Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Midway" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 1, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 15) my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch the two remaining shows of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order itself. The SVU show, called “Midway” because it takes place largely inside a carnival, was a chilling episode in which Leo Brooks (Rhett Dustin), the nine-year-old son of divorced couple Thomas and Helene Brooks (Anthony Goes and Abby Mueller), is taken to the carnival by Thomas even though he's not supposed to have unsupervised visitation rights. Thomas and Leo get into an argument, Leo throws down his cotton candy in anger, and Thomas goes off to get him some more – and when he turns back Leo is gone. Helene arrives at the carnival, having traced her son and her ex there, and they get into an argument that degenerates quickly to the point where the SVU cops there to investigate Leo’s disappearance have to separate them before they assault each other. Complicating matters is the fact that Leo had been sexually abused previously by his paternal uncle, and of course mom blames dad for his abusive brother. The police investigate and find Mary (Stella Marcus), a 19-year-old who worked as a casual employee at the carnival, who tells them that Leo is with “Bob” and will be better off with him than with his dysfunctional parents. Ultimately it turns out that “Bob” was an older man who kidnapped Mary, whose real name is Christine Anderson, when she was five. For the next 14 years Bob toured the country with Mary (as he called her) and regularly abused her physically and sexually, while she developed a full-blown case of the Stockholm Syndrome.

Ultimately Bob trusted her enough to let her out of his sight long enough to run errands for him, and the ironic twist at the end of the episode is that Bob had actually been dead for several months when Mary kidnapped Leo to “save” him from the dismal fate that awaited him with either of the bozo-brains he had for parents. (She had a point there.) The police ultimately find Leo locked in a storage box in the back of Mary’s truck, but he’s dead (a bit of a surprise because writer Kevin Deiboldt had so carefully built up the suspense around the police search for Leo we were convinced – or at least I was convinced – he’d be found alive), and the question becomes what to do with Mary. Obviously she’s legally responsible for Leo’s death, but she’s also a victim herself, and her parents, Joe and Linda Anderson (Pej Vahdat and Emily Donahoe), don’t want her convicted of murder or even manslaughter because they’ve been carrying the torch for her for 14 years and they just want her back. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn, Samuel Goldwyn’s grandson, and before he got on Law and Order he played Fundamentalist Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs in a TV-movie) and his deputies, Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin), cut a deal by which Mary t/n Christine will serve a 10-year sentence, the first five years in a secure mental-health facility and the second five years on supervised probation. Her parents practically go ballistic at that one, and so does Mary’s obnoxious heavy-set piece-of-work Black woman attorney, Cherise Hamlin (Saida Arrika Ekulona), but in the end Mary takes the deal because she realizes that even if she could win an acquittal at trial, she’s not sure that her deranged (by years of abuse) psyche won’t cause her to lash out at someone else and harm them again. The best thing about this show was Stella Marcus’s spectacular performance as Mary/Christine, ably delineating the tumbled state of her psyche and her own guilt feelings over what she did to Leo.

Law and Order: "Into the Mystic" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 15, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show my husband Charles and I stayed on NBC October 15 to watch a quite grim Law and Order episode called “Into the Mystic” (though what it has to do with the Van Morrison song that gave it its title is something of a mystery). It was startling in that it actually showed one of the series’ two lead detectives, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), not only getting shot in the line of duty but actually dying from his bullet wounds. If they’re going to kill off a series regular, they usually do it at the very end of a season so they can groom whoever’s going to take over as his or her replacement, not just two episodes into a new season. Riley was shot by Eddie Biller (Orion McCabe) as part of an elaborate mistaken-identity gimmick; Biller’s brother had previously been convicted of robbery and prosecuted by deputy district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy). Now the brother has been killed in prison by a fellow inmate, and Eddie is out for revenge against Nolan, only he shot and killed Det. Riley instead because the two men looked quite similar. (I should have known that Dick Wolf and his writers – here Rick Eid and Will Lapp – would someday do something with the striking physical resemblance between Reid Scott and Hugh Dancy.) Riley’s partner, Detective Theo Walker (David Ajala), originally tells the investigating police that he didn’t get close enough to see the shooter’s face, but Riley’s brother Matt (Ryan Eggold) pressures Walker to change his testimony and say he did see Eddie Biller well enough to identify him. Because Vincent Riley is personally involved in the case, DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) pulls rank on him and insists on trying the case himself. We don’t actually see Walker on the stand “testilying” (as it’s colloquially called whenever police lie on the witness stand to secure a conviction), but we assume that’s what happened because Biller is indeed convicted. There’s also an interesting subplot in which Biller’s attorney tries to sow reasonable doubt about his guilt by claiming that the D.A.’s office framed him just when he was about to expose their corruption. It was an O.K. Law and Order, most striking for the sheer surprise in seeing one of the series regulars bite the big one just as a new season is getting underway!

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

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

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

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

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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