The Power of the Whistler (Larry Darmour Productions, Columbia, 1945)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 13) I showed my husband Charles a 65-minute movie on YouTube, The Power of the Whistler, third in the series of eight movies Columbia Pictures and their subcontractor, Larry Darmour Productions, made as “B” movies inspired by the popular CBS radio show of that name. Obviously Columbia was hoping for the same level of success as Universal was getting with a “B” movie series based on Inner Sanctum, since they not only adapted the radio show (more or less), they copied Universal’s strategy of using the same actor in each series entry but having him play a different character every time. Universal’s Inner Sanctum star was Lon Chaney, Jr.; Columbia’s for The Whistler series was Richard Dix. By 1945 Dix was definitely in the “on their way down” department, having fallen from his early-1930’s heights as the star of films with major budgets and production values like 1931’s epic Western Cimarron, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. (It was the only one RKO ever won for a film they produced directly, though they won a second Best Picture by proxy as the distributor of Samuel Goldwyn’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives.) Dix had an unusual career trajectory; he broke into films in 1917 after having gone to college to study medicine but ended up in the school’s drama club. Within six years he was appearing in big-budget blockbusters like Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923). That film paired the Biblical story with a modern-dress portion illustrating the immortal moral truths of the Ten Commandments, and Dix appeared in the modern section as John McTavish, “good” brother to Rod LaRocque’s “bad” brother Dan. (I’ve posted about this: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-ten-commandments-paramount-1923.html.) Dix successfully made the silent-to-sound transition in 1929 with a quite good film of Earl Derr Biggers’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, but by the late 1930’s he was on the downgrade. The Whistler series entries were his last films before he suddenly died in 1949 at age 56 of a heart attack. Just before he started making them he’d been in a quite good “B,” Val Lewton’s and Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (1943), but that movie was suppressed for years because RKO lost a plagiarism suit over it to two well-known copyright trolls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-ghost-ship-rko-1943.html).

The first two Whistler films, The Whistler and The Mark of the Whistler (1944), were both directed by up-and-comer William Castle. For this third one Columbia and Darmour replaced him with ancient “B” hand Lew Landers (t/n Louis Friedlander) and commissioned a script by Aubrey Wisberg that [spoiler alert!] cast Dix as a psychopathic killer instead of the sympathetic roles he’d played in the first two series films. The revelation that Dix is a psychopath is supposed to be a shock to the audience, but it’s been revealed in so much of the literature on this film (including the YouTube post on which Charles and I were watching it) that it’s well known even to people who’ve never seen it. The gimmick of the radio show The Whistler was that the narrator (Bill Forman and Bill Johnstone on radio and Otto Forrest here) was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, essentially nagging him as he told the story. The Power of the Whistler begins in the evening in New York City (we know that because the film starts with a stock establishing shot of Times Square, in which William Everest (Richard Dix) is struck by a car and nearly killed. He comes to but has amnesia (amnesia was a frequent plot gimmick in mid-1940’s movie thrillers and I suspect the end of World War II had something to do with that). He walks into a club called The Salt Shaker and meets up with a young couple, Charlie Kent (Loren Tindall) and Francie Lang (a girl named Jeff Donnell, a quite personable actress who was in a number of Columbia “B”’s in the 1940’s). Francie’s sister Jean (Janis Carter, second-billed) does an improvised card reading on Everest and turns up the ace of spades followed by the two of clubs, which is supposed to indicate that he will die within 24 hours. Jean does the card reading again and achieves the same result. Against Francie’s advice, Jean follows Everest out of the club to warn him, and he thinks she’s crazy but ultimately agrees to accompany her on a search for his true identity. They have a number of clues in his pocket, including a drug prescription (which, unlike real-world ones, doesn’t have the patient’s name on it), a receipt for a bouquet of 20 long-stemmed roses, a cigarette lighter with an ornate design, a train schedule with the place name “Woodville” circled on it, and a few other odds and ends.

The two calmly walk into the back seat of a parked car so they’ll have a place to talk in private, and in one of the weirder plot twists to a modern audience, the owner of the car not only doesn’t call the police on them but accepts their explanation and offers them a ride. They ask him to take them to the Civic Theatre where the woman Everest (or whoever) sent the roses to, Constantina Ivaneska (Tala Birell), is performing as a star ballerina. They crash her dressing room and her maid, Flotilda (Nina Mae McKinney, the “bad girl” in King Vidor’s all-Black movie Hallelujah in 1929), tells them to wait for her as soon as she comes off stage. Alas, Constantina denies that she ever knew Everest, who because she doesn’t know his real name Jean insists on calling “George.” They also trace the prescription, but learn through a bookstore owner (John Abbott) and a rare book in his stock that the doctor who allegedly wrote it died in 1895, and through a druggist (the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) that the prescription is for a poison. Jean invites “George” to spend the night at the apartment she shares with Francie, but when the parties wake up they find “George” already up and having made breakfast. Alas, Francie finds her bird has mysteriously died during the night. Later we see “George” alone in a park with a squirrel, whom he’s first feeding out of a bag of nuts and then … we don’t see the altercation, but when Jean joins him later the squirrel is dead and “George”’s hands are bandaged; obviously the squirrel fought back. Ultimately Jean and Francie trace “George” to Woodville, a rural community where the most prominent resident is a retired judge who, unbeknownst to us, originally certified William Everest as crazy and ordered him locked up in a mental institution. William Everest had gone there to kill the judge for revenge, only his plot was temporarily derailed by his amnesia. Thanks to Jean, he’s recovered his full memory (oops!) and he goes out to the judge’s ranch to kill him, but Jean successfully fends him off and at the end she kills him with a farmer’s rake, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of her cards.

The most interesting part of Dix’s performance is the personability with which he plays the psychopath, eerily anticipating by 15 years Anthony Perkins’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Like Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932) and Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Dix gently and even lovingly tries to convince the heroine that by killing her he’s actually doing her a favor, since by taking her out young he's sparing her the fate of growing old and losing her looks. (Dix had also played this game in The Ghost Ship, which contains a scene in which a ship’s junior officer is accusing him of being crazy, but it’s the accuser who’s losing his temper and screaming at the top of his lungs while Dix’s character is staying personable and cool, and even inconveniently points out to his accuser that to any objective observer it would be the accuser who seemed crazy.) It’s also a film that evokes much of the noir look (the cinematographer was L. William O’Connell), including the shots of Venetian-blind shadows over Our Heroine as she sleeps before the day when she will go out with “George” and learn at last who he really is. (Venetian blinds were an all-purpose gimmick for “B” directors seeking a really cheap and easy way to build visual atmosphere; look how often William Nigh, a good candidate for the worst director of all time, used them.) The Power of the Whistler has been called a film noir, which is borderline; Dix’s character is the stuff of noir but everyone else in the movie is too unambiguously nice to qualify as a noir character, and only rarely do we get the chiaroscuro visuals that are also so much a part of the film noir universe.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios, Wendy Finerman Productions, Sunswept Entertainment, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2026)

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

Last night (Tuesday, May 12) I went with the Bears San Diego to the AMC Mission Valley 20 theatre to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2, whose existence is something of a surprise because while I’d been aware that the original The Devil Wears Prada had been a hit, I hadn’t realized it had been a big enough hit to merit a sequel. The Devil Wears Prada began as a novel by Lauren Weisberger from 2003, which was first filmed three years later with Meryl Streep starring as Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine – a thinly disguised portrayal of the real-life Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue. I’d caught up with The Devil Wears Prada on Lifetime, of all places, in early 2023 and posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-devil-wears-prada-fox-2000-pictures.html, and re-reading that was helpful in deciphering last night’s film. Weisberger published a sequel to her novel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, in 2013, and the original producers came sniffing around to her with sequel in their minds. But they couldn’t get the original stars – Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci – to agree. Streep repeatedly turned it down, and Hathaway said she’d like to work with Streep again but on a totally different story. With the rights having passed from 20th Century-Fox to Walt Disney Studios (which bought Rupert Murdoch’s entire movie enterprise so Murdoch would have that many more billions to spend in turning the entire world’s politics Rightward), Disney started work on a sequel in 2024. They hired the original director, David Frankel, and assigned Aline Brosh McKenna to create a new script with no resemblance to Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada. We know that because Weisberger’s credit this time around only says, “Based on characters created by … .”

The story picks up the original characters of The Devil Wears Prada 20 years later and closely recycles the events of the first film. Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has left Runway magazine and built an illustrious career as an investigative reporter for the (fictitious) New York Vanguard, only the Vanguard’s owners have decided print journalism is so 19th century. They suddenly and without advance notice close the paper and send the entire staff layoff notices via text messages, which they receive while they’re at a banquet honoring journalists and Andy Sachs is winning an award for her latest exposé. Meanwhile, Runway magazine is having troubles of its own; they hyped a clothing manufacturer that turned out to make all its goods at a sweatshop in Thailand. Runway’s publisher, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), has the brainstorm to hire Andy to set up an investigative unit at Runway to rehabilitate its credibility. But he doesn’t tell Miranda Priestly about this in advance, so Andy just shows up at the Runway offices, ready to work, and has to face one of Miranda’s celebrated cold rages. Meanwhile, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s rival at Runway in the old days, has switched sides in the fashion industry and is now working at Dior, which holds up Miranda and Runway for the proverbial king’s ransom in exchange for continuing to advertise in Runway. Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), Miranda’s right-hand man in both films, tries to explain to her that virtually nobody reads the print edition of Runway anymore; the real money lays in digital outreach, and that means the editorial content has to be reworked in favor of shorter stories with obvious hooks that will serve as clickbait. One of the old Runway stories was about a high-tech power couple, Benji (Justin Theroux) and Sasha (Lucy Liu) Barnes, who were portrayed as deliriously happy with each other. Since then Benji and Sasha have broken up, and Andy makes her bones at the new Runway by scoring an interview with the famously reclusive Sasha.

Meanwhile, Miranda is lobbying Irv Ravitz for a promotion to run media content for his entire company, Elias-Clarke, only at the big party at which Irv is supposed to announce this he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack instead. Runway and the entire Elias-Clarke enterprise is inherited by Ravitz’s son Jay (B. J. Novak), who couldn’t care less about the fashion world or Runway’s unique role in it. Andy and Emily lobby Benji Barnes to do a white-knight buyout of Runway, only Benji, who’s been dating Emily, intends to double-cross Andy and Miranda, take over Runway, and install Emily as the new editor. He also wants to cut way back on the human role in creating the magazine’s content and rely on AI instead. As soon as Andy learns of this, she organizes her own white-knight buyout with Sasha as her backer. It seems Sasha’s motive is more to double-cross her ex than anything else, but she makes a bid not only for Runway but the entire Elias-Clarke company, and agrees to give Miranda the promotion to worldwide editorial control of the Elias-Clarke enterprise that Irv Ravitz was going to give her when he croaked. All this happens while Runway is hosting a huge fashion event in Milan (the counterpart to the one in Paris in the earlier film), with Lady Gaga (playing herself and really energizing the movie) performing a new song called “Shape of a Woman.” Lady Gaga, who’s one of my favorite current stars because she writes songs with recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends instead of just barking out a few words over a dance groove and calling it a “song,” also wrote two other pieces for the soundtrack, “Runway” and “Glamorous Life.” She essentially serves the same role Madonna did in the earlier film, though once again the soundtrack contains Madonna’s mega-hit “Vogue.” (Once again, I loved the irony that the film contained a song with the same title as the real magazine on which the fictitious Runway is based.)

One of the film’s greatest gags is about Jay Ravitz’s cost-cutting strategies; he’s forbidden Runway’s staff to travel in private cars or planes, and it’s delicious to watch Miranda have to fly as an ordinary business-class passenger and be told to her fury that the terms of her ticket don’t allow the airline to serve her champagne. There’s also a subplot in which Andy, while shopping for a new apartment in a renovated old building and unwittingly insults the man who redeveloped it, Stuart Simmons (Kenneth Branagh), only to end up falling in love, or at least dating him. There are also nice references to the bodybuilding spree Benji Barnes goes on after his divorce (inspired, I suppose, by the real-life physical trainings high-tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook – excuse me, Meta – have gone through, apparently under the belief that if they’re going to be Masters of the Universe they should build up their own bodies so they’ll look more like gods and less like nerds). I liked The Devil Wears Prada 2 but a) it’s not as good as the original (most sequels aren’t, though I can think of at least three that improved on their originals: James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein; Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two; and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part Two) and b) it contains enough “digs” against capitalism to qualify as mildly progressive but not so many as to suggest there are any serious alternatives to a system that lets the super-rich pretty much run the world however they want. The consensus of most of the audience members I overheard after the movie was over was it wasn’t as good as the first one, and it would be almost incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen the original film (which might be overstating it a bit, but just a bit).

Habeas Corpus (Hal Roach Studios, MGM, 1928)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 10) Turner Classic Movies did a “Silent Sunday Showcase” night featuring four two-reel comedy shorts by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Habeas Corpus, Putting Pants on Philip, Two Tars, and You’re Darn Tootin’. The last three are acknowledged comedy masterpieces and I’d looked forward to seeing them again. They’re also movies I’ve previously posted about on moviemagg, so I was surprised when I looked online for a previous Habeas Corpus review and found one: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/10/dr-pyckle-and-mr-pryde-joe-rock.html. My husband Charles and I had seen it before at a 2021 event at the San Diego Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, the year that due to the gradual wind-down of the COVID-19 lockdowns the summer organ festival, including its annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” took place in September and October instead of the usual July and August. That year’s “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” took place on Saturday, October 30, the day before Hallowe’en, and was partially Hallowe’en-themed. Along with Habeas Corpus it contained a film by Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925), a spoof of the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore in the title role(s); and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1922). In my previous post I gave special praise to the organist, Mark Herman, for (among other things) his real flair for jazz. I wasn’t that impressed by the films themselves, and Habeas Corpus is still an O.K. movie rather than a truly great one. It starts at the home of mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle), who is lamenting to his butler and assistant Ledoux (Charley Rogers) that he needs a freshly dead human body for his latest experiment to prove his theory that, as the intertitle claims, “the human brain has a level surface – in some instances perfectly flat.”

Laurel and Hardy show up at Padilla’s door begging for food – in Laurel’s case, particularly buttered toast – and instead get offered $500 (jointly or severally?) to go to the local graveyard and steal a recently deceased body. The remaining 15 minutes of this 20-minute movie drag predictably as Laurel and Hardy go through a series of repetitive gags as they try to break into the cemetery and steal a body while Ledoux, who’s really an undercover police officer trying to get the goods on Padilla, follows them there wearing a white sheet disguised as a ghost. Habeas Corpus is only mildly effective and funny, though even at less than full strength Laurel and Hardy are great clowns. Incidentally the film was originally released with a synchronized soundtrack, and that version is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWleZnEN_w. The version TCM showed last night had a fresh (well, 2013 anyway) soundtrack by Robert Israel which, like the movie itself, was O.K. but wasn’t much. It ends with Laurel and Hardy carrying a bag with Ledoux inside and being predictably startled when Ledoux’s feet start sticking out of the bag and he tries to walk until he and Hardy fall into a giant manhole (the same one used to much greater comic effect at the end of Putting Pants on Philip) and Laurel helplessly trying to get them out of there. Habeas Corpus is credited to director James Parrott (brother of Charley Chase, three of whose shorts were last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature) but with Leo McCarey, a comic genius at the level of Laurel and Hardy themselves, credited as “supervising director.” It was apparently McCarey’s idea to lift Laurel and Hardy from the amorphous ranks of Hal Roach’s “Comedy All-Stars” and feature them as leads, and it was also he who invented the “tit-for-tat” style of comic fighting in which, instead of having at each other willy-nilly as in most movie fights, the two combatants each take turns and patiently wait for the other’s retaliation. He made enough good movies – including the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – I can forgive him this lapse (as well as his truly rancid politics: he was a supporter of the Hollywood blacklist and director of the 1952 anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John, with Robert Walker in his last film as a naïve young rich kid who gets swept into joining the Communist Party).

Kanał (Zespol Filmowy “Kadr,” 1957)

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

The first film I watched last night on Turner Classic Movies was a 1957 Polish production called Kanał (notice the diacritical slash through the terminal “l”), whose title is the Polish word for “Sewer.” It was the second film directed by Andrzej Wajda, and also the second in his “World War II Trilogy” after A Generation and followed by the movie that really made his international reputation, Ashes and Diamonds. It’s loosely based on a true story: in August 1944 citizens of Warsaw decided to rise up against their Nazi occupiers and mounted a futile two-month resistance campaign which ended, all too predictably, with their mass slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. The campaign had been O.K.’d by the provisional Polish government in exile in London, but had not been cleared with the Soviet Union, Britain’s nominal allies and the country that would essentially take over Poland after the war ended. Kanał takes place in late September, during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, and deals with a unit of 43 soldiers and civilian volunteers commanded, more or less (the unspeakable conditions under which they were fighting made it virtually impossible for the nominal authorities to maintain discipline), by Lieutenant Zadra (Wienszyslaw Gliniski). By then the Uprising has been crushed in most of the districts of Warsaw and the rebels are down to just three neighborhoods, including one called Mokotów. The unit in the movie has received orders to evacuate Mokotów and retreat to downtown, the last part of Warsaw that has not yet been recaptured by the Nazi occupiers. But only 27 of Zadra’s 43 men are fit to travel. Among the troops are Ensign Korab (Tadeusz Janczar); Lieutenant Madry (Emil Karewicz); Daisy (Teresa Izewska), the blonde-haired guide with whom he’s fallen in love in what has got to be the most bizarre “meet-cute” in movie history; Halinka (Teresa Berezowska), the other woman in the dramatis personae, who’s butch and dark-haired; and the man I thought was the film’s most interesting character, a would-be composer named Michal (Wladyslaw Sheybal).

A narrator (Tadeusz Lomnicki) who introduces the characters off-screen and fortunately isn’t heard from again matter-of-factly informs us that none of these people will still be alive by the end of the day, though quite frankly that’s not that big a surprise. The sense of doom that hangs over the film is its most palpable aspect; that and how vividly Wajda dramatizes the truly awful conditions under which the insurgents have to make their escape attempt. They literally have to wade through shit to get through the sewers and hopefully find an opening, only every time they do either their way is barred by a grille or German soldiers are waiting for them when they come out. In one chilling scene we see some of the escapees emerge and get confronted by a man in a uniform, and just when we’re wondering, “Friend or foe?,” Wajda shows us the SS logo on his arm and we know he’s foe and they’re in for an on-the-spot execution. Kanał is a grim film, as befits the subject matter, and in one scene Smukly (Stanislaw Mikulski), one of the insurgents, successfully disarms two German hand grenades hanging from the ceiling as booby traps but is blown to bits by a third one. It ends with Zadra shooting one of his own men, Sergeant Kula (Tadeuz Gwiadowski), for having lied to him; he said the others were right behind them and not, as the truth was, that they’d left them behind hours before. After Zadra kills Kula, he descends back into the sewers to look for his men ¬– and the film abruptly ends.

Kanał began life as a story called “They Loved Life” by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, a real-life survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, and it was released (no surprise here!) in the middle of a fraught political climate in Poland. Wajda had previously released his first film, A Generation, also about the Polish experience during World War II but one with a considerably more sympathetic depiction of the Russians than this one. In between the two movies, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had personally denounced his predecessor, Josef Stalin, at the 1956 Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Suddenly it was now safe for writers and filmmakers in Eastern Bloc countries to mount less than hagiographic depictions of the Russians in general and Stalin in particular in stories set during World War II. A Polish critic named Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz acknowledged the political tightrope Wajda was walking with this movie: “Like all artists approaching this subject, Wajda has succumbed to certain pressures. On the one hand there was the rational pressure against delivering an apologia for the Rising and, on the other hand, the emotional pressure against taking a merciless criticism of the Rising. The film stopped halfway.” Though the Soviet-backed government of Poland didn’t allow direct criticism of Russia’s role in the war, one critic said, “They could not censor the silence” – the chilling moment in the film in which the partisan rebels expect to be rescued by the Soviet army, and instead they hear only silence as the Soviet forces stop firing. Wajda originally wanted to begin the film with a montage of similar doomed attempts at resistance throughout Polish history, including the Napoleonic era’s Battle of Samosierra, the Charge of Rokitna in World War I, and the legend of the Charge at Krojanty, reputedly on German tanks in 1939. While he abandoned that plan, I suspect because including all those scenes would have blown his budget, Wajda’s biographer, Boleslaw Michalek, wrote, “Wajda’s treatment of the Warsaw Rising and the retreat through the sewers had a definite and deliberate historical and social edge.”

The result was a movie that frequently reminded me of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” another testament to individual heroism within the context of an absolutely stupid, hopeless, and pointless battle. It’s not surprising that on its initial release Kanał was unpopular with Polish audiences and critics because it depicted presumed national heroes literally wading through shit. Kanał is an impressive movie but also a quite grim one, and one of the most chilling sets of scenes occur when the Polish would-be escapees are convinced that the Germans are flooding the sewer tunnels with poison gas, but it turns out to be just the natural by-products of the decay of the human waste and other garbage in the sewer tunnels. One of the weirder parts of World War II was that Adolf Hitler, who himself had been the victim of a poison gas attack during World War I, strictly forbade the German armed forces from using it in World War II. Of course he had no problem using gas to kill millions of innocent and helpless civilians in the extermination centers as part of the Holocaust, but Hitler didn’t want any of his troops to suffer the way he had in the preceding war. Another neat part of the movie is Michal’s quoting passages from Dante’s Inferno describing the descent into hell as the partisans make their own descent into the sewers – a reference Wajda acknowledged was deliberate on his part. As biographer Michalek wrote, “Kanał is permeated by a virtually unrelieved mood of despair, bitterness and resignation. The whole structure is pivoted on the idea that there is no way out, no hope, no chance of deliverance. As in Dante, there is only a succession of narrowing circles of torment.” This makes it ironic in the extreme that both this and the next film shown on Turner Classic Movies May 9, the Italian film Salvatore Giuliano, were intense dramas with no (or virtually no) comic-relief elements – and yet the showings were co-hosted by TCM regular Ben Mankiewicz and Bill Hader, who’s prlmarily known as a comedian. The ironies got even more intense when Hader acknowledged that he’d ripped off Kanał for the opening of the second season of one of his comedy mini-series!

Salvatore Giuliano (Galatea Film, Lux Film, Vides Cinematografica, 1962)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 9) the second film on Turner Classic Movies’ program with guest host Bill Hader was a movie I’d been curious about for quite some time: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), an Italian film directed and co-written by Francesco Rosi about a real-life bandit who terrorized and caused a lot of discomfort for law-enforcement authorities in Sicily in the five years between the end of World War II and his murder in 1950. I’d first heard of this film under unusual auspices: in 1972 I received a mailing from a film distributor in my capacity as part of the student government at College of Marin. The letter said that they had just acquired the U.S. rights to this movie after it had previously been released in this country only in a brutally cut and mutilated version, and now that I’ve seen it I’m guessing that the reason for the re-edits was to put the film’s non-linear narrative sequence into a more normal chronological one. Born in 1922, the real Salvatore Giuliano (Pietro Cammarata) got onto law enforcement’s radar screen in 1943, when at a time when it was virtually impossible to get food in Italy without resorting to the black market. On September 2, 1943 he was caught by the Italian Carabinieri (a national police force similar to America’s FBI, though with broader duties; until 2000 they were actually a part of the Italian Army, though that year they were spun off into a separate part of the Italian armed forces) transporting two sacks of black-market grain. He ended up killing one of the Carabinieri who’d been trying to arrest him. Giuliano fled back to his native village, Montelepre, where he held out until 1945, when the ending of World War II seemed to open up new opportunities for him.

When the war ended the Movement for the Independence of Sicily (MIS), which wanted Sicily to separate from Italy and become its own country, saw an opportunity and hired Giuliano to help set up a military wing called EVIS (Italian initials for “Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily”), which related to MIS much the way the Irish Republican Army did to its political wing, Sinn Fein. MIS promised Giuliano and his fellow banditti not only payment but full pardons for any crimes they’d committed previously. Giuliano recruited 40 to 60 young men in addition to his previous associates, including a man named Gaspare Pisciotta (Frank Wolff) who became his best friend. Giuliano assigned them military ranks and trained them in how to use weapons (not very well, if the movie is to be believed). He launched his war on December 27, 1945 with an attack on a Carabinieri outpost in Montelepre, to which the Italian government (still under the control of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had deposed Benito Mussolini in 1943 and been recognized by Mussolini’s Allied enemies as the rightful ruler) responded by sending 500 Carabinieri and declaring martial law. In 1947 Giuliano staged his next campaign: an attack on a May Day rally held by the Italian Communist Party at Portella della Ginestra. It’s not clear from the historical record why Giuliano targeted the Communists, who were ostensibly seeking the same goals he was – developing the local economy and in particular providing the remote villages of Sicily with electricity and running water – though part of the explanation may be that in 1947 Giuliano gave an interview to anti-Communist American journalist Michael Stern, who recruited him to fight the Communists and did the interview wearing a U.S. Army uniform, which gave Giuliano the impression that he was an official representative of the American government.

Giuliano’s attack led to the deaths of 11 children (including a woman and three children) and between 24 and 36 people wounded. The attack shocked the country and led to public demands for the capture and/or killing of Giuliano. It also turned the local Mafia, which had previously supported Giuliano and given his men tactical support in exchange for a cut of their profits, against Giuliano. Like the organized criminals in Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931), who mounted their own campaign to find a psychopath who was murdering children because the official police’s efforts were disrupting their activities, the Mafia now saw Giuliano as a threat, though instead of starting their own manhunt they teamed up with the police and ratted Giuliano out to the Carabinieri. Giuliano was ultimately killed on July 5, 1950 in the town of Castelvetrano. The authorities set up an elaborate cover-up to make it look like he’d been killed in a shoot-out with authorities, but in fact he was killed by his best friend Gaspare Pisciotta after Giuliano had received an anonymous letter saying that Pisciotta had become an informant and was ratting out the members of Giuliano’s gang to the authorities. Rosi’s film took a non-linear approach to the material, starting the movie on July 5, 1950 with a shot of Giuliano’s corpse laid out in an outside courtyard even though, as we learn only much later, he was really killed in his bedroom. Rosi cuts back and forth between time frames, including an elaborately staged account of the Portella della Ginestra massacre that made it look like he’d seen and learned from Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps massacre in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the trial of Pisciotta and the other participants in the massacre, which took place in 1952, two years after Giuliano’s death.

It also shows Pisciotta being poisoned in prison, presumably by the authorities to maintain their cover-up, in 1954. The final shot of the film takes place in 1960, just two years before it was made, in which the Mafioso who ratted Giuliano out to the authorities is himself shot dead in a public square. Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films; he’s said it influenced him when he made Taxi Driver (1975), though that’s something of a surprise because one of Rosi’s trademarks as a director is to avoid the direct depiction of violence. We don’t see Giuliano get shot, and we don’t see most of the other victims get killed either. Salvatore Giuliano is also a brilliantly photographed film; Rosi used Federico Fellini’s favorite cameraman, Gianni di Venanzo, and was rewarded with stunning chiaroscuro nighttime compositions that looked like film noir as well as stirring daytime scenes in the bright Sicilian sun. Rosi kept us in tune as to the two biggest questions with a non-linear film, not only “Where are we?” but “When are we?,” by sprinkling bits of narration throughout the movie which he delivered himself. Rosi also followed the non-traditional casting strategy of Italian neo-realist directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, shooting the film in the locations where the real-life events took place and using non-professional actors without major reputations. (Though Pietro Cammarata is playing the title role – and he’s a magnetic screen personality – we hardly see him.) Salvatore Giuliano is a quite remarkable movie that deserves to be better known, even though when my husband Charles (who returned from work with about 25 minutes left to go in the film) read the Wikipedia page on the real Giuliano he said an entire mini-series could be made from his life.

Law and Order: "Once Burned" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 7) my husband Charles and I watched episodes in sequence of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Inspector George Gently. The Law and Order show was “Once Burned,” and it begins with a sequence in which New York Fire Department Captain Clint Braddock (Chad Knorr), a 25-year department veteran who became a legend as one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, peremptorily ordering a younger firefighter away from a doorway in a burning apartment where the fire is sucking in smoke. Braddock barks out an explanation that that’s a backdraft and would suck his younger colleague into the burning room and incinerate him. The next see Braddock he's dead, killed by a Halligan (a common firefighting tool that looks like a pickaxe on one end and a hoe on the other) outside on the sidewalk. The investigating police, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), cycle through various red herrings, including a fellow firefighter named Steven Delvecchio (Max Cassella) whom Braddock had been friends with for decades until Braddock found out that Delvecchio was wrongly claiming money from the fund set up after 9/11 to compensate its victims and pay benefits to their families. The cops also investigate Braddock’s wife Candace (Catherine Eaton), from whom he’d filed for divorce just a week or so ago.

Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Diego Peralta (Bobby Soto), another firefighter and the man Braddock rescued from being burned alive in the opening scene. The two got into an argument when an elaborate necklace disappeared from the scene of a fire which Braddock’s company had worked, with Peralta as part of the crew. Because his own claim from the 9/11 compensation fund had been turned down after the insurance industry representatives determined that Braddock’s multiple sclerosis couldn’t be traced definitively to 9/11, Braddock first stole the valuable item to pay for his health-care treatments and then tried to frame Peralta for it, knowing that as a twice-convicted felon (first for assault and then for burglary) Peralta’s denials wouldn’t be believed. According to Peralta’s own account, Braddock got so worked up at Peralta he attacked him and Peralta killed him in self-defense. Peralta testifies to that effect at his murder trial and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), though not convinced of Peralta’s innocence, has enough doubts about his guilt he considers dismissing the case. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) talks him out of it and Price delivers a cross-examination replete with photo evidence of the victim of Peralta’s assault. The jury finds Peralta guilty but the open-ended script by old Law and Order hands Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson and Michael Smith’s powerful direction leave us in considerable doubt as to whether justice was done. It’s the kind of thoughtful writing that has made Dick Wolf’s Law and Order shows my all-time favorite policiers.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order show on May 7, my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit program featuring an episode called “Old Friends,” in which the Manhattan Special Victims Unit detectives respond to a 911 call from a woman named Angela (Christina Brucato) who’s just awakened from a drink-induced slumber at an all-night party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her college graduation. She’s stayed in touch with quite a lot of people she knew from her days at Columbia University, including the party’s host, Preston Winthrop (John Skelley), a spoiled-brat trust-fund kid with a long history of drinking, drug abuse, failed stints in rehab, and sexually obnoxious behavior towards women. The 911 call was occasioned by Angela’s discovery of her friend Nora Pontius (Izzie Steele) lying unconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Usually, at least on Law and Order and other crime shows, that means the victim is a-goner, but thanks to Angela’s quick action a team of paramedics is able to get her to a hospital in time to save her life. Needless to say, she turns out to have been the victim of a sexual assault. Other people at the party were Ryan (Mishka Thébaud); Adam (James William O’Halloran), his wife Sophie (Julia Yorks) – who’s from the Bay Area, attended Stanford instead of Columbia, but was there only to make sure Adam didn’t get into anything extra-relational with any of the other women – and Josh Ortega (Benny Elledge), who because he was the only one of the gang who didn’t spend the night and who has the biggest chip on his shoulder of any of the attendees is clearly being set up by writer Justine Ferrara to be the prime red-herring suspect.

Though she was indefinitely suspended at the end of the previous week’s episode by an African-American woman chief of detectives who obviously hates her, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gets to investigate the case anyway after her suspension is itself suspended pending her appeal. (Ferrara drops a big hint in the middle of the show when she has Benson tell one of the detectives on her squad that after 25 years she’s no longer sure the Special Victims Unit is the right place for her. It’s possible Mariska Hargitay wants to move on with her life and is stepping down from the show; we’ll see in next week’s episode, which is the last of the current season.) Midway through the show, I turned to Charles and said I thought this was one of the weaker SVU’s for the simple reason that there was no one in the cast we actually liked. As it kept going, it kept reminding me of all those mysteries I’ve read in which the clue to the current crime was a secret concealed in one or more of the characters’ pasts, including the sub-genre invented (I think) by Ross Macdonald in The Galton Case in which the lead detective character has to solve a 20-year-old cold case to get the clue needed to figure out the more recent crime(s). But Ferrara was hardly at the level of Macdonald or other writers that have used this gimmick. It turns out that Josh Ortega stole a gold ring from Nora, but only because she owed him money. Adam and Nora had been having a long-term “friends with benefits” relationship, sneaking off together for casual sex whenever they had the opportunity, and they’d done so that night even though Adam’s wife Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) was in the same apartment at the same time. The real culprit turned out to be [spoiler alert!] Ryan, who’d had a long-standing and decidedly unrequited crush on Nora from their college days to the present. He found her in an unconscious state and took advantage of it to rape her. After the excellence of the Law and Order episode that had preceded it, this one really rubbed me the wrong way and made me felt slimy not only for having watched it myself but having subjected Charles to it.