Wagner: Siegfried (Unitel, Bel Air Media, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Arte, RBB, CNC, C Major, 2022)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 19) my husband Charles and I made it through the third installment of Dmitri Tchneriakov’s misbegotten production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen for the Berlin Oper Unter den Linden in 2022. The Berlin Oper Unter den Linden was officially the state opera company of East Germany during the partition from 1945 to 1990. Last night’s opera was Siegfried, designated by Wagner as the “Second Day” of the cycle, since he regarded the first of the four Ring operas, Das Rheingold, as merely a “Vorabend” (“prologue”). Tcherniakov was hired to direct and design the Ring by the company’s former music director, Daniel Barenboim, before he stepped down as conductor of the Ring in 2022 and retired altogether the next year. The directorship was taken over by Christian Thielemann, who assumed the post of music director for the entire company in 2023 on top of his directorship of the Bayreuth Festival. Tcherniakov’s whole conception of the Ring was to have it take place in a giant scientific research lab called E.S.C.H.E. (the word is the German for “ash,” as in “ash tree,” from which the Norse god Odin, whom the Germans called Wotan, cut a twig to form a spear, onto which he carved runes expressing the knowledge for which he’d given up one of his eyes, though E.S.C.H.E. is spelled like an acronym but we’re never given a clue as to what the acronym stands for) in which various behavioral experiments are going on with both animal and human subjects. This meant, among other things, that Tcherniakov filled up the stage with a lot of silent characters as well as the speaking (or singing) ones Wagner created, and frequently had some of the named characters appear in enclosed catwalks as they looked down on the action in scenes in which Wagner had not called for their participation. Siegfried suffered from Tcherniakov’s bone-headed conception less than the two previous operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, had, but that’s praising with faint damnation.

Tcherniakov set the first act of Siegfried, like the first act of Die Walküre, inside the frame of a modern-day house, though without side walls so the audience could see what was going on inside. The opera actually begins during the orchestral prologue (during which Wagner expected audience members to be filing into their seats as the music played) with extreme close-ups of a rather sullen-looking child who we assumed will grow up to be the young Siegfried (Andreas Schager) playing with giant-sized Lego blocks. (One movie idea the world really didn’t need: The Lego Siegfried.) When the curtain rises we see Mime (Stephan Rügamer), brother of Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle) and Siegfried’s foster-father, even though Siegfried can’t stand him. (Mime and Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are the two characters in Wagner in whom his anti-Semitism gets in the way of appreciation even for a diehard Wagnerphile like me.) Mime got to be Siegfried’s foster-father after the events of Die Walküre, in which Siegmund (Robert Watson) met his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė) and had a one-night stand with her even though, as Anna Russell put it, “she’s married to someone else, which is immoral; and she’s his own sister, which is illegal.” The next day Siegmund got killed in a duel with Sieglinde’s husband Hunding, and Sieglinde was ready to kill herself until the Valkyrie Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe) persuaded her that she needed to keep herself alive for at least the next nine months so she could give birth to her and Siegmund’s child Siegfried. Brünnhilde told Sieglinde she should hide out in the forest where the giant Fafner (Peter Rose) had turned himself into a dragon and was guarding the treasure the Nibelungs had accumulated for Alberich in Rheingold. Sieglinde did as instructed but died in childbirth as Siegfried was born, and Mime took the baby in, deciding to raise him and use him as an instrument of vengeance against his brother Alberich. Siegfried also inherited the fragments of Nothung (“Needful”), the sword his dad had used in his duel with Hunding until Wotan, secretly intervening on Hunding’s side, had broken it with his spear.

Mime, who as a metalsmith had created the magical ring from the gold Alberich had stolen from the Rhinemaidens in Rheingold, tries in vain to create a sword Siegfried couldn’t break. Mime also has been fending off various questions from Siegfried about who he really is and where he came from, including telling him, “I am both your father and your mother.” Siegfried has spent enough time out in nature to know that that’s nonsense; he’s noticed that animals pair off with each other and produce offspring that resemble them, and he assumes that he must have had both a father and mother and Mime wasn’t either of them. At one point Siegfried runs off into the woods to get away from Mime, and while he’s out the god Wotan shows up in the guise of “The Wanderer.” Together they go through one of the maddening recitations of the backstory that plague the Ring and remind us that Wagner originally planned a stand-alone opera called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), then decided it needed a prologue called Der Junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), and by the time he finished writing the texts he’d written all four in reverse order and never went back to eliminate the now-superfluous parts giving the backstory. Wotan leaves Mime hanging, almost literally (the rules of the contest allowed the winner to kill the loser once he got a question wrong), over who will reforge Nothung and use it to kill Fafner. Then Siegfried returns and decides that rather than attempt to piece the old Nothung back together, he must file it down to shavings and melt it down completely, making a new sword of the old metal. He does this to the accompaniment of some of the greatest music Wagner (or anybody) ever wrote, the “Forging Scene” and “Hammer Scene,” and at the end of the scene Siegfried tests the power of his newly forged sword by splitting the anvil on which he shaped it. At least that’s the scene as Wagner wrote it, but Tcherniakov had other, worse ideas; Siegfried celebrates his forging of the sword (which we never see in restored form) by taking his hammer and smashing to smithereens just about all of Mime’s furniture as well as his Lego set and the rest of his boyhood toys (putting away childish things, get it?). The second act is supposed to take place in Neidhöhle, the forest where Fafner is hiding out, and Mime takes Siegfried there ostensibly to teach him fear. Tcherniakov presents this wonderful act as a series of six steps in a research assignment:

Phase 1 – Relaxation (Forest Murmurs)
Phase 2 – Immersion in Meditation
Phase 3 – Search for the Inner Helper
Phase 4 – Contacting the Inner Helper
Phase 5 – Confrontation with Conflict. Reaction to Danger.
Phase 6 – Realisation of an Unconscious Desire

The “Inner Helper” turns out to be Wagner’s Woodbird, who in the original sang in incomprehensible birdsong until Siegfried literally tasted Fafner’s blood after killing him (did I spoil it for you?), after which she sang in comprehensible German and warned Siegfried not to trust Mime (Mime had prepared a poisoned drink to knock off Siegfried after Siegfried killed Fafner) and also told him that there was a woman waiting for him sleeping on a rock surrounded by a wall of fire only a hero who had never known fear could go through. Tcherniakov turned the Woodbird into a Black (should I call her “African-German”?) lab assistant (Victoria Randem) who manipulates a toy bird to be Siegfried’s “Inner Helper.” My husband Charles had been wondering how Tcherniakov would stage Fafner in dragon form, and the answer was he didn’t try; instead he had two orderlies bring out Fafner, strait-jacketed and wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask but still recognizably human (and later in the act Siegfried also tries on the Lecter mask for some reason). The third act takes place in various locations in the already established lab sets, and Siegfried has his big confrontation with Wotan in which he’s supposed to break Wotan’s spear with his sword and thereby end what little power the gods have left before he makes it through the flames, finds the sleeping Brünnhilde, says, “Das ist kein Mann!” (“That’s not a man!”) – which has been called one of the silliest lines in all opera – and sings a 35-minute duet with her. The big scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, in which he feels fear for the first time, was supposed to take place on her fire-encircled rock; instead Tcherniakov set it inside a sterile white room labeled “Schlaf Labor” (“Sleep Lab”), and preceded it by having Brünnhilde escorted by Wotan, who lays her on the lab table and even gives her a fatherly kiss. (In Wagner’s original he hasn’t had any contact with her at all since she defied him over Siegmund’s fate in the Walküre duel.) Wotan shows up along with some other extraneous characters watching from a catwalk as Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the final phrases of their duet and pledge their love to each other for eternity [spoiler alert! It doesn’t work out that way in Götterdämmerung]. In the Siegfried/Brünnhilde duet the man who lets the side down is not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann, who slows down some of the most intensely erotic music of all time to a virtual crawl. Listening to this sort of Wagner performance, one can understand Arturo Toscanini’s famous jibe about the similarly extended length of the love duet in Act II of Tristan und Isolde: “If they were Italians, they’d have had seven kids by now!”

I haven’t yet mentioned the quality of the singing, which I would describe as serviceable. Andreas Schager as Siegfried is obliged to spend the entire opera (except for a brief scene in which he’s allowed to doff his jacket and wear a white T-shirt under it) in a powder-blue sweat outfit that doesn’t do much to show off his masculine charms. My dream image of an ideal Siegfried would be one who looked like Paul Richter (who played Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s 1923 film, based not on Wagner but the original Norse myths Wagner had also used) and sounded like Lauritz Melchior; Melchior was vocally incomparable in the part but he fully lived up to Jonathan Tolins’ jibe in the play Twilight of the Golds that “you’re supposed to believe this guy is a superhero when he looks like Ed Asner in a loincloth and a blond wig.” (In the 1930’s, when Melchior was at his peak, the joke would have been “like Eugene Pallette in a loincloth and a blond wig.”) I give Schager credit for sheer stamina; his voice sounded as strong at the end of Act III as at the beginning of Act I, which hasn’t been true of a lot of live-performance Siegfrieds. He doesn’t get to wear a loincloth or a blond wig, and he’s attractive enough he doesn’t look like Ed Asner but he’s hardly a hunk to die for either. Stephan Rügamer is properly annoying as Mime and Michael Volle is strong as the Wanderer a.k.a. Wotan, though I still think his best performance in the cycle came in Walküre because he got to play a genuinely conflicted character. In Rheingold he was a Trump-like con artist and here he’s portrayed on an unrelieved level of world-weariness. Peter Rose as Fafner got to do little but get dragged on in his straitjacket and get stabbed (in the back, though Wagner clearly wrote the text to say Siegfried stabbed Fafner in the heart, and in the hero quotient it makes a big difference whether you kill your adversary in the front or in the back). As Erda the Earth Goddess, with whom Wotan has a dialogue after he wakes her up (three characters – Fafner, Erda, and Brünnhilde – are all awakened from powerful, dream-filled sleeps) and with whom he’s already produced 12 children (the nine Valkyries and the three Norns, whom we will hear from at the beginning of episode four, Götterdämmerung, though we’ve already seen them doing a lot of lurking around in one of Tcherniakov’s many bad ideas) – Anna Kissjudit looks as strong as she could given the shapeless light blue dress outfit Tcherniakov has her wear throughout. I for one would much rather have seen her as “a green-faced torso that pops out of the ground,” as Anna Russell described her in her infamous spoof of the Ring. But then that would have required a special effect, something Tcherniakov avoids like the proverbial plague. The Brünnhilde, Anja Kampe, sang with real power and authority but her appearance in a light blue top and skin-tight black jeans was hardly the stuff of which legends are made.

I actually liked the one Tcherniakov production I’d seen before this, Borodin’s opera Prince Igor at the Met, but it’s possible that since Borodin was Russian and so is Tcherniakov, he was more respectful of an opera from the home-town team. It also helped that Borodin died before he finished Prince Igor, and the standard edition was put together by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov from Borodin’s notes and their memories of parts of the opera Borodin played them before he croaked. This gave Tchneriakov the latitude he thought he needed to rewrite the opera and use bits from other Borodin pieces to create an ending gloomier than the one Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov had supplied. In 2015 Tchneriakov staged a Canadian production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in which he decided to make all the characters part of Donna Anna’s extended family and, instead of having the statue of the dead Commendatore come to life and drag Don Giovanni to hell at the end, he had Don Giovanni’s family stage an intervention at the end with an actor made up to look like the Commendatore. Tcherniakov did this because he hates supernatural plot twists in opera, which made him a strange choice to direct Wagner’s Ring because so much of its plot is dependent on the supernatural. The singing in this Siegfried was strong enough it overcame Tcherniakov’s silly staging ideas most of the time, but it’s a real pity that since the passing of Birgit Nilsson the world has been singularly bereft of the kinds of heroic voices needed to make Wagner work. The best era for Wagner singing was between the two world wars, when you had sopranos like Frida Leider, Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann, Helen Traubel, and Astrid Varnay; tenors like Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, and Franz Völker; baritones like Friedrich Schorr, Rudolf Böckelmann, and Josef Herrmann; and basses like Alexander Kipnis, Eduard Habich, and Emanuel List. There’s no one here who stands out the way Jonas Kaufmann (the world’s greatest living Wagner tenor) did as Parsifal in the Met’s 2013 staging, though that production by François Girard was so atrocious Tcherniakov’s hatchet job on the Ring seemed respectful by comparison. In my moviemagg review, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/03/wagner-parsifal-live-from-met-in-hd.html, I wrote an account of how much I disliked the production: the singing was spectacular throughout (far better than what Thielemann got from his cast here!) but the staging was even sillier.

His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 18) I watched an unusually long (two hours even) 1951 film noir, sort of, called His Kind of Woman, executive-produced by Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) for RKO during the troubled seven years (1948 to 1955) in which he owned the company outright. The film began life as an unpublished story by Gerald Drayson Adams called Star Sapphire (though no sapphire, or any other sort of jewelry, appears as a plot element in the finished film). John Farrow, Mia Farrow’s father and a sporadically interesting director with two all-time great noirs on his résumé, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (both made at Paramount in 1948), was assigned to direct and Robert Mitchum, then RKO’s biggest leading man, was set to star. The originally assigned writers, Frank Fenton and Jack Douglas, turned in a script with comic-relief elements, and when Hughes took over the project as a personal production he not only assigned his biggest female lead, Jane Russell, to be Mitchum’s co-star, he ordered the writers to build up the character of ham actor and movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). He also not only ordered them to insert a sadistic Nazi refugee plastic surgeon, Martin Krafft (John Mylong, who two years after this film would appear as “The Professor” in Phil Tucker’s legendarily awful Robot Monster) but wrote the dialogue for this character himself and even recorded tapes of the character’s lines so Mylong would deliver them as Hughes wanted them. (The character appears in the film as an uncanny premonition of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece about nuclear war from 13 years later.) John Farrow, who had worked well with Mitchum on Where Danger Lives the year before and expected an untroubled shoot, was appalled when he turned in what he thought was a fully finished film and Hughes demanded extensive changes. Hughes persuaded Richard Fleischer to take over the project and direct the reshoots by offering Fleischer the chance to remake his already completed film, The Narrow Margin (one of the better “B” noirs of the period), with a bigger budget and “A”-list stars. When Fleischer said he was satisfied with The Narrow Margin as it was, Hughes threatened to scrap the movie altogether and not release it unless Fleischer did the retakes on His Kind of Woman.

Hughes also supplied a new writer, Earl Felton, and summoned Fleischer and Fenton for story conferences either at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the office he rented at Samuel Goldwyn Studios (amazingly, during the entire seven years he owned RKO he never set foot in the studio at all; instead he rented an office from Goldwyn and ran it from there). Much to Felton’s irritation, Hughes supplied him only with milk, and an occasional half a sandwich, instead of the steady supply of Scotch Felton was used to having by his side as he worked. What resulted from all this taking and retaking was an odd and quirky tale of a mystery man, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum), who’s recruited by some equally mysterious crooks for a job assignment. They’re willing to pay him $50,000 total and $5,000 in advance, for which he’s told to go to a resort town in Baja California, Mexico and stay at a high-end resort called Morro’s, run by José Morro (Philip Van Zandt). Milner doesn’t know what the job is and neither do we until halfway through the movie. It seems that a gangster named Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr, though the mercurial Hughes used two other actors, Lee Van Cleef – later a star in Italian “spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960’s – and Robert J. Wilke, in the role and shot all their scenes before throwing out all that expensive shooting and having Burr take over the role: a good move, actually, as Burr steals the film in every scene he’s in) was expelled from the U.S. and deported to his native Italy by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before its name was changed to the now-notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ferraro’s gang had hit on the idea of finding a no-account drifter with no living relatives, no significant others, and no one who would miss him if he disappeared and recruiting him to serve as a model for Dr. Krafft to use to alter Ferraro’s face with plastic surgery. Then Ferraro would be able to return to the U.S. in the patsy’s identity while the patsy would be quietly murdered and his body dumped somewhere.

Milner learns all this from INS agent Bill Lusk (Tim Holt) just before Lusk is killed by Ferraro’s gang. In a scene Fenton, Leonard, and/or Felton seem to have ripped off from Casablanca, Milner comes to the aid of a young couple, Milton (Richard Bergren) and Jennie (Leslye Banning) Stone, who’ve been cheated at cards by investment broker Myron Winton (Jim Backus), by rigging the game until the Stones have made back their money. And where does Jane Russell fit into all this? She plays an adventuress named Lenore Brent who poses as a millionaire heiress even though she doesn’t have a dime to her name. She’s hoping to “marry up” to movie star Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price) despite the inconvenient detail that Cardigan already has a wife, Helen (Marjorie Reynolds). Helen went to Reno to obtain a no-fault Nevada divorce, but then changed her mind and decided to stay married to Mark. Lenore and Milner meet when they’re the only passengers on a chartered plane that takes them to Morro’s resort in Mexico, and they hit it off immediately even though in real life Mitchum and Russell were never more than good friends. Most of the troubles with the film came from the final sequence, which Hughes kept expanding past all sense, either dramatic or financial. It takes place on Ferraro’s yacht, which is moored just off the Baja coast. Hughes kept adding so many scenes to this sequence that the yacht set had to rebuilt and vastly expanded; it had started out as a relatively simple set involving just the ship’s bridge, but as Hughes’s vision for the film grew so did the set until it was as big as a real yacht and took up most of the tank in RKO’s Stage 22. When Fleischer turned in a rough cut of the sequence, it lasted 80 minutes and Hughes said he loved every minute of it except for the scenes involving Nick Ferraro, whom he demanded be replaced. By the time Hughes finished fussing with His Kind of Woman, over a year had passed and the film lost $850,000, which as Fleischer inconveniently pointed out was exactly what Hughes had spent on the retakes.

I remember getting into an argument with my late friend Chris Schneider about His Kind of Woman because he absolutely loved the movie, especially the camp scenes involving Vincent Price’s character, whereas one of my all-time pet peeves is a film that tries to be both a serious genre piece and a spoof. All too often such a movie with a mixed mission tries to be both and achieves neither. Vincent Price flames out in his role with his camp amplifier turned up to, or even past, 11; it’s the sort of playing he’d used to liven up many of the awful horror movies he got shunted into after the success of House of Wax (1953) “typed” him as a horror actor, but it’s relentlessly out of place here, resulting in an audaciously stupid scene in which he sets out to confront the bad guys on a small rowboat, only it literally sinks under the weight of the crew Price’s character has recruited to sail with him. Shortly after His Kind of Woman, Howard Hughes assigned Mitchum and Russell to co-star in another thriller, Macao, which I haven’t seen since my husband Charles and I ran a VHS tape in the 1990’s to commemorate Portugal having finally relinquished their control of Macao and handed it back to China. I remember Macao as quite a bit better than His Kind of Woman, even though it was also a film in which Hughes fired the director. Josef von Sternberg started the movie and Nicholas Ray finished it, and unlike in a lot of such instances it’s really easy to tell who directed what. Sternberg tried to get Jane Russell to play the same sort of “woman of mystery” Marlene Dietrich had portrayed in their seven films together between 1930 and 1934, while Ray saw Russell – who was always surprisingly masculine despite those famously large breasts; when she and Marilyn Monroe co-starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953 they came off as a Lesbian couple, with Russell the butch and Monroe the femme – as “just one of the boys” and directed her accordingly.

With more sensitive writing – especially for Price’s character (he could have become a real figure of pathos as he realized his career as an actor had been mired in make-believe heroics and now he had the chance to show real guts) – and following the Hitchcock formula of letting the audience know from the get-go who the villains are and what they’re after instead of shrouding it all in mystery, His Kind of Woman could have been a much better movie than it is. But as it stands it’s just another movie that takes a serviceable noir plotline and drowns it in quirks. The one person involved with His Kind of Woman who actually got good reviews at the time was the cinematographer, Harry J. Wild, who’d shot RKO’s quintessential film noir Murder, My Sweet seven years earlier and brought the same chiaroscuro style to this much less convincing film. But I was quite struck by the line with which Eddie Muller closed his outro; after telling the weird stories about how Howard Hughes got directly involved in the production and the endless changes he dictated to his cast and crew, Muller said, “How does someone so erratic, incompetent, and delusional end up in charge?” In today’s political situation, it came off as a thinly veiled critique of Donald Trump – and with Trump’s good buddies Larry and David Ellison set to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner Classic Movies’ parent company, and CNN on top of Paramount and CBS, Eddie Muller might be in trouble over that remark!

Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)

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

Last night (Friday, April 17) when my husband Charles actually did get home shortly after 11 p.m., I ran him an oddball item off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHc0rxm628&t=6s): the 1929 short Black and Tan, starring Duke Ellington (in his film debut) and light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington in a film written, directed, and probably produced by Dudley Murphy. Dudley Murphy (1897-1968) had a quirky career; according to his imdb.com page, his “output varied wildly from modernist avant-garde to routine studio programmers.” He’s best known for three films he made featuring major African-American performers: this one, St. Louis Blues (1929) – another short, and the one film we have of the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith – and the feature The Emperor Jones, made in New York City in 1933 and preserving Paul Robeson’s performance as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play (though Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward worked on the script and “opened up” the play to show how Brutus Jones got to be a Caribbean dictator in the first place). I’d seen Black and Tan several times before, usually in pretty grungy and beat-up prints presented on programs about jazz in films. This version from the Cult Cinema Classics YouTube page was ballyhooed as a major restoration: “The source material used includes a 35mm print from the collection of KAVI (a film archive in Finland) and a 16mm duplicate negative from the collection of Blackhawk Films.” The restoration was a big improvement over any version of the film I’d seen before. The plot of Black and Tan is simple: Duke Ellington and his trumpet player, Artie Whetsol, are shown rehearsing the title song, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (actually co-composed by Ellington and his earlier trumpet star, James “Bubber” Miley, but it’s possible that Miley had already drunk his way out of Ellington’s band by the time this film was made) in a grungy Harlem apartment.

Two men (Edgar Connor and Alec Lovejoy) come over to repossess Ellington’s piano, but Ellington’s girlfriend, dancer Fredi Washington, arrives with the seemingly good news that their financial troubles are over. “I've just landed a job in a nightclub. And I’m going to dance and you’re going to play. Isn’t that wonderful?” Ellington reminds Fredi that her doctor had just diagnosed her with heart disease and told her she shouldn’t dance anymore, but Fredi ignores his warning and takes the job anyway. We then cut to the band’s and Fredi’s debut performance at the club, which is probably as close as we’re going to get to what Ellington’s actual performances at the Cotton Club, the prestige nightclub in Harlem that featured Black performers but didn’t let any Blacks in the audience, looked like. Among the acts are a group of five Black male dancers who move in a staggeringly perfect unison to Ellington’s composition “Black Beauty” while Fredi waits to do her number. Murphy gives us “Black Beauty” first filmed normally and then through a point-of-view shot showing how Fredi sees the number in a series of fragmented, kaleidoscopic vistas that let us know without stressing it just how sick she is and how dangerous it is for her to be working there. Then Fredi does her big number to Ellington’s “Cotton Club Stomp,” flails her arms and legs around big-time, and Murphy gives us an astonishing angle shooting up at her legs and her crotch. As the dance number stops Fredi literally collapses on stage, and the club’s manager tells Ellington to keep playing. He does so until someone comes up to him on the bandstand and gives him word that Fredi is literally on her deathbed, whereupon he orders his band members to stop playing and pack up so he and they can be with Fredi as she dies. They all end up in Fredi’s bedroom, where she makes her last request: “Duke, play me the ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’” The Hall Johnson Choir turns up and sings a version of the song (all other renditions I’m aware of present it as an instrumental), and we get a final point-of-view shot from Fredi’s perspective as Ellington’s face gets blurrier until Murphy and cinematographer Dal Clawson cut to a more conventional angle as Fredi finally dies. The restoration definitely improved the picture quality and seems to have helped the sound as well, though it’s still awfully difficult to make out the words the Hall Johnson Choir is singing to “Black and Tan Fantasy.” (The Hall Johnson Choir also appeared in the 1929 St. Louis Blues, but there they just seemed to get in the way.)

One thing I hadn’t realized until last night is that Black and Tan is actually at least loosely based on a true story; Fredi Washington’s character is based on Florence Mills, a spectacularly successful and tragically short-lived African-American entertainer. Born in 1896, Mills made her New York stage debut in the all-Black revue Shuffle Along, which was such a huge hit it convinced white promoters there was a market among white audiences for Black entertainers. White producer Lew Leslie hired Mills and other Black stars for the Plantation Club and later developed a Broadway show out of the club’s roster, the Plantation Revue. Alas, Mills’s rise to stardom ended abruptly when she caught tuberculosis after 300 performances of a show called Blackbirds in London. She made it home but died at a hospital in New York City on November 1, 1927. More than 10,000 people attended her funeral; Black poet James Weldon Johnson was one of them, and Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee, all of whom had performed with Mills, were honorary pallbearers. One giveaway that the plot of Black and Tan was inspired by the real-life death of Florence Mills was that the film includes “Black Beauty,” a song composed by Ellington specifically as a memorial tribute to her. The connection between Fredi Washington’s fate in the movie and Florence Mills’s in real life gives Black and Tan a poignancy most 1920’s and 1930’s band shorts don’t have, while Murphy’s amazingly creative visual direction (at a time when most Hollywood musical features were still being filmed from straightforward angles, in which dancers were seen cavorting on big sets from far away and looking like ants on a wedding cake) also makes this film really special – though Ellington’s later band shorts, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller at Paramount before he left to invent Cinerama, are also unusually creative visually. I’ve long suspected that Ellington, who began as a painter and showed off his visual flair by (among other things) naming so many of his songs after colors, had a lot to do with the unusually rich visual “looks” of his band shorts.

Elsbeth: "Murder, He Wrote" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount; TV episode, aired April 16, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 16) I watched a new episode of Elsbeth after bypassing Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit because they were doing reruns. The Elsbeth was called “Murder, He Wrote” as an obvious pun on the name of the old TV series Murder, She Wrote, which starred Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a murder mystery writer who got involved in solving real-life crimes in her home town of Cabot Cove, Maine. (Charles said he didn’t like the show because so many people in Cabot Cove got themselves killed he thought the entire town would have quickly been depopulated – and I suspect the people behind Murder, She Wrote felt that way, too, because in later years they had Jessica Fletcher get out more and solve crimes in other locales.) This Elsbeth show starred Griffin Dunne, whom I remembered as the cute young man who was Madonna’s co-star in the 1987 film Who’s That Girl?, which I thought was quite better than its reputation even though the two earlier films it was reworked from, 1938’s Bringing Up Baby and 1971’s What’s Up, Doc?, were even better. Getting back to Elsbeth, it was disheartening to see Griffin Dunne turned into a grizzled old man (but just consider how different I look now from what I did in 1987!), but he still acted with authority as Elliott Pope, a mystery writer who grew up in Massapequa, New York and became successful with a series of books containing such hot and steamy sex scenes they verged on pornography. (Was writer Jonathan Tolins thinking Mickey Spillane here?) Ultimately Pope started writing more ambitious mysteries and broke out of the neo-porn confines into the world of “serious” literature, though he always drew on people he’d known from Massapequa and wrote thinly disguised paraphrases of them into his novels. One such person was Barney Corman (Mark Linn-Baker), who grew up in Massapequa alongside Pope and then moved to New York City, opened a small bookstore called Barney’s Books, and also supplemented his income by writing book reviews for tiny publications. Corman never reviewed Pope’s books publicly because of their former friendship, which has remained strong enough that Pope regularly does book events at Corman’s shop.

In the opening scene Pope entrusts Corman with the handwritten manuscript of his latest novel, Troubled Pants, because Corman wants to read it. Since it’s the only extant copy of the work, and would remain so until Pope has it typed and it becomes a computer file, Pope threatens to murder Corman if the manuscript disappears. A year and a half later, Pope shows up at Barney’s Books upset that the manuscript of Troubled Pants is still missing, and he kills Corman by shoving a series of bookshelves onto him until they crush him. The police, of course, assume it was an accident, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) reopens the case a year and a half later after Pope publishes a new novel, Snow Keeps Falling, in which Pope’s usual alter ego, “Henry Bishop” (so named because his creator’s name is “Pope”), goes on a skiing trip with a friend who resembles Barney Corman who dies in an avalanche while Pope’s character is having an affair with his wife. One of the things we quickly learn about is that, like quite a few politicians, Pope has an insatiable appetite for sex, so much so that his publisher stopped paying him to hire young, comely female college students as “interns” because he was continually trying to seduce them, and they were filing too many human-resources complaints against him. Elsbeth’s B.S. detector is triggered by a passage in Pope’s book that says he and his late friend locked eyes and stared at each other just before the avalanche killed the friend. Elsbeth reasons that any such avalanche would have killed Pope’s character, too, if the two men had been close together enough to lock eyes. There’s a subplot in which Elsbeth’s friend Alec Bloom (Ivan Hernandez) actually wins the election for mayor of New York, only Elsbeth jilts him as soon as the results are in. There are also some engaging character performances by middle-aged women, including Sarah Steele as Marissa Gold, Alec’s campaign manager, and Joanna Gleason as Barney Corman’s widow Beverly, who took over the store after his death and seems to have built it back up into a going concern again.

Barney had been worried he’d have to close since the landlord had jacked up the rent on him, and to that end he had a first edition of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End in a copy supposedly once owned by Henry James that he was reluctantly going to have to sell to keep the store open. Elsbeth ultimately discovers that Pope went through a bitter divorce from Maura Davidoff (Didi Conn), and that Barney Corman had been sending her bitterly negative reviews of each of Pope’s books as they came out. Elsbeth goes to see Maura and finds that Barney sent her a review of Troubled Pants, even though it was never published, only Pope had recovered his handwritten manuscript from the store’s files the night he killed Barney and it’s sitting in his apartment until, worried that its existence would give him away, he burns it and reports it to the fire department as a house fire. Ultimately Elsbeth is able to tie Pope to the crime through his habit of licking his fingers before he turns the pages of a book, which gives the police enough of his DNA to test it and find a match between the residue on the footstool Pope pushed out of the way to make sure that the shelves would crush Barney and the saliva Pope left on the pages of Howard’s End as he turned the pages on the book. Like a Law and Order writer, Jonathan Tolins has Pope arrested at the most publicly embarrassing moment, right when he’s about to do a public reading from Snow Kept Falling and take questions at a book signing. Mention should be made of this episode’s director, Robin Givens, who entered the celebriati in 1988 by marrying boxer Mike Tyson. Her imdb.com bio is a sad tale of multiple relationships with male athletes that all seem to have ended badly, two of which produced children whom she raised as a single mother. She turned in a perfectly professional job of directing here. I also liked the scene in which Elsbeth is out walking with her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), and as is common in real-life friendships between straight women and Gay men, they’re both commiserating about how awful it is to date men!

Rope of Sand (Wallis-Hazen Productions, Paramount, 1949)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched Rope of Sand, a 1949 film gris (my term for a movie that attempts film noir but doesn’t quite make it) produced by Hal B. Wallis for his independent unit at Paramount, directed by William nè Wilhelm Dieterle, and written by Walter Doniger with additional dialogue by John Paxton (the quite talented writer who adapted Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely into the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet, to my mind the quintessential film noir). It’s essentially a knock-off of the film Casablanca, also produced by Hal Wallis and with three of the same actors: Paul Henried, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. (The trailer even ballyhooed the resemblance; it mentioned that Hal B. Wallis had also produced Casablanca.) The best thing about Rope of Sand is the title, a description of the South African desert and the way it serves to keep most of South Africa’s diamond wealth safe from potential smugglers. Otherwise it’s a melodrama about post-war intrigue that needed Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and got Burt Lancaster and Corinne Calvet. Lancaster was capable of strong performances under directors who knew what to do with him, but Dieterle didn’t; time and again throughout this movie Lancaster bellows and bullies his way through scenes that in the hands of a subtler actor like Bogart or John Garfield might actually have been moving. Calvet, a French import who had a brief vogue in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, has little to do but look pretty and sultrily alluring in her role as a former “dancer” (in the days when that was a Production Code-safe euphemism for “prostitute”) posing as the daughter of a major shareholder in Colonial to seduce Mike Davis (Burt Lancaster) into revealing the secret location of his diamond stash. The biggest surprise about this movie is Paul Henried’s casting as a totally black-hearted villain, Commandant Paul G. Vogel of the Colonial Diamond Company in South Africa (the name “Colonial Diamond Company” says all you need to know about the ethics, or lack thereof, of the people running it). In the opening scene he’s driving a half-track through the desert (half-tracks, which had normal car wheels in the front and tank treads in the back, were major vehicles used on all sides in World War II because of their off-road capabilities). In the opening scene Vogel is shown using his half-track to hunt down a Black native who worked at the mine until his attempt to escape. Both Charles and I guessed that he’d be the only Black person we’d see in the whole movie, but we were wrong; there were several other Black characters, including John (Kenny Washington), on whom Vogel dumps a large cargo of trunks. Davis helps him out and gives him first aid, in return for which John becomes Davis’s personal servant and all-around factotum.

For the first 15 minutes of the film we don’t see Burt Lancaster’s character until he shows up at the diamond company’s town, slightly the worse for wear, and we learn that he was there before. While in the so-called “Prohibited Area” near the South Africa/Angola border Mike Davis stumbled on a major stash of diamonds on a previous trip, and naturally Vogel wants to worm the information out of him through what then would have been called “tortures” but now would be “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Claude Rains plays Arthur Martingale, Vogel’s immediate superior in Colonial and a man who literally blackballs Vogel’s application to join the local rich white men’s social club. He’s essentially the same character he played in Casablanca, a man not actively evil but also not giving a damn about traditional morality – and the script for Rope of Sand doesn’t give Martingale much of a chance to regain his integrity the way the one for Casablanca did. There’s also a small role for Sam Jaffe as Dr. Francis Hunter, an alcoholic who’s drunk his way out of any established practice but hasn’t quite been de-licensed yet. Rope of Sand lurches to a climax in which Davis actually scores his diamond haul, thanks largely to his having literally held Vogel at gunpoint and forced him to call off all the security details. But Vogel has accidentally killed Dr. Hunter and framed Suzanne to take the fall. Davis, who has come genuinely to love Suzanne, agrees to turn over the diamonds to Martingale if he undoes Vogel’s frame-up against Suzanne, and in a nice bit of worm-turning gratitude Martingale throws Davis a small bag of three of the uncut diamonds, one of which Davis gives to John, one of which goes to a comic-relief character named Thompson (John Bromfield), and one of which Davis keeps to finance his and Suzanne’s escape to Angola.

There are a lot of problems with Rope of Sand, including the shooting of the desert scenes in Yuma, Arizona, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for sandy deserts (when Vogel was chasing the anonymous Black man through the desert in his half-track, Charles joked, “It’s really Arizona,” and he was right) and the ill-use of Peter Lorre. He’s only in two scenes (well, in Casablanca he was only in one scene, but it was such a strong and powerful scene it became indelible), and aside from him claiming connections that will allow Davis to fence the diamonds and turn them into cash, it’s not at all clear what he’s there for aside from to make obvious and banal pseudo-philosophical observations about diamonds. (Lorre would do much better in that regard five years later when he philosophizes about time in Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and written by Truman Capote from a novel by Claud Cockburn.) Rope of Sand is the sort of mediocre movie that gets made because the filmmakers, Hal Wallis in particular, wanted to re-create their older and considerably better movies. I only got this one so I could see Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; Amazon.com had either a $15 DVD with Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye alone or a $25 Blu-Ray box from Kino Lorber with two other movies. I chose the two other movies (the third is a 1958 potboiler called Never Love a Stranger, based on a best-selling 1948 novel by Harold Robbins, his first of many), but after watching Rope of Sand I’m not sure that was a wise move after all.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (William Cagney Productions, Warner Bros., 1950)

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

Last night (Tuesday, April 14) my husband Charles and I watched Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a really strange 1950 crime drama/film noir directed by Gordon Douglas from an adaptation by Harry Brown of a similarly titled 1948 novel by Horace McCoy. The name Horace McCoy was familiar to me largely as the author of the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a grim tale about the marathon dance contests that were all the rage in the early 1930’s which McCoy was inspired to write after having briefly worked as a bouncer at the Santa Monica Pier. McCoy was living in Hollywood at the time and actually tried to make it as an actor, then as a screenwriter, and he apparently did some uncredited polishing on the classic King Kong (1933), though his imdb.com page doesn’t list that as one of his credits. Most of his credits were for “B” gangster movies, though there’s a rather intriguing one from late in his life (he died on December 15, 1955 at age 57 of a heart attack) was Bad for Each Other (1953), which he didn’t write for the screen but was based on his novel Scalpel (1952). I had a lukewarm response to Bad for Each Other at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/bad-for-each-other-columbia-1953.html when I saw it in 2023. Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye (note the hyphenated spelling) began life as a novel McCoy published in 1948 and was filmed two years later as a co-production between Warner Bros. and William Cagney Productions. William Cagney was James Cagney’s brother and production partner on a number of his films made between 1943 and 1948, when James had successfully run out his contract with Warner Bros. and was working independently, including Johnny Come Lately (1943), Blood on the Sun (1945), and The Time of Your Life (1948).

When James Cagney returned to Warners and made one of his best films, White Heat (1949), with Louis Edelman producing and Raoul Walsh directing, William reorganized his production company and both Cagneys made this film as a William Cagney Productions/Warner Bros. co-credit. William Cagney also supplied the leading lady for the film, Barbara Payton, who’d already made her movie debut in Trapped (1949), about which I’d written approvingly in a previous post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/rby-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2023.html): “It also has one of the best-written characterizations for a woman in the entire noir canon; Barbara Payton is not a femme fatale leading an innocent hero to destruction, nor is she the standard-issue ‘gangster’s moll,’ but a tough, no-nonsense woman living her life on her own terms and expressing her sexuality as she sees fit. Her only real fault is an unwise (to say the least!) attraction to a no-good man.” I’m not sure if William Cagney was physically attracted to Barbara Payton, but he signed her to an unusual contract that obligated her to William Cagney Productions and Warner Bros. simultaneously. One major difference between McCoy’s novel and the film is that, according to Brian Greene (https://www.criminalelement.com/lost-classics-of-noir-kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-horacemccoy-brian-greene/), the book is narrated by the central character, gangster and escaped convict Ralph Cotter (James Cagney). In the film, Cotter is dead at the start of the action and the story is told in flashbacks by the prosecution’s witnesses in the trial of his seven key accomplices (John Halloran plays the prosecutor, Peter Cobbett). Once the preliminaries are over, the film begins with Ralph Cotter and Frank Carleton (an uncredited Neville Brand) escaping from a work-farm prison run by guard Byers (William Frawley, whose presence here seemed odd given that his best-known role is as Fred Mertz in all seven original seasons of I Love Lucy, though we’ve seen him playing official police detectives quite credibly in a number of “B” private-eye series films).

The escaping convicts are expecting to be picked up by a car containing Frank’s sister Holiday (Barbara Payton) and a driver called “Rushie” (an uncredited King Donovan), only before the escape was effected Frank was shot, ostensibly in a shoot-out with guards but really by Ralph because he didn’t want to carry the burden of a wounded colleague. Needless to say, Holiday is not happy that her brother was killed in the escape attempt, but by a combination of intimidation and star power Ralph is able to talk her into not only letting him use the apartment in her building she’d rented for Frank but becoming her lover. Needing money in a hurry, Ralph decides to stick up a local supermarket, only during the robbery he pistol-whips the store’s owner, who lingers in a coma for a few days before ultimately expiring. The police track down the supermarket robbers in a hurry, but fortunately for Our Anti-Heroes the cops who answer the call are corrupt: Inspector Charles Weber (Ward Bond) and Lieutenant John Reece (Barton MacLane), an intriguing reunion of the official police officers from The Maltese Falcon, show up but only to demand the loot from the robbery rather than to arrest the participants. Ralph hits on the idea of buying (or stealing?) a disc recording machine and using it to entrap the cops into a criminal scheme so he can then use the threat of exposure to blackmail them into going along with whatever big caper he cooks up. Ralph also decides he needs to line up an equally corrupt attorney to represent him in the scheme, and he looks for one in an unlikely source: a spiritualists’ meeting led by Darius “Doc” Green (Frank Reicher), who was a racketeer until two years previously, when he got out of the crime game and reinvented himself as a supposedly legitimate religious leader. Green’s assistant is Margaret Dobson (Helena Carter, whose name I remember seeing in a number of RKO “B” cast lists from the 1930’s and, since Charles and I were watching them at the height of the fame of Helena Bonham Carter, I jokingly called her “Helena Non-Bonham Carter”), daughter of the richest man in town, former governor and senator Ezra Dobson (Herbert Heyes). Naturally, even though he already has a girlfriend, Ralph is attracted to Margaret, and the two go for a thrill-seeking ride at 120 miles per hour in her sports car (whose right-handed drive indicates she’s a woman who has more money than she knows what to do with). There’s a nicely ironic sequence in which two motorcycle cops stop them for speeding but don’t recognize Ralph as the escaped con half the police in town are after.

The attorney Ralph finally recruits via Green’s tip is Keith “Cherokee” Mandon (Luther Adler), with whom he insists on using the pseudonym “Paul Murphy” (as Holiday calls herself “Caldwell” through most of the film, though why she didn’t change her distinctive first name as well is something of a mystery). Mandon warns Ralph against tangling with the Dobsons, whose far-reaching influence would destroy anyone who crosses Ezra about anything. Mandon says he’ll withdraw from Ralph’s case if he has anything to do with the Dobsons, but Ralph ignores it and not only continues to date Margaret (pissing off Holiday, of course) but even secretly marries her, taking her to another state for the wedding, ostensibly so they don’t have to endure the three-day waiting period their own state (whatever it is) imposes but really because they needed to avoid Ezra’s influence. When Ezra catches Ralph in Margaret’s bedroom (they’re supposed to be married to each other but they still have to sleep in the Production Code-obligatory twin beds!), Ezra demands that Ralph agree to file for an annulment on the spot. Ralph does so but later Ezra thinks better of it and decides not to file the annulment papers because he’s decided Ralph is just the right man to tame his wayward daughter. Meanwhile Ralph has settled on his next big crime: to hijack the receipts of the town’s leading bookie, Romer (Larry J. Blake). His plan is to stick up Romer’s three collection agents, then kill them and hide their cars in a convenient quarry, so Romer will think his agents absconded with the money themselves and disappeared. The plan succeeds and the crooks meet at Holiday’s apartment to divide the loot, only Holiday sees Ralph canoodling with Margaret, realizes she’s about to be dumped, and shoots Ralph dead. There’s a neat gag scene in which her revolver fails to fire, Ralph reminds her that he once told her never to trust a revolver but insist on an automatic, then she finds a bullet in her gun after all and kills him with the second shot. Before she fires at Ralph she shows him a bullet which she says is the one with which he killed her brother Frank. (How did she know? Did she have access to the police’s ballistics tests?)

I’d seen Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye only once before, in the mid-1970’s courtesy of a late-night TV airing, and I hadn’t cared for it, especially since it was a major letdown following the incandescent energy of White Heat (still my favorite James Cagney film). One thing I didn’t like about it then was the sheer complexity of the plot; there are so many intrigues, acting at cross-purposes with each other, including the one in which the town’s (honest) police chief Sam Tolgate (John Litel) gives the corrupt plainclothesmen 48 hours to find the real crooks who robbed the supermarket and killed its owner. (The bad cops hadn’t known until that moment that the owner had died and therefore they were now liable for a murder charge.) I found it a bit better this time around but it’s still not a great movie. Part of the problem is Gordon Douglas’s direction: like most of his films it’s competent and workmanlike but never rises to the sheer energy level both the plot and the stars deserved. (Imagine this film with Fritz Lang directing it; in 1953 Lang would get a somewhat similar script and make a masterpiece, The Big Heat.) Also, though I was watching this movie largely as part of a Barbara Payton tribute (her excellent performance in the otherwise rather sorry The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde had made me curious about her other work, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is generally considered her best film), the most interesting character this time around was the other female lead. Margaret Dobson is a fascinatingly drawn woman who’s much more a femme fatale than Holiday Carleton, and since she’s not only alive at the end but is not ensnared in Ralph’s crimes it’s interesting to imagine whatever future she might have. Helena Non-Bonham Carter plays her with a cool efficiency that actually makes her considerably more chilling than Barbara Payton’s role, and though she’s dark-haired she has something of the affect of the “Hitchcock blonde,” the woman of class and breeding whose well-damped sexual fires are just waiting for the right sort of wrong man to set them off again. Unsurprisingly the original trailer for the film (included as a bonus on our Blu-Ray disc from Kino Lorber as well as on imdb.com, and the imdb.com transfer was noticeably better in visual quality) emphasized James Cagney’s action credentials – Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye has been called Cagney’s last major gangster movie – but through much of the movie he seemed bored, as if he’d gone to the well too often with these particular character tropes and saw the diminishing returns, both artistically and commercially, of these story tropes.

Wagner: Die Walküre (Unitel, Bel Air Media, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Arte, RBB, CNC, C Major, 2022)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 12) my husband Charles and I watched the second episode in that rather odd production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen from the Berlin Staatsoper at Unter den Linden, Die Walküre. The production was staged in October 2022 and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, a Russian Regietheater guy who among other things has an utter hatred of the supernatural in opera, which makes him a strange person indeed to stage a work so heavily reliant on supernatural plot elements as Wagner’s Ring. Tcherniakov’s conceit was to set the entire Ring in a giant medical laboratory in 1970’s Germany, with the various characters either experimenters or subjects. For the first episode, Das Rheingold, this resulted in a lot of silly vistas of cells dividing, brains mutating, and the like projected on a giant video screen that hung over the action, while Alberich became a lab rat (which suggests that Tcherniakov might be a better director for Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, in which the title character literally is a human guinea pig for various medical professionals). For Die Walküre, at least the first half thereof, Tcherniakov used a more “normal” setting; Act I and the first half of Act II take place inside a large frame set representing a house, albeit a house without any walls, windows, or doors. This is supposed to be the residence of Hunding (Mika Kares, who also played the giant Fasolt in Das Rheingold), who lives there with Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), a woman he kidnapped and forced to marry him. In Tcherniakov’s production, Hunding is dressed as a German police officer (though his greatcoat and his line of military decorations across his chest make him look more like a minor officer under the Nazis) and Siegmund (Robert Watson), Sieglinde’s long-lost twin brother and eventually her lover, is depicted as a fugitive from justice who escaped police custody when the transport van he was in had a collision with another vehicle. Hunding’s home has a water faucet that actually works – we see Hunding wash his hands under it – and also a toilet in front of which Mika Kares had to mime the action of peeing, though fortunately having the toilet actually flush (and the singer really piss) was beyond even Tcherniakov’s demented imagination.

The action more or less follows Wagner’s original dramatic plan: Siegmund collapses on Sieglinde’s doorstep (though at that time he calls himself “Wehwalt” – “Woeful” – because he’s had a life of misery since his father, who unbeknownst to him is the god Wotan, disappeared and his mother died when enemies burned down her house), asks for a drink of water, tells Sieglinde his tale of woe – he was surrounded by enemies when he tried to save a woman from being forced into marriage with a barbarian man she didn’t love and barely knew – and says that in the fight he lost both his spear and shield and is now weaponless. Hunding arrives and recognizes Siegmund as the leader of his sworn enemies; he pledges to give him shelter for the night but then says in the morning they will fight a duel to the death. Siegmund laments that his father hasn’t come through on his pledge to provide him a sword when he needs one. Fortunately the sword is right there; in Wagner’s original it’s stuck in an ash tree growing through Hunding’s living-room floor, but in this version it’s just stuck on the upper part of a framework that’s supposed to represent a wall just under Hunding’s ceiling. As Siegmund and Sieglinde are getting the hots for each other, Siegmund spots the hilt of the sword and pulls it out (this is the sort of symbolism that has led some writers to call Wagner an intellectual ancestor of Freud) while Sieglinde is spiking Hunding’s nightly drink so the two can get it on without Hunding noticing. Oddly, the man who let the side down on Act I was not Tcherniakov but his conductor, Christian Thielemann (who stepped in at the last minute to replace Daniel Barenboim, artistic director of the Berlin Oper unter den Linden, who’s in his 80’s and is pulling back from the arduous work of actually conducting). He plodded through an act that’s one of the most stunning and intensely romantic scenes in all opera, making it sound almost boring. At least he had good singers: Robert Watson isn’t exactly going to efface memories of Lauritz Melchior, Max Lorenz, or Franz Völker (the greatest Siegmunds of the period between the two world wars, which was the acme of great Wagner singing on records even though the only recordings we have from it are studio excerpts and live broadcasts) but he has the right tonal qualities for the role. Vida Miknevičiūtė isn’t exactly in Lotte Lehmann’s league, either, but she’s equally strong as Sieglinde despite a tendency to overact, which becomes worse in Act II and Sieglinde’s brief appearance in Act III.

Tcherniakov chose to have the first half of Act II take place inside the same frame house as Act I, and we see Siegmund and Sieglinde hurriedly packing as they prepare to flee and presumably live in the woods together. Siegmund carelessly packs in one of those large and flimsy plastic bags they sell you in supermarkets, and he even more carelessly treats his precious sword “Nothung” (“Needful”), throwing it around the room and waving it around like it were a baseball bat. There Tcherniakov stages the great confrontation between Wotan (Michael Volle); Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), (one of the nine Valkyries, product of an extra-relational liaison between Wotan and the earth goddess Erda whom he’s pressed into service to recruit dead heroes as a palace guard for Valhalla against any attempt to conquer it, which Wotan expects to come from the dwarf leader Alberich); and Fricka (Claudia Mahnke), Wotan’s wife. (Both Volle and Mahnke repeated their roles from Das Rheingold.) At first Wotan assigns Brünnhilde the task of protecting Siegmund in his duel with Hunding, since Siegmund’s very existence is part of an elaborate plot by Wotan to get back the ring of the Nibelung, the magic object that can make its owner the master of the universe if he first renounces love. Alas, Fricka sees through the deception immediately; Siegmund is not an independent actor but merely a tool of Wotan to get back the ring from the giant Fafner, who grabbed it from his brother Fasolt after killing him, turned himself into a dragon, and now guards the Nibelung treasure. She orders Wotan to side with Hunding not only because Hunding is the aggrieved-upon spouse whose wife is having extra-relational activity with her own brother (thereby committing both adultery and incest) but because part of her job in the Norse pantheon is to protect traditional morality and punish sin. Unfortunately, when Siegmund and Sieglinde reappear in flight from Hunding’s wrath, they turn up in the same animal research lab that served as Alberich’s underground realm Nibelheim in Das Rheingold.

Matters plummet from there as we don’t even get to see the big fight at the end, in which Brünnhilde, impressed by Siegmund’s refusal to accompany her to Valhalla after Hunding kills him because he loves Sieglinde and won’t leave her behind, intervenes for Siegmund. Wotan in turn honors his commitment to Fricka and thrusts his spear, made from the world-ash tree and for which in normal Ring productions he gave up an eye for the wisdom engraved on it, in the way of Siegmund’s sword, shattering it. Alas, we don’t get to see any of that happen; we hear it entirely from Sieglinde’s point of view until the absolute end of the sequence, in which Wotan, disgusted by the whole situation, literally orders Hunding dead with a brief arm gesture. He does this while Siegmund is standing up and looking on (in Wagner’s original Siegmund is already dead by then), and later Siegmund is dispatched not by Hunding himself but by five anonymous thugs from his gang set. Matters get even worse in Act III, which for some reason Tcherniakov set in the same lecture hall in which scene two of Rheingold took place. The Valkyries mill in to the famous music Wagner used to abstract the “Ride of the Valkyries” for concert performance (in order to raise money to premiere the Ring at Bayreuth in 1876, he gave fund-raising concerts all over Europe of orchestral excerpts from the Ring – “his Kickstarter campaign,” Charles once called it), and it’s momentarily uncertain as to how many of them there are. There are supposed to be nine, including Brünnhilde (eight without her), but at various points I counted two, four, six, and nine without Brünnhilde. The Valkyries are all dressed in black pantsuits and none of them are riding horses (though of course Wagner’s original libretto says they are). Some of them are listening to music on portable players and some of them are carrying around things that look like briefcases. At least one of them has short, dark hair and looks decidedly butch, though I suspect that wasn’t Tcherniakov’s intention.

Wotan enters the scene snarling with rage at Brünnhilde for having defied him, Brünnhilde pleads with her sister Valkyries to defend her, of course they want nothing to do with her, but one of them suggests that she take Sieglinde, who has fled with Brünnhilde even though with Siegmund dead she just wants to kill herself, to Fafner’s realm in the East because it’s the one place in the universe to which Wotan does not dare go. Brünnhilde sends Sieglinde on her way after telling her she can’t die for at least another nine months yet, since not only is she pregnant by Siegmund but the child is going to grow up to be the great hero Siegfried, who will kill Fafner and recover the ring. (Siegfried will also grow up to be Brünnhilde’s boyfriend even though she’s his aunt.) Wotan sentenced her to be stripped of her godhood and the immortality it conveys, and left alone on a rock to be the property of whichever man claims her first. Brünnhilde pleads that this would be way too humiliating, and ultimately she gets Wotan to compromise: he’ll surround the rock with a ring of magic fire so only the bravest of heroes, one who has not known fear, can penetrate it and win Brünnhilde’s love. Properly produced, this scene is one of the most stunning in all opera, but Dmitri Tcherniakov can’t be bothered. While Wotan and Brünnhilde are arguing they’re both throwing the chairs around the lecture hall and then picking them up again, to no effect, and when it comes time for Brünnhilde to be put to sleep and surrounded with the magic fire, all Tcherniakov can think of doing is to have poor Anja Kampe draw jagged lines on the chairs with a red Sharpie to indicate that there’s a fire surrounding her (and it only gets worse when Brünnhilde, instead of lying down, is standing up on one the chairs). Both Charles and I started laughing out loud when Brünnhilde got out the Sharpie and started making lines on the chairs.

The most frustrating thing about this entire Ring, or at least the first half of it, is the infuriating contrast between the grandeur of Wagner’s music and the banality of Tcherniakov’s modern-dress settings. It occurred to me that an opera originally set in the time and place where it was composed is a better candidate for this sort of modern-dress updating than one set in historical, legendary, or mythical times. That’s the conclusion I came to when I wrote my review of Das Rheingold and listed modern-dress opera productions that had especially impressed me (Peter Sellars’s The Marriage of Figaro, Frank Corsaro’s 1983 Carmen from the New York City Opera, Michael Mayer’s 2013 Rigoletto from the Met). At least the singing this time around seemed better than it had in Rheingold, which is partly because in Michael Volle’s case he was dealing with a stronger, more complex and dramatically interesting version of Wotan. In Rheingold, especially as Tcherniakov re-imagined it, he was an unscrupulous Trump-like schemer throughout; here, especially in his unexpected veerings between anger and support for Brünnhilde, Volle found more to work with and turned in a much more intense and moving performance. Robert Watson was a quite good Siegmund – he didn’t efface memories of past greats in the role, but Volle didn’t either – and Vida Miknevičiūtė, despite her mouthful of a last name, was a capable Sieglinde even though she overacted relentlessly in the last two acts. (I hadn’t realized until last night that Wagner, as much as he upended the operatic conventions of the 19th century, still couldn’t resist writing a mad scene for his soprano.) Anja Kampe was properly authoritative as Brünnhilde, and she made at least a stab at doing the notated trills in her entrance at the start of Act Two (that’s been a sore point with me since I reviewed Laila Andersson-Palme’s 1987 Walküre for Fanfare and she made a big to-do about singing the notated trills, which most Brünnhildes either only approximate or ignore altogether), but I’ll have to wait for the two other operas in the series (especially Götterdämmerung, in which her role is considerably longer) to judge her fairly. I liked Mika Kares’s Hunding; for the most part he avoided the outright piggish villainy with which this part is usually played (Hunding is a brief role and lots of basses snarl through it at what the makers of This Is Spinal Tap would have called 11), and Tcherniakov deserves at least some credit for trying to make the other eight Valkyries come off as individuals instead of a mass opera chorus. Once again, though, this was a frustrating production that failed to satisfy, largely because of Tcherniakov’s relentless prejudice against anything that might even remotely qualify as a special effect.