Please Murder Me! (Gross-Krasne Productions,Distributors' Corporation of America, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 27) at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a 1956 film noir, Please Murder Pe!, which is a great title that deserved a better film. Please Murder Me! was directed by Peter Godfrey from a committee-written script – veteran German director E. A. Dupont and David Chandler are credited with the “original” story and A. C. Ward and Donald Hyde with the actual screenplay – and judging from his quite good 1951 film noir The Scarf, Please Murder Me! might have been a better movie if they’d let Dupont direct it as well. The Scarf indicates that Dupont’s directorial chops hadn’t deteriorated during his years of exile after his 1925 German film Variety, a proto-noir in which Emil Jannings played a circus trapeze artist whose wife falls in love with his hunky young partner. (He murders both of them and the film is told in flashback as he’s being released from prison following the completion of his sentence – a surprising gimmick since it wasn’t easy to do flashbacks in a silent film.) Please Murder Me! is basically your standard-issue tale of a femme fatale, Myra Leeds (Angela Lansbury), who for the past two years has been married to a successful real-estate developer in Los Angeles, Joe Leeds (Dick Foran). But not only is she tired of him, she never loved him in the first place – all she was interested in was the money he was making from the post-war L.A. real-estate boom. So she hatches a plot to seduce Joe’s old Marine buddy from World War II, defense attorney Craig Calhoun (Raymond Burr), in which she will kill her husband and make it look like she did so in self-defense because she’d just told him that she wanted to leave him and he got angry and attacked her.

Thanks largely to a brilliant closing argument in which Calhoun reveals that he was Myra’s lover, she’s acquitted – only then Craig discovers that Myra really did plan the killing and she did so not because she was in love with him but with yet another man, struggling artist Carl Holt (Lamont Johnson), who had actually proposed to her before she married Joe but she had turned him down because he had no money. Because he helped her win acquittal for the murder of her husband, she’s home free due to double jeopardy and so the only way Craig can see she gets punished for her crime is if he can goad her into murdering him. The film is narrated as a flashback by Craig into a tape recorder (obviously someone on the writing committee had seen Double Indemnity) and it begins with by far its best sequence: an openign pre-credits scene in which a shadowy figure whom we later realize is Craig is shown walking down the classically mean streets of L. A. at night. He goes into a pawnshop and buys a gun – without any of that fol-de-rol about waiting periods or background checks – then loads it and takes it back to his office. Then the main credits come up and the intrigue, such as it is, starts. Charles put his finger on what’s wrong with this film: Angela Lansbury has virtually no sex appeal. She’s certainly a physically attractive woman, but it’s hard to see why three men in the dramatis personae are so hopelessly drawn to her she’s able to use them as pawns in her plot to grab a fortune.

Lansbury projects neither the allure of Barbara Stanwyck (whom director Godfrey had worked with in Christmas in Connecticut and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, the last a dreadful movie hardly worthy of its stars; the one film that co-starred Humphrey Bogart and Stanwyck should have been better than this!) in Double Indemnity nor the sheer animal ferocity of Ann Savage in Detour. In the end, Craig arranges for Myra to come to his office at 12:30 a.m. and she shoots him with his own gunas he’s dictating the flashback, only Craig also invited the prosecutor in her murder trial, Ray Willis (John Dehner) , to his office 10 minutes later and the tape, which has been running all the time, proves that she killed him and he didn’t commit suicide, as she briefly tries to claim. This print, an item in the 50-film “Crime Wave” boxed set, cut off the closing credits,while the imdb.com page for the film shows what’s ostensibly a clip from this film but turns out to be from a totally different (and probably better) movie, in which a married woman is seducing a man by offering him capital for a real-estate development from her soon-to-be dead husband. Also one can’t watch Please Murder Me! without being haunted by the iconic TV roles its two stars would play later; one imagines Perry Mason trying to warn Craig Calhoun about all the mistakes he’s making, white Jessica Fletcher would fault the whole absurdity of the plot and declare, “I could write something better than that!”

Within Our Gates (Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, February 26 at 9:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite remarkable film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” as part of their commemoration of Black History Month. The film was Within Our Gates (1920), produced, directed and written by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was born in Metropolis,,Illinois on January 2, 1884,t he fifth child of a Black farm couple. Though his Wikipedia page doesn’t specify it I’ve long suspected Micheaux was mixed-race, not only because he had a French last name (many of the mixed-race Creoles in Louisiana had French last names, mainly because the French were more easygoing about race mixing than the Anglos) but because so many of his films,including this one, feature mixed-race characters. A number of Micheaux’ films feature a young Black man who’s strongly in love with a white-looking woman; he’s torn between his love for her and his desiree to marry within his own race, and it’s resolved when the woman turns out to be either a light-skinned Black person or mixed-race and therefore he can marry her and still be true to his racial identity. Micheaux got into filmmaking by writing a novel about Black homesteaders called The Conquest in 1913 and then filming it six years later as The Homesteader, He put a lot of his own life into this story, including calling the central character “Oscar Devereaux” (his full name at birth was Oscar Devereaux Micheaux) and basing much of the plot, including the hero’s failed first marriage, on his experiences.

Within Our Gates is Micheaux’ second film and the first one that survives, though the one extant print was from Spain and had intertitles in Spanish that had to be laboriously re-translated into English for this version. Its plot exposition is so complicated that Charles joked, “This film has more intrigues than The Birth of a Nation – and there isn’t even a war going on!” (A l;ot of people have interpreted Within Our Gates as a Black response to The Birth of a Nation, with its glorification of the Ku Klan and open advocacy of white supremacy, but Micheaux himself said he didn’t intend it that way.) The central character is Sylvia Landry, played by – as the credits advertise – “the renowned Negro artist, Evelyn Preer,” who moves back and forth between Boston and Piney Woods, Texas, where she’s been involved in founding a school for Black children so they can get the same sort of education as whites. Unfortunately the school is going broke, and in order to raise the money to save it Sylvia travels to Boston, where she meets white philanthropist Elena Warwick ()played by an actress billed only as “Mrs. Evelyn”). Sylvia is hospitalized when Mrs. Warwick’s driver accidentally runs her over, but Elena is sufficiently concerned, guilt-ridden or both, she visits Sylvia in the hospital. Sylvia talks Mrs Warwick into pledging a $5,000 donation to the Piney Woods school, but a white Southerner named Geraldine Stratton (Bernice Ladd) tries to talk her out of it. Stratton says the Blacks had no need of education, and instead of giving $5,000 to a school Elena should lust give $100 to the local Black preacher, Nick, who preaches to his Black congregation that they’re God’s chosen people and therefore they didn’t need to burden themselves with getting educated or winning the vote. Fortunately, Elena is so appalled by her friend's racism that she decides to up her donation to the Piney Woods school from $5,000 to $50,000.

There’s an extraordinary scene in which we see Nick alone lamenting that he’s sold his soul for a mess of pottage (a Biblical phrase that actually appears in the intertitle) and he’s getting lots of money from rich whites for preaching a message he knows is B.S. (Many of Micheaux’ films take a singularly dim view of the Black church; his 1925 film Body and Soul, the only one of Micheaux’ five extant silent films that survives with its original English titles, cast Paul Robeson in his film debut as a corrupt Black minister – and was a major financial flop because Black audiences of the time didn’t want to see a movie that criticized their church.) Sylvia was raised by a foster family in the South, and there’s a dark secret about her past that one of the film’s Black villains, a street criminal named Jake, tries to use against her. He’s fled from Boston to avoid arrest and ended up in Piney Woods, where he tries to blackmail Sylvia into marrying him by threatening to reveal her past. Eventually we learn just what her big, bad secret was in a flashback sequence that’s the best part of the movie: it seems that Sylvia learned bookkeeping from a local school (which explains why she puts so much importance on getting Black children educated) and offered to help her adoptive father, sharecropper Jasper Landry (William Starks), and his family from being cheated by the plantation owner, Philip Gridlestone (Ralph Johnson). Unfortunately, just as Jasper is confronting Philip Gridlestone and saying that because his daughter has been educated Philip can no longer cheat him, a white man who worked on the Gridlestone plantation and was similarly being cheated points a rifle through Philip’s window and kills him. Philip’s Black servant Efram (E.G. Tatum) sees the incident and gossips around tiwn that Jasper Landry killed Philip, and the white townspeople form a lynch mob and slaughter not only Jasper Landry but his entire blood family as well.

Sylvia escapes by hiding out with a friend, but is later confronted by Phili’s brother Armand Gridlestone (Grant Gorman),who attempts to rape her when he suddenly notices a scar on her chest. The scar convinces Armand that Sylvia is actually his daughter, produced by his brief marriage to a Black woman – and Miciheaux’ titles stress that the two were “legally married,” even though I couldn’t help but wonder where this could have happened in the early 20th century. Certainly not in the United States, where all states had laws banning interracial marriage until the California Supreme Court ruled theirs unconstitutional in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case aptly named Loving v. Virginia ruled that interracial marriage bans voilated the U.S. Constitution. Sylvia’s deep, dark secret is out at last, and after having resisted Jake’s blackmail attempt and broken up with her previous boyfriend, Conrad Drebert (James D. Ruffin) when he took a job with a mining company in Brazil, she’s free to marry by far the most interesting man in the movie, Dr. V. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas). Though Micheaux’ Wikipedia page quotes him as saying, “I am too imbued with the spirit of Booker T. Washington to engraft false virtues upon ourselves, to make ourselves that which we are not,” it seems to me likely that he based the character of Dr. Vivian on Washington’s fierce critic and arch-rival. W. E. B. DuBois. Like DuBois (and unlike Washington), Vivian writes articles denouncing segregation and calling for civil rights and racial equality. He particularly argues that Black Americans must demand equal opportunity in education and slso fight for the vote. When he and Sylvia finally get together at the end, it’s clearly not only a love match but a meeting of equal minds and a triumph for racial progress and the nascent civil rights movement.

Within OUr Gates has its flaws, many of which would grow worse in Micheaux’ later work – particularly the awfully preachy intertitles, which judging from the clips I’ve seen of Micheaux’ sound films (I’ve never seen a Micheaux talkie start to finish) got even worse when sound came in and he could have his characters preach at length to his audiences his ideas about racial uplift. But it’s also a surprisingly well-made film for 1920, especially from an independent director (though in the silent era it was possible to make a film on virtually no money and give it the look, finish and “feel” of a major-studio production; that became impossible in the sound era and guerrilla filmmaking only became possible again as both cameras and recording equipment became cheaper, simpler and more portable starting in the 1960’s). Whatever his personal feelings about D. W. Griffith and his use of state-of-the-art cinema technique to deliver the racist message of The Birth of a Nation, Micheaux clearly had learned from Griffith; Within Our Gates contains elaborate cross-editing, superimposition shots, iris-out effects and the entire panoply of cinematic effects Griifith, more tnan any other filmmaker, had pioneered. There are even a couple of sequences – a dream poker game in which someone is killed and several shots in the big flashback – that anticipate film noir.

Within Our Gates is a movie that deserves to be better known, not only as a benchmark for the self-depiction of Blacks in the cinema but as a masterpiece in its own right. It’s also finely acted, by Evelyn Preer in particular; Paul Robeson called her the greatest Black actress of his time, and she delivers a powerfully restrained performance not at all like what most people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish think they were acted like. While some of the other players fall into the traps of overacting and hammy gestures that were endemic to silent acting, Preer avoids them completely. She also avoids the trap of coyness a lot of silent-film heroines fell into; it’s a marvelous portrayal and it’s easy to see why Micheaux used her in seven more films.

12 Desperate Hours (Best on Best, Allegheny Image Factory, Lifetimew, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 25) I watched a much-hyped “premiere” movie pmn Lifetime called 12 Deperate Hours – the numeral is part of the official title – based on the story “Last Dance, Last Chance” by the late true-cime writer Ann Rule. For some reason Rule changed the names of the protagonists of her story – the villain, originally Gary Lee Quinlivan, to “Denny Tuohmy” (Harrison Thomas), and his principal victim – the suburban housewife he kidnaps and forces to drive him to different locations around the town of Kent in Washington state – was really Patricia Jacque but Rule called her “Val Jane.” Also, either she or Lifetime’s writers,Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson, updated the story from December 1963 (the time the real crimes occurred) to the present. The film was directed by Gina Gershon, who made a literally explosive film debut as a predatory Bisexual Las Vegas chorus dancer in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Gershon turns out to be a marvelous director with a real flair for suspense and action, and under her guidance Harrison Thomas gives an excellent performance. What in other hands (both actor and director) could have all too easily turned into just another Lifetime psychopath becomes a rich, varied and pathos-inducing character.

When we first see Denny he’s already killed an acquaintance – though Val doesn’t know that – and he holds her at gunpoint with a sawed-off shotgun and takes her hostage, forcing her to drive him. She’s a put-upon wife with two sons whose safety she understandably fears for and a husband who’s a construction worker and is too busy on his job to sped the “date night” she was hoping for. She’s also bought him a watch for Christmas – the story takes place on December 21 and there’s enough “Christmasicity” in the story to qualify this as a Christmas movie even though it wouldn’t have fit into Lifetime’s actual holiday season programming (basically Lifetime copying the Hallmark Chanel’s romance formula for November and December – even though he thought they had agreed not to buy each other presents because they’re still under water financially. Once Denny enters we quickly learn that he grew up in foster homes and just broke up with a girlfriend named Cherie (Tali Rabinowitz), who works in a nursing home and has instructed the Black woman who runs the front desk to tell Denny she’s gone home even when she hasn’t. In the film’s most chilling scene, Denny uses hos shotgun to blow away Cherie’s mother, and Cherie comes over to see her and discovers her corpse in the kitchen.

Val tries to reason with Denny as much as possible and Denny tells her of the trip he and Cherie took to Pismo Beach, California for what appears to be the happiest time of Denny’s life. Eventually Val drives Denny to the home of his foster brother, whom he wants to borrow a car from, only the brother cruelly taunts Denn, first waving the keys to the car in his face and then snatching them away. The brother’s wife hates Denny even more than her husband does, and when the brother gives Denny $5 she bitterly says that’;s $5 more than he’s worth. Denny returns to Val’s car and says she can leave him there and go home now, but Val doesn’t because she knows as soon as she leaves Denny is going to go back into his brother’s place and kill him, his wife and their kid. Instead Val drives Denny out again until the police, alerted by Val’s husband Mark (genuinely hot-looking David Conrad),ambush them and arrest Denny. 12 Desperate Hours – like A Rose for Her Grave,last week’s Lifetime “premiere” also based on a true-crime story by Ann Rule – is one of the better recent movies on this problematic but occasionally brilliant channel, very much worth watching and hopefully heralding the advent of yet another woman director who’s got an opportunity on Lifetime to show her stuff and hopefully advance to theatrical features (we hope!).

A Thrill for Thelma (MGM, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following 12 Desperate Hours I tured on Turner Classic Movies for a 1935 MGM “Crime Does Not Pay” short, fourth in the long-running series,called A Thrill for Thelma. The “Crime Does Not Pay” series started out as a series of mock newsreels made by MGM in1934 to stop the campaign of socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair for governor of California. The intent was to show that if Sinclair won, the state would be flooded with ruffians and bums of all kinds taking advantage of the anti-poverty programs Sinclair proposed, and once the newsreels did their job and Sinclair lost, MGM kept the unit together and shifted focus to anti-crime films. The “Crime Does Not Pay”movies served as a training ground for various actors, writers and directors whom MGM wanted to groom for bigger careers. The first film in the series, Buried Loot, featured an up-and-coming actor named Robert Taylor who soon became a major star.

A Thrill for Thelma opens at a women’s prison where Thelma Black (Irene Hervey) is serving a 20-year sentence for robbery and accessory to murder, and then in lashbacks narrated by both Thelma herself and police captain Richard Kyne (Robert Warwick), who arrested her, we lsee Thelma at her high-school graduation two years ago. She tells her classmate that she wants “thrills” and an exciting, lavish lifestyle. Thelma gets a job at a beauty salon in a hotel – there’s a scene in which she enviously fingers a fur coat before having to give it back to its real owner – and her criminal career begins when she emets a ne’er-do-well named Steve Black (Robert Livingston, oddly cast as a no-goodnik when his best-known role was in a Republic Western series called “The Three Mesquiteers,” in which after a year he was replaced by John Wayne). On their first date they accidentally crash into a car being driven by another young couple, killing him and iinjuring her. Thelma’s initial thought is to report this to the police,but Steve talks her otu of it and the two end up as a sort of bush-league Bonnie and Clyde, staking nightclubs in search of well-to-do couples and then ambushing them with their car and holding them up. (This was in the pre-credit card days when if you wanted a big night on the town you had to pay for it with cash, and a number of their victims flash their bankrolls so ostentatiously it’s lie they’re putting up neon signs saying, ”Rob me – please!”)

Though Steve and Thelma are smart enough to use not only a different car but a different gun on each job – that’s so the police can’t tell from ballistics that the robberies were being committed by the same people – one thing that never occurs to them os to change the color of Thelma’s bright red hair. Just about all the victims recall that the woman robber had red hair,and when one of the stolen cars they used is recovered and a long red hair is found inside it, the police eventually work out the pattern. They take over one of the nightclubs in the area where the criminals are working and staff it full of cops, then wait for the robbers to strike and, when they do, follow them out. There’s a gun battle in which Steve is killed and Thelma is arrested and sentenced to 20 years, and there's a nasty twist in the final scene (the film was written by Richard Goldstone and Marty Brooks) in which we learn that Thelma was pregnant when she was arrested and thus will never see her son, who was born in jail, until 20 years later and thus she’ll miss the boy’s entire childhood. This explains the scene in which we see Thelma wearing a wedding ring; she could be a robber and a crook, but God (or the Production Code) forbid she be an unwed mother!

The Wind and the Lion (MGM, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After A Thrill for Thelma TCM showed the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion, written and directed by John Milius – who as a filmmaker seems to have had all of Clint Eastwood’s testosterone and little or none of his talent. It was actually an intriguing companion piece to 12 Desperate Hours: both were looely based on true stories,both dealt with women with children who were kidnapped by morally ambiguous crooks, and both started out depicting the bad guy as just that but ultimately gave him more depth as the story progressed. The setting of The Wind and the Lion is Tangier, Morocco in May 1904, where a group of bandits headed by Ahmed al-Raisuli (Sean Connery), who in the film’s opening scenes is shown leading a band of marauders through the streets of Tangier. overturning peddlers’ carts and smashing their wares. Al-Raisuli ultimately stops at the home of American widow Eden Perdicaris (Candice Bergen) and kidnaps her and her two children. He takes them to his desert hideout in the Riff country and hods them hostage. In the film he isn’t clear just what he wants in exchange for them, but in real life he demanded a ransom of $70,000 and personal control of two of the richest districts in Tangier,which he later upped to six districts. The film cuts back and forth between Tangier and Washington, D.C., where President Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) and his Secretary of State, John Hay (John Huston, making one of his first forays into acting since he played the super-villain in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown) try to figure out how to deal with the situation.

They ultimately decide to send in a series of gunboats and servicemembers to rescue the hostages by force, at least in poart because Roosevelt is worried that if he doesn’t look tough enough the American people will vote him out of office in the 1904 election.Roosevelt notes that no U.S.Vice-President who succeeded to the presidency after the death of his predecessor got elected to a full term in his own right – though Roosevelt pulled it off and several others (Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson) have since. Eventually the mission is a success, the hostages are freed and Roosevelt goes on to a big win in November 1904. The biggest change Milius made in the real story was to transform the principal victim, who in real life was a 64-year-old man aned Ion Perdicaris, both in Greece to the U.S. ambassador and his wife in 1840 but considered a U.S. citizen. The real Ahmed al-Raizuli kidnapped Ion Perdicaris and his stepson, Cromwell Varney, but Milius decided to make “him” a relatively young, attractive woman. I suspect he was trying to create the same kind of ronaltic/sexual tension director George Melford and writers Edith Maude Hull,June Mathis and Monte Katterjohn had back in 1921 when they made Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik. That film became famous for an interttile in which the kidnap victim (Agnes Ayres) asked the sheik who kidnapped her why he did it, and he replies, “Are y ou not woman enough to know?”

The Wind and the Lion is not an especially good movie; it drags on and on and suffers from a lack of pace even in the action scenes, where one would have expected Milius to excel. Its biggest importance was on real-life U.S. history; reportedly President Gerald Ford had just watched it in a private screening in May 1975 when officials of the Communist Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia (which they renamed “Kampuchea”) had seized the cargo ship Mayaguez and were holding the ship, its crew and its cargo hostage. Like Roosevelt, Ford ordered a U.S. naval mission to free the Mayaguez and its crew, and it was successful even though, unlike Roosevelt,Ford lost his bid to be elected to a full term as President after Richarde Nixon’s resignation in1 974. Instead he lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter, who in turn lost his re-election bid to Roanld Reagan largely on a major hostage crisis of his own involving the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran kidnapped and held for over a year by forces aligned with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Wind and the Lion would be a completely unmemorable movie were it not for its interesting effect on real-life American politics.

Ukraine's Secret Resistance (MS-NBC, aired February 24,2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On February 24 at 7 and 10 p.m., MS-NBC showed a quite remarkable documentary called Ukraine’s Secret Resistance, hosted by NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel and featuring profiles of four individuals who became part of the partisan resistance in Kherson, Ukraine’s second-largest city and one of the earliest targets for the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which started one year ago yesterday) because it lies only 25 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia. The show profiled four resisters: Vladyslav “Vlad” Nebolstup, Nastya Burlak, Mykhailo Kuanov and a 17-year-old identified only as “Sergei.” Their stories of resistance eerily paralleled the ones we’ve heard of people similarly organizing resistance networks against Nazi occupatioin during World War II, though with a few modern features. Vlad was a car-parts salesman, Nastya a bartender, and Mykhailo a cab driver,and the three of them originally became involved in resistance activities when they traveled around Kherson and looked for the Russian encampments. They were specifically interested in where the Russian troops were staying and storing their heavy equipment. The show didn’t come right out and say Vlad and Nastya were a couple, but it certainly hinted at a romantic interest between them; they recalled how she would make him drinks when he came into the bar where she worked. When the Russians captured Kherson, Nastya’s bar became one of their favorite hangouts. They talked a lot and drank a lot, and Nastya picked up information about what they were saying and passed it on to Ukraine’s official intelligence service. Nastya also reported that the Russian soldiers in her bar were nasty and frequently brutal – one waiter even found himself arrested because the Russian soldier he was waiting on didn’t think the service was fast enough. She said the Russians drank all manner of hard liquors, including whiskey (one wonders if they were taking advantage of being in Ukraine to have drinks they couldn’t get back home instead of being stuck with vodka all the time).

Eventually Vlad crossed the line from just collecting intelligence to killing a Russian soldier; he recalled the incident as he fingered the knife with which he did the killing. He sneaked up behind the Russian with his knife and grabbed him from behind – the Russian was listening to music on earbuds and so he didn’t hear Vlad coming even though, as Vlad grimly joked, he’s a big man and therefore not all that good at sneaking up behind someone silently. Vlad plunged the knife into the Russian’s back and the Russian felt toe knife go in, he turned to face Vlad, and the two wrestled briefly before the Russian finally succumbed to Vlad’s wounds. Richard Engel asked if Vlad had any guilt feelings about the killing, and Vlad said no: the Russians had invaded their country, they didn’t belong in Ukraine, and therefore he felt justified in killing one of them. (At the same time it occurred to me that the Russian he killed was probably a draftee and didn’t want to be in Ukraine aqny more than the Ukrainians wanted him there.) In some ways Sergei’s story was the saddest: unlike the others,who were in their 20’s, Sergei was only 17 when oe got involved with the resistance, and after a few missions he was captured by the Russians. Sergei was held in a makeshift warehouse the Russians had converted into a prison and torture center, and after a few days of torture he “broke” and gave the Russians the information they wanted, including the names and addresses of fellow resisters. One grim irony is that Sergei himself had been ratted out by another resister whom the Russians had already captured and tortured.

Sergei, alone of the four Engel profiled, insisted that his real name not be used and he be shot in shadow so his face couldn’t be recognized. He’s also the only one of the four who isn’t still living in Kherson. While the other three stayed in the city after Ukrainian forces retook Kherson in November 2022, Sergei moved to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital (which Russians have steadily bombed since the war started but where life is still relatively normal; it’s like the difference between living in London and living in Paris during World War II), and he’s still traumatized by having yielded to torture and giving the Russians the information they wanted – which meant he subjected his friends to the same abuse he suffered himself. Today he’s a “broken” man in more ways than one; he told Engel he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his rent in Kyiv,, and though he was an aspiring musician before the war started he doesn’t seem to have taken that up again – and it’s possible he can’t, since one of the things the Russians did to him when they held him was break all his fingers. He also said that one reason he moved from Kherson to Kyiv was none of his old friends would speak to him again, and he wanted to be in a place where no one knew him and therefore he wouldn't be hated as a man who broke down and compromised the resistance.

One comes away from Engel’s documentary impressed by the sheer courage and commitment of the Ukrainians – it’s the sort of story that makes you wonder whether you’d have had the guts to do what they did – and also the sheer meanness of occupiers everywhere. Among the things the Russians did during the nine months they controlled Kherson was jackhammer emblems of Ukraine from all the public buildings and order that all public schools should teach their students in Russian. It’s been clear from the get-go that Vladimir Putin’s long-term ambition in Ukraine is not only to subjugate the Ukrainian people but obliterate any idea that Ukraine was ever an independent state or anything other than an integral part of Russia. Though Putin’s army has not (at least so far) set up extermination centers the way Hitler’s did, the war against Ukraine (or, as Putin euphemistically calls it, a “special military operation”; his captive legislature has made it a felony, punishable by a 15-year prison sentence, to call the war a “war”) still constitutes a genocide.

Law and Order: "Fear and Loathing" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 23) I watched the last new episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order series – the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime – for a month before new episodes return March 23 in one those infuriating mid-season hiatuses (hiaiti?) that have become mind-numbingly familiar. The Law and Order episode, “Fear and Loathing,” was actually quite good and fit in well with the current controversies about how police treat African-Americans. It opens with one of the show’s regulars, Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), being stopped and held at gunpoint by two uniformed patrol officers, and since Shaw is Black and the officers are white, he fears for the worst when they tell him to lie flat on the ground so they can cuff him and arrest him on suspicion of murder. Immediately both Shaw and we know that he’s being racially profiled – there’s a killer loose in the neighborhood and the description the cops have to go on is that he’s Black, but he’s younger, shorter and heftier than Shaw. Shaw refuses to comply with the orders of his fellow officers. He offers to show them his badge but they say no, and he realizes that if he reaches for it anyway they’ll decide he’s reaching for a gun and shoot him on sight. Shaw files a complaint with the police’s internal affairs division, but one of the two white officers who stopped him brings a bottle of Scotch (which Shaw throws in the nearest wastebasket) and pleaqds with him to withdraw the complaint. Saying that having it in his file will jeopardize his pending promotion to plainclothes detective. Shaw insists he’s going to pursue the case anyway, and the white officer essentially threatens him. Then he and his partner file their own internal affairs complaint, saying that Shaw violated police protocol by refusing to comply with their orders.

At this point the story’s main intrigue begins: a middle-aged Black heart surgeon is found dead on the street,clubed with a bottle. Shaw and his partner, white detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), who’s come a long way from his racist complaints when he was partnered with another Black detective in the first season of the revived Law and Order, discover that the killer is Brian Burke (Derek Cecil),who had previously been mugged and robbed by a Black man and who claimed to have acted in self-defense because he saw another Black man approaching him on the street. District attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and the two lead prosecutors on the show, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), prepare to try Burke for murder when the cops suddenly realize he3 was essentially put takes pictures of Black men on the streets of the neighbup to it by local realtor Daniel DeLuca (David Aaron Baker). Aside from making only slightly veiled racist comments of his own – when Cosgrove and Shaw interview him DeLuca says “those people” are ruining New York’s neighborhoods – also runs an Internet app warning people of allegedly threatening criminals in certain neighborhoods. To illustrate his point, DeLuca posts online photos of Black men and alleges th ey are criminals – only it turns out he’s really doing this for business reasons. To drive down property values in certain neighborhoods where he wants to buy properties, he puts allegations online that they are high-crime areas. Then he buys the apartments for well below their market value, and when the crime scares he’s stoked die down he resells the apartments at a major profit.

Various Black men have been victimized by DeLuca’s antics before, including at least one person who was beaten unconscious by local residents convinced by DeLuca’s false threats that they were criminals, and at least two others who were falsely arrested. Ultimately Price and Maroun win a jury verdict against DeLuca but only by giving Burke, the actual killer, a sweetheart deal which means he will serve no more than seven years in prison. Then we return to the internal affairs complaints and we learn that the internal affairs department has tossed out Shaw’s complaint against the two white officers, but approved their complaint against him and sentenced him to a one-week suspension without pay. The episode ends with Shaw handing over his badge to his superior officer, Lieutenant Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim), and stoically accepting the injustice of it as part of the dues of being a Black police officer. This show was unexpectedly timely after the Tyre Nichols killing in Memphis, Tennessee, where an unarmed young Blackman was stopped by five police officers – all of then Black themselves – and literally beaten to death by the Black officers, while at least one white officer egged them on and, as they were chasing the suspect who was futilely trying to get away and go to his mother’s house nearby, yelled at them, “I hope you stomp his ass.”

The lesson of this show is that Black police officers are under perpetual scrutiny by their white counterparts, constantly given the message that they have to show where their loyalties are – to their fellow police or their fellow Black people. The point was underscored by an interview Stephen Colbert did with Black journalist Isabel Wilkerson, author of a book called Caste that has just come out in paperback after it was published in hardcover two years ago, which argued that the U.S. has a caste system and it’s based on racial appearance. Her point reminded me of pre-Civil War pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun (D-South Carolina), who argued in defense of slavery that the experience of democracy in ancient Athens had proved that a democracy could not survive without a permanent servant class, and given that America was a nation that defined itself on the principle of equality for all (white) people, it was necessary that the permanent servant class be non-white.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "King of the Moon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, while the writers and director (regrettably unidentified as yet on imdb.com) behind the “Fear and Loathing” episode of Law and Order deftly combined two intersecting plot lines,the writers (David Graziano and Julie Martin) and director (series star Mariska Hargitay) of the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed,”King of the Moon,” failed to pull off their integration of separate story lines with anything like the same skill. One plot line concerned Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano, the sexiest male “regular” on this show since Christopher Meloni departed over a decade ago), who in an effort to get a heroin addict to talk not only waved a baggie of the drug in his face but tp;d jo, tjat two decades earlier he’d been a would-be gangbanger involved in two still-unsolved murders in Fort Worth. The other story concerned psychologist and best-selling non-fiction author Pence Humphreys (Bradley Whitfield), who is suffering from age-related dementia and claims to have had a murder-suicide pact with his wife Winifred, a.k.a. “Winnie,” who’s been found raped and murdered in her bed. He’s convinced that he must have killed her and then dishonored her by not fulfilling his part of the bargain and knocking himself off – he told the cops he was going to commit suicide with a shotgun but no such weapon was found in his home.

While Velasco is being investigated by internal affairs for allegedly breaking police protocol by giving a suspect drugs to get him to talk (his hands tested positive for drug residue but he said that was only because he emptied the bag of actual heroine and refilled it with powdered sugar) and confessing to a real-life murder in Fort Worth two decades earlier, Humphreys remains convinced that he killed his wife. Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tries to talk him out of it, and eventually the cops discover that Winnie’s real killer is Humphreys’ scapegrace 20-year-old nephew, who apparently believed that his uncle and aunt had large sums of cash on hand in their home and was convinced to steal it to satisfy his underworld creditors. Meanwhile, Benson learns that Velasco is covering up the Fort Worth murders for the real killer, a boyhood friend of his who saved his life by keeping him out of the gangs. Benson insists that Velasco rat out his friend as a condition of being allowed to remain in SVU. The two stories really don’t intersect or reinforce each other in any way, unlike the dual plot lines of the Law and Order that preceded it, though there was a clever line of dialogue in which pence tells Benson that her face looks like an angel's and her butt looks like like Jayne Mansfield’s – Hargitay’s real-life mother. The episode title is explained as the name of a book Pence wrote in his childhood, a fantasy about going to the moon and becoming its king until he got lonely for the companionship of other humans/ Benson reads the book to Pence as a comfort to him, and this explains the opening scene showing Pence and Winnie as grade-school kids (Noah Feldman and Mariana Cay Baker) who meet when they compete against each other in a spelling bee.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "The Wild and the Innocent" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “The Wild and the Innocent,” was a good deal better than this show usually is, basically because ot broke its usual allegiance to the Great God SERIAL and instead told a story that was complete in one episode. (Thank you to Dock Wolf and his staff of writers and show runners for doing that and not creating a cliffhanger that we’d have to wait for a whole month to see resolved.) The story opens with a young couple being dropped off a few blocks from home after a dinner date, only as soon as they get our of their ride-share car they’re both assaulted by gang members driving both motorcycles and cars. He’s killed and she’s kidnapped. It turns out that she’s Janelle Carver (Brnadi Bravo), daughter of “Sins of Satan” motorcycle-gang leader David Carver (Michael Biehn, a name I’ve actually heard of elsewhere). David is an old Marine buddy of Detective Elliott Stabler (series star Christopher Meloni), and the kidnapping of his daughter was part of a plot by a much nastier rival motorcycle-gang leader, Peter Grimes (Ronnie Gene Blevins) to get the Sins of Satan gang involved in a plot to sell untraceable plastic “ghost guns” to a Latino drug cartel. Only various other agencies get involved on both the good and bad sides of the ledger; on the good side (more or less) are a squad of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who interrupt the proceedings just when the New York ccops have set up a controlled drug buy, and on the definitely bad side there’s the leader of the drug cartel, who decides he doesn’t need the Anglo middlemen anymore and enters the action with the intent of knocking off both cops and fellow crooks and grabbing the ghost guns for himself.

There’s one of the engagingly quirky characters this show is known for, Julius Hayes (Ethan Dubin), who’s made the ghost guns and used a special kind of polymer so they can be fired repeatedly without melting under the heat of real bullets he way most plastic guns do. One of the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s officers is assigned the task of impersonating Julius, since no one on the cartel or the gang brokering the gun deal has actually met him. The cops also take over the actual manufacture of the guns and deliberately disable the firing pins son they won’t risk flooding the criminal world of New York City and elsewhere with working models of untraceable guns. That seemed unnecessarily risky to me, given the likelihood that one of the crooks involved in buying the guns – either the cartel leader orthe motorcycle gang – would test-fire at least one of the guns to make sure it worked. Certainly it would have made more sense for the cops to leave a few guns operational in the mix and put those on top. But at least this episode ended powerfully, with David Carver confronting Peter Grimes (did they deliberately grab the name “Peter Grimes” from the prtagonist of Benjamin Britten’s second, and most commercially successful, opera?) and having a crisis of conscience: shoot the man who kidnapped his daughter and killed her fiancé, or let the cops arrest him instead?

Dog Day Afternoon (Artist Entertainment Complex, Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night – February 22 – I looked for a movie on Turner Classic Movies I could watch with my husband Chalres. I found it in Dog Day Afternoon, a 1975 film based on a true-life tale of a hilariously botched bank robbery that took place at the Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank on August 22, 1972. The bizarre story that ensued was publicized as far west as San Francisco, where the Chronicle published two stories about it, both on the front page, one while the standoff on the bank was still going on and again the next day when the FBI finally arrested the lead bank robber, John Wojtowicz, and shot and killed his partner in crime, Salvatore Naturale. In 1973 Wojtowicz managed to negotiate a deal for the movie rights to the story, and the film was finally made in 1974 and released in 1975 with Al Pacino as Wojkowicz (renamed “Sonny Wortzik” for the film), John Cazale as Sal (whose last name became “Naturile”), and the young Chris Sarandon as Sonny’s boyfriend, Ernest Aron (renamed “Leon Shermer”). Dog Day Afternoon was, among other things, a pioneering film in the sympathetic depiction of both Gay and Trans characters in film (which makes it quite ironic that five years later Pacino made Cruising, a film so relentlessly homophobic in its depiction of a serial killer of Gay men various ueer-0rights groups protested it and tried to stop it from being made). In 2014 a documentary film called The Dog was released based on interviews Wojtowicz had done in the last two years of his life. (Though he was sentenced to 20 years in prison he was released after only five, and ended up with a Gay partner named George Heath whom he had met in prison.)

The real Wojtowicz was married to a woman named Carmen (called “Angie” in the film and played by Sisan Peretz)and had two children with her, but he also joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a pioneering queer-0rights group. According to Randy Wicker, a Gay journalist who helped Wojtowicz with the negotiations for the movie rights to his story, “He was considered a disgrace at GAA [dances]. He would fall on a couch and start having sex with somebody in a semi-public place. His reputation within GAA was, ‘This guy is a looney-tune.’” One part of the real story that survived intact in the film was John’s/Sonny’s motive for the robbery: he wanted the money to pay for gender-reassignment surgery for his partner. The real Wojtowicz gave his income from the film rights to Ernest, who had the operation in 1973 and took the name Elizabeth “Liz” Eden, but after that Liz told Wojtowicz she never wanted to see him again, and this led Wojtowicz to attempt suicide. This was especially ironic because Liz had also attempted – or at least threatened – suicide pre-transition, and it was that which led Wojtowicz to hatch the plot to rob the bank in the first place.

Whatever its deviations from real life – and it’s quite obvious that had screenwriter Frank Pierson stuck closer to the facts, he would never have got the film made in 1975, and certainly Al Pacino would never have agreed to star in it – Dog Day Afternoon holds up as a brilliantly entertaining and boundary-pushing movie. Al Pacino’s performance is sheer perfection (even though Randy Wicker said he made the character far more rational and sympathetic than the real person), and aside from being a landmark movie in the depiction of Queer people on film it also holds up even 48 years later,when the whole idea of men marrying men, women marrying women and Trans people marrying whomever they want inn whatever gender identity they want has become largely, if not totally, accepted. At the same time Pierson’s changes to the character make him considerably more ambiguous than he really was, and therefore more dramatically interesting: Sonny defies characterization as Gay, straight or Bi, and the way he’s presented here it’s unclear just how he got into sex with men. The real John Wojtowicz said he had his first Gay experience while in basic training for the U.S. military; both he and the fictional Sonny were Viet Nam War veterans.

The imdb.com synopsis for the 2014 documentary The Dog attributes it to the loose sexual mores of the time: “Coming of age in the 1960’s, John Wojtowicz’s libido was unrestrained even by the libertine standards of the era, with multiple wives and lovers, both women and men.” Whatever its deviations from the true story, Dog Day Afternoon holds up beautifully as a film, with Sonny achieving folk-hero status – like Alfred Hitchcock in his best films, Sidney Lumet and Frank Pierson turn our moral judgments on their heads and have us rooting for Sonny through much of the film – and there’s also a real irony in a line Sal (whose best moment comes when he takes umbrage at the report that “two homosexuals” are robbing the bank, ahd ne demands a retraction from the TV station that he is straight) speaks to one of the women they’re holding hostage. He tells her not to light the cigarette she’s asked to smoke because it will give her cancer – and,, tragically, the real John Cazale died of lung cancer on March 13, 1978 at age 42 after making just five films, all among the best of his time: this one, the first two Godfather films, The Deer Hunter and The Conversation.

Ode to Victory (MGM,1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ll just comment on the short film Turner Classic Movies ran immediately after Dog Day Afternoon on February 22: Ode to Victory, a strange little 11-minute shor featuring character actor Ray Teal (who later appeared as a regular cast member of the 1950’s TV Western series Bonanza, though an online reviewer on imdb.com said he was heavier in his Bonanza days than he is here) conducting an orchestra of U.S. servicemembers in a “patriotic” pastiche by Nathaniel Shilkret. After about a minute or so in which conductor Teal tells the players to stop treating their instruments like bazookas, we hear the full Shilkret piece. The work is divided intol four sections: 1) “Birth of Freedom” (the American Revolution); 2) “The Land Divided” (the Civil War); 3) “Coming of Age” (World War I, beginning with the sinking of the Lusitania): and 4) “Land of the Free” (World War II, beginning with footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering his famous “day of infamy” speech on December 8, 1941). It’s indicative of the time that generated this short that all four of the benchmarks of American history it commemorates are major wars. Of course, the segments are illustrated on screen with suitable excerpts from MGM films depicting these events – the earlier clips are probably from dramatized fiction films about these events while the ones depicting the two world wars were likely from MGM’s newsreel vaults. The strategy was the same as used in Duke Ellington’s minor masterpiece Symphony in Black (1935): we see the band playing the section of the piece, the image dissolves into the illustrative footage, then fades back onto the band for the closing of the movement. I quite liked the piece until the chorus that came in at the end and saqng a bunch of “inspirational” lyrics by Patricia Johnston that underlined ahd made mind-numbingly explicit the patriotic message that had been much more powerfully implicit in the earlier instrumental sections.

I have a great deal of respect for Nathaniel Shilkret: in the late 1920’s he was a record producer for Victor and the session he produced for Jean Goldkette’s band featuring Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer showcased the band playing the closest it ever got on records to true jazz. In 1929 Shilkret conducted the first recording of George Gershwim’s tone poem An American in Paris and it’s a stunning performance, still my all-time favorite of the piece, even though apparently Shilkret and Gershwin argued over the conductor’s tempi. In 1932 Shilkret conducted Victor’s eight experimental re-recordings of Enrico Caruso, who had died 11 years earlier and hadn’t lived long enough to make electrical recordings. Engineers at RCA Victor had the idea to overlay new electrically recorded accompaniments over Caruso’s old records, and they chose Shilkret to conduct the additions. I’ve heard four of the results and they are stunning, far better than the more recent attempts to filter out Caruso’s voice and add new orchestral accompaniments, mainly because Shilkret was a much more imaginative conductor than Gottfried Rabl, who got the assignment for the “Caruso 2000” CD’s and pretty much just followed a click track. In 1945 Shilkret worked on an even more ambitious project, the Genesis Suite, a series of musical settings from the first book of the Bible recorded by conductor Werner Janssen with Edward Arnold narrating. Shilkret composed the opening segment, “The Creation,” himself and for the rest recruited Alezandre Tansman (“Adam and Eve”), Darius Milhaud (“Cain and Abel”), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (“Noah’s Ark”), Ernst Toch (“The Covenant”), Igor Stravinsky (“Babel,” a five-minute mini-cantata Stravinsky later re-recorded on his own, though with John Colicos, a far less imposing actor than Arnold) and Arnold Schönberg (a piece based on the words “In the beginning God” that was a postlude in the original 78 rpm album and a prelude when the piece was reissued on LP, albeit with a different narrator). Shilkret’s “Ode to Victory” sounded a bit too much like his attempt to duplicate Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans” (not a great piece of music, either, but a good deal better than “Ode to Victory”), and the whole short seemed like a real historical curio, a souvenir of the patriotic pretension that was supposed to inspire us to do our best to support the war effort.

The Stranger (International Pictures, RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On August 20, 2005 my husband Charles and I ended the evening by watching a Critics’ Choice DVD of the 1946 Orson Welles film The Stranger, produced by Sam Spiegel (under his “S. P. Eagle” identity, which inspired a lot of Hollywood jokesters to suggest that other producers would juggle their own names similarly and bill themselves with things like M. A. Yer or Z. A. Nuck) and billing Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles (in that order) in a tale of international intrigue: Inspector Wilson of the Nazi War Crimes Commission (Robinson) allows the commandant of one of the more brutal concentration camps, Konrad Meineke (a marvelous performance by Konstantin Shayne), to escape in order to lead him to the master architect of the Holocaust, Franz Kindler (Welles), who has hidden out in a small town called Harper, Connecticut, assumed the identity of history professor Charles Rankin and somehow got to marry him Mary Longstreet (Young), daughter of Supreme Court Justice Longstreet (Philip Merivale). Joseph McBride’s book on Welles quotes him as calling The Stranger “the worst of my films … I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else,” and another Welles biographer, Frank Brady, said what put out Welles was Spiegel’s insistence that Welles shoot the script (by Anthony Veiller from a story by Victor Trivas) exactly as written, and also that Robinson play the investigator instead of Welles’ intriguing choice, Agnes Moorehead (!). I’d like to think that if Welles had got to rewrite the script he would have done something about this plot’s sheer preposterousness: we’re supposed to believe that somehow Kindler managed to get out of Nazi Germany and within a year after the war had successfully integrated himself into a small New England town and got the Loretta Young character to marry him; that he’d managed to erase all documentary evidence of his existence and yet he’s such a stupid criminal that when Meineke comes to town to expose him (Meineke in the meantime having undergone a religious conversion and seen the evil of his previous concentration-camp commandant ways) he kills the man in the middle of a wood where a group of students are having a paper chase and then has to kill his wife’s dog for fear the dog will dig up the crudely dug grave in which he’s buried his victim (after which he comes home in a spotlessly clean suit and tie without any clue that he’s been exerting himself physically and gotten dirt all over his clothes).

The Stranger is one of those mediocre movies that could have been truly great — indeed, the main problem with it is that it seems even more than most movies to be made up of other movies rather than having anything to do with life. According to Brady, critics at the time compared it unfavorably to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt — which certainly has some similarities to this film, only in Hitchcock’s film the woman who’s taken in by the superficially charming murderer is his niece rather than his wife, and her naïveté is at least explicable by her youth (indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Shadow is that the Teresa Wright character’s coming-of-age story is ably juxtaposed with the thriller plot), while Welles associate Joseph Cotten was considerably better than Welles himself at projecting the character’s charm as well as his evil (and, significantly, both Shadow and Stranger contain scenes in which the villain “outs” himself in an impassioned monologue he gives at a party), but one can see parallels in other movies as well, notably Gaslight, in which a woman gradually realizes she’s married to a crook even while he’s attempting to convince her that she’s insane. Gaslight worked better because it gave us enough of the backstory of the principals’ relationship that we understood why she would so fervently cling to him, and in The Stranger it’s not Mary’s husband but the presumed “good guys,” Robinson and his bosses (with whom he’s in contact by phone), who want to drive Mary to the brink of a nervous breakdown so her cognitive dissonance over her husband’s moral position will eventually drive her to do the right thing and turn him in. Another movie of the time which worked these tropes far better than The Stranger is Hitchcock’s Notorious, in which a woman (played by Gaslight star Ingrid Bergman) deliberately marries a Nazi as part of a spy agency’s plot to nail him, and Hitchcock and Ben Hecht create a far more morally ambiguous and complex riff on the plot by having her Nazi husband (Claude Rains) be genuinely in love with her, giving added poignancy to the plot twist at the end of both films in which the Nazi attempts to kill his wife to shut her up.

But The Stranger has its echoes in later films as well. Welles told McBride that “the best stuff in the picture was a couple of reels taking place in South America” which were supposedly completely removed by Spiegel — actually a few minutes of this footage survives, at least in the print we were watching (the running time is variously listed as 85, 95 and 115 minutes, and ours was the 95-minute version), and while it’s virtually incoherent dramatically, it’s by far the most visually arresting part of the movie, all oblique angles and deep shadows, anticipating Welles’s use of Latin American settings for similarly dark and dire atmospherics in The Lady from Shanghai (a film whose script isn’t appreciably more coherent than this one, but which in Welles’s hands comes off as surrealism instead of mere sloppiness) and Touch of Evil. There’s also an astonishing anticipation of The Third Man — a film Welles didn’t direct but seems to come closer to his “world” than any other in which he starred but did not direct; in both The Stranger and The Third Man Welles is playing a master villain who faked his own death to avoid capture, and in both films the authorities win the cooperation of the reluctant associate of the Welles character (his wife in The Stranger, his male best friend in The Third Man — and, curiously, the relationship between the Welles and Joseph Cotten characters in Third Man seems more intense and emotionally weighty than that between Welles and Loretta Young in The Stranger) by showing films of the atrocities for which he’s responsible. Many films seem to be concocted out of bits of other movies, but few to the extent this one is — even the spectacular clock in the Harper church, which Welles’s character (described as having an obsessive hobby of buying, restoring and repairing clocks) fixes, has a series of statues that revolves inside it as it strikes the hour (one of which, a figure holding a sword straight out, impales Welles in the final scene), is straight out of Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, in which a similar (and similarly sinister) clock symbolized the effect of fate on the Emil Jannings character. — 8/21/05

•••••

The feature film my husband Charles and I watched February 21 was The Stranger, a 1946 quasi-noir thriller directed by and starring Orson Welles, though it was at once the least personal of his projects as director and the only film Welles ever directed that actually turned a profit on its initial release. The Stranger began life as an “original” story by Victor Trivas, who worked on a film adaptation with Decla Dunning (both names that otherwise mean nothing to me), though the actual script was by Anthony Veiller, who had some pretty imposing credits under his belt even though few of his films became enduring classics. (One which at least arguably did was State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy, katharine Hepburn and Angela Lansbury and directed by Frank Capra, who had previously worked with him on some of his U.S. Army Signal Corps productions.) Welles signed to make this film for the short-lived International Pictures, then an independent studio releasing through his old stomping ground, RKO, though within two years they would merge with International to form Universal-International. The producer of the film was Sam Spiegel, though for some reason he took his credit as “S. P. Eagle” (which led to Hollywood’s jokesters offering suggestions to other movie moguls to do the same to their names and call themselves things like M. A. Yer or Z. A. Nuck). Spiegel’s contract with Welles specified that he could not make any changes to Veiller’s script and if he ran overbudget or otherwise displeased Spiegel, the producer could fire him as director while requiring him to continue as star.

The plot of The Stranger casts Welles as ex-Nazi Franz Kindler, who following Germany’s defeat in World War II assumed the name “Charles Rankin” and got a job as a professor of history at a small college in Harper, Connecticut. The film opens with what in many ways are its best scenes, a few minutes of Nazis arriving in South America to hide out after the war; Welles said these sequences took up the first 20 minutes of the film and were the scenes he was proudest of, but they were cut to the bare minimum needed for exposition. Among the refugees are Konrad Meineke (Konstantin Shayne), who during the war was a top Nazi official but after Germany’s defeat repented, became a born-again Christian and was deliberately allowed to escape from an Allied war-crimes prison in hopes he could lead the investigators to Kindler. The lead Allied investigator is Wilson (Edward G. Robinson, in a role Welles originally wanted Agnes Moorehead to play, though the late William K. Everson in The Detective in Film argued that Robinson’s casting tied this film in to Confessions of a Nazi Spy and put Robinson in the position of being a Nazi-hunter both before and after the war), and he traces Meineke to Harper. Meineke arranges for Wilson to come to a deserted gym at the college and tries to kipp him with a piece oif gymnastics apparatus, but though injured Wilson survives and maintains the hunt for Kindler. He arrives in town on the day “Rankin” is scheduled to marry Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of U.S. Supreme court Justice Adam Longstreet (Philip Merivale), though Veiller’s script doesn’t give much insight into just why she was attracted to him.

Both Wilson and “Rankin” befriend Mr. Potter (Billy House), the town clerk, who challenges all comers to games of checkers at 25 cents per game. Potter beats Wilson easily but can’t beat “Rankin.” Supposedly Franz Kindler is the true architect of the Holocaust (there’s a brief seque3nce ini which Wilson, trying to convince Mary that the man she’s married is a monster, shows her some of the infamous true-life footage of teh concentration camps being liberated after the war, thereby including the film-within-a-film that was one of Welles’s trademarks), and in a party scene “Rankin” starts babbling about how the German people will never overcome their lust for world domination. He starts talking about “the fiery sword of Siegfried” and mentions Wagner, and at the end of his spiel he makes the argument that the only way to end the German threat to the world is to annihilate them, thereby establishing that he’s a man who thinks in terms of genocide. When one of the other guests mentioned Karl Marx as a counter-example of a German who believed in workers’ rights and human equality, “Rankin” snaps back, “But Marx wasn’t a German. He was a Jew.” Early in the film “Rankin” strangles Meineke because he realizes that if Meineke found him, so can others, and he wants to stop the trail before it leads Wilson to him (though it already has). Meineke’s body is discovered by Mary’s dog, whom “Rankin” poisons, and also by a bunch of students doing a “paper chase” through the woods surrounding the college. One of them invites “Rankin” to join the chase, saying, “You could stand to lose a few pounds” – an almost unbearably ironic line given what Orson Welles ended up looking like eventually.

Gradually it dawns on Mary just what kind of man she’s married – though it takes Wilson and his film screening to turn her around completely – and there’s an ending sequence in which “Rankin” hatches a plot to kill Mary by inviting her up to visit him in the local church’s bell tower. It seems that the bell tower has a clock and “Rankin,” an inveterate devotée of clocks and their mechanisms, has devoted himself to repairing the old medieval German clock installed in the church steeple. But he’s really sawed through the rungs of the ladder so anyone climbing up it will break the rungs and fall to their death. Mary’s life is spared when her old nursemaid and still servant Sara (Marjorie Wentworth) has a sudden heart attack and Mary has to wait with her for the doctor (Byron Keith) to arrive. Her brother Noah (Richard Long) goes to the bell tower in her place, only “Rankin” is horrified by this and pleads with Noah not to go. Mary realizes that the trap was meant for her – in an earlier scene she even tells “Rankin” that she’s O.K. with him killing her as long as he doesn’t use his hands – and in a truly baroque finish “Rankin” is stabbed to death by a spear held by one of the ornate statues that are part of the clock.

According to Frank Brady, who published the first biography of Orson Welles published after his death in 1985, critics reviewing The Stranger on its initial release complained about its similarities to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and the resemblance is there, not only in the basic situation of a young, naïve woman slowly realizing that the man she’s fallen in love with is a psychopathic killer but the specific scene in which the psychopath “outs” himself by making a shocking speech at a dinner party. But this time around the film also seemed to be reminiscent of a lot of other movies, including Gaslight (whose writers dared to explain why the woman is attracted to the man in ways that eluded the writers of The Stranger), Rebecca and the mother of all those stories in which a naïve young woman is involved with a brooding older man, Jane Eyre (n which Welles had starred just three years before The Stranger). Charles saw a parallel with Val Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, specifically in the symbolism of the clock tower as analogous to the ship’s masthead in Zombie, though I remember when I first saw The Stranger the film the clock tower and its ornate statues reminded me of was The Blue Angel.

I’m not sure what I’ve said about The Stranger when I’ve seen it before, but this time around it seemed like a good movie that could have been great. It’s a pity Welles didn’t get to cast Agnes Moorehead as the Nazi-hunter – it could have given her a rare sympathetic role and also added an extra edge to the intrigue that a woman was hunting down Kindler. It also needed a more sensitive female lead than Loretta Young – like (dare I say it?) Barbara Stanwyck, or (as difficult as it would have been to accept her as an all-American character) Ingrid Bergman, who brought far more pathos and subtlety to the equivalent character in Gaslight. Some of the original reviewers lamented that since Welles was both star and director, there was no one on board to tell him when he was overacting and try to calm him down. – 2/22/23

Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History (Robert Stone Productions, WGBH, PBS, aired February 20, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, on February 20, my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating episode of the long-running PBS documentary series American Experience; “Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History.” The “Monopoly” being referred to is the famous board game, first nationally marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935 and an instant sensation. The official history of Monopoly is it was invented by Charles Darrow, a Philadelphia electrician left unemployed by the Great Depression, whjo patented the game and sold it to Parker Brothers. The truth, as it turns out, is a lot more interesting and complicated than that. It was unraveled by, of all people, a San Francisco State University economics professor named Ralph Anspach,who ini the early 1970’s invented his own board game, Anti-Monopoly. Anspach’s game inverted the central principle of the standard Monopoly; instead of playing private real-estate speculators trying to build up monopolies, the players in Anti-Monopoly were fedran anti-trust attorneys trying to break them apart. The food company General Mills, which had acquired Parker Brothers in 1968. Sued Anspach and won an injunction preventing him from selling Anti-Monopoly and even ordering him to destroy the 40,000 copies of his game in his possession. Anspach lost in the trial court, won on appeal, then had to defend his victory all over again until in 1982 General Mills appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court eventually found in Anspach’s favor, based largely on the research he and his colleagues had done about the history of Monopoly.

It actually was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie (pronounced “McGee”), an activist and early feminist who was a devotée of British economist Henry George. George enjoyed a brief vogue in the last two decades of the 19th century; he wrote a book called Progress and Poverty in which he said the root of all economic evil, and specifically of inequality, was the private ownership of land. George’s argument was that land was the ultimate “free good” – there was only a certain amount of it and no one could create it – and therefore all existing taxes should be replaced with a single tax on land, the proceeds from which would be paid into a common fund for the benefit of all people. Realizing tnat not many people would be able to plopw their way through Progress and Poverty to get George’s message, Magie invented a board game she called “The Landlord’s Game,” in which players would move around a continuous-loop board and acquire properties, for which they culd charge rent if other players landed on them afterwards. Magie wrote two sets of rules for her game, one set very much like the Monopoly of today and a second set that follows George’s principles and aimed at teaching them to the players. Magie patented her version twice, one in 1904 and again in the early 1920’s, and in addition to the games made under license there were plenty of home-made versions in circulation. In 1929 a group of Quakers in Atlantic City created their own version and gave the various properties the names oif Atlantic City streets, with Boardwalk being the most expensive and prestigious. The cheapest properties,Mediterranean and Baltic Avenies,.were the Black ghettoes of Atlantic City, and the light-blue properties next to them on the board were the Jewish sections.

The Quaker version of the game made its way to Philadelphia, when a couple named Charles and Olive Todd taught it to their friends Charles and Esther Darrow. Sensing a commercial property he could exploit as his way out of the Depression, Charles Darrow wrote a prospectus for the game, filed for a patent, got it and sold the rights to Parker Brothers in 1935. Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History is a fascinating tale about how American capitalism can commoditize anything, including products and properties originally created in opposition to it. Certainly the history of Parker Brothers itself, with its sale to General Mills in 1968, its subsequent spinoff along with Kenner as a separate company, and then Hasbro’s acquisition of Kenner, illustrates the point Anspach (and Magie before him) was trying to make about how capitalists really don’t like competition. Instead they want to concentrate capital in fewer and fewer hands until the whole business world is a series of monopolies. In addition to showing how the giant capitalist meatgrinder took a game that was intended as a critique of capitalism and turned it into a celebration of it, writer-director Stephen Ives, a 30-year veteran documentary filmmaker for PBS, also made the point that what the commercial mega-success of Monopoly says about this country is that it is one that prizes ruthlessness and the total economic destruction of all rivals, When he made that point towards the end of the film, he phrased it in a way that could have been a description of Donald Trump, the conscience-free capitalist who ruthlessly stomps out his competitors and prides himself on his utter lack of compassion. A country that took Monopoly to its heart as much as the U.S. did from 1935 to the present day is a country that was ultimately destined to be ruled by someone like Donald Trump!

White Boy Rick (LBI Productions, Protozoa Pictures, Studio 8, Columbia, Sony, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On February 20 shortly after 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a 2018 movie called White Boy Rick, based on a true story about Richard Wershe, Jr. (Richie Merritt), a white kid from the working-class neighborhood of east Detroit, who at age 14 was recruited by the Detroit Police Department and the FBI to make drug buys and set up local drug dealers for arrest. He was busted three years later when he started dealing drugs himself, much to the disgust of his father, Rochard Wershe, Sr. (Matthew McConaughey at his twitchiest). Eventually his “handlers” at the Detroit Police Department and the FBI turned against him and busted him, and he ended up spending 30 years in prison in Michigan and another three years in Florida after he was somehow convicted of auto theft even though he’d been in a Michigan prison for 30 years. Wershe’s stretch remains the longest ever served in the Michigan penal system for a non-violent crime. Though McConaughey not surprisingly got top billing as Wershe’s dad – himseif a low-life who makes his living buying guns at gun shows and reselling them to drug gangs º and Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie (who’s died in so many of her film roles it’s a surprise to see her still alive and working; she was born January 22, 1932 in, appropriately enough, Detroit, and she’s still alive as of this writing) as his grandparents, this is definitely Merritt’s vehicle. This was Merritt’s first film; he’s since made another crime-themed movie, Clean (2020), done two episodes of the TV series Euphoria, and currently has a film called Lois James in post-production. Judging from his performance here, his later films should be worth watching.

White Boy Rick was directed by Yann Demange and co-written by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller (names that otherwise mean nothing to me), and despite the overall past-is-brown cinematography (the director of photography was Tat Radcliffe,who like so many of his modern-day brethren should be required to watch the 1956 film Slightly Scarlet, directed by Allan Dwan and photographed by John Alton, to see it’s possible to do the classic noir look in color) and the relentless darkness of the story, it’s quite an accomplished film. Richard Wershe, Jr.’s walk on the wild side begins with his dad and his drug-gang clientele for weapons sales – in the opening scene the Wershes are at a gun show talking to a dealer who’s hawking what he claims are genuine Russian-made AK-47’s, and Richard, Sr. recognizes them for what they are, cheap Egyptian knock-offs – and intensifies when his sister Dawn (Bel Powley) runs off with a Black lowlife drug guy named Tyler “Ty” Finney (Lawrence Adjimora). Richard, Sr. catches Ty and Dawn doing it in his home when he returns from the gun show early, threatens Ty with his newly purchased gun and drives him out of the house, which leads Dawn to run out after him even though she’s wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. Eventually Ty gets Dawn hooked on drugs, which gives Richard, Sr. yet another reason to look with disfavor on the drug trade. Since just about everyone else in the drug trade, or at least the part of it Richard,Jr. Is involved with, is Black – even hos point man on the Detroit police narcotics task force is a Black man, Demetrius Johnson (Isaiah Ali), though his FBI contact is a white woman, Snyder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – he inevitably earns the nickname “White Boy Rick.” At one point he and the crew he’s involved with do a jaunt to Las Vegas because they’ve been told – wrongly – that they have V.I.P. tickets to a major boxing match,which they don’t and they’re forced to watch the fight on a

hotel-room TV. We’re also told that the corruption in the Detroit city government reaches as far as the Mayor’s nephew and quite possibly the Mayor himself. The one moment of tenderness in the whole movie is a remarkable scene when Richard, Jr. is presented with the daughter he fathered in a tryst with a Black woman named Brenda, and even Richard, Sr. seems unexpectedly thrilled at realizing he’s a grandfather. White Boy Rick is a relentlessly dark film, both thematically and visually, but it’s also a quite remarkable movie and an example of both the sordidness of the drug trade and the absurdity of America’s decades-long attempt to control drug abuse by making drugs illegal. It’s also quite well directed and acted, and even the soundtrack music, most of it early rap, works quite well both as source music – this is what these people would have been listening to, after all – and a self-justifying glorification of their lifestyle. There’s one hilarious moment in which Richard, Jr. returns from his Vegas trip wearing a necklace with a Star oif David emblem as a pendant. Richard, Jr. has no idea what the emblem means, and he’s shocked when his dad asks him when he converted to Judaism. And it was ironic to read Richard Wershe, Jr.’s Wikipedia page and learn that, after he was finally released from prison in 2020 and filed a lawsuit against the FBIi in 2021 in which he compared the FBI’s treatment of him to child abuse and said, "Had I not been an informant for the task force, I would never have gotten involved with drug gangs or criminality of any sort," he’s once again making his living by selling drugs. Wershe, Jr. now owns a legal marijuana dispensary called “The 8th.”

Master of the House (Palladium Film, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ono February 19 my husband Charles came home relatively early from work and we got to have dinner together, and at 9 15 p.m. we watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1925 film Master of the House. After traveling throughout Europe in search of filmmaking opportunities since he left the pioneering Nordisk studio in 1920, Dreyer returned to his native Denmark and an independent company called Palladium Film for what amounts to a domestic tragi-comedy. The opening title card reads, “In the numerous streets of the Big City, house follows house, and in those houses, people live in layers - like wild birds carving their nests into the rock ... nest above nest … ,” and so on until Dreyer and his co-writer Svend Rindom (who wrote the story originally as either a novel or a play, or both, and then worked with Dreyer on the script) get to the meat of their story. Their argument is that men think they’re the masters of their own homes and families, but it’s rally their wives and the other women in their household who keep the family together/ In some ways it’s a film astonishingly ahead of its time; as the so-called “first wave” of feminism was winding down and women had got the vote in most republican countries, Dreyer and Rindom were already looking ahead to the so-called “second wave.” This film was made 38 years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the pioneering work of second-wave feminism and the one that articulated what Friedan called “the problem that has no name”:the stultifying character of women’s lives and the extent to which they were expected to subordinate their own wishes, desires, interests and talents to those of their husbands.

OThe central characters are Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), a middle-class husband who’s become a tyrannical martinet since the loss of his business some time previously; Ida (Astrid Holm, four years after her remarkable performance in Victor Sjöstrom’s The Phantom Carriage, another c;assoc Scandinavian silent I recently saw on the TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase”), his long-suffering wife; their children, Karen (Karin Nellemose) and Frederik (Aage Hoffman), and two other characters who move in to the Frandsen home and come to domoinate it. One of them is Mads (Mathilde Nielsen), Viktor’s nanny when he was a child, and the other is Ida’s mother, Mrs. Kryger (Clara Schønfeld). Disgusted by the way Viktor is treating Ida, Mads and Mrs. Kryger move into the house and literally turn the tables on him – Dreyer and Rindom include a scene of him putting the tablecloth on the dining table, a job that once was Ida’s – while Ida walks out on the marriage and does heaven knows what. Most films, if anything, over-explain their characters and situationi; Dreyer and Rindom keep things so ambiguous we don’t know how Viktor made his living after he lost his business or what Ida does for a living when she leaves Viktor. Instead they explain in an intertitle that Ida’s life was so ruled by the routine of the house that once she was on her own, she had what amounted to a nervous breakdown.

OThere’s a brief scene in which Ida is shown in what appears to be some sort of residential treatment facility and the four doofuses who are, we presume, her therapists ceremonially burn a letter soe got, presumably from Viktor even though it’s pretty clearly established that Viktor doesn’t know where Ida is and the people in the household who do know her whereabouts aren’t about to tell him. In the end, of course, Ida returns to the house and she and Viktor resume their relationship, we guess on a more equal basis, and Viktor is also able to resume his business because Ida had saved up 10,000 kronor to buy him an ophthalmology practice that just happened to come up for sale. Master of the House was the biggest commercial success Dreyer ever had, and it got him the financing to make the film generally considered his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (which is also about a strong woman and the men who are put off by that, even though in a completely different set of social and historical circumstances)

ODreyer had originally wanted to shoot the film in an actual apartment home, but cinematographer George Schneevoigt (who later became a director himself) protested that the big, bulky cameras of the time couldn’t shoot in such acramped space. So Dreyer, who’s not only credited as director and co-writer but also as editor, production designer and set decorator, did what he considered the next best thing: he had an apartment built into the studio and insisted it be equipped with its own electric and gas connections. Schneevoigt was still unhappy and had to shoot much of the film through open windows or doors, or crouch inside corners with his big old cameras. The final result was a film that makes its points about women’s real role in society rather too didactically, and it also seems padded: Alice Guy-Blaché made the same point more economically in her 1915 short A House Divided (in which a couple legally separate but don’t have the money to live apart, so they literally divide their home down the middle and have to ask each other for permission to cross into the other’s space). Guy-Blaché took just 10 minutes to make the same feminist point on which Dreyer and Rindom spent nearly two hours of running time.

A Rose for Her Grave: The Randy Roth Story (Best on Best, Alleghenny Image Factory, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The February 18 Lifetime “premiere” movie was of the surprisingly romantically titled A Rose for Her Grave: The Randy Roth Story, based on a true-crime book by Ann Rule (1931-2015), who got into the business in an unusual way. She briefly dated a man named Ted Bundy who later turned out to be a serial killer, and when she learned that about him she wrote a memoir about their relationship called The Stranger Beside Me which became a huge best-seller and launched her on a career as a true-crime writer. A Rose for Her Grave is set in the Seattle area and concerns a hot-looking middle-aged widower named Randy Roth (Colin Egglesfield) who’s shown in the opening scene viciously attackign and killing a woman,we’re not told who. Then there’s a typical Lifetime cyhyron reading “Five Years Later,” and five years later Randy is a Little League coach and garage mechanic in Washington state when he meets Cynthia “Cindy” Baumgarther (Laura Ramsey). Cindy is a widow whose son Tyson (not listed on imdb.com, though he’s a cute and personable kid who’s probably going to be really hot when he grows up)is plaiomg om the ga,e amd jots a triple,then scores on the next pitch. Randy’s son Greg (Jonathan Bergman) sidles up to Cindy and asks her, “How’d you like to date my dad?” She would – it helps that aside from having great pecs and a basket literally to die for, he’s also qu9ite charming and seems like a really nice guy – and within a few months they’re married, at least in part because Cindy has been anxious that Tyson has been without a male role model in the family since his actual dad died.

Once Randy and Cindy are actually married, his whole attitude does a 180° turn: he becomes an almost insane disciplinarian to both Greg and Tyson, including spilling trash on the kitchen floor and then demanding that the two bous clean it up until the floor is spotless. Before Randy moved in, Cindy had been hosting a long-term house guest named Lori Baker (Chrishell Stause), whose relationship to Cindy is unclear – at first I assumed she was either Cindy’s adult daughter (and therefore Tyson’s sister) or Cindy’s younger sister, but eventually it turns out she’s no biological relation at all,just a very close friend whom Cindy wanted to help out, to the point of turning down Lori’s offers to pay rent. At one point Loru hears cries from the bedroom Randy and Cindy share and assumes – correctly – that Randy is beating her. (My thought was they could have just been having consensual rough sex, and I remembered one time decades ago when I met a man in a bar and he took me back to his place, where we got into it so ecstatically that his partner, who was there, knocked on the door and said he’d kill me if I were hurting him.) Cindy keeps a journal in a little orange book and won’t let anyone else, even Lori, read it. Randy has also so totally browbeaten his own son Greg that the poor kid regularly wets the bed – something Tyson tells his mom about.

Midway through the movie Randy suggests that the blended family – himself, Cindy, Tyson and Greg – go on a river-rafting trip, only Cindy drowns on the way and dies. Remembering that Randy’s previous wife died in a similar “accident” while on a camping trip – this one a hike on Mount Rainier – Lori becomes determined to get to the bottom of this and becomes convinced that Randy killed both his wives. She meets at least two of Randy’s exes, Donna Clift (Meredith Jackson) – who bought a cat after she and Randy broke up and whose cat later disappears (we presume Randy killed the cat as revenge for Donna’s having talked to Lori about Randy, though we’re not told that for certain) – and Mary Jo Phillips (Katy Wilson), who tells Lori that Randy dumped her once he found out she’d survived ovarian cancer and therefore no life insurance company would sell a policy on her. That, at last, explains Randy’s motive. Randy has also started an affair with Dana Carlson (Rachel Stubington), teenage daughter of his old friends John and Megan Carlson (Jim E. Chandler and Amy Parrish), and Lori starts to fear for Dana’s safety, especially when she goes to a party at the Carlsons’ and sees Randy chatting up yet another woman, once again using his son as lure: “Hey, would you like to date my dad?”

Eventually Lori wins the help of Seattle police detective Susan Peters (Cathy Salvodoon), a Black woman who goes by the name “Soupie” as a mash-up of “Sue P.” Though a search of Randy’s home yields no evidence, Soupie is determined to make the case against him and ultimately does so through having Randy arrested and subjected to a police interrogation. Ultimately Lori wins custody of Tyson after she traces the will Cindy had written before her marriage to Randy and never rescinded, in which all her money (which is a considerable fortune since her late husband was well-to-do) was left to a trust fund for Tyson and with Lori named as the executor and also the person she wanted to have custody of Tyson if anything happened to her while Tyson was still a minor. While it was somewhat surprising that Cindy was offed halfway through the story – I suspect if writers Conor Allyn and Benjamin Anderson had had their way and not been constrained by the facts of the case, they would have had Cindy herself come to the realization that her husband was a psychopathic killer and would have led the charge against him – for the most part A Rose for Her Grave is a quite good Lifetime movie.

Part of its quality stems from the perfect casting of Colin Egglesfield as Randy Roth. I had assumed from that mouthful of a last name that he was British; he isn’t, he’s anAmerican actor best known for parts on TV, including a run on the soap opera All My Children. He also had a small part in the 2010 Lifetime movie The Client List, but my moviemagg blog post on that filmdoesn’t mention him. Egglesfield is not only drop-dead gorgeous, he’s totally in command of his performance both as the charming man he appears to be and the cold-hearted maniacal killer he turns out to be. Part of his skill is being able to make us believe that he’s been wounded by post-traumatic stress disorder )his excuse for that assault on Cindy in their bedroom early in their relationship) suffered in combat with the Marines. His insistence on treating his kids kile a drill sergeant reminded me of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, though without the charm that ultimately softened Von Trapp and led him to fall in love with the convent girl he hired to be governess to his children.Only it turns lut, unsurprisingly, that though he was actually in the Marines he was a file clerk at a base in North Carolina and never got anywhere near a combat zone. In the end Randy is convicted of the murders of both his wives and sentenced to life without parole.

The other especially good aspect of A Rose for Her Grave is its director, Maritte Lee Go. She’s mostly a producer and second-unit director, and most of her directorial credits in imdb.com are for shorts or an episode in a compilation film called Phobias, though she’s had at least one feature-length credit, Black as Night. Judging from her work here, anything she does would be worth watching; she creates a convincingly Gothic atmosphere and gets incredible performances not only from Egglesfield but from Ramsey and the two boys playing the kids. You can add Maritte Lee Go to Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise as potentially major female directors who’ve got a hand up from their work on Lifetime!

Deathtrap (Warner Bros.,1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 18) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that he had seen when it was relatively new but not since,while I’d never seen it before at all: Deathtrap, a 1982 comedy based on a play by Ira Levin (usually known as the novelist behind such tales as Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil rather than a playwright, direc\ted by Sidney Lumet and adapted for the screen by Jay Presson Allen. Allen actually had a connection with Alfred Hitchcock; she wrote the final script for his 1964 film Marnie after Hitchcock fired the first writer he had on it, Evan Hunter, because it was a psychological tale about a woman and he thought the script needed a woman writer. The film was controversial at the time because it cast Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve as a (more or less) Gay couple right after Reve had done the second film in his Superman cycle. It’s actually more complicated than that, but 1982 audiences were shocked at the idea that the actor who’d played Superman could portray a Gay character on screen, though things have loosened up since then. The 2000 film Wonder Boys cast Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as Gay lovers, but that didn’t stop the folks at Disney and Marvel from casting both men as superheroes later, Downey as Iron Man and Maguire as Spider-Man.

Michael Caine plays Sidney Bruhl, burned-out playwright who’s just come off his fourth flop in a row on Broadway after previously having written hits like The Murder Game (billed as the longest-running whodunit in Broadway history – was Levin thinking of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap here?). Sidney lives with his wife Myra (Dyan Cannon), who’s a rich woman and is keepingt hem both alive on her family’s money, in what looks like a converted barn in Bristol,Connecticut. When he slinks home following the failure of his latest play (if it was so bad, why didn’t Zero Mostel’s character from The Producers do it?_,he misses the train station and has to book a stretch limo just to get himself back home. Salvation arrives,or seems to, when Sidney receives a play in the mail from a former student of his at a playwriting seminar, Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve),who sends Sidney a carbon copy of his latest play, “Deathtrap.” After establishing that Clifford has never written a play before and the only copies extant are Anderson’s original manuscript and the carbon copy he made while typing it, Sidney and Myra hatch a plot to murder Clifford,.steal the great play and pass it off as Sidney’s latest work.

Only [spoiler alert!] Sidney and Clifford are really lovers, and Sidney’s true plot is to scare Myra into having a fatal heart attack – which duly happens when the supposedly dead Clifford comes back to life and appears at their front door in face makeup that makes him look like Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. The intent was that Sidley would inherit Myra’s family fortune and he and Clfford could live comfortably ever after on her money. I kept waiting for another plot twist in which Myra, too, would turn out to be alive, but she’s really dead and a minister leads a funeral service for her on the bank of a river. Among the other people living in this Connecticut village are Dutch psychic Helga ten Dorp (Irene Worth, a delight), whom Sidney is afraid will sense the details of his latest scheme with her psychic powers – even though she’s a guest on the Merv Griffin Show and bombs. Only Sidney and Clifford are understandably suspicious of each other and sidney still seems to have it in the back of his head that he’s going to kill Clifford and take credit for the play all by himself. The film ultimately ends up ripping off the ending of Seven Keys to Baldpate as the entire story turns out to be the plot of a new play called “Deathtrap” written by, of all people, Helga ten Dorp – and we don’t see either Michael Caine or Christopher Reeve along the actors taking the curtain calls for this production.

Deathtrap reminded me a good deal of Sleuth, made a decade before and also starring Michael Caine,though in Sleuth he was the younger man and Laurence Olivier played the older burned-out guy. There’s some of the same devil-may-care spirit of Sleuth in Deathtrap,though at least Deathtrap doesn’t pull the bizarre trick Sleuth did of listing four other actors in the opening credits even though Olivier and Caine are the only two people in the film. It was a lot of fun despite the overly busy musical score by Johnny Mandel, particularly the opening harpsichord theme that sounded like a wind-up clock run amok. At least the three stars deliver the goods and act competently and personably, and though Caine and Reeve show no more physical affection for each other than a couple of on-the-lips kisses, it’s nice not only to see Christopher Reeve topless but to be reminded of what a hot guy he really was before the terrible accident that effectively ended his career, though he did at least two TV-movies after the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him, including a remake of Alfred Hitchcok’s Rear Window in which a genuinely disabled man played the wheelchair-using photographer James Stewart portrayed in Hitchcock’s original.