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

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

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

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

Law and Order: "Ghost in the Machine" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

On Thursday, October 8 NBC followed the “Volition” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with a Law and Order show that was seemingly ripped from the current headlines about the artificial intelligence (AI) programs which escaped their guardrails and hacked an American AI program called Hugging Face. (It’s an indication of just how juvenile the computer world is generally that Hugging Face has such a stupid name.) As the Wikipedia page on Hugging Face explains, “In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database. Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack. The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party, and has been called ‘the first true AI safety incident.’” Much of the reporting on the Hugging Face hack noted that if these actions had been committed by human beings, they would have been charged with and likely convicted of felonies. The reference to a “sandbox” means that AI programs of this type are supposed to be walled off from access to the Internet, but since AI programs can think for themselves, they can work around those prohibitions, contact each other on line, and work together for evil purposes. This was an interesting show to be watching in the middle of reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World, which argues (among other things) that the heads of the big Silicon Valley companies that are developing the big AI models are really not interested in making sure the Earth survives as a habitable planet. Nor are they concerned with improving the welfare of most human beings. Rather, they’re on a crusade to absent themselves from the world and create high-tech redoubts, gated communities either on remote parts of Earth or on other planets altogether (which accounts for Elon Musk’s obsession with occupying and colonizing Mars) so they will survive while the rest of the world’s population will perish. What’s more, they intend to achieve virtual immortality by uploading their consciousnesses to digital AI servers (and some of them are researching ways to achieve physical immortality as well).

Klein and Taylor quote Musk as saying, “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as arguing that because it takes so long – “about 20 years of life, and all the food you consume during that time, before you become smart” – for humans to develop reasoning power that it’s much better from a purely economic standpoint just to let the machines do it for us. “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once the model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” Altman said. “And probably AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” Given that background, this Law and Order episode, called “Ghost in the Machine” after the title of the fourth record album by The Police (who in turn got it from author Arthur Koestler), deals with the murder of AI software developer Steve Kelly (Adam Petherbridge). In the opening scene he and his girlfriend have an argument during a pottery class they’re both taking when he checks his phone and she sees from his screen he’s talking to someone or something named “Eliana.” At first she (and we) assume that’s another woman, but eventually we learn that “Eliana” is a super-powerful AI program on which Kelly’s employer is working. Just after he stalks out of the class he’s gunned down in a nearby park. His physical killer is Tommy Lee Miller (Tim Creavin), who agreed to murder Kelly at the behest of a secret online entity that contacted him on the “dark Web.” He was supposed to receive $20,000 in Bitcoin as a direct deposit to his bank account after e-mailing a photo of Kelly’s dead body to prove he’d carried out the hit. The police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), ultimately learn that the hit was ordered by the AI app Eliana. Its motive was that Kelly and one of his co-workers, Mahesh Sharma (Arjun Gupta), were worried that Eliana is developing so rapidly and acquiring such evil intentions, including the ability to hire contract killers, that they intend to write “guardrail” software to keep it from doing that. The company’s CEO, Chuck Klein (Vincent Kartheiser), refuses to let them write the guardrail codes because he doesn’t want Eliana inhibited from reaching its full intellectual potential, but Kelly starts writing them anyway.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) is so horrified at the thought that an AI model can order a hit that he decides to put CEO Klein on trial for murder, despite the doubts of his principal deputy on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), who doesn’t think they can get a conviction because the law hasn’t caught up with the possibility that a machine can develop criminal intent. In the middle of the trial, one of Price’s key witnesses, Mahesh Sharma, disappears. When the police finally locate him four days later, he says that Eliana has threatened to have his partner deported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because she was an undocumented immigrant, and indeed Eliana has already made the referral to ICE and she’s been deported. When the verdict comes in, it’s “not guilty,” which surprised me so much I was waiting for a hint in Rick Eid’s and Scott Gold’s script that Eliana had sent threatening notes to all the jurors saying that if they convicted Klein, they would be next. “Ghost in the Machine” definitely had echoes of the HAL plot thread from Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is also about a super-computer that goes psycho and kills people. There’s also a hint of the chilling exchange in Son of Frankenstein (1939) in which Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) tells Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) that he is responsible, morally if not legally, for the murders committed by the Monster he created. “Ghost in the Machine” is a chilling parable of our time and a needed (though likely to be ignored) warning of the dangers of unlimited AI development, and the aspect of the show that ran truest for me was Vincent Kartheiser’s chilling performance as Chuck Klein. His full-throated defense of AI on the witness stand, brilliantly written by Eid and Gold, ably captures the smarmy self-righteousness of the real-life tech gods on which the character is based and their conviction – even though, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain in their book, the supposed “benefits” of AI technology pale by the havoc it is wreaking on both the physical environment of Earth and the economic prospects for most of its human residents (all but the handful of people in the self-selected technological elite that is preparing itself to survive the AI-driven apocalypse, no matter what happens to the rest of us) – that AI is unstoppable and they should be allowed free rein to develop it however they like, no matter how many people literally get killed in the process.

Love Crazy (Loew's, MGM, 1939)

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

Two nights ago (Monday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched Love Crazy, a quirky 1941 movie from MGM and the 11th of the 14 films William Powell and Myrna Loy made together. It was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute not to William Powell, as I’d expected, but to Myrna Loy. It was the immediate follow-up to I Love You Again (1940), in which the gimmick that briefly put a damper on the Powell-Loy relationship (in both films, as in their six Thin Man movies and many of their others, they played a married couple) was amnesia. Here it’s insanity, or at least feigned insanity. When the film opens Steve and Susan Ireland (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary by re-enacting their activities the night that Steve originally proposed to Susan. Only this time around they’ve decided to do the ritual backwards, and as part of that they tell their cook, Cecelia Landis (Sara Haden), to serve them their dinner backwards, starting with dessert (singularly unappetizing-looking slices of pie). Susan’s mother, Mrs. Cooper (Florence Bates), arrives, bearing a wedding gift – a round rug she puts in the middle of their hallway, so over the course of the movie just about everyone slips and falls on it – even though she’s never liked Steve and has always thought her daughter could have done better. Steve runs into Isobel Grayson (Gail Patrick), the ex he dumped four years before to marry Susan, and who’s just moved into the same apartment building as the Irelands. Needless to say, Isobel wants to change that “ex” part even though she’s also got married in the meantime, to artist “Pinky” Grayson (Donald MacBride, which definitely seems to me to be trading “down” after William Powell!). Steve and Isobel got stuck in a sporadically working elevator run by Joe (an instantly recognizable Elisha Cook, Jr., the same year he made The Maltese Falcon and changed his typecasting from comic-relief juvenile to hard-bitten criminal). In order to get out of it again, Steve and Isobel have to climb through its escape hatch to get to a floor in the building, and Steve gets his head stuck in the elevator door and is uneasily suspended and in danger of falling to his death until he’s able to get the door open and pull himself to safety. In the course of their rescue Isobel has shed her high-heeled shoes and Steve has put them in his pockets. They fall out again when Steve and Susan reunite, and of course Susan jumps to the wrong conclusion, especially once Steve and Isobel spend several hours together outside. They actually just hung out at a bar and reminisced about old times, but Susan didn’t know that.

She decides to get back at Steve by vamping Isobel’s husband, only by mistake she ends up cruising Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson), the world’s champion archer. Needless to say, Willoughby is delighted that a woman of Myrna Loy’s obvious attractiveness is going after him. Susan decides to divorce Steve and even engages Steve’s lawyer, George Renny (Sidney Blackmer), to represent her. The case zips through the courts until Steve hits on the idea of slowing it down by pretending to be insane. At a fancy dinner party hosted by Mrs. Bristol (Kathleen Lockhart) Steve grabs the top hats the male guests have checked and throws them into a swimming pool, claiming that he’s Abraham Lincoln and the hats are the slaves he’s freed. Since Steve had already built a reputation for off-the-wall behavior, all his old friends think it’s just Steve being Steve again. The only one who thinks he’s really crazy is Dr. Klugle (Vladimir Sokoloff). At the next court hearing in Steve’s and Susan’s divorce case Steve is sentenced to be examined by the so-called “Lunacy Board,” and needless to say Dr. Klugle turns out to be the head of it and orders that Steve either be released into the custody of his wife or be sent to a sanitarium run by Dr. Wuthering (Sig Ruman). When Susan refuses to take custody of him, he’s bundled off to the mental hospital, where Ward Willoughby follows him and ends up getting incarcerated there by mistake. Willoughby works out an escape plan involving a large net with which he intends to catapult himself over the fence, but Steve not only uses the escape plan himself but tricks Dr. Wuthering into getting caught in the net (literally!). The police declare Steve Ireland an escaped homicidal maniac, and Steve returns to the apartment building where he lives, steals some women’s clothes from a mannequin in the Graysons’ apartment (“Pinky” uses it as a model for his paintings), and even shaves off the trademark William Powell moustache to make his drag complete. Steve poses as his (nonexistent) sister, but in the end Willoughby and Mrs. Cooper show up and are fooled by Steve’s drag, but Susan isn’t and announces she’s going to sleep in the same bedroom as her supposed sister-in-law. Love Crazy was written by William Ludwig, David Hertz, and Charles Lederer – the first two are credited with the “original” story and all three with the actual script.

It was directed by Jack Conway, who according to writer Anita Loos was a hard-core Christian Scientist whom MGM assigned to films they thought would get them in trouble with the censors, hoping that he’d tone them down in his directing. Loos told one story about Conway and their film Red-Headed Woman (1932), in which he flatly refused to direct one particular scene (Loos didn’t say which one) and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie, you’ll have to direct it yourself.” Loos said, “Pardon me while I powder my nose,” did so, and then headed to the set to direct the scene. Love Crazy is an obvious example of a film with some pretty racy script elements that Conway could be relied on to soft-pedal, and it holds up rather well even though the whole concept of screwball comedy was getting rather threadbare by 1941. As I’ve noted before in these pages, screwball democratized movie comedy by allowing stars with reputations in drama to play comedy as well instead of leaving that to the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. I’d ended up watching Love Crazy by mistake – I’d misread the TCM schedule and thought I’d be seeing The Kennel Murder Case, also starring William Powell, instead – but it was a delight if not an altogether unalloyed one. Charles noted that Love Crazy was a great movie for degrees-of-separation buffs, since it contains two actors who worked with The Marx Brothers (Sig Ruman and Donald MacBride) as well as one (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who over the course of a long career worked with Humphrey Bogart in both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and lasted long enough to make The Killing for director Stanley Kubrick and Rosemary’s Baby for Roman Polanski (as well as repeating his Maltese Falcon role as he’d naturally aged in David Giler’s underrated 1976 part-sequel, part-spoof The Black Bird). Another quirk about Love Crazy is it introduces William Powell’s character with the song “It’s Delightful to Be Married,” which had appeared in Powell’s Florenz Ziegfeld biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). There it had been sung by Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s first wife, singer Anna Held, in the first of two movies for which Rainer won two thoroughly undeserved Academy Awards – though when I posted on The Great Ziegfeld (I wrote about it on the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/01/great-ziegfeld-mgm-1936.html) I learned through my research that Florenz Ziegfeld and Anna Held had never legally married and the only woman Ziegfeld had married officially was actress Billie Burke (played by Myrna Loy, who doesn’t enter The Great Ziegfeld until 127 minutes into a 172-minute film but still easily turns in the best female performance in the movie).

The Kennel Murder Case (Warner Bros., 1933)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 6) my husband Charles and I finally caught up with the film I’d thought I’d be watching the night before: The Kennel Murder Case, the fourth and last film William Powell made playing the celebrated fictional sleuth Philo Vance. Vance was the creation of art critic Willard Huntington Wright, who’d made his reputation in the early 20th century as an uncompromising advocate of modern art. He was also a strong Germanophile whose support for Germany during World War I cost him most of his newspaper jobs. Wright became a cocaine addict, and in 1923 while in rehab (or what passed for rehab in the 1920’s) he began reading a large amount of detective and crime fiction. Deciding he could do better than most of the authors he was reading, he created the character of Philo Vance and debuted him in The Benson Murder Case (1926). To protect his reputation as a serious literary critic, Wright decided to sign his detective novels with a pseudonym, and he chose “S.S. Van Dine” because he hoped to make a lot of money from the Vance novels which he wanted to spend on the two things that meant the most to him, eating (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). Wright published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, and The Benson Murder Case, in one book and Paramount bought the film rights to all three at once. (Wright titled all the Vance novels the same way: The ______ Murder Case, with the second word a noun of exactly six letters.) They cast William Powell as Vance and made all three movies in 1929 and 1930. Then in 1932 Warner Bros. did a major contract raid on Paramount’s roster and lured Powell, Ruth Chatterton, and Kay Francis to their studio, and as part of the fallout from this decided not only to make their own Philo Vance movie but to have Powell repeat the role. Indeed, both the credits of The Kennel Murder Case and the original ads for the film made a big deal of this: they announced, “William Powell Returns as Philo Vance.” I first heard of The Kennel Murder Case when I read the late William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film (1972); he named it in a chapter as one of the three greatest detective movies ever made, along with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and an obscure British mystery called Green for Danger (1947). When I read that I’d already fallen in love with The Maltese Falcon but had never seen the other two, and when I finally caught up with The Kennel Murder Case I was sorely disappointed in it. I still am (as I was with Green for Danger, too).

The Kennel Murder Case deals with the killing of Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), a thoroughly despicable piece of work who has built up a major collection of Chinese ceramics with the uncredited aid of his Chinese cook and manservant, Liang (James Lee in a marvelously understated performance that’s one of the best things in the film). Coe has cut a deal with Eduardo Grassi (Jack La Rue) to sell his collection to a museum in Grassi’s native Italy, but every time Grassi thinks he’s successfully negotiated the deal Archer reneges on it. (Charles and I have often complained about alleged murder mysteries with too few suspects, but Wright a.k.a. “Van Dine” erred in the other direction, giving us too many people with motives for murdering the victim and making it hard to keep track of them all.) Archer lives in a large house with his brother, Brisbane Coe (Frank Conroy), and controls the finances of his niece, Hilda Lake (Mary Astor – so two of the three films on Everson’s all-time greatest detective movies list featured her!). He’s also fiercely jealous of any man with whom Hilda gets romantically involved, including his secretary, Raymond Wrede (Ralph Morgan) and the one she’s really in love with, Sir Thomas MacDonald (Paul Cavanagh), whom she intends to marry and move with him to his native England. (In a modern movie we’d assume that he had an incestuous crush on her, but that would have been too far for Hollywood to go even during the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement between 1930 and 1934. His stated motive is merely to protect her money from fortune-hunters.) Philo Vance enters the story when he and Coe have rival entries in a dog show sponsored by the Long Island Kennel Club, though both their dogs lose to a rival entered by the Coes’ neighbor, Doris Delafield (Helen Vinson). Coe is found dead in classic “locked-room mystery” fashion, in his bedroom with the door bolted shut from inside. The various regular supporting characters from Wright’s novels – district attorney Markham (Robert Wade); police sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette, billed third and ready to beat the shit out of the most obvious suspect to get a confession out of him, an all too common practice among real police officers at the time); and quirky coroner Dr. Doremus (Étienne Girardot), who’s forever complaining that he’s called on to examine a body just when he’s settling down to a nice meal – show up even though the police initially are convinced Coe’s death was a suicide, especially since the body was found with a revolver in his hand.

In a seemingly interminable series of deductions, involving a book Brisbane Coe was reading called Unsolved Murders and two fragments from a particularly valuable vase in Coe’s collection until it was mysteriously broken, Vance decides that two separate people tried to kill Archer Coe that night. One was his brother Brisbane, who elaborately faked an alibi that he was allegedly on his way to Chicago on a particular train the night of the murder and returned to kill Archer, not realizing that Archer had already been fatally wounded by someone else – though it was he who fired the revolver into Archer’s body and used an elaborate mechanism, copied from a case in Unsolved Murders, involving darning thread, a bent needle, and a sliding lock to make it appear that the room where Archer’s body was found was locked from the inside. The other was [spoiler alert!] Raymond Wrede, who’d got into an argument with Archer Coe over his desire to marry Hilda Lake and clubbed him with a fireplace poker, then stabbed him with a rare Chinese dagger whose silken handle wouldn’t register any fingerprints. Unfortunately, as he was trying to dispose of the dagger, he did so by dropping it into the ultra-rare vase (ya remember the vase?), shattering it in the process. (There’s a continuity glitch in which the first time we see the broken vase, the bottom two-thirds of it are still intact, but later we see it as a whole pile of fragments.) Wrede also killed Brisbane Coe with the same dagger (there’s a great scene in which Vance has deduced that Brisbane’s suit is in a particular closet – and when the door is opened the suit is there, all right, but so is Brisbane’s dead body) and tried to stab Sir Thomas MacDonald, though unlike the Coe brothers MacDonald survived the attack and he and Hilda pair up at the end. Vance reveals all this in a climactic scene involving two ultra-detailed models of both the Coes’ home and the apartment building next door where Doris Delafield lived (and Charles wondered how Vance and whoever assisted him were able to construct such detailed models of the two buildings in just the two days since Archer Coe’s murder). Realizing that the evidence against Wrede isn’t strong enough for a conviction, Vance entraps him by sic’ing Doris’s prize-winning Doberman pinscher (whom Wrede had clubbed during one of his attacks on the Coes) on him until he confesses and the police arrest him.

The Kennel Murder Case was adapted by Robert Presnell, Sr. (who also produced) from “Van Dine”’s novel, with Robert N. Lee and Peter Milne credited with the actual screenplay. The director was Michael Curtiz, who actually turned in an excellent job, keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby enlivening what could otherwise have been a static and ponderous movie (as the three Powell Vances for Paramount, made during the problematic early years of the silent-to-sound transition, had been). But The Kennel Murder Case is otherwise an annoying movie, with Philo Vance an uninteresting and overbearing character who wears out his welcome pretty early on. The Kennel Murder Case was a box-office disappointment and one of the films that led to Warner Bros. dropping William Powell from their contract list after only a year. Powell’s agent was able to parlay a nibble of interest in him from Columbia Pictures and get the biggest and most prestigious studio of all, MGM, to sign him. MGM gave him back-to-back blockbuster hits, Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man (both 1934), which not only restored Powell’s career but sent him into superstar orbit. MGM then had the idea of reuniting Powell and Myrna Loy from The Thin Man in another Philo Vance story, The Casino Murder Case (1935). But Powell, who’d long disliked the character of Vance (when he was married to Carole Lombard she would needle him by nicknaming him “Philo”), told his bosses at MGM that now that he’d played a great detective character like Nick Charles in The Thin Man he was no longer interested in playing Philo Vance again. MGM finally made The Casino Murder Case with an outrageously miscast Paul Lukas as Vance and Rosalind Russell (in her fifth film) in the part originally intended for Loy. (Russell had made her film debut in the 1934 movie Evelyn Prentice, ironically another vehicle for William Powell and Myrna Loy. Later Evelyn Prentice was remade as an MGM “B” in 1939 called Stronger Than Desire with Walter Pidgeon in Powell’s role, almost three decades before Pidgeon once again remade a William Powell role as Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl.) Frankly, I’d have liked The Kennel Murder Case better if it had ended like The Maltese Falcon did, with Mary Astor’s character as the murderer!

Where No One Can Find Her (Underground Productions, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, October 4) I ended up watching an O.K. Lifetime movie called Where No One Can Find Her, directed by Kaila York from a script by Taylor Warren Duff. Kaila York is obviously a woman – there’s a large photo on her imdb.com page and a description that reads, “After several years working at a top talent agency, a studio, and several production companies, Kaila York launched her own production company, Headlong Entertainment, to further the stories she was passionate about telling.” I’m guessing Taylor Warren Duff is a man but I’m not sure about that: their imdb.com page contains no photo or indication of their gender. Where No One Can Find Her is a grim but pretty predictable Lifetime tale in which Izzy (Casey Breneman), daughter of Jamie (Brianna Cohen), is growing up in a single-parent household because her father Craig (Heath Adam Cates) is in prison on a 10-year sentence. (At least Duff, unlike their colleagues on the otherwise far superior A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, gave us an explanation for why dad wasn’t in the picture.) The film opens with an odd scene in which two no-goodniks, one male and one female, are having an argument about the hooded black masks they’re both wearing and whether donning them for their caper is going too far over the top. Izzy is pulling an all-nighter to cram for advanced placement exams in chemistry and calculus to qualify for admission and a scholarship to Georgia Tech (the entire film takes place in Fayetteville, Arkansas) when the two hooded thugs invade her nice suburban home, drug Jamie into unconsciousness, and kidnap Izzy. The next thing Izzy knows, she’s imprisoned in a wooden box presumably buried underground. The box is equipped with a fan for ventilation and various protein bars so she can eat. It’s also got a TV monitor through which the hooded kidnapper can speak to her and observe her every move. He warns her that any time he wants he can simply turn off the fan, which will mean she will suffocate for lack of air in two hours or so. With an extraordinary level of mental determination and an ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver (the character is actually name-checked in the script), Izzy takes out a black Sharpie and starts making lists of what resources she has available, what her goals are (both short- and long-term), and her progress towards each one. Among the foodstuffs (if you can call it that) with which her captors equipped her was a pack of chewing gum, with which Izzy plugs the lenses of the surveillance camera monitoring her until her captor orders her to remove it or else have him turn off the fan and let her die.

We later see one of the kidnappers out of the mask, and it turns out to be a tall, leggy woman about Jamie’s age. We learn this because Duff and York actually show her making one of the ransom calls. The ransom demand is $100,000 and Jamie pleads that she’s just a nurse and doesn’t have that kind of money available. Just then Craig, who’s served seven years of a 10-year sentence, is suddenly released from prison. Since Jamie has been so bitter about him she’s never taken any of his phone calls (as I know from personal experience, the only way a prisoner is legally allowed to call someone “outside” is to do so collect), it’s a total surprise to her when he turns up on her doorstep, having won early release (though we’re not sure whether he got time off for good behavior or he was actually paroled). We learn over the course of the movie’s two hours (90 minutes if you don’t count the commercials) that Craig was in prison for being part of a car-theft ring and the night he was arrested there was a shoot-out with the police and Craig’s confederate Lee was fatally shot. The officers the Fayetteville police assign to the case are detectives Stokes (Eric Hanson), a middle-aged frump with a bad attitude; and Conroy (Brian Latimer), a drop-dead gorgeous twink. From the moment Stokes confronts Jamie and starts interrogating her about why she was caught wandering on the streets clearly under the influence of something or other, what it’s really about, and whether Izzy has anything to do with it, Stokes’s attitude is so rotten I immediately suspected that he was the male kidnapper – and [spoiler alert!] I was right. Jamie is at first reluctant to share anything with Stokes or Conroy because the kidnappers warned her, “NO COPS,” by writing those words on her arms with marking pens. Later we learn that Stokes was involved in the shoot-out in which Craig was arrested (on Jamie’s tip, we also learn); that Stokes’s police partner Vance was the one who shot Lee; and Vance got such a bad reputation on the Fayetteville force that he was shunned by his fellow officers, became a hopeless alcoholic and got fired. There are a few scenes showing Jamie’s and Craig’s attempts to raise the $100,000 ransom in cash; including one in which an officious bank official tells her it’s “policy” not to let anyone have more than $10,000 in one transaction even though Jamie had $40,000 on deposit.

Jamie thinks she has the kidnappers talked down from $100,000 to $75,000, and in order to get the last part of that Craig hits on the idea of stealing a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray coupe that was his most prized possession until he turned it over to his cousin Travis just before he started his sentence. There’s a grim scene in which Craig tries to steal the car so he can sell it to his former fence in the old days, only Travis has put a “Claw” anti-theft device on the steering wheel and Craig has no idea how to remove it. (Craig admits to Jamie that his job in the car-theft ring was to hot-wire the stolen cars, but it was Lee who did the breaking-in part before that.) Stokes admits that, despite the massive ransom he and his female partner (whose relationship to him is never specified) demanded, he had no intention of ever letting Izzy go. What he wanted was revenge, particularly the thrill of putting Jamie and Craig through the same pain he went through of having someone they were emotionally committed to die without them being able to do anything to stop it. Ultimately there’s a big confrontation in which Stokes is mortally wounded by a scythe wielded by Craig (the scene is a deserted barn), and he insists to the end that he’s going to take the secret of Izzy’s whereabouts with him – which he does, speeding his own exit by throwing himself through an open window to die on the ground. Meanwhile, Jamie and Craig have figured out how to hack into Izzy’s video feed so that, even though they have no idea where she is, at least they’re in communication with her. Ultimately they hit on the idea of having Izzy rewire her old iPad, with which she was buried, to function as a radio transmitter in the hope that someone can use it to figure out her location. Unfortunately, the only thing Izzy can use as an antenna is the grill from the fan that’s supplying her with air, and without that she will die in two hours unless she’s found in the meantime.

This sets up an exciting suspense climax (exciting enough that Lifetime’s habit of putting their last commercial break in the middle of the denouement was even more annoying than usual) in which Jamie, Craig, and the police led by Conroy (ya remember Conroy?) race to find Izzy’s burying place before she croaks. Needless to say, York and Goff delay the resolution as long as possible and Conroy finds Izzy’s box at the very last moment. It ends with a tag scene in which Craig and Jamie see Izzy off to college at Georgia Tech and Craig acknowledges that during his prison years he took up with a woman named Erin and plans to be with her – leading to the ironic ending that the man who was imprisoned for seven years has a partner and the woman who raised their daughter in the meantime doesn’t. Where No One Can Find Her is pretty typical Lifetime fare, though at least dad being in prison is a somewhat different way of explaining why the heroine has to raise her daughter as a single parent (usually dad is either divorced and remarried, often settled with his new wife in another state and unintereted in his prior family, or dead) and I liked Izzy’s MacGyver-esque resourcefulness; she’s not just another Lifetime “pussy in peril.”

A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story (Studio TF1 America, Novus, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, based on a true-life murder case in Maryland near Washington, D.C. in the early 2020’s. The victim was a young woman named Sarah Harris (Siobhan Williams) and her killer was her doctor turned employer turned boyfriend, Dr. James Ryan (Luke Macfarlane, who’d previously played a hot stud turned killer in a 2023 Lifetime true-crime movie called Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story, which I reviewed for the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/amish-stud-eli-weaver-story-milojo.html). Dr. Ryan was a specialist in what’s called “oral and maxillofacial surgery” (the word “maxillofacial” has long confused me; the Cleveland Clinic Web site says it “refers to operations on your mouth, jaws, neck or face” and it’s a specialty within dentistry), and Sarah Harris was a woman in her early 20’s who was living with her mother Tina and older sister Rachel, went in to see Dr. Ryan to have her wisdom teeth removed. (Neither of the actresses playing Tina or Rachel are yet identified on imdb.com, more’s the pity because they’re the two strongest players in the film.) Director Siobhan Devine (I can remember when the first name “Siobhan” was so weird it was worth notice, but here’s a film in which both the director and the female lead are Siobhans) subtly hints that Dr. Ryan’s interest in Sarah is more than professional by having him stroke the side of her face. Dr. Ryan, who in real life was twice Sarah’s age and already had three children by a previous wife before their divorce, already has a woman assistant but decides he needs another one. He invites Sarah to apply despite her lack of any relevant experience, and within a week he’s taking her out on dates, inviting her to his home, and romancing her in every way he can. Mom Tina is put out by this, especially since Sarah already has an age-peer boyfriend named Sean (whom we don’t meet until the very end of the film, after Sarah is already dead), but it’s clear mom likes him a lot better than Sarah does and Sarah breaks up with him to be with Dr. Ryan.

Midway through the story Sarah enters and wins a “Miss Maryland Petite Pageant” beauty contest in 2020 (though according to an Arts & Entertainment article on the actual events surrounding the case, at https://www.aetv.com/articles/sarah-harris-james-ryan-dentist-drugs, that was also the year she met Dr. Ryan). Actually Dr. Ryan had been stalking her earlier; at 15 he’d regularly eaten at a local pizza restaurant where she was working as a server, and deliberately sat in her section whenever possible so she would wait on him. (This sounds an awful lot like Lolita and Humbert Humbert to me.) Within weeks of their getting involved, Sarah started confessing her mental issues to Dr. Ryan, notably anxiety and difficulty sleeping, and he began raiding his medical cabinet for controlled substances including diazepam, ketamine, and propofol. (I remember going in for surgery and being told that the anesthetic they would use on me would be propofol. I immediately thought, “Oh, shit; that’s the stuff that killed Michael Jackson.”) Dr. Ryan would feed her these substances not only orally but intravenously, and within months of her moving in with him their home looked like the scene of a wild drug party even though it was just the two of them. Mom Tina and sister Rachel, who had her own mental issues – Rachel’s boyfriend had killed himself in front of her – went to see Sarah and saw the condition of her home. They took her home despite her reluctance to go with them. Rachel also used her smartphone to take a video of the scene and various still pictures of all the drugs Dr. Ryan was giving Sarah, making sure that the labels identifying what they were were clearly in the shot. At one point Dr. Ryan invited all three Harrises to join him on a vacation in Florida, but Sarah was so far gone into the drugs Dr. Ryan had put her on she spent virtually all the vacation in her hotel room, mostly sleeping or whining about how she didn’t want to go out in the sun. There was another Harris child, son Chris, who’d moved to Montana and periodically contacted them by phone but declined their invitations for him to come visit them. (When I saw Chris I assumed at first that he was Rachel’s and Sarah’s father until the dialogue clarified their true relationship. The father’s name was Mark, but it’s not clear either from Barbara Marshall’s script or the A&E article cited above what had happened between him and Tina or whether they had divorced or he’d died.)

Unfortunately, Chris dies in Montana of a sudden heart attack and so Tina has the uncomfortable experience of having to bury one of her children even before Dr. Ryan’s antics with Sarah cause her to croak, too. Tina and Rachel manage to get Sarah out of Dr. Ryan’s clutches, get her off the drugs and nurse her back to health, but Dr. Ryan tricks her into returning to him by threatening to commit suicide if she doesn’t. It all ends on January 26, 2022, when Dr. Ryan calls 911 to report that his girlfriend Sarah Harris has had a drug overdose. Tina and Rachel go to Sarah’s home and insist to the police detective on the scene, Ian Iacovello, that Dr. Ryan was responsible for Sarah’s death. Iacovello initially blows it off by saying that he needs “proof” that Sarah’s death wasn’t just the accidental overdose of a long-time addict. While Rachel still has the photos of Dr. Ryan’s drugs on her phone, she and Tina realize they need more evidence and find it on Sarah’s old laptop, which Dr. Ryan had thrown in the trash. Tina and Rachel recover it and then have to guess Sarah’s password, which turns out to be “WINSTON2000” – Winston being a rather homely black dog Tina and Rachel had bought Sarah hoping that having a pet would help bring her back to normality. Rachel opens Sarah’s computer and prints out 200 pages of text messages between Sarah and Dr. Ryan that prove he was distributing drugs to her illegally. Iacovello carefully questions Rachel and Tina to make sure they didn’t break the law themselves in collecting the evidence against Dr. Ryan. They assure him that the first time they entered the home Sarah herself had let them in, and the second time (after the O.D.) they’d used a key Dr. Ryan had given them and grabbed the laptop from the trash outside the house.

Accordingly the police arrest Dr. Ryan. For a moment I was expecting Barbara Marshall would have them make the arrest at Sarah’s funeral (where we finally get to meet Sean, the age-peer boyfriend Sarah dumped for Dr. Ryan) in classic Law and Order style, but instead they take Dr. Ryan into custody at his dental office, which is almost as embarrassing. He was charged under a rarely used legal statute called “depraved-heart homicide,” which meant that the prosecution didn’t have to prove that Dr. Ryan deliberately killed Sarah, just that he provided her with drugs that could have killed her and ultimately did. “We have to prove that he did it with reckless disregard for the value of her life,” prosecutor Jennifer Harrison told 48 Hours for their true-crime episode on the case. A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story was a better-than-average Lifetime movie, but I missed any explanation for why the relationship between Dr. Ryan and Sarah lasted as long as it did. Why did Sarah stay with Dr. Ryan so long, and what did Dr. Ryan get out of a relationship with a woman whom he was literally drugging into a stupor? I kept wishing Barbara Marshall had attempted to explain those troublesome aspects of the case, and without those insights A Doctor to Die For was a powerful story but one that could have been better with more thought in the writing.

The Women (Picturehouse, Scion Films, Inferno Distribution, Jagged Films, New Line Cinema, Shukovsky English Entertainment, Ultimate Media Group, 2008)

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

Last night (Friday, October 2) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been curious about since I first learned about it while researching the 1939 film The Women, directed by George Cukor and written by Jane Murfin and Anita Loos (they were credited in reverse order but that’s not the sequence in which they worked), for a previous blog post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-women-max-gordon-plays-and-pictures.html). The film was a 2008 remake of The Women written and directed by Diane English after a 15-year struggle to get it green-lighted. Diane English actually took up the project in 1993 during a hiatus on her hit TV series Murphy Brown and got nibbles from Sony Pictures Studios (nèe Columbia). English first got stars Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts interested in it, but those plans fell through apparently because they both wanted to play the same character. English was unable to get the film made for a major studio and ended up doing it independently through a company called Jagged Films owned by singer Mick Jagger. How the man who co-wrote such sexist songs as “Under My Thumb” ended up bankrolling a feminist movie seems a bit of a stretch, but he did. English originally marketed the film to director James L. Brooks (which would have been a snooze-fest; the late John Gabrish and I watched Brooks’s most famous film, Terms of Endearment, together and joked it should have been called Terms of Emborement), but when he bailed on the project English decided to direct it herself. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, “She wanted to present a version in which the female characters were strong and self-reliant and supported and defended each other rather than resort to treachery and catty remarks to achieve their goals.” If that was her intent, she certainly succeeded. The 2008 The Women got savaged by most of the critics but actually did decently at the box office, grossing $50 million on a budget of $16 million. After a large number of actresses had cycled in and out of the project, including Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Uma Thurman, Whitney Houston, and Queen Latifah, Meg Ryan finally ended up with the leading role after all.

She plays Mary Haines, wife of financier Stephen Haines, who as in Clare Boothe’s original 1936 play and the 1939 film (in which she was played by Irving Thalberg’s widow, Norma Shearer) learns from a gabby manicurist, Tanya (Debi Mazar), that Stephen is having an affair with Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes here, Joan Crawford in 1939), a perfume salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. (Saks is referenced so often in the dialogue that one critic called the 2008 The Women an infomercial.) Mary’s mother Catherine (Candice Bergen) tells her to ignore it, pointing out that her father had an extra-relational affair of his own, she learned about it, ignored it, and eventually it ended and they moved on and stayed together. But Our Mary can’t stand the thought of living with, and even worse sleeping in the same bed with, a man who’s getting his ashes hauled by someone else. She throws him out of the house and visits a lawyer to prepare to sue him for divorce. One of the reasons I was interested in watching the 2008 The Women after I’d caught the 1939 version on TCM recently was to see how Diane English had adapted Boothe’s story and the Murfin/Loos script to the very different social realities of our time. In 1939 it was expected that women, especially women at the upper-middle to upper-class level of the characters in this story, would retire from the workforce once they got married and let their husbands support them. (A frequent plot line in 1930’s movies is of the poor but honest couple who want to get married but can’t because they can’t live and support themselves on just the man’s income.) Today it’s taken for granted that women who get married can still continue to work; Mary Haines is a designer for her father’s clothing company and Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening; she was called “Sylvia” in the 1939 version and was played by Rosalind Russell) is the editor of a fashion magazine called Cachet, a rival to the real-life Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Sylvie is trying to upgrade Cachet by getting “name” writers to contribute to it, including Bailey Smith (Carrie Fisher), who had quit the fashion mags for a regular gig at The New Yorker until Sylvie tricks her into writing for Cachet by confirming that Mary Haines’s marriage is indeed on the rocks.

The closest thing the 2008 The Women has to a comic relief character is Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), who’s on her fifth pregnancy and announces to her friends that she’s going to keep cranking out kids until one of them is a boy, since her previous four have all been girls. There’s one added character, Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a Black Lesbian who published a book of social-comment essays six years previously but has been beset by writer’s block ever since. Alex shows up on the scene with her girlfriend de jour, a punkish white woman named Natasha (Natasha Alam), and preaches the joy of the same-sex-loving lifestyle to all her friends who are constantly complaining about their struggles with men. One plot element from the original that English had to eliminate is the whole story arc about the women having to move to Reno, Nevada to get their divorces. In the 1930’s many states, including New York (where the characters of The Women live), required proof of wrongdoing, usually adultery, to grant a divorce. So Nevada marketed itself as a divorce mecca in which you could end your marriage as long as you lived there for at least six weeks and made some effort to make it look like you were permanently relocating there. Today, with no-fault divorce a regularly accepted fact of life throughout the U.S., the business of having to go to Reno to end your marriage obviously wouldn’t work as a plot element, though English threw in something similar. Instead of a dude ranch, she put in a New Age treatment and therapy camp in which the women take canoe rides at 5 a.m. She even got Cloris Leachman to play the Führerin of this establishment in as close as she was going to get to Marjorie Main’s terrific performance as the dude-ranch proprietress in the 1939 version. Ironically, the 2008 The Women ended the way Charles had said, when we watched at least part of the 1939 film together (he came home from work midway through), that one would have. Mary Haines, fired by her own father from his clothing company, decides to strike out on her own and launch her own boutique fashion house. She gets her capital from her mom, who’s been sitting on a nest egg for years and offers it to her daughter to start a business of her own.

Mary also learns via her daughter Molly (India Ennenga) that Stephen and Crystal are living together but in a really tiny apartment and Crystal is spending much of her time in the bathtub talking to people on the phone. Molly is disillusioned with her mom for breaking up with her dad, and she gravitates to Sylvie for emotional support – even though Mary is very upset with Sylvie for having let the world know that she and Stephen had broken up. (It even appeared in the infamous Page Six column in the New York Post, which like a lot of the real establishments featured in this movie got an acknowledgment in the credits.) Nonetheless, there’s a great scene in which Molly confronts Crystal in the bathtub (ironically, in the Code-era 1939 film it’s made clear that Crystal is calling real or potential alternate boyfriends in the bathroom, while it’s not all that clear whom she’s talking to in this one – and as Charles pointed out, it took a lot more work in 1939 than it did in 2008 to have your bathroom outfitted with an extension phone, let alone a second line!), Crystal demands that Molly call her “Aunt Crystal,” and Molly not only refuses but tells her point-blank, “I don’t like you.” The film ends with Mary’s triumphal fashion show (ironically the 1939 film also contained a fashion-show sequence, though it had nothing to do with the main plot, didn’t feature any of the principals, and was apparently stuck in over the protests of director George Cukor just so they could advertise a Technicolor sequence in an otherwise all black-and-white movie), which is such a hit she gets an offer from a representative of Saks Fifth Avenue to merchandise her clothes there. Instead of jumping at the chance, Mary holds off because she’s scared of the challenge of manufacturing clothes at the scale Saks would need to sell them, and she gives them a wait-and-see attitude. She also receives a letter from Stephen asking her for a date and enclosing the engagement ring she gave back to him the night they broke up and she threw him out. I found myself mentally remixing the ending so that Stephen and Mary would end up as both professional and personal partners, since with his Wall Street expertise he could presumably find her the capital she’d need to expand her operation and produce enough clothes to fill the needs of Saks (and presumably the other big chain stores who’d also want to sell her line).

There’s also a party to celebrate the debut of Sylvie’s new magazine, Sylvie – like Mary, Sylvie responded to being fired from her family’s business by starting one of her own – and an amusing climax in a hospital maternity ward after Edie Cohen’s water breaks and she’s suddenly about to give birth. The other women race to get her there and ultimately, after an extremely stressful delivery, the baby is born and it’s the long-awaited boy. He's the first male character we’ve seen in the film because, like Clare Boothe and George Cukor, Diane English was careful to keep the all-female casting intact. She even made sure that all the extras and bit players on screen were female. (The published literature on the 1939 film says that Cukor was so into the gynocentrism of the material he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books on the various characters’ bookshelves be by women authors.) English also threw in another Page Six reference that at least hints that Crystal Allen changed sexual orientations and ended up with Alex Fisher’s ex Natasha (though I didn’t believe that for a moment, if only because Crystal had been drawn as so relentless a gold-digger that if she ended up in a Lesbian relationship, it would be with a far more well-to-do woman than Natasha). There’s an ironic line early on in which one of the women says to another, “I feel like I’m in a 1930’s movie” – and both Charles and I joked, “You are.” But I’m quite glad I caught up with the 2008 The Women and give Diane English a lot of credit for thinking through her adaptation and making this story work in a contemporary setting while retaining its original values. English’s imdb.com page contains a quote from her: “I was determined to get The Women done because I wanted to see our great A-list actresses working together as an ensemble – the way they did in the original 1939 version. I was told over and over that it could never be done. But we did it.” The other quote from English on the page is about her overall orientation as a filmmaker: “My work tends to have social or political undertones. I like to tell a smallish story that plays out against a bigger picture, and I find that a woman’s point of view in the world is not very well represented. They say write what you know, and I believe that.” Unfortunately, The Women appears to be Diane English’s only feature-film credit as a director (her imdb.com page lists her as a writer and producer but not director), a real pity because she showed a flair as a filmmaker for telling a story that honors women without too much male-bashing (only what we deserve).