Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss (BlackStream Films, Cutting Room Floor, 2023)

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

Last night (Monday, April 28) my husband Charles and I watched a quite compelling KPBS local documentary on one of the legends of San Diego’s music scene: Lou Curtiss, whom I first encountered at the Adams Avenue location of Folk Arts Rare Records in the early 1980’s when my then-partner Cat and I had just moved to Adams from Golden Hill. I stumbled on Folk Arts during one of my walks through the neighborhood and ultimately bought a few old 78’s there (notably Faye Adams’s “Shake a Hand” and Ruth Brown’s “So Long” and “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”). I also managed to stump Lou Curtiss when I mentioned I owned a bootleg LP of the Dorsey Brothers’ first recordings from 1928. His eyes lit up and he asked if he could borrow it so he could make a tape for himself. I agreed provided he’d write a cue sheet for it listing all the personnel on the various songs, which he did. The documentary was called Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss and told the story of his life as well as his history as a collector and promoter of folk music, both live and recorded. It was directed by Yale Strom, whose other films include The Last Klezmer and American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, along with his wife, Elizabeth Schwartz. Lou Curtiss was born July 2, 1939 in Seattle, but he grew up in San Diego and in the 1950’s used to do raids on thrift-store record racks with a good friend named Frank Zappa. Curtiss started building up a huge collection of rare 78 and 45 rpm recordings; like me in my earliest days, he had little use for rock ‘n’ roll but a great love of the musics from whence it came: African-American blues from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s; traditional white bluegrass and hillbilly (which ultimately came together to form country music); and the pop music of the first three decades of the 20th century, including the crooners of the 1920’s. Curtiss sold his first record collection when his girlfriend at the time asked him to donate money to John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign in 1960. Then he inevitably started building it up again.

In the early 1960’s he moved to New York at the beginnings of the nascent folk-music scene in hopes of becoming a folk-music star himself, but his career went nowhere. Curtiss begged his parents for the money with which to return to San Diego, and in 1967 he opened Folk Arts Rare Records as a meeting place for people interested in roots music to come together and, almost incidentally, buy records of it. He married his wife Virginia in 1968 after she joined his folk-music group as a backup singer, and after its original locations at the foot of Washington and India Streets and later on Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest, Curtiss moved Folk Arts to a converted house on Adams Avenue. Curtiss did a regular radio show on the San Diego State University (SDSU) and also promoted folk-music concerts on the SDSU campus. For his opening one he lured the legendary bluegrass musician “Doc” Watson to headline. Once he settled in on Adams Avenue, Curtiss met up with the head of the Adams Avenue Business Association, who asked him to book the musical acts for the annual Adams Avenue Street Fair in the fall. Curtiss agreed as long as he could promote his own event in the spring, the Adams Avenue Roots Festival. (Today it’s called “Adams Avenue Unplugged” and Charles and I had just been to it the previous Saturday, April 26.) Curtiss prided himself on being able to book acts with major cult reputations even though most people outside the folk-music scene had never heard of them – including blues musician “Little Pink” Anderson, son of Pink Anderson, one of the two bluesmen (along with Floyd Council) from whom the band Pink Floyd got their name.

The film featured extensive interviews with Lou Curtiss himself – reportedly Strom and Schwartz started filming him in 2014, four years before his death – as well as his wife Virginia and many musicians who’d hung out at Folk Arts, played Curtiss’s street festivals, or otherwise interfaced with him. Among the names featured in the documentary are Mojo Nixon, Gregory Page, George Winston, Sue Palmer, Alison Brown, Tomcat Courtney, A. J. Croce (son of Jim Croce and his wife Ingrid), Tom Waits, and Jack Tempchin. You’ve probably never heard of Jack Tempchin but you’ve almost certainly heard “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” a song he wrote and sold to The Eagles via his friendship with Eagles co-leader Glenn Frey. (Tempchin wrote some other songs for The Eagles but “Peaceful Easy Feelings” was his biggest hit with them.) Lou Curtiss was an amazing man, and I’ll never forget the last time I saw him. It was at a brief relocation of Folk Arts to 3610 University Avenue (where it exists today; it’s run by Brendan Boyle, whom Curtiss personally chose to take it over and who’s featured in the film) and it was at an event that promised a rare chance to hear 1930’s blues legend Robert Johnson via an original pressing of one of his Vocalion 78’s. The announcement drew a crowd of people that might have made some people wonder whether Johnson himself had returned from the grave (he was murdered in 1938 by the jealous husband of a woman he was fooling around with) to give a concert. The record was ceremonially played and afterwards put back in its sleeve like a relic to be venerated. Lou Curtiss himself was there, though his wife and Brendan Boyle were running the event; he was seated behind the store’s counter and gave an unmistakable “not long for this world” vibe. Folk Arts had moved there when its landlord on Adams Avenue raised the rent unsustainably (which shocked me because I’d always assumed Lou Curtiss owned the location), but it’s nice to see it still going and still having the unmistakable wall decorations and various bits of clutter I remember from its Adams Avenue days. The film was well done and ran 67 minutes, and it took its title from the sign-off line Lou Curtiss almost always used to end his personal letters as well as his column in the folk-music newspaper San Diego Troubadour.

The Drowning Pool (Coleytown, First Artists, Turman-Foster Company, Warner Bros., 1975)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 26) I was disappointed in the schedule for Turner Classic Movies because they’d announced online a double bill of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and The Left-Handed Gun (1958), the films that had been announced for James Dean and then recast with Paul Newman after Dean’s death. Alas, there was a change in plans and, though they did in fact show a double-bill of Paul Newman vehicles, instead of the two in which he’d replaced Dean they showed the two movies in which Newman played Lew Harper. The character was originally developed by Canadian noir novelist Ross Macdonald (true name: Kenneth Millar) for a 1949 novel called The Moving Target, which was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1966 in a movie that changed the title to Harper and the name of the central character from “Lew Archer” to “Lew Harper.” I turned on TCM hoping to see The Left-Handed Gun – a film that has somehow eluded me so far even though it cast Newman as Billy the Kid and was the first feature film directed by Arthur Penn – and instead watched Newman’s other “Harper” movie, The Drowning Pool (1975). This one cast Newman opposite his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward, and I remembered having seen it in a downtown San Francisco grindhouse towards the end of its initial theatrical run. I hadn’t seen it since, though, and about the only thing I remembered about it was the titular “drowning pool” in which Lew Harper (Paul Newman) and Mavis Kilbourne (Gail Strickland) are locked in the hydrotherapy room of an abandoned mental hospital and try to escape by flooding the room with water in hopes they’ll float to the top and be able to break through the room’s skylight.

The overall plot, which screenwriters Tracy Keenan Wynn, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Walter Hill and director Stuart Rosenberg (who’d previously helmed one of Newman’s weaker movies, Cool Hand Luke, and an earlier Newman-Woodward vehicle, WUSA) moved from Macdonald’s Los Angeles to New Orleans, casts Woodward as Iris Devereaux, a former flame of Lew Harper’s who after their breakup moved back to New Orleans and married James Devereaux (Richard Derr). Apparently she only married him for his money and social position. The two had a daughter named Schuyler (played by the young Melanie Griffith, who exudes precocious sexuality the way the equally young Carrie Fisher did a year later in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo). Harper flies to New Orleans to find out who’s sending anonymous letters to James accusing Iris of having extra-relational activity – which seems likely because, though James and Iris have conceived a daughter, the hint is that James is actually Gay. We think that because James is an unsuccessful playwright who’s living off the income from the old Devereaux plantation run by his formidable mother Olivia (the British actress Coral Browne, who was also Mrs. Vincent Price), and in one scene he’s visited by – and quickly disappears with – a male friend who’s identified as someone who “helps him with his writing.” The film opens with Harper flying into the New Orleans International Airport (today it’s called the Louis Armstrong International Airport even though Armstrong avoided New Orleans as much as possible in the last three decades of his life because he was appalled at its racism) and renting a room at a motel, where Schuyler Devereaux shows up, knows his name, and offers to have sex with him. Then he’s busted by Lt. Franks of the New Orleans Police Department (Richard Jaeckel) and changed with having sex with a minor – an offer Harper either virtuously or sensibly refused – though the New Orleans police chief, Broussard (Anthony Franciosa), shows up and plays good cop to Franks’s bad cop. Broussard lets Harper off with a warning, and then we meet Iris, who turns out to be the precocious Schuyler’s mother.

Harper traces the letter to Pat Reavis (Andrew Robinson, a quite good actor who was the serial killer in Dirty Harry and who played Liberace in one of the two dueling movies about him in the late 1980’s), who’d been the Devereaux family chauffeur until he was fired about a week and a half before Harper arrived in town. Ultimately Harper learns that a crooked, crazy oil tycoon named J. Hugh Kilbourne (a marvelous crazy-villain performance by Murray Hamilton) is after the Devereaux plantation because there’s an enormous oil deposit right under it, only Olivia Devereaux refuses to sell at any price. So he’s suspect number one when Olivia Devereaux is found murdered, and later Pat Reavis is killed too. It turns out that Kilbourne hired Reavis to kill Olivia and then hired the dirty cop Franks to kill Reavis. It also turns out that the old sanitarium where Harper and Mavis Kilbourne, J. Hugh’s unhappy trophy wife, are locked in the hydrotherapy room and threatened with drowning was one to which J. Hugh Kilbourne’s parents had taken him in his childhood because even before he grew up, they could tell he was crazy. Out of revenge, when Kilbourne became a man and made his fortune in the oil business, he bought that old sanitarium and closed it, thereby putting his former tormentors out of work. Harper and Mavis try to break out by smashing the window of the sunroof (my husband Charles wondered why they didn’t try to break the reinforced-glass side windows) but they’re unable to, and they’re finally rescued in a weird scene that’s a visual cop from the end of the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. It seems that Kilbourne forgot a badly needed medication he left in the room when he threatened to kill both Harper and his wife the morning afterwards, and when he and his assistant open the door, an enormous amount of water as well as Harper and Mavis come spilling out. Then Iris gets killed, and we learn that the real culprit is [spoiler alert!] her daughter Schuyler, who had an incestuous crush on her father and thereby decided to kill the two women in his life, his mother Olivia and his wife Iris. Harper then returns to L.A.

The Drowning Pool is an O.K. example of the revisionist neo-noirs of the 1970’s, which suffered not only from color instead of the cool black-and-white of the original noirs but from overly bouncy jazz-inflected music by Michael Small instead of the dark orchestral scores used for these types of movies in the 1940’s. There’s a cool professionalism about this film that’s appealing, but The Drowning Pool isn’t a great thriller the way it had every right to be (Ross Macdonald published the novel in 1950 right after The Moving Target, the source for Newman’s 1966 debut as Harper nè Archer, and just before the book he considered his best, The Way Some People Die, which also had a teenage girl as the murderess). It’s an O.K. movie that does what it sets out to do, and the big surprise is that Iris Devereaux doesn’t survive until the end of the movie and pair up with Harper at the end the way we’re expecting them to, if only because the actors playing them were married for real!

Dogs of War! (Hal Roach Studios, Pathé Exchange, 1923)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 27) Turner Classic Movies showed a program of films that were about the movie business, including a 2023 quirk-fest called Film Geek about a movie-mad kid in New York City and his relationship with his father; and Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a movie character steps off the screen of his film and ends up in real life (a neat reversal of Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy masterpiece, Sherlock, Jr., in which Keaton played a movie projectionist who dreamed his way into the film he was showing). They closed out the night with a quite quirky short called Dogs of War! (1923), one of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” a.k.a. “Little Rascals” comedies. “Our Gang” was a series Roach launched in 1921 when he auditioned a child actress for a film with adults. Roach was put off by the overly made-up appearance of the girl and the stage-bound nature of her acting – both had been decided on by her parents – and when he walked out on the audition he saw a bunch of kids playing in the streets and behaving naturalistically. Roach also wanted to build a comedy series around Black comic boy actor Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, and the “Our Gang” films, including this one, frequently featured Black and white children playing together as equals. There are at least two Black child performers in Dogs of War!, Morrison and Allen “Farina” Hoskins, who was popular enough in the Black community that Duke Ellington wrote one of his first records, “L’il Farina,” about him. The first reel of Dogs of War! consists of the children fighting a war with each other, using weird weapons like a periscope made from old chimney pipes, artillery similarly repurposed from old drainpipes, and a preposterous comic tank that doesn’t look that different (as my husband Charles pointed out) from the real primitive tanks used in World War I.

This part is O.K. but the second half is considerably funnier: Farina’s mother (whom we don’t see) has found him a job in the movies at $5 per day. (The studio is the fictitious “West Coast Studios,” really Hal Roach’s lot.) The other kids naturally decide they want some of that movie money for themselves, and they determine to crash “West Coast Studios” and see if they can get hired. After being turned away by the studio gateman (which became a staple scene in movies about Hollywood for the next several decades), they sneak in by disguising themselves as non-living dummies. The best scene in Dogs of War! is one in which the “Gang” are chased down a long studio hallway both with doors that genuinely open and doors that don’t. They achieve the same almost balletic precision the Marx Brothers would achieve when they did scenes like this about a decade later. The kids also run into Harold Lloyd, making an early star cameo with his then on-screen co-star Jobyna Ralston as the kids run into him while he’s shooting his film Why Worry? (1923). Also on screen is Why Worry?’s co-director, Fred C. Newmeyer, who ironically had filmed the first Our Gang short but Roach hadn’t liked his work and replaced him with Robert McGowan, who directed Dogs of War! as well. McGowan deserves a lot of credit for getting the “Our Gang” kids to do such great precision slapstick. Dogs of War! ends with the gang grabbing hold of a movie camera and trying their hands at filmmaking themselves – only they don’t realize that their camera had previously been used to shoot the big climax of a “West Coast Studios” romantic melodrama called Should Husbands Work? (an obvious mockery of the overripe modern-dress movies Cecil B. DeMille was making at Paramount at the time). The film for Should Husbands Work? had never been taken out of the camera when the Gang came in to shoot their mock movie, so when the rushes are screened for the director and stars of Should Husbands Work?, the images of the Gang kids are superimposed over them. Ultimately the kids are chased off the “West Coast Studios” lot. The confusion over the title of the series came about when Roach sold the rights to it to MGM in 1938, but in the 1950’s he released the “Our Gang:” comedies he still owned (at least the ones made after sound came in) to TV as The Little Rascals, though even this early both titles were still being used. The title card of Dogs of War! announces it as an “Our Gang” comedy starring “Hal Roach’s Rascals” – and it’s a surprisingly pleasant and entertaining film with quite stunning slapstick gags.

The Temptress (MGM, Cosmopolitan, 1926)

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

Afterwards on April 27 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of The Temptress (1926), Greta Garbo’s second film in Hollywood for MGM. Like the first, Torrent (also 1926), The Temptress was based on a novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose books The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand had become iconic roles for Rudolph Valentino. Blasco Ibáñez was considered enough of a “draw” for moviegoers that his name is billed above the title while all the mere actors are listed below it. Oddly, both Torrent and The Temptress had their titles radically changed for the film versions: Torrent was published as Entre Naranjos (“Between Orange Trees”) and The Temptress was originally La Tierra de Todos (“Everyone’s Land”). Garbo had been brought to the U.S. in 1925 as part of a package deal by which MGM was eager to hire Swedish director Mauritz Stiller, who’d just directed Garbo in The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924). Stiller insisted that the studio sign Garbo as well, but much to their mutual disappointment MGM assigned Torrent to a hack contract director named Monta Bell. Stiller continued to meet with Garbo privately and coach her in her role in Torrent (much the way George Cukor continued to meet with Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles in Gone With the Wind even after he was fired from the film and Victor Fleming replaced him). Then Stiller and Garbo got the good news that MGM would allow him to direct The Temptress – MGM had had a success with their first film under that name, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), directed by another Swede, Victor Sjöstrom (though they’d “Anglicized” his name to “Seastrom”) and were hoping another Swedish director would bring them more hits. Alas, after 10 days Stiller was fired from The Temptress and from MGM itself, and Fred Niblo – who’d replaced Charles Brabin on MGM’s monumental production Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and earlier had been hired instead of Valentino’s choice, George Fitzmaurice, to direct Blood and Sand – replaced him.

Most of the Garbo biographies dismiss Torrent and The Temptress as meaningless melodramas and claim she didn’t start getting good roles at MGM until her third film for them, Flesh and the Devil (1927), but they’re both quite good movies. All too often, especially in her silent films, Garbo was cast as an amoral femme fatale, and so she is here. At one point Garbo demanded a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, MGM’s studio head, to complain about her roles: “Always the vamp I am, always the woman with no heart.” The film begins in Paris, with Elena (Garbo) being romanced at a garden party by a rising young Argentinian engineer, Manuel Robledo (Antonio Moreno). She tells him, “I belong to no other man,” but that’s a lie (or else Elena is a liberated woman who believes that just because she’s married doesn’t mean she can’t have sex with whomever she wants). She’s really the wife of the Marquis de Torre Blanca (Armand Kaliz), though the Marquis has essentially pimped her out to yet a third man, the banker M. Fontenoy (Marc McDermott). Fontenoy has lavished so many expensive jewels on her that he’s gone broke, and at another dinner party he announces that this is the last one he’ll ever have because he’s about to go bankrupt. Then he pours poison powder into his own wine glass and uses it to commit suicide in front of his dinner guests. Elena gives the jewels Fontenoy had given her to the Marquis to bail him out of his “debts of honor,” and Manuel hot-foots it back to his native Argentina. There we see a lot of shots of him and his fellow gauchos riding through the Argentinian countryside and singing lusty songs about lands where men are men and women are women (though since this is a silent film, the “songs” have to be suggested with intertitles). Manuel is entrusted to lead the construction of a massive dam across an Argentine river, and his two straw bosses are Canterac (a young and surprisingly agile Lionel Barrymore) and Pirovani (Robert Andersen), an Italian immigrant who plans to make enough money on the dam project to send for his beloved daughter to join him. Alas, things get screwed up big-time when Elena shows up with the Marquis at the workers’ camp and moves in a preposterous amount of baggage that reminded me of Katharine Hepburn’s entrance in the 1937 film Stage Door.

Also on hand is Argentine bandit Manos Duras (which Charles told me means “Hard Hands”), who gets an almost spectral entrance. He’s first seen as a silhouette, standing in a shadow and smoking a cigarette from a holder, and only then does the camera reveal him full-figure. He’s played by Roy D’Arcy, whose second film was Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow (1925) as a last-minute replacement for Stroheim himself after MGM production chief Irving Thalberg wouldn’t allow Stroheim both to direct and act. (He and Mayer wanted the option to fire Stroheim, which they couldn’t well do if he were both director and a major actor, but as things turned out they couldn’t fire Stroheim anyway because when they tried it, the extras and the crew threatened to quit the film if he went.) D’Arcy got a few plum villain roles in films like this and King Vidor’s Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), but his career didn’t last long and within a few years he was reduced to playing minor parts like one of the “Three Greeks” in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Manos Duras tries to rape Elena, Manuel saves her from the Fate Worse than Death, and later Manos Duras tries to shoot Elena but fate intervenes and her husband takes the bullet meant for her instead. Unfortunately, having a woman around has inflamed the libidos of just about everyone in Manuel’s work crew, to the point where they’re too busy lusting after her to get the job done. Both Canterac and Pirovani cruise her, and they end up in a bizarre fight scene in which Canterac – who shows up for some reason in the uniform of an Argentine military officer, which at first had me thinking that this was a totally different character – stabs Pirovani out of jealousy and then remorsefully breaks the sword with which he killed him and says, “I have murdered my friend.” Manos Duras is so angry at Manuel for breaking up his sexual assault on Elena that he decides to blow up the dam, and he manages to plant enough dynamite to blast a hole that takes out about one-third of it. With a big storm brewing (like Torrent, The Temptress ends with a major natural disaster), Manuel tries to build a breakfront to keep the raging floodwaters from destroying the whole dam. He ends up hauling bags of sand himself when the crew deserts the site, but it’s too late: the dam collapses anyway and it’s almost totally destroyed. (The special effects work is quite convincing and surprisingly good for a 1926 film.)

Years later Manuel shows up in Paris again after having finally finished the dam and earned a worldwide reputation as a great engineer for doing so, and he runs into Elena, very much the worse for wear as she’s been reduced to cadging drinks in cheap cafés. Manuel is there with Celinda (Virginia Browne Faire), the proverbial “nice girl” he took up with after the disaster, and when Elena makes a play for him again he virtuously refuses. That’s how the film ends; in a 1930’s movie either Garbo’s character would have had to die for her sins or she’d have had to go through a moral redemption and end up with Manuel as a good little wife at the end. But in this truly “pre-Code” era the writers and directors could give the film this bittersweet, morally ambiguous and quite beautiful and moving ending. Later MGM boss Louis B. Mayer demanded that a happier ending be shot – much the way that in a later Garbo film, Love (1927), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, European audiences got to see her commit suicide as she did in Tolstoy’s novel while American ones got to see her and the male lead, John Gilbert, get together and presumably live happily ever after. The version of The Temptress we were watching was a 2005 restoration produced by Turner Entertainment with a musical score by Michael Picton, which was quite well done in the Paris scenes but tended to sound too much like Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) for my taste as Manuel and his crew rode their horses through the Argentine expanses. It’s actually a quite good film, though it’s tempting to credit the genuinely inventive shots (including the scene at Fontenoy’s dinner party in which the camera tracks down the long dining table and then pans under it to show the men and women playing footsie with each other and even starting to dance; Charles was reminded of the similar scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1919 silent The Oyster Princess and we both wondered if someone involved in The Temptress had seen the Lubitsch film and consciously copied it) to Stiller and attribute the plainer ones to Niblo. Still, like Torrent, The Temptress is a surprisingly good film. Charles said it had a dreamlike quality, and the last time he said that about a film we were watching together was Rex Ingram’s independently produced masterpiece Mare Nostrum (1925) – by coincidence (or maybe not), also based on a Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novel!

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (George Pal Productions, Warner Bros., 1975)

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

Last night (Friday, April 25) I watched another installment in the series Turner Classic Movies was doing based on films drawn from pulp fiction. This time it was a 1975 would-be superhero epic called Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, based on the Doc Savage pulp novels credited to “Kenneth Robeson” (a pseudonym owned by the company that published them, Street and Smith) but mostly written by Lester Dent. In later years Dent looked back on his career as a pulp writer with thinly disguised disdain. He’d been able to sell two stories to the legendary Black Mask magazine, both noir tales built around a Florida-based detective named Sail, in the mid-1930’s and had enjoyed working with its editor, Joseph Shaw. Unfortunately, in 1936 Shaw was fired as Black Mask’s editor after having launched the careers of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and was replaced by a woman named Fanny Ellsworth who came to the job from a pulp called Range Romances. Chandler jumped ship and did the rest of his pulp work for a competitor, while Dent lamented the loss of Shaw and went back to writing what he himself dismissed as “reams of saleable crap” and mourned the loss of “the little bit of power Shaw had awakened in me.” Doc Savage (former Tarzan Ron Ely in the movie) was a company creation of Dent, Henry W. Ralston, and John L. Nanovic. His real name was Clark Savage, Jr. and he was a young heir trained by his father, explorer Clark Savage, Sr., to be both an ultra-fit physical specimen and a brilliant scientist in various disciplines. Though he was Earth-born instead of from another planet, the creators of Superman borrowed a lot from the Doc Savage pulps, including a similar metallic sobriquet (Doc Savage was the “Man of Bronze,” Superman was the “Man of Steel”), the use of “Clark” as his non-hero first name (apparently both drawn from the popularity of real-life Hollywood star Clark Gable), and even their identically named redoubts in the Arctic, the “Fortress of Solitude.” When Doc Savage isn’t hiding out in the Fortress he has a redoubt on the 86th floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan (never specified but obviously the Empire State Building) with his five sidekicks (called “The Fabulous Five” in later novels about the character and in this film): chemist “Monk” Mayfair (Michael Miller), general-turned-attorney “Ham” Brooks (Darrell Zwerling), electrical engineer “Long Tom” Roberts (Paul Gleason), archaeologist and geologist “Johnny” Littlejohn (Eldon Quick), and the brawn of the group, construction engineer “Renny” Renwick (Bill Lucking).

The film was produced by George Pal, who’d had an interesting career; as a European refugee during World War II, he got a job at Paramount producing so-called “Puppetoons,” animated shorts featuring stop-motion puppets. In 1950 Pal acquired the rights to two books by Robert A. Heinlein on humans going to and landing on the moon, and he offered them to Paramount for his first feature. Paramount said no, so Pal offered the project to Eagle-Lion Pictures, who filmed it as Destination Moon. As luck would have it, the theatre where Destination Moon was first shown in New York was just down the street from the office building where Paramount had its headquarters, so for weeks the “suits” at Paramount had to pass the queues of customers literally lined up for blocks to see the movie they’d turned down. The Paramount executives got the message and immediately signed Pal to make a series of science-fiction films: When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955). Pal then branched out to work for other studios on films like Tom Thumb (1958) and Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961). Pal got interested in Doc Savage as a film property when he noticed huge stacks of Bantam Books’ reprints of the original pulp stories (which they’d began printing in 1964 in the wake of the success of James Bond both on paper and film), only the stacks gradually got smaller every time Pal went in the store. After elaborate negotiations with various claimants to the rights, Pal licensed all 181 original Doc Savage stories and started developing this film in 1969, though it took him six years to bring it to the screen. Pal hired Ron Ely to star as Doc Savage because Ely had become a star playing Tarzan in a TV series that Mad Magazine devastatingly lampooned. The aspect of the Tarzan show Mad chose to ridicule was that, though the show supposedly took place in Africa, it was really shot in Mexico. The original Tarzan show ran its credits over a map of Africa; the Mad parody started with a map of Mexico, with the name “Mexico” erased and “Africa” crudely written in. Also the natives looked Latino instead of Black, and they spoke Spanish. Ely apparently resented the way playing Tarzan on TV had stereotyped him, and he’d moved to Europe to find work there when Pal contacted him and invited him back to the U.S. to play Doc Savage.

Doc Savage: Man of Bronze remains the only film ever made about this character, partly because it was a major box-office flop that destroyed Pal’s career (he had planned a sequel and it was promised in a post-credits tag scene, but it never materialized and the subsequent attempts to bring Doc Savage to the screen fizzled, though among the actors considered for the role were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Chris Hemsworth, at least partly because the rights have become so dispersed that negotiating for them would be a nightmare) and partly because audiences didn’t like the relentlessly campy approach. Pal not only produced the film but also co-wrote the script with Joe Morheim, though instead of directing the film himself he hired Michael Anderson to do it. Anderson is best known for directing Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which many critics rank alongside Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1953) as the least deserving winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, though there are some compelling films on his résumé, including the first (1956) film version of George Orwell’s 1984 and The Naked Edge, Gary Cooper’s last film (1961), as well as the quite good papal melodrama The Shoes of the Fisherman (1969). Alas, Doc Savage isn’t one of them. It’s basically a series of bizarre action scenes with bits of plot exposition thrown in to connect them. Most of it takes place in the Latin American country of “Hidalgo” (fictitious, but obviously meant to be Mexico because Miguel Hidalgo was the priest and guerrilla leader who declared Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16, 1810) and it’s about a mysterious tribe called the “Quetzamal” who lost a civil war and were supposedly annihilated. Only a few remnants of the Quetzamal found refuge on the bottom of a canyon referred to by the locals as “The Edge of the World,” where they’ve been discovered and enslaved by the film’s principal villain, Captain Seas (Paul Wexler, in a role that should have been played by Vincent Price), who has enlisted the natives to work for him extracting gold from a pool of molten metal at the base of their canyon.

Captain Seas kicked off the plot by assassinating Doc Savage’s father, who was exploring Hidalgo and had made a deal with the natives to take over the pool of molten gold and use it for their benefit. He’d recorded a land deed to that effect, but the deed was stolen and destroyed by one of Seas’s henchmen, little-person Don Rubio Gorro (Bob Corso). Don Rubio sleeps in a giant-sized crib that rocks, which couldn’t help but remind me of the “adult baby” story I once did as a cover article for Zenger’s Newsmagazine. Another clerk in the land recorder’s office, though she’s on the side of good, is Mona Flores (Pamela Hensley, who got an “Introducing” credit), a refugee Quetzamal who offers to lead Doc Savage and his Fabulous Five to the secret treasure. There’s also a mysterious weapon the Quetzamal have called “The Green Death,” which variously appears as a flying luminescent creature and an all-too-obvious full-sized snake, as well as being tattooed across the chest of a Native American assassin who’s flown to New York to make an attempt on Doc Savage’s life in the opening sequence. Quetzamal Chief Chaac (Victor Millan) is discontented with the way Captain Seas has turned his people into slaves, but his lieutenant Kulkan (Carlos Rivas, whose best-known credit is as the Burmese Lun Tha in The King and I) was the one who cut the deal and he has the power to enforce it. My husband Charles got home from work in time to join me for the last 20 minutes or so of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and he immediately asked me, “Was all of it as silly as this?” “Yes,” I said.

The pulp version of Doc Savage beat the character of Superman to print by five years, and the film Doc Savage: Man of Bronze beat the Salkind Brothers/Richard Donner film of Superman by three years – but Doc Savage failed where the first Superman feature with Christopher Reeve succeeded in striking a balance between heroism, comedy, and the sheer preposterousness of a comic-book superhero story. It also doesn’t help that Ron Ely, though possessing a gorgeous body, couldn’t act for beans (Christopher Reeve was considerably more personable). Before it was released, a film buyer saw it and called it “unsellable, horrible – supposedly a camp movie about this character called Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. Just terrible. Ron Ely is in it, and he doesn't even take off his clothes.” Doc Savage: Man of Bronze ran into a lot of bad luck, including a change of management at Warner Bros. just as the film started shooting (the old studio head had green-lighted the project; the new one hated it), major cutbacks in budget (among other things, Pal lost the money to commission a new musical score; instead music director Frank De Vol had to piece together one from the public-domain works of John Philip Sousa, with “The Thunderer” – the march Sousa composed for the 1888 Presidential campaign of the terminally dull and un-thundering Benjamin Harrison – becoming Doc Savage’s theme), and coming out on the same day as Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws. The film is a total mess with little or nothing to redeem it other than the technology; Lester Dent prided himself on keeping abreast of the latest in science, and though the story takes place in 1936 it includes SCUBA gear, a form-fitting bulletproof vest, and glass-globe fire extinguishers as well as a secret operation that transforms Captain Seas from a supervillain into (literally!) a Salvation Army street volunteer. (That was a gimmick cribbed from a genuine 1936 movie, The Man Who Lived Twice, in which it was unsurprisingly handled far better.)

Elsbeth: "I Know What You Did 33 Summers Ago" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 24) at 10 p.m. I watched an unusual and quite good Elsbeth episode with the rather awkward title, “I Know What You Did 33 Summers Ago.” Though imdb.com listed April 24 as the first air date for this program, it was obviously intended for earlier in the story arc than episodes that aired earlier. Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) is still a uniformed police officer in this one – later on she got promoted to plainclothes detective – and Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) has just announced he’s seeing a new boyfriend, Roy (unseen in this episode but later played by Heywood Leach). In later episodes Roy would become an on-screen character and he and Elsbeth would get along so well together that Teddy would feel a social obligation to his mom to make his relationship with Roy work despite some issues, notably over where the two are going to live. This Elsbeth features Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) getting a summons for jury duty just as she’s about to be visited by her son after he’s mostly grown up with his dad in Chicago. Officer Blanke takes him around New York while Elsbeth is stuck serving on an actual jury under a hard-ass judge, Milton Crawford (Michael Emerson), who’s a member of a fictitious organization that’s obviously supposed to be the Federalist Society and is hoping for an appointment as a federal judge. Judge Crawford is also notorious for skewing his court rulings in favor of the prosecution, and he’s anxious that the trial be wrapped up in a few days so he can bolster his reputation for efficiency. The defendant is a heavy-set middle-aged woman who’s on trial for murdering a man she was supposedly stalking. She was found naked in his apartment while he’d been clubbed to death, and she has a spectacularly incompetent attorney who advertises himself on the subways as “The Lawyer You Can Afford.” Elsbeth is seated as an alternate juror and is anxious to get on the real jury because she’s already noticing the mistakes the defendant’s lawyer is making, so much so that she starts giving him hand signals as to when he should object to the Black woman prosecutor’s questions.

It’s a bit surprising that writers Matthew K. Begbie and Eric Randall didn’t have Elsbeth asking questions from the jury box, a rarely used power real jurors have even though most don’t know they have it. Still, Elsbeth’s antics attract the attention of Judge Crawford, who calls her to his chambers in the judicial equivalent of a schoolchild being called to the principal’s office. Elsbeth finds her way into the jury room by ratting out a quite cute young man for recording the court proceedings for a podcast he does called “Psycho Slut Murderers,” thereby not only showing he’s making a recording in violation of court procedures but he’s also clearly biased against the defendant. Once Elsbeth is in the jury box for deliberations, the show turns into an offtake of the famous 1950’s TV show and film Twelve Angry Men, as Elsbeth shatters the prosecution’s case point by point. The defendant’s testimony was that she was in the shower when the crime occurred, and then she came out of the bathroom naked and grabbed a baseball bat that the real murderer had used to kill the victim, getting her fingerprints on it. Elsbeth argues that both the defendant and the victim were from Boston and were therefore hard-core Boston Red Sox fans, but the bat in question had the name of a New York Yankees player on it and therefore would not be likely to be the property of someone from Boston. One thing I liked about this show is it had an open-ended finish; the defendant finally gets acquitted of the crime but we don’t actually find out who really committed the murder. A lot of people (including my late roommate/home-care client) grew up watching Perry Mason and therefore got the idea that it’s the job of a defense attorney not only to prove that their client didn’t commit the crime but to play detective and find out who did. Actually, in the real world most criminal defendants who reach the stage of a trial (most don’t because they plead guilty to a lesser charge) are guilty, and it’s the job of a defense attorney not to exonerate them but to mitigate their punishment, either in pre-trial plea bargains or at the trial itself. I’m glad Matthew Begbie and Eric Randall got that right!

Sky Liner (Lippert Pictures, Screen Guild International, 1949)

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

Last night (Tuesday, April 22) I ran my husband Charles a vest-pocket thriller from Lippert Pictures in 1949 called Sky Liner (two words), directed by William Berke in much the same manner as the later films in the Falcon series he directed at RKO in the mid-1940’s. I was a bit worried from the imdb.com description – “FBI Agent Steve Blair (Richard Travis) finds himself caught up in Cold War espionage when he boards a plane heading west. Some sensitive papers have disappeared and Steve must keep tabs on a suspect without giving himself away” – that it would turn out to be a rancid bit of flag-waving anti-Cold War propaganda, but writers John Wilste and Maurice Tombragel blessedly kept the patriotic chest-beating to a minimum. Most of the film takes place aboard an airliner, and it’s one of those thrillers that’s set aboard a confined space, so when one of the passengers is murdered, everyone who could have killed him is aboard the plane. The murder victim is a young courier (Allan Hersholt) who’s on his way to an important political conference carrying sealed orders that are not to be opened until he arrives. We know from the get-go who killed him: Bokejian (Steven Geray), a diplomat from another country who’s just signed a secret treaty with the United States and who’s after the sealed orders. Bokejian buys them from the courier but then finds out that they’re just blank pieces of paper with the State Department letterhead.

The fake orders were part of a State Department and FBI plot to nail Amy Winthrop (Rochelle Hudson, the quite beautiful actress who in the 1930’s played supporting roles for Mae West and W. C. Fields; she’s the woman in West’s She Done Him Wrong who’s lost her virginity ahead of schedule, and to whom West gives these marvelous words of reassurance: “Don’t worry; when women go wrong, men go right after ’em!”), whom they suspect of being a foreign spy. There are at least two other criminals on the flight: a jewel thief who just murdered one of New York’s top gem dealers when the victim caught the killer burglarizing his safe; and a man who impersonates Mr. George Eakins (John McGuire), Amy Winthrop’s employer, after he clubbed the real Eakins to death in his office the night before the flight took off and then stole the real Eakins’s cash stash. One of the surprises of this film is that the plane depicted is a Lockheed Constellation, with its iconic three tail fins instead of the usual one – though the fact that the plane is still driven by propellers instead of jets really dates this movie (as does the cigarette vending machine in the airport). What makes it even more ironic is that the airline flying the plane is the very real TWA, which at the time this movie was made was owned outright by Howard Hughes. When Hughes bought RKO studios in 1948, just about every time an RKO film featured a commercial airliner, it was from TWA – but it was a surprise to see a TWA plane in a non-RKO film from this period.

The Constellation has an interesting backstory: Hughes actually designed the plane personally, but then ran afoul of federal regulations that forbade airlines from flying planes their owners built. So Hughes licensed the design to Lockheed with the promise that he’d buy enough of them they’d turn a profit on the aircraft from Hughes’s orders alone. (Later the Constellation was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration after it was involved in a number of plane crashes in the 1960’s.) Ultimately FBI agent Blair uses his federal credentials to force the plane to land at the military base in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, despite the protests of the pilots who say it’s too foggy to land there. He wants to offload the body of the murder victim so he and the other good guys will know how he was killed. Later Blair also wants the plane to land at Burbank instead of L.A., but one of the crooks on board pulls a gun on him (the lack of any pre-boarding passenger screening is yet another item that dates this movie big-time!) and forces him to countermand his own order and have the plane land at “Municipal” (presumably what is now known as LAX). Ultimately Bokejian and Winthrop are arrested and Blair starts chatting up the young, attractive flight attendant (they were still called “stewardesses” then) Carol (Pamela Blake) and asks her for a date while they’re both in L.A. There’s also Smith (Gaylord Pendleton), a stuffy British diplomat on the plane who chats up Bokejian, and Mary Ann (Anna May Slaughter), a child movie star obviously, shall we say, “inspired” by Shirley Temple, as well as a young straight couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jennings (Roy Butler and Jean Clark), who have an argument when he gets airsick but doesn’t want to admit it.

Sky Liner is no great shakes as a movie, though at least Wilste and Tombragel showed some ingenuity in their choice of a murder weapon – a trick fountain pen with a needle and secret compartment containing the deadly poison curare – and it’s likable and blessedly subtle in its political finger-pointing. Only in one scene, in which Blair is openly speculating on what made Amy Winthrop turn traitor – was it for money or a misguided loyalty to a bad political cause? – does Sky Liner start to breathe the foul air of the unfortunate explicitly anti-Communist political pieces of that era.

Harvey (Universal-International, 1950)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 20) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, the 1950 version of Harvey and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. I’m assuming the programmers at TCM picked Harvey because it’s about the imaginary (or is he imaginary?) six-foot tall rabbit friend of Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart), who goes out with him just about everywhere he goes. Harvey began life as a stage play by Mary Chase, who premiered it on Broadway in 1944 with Frank Fay playing Dowd. Frank Fay was a now-obscure performer whom TCM host Ben Mankiewicz credited with inventing stand-up comedy – which is ridiculous. There were plenty of stand-up comedians in vaudeville; they were just billed as “monologuists.” Fay also lived a real-life version of A Star Is Born: he was an already established star on vaudeville and in films when he married a Broadway dancer named Ruby Stephens and brought her with him to Hollywood. He energetically promoted her movie career under her new name, Barbara Stanwyck, only he started drinking more and more. His career fell as hers rose, and in 1935 she divorced him and shortly thereafter married Robert Taylor. Fay grabbed the part of Elwood P. Dowd in the stage version of Harvey hoping it would be a comeback vehicle for him both on stage and in films, but Universal-International bought the movie rights and wanted a more bankable “name” for the movie lead. They found him in James Stewart, whom they’d just picked up on a series of percentage deals under which he was paid part of the profits of a film rather than a straight salary. He’d just made himself three-quarters of a million dollars on Winchester .73 and he went on to play Dowd (whom he’d already played on stage for a few weeks as a substitute for Fay).

Mankiewicz said that Elwood P. Dowd was Stewart’s favorite among his own roles, which quite frankly I find hard to believe. I can think of at least five Stewart films that I’d prefer over this one: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 (1950), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). All of those stretched him far more as an actor than Harvey did. The plot features Elwood P. Dowd living in an elaborate house in a Middle Western town with his sister Veta Louise Dowd Simmons (Josephine Hull, who’d played the part on stage as well) and Veta’s daughter Myrtle Mae Simmons (Victoria Horne). Elwood’s and Veta’s mother left Elwood the house (and, presumably, enough accumulated wealth that he doesn’t have to work) and Veta is resentful of her status as essentially a boarder in a house she thought should have gone to her instead. She’s also planning an afternoon lunch party at which she’s carefully made sure that Elwood doesn’t know about so he can’t come home and drive all her guests away by talking to his invisible rabbit friend. Alas, Elwood finds out about it from an ex-con friend of his who hangs out with him and Harvey at Charlie’s Bar. It turns out the local newspaper actually advertised the event in their social column, and Elwood’s friend points it out to him and wonders why he hadn’t heard of it already. Veta says the purpose of the party is to help get Marcia Mae out more often so she can find a man to marry, but all the guests are older dowager ladies like Veta herself and how that’s going to help Veta find a husband is a mystery locked in Mary Chase’s head. (Chase not only wrote the original play but co-wrote the screenplay with Universal regular Oscar Brodney.)

Veta is determined to get Elwood committed to a mental hospital owned by Dr. William Chumley (Cecil Kellaway), but in a neat role-reversal, when she and Elwood show up at Chumley’s institution, she’s considered the crazy one and is taken into custody by the hospital’s thug-like orderly, Martin Wilson (Jesse White). Though Dr. Chumley is nominally the one in charge, the place is run day to day by his assistant, Dr. Raymond Sanderson (Charles Drake), whose nurse, Miss Kelly (Peggy Dow), is in unrequited love with him. There are some quite charming and rather ironic moments in Harvey, including a great scene in which there’s a complete role-reversal between Elwood and Dr. Chumley in which Elwood ends up in the analyst’s chair and Chumley lies on his office couch in the classic analysand’s pose. But Harvey dates rather badly because Elwood P. Dowd is just too nice and too morally superior to everyone else in the film. He innocently goes through life – in one neat bit of dialogue he says that he’s been fighting reality for decades and now he’s finally beaten reality, which makes us suspect that he knows Harvey isn’t real but he also doesn’t care – and among the things he does that shows his moral superiority to everyone else in the movie he plays matchmaker not only between Dr. Sanderson and Nurse Kelly, but also between his niece Marcia Mae and Martin Wilson. Charles remembered a made-for-TV remake – which turned out to be from 1972, with Stewart repeating his role (well, since Elwood P. Dowd is drawn as essentially asexual, it didn’t matter that he was 22 years older) – though if there’s anyone I’d like to see remake Harvey today, it would be director Tim Burton as a vehicle for his favorite star, Johnny Depp.

The 1950 Harvey was directed by Henry Koster, who “made his bones” in Hollywood directing Deanna Durbin in her star-making musicals Three Smart Girls (1936) and One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) before he went on to make another charming farce, The Bishop’s Wife (1947) with Loretta Young, David Niven, and Cary Grant. (Apparently Grant was one of the actors short-listed for the part of Elwood P. Dowd as well.) Then after Harvey Koster got side-tracked into big, splashy historical epics like the Biblical tale The Robe (1953) and more secular films like Desirée (1954) and Bette Davis’s second “go” at Queen Elizabeth, The Virgin Queen (1955) – while another expatriate from the German-speaking world, Fritz Lang, got stuck with vest-pocket romantic melodramas and films noir when he’d established his spectacle credentials in the 1920’s with Die Nibelungen and Metropolis. Harvey is a well-loved movie but my problem with it is that Stewart’s character is just too well-loved. He’s almost a caricature of the “Jimmy Stewart” image, and quite frankly I like him better in films like the five I mentioned above, as well as his, John Wayne’s and John Ford’s late-careers masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which has grit and toughness the charming but paper-thin fantasy of Harvey lacks. The makers of Harvey even tried to pull off Val Lewton’s old trick of keeping it ambiguous as to whether the monster (or, in this case, the charming upright-walking giant rabbit) really exists, down to pulling the old trick from Universal’s Invisible Man movies of showing doors opening and closing seemingly by themselves. I also didn’t like the ending, in which Elwood says a fond farewell to Harvey, who’s decided (we’re told) to stay at the sanitarium with Dr. Chumley and become his imaginary (or not) friend, only Harvey decides to bail on Chumley and go home with Elwood instead. Having Harvey stay at the sanitarium would at least have solved Elwood’s social problems with his family, and that’s where I thought Mary Chase was going with this – but no-o-o-o-o.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (MGM, 1925)

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

After Harvey on Easter Sunday, April 20, my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of one of my favorite movies, the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur. Originally released as Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, this story began in 1880 when former U.S. Civil War General Lew Wallace published it as a novel. In 1899 it was adapted as a play and became a huge stage success for a theatrical syndicate called Klaw and Erlanger, but the problem was that it could only play in cities with theatres large enough for the treadmill equipment needed to stage the story’s famous chariot race. One reviewer of the play version said the chariot race could only be staged “with Mr. Edison’s invention,” and in 1907 the Kalem Company decided to do just that: make a 15-minute cut-down version of Ben-Hur centered around the chariot race. Alas, they were sued by Wallace’s heirs (and probably the Klaw and Erlanger company as well) for copyright infringement, and in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the courts ruled that intellectual property laws applied to films and you couldn’t just go ahead and film a copyrighted story without negotiating and paying for the rights to do so. In 1922 the Goldwyn Corporation was in that weird two-year nether period between corporate raider Pat Powers’s successful ouster of Sam Goldwyn from the company he had founded and named after himself (actually Goldwyn the corporation came before Goldwyn the person: he’d formed “Goldwyn” as a mash-up of his own name, Samuel Goldfish – which he got from a typical Ellis Island screw-up in which a clerk wrote down his original name, “Schmuel Gelbfisz,” as “Samuel Goldfish” – with that of his partners, brothers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, and then he decided to take “Goldwyn” as his own name as well because it sounded less silly than “Goldfish”) and the company’s absorption into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1924.

The Goldwyn Corporation put a movie version of Ben-Hur into production in 1922 and originally offered it to Erich von Stroheim to direct, but he turned it down in favor of Frank Norris’s McTeague, which he filmed as Greed (1924). They finally hired Charles Brabin as director and sent a crew to Italy to make the movie there, even though, as Gary Carey pointed out in his book on MGM, “none of Ben-Hur’s Rome then existed except as ruins.” Originally they cast a nondescript actor named George Walsh (younger brother of actor and, eventually, director Raoul Walsh) as Judah Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Ben-Hur’s friend turned bitter enemy and rival, the Roman officer Messala. Then Goldwyn was absorbed into MGM and the people now in charge, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, looked at the rushes and were horrified at the amount of time and money being spent on a film that was at best mediocre and at worst unreleasable. So they called off the production and decided to shoot Ben-Hur in Hollywood, with Fred Niblo replacing Brabin as director and Ramon Novarro taking over as Ben-Hur. They built a huge replica of a Roman chariot track (though one thing I’d forgotten about this movie was that the chariot race takes place not in Rome itself, but in Antioch), and a work crew from Culver City, where the MGM studio was located, suddenly showed up one afternoon, jackhammers at the ready, to tear it up so they could repair a sewer line underneath. I’d seen the 1925 Ben-Hur before with Charles from a videotape I’d made off a previous TCM showing, and I was quite impressed with it then – and I still am, even though there were a few things I misremembered about the film.

The version we were watching was a 1987 reissue print prepared by Thames Television (the main commercial channel on British TV) and Ted Turner’s company (Turner had bought the rights to the entire MGM, Warner Bros. and RKO film libraries to feed his super-cable channel, and they all ended up back at Warners when Turner merged his company into Warner Bros.), featuring a musical score by Carl Davis that, among other things, made liberal use of the “Dresden Amen,” the traditional Saxon hymn quoted by Mendelssohn in his “Reformation” Symphony and Wagner in his last opera, Parsifal. (I can readily imagine Carl Davis thinking, “Well, if it’s good enough for Mendelssohn and Wagner, it’s good enough for me.”) The “Dresden Amen” became a Leitmotif for Jesus Christ and the bits of his life that interface with Ben-Hur’s. One of the things I had thought about the film was that its multiple sequences in two-strip Technicolor only depicted events in Jesus’s life, but there was one big scene in two-strip that didn’t involve Jesus. It took place in Rome, after Judah Ben-Hur (to use his full name) has become the star athlete of the Roman Empire and is being fêted in the streets of the city and given the ancient Roman version of a ticker-tape parade. Charles made the interesting comment that Novarro was one of the few actors of his generation who actually got filmed in color – and in 1934, nine years after Ben-Hur, Novarro would appear with Jeanette MacDonald in The Cat and the Fiddle, whose last reel was shot in three-strip Technicolor: the first time that process was used in a live-action film.

I remember quite liking the 1925 Ben-Hur and finding it a much better movie than the far more famous 1959 remake, and one of the things I liked about it was that Ramon Novarro seemed much better casting for Ben-Hur than Charlton Heston had in the remake. Ben-Hur is a character who for all his action cred is far more someone to whom things happen than someone who makes things happen. He first gets in trouble when the new Roman governor Valerius Gratus (played by an actor not identified on imdb.com but who looks like the beta version of Charles Laughton in the one scene we get to see him in) arrives in Jerusalem and announces a kick-ass policy to suppress even the hint of anti-Roman dissent among the Jewish population. Gratus is staging a triumphal parade down the streets of Jerusalem to show those pesky Jews who’s boss, and Ben-Hur and his remaining family – his mother Miriam (Claire McDowell) and sister Tirzah (Kathleen Key) – are watching from the balcony of their palatial home. (It’s already been established that the Hur family is one of the few genuinely rich ones in the Jewish community of Jerusalem.) As the Hurs are watching the big parade, Ben-Hur accidentally loosens a piece of masonry and it falls on Gratus, killing him. Ben-Hur’s boyhood friend, the Roman Messala (Francis X. Bushman, who’d been a major star at Essanay Studios in the 1910’s, had fallen in popularity and was hoping playing Messala in Ben-Hur would be a major comeback role), condemns him to life as a galley slave as punishment. Ben-Hur is being marched through the desert to his new fate when he and the Roman soldiers who are in charge of him and the other Jewish slaves – one of whom faints from exhaustion and is left behind in the desert to die – are denied water, though when they’re passing through Nazareth the son of a local carpenter takes Ben-Hur aside and gives him water. Then Ben-Hur suffers as a galley slave for the next 20 minutes or so until he ends up on a ship commanded by Roman bigwig Quintus Arrius (Frank Currier).

The ship is attacked by pirates who have twice as many ships in their fleet as the Romans do, and the pirates’ rams sink most of the Roman ships and kill most of the galley slaves – they were literally chained to their posts – but Ben-Hur escapes because Arrius had ordered him unchained because he liked Ben-Hur’s spirit. “You talk like a Roman,” Arrius tells him. Ultimately they’re shipwrecked and spend two days drifting on the ocean surface clinging to a piece of their former ship, until they spot a Roman vessel which rescues them. At first Arrius tells Ben-Hur to let him die because his debacle at the hands of the pirates has convinced him he has no right to live, but Ben-Hur won’t let Arrius drown. When the two are finally rescued, Arrius is acclaimed as a hero and the two go to Rome, where Ben-Hur becomes a major chariot-racing star. All goes well until Ben-Hur receives word that his old retainer and literal slave Simonides (Nigel de Brulier) managed to preserve the Hur fortune and use it to establish himself as a major merchant in Antioch. Ben-Hur, who in the meantime has become Arrius’s adopted son, is given permission to go to Antioch, where he meets Simonides and also reunites with his former girlfriend, Simonides’s daughter Esther (May McAvoy, one year before she would be Al Jolson’s leading lady in The Jazz Singer, the film that would essentially do in the silent era). The big thing Ben-Hur wants to know is where his mother and daughter are; we know, though he does not, that they’re being held prisoner in one of the many dungeons the Romans have built under Jerusalem. When Sheik Ilderim (Mitchell Lewis) loses his chariot driver on the eve of a big race, he tries to recruit Ben-Hur to take his place. Ben-Hur refuses until he learns that his friend turned enemy Messala is another one of the contestants, whereupon he agrees to drive as long as he’s billed merely as “The Unknown Jew.”

The night before the Big Race, Messala assigns his vampy girlfriend Iras (Carmel Myers), to seduce Ben-Hur and find out who he really is. She does her damnedest, but she’s so angry at him for not responding to her that she gives him a parting insult that Messala could drive a team of snails and still beat him. (Given that in real life Ramon Novarro was Gay, I couldn’t help but joke that if Messala had sent him the cute little slave boy clad only in shorts we’d seen earlier in the scene, that might have worked as intended.) The race is staged surprisingly similarly to the one in the 1959 remake – it even takes place under a singularly ugly giant statue – perhaps because William Wyler worked as an assistant director on this one and had graduated to full director on the remake. There are just two big differences: in 1959 a big to-do was made over Messala’s use of so-called “Grecian wheels” on his chariot, studded spikes that stuck out of his wheelbase and sliced the other drivers’ chariot wheels to ribbons (in 1925 Messala deliberately fouls one of the other drivers and causes him to crash), and in this version Messala survives the chariot race, though disabled rather than dead. I remember the first time I saw the 1959 Ben-Hur in a 1970’s theatrical re-release with my mother and I was disappointed that the rest of the movie seemed like a big anticlimax after the chariot race. That’s less true of this version as Ben-Hur, determined to avenge himself against the Roman occupiers and convinced that Jesus is the rebel leader the Jews need, stakes his entire fortune on raising two legions to fight a resistance war. Only Jesus refuses Ben-Hur’s offer because His message is about peace and loving one’s enemies, not bloody revolution.

Meanwhile, a new governor, Pontius Pilate, has taken over as the Romans’ on-site ruler in Jerusalem, and he’s mounted a campaign to release all the Jewish prisoners who weren’t already accounted for in the Roman dungeons – only instead of setting them free, he sends them to a leper colony where they’ll get leprosy and die from its effects. Pilate does this to Miriam and Tirzah, and they’re both duly infected until Jesus runs into them literally on the road to his crucifixion and cures them on the spot. The film ends with Jesus crucified but Ben-Hur back with his family insisting that Jesus will live on in the hearts of his followers. The 1925 Ben-Hur is quite an impressive movie, back when “a cast of thousands” literally meant just that – you couldn’t fake the crowd scenes with CGI like you can now – and a number of famous Hollywood people, including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, John Gilbert, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Marion Davies, producer Sam Goldwyn and directors Clarence Brown, Henry King, George Fitzmaurice, Rupert Julian and Sidney Franklin emerged as audience extras in the chariot-race scene. I also like the painterly elegance of the two-strip Technicolor scenes, especially the ones in which Jesus appears – though one thing I don’t like about the movie is the almost strip tease-ish way the character of Jesus is handled. While previous Jesus films including the 1903 French film The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ and the 1912 From the Manger to the Cross, had actually shown Christ full-figure on screen, for Ben-Hur MGM’s “suits” decided that having an actor play Jesus visibly would be considered sacrilegious by Christian audiences. (Fortunately, within two years Cecil B. DeMille would redress that particular bit of Hollywood grievance and make a full-blown biopic of Jesus, The King of Kings, which showed H. B. Warner full-figure as Jesus and was an enormous hit.) Ben-Hur was a committee-made film, though it doesn’t look like one – Carey Wilson and Bess Meredyth wrote the version shot in Rome but June Mathis rewrote it and did the Hollywood version – and it’s so beautifully balanced between faith and drama (as the 1959 version really wasn’t) it still packs a punch as both pro-Christian propaganda and excellent entertainment.

The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (Pathé Frères, 1903)

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

My husband Charles was already at home when I returned from the Bears San Diego party last night, and we ended up watching an intriguing movie he’d stumbled upon online: The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcQmM8qrOA), a French film made by Pathé Frères in 1903. This was one of at least three films about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ made in 1903 – the others were a straightforward filming of the annual Horitz Passion Play in Horitz, Bohemia (now it’s called Hořovice and it’s in the Czech Republic) and an American production by Sig Lubin that was cut up and released as a series of shorts because Lubin was a member of the Motion Picture Patents Trust and their policy was based on the idea that no one would sit through a movie longer than one reel (10 to 12 minutes at silent film speed). This was particularly interesting to me because after we watched The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ YouTube showed a cheerily irreverent video about Jesus films hosted by self-proclaimed atheist Steve Shives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60vCFjbWCTs) that proclaimed 1912’s From the Manger to the Cross from the American Kalem company as the first film ever made about Jesus. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ runs 45 minutes (unusually long for 1903) and it’s a film shrouded in mystery. It had two directors, Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and imdb.com lists credits for two cinematographers (Camille Legrand and Wormser) and two art directors (Gaston Dumensil and Vasseur), but the only actors credited are “Monsieur Moreau” as Joseph and “Madame Moreau” as his wife Mary, the Virgin Mother of God. (I like the irony of casting a real-life married couple as Joseph and Mary, and wonder if that’s been done in any Jesus movie since.)

Since it was made in 1903 it’s a set of pretty static tableaux and it would be utterly incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know the story already, but it had a certain degree of charm. It begins with the Annunciation, the visit to Mary from the Angel Gabriel telling her that she’s pregnant with the Son of God, and ends with a surprisingly effectively filmed scene of the Resurrection even though it was done with simple double exposure of the rock moving and a platform device to show Christ rising from the tomb. Double exposure was also the technique used in an earlier scene showing Christ walking on the water. Nonguet and Zecca pushed 1903’s primitive effects technology to the limits, including an animated Star of Bethlehem – in this version the shepherds and the wise men don’t follow the star, the star follows them – and a quite good shot (probably done by masking part of the image so two separate scenes could be shot on the same strip of film) of the angels in their heavenly host looking down on the action featuring Joseph, Mary and Jesus. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ is also noteworthy for the extensive early use of stencil color in some scenes. Stencil color was a process invented at Pathé by which watercolor-like dyes would be applied to the film using stencils to make sure the colors ended up where they were supposed to be. This was an improvement over the hand-painted colors used in a few American films like The Great Train Robbery (also 1903) but it was basically the same principle as was frequently done with still photos in the early days: a black-and-white print was painted over with watercolors to create the illusion of color. For some reason the colorizers (I can’t help but use the term!) of The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ decided to make all the Roman soldiers’ uniforms yellow, but for the most part the use of stencil colorization in this film is quite inventive and adds to its appeal even though the only colors routinely featured are yellow and blue. The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ is an engaging movie, well done within the limits of 1903 (both the technology and the creativity; this was well before the “grammar of film” developed and directors learned to change camera angles, shoot close-ups, and use intercutting – though William K. Dickson had pioneered intercutting in The Great Train Robbery to indicate different actions happening at the same time the same year The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ was made), and I was glad to have been able to watch it and to do so with perfect timing during the evening between Good Friday and Easter!

The Case of the Howling Dog (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1934)

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

Last night (Friday, April 18) I watched a quite good 1934 film on Turner Classic Movies: The Case of the Howling Dog, the first film featuring Erle Stanley Gardner’s super-attorney Perry Mason. Gardner had created the Mason character only a year earlier, in 1933, with The Case of the Velvet Claws (the title comes from a self-published essay written by an anti-feminist woman), and he objected strenuously to Warner Bros.’s decision to cast gentlemanly actor Warren William as Mason. The film opens with a haunting shot of the allegedly howling dog and then cuts to a shot of Mason’s offices, which in this version take up at least two floors. We know that because not only do we see two rows of office windows painted with “Perry Mason, Attorney-at-Law” legible from outside, but when we pan into the building we see row upon row of individual offices, each one occupied by an attorney and his secretary (naturally, this being 1934, all the attorneys are male and all the secretaries are female), as well as a telephone switchboard to handle the sheer volume of calls. It’s quite a different picture of Mason’s operation than the one we get on the famous 1955-1966 TV series, in which secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake appeared to be Mason’s entire staff. The titular howling dog is owned by Clinton Foley (Russell Hicks), and the neighbor who’s complaining about it is Arthur Cartwright (Gordon Wescott). Arthur pays Mason $10,000 as a retainer and writes a holographic will leaving everything to Foley’s wife Bessie (Mary Astor) – or is she Foley’s wife? It seems she may be legally married to Arthur instead; there are some conflicting stories about how Cartwright’s legal wife Evelyn (whom we never see) may or may not have run off with Foley, or Bessie with Cartwright, while the two couples were living near each other in Santa Monica years before. Mason takes Cartwright’s case and then Cartwright disappears mysteriously. Mason then decides that Bessie Foley is now his client because Cartwright willed her 90 percent of his fortune. Shortly thereafter Clinton Foley is killed in his home by someone who also shoots his dog, and the police and district attorney Claude Drumm (Grant Mitchell, who seems a much more able prosecutor than William Talman’s Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV show!) indict Bessie for the murder.

Eventually it turns out that there were actually two identical-looking dogs, one which howled and one which didn’t (which explains the contradictory testimony on whether the dog howled or not), and Foley swapped one out for the other at the local pound. Mason agrees to represent Bessie Foley at her trial, and he strongly hints that Clayton Foley’s maid, Lucy Benton (Dorothy Tree), killed both Clayton and the dog because she was in unrequited love with Clayton and was jealous of Bessie. Mason’s investigators visit Benton’s home in search of pages from her diary to establish that she wrote the telegram Bessie allegedly sent to her husband stating that she was running off with Arthur Cartwright. They pose as reporters offering to purchase the diary for publication but, on Mason’s orders, tear out the pages for June 21 of that year and bring them to Mason’s office. Mason determines that Benton forged the telegram to Clinton Foley by using her left hand to write it, since she’s ambidextrous and can write equally well with either arm. This certainly makes it seem like Benton is the murderer, and on the basis of that evidence Mason is able to get Bessie Foley acquitted, but later in the film’s tag scene Mason recovers the original dog from the pound. When Bessie comes to Mason’s office the dog greets her warmly without making any hostile growls or other gestures. Thus Mason deduces that she did indeed kill Clinton Foley, though it’s excusable as self-defense because Foley killed both Arthur Cartwright and his wife Evelyn and had his sights set on her, too. One bit of evidence that led Mason to this conclusion was that Clinton Foley was renovating his garage to accommodate three cars even though he doesn’t need that extra space. Mason arranges for the trial to be moved to Clinton’s living room, where the sounds of jackhammers cleaning up the concrete floors make it impossible to understand much of anything being said there. Mason succeeds in dramatizing this by having the last session of the trial moved to Clinton’s home, where the jackhammers mostly drown out the proceedings. It turns out that Clinton Foley murdered both Arthur and Evelyn Cartwright out of jealousy and buried them under the concrete being laid for his new garage addition. So Bessie Foley really did kill her husband after all, as is revealed in a tag scene in which Mason explains that he got the original dog, “Prince,” by buying him from the pound, and it didn’t bark or growl when it approached her as the replacement dog did on the night of the murder. But since she’s already been acquitted by a jury, she can’t be tried for Clinton’s murder, and Mason decides that since she acted in self-defense and Clinton was a psychopathic monster anyway, he’s O.K. with the outcome (though one wonders what he’d do if the police and prosecutors went after the innocent Lucy Benton and indicted her).

Incidentally The Case of the Howling Dog was remade as an episode of the Perry Mason TV series with Raymond Burr, only in the TV version the ending was rewritten so the housekeeper was the killer after all and that bizarre final twist was deleted. William K. Everson in his book The Detective in Film called The Case of the Howling Dog a sort of dry run for Mary Astor’s role in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon, which also cast her as a murderess (albeit a far less sympathetic one!) – and the scene involving a defaced diary had an eerie parallel two years later in Astor’s own life, in which her husband accused her of having an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. Astor’s husband’s attorneys subpoenaed her diary, but when it came into evidence the judge in her divorce case ruled it inadmissible because some pages had been torn out. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz gave a different explanation for how Raymond Burr got to play Perry Mason on TV than the one I’d read before in an old TV Guide article. TV Guide claimed that CBS was considering three actors for the role and left the final decision to Erle Stanley Gardner, who chose Burr. It didn’t name who the other two were, but Mankiewicz’s version of the tale was that Fred MacMurray was set to play Mason on TV and Burr was up for the role of his nemesis, prosecutor Hamilton Burger. But Burr asked to read for Mason as well, and Gardner saw his reading and insisted that Burr be cast as Mason. Gardner had always imagined Mason as a roughneck type, which was why he hadn’t cared for the Warner Bros. films (four of which starred Warren William and one each used Ricardo Cortez and Donald Woods as Mason – which had me thinking that, since William and Cortez played both Perry Mason and Sam Spade, it’s a pity Warners didn’t cast the third and by far best-known Spade, Humphrey Bogart, as Mason in their last film with the character, especially after Bogart did so well as a Thomas Dewey-esque prosecutor in the 1936 film Marked Woman – and Burr likewise had played a prosecutor in the 1951 film A Place in the Sun four years before his debut as Mason) and he loved the TV series with Burr, Barbara Hale, William Hopper and William Talman.

Law and Order/Law and Order: Special Victims Unit crossover event: "Play with Fire" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 17) I got to watch a so-called “crossover event” between Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, a two-hour show called “Play with Fire,” as well as the welcome return of Law and Order: Organized Crime to the airwaves (for some reason the fifth season has hitherto been available only on Comcast/Universal/NBC’s “Peacock” streaming channel, and I’m not sure whether last night’s telecast is an indication that Organized Crime is returning to NBC’s airwaves or it was just a loss leader to get more people to shell out for Peacock subscriptions) with a series episode called “Lost Highway.” The “Play with Fire” episode began with a scene in a youth shelter featuring two young women, Ana Machado (Marisela Zumbrado) and Sofia (Dani Montalvo). Sofia gives Ana her phone and punches in the number of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, with instructions to call it if anything happens to her. Then Sofia goes to check out a warehouse, only hours later Ana goes to the warehouse to check on her friend and finds a corpse of a young woman literally burned to a crisp inside a metal barrel. Ana calls the police but then hangs up on Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) as soon as Benson asks for her name. The M.O. reminds both Benson and Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) of the 2-7 precinct where the flagship Law and Order show is centered of an earlier rape in which the victim was similarly burned to the proverbial crisp. The cops thought they had a suspect, but he fled to Mexico and the Mexican government not only refused to extradite him based on lack of evidence, they also utterly ignored the NYPD’s entreaties. The New York cops weren’t particularly worried about that because he was in custody in Mexico for unrelated crimes, but as soon as he was released he high-tailed it back to New York. The police actually arrest him, but he turns out to have firm alibis for both rapes/murders, the one from two years before and the one now.

When Benson and Brady both learn of the new victim’s identity, it’s a shock, especially to Benson: “Sofia” was really Detective Maria Recinos, whom Benson had personally rescued from human traffickers when Maria was just a child. Benson had personally made sure she was taken care of, and when she grew up Maria decided to become a police officer and worked her way up to detective until she was assigned to go undercover at the youth hostel run by Father Alberto Garcia (Al Vicente). The SVU and 2-7 police apprehend Ana and bring her back to a police station for interrogation, and Benson and Brady have an argument that goes far beyond “good cop/bad cop” tactics in how to deal with her. Benson ultimately asks Brady to leave the interrogation room because Brady’s hardball tactics are making Ana nervous, but as Benson is called out of the room herself briefly, Ana takes advantage of her absence to escape. Later Ana’s body is found strangled in the park; like the other two victims, she was raped before she was murdered, but unlike the others she wasn’t burned as well. Both Benson and Brady start to suspect that the mystery rapist/murderer must have inside knowledge of the case to have targeted Ana so quickly, and they start to suspect Father Garcia. This is one Law and Order show that seems to be copying the Midsomer Murders formula of having the police unearth other criminal conspiracies on their way to solving the main intrigue; in this case they stumble on a hotel where women are kept locked up in rooms and sexually enslaved to a sequence of “Johns.” The cops bust that one by assigning Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) to call the phone number provided on the gang’s “Dark Web” page and pose as a would-be john, and ultimately they catch on to who he is and the cops have to raid the place, but they take into custody a few rather confused teenage women who, like Ana, are undocumented immigrants sent to the U.S. by their parents in hopes of landing good (or at least well-paying) jobs and sending money back home as remittances.

The cops then pay a visit to the church were Father Garcia is pastor, and they find him in an armed confrontation with Lieutenant Paul Gomez (Reinaldo Faberlie), Maria Recinos’s supervisor on her undercover assignment. Garcia grabs Gomez’s gun and the two are both reaching for it when Benson and the SVU cops arrive and demand that Garcia drop the gun. “I can’t,” he says, and Gomez reaches for another gun strapped to his leg and uses it to kill Father Garcia. Ultimately the police realize that [spoiler alert!] Gomez is the real rapist and killer they’re after. Benson has her jacket, with its bloodstains from the gun battle, secretly tested and it reveals that Gomez’s DNA is a match for what was found on the victims’ bodies, courtesy of a new technique that allows police lab scientist Libby Wagner (Natalie Liconti, a fascinatingly butch woman with starkly pulled-back hair) to extract DNA even from burned corpses through looking for it in the victims’ vaginas. Earlier the cops had been led on a red-herring chase for a recently released ex-con named Miguel Pinto (J. Anthony Pena) because his semen was found on Anna’s corpse, but that turns out to be yet another frame-up from Gomez. When Pinto got out of prison, Gomez hired a sex worker to “do” him with instructions that she make him use a condom and retrieve it from the hotel bathroom’s trash can once they were finished so Gomez would have Pinto’s semen to use in a later frame-up.

When the case goes to trial, a key witness balks on the stand after yet another corrupt cop, Mueller Hayes (Charles Edwin Powell) – though his corruption only extends to fixing traffic tickets for his friends in exchange for bribes, not outright rapes and/or murders – walks into the courtroom and stares her down as she’s testifying. We’ve also seen Hayes accost Benson’s adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle, who’s played this character since he was introduced and we’ve seen him naturally age over the years) on his way out of school and threaten him. In a remarkable cameo appearance, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) confronts Hayes in a court restroom and tells him he’s on to him and there will be dire consequences for him if he pulls any more such threats. Ultimately Benson has to go back to a woman who formerly lived at the homeless shelter and knew the earlier victim while she was still struggling with drug addiction. Since then she’s got clean and sober and has fallen in love with a nice young man who knew nothing of her past, but Benson has to visit her and talk her into testifying even though she risks losing everything she’s fought for if her past is exposed publicly. Ultimately she testifies, Gomez is found guilty of all three rapes and murders, and the woman and her fiancé are shown together inside Garcia’s old church. While this Law and Order “crossover event” is something of a compendium of both Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit clichés (something I became more aware of while writing the above than when I was actually watching it), it was also quite powerful, well staged drama. The two episodes had different directors – Jean de Segonzac for the Law and Order portion and Juan José Campanella for the SVU segment – but the writers, Rick Eid and Art Alamo, were the same and the two episodes meshed well into a quite powerful and moving two-hour extended event.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Lost Highway" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 17, 2025)

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

Later on last night (Thursday, April 17) I watched the season five premiere of Law and Order: Organized Crime, which had previously been available only on NBC/Universal/Comcast’s premium subscription “streaming” service, Peacock (barf). The show was called “Lost Highway” and it put Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, who’s been so well preserved it’s shocking that he’s just a year and a half younger than I am) through yet another undercover assignment posing as a trucker to infiltrate a gang called The Three Kings. The Three Kings are so called because they’re run by three brothers named Kingman: Steve (Erik Fellows), Mark (Dov Davidoff), and Vic (Blake DeLong, who’s hot enough he could be a villain in a Lifetime movie). That’s their age ranges, from oldest to youngest, but Mark seems to be the one in overall charge, and he gives Stabler a job interview. Stabler’s cover identity is “Henry Drummond” (also the name playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee gave their Clarence Darrow analogue in their Scopes Trial play Inherit the Wind), though he’s citing his experience in season four driving a truck for a honey farm that was also smuggling illegal commodities. He claims to have served a two-year prison sentence for that, and that’s good enough for Mark Kingman, who hires Hank (the shortened version of the name Stabler goes by in his undercover identity) as a driver for his own illegal cargoes. He’s working for a particularly brutal French-Canadian gang on the other side of the border, all of whose members except their leader (or at least their straw boss), André Lebec (Adam Dunlap), wear burlap masks that make them look as if Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz went really, really bad. What’s more, they have a penchant for not only eliminating gang members who screw up but setting their corpses on fire (so it was the second Law and Order show in a row in which the bad guys set people on fire once they’re done with them), which they’re shown doing in an opening prologue.

The Three Kings not only smuggle drugs and weapons across the border, they also run an al fresco whorehouse right out of their truck yard. In fact, Stabler is accosted by one of the prostitutes on his first day on the job, and he’s also pickpocketed by a teenage girl named Bunny (Maggie Toomey) who’s a badass little woman who steals things from people and then makes her victims pay her to get their stuff back. On his first night staying at the truckyard Stabler overhears a prostitute literally screaming at the rough treatment she’s getting from one of her johns, an African-Canadian named Felix (Paul Bikibili). Stabler crashes into the room and rescues her, though she didn’t particularly want to be rescued – she explains that she accepts that enduring rough treatment from johns is just part of the job. Also, by doing his man-on-horseback schtick (as if he can’t keep from his training in the old days on the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit), he gets in bad with Mark Kingman because Felix was the Three Kings’ contact with the French-Canadian gang they’re supposed to be working for. As things turn out, Felix isn’t long for this world anyway because as soon as he returns to the gang, André decides that his actions with the whore at the truckyard make him a liability and the gang shoots him and then burns the corpse. One of the prostitutes is knocked out and comes to locked in a trailer with the body of a dead hooker nicknamed “Sad Eyes” (Sofia Insua). Ultimately Bunny is kidnapped and Stabler tries to rescue her by driving her out of the compound in a blue SUV, but Vic realizes what’s up and gets into a truck cab, detached from the trailers it usually pulls, to give chase. Because he’s driving a considerably more maneuverable vehicle, Stabler is able to outrun Vic – but for some reason writers John Shiban and Amy Berg don’t bother to explain, Stabler parks his truck along the roadside and Vic spots him, deliberately ramming him with his truck cab.

That’s the end of the episode, and I frankly have no idea whether NBC is going to let us see the rest of this season of Law and Order: Organized Crime weekly in its former Thursdays at 10 p.m. time slot (before they replaced it by a really putrid-seeming show called Found) or their showing it on this occasion was just a loss leader for the Peacock “streaming” service (once again, barf). Still, it was a good, taut, well-staged episode (the director was Michael Slovis) whose only defect was its maddeningly open ending; at least on his other shows Dick Wolf, thankfully, does not worship at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL the way he does on Organized Crime!

Power of the Press (Columbia, 1943)

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

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

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

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

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