which route I would take or whether I’d attempt to combine both. (I did have a mild colon cancer diagnosed through a colonoscopy, for which I underwent surgery to remove part of my colon, and a later colonoscopy showed no remaining trace of cancer.)

Aside from presenting the dilemma in a dramatically effective way, “Remedies” ends with Mrs. Massey’s murder conviction and a rather prissy statement from Nolan Price that murder is still wrong even when good people commit it for at least understandable, if not entirely sympathetic, reasons. The show’s script by Jennifer Vanderbes also throws in a few complications, including the five-figure sums Lauren was paying Starr for her treatments (her mom found out about her excursions into alternative health in the first place by seeing the charges on the family’s credit-card statements), and the prosecution’s discovery late in the trial that Emily Starr wasn’t actually a cancer survivor at all; she was either pretending to be one to justify her treatments or genuinely believed she’d beaten cancer when she really hadn’t. Price briefly considers disclosing this to Mrs. Massey’s attorney as potentially exculpatory material under the Brady rule, but Maroun talks him out of it. My long-time involvement with alternative health movements gives me a rather mixed view of this story in which I can identify with both sides, while at the same time I’m concerned about the loonier aspects of alternative health, including particularly its skepticism towards vaccinations that has led, among other things, to a recurrence of measles; this morning, as I accompanied my husband Charles to a doctor’s appointment, I was struck that in addition to the expected posted warning signs about flu and COVID-19, there were ones for measles.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Frequency" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that followed after the flagship Law and Order on March 5, 2026 was called “Frequency,” and like the “Remedies” episode of Law and Order also used a gimmick that had been used previously on SVU. A child has been kidnapped by a predator and is being held in captivity inside a dog’s cage in a room in an unknown home, and the cops have to find the child and rescue him (in this case it’s definitively a he) before the sicko who took him gets tired of the game and kills him. The police stumble on this when the radio and video frequencies under which the perp is monitoring his captive somehow got jammed and end up being viewed by a middle-aged (straight) couple who use identical equipment to monitor their own pre-pubescent daughter. It’s therefore a race against time to see if the police can find where the child is being held before anything nasty happens to him. They also aren’t sure just who the kid is or how long he’s been held captive, and there’s one chilling scene in which they invade the office of an Asian-American doctor to ask if it could be her child, who’s been missing for over a year. She freaks out when her hopes are initially raised and then dashed again, and the people I felt sorriest for in the scene were her patients, who came there expecting a professionally competent woman doctor and ended up with an at least temporarily traumatized basket case. The newest member of the Manhattan SVU, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott, who among other things is the sexiest cast member of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit since Christopher Meloni left), notices from the video that the captive boy is autistic, which he realizes because he had a younger brother who was autistic and the two worked out a system of non-verbal communication which he wants to try out on the captive. One quirk in Brant Englestein’s script is that the eavesdropping is two-way; the police can speak to the child (though, being autistic, he’s not inclined to answer verbally) and can also be overheard by his captor, who’s in a different location (it turns out) but is using the video feed to monitor his captive.

Ultimately the police identify the child as Avery Li (Camden Everett Kwok), son of Lauren Li (Elizabeth Sun), who reported him missing a year before. The cops also obtain a note written by the captor, which is printed in a childlike script full of misspellings, including “sturt” for “street.” From the note, and from her training in profiling from a male FBI agent she once dated and who fathered one of her own children, Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) deduces that the criminal is a loner with poor social skills, a lot of time on his hands because he probably isn’t working, and is a hoarder. The police ultimately trace the signals to an apartment occupied by Costa Lykos (Eric Edelstein), a sort of slovenly, proletarian version of Orson Welles. When Detective Rollins visits him as part of her investigation, he at first tries to divert her attention by giving her the address of a cousin named George who he says is the real crook. We figure Costa is the real abductor when he slams the door behind Rollins as she enters his apartment and we see he’s carrying a gun, but we also worry about Rollins’s safety because she’s trapped behind a locked door with a madman with a gun. Costa also turns out to have an elaborate ham radio setup and huge stacks of old newspapers on shelves (thereby checking off the “hoarder” box and making this show something of a busman’s holiday for me, since my husband Charles and I have an apartment filled with stacks of books, CD’s, DVD’s, and papers). Fortunately Rollins catches on in time when Costa writes the address of the either innocent or totally fictitious “George” on a slip of paper, and misspells “street” as “sturt” just the way the kidnapper did in his old note, which explained that he had taken Avery precisely to preserve his innocence instead of for physical or sexual abuse. Costa attempts to flee the scene through the subway system, but he ends up getting run over by a train (subway ex machina) and killed – alas, before he can reveal to the police exactly where Avery is being held. But because one of the things he told Rollins before he fled and was killed was that he had a mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, the cops trace the mother’s apartment and, behind the bed where she’s laying unable to go anywhere, they find a secret padlocked door which one of the male SVU members breaks down and discovers the dog cage with Avery in it. It was a grim and appropriately suspenseful tale even though as social comment it was hardly in the same league as the Law and Order “Remedies” episode just before it.

Elsbeth: "All's Hair" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired March 5, 2026)

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

After the two Law and Order franchise episodes on Thursday, March 5 I turned from NBC to CBS and watched the latest episode of Elsbeth, a policier I’ve described as “Columbo in drag” because the main sleuth character, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), like Peter Falk in Columbo, essentially intuits who the killer is and eventually annoys him or her into confessing. This show was called “All’s Hair” and opens with a bizarre shouting match between a harried U.S. Customs agent (Terrell Wheeler) and the top five wigmakers in New York, each of whom specializes in one particular set of customers. Felix Weaver (Jeff Hiller, who looks oddly queeny and strikingly resembles the young Elton John) specializes in hair appliances for medical patients, including people on chemotherapy who’ve lost all their natural hair as a side effect. Gordon “Persimmon” Tuttle (Antwayn Hopper) is a Black wigmaker who specializes in doing drag queens and looks like he just walked in from the cast of Paris Is Burning. Domenico Cappelli (Al Sapienza) – his last name means “heads” in Italian, an odd “in” joke from writers Erica Shelton Kodish and Wade Dooley – is the wigmaker to the stars, including Diana Ross as well as several white celebrities. The wigmakers desperately plead with the customs agent to get their supplies of natural hair, while the customs agent pleads bureaucratic policy, says he won’t be able to release the hair until the next day, and closes his computer just to make sure they get the message. Then Felix gets a visit from morning TV host Lina Vyanti (Alexandra Wentworth) asking for a wig for her show. She usually goes to Domenico for her wigs, but for some reason she’s dissatisfied with him and wants Felix to do it. Felix in turn is delighted to have a chance to cut into the celebrity market that Domenico has been dominating, and agrees. But in order to make Lina’s wig he needs a sample of untreated naturally blonde hair, and to get it he simply sneaks behind a teenage girl with a long blonde ponytail and snips it off. Unfortunately, Domenico witnesses him do this and tries to blackmail him, demanding 40 percent of all Felix’s future earnings as the price of his silence. The struggle between them happens in Domenico’s living room, where Domenico’s mother (Patricia Mauceri) is simmering a large pot of homemade pasta sauce. Felix tries to take a taste of it but that just gets Domenico even angrier; he declares that Felix is not morally fit to eat his mother’s sauce.

The two have a struggle in which they both reach for, not a gun this time, but a curling iron, and Felix eventually strangles Domenico to death with the curling iron’s cord and steals some of his most prized wigs, including Diana Ross’s, to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. There’s also a subplot involving the captain of the squad Elsbeth works for, C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), and a wealthy donor to his charity who insists on involving the New York Police Department in stopping his daughter from being buried in high school. The daughter is a rising star in dressage (that preposterous 0.1 percenters’ sport described on Wikipedia as one “where the rider executes a memorized sequence of predetermined movements, directing the horse through the test using coordinated leg, seat, and rein aids”; it unexpectedly became an issue in the 1996 Presidential campaign when it turned out Ann Romney, wife of Republican nominee Mitt Romney, was a major participant in dressage). Her dad insists she’s being bullied and enlists Wagner to find out who and why, and though Wagner insists that it’s not part of his job description to settle quarrels between schoolchildren, ultimately he takes the case. It’s a good thing he does, too, because the two stories turn out to be linked: the daughter was the kid from whom Felix Weaver stole the ponytail he needed for Lina Vyanti’s wig. There are also a couple of other subplots that don’t link to the main intrigue; Elsbeth gets a sudden charm offensive from Winnie Crawford (Henny Russell), who unbeknownst to her is an operative for the opponent of the mayoral candidate Elsbeth has been dating; and there’s also an estrangement between Elsbeth and her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) which police officer Reese Chandler (Ethan Slater) is trying to end by figuring out how to bring the two of them back together. Ultimately Elsbeth cracks the case by realizing that a hair from Felix’s wig for Lina ended up in Mama Cappelli’s spaghetti sauce when Felix tried to taste it. She also gets Felix to lift the bangs across his forehead, revealing a black scar where the curling iron burned his face during his struggle with Cappelli prior to killing him. This Elsbeth episode was a bit too campy for my taste, but at least it was fun, and like Columbo it builds suspense not by asking “whodunit” but “whosgonnagetcaughtandhow,” since we already see the murder go down in the first act before we see any of the police or other authority figures investigating it.

Sweet Bird of Youth (Roxbury Productions, MGM, 1962)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 4) I watched the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth on Turner Classic Movies, largely because there wasn’t much better to do. Sweet Bird of Youth was based on a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams, who’s not one of my favorite writers anyway. I’ve long suspected the peak of his popularity, between 1947 and 1959, came largely because of the ascendancy of the Method school of acting, including the tenet that an actor should draw on his or her own memories to play a scene by looking back on instances in their lives that paralleled what was happening to their characters. Williams wrote plays that lent themselves to that type of acting style because all too many of his characters are tortured by memories of events that happened in their backstories. Sweet Bird of Youth was produced at MGM by former RKO studio head Pandro S. Berman (when his credit appeared I joked, “Where are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers when we need them?”), written and directed by Richard Brooks, and with Paul Newman as the male lead. Newman and Brooks had worked together on a previous film of a Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Elizabeth Taylor as the female lead (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/11/cat-on-hot-tin-roof-avon-productionsmgm.html). (Ironically, in 1989 Taylor would appear in a TV-movie remake of Sweet Bird of Youth as the alcoholic, drug-addicted former movie star played here by Geraldine Page, with Mark Harmon from Star Wars in Newman’s role.)

Newman plays Chance Wayne, who grew up in St. Cloud, Mississippi until he left town to seek a career on Broadway. He made it as far as a featured role in a musical with two other men, and all three made it onto the cover of Life magazine. Then fate intervened in the form of the Korean War. Back home in St. Cloud, local political boss Tom “Boss” Finley, Sr. (Ed Begley) saw a chance to get rid of Chance, who was having an affair with Finley’s daughter Heavenly (Shirley Knight) very much against dad’s wishes, since dad would prefer to pimp her out to powerful older men who could advance his political interests. Finley puts Chance in command of a regiment raised in St. Cloud to fight in the war (incongruously setting him off to battle under the Confederate flag), and when Chance is wounded in combat he returns to the U.S. He settles in Hollywood, hoping to make it as a movie star, but the best he can do is become a beach boy. He attracts the attentions of fading movie star Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), who essentially hires him as a gigolo – it’s hard not to make the connection between this plot line and the story of the 1950 film classic Sunset Boulevard – who’s on the outs after a drunken scene at the premiere of her attempt at a comeback film. (She was upset when her close-ups revealed how old she really was.) Chance returns to St. Cloud in Alexandra’s Cadillac convertible and tries to pass himself off as a success, but the townspeople know better. Chance tries to resume his affair with Heavenly, but Finley uses his political power in town to frustrate them and keep them apart.

Finley is about to stage an Easter Sunday political rally on TV to respond to allegations being made against him by an outside candidate for the governorship, Brutus Haven Smith (James Chandler), a professor who’s discovered Finley’s big secret: he’s keeping a mistress outside of town, Miss Lucy (Madeleine Sherwood), and paying her rent and lavishing gifts on her in exchange for sexual favors. (One wonders why this is considered such a big deal, especially since Finley is a widower; his wife died years before the story we see takes place.) Finley is upset because his son Tom, Jr. (Rip Torn in a performance that steals the film) organized a “Youth for Finley” group that retaliated against Professor Smith by crashing his office and literally burning his books. If you had to do that, Finley tells his son, you should at least have dressed in white hoods instead of clown masks and burned a cross instead of books, so it could have been blamed on the Ku Klux Klan. While that political intrigue is going on (and frankly, it’s a lot more interesting than the romantic story!), Chance is attempting to extract a screen test and a movie contract from Alexandra while at the same time courting Heavenly and trying to get her to return to him, which is a tall order because (though we don’t find this out until the film is almost over) at one point Chance got her pregnant. Finley ordered an illegal abortion from Dr. George Scudder (Philip Abbott), who screwed it up and left Heavenly permanently infertile. Now he’s trying to marry Heavenly off to Dr. Scudder, and both Finley himself and his staffers and allies use various techniques to order Chance and his drunken, drugged-up movie-star companion out of town. There are a number of scenes between Heavenly and Chance that make it seem like she’s still interested in him as well as he in her, but she’s all too aware of how much her dad hates Chance and will do everything he can to make it impossible for them to get together.

Eventually the film’s climax takes place outside Finley’s big political rally, where Professor Smith drives by in a convertible with a bullhorn giving away Finley’s big secrets – not only that he had a mistress but he literally beat her and broke her fingers as revenge for her having written a note in the women’s bathroom of the hotel with red lipstick saying that Finley couldn’t get it up anymore. Tom, Jr. and three of his goons corner Chance outside the rally in the chaos of the situation, beat him within an inch of his life and threaten him with a D.I.Y. castration. (In the play they actually did that, but Richard Brooks had to change that because the Production Code, albeit slightly liberalized over the years, was still in effect.) They think they’ve beaten Chance so badly he’ll no longer be attractive to women and therefore won’t be able to make a living as a gigolo, but after some uncertainty Heavenly finally runs off with him and the two leave town together as lovers. That rewritten ending earned a lot of criticism at the time, including from Tennessee Williams himself, who called it “a contradiction to the meaning of the play.” One reviewer for a publication called FilmInk wrote, “You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served. Chance didn’t deserve a happy ending in Sweet Bird of Youth. (If the filmmakers wanted that ending, they needed to make more changes throughout to justify a happy ending.)” Brooks agreed to lose the castration but worked out an alternate ending in which Alexandra and Miss Lucy would leave town together on a ferry and see Chance’s broken but still living body on a garbage scow, but the “suits” at MGM refused to let him shoot it.

As he had done with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brooks had his cinematographer (Milton Krasner here, William Daniels on Cat), shoot the film in pretty picture-postcard color instead of the black-and-white noir look the story’s darkness demanded, and justified it by saying, “It’s a very harsh picture, and I didn’t see why the photography had to be as harsh as the content.” One thing Brooks did right was recruit four actors from the original stage cast – Newman, Page, Begley, and Torn – to be in the film, though he had to fight the studio over Page because they didn’t think she was glamorous enough to be believable as a movie star, even a fading one. He was rewarded by the Academy, which gave a nomination to Page for Best Actress, to Knight for Best Supporting Actress, and to Begley for Best Supporting Actor. Begley actually won even though his character is a typical Tennessee Williams overbearing villain and a pale echo of Burl Ives’s work in the analogous role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once again, Boss Finley reminded me of Donald Trump, especially in the similarly mindless adulation he attracts from his supporters, who carry signs at the rally with slogans like, “Save us, Boss.” Given the flashback we see of Finley’s first campaign for office in the late 1920’s, I got the impression that we were supposed to read Huey Long as the real-life basis for his character: a man who emphasizes his humble origins, wins office with all the best intentions to serve the people, is drawn deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and self-dealing, but manages to retain his support with a “man of the people” image that no longer fits (if it ever did) what he’s actually doing with his power. Finley also reminded me of Trump in his determination to tar his political enemies as “Reds,” “Bolsheviks,” and “un-American,” and his visceral upset whenever anyone in the media criticizes him. In one scene he’s being shown a newsreel copy of a TV show exposing his regime as the corrupt, fraud-ridden mess it is, and he gets violently upset, demands that the film be stopped, and says that people shouldn’t be allowed to make films like that about him. But then by now, 11 years into the Trump Era of American politics, it’s almost a reflex-conditioned response for me to think of Trump whenever I see a film about a megalomaniac political leader using his power to corrupt absolutely!

All That Jazz (Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, 1979)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a night of Academy Award-winning or -nominated films about music and dancing, of which the one I decided to watch was Bob Fosse’s highly regarded, semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979). This was the fourth of the five films Fosse directed, along with Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of a show Fosse had also done on stage but the studio, Universal, forced him to use Shirley MacLaine as the star instead of Gwen Verdon, Mrs. Bob Fosse, who’d played the part on stage; Cabaret (1972), which won Fosse the Best Director Academy Award; Lenny (1975), the biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce (which once again suffered a cast change from play to film; on stage Cliff Gorman had played Bruce, but for the movie they got Dustin Hoffman because he had a bigger movie “name”); All That Jazz (1979); and Star 80 (1983), about the rise to stardom of model and Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten and her murder at the hands of her ferociously jealous manager and husband, Paul Snider. I’d seen All That Jazz before in the early 1980’s at a party thrown by some of the friends Cat Ortiz and I knew at UC San Diego; they hosted a party of movies on videotape when that was still a major novelty. I remember not liking the film, finding it really self-indulgent and almost offensive, and calling it overrated while I thought Star 80 was underrated. But when I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night I decided to give it another try.

All That Jazz was based on an incident in Fosse’s real life: a heart attack he suffered while simultaneously directing the stage version of Chicago and editing the film Lenny in 1975. Fosse came near death as a result, and was inspired to create this film about choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing alcoholic and drug addict who begins every morning with an implacably consistent routine: he takes Alka-Seltzer and Dexedrine while listening to a Vivaldi concerto (on cassette, which really dates this movie) while facing his bathroom mirror, then says to himself, “It’s show time!” He also has an ex-wife named Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer) whom he continues to work with in his shows, and a current main squeeze named Katie Jagger (Ann Reinking), with whom he has an argument when she wants to leave town for a six months’ tour with someone else’s show and he wants her to stay in town. There’s one grimly funny scene in which Audrey lets herself into Joe Gideon’s apartment (she still has his key) while Katie is in bed with him, and we brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable confrontation … only it never occurs because Katie is able to hide her body behind Joe’s so Audrey doesn’t see her. Gideon is simultaneously working on a lumbering stage musical called NY/LA and editing a movie he’s shot called The Stand-Up, and dealing with both sets of producers. The Broadway ones are concerned mainly about the sheer amount of sexual content he’s working into the big numbers, particularly one called “Class” which supposedly takes place on an airliner and features not only men dancing with women but women dancing with women and men dancing with men. (It’s an interesting index of the grudging level of social acceptance Gay men and Lesbians were just beginning to claw towards in the late 1970’s before the calamity of AIDS associated the Queer community in general with illness and death.) The Hollywood ones are upset with how far he’s gone over budget both in shooting The Stand-Up and in editing it, including obsessively recutting a sequence in which Cliff Gorman’s character performs a routine satirizing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her famous five stages of grief. (The routine features a nice line about how Kübler-Ross presented herself as a definitive authority on dying when she hadn’t yet died herself.)

Gideon is in the middle of rehearsing NY/LA when he starts getting symptoms of heart disease, which leads to a full-blown heart attack and eventually open-heart surgery. Having had open-heart surgery myself, I couldn’t help but think as the blatant med-porn of Gideon’s body being sliced open flashed on the screen, “Did this really happen to me?” (It did, and I have the chest scars to prove it.) The credits for All That Jazz contain an acknowledgment to Dr. John E. Hutchinson III as a technical advisor. It’s also grimly appropriate that Gideon’s doctor, Ballinger (Michael Tolen), is warning him to cut back on his drinking and smoking while both of them are puffing away like mad on cigarettes and coughing big-time from it. (One of my ongoing fascinations with older movies is seeing the sheer amount of smoking doctors, nurses, and patients all did in environments that today maintain rigid anti-smoking policies.) All That Jazz remains a fascinating movie, but not always for the right reasons. It co-won the Cannes Film Festival’s best-movie award the year it was shown there (1980) and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay (for Fosse and Robert Alan Aurthur, who also produced the film and whose last project it was), but it only won for four lesser categories: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Score. Before Roy Scheider got the part of Joe Gideon, it was offered to Paul Newman and also to Scheider’s former Jaws cast-mate, Richard Dreyfuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Scheider in the role, he’s so spot-on.

At the same time All That Jazz is a film I respect a lot more than I really enjoy; there’s a certain sick level of self-satisfaction in watching the downward spiral of a man who is clearly destroying himself, but at least for me it only sporadically works. You have to be given some reason why you should care about this man, and you aren’t except for a few ultra-brief flashes. There’s a grim ending sequence in which the producers of the show-within-the-show NY/LA realize that they’re actually better off financially if Joe Gideon dies, since if he croaks they’ll be able to collect enough profit from the insurance company to pay off the incurred costs and have $600,000 left over, while if they wait the four months before his doctors clear him to return to work on it, they’ll have to use their own money to keep the cast together. (I wonder if this was a problem for all the shows on Broadway which had to close when the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect, at least a few of which did open after all once the lockdowns were lifted.) On my first go-round with All That Jazz I had especially disliked the final number, with Ben Vereen as “O’Connor Flood” enthusiastically singing off Joe Gideon with the Everly Brothers’ song “Bye, Bye, Love,” with the lyrics appropriately tweaked to “Bye, Bye, Life.” This time around that seemed like one of the best parts of the movie, along with the “Class” number: artfully rewritten and tweaked in the lyrics to give Gideon the larger-than-life send-up the character deserves. Two women are wearing body stockings emblazoned with drawings of arteries and veins as they become part of his chorus line, alongside all the doctors, nurses (including one he’s repeatedly made passes at), and others who’ve tried to take care of him. Then this spectacular number comes through a thudding halt and we see Gideon’s real end: he dies and is zipped up into a plastic body bag. Those are the two big spectacular numbers; the others are pretty much a compendium of Fosse’s Greatest Hits, with lots of jerky, almost robotic movements; lots of people waving and strutting around in hats, a sequence that blatantly rips off the “Two Ladies” number in Fosse’s Cabaret, another driven by finger-snapping based on a similar song in Sweet Charity, and so on. There’s a marvelous sequence in which an older woman TV film critic blasts Gideon’s newly released The Stand-Up for being pretentious, self-referential, and dull: precisely the criticisms I would make about All That Jazz!

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (David Foster Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 28) my husband Charles and I watched a legendary movie neither of us had seen before (at least I hadn’t seen it; I’m not sure whether Charles did or not): McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a 1971 neo-Western directed by Robert Altman, co-written by him and Brian McKay (with uncredited contributions from Ben Maddow, Joseph Calvelli, and Robert Towne), based on a novel from 1959 by Edmund Naughton simply called McCabe. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest in 1902 and revolves around a mining-driven boom town (though we don’t see what’s being mined or any scenes of the characters actually working) with the improbable name of Presbyterian Church, after the town’s largest building. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and typical Old West wanderer, arrives in town with the objective of making a lot of money playing poker with the locals – he’s passing himself off as “Pudgy” McCabe, a legendary gunslinger famous for knocking off a particularly nasty outlaw. He hopes to use the money from his poker winnings to open a whorehouse in town, and to that end he buys three prostitutes from a local dealer. Then he runs into Constance Miller (Julie Christie, Beatty’s real-life off-screen partner at the time), who pushes her way into his enterprise by pointing out all the problems he’s blithely ignoring, including the obvious complications of pregnancy and STD’s. Despite McCabe’s disinterest in any business partners, the two work together with Mrs. Miller taking charge of the prostitution operation and McCabe running the associated saloon and gambling den. Then complications arise in the form of two representatives from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in nearby Bearpaw, whose workers are the main client base of McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s enterprises. The two, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland), offer to buy out McCabe for $5,000, which they later raise to $6,250. When McCabe turns them down, insisting on $12,000 to $14,000, Sears and Hollander bluntly tell him that their employers have no intention of paying that much. Instead they’re going to bring in a hit squad of Breed (Jace Vander Veen), Butler (Hugh Millais), and The Kid (Manfred Schulz) to knock off McCabe and take his property by force. McCabe realizes that they’re going to kill him when he returns to Bearpaw and finds that both Sears and Hollander have left town. McCabe sees a local attorney, Clement Samuels (William Devane), who encourages him to fight the mining company in the courts, but it’s no use; Butler stalks McCabe and shoots him in the back, though as he’s dying McCabe is able to take a small derringer and shoot Butler in the forehead, thus killing him as well.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an important film in terms of its visual look; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer. He had fled Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed government, and because the business of cinematography in the U.S. was so hard to break into (the American Society of Cinematographers was a notoriously “closed” union, meaning you weren’t allowed to join unless a previous member invited you), he made his living the next decade working non-union jobs for really terrible cheap producers like Arch Hall, Sr. Hall gave Zsigmond his first full cinematography job on the 1963 film The Sadist, which like all Hall, Sr.’s productions starred his son Arch Hall, Jr. By 1970 Zsigmond had gradually began to work his way into more prestigious jobs, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the film that really “made his bones.” Zsigmond developed a technique called “flashing,” which meant briefly exposing the raw film stock to light, creating a slightly fogged look that added to the verisimilitude. Though the film was shot in color, the “flashing” made it look more like the black-and-white photos of the era in which the story took place. Altman also insisted on shooting the film as much as possible in sequence to illustrate the growth of the town as McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s business acumen brings more money into it and the town expands as a result. He had his set construction crew building the town as he was shooting, and some of them actually appeared in the film as the construction workers they really were. Oddly, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie weren’t Altman’s first choices for the leads: he wanted Elliott Gould (who would later star for Altman as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the absolutely worst film ever made about Raymond Chandler’s detective character) and Patricia Quinn. That was interesting since the film was sold largely on the basis of Beatty’s and Christie’s star power and the publicity surrounding their real-life relationship.

I’d like to report that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a masterpiece, but no can do; the film was obviously trying too hard to be “different.” With the Motion Picture Production Code finally having broken down a few years before and been replaced by the movie ratings system we’re familiar with today, Altman and his writers are obviously taking a certain joy in being able to show things and talk about them on screen that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1930’s or 1940’s. They could present a whorehouse as just that instead of having to call it a “dance hall” (the usual Code-era euphemism) and even show the breasts of some of the actresses playing hookers. There’s a certain air of in-your-face cheekiness about this movie which, paradoxically, makes it a lot less fun than it could have been. But the film’s major problem is Altman’s ponderously slow pace. Charles found a lot of it boring and both of us sometimes had difficulty staying awake. McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a lot of Altman’s directorial trademarks, including overlapping and frequently repetitive dialogue (he wanted his actors to talk the way real people do, interrupting each other and saying the same things over again, and he did) and frequent cross-cuts that undermine any sense of pace. Just as we’re getting interested in and even engrossed by one story thread, Altman wrenches us away from it and whipsaws us into another. Altman’s best films, M*A*S*H and Nashville, make that device work and help him bring his stories and characters to vivid life. McCabe and Mrs. Miller just plods along from one not very interesting plot strand to another. It ends in what has got to be one of the all-time dullest and least exciting final shootouts in the history of the Western genre. There are some marvelously subtle bits in the film, including McCabe’s bitter opposition to drug use (especially among the Chinese mine workers in the area) versus Mrs. Miller’s carefully concealed opium addiction; and McCabe first paying Mrs. Miller to have sex with him (revealed quite cleverly by Altman keeping Zsigmond’s camera on the box where he’s put her fee rather than showing us them having sex) and then the two of them having sex without him paying her just before he gets tracked down and shot. Overall, though, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an overrated movie, despite some good qualities, and one of my particular aggravations was the exaggerated Cockney accent with which Julie Christie spoke. She sounds like she’s auditioning for Eliza Doolittle rather than running a relatively high-end brothel in 1902 Washington. It seems unbelievable to me that in the 2008 American Film Institute poll it was rated eighth among the “100 Best Westerns of All Time” – I can think of a lot of better Westerns than this!