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 to the music, more or less, 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.

Dracula (Universal, 1979)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 31 – well, what else were they going to show on Hallowe’en?) Charles and I watched a pair of films on Turner Classic Movies identified as horror classics from the 1970’s. Both of them were reworkings of Universal horror films from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s: the 1979 remake of Dracula and the 1974 Phantom of the Opera spoof Phantom of the Paradise. I have vague memories of seeing the 1979 Dracula, directed by John Badham and written by W. D. Richter, once before in the early 1980’s on a poor-quality image on an over-the-air black-and-white TV, and seen today it’s a good movie but not a great one (something I could say about the 1931 original Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye, too). Richter made the same mistake Garrett Fort, who scripted the 1931 version, did; he based it not directly on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula but on the intervening play version written by British actor/playwright Hamilton Deane and edited and rewritten by John L. Balderston for a U.S. production on Broadway in 1927. (I’ve read that before the 1931 Dracula was filmed, Universal commissioned Louis Bromfield to write a script based directly on the Stoker novel, but decided it would be too expensive to film and had Fort adapt the play instead.)

Oddly, both movies transposed characters from the original novel; in Stoker’s book it’s Jonathan Harker who goes to Transylvania as a real-estate agent to negotiate Dracula’s purchase of a castle at Carfax Abbey in England. In the 1931 film it’s Renfield who does that (though I don’t mind that if only because it gave Dwight Frye, who played Renfield and was by far the best actor in it besides Lugosi, more screen time). In the 1979 version, which omits the Transylvanian prologue completely and begins with the vessel Demeter (Vesta in the 1931 film) floating off the coast of Whitby, England with no living crew members except for a tribe of rats, it’s Lucy (Kate Nelligan) who’s Jonathan’s (Trevor Eve) fiancée and the story’s ultimate heroine, and Mina (Jan Francis) who’s vampirized by Dracula midway through the film. Badham and Richter also decided to make them the daughters of principal middle-aged male characters: Lucy is the daughter of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence) and Mina the daughter of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier, replacing Edward Van Sloan from the 1931 cast and playing it effectively except for his overwrought accent to make himself sound appropriately Eastern European). Mina’s own father Van Helsing has to remove her heart to end her vampire existence and allow her to die normally, which adds an unexpected bit of pathos to Olivier’s characterization. It doesn’t help the film that Kate Nelligan and Jan Francis look so much alike, or that we see them sleeping in the same bed so often we start to think they’re having a Lesbian relationship (until we remember that the original novel was published while Victoria was still on the British throne, and that sort of thing was frowned upon so much a popular writer like Bram Stoker wouldn’t have dreamed of including it).

The biggest problem with the 1979 Dracula was that John Badham seems to have taken way too much to heart the criticism of Browning’s original that it was too static and theatre-like. Badham fills the screen with so much camera movement (the cinematographers were Gilbert Taylor and an uncredited Frank Tidy) and such a plethora of cacophonous sounds (the movie is already several minutes old before we hear a line of recognizable English rather than just characters making vaguely vocal noises) it becomes more overwhelming than entertaining. One of the reasons the 1979 Dracula was based on the play rather than straight from Stoker’s novel was that before the film was made Frank Langella had starred in a revival of the play on Broadway, and the film was built around the renown Langella had won for performing the role live. Like the movie as a whole, Langella was a good Dracula but not a great one; he doesn’t have the otherworldly quality Lugosi brought to the role (but then, aside from Orson Welles in the 1938 radio adaptation of Dracula that remains my favorite retelling of this story in any medium, who did?). He wanted to play Dracula more as a tragic figure than an out-and-out monster (ironically there are hints of that in the 1931 film as well, especially in the scene in which Lugosi as Dracula says, “To die – to be really dead! That would be wonderful! … There are far worse things awaiting man than death,” lines that oddly don’t appear in the simultaneously filmed Spanish-language version). The tag line for the film’s promotion was, “Throughout history, he has filled the hearts of men with terror, and the hearts of women with desire.” (In its original release, the 1931 Dracula was sold similarly as “the strangest love story ever told,” probably because there hadn’t been a major horror film with sound before and Universal’s marketing people weren’t sure how to sell one.)

The print we saw on TCM had an unusual look in which the colors were deliberately toned down to look almost black-and-white, which according to an imdb.com post under “Alternate Versions” was John Badham’s idea. Badham had originally wanted to shoot the 1979 Dracula in black-and-white like the 1931 version, but the “suits” at Universal said no and forced him to shoot it in Technicolor. (Likewise Mel Brooks had had to move his production of the 1974 spoof Young Frankenstein from Columbia to 20th Century-Fox because Columbia wouldn’t let him shoot it in black-and-white and Fox would.) For the original home-video version, first on laserdisc, then on VHS tape, and finally on DVD, Badham denatured the color sufficiently to achieve the “black-and-white in color” look he’d wanted, and that was also the version that got shown on over-the-air TV. Not until 2019 was the original full-color version released on DVD, on a reissue label called Shout! Factory which gave you the option to watch both the theatrical original and Badham’s decolorized version. Oddly, the TCM print we were watching was edited for commercial TV, since it had periodic pauses in the action which were very noticeable and were obviously where the commercials were supposed to go when the film was shown on TV. One odd result of the film being based on the play was that certain famous bits of dialogue turned up, like Dracula’s “I never drink … wine” and, responding to the howling of wolves outside, “Children of the night, what music they make!,” as well as the marvelous exchange I’ve heard otherwise only in the 1938 Orson Welles radio version, in which Dracula’s seduction becomes a wicked parody of the Communion ritual: “Flesh of my flesh – blood of my blood!” The 1979 Dracula did decently at the box office but not so well as to merit a sequel (though an ambiguous ending seemed to be setting one up). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz attributed that to the release just six months earlier of another Dracula movie, the 1979 spoof Love at First Bite, directed by Stan Dragoti, with George Hamilton as a modern-day Dracula reincarnated in New York at the height of the disco craze.

Phantom of the Paradise (Harbor Productions, Pressman-Williams Enterprises, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

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

Fortunately, the next film after the 1979 Dracula on Turner Classic Movies’ 2026 Hallowe’en marathon was considerably better: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), written and directed by Brian De Palma and obviously a rehash/spoof of The Phantom of the Opera set in the world of rock music. The principal villain is Swan (Paul Williams, who was at the height of his 15 minutes in the mid-1970’s and wrote and produced the music for the film as well as playing a major role on screen), a teen idol from 1953 who made a deal with the Devil that he would never age visibly. The deal was recorded on a videotape (though an imdb.com “Goofs” poster noted that color videotape didn’t exist in 1953) on which, The Picture of Dorian Gray-style, Swan’s image would age over the years while the live person would not. We don’t learn Swan’s sinister backstory until well past the halfway point of the film. Instead we meet Winslow Leach (William Finley), a nerdish young composer who’s just written a rock cantata based on the Faust legend. Swan hears this music and decides it’s the perfect piece to open the Paradise, a palatial ballroom he wants to open as the ultimate rock-concert venue. Of course, being a music-industry slimeball with an even slimier business partner, Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli), Swan also takes credit for Leach’s score and puts his own name on it as composer (a plot twist also used in the 1943 and 1962 films of The Phantom of the Opera and in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1996 musical, though not in Gaston Leroux’s original 1910 novel or the first – and still the best – film version, made in 1925 with Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and Lon Chaney as directors and Chaney as star). Swan and his henchmen try to get rid of Winslow by framing him on drug charges; he’s given a life sentence at Sing Sing and forced into an experiment in which all his teeth are removed and replaced by metal ones. He escapes (absurdly easily) only to be caught in a record press at Swan’s “Death Records” label, which is pressing copies of Swan’s version of Winslow’s Faust cantata. The press wrecks his vocal cords and permanently scars the right side of his face, forcing him to don a metal mask and haunt the Paradise as its mysterious “Phantom.”

Winslow is also in unrequited love with Phoenix (Jessica Harper, making her film debut and giving an “Introducing” credit), whom he heard auditioning for Swan at his palatial mansion (where Swan was entertaining multiple women in a circular bed). Winslow sneaked into the mansion in the first place by dressing in drag, which he was wearing when the cops busted him on the phony drug charge. Once he’s on the loose and haunting the Paradise, Winslow decides that only Phoenix will be allowed to sing his Faust cantata. When Swan assigns the lead role to a man, Beef (Gerrit Graham, voice-doubled by Ray Kennedy), Winslow sneaks into the bathroom where Beef is showering and … well, it wouldn’t be a Brian De Palma movie without an Alfred Hitchcock allusion somewhere, would it? In fact Beef survives his encounter with Winslow in the shower (earlier Swan had sealed Winslow in a brick-walled room à la Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, but once again Winslow managed to escape), only to get electrocuted on stage by a prop lightning bolt Winslow wielded. Ultimately Swan seduces Phoenix and gets her to agree to marry him in exchange for the lead role in Faust, only he really has hired an assassin to kill her on stage because her premature death will send her posthumous record sales soaring. (It’s a gimmick that’s “planted” in the film’s first song, “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” by Swan’s 1950’s retro group “The Juicy Fruits,” about a rock star named Eddie who committed suicide because his death would increase his record sales so much it would generate the money needed for his sister to have a life-saving super-operation.) Earlier in the story Winslow had tried to commit suicide himself, only to be told by Swan that he wouldn’t be allowed to do that because the contract he’d signed to sell his soul to the Devil wouldn’t allow him to exit the earth ahead of schedule. Instead he leaves a gaping wound in his chest and Swan tells him that if Winslow tries to kill Swan, his wound will open up and they’ll both die. Winslow manages to save Phoenix from the assassin’s bullet ¬– Arnold Philbin gets shot and killed instead – and he also destroys Swan’s videotape collection, ensuring that they both die but not before Swan’s face ages all at once, repelling Phoenix.

Phantom of the Paradise also contains a sequence that eerily anticipates the similar scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, filmed a year later (though the stage version, The Rocky Horror Show, had premiered in 1972 and so it’s unclear who influenced whom), in which Beef appears as a Frankenstein-style monster created (as in the Hammer Frankenstein films in the 1950’s but not Universal’s originals from the 1930’s) in a bathtub. As his creation is being prepared the cast (Jeffrey Comanor, Archie Hahn, and Harold Oblong, who appear successively as Swan’s various bands, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums – for a quite funny Beach Boys parody called “Upholstery” in which the main aria from Winslow’s Faust cantata is turned into a car song – and “The Undeads”) sing a song called “Somebody Super Like You.” When he finally emerges from the nurturing vat Beef sings “Life at Last” (whose second line is “Salutations from the other side”) until he’s offed by Winslow’s lightning bolt. I first heard the soundtrack album of Phantom of the Paradise well before I got to see the movie; my then-girlfriend Cat had been a huge fan of the film and had bought the album. I was quite impressed with the quality of the music and the sheer cheekiness of the concept, and we first got to see the film together in 1980 when it was being revived for a midnight screening in Pacific Beach. Indeed, that was where Phantom of the Paradise lived for years, though it never developed the fanatic following that The Rocky Horror Picture Show did.

For years I had thought Phantom of the Paradise was Brian De Palma’s first feature; it wasn’t – indeed, he already had the strange and beautiful horror film Sisters under his belt when he shot this. But it’s a film I really like and one which holds up surprisingly well. Incidentally, after the screening Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said that Phantom of the Paradise ran into legal trouble not only from the source you’d expect – Universal, which still owned the movie rights to The Phantom of the Opera – but from one you wouldn’t: the British superstar rock band Led Zeppelin. It seems that though Swan’s record label in the film is “Death Records” (anticipating the real “Death Row Records,” a rap label founded in the 1990’s which was essentially a racket run by one faction of the Bloods street gang; it “broke” such “artists” as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg before meeting its blessed demise in 2002, though Snoop Dogg bought the remnants of it and tried to revive it 20 years later), its parent company is called “Swan Song Productions.” At the time the film was released, Led Zeppelin had just founded their own record label and had named it “Swan Song Records.” Led Zeppelin sued 20th Century-Fox over the name, and the settlement required the studio to blur out just about every appearance of the name “Swan Song Productions” in the film. According to Mankiewicz, Brian De Palma is still upset about this, and more than once he’s expressed the wish, “Can’t someone take those ugly mattes off my film?”

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Arcana" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 29) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episodes of Dick Wolf’s series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order. The SVU, called “Arcana,” turned out to be an odd, quirky show that begins with self-proclaimed psychic Beatrice Witt (Susannah Flood) giving a reading to a hot-headed middle-aged man who demands to be put in contact with the spirit of his dead mother. All goes reasonably well until he demands to know the whereabouts of the valuable stash of Nikon cameras his late mom owned, and just then Beatrice tells him that she’s lost contact with his mom’s spirit. He gets angry and grabs her wrists, leaving bruises on her arms. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether the main plot (the writer was Brant Englestein, a relative newcomer to Dick Wolf’s franchise) was going to turn out to be that the cameras would be recovered, there would be exposed film inside them, and on one of the rolls would be photographs of a sexually related murder or assault, instead the guy just walks out and the location of the camera stash remains unknown. Later Beatrice Witt complains to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit that she was raped by an unknown assailant who allegedly broke into her home through a window whose lock was broken. The cops come out to investigate and Beatrice assures them that she lives alone except for her seven-year-old daughter Emma (not listed on imdb.com). When the police, in the persons of Captains Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), show up they find there’s a third person there: Sarah Witt (Lisa Emery), Beatrice’s mother, who’s come down with Alzheimer’s and has been locked up inside a room, sort of like the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre. When the police enter her room she literally screams at them.

Eventually it turns out that Sarah’s late husband, Beatrice’s father, was an alcoholic who regularly beat, assaulted, and raped her while “in his cups” until he was killed. The police who investigated his killing at the time assumed that Sarah had killed him in self-defense and she wasn’t prosecuted, but as part of the investigation into Beatrice’s current assault they uncover evidence that Beatrice herself was the killer. She’d picked up dad’s revolver off the floor where he’d dropped it in an alcoholic stupor and used it to knock him off before he could do in her mom. At this point I was wondering whether the payoff would be that dad actually didn’t die; he was still alive and secretly living in the house’s attic (where the police had found evidence of recent habitation), where he could occasionally sneak out and go after Beatrice. Instead Englestein did one of the most annoying tricks a mystery writer can pull: he had the assailant be someone totally unrelated whose existence we had no idea of until he got brought on as a culprit ex machina in the final act. He turns out to be Chris Garibaldi (Bryan Manley Davis), whom Beatrice dated while still in high school and later went crazy and was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life. He’d just got released from his latest incarceration three weeks before and he’d gone back to the Witt home, secretly moved into her attic, obsessed over her and finally made his move on her one night.

This reminded me of a Lifetime movie called Boy in the Attic which I quite liked, and another Lifetime film that also involved a man secretly living in the heroine’s attic that took on an unintended aura of comedy. In fact I reviewed that one on imdb.com and got a rather testy response from someone who said there was nothing funny about the situation and in fact it had been based on a real-life story in which the man in the attic had terrorized the woman who was unknowingly hosting him. The character I felt sorriest for was Sarah’s former caregiver, a hot young Black guy who’d been accused of stealing Sarah’s jewelry and been fired for that by Beatrice – only when the cops finally busted Chris Garibaldi they found all Sarah’s jewels in his attic redoubt and gave it back to Beatrice. There’s also a subplot in which Captain Curry makes her distaste for Beatrice’s line of work clear because after her husband died, her mother had urged her to go to a psychic, and said psychic had told her that her late husband missed her in the afterlife and wanted them to communicate. That raised Curry’s hackles because in this life she and her husband had agreed to separate because they weren’t getting along, which of course reminded me of the plot of the film A Stolen Life (the 1946 Curtis Bernhardt-directed Bette Davis vehicle in which she played twins, and when the bad sister dies the good sister tries to take her place without realizing that the bad sister’s husband, whom the good sister had always wanted, had got tired of her extra-relational activities and was about to divorce her; I reviewed it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-stolen-life-bd-productions-warner.html) which Charles and I had just watched. “That was a weird one,” I acknowledged to Charles afterwards, and of course he agreed.