Law and Order: "Once Burned" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 7) my husband Charles and I watched episodes in sequence of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Inspector George Gently. The Law and Order show was “Once Burned,” and it begins with a sequence in which New York Fire Department Captain Clint Braddock (Chad Knorr), a 25-year department veteran who became a legend as one of the first responders on September 11, 2001, peremptorily ordering a younger firefighter away from a doorway in a burning apartment where the fire is sucking in smoke. Braddock barks out an explanation that that’s a backdraft and would suck his younger colleague into the burning room and incinerate him. The next see Braddock he's dead, killed by a Halligan (a common firefighting tool that looks like a pickaxe on one end and a hoe on the other) outside on the sidewalk. The investigating police, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), cycle through various red herrings, including a fellow firefighter named Steven Delvecchio (Max Cassella) whom Braddock had been friends with for decades until Braddock found out that Delvecchio was wrongly claiming money from the fund set up after 9/11 to compensate its victims and pay benefits to their families. The cops also investigate Braddock’s wife Candace (Catherine Eaton), from whom he’d filed for divorce just a week or so ago.

Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Diego Peralta (Bobby Soto), another firefighter and the man Braddock rescued from being burned alive in the opening scene. The two got into an argument when an elaborate necklace disappeared from the scene of a fire which Braddock’s company had worked, with Peralta as part of the crew. Because his own claim from the 9/11 compensation fund had been turned down after the insurance industry representatives determined that Braddock’s multiple sclerosis couldn’t be traced definitively to 9/11, Braddock first stole the valuable item to pay for his health-care treatments and then tried to frame Peralta for it, knowing that as a twice-convicted felon (first for assault and then for burglary) Peralta’s denials wouldn’t be believed. According to Peralta’s own account, Braddock got so worked up at Peralta he attacked him and Peralta killed him in self-defense. Peralta testifies to that effect at his murder trial and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), though not convinced of Peralta’s innocence, has enough doubts about his guilt he considers dismissing the case. District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) talks him out of it and Price delivers a cross-examination replete with photo evidence of the victim of Peralta’s assault. The jury finds Peralta guilty but the open-ended script by old Law and Order hands Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson and Michael Smith’s powerful direction leave us in considerable doubt as to whether justice was done. It’s the kind of thoughtful writing that has made Dick Wolf’s Law and Order shows my all-time favorite policiers.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 7, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Law and Order show on May 7, my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit program featuring an episode called “Old Friends,” in which the Manhattan Special Victims Unit detectives respond to a 911 call from a woman named Angela (Christina Brucato) who’s just awakened from a drink-induced slumber at an all-night party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her college graduation. She’s stayed in touch with quite a lot of people she knew from her days at Columbia University, including the party’s host, Preston Winthrop (John Skelley), a spoiled-brat trust-fund kid with a long history of drinking, drug abuse, failed stints in rehab, and sexually obnoxious behavior towards women. The 911 call was occasioned by Angela’s discovery of her friend Nora Pontius (Izzie Steele) lying unconscious on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. Usually, at least on Law and Order and other crime shows, that means the victim is a-goner, but thanks to Angela’s quick action a team of paramedics is able to get her to a hospital in time to save her life. Needless to say, she turns out to have been the victim of a sexual assault. Other people at the party were Ryan (Mishka Thébaud); Adam (James William O’Halloran), his wife Sophie (Julia Yorks) – who’s from the Bay Area, attended Stanford instead of Columbia, but was there only to make sure Adam didn’t get into anything extra-relational with any of the other women – and Josh Ortega (Benny Elledge), who because he was the only one of the gang who didn’t spend the night and who has the biggest chip on his shoulder of any of the attendees is clearly being set up by writer Justine Ferrara to be the prime red-herring suspect.

Though she was indefinitely suspended at the end of the previous week’s episode by an African-American woman chief of detectives who obviously hates her, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) gets to investigate the case anyway after her suspension is itself suspended pending her appeal. (Ferrara drops a big hint in the middle of the show when she has Benson tell one of the detectives on her squad that after 25 years she’s no longer sure the Special Victims Unit is the right place for her. It’s possible Mariska Hargitay wants to move on with her life and is stepping down from the show; we’ll see in next week’s episode, which is the last of the current season.) Midway through the show, I turned to Charles and said I thought this was one of the weaker SVU’s for the simple reason that there was no one in the cast we actually liked. As it kept going, it kept reminding me of all those mysteries I’ve read in which the clue to the current crime was a secret concealed in one or more of the characters’ pasts, including the sub-genre invented (I think) by Ross Macdonald in The Galton Case in which the lead detective character has to solve a 20-year-old cold case to get the clue needed to figure out the more recent crime(s). But Ferrara was hardly at the level of Macdonald or other writers that have used this gimmick. It turns out that Josh Ortega stole a gold ring from Nora, but only because she owed him money. Adam and Nora had been having a long-term “friends with benefits” relationship, sneaking off together for casual sex whenever they had the opportunity, and they’d done so that night even though Adam’s wife Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) was in the same apartment at the same time. The real culprit turned out to be [spoiler alert!] Ryan, who’d had a long-standing and decidedly unrequited crush on Nora from their college days to the present. He found her in an unconscious state and took advantage of it to rape her. After the excellence of the Law and Order episode that had preceded it, this one really rubbed me the wrong way and made me felt slimy not only for having watched it myself but having subjected Charles to it.

Inspector George Gently: "The Burning Man" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired July 13, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening (Thursday, May 7) I switched channels from NBC to PBS to catch a rerun of Inspector George Gently, a BBC-TV policier that ran from 2008 to 2017. Its central character, Detective Chief Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw), was a crabby middle-aged man who as the series began had just suffered two big-time blows, one personal and one professional. The personal blow was the death of his wife at the hands of one of the criminals he’d been after, and the professional one was losing his prestigious job at New Scotland Yard in London and being reassigned to the small town of Durham in Northumberland in the north of England. Gently’s new professional partner is Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby), who in 1964 (when the series was set at first) is wearing his hair Beatle-length (as I’ve noted in previous entries in the series, he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic of John Lennon) but other than that is a quite stuck-up conservative personally, if not politically, The Gently character was created by author Alan Hunter and brought to the small screen by Peter Flannery, who’s listed as the show’s creator and also wrote this particular episode, “The Burning Man.” Only the second episode of the series, “The Burning Man” begins with Gently and Bacchus finding the corpse of a man that has not only been killed (with a single gunshot to the forehead) but soaked in a flammable liquid so he would be burned beyond immediate recognition. The only clue as to his identity is a gold ring which he swallowed just before he was killed, and emerged intact even though the rest of his body was utterly consumed and only his skeleton remained. The ring has an inscription to “Wanda,” and the cops trace it to Wanda Lane (Pooky Quesnel), a barmaid at a local tavern called The Rook.

The Rook markets itself to the local Irish community, including hosting bands playing traditional Irish folk music (with, shall we say, more enthusiasm than talent) and playing host to various operatives with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The show’s 1964 setting puts it well ahead of the so-called “Time of Troubles” which rocked the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, which stayed part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland, and Wales after the remaining 26 Irish counties at last gained independence, but the seeds of doubt are already brewing. Gently and Bacchus find themselves investigating two cases at once: the murder of the burned-out mystery corpse and the disappearance of O’Shaughnessy (Deka Walmsley), a middle-aged man whose (barely) adult daughter Carmel (Charlotte Riley) is looking for him and entreating the police to take more care of the case than they might otherwise. Their task is complicated by the appearance of Empton (Robert Glenister) from London’s Special Branch, which as its Wikipedia page explains “was a unit of London's Metropolitan Police formed in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name became Special Branch [it was originally Special Irish Branch] as the unit's remit widened to include more than just Irish Republican-related counter-espionage.” When he’s not trying to recruit John Bacchus to leave the police force in Durham and join the Special Branch, Empton is pushing his weight around and getting in the way of the investigation big-time. Eventually we learn – or think we learn – that the burned-out corpse was Ruairi O’Connell (Finbar Lynch), a gunman for the IRA. O’Connell was having a casual sexual affair with Wanda, who is, shall we say, quite free with her affections (at one point she tries to seduce Gently and even undresses to her underwear, but Gently, whose only interest in her is to take her down to the police station and get her information, calmly tells her to put her clothes back on so he can do that).

The true villain of the piece turns out to be Doyle (John Kavanagh), who runs a local trucking company for which O’Connell drove.Through an inside connection at the local British military base, O’Connell had acquired a large collection of guns which he intended to smuggle into Northern Ireland to continue the struggle for full Irish independence. Only O’Connell had been recruited by Empton as an informer, and his murder was an IRA execution as revenge for his having given Empton the names of his colleagues. O’Shaughnessy is in turn killed by a hit squad led by Doyle as Gently, Bacchus, and O’Shaughnessy’s daughter Carmel look on helplessly. Ultimately Empton turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, willing to let the shipment of stolen guns make its way to the IRA in exchange for having Doyle, who’s really his agent, win a place on the IRA’s governing council so Empton can gain intelligence on the group from the source. In the end Doyle is picked off by a well-aimed shot from Gently as he’s attempting to save himself by holding Wanda Lane hostage, Empton is disgraced, and fortunately both the women we’ve come to like, Wanda and Carmel, are alive at the end (though we get the impression Wanda has been chastened by the experience and won’t be anywhere nearly as man-hungry as she was before). I like Inspector George Gently because it almost totally lacks the campy levity of a lot of the other British policiers, especially the ones like Midsomer Murders set in central England instead of London, Manchester, or Liverpool. Instead it virtually qualified as neo-noir, and I particularly liked this episode because it had a political background but luckily didn’t hit us over the head with it.

X the Unknown (Sol Lesser Productions, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, Warner Bros., 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 7) I showed my husband Charles a film I’d got in the same container as Four Sided Triangle: X the Unknown (the official poster had a three-dot ellipsis between “X” and “the,” but the film’s own opening credits did not), a strange little story by future Hammer director Jimmy Sangster about a menace, not from outer space this time, but from inside the Earth’s crust. As explained in the exposition by Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger, an American actor imported to star in the film by producer Sol Lesser, a long-time Hollywood bottom-feeder who got his name on the copyright), as the earth’s crust expanded and took up more of the volume of the planet, agencies inside the crust started feeling squeezed and eventually rebelled, breaking open the crust in certain places to grab the energy they needed as their source of food. (Some critics at the time praised Sangster’s script as at least not being yet another tale of an alien invasion from outer space.) The film is set in Scotland, where the British army is doing tests to train their troops in the proper use of Geiger counters to detect underground radiation, only one of the servicemembers detects radiation in a location other than where the atomic materials have been planted as part of the exercise. The army orders the suspicious site cordoned off, but two young boys, Ian Osborn (Fraser Hines) and Willie Harding (Michael Brooks), investigate the site on a dare. Ian emerges unscathed but Willie is badly burned and eventually dies in the hospital of his wounds, much to the understandable displeasure of his parents Jack (Jameson Clark) and Vi (Jane Aird). Later the great whatsit kills a doctor in the hospital where the boy was being treated (when we saw his flesh literally melt on screen I joked to Charles, “Now this looks like a Hammer movie”). It also opens a deep fissure in the ground and kills two soldiers stationed outside the perimeter to guard it. Royston’s colleague Peter Elliott (William Lucas) volunteers to be lowered into the fissure to investigate it first-hand, taking a Geiger counter with him and saying he’ll asked to be raised out of the pit immediately once it starts registering radiation. He gets his (and our) first clue about the mysterious menace when an oddly animate patch of mud fastens itself to his hand. Royston and Elliott have a frosty relationship with Inspector “Mac” McGill (Leo McKern, who later played Clang, the High Priest of Kalili, in Help! and thus put the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Beatles) of the local police. The cops insist on trying to blow up the monster while Royston says that it feeds on energy and therefore supplying it with more energy will only help it.

Ultimately the mud-monster emerges from its cave and starts menacing everyone in the vicinity in search of the radioactive cobalt core from a nearby nuclear reactor, which coincidentally has been removed as part of a shutdown of the reactor instituted by Royston. The scientists finally figure out a way to kill the thing using the cobalt core as a lure, on the theory that by bombarding it with out-of-synch radio waves they can neutralize it and keep it from feeding on the surrounding energy. Just as the scientists think they have killed it with their first explosion, it explodes a second time, leaving it uncertain at the film’s rather abrupt ending if they’ve really killed the whatsit or just put it to sleep for a while. I remembered that both Charles and I had seen this movie before because I’d joked about a sequel to it and even come up with a title: X2: Killer Mud Strikes Again! According to the film’s Wikipedia page, the originally assigned director was American expatriate and blacklist victim Joseph Losey, but he was let go when Dean Jagger refused to work with him, probably fearful for his own future if he made a film with a blacklisted director like Losey. Instead they assigned the film to Leslie Norman, best known as a comedy director for Ealing Studios and rather out of place in a science-fiction/horror film. The page also says that Sol Lesser had a deal to release the film in the U.S. through RKO, but at the time that studio was in its death throes during the three-year interregnum between Howard Hughes’s selling it in 1955 and its eventual closure three years later. During that time RKO seemed to be going through a corporate version of post-traumatic stress disorder, and by the time its owners bowed to the inevitable in 1958 they’d begun placing their unreleased films with other studios, mainly Warner Bros. and Columbia. X the Unknown ended up at Warners, which released it on a double bill with Hammer’s first foray into classical monster-movie making, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The page also explains that Hammer’s producer, Anthony Hinds, had originally wanted to call Dean Jagger’s character “Bernard Quatermass,” but the creator of the Quatermass character, Nigel Kneale, refused to give permission. There’s at least one other quirky credit in the film besides Leo McKern’s: Anthony Newley appears briefly as one of the servicemembers killed by the monster early on in the Hammer equivalent of a Star Trek “red shirt.” X the Unknown is an O.K. entry into the alien-monster sweepstakes, surprisingly dull for most of its running time (for which I’m inclined to blame Sangster rather than Norman) and with a woefully unscary monster. It’s basically the same concept as The Blob, made in the U.S. two years later, but The Blob, while no great shakes as a movie either, at least was made with a cheery awareness of its camp aspects that pretty much eluded the makers of X the Unknown.

Wagner: Götterdämmerung (Unitel, Bel Air Media, Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden, ZDF, Arte, RBB, CNC, C Major, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 4) my husband Charles and I watched Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, fourth installment in the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”), in a frustrating staging by the Berlin Oper Under den Linden (the last part of the name refers to its location, and during the split of Germany between 1947 and 1990 it was in East Berlin) conducted by Christian Thielemann (after the original conductor, Daniel Barenboim, withdrew for health reasons – he is in his 80’s, after all!) and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Dmitri Tcherniakov is a youngish (born 1970, which would make him 55) Russian stage director with a terrible reputation for making hash out of great operas. Among his problems as an opera director are an aversion to supernatural plot elements (which makes me wonder whose idea it was to have him direct Wagner’s Ring, which is full of supernatural plot elements!) and an acute allergy to anything resembling a special effect. Before watching this Ring as part of a Fanfare review assignment, I’d seen only one Tcherniakov production before, a Metropolitan Opera staging of Borodin’s Prince Igor from 2014 which I actually liked. I suspect one of the reasons I liked his Prince Igor is that, though he updated the story, he didn’t do so obtrusively. He also was working with a Russian opera, and he’s Russian, so he might have had a home-field advantage. It also helped that Prince Igor is an unfinished opera; Alexander Borodin was a chemical researcher by profession and composed as a hobby, and he didn’t have time to create a final shape for his opera before he died. The standard version of Prince Igor was created by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov after Borodin’s death based on the fragments he’d left behind and things he'd told them about his plans for the piece, and Tcherniakov took parts of the Prince Igor manuscript Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov hadn’t used in their version as well as some of Borodin’s instrumental music, notably a piece called “The River Don Floods,” to give the opera a more downbeat ending than the standard version’s.

Alas, in Wagner’s Ring Tchneriakov was working with a well-established text whose composer (who was also his own librettist) not only lived to finish it but actually directed the premiere. Tchnerniakov had the looney-tunes idea to stage the Ring in a giant medical research complex called E.S.C.H.E.; he never specified what the initials stood for but it was clearly a reference to the World-Ash Tree (“Esche” is the German word for “ash,” as in a species of tree) where the characters are being watched 24/7 by a group of mad researchers who manipulate them in ways designed to test their … well, Tchneriakov isn’t very specific as to who these people are or what they’re testing the subjects for. Götterdämmerung opens in the corridors of the establishment, where the three Norns, the Norse equivalents to the Fates in Greco-Roman mythology (Noa Beinart, Kristina Stanek, and Anna Samuil), are spinning the rope of destiny – only there is, of course, no rope. All the Norns are mobility-impaired; two are using canes (one has a four-legged extension so it can stand up, one doesn’t) and one has a portable chair that doubles as a walker. The Norns are watching Siegfried (Andreas Schager) and Brünnhilde (Anja Kampe), who united at the end of the immediately previous opera, Siegfried, in bed together, only Brünnhilde gets up before Siegfried does and starts making them coffee. Siegfried and Brünnhilde sing the so-called “Dawn Duet” in which she calls out to him to go forth and do new heroic deeds in her honor. Then they exchange presents: Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the Ring of the Nibelung and in exchange Brünnhilde gives Siegfried Grane, the magic flying horse she used to ride into battle during her days as a Valkyrie until she lost that job at the end of Die Walküre by siding with Siegfried’s father Siegmund (Robert Watson) in a duel over Sieglinde (Vida Miknevičiūtė), Siegmund’s long-lost twin sister as well as his girlfriend and Siegfried’s mother. Grane is one of Tcherniakov’s worst ideas; instead of either a real horse or a mock-up of same, he’s a plush toy horse less than a foot long, even though Siegfried and Brünnhilde pass it back and forth and address it as if it were a real horse either of them could ride. Then Siegfried takes off on the Rhine Journey, which Wagner composed as an instrumental interlude and Tchneriakov and his TV director, Andy Sommer, gave it to us as precisely that, shooting the orchestra in the pit rather than sticking some stupid visual sequence before our eyes.

He arrives at the castle of the Gibichungs, ruled by brother Gunther (Lauri Vasar) and his sister Gutrune (Mandy Fredrich) and their half-brother Hagen (the formidable Mika Kares, who’d already sung two roles in this Ring cycle before, as Fasolt the giant in Das Rheingold and Hunding, Sieglinde’s cuckolded husband, in Die Walküre). All three of the characters had Gibich’s wife Grimhilde as their mother, but whereas Gunther and Gutrune were sired by King Gibich, Hagen’s father was Alberich (Johannes Martin Kränzle in all three operas in which he appears), the dwarf who stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens in the first part and thereby set the entire plot in motion. Hagen has the idea that Siegfried would make a good husband for Gutrune and Brünnhilde an equally good wife for Gunther, only Gunther is too fearful to make it across the barrier of flames (which, of course, doesn’t exist in Tchneriakov’s production; the closest we get is a series of jagged red lines drawn with a scarlet Sharpie to suggest fire). So Siegfried agrees to use the Tarnhelm, the shape-shifting and teleportation device Alberich’s brother Mime (Stephan Rügamer) invented in Rheingold, to impersonate Gunther and kidnap Brünnhilde on his behalf. In Wagner’s original, Siegfried is induced to do this by being given a magic potion that makes him lose his memory and fall instantly in love with Gutrune, but in Tcheriakov’s rewrite the “potion” is an ordinary bottle (or series of bottles) of white wine and Siegfried is the only one of the party who doesn’t drink any – which makes his immediate forsaking of his vows to Brünnhilde and near-rape of Gutrune even more inexplicable than it was in Wagner’s original. I was also bothered by the way in which the characters smoked cigarettes; in Siegfried Siegfried smoked twice, once in the first act and once in the third, and in Götterdämmerung not only does Siegfried smoke, so do Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen. This suggests that Tcherniakov has reset the story in the 1970’s, when it was still common for health-care workers to smoke on the job, but a later scene in which the characters all display modern-style cell phones marks it as 21st century.

There’s also a confrontation scene between Brünnhilde and her sister, fellow Valkyrie Waltraute (Violeta Urmana, one of the few people in this cast I’d heard of before; she played Aïda in a 2009 Met production that was telecast, and she did so quite well) in which Waltraute brings her up to speed on what’s been happening in Valhalla while Brünnhilde has been in exile. Apparently Wotan (Michael Volle), the head of the gods, has lost his will to live and has stopped eating the golden apples that make the gods immortal. Instead he’s ordered the world-ash tree to be chopped down and the twigs stacked around Valhalla waiting for a spark to start a conflagration and burn down Valhalla and all the gods with it. Waltraute wants Brünnhilde to give the ring back to the Rhinemaidens, Woglinde (Evelin Novak), Wellgunde (Natalia Skrycka), and Flosshilde (Anna Lapovskaya), from whom Alberich stole the gold to make it in Rheingold, in hopes that can lift the curse on it and get Wotan and the other gods interested in life again. But Brünnhilde refuses to part with the ring because it was Siegfried’s love token. Then Siegfried shows up in Gunther drag and kidnaps Brünnhilde. In Act II, Siegfried brings Brünnhilde back to Gibich Land, only Brünnhilde catches on that he’s betrayed her and immediately plots with Gunther and Hagen to kill him. They take the famous Oath on the Spear, which in this production is the Oath on a Bunch of Cell Phones. In Act III Siegfried is wandering around and meets the Rhinemaidens, though in Tcherniakov’s production this happens in the so-called “Stress Laboratory” where they work as nurses or something. They ask Siegfried to give them back the ring, but he refuses. Instead he keeps walking into a basketball court (in the immortal words of Anna Russell, who vividly parodied the Ring in one of her most famous routines, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) where Hagen is leading a game.

In Wagner’s original, Siegfried, Hagen,and the Gibichung vassals (Götterdämmerung is the only one of the Ring operas to contain a chorus, and they do the usual opera-chorus things, commenting on action we’ve just seen and therefore don’t need to have explained to us) are on an outdoor hunting trip, and Hagen first gives Siegfried an antidote to the potion he took in Act I that enables him to remember the whole story about how he killed Fafner the dragon (Peter Rose) and crossed the magic flames to rescue Brünnhilde. Then, just as Siegfried is remembering his whole backstory, Hagen kills him with a spear. In Tcherniakov’s production, once again Siegfried doesn’t drink the bottled water that supposedly contains the potion, and Hagen has no spear since he’s playing basketball (the team are wearing matching green polo shirts and dark blue shorts) instead of hunting. Just as I was beginning to wonder how Tcherniakov was going to have Hagen kill Siegfried, he had Hagen pick up a standard with a flag on the end of it and stab Siegfried in the back with it. (I wondered if Tcherniakov had got the idea from the use of flagstaffs as weapons by some of the January 6, 2021 rioters who staged an action at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to keep Congress from certifying the 2020 election so Donald Trump could stay in power. Remember that this Ring was staged in 2022, during the Joe Biden interregnum between Donald Trump’s two Presidential terms.) Siegfried’s corpse gets put on a hospital gurney and pushed back from the basketball court to the stress laboratory next door. Gutrune gets her big mad scene as she anxiously awaits the return of her beloved Siegfried, not realizing until she actually sees his corpse that he’s been killed by her half-brother Hagen. Brünnhilde sings the famous Immolation Scene, which in Wagner’s original is supposed to set off a fire that spreads from the Gibichung territory to engulf all Valhalla and kill off the gods once and for all, only once again Tcherniakov, in one of his most stupid ideas, dispensed with a flame and had Brünnhilde survive the incident; as the orchestra plays the grand postlude that was supposed to accompany the fire that took out Valhalla and the gods, she stands stage center as the text for one of the earlier versions of the Immolation Scene scrolls behind her. Wagner actually wrote no fewer than seven versions of the text for this scene as his philosophical views grew and changed, and the version Tcherniakov picked for his big crawl was the one in which Brünnhilde said, “I saw the world end.” Then the white text on a black background crumbles into dust and blows away, in what Tcherniakov with his fabled allergy to special effects came as close as he was going to get to one.

Götterdämmerung is a schizoid opera anyway because Wagner wrote the text over two decades before he composed the music. He originally planned it in 1848 as a stand-alone work called Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), and had it not been for his involvement in the 1848 Dresden revolution he probably would have composed it right after Lohengrin and in much the same style. When the revolution failed Wagner had literally to flee for his life; he spent the next 16 years mostly in Switzerland and decided that Siegfrieds Tod needed a prologue, Der junge Siegfried (“Young Siegfried”), to explain how Siegfried came into the world in the first place. Then he decided that needed another prelude to explain how Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, got together and conceived him. Finally he decided he needed a prologue to the whole work to explain who Wotan and the gods were, who Alberich was, and all about the Rhinegold and the Rhinemaidens who had custody of it until Alberich stole it, renounced love, and used its power to try to take over the world until Wotan tricked him into giving it up, only to lose it again to the giants who built Valhalla for him. By the time he finished composing the Ring, Wagner was stuck with a text that really didn’t fit his operatic ideal as it had evolved over the years, and especially since he’d broken off midway through the third act of Siegfried to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, two operas he rather naïvely thought would be easier to produce and make him some money, and didn’t resume composing the Ring for 12 years.

I don’t automatically dislike modern-dress permutations of classic operas, but I suspect that a work set in or near the time it was written and dealing with realistic situations and emotions is a better candidate for updating than a work like the Ring with a mythological or legendary setting. Among the modern-dress opera productions I’ve liked are Peter Sellars’s version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which worked because he found modern-day equivalents to the social and class conflicts of the original characters (his Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte didn’t work for me because he was just trying too hard to be “different” and not taking the same kind of care he had with The Marriage of Figaro); a stunning 1983 New York City Opera production of Bizet’s Carmen that not only moved the setting to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s but (unlike the Met with a later production) actually incorporated the war into the plot (Carmen and her gang were smuggling guns to the Loyalists, and the army from which Don José deserted was Franco’s); and Michael Mayer’s 2013 Met production of Verdi’s Rigoletto that moved the setting to 1960’s Las Vegas and made the characters Frank Sinatra and the “Rat Pack.” Tcherniakov’s Ring was full of absolutely silly ideas (like the toy Grane and the Hannibal Lecter mask Fafner wore in Siegfried), and its biggest sin was it did absolutely nothing to illuminate the character conflicts in Wagner’s original. Even Sam Goodyear, who successively reviewed the four operas as they were originally presented “live” and liked the production considerably better than I did, admitted at the end, “I’m just still not very sure how they add up to a whole and say anything profound. An experiment, if you like, with a hypothesis, a method, and some results, but to me, no real conclusions.”

Three by Charley Chase: "Are Brunettes Safe?," "Forgotten Sweeties," and "Bigger and Better Blondes" (Hal Ruach Studios, Pathé, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 3) the “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies consisted of three short films by comedian Charley Chase. His real name was Charley Parrott and the movies – Are Brunettes Safe?, Forgotten Sweeties, and Bigger and Better Blondes – were all made in 1927 by Hal Roach Studios for distribution by Pathé just before Roach switched his distribution contract to MGM. They were also all directed by Chase’s brother, James Parrott (later on Charley would start directing his own films and would take his directorial credit as “Charley Parrott” and his acting credit as “Charley Chase,” much the way later singer-songwriters like McKinley Morganfield, Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, and Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus did: you know them better as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elvis Costello, respectively) and written by H. M. “Beanie” Walker, one of the few title writers in the silent era who successfully converted to writing screenplays for talkies. Chase is often considered the father of situation comedy, though an even earlier star, John Bunny, probably deserves the honor: like such later sitcom stars as Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, he worked with his real-life spouse and was employed by Vitagraph, and since Mr. and Mrs. Bunny were both rather heavy-set the two couldn’t have done the kind of knockabout slapstick specialized by Mack Sennett’s Keystone crew. So they did a more sedate, genteel sort of movie humor that Vitagraph sold audiences as a kinder, gentler alternative. The three Chase films were shown in descending order of visual quality; the first, Are Brunettes Safe?, contained a closing credit thanking archives in Germany and Austria for supplying prints and for the most part the Boris Faquality was excellent, probably quite close to what 1927 audiences saw. Alas, the other two were considerably blurrier.

Are Brunettes Safe? Is an engaging little farce about “Helping Hand” (Charley Chase), an advice columnist at a big-city newspaper who receives a letter from a small-town woman asking for his help in finding her long-lost son. She enclosed a photo of him, and damned if he doesn’t look just like Charley Chase. On the advice of his editor, who thinks there’s a great human-interest story in it, Chase goes to the small town and impersonates the brother, not realizing that the brother is in fact Bud Gordon, notorious bank robber and criminal. There’s a tearful reunion between mother and (supposed) son in which she tells him all the crimes he’s accused of in the hopes that he can prove his innocence. He meets Bud Gordon’s sister (Lorraine Eason) and falls for her, only there’s the little problem that he’s supposed to be her brother even though he really isn’t. Ultimately it all turns out well as the real brother comes back to town and is duly arrested, while Chase and Bud’s sister get together after all once it’s established that Chase isn’t her brother. Forgotten Sweeties is a more off-the-wall comedy about two young couples, Thurston and Lillian (Charley Chase and the marvelous Anita Garvin, who played comic bitches brilliantly for Roach but never got the feature-film break she deserved) and Ira and his wife (Mitchell Lewis and Shirley Palmer), who literally can’t get away from each other. Lillian sees her husband getting cruised by the other woman and demands that they move somewhere else – only every place they try to move, first to a rental house and then to an apartment building, the other couple follows and rents either the same house (courtesy of an intrepid realtor who seems to think the place is vacant even though it isn’t) or another unit in the same apartment building.

Bigger and Better Blondes – a truly misnomered movie since there are no blondes of any size in the film – casts Chase as an employee of a jewelry store that has just been robbed. The jeweler who owned the store had luckily kept the VanDeusen jewels at his home, preparing to clean them, and he assigns Chase to return them. But Chase runs into Ramona VanDeusen (the young Jean Arthur, who’d become a blonde later in her career but was still dark-haired here) at a restaurant and cruises her. In order to impress her he puts on one of her rings, but she recognizes it as hers and thinks Chase is one of the jewel thieves. Chase loses the ring in a pot of soup and grabs the pot, serving himself the whole supply of soup in an effort to find the ring, but he has to reckon with another customer (Sammy Brooks) who just happened to get the serving containing the ring. There’s some nice slapstick as Chase tries to get the ring away from Brooks before he swallows it, thinking it’s just part of the soup. The diner is also inhabited by the real thieves, Boris Fantomas (Mario Carillo) – the name comes from a then-popular French serial about a master thief who’s a good/bad guy like Raffles and The Saint – and his sidekick (Edgar Dearing). Ultimately it ends the way it’s supposed to, with the crooks being arrested, the VanDeusens getting their jewels back, and Charley getting Ramona. Charley Chase was not exactly one of the greats of silent comedy (and judging from the films of his I’ve seen I’d say he got better when sound came in), but these films were charming and welcome diversions.

The Wedding in Monaco (Loew’s, Compagnie Française de Films, Citel Monaco, MGM, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the three Charley Chase films on “Silent Sunday Showcase” Sunday, May 4 Turner Classic Movies showed an engaging if somewhat disappointing half-hour short called The Wedding in Monaco from 1956. It’s not hard to guess just what wedding in Monaco they were referring to: the real-life marriage of actress Grace Kelly to His Serene Highness, Prince Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi of Monaco. The two met when Kelly was filming her third and last movie with Alfred Hitchcock directing, To Catch a Thief (1955), and ironically the last film Grace Kelly made before she retired from acting to become the Princess of Monaco was The Swan (1956), in which she played a young woman who renounced her worldly ambitions to marry into royalty. (It was a remake of a silent film featuring actress Frances Howard, who after it was finished quit acting to marry producer Sam Goldwyn.) The film was directed and written by a Frenchman named Jean Masson, and was originally in French with Masson narrating himself. For the American release by MGM, Masson’s French narration was replaced with one by José Ferrer (whose voice I’m ashamed to say I didn’t recognize) in English. The narration claimed that Monaco was the tiniest sovereign state in Europe (which I rather doubt: what about Liechtenstein? Andorra? San Marino?). My husband Charles was amused that the film contained three languages: English, French, and Latin. Masson did quite a few aerial shots, including one of Kelly’s ship, the U.S.S. Constitution, arriving in the harbor of Monte Carlo and delivering her directly to Prince Rainier’s yacht. He was also startled to see Aristotle Onassis in the wedding party looking like the couple’s usher (Onassis was then heavily invested in Monaco, though later he and Rainier had a bitter falling-out and Onassis angrily pulled his investments).

The film showcased the two wedding ceremonies of Rainier and Kelly: a civil ceremony which we didn’t get to hear (all we heard was Ferrer describing it as it was going on) and a religious one which we did. There were also some intriguing credits, including ballet companies from both Paris and London, and the London one was supposed to be dancing to music by, of all people, Stan Kenton. That piqued my curiosity, and indeed the Kenton music turned out to be a ballet that mixed in modern dance steps and was performed to an elaborate re-arrangement of Kenton’s Ravel-derived theme song, “Artistry in Rhythm.” (Before there was progressive rock, there was progressive jazz – a term Stan Kenton actually coined – and like the later prog-rockers, the prog-jazzers were denounced as pretentious and provoked a back-to-basics reaction: “hard bop” or “soul jazz” in the jazz community, especially its Black members since most of the prog-jazzers had been white; and punk in the case of prog-rock.) Other than the big dance sequences, The Wedding in Monaco did tend to drag, and the print TCM had was not in the best condition, but it was an interesting curio even though one senses the desperation from the “suits” at MGM: “Quick! Let’s get one more movie out of Grace Kelly before she retires to be with this guy.” Grace Kelly actually considered an acting comeback in 1963, when Alfred Hitchcock offered her the title role in Marnie. But some busybody in Monaco read the book, realized that their princess would be playing a kleptomaniac, and started a referendum asking the citizens of Monaco if they thought it was appropriate that the wife of their hereditary ruler make a film playing such a vile and disgusting character. The people overwhelmingly voted against her, and she obediently gave the role up and spent the rest of her life, until a car crash ended her life in 1982, playing the role of a princess and mostly waving at crowds from the balcony of hers and Rainier’s palace.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "How to Murder a Tune" (Britbox, BBC, PBS, aired May 8, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched the KPBS showings of episodes of two consecutive British crime series, Sister Boniface Mysteries and Father Brown. Father Brown began as a series of detective stories involving a Roman Catholic priest written by G. K. Chesterton from 1910 to 1936 (when Chesterton died), and apparently the character was based on a real-life priest, Right Rev. Monsignor John O’Connor of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, who was instrumental in converting Chesterton from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. Sister Boniface Mysteries was in turn an offshoot of the long-running Father Brown TV series in which the title character was not only a nun but one with a greater understanding of forensic medicine than anyone else in England (or at least in her fictional central England community, “Great Slaughter”), including anyone connected with official law enforcement. Sister Boniface Mysteries is set in the 1960’s and this particular episode, originally aired on May 8, 2024, was called “How to Murder a Tune.” Written by Lisa McMullin and directed by Diana Patrick, it was built around a fictional TV series called Glory Be that was about contests for various church choir soloists. The winner would get a scholarship and national exposure for a potential singing career in either sacred or secular music. The contest was originally thought up by Barry Gold (Jason Pennybrooke), an African-British man, but eventually Donald Merriweather (Michael Spicer) aced Gold out of control of the contest. Merriweather is portrayed as so much of an asshole with a lot of people enraged at his no-holds-barred efforts to get what he wants, including a long-term sexual relationship with Marion Kane (Victoria Broom), for whom he’s rigged the contest so she will win, that it’s not at all surprising that he was the murder victim. He collapses at the organ keyboard of the convent while rehearsing the show, and it turns out he was killed by cyanide but, since he neither ate nor drank anything prior to his sudden death, it’s a mystery how the poison was administered to him. Needless to say, Sister Boniface (Lorna Watson) figures it out.

The cyanide was from the sheet music he was playing from, each page had been soaked in a solution containing it, and whenever Merriweather moistened his fingers to turn a page in the score, the residue collected on them and transferred itself to his body when he licked his fingers to turn the pages again. (It’s not that different from the death of the legendary real-life French organist and composer Louis Vierne, who was the regular organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris until June 2, 1937, when at the end of his 1,750th recital on the great organ he was scheduled to play two improvisations on submitted themes; he opened the envelope containing one of them, selected the registrations he would use, and then had a heart attack and died while his hands and feet still rested on the organ, producing a low note E from his foot on the pedal. But at least Vierne was not deliberately poisoned.) The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Oliver Potts (Tristan Whincup), whose mother was a lover of Donald Merriweather when they were both attending the same music college, until she decided to leave him. Merriweather’s revenge was to frame her for allegedly cheating on the school-wide exams by stealing the answers in advance. In reality, he stole the answers himself and planted them on her, but this ruined her reputation, she never recovered from it, and ultimately committed suicide over her ongoing shame. We also get a hint, though writer McMullin keeps it from becoming more than a hint, that Donald Merriweather is the young man’s father. There’s a moment of pathos as the official police arrest Oliver, whose boy-band rock-star good looks are impressive in and of themselves, and tell him that by killing Merriweather he’s ruined his own life – and he solemnly tells them that it’s worth it because at least Merriweather’s death means he can’t ruin anybody else’s lives. There are also a couple of amusing subplots, including Marion’s decision after the contest (which she wins because Oliver’s arrest has eliminated her principal competitor) to devote herself to God and sing only sacred music from now on; and the rehearsals for the nuns’ choir, which go terribly until they decide to let their hair down, rehearse at a local pub, and sing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” and other similarly ribald material. The gag is they sound terrible when singing hymns but great at the profane (in both senses) songs. I also liked the way the show kept shifting from color to black-and-white and back, reflecting whether the scenes were real or part of the Glory Be telecast, after I remembered that in the 1960’s British TV had not yet adopted color.

Father Brown: "The Jackdaw's Revenge" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired January 2, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Saturday, May 2) I watched a Father Brown episode from 2018 (I was a bit surprised they reached that far back in the archives) called “The Jackdaw’s Revenge.” It opens in a singularly stark set of a noose and a woman being led to it. She is Katherine Corvin (Kate O’Flynn), and she’s about to be hanged for the murder of her husband. (The show is set in the 1950’s, well before Britain abolished capital punishment.) At first she seems to have come to grips with her fate and meekly accepted it, but it turns out she has a trick up her sleeve. A terminally ill woman who used to work for her as a maid has made a deathbed confession to the murder, and so Katherine is released and officially exonerated. Then she moves back to Father Brown’s home town and shows up at the local Roman Catholic church, declaring her intent to take the vows and become a nun. It turns out that the whole thing is part of an elaborate revenge scheme Katherine has hatched to get back at Father Brown for having established her guilt for murdering her husband in the first place. She has an unlikely ally: Robin Gladwell (Paul Cauley), the publisher of the local newspaper, who was her lover way back when and the reason she wanted to knock off her husband. At first Father Brown suspects her accomplice is the young woman reporter for the paper who’s trying to reopen the case from a point of view sympathetic to Katherine, but in the end Katherine entraps Father Brown by kidnapping one of his parishioners and threatening to kill her. She presents Father Brown with a Hobson’s choice: either kill the assailant and thereby commit a mortal sin, or not act and therefore have the death of an innocent person on his conscience. Along the way she reveals how she got the old maid to confess on her behalf: she hired a thug to visit her and bribe her to do so, saying that if she issued the false confession her children and grandchildren would be well taken care of after her death, while if she refused the thug would kill the grandchildren. Ultimately one of Father Brown’s associates grabs the gun from his hand and kills the assailant himself, and the police show up and arrest Katherine. It was an O.K. episode – the titular jackdaw is a bird actually released in the church as Father Brown is preaching, and it’s an emblem of Katherine – though a bit on the twee side.

Drunken Angel, a.k.a. Yoidore tenshi (Toho Studios, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work relatively early last night (Saturday, May 2) and we jointly watched a quite impressive film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” TV series: Drunken Angel (originally Yoidore tenshi), a 1948 Japanese movie directed and co-written (with Keinosuke Uekusa) by the young Akira Kurosawa and co-starring two of Kurosawa’s all-time favorite actors, Takashi Shimura (in their fifth film together) and Toshiro Mifune (in his first of 16 Kurosawa films). It was shot during the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II, and deals with the collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) the entire nation of Japan seems to have experienced after having lost the war. Specifically it’s about an alcoholic doctor, Sanada (Shimura), and Matsunaga (Mifune), a yakuza gangster who comes to Sanada to have a bullet removed from his hand. It also turns out he needs to be treated for a disease which turns out to be tuberculosis. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller explained during his intro that the yakuza were a phenomenon in Japan that started right after World War II. The Japanese government during the war had built up the culture of the samurai and used it to motivate their young men to perform similar feats of bravery during the war, including training to be kamikaze pilots and give their lives in suicide missions against American ships. After the war a lot of young men who’d survived took up crime and organized gangs that operated according to the principles of bushido, the honor code of the samurai – or at least what they thought bushido was. If this is historically accurate, it wouldn’t have been the first time in history a criminal gang started as the result of a war. The Mafia originally began as a resistance movement to Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the 1810’s – the word “Mafia” is an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society” – which turned to crime after Napoleon’s defeat. And Jesse James and his brother Frank started out as Confederate guerrillas under the command of William Quantrill in 1862 and turned to crime once the Confederates lost the Civil War.

The main conflict of this quite remarkable movie is between Sanada and Matsunaga, and between Sanada’s efforts to get him to give up alcohol, sex, and the other accoutrements of his gangster life and take his disease seriously, and Matsunaga’s own conflicts between following Sanada’s advice and avoiding the loss of “face” he fears will befall him if his former associates see him drawing back from drinking and screwing. Also, Sanada has a live-in nurse named Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) – it’s not clear whether they’re romantically involved, but probably not – whose abusive former boyfriend Okada (Reizaburô Yamamoto), is just about to be released from a two-year prison sentence. In a bit of coincidence-mongering Kurosawa and Uekusa should have been ashamed of (it’s the one flaw in an otherwise impeccably constructed film), Okada is also Matsunaga’s former boss in the yakuza, and when he gets out he’s determined both to regain control of his old gang and to force Miyo to come back to him. On several occasions Miyo seriously weighs whether to go back to Okada despite his history of abusing her, and Sanada keeps trying to talk her out of it. On a night out with the gang, Matsunaga at first refuses the offer of a drink because he’s at least briefly trying to stay on Sanada’s program and recover from the TB, but Okada goads him into drinking and Matsunaga ultimately ends up drunk and much the worse for wear. Much of the action centers around a wild nightclub and dance hall called “Number One Cabaret” (the signs are in Roman letters) where the yakuza are “regulars” and one of the entertainers is a singer (Shikuzo Kazagi) who in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s had a brief run of success on the Japanese charts with songs that all had the word “boogie” in the title even though, judging from the example here (“Jungle Boogie,” with music by Ryôichi Hattori and lyrics by Kurosawa himself), they had more to do with rhythm-and-blues than what we Americans think of as boogie-woogie. (One of the quirkier results of the American occupation of Japan was that a lot of young Japanese got exposed to American popular music; there’d been something of a jazz scene in Japan before World War II but the Japanese government banned it during the war as an expression of enemy culture. After the war Japanese musicians took up American pop but put an Asian “spin” on it.)

There are also some fascinating supporting characters, including Dr. Takahama (Eitarô Shindô), a classmate of Sanada’s from medical school who avoided alcoholism and went on to a lucrative, successful career while Sanada got mired in the dregs, only when Matsunaga showed up at Dr. Takahama’s clinic, Takahama X-rayed him, diagnosed him with TB, and sent him to Sanada for treatment because Sanada knew more about that particular disease than he did. And there’s a dirty sump of water that becomes a character in itself; it was apparently a set built for another Toho Studios movie but Kurosawa appropriated it and turned it into a metaphor for the waste and destruction left behind when Japan lost the war. Early on in the movie Dr. Sanada sees a group of young boys about to bathe in the water, and he scares them out of it by telling them they’ll get typhus. And there’s a fascinating fight to the finish at the end between Matsunaga and Okada in which Matsunaga tries to kill Okada but is too weak to do so. They have this fight while covered in spilled white paint, and I wondered if Kurosawa covered them in white as a symbol of their lost innocence. After Matsunaga’s death Sanada encounters a 17-year-old schoolgirl (Yoshiko Kuga) who had earlier been counterpointed to Matsunaga as an example of a responsible TB patient who followed her doctor’s orders and took her treatments seriously. He also runs into Gin (Noriko Sengoku), Matsunaga’s former girlfriend, who took charge of his body and had him cremated. She recalls that she tried to get Matsunaga to move with her out of Tokyo and to her family’s farm in the countryside, where he could have got away from the yakuza and their pressures and recovered in relative peace.

Drunken Angel is a quite remarkable movie, and though I’ve considered myself a movie maven I must say I’m far back of scratch on Kurosawa. When Eddie Muller mentioned that Kurosawa’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Seven Samurai (1954), was the first non-English-language film he ever saw at age 12, I felt ashamed that I’ve never seen it at all. I’ve quite liked the Kurosawa films I have seen, including such modern-dress movies as Scandal (1950) and the awesome High and Low (1963), but I haven’t pursued him the way I have with other directors, and it’s possible one reason is I don’t much like the sound of the Japanese language. It’s harsh, guttural, and considerably less pleasant to the ears (these Western monolingual-English ears, anyway) than Chinese. Also, one oddity is that Kurosawa got stereotyped from the international success of The Seven Samurai as “the samurai director,” when at least half of his films take place in the Japan of his own time. But Drunken Angel – Kurosawa’s eighth film as director and the first one that he felt expressed his personal vision instead of being merely an assignment for hire from Toho – emerges as a masterpiece and a worthy entry into the film noir canon.

Law and Order: "Accidentally Like a Martyr" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 30, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 30) I watched the two remaining shows in the Law and Order franchise: an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Accidentally Like a Martyr” (after a song by Warren Zevon off his third album, and second for a major label, Excitable Boy) and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Old Friends.” The Law and Order “Accidentally Like a Martyr” show begins with the 30th birthday party of Angela Cole (Annette Berning), in which her father Evan Cole (Eric Stoltz) cuts in on her husband Lucas Peters (Kyle Harris) and demands the first dance of the night with her (to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” – I’ve often been fascinated by the difference between the two major versions of this song: Green’s is an ode to a smoothly functioning relationship while Tina Turner’s is a desperate plea from someone whose partner is about to dump her). Of course we instantly know that someone in that group is not going to make it out of the evening alive, and it turns out the victim is Angela. Dad is briefly a red herring since he never liked Angela’s husband anyway, and he also seemed to be coming on to her in an almost incestuous way. But he’s innocent and the real killer, at least we’re led to believe, is Alan Ross (Jack Mckinney – that’s how the name is spelled on imdb.com), a nerdy hanger-on who has a closet full of 30 photos of Angela, mostly framed (which itself puts him one tick above the usual little nerd stalker we see on shows like this, who just stick the pictures of their unrequited crush object on the walls and don’t bother to frame them). Ross actually confesses to the cops, but the judge in the case, Roberta Hines (Angela Desal), rules the confession inadmissible because the police in general, and Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) in particular, essentially tricked Ross into making the confession by saying, when he called for a lawyer, “You’ll really need a magician to make evidence disappear.”

Ross’s attorney has another suspect in mind, rock star Cash White (Zach McGowan), who two years earlier was living with Angela in a relationship and beat her up so badly she required stitches and he got arrested for assault. The morning of Angela’s party Cash came to the venue where it was supposed to be held and asked her to do lunch with him. When she refused, he got so outraged he literally put his fist through a glass window and got it inches away from her face. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Odelya Halevi (Stephanie Maroun), discover that Cash’s assault on Angela took place at the end of a long evening in which they were both doing cocaine, and it was because Angela was using drugs that night that she didn’t report the assault to the police. But Price refuses to introduce this information to the jury on the understandable ground that he doesn’t want to traduce Angela’s memory, especially since she’s dead and therefore in no position to defend herself. As a result the jury hangs, there’s a mistrial, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) royally chews out Price and tells him in no uncertain terms that the purpose of their office is not to see that justice is done in the abstract but to win cases, and the closing shot is of Nolan Price getting a phone call from Angela’s widower Lucas, which he refuses to answer. It was a well-done Law and Order episode and a worthy entry in this series’s canon, though I can’t help but wonder if there’ll be a sequel several months down the road that finally resolves the case one way or the other. Incidentally I looked up the lyrics to Warren Zevon’s song “Accidentally Like a Martyr” online at https://genius.com/Warren-zevon-accidentally-like-a-martyr-lyrics, and it’s a bitter song from the point of view of a lover who’s pissed off at a breakup. If it applies to anybody in the dramatis personae of this episode, it’s Cash White!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 30, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards on Thursday, April 30 I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Old Friends,” about one of the series’s recurring themes: the ability of the rich, powerful, and well-connected to avoid accountability. (Given how the U.S. is currently being run, and by whom, it’s a theme that’s all too timely.) Though the imdb.com page on this episode is woefully inadequate and some of the most powerful actors on the show are, alas, uncredited on it, it’s a gripping tale about a 16-year-old woman named Emma who’s thrown out of a Mercedes-Benz minivan in front of a hospital, where she’s treated for both external and internal injuries. She was at a wild party with plenty of underage drinking and screwing going on, and at one point she and her quasi-boyfriend Matt ended up in the guest bedroom having a sexual encounter, though neither of them remembered the details when they finally came to. Both Emma and Matt had residue of a date-rape drug in their systems, but neither of them were drug users and so they had no idea how the substance had got there. It turns out the party was actually hosted by the mother of one of the guests, who let teenagers come over to her place and do their drinking there on the ground that it’s better they do it in a controlled environment than outdoors in some alley. It also turns out that the mother’s real motivation was to watch her daughter and her daughter’s friends have at it sexually on a video camera hidden in a lamp inside That Room, so she could get her own kinky thrills from it. Unfortunately, the mother is also the daughter of a well-respected retired judge who had been a mentor to just about every sitting judge in New York City. He not surprisingly pulls every string he can to ensure that mom doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of a criminal conviction, including assigning the case to Judge Lance Ryan, an old friend of his who stacks the case against the prosecution big-time. The case turns on Emma’s testimony, only Emma has a dark secret of her own: when she was a child she was regularly sexually molested by a rich uncle. Emma told her mother what was going on, and her mom responded by making sure she and the uncle were never alone together again, but she refused to report the crime to the police because the uncle bought her silence by agreeing to pay for Emma’s dad’s cancer treatments.

Emma tells all this to Captain Olivia Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay) but swears her to secrecy, and Benson keeps that vow even during an intense trial session in which Judge Ryan demands that she answer the question, she refuses, and ultimately Judge Ryan orders her held in contempt of court and arrested and handcuffed on the spot. Fortunately for the case, this shocks Emma into releasing Benson from her vow of secrecy and testifying fully for the prosecution, and the Kinky Mom is ultimately convicted. But there are two intriguing subplots to this episode, both involving a Black woman who’s been appointed Chief of Detectives for the entire New York Police Department. For some reason she’s convinced that Benson is a dirty cop and is determined to destroy her career, and to that end she’s installed a young protégé of hers on the Manhattan Special Victims Unit to get the goods on Benson so the Black woman chief of detectives can fire her, or worse. The young male detective to whom she gave this assignment joined the police force in the first place to exonerate his father, who was previously forced out for an allegedly “bad” shooting of an unarmed suspect – only the suspect was actually armed and the young man finds the gun in the evidence room in the police archives. At the end of the episode, just as Kinky Mom has been convicted in spite of Judge Ryan’s best efforts to rig the case in her favor, and the SVU detectives are in the office celebrating, the Black woman chief of detectives, whose animus towards Benson is left powerfully unexplained by writer Justine Ferrara (and though it might have been explained in an earlier episode, I can’t recall any such thing and I watch this show regularly enough I think I would have noticed), suddenly strikes back. She announces that because Benson was held in contempt of court and arrested, she’s suspending Benson indefinitely and demanding that she surrender her badge and gun. I doubt if this is going to last long, because after “Old Friends” ended NBC showed a trailer for next week’s episode and Benson was back on the job as usual, but it still seemed like an outrageous plot twist and a decidedly unfair one given that we’ve seen no indication that Benson ever acted inappropriately on this case or any other.

Michael (Lionsgate, Universal, GK Films, Optimum Productions, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, April 28) my husband Charles and I went to the Plaza Bonita movie theatre in National City to see the 2026 biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua (an African-American filmmaker who got his start in music videos and whose best-known film is Training Day, though I know him best mostly from his action spectacular Olympus Has Fallen, a 2013 thriller starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent who saved the U.S. President from a dastardly terrorist plot hatched by North Koreans; Fuqua took the job partly on condition that the villains not be from the Middle East, and turned down the sequel, London Has Fallen, when the writers of that one insisted on Middle Eastern bad guys) from a script by John Logan. When I heard that someone was making a biopic of Michael Jackson, my first question was, “Who’s going to play him?” I’ve often joked whenever I’ve seen Bruno Mars perform on an awards show that he seems to be in a continual audition for a Michael Jackson biopic, but in the end Fuqua, Logan, and producer Graham King (a lot of other people are listed in the credits as “producers,” “executive producers,” and whatnot, but it was King who put up most of the money and organized the production) went for an audacious choice. His name is Jaafar Jackson, he’d never acted before, but as the son of Jermaine Jackson and therefore Michael’s nephew he’s a blood Jackson, and I’m not sure whether anyone other than a Jackson relative could have pulled it off. I hadn’t realized until we watched the credit roll at the end of the movie (Charles and I are used to being the only audience members who sit through the closing credits, while everyone else treats the last frames of the movie like the starting gun for a 100-yard dash; this time at least half the audience stayed in the theatre during the credits, partly because they were accompanied by “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” with Michael Jackson in full cry) that King, Fuqua, and Logan had used Michael Jackson’s actual recordings for the soundtrack. So all Jaafar Jackson had to do during the musical selections was lip-synch acceptably and execute the dance moves (which he did spectacularly, almost as well as Michael himself had).

We watched this movie the day after I’d played through the soundtrack CD for the 1988 biopic Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker and with Parker’s own records used for the soundtrack. A lot of sources claim that Charles McPherson was Whitaker’s sax double, but he was only used for the opening heads (the parts where the band plays the theme in unison) and bits where Parker was shown playing unaccompanied. Of course the makers of Bird, including director Clint Eastwood, had a bigger challenge doing that with a man who made his great records between 1945 and 1955 than with someone like Michael Jackson whose recording career began in 1969 and ended in 2001 for all intents and purposes. (Jackson actually died in 2009 but he recorded almost nothing during the last eight years of his life aside from a guest vocal on a song by an artist named Akon.) The movie has inevitably been criticized for ending with Michael Jackson on his solo tour for the Bad album and ignoring the scandals that plagued him during the last two decades of his life, including the allegations of child molestation that have largely overshadowed his legacy. According to a New Yorker profile of director Fuqua, that wasn’t his original intention. He actually planned to include in the movie the famously humiliating medical examination Michael Jackson was forced to undergo at the behest of the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old boy Michael was accused of sexually abusing. The Chandlers were suing Michael civilly instead of seeking a criminal prosecution (which makes me suspect they were really after a multi-million dollar payout, which they got when Michael settled the case for $23 million) and as part of the discovery process they got a court to order the examination to see if Michael’s penis matched Jordan’s description of it.

But, according to New Yorker profiler Kelefa Sanneh, “In 2024, after principal photography on Michael was finished, Fuqua got some shocking news from Graham King. Jackson’s settlement with the Chandler family turned out to include an agreement that forbade the estate to participate in depictions of the events around Chandler’s allegation.” Since Michael Jackson’s estate was a co-producer of the film – that was the price for being able to use Michael’s songs and his original recordings of them – “the film that Fuqua had made was essentially unreleasable – not because Fuqua was too critical of Jackson but, in a sense, because he was too eager to defend him,” Sanneh wrote. “Fuqua thought about abandoning the project, but ultimately agreed to reconceive it instead. Even if he couldn’t engage with the accusations, he could still defend Jackson, by reminding audiences of all that he endured during his rise from overworked child star to over-worshipped pop phenomenon.” Fuqua also told Sanneh that he’d like to do a sequel to Michael that would include some of the footage he shot for this one but didn’t get to use because of the legal ukase against it, and that desire was borne out by the end credit, which instead of merely saying “The End” (or nothing at all, which ia how all too many modern movies end) said “His Story Continues.” (That’s a reference to one of Michael Jackson’s 1990’s projects: HIStory: Past, Present, and Future: Book 1. That began as a greatest-hits collection for which CBS, Jackson’s label, asked him to record two new songs so people who already had Jackson’s other albums would have a reason to buy it. Instead Jackson recorded a whole new album’s worth of material and HIStory came out as a two-CD set, half old material and half new. For some reason, Sony, the current owners of CBS’s record division, reissued it as a single disc with just the old songs, so the second half of HIStory has become the hardest item of Michael Jackson’s adult career to find.)

Instead what Fuqua came up with was essentially a reworking of Gypsy, the legendary stage musical about the childhood of burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee and her bitch-goddess mother (played by Ethel Merman on stage and Rosalind Russell on film). It’s true that in this incarnation it’s Black brothers instead of white sisters, and instead of a crazy stage mother it’s a crazy stage father, but it’s essentially the same dynamic. And Colman Domingo’s performance as Joe Jackson, Michael’s psycho dad, is one of the great etched-in-acid villain roles of all time. In fact, I remember thinking at the height of the popularity of Thriller in the early 1980’s that Michael Jackson might be a modern-day castrato. In the 18th century boy sopranos were frequently castrated so they wouldn’t go through a normal puberty and would retain their high voices into adulthood. Michael Jackson being a castrato would have explained why he didn’t seem to have a normal sex life with either gender and how he could still sing “I Want You Back,” the Jackson 5’s first record, in the original key or quite close to it. And I thought that crazy dad of his could have been willing to have him castrated, figuring his high voice was his stock in trade. Against that we have the testimony of Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley (which had the trappings of a dynastic marriage to me: the self-proclaimed “King of Pop” married the daughter of the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”), who said their sex life was perfectly normal (to the extent that anything to do with Michael Jackson could have been described as “perfectly normal”).

Though Michael ends rather abruptly with the last show of the Victory tour (while Michael was coming off the best-selling album of new material of all time, a record Thriller still holds, he otherwise inexplicably did a reunion tour with his brothers instead of a solo tour), Michael’s onstage announcement that this will be the last time the Jacksons perform together, his dad’s huge hissy-fit about that and a clip from the Bad tour, at least some audience members will remember the real-life sequel. Jimmy Kimmel’s comical movie critic, Yahya, joked that the film doesn’t show Michael Jackson ending up as a rich, crabby, old white woman living in a deserted amusement park, which is at least sort of what happened to him in real life. One thing that I give Fuqua and his cinematographer, Dion Beebe, credit for is shooting virtually the entire film in neon-bright colors instead of relegating it all to the dirty browns and greens that predominate in most modern films. That’s a look that’s annoying enough with a film where the protagonists are white but it’s even worse when they’re Black: the actors’ brown skins tend to blend in with the brown backgrounds and turn everything to murk. It’s true that Fuqua and Beebe were virtually forced to do that; everyone who’d seen a Michael Jackson video would be expecting the rich, vibrant colors with which they were filmed (on 35 mm film rather than video because Jackson insisted he wanted the better image quality; it’s why he called his videos “short films,” which writer John Logan got right in the script for Michael). Michael is an overwhelming movie that should be seen by virtually anybody who remembers the pop culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and because of the lawyers’ edicts I’m O.K. with it leaving out the rest of Michael Jackson’s sorry story.

When I posted about HIStory on Film: Volume II, the video compilation released in 1997 in tandem with the HIStory two-CD set, I wrote about the Michael Jackson enigma (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-jackson-history-on-film-volume.html): “[T]he portrait we get from it is of Michael Jackson the child-man who had a great gift for communication and, because of his eccentric background, surprisingly little to communicate: an egomaniac with at least some awareness of his own limitations, a prima-donna star with a willingness to learn from others, and a sad and pathetic figure who professionally projected an aura of excitement and joy.” It’s why Michael Jackson remains endlessly fascinating despite the scandals that threatened to unravel his career when he died; as Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “[I]t’s much harder to stop listening to Jackson’s songs than it is to stop watching Woody Allen’s films or The Cosby Show. Part of the problem is that his influence is so huge; the Canadian singer known as the Weeknd has become one of the most popular performers in the world with his moody, artful update of Jackson’s music. On Broadway, MJ the Musical has been running for more than four years, encouraging theatregoers to let their love of Jackson’s hits outweigh concerns about his life. And, though his songs have been mainly absent from television ads, the animated film The Bad Guys 2 used “Bad” in a trailer last year. The legal fights aren’t over; a case against Jackson’s estate, filed by the two primary accusers from Leaving Neverland, is scheduled to go to trial this fall. But it has now been more than fifteen years since Jackson’s death, and the public outrage seems to be fading, perhaps because Jackson is increasingly viewed as a troubled figure from the past, rather than a troublesome figure in the present.”

I was annoyed by a few omissions and mistakes in the film; they had the group billed as “The Jackson 5” while they’re still kids in Gary, Indiana (it was actually either Suzanne DePasse or someone else from Motown who had the idea to change the group’s name from “The Jackson Five” to the version with the numeral); they had Off the Wall, Michael Jackson’s first solo album for Epic Records, be his first solo recording (in fact Michael had recorded four solo albums at Motown); and not only is Janet Jackson not in the dramatis personae (at her own insistence; she refused to allow herself to be portrayed and after the film came out issued a press statement blasting its alleged inaccuracies, which seemed to me to be trying to have it both ways), neither is Diana Ross. It was actually Ross who first scouted the Jacksons and brought them to Motown, and their first album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5. I’d also have liked to see more scenes of Michael and Quincy Jones actually in the studio together working out the febrile dance grooves that made Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad such great hits; as it is, all we see is Michael adding his final vocals to already pre-recorded tapes. I did like the way they portrayed the famous accident that happened to Michael Jackson in 1984, in which he received third-degree burns on his scalp while filming a commercial for Pepsi-Cola and as a result developed an addiction to painkillers that lasted the rest of his life. And I remember reading a review of a biography of 1940’s and 1950’s opera star Jussi Björling and being struck by the similarities between his life and Michael Jackson’s: both started their careers as children in singing groups with their brothers, both were known for high-lying lyrical voices, both had major addiction issues (Björling to alcohol and Jackson to prescription drugs), and both died at age 49. As we were leaving the theatre I pronounced Michael the movie as “overwhelming,” and Charles agreed – though he’d also found it “overwhelming” in a quite different way, put off by the ear-splitting volume of the IMAX presentation we had watched.

711 Ocean Drive (Frank Seltzer Productions, Essaness Pictures Corporation, Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 25) I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies: 711 Ocean Drive, directed by Joseph M. Newman (quite effectively) from a script by Richard English and Francis Swann, and starring Edmond O’Brien in what Eddle Muller said was his first starring role. (It wasn’t; that was D.O.A., made a year earlier and an even better movie than this one as well as one closer to the noir world.) The publicity for 711 Ocean Drive (an address I don’t remember hearing in the film itself, though it was presumably the headquarters of “Liberty Finance,” the above-board business the ring of bookmakers at the center of the story use as cover) emphasized the actual danger the filmmakers were in – or at least said they were in – by exposing secrets of gangland the gangsters didn’t want you to know. The opening prologue of 711 Ocean Drive expresses this: “Because of the disclosures made in this film, powerful underworld interests tried to halt production with threats of violence and reprisal. It was only through the armed protection provided by members of the Police Department in the locales where the picture was filmed, that this story was able to reach the screen. To these men, and to the U.S. Rangers at Boulder Dam, we are deeply grateful.” The film starts with its protagonist, Mal Granger (Edmond O’Brien), being chased by police detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Gangster Squad (which frequently used extra-legal tactics of their own to keep organized criminals, especially ones from other cities, out of town). One of the cops, Lt. Pete Wright (Howard St. John), tells his partner, who’s asked what Granger is wanted for, “Murder,” leaving us in suspense as to whom Granger is supposed to have killed, let alone why.

Then all is explained in a flashback that takes up the bulk of the film: when the story began Granger was just a lowly proletarian at the local telephone company. But he’d served in World War II and thereby gained an impressive knowledge of electronics. Granger also likes to place a few small-scale bets with the local bookies, one of whom recruits him for the gang. Using his knowledge of electronic gear, Granger sets up a system that vastly improves the gang’s ability to collect horse-racing results from tracks all over the country, including a marvelous rig that essentially turns the gang representative’s body and the fence surrounding the track into a transmitter. The boss of the gang is Vince Walters (Barry Kelley), until he makes the mistake of putting too strong a strong-arm on one of the bookies. The bookie shoots him dead and then kills himself, and Granger takes advantage of this opportunity to take over the bookmaking racket. Meanwhile, members of a national crime syndicate based in Cleveland notice how much money Granger’s operation is making while they’re not getting a dime from it. They decide to remedy this situation by moving out to California, setting up their own operation, and either bribing or intimidating Granger to sell out to them. Granger is all too willing to sell out his old comrades, especially once he meets the Mob’s point man for the deal, Larry Mason (Don Porter). Granger has also been working himself up in the sex-partner department, first dumping his honest proletarian girlfriend who wanted him to marry her and make a decent, industrious living at the phone company even though neither of them would have much money or any dreams of making any. He briefly takes up with Trudy Maxwell (Dorothy Patrick), business manager for his gang, before dumping her and forming an extra-relational crush on Mason’s hot young trophy wife, Gail Mason (Joanne Dru, who reportedly loved making this movie because until then she’d only played sympathetic roles and she loved getting her first crack at a villainess).

Most of the film takes place in the L.A. area, but there were a few run-ins to Palm Springs and a finale that takes place at the gigantic structure alternately called Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam. (Hoover Dam was originally authorized in 1931, when its namesake, Herbert Hoover, was President. It was finished in 1937, during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and Roosevelt insisted on unilaterally renaming it Boulder Dam. In 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death and with the Republicans in control of Congress for the first time since 1929, they passed a law re-renaming it Hoover Dam, though this film, made three years after that, still calls it “Boulder Dam.”) Granger gets into big trouble when he first hires a hit man, Gizzi (Robert Osterloh, who apparently made a specialty of slimy subordinate villains like this), to knock off Gail’s inconvenient husband, then has to kill Gizzi himself by ramming him off the Santa Monica Pier after Gizzi tries to blackmail Granger into a percentage of his operation. The film’s climax takes place at the Hoover/Boulder Dam, where there’s an exciting chase scene between Granger and the L.A. police, who have an extradition agreement with the state of Nevada but not with Arizona. The idea is if Granger can escape, either with or without Gail, from Nevada to Arizona they’ll be able to take a plane to Guatemala, which doesn’t (or at least didn’t in 1950) have an extradition treaty with the U.S. at all, and enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace. Only the police track down Granger as soon as he breaks free from the tour group that’s being led around the dam, and shoot and apparently kill him before he can make it to Arizona.

711 Ocean Drive isn’t really a film noir: the good guys are all good, the bad guys are all bad, and only Joanne Dru’s character is genuinely conflicted between the two. But it is a well-structured crime thriller and it often seemed to me like an updated version of Little Caesar from 20 years earlier. Remember that in his autobiography, Edward G. Robinson described his character of Enrico Caesar Bandello as a striver, a young man on the make trying to get ahead and finding by a combination of personal quirks and economic circumstances that the only route for advancement available to him is crime. Like Little Caesar, Mal Granger is a basically decent, hard-working sort at first who’s tempted by the riches and social position offered by the criminal lifestyle. The film is well structured in showing off Mal’s gradual moral deterioration until he’s literally knocking off other people to fulfill his own survival as well as his romantic/sexual desires. Eddie Muller said he met Joseph M. Newman at a screening of 711 Ocean Drive he organized, and he said Newman was a down-to-earth guy who probably never made it to the upper echelons of directing precisely because he wasn’t a pushy blow-your-own-horn type. Muller also disparaged what’s probably Newman’s best-known film, the 1955 science-fiction thriller This Island Earth, as “campy” – which disappointed Charles and I because both of us like the film considerably better than that. Despite its flaws, This Island Earth is a quite good movie and, ironically, considerably more progressive politically than Raymond F. Jones’s source novel. Jones wrote what was essentially a Cold War parable in science-fiction terms while the screenwriters, Franklin Coen and George Callahan, turned it into a surprisingly radical (for 1955) anti-war film.

Bashful (Hal Roach Productions, Rolin Films, Pathé, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 26) my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring two films by Harold Lloyd: the early short Bashful (1917) and the mature feature Girl Shy (1924). Charles and I had already seen Girl Shy at least twice on previous “Silent Sunday Showcases” in 2022 and 2025. I posted about it to moviemagg after the 2022 screening at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/01/girl-shy-harold-lloyd-corporation-pathe.html, and I have little to add about it except that Lloyd played a character who stuttered – and through a lot of extreme close-ups of his mouth visibly repeating the same motions again and again, Lloyd and his directors, Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, were able to suggest stuttering quite effectively in a silent film. (Remember that during the 1920’s a lot of moviegoers got quite good at lip-reading, and often realizes that what the actors had actually said on set was often quite different from what the dialogue titles said they were saying. When Fox filmed Leonard Stallings’s World War I play What Price Glory? in 1926, they got deluged with complaints that the actors had uttered the expletives in Stallings’s original dialogue – even though by today’s standards they were relatively mild ones like “damn,” “hell,” and “son of a bitch” – though the titles had been appropriately bowdlerized.) Bashful was a surprise in that it was a 15-minute short featuring Harold Lloyd, already wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that became his trademark (actually just the frames because he didn’t need glasses in real life), and playing a man farther up on the socioeconomic scale than he usually did. Generally all five of the biggest male stars in silent comedy had well-established niches into which they fit their characters: Chaplin the lower-class “Tramp,” Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle working-class, Harold Lloyd middle-class, Buster Keaton upper-class, and Harry Langdon a child-man seemingly out of the normal economic strata altogether.

This time Lloyd crossed over into Keaton’s territory (though when Lloyd made Bashful Keaton was still just a supporting player in Arbuckle’s unit and he didn’t start making two-reel vehicles on his own for another three years) and played an upper-class twit who’s in line to receive an inheritance from a recently deceased aunt if only he can prove he has both a wife and a baby. Eight years after Bashful Keaton would make a feature-length masterpiece on the same premise, Seven Chances, though in Keaton’s film (based on a play by David Belasco, who’s best known today for having written the plays on which Puccini based his operas Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West) he only needed a wife, not a child, to claim the inheritance. One imdb.com reviewer said that Oliver Hardy, before he teamed with Stan Laurel, had made a similarly themed short called One Too Many (1916). Bashful contains a gag that Laurel and Hardy repeated in their 1932 feature Pack Up Your Troubles: Lloyd and his girlfriend (Bebe Daniels) agree to pass themselves off as husband and wife, but the first baby they try to claim as their kid is Black. Lloyd’s butler, “Snub” Pollard (billed here under his actual first name, Harry), essentially rounds up all the babies in the near vicinity and manages to convince Lloyd’s uncle (William Blaisdell) that he deserved the inheritance because he’s got so many mouths to feed – even though the real mothers of all those babies are understandably upset that their children have literally been kidnapped. Bashful was directed by Alf Goulding, who years before had hired Charlie Chaplin to star in Fred Karno’s comedy troupe in the British music halls before either Goulding or Chaplin set foot in front of (or behind) a movie camera. It’s a minor makeweight in Lloyd’s career, but it is charming and funny, and it’s also nice to see Lloyd when he still had his full complement of fingers, before he lost two fingers on his right hand in 1919 when a prop bomb exploded as he was holding it. Lloyd made a prosthetic glove so his injury wouldn’t be noticeable on screen, and later in 1924, when he married his leading lady Mildred Davis, he had a matching glove made for his left hand so he could play a single man without having to take off his wedding ring.

Death in Paradise: Season 13, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 24) I watched an unusually engaging episode of the Caribbean-set mystery and policier Death in Paradise, the eighth and last episode of season 13 and the one in which they were basically attempting to write off Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), the one white person on the police force of the fictitious Caribbean island of “Saint-Marie.” He’s on a chartered plane flight from Saint-Marie to Dominica, only he’s feeling a bit under the weather from the hard night of partying he did the night before and also a couple of antihistamines he took just before he got on the plane. While waiting at the airport Parker makes the acquaintance of Raphaël Coty (Jules Miesch), a tall, skinny Frenchman who works for a travel site. This means he gets to travel to various exotic locations throughout the world but does not get paid much, so his ability to enjoy himself in these wonderful spots is severely limited. Parker also meets a Black man named Kurt Henderson (Calvin Demba), only shortly after the plane takes off Parker falls asleep from the booze and drugs and doesn’t wake up until the plane has arrived at Dominica. There he wakes up and finds that Kurt Henderson is gone and the other passengers, Coty and the married couple Taylor (Richard Fleeshman) and Chelsea (Emma Naomi) Fielding, and also the plane’s crew, pilot Peter Holcroft (Richard Lintern) and co-pilot Catherine Bordey (Elizabeth Bourgine) insist he never got on the plane at all. Parker is summoned back to Saint-Marie after the body of Kurt Henderson is found on a local beach, shot to death.

The police eventually learn that Henderson was living as a house guest with Taylor and Chelsea Fielding, only Henderson started an extra-relational affair with Chelsea and Taylor, not surprisingly, was not happy about this. They also learn that pilot Holcroft was under investigation by United States authorities for flying smuggled drugs into the U.S., though the Americans couldn’t make the charges stick. Ultimately the police search Holcroft’s plane and find a compartment to hide drug money in, and eventually Chelsea Fielding gives Parker and the others on the Saint-Marie police force a confession claiming that she killed Henderson out of anger that Henderson wanted her to leave her husband for him. Only Parker is convinced that not only is Chelsea lying but he really did see Henderson on the plane, even though he wasn’t on it when the flight arrived in Dominica. Ultimately writer James Hall lets us in on the truth: a combination of Murder on the Orient Express and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Henderson got on the plane, all right, only he left it again when he realized his life was in danger. Chelsea Fielding thought she’d killed Henderson, but it was actually her husband Taylor who shot the man. Taylor had grabbed the same gun Chelsea fired at Henderson but missed, clapped a silencer on it, shot Henderson dead and left him behind. The Fieldings bribed the others with $50,000 apiece in drug money to keep quiet and lie about Henderson having ever been on the plane. Eventually everyone who was on the plane (aside from Parker) is arrested and Parker is sidetracked into returning, though it’s unclear whether he aborted his plan to leave Saint-Marie or just decided to travel to London with his Black Saint-Marian girlfriend Monette Gilbert (Rachel Adedeji) in tow instead of leaving her behind on the island. It seems that Ralf Little left the show after all for season 14 because his role leading the Saint-Marie police force has been taken over by a Black man, Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), and the producers chose to add an annoying and often infuriating “comic relief” character, a young Black police trainee named Sebastian Rose (Shaquille All-Yebuah) whose incompetence quickly stopped being amusing and just got awful.

International Jazz Day: April 30, 2025 (Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, recorded 2025, copyrighted 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 24), after the Death in Paradise episode, my husband Charles (who’d come home from work right as the Death in Paradise show was wrapping up) and I watched a program whose title had intrigued me since I saw it listed on the KPBS Web site: International Jazz Day. It was a show to commemorate International Jazz Day, which for the past 20 years has been celebrated on April 30 (though I’d never heard of it before), and it turned out to be an hour-long concert special from a Frank Gehry-designed auditorium in, of all places, Abu Dhabi. Given what little I’ve been able to find out about it online, I suspect the show, though it carried a 2026 copyright date, was actually filmed on April 30, 2025, partly because April 30, 2026 is a few days away from now and partly because Abu Dhabi, as a member state of the United Arab Emirates (so called because it’s a coalition of Persian Gulf countries who call their leaders “emirs”), is currently under attack by Iranians as retaliation for the U.S. assaults on Iran. The show was sponsored by the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, which until 2019 was known as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until it renamed itself after its long-time director (which seems a bit churlish to me). I quite liked the program even though, as often happens in all-star spectacles like this, their definition of “jazz” was rather elastic. Not only did the program include non-jazz songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and the Rolling Stones’s “Miss You,” virtually all the (quite good) vocalists – Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dianne Reeves, Ruthie Foster – sang in all-out rhythm-and-blues or soul styles that had little to do with jazz singing as I understand it. (One of my major wishes for this program would have been the inclusion of Samara Joy, whose CD Linger Awhile won the Best New Artist Grammy Award for 2023. Though she’s not an outright copyist of Ella Fitzgerald, she has enough similarities I’d like to see her star in a Fitzgerald biopic, and her more delicate style of singing would have been a welcome respite from all the R&B/soul howling.)

The program began with “The Thrill Is Gone,” originally written and recorded by obscure blues singer Roy Hawkins in 1951 but which became B. B. King’s signature song when his cover became a mega-hit in 1969. It was sung here by Dee Dee Bridgewater with a succession of three electric guitarists taking solos: John McLaughlin, Leonard Brown, and John Pizzarelli. McLaughlin in particular was a welcome sight; a lot older and decidedly more grey-haired than he was when he emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and became acclaimed as “the white Hendrix,” he was nonetheless in fine form and his chops were quite intact. The next song was George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and though Dianne Reeves’s vocal was excellent on its own terms, she did rather overpower this delicate, wistful romantic ballad. Still, she had some good players in her band, including alto saxophonist Tia Fuller and bassist Linda May Oh. (There were quite a few women musicians in the various ensembles, which was nice; it seems that the glass ceiling in jazz is shattering, or at least cracking, at last. The days when a genius like Mary Lou Williams could be relegated to novelty status because she was a non-singing woman jazz musician are fortunately gone.) The third song was “Voyage,” featuring tenor saxophonist David Sánchez, pianist Kenny Barron (misspelled “Baron” on his chyron), trumpeter Eldred Scott (at least that’s how I scribbled his name in my notes; I take full responsibility for any mistakes in my ID’s), bassist John Pattitucci, and drummer Kendrick Scott.

The fourth song was led by trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, a native of Cuba whose defection to the U.S. was arranged by jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie when he was on tour in Cuba with the United Nations Orchestra in 1977. In obvious gratitude, the song he chose to play was Dizzy’s Latin-inflected “Tin Tin Deo,” for which Sandoval sang in Spanish as well as playing a spectacular trumpet solo. The song also included an excellent flute part by a first-rate woman player whose name was too long, convoluted, and Hispanic for me to take down, and the pianist was Danilo Pérez. The next song was “As the Spirit Sings,” a welcome vehicle for John McLaughlin with David Sánchez returning on tenor sax and Marcus Miller on piano. Then there were a couple of numbers celebrating the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s educational mission – among their other activities, they run programs to train the next generation of jazz musicians – including a drum circle on Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” (the song that Carlos Santana covered and had his first major hit on in 1969) and a jazz history presentation that included the Dixieland standard “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The next song was “Take It Easy,” sung by Ruthie Foster with Nasseer Shanne (please don’t hold me to that spelling) playing a bulbous Arab stringed instrument which I think was an oud. (I looked up the oud online and it certainly looks like the instrument I saw on last night’s show; it was also the ancestor of the European lute and the Iranian/Persian “tar,” which later became the guitar and got imported into Spain when the Muslim Moors ruled it from the 800’s to the 1400’s.) What followed was a unique two-piano version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played as a duet by A Bu and Hélène Mercier; it was rather heavily edited (but then Leonard Bernstein once said of the Rhapsody in Blue, “You can cut it any way you like and it will do nothing to the piece except make it shorter”) but the two pianists played the piece with the appropriate swagger. I noticed that A Bu was playing a Fazioli piano and Hélène Mercier was playing a Steinway, exactly the same division that Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig used in their two-piano recording of Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, which I reviewed for Fanfare magazine. Sandberg explained in the liner notes to that CD (OUR Recordings 8.226923) that they split the work between two pianos (Nielsen had done the original as a so-called “piano four-hands” score, which means two people sitting at one piano and playing it simultaneously), a Fazioli and a Steinway, because the Fazioli “has an incredibly rich and round bass.”

After the Rhapsody in Blue came one of the most pleasant surprises of the evening: an infectious version by singer and rapper José Jones of the Rolling Stones’s song “Miss You.” I’ve never been that big a fan of that song – the Stones put out their version at the height of the disco craze and it was clearly the work of a aging band trying desperately to keep up with the times – and oddly I liked Jones’s laid-back version, complete with a genuinely witty rap section, better. Jones was backed with a band that included Emmett Cohen on keyboards, Nils Lundgren on trombone, and an unidentified Black electric bass players that delivered one of the most exciting and stirring solos of the night. Then Herbie Hancock came on and did his song “Chameleon” on an instrument called the “keytar,” which allows keyboard players to stand in front of a band and bop around like guitarists do. Only Hancock’s right hand activated the keys of the “keytar,” though with his left hand he was able to manipulate a series of electronic controls on the neck that altered the sound and created an infectious slide-guitar effect as well as an echo of the all-electronic instrument, the theremin. The finale was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and while it was a bit disappointing that they didn’t try to treat this song in jazz style, they had a succession of singers as well as Herbie Hancock leading the accompaniment from an old-fashioned standard acoustic piano. The singers included Dianne Reeves, Janis Siegel, Dee Dee Bridgewater (who sang her contribution in French), Kendrick Young, Varijashree Venugopal (a singer from India who sang in her native tongue; I’m guessing it was Hindi but it might have been another of India’s indigenous languages), John Pizzarelli (who also contributed some tasty acoustic guitar), and another name I can’t make out from my scrawl. Arturo Sandoval also came out with a quite good trumpet solo. It was a very nice program and a welcome acknowledgement of jazz’s importance in the world’s musical history over the last 125 years, and my only criticism was that too much of the singing was strident and didn’t have the subtlety of true jazz vocalism as practiced by the late greats like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Ivie Anderson, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Anita O’Day, June Christy, or Chris Connor. But given how much righteous soul the people who did sing projected, that was at best a minor quibble.