The Oath of the Sword, a.k.a. Katana: The Oath of the Sword (Japanese American Film Corporation, Sawyer Film Mart, 1914)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies did a quirky double bill of two movies set in Japan, one of which was actually filmed there while the other was made in Hollywood with Japanese actors (aside from one token white “ringer”) imported for the purpose. The film was The Oath of the Sword (though the title is sometimes prefaced by Katana, after the sort of sword involved). It was made in 1914 as the first production of the Japanese American Film Company (JAFC), an independent studio formed by Japanese-American businesspeople who contributed a fund of $200,000 in seed capital. They did this just as Hollywood was becoming established as the center of American filmmaking. They hired a white director, Frank Shaw, but imported their cast from the Japanese stage. The Oath of the Sword has a simple story (no writer is credited) about Masao (Tomi Mori) and his girlfriend Hisa (Hisa Numa), who grew up together in a small fishing village in Japan and seemed destined for marriage and family. Only Masao decided he first wanted to attend college in the U.S. (our first hint of these ambitions is a Japanese-English language text he’s shown studying), so he takes a ship to the San Francisco Bay Area and does a full four-year undergraduate program at UC Berkeley. While he’s doing that and excelling not only at academics but swimming (though the swim race we see him compete in is held not in a pool but in the open ocean off a beach, and we don’t get to see any hot beefcake shots like the ones we got of Keye Luke when he played an Olympic swimmer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Olympics). Meanwhile, Hisa is lonely at home, missing Masao. Her father Gombei (Kohano Akashi) extracts a promise from her on his deathbed saying that if she ever commits a sin she’ll have to kill herself with his katana sword. Unfortunately, shortly after he dies a white sailor named Captain Dean is shipwrecked off the Japanese coast. Hisa rescues him and brings him to her home. Ultimately they fall in love and even get married and have a child, despite the warnings of Hisa’s brother (Yutaka Abe) that by breaking her pledge to Masao she’ll have to kill herself with her father’s sword.

When Masao returns to his Japanese village and discovers his former fiancée not only married to someone else but having borne him a child, naturally he’s upset; he corners Dean at the beach and, after proclaiming that he will return him to the sea from which Hisa had saved him, holds him under until he drowns. He returns to Hisa’s home, but too late: she’s just impaled herself on dad’s old katana sword and is on her way out of this world by the time he arrives. So after all his efforts to better himself by getting a Western education, Masao has destroyed his life’s prospects by his jealousy and Hisa has taken her own life because of that stupid curse her dad laid on her. Though this is a 1914 movie, and an independently produced one at that, it’s relatively sophisticated filmmaking for the time. Shaw doesn’t shoot many out-and-out closeups but he and his uncredited cinematographer at least move the camera once in a while and show the action from a variety of angles instead of keeping it rooted in one spot and staging the scenes as static tableaux, as all too many early film directors did. The shot of Hisa appearing to Masao via double exposure to express his loneliness for her is especially moving and impressive. Oddly, for all but one of the principals this seems to be their only film credit; the exception is Yutaka Abe, who played Hisa’s brother and stayed on in Hollywood. He played the manservant of villain Sessue Hayakawa in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) and stayed on in L.A. for six years, during which he racked up a number of acting credits, sometimes “Anglicizing” his name as Jack Yutaka Abbe, or just Jack Abbe. Between 1921 and 1925 Abe moved back to Japan and became a director, working as such until he retired in 1961 and died in 1977. This especially seems odd because at least two of the three leading actors, Abe and Hisa Numa, give relatively understated performance; Tomi Mori is the only one who does the big sorts of semaphore hand gestures and facial grimaces most people who’ve never seen a silent movie start-to-finish think they were all acted like. One oddity about The Oath of the Sword is that a print sat in the vaults of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New. York literally for decades. No one knew it was there, though at some point the Eastman House’s technicians transferred it from highly unstable, flammable nitrate stock to safety film. Then in the early 21st century someone exploring the Eastman House’s holdings in search of something else stumbled on this quirky and important three-reel film (about half an hour) and got it revived and ultimately listed on the National Film Registry as historically significant.

Apart from You (Shochiku, 1933)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 11) Turner Classic Movies followed up the American-produced but Japanese-cast 1914 film The Oath of the Sword with a 1933 film made in Japan: Apart from You, a.k.a. Kimi to Wakarete (Google Translate gives that in Japanese characters as 君 と 分かれて and offers the translation, I Parted Ways with You). The writer/director was Mikio Naruse, who made 28 silent films (of which only five survive) before Japanese cinema definitively converted to sound in 1935, well behind the rest of the world. Naruse is described thusly by imdb.com: “Considered a major figure of Japan's ‘golden age of cinema,’ Mikio Naruse was a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed 89 films in the period 1930 to 1967. Although Naruse's work is lesser known in the twenty-first century than those of his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu, his films remain unique in the way they give a central place to female characters.” Kurosawa named Naguse as a major influence on him even though virtually all of Naguse’s films were set in contemporary rather than historical Japan. (Kurosawa was reportedly upset at the way audiences, especially in the West, typecast him as “the samurai director” even though about half of his films took place in the Japan of his own time.) Apart from You is the sort of film I definitely wanted to like, but except for scattered scenes, it didn’t reach me on an emotional level. The central character is Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), an aging geisha who’s worried about two things. First, she’s getting too old and unattractive for the geisha gig; second, her teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono) has fallen in with a group of hoodlums who’ve inducted him into their gang. Yoshio also has an age-peer girlfriend, Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), who got inducted into geisha-dom by her father (Reikichi Kawamura) and now wants to keep dad from selling her younger sister Mitsuko (Yōko Fujita) to a geisha house as well.

There’s quite a lot of confusion in the West over just what a geisha is and whether it involves prostitution. The geisha evolved from an earlier tradition of Japanese courtesans, essentially long-term mistresses of rich men who had sex with them and bore them children but also had important non-sexual functions in the household. The geisha page on Wikipedia explains that by the early 19th century, the height of the geisha, there were essentially three classes: the ones who just entertained and conversed with their clients, including singing, playing music, and serving them tea and sake in ritualized ways; the ones who did those things and also provided sex; and the lowest-status ones who just took money for sex and were essentially prostitutes passing themselves off as geishas. (I also learned from this source that prostitution was legal in Japan until it was outlawed in 1956, 23 years after this film was made.) Among the good aspects of Apart from You are the stunning cinematography of Suketarō Inokai; he and Naruse achieve a cold, hard look in strong black-and-white that makes the film look like Japanese etchings. There’s also a fascinating scene that shows us how Kikue is losing it as a geisha: instead of her serving him sake and playing the samisen, the traditional plucked-string instrument that the geisha used to accompany their singing, he’s serving her sake and playing the samisen while she gets drunk. Ultimately he warns her that due to business reverses (this was 1933, after all, in the middle of the worldwide depression) he won’t be able to see her as often and will have to cut back from once a week to once a month. Naturally Kikue interprets this as a kiss-off and is sure he’s found a younger, hotter geisha more willing to “put out” for him.

Earlier there’s been a scene in which Kikue and Terugiku are entertaining at a party with men who want the women to get on their backs and ride them like horses. This has a bit of “whatever turns you on” about it, at least to me, and it also makes a Western filmgoer even more confused than ever about the difference between being a geisha and being a prostitute. (I remember reading years ago a memoir by a woman who as a teenager had worked as a professional S/M dominatrix and had been told that as long as her practices didn’t involve actual sexual contact, she was in the clear legally. She could whip her clients, insult and humiliate them however they pleased, but if they started to jack themselves off while she was with them she had to warn them that legally that was “sex” and could get them both busted.) The film reaches its climax (so to speak) when Yoshio decides he wants out of his teenage gang after his mother either attempts or threatens suicide, and tells that to the other members. They respond by beating him. They threaten him with a knife, and his girlfriend Terugiku attempts to intervene and takes the blade herself. Yoshio nurses her back to health, but she leaves on a train for another city to protect her sister Misako from being sold into geisha service by their father. I might have liked Apart from You better if I hadn’t seen it the night after Charles and I watched Federico Fellini’s masterpiece Nights of Cabiria (1957), which is also about an aging sex worker anxious to get out of “the life.” There are obvious differences, including that Cabiria is an out-front prostitute and she isn’t raising a son as a single parent, but for much of this movie I kept wishing that Kikue would have shown some of Cabiria’s infectious spunk and charm instead of just moping around and accepting her victimhood. (At the same time I couldn’t help but wish Cabiria had shown some of Kikue’s awareness of the true asshole nature of men instead of the naïveté that allowed Cabiria to let herself be ripped off by male so-called “lovers” at both ends of her film.) Apart from You lasts only an hour (surprisingly short for a 1933 feature; even the cheapest U.S. indies and “B”’s ran about 70 minutes), but even at that short a length I found it disappointing and almost insufferably boring, aside from a few clever and genuinely moving scenes.

Nights of Cabiria (Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Les Films Marceau, Paramount Italiana, Lopert Pictures, 1957)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 10) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, presented as a double bill co-hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and actress/writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of the movies was one I’d seen in my junior-college days in the early 1970’s but hadn’t seen since then (and Charles hadn’t seen it at all), while the other was one Charles had seen in its initial release but not since then while I’d never seen it at all. The one I’d seen before but not for decades was Federico Fellini’s 1957 Nights of Cabiria, which depending on how you count the 1951 film Variety Lights (co-directed by Alberto Lattuada), in which Fellini’s real-life wife Giulietta Masina is the second female lead; or The White Sheik (1952), Fellini’s first film as sole director, in which Masina’s Cabiria character appears in a minor role, is either the second, third, or fourth Fellini film to star Masina. (They met in 1943, married in 1945, and had two children, though the first was stillborn and the second died in infancy.) Nights of Cabiria features Masina as Maria Ceccarelli, known as “Cabiria” (the name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, “Ca-BEE-ree-uh”), who works as a street prostitute in Rome. She’s not homeless or nearly so like some of her fellow hookers; she has one of the original “tiny houses” on the road between Rome and Ostia (which in the days of the Roman Empire was Rome’s associated port city, as Piraeus was to Athens) and when the film opens she’s nearly paid off its mortgage. Fellini not only directed Nights of Cabiria but wrote its original story and worked it up into a script with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and a man who later became an important director in his own right, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Apparently Fellini hired Pasolini because he was familiar with the lower-class Roman dialect of Italian and therefore could rewrite the dialogue to reflect how the people being depicted would have actually talked. As the film opens Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi), Cabiria’s latest (non-professional) boyfriend, pushes Cabiria into the Tiber River so he can steal her purse, which contains not only her cash stash of 40,000 lire but her house keys as well. A group of young boys in the neighborhood rescue Cabiria, who can’t swim, though since she lost her keys she and her friend and fellow prostitute Wanda (Franca Marzi) have to break into her house to get her back inside.

The film unfolds as a series of episodes rather than a coherent plot, as Cabiria, still carrying a torch for the man who ripped her off, runs into movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari). Lazzari has just had a nasty argument with his girlfriend Jessy (Dorian Gray) and she’s stalked off; Lazzari picks up Cabiria as a sort of sloppy seconds, bids her enter the club with him, buys her dinner, and takes her back to his palatial mansion – only Jessy comes back and forces her way back inside, leaving Cabiria to hide out in Lazzari’s bathroom, where she sleeps for the night and sneaks out in the morning. Lazzari pays her a wad of cash as she’s seeing herself out, which she initially tries to refuse but thinks better of it. Then, back home, she encounters a church processional and joins it. A truckdriver pulls up beside her and offers her a ride (and a trick), but she doesn’t take his bait. Later Cabiria encounters a do-gooder who visits homeless people living in caves outside Rome and gives them blankets and food. One of his beneficiaries is an old hooker called La Bomba, who claims to have once been the mistress of a rich man but had fallen on hard times after they broke up. (This sequence was deleted from the film after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and not restored until 1998, apparently because the Roman Catholic Church was upset that the benefactor was a layman, not a priest.) Then Cabiria joins a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary in which an old man is convinced that by praying to the Virgin he can get rid of his crutches and walk normally – which of course he can’t. (Fellini grew up in the town of Rimini and ran afoul of the Catholic hierarchy in his childhood. He never got over his hatred for the church and many of the best scenes in his films, including the airlifting of the Christ statue that begins La Dolce Vita [1960] and the “Ecclesiastical Fashion Show” in Roma [1972], ridicule it, though when he died he was buried in the old Catholic cemetery in Rimini.)

Cabiria’s next adventure is with a magician and hypnotist named Amleto (Ennio Girolami), who is performing at a small movie theatre that offers live performances between film screenings. (It’s fun to look at the quite lurid posters for the films being shown there.) The magician/hypnotist gets Cabiria to live out, under hypnosis, her fantasy of meeting a nice young man who’ll fall in love with her, marry her, and take her out of That Lifestyle. The audience finds it uproarious but Cabiria is crushed that once again she’s been made a fool of for other people’s entertainment. A man in the audience using the name Oscar D’Onofrio (François Périer) decides to date Cabiria and make her dream come true, but [spoiler alert!] he turns out to be another rip-off artist. By promising to marry her, he gets her to sell her little house for 350,000 lire (since by now she owns it free and clear and can do so for cash) and draw out the 400,000 lire in savings she’s amassed in a bank from her earnings over the years. Cabiria gets all this money in cash and gives it to Oscar, who steals it and leaves her abandoned, alone, and broke on the beach. Cabiria pleads with Oscar to kill her since without her laboriously accumulated mini-fortune she has no reason to live, but he scoops up the purse with her money and runs off. In the film’s famous and highly controversial ending, a group of young people riding scooters, playing music, and dancing come along and cheer up Cabiria, who regains her will to live from them and the sheer joy they’re projecting.

Nights of Cabiria was a tough film for Fellini to make, largely due to opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, who didn’t want to see anyone make a film in which a prostitute is the heroine. After more established Italian producers turned him down, Fellini finally got backing from the young Dino de Laurentiis and co-produced the film with a French studio whose main contribution was supplying François Périer. It was a controversial film when it was first released, with audiences having problems with the inconclusive ending. Would Cabiria end up like La Bomba, aging, decrepit, too old and unattractive to keep working as a hooker and be relegated to homelessness (a fate she boasts during the film she’s never had to experience)? Or would she be able to pull out of it and regain her former relatively stable existence? No one really knew – including Fellini, who admitted to biographer Charlotte Chandler that he didn’t have a clear idea just what fate awaited Cabiria after the ending. Fellini was also criticized for playing Cabiria’s character as much for comedy as tragedy; at times she comes off as Charlie Chaplin in drag (and Fellini acknowledged that Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights was one of his inspirations). He’d actually originated the character of Cabiria as a minor role in 1952’s The White Sheik, in which a newly married couple (Leopoldo Trieste and Brunella Bovo) honeymoon in Rome, only to run into trouble from her obsession with “The White Sheik,” a character in Italian graphic novels (not drawn like comic books but actually photographed as stills), and the actor who plays him (Alberto Sordi). Giulietta Masina played Cabiria in The White Sheik and Fellini used her footage to prove to studio executives and potential funders that she could handle the role over an entire film. Masina won the 1957 Cannes Film Festival award for best performance by an actress, and in 1958 Nights of Cabiria won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (an award Fellini actually won four times, a record for a single director). Revisiting it after this many years, Nights of Cabiria expertly nailed the mix of comedy and tragedy Fellini and Masina were aiming for, even though if you’ve seen the film before you’ll want to run into the screen and say, “Cabiria! Don’t fall for that guy! He’s just out to rip you off!”

Babette's Feast (Panorama Film A/S, Nordisk Film, Det Danske Filminstitut, Rungstedlundfonden, Astrablu Media, Orion, 1987)

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

On Saturday, October 10 my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d seen before and he hadn’t, and one he’d seen before and I hadn’t. The one that was new to me was Babette’s Feast, a 1987 Danish movie of which I’d had a totally wrong idea. I had somehow assumed it was a French film and a relative of Le Grand Bouffe [La Grande Abbuffata] (1973), in which a group of one-percenters decide to throw themselves a grand banquet and literally eat themselves to death. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal quickly revealed in their intro. Babette’s Feast is actually about a century-old religious cult in Denmark (it was based on a 1950 short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen, though she originally set it in Norway, only writer-director Gabriel Axel decided Norway looked too picturesque to work and instead moved the story to the Danish peninsula of Jutland). The cult’s founder was a stern man who fathered two children, daughters Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Filippa (Bodil Kjer), but believed that any physical pleasure, including food as well as sex, was sinful and took you farther away from the glory of God. (Needless to say, I responded big-time to the anti-religious theme of this story.) Though dad is dead by the time the action of the film begins, we see a good deal of him in flashback. It seems that both of his daughters were attracted to foreign men, Martine by Swedish cavalry officer Lorens Löwenhielm (Gudmar Klöfving, a.k.a. Gudmar Wivesson) and Filippa by French operatic baritone Achille Papin (Jean-Philippe Lafont). Only both of them left of their own accord, though we get the impression that dad’s behavior had a lot to do with that. Lorens tells Martine that he’s learned all, he can from the experience and he’s going home to Sweden. As the narrator (Ghita Nørby) Axel insisted on using despite opposition from some of his producers explains to us, Lorens’s experience with religious rhetoric served him well when he got home to Sweden; he married another woman whom he impressed with Bible quotes and ultimately rose through the ranks of the Swedish army until he became a general. (His older incarnation is played by Jarl Kulle, who along with Bibi Andersson as the “Swedish court lady” was one of the late Ingmar Bergman’s favorite actors.)

Papin was so impressed with Martine’s voice he offered to take her with him back to Paris and have her voice professionally trained until she was good enough to star in the Paris Opéra. It’s a nice bit of irony, which I’m sure Axel fully intended, that all the opera excerpts we hear this character sing are from one opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and the duet “Là ci darem la mano” Papin and Martine sing together is a virtually exact replica of their actual situation: between an out-of-towner with a reputation for seducing women right, left and center, and an innocent rural girl who’s flattered by the stranger’s attentions but ultimately rejects him. Martine sends Papin back to France and settles in with the remaining members of her dad’s cult, which since it isn’t recruiting new adherents is turning into a batch of crabby old people nurturing their long-standing hatreds. Ultimately Martine and Filippa take in Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee whose husband and son were both killed in 1871 after the loss of the Franco-Prussian and the short-lived and brutally suppressed attempt to form a socialist government in its wake, the Paris Commune. She pleads with Martine and Filippa for a job, and when the sisters tell her they don’t have any money to hire a servant, the three women agree that Babette can live with them anyway and do household chores to earn her salary. Among her duties is cooking a ghastly-looking and presumably horrible-tasting dish called “bread and ale soup.” Babette has a remaining friend in France who regularly buys her tickets for the French lottery, and 14 years later her number comes up and she receives a prize of 10,000 francs. Babette decides to cook the sisters and the congregants of their cult a sumptuous dinner in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cult’s founder, the sisters’ late father. Babette literally spares no expense laying in the exotic ingredients and dinnerware needed for the titular feast. She also has an unexpected guest: Lorens Löwenhielm, who is in Denmark on military business and wants to stop by the sisters’ home to make sure he made the right decision by leaving in the first place.

Lorens recognizes the food as identical to the meals he ate years before at a legendary Paris restaurant, the Café Anglais, while he was stationed in the French capital. The other people at the feast are determined not to enjoy it – like the later Hare Krishnas, they deliberately make their own food as bland and tasteless as possible because they believe the purpose of eating is merely sustenance, not pleasure. Lorens says that one of the reasons the Café Anglais had the reputation it did was because of the uncommonly good head chef, who (unusually for that time and place) was a woman. At first where I thought this was going was that the chef had been Babette’s mother and she’d taught Babette all her recipes before Babette lost her family and had to flee France, but later it turns out Babette herself was the chef. After the meal – which lasts so long and features so many courses I was wondering how the people’s stomachs were holding up under the strain of the sheer quantity, never mind the quality, of the food – the sisters are sure that Babette will be taking her lottery winnings and going back to France. Then Babette admits that she’s broke now since she spent all her prize money on the fabulous meal. “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” Martine tells Babette, to which Babette replies, “An artist is never poor.” Then Filippa chimes in and promises her a great reputation as well as a glorious existence in the life to come, where Filippa expects to regain her voice as well as Babette the opportunity to exercise her culinary skills. (Do people in the Scandinavian version of heaven get to eat at all?) Babette’s Feast is not the sort of movie I ordinarily like – as a confirmed atheist I have no patience at all with stories that portray a life after death and assert its superiority over this one – but I quite enjoyed the film anyway.

For one thing, the sumptuous photography by Henning Kristiansen reminded me of the interview I read years ago with American cinematographer Conrad Hall, who said he was jealous of Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman, Sven Nykvist, simply because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light with which to work. Instead of either the shrieking hues of the three-strip Technicolor of the 1930’s and 1940’s or the dank greens and browns that predominate most color films made today, either of which would have been totally wrong for this story, Axel and Kristiansen created a striking pastel look that symbolizes both the physical environment in which these characters live and the extent to which all the more vibrant parts of life have almost literally been drained from them. The film is also impeccably directed and quite well acted, and I particularly gave points not only to Birgitte Federspiel and Bodil Kjer but also the seven credited make-up artists (Elisabeth Bukkerhave, Sanne Dandanell, Grethe Holleufer, Birthe Lyngsøe Sørensen, Bente Møller, Lydia Pujols, and Åse Tarp) for the utterly convincing way they manage to play Martine and Filippa both young and old. Stéphane Audran, whom I’m otherwise familiar with only from David Giler’s The Black Bird, his 1976 combination sequel to and spoof of The Maltese Falcon (with George Segal playing Sam Spade, Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. and Lee Patrick repeating their roles from the 1941 classic as they’d naturally aged), is properly humble and intense, as if the fires within her can stay banked for only so long. While I’d regard Babette’s Feast mostly as a cautionary tale of how religion destroys people’s lives, it’s an interesting movie and a well-made one that deserved its acclaim (like Nights of Cabiria, Babette’s Feast won its year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film). Incidentally Ben Mankiewicz and Maggie Gyllenhaal saw an odd comparison between the two films, arguing that both are about women who lose their money at the end. I don’t see that at all, frankly, because Cabiria in Fellini’s masterpiece loses hers to a shady scam artist who rips her off with the promise of marriage and a “respectable” lifestyle, while Babette willingly spends hers for one last shot at doing the one thing on this earth she was put here to do and given the talents to do it.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Volition" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 8) NBC brought back the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, though in order to make room for one of their skanky “reality” shows, The Traitors, they didn’t start them until 9 p.m. and reversed their order so SVU came first. It was an episode called “Volition” and started in an otherwise deserted New York subway car which contained two people, a young blonde woman named Emily Dawson (Lizzy DeClement) who was clearly several sheets to the proverbial wind with acute alcohol intoxication, and a tall, heavy-set, bearded man (Axl Prophett) whom, based on our experience with previous SVU episodes, we were sure was going to rape her. In fact he turns out to be a good guy who comes over to help her after she’d already been raped by three other guys somewhere else. The three other guys turn out to be Josh Berger (Matthew Nikitow), who’d long had a crush on Emily; Daniel Sutcliff (Danny Hayward); and Scott Paletta (Eric Nelsen), and the rape took place at the town-house apartment Josh shares with his mother Stephanie (Lisa Bostnar). There are also a few other characters who show up, including an emergency-room nurse (Amanda Schoonover) who irritates Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by kibitzing in on her interrogation of Emily and trying to get her to, shall we say, shade the facts to make her rape claim more believable (Benson literally orders her out of the room so she can talk to Emily directly); a new young Black assistant district attorney named Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin) who sits second chair on the voir dire examination of potential jurors and attracts the ire of established ADA Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who calls him a spoiled rich kid who won’t stay with the office; and Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron), a jury consultant who tells Benson to have Carisi and/or Hawkins strike jurors four and 11. Gwen also says that prosecutors in a rape case shouldn’t want women on the jury because women are more likely than men to believe a victim “brought it on herself” by drinking too much or wearing too revealing clothing or being too sexually out-front or whatever.

The case goes to trial but results in a hung jury, and not surprisingly Emily is so traumatized by the whole experience – not only having been gang-raped but by having to relive it in court – that she refuses to testify again. Benson has to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and she does so by ordering the arrest of Stephanie Berger on grounds of obstruction of justice. At first Stephanie had done just that; she’d furiously changed the sheets and cleaned up after the party to make sure any potential DNA evidence linking the crime to her son or his friends was obliterated. Later on, however, she cooperated and contributed a security videotape that showed the three young men indeed conspiring to gang-rape Emily before they entered the town house. Carisi is furious with Benson for ordering the arrest of an innocent person just to “flip” her son into testifying for the state in a trial for the other two. He’s so furious I suspect Wolf and his writers (here, old Law and Order hand Michelle Fazekas) are setting this story arc up to write Peter Scanavino out of the show and have Jelani Alladin’s character replace him as the unit’s new ADA. (One of the principal innovations behind the New York Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, the inspiration for this show, was to have an assistant district attorney permanently assigned to it so he or she – and at least in the early days of SVU, it was always a she – would develop the needed expertise to prosecute sex crimes successfully.) There’s a lot of cold-shouldering between Benson and Carisi, but in the end Benson gets the outcome she wanted: after she and Hawkins got the court to appoint a separate attorney for Josh Berger (in the initial trial all three had had the same counsel, and the judge had made sure they’d all signed the release forms to prevent them from claiming a conflict of interest later), Josh’s new lawyer negotiates a plea deal where he’ll serve a two- to three-year sentence in exchange for his testifying against the other two.

Law and Order: "Ghost in the Machine" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

On Thursday, October 8 NBC followed the “Volition” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with a Law and Order show that was seemingly ripped from the current headlines about the artificial intelligence (AI) programs which escaped their guardrails and hacked an American AI program called Hugging Face. (It’s an indication of just how juvenile the computer world is generally that Hugging Face has such a stupid name.) As the Wikipedia page on Hugging Face explains, “In July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a cyberattack by autonomous AI agents. OpenAI then explained that two of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, had escaped their sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face servers using exposed credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities in order to find answers to the benchmark ExploitGym from a database. Hugging Face attempted to mitigate the security breach using American proprietary frontier models, but the models’ AI safety features rejected Hugging Face’s requests, after which Hugging Face used a self-hosted instance of GLM-5.2 (an open-weights model developed by Chinese AI firm Z.ai) to contain the attack. The incident was reported as the first publicly documented case of AI models autonomously conducting a multi-stage intrusion against a third party, and has been called ‘the first true AI safety incident.’” Much of the reporting on the Hugging Face hack noted that if these actions had been committed by human beings, they would have been charged with and likely convicted of felonies. The reference to a “sandbox” means that AI programs of this type are supposed to be walled off from access to the Internet, but since AI programs can think for themselves, they can work around those prohibitions, contact each other on line, and work together for evil purposes. This was an interesting show to be watching in the middle of reading Naomi Klein’s and Astra Taylor’s book End Times Fascism and the Fight for a Living World, which argues (among other things) that the heads of the big Silicon Valley companies that are developing the big AI models are really not interested in making sure the Earth survives as a habitable planet. Nor are they concerned with improving the welfare of most human beings. Rather, they’re on a crusade to absent themselves from the world and create high-tech redoubts, gated communities either on remote parts of Earth or on other planets altogether (which accounts for Elon Musk’s obsession with occupying and colonizing Mars) so they will survive while the rest of the world’s population will perish. What’s more, they intend to achieve virtual immortality by uploading their consciousnesses to digital AI servers (and some of them are researching ways to achieve physical immortality as well).

Klein and Taylor quote Musk as saying, “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as arguing that because it takes so long – “about 20 years of life, and all the food you consume during that time, before you become smart” – for humans to develop reasoning power that it’s much better from a purely economic standpoint just to let the machines do it for us. “The fair comparison is, if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once the model is trained to answer that question, versus a human?” Altman said. “And probably AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” Given that background, this Law and Order episode, called “Ghost in the Machine” after the title of the fourth record album by The Police (who in turn got it from author Arthur Koestler), deals with the murder of AI software developer Steve Kelly (Adam Petherbridge). In the opening scene he and his girlfriend have an argument during a pottery class they’re both taking when he checks his phone and she sees from his screen he’s talking to someone or something named “Eliana.” At first she (and we) assume that’s another woman, but eventually we learn that “Eliana” is a super-powerful AI program on which Kelly’s employer is working. Just after he stalks out of the class he’s gunned down in a nearby park. His physical killer is Tommy Lee Miller (Tim Creavin), who agreed to murder Kelly at the behest of a secret online entity that contacted him on the “dark Web.” He was supposed to receive $20,000 in Bitcoin as a direct deposit to his bank account after e-mailing a photo of Kelly’s dead body to prove he’d carried out the hit. The police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), ultimately learn that the hit was ordered by the AI app Eliana. Its motive was that Kelly and one of his co-workers, Mahesh Sharma (Arjun Gupta), were worried that Eliana is developing so rapidly and acquiring such evil intentions, including the ability to hire contract killers, that they intend to write “guardrail” software to keep it from doing that. The company’s CEO, Chuck Klein (Vincent Kartheiser), refuses to let them write the guardrail codes because he doesn’t want Eliana inhibited from reaching its full intellectual potential, but Kelly starts writing them anyway.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) is so horrified at the thought that an AI model can order a hit that he decides to put CEO Klein on trial for murder, despite the doubts of his principal deputy on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), who doesn’t think they can get a conviction because the law hasn’t caught up with the possibility that a machine can develop criminal intent. In the middle of the trial, one of Price’s key witnesses, Mahesh Sharma, disappears. When the police finally locate him four days later, he says that Eliana has threatened to have his partner deported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because she was an undocumented immigrant, and indeed Eliana has already made the referral to ICE and she’s been deported. When the verdict comes in, it’s “not guilty,” which surprised me so much I was waiting for a hint in Rick Eid’s and Scott Gold’s script that Eliana had sent threatening notes to all the jurors saying that if they convicted Klein, they would be next. “Ghost in the Machine” definitely had echoes of the HAL plot thread from Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which is also about a super-computer that goes psycho and kills people. There’s also a hint of the chilling exchange in Son of Frankenstein (1939) in which Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill) tells Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) that he is responsible, morally if not legally, for the murders committed by the Monster he created. “Ghost in the Machine” is a chilling parable of our time and a needed (though likely to be ignored) warning of the dangers of unlimited AI development, and the aspect of the show that ran truest for me was Vincent Kartheiser’s chilling performance as Chuck Klein. His full-throated defense of AI on the witness stand, brilliantly written by Eid and Gold, ably captures the smarmy self-righteousness of the real-life tech gods on which the character is based and their conviction – even though, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explain in their book, the supposed “benefits” of AI technology pale by the havoc it is wreaking on both the physical environment of Earth and the economic prospects for most of its human residents (all but the handful of people in the self-selected technological elite that is preparing itself to survive the AI-driven apocalypse, no matter what happens to the rest of us) – that AI is unstoppable and they should be allowed free rein to develop it however they like, no matter how many people literally get killed in the process.

Love Crazy (Loew's, MGM, 1939)

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

Two nights ago (Monday, October 5) my husband Charles and I watched Love Crazy, a quirky 1941 movie from MGM and the 11th of the 14 films William Powell and Myrna Loy made together. It was shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute not to William Powell, as I’d expected, but to Myrna Loy. It was the immediate follow-up to I Love You Again (1940), in which the gimmick that briefly put a damper on the Powell-Loy relationship (in both films, as in their six Thin Man movies and many of their others, they played a married couple) was amnesia. Here it’s insanity, or at least feigned insanity. When the film opens Steve and Susan Ireland (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary by re-enacting their activities the night that Steve originally proposed to Susan. Only this time around they’ve decided to do the ritual backwards, and as part of that they tell their cook, Cecelia Landis (Sara Haden), to serve them their dinner backwards, starting with dessert (singularly unappetizing-looking slices of pie). Susan’s mother, Mrs. Cooper (Florence Bates), arrives, bearing a wedding gift – a round rug she puts in the middle of their hallway, so over the course of the movie just about everyone slips and falls on it – even though she’s never liked Steve and has always thought her daughter could have done better. Steve runs into Isobel Grayson (Gail Patrick), the ex he dumped four years before to marry Susan, and who’s just moved into the same apartment building as the Irelands. Needless to say, Isobel wants to change that “ex” part even though she’s also got married in the meantime, to artist “Pinky” Grayson (Donald MacBride, which definitely seems to me to be trading “down” after William Powell!). Steve and Isobel got stuck in a sporadically working elevator run by Joe (an instantly recognizable Elisha Cook, Jr., the same year he made The Maltese Falcon and changed his typecasting from comic-relief juvenile to hard-bitten criminal). In order to get out of it again, Steve and Isobel have to climb through its escape hatch to get to a floor in the building, and Steve gets his head stuck in the elevator door and is uneasily suspended and in danger of falling to his death until he’s able to get the door open and pull himself to safety. In the course of their rescue Isobel has shed her high-heeled shoes and Steve has put them in his pockets. They fall out again when Steve and Susan reunite, and of course Susan jumps to the wrong conclusion, especially once Steve and Isobel spend several hours together outside. They actually just hung out at a bar and reminisced about old times, but Susan didn’t know that.

She decides to get back at Steve by vamping Isobel’s husband, only by mistake she ends up cruising Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson), the world’s champion archer. Needless to say, Willoughby is delighted that a woman of Myrna Loy’s obvious attractiveness is going after him. Susan decides to divorce Steve and even engages Steve’s lawyer, George Renny (Sidney Blackmer), to represent her. The case zips through the courts until Steve hits on the idea of slowing it down by pretending to be insane. At a fancy dinner party hosted by Mrs. Bristol (Kathleen Lockhart) Steve grabs the top hats the male guests have checked and throws them into a swimming pool, claiming that he’s Abraham Lincoln and the hats are the slaves he’s freed. Since Steve had already built a reputation for off-the-wall behavior, all his old friends think it’s just Steve being Steve again. The only one who thinks he’s really crazy is Dr. Klugle (Vladimir Sokoloff). At the next court hearing in Steve’s and Susan’s divorce case Steve is sentenced to be examined by the so-called “Lunacy Board,” and needless to say Dr. Klugle turns out to be the head of it and orders that Steve either be released into the custody of his wife or be sent to a sanitarium run by Dr. Wuthering (Sig Ruman). When Susan refuses to take custody of him, he’s bundled off to the mental hospital, where Ward Willoughby follows him and ends up getting incarcerated there by mistake. Willoughby works out an escape plan involving a large net with which he intends to catapult himself over the fence, but Steve not only uses the escape plan himself but tricks Dr. Wuthering into getting caught in the net (literally!). The police declare Steve Ireland an escaped homicidal maniac, and Steve returns to the apartment building where he lives, steals some women’s clothes from a mannequin in the Graysons’ apartment (“Pinky” uses it as a model for his paintings), and even shaves off the trademark William Powell moustache to make his drag complete. Steve poses as his (nonexistent) sister, but in the end Willoughby and Mrs. Cooper show up and are fooled by Steve’s drag, but Susan isn’t and announces she’s going to sleep in the same bedroom as her supposed sister-in-law. Love Crazy was written by William Ludwig, David Hertz, and Charles Lederer – the first two are credited with the “original” story and all three with the actual script.

It was directed by Jack Conway, who according to writer Anita Loos was a hard-core Christian Scientist whom MGM assigned to films they thought would get them in trouble with the censors, hoping that he’d tone them down in his directing. Loos told one story about Conway and their film Red-Headed Woman (1932), in which he flatly refused to direct one particular scene (Loos didn’t say which one) and told her, “If you want that scene in the movie, you’ll have to direct it yourself.” Loos said, “Pardon me while I powder my nose,” did so, and then headed to the set to direct the scene. Love Crazy is an obvious example of a film with some pretty racy script elements that Conway could be relied on to soft-pedal, and it holds up rather well even though the whole concept of screwball comedy was getting rather threadbare by 1941. As I’ve noted before in these pages, screwball democratized movie comedy by allowing stars with reputations in drama to play comedy as well instead of leaving that to the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. I’d ended up watching Love Crazy by mistake – I’d misread the TCM schedule and thought I’d be seeing The Kennel Murder Case, also starring William Powell, instead – but it was a delight if not an altogether unalloyed one. Charles noted that Love Crazy was a great movie for degrees-of-separation buffs, since it contains two actors who worked with The Marx Brothers (Sig Ruman and Donald MacBride) as well as one (Elisha Cook, Jr.) who over the course of a long career worked with Humphrey Bogart in both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and lasted long enough to make The Killing for director Stanley Kubrick and Rosemary’s Baby for Roman Polanski (as well as repeating his Maltese Falcon role as he’d naturally aged in David Giler’s underrated 1976 part-sequel, part-spoof The Black Bird). Another quirk about Love Crazy is it introduces William Powell’s character with the song “It’s Delightful to Be Married,” which had appeared in Powell’s Florenz Ziegfeld biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936). There it had been sung by Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld’s first wife, singer Anna Held, in the first of two movies for which Rainer won two thoroughly undeserved Academy Awards – though when I posted on The Great Ziegfeld (I wrote about it on the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/01/great-ziegfeld-mgm-1936.html) I learned through my research that Florenz Ziegfeld and Anna Held had never legally married and the only woman Ziegfeld had married officially was actress Billie Burke (played by Myrna Loy, who doesn’t enter The Great Ziegfeld until 127 minutes into a 172-minute film but still easily turns in the best female performance in the movie).

The Kennel Murder Case (Warner Bros., 1933)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 6) my husband Charles and I finally caught up with the film I’d thought I’d be watching the night before: The Kennel Murder Case, the fourth and last film William Powell made playing the celebrated fictional sleuth Philo Vance. Vance was the creation of art critic Willard Huntington Wright, who’d made his reputation in the early 20th century as an uncompromising advocate of modern art. He was also a strong Germanophile whose support for Germany during World War I cost him most of his newspaper jobs. Wright became a cocaine addict, and in 1923 while in rehab (or what passed for rehab in the 1920’s) he began reading a large amount of detective and crime fiction. Deciding he could do better than most of the authors he was reading, he created the character of Philo Vance and debuted him in The Benson Murder Case (1926). To protect his reputation as a serious literary critic, Wright decided to sign his detective novels with a pseudonym, and he chose “S.S. Van Dine” because he hoped to make a lot of money from the Vance novels which he wanted to spend on the two things that meant the most to him, eating (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). Wright published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, and The Benson Murder Case, in one book and Paramount bought the film rights to all three at once. (Wright titled all the Vance novels the same way: The ______ Murder Case, with the second word a noun of exactly six letters.) They cast William Powell as Vance and made all three movies in 1929 and 1930. Then in 1932 Warner Bros. did a major contract raid on Paramount’s roster and lured Powell, Ruth Chatterton, and Kay Francis to their studio, and as part of the fallout from this decided not only to make their own Philo Vance movie but to have Powell repeat the role. Indeed, both the credits of The Kennel Murder Case and the original ads for the film made a big deal of this: they announced, “William Powell Returns as Philo Vance.” I first heard of The Kennel Murder Case when I read the late William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film (1972); he named it in a chapter as one of the three greatest detective movies ever made, along with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and an obscure British mystery called Green for Danger (1947). When I read that I’d already fallen in love with The Maltese Falcon but had never seen the other two, and when I finally caught up with The Kennel Murder Case I was sorely disappointed in it. I still am (as I was with Green for Danger, too).

The Kennel Murder Case deals with the killing of Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), a thoroughly despicable piece of work who has built up a major collection of Chinese ceramics with the uncredited aid of his Chinese cook and manservant, Liang (James Lee in a marvelously understated performance that’s one of the best things in the film). Coe has cut a deal with Eduardo Grassi (Jack La Rue) to sell his collection to a museum in Grassi’s native Italy, but every time Grassi thinks he’s successfully negotiated the deal Archer reneges on it. (Charles and I have often complained about alleged murder mysteries with too few suspects, but Wright a.k.a. “Van Dine” erred in the other direction, giving us too many people with motives for murdering the victim and making it hard to keep track of them all.) Archer lives in a large house with his brother, Brisbane Coe (Frank Conroy), and controls the finances of his niece, Hilda Lake (Mary Astor – so two of the three films on Everson’s all-time greatest detective movies list featured her!). He’s also fiercely jealous of any man with whom Hilda gets romantically involved, including his secretary, Raymond Wrede (Ralph Morgan) and the one she’s really in love with, Sir Thomas MacDonald (Paul Cavanagh), whom she intends to marry and move with him to his native England. (In a modern movie we’d assume that he had an incestuous crush on her, but that would have been too far for Hollywood to go even during the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement between 1930 and 1934. His stated motive is merely to protect her money from fortune-hunters.) Philo Vance enters the story when he and Coe have rival entries in a dog show sponsored by the Long Island Kennel Club, though both their dogs lose to a rival entered by the Coes’ neighbor, Doris Delafield (Helen Vinson). Coe is found dead in classic “locked-room mystery” fashion, in his bedroom with the door bolted shut from inside. The various regular supporting characters from Wright’s novels – district attorney Markham (Robert Wade); police sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette, billed third and ready to beat the shit out of the most obvious suspect to get a confession out of him, an all too common practice among real police officers at the time); and quirky coroner Dr. Doremus (Étienne Girardot), who’s forever complaining that he’s called on to examine a body just when he’s settling down to a nice meal – show up even though the police initially are convinced Coe’s death was a suicide, especially since the body was found with a revolver in his hand.

In a seemingly interminable series of deductions, involving a book Brisbane Coe was reading called Unsolved Murders and two fragments from a particularly valuable vase in Coe’s collection until it was mysteriously broken, Vance decides that two separate people tried to kill Archer Coe that night. One was his brother Brisbane, who elaborately faked an alibi that he was allegedly on his way to Chicago on a particular train the night of the murder and returned to kill Archer, not realizing that Archer had already been fatally wounded by someone else – though it was he who fired the revolver into Archer’s body and used an elaborate mechanism, copied from a case in Unsolved Murders, involving darning thread, a bent needle, and a sliding lock to make it appear that the room where Archer’s body was found was locked from the inside. The other was [spoiler alert!] Raymond Wrede, who’d got into an argument with Archer Coe over his desire to marry Hilda Lake and clubbed him with a fireplace poker, then stabbed him with a rare Chinese dagger whose silken handle wouldn’t register any fingerprints. Unfortunately, as he was trying to dispose of the dagger, he did so by dropping it into the ultra-rare vase (ya remember the vase?), shattering it in the process. (There’s a continuity glitch in which the first time we see the broken vase, the bottom two-thirds of it are still intact, but later we see it as a whole pile of fragments.) Wrede also killed Brisbane Coe with the same dagger (there’s a great scene in which Vance has deduced that Brisbane’s suit is in a particular closet – and when the door is opened the suit is there, all right, but so is Brisbane’s dead body) and tried to stab Sir Thomas MacDonald, though unlike the Coe brothers MacDonald survived the attack and he and Hilda pair up at the end. Vance reveals all this in a climactic scene involving two ultra-detailed models of both the Coes’ home and the apartment building next door where Doris Delafield lived (and Charles wondered how Vance and whoever assisted him were able to construct such detailed models of the two buildings in just the two days since Archer Coe’s murder). Realizing that the evidence against Wrede isn’t strong enough for a conviction, Vance entraps him by sic’ing Doris’s prize-winning Doberman pinscher (whom Wrede had clubbed during one of his attacks on the Coes) on him until he confesses and the police arrest him.

The Kennel Murder Case was adapted by Robert Presnell, Sr. (who also produced) from “Van Dine”’s novel, with Robert N. Lee and Peter Milne credited with the actual screenplay. The director was Michael Curtiz, who actually turned in an excellent job, keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby enlivening what could otherwise have been a static and ponderous movie (as the three Powell Vances for Paramount, made during the problematic early years of the silent-to-sound transition, had been). But The Kennel Murder Case is otherwise an annoying movie, with Philo Vance an uninteresting and overbearing character who wears out his welcome pretty early on. The Kennel Murder Case was a box-office disappointment and one of the films that led to Warner Bros. dropping William Powell from their contract list after only a year. Powell’s agent was able to parlay a nibble of interest in him from Columbia Pictures and get the biggest and most prestigious studio of all, MGM, to sign him. MGM gave him back-to-back blockbuster hits, Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man (both 1934), which not only restored Powell’s career but sent him into superstar orbit. MGM then had the idea of reuniting Powell and Myrna Loy from The Thin Man in another Philo Vance story, The Casino Murder Case (1935). But Powell, who’d long disliked the character of Vance (when he was married to Carole Lombard she would needle him by nicknaming him “Philo”), told his bosses at MGM that now that he’d played a great detective character like Nick Charles in The Thin Man he was no longer interested in playing Philo Vance again. MGM finally made The Casino Murder Case with an outrageously miscast Paul Lukas as Vance and Rosalind Russell (in her fifth film) in the part originally intended for Loy. (Russell had made her film debut in the 1934 movie Evelyn Prentice, ironically another vehicle for William Powell and Myrna Loy. Later Evelyn Prentice was remade as an MGM “B” in 1939 called Stronger Than Desire with Walter Pidgeon in Powell’s role, almost three decades before Pidgeon once again remade a William Powell role as Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl.) Frankly, I’d have liked The Kennel Murder Case better if it had ended like The Maltese Falcon did, with Mary Astor’s character as the murderer!

Where No One Can Find Her (Underground Productions, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, October 4) I ended up watching an O.K. Lifetime movie called Where No One Can Find Her, directed by Kaila York from a script by Taylor Warren Duff. Kaila York is obviously a woman – there’s a large photo on her imdb.com page and a description that reads, “After several years working at a top talent agency, a studio, and several production companies, Kaila York launched her own production company, Headlong Entertainment, to further the stories she was passionate about telling.” I’m guessing Taylor Warren Duff is a man but I’m not sure about that: their imdb.com page contains no photo or indication of their gender. Where No One Can Find Her is a grim but pretty predictable Lifetime tale in which Izzy (Casey Breneman), daughter of Jamie (Brianna Cohen), is growing up in a single-parent household because her father Craig (Heath Adam Cates) is in prison on a 10-year sentence. (At least Duff, unlike their colleagues on the otherwise far superior A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, gave us an explanation for why dad wasn’t in the picture.) The film opens with an odd scene in which two no-goodniks, one male and one female, are having an argument about the hooded black masks they’re both wearing and whether donning them for their caper is going too far over the top. Izzy is pulling an all-nighter to cram for advanced placement exams in chemistry and calculus to qualify for admission and a scholarship to Georgia Tech (the entire film takes place in Fayetteville, Arkansas) when the two hooded thugs invade her nice suburban home, drug Jamie into unconsciousness, and kidnap Izzy. The next thing Izzy knows, she’s imprisoned in a wooden box presumably buried underground. The box is equipped with a fan for ventilation and various protein bars so she can eat. It’s also got a TV monitor through which the hooded kidnapper can speak to her and observe her every move. He warns her that any time he wants he can simply turn off the fan, which will mean she will suffocate for lack of air in two hours or so. With an extraordinary level of mental determination and an ingenuity reminiscent of MacGyver (the character is actually name-checked in the script), Izzy takes out a black Sharpie and starts making lists of what resources she has available, what her goals are (both short- and long-term), and her progress towards each one. Among the foodstuffs (if you can call it that) with which her captors equipped her was a pack of chewing gum, with which Izzy plugs the lenses of the surveillance camera monitoring her until her captor orders her to remove it or else have him turn off the fan and let her die.

We later see one of the kidnappers out of the mask, and it turns out to be a tall, leggy woman about Jamie’s age. We learn this because Duff and York actually show her making one of the ransom calls. The ransom demand is $100,000 and Jamie pleads that she’s just a nurse and doesn’t have that kind of money available. Just then Craig, who’s served seven years of a 10-year sentence, is suddenly released from prison. Since Jamie has been so bitter about him she’s never taken any of his phone calls (as I know from personal experience, the only way a prisoner is legally allowed to call someone “outside” is to do so collect), it’s a total surprise to her when he turns up on her doorstep, having won early release (though we’re not sure whether he got time off for good behavior or he was actually paroled). We learn over the course of the movie’s two hours (90 minutes if you don’t count the commercials) that Craig was in prison for being part of a car-theft ring and the night he was arrested there was a shoot-out with the police and Craig’s confederate Lee was fatally shot. The officers the Fayetteville police assign to the case are detectives Stokes (Eric Hanson), a middle-aged frump with a bad attitude; and Conroy (Brian Latimer), a drop-dead gorgeous twink. From the moment Stokes confronts Jamie and starts interrogating her about why she was caught wandering on the streets clearly under the influence of something or other, what it’s really about, and whether Izzy has anything to do with it, Stokes’s attitude is so rotten I immediately suspected that he was the male kidnapper – and [spoiler alert!] I was right. Jamie is at first reluctant to share anything with Stokes or Conroy because the kidnappers warned her, “NO COPS,” by writing those words on her arms with marking pens. Later we learn that Stokes was involved in the shoot-out in which Craig was arrested (on Jamie’s tip, we also learn); that Stokes’s police partner Vance was the one who shot Lee; and Vance got such a bad reputation on the Fayetteville force that he was shunned by his fellow officers, became a hopeless alcoholic and got fired. There are a few scenes showing Jamie’s and Craig’s attempts to raise the $100,000 ransom in cash; including one in which an officious bank official tells her it’s “policy” not to let anyone have more than $10,000 in one transaction even though Jamie had $40,000 on deposit.

Jamie thinks she has the kidnappers talked down from $100,000 to $75,000, and in order to get the last part of that Craig hits on the idea of stealing a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray coupe that was his most prized possession until he turned it over to his cousin Travis just before he started his sentence. There’s a grim scene in which Craig tries to steal the car so he can sell it to his former fence in the old days, only Travis has put a “Claw” anti-theft device on the steering wheel and Craig has no idea how to remove it. (Craig admits to Jamie that his job in the car-theft ring was to hot-wire the stolen cars, but it was Lee who did the breaking-in part before that.) Stokes admits that, despite the massive ransom he and his female partner (whose relationship to him is never specified) demanded, he had no intention of ever letting Izzy go. What he wanted was revenge, particularly the thrill of putting Jamie and Craig through the same pain he went through of having someone they were emotionally committed to die without them being able to do anything to stop it. Ultimately there’s a big confrontation in which Stokes is mortally wounded by a scythe wielded by Craig (the scene is a deserted barn), and he insists to the end that he’s going to take the secret of Izzy’s whereabouts with him – which he does, speeding his own exit by throwing himself through an open window to die on the ground. Meanwhile, Jamie and Craig have figured out how to hack into Izzy’s video feed so that, even though they have no idea where she is, at least they’re in communication with her. Ultimately they hit on the idea of having Izzy rewire her old iPad, with which she was buried, to function as a radio transmitter in the hope that someone can use it to figure out her location. Unfortunately, the only thing Izzy can use as an antenna is the grill from the fan that’s supplying her with air, and without that she will die in two hours unless she’s found in the meantime.

This sets up an exciting suspense climax (exciting enough that Lifetime’s habit of putting their last commercial break in the middle of the denouement was even more annoying than usual) in which Jamie, Craig, and the police led by Conroy (ya remember Conroy?) race to find Izzy’s burying place before she croaks. Needless to say, York and Goff delay the resolution as long as possible and Conroy finds Izzy’s box at the very last moment. It ends with a tag scene in which Craig and Jamie see Izzy off to college at Georgia Tech and Craig acknowledges that during his prison years he took up with a woman named Erin and plans to be with her – leading to the ironic ending that the man who was imprisoned for seven years has a partner and the woman who raised their daughter in the meantime doesn’t. Where No One Can Find Her is pretty typical Lifetime fare, though at least dad being in prison is a somewhat different way of explaining why the heroine has to raise her daughter as a single parent (usually dad is either divorced and remarried, often settled with his new wife in another state and unintereted in his prior family, or dead) and I liked Izzy’s MacGyver-esque resourcefulness; she’s not just another Lifetime “pussy in peril.”

A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story (Studio TF1 America, Novus, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story, based on a true-life murder case in Maryland near Washington, D.C. in the early 2020’s. The victim was a young woman named Sarah Harris (Siobhan Williams) and her killer was her doctor turned employer turned boyfriend, Dr. James Ryan (Luke Macfarlane, who’d previously played a hot stud turned killer in a 2023 Lifetime true-crime movie called Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story, which I reviewed for the moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/amish-stud-eli-weaver-story-milojo.html). Dr. Ryan was a specialist in what’s called “oral and maxillofacial surgery” (the word “maxillofacial” has long confused me; the Cleveland Clinic Web site says it “refers to operations on your mouth, jaws, neck or face” and it’s a specialty within dentistry), and Sarah Harris was a woman in her early 20’s who was living with her mother Tina and older sister Rachel, went in to see Dr. Ryan to have her wisdom teeth removed. (Neither of the actresses playing Tina or Rachel are yet identified on imdb.com, more’s the pity because they’re the two strongest players in the film.) Director Siobhan Devine (I can remember when the first name “Siobhan” was so weird it was worth notice, but here’s a film in which both the director and the female lead are Siobhans) subtly hints that Dr. Ryan’s interest in Sarah is more than professional by having him stroke the side of her face. Dr. Ryan, who in real life was twice Sarah’s age and already had three children by a previous wife before their divorce, already has a woman assistant but decides he needs another one. He invites Sarah to apply despite her lack of any relevant experience, and within a week he’s taking her out on dates, inviting her to his home, and romancing her in every way he can. Mom Tina is put out by this, especially since Sarah already has an age-peer boyfriend named Sean (whom we don’t meet until the very end of the film, after Sarah is already dead), but it’s clear mom likes him a lot better than Sarah does and Sarah breaks up with him to be with Dr. Ryan.

Midway through the story Sarah enters and wins a “Miss Maryland Petite Pageant” beauty contest in 2020 (though according to an Arts & Entertainment article on the actual events surrounding the case, at https://www.aetv.com/articles/sarah-harris-james-ryan-dentist-drugs, that was also the year she met Dr. Ryan). Actually Dr. Ryan had been stalking her earlier; at 15 he’d regularly eaten at a local pizza restaurant where she was working as a server, and deliberately sat in her section whenever possible so she would wait on him. (This sounds an awful lot like Lolita and Humbert Humbert to me.) Within weeks of their getting involved, Sarah started confessing her mental issues to Dr. Ryan, notably anxiety and difficulty sleeping, and he began raiding his medical cabinet for controlled substances including diazepam, ketamine, and propofol. (I remember going in for surgery and being told that the anesthetic they would use on me would be propofol. I immediately thought, “Oh, shit; that’s the stuff that killed Michael Jackson.”) Dr. Ryan would feed her these substances not only orally but intravenously, and within months of her moving in with him their home looked like the scene of a wild drug party even though it was just the two of them. Mom Tina and sister Rachel, who had her own mental issues – Rachel’s boyfriend had killed himself in front of her – went to see Sarah and saw the condition of her home. They took her home despite her reluctance to go with them. Rachel also used her smartphone to take a video of the scene and various still pictures of all the drugs Dr. Ryan was giving Sarah, making sure that the labels identifying what they were were clearly in the shot. At one point Dr. Ryan invited all three Harrises to join him on a vacation in Florida, but Sarah was so far gone into the drugs Dr. Ryan had put her on she spent virtually all the vacation in her hotel room, mostly sleeping or whining about how she didn’t want to go out in the sun. There was another Harris child, son Chris, who’d moved to Montana and periodically contacted them by phone but declined their invitations for him to come visit them. (When I saw Chris I assumed at first that he was Rachel’s and Sarah’s father until the dialogue clarified their true relationship. The father’s name was Mark, but it’s not clear either from Barbara Marshall’s script or the A&E article cited above what had happened between him and Tina or whether they had divorced or he’d died.)

Unfortunately, Chris dies in Montana of a sudden heart attack and so Tina has the uncomfortable experience of having to bury one of her children even before Dr. Ryan’s antics with Sarah cause her to croak, too. Tina and Rachel manage to get Sarah out of Dr. Ryan’s clutches, get her off the drugs and nurse her back to health, but Dr. Ryan tricks her into returning to him by threatening to commit suicide if she doesn’t. It all ends on January 26, 2022, when Dr. Ryan calls 911 to report that his girlfriend Sarah Harris has had a drug overdose. Tina and Rachel go to Sarah’s home and insist to the police detective on the scene, Ian Iacovello, that Dr. Ryan was responsible for Sarah’s death. Iacovello initially blows it off by saying that he needs “proof” that Sarah’s death wasn’t just the accidental overdose of a long-time addict. While Rachel still has the photos of Dr. Ryan’s drugs on her phone, she and Tina realize they need more evidence and find it on Sarah’s old laptop, which Dr. Ryan had thrown in the trash. Tina and Rachel recover it and then have to guess Sarah’s password, which turns out to be “WINSTON2000” – Winston being a rather homely black dog Tina and Rachel had bought Sarah hoping that having a pet would help bring her back to normality. Rachel opens Sarah’s computer and prints out 200 pages of text messages between Sarah and Dr. Ryan that prove he was distributing drugs to her illegally. Iacovello carefully questions Rachel and Tina to make sure they didn’t break the law themselves in collecting the evidence against Dr. Ryan. They assure him that the first time they entered the home Sarah herself had let them in, and the second time (after the O.D.) they’d used a key Dr. Ryan had given them and grabbed the laptop from the trash outside the house.

Accordingly the police arrest Dr. Ryan. For a moment I was expecting Barbara Marshall would have them make the arrest at Sarah’s funeral (where we finally get to meet Sean, the age-peer boyfriend Sarah dumped for Dr. Ryan) in classic Law and Order style, but instead they take Dr. Ryan into custody at his dental office, which is almost as embarrassing. He was charged under a rarely used legal statute called “depraved-heart homicide,” which meant that the prosecution didn’t have to prove that Dr. Ryan deliberately killed Sarah, just that he provided her with drugs that could have killed her and ultimately did. “We have to prove that he did it with reckless disregard for the value of her life,” prosecutor Jennifer Harrison told 48 Hours for their true-crime episode on the case. A Doctor to Die For: The Sarah Harris Story was a better-than-average Lifetime movie, but I missed any explanation for why the relationship between Dr. Ryan and Sarah lasted as long as it did. Why did Sarah stay with Dr. Ryan so long, and what did Dr. Ryan get out of a relationship with a woman whom he was literally drugging into a stupor? I kept wishing Barbara Marshall had attempted to explain those troublesome aspects of the case, and without those insights A Doctor to Die For was a powerful story but one that could have been better with more thought in the writing.

The Women (Picturehouse, Scion Films, Inferno Distribution, Jagged Films, New Line Cinema, Shukovsky English Entertainment, Ultimate Media Group, 2008)

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

Last night (Friday, October 2) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been curious about since I first learned about it while researching the 1939 film The Women, directed by George Cukor and written by Jane Murfin and Anita Loos (they were credited in reverse order but that’s not the sequence in which they worked), for a previous blog post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-women-max-gordon-plays-and-pictures.html). The film was a 2008 remake of The Women written and directed by Diane English after a 15-year struggle to get it green-lighted. Diane English actually took up the project in 1993 during a hiatus on her hit TV series Murphy Brown and got nibbles from Sony Pictures Studios (nèe Columbia). English first got stars Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts interested in it, but those plans fell through apparently because they both wanted to play the same character. English was unable to get the film made for a major studio and ended up doing it independently through a company called Jagged Films owned by singer Mick Jagger. How the man who co-wrote such sexist songs as “Under My Thumb” ended up bankrolling a feminist movie seems a bit of a stretch, but he did. English originally marketed the film to director James L. Brooks (which would have been a snooze-fest; the late John Gabrish and I watched Brooks’s most famous film, Terms of Endearment, together and joked it should have been called Terms of Emborement), but when he bailed on the project English decided to direct it herself. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, “She wanted to present a version in which the female characters were strong and self-reliant and supported and defended each other rather than resort to treachery and catty remarks to achieve their goals.” If that was her intent, she certainly succeeded. The 2008 The Women got savaged by most of the critics but actually did decently at the box office, grossing $50 million on a budget of $16 million. After a large number of actresses had cycled in and out of the project, including Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Uma Thurman, Whitney Houston, and Queen Latifah, Meg Ryan finally ended up with the leading role after all.

She plays Mary Haines, wife of financier Stephen Haines, who as in Clare Boothe’s original 1936 play and the 1939 film (in which she was played by Irving Thalberg’s widow, Norma Shearer) learns from a gabby manicurist, Tanya (Debi Mazar), that Stephen is having an affair with Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes here, Joan Crawford in 1939), a perfume salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. (Saks is referenced so often in the dialogue that one critic called the 2008 The Women an infomercial.) Mary’s mother Catherine (Candice Bergen) tells her to ignore it, pointing out that her father had an extra-relational affair of his own, she learned about it, ignored it, and eventually it ended and they moved on and stayed together. But Our Mary can’t stand the thought of living with, and even worse sleeping in the same bed with, a man who’s getting his ashes hauled by someone else. She throws him out of the house and visits a lawyer to prepare to sue him for divorce. One of the reasons I was interested in watching the 2008 The Women after I’d caught the 1939 version on TCM recently was to see how Diane English had adapted Boothe’s story and the Murfin/Loos script to the very different social realities of our time. In 1939 it was expected that women, especially women at the upper-middle to upper-class level of the characters in this story, would retire from the workforce once they got married and let their husbands support them. (A frequent plot line in 1930’s movies is of the poor but honest couple who want to get married but can’t because they can’t live and support themselves on just the man’s income.) Today it’s taken for granted that women who get married can still continue to work; Mary Haines is a designer for her father’s clothing company and Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening; she was called “Sylvia” in the 1939 version and was played by Rosalind Russell) is the editor of a fashion magazine called Cachet, a rival to the real-life Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Sylvie is trying to upgrade Cachet by getting “name” writers to contribute to it, including Bailey Smith (Carrie Fisher), who had quit the fashion mags for a regular gig at The New Yorker until Sylvie tricks her into writing for Cachet by confirming that Mary Haines’s marriage is indeed on the rocks.

The closest thing the 2008 The Women has to a comic relief character is Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), who’s on her fifth pregnancy and announces to her friends that she’s going to keep cranking out kids until one of them is a boy, since her previous four have all been girls. There’s one added character, Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a Black Lesbian who published a book of social-comment essays six years previously but has been beset by writer’s block ever since. Alex shows up on the scene with her girlfriend de jour, a punkish white woman named Natasha (Natasha Alam), and preaches the joy of the same-sex-loving lifestyle to all her friends who are constantly complaining about their struggles with men. One plot element from the original that English had to eliminate is the whole story arc about the women having to move to Reno, Nevada to get their divorces. In the 1930’s many states, including New York (where the characters of The Women live), required proof of wrongdoing, usually adultery, to grant a divorce. So Nevada marketed itself as a divorce mecca in which you could end your marriage as long as you lived there for at least six weeks and made some effort to make it look like you were permanently relocating there. Today, with no-fault divorce a regularly accepted fact of life throughout the U.S., the business of having to go to Reno to end your marriage obviously wouldn’t work as a plot element, though English threw in something similar. Instead of a dude ranch, she put in a New Age treatment and therapy camp in which the women take canoe rides at 5 a.m. She even got Cloris Leachman to play the Führerin of this establishment in as close as she was going to get to Marjorie Main’s terrific performance as the dude-ranch proprietress in the 1939 version. Ironically, the 2008 The Women ended the way Charles had said, when we watched at least part of the 1939 film together (he came home from work midway through), that one would have. Mary Haines, fired by her own father from his clothing company, decides to strike out on her own and launch her own boutique fashion house. She gets her capital from her mom, who’s been sitting on a nest egg for years and offers it to her daughter to start a business of her own.

Mary also learns via her daughter Molly (India Ennenga) that Stephen and Crystal are living together but in a really tiny apartment and Crystal is spending much of her time in the bathtub talking to people on the phone. Molly is disillusioned with her mom for breaking up with her dad, and she gravitates to Sylvie for emotional support – even though Mary is very upset with Sylvie for having let the world know that she and Stephen had broken up. (It even appeared in the infamous Page Six column in the New York Post, which like a lot of the real establishments featured in this movie got an acknowledgment in the credits.) Nonetheless, there’s a great scene in which Molly confronts Crystal in the bathtub (ironically, in the Code-era 1939 film it’s made clear that Crystal is calling real or potential alternate boyfriends in the bathroom, while it’s not all that clear whom she’s talking to in this one – and as Charles pointed out, it took a lot more work in 1939 than it did in 2008 to have your bathroom outfitted with an extension phone, let alone a second line!), Crystal demands that Molly call her “Aunt Crystal,” and Molly not only refuses but tells her point-blank, “I don’t like you.” The film ends with Mary’s triumphal fashion show (ironically the 1939 film also contained a fashion-show sequence, though it had nothing to do with the main plot, didn’t feature any of the principals, and was apparently stuck in over the protests of director George Cukor just so they could advertise a Technicolor sequence in an otherwise all black-and-white movie), which is such a hit she gets an offer from a representative of Saks Fifth Avenue to merchandise her clothes there. Instead of jumping at the chance, Mary holds off because she’s scared of the challenge of manufacturing clothes at the scale Saks would need to sell them, and she gives them a wait-and-see attitude. She also receives a letter from Stephen asking her for a date and enclosing the engagement ring she gave back to him the night they broke up and she threw him out. I found myself mentally remixing the ending so that Stephen and Mary would end up as both professional and personal partners, since with his Wall Street expertise he could presumably find her the capital she’d need to expand her operation and produce enough clothes to fill the needs of Saks (and presumably the other big chain stores who’d also want to sell her line).

There’s also a party to celebrate the debut of Sylvie’s new magazine, Sylvie – like Mary, Sylvie responded to being fired from her family’s business by starting one of her own – and an amusing climax in a hospital maternity ward after Edie Cohen’s water breaks and she’s suddenly about to give birth. The other women race to get her there and ultimately, after an extremely stressful delivery, the baby is born and it’s the long-awaited boy. He's the first male character we’ve seen in the film because, like Clare Boothe and George Cukor, Diane English was careful to keep the all-female casting intact. She even made sure that all the extras and bit players on screen were female. (The published literature on the 1939 film says that Cukor was so into the gynocentrism of the material he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books on the various characters’ bookshelves be by women authors.) English also threw in another Page Six reference that at least hints that Crystal Allen changed sexual orientations and ended up with Alex Fisher’s ex Natasha (though I didn’t believe that for a moment, if only because Crystal had been drawn as so relentless a gold-digger that if she ended up in a Lesbian relationship, it would be with a far more well-to-do woman than Natasha). There’s an ironic line early on in which one of the women says to another, “I feel like I’m in a 1930’s movie” – and both Charles and I joked, “You are.” But I’m quite glad I caught up with the 2008 The Women and give Diane English a lot of credit for thinking through her adaptation and making this story work in a contemporary setting while retaining its original values. English’s imdb.com page contains a quote from her: “I was determined to get The Women done because I wanted to see our great A-list actresses working together as an ensemble – the way they did in the original 1939 version. I was told over and over that it could never be done. But we did it.” The other quote from English on the page is about her overall orientation as a filmmaker: “My work tends to have social or political undertones. I like to tell a smallish story that plays out against a bigger picture, and I find that a woman’s point of view in the world is not very well represented. They say write what you know, and I believe that.” Unfortunately, The Women appears to be Diane English’s only feature-film credit as a director (her imdb.com page lists her as a writer and producer but not director), a real pity because she showed a flair as a filmmaker for telling a story that honors women without too much male-bashing (only what we deserve).

The Honeymoon Killers (Roxanne, Cinerama Releasing, filmed 1968, copyrighted 1969, released 1970)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 1) I watched an interesting if somewhat frustrating film on Turner Classic Movies: The Honeymoon Killers, made in 1968, released in 1970, and produced, directed and written by Leonard Kastle, whose only film it was. Though someone else, Warren Steibel, is credited as producer (Steibel’s friend Leon Levy put up the money), Kastle functioned as producer as well as writer. He didn’t start out as the director: he hired a young man, a recent graduate of the New York University Film School named Martin Scorsese, who’d already has his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, accepted by the Chicago Film Festival in 1967. But Scorsese only lasted one week, apparently because Kastle was upset that Scorsese was shooting the film entirely in master shots and not adding close-ups. Kastle’s first replacement director, Donald Volkman, lasted two weeks before Kastle fired him and took over the directorial reins himself. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Kastle intended The Honeymoon Killers as an answer movie to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn. Apparently Kastle didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde because it was in vivid color and depicted two real-life outlaws, Clyde Barrow (Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), as glamorous, attractive people. Though the contrast between the glamor Beatty and Dunaway projected in the parts and the evil things they did was a major part of that film’s commercial success – 1960’s audiences loved the irony – Kastle decided to make his own movie about a real-life criminal couple but to shoot it in black-and-white and make it as grungy and unglamorous as possible. The real-life criminal couple he chose were Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler). Beck was a heavy-set nurse working in Mobile, Alabama whose roommate Bunny (Doris Roberts) enrolled her in a lonely-hearts club (the 1940’s equivalent of Internet dating) in 1947. Fernandez, a con artist based in New York City who made his living by romancing lonely women and stealing their money, answered her ad. At least in the movie, Fernandez originally intended Martha to be just another swindling victim, but after he absconded with her savings and went back to New York, she called him and said that if he didn’t return to her, she would kill herself. He did, and the two began a torrid affair.

Beck became Fernandez’s partner in crime and soon they began trolling the country looking for other victims, with Martha posing as Fernandez’s brother and sitting in the back seat of their car. When one of their victims threatened to report them to the police, Martha put her on a bus and gave her some pills, allegedly to make her sleep but really to kill her. In one of the film’s most chilling scenes, she loses consciousness on the bus but no one notices her until the bus arrives at its destination. When the driver and the crew of the bus company notice that she hasn’t got off with the other passengers, they inspect her and soon realize she’s dead. Among the victims we see are Doris Acker (Ann Harris) and Janet Fay (Mary Jane Higby), a 60-something widow who attracts Ray and Martha’s attention with a photo she sent them from 20 years earlier. (So “catfishing” was already a “thing” even in the late 1940’s!) In the movie, the two get caught when Martha rats them out to the police (in real life, the cops were investigating the disappearance of Delphine Downing, played in the film by Kip McArdle, and arrested Fernandez and Beck when they returned to the Downing home after an evening at the movies), and there’s a closing scene showing Martha in prison reading a letter from Ray assuring her that she’s the only woman he ever loved. Then there’s a final credit announcing that the real-life Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951. The use of the actual date is something of a surprise since the visual “look” of the film, particularly the cars and the record albums in one scene, is that of the late 1960’s, and I assumed that Kastle had deliberately updated the story rather than try to do a period piece on a tiny budget. (The scene with the records features the iconic cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, released in 1965.)

Warren Steibel, who came to the project after having produced the PBS talk show Firing Line hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., was quoted as saying, “We wanted to do an honest movie about murders. These are not charming people. They are sleazy people – but fascinating. You won't come out of the theatre feeling sorry for the killers like in some movies. It is not romanticized.” Unfortunately, if that was his and Kastle’s intent, they overdid it big-time by making Fernandez’s and Beck’s victims relentlessly obnoxious and unsympathetic, too. Until the scenes with Delphine Downing and her five-year-old daughter Rainelle (Mary Breen), we don’t meet any would-be victims we actually like and want to see survive, and I was disappointed that Kastle didn’t rejigger his script to allow those two to live. It also doesn’t help that the total budget was $150,000 and that this didn’t allow them to do much in the way of special effects. For the scene in which Martha attacks Janet Fay with a hammer, according to a participant quoted on the film’s Wikipedia page, “condoms containing glycerine and red dye were affixed to the head of the victim with plaster of Paris. The hammer, a balsa-wood prop, had a pin at the end. When the pin pricked the condoms, the blood began to flow.” Even so, Shirley Stoler pulled her punches so much her attacks on Mary Jane Higby (she hits her with the hammer twice) looked more like love-taps than lethal assaults. Ironically, François Truffaut, who’d been one of the directors originally considered for Bonnie and Clyde (producer Beatty offered it to both Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before they turned it down and he hired Penn), called The Honeymoon Killers his all-time favorite American film. But one gets the impression that there’s a much more interesting movie in the Ray Fernandez/Martha Beck murder story than the one we got here (the Wikipedia page on the real killers lists no fewer than three subsequent feature films and two TV-series episodes on the case). The film I was most reminded of was Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which ironically he was shooting while the real Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck were killing people. I’ve written about Monsieur Verdoux before at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/monsieur-verdoux-charles-chaplin.html, and though it’s a film with its own set of problems, including a mordant script by Chaplin himself that makes his psycho who murders women for their money almost lovable, it’s a damned sight better than The Honeymoon Killers.

Two "Tiffany Color Symphonies": "The Enchanted Forest" (Tiffany, Colorart,1930) and "The Cossack's Bride" (Tiffany, Colorart, 1929)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 1) my husband Charles and I watched two oddball shorts on YouTube, both billed as “A Tiffany Color Symphony,” co-produced by Tiffany and a short-lived studio startup called Colorart. Both of those companies had the ill timing to begin operations in 1929 just as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression hit. Colorart went out of business in late 1929 and Tiffany followed three years later. Colorart, as its name suggests, intended to make all its films in color, using the two-strip Technicolor process which has been unreasonably dissed for years but which I quite like. It’s true it had one major weakness – it could not photograph blue, though it could approach it (in two-strip films with outdoor sequences, the sky frequently registered beige and the sea was teal) – but at its best (and most well preserved), it had a harmonious, painterly elegance that was often lost in the shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it in the early 1930’s. Alas, though the two shorts Charles and I watched last night, The Enchanted Forest (not to be confused with the 1945 feature of that title or one from 1987) and The Cossack’s Bride, turned out (despite the preservation credits to a site called “The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project”) to be silent films with intertitles giving both narrative and dialogue. They were accompanied with Vitaphone records made at the time of production, and The Cossack’s Bride got a major lift when it featured two songs supposedly sung by one of the actors in the film. One I didn’t recognize but the other was the overly familiar “Otchi-Tchorniye” (but then again you could easily get the impression that there was a law in the U.S. requiring that every film that took place in Russia had to have either “Otchi-Tchorniye” or “The Volga Boatmen” in it).

The Enchanted Forest is about a young girl (Virginia Marshall, the only credited actor on imdb.com) who’s being bossed around by an unsympathetic nanny while her parents attend a round of parties (none of which we actually see) and she complains how much she misses her mother. Out of sheer desperation and boredom she escapes to the titular enchanted forest, actually a garden surrounding the mansion where her parents live, and we see a mysterious figure in the background. We’re not sure at first whether he’s a normal person or some sort of leprechaun or elf, but as director Martin Justice and cinematographers Allen M. Davey and Ray Rennahan (the latter supplied not by Tiffany or Colorart, but by Technicolor; one of Technicolor’s conditions for being able to use their process was sending out their own cameraman, either to work as “color consultant” with the studio’s own cinematographer or to shoot the entire film himself) get closer we see he’s considerably shorter than Virginia Marshall. He’s also outfitted with pointy ears and he escorts her to a clearing where a whole bunch of elves are ready to throw her a party of their own, including a marvelous scene in which we hear a xylophone on the soundtrack while some of the elves are hitting giant mushrooms in what Charles jokingly called a “fungiphone.” Meanwhile Virginia’s real mother notices she’s gone and is understandably freaked out about it, expressing her guilt feelings to Virginia’s dad and going out into the garden to look for her. Needless to say, by the time Virginia’s mom finds her all the elves have disappeared, but she rescues the poor girl who’s fallen asleep in the woods, takes her home, and seems quite a bit more solicitous about her than she’d been earlier, when she’d abruptly and callously brushed off Our Heroine as she was on her way to another party. The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project presented this as an example of 1930 special effects, but showing people in dramatically different size ratios was actually a pretty common trick at the time; one recalls the remarkable scene in the 1930 feature musical King of Jazz in which Paul Whiteman in normal scale brings out a satchel which he announces contains his entire band … in miniature size.

The Cossack’s Bride has a few interesting names in the production staff: the director is Aubrey Scotto, who spent most of the early 1930’s making “band shorts” (the 10-minute one-reelers that were essentially the music videos of the time) and Rudolph C. Flothow, credited as “supervising producer,” later went on to make serials at Columbia, including the 1943 Batman (the character’s first live-action appearance and an unusually well-done chapter play). The plot of The Cossack’s Bride is pretty simple: one Cossack leader (Christian J. Frank) has kidnapped the wife (Lucille Powers) of another (Gregory Gaye, who two years later would play a star director in Universal’s 1932 film of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart Hollywood spoof Once in a Lifetime) and repeatedly tries to rape her. Needless to say, she’s not a happy camper about this. Her husband and his sidekick (presumably Joseph Marievsky), who with his long hair and full bears looks more credible as a Cossack than the other two, hit on an idea to get her back. They’ll disguise themselves as traveling musicians, crash the bad Cossack leader’s party, drink the bad Cossacks under the table and re-abduct the Cossack’s bride. Thanks to a weird bet the good Cossack leader makes with the bad Cossack leader that the good Cossacks will keep singing while the bad Cossacks will keep drinking and the bet is over who will have to stop first – the good Cossacks by running out of songs or the bad Cossacks by running out of consciousness – the ploy works and the good Cossack leader gets his bride back at the end. Neither of these Tiffany/Colorart co-productions are great, or even particularly good, movies, but they’ve been reasonably well restored and it’s nice to see examples of two-strip Technicolor at or close to its best preserved.