Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison, a.k.a. Alison (Insignia Pictures, Todon Productions, Anglo-American Film Distributors, RKO, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 29) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing and rather bizarre film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison or just Alison, a 1955 British production starring American actress Terry Moore along with an all-British supporting cast in an odd suspense story that blatantly rips off the Rouben Mamoulian/Otto Preminger 1944 film Laura. It was directed by Guy Green from a script he co-wrote with Ken Hughes (later a director himself) from a story written by Francis Durbridge as a BBC-TV miniseries. (For years I had misgendered Francis Durbridge because of a typo in William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film that referred to him as Frances Durbridge.) The film begins with an auto crash on a winding country road in Milan, Italy in which a car is driven off the road by another oncoming car, crashes and burns. At this point we don’t know who was driving or who, if anyone, was in the car next to them. The film then cuts to its opening credits, and the first thing we see after those is a scene in the studio of painter Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty), who’s in the middle of doing a beer advertisement with model Jill Stewart (Josephine Griffin). Tim invites Jill to dine with him that night, but she says she already has a date with a rich man she’s hoping to marry, Henry Carmichael (Allan Cuthbertson). In fact, when she returns to Tim’s studio the next day, she’s happy because Henry has already proposed to her and she’s looking forward to the wedding. She leaves behind a mystery package she was supposed to bring to Henry but decided to deliver in person rather than spend the time and money to mail it – only she absent-mindedly leaves it behind in Tim’s studio. We then learn that the victims in the car crash in Milan were Tim’s brother Lewis, a journalist who was about to expose an international jewel-smuggling gang called the “Arlington Ring,” and his girlfriend, actress Alison Ford (Terry Moore). Ford’s father, John Smith (Henry Oscar) – her name too was “Smith” originally but she took “Ford” as a stage name – hires Tim to paint her portrait from a photograph and gives Tim a dress Alison owned because he wants the painting to feature Alison wearing that dress.

Only Alison Ford turns up, very much alive, and walks into Tim’s studio at night (he has a penchant for leaving his door unlocked when he goes out), grabs a paintbrush and whites out her face on the painting, and also steals the photo from which Tim was painting her. Tim flies out to Milan with his brother Dave (William Sylvester), a charter pilot who owns his own plane, to identify Lewis’s body even though the two victims were so badly burned as to defy recognition. Later we learn that the woman who died with Lewis was probably a hitch-hiker he picked up after John Smith warned his daughter not to get in that car. The implication, later confirmed as true, was that John Smith is part of the Arlington Ring and knew that the gang was setting Lewis up to be killed and didn’t want to lose his daughter as collateral damage. When they got back to Britain, Tim and Dave discover that his former model Jill Stewart had been killed in Tim’s studio; she’d been posed in Alison’s old dress and sprawled out on Tim’s bed when she was killed. The police immediately suspect Tim of the murder, but there are two clues that could conceivably crack the case. One is a postcard with a crude drawing of a woman holding a chianti bottle that Lewis mailed from Europe, and the other is the mysterious package Jill mistakenly left behind in Tim’s flat just days before she was killed there. Tim receives a mysterious phone call from a blackmailer named Reg Dorking (William Lucas), who runs a used-car lot as a front, and the police set up a dummy money roll with which Tim can pay Dorking – only Dorking doesn’t have the postcard, and says the person who does is Fenby (Terence Alexander), a colleague of Lewis’s on the Gazette newspaper. Tim is embarrassed when he tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, having her stay in his brother’s room, only when he calls the police the next morning Alison has disappeared for fear of getting her father caught as a member of the Arlington Ring.

The police examine the contents of Jill’s mysterious package, which turns out to be an empty chianti bottle engraved with the name “Nightingale & Sons” – a firm which the cops discover doesn’t exist. From this they deduce that “Nightingale & Sons” is a front for the Arlington Ring, and eventually Dave admits to Tim that he was involved in it as a pilot who could easily smuggle stolen diamonds from country to country under the cover of his normal charter service. The police also recover the postcard (ya remember the postcard?) from the effects of Fenby after he’s killed, and discover it contained a full list of the members of the Arlington Ring. Tim tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, but someone else comes to call on her – it’s Henry Carmichael, Jill’s former fiancé, who’s [spoiler alert!] the secret head of the Arlington Ring and the killer of both Jill and Fenby. Tim tries to rescue Carmichael and eventually the two men have a fight and Tim pushes Carmichael out of a window to his death on the sidewalk below. Later there’s a quirky denouement that lets us know Tim and Alison are going to get together as a couple. Postmark for Danger a.k.a. Portrait of Alison (a title which reminded me of two great songs, J. Russell Robinson’s “Portrait of Jennie” – also from a movie about an enigmatic young woman surrounded by an air of mystery – and Elvis Costello’s “Alison”) a.k.a. Alison is an O.K. movie. It’s hardly film noir, either thematically or visually, but it’s effective entertainment and holds the viewer’s interest. It could have used a more interesting female lead than Terry Moore (an actress named Helen Shingler had played her character in the TV miniseries), but she was an American mini-star and part of the package deal by which the film was made and distributed by RKO just after Howard Hughes, Moore’s former boyfriend (and, according to her own account, her husband; she made enough of a claim that the Hughes estate paid her a settlement after Hughes died), sold the studio and it went through about three years of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder before finally going out of business in 1958.

Quigley Down Under (Pathé Entertainment, MGM, 1990)

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

The movie my husband Charles and I ended up watching last night (Friday, November 26) was Quigley Down Under (1990), directed by Australia-born Simon Wincer straight off his triumphant success with the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. It’s a novelty Western in which the biggest novelty was that it takes place in Australia, and screenwriter Jack Hill was inspired by a 1974 article he read in the Los Angeles Times about the genocidal campaign 19th century white settlers in Australia had launched against the Aborigines. It was one of those projects that quickly fell into “development hell,” cycling through several different studios, directors, and stars (one of the most interesting attempts would have starred Steve McQueen just after his 1980 film The Hunter, but McQueen’s asbestos-caused cancer caught up with him and The Hunter was his last film before he died) before it finally ended up with Pathé Entertainment. The star was Tom Selleck, just coming off not only his eight-season run as Hawai’i-based private investigator Thomas Magnum on Magnum, P.I. (the first time I tricked with my late partner John Gabrish, he had a huge photo of Selleck as Magnum on his bedroom wall) but also his surprise success in the Disney comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987). I’ve sometimes listed Selleck along with classic-era Hollywood stars like Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn as someone whose acting chops developed as he lost his looks, but in 1990 he was still the tall, thin Selleck of Magnum, P.I. rather than the far heftier police commissioner Frank Reagan on a later CBS-TV series, Blue Bloods (2010-2024), a role he acted with power, authority, and depth. Alas, Quigley Down Under didn’t give him much of an acting challenge; though the film is set (and shot) in Australia, he’s still playing the typical “Western outsider,” riding implacably through a desert countryside and proving quick both with his fists and his gun. The gun in question is a long rifle which Matthew Quigley (Selleck) had custom-built (the gun was actually made by the Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company of Big Timber, Montana, which gets credit in the film) which we’re told has a range of 1,200 yards. (As Charles pointed out, that’s well over half a mile.)

Quigley has come to Australia in the first place in response to an ad from cattle rancher Elliott Marston (a superior villain performance by Alan Rickman) looking for long-range shooters. Marston explains to Quigley that the reason he got the job was that the other 28 applicants just sent him letters; Quigley sent him a wanted poster of himself with six well-placed shots drilled into it as a sample of his skills. We first know that Marston is a villain when he casually shoots two deserters from the British army after they, who’ve brought Quigley to Marston’s ranch in the first place on a cart drawn by cattle (“Doesn’t anyone ride horses in this place?” Quigley asks), plead with Marston to shelter them and give them work. Marston gives Quigley a bag of 50 gold coins as a retainer and says there’ll be more once he finishes the job, whatever it is. Only it turns out that the job Marston has hired Quigley for is a genocidal campaign against the Aborigines – he even cites the U.S.’s genocide against its own Native population as an example – and Quigley is so angry about this he literally throws Marston through the windows of his own home. (The people who make fake “glass” out of spun sugar sure had a workout with this film. So did the stunt people: Quigley Down Under’s imdb.com page has 40 stunt people listed, which is nice to know because it means Wincer didn’t do it all with CGI.) Marston’s Aboriginal servant sneaks up behind Quigley and knocks him out (he’s obviously the Aboriginal equivalent of a “house n****r”). The next thing Quigley knows, he and his sort-of girlfriend “Crazy Cora” (Laura San Giacomo, coming off her part in Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape that should have made her a star; alas, instead she sank into the salt mines of TV), whom Quigley previously rescued from a gang of kidnappers who obviously wanted to traffic her, are left on Marston’s orders in the middle of the Australian desert with the intent that the heat, thirst, and overall exposure will do them in. This reminded Charles of his joke about the James Bond movies, in which the villains, instead of simply shooting him when they capture him, cook up some elaborate way of killing him that just gives him a chance to escape.

Through their desert ordeal and afterwards Cora keeps calling Matthew “Roy,” which turns out to have been the name of her late husband from Texas. It seems that Cora accidentally killed their child back home, the police wanted to arrest her, and Roy arranged for the two of them to escape to Australia. (This was supposed to be delivered in a piece of expository dialogue from Laura San Giacomo that was almost totally buried during the movie from Simon Wincer’s deathly sound mix.) Cora even offers to have sex with Quigley, but he turns her down because she keeps calling him “Roy” and if he’s going to make love with her, he wants her to acknowledge his name. Fortunately, they’re rescued, partly by a raiding party which Quigley, even with his hands tied, is able to shoot them and grab his personal long-range rifle from one of his victims; and partly by the Aborigines. They take him in, allow him to recover in a cave decorated with sacred drawings that supposedly help him heal, and ultimately send him on his way. Later Quigley and Cora encounter another Marston raiding party who are literally throwing Aborigines off a cliff, and they rescue one of them, a baby. In between these incidents, Quigley rides off in search of a local town where he can get supplies and also more of the special ammunition his gun requires. He gets it from Grimmelman (Ron Haddrick), a German immigrant who runs the local general store and has a wife and young son. Alas, Marston’s men catch up with him and kidnap Grimmelman’s son so they can steal Quigley’s horse. Grimmelman, who helped Quigley in the first place because he hates what Marston is doing to the Aborigines, ends up with his wife dead in the ensuing gunfight but with the 50 gold coins Marston gave Quigley way back when. Then, after a few more confrontations with Marston’s men, Quigley returns to Marston’s ranch and ultimately kills Marston and his two surviving lieutenants with a revolver, the culmination of an in-joke throughout the movie because Quigley had always said he didn’t like handguns. As Marston lays dying from Quigley’s shots, Quigley tells him, “I said I never had much use for one; I never said I didn't know how to use it.” Then he’s confronted by Major Ashley-Pitt (Chris Haywood), commander of the local British army regiment, who brings 50 men to the ranch and threatens to arrest Quigley – only Quigley is saved by his Aborigine friends, who mass on the mountaintops and far outnumber the Brits. Quigley and Cora set off to take a ship to San Francisco (one wonders why they’re going back to the U.S. where they’re both wanted for murder), only when the clerk selling them the tickets asks for Quigley’s name, he says, “Roy Cobb” – the name of Cora’s late husband. The film’s tag scene shows Quigley kissing Cora after she finally tells him the two words he wanted most to hear from her: “Matthew Quigley.”

Quigley Down Under was a box-office flop and it got roasted by the critics, too. The film’s commercial failure probably had something to do with the fact that it was released around the same time as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, which pretty much cornered the market for Westerns with sympathetic depictions of Native people. The critics generally didn’t like it (except for Alan Rickman, whose man-you-love-to-hate performance got raves) because it just seemed like a recycling of old Western tropes; the New York Times damned it as “a formula Western at its most pokey.” Charles and I had the same feeling about it; Tom Selleck was just doing the same outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had done before him – and two films Wayne made about the Alaska Gold Rush, Ray Enright’s The Spoilers (1942) and Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960), did a much better job of transporting the standard Western clichés to a different but related locale. For some reason, though, Quigley Down Under gradually developed a cult following on cable TV. Apparently real-life snipers have coined the term “a Quigley” to indicate killing two people with the same bullet from the same gun, as Quigley does in the movie, and the town of Forsyth, Montana renames itself “Quigley” for one day each year, on which it hosts a long-range shooting contest. As far as the reason I was watching this movie – Basil Poledouris’s score – it, like the film itself, seems to be made from bits and pieces of old Western clichés. The “Main Title” theme started with a clarinet, then a tuba, then a banjo for a ragtime feel that had me expecting a more light-hearted movie than the one we got. Then it suddenly cut to a big theme reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein’s iconic score for The Magnificent Seven (1959) – but then, aside from Ennio Morricone and his pan-pipes for the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood “spaghetti Westerns” from the 1960’s, just about everyone who’s written a score for a Western since The Magnificent Seven has copied it. There’s a nice violin solo on the Irish folk song “The Rising of the Moon” (also known as “The Wearing of the Green” and sung under that title by Judy Garland in her 1940 musical Little Nellie Kelly) and a few relatively restrained moments before both the ragtime theme and the Magnificent Seven knock-off return. Overall, Quigley Down Under is a nice little movie and I don’t regret having seen it, but there’s nothing particularly special about it either.

Laughing at Life (Mascot, 1933)

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

My husband Charles came home from work about an hour earlier than usual last night (Wednesday, November 26), and as a result I showed us an odd little 1933 actioner from Mascot Pictures, later Republic: Laughing at Life, directed by Ford Beebe (who would later end up at Universal producing all three Flash Gordon serials and directing the last two, as well as directing the 1944 film The Invisible Man’s Revenge, which I consider the best Invisible Man movie made at “The New Universal” following the departure of the Laemmles and James Whale, who made the stunning 1933 original) from a script he co-wrote with Prescott Chaplin and Tom Dugan. It’s a picaresque tale of an adventurer named Dennis McHale (Victor McLaglen) who travels the world on the run from whoever he’s pissed off in his last go-round. It starts in 1913 in the U.S., in which he’s a construction engineer with a wife and young son (Buster Phelps), only he gets involved in some shady deal and is forced to flee to avoid being arrested by his best friend. He turns up in China and seems to have settled down in a stable work situation, enough so that he writes his wife a letter to invite her and their son to join him, only a gang of no-goodniks recruit him for a job smuggling stolen jewels (or something) and he tears up the letter. But the caper goes awry and he’s forced to flee again. In 1917 he’s captaining a unit in the U.S. effort in World War I, only he’s arrested and threatened with court-martial for having had his unit advance when they were supposed to retreat. They decide to give him a medal for bravery even though he’s in the hoosegow, only when they’re ready to pin it on him they find the bars of his cell broken and him gone.

He ends up in 1933 in the small (and fictional) Latin American country of Alturas, ruled by President Valenzuela (Henry B. Walthall), who’s pleading with the Alturan people to be allowed two more years in office to carry out his reforms. Unfortunately, the people of Alturas are getting restive and threatening to overthrow Valenzuela in a revolution, and the revolutionary leader is an unscrupulous bastard named Don Flavio Montenegro (Ivan Lebedeff), who hires McHale, using the name “Captain Easter,” to train his army. Don Flavio then intends to get rid of Easter as soon as he’s served his purpose, and the rest of the film is a scramble between Easter/McHale, the revolutionaries, the government, a man named Inspector Mason (William “Stage” Boyd, the real-life alcoholic, drug addict and general wastrel whose antics got the other William Boyd fired from his RKO contract for violating the morals clause; the good Boyd sued the bad Boyd and won a judgment that the bad Boyd henceforth must use “Stage,” in quotes, as a middle name; unfortunately the bad Boyd made only one more film, the serial The Lost City, before the effects of his alcoholism and drug use caught up with him and he died in 1935 at age 45) who’s out to arrest Easter/McHale on behalf of the U.S. government, along with Easter’s local girlfriend Panchita (Conchita Montenegro) and an associate named Pat Collins (Regis Toomey). For much of the movie it’s unclear whether Easter is on the side of the government or the rebels (most likely he’s on the rebel side until he learns Don Flavio has double-crossed him, whereupon he goes over to the government and rats out the rebels), and it’s also not clear whether Easter regards Pat as a protégé in his business (whatever it is) or an innocent young naïf who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

Easter resists Panchita’s attempts to get something of a romantic commitment out of him, which he does because he thinks he still has a wife back home even though we know, courtesy of a letter that’s been chasing him around the world but which he hasn’t read, that his wife back home is dead and others have had to raise their son (ya remember the son?). Pat, who has a blonde Anglo-looking local girlfriend named Alice Lawton (Ruth Hall), turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Easter’s nè McHale’s long-lost son, in what Charles joked was “a real surprise … to anyone who’s never read a book or seen a movie before.” Ultimately President Valenzuela gives Easter a safe-conduct pass but instructs his army to arrest Easter if he tries to leave Alturas (obviously El Presidente had seen Tosca sometime in his life), and rather than the ending I was expecting – a doomed romantic one in which Easter sacrifices his own life so Pat and Alice can get away – the final scene is a light-hearted escape out of Alturas in which Pat and Alice are driving out in a convertible with its top down, and Easter clambers into the car and escapes with them. I’m not sure why the film was called Laughing at Life – I stumbled on it when I was looking for a recording of the song of that title – though it does seem to sum up the attitude of Victor McLaglen’s character. One surprisingly good thing about Laughing at Life was the excellence of the process work: Ford Beebe and his special-effects crew were far ahead of most of the indies of the day (anticipating the later technical excellence of Republic’s productions, no matter how deficient they were in lesser matters like plot and cast), including the folks at Hal Roach Studios who in Laurel and Hardy films like County Hospital gave us scenes that were less funny and less thrilling than they would have been with better process work. Other than that, the main mystery was why Victor McLaglen, who’d already established himself as a major star with the 1926 Fox film What Price Glory?, had to work at an indie like Mascot just two years before The Informer re-established his career and got him an Academy Award (for an atrociously overacted performance, by the way; it’s odd, to say the least, that Ford Beebe was able to restrain him while John Ford let him loose to do beaver imitations on the scenery).

The Christine Jorgensen Story (Edward Small Productions, EdProd Pictures, United Artists, 1970)

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

Last night (Monday, November 24), as part of a month-long salute on Turner Classic Movies about Trans images in film, TCM showed the rather strange and fascinating 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story. Christine Jorgensen (played in the movie as a boy by Trent Lehman and as an adult by John Hansen) was born George Jorgensen, Jr. in the Bronx, New York City. His father, George William Jorgensen (John W. Himes), was a construction worker and expected George, Jr. to follow in his footsteps, especially since he and his wife Florence (Ellen Clark) had already had a daughter, Dolly (Pamelyn Ferden as a child, Lynn Harper as an adult), and he was looking forward to a son. Alas, as a boy young George, Jr. gravitated to playing with his sister’s dolls and, in one flashback scene, wearing one of his sister’s dresses and putting on their mother’s lipstick (wretchedly). When he builds a crooked toy building with his Erector set (I remember Erector sets from my own childhood; they were essentially the Legos of their time) and the other guests at his family’s Christmas party make fun of it, he smashes it to smithereens. When he tries to play football with the other local boys – something he’s drafted to do when he’d rather play jump-rope with the girls – he catches the ball but then immediately drops it, and the boys bully him and call him “Georgette.” When George, Jr. is drafted into the Army during World War II – again, something he was drafted for – he washes out of basic training and is told he’ll fight his war stateside in offices. There’s also a flashback scene late in the movie (this film has more flashbacks than anything since Citizen Kane) in which George and his army buddies go out to a whorehouse, only George is unable to perform sexually with Angela (Sondra Scott), the prostitute he draws (who’s so sleazy she’s a rotten advertisement for heterosexuality anyway),and as he apologizes to her she takes his failure as a personal and professional insult. (This scene reminded me of a story I heard from a Gay man who’d been in the Navy and had been stationed in the Philippines when he got in a similar challenge from his sailor buddies. But the way he told his story, he spent the requisite amount of time with his hooker without doing anything, and she was grateful for the momentary rest.)

After the war George gets a job as a fashion photographer for advertising agencies and he turns out to be quite good at it, only his job ends abruptly on a beachfront shoot when one of the female models, Loretta (Elaine Joyce), questions his masculinity. George has already started to pack his bags and head back to New York when his boss, Jess Warner (Rod McCary), intervenes and tries to talk him into staying. Alas, he does much more than that; though we’ve previously seen him with a woman, his overtures to George had so much the air of Gay cruising about them that we’re not at all surprised when Jess tries to rape him. George flees with his virginity intact but then heads to the wharf and contemplates suicide. He’s talked out of it by the other model on the shoot, the more sympathetic Tani (Joyce Meadows), but he spends the next few months of his life reading every sexology book he can get his hands on from the New York Public Library. He knows he’s not a straight man and not a Gay man either, but just what he is eludes him until he reads a book by doctor and researcher Professor Estabrook (Will Kuluva) called Man and His Glands. Professor Estabrook has developed a theory that humans’ behavior is determined by their glands, and he’s astonished that young George attends all his lectures, reads all his books and journal articles, and is genuinely interested in his theories while his colleagues scoff at him. Estabrook draws a sample of George’s blood, he has it tested, and he finds that George’s blood contains a high concentration of the female hormone estrogen, equivalent to the normal amount for a woman but not a man. Estabrook tells George that American laws prohibit gender-reassignment operations in the United States but there’s a doctor in Denmark, Victor Dahlmann (Oscar Beregi, Jr.), who’s interested in performing one if he can find the right patient. Since the Jorgensen family’s ancestral home was Denmark, it’s relatively easy for George to arrange a trip there under the guise of visiting relatives and (at least in the movie) signing on to do a photo essay of Denmark’s famous landmarks. George settles in Copenhagen and stays with his Aunt Thora Petersen (Joan Tompkins). He sees a photo of a teenage blonde woman and asks Aunt Thora who that was. “My daughter,” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married!” George exclaims. “I wasn’t,” she says, adding that the girl died in her teens.

George comes out to Aunt Thora and tells her the real reason he’s in Copenhagen. He gets in touch with Dr. Dahlmann and is ready to sign the consent form for the operation immediately even though Dahlmann tries to explain just how complicated the procedure will be and the potential risks. (One irony is that George can’t read the form because it’s printed in Danish, though Dr. Dahlmann’s later case notes on him are in English so the audience can understand them.) Then we get several minutes of medical porn as we’re treated to close-in shots of the surgery in progress, not enough to create problems with the motion picture ratings code – though after all the surgeries are finished we get some nice shots of John Hansen’s chest as we’re told the breasts are expanding because of all the estrogen he’s taking. (One of the original researchers on the birth control pill likewise grew a set of breasts from the female hormones he was working with, though they went away again when his work on the project ended.) When she emerges from the transition she asks Aunt Thora if she can take the name “Christine” after Aunt Thora’s late daughter, and the aunt agrees. For the rest of the film Christine Jorgensen is subjected to huge media exposure, almost all of it sneeringly negative, calling her a “he-she” and various even less pleasant things. Aunt Thora’s home in Copenhagen is set upon by reporters who demand to get Christine’s side of her story after the barrage of negative publicity – started, we learn later, by a worker in the office responsible for giving out American passports in Denmark, who for $200 leaked the information to the media that an American woman who used to be an American man was applying for a passport in her new identity. This is something that she wouldn’t be allowed to do today, thanks to an executive order from President Trump that states all U.S. passports must be under the person’s gender at birth, just in case you’re tempted to believe that the road to acceptance for Trans people has gone in a straight line forward since Christine Jorgensen’s time. Christine returns home in her new identity and wins the acceptance of her parents, who are reluctant at first but realize that’s the only way she’ll still be part of their lives. (The real Christine Jorgensen gave an ultimatum to her parents: treat me as the woman I am or you’ll never see me again.) Christine also meets a reporter, Tom Crawford (Quinn K. Redeker), for Globe magazine (read: Life), who wants to interview her at length and really tell her side of the story. Tom is also sexually attracted to Christine, but she’s too scared of a relationship even though Dr. Dahlmann told her she could function as a woman sexually and be intimate with a man.

While I was watching The Christine Jorgensen Story I was thinking of my comment about the 1934 film Imitation of Life, “I get the impression the filmmakers wanted to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how.” Likewise, the makers of The Christine Jorgensen Story – producer Edward Small, director Irving Rapper (both of them at the ends of their careers; it was Small’s last film and Rapper’s next-to-last), and writers Robert E. Kent and Ellis St. Joseph – wanted to make a pro-Trans movie but didn’t quite know how. Certainly there’s a sense of liberation from old Hollywood hands like Small and Rapper that at last, with the breakdown of the old Motion Picture Production Code, they could get away with making a film that would have been completely verboten between 1934 and 1968. But there’s also the age-old problem with stories about Trans people: how do you cast them? I remember reading a quite impressive book called Trans-Sister Radio and thinking it would have made a marvelous movie, only the one conceivable way of casting it would have been to find an actor who was actually Trans and film them on both sides of a gender transition. The film Transamerica pulled it off by having a woman, Felicity Huffman, play the Transwoman central character and only showing her post-transition (and she won an Academy Award nomination for it). John Hanson wasn’t a bad choice overall; he’s sufficiently ambiguous in his gender presentation he’s believable as both a man and a woman (though as Christine he looks less like a womyn-born woman and more like a very good drag queen). The problem is he wasn’t an experienced actor, and there are flashes of brilliance in his performance in which he really dramatizes vividly the character’s dilemmas. Unfortunately, they remain only flashes and for most of the movie he delivers his lines in a flat first-day-of-acting-school monotone, while the voiceover narration he gives doesn’t sound that credible as either a man or a woman. One imdb.com reviewer, Christopher Greenleaf, compared this film to Ed Wood’s infamous Glen or Glenda? (1953) – which was originally supposed to be about Christine Jorgensen, only she wanted way too much money for the rights – and argued that, despite the celebrated technical ineptitude of Glen or Glenda?, “Wood was way ahead of his time and actually delivered a much better and (believe it or not) more serious picture.”

That’s overstating it more than a little bit, but The Christine Jorgensen Story (like the life story of its subject) is at once an odd footnote in the history of exploitation cinema and a well-meaning attempt at telling the story of the first post-op Transwoman (she wasn’t, but at least she was the first who went public with her story and used her 15 minutes of fame to advocate for the rights of fellow Trans people) with some sensitivity and depth, Just about everyone who writes about this movie mentions that Irving Rapper directed Bette Davis in three films – Now, Voyager, The Corn Is Green, and Deception – which is actually a fair criticism of what’s wrong with it. Like Vincent Sherman, Rapper could handle a self-starting star like Davis or Joan Crawford but was virtually hopeless with the cast of mostly non-actors, or at least lousy actors (Joan Tompkins as Aunt Thora is the only cast member who really makes her character come alive), he had here. It also doesn’t help that Edward Small had a pretty minuscule budget – maybe not as low as Ed Wood’s for filming Glen or Glenda?, but too little to avoid such anachronisms as the streets in both New York and Copenhagen being full of late-1960’s cars for scenes supposedly taking place in the early 1950’s. Though the film was nominally based on Jorgensen’s autobiography, and Jorgensen got a credit as one of the technical advisors, it was highly fictionalized in ways that make me want to read the book just to see what the filmmakers got wrong, especially since one ominous sign was the co-writing credit to Robert E. Kent. My defining anecdote about Robert E. Kent was the one about how he was a major baseball fan, and in the studio’s writing room he’d regale his colleagues with accounts of the ballgame he’d seen the night before while his fingers would fly over his typewriter keys banging out the cinematically appropriate clichés for his latest script. I’d like to think that Kent delivered at least a little more thought to his work on The Christine Jorgensen Story than usual.

Johanna Enlists (Mary Pickford Productions, Artcraft, 1918)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 23) Turner Classic Movies offered as their “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature a 1918 film called Johanna Enlists, directed by William Desmond Taylor (whose still-mysterious death in 1922 – he was shot but it’s never been definitively determined by whom or why – is about the only thing anybody remembers about him) and produced by its star, Mary Pickford. Johanna Enlists began life as a short story by Rupert Hughes, Howard Hughes’s uncle, called “The Mobilizing of Johanna.” From the title I was expecting a story in which Johanna Ransaller (Mary Pickford) was so excited by the patriotic fervor surrounding America’s entry into World War I that she donned male drag and literally enlisted. (There are a number of recorded instances of this happening during the American Revolution and the Civil War, but by 1917 it was standard practice to give enlistees physical examinations that would have “outed” any drag kings who tried to get in.) Instead it’s a rural comedy set on a farm in which Johanna is forced to work relentlessly and regularly beaten by her mother (Anne Schaefer) whenever she tries to slack out of line. At one point Johanna offers a prayer to God to send her a “beau” to liberate her from her drab farm existence. Instead God, Rupert Hughes, or Frances Marion (Pickford’s long-time writer, who did the screenplay) send her a whole regiment of them, courtesy of the U.S. Army, which is preparing to deploy them in France. When the site where they were supposed to camp falls through for some reason Hughes or Marion don’t make clear, they approach Ma Ransaller and her husband (Fred Huntley) for permission to rent their farm for the next few weeks. Naturally, Johanna is overjoyed at the presence of so many men in her life, and while the officer in charge of the outfit, Col. Roberts, is played by an instantly recognizable Wallace Beery, some of the men under his command are genuinely attractive. Among them are Lieutenant Frank LeRoy (Emory Johnson) and Private Vibbard (Monte Blue, the only cast member besides Pickford and Beery we’ve seen in anything else), though the one Johanna is most attracted to is Captain Archie van Rensselaer (Douglas MacLean) because he arrives at the Ransaller farm already ill and Johanna has to nurse him back to health.

Johanna is also in search of glamour, which she reads about in magazines, including one that recommends milk baths as the way to have great skin. So she makes herself a milk bath, laboriously pouring bucket after bucket of milk (presumably fresh, since they are on a farm after all!) into her tub and lowering herself into it in a surprisingly graphic sequence even for this genuinely “pre-Code” era. (There’s also a scene in which Johanna is shown bathing her younger twin sisters, played by June and Jean Prentis. At first I saw their names in the cast list and thought that even in 1918 the filmmakers were pulling the trick of casting twins as a baby character to avoid violating California’s laws on how many hours a day kids can work, but no-o-o-o-o: the actors were really playing twins.) Alas, Johanna’s milk bath is rudely interrupted by LeRoy and Vibbard, who walk into the room where she’s taking it and have a fight in which the tub is knocked over and all the milk spills out over the floor. Johanna has an innovative way of cleaning it up; she lets loose a pride of puppies on the floor and they eagerly lap up the milk. But the incident results in LeRoy preferring charges against Vibbard and putting him on trial in a court-martial in which Johanna becomes the star witness. Ultimately she’s able to persuade LeRoy to drop the charges against Vibbard, who’s acquitted (we’re not quite sure of what), and both men are free even though the one Johanna ends up with is Lt. Rensselaer, because the similarity in their tongue-twisting last names indicate that they’re both descendants of the Old Dutch nobility who colonized New York (or “New Amsterdam,” as they called it) in the first place. (I still remember the marvelous scene in the 1970’s TV-movie Eleanor and Franklin in which Franklin Roosevelt laconically proposes to Eleanor by saying, “Mr. Roosevelt would like to know if Miss Roosevelt will consent to becoming Mrs. Roosevelt.”) At the end there’s a breast-beating patriotic climax in which Pickford, as an honorary colonel in the U.S. military, poses next to Ralph Faneuf, the real colonel who commanded the real-life regiment seen in the film.

Johanna Enlists was preserved in an unusual way: the only surviving print was found in 1956 in the archives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (an odd place indeed to be involved in film preservation, though maybe the Agriculture Department was involved because the film takes place on a farm) and printed down to 16 mm. Unfortunately, the sole print was missing the first half of the third reel, which was reconstructed here via production stills and intertitles either copied from the cutting continuity (a record of a completed film after it’s edited, as compared with the shooting script which was frequently revised on the spot during production) or newly written. (The newly written titles were indicated by an icon of a typewriter in the lower right-hand corner.) This is something of a surprise because Mary Pickford was usually meticulous about preserving copies of all her movies (though at one point late in her life she briefly considered destroying them all; luckily, she didn’t). Another film she let slip through the cracks was Rosita, made in 1923 and the first American credit for director Ernst Lubitsch (I’ve published a commentary on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/rosita-mary-pickford-company-united.html), a quite good Carmen-esque melodrama set in historic Spain. I’m not sure what I think of Johanna Enlists as a whole; it’s obviously a well-made movie (director Taylor wasn’t exactly a major innovator on the order of Griffith, De Mille, or Stroheim, but he certainly knew his way around a set and had a basic command of the grammar of film as it existed c. 1918) with flashes of brilliance. But it’s also a flawed film in many respects, including the flibbertigibbet nature of much of Pickford’s performance (like coyness and simpering, an occupational hazard for silent-film heroines) and the forced “rustic” writing of the intertitles to denote the characters’ rural accents, and frankly I think I’d have liked it better if Johanna really had enlisted. The production credit to “Artcraft” was a prestige label invented by Pickford’s usual home studio, Paramount, until First National lured her away later in 1918 and she ended up as one of the co-founders of United Artists – and according to another co-founder, Charlie Chaplin, Pickford knew more about the articles of incorporation and other legal documents than any of the other partners or their attorneys: she was that good as a businesswoman.

24 Hour Alert (Warner Bros., Mark VII Limited, United States Air Force, Walt Disney Productions, 1955)

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

After Johanna Enlists Turner Classic Movies showed a 31-minute short from 1955 called 24 Hour Alert, produced by Cedric Francis, directed by Robert M. Leeds, and starring Jack Webb in a bizarre propaganda tale about the Cold War and in particular the defenses against a sneak attack by a foreign power (carefully unnamed in the Beirne Lay, Jr./Richard L. Breen script, but any 1955 audience member would have known they meant the Soviet Union) the U.S. Air Force had instituted. Webb introduces himself in the same laconic, understated way in which he proclaimed his identity as Sgt. Joe Friday on the iconic TV show Dragnet. In fact, it was Dragnet that had brought him to Warner Bros. in the first place: they signed him to do a feature-film version of the show, which my husband Charles and I watched years ago on a VHS home tape. I remember that when Webb as Friday referenced an “eyeball witness” in the dialogue, both Charles and I immediately thought of the same joke: “What did the ‘eyeball witness’ see the eyeball doing?” Anyway, 24 Hour Alert had an intriguing set of production company credits: Warner Bros., Mark VII (Webb’s production company), the U.S. Air Force, and Walt Disney Productions (though since the film doesn’t contain any animated sequences, Disney’s role is unclear). Its basic message is an attack on the NIMBY’s (“Not In My Back Yard”) who were challenging the Air Force’s network of bases in semi-urban areas and asking them to move. The story is set in a smallish town called “Millville” whose mayor, Hogan (Walter Sande), is dead set against the Air Force base in or just outside Millville. He’s getting plenty of complaints from the local residents, mostly about the noise the planes at the base are making – especially when they cross the speed of sound and emit loud, nerve-shattering sonic booms.

The main plane seen here is the U.S. Air Force’s first supersonic fighter plane to go faster than sound without an assist from another plane taking it aloft (as the various X-series experimental planes had to have to cross the sound barrier), though we also get to see earlier jet fighters like the F-86, which couldn’t go supersonic but was still America’s workhorse fighter in the then recently-concluded Korean War. Many of the planes seen in the film carry the designation “F-U” before the registration numbers on their noses, which was probably considered unobjectionable then but seems almost hilarious in its naïveté today. The mayor of Millville, along with one of the town’s City Councilmembers, fly a private, propeller-driven plane to Washington, D.C. to lobby the Air Force to move the base out of Millville after various noise complaints from Millvillians, including some from a chinchilla farmer who complains that the noise from the jets is waking up the chinchillas and making them unhealthy. As luck would have it, on his way back his plane is trapped in a fog that makes it virtually impossible to land, especially since its radio has failed and thereby cut out its pilot’s ability to communicate with ground control. No problem: the Air Force base commander sends up a plane to signal the pilot of the mayor’s plane visually and guide it in for a safe landing. Mayor Hogan is so grateful that he immediately reverses his position on whether the base should remain open in Millville, but a number of City Councilmembers who didn’t have his experience of the Air Force’s beneficence still want to see the base moved. Webb, his old Army Air Corps World War II buddy Col. Jim Breech (Art Ballinger), and others in the operation of the base work out the idea of hosting a big festival featuring stunt flyers and the Air Force’s latest cool hardware to ease public opposition, and of course it works. Much of the last third of the film consists of stunning footage of Air Force planes flying in formation, and even earlier than that we’ve seen a scene in which an Air Force fighter manages to bump the defective landing gear of a B-25 bomber into place so the B-25 can land safely: an amazing feat of precision flying. 24 Hour Alert is a fascinating souvenir of a time when most Americans basically trusted their government to do what was right for them, and its message is that sonic booms and the accompanying lost hours of sleep are a small price to pay for protecting our “freedom” against the evil people and nations who want to take it away.

Chinatown (Paramount, Penthouse Video, Long Road Productions, Robert Evans Company, 1974)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 22) Turner Classic Movies showed one of their double bills co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and actor Nathan Lane. They picked two films noir, the 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by him and Raymond Chandler from a source novel by James M. Cain) and the 1974 neo-noir Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne which Polanski heavily rewrote). I’ve long appreciated Double Indemnity but I hadn’t seen Chinatown since my mother took me to see it in its original theatrical release. I didn’t like it then and I still don’t. The publicity for Chinatown said that it had revived the spirit of classic noir, which it decidedly didn’t. I had a sense of The Emperor’s New Clothes when both Mankiewicz and Lane prattled on both before and after the movie about how great it was – Lane even called it “perhaps the perfect movie” – when I didn’t like it when it first came out and I don’t like it any better now. Chinatown is a vaguely comprehensible tale about how the super-rich villain, Noah Cross (John Huston in a great man-you-love-to-hate performance that’s easily the best thing about the film, even though his presence inevitably had me thinking it would have been a much better film if he’d directed it as well, especially since he probably would have dispatched the story in two-thirds of Polanski’s bloated and ponderous 130-minute running time), has hatched a scheme to take over the San Fernando Valley and make millions of dollars off it on top of the millions he’s already accumulated. His plan involves cutting off the irrigation water that the orange growers in the Valley desperately need to grow their crops, then persuading the citizens of Los Angeles County to approve an $8 million dam project. Ostensibly the dam is to provide the residents of Los Angeles with water, but Cross really wants it to go to the Valley so the housing developments he plans to build there will have water.

The hero, to the extent this film has one, is private investigator J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, top-billed), who like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer specializes in “divorce work” – in documenting extra-relational affairs being carried on by his clients’ spouses and using those photos either as grounds for divorce or ways to cut down on the amount of settlement money his well-to-do clients have to pay. (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed such work as inherently unethical.) Gittes gets involved when he’s hired by a woman who claims to be Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), wife of Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who’s opposed to the dam project because he thinks the porous shale bedrock they want to build it on top of won’t withstand the weight and the dam will eventually collapse and flood the city. (The character was supposedly based on the real-life William Mulholland, who ran the Department of Water and Power and ensured that Los Angeles would have an ample water supply even though its natural climate is desert.) Gittes’s photographer captures clandestine pictures of Hollis Mulwray apparently frolicking with a young girl, and the photos end up on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper. Then Gittes gets an office visit from the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him for the way he framed her husband. Ultimately Gittes learns that the woman who posed as Mrs. Mulwray was aspiring actress Ida Sessions (an early role for Diane Ladd), though in the meantime the case spirals out of control when Hollis Mulwray is found dead in a reservoir. Later Ida Sessions is also found dead in her apartment after she and Gittes had an appointment in which she was supposed to Tell Him All She Knows. While all this has been going on, Gittes has drifted into an affair with Evelyn Mulwray and been shot at by a number of people, including angry orange growers who think he’s with the Department of Water and Power. Gittes has also discovered that a secret financier, who of course turns out to be Noah Cross, has been buying up the orange ranches and using the names of residents of a local nursing home as fronts.

We also learn that the “other woman” with whom Hollis Mulwray was apparently having an affair with was actually Evelyn’s daughter Katherine (Belinda Palmer), and both Evelyn and Katherine were fathered by, you guessed it, Noah Cross. This piece of information – Evelyn insisting to Gittes, “She’s my daughter and my sister” – so angers Gittes that he slaps her repeatedly, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, for the first few takes Jack Nicholson pulled the blow so as not to hurt Faye Dunaway for real. But director Polanski didn’t think the result looked convincing, so at Dunaway’s suggestion Nicholson slapped her for real, at full force – and that’s the take that ended up in the final cut. The film’s title gets explained in the final scene, in which two hit men hired by Noah Cross murder Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown just as Gittes is getting ready to drive her and Katherine to Mexico to hide out from dad’s vengeance. Noah then swoops up Katherine, strongly suggesting that the cycle of incest is going to continue and he’s going to deflower her, too. This was the ending Polanski insisted on, overruling Robert Towne’s desire to have the escape to Mexico be successful. One of the two official police detectives who’d been harassing Gittes all movie tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” – a closing line that’s become iconic. (It got recycled in the part-live, part-animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Toontown.”)

I first saw Chinatown as I was making my acquaintance with the classic films noir of the 1940’s, and while the critics who reviewed Chinatown when it was new acclaimed it as a successful recreation of that style, I strongly disagreed (and still do). First of all, Jack Nicholson – an actor I usually dislike, though I loved him as The Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman because the shark-like smile and the vulpine laugh, which usually put me off, were exactly right for that character – is all wrong to play a noir lead. He doesn’t have the world-weariness and depth of the great 1940’s noir stars (Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd). There were some battles between Polanski and the film’s producer, former Paramount studio head Robert Evans; Evans wanted the film shot in black-and-white and he also wanted Jane Fonda to play the female lead. I don’t know about the first (a black-and-white Chinatown would have looked like an even more inept attempt to reproduce classic film noir than the one we have) and I’m with Polanski on the second: Jane Fonda would have been too tough, too independent, too powerful. Faye Dunaway was just right even though she was a limited actress with only two truly great films on her résumé (Bonnie and Clyde and Network). The long early establishing shots of Hollis Mulwray soulfully looking out at the city’s various reservoirs struck me then, and still do, as the sensibility of the 1970’s uneasily grafted on to a film nominally set in the 1930’s. It also doesn’t help that Nicholson as Gittes wears a silly-looking bandage covering his nose through the middle third of the film. That bandage was put there after Gittes was accosted by two thugs, one of whom – the one who actually slashed his nose, and told him that unless he laid off the Mulwray case, next time he’d cut off the nose completely – was played by Roman Polanski himself. This time around I couldn’t help but be reminded of the equally silly-looking bandage Donald Trump wore throughout the 2024 Republican National Convention days after his ear was supposedly grazed by an assassin’s bullet (though I’ve long believed both the alleged assassination attempts on Trump were Sensations of 1945-style gimmicks faked for publicity and sympathy). Of course this time around I couldn’t help but think of Trump when I watched John Huston as Noah Cross, dominating the screen as well as his character dominates the lives of everyone else in the film. Though there’s no evidence that Trump ever actually had incestuous sex with his daughter Ivanka, much less fathered a child with her, Trump did say during the 2016 campaign, “If she weren’t my daughter, I’d date her.” Certainly both the fictitious Noah Cross and the all too real Donald Trump are case studies in the ability of the super-rich to buy their way out of any accountability for their myriad crimes!

The Strip (MGM, 1951)

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

After Roman Polanski’s dull, ponderous attempt to re-create the classic world of film noir in Chinatown, the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ November 22 schedule was a much better film that was shown on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program even though it isn’t really film noir at all. It was The Strip, made by Mickey Rooney on his old stamping ground, MGM Studios, even though he’d asked for a release from his contract after Words and Music in 1948 and was then free-lancing. (For some reason, TCM cut off the studio logo usually shown at the start of MGM’s films even though a shrunken version of the logo is clearly visible on the main title card.) The Strip begins with an aerial shot of a police car speeding down the Sunset Strip at 4:30 a.m. (though it’s already daylight) while a stentorian narrator explains that because the Sunset Strip is not technically part of the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office has jurisdiction. The police car comes to a stop in front of an apartment building, where they find 25-year-old dancer, cigarette girl, and aspiring actress Jane Tafford (Sally Forrest) badly wounded but still alive. The sheriff’s deputies pick up Stanley Maxton (Mickey Rooney) on suspicion of having assaulted Jane, and when he references Jane’s other boyfriend, gangster Delwyn “Sonny” Johnson (James Craig, one of the many actors MGM tried out as would-be Clark Gables while the real one was fighting in World War II and didn’t know what to do with once the genuine Gable returned in 1944), and says he’d like to kill him, the sheriff’s deputies announce that Johnson was himself killed that night in his palatial beachfront home. The rest of the film is a flashback narrated by Maxton (though we don’t hear Mickey Rooney deliver a voice-over) which tells his story.

Maxton had served in the Korean War and ended up in a Veterans’ Administration hospital in Kansas City recovering from unspecified injuries, either physical or mental. (Today they’d be attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder, but MGM and screenwriter Allan Rivkin were probably well aware of the danger in stories about veterans with PTSD from the experience Raymond Chandler had put Paramount through on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. Chandler had wanted the killer in that film to be William Bendix’s character, severely damaged psychologically as well as physically from a brain injury he suffered in World War II, but when the Department of the Navy got word that Chandler had written that, they immediately threatened Paramount with withdrawal of their cooperation from any subsequent Paramount film – so Chandler had to write an abysmally unconvincing alternate ending.) Maxton has announced that upon discharge he intends to travel to Los Angeles and seek out a career as a jazz drummer, and to this end his buddies at the VA hospital have bought him a set of drums, which he tries out in a jam on Bob Carleton’s 1920’s song “Ja-Da.” Unfortunately, while he’s on the road to L.A. he and his car are run off the road by Sonny Johnson and his girlfriend de jour, and both the car and (more importantly for Maxton at the moment) his new drum set are totaled. No problem, Sonny insists to Maxton: he can give him a job in his enterprise, which he tells Maxton is an insurance business but it’s really a bookie joint. When the joint is raided by police (who break in through an absurdly flimsy door that looks like it was made of balsa wood). Maxton flees and gets into a car being driven by Jane. She takes him to her workplace, Fluff’s Dixie Land club on the Strip, where she introduces him to her boss, Fluff (William Demarest), who’s also its piano player. Eddie Muller said ordinarily this part would have gone to Jimmy Durante or Hoagy Carmichael, both of whom could really play piano, but Demarest had to fake it as best he could.

The house band is Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars (mistakenly billed as “Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra” in the opening credits, even though he’d broken up his big band four years before he made this movie) back when they really lived up to that name. Besides Armstrong on trumpet and vocals, they included Barney Bigard on clarinet, Jack Teagarden on trombone and vocals, Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass, and William “Cozy” Cole on drums. (For some racist reason, though MGM allowed Armstrong and Hines to show their Black faces on camera because they were stars, Shaw and Cole both had white guys doubling for them on screen. The same year MGM did the same thing to Charles Mingus, who played bass for Red Norvo’s trio in the Red Skelton/Ann Miller musical Texas Carnival, but when their number was filmed a white bassist doubled for Mingus on screen.) As luck would have it, Fluff’s previous drummer was just drafted to serve in Korea (the same war Maxton was just discharged from) and he needs a replacement in a hurry. At first glance playing drums for Louis Armstrong would seem like the sort of dream gig any musician would die for, but Maxton, who’s been working for Johnson for over a year and making twice as much money as Fluff can afford to pay him, hesitates. The next day he changes his mind and takes the gig so he can cruise Jane at Fluff’s, though Jane isn’t interested in him “that way” and tells Fluff to tell Maxton he has approval over any guy who wants to date a woman on his staff. Eventually Maxton and Jane do start dating, only she complains that what she really wants is a break to get into pictures. Maxton accordingly introduces her to Sonny, thinking he hosts enough parties for Hollywood bigwigs he can introduce her to someone who can jump-start her career. Actually Sonny has no intention of doing any such thing; he’s just stringing her along until he can get in her pants. Sonny takes Jane to such real-life clubs on Sunset Strip as Ciro’s and The Mocambo, while Maxton follows them around and is essentially stalking them.

Fortunately, along the way we get to hear a lot of great music from Armstrong and the All-Stars, including a marvelous medley of the pop-gospel song “Shadrack” (about the three Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to worship the Babylonian gods and were threatened to be thrown into a fiery furnace by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego actually survived the furnace because God protected them; the song had previously been recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1938, but that version had only featured Armstrong as singer with the Lyn Murray Chorus) and the traditional song “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When my husband Charles (who came home last night in the middle of the film) and I had watched it before, I had marveled at the remarkable trombone solo Jack Teagarden played on “Shadrack” in which he didn’t move his slide at all and controlled pitch only with his lips. I had misremembered the sequence; it occurs after the band has segued into “When the Saints Go Marching In” and it lasts for just one phrase. Even so, Teagarden was famous for never pushing his slide past the fourth of the seven standard positions (according to Teagarden himself, that was because he’d learned trombone as a child, when his arms were still too short to reach past the fourth position). The big featured song from the film was “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” which is actually introduced with William Demarest croak-singing it in a duet with Mickey Rooney (much the way the song “Silver Bells” from the movie The Lemon Drop Kid, also made in 1951, was introduced in a croak-sung version by Willliam Frawley!) and is then performed by Kay Brown as a singer at Fluff’s before Armstrong and company finally give it to us beautifully in the final scene.

After we’ve heard the story, the film cuts back to the sheriff’s station, where Maxton impulsively confesses to Sonny’s murder to save Jane from taking the fall, only he’s spared by a deathbed confession from Jane herself, who dictated her own account – she confronted Sonny at his place, they wrestled for his gun (not another “they both reached for the gun” gimmick!) and both got shot, him fatally; she managed to get back to her own apartment before she lost consciousness) – and lasted long enough to sign it before she finally expired from her wounds. It was this surprisingly downbeat ending that led Eddie Muller to call The Strip film noir even though until then there’s been nothing particularly noir about it either thematically or visually. Rivkin’s script was given serviceable direction by Laszlo Kardos (an Old Country friend of producer Joe Pasternack), though he “Anglicized” his first name to “Leslie” and that’s how he’s billed here. The Strip is quite a genre-bender, at once crime drama, whodunit, romantic comedy, and musical, with the musical elements consistently the best parts. Besides Armstrong and his All-Stars, the film features Monica Lewis, a blonde who doesn’t look at all Latina, singing a Spanish-language ballad called “La Bota,” and Vic Damone singing “Don’t Blame Me” by Jimmy McHugh (melody) and Dorothy Fields (lyrics). Vic Damone had a hit with the 1949 song “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas,” but it was also recorded by the incomparable Mel Tormé – and likewise on “Don’t Blame Me” he was competing with Sarah Vaughan’s record on Musicraft, which was far better and more sensitively phrased. I quite liked this movie even though there’s nothing truly great about it; still it worked a lot better for me than the far more highly regarded Chinatown did!

The American Revolution, part 5: "The Soul of All America" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, November 20) I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the major documentary Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt, The American Revolution: “The Soul of All America.” This episode covered the years 1778 and 1779 and covered the catastrophic winter George Washington and his army spent in the freezing cold of an abandoned ironworks at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania as well as the long-sought alliance between the U.S. and France. The French entry into the war on the American side (and the likelihood that Spain and The Netherlands would soon join them, Spain in hopes of regaining their former colonies in the West Indies they’d lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, and The Netherlands may have dreamed of retaking New York, formerly New Amsterdam, from the British) turned the American Revolution into a European conflict. The French sent a fleet of ships too big for American harbors and gave its command to Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who proved spectacularly incompetent. Defeated by the British Navy in their first sea battle off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed for the West Indies, where he tried and failed to conquer the British-held islands of St. Lucia and Grenada. Ultimately he was recalled to France after a coordinated attack by the French and American navies on the British position at Savannah, Georgia in 1780 also failed. D’Estaing was replaced by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who led the French participation in the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 that finally won the war for the U.S., and when he returned to France he was targeted by its own revolutionaries after 1789 and guillotined in 1794 largely due to his friendship with the deposed Queen Marie Antoinette. “The Soul of All America” also featured a segment on U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones, who sailed a barely seaworthy ship called the Bonhomme Richard (after the French title for Benjamin Franklin’s book Poor Richard’s Almanack) and staged a series of successful raids on British ships sailing to bring supplies to their embattled armies in America.

Most guerrilla campaigns by rebels seeking to regain control of their countries by foreign forces work by wearing down the willingness of the government of the occupying country to resist – the collapse of public support for the U.S. war in Viet Nam was the most obvious modern example – and the American Revolution was no exception. As the war dragged on and the British Parliament started to realize that the Americans wouldn’t be the pushovers they’d thought originally (much as the modern-day Russians have gradually realized that the Ukrainians won’t going to be the pushovers they originally thought), a number of Members of Parliament started to wonder just why they were putting so much money and resources into what was beginning to look like an unwinnable war. What’s more, the American Revolution was one that was dragging other European countries into alliance against the British, and it was threatening important parts of the British Empire, including not only the West Indies but also the port of Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile, the Americans were able to retake Philadelphia and return the Continental Congress there after its exile to an old meeting house in York, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most moving part of this episode was the sequence which depicted the roller-coaster ride the population of Philadelphia went through as the city went from American to British control and then back, and when Philadelphia finally went back to the Americans a number of the Loyalists that had sought refuge there fled to New York, which remained under British control until the war finally ended and the British withdrew. There was also a segment about the American campaign against the Native Americans throughout what later became known as the American Midwest, where American raiders got as far as modern-day Illinois before they were stopped by Native resistance and the anxieties of Colonial commanders who called them back to the main front. This part of the documentary reinforces the critique of Left-wing historians who point out that the rise of the United States was inexorably tied in with genocide against the Native Americans and the economic prosperity of a nation built on the labor of enslaved African-Americans.

The American Revolution, part 6: “The Most Sacred Thing” (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 21, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, November 21) my husband Charles and I watched “The Most Sacred Thing,” the sixth and last episode of the mega-documentary mini-series The American Revolution directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. “The Most Sacred Thing” dealt with the years 1778 to 1781 (when combat in the American Revolution effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia) and beyond, well beyond. Ken Burns and company chose to make The American Revolution at a time in our history when the whole question of whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerate into tyranny the way Plato said all democracies would is frighteningly open. Among the many events that call into question America’s future as a republic that happened during the six days PBS was airing this program were Donald Trump hosting Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, at the White House with full honors; him giving Ukraine an ultimatum that they must effectively accept his terms (which are basically the same as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s) for an end to the war or face the total withdrawal of American support; and his extraordinary threat to six sitting Democratic members of Congress (Senators Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and House of Representatives members Jason Crow, D-Colorado; Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio, D-Pennsylvania; and Maggie Goodlander, D-New Hampshire) that they should be tried, convicted, and executed for “seditious behaviour at the highest level.” The “crime” for which Trump wants them put to death was making a social-media video telling U.S. servicemembers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and indeed they have a legal obligation to resist them. Already I’ve received texts from Slotkin and Kelly asking me to respond by – guess what? – donating to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I’m sure Trump envies the power Putin and MBS (as the Saudi crown prince is universally called) of simply having their political enemies put to death without bothering with such niceties as due process and a criminal justice system.

The “Most Sacred Thing” episode of The American Revolution covered the period during which George Washington fiercely sought to coordinate his operations with those of the French officers and troops sent to bail out the Revolution despite the fact that they literally didn’t know each other’s languages – most of the Frenchmen sent to aid the American Revolution spoke no English and almost none of the Americans knew French. He also brought in the German Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to train his troops and give them a sense of real discipline. Von Steuben (who’s become so much of a hero to German-Americans they even hold “Steuben Day parades” in cities with large German-descended populations; one figures prominently in John Hughes’s teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) had been driven out of Europe for having seduced underage boys, and while I’m not sure whether his sexual activities would have been considered part of a Gay identity today, he was definitely attracted to his own gender. Steuben was bilingual in German and French, but the only English word he knew when he arrived was “Goddamn!” So he would swear colorfully in the languages he did know until the troops got the message that he disapproved of their screw-ups. Also the French expeditionary force sent to aid the Americans, the Expédition Particulière, was led by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and like the French officers assigned to command the navy (Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who had the job until 1780; and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who replaced him after d’Estaing bombed badly in a naval battle with the British on the open seas outside Virginia in 1780), he spoke barely any English. The person brought along to interpret for him was a Swedish diplomat named Axel von Fersen, who later became friends (and possibly more than that) with French queen Marie Antoinette. Unlike most of the French officers who helped win the American Revolution, Rochambeau narrowly escaped the guillotine when his own country erupted into revolt in 1789. He was actually scheduled to be executed when the so-called “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 abruptly brought an end to the Reign of Terror and saved his life, and he was rehabilitated by Napoleon, allowed to retire with honors, and died quietly in 1807 at age 81.

One of the fascinating stories about the American Revolution is that the cause was nearly lost because the U.S. Congress had no money to pay the troops, and therefore a number of them mutinied. Washington ended one mutiny by negotiating with the mutineers and getting them to re-enlist; he ended another by hanging the two ringleaders in full view of their followers and thus scaring the rest of the men into submission (which may be what Trump meant when he said of the six sitting U.S. Senators and House members he’s accused of “seditious behavior,” “Hang them! George Washington would”). The immediate crisis ended when the French arrived and paid off the restive American troops in silver coins instead of worthless Continental paper money, but even after the Revolution ended (with a 1783 treaty that, though it was negotiated in Paris, involved direct talks between the Americans and British that did not include the French, despite their decisive role in winning the Revolution in the first place), there were still mutinies. One of the most famous was Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 and was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. It was ultimately put down by a militia force led by another Revolutionary War commander, Benjamin Lincoln, but the spectre of civil war on top of what had already largely been a civil war (a number of battles in the Revolution featured Loyalist Americans fighting in support of the British Crown against their fellow Americans on the Patriot side, including some instances of brother against brother) led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Originally called just to revise the Articles of Confederation of 1778, which had created a federal government but a surprisingly weak one with no independent taxing authority, the Convention decided early on to write an entirely new founding document which became the Constitution of the United States. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention, and one reason the President was given such extensive authority was everyone at the Convention assumed Washington would be the first one. At the same time some of the people who later became the nucleus of the Federalist Party wanted an even more powerful executive: Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be elected for life (it was the biggest battle he lost at the Convention) and John Adams wanted a more royal-sounding title for the chief executive, which Washington successfully stopped. (At the same time I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the United States didn’t become a monarchy was Washington’s low sperm count. Washington never had children of his own, though one of his wife Martha’s sons by her late first husband called himself “George Washington, Jr.,” and you can’t very well start an hereditary monarchy with someone who can’t produce heirs.)

The saddest part of The American Revolution’s final episode was the treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans who had fought in the war on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides. A number of Black slaves who had joined the British army lured by promises of freedom after the war if the British won were ordered returned to their owners, and some fled to Canada rather than allow that to happen. As for the Natives, long-standing tribal alliances split over the question of which side would be better for them to ally with, and as I’ve noted in discussing previous episodes of the series, even while the war was still going on Washington and the other officers running the American army were promising soldiers “Indian land” in areas where there were still self-governing Native nations and which white Americans hadn’t conquered yet. At the same time, The American Revolution also challenged some of my ideas about the history of warfare, especially on the American continent. Some of the fighting forces in the American Revolution on the Patriot side included Black and white troops fighting alongside each other – a distinction that wasn’t repeated again in U.S. history until 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered an end to the segregation of the U.S. military that had required Black soldiers to participate only in all-Black units (under white commanders). The American Revolution was also the first war that involved trench warfare; I’d long assumed that Ulysses S. Grant and his fellow Union commanders in the American Civil War invented trench warfare, but not only were there American commanders in the Revolution who ordered their men to dig trenches, the final victory at Yorktown was achieved in part through two long trenches by which the American forces and their French allies were able to surround the British general, Charles Cornwallis, and force him to surrender.

Overall, The American Revolution was a fascinating program and aired at a particularly fraught time in U.S. history, when the nation is led by a rogue President who longs to be a dictator; the separation-of-powers scheme by which the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep that from happening has almost completely broken down (Trump essentially owns both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court, and they meekly do his bidding at least 90 percent of the time); he’s doing the classic dictator thing of ruling by decree through a seemingly unending series of “executive orders”; and by pardoning all the rioters who fought to keep him in power on January 6, 2021 even though he’d lost the 2020 Presidential election (and in some cases pardoning them again for crimes they’ve committed since his last pardon of them), he’s created a cadre of people who’ve already proven themselves willing to commit political violence on his behalf and proclaimed on social media their willingness to do so again. Reason enough that the six Democratic Senators and House members Trump directly threatened have had their security details increased, lest some maniac pro-Trumpers try to do themselves what Trump has so far been unable to do on his own, namely kill his so-called political “enemies.”

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "He Was a Stabler" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed June 12, 2025; aired November 20, 2025)

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

After The American Revolution episode “The Soul of All America,” I watched a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “He Was a Stabler” that rehabilitated the memory of Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joey (Michael Trotter), who’d been killed at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Off the Books,” by Julian Emery (Tom Payne), British-born psychopath and leader of a smuggling operation linked to a drug cartel from Syria. The Syrians are planning to fly in a shipment of a new, highly dangerous drug (were writers Edgar Castillo and Matt Olmstead thinking of the so-called “C-Fentanyl,” even more deadly than original fentanyl, here?) on a plane and are counting on Emery’s organization to be their American distributors. At the end of “Off the Books” Stabler and another cop skating on the thin edge of the law, Stabler’s old Police Academy buddy Detective Tim McKenna (Jason Patric), captured one of Emery’s right-hand men, Vincent Mathis (Paul Gorvin). They quickly debated whether to turn him in to their superiors for proper booking or kidnap him and subject him to what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture. At the beginning of “He Was a Stabler” they hold him in a secret location and Elliott pours lighter fluid over him and threatens to set him on fire if he doesn’t reveal the secret locations where Emery might be hiding. Mathis gets scared enough to give Elliott a list of 21 possible locations where Emery might be staying, and then Elliott turns that list over to his colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau. They’re able to whittle it down to one, but when the police raid it Emery had left just 15 minutes before – they can tell because he ordered a dinner delivered and then fled while it was still warm, and the delivery bag contained a receipt with a time stamp. There’s an odd scene in which Elliott visited his wife and child in New York and threatened to have the child taken away from them if she didn’t yield up Emery’s whereabouts, and needless to say she’s upset, calls his bluff, and throws him out of her apartment. Ultimately the police finally capture Emery after a gun battle between the cops on one side and Emery, his associates, and the Syrians on the other at the airport where the Syrians have flown in their drug cargo.

Elliott is ready to shoot down Emery on sight, but his nominal superior, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), an African-American (in the earlier episodes she was established as an “out” Lesbian, but we haven’t seen her romantically involved with anybody since her wife broke up with her in the second or third season, I forget which), talked him out of it and allowed Emery to be arrested normally instead. Then Emery boasts that he’ll be able to retire to his estate in Devonshire, England after his arrest, and an FBI agent comes in and announces that the federal anti-terrorism unit has cut a deal with Emery. In exchange for information that will allow the U.S. and its Israeli allies to bust the three top leaders of the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah, he’ll be allowed to return to England and serve out his sentence, whatever it is, under house arrest at, you guessed it, his estate in Devonshire. Elliott is predictably mega-upset at this turn in the case, and fortunately he’s able to stop it from happening via evidence in the form of a flash drive his brother Joey mailed to his family’s home before Emery killed him. The writing in “Off the Books” had made it seem like Joey had gone permanently to the Dark Side and been lured by Emery into taking part in his drug enterprise, but it turns out at the end of “He Was a Stabler” (explaining the rather clunky episode title) that he remained on the side of law and order after all. In fact, among Joey’s effects Elliott finds an uncompleted application to join the New York Police Department just like his big brother, which Joey abandoned when he realized his history of drug abuse would disqualify him. But he also carefully collected enough damning evidence against Emery that the FBI abandons its sweetheart deal with him (though we never find out just what the evidence is or why it’s so terrible the feds agree to let Emery be punished by New York’s authorities instead of protecting him), and in the end Emery is marched off to the untender mercies of New York’s criminal justice system and his story arc blessedly ends. I still don’t like the way the writers of Law and Order: Organized Crime have moved Elliott Stabler’s character from one willing to skirt the thin edge of the law to one whose quest for revenge (for the killing of his wife in the very first episode of Organized Crime to the killing of his younger brother in “Off the Books”) leads him to break it outright. Overall, though, this was a good episode and benefited from an especially sleazy and at the same time powerfully understated villain.

The American Revolution, part 4: "Conquer by a Drawn Game" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 19, 2025)

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

Last night (Wednesday, November 19) I watched the fourth episode of Ken Burns’s (and Sarah Botstein’s and David P. Schmidt’s) mega-documentary (12 hours over six straight nights on PBS-TV) The American Revolution. The episode was called “Conquer by a Drawn Game,” a title that comes from one of Thomas Paine’s later Revolutionary War essays, the same one in which he denounced ‘the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” who turned their backs on the war and walked out on it. (They had a perfect right to do that since most of them were militiamen who had enlisted for a limited time, usually one year, and were free to go once their term expired.) Paine was arguing basically the guerrilla war strategy before the term “guerrilla warfare” existed: wear down your enemy, avoid engaging in pitched all-out battles unless absolutely compelled to, fight skirmishes all over the place, and ultimately cause their country to lose the will to win so they withdraw and give you back peace. At the same time the Americans were in the sort of quandary that would later befall the British, our enemies in the Revolution and the War of 1812 and our solid (to the extent that any American alliance can be considered “solid” under the wild, mercurial, mistrustful leadership of Führer Donald Trump) allies since. While Winston Churchill was bravely carrying on about how the British would fight to the bitter end, he was secretly in communication with Franklin Roosevelt over whether and how the Americans would enter the war on his side, which he was well aware was the only way he could conceivably withstand Nazi Germany’s assaults long-term. Likewise the Colonial Americans in the 1770’s were aware that their only hope for a victory lay in winning one of the European powers to enter the war on their side – and the logical one to go after as an ally was Britain’s centuries-old enemy, France. The French were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Britain in the Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian War that cost the French their own North American colonies in Canada had been just a part of what amounted to a world (or at least a Western-world) war. They were anxious to strike back however they could against their traditional enemies, Britain and Russia, and one way to do that would be to help the Americans win their war of independence against Britain. But the French proceeded cautiously, understandably reluctant to go all-in to help an insurgency which seemed to be losing steadily as the Americans retreated from Fort Ticonderoga and its neighboring Fort Independence on either side of Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The French first opened their ports to U.S. merchants and then carefully provided arms to the Americans on an arrangement that anticipated the Lend-Lease program President Franklin Roosevelt would initiate, on shaky legal ground, to help the British in World War II while still maintaining America’s official neutrality. The battle that turned the tide for the Americans was one, ironically, on which British General John Burgoyne had pinned his hopes for ending the war altogether and forcing the Colonials to surrender: a three-pronged assault on Albany, New York. Unfortunately for Burgoyne, his three-pronged assault only was a two-pronged one in fact because General William Howe decided not to march on Albany but to send his forces south to conquer the rebel capital, Philadelphia. The narration, delivered by Peter Coyote from a script by Geoffrey C. Ward, noted that most European wars at the time ended when one country captured the other’s capital. Howe successfully took Philadelphia, forcing the Continental Congress and what there was of a national American government to retreat to a small town north of the city, largely due to George Washington making some of the same mistakes he’d made earlier in the battle of Long Island and the defense of New York. He overestimated the depth of the river separating the city from the British forces, and the British army was able to ford the river where the water was waist-high, sneak up behind the Americans, and catch them in a pincer movement on both sides. Meanwhile, Burgoyne’s strategy was to capture Albany and use it to isolate the New England colonies, which the British considered the heart of the rebellion, from the rest of the American territories. One thing the British didn’t realize was that their actions of offering enslaved African-Americans their freedom if they fought for the British and also enlisting the support of Native Americans backfired and solidified the support for American independence throughout the 13 colonies. It scared slaveowners and white settlers anxious to grab Native lands and made them more, not less, willing to support the Patriot cause.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the American Revolution was that it broke apart the Six Nations Confederacy of six Native nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora – in upstate New York that the framers of the Constitution would later cite as an example of how to make a confederation of independent states work. As explained here in Ward’s narration, the Six Nations Confederation was a forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Each nation would continue to govern itself as it always had, but they would regard an attack on one nation as an attack on all of them and mobilize to defend each other. The Oneida and Tuscarora aligned themselves with the Americans while the rest of the nations sided with the British. The Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, also known by his British name Joseph Brant, was the most aggressively pro-British member of the Confederation and recruited his own raiding parties to help the British in their battles. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Lafayette, the well-to-do heir of a major French noble family, decided on his own to help the Americans and use some of his family fortune to do so. He arrived in the U.S. on a ship he’d paid for himself – and, naturally, he was quick to point that out. He also helped pay for arms and uniforms for the American soldiers. Ultimately the Americans won a major victory at Saratoga in upstate New York, where in a battle in which Benedict Arnold was one of the key commanders (his later treachery to the American cause has so far eclipsed his earlier successes in the war on the U.S. side he’s basically been “unpersonned” in U.S. histories of the Revolution and his importance in battle after battle has been ignored) the Patriot forces seized Saratoga and surrounded Burgoyne and his men. The overall U.S. commander at Saratoga, Horatio Gates, was promoted after his victory and put in charge of the Continental Army in the South (where he led it to a major defeat at Camden, South Carolina in 1780 and never commanded it again even though after his victory at Saratoga he’d been talked about as a possible replacement for George Washington). He cut a deal with Burgoyne and the German general who had led troops in the battle, Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, to allow them to leave the U.S. and never return in exchange for their freedom, but the Continental Congress reneged on the deal and forced the defeated British and German armies on a long march stretching all the way to Virginia, where they were incarcerated as prisoners of war.

Saratoga was in many ways the turning point of the American Revolution; one British officer is quoted as saying, “The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone, and we now became fully convinced that they are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them, incapable of standing a regular engagement and that they would only fight behind strong and powerful works.” Word of the sweeping American victory reached France about seven weeks later – that’s how long it took for information to travel in an age before electronic communications of any kind – and it helped America’s ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, in convincing the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, that the American cause was a worthy investment for France. (Vergennes’ career is fascinating; before he was recalled to Versailles as foreign minister he’d been an ambassador to Sweden and Ottoman Turkey. He was recalled from his Turkish posting because he married his long-time mistress without King Louis XV’s consent and he hadn’t done enough to provoke the war between Turkey and Russia his boss, the Duc de Choiseul, had wanted. When Louis XV died and his son Louis XVI became king, Vergennes was rehabilitated and served first as foreign minister and then also as prime minister until his death in 1787.) Actually the Americans had sent two ambassadors to France, Franklin and John Adams, but the French were put off by the strait-laced Puritan Adams while they eagerly embraced Franklin, with his love of fine wines and women, as one of their own. In Ken Burns’s previous documentary on Franklin, he showed how Franklin became a celebrity, the most well-known American in the world at the time, and essentially charmed the French court into accepting his plea for an alliance with the nascent United States to help them win their revolution.

This episode also narrates how George Washington changed his mind about requiring his troops to be inoculated against smallpox when the Continental Army was so swamped with troops, many unknowingly carrying the disease with them. Before he’d hung back from requiring inoculations because he’d been concerned that the process would put the men out of action for weeks. It’s fascinating to note how far back the tradition of requiring American military enlistees to get inoculated or vaccinated runs, especially given the absurd accusations of various Right-wing conspiracy theorists (including, alas, Trump’s appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) that this was part of some sinister plot against the lives and health of American citizens. And it also mentioned how, when Washington finally realized that he couldn’t rely on a volunteer army consisting of militiamen and he would need to pay his troops something to keep them in the field, among the promises he made to them was the offer of “Indian land” – in parts of the country where the Natives still ruled and weren’t yet under the control of the American government. This is yet another indication (as is the official name of Washington’s force, the “Continental Army”) that the American Revolution was intended from the get-go as an imperialist struggle to build an empire across the entire American continent, not just a struggle about “taxation without representation.” One of the major ironies of the American Revolution is what it did to the French government whose support was crucial to its success; it drained the French treasury so dry that the French regime raised taxes on its own people so high that eventually they rebelled, overthrew the King and his royal government, and did so using the same sort of high-falutin’ rhetoric about “liberty, equality, fraternity” the Americans had used in their struggle.

The American Revolution, part 3: "The Times That Try Men's Souls" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 18, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, November 18) my husband Charles and I watched the third episode of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution, which he co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt from a script by Burns’s usual collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward. This was actually more than the first two episodes had been about the nitty-gritty of the war itself, particularly the battles in and around New York City that resulted in New York becoming the bastion of Loyalist (anti-Revolutionary) support for the rest of the war. Ward’s script was quite out front about the strategic mistakes George Washington made during the battle for Long Island and New York itself (though at the time “New York” was just a village of one square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan Island), including not guarding the Jamaica pass that the British were able to use to encircle the American forces, and moving most of his army to repel the attacks the British meant just as feints. The troops of the Continental Army started grumbling about how good they were getting at retreats, since the British had them on the run and gradually forced them out of New York City, New York state, and New Jersey until they reached Trenton, on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. About the only thing that saved Washington’s army was his successful mobilization of a fleet of whatever boats he could solicit, requisition or just plain grab to ferry his men across one of the rivers in an operation both Charles and I compared to the fabled British retreat at Dunkirk, France in 1940. When he finally got his men to safety it was already December 1776, and most of the troops under his command were militiamen whose enlistments were due to expire at the end of the year. This was one of the issues that bedeviled the American side throughout the Revolution; the Americans were relying on militias that didn’t consider themselves bound by military discipline and considered themselves loyal to their individual states rather than the entire U.S. Through two stirring speeches, Washington managed to convince most of his troops to stick it out for three months more.

The show also touched on the debate over the Articles of Confederation, which are usually dated from 1778 but which were actually discussed and fought over two years earlier. As it happened, the Articles of Confederation were being drafted and debated by the Continental Congress in the same building as the Pennsylvania legislature was drafting its own state’s constitution – and the radicalism of the Pennsylvania document, which among other things contained a Bill of Rights and guaranteed the right to vote to all adult white men whether they owned property or not, put off a lot of the delegates to the Continental Congress. (This probably reflects the view of the most famous Founding Father from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, who once joked that if a man owns a donkey, that’s considered “property” and he has the right to vote. Then, if his donkey dies, he loses his vote – so who held the franchise originally, the man or the donkey?) The Founding Fathers were in no way democrats: they equated democracy with anarchy and were quite specific that what they wanted the new nation to be was a republic governed by an elite political class. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, “[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

In the same document, Madison wrote that one of the benefits of a representative republic rather than a pure democracy was “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” (Ironically, one of the major anti-democratic provisions the Founders put into the Constitution – the Electoral College for electing the President – had exactly the opposite result from the one the Framers were seeking: the election of a pseudo-populist demagogue who lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral College and proceeded to govern in so wretched a way as to fulfill Madison’s dire predictions about the fate of democracies as well as Plato’s belief that democracy would always degenerate into tyranny because a democracy “will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.”) Regrettably, though the imdb.com pages on The American Revolution name the voice-over actors featured in the series (including major stars like Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Michael Keaton, Edward Nortun, David Oyelowo, and Liev Schreiber), they don’t identify them as to who voiced whom. And the talking heads (mostly historians, among them a few African-Americans and Native Americans to make sure their sides of the story are included) aren’t identified at all, which is a shame because many of them tell compelling stories.

I was especially struck by Friedericke Baer, a woman historian from Germany who mentioned that a lot of the German troops who fought in the Revolution on the side of King George III (himself of German ancestry, by the way; he’d succeeded his grandfather George II and was the first of the Hanoverian kings who actually could speak English) were themselves conscripts who resented being drafted to fight in a war in which they had no personal stake in the outcome. Indeed, the show pointed out that a lot of the Germans (many of whom were from the state of Hesse, which led to all the German troops being nicknamed “Hessians” whether they were from Hesse or not) ultimately stayed behind or returned to America and became immigrants, and eventually citizens, of the United States. The American Revolution is turning out at its midway point to be a quite interesting and surprisingly relevant look at both the founding myth of our nation and the reality as it was lived on the ground by those who fought (on both sides) as well as those who just stood by and waited for the dust to settle and the conflict to finish one way or the other. I recently reviewed an Intrada Records re-release of John Williams’s soundtrack music for Roland Emmerich’s film about the American Revolution, The Patriot, in which I wrote, “In a sense, The Patriot is about an old order dying and a new one being born – but not necessarily in the way you’d think. One of the recurring themes is the death of the old chivalric ideal of warfare, where both sides were led by gentlemen whose senses of honor put limits on what they could do to each other, and its replacement by the modern free-for-all in which anything literally goes and the distinction between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian’ essentially disappears.” Certainly the American Revolution featured war crimes, or what today would be considered war crimes, committed by both sides, as well as instances of what amounted to blacklisting by Patriot committees of people who were, rightly or wrongly, suspected of Royalist sympathies. People who’d been victimized by this process emigrated en masse to New York once the British solidified their hold over it and spent the rest of the war there.