12 Years a Slave (Regency Enterprises, River Road Entertainment, Plan B Entertainment, New Regency Productions, Film4, Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013)

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

Last night (Friday, September 18) my husband Charles and I watched a compelling but also draining movie called 12 Years a Slave, made in 2013 by director Steve McQueen (an African-British filmmaker and not the legendary late white American action star of the 1960’s and 1970’s) from a script by John Ridley based on an 1853 slave memoir by Solomon Northup. Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a free Black man living in Saratoga, New York in 1841 and making an occasional living as a violinist (Ejiofor looks credible playing the instrument, though Tim Fain was his soundtrack double). Then he was lured away from his relatively comfortable life with his wife Anne (Kelsey Scott), daughter Margaret (Quvenzhané Wallis), and son Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler) by two white entrepreneurs, Brown (Scoot McNairy) and Hamilton (Taran Killam). They say they want him to perform with their circus for two weeks, but they get him drunk on the first night and when he comes to he’s literally shackled and being held in a slave pen. He’s in the custody of slave dealers James H. Burch (Christopher Berry) and Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who announce to him that he’s considered a runaway slave from Georgia named Platt. He’s sold to New Orleans (in Northup’s original memoir he mentions that a smallpox epidemic broke out among the slaves in his shipment and one of them died and was buried along the way, but this isn’t included in the movie) and ends up the property of plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford takes a liking to “Platt” and gives him a violin so he can entertain his guests at plantation “big house” parties, but his overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) can’t stand him and rides him hard until Northup makes the mistake of fighting back, grabbing the whip with which Tibeats was about to beat him. Tibeats and his gang attempt to lynch Northup, and he’s strung up for hours until Ford finally comes along and rescues him. Ford has financial troubles and tries to get of them by selling Northup a.k.a. “Platt” to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender, who also starred in McQueen’s immediately previous film Shame), who’s described in the dialogue as “a notorious nigger-breaker.” (I like the fact that what’s usually and cutesily described these days as “the ‘N’-word” is used throughout this film, not only by white characters expressing their racism but by Black ones, often criticizing each other for having given in so totally to the slave mentality they’ve lost all will to resist.)

Epps is also having a decidedly nonconsensual affair – remember that under the laws of slavery a man had a legal right to rape anyone he owned because they were considered “property” – with Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), a slave on his plantation and either his star cotton-picker (she’s reported as picking over 500 pounds a day when everybody else is picking in the high 100’s or low 200’s) or getting her stats inflated by the owner’s obvious interest in her. Epps’s interest in Patsey is so obvious that his wife (Sarah Paulson) has got jealous of her, though when she complains to Epps he reminds her that she was just a poor white-trash girl he picked up in a bar and he can always send her back from whence she came. At one point, thinking of escape, Northup wanders through the woods, only to be discouraged when he comes upon a lynching party of poor whites who’d captured runaway slaves and, instead of returning them to their masters, just killed them. Northup hasn’t given up hope of contacting his family up North and getting them to lobby for his release, but when he puts together writing materials (stealing paper from a supply Mrs. Epps told him to buy her, carving his own pen, and making his ink from blackberry juice), he entrusts its delivery to Armsby (Garret Dillahunt). Armsby is a white former slave overseer who fell into alcoholism and ended up reduced to being a common field hand, picking cotton alongside the slaves he used to drive. But Armsby double-crosses Northup to Epps in hopes of getting his old overseer job back, and a frustrated Northup burns the letter he wrote his wife because for a slave it’s a whipping offense to know how to read and write. Meanwhile Patsey has sneaked off the Epps plantation to visit another one nearby, and Epps catches her and insists that she be whipped within an inch of her life. Epps seems to think Patsey was whoring herself to the other plantation owner, but she was really just asking for soap because the jealous Mrs. Epps had forbidden her to have any and without being able to bathe, she was starting to reek so much she was offended by her own smell. (Was Mrs. Epps hoping that by making Patsey literally stink, she’d get her husband to stop screwing her?) Patsey asks that Northup be assigned to administer the whipping, but Epps notices that Northup is pulling his blows, grabs the whip himself, and nearly kills Patsey with the force of his beating her. Then Patsey receives treatment with an improvised salve made by her fellow slaves, whose application seems to hurt her almost as much as the whipping did.

After years enduring the Kafkaesque torture of being wrongly enslaved, Northup is finally saved through an unlikely white deus ex machina, Bass (Brad Pitt, delivering a surprisingly sensitive performance), a building contractor from Canada who’s hired by Epps to build a gazebo on his property. Bass gets Northup to help with the construction, and while they’re working together he tells Northup that he’s morally opposed to slavery. Northup feels safe confiding in Bass despite what happened to him the last time he trusted a white man to help him, and he tells him his whole origin story. Bass promises to help, which he does by mailing Northup’s latest attempt to write his wife and children and getting Parker (Rob Steinburg), a store owner the Northups knew in New York, to come with him to Louisiana and identify Northup to the local sheriff as someone who’s legally free. Northup returns home to New York the free man he always was by law, and he meets his wife, and children (now grown adults; Margaret is played by Devyn A. Tyler and she has a husband, played by Willo Jean-Baptiste, and a child of her own, so Northup learns he’s a grandfather). A printed epilogue states that Northup tried to have his abductors prosecuted but couldn’t because in Washington, D.C., where the initial crime took place, Blacks were not allowed to testify in court against whites. Instead he became an activist for abolition and wrote a memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (note that Northup’s title began with the word “Twelve” while the film’s begins with the numeral), which he dedicated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe noted that Northup had spent his twelve years as a slave in the Red River country of Louisiana, where Stowe had set her novel, and she used his memoir as a counter to people who accused her of making up the story out of whole cloth to make slavery look bad. At least partly because of Stowe’s endorsement, Northup’s book sold three times as many copies as Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his years as a slave.

Northup ended his book with these words: “My narrative is at an end. I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery. Those who read this book may form their own opinions of the ‘peculiar institution.’ What it may be in other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages. This is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana. But I forbear. Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.” (Ironically, it’s not known when and where Northup died, or where his remains ended up; modern historian Joseph Logsdon, who co-edited a 1968 republication of Twelve Years a Slave, planned to make a search but died himself before he could do so.) Though 12 Years a Slave is a powerful denunciation of slavery as it existed in the American South in the 1840’s and the 1850’s, I did feel after a while that I was being manipulated. I wondered whether screenwriter Ridley had cherry-picked Northup’s memoir to highlight the most brutal aspects of his experience, or whether Northup himself had done so when he wrote his original book. Modern critic Eric Herschtal has acknowledged, “Slave narratives were never intended to give an unbiased view. They were anti-slavery polemics meant to bring down the institution.”

Technically, 12 Years a Slave is a well-made movie; while director McQueen and his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, occasionally falls into past-is-brown effects (perhaps justifying it because when their movie takes place, nighttime illumination still relied on candles and occasionally lamps), much of the film takes place during bright daylight. There’s an almost tactile sense of the beauty of the countryside and an ironic contrast with the horrific events taking place in it. Also McQueen and Bobbitt include a few gimmicky visuals, including the sight of a paddle-wheel steamer churning up the river water, for the most part they shoot the film plainly and effectively. Ironically, Charles had the opposite reaction to the film than I did; he thought there were too many scenes of the slaves celebrating each other, washing each other (it occurred to me that a large part of the racist myth that Blacks smell worse than whites is a legacy of both slavery and the subsequent plantation sharecropping system that condemned most of them to farm labor, which among other things gave them few opportunities to wash), singing spirituals and, in one remarkable scene, sending off a dead comrade to “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” (For some reason, Nicholas Britell, who assisted composer Hans “Room Man” Zimmer in writing the film’s score, junked the song’s beautiful original melody and wrote one of his own.) There’s even one strange scene in which the slave masters are getting their slaves to sing a rather strange song called “Run, Nigger, Run,” which was one of the old African-American folk songs Alan and John Lomax collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It seemed bizarre, to say the least, that white slave owners would encourage their slaves to sing a song that at least appears to celebrate a slave’s escape. There are also a few scenes showing the carefully sanitized version of Christianity the masters were teaching their slaves, one which emphasized the duty of slaves to submit to their owners and downplayed all that stuff about the Israelites escaping bondage. (I’ve heard elsewhere that there was a special “slaves’ Bible” – which white ministers read to the slaves because slaves were punished severely if they learned to read or write – which cut the entire Book of Exodus down to just three chapters.) After we watched the film I joked to Charles that if Verdi had been submitted this script as an opera libretto, he probably would have turned it down as too extreme and downbeat.

I also thought a lot about the 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie, and in particular of how much more courage it took to make an anti-racist film in 1942 than it did in 2013. Though I Walked with a Zombie takes place in the 1942 present, well after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834 (31 years before the U.S. did it, and without having to endure a civil war over it), it’s clear that the rich white characters are all suffering from the moral burden of still living lives of privilege based on fortunes accumulated from slave labor. My admiration for I Walked with a Zombie (despite its horrible title) has grown over the years, especially when I realized the significance of Val Lewton having tried to talk David O. Selznick out of making Gone with the Wind; maybe instead of doubting the commercial appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticization of the ante-bellum South and its “peculiar institution,” Lewton was giving it a “woke” reading, seeing the depiction of slavery in Gone with the Wind as the racist nonsense it is. By now virtually everyone in the U.S. (with occasional exceptions like Florida Governor Ron De Santis, who’s on record as making the preposterous claim that slavery benefited the slaves by teaching them manual skills) pretty much agrees that slavery was a terrible thing. It’s a point underscored in one of the few genuinely subtle scenes in 12 Years a Slave, in which slaves are being examined by potential purchasers as if they were livestock and one slave dealer boasts that a particular piece of merchandise “hasn’t been sick a day in his life.” (Today he'd be a used-car dealer similarly assuring the would-be buyer that the car he’s selling has never been in an accident.) At least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave 12 Years a Slave the Best Picture award – it still rankles me that six years later they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book, a liberal film in which the Black characters exist merely to provide moral redemption to the white ones, instead of a radical masterpiece like Black Panther in which the Black characters (even the unsympathetic ones) have agency and independence – but as I noted above, the kind of up-front anti-racist stance Lewton and Tourneur took in I Walked with a Zombie (and probably got away with only because it was written off as another cheap horror “B” with a lurid title) in 1942 really wasn’t that much of a risk, either artistically or commercially, in 2013.

The Shadow Scholars (White Teeth Films, Lammas Park, Doc Society, Film4, Dogwoof Sales, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 17) I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church on the cusp between Hillcrest and Mission Hills to attend a film screening of a quite compelling 2024 documentary called The Shadow Scholars. The film was written and directed by Eloïse King (though her imdb.com page deletes her umlaut), described in the screening notes as “a Queer, London-born, Caribbean filmmaker who adopts an interdisciplinary approach to telling complex stories that foreground marginalized perspectives within mainstream and popular culture.” The Shadow Scholars is about the $15 billion per year industry that has arisen in Kenya in which Kenyan students with bachelors’, masters’, and even Ph.D. degrees ghost-write everything from college term papers to theses and dissertations for mostly white students from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The main on-screen presence is Professor Patricia Kingori, who was born in Kenya, moved as a child with her mother to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, then moved again with her mom to London in her early teens. While there she read a book on sociology left behind by one of her mother’s friends, was fascinated by the discipline, and determined to study it and make it her career. Kingori found out about a night course in sociology that she could enroll in at age 14, but only if she found a “responsible adult” to co-sign her application. She asked the class’s teacher to be her co-signer, and the teacher turned her down. Then she went back to her mother (also named Patricia), who was not surprisingly upset that her daughter hadn’t asked her to co-sign. Mom said she would co-sign as long as Patricia agreed to use whatever knowledge she gained from her coursework to help her people achieve power. Kingori ultimately made it into the British academic establishment and won a full professorship at Oxford, though her claim to be “the youngest Black Oxbridge professor and one of the youngest women to ever be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford” has been disputed. Her Wikipedia page states, “According to the official UK Companies House register, Patricia Kingori's date of birth is November 1977. She was appointed to a full professorship in December 2021, meaning she was 44, not 28, at the time.” (Certainly, from her appearance in the film, she’s more believable as a 40-something than a 20-something or 30-something.)

Kingori has made a specialty of studying fraud and fakery in medical research, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but also in the Caribbean and in the developed world, and according to the film her own masters’ thesis was stolen by someone else in 2012, though she couldn’t do anything about it because the alleged thief was higher up in the academic hierarchy than she and adopted the defense, “Why would I need to steal from her?” Ironically given her background and especially her research specialization on academic fraud, Kingori’s presentation of the material in The Shadow Scholars is remarkably fair-minded. She depicts the professional paper-writers in Kenya with a great deal of sympathy, especially since they’re trapped in a system in which they’ve been promised a bill of goods – work hard and get a college education, and they’ll have a good life – only to find that there are virtually no jobs for them. (This is increasingly a problem for college students in the developed world as well, especially American students who graduate with five- or six-figure student loan debts and then find that the only jobs available for them pay far less than they would need to repay those loans.) The Shadow Scholars is a fascinating story in many respects, including the irony that in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries Europeans philosophically justified the practice of enslaving and colonizing Africans by saying they were mentally inferior to whites, and now we’re expropriating their intellectual brilliance for our own profit. Director King makes the point by juxtaposing early 20th century footage of Black American sharecroppers working on cotton plantations (as well as including an aside about how cotton processing equipment actually invented by slaves became, like everything else they did, the legal and intellectual property of their slaveowners) with modern-day scenes of Kenyan contract writers cranking out paper after paper for the benefit of the well-to-do clients who can afford to pay them. There’s also an ironic wrinkle in that the Kenyan writers often speak to their clients via voice filters that make them sound like American or British English speakers and thus conceal from the people paying them that they’re actually speaking to someone in Africa.

It’s also fascinating that the only people who use the morally loaded term “contract cheating” to describe the practice are white First World academics, including a woman professor from UC San Diego who actually met with Kingori to discuss the issue. My husband Charles noticed the above and said that the Kenyan writing industry has actually taken over the market from white Americans and Europeans who used to do this sort of work. He mentioned author Nick Mamatas, who recalled ghost-writing term papers for mathematics and engineering students who were actually far smarter than he was but were from non-English-speaking countries and therefore couldn’t write the English class papers required of them to graduate. One of the many ironies that abound in this film is that the writing industry is functioning like every other developing industry under capitalism: the assignments come from supervising editors who farm them out to mid-level managers before giving them to the people who actually do the work. One interviewee talked about working his way up through the management chain so he can be taking the bigger cuts without having to do the grunt work of actually writing. Another writer, a woman, recalled doing two term papers in one night on two totally different subjects, which had audience members wondering just how she pulled it off. (I can remember from my own days as a college student in my 20’s pulling all-nighters I can’t imagine myself being able to do today.) And the final irony in The Shadow Scholars is that the entire term-paper industry is being threatened by technological change: in this case by artificial intelligence (A.I.), which has the capability to ghost-write acceptable papers, theses, and dissertations itself without human intervention. Some of the writers interviewed in the film (adding to the ironies, King said she used A.I. herself to disguise their identities and make it harder for people to find out who they are) talked about adapting to the threat of A.I. by devising ways to edit A.I.-composed papers to add human touches to them so they will seem less like A.I. products and more like the work of human beings.

One young man said he had ambitions to study in Europe and obtain a masters’ degree, though he’s already done enough work for 10 masters’ degrees – he’s just done it under other people’s names. All that’s holding him back from an academic career in Europe is the money, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he actually did get the funding to study abroad, if his masters’ thesis will be red-flagged by an online plagiarism detector which would note its similarities … to a paper he himself wrote under contract to someone else. The post-film discussion had some interesting points; most of the people in the audience were retirees who’d worked in academe and therefore took the whole challenge the writing industry poses to academic integrity seriously. The film itself made the point that you might not know, when going into surgery for cancer, that your doctor essentially bought an unearned degree from a Kenyan term paper mill. One woman in the audience who’d earned a masters’ degree legitimately for a paper she wrote found herself wondering how many of the other papers she cited as sources had actually been ghost-written by Kenyans or others. The Shadow Scholars offers fascinating insights into the fundamental corruption behind academe, and in particular how we as a society decide what are the “good” schools and which (and whose) credentials we will accept as “legitimate” and therefore establish who we let run things, including operating on our bodies. The film briefly mentioned the scandal surrounding actress Felicity Huffman and 30 other celebrities who got caught using a service that promised to get their children into top-notch Ivy League institutions, and the relentless competition to get into America’s supposed but largely fictitious meritocracies has reached so far down that even at pre-school level parents are fighting each other like mad to ensure that their children get into the best pre-schools, which will get them into the best grade schools, which will get them into the best high schools, which will get them into the best colleges, which will get them into the best jobs. And yet all this is happening in a country whose ruling elites are filled with people who pride themselves on being anti-intellectual and announce they’re basing their decisions on idiotic prejudices masquerading as “common sense.”

78th Annual Emmy Awards (Jesse Collins Entertainments, Academy of Television Arts and Scleices, NBC-TV, aired September 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Monday, September 14) I watched all three hours of the 78th annual Emmy Awards on NBC. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been interested in this – it’s an awards show honoring TV programs, most of which are on so-called “streaming” channels that are unavailable to me – but it was being hosted by one of my favorite celebrities: Mariska Hargitay, long-time (27 seasons and counting) star of the TV series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I saw Hargitay on Jimmy Kimmel’s program promoting the show and appearing in a full-length black dress, the first time I can recall seeing her in anything other than the skin-tight pants she wears on SVU. (When she and Christopher Meloni co-starred on the first 12 seasons, I used to joke that SVU had two groups of fans: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot.) On the Kimmel show she explained that her first name is pronounced “Marishka,” since she’s of Hungarian ancestry (her mother was movie star Jayne Mansfield and her father was Hungarian-born muscleman Mickey Hargitay) and in Hungarian the “s” becomes “sh.” (My husband Charles joked that if she was going to be that serious about using the Hungarian form of her name, she should call herself “Hargitay Mariska,” since Hungarians – alone among Europeans – put the family name first and the given name last.) The Emmy Awards were even more interminable than most awards show, because there were very few musical numbers to break the monotony of introduce presenter-announce nominees-give the Emmy to … Ironically, the biggest highlight of the show was a musical number: Reba McIntire doing a wonderfully heartfelt tribute to the late Dolly Parton by singing one of her more obscure songs, “Appalachian Memories.” The show opened with Hargitay doing a sort-of number, a parody of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (a hit for Joan Jett but which I later learned was actually written by two British men, Allan Merrill and Jake Hooker, in 1975 for a band they were in called The Arrows. Jett heard the song in 1976 while on a British tour with her first band, The Runaways, and tried to get them to perform it. When they refused, she recorded it twice, first in 1979 with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of The Sex Pistols, which went nowhere; and then with her subsequent band, The Blackhearts, in 1981, where it became her star-making hit) about the enduring appeal of television.

Mariska Hargitay isn’t that great a singer (neither was her mom, come to think of it, though in 1965 Jayne Mansfield recorded a halfway decent single called “Suey” with a then-unknown young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix) but she had enough of a voice to get the job done. There was also a nice version of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” sung by Noah Kahan with a discreet string quartet backing to herald the “In Memoriam” segment, featuring a number of people I’d heard of as well as a lot I hadn’t. “In Memoriam” was hosted by Macaulay Culkin, Dan Levy, and a woman whose name I didn’t catch paying special tribute to Catherine O’Hara, who played Culkin’s mother in the movies Home Alone and Home Alone 2. (I’m still amazed that Culkin’s incandescent performance in the 2003 independent drama Party Monster didn’t give him the boost he deserved and the entrée into a major adult career.) The surviving cast members of Charlie’s Angels, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd (the last of whom was a mid-run replacement for the late Farrah Fawcett Majors), appeared to present the award for Best Drama Series to The Pitt. The Pitt was created in 2025 by show runner R. Scott Gemmill, who appeared last night to accept its award, along with Noah Wyle (pronounced “Wylie”), who also stars, and John Wells. It was largely inspired by the stresses placed on emergency room physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Ironically, it’s being hailed as a ground-breaking portrayal of the stresses on medical professionals in general, and those who work in emergency rooms in particular, when in fact George Clooney got his big break on a similarly themed program, ER. (Then again Mariska Hargitay’s presentation on Charlie’s Angels had its own bit of first-itis; she said that as a young woman she watched Charlie’s Angels regularly and it gave her the idea that she, too, could play a hot-looking, sexily dressed police detective. Actually, her role on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit owes a lot more to Angie Dickinson’s part on Police Woman than it does to Charlie’s Angels, whose stars played private detectives, not official policewomen. And I remember an article I read in People about a decade ago in which Hargitay said she took the part on SVU because it was the first role she’d been offered who wasn’t a dumb-blonde sex-kitten character like the ones her mom had played.)

The big winners last night were the drama series The Pitt and the comedy Widow’s Bay, which I’ve never seen but judging from its Wikipedia page comes off like a part ripoff and part spoof of Jaws. Widow’s Bay (the location) is a New England beach town whose government is trying to promote it as a tourist destination despite the place being cursed by various thousands-of-years-old unseen menaces. Instead of a shark, the main threat to the Widow’s Bay tourist trade is an ancient octopus, and the show’s musical theme includes lots of gurgling noises that supposedly represent the octopus lying in wait, ready to ensnare any bathers who come too close to it. The last time I watched the Emmy Awards on September 20, 2020 the big comedy winner was a Canadian show called Schitt’s Creek, and by order of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), every time the show’s name was spoken, its logo had to be flashed on the air to make sure the audience knew it was the show’s name and not the vulgarism for excrement. Another high point of the show was the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award going to Michael J. Fox for both his personal and professional struggle against Parkinson’s disease; after he was diagnosed with it himself he organized a foundation to raise money and fund research aimed at improving the treatments for it and ultimately hopefully discovering a cure. I must admit I had a long-standing prejudice against Michael J. Fox because of his star-making role as the Right-wing son of two Left-wing parents on the TV sitcom Family Ties – I guess he was good enough in the role he convinced me his politics were really that terrible. I also resented the weird portrayal of him as essentially the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll in the first Back to the Future movie (he plays a lick at a school dance in the 1950’s that Chuck Berry hears, copies, and uses as the basis of his style; they even played him on with a bit of “Johnny B. Goode”!), but it was nice to see him again. I was a bit perplexed that he was being pushed in a manual wheelchair (made by the Drive company, which also made the rollator I’ve used occasionally since my knee replacement) instead of using a power chair (though maybe his Parkinson’s is so far advanced he can’t operate the controls of a power wheelchair).

I was also impressed that actor Matthew Rhys won two Emmy awards for acting, one on a limited series called The Beast in Me in which he plays a man whose suburban neighbor (Claire Danes) begins to suspect he murdered his previous wife, and one for Widow’s Bay. I was gratified that Stephen Colbert won for The Late Show on its last season, and surprised that Colbert came out wearing a full beard. He’d briefly grown one on the show just after he returned to doing it in front of an audience after the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions ended, only to announce one week in that he was shaving it because his wife Evie was complaining that it itched her when they kissed. (I joked that if I could learn to live with Charles’s beard, she can learn to live with his.) Another big winner from last night’s show was Pluribus, described on Wikipedia as “an American post-apocalyptic science fiction television series created by Vince Gilligan for Apple TV. Set and filmed primarily in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series follows novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who finds herself isolated after an alien virus transforms the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive mind, which nevertheless seeks to assimilate her and other immune individuals.” Seehorn won an acting award for it; and Allison Janney, one of the few people on last night’s show I’d actually heard of before, won for The Diplomat, in which she played the title character who finds she’s in way over her head in her latest posting. The show lumbered on to a limp conclusion in which Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson did a thoroughly lame “comedy” routine inspired by a new Apple TV miniseries in which they play celebrities who discover they are half-brothers. They dragged this routine on to excruciating lengths before they finally announced the winner of the Best Comedy Series award – which, to utterly no one’s surprise, was Widow’s Bay.

The Women (Max Gordon Plays and Pictures, Loew’s, MGM, 1939)

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

The film I watched two nights ago (Sunday, September 13) on Turner Classic Movies was The Women, a 1939 adaptation of Clare Boothe’s classic play about women and gossip, and how telling tales out of school derails the presumably happy marriage of Stephen Haines, an engineer, and his wife Mary, a non-working spouse. Boothe’s celebrated gimmick was that, though the story is almost entirely about men, no men are actually seen on stage or screen: just a cast of 135 women. Director George Cukor, who got assigned to the project after David O. Selznick fired him from Gone With the Wind (the film’s male star, Clark Gable, got paranoid that the Gay Cukor would take too much attention away from him and turn Gone With the Wind into a “women’s picture” and demanded Victor Fleming, Gable’s hunting buddy, replace him), took the piece’s gynocentrism to such extremes that he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books in the characters’ libraries be by women authors. (He compromised in one particular, keeping in a scene from the play in which Mary Haines, played by Norma Shearer, reads an excerpt from The Prophet by male author Khalil Gibran. The original lines read, “Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor/Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.” But the Production Code Administration and its enforcer, Joseph Breen, demanded that the words “cover your nakedness” be struck from the quote.) The Women begins with an engaging credit sequence comparing the various leading characters to animals: Mary as a doe; Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford), the perfume saleswoman who seduces Stephen away from Mary, as a panting leopard; Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) as a snarling black cat; the four-times married Flora de Lave (Mary Boland) as a monkey; Miriam Aarons (Paulette Goddard), a chorus girl who’s after Sylvia’s husband, as a vixen (female fox); Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine), who faces a domineering husband named John even though she has more money than he does (due to a small income) as a lamb; Mary's mother, Mrs. Morehead (Lilian Watson), as an owl; Edith Potter (Phyllis Povah) as a cow chewing its cud; and Lucy (Marjorie Main), the tough, no-nonsense proprietress of the Nevada dude ranch where a number of the women repair to get their divorces, as a neighing horse.

The film’s script is credited to Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, in that order, but that wasn’t the sequence in which they worked on it. After a few other writers worked on the script, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (about whom my husband Charles, who watched parts of the film with me and who’s decidedly less of a Fitzgerald fan than I am, said it was the perfect story for him because it’s about a bunch of women who don’t have or need jobs) and Donald Ogden Stewart, Murfin took on the screenplay, threw out everything that had been written for it before, and wrote her own adaptation from scratch. Producer Hunt Stromberg was about to green-light this version for production when he looked it over and decided it wouldn’t work. He called in Anita Loos and told her, “We’ve had to take out all Clare Boothe’s dirty jokes, and now the script isn’t funny anymore.” Loos was assigned to come up with “clean jokes” to replace the dirty ones that had been sacrificed at the altar of the Production Code. The result was a feast of bitchery (though, once again by order of Joseph Breen, the word “bitch” couldn’t be used and the writers had to come up with the invented word “beezle” as its equivalent) on screen in which Crystal Allen (who, as Charles pointed out, was virtually the only woman besides Marjorie Main’s character who had a job!) manages to steal Mary’s husband away from her. Mary’s mom and daughter (Virginia Weidler, the superb child actress who a year later played the daughter of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story and did a spot-on Hepburn impersonation) both urge her to fight back, but instead Mary retreats to Reno to sit out the six-week residency Nevada law required and shed her erring husband once and for all. Among the film’s most delicious scenes are the ones taking place on the train from New York to Reno (which took three days then and now) in which Mary runs into Countess De Lave, Peggy Day, and Miriam Aarons. Much of the action of the film centers around a New York beauty salon and spa named Sidney’s (after MGM’s long-time makeup head, Sidney Guilaroff) whose manicurist, Olga (Dennie Moore), starts the gossip about Stephen and Crystal and unknowingly spills the beans to Mary herself, who’s come to the salon for the hottest new shade of nail polish, “Jungle Red.”

There’s an intriguing item on the film’s imdb.com “Trivia” page to the extent that, even though Crystal is portrayed as the villainess of the piece, Clare Boothe sympathized with her more than anyone else in the dramatis personae. That’s not a bit surprising given that Clare Boothe lived the Crystal Allen character arc for real; she seduced Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce from his first wife, married him, and stayed with him until Luce’s death. If anything, the real bad girl of the piece is Sylvia Fowler, who cheerily spreads bits of gossip around her circle of friends, heedless of what the bad news might do to them and their families, and when her own husband dumps her for a younger, hotter woman, we read that as just comeuppance. Rosalind Russell recalled years later that Cukor had told her to play the part with a light touch “because in this picture Sylvia’s breaking up a family, and there’s a child involved, and if you’re a heavy, audiences will hate you. Don't play it like a heavy, just be ridiculous.” Russell recalled later that “everything that came to me from 'The Women' –namely, my reputation as a comedienne – I owe to George. … He was marvelous to work for, he could think of a hundred bits of business for every moment." Russell said that working back-to-back for Cukor in The Women and Howard Hawks in His Girl Friday established her as a major star after mediocre assignments in the previous five years of her film career. (My favorite Cukor anecdote came from Jack Lemmon, who made his first film, It Should Happen to You, for Cukor. Lemmon’s character had one big scene in the film and he came in determined to act his pants off and throw himself into the role so all Hollywood would notice him. They shot the first take and Cukor said, “Less, Jack, less.” Lemmon turned it down a little, they shot the second take, and Cukor said, “Less, Jack, less.” They went through this a dozen times, with Lemmon turning it down a little more on each retake and Cukor saying, “Less, Jack, less.” Finally an exasperated Lemmon complained, “Look, if I give you any less, I won’t be acting at all!” “That’s right, Jack, that’s right,” Cukor said. To the end of his life Lemmon said that was the best advice he ever got from a director.)

Accounts differ as to how the actresses on the film got along and whether there were any tensions. Cukor decided to have three assistant directors call Shearer, Crawford, and Russell to the set at exactly the same time so none of the principals would feel they were being short-changed in favor of the others. (Shearer, Crawford, and Russell were all billed before the title, though Russell’s name was in letters 50 percent the size of Shearer’s and Crawford’s.) In her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, Joan Fontaine said of Cukor, “He handled all the women in the star-studded cast with tact and gallantry, so that what might have been a highly charged assignment for any other director turned out to be a happy association all around. We adored George, as do all actresses who work with him.” Yet there’s one story about Shearer and Crawford, who’d allegedly hated each other for years. Because Shearer had been married to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg for 12 years until his sudden death in 1936, Crawford had been ferociously jealous. She complained to her friends, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!” Though their two characters in The Women meet in only one scene, that proved to have more than its share of fireworks. They shot the main scene as a master shot and then late in the evening Shearer returned to the set to shoot her close-ups. Crawford was there to feed her her lines, and to discomfit Shearer as much as possible Crawford brought along an afghan rug and the knitting needles and yarn she was using to make it. Crawford made so much noise with her needles that Shearer lost her temper and told Cukor, “You can send Crawford home and feed me her lines yourself.” The Women has been remade several times, including an ill-advised musical version from 1956 called The Opposite Sex that put the male characters on screen; an aborted version from 1960 called Gentlemen’s Club that would have reversed Clare Boothe’s gimmick and included only males on screen; and a 2008 remake under the original title directed and written by Diane English and starring Meg Ryan. (I’m guessing that one took a more feminist slant on the original than this one did.) The film ends in a confrontation sequence in which Mary Haines wins back Stephen’s love from the predatory Crystal, though Charles said he would have preferred an ending in which Mary says goodbye and good riddance to Stephen and establishes herself as a career woman independent of Stephen or any other man. Actually, that’s largely the part Norma Shearer had played in her Academy Award-winning film The Divorcée (1930)!

Jeopardy (Loew's, MGM, 1953)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched the latest presentation on Turner Classic Movies’s “Noir Alley” hosted by Eddle Muller. The film was Jeopardy (Muller couldn’t resist making jokes about the long-running TV quiz show of that title, even though the movie, unlike the series, doesn’t have an exclamation point after its name), and it was based on a radio play by Maurice Zimm, “A Question of Time,” aired on a series called Hollywood Star Playhouse on September 18, 1950. The film’s director was a young John Sturges (no relation to Preston), its writer was Mel Dinelli, and the stars were Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan (whom I liked a lot better as a good guy than the villain in Monogram’s late-1940’s thrillers Suspense and The Gangster), and Ralph Meeker. In his introduction Eddie Muller said he regarded Stanwyck as the all-time best actress in cinematic history, and I’d entirely agree with that: she had more versatility than any other female film star in the classic era and only one since then, Meryl Streep, has equaled her range. Alas, the film itself doesn’t rise to the level of Stanwyck’s performance. It casts her and Sullivan as married couple Doug and Helen Stilwin, who are vacationing in Baja California. They drive past the relatively big cities of Tijuana and Ensenada in search of a small fishing community where Doug used to hang out with his old buddies from the war (presumably World War II). Alas, the Stilwins have a typically cute, obnoxious movie kid, Bobby (Lee Aaker), who precipitates the crisis when he decides to go exploring on a seedy-looking old jetty despite the warning sign, “PELIGRO,” which of course Bobby doesn’t understand. (Neither does Helen; she has to ask her husband Doug what it means, and of course he tells her, “Danger.”) Bobby gets his foot caught in between two of the rotting old planks of the jetty, and Doug goes out to rescue him. Bobby emerges unscathed but Doug is not so lucky: the jetty collapses on top of him and he's trapped with a large steel piling pinning his leg in place and dooming him to drown as the tide rises unless he can be rescued within hours. Helen goes off in search of someone to help him after she breaks the car’s tire-changing jack in a futile attempt to use it to raise the piling enough to free her husband.

Unfortunately, the one man she runs into is a thoroughgoing villain, Lawson (Ralph Meeker), an escapee from prison and a psychopath who terrorizes Our Heroine (not that it’s that easy to terrorize a Barbara Stanwyck character!) and in one surprisingly graphic scene for a Production Code-era film makes it clear that his price for helping her rescue her husband is going to be not only her having sex with him but running away with him and allowing him to pose as Doug Stilwin. Lawson is still wearing his prison garb with a number across his back, though Charles found himself wondering just which side of the U.S.-Mexico border he’d escaped from. I assumed he was an American prisoner who’d crossed the border to flee from U.S. authorities, though Charles wondered if he’d committed his crime in Mexico. Certainly the Mexican police are mounting a major manhunt for him. Lawson becomes increasingly desperate as police car after police car, one of which he’s able to force off the road, goes chasing after him. Lawson finds a loaded pistol in the glove compartment of the Stilwins’ car and holds it on Helen, threatening to shoot her unless she follows his instructions. When Helen’s car gets a flat tire, Lawson is angry that the jack is missing – Helen having broken it in her attempt to use it to rescue Doug – but he jury-rigs a way to raise the right front fender so he can change the tire without one. (There’s a continuity glitch here: the car’s four tires are white-walled but the spare isn’t, though later when we see the car after the tire change all its tires are white-walled again.) Meanwhile, back at the dock, at one point a Mexican fishing boat passes the pier and Doug and Bobby try to call out to its crew to help rescue them, but the crew members think they’re just tourists, give them a friendly greeting, and pass on. There’s also a rather bizarre scene in which Bobby is frantically clinging to his dad despite his own danger of drowning with him, and Doug equally frantically tries to get his son to flee to safety. When Lawson and Helen reach the scene of the accident, Lawson follows through on his arrangement with Helen and rescues Doug, then tries to flee in her car. It gets another flat tire (it’s not surprising given how rough the roads in this stretch of Baja are and how frantically she’s been driving) and Lawson flees on foot. There’s a surprisingly open ending for a Code-era movie in that we’re not told definitively what happened to Lawson; Helen doesn’t mention him to the cops that finally pick up the Stilwins and take them back to civilization, and it’s unclear whether he’s shot down by the Mexican cops, taken alive, dies in the desert, or gets away.

In his intro, Eddie Muller compared Jeopardy to two other movies, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), another Barbara Stanwyck vehicle adapted from a radio play (by Lucille Fletcher); and The Hitch-Hiker (1953), another film noir set in the Mexican countryside and dealing with two American tourists (both male and just buddies) played by Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy who are taken hostage while on a fishing trip to Baja by a fleeing criminal (played by William Talman, best known as the hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV series). I’ve often said that such-and-such a classic movie would have been better with Barbara Stanwyck in it (Charles, with his quirky sense of humor, sometimes says that about films Stanwyck was actually in!), but Sorry, Wrong Number was one movie Stanwyck was in that I thought would have been better with someone else: Agnes Moorehead, who’d played the part on radio. Sorry, Wrong Number was also beset with the lamentable decision to “open it up” from the tight-knit half-hour radio play about a disabled woman who realizes through various phone calls she intercepts that her husband is trying to kill her to a sprawling 90-minute movie. Even though Fletcher did the adaptation herself, the long-winded explanations for who her husband is, why they got married in the first place, and why he now wants her dead just diluted the force of the radio original. (It also doesn’t help that the role of the husband cried out for John Garfield and got Burt Lancaster.) As for The Hitch-Hiker, it’s a far, far better movie than Jeopardy, creatively directed by Ida Lupino from a script by Daniel Mainwaring that added depth to the basic situation. One of Mainwaring’s clever touches is that the psycho hitch-hiker doesn’t know any Spanish but his two victims do, and as they travel through Mexico and have to deal with Spanish-speaking shopkeepers, clerks, and whatnot the hitch-hiker becomes paranoid that his victims will give him away by saying something the Mexicans will understand and he won’t. One thing I hadn’t known about Jeopardy was that it was Stanwyck’s comeback movie after a brief year-long retirement following Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), an adaptation of a Clifford Odets play that featured, as the second female lead, Marilyn Monroe. Lang recalled that Hollywood journalists visiting the set would push past Stanwyck in their eagerness to talk to “the young girl with the big tits,” though Monroe herself said throughout the remaining 10 years of her life that out of everyone in Hollywood’s previous generation, Stanwyck was the only one who had been nice to her and treated her with professional courtesy. Stanwyck finished Clash by Night and took an extended vacation to Europe, but within a year she was bored and eager to get back to work. It's only too bad she couldn’t have made her comeback role in a deeper, richer film than Jeopardy!

Lolita (A.A. Productions, Anya, Transworld Pictures, Harris-Kubrick Productions, Seven Arts, MGM, 1962)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 10) I caught a film on Turner Classic Movies that I’d seen only once before, at the late, lamented Ken Cinema in Normal Heights: Lolita, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov’s alternately revered and reviled 1955 novel about romantic pedophilia. I liked the film a lot better on this go-round than I had before. Like the novel, the film tells the story of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his infatuation with Dolores “Lolita” Haze (Sue Lyon in her film debut; she was 12 in the book but Nabokov, adapting his own work for the screen, and Kubrick made her 14). I remember reading the book decades ago and being amazed at the contrast between the sordidness of the plot situations and the dazzling prose style with which Nabokov narrated them. The book is told in the first person by Humbert himself, and the depths of his self-delusion as he describes his sordid attraction to Lolita in some of the most gorgeous prose ever written in English (like Joseph Conrad, Nabokov became a major English-language writer even though it wasn’t his native tongue) are key to the novel’s appeal. Humbert has been living in Europe and has acquired a minor reputation as a translator of French poetry into English that has earned him a position as guest lecturer at Beardsley, a women’s college in Ohio. Needing a place to stay for the summer until his term starts, Humbert settles in a quiet town in New Hampshire where he rents a room from a widow named Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). Charlotte is still pining for her late husband, who’s actually on the premises (she’s kept his ashes in a black urn she literally hugs and talks to), but she’s immediately smitten with Humbert as a potential replacement. At one point she demands he either vacate the premises or marry her, and he’s so taken with Lolita (whom he meets while she’s sunbathing on the back porch) he agrees to marry her mom. He also keeps a secret diary in his study detailing his attraction to Lolita and his utter revulsion for Charlotte. Humbert attempts to have sex with Charlotte but he’s only able to do so because there’s a photo of Lolita on her bedside table that he can look at and get turned on by. Ironically, the last time I watched Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter I noted the similarity between the characters played by Shelley Winters: in both films she marries a sinister outsider who only wants her for her kids, to kill them for their dad’s stolen money in The Night of the Hunter and to have sex with her daughter in Lolita. Also the sheer level of bitchery between James Mason and Shelley Winters in their scenes together made me wish it could have been them, not Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, in the film of Edward Albee’s caustic play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Ironically the play premiered in 1962, the same year Lolita was made.)

Ultimately the Humberts move to Ohio, where a TV writer named Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) – a character much more important in the movie than the book – is leading a drama workshop and presenting a new play he’s written for the drama students at the nearby high school where Lolita attends. Humbert is ferociously jealous of any of Lolita’s age-peer friends and also of the middle-aged couple, John and Jean Farlow (Jerry Stovin and Diana Decker), who hold forth at the local college where Humbert is teaching and announce themselves as being “broad-minded,” which in the early 1960’s was code for wife-swapping. (One of the reasons I know that is by reading Michael Leigh’s 1964 book The Velvet Underground, his journalistic account of the multi-partner sex scenes of the day. Lou Reed read the book when it came out and took the name of his rock band from it.) Midway through the movie Charlotte Haze sneaks into Humbert’s room, reads his diaries detailing his love for Lolita and hatred of her, and immediately reacts the way you’d think she would. She demands that he leave and storms out of the house – only as she’s on her way out, after he’s made the preposterous excuse that these were only notes for a novel he was writing, she gets run over by a car and killed. Meanwhile, Charlotte had shipped off Lolita to an all-woman camp called “Camp Climax,” but after Charlotte’s death Humbert drives out to the camp, signs Lolita out of it (arousing the suspicions of Charlie Sedgewick, played by Colin Maitland, the one male who lives at the camp and does odd jobs around the place), and drives with her around the country. Lolita turns out to be a spoiled brat, a bitch who arrogantly refuses to let Humbert tell her what to do as she earlier fought back against her overprotective mother. When Lolita asks Humbert for permission to be in the school play, he angrily turns her down. Then he’s visited by an alleged psychiatrist named Dr. Zempf who’s really Clare Quilty in disguise. Zempf threatens Humbert with a long-term visit from four other psychotherapists to examine Lolita’s sexuality unless he signs the permission slip allowing her to act in Quilty’s play. She’s a hit on opening night (even though what we see of her performance is terrible) and she wants to attend the cast party with a lot of age-peer men around, but Humbert angrily refuses to let her go. Humbert also learns that instead of taking piano lessons every Saturday afternoon, she’s been visiting another man. Humbert walks out on his job as a lecturer and takes Lolita across the country again, but notices another car following him across country. When Humbert’s tire goes flat and the resulting accident puts Lolita in a hospital, Humbert finds out to his shock that a man claiming to be Lolita’s uncle has already signed her out.

Three years later Lolita writes Humbert a letter asking for money, and thus Humbert is able to track down the now 17-year-old Lolita married to an empty-headed young man named Richard T. Schiller (Gary Cockrell) and pregnant by him. They’re planning to emigrate to Alaska to take advantage of his job opportunities there, and Humbert gives Lolita all the money he got from selling her mother’s old home before setting out to track down Quilty, the mystery man who had signed Lolita out of the hospital and thereby taken her away from him, whom he intends to kill. Kubrick decided to move Humbert’s murder of Quilty to the start of the film and tell the rest in flashbacks, and there are plenty of in-jokes in the movie. One occurs at the start, when Humbert invades Quilty’s home, finds it looking like the alcohol-fueled detritus of a frat party, and encounters Quilty hiding out under a furniture cover. When Humbert asks Quilty who he is, Quilty says, “I’m Spartacus, come to liberate the slaves” – the joke being that Kubrick’s immediately previous film before Lolita had been Spartacus, the 1960 film adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel produced by and starring Kirk Douglas from a screenplay by formerly blacklisted author Donald Trumbo. Kubrick had originally bought the film rights to Lolita in 1957 intending to make it as a follow-up to his anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, but he got sidetracked by two actor-producers. First Marlon Brando hired Kubrick to direct his offbeat Western One-Eyed Jacks, only after some creative disputes Brando fired Kubrick and took over the direction himself. That left Kubrick free to take over Spartacus after Douglas fired his original director, Anthony Mann, but it also meant Kubrick wasn’t free to make Lolita until 1961. Kubrick and his producing partner, James B. Harris, made Lolita under a deal with MGM that required them to make it in Britain to take advantage of frozen funds MGM had earned in the United Kingdom but couldn’t export, though for the exteriors showing Humbert’s and Lolita’s cross-country road trips Kubrick brought his cast and crew back to the U.S. for location shooting in and around Albany, New York. (Once Lolita was finished Kubrick lived in Britain for the rest of his life. Ironically, for someone who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, which among other things was an ode to space travel and science-fiction technology, he was deathly afraid of flying and never again attended the U.S. premiere of one of his films.)

Another set of ironies concerned Kubrick’s choice of a composer: Nelson Riddle, who at the time was best known as an arranger, and specifically for his work with Frank Sinatra. In Will Friedwald’s Sinatra biography The Song Is You he wrote about how jealous Riddle was of Henry Mancini, since as a composer Mancini got royalty payments every time a song of his was recorded, while as an arranger Riddle got paid just once per chart. In his autobiography All You Need Is Ears, George Martin (whose main claim to fame was as producer for The Beatles) recalled sitting in on one of the mixing sessions while Riddle was dubbing the Lolita soundtrack to the film. Martin was astonished at how precisely Riddle was able to cue the musical “stings” to the action on screen, and Riddle explained it was because he was using a click track, something Martin had never heard of before despite having been a record producer and label head for over a decade. Though Lolita’s main theme was written by another composer, Bob Harris, Riddle did the rest of the score and also selected the source music for the film, which included at least three songs associated with Sinatra: “There’s No You,” “Learning the Blues,” and his radio theme song, “Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day).” One of the most remarkable things about Lolita was how much Kubrick and Nabokov were able to get away with given that the Motion Picture Production Code was still in effect (in fact Lolita bears Production Code Seal number 20,000). They were able to suggest the mutual sexual attraction between Humbert and Lolita, and later between Quilty and Lolita, without any physical displays of affection between James Mason (or Peter Sellers) and Sue Lyon. On at least two occasions we see James Mason painting Sue Lyon’s toenails, thereby creating the impression of a sexual relationship without showing Mason slobbering all over her. Though most of the movie is told third-person, there are at least fragments of Humbert’s first-person narration from the novel in the film, and as with the book they at once reveal and conceal the sordidness of the relationship by the sheer beauty of the prose with which Humbert expresses it. Among other things Lolita is a virtuoso explication of just how much you could get away with under the old Code (which had been liberalized in bits and pieces since its initial promulgation in 1930, but not by much) if you were a filmmaker with the right sort of imagination. Indeed, the original promotion for the film used its daring challenge to the censors as a major selling point: the ads proclaimed, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”

I used to divide Stanley Kubrick’s films between Stanley Kubrick I and Stanley Kubrick II: Kubrick I made deathless masterpieces like Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, while Kubrick II made pretentious, overblown films like Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. After last night I’m willing to move Lolita from Kubrick II to Kubrick I; whereas I didn’t connect with it the first time I watched it, I did last night and was gripped by the sheer imagination of the filmmaking and in particular how Kubrick and Nabokov were able to navigate the true dynamics of the power relationship between Humbert and Lolita. The modern stereotype of a couple with a major age difference between the parties, especially when one of the partners is underage, is that it’s always the older partner exploiting and using the younger one. At times the relationship between Humbert and Lolita looks like that; at other times Lolita is shown as a grasping little bitch who’s all too aware of her power over Humbert and exploits it mercilessly. Lolita is also fascinating in how Kubrick uses Peter Sellers, an actor he’d long admired but hadn’t worked with before. In a way it anticipates what Kubrick would do with Sellers in his next film, Dr. Strangelove, in which Kubrick cast Sellers as three different characters: U.S. President Merkin Muffley, British army officer Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove. Here, though Sellers is playing just one person, he’s taking on three distinct personae: as the TV playwright with delusions of grandeur, as an undercover cop supposedly trailing Humbert and Lolita to bust them, and as Dr. Zempf, the fake psychiatrist who confronts Humbert. Dr. Zempf didn’t exist in Nabokov’s novel, and between them Kubrick and Sellers (Sellers liked to improvise as much as possible; also, like Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Sinatra, Sellers did his best work on the first take of a scene, so Kubrick had to set up enough cameras and lights to make sure he captured Sellers at his best) used the same fake German accent with which he’d later play Dr. Strangelove.

In 1997 Adrian Lyne did a remake of Lolita with Jeremy Irons as Humbert, Melanie Griffith as Charlotte, and Dominique Swain as Lolita. Like Nabokov in the earlier film, Lyne’s screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, moved Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, but Schiff otherwise stayed a good deal closer to the original novel. Ironically, the 1962 Lolita was a solid hit while the 1997 film was a flop, probably because attitudes about cross-generational sexual relationships had hardened in the meantime and today we tend to see them exclusively through the lens of the innocent child being exploited by the older pervert, even though the reality can be a good deal more complicated than that and Kubrick and Nabokov did a great job depicting the emotional, romantic, and sexual complexities of such a relationship, including the fact that the power imbalance doesn’t always work in favor of the older partner. And one of the ironies about the Kubrick Lolita is that it was released under an age-related exemption to the Production Code, anticipating the ratings system which replaced it in 1968, with a lot of publicity at the time noting that Sue Lyon wasn’t allowed to see the movie she was in! I’ve seen only two other films featuring Sue Lyon, Evel Knievel (1971) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/02/evel-knievel-fanfare-corporation-1971.html) and a lousy science-fiction exploitation film from 1976 alternately called The Astral Factor and Invisible Strangler (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/astral-factor-invisible-strangler.html), and in both cases I noted that having started at the top, in a film of a classic novel with the original author doing the screenplay and an acknowledged master like Stanley Kubrick directing, after that the only place Sue Lyon’s career had to go was down!

Never Love a Stranger (Harold Robbins Productions, Caryn Productions, Allied Artists, 1958)

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

Last night (Tuesday, September 8) my husband Charles and I watched a rather strange and offbeat movie on Blu-Ray, Never Love a Stranger, based on a 1948 novel by Harold Robbins (his first) but not filmed until a decade later. I got this as part of a three-disc box from Kino Lorber called Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXIII along with the 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye co-starring James Cagney and Barbara Payton (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/04/kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-william-cagney.html) and the 1949 film Rope of Sand, a Casablanca knock-off (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/04/rope-of-sand-wallis-hazen-productions.html) which, as I wrote in the above moviemagg blog post, needed Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and got Burt Lancaster and Corinne Calvet. None of these three movies is all that impressive as film noir (and judging from a quick scan of Kino Lorber’s other alleged film noir the other 22-plus boxes, few if any of the items within them qualify as all-out noir). Never Love a Stranger – which I must acknowledge I frequently get confused with Not As a Stranger, a 1955 medical melodrama starring Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum as aspiring doctors, produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (his directorial debut) and based on a novel by Morton Thompson, a writer with an even hackier reputation than Harold Robbins – is a gangster movie from the late 1950’s, when Hollywood was churning out films that recycled the clichés of the 1930’s gangster films.

It begins with Francis Kane (John Drew Barrymore, John Barrymore’s son and Drew Barrymore’s father) driving down a New York street in a late-model convertible, which he has a great deal of difficulty controlling because he’s been severely wounded in a gun battle. He loses control of the car and it crashes, with his body spilling out of it to indicate that he’s dead. Then we get the opening credits and a sepulchral-voiced narrator (Milo O’Shea) reading what we presume are bits of Harold Robbins’s non-deathless prose about the situation this so far unnamed character got himself into and why he's died such an ignominious death. Then, after the opening credits tell us at long last what the movie is called and who’s in it, it flashes back to 1912. Expectant mother Frances Kane (Vitina Marcus) shows up at the home of a midwife, Mrs. Cozzolina (Augusta Merighi) about to give birth, and the birth is attended not only by the midwife but by a doctor; a Roman Catholic priest, Brother Bernard (Douglas Rodgers); and another man whose function seemed mysterious to me. The midwife takes the suitcase from the mom-to-be and puts it on the top shelf of a closet, where it immediately falls out the back and is lost for the next 16 years (this will be important). With the mother offering no clue as to what she wants her newborn baby boy to be called, and also offering no clue as to who the father might be, the priest decides to give him the name “Francis Kane,” the masculine form of his mother’s name. Ironically Harold Robbins was born in 1916 and given the name “Francis Kane,” though unlike his fictional namesake, who’s raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage, the author was adopted by a New York Jewish couple, Charles Rubin and Frances Smith.

Anyway, the movie Francis Kane drifts into a life of crime when he hangs out at a pool hall that’s a front for a speakeasy (it’s 1928, during Prohibition). He’s there giving a shoeshine to gangster “Silk” Fennelli (Robert Bray) when he’s disrupted and his shoeblack is spilled over the floor. Fennelli gives him $5 to get more and asks him to come back; Fennelli’s associates are skeptical as to whether they’ll ever see him again. Meanwhile a police raid forces Fennelli and his fellow gangsters to flee the place, but Francis catches up to him later. Fennelli is running a protection racket and extorting money from the speakeasies as well as legitimate businesses, and he’s just collected a large amount of cash when there’s a drive-by shooting (which was so much grainier than the rest of the film I suspect it was a stock clip from the 1932 Scarface), and Fennelli gives Francis the wad of cash he had on him. Meanwhile Francis has hooked up with a Jewish family, the Cabells: dad is a politician, son Martin (a young Steve McQueen; when I saw his name in the cast list I assumed he was playing a nothing bit part, but he’s actually fourth-billed and his character runs throughout the film) is a good boy who’s cornered in the neighborhood by racist thugs who resent that he’s a Jew; and daughter Julie (Lita Milan) resents that she had to give up her singing career to go to work to maintain the family. Naturally Francis falls for Julie, and he also agrees to teach Martin how to box so he can defend himself against any further prejudicial attacks. Just then Brother Bernard discovers the suitcase Francis’s mom left at Mrs. Cozzolina’s lo those many years ago. He opens it and discovers a Bible printed in Hebrew and bound right-to-left in a white cover with a star of David. This proves that Francis is really Jewish, and therefore he can’t stay at the Catholic orphanage anymore – though, oddly, at least in the movie (maybe Robbins made more of this plot point in his book), nothing much happens except that Francis, determined not to be shunted off into a Jewish orphanage, hops a freight train and gets out of town. Unfortunately the Great Depression hits at this time and trashes any hope of Francis actually finding legitimate employment. He ends up homeless and ultimately is run over by a truck and ends up in a hospital, where the other principals find him and reunite with him.

Francis gets hired as Fennelli’s chauffeur, only to find that Julie Cabell (ya remember Julie Cabell?) has become Fennelli’s mistress in exchange for voice lessons and sponsorship in a career as a singer (where she sings two songs, “Never Love a Stranger” and “Oh Baby,” composed by the film’s musical director, Raymond Scott, with lyrics by Lawrence Elow and Dorothy Collins as Lita Milan’s voice double). Unfortunately the end of Prohibition also sparks a major gang war between Fennelli and his fellow ex-bootleggers who’ve taken up running casinos and off-track horse-racing betting as alternative sources of income. After two or three years of this, Francis hits on the idea of organizing the gangsters into a syndicate, and when they naturally ask him who’s going to run it for them, Francis announces that he will because he's the only one who isn’t running a racket himself. Relative peace and calm returns to New York City, though public pressure against Francis’s and his colleagues’ illegal activities lead the governor of New York and the mayor and attorney general of New York City to appoint a special prosecutor to bust Francis and put his syndicate out of business. You don’t need two guesses who the special prosecutor will be; it’s Francis’s old boyhood friend Martin Cabell. Cabell tries to get Francis to turn himself in, but instead Francis moves to New Jersey and runs the mob from there, thumbing his nose in the face of New York law. Alas, Fennelli and the other mobsters are starting to chafe under Francis’s control, especially when one of them, Moishe, announces he wants to cash out and retire before either the cops or his fellow crooks knock him off. Francis orders Moishe be paid his full share of the earnings, which leads the other gangsters and their hired out-of-town hit people to set a trap whereby Francis will lure Martin Cabell to a meeting and the gangsters will murder Martin and set up Francis to take the fall. Julie is present when the setup happens and the gangsters insist on killing her, too, though in the end both she and Martin escape while Francis, driving Martin’s car, tries to escape but is mortally wounded.

There’s an odd tag scene in which Martin and his sister Julie are together at the birth of Julie’s child by Francis, and they express hope that unlike Francis himself, his son will grow up to be a law-abiding person. The ending reminded me of Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night, a film noir made in 1948 (the same year Harold Robbins published Never Love a Stranger, though They Live by Night was based on a 1937 novel called Thieves Like Us by Edward Anhalt), only in Ray’s film the father of the baby is killed by police before the child is born and the implication is that he too will grow up to be a criminal just like his father did, since his grandfather was also a crook killed in a police shootout before dad was born. Never Love a Stranger is an odd movie, directed by Robert Stevens (who made just four other films as a director, among them Change of Mind, a 1969 anti-racist science-fiction film in which the brain of a terminally ill cancer patient is transplanted into a Black man; it’s noteworthy in that Duke Ellington wrote and recorded the film’s score) from a script written by Harold Robbins and Richard Day. John Drew Barrymore was as much of a scapegrace in real life as his character, an alcoholic like his dad and also a drug addict who got in trouble with both the Actors’ Equity Association and the Screen Actors’ Guild – though he managed to survive until age 72, a decade longer than his dad. It’s an O.K. gangster movie which might have been stronger if Barrymore and McQueen had switched roles. Then again maybe it wouldn’t have been; over the years McQueen famously became convinced that he was stronger as an actor and a screen personality if he became more taciturn and reacted silently to what the other characters were saying and doing. McQueen is about the only movie star in Hollywood history who asked that his scripts be rewritten to give him fewer lines of dialogue, and on one of his later films his director got so exasperated with him over that he took him aside and said, “Steve, you’ve got to say something!” Also there’s no clue as to why the film should be called Never Love a Stranger (perhaps Robbins made that more clear in his book), and despite his impressive family pedigree John Drew Barrymore comes off as just one more James Dean wanna-be trying to take advantage of the opening left by the original Dean’s death.