Power of the Press (Columbia, 1943)

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

Last night (Monday, April 15) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Power of the Press a 1943 Columbia “B” directed by Lew Landers (not a very good sign, though this ranks alongside The Raven, Condemned Women, Night Waitress – despite its blah title – and Twelve Crowded Hours among his best films), from a script by Robert Hardy Andrews (not a good sign either) based on an original story by Samuel Fuller (a very good sign). I was attracted to this because I’d seen a précis about it on YouTube and it sounded interesting, since both Charles and I have read extensively about America’s last brush with fascism – in the 1930’s, when a lot of Americans looked at what Mussolini was doing for Italy (not only getting the trains to run on time but abolishing the Mafia in its country of origin until the U.S. brought it back as part of the World War II effort) and what Hitler was doing for Germany (mostly reawakening its sense of national purpose and successfully stimulating its economy through rearmament) and thought this country could use a solid dose of that. Power of the Press deals with John Cleveland Carter (Minor Watson), publisher of the New York Gazette, who’s let a 45 percent shareholder, Howard Rankin (Otto Kruger), essentially take over the paper and use it to spread isolationist propaganda even after the Pearl Harbor attack. Carter’s conscience is aroused by an editorial against him written by Ulysses Bradford (Guy Kibbee, top-billed), who runs a small-town hand-set letterpress weekly in an upstate New York town and has just blasted Carter for allegedly misusing his Constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press to undermine American democracy, sabotage the war effort, and ultimately bring about the end of democracy in America and its replacement by dictatorship. (Ulysses Bradford, you didn’t know how right you were!)

Carter decides Bradford was right about him, and he determines to make a big speech, which will be published on the front page of the Gazette as well as broadcast live on radio, in which he will admit his own responsibility, name other Fifth Columnists in the American media, and realign the Gazette’s editorial policy towards full-throated support of the war effort. Alas, he’s just started to deliver his big speech when he’s shot and killed, though he lingers in the hospital long enough to write a new holographic will giving Bradford control of the Gazette and naming him the new publisher. Carter’s secretary, Edwina “Eddie” Stephens (Gloria Dickson, a quite accomplished actress whose career went nowhere), goes out to see Bradford, who’s all too conscious that the task of publishing a major-city daily with a circulation of millions is way outside his comfort zone. Nonetheless, he’s persuaded to relocate to New York City and take over, though between them Rankin and his irascible city editor, Griff Thompson (Lee Tracy, older and very much stouter than he was in his glory days before he literally pissed away his career: he was in Mexico shooting the 1934 film ¡Viva Villa! when one morning while drunk he pulled out his dick and urinated on a detachment of Mexican soldiers marching by, which led to him and the entire ¡Viva Villa! company being expelled from Mexico and both Tracy and the film’s original director, Howard Hawks, being fired from it and from MGM when shooting resumed in Hollywood), he’s not able to accomplish much in changing the paper’s policy.

Behind his back, Rankin and Thompson between them arrange for former Gazette reporter Jerry Purvis (Larry Parks, three years before another Columbia production, The Jolson Story, briefly elevated him to stardom), to be framed as Carter’s killer. Rankin and his hired thug, Oscar Trent (Victor Jory) – who really killed Carter – trick Purvis into handling the gun used to kill Carter, thereby getting his fingerprints on it, and under Rankin’s direction the Gazette’s staff make what amounts to a citizen’s arrest of Purvis. Purvis’s elderly mother dies from a heart attack induced by the shock of her son being arrested for murder. (Purvis’s complaint that Rankin’s firing him from the Gazette has literally put him on a blacklist so no other paper will hire him is an eerie anticipation of Larry Parks’s own fate when he ended up on the Hollywood blacklist following the House Un-American Activities Committee’s second round of phony “investigations” of alleged Hollywood subversion in 1951.) Rankin and Trent intercept a cigar-store owner named Tony Angelo (Frank Yaconelli), who’s just taken the oath to be an American citizen, who’s come to the Gazette office saying that Purvis couldn’t have murdered Carter because Purvis was in his cigar store when Carter was killed. Rankin and Trent get rid of him by pushing him down an empty elevator shaft. (Purvis’s complaint that Rankin’s firing him from the Gazette has literally put him on a blacklist so no other paper will hire him is an eerie anticipation of Larry Parks’s own fate when he ended up on the Hollywood blacklist following the House Un-American Activities Committee’s second round of phony “investigations” of alleged Hollywood subversion in 1951.)

They next frame an innocent man (who beat Rankin in his campaign to be New York governor) as an alleged war profiteer, claiming in the Gazette’s pages that the man is hoarding large supplies of rationed goods (which starts to sound very much like the complaints of more recent radical-Rightists in America about the COVID-19 restrictions). They get him arrested and ultimately he dies, again of a heart attack, and it’s only after he croaks and his warehouse is set on fire by angry Gazette readers that it comes out. He was really working with the U.S. government to accumulate goods for a major overseas military operation. Ultimately Rankin files a lawsuit against Bradford to challenge his inheritance of the Gazette, thereby preventing Bradford from using the paper to expose Rankin’s treasonous activities. Where I thought Fuller and Andrews were going with this was copying Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (a film to which this one owes a lot): I thought they’d have Bradford retreat to his original small-town weekly and use it to expose Rankin’s secrets, including his murders – including using another hired thug, Mack Gibbons (Frank Sully), to kill Trent once it looked like Trent might turn state’s evidence and blow the whistle on him. Instead they crash Trent’s office and fake a confession from him even though he’s dead, then publish a mock edition of the Gazette and use it to trick Rankin himself into confessing. After it was over Charles said that Power of the Press was definitely a Sam Fuller auteur movie even though he only wrote the original story and others both did the screenplay and the direction. It’s tough and fast-moving (it had to be to crowd this much plot in just 61 minutes!), and though the melodrama gets to be a little hard to take after a while, it’s quite an intense little film that is now more timely than it’s been since it was made, now that the biggest threat to America’s future as a democratic republic is from inside via President-turner-Führer Donald Trump and his political movement.

The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin) (Projektions AG-Union [PAGU], Berliner Union-Film, 1919)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 13) my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” program an engaging 1919 slapstick comedy from Germany, Die Austerprinzessin (“The Oyster Princess”), directed by the young Ernst Lubitsch (his 30th screen credit in just five years as a director) and co-written by him and Hanns Kräly, who was to Lubitsch what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, Dudley Nichols to John Ford, and the less well-known Charles Bennett to Alfred Hitchcock. Alas, the collaboration between Lubitsch and Kräly ended suddenly in 1930, by which time both men had relocated to Hollywood, when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Lubitsch’s wife, actress Helene Krauss. Rather than react in the detached ah-what-the-hell, men-will-be-men-and-women-will-be-women way of a Lubitsch character, Lubitsch got toweringly jealous and banned Kräly from all his future projects. Kräly lived for another 20 years (surviving Lubitsch by three years: Lubitsch died in 1947 and Kräly in 1950) and, despite the statement on his Wikipedia page that his career never recovered after his break with Lubitsch, Kräly got his name on quite a few important films, including adapting Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1931) for its screen version and working on James Whale’s By Candlelight (1933) and Henry Koster’s One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937). Kräly’s last credit during his lifetime was for a not-very-good Universal horror film called The Mad Ghoul (1943), though he has some posthumous credits from remakes of films he’d written earlier.

For Die Austernprinzessin Lubitsch and Kräly came up with a madcap comedy closer to slapstick and farce than the comical romances Lubitsch became known for later, especially in the early 1930’s. The story is a very class-conscious tale of an American oyster tycoon, Mr. Quaker (Viktor Janson), whose restive daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) shows her discontent by throwing vases on the floor and ripping up newspapers. She demands to get married, and her dad decides to find her an impoverished prince who will marry into the Quaker family for the accompanying fortune. Mr. Quaker goes to a matchmaker, Seligsöhn (Max Kronert), whose office walls are lined with headshots of various young and not-so-young men, and picks out a prince for his daughter. He picks Prince Nucki (the surprisingly good-looking Harry Liedtke), who when we see him is living in a walk-up room in a dilapidated apartment building with his “friend,” Josef (Julius Falkenstein). We get the impression that Josef is actually Prince Nucki’s former manservant, who’s stayed with him even though Nucki no longer has the money to pay him. We’re instantly told what dire straits Nucki is in when we see him working at a basin, hand-washing all his dirty laundry and hanging his long black socks on an indoor clothesline. When Seligsöhn knocks on their door, Nucki is cautious and at first won’t let him in – doubtless he fears he’s being set on by another bill collector – and when Josef finally lets the matchmaker in, Nucki is sitting on a preposterously high stack of chairs to give the illusion that he’s occupying a throne. Mr. Quaker’s home is preposterously overdecorated, and its staff is as over-the-top as his décor. In the opening scene he’s shown dictating a letter to a roomful of white female secretaries – apparently his home is a live-work space – and he’s being attended to by four Black men in costumes that suggest they got sidetracked from a Marcus Garvey event and ended up in Germany by mistake. The effect makes Die Austernprinzessin look like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton commandeered one of Cecil B. DeMille’s ultra-huge interior sets and decided to stage a slapstick comedy on it.

Eventually Nucki and Josef show up at the Quaker home – and immediately Ossi mistakes Josef for Nucki and insists he’s the prince she’s supposed to marry. She takes him for a carriage drive through the streets and even finds a minister in an open street-level window, who performs the ceremony then and there. Only Ossi refuses to sleep in the same bed as Josef; she banishes him to a separate bedroom across the hallway. The actual wedding party follows, with Quaker’s servants feeding his guests course after course in a strictly ordered scene that looks like a Busby Berkeley musical number over a decade early. Josef sneaks away and consumes Quaker’s entire supply of alcoholic beverages, then keeps saying, “I’m so happy!” After the dinner comes a wild scene that the intertitles refer to as a “Fox-Trot Epidemic,” in which just about everyone there, from the upper classes to the servants, pair off in opposite-sex couples and dance to the music of a band conducted by actor Kurt Bois, who’s so hyperactive at the podium he looks as much or more like a dancer than anyone else in the film. Prince Nucki gets an invitation from some of his “friends” to go out on a spree, and there’s a charming scene in which he asks to borrow some money from the only friend of his who has any – only as the sum is passed down the line of Nucki’s “friends,” each one takes a bill as a sort of cut and the money is down to just two bills by the time it gets down to Nucki. When he returns from his spree, Ossi is in the middle of leading a meeting of the “Multi-Millionaires’ Daughters Against Dipsomania,” and of course Nucki (of whom Ossi has no idea who he really is) is Ossi’s chosen victim for her “reform” efforts. Ultimately Ossi and Nucki hide out in Ossi’s bedroom, where Mr. Quaker and Josef discover them. Mr. Quaker is shocked at first, but Josef explains that when he married Ossi, he used Nucki’s name, so it ends up with Nucki and Ossi paired off as a legally wedded couple and Quaker and Josef happy about the outcome.

In her outro, TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart tried to tie this into Lubitsch’s later comedies and musicals (one could make a good case that Lubitsch invented the rom-com), but as I noted above it’s really more of a slapstick film than anything, albeit one full of the so-called “Lubitsch touches” that would become his trademark. At that, it’s a charming little film (running just over an hour long) and a welcome lesson that German comedies (this one, anyway) from the silent era could be genuinely funny despite the reputation of Germans as … well, let’s just quote the line from Peter Sellers’s Goon Squad BBC radio show (the ancestor of Monty Python 20 years early), in which Sellers in his best faux-German accent says, “Who says ve Germans haff no sense of humor?” – and the audience yells back in unison, “Just about everybody!”

Some of the Best (MGM, 1944)

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

Right after Die Austernprinzessin on Turner Classic Movies April 13, my husband Charles and I watched a peculiar 1944 MGM featurette called Some of the Best, a compilation running about 40 minutes of clips from the films some of the people running MGM thought were the best films the studio had made since its founding in 1924 from the merger of Metro Pictures (run by theatre owner Marcus Loew), the Goldwyn Corporation (two years after its co-founder Samuel Goldwyn had been forced out of it by corporate raider Pat Powers), and Louis B. Mayer’s independent studio on Mission Road in Hollywood. Part of the deal was that Mayer and his assistant, Irving Thalberg – whom he’d just hired away from Universal, where he’d got his start – would run the new studio and would take over Goldwyn’s physical plant. Though the first MGM release was a 1924 melodrama called He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, and Norma Shearer, Some of the Best kicks off with the 1925 blockbuster hit The Big Parade, a World War I-themed drama with John Gilbert and the absurdly named French actress “Renée Adorée.” (She was actually French, but her real name was the considerably more prosaic Jeanne de la Fonte.) Some of the Best continues with the big dance to the “Merry Widow” waltz from Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 version of Franz Léhar’s operetta (though Lewis Stone’s narration discreetly doesn’t mention Stroheim and, indeed, no other directors are named either). Then it showcases the chariot race from the 1926 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (a film I like better than its 1959 remake, partly because the scenes involving Christ are shot in two-strip Technicolor for a loftier air than the black-and-white used in the rest of the movie, and partly because Ramon Novarro, precisely because he wasn’t as butch, makes a better Ben-Hur than Charlton Heston did in the remake) and Greta Garbo’s first major U.S. hit, Flesh and the Devil (1927) – even though it was already Garbo’s third MGM film and fifth major starring vehicle overall. After that we get a clip from Tell It to the Marines! (1928) – in which Lon Chaney essentially plays a John Wayne part before John Wayne.

Then, as silent films give way to sound ones, the next clips shown are from The Broadway Melody (1929), the first all-talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and a film that holds up pretty well today even though the cameras are static and the numbers filmed from such a distance the dancers look like ants on a wedding cake. The next film was the hard-edged prison drama The Big House (1930), for which screenwriter Frances Marion won the Academy Award (the first woman to win an Oscar outside of the Best Actress category). It’s basically a romance grafted on to a prison-escape movie, and in Marion’s original draft the characters played by Robert Montgomery and Leila Hyams were husband and wife. Preview audiences reacted negatively to the film, and Irving Thalberg decided that they didn’t want to see Chester Morris’s character having an affair with a married woman. So Thalberg ordered Marion to rewrite the script so Montgomery and Hyams would be playing brother and sister instead, Marion did so, director George Hill (who was then Marion’s husband) shot the retakes, and the film as modified was MGM’s biggest hit of the year. The compilers of Some of the Best clearly concentrated on MGM movies that had won Academy Awards, including Marie Dressler’s Best Actress win for her role in Min and Bill (1930); Lionel Barrymore’s Best Actor Oscar for A Free Soul (1931) – which, though it’s set in contemporary times, is essentially a prototype for Gone With the Wind in that it’s a two-man, one-woman romantic triangle and Leslie Howard and Clark Gable are the two men – and Helen Hayes’s Best Actress win for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). When Hayes was offered this role, an adaptation of an old French tearjerker called The Rosary, Hayes’s husband, Charles MacArthur, complained to Thalberg that the role was unworthy of his wife. Thalberg offered MacArthur the kind of dare he was famous for: he said, “You’re a writer – you fix it.”

After that MGM paid tribute to W. S. Van Dyke’s African jungle melodrama, Trader Horn (1931), which led to MGM producing Tarzan of the Apes with Johnny Weissmuller a year later because the studio had spent so much time and money shooting in Africa they had an enormous amount of footage left over that could be used in another Africa-set story. Then Some of the Best acknowledged MGM’s 1932 Best Picture winner, Grand Hotel, an all-star production of a type that was relatively easy to make under the studio system, in which actors, directors, writers, and all other personnel were under long-term contracts to the studio. Each star could shoot scenes for Grand Hotel in between their assignments to other films, and MGM ended up with a breathtaking cast: Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Joan Crawford, Jean Hersholt, Lewis Stone and many others. MGM followed that up with another all-star film, Dinner at Eight (1933), and re-teamed Beery and Dressler for Tugboat Annie (also 1933). Then Some of the Best showed another MGM Best Picture Oscar winner, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as a force-of-nature Captain Bligh, and the spectacular blockbuster San Francisco (1936) with Gable, Spencer Tracy, Jeanette MacDonald and reproductions of the 1906 earthquake and fire that even in this era of CGI still look spectacular. After that Some of the Best referenced Luise Rainer’s two thoroughly undeserved Academy Award Best Actress wins, The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937), followed by a tribute to Spencer Tracy’s two consecutive Oscar winners, Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938).

Captains Courageous is represented by a great confrontation scene between Portuguese fisherman Tracy and his first mate, John Carradine (a superb and underrated actor who gravitated between character roles in big movies like this and leads in “B” films, though one of his “B”’s, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, is superb and well worth watching). Captains Courageous is notorious as the film for which Tracy sought out a real Portuguese-American fisherman to be his dialogue coach. Tracy asked the man, “When you wanted to say, ‘Little fish,’ you’d say, ‘Leetle feesh,’ wouldn’t you?” Unfortunately for Tracy, this Portuguese-American fisherman was rightfully proud of his impeccable English; he told Tracy, “No, I wouldn’t. I would say, ‘Little fish.’” Tracy ignored his supposed dialogue coach and said things like “Leetle feesh” in an outrageously phony accent that had my husband Charles asking just what nationality Tracy was supposed to be playing. Then followed a scene between master underactor Spencer Tracy and master overacter Mickey Rooney from Boys Town. After that the compilation included scenes from the 1939 British-made MGM film Goodbye, Mr. Chips – shot at the Boreham Wood studio MGM opened so they could sign Robert Donat, an asthmatic who insisted he would only work for MGM if they would make all his films in his home country. Donat won the Academy Award for Best Actor, inexplicably since his competition included Clark Gable for Gone With the Wind (not included here because it was a Selznick International production and MGM was originally just the distributor) and Jimmy Stewart for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Then Some of the Best included scenes from the 1940 melodrama Boom Town, with Gable and Tracy as rival wildcat oil drillers, and The Philadelphia Story (also 1940), with Katharine Hepburn making her MGM debut and Cary Grant and Stewart as her male leads. She’d asked for Gable and Tracy but Louis B. Mayer said no; he said she could have Stewart because he was still under a contract that gave him no choice in his roles, but for the other male lead Mayer offered Hepburn a budget of $150,000 and told her to go hire someone herself. She came up with Cary Grant, with whom she’d already made three films, and if anyone deserved an Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story it was Grant. But it was Stewart who won the Oscar, partly because MGM had him under contract and was promoting him (Grant was a free-lancer) and partly as a “consolation award” for having been passed over for his genuinely award-worthy performance the year before in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The next MGM film represented in Some of the Best was Mrs. Miniver (1942), a major movie about the British home front during World War II which Winston Churchill called “propaganda worth a thousand battleships.” It won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actress for Greer Garson in the title role, and Garson gave so extended an acceptance speech that the next year Academy Awards host Bob Hope joked that the Academy had made a new rule: your acceptance speech couldn’t be longer than your film. (That joked got revived this year when Adrien Brody went on quite a while in his acceptance speech for the award for The Brutalist.)

The final film represented in Some of the Best was Random Harvest (1943), which I remember running for Charles and our late roommate/home-care client John Primavera around the same time as The English Patient because it had a similar plot: an amnesiac war veteran returns to an old partner he barely remembers. I was amused that Some of the Best showed two sequences between Random Harvest stars Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, one of which was supposed to take place about two decades after the other, and it was an illustration of classic Hollywood’s sexism that Colman was put in age makeup so he looked 20 years older, while Garson looked about the same. Some of the Best is as intriguing for some of the films it didn’t include as the ones it did; to a modern audience the biggest surprise is there’s nothing from The Wizard of Oz, which had been so expensive to make it lost money at the box office and didn’t turn a profit until it was theatrically re-released in 1949 and then sold to television in 1956 for the first of what became an annual tradition of telecasts for the next 39 years. In fact Some of the Best contained nothing with Judy Garland, though 1944 was the year her performance in her husband-to-be Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis broke her through to superstar status at long last.

Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story (Undaunted Content, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 12) I watched a Lifetime movie called Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story. It was based on a true-crime story about an African-American woman named Symbolie Monique Smith (played as a child by Solace Kimbro Jones, as an adult – stunningly – by Yaya DaCosta) who lives a nightmarish childhood. Her supposed mother Elizabeth (Tiffany Black) regularly beats her, and Elizabeth’s brother Leroy (Philip Fornah) sexually molests her. According to a story in The U.S. Sun (https://www.the-sun.com/news/14007992/true-story-monique-smith-lifetime-sex-trafficking-film-abuse/), Leroy started abusing Monique when she was four, though in the movie it starts a few years later than that. The only people in Monique’s life who are at all supportive are her other “uncle,” Nelson (Sir Brodie), and Elizabeth’s mother Barbara (Nikki T. Carr). Despite all the trauma at home, Monique (whom everyone around her calls “Bolie,” much to her disgust, though that’s about the least of her problems), manages to excel in school and gets an acceptance letter from the U.S. Army, which she sees as an escape from her domestic hell. But Elizabeth tells her the Army rejected her and Monique finds the actual letter from the Army accepting her torn up in Elizabeth’s trash. This is Monique’s last straw: desperate to escape the abuse at home, she steals an envelope of cash from under Elizabeth’s mattress – where she finds three different birth certificates and three Social Security cards for herself, each with a different name and date of birth, though all of them list her birthplace as New York City instead of Baltimore, where she’s been raised – and takes a bus to St. Augustine, Florida.

Alas, a young man on the bus (who’s actually one of the hottest-looking guys in the film) picks her pocket and steals her cash stash, so when the bus finally arrives at St. Augustine she’s completely broke. She’s met at the bus station by Caroline (Anona Tolar), a tall, grey-haired middle-aged woman who offers to befriend her and give her a place to stay until she can find a job, but we’re thinking this is too good to be true. I was wondering whether she was some sort of madam who was going to force Monique into prostitution, and that’s duly what happens. One night a young Black man named Gale meets her at a restaurant and offers to take her on a real date instead of just a sexual “quickie” for pay, and it seems too good to be true – which in fact it is. Gale marries her, gets her pregnant, and also burns up all their money on drugs. One night Monique, still pregnant, sees him passed out and takes the chance to escape, but the only place she can think of going to is the hellhole in Baltimore with Elizabeth and Barbara in charge. I was worried that when she got back to Baltimore Barbara would already be dead, but luckily she’s still alive, though gravely ill and both Monique and we are all too aware that her remaining time on earth is limited. Fortunately Monique is able to find work at a realty office, where she meets a young white best friend who helps her find a place of her own. When she’s moving in she meets a hot young Black man named Jonathan (Robert III Hamilton – according to imdb.com, that’s really his name!), the landlord’s maintenance man, who’s sent there to unclog a drain. Director Tailiah Breon gives us the idea of what’s going to happen next by showing Hamilton in a lot of medium shots, with his big basket snugly encased in blue jeans.

Before long he and Monique are an “item,” and in addition to being surprisingly willing to play father to her daughter by another man, he fathers her next child, a son inevitably named Jonathan, Jr. All seems to be going fairly well in Monique’s life until Jonathan, Jr. comes home with a schoolwork assignment to do a family tree – and this shakes Monique’s confidence and her equilibrium because she can’t make up a family tree since she doesn’t have a real family. She’s long since intuited that Elizabeth, the woman who raised her, beat her regularly, and allowed her brother to molest her, couldn’t have possibly been her biological mother (though actually the character reminded me of the negative aspects of my mother and our relationship, albeit without the positive ones), and she’s become more and more convinced when she’s been unable to find a birth certificate for herself in Baltimore and its environs. She ends up in New York City because the fake birth certificates Elizabeth had for her all listed that as her birthplace, and in a scene that we see first as the prologue of the movie and then is repeated midway through, she hands out a missing-person flyer on the streets of New York and asks passers-by for help finding the girl in the photo. When a woman stops her and naturally assumes she’s a mother searching for a missing daughter, Monique explains that she is the one who is missing. Ultimately Monique’s street outreach attracts the attention of a Black woman reporter for the New York Times who grabs onto her tale as a human-interest story. Together the two of them investigate and Monique persuades “Uncle” Nelson to do a DNA test – which proves conclusively that Monique and her supposed “family” are not biologically related at all.

Eventually Monique finds out that her real mom was a hopeless drug addict who died of a heroin overdose when Monique was eight – so Elizabeth’s claim that she “saved” Monique by kidnapping her when Monique was a baby might have been right after all. Certainly it’s all too likely that had Monique stayed with her birth mom, her life might have been just as miserable as it was, if not more so. One can readily imagine the kinds of scumbag men who are attracted to drug-addicted women molesting Monique as well as screwing her mom for drug money. Monique’s intense search for her true origins starts alienating Jonathan, who wishes she’d stay home and take care of the family she knows she has instead of searching for the phantoms of her past. But her search is finally rewarded when she finds her biological sister Veronica, and the two have an emotionally intense reunion. Alas, Elizabeth dies at age 77 before Monique can expose her to the authorities, and at her funeral Monique watches from inside her car with Jonathan. “Don’t you want to go see her?” he asks. “I’ve already seen her,” she dismissively and bitterly replies. My husband Charles came home from work while Not My Family was just half an hour in, and he was as moved by it as I was; though imdb.com doesn’t list a screenwriter, whoever he, she or they were did a superb job dramatizing a story that, if anything, was even grimmer in real life than it is in the movie. “Today, she works fearlessly in the Washington metropolitan area, helping affected families and raising awareness,” wrote The U.S. Sun reporter Steve Brenner. “She talks about kids in fifth grade being taught how to groom classmates, and admits one case involved a 16-year-old pregnant pimp.” (Wait until Lifetime’s producers, writers, and directors get hold of that story!) “People just need to be believed,” Monique told Brenner. “I told multiple people at high school that I was being sexually abused. But some folk don’t want to get involved.”

My Gun Is Quick (Parklane Pictures, United Artists, 1957)

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

Last night (Friday, April 11) I wanted to watch a film on Turner Classic Movies: My Gun Is Quick (1957), third in producer Victor Saville’s cycle of films based on Mickey Spillane’s granite-boiled detective Mike Hammer. My husband Charles came home from work in the middle of it, and it’s still a mystery to me why a filmmaker best known for his marvelous series of musicals starring British dance star Jessie Matthews – The Good Companions (1932), Evergreen (1934), First a Girl (1935, a remake of a German film from 1933 that ultimately became the basis for the 1982 movie Victor/Victoria), and It’s Love Again (1936) – wanted to take on so hard-boiled a character in a genre so different from the Matthews musicals as film noir. Saville set up an independent company called “Parklane Pictures” to make the Hammer films and cut a distribution and release deal with United Artists. He also used different actors to play Mike Hammer in each film: Biff Elliott in I, the Jury (1953); Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly (1955); and Robert Bray, who got an “Introducing” credit even though he’d made 32 films already, here. And Saville co-directed My Gun Is Quick himself (under the name “Phil Victor”) with George A. White, a long-time film editor whose only directorial credit is this one. The film opens in a cheap diner where Hammer hangs out and has a love-hate relationship with the owner, Shorty (Phil Arnold). Then again, Mike Hammer seems to have a love-hate relationship with everybody, including his long-suffering secretary Velda (Pamela Duncan), whom he keeps working well into the night without so much as giving her a lunch break. He finally throws her a chopped-egg sandwich he got her at that diner while he was rendezvousing with Red (a nicely drawn performance by Jan Chaney), a good-looking girl who came to L.A. with dreams of Hollywood stardom in her eyes whose attempts either at a movie career or any other respectable job went nowhere. We get the impression she’s turning tricks to survive and an unpleasant man named Louis (Richard Garland) is her pimp, though screenwriters Richard Powell and Richard Collins had to keep this veiled to get it past the Production Code.

Hammer takes pity on her and gives her a large bankroll, telling her to use it to buy herself new clothes and buy a ticket back home to Nebraska. He also notices that she’s wearing an unusual ring, a large one with a V-shaped figure surrounded by crossbars. Later that night, Hammer hears from his friend/enemy on the official Los Angeles Police Department, Captain Pat Chambers (Booth Coleman), that Red was found dead that night, the apparent victim of an automobile accident. Hammer immediately becomes convinced that Red was murdered, especially since when her body was found it was missing that ring. He’s able to trace her to the strip club where she worked, run by a hard-bitten woman boss played by Claire Coleman, where he meets her former roommate Maria (billed as Gina Core but really Gina Maria Hidalgo, and definitely portrayed as a person of color, though at first I “read” her as a light-skinned Black woman instead of a Latina). Hammer learns that all the criminals are after a cache of Nazi-looted jewels of which Red’s ring was one, and later he finds the body of a mute Frenchman who couldn’t speak because of the tortures the Nazis inflicted on him during World War II. The jewels were stolen by Herrmann Goering’s men and in turn were re-stolen by an American officer, Col. Holloway (Donald Randolph), who served a 10-year prison sentence for the theft but never revealed to anyone where the jewels were. Hammer also runs into a mystery woman named Nancy Williams (Whitney Blake) who lives alone in a lavish beachfront home, She was once Col. Holloway’s lover and also had an affair with a married man (she doesn’t specify whether Col. Holloway was the married man or not) whose wife committed suicide when she found out about his extra-relational activities. Hammer is also repeatedly beaten up by a gang of three Frenchmen who are looking for the stolen jewels, and in one chilling scene they try to put Hammer out of their way once and for all by cornering him in a junkyard and trying to dump a large amount of scrap metal on his head. (He ducks and moves out of the way just in time, of course.)

Like I, the Jury – the only Spillane novel either Charles or I have actually read – My Gun Is Quick rips off a lot from Dashiell Hammett in general and The Maltese Falcon in particular. The confrontation scene between Hammer and Col. Holloway is so much like the one between Sam Spade and Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon it’s a wonder Hammett didn’t sue (unless he was too drunk to care by then), and like both The Maltese Falcon and I, the Jury, it ends with the detective realizing that his girlfriend is the killer he’s after. The final confrontation between Hammer and Nancy Williams on her speedboat, in which she tries to get him to take her out of the country and flee with her to Mexico, while he insists that he’s going to drive her back to the mainland and turn her in, is very much patterned on the one between Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. (At least he doesn’t kill her himself the way he did in I, the Jury, which after I read it I described as, “A testosterone-fueled high-school boy trying to write his own version of The Maltese Falcon.”) The only Mike Hammer movie I’d seen before this was Kiss Me Deadly, which has acquired a cult reputation because Robert Aldrich was the director and a number of future stars got their starts in it (notably Cloris Leachman, who plays the damsel in distress Hammer takes an interest in who gets knocked off almost immediately in the first reel, the same sort of character Jan Chaney plays here but with a lot more nuance and richness), and My Gun Is Quick (a silly title) is O.K. sleazy fun, but there’s a difference between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler on one hand and Mickey Spillane on the other. Hammett’s and Chandler’s detectives got played by reputable actors: Humphrey Bogart, Ricardo Cortez, Warren William, William Powell, Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum (alas, about 30 years too late, but that’s another story).

The actors who played Mike Hammer were Biff Elliott, Ralph Meeker, Robert Bray, Darren McGavin (on a TV series that ran for two years in the late 1950’s and which I caught on reruns in the late 1960’s), and on one occasion, in 1963’s British-made The Girl Hunters, Mickey Spillane himself. It was only in later decades that Chandler’s Philip Marlowe got stuck with outrageously miscast actors like George Montgomery, James Garner, and Elliott Gould, while Mike Hammer got a new lease on life with a premium-cable TV show with Stacy Keach. One quite good aspect of My Gun Is Quick is the musical score by Martin Skiles, who was obviously tuned in to the 1950’s jazz scene in L.A. He not only wrote an exciting main theme full of jazz bits, he clearly got some of the top West Coast jazz musicians to play in the strip club scenes – and only a drummer who aggressively beats on his tom-toms to make the band sound more like “strip music” lets us know we’re not supposed to be focusing on the playing as such. Skiles also co-wrote a song with Stanley Styne called “Blue Bells” (though for some reason I keep thinking the title should be “Blue Balls”) which becomes the theme song for Dione (Patricia Donahue), the stripper who’s in league with the baddies and whose job in the plot is to offer Hammer her keys (if there were ever a straight male character who’s led around by his dick, it’s Mike Hammer) so he shows up at her apartment expecting a night of hot sex – and instead he’s confronted by Col. Holloway for their Maltese Falcon-style confrontation even though Donald Randolph’s Holloway is considerably slenderer than Sydney Greenstreet’s Casper Gutman.

Law and Order: "Inherent Bias" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 10, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 10) I watched Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth. My husband Charles had a relatively early day at work and he joined me for the second half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and virtually all of Elsbeth, though he spent a lot of time at the computer while the shows were on. The Law and Order episode, “Inherent Bias,” dealt with the murder of a major women’s basketball star, who’s shot in plain sight with a single bullet through the heart. The murder victim was white but her female partner was Black (when the script mentioned “her girlfriend” I groaned inwardly and thought, “Ah, now it’s the stereotype that all women basketball players are Lesbians”). There were a few red-herring suspects, including the victim’s former boyfriend from back in Texas, whom she dumped to turn Gay and move in with her Black female partner; and a Black player on a rival team who’s resentful that women’s basketball, largely ignored when most of the players were Black, suddenly started attracting the big money when white women started playing and becoming stars. Ultimately the cops fix on a Black man named Darius Cain (Isaiah Johnson) as the shooter. Cain and the victim had become partners in a legal marijuana dispensary because New York state officials were giving preferential treatment for legal cannabis licenses to people who’d been prosecuted and punished for dealing pot when it was still monumentally illegal. Unfortunately, Cain wasn’t just prosecuted for marijuana; he also had a rap sheet for assault and other violent crimes.

When the woman basketball player he was partnered with realized that his record included crimes of violence, she decided to force him out and part ways with him, paying him off for his share of the business, because she worried that being associated with a violent criminal would harm her “brand.” Police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), who’s white, and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), who’s Black, corner Cain and arrest him at the waterfront just after he’s taken a metal object from his pocket and dumped it in the water. At first we assume it’s the gun with which he shot the victim, and Riley so testifies at Cain’s trial. Then, testifying in his own defense, Cain says it was not a gun; it was an outboard hard drive from the victim’s computer, which he had stolen in hopes it contained evidence that would bolster his legal claim against her. Shaw hears Cain say that from the witness stand and decides he can’t be sure himself whether the object was a gun, a hard drive, or something else. The defense calls Shaw as a witness, and Shaw tells his partner that in the face of contradictory testimony the jury is likelier to believe a white witness over a Black one (even though I’d seen earlier shots of the jury, and it looked like there were Black people on it). Damien Cain is duly found guilty, and as he’s being handcuffed at the end of the trial he loudly screams his innocence. Part of me was thinking, “That’s what they all say,” and part of me was wondering whether I was supposed to doubt the verdict after all even though, if Damien Cain didn’t kill her, that leaves open the question of who did.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The Accuser" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 10, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, ”The Accuser,” was more predictable than the Law and Order “Inherent Bias” episode but also a good deal more exciting. The show begins with a young man named Seth Carson (Caleb Maris, a young man of almost unearthly beauty) being goaded by his father Nate (Erik Palladino) to go into the garage owned by his former employer, Eddie Upshaw (Todd A. Horman), to whom he was apprenticed as a welder. Only when he enters the work space – which, even though it’s late at night, the door is unlocked – he finds Eddie chained to a railing and near death from assault by someone unknown, who also forcibly sodomized him with a metal rod. (For some reason the imdb.com Web page on this episode identifies Caleb Maris’s character as “Sam,” even though not only did the show itself call him “Seth,” I remembered reflecting that he had the same name as Adam’s and Eve’s third son, after Cain and Abel.) Eddie is found comatose and it’s a few days before the police can question him, but there are mysterious numbers, “6-11-01,” scratched across his back. The SVU cops deduce that these represent a date, and presume that Eddie somehow sexually molested someone on that date and thereafter. But Seth was clearly too young because he hadn’t even been born yet on June 11, 2001, so the cops look for another victim. Ultimately they find her in Angela Jones (Carolyn Fagerholm), whom Eddie had started molesting when she was just eight years old. She told her mother and mom called the police, but when the case finally came to trial in 2004 Eddie Upshaw was acquitted after his defense counsel managed to undermine her credibility. She spiraled downwards into alcoholism, drug abuse, and petty crime, and ultimately got arrested and imprisoned for years.

Angela was finally released on parole just one week before the attack on Eddie, and when the SVU cops finally take her into custody Carolyn Fagerholm delivers a stunning performance as a woman so traumatized by her past life that she’s stone-faced and implacable in her manner. She’s good enough that if anybody wants to do a remake of Detour, she’d be perfect for the Ann Savage role. While there’s a bit too much of the goody-two-shoes about Art Alamo’s script, as well as an over-reverence for therapy – once she finally realizes what’s really happened, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gives Nate Carson a list of therapists Seth should see, and Nate duly enrolls him with one, which is supposed to reassure us that Seth will recover acceptably from his own molestation at Eddie’s hands and won’t go down the tragic route that Angela did – it’s also a tough moral tale. It’s true that once we saw the scars on Eddie’s back, we were clear not only that it was a date but it would turn out to be the date on which he first attacked whoever it was he molested, and I also had a bit of a problem with Alamo’s script. My understanding is that even pedophiles have a sexual orientation and gravitate to one or the other gender in picking their victims, though a previous Law and Order: Special Victims Unit script made the rather odd claim that what matters to a pedophile is the unspoiled youthful appearance of the victim and the gender really doesn’t matter. That’s not the impression I’ve got from the admittedly meager reading I’ve done into real true-crime stories involving pedophilia! Still, I quite liked “The Accuser” and I especially liked Carolyn Fagerholm’s performance; even in a quite short role (only two scenes), she dominates every scene she’s in and leaves an indelible impression. So does Kate Middleton (presumably not the same woman who’s married to the heir to the British throne) as Eddie Upshaw’s ex-wife Jenny, who’s working as a bartender in a seamy joint and is still repulsed by the fact that she was once married to such a monster and had three children by him.

Elsbeth: "Four Body Problem" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 10, 2025)

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

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode April 10, I switched from NBC to CBS for the latest Elsbeth episode, “Four Body Problem.” After the quite charming run of Elsbeth shows lately, this one was a disappointment. Funeral director Arthur Greene, Jr. (played by African-American Broadway star David Alan Grier) is paranoid over the conspiracy-mongering activities of his nephew Raymond (Charles Turner), in particular over the ongoing rumors that a legendary dead Black woman novelist for whom the Greene Funeral Home handled her service is still alive. Arthur sneaks up behind his nephew and clubs him over the head, killing him and plopping him into a conveniently available coffin which he can have cremated immediately so no one will be the wiser that Raymond was murdered by his uncle. Alas for Arthur, the crematorium he usually uses ls closed for repairs that weekend, and he can’t go somewhere else because then he’d be required to show a death certificate and orders from the next of kin to get the body burned. Meanwhile, a Senator, his girlfriend, his staff member and two crew members of his helicopter are killed in a crash, and while Greene callously and snobbishly refuses to bury the two proles who were flying the helicopter, he agrees to take on the Senator, his girlfriend, and the staff member. That makes his already crowded mortuary even more so, especially since he’s simultaneously dealing with a woman whose eco-freak sister just died and wanted an environmentally sound funeral. The sister is appalled when Greene quotes her a cost of almost $300,000 for a funeral in which the body will be buried in a biodegradable casket and allowed to return to the earth as organic chemicals to continue the life cycle (which is also the sort of funeral I want. Series heroine Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) starts hanging around the mortuary and encounters Raymond’s fellow conspiracy theorists, including a woman named Barbara (Jenn Harris) who insists that Raymond was kidnapped and is being held hostage by the FBI (which in the wake of the Trump administration’s mass deportations of Venezuelan and Salvadoran nationals to a notorious “black site” prison in El Salvador is a good deal more credible than it was when writers Erica Shelton and Sarah Beckett thought it up).

Barbara insists that she saw Raymond Greene being targeted by a drone in the cemetery that night, while fellow conspiratologist Jay (Tim Griffin Allen) insists that it was a spaceship. In fact it was a Greene Funeral Home hearse in which Arthur loaded Raymond’s body after killing him. The head of the precinct for which Elsbeth works as an advisor, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), is predictably upset when Barbara posts on her conspiracy Web site a photo of her and Elsbeth together and an announcement that Barbara is now working as an official consultant to the police. Ultimately Albert hits on the idea of persuading the late eco-freak’s sister to allow her body to be cremated, only Elsbeth insists that the coffin be opened before it’s cremated, and when it is the corpses of Raymond Greene and the white woman eco-freak are posed together inside it in a position that would have been considered sexual if either or both of them had still been alive. Arthur’s motive in killing his nephew was to cover up the mistake he made when, at the request of the Black novelist’s father, who was senile with Alzheimer’s at the time, his pet dog was buried instead of the novelist and her body was cremated – which they know because her gold ring was found amongst the ashes, allegedly of the dog. (Charles, who knows something about mortuary work because one of his sisters briefly tried to get into the field, said that a crematory oven is so hot any jewelry on the deceased’s person would either be totally vaporized or turned into an unidentifiable hunk of metal, so there wouldn’t be an intact ring in the cremains.) This was an Elsbeth better in its parts than its whole, including one great scene in which Albert Greene tries to get rid of the inconvenient Elsbeth by literally locking her inside a coffin. He insists she try it out, saying that a lot of would-be funeral home customers like to try out their final resting places while they’re still alive to enjoy the experience, but ultimately she escapes.

Man in the Dark (Columbia, 1953)

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

Last night (Wednesday, April 9) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Man in the Dark, a 1953 Columbia production (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCsHuDq2vrg). The initial auspices did not bode well: the director was Lew Landers, who despite having a few good films on his résumé (notably the 1935 The Raven, under his original name, Louis Friedlander; also Condemned Women, Night Waitress and Twelve Crowded Hours), was mostly a mindless hack. The script was committee-written: the original story was credited to Tom Van Dycke and Henry Altimus, “adaptation” by William Sackheim, and the actual script to George Bricker and Jack Leonard. It turned out to be a remake of a 1936 Columbia “B” called The Man Who Lived Twice which starred Ralph Bellamy in the role played here by Edmond O’Brien: Steve Rawley, a common criminal who’s the guinea pig in an experimental operation done by a brain surgeon who’s convinced that at least some people are made to commit crimes by tumors in their brains, and if they’re operated on to remove them, they can live happy law-abiding lives when they recover. The Man Who Lived Twice (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-lived-twice-columbia-1936.html) also had a director who turned in a much better job than you’d think from his hacky reputation (Harry Lachman), and it begins with an exciting scene in which the cops are chasing Rawley through a university classroom and the adjoining lab until he runs into Professor Clifford Schuyler (Thurston Hall) in the middle of a lecture to his class explaining his theory of brain surgery as a cure for crime.

In Man in the Dark, Rawley (Edmond O’Brien) is already in custody when he volunteers for the super-operation, performed by a surgeon whose name in this version is Dr. Marston (Dayton Lummis). Rawley is convinced that he won’t survive the operation, and O’Brien’s acting in this scene is quite dark in its world-weariness and acceptance of impending death from the operation. He makes just one request: that a mirror be mounted in the operating room so he can watch the medical personnel for as long as he remains conscious. (Director Landers gets some unusual and quite impressive shots of the mirror-imaged doctors and nurses.) Once Rawley goes through the operation and recovers, he’s given a new identity, “James Blake,” and he has no memory of his former criminal life. Unfortunately, a lot of people want to shock him into recalling the past whether he wants to or not, including the police, a maniacal Javert-like insurance investigator named Jawald (Dan Riss) who’s determined to recover the $130,000 Rawley and his gang stole in their last robbery before Rawley was sent to prison for it, and Rawley’s old partners in crime. They are Lefty (Ted de Corsia), Arnie (Horace McMahon), and Cookie (Nick Dennis), along with Rawley’s former girlfriend Peg (the always electrifying Audrey Totter, billed second after O’Brien). The bad guys are determined to get the secret of where Rawley hid the $130,000 out of him even if they have to beat him within an inch of his life to do it. Peg tries to seduce the secret out of him but also becomes convinced that whatever happened to him in the prison hospital, it made him forget the hiding place where he stashed the loot.

Lefty, Arnie and Cookie kidnap Rawley from the grounds of Marston’s clinic and take him to an apartment in San Francisco overlooking the famous amusement park Playland by the Beach, also the setting for the climaxes of such well-known movies as Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Welles protégé Norman Foster’s Woman on the Run (1950). At one point Lefty threatens to put out Rawley’s eye with a lit cigar; he thrusts the cigar directly at the camera, and that shot made me suspect – correctly – that Man in the Dark was originally filmed in 3-D. There’s another 3-D shot of a bird flying straight at the camera when the crooks take Rawley to his former house, which is now boarded up and is about to be torn down to make room for a “motor company” (which could mean anything from an automobile family to a car dealership), and the crooks break into and walk Rawley through his former home in hopes that will jog his memory. Alas, neither the crooks’s brawn nor Peg’s wiles are able to tap Rawley’s unconscious to worm the secret out of him. Ultimately, realizing that both the crooks and the cops (not to mention the insurance investigator; ironically Edmond O’Brien played a maniacally obsessed insurance investigator himself in the 1946 film The Killers) will remain after him, Rawley decides to deduce the hiding place himself based on his dreams. He has one clue: a piece of paper on which is written the number “1133.” After checking out the local post office to see if it’s a P. O. box, Rawley and Peg realize it’s a check-in number for a series of lockers at Playland.

They recover the loot in a box of candy Rawley had bought Peg the night the cops busted him, and Charles moaned about one of his ongoing pet peeves about movies: the container the money is in simply isn’t big enough to hold $130,000. (He said the on-screen container would be big enough only if the money were in $500 bills, and since the loot came from a payroll robbery, it’s hardly likely a company in 1953 would have paid their employees so much it would be in $500 bills. We’d already had a warning that this would be the case when in a flashback scene depicting the robbery, the loot was in a small bag that, like the candy box, was way too tiny to hold that much money.) There’s an exciting, vertiginous scene on the roller-coaster in which Rawley tries to hide out from the gangsters by taking the ride, only to jump off and attempt to flee while clambering up and down the roller-coaster tracks and narrowly missing being run over by the roller coaster several times. (Edmond O’Brien’s stunt double, Paul Stader, certainly had a lot to do in this movie; knowing from Don Siegel, who directed O’Brien in another Columbia “B,” China Venture, that year, that O’Brien was virtually blind from cataracts and could not read his own scripts – he had to rely on his wife reading to him the pages he was going to shoot the next day – it was pretty obvious that O’Brien was being doubled through almost all the action scenes.) Ultimately Lefty and Cookle both die spectacular 3-D falls from the roller-coaster tracks, Arnie is arrested, and Peg, who’s decided she’s in love with the law-abiding “James Blake” incarnation of O’Brien’s character but can’t stand “Steve Rawley” anymore, threatens to leave Rawley if he tries to keep the loot. So he gives it to Jawald and he and Peg go off together, penniless but proud.

When I wrote about The Man Who Lived Twice on moviemagg, I called it “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse” – in that version Rawley not only survived and lived a law-abiding rest of his life but he actually became a doctor by apprenticing to the surgeon that operated on him (maybe you could still do that in 1936, but that would have been an anachronistic plot point by 1953) – and Charles was a bit disappointed that Man in the Dark didn’t make more of the science-fictional elements of the tale. But I quite liked Man in the Dark; like The Man Who Lived Twice, it was a surprisingly good “B” that blessedly didn’t go too far overboard with the 3-D effects, and though O’Brien was hardly as challenged here as he was as the victim of a slow-acting poison determined to find his killer before he croaks in the original D.O.A. (1949), the title character in Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953) or as a Jimmy Hoffa-like union leader in Don Siegel’s The Hanged Man (1964), he nonetheless comes through and (like Bellamy in the original film) gives a surprisingly nuanced performance and turns a stick-figure character into a rich multidimensional creation.

Give Me Back My Daughter (Swirl Films, Tiny Riot Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 6) my husband Charles and I watched one of the most remarkable movies I’ve seen recently on Lifetime: Give Me Back My Daughter, written by Xavier Burgin and directed quite effectively by Kelley Kali. It’s about a heavy-set middle-aged African-American woman named Renée Johnson (Gabourey Sidibe), a widow who’s raising her daughter Imani (Cadence Reese) as a single parent following the death of her husband/Imani’s father (whom we see only as a dim image in old photos). She works as a bookkeeper in an office, and she’s hoping for a promotion – only she gets laid off instead, which quickly unravels her life. Renée ends up evicted after three months of unemployment, and she and Imani are reduced literally to living in Renée’s car and fearing being rousted (or worse) by the police in Houston, Texas, where this story takes place. Renée’s application for public assistance is denied because she no longer has a physical address – when the letter the welfare department sends her is returned with a “Not at This Address” message, her application is automatically canceled – and she sees a white woman breeze into the same office and get emergency assistance, but Renée is told that this program is only open to disabled people. “She doesn’t look disabled to me,” Renée snaps back. One of her job interviews is with a supercilious young idiot (Christian Adam) who insists she doesn’t have the right “vibes” for his office; we’re left to wonder if his real problem with Renée is because she’s a woman, she’s Black, she’s fat, or all of the above.

Through much of the first half of the movie Xavier Burgin (who’s also listed as “co-executive producer,” while Kelley Kali is listed as “producer”) seems to be channeling Franz Kafka in the tortures she puts Our Heroine through and the levels of bureaucratic insanity she confronts merely trying to support herself and her daughter with food and shelter. At one point she’s trying to bathe her daughter in a women’s restroom and get the “funk” out of her underarms. There’s also a chilling scene in which Renée and Imani are sleeping in Renée’s car when they’re confronted by a well-off suburban couple who demands that they move. The woman (Chloe Kiefer) is so adamant about it Renée snaps, “Who elected you mayor of this block?” The woman says she’s actually on the homeowners’ committee for the neighborhood, and threatens to call the police on Renée and Imani. In what becomes the last turn of the screw on Renée, she finally lands a job interview and actually gets offered the job, but because the woman who was supposed to baby-sit Imani during her interview flaked out and wasn’t in when they stopped by, Renée left Imani in her car and left it parked in front of the office where she was being interviewed. A woman spotted Imani alone in a parked car and called the police, and by the time Renée got out of her job interview the cops have already responded, taken Imani into custody, and when Renée returns she’s arrested and charged with child endangerment. Imani is sent into the foster-care system, which particularly bothers Renée because she and her late husband had both spent time in foster care during their childhoods, and they had sworn they would never let that happen to their daughter. Indeed, we later learn that Renée ran away from her last foster placement when her foster father either successfully molested her or at least tried to.

McCullough (Brian Kurlander), the judge assigned to Renée’s case, takes Imani away from her and assigns her to a foster home run by a white couple named Patterson (the actor playing Mr. Patterson isn’t listed on imdb.com but Mrs. Patterson is played by Susan Gallagher) who are already fostering 10 other kids – but none of them are Black and they don’t have any idea how to take care of Imani’s hair. This is a particularly sore point with Renée because she’d once wanted to become a beautician herself, specializing in Black women, and she even got a cosmetology license (albeit in another state, so it doesn’t transfer to Texas), only her marriage and later her husband’s illness sidetracked her and led her to office work and taking care of Imani. After a pretty unrelenting first hour and 10 minutes of misery, things finally start lightening up for Renée when she talks her way into a job at Jeff’s Diner, an independent hamburger joint where she used to take Imani. The place is owned by Jeff (Sean Anthony Baker) and his sole other staff member is his son, aspiring rapper Curtis (Myles Truitt). He’s advertising for another worker and Renée pleads with him for the job, which he reluctantly gives her after saying she’s overqualified. This is significant because among the conditions Judge McCullough laid down for Imani’s return to Renée is that she find steady employment and a place to live, as well as attend 80 hours’ worth of “parenting classes” – which in practice turn out to be a sort of support group for people who’ve lost their children due to poverty, racism (one woman in the group notes that white parents get much more compassionate treatment from “the system” than Black ones, and she’s shut down for not showing enough “personal responsibility” and blaming her predicament on racism instead), or both.

Fortunately, in the group she meets a beautician named Halima (Jade Fernandez), who works in a salon owned by her mother Tiana (Charmin Lee), and Halima helps Renée get a “booth rental” (one of the most preposterous sorts of employment on earth: you’re a sort of independent contractor on one chair of the salon, and you get to keep 60 percent of what you earn while the salon owner gets 40 percent, essentially the sharecropper principle applied to beauty work) at her mom’s salon after Renée demonstrates her “right stuff” by finishing setting a customer (Lakisha M. Thomas) whose previous beautician left her hair half-finished. Renée handles a troublesome customer at Jeff’s Diner – she ordered a hamburger without cheese, got one with cheese (a problem I’ve had as well and could readily identify with!), ate most of it but then demanded a refund. Curtis angrily refused but Renée offered to serve her a replacement cheese-free hamburger on the house. Renée also mediates a conflict between Jeff and his son Curtis over his rapper aspirations and his liberal use of the “F”-word in his raps; she gets Curtis to read a compassionate and obscenity-free poem he wrote about his dad to his dad. Jeff also has a contact with a Black landlord who has an apartment available, and the landlord is willing to take a chance on renting to Renée after Jeff vouches for her even though she doesn’t earn three times the rent money (a rule of thumb in the realty business that’s kept a lot of people, including some I know personally, homeless).

Alas, writer Burgin isn’t finished with putting Renée through Kafka-esque trials; just as things are finally looking up for her, her car (ya remember her car?) is stripped by a street gang, who take her battery (so the car is undrivable until Jeff gets it fixed for her) and also all her belongings, including the notebook of Imani’s drawings the foster parents gave Renée. Ultimately, despite Renée’s concern that Imani is bonding with her foster parents and won’t want to come home to her, she goes before the same judge that took Imani away and he goes into a long, elaborate spiel about how he’s concerned that Imani needs “stability” in her life before he reluctantly awards custody back to Renée, warning her that if she loses her jobs (plural) or her home, or her life derails again, he’ll take Imani away from her and put her back in foster care. Though there were some problems with the script (the whole gimmick of Renée getting arrested just after she’s been offered the sort of job she was working before smacks too much of coincidence-mongering to me, and I also could have done without the intimation of a romantic interest between the widow Renée and the widower Jeff at the end), overall Give Me Back My Daughter is a chillingly effective bit of Lifetime melodrama. It’s not billed as being based on a true story, but I can readily believe it – and with Donald Trump’s deliberate crashing of the American economy with his insane trade war against the rest of the world in general and our historic allies like Canada in particular, we can expect thousands – or even millions – of Americans to end up in the same predicament as Renée Johnson in this movie, losing absolutely everything utterly through no fault of their own and facing the grim task of mobilizing their energies to get back up again.

An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile (Fuiwell, Global, Stack TV, CBS-TV, filmed March 26, 2025; aired April 6, 2025)

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

After the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter on Sunday, April 6 I switched channels for a 90-minute TV concert special featuring Elton John and Brandi Carlile in joint performance at the London Palladium. This was a venue young Reginald Kenneth Dwight (Elton John’s original name – I often joke that he’s the rock star with five first names) frequently attended because it showcased the top American rock acts as well as British stars like The Beatles, but he’d never actually performed there himself before this show. Their collaboration came about when Carlile wrote John a letter offering to record a song with him, and it snowballed from there into an entire album, recorded over a three-week period at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. With American producer Andrew Watt, they crafted an album with Elton John writing the music and Carlile and John’s longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin doing the lyrics. “The minute she arrived in the studio, I fell in love with her,” John told Jimmy Fallon on a Tonight Show interview. “And I fell in love with her talent, her voice. But more than that, I fell in love with the person. And we’ve become firm friends. We’re like family.” This couldn’t help but remind me of that bizarre message Elon Musk posted about Donald Trump a while back on his social platform “X” (formerly Twitter) in which he said, “I love Donald Trump as much as any straight man can love another man.” I guess in the case of Elton John and Brandi Carlile, they love each other as much as any married Gay man can love a married Lesbian. Most of the program featured Elton John on piano and Brandi Carlile on guitar, with the two sharing vocals and singing a few songs as duets, others as solos from him or her.

I’ve never been that big a fan of Elton John; he emerged just before David Bowie and I had a bit of resentment that John stayed in the closet as long as he did while Bowie came out as Bisexual – and his career suffered from it in the less tolerant early 1970’s. Certainly no one alive in the 1970’s would have guessed that Bowie would end up in a long-term relationship with a woman (his second wife, the supermodel Iman) and John in a long-term relationship with a man (his husband, filmmaker David Furnish). At the same time I remember getting particularly resentful about a PBS-TV documentary about John Denver that proclaimed him the most popular singer-songwriter of the 1970’s. I talked back to the TV and said, “Does the name ‘Elton John’ mean anything to you?” I’ve long thought that what made Elton John a great star wasn’t so much his voice as the sheer quality of his songs; at its best his voice was serviceable, with a nice falsetto (that’s long since deserted him, making some of his biggest hits, like “Rocket Man,” “Tiny Dancer,” and “Bennie and the Jets” – the last two of which he performed here – quite problematical), but it served as a vehicle for some of the finest pop-rock songs ever written. John himself is quite proud of Who Believes in Angels?, the album that came out of the joint three-week sessions with Carlile. On his Web site he’s quoted as saying, “This record was one of the toughest I’ve ever made, but it was also one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. It has given me a place where I know I can move forward. Who Believes In Angels? feels like going into another era and I’m pushing the door open to come into the future. I have everything I’ve done behind me and it’s been brilliant, amazing. But this is the new start for me. As far as I’m concerned, this is the start of my career Mark 2.”

John kicked off the London Palladium telecast with a strong version of “I’m Still Standing,” an anthem to survival and one of the best songs he’s ever written, with Carlile on guitar and backing vocal. Then they did the title song from their new joint album, “Who Believes in Angels?,” as a true duet with some of Carlile’s killer high notes. After that they performed the inevitable “Your Song” – Elton John’s breakthrough hit from 1970 and one of the worst, most sickeningly sentimental pieces of all time and one I can’t help but parody, given that it’s well known that John writes only the music for his songs and relies on someone else for the words (usually Bernie Taupin, though in the late 1970’s he used other lyricists like Gary Osborne, openly Queer “Glad to Be Gay” composer Tom Robinson, and even – on one of his greatest songs, the openly Gay “Flinstone Boy” – himself): “I hope you don’t mind/That my friend Bernie/Really wrote the words.” After that Carlile got two solo numbers of incredible range (both vocal and emotional) and power, “The Joke” and “Swing for the Fences.” They followed that with a version of “Tiny Dancer” on which John croaked an approximation of his original melody, and after that there was an unusual cover at Elton John’s request: Brandi Carlile singing “Crazy,” the all-time country classic the young Willie Nelson wrote and Patsy Cline turned into a mega-hit. Following that John with Carlile’s help did his best with “Bennie and the Jets,” one of John’s greatest songs in its original recording on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road double LP before he lost the falsetto notes around which he built the song.

Then Carlile gave a bizarre introduction to the song “You Without Me” about the moment in which your children definitively claim their own identities and are no longer your clones. Both Carlile and John proclaimed the joys of parenthood – I’m old enough to remember when most Queer people took pride in the fact that their sexuality relieved them of the potential burdens of motherhood or fatherhood, but Carlile made a curious statement that motherhood was a surprise to her where for most Lesbians it’s well-planned. That made me wonder if, despite her public Lesbian identity, either she, her wife, or both are actually Bisexual. Likewise Elton John said that he’d want the message on his tombstone to proclaim him, not a great singer, piano player or composer, but “a great dad.” They wrapped up the 90-minute time slot with a searing version of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and a new John/Taupin original, a tribute to Little Richard called “Little Richard’s Bible” that centered around the clash between Richard’s true Gay (actually Bi) sexuality and his religious belief that homosexuality was a sin. (Ironically, Little Richard got much of his musical style – including the hammering piano triplets that became his trademark – from Arizona Dranes, the pianist and musical director of the African-American church in Macon, Georgia where Richard’s family, the Pennimans, regularly attended services when Richard was a child. Dranes’s recordings, including the awesome piano instrumental “Crucifixion,” were collected by the Austrian label Document Records and are available for download at https://thedocumentrecordsstore.com/product/arizona-dranes/.) An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile was acceptably directed by Lisa Clare and filmed on March 26, 2025, which meant an amazingly fast 11-day post-production period before the April 6 air date, and it was a welcome program that showcased two great Queer singing stars from radically different generations.

Benise: 25 Years of Passion! (Spanish Guitar Entertainment, PBS, 2025)

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

By the time I got home from the stunning Vox Humana concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 5, 2025, it was already 8:35 p.m., too late to watch the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter, and for some reason Turner Classic Movies isn’t doing the dedicated “Noir Alley” and “Silent Sunday Showcase” time slots usually hosted by Eddie Muller and Jacqueline Stewart, respectively, this month. So I looked online for something else to watch and found it in a PBS special called Benise: 25 Years of Passion! This is apparently the eighth PBS special for Benise, though I’d never heard of him before and judging from the widely disparate settings for the various songs (including Cuban music performed on a giant set representing “Club Havana” and Asian music from an equally monstrous set in China), this appeared to be a Greatest Hits compilation from all Benise’s seven previous PBS shows. So who or what is Benise? According to Wikipedia, his full name is Roni Benise (not pronounced like “Denise,” as I had assumed, but “Buh-NEE-say”), he’s 60 years old (and looks damned good for that age, even though many of the songs heard and seen tonight are from considerably older clips), he’s got a son named Bodhi, and he’s not from Spain but from Ravenna, Nebraska. Benise started out playing electric guitar, and in 1999 he moved from Nebraska to southern California to pursue a career in rock music in the manner of his idols, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Then he happened to catch a flamenco record on a local station. “I think there are times in everyone's life when everything changes,” he said. “Hearing the Spanish guitar in the car was that moment for me because the sound takes you away to an exotic place, and it was a perfect fit, especially when I was in this crossroads of my life.” So he junked his electric guitars and bought a nylon-stringed acoustic.

He started developing a style that would combine flamenco and rock, only to be turned down by most of the music-industry people he auditioned for, most of whom said things like, “Spanish guitar? Forget about it.” Instead he started busking on the streets of Los Angeles and eventually got an agreement with the owner of a club called Golleto’s who let him play there nightly, presumably for tips. That got him noticed not only by music-industry bigwigs but also by producers working for PBS, who decided he had the makings of a major crossover sensation. Benise was able to pull together enough funding to rent out theatres and present elaborate programs with other musicians and dancers, and his first PBS special, Nights of Fire!, followed the same pattern. Benise looked to PBS for a TV outlet because of their success promoting and presenting previous crossover acts like the Riverdance Irish dance troupe, singer Sarah Brightman (the former Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber), and musician Yanni. Alas, if the local San Diego a cappella vocal group Vox Humana had presented an example of how to do good musical crossovers (see my review on musicmagg at https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/04/eight-person-vox-humana-cappella-group.html), Benise’s leaden, overblown TV special 25 Years of Passion! was a cautionary tale in how not to do them. One of the arguments he said he had with would-be managers was when they asked him to downsize his shows, and judging from last night’s special he should have listened to them. Much of last night’s Benisextravanga reminded me of a review I read about 30 years ago in the Los Angeles Times from a film critic who, writing about a new action-driven blockbuster, said, “The audience was not so much entertained as bludgeoned into submission.”

Benise rammed a lot of disparate pieces of music into his “flamenco rock” approach, including such traditional Spanish or Latin tunes as Agustín Lara’s “Granada,” Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña” (which he used as background for a major production number in a bullring called “the Duel”), Consuelo Velásquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” and Latin mashups like “Running with the Bulls” and “Salsa Salsa” (one salsa was just fine for me, thank you); classlcal pieces like the opening “Adagio” from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the slow movement from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez; light-rock standards like The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”; and originals like “Galleto’s Jam” and “I Will Always Love U.” That last was not the Dolly Parton song that Whitney Houston covered as the theme from her film The Bodyguard (a rare instance of a Black artist taking a big hit away from a white one; usually it’s been the other way around!), but a Benise original dedicated to his son Bodhi. (Just why Benise and whatever wife, partner, girlfriend or female other co-conceived the kid with him decided to name him after the species of tree under which Buddha famously meditated and received his message is a mystery to me.) Benise casually mentioned that he’s just had a daughter as well, and he’s going to have to write a song for her, too. Benise also played a mashup called “AC/DC vs. Bach” (naturally I couldn’t help but wonder whether a mashup of AC/DC and Bach would produce a highway to heaven), which referenced the song “Thunderstruck” and dragged in a gospel choir, though all he had them do was chant the word “Thunder” over and over again. He also played a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” at a concert from China, which had me scratching my head given that the real-world Kashmir is on the Indian subcontinent and India and Pakistan have been fighting over it since the British quit India in 1947. (Since then I’ve looked up the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Kashmir and it says that China, which is one of the countries that borders Kashmir, has got involved in the struggle over its future, too, so Benise may have had a point about that.) And Benise closed his show with another Latin number, “Bamboleo,” which showed him at his best.

Frankly, I think I’d have liked Benise better if I’d caught him in his days as a street busker in L.A. without all the bombastic production he surrounds himself with, including flamenco dancers (one of whom was wearing tight stone-washed blue jeans that did show off a nice basket); a loud, obnoxious drummer; a plethora of various musicians, including at least two other guitar players as well as a Black bassist; at least two guest stars (his brother Pablo on “Hotel California” and guest singer Daniel Emmett on “Hallelujah,” just another voice incapable of doing justice to this overwhelming song); and all the other overdone production elements that just took away from the basic appeal of Benise’s guitar playing. What we could hear of him as a guitarist is quite good – he even manfully attempted to shred on an acoustic guitar – though I found myself resenting every time the director cut away from him the way I get with the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix, which likewise kept cutting away from what we wanted to see: what he did with his fingers to get those awesome sounds out of a guitar. (Benise’s anecdote about falling in love with the acoustic guitar after trying to make it as an electric player is just the opposite of Hendrix’s; his dad, Al Hendrix, got Jimi an acoustic guitar and he wasn’t that interested in it. Then Al got his son an electric and Jimi couldn’t stop playing it, even taking it into the bathroom and strumming it whether it was connected to an amp or not.) Overall, 25 Years of Passion! is the typical PBS pledge-break special, taking a basically talented but not “great” musician and building him or her up to look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Law and Order: "A Perfect Family" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 3, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 3) I watched episodes of Dick Wolf’s remaining Law and Order series: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. (They’re reviving Law and Order: Organized Crime, but only as a “streaming” exclusive on NBC Peacock – barf.) The Law and Order show, “A Perfect Family,” proved to be a challenging tale about a supposedly perfect family that unravels when the mother, Melinda Chapman (Allison Miller), gives birth to new daughter Sophie a decade after having had her previous two girls, Emily (Riley Vinson) and Amanda (Delaney Quinn). This sends her into post-partum psychosis big-time; she hears voices telling her “demons” are out to kill Sophie, and Emily has been taken over and possessed by one of them. We first see Emily out for a walk with her father, investment broker and former Navy SEAL Derek Chapman (Brett Zimmerman), who’s telling her to be strong and assertive in ways that make this seemingly innocuous advice sound toxic. There’s an intriguing red herring in the person of Walter Jeffries (Todd Gearhart), Emily’s volleyball coach, who takes an interest in her above and beyond the call of duty. They exchanged text messages on an app that deleted most of them within hours, but her last one survives and reads, “I just can’t take this anymore.” Had this been a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode he’d have been the culprit, a nasty pedophile who’d been driven from several previous schools for taking an undue interest in his 12-year-old female charges. Instead both the cops investigating the case, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), and we are shocked when surveillance video surfaces showing Melinda herself killing Emily by pushing her off a high pedestrian bridge.

At first her attorney enters a not-guilty plea but then changes it to guilty by reason of insanity. Among the people they interview is a therapist Melinda saw just once, since at her husband’s insistence she refused to take an anti-psychotic medication, check in at the day clinic the therapist recommended, or do anything to report the danger she was putting her children in by her mental illness. The therapist tells the police that the husband was so insistent that his wife not go on psychotropic drugs he literally tore up the prescription as soon as the doctor ordered it and gave it to her. Accordingly, lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) talks district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) into indicting Derek Chapman for manslaughter, second degree, in Emily’s death on the ground that if he hadn’t pressured his wife into not taking medications and getting treated for her post-partum psychosis, Emily would still be alive and Melinda wouldn’t have heard “voices” from inside her head telling her to kill Emily to save Sophie from nonexistent “demons.” Alas, the case doesn’t go well for Price because Derek’s lawyer is able to sow reasonable doubt by pointing out (correctly) that it was Melinda who actually killed Emily and she’s acknowledged herself insane under oath, so not a word she says should be taken seriously. Rather than call the psychiatrist who said she saw Derek literally tear up the prescription she’d written Melinda for anti-psychotic medications, Price figures that the only way he can get Derek’s hostility towards psychiatric treatment in general and treatment for his wife in particular is to call their other daughter, 10-year-old Amanda, to the witness stand to testify against her dad. Oddly, writers Rick Eid (an old Law and Order hand and one who was credited with the reboot of this series after it was off the air for nearly 12 years from 2010 to 2022) and Jennifer Vanderbes do a major cop-out here: they have Price have a crisis of conscience about grilling Amanda himself and even more of one about subjecting her to cross-examination. So he excuses her from the witness stand without asking her any questions, the jury acquits Derek, and the reason I thought this was a cop-out is that whatever traumas Amanda would have faced on the witness stand, having her dad acquitted and having to go back and live with him and his asshole ways would be far more traumatizing both short- and long-term.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit "Accomplice Liability" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 3, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed Law and Order on April 3 was called “Accomplice Liability” and was a follow-up to an episode originally broadcast November 21, 2024 called “Cornered” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/11/law-and-order-special-victims-unit_25.html). In “Cornered,” Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), the assistant district attorney assigned to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, gets caught in a robbery turned hostage situation when he stops in a Brooklyn bodega for his usual cup of coffee and a card for a bouquet he’s bringing his paralegal. Alas, he walked in just after newly released convicts Boyd Lynch (Silas Weir Mitchell), a 50-something white guy, and his 20-something Black “prison bitch,” Deonte Mosley (Keith Machekanyanga), are holding up the place. The hostages include Carisi and two young women, Tess Milburn (Paige Mitchell) and her roommate, Elizabeth Alden (Toni Khalil), who stopped in at the bodega on their way from a yoga class. At one point Lynch decides to take both Tess and Elizabeth and lock them in the store’s walk-in freezer, and later he gets Tess alone in there and rapes her. Then Carisi, after an abortive attempt to get the bad guys to accept Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of the Manhattan SVU as a hostage in his place, goads Mosley into shooting his partner by telling him that if he does so, the law will consider it self-defense and he won’t be prosecuted for it. Mosley takes the bait – and is then promptly arrested by the police. He’s understandably upset that he was lied to, though writers David Graziano and Julie Martin (both old Law and Order hands) seem to want us to believe that by deliberately deceiving Mosley, Carisi was acting ethically and in an above-board manner by doing what he had to do to end the hostage situation and save innocent lives.

“Accomplice Liability” picks up as Deonte Mosley is about to go on trial for the various crimes, including murdering the bodega owner, under the doctrine that even if you didn’t do the specific crimes of murder or rape, because you were there as part of a criminal conspiracy you’re every bit as guilty in the eyes of the law as if you had pulled the trigger (or your dick) yourself. The case falls into the hands of Brooklyn assistant district attorney Camille Rourke (Stacey Farber), who unsurprisingly makes it clear to Carisi that it’s her case and she doesn’t appreciate his second-guessing her trial strategy. The case falls on the testimony of Tess Milburn, who in the meantime has become so traumatized by having been raped that she’s become a drug addict. She nearly dies from an overdose of benzodiazepine and fentanyl, and she’s also acquired a large Black quasi-boyfriend, Marquis Wallace (Miles Dausuel), who’s obviously taking advantage of her and getting her to have sex with him in exchange for drugs. The Manhattan SVU detectives and the Brooklyn D.A.’s office are both naturally worried about keeping Tess alive and in coherent enough shape to testify. Benson even gives her one of her usual lectures to convince her that as traumatic as it will be for her to relive the rape, the experience will be cathartic and she’ll come out a better and mentally healthier person. Tess sneaks out of her police-provided hotel room the night before she’s supposed to testify and the cops ultimately track her down and find her pretty non compos mentis, though they’re able to sober her enough to enable her to testify. One of the plot points is whether or not Carisi can keep his cool on the witness stand or can be goaded into losing his temper; he manages to avoid a temper tantrum on the stand but goes into one when he sees Deonte smirk at the defense table after talking to his attorney. Rourke gets upset with him and fears that his outburst has blown her whole case. Ultimately the jury convicts Deonte of the murders (including his partner, whom he did kill directly, as well as the bodega manager whom Boyd Lynch actually shot fatally) but not of raping Tess – though she seems to have gained from the experience and she and Elizabeth make up after Tess, at the height of her addiction, stole Elizabeth’s laptop and gave it to Wallace for drugs.

Elsbeth: "Hot Tub Crime Machine" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 3, 2025)

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

As usual on Thursdays, once the two Law and Order shows on Thursday, April 3 were finished, I switched the channel to CBS and watched the latest Elsbeth. It was a quirky story about a physical trainer named Axel Frostad (Will Swenson), with long black hair and a stocky, compactly built body I found very sexy, whose wife Freya (a beautifully honed performance by Mary-Louise Parker) has insisted that the two invite another woman, Taylor (Jess Darrow), into their relationship for a “thruple.” So we get to see Axel make out with Freya, Axel make out with Taylor, and Freya make out with Taylor. Only Freya apparently gets tired of feeling like the odd woman left out in the “thruple,” and she kills Axel in a carefully planned way. She clogs up the drain of his carefully designed state-of-the-art hot tub (the company that made it is called “Tub Tops” and the episode’s title is “Hot Tub Crime Machine,” after the film Hot Tub Time Machine that was apparently the last movie MGM made under its old management before Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com bought it) with Axel’s hair – old hair of his that she’s filched from one of his brushes – and locks him into the hot tub with a remote-control device. At first I thought it was one of those Roomba self-propelled round vacuum cleaners (though that was hard to believe given that there are no carpets in the Frostads’ apartment; all the floors are hard). But it turns out to be an odd gimmick that, among other things, can crash itself into the outboard on-off switch on the hot tub and disable its mechanisms, including the security feature that’s supposed to keep you from being locked in.

Axel is found drowned in the hot tub, and naturally the official police detective assigned to the case, Edwards (Micaela Diamond) – and what happened to the intriguing character of Nicky Reynolds, a gender non-binary person who appeared on the last new Elsbeth, “I See … Murder,” who appeared as Elsbeth’s official police partner, insisted on being called “they” and “them” as their personal pronouns, and was played by an equally gender-ambiguous performer billed only as “b” (one letter, lower-case)? I was really hoping to see more of them! – wants to dismiss it as an accident. There are also two officials from the Tub Tops company, who are worried that the incident will discredit their product and hurt sales. One of them is a middle-aged white guy and the other a quite hot-looking young Black woman who wears her hair in a Jimi Hendrix-style “natural.” The two Tub Tops reps decide that a murder would be a better image for their product than an accident or a suicide. Complicating the issue is the fact that Freya Frostad is also at least a minor celebrity, author of a major best-seller for people who want to discipline themselves from hoarding. She’s made a rule that no one can bring a new item into the house without giving up another because her book proclaims a “Rule of 44,” that being the total number of personal possessions you can have. (My husband Charles, who watched this with me and looked at it rationally – arguably more rationally than the actual writers, Erica Larsen and Jonelle Lightbourne – wondered how clothes would count. Would a pair of socks and shoes count as one item, two, or four, he asked?)

As with the old TV series Columbo (to which this show owes a lot, mainly in the character of a police-affiliated person who basically annoys and browbeats a murderer into confessing), we see Freya commit the murder in the opening sequence, so there’s no suspense as to who the guilty party is but rather in how they will be found out. While Freya’s motive for knocking off Axel seems to have been that she wanted Taylor all to herself (which poses some interesting possibilities the writers didn’t explore, including the character of a previously heterosexual woman who explores Lesbianism and finds she likes it a hell of a lot better than just letting guys stick their dicks into her), Taylor isn’t into old-fashioned two-person relationships. In the show’s best scene, the two women interview a young Black man whom they’d like to invite to take Axel’s place in their “thruple,” but though Freya obfuscates and says their previous male partner just “went away,” Taylor tells him the truth that Axel drowned in their hot tub, and the Black hunk gets scared, decides he’s not willing to take the risk, and leaves. There’s also a subplot between Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his on-again, off-again partner Roy (Hayward Leach), who genuinely love each other but are having commitment issues and are also fighting over where they’re going to live if they move in together, since one of them has a gig in Washington, D.C. and the other doesn’t want to leave New York. At one point Teddy asks Roy if he’s staying with him just because Elsbeth likes Roy so much – and of course I couldn’t help but joke with Charles about how well my mother-in-law and I get along. And there’s still another subplot about Elsbeth’s friend, official police detective Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), and how Elsbeth and Kaya’s boyfriend, Dr. Cameron Clayden (Sullivan Jones), are secretly meeting to plan a surprise birthday party for Kaya. I’m a bit surprised the writers didn’t think of having Kaya worry about these clandestine meetings between her partner and her best friend for fear Elsbeth is going to ask to join them for a “thruple” of their own!