Frontline: "Democracy on Trial" (Kirk Documentary Group, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 30) PBS ran a 2 ½-hour episode of their long-running documentary series Frontline called “Democracy on Trial,” directed by Michael Kirk and co-written by him and Mike Wiser. It purported to be the whole story of the indictments against former President Donald J. Trump but it was pretty much a rehash of the hearings last summer of the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021. Most of the archival film clips were from the committee’s televised hearings, and a lot of the interviewees were participants in the hearings, including former Congressmember Adam Kinzinger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Bowers was voted out of office by the voters in his legislative district and Kinzinger voluntarily chose not to run for re-election because he realized it wasn’t worth the bother – two more heads on Donald Trump’s trophy wall of Republicans who disagreed with him and tried to hold him accountable. One of the people I felt sorriest for in the show was Robert Ray, a former Trump attorney, who tried to present the case for Trump’s defense in a calm, reasonable and relatively emotionless fashion – which may explain why Ray is a former Trump attorney. Last Monday, when Rachel Maddow interviewed E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump sexually assaulted in the mid-1990’s and who sued him for defamation and won two judgments against him – the first for over $5 million and the second for a whopping $83.3 million) and her two attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, one of the attorneys mentioned that Trump’s principal counsel in the case, Alina Habba, behaved very differently whether or not Trump was in the courtroom. When he wasn’t, she was a professional, reliable attorney who avoided histrionics; when he was, she went off the deep end with him and, among other things, insulted the judge to his face.

Though the show didn’t mention it, Fox News chose not to cover the House hearings on January 6 and, when asked why, the people in charge of Rubert Murdoch’s “news” network said bluntly that it was because their audiences weren’t interested in seeing it. It’s yet more evidence that the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts.” America’s media landscape has become so fragmented that people are entitled to their own sets of facts, since the modern age of multiple TV networks and Web sites allows them to absorb only information that agrees with their preconceived notions of what is “true.” It’s been said that had Fox News existed during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have survived politically and served out his full Presidential term. One development since the House committee hearings on January 6 that the show mentioned was Trump’s (and his attorneys’) attempt to get the whole case against him thrown out on the idea that a former President is absolutely immune from any criminal charges against him for things he allegedly did while in office unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted and removed from office by the Senate for the same offenses. In this, as in so much else, Trump is following the precedent set by Richard Nixon, who in 1977 matter-of-factly told interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Nixon was effectively arguing for an American version of the Führerprinzip (“Leader Principle”), the Nazi doctrine that the will of the leader was the ultimate law and he could make anything he wanted to do legal just on his own say-so. Trump is also very much of this mind-set; early on in his Presidency he fired FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” – “loyalty” not to the United States Constitution and the laws he was pledged to enforce, but personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And it was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, who established the precedent that former Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did in office when he gave Nixon a blanket pardon for everything he did as President just one month after Nixon resigned the Presidency. Every time I hear how unprecedented it is to indict a former President for crimes allegedly committed while in office – including on this show, in which narrator Will Lyman said, “For the first time in American history, a president [was] charged with crimes in office” – I once again curse Gerald Ford and hope he is rotting in hell for the Nixon pardon.

One of the most interesting aspects of this Frontline episode, at least to me, was the sheer number of people who were identified as “conservative” in the chyrons announcing who they were as they made statements critical of Trump: David French, Bill Kristol (once an iconic figure on the American Right), Mona Charen, Gabriel Sterling (the Florida elections official who first warned that Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were going to trigger violence), Charlie Sykes, and perhaps Trump’s most significant critic on the Right: retired judge J. Michael Luttig. It was Luttig, along with former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who convinced Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, that he did not have the loony-tunes “power” Trump and his attorneys, notably John Eastman, said he had to reverse the outcome of the Presidential electors by throwing out slates of electors who’d voted for Joe Biden and replacing them with electors pledged to Trump. In her 1974 book The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, Mary McCarthy said that among other things, Watergate had been a test to determine who is truly “conservative” – “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense of believing in the rule of law and in social traditions that should not be reversed lightly or arbitrarily based on the idea that we could do better by radically changing course – and who isn’t. As I’ve read in these pages before, the current six-member majority on the United States Supreme Court is not “conservative”; the six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, are Right-wing revolutionaries committed to making radical social changes in American society (most of which, above all the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not supported by majorities of the American people).

It’s become obvious that most Americans, especially most Republicans, are not “conservative” in the Burkean sense either; they are committed to a radical restructuring of American society aimed at reversing the liberal gains of the 20th century (the 1930’s and 1960’s in particular) and remaking America into a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. Among the voices of true conservatism on this program was Bill Kristol’s analysis of the dilemma Mike Pence faced on the eve of January 6, 2021: “Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.” Another voice for true conservatism on this show came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – one of the few Republican politicians who has defied Trump and got away with it, repelling the primary opponent Trump put up against him and being renominated and re-elected – who explained his reaction to the phone call he got from Trump on January 2, 2021 pleading with him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have “flipped” Georgia from Biden to Trump. “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find,” Raffensperger recalled. “We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.”

Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also spoke for true conservatism against the cult of Trump when he said, after Trump appealed to him in on the basis of party loyalty, “For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or punt it to someone else, is not something I will do. … We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath.” And Gabriel Sterling, who recalled that he had been a Republican since age 9 during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, said, “I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America, and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.” But given the thug-like behavior of the Trump cultists and the fact that anyone, no matter how low on the totem pole – like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were personally called out by President Trump and his then-attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, on ridiculous charges that they altered the Georgia election results – gets not only vituperative insults but out-and-out death threats, it takes real personal courage to stand up to the Trump thugocracy, and that kind of courage is in tragically short supply in today’s Republican Party.

Shampoo (Persky-Bright Vista, Rubeeker Films, Columbia, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies last night (Monday, January 29) that I hadn’t seen since its initial release in the late 1970’s (it came out in 1975 but I didn’t catch up with it until a year later) and my husband Charles had never seen it at all. It was Shampoo, a 1975 vehicle for Warren Beatty (he not only starred but co-wrote it with Robert Towne as well) as George Roundy (as in “randy,” meaning always horny), a Hollywood hairdresser who rides a Triumph motorcycle (get it?) as his principal vehicle, and when he isn’t cutting hair he’s screwing a lot of women. We first see him in bed – albeit in a dimly lit scene (Hal Ashby is the director and Laszlo Kovacs the cinematographer) – with Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant in an Academy Award-winning performance; she was 51 when she made this film and she regarded her Oscar as belated release from having been blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee against her then-husband, Arnold Manoff). She’s banging her head against the headboard of the bed and asks George to put a hand over her head to brace her as they fuck. Then the phone rings and George goes off to meet the caller, his sort-of girlfriend, aspiring actress Jill (Goldie Hawn), who’s been offered a three-week shoot in Egypt by director Johnny Pope (played by real-life producer Tony Bill), who wants her personally as well as professionally. Felicia is married to Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), who has a mistress on the side who’s also a sometimes girlfriend of George: Jackie Shawn (Julie Christie, who had a real-life affair with Beatty even though that didn’t stop him from going after Goldie Hawn; this film has a definite art-imitates-life attitude about it, made at a time when Beatty was one of Hollywood’s leading cocksmen).

George’s messy life comes to a head on the night of the November 1968 Presidential election; Lester is hosting a watch party for fellow 1-percent supporters of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in a private room above a posh restaurant. The film adds complications, including George’s desire to open his own salon and get from under the thumb of his immediate supervisor, Norman (Jay Robinson, still cast as a screaming queen 22 years after his film debut as a Production Code-sanitized version of the Roman Emperor Caligula in The Robe). There’s a great scene in which George meets a banker to seek a loan to start his salon, and the banker doesn’t even come close to understanding George’s business plan (to the effect he has one). The banker asks George if he has references, and George says, “I do Barbara Rush” – meaning he does her hair. Shampoo suffers from one semi-major flaw: we never actually see George shampooing anybody or practicing any other form of hairdressing, so we have to take it on faith that he’s as good as the script says he is. The closest we get to a mea culpa or an explanation for What Makes George Run comes towards the end of the film, in which George confesses, “Let's face it, I fucked 'em all. I mean, that's what I do. That's why I went to beauty school. I mean, they're always there and I – I just can't I – I, you know, I – I don't know what I'm apologizing for. So, sometimes I fuck 'em. I go into that shop and they're so great lookin', you know, and I – I’m doing their hair and they feel great and they smell great. Or, I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight or go into an elevator or – I – it's a beautiful girl – I – I don't know – I mean, that's it! It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever.” Aside from the striking similarity between Beatty’s lines and Donald Trump’s infamous confession to Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush in 2006 that he couldn’t stop himself from coming on to attractive women, kissing them and feeling them up because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything,” in today’s world we generally don’t like or appreciate men who treat women like that, and that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Shampoo is a good movie but it seems awfully dated; it wasn’t the randy masterpiece Charles was expecting (after the film he admitted that he’d thought it would be more of a comedy because Goldie Hawn was in it) and it wasn’t the rule-breaking movie I remembered from 1976 either. The film’s lowest point comes when George drops by Lester’s and Felicia’s home and neither of them are there, but their daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher in her first noticeable performance, suggesting a road-not-taken for her before George Lucas took her to that galaxy far, far away and made her Princess Leia in the Star Wars sequence) is and she blatantly says to George, “You wanna fuck?” (Maybe she just wanted to experience what her mom thought was so hot.) Throughout the film George is frequently asked if he’s Gay – which reminded me of the account Steve McQueen’s first wife Neile gave in her memoir in which she said their marriage broke up when someone published a rumor that McQueen was Gay, and he went on a campaign to seduce any remotely attractive woman he could get his hands on just to prove he wasn’t. George’s sexual capabilities also reminded me of Gore Vidal’s critique of Henry Miller’s novels, in which he said he marveled that Miller never once had his protagonist not be able to get it up. George goes from fucking Felicia to fucking Jill without any opportunity to rest up in between. Shampoo does its best to turn Warren Beatty into an irresistible sex object, dressing him in skin-tight jeans (his ass looks great in them, though he doesn’t seem to have that big a basket) and an ornate belt with a giant buckle that suggests he’d have been good casting (at least visually, if not vocally) for an Elvis Presley biopic if one had been made right after his death. But overall it’s a movie that doesn’t hold up all that well, and the final shot – George standing on a bluff and watching the two most significant women walk out on him (Jackie in a car with Lester, who’s told her he’s going to divorce Felicia, marry her and take her to Mexico; and Jill with Johnny Pope and that acting gig in Egypt) – is supposed to make us think he’s learned something and grown from his experience, but it’s hard for us to believe he’s anything but the same overgrown adolescent he was at the start of the film. Also, though I didn’t spot her, Charles thought he saw Warren Beatty’s real-life sister, Shirley MacLaine, doing a cameo as one of the customers in George’s salon.

My Husband's Seven Wives (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 28) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called My Husband’s Seven Wives, originally shot under the working title He Had Seven Wives but obviously changed to sound more “Lifetime-y.” The man with the titular seven wives is Alan Davis (Adam Harper), a good-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous man (though there are a few side shots showing an ample basket, which may be the explanation for why so many women are attracted to him) who claims to be a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company in Georgia. He does really work for the drug company he says he does, but he’s in their information technology department and doesn’t do any work-related travel. Alan’s wife Maggie (Kristi Murdock) starts catching on when she goes shopping and her credit card is declined. Alan drives a fancy and quite conspicuous Chevrolet Corvette sports car – he fusses over the car more than he does any of the women in his harem and the car practically becomes a character in and of itself – and one day Maggie recognizes Alan’s car in the open garage of someone else’s home. (She knows it’s his because of the large blue velvet dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.) The someone else turns out to be Pam (Christina Licciardi), and when Maggie walks into the garage Pam naturally thinks she’s a prowler. Pam explains that the car belongs to her husband, and Maggie says it belongs to her husband. They compare photos of their husbands on their cell phones and realize they’re both married to the same man. Maggie’s first thought is to report Alan to the police for bigamy, but Pam talks her out of it by pointing out that if they turn him in to the authorities, they’ll never be able to recover the money Alan has embezzled from both of them.

The two plot to go after Alan’s secret accounts, and as they search they encounter more of Alan’s wives, including hard-bitten Kristen (Kylie Delre) and her precocious high-school age son Max (the genuinely cute Nathan Lee); Katie (K. J. Baker); Selma (Bonny Brewer); and his most recent conquest, the racially ambiguous Adrian (Amanda Rosario Glass), who’s still in the first throes of love with Alan and has a hard time realizing that he’s been married to other women and hasn’t bothered divorcing any of them first. Alan, it turns out, also had two previous wives who had died along the way, Heather and Amy, which led both Charles and I to try to suss out the chronology and figure out just which of Alan’s wives had the true legal title. (Writer Matt Fitzsimmons wasn’t too helpful on that score, and I got the impression he couldn’t have cared less.) Maggie and Pam set up a command center in a back room of the library where Maggie works to run their search for Alan’s elusive finances, since his modus operandi is to open joint bank accounts in his name along with that of his wife de jour and then loot the money and keep it for himself. When Kristen joins the group she insists that she can’t follow a written document and needs the information laid out on a whiteboard, so Maggie produces a whiteboard and starts a cop show-style chart of Alan’s various wives and some of their offspring. (It’s not clear whether Alan has any biological children or they’re all the products of his wives’ previous marriages. Frankly, I hoped the latter because I really wouldn’t want to see Alan’s scumbag genes passed on to future generations.)

Midway through the story it takes a dark turn when a couple of Black thugs, Curtis (Brendan Goshay) and Buddy (LaTrallo Presley), kidnap Maggie, put her into a body bag, tie her up and threaten to throw her in a lake (this all takes place in Georgia, by the way, and we know from the actors’ risible accents early on that we’re somewhere in the South). It turns out that Alan scammed their gangsta boss out of $30,000 and they want it back. Fortunately, Curtis at least has some normal human sympathies and Maggie is able to persuade him to back off and give her a week or so to collect the money. It all ends when Max (either Alan’s son or his stepson, see above) figures out a way to hack into Alan’s accounts and steal back the money – he does this with Alan’s cooperation as a way of hiding his funds from the avaricious women who are trying to collect them – and they end up with $250,000 in cash, while the women finally call the police and Alan is arrested. Only Maggie obtains the money in cash and stashes it in her dishwasher, and unexpectedly Alan makes bail (how? Even if he had another reserve of cash stashed somewhere, how could he get at it?) and steals the money back. Ultimately, though, Maggie and the others figure out Alan’s true hiding place for the bulk of his ill-gotten fortune – it’s secreted behind a stucco wall in his office and Maggie inadvertently discovers it when she takes down a photo of Alan with his Corvette, says, “I always hated that car,” and smashes her fist into the wall, revealing Alan’s cash stash. (That’s also a puzzling twist because there isn’t a secret door behind the framed photo, so there’s no clear indication of just how Alan could access the cash when he wanted to spend some of it.) The five living wives of Alan Davis divide up the money between them after presenting Max (ya remember Max?) with a cashier’s check to cover tuition for college, where he plans to major in business and become a big-time financier (thereby essentially pursuing the same sort of career Alan is, only legally).

Though I was expecting a plot twist that Max was secretly still in league with Alan and he was responsible for the disappearance of the $250,000, for the most part My Husband’s Seven Wives kept a relatively light tone – even the Black gangstas have a cartoonish quality to them – much like a movie I vaguely remember (and can’t recall the title of at the moment) that also featured an unlikely duo or trio of women each trying to recover the fortunes they’ve lost to a scumbag man with whom they were both romantically involved. Charles noted that it was basically just a “treasure-hunt movie” reworked for the modern era, but while hardly the best thing I’ve seen, even on Lifetime, it was fun and pleasant, effectively directed by Louise Alston (reversing the usual Lifetime formula of having a female writer and a male director!), who maintains the suspense and gives it an overall light tone even though through the final stages we keep expecting a trick ending that never comes.

Wings of the Hawk (Universal-International, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I made the mistake of running a 1953 Universal-International 3-D movie, Budd Boetticher’s Wings of the Hawk (though the movie has nothing to do with wings or hawks and the only bird reference is a non-specified species the principal villain keeps as a pet and allows to roost on his shoulder). I had previously got this on Blu-Ray in an edition that ballyhooed a major restoration by the 3-D Film Archive, but when I ordered the disc from Amazon.com it didn’t come with 3-D glasses. I tried to run it in 2-D but couldn’t figure out how to get the alternate version to show, so I ordered two pair of glasses (also from Amazon.com) and Charles and I tried to watch it last night. The problem was that the alleged 3-D effects were awful; the left and right images didn’t even come close to a proper resolution. At first I thought it was a problem with my eyes; I wondered if the artificial lenses implanted in my eyes after my cataract surgeries weren’t capable of focusing well enough to get the 3-D effects in this movie. Then my husband Charles told me that he was seeing the same sorts of blurry, out-of-register images I was. I briefly considered stopping the movie and switching to the 2-D version but decided to stick it out. I suspect Wings of the Hawk was actually a better movie than the one we experienced last night, in which we kept hoping that the actors would move closer to the camera because at least the close shots made them look like normal people. When the film cut to long shots we got the ghosting effect like those we used to see on black-and-white televisions when the over-the-air reception wasn’t good enough to give a clean image. I had bought Wings of the Hawk in the first place because it was listed on imdb.com as the first film by Pedro González González, who had his 15 minutes of fame when he appeared as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life. Groucho found it irresistibly hilarious that his family name and his matronymic were the same, and John Wayne signed him to a contract as a character actor. He was in the High Sierra remake, I Died a Thousand Times (1955), playing a stereotypical Mexican servant, but his role in Wings of the Hawk, “Tomás,” was more interesting and nuanced.

The film takes place in 1910 on the eve of the Mexican Revolution; Porfirio Diáz is still in power, but revolutionaries are mobilizing for his overthrow – and one actual Mexican revolutionary, Pascual Orozco (Noah Beery, Jr., whose uncle Wallace Beery had played Pancho Villa in MGM’s 1934 Mexican Revolution movie ¡Viva Villa!), is a character in the film. The lead actor is Van Heflin, playing Gallagher, nicknamed “Irish” (if he has a real first name, we don’t learn what it is), who’s just opened a gold mine in the Mexican state of Chihuahua along the U.S. border with New Mexico and Arizona. He’s getting a shakedown from the Chihuahua state governor, Col. Paco Ruiz (George Dolenz, father of future Monkee Micky Dolenz), who has risen through the ranks – Gallagher grimly jokes, “The last time I met you, you were just a captain. You’ll probably be a general next time” – thanks to Diáz’s favoritism. Col. Ruiz demands half of the mine’s income, and when Gallagher refuses, Ruiz orders his troops to seize the mine and throw Gallagher off it altogether. Ruiz also kills Gallagher’s Mexican business partner. Bereft of an income, Gallagher throws in with the local revolutionaries who are organizing against the Díaz regime, including “The General,” who turns out to be a woman, Raquel Noriega (Julia Adams). Raquel was wounded in a firefight with Ruiz’s men, who previously murdered her parents and kidnapped her sister Elena (Abbe Lane, best known as a singer and TV personality rather than an actress). Ruiz made Elena his mistress, and when Orozco’s army invades Ruiz’s home and tries to take her back, Elena has a big-time case of the Stockholm Syndrome and refuses to leave. The fancy dresses Ruiz has bought her with some of the money he’s stealing from the Mexican people have helped cement her loyalty to him, and when the two sisters confront each other Raquel acidly says, “I wish you had bought that dress.”

Eventually Orozco decides to stage a raid on the border town of Ciudad Juárez (the real Orozco did that, too, contrary to the orders of the leader he was presumably fighting for, Francisco Madero, and it was a key turning point in the Mexican Revolution even though Orozco became disillusioned with Madero’s leadership and, along with Pancho Villa, turned against him), for which he needs guns. Gallagher proposes to break into his old gold mine and steal the gold, with which Orozco can purchase guns in the U.S. (these days Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people to the U.S. for guns since Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and we don’t). Realizing that the key to Orozco’s success is blocking Ruiz from being able to bring his own troops to the city to bolster the Diáz government’s defense, Gallagher ultimately blows up his own gold mine to block their way, so Van Heflin’s character does a Bogart-style arc from indifferent opportunist to dedicated patriot. The film’s debt to the Bogart oeuvre in general and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (another tale of opportunistic Americans in Mexico who mine a fortune in gold and then lose it all) in particular is pretty obvious, but Wings of the Hawk is actually a quite good, tough melodrama if you can stomach the awful 3-D effects. Afterwards Charles and I screened some of the bonus items on the disc, including the film’s theatrical trailer as well as a Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Hypnotic Hick, which we chose to watch in 2-D rather than subject ourselves to any more wildly out-of-register images allegedly reproducing 3-D. Hypnotic Hick turned out to be a quite delightful short film with some really spectacular effects and an overall good humor; it was reminiscent of the Road Runner cartoons from Warner Bros. even though Woody Woodpecker, unlike the Road Runner, actually spoke.

Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Seasoned Murder" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, Film Victoria, All3 Media, GPB, WGBH, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 27) I watched an episode of the engagingly quirky detective series on PBS, an Australian production called Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, set in the 1960’s and featuring private detective Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill), niece of the original Mrs. Fisher who was the lead character in a similar series set in the 1920’s, and her budding romance with official police detective James Steed (Joel Jackson). This episode was called “Seasoned Murder” and centered around the murder of Graham King (Josef Brown), an egomaniacal chef who’d formerly owned a Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong until he emigrated to Australia and started a cooking school. He has constant arguments with his business partner, Lucy Harrington (Ling Cooper Tang) – a Chinese woman despite her Anglo-sounding name, which she acquired through marriage – mostly over the recipes. Lucy insists that Graham’s dishes are inauthentic, and Graham replies that he has to cook “Chinese” food the way Australian diners expect it whether it’s authentic or not. “Seasoned Murder” was the weakest of the three episodes of this intriguing series I’ve seen so far, mainly because writers Jo Martino and Alli Parker really larded on the plot devices and clichés to James Bondian levels. It doesn’t help that James Steed’s character name is a mashup of James Bond and Steed, Patrick Macnee’s role on the 1960’s spy TV series The Avengers.

Among the gimmicks is that the Chinese cooking school is a front for smuggling refugees out of mainland China who face a well-founded fear of persecution from Mao Zedong’s dictatorship, including Tony Wu (Jason Chong) and Chung Li (Gareth Yuan). Rita Harrington (Alicia Banit), Lucy’s stepdaughter, has become an opium addict – twice, since she kicked the stuff once but has relapsed. She’s getting the drug via a smuggling ring led by Bruce Taylor (Alan Dukes), who turns out [spoiler alert!] to be the real killer not only of Graham King but also his widow Shirley (Jane Allsop). Taylor literally blew up Shirley via an explosive concealed in a baked alaska dessert Lucy had prepared for her as a peace offering, and Peregrine Fisher and James Steed are nearly taken out as well when they just happen to show up at Lucy’s home to interrogate her as she lights the flambé dessert and unknowingly blows herself up. It also turns out that Samuel Birnside (Toby Trulove), nephew of Birdie Birnside (Catherine McClements) who owns the detective agency Peregrine works for, is still pining over his late wife Daphne, who died in a car accident; Rita was with her in the car but survived, though the lingering pain was what got her addicted to opium in the first place. She felt guilty because, as she tearfully confesses at the end of the episode, she had been driving when the fatal crash occurred, and the other good guys tell her they don’t hold it against her and they just accept it as a terrible accident. I generally like this show and in particular the spunkiness of the heroine (as well as the great mod dresses Peregrine gets to wear), but this time they really laid the clichés on too thick!

Woman in Hiding (Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 27) I watched the “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of a film I’d only barely heard of: Woman in Hiding, made in 1950 by Universal-International and directed by Michael Gordon. It began life as a Saturday Evening Post serial called “Fugitive from Terror” by James Webb; the “adaptation” was made by Roy Huggins, most famous for creating the mega-hit TV series The Fugitive in 1962, though Oscar Saul wrote the actual screenplay. What was most striking about it was how strongly it anticipated the ground-breaking 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy: both movies are about women who escape abusive marriages by pretending to have died in accidents. In Woman in Hiding the woman in hiding is Deborah Chandler Clark (Ida Lupino), who just after her wedding to Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally, in a chilling villain performance rivaling his work in the Universal-International horror film The Black Castle two years later) got in her big convertible car and tried to run away from him. The opening scene shows Deborah at the wheel frantically speeding along a mountain road and ultimately losing control and taking a header off a bridge. Then we hear Deborah’s voice in the soundtrack and for a moment we think this is going to be one of those movies narrated from beyond the grave, like the masterpiece Sunset Boulevard (1950) or the messterpiece Scared to Death (1947). No: actually Deborah survived the crash (we’re not sure how, but perhaps she bailed from the car before it went over the bridge), and we next get a flashback sequence that establishes that Deborah’s father John Chandler (John Litel) owned the mill in Clarksville that provided the town’s only economic driver until he suddenly died in a supposed “accident” and Deborah was next in line to take over. Only it turned out that Selden Clark IV, whose great-grandfather was a Confederate general in the Civil War (the film starts out in North Carolina and then shifts to Tennessee) who led his troops to certain slaughter in a nearby battle against a Union army that far outnumbered his forces and were also dug in. (Not many people realize that Ulysses S. Grant actually invented trench warfare; he knew he could fight a war of attrition because the Union had three times as many men of military age as the Confederacy, though a lot of his fabled drinking was done to assuage his guilt over the number of men he was sending to their deaths. When the armies of both sides tried the same tactic during World War I the result was a bloody stalemate that lasted four years), murdered John Chandler and then intimidated Deborah into marrying him as part of his long-term plan to grab control of the mill.

Deborah realizes this when the couple show up at a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains (which I’ve otherwise heard of only as the birthplace of Dolly Parton) for their wedding night – and another woman is already there. She’s Selden’s former girlfriend Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow, turning in a marvelous acid-etched performance along the lines of Ann Savage’s in Detour: a hard-bitten woman who’s decided that conventional morality is a luxury she cannot afford; too bad that just two years after making this film she married an oil multimillionaire from Oklahoma and retired, though the marriage lasted 60 years). Patricia doesn’t want to let go of Selden but reluctantly agrees to the inevitable, but only after he gives her a back-handed slap with such force he literally knocks her down. (This was the scene that started me thinking of Sleeping with the Enemy, though in the more recent film it was the abused wife who was the recipient of the evil husband’s back-handed slap.) This shocks Deborah into the realization that she’s just married a psychopath who will stop at nothing to kill her, and she tries to get away – only she realizes that Selden has done a surprisingly thorough job of sabotaging her car. Not only has he cut the brake lines, he’s disconnected the hand brake as well and he’s disabled the inside driver’s-side door handle so she can’t bail out and escape. Deborah takes whatever money she has on her and buys a bus ticket, trying to trace down Patricia because she figures she needs a witness to attest to the police about what an evil and unscrupulous man her husband is. She goes to the address she has for Patricia, but her landlady tells Deborah that Patricia is out of town and not expected back for three weeks. Meanwhile, Selden, upset that he can’t get full control of the mill until Deborah is definitively established as either alive or dead, offers a reward for her – and her picture gets published in the newspapers and magazines. Fearful of being recognized, she abruptly quits her job as a waitress and stops in a beauty salon to have her hair dyed blonde, then gets on a bus again.

In the bus station she’s recognized by Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), who decides to turn her in to Selden for the $5,000 reward so he can relocate to California and pursue a career as a boatbuilder. (I wonder if this plot twist was inspired by the 1949 film Holiday Affair, a romantic drama rather than a film noir but with noir legend Robert Mitchum as a similarly impoverished young drifter and World War II veteran with an ambition to build boats.) They end up in the middle of a hotel hosting a sales convention for the Make Rite company – reminding me of a film my husband Charles and I had just watched, the 1949 D.O.A., which also had a key sequence taking place at a hotel convention. But this one is even wilder than the one in D.O.A., complete with randy male salespeople chasing down anyone who’s alive, human and female. Selden catches up to Deborah and runs into her in a stairwell, hoping to kill her the way he did her dad, but they’re interrupted by a conventioneer who tells him to lay off a woman who’s clearly uninterested in him because there are plenty of females there who would trick with him. Later Keith brings Deborah, who in her flight has been calling herself “Ann Carter,” to a train – only Selden is there and accepts delivery of his runaway bride. But something he says makes Keith aware that the stories Deborah told him about Selden’s ruthlessness are true, and he realizes he’s turned over a woman he’s come to care about to her monster of a husband. Still later Deborah finally finds Patricia Monahan – only she, too, double-crosses her because she and Selden have made up and got back together, and Patricia is as eager as Selden to get Deborah out of the way so Selden can inherit the mill. The climax takes place inside the mill, where Selden has trapped Deborah and turned on the mill’s machinery so no one can hear her cries for help; Keith arrives in a cab and the two men have a fight to the finish, with Patricia also there. Ultimately both Selden and Patricia fall to their deaths off the mill stairs, and Deborah seemingly unloads the mill on her dad’s attorney, Lucius Maury (Taylor Holmes), since the last shot shows her and Keith, newly married after Selden’s death, driving a new car (a black Ford hardtop) to California and settling there.

Eddie Muller said in his intro that Ida Lupino didn’t really want to make Woman in Hiding. At the time she’d taken up directing as part of a company she and her then-husband, producer Collier Young, had formed called The Filmakers [sic]; they wanted to make socially conscious films and their first, Not Wanted, was a drama about unwed motherhood. Elmer Clifton was supposed to be the director, but he had a heart attack during the first week of shooting and Lupino took over. Lupino caught the directorial bug and looked for further projects that would keep her behind the cameras, but she realized she’d still have to make a living as an actress between directorial gigs. So she took Woman in Hiding just for the money, and Universal-International promised her two old friends from Warner Bros., Bruce Bennett as the evil husband and Ronald Reagan as the man who rescues her. Only Reagan, in the throes of his political changeover from self-described “hemophiliac liberal” to dyed-in-the-wool Right-winger, crashed Lupino’s party and shocked her progressive friends by denouncing the Screen Writers’ Guild as full of Communists. Then he injured himself in a softball game and was out of commission, forcing the role to be recast. The replacement, Howard Duff, was an actor Lupino had once insulted to his face, but he took the job anyway and once they started working together they began an affair even though Lupino was still married to Collier Young. Eventually Lupino divorced Young and married Duff – though it was a troubled marriage and Lupino responded by upping her alcohol consumption. But she and Young remained business partners in The Filmakers, and when Don Siegel directed the movie Private Hell 36 (the title referred to a trailer where Lupino’s character and Steve Cochran, playing a cop Lupino’s character had corrupted, shacked up) for The Filmakers in 1954 he said he had a hard time with the “bedroom politics” of a film starring a woman with her ex as producer and her current husband as co-star. (Duff played the honest cop who was Cochran’s partner.) Later in the 1950’s Duff and Lupino co-starred in a TV situation comedy called Mr. Adams and Eve – apparently the mega-success of I Love Lucy had sparked a trend for real-life couples doing sitcoms on TV – but it only lasted two seasons.

Woman in Hiding is one of those movies that starts at 11 and works up to 20 or even 25, but the sheer overwroughtness of it is part of the fun. Michael Gordon is the director of record, but the film is so uneven I suspect Lupino herself ghost-directed a lot of it, particularly the scenes that most look like film noir. This certainly does not look like the work of a director whose most famous credit was the first Doris Day-Rock Hudson film, Pillow Talk. Is Woman in Hiding really a film noir? I would say basically no – it lacks the moral ambiguity, though Peggy Dow’s character is a classic femme fatale – but a lot of it looks noir, and whatever its merits as a noir it is an exciting, nail-biting thriller, and whether Lupino directed any of it or not, certainly her performance is at least as good, and probably better, than Julia Roberts’s in the quasi-remake Sleeping with the Enemy from four decades later!

Confessions of a Cam Girl (Singer/White Entertainment, Sepia Films. Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In order to watch Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries and Woman in Hiding I’d skipped the initial showing of last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Confessions of a Cam Girl, but I decided to catch up with it on the repeat showing from midnight to 2 a.m. I figured my husband Charles would go to bed while I stayed up to watch it, but he surprised me by staying up with me and we saw it together. The gimmick behind it – the sorry fate of a so-called “web cam girl,” a teenager who sells near-naked or totally naked photos of herself online for “credits” that can be exchange for cash – had already been done by Lifetime at the end of 2017 in Web Cam Girls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/12/web-cam-girls-reel-one.html), and as in that film the lead “cam girl” in this one comes to grief when she actually agrees to meet a client face-to-face instead of just hiding behind the security (although really false security) of an online presence. Confessions of a Cam Girl, directed by Siobhan Devine from a script by Miriam Van Ernst, is that most frustrating of films, a bad movie in which we sense the germ of a good movie trying to come out. The lead character is Kristen Anne Walters (Megan Best), a blonde high-school senior with the sort of innocent good looks pervy men would go for. She’s a good student and does particularly well in English literature, but her real ambition is to be a fashion designer (of course I couldn’t help thinking that in today’s world fashion designers are far more readily employable than English teachers). Alas, Kristen’s parents are dead set on her going to college, partly because neither of them got to go to college themselves. Her dad works graveyard shifts at a factory and her mom (Camille Sullivan) is a supermarket manager; mom went to college but then dropped out when she got pregnant with Kristen.

Kristen has been accepted into a dream program that would enable her to spend six months in Europe, three months in Milan and three months in Paris, studying fashion, but the program costs $10,000, including a $1,000 application fee. Kristen doesn’t have that kind of money and her parents won’t let her tap the college fund they set up for her because they insist it can only be spent on an accredited institution. My husband Charles spotted the plot hole almost immediately – there are plenty of American colleges that offer programs in fashion design and surely Kristen and her parents could have found one for her – and he also wondered whether the program Kristen is aiming for was itself a scam. But I think Miriam Van Ernst wanted us to think it was legit, and the only stumbling block for Kristen would be the cost. So Kristen decides to be a “cam girl” to raise the money for her dream education, at first with her Black best friend Rezia taking the photos and videos for her site until Rezia has second thoughts about what Kristen is doing and the toll it’s taking on her. Kristen also has a younger sister, J. J., who seems to be interested almost exclusively in playing soccer; and a boyfriend at school, Owen Saunders (the genuinely cute Josh Bogert), who dumped his previous girlfriend because he caught her dating a boy from another school. Owen is on the school’s swim team (director Devine doesn’t show us the school’s name but she gives us a lot of shots of its mascot and the banner above the school’s main entrance telling us it is the “Home of the Bobcats!”), and one of his fellow swimmers, Brandon Nichols, as a prank hacks into Kristen’s Web cam account and e-mails her hot videos to every student at the school. But before that happens Kristen has agreed to a face-to-face meeting with her favorite online client, “Frank35,” for which he offered to pay $6,000 – $3,000 in advance and the rest after they get together. While she’s at least luckier than the heroine of Web Cam Girls, who got kidnapped by a human trafficker who turned out to be her school English teacher – Kristen manages to get away, though “Frank35” screams at her and vows revenge as she escapes – one has to wonder about her naïveté about his intentions and just what he was expecting for the $6,000 he was paying her. Later, when her account gets hacked and her fellow students receive her sexy images and photos on their e-mails, at first we think this was “Frank35”’s revenge (at least that’s what I thought it was!) before it turned out to be Owen’s friend Brandon.

Kristen’s life spirals out of control in the predictable ways of Lifetime writers: her grades take a nose-dive, Owen breaks up with her after he decides that what she’s doing constitutes cheating, and her sister J. J. is pissed at Kristen for missing her big soccer match – because she was at a wild party drinking booze out of the bottle (there were the obligatory red Dixie cups on hand but she couldn’t be bothered with them) the night before. At the party she went into a bedroom with Owen and took him aback with the aggressiveness of her sexual advances, and when he rejected her and she got drunk, she collapsed and slept over. Ultimately her mom confiscates her phone and demands her password (which is “3000,” not exactly the most secure one available), but doesn’t think to take Kristen’s laptop. So Kristen is able to alter her phone’s security settings to require facial recognition, which means mom is still unable to open her phone and check her account. But her parents find out anyway because Kristen shot at least one of her images on campus grounds – in the gym, with the “Bobcats” logo clearly visible – and this gives the high-school principal (yet another African-American woman authority figure in a Lifetime movie) authority to convene a discipline committee and consider Kristen’s expulsion. Also, Kristen's parents receive an unposted manila envelope with print-outs of her sexually explicit pics on one side and red lettering on the other with threatening slogans. The movie ends oddly inconclusively: we definitively learn that “Frank35” has been arrested and extradited back East on open charges of child sex abuse (they barked out his real name, which to me sounded like “Warren Heer”) and that Kristen is not going to go on that European fashion workshop even though she made enough money as a cam girl to pay for it herself. In fact, the scumbag is taken into custody just as he's trying to abduct Kristen’s younger sister J. J. after a soccer practice. But it’s unclear whether she goes to college or makes up with Owen; the last time we see them together she’s asked him to take her to the prom, and he’s declined but kept open the option of them dating again.

If there’s a moral to Confessions of a Cam Girl, it’s the sheer amount of misery parents cause their children by trying to use them to live out their own life dreams vicariously. As troubled as we are by Kristen’s naïveté about the world of Internet porn, we really begin to like her (at least I did!) and hate her parents for having put her in this box in the first place. Like so many other over-controlling parents in Lifetime movies (and, dare I say it, in real life as well), the parents have all the sensitivity of concentration-camp commandants and their total indifference to their older daughter’s independent humanity is a thing of ugliness and a profound sorrow to behold. Had Miriam Van Ernst and Siobhan Devine been more sensitive and more grounded artists than they are, they could have developed this aspect of their story far more deeply than they did and created a truly moving drama instead of a typical Lifetime bit of mild, teasing titillation.

Death in Paradise: "The Painkiller Thriller" (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 26) at 10 I watched a show on PBS that’s been on the outskirts of my consciousness for a while but I hadn’t actually seen before: Death in Paradise. It’s set on Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, whose Web site, https://www.guadeloupe-islands.com, makes it clear the islands (there are several) are marketing themselves as a tourist attraction. The regular characters are a white British-born police detective, Neville Parker (Ralf Little); his Black immediate supervisor, Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington); and various other police in the station referred to both as Saint-Marie and Honoré. (“Saint-Marie” is the name on their police uniforms and “Honoré” is the name above the entrance to the police building.) This episode, number five in season 11, was called “The Painkiller Thriller” and was about a troubled 22-year-old pop star named Ayana Jelani (Olivia D’Lima) who was sent to a rehab center on Guadeloupe after she crashed and burned on alcohol and drugs following a bitter breakup with an older man. She’s also deathly allergic to aspirin, and she duly dies from aspirin poisoning one night after taking – or seemingly taking – her prescribed meds for the night. (I couldn’t help but musing on the irony of a rehab center for drug addicts prescribing the residents drugs. Remember Woody Allen’s great line in Annie Hall: “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict.”) The nurse who gave her the prescribed pill, Darlene Curtis (a nice pathos-filled performance by Ginny Holder), is worried that Ayana’s death will be blamed on her and at best she’ll lose her job; at worst, she’ll be prosecuted.

Writers Asher Pirie and James Hall give us the usual round of red-herring suspects, including two other residents at the rehab center: Ariel Fanshaw (Leo Hatton – a woman, by the way) and Evann Parry (Jack Parry-Jones). There’s also Ayana’s mother, Sandra White (Camille Coduri), who runs Ayana’s career with all the sensitivity of a concentration-camp commandant (were writers Pirie and Hall thinking of Britney Spears and her dad here?) and a mystery stalker who turns out to be paparazzo Gerry Wigsworth (Nicholas Asbury), a photographer who’s been out of work since the closure of his former employer, the notorious tabloid News of the World, a few years before and has scrambled to make a living as a free-lancer. Ayana’s killing turns out to revolve around a mysterious two-page letter Ayana was handwriting in a notebook until Ariel came upon her and reminded her that she was due back in the facility for a group-therapy session. The police get an inkling of the contents of the letter – or at least its first page – when they find a surveillance video that somehow recorded it well enough the cops could see that it was written to her mom firing her as her manager. Later, however, the cops find the letter, including its second page, which announces that she and Evann have fallen in love and plan to continue as a couple as soon as they both finish rehab. They trace the principals back to Britain and learn that the killer is [spoiler alert!] the facility’s medical director, Dr. Mark Fuller (Keir Charles), who was previously in a similar job in London, only he was fired when he and Ayana ended up in a sexual relationship.

Dr. Fuller was able to pull strings with Ayana’s mother Sandra to get her assigned to his new facility in Guadeloupe when she relapsed, and there he hoped to restart their relationship – only Ayana wasn’t interested because in the meantime she’d fallen in love with Evann. So Dr. Fuller killed her and staged it elaborately, pickpocketing her EpiPen so she couldn’t use it to save her life when she noticed she was going into anaphylactic shock, and later restoring it to her bag when he broke into her room, ostensibly to try to save her life but really to cover his tracks. There also were a couple of subplots, a genuinely moving one about Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), a uniformed police officer who wants to be promoted to detective and become Parker’s police partner, and an annoying one featuring Parker’s long-lost sister Izzy (Kate O’Flynn), who shows up on Guadeloupe after having not had any contact with him for two years. She proceeds to wreck his apartment, where she’s staying – she’s there less than a day and already his kitchen is full of dirty dishes that in the hot tropical climate attract all manner of pests – and she embarrasses him creating a scene at an outdoor dance club. Naomi Thomas, meanwhile, gets her promotion, but only after Parker literally runs out of the office to block Commissioner Patterson from going to a larger city (we’re not told which one) and fetching a new detective from outside. Death in Paradise is a nice little show, and among its official producers are Région Guadeloupe and the Film Commission of Guadeloupe – obviously those authorities are hoping the show will promote tourism to the islands – along with a production company called Red Planet Pictures and the BBC. And we certainly get lots of glimpses of the Guadeloupean scenery, the better to make viewers want to go there!

Law and Order: "Human Innovation" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 25) I watched the second cycle of new Law and Order shows since Dick Wolf’s franchise returned to NBC following the delays caused by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The first in the sequence was an episode of the flagship Law and Order show called “Human Intentions,” and it showed the murder of a high-tech entrepreneur called Evan Marks (Joey Mintz), who along with his partner James Sawyer (Gopal Divan) has built a PayPal-style app and have made themselves billions off it. I strongly suspect the writers were thinking of Elon Musk – not only did they give the character the same initials and the same business model (the real Musk co-founded PayPal and then sold it, making so much money he became “the richest man in the world,” and at least according to lazy reporting he’s remained so despite every business he’s been involved in that we know about losing money) but they made him a compulsive partier and drug user. Marks was withdrawing $2,000 from an ATM just before he was shot and killed to restock the party currently in progress with various illegal drugs. The cops first suspect Marks’s drug dealer, who’s also an aspiring rapper – he’s arrested in the middle of a recording session, and later he explains he’d got out of drug dealing except for servicing Marks, which he was willing to do because “studio time is so expensive.” The cops also have a witness who heard Marks arguing with another man over someone named Eva, and naturally they assume that was a woman Marks and the other guy were both interested in. They interview Marks’s widow, who tells them they had an open relationship and were free to have extra-relational activities.

Then they’re told by someone in the company that “Eva” was not a human female, but an artificial intelligence program developed at the company by lead technician Ben Stafford (Jacob A. Ware). “Eva” was so good at displacing the company’s human employees that Marks had just laid off half of them, including Ben Stafford, who found himself in the position of Victor Frankenstein: he had created a monster that ultimately destroyed his job. Eventually Stafford is arrested and indicted for Marks’s murder after he blurts out a confession in the police station, but the confession is later thrown out because Stafford had asked for Adderall, a drug he became addicted to because of the long hours Marks and Sawyer were making him work, and one of the detectives interrogating him had dropped a hint that he’d be given the drug if he confessed. Stafford has an excellent woman attorney who drops hints to the jury that James Sawyer may have murdered Marks to grab sole control of the company; he had an alibi for the night of the murder but he could easily have hired someone else to do it. Just as the prosecutors’ case seems on the rocks, Sawyer comes forward with a surveillance video from a camera neither the police nor the prosecutors had known about earlier, in which Stafford is seen ambushing Marks at the ATM, shooting him and then turning to the camera and helpfully showing his face. Only lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) is suspicious of the video and thinks it’s an AI “deep fake” because the Stafford figure is shown holding the gun in his right hand – and the real Stafford is left-handed. But his boss, District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the only survivor from the original Law and Order cast – or at least the only one who’s still on the show today), orders him to use the video, and he does so and gets a guilty verdict despite his own doubts not only about the veracity of the video but the whole Promethean bargain of AI generally. The first half of this Law and Order treads in well-worn paths for this show, but the second half is fascinating in terms of what AI means long-term and whether we can still trust what we see and hear – especially in the wake of the deep-faked AI robocalls, allegedly from President Biden, that flooded into New Hampshire telling Democrats not to vote in the January 23 primary.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Truth Embargo" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed it, “Truth Embargo,” directed by Jean de Segonzac (an old Law and Order hand) from a script by Brendan Feeney, showed Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who’s been playing this role for a quarter-century by now and is visibly tired of it, though she grabbed it in the first place because it was the only part she was being offered that was not like the big-breasted blonde bimbo roles her mom, Jayne Mansfield, had played) still traumatized by her failure to find the kidnapper of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine) in the previous week’s episode, “Tunnel Blind.” At one point she even stops the driver of a van from the energy-drink company identical to the one Maddie’s kidnapper drove, only the driver had nothing to do with it and is nonplussed that he’s being stopped and harassed by a desperate cop with an agenda. But the main plot of this episode deals with Natalie Ross (Romina D’Ugo), who’s about to marry her partner Brooke Jaffit (Keeley Miller). They’re planning an island honeymoon and Natalie wants to pick up a sexy swimsuit to impress her girlfriend, but their plans are sidetracked when the store where she’s shopping is invaded by a gang of smash-and-grab robbers, one of whom drags Natalie into a fitting room and rapes her. (The way my mind works, I was wondering whether we were supposed to believe that Natalie was so Queer she’d never had sex with a man before and would never have done so if she hadn’t been forced into it.) The police arrest one of the gang members, a white kid named Travis Butler (Tommy Nelson), who as a sign of bravado takes off the shirt he stole at the store and throws it in the cops’ faces (and shows off a quite nice bod, clean-shaven chest-wise but with very nice, prominent nipples).

They’re able to apprehend Watson because he shot a selfie video and posted it on social media; he posed for the video with a Black friend who turns out to be Natalie’s rapist. Though he’s predictably unwilling at first to give the cops the other kid’s name, eventually they pressure him into ratting out his friend. Along the way the same gang literally smashes their way into the SVU precinct station, though they’re doing it only as a form of intimidation and we only briefly get the thrill of seeing Benson scream into an intercom, “WHERE’S MY BACKUP?” Eventually the police arrest the accused rapist, Jay Watson (Mykey Cooper), and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) put him on trial – only midway through the trial, when it’s time for Natalie to identify Watson as her rapist and point him out on the witness stand, she gets cold feet. It turns out that both she and Brooke feel sorry for Jay Watson – it reminded me of the old joke that “a liberal is someone who feels the other person’s point of view – when they’re being robbed,” only it turns out Natalie had a personal experience as a child that affected her in that direction. It seems that when she was being raised as a foster child, one of her foster brothers was a Black boy and the two of them would go into stores and shoplift as a prank – only one time they got caught and she, as a white girl, was let off with a warning while he had to spend a night in juvenile hall and it started him on a downward spiral that led him to career crime and drug use. Ultimately Natalie identifies Watson as her rapist and he’s convicted, and as a long-time SVU viewer I’m left with a certain anger over the kind of liberal guilt that came close to allowing a rapist to go free even though I also could tell writer Feeney was deliberately setting up his plot to make me angry about that.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Deliver Us from Evil" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next show in the Law and Order cycle, a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Deliver Us from Evil,” about a New York mosque which is bombed to cover up the deliberate and targeted assassination of the mosque’s imam (a spiritual leader of a Muslim congregation the way a minister is in a Christian church or a rabbi is in a Jewish synagogue), was better. It begins with a graffiti artist spray-painting the outside of the mosque with a slogan, “DIE MUSLIM PIGS,” but it turns out the artist, Asher Klein (Ben Heineman) – obviously Dick Wolf and his show runner were leading us up the garden path by making the graffitist Jewish and thereby hinting it had something to do with the conflict in Gaza – was hired to do it by two mysterious men. Unfortunately Klein is put in a hospital, where a blond man who presumably is one of the two men who hired him mugs a cop, steals his uniform, infiltrates the hospital and kills Klein by injecting a toxic drug into his IV. The main characters are Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and a Muslim police officer named Samir Bashir (Abubakr Ali), who’s married a white woman named Stacy (Gaby Slape). Stacy had converted to Islam and the two had had a child, with another on the way. Stacy was at the mosque the morning it was bombed, but luckily she was in another room and survived.

Officer Bashir volunteered to be part of the investigation by the New York Police Department’s hate-crimes unit, headed by Captain Nazanin Shah (Nicole Shalhoub), but she turned him down because his wife was a potential victim. So he goes to the Organized Crime Control Bureau and tries to get them to investigate, and inveterate rule-breaker Stabler joins him. The two ultimately recover a bullet slug from the wall of the ruined mosque, confirming Stabler’s and Bashir’s hunch that the imam was shot and killed before the bomb went off. The episode also features a reunion between Stabler and his long-lost brother Randall (Dean Norris, who doesn’t look that much like Christopher Meloni but is enough in the ballpark that he’s at least faintly credible). Their mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn, an old pro who’s still giving the youngsters lessons in what acting is all about) wanted Randall but, suffering from some sort of age-related dementia, isn’t sure who he is when he finally shows up. Randall, it seems, has spent the last 20 years or so living in Florida; writers Will Tyler and Bridget Pascoe drop hints that he’s been making his living in something unseemly if not downright criminal, but they don’t specify what it is. Stabler’s immediate boss at OCCB, Black Lesbian Sargeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), has long-term “issues” with Captain Shah, mostly turf wars over whose unit has jurisdiction over various cases. It’s a better than average Organized Crime episode, partly because the villains are pretty ordinary human beings without the extraordinary levels of sophistication and partly because it comes to at least some sort of resolution, even though the finish is pretty open-ended in the fashion of this show’s worship (which Dick Wolf’s other Law and Order shows have blessedly avoided) of the Great God SERIAL.

American Experience: "Nazi Town, U.S.A." (WGBH, PBS, aired January 23, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 23) my husband Charles and I watched two documentaries (three if you count the two halves of the Frontline program, “Israel’s Second Front” and “Failure at the Fence,” separately), one of which I was particularly interested in and I was glad that Charles could see, too, since he’d taken the day off work. That was an American Experience episode called “Nazi Town, U.S.A.,” dealing mostly with the German American Bund. (The German word “Bund” officially means “federation” but it’s also translated as “organization.”) This was a front group originally started by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi German government as soon as it took over in January 1933 to build support for the Nazi regime among Americans in general and Americans of German origin in particular. It was originally called “Bund of Friends of the New Germany” and it staged mass parades and rallies carrying swastika flags. As word of the brutality of the Nazi regime started to filter into the U.S. – though until the U.S. actually entered World War II in December 1941 surprisingly little news about the horrors of Nazi Germany appeared in the U.S. media – the Bund’s open identification with the Nazi regime started to be a political liability. In 1935 the Nazi government decided to close it down, but Fritz Kuhn, the German-born naturalized U.S. citizen who had been picked to head the Bund, kept it going anyway, rebranding it the “German American Bund” and trying to pass it off as the fulfillment of America’s own Revolutionary ideals. Bund rallies and events featured life-sized paintings or statues of George Washington onstage, and much of the rhetoric of the Bundists is strikingly similar to the way the American Right talks today. Like the U.S.’s modern-day Right-wing revolutionaries (usually misbranded “conservatives” even though they are anything but true conservatives), the Bundists spoke of creating a “Christian nationalist” government with ultimate power in the hands of a single individual and Jews, Blacks and others deemed “racially inferior” relegated to second-class status.

The documentary’s title, “Nazi Town, U.S.A.,” relates to the real-life Nazi town the Bund and its allies tried to create in 1937 in Yaphank, Long Island, New York (ironically also the location of the military base where Russian-born Jewish-American songwriter Irving Berlin had created his World War I musical Yip Yip Yaphank). Working off their success in creating a German-American district of New York City in Yorkville, Manhattan, the Bund and its supporters set up a township called “German Gardens” in Yaphank and named its streets after prominent Nazi leaders like Adolf Hitler and his second-in-command, Herrmann Göring. The German American Bund also set up summer camps for children, mostly young boys, with the promise to parents that they could protect their kids from having to mix with “racial undesirables” over the summer. The most successful of these was “Camp Siegfried” in Yaphank which, as historian William Hitchcock explains in the show, “was a destination for lots of people from the New York area, not just during summer camp, but for rallies and picnics and gatherings throughout the year.” Among their tactics for making sure Jews and other “undesirables” couldn’t buy homes in German Gardens were racially restrictive covenants in the title deeds saying that owners couldn’t sell their homes to anyone from a racial, ethnic or religious group the Nazis didn’t approve of. Racial covenants were actually a quite common thing in American real estate until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them in 1948 – they didn’t outright declare them unconstitutional, but they said the courts could no longer enforce them – and they were used against many different groups, though mostly against Jews and Blacks. (There’s a marvelous line in the play Auntie Mame in which the villain, Babcock, tries to assure Auntie Mame Dennis that a certain neighborhood is “exclusive and restricted.” Mame snaps back, “Exclusively what, and restricted to whom?” She’s referring to racial covenants designed to keep out Blacks and Jews, especially Jews, and later in the story she announces that she’s bought a home in that neighborhood and intends to convert it into a school for Jewish musicians whose teachers are refugees from Nazism.)

During the 1920’s and 1930’s there was an immense amount of racism in America, and it was freely, openly and proudly expressed. D. W. Griffith’s racist movie masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915) had sparked a revival of the Ku Klux Klan that was larger and more powerful than the original – and reached as far north as Indiana, where it briefly controlled the state’s politics. In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed an openly racist new immigration law that set up quotas – limits on how many people from each country could enter the U.S. – and the quotas were written to make sure most immigrants would come from the northern European countries the racists of that era considered most “white.” (This system remained in force until 1965, and many people in the Trump administration, including anti-immigrant hard-liner Stephen Miller, regarded it as a model for how they wanted to rewrite U.S. immigration laws.) Then in 1929 the U.S. stock market crashed, and racists throughout America seized on it as a justification for even more hard-line policies against immigrants. It also kicked off the Great Depression, which led a lot of Americans to believe that capitalist democracy had reached its limit and the future lay with authoritarian rule, either on the Left with Communism or on the Right with fascism. Before Hitler, fascism had meant Benito Mussolini’s regime in Italy, which had taken power in 1922 and which had generally got quite good press in the U.S. American newspapers regularly published fawning profiles on Mussolini, heralding not only his success at getting Italian trains to run on time but eliminating the Mafia in its country of origin – which looked good to Americans who saw U.S. gangsters running roughshod over law-abiding Americans and staging drive-by shootings that claimed the lives of innocent victims. (Ironically, the U.S. and its World War II allies would bring the Mafia back to Italy by organizing it as a resistance movement against fascism, the way the Mafia had been set up in the first place as a resistance against Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the early 19th century; the name “Mafia” is actually an acronym for the Italian for “Anti-French Society.”)

Mussolini had not only invented the ideology of fascism but had coined the name, taking it from the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority consisting of a bundle of twigs with axes bound in. So there was already fertile soil for an American Right in the early 1930’s that openly disdained democracy and hailed fascism as the wave of the future, and when Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 they seized on that as a way of fighting back against perceived enemies like Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had organized a boycott of all goods imported from Germany that significantly impacted the German economy. In 1936 the subversive activities of the German American Bund were so blatant and open that President Franklin Roosevelt asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate it. The FBI agents in charge of the investigation produced a 1,000-page report – which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover suppressed because he regarded the major threat to U.S. security as the American Left in general and the Communist Party, U.S.A. in particular, not the American Right. In 1937 the state legislature of New Jersey passed a so-called “race libel law” which banned speech attacking other people for their race, color or religion. The first prosecution under this law took place over Camp Nordland, a Bund-run summer camp in New Jersey, but the convictions were later reversed on appeal after the American Civil Liberties Union intervened on the Bund’s side and got the law thrown out as a violation of the First Amendment. (The ACLU got into trouble for a similar case 45 years later when they intervened on the side of neo-Nazis who wanted to stage a march through Skokie, Illinois in a neighborhood with many Holocaust survivors. Staging parades through largely Jewish neighborhoods had been a regular tactic of the original Bund, too.) In 1939 the Bund rented Madison Square Garden for a major rally at which Fritz Kuhn was the featured speaker – and when he began his speech he was heckled by a Jewish man who had crashed the event. Members of the crowd beat him within an inch of his life, and only the police, who’d been sent by then-Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to keep order and prevent a fight between Bundists and anti-Bund counter-protesters, rescued him.

The stage at Madison Square Garden featured Bund members dressed as the original Minutemen from the American Revolution, as well as at least one man in full Native American drag, though it wasn’t clear whether that was a real Native person or a Bund member dressed as one. (Charles mentioned that there was at least one Native activist who was also a Bund supporter, Elwood Towner a.k.a. Chief Red Cloud of Portland, Oregon, who was attracted by Silver Shirts founder William Dudley Pelley’s proposal to empty the reservations of Native Americans and force American Jews to live there instead.) One upshot of the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden was that Mayor La Guardia called in New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey and asked if there was anything they could do to stop Fritz Kuhn. There was; it turned out Kuhn had been regularly embezzling from the German American Bund to fund his various mistresses across the country, and he was prosecuted for that. By the time he was released from prison on that charge, the U.S. had entered World War II and he was re-arrested for failing to register as an agent of the German government (a charge the U.S. used against quite a number of home-grown fascists). Meanwhile, the ever-resourceful American Nazis had gone on from the discrediting of the Bund to form the America First Committee, an umbrella organization that attracted a wide range of members including ideological pacifists like Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, and Communist Party members who opposed U.S. entry into World War II as long as Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were allies but quickly changed their tune as soon as Hitler broke the alliance and invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941. But the main impetus behind the America First Committee was from the old Bund leaders and their pro-Nazi brethren, and they recruited a major celebrity to be the public face of their movement. He was Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had become world-famous for becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris.

In 1938 Lindbergh had been personally invited to visit Nazi Germany by Herrmann Göring himself, who in addition to his other titles was head of Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe (literally “air weapon”). Lindbergh was persuaded by Göring that the German air force was far too powerful for the U.S. to resist, and this set him on a career of making isolationist speeches and using his still-great fame to keep the U.S. out of World War II. He was such an asset to the movement that the American Right started talking him up as a Presidential candidate and a replacement for the discredited Fritz Kuhn as America’s would-be Führer. What’s most striking about “Nazi Town, U.S.A.” is how it shows that the modern American Right has adopted not only the goals of the 1930’s fascist movement but a lot of its tactics as well, including the invocation of both God and America’s patriotic past and the claim that their goal is to “Make America Great Again.” (This desire to return to an idealized mythical past is one of the usual hallmarks of fascism: the name came from Mussolini’s appropriation of a symbol of ancient Rome, and Hitler invoked Siegfried and other fabled characters of Norse mythology.) One of the most powerful comments on the program came from anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931 (two years before he seized power in Germany), had been personally ejected from Germany on Hitler’s orders in 1934, and who in 1938 said, “The classical end of all pure democracy is the popular tyrant. And incidentally, all successful tyrants throughout history have been popular idols. The tyrant, said Machiavelli, must pose as the friend of the people, as their champion against the rich and aristocratic, as the incorporation of the people's will. They must be made to feel that through him, in his person, they are actually ruling. This was the formula of Caesar, and it's the formula of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.” She could have been talking about Donald Trump!

Frontline: "Israel's Second Front" and "Failure of the Fence" (Schonder Productions, Washington Post, WGBH, PBS, aired January 23, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Experience show “Nazi Town, U.S.A.” I kept PBS on for a split-level Frontline episode containing two vest-pocket documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from radically different perspectives. The first was called “Israel’s Second Front” and featured Ramita Navai, half-British, half-Iranian journalist (that’s a bit of a surprise since she speaks Arabic perfectly even though her ancestral languages are English and Farsi), touring not only Gaza but also the West Bank, where since October 7, 2023 Israel has staged major attacks (though nothing so far like the genocidal campaign they’re waging in Gaza!) and have killed hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children, in a vain hunt for leaders of Hamas and its allies. The second was called “Failure of the Fence,” was produced, directed and written by Gabrielle Schonder and featured Washington Post reporters John Swayne and Joyce Sohyun Lee trying to figure out how Hamas’s fighters were able to break through Israel’s so-called “Iron Wall” across the border with Gaza and stage the October 7 attacks in the first place. This show could be an object lesson for all the Trump-worshiping idiots who think not only can we build a wall across the U.S.-Mexican border but it will stop undocumented immigration once and for all. Among their tactics were using paragliders literally to fly over the wall, literally cutting their way through it, burrowing under it (despite Israel’s attempts to harden the ground under the wall to make tunneling impossible) and targeting the surveillance balloons that are supposed to alert Israelis to an impending or in-progress incursion from Gaza.

One aspect of the attack that’s pretty amazing is that Hamas wasn’t making much of an attempt to keep the planning secret; they had not only made graphic training videos of just what they wanted their commandos to do but had posted them on social media for all the world to see. Apparently “all the world” didn’t mean Israeli intelligence, because either no one was monitoring Hamas’s social-media sites or (a conspiratorial possibility but one that occurred to me almost immediately) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others in his government allowed the Hamas attacks to take place because they would provide the pretext for the genocidal campaign against the Palestinians Netanyahu has always wanted. “Israel’s Second Front” was, in its way, even more chilling: proof that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” During the show, Navai talked about the Israeli settlements that have steadily been built in the West Bank territories that, along with Gaza, were supposed to be the site of the future Palestinian state envisioned by the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). “Under the far-Right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the settlements have been expanding,” Navai said. (They’ve actually been expanding steadily under whatever government Israel had at the moment, including supposedly more “liberal” ones.) “And adding to the tensions since Oct. 7, there have been hundreds of reported attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians.” Navai showed an interview with Abdul Hakim Wadi, survivor of a settler raid that killed four members of his family, in which he said, “I was shocked that my brother and his son were martyred, and they wouldn’t be with us anymore, not in this lifetime, at least. [Cries.] The increased attacks by settlers mean we are in uncharted territory. The future appears uncertain, and we are unsure of what lies ahead.”

She also talked with Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and Shikaki told her that his polls showed an already strong level of support among West Bank Palestinians for armed resistance to the Israeli occupation has risen sharply since October 7. “The level of support for armed struggle in the West Bank before October the 7th stood at about 54 percent. Today, it is almost 70 percent,” Shikaki explained. “The perception is that there is today no political or diplomatic option available to Palestinians. If Palestinians are unhappy with the status quo, the only way to change it is violence, armed struggle, formation of armed groups. That is a fundamental reasoning that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians today fully endorse.” Navai described an increasing level of Palestinian resistance that is coming uncomfortably close to the campaign that ultimately brought down the Shah of Iran in 1979 and led to the Islamist regime that has bedeviled that country ever since. Though one of her interviewees is a Palestinian woman who considers herself a feminist and has every reason in the world to hate and fear Hamas’s extreme Islamist agenda, including the entrenched sexism that seems to come with the territory, Navai notes that Hamas has become the personification of Palestine’s liberation from Israel’s suffocating occupation and a lot of people are being drawn to their cause even if they’d probably not want to live in the regime a victorious Hamas would set up. One of her most heart-rending interviews is with a young Palestinian fighter named Mohammed (she agreed not to use any more of his name, and given the penchant of Arab parents generally to name their sons after the Prophet, “Mohammed” could be just about anybody) who told her, “They started to attack us with missiles. This has never happened before. They attack us with missiles and we don't have missiles.”

Mohammed also told Navai that his brother had just been killed by an Israeli drone – “It fell from above the cover. He was here. Here, exactly” – and Navai added that just two days after that interview, Mohammed was also killed in an Israeli attack. At the same time she showed interviews with Israeli officials who blandly asserted that the atrocities Israel is committing against the Palestinian population are necessary for “security.” One of her strangest interviews was with Orna Mizrahi of the Institute for National Security Studies, who tried to assure her that Israel is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties – “There is no intention in doing it, but it happens. Sometimes it happens. And I tell you, as one who is coming from the army, that there is a big effort to prevent these accidents, but sometimes they happen” – which had me yelling at the TV, “Bullshit.” Navai closed her show with a quote from Palestinian scholar and philosopher Sari Nusseibeh (a male, born in 1949, and former president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem): “I hope it's, we've passed the critical stage between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the war that’s raging in Gaza. And I hope that after this, the world will open its eyes to the need to step in and do something here. If it doesn't, if there's no solution, if there's no solution to the conflict, I think it'll just get worse in time. You never know how a situation of war can actually drive people to act. Things are boiling, simmering. And I think the wise thing to do for everybody concerned, local and international players, is to try and contain this before it explodes.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are trending right now: with Joe Biden maintaining public support for Israel while vainly trying to dissuade Israel’s current government from carrying out its genocidal campaign against Palestine, and Donald Trump waiting in the wings to take over as President and give the full green light to Israel’s genocide, the likely outlook for the Palestinians is virtual annihilation – and a sustained campaign that will only drive the few Palestinians that survive ever closer to Hamas and its militant agenda.

D.O.A. (Harry M. Popkin Productions, Cardinal Pictures, United Artists, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 22) I was going to run my husband Charles and I the Blu-Ray disc of the 1953 3-D Western Wings of the Hawk, directed by Budd Boetticher for Universal-International and starring Van Heflin and Julie Adams (the latter the damsel in distress that attracted the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the first of Universal’s three series entries), but we didn’t have 3-D glasses ready to hand (I ordered some from Amazon.com this morning and expect them to arrive Thursday) and I couldn’t figure out how to select the alternate 2-D version of the movie. So instead I put that aside and we watched the original 1949 version of D.O.A., a haunting movie that has held a certain level of audience’s imagination for its unique and bizarre central premise. Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) takes an out-of-town trip to San Francisco and ends up in a pub crawl, where a mystery assailant slips a poison called “luminous toxin” into one of his drinks. The next day he goes to a doctor and is told that the poison has already worked its way into his system and rendered him fatally ill; he’s told he has anywhere from a day to a week to live. He decides to use the time he has to find out who killed him – one of the film’s greatest moments is when one of the doctors who diagnoses him asks how he got the poison, he says, “I don’t know,” and the doctor takes a beat and then says, “You’ve been murdered.” Bigelow is a tax accountant from the desert town of Banning, California (which really exists) and he went on that fatal vacation to San Francisco to get away from Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton), his fiancée and secretary.

The film was directed by French émigré and former cinematographer Rudolph Maté from a story and screenplay by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene. It was produced by Harry M. Popkin and his brother Leo C. Popkin, who got their start in the film business producing “race movies” (films with all-Black casts aimed at Black-only theatres) in 1941 and later graduated to movies aimed at white audiences. Apparently the idea for D.O.A. first came from German screenwriter Robert Thoeren in 1932, but it seems either to have never got filmed then or to have been one of those daring projects, like the original 1933 Viktor und Viktoria, that fell through the cracks when the Nazis took over Germany and imposed their dictatorship on the arts as well as everything else. So it’s not surprising that a movie made in Hollywood at the height of the film noir craze would have its ultimate roots in Weimar Republic Germany. The 1949 D.O.A. has one big problem: the musical score by Dmitri Tiomkin, who drenched it in goo and whose most annoying affectation is the sound of a slide whistle every time Frank Bigelow is tempted by a hot-looking woman in his hotel (the St. Francis) in San Francisco, which is often since he arrives in town at the close of “Market Week,” a week-long convention in which male clothing salesmen attract the attention of women buyers for department stores. (In 1932 Warner Bros. had made a quite good film, She Had to Say Yes, about the lives of women in those jobs and how they literally had to prostitute themselves to get orders, though that film reversed the genders and the women were the fashion reps who “had to say yes” to the male department store buyers who had the power to make or break them by ordering from them or not.)

Just before Bigelow left on his weekend out of town, a man named Phillips frantically called him but wouldn’t tell Paula who he was or what he wanted. It turns out Phillips’ wife (Lynn Baggett) was having an affair with the company’s comptroller, Halliday (William Ching). Phillips ran an export-import company headquartered in Los Angeles’s famed Bradbury Building, which appeared in so many films noir it was practically noir central. The two, along with Phillips’s mistress Marla Rakubian (Laurette Luez) and her brother Raymond, who posed as a man named “Jennings,” were in a plot to frame Phillips for receiving stolen property, the said property being a shipment of the rare metal iridium. Frank Bigelow got involved because on his way back to L.A. from making the iridium transaction, Phillips stopped in Banning and had Bigelow notarize the receipt for the metal. With Bigelow’s help, Phillips could have proved that he bought the iridium in what seemed like a legitimate transaction and thereby escaped prosecution for receiving stolen property. Instead Mrs. Phillips pushed her husband off the balcony of their apartment and thereby murdered him, while Halliday went to San Francisco, sneaked into the bar and poisoned Bigelow’s drink. D.O.A. is a quite remarkable movie noticeable for having been largely shot on actual locations – one scene with Bigelow fleeing both crooks and cops through the streets was a “stolen” shot with the passers-by unaware that they were being filmed for a movie – and for an explosive shock cut to the scene at “The Fisherman” bar, where Halliday catches up to Bigelow and poisons him.

“The Fisherman” is called that because it has a band featuring a honking tenor saxophonist who uses that name, and it’s nice to know who the band members are at long last: Van Streeter (tenor sax) as “The Fisherman”; Teddy Buckner (trumpet); Ray Laurie (piano); John Willie “Shifty” Henry (bass); and Al “Cake” Wichard (drums). It’s also noticeable as the first film appearance of actor Neville Brand, who played a psychopathic killer named Chester; Brand recalled years later that he’d been a struggling actor in New York City when Harry and Leo Popkin offered him a large amount of money for this film, plus free transportation from New York to Los Angeles and back. Brand made so much more money on this film than he’d ever made as a stage actor that he decided to stay in Hollywood; he had a solid, if not exactly stellar, career in 1950’s films, mostly “B”’s in which he played heavies. (His best movie was probably Riot in Cell Block 11, directed by Don Siegel in 1954, in which he played a convict who leads a prison revolt.) I’m not sure D.O.A. in 2024 is quite as amazing a movie as I thought it was when I first saw it on local TV in the late 1960’s, but it’s still a quite exciting and moving film. I especially like the scenes in which Brand’s Chester is trying to threaten O’Brien’s Bigelow, and Bigelow couldn’t care less because he’s fatally ill anyway, as well as the final sequence in which the missing-persons report on Bigelow is stamped “D.O.A.” – “dead on arrival” – as he finally expires inside the L.A. Police Department’s homicide unit, where he’s narrated the story in flashback. And Edmond O’Brien’s performance is superb as the Everyman literally not only caught but killed by the noir underworld, even though when Pamela Britton’s character got jealous and possessive over him and worried that he was having extra-relational activities with one or more of the girls in San Francisco, I couldn’t help but remember that four years later O’Brien would play the title role in Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist.

Klute (Gus Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1971 film Klute, produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula based on a screenplay by Andy and David E. Lewis, starring Jane Fonda in the first of her two Academy Award-winning roles as call girl Bree Daniel (or is it “Daniels”? We hear it both ways in the film, though “Daniel” is how it’s spelled in the credits) and Donald Sutherland as John Klute, former police detective from Tuscarora, Pennsylvania who steps down from the force and becomes a private detective to trace his best friend, Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli), at the behest of his wife Trina (veteran character actress Rita Gam, who’s probably best known for playing the wife of Hannibal in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1960 European-made film, with Victor Mature in the title role). Gruneman’s family has got copies of obscene letters he’s been writing to various New York prostitutes, including Bree Daniel, and he hasn’t been heard from at all for six months. I first saw this film when my mother took me to it during its initial theatrical release in 1971, and I don’t recall ever having seen it again until last night. When it first came out Klute was considered especially daring for casting Jane Fonda not only as a prostitute but one who wasn’t guilt-ridden or ashamed, but was proud of what she did for a living and how she made her clients feel (though over a decade earlier Melina Mercouri had played a similar role in Never on Sunday).

Today it’s still a good movie but it’s also badly dated; we get to eavesdrop on Bree’s sessions with her therapist (Vivian Nathan) in scenes William K. Everson in The Detective in Film suspected were added after the rest of the film was complete. We also hear a lot of Bree’s sessions with her clients in recordings secretly made on miniature reel-to-reel tape recorders (cassettes already existed when this film was made and were what real-life detectives, eavesdroppers and voyeurs would have been using in 1971), and ultimately we realize that Bree is being stalked by a former client who gets off on beating up women. The mystery, to the extent there is one, is who the client is and why he’s killing the women he’s been with; one of them is already dead by the time John Klute gets to New York and starts his investigation, while a second, Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan in a vivid portrayal of a piece of human flotsam that was one of the few things I remembered about this film from 1971), has become a heavy-duty drug addict and has worked her way down through various madams until she’s hooked up with a pimp who keeps her well supplied. Arlyn’s body is found floating in one of New York’s rivers, and by this time Bree and Klute have become lovers and she’s trying to deal for the first time in her life with experiencing sex as an expression of love rather than a job. (Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were having an affair for real when they were making this film, and it lasted through one more movie – a documentary called F.T.A. in 1972 based on the alternative shows they were doing for U.S. servicemembers on their way to Viet Nam to what they considered the patriotic drivel being fed them by the official USO – before they broke up and Fonda began dating, and ultimately married, New Left activist Tom Hayden.)

The killer ultimately turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), a 1-percenter who discovered he liked beating up women to within an inch of their lives when he started purchasing the services of prostitutes and realized just having paid-for sex wasn’t sufficiently turning him on. Cable’s matter-of-fact explanation as to why he’s doing what he’s doing and why he believes he has a perfect right to exploit people and kill them if they threaten to expose his secret is very much of the time and the radical-Left sympathies of many of the creative people involved in this film, Fonda and (to a lesser extent) Sutherland in particular. It also plays quite differently in the Donald Trump era than it did in 1971; then we just hated him but now we’re afraid that people like him will end up running the country (again). Klute is a good film but also a rather ponderous one; we get way too much explanation of what’s going on. What earned Jane Fonda her Academy Award was the sheer authority with which she plays Bree Daniel, staking out territory far different from the (stereo)typical portrayals of prostitutes then and now; though Bree is trying to break into modeling and acting (we see her rehearse a little-theatre production and we get to meet her as part of a cattle-call audition for a modeling job which she, naturally, doesn’t get), she’s proud of her skills as a sex worker and in particular her ability to make her johns believe that she’s having the time of her life with them when she isn’t. Indeed, there’s a throwaway line in the film in which she tells Klute early on in their sexual relationship that with him she’s experienced orgasm for the first time in her life. At the same time Jane Fonda was coming off a film, Barbarella, a science-fiction movie that cast her as an out-and-out nymphomaniac, so it’s not like audiences weren’t used to seeing her as a wanton woman pushing the envelope of conventional sexual morality.

The TCM showing of Klute was introduced by a man who’s been writing about Academy Award winners and how they felt on the Big Night, and in Jane Fonda’s case she felt embarrassed that she was winning a competitive Oscar while her father, Henry Fonda, never had. (Jane would win her second Best Actress Academy Award in 1978 for the anti-war film Coming Home; Henry wouldn’t win until his next-to-last film, On Golden Pond, in 1982, in which he and Jane played the father and daughter they in fact were.) When Jane Fonda was shooting Klute she already had to deal with a lot of hatred from the crew members; though she hadn’t taken the infamous trip to Hanoi in which she rode atop a turret with North Viet Namese gunners shooting at American bombers (that would happen in 1972 and would earn her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and the enduring hatred of the American Right), her activities with the anti-war movement and the F.T.A. tour (the initials variously meant “Free the Army” and “Fuck the Army,” depending on how transgressive the people running it wanted to be at any given moment) had aroused the ire of many real-life crew members who supported the war and aligned themselves with the hard-hat-wearing counter-demonstraters who were beating up anti-war protesters on the streets of New York and other major cities. When Jane Fonda was nominated for Klute, she wisely sought counsel from her father as to what she would say if she won; he told her not to say anything political, so she didn’t – though she kinda-sorta hinted at it at the end.