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

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

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

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

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

The Crooked Circle (Ventura, Republic, 1957)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mysterious Intruder (Columbia, 1946)

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

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

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

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

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