Wife Stalker (Swirl Films, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Röhm-Feifer Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 29) I watched what promised to be a pretty standard Lifetime movie called Wife Stalker, produced by a plethora of companies affiliated with the Johnson Production Group, directed by Elisabeth Röhm (whose experience playing Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order has obviously stood her in good stead as a thriller director for Lifetime) from a script by Barbara Marshall based on a novel called The Wife Stalker (note the article) by sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine. The Constantines sign their books with the joint pseudonym “Liv Constantine,” mashing up their real first names, and they apparently specialize in these sorts of dark family tales. For the first hour and 55 minutes Wife Stalker seemed like a pretty generic Lifetime movie (my husband Charles got home from work early and watched all but the first half-hour of it with me). Hot-shot successful divorce attorney Leo Drake (Trai Byers, a hot hunk of Black man-meat I was looking forward to seeing in a soft-core porn scene – and, blessedly, I was not disappointed!) is apparently happily married to Joanna (Keshia Knight Pulliam) and is living in a large home in Atlanta, Georgia with him and two children, Evie (Alayna Bernard) and Aaron (A. J. Bernard). Only their relationship is suddenly broken up when, as part of a case he’s working on, Leo goes to see a yoga instructor and meditation counselor named Piper Reynaud (Grace Byers, Trai Byers’s real-life wife). He wants her to testify as a character witness for a client who’s fighting his ex in court to maintain custody of their kids, but even before the first commercial break, they’re seeing each other on a dinner date, she’s heavily cruising him, he’s giving in, and ultimately they end up having sex. Leo is so obsessed with Piper that he immediately decides he wants out of his relationship with Joanna so he can marry Piper. Naturally Joanna is upset, so she starts stalking Piper, having looked up her last name and found it’s also the name of a legendary fox-like creature in medieval France who specialized in breaking up other people’s marriages.

Joanna gets her first clue when she sees a man named Brent (Eric Tiede, a white guy whom I thought was even sexier than Trai Byers; director Röhm gave us lots of nice mid-shots of him showing off his ample and impressive basket, though alas he appears in just that one scene). Brent addresses Piper as if he knows her but calls her by another name, “Pamela Dunn,” and it’s Joanna’s (and our) first clue that “Piper” is not who she seems. Ultimately Joanna traces Pamela a.k.a. “Piper” across the country to San Diego; Annapolis, Maryland; and Washington, D.C. It turns out her original name was Pamela Rayfield and her first husband was Eric Sherwood, only they and Eric’s child from a previous marriage went on a hiking trip, the kid died, Eric ended up in a coma and Pamela survived unscathed. Joanna hears this story from Eric’s mother Trisha (Deja Dee) and gets to see Eric in a coma in the guest house Trisha built for him. When Joanna asks the comatose Eric to squeeze her hand if Pamela disabled him and killed his kid, he does so violently and Trisha has to separate them. Pamela later made her way to San Diego, joined the local yacht club, bought a sailboat and got married again to local politician Matthew Dunn, only that abruptly ended when the boat “accidentally” capsized in San Diego Bay and both Matthew and his daughter Mia drowned. Joanna hears that part of the story from Matthew’s ex, Mia’s mother. Our suspicions are aroused when Joanna acts so neurotically overprotective of Evie and Aaron that ultimately a police officer accosts them in a park and warns Joanna not to be physically abusive to Aaron. They’re also aroused when Joanna finds a gun box belonging to her mother (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com even though she’s the only truly sympathetic character in the story), and later mom finds the box emptied of its gun and the Taser she also carried. Joanna’s fears ramp up into overdrive when “Piper” offers to take Leo and the kids sailing during the upcoming three-day weekend, and she desperately pleads with Leo not to let that happen because of what Piper a.k.a. Pamela did the last time she took her husband and his kids out sailing.

Where I thought this was heading was towards a climax at sea, in which Joanna would rent a power boat, use it to track down Piper, Leo and the kids, and shoot Piper with the gun before Piper could kill Leo and the kids. Instead the final confrontation takes place on land, and Joanna’s gunshot wounds but does not kill Piper. Then there’s a commercial break, and with just five minutes of running time left to go [big-time spoiler alert!], we’re suddenly thrown a curveball. The next scene after the commercial break shows Joanna in a federal penitentiary (the intertitle doesn’t say which one, and Charles questioned this because even if Joanna had killed somebody, since murder is generally not a federal crime she’d most likely have been sent to state prison instead), and we learn that Joanna and Leo were never married; that Joanna was just a woman Leo hired as either a paralegal, a nanny, or both; and Joanna became so obsessed with the kids that she drowned their actual mother in a bathtub and moved herself into Leo’s house, posing as Leo’s wife and the children’s mother. I looked up the book The Wife Stalker on goodreads.com mainly to find out which writers to blame for that preposterous ending – the Constantines or Barbara Marshall – and it turned out that was how the book ended, too. There were quite a few changes between the book and movie: the book takes place in Westport, Connecticut; the male lead’s name is Leo Drakos; one of the kids is still named Evie but her sibling is Stelli; Piper joins the local yacht club as soon as she arrives in Westport (don’t most yacht clubs require you to have a sponsor who’s already a member?); and, judging from the heavily lipsticked model on the cover, the protagonists of the novel are white instead of Black. (I was amused that Leo Drake is presented as a graduate of Howard University, the historically Black college whose alumni included Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris.) But enough people on goodreads complained about the ending that it was clear Barbara Marshall had simply carried it over from the novel and it was the Constantines who were the culprits.

Loan Shark (Encore Pictures, Lippert Films, 1952)

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

Later on March 29, my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Loan Shark, a 1952 “B” from Encore Pictures (as soon as I saw that credit I inevitably joked to Charles, “Haven’t we seen this before?”) released through Lippert and dealing with a loan-shark racket that victimizes the employees of the Delta Tire Company. (I was tempted to joke that Delta would be better off if they made their tires round rather than triangle-shaped, but there was enough “tire porn” in the movie it was clear that Delta tires, like everybody else’s, were round.) Directed by Seymour Friedman from a story by future producer Martin Rackin and a script by Rackin and Eugene Ling, Loan Shark stars George Raft as Joe Gargen, who’s just been released from prison after serving a nearly three-year prison sentence for assault. (He hit somebody in a bar fight and knocked him down, but though he only used his fists, since he’d once been a professional boxer his fists legally counted as “weapons.”) He shows up at the unnamed town where Delta has its headquarters to stay with his sister, Martha Haines (Helen Westcott). Only the workers at Delta are being victimized by a particularly nasty ring of crooks who first run an illegal casino where the Delta employees gamble away their money, then offer to loan them at typically outrageous rates of interest so high that the poor victims are continually paying interest and never get a chance to pay off the principal. What’s more, the gang has a bunch of thugs on retainer to beat up anyone who falls behind on their payments. Martha’s best friend, Ann Nelson (Dorothy Hart), is the secretary of the plant supervisor, Mr. Howell (George Eldredge), who’s trying to work with the union leader to break the loan-shark gang once and for all.

She offers to get Joe Gargen a job at Delta Tire, but Joe at first refuses when he finds that what the job really is is to infiltrate the loan-shark gang and thereby get the information they need to report them to the police. Then Martha’s husband Ed (William Phipps) is murdered by Charlie Thompson (Russell Johnson), who’s ostensibly just another Delta worker but is secretly part of the gang. His real job is to steer fellow Delta workers to the illegal casino and hook them up with the loan sharks. Charlie knocked off Ed because Ed was threatening to organize the Delta workers to fight back against the gang and resist them. Joe takes the job of busting the gang but insists on doing it his way with no interference either from Delta’s management or the union and no involvement of the police. Joe ultimately gets invited to join the gang by Vince Phillips (John Hoyt), its above-ground leader, but enforcer Lou Donelli (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane) is suspicious of him. Joe rises quickly in the gang, especially after he opens a legitimate-seeming laundry, Embassy, as a front to reach out to bored housewives and ensnare them as casino and loan-shark customers. Of course Martha and Ann are thoroughly disgusted with Joe’s gang involvements, especially since Joe can’t explain to them why he’s doing it. In that regard Loan Shark resembles a 1930’s Warner Bros. gangster movie, including ones George Raft had previously made, in which the good guy has to pretend to be a crook to infiltrate a criminal organization but can’t tell those near and dear to him why he’s doing it. Joe is determined to remain in the gang long enough to suss out the mysterious “Mr. Big” who’s really in charge of it and making all the money, and to accomplish this he starts keeping his own set of books about Embassy Laundry detailing how much money they’re actually taking in, so even if they escape justice for the loan-sharking he can still report them to the Internal Revenue Service and get them busted as tax cheats. Alas, Joe “outs” himself by calling Howell from the Embassy office, unaware that Donelli has flipped on the office intercom so he can eavesdrop on Joe’s end of the call.

Joe gets waylaid outside the office by Phillips and Donelli, though he refuses to get in the same car as them and insists on taking a taxi to the secret headquarters of the real head of the organization, In a 1930’s movie, made during a far more anti-capitalist age, Delta CEO Mr. Howell would have turned out to be the “Big Boss,” but as of 1952 it is Walter Kerr (Larry Dobkin), whom we’d previously seen only as the gang’s seemingly milquetoast accountant. Ultimately there’s a big shoot-out in Walter’s home in which both he and Donelli are killed, and after they learn the real reason Joe had apparently sold out to the gang, Martha and Ann reconcile with him and there’s the expected clinch between Joe and Ann at the end. There’s also a rather odd credit for a song called “Peru,” composed by Victor Young with lyrics by Edward Heyman and with a melody strikingly reminiscent of the 1930’s song “September in the Rain,” but though it’s heard as an instrumental through much of the movie (including a relatively complete performance by a vaguely Latin band in a bar called, like the one in The Leech Woman, simply “Bar”), no one actually sings it – not even Margia Dean as “Ivy,” a waitress and (it’s hinted) B-girl at “Bar” and the illegal casino for which it’s a cover. Loan Shark is a pretty predictable movie – though that in itself was a relief after the hairpin turn Wife Stalker took in its last five minutes – but also a surprisingly well-made one, even though it would have been better if Raft had made it 15 years earlier and hadn’t been so obviously over the hill as he was here (he was 51 when he made Loan Shark and both he and Paul Stewart were obviously being stunt-doubled in their fight scenes). Incidentally, Charles and I both looked up Raft’s career on imdb.com after Loan Shark, and it turned out his real name was George Ranft (just one letter longer than his screen moniker), he lived until 1980, and his last film, made that year, was called The Man With Bogart’s Face. Given the bizarre connections between Raft’s and Bogart’s careers – Bogart got major boosts from making High Sierra (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) after Raft turned them down, and Raft actively lobbied for the male lead in Casablanca (1942) only to be told by Jack Warner, “Forget it. After High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart’s a bigger star than you are now” – Raft must have felt haunted by Bogart’s memory even though Raft survived him by 23 years!

Three Bad Men (Fox Film Corporation, 1926)

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

Last night (March 26, 2025) my husband Charles and I watched Late Night with Stephen Colbert, which among other things featured Chris Hemsworth taking the “Colbert Questionert,” a list of 15 questions Colbert asks selected guests to make sure they can be well and truly “known” to him and his audiences. One of the questions was, “Favorite Action Movie” – and if I were asked that question my choice would be an unusual out-of-left-field one: John Ford's tragically neglected and unsung 1926 silent masterpiece, Three Bad Men. My husband Charles and I watched it on January 13, 2008 – four months before I launched this blog – and here’s what I had to say about it when I wrote my journal the next morning.

My partner Charles and I watched the third film in sequence from the Ford at Fox box — which turned out to be an unexpected masterpiece; Three Bad Men, a surprisingly dark Western set against the backdrop of the Dakota land rush in 1876 (a precursor to the one in Oklahoma 14 years later and triggered by the discovery of gold in the Dakota Hills, for which the Sioux Indians were forced off their lands and onto smaller and nastier reservations — a reality considerably whitewashed in this film’s expository titles — to make room for the whites). Three Bad Men was based on a novel called Over the Border by one Herman Whitaker, though it certainly has a family resemblance to Peter B. Kyne’s story “Three Godfathers” (which Ford had already filmed at Universal in 1919 as Marked Men and would remake for MGM in 1948 in color, with John Wayne in the lead). It was scripted by John Stone with titles by Ralph Spence and Malcolm Stuart Boylan — though the cornball humor and the references to actual old songs of the period are pure Ford (it’s intriguing that Ford was using old songs in his films even before sound came in and actually allowed him to make sure the audience could hear them) — and photographed by George Schneiderman, though this time the surviving print was scratchy and grainy and, though quite watchable, didn’t do justice to Schneiderman’s work the way the DVD’s of Just Pals and The Iron Horse had. Also, according to Ford biographer Tag Gallagher, the film was drastically cut during its initial release (from 118 to 92 minutes) and the shorter version is all that survives — one suspects the longer version would have made more of some of the contrasts, like the Southern background of leading lady Lee Carlton (Olive Borden), revealed when the canteen on her wagon is grey and has the crossed-swords Confederate logo and the initials “C.S.A.” on it, versus the Northern background of leading man Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien), who appears in most of his scenes in full Union uniform — but, like such other famously shorn films as Greed and The Magnificent Ambersons, what’s left of Three Bad Men is enough to establish its greatness.

Gallagher says it was a major box-office flop in 1926 — so much so that Ford, who in the preceding 12 years of his directorial career had made Westerns almost exclusively, didn’t make another Western at all for the next 13 years (until Stagecoach marked his return to the genre). What I suspect turned audiences off of this movie in 1926 is the very quality that today makes it seem far ahead of its time: its moral ambiguity. The titular three bad men are outlaws “Bull” Stanley (Tom Santschi, a second-tier Western star who lasted until the end of the silent era but mostly in independent “B”’s), Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and “Spade” Allen (Frank Campeau), and we know they’re bad because we see a montage of wanted posters for them in various jurisdictions (including Mexico!) and crimes (mostly bank robbery and horse stealing), but in the plot of the film they actually become heroes and (like the “bad” men in Three Godfathers) are redeemed at the end by sacrificing their lives for a good cause — here, to save the ingénue leads. The real villain is Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen, a surprisingly cosmopolitan actor to turn up in a John Ford Western), the sheriff of the town of Custer, from which the land rush is supposed to start; though supposedly on the side of law and order, he actually has his own gang of criminals, whom he sends after the high-priced thoroughbred race horses in the Carlton wagon train. Hunter’s gang kills Lee Carlton’s father, but then the three “bad” men happen by because they were planning to steal the race horses themselves, only instead of doing so they drive off Hunter’s men and save Lee, with “Bull” insisting to his sidekicks that they leave Lee’s horses alone while he takes the girl under his personal protection. Lee and O’Malley had already met earlier in a rather annoying meet-cute in which she had got grease on her face from her wagon losing its wheel (his face looks like that of a normal human being, but hers is so heavily swathed in white makeup she looks like a mime), and intriguingly it is Lee who is the sexual aggressor between them, but through most of the film Lee is living with “Bull” and seems genuinely attracted to him, and it’s he who decides he isn’t worthy of her and so he sends his men into Custer to find her a suitable husband.

There’s one incredible scene in the town saloon in which Mike and “Spade” (whose body language when they sleep together does seem decidedly homoerotic) fasten onto a “dandy” type and practically cruise him — when they’re not opening his mouth and kicking his leg as they would do if they were buying a horse. Hunter is shown as such a no-goodnick he off-handedly tells his mistress Millie (Priscilla Bonner) to get lost (and there’s a mistaken-identity scene in which she sneaks up behind O’Malley, who’s joined “Bull”’s entourage, and attempts to seduce him while he has his eyes closed and responds because he thinks she’s Lee; it’s old hat but still funny) and devises a scheme to sneak across the border into land-rush territory the night before, grab a choice spot and drive off anyone who tries to claim that land legitimately. Three Bad Men contains a spectacular sequence of the land rush itself, comparing favorably to the depictions of the later Oklahoma land rush in William S. Hart’s Tumbleweeds (also released in 1926), Cimarron (1931) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939) and obviously meant as Fox’s attempt to attract audiences who’d loved The Iron Horse with more exciting mass action. It includes a great bit in which the editor of the Custer paper takes along a pressman and a press on a flatbed wagon so he can write dispatches from the land rush as it’s going on — which Ford insisted was based on a true story: “The newspaperman who rode along with his press — printing the news all through the event — that actually happened.” It also has a superbly staged fight scene in the Custer saloon and a heart-stoppingly beautiful shot introducing the title characters against either a rising or setting sun (we’re not sure which but, even in a less than pristine print, Schneiderman’s camerawork is absolutely gorgeous), but this is more than a simple story illustrated with pretty pictures.

The moral ambiguity and especially the strong attraction between Lee and “Bull” (anticipating one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from 1962, in its love triangle between an innocent young woman, a bookish young man and a man of strength and power) make this an extraordinary movie for 1926, a precursor of the “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s and considered so innovative then. Three Bad Men also derives a lot of its richness from a favorite theme of Ford’s: the “civilization” of the West, the imposition of rules and mutual responsibilities on previously free-wheeling frontier communities, and the role of women in bringing that about (which makes me wonder, however good the 1931 Cimarron is as it stands, if it would have been even better if Ford had directed it; maybe he would have made Yancey Cravat’s wanderlust believable, a task that evaded Wesley Ruggles and his writers). There’s also a great scene in the middle of the land rush in which a pioneer family is stopped short of the gold country when their wagon breaks down, the husband paints a sign on their wagon reading, “Busted by God!,” the wife (it would be the woman!) picks up the soil and grinds it in her hands, and then solemnly tells her husband and us that the real gold in the Dakota country is in the fertility of its soil. In the end, the three bad men give their lives to save O’Malley and Lee from Hunter’s men and give them time to plant their homestead — and an epilogue reveals their farm, growing a bumper crop of wheat freely waving in the wind, and their home and child, whom they’ve named after the “bad” men who enabled them to survive long enough to settle, marry and give birth to him. Three Bad Men is a surprising masterpiece, its sentimentality held in sufficient check (as with Chaplin, Ford’s biggest weakness as an artist was his tendency towards the sentimental) that it can reach far deeper levels of emotion than the average film of its (or any, for that matter) time — and the fact that the “bad” men are its heroes and the representative of law and order its principal villain gives it a richness and moral complexity that may have put off 1926 audiences but makes the film seem modern now.

Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, March 22) I watched a Lifetime “race” movie called Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter (though maybe not; I wouldn’t put it past Lifetime and their partner company on this one, Swirl Films, to concoct a Single Black Female 4) which deals, like the previous two films in the sequence, Single Black Female (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html) and Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/single-black-female-2-simones-revenge.html), with the bizarre rivalry between Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin) and her half-sister Simone Hicks (Amber Riley from the cast of Glee). Monica and Simone had different moms but the same dad, a wealthy and well-regarded Black businessman and former Mayor of Houston (the Single Black Female stories alternate between Houston, Texas and Seattle, Washington) who sired Monica with his above-board wife but Simone with a long-term extra-relational partner. Simone’s mom farmed her out to the foster-care system and she was finally adopted, but never got over her bitterness. In previous episodes Simone murdered her and Monica’s dad by slipping poison into his drink, then killed Monica’s boyfriend, Trevor Williams (Kendrick Cross) by posing as Monica, luring him into an S/M sex scene and then strangling him with her whip. Single Black Female 2 ended with Monica being convicted of Trevor’s murder – Simone’s attempt to frame her half-sister having worked – though at the start of Single Black Female 3 Monica is released from prison after serving six months, since DNA evidence conclusively proved that someone else killed Trevor. But that doesn’t stop Trevor’s sister, Seattle Police Department Detective Ebony Williams (Porsha Williams), from insisting that Monica is guilty after all and vowing revenge.

Partly to escape the notoriety she’s still under in Seattle – where she hosted a successful news commentary TV show after graduating from a pop show in Houston called Tea Time – and partly because her old producer in Seattle, Nathan (Garrett Hines), has offered her a revival of Tea Time, she moves back to Houston. She’s accompanied by her best friend, beauty-salon owner Bebe Morgan (K. Michelle), who sets up shop in Houston and serves as Monica’s confidante. Simone was saved from the legal consequences of her actions by a Mother Superior at a Houston convent, Sister Margaret Rodriguez (Stella Doyle), who rescued her from her near-death at the end of Single Black Female 2, took her into the convent, brought her back to health and ultimately admitted her to the convent as “Sister Grace” to symbolize the grace of God that had spared her life. Along the way Simone had a daughter named Joy Chanel Javis (Kennedy Clemmons). By the time of Single Black Female 3 Joy, who like her mom was adopted, is a student at South Texas State College and is dating a nice-looking young man named Devin (Mason Douglas). Mysterious things start happening to Monica, including her car losing its brakes on a mountain road. She survives but is informed that her brake cable was cut, so it was a deliberate assault and murder attempt. Then a mysterious assailant slips poison into Devin’s drink just as Devin has stumbled onto the truth about Simone online, and he dies on Joy’s living-room floor while he and Joy are spending a quiet evening together. The mystery killer also sneaks into Sister Margaret’s bedroom and smothers her with a pillow, leaving all and sundry to wonder just who would kill someone as wonderful and universally beloved as Sister Margaret. Meanwhile, Monica has rejected Nathan’s proposal to revive Tea Time and instead made a counter-offer to host a video podcast about innocent people who’ve served long prison terms because they couldn’t afford good enough attorneys and forensic experts to establish their innocence. Though the first episode is about a Black woman who literally spent years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit but couldn’t prove she didn’t (all too often our justice system in practice is “guilty until proven innocent” even though it’s supposed to work the other way!), and Monica attributes her own release after just six months to the fact that she had a reasonable amount of money and celebrity with which to fight back, of course her own experience haunts the show.

Ultimately Monica confronts Simone, and Simone answers back that she didn’t cut Monica’s brake line, nor was she responsible for the death of Sister Margaret or the disappearance of Devin (whose corpse was hidden after he was killed and hasn’t yet been found). The two half-sisters make an uncertain and guarded bond to find out who did, and ultimately settle on [spoiler alert!] Ebony Williams, who in the meantime has turned up in Houston and flashing her police badge around town to get information about Monica, not letting people get close enough to it to see it’s from another city and she has no jurisdiction in Houston. Ebony goes out to the old mountain cabin once owned by Monica’s and Simone’s dad to track down Joy, only Joy stabs Ebony with a pitchfork and kills her. At first we assume it was in self-defence, but later it turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Joy was the real killer all along, murdering Sister Margaret and Devin and cutting Monica’s brake cord out of an insistence on protecting Simone’s secrets no matter how many killings she had to commit herself in the process. In the end Simone goes to the authorities and confesses her own crimes, and there’s a preposterous scene in prison in which Simone and her daughter Joy run into each other in orange jail garb and actually go for a walk together in the prison yard, happy and bonded at last even though they’re both in penal custody (and thoroughly deserve it). Would any prison in the world house a mother and daughter in the same unit? I don’t think so. Like the two previous episodes, Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter was written by Tessa Evelyn Scott and Sarah L. Jones (though this time Jones spelled her first name normally instead of using the “Sa’Rah” spelling she was credited with on the first two), though it had a new director, Kessa Ferguson Frasier. This was Frasier’s first feature-length film – until now her previous directorial credits had been for shorts or TV series episodes. Like Shari L. Carpenter, who directed the first two, she’s quite talented with a real flair for suspense and neo-Gothic atmospherics, but she’s hamstrung by the Lifetime conventions and a script that seems to have been concocted by people who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, believe in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast.

My Husband's Baby (Neshama Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 23) I watched another Lifetime movie with the provocative title My Husband’s Baby. This was directed by Alicia K. Harris from a script by Lu Asfaha, and centers around star football coach Damien Noble (Eddie G.) and his younger “trophy wife” Mecca (Moni Ogunsuyi, top-billed). Noble and Mecca are the co-stars of a “reality” TV show called Trophy Wives, produced by Aaron Pieper (Jeremy Walmsley, one of the few white people in the dramatis personae). Aaron is getting tired of Mecca’s do-goodisms, including hosting charity luncheons to raise money for noble causes, especially given that the other “trophy wife” on the show, a white woman named Tara (Dana Schiemann), is a bitch (or at least she plays one on the show), and is clearly Aaron’s favorite. The marriage of Damien and Mecca (just why did writer Asfaha name her after Islam’s holiest city? I kept thinking of “Macca,” one of Paul McCartney’s nicknames) is foundering on Mecca’s inability to conceive his child, even after the whole armamentarium of modern-day fertility treatments, including IVF. Things go south in a hurry when a white woman named Angela Wright (Samantha Brown) shows up on the Nobles’ doorstep and claims to be carrying Damien’s baby, which he supposedly fathered on a recent road trip with his team in which they had a party celebrating their victory on the field and got totally wasted. Damien has no memory of ever having had sex with this person, but a paternity DNA test establishes to within a 99.99996 percent certainty that Damien is the biological father of Angela’s baby. Angela insists on moving in with the Nobles and co-parenting the child with them; Mecca is understandably upset at the thought of having to accept Angela as a Mormon-style “sister-wife.”

The people around the Nobles try to work out ways of exploiting the situation to boost ratings for Trophy Wives. Mecca’s friend and manager Trish (Nadine Whiteman) suggest they work out a storyline for the show in which Damien is portrayed as a dastardly villain and Mecca righteously breaks up with him and strikes out on her own as an independent woman. But Mecca is too much in love with Damien to want to break up with him permanently, and even more so to paint him as a villain on a “reality” TV show. (I remember reading a Los Angeles Times report a few years ago about a threatened strike of reality-show writers, and joking, “It’s an illustration of the essential falsity of the ‘reality’ genre that a job called ‘reality-show writer’ exists.”) Damien has to deal with a lingering burden of mistrust from his wife because during their engagement he had sex with another woman as a means of ensuring that he really was willing to devote himself only to Mecca. Along the way Angela poisons Mecca’s best friend Trish by slipping poison into her drink, and later clubs Jalen Cross (Gabriel Davenport), Damien’s star player, on the head from behind, killing him too. Ultimately Damien and Mecca wrestle the gun away from Angela after Angela starts breaking water and giving birth just when she’s about to kill them both (fetus ex machina).

My husband Charles came out of our bedroom midway through My Husband’s Baby and correctly guessed the plot payoff [spoiler alert!]: Angela and the slimeball producer of Trophy Wives, Aaron, were in a relationship themselves and conceived this whole plan as a means of creating a more exciting storyline for the show and, in Angela’s case, getting back at Damien for forcing Jalen Cross (Gabriel Davenport), the star football player on Damien’s team, to break up with Angela because he didn’t think she was a responsible enough partner. Angela worked at the IVF clinic where Damien and Mecca were trying to have a child artificially, and stole some of Damien’s semen and used it to impregnate herself (so when Damien told Mecca he hadn’t had sex with Angela, he was telling the truth). Damien’s troubled star player Jalen had got Angela, whose real last name turns out to be “Zimmerman,” pregnant and then had broken off the relationship at Damien’s insistence. In the finale, Angela ends up holding a gun on both Damien and Mecca and saying, “You stole my baby, so I’m going to steal yours.” (We’re not sure how Angela lost her baby by Jalen after they broke up, but we were clearly supposed to assume either it was a miscarriage or an abortion.) Angela gets arrested (it’s becoming more common for Lifetime villainesses to be arrested instead of killed) and ultimately Damien and Mecca end up raising Angela’s baby, a girl. (Despite her white mother, luckily the girl ends up looking racially African enough – sort of like former President Barack Obama – to pass as Damien’s and Mecca’s child.) My Husband’s Baby actually could have made some interesting comments on the whole celebrity culture and the absurd fishbowl in which so-called “reality” TV stars are made to live, with their every move scrutinized by a skeptical public which gets to eavesdrop on them at the twist of a TV dial or access through “streaming” on the Internet. But it was, alas, the product of filmmakers who generally couldn’t have been less interested in its social-comment aspects, instead going for the sleaziest and most sexually titillating story elements. Once again, director Harris did the best she could with a troubled and exploitative script.

Breakaway (Cipa, Twickenham, Screencraft International, 1956)

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

Afterwards my husband Charles and I watched Breakaway, a 1956 British film that followed up on Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest in casting Tom Conway as British private detective and all-around intriguateur Tom “Duke” Martin. Once again Martin gets involved in an international criminal operation, though in this case the MacGuffin is not a super-rare stamp (the so-called “Barbados Overprint”) but a secret formula for combating metal fatigue invented by a German named Professor Dohlmann (Frederick Schrecker). Dohlmann is living in a hotel in East Berlin with his sister Freda (Marianne Walla), and this being five years before the Berlin Wall was constructed, a British man named Johnny Matlock (Brian Worth), drives straight across Berlin from the American to the Russian sector, though he has to pass through a checkpoint on the way. Once he crosses into the Russian sector, Matlock visits Dohlmann and says he can offer him political asylum in Britain, but Dohlmann is dying (he says a marvelously poignant line, “I’m a good enough engineer to know when a machine is breaking down,” meaning his body) and his sister refuses to leave without him. Matlock gets the formula from Dohlmann and photographs each page of it, then burns the original, only just as the papers are smoldering in Matlock’s oversized ashtray his room is invaded by a group of thugs after the secret formula. (Oddly, he’s using an ordinary 35 mm camera to photograph the papers and he’s doing so in horizontal format instead of turning his camera around and framing the pages vertically – just the opposite of the way most people shoot scenes vertically on their smartphone cameras even if the pictures would look better horizontally framed.) Matlock then leaves Berlin and flies to London, where he meets his girlfriend Diane Grant (Paddy Webster – a girl named Paddy?) at Heathrow Airport, only along the way back to wherever they live they’re waylaid by a gang of thugs, who beat Matlock (though he survives) and kidnap Diane.

Along the way they drop Diane’s purse, but later Tom Martin (Tom Conway) and his ultra-annoying comic-relief assistant, Barney (Michael Balfour, alas repeating his obnoxious role from Barbados Quest) come on the scene and grab the purse. Then Tom traces Diane’s movements and asks a bartender at the “Crystal Jug Club,” where Diane was a “regular,” about her, ostensibly to get in touch with her to return the purse. It seems that two rival corporations are after the formula, one owned by Matlock’s father Michael (John Horsley) and one owned by MacAllister (Michael George). There are a lot of car chases through deserted London streets (at one point I joked, “They’ve just driven into noir London”) as well as equally dark country lanes, and Martin teams up with Diane’s sister, Paula Jackson (Honor Blackman, eight years before she electrified the world as Pussy Galore in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger), to find the film and get it to the British authorities. I was amused by the in-joke in the script (by Norman Hudis based on a story by Paddy Manning O’Brine) about the two sisters using different last names when Tom Conway also had a brother, the more famous actor George Sanders, but used a different last name because he didn’t want to coast to fame on his brother’s coattails. (George Sanders and Tom Conway made two films together, 1942’s The Falcon’s Brother and 1956’s Death of a Scoundrel, in both of which they played brothers.) Charles didn’t like the way the villains, Matlock and Diane, went crazy at the end – and I suspect the reason they made Diane a villain was they’d already done that with the ostensible heroine of Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest – but ultimately it ended the way you hoped it would, with Tom recovering the formula (ya remember the formula?) and delivering it to the authorities. Oddly, Barbados Quest and Breakaway were made by different producing studios, different directors (Bernard Knowles on Barbados Quest, Henry Cass here) and writers (Kenneth R. Hayles on Barbados Quest, Hudis and O’Brine here), but Breakaway is at least a marginally better film, though Barney’s ultra-campy “comic relief” is even more tiresome here than in the earlier one. At least he gets one great scene, in which Barney runs away from the thugs that have invaded Martin’s home by fleeing out the window in his pajamas – and later, of course, he runs into the thugs anyway!

Law and Order: "Folk Hero" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, March 20) I watched the latest episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show was called “Folk Hero” and was quite obviously based on the real-life killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione on December 4, 2024. In this fictionalization the victim is called “Logan Andrews” (Laird Macintosh) and the killer is “Ethan Weller” (Ty Moback). The show actually begins with a scene between three police officers, including series star character Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), all in a patrol car together bitching about American health care and the difficulty in accessing promised benefits from health insurance companies. Then Andrews gets shot outside the offices of the (fictitious) health insurance company he ran by a figure wearing a camouflage hoodie. The cops have to deal with a red-herring suspect, a man who’d been chief operations officer of the company and had resigned after a fight with Andrews over Andrews’s insistence that the company “delay, deny, defend”: i.e., contest virtually every health-care claim met against it and deny claims right and left, confident that their clients either would be too sick or too ignorant to know they could appeal it. (The real Luigi Mangione is claimed to have inscribed a variant of that slogan, “delay, deny, depose,” on the bullets with which he allegedly killed Brian Thompson.) The killer, Ethan Weller, turns out to be a young man who was raised by his mother as a single parent after his father died when Ethan was four. Then his mom got metastatic breast cancer eight months before the main action. Her oncologist told her and Ethan that the only drug that could save her life was a recently approved one that was hellaciously expensive. Naturally her insurer, Andrews’s company, denied the claim and Ethan’s mother died of her disease.

Even after the police identify Ethan as the killer, they have a hard time running him down. A barista at a coffeehouse where Ethan stopped for a coffee and snack flatly refuses to help the cops, calling it a “hard no” because, while she got a look at his face, she won’t cooperate in giving the police a description because to her he’s a folk hero. Later on a number of people start wearing the same sort of camouflage hoodie Ethan had on when he killed Andrews to throw the police off his trail. Ultimately they arrest him, but his attorney, Megan Stratton (Laila Robbins), cooks up an unusual defense. She claims that Ethan killed Andrews under the “necessity” exemption to the homicide laws, saying that Andrews’s policies put thousands of people in imminent danger. Prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) argues that the “necessity” defense to a murder charge only applies when the killer was in the immediate presence of the victim and the victim was literally threatening the life of the killer or a third person. The case draws a progressive judge, William Moscatello (Benito Martinez), whose rulings are just about everything the defense could ask for. Though I was a bit surprised that Megan didn’t call the health insurance executive who had resigned from Andrews’s company rather than go along with his “delay, deny, defend” plans, the case goes to trial and the jury ultimately returns a verdict. Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear what the verdict is because producer Dick Wolf and writers Rick Eid and Scott Gold abruptly cut to the closing credits just as the jury’s African-American woman foreperson (Keisha T. Fraser) is about to announce it. Maybe the writers themselves disagreed on what the just and proper outcome should have been, but it was still an annoying cop-out at the end of an otherwise quite well-written and well-dramatized (the director was Carlos Bernard) episode. I remember Charles and I were watching a TV news report on the real United Healthcare CEO murder and, as we heard some talking head on MS-NBC say, “There are good reasons for Americans to hate health insurance companies, but murdering their CEO’s is not a solution,” and I immediately talked back to the TV, “No, single-payer is the solution.”

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Let Me Bring Pardon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 20, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was on just after that, “Let Me Bring Pardon,” was in its own way just as powerful as the “Folk Hero” episode on Law and Order. It was a sequel to “Rorschach,” aired November 7, 2024, which picked up the story of Ellie Hughes (Jen Parker Davis), who was traveling across the country with her boyfriend Chris Becker (Graham Patrick Martin) shooting a “vlog” (a video Web log) and telling their followers how happy and how much in love they are – until it all went south one night in Rockland County, New York. Ellie took off to cruise a bar, Chris had a jealous hissy-fit, and ultimately he attacked her and put her in a permanent coma. He tried to weasel out of it by claiming a third person had attacked both of them, but the cops discovered there was no such person. That’s all in the backstory; as “Let Me Bring Pardon” opens, Laura Hughes (Jama Williamson), Ellie’s mother, and Virginia Becker (Gina Costigan), Chris’s mother, have formed an uneasy alliance. Ellie is now in a long-term care facility but the doctors there discover that she’s pregnant. They estimate the time of conception as between 12 to 16 weeks before, which leaves it uncertain as to whether the biological father was Chris or someone who sneaked into her room at the trauma center she was in before she was placed in long-term care and raped her. The SVU detectives want to take DNA from the fetus to run a genetic test, but Laura Hughes flatly refuses, saying that Ellie has had enough needles stuck in her for several lifetimes and she won’t authorize one more. So they have to go to Chris, who’s serving a 25-year sentence for attempted murder, and ask him to file a petition requesting a fetal DNA test on Ellie and her offspring.

The test comes back and definitively proves that Chris is not the father, which leaves the SVU cops with the chancy task of finding out who is. The detectives ask the staff at the trauma center for a list of all their male employees during the time Ellie was in there, and they get a list of 150 names and ask them all to take DNA tests. The only one who refuses is the head of neurosurgery there, Dr. Isaac Haimes (Mark Shapiro), who says he can’t be bothered because he’s on his way to perform an important and elaborate emergency operation. Naturally this zooms him to the top of the suspect list, but he turns out to be a red herring. The real rapist is the trauma center’s volunteer chaplain, Caleb Hartwell (a really sexy actor named Garnett Coffey), who turns out to have a wife, Lilith (Madeline Anîfé), and a four-month-old baby, Zachary (everyone in his family would have a name from the Bible!), himself. When the cops finally arrest him – in true Law and Order fashion, in the middle of a service he’s leading at his church – he insists that Ellie’s child is a “miracle baby,” fathered by God, and he was just the instrument through which that was possible. It’s not clear whether he came up with this as just a B.S. rationalization or he’s crazy enough that he truly believes it, but either way that’s the defense he’s going with. Indeed, the writers, old Law and Order hands David Graziano and Julie Martin, leave it powerfully ambiguous not only what Caleb’s motives were but what’s going to happen to Ellie’s child once it’s born. Though before the paternity was definitively established, Laura Hughes and Virginia Becker were talking about co-parenting even though one of them only has a part-time job and the other is a temp, I found myself wondering if Lilith Hartwell, whose understanding passes understanding (as Nora Ephron put it in her essay about Trans person Jan nèe James Morris and their wife’s insistence on staying married even after they transitioned), would ask for the baby herself and raise lt alongside her own. It is her husband’s biological progeny, after all!

No Man of Her Own (Mitchell Leisen Productions, Paramount, 1950)

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

On Wednesday, March 19, my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing if rather mixed film on Turner Classic Movies, which they showed as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to Barbara Stanwyck: No Man of Her Own (1950), a film noir – or at least a film gris, my joking term for a movie that attempts to be noir but falls short either thematically or visually. No Man of Her Own was based on a 1948 novel called I Married a Dead Man – a much better title – by echt noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Many quite good noirs were made from Woolrich’s stories, either under his own name or his pseudonym “William Irish,” including Phantom Lady (1944), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Fear in the Night (1947) and its remake Nightmare (1956), and by far the best known film of a Woolrich story, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Woolrich’s great weakness as a writer was plot points that make virtually no sense; for example, Fear in the Night asked us to believe that a person could be hypnotized into literally committing a murder but believing he had only dreamed the crime. I looked up I Married a Dead Man on Wikipedia (I’ve never read the book), and it was about a young woman named Helen Georgesson who has an affair with a scoundrel. Georgesson gets pregnant, and when she’s eight months along the baby’s father gives her a train ticket from New York to San Francisco and a $5 bill. On the train she encounters a young newlywed couple named Hugh and Patrice Hazzard, only the train crashes and the Hazzards are both killed. Since Helen was trying on Patrice’s wedding ring at the time of the crash, she’s mistaken for Patrice and is taken in by the Hazzard family. She goes along with it because the Hazzards are well-to-do and can give her newborn son (in the book she gives birth in the wreckage of the train; in the film she delivers in a hospital after she’s taken there and put in a high-class ward the rich family have paid for) a good and financially secure life. All goes well for her until one day she receives a mysterious unsigned letter asking one question: “Who are you?”

Paramount bought the film rights to I Married a Dead Man and gave the task of adapting it to two writers, Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, neither of whom were noir specialists but both of whom were associated with classic noirs. Benson’s best-known film was Meet Me in St. Louis, based on 5135 Kensington, her memoir of her childhood in St. Louis, though she’d also worked on Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) because Hitchcock felt her small-town background would be helpful for that film. Turney worked on the script for Mildred Pierce (1945), though Mildred Pierce was a hybrid – half romantic melodrama and half film noir – and Turney worked on the romantic-melodrama parts while Ranald MacDougall wrote the noir portions and got sole credit. Paramount’s choice of a director was also problematic: Mitchell Leisen, a more or less openly Gay man who’d started out as an assistant to Cecil B. DeMille and by the early 1930’s had worked his way up to directing himself. Leisen had directed the spectacular musical Murder at the Vanities (1934) but that film had been far less entertaining than it could have been because Leisen hated Busby Berkeley’s lavish production numbers and insisted that the numbers in Murder at the Vanities be shot from the vantage point of a good seat in a theatre. Leisen’s best films were ones in which Preston Sturges, Norman Krasna or Billy Wilder were his writers, and Sturges and Wilder both got so exasperated at the changes Leisen made in their scripts they sought out and won directorial jobs themselves. Leisen had worked with Stanwyck before on Remember the Night (1940), a marvelous screwball comedy with Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the prosecutor who ultimately falls in love with her, but Sturges wrote the script for that one and was disappointed that Leisen didn’t think MacMurray could handle the rapid-fire dialogue exchanges Sturges had written for him and Stanwyck.

For No Man of Her Own – a title Paramount lifted from a 1932 romantic comedy they’d made with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (their only film together, four years before they became a couple for real) with nothing in common plot-wise with this one – Benson and Turney changed the characters’ names to “Helen Ferguson” (Barbara Stanwyck) and “Hugh and Patrice Harkness” (Richard Denning and Phyllis Thaxter). Hugh’s parents were played by Henry O’Neill and Jane Cowl; Cowl had been a major stage star in the early 20th century and was in the middle of a late-in-life comeback in films that lasted until her role in Bette Davis’s first post-Warner Bros. feature, Payment on Demand (1951), made before but released after All About Eve. The first half of the film closely follows Woolrich’s tale but the second half veers into some pretty bizarre melodramatic complications. In the movie the document that lets Helen Ferguson, a.k.a. Patrice Harkness, know that someone is on to her is a telegram, not a letter, and it contains three questions instead of just one. The sender turns out to be Stephen Morley (a marvelously oily performance by Lyle Bettger), the man who got her pregnant in the backstory and is therefore the biological father of Helen’s son. We know Helen is about to be exposed as an imposter when we see Morley’s alternate girlfriend, listed in the dramatis personae only as “The Blonde” (Carole Mathews), at a dance party Helen attends as the date of the late Hugh Harkness’s brother Bill (John Lund, a dull actor Paramount tried giving a star buildup to). Later Helen is accosted by Stephen Morley himself, who demands that she pay him for his silence. When she writes him a check for $500 on an account the elder Harknesses have just opened for her, Morley announces that instead of leaving the small town of Caulfield, Illinois where the film is set, he’s going to demand that she marry him so he can grab one-third of the Harkness fortune whenever the elder Harknesses croak. Mrs. Harkness has already changed her will to give Helen a.k.a. Patrice three-fourths of the fortune instead of splitting it evenly down the middle between Bill and the now-dead Hugh. Morley puts the $500 check in an envelope along with an incriminating document specifying Helen’s real identity, and threatens to mail it to the Caulfield police unless Helen agrees to the marriage.

The wedding ceremony takes place in a nearby town and is officiated by a justice of the peace (Gordon Nelson) with his wife (Virginia Brissac) and son (Anthony Cowan) as witnesses. Once it’s over, Stephen drives Helen to his live-work space under the business name “Superior Investments” (an ironic name that’s one of the few flashes of creativity in the Benson/Turney script), and Bill tries to follow but loses control of his car in the snow. By the time he tracks Helen down, she’s in the office of Superior Investments but Stephen is lying in bed, clearly already dead. We hear a shot ring out and presume Helen has shot Stephen with a .38 revolver she got from the Harknesses’ desk drawer, but later Bill (though not Helen, who goes on thinking that she shot Stephen) checks the gun and finds bullets in all its chambers. Then there’s a series of plot reversals that, though they don’t appear to be Cornell Woolrich’s work, have his fingerprints all over them: first [spoiler alert!], Mrs. Harkness writes a dying declaration just before she croaks from a heart attack in which she confesses to the murder herself, saying she sneaked over to Stephen’s live-work space and shot him to spare Helen, whom she’s come to love as part of her family, from his schemes. Then [double spoiler alert!] it turns out that both Helen’s and Mrs. Harkness’s guns were .38’s and Stephen was shot with a .32 – and “The Blonde” was the actual killer. No Man of Her Own is one of those frustrating films that could have been great, especially with writers more sensitive to the noir world than Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, and with a better leading man as well. TCM showed it as part of a night of Stanwyck’s crime films that also included Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece, Double Indemnity (1944), as well as Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – and when I posted to moviemagg about Sorry, Wrong Number (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/12/sorry-wrong-number-paramount-1948.html), I expressed the wish that John Garfield could have been her leading man in that film instead of the comparatively wooden Burt Lancaster.

Garfield would also have been a far better choice to play Bill Harkness in No Man of Her Own – though part of the problem there lay with Benson and Turney, who put absolutely nothing in their script about the obvious unease Bill would feel about dating and falling in love with his sister-in-law (not that Lund could have acted it effectively if they had). The film does include a marvelous dialogue exchange in which Helen, recovering in the hospital from the train crash, casually asks one of the nurses who’s paying for her care. She’s told – no surprise – that the Harknesses are because they consider her “family” and her son to be their long-awaited grandchild. If they weren’t, the nurse explains, she’d be in the “charity ward” and get either substandard care or almost none at all. It’s a neat little indictment of America’s preposterous profit-driven health care system at a time when Congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats had just blocked President Harry Truman’s proposal for national health insurance. It also contains snatches of voice-over dialogue from Stanwyck’s character, expressing her skepticism that she can maintain the “Patrice Harkness” identity forever and she’s bound to get caught sometime. There’s even a neat borrowing from the Ken Maynard Western Smoking Guns in which Helen inadvertently almost gives the game away when she doesn’t recognize the song “Molly Malone,” which was the real Hugh Harkness’s favorite – though fortunately for her the elder Harknesses write that off as a memory lapse caused by the accident. (In Smoking Guns the scene was reversed: the impostor plays a music-box record of a song the person he’s posing as actively hated.) What saves No Man of Her Own is Stanwyck’s typically intense performance as Helen a.k.a. Patrice – and equally fine work by Jane Cowl as well as two first-rate bad guys in Lyle Bettger and Carole Mathews, whose appearances (especially Mathews’s) are indelible. Mathews should have had a major career in these sorts of femme fatale roles; instead her career got sidetracked into the wilderness of series television.

Murder on Approval, a.k.a. Barbados Quest (The Barbour Corporation, Screenbound International Pictures, 1955)

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

Last night (Monday, March 17) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie on YouTube, a 1955 British crime thriller alternately called Barbados Quest and Murder on Approval. I’m guessing the producing studio, the Barbour Corporation, had second thoughts about calling it Barbados Quest because that would have led audiences to believe all or some of it took place in Barbados, and none of it does. I jokingly called it The Maltese Stamp when I introduced it to Charles, little realizing how right I was! The MacGuffin is a super-rare (only four copies known to exist, and three are locked up in private collections and never publicly exhibited) postage stamp called the “Barbados Overprint.” An American collector, J. D. Everleigh (Launce Maraschal), has paid a British stamp dealer, Robert Coburn (Campbell Cotts), 10,000 pounds for the Barbados Overprint that was the prize possession of the late Lord Hawksley, a major philatelist. (Yes, there are the inevitable puns on the word “philatelist.”) Only Everleigh didn’t deal with Coburn directly but instead with someone posing as the stamp dealer’s agent, Geoffrey Blake (Brian Worth), and once he gets back to America (New York City, to be precise) Everleigh becomes convinced the stamp is counterfeit and made up as part of a crooked scheme to swindle him. To solve the crime and recover either the real stamp, the money, or both, Everleigh turns to international private detective Tom Martin (Tom Conway in his first of two films in this character, which is basically Tom Lawrence a.k.a.The Falcon in a new disguise) who orders him to go to London and get to the bottom of the missing stamp business. Martin crosses paths with Hawksley’s widow (Grace Arnold), who disclaims any knowledge of her late husband’s stamp collection but is well aware of the value of the Barbados Overprint, and also her secretary, Jean Larson (Delphi Lawrence, the female lead). The Hawksley stamp collection is supposed to be auctioned off in six months’ time but certain items in it, including the Barbados Overprint, are being sold clandestinely. Blake swore Everleigh to secrecy for six months when he bought the Barbados Overprint (or the fake one substituted for it) so as not to interfere with the planned auction.

Martin and Larson investigate the crime together – the two drive a really cool-looking Jaguar sedan with doors that open the opposite ways from most cars, then or now – and they find a circus poster that gives them a clue. They become convinced that whoever engraved the poster also made the phony plates to print replicas of the Barbados Overprint (so the plot not only resembles Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon but Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, in which multiple copies of a super-rare American coin, the Brasher Doubloon, were created and circulated by fraudsters, and in both The High Window and Murder on Approval one of the criminals turns out to be a long-suffering young relative of the rightful owner). The engraver turns out to be Stefan Gordoni (Ronan O’Casey), only he’s murdered by one of his co-conspirators just before Martin can interview him. At first we’re led to believe that Robert Coburn was just an innocent victim and Geoffrey Blake had posed as his agent to defraud the American stamp collector, but later it turns out Coburn actually masterminded the plot and hired Gordoni to create the plates to print the fake Barbados Overprints. What’s more [spoiler alert!], Larson, who seemed to be just a nice young career girl and a suitable match for Martin, turns out to be part of the plot herself, which Martin doesn’t figure out until the final scene, a confrontation at the Hawksley estate in which she holds a gun on him. Ultimately Martin weasels his way out of the threatening situation, the bad guys get arrested and he is on his way back to New York with the real stamp – only at the airport he’s momentarily (or maybe not so momentarily) distracted by the sight of a hot young woman, and there he goes again.

A lot of the Falcon movies Tom Conway starred in at RKO in the mid-1940’s also ended that way – the Conway character swearing off women and then tearing off after one. Like his brother, George Sanders (Conway chose to use a different last name precisely to avoid riding the coattails of his more famous brother), Conway was starting to look rather seedy by the 1950’s. His best films were his three for Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO: Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie (both 1942) and Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim (1943). According to imdb.com, Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest was supposed to be the start of a Falcon-style series, but only one other, Breakaway (1956), was made. More’s the pity, for despite its derivations, Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest is a reasonably entertaining thriller even though the sheer number of characters in on the phony stamp plot somewhat beggars the imagination!

Playing with Fire (5 Bridges Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 16) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Playing with Fire, about a young white straight couple, Loughlin (Brett Geddes) and Natalie (Kirsten Comerford, top-billed), who attract the attentions of an obsessed African-American firefighter named Jack Strathern (Stephen Adekolu). Loughlin is a medical student and Natalie is working her ass off as a night nurse at a hospital emergency room to pay his tuition and other expenses. Though he’s actually rather nice-looking (enough that in another Lifetime movie he might have been cast as the principal villain), Loughlin is befuddled and careless around the house, and Natalie returns home from work so exhausted that often she falls asleep on their living-room couch instead of being able to make it upstairs to their bedroom. Jack enters their lives when Loughlin inadvertently leaves a stove burner on when he leaves for school, and Natalie goes upstairs and takes a long bath in a bathroom mood-lit with at least one candle. (I wonder if screenwriter Caroline Portu had seen the 1976 Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born, with its infamous candle-lit bathtub seduction scene.) Apparently she nods off in the tub, and by the time she awakens the entire hallway is engulfed in flames. Natalie climbs out the window, stands on a ledge and then looks down at the sheer length of the drop down two stories. Fortunately, the fire department arrives in time to rescue her. The team is led by a heavy-set woman named Mandy (Shannon McDonough), whom I read as a Lesbian even though Portu gave us no actual information about her romantic or sexual life, and it includes both Jack and Tony (Deklon Roberts), also tall and Black but a lot more normal mentally.

Loughlin and Natalie accept an invitation from Natalie’s Black friend Alesha (Shanna Armogan) to stay at her place until their own home is rebuilt – and of course Natalie is anxious about how quickly the fire insurance company will pay their claim so they can start rebuilding – but Jack has other ideas. Jack recommends that Natalie and Loughlin move into an apartment in his building that’s rented by a British couple who spend half of each year in London and half in the U.S. (the locale is eventually identified as Chester, Pennsylvania, which really exists and is the oldest city in the state, the place where William Penn first landed to establish his colony). Unbeknownst to the Collinses, Jack not only has the place totally bugged but he’s a whiz at using artificial intelligence. He uses A.I. to simulate Loughlin’s voice and leave messages for people in Loughlin’s voice (I guess Playing with Fire counts as an historical milestone as the first Lifetime movie – or at least the first I’ve seen – to use A.I. as a plot gimmick). One of his messages in Loughlin’s voice is an invitation to Loughlin’s study partner, Alison Sun (Rachel Sellan), to meet him at a hotel bar to get together for romantic purposes. Loughlin and Natalie have already had arguments over Alison’s obvious crush on Loughlin, which he responded to by kissing her one night and then, like a typical American straight guy, felt immediately guilty about it. Loughlin insists that he never sent the message, and tries to prove it by showing Natalie an error message on his phone alerting him that someone else signed onto his device with a different e-mail address. Natalie, of course, doesn’t believe it, especially when she logs onto Loughlin’s phone and sees three pictures (actually taken secretly by Jack) that make Loughlin’s and Alison’s interaction look more physically intimate than it was.

Jack crashes into Natalie’s and Loughlin’s apartment – though, as Charles noted, for some reason Jack needs to pick their lock instead of having the key, even though otherwise he seems able to enter and leave their apartment at will – and later he comes by to present Natalie a so-called “housewarming gift” of a plant Jack, Natalie and Loughlin had seen and admired earlier at a rooftop restaurant. Jack puts out his hand to stroke Natalie’s face, and Natalie matter-of-factly brushes it away, and Loughlin just happens to walk in on them (he’d been on his way to school but he forgot something and went back for it) and has a jealous hissy-fit. Ultimately, like so many Lifetime villains before him, Jack’s obsessive mania gets farther and farther out; when Mandy (ya remember Mandy?) catches Jack at the fire station using his laptop to do Web searches on Natalie, Mandy gets suspicious and threatens to report him to human resources. Jack bides his time until that night, when he sneaks into Mandy’s apartment (how does he know where she lives?) and strangles her to death. The next morning, one of Jack’s white male colleagues wonders where Mandy is, especially since she’d asked him to report early that day, but Mandy just disappears and there’s no account of anybody actually discovering her body and realizing she’s dead. The climax comes when Jack burns down the home of Natalie’s friend Alesha (though fortunately she is out jogging with Natalie and therefore escapes the usual Lifetime fate of The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her) and then confronts Natalie in the apartment Jack arranged for her to have. Jack tries to convince Natalie that Loughlin deliberately set the fire to kill her so he could get together with Alison, but luckily she doesn’t believe him and all comes out right in the end.

One intriguing subplot is Jack’s explanation for why he became a firefighter in the first place; he says his ex-girlfriend Rebecca Montul (whom we never see) died in a house fire, and Jack became determined that no one else would ever die that way. Rebecca actually dated Jack after he joined the fire department, and Jack was so possessive and controlling she got out a restraining order against him. Previous Lifetime movies by other writers have had the ex turn up alive and talk to the current victim about their vengeful, crazy ex, but Caroline Pontu thankfully avoided that gimmick. Instead we see a picture of Rebecca, and she’s dark-haired and doesn’t look that much like Natalie at all even though Jack has told us he got obsessed with Natalie because she was the spitting image of Rebecca. Ultimately Loughlin and Natalie move back into their old house after it’s rebuilt, with Alesha helping them move and announcing that she is engaged to Tony (ya remember Tony?). Playing with Fire is a pretty average Lifetime movie, not either as good or as bad as a few of them have been, and the acting is O.K. but not spectacular; Jack’s character offers opportunities for either dramatic overplaying or dramatic underplaying as a psycho, but Stephen Adekolu doesn’t avail himself of either – though the direction by old Lifetime hand Alexandre Carrière is reasonably capable, exciting and fast-paced enough we don’t linger too long over the plot improbabilities.

Two Harold Lloyd Shorts: "Now or Never" and "I Do" (Hal Roach Studios, Pathé Distributors, Associated Exhibitors, 1921)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 16) Turner Classic Movies was showing a “Silent Sunday Showcase” program of three Harold Lloyd shorts from 1921, and after my husband Charles and I watched Playing with Fire on Lifetime I switched to TCM for the final two films on the Lloyd telecast. They were Now or Never and I Do, and the latter title was ironic indeed because in 1923, two years after these films were made, Harold Lloyd and his co-star, Mildred Davis, got married for real. (They stayed together until her death in 1969, two years before his, and of the great male comedians of the silent era – Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon – Lloyd was the only one who married just once.) The theme of both films was Lloyd’s character suddenly confronted with the responsibility of taking care of one or more children and being totally flummoxed by it. Now or Never takes place mostly on a train – though Lloyd and his nominal directors, Hal Roach (who also produced) and Fred C. Newmeyer, were utterly unable to create the illusion that the train was actually moving. The plot has “The Girl” (Mildred Davis), who works as a maid for a well-to-do couple, taking their daughter for a weekend trip on which she’s accompanied by “The Boy,” her boyfriend (Harold Lloyd). They’re on a train when the girl, billed as “The Lonesome Little Child” and played by Anna May Bilson, asks Lloyd for a glass of water – and in a series of grimly amusing pratfalls Lloyd keeps spilling said glass of water no fewer than four times before he finally manages to bring it to her. The Lonesome Little Child takes just one sip of it and then gives it back to Lloyd, who, feeling mocked by sheer frustration after he’d gone through the tortures of the damned to get her that cup of water, dumps it on a transparently phony floral arrangement pinned to a woman’s dress. (Fortunately the woman isn’t wearing it at the time.) There’s also one scene in which Lloyd raises his hand to strike the obnoxious brat, though before he can actually hit the girl he’s upbraided by a woman for daring to strike a child.

I Do was a considerably better and funnier film, though it was also about the turmoil faced by a man without kids when he’s suddenly forced to take care of some whether he really wants to or not. I Do opens with a quite charming animated sequence showing the wedding of the central characters later played in live-action form by Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis. It then cuts to a title, “One Year Later” (how Lifetime!), and one year later the live-action Harold and Mildred are more or less happily married except that he’s beset by the familial demands of brothers-in-law in general and his own brother-in-law, listed in the credits as “The Agitation” and played by Lloyd stock company member Noah Young, in particular. The brother-in-law drafts Harold and Mildred to be his baby sitters for the upcoming weekend, saying, “They’re so quiet you won’t even know they’re there.” Needless to say, that proves to be less than the truth. The kids Lloyd and Mildred have to take care of in I Do are two rambunctious boys named “The Disturbance” (Jackie Morgan) and “The Annoyance” (Jackie Edwards). “The Annoyance” is still in a cradle but “The Disturbance” is not only able to walk but uses his ability to move under his own power to get into as much mischief as possible. When Lloyd enters the living room of his brother-in-law’s home, it looks like a tornado has hit it, and no sooner has he started to clean up the mess that “The Disturbance” sneaks around behind him and takes all the stuff out of Lloyd’s basket as fast as Lloyd can put it in there. Later Mildred manages to get “The Annoyance” to sleep at long last – only you just know what’s going to happen: Lloyd is going to take a noisy pratfall down a set of stairs and wake the kid up again. (It’s fascinating that even in a film without sound, you’re in no doubt about how much noise he’s making and you know it’s going to wake up the child.)

There’s also a succession of gags, similar to the ones involving water in Now or Never, in which Lloyd is obliged to fill the baby’s bottle with milk. His first attempt ends with him puncturing the seal of the milk bottle and having it splatter all over his body. Then he spills the milk bottle over the floor, and when he doesn’t have enough milk left over to fill the baby’s bottle he grabs a container of buttermilk from the icebox (back when that’s what it literally was: a box containing ice that kept food more or less cold until the ice melted, and you got home deliveries from an iceman who kept your icebox supplied) and fills it in with that. Then, in his attempt to get the rubber nipple onto the baby’s bottle, he breaks the bottle (a reminder of the days when baby’s bottles were still made of glass instead of plastic). Finally he gives up and pours the baby a glass of buttermilk, giving the kid a straw made of a pasta noodle, only he trips on the floor and breaks that, too. Midway through the film Lloyd and Mildred are scared by a report that a burglar is loose in the neighborhood, and there are a lot of fright gags as well as the sudden reappearance of a Black maidservant, Magnolia (Marie Mills), who’d left earlier because it was her night off (sticking Lloyd with the task of filling the baby’s bottle himself) but returns later in the evening. I momentarily expected that she’d turn out to be one of the burglars, disguising himself as a Black woman, but she doesn’t, and Lloyd deserves kudos for casting an actually Black actress in this role instead of using a white actor in (bad) blackface the way D. W. Griffith did in The Birth of a Nation.

I Do was directed by Hal Roach personally and the writing credits go to Roach and future director Sam Taylor (he of the infamous credit on the Douglas Fairbanks/Mary Pickford The Taming of the Shrew: “By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”), though I suspect that most of the gags were worked out collectively in a writers’ room (an institution Roach’s great rival as a film comedy producer, Mack Sennett, actually invented). Now or Never and I Do are great examples of silent comedies just below the genius level of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton (though Kevin Brownlow and the late David Gill did a documentary on Lloyd and called him The Third Genius, which is more supportable looking at his later features than his shorts). Lloyd was actually the most “normal” of the major silent comedians; he married just once, he had the longest career, he adjusted to sound quite well (Chaplin famously hated talkies and Keaton, whose love of gadgetry should have suited him for sound, lost control of his career after Joseph Schenck dissolved their production company in 1928), and kept control of his work after he retired, though for years he also kept it woefully out of circulation until its recent rediscovery through the work of his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd.

Law and Order: "Crossing Lines" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 13, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 13) my husband Charles and I watched my usual cycle of crime shows on Thursday night: Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order show was called “Crossing Lines” and dealt with the murder of the influential 50-something James Powers (Benjamin Eakeley), son of Senator George Powers (Richard Hughes) and his wife Frances (Denise Cormier). He was found dead at the foot of a stairway in Riverside Park with his head bashed in three times with a rock. The killer turns out to be a journalist named Julia Gallo (Caroline Pluta) who was about to publish a negative story about James Powers that would have meant an end to his political ambitions. He was planning to run for governor on the strength of his dad’s name, and Gallo’s article – revealing that though he posed as an environmentalist, he was also a big-game hunter and, it was hinted, a sexual predator – would have destroyed his chances. Just before he was killed, we saw James Powers talking rather animatedly on his phone as he walked the streets and nearly got run over by a few drivers, telling the unseen and unheard (by us, anyway) person he was talking to that if they persisted in going all-out to destroy his career, he’d destroy them, too. It turned out that James really did have devastating ammunition on Julia; eight years before she’d had an affair with a rock star while still married to someone else, and though she’d denied under oath in the divorce proceedings that she and the rock star had had sex, either he or a paparazzo posted a video online that showed them getting it on. When Gallo is finally busted for the crime, naturally this gets brought up in court by her attorney, Rose Gregory (Jackie McCarthy). Things get further complicated when it turns out that Rose Gregory is also the new girlfriend of New York District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), only they keep ending up discussing the case on their in-home dinner dates even though they both know full well they shouldn’t be doing that. And they get even more complicated when Senator Powers weighs in on the case and tries to get testimony about James’s alleged sexual assault on Julia – she’s claiming she killed James in legitimate self-defense after he tried to rape her – excluded. Senator Powers even tries to get Baxter to offer a plea deal so the salacious details about his late son don’t come out in court. The judge in the case, Sydney Bolden (Gary Pérez), tries his best to be level-headed and fair, but the hatreds in the courtroom in all directions prove to be almost too much for him. In the end Julia is convicted of second-degree murder, but there are really no winners in this rather sordid tale of power, sex, and political influence. If nothing else, it shows that there’s still life in that unimaginably ancient program and its writers (here, Pamela J. Wechsler and Marley Scheider) remain good at tweaking the old formulae of this show and creating something warm and genuinely moving with it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Undertow" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 13, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode from Thursday, March 13 was in its own ways even more powerful than the Law and Order that preceded it. It was called “Undertow” and told the rather pathetic (in both senses) story of a woman named Stacey Moran (Marilyn Caserta), a 30-year-old schoolteacher whose husband of five years, Tony Fusco (Mark Gorham), takes her to a swanky New York hotel called the Atelier for an expensive money-no-object dinner for their anniversary and then gets drunk (breaking his six months of sobriety) and makes a crude sexual assault on her in bed, which she responds to by leaving their hotel room and going downstairs to the lobby bar. While there she hooks up with a young man named Ryan Perry (played by a young actor of almost unearthly beauty named Billy Keogh), who’s sitting alone at the bar because his father is elsewhere in the hotel getting married to his third wife, Emily Perry (Clea Alsip). Together they head for the hotel pool and she takes a swig from a flask of vodka that, unbeknownst to her, is laced with the drug MDMA, also known as “Molly” or “ecstasy.” They end up in the hot tub and they have sex together. Then the next morning Emily Perry goes through the pockets of the rented tuxedo her stepson wore to her wedding (it’s established that Ryan’s mother died when he was still a toddler and his father had been married and divorced one other time since) and found a red pair of women’s lace panties. When Ryan admits that they’re from a woman he hooked up with at the hotel where his dad’s wedding took place, Emily immediately reports it to the Special Victims Unit because Ryan was just 16 years old and a high-school sophomore, so any sex he had with an adult counts as statutory rape. Stacey is arrested and indicted for third-degree rape. Prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) offers her a plea deal that will allow her to avoid prison time, but one thing he can’t offer her is keeping her name off the sex offenders registry, which will cost her her job as a schoolteacher. The case comes to a quite intriguing trial, as it turns out Ryan texted two of his school friends that he was “bored” with girls his own age and he was determined to seduce one of the 30-something bridesmaids at his dad’s wedding just to prove that he could. (Billy Keogh was already setting my Lust-O-Meter off the charts right then, and I was asking myself what I would do if someone that drop-dead gorgeous made a pass at me.) Between Stacey’s claim that she was incapacitated at the time and a photo of the two of them taken by one of the other wedding guests that made it look like she was enjoying it, the jury on the show is unable to reach a unanimous verdict and the judge declares a mistrial. I suspect the writer, Brendan Feeney, was also unable to decide for himself how the case should resolve and what was the most just outcome.

Elsbeth: "I See … Murder" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired March 13, 2025)

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

After that I switched from NBC to CBS March 13 and watched the latest Elsbeth, “I See … Murder,” which guest-starred Tracey Ullman as self-proclaimed psychic Marilyn Gladwell (I wondered if writers Sarah Beckett and Wade Dooley deliberately named her after Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm Gladwell), who gets an hourly rate of $1,500 (some big-name attorneys would drool over a fee that big!) for her consultations with people with more money than sense. Her biggest client/pigeon is Phyllis Pierson (Jill Eikenberry), whose husband George died two years earlier. Phyllis inherited a candy and snacks company from him, but George, via Marilyn, is telling her to let go of it and agree to a takeover bid from their biggest competitor. Unfortunately for both Phyllis and Marilyn, Phyllis’s son Tim (Max Jenkins) has just returned from Hollywood, where he ran a failed production company (he ruefully admits that his movies were too sophisticated for the general box-office taste), intending to take over his late father’s candy company and restore it to its former success. Then Tim is lured to a park by the promise of an online date and is shot through the breastplate with a bow and arrow. Suspicion first falls on a group of people who literally shoot rats in the park with bows and arrows – they don’t want to use standard rat traps because the poisons from them would leak into the environment and kill more desirable animals like squirrels – but they point out that the only arrows they use are blunt-tipped. Apparently these arrows kill rats in some way the writers aren’t that good at explaining, but are harmless to humans because their points won’t penetrate skin. Elsbeth’s former police partner, Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), gets promoted from uniformed officer to plainclothes detective in this episode, which means that Elsbeth needs another officer from the official force to partner her.

She gets assigned a gender-ambiguous officer named Nicky Reynolds, whose preferred gender pronouns are “they” and “them” and who is played by an actor of equally uncertain gender who’s billed on imdb.com as “b” (one letter, lower-case). As they investigate Tim’s disappearance and the discovery of the corpse – Marilyn leads them to it the day after the murder – Elsbeth keeps trying to draw out Reynolds in small talk and gets either no response at all or the most taciturn ones they can come up with. Eventually Elsbeth deduces from the sound of Marilyn’s voice that she’s not from Europe at all, as she claims. Instead she’s really from rural Pennsylvania, and by chance the arrow Tim Pierson was shot and killed with is a discontinued model which was pulled from the market precisely because its point was unusually sharp. Elsbeth and Reynolds canvass the hunting supply stores that used to carry those arrows and find that the one which supplied the arrow that killed Tim was from the same part of rural Pennsylvania that Marilyn was from. From that Elsbeth deduces that Marilyn herself killed Tim; her motive was that she was going to profit personally from the sale of the snack company to its principal competitor, and if Tim talked his mom out of the sale Marilyn would stand to lose a major amount of money. I couldn’t help but wonder if writers Dooley and Larson had read Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles (1936), a marvelous mystery novel about the murder of movie star Christine Clay by a fortune-teller who had publicly predicted her death and then killed her herself to make her prediction come true. (A Shilling for Candles was filmed the following year by Alfred Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, but he used only about one-third of Tey’s novel and changed both the identity of the murderer and their motive; in Hitchcock’s version the killer was the movie star’s estranged husband, and the giveaway is his uncontrollably twitching eye.) After the heavy-duty issues raised by the two Law and Order shows I’d seen before, this Elsbeth was a breath of fresh air, and while ordinarily I’m not that fond of comedy-mysteries, this one manages to thread the fine line between campiness and darkness (thank you, series creators Robert and Michelle King!).

The Lone Wolf's Spy Hunt (Columbia, 1939)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 12) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of the 1939 film The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt, third in the late 1930’s/early 1940’s series of Lone Wolf “B” movies at Columbia and the first that featured Warren William (a bit long in the tooth for this sort of romantic lead; he was 40 but the script referred to him as 35, and Charles chuckled at that) as Michael Lanyard, a.k.a. The Lone Wolf, reformed jewel thief turned amateur detective. I was interested in this one mainly because both Ida Lupino and Rita Hayworth were in it. Lupino plays Val Carson, daughter of Senator Carson (Brandon Tynan) – if the Senator has a first name, we never learn what it is. Val is Lanyard’s long-suffering girlfriend, and at least twice during the film he abandons her in the middle of a date to meet another woman and sticks her with the check. Rita plays Karen, a mystery woman (and one of the ones Lanyard abandons Val to be with) who’s part of a spy ring after the plans for a new anti-aircraft weapon. Aside from the fact that the MacGuffin is a set of plans for a high-tech weapon well before the U.S. entered World War II, it’s really not much of a movie, and compared to The Lone Wolf Strikes it falls short. It has a less interesting director (Peter Godfrey, who’d later decamp to Warner Bros. and make a few genuinely good movies like the first Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck and the remake of Escape Me Never with Errol Flynn, as well as total bombs like The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart and That Hagen Girl and The Girl from Jones Beach with Ronald Reagan), writer (Jonathan Latimer, a veteran of the pulps), and cinematographer (Allen G. Siegler). It also had a far less interesting actor, Leonard Carey, playing Lanyard’s manservant Jameson; in The Lone Wolf Strikes and for most of the rest of the series Jameson was played by the marvelously droll Eric Blore.

What The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt has going for it is mainly the salty performances by the three women: Lupino, Hayworth (considerably sexier than she was in Homicide Bureau and giving us a glimpse of the sultry attractiveness she’d portray in her best films), and Virginia Weidler, the child actress who enlivened film after film, including such classics as The Great Man Votes and The Philadelphia Story (in which she played Katharine Hepburn’s younger sister and does a brilliant impression of Hepburn in one unforgettable scene). Just why Weidler didn’t have a major career as an adult is a mystery; as she grew up she quit films and did stage work until she retired after she got married and died tragically young at age 41 from heart disease. Here Weidler is playing a young orphan relative of Lanyard’s; Lanyard is trying to raise her as best he can but she keeps testing the rules he imposes on her and making up new ones of her own, including posing as FBI agent “G-7” and repeatedly shooting Jameson with her cap pistol and insisting that he pantomime death at least three times a day. But one of the big things The Lone Wolf Strikes had to offer that The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt didn’t is an almost noir visual look. The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt is a pretty straightforward comedy-mystery in which the comedic elements are both stronger and more memorable than the mystery ones; we don’t get much of an idea of who the villains are, much less their motivations, and we presume they’re interested in selling the plans for the anti-aircraft gun to a sinister foreign power but Latimer doesn’t make that all that clear in the film itself. Despite excellent performances by the three women in the cast, The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt is a pretty lame movie whose defects are shown in a scene towards the end in which the inventor of the anti-aircraft gun turns up a kidnapping victim of the villains and we see this doddering old man and wonder, “Who the hell is he?”

The Philadelphia Eleven (Time Travel Productions, Good Docs, WHYY, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Tuesday, March 11) I looked up the KPBS schedule and found a fascinating program which I wanted to watch – and which, because my husband Charles was getting off work early, he could watch it with me. The film was called The Philadelphia Eleven and told the story of 11 women who challenged the Episcopal Church in 1974 over its refusal to admit women as priests. It was produced and directed by Margo Guernsey and began the story in 1970, when the U.S. Episcopal Church debated at their triennial convention whether to ordain women priests. The church’s organizational structure required that the proposal win approval from both the lay people at the convention and the church’s existing bishops, all of whom were men. The proposal to ordain women was narrowly defeated at the 1970 convention and advocates for women’s ordination made plans for the next church convention in 1973 in Louisville, Kentucky – where the proposal was defeated by a wider margin than it had lost by in 1970. By that time, women were already serving in the church as deacons, the next step before an actual ministry, and though the documentary doesn’t mention it, the late Bishop James Pike of San Francisco (one of the most amazingly progressive officials in the church’s history; it was he who in the early 1960’s started the “Council on Religion and the Homosexual” to debate whether the church should support Queer rights and admit Queer people to worship on an equal basis with everyone else) had insisted on ordaining the first woman deacon. Before 1965, women had been admitted to the title of “deaconess,” under which they had to wear blue habits that made people think they were the Episcopal version of nuns. They were also expected to remain sexually celibate.

In 1965, Pike ordained Phyllis Edwards as the first Episcopal woman deacon and insisted on giving her the full title instead of the inferior and insulting “deaconess” name and the restrictions that went along with it. This opened the door to other women who wanted to be Episcopal deacons, including the members of the Philadelphia Eleven themselves. After the major setback at the 1973 convention, they pulled together under the leadership of Suzanne “Sue” Hiatt and sought out retired bishops who would be willing to ordain them whether the church sanctioned it or not. According to the Wikipedia page on the Philadelphia Eleven, “By July 1974, as supporters of women’s ordination to the priesthood grew restless, three retired bishops stepped forward and agreed to ordain a group of qualified women deacons. The bishops were: Daniel Corrigan, retired bishop suffragan of Colorado; Robert L. DeWitt, recently resigned Bishop of Pennsylvania; and Edward R. Welles II, retired Bishop of West Missouri. Eleven women who were deacons presented themselves as ready for ordination to the priesthood, and plans for the service proceeded. The women who became known as the ‘Philadelphia Eleven’ were Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig.” The actual ordination of the Eleven took place at the predominantly African-American Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia on July 29, 1974, and was followed by a similar action involving four women deacons in Washington, D.C. who were ordained as priests a year later.

Speakers at the Philadelphia event specifically made the connection between the African-American civil rights movement and the struggle of women within the Episcopal Church for full equality, including access to the priesthood. Though the original plan had been to keep the event secret, someone leaked the news to the local media, and by the time the ordination rolled around TV crews from the three major networks of the time as well as plenty of print journalists were there to cover it. The documentary includes a fascinating shot of a local Philadelphia newspaper the next day that had three big headlines: the House Judiciary Committee’s passage of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon for “abuse of power,” the ordinations of the “Philadelphia Eleven,” and the death of singer “Mama” Cass Elliott at age 31. The film also includes actual recordings of the debates over women’s ordination at the time – and, all too predictably, they sound like particularly incendiary fiction writers coming up with insane caricatures of sexism. One especially nasty bishop said he was going to respond by ordaining the horse Secretariat, who, he said, at least had the right equipment, and he compared the women who’d been ordained at the Church of the Advocate to the horse’s posterior.

The big bozo-no-no came over whether the women priests had the right to lead the service of the Eucharist, which they were finally allowed to do at the Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. The Riverside Church already had a reputation as a politically and socially liberal one where Martin Luther King, Jr. had given his famous speech in which he said, “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” They still have that reputation today: their Web site (https://www.trcnyc.org) proclaims, “We are an interdenominational, interracial, international, open, welcoming, and affirming church and congregation. Whoever you are: You are safe here. You are loved here. You are invited into full participation in our life together. We welcome, affirm, and celebrate all God’s children, LGBTQIA+. We actively work to become an anti-racist congregation.” Among the most moving parts of this film were the sequences of women actually leading the Eucharist as part of various church services and it not being a big deal, despite the insistence of more socially retrograde members of the church that because Jesus Christ was male, and the standard depictions of God also show a male, therefore all priests must be male. The usual comeback from the supporters of women’s ordination was the quote from St. Paul that in the Christian church there was no longer a difference between Jew and non-Jew, between free and enslaved people, and between women and men. In 1975 the two male bishops who had allowed members of the Philadelphia Eleven to lead Eucharist ceremonies at their churches, William Wendt of the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. and Peter Beebe of the Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin, Ohio, were prosecuted by the male Episcopal establishment in what amounted to a heresy trial, though the official charge against them was violating church policy. Finally, at the next Episcopal Convention in 1976, held in the friendlier environment of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the church voted specifically to allow the ordination of women as priests.

While my husband Charles and I attend services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Banker’s Hill section of San Diego, where the head of the church is a woman and nobody makes a great deal about it, it’s also clear this story “plays” a lot differently in the current Right-wing political climate in the U.S. Many Fundamentalist Christian churches claim that their ranks are growing, while the ranks of mainstream Protestant denominations are shrinking, precisely because they still cling to old-line interpretations of the Bible that forbid women from serving as priests and also oppose any outreach to Queer people except on the basis of so-called “reparative therapy.” Though a number of the Philadelphia Eleven were, or had been, married to men and some of them had had children, one of the accusations against them is they were all Lesbians. One of the Eleven, asked point-blank if she were Lesbian, said, “Thank you!,” mystifying the person asking the question who’d obviously expected a yes-or-no answer. Merrill Bittner, one of the Eleven, later quit the priesthood and lived out the rest of her life in an off-the-grid cabin with a female partner. With all the political, economic and social gains from the 1930’s on under mortal threat right now from the second Donald Trump administration and the Right-wing fanatics with which he’s staffed his government, The Philadelphia Eleven is a story that “plays” quite differently than it would have if the nominal – and, in some cases, real – gains in social recognition of “diversity, equity and inclusion” were continuing instead of being actively and aggressively rolling back not only in government but in private companies and in the religious community. Still, The Philadelphia Eleven is a moving story of social change and how it can sometimes happen even in the seemingly most retrograde areas of society.