33rd Annual National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, WETA, PBS, aired May 29, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the 33rd annual Memorial Day concert on KPBS, and with the pandemic more or less over (at least people are pretending tt’s over even though the SARS-CoV-2 virus is continually evolving new “varnants” and “sub-variants” and the case rate, at least as measured by PCR tests of viral sequences, is going up again), this year’s event was once again held in public on the Capitol mall. The “concert” was the usual mix of musical selections and extended tributes to various members of the U.S. armed services, portrayed by actors even though the original people, if still alive, were there – and if they weren’t, they had surviving descendants or other family members representing them. The most moving story told during the program was the lives of Mark and Carol Graham and their three children, sons Jeffrey and Kevin and daughter Melanie. With the show’s regular co-host, Joe Mantegna, playing Mark and actress Jean Smart playing Carol, the show told the story of two lifelong military careerists who met, fell in love, married and had children while part of the Army, moving as ordered from one barracks community to another. When their kids were grown up, naturally they enlisted too – only Kevin was diagnosed with clinical depression, went off his medications and committed suicide. Eight months later, their other son, Jeffrey, was blown up when his unit in Iraq hit an improvised explosive device and he was almost literally blown to bits. The explosion severed both his legs and one hand, and though the medics did the best they could he didn’t make it. The Graham parents at least got some comfort in that he’d saved the lives of the other members of his unit – Jeffrey and one either servicemember took the brunt of the explosion so the others in the unit survived and eventually got home safely.

The concert actually led off with one of its most impressive and inspiring musical segments: “The Star-Spangled Banner” as sung by recording artist Pia Toscano, who placed ninth in the 2016 season of American Idol. Most singers who get called on to sing the national anthem on shows like this pretty much plod through it. Not Toscano: she ornamented this song in the style of a gospel singer and added extra high notes to a song that’s already notoriously difficult to sing – and she treated the closing number, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the same way. The next selection was “This Is Our Country,” performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who’s been the conductor of these concerts ever since the first one, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009) while the show’s hosts, Mantegna and Gary Sinise, were introduced. The next segment was a tribute to the late General Colin Powell – a “regular” on this show since its inception in 1991 – delivered by Black actor Dennis Haysbert, who fortunately narrated the tribute in third person and didn’t actually try to play Powell. (There were certainly enough film clips of the real Colin Powell, so he was present virtually.)

The next musical selection was, olf all things, “The Impossible Dream” from the Don Quixote musical, Man of La Mancha, sung by Alfie Bowe, who was billed as a tenor but whose voice sounded like it was on the cusp between tenor and baritone to me; only his upper-register flourishes towards the end really sounded “tenorish.” After that we got actress Mary McCormick – considerably, shall we say, stouter than she was when she played the lead federal witness-protection agent on the show In Plain Sight – delivering a heartfelt and needed tribute to the women who served in World War II, bvoth as defense workers and actual enlistees in the WAC’s and WAVE’s. McCormick’s segment was followed by one of the reasons I wanted to watch this, singer Rhiannon Giddens (who’s part African-American, part Native American and part white) doing a song whose title appeared to be “You Can Count on Me.” Rhiannon Giddens is one of my favorite currently active singers, and I fell in love with her ever since she did a rewrite of the Johnny Cash-Johnny Horton song “The Vanishing Race” for Look Again to the Wind, the multi-artist tribute to Cash’s 1964 LP Bitter Tears, his concept album about the oppression of NIative Americans. The original song had lamented the passing of the American Indian (actually America’s Native populations were subjected to systematic genocide that Adolf Hitler actually cited as a model for what he was doing to the Jews), but Giddens added powerful new verses that defiantly said that Native Amercans haven’t gone anywhere, that they are still very much a part of this country’s body politic despite the best efforts of white Americans to destroy them. Though Giddens’ contribution to this show wasn’t at the level of some of the songs she’s recorded on her own, it was welcome.

The next segment was a tribute to Abraham Lincoln occasioned by the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial, and an acknowledgment of nine past recipients of the Medal of Honor’ America’s highest military decoration. The song that followed was a rather stentorian ballad by country singer Norm Lewis called “He’s My Hero. After that Gary Sinise narrated a tribute to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the resulting wars in Afghanistan ahd Iraq, which led into the Joe Mantegna/Jean Smart tribute to Mark and Carol Graham and their bravery in the face of the loss of both their sons. This was followed by another country ballad, this one by Craig Morgan called “The Father, My Son and the Holy Ghost.” (Notice the pronoun instead of the article before “Son”) After that a member of the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets played “Taps,: and I noticed that though he was playing a standard trumpet with valves, he was playing it bugle-style and not touching the valves at all. The next singer was Broadway star Lea Salonga, who performed “Our Prayer” and sang it considerably better than the person who had the hit on it, Andrea Bocelli; her interpretation was refreshingly free of all Bocelli’s lachrymose affectations.

Then it was time for the obligatory medley of all the U.S. Armed Forces’ songs, which made an interesting contrast to the version I’d heard “live” earlier that afternoon by organist Alison Luedecke and singer Amy Mein at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park: the Navy was represented by the familiar “Anchors Aweigh” iknstead of the less well known Navy hymn “Eternal Father,” and the Army song was sung with the revised lyrlc, “The Army goes rolling along,” instead of the original “The caissons go rolling along” (caissons, which the Army doesn’t use anymore, were small wagons used to transport cannonballs to artillery gunners so they could use them). The show closed with a speecy by General Mark A. Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who probably performed his greatest service to America when, after he was tricked into marching along with then-President Donald Trump through a park that had been deliberately cleared of protesters to participate in Trump’s photo-op holding a Bible in front of a church whose pastor hadn’t wanted him there, heroically resisted Trump’s later attempts to get the U.S. military involved in subverting the 2020 election), and Pia Toscano’s stellar version of “God Bless America.” Overall the National Memorial Day Concert is a lumbering beast of a show, half concert and half tribute – my husband Charles described the tribute segments as essentially commercials for war – and it’s not surprising that its list of sponsors includes major defense contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics who have a vested interest in keeping America at war. But the parts of it that do work are exalting and moving, and that’s why I keep watching it year after year even though I remain discomfited by the fact that this country needs a military (albeit one considerably smaller than the one we’ve got!).

The Spanish Cape Mystery (Republic, 1935)

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

After the National Memorial Day Concert KPBS announced that they would re-run it and then show a Great Performances episode on the recent revival of Stephen Sondheim’s classic 1970 musical Company, which left a gap in our TV-watching last night that I filled with a YouTube viewing of The Spanish Cape Mystery. Made by Republic Studios in 1935, this was the first film ever made to feature Ellery Queen, the fictional detective invented by authors Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee. To add to the verisimilitude of the stories, they used “Ellery Queen” not only as the name of their sleuth character but their joint pen-name for the books. The stars of this film are Donald Cook as Ellery Queen (he’s a reasonably attractive and personable leading man who’s quite effective in a role later played by Ralph Bellamy and William Gargan in a series of “B”’s for Columbia) and Helen Twelvetrees, an incredibly underrated performer, in the lead role of Stella Godfrey, heiress to a major fortune whose father is understandably wary of every man who pays her attention, suspecting them all of being gold-diggers.

It’s an attempt to do the sort of comedy-mystery MGM had just scored big with in The Thin Man the year before. It begins with Ellery Queen strutting his stuff and managing to nail a jewel thief who’s been detained by Ellery’s father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police Department (if Dannay and Lee ever gave him a first name, I don’t know what it is). A family friend, Supreme Court Judge named Macklin (Berton Churchill), is determined to take Ellery Queen on a vacation from New York to Spanish Cape, California and is determined to make sure he doesn’t get involved in any murder investigations while he’s on vacation. Needless to say, as soon as he gets to Spanish Cape the bodies start dropping, and eventually the culprit is found: a man who faked his own kidnapping to divert suspicion. He’s one of the potential heirs to a fortune left behind by Stella’s recently deceased aunt,and though the aunt left all her money to her “companion” (that’s the word used in the script, and I’m presuming it meant the sort of person Joan Fontaine was playing in the opening scenes of Rebecca: a woman paid to accompany an older, richer woman on her travels and help keep her amused), the Godfreys are confident of being able to break the will.

There’s also a local police official, Sheriff Moley (Harry Stubbs), who’s even dumber than the usual foils for the brilliant outside detective in films like these. Throughout the investigation he keeps fastening on the most obvious suspect and threatening to arrest him or her on the spoit – until the man or woman Moley is threatening conveniently exonerates himself by becoming the murderer’s next victim. The Spanish Cape Mystery is a reasonably competent thriller, directed by Lewis D. Collins – who doesn’t have any particular flair for this sort of film but at least keeps it moving – and adapted by Albert DeMond from one of the “Ellery Queen” books. The revelation of the murderer stretches credibility but at least doesn’t do the sort of taffy-pull with it a lot of the denouements of 1930’s mystery films did, and The Spanish Cape Mystery holds up as unpretentious entertainment even though it’s hardly a patch on The Thin Man, which had a better story source (Dashiell Hammett instead of Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee), a better director (W. S. Van Dyke) and a much better cast: as good as Helen Twelvetrees and Donald Cook are, Myrna Loy and William Powell they are not.

Great Performances: "Keeping 'Company' with Sondheim" (WNET, PBS, 2022)

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

Eventually my husband Charles and I watched the rather awkwardly titled episode “Keeping Company with Sondheim” on the PBS series Great Performances. Their record with Stephen Sondheim has been mixed – first-rate versions of his later musicals Sunday in the Park with George (to my mind’ Sondheim’s masterpiece) and Into the Woods along with a sad, inadequate version of Follies from a 1985 New York Philharmonic concert production. The Follies show was 90 minutes long and half of it was behind-the-scenes interviews and rehearsal footage, and 45 minutes of a very abbreviated version of the concert. This show centered around the revival of Company, Sondheim’s 1970 show set in the New York City of the time and dealing with a 35-year-old man named Bobby who, alone of his friends, has never had a serious relationship with a woman and certainly has never been married. The show takes place on the night of his 35th birthday party and contrasts his single state with the marital dysfunctions of his friends.

The show was originally done with a white lead, Dean Jones (mostly known as a Disney actor and star of The Love Bug and similar trifles), but for a 1995 revival they made Bobby Black and cast Boyd Gaines in the role. Later in 2006 they cast another person of color, Raúl Esparza (best known to me as the prosecutor on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in the immediate aftermath of Christopher Meloni’s departure, and to my mind the only genuinely sexy leading man they’ve had on the show since Meloni left). For a London West End revival in 2018 director Marianne Elliott asked Sondheim for permission to make two key gender changes in the cast: she asked to turn Bobby into a woman, Bobbie (played by Rosalie Craig on the West End and Katrina Lenk in the current Broadway production), and the character of Amy from a woman to a man, Jamie (Jonathan Bailey on the West End and Matt Doyle on Broadway). Elliott acknowledged there would be criticism, especially over her taking the song “Not Getting Married,” originally presented as a feminist anthem to independence, and giving it to a Gay man expressing his anxiety over the prospect of marrying his partner Paul. (In the current Broadway production Paul is played by Etai Benson, and the Great Performances show featured footage of them being interviewed together, and they showed off so strong a “couples vibe” I wondered if they’re a Gay couple in real life as well.)

The show inevitably brought up Stephen Sondheim’s own Gayness – as early as 1970 some critics ventured that maybe the reason Bobby hadn’t got married to a woman was that he was supposed to be Gay – and it struck me that Sondleim, like Noël Coward, looked on straight people as essentially lab rats, to be observed and studied without being taken all that seriously. I’ve long felt that some Gay artists (thougn defiinitely not all) tend to look on lie and love with that kind of cynical detachment, perhaps because being Gay or Lesbian removes you from the cycle of generations by which the human race reproduces itself. (It’s true that there are plenty of Gay or Lesbian parents – either of children they conceived before they definitively “came out,” ones they’ve adopted or brought into being via surrogacy or artificial imsemination – but it’s still an inescapable biological fact that you don’t get to be a parent by having sex with partners of your own gender.)

The show also ran headlong into the COVID-19 pandemic; Company had already got as far as public previews (the last stage before an official opening) when the axe fell in March 2020. Af first the cast members believed they would be delayed only for about two weeks or so; as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into over a year, the actors went into quarantine and the show didn’t actually open until November 2021, 17 months late. At least it opened in time for Stephen Sondheim to see it – he’s shown at the theatre for the first performance just 11 days before he died in his sleep at his Connecticut home at age 91. One of the actors described the eerie feeling of walking into the theatre once the ban on Broadway performances was lifted – and finding it exactly the same as he'd left it 17 months earlier.

Father Brown: "The Requiem for the Dead" (BBC Studios, 2022)

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

Last night I wanted to watch a couple of shows on KPBS, including a quite engaging Father Brown mystery, “The Requiem for the Dead,” in which a young man named Ned Hannigan (Michael Cooke) returns to the English village where years before he tried to run off with a teenage farm girl, Mary Banks, and killed her when she refused. Later Ned is himself found dead, and the principal suspects are the surviving members of Banks’ family, her father John (John Thomson), mother Nora (Penny Leyden) and brother Daniel (Tommy Garside). Father Brown (Mark Williams), an elderly parish priest who investigates murders in his spare time and thoroughly annoys the local cops by doing so, is of course convinced that there’s more to this case than meets the eye. He figures out that there are actually two Ned Harrigans – well, two Harrigans anyway, Ned and his identical twin brother Bryn Harrigan (John Cooke, who actually is Michael Cooke’s twin brother, though they look different enough I suspect the real Cookes are fraternal rather than identical), who despite having grown up in different homes – after their parents died Ned was taken in by a foster family while Bryn was left to fend for himself and had only sporadic guardians – have formed such a close bond as adults that they have stopped seeing themselves as two different people.

Father Brown learns this after he agrees to hear Ned’s confession – Ned pleaded guilty in court to murdering Mary Burke but has not settled his accounts with God – and he learns that the real Ned Harrigan is still alive and the man murdered in his place is actually Bryn. It was Bryn who really ran off with Mary Burke and killed her when she resisted him, and Ned falsely confessed to the crime and did a prison sentence for it to spare Bryn and protect him. Ned explains to Father Brown that he returned to the village where the original crime occurred to see if he could get Bryn to tell him what he had done with Mary’s body – understandably the surviving Burkes wanted to know her whereabouts so they could give her a proper funeral – and at the end Father Brown officiates at a joint memorial service for both Mary Burke and Bryn Harrigan, while the police accept Ned’s claim that he killed Bryn in self-defense after Bryn started choking him. I liked this show a lot better than the “Saints and Sinners” episode of Midsomer Murders Charles and I had watched previously, partly because it was only 45 minutes long and therefore didn’t had the time to create the confusing plethora of suspectrs and potential motives that weighted down the longer show.

While the gimmick of two people who are identical twins and therefore look almost exactly alike isn’t all that fresh or unique, writer Michelle Lipton uses it quite artfully here. She also creates an engaging character names Mrs. McCarthy (Sondra Cusack, who’d be good casting for a biopic of the current Queen), whose carefully curated flower bed is crushed under the wheels of a car being driven by the local police chief, Inspector Manony (Jack Deam) just as she’s about to enter it in the annual contest for best floral arrangement ini that particular part of England. Ultimately she gets a donation of flowers to replace the ones that were crushed, but she donates them to the church for the double funeral and says there’s always next year. The show was set, like tieFather Brown series in general, in the late 1940's, just after World War II, tough that's only visible in the late 1940's model cars the people drive and the brown woolen pants the proletarian male characters wear in this pre-jeans age.

The Rolling Stones: "A Bigger Bang" (Concert Productions International, WBC, TNA, Marcy Studios, Promotone; "Live" at Copacabaña Beach, Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, 2006)

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

After the Father Brown show KPBS ran a big pledge-break special featuring the 2006 edition of the Rolling Stones: core members Mick Jagger (vocals, and guitar on one song), Keith Richards and Ron Wood (guitars) and Charlie Watts (driums) nad a bunch of hired hands,including a full horn section and three backup singers, one of whom, Lisa Fischer, gets to sing the second vocal part on the Stones’ cover of “Night Time Is the Right Time” and totally explodes Jagger’s pretensions of being a soul singer. (Ray Charles, who had the original hit on this song even though his wasn’t the first version – Roosevelt Sykes had recorded it as early as 1937 and there are also previous versions by Big Bill Broonzy and Nappy Brown – could have more than held his own against Fischer. Mich Jagger, not so much.) The concert was held outdoors at Copacabaña Beach ini Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as part of a 90-show tour the Rolling Stones did in 2006, and according to the show’s announcers (who could well be exaggerating) drew almost a million people. It was also a nice memorial to drummer Watts, who had been with the tones for their entire existence as a band (so the Stones didn't go through the struggles of finding the right drummer the Beatles did!)and who played his last show with them in 2019, two years before his death.

I must say that in recent years the Rolling Stones have pretty much faded from my cultural radar screen; I first discovered them when my mother passed down to me a copy of the original 45 rpm of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” saying that she hadn’t liked it. I immediately clasped it to my bosom (metaphorically) and embraced it because it finally enabled me to complete the rite of passage of adolescence: embracing a piece of music your parents can’t stand and blasting it out every chance I could get. (My mom actually liked the Beatles before I did, and she also turned me on to Bob Dylan.) Alas, the Rolling Stones did their best work in the 1960’s, and I suspect the reason the quality of their songs fell off after 1970 was that the Beatles broke up and therefore were no longer around to keep the Stones artistically honest. In fact, the Stones’ career still follows in the wake of the Beatles’ (or what’s left of them): in 2019 Paul McCartney did a huge worldwide concert tour and the following year the Stones planned a mega-tour of their own to compete – only the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic intervened and so Mick Jagger didn’t get to do his spit-in-the-face tour to put McCartney in his place.

It still rankles me when I hear the Rolling Stones described as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time” – to me they don’t hold a candle to the Beatles as a creative recording act, even though the Beatles stopped touring in August 1966 (3 ½ years before they broke up, and one of the reasons for the breakup was that McCartney wanted to go back to performing “live” and the other three regarded that with all the appeal of a soldier already diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder being sent out on another tour of duty). My last encounter with the Stones’ music had been ordering two CD’s of the 1967 psychedelic album Their Satanic Majesties Request, one for a friend of ours who had bought the original LP (with the 3-D cover) in a thrift store but nad nothing to play it on, and one for me. It’s a bizarre and largely self-indulgent album, with two different versions of the song “Sing This All Together” (a normal version at the start of the album and a really long and rather pointless jam on the end of side one), though it has some lovely songs on it including “She’s a Rainbow” and “2000 Light Years from Home.” It was also, to put it politely, inspired by the Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview John Lennon expressed his irritation. Not only did it rankle him that the Beatles were portrayed as safe and cuddly, while the Stones were considered the bad boys of rock, he bluntly said, “Satanic Majesties is Sgt. Pepper and ‘We Love You’ (the non-LP single the Stones recorded at the same sessions) is ‘All You Need Is Love.’”

I’ve seen the Stones on stage three times – in 1969 (at the infamous Altamont show), 1972 and 1981 – and they are a spectacular live act even though I’ve seen better. I remember my mother and I watching a Stones appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1969 and she, who had apparently expected Jagger to be a sort of white James Brown, got incensed at how little he did on stage. “He doesn’t even dance! He just jumps!” my mom complained. Actually, I was impressed with how well Jagger jumped at this 2006 concert; despite all the years he’s lived (he was born July 26, 1943, which would have made him 63 when this concert took place) and all the physical abuse he’s put himself through, both natural and chemical, he came across as ini excellent shape. Certainly he looked better than his long-time collaborator Keith Richards, who looked like a stoned zombie – remember that he’s had his blood completely changed at least twice as a sort of high-expense instant cure for heroin addiction – and I had a hard time telling which guitarist was Richards and which was Ron Wood (another 1960’s veteran but one who was originally part of the Small Faces and didn’t become a Rolling Stone until 1975). I remember the last time I saw the Stones live Richards looked and sounded so “out of it” that it took him a minute or so to get into each song on which he had to play lead (whine on the newer songs Ron Wood was visibly playing lead); 25 years later he was in surprisingly good form.

The Stones raced through a set that in this TV version (once again, the PBS network persisted in this disgusting practice of abbreviating their music specials and then boasting during the pledge breaks that if you gave them a fair amount of money they would send you a set of two CD’s and a DVD containing the entire concert, not just the loss leader) consisted of 14 songs, mostly from their 1960’s heyday and their 1970’s not-quite-heyday-but-still-better-than-they’ve-been-since: “Jumping Jack Flash” (their obligatory opener), “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” “You Got Me Rockin’,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Wild Horses,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Night Time Is the Right Time” (the Stones’ only nod to their early years as a cover band for African-Amencan blues and R&B songs), “Miss You,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Sympathy for the Devil” (my all-time favorite Rolling Stones song, though since they were in Brazil I wish they’d recruited a local group to reproduce the samba percussion on the original record, which they didn’t), “Start Me Up,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Satisfaction” (their obligatory closer).

From their set list you can see that the Stones were going all-out for energy and power, neglecting the quieter and more lyrical parts of their repertoire; even the beautiful ballad “Wild Horses” was taken way too fast, and in “Tumbling Dice” I could hear Jagger dodging high notes he no longer has. This business of the Stones speeding up when they perform live was noticeable even from their very first live album, Got Live If You Want It (a notorious album because at least one song, “Fortune Teller,” was an early Stones demo crudely faked to sound live when it wasn’t) – they zipped through the opening song, “Under My Thumb,” at warp speed compared to the studio version, and that pattern persisted throughout the recording. (Jagger also showed off his limitations as a soul singer with a cover of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Much Too Long” that isn’t a patch on Otis’s own version from his Live in Europe LP.) It resulted in a show that was exciting and a lot of fun, but also just a bit wearing after a while, and one would expect “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band” to show off their quieter as well as their louder side. Then again, the title of the special (and the tour it was drawn from) was A Bigger Bang, and that essentially warned us what they would do!

Blue Bloods: "Reality Check" (Panda Productions, Inc., CBS-TV, originally aired December 3, 2021)

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

Yesterday at 10 p.m. I watched another compelling rerun of the CBS-TV series Blue Bloods, “Reality Check,” which for some reason has got a reputation as an uncritical rah-rah celebration of police work even though it’s a good deal more complicated than that. The conceit of Blue Bloods that one family, the Reagans, has dominated New York law enforcement for decades – the current police commissioner is Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, who as I’ve noted before really grew and matured as an actor once he lost his looks), the retired police commissioner is his dad, Henry Reagan (Len Cariou, the original Sweeney Todd in the 1974 premiere production of the Stephen Sondheim musical), and his sons Danny (Donnye Wahlberg)( and Jamie (Will Estes) are both cops, while his daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan) is a New York City prosecutor who in this episode is considering a run for district attorney. The political consultant she’s working with tells her that her decision to focus on her professional life to the exclusion of everything else, including her marriage (which broke up in divorce and her husband subsequently married someone else and had two children with her) will actually leave voters cold and she won’t win as long as she projects such a forbidding work-obsessed image. Erin plaintively protests that she’s “old-school,” and the consultant says, “If ‘old-school’ still won elections, that wouldn’t be a problem. But it doesn’t.”

Writers Siobhan Byrne O’Connor and Graham Thiel blend this plot line with the antagonism between Jamie’s wife Eddie (Vanessa Ray) – that’s right, a woman named Eddie – and the new police partner Jamie has assigned her, Luis Badillo (Ian Quinlan), whom she doesn’t like because she finds him too gung-ho, too macho and too reckless. In one scene, when they get called to a liquor store that’s being held up by three armed men, he insists on going in without waiting for backup and ultimately either kills or arrests the suspects, only Jamie chews him out for a course of conduct that could have put a lot more people at risk. It turns out that the detective is still grieving over the loss of his previous partner in action, and Jamie knows what that’s like because he too lost a partner on the job.

The third plot thread concerns a police informant, a cousin of the Reagans, who’s affiliated with the notorious “Treys” gang, who is supposed to be their money launderer but has lost a big chunk of their money – and not for the first time, either. The police, specifically Danny Reagan and Anthony Abatemarco (Steven R. Schimpa), wire him and arrange a meeting between him and Orlando Burns (Donny Burke), the hired killer the Treys have sent to “off” him if he doesn’t come up with the money – though when the informant does come up with the money (courtesy of the police, who have come up with the cash as part of a sting operation), the killer takes it but then tells the terrified informant that he may kill him anyway, just for fun. Only Anthony gets incensed when the informant tells the killer that he stole from his late grandmother to pay the Treys off the last time he owed them – including selling her prized women’s Rolex watch. (I didn’t know Rolex made watches for women, but I’m not really surprised.) Anthony actually starts beating up the poor guy right after the cops have confronted the Treys killer in a shoot-out and either kill or arrest the other members of the gang, and Danny has to pull him off.

The final plot concerns a decorated police officer who was forced to retire due to an injury sustained in the service, who forms an organization and starts putting out statements of sound clips from Frank Reagan taken wildly out of context and paired with video footage of riots and other disturbances, The idea behind the videos is to make Frank seem like way more of a hard-liner than he is, and in the process move him to the Right in terms of how he actually runs the department and in particular his use-of-force policies. As I’ve said before, Blue Bloods is considerably more complex than the simple rah-rah celebration of the police it’s frequently described (and denounced) as, and indeed it sometimes rivals the Law and Order franchise shows as nuanced depictions of law enforcement – even though the ultimate plot lines all too often follow the template of the good guy with guns foiling the bad guys with guns, and this feeds the mythos governing this society that enables both massacres like the ones in Buffalo and Uvalde and the ridiculous narrative being peddled about them by the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association.

Live at the Belly Up: Squirrel Nut Zippers (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University' PBS-TV, 2022)

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

After the Blue Bloods episode I watched a KPBS Live at the Belly Up show featuring the Squirrel Nut Zippers, a local San Diego band described on their Wikipedia page as playing swing and jazz. In fact, their Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_Nut_Zippers gives a surprisingly convoluted history of them, saying that they were formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1993 by James “Jimbo” Mathus (who was born and raised in Mississippi) and his then-wife, Katherine Whalen. When the couple broke up, so did the first edition of the band, and they didn’t reunite until 2007, after which they broke up again and didn’t re-reunite until 2016. Their current lineup features Mathus on lead vocals, guitar and amplified banjo, a violin player and singer who calls himself “Dr. Sick” (and he was easily the sexiest one of the crew, with his electrifying red pants and, midway through the show, he took off his shirt to reveal a T-shirt with a design that looked like a rib cage) and a woman singer named Cella Blue who sings with a thin, reedy voice but has the exuberance to fit in with the high-energy ensemble.

Mathus spoke for the band during the interstitial interview segments, and the band played through 15 songs – an unusually high number for a Live at the Belly Up episode even though this was not filmed at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, Instead it took place at a club in Little Italy, and Mathus encouraged his audience to get out of their seats and jump in time to the music. Mathus also mentioned the checkered upbringing he had, saying that his parents were musical and he played at being a musician since he was four. According to Mathus, he grew up in a really isolated part of Mississippi and he only gradually discovered the full range of American musical genres which he would fuse into the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ sound. He recalled that it was a big deal when his isolated community in Mississippi finally got access to the HBO premium cable TV channel (I’m probably one of the dwindling number of people who remembers that HBO originally stood for “Home Box Office”), and an HBO showing of the film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with the Ramones was his introduction to punk rock. A pity he didn’t perform a swing-jazz version of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” in his set; instead he performed 15 songs in the obligatory one-hour time slot, which indicates that he keeps the songs quite short and doesn't let his band engage in the kind of jamming in which other Live at the Belly Up artists have indulged..

Some of them were oldies I recognized from the classic jazz and swing eras – Milton Ager’s and Jack Yellen’s “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Walter Donaldson’s “You’re Driving Me Crazy” (which Cella Blue sang and included the song’s rarely heard verse, which she sang at a slow tempo before speeding up for the chorus) and Jelly Roll Morton’s ”Animuile Ball,” as well as a tango-flavored reworking of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” written in the 1960’s by Four Seasons songwriters Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe for a solo session bu the Four Seasons’ lead singer,Frankie Vally. These were mixed in with what I guess are originals by Mathus, possibly collaborations with his bandmates, in 1920’s and 1930’s style: “Lover’s Lane,” “Good Enough for Granddad,” “Wash Jones,” “La Grippe” (a satirical song about a new flu epidemic which Mathus wrote in 1994 and which became newly fresh and relevant at the height of COVID-19), “The Suits Are Picking Up the Bill,” an instrumental called “Memphis Exorcism,” two more Cella Blue vocal features called “It Ain’t You” and “Still Ballin’,” “Hell,” “Prince Nez” (another Cella Blue feature and a song with a cleverly punning title), and a finale, “Plenty More,” one of those pieces in which the singer assures his friend who’s just broken up with his (or her?) partner that iut;s O.K. because there are literally plenty more out there. It was sung by a quite good singer in a crooning style and featured a break in which the singer whistled, the way Bing Crosby and others did in the early 1930’s but which has become quite passé. All in all, it was a fun show featuring a band that is clearly out just to entertain – at which they are quite good.

Midsomer Murders: "Saints and Sinners" (Bentley Productions, ITV, PBS, 2016)

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

Yesterday at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a rerun of a 2016 episode of the British TV series Midsomer Murders, dealing with a fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England in which detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and a younger, cuter detective sergeant – here Charlie Nelson (Gwylim Lee), which my husband enjoyed since his name is Charles Nelson, investigate oddball murders that frequently involve some sort of big public event that the killer or killers are trying to sabotage for their own reasons. The episode we watched was called “Saints and Sinners” and deals with the annual festival of “Midsomer Cecily,” which honors a deceased martyr of 16th Century England who was standing up for Protestantism in the fiercely Roman Catholic era of so-called “Bloody Mary,” the daughter of Henry VIII who took the throne after the death of her younger half-brother Edward VI and sought to exterminate any challenges to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy she had inherited from her mother, Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. For years the local vicar, Rev. Peter Canby (Malcolm Sinclair), has been doing a land-office business exhibiting the alleged remains of the martyr Cecily Milson, which are on display in the local church and around which an annual “Cecily Day” festival is held.

Only Peter Canby’s brother, historian Christopher Canby (Adan Gillen), is convinced that the bones on display in Peter’s church aren’t those of the rean Cecily Milson, so he invites an archaeological team to do a “dig” on the grounds of the former Milson estate to see if they can excavate the remains of the real Cecily. The leader of this dig is Zoe Dyer (Kim Virhana), who announces to her team that she’s found Cecily’s real bones and can prove it. To celebrate she marches her team to the local bar and offers to buy drinks for everybody, only to find her generosity angrily rejected by the townspeople, who are making money from the Cecily Milson festival and don’t want its authenticity questioned by a team of scientists or anyone else. Later Zoe goes out to the dig site with a bottle of champagne, intending to meet someone – she’s married to fellow archaeologist Alex Dyer (Jonathan Aris) but is given to extra-relational flings with some of her younger, hotter, hunkier assistants, and at the moment the flame she wants to haul her ashes is Jared Horton (Ralf Little). Instead she literally gets buried alive when an unseen assailant shoves her into the burial site, then uses a steam shovel literally to bury her alive. She is knocked unconscious by the force of the blow, and though she at least partially comes to later it’s too late to save her from the relentless onslaught of the dirt.

Later her husband Alex is killed when a tombstone is dropped onto him, and still later Christopher Canby, the historical researcher who led the Dyers to the dig site in the first place, is literally stabbed in the back with a 16th century pike just as he’s on the phone to a book publisher saying he has a sensational scoop that will make a best-seller. It seems that when the Milsons were dragged into prison and Cecily was tortured to death while her parents fled to France (not exactly the most hospitable place in Europe for Protestants fleeing religious persecution, either; remember the massacre of the Huguenots in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572), they collected their belongings, including quite a lot of gold jewelry. They buried the treasure somewhere on the estate where the modern-day archaeologists are digging up the remains of the real Cecily Milson. Most of the archaeologists are convinced the “treasure” is a myth, but a so-called “nighthawk” – an unscrupulous person who brings a metal detector to archaeological sites in search of valuables – named Dexter Ingram (Stefano Braschi) has found the clasp with which the treasure box was fastened, itself solid gold and verified as authentic because it’s shown on a contemporary painting of the original Cecily Milson.

So the treasure exists after all, and after a long period of being embroiled in other intrigues – including the adulterous affair between Rev. Peter Corby’s Black associate pastor, Bartholomew Hines (Kingsley Ben-Adir), and Rhiannon Sawney (Pippa Nixon), a white married woman (we do get a nice, reasonably hot soft-core porn scene between them even though they were fully clothed and so I didn’t get any of the color contrasts of skin on skin that usually excite me about interracial sex scenes), and the murder of the previous pastor in 2002 or 2003 of which Rniannon’s husband Noah (Edward MacLiam) may have been implicated – some valuable, if modern, precious-metal pieces from the church’s altar are found during the course of this story – ultimately the police deduce that all the killings have something to do with the treasure. They’re ready to arrest Peter Corby for the murder of his brother, whom he’d long hated, but in the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Penny Henderson (Julia Sawalha), a research assistant on the dig, and her motive is to eliminate rival claimants to the treasure, to which she las a legal right because she’s the last surviving descendant of the original Milson family. She tries to hold someone hostage but eventually the police talk her down and arrest her – and also arrest Rev. Peter Corby for fraud.

One of the key things about Midsomoer Murders is that the cops almost never arrest just one person; instead, ikn the course of their investigation, other crimes come to light, so even if the poiice can’t arrest someone for murder they can stilel arrest them for something. – in Peter’s case for fraud. Midsomner Murders is a consisteltly interestng show even though the writers (here, Lisa Holdsworthy) tend to overdo the sheer number of suspects and make it hard to keep track of all of them. The series as a whole has a kind of pastoral gentility relatively common in British mysteries, though American whodunits generally are a lot more in-your-face about violence and the darker sides of human nature.

The Benson Murder Case (Paramount, 1930)

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

When my husband Charles came home from work we watched a YouTube video post of The Benson Murder Case, third and last in the series of movies made by Paramount based on the first three Philo Vance novels, with William Powell starring as Vance. As I’ve noted in previous posts about this series, “Philo Vance” was the brainchild of author Willard Huntington Wright, though he wrote the Vance stories under the pseudonym “S. S. Van Dine” because it combined the two things Wright hoped he’d get to do more of if the Vance novels were commercially successful (which they were), eat (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). He published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case and The Benson Murder Case, in a simgle book before he lengthened each one and republished them as separate novels. The Benson Murder Case was actually the first one published, in 1926 – which is somewhat surprising because the plot as presented in the movie, adapted by The Racker playwright Bartlett Cormack from “Van Dine”’s book, makes the 1929 stock market crash an integral part of the story.

Indeed, the opening scene is a quite effectively dramatized montage depiction of the crash and the Great Depression it kicked off, complete with images of falling stock prices literally melting across the screen (anticipating by nine years the marvelous montage of melting ticker tape machines montage director Don Siegel concocted for the 1939 Warner Bros. gangster film The Roaring Twenties). The plot deals with stockbroker Anthony Benson (Richard Tucker – no, not the later opera singer), who sells out all his clients when they don’;t respond to his margin calls – a feature of stock buying in the 1920’s in which people were allowed to buy stocks with only a small payment up front and expected to come up with the rest of the price when the stocks rose in value. Then the market crashed, the stocks stopped rising and started falling, and the brokers who held the stocks on margin had the legal right to sell then for whatever they could get, while the customers were left literally with nothing.

Needless to say, since The Benson Murder Case is a mystery, this leaves a lot of people with the motive to murder Benson – which indeed happens on the pruverbial dark and stormy night to which Benson has inexplicably invited a lot of people who have every reason to kill him. Among them are Paula Banning (May Beatty); her gigolo, Adolph Mahler (Paul Lukas, who five years later played Philo Vance himself in MGM’s The Casino Murder Case, with the young Rosalind Russell as his co-star; MGM had originally planned the film for William Powell and Myrna Loy as a follow-up to the 1934 smash hit The Thin Man, only Powell served notice that now that he had played Dashiell Hammett’s Nick Charles, he never wanted to play Philo Vance again); Fanny Del Rey (the marvelous Natalie Moorhead), the woman Adolph is cheating on Paula with; and Harry Gray (William “Stage” Boyd – he’s only “William Boyd” here because this was before the other William Boyd, the one who played Hopalong Cassidy, got fired by mistake for violating the morals clause in his contract; he was a victim of mistaken identity and suffered for the antics of this William Boyd, so he sued ahd won a settlement that,m among other things, required the bad William Boyd to bill himself as “William ‘Stage’ Boyd” in all his subsequent films, of which there was only one – a serial called The Lost City – before his drinking, drugging and womanizing caught up with him and led to his death).

The moment Harry Gray comes on, presents his credentials as a psychiatrist and tells Philo Vance that he can only solve murders in which the killer creates an elaborate ruse to cover the crime instead of just going in and killing the person without fuss, it became obvious that Gray would turn out to be Benson’s killer – and indeed he does. “Van Dine” actually anticipated Raymond Chandler’s criticism of elaborate mystery stories with complicated and implausible murder methods, and in oarticular the Vance novels as well as ones by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Chandler said that any real homicide cop would tell you that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer tried an elaborate scheme to cover it up, and the hardest were the ones in which the killer and victim were best friends until moments before one killed the other. Alas, Gray not only kills Benson, he does not do so straightforwardly Instead he rigs an elaborate scheme to make Benson’s body fall down a flight of stairs in the house so he can have the murder discovered a few minutes after it took place, thus giving himself time to set up an alibi among the guests. Vance figures out that Gray shot Benson and then rigged a piece of twine and set it on fire so when the twine pulled past Benson’s body, it would release it so it would fall down the stairs the way Gray wanted it to instead of when Gray actually killed him, and he used a firecracker to simulate the sound of a bullet to make it seem like the shot was fired just before the body fell down, when really Gray had equipped a silencer-equipped derringer to commit the murder minutes before the body fell.

Despite the ludicrous nature of the murder mechanism, The Benson Murder Case is actually a quite good thriller, creatively directed by Frank Tuttle (who had also done the sound version of The Canary Murder Case – which had originally been shot as a silent by Malcolm St. Clair, only by the time St. Clair had finished it the bottom had dropped out of the market for silent films – and The Greene Murder Case), who used quite a few oblique camera angles and proto-noir half-lit shots to enliven what otherwise could have been a dull and talky film. It’s also nicely acted, though Paul Lukas seems stuck up as usual and May Beatty has just one good moment, when she watches Natalie Moorhead’s pursuit of available male affections in all directions and recalls how in her younger years she had the looks to do that as well. But the duel of wits between William Powell and William “Stage” Boyd is nicely played, and the movie as a whole is almost as good as The Canary Murder Case and considerably better than the deadly-dull The Greene Murder Case – indeed, there are sequences here that anticipate Tuttle’s later films noir, including the marvelous and underrated 1946 Monogram film Suspense.

Happy Days (Fox Film Corporation, 1930)

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

With all the gloom and doom in the news last night, when my husband Charles asked if we could watch a movie I looked for pure escapism and found it in Happy Days, a 1930 musical from William Fox’s studio before it was absorbed by 20th Century in 1935 and more recently by Disney. The date is listed as 1929 on imdb.com, but the film itself clearly bears the copyright date of 1930. It was directed by Benjamin Stoloff from a script by Sidney Lanfield (later a director himself) and Edwin J. Burke, and its plot consists of a half-hour of setup in which Margie (Marjorie White), ward of show-boat owner Col. Billy Batcher (Charles E. Evans) abd sort-of girlfriend of Batcher’s grandson Dick (Richard Keene), learns that Batcher’s show boat is stranded in Mobile because a county sheriff there has attached the boat for a bill of $700 and change the captain owes. Having heard that a number of the world’s greatest stars, including Will Rogers, Walter Catlett, Victor McLaglen and El Brendel, got their starts on Col. Batcher’s show boat, Margie hits on the bright idea of going to New York, telling them that Col. Batcher needs their help, and bringing them down to Memphis, Tennessee for a major benefit that will save the show boat.

There’;s a great scene in which Margie disguises herself as a page boy to crash the all-male environs of the Stage & Screen Club, where the big stars (the male ones, anyway) hang out. Though it’s hard to believe Marjorie White’s FTM drag would have fooled anybody (the rear shots make her womanly hips all too obvious), and she keeps forgetting to drop her voice into a convincing male register, but in the end she’s only “outed” when, as a prank, one of the actors tells her to interrupt Tom Patricula (playing himself, like most of the rest of the cast) while he’s playing pool. The real Patricola gives the supposedly male “page” a back-handed slap, and while she escapes relatively uninjured, the blow knocks her page-boy’s cap off her head and reveals her true gender. There are also some cute bits of some of the Fox stars at the time, including Will Rogers trying to get some of the others to spend the weekend at his ranch and Warner Baxter doing card tricks. Eventually Margie is able to round up the big stars to come to Memphis for the benefit, and the rest of the film – about an hour’s worth – is a revue during which the stars perform their turns. Oddly they’re presented in the form of a minstrel show, and the performers wear blackface while they’re sitting in the chorus but suddenly appear white when they actually start their songs and/or dances – an effect I’m presuming was done with the same mix of colored lights,gels and filters with which Cecil B. DeMille made Moses’ sister Miriam develop leprosy on screen in the 1923 silent version of The Ten Commandments and Rouben Mamoulian did Fredric March’s transitions from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in his 1932 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic.

The show is even introduced by a song called “Minstrel Memories” sung by George MacFarlane, one of the two interlocutors (whiteface performers who MC’d a minstrel show and introduced the blackface acts, many of whom got laughs from their mangling of the word “interlocutor”). The other interlocutor was, of all people, former boxer James J. Corbett, who’s decent-looking enough but I don’t think anyone seeing him here would think that 12 years later Errol Flynn would play him in a biopic. The featured performers include overwrought baritone J. Harold Murray and such non-singers as Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, as well as semi-singers like George Jessel (who’s a whiteface MC as part of the big benefit but isn’t part of the minstrel show – ironic since Jessel had starred in the strage version of The Jazz Singer, playing the part Al Jolson famously took over in the movie). The show has the lumbering quality of a lot of pre-42nd Street musicals (King of Jazz and Whoopee definitely excepted), with the camera at a discreet distance from the performers, who look like ants dancing on a wedding cake. (One of the songs is actually called “Dream on a Piece of Wedding Cake.”) There are a couple of shots in which the camera rises a bit and we get some slightly overhead shots of the chorus line, but nothing like the effects Busby Berkeley became famous for (which had already been done by Joseph Santley in The Cocoanuts, Luther Reed in Rio Rita and Albertina Rasch in Lord Byron of Broadway in 1929). The show is accompanied by George Olsen’s band, though it seems rather raucous here, a far cry from its reputation for sweet dance-pop.

At the end Margie is supposed to do her big number, “I’m On a Diet of Love” (whose lyric is as silly as you’d guess from the title), with Frank Albertson, but her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dave (ya remember Dave?) beats up Albertson, steals his costume and goes on instead. He and Margie have an argument and Jessel rather unfunnily jokes that they’re not supposed to fight like that until after they’re married. The show is a hit, the show boat is saved, and all ends more or less happily even though it’s hard to hold out much hope for the future of Marjorie White and her ill-tempered on-screen boyfriend Richard Keene! Happy Days was the second film shot by Fox in the short-lived 70 mm “Grandeur Screen” process (theatre owners balked, especially when the Depression hit, of spending the money for new projectors and screens just after they’d already absorbed the expense of retooling for sound films!), though unlike tie first – The Big Trail, an epic cross-country Western which gave John Wayne his first featured role (and was a giant commercial flop, delaying Wayne’s emergence into stardom for nine years) – no Grandeur Screen prints of Happy Days are known to exist. I also found myself wondering if any sequences for Happy Days were shot in Multicolor, the short-lived rival to Technicolor backed by William Fox and Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes), but so far as I know no Multicolor films exist at all and the biggest sequence ever shot in the process, the “Turn On the Heat” from Fox’s 1929 mega-hit musical Sunnyside Up, survives only in black-and-white.

When Were You Born (Warner Bros./First National, 1938)

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

Last night at 10 I ran my husband Charles a quite intriguing movie from Warner Bros.’ “B” unit ini 1938 called When Were You Born. Note that the original title does not have a question mark at the end, and indeed the poster art for the film has the other letters in white against a color background but the word “YOU” in bright red letters, so the title actually comes off as When Were YOU Born. It was the brainchild of a man named Manly P. Hall (though the people who did the movie’s credits seemed unsure whether or not his first name had an “e” in it; it’s “Manley Hall” on the credit for the film’s original story and “Manly” in the printed foreword to a prologue of Hall introducing the 12 signs of the Western zodiac), who was essentially a New Ager before New Age was a “thing.” In 1928 Hall published a book with the very New Age-y title The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and for the next two decades or so he became a sort of New Age celebrity, claiming expertise in hypnotism and psychic phenomena in general as well as astrology.

The story he came up with for this film (though another writer, Anthony Coldewey, gets credit for turning Hall’s story into an actual script) concerns a Chinese astrologer, Mel Lei Ming (Anna May Wong, using her superb and underrated acting skills to liven up an otherwise pretty boring movie), who’s depicted as having almost uncanny powers just from doing people’s charts and deducing from them their personal characteristics. I was a bit perplexed that Ming was depicted as using Western astrology instead of the quite different Chinese version – especially since Wong, though Chinese-American in real life, was using the thick accent she did when she played a native Chinese – and I was also hoping for an explanation that Ming was actually doing Sherlock Holmes-style deductions about the other characters and merely pretending she was getting her information from the stars. But no-o-o-o-o, that wouldn’t have fit Manly P. Hallo’s agenda for this film; he ends his prologue by declaring defiantly that “astrology is a science,” and the story he concocted was an attempt to establish that.

The plot kicks off on an ocean liner on the last leg of a journey across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, during which Ming tells Phillip Curey (James Stephenson, the quite interesting British-born actor who seemed headed for a major star career when he died suddenly in 1941 at age 52 of a heart attack after having made 40 films in just four years) that he has just a day or two left to live. Carey is duly killed that night in his apartment in San Francisco (which we get to see a lot more of than we would in The Maltese Falcon three years later, including stock footage of cable-car tracks and a “Chop Suey” sign that looked identical to the one that used to adorn the now-closed Pekin Café in San Diego: both Charles and I wondered if there had been a company mass-producing these signs for Chinese restaurants nationwide), and the mystery becomes a whodunit in which Ming’s astonishingly uncanny astrological skills are put to work by the police investigating the crime, even though the lead detective, Inspector Jim C. Gregg (Charles C. Wilson), is scared to death that word is going to leak out that he’s using an astrologer, of all people, to solve a murder.

The principal suspects include Ming herself – the police detain her briefly and I wondered whether writers Hall and Coldewey were going to use the device of Josephine Tey in her novel A Shilling for Candles (1936), in which a well-known astrologer first predicts the death of a movie star and then kills the star herself to make the prediction come true. (Tey’s novel was filmed in 1937 by Alfred Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, but he and his writers, Charles Bennett and Edwin Greenwood, changed both the identity of the murderer and the motive.) But once again Manly P. Hall’s political and social agenda got in the way; not only was he not going to make the astrologer a clever faker, he wasn’t going to make her a killer either. Instead the finger of suspicion points to Doris Kane (Margaret Lindsay, top-billed and proving to be a quite authoritative actress despite the claims of Bette Davis, who in the 1930’s was frequently cast as the “bad girl” to Lindsay’s “good girl,” that she was wooden and uninteresting) and her supposed “brother,” Larry Camp (Anthony Averill).

Doris was engaged to Phillip Carey even though she couldn’t stand him – her mother (whom we never see) had arranged the marriage even though Larry was the man she really loved. Of course Ming figures out from their charts that Doris and Larry are not sister and brother, and the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Phillip Carey’s business partner, Frederick Gow (Leonard Mudie, trying his best to pass himself off as Chinese in a film with a real Chinese – or at least Chinese-American – actress in the female second lead!), who was using their Oriental imports business as a front for smuggling drugs without Carey’s knowledge. The climactic revelation occurs in the gallery from which Carey and Gow sold their (above-board) items,which turns out to be honeycombed with secret passages, in one of which Gow ambushes and traps Ming until she is saved by Carey’s butler, Shields (Eric Stanley, Virgo – the only Virgo in the cast, which was a source of pride because both Charles and I are Virgos), who kills Gow in what the authoriites consider justifiable homicide. When Were You Born has a credit roll in which the actors are shown in brief clips from their roles in the movie – only instead of being identified with their character names, as was the usual practice with these credits (especially at Warner Bros.), they’re identified by their astrological sign.

When Were You Born was apparently intended as the first of a five-film series featuring Anna May Wong’s astrologer character, but alas this was the only such film actually made. Manly P. Hall would turn up on screen two years later in a promotional trailer for the 1940 film Black Friday – in which Boris Karloff played a science professor who does a brain transplant on a colleague , Professor Kingsley (Stanley Ridges), fusing part of his brain with parts of the brain of a gangster, Red Cannon, who happened to be in the same car crash. Only the transplant turns Kingsley into a modern-dress version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the sound of a police siren shifts him back and forth between professor and gangster. Hall was shown hypnotizing Bela Lugosi, who had a minor part in the film as one of the four ex-associates of Cannon who were trying to find where he hid the gang’s loot, to get him in the right mood to play a scene – a truly weird idea since Lugosi was playing a nothing villain role he could have done in his sleep (and not hypnotically induced trance-sleep, either!). Originally Black Friday was supposed to have featured Karloff as the professor and Lugosi as the scientist (given away by the fact that the character has the Hungarian-sounding name “Ernest Sovac”), but for some reason Universal changed plans at the last minute and sent out this trailer with Manly P. Hall essentially making Lugosi’s role seem more sinister than it was.

The Price of Perfection (Neshama Entertainbment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie: The Price of Perfection, directed by Alexander Carrière and written by Imogen Grace (she has eight imdb.com credits as an actress and three for her scripts, all for shorts, but she’s clearly got a major future as a writer). It starts out with a late-night car chase in which a young girl is running down a deserted back road on foot while an SUV, driven by we don’t yet know whom, is chasing her and finally runs her down. Then we see a Lifetime title,”Eight Days Earlier,” and eight days earlier high-school junior Ava James (Keara Graves) is shown running at a high-school track practicing for the relay team. Her coach announces that Ava will run the starting leg of the relay, even though she only joined the team three months previously, much to the displeasure of the blonde villainess, Madison Russell (Victoria Baldessara). It seems that in junior high school (Grace’s script still calls it that instead of that horrible modern-day term “middle school”) Ava and Madison were best friends until Madison placed a prank call one day posing as a young girl and phoning the girl’s mother. Since the girl had committed suicide, this was an especially cruel prank, and Madison weaseled out of punishment for it by blaming it on Ava. Ava is the daughter of Leslie James (Christy Bruce), who’s had to raise her as a single parent since the death of Leslie’s husband Bradley the year before. Leslie and Bradley were partners in a party-planning and catering business until Bradley’s death, and now Leslie is trying to hold the business together and deal with the usual bitchy prima donna-ism from her clients.

The business keeps Leslie away from home most nights and weekends, but she isn’t worried because Ava is Little Miss Perfect and is good at, among other things, taking care of her younger brother Ryan (Cameron Brodeur, one of the few people in the cast who actually looks young enough to be in high school), who’s been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Dexedrine. Only Ryan, an aspiring heavy-metal singer and guitarist, says the drugs get in the way of his creativity and gives a bottle of them to Ava to help her concentrate on her studies. He warns her not to abuse them, but Ava is a typical teen (especially a typical teen in a Lifetime movie) and not only starts popping the pills herself but giving them away – and Madison spots her doing this, threatens to “out” her as a drug user (which, among other things, could get her kicked off the track team and blow her chance at a college scholarship) and demands some of the pills for herself. Madison runs with a “fast” crowd that includes Xavier Morales (Nico De Castris), son of Senator José Morales and Madison’s sort-of boyfriend; Wesley, a Black student who’s Madison’s dance partner in high-school competitions (dancing is the one physical endeavor Madison is actually good at, though her mother Caroline denounces it as a “hobby” and a waste of time); and Casey Lang, a girl Ava has been tutoring and who has her own supply of Dexedrine which Ava turns to when her brother’s stash runs out. Having access to pills has reunited Ava and Madison – apparently Ava, so smart in other aspects of her life, doesn’t realize Madison is using her – and the four of them have a wild party at the Morales home one weekend when Leslie is working and the Moraleses are at a political fundraiser.

The party features a lot of underage drinking as well as pill-taking until Ava passes out and falls unconscious on the floor of one of the upstairs bedrooms. Casey leaves and threatens to report them to the police, but Madison has other ideas: she gets into her SUV and determines to run Casey down and kill her so she can’t turn them in for having caused Ava’s overdose, and as she did all those years before in junior high school Madison frames Ava for the crime by stealing her cell phone and leaving it at the scene. The police, led by Detective Parsons (no first name given), a Black official who is resentful when anyone calls him an “officer” (“I’m not an officer, I’m a detective,” he says, obviously taking great pride in having been promoted from a uniform into plain clothes), find Casey’s body and take her to the hospital, where she spends several days “out of it” and unable to be questioned about what happened to her and who might have been responsible. Leslie James decides to take it on herself to investigate the situation and see if she can find her missing daughter. After Leslie visits the Morales home and Xavier tells her Ava wasn’t at the party, Leslie watches a social-media video post from the party and her son Ryan (ya remember Ryan?) recognizes the sound of Ava’s laugh and tells his mom that his sister was indeed there.

Detective Parsons feels threatened by Leslie’s D.I.Y. investigation and threatens to arrest her for obstruction of justice if she keeps pursuing it and bird-dogging his leads. After several hours of unconsciousness, Ava comes to on the floor of the Morales home, and she tries to escape but Madison catches her and ties her up. Wesley, who seems to be the one member of Madison’s circle with an actual conscience, unties Ava and takes out his own phone to call the police, but Madison grabs the phone from out of his hands and throws it into the nearby swimming pool. (You didn’t think the Moraleses had a swimming pool? They’re affluent people in a Lifetime movie: of course they have a swimming pool!) In the end, Madison and Xavier decide to tie a stone to Ava’s leg with a rope and take her out to the same lake where her father died of his heart attack, but fortunately Leslie and Ryan are able to deduce this and arrive just in the nick of time, though Leslie has to do some perilous swimming underwater to untie the rope from Ava’s leg so she can rescue her.

The Price of Perfection is built from traditional Lifetime elements and situations – like the supposedly “perfect” daughter being tempted off the rails into the drug scene, the spoiled rich kid who thinks his dad’s money and social position can get him out of anything, and the official detective threatening the mom who just wants to get her missing daughter back unharmed – but it’s built unusually well. Despite some wrenching flashbacks – it’s not until an hour and a half into the movie that we finally learn what happened at the big party and how Casey got run over, and there are a few spots in which we’re not altogether sure just when are we – Grace’s script is a powerful reworking of traditional Lifetime formulae into something new and original, and Carrière’s direction matches the quality of the writing and gives Victoria Baldessara a chance to draw an effective character transition from malicious little bitch to out-and-out psycho. Grace gives the characters just enough hints of multidimensionality to keep them interesting, and though I haven’t been able to find an online source for the name of the actor who plays Wesley, he’s unusually good as a conscience-stricken kid whose mixed motives, including what’s pretty clearly an unrequited crush on Madison, come through strongly and beautifully in this fine young actor’s performance. I quite liked The Price of Perfection, and I suspect you’ll like it too: it’s available for viewing on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K9V9vMY6tE.

Disappearance in Yellowstone (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I put on a LIfetime movie called Disappearance in Yellowstone, directed by Tony Dean Smith (a name I didn’t recognize) from a script by Paul A. Birkett (which I did). It had a few unusual wrinkles, mostly nibbling around the edges of the usual Lifetime clichés and with two drop-dead gorgeous guys, but was mostly a cut-to-pattern piece. The plot starts with mother Jessie Mae Gephart (Lucie Guest) and her sullen daughter Michelle (Cassandra Sawtell) driving from California to the legendary Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Jessie and Michelle’s father have just gone through a bitter breakup and Jessie tells us via some of the other characters that he was abusing her, but all this is carefully concealed from Michelle, so she thinks her dad is a hero and her mom is an asshole for leaving him and dragging her away from her friends and her electronics to go on a trip to see natural beauty Michelle couldn’t be less interested in. Jessie and Michelle stop at a place called the Bear Bites Diner, where Jessie sends Michelle in to order something because she doesn’t want to leave the car to buy anything herself. While in the restaurant Michelle is chatted up by a hot baby-faced guy named Nolan (Aren Buchholz) who is a park ranger – or at least he’s wearing the uniform of one – and those of us who have watched more than two Lifetime movies before are immediately convinced that he’s up to no good, especially since, like a lot of other Lifetime writers, Birkett has him mention that there are some scary human predators in the park and she needs to be wary of them.

Then Birkett throws us a curve ball when he has Jessie’s and Michelle’s car break down in the middle of nowhere. They have a map which indicates that there’s a service station about a mile’s walk from where they are stranded, and when Jessie shows up (alone) to the garage, the person who greets her is the proprietor, Grant Hollings (Jonathan Scarfe), who’s first shown working on a car with his shirt off. He doesn’t have the killer baby face of Aren Buchholz but he’s got great pecs, and director Smith and cinematographer Jay Kamal driver us a lot of choice views of them. Unfortunately, while Michelle is waiting alone by the car for her mom to return, Nolan drives by, offers her a ride, and then injects her with a knockout drug that renders her unconscious. She comes to in an old deserted cabin (not another old deserted cabin, especially in a place where there is no cell-phone reception!) where Nolan is imprisoning her, and though she gets loose long enough to grab his hunting rifle he’s taken the precaution of removing all its bullets. Meanwhile, as Grant Hollings and Jessie are staking out the diner because they’ve learned that Nolan is a “regular” there, they’re both accosted by police officer Darrell Stoddard (Reese Alexander, the one African-American cast member in a featured role), who’s immediately convinced that Jessie is a kidnapper because her ex sent out a notice saying she’d taken their daughter by force.

Stoddard mentions allegations that Grant’s garage is a front for a “chop shop” (a place where stolen cars are disassembled so their parts can be sold), which just raised my suspicions that Birkett was planning a last-minute reversal in which Grant would turn out to be the real villain and Nolan would turn out to have drugged Michelle just as a way of saving her from Grant – but no such luck. Nolan ends up kidnapping Jessie as well and getting a sick kick out of having mom and daughter both held captive under his roof; he says he’s going to skin Michelle alive while forcing mom to listen and then doing the same to her. Grant and his friend Wally (Ben Cotton) set out to track down Nolan, only Nolan ambushes them and shoots them with his rifle. He leaves both of them for dead but Officer Stoddard finds them in time to save Grant even though Wally actually does die. Meanwhile, Nolan has left a bear trap outsider his cabin and, thinking of Anton Chekhov’s famous advice to would-be playwrights that of you introduce a gun in act one, it has to go off in act three, I wondered what Birkett was going to do with it. I was worried he was going to have Jessie trapped in it just as she’s trying to escape (for someone who’s supposed to have done this lots of times before, as we’re told Nolan has, he doesn’t seem to be all that good at bondage), but in the end it’s Nolan who gets caught in his own bear trap. He’s still got his gun and tries to use it to shoot down both Jessie and Michelle, but a bear – a real one – comes along as a deus ex machina and takes care of him, while Jessie and Grant get together as lovers (as foreshadowed by a scene in which they clearly had sex in the back of Grant’s SUV while they were staking out the Bear Bite Diner to wait for Nolan).

Disappearance in Yellowstone is a movie that rose and fell on the performance of Aren Buchhoilz as the psycho, and he was literally overwrought, as if he were trying to fuse psychotic characterizations from classic 1940’s films noir – Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill and Neville Brand in D.O.A. – though it’s highly unlikely Buchholz has actually seen any of those movies. More likely Tony Dean Smith was just telling him to giggle a lot and punctuate his utterance with weird little cackles that sounded more silly than scary – and it didn’t help that right after this movie we saw Joseph H. Lewis’s 1945 vest-pocket thriller My Name is Julia Ross (which I already wrote about when Charles and I watched it together in 2009 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-name-is-julia-ross-columbia-1945.html, and I have little to add) and got to see George Macready’s chillingly understated performance as that film’s sinister psycho, who just because of his restraint is far more terrifying (though I must say I got enough of a kick watching Buchholz’ hot bod I’d like to see him in something else – especially something in which he’s playing a good guy, just as the day after Charles and I watched James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic I bought the videotape of The Phantom because I’d thought Billy Zane was so much sexier than Leonardo di Caprio I wanted to see him as a superhero!). In the end we’re given the preposterous explanation that Nolan became a psychopath because his father, a real park ranger, trained him to be one – supposedly the old man was himself a serial killer and he taught his son to kidnap, torture and kill park tourists, and the son took over dad’s sinister family business after dad croaked – thereby adding Michael Powell’s 1959 thriller Peeping Tom to the sheer number of better movies from which this one ripped off.

Blue Bloods: "Old Friends" (Panda Productions, Paw in Your Face Productions, CBS-TV, originally aired January 76, 2022; rerun May 20, 2022)

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

Last night at 9 I turned on CBS-TV for an episode of the police procedural Blue Bloods, which my husband Charles doesn’t like because he thinks it’s just a rah-rah show cheering the New York Police Department (and, by extension, police departments everywhere in the U.S.) and ignoring the very real history of police abuses in this country, especially of people of color. I think the show is a lot more complicated than that, and this episode – a rerun from last January called “Old Friends” – was considerably more nuanced and emotionally complex. The main intrigue was the attempts of the New York Police Department and a gung-ho visiting cop from the Texas Rangers (how many people know that the Texas Rangers actually still exist?) named Garrett Moore (Gregory Jbara, an interesting last name for an actor who does such a good job playing the good ol’ Southern white boy, albeit the grizzled elder version of same), who comes to New York to avenge the murder of his partner by hired assassin Juan Carlos Lopez (Joseph Raymond Lucero). Lopez killed Moore’s partner back in Texas and apparently cut him up first, since when he finally corners Moore he threatens to do the same to him until the NYPD detective assigned to partner him, Danny Reagan (former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg, Mark Wahlberg’s older brother) deduces where he’s gone and arrives in the nick of time to save Moore.

Then he has to talk Moore out of killing Lopez and instead arrests the killer, not only because he can’t countenance the idea of a cop outright murdering a suspect but because they need Lopez to tell them when and where a major drug shipment from the Zaragosa cartel, which Lopez works for, is scheduled to arrive. They worm the information out of him by waving a vial in front of his face and telling him it’s heroin mixed with fentanyl, until he finally breaks down rather than get killed by that lethal combination. Later the two cops joke that the vial only contained powdered sugar from the doughnuts they’d been sharing. (Powdered sugar is frequently used as a prop substitute for drugs in movies and TV shows, as well as a “live” drag act I went to once at the LGBT Community Center.) Blue Bloods features the three-story format (I wish they’d follow the original format Dick Wolf used in his policiers, Law and Order and Law and Order: Sp;ecial Victims Unit, of having a single crime be their through line, but that’s become decidedly unfashionable in modern-day TV writing and even Wolf has had to do obeisance to the Great God SERIAL in his latest show, Law and Order: Organized Crime), and the other two stories are about a retired cop who gets busted for working at a bar that’s acftually a front for a bookmaking operation, in which among other things he’s become an “enforcer” for one of the bookies.

The idealistic sergeant who learns of this, Danny’s younger brother Jamie Reagan (Will Estes), reports the ex-cop turned bookie enforcer to his superiors and gets an enormous push-back, being told it’s shameful for him to trash the reputation of a good cop just because of his current job – especially since it turns out that the reason he turned to crime was because he needed far more money than his police pension could afford to keep his wife in the nursing home sne needs to take care of her medical issues. The third plot line is in some ways the most interesting, and certainly the most surprising given this show’s reputation as a rah-rah celebration of police work: a white cop, Christopher Zeal (Josh Crotty) – one wonders if writer Ian Biederman deliberately gave him that last name to underline the irony – and a Black cop, Paul Salter (Jamal James), get into a brawl at a bar. The fight was over the demand of a lot of people of color to “defund the police,” in which Zeal unequivocally opposes and Salter rather gingerly suggests might have some validity in that at least some of the money that currently funds the NYPD might be better spent doing more positive crime prevention programs instead. Officer Zeal reacts to Officer Salter’s presumed apostasy by belting him one, and when the matter comes to the attention of current police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, a far better actor than he was when he was still a hot stud – he didn’t do much for me but my late partner John Gabrish had a life-size poster of Selleck in his Magnum, P.I. role on his bedroom wall when we first started dating), father of Danny and Josh (and, it seems, a blood relative of virtually the entire New York police force, the conceit that got this show called Blue Bloods and is in fact one of the most embarrassing things about it), he orders Officer Zeal suspended.

This earns him major opposition not only from the rank-and-file officers in his department, who are angry with him for defending a Black officer who admitted that increasing police funding is not necessarily the best way to fight crime, but the city’s mayor, Peter Chase (Dylan Walsh), as well. Mayor Chase goes so far as to write an op-ed for the New York Times denouncing his police commissioner and saying point-blank that Officer Zeal was correct in his actions. Frank Reagan and the mayor have the sort of talking-past-each-other argument you might expect, in which the mayor says that polls indicate that crime is the number one concern of New York City voters and residents, tourists and business owners (particularly of businesses catering to tourists) don’t like the idea of defunding the police and are fearful of what that could mean to their safety. He raises the spectre of the reputation New York got in the 1970’s and what that did to the city’s reputation as a tourist attraction. Commissioner Reagan equally insists that Officer Zeal broke the regulations governing police behavior and needed to be punished for it because, no matter what you think of the argument between him and Officer Salter, he has to enforce the regulations even-handedly throughout the entire department.

This part of this Blue Bloods episode got an interesting anonymous review on imdb.com that read, “Voltaire's famous statement defending free speech [‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’] is often repeated, but Commissioner Reagan demonstrated what that statement means in practice. He was defending an off-duty Officer expressing a view he disagrees with (defunding the police).” As I said at the outset of this post, Blue Bloods has been unfairly stigmatized as a rah-rah show cheering law enforcement, when in fact it’s a considerably more complex show than that, artistically and morally. Not only does it feature a police commissioner who defended a Black officer against a white one in an argument about defunding (at peast partially) the police, it also features a Texas Ranger who nearly gets killed for taking the law into his own hands and even has to be restrained from killing his partner’s alleged murderer after the man has already been arrested and is officually in custody.

Live at the Belly Up: The Wood Brothers (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, KPBS-TV, 2022)

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

After the Blue Bloods episode I watched a KPBS Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a quite compelling band called the Wood Brothers, whom I hadn’t realized have been around for quite a while: they made their first record in 2005 for, of all companies, Blue Note. The surprise was that Blue Note has historically been a jazz label and jazz is about the one major American musical genre which their Live at the Belly Up performance did not include. (They finally left Blue Note in 2008 and their subsequent records have been for labels with reputations more appropriate to their music, Southern Ground and Honey Jar.) Also, though the Wood Brothers are a four-piece band, only two of the members are actual Wood brothers: Oliver Wood, who’s the lead guitarist, lead singer and principal songwriter; and his younger (I assume) brother Chris, who plays stand-up bass and harmonica (simultaneously, through a Bob Dylan-style harmonica rack). The version of the band seen on Live at tne Belly Up also featured two non-Wood members, one who played acoustic rhythm guitar and doubled on melodica (the miniature keyboard instrument which has keys like a miniature piano and reeds so you have to blow into it to get it to sound; Nat “King” Cole is seen playing it on some of his surviving concert videos), and a drummer who doubled on an electronic keyboard instrument and which he was somehow able to do by reaching over with his arm and playing the keyboard with one hand while still keeping a beat going with his other arm and his feet.

Basically the Wood Brothers are a so-called “Americana” band, a genre name that was associated ini the late 1960’s with The Band and Creedence clearwater Revival (who got lumped into the category even though they didn’t sound that similar, maybe because they both seemed to be harking back to older, earlier times in music). The Wood Brothers reminded me of Grant Lee Phillips, whom I’ve been a fan of since the mid-1990’s when I discovered them on one of those sport-lived video compilations you could get by mail order: I loved the song Phillips did with his band Grant Lee Buffaly called “Lone Star Song” and immediately bought the CD containing it, and it’s still a personal favorite. Though Oliver Wood’s voice doesn’t sound that much like Phillips’, they are quite similar as songwriters and their voices have a laconic, laid-back sound. The sparseness of their instrumentation reminded me of Grant Lee Buffalo (and of Creedence as well!). They played 12 songs – a relatively high number for this 52-minute program, indicating that they play simply and straightforwardly, and don’t do a lot of jamming within their songs – and the only fault I could find with them is that all the songs sounded too similar.

The song titles were “Little Bit Sweet,” “Alabaster,” “Little Bit Broken,” “The Mose” (ini which Oliver’s lyric refers to waking up to see his muse in her underwear – obviously a reference to a wife or girlfriend), “Keep Me Around,” “River Takes the Town” (yet another song about a river flood, which has become a standard subject for blues songs since the 1927 Mississippi River floods and the contest the Melrose Brothers publishing house ran for the best song about the natural disaster, which Bessie Smith deservedly won for her masterpiece, “Backwater Blues”), “Atlas,” “:Who Are Devil?,” their cover of the traditional folk ballad “Little Liza Jane” (first recorded in 1916 by Wilbur Sweatman’s band, the first jazz record ever made by an African-American band, which predated the supposed first jazz record, “Livery Stavle Blues” b/w “Original Dixieland One-Step” bo the white Original Dixlenakd Jazz Band, by a year) and “Luckiest Man,” the song on their program on which they came close to a real jam. It was a nice show and it’s a good thing that the COVID-19 restrictions have eased enough that Live at the Belly Up is running new programs instead of dredging through toeir vaults for things they could reissue (including one by blues singer Candye Kane, who tragically died of cancer in 2016 at age 54), and though the show started to drag after a while (at least until the “Liza Jane” cover and the original “Luckiest Man” livened things and helped the show finish strongly), they’re a solidly good band and it was nice tomake their acquaintance.

Law and Order: "Black and Blue" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I turned on NBC-TV for the last new episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order cycle: the original Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order show was called “Black and Blue,” and it was about the killing of New York police detective Jimmy Doyle (Daren Donofrio), an old friend of Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan). The only time we see Detective Doyle is in the opening scene, in which he chats up a Black woman in full hooker regalia, obviously wanting to have sex with her, an important clue whose significance we don’t realize until well into the episode. The lead cops investigating the case, Cosgrove and his Black partner Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson, one of the two actors who carried over from the original Law and Order into this reboot), investigate several people, including a Black man who says he saw a white man fleeing the scene, and said white man, a rich Wall Street operator named Scott Gleacher (Nathan Darrow), who has given over $1 million to a charity that helps at-risk teenage girls. Unfortunately Scott’s real motive in helping this charity is in helping himself to the girls, particularly 19-year-old Regina Daniels (Morgan Wardlaw), who shows up with a cut and a bruise over one eye courtesy of a fight she got into with Scott.

Scott says he actually saw Detective Doyle get shot but will only give the police the name if he gets full immunity from prosecution for anything involving Regina, including his assault on her. Ultimately he gets his deal and tells the police that the real murderer is Regina’s older sister, Kendra Daniels (Ashley Nicole Blake), who happened to have a gun with her to scare off Scott from dating her sister and ended up shooting and killinjg Detective Doyle when he tried to arrest her. She says she did it because she was in fear of her life – George Floyd almost inevitably got name-checked in the dialogue – especially since Doyle started yelling racial epithets at her, including what is annoyingly referred to euphemistically as “the N-word.” It also turns out that Doyle broke up with his white wife three years earlier and just three months previously to the murder had started dating a Black woman, whom the prosecution puts on the stand to prove Doyle wasn’t a racist. Given the racial animus at the root of the crime, prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) decides to put Kendra Daniels on trial only for “aggravated manslaughter” rather than murder – which not surprisingly pisses off all the cops involved in the case, especially Cosgrove, who can’t believe the prosecutor is pulling back from a murder charge out of exaggerated racial sensitivities from the poteltial jurors.

Kendra hires a Black lawyer who plays the race card to the max, including playing a birthday video Doyle recorded for his Black girlfriend in which he boasts, “Brown sugar is the sweetest kind there is.” (Who was writing his dialogue, Mick Jagger?) Aside from explaining just why he was chatting up the Black hooker in the opening sequence, this sufficiently shocks the jury that they find Kendra not guilty of first-degree aggravated manslaughter but guilty of second-degree, which like King Solomon threatening to cut the baby in half pisses off both sides equally. This Law and Order was quite well done and a fitting end to the first season of the reboot, and it benefited from some moral ambiguity created by the screenwriters even though Doyle, both from what we saw of him in the first scene and the way he’s described by his fellow officers who quite naturally wanted to see his death avenged, comes off as an old-school cop who carries his racial prejudices into the field even while mostly aiming his epithets against real criminals who happened to be Black.

Law nad Order: Special Victims Unit: "A Final Call at Forlini's Bar" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

Once again, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “A Final Call at Fortini’s Bar,” turned out to be even better than the Law and Order which preceded it. This time the central character was Delia Hackman (Jordana Spiro), a monumentally abused woman who’s been married four times (twice to the same man), who encounters the Special Victims Unit when she claims to have been raped by her current husband, construction worker Ty Hackman (Derek Phillips). The two have had a long cycle of abuse going on, including her taking out restraining orders and him getting a sick kick out of flouting them. Midway through the episode she reaches out to him because he still has her cell-phone charger (it’s an indication of how subjugated she feels that it doesn’t occur to her to go out and buy another charger). He goes out to the place she’s renting while he’s out on bail – he’s supposed to be wearing a monitoring bracelet on his ankle and that’s supposed to ensure he only goes from his home to his job and back – and he plays cat-and-mouse with the charger, waving it in her face and then putting it in his pocket. Then he grabs her and pulls her head to his crotch, and she’s been with this asshole long enough that she knows what that means. He turns his back to her long enough to mix them both drinks, and that’s when she grabs a kitchen knife and shoots him from behind, then leaves him on the floor bleeding out until he dies.

She explains that she didn’t call 911 because she was waiting for her phone to recharge – and when it’s finally charged she called Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) from SVU because Rollins had taken her original rape allegation. Unfortunately, the head of the district attorney’s trial division, Lorraine Maxwell (Betty Buckley), is a hard-ass who, when Rollins asks her to be lenient, says, “I was in an abusive relationship for 15 years, and I got out of it without killing the guy.” Maxwell not only assigns Rollins’ boyfriend, assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), to prosecute the case despite his obvious conflict of interest (a real slip on the part of this episode’s writers, old Law and Order hands Warren Leight and Julie Martin), but during the trial she takes over Delia’s cross-examination and asks a few pointed questions herself. Desperate to ensure that Delia gets a fair trial and doesn’t have to rely on an overloaded public defender who doesn’t have the time, energy, skill or budget to investigate it properly, Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) reaches out to former SVU prosecutor Ravael Barba (Raúl Esparza), despite her antagonism towards him for having defended super-criminal Richard Wheatley over on Law and Order: Organized Crime.

But Barba agrees to take the case despite being in an alcoholic stupor (the episode title “A Final Call at Forlini’s Bar” refers to Barba’s favorite watering hole, which is about to be torn down), and he recovers from lt long enough to unearth an expert witness, psychiatrist Dr. Emily Sopher (Linda Emond), who testifies that the repeated bouts of physical injury Delia sustained at the hands of her husband, including actual blows as well as him repeatedly slamming her head into the wall, had caused her long-term damage and made it possible that she killed him without an actual criminal intent. Lorraine Maxwell is sufficiently moved that she agrees to drop the case, and Delia is referred to a long-term therapy program aimed at restoring as much of her cognition as possible, but the real takeaway is watching prosecutor Carisi go after Delia and the other witnesses for her with all guns blazing, even though it’s likely to piss off his girlfriend and possibly even lead her to break up with him.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Friend or Foe" (Dick Wolf Prudictons, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime which followed, “Friend or Foe,” was less of a comparative breakdown than usual, probably because it was the last show of the current season and thereby writers Rick Mann and Barry O’Brien were able to tie up loose ends and actualoly resolve several of the overlapping plot lines. This episode begins with Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) seeking out his late father’s old police partner, Gus Henson (Paul O’Brien), for information about the police shooting in which Stabler, Sr. was involved, in which he got the police department’s highest decoration even though it was a set-up: Stabler père shot himself in tle leg and planted the gun on an unarmed suspect he and Gus had just shot, then pretended they had risked their lives in a shoot-out with an armed assailant. Gus instantly realizes that Stabler isn’t the dirty cop he’s been posing as to infiltrate The Brotherhood, the gang of corrupt cops led by Detective Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary), but a compulsively clean one who’s determined to expose police corru9ption even if it means exposing his own father as a villain.

Gus calls Donnelly and tips him to Stabler being an infiltrator, and under the guise of finding corrupt Black businessman Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), who behind a front as a legitimate businessman and philanthropist is really a crook and the head of the Marcy drug ring, who has driven out the Italians, Colombians and Albanians from New York’s illicit drug trade, they lure Stabler to a deserted house and ambush him, Stabler is seriously injured and presumed dead, but the other members of the Organized Crime Control Unit – including Stabler’s current commanding officer, young Black Lesbian Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) – rescue him just in time. Meanwhile Preston Webb is found dead at the Gowanus Canal and his wife Cassandra (Jennifer Beals, sill surprisingly well preserved 45 years after Flashdance gave her her 15 minutes of fame) is originally suspected of having had her husband killed but later, for no good reason we’re told, is exonerated. Stabler finally confronts Donnelly after the other members of The Brotherhood are arrested, and there’s a car chase in which Donnelly is driving his racing-striped customized Chevy which he let Stabler drive in an earlier episode to show the growing bond between them (that car is to Donnelly what the Gran Torino was to Clint Eastwood’s character in the film of that title) while Stabler chases him in an anonymous black SUV and crashes it into Donnelly’s prized possession in an attempt to force him off the road.

The two have their fonal confrontation in a railway yard in which Donnelly commits suidice – at least we think that’s what he’s done – by stepping out on the tracks in the face of an oncoming train. Also, Preston Webb’s political ally, Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Ron Cephas Jones), is arrested by Sergeant Bell and her forces – but Bell’s wife, who took a job with Kilbride thinking he was an honest man and the community benefactor he posed as, leaves her at the end. This Organized Crime episode is unusually good in its depiction of conflicted loyalties – including the scene in whcih Donnelly’s widow Bridget (Jen Jacob) tears into Stabler for having worked his way into the Donnellys’ confidence to the point where she even gave her newborn son the middle name “Elliott” in Stabler’s honor. I’ve faulted this show in the past for having made its characters too black-and-white, too obviously either heroes or villains, but this episode was haunting precisely because writers Mann and O’Brien gave at least some of the characters more depth and greater moral ambiguity. (I like moral ambiguity.)