The Unknown (MGM, 1927)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 18) I wanted my husband Charles and I to get back home from dinner soon enough to watch the “Silent Sunday Nights” program on Turner Classic Movies, which was featuring a really quirky movie: The Unknown, a 1927 film directed by Tod Browning and featuring Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who poses as a man without arms and manipulates objects with his feet, using his toes as fingers. He shoots a gun, throws knives, and smokes with his toes. Written by frequent Browning collaborator Waldemar Young from a story by Browning himself, The Unknown tells a story of Alonzo’s love for Nanon (Joan Crawford, cast in the film after MGM abandoned their original plan to have Greta Garbo in it, and quite effective), daughter of the circus’s owner, Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz). Alonzo has a sidekick named Cojo (John George) who’s the usual philosophical voice of reason trying to talk him out of his doomed attraction to Nanon. Nanon has a phobia against being touched by a man, courtesy of all the male assholes who’ve tried to paw her previously as a prelude to seduction or rape. Alonzo figures that with his armless act he’s got a shot at Nanon’s affections since she won’t have to worry about him trying to hold her. Cojo tells him that once she realizes he has arms, she won’t want anything to do with him again. Alonzo is “outed” when Zanzi attacks Nanon and Alonzo kills him to defend her. This also reveals that not only does Alonzo have arms, he has a quite obvious deformity: a doubled thumb on his left hand. Browning and Young hint that Alonzo is an escaped criminal on the run from something or other (blessedly they do no more than hint at this, though apparently some still-lost footage gave us more of the backstory), and that’s why he adopted the pose of an armless man and went to work for Zanzi’s so-called “Gypsy Circus.” Unfortunately Alonzo has a rival for Nanon’s affections: Malabar (frequent Chaney co-star Norman Kerry; he was in The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera), the circus strongman, who’s determined to woo Nanon and break her of her phobia against being touched by a male.

Alonzo decides that [spoiler alert!] the only way he can ensure that Nanon will love him is to have both his arms amputated for real. So he blackmails a surgeon (John St. Polis) who used to be part of his gang to perform this bizarre operation, and while The Unknown would be an even kinkier movie than it is if Browning had shown Alonzo’s recovery from this procedure (having had some major surgeries myself I’m all too aware of how long it takes for the body to recoup from a shock like that!), he returns to the film’s Spanish setting in time to see Malabar and Nanon doing a theatre act. By this time Malabar and Nanon have become engaged – there was a quite clever scene earlier on in which Nanon and Malabar were bathing and Nanon panicked, leapt into Malabar’s arms, and decided being touched and embraced by a man weren’t so bad after all – and they’re just waiting for their old friend Alonzo to return and attend their wedding. They’re preparing to do an act in which Malabar will be fastened to harnesses hooked up to horses. The two horses will pull in different directions and Malabar will demonstrate his strength by being able to resist so his own arms won’t be pulled off. Alonzo shows up thinking that he’s got it made with Nanon now that he no longer has arms, but all too soon he realizes that he’s given up his arms for nothing. He determines to kill Malabar by sabotaging his stage act, throwing the switch that controls the treadmills the horses walk on so they’ll pull Malabar’s arms off and kill him, but in the end one of the horses stomps on Alonzo and kills him, so Malabar and Nanon end up together at last.

For years the only version of The Unknown known to exist was a 46-minute cut-down print released in England (we knew where it was from because it bore the name of Sir William Jury, head of MGM’s British distributor) until two much longer prints were found in France and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately these prints had titles only in French and Czech; fortunately a cutting continuity survived and contained the text of the titles in English. (A lot of silent films that survived in the archives of non-English-speaking countries have only badly translated titles, and it’s been a chore to figure out just what the actors should be indicated as saying. The titles of Oscar Micheaux’s surviving silents were sometimes restored from quoting the dialogue in Micheaux’s published novelizations of their stories.) The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York pieced together a nearly complete version of The Unknown from the French and Czech prints and redid the titles, putting the indication ‘GEM 2022” (for “George Eastman Museum” and the date they did the restoration) in the lower right corner of each title. They also created a new set of opening credits in the authentic style MGM used during the period instead of just slapping on the film’s name and credits onto plain black boards (good for them!). Joan Crawford later said that working with Chaney had been a major step forward in her career: “Lon Chaney was my introduction to acting. The concentration, the complete absorption he gave to his characterization filled me with such awe I could scarcely speak to him. … Watching him gave me the desire to be a real actress.” Not surprisingly, the film’s publicity stated that Chaney had taught himself the art of manipulating objects with his feet and toes, though modern sources indicate that he had a “foot double” for the close-ups, a real armless circus performer named Paul Desmuke. Desmuke was even advertised by the circus owner that employed him, Al G. Barnes, as “The Man Who Doubled for Lon Chaney's Legs in ‘The Unknown’.”

In her introduction to the film, “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart said that The Unknown was an outlier from MGM’s usual house style of sophisticated films set in affluent locations. It was and it wasn’t; I’ve long suspected that the whole idea of studios’ “house styles” has been way overblown by film historians. It’s true that certain studios gravitated to certain types of stories (Warner Bros. aimed a lot of their films at proletarian audiences because in 1928 they bought the First National theatre chain, and since the theatres that formed First National had been built in relatively middle-class parts of cities and rural areas rather than the upscale movie palaces of more affluent locations, that’s what the audiences who lived there wanted to see), but it’s also true that any of the major studios were prepared to make any sort of film as long as they thought it would make money. MGM heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg knew they’d inherited an effective and lucrative director/star collaboration in Tod Browning and Lon Chaney when they got them from Goldwyn Pictures after the 1924 merger. So they let Browning and Chaney continue to make the series of bizarre melodramas like The Unholy Three, The Blackbird (another story in which Chaney pretends to be disabled to carry out a criminal career: he’s posing as a kindly crippled bishop and his brother, a criminal mastermind called “The Blackbird,” only midway through the film we learn that “The Bishop” and “The Blackbird” are the same person, and in the sort of ironic twist Browning loved it turns out that by posing as a cripple for so long he’s actually become one), London After Midnight, and this. I’ve long thought that Browning’s career never recovered from the dual whammy of the coming of sound and Chaney’s death from throat cancer in 1930; the two were supposed to make Dracula together when Chaney died and Browning’s disinterest in the Dracula he ultimately made with Bela Lugosi is all too obvious in the final product. Asked by Thalberg to follow up Dracula with a film scarier than Frankenstein, Browning came up with Freaks (1932), in which he filled his cast with real circus freaks and made them the good guys and the normal people in the story the bad guys. Freaks was a notorious box-office bomb and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s (much too late for Browning, who made his last film in 1939 and died in 1962), and for the rest of the 1930’s he made just four movies, two of them remakes or reworkings of his previous hits.

Story Conference (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 18), after the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” showing of the 1927 Tod Browning/Lon Chaney vehicle The Unknown, they put on Story Conference, a quite engaging 1934 short starring Lillian Roth, who burned out her career on alcoholism and poor choices in men in the 1930’s and made a comeback of sorts via a sensationally successful autobiography (co-authored with Gerold Frank, who’d later parlay his experience with self-destructive stars with his 1975 biography of Judy Garland, and Mike Connolly) published in 1954 called I’ll Cry Tomorrow. This got filmed in 1955 by MGM with Susan Hayward, Hollywood’s go-to girl for alcoholics then, as Roth. (I’m pretty sure this was the first film ever to depict an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on screen.) Story Conference casts Roth as herself, a major Broadway star brought to Hollywood by “Terrific Pictures” – only they don’t have a script for her (an all too common occurrence among movie producers in the 1930’s, who’d sign people without a clear idea of just what they were going to do with them: witness Paul Whiteman and King of Jazz). So studio head Eugene Von Grona (as himself) gathers a bunch of writers to brainstorm a story for Roth, and they have a number of intriguing ideas which the film’s director, Bert (Bert Matthews), shoots down. The short was produced by Warner Bros. and their subsidiary Vitaphone (though they’d abandoned the original Vitaphone sound-on-disc process by 1931 and were shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, they kept Vitaphone as a trade name for their band shorts into the 1930’s), and not surprisingly they parodied a number of Warners’ then-current feature films in this one.

The high point was “Alimony Hotel,” in which they took the premise of “Honeymoon Hotel” from the 1933 Warners musical Footlight Parade and flipped it. The number takes place in Reno (at the time when Nevada was a mecca for divorcing couples because it was one of the first states to institute no-fault divorce; all you had to do is live there for six weeks and at least pretend to be planning to relocate there permanently, and quite a number of “divorce hotels” sprang up for people needing a place to stay for the legally obligatory six weeks) and features a number of women joyously waving their divorce decrees in the air and celebrating their newly regained singlehood. The film opens with a group of women singing a song to the glories of working in Hollywood, “Working in the Movies,” and an amusing scene, a Western parody, in which all the parts (including the moustachioed villain) are played by women. The film also features two vocal groups, The Sizzlers and The Three Minutes; The Sizzlers were all male but I can’t find out anything online about The Three Minutes and (unlike The Sizzlers) they made just this one film. There’s also a weird rural comedy number called “Down the Old Back Road” that’s far inferior to the other songs from the film (all the others were by Cliff Hess but this was by Herman Hupfeld, who wrote “As Time Goes By” and “Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep”) and for some reason doesn’t feature Lillian Roth; and an even odder number called “If I Were a Millionaire,” done as a duet between Roth and a mediocre Irish tenor who’s unidentified on imdb.com. This sets up a nice production number in which the various chorus girls are turned into items of jewelry, the sort of thing Busby Berkeley was doing in the big-budgeted musical features this one was parodying. Story Conference was a genuinely charming bit of Hollywood self-parody, directed by Roy Mack from a script by Eddie Moran, A. Dorian Otvos, and Cyrus Wood – and it’s hard to imagine that the real-life process of coming up with the story for this one wasn’t as lame as the story conference depicted in it!

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.