Stalked by a Prince (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the latest “Premiere” Lifetime movie, Stalked by a Prince, and if Girl in the Shed was an example of Lifetime at or close to its best, this was Lifetime at or close to its worst. This one hewed closely to the Lifetime formula, which Maureen Dowd once jokingly dismissed as “Pussies in Peril” – in fact it hewed so closely to the formula it was irritating watching it because director Matthew McGuire and his writers (I remembered the name of Shawn Riopelle as one of them) folloewed an all too predictable course through the events of the story. Once again Lifetime failed to provide cast and credits lists in advance so there is no imdb.com page for the film. The only online information I could find was at https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/stalked-prince-cast-list-natalie-hall-others-lifetime-s-thriller-movie, and all that listed was the director and the actors playing the leads, Jonathan Heltz as Prince Stalker and Natalie Hall as his stalkee, New York-based publicist Alyssa Hall.

To add to the irony, the star couple of Heltz and Hall previously appeared together in a Hallmark movie called Fit for a Prince, in which the plot line was straight Cinderella with none of the darker undertones of this one. A fashion designer and a prince simply meet, fall in love and get the proverbial “and they all lived happily ever after” ending. In Stalked by a Prince the first thing we see is a scared young woman running for her life in a baronial estate whose doors are locked from the outside so she can’t get out. At first we think that Our Heroine is the terrified pigeon trying to flee for her life, but later we learn that this is another woman whom the terrifying Prince Jack has lured to his baronial estate with the full intention of torturing and then killing her. Once we realize that this is not going to be one of those Lifetime movies in which most of the running time is a flashback, we next get to meet Alyssa, who works for a New York publicist along with a fellow employee named Rachel. Alyssa and Prince Jack meet at a reception given by a cheap vodka company whom the prince inveigled a large charitable donation from, and he’s obliged to show up even though he’d rather stay at home in his lavish New York hotel room and drink whiskey directly from the bottle.

That’s our first sign that he’s positively demented, and the next sign we get is a phone call from his older and much more “together” brother Timothy asking Jack if he’s taking his meds. Of course he isn’t, and in fact he grabs the pill bottle and makes an ostentatious show of pouring them down the sink (one wonders why he does that, since it’s only an audio, not a video, phone call) to indicate not only that he’s off his meds but he’s feeling just fine about that. Once he meets Alyssa he’s immediately smitten with her – and he also starts cyber-stalking her even before they’ve had their first date. Egged on by her friend Rachel, who thinks it’s absolutely wonderful that an honest-to-goodness prince is interested in her, she agrees to fly back to England with him on his private plane, accompanied by Tepper, his butler/fixer/bodyguard/whatever (who’s to the prince what John Gielgud’s character was to Dudley Moore’s in the original Arthur). Only, as we soon realize, he’s got every room in the entire house bugged, including her bedroom – though he seems to draw back from actually watching her undress – and she soon realizes that she’s stuck in an environment which is so remote, complete with a veritable maze of hedgerows that separates the house from anywhere outside the estate. The prince soon gets to the business of stalking and terrorizing his latest pigeon, though this is a bit complicated because Timothy, his wife and their kids have all invited themselves to the estate as houseguests.

Eventually all the rest of the dramatis personae realize the prince is a psycho killer, and Alyssa grabs a knife from one of the statues of men in armor that line the walls but is quickly overpowered by Prince Jack, who’s got a gun, and he obviously means to shoot her with it until Tepper shoots and kills him, explaining afterwards that his job is to protect the royal family as a whole, not any particular member of it. Aside from having me wonder whether the inspiration was the oft-argued theory that the real Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family and instead of allowing him to be arrested and tried like a normal criminal, Queen Victoria arranged for him to be either exiled or murdered, Stalked by a Prince was relatively undistinguished. It telegraphed so many of its plot points in advance, and the only even remotely good thing I’d have to \say for it is Jonathan Keltz’s performance as the psycho prince. He reminded me of Murray Fraser, who played the real-life Prince Harry in Lifetime’s (first) TV-movie about him, Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance (2018); though he was born in New York City he came off as convincingly British, and he had the same kind of disarming charm as Fraser did until the mask came off and we saw what a rotter and a creep he really was. Aside from his performance (and that of the unknown actor playing Tepper, who clearly makes his character’s disgust at having to play nursemaid and fixer to a spoiled brat of a prince), Stalked by a Prince has nothing to recommend it; it’s just Lifetime from hunger, and in my comments about the first Harry and Meghan movie on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/05/harry-and-meghan-royal-romance-crown.html, I actually predicted they’d make this movie and suggested possible titles for it: Psycho Prince, The Perfect Prince, The Wrong Prince, Devious Prince, or The Prince She Met Online.

Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I put on the latest Lifetime movie, Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez, based on a true story (the real Abigail “Abby” Hernandez was abducted from her home town of North Conway, New Hampshire while walking home from high school on October 9, 2013 – by coincidence also the 73rd anniversary of the birth of John Lennon – and held captive for nearly a year) and the latest in a series of similarly titled Lifetime movies: Girl in the Box, The Girl in the Bathtub. Girl in the Bunker, Girl in the Basement and somewhat similar stories with different titles, Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story and Cleveland Abduction. (I’ve seen all the above except for Girl in the Basement.) Once again, doing a film (however altered from the real events) based on a true story seemed to put Lifetime’s directors, writers and actors on their best behavior. Here, director Jessica Harman and writer Michael Vickerman (it’s odd that this script was written by a man and directed by a woman: usually it’s the other way around!) turn Girl in the Shed (actually a converted freight car from a train that still stank of the stuff it had handled previously) into a taut, exciting melodrama with some level of dramatic and emotional complexity.

That’s true even though those damnable laws against depicting sexual relationships between adults and children forbade Vickerman and Harman from dramatizing perhaps the most abusive thing Hernandez’ kidnapper, Nicholas “Nick” Kibby, did to her. Given that Abby Hernandez was just 14 when she was kidnapped – and the actress playing her, Lindsay Navarro, was 17 (still underage) – the writing and direction could do no more than hint at what was going on between them and what he was really doing to her. Thus we see them facing away from each other as they lay in the same bed, and occasionally she puts out her hand to him, but we don’t see anything more sexually explicit than that. Given that the real Nick Kibby was arrested and pled guilty to rape as well as kidnapping, the whitewashed portrayal of him in the movie – in which he seems decorous and almost charming – doesn’t match what we can guess were his real motives were. The movie doesn’t include a scene mentioned by the real Abigail Hernandez during a 15-minute “Behind the Headlines” in which she asked Nick exactly why he had kidnapped her, and he said it was because his girlfriend had just left him and he wanted to strike back by hurting a woman, any woman, he didn’t care whom. Also, Hernandez’ account of her own abduction is considerably saltier linguistically, with liberal doses of the “F”-word (bleeped, of course, this being American TV) as she recalls what he said to her as he took her and held her for nearly a year.

Despite the censorship issues that kept Lifetime and its producers, the Johnson Production Group, from being able to tell this story exactly as it happened, Girl in the Shed as it stands is excellent, with rich, powerful characterizations and actors that are able to take advantage of the complexities in Vickerman’s script. One fascinating thing about Girl in the Shed is that for much of it the focus is as much on Abby’s mother Zenya as it is on Abby herself; Zenya becomes an impassioned revenge figure in her own right as she mobilizes everyone from the FBI to the media to local store owners to help her search for Abby and counter all the suggestions she gets from well-meaning but misunderstanding officials who keep saying Abby was a runaway, that she must have got pregnant, or any number of less sinister possibilities than the real one: that she was abducted by a psycho who’s holding her hostage. As time passes and the media move on, and Zenya finds her case is being treated as yesterday’s news, she gets more and more exasperated and at one point even gets to say, “Bullshit!”, as yet another authority figure patronizes her and says Abby was quite likely a runaway. And we get to hear Erica Durance, as Zenya, say the B.S.-word on screen instead of having her euphemized. Durance is as authoritative in her role as Lindsay Navarro is in hers – and the third principal, Ben Savage as Nate Kibby, is also quite good. He manages to come off as pathetic in the good sense, making us understand What Makes Nate Run even while we also can’t stand him for taking captive and torturing that poor, defenseless teenage girl.

At one point he wears a bizarre mask that reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera because, he explains, he can’t let Abby see what he really looks like – though Abby finally gets a good look at him when they’re in bed together and Nick has let it slip off his face. He also tells her he can’t let her know his real name, so she decides to call him “Felix” because, she says, it sounds smart. (The only two Felixes I could think of are on opposite sides of the culture divide: composer Felix Mendelssohn and the 1920’s cartoon character Felix the Cat, of whom Paul Whiteman recorded a novelty song that featured Bix Beiderbecke soloing.) As the film is winding down Nick gets laid off from his job – we aren’t sure what he does for a living but it appears to be something proletarian – and he decides to enlist Abby’s help in using his computer and scanner to counterfeit $100 bills. The moment the plot went there, I figured, “Oh, a cop is going to bust someone for counterfeiting and they’re going to rat him out.” That indeed happens, though the hapless victim of Nick’s fake-money scam is a woman who screams at him over his phone and tells him she’s going to report him to the police. In Abby Hernandez’ post-film interview she said that this woman was a prostitute – maybe that’s why Nick thought he would be a safe person to pass a counterfeit bill to – but once again LIfetime and writer Vickerman decided to pull their punches on this. (One also wonders why Nick would need a $100 hooker when he was also regularly raping Abby.).

After a frantic scene in which Nick tries to wipe down every surface on his home and everywhere else, including that shed where Abby has spent most of her time in captivity, he forces her to get into his car, drives to a deserted road – and then just lets her go. Abby, who has already learned that Nick had lied to her about taking her out of state when in fact she was just miles away from North Conway, walks miles back to her mom’s place – she certainly learned her lesson about accepting rides from strangers! – and after first showing up looking so worn and bedraggled her mom isn’t sure who she is, the two eventually recognize each other and we get the expected happy ending. Abigail Hernandez is named as one of the producers on this film – which makes the inaccuracies in the script all the more galling (in one news report, https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/4779927/who-abby-hernandez-girl-in-shed/, Nick Kibby is described as having created and passed counterfeit money throughout Abby’s captivity, not just towards the end after losing his job), but on its own terms Girl in the Shed is quite entertaining and moving despite the inaccuracies, and there are nice touches like making Nick a conspiracy buff believing everything from the flat-earth theory – at one point he wears a T-shirt with the logo of NASA, only instead of saying “NASA” it says “LIES” – to the one about 9/11 being an inside job, which leads to him getting reprimanded by his boss even though it’s financial pressures, not Nick spouting conspiracy propaganda on the job, that leads to him getting fired.

The Endgame: Pilot Episode (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, originally aired February 21, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. my husband Charles retreated to the bedroom to call his mother and I started flipping through the channels, where I found a surprise on NBC: a rerun of last Monday’s highly publicized new series The Endgame, directed by Justin Lin of the Fast and Furious series based on a script by Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn, who also get producer credit on the show. It’s all about the clash of wills between super-heroine and super-villainess: the super-villainess is Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, who also got a co-producer credit), icy brunette with a flap-open top that looks like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen and matching blue skirt. She plays the part so icily it looks like she could have sunk the Titanic and she supposedly heads a mercenary army of international fighters who can be identified only by the tattoos on their wrists. The super-heroine who takes her on is FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathe), who alone of all her colleagues in the Bureau has an idea of what she’s up against in Elena, who somehow manages despite being in custody when the show opens (she was actually kidnapped by the U.S. government: none of that errant nonsense about due process here!), to activate an elaborate revenge plot involving the robbing of seven banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. Where this scores is in the battle of wills between Fedorova and Turner, including Turner’s determination to get to the bottom of things and find out just what Fedorova’s ultimate motive is, and Fedorova’s striking appearance.

We get a lot of shots of Morena Baccarin’s chest, including those spill-over breast shots straight male viewers love, and though it’s unclear whether the Mata Hari gimmick of seducing men in order to win their cooperation is part of her arsenal, she does stick out her kneecap in a strikingly sexualized pose even though it’s not clear what she hopes to accomplish by looking this way. (Maybe it’s just par for the course for a female super-villain, or she’s keeping up her bad-girl “chops” up in case she needs to seduce someone in the future even though it’s hard to see which one of the male dramatis personae she would have any reason to get in her orbit.) Aside from that, The Endgame is a pretty standard cops-and-robbers tale updated for the modern age; early on we see FBI Special Agent Turner’s husband Oscar, also an FBI agent until he was caught taking bribes from a drug cartel. In the middle of the episode we learn he’s hired a high-priced divorce attorney to weasel out of his marriage with as much money as he can get out of her. Later she discovers that the divorce lawyer who’s taken her husband’s case is the law partner of Fedorova’s attorney, and if that isn’t enough twisting the knife in for you Fedorova tells Turner that she framed her husband in the first place so her bosses at the FBI would wonder if she were dirty. The Endgame also contains some big action set-pieces, including a couple of car chases just to remind viewers what Justin Lin is famous for, and as it stands it’s quality entertainment but little more than that – though the idea of a Russian super-villainess who learned her craft from her father, who until his own death trained her to be an assassin because he knew she would need those skills to survive in post-Soviet Russia seems awfully timely now in ways the makers of this show couldn’t have possibly guessed at, much less intended!

Blue Bloods: "Allegiance" (Panda Productions, CBS-TV, aired February 25, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Endgame I switched channels and watched a Blue Bloods episode called “Allegiance,” which in spite of being weighed down by the three-storyline plot structure is by far the most literate and intelligent police show on TV next to Dick Wolf’s Law and Order multi-series. The show’s central conceit that one Irish-American family, the Reagans, has made the New York Police Department essentially a family business (the current police commissioner is the son of the former police commissioner, and virtually his entire family, including his in-laws as well as his kids, are also on the force or otherwise involved in law enforcement as assistant district attorneys) gets a bit tiresome and hard to take, but overall this show is well-written and well-acted. Tom Selleck, the series star, is one of those actors who’s got better dramatically as his looks have faded; I never thought he was all that sexy (unlike my late partner John Gabrish, who had a huge poster of Tom Selleck as Magnum, P.I. on his door when I first tricked with him), but I was sorry that John G. died seven years before Selleck made a film, In & Out, in which he played a Gay man. The show dealt with various plot lines, including the on-air murder of a female talk-show host who looked on her way to becoming the next Oprah or Ellen; a police officer who is shot in his own apartment over his son’s involvement with drug gangs; and a plot line in which a cop who’s a part of the Reagan family overhears a conversation between a woman he’s tricking with and her employer, a corrupt attorney who’s using her to keep a witness from testfyinig against one of his Mobbed-up clients.

Eventually it turns out that the surprisingly unattractive husband of the glamorous talk-show host hired her personal assistant to kill her by spiking her coffee with something containing nuts, to which she was allergic (the cops also interview a former assistant who had written a tell-all book about her time with the host’s show, ahd who had tried to blackmail her into paying her a lot of money not to publish the book; they arrest her for blackmail but realize she had nothing to do with the murder). Police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) gives the veteran cop an ultimatum – either make his drug-addicted and gang-connected son move out or turn in his badge and gun. The police rescue the girlfriend of the cop just as she’s being kidnapped by the gang who want to keep her from testifying, and a running character who’s the wife of one of the Reagans on the force takes the police sergeant’s exam and aces it, but then decides he really doesn’t want to be a sergeant after all because he still wants to work cases “live” instead of being stuck behind a desk. Blue Bloods is a nicely written show – though the producers have tied themselves in knots by linking themselves into the three-storylines-per-episode format and I think the show would be better if each episode focused on one crime the way Dick Wolf and his producers and show runners have.

Law and Order: "The Right Thing" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired February 24,2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched NBC’s new block of three Law and Order shows, starting at 8 p.m. with a revival of the original Law and Order after a 12-year hiatus. At least two of the original cast members returned: Sam Waterston as district attorney Jack McCoy, which I more or less expected; and Anthony Anderson as Detective Kevin Bernard. That was during the last 12 years when Anderson got a career boost from doing a whole other sort of show – eight seasons as the all-knowing dad in the sitcom Blackish, essentially the old Father Knows Best with an all-Black cast (which had already been done by Hollywood as The Cosby Show).

In fact, though Bill Cosby wasn’t mentioned in the script, he was clearly the model for the murder victim at the start, a once-popular Black singer named Henry King (Norm Lewis) who receives a promise not to be prosecuted for raping a woman named Nicole (Jeaninne Kaspar). Then the assistant district attorney who made that promise receives word that King raped up to 40 other women, all by drugging them with spiked drinks and then having his wicked way with them while they were conscious but powerless to resist. She prosecuted King for raping some of these other women, but an appeals court threw out his conviction on the ground that the A.D.A.’s promise not to prosecute extended to all King’s alleged victims. King is set free and gives a TV interview in which he plays the race card, depicting himself as yet another innocent Black victim of an unjust and racist white system. Then he’s found dead with five bullets in him, and the cops launch an investigation.

This time the captain of the precinct the cops work out of is a heavy-set white woman, Camryn Manheim, instead of a heavy-set Black one, S. Epatha Merkerson; and the partner Detective Bernard has to work with is hot-tempered Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), who takes so cavalier an attitude towards the Constitution and its due-process guarantees he makes Clint Eastwood’s character of “Dirty” Harry Callahan seem like a charter member of the ACLU by comparison. After cycling through and clearing various suspects – including a gang leader who was receiving $100,000 per year to have his boys in prison protect Henry King from personal or sexual assault, who got pissed at him when he announced tnat now that he was out, the deal was off – the cops zero in on Nicole, the first woman King raped (at least the first to complain publicly and call the police), who killed him after seeing him on TV expressing no remorse and proclaiming himself an innocent victim. She took a gun from a safe belonging to her husband, Ryan Bell (Marcel Simoneau), and when the police come to their apartment with a search warrant and find a green hoodie she had just washed (she’d worn it during the murder to get rid of the blood spatter) but hadn’t dried, they take her into custody.

During the interrogation Detective Cosgrove feeds Nicole a cock-and-bull story about how if she confesses to the crime she’ll be allowed to go home; he signs the confession and then arrests her. At the trial, the assistant D.A. McCoy assigned to the prosecution, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), agrees with Nicole’s defense attorney that he won’t use the confession in evidence, but hot-headed Detective Cosgrove mentions it anyway in answering a question on cross-examination as to just how the cops knew to find the gun in the dumpster where Nicole had dumped it after the murder. The defense attorney asks the judge to declare a mistrial, but the judge (a woman) tells her that a simple instruction to the jury to disregard the mention of a confession is enough. Then the defense attorney does such a good job making her client seem sympathetic that the prosecutors worry Nicole is going to be acquitted, so McCoy and Price ask the other prosecutor who’s sitting second-chair, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), to handle the closing argument, apparently deciding that the jurors will be more likely to convict if the last voice they hear telling them to is a woman rather than a man. They get their conviction, but Samantha has guilt feelings about the way she was used and asks Price to get the lowest sentence possible.

The credits for this Law and Order lists Rick Eid as having developed the show but Dick Wolf, who created the entire Law and Order franchise, co-wrote the script himself with Eid, and veteran Law and Order hand Jean de Segonzac directed. The show was quite well-done and a welcome introduction to the revived series,,which from the look of the first new episode tap into the same complexities of police work and law enforcement in general – particularly how the constitutional protections of due process and equal rights work in actual cases – which led the late science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to recommend that anyone who wanted to get an idea of how the Constitution worked in real life could get it by watching Law and Order.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "If I Knew Then What I Know Now" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired February 24, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed – which, like the seminal Law and Order, was preceded by a disclaimer stating that the story and characters had nothing to do with real people (which, as my husband Charles pointed out, means that it does have a basis, albeit a tenuous one, with real life and real people) – has to deal with an 18-year-old who has just been informed by her birth mother, whom she had never met before, that she was conceived via rape. This poses a problem for the series’ star, Mariska Hargitay, playing Captain Olivia Benson, since as all hard-core SVU mavens have long known Benson, too, was conceived when her dad raped her mom, and unlike the woman in the story, Benson’s mom actually raised her as a single parent. The young daughter is named Ashley Peters (Gates Leonard) and her mom is Michelle Young (Lisa Joyce); the two women don’t look at all alike (a pet peeve of mine in watching movies or TV is when we’re told by the script that two characters are biologically related when the people playing them don’t look a bit alike), but we’re supposed to believe they are mother and daughter.

The cops ultimately trace Michelle’s alleged rape to a July 4, 2003 Fourth of July party (she remembers it was the Fourth of July because she remembers fireworks going off) at a New York brownstone with a red door. It’s just been bought by a Lesbian couple but they agree to let the cops come in and allow Michelle to look through the place and see if there is something she recognizes. She does: a large rose-like pattern on the ceiling above which she was raped. The cops were able to trace the guests at the party, including Josh Wilcox (Ben Jeffrey), his brother Zach (Corey Sorenson) and Cole Eaton (Joe Cumutte), a high-flying Wall Street financier who thinks his money could bail him out of anything. After a DNA test clears both the Wilcoxes, Cole Eaton turns out to be the real rapist and the cops wire Michelle for a “controlled meeting” with Cole – who first offers her a bribe to make all this go away and then flippantly tells her, “You missed your chance,” just before the cops burst in and arrest him. But he works out a plea deal that enables him to plead to a misdemeanor and avoid any jail time; just two years’ probation and 400 hours of community service.

The imdb.com page on this episode doesn’t credit the writers or director (though I believe Brianna Yellen, yet another old Law and Order “hand,” was involved), and it also features a Law and Order: The Soap Opera sub-plot in which assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) realize they have to disclose their love relationship both to their respective bosses and to Rollins’ kids (she’s had two, by different fathers, and at least one of them is seeing Carisi come over a lot and has leaped to the wrong conclusion that he is her dad), but it was also a tough story. Though the real-life aspects of this show were nowhere nearly as apparent as the ones in the Law and Order just before it, I could detect elements of the Martha Moxley case from years ago (in which two relatives of Ethel Kennedy were accused of her rape and murder) and also the accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his bravado in the face of them, essentially knowing both in advance at the time of his alleged assault on Christine Blasey Ford and years later that he would be able to get away with murder because of his wealth and social position.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "As Hubris Is to Oedipus" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired February 24, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the Law and Order: Organized Crime show that followed this one wasn’t anywhere nearly as good, though it was legitimately exciting. Like the previous shows in the series, which like all too many programs these days is so heavily serialized you can’t hope to follow it unless you watch every single episode, it featured super-criminal Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) and the single-minded attempt of Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than I remember him from his SVU days but still sexy) to hold him to account. This time Wheatley and hacker anti-hero Sebastian McClane (Robin Lord Taylor) team up – unwillingly in McClane’s case; Wheatley tricks him into helping him by playing a pretend game of Russian roulette with a woman who is really one of Wheatley’s lovers – to call out McClane’s army of online followers and enlist them in real-life bombings of various high-profile targets, incluidng the New York Stock Exchange and the New York district attorney’s office. Just how credible this plot is, I have my doubts about – my perception is most online community members are hopeless nerds who couldn’t be led off their desk chairs to commit real-world crimes and shouldn’t be useful as real-life saboteurs even if they were motivated to get off their chairs.

But it turns out that the whole operation is just a blind for Wheatley’s real ambition: to plunge all New York City into a power blackout by sabotaging a particular substation which he’s discovered is the key to the entire grid. There’s a marvelous shot of the lights of New York going out, one by one, as the episode ends. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but though the show is annoying in its obeisance to the Great God SERIAL in its so-called “story arc,” it was also highly exciting on its own. There’s also one scene in which New York’s governor apologizes to Stabler for having doubted his analysis of Wheatley, whom he had hailed as a great benefactor of the city and the state, but he refuses to make the apology public. But for the most part he’s a typical politician in a Dick Wolf series episode, and no matter how peripheral Wolf’s involvement is these days and how many producers and show runners are working for him and dictating the policies of “his” shows, the Law and Order franchise has remained pretty consistent in its cynical view of law enforcement and in particular its ability (or lack thereof) to hold the rich and powerful to account.

A Very British Coup, episode 1 (Independent Television Service, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had on various videos on YouTube, including one on how to avoid CD compilations that advertise “original hits by the original artists” but not the actual original recordings, but either live versions or studio remakes; and another comparing the 1977 LP and 2016 CD of the live record The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, but my husband Charles wanted to watch something “heavier” and found it in the first episode of A Very British Coup. This was a three-part miniseries produced – oddly, given its political ideology of attacking Margaret Thatcher’s program in general and the privatization of much of Britain’s economy in her 11-year reign in particular – not by the BBC but by the Independent Television Service (ITC), which the Conservative Party had created in the early 1950’s as their attempt to break the previous government-mandated monopoly the publicly owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had had on British radio and TV.

This episode begins with the landslide election of the Labour Party in general and its candidate for Prime Minister, Harry Perkins (Ray McAnnally), in particular. Charles and I both said the show looked like what might have happened if Bernie Sanders had actually been elected President of the United States, since Perkins is an “out” socialist as well as a former trade union leader who takes his total lack of gentlemanly “polish” all too seriously. The first episode deals with Perkins as the proverbial fish out of water, encountering the trappings of power at No. 10 Downing Street (the British equivalent of the White House) and in particular the shadow government – what former (and, all too likely, future) President Donald Trump liked to call the “Deep State” – that has frustrated and successfully blocked every previous Labour Party government from actually implementing its socialist goals. In a line by screenwriter Alan Plater (based on a novel by Chris Mullin) that’s probably the most incisive bit of satire in the film, one of the 1-percenters who are trying to figure out how to stop Perkins from enacting his agenda says, “I’ve been reading Labour Party manifestos since 1945” – when Clement Attlee defeated Winston Churchill and created the first modern Labour government of Britain.

The show deals mainly with Perkins’ attempts to tame the British bureaucracy and achieve at least part of his program, including a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State who insists that Britain’s becoming a non-aligned country in the Cold War and withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will be considered as hostile acts by the U.S. government. In a grimly funny scene, Perkins asks if any of his private telephone conversations are being recorded, and it turns out they all are: like Richard Nixon’s taping system, which went on and off automatically whenever someone made a phone call or began an in-person meeting, Perkins is actually being “bugged” 24/7 via a bank of Revox tape recorders (did Revox have to pay a product placement fee for their recorders, or did they more cynically agree to loan their equipment to the production in exchange for the exposure?), at least one of which starts when he picks up the phone receiver and doesn’t stop until he hangs up. Though Perkins is still in power at the end of this episode – he’s warned by Wainwright (Geoffrey Beevers), the moderate he appointed to his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer (essentially Britain’s Secretary of the Treasury) as a token figure to appease the fat cats, that he can’t possibly cover the costs of his expanded social network, but he’s arranged a deal for a loan from the Russians instead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so he doesn’t have to deal with those pesky “austerity” restrictions the IMF would insist on that would require him to gut his programs – the stage is clearly being set for the “very British coup” that would remove him.

Charles had seen A Very British Coup 30 years ago (just before we re-met and began our relationship) and he had fond memories of it and talked it up relentlessly, but encountering it again he acknowledged it was dated and had aged badly. Certainly, when the real Russia is threatening an all-out war against Ukraine and the U.S. and Britain are united in opposition (though just how effective their opposition here, since it’s limited so far to economic sanctions and Russia has already endured those from the West for eight years, remains to be seen), it’s hard to see the Russians as white knights agreeing to bail out a sympathetic Prime Minister and his socialist policies. Apparently the writers of this show weren’t anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union – they still believed Russia would be a Left-wing dictatorship instead of a Right-wing one (which is why so many modern-day U.S. Republicans are A-O.K. with Putin: it wasn’t Russia they hated all those years, it was the Soviet Union, and now that Russia is a Right-wing instead of a Left-wing dictatorship a lot of Republicans are just fine with Putin and his regime). And one thing they assumed was that Queen Elizabeth II would have croaked already, since the dialogue refers to Britain’s reigning monarch as the King instead of the Queen. (Elizabeth II has been Queen of England since before I was born, and I’m 68 years old: in fact she just celebrated the 70th anniversary of her reign, and she long ago surpassed Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-reigning monarch ever.)

I had suspicions that I wasn’t going to like A Very British Coup as soon as I saw the name of the director: Mick Jackson, the man who did so much to ruin the 1992 film The Bodyguard. I said when Charles and I finally caught up with The Bodyguard that it needed Alfred Hitchcock and got Mick Jackson, who had nothing in common besides a shared British heritage: imagine what Hitchcock could have done with a celebrity being stalked by a mad killer during the Academy Awards, and how little Jackson actually did with it. A Very British Coup shares some of the same nervous editing as The Bodyguard, and while at least Jackson was dealing with a cast of British professionals instead of a neophyte like Whitney Houston who, as Charles said, couldn’t even play herself, he seems to be content with attitude instead of real characterization. Whether it’s the opening shot of Harry Perkins peeing (we don’t actually see urine come of his dick, but we hear it and see his toilet bowl filling with yellow liquid) or the bizarre quotes from A Hard Day’s Night of crowds mobbing the train that’s supposed to be taking Perkins to London from his working-class home in Sheffield, Mick Jackson turns out to be a dubious director and if A Very British Coup has any high points (which it does, though less in the direction than the writing and acting), it’s in spite of the director rather than due to him.

Early Days of Rock 'n' Roll (Archve Film Productions, RCA Columbia Home Video, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I an hour-long documentary on YouTube, Rock and Roll: The Early Days (1984), written and directed by Patrick Montgomery and Pamela Page and narrated by John Heard. It’s basically a print-the-legend version of the history, though I give Montgomery and Page a lot of credit for acknowledging that rock ‘n’ roll was just Black rhythm-and-blues repackaged for white audiences and performed by white people.; (Louis Jordan, curiously not mentioned in this documentary even though he was one of the first R&B performers to cross over to a white audience, understandably was bitter about how the rise of rock killed his career and said, “Rock ‘n’ roll is just rhythm-and-blues played by white people.”) The documentary opens with a thoroughly bland song being performed by a woman singer – neither the singer nor the song are identified (and curiously the imdb.com page for this film does not have a “soundtracks” list) – as an illustration of the doldrums pop music had fallen into in the early 1950’s after the demise of the big bands and their replacement by solo singers.

Actually, some of the singers were pretty good and a few of them – notably Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray – had drawn on Black models in developing their styles the way the later white rockers did, but for the most part white pop music in the early 1950’s was largely the artistic wasteland it’s depicted as here. Then there’s a bizarre clip from the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showing the two sons of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard having a musical battle: David wants to listen to Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s scorching 1952 version of “Hound Dog” while brother Ricky wants to listen to annoying pseudo-symphonic pop pap. (Ironically, Ricky Nelson would go on to a career as a rock ‘n’ roll singer himself, making records like “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello, Mary Lou” that were much better than most of what was heard on the radio in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. His guitar player, James Burton, would later join Elvis Presley’s touring band.) This is supposed to dramatize how teenagers – a relatively new demographic category in the early 1950’s as post-World War II America’s relative affluence led to a new group of people in a sort of holding pattern between childhood and adulthood, with spending money of their own – were getting bored with the songs on the traditional pop charts.

They looked for livelier music, and they found it in the records entrepreneurs like Sam C. Phillips, Art Rupe, the Bihari, Chess and Ertegun brothers and others were made for the African-American market. In an interview with Arnold Shaw for his seminal history of R&B, Honkers and Shouters, Rupe recalled a lot of white people buying his company’s record of Lloyd Price singing “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” and telling the clerks at the store it was a present for their Black chauffeurs or maids when “they were really buying it for themselves.” A few white disc jockeys, notably Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, started to pick up on what was happening and how white listeners were starting to embrace Black music (as their forebears had in the 1920’s and 1930’s when they similarly embraced jazz). Freed even coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll” – which he derived from a turn-of-the-century blues song called “My Daddy Rocks Me with One Steady Roll,” and which had also been used in 1930’s songs like the Boswell Sisters’ “Rock and Roll,” Bunny Berigan’s “Rockin’ Rollers’ Jubilee” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Rock It for Me” – as a euphemism to conceal the fact that what he was programming on his show was Black R&B. Freed would eventually move on to New York City and start organizing package tours of his artists, and in a rare display of racial justice he insisted that the Blacks on his bills get exactly the same treatment as the whites, but he fell from grace in the late 1950’s when he acknowledged publicly that he had accepted bribes from record companies to play certain records on his shows. (Freed would also take so-called “cut-in credits” on songs, agreeing to promote them in exchange for a credit on the label as co-composer, thus earning songwriters’ royalties for records on which his contribution was, as Arnold Shaw politely put it in his book, “more promotional than creative.”)

The show deals with how white performers started playing the new music – many of them came from backgrounds in country music, which had also drawn heavily on the blues and other Black traditions, fusing it with traditional British and Irish folk songs with admixtures of Mexican and Hawai’ian music. Bill Haley, the first white rock star (who’s treated here with more respect than he usually gets from early-rock tributes in which he’s largely depicted as the John the Baptist of white rock, heralding the coming of Elvis), had two bands: the Saddlemen, who played country, and the Comets, who played rock … but they were exactly the same people. The show also depicts the music scene in Memphis, Tennessee (who by rights should be the site of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, since it occupied the same seminal position in the history of rock that New Orleans had in the history of jazz; but it ended up in Cleveland instead because that was the city where rock ‘n’ roll was first promoted) and the rise of Sam C. Phillips. He build a small recording studio on Union Avenue and opened something called the Memphis Recording Service, which would record people who were willing to pay to hear their voice on a professionally made record. Phillips also recorded Black blues artists and originally licensed his records to other companies – among them Chess in Chicago and the Bihari brothers’ Modern in Los Angeles – and in at least one case, the Memphis blues star Howlin’ Wolf (real name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, which makes one wonder what his parents were thinking in naming him after one of America’s least distinguished Presidents), he sold different recordings of the same songs under different titles to both Chess and Modern. (This led to a lawsuit between the Chess and Bihari brothers that got settled when the Biharis agreed to relinquish Wolf’s contract to Chess in exchange for Rosco Gordon’s services on Modern.)

In 1953, fed up with the money he was losing by selling his masters to other companies, Phillips started a record label of his own, Sun, and though he had a local graphic artist design an iconic label design – a rooster on a field of sunbeams – and continued to release records by Black artists, he told his cousin and business partner Dewey Phillips, “If I could find a white kid who could sing like a [N-word], I’d make a million dollars.” Said white kid walked into the Memphis Recording Service one day in early 1954 on a break from his job as a truck driver; his name was Elvis Presley and he said he wanted to make a record as a souvenir present for his mother. Actually the Presleys didn’t own a record player and Elvis probably just wanted to hear how his own voice would sound on disc, but he recorded two songs – a cover of “My Happiness” by the Black vocal group The Ink Spots and a traditional country song called “That’s Where Your Heartaches Begin.” Sam Phillips wasn’t there that day – his secretary Marion Keisker was running the place in his absence – and she heard something potentially commercial in the 19-year-old kid’s voice. In addition to sending Elvis home on a directly recorded acetate disc, as the Memphis Recording Service usually did, she also turned on the studio tape recorder so Phillips could hear the voice later. When Elvis returned for another al fresco session shortly afterwards, Phillips recorded him and on the studio’s tape machine he marked the tape, “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

When he booked Elvis for his first commercial recording session – for which Elvis would be paid instead of having to pay – he couldn’t get anything out of him that sounded like it would sell until Elvis and the accompanists Phillips had booked for him, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, started jamming on songs by Black blues musician Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Though the legend has it that Elvis totally recomposed the song, the version of Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama” that became Elvis’s first record release (backed by Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” because Phillips wanted to market Elvis to both the blues and country audiences; Elvis’s first promotional moniker was “The Hillbilly Cat”), was almost identical to Crudup's. This documentary includes a bit of “That’s All Right, Mama” and Elvis’s fifth and final Sun single, “Mystery Train,” along with a bit of a famous outtake of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at Monroe’s tempo (later Elvis speeded it up for the released version, and Monroe played the song a decade later at a Newport Folk Festival in which he did the first chorus at his original tempo and the second at Elvis’s), in which you can hear the voice of Sam Phillips saying, “That’s a pop song now, Little Vi! That’s good!”

Phillips only made $35,000 off Elvis – his price for selling the singer’s contract and all rights to his Sun recordings to RCA Victor – but he figured there was more talent where that came from and he landed several other white singers who could sound Black, including Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Unfortunately, they were both victims of a curse that seemingly hung over the original generation of rock ‘n’ rollers: Perkins crashed his car on his way to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show (which enabled Elvis to take away Perkins’ biggest hit, “Blue Suede Shoes”), and Lewis married Myra Gale, 13-year-old cousin and daughter of his bass player J. T. Brown. The scandal of Lewis’s marriage broke in the British tabloids just as he arrived there for a tour in 1958, and he got catcalls and boos from the audience (one heckler said, “Go wheel your wife out in a pram!”), and this film juxtaposes footage of a press conference Lewis and his wife gave on their return to the U.S. in which he said his tour went wonderfully with real clippings of how badly it had gone (he was canceled after just three shows). It also shows Myra Lewis looking all of her actual age and helplessly trying to impersonate an adult woman.

The curse of the early rockers struck down Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, who died in a chartered plane crash in 1959 (this film includes a marvelous clip of Buddy Holly performing on the Ed Sullivan Show, sitting through an attempt by Sullivan to interview him and then playing Holly’s heaviest record, “Peggy Sue”); Eddie Cochran (who isn’t shown in this movie but is represented by a sound clip of his greatest song, “Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash a year later (just before launching the career of a little-known band from Liverpool called The Beatles, who were hurriedly added to a concert bill Cochran was supposed to play with Gene Vincent; it was their first performance in an actual theatre instead of a club); Elvis got drafted and sent to a U.S. military base in Germany; Little Richard abruptly quit rock to study for the ministry (he spent the rest of his long life torn between music and God); and even Chuck Berry, oddly presented in this film as the one rocker who survived the 1950’s with his career intact, got caught in 1961 with a 14-year-old Mexican prostitute and served two years in prison for violating the Mann Act, originally passed as a law against human trafficking but regularly abused to prosecute people the authorities didn’t like. (Berry’s first conviction was reversed on appeal because the judge had made openly racist statements on the bench, but he was re-convicted on his retrial.)

The film also delves into the contentious topic of the so-called “cover versions,” which now means any re-recording of a hit song by someone other than the original artist but in the 1950’s came to mean a white artist’s version of a song originated by a Black act. The film contained an interview with Pat Boone in which he admits that he didn’t want to record Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” or Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” at first, but his managers talked him into doing those songs and assured him they would sell. They did: this film includes a mid-song cut from Boone’s hilariously misguided version of “Ain’t That a Shame” to Domino’s original (the 1978 NBC documentary Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll did a reverse of that cut, from Domino to Boone, but it made the same point), and the limp white covers usually sold 10 times as many copies as the gritty Black originals. (Art Rupe of Specialty Records, Little Richard’s label, was especially proud that Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” sold one-third as many copies as Boone’s anemic cover – 3 to 1 was a lot better than 10 to 1.) When Pat Boone emerged in 2008 and proclaimed the Queer community enemies of democracy for attacking California voters who had passed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, I wrote an editorial in my newsmagazine, Zenger’s, saying, “One of the ironies behind Pat Boone’s bizarre emergence as an impassioned spokesperson against the Queer community is that his open embrace of bigotry and prejudice is all too appropriate for a man who owes his entire career to bigotry and prejudice.”

I also quoted Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, who told Arnold Shaw in an interview for Honkers and Shouters that “we had a real tough time getting our records played. All the jocks had to see was the Atlantic label and the name of the artist — and we were dead. We’d say, ‘Just listen and give your listeners a chance to listen.’ But they had a set of stock excuses: ‘Too loud.’ ‘Too rough.’ ‘Doesn’t fit our format.’ They’d never say, ‘We don’t play Black artists.’ But then they’d turn around and play a record of the very same song that was a copy of our record, only it was by a white artist.” This film argues that between the self-destruction of many of the original rock stars and the public opposition rock ‘n’ roll engendered (among the enemies of rock shown in this film is the head of the Alabama White Citizens’ Council, essentially the above-ground political arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and not surprisingly his main beef against rock is it was leading young white people to look, sound and act Black), by the end of the 1950’s music was once again as bland and boring as it had been at the beginning. The clips shown of pseudo-rockers like Paul Anka and Fabian aren’t too bad, actually – Fabian’s “Turn Me Loose” sounded like it could have been a credible rock song with either a Black singer or a better white one, like Elvis (whom he was obviously imitating) – but they are hardly at the same energy level as the music we’ve seen and heard earlier.

The film makes the claim that pop music had lost its edge in 1959 and didn’t regain it until the Beatles arrived in the U.S. five years later – but as my husband Charles pointed out, there was quite a lot of good music being made between those years, including the early Motown records, the girl groups, the elaborate productions of Phil Spector and even records by some grittier white artists like Ricky Nelson and Del Shannon. (I remember Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello, Mary Lou” and Shannon’s “Runaway” leaping out of the sludge clogging up the radio in the early 1960’s – and also loving Chuck Berry’s comeback record, “No Particular Place to Go,” made in 1964 after he was finally released from prison.) Finally, the show touches on how rock ‘n’ roll would eventually get revived when it migrated across the Atlantic: it shows how, with his U.S. record sales declining, Bill Haley salvaged his future and crossed the English Channel, re-establishing his career in Germany and causing literal riots when he appeared there. Though it isn’t mentioned here, Buddy Holly’s records sold considerably more in Europe – especially in Britain – than they did here, and that was of huge importance to the future of rock. Unlike most white rockers of the 1950’s, Holly and Carl Perkins had written most of their own songs, and that set an example for three lads from Liverpool named John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison who figured they could write their own songs, too, and build a career on them.

Wilhelm Furtwängler (British TV documentary, date and provenance unknown)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I showed my husband Charles a documentary lasting just over an hour on the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängier. The show’s YouTube posting lasted just over an hour and cut off shortly before it was over, which made it even harder to tell what company made this or what its provenance was. The show’s Web link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2D_vGdwsUo, and though I couldn’t tell who had made it or how it was originally released (I’m guessing as a TV documentary) and the only opening title was “Wilhelm Furtwängler,” so I’m not sure whether or under what auspices it was made. I came to this YouTube documentary through a circuitous source: I had been struck by the use of the final “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the closing ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics, and that got me to thinking about how other authoritarians have used and abused that piece of music for propaganda purposes. I had also decided to accompany my writing about the film with a recording of Furtwängler’s Nazi-era performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which led me to run down a YouTube commentary on one of them by Classics Today editor David Hurwitz on “Why Furtwängler’s 1942 Nazi Ninth Really Sucks.”

Though the documentary Charles and I watched later isn’t connected to Hurwitz’s comment, it evokes the quiet, pastoral environment into which he was born. His father, Adolf Furtwängler, was a leading archaeologist and anthropologist who specialized in exploring ancient Greek ruins and took his young son with him on at least one expedition. His younger brother became a mountaineer and was one of the first people to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa – where a spur on the side of the mountain got named after him. Wilhelm was home-schooled from age eight and given particularly intense training in music after he started writing his own pieces by age seven. He learned both piano and violin, and seemed headed for a career as a great composer but got sidetracked into conducting, at first as a way of getting his own scores performed but later due to financial concerns: he saw that conductors, especially if they were good enough to land a job with a major orchestra, had a steadier income stream than composers. In 1922 he was appointed music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra following the death of Artur Nikisch, and with one exception (1945 to 1952) he remained in that post until his death in 1954.

The essence of the controversy surrounding Furtwängler is his decision to remain in Germany after the Nazis took power in January 1933 and stay until January 1945, when he was warned by Albert Speer that his name had been put on a Nazi hit list because of his secret activities on behalf of Jewish musicians. Furtwängler’s attitude towards the Nazis mirrored that of Richard Strauss (another towering musical figure who sucked up to the Nazis in public while at least partially working against them in private, though in Strauss’s case it seems to have been more about keeping his Jewish daughter-in-law alive than anything else) or Dmitri Shostakovich being forced by Stalin to compose bombastic cantatas honoring the Soviet regime while either disliking or actively detesting it in private. Critic David Hurwitz, whose commentary on the 1942 Furtwängler recording of Beethoven’s Ninth is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBRXDrrXqLM, argues that Furtwängler was part of the German academic and intellectual elite who regarded all politics as beneath them, and as such they were easy prey for the Nazis’ nationalistic appeals and offered no effective resistance to the regime even as they kvetched about its excesses in private. (In that they were a lot like the Republicans like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins who have told people in private how much they hate Donald Trump while they continue to stand behind him in public.)

The film includes a clip from, one of the Nazi-era Furtwängler performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with a giant swastika mounted on the stage expressing the Nazis’ view of this work as a monument to the superiority of German art and culture; what we view as a hymn to joy, peace and brotherhood, the Nazis regarded as yet another nationalistic triumph of the will. The effect is creepy and shows both how artists can be perverted by politics and how they can allow themselves to be used for propaganda purposes – as Furtwängler definitely was. Reading Furtwängler’s Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Furtwängler, one is struck by how hard Hitler, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Reichsmarschall Herrmann Göring tried to keep Furtwängler in Germany and to stage events that would make it look like he was a Nazi supporter, even though he never joined the Nazi Party (as compared to the young Herbert von Karajan, who joined as early as 1933), never wrote the “Heil Hitler!” salute on his letters (even when he was writing to Hitler!) or gave the outstretched Nazi salute, and on at least some occasions played the music of banned composers like Mendelssohn and Hindemith. (In 1934 Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic gave the world premiere of the symphony Hindemith had composed based on themes from his opera Mathis der Maler – about the struggle of the painter Matthias Grünewald for individual rights against a corrupt dictatorship – even though the directors of the Berlin State Opera pulled their invitation to premiere the complete opera and it was not performed until 1938 in Zürich, Switzerland, the only city in the world then that had a German-speaking theatre and was not ruled by the Nazis.)

Goebbels and Göring had to keep saving Furtwängler’s bacon from other Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler and “racial theorist” Alfred Rosenberg, who literally wanted to send him to a concentration camp – until early 1945, when Furtwängler received word that the Nazis had put him on a hit list and he fled across the border to Switzerland. There he was not allowed to work as a conductor until a de-Nazification tribunal cleared him of the charge of Nazi sympathies, and he spent the next two years working on his Symphony No. 2 (the most famous of his compositions) and recovering from the strains of life in Germany under a war the country was losing. The Furtwängler documentary featured interviews with various musicians, including Jewish ones like Jascha Horenstein (who had worked as an assistant to Furtwängler in the pre-Nazi years and was fired at the Nazis’ insistence; he later settled in Britain and became a major conductor there, including making a scorching recording of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony and tone poem Saga-Drøm), Yehudi Menuhin (who made a point of appearing with Furtwängler after the war because he thought critics were giving him a raw deal and making him out to be a Nazi when he was nothing of the sort), and Daniel Barenboim (who was born in Argentina from a German-Jewish family but is shown performing the solo piano part in one of Furtwängler’s compositions and in 1965, 11 years after Furtwängler’s death, made a record of Furtwängler’s Symphony No. 2).

There are also non-Jewish interviewees, including Hans Keller (whom it’s hard to watch since he’s wearing what sure looks like a clip-on Groucho Marx moustache), making the film’s overall case that Furtwängler has gotten a bum rap from historians. Given how the United States has come close to authoritarianism of late – the Republican Party has definitively rejected democracy and in the states it controls has committed itself to rigging the next two elections to stay in power, and those of us who have been able to feel smug in the certainty and security of our democracy may find ourselves very soon in the position that Furtwängler and other Germans who hated the Nazis but decided to stay in the country, we too may be facing moments of courage (or cowardice) very soon in our own country and have to deal ourselves with the same moral dilemmas and agonies Furtwängler did.

2022 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremonies (International Olympic Committee, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the closing ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China – the first city to host both the Summer Olympics (in 2008) and the Winter Olympics – and it was a surprisingly low-keyed spectacle lasting only an hour and a half, a far cry from the spectacle the organizers of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway did. Given how many of the familiar winter sports were invented by the Scandinavians, especially the Norwegians (skis were a Scandinavian invention and were originally a means of transportation over long distances in the snow: the idea that you could race on them came later), it’s not surprising that Norway led the medal count this year, as they did in 1994 and pretty regularly ever since. The commentators talked a lot about how much of what we were seeing was digital projections rather than real objects, including the huge snowflake that hung over the proceedings, and there was the usual ceremonial handover of the Olympic flag from the mayor of Beijing to the mayors of Milan and Cortina, Italy, which will host the next Winter Olympics in 2026.

The commentators also talked about the political pall over the Olympics, particularly over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive military buildup on the border with Ukraine. Throughout the Games I felt sorry for the Ukrainian athletes because they had no way of knowing whether they’d still have a country to come home to when the Olympics were over. Remember that Putin ordered an invasion of Georgia in 2010 while the Winter Olympics were going on in Sochi, Russia, and President Biden ordered the entire staff of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine out of the country in fear of a Russian invasion. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have become close geopolitical allies and have made various statements saying that the era of democracy (even limited bourgeois democracy) is over and the future belongs to authoritarians and one-person rule. The last time the leaders of major countries talked that the future lay with dictatorships was during World War II, when the U.S. and Britain essentially cut a deal with the devil by accepting the aid of Left-wing dictator Josef Stalin of Russia to block the more immediate threat of Right-wing dictator Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Speaking of Hitler and the Nazis, it’s amazing how much of the panoply associated with the Olympics today began in 1936, when Germany hosted both the Winter Olympics (in the ski resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss had his villa) and the Summer Olympics (in Berlin). Originally Hitler had planned to turn down the offer to host the Summer Olympics – the bid was made in 1932 when the more or less democratic Weimar Republic was still in power – but his Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, talked him into letting the games proceed on the ground that they provided a marvelous propaganda opportunity in which the world would see Nazi Germany as just another country, not a nation governed by mass-murdering thugs. The whole business of a worldwide relay race from Greece (site of the ancient Olympics as well as the first revival of the modern games in 1896) to whichever city was hosting that year was born in the fertile minds of Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaking genius Hitler had personally put in charge of directing a documentary about the games. Among the gestures Hitler pulled to make sure the world was on his side and he would see the image of Nazi Germany he wanted them to see was that for the duration of the Olympics he ordered all persecution of the Jews to stop, and he even let one Jewish athlete (a woman swimmer) participate in Germany’s national team. So when I saw a member of the Uighurs, China’s Muslim minority whom the current Chinese government has been accused of targeting for genocide, assigned the honor of lighting the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony, I thought, “Ah, Xi is following Hitler’s playbook.”

In fact, at least partly due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 protocols, the modern-day journalists covering the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing were literally encased in a barbed-wire prison, from which they were never allowed either to leave to do person-on-the-street interviews to tell parts of the story representing Chinese reality other than the ones toe government wanted told; or, if they were outside the bubble, they were not allowed to come back in. This dual tension between the Olympics’ stated aim of promoting worldwide brotherhood (and sisterhood: one of the things I like about the Olympics is they essentially treat male and female athletes equally) and peace and the reality that they are often held in dictatorial countries and use them for propagandistic purposes was ironically responded by the use of the “Ode to Joy” finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as part of the closing ceremonies. The Beethoven Ninth has been exploited for political purposes before, and not always positive ones either: there is a famous film of a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler on April 19, 1942 in which the hall was festooned with swastikas and at least some of the Nazi bigwigs, including Joseph Goebbels, were in the audience. What we hear as an ode to world harmony and peace (so much so that when Leonard Bernstein led a 1989 concert in Berlin to celebrate the tearing down of the Berlin Wall he changed the word in the finale from “Freude” – joy – to “Freiheit,” “freedom”), the Nazis heard as a testament to German culture and its superiority to the rest of the world’s. So it was no real surprise that the Chinese overlords picked this piece of Western music (along with the “Lone Ranger” final theme of Rossini’s William Tell overture, played right after the Italian national anthem to symbolize the transition of the next Winter Olympics from China to Italy) to proclaim the superiority of their system to ours and their destiny to rule the world.

Aside from the politics of the closing ceremony, there was the power and drama of the Winter Olympics themselves, including the fall of Mikaela Shiffrin (she came to Beijing with the burden of NBC’s hype machine, laden with the expectation she would win six medals and she won none; I actually feit sorry for her and exasperated at the way NBC was thrusting its cameras and microphones in her face at each new disappointment) and the rise of Erin Jackson and Elana Meyers-Taylor, who hoped that their medal victories (in speed skating and bobsled, respectively) would inspire future African-Americans to take up winter sports and compete. There was also my newest cultural hero, Timothy LeDuc, who was the first openly non-binary athlete to compete in the Olympics. They (I’m following his preferred gender pronoun here) didn’t win the pairs figure skating competition but they had a good run, and if they didn’t win it was less their fault than the fault of their partner, Ashley Cole-Gribble (who I presume is a cisgender female), who missed her landings on a couple of the big jumps. I won even more admiration for LeDuc when I looked at their Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_LeDuc, and found that their parents had responded to them coming out as Gay (let alone non-binary) by pushing them into “conversion therapy,” but they gradually brought their parents around and now their parents do Queer and Trans Pride events with them. I give NBC’s announcers a lot of credit for calling LeDuc “they” and “them,” even though it wasn’t always clear whether “they” meant LeDuc alone or them and Cole-Gribble as well.

Swim Instructor Nightmare, a.k.a. Psycho Swim Instructor (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Since the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies ended well before I’d expected them to, I was able to watch a Lifetime movie and a PBS concert special rerun as well. The Lifetime movie was called Swim Instructor Nightmare – though imdb.com lists it under what they said was a later title. Psycho Swim Instructor – and it opens with a women swimmer named Sabrina Jameson (Sydney Hamm) having an argument with her coach, Sharky Wallace (Elijah Mahar). He tells her that he’s cutting her from the squad he’s training for the “Summer Games” (apparently the writer, David Chester, was so afraid of the power and ferocious protectiveness of the International Olympic Committee towards their intellectual property that he didn’t dare use the “O”-word) because her lap times in the training pool are actually slowing down. She then reaches for his crotch, apparently thinking that he’ll let her stay on the team if she gives him a blow job (or more), but he points out he’s married and isn’t interested in her sexually. Tnen Sabrina has a hissy-fit of jealous rage and the two struggle in the pool, seemingly to death, and it’s touch and go whether either or both will survive.

The next scene takes place one year later, and Sabrina is complaining to her mother Violet (Janis Carter) that she’s been reduced to “teaching other people’s brats to swim.” But she’s also fallen in obsessive love with the father of ner newest charge: Parker Scott (an absolutely gorgeous and delectable piece of man-meat named CJ Hammond – that’s how he’s billed), whose wife Ellen (Shellie Sterling) is in rehab for having drunk herself out of a career as a divorce attorney. Besides being drop-dead gorgeous Parker is also well-to-do, making his living as an investment consultant (I don’t know that many Black investment consultants, but I don’t know that many white ones, either), and Sabrina immediately sets her cap for him because (though we’re not told this until later) her dad left her mom when Sabrina was just five and ever since then she’s had a “thing” for older men. She tells her mom she’s just met “the one,” and mom, having lived through this scenario with her daughter before, understands what’s going on and turns her back on Sabrina to call the poor pigeon and warn him.

Big mistake: Sabrina grabs a frying pan off the stove and clongs her mom with it, though she later seems surprised that the blow has actually killed her. Nonetheless, she’s resourceful: she drags her mother’s dead body into the tub and later gets a large can of sulfuric acid and uses it to dissolve her mom’s remains completely. (According to an article on the Web site of Discover magazine, https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-mafia-was-wrong-you-cant-quickly-dissolve-a-body-in-acid, pure sulfuric acid can’t dissolve a body, but if you add water to it, it can in 12 hours, which is the obvious significance of Sabrina putting her mom’s corpse in a bathtub.)

Then Sabrina shows up for work and finds out Parker’s 10-year-old daughter Ashley (Kiarra Beasley), the girl Sabrina is supposed to teach to swim, had a phobia against going in the water because the day Ashley’s mom Ellen was supposed to give her her first swimming lesson, she fell into a drunken stupor and never showed up at the pool. Sabrina manages to get Ashley into the pool and starts teaching her to swim, but at the same time her lustful interest in Parker is all too obvious, and when Ellen returns from rehab she, as a former divorce lawyer, immediately spots the way Sabrina is looking at her husband and demands that he fire her. The replacement is Donna Dean (Mackenzie Possage), who actually made it to the Oly- – oops, I mean the “Games” – and won a bronze medal. Donna is training for another “Games” shot and was hoping to win gold this time, but Sabrina takes care of that: once again, Donna makes the same mistake Sabrina’s mom did – she turns her back and threatens to call the police while Sabrina goes into a murderous rage – and eventually Sabrina knocks Donna into the pool and drowns her, saying as she dies, “You’re never going to win that gold medal now.”

Sabrina also plots to get Ellen back into rehab by feeding her a cookie spiked with Rohypnol and hiding a bottle of Scotch under the couch, and naturally when Parker returns home and sees the worst, Ellen passed out in bed and Ashley in the pool alone, he assumes the worst and orders her back. But this turns out to be a lucky break because Ellen remembers during another group-therapy session in which, after she hears another patient mentions the movie Jaws and says it’s about a shark attack, recalls that she was told Sabrina trained under a coach named Sharky. She talks a nice but rather dim aide into giving her back her cell phone, though with him watching her she knows she can only text, not call, her husband – who in the meantime has actually been seduced by Sabrina (there are a couple of lubricious soft-core porn scenes between them in which I got some nice glimpses of CJ Hammond’s glorious body – yum!) and has invited her to his home to look after Ashley for the two weeks he’s going to be in New York on business. Only Ellen has fled the rehab center and found her car in the parking lot the very next day, and she arrives home in time to rescue her husband from the clutches of the psycho swim instructor, and she knocks out Sabrina by swinging a convenient golf club in her direction.

The final shot is of Sabrina being arrested – writer David Chester wisely avoided one of the open-ended finishes we’ve sounded lately. There is no scene of Sabrina getting away and turning up at the home of some other older man who has a failing marriage and a child whom he wants to teach to swim. There is also no scene of Sabrina rubbing her belly while she’s in prison,obviously plotting a way to get back into the life of the man who’s fathered her child-to-be. And there’s no reaction shot of Ashley, who quite likely would be devastated by seeing Sabrina, whom she still loves and trusts, being led away in handcuffs by the cops. With all that – and the decision to make the three central characters Black (as if Lifetime is celebrating Black History Month by putting Black actors through the usual paces of their formulae they previously reserved for white ones), though they are all what once called “high yellows,” and in a weird sort of internal racism within the African-American community they were widely respected and got the leads in “race movies” while darker-skinned Blacks were relegated to villains or comic-relief roles – Swim Instructor Nightmare is actually a nicely done movie. The director, Doug Campbell, has doing those sorts of things so long and yet there are some quite creative shots in there, as if his long-standing experience hasn’t jaded him. And the acting is generally good, even though I was too busy drooling over CJ Hammond to care whether he could act or not and I liked the fact that as the thankless part of the wife, Shellie Sterling got to be at least as sexy as Sydney Hamm and got a lot of skin-tight jeans to show it off. One roots for Ellen to get over her problem and she and Parker to stay together!

"Live from Lincoln Center:" New York Philharmonic Tribute to Stephen Sondheim (New York Philharmonic, WNET, PBS, originally aired December 31, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the Lifetime movie and taking a half-hour break because the local PBS station was showing a 90-minute episode of All Creatures Great and Small (actually an hour-long episode stretched out via those god-awful pledge breaks – as I’ve said before, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich advocated zeroing ont PBS’s funding by saying those pledge breaks were worse than ordinary commercials, he had a point – and even more when PBS started selling corporate donors what they called “enhanced underwriting opportunities,” i.e. commercials, and often the same commercials these companies ran on for-profit stations), I got to see a quite remarkable concert video showcasing the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s 2019 concert (i.e., three months before COVID-19 changed the world) on Stephen Sondheim.

When I saw their previous New Year’s concert celebrating the musical legacy of Marvin Hamlisch in 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-york-philharmonic-new-years-eve.html) and wondered why they hadn’t done Sondheim instead. Well, praise be, they not only had done Sondheim, they had done him while Sondheim was still alive (he didn’t die until November 26, 2021, at the age of 91) even though the legendarily introverted Sondheim didn’t show up for the concert. The performances included mostly overtures and so-called “orchestral suites” from Sondheim’s works, including the 1962 musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (the first time Sondheim wrote the music, not just the words, to a show, duplicating Frank Loesser’s similar transition from librettist to composer) which opened the concert. The Forum music was arranged by Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin, who had done similar work for West Side Story (1957), with lyrics by Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein.

Then host Bernadette Peters, who boasted that she’d been in Broadway productions of five Sondheim musicals, did a snatch of the big song from one of them – the Witch’s song from Into the Woods – before yielding the stage to the Philharmonic, who under the baton of Alexander Gemignani (son of Paul Gemignani, who frequently conducted Sondheim’s scores on Broadway; Paul is still alive and reportedly gave his son lessons on how this music should go) performed an orchestral suite from Into the Woods. This time the suite was arranged by one of the names I love to hate, Don Sebesky, who in the 1960’s and 1970’s was often called upon to arrange sappy orchestral backgrounds for major jazz musicians like guitarist Wes Montgomery. Sebesky’s work here was unexceptional but acceptable – he showcased the original tunes well, which is what this type of arrangement is supposed to do. Afterwards came another orchestral suite, this time from a much-maligned Sondheim show, Assassins, a musical depiction of both successful and would-be Presidential assassins that got a lot of hissy-fit comments from reviewers. This was arranged by Michael Starobin, who had also orchestrated the original songs for Broadway, and he did a good job with the deliberately old-timey feel of the music, including incorporating a solo banjo.

Then came a song written for the original production of Sondheim’s piece Company, “Multiples of Amy’s” (I’m guessing at the punctuation), which was deleted (along with another song Sondheim wrote for that spot in the show) and replaced with the familiar “Being Alive.” (For a quite good performance of “Being Alive” without the added clutter of the show’s spoken dialogue, check our Chris Colfer’s version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lbfzzjybU.) I’d rather have heard the song with Sondheim’s original lyrics – that would have given us a better point of comparison with the song that replaced it, if nothing else – except for the terrible singer they got as the show’s guest star (more on her later). The next items on the program were an orchestral suite from Sweeney Todd (also arranged by Don Sebesky) and an instrumental piece called “Night Waltz” from A Little Night Music (done by the show’s original arranger, Jonathan Tunick). The Sweeney Todd suite was well done and showcased the principal songs (“Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Not While I’m Around” and the patter song “A Little Priest”) and the waltz was really lovely, half a traditional waltz that might have been composed by Johann Strauss, Jr. and half the twists put that style through by Richard Strauss (no relation) in his Vienna-set opera Der Rosenkavalier.

Then the orchestra played three songs from one of Sondheim’s most difficult and enigmatic musicals, Follies – a reunion of old cast members of the Weissmann Follies just before the theatre they performed in is about to be demolished and turned into a parking lot. One was the overture done by the orchestra alone, and the other two were songs sung by the concert’s guest vocalist, Katrina Lenk. She has an imposing list of credits on her Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Lenk – including a stint in a revival of Sondheim’s Company in which she played a gender-reassigned version of the male central lead (it was a victim of the COVID-19 lockdown but went back into previews in November 2021) – but I didn’t like her. The songs she sang from Follies were “Losing My Mind” and “Could I Leave You?” – the latter an exercise in Sondheim’s lack of sentimentality: the singer, a woman who has married a rich man, ponders how much she could to soak him for if she divorced him, and her final couplet is, “Could I leave you? Yes. Would I leave you? Guess.”

But Lenk totally misphrased and misunderstood the songs: “Losing My Mind,” which should be sung in almost hushed tones, got the full Broadway-belt treatment, and “Could I Leave You?” totally missed the irony in Sondheim’s lyric and just made the woman sound mean. Besides, though Lenk was born in the U.S. (in Chicago, though she doesn’t say when), her Eastern European accent was very noticeable both in the overall timbre of the voice and in her phrasing. Though she has more of a conventional voice than Nico, I couldn’t help but think, “If Nico had made a standards album, this is what it would have sounded like,” just as the 1964 record Lionel Hampton made with Japanese singer Miyoko Hoshino had me thinking, “If Yoko Ono had made a standards album, this is what it would have sounded like.”

After the near-disaster of Katrina Lenk’s performances the concert returned to “orchestral suite” territory with an arrangement of the songs from the show I consider Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sunday in the Park with George (a statement about art and life whose first act was a dramatization of the real-life French pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s creation of his most famous painting, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” and whose second act is about a modern multi-media artist who learns he is Seurat’s great-grandson). I’ve loved the show since I watched the original PBS production of it with the original leads, Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, and when I showed it to my late partner John Gabrish he not only loved it, too, he mentioned seeing the original painting in the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. Once again the original arranger, Michael Starobin, did the suite, and he did an excellent job, including the effect Sondheim created of having little bursts of staccato notes to simulate the style of Seurat’s paintings.

After that there was an encore – the overture to Merrily We Roll Along, a show based on a play by George S. Kaufman from 1934 which told the story of a love relationship backwards, starting with the couple already broken up and ending with them in the first throes of love. It hadn’t been a hit for Kaufman and his collaborator, Moss Hart, in 1934 and it wasn’t a hit for Sondheim and his book writer, George Furth, in 1981 either. The overture was a fun piece, at least, but the Sunday in the Park with George suite was really the right way to end the show. It is Sondheim’s deepest and richest score, witn a minimum of comic-relief songs showing how clever he was and a maximum of raw emotion and power – and though the PBS telecast with the original leads is the definitive statement of this show, the orchestral arrangement did justice to it and celebrated the lyrical beauties (not words often associated with Stephen Sondheim) of its melodies.

Line Sisters (Big Dreams Entertainment, Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Line Sisters, about the Alpha Beta Omega (interesting of writers Jasmine S. Greene and Scott Mullen to pick the first two and the last letters of the Greek alphabet) sorority – all the sisters are Black but it’s unclear whether it’s a sorority at an historically Black college or just a Black sorority at a mixed-race school, maybe because the Greene-Mullen script ignores any reference to the “education” part of “higher education”). For the first half-hour it’s a depiction of a hazing ritual at the sorority, with one pledge, Brianne (Morgan Alexandria), thrown out at the last minute because she’d claimed her mother had been a member of Alpha Beta Omega when she hadn’t been. She’d pledged the sorority twice but hadn’t made it in because it required a final payment she doesn’t have. So the “Fantastic Five” become the “Fantastic Four”: Valerie (LeToya Luckett-Walker), Cassandra (Kierra “Kiki” Sheard), Dominique (Drew Sidona) and Simona (Ta’Rhonda Jones).

The woman leading the initiation ceremony is Jodi, and for the final test, the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (not one Paul Simon ever thought of writing a song about), Jodi explains that the pledges will merely be required to drink from a chalice containing filthy water from a river. But Simone insists that she wants the “real ABO experience” of swimming to a buoy in the river and back. Jodi protests that the ABO sisters have decided that would be dangerous and have stopped doing it, but Simone insists on going into the water and daring her three colleagues to do so – even though Cassandra can’t swim. Jodi sees Cassandra start to drown and dives into the water to save her; Cassandra survives but Jodi drowns as an apparent accident. The sorority sisters cover up the incident, and the next time we see the sisters it’s 15 years later. Cassandra is going through a hotly contested divorce from her husband Mitch (Marland Burke), and Valerie is her attorney in the case. (She’s also dyed her hair blonde, which makes me want to send a memo to LeToya Luckett-Walker: unless your name is Beyoncé, if you’re a Black woman you aren’t going to look good with blonde hair.)

The four are invited to a weekend party at a lavish mansion which one of them thinks looks too much like a plantation house for her to feel comfortable there. Only mysterious things start happening: the food they’ve ordered for delivery twice turns out to be full of live worms (there’s a funny gag on the part of director Tailiah Breon that the live animals don’t look that different from the noodles they were expecting as part of their order), their kitchen sink is stopped full of bleach water and all their sorority clothes are ruined, one of the girls finds a live rattlesnake in her bed and ultimately Cassandra is locked in the restroom from the outside and ends up covered in piss and/or shit before another woman finally opens the door and lets her out. I guessed well before the movie ended that Mitch, who was seen stalking the girls, was a red herring and the real culprit is … well, having missed the first few minutes I didn’t recall her name but I was thinking, “Oh, it’s going to be the girl who was thrown out of the sorority for lying about her mom,” and indeed that’s who it turned out to be.

Even before the big revelation (which wasn’t a surprise to me) I was disliking Line Sisters because I didn’t like any of the women; quite frankly I was getting tired of them and almost wishing they’d be knocked off one by one à la Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, from which the writers obviously cribbed a lot (notably the mystery surrounding the invitations that bring the characters to the isolated place the villain has chosen for their comeuppance). Instead they’re not only still around at the end but Valerie is shown “one year later” in a maternity ward after she and her husband (whom we don’t see until the final scene) nave their child at last following the usual and quite tired jokes about how she’s become too much the career woman to have a baby. There’s also a tease shot in which we see an orderly pushing a cart through the hospital and at first we’re led to believe it’s Brianne – until Tailiah Breon brings her camera closer and we see it isn’t.

Line Sisters is one of those Lifetime movies that is just too predictable for its own good, and if Tailiah Breon is a woman (I’m guessing that’s her gender even though there is no photo on the imdb.com page for her, or him) she’s not one of Lifetime’s better “finds” for a woman director. And as much as I’ve ridiculed the Lifetime writers for their usual practice of making the Black characters foils for the white villainesses, I have a lot more sympathy for this than for the writers who make Blacks the prime characters but render them so obnoxious and dull I wish they would go back to stories with white protagonists!

2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies (International Olympic Committee, NBC-TV, aired February 4, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5:10 p.m. I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China (formerly Peking, and still referred to as such in French). The commentaries were in the official languages of the International Olympic Committee, English and French, plus the official language of the host country, which in this case is Mandarin Chinese since when Mao Zedong took over in 1949 he issued a decree declaring that Mandarin be the official language of China, presumably to avoid the linguistic confusion that has beset India and kept English as a second language through much of India’s politics and commerce. The 2022 Winter Olympics are occurring at a fraught moment in the political contest between democracy and authoritarianism, the latter represented not only by China’s president-for-life, Xi Jinping, but by Russian President Vladimir Putin,who was there as Xi’s honored guest; reportedly the first time in two years Xi has hosted a foreign head of state on Chinese soil. Ironically, while former (and possibly future) U.S. President Donald Trump focused his re-election campaign on the alleged threat from China and counted Russia as an ally, Xi and Putin are forming an alliance and offering massive grants to Third World countries essentially to buy their support in the new Cold War.

There were a couple of interesting political commentators, a former Wall Street Journal reporter (who looked white) and an Asian woman, a Chinese émigré who has published a book about the politics behind the Chinese system of writing. Though one of Mao’s innovations was the Pinyin writing system, which adopts the Roman alphabet we’re all familiar with, Chinese still make “alphabetical” lists based on the number of strokes needed to write the first character of their name. Thus, as the various nations participated in the opening parade, they were called in seemingly random order reflecting the ease with which their countries’ names can be written in characters, with the lowest numbers first. The commentators also warned us to expect some great political message to be slipped into the opening ceremonies, and it duly came; The Chinese flag tiat will fly over the main stadium was carried en masse by members of all 56 Chinese ethnic groups, and there were two torchbearers to light the Olympic flame, one of whom was a Uighur, a Muslim moniroty in China whom the current government has been accused of targeting for genocide. That, along with the recent crackdowns on political protest and press freedom in Hong Kong, was the reason U.S. President Joe Biden and several leaders in his administration gave in ordering a so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Olympics. In practice, that means that neither Biden nor anyone else from the U.S. government would attend the ceremonies, to which the Chinese probably thought, “Good riddance.”

The U.S. is in the middle of a worldwide clash between democracy and authoritarians, and unlike in the last previous clash, World War II, the democracies are losing. Of the three main countries that united to fight in the war, Russia and China are already dictatorships and the U.S. is set to become one as soon as President Trump (or a hand-picked successor which will continue not only the same policies but the same visceral contempt for the rule of the people) and the Republicans retake the presidency and Congress. (Yesterday the Republican National Committee censured Congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the committee investigating the Januar6 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling the attack itself “legitimate political discourse.”) It comes as no surprise that the Chinese government is using the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to generate support for their authoritarian policies since that’s what all this elaborate pageantry was invented for in the first place: it was cooked up by the Nazis, the real ones, wneh the 1936 Games were awarded to them. (Both the Winter and the Summer Olympics that year were held in Germany, the Summer Games in Berlin and the Winter Games in the well-established ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss had his winter home.)

At first the Nazis were ready to cancel the Olympics since the whole principle of friendly competition between nations was anathema to the spirit of Nazism, but Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, quickly realized that hosting an Olympics was a good way of rehabilitating their nation’s image on the world stage. They ordered a temporary halt to the persecution of the Jews for the duration of the Games (which of course they ramped up again as soon as those pesky foreign correspondents went home) and they even let one Jewish athlete, a woman swimmer, onto the national team. It was also the Nazis who cooked up a lot of the rituals that have become obligatory to open the Olympics, including the idea of a torch being carried worldwide from the original site of the Games in ancient Greece to their modern-day home and the huge displays of neoclassical statuary that lined the stadium entrance. (One thing the Nazis were good at was putting on pageants.) And hosting an Olympics (two, actually) was also good for Nazi Germany’s long-term goal of conquering first Europe and then the entire world: training young men to be athletes would also give them the training and discipline to be soldiers in the upcoming world war Hitler intended to start. (Recently Vladimir Putin has ordered over 130,000 troops to the border with Ukraine and laid plans for a false-flag operation with corpses to simulate war casualties and actors dressed as Ukrainian soldiers, which is the same way Hitler started World War II by forcing German prisoners to dress in Polish army uniforms and smuggle then across the Polish border to launch a supposed “attack” the Germans would “retaliate” against. I predict that not only will Russia launch an invasion of Ukraine – possibly during the Olympics, the way Putin launched an invasion of Georgia during the previous Olympics he was hosting in Sochi – but the outcome will be a quick Russian victory the way Nazi forces similarly overran Poland.)

Besides the geopolitical controversies, there is also a quite different agenda in China now than there was the last time Beijing hosted an Olympics opening ceremony in 2008 (Beijing, as we were constantly reminded last night, is the only city in history to have launched both a Summer and a Winter Olympics), when China staged a massive celebration to impress the world and show their prowess on the stage. Today the political situation is very different – under Xi, China is turning inward and engaging in political repression – and also the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has complicated matters. Not only did nobody expect the pandemic to be going on this long (even I, a glass-half-empty kind of guy, didn’t expect the pandemic to last more than two years, partly because I expected the virus to evolve into a more benign form the way the flu did and partly because I was expecting that as soon as the vaccine were made available everybody, or almost everybody, would get it and there wouldn’t be this well-organized resistance campaign against it), but it also originated in China and thus the Chinese have suffered the blame for it. So there was a controversy surrounding the very idea of a gathering of people from all over the world, and one of the most heartbreaking segments of last night’s coverage was the segment, scored with Frank Sinatra’s version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (I hadn’t remembered that Sinatra had recorded that song!), on how the parents ald relatives were being denied the chance to see their kids compete after looking forward to that opportunity for years or even decades.

The actual opening ceremony was low-keyed, though there were enough pyrotechnics to remind us that China was the country that invented fireworks in the first place (they came up with gunpowder but used it only decoratively, and it was we in the West who first realized that it could be put in a metal tube and used to fire a projectile that could kill people). The main themes were snowflakes, used as a symbol of unity both around the world and specifically within China; and the number 24, which represented both the 24th Winter Olympics and the 24 months of the traditional lunar new year by which the Chinese figure out what year it is. Since the start of the Olympics happened to coincide with the Chinese new year (this being the Year of the Tiger in Chinese astrology), the 24 seasons into which the Chinese divide the calendar became a key theme of the ceremony. Along the way we heard a lot of singing, some in Chinese from massed choruses and some in English by solo singers plowing their way through inspirational songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – though I couldn’t make out any of the words to “Hallelujah” besides the title and they might have just been singing that one word over and over.

At one point the 200 or so choristers formed a circle around the ice of the Bird’s Nest stadium (built for the 2008 Summer Games, and whose architect later became a dissident and ultimately defected to the U.S.) and both my husband Charles and I were reminded of a Busby Berkeley musical number and also of Herman Mankiewicz’ comment about Cecil B. DeMille: “It just goes to show what God could do if He had money.” (Of course I also mentioned my joke about how Beyoncé’s videos look like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.) These opening ceremonies weren’t a patch on the most spectacular ones I’ve seen – those would be the ones in Lillehammer, Norway, with both bad and good vettas (local spirits) fighting it out for control. It also didn’t live up to the one in Vancouver, where “Hallelujah” was sung by native Canadian k. d. lang and she turned in one of the three best performances of the song (along with Leonard Cohen’s and Jeff Buckley’s), but it was still a nice segment and a good kick-off to the next two weeks.