Chicago Syndicate (Clover, Columbia, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing 1955 gangster film called Chicago Syndicate on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies. This was one of a cycle of movies with city names in their titles that purported to expose the stranglehold organized crime had on those areas. In his intro, Muller compared it to the 1949 Paramount movie Chicago Deadline and said that Paramount had spent $1.2 million on their film while producer Sam Katzman, who made this film through his own Clover company with Columbia as his distributor, spent just $125,000. At least part of the differential was due to a much lower-voltage cast in the principal roles; while Chicago Deadline had starred Alan Ladd and Donna Reed; the leads in Chicago Syndicate were Dennis O’Keefe (visibly older and more avuncular than he’d been in the mid-1940’s when he transitioned from musicals and romantic comedies into noir) and Allison Hayes. Chicago Syndicate begins with the on-the-streets drive-by shooting of accountant Nelson Kern, whose wife commits suicide that night because she doesn’t want to live with the shame of having her late husband exposed as a front for gangster Arnold “Arnie” Valent (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane and afterwards a quite frequent villain in crime films like this). A Secret Six-like combine of local newspaper owners, businesspeople and relatively honest politicians forms to get rid of Valent and his crooked enterprises once and for all, but they face a problem. Thanks to Kern and his accounting expertise, the money the gangsters earn from their illegal enterprises (including gambling, off-track horse-race betting, and extortion) has been routed and re-routed through a batch of supposedly legitimate business enterprises, one of which, Olympic Insurance, hires Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe), as an accountant. Barry is really a secret agent for the combine that’s trying to put Valent out of business; a veteran of World War II, he’s an expert on tax law. He crashes one of Valent’s illegal casinos one night and enlists well-dressed society woman Sue Morton (Allison Hayes, quite capable here even though three years later she was doing cheap sci-fi dreck like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman) to do so.

What he doesn’t realize – and neither do we until midway through the film ¬– is that “Sue Morton” is really Joyce Kern, daughter of the murdered accountant, who’s set out on her own campaign to bring Valent to justice for having had her dad murdered and her mom driven to suicide. Amsterdam (whose name sounds so phony I kept expecting it to be an alias, too, though it isn’t) got hired to take down the titular Chicago syndicate (which actually operates nationwide, though the Windy City is its center) with a promise of $60,000 as a reward payment, with which he intends to start his own accounting firm, though he laconically says he’s reluctant to take the job because he’s worried he won’t live long enough to collect. The illegal casino operates in the back room of a legitimate nightclub where the star attraction is Benny Chico (Xavier Cugat, who in the 1930’s and 1940’s had been the top Latin American bandleader in the U.S. until Desi Arnaz replaced him). Chico’s singer is Connie Peters (Abbe Lane, Cugat’s real-life wife at the time and the one person in the film who gets to play a role of real moral complexity), who’s also Valent’s girlfriend de jour. Unfortunately, he's got tired of her and wants to replace her with Sue Morton even though Sue is attracted to Amsterdam even before she learns that he’s really a secret agent out to bring down Valent (which she learns from the police, who figure that if she knows who he is and what side he’s really on they’ll be able to coordinate their anti-Valent activities). Amsterdam rather passively lets Valent go after Sue without any apparent objection, which gets some interesting what-kind-of-man-are-you reactions from Connie, who wonders why he’s being so cavalier as to let Valent move in on his girl. At first mistrustful of Amsterdam, Valent takes him into his confidence when Amsterdam, with the help of the police, engineers a phony insurance claim and thereby saves Olympic Insurance $75,000 (though Amsterdam demands $5,000 of the savings for himself as a “Christmas bonus”).

Eventually Amsterdam learns that there are two sets of books for Valent’s enterprises, the above-board one that the Internal Revenue Service knows about and the secret ones that Valent keeps in his own handwriting and are at the apartment of his mother (Carroll McComas), who’s completely ignorant that her son is a gangster. When Amsterdam finally learns where the secret set of books are kept, he’s too late: Valent is shown carefully burning them all and thereby making the evidence against him literally go up in smoke. Fortunately, the late accountant Nelson Kern, who had access to Valent’s secret books, had them microfilmed and hidden in a secret location. The only people who know the hiding place are Connie, whom Valent and his thugs torture (we only hear the sounds of her being beaten off-screen, but there’s a surprisingly graphic shot of her later on showing just how much damage Valent’s henchmen have done to her face), and Benny, who out of love for Connie gives away the secret that the microfilm is hidden in a spare violin case in storage at a local music shop. (I wondered if the writers, William Sackheim for the story and Joseph Hoffman for the script, borrowed this device from Puccini’s Tosca, only reversing the genders; in the opera, based on a play by Victorien Sardou, it’s Tosca who blurts out the secret to prevent the bad guys from torturing her lover Cavaradossi.) The crooks head out to the music store, where Valent finds the microfilm and are about to set it on fire when Amsterdam, despite being outnumbered three to one, manages to push Valent, grab the microfilm, and escape. Naturally the crooks hunt him down, and in a final climax that takes place in a tunnel of mysterious provenance (it looks like a subway tunnel even though Chicago’s light-rail transit system is a network of elevated trains rather than a subway; later we’re told it’s to move goods from one department store to another without them getting caught in urban traffic). Amsterdam, who’s unarmed at first but manages to get a gun from somewhere (until it runs out of bullets and he’s helpless again), holds out long enough until the police, summoned by Sue, finally arrive and shoot down Valent just as he’s about to kill Amsterdam. Amsterdam and Sue end up together and the usual stentorian narrator of the film (Richard H. Cutting) announces that the microfilm was used to convict all the surviving members of the syndicate and therefore put it out of business … at least for now.

Chicago Syndicate was billed on Eddie Muller’s TCM program as a film noir but it’s really more of a gangster movie; aside from Connie, all the characters are either 100 percent good or 100 percent evil. What’s more, despite the presence of two talented cinematographers (Henry Freulich and Fred Jackman, Jr., the latter the son of one of the earliest special-effects pioneers in the silent era), Chicago Syndicate doesn’t even look like a film noir until the final scene. By 1955 the movie studios had taken advantage of the greater portability of film equipment to shoot on real locations, which meant a gain in authenticity (plenty of recognizable Chicago landmarks, including the Wrigley Building, are seen in this film) but a loss of the kinds of claustrophobic chiaroscuro effects possible in studio set-build “exteriors.” Also by 1955 the studios had ended their Cold War with television and were starting to sell TV networks and local stations the rights to air their films once they were done with their theatrical runs. As a result, producers and studio executives were starting to order cinematographers to avoid high-contrast lighting and shoot their films with a greyer, more “even” look because the shadows of classic noir wouldn’t reproduce well on the low-contrast, low-resolution over-the-air images of the black-and-white TV sets of the time. Chicago Syndicate emerges as a competent, workmanlike thriller, decently directed by Fred F. Sears (who was also making the quickie rock ‘n’ roll films for Katzman and Columbia at the time, as well as an outlier, 1957’s Calypso Heat Wave, which made the spectacularly wrong prediction that calypso would replace rock as the popular music of young America but came off as better than Sears’s rock movies, I suspect because calypso turned him on a lot more than rock did!) until his career and his life both came to a skidding halt when he died of a heart attack on November 30, 1957 at just 44. (He worked so fast he had five films, Crash Landing, The World Was His Jury, Going Steady, Badman’s Country, and Ghost of the China Sea, left “in the can” to be released after his death.)

Interstate (Oscar Corral, Haleem Muksin, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 15) my husband Charles and I went to the First Unitarian-Universalist Church for a screening of Interstate, a 2026 documentary film by Oscar Corral and Haleem Muhsin which depicted how the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s was routed in ways that destroyed economically thriving African-American communities and dispossessed residents that had owned their own homes for generations, forcing them to become renters or mortgage holders. The film focused on five cities where this happened: Miami, Florida (whose Black Overtown district was targeted and where Corral and Muhsin started their research; they originally planned a short film about Overtown but ended up expanding it); St. Paul, Minnesota; New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Montgomery, Alabama. The situation in Montgomery was the worst of all because there the person in charge of constructing the interstate highway system was Alabama State Senator Sam Engelhardt, Jr., the closest this film has to a hissable villain. Engelhardt was also the head of the Montgomery branch of the White Citizens’ Council, which can best be thought of as the above-ground political branch of the Ku Klux Klan the way Sinn Fein was the above-ground political branch of the Irish Republican Army. The White Citizens’ Council did the lobbying and strategizing of the white South’s bitter-end resistance to integration, while the Klan supplied the terrorist “muscle” to enforce the status quo. Engelhardt got the job of local contact and supervisor of the interstate highway system in Montgomery in 1956, with the wounds of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott still fresh. Armed with the weapon of eminent domain, the government’s ability to take people’s private property supposedly for the “public good” (though all too often it’s just been to reallocate it to bigger-pocketed and more politically influential private interests in the scam known as “redevelopment”), Engelhardt deliberately targeted the people who had led the bus boycott, specifically Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s second-in-command. Fortunately he misread the map and Abernathy’s home was spared (though one right next door to it was condemned), but his church was targeted and destroyed.

This sad story has been repeated in American history again and again; I couldn’t help but think of the riots that destroyed the Black business community in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 as well as the more recent battles over artificial intelligence data centers. As with the interstate highway system, data centers are being presented to communities across the U.S. (including white rural communities whose residents thought this would only happen to people of color, not them) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. People are being told their hard-earned equity must be sacrificed on the altar of “progress” and they’re going to have to live with the eyesores and noise pollution (one thing this film stressed was the public health dangers of living next to a freeway, especially the higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease, and asthma, all of which gets cited by white racists as “proof” that African-Americans and other people of color are “racially inferior” because they don’t live as long). One of the sorriest aspects of this film was the appearance of Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation under President Joe Biden, who talked up the provision of the Infrastructure Restoration Act of 2023 that set up a program to restore, as much as possible, the physical connections between segments of the African-American community that were bisected by the interstates. Then the film’s closing credits noted that in 2025 the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress eliminated all funding for this program, and in 2026 the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the few remaining provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Southern and border states raced to reapportion their congressional and state legislative districts to eliminate the few footholds of Black representation that had been eked out after 1965.

The point was that one of the reasons the Black community got so thoroughly screwed by the interstate highway program was that they had no political representation to speak of, and those are the “good old days” to which the whites who dominate the South and (less so) the rest of the country want to return. At the same time Corral and Muhsin, restricted to a one-hour running time, only touched on some of the broader issues raised by the interstate highway system – like why it had to be based on private cars at all. They show a brief clip of Robert Moses, the New York parks commissioner and construction supervisor, who was key in making sure the transportation system of America’s future would be based on private cars rather than mass transit – and who, according to his biographer Robert A. Caro, didn’t have to worry about the aggravation of traffic because he was always driven rather than having to drive himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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