David Frost vs., Episode 1: The Beatles (Paradine Productions, White Horse Pictures, SKY Studios, MS-NBC, originally aired April 27, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, May 26) my husband Charles and I watched two quite interesting TV shows together, the first episode of the mini-series David Frost vs. and the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen. I’m a bit surprised at the title given to the six-part TV miniseries on Frost, David Frost vs., because David Frost was never known as a particularly combative interviewer. Indeed, when it was announced in 1977 that he would be doing the first (and, as it turned out, only) interviews with Richard Nixon between Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency in 1974 and his death 20 years later, Frost was considered too much of a lightweight to give Nixon the intensive grilling a lot of people disappointed by his successor Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon wanted. Frost wrote a memoir of the process by which the Nixon interviews happened called “I Gave Them a Sword,” from a remark Nixon made during the interviews to the effect that his involvement in the Watergate cover-up had given his long-time Democratic enemies in Congress the weapon with which to remove him from power, in which he detailed the elaborate negotiations that brought about the Nixon interviews and the research team he assembled to prep him on what questions he should ask Nixon.

The first episode of the David Frost vs. mini-series (of six in all) was called David Frost vs. The Beatles. It made the point that David Frost and The Beatles both emerged on the British cultural scene in the same year, 1962: Frost as the host of a weekly TV series satirizing the news called That Was the Week That Was and The Beatles with their first two singles, “Love Me Do” b/w “P.S., I Love You” and “Please Please Me” b/w “Ask Me Why.” It began with Frost’s first-ever interview with a Beatle on his later talk show, and the Beatle he got was Paul McCartney. It’s certainly an interesting clip, especially given Paul’s musings about his future, in which (among other things) he mulls over the prospect of an early retirement. It’s especially amazing given that Paul has never retired; he’s still making music, releasing records and even giving live concerts into his 80’s. Later there’s a clip of John Lennon and George Harrison from a 1967 Frost show with the Maharishi Maheah Yogi during the time in which The Beatles had embraced Transcendental Meditation, and Frost was tolerant with both the Beatles and the Maharishi. The Maharishi spoke in an annoying sing-song voice (there are plenty of East Indians who became proficient in English as a second language during and even after the British colonization, but the Maharishi wasn’t one of them) and it’s obvious that he was using The Beatles as a tool with which to push his own business.

When Frost interviewed the three of them they had just got back from a week-long meditation marathon in Bangor, Wales (during which they learned of the death of their manager, Brian Epstein) and they would go on to spend an entire month at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, during which they would write most of the songs for the so-called “White Album.” The Beatles became disillusioned with the Maharishi during their stay in Rishikesh; Ringo said it was like being in a summer holiday camp and John, noticing the way the Maharishi was cruising Mia Farrow, said, “Oh, he’s just a man after all,” and wrote the song “Sexy Sadie” caricaturing him. George got more serious about Indian spirituality, departing the Maharishi and adopting Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, as his new guru; at one time the two biggest financial contributors to Hare Krishna were a successful Indian car dealer and George Harrison. As for the Maharishi, with The Beatles unwilling to put together a tour that would include the Maharishi lecturing and a rock performance, he got The Beach Boys to tour with him instead – a financial disaster for both parties that was canceled in mid-tour. John’s next interview with David Frost was with Yoko Ono in early 1969 to publicize what he called his commercial advertising campaign for peace. In between he presented The Beatles performing “live” before an in-studio TV audience and doing the song “Hey Jude,” and the intertitles for this show note ruefully, “This was the greatest performance The Beatles ever gave on TV. It was also their last.”

John and Yoko again appeared on Frost’s American TV show in 1972 to promote their radical politics and perform the song “Attica State,” which got a hostile reaction from members of the audience in the back of the theatre. Two people, a man and a woman, started calling out that however the prisoners at Attica State Prison had been treated during the brutal suppression of their prison riot in 1971, they were still dangerous criminals and shouldn’t be whitewashed the way they felt John and Yoko were doing in their song. Frost, as he often did with hostile members of his audience, invited them to come to the front of the theatre and debate them directly. The credits noted the irony that when John Lennon was murdered in New York City on December 8, 1980, his killer, Mark David Chapman, ended up as a prisoner at Attica State. The show made the bizarre claim that David Frost was the only TV host who dared to have John and Yoko appear at the peak of their radical political phase. In fact, John and Yoko were invited to co-host Mike Douglas's show for one week from February 14-18, 1972 and were permitted to pick the other guests. There’s even a documentary film, Daytime Revolution (2024), about the week John and Yoko co-hosted the Douglas show. Frost’s last interview with a Beatle was with the one who’d started it all: Paul McCartney, in 2012, just a year before Frost himself died. That clip is posted on YouTube and one commentator, Mark Hildebrand, wrote, “Wow! An interview where the subject is allowed to express himself completely without being interrupted every 30 seconds. Terrific interview, thank you.” There’s a kind of “two old warriors reminiscing about the old days” feeling about this interview that made a nice postscript to the show.

The Dirty Dozen (Seven Arts Productions, MKH, MGM, 1967)

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

After David Frost vs. The Beatles on May 26, 2025 I changed to Turner Classic Movies for another artefact of the 1960’s: Robert Aldrich’s 1967 World War II film The Dirty Dozen. TCM’s host for this one, Dave Karger, said that when MGM green-lighted this film they thought the audience for it would be “hawks,” supporters of the war in Viet Nam and lovers of the military and its codes of honor and duty. What they didn’t realize was that a lot of anti-war “doves” who wanted the U.S. to withdraw from Viet Nam would embrace the film, too. Watching the movie – which neither Charles nor I had ever seen before – it became clear why anti-war audiences would have embraced it, for The Dirty Dozen – based on a novel by E. M. Nathanson and written by old Hollywood hand Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller, a writer whom director Aldrich had picked up in Germany in an abortive attempt to film Willi Heinrich’s German-centered World War II novel The Cross of Iron – took a jaundiced view of the military and made its rituals look ridiculous. The central character is U.S. Army Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), who in the opening scene witnesses a soldier being hanged for murder. Just before the noose is tightened and the trap door released, he pleads that he didn’t mean to kill the victim, but the hanging goes on anyway. Then Reisman is given an order to recruit 12 Army prisoners, sentence either to be hanged or to long prison terms, to be trained for a commando mission against a castle at Rennes-le-Chateau, France (best known as the headquarters of the Priory of Sion, the secret society made famous by Dan Brown in his novel The Da Vinci Code) where many of the major German army officers hang out for rest and recreation.

Among the unlikely recruits for this mission are Joseph T. Wladislaw (Charles Bronson, establishing the action-hero cred that would largely define him in the 1970’s); Robert T. Jefferson (football hero Jim Brown, who naturally is given a scene in which he gets to do what he was most famous for, run really fast); the anti-social Victor R. Franko (John Cassavetes) who was a Mob hit man in Chicago; the religious fanatic Archer J. Maggott (Telly Savalas before he became a cop on the long-running TV detective show Kojak) who killed a prostitute because he thought (delusionally) that the Lord was telling him to; Vernon Pinkley (Donald Sutherland); Glenn Gilpin (Ben Carruthers); Seth Sawyer (Colin Maitland); Tassos Bravos (Al Mancini); Roscoe Lever (Stuart Cooper); Milo Vladek (Tom Busby); and Pedro Jiminez (pop singer Trini Lopez, who gets to sing a pretty good song called “The Bramble Bush” in the film). Much of the movie is taken up by Reisman’s training sessions to turn his unlikely recruits into an effective commando unit, which takes up the first 90 minutes of this 165-minute film, followed by a war games sequence that takes up so much time it’s only in the last 45 minutes or so that the Dirty Dozen actually face the enemy. Reisman had been given the assignment by General Worden (Ernest Borgnine, surprisingly effective as an asshole after all the sympathetic roles he’d played in films like Marty and TV shows like McHale’s Navy), and there’s a long-running antagonism between him and his nominal commanding officer, Col. Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan). One complication is that Reisman is under strict orders not to tell anyone who his recruits are or what they’re being trained to do, which leads to a bizarre confrontation in a base-camp latrine between Wladislaw and two MP’s who, acting under orders from Col. Breed, beat the shit out of him to get him to give up the secret.

At Reisman’s insistence, the men in his unit are promised full pardons if they survive the mission. Franko nearly blows it for them when he refuses to shave with cold water while other people on the base are allowed hot water, and when he’s told no, he and the other Dozen respond by refusing to shave or bathe at all. Reisman actually likes this turn of events because it shows that the Dozen are taking responsibility for each other and behaving as a unit instead of rowdy, rambunctious individuals. There’s a great scene in which a U.S. Army band is on hand to play standard-issue marches like John Philip Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” and “The Thunderer” and Edwin Bagley’s “National Emblem,” only Col. Breed keeps ordering the band to stop so he can deliver a meaningless and interminable speech. One of the best things about The Dirty Dozen is precisely its irreverence towards the military and its rituals that John Ford was so serious about in his war films. There’s a great scene in which Reisman orders Pinkley to impersonate a general inspecting his troops – when Pinkley asks how he can pass himself off as a general, Reisman tells him, “That’s easy, Just walk past them and look stupid” – anticipating Donald Sutherland’s star-making role as “Hawkeye” Pierce in the 1970 film M*A*S*H, another irreverent look at the Army and its rituals. Col. Breed demands that the Dozen prove their ability to function as a unit, and Reisman takes the bait by assigning them to a war-games exercise (though for something that’s supposed to be a practice battle, there are an awful lot of explosions and fires that make it look like they’re using live ammo) and having them “capture” the base commanders by disguising themselves as the other side in the games. This is an ironic reflection of what will happen to them when they actually attack the castle at Rennes, in which some of them will be disguised as German officers so they can slip into the castle undetected until the others are ready for the kill.

When the attack happens – minus one of the Dozen, whose parachute deposits him in an apple tree and breaks his back so they have to abandon him to his death – the Germans realize their supposedly safe space has been infiltrated and they hide in a cellar they’re using as an improvised bomb shelter. Reisman orders his men to throw hand grenades and gasoline down the cellar’s ventilation shafts, then having Jefferson set fire to them. It’s an ironic reflection, which Aldrich and his writers may have intended, of what the real-life Nazis were doing to Jews in the infamous gas chambers at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other places. Ultimately about half the Dirty Dozen escape while the others get killed as part of the mission, and Reisman makes sure that the survivors get their promised pardons and the families of the dead ones get letters that their sons died honorable deaths in battle. In his interview for the Charles Higham/Joel Greenberg book The Celluloid Muse (1969), Robert Aldrich recalled that, “although I had arranged with [producer Kenneth] Hyman to do the casting and the cutting, Metro hired John Wayne. Now I’m a Wayne fan. His politics don’t bother me, that’s his mother’s problem. But you don’t get John Wayne to play a Lee Marvin part. Anyway, after a lot of unnecessary, unpleasant abrasion, Wayne himself decided not to play the part.” The Dirty Dozen became an important way-stop for Lee Marvin’s improbable rise from villain-role typecasting to stardom, first in the 1965 comedy Western Cat Ballou (in which Marvin played a dual role, an implacable bad guy and an alcoholic good guy who was the model for Gene Wilder’s character in Blazing Saddles), then in this and ultimately in anti-hero action roles like Point Blank (1967) and Prime Cut (1972). The Dirty Dozen is a surprisingly good movie, and I think I read somewhere that Quentin Tarantino modeled the big action sequence in his own World War II movie, Inglourious Basterds (2009), on The Dirty Dozen. I’m glad I finally caught up with this quite remarkable film which I’d always written off, without seeing it, as a pro-war propaganda-fest.

The Red Badge of Courage (MGM, 1951)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films from Turner Classic Movies’ three-day Memorial Day weekend marathon of war films. They were both movies I’d seen before, but not for many years. The first was The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s classic novel of both cowardice and courage in the Civil War. I haven’t read The Red Badge of Courage since junior high school and I hadn’t seen the movie since I ran it for Charles on a home-recorded videotape in the late 1990’s. The Red Badge of Courage has gone down in history alongside such similarly butchered films as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), John Ford’s Three Bad Men (1926), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Huston considered the original two-hour director’s cut the best film he’d made to that point, but as part of the turmoil that gripped MGM when Louis B. Mayer was fired in 1951 and Dore Schary took over as head of production, it was given various cut-down edits until the final release version was only 69 minutes. John Huston was unable to fight back because he was already in Africa making The African Queen (a mirror image of how Orson Welles lost control of Ambersons by flying off to South America for his never-finished documentary It’s All True). Oddly, The Red Badge of Courage as it stands now is a powerful and totally engaging cinematic parable of war and what it does to the psyches of the people – especially the “grunts” on the ground – who have to fight it. Huston chose mostly unknown or barely known actors for the roles, and he gave the leads to two real World War II veterans who’d never made movies before: Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated war hero in the war, and Bill Mauldin, a cartoonist whose bedraggled, unshaven characters “Willie” and “Joe” communicated what being an infantryman in World War II was really like. (Later Murphy would become at least a minor star in Universal Westerns, and would also play himself in a film of his autobiography. To Hell and Back.)

Huston was one of those filmmakers who actually left the industry during the war to enlist in the U.S. Signal Corps and make on-the-spot documentaries of actual combats, notably The Battle of San Pietro (1942). I couldn’t help but think of the anecdote that when Huston completed San Pietro and showed it to his commanding officers, one of them said, “You’ve made an anti-war movie!” Huston replied, “If I ever make a movie about war that isn’t an anti-war movie, you can take me out and shoot me.” Certainly The Red Badge of Courage (the title is a reference to one’s first war wound) is an anti-war movie, and Huston’s approach to shooting fictionalized battles was informed by his wartime experience filming real ones. Both Huston and Murphy tried to buy back the film from MGM to restore his original cut, but they were told that the negative had been destroyed. One Huston biographer said he’d actually gotten a 16 mm print of his version, but he’d lost it on one of his many travels. Huston told that writer, Lawrence Grobel, that it didn’t much matter to him because he’d made so many films and he’d written off The Red Badge of Courage as a flop between two major hits, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The African Queen (1952). Huston (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Albert Band, both of whom also played parts in the film) and his no-name cast do such a good job establishing verisimilitude that when we momentarily do encounter a familiar face (and an even more familiar voice), Andy Devine as “The Cheery Soldier,” we’re jarred back to the usual experience of watching a movie. The familiar story of a young man who deserts during his first battle, falls in with a line of wounded soldiers who ask him what his wound is, and then has a chance to redeem himself the next day in another all-out engagement is well told and suffers from none of the lacunae that usually afflict massively edited films. Indeed, I think one could make a case that a longer The Red Badge of Courage wouldn’t necessarily be a better one – just as when I read that the original rough cut of The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup was two hours long and the version we have is just 70 minutes, I thought that a longer Duck Soup might have been a batch of great comedy scenes with a lot of boring stuff in between (like all too many of The Marx Brothers’ later movies), while the Duck Soup we have is a batch of great comedy scenes with nothing in between.

Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin Productions, First National Pictures, 1918)

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

After Turner Classic Movies showed The Red Badge of Courage on Day 2 of their Memorial Day weekend marathon of war films, it was time for Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature. Instead of making the obvious choice and showing King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), the second highest-grossing silent film of all time (after another war movie, D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation from 1915), Stewart chose two war comedies, Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918) and Harold Lloyd’s A Sailor-Made Man (1921). Charles and I had seen A Sailor-Made Man in 2024 and I’d posted about it to moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-sailor-made-man-hal-roach-productions.html. I have little to add about it now except that it was a lot more fun to watch it on the big screen of our 50-inch TV than the comparatively small computer monitor. It had been a lot longer since I’d seen Shoulder Arms: in a storefront revival theatre in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s. The version TCM showed was outfitted with a not well recorded musical score that according to the imdb.com page on the film was added in 1957 but the sound quality seems more like the 1930’s to me. Like The Red Badge of Courage, Shoulder Arms was planned as a considerably longer film (five reels) than the one we have (three reels). According to pioneering Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff, the missing sequences occurred at both the beginning and the end: Chaplin’s character was introduced as a family man, he was shown getting drafted, and after the big scene in which he captures the Kaiser (played by Chaplin’s older brother Sydney) and ends the war (only this turns out to be just a dream), there would have been scenes in which he was fêted by King George V and French president Raymond Poincaré. Huff didn’t regret the deletions; he wrote, “Cut down to three reels, the film’s pace and impact were magnified.”

Chaplin’s friend Douglas Fairbanks and fellow directors D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille warned him against making a comedy about the “Great War” (as World War I was usually called before there was a World War II), but Shoulder Arms turned out to be the highest grossing Chaplin film to date (a title it retained until 1925’s The Gold Rush). It had such Ur-clichés of service comedies as the hapless private who can’t stay in step with the rest of his regiment and gets lost and marches off alone until he realizes what he’s done and hurriedly tries to catch up with them. It also has a great scene in which the trench the soldiers of Chaplin’s company have been living in gets flooded, and Chaplin and his buddy sleep floating on the water regardless. (Chaplin breathes under water by grabbing the detachable horn of a wind-up phonograph and using it as a snorkel.) It has a quite remarkable special-effects scene in which Chaplin flashes back to his former urban life and we see a New York (at least I’m guessing it was New York) cityscape, complete with skyscrapers, on the left side of the screen while the right side still shows the trench in the middle of the battle. Later on there’s an equally astonishing scene in which Chaplin’s character fantasizes that a bar has opened up in his trench and a bartender serves him a drink. In 1918 those scenes could only have been shot by masking off part of the image, rewinding the film in the camera without exposing it, and shooting the additional scene on the previously masked-out portion of the film. And to play the commander of the German forces seen in the film, Chaplin found a really short (we’re talking close to little-person status here) named Loyal Underwood – though in the first scene we see of him I thought it might be Chaplin doubling both roles and it was only a later scene in which both he and Chaplin appear that I realized they were two separate actors. (Ironically, Chaplin himself was safe from being drafted because, at only 5’4”, he didn’t meet either the British or American army’s height requirement.)

About the only scene that seems to take away from the film’s high spirits was the one in which we meet Chaplin’s usual leading lady at the time, Edna Purviance, playing a French farm girl who’s trying to hold onto a house that’s been literally blasted to smithereens. When he arrives, Chaplin politely opens the door to be let in even though a good chunk of the wall next to it is missing and he could have just walked through where the wall used to be. This scene has a great payoff in which what’s left of the house collapses just as the Germans have tried to commandeer it, but Purviance’s whole role seems to have been inserted just because Chaplin felt that for commercial reasons there had to be a woman in the cast somewhere. There is a great scene in which Chaplin and Purviance have disguised themselves in German uniforms and, to add to the verismilitude of her FTM drag, he paints an artificial moustache on her upper lip. (This was actually the second time Purviance had gone FTM in a Chaplin movie; her first time was in Behind the Screen, made at Mutual in 1916, in which she dons man’s overalls and hides her long hair under a cap to get a job as a prop person in a movie studio. She’s “outed” when her cap falls off.) One odd thing about Shoulder Arms is it’s not altogether clear just when the story reality ends and the dream sequence begins. Bits of surrealism like Chaplin capturing 13 German soldiers and telling his commander (via intertitle) “I surrounded them,” or the scene in which he infiltrates behind the German lines by disguising himself as a tree (and convincing one of the German soldiers enough that the German tries to chop him down with an ax, only he saves himself by bopping the enemy with one of his branches) add to the dreamlike quality of the entire movie. It’s also interesting that A Sailor-Made Man also contains a dream sequence (Harold Lloyd dreams that he’s an officer instead of just a common seaman), and that later service comedies like Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates and In the Navy also feature dreams in which the leads get to be officers.

Chaplin’s eight films for First National from 1918 to 1922 – including his actual first feature, The Kid (1920) – were for years the hardest films of his to see because of his Fafner-like determination to keep them from the public, and even when he reissued a number of his silents in the 1970’s just before his death, he gave The Kid a ruinous set of cuts in the process. If you want to see this masterpiece at full strength, look for a public-domain DVD of the original version. But it’s nice to see Shoulder Arms readily available and get to watch what tickled the funnybones of audiences while the war it depicts was still going on. It was also historically fascinating to see the beginnings of trench warfare in The Red Badge of Courage’s historical re-creation of the Civil War (Ulysses S. Grant actually invented trench warfare and the strategy of attrition it facilitated, and when all sides in World War I adopted it, it was a classic example of fighting the last war: Grant could fight a war of attrition because he knew the Union had three times as many men of military age as the Confederacy, whereas the potential fighting forces on both sides of World War I were basically the same size and therefore trench warfare became a bloody slaughter that chewed up hundreds of thousands of lives for minimal territory gains) and then watch trench warfare fully developed in Shoulder Arms.

Cornered (RKO, 1945)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 24) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing even though not all that satisfying film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” feature. It was called Cornered, and it was made at RKO in 1945 as a follow-up to the surprise success of Murder, My Sweet (1944), perhaps the quintessential film noir and certainly the Raymond Chandler movie the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the Dashiell Hammett movie and Double Indemnity (1944) the James M. Cain movie. RKO reunited the key creative personnel from Murder, My Sweet for Cornered: producer Adrian Scott, director Edward Dmytryk, writer John Paxton, cinematographer Harry J. Wild, and star Dick Powell. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller described a particularly convoluted writing process for Cornered that probably accounts for the film’s weaknesses. Cornered began as a screen treatment ostensibly by Ben Hecht, though actually it was only from Hecht’s atelier. Like a number of more recent writers, including James Patterson and the late Tom Clancy, Hecht frequently farmed out his concepts to other, anonymous writers and collected big fees out of which he paid the actual writers a share and pocketed the rest himself. When Adrian Scott got the treatment for Cornered, he was immediately convinced it wasn’t by Hecht and assigned John Paxton, who’d written Murder, My Sweet and had made one key change to Raymond Chandler’s source novel Farewell, My Lovely that vastly improved the film (he changed the “good girl” from the unrelated Anne Riordan to Anne Grayle, stepdaughter of the villainess) to rewrite it and flesh it out into a full script.

Alas, William Dozier, head of RKO’s writers’ department, pulled Paxton off the film and reassigned it to John Wexley, who’d just worked on the Fritz Lang/Bertolt Brecht film Hangmen Also Die (1943) and had pulled a fast one to deny Brecht’s credit for writing the film. (Brecht wrote his script in German, Wexley translated it into English, and Wexley convinced the Screen Writers’ Guild to award him sole credit because he was staying in the U.S. and Brecht planned to return to Germany after the end of World War II. Lang got Brecht’s name on the film by giving him a co-credit with Lang himself for the basic story and its construction.) Political considerations played a part in the convoluted writing process of Cornered. Like Dick Powell, Paxton was a political conservative who apparently filled his script for Cornered with ponderous speeches full of Right-wing propaganda. Like Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk, Wexley was an actual Communist Party member, and he filled his script for Cornered with ponderous speeches full of Left-wing propaganda. Scott decided Wexley’s script was unusable, and he brought Paxton back onto the project – and Wexley struck again, hauling Scott and Dmytryk before an internal Communist tribunal and getting them banned from future participation in the Party. (Two years later, Scott and Dmytryk were part of the “Hollywood 10,” “unfriendly” witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who were blacklisted and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Scott never again got a producer’s credit in Hollywood. Dmytryk decided to cooperate, seeing no reason to tank his career for a cause in which he no longer believed and for people who’d treated him so shabbily, and he went on to a major comeback in the 1950’s with films like The Caine Mutiny, Raintree County, and The Young Lions.)

The result was a convoluted story in which Dick Powell plays Laurence Gerard, a Canadian air force pilot in World War II who was briefly stationed in France and married to a woman named Celeste (whom we never see, not even in a flashback) for three weeks. Celeste was then killed, along with 50 other Resistance fighters, by a gang of French collabós led by Marcel Jarnac (Luther Adler, who had made only one film before – Lancer Spy from 1937 – and whose name was shrouded in secrecy; while the other actors were billed before the movie as usual for the time, Adler was only listed in a special credit at the end). Gerard wants to track down Jarnac and kill him for revenge. Delayed by the British authorities in obtaining a passport, he literally rows across the English Channel, deliberately sinking his boat and swimming the last leg. The search takes him first to Marseilles, then to Switzerland, and finally to Argentina, where he meets Jarnac’s purported widow Madeleine (Micheline Cheirel) as well as an obnoxious tour guide named Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak). Incza has clearly been briefed about Gerard, since when he introduces himself he already knows Gerard’s name and a good deal of his backstory. Incza suggests that Gerard attend a cocktail party hosted by Tomas Camargo (Steven Geray) and his wife (Ann Hunter, electrifying in a long black form-fitting, sequin-studded gown) where he promises a level of sexual and drug decadence the filmmakers obviously couldn’t do justice to in a Code-era movie. Señora Camargo blatantly makes a pass at Gerard, and when she tells him that this will be a relatively conservative (for her) party in which “only three husbands will be compromised,” Gerard fires back and asks, “Who are the other two?” That sounds very much like a Ben Hecht wisecrack no matter which writer came up with it.

While he was in Switzerland Gerard had come upon a burned-out house where Jarnac had formerly lived, and he recovered the front page of a dossier on Jarnac but the rest of the document was consumed in the fire. In Buenos Aires one of the guests at Mrs. Camargo’s party, attorney Manuel Santana (Morris Carnofsky), first has a couple of his goons beat Gerard up (Gerard loses consciousness in a scene so similar to the one in Murder, My Sweet both Charles and I chuckled at the similarity) and then, when Gerard comes to, tells him that he’s part of a secret Allied operation aimed at getting Jarnac and having him tried for war crimes, only Gerard’s personal revenge quest is just getting in their way. One of the baddies shoots Diego (Jack LaRue), ostensibly a hotel valet but actually part of the intrigues (though we’re not told how or which side he’s on) and tries to frame Gerard for the crime. Gerard is captured at an old bar called “Fortuna” he’s been lured to by the bad guys (I joked that the waiters there get together and sing Carmina Burana), and he finally meets Jarnac, whom he’d never seen before even though Jarnac ordered the murder of his wife. Gerard gets the guns away from the baddies and beats Jarnac literally to death, then presents Santana with a document that will prove Jarnac’s connection with the Camargos and expose the entire Nazi spy ring.

Cornered is a tricky, convoluted movie in which the various intrigues seem at war with each other for prominence, and the film seems way too contrived, too consciously designed as a showpiece for “The New Dick Powell.” James Agee reviewed it for The Nation when it was new and liked it considerably better than I did: “Dick Powell, with a Bogart haircut [in fact Powell’s hair is noticeably shorter and more buzz-cut in the final scene than in the rest of the movie], sometimes works a bit too conspicuously at being The New Dick Powell (‘rougher, tougher, and more terrific,’ as the billboards not very helpfully insist). But on the whole, perhaps because he still looks less official, less highly paid to look small-bracket, and less superhuman and bound-to-win-out, I think he is even better, just now, for this sort of role, than the Founder himself.” Actually, despite the extent to which the film was tailor-made for Dick Powell 2.0, it did occur to me that it might have been better with John Garfield in the lead. With his knack for playing toughness and vulnerability at the same time, Garfield could have made Gerard’s revenge quest more authentic and believable, whereas Powell approaches the role so stoically one agrees with the other character who asks him why the death of a woman he was married to for just three weeks matters so much to him.

As a follow-up to Murder, My Sweet, in which Powell played a tough but vulnerable character far richer and more complicated than Laurence Gerard, Cornered is a disappointment. As a showcase for Dick Powell 2.0, it works pretty well even though all too much of it takes place during daytime and only the final scene has the true look of film noir. Charles chuckled at the street in Buenos Aires, which was actually RKO’s standard urban street set with the usual English-language signs replaced with Spanish ones. There’s also a scene in a park that was equally obviously an RKO standing set: the one that so memorably served as New York’s Central Park in Val Lewton’s first production, Cat People (1942). Cornered also has too many resemblances to The Maltese Falcon for its own good, from the fake “dossier” Gerard makes up about Jarnac (the cover page is the real one but the rest is just blank pieces of paper Gerard singes the edges of to make it look authentic) and the attempts to turn Walter Slezak’s character into a fusion of the Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre characters from Falcon, to Madeleine Jarnac’s admission (especially when it turns out she isn’t really Jarnac’s widow but was hired by the good guys to pose as such in order to lure him out of hiding) that she’s been lying all along that sounds an awful lot like Mary Astor’s confession to Bogart that “I’ve been a bad woman, worse than you could know.” But overall, Cornered is a pretty good movie even though it’s hardly in the top flight of noirs the way Murder, My Sweet is.

A Little Trip to Heaven (Blueeyes Productions, Pink Productions, Palomar Pictures, Iceland Film Centre, First Look International, 2005)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 22) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing DVD of a 2005 Icelandic production called A Little Trip to Heaven. My first guess was that it was a romantic comedy about a family on vacation together; but I was quickly disabused of that by a note on the DVD, which read, “Insurance agent Abe Holt (Forest Whitaker) is investigating the suspicious death of the driver of a burned-out car. Holt has to work out whether the dead man, a con-man with a criminal record, could possibly have been the victim of an attempt to swindle the insurance company. When he meets Isold (Julia Stiles), the dead man’s sister, Holt slowly begins to lose his professional distance.” That blurb had me thinking “neo-noir,” if only because two of the classic mid-1940’s films noir, Double Indemnity (1943) and The Killers (1946), feature insurance agents among the dramatis personae (an insurance salesman who turns corrupt in Double Indemnity and a claims agent who’s personally honest but uncovers a criminal scheme in The Killers). It is and it isn’t; the plot elements are the stuff of film noir but the overall atmosphere is so gloomy and draggy I kept thinking, “If Ingmar Bergman had made a film noir, this is what it would have looked like.” It was made by an Icelandic director, Baltasar Kormákur, though he cast four American actors as his leads – Forest Whitaker, Julia Stiles, Jeremy Renner (three years before his breakthrough role in The Hurt Locker as the crazy leader of a bomb disposal unit in the U.S.-Iraq war), and Peter Coyote as Holt’s boss at the Quality Life Insurance company. It also takes place in the United States, specifically Hastings, Minnesota (though I briefly spotted a license plate which seemed to identify the locale as Missouri; there really is a Hastings, Minnesota, but “Hastings, Missouri” is a fictitious community in Marvel comic books), though it was shot entirely in Iceland except for some second-unit work in Canada.

Director Kormákur, who also co-wrote the script with Edward Martin Wineman and Sissi Kugler, kicks off the film (at least on the DVD version; the theatrical release had a different beginning) with Kelvin Anderson (Jeremy Renner) in a bar whose bartender, a buxom woman named Josie (Joanna Scanlan), is cruising him – as she later does with Holt and just about every other passably attractive man she meets, including the father-and-son team of cops that seem to be Hastings’ only official law-enforcement personnel. He couldn’t be less interested; what he’s most interested in is getting a fellow customer who’s identified on the imdb.com cast list only as “Long Haired Man” (Damon Younger), drunk. It’s part of an elaborate plan in which Anderson, an experienced con artist, will first siphon some of the gas out of the Long Haired Man’s car; then he’ll wait for the man’s car to run out of gas and stop, after which he will offer the man a ride to get gas, but will really crash the car deliberately, set it on fire, and walk away. Kelvin has cooked up this scheme in connection with his sister Isold (Julia Stiles) and her son Thor (Alfred Harmsworth), with whom he’s living in a remote farmhouse in Hastings and posing as her husband “Fred McBride.” For quite a while we’re not sure whether Isold is part of Kelvin’s schemes or an innocent dupe of his, but there’s a flashback sequence, repeated several times with more detail each time, in which Kelvin and Isold are shown driving a red convertible, deliberately cutting in front of a truck so the truck will crash into them, taking a flying leap off a cliff and both surviving. The idea is to make a false insurance claim, and to add realism to their claim Kelvin has Isold kneecap him to make it look like the accident injured him much worse than it actually did.

Abe Holt, played by Forest Whitaker just a year before his breakthrough role as an actor as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (for which he won the Academy Award he should have won for his incandescent portrayal of jazz great Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic Bird), is depicted as a super-dedicated servant of his company. In an early scene he’s sent out to investigate a bus accident in the fictitious “West City,” and he tricks potential scam artists by claiming (falsely) that there are secret cameras in the bus that will reveal anyone who got onto the bus after it crashed to make fraudulent insurance claims against the transit company. He shocks Isold on their first meeting when he comes to her house and sees her through the window while she’s wearing nothing but a filmy robe. When he knocks on her door, she frantically puts on something over it. For some reason Quality Life Insurance has issued a $1 million life insurance policy on Kelvin Anderson even though he’s a known criminal who’s just been released from prison, and Isold is named as his beneficiary. What Kelvin was doing at the bar was setting up a fake “death” for himself by which he would pick up an unknown man, go riding with him, crash the car, set it on fire and then claim that the corpse burned to a crisp was Kelvin Anderson’s instead of someone else’s. Then Isold will collect the $1 million payout and the two can split the money and get out of Hastings at last. Only Abe, whom we’d already seen deny a woman most of her late husband’s insurance claim because he’d got a preferential rate for not being a drinker or a smoker, and he had video of the man smoking, tells Isold that they’ve done blood tests on the corpse and found he was drunk at the time of his fatal accident. Isold is fooled at first and, much to Kelvin’s displeasure, accepts only a $1,500 payment for the damage to the car. Kelvin physically beats her when Isold gives him the $1,500, and later Kelvin takes Abe hostage in his car. Abe pulls a gun on him and Kelvin sensibly points out that if Abe shoots him while Kelvin is driving, the likeliest outcome is they both will die. Suddenly the car crashes and they both do die, but Isold is able to claim the $1 million death benefit for the nonexistent “Fred McBride” because Abe altered the insurance policy to name “McBride” rather than Kelvin as the insured. (Why he had to do that is something of a mystery, since the initial policy named Kelvin as the insured and Isold as the beneficiary, and Kelvin is unquestionably dead.)

The final scene shows Abe’s ghost entering heaven on a beach that had figured prominently in Quality Life Insurance’s commercials, which in this movie are literally omnipresent: every time we see a TV showing anything, it’s the same unctuous Quality Life Insurance commercial, with the same comforting message totally at odds with how the company actually does business. The film received mixed reviews; Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that director/co-writer Kormákur “falls short in the story department and even shorter in evoking the droll, twisted humor that must carry the day.” Dennis Harvey of Variety called the movie “"ESL Cinema,” with “its [murky] narrative … [undeveloped] characters, [dislocated] sense of place [and] fuzzy overall intent” that is “ill-compensated for by quirky touches” – though some of the “quirky touches” are among the best things about the film. They include the Big Brother-ish omnipresence of that Quality Life Insurance commercial, Josie’s insistence on cruising just about every male who walks in her bar, and a great gag scene in which, having discovered that “Fred McBride” doesn’t exist (he learned that when he came on the tombstone of McBride’s father, found it had the word “AND” under it, and excavated it to find that “Frederick McBride” was the other person memorialized under that stone), he shows up at the school “McBride” attended, tries to pass himself off as a relative, only is given away by the fact that “McBride” was white and Abe is Black. (The photo of “Frederick McBride” attached to his school record is in fact a childhood picture of Jeremy Renner.)

Charles compared it to the 1984 Repo Man, one of his all-time favorite films, especially since so much of the plot revolves around cars. He also said that Peter Coyote was basically playing the same sort of character Harry Dean Stanton played in Repo Man. Both of us basically liked the movie but with a lot of “yes, but”’s about it, though on balance I’d say that it’s one of those movies that doesn’t quite come off the way the filmmakers intended but is still a lot more stimulating than a lot of movies that do achieve what their makers wanted. The title comes from a song by Tom Waits, though it’s sung in the film by an Icelandic singer/songwriter named Mugison (true name: Örn Elías Guðmundsson) – a blessing as far as I’m concerned, since I love a lot of singers without conventionally attractive voices (Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, Lou Reed) but I draw the line at the gin-soaked barroom growl of Tom Waits. It appears in the movie as a lullaby sung by Julia Stiles to her son (who’s referenced in a line of dialogue that she’s ashamed of what she did to conceive him, which could be merely an admission that he was conceived out of wedlock or a hint that Kelvin is his father and he’s a child of incest) and also over the closing credits in Mugison’s cover version. Mugison also contributes a number of songs to the soundtrack that obliquely reflect on the action in the manner popularized by Easy Rider (1969), though there’s also a version of Frank Loesser’s classic sexual ballad “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s credited on the soundtrack to “Ann Margaret,” which surprised me not only because there’s clearly a male singer as well who’s audible but unidentified, but I would have think filmmakers who shared Ann-Margret’s Scandinavian ancestry (she was born in Sweden) would at least have spelled her name right!

Unmasked (Republic, 1950)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 21) I showed my husband Charles an oddly compelling hour-long “B” thriller from Republic called Unmasked, which starred Robert Rockwell from The Red Menace (an oddly hunky and monotonal leading man whom Republic might have been grooming as the next John Wayne) as a crusading New York police lieutenant named Jim Webster who’s hot on the trail of New York Periscope editor-publisher Roger Lewis (Raymond Burr). Lewis started the Periscope in the first place with money he got from his sugar mama, actress turned socialite Doris King (Hillary Brooke, who was so fine as Professor Moriarty’s confederate in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green but here doesn’t make it out of the first reel, more’s the pity). Doris King’s acting career was launched in the first place by her aging husband, Harry Jackson (Paul Harvey), who pulled her out of the chorus, made her a major star, then suffered a series of flops and lost most of his money. Harry tries to take back the jewels he gave Doris when they were flush, which were collectively worth $100,000, but it is Lewis who kills her to avoid having to pay off the promissory notes she’s holding on him for the money she gave him to start the paper. Lewis intends to frame Harry Jackson for the crime and use the full power of his paper to get him arrested, convicted, and ultimately executed. Lewis also has a long-suffering secretary, Mona Durant (Grace Gillern), who’s in decidedly unrequited love with him. Webster teams up with Jackson’s daughter (from his previous marriage to a wife who died) Linda (Barbra Fuller – so Streisand wasn’t the first celebrity woman who decided that the middle “a” in “Barbara” was redundant!), to uncover the truth.

Alas, Harry Jackson gives the jewels to “Biggie” Wolfe (Norman Budd), a scapegrace private investigator who’s on Lewis’s payroll (though Lewis keeps stiffing him and he hints to Jackson that he’s disillusioned with Lewis and is no longer working for him) in order to pay for a hot-shot attorney who could help prove his innocence. (I couldn’t resist joking, “Why doesn’t he hire Perry Mason?” Indeed, in my mind I remixed this movie so Burr would play a dual role as the unscrupulous publisher and as Perry Mason, so Burr would prove Burr guilty of the crime.) When his daughter finally visits him, Jackson is so despairing of his likely future that as soon as she leaves, he kills himself. Biggie takes Jackson’s jewels to “Pop” Swensen (Emory Parnell), who runs a shop on the pier that’s really a front for Johnny Rocco (John Eldredge) – by coincidence “Johnny Rocco” was also the name of Edward G. Robinson’s gangster character in the last Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film, Key Largo, two years earlier – who offers to buy the jewels from Biggie if Biggie will in turn engineer the escape from prison of a bond forger named Mort Stone (Gil Frye), who unbeknownst to anyone but Rocco himself is really Rocco’s brother. Alas, the escape goes awry and Stone is shot and killed by prison guards, and Rocco is sufficiently angry he kills Biggie. The finale takes place at Swensen’s seafront establishment, where he plans to drive Linda Jackson in a boat and throw her overboard, only Webster figures it out, gets to Swensen’s and has a big fight scene in which he overpowers Rocco’s henchmen even though they outnumber him three to one. This was the kind of filmmaking Republic directors like George Blair, who helmed Unmasked, were most comfortable with: heroic leading men subduing baddies with their fists in scenes with lots of breakaway furniture. Ultimately Unmasked ends with Webster and Linda Jackson together in her car, apparently headed for real-life couplehood.

Though Unmasked was written by a committee (Manuel Seff and Paul Yawitz, story; Albert DeMond and Norman S. Hall, screenplay), and all its story elements are familiar crime-movie tropes, I nonetheless give it credit for deploying the clichés in new and different ways. The acting honors are easily taken by Raymond Burr, who in some ways is even more psychopathic than he was in most of his early villain roles, notably in an extreme close-up of his face as he’s actually strangling Doris King and then casually burning the notes he killed her to avoid having to pay. It’s true that the script improbably depicts him as a babe magnet – which seems weird not only because he’s not conventionally attractive but now that we know he was really Gay – but the cool professionalism with which he dispatches his fellow characters and plots his evil is chillingly effective. Unmasked is not a film noir either thematically (the characters are either all good or all bad – indeed, Lt. Webster and Linda Jackson are the only truly likable characters in the movie) or visually (except for one chiaroscuro scene from otherwise conventional cinematographer Bud Thackery, who seemed to have learned something from working at the same studio as John Alton!). But it’s one of those movies that tells a familiar story in new and engaging ways, and director Blair and the writers are to be congratulated for their ability to crowd this much plot into just 59 minutes of running time!

Girl Taken (CMW Springtime Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Yesterday evening (May 18) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Girl Taken. Charles at first wondered if we’d seen it before, because the title is so generic and could apply to so many Lifetime movies it sounded like something we’d seen before even though we hadn’t. (Last night’s showing was advertised as a “Premiere.”) Girl Taken was directed by Paula Elle from a script by Mark Sanderson, and it’s basically your generic story about a disaffected teenage girl, Rose Morrell (Kennedy Rowe), who runs away from home the next morning after her 17th birthday party ended ignominiously. It seemed that during the party Rose got a call from her boyfriend Trevor Riley announcing not only that he isn’t coming to her party but he’s breaking up with her and doesn’t want to see her again. Rose’s mother Anita (Erica Durance), who’s raised Rose as a single parent since Rose’s dad was killed in a hit-and-run accident years before, never liked Trevor anyway and her reaction is basically “good riddance,” but Rose is sufficiently heartbroken that she abruptly calls a halt to the party, sends everyone home and hides out in her bedroom. Before we learn any of this we’re treated to some spectacular aerial shots of the countryside in Washington state (where Girl Taken is set) and a scene in which a weekend camper, who’s a “guest body finder” along the lines of Law and Order, stumbles on the corpse of a 50-something white man, and Sheriff Beresford and his deputy, a Black woman named Marla Henrique, start an investigation to find out who he was and what might have happened to him. The intersection of these plot lines occurs when Rose is hitchhiking along Ridgecrest Road in the Washington back country.

After stopping briefly at an establishment called Faith’s Diner, she’s spotted by a man named Perry Simpson (Eric Hicks), whom she trusts at first because he’s a family friend. Perry is sufficiently in touch with Anita Morrell he occasionally borrows tools from her to repair his trucks, and he was actually invited to Rose’s disastrous birthday party, though he never showed up. Having the principal villain be someone the avenging heroine actually knows and considers a friend was a major departure from Lifetime’s usual “stranger danger” formula, and Sanderson gives us a marvelously ironic sequence when Perry calls up Anita and asks to borrow her tools again while, of course unbeknownst to her, he’s actually holding her daughter Rose as a captive. Perry is holding Rose at his home, a largely abandoned farm in the middle of the Washington countryside, where he’s living with a partner, a visibly pregnant blonde woman named Dani (Tavia Cervi) who’s the most genuinely conflicted character in the story. Rose asked Perry to give her a ride to the town of Cross Creek where her ex-boyfriend Trevor lives – she wants to confront him and get him to tell her to her face why he broke up with her – but Perry takes a different route and drives her to his farm instead. There he and Dani offer her coffee, which Dani spikes with a knockout drug, and when Rose finally comes to nearly 24 hours later she awakes in a quite large bed with no idea where she is or what happened to her. One thing I liked about Sanderson’s script is he kept it ambiguous as to just what Perry’s motives are: when Rose asks him point-blank why he’s taken her, he answers noncommittally and says he wants her to be part of his family.

Sanderson also drops us some hints, including an old letter Rose stumbles on addressed to “Edward Teale” at the farm and Dani’s rather elliptical statement that she’s lived on the farm her whole life but has only known Perry for two years. It doesn’t take long to figure out that Edward Teale was the original owner of the farm and Perry killed him and took it over from him while intimidating Dani into a sexual relationship with him. Sanderson also drops hints that Perry has done this at least once before, only on that occasion the girl was just 14 and “didn’t work out” because she refused to follow Perry’s orders. At one point Dani offers to show Rose the one remaining animal on the farm, a horse, and I was thinking they’d have Rose steal the horse and ride home to her mother, who in the meantime has launched her own investigation and is determined to find her daughter. Instead Rose tries to escape more prosaically and Perry catches her and leaves her chained up in a secret basement underneath the farm’s barn, from which she tries to break out by striking her bonds with a brick she’s conveniently found. (Charles objected to this scene because the most likely outcome would be her breaking her wrists. He said she should have tried to break the chain off the beam to which its other end was attached.) It also turns out that sheriff’s deputy Marla Henrique takes the case unusually personally because a year or two previously her own daughter Olivia similarly disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Eventually Marla traces an unusual ring found on the finger of the mystery corpse and finds the jeweler who custom-made it. The ring was made for Edward Teale and sent to him by mail at the address of the farm Perry is now occupying.

Marla goes out to the farm and Perry tells her he is Edward Teale, but Marla looks up the driver’s license of the real Edward Teale, sees his ID photo, and realizes he’s a much older and heavier man than the one she talked to at the farm. It’s not surprising, therefore, when we learn later that Perry killed Teale and took over the farm, leaving his body to rot in the Washington hills until the weekend outdoorsman in the opening scene discovered it. It’s also not surprising that Dani is Teale’s daughter, whom Perry seduced and turned into his sex slave, though we never definitively learn whether Marla Henrique’s daughter Olivia was the mystery woman whom Perry kidnapped previously and then “disappeared.” Sanderson also gives us an action-filled climax with plenty of reversals of the kinds Lifetime writers so love. Marla drives out to Perry’s (stolen) farm determined to arrest him and find and rescue Rose, only just as she’s located the secret entrance to the sub-basement where Rose is chained up, Perry sneaks up behind her and clobbers her over the head. When Sheriff Beresford himself shows up as backup, Perry grabs a gun and shoots him in the shoulder. Fortunately, Rose’s mom Anita shows up at this point and takes out Perry from behind, and other people in the local constabulary soon arrive and take Perry and Dani into custody. Luckily Beresford and Marla survive Perry’s attacks on them, though Perry will still face murder charges for Edward Teale and the mystery girl he “disappeared” who may or may not have been Marla’s missing daughter Olivia (ya remember Marla’s missing daughter Olivia?) The film ends with a reconciliation between Rose and her mother Anita even though Anita laments that Rose is going off to college to study veterinary medicine in the fall after she graduates from high school, and that will leave Anita an “empty nester.” Though not at the quality summit of a few Lifetime movies, Girl Taken is a quite well done movie within the Lifetime formula, and Mark Sanderson deserves kudos not only for some artful variations on the Lifetime formula but also his refusal to ramp up the situations and the level of melodrama found in all too many other writers’ Lifetime scripts!

Il Volo … Takes Flight (AEG Ehrlich Ventures, Interscope Records, 2011)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 18), my husband Charles and I watched an engaging classical-pops crossover concert video by an Italian singing trio called Il Volo (“The Flight”). The video was called Il Volo … Takes Flight (though there’s some uncertainty about the ellipsis in the title and whether it belongs there) and was an early live album from Detroit with the Detroit Symphony in 2011. Il Volo organized when its three members, tenors Ignazio Boschetto and Gianloca Ginoble and light baritone Piero Barone, met in 2009 when they separately entered a televised singing contest in Italy called Ti Lascio una Canzone (“I Bring You a Song”). Roberto Cenci, the show’s producer, had the idea of teaming them as a sort of younger version of the “Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras), who had created a sensation when they performed together for the 1990 opening ceremonies of the World Cup soccer tournament in Rome. Tony Renis, an Italian-American singer and music producer in L.A., saw Il Volo perform on a clip from an RAI (Radio-Televizione Italiana) TV show and decided they had the makings of international superstars. He got them a contract with Geffen Records and got their first CD, which contains much of the same material they performed here, released in 2010. This show was shot on October 21, 2011 at the Detroit Opera House just two years after Il Volo (first called “The Three Tenorinos” and then “The Tryo” before settling on “Il Volo” in late 2010) formed. They’re still together and still singing the mix of Neapolitan folk songs, Latin pop songs, pieces from movie soundtracks and occasional forays into the light-rock repertoire that they did here.

One thing that surprised me about the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as shown here is its membership was overwhelmingly female. Women musicians have had a long, hard struggle to overcome the sexism of the traditional music world, and even in the most advanced European ensembles we’re used to seeing a smattering of women players among the ranks of men. This orchestra is the opposite: you had to look really long and hard to find the handful of male players in this sea of mostly female faces and bods. Il Volo sang mostly Italian songs, though of their 15 selections there were two each in English (Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” based on the main theme of his score for the 1936 film Modern Times, and Bryan Adams’s “This Time”) and Spanish (Agustín Lara’s “Granada” and Roberto Cantoral’s “El Reloj,” which I realized was in Spanish when Il Volo’s members sang the word for “night” as “noche” instead of “notte”). Il Volo began the concert with their first song, “Il Mondo” (“The World”) by Carlo Pes, Lilli Greco, Gianni Meccia, Jimmy Fontana based on themes from Ennio Morricone’s film scores. Then Piero Barone (who did most, though not all, of the interacting with the crowd) announced that for the next hour or so “you’re all going to be Italians,” which wasn’t quite true as only 11 of the 15 songs they sang all night were in Italian (and one was a translation of an English-language pop song by Josh Groban, Marco Marinangeli and Walter Afansieff called “This Time”). After “Il Mondo,” a hit for Andrea Bocelli (who plows much the same pop-classical territory as Il Volo, though the trio does it considerably better), they sang another recent Italian pop song, “Un Amore Così Grande” (“Such a Great Love”), written by Antonella Maggio and Guido Maria Ferelli for fellow Italian pop singer Claudio Villa.

After that Ignacio Boschetto, whom I thought was both the cutest of the three (he had black curly hair and his face resembled the young John Lennon’s) and the one with the strongest voice (he had good enough high notes I could imagine him having a career in opera), sang a solo on their first traditional Neapolitan song of the night, “Ti Voglio Tanto Bene” (the title means “I love you” but in a familial or affectionate, not a romantic or sexual, way). The song was written by Ernesto De Curtis (music) and Domenico Furnò (lyrics) for a 1936 film alternately titled Forget Me Not and Forever Yours starring the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli. After that came a song from a much better-known film, “Smile” from Charlie Chaplin’s score for his last silent film, Modern Times (1936). Chaplin wrote the music for his own films with David Raksin, future composer of the big title theme from the film Laura (1944), as his assistant. Two British songwriters, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, added lyrics to the theme in 1954 and created a beautiful ballad that was a hit for Nat “King” Cole. Though Chaplin didn’t have anything to do with the words, they express his philosophy of living life through adversity and maintaining a happy attitude. Il Volo’s concert featured a movie screen behind the singers that occasionally showed film clips, and for “Smile” they showed animated scenes of people who looked like Chaplin and Michael Jackson. For the next song, Agustín Lara’s “Granada,” the screen showed images of bullfighting even though the song itself is an ode to the charms of the Spanish city and has nothing to do with the corrida del toros. Their next song, “È Più to Penso” (“It’s More to Think”), was from a film score by Ennio Morricone adapted into a song by Mogol and Il Volo’s producer and manager, Tony Renis.

After that Piero Barone did a solo version of a song called “Non Ti Scordar di Me” (“Don’t Forget Me”), a title that’s been used for quite a few songs over the years, including the one that was Enrico Caruso’s first record, a cylinder for the Anglo-Italian Commerce Company in 1900. This “Non Ti Scordar di Me” is a relatively modern piece by Roberto Casalino and Tiziano Ferro. Then Il Volo got back together for the Spanish-language “El Reloj” (“The Clock”) and one of the oddest pieces they did all night, “Notte Stellata (The Swan),” based on the “Swan” movement from French classical composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals with Italian-language lyrics by Tony Renis. The next piece on the program was Gianluca Ginoble’s solo turn on a song called “Musica Proibita” (“Forbidden Music”), written by Stanislao Gastaldon for a 1942 Italian film of that title which starred the young Tito Gobbi (later a star baritone particularly known for his electrifying performances as the villain, Baron Scarpia, in Puccini’s Tosca alongside Maria Callas in the title role) as an aging composer who looks back on his youth and the misunderstanding that separated him from his girlfriend and condemned both of them to a life of loneliness and frustration. I first learned this song from Beniamino Gigli’s recording on an RCA Victor compilation album from 1962 called Great Tenors Sing Neapolitan Songs, and Ginoble’s voice and overall projection were hardly in the same league as Gigli’s, but he made it through the song acceptably.

After “This Time,” which came next, three of the next four pieces were from the traditional Italian song repertoire, with only an Italian-language version of Josh Groban’s hit (originally called “Solo Per Te” – “Only for You” – and on his 2006 album Awake) as “ringer.” One of the Italian songs was Cesare Bixio’s bathos-ridden “Mamma,” one was Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s “Mattinata” (Leoncavallo, composer of Pagliacci and a lot of other now-forgotten operas, was the first major composer to write a song specifically to be recorded; he wrote it for Enrico Caruso and the two recorded it together in Milan in 1904), and one was the inevitable “O Sole Mio” (“O My Sun”), which has gone down in history as the one song both of Victor Records’ most legendary artists, Enrico Caruso and Elvis Presley, recorded. (Elvis’s version was supplied with an English-language lyric as “It’s Now or Never.”) Alas, either Il Volo themselves or their music director decided to do the song in the original Italian but use the soft-rock arrangement of Elvis’s version. Early on in Il Volo … Takes Flight I joked to Charles that they were essentially an Italian boy band, albeit with at least somewhat better music. They’re still together with the same personnel, and at least according to the hyped-up bio on their Web site they’re going strong and are hugely popular, with Grammy-winning albums (the show was produced by Ken Ehrlich, who more than anyone else shaped the Grammy Awards into the overblown monstrosity they’ve become, with so-called “Grammy moments” that jam musicians of wildly different styles, talents and audiences together) galore and massive international tours, one of which was scheduled for 2020 but delayed by COVID-19. Il Volo … Takes Flight was actually an engaging video of what was undoubtedly a quite fun and entertaining concert, and as such was well worth watching.

The Curse of Frankenstein (Hammer Films, Clarion Films, Warner Bros., 1957)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched two 1950’s films on Turner Classic Movies. One was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the first Frankenstein movie made by Britain’s Hammer Studios. TCM’s regular host, Ben Mankiewicz, presented this with guest host John Carpenter (director of the Hallowe’en franchise films as well as the 1982 remake of The Thing, which I liked better than the 1951 original, and at least one masterpiece, 1988’s They Live) as the second half of a double bill with the original 1931 Frankenstein, made at Universal in Hollywood, directed by James Whale with Colin Clive as Frankenstein and Boris Karloff in his iconic star-making role as the Monster. I skipped the 1931 Frankenstein (I’ve seen it innumerable times and Charles and I had to make dinner sometime) and I hadn’t seen the first Hammer “take” on it since the early 1970’s. I attended a free screening at the College of Marin and didn’t care for it. I resented that, barred by copyright from using the original Jack P. Pierce makeup Karloff and his successors (Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange) had worn in the Universal films (one of my favorite pranks is going up to people wearing T-shirts with the Universal Frankenstein face and calling out, “Jack Pierce!” Most people assume I’m under the misapprehension that their name is Jack Pierce, and then I explain that he created the original Frankenstein makeup – well, someone had to decide what the Monster should look like and figure out how to make Boris Karloff look like that), Hammer’s makeup crew – Philip Leakey, Roy Ashton and George Turner – decided to make the Monster (Christopher Lee) look like Marcel Marceau had been in a really bad accident.

The Curse of Frankenstein is the first Frankenstein film ever made in color, though Charles groaned when he saw the credited process was Eastmancolor instead of Technicolor. As we watched the film Charles wondered if they were deliberately muting the hues to evoke the early two-strip Technicolor process, and given the reputation Hammer had for upping the gore quotient from the Universal originals, it was surprising that the color was actually fairly muted and didn’t just splash red blood across the screen like all too many modern horror films do. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster did one interesting thing with the story; he presented it as an extended flashback opening with Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) narrating it from a prison cell where he’s been incarcerated for murder. Sangster also definitively returned the story to Mary Shelley’s original Swiss setting (Charles was startled that the opening title of The Curse of Frankenstein identified the locale as Switzerland – I think he’d always assumed it was Germany but Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in Switzerland and so she set it there) and changed Frankenstein’s first name back from Henry (in the 1931 film) to Victor (in Shelley’s novel). Director Terence Fisher copied a lot of the setups from the 1931 film, though he and Sangster put quite different “spins” on them: there’s a scene in Curse in which a blind grandfather is out in the woods with his grandson when he encounters the Creature (as he’s called in this film; they deliberately avoided using the term “Monster”) which at first seems to be a mashup of the scene with the little girl with the daisies in the 1931 Frankenstein and the scene with the blind hermit in Whale’s brilliant 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein – only in this version it’s the blind man who’s killed by the Creature while the kid survives.

The biggest single difference between the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1957 Curse is that Frankenstein himself is literally psychopathic. When he decides that his Creature needs a super-brain he doesn’t just send a hunchbacked assistant to steal him one; he murders his ideal brain’s owner, Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth), and harvests it. His guilt-ridden assistant, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart), tries to wrest the brain from Frankenstein’s hands but only damages it in the process, and that (not the inclusion of a so-called “criminal brain” as in the 1931 film) is what makes the Creature a monstrous killing machine. As in both Shelley’s novel and the 1931 film, Frankenstein is engaged to marry his cousin Elizabeth Lavenza (Hazel Court), but in this one he’s also carrying on an affair with his maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt) until he strangles her for expecting him to marry her. One thing John Carpenter said he liked about The Curse of Frankenstein is it went into more detail than the 1931 film about how Frankenstein assembled the parts for his Creature, including a famous scene ordered deleted by the British censors but included in current prints in which, deciding that the head of the corpse he’s just stolen from a hangman’s scaffold is unusable, he cuts it off and throws it in a vat of acid, saying that this will wipe out all traces of its existence. (Apparently it didn’t occur to Jimmy Sangster that though the acid might eat away the flesh and organic parts of the brain, the skull would survive.) The other scene that fell afoul of the censors was one in which Frankenstein uses a magnifying glass to examine a stolen eyeball to determine if it’s good enough to use in the Creature. (This scene hasn’t been restored and it apparently no longer exists.)

One quirk of The Curse of Frankenstein is that the makers of The Rocky Horror Picture Show used the vat of liquid in which the Creature was brought to life from this film; even before I learned that, I commented on Rocky Horror that it was more a spoof of the Hammer Frankenstein films than the Universal ones. This time around I was more impressed by Peter Cushing’s performance than I was previously; the authority he projects and the profile shots of his aquiline nose show why two years after The Curse of Frankenstein Hammer decided to cast him as Sherlock Holmes in their 1959 film The Hound of the Baskervilles, with André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker and pipe after Dressed to Kill (1946), and of course Rathbone also got into the monster-creating business in the title role of Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (1939). The Curse of Frankenstein is an O.K. movie, not terribly inspired and certainly not at the level of James Whale’s two takes on the Frankenstein mythos. John Carpenter couldn’t help but joke about how it ended – Frankenstein is led off to be guillotined for the murders of Bernstein and Justine, which struck me as odd since I hadn’t thought the guillotine was ever used as a means of execution outside France and its colonies – when the next year he again appeared as Frankenstein in Hammer’s immediate sequel, The Revenge of Frankenstein! The imdb.com synopsis for Revenge explains, “Having escaped execution and assumed an alias, Baron Frankenstein transplants his deformed underling's brain into a perfect body, but the result proves to be mortally perilous.”

Touchez-pas au Grisbi (Del Duca Films, Antares Produzione Cinematografica, 1954)

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

Afterwards I kept on Turner Classic Movies for a film I’d long been curious about but had never had a chance to see: Touchez-pas au Grisbi (1954). I think I’d had this movie confused with another French caper film from a year later, Rififi, which was directed by Jules Dassin after he was forced out of Hollywood by the blacklist. Part of my confusion was that harmonica player Larry Adler, who was also driven out of the U.S. by the blacklist, had recorded the themes from both Grisbi and Rififi, though the harmonica player in Grisbi (as the original U.S. distributor abbreviated the title; the literal translation is Don’t Touch the Loot but in Britain it was called Honour Among Thieves) was Jean Wetzel. Grisbi was directed by Jacques Becker from a novel of the same title by Albert Simonin, who worked on the screenplay with Becker and Maurice Griffe. It’s basically a tale of depressingly ordinary criminals, including the lead character, Max (Jean Gabin, nearing 50 and making a major comeback in this after he’d briefly left for Hollywood after the Nazi occupation of France, returned, joined a Free French garrison so he could fight fascism for real, but had been largely forgotten by French movie audiences after the war). Max had masterminded the theft of eight large gold bars from Orly, the largest airport near Paris, worth a total of 500,000 francs and he’s hidden the bars in four suitcases and put them in the trunk of a car. (I was trying to figure out the make of the car; it looked vaguely like a Plymouth of the period and had a seven-letter name across the hood that looked like it said “Rosette.”) Alas, when Max tries to fence the bars with his uncle Oscar (Paul Oettly) he’s only offered 35,000 francs for them and he tries to hold out for 50,000. (The problem crooks have with fences willing to pay them only a fraction of what the loot is worth is a frequent issue in gangster movies.)

Max is visibly world-weary; introducing the film as part of his “Noir Alley” series (Grisbi is film noir thematically but not visually; cinematographer Pierre Montazel shot it not in chiaroscuro images with lots of shadows, but with an even grey tonality much like the later French Nouvelle Vague – “new wave” – films that mostly avoided studios and shot exteriors on real French streets and interiors inside French buildings) Eddie Muller said that if you put Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart together you’d have an actor in America equal to Jean Gabin’s importance in France. (That was a joke I used to make about Bob Marley; I said, “If Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Bob Dylan had been the same person, that person would have been as important in the history of rock as Bob Marley was in the history of reggae.”) What’s most interesting about Grisbi is the sheer ordinariness of these people’s lives: Max and his friend turned enemy turned friend again Henri “Riton” Ducros (René Dary) hang out at various nightclubs, mostly at one run by Madame Bouche (Denise Clare) that features dancing girls performing routines to recorded music. They also date various women – Max has at least two semi-serious girlfriends, Lola (Dora Doll), a dancer at Madame Bouche’s; and Betty (Marilyn Bufferd), a young rich woman who doesn’t have to work. Riton is jilted midway through the movie by Josy (Jeanne Moreau, who gets a special credit; obviously the producers knew what they had in her), who abandons him for a younger, hotter criminal named Angelo Frasier (former professional wrestler Lino Ventura in his first film). There’s a long scene between Max and Riton in which they’re having breakfast and the story, such as it is, comes virtually to a dead stop as they trade banalities and eat ordinary foods. I was particularly disturbed by an off-white substance on their table that comes in plastic tubs; at first both Charles and I thought it was margarine, but they were taking far too much of it for it to be used as a spread to flavor bread. Finally, after the movie was over, Muller explained that it was paté. (I’ve never eaten paté in my life and have no desire to do so, ever.) Muller said that this scene is the key one that seems to divide audience opinions about this movie; people expecting a crime film to contain lots of action are put off by it, while those with subtler tastes in entertainment enjoy the sheer vulgarity of it.

Indeed, Grisbi generally is an object lesson in what the late Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Though there is one big action sequence towards the end – a shoot-out on a deserted country road in which Angelo and his gang try to hijack the gold bars, and ultimately blow up the car containing them and set it on fire – that isn’t the outright ending of the film. It actually ends with Max at one of his favorite diners, in which he and fellow customers discuss how the police (who are totally invisible in this film) finally recovered the stolen gold from the wreckage of the car containing it after the heat of the fire had melted the ingots (one wonders if Becker and Simonin got the idea for this ending from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both B. Traven’s novel and John Huston’s film) and wonder just who masterminded the robbery in the first place. Grisbi is a quite good movie that turns the expectations of a crime movie on their heads – for one thing, it takes place after the big robbery has already occurred (in a U.S. version, the robbery would have been the focal point and been depicted in great detail). It also has the sort of frankness about human frailties that established an American audience for European films in the 1950’s when they started being routinely released here, not just about people’s sex lives but their drug use as well. One scene shows Max arranging for his protégé Marco (Michel Jourdan) to work as a drug dealer for Pierrot (Paul Frankeur), owner of Madame Bouche’s, and even before that a woman in Max’s car is shown sprinkling cocaine on a cigarette case and inhaling it. I did a double-take on that scene and thought, “Did she really just do what I think she did?” I don’t really think of Grisbi as a deathless classic, but it’s quite a good film and well worth watching precisely because of its slow, relatively action-less plotting and the extent to which it treats its criminals as just ordinary people who happen to make their livings in less than legal ways.

Law and Order: "Look the Other Way" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2025)

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

Last Thursday (May 15) NBC ran what I think are the last new Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit shows of the current season. The Law and Order episode was a quirky one called “Look the Other Way” which I suspect may have been written (by Rick Eid) as a way to get Odelya Halevi, who plays assistant district attorney Stephanie Maroun (and I’ve already noted the irony of casting an Israeli actress as an Arab-American), off the show. The plot deals with the savage beating and murder of 19-year-old model Georgia Kent (Hazel Graye), whom we meet in a typical Law and Order opening. We first see Georgia out for a night on the town in the company of a young Black man, Jaxon (Zach Sowers), though it’s pretty clear he’s just a friend and not a lover or a partner. He worries about her going off by herself at night but she assures him she’ll be perfectly safe. Of course the moment we hear that, we know she’s not long for this world, and in the next scene police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks, who was off the series for a brief hiatus and whose return is very welcome), find her body literally beaten to the proverbial pulp by whomever murdered her. Her killer turns out to be a youngish man named Carter Mills (Jordan M. Cox), whom the police are able to identify by running a DNA test on the blood he left behind on the corpse. His motive, we eventually learn, was that he’d raped Georgia three days before he killed her and he’d got word from one of her friends by intercepting their text messages that Georgia was about to report him to the police, so he killed her to cover up having raped her. The police don’t get a DNA match on his blood but they find a “familial match” because his aunt sent in a sample to one of those commercial DNA testing services and they’re able to find him through her.

Unfortunately, the judge in the case, Erica Foster (Joy Lynn Jacobs), decides that by searching Carter’s aunt’s DNA the police invaded his privacy, and therefore she throws out not only the DNA identification but also the blood-spattered shoes the police found at Carter’s home as “fruits of the poison tree.” With that major blow to their case, Price sets out to find more evidence to convict Carter. He tells Maroun that she’s too close to the case because the familial DNA also revealed a connection to an as-yet unsolved murder from 12 years ago – and the victim in that crime was Maroun’s sister. So she can’t sit second chair in the actual trial, but Price allows her to do evidence-gathering outside the courtroom – which she does. She discovers a hotel doorman, Peter Dagnello (Kyle S. Moore), who saw Carter in the vicinity of the site of Georgia Kent’s murder just 15 minutes before it happened. Dagnello proves eager to testify, but when Price is prepping him for cross-examination and asking hypothetical questions Carter’s attorney, Nicole Potter (Anna Woods) – it’s typical of both Law and Order and real life that defendants accused of violence against women hire women attorneys – might ask him, Dagnello says that Maroun asked him leading questions and implied that she and the authorities already knew Carter was guilty. Price decides that he can’t call Dagnello as a witness because then he’d have to disclose Maroun’s improper questions of him to the defense.

The episode’s title comes in when Price’s boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), tells him an anecdote in which he was prosecuting a man on trial for raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl. As he was getting ready to deliver his closing statement, Baxter received an anonymous handwritten note stating that the writer, not the actual defendant, killed the girl, but Baxter decided to “look the other way” and not disclose to the defense that he’d received the note. (Later Price searches both court records and newspapers of the period to find that case, doesn’t and assumes that Baxter just made up the anecdote to stiffen his resolve to pursue the case against Carter.) With no real admissible evidence against him, Carter is acquitted of murdering Georgia Kent (and director Alex Hall gives us a heartbreaking shot of her parents, played by Richard Lear and Celia Schaefer, in the audience in the courtroom as the verdict comes down and they realize they’re not going to get justice for their daughter), but at the end of the episode he’s found beaten to death the same way he beat and killed Georgia. The hint is that Samantha Maroun committed the crime to avenge her sister’s death 12 years ago. Where I thought this was going was that, though acquitted of Georgia’s killing, thanks to Judge Foster’s ruling to try the cases separately he could still be convicted of Samantha’s sister’s murder if new evidence came to light in the 12-year-old case, but as it turned out writer Rick Eid left things open-ended to give Dick Wolf and his show runners the option of either keeping Odelya Halevi and her character on the show (and having Carter’s killer turn out to be someone else) or writing her out of it (if the killer turns out to be her).

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Post-Rage" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that came on after that, “Post-Rage,” was an unusually kinky one even by their standards and had a quite impressive performance by the principal villain. The Special Victims Unit detectives are dealing with the rape and attempted murder of psychiatrist Dr. Gretchen Stewart (Betsy Brandt), who was posed with a blanket over her and had one eye gouged out by her assailant. Fortunately she survived and was available, after she recovered enough to be able to talk, to tell the SVU cops just what had happened to her, though she refuses to give them the names of her patients due to confidentiality (what I jokingly call “medical omertá”) and the police have a hard time tracing her assailant. The task is complicated by her practice of giving the first session free as a “consultation” and not recording the names of her patients until they actually sign on for a long course of therapy. Later another woman therapist who works at a free clinic in Harlem is also found raped and with an eye gouged out, but unlike Dr. Stewart, she actually died at the hands of her assailant – as did a third victim who was attacked in another jurisdiction prior to the other two. Eventually the police trace the killer: Ted Schramm (Brian Krinsky), a.k.a. “Keith Sparks,” with a particular grievance against women psychiatrists but also enough guilt feelings that after he rapes and (in two cases) kills them, he feels remorse and covers them up with blankets so the police don’t find them in compromising positions (the meaning of the episode title). The centerpiece of the episode is an intense interrogation scene between Schramm and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) during which she finally breaks him down into confessing. Brian Krinsky’s performance in this scene is excellent as Benson unravels the onion layers of his twisted psyche. While all this is happening, one of the most problematical people on Benson’s squad, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), is being given a promotion to detective, second class despite his troublesome reputation (he’d been a gangbanger before he turned his life around and became a cop, though he insisted he’d never actually killed anybody in his gang life). The ritual of his promotion features Department Commander Gavin Sullivan (Jerry D. O’Donnell) giving him and about 14 other people diplomas conferring their new rank.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Families" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 10, 2004)

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

After watching the most recent Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, I dug out the season five boxed set of the same show (at the height of my lust-driven infatuation with Christopher Meloni, I bought the boxes for all 12 seasons of SVU that featured him) to watch “Families.” I’d wanted to see that particular episode again ever since I saw the episode a week before “Post-Rage,” “Aperture,” about two teenagers who grow up as part of a blended family, only the boy has romantic, or at least sexual, feelings towards the girl while the girl sees him as her brother and isn’t at all interested in him “that way.” In “Aperture,” which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/law-and-order-special-victims-unit_9.html, the virtual siblings end up in a sexual encounter the boy arranges with an online acquaintance from another city to stage a mock “kidnapping” and hold them at gunpoint to force them to have sex with each other, when in fact it’s all a setup because he wants to have sex with her and she doesn’t. Watching “Families” over 21 years after it first aired was welcome because it was a great chance to get reacquainted with the marvelous actors who’ve since departed the show (and in at least one case has departed the planet): not only Christopher Meloni at the height of his hotness but also Richard Belzer (d. 2023), Dann Florek, B. D. Wong (the openly Gay man who became a star as the male concubine of a French diplomat stationed in Beijing in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), Tamara Tunie (I love her name!) as medical examiner Dr. Melinda Warner, and Diane Lane as the prosecutor assigned to the Special Victims Unit. (In the original SVU the prosecutors assigned to the unit were all female – as they had been for the original New York Police Department Sex Crimes Unit that was the model for the show – but more recently the prosecutor has been a man, Peter Scanavino as Dominick Carisi, Jr., and I think the show has suffered from it.)

“Families” is in some ways the mirror image of “Aperture”: in this case the two amorous teens are related as half-siblings, though only one of their mothers knows that. The teen lovers are Aidan Connor (Patrick John Fleuger) and Shannon Coyle (Jenna Gavigan), and the only person who knows they’re biologically related is Shannon’s mother, Susan Coyle (Helen Slater). The police find Shannon’s body in the course of investigating another crime, and when she’s autopsied they learn that not only was she pregnant, but 62 percent of the fetus’s genes were biologically related to her – meaning that the pregnancy was the product of incest. The cops at first suspect Shannon’s father, Jason Connor (Tom Mason), and also her brother Brian (Spencer Treat Clark), but ultimately they learn that Susan Coyle and Jason Connor had been involved in an extramarital relationship that had lasted at least two decades, and Aidan was the result. Susan had covered for Jason by claiming that she was married to someone else who was continually out of the country on “business trips,” but later we learn that there was no such person. There’s the sort of red herring beloved of the SVU writers in the early days, as the police uncover a pedophile choir teacher, Steven Abruzzo (Geoffrey Noffts), who was having a sexual affair with Shannon’s 17-year-old classmate Lisa Faber (Stefanie Nava). The police have already started to suspect Steven of having an affair with Shannon and killing her to cover it up, but it turns out that Lisa is the girl from his prep-school choir he’s been doing. The cops actually find Steven and Lisa in flagrante delicto and bust Steven (in having more than one crime going on at once this episode, written by Jonathan Greene and directed by Constantine Makris, starts encroaching on Midsomer Murders territory), but they soon clear him of the murder even though he’s clearly on his way to prison for screwing an underage student.

Things take an even darker turn when Jason Connor is found murdered and Susan Coyle is indicted and actually put on trial for it. But the real killer is Jason’s wife Debra (Jane Seymour, a more prestigious actress than we’re used to seeing on SVU), who knocked off Jason when she caught him planning to leave her for Susan once and for all and found they’d booked plane tickets to Cuba to get away from her. (This was a bizarre plot hole given that in 2004 direct travel between the U.S. and Cuba was still strictly forbidden; when my mom, my brother and I went there in 1977 during Jimmy Carter’s “thaw” we had to get to Cuba by first flying to Mexico.) As for Shannon, it turned out that Jason had accidentally killed her before his own murder. The film ends with Aidan almost literally throwing up at the knowledge that the girl he had sex with was his (half-)sister, and the SVU police telling Aidan that he’ll need to be there for his half-brother Brian given that Jason’s dad is dead and their mom is on her way to prison for killing him. I’ve been haunted by “Families” since I first saw it and it still holds up quite well, even though Mariska Hargitay as Detective Olivia Benson (before the series of promotions she got later in the show’s run) was still wearing her hair almost murderously short. She looked a lot better in the role once she started to let it grow!

American Masters: "Hopper: An American Love Story" (M&C Media and Exhibition on Screen, Seven Arts Productions, American Masters Pictures, Center for Independent Documentary, Thirteen Productions, Inc., WNET Group, PBS, 2024)

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

Last night (Tuesday, May 13) my husband Charles returned home from work in time to join me in watching an American Masters PBS-TV special on the artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) called “Hopper: A Love Story.” The love story in question was between Hopper and his wife, fellow artist Josephine Nivinson. Hopper was born in Nyack in upstate New York to middle-class parents who frequently took him the 40 miles to New York City and experienced its culture, including galleries, musea and Broadway shows. Born relatively short, Hopper experienced a growth spurt just before his senior year in high school, which ironically made him the target of bullying. (As someone who spent much of his school years wishing for a spurt in growth so I wouldn’t be bullied for being too short, I thought that’s in the “be careful what you wish for, you might get it” category.) Hopper was drawn to art and never wanted to do anything else with his life, though in his early years he made his living as a magazine and poster illustrator and hated every minute of it, particularly the constraints under which illustrators labored and the lack of any real creativity. In 1913 Hopper’s parents sent him to Paris to study, but they insisted he live in a church-owned building to protect him from the bad habits other would-be artists fell into in Paris, including alcohol, drugs and casual sex with “loose” women. Hopper had a weirdly one-sided relationship in Paris with a woman named Alta Hilsdale, who literally kept putting off his requests for dates in letters formally addressed “Dear Mr. Hopper” in which she repeatedly wrote she was way too busy to see him. (The “Dear Mr. Hopper” salutation should have been enough to make clear to him that she kept him firmly in the “friend zone,” as we would say today, and wasn’t at all interested in him as a romantic or sexual partner.) Hopper also made it clear in later years that though he lived in Paris at a time when successive revolutions had shaken the art world – Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism – his own work remained resolutely representational and he said he’d never heard of Picasso until he returned to the U.S. in the early 1920’s.

Hopper alternated between Glouscester, Massachusetts (where Nivison also lived and the two became art partners before they started dating and became a life couple as well) and Greenwich Village, New York City. As his style evolved he specialized in urban scenes, often of people in dead-end middle-class jobs, riding subways, sitting in lonely hotel rooms, or – in his most famous painting, Nighthawks (1942) – at an all-night diner. When he wasn’t working, he would either read magazines or watch movies, and the show argued that Hopper’s work and the film world influenced each other. It cited a painting he did of an old house in Gloucester, House by the Railroad (1925), as the alleged inspiration for Norman Bates’s seedy ancient abode in Psycho (1960) – though the house in Psycho was a pre-existing old set on the Universal backlot that Hitchcock just pressed into service, and all he had built were the rows of motel rooms behind it. The narration for this film, written and directed by Michael Cascio and Phil Grabsky, also said Hopper was particularly influenced by Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955) and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), though bizarrely they called Strangers on a Train “early Hitchcock.” It was actually made at the mid-point of his career between his first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), and his last, Family Plot (1976). The film touched on the problems faced by straight two-artist couples like Hopper and Nivison, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: the woman’s career tended to get overshadowed by the man’s (though in the case of Rivera and Kahlo their relative reputations have flipped since their deaths: today “Frida” is a feminist icon and Rivera rather humbly trundles along in her wake). It’s arguable that Nivison was at least potentially a more interesting painter than Hopper; there’s a fascinating scene in the film in which two paintings they both did of the same scene in Gloucester are shown side by side. They’re clearly of the same subject, but Nivison’s color palette is much brighter and (to me, at least) more interesting than Hopper’s.

It’s also fascinating that Hopper “froze” his style relatively early and there’s little difference between his New York urban landscapes from the 1930’s and those from the 1960’s. One of the “talking heads,” National Gallery of Art curator of American paintings Franklin Kelly, says of Hopper in the film, “[H]e's going one place and he did it and he did it brilliantly. But in terms of the tree of art history, of modernism, Hopper’s line really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s its own line.” Just as Hopper’s art in his Paris years had ignored the revolutionary developments of the age, so Hopper in New York and Gloucester remained resolutely representational at a time when the American art scene in the 1950’s was dominated by Abstract Expressionism (though some of the Abstract Expressionists, notably Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, either cited Hopper as an influence or referenced him in their early paintings), which in the 1960’s was similarly dethroned by Pop Art. Hopper was never a prolific painter – he would work for about a month or so on a single painting, though once he finished he would ship it to his dealer within a day or two instead of letting it sit in his studio for weeks or even months – and only 366 of his canvases are known to exist. One of the “talking heads” in the documentary criticized Hopper for his political obliviousness and the fact that he ignored “[t]he ‘new Negro’ movement beginning, really, kind of burgeoning in Greenwich Village, the protests that would have been happening through the '50’s and '60’s. It's just almost comical for me to imagine Hopper still in his button-down at his easel when you have this great, like, bohemian culture happening right outside the window. And it's not really reflected in the work.” It’s also worth noting that just about all the people in Hopper’s paintings are white; he either ignored or failed to register New York’s incredibly racially diverse population. And yet Hopper’s work has survived and even thrived in American popular culture; Nighthawks in particular has been endlessly parodied (including by Turner Classic Movies, whose artists replaced the anonymous figures of Hopper’s original with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean) and referenced by, among other people, singer-songwriter Tom Waits, who called one of his albums Nighthawks at the Diner in honor of the painting.