Battlestar Galactica: "Saga of a Star World" (Glen A. Larson Productions, Universal Television, ABC-TV, aired September 17, 1978)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 8) my husband Charles and I watched “Saga of a Star World,” the first episode (of 24) in the short-lived ABC-TV series Battlestar Galactica, a really obvious knockoff of Star Wars produced by Universal Television. I got interested in this when Fanfare magazine sent me a boxed set of eight CD’s in a five-volume package containing Stu Phillips’s original scores for the Battlestar Galactica show. I’ll also never forget the hype that surrounded Battlestar Galactica when it was first aired, or the bad luck that beset ABC the night the show was scheduled to premiere. It was September 17, 1978, also the night then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced from Camp David near Washington, D.C. that he had successfully brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. The opening of Battlestar Galactica was pre-empted so we could see the ceremony and hear a lot of promising talk from the principals – Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat – about what a great deal they’d made with each other and how peace would finally come to the Middle East at last. That was a really strange lead-in to a TV show whose whole plot is based around a peace treaty that goes horribly wrong and allows an attack that wipes out virtually all of the human race. Set many centuries in the future, Battlestar Galactica posited that Earth had colonized a string of nearby planets in other solar systems, only this had happened so long ago that the people living in these colonies had only dim and distant memories and legends about their true origins. The bad guys in Battlestar Galactica are the Cylons, who have been fighting a war with the colonists for 1,000 years and seek the utter annihilation of the human race (sort of like Hitler with the Jews).

The Cylons are actually robots; they were originally invented by a race of sentient reptiles but, like the robots in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the pioneering 1920 science-fiction play that not only invented the concept of artificial humans but actually coined the term “robots” for them; Čapek took it from the Czech word Robotnik, meaning “worker”), they rebelled against their makers, killed them en masse, and took over. It’s as if George Lucas had decided to make everybody in the Star Wars Evil Empire look like Darth Vader, though I wondered if Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson had taken the concept from the Daleks of Doctor Who, also killer robots who wanted to annihilate the human race. (Charles cited another possible source for this plot element: Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series, about a universe whose killer robots, which like the Cylons obliterated the race that created them, seek to eliminate not only human beings but all biological life forms, Saberhagen first introduced this universe in a 1963 magazine story, published his first book using it in 1967, and continued until 2005, two years before his death, so it was still running when Battlestar Galactica was made.) When the “Saga of a Star World” episode begins, the Cylons have sued for peace after 1,000 years of war against humanity, and President Adar (Lew Ayres), leader of the Council of Twelve that rules the various human colonies, has gladly accepted the peace offer. Only it’s a Cylon trap and, as the humans are resting and taking it easy thinking there will be peace at last, they will launch their genocidal attack and eliminate humanity once and for all. There seems to be something uncomfortably ironic about the casting of Ayres, real-life conscientious objector during World War II, as the President whose appeasement policy leads to humanity’s near-extermination, as if series creator Glen A. Larson and casting director Mark Malis were telling Ayres, “You were wrong then and you’re wrong now.”

The one member of the Council of Twelve who sees through the Cylons’ scheme is Adama (Lorne Greene, once again playing a single father with a number of adult kids as he did on his star-making role on the Western TV series Bonanza), who’s also the commander of Galactica, one of 12 “battlestar” spaceships that are the main defense force of the colonists. He sends his most trusted pilots, his son Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch, the only actor who appeared in both the original Battlestar Galactica and its 2004-2008 reboot) and Lieutenant Starbuck (Dirk Benedict), who’s dating Adama’s daughter Lt. Athena (Maren Jensen) but also has, you might say, a girl on every planet. Unfortunately, Starbuck bails at the last minute to give Apollo’s brother Zac (Rick Springfield, whom Charles immediately recognized even though at the time he’d only appeared as an actor on General Hospital; his brief but spectacular career as a singer would come later) a chance to fly his first patrol. The Cylons attack them and Apollo escapes but Zac is killed. The Cylons also destroy all the other 11 battlestars, including the Atlantia, which kills President Adar, as well as virtually all the colonized planets and their inhabitants. The federation organizes a Dunkirk-style evacuation of as many survivors as they can find and fit in on a ragtag batch of leftover freighters that made it through the Cylon attack. The rest of the show is a pretty dreary succession of battles and near-misses as the evacuees are understandably upset that they’re on spaceships without food or water. They call the fleet command and get only evasive answers that what’s left of the federation’s leadership is aware of the situation. The Galactica and the freighters make it past the Nova of Madagon, their only route to safety, by sending advance fighters out to detonate all the mines the Cylons have planted there.

Ultimately they land on a planet called Carillon, where there’s plenty of food and drink. There’s also a major casino whose players seemingly never lose, and a deposit of tylium, the fuel needed for the federation’s spaceships. Previously the federation had set up a tylium mining operation, but Count Baltar (John Colicos, an actor who’d worked with Igor Stravinsky; in 1962 in Canada he and Stravinsky had recorded the five-minute mini-cantata “Babel,” which Stravinsky had written for the multi-composer piece Genesis Suite in 1945), a traitor in league with the Cylons, had falsely reported that the mine didn’t contain enough tylium to be economically viable. Starbuck gets distracted by one of the evacuees, Cassiopeia (Laurette Spang), a “socialator” (a legal but not socially accepted prostitute), only their attempt at a tryst is caught by his girlfriend Athena, who fills the cabin they’re in with steam so he's badly burned when he makes the all-important trip to disarm the Cylon mines. There’s also a single woman and her son, an obnoxiously cute kid named Boxey (Noah Hathaway), whose dog was killed in the Cylon attack on their planet, though the federation scientists make him a robot replica (essentially Battlestar Galactica’s equivalent to R2-D2 on Star Wars) with which he falls in love. Eventually, and not surprisingly, the planet Carillon turns out to be yet another trap; its inhabitants, the Ovions, are in league with the Cylons and have set up that casino where nobody ever loses to lure the surviving humans to the planet so they can be either destroyed or turned into slave laborers to mine tylium for the Cylon war fleet. There’s also a three-being vocal group called the Tucanas, who look like normal Black women with sky-high Afros except that their facial organs are doubled: four eyes, two noses, and two mouths. Starbuck sees them perform in the film’s equivalent of the Star Wars cantina and immediately wants to sign them up and make money off them (though how he can do this in an era in which almost the entire human race has been destroyed, along with almost all of its infrastructure, is beyond me).

There’s also another traitor, Council of Twelve member Sire Uri (Ray Milland), who cuts a deal with the Cylons by which they will voluntarily disarm and prove to the Cylons that the human race (or what’s left of it) means them no harm by destroying the Galactica and all its weapons. The treaty is supposed to be announced at a ceremony in which Apollo and Starbuck are going to be given the highest human award. Once again most of the humans fall for it but Adama sees it as a trap; he realizes that the Cylons mean to get all the human warriors together so they can destroy them in one fell swoop. So he and his second-in-command, Col. Tigh (Terry Carter) concoct a plan to dress as many of the battlestar’s support staff as possible in battle uniforms to fool the Cylons into eliminating the wrong people. Starbuck catches on when he sees people he recognizes in uniforms they don’t normally wear. Ultimately the good guys win when they target a Cylon base star and send it crashing into Carillon, where it sets off a tylium explosion that literally blows up the planet. Then the fleet sets off on its long-delayed search for the legendary planet Earth, the only place in the universe where they can hope to be safe. Battlestar Galactica, seen at this remove, is alternately frustrating and campy. 20th Century-Fox, the production company that made Star Wars, sued Universal for plagiarism, noting 34 points of similarity between Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, though when Charles read that on the Battlestar Galactica Wikipedia page he thought it was rich of anyone connected with Star Wars to sue anyone else for plagiarism when Star Wars creator George Lucas himself ripped off so much of Star Wars from previous stories. Universal countersued and claimed that Lucas had ripped off the Buck Rogers serials from the 1940’s and their 1972 film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, who’d worked on the famous psychedelic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the light show at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Lucas also sued John Dykstra, who’d built the spaceship models for both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, for having left his company, Industrial Light and Magic, to work on Battlestar Galactica. (Dykstra was acknowledged with a producer credit on the show, and when the National Lampoon parodied Battlestar Galactica they called it Battlestar Dykstra.) Charles and I were watching “Saga of a Star World” on a DVD (not Blu-Ray) from Universal, part of a multi-disc box containing the full initial run of the show (24 episodes from September 17, 1978 to April 29, 1979). It presented the show in the original 4:3 TV aspect ratio (not the cropped 16:9 widescreen version that was briefly released as a theatrical movie), and it was a lousy transfer. Some scenes looked relatively clear but others were intensely grainy, and it also didn’t help that the soundtrack was mono (Battlestar Galactica was made at the dawn of the stereo TV era) and that Stu Phillips’s score was muddy and mixed far too softly. Phillips’s score, the main reason I was watching this (I had received a five-volume, eight-CD boxed set of the music from Intrada Records via Fanfare for review purposes), was about what you’d expect. In a project that from the get-go was intended as a knock-off of Star Wars, Phillips knew that he’d have to go after John Williams’s sound as much as possible. He responded with lots of loud brass fanfares accompanied by strings and plenty of pounding percussion, though occasionally the scripts offered him opportunities to write more quietly and lyrically. Battlestar Galactica was a flop on its initial TV run and ABC canceled it after just seven months on the air, largely because it cost so much to produce (Universal spent $8 million on the pilot alone), but it developed a cult following and Universal revived it for a new series that ran from 2004 to 2009 and produced 74 episodes, considerably more than the 24 of the original show.

Breakdown (Pegasus Productions, Realart Pictures, 1952)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 7) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies: Breakdown, a 1952 boxing melodrama directed by Edmond Angelo (whose only film this was) and written by Robert Abel based on a play of his called The Samson Slasher. (That title had me dreading that there’d be a plot complication along the lines of the 1940 James Cagney vehicle City for Conquest, in which he played a prizefighter billed as “Young Samson.” His enemies are gangsters who spike his eye medicine with poison, thereby blinding him like the Biblical Samson. Fortunately, Abel didn’t go there.) This came at the end of an odd run of movies including two co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Diane Warren, who probably did more than any other single person to rehabilitate professional songwriting as a career path. The irony is that one of the films she was co-hosting was A Hard Day’s Night, whose stars, The Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular), had been instrumental (pardon the pun) in destroying non-performing songwriting as a musical career because not only did they rely on their own material, their manager, Brian Epstein, promoted that about them. (The other film Mankiewicz and Warren co-hosted was Born Free, an O.K. movie with a quite memorable theme song by John Barry and Don Black that won the Academy Award and became a huge hit.) Between A Hard Day’s Night and Breakdown TCM showed a 20-minute short in the MGM series Crime Does Not Pay: The Public Pays (1942), about an attempt by gangsters to set up an extortion racket targeting dairies in the fictional “Claiborne City.” Directed by Errol Taggart and written by John C. Higgins, The Public Pays was a pretty straightforward little film (some of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts had intimations of film noir about them, but this one didn’t) whose main distinction was casting Cy Kendall, usually an oily villain, as the hero: John Carney, the Claiborne City police chief who partners with Paige Creamery CEO Charles Paige (Ivan Miller) to bust the extortionists by infiltrating his officers into Paige’s workforce and having them pose as milkmen. (In an earlier Crime Does Not Pay short, 1941’s Coffins on Wheels, he’d played a cynical used-car dealer who sells unsafe cars to teenagers.)

The 1952 Breakdown is a truly unusual movie, at once boxing drama, gangster movie, romantic melodrama, and film noir. Terry Williams (William Bishop) is a promising young boxer who runs afoul of the big-city political machine when he intervenes to stop them from roughing up a public speaker who’s trying to oppose them. In the course of the melee one of the machine’s enforcers gets killed accidentally, and Williams is convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for 10 years. The judge in the case, Sam Hannum (John Vosper), has been bribed by the political machine to ensure Williams’s conviction by the promise of a major political career, including the state governorship. Meanwhile, machine gangster Nick Sampson (Sheldon Leonard) and his brother Pete (Wally Cassell) are looking for a potential championship contender, and they find him in Williams when they watch Williams and a sparring partner fight in a ring set up in the prison’s exercise yard. (Fortunately we get a lot of yummy shots of William Bishop in his boxing togs, with plenty of chest hair. For years Hollywood had forbidden men to have chest hair; if they had to go topless and they weren’t chest-hairless au naturel, they had to shave it.) Love, or at least sex, enters the story in the person of June Hannum (Ann Richards, who’d got a big star buildup at MGM but abruptly quit the business to marry director Angelo; she hadn’t made a film in four years and this would be her last). She’s not only the niece of Judge Hannum, she’s also Nick Sampson’s girlfriend, though she’s only reluctantly with him and she quickly gets the hots for Williams. Terry Williams works his way up as a boxer through a series of fights, in each of which he wins by a knockout in the first round. Unlike the heavyweight contender in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), an inept boxer who’s carefully built up through a series of fixed fights, Williams is genuinely talented in the ring. Though writer Abel doesn’t come right out and say Williams’s opponents are being paid to take dives – he has one of the characters say that his adversaries have been carefully selected – the monotonous similarity of the outcomes certainly leaves that impression.

At least two characters in the film, Harry “Punchy” Adams (Richard Benedict) and “Longshot” Maginnis (Joe McTurk), serve as warnings of the long-term consequences of a prizefighting career. They both work as ill-defined assistants in Pete Sampson’s gym, and “Punchy”’s ex-girlfriend Candy Allen (Anne Gwynne) is so angry at the sport she pleads with Terry to give it up while both his looks and his brains remain intact. (He’s so far gone he literally has no idea who she is when they see each other at the gym.) In fact, before one bout Terry is told to look carefully at the face of his opponent to determine how much experience that man has had by the number of scars he’s carrying from previous bouts. If nothing else, Breakdown is a particularly vivid film in terms of dramatizing the toll boxing takes as a career on its practitioners; in some ways it anticipates The Raging Bull (1980) in this regard. Even previous films like The Set-Up and Champion (both 1949) didn’t go as far as this one. The movie reaches its climax when June Hannum puts pressure on Terry to agree to a championship fight against reigning titleholder Joe Thompson (Hal Baylor) to benefit the Milk Fund charity (“Milk Fund” was an all-purpose nonprofit for which to raise money in classic-era movies). Pete Sampson insists that Terry isn’t ready for a championship fight and won’t be for another year or so, but the other characters pull rank on him and convince him to do it. Once the bout actually begins, Pete Sampson turns out to be right; Terry is totally outclassed and is beaten so badly by the champ one wonders why the referees don’t stop the fight. I’m guessing the reason is that for his anti-boxing message Robert Abel needed Terry not only to lose but to be beaten so badly he needs hospitalization by the time it’s all over, and he’s literally carried out of the arena on a stretcher. Director Angelo gives us plenty of close-ups of Terry’s previously pristine face as it’s been hammered into near-oblivion by Thompson’s blows, though at least June (ya remember June?) stays with him at the end and is presumably going to remain a part of his life, no matter what he does with the rest of it.

Breakdown is a quite accomplished movie even though it had a rock-bottom production budget and an 11-day shooting schedule. It was filmed at Republic studios even though it wasn’t a Republic release (it was produced by a collapsible outfit called Pegasus Productions and released through Realart, which was usually a reissue label for Universal but also released a few originals like this), though the special-effects credit to “Consolidated Film Laboratories, Inc.” is a giveaway. Consolidated Film Laboratories was Republic’s parent company; Republic was founded in 1935 by Consolidated’s owner, Herbert J. Yates, who offered to forgive the debts Mascot and Monogram had run up to him for processing their film if he could take control of their companies. Yates paid off both Nat Levine of Mascot and W. Ray Johnston of Monogram. Johnston banked his money and, after a falling-out with Yates, re-started Monogram in 1937; Levine blew his on bad horse-racing bets and had a catch-as-catch-can existence until his death in 1989 at age 90. As for Edmond Angelo, after Breakdown (and after a lawsuit against Realart because he claimed they had sold the film to TV too soon after its theatrical run), he left the movie business (as well as the theatre, where he’d produced plays before his brief foray into filmmaking) to become, of all things, a rocket scientist for a California aerospace firm. Richards pursued a career as a writer and poet but mostly just stayed out of the public eye and stayed married to Angelo until his death in 1983 (she died in 2006).

The Enchanted Cottage (RKO, 1945)

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

Last night (Friday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched an alternately intriguing and frustrating film from RKO in 1945 called The Enchanted Cottage, based on a play by British dramatist Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, who premiered it in 1920 and called it “a fable in three acts.” It was first filmed in 1924 by First National with Richard Barthelmess as star and John S. Robertson (best known today for the 1920 John Barrymore silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as director. Not surprisingly, the original play took place in Sussex, England in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II). In 1945 RKO remade it with John Cromwell as director and Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire as stars. They were coming off the success of a 1943 film called Claudia, about the trials and tribulations of a young newlywed couple adjusting to married life, which McGuire (though not Young) had previously done on stage as a play. RKO’s producer, Harriet Parsons (who nearly lost the assignment to Dudley Nichols and had to fight the studio brass to stay on the film), and her writers, DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who came on for a last-minute rewrite just before the shooting started), moved the story to the U.S., to New England, and set it in an otherwise destroyed or ruined mansion of which only a cottage survived. The property’s former owner had made it a practice to rent the cottage to newlywed couples on their honeymoons, allowing them to stay as long as they liked, but the current owner, Abigail Minnett (Mildred Natwick in quite a good performance), has ended the practice. Previous couples have etched their names and dates when they lived there onto the cottage’s windows. The latest tenants are Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) and his fiancée Beatrice Alexander (Hillary Brooke, who frankly is too strong a personality for the nothing role she’s playing here; I liked her a lot better as the black-hearted villainess and partner of Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green, made the same year with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Watson, and Henry Daniell as Moriarty). When Oliver borrows the engagement ring he’s given Beatrice and tries to use it to etch their names on the window, the stone falls out and Mrs. Minnett tells them they’re not supposed to do that yet since they haven’t actually married.

The date is December 7, 1941, and when the Pearl Harbor attack happens that very day Oliver becomes a pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps (it wasn’t until 1955 that the U.S. Air Force became a separate service branch of its own). Mrs. Minnett is herself a war widow; her husband was killed in the Great War and she’s kept her desk calendar set to April 6, 1917, the date the U.S. formally entered World War I. The whole story is framed as a flashback narrated by Major John Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall), who was blinded while serving in the Great War and took up piano playing and musical composition as part of his recovery process. I couldn’t help but note that Marshall is playing a man who became disabled as a result of World War I when the war had disabled him in real life as well, though instead of going blind he’d lost his left leg in the Second Battle of Arras, France. (To add to the irony, Marshall’s war injury occurred on April 9, 1917, just three days after the date on Mrs. Minnett’s calendar.) Oliver returns to the cottage a year later with his face badly scarred by an accident from when his plane was shot down in combat in the Pacific theatre. There he takes up with Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire), a homely woman whom Mrs. Minnett had hired years before as a maid. The two not-quite-attractive people are gradually drawn together and ultimately fall in love and get married, despite each of them having anxieties that the other has married them only out of pity. Hillgrove regularly visits the cottage with his nephew, Danny “Taxi” Stanton (Alec Englander), leading him. As he would the next year in the ponderous Tyrone Power vehicle The Razor’s Edge, Marshall as Hillgrove is the voice of sanity in this rather mixed set of emotions and frequently prattles on about spirituality and the life beyond this one. Laura and Oliver announce that they’ve gone through a physical transformation that’s made them both beautiful, or at least conventionally attractive – only the sudden appearance of Oliver’s mother, Violet Price (Spring Byington), and stepfather Frederick Price (Richard Gaines), breaks the illusion and their images in the movie revert to the ones we’ve been seeing all movie.

Hillgrove narrates all this in flashback during a party which he’s giving in Oliver’s and Laura’s honor and at which he’s going to play a piano reduction of the new tone poem, “The Enchanted Cottage,” which he’s written in their honor. Unfortunately they’re late coming to their own party and Hillgrove has to fill in for them by narrating their story and playing the piece (with Max Rabinowitz as his piano double). Ultimately Oliver and Laura etch their names on the window of the cottage and then show up at Hillgrove’s party declaring their undying love for each other. I looked up the Wikipedia page on Pinero’s play and learned not only that the original was set in England (as I had guessed from the fact that no one drinks coffee in the film; all the characters’ hot drink of choice is tea) but it had a much greater supernatural element. In the original play we never get to see Oliver (whose last name is the clunkier “Bashforth”) before he’s disabled, and his injuries are quite a bit more severe. According to Wikipedia, “In the stage directions, Oliver is described as an emaciated wreck of a man, broken by the war. The dialogue reveals that he was wounded in the neck and that it is painful to straighten his left leg, but he says his ‘head,’ meaning his mind, is the worst. In the 1924 film, his body is contorted, he walks with a cane, and he cannot put his right foot to the ground. In the 1945 film, most of Oliver’s face is scarred, and he has completely lost the use of his right arm and hand. He can walk without aids and there is no visible impairment of his lower body.” (I must say I didn’t notice that his right arm was disabled.) Also in the play Mrs. Minnett is actually a witch, albeit a beneficent one (one would think that just six years after MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz a “good witch” wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar concept to an American movie audience), and there’s a long dream sequence for Laura in the second act in which she dreams that both she and Oliver are good-looking people.

In the dream they’re attended by Mrs. Minnett and at least one other witch, along with three other married couples, three bridesmaids, and assorted cherubs, imps, and children. (In 1920 audiences for the original play had had a problem reconciling the supernatural plot elements with Pinero’s previous reputation as a rom-com writer, just as James M. Barrie is thought of today mainly as the author of Peter Pan even though most of his works were rom-coms, too.) Alas, in this film writers Bodeen (who’d done a much better job balancing realistic and supernatural elements in his script for the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People three years earlier) and Mankiewicz can’t get the supernatural plot elements to work at all. When we first see Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire in full Hollywood makeup and Herbert Marshall’s character proclaims it a “miracle,” all we can think is, “God must be a really good plastic surgeon.” The Enchanted Cottage is one film from Hollywood’s classic era I’d never seen before, and I’m not sure what to make of it now. Charles said he thought he might like it better on later reflection than he did when we were actually watching it. Curiously, there was an attempt to remake The Enchanted Cottage in 1973 and the would-be producers wanted Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire to be in it, Young in Marshall’s role and McGuire in Natwick’s. Young, who was on record as saying this was the best film he ever made, was eager to do it, but McGuire watched the earlier film and said, essentially, “You can’t go home again.” The Enchanted Cottage wasn’t remade until 2016, with Richard Hatch (not the same one who won the first season of Survivor; this Hatch said, “We forget there are other people with our name, and somehow we feel an ownership with our name. Honestly, this is one of the strangest experiences that's ever happened in my life, and I'm having to deal with it”) and Sarah Navratil in the leads and three credited directors (Joshua Arcadi, Ryan Del Nero, and Andrew Fisher), not a good sign.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Forsaken" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 5) I put on NBC for the latest two episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They’re showing them in reverse order these days, with SVU first, to make room for that abominable “reality” show The Traitors they’ve scheduled for 8 p.m. The SVU episode was called “Forsaken” and opened at a much-publicized wedding of a major male comedian who’d been living with the same woman for years but had finally got around to tying the knot legally. At first I assumed that the comedian would be the principal perpetrator and it would be a story about how he raped a woman to get his rocks off one last time before he got hitched, but writer Justine Ferrara took her plot in a quite different direction. The victim is Chloe Davis (Lauren Cole, turning in an impressive performance), who’s found lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood at the wedding party. The investigating police detectives, including Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), have to deal with Chloe’s overbearing mother Monica (Jessalyn Gilsig) and even more overbearing stepfather Rick (Bill Heck). Chloe gives a description of her assailant as a young man in his 20’s, tall, white, and with red hair. As things turn out, a man matching that description, Scott Germon (Harrison Ball), was actually at the event and is arrested for the crime, but he turns out to be innocent. We don’t feel too badly for him, mainly because he was at the wedding party to sell cocaine to one of the other guests and there was already a bench warrant outstanding on him for violating his probation on a previous offense.

It turns out that the Davises are a monumentally dysfunctional family even by SVU standards: they consist of Rick, Monica, Chloe, her stepbrother Tyler (Sam Cusson), and her seven-year-old half-brother Evan (Emmett Moss). Evan is the only direct offspring of both Rick and Monica; Chloe is Monica’s daughter by her previous partner (who’s in prison for a long stretch of his own) and Tyler is Rick’s son by his earlier wife. So Tyler and Chloe have one of those weird sort of relationships that is psychologically incestuous even though it isn’t literally (sort of like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, who grew up together as virtual brother and sister even though they were not biologically related). What’s more, Tyler is literally a psychopath and Rick has been actively covering for him, intimidating the rest of the family into endorsing his evil. It turns out that Tyler was Chloe’s assailant, and he attacked her for revenge after another woman whom he was cruising at the wedding party turned him down. Prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) has the problem of convincing the trial jury of this, particularly since Rick Davis was a quite persuasive witness for Tyler’s defense. Monica offers to break spousal privilege and testify for the prosecution about what’s really been going on in their household, but Carisi decides that she’s changed her story so often that she won’t be credible to the jury.

Instead he calls seven-year-old Evan, and after the usual rigmarole involving a child witness as to whether or not they will be “swearable” – whether they understand the difference between the truth and a lie well enough to comprehend the oath – Evan testifies. While his son is on the witness stand Rick stalks out of the courtroom, and that’s where Dick Wolf and Justine Ferrara end it. We don’t see the jury return a verdict either way, and we are left with a sense of dread as to just what’s going to happen to the other Davises after Evan broke Rick’s omertà about Tyler’s psychopathology. I’m guessing they’re setting us up for a sequel. The most remarkable aspect about this episode is Sam Cusson’s chilling performance as Tyler. He’s of medium height and has an angelic face reminiscent of the young David Cassidy (he’s close enough he’d be good casting for a biopic, especially if he could sing), and he projects just the right sort of affect (or lack thereof) I’ve seen in TV documentaries about real psychos. Incidentally this was the 599th episode of SVU, and afterwards they announced that Christopher Meloni is going to return for the 600th episode next week. That will be a treat, even though he’s become too old and grizzled to do much for me the way he did when he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and I literally lusted after him (as, I suspect, did much of Gay male America; when he was on the show I used to joke that SVU had two different fan bases: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot).

Law and Order: "Rage Bait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

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

On Thursday, November 5 after the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Forsaken” my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order show that was even more chilling. It was called “Rage Bait” and dealt with the murder of Aaron Dressler (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.), a promising young college basketball player. Writers Scott Gold and Ajani Jackson throw us a few red herrings along the way, centered mainly around the sports betting sites that have become a bane on modern life. It seems that Aaron, a high-school star but one who was outclassed in the college game, was put in the game during the last nine minutes, with his team already comfortably ahead. But he sank a three-point shot that put his team’s victory margin above the stated odds on the gambling sites and thereby cost bettors a lot of money. Once those get resolved, however, there’s little doubt as to who the killer is: he’s Tyler Duncan (Michael Drayer), a Right-wing Internet provocateur whose schtick, under the pseudonym “Stone Freedom,” is going up to Black people on the street, calling them “chimps,” making ape noises at them, and goading them until they react to him. He uses his smartphone camera to photograph them doing this and post the footage online. Tyler’s basic defense is he isn’t a racist, he just plays one online to make money. He admits to shooting Aaron but claims he did so in self-defense because Aaron responded to his provocations by hitting him in the face.

Gold and Jackson throw us a few more curveballs, including giving Tyler a Black wife who shows up in court to defend him and having him hire a Black woman lawyer to represent him at trial. The principal witness against Tyler is Alexis Fisher (Jade Jones), a Black bodega clerk whose testimony is raked over the coals by Tyler’s lawyer, who discredits her by pointing out that she originally told the police that the insulting word Tyler had used towards Aaron was “chump” and she only later changed that to “chimp.” Meanwhile, the audience section in the courtroom is being packed by Right-wing podcaster Tom Phillips (John Romano) and his acolytes, who loudly demonstrate every time a ruling goes against Tyler that he’s being made into a martyr for his Right-wing racist views. Things seem headed towards an acquittal for Tyler until assistant prosecutor Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) stumbles onto a video recording, outtakes from an appearance Tyler made on Phillips’s podcast weeks before Aaron’s murder, in which Tyler said that actually killing a Black person on the street would be the ultimate thrill of his life. By playing that in court (presumably over the objections of Tyler’s Black woman attorney), prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) gets his conviction. This Law and Order is unexpectedly timely given how the midterm elections turned out and Donald Trump’s response to his defeat by appointing his most rabidly prejudiced aide, Stephen Miller, to be his new White House chief of staff. It’s more evidence that the racism and the cruelty that have driven Trump’s immigration policies from day one – beginning in his first term as President and even more so in this one – are alive and all too well in the current governance of our country.

The Garden of Eden (Feature Productions, United Artists, 1928)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights” program that I’d never heard of before but which turned out to be an utter delight. It was called The Garden of Eden and was made in 1928 by Feature Productions and United Artists. The Garden of Eden began life as a 1926 play called Der Garten Eden: Komödie, written by two Europeans, Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher (that last name just means “Austrian”). It was adapted for Broadway in 1927 by Avery Hopwood, five years after his play The Gold Diggers received its first film adaptation (it would later become the basis for Gold Diggers on Broadway in 1929 and the version you’re most likely to have seen, Gold Diggers of 1933) for a cast including Barbara Barondess, Harlan Briggs, Miriam Hopkins, Douglass Montgomery, and Alison Skipworth. That version ran for only 29 performances but it was good enough for producer John W. Considine, who snagged the movie rights as a vehicle for his star Corinne Griffith. Griffith was nicknamed “The Orchid Lady” because her beauty supposedly resembled that of the exotic flower (though she didn’t seem all that attractive to me). He hired Lewis Milestone to direct the film after his two successes for Howard Hughes, the service comedy Two Arabian Knights and the gangster drama The Racket (both 1927), and to write the movie he hired Hanns Kräly for the scenario and George Marion, Jr. to write the intertitles. Kräly was a quite remarkable writer who came to Hollywood with his frequent collaborator, director Ernst Lubitsch. Indeed, he was to Lubitsch what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford, Robert Riskin to Frank Capra, or Charles Bennett to Alfred Hitchcock: the early collaborator who helped set the style of a major director with an auteur reputation. Unfortunately the Lubitsch/Kräly collaboration broke up in 1930 when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Helene Krauss, then Mrs. Lubitsch. Rather than react in the detached “oh, what the hell, men will be men and women will be women” way of a character in a Lubitsch movie, Lubitsch got ferociously jealous and never worked with Kräly again, while Kräly’s own wife Elsie divorced him over it. Though Lubitsch didn’t direct The Garden of Eden, the film is full of so many of the so-called “Lubitsch touches” one wonders just how much credit Kräly deserves for that part of Lubitsch’s style.

The plot centers around young Viennese woman Toni Lebrun (Corinne Griffith), who’s just received a correspondence-school degree in opera singing (the idea that you could learn to sing without any evidence that you were recording your lessons and therefore the people running the school wouldn’t know how well you were doing is preposterous enough on its face). Though Vienna was well known as a major operatic center, Toni leaves her aunt and uncle, who raised her and owned a pretzel shop they were hoping she would take over when they were ready to retire, to travel to Budapest to take a job singing at a venue called the “Palais de Paris.” Once she arrives (after she leaves her sandwich behind on the train and, in a typical Kräly touch, the porter who finds it eats it himself), she learns that the “Palais de Paris” isn’t an opera house at all. Instead it’s a high-end cabaret whose butch owner, Madame Bauer (Maude George), hires attractive young women to dance and, it’s hinted, prostitute themselves to the rich men who are the place’s main clientele. Madame Bauer asks Toni to show her legs (“Don’t you want to hear my voice?” Toni naïvely asks) and, for her first number, offers her a super-scanty costume. Toni refuses to wear it and the cabaret’s costume designer, Rosa (Louise Dresser, an appropriate last name considering her character’s occupation), supports her. Instead Madame Bauer dresses Toni in a so-called “Puritan” costume, only the material is so sheer that when the stage lights are shone through it, all of Toni’s womanly charms are instantly exposed. (Remember that the Production Code was not promulgated until 1930 and therefore this is a genuinely “pre-Code” film.) After her performance attracts the attention of young, rakish, slimeball aristocrat Henry D’Avril (Lowell Sherman, who’d got a reputation for playing sexy villains when he seduced and impregnated Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East), Madame Bauer locks Toni in a room with D’Avril. Thanks to more byplay with lights (this film is full of lights that go on and off rapidly as various characters manipulate switches), we see flashes of the struggle that goes on between them as Toni desperately tries to hold on to her virtue in the face of D’Avril’s assaults. Rosa ultimately rescues Toni, which gets them both fired.

Much to Toni’s astonishment, Rosa then announces that the two are taking a two-week vacation in Monte Carlo and staying at the prestigious (and expensive) Garden of Eden hotel. Like us, Toni is wondering how on earth Rosa can pay for all this. When they register at the Garden of Eden, Rosa signs the book as “Baroness von Garten and her daughter Antoinette.” Then Rosa explains that she actually is a baroness, though she lost her husband during World War I and with him went all her money. So she works as a costume dresser 50 weeks per year and saves her money, then splurges on a two-week stint living the life she formerly had year-round when she could still afford it. While they’re staying at the Garden of Eden, Toni attracts the attention of nice rich guy Richard Dupont (Charles Ray, a silent-era star whom writer/director Garson Kanin met in the early 1940’s, when he was reduced to doing extra work to survive; Kanin asked Ray if it were true that during his star years he’d had his teeth polished every day, and Ray said it was, though “not every day – not 365 days a year – just on the days when I was shooting”) and his not-so-nice uncle, Col. Dupont (Edward Martindel). At one point Richard tries to get Toni’s attention by blinking the lights in his room across the street from hers, and Toni tries to respond the same way – only the gimmick is caught by everyone else in Richard’s building and they start blinking their lights, too. Richard insists that he wants to marry Toni, and his uncle the colonel, who’s also attracted to Toni, gives him an ultimatum: get Toni to accept his proposal within the next half-hour or the colonel will swoop in and marry her himself. Just then Rosa gives Toni a dose of sleeping powder, so Richard is frantically trying to wake her up to accept his proposal while his uncle is giving him hand signals indicating that he has just five, then four, minutes left. To make matters even worse, Richard has taken a sleeping powder of his own (was he thinking that if he fell asleep in Toni’s bedroom, his uncle would have to let them marry to avoid a scandal?), though the two of them fortunately wake up enough that Toni accepts Richard’s proposal at long last.

The two set up a wedding for the lobby of the Garden of Eden, but it can’t take place until all Richard’s relatives arrive (there’s a laconic Marion title which says the original Eve was lucky because Adam had no relatives), including his Uncle Henri. “I’ve been to all his weddings; why can’t he come to mine?” Richard complains. Unfortunately, “Uncle Henri” turns out to be the scumbag Henri D’Avril from the Palais de Paris, who immediately “outs” Toni as a poor cabaret girl and not a baroness’s daughter at all. Rosa replies that she’s legally adopted Toni and therefore she is a baroness’s daughter, but Richard’s family is unmoved. They determine to break up the wedding and offer Toni a settlement to leave him alone – Richard doesn’t know his family is trying to buy off Toni, but Toni doesn’t know that he doesn’t know that. She virtuously tears up the check and throws the pieces at Richard’s face, then tears off the elaborate wedding dress he’d bought her and flees the scene in her underwear. Richard chases after her and ultimately they reconcile and get married after all. The Garden of Eden is a marvelous movie, though at least one sequence – involving a song both Richard and his uncle claim to have written for Toni, and both play for her – really cries out for sound. Indeed I found myself wishing that someone would have remade the entire movie as a talkie in the 1930’s, and I know just who should have been in it, too: Carole Lombard as Toni and Cary Grant as Richard. (I’ve long thought Lombard and Grant would have been ideal co-stars for screwball comedy, though the one film they actually made together, 1939’s In Name Only, was a melodramatic tear-jerker instead of a comedy.)

I mention that because the two stars of The Garden of Eden are the weakest links in the film as it stands. Corinne Griffith doesn’t wear that well; she’s attractive but hardly drop-dead gorgeous in the looks department and her acting consists mainly of grimacing and looking queasy whenever something bad happens to her character. Charles Ray is stolid and dependable-looking but hardly the acme of sexiness, either – and it doesn’t help that he and Lowell Sherman look surprisingly similar. One expects more of a visual differentiation between hero and villain, though that may just be a convention of how roles like these were cast in later movies. But the rest of the cast comes through with flying colors – I especially liked Maude George as the butch proprietress of the Palais de Paris, even though the film carefully avoids any hints of her own sexual interest in the dancers there – and Louise Dresser turns in a properly concerned reading of her role. The Garden of Eden, presented here in a 2002 reissue print from Flicker Alley with a soundtrack by Robert Israel, mostly playing organ but with at least two interludes on piano (Toni’s “Puritan” dance at the Palais de Paris, which Israel accompanied with the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and a later scene in which he plays a Chopin nocturne, though I couldn’t identify which one), is actually a delightful film and a welcome rediscovery as well as a Schreiber movie, since though Lewis Milestone was an excellent director its appeal is really much more from the sensibility of writer Kräly.

Good Morning, Eve! (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

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

The short Turner Classic Movies ran on Sunday, November 1 right after The Garden of Eden was only tangentially related even though, unlike the feature film, it starts out in the real Biblical Garden of Eden. It was called Good Morning, Eve! and was the second in a series of 20-minute shorts made by Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Corporation (Warners abandoned the sound-on-disc Vitaphone process in 1930 and started shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, but kept the trade name going through the end of the 1930’s for their band shorts) in 1934. Both this and the first Warner/Vitaphone short, Service with a Smile, were in three-strip Technicolor and were in fact the first live-action films made entirely in the process. (That honor is given in most film histories to another musical short, the Pioneer/RKO release La Cucaracha from 1934, but that was made after the two Warners shorts.) Directed by Roy Mack from a script by Cyrus Woods, Eddie Moran, and A. Dorian Otvos, Good Morning, Eve! is an audacious fantasy that begins in the Garden of Eden, though Adam (Leon Errol – and yes, it’s alternately amusing and annoying to imagine that the entire human race stemmed from the not-very-appealing physique of Leon Errol) and Eve (June MacCloy) are already wearing fig leaves even though they haven’t yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A papier-maché snake comes in to tempt them, and this sets them on a weird walking journey through several historical eras. Each of their time-travel visits is accompanied by a song by Cliff Hess.

First they stop off in ancient Rome under Emperor Nero (future Three Stooges nemesis Vernon Dent) – the film gives the year as “100 A.D.” even though Nero’s reign was from 37 A.D. to his suicide in 68 A.D. – for a song called “Rhythm in the Bow” featuring a quartet of violinists delivering a piece that veers between hillbilly and swing. Their next stop is at the court of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere (Arthur is unidentified on imdb.com but Guinevere is played by Maxine Doyle), where Adam interrupts and tries to referee a swordfight between Sir Lancelot (Bill Elllott) and Sir Gawain the Black Knight. After Lancelot wins the duel (though without causing the Black Knight’s arms to fall off and spurt blood as they did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), he goes to greet Guinevere and there’s another big musical number, “Got There Just the Same.” Finally Adam and Eve end up in 1934 Florida, where under a bright blue sky (remember that the biggest single improvement in three-strip Technicolor over two-strip was that it could at last photograph blue, so early three-strip adopters went out of their way to show blue things, including sky and sea as well as a lot of blue clothes) a group of chorus girls play with beach balls and maneuver them in time, more or less, to the music of a song called “Lookin’ ’Em Over.” Then Adam and Eve wake up from their dream (yeah, that’s right, It Was All a Dream!) and turn out to be residents of “The Garden of Eden Nudist Colony.” Good Morning, Eve! was a cleverly staged vest-pocket musical fantasy that, like the feature film which preceded it, was engagingly cute and audacious in its imagination.