The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Black Widower" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, March 7) I watched a 2016 episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, a quirky mystery show set in New Zealand featuring a thrice-married, thrice-divorced lead detective named Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), who’s actually been to the altar and back so many times even he’s not sure if he had a fourth marriage and divorce somewhere along the way. He’s in an uneasy partnership with woman detective Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), who’s understandably worried that he’s going to screw up their working relationship by hitting on her; and there’s a third cop in the mix, young, hunky red-headed detective constable Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), who gets assigned by the other two to run around and do the muscle work required. This episode was called “The Black Widower” at centers around a so-called “Lord of the Ringz” tour – note the spelling, precisely to avoid copyright litigation from Warner Bros. and the estate of J. R. R. Tolkien – run by a local pub owner named Ray Nielson (Jason Hoyte). Ray’s “Lord of the Ringz” tour features a re-creation of one of the biggest scare sequences in Peter Jackson’s movie: the tour guests stumble first on a giant spider’s web and then meet the giant spider (a pretty obvious papier-machê mockup thereof) and its alleged victim, Ray’s wife Denise (not listed on imdb.com, though we get quite a few flashbacks showing her even though she’s dead at the start of the main story). One of Denise’s stops on the main part of the tour was to put on a costume that would make it look like she’d been attacked by the giant spider, only she would turn out to be A-O.K. Only this time Denise dies for real while trussed up inside the costume that’s supposed to make her look like a spider has mummified her as prologue to killing her. At first the cops think it was a workplace accident – the diabetic Denise went into shock and couldn’t reach her insulin pen in time to save her life – but when Denise’s body is autopsied it revealed that the real cause of her death was the venom of a Katipō spider, related to a black widow and native to the New Zealand coasts.

A local woman named Chandra Singh (Kalyani Nagarajan) raises Katipō spiders in the area to extract their venom so a New Zealand pharmaceutical company can develop an antidote, while her live-in boyfriend Billy Franks (Dan Veints) is intimidated by spiders but has his own oddball career working with dangerous animals. Billy studies sharks who live on the Brokenwood coast, and he’s got so attached to them he’s named them and attributed personality traits to them, just as Chandra has with her spiders. (At one point the police show Chandra a photograph of a spider they’ve found on Denise’s body and ask her which one it is, and Chandra twice says, “I can’t tell from a photo. I’d have to look at her in person.”) After a lot of red-herring suspects, including Ray Nielson – whom the cops suspect at first partly because of the matter-of-fact way he responds to his wife’s death and partly because in the case of a married murder victim, the cops automatically make the surviving spouse the prime suspect – and a highly dissatisfied German tourist named Hans Zigler (Julian Wilson), who took the “Lord of the Ringz” tour and picked apart its inaccuracies, its deviations from Tolkien and the implication that Peter Jackson filmed The Lord of the Rings movies in Brokenwood, which he didn’t, the police finally solve the crime. The killer is [spoiler alert!] Billy Franks, who killed Denise Nielson because she’s been harvesting his sharks for shark-fin soup, which she used to make the gourmet meal the tourists taking her husband’s trip were promised as part of their ticket price. Billy stole the venom Chandra had painstakingly extracted from the spiders – the gimmick is that one spider doesn’t carry more than a fraction of the venom needed to kill a human, so in order to use it as a murder weapon he needed a large amount of it – and also stole a living spider so he could plant it on the body and make it look like the spider killed her.

Aside from it briefly looking like The Brokenwood Mysteries’ casting director, Annabel Lomas, was adopting the Lifetime practice of making the hunkiest guy in the movie the villain, it’s an O.K. ending to a highly unsatisfying program that almost totally lacks the wit and humor of previous episodes in the series. The closest we come to it is when Mike Shepherd asks his immediate supervisor on the police force, Hughes (Colin Moy), about Hughes’s wife Linda, who’s a diabetic like Debbie Nielson was. Hughes immediately worries that Mike is going to try to seduce Linda away from him and make him Mike’s wife number four (or is it five?), and when Mike seemingly innocently says to Hughes, “Give my love to Linda,” Hughes replies, “Not on your life!”

The Crooked Circle (Ventura, Republic, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 6) my husband Charles and I watched an engaging if overly familiar movie from 1957 about the corruption within the boxing world. It was called The Crooked Circle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-JiiBA7U4Y] (given the fact that boxing matches take place inside a space called a “ring” that, despite its name, is actually a square, The Crooked Ring would have made more sense as a title) and was a co-production between an entity called Ventura and our old friend, Republic Pictures. It was noteworthy for having a director, Joseph Kane, and a star, John Smith, who mostly (like Republic itself) did Westerns. “John Smith” was born Robert Errol Van Orden but had his name changed by his infamous agent, Henry Willson, on the ground that “John Smith” was so ordinary a name no actor had used it before, so his client would be different. Willson’s most famous clients, Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, were both Gay, and even at the height of his fame Willson had a great deal of difficulty signing straight male actors as clients because the scandal-mongers inside Hollywood assumed that all his clients were Gay, and that they’d had to trick with Willson to get him to sign them. Smith was married to actress Luana Patten in 1960 but they divorced after 4 ½ years. He had the brief part of a ship’s doctor in the marvelous farce We’re No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart and Aldo Ray and the last film Bogart made with his Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Smith’s best-known role was as star of the TV Western series Laramie with Robert Fuller, who became a lifelong friend.

The Crooked Circle is an exposé of the corruption inside boxing, and specifically the way syndicates of crooked managers, agents, trainers and gamblers build up young hopefuls by putting them in fights that, unbeknownst to them, are “fixed” by bribes to their opponents to lose. Then the young fighters are told to start throwing bouts themselves when it’s in the interest of their sponsors, who are now betting against them, for them to lose. It starts with a fight sequence in which a boxer named Castro, who’s been told to throw the bout, knocks out his opponent and wins – only later that night his body is found in the street, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run traffic accident. But sports journalist Ken Cooper (Steve Brodie, formidable as ever; he was one actor who deserved better career breaks than he got) suspects he was really murdered because his sponsors had bet against him and had lost a lot of money when he won instead of losing as instructed. A few years before, a promising young boxer named Joe Kelly (Don Kelly) had abruptly quit the ring because he’d been getting demands like this. He fled to the countryside (the script sends conflicting signals as to what U.S. state this takes place in; one of the fights is announced as being held under the auspices of the New York Boxing Commission, but the one auto license plate we see, on a Chrysler, is from Connecticut) and opened a fishing resort, where his younger brother Tom Kelly (John Smith, top-billed) works. Tom has been coached in the basics of boxing by his brother, but only for self-defense purposes. But Tom has been bitten by the prize-fighting bug, and he’s being pushed by his girlfriend, Carol Smith (Fay Spain), towards a career in the ring even though big-brother Joe wants to keep him from that because he fears he’ll fall into the clutches of corrupt sponsors the way Joe himself did.

Tom runs away from the resort and goes to the big, bad city, where he hooks up with his brother’s friend Ken Cooper and asks for help getting into the fight game. Cooper tells him to change his name, and he starts boxing as “Tommy Patrick.” He wins his first professional fight, aided by manager and coach Al Taylor (and I was overjoyed to see the great character actor Robert Armstrong in this role, about the one person in this movie – two if you count Steve Brodie, who’d been a name buried deep in my unconscious – I’d actually heard of before), only the second fight he trains for is abruptly canceled because the syndicate that controls boxing in this city wants a fighter of their own in his place. Tom is told in no uncertain terms that the only way he can get enough matches to build a career is to dump Taylor as his manager and sign with syndicate member Larry Ellis (John Doucette). Ellis is part of the gang along with arena owner Max Maxwell (Philip Van Zandt) and gambler Sam Lattimer (Richard Karlan), and the three of them make clear to “Tommy Patrick” that he can only have a boxing career if he plays along with them. He goes on to win 10 more fights, eight of them by knockouts, only unbeknownst to him eight of them are fixed, with opponents paid to lose to him. Then Tom is told to take a dive in his next fight, and one of the gang members tells him that boxing is just “entertainment,” that the people running the fight game decide who will win and who will lose, and it’s all to keep the millions of viewers watching on TV happy and enthralled with the fake spectacle. (This is an unusual film for the late 1950’s in that it actually acknowledges the existence of television as a medium. At first Hollywood studios had depicted TV as a novelty, then in the early 1950’s they barred TV from films altogether, but by 1956 the major studios started to realize they could make money selling their old films to TV and filming new half-hour and hour programs for the home screen, so TV’s started appearing in movies again. But there were still attacks on the TV medium in major movies like the 1957 satirical farce Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, in which the image suddenly shrinks to a fraction of its size and goes from vivid color to blurry black-and-white, and the lead character played by Tony Randall announces that that’s what the movie would look like if you were watching it on television. Ironically, both the movie itself and Tony Randall would end up on TV.)

Among the people watching Tom’s thrown fight on TV are his brother Joe, who notices he’s not up to his usual standards and correctly guesses he was bribed to lose the match – which he took because he wanted $1,000 to buy an engagement ring for Carol. Despite his latest loss, the syndicate sets him up with a bout that will earn him a shot at the heavyweight championship if he wins, but naturally they want him to lose this match, too. Meanwhile, sportswriter Ken Cooper is determined to expose the syndicate once and for all, and to that end he dresses an impostor in Tommy Patrick’s robe and witnesses an encounter between him and a syndicate member telling him to throw the upcoming match. Tommy wins the fight, but the syndicate goes after him determined to run him over in the street in a faked “accident” the way they did with Castro (ya remember Castro?) in the opening scene. Fortunately, Ken chases them down in his Ford Thunderbird sports car and so do the police, who block the gangsters’ car just as it’s about to run over Tom. Ultimately Ellis, Maxwell and Lattimer are arrested and Tom is determined to stay in the fight game but to do so honestly, with Al Taylor returning as his manager. Movies alleging corruption in prizefighting were nothing new; this film came out a year after one of the best, The Harder They Fall (1956), directed by Mark Robson and with Humphrey Bogart (in his last film) as a press agent hired by a corrupt syndicate to build an imposing but spectacularly untalented boxer as a championship contender through a series of fixed fights. The Harder They Fall was advertised with a slogan that would have fit The Crooked Circle as well: “The only thing that’s on the square is the ring itself.”

In fact, boxing was portrayed not only in movies but in real life as so hopelessly corrupt that by the early 1960’s there were demands for its abolition, especially after two promising young fighters, Benny Paret and Davey Moore, were killed in the ring. What saved the sport was the arrival of Muhammad Ali; progressives who once had denounced boxing as immoral and corrupt now started to follow the sport so they could root for Ali and support his courage in taking on the U.S. government over the war in Viet Nam. When Ali was asked how he could justify claiming status as a conscientious objector when he made his living through violence, he answered effectively, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” The Crooked Circle was well made (Republic had a state-of-the-art studio that was bought by CBS and became Television City when Republic CEO Herbert Yates pulled out of new production in 1958, and their movies generally looked better than other minor companies’ “B”’s) but nothing special, and given that Columbia had told this sort of story a good deal better with “A”-list actors like Bogart and Rod Steiger a year before it’s hard to get excited about this version starring John Smith and Steve Brodie.

Elsbeth: "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening, after I’d put my husband Charles through Jimmy Kimmel’s latest monologue and two Dave Hurwitz videos (one about recently deceased conductors and one about Michael Gielen’s formidable performance of Bartók’s complete ballet The Miraculous Mandarin), we watched the latest episode of Elsbeth, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (a title taken from a Billy Joel song). This one features Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his partner Roy (Hayward Leach) taking a tour of New York City’s most notorious true-crime sites. Among them is Pupetta’s Italian Restaurant, owned by Pupetta Del Monte (Alyssa Milano, who’s important enough that the promos for this show billed her heavily as a guest star), where a young soldier in the Del Monte crime family, Goldie Moresco (Anthony Pyatt), was both stabbed (with a corkscrew) and then shot, ostensibly by rival Mafia family soldier Eddie Nova (Adam Fontana). The killing provoked an all-out war between the Del Monte and Nova crime families that annihilated both of them until Pupetta Del Monte was the only Del Monte left. She has claimed not to be involved in the Mafia and says her sole source of income was as a restaurateur. She married Gene Genetti (Adam Ferrara), a waiter at Pupetta’s who was the only witness to the crime, and the two had a son, Gene Genetti, Jr. (also played by Anthony Pyatt). The incident took place in 1998 and inspired a big-budget crime film, City on a Knife Edge – the title comes from Goldie Moresco’s penchant for eating spaghetti with a knife instead of a fork, which he was in the process of doing when he was killed – which was 3 ½ hours long in the final released version and two hours longer than that in the director’s cut, included as a bonus item when the film finally came out on DVD.

Elsbeth questions the tour guide Henry Fellig (played by a marvelously gender-ambiguous actor named Murray Hill – who for a while I thought was going to turn out to be a woman wearing a fake moustache as part of her FTM drag) about the details of the case, and decides that they don’t add up. Elsbeth connects with the New York police detective who investigated the case when it originally happened, Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes), when Gene Genetti slips her a note asking to meet her later at a secret location – only the “secret location” didn’t stay secret anymore, since Geretti is run down by a hit-and-run driver just before Elsbeth gets there. Elsbeth and Fleming connect the old case with the new one even though the current management of the New York Police Department insists they have nothing to do with each other. A person is finally arrested for the hit-and-run accident, but he turns out to be an accountant who was working for Pupetta. Elsbeth also realizes that Gene Genetti, Jr., who graduated from Wharton Business College in Pennsylvania (also Donald Trump’s alma mater) with a degree in accounting, was being recruited to take over as Pupetta’s accountant, but Gene, Sr. didn’t want him to take the job because he didn’t want Gene, Jr. to get sucked into Pupetta’s lifestyle, which included laundering money for the Mob through her restaurant. Elsbeth and her official police partner, Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) – who’s in line for promotion to plainclothes detective but whose promotion has been held back for either political or racial reasons (Blanke is African-American; so is her immediate supervisor, Captain C. W. Wagner [Wendell Pierce], but there are intimations of racism above them) – also realize that Gene, Jr. is several inches taller than either of his parents.

From this Elsbeth deduces that Gene, Jr. is not Gene, Sr.’s biological son; his real father was Goldie Moresco, and Goldie was actually killed by Pupetta Del Monte in a jealous fit after he refused to marry her. Elsbeth and Blanke finally get the clue they need from an outtake in the film City on a Knife Edge in which the actress playing Pupetta breaks a fingernail, and by faking a confession by which Gene, Sr. says he killed Goldie, they get Goldie’s body exhumed and find a fake fingernail with an emblem embedded inside that Pupetta was known to have worn at the time of Goldie’s murder. This Elsbeth episode had the quirky charm that has endeared this show to me, as well as a charming tag scene in which Teddy and Roy decide to launch a podcast about the so-called “white whales” – cases certain police officers were never able to solve and were haunted by for years – with Goldie Moresco’s murder as episode one. There’s also an intimation that Teddy and Roy will break up because one of them lives in New York, the other in Washington, D.C., and they don’t want to move to the other’s city or attempt a long-distance relationship, though the understanding at the end is they will stay together (and I hope so, if only because they’re an unusually positive depiction of a Gay male couple on TV, and that pleases me as a Gay man married to another man). Elsbeth is a charming show, which owes more than a little to Columbo (particularly the gimmick of having the “sleuth” character basically annoying the murderer into confessing) but which luckily has some of the same appeal as its fabled ancestor. This is also the episode in which Elsbeth gives away that she’s really Icelandic by birth (she gives a long and complicated Scandinavian name as her real one), and her Italian name only came from a long-since dumped ex-husband.

The Earth Dies Screaming (Lippert Pictures, Shepperton Studios, 20th Century-Fox, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, March 5) my husband Charles came home from work relatively early and ultimately I showed him a movie from YouTube: The Earth Dies Screaming, a 1964 British-made production directed by Terence Fisher (who mostly worked at Hammer Studios on their remakes of the Universal horror classics) from a script by Harry Spalding. There’s an imdb.com “Trivia” item in which Spalding allegedly said that the title was a joke suggested by a friend, and it stuck despite his not liking it. It certainly is a misnomer because, while it’s an alien-invasion movie, it’s a surprisingly decorous one (especially given how much sex and gore Fisher put into his Hammer films!) and virtually no one screams. It’s about an American pilot, Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker), who’s doing test flights in Britain on the same sort of exchange program that sent Col. Mandrake (Peter Sellers) to the U.S. in Dr. Strangelove. When he lands his plane, he discovers that everyone around him has suddenly died except for a few people who, like himself in his pressurized cabin, were in hermetically sealed environments. Among the survivors are Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), the film’s human villain (and when we discussed the film Charles mentioned that he was the only survivor whose survival method was not explained by Harry Spaldiing); Peggy Hatton (Virginia Field, Parker’s real-life wife), who’s being held hostage by Taggart and forced to pose as his wife; local hotel and bar owner Edgar Otis (Thorley Walters); his wife Violet Courtland (Vanda Godsell); and young J.D. type Mel Brenard (David Spenser) and his pregnant wife Lorna (Anna Palk). The action stays so resolutely within the hotel – it cuts outside only occasionally – I found myself wondering if Spalding had originally written it as a stage play and then adapted it for film. The aliens turn out to be two robots – there are supposedly more, but on a Lippert Films budget they obviously could afford only two robot suits – who annihilated most of the human race, or at least most of it in the north of England, with a poison gas attack. Then they started walking around and picking off the few survivors. (Charles also noted the resemblance between the robots in this film and the Cyber-Men on Doctor Who.)

The robots also have the power to put humans under mind control, and the indication that they’ve done that to someone is their eyes are replaced by solid white globes in their sockets. Violet is taken over in this fashion and Quinn shoots her in self-defense, naturally pissing off her husband Edgar. Later Quinn also gets transformed into an alien-controlled person, and what’s left of the human race appears to be doomed until Jeff figures out how to defeat the aliens. He realizes that, as robots, they’re all being controlled by a radio signal, and if he and the remaining good guys can blow up the transmitter that’s sending the signal (represented here by a model of unwitting tackiness), the robots will collapse and become just useless hunks of metal. That duly happens, though in the final frames, as Lorna finally gives birth to Mel’s baby (thereby symbolizing that Life Will Go On despite the catastrophe), Jeff warns that Earth may not have seen the last of these alien invaders. Though by then the aliens-invade-Earth trope had hardened into cliché, The Earth Dies Screaming is actually pretty good. At just 62 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome (and YouTube blessedly showed it with no commercial interruptions at all, a far cry from what they and their algorithms had done to The Hangman Waits when Charles and I had watched it the night before), and there are just enough conflicts between the human characters to keep it interesting without letting it become annoying. And besides, I’ll admit it, it was lots of fun to watch David Spenser exude male sexuality as Mel, especially since wardrobe supervisor Jean Fairlie found him a pair of white pants that did a great job of showing off his assets. Also noteworthy was that The Earth Dies Screaming’s musical score was composed by a woman, Elisabeth Luytens, described on imdb.com as as “avant-garde composer … whose father, Edwin Lutyens, designed Manor House Lodge in Shere, Surrey, a small property which features prominently at several points in the film.” Though her credits look pretty minor-league (her best-known film is probably Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, made by the British Amicus studio in 1965 with Hammer refugees Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), it’s still nice that this early a woman was finally able to break the glass ceiling and get a job as a film composer!

The Hangman Waits (Five Star Films Ltd., Butcher’s Film Service, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 3) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing 1947 British film called The Hangman Waits, written and directed by A. Barr-Smith (the “A.” stood for “Albert,” by the way), who was born in Australia in 1905, acted in films both in Australia and the U.S., and then ended up in Britain where he directed this and a short called Death in the Hand (1948), a 43-minute film about a palm reader who predicts the murders of several people she’s traveling with on a train. The Hangman Waits is listed on imdb.com as being 63 minutes long but the version Charles and I saw on a YouTube post that was riddled with commercials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWboiMWgiIY) was 49 minutes 31 seconds. The Hangman Waits is a peculiar mixture of fictional crime film and British documentary; it starts with a mysterious man confronting a young woman, Mary Carney (Beatrice Campbell), in front of a makeup table, locking the door of the room behind him, and advancing towards her with murderous intent. (We don’t see the actual murder.) Then he’s shown carrying a suitcase into Victoria Station in London and asking that the suitcase be stowed in place. The suitcase is so heavy that the person running the check-in stand needs a second person to help him lift it. When one of the people notices blood dripping from the suitcase onto his clothes as he lifted it, the two people who lifted the suitcase decide to open it and find out what’s in it. It turns out to be the torso of a missing woman, and later the woman’s head is found on a local beach. A. Barr-Smith and Five Star Films, the company he owned, cut a deal with the News of the World (then a broadsheet rather than a tabloid) to shoot much of the film in their offices and printing plant, though oddly he didn’t call the newspaper featured in the movie News of the World but rather gave it a fictitious name, the Daily Clarion.

News of the World was founded on October 1, 1843 by John Browne Bell in London, and as the cheapest paper in Britain at the time it quickly established a major audience among newly literate working-class Britons. According to its Wikipedia page, “It quickly established itself as a purveyor of titillation, shock, and criminal news. Much of the source material came from coverage of vice prosecutions, including lurid transcripts of police descriptions of alleged brothels, streetwalkers, and ‘immoral’ women.” Bell’s family ran it until 1891, when they sold it to Henry Lascelles Carr, publisher of the Western Mail in Wales. Carr’s family in turn held on to it until they sold it to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1969. In 1984 Murdoch turned News of the World from a broadsheet to a tabloid, and for the last decade of its existence it focused on celebrity exposés – though even before it became a tabloid it was notorious enough that Chrissie Hynde of the rock band The Pretenders name-checked it in her 1982 song “Back on the Chain Gang.” Finally Murdoch closed it in 2011 after five years’ worth of scandals, including reports that its staff members had hacked into private telephone lines to get stories. In 1947 it still ran its editorial offices in London but it was actually printed in Manchester – though through some creative geography Barr-Smith made it look in the movie like the paper was published and printed in the same city. The Hangman Waits cuts back and forth between the efforts of the murderer to flee, the efforts of the police to find him, and the efforts of the “Daily Clarion” to be there and cover the arrest.

The murder is not particularly mysterious; the criminal is identified fairly quickly as Andrew Sinclair (Anthony Baird), a theatre organist at the theatre where Mary Carney worked. It seems that Sinclair and Carney were dating each other when Carney ticked him off by starting an affair with the theatre’s manager, Peter Knight (Robert Wyndham), and Sinclair killed Carney out of jealousy. We see a lot of shots of Sinclair from the back, wearing the tell-tale raincoat he wore when he killed Carney, and at one point he tries to hide out in a church where the staff organist is practicing. The church organist leaves Sinclair in the church to go to a newsstand and buy the Daily Clarion, which is running a headline stating that the police have identified a theatre organist as the murderer. When the poor, hapless, doomed church organist returns to the church, Sinclair notices that he’s bought a paper and demands to read it. The church organist sneaks away from the console to call the police – Charles was amused that he dialed the British “999” emergency number, in use well before U.S. phone companies adopted 911 as a similar all-purpose emergency line – but as soon as he returns from making the phone call, Sinclair realizes what he’s done and kills him. There’s a nice shot of his body slumped against the organ console, with a drone-like chord playing from the keys on which his body fell. Ultimately the police arrive at the church, but Sinclair gets away (incidentally the police are shown carrying guns, which I thought British police had never done as of 1947; in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, made in Britain in 1934, he had to show the cops obtaining guns from the military at a nearby armory before he could stage the final shoot-out) and he hides out at the Daily Clarion’s printing plant.

In the meantime we get some great shots, especially for a newspaper junkie like me, of just what producing a paper in the era before offset type entailed. First the copy is taken down, either written or (in the case of a late-breaking story like Mary Carney’s murder) dictated over the phone. It’s typed up and sent to the composing room on long conveyor belts to which the copy is clipped. Then it’s typeset on a Linotype machine, whose output is used as a mold for a metal plate from which the actual printing will be done. Any photos that go with the article will be stripped in separately, half-toned to make them printable, and cut into the master mold before the plates are manufactured. (Pre-produced ads in those days often came from the advertiser or their agency as papier-machê molds that could be inserted into the master plates before the metal was poured to make the negative printing plates. I remember seeing a few of those at the College of Marin Times in the early 1970’s; we had to explain to advertisers submitting ads that way that we were offset-printed.) Ultimately Sinclair is trapped in the Daily Clarion print building after he, like so many panicked or simply stupid movie criminals before him, tries to escape by fleeing up instead – which only makes him more trapped. He leaps to his death from a high window to the street below after telling the police official who’s trying to arrest him that he has no family “except for the people outside, and I should hate to disappoint them.” The film isn’t much in synopsis, but it’s got some great scenes, representing both the fictional story and the newspaperpeople’s involvement in it, including the way in which Barr-Smith poaches some of the extravagant effects John Grierson and the filmmakers of the British Film Unit used in their documentaries. Stunning shots of trains criss-crossing the street, ominously lit and most likely red-filtered as well, and the scenes of the actual printing of the “Daily Clarion,” and overall The Hangman Waits is a quite good and appealing mixture of documentary technique and a fictional story, and quite a bit more creative cinematically than the Louis de Rochemont quasi-documentaries being made in the U.S. at the time (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, Boomerang!, Call Northside 777).

The 97th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired March 2, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The ABC-TV telecast of the 97th annual Academy Awards was officially announced as starting at 4 p.m. (7 p.m. Eastern time) but I figured I could start watching it at 5 because I assumed the first hour would be a red-carpet special showcasing the celebrities in the audience and – in that rather unlovely phraseology – who they were wearing. (There’s a story about one person taking umbrage at being asked, “Who are you wearing?,” as if they were being accused of skinning a human corpse to get the material for their outfit.) I didn’t turn on the TV until 4:40 p.m. and discovered, much to my surprise, that the Academy Awards were already in progress – though fortunately they were early enough into the show I only missed one awards presentation, Kieran Culkin winning for Best Supporting Actor for a film called A Real Pain. I’d never heard of it and it won no other awards, but the Rotten Tomatoes Web site describes it as, “Mismatched cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.” I’m still miffed that Kieran’s older brother Macaulay Culkin (by two years: Macaulay was born in 1980 and Kieran in 1982) didn’t get the Academy Award I thought he deserved for his marvelous performance as real-life “club kid” turned murderer Michael Alig in Party Monster (2003) – Macaulay wasn’t even nominated for that terrific performance in a marvelous movie. When I turned on the show at last I saw the Academy give out the awards for Best Animated Feature to Flo by Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža, Ron Dyens, and Gregory Zalcman and Best Animated Short to In the Shadow of the Cypress by Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi. In the Shadow of the Cypress was made in Iran, and though it doesn’t seem to have any political bent (the imdb.com synopsis says, “Living in a house by the sea with his daughter, a former captain who has post-traumatic stress disorder leads a tough and secluded life”), Sohani and Molayemi nonetheless complained about the country’s repressive political climate and the problems it poses for would-be artists. The makers of Flo were from Latvia, and the host, Conan O’Brien (who has no personality for this sort of thing, plus the camera was close enough to him to show the lines on his face), made a lame joke about how it was now Estonia’s turn to make an Academy Award-winning film. He repeated that joke a few awards later in an even less appropriate context, and my wish was that he’d have made a joke to the effect that it’s a good thing Latvian filmmakers got to win an Academy Award before Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump get together to hand their country back to Russia the way they’re doing with Ukraine.

The political content on this year’s Academy Awards was pretty muted; there was one winner who was wearing a yellow and blue ribbon (those are the colors of the Ukrainian flag) and Zoë Saldána, winner of Best Supporting Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez (the early favorite, with 13 nominations, more than any other film, though it was beset by a scandal involving its star, open Transwoman Karla Sofia Gascón, over some old tweets from 2020 and 2021 that led to the film’s distributors asking her not to have anything to do with the film’s publicity, and Emilia Pérez won only for Saldaña’s performance and “El Mal” for Best Original Song), proudly boasted that she was the first child of Dominican immigrants to win an Oscar. As for the other big favorite, Wicked, it won only for Production Design (Nathan Crowley, with set decorations by Lee Sandales) and Costume Design (Paul Tazewell, who boasted in his acceptance speech that he’s the first African-descended person to win in that category). A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold, was shut out completely; I was especially disappointed when the Best Actor award went not to Timothée Chalamet for his incandescent performance as Dylan but to Adrien Brody for once again playing an artist who got screwed over by Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust in a film called The Brutalist about the Bauhaus school of architecture and how the Nazis denounced and banned it as “un-German.” (I was similarly disappointed two years ago when Austin Butler’s similarly amazing performance as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was likewise passed over for Brendan Fraser playing a morbidly obese English professor in the film The Whale. Maybe Academy voters recalled what a hunk he’d been once upon a time and decided if he could make himself look so homely, that was great acting.) Another big film in the nominations department, Conclave – a movie about the election of a new Pope that seemed to me from the previews to be a rehash of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons – won only for Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Straughan, from a novel by Robert Harris).

The big winner of the night was a film called Anora that flew so low under my radar screen that I’d never heard of it before, even though Sean Baker won so many personal Oscars for it – he won for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editor, as well as sharing in its Best Picture award as a co-producer with Alex Coco and Samantha Quan – I got tired of seeing his pasty little face and hearing his queeny voice after a while. (I was pretty sure he was Gay until he mentioned having a wife on his second acceptance speech.) Anora, described on imdb.com as, “A young escort from Brooklyn meets and impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairy tale is threatened as his parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled,” was hailed as an honest depiction of sex work by Sean Baker and its fans generally, as well as an example of what it’s still possible to do in an independent movie made without major studio backing at all. Anora also won Best Actress for Mikey Madison, who played the title character; the only nomination it didn’t win was Yura Borisov for Best Supporting Actor as Igor, presumably the oligarch’s son who’s being deprived of his partner by his family, who lost to Kieran Culkin. The Best Documentary Feature was No Other Land, a film about the conflict in Gaza made by a team of two Israelis and two Palestinians: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham. Two of the four alternated giving bits of the acceptance speech and stressed the desirability of a peaceful outcome that respects the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis – nice try, guys (and one gal), but the real situation is going entirely in the other direction, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Right-wing allies advocating a genocidal policy towards the Gaza Palestinians and Donald Trump seemingly willing to come in after the Gaza Palestinians are “ethnically cleansed” and redevelop their land as a super-resort.

The Best Documentary Short seems interesting; it’s called The Only Girl in the Orchestra. It’s described on imdb.com as, “This unsung hero story celebrates trailblazing musician Orin O'Brien and the double bass she plays.” I’m not sure just how much sexism woman classical musicians still have to deal with; they’re a long way from gender parity but every American or European orchestra I see on TV these days (even the Vienna Philharmonic, the last holdout among the major European orchestras), has a smattering of women musicians these days. Dune: Part Two won for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound; my late home-care client, roommate and friend John Primavera used to call Best Sound the catch-all consolation category for which movies that were otherwise shut out of the awards could still win – and I can remember not that long ago where they were two Sound awards, for Editing and Mixing, before they were recombined into just one. The Best Live-Action Short award went to something called I’m Not a Robot, produced and directed by a straight Dutch couple named Victoria Warmerdam and Trent, and according to its imdb.com synopsis it has a quite provocative premise: “After repeatedly failing Captcha tests, music producer Lara becomes obsessed with a disturbing question: could she be a robot?” And the parts of the show I liked best were the musical numbers; while I miss the performances of the Best Original Song nominees that used to be expected on the show, there was a nice tribute to the James Bond movies featuring Lisa singing “Live and Let Die” (I joked, “I’ve heard worse Paul McCartney covers”), Doja Cat singing “Diamonds Are Forever,” and Raye (whose song “Oscar-Winning Tears” really impressed me at the Grammy Awards) doing “Skyfall.” There was also a nice tribute to the late Quincy Jones with Queen Latifah doing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz. Though I would have rather they’d paid tribute to Jones with “Miss Celie’s Blues” from The Color Purple, which he actually composed (“Ease On Down the Road” was by Charlie Smalls, along with the rest of the score from The Wiz), Jones was credited on the 1978 film adaptation of The Wiz as “associate conductor / music arranger / music supervisor / orchestrator.” All in all, the 97th Annual Academy Awards were the usual lumbering spectacle, though since they started earlier than usual they were over by about 7:40 p.m. and my husband Charles and I had plenty of time with which to watch something else.

Abducted in the Everglades (Sunshine Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The “something else” my husband Charles and I watched after the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 2 turned out to be two pretty good Lifetime movies: Abducted in the Everglades (originally shot under the title Lost in the Everglades, which doesn’t sound that different except “Abducted” conveys a greater sense of menace than just “Lost”), and the film turned out to be a pretty wild but entertaining suspense tale. The film follows two young women who are about to enter college after growing out of their high-school senior year. One is Carli O’Connell (Tommi Rose), daughter of overprotective mother Beverly O’Connell (Tori Spelling, who also developed this story and co-produced the film even though three other people – Dane K. Braun, Thomas Dolan-Gavitt, and Richard Pierce – wrote it). Her friend is Simone Sayles (Nikki Nunziato), shorter, mousier and brown-haired instead of blonde like Carli but still hot to trot. They’re drinking at an outdoor bar and the bartender is ignoring them, but they’re accosted by a nice-looking young man named Pete (Nick Flaig) who invites them to a private party where they’ll really be able to tie one on. The two women walk up the strand on South Beach, Florida with Pete and get to the location of the alleged party – only to find there’s just one other person there, and it’s Luke Burns (Joseph Cannon). Luke and Carli were a couple until recently, when Carli got offered admission and a scholarship to her dream college and she decided Luke was too ambition-less to be bothered with anymore. Luke hot-footed it to Florida and hooked up with his friend and cousin Pete for a revenge plot. His idea was to get Carli drunk so he could shoot some sexually explicit photos of her and post them online, whereupon the admissions people at her dream school would be horrified and withdraw their offer to her. Of course, things quickly spiral out of control; Carli is sufficiently worried about losing her cell phone she checks it and her backpack containing it at a nearby storage locker, but Simone still has her phone and uses it to upload footage of their whereabouts to show what a good time they’re having.

Carli’s mom Beverly has hacked into Carli’s social media feed, which is showing all Simone’s footage, but she has no idea where they are and she panics when her calls to her own daughter’s phone keep going to voicemail and her texts also go unanswered. For some reason Pete gives Simone a drink spiked with the “date rape” drug GHB, and she reacts by foaming at the mouth. Pete and Luke leave her for dead on the beach, though luckily she’s discovered in time and ends up in a hospital, comatose for a few days but still alive. Believing that they’ve just killed someone, Pete and Luke flee to Pete’s crash-pad style home in the Everglades and then fret about how they’re going to cover it up. One of the ways they’re going to do that is by throwing Simone’s phone into the swamp, whereupon all the uploads to Carli’s Web sites magically disappear and Beverly gets even more freaked out that now she has no idea where her daughter is, what she’s doing or what might be being done to her. So she flies out to Florida herself and meets a hunky man her age named Ray (Nick Ballard, who frankly did a lot more for me in the looks department than either Nick Flaig or Joseph Cannon did!) who says he’ll help her find her daughter. Alas, Beverly is tricked by Pete into coming with her in one of the “air boats” (staples of every movie ever made about the Everglades: they’re the boats with giant propellers outside the water because normal underwater propellers would just clog up from all the vegetation in the swamp), allegedly to find her daughter. Pete is hoping for a chance to knock off Beverly in the swamp and make it look like an accident, but Ray figures out what’s going on and gets his own air boat to give chase. Ray actually rescues Beverly and Carli, who’s managed to escape her captors (not that that was all that hard since Pete and Luke aren’t exactly the brightest stars in the local criminal firmament), but he entrusts Carli with driving the boat back and Carli crashes it on a sandbar.

Ultimately Ray and Pete confront each other and Pete stabs Ray with a knife, but in a later scene it’s Pete who’s eliminated permanently when he’s bitten by a copperhead snake (earlier we’ve learned that Ray works for the Florida state government literally as a snake-killer; his job is to rid the Everglades of pythons, an invasive species that threaten the local raccoons and opossums; he also just happens to volunteer at the hospital where Simone – ya remember Simone? – is staying while the doctors and nurses bring her back to consciousness) and then falls into the swamp, where an alligator eats him. (When we first saw that alligator in act one I joked, “This is how Chekhov would have written if he’d been born and raised in Florida.”) Pete also visits the hospital where Simone is staying and intends to knock her off by smothering her with a pillow, but fortunately Beverly arrives just as he does and he hides out while she questions Simone – who still isn’t well enough to leave, but has regained her consciousness and memory – and after Beverly leaves, does Pete go ahead with his plan to murder Simone? Ya remember what I said earlier about Pete not being an especially smart bad guy? No-o-o-o-o, he just stalks out and the chases resume. It ends with the cops arriving on the scene in an air boat of their own and arresting Luke, who can’t escape because Beverly thoughtfully pocketed the ignition key of the air boat he’d rented, while Beverly, Carli and Ray are rescued and it looks like Beverly and Ray will become lovers. Abducted in the Everglades was actually a lot of fun, ably directed by Lifetime veteran Damián Romay, and though his writing committee left a lot of holes in their plot, Romay moved it along fast enough there wasn’t much time to think about or dwell on them.

Who's Stalking My Family? (Pierre David-Tom Berry Films, Storyteller Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ironically, the next Lifetime movie up on last night’s (Sunday, March 2) program after Abducted in the Everglades was one my husband Charles liked better, even though I didn’t think it was as good. It was called Who’s Stalking My Family? (the imdb.com listing doesn’t have the question mark in the title, but the actual credit does) and it’s about a woman named Ivy Nicole Davis Miller (Kate Watson). There’s an opening scene in which she’s shown giving birth while another woman is in the hospital room watching because she’s already agreed to adopt Ivy’s baby, but this scene was a bit perplexing because Ivy woke up in the middle of it and we’re not sure whether this is a flashback or just a dream. In the main part of the film Ivy is a widow who’s raising her daughter Sadie (Kennedy Martin) as a single parent. Ivy and Sadie have moved to a small town where Sadie is a sophomore in high school who’s attracted the attention of a nice-looking young man named Colton Daniels (Jacob Kaufman). Colton and Sadie are helping each other out with homework despite their two-year age difference. Meanwhile, Ivy has also hosting her sister Lily Kennedy (Muretta Moss), who’s trying to break up with a neurotically abusive husband named Pete (Daniel Stine). Pete is determined to win his wife back and insists that no matter what, the two belong together and he’s determined to get her again whether she wants him or not. Colton is also being raised by a single mother, Angela Daniels (Liz DeCoudres), after the death of his father about six years before. Colton has a memory of overhearing his dad telling his mom he was in love with another woman and was going to leave her for his new girlfriend on the night before he died. Ivy ends up stalked by both Pete and Colton; Pete is stalking her openly, demanding that he be allowed to see Lily, while Colton, who worms the key code to their security system out of Sadie by saying he needs to retrieve a calculus textbook he accidentally left at her place, sneaks into Ivy’s and Sadie’s house to collect samples of Ivy’s hair and a photo of Ivy and Sadie together. Sadie learns he’s stolen the photo when she stumbles on it in Colton’s copy of the play Romeo and Juliet.

Ivy was out on a date with a fellow professor (she’s working as a teacher and has just scored a tenured position) named Leo Franzen (Will A. Holland) when she realized she forgot her jacket and went back to retrieve it, leading to an oddball scene in which Ivy and Colton realize someone else is in the house but keep missing each other (Buster Keaton, call your office!). What’s more, Ivy is being stalked by a mystery figure in a dark hoodie (hoodies have become de rigueur for Lifetime’s villains because they can conceal the wearer’s true gender) that may be Pete, Colton or someone else. For a while I thought that Pete and Colton might be in cahoots in a revenge plot against both Ivy and Lily – I figured Colton might have been adopted and Pete was his real father – but instead the writer, Lori Canavaro, had some other tricks up her sleeve. Colton was adopted, all right, but [spoiler alert!] he’s really Ivy’s son by another man. The other man was the one who had raised Colton and then been killed on their stairs by [double spoiler alert!] his wife Angela Daniels, who was desperate that he not leave and was willing to kill him to make sure he didn’t find happiness with Ivy instead of misery with her. Angela was also responsible for shooting Leo (ya remember Leo?) after his date with Ivy, and the reason for her madness was her neurotic concern that Colton not learn that he was adopted or that Ivy was his biological mother. Colton figured it out from a legal paper related to his case that he found in his researches, and he wanted to steal a sample of Ivy’s hair to run DNA tests on it to prove it. Pete takes himself out by getting drunk and crashing his car into a ravine – apparently we’re supposed to believe that was just an accident, not another of Angela’s machinations – and ultimately Beverly knocks out Angela just as Angela is about to kill Sadie, though she lives long enough to be arrested and ultimately Ivy, Sadie and Colton end up as a rather tense and uncertain but at least not in mortal peril family. I’m not sure why Charles liked Who’s Stalking My Family? so much better than Abducted in the Everglades, since my reaction was the other way around; Abducted had its own set of plot contrivances and coincidences but was at least more straightforward in its plotting. Abducted was also more action-driven, which helped big-time. Like Abduction, Who’s Stalking My Family? was directed by an old Lifetime hand, Jeff Hare, but Canevaro’s script didn’t give him as much to work with as the writing committee on Abduction had done for Damián Romay. But it was still fun to drool over Jacob Kaufman, the nice and very hot young man playing Colton!

Killing the Competition (Allegheny Image Factory, Hartbreak Films, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 1) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie that I hadn’t had much hope for, but turned out to be better than it had looked from the previews: Killing the Competition, one of Lifetime’s sub-genre involving high-school cheerleaders. It was interesting that they did not include the word “cheerleader” in the title; usually they do that to attract straight males to watch in hopes of seeing lots of hot, nubile underage female flesh. This was a personal project for Melissa Joan Hart, who co-produced and starred as Elizabeth Cooper Fenwick, who’s just moved back to the small town where she grew up. She was reluctant to do that at first, but her husband Steve (Eddie Mills) got a job transfer there that was just too lucrative to pass up. So Elizabeth moves there with her daughter Grace (Lily Brooks O’Briant) and her younger son Jackson (Cyrus McReynolds), and even before the school year starts she forms a fierce determination to have Grace relive all the triumphs of Elizabeth’s own last high-school year, including being lead dancer on the cheerleading squad. Alas, Grace doesn’t even pass the audition for the squad, and Elizabeth lobbies the school board to expand the squad to make room for her daughter. The board finally decides to let everyone who was good enough to make the initial tryouts onto the squad, the “Thresherettes” (apparently this is a farm community and “Threshers” is the official nickname of the school’s athletic teams). This makes Elizabeth even angrier because she claims that that’s just diluted the honor and made it meaningless. The squad’s original coach resigns in protest and is replaced by Nicole Li (Anzu Lawson), whose daughter Hannah (Valerie Loo) was the star of the auditions.

Elizabeth also has taken exception to Grace’s involvement with a boyfriend, Tyler Tulsey (the boyishly cute Lucas Randazzo). Elizabeth is convinced Tyler is only after Grace for her body and once he’s fucked her, he’ll move on. She even tries to convince Grace that Tyler is having an affair with Hannah behind her back, but he isn’t; the only reasons Tyler and Hannah are seeing each other outside school hours are to tutor each other in calculus and to grab Grace’s old batons so she can do a spectacular routine involving them even though the cheer squad at this high school has never used batons before. As the school year starts, Elizabeth’s mania ratchets up; at one point she tries to run Tyler’s bike (an old-style “sting ray” I remember from my childhood in the 1960’s, with relatively small wheels and an extended “banana seat”) off the road with her car (a sports-equipped blue Ford Mustang with a personalized license plate reading, “DANCE 1” – the car practically becomes a character in itself). She also dons a black wig (she’s naturally blonde) so she can sneak into cheer practices and not be recognized, and she steals her daughter’s phone on at least two occasions so she can send fake texts purportedly from Grace. Elizabeth shoots a photo of a bridal gown and writes, “Thinking of the future” – obviously she’s hoping this will scare Tyler off her daughter by making it look like she’s determined to marry him – and later she sends a phony message supposedly from Grace resigning from the cheer squad. Ultimately Elizabeth buys a gun (we get a close-up of the Glock name on it, a bit of product placement the Glock company would probably have wanted to do without) from a gun store, saying she needs it “to protect my family,” and on the night of the big football game she kidnaps both Nicole and Hannah. She takes Hannah to a storage shed where she’s kept all the memorabilia of her own high-school years and ultimately strangles her until she passes out. Leaving Hannah for dead, Elizabeth makes her way back home – but fortunately Hannah recovers, figures out a way to get out of the storage garage (the door to Elizabeth’s own unit is locked but the one on the next shed over is open), and reports what happened to the police. Nicole was able to get away from Elizabeth even earlier and is safe, though neither show up for the opening football game of the season and a Black girl who’d sat in on the tryouts is drafted to join the squad on the spot because they need an even number for their “chair routine.”

I didn’t think I was going to like Killing the Competition, but as things turned out I did. Writers Jane Espenson and Christina Welsh created a marvelously morally ambiguous character for Melissa Joan Hart – reminiscent of the morally uncertain scripts Christine Conradt has contributed to Lifetime over the years – and Hart rose to the challenge magnificently. She grabs hold of the marvelous and sometimes self-contradictory speeches Espenson and Welsh created for her, especially when she acknowledges the transitory nature of high-school fame and the hints they drop on occasion that Grace is not Steve Fenwick’s daughter but the product of a transitory liaison Elizabeth had with a fellow high-school student. When she comes down so hard on Grace for dating Tyler, her motive seems to be a deep (and understandable) desire to keep her daughter from following in her own footsteps and becoming a single mother while still a teenager. Add to that marvelously effective suspense direction by Lee Gabiana – who has only one previous directorial credit, for Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story (a title that riled me because in the original Gaslight the heroine was also being gaslighted by her husband), though I haven’t been able to find out online whether Lee Gabiana is a man or a woman – and Killing the Competition emerges as a quite good thriller and also a study in how maternal overprotectiveness can shade over into absolute psychopathology. Inevitably, as Charles and I were watching this together, I rather grimly commented, “And I thought my mother was crazy!”

Mysterious Intruder (Columbia, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I finally ended up watching was Mysterious Intruder, the fifth film in the Columbia series based on the radio program The Whistler and, while I wouldn’t exactly call it the best (as one imdb.com commentator did — frankly I still find the first Whistler movie the most haunting plot-wise, and am frustrated that Don Miller’s favorite — The Mark of the Whistler, the second in the series — remains out of circulation), it’s a marvelously honed movie, much more film noir than radio-based suspense thriller. Series regular Richard Dix plays unscrupulous private eye Dick Gale, who like Sam Spade lives on the thin edge of the law (indeed, on the basis of Dix’s performance here he would have made a quite good Spade or Marlowe — maybe not as good as Bogart or Powell but definitely better than Robert or George Montgomery!). He’s hired by an elderly music-shop owner, Edward Stillwell (Paul E. Burns) to find a missing relative named Elora Lund (Pamela Blake) because he has a mysterious object that will make her a fortune. Gale hires an operative of his own, Freda Hanson (Helen Mowery), to pose as Elora to find out just why the old man wants to find her so badly and what on earth he could be holding for her that would be worth a small fortune. The false Elora is in turn stalked by a sinister killer named Harry Pontos (Mike Mazurki, essentially repeating his role from Murder, My Sweet and the first RKO Dick Tracy movie) — when I first heard the character name I thought, “Harry Potter is the murderer?” — and the MacGuffin turns out to be two cylinder recordings of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, who in the real world died in 1887 (one year before the invention of wax-cylinder recording) but in this film’s reality made two cylinders that are estimated to be worth $100,000 each.

Pontos kills Stillwell and abducts the fake Elora, only to release her when it turns out she doesn’t know where the records are ¬— and after an elaborate series of plots and counter-plots, including Freda’s death (by now the corpses are beginning to mount up and, this being a Columbia “B,” the police are suspecting Gale of being the killer), the real Elora Lund turns up, having been in a sanitarium for the previous month recovering from a car accident. Eventually the mastermind of the evil scheme to grab the records turns out to be Freda’s landlord, James Summers (Regis Toomey), and in a final shoot-out Gale kills Summers and then is killed by the police, whom he’s fired at thinking they’re Summers’ henchmen — and of course a bullet pierces the case containing the Jenny Lind records, ruining them. Though the ending is a bit of a cheat ¬— an attempt to shoehorn what’s otherwise a compelling film noir plot into the Whistler formula — the film up until then is quite good, imaginatively scripted by Columbia “B” stalwart Eric Taylor and marvelously directed by William Castle, who seems this time around to have been trying to convince the suits at Columbia that he was an excellent noir director and deserved a chance to make “A”-budget thrillers. Aided by cinematographer Philip Tannura, Castle almost never shoots a scene straight-on from a conventional angle with normal lighting: shot after shot is obliquely angled, lit in half-shadow, rich and detailed in its composition and obviously aimed at showing the Columbia bosses that they had a master director who deserved bigger budgets and stars. The combination of Castle’s visually rich direction and Taylor’s morally ambiguous script (Dick Gale emerges as a nasty character with a noble streak, probably closer to Dashiell Hammett’s version of Sam Spade than the somewhat softer character we know from the 1941 film, who was more of a noble character with a nasty streak) creates a quite compelling little drama that should not only have made Castle an “A” director but also pointed a way for Richard Dix to revitalize his career — as it was, he made just two more Whistler movies (his last was The Thirteenth Hour, also convincingly noir in its plotting and moral ambiguity even though its director was ex-Warners’ “B” stalwart William Clemens, not Castle) and then retired, dying two years later (September 20, 1949 in L.A., of a heart attack, at just 56 years of age). — 2/11/08

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Last night (Friday, February 28) I looked for an online movie on YouTube I could show my husband Charles, who was scheduled to work unusually early today, and I found something called Mysterious Intruder, one of the Whistler series of films produced by Columbia Pictures’ “B” unit in the 1940’s based on a highly popular radio show. The character of The Whistler, who narrated the stories both on radio and film, was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, and as with Universal’s contemporaneous Inner Sanctum series, also based on a highly popular radio drama series, each of the films starred the same actor but in different roles. For the Inner Sanctum films it was Lon Chaney, Jr.; for the Whistler movies it was Richard Dix. It didn’t take long for Charles and I to realize we’d both seen Mysterious Intruder before – on February 10, 2008, to be precise, just three months before I started the moviemagg blog – especially once I remembered the MacGuffin. The MacGuffin was two cylinder recordings by the late star opera soprano Jenny Lind, which she made months before her death in 1887 and for which either a private collector or an historical society was willing to pay $100,000 each. Ironically, in Roland Gelatt’s book The Fabulous Phonograph, a history of the recording industry first published in 1955 (and for which Gelatt rather wryly conceded that he’d started his research just in time, catching and interviewing a number of participants in the early history of recording just before they died), he noted that after making a brief splash with his original tin-foil cylinder recorder in 1877, he shelved the invention for another decade to concentrate on the electric light. “But unfortunately voices continued to die during the decade that the phonograph lay dormant,” Gelatt wrote. “Mankind gained the incandescent lamp, but posterity lost Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt.” In Mysterious Intruder, directed by William Castle (showing real promise in his early years as a noir thriller director before he got sidetracked into that weird series of horror movies like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, promoted with gimmicks like “Emergo” and “Percepto,” that made his name in the 1950’s and 1960’s) from a script by Eric Taylor, Dix plays private investigator Don Gale. Gale is hired by music-store owner Edward Stillwell (Paul E. Burns) to find his missing niece, fellow immigrant Elora Lund (Pamela Blake).

Sounding a lot like Sam Spade in the early stages of The Maltese Falcon, Gale bluntly tells Stillwell that the $100 he’s offering won’t be of much use to finding a missing person, especially one like Lund who’s been off the radar screen for years. So he hires a friend of his named Freda Hanson (Helen Mowery) to pose as Lund and visit Stillwell claiming to be Lund, so she (and Gale) can find out just why Stillwell is so anxious to find her and why he’s so sure that as soon as she comes to light, Lund will be able to make a lot of money. It turns out Lund’s grandmother ended up with the Jenny Lind records and brought them over to America with her, and they’ve remained in the family ever since. Only the titular “mysterious intruder” shows up; his name is Harry Pontos (though I remember when I saw this movie for the first time, I joked, “So Harry Potter is the killer?”) and he’s played by Mike Mazurki, who was so good as a figure of pathos and pain in Murder, My Sweet and the first RKO Dick Tracy but this time around he’s a lot less interesting because he doesn’t say anything. He just skulks around and ultimately kills Edward Stillwell and steals the breadbox containing the Lind cylinders (though of course we don’t know what they are yet). Freda, whom we assume at first is just an innocent stooge working for Gale, turns out to be a full-blown femme fatale, interested in the records for her own gain. There are two official police officers, detectives Taggart (Barton MacLane, who was in The Maltese Falcon as well in a similar role) and Burns (Charles Lane), who are convinced Gale is up to no good and are determined to bust him for one or more of the murders – since later Freda Hanson is also found murdered in her apartment building, whose manager, James Summers (Regis Toomey), is also after the records. Eventually it turns out that Pontos killed Stillwell, Summers killed Freda, and there’s a shoot-out at the end in which Gale is killed by the cops and the precious records are ruined, smashed to bits by a wayward shot. It’s a nicely atmospheric film, well directed by Castle and photographed by Philip Tannura, and though the YouTube page on which it was posted generated a lot of debate in the comments as to whether Mysterious Intruder is really a film noir, I think it counts. It certainly looks like one, and its unusually corrupt private detective and wanna-be femme fatale steer it towards noir territory and even push it over. The only other 1940’s film I can think of in which a private detective is a villain is the 1949 Manhandled. One thing that amused me this time around about Mysterious Intruder is that, though Mischa Bakaleinkoff got credit for the overall underscoring, and imdb.com lists George Duning as an uncredited composer on the project, the Whistler theme music is credited to Wilbur Hatch – whose best-known credit by far is writing the theme song for I Love Lucy, which inhabits a far different musical world than this film! – 3/1/25

Law and Order: "A Price to Pay" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show, “A Price to Pay,” starts with a young topless man being held up and threatened with a gun – only the camera pulls back to reveal that this is only a scene being shot for a movie. (I believe the first time this device was used in a movie was the 1937 film Something to Sing About, directed by Victor Schertzinger, but there might be a previous example.) The next scene shows one of the series’ current stars, Black Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), attending a party being given in honor of his former police mentor, Darryl Jones (Demetrius Grosse), when he and his police partner Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) are suddenly called away to work the murder of one of the stars of the film sequence, Johnny Colvin (Colt Prattes), who was making tons of money and had already won three Academy Award nominations. Alas, he was spending it as fast or faster than he was making it, and his ex-wife complains that she’s about to lose her apartment because he keeps falling behind on his alimony payments. It turns out that Johnny has developed a hard-core addiction to the illegal drug ketamine, colloquially known as “Special K” and originally developed as an animal tranquilizer. Johnny has even run a so-called “rehab” clinic out of his apartment in which he uses ketamine to get people off other drugs. The police trace Johnny’s ketamine source to Dr. Simon Neagle (Bart Shatto), a psychotherapist who buys a lot of ketamine not only for his clients but for himself. The investigation leads the police to “Mama K.,” a woman whose real name is Diane Oliver (Amanda Jaros) and who markets herself with a lot of New Age cant as a “spiritual guide” offering people chemically enhanced “enlightenment.” The writers, Scott Gold and William Lapp, were obviously inspired by the real-life ketamine-related death of Friends star Matthew Perry – who’s actually name-checked in the dialogue – though Oliver and Dr. Neagle at least maintain a veneer of caring about Johnny Colvin whereas the real doctors involved in Perry’s fatal overdose wrote each other e-mails boasting of how much money they were able to make from this “moron.”

Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment of Diane Oliver for murder, but their case is dependent on the testimony of Dr. Neagle. Unfortunately, though Dr. Neagle has won complete immunity for his own crimes as part of his deal to testify against Oliver, including a vague promise that he could keep his medical license at the end of all this, ultimately on the eve of the day he’s supposed to testify he deliberately commits suicide with an overdose of ketamine. It’s at this point that the two plot strands finally come together; Detective Shaw has spotted his former mentor Darryl Jones’s name on a list of Oliver’s ketamine clients, and Jones protests that ketamine offered him the only relief for his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by what he saw on his three tours of duty with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Jones was scheduled to take his regular delivery of the drug the night Oliver killed Colvin, but when he arrived at her place she was in an agitated state and her shoes – a pair of blue tennis shoes of a make Riley and Shaw had already determined were worn by the murderer – were covered in blood. Price and Maroun are determined to get Jones to testify in Oliver’s trial because, with Dr. Neagle dead by his own hand, Jones is the only one who can definitively link Oliver to Colvin’s murder. But Jones doesn’t want to testify because that will get him dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military, all his veterans’ benefits – including his health care – will be cut off and he’ll be left without a pension and destitute. On the day Jones is supposed to testify, Maroun goes to pick him up and finds that he’s gone; Detective Shaw pulled strings with the U.S. military and got him reassigned to a base on Okinawa. While one would think that Price and Maroun could still have him testify via video link, in the end they cut a plea deal with Oliver in which she pleads guilty to second-degree manslaughter and gets a sentence of up to 10 years, though she’ll probably be let out in six. This was a tough, no-nonsense Law and Order episode, well done and effectively presenting Shaw’s moral dilemma – protect his former partner and mentor, or serve the interests of justice – even though I’d have liked a lot more about the probable fan reaction to so lenient an outcome and I was sort of expecting to see Brittany Weaver (Marissa Rosen), a bonkers Colvin fan whom he agreed to meet with the night he was killed if she’d promise never to seek him out again, kill Oliver out of revenge for the sweet plea deal she got from the authorities given that one of the witnesses against her had committed suicide and the other was safely out of the country.

Law and Order: Special Victim Unit: "The Grid Plan" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “The Grid Plan” (after Manhattan’s famous street grid which alternates named and numbered streets), deals with a middle-aged woman from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Megan Wallace (Donna Lynne Champlin), who comes to New York without her husband Richard (Joe Lanza) intent on seeing at least one Broadway show every day of her week-long visit there. Things go terribly wrong for her when on her sixth day she’s accosted by a stranger in Times Square and raped in full view of the crowds that throng the place, none of whom take notice except for a younger woman who sees her pressing him against an outdoor alcove and assumes that the sex was consensual. Megan also had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and one of the reasons she took the New York trip in the first place was to cross a Broadway theatrical vacation off her “bucket list” of things to do before she got too sick or just croaked. Unlike some of SVU’s other rape victims, who are so ashamed of what happened to them they hide out in their rooms and refuse to cooperate, Megan is cooperative to a fault. She’s determined to track down her assailant and bring him to justice whether the police, stuck in the due-process rigmarole, can do it or not. Among the things she does is make up her own wanted posters and wheat-paste them onto lighting standards in the area where she got raped. She also remembers that her assailant shared a bottle of wine with her and afterwards threw it away, then went back to the scene of the crime to reclaim it. Then he threw it away again and it landed on the awning of a Broadway theatre, where the SVU cops recover it. The wine bottle gives the police the key clue to find the culprit: it’s an Australian bottle of shiraz, an ultra-high-end vintage worth $1,000 per bottle.

Not many bars or liquor stores carry wines that expensive, and the cops are able to trace the bottle to sales representative Gerard Ripley (Christian Mallen), who turns out to be Megan’s rapist. Unfortunately, as they’re about to arrest Ripley, Megan recognizes him in the street and hauls off and punches him one, whereupon the cops arrest her for assault and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) uses her influence to quash her arrest. Prosecutor Daniel Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and the police try to bolster the case against Ripley and uncover one of Ripley’s old girlfriends, who broke up with him once he tried to force himself against her, but Carisi decides that the facts are too different to get that admitted into evidence as an example of a “prior bad act.” Once the case goes to trial, Ripley’s woman attorney (apparently it’s a rule of thumb in the defense bar that a man accused of raping a woman should hire a woman lawyer to defend him), Christine Vega (Michelle Ventimilla), extracts from Megan the information that she’s been diagnosed with MS, and her husband – whom she’d intended to tell about her diagnosis when she got back from New York – understandably feels betrayed that she’d kept that a secret from him and threatens to leave her over it. Megan briefly threatens to bail on the trial and flee with him back to the relative safety of Council Bluffs, Iowa, but Benson talks her out of it and the case ends with Ripley being found guilty and Megan being able to go home with her husband secure in the knowledge that her persistence led to her rapist being punished. This was an O.K. SVU whose most remarkable aspect was the sheer power and energy of Donna Lynne Champlin as Megan; it’s a pity that she’s middle-aged and homely, since there are not going to be that many parts available for her, but she’s damned good and plays with rare authority as well as dramatizing by her very plainness that rape is a crime against women and not a matter of sex. At one point she even expresses wonderment that anyone would target her for sexual assault when she was not only not conventionally attractive but she wasn’t dressed in a “slutty” or especially revealing manner – and Benson, who throughout the show’s 25-year run has been the voice of social consciousness, explains to her that that doesn’t matter: men rape women (or, more rarely, other men) to exert their dominance rather than for sexual gratification.

Elisbeth: "Tearjerker" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Elsbeth episode I watched after the two Law and Order shows was called “Tearjerker” and featured a long opening scene in which an elderly rich man named Nathan Jordan (Larry Pine) is being escorted – in more ways than one – by a hot young, though not too young (director Peter Sollett and cinematographer John B. Aronson give us enough close-ups of her that we can see she’s starting to get crow’s feet and the first visible signs of aging), woman named Chloe (Jordana Brewster). Nathan Jordan was a New York real-estate developer who built, among other projects, a condominium high-rise which was so sloppily constructed it literally sways in a high wind and the trash chute is so long that anything thrown away in it will make the sound of a bomb as it lands. Nathan has become a virtually total recluse; he never leaves his apartment except to eat at an ultra-exclusive restaurant within the building, where Chloe takes him that night before literally tucking him into bed in his room. Overnight he dies of an overdose of a drug called pentobarbitol which Chloe obtained from Dr. Jason Yamamoto (Phil Nee), who was dating and living with Nathan’s estranged wife Deborah (Victoria Clark). When the police find Nathan’s dead body, the case is assigned to Detective Rivers (Braeden de la Garza), who’s quite easy on the eyes but otherwise is a total asshole, trying to browbeat someone, anyone – Deborah Jordan, Dr. Yamamoto, Chloe – into confessing. Fortunately, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) solves the case; based on the fact that Nathan was found wearing button pajamas instead of the snap-on ones he’d been wearing ever since he was diagnosed with a rare muscle disease, and how neatly he was tucked into bed, she realizes that Chloe killed him but it was essentially an assisted suicide. The two had had a meal together at the in-house restaurant where Nathan luxuriated in all the foods he’d been told by his doctors he shouldn’t be eating, then Chloe took him to his bedroom, tucked him in, and waited for the lethal dose of pentobarbital to kick in after she’d spiked his martini with it. Chloe avoided detection by the security cameras in the hall by loading take-out steaks into a to-go bag and throwing it down the trash chute, thereby faking out the cameras which were on motion detectors activated by sounds.

The most interesting character is Chloe, who’s matter-of-fact about being a sex worker – though I wasn’t sure at first whether she was an actual prostitute or an S/M dominatrix. One weird quirk in the anti-prostitution laws is that in order to count as an act of prostitution, actual contact involving sex organs must occur. So a man can pay a woman to beat him, tie him up, physically or verbally abuse him, and do whatever he likes as long as no sexual contact occurs, and it’s perfectly legal for both of them. (I learned this at least in part from memoirs written by former escorts, including a woman who successfully worked her way through college as a dominatrix and wrote about how careful she was to play by the legal rules; according to her, the only trouble she ran into came from men who begged her to masturbate them, which would have crossed the line into illegal prostitution.) The cops uncover three of Chloe’s other clients, two of whom beg them not to tell their wives, while a third says, “Please don’t tell my boyfriend” – which for me was the most intriguing one of all: why would someone in a serious Gay relationship be tricking out with a woman? There’s also a subplot about a $9 million Cézanne painting Nathan bought Chloe out of a secret fund, since his wife had had him declared legally incompetent largely out of all the money he was paying Chloe as “consultant” fees, and a plot twist in which Deborah got jealous of Chloe after she learns she got the pentobarbitol in the first place by seducing her boyfriend Dr. Yamamoto and stealing it from him while she was at his place doing her sex-worker thing. I like the rather loopy humor behind Elsbeth and Carrie Preston’s ability to make this rather bizarre character credible, and after watching the two-part PBS program about the international art market and Bruno Lohse, the Nazi art dealer who made tons of money after the war dealing in art he’d stolen on behalf of Hermann Göring and other Nazi bigwigs, which had made the point that the art market is as effectively unregulated as the trades in weapons or drugs, here was another story about the lawlessness of the market for classic art!

Dead Man Walking (Havoc, Working Title Films, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Gramercy Pictures, Paramount, 1995)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 26) my husband Charles and I watched a truly great film on Turner Classic Movies: Dead Man Walking, a socially conscious film based on the real-life memoir of Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), a nun in Louisiana who reached out to death-penalty inmates at the notorious Angola state prison in general and one inmate in particular, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). Six years before the main action, Poncelet and an older accomplice posed as police officers on a stretch of Louisiana back country being used as a lovers’ lane, handcuffed a young man named Delacroix and a young woman named Percy and took them to a deserted stretch, where one or the other of them raped the girl and then killed both of them. (The real criminals’ names were changed for the film, and so were the names of their victims.) Dead Man Walking was based on Prejean’s book of the same title and was a personal project for Tim Robbins, who not only wrote and directed the film but cast his life partner, Sarandon, in the lead. What made this film especially remarkable was that, though Robbins and Sarandon were well known in Hollywood and among the celebriati as political liberals, they did not make this film a didactic anti-capital punishment “message” movie. They felt real compassion not only towards Poncelet but the parents of his victims, Earl and Lucille Delacroix (Raymond J. Barry and Roberta Maxwell), and Clyde Percy (R. Lee Ermey, the real-life drill sergeant Stanley Kubrick famously cast as one in his 1987 Viet Nam War film Full Metal Jacket) and his wife Mary Beth (Celia Weston). In one intense scene, Earl tells Sister Helen that his brother was totally against the death penalty until Earl’s son was murdered, after which he was all for it. I’d already been asking myself how I would feel if Charles was murdered: if I would be so angry and revenge-driven I’d want to see his killer put to death or would my overall compassion win out and I’d want to see even the man who took the love of my life away from me spared the ultimate accounting. There’s one line in Robbins’s script in which Sister Helen consciously or unconsciously echoes the late Lenny Bruce’s marvelous line about the death penalty: “Capital punishment means killing people who killed people to prove that killing people is wrong.”

Throughout the film’s two-hour four-minute running time, we not only meet the parents of the victims and feel genuine sorrow for their loss, we also see fragmentary flashbacks of the crime and we learn in the end that, though Poncelet originally attributed both murders to his accomplice (who for some quirky reason that goes unmentioned in the film drew a life-without-parole sentence instead of a death warrant), he ultimately admitted that while the other man in question raped and killed the girl, he shot the young man himself. Prejean’s memoir and the film both controversially claimed that in the end Poncelet felt remorse for his crime, while that’s been questioned. It reminded me of some of the classic 1930’s movies that attacked the death penalty, including The Last Mile (1932) – which carried a written preface by Lewis E. Lawes, then warden at Sing Sing, that read, “The Last Mile is more than a story of prison and of the condemned. To me it is a story of those men within barred cells, crushed mentally, physically and spiritually between unrelenting forces of man-made laws and man-fixed death. And justly or unjustly found guilty, are they not the victims of man’s imperfect conventions, upon which he has erected a social structure of doubtful security? What is society’s responsibility for ever-increasing murders? What shall be done with the murderers? The Last Mile does not pretend to give an answer. Society must find its own solution. But murder on the heels of murder is not that solution” – which could have been used as a preface to Dead Man Walking as well.

The final scene, in which Poncelet is strapped to the gurney and made ready for the three injections that in sequence will kill him (and both Charles and I responded to the irony that the nurse who inserts the IV through which the lethal injections will be administered swabbed the skin with alcohol first; the moment he started chuckling at this, I knew immediately he was savoring, as I was, the irony that she was carrying out the standard precaution against giving the patient an infection when the whole point of the procedure was to kill the person anyway) and faces death with a preternatural calm, couldn’t help but remind me of the classic ending of Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) in which priest Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), who was the boyhood friend of gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), asks him to act like a coward as he approached his execution. Cagney did just that, though in his memoir he wrote that the most frequent question he was asked about his career was about that scene and whether he meant to depict Sullivan as really scared to die or feigning cowardice to disillusion the slum kids that idolized him. He didn’t give an answer and said that was a secret he would take to his own grave (which he did). Dead Man Walking won an Academy Award for Sarandon, and arguably Sean Penn (who was nominated but lost to Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas) deserved one too. It’s a quite impressive movie and Robbins directed it in a quiet, unassertive style that communicates its message effectively. Mention should also be made of the film’s unusual musical score, which was publicly credited to Bruce Springsteen even though he wrote only one song for the film and it isn’t heard until the very end (and it’s a good song but not at the level of his own Academy Award winner, “Streets of Philadelphia” from the 1993 AIDS message movie Philadelphia). Mostly the score was atmospheric (East) Indian music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with a few rock performers, notably Eddie Vedder and Ry Cooder, briefly chiming in, a score of great subtlety and power that adds immeasurably to the film’s haunting mood and echoes its unwillingness to take sides, its compassion for all affected by a heinous crime and the absurdity that “murder on the heels of murder,” as the foreword to The Last Mile put it, can be part of the solution to any moral dilemma.

Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief (David M. Milch Foundation, Arte, BR, Taglicht Studios, WNET Group, PBS, aired February 19 and 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 23) I watched the second half of a PBS Secrets of the Dead episode whose first part my husband Charles and I had seen last week. It was called “Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.” The Nazi art thief in question was a man named Bruno Lohse, who lived until 2007 and profited greatly first from his background as a Nazi art historian during World War II and then, after the war, from his knowledge of the caches in which Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen art and his willingness to sell certain artworks to Americans looking for tax-deductible gifts to musea. Lohse had made a minor name for himself in 1936 when he published a dissertation on an unimportant German painter named Jacob Phillip Hackert. He had already enlisted in the SS in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party in 1937 (a bit surprising to me because I had assumed you had to be a Nazi Party member to be accepted into the SS). When World War II started Lohse was drafted into the Luftwaffe (Germany’s air force) as a member of n anti-tank unit, but soon his background as an art historian came to the attention of Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command as well as the head of the Luftwaffe. Göring hired Lohse to be part of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a group of art looters Göring assembled when the Nazis occupied France to go through the collections the Nazis had seized from Jewish owners they intended to kill anyway, steal them and then pick out the pieces Göring and the other Nazi bigwigs would be interested in. Since the Nazis in general had very conservative tastes in art and weren’t interested in Impressionist works or anything later than that, the ERR at first discarded such pieces but then realized that they could make money for the Nazi regime by selling such paintings clandestinely to collectors around the world. After Germany lost the war, Lohse fled from Paris to Berlin and then to Munich, where he established himself in Ludwig II’s old castle of Neuschwanstein and waited for American art historians to interview him.

A number of the so-called “Monuments Men,” portrayed as heroes in George Clooney’s film about them but whose real-life role was far more ambiguous, became Lohse’s friends and realized that he was one of the few people left alive who actually knew what had happened to all the artworks the Nazis had stolen, mostly from Jewish collectors. In 1950 Lohse was put on trial before a French military tribunal on charges of looting the art collections of Jews and others singled out for elimination in the Holocaust, and the principal witness against him was a woman named Rose Valland (who’s called “Claire Simone” in The Monuments Men movie and is played by Cate Blanchett), who had literally risked her own life to keep track of all the artworks the Nazis were stealing and putting in their own personal collections. Amazingly, Lohse was acquitted and he treated that verdict as a full exoneration. The first part of this film ends in 1955, when Lohse relocated from Germany to the U.S. and hooked up with art dealers and museum officials throughout the United States, including Theodore Rousseau, who had become the head of the paintings department at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rousseau and Lohse carried on an elaborate correspondence, almost all in German since Lohse never learned more than a smattering of English. With tax rates on the richest Americans in the 1950’s approaching 90 percent (to me, those were the good old days!), it was advantageous for rich Americans to buy a work of art of doubtful provenance for $1,000, then donate it to a museum whose experts would value it for $10,000, and the donor would get the full $10,000 as a deduction from their taxes. Amazingly, it took the fall of the Berlin Wall – literally – to derail Lohse’s double game of posing as an honest art dealer while quietly unloading stolen art to various private collectors. The East German government had been holding various archival records from the Nazi era and, once the wall came down and East Germany ceased to exist as an independent state, those records gave away more of the secret stashes where Lohse and other Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen treasures.

Jonathan Petropoulos, the principal source for this documentary, hooked up with Lohse and started interviewing him extensively in the late 1990’s. Some people have alleged that Petropoulos got too close to Lohse and was therefore an accessory after the fact to some of his crimes. One part of the second half of this documentary deals with a painting by French artist Camille Pissarro called “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps,” an outdoor street scene Pissarro painted from a balcony window of his home, where he, a Jew himself, was hiding out in an attic from anti-Semitic mobs who were besieging Paris in 1902 (probably as fallout from the Dreyfus case). Petropoulos was told he could go to the Kantonal Bank in Zurich, Switzerland and be permitted to view the Pissarro painting, and when he did so he was offered two more alleged Nazi-looted paintings, one by Monet and one by Renoir. Petropoulos was given an elaborate set of instructions, one that could have been dreamed up by a spy novelist like John Le Carré or James Bond creator Ian Fleming, which involved going to the small home-based office of an art foundation called “Schönart” and meeting with attorney Andrew Baker, who allegedly managed it. It turned out that Baker was also involved with such sketchy “foundations” as Ali, Miselva (one of whose members was accused of dealing in stolen nuclear materials), and the Griffin Trust, which has been accused of laundering art for Russian oligarchs. Needless to say, the whole scheme was an elaborate setup (Petropoulos called it “theatre”) by which the art expert was led to believe the stolen paintings would be returned to him while the whole time they were sitting in the Zurich bank vault under Lohse’s and his business manager Peter Griebert’s control. (Ultimately the Pissarro was ordered returned by a Lichtenstein court to the family of its original owners shortly after Lohse’s death in 2007, and they sold it at auction two years later for $1,850,000.)

One interviewee for the program compared the art market to the traffic in weapons or drugs: an unregulated market in which both buyers and sellers are free to do pretty much whatever they like, without pesky government bureaucrats standing in the way. In the first few weeks of the second Donald Trump Presidency, in which he and his “hand” (to use the Game of Thrones term) Elon Musk seem bound and determined to destroy the federal bureaucracy and forever eliminate it as a check on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to do whatever they please and make money in whatever scummy ways they can while screwing over ordinary non-rich individuals, Plunderer seemed more timely than ever in detailing how a few unscrupulous men made a ton of money off the social evil of Nazism and never had to look back or face being held to account.

Taxi (20th Century-Fox, EuropaCorp, Robert Simonds Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 25) my husband Charles got tired of watching MS-NBC after Rachel Maddow’s and Lawrence O’Donnell’s shows and asked me to put on a movie. I rummaged through the DVD backlog and found a bootleg copy of the 2004 film Taxi I’d picked up from the free pile at the North Park Library. It’s a remake of a French film from 1998 (which did well enough at the box office it merited three sequelae) written by Luc Besson and directed by Gérard Pirès, described on imbd.com as follows: “To work off his tarnished driving record, a hip taxi driver must chauffeur a loser police inspector on the trail of German bank robbers.” For the U.S. version, directed by Tim Story from a script by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Jim Kouf, the taxi driver was changed into a woman, Isabelle “Belle” Williams (Queen Latifah), and the hapless policeman was called Andrew “Andy” Washburn and was played by current Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon – who’s quite nice in a doofus-y Chevy Chase-esque way. In the opening scene we see Belle leaving her job as a bike messenger and taking proud possession of the so-called “medallion,” the permit you need to drive a taxicab in New York City. (At one point taxicab medallions were so scarce the price for one had reached $1.2 million; the advent of ride-shares dropped the price to just $250,000.) Belle is the widow of a NASCAR driver and before he died he showed her how to soup up an ordinary Ford Crown Victoria into a super-vehicle equipped for speeding. Her cab includes a secret panel activating a supercharger and also concealing its usual license plate and substituting a New Jersey one for her usual New York one. In the opening scene she gets a middle-aged male passenger who offers her $100 over the regulation fare if she can get him to Kennedy Airport in 15 minutes.

She opens the secret controls, activates the supercharger, and drives a hell-bent-for-leather car chase through New York City’s predictably crowded streets until she gets the guy there with 5 ½ minutes to spare – whereupon he’s so unnerved by the whole experience he immediately finds a spare trash can and retches into it. Andy needs a driver because he’s wiped out his previous car; he unknowingly put it in reverse instead of forward gear and backed into a bodega. So he hails Belle and the two set off in the direction of a bank in the process of being robbed by a quartet of hold-up artists who turn out to be four Brazilian women in male drag: Vanessa (Gisele Bündchen), “Redhead” (Ana Cristina de Oliviera), and two identified merely as “Third Robber” (Ingrid Vandebosch) and “Fourth Robber” (Magdali Amadei). Both Belle and Andy are having relationship problems: Belle is dating a hot, sexy Black stud named Jesse (Henry Simmons) but he’s understandably possessive when she misses a dinner date at which he’d planned to propose and offer her an engagement ring to continue to chase the bank robbers with Andy. As for Andy, he’s having a sexual affair with his commanding officer, Lt. Marta Robbins (Jennifer Esposito), but she’s so determined not to let their personal relationship get in the way of their professional one that midway through the movie she suspends him and threatens to fire him. Belle and Andy show up at Jesse’s apartment – coincidentally Andy lives in the same building with his mother (the formidable Ann-Margret) – and Andy tries to explain what he’s been doing with Jesse’s girlfriend but Jesse doesn’t take it well and uses a blowtorch to melt down Andy’s police badge until it’s a hunk of amorphous black metal.

Mostly, though, Taxi is just an endless series of car chases – one wonders how many stunt drivers the producers had to hire and whether they got hazard pay – which Charles called a cross between The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., and The Blues Brothers. (There are drug dealers in this movie, but not much is made of them. There’s just a scene in which a drug deal goes bad and various people on either side of it kill each other.) Vanessa and her henchwomen take a young, scared guy hostage at one of their robberies, though Lt. Robbins offers to trade places with him and so she ends up in the car during the last chase scene and there’s a quite good stunt scene in which she (or her stunt double) tries to cross from the robbers’ car to Belle’s. There’s also a good scene in which Andy drops his gun in the back seat of Belle’s cab and accidentally shoots out her window as he retrieves it, and a clever shot of Vanessa ripping off the red coat covering her BMW to reveal a blue exterior underneath so the cops won’t know what color car to look for. Ultimately Taxi is a fun film even though it makes almost no sense; and romantically it ends the way you’d expect it to, with Belle and Jesse reunited and altar-bound and Andy apparently back on track with Lt. Robbins both personally and professionally even though I was hoping for a romantic attraction between Queen Latifah’s and Jimmy Fallon’s characters. Charles and I were watching it from a bootleg DVD that cut off about 20 minutes from the original 97-minute running time (though it’s likely that about 10 minutes were just the closing credits, which cut off abruptly), which at least gave us enough time to squeeze in another movie on last night’s cinematic diet. It’s also indicative of how sloppily Taxi is structured and how little of it is important plot-wise that we could watch an abbreviated version and not feel like we were missing anything of consequence – though the sound was pretty hissy (not that that matters much in an action-driven movie like this!). Also, the image was letterboxed on all sides and I missed our old TV that could have corrected for that.