Death in Paradise, season 14, episode 4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 30) my husband Charles and I watched a Death in Paradise episode and then a quite compelling performance by The Wood Brothers on The Kate, a PBS show that’s something like Live at the Belly Up except it’s done from the other side of the U.S. (more on that later). Alas, the Death in Paradise episode was surprisingly boring – I had a hard time staying awake through it. It was about a murder at a rum distillery called Ambrose whose founder had suddenly died. The founder had left behind two children, son Patrick (Ansu Kabia) and daughter Cora (Madeline Appiah). For the previous 18 years Cora had worked her ass off to keep the distillery going while Patrick left the fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Honoré or Marie or whatever the locale of Death in Paradise is called and didn’t return until his dad died, whereupon the will was opened and Patrick inherited the whole business even though he hadn’t had anything to do with running it for 18 years. His sole interest in the distillery is in cashing it out, so in order to make his money quickly and get the hell out of there again he cuts a deal with a larger company to buy the place. The deal papers are supposed to be signed at a private celebration with several other people there, and they’re supposed to drink from the same bottle of Ambrose rum to commemorate. But when he takes a second drink from the bottle, Patrick suddenly collapses and ultimately dies, while the others get sick. One of them, Saunders, dies later, and for about 52 minutes of running time the Black constabulary try to figure out whodunit.

The resolution is not that surprising – Cora murdered her brother to stop the sale of Ambrose Distillery and get back at him for having inherited the business even though she’d been running it all those years – though her murder method is. Cora killed Patrick and Saunders and sickened the others by injecting the rum with methanol, also known as wood alcohol, an incredibly toxic substance (I remember the warnings from my own childhood never to drink it because at worst it would kill you and at best it would leave you blind). But she did it in a quirky way; she poured the first round of drinks from an uncontaminated bottle, then injected both the bottle and a previous soft drink Patrick had had with the methanol, so Patrick would get the immediately lethal dose and the others would get sick but not croak. Not only that, she also spiked the ice cubes with methanol; Patrick, who drank the rum “neat” without ice, got the pre-dose of methanol from his soft drink and Saunders got his methanol from both the spiked rum and the spiked ice cubes. It’s yet another one of the preposterous murder schemes beloved of so many mystery writers that seem flamboyantly unrealistic in the actual world, and frankly I felt sorry and hoped that Cora would not turn out to be the murderer because I liked her and what she’d done to keep the place running. It didn’t help that the producers of Death in Paradise have maintained the annoying comic-relief character of apprentice police officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), who as I said about him in a previous post seemed there to prove they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and this time they put black plastic into it. It also doesn’t help that the lead cop, detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet), is so dour as a personality. There’s a bit of pathos in the end as Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), the avuncular executive who’s Wilson’s direct supervisor, sees an online posting for a petition aimed at saving his job from whatever “genius” in the island’s administrative hierarchy decided to lay him off.

The Kate: The Wood Brothers (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, January 30), after a dull and disappointing episode of the Caribbean-set policier Death in Paradise, my husband Charles and I watched an engaging set on the TV show The Kate featuring a three-person band called the Wood Brothers. The Kate is shot at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, and the Wood Brothers had an interesting backstory. Guitarist and lead singer Oliver Wood and bassist and harmonica player Chris Wood grew up together in Boulder, Colorado; their father, a molecular biologist by day and an amateur musician by night, was active in the 1960’s folk-music scene and music was very much a part of the family’s life. But when they grew up and moved out they separated and didn’t see each other for 15 years. Chris became a jazz bassist and co-founder of the band Medeski, Martin, and Wood, while Oliver hooked up with white blues singer/guitarist Tinsley Ellis and later, at Ellis’s suggestion, formed a band of his own called King Johnson. On May 24, 2001 King Johnson played a show in North Carolina as Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s opening act. Oliver sat in with his brother’s band and the two brothers decided they should be making music together. They recorded a demo of Oliver’s songs and in 2006 landed a contract with Blue Note Records, mostly a jazz label, though later they’d release on more rootsy labels like Southern Ground and Honey Jar. In their interstitial interviews they said they’ve changed their philosophy of recording so they do just one song at a time instead of thinking of full albums, and now that they have a studio at home they can take their time working on a song rather than having to worry about the clock ticking on expensive studio rentals.

The third member of the band, Jano Rix, is mostly a drummer, though he also played electric keyboard and melodica, a toy instrument consisting of a small keyboard and a mouthpiece. (Charles recalled seeing Stephen Colbert’s former musical director, Jon Batiste, playing melodica on his show, while I’d seen earlier videos from the 1960’s of Nat “King” Cole playing one during his live shows.) Rix said he, too, had grown up in a musical family; his father had been a major drummer whose high point was playing with Bob Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue. He recalled his childhood as his dad playing drums for three hours, then him playing drums for three more hours, and then jamming. I was particularly struck by his ability to play keyboard with his right hand while maintaining a steady drum beat with his left hand and his feet. (Like organists, drummers play as much with their feet as they do with their arms.) Oliver writes most of their songs, and he’s proud of his elliptical lyrics – one aspect of their music that reminded me of the 1960’s folk-rock scene, along with Oliver’s Bob Dylan-like phrasing as a vocalist (though his voice doesn’t have the edgy quality of Dylan’s that led a lot of people to believe Dylan couldn’t sing at all), to the point where I said “folk-rock” when Charles asked me what genre of music the Wood Brothers belonged to. He thought they sounded more like modern country-rock than anything else. I wasn’t particularly impressed by their first four songs, “American Heartache,” “Postcards from Hell,” “Sparkling Wine,” and “Alabaster,” but for me their set kicked into high gear when they got to their fifth song, “Who the Devil.”

For the first seven songs Chris played acoustic bass – and played it quite well, reflecting his jazz heritage. During a segue between “Alabaster” and “Who the Devil” Chris inserted a drumstick between the strings of his bass and created an heavy vibrato whine effect that I would have sworn was electronically generated if I hadn’t seen that he was doing it all acoustically. “Who the Devil” also included one of OIiver’s best lines as a lyricist, “You gotta be lost to be found.” After “Who the Devil” they played “The Muse,” the title track from their 2013 Southern Ground album, and then they performed another particularly good song, “Keep Me Around.” That one featured Jano Rix playing “sluitar,” an odd instrument that looked like an acoustic guitar (albeit with one string missing) but wasn’t played like one; instead Rix beat it like a hand drum and the tambourine-like bells attached to it added to the sound’s appeal. Following that Chris shifted to electric bass, at first using the Hofner violin bass Paul McCartney played with The Beatles (Paul liked it because its body was symmetrical and therefore it looked right played left-handed, and I remembered seeing a local Beatles cover band called The Baja Bugs who recruited a left-handed bass player so they would look right standing together at one mike with the necks of their guitars pointing in opposite directions the way The Beatles did) – though it looked considerably more worn than Paul’s basses did – and then switching to a more normal-looking Fender bass. Their last three songs were “Shoofly Pie” (not the “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy” novelty hit for Stan Kenton in the 1940’s that briefly got me interested in making apple pan dowdy), “Luckiest Man,” and “Happiness Jones,” the last of which proved that you can write a song about happiness without making it sound as banal and awful as Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” or Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” Overall The Wood Brothers turned in a remarkable performance with a sound that grew on me over time: a good-natured approach that was infectious and gave me, dare I say it, a happiness jones.

Law and Order: "Never Say Goodbye" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 29, 2026)

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

Last night (January 29, 2026) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. My husband Charles was with me all night but while the Law and Order episode was on he was in the bedroom on the phone with his mother, while during SVU he mostly sat in the kitchen and worked on (or played with) the computer. The Law and Order was about artificial intelligence, though that didn’t become clear until about 20 minutes into the running time. It begins with the farewell party for air traffic controller Mark Turner (Chamblee Ferguson) after 37 years of service, following which he’s stalked by another bicyclist as he biked home. He’s shot and killed (it’s typical of this show that we see somebody murdered just as we’ve got to know and like him as a character – I’ve said this about real-life murder victims as well: we’re always told after a murder how nice and wonderful the victim was, and I’ve thought, “Don’t assholes get themselves killed, too?”) by the other cyclist, who’s wearing a helmet and a dark outfit that makes it impossible for the police to identify them or even state their gender with confidence. After some of the usual red herrings, including Bodie Walsh (Tom Cioricari), a would-be partner in a venture with Turner who’d got himself beaten up within an inch of his life by Armenian loan sharks he went to for seed capital, the police finally identify the killer as Kate Leavy (Emily Bergi), who was bitter with Turner for having ruled that a helicopter crash that killed her husband, pilot Brian Leavy (Scott Adsit), was caused by pilot error. They go to Kate’s home either to question or arrest her, but they hear a man’s voice in the living room. It turns out to be Brian Leavy himself – or, rather, an AI ghost image of him created by a company that manufactures AI replicas of your dearly departed relatives and rents them to you for $49.99 per month. (I’m quite sure I would not want any such thing if Charles, goodness forbid, ever dies well ahead of me.) Kate is watching her late husband’s AI image on a big-screen TV that also shows her image as she communicates with him.

The police detectives on the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), get into hot water over it, Walker in particular because by accepting Kate Leavy’s invitation to pray with her and thereby get her to confess, Judge Paul Gifford (Daryl Edwards) declares that the confession was coerced and therefore is inadmissible. The cops and the prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), get in trouble again when, in order to establish motive, they seek to play Kate’s AI chats with her late husband in court – and Judge Gifford rules them inadmissible on the grounds of marital privilege, even though the entity on the other end of those calls wasn’t her late husband, but merely a computerized construct of him. (This plot twist suggests that real-life courts are going to have a hard time dealing with the challenges of AI, too.) With all the judge’s rulings going against them – a reversion to the early days of Law and Order, in which the entire theme seemed to be those pesky little due-process requirements that enable criminals to evade justice – the cops and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) need help. They get it from an interesting source; Detective Walker hits on the idea of allowing Kate to contact her dead husband’s avatar from the jail computers, which she’d previously been barred from doing. Walker reconnects Kate with Brian’s avatar, either tweaking the algorithm or having it programmed to deliver a quite different message from the one it gave her before, and the result is that Kate insists in court on changing her plea to guilty of second-degree murder, admitting that Mark Turner was blameless, the helicopter crash was actually Brian’s fault, and therefore she killed an innocent man for no reason. These days I’m more concerned with the use of AI evidence to manufacture guilt; I’m still worried that in the future the Trump administration may tweak the videos of citizens being killed by Border Patrol or ICE agents through AI so they show what the government wants them to show (the citizens attacking the agents and the agents killing them in self-defense) instead of just lying verbally about what the videos show. But this Law and Order was an intriguing exploration of some of the other pitfalls that may arise as AI systems become more sophisticated and harder to tell apart from “real” reality.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Hubris" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 29, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order episode on January 29 I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that seemed to be aimed at proving once and for all the truth behind the old joke: “What do you call a person who thinks they’re God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows they’re God? A doctor.” In this case the megalomaniac doctor in question is Dr. Bethany Allen (Kate Burton), who turns up frequently as an “expert” witness in cases of alleged child abuse by parents and almost always argues that the parent was abusive and deserves to have the child taken away and put in foster care. This comes to the attention of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit in general and its long-term head, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), in particular, when a man from New Jersey is busted in a sting operation for solicitation of prostitution. He already had a 15-year-old Black girl, Riley Williams (Milan Marsh), in his car when the white woman cop posing as a hooker announced herself as a police officer and busted him. Naturally he pleaded that he has a wife and children back in New Jersey and once word of this gets back to her, she’s going to leave him and take the kids. But Benson approaches Riley in the hospital and, though she later flees the emergency room, ultimately she’s recaptured and Benson establishes enough of a contact with her that she learns Riley was taken away from her father, who was raising her (or trying to) as a single parent since Riley’s mother died, and put in foster care. Alas, the foster parents she was assigned to were literally the ones from hell; her foster dad in particular saw Riley as an income opportunity and pimped her out. Olivia meets with Riley’s dad, Nate Williams (Sean Patrick Thomas), and with the help of a sympathetic social worker assigned to Riley’s case manages to get the custody case reopened.

Alas, the jurisdiction is the Bronx, and she runs into not only an overworked attorney who doesn’t see much hope of getting Nate custody of his daughter again but the solid wall of Dr. Bethany Allen. Writer Michelle Fazekas (an old Law and Order hand) goes out of her way to make Dr. Allen a self-righteous scumbag who sees herself on a mission to protect children from abusive parents whether the abuse is real or not. Wisely, Fazekas didn’t turn Dr. Allen into a racist; though the two children we’ve seen victimized by her testimony, Riley and the child of Corinne Langford (Briana Starks), who not only lost her child but went to prison for a crime that in fact never happened, are both Black, at least she avoided that cheap shot. But both the writing and Kate Burton’s chillingly effective performance turn Dr. Allen into a self-absorbed egomaniacal monster. Ultimately true justice prevails when Olivia discovers that Dr. Allen actually ran a test on Connie Langford’s son that proved his injury had been caused by a congenital disease rather than parental abuse, then deliberately left that out of the case files, and still later lied under oath about doing so. That gives Olivia the leverage she needs to get Dr. Allen to surrender her medical license to avoid a perjury charge, and both Corinne Langford and Nate Williams get their kids back. This was a well-done SVU episode, though quite frankly they’ve done self-absorbed, arrogant professionals several times before (as have the Lifetime writers) and done them even better than here.

Midsomer Murders: "A Climate of Death" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 25, 2023)

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

My husband Charles joined me for my third and last TV show on Thursday, January 29: a Midsomer Murders episode called “A Climate of Death” that has one of the most intriguing premises ever used on this show. It takes place in and around a village in Central England called “Goodman’s Green,” whose leading citizens have decided to make it a model of environmental self-sustainability and proof that human-caused climate change can be reversed. To this end, they’ve banned internal combustion-engined vehicles and cell phones (they can’t be charged without fossil-fuel energy) and set up an array of multi-colored trash cans to make sure everything that can possibly be recycled is. They’ve also set up solar panels everywhere they can to make sure all their energy comes from renewable sources. Alas, the centuries-old land grant by which the village became independent of direct control of the British government has run out, and a notorious American oil millionaire named Rooster Harlin (Corey Johnson, who affects the worst American accent I’ve heard from a British actor since Ron Randell’s horrible 1955 performance in the film I Am a Camera, the earlier non-musical version of Cabaret which suffered irretrievably from the total miscasting of Julie Harris as Sally Bowles) has just bought the place. The enforcers of the strict “green” code by which the village lives are Brian Havergal (Nathaniel Parker) – one wonders whether writer Maria Ward deliberately created his name by reversing one of Britain’s quirkier 20th century composers, Havergal Brian – and his wife Dixie (Julie Graham). Their enforcer is Tobis Seaton (Robert Akodoto), who not only refuses to wear shoes but patrols the village with a long-lensed digital camera taking photos of anyone who transgresses against the green-at-all-costs ground rules.

The show opens with the murder of a young villager named Danny Tarleton (Tim Cullingworth-Hudson), who not only owns a motorcycle (a big bozo no-no under the Goodman rules) but hopes to cut a deal with Rooster Harlin to build a motor-racing track in the middle of the village. He’s stabbed to death with a weather vane – I was regretting that he exited so early since he was easily the sexiest guy in the cast by far, with a huge cock flapping around under his blue running shorts that was turning my crank big-time – and the lead police officers, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), run smack into the middle of Goodman’s environmental politics and both its supporters and its enemies. One of its biggest enemies is Aldo McLean (Tony Jayawardena), who was forced to close his butcher shop after his family had run it for several generations because he couldn’t make money with the high cost of organically raised meat. Another one of the suspects is Danny’s father Liam Tarleton (Nigel Betts), who also didn’t support the environmental policies of the Havergals but was not as outrageous about it as his late son – until he, too, is murdered with a particularly picturesque weapon, a multi-toothed farming tool. And one of the quirkier plot twists is the so-called “Chilli-Eating Contest” [sic], which turns out to be not a contest between cooked chili dishes but one in which the contestants actually have to eat raw chili peppers. Rooster Harlin enters the contest but the chili pepper meant for him actually gets consumed by Aldo McLean, who dies of a heart attack immediately after eating it because it’s been artificially injected with several times the usual amount of capsaicin, the spice that makes chili peppers hot.

Ultimately we learn that [spoiler alert!] Rooster Harlin was not an oil millionaire; he’d made money in oil but then lost it all and that led him to a road-to-Damascus moment in which he decided he’d been wrong all along and the environmentalists had been right. He bought the village not to shut down its no-carbon-footprint experiment but to sustain it and also to locate his missing brother, who’d dropped the last name “Harlin” and was living in Goodman’s Green well before its environmentalist conversion. The brother had been dating Harper Havergal (Eve Austin), daughter of Brian and Dixie, but he didn’t want to marry her because his real love interest was Ginny Kilcannon (Helen Lederer). Since Rooster Harlin didn’t have any money himself, his purchase of Goodman’s Green was bankrolled by a Japanese tech billionaire, Ken Makoto (Takayuki Suzuki), who was committed to the cause of environmental sustainability and wanted to use his money to establish that the Goodman’s Green lifestyle was sustainable and should be exported around the world. We later learn that the real killer was [double spoiler alert!] Harper Havergal, who killed Hardin’s brother in a fit of jealous rage over his breakup with her and then killed the others out of fear that Danny Tarleton’s proposed racetrack would expose the brother’s remains and thereby incriminate her. (Charles thought that was a bit far-fetched, but the annals of true crime are full of stories about murderers who get caught because they get paranoid about being discovered and do stupid things that unravel their cover-ups.) Even before the murders started, Harper Havergal not only had a bootleg cell phone but had been building herself up as an online influencer and was hoping she could break free of her parents’ obsessive control so she could expand her site, get hundreds of thousands of followers, and ultimately secure herself big and lucrative advertising deals. This was a better-than-average Midsomer Murders episode that was, among other things, refreshingly free of one of this show’s most maddening tropes – the sheer multiplicity of crimes that often get exposed along with the primary intrigue – and it also had some nice comic-relief moments involving Barnaby’s malfunctioning Fitbit (the watch records him as walking only nine steps on a day when he’s been trundling around the fictitious Midsomer County on his investigation) and the insistence of his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) that he wear it at all times and take its results seriously.

When a Man's a Man (Atherton Productions, Sol Lesser Productions, Fox Film Corporation, 1935)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 28) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of the 1935 movie When a Man’s a Man, which I’d been curious about since we watched the nominal 1949 remake, Massacre River, a few nights ago (January 21). The story began as a novel by Harold Bell Wright in 1916 and was first filmed as a silent in 1924, with former Keystone Kop Eddie Cline as director. Cline, not surprisingly, was known as a comedy specialist who had worked with Buster Keaton in the 1920’s and W. C. Fields in the early 1940’s (he directed The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, which both ended with two of the greatest slapstick chases ever filmed in the sound era), though he directed plenty of films in other genres too. Cline directed the 1935 version as well, though as Charles pointed out, the story of this film had so little in common with that of Massacre River he’d like to read Wright’s novel just to figure out how the same basic story could generate such radically different films. The 1935 When a Man’s a Man has little in common with Massacre River but the character names of the male leads, Larry Knight (George O’Brien in 1935, Guy Madison in 1949) and Phil Acton (Paul Kelly in 1935, Rory Calhoun in 1949), and the romantic triangle between them and the female lead. Here her name is “Kitty Baldwin” (Dorothy Wilson, a personable actress who deserved more of a career than she got) and she’s the daughter of cattle rancher Dean Baldwin (Nick Carlyle). The bad guys are Nick Gambert (Harry Woods) and his henchman (Frank Ellis), who are taking advantage of a landslide (which we suspect they actually caused by dynamiting the nearby hill; this movie makes dynamite seem as easy to get as flour) that has cut off the entire water supply for Baldwin’s Triangle Cross ranch. Without water, Baldwin’s cattle are dying off one by one.

Larry Knight is an effete Easterner who enters the action when he steps off a Los Angeles-bound train in Simmons, Arizona and stumbles into a rodeo. He accepts the challenge of trying to ride a particularly violent horse which Phil Acton, who works as a hand on the Baldwin ranch, has already tried and failed to stay on for more than a second or two. The impulsive challenge causes him to miss his train and leaves him stranded in Simmons, where he accepts a job as another Baldwin hand and starts courting Kitty even though she and Phil are also dating. At one point Larry starts fingering the lock on the gate in the fence separating Baldwin’s and Gambert’s ranches – Gambert is planning to force Baldwin to sell out to him at far less than his land’s value by killing his cattle from dehydration. He pretends to break the lock (he really opens it willfully) and the Baldwin cattle flood through the opening and have at least one drink of water before Gambert catches them and forces Phil to drive them back to Baldwin’s own parched land. Larry and Phil eventually hit on the idea of drilling an underground well and thereby, shall we say, “appropriating” some of Gambert’s water for their own stock. Larry starts digging the well from the existing tunnel – which is serviced by a bucket and windlass that’s strong enough to lower not just one but two people at once – intending to plant dynamite down there and blow a hole in the ground through which some of the water will flow to the Triangle Cross. For some reason not terribly well explained by Agnes Christine Johnson and Frank Mitchell Dazey, who wrote the script from Wright’s novel, Kitty ends up at the bottom of the well planting the dynamite; she doesn’t set it off but she’s the victim of a dirt slide that threatens to bury her alive. Both Larry and Paul set out to rescue her, and in order to get to her on time Larry has to ride that fearsome horse. Ultimately the three set off the dynamite (we get a helpful shot of the label showing the rate at which the fuse will burn), a geyser of water erupts from the top of the well, the cattle are saved, and Larry leaves to catch his long-overdue train to California and nobly sacrifices his interest in Kitty to Phil.

When a Man’s a Man isn’t much of a movie, even by the meager standards of “B” Westerns of its time (it’s not at the level of Smoking Guns or Big Calibre, two genuinely innovative “B” Westerns of the same period), and the one scene in which Charles noticed that cinematographer Frank B. Good was using a red filter just underscored the plainness of his camerawork in the rest (though he and Cline deserve credit for some creative shots of the inside of the well). Neither the 1935 When a Man’s a Man nor the 1949 Massacre River include the scene at the start in which Larry Knight’s upper-class urban girlfriend sends him off to the West because she wants him to prove he’s a “real man” before she marries him, which was apparently the central premise of Wright’s novel and, according to imdb.com’s synopsis, of the 1924 silent film as well. Nor does the 1935 When a Man’s a Man contain the at least mildly sympathetic depiction of Native Americans in Massacre River (in fact it contains no Native Americans at all!) or the fascinating character of bar owner Laura Jordan who did so much to enliven Massacre River – though Kitty Baldwin is the most interesting character of the 1935 When a Man’s a Man. She spends most of the movie dressed either in buckskin pants (at a time when it was unusual for a female in an American movie who wasn’t Marlene Dietrich to wear trousers) or a cotton dress, and though for the most part she’s a typical movie heroine of the period, she’s convincingly butch when she needs to be.

The Invaders (Kay-Bee Productions, Mutual Film Corporation, 1912)

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

Last night (Sunday, January 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart. They were both Westerns, a three-reeler (about 40 minutes) from 1912 called The Invaders and William S. Hart’s last film, Tumbleweeds (1925). They were being paired, Stewart explained, because they both had the same screenwriter, C. Gardner Sullivan, who wrote an original “scenario” for The Invaders and adapted a magazine serial by Hal Evarts for Tumbleweeds. (Remember that in the silent era a “scenario” simply meant an overall account of the story and a series of descriptions of how the director could visualize it on screen. Screenwriting became more important once sound came in and producers actually had to have written dialogue to give to the actors.) The Invaders was directed by Francis Ford, who also starred in it as Col. James Bryson; Francis Ford was the older brother of John Ford (their family name back in Ireland was “O’Fearna” and what got written down at Ellis Island was “Feeney”). Francis helped John get his start in the film industry, only for reasons that still are unclear to me Francis’s star fell as John’s rose, and ultimately Francis was given minor roles in John’s films just to keep him alive. The film opens with Col. Bryson signing a treaty with a Native American Sioux chief (played by an actual Native American, William Eagle Shirt) setting aside a stretch of land as a permanent reservation in exchange for the Sioux giving up other land to settlers. As with just about every real-life treaty white Americans ever made with Natives, though, this one is broken – in this case by the builders of the Transcontinental Railroad, who send out a survey team headed by two young men. U.S. Army Lieutenant White (Ray Myers) falls for Col. Branson’s daughter (Ethel Grandin), while a member of the Transcontinental Railroad survey team falls equally hard for the Native chief’s daughter, Sky Star (Ann Little). Unfortunately, Sky Star takes a bad fall off a horse into a ravine and is seriously injured; Branson’s daughter has her taken to the army camp and tries her best to keep her alive, but ultimately she dies.

Meanwhile, the Sioux chief considers the invasion of the Transcontinental Railroad surveyors as either an actual act of war or the precursor to one. He mobilizes his own tribe to attack the fort and cuts a deal with the Sioux’ historic enemies, the Cheyenne, to mount a joint attack on the white fort. The Natives are actually doing pretty well in the battle when Col. Bryson hits on the idea of telling the Sioux chief that they’re holding his daughter hostage and will kill her unless the Native chief calls off the attack, but just as they’ve pretty well convinced, the Sioux chief’s daughter dies anyway. There’s a pitched battle in which a lot of people die, and the outcome is a bit uncertain until Lt. White arrives with the reinforcements he rode to fetch from another white Army fort after the Natives burned the telegraph pole so Col. Bryson’s telegraph operator (Art Acord, who also stunt-doubled for Ann Little in her fatal fall from a horse; men in drag doubling for women was a common practice in Hollywood until 1953, when Doris Day insisted for the film Calamity Jane that her stunt double be a woman, Donna Hall) couldn’t get word to the outside that they were under siege. The Invaders is actually a pretty good movie for 1912, but it was still a 1912 movie and there was virtually no cross-cutting, camera movement, or any of the other ways filmmakers would soon develop to ratchet up the excitement and suspense of action scenes. The Invaders was produced and co-directed by Thomas H. Ince, the man who did more than anyone else to invent the Hollywood studio system in which the producers were the real powers and directors, writers, actors, and everyone else were under contract to major studios and had little say over the artistic decisions of their projects. Ince even built the largest and most grandiose of the early studio complexes, the big lot in Culver City that would be the home of MGM during its glory years in the 1930’s and 1940’s and ultimately would become the property of Sony when it bought Columbia.

Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart Productions, United Artists, 1925; reissued with sound by Astor Pictures, 1939)

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

The 1925 Tumbleweeds, which Turner Classic Movies showed right after the 1912 The Invaders on Sunday, January 25, was something else again. Made when silent-era filmmaking had reached its artistic peak, Tumbleweeds was a technically assured movie in which all the techniques of cinema as they had matured were brought to bear on a story of the real-life Oklahoma land rush. The U.S. had originally set aside what is now the state of Oklahoma as “Indian Territory,” only as the 19th century went on they cut various portions of it off and made them available to whites. At first, at least according to C. Gardner Sullivan’s script for this film, the U.S. government had allowed the Native tribes in what was called the “Cherokee Strip” (though most of the Native inhabitants were Creeks and Seminoles) to lease their land to white cattle ranchers, but prior to the 1889 land rush Congress and President Benjamin Harrison ordered all the cattle ranchers to move their herds off the land so it could be taken over by homesteaders and converted into farms. Tumbleweeds is about the Box K Ranch (named after the brand it put on its cattle to distinguish them from other ranchers’ herds) and the drifter who worked there, Don Carver (William S. Hart), who proudly proclaimed himself and the other cowboys (in the most literal sense; a “cowboy” was a man who helped drive cattle herds, and they still exist, only today instead of riding horses they drive trucks or SUV’s) “tumbleweeds.” That meant that instead of settling down in one place, they drifted from one frontier community to another. In the version we were watching, a sound reissue from 1939 to which the long-retired Hart added a talking prologue and Arthur Gutman contributed a musical score (a rather hackneyed one drawing on well-known songs, including “Home on the Range” heard whenever one of the characters thought about settling down and building a home of their own), two songs about these nomadic cowboys were actually sung on the soundtrack.

Carver and his comic-relief sidekick, Joe Hinman (James Gordon), are playing around in the local saloon in Caldwell, Oklahoma, from which the Land Rush is supposed to start on April 22, 1889. As a joke, Carver attempts to lasso Hinman but actually catches Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) in what is got to be one of the oddest “meet-cutes” in Hollywood history. Earlier Carver has shown his sense of justice when he protected a boy and his dog from being beaten by an obnoxious town bully who turns out to be both Molly’s and the boy’s half-brother, Noll Lassiter (J. Gordon Russell). Carver literally waterboards Noll to force him to apologize to both the boy, Bart Lassiter (Jack Murphy), and the dog. Noll is in cahoots with Bill Freel a.k.a. Bryson (Richard Neill) to appropriate the Box K ranch in the Land Rush and keep Carver from getting it. Carver in turn wants to grab the Box K and settle there with Molly because he’s getting tired of being a tumbleweed and wants a place to settle down. Noll Lassiter and Freel trick Carver into going back to the Box K the night before the Land Rush, allegedly to fetch some stray cattle that had been left behind there. Once he crosses into the Strip, Noll and Freel have the U.S. Army arrest him as a “Sooner” (actually a major part of Oklahoma’s mythology; it meant someone who jumped the gun – literally; the Land Rush was signaled by a cannon shot – and grabbed a choice piece of land by cheating; the state motto of Oklahoma became and remains “The Sooner State”) and hold him in a stockade until the Rush is over. But Carver manages to escape and, in a beautifully staged suspense sequence, he rides across the range in time to claim the Box K land for himself and Molly to live on and farm. There’s a bit of a disagreement between Carver and Molly and it briefly looks like he’s going to hit the range and become a tumbleweed again, but ultimately Carver and Molly pair up, as do Hinman and a widow with kids he’s met in Caldwell, and an elderly couple also looking for a homestead (George F. Marion – the actor whose terrible fake Swedish accent helped weaken Greta Garbo’s 1930 talkie debut, Anna Christie – it would have sounded bad enough on its own but was especially disgusting by comparison with Garbo’s real one – and Gertrude Claire) who provide the film a bit of much-needed pathos.

William S. Hart (1864-1946) had been a “tumbleweed” himself, a Western drifter who’d seen much of the lifestyle his films were depicting before he went into acting. As film historian Richard Koszarski put it, “Demanding realism in his [film] settings, Hart knew that it was not merely his physical presence, but the entire design of his films that audiences recognized. They knew a Bill Hart film from a Broncho Billy through the integration of landscape and action, the characteristic dilemmas of the protagonists, and the gritty realism of the studio interiors. Hart was obsessed with all these details, and made sure they dominated the screen 100 per cent of the time.” Unfortunately, by 1925 Hart was 50 years old and was starting to look decidedly careworn on screen. He was also facing competition from younger Western stars like Tom Mix and Buck Jones who weren’t so obsessively concerned with realism, but were giving the Western audience what it wanted: unambiguous good-guy heroes and bad-guy villains in plots that were easy to follow and didn’t present either their characters or their audiences with moral dilemmas. So Hart decided to hang it up after Tumbleweeds, though he thought enough of this film to reissue it as a sound film 14 years later and shoot a speaking prologue for it. Judging from the prologue, it’s probably just as well Hart never attempted a talkie; his voice recorded well but he veered back and forth between natural speech and oratorical boominess, and even seemed to be crying at the end over the passing of both the West itself and his career.

It was ironic that one of the things Hart said he missed about filmmaking was the cry of a director telling him after a shot that it had gone well, when Hart mostly directed or co-directed his own films. Tumbleweeds was co-directed by Hart and King Baggott, and produced by Hart through his own company, though for the sound version (actually surprisingly well synchronized and edited by James C. Bradford) he licensed the film to a cheap-jack studio called Astor Pictures. It still holds up surprisingly well, with Hart delivering an understated performance that reminded me of Gary Cooper (so much so that I was mentally adding Cooper’s voice during the film instead of Hart’s own as we’d heard it in the prologue) and the other actors also reasonably capable. It doesn’t help that John Ford would stage an even more exciting land rush on screen in his woefully ignored masterpiece Three Bad Men just the next year, or that the Oklahoma Land Rush would appear on screen again in films like Wesley Ruggles’s Cimarron (1931) and Lloyd Bacon’s The Oklahoma Kid (1939), the latter of which film historian and programmer Tom Luddy called “a gangster movie in Western drag” since it was made at Warner Bros. and James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were the leads.

Shield for Murder (Camden Productions, United Artists, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, January 24) I watched an intriguing and surprisingly good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” show: Shield for Murder, produced by Aubrey Schenck in 1954 and starring Edmond O’Brien, who also co-directed with Howard W. Koch (not the writer who, along with the Epstein brothers and an uncredited Casey Robinson, wrote Casablanca but one who went on to a less illustrious career churning out “B” horror films in the 1950’s). In a film based on a novel of the same title by William P. McGivern (whose other stories about corrupt or morally dubious cops that got filmed around the same time included The Big Heat and Rogue Cop) and scripted by Richard Allan Simmons and John C. Higgins, O’Brien plays Los Angeles police detective Barney Nolan. He’s been on the force for 16 years but he’s edging closer to outright corruption. As the film opens, he accosts a courier for the bookmaking ring led by Packy Reed (Hugh Sanders), shoots and kills him in the back with a silencer-equipped gun, then fires two more shots without the silencer into the air to make it appear that there was a gun battle between the two, and lifts the $2,500 the victim was carrying to Reed’s gang. Nolan works out of a precinct whose captain is Gunnarson (Emile Meyer, an amateur actor in New Orleans Elia Kazan had discovered when he shot the 1950 plague drama Panic in the Streets there and cast in his movie, after which he got a low-level career in Hollywood mostly playing character villains) and his partner is Mark Brewster (John Agar, better than usual), who like Howard Duff’s role in Don Siegel’s very similar Private Hell 36 that year is the honest cop to O’Brien’s corrupt one. There’s also a press reporter named Cabot (Herb Butterfield) hanging around the police station hoping to get the real story of the shooting; he’s convinced Nolan may be guilty because there were rumors of two previous officer-involved shootings that may have been extra-judicial executions by Nolan.

Unfortunately for Nolan, Ernst Sternmueller (David Hillary Hughes), a deaf-mute who lived in the neighborhood of the shooting, literally saw the whole thing and wrote down a description of how it went that would incriminate Nolan. So Nolan pays him a visit and, not knowing the man is deaf, accosts him, beats him and accidentally kills him, then throws him down the flight of stairs leading up to his apartment to make it look like he died in an accident. But he doesn’t get the written description of the crime the man put down in his notepad. Investigating the suspicious death, Mark Brewster recovers the notebook and leaves it with the police in the precinct office. Then he goes to arrest Nolan, who pistol-whips Brewster but hasn’t fallen so far morally as to be willing to shoot his partner in cold blood. Before that we’ve seen Nolan take his girlfriend, Patty Winters (Marla English), to an open house in a new suburban development (according to Eddie Muller’s outro, it was a real one going up in the rapidly sprawling L.A. suburbs), where he buries the $2,500 loot behind a sideboard outside the house. Also complicating Nolan’s life are a couple of private detectives, Fat Michaels (Claude Akins) and Laddie O’Neal (Lawrence Ryle), sent by Packy Reed to recover his money, who turn up in odd places and demand it from him. When they assault Patty, Nolan confronts them in a bar and pistol-whips both of them. Nolan gets into an argument with Patty and hits her, knocking her over, then goes to a combination Italian restaurant and bar and hits on a woman named Beth (Carolyn Jones in an electric blonde wig), who notices how much he’s drinking and orders him something to eat – which he’s too out of it to touch.

Realizing that his fellow officers are now on to him – Gunnarson is particularly upset because a criminal cop discredits police officers everywhere – he plots to flee to Argentina and demands that Patty leave with him, which she refuses to do because she’ll need time to think about uprooting herself from the only life she’s ever known. He cuts a deal with a couple of other crooks, one of whom, “The Professor,” is played by Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show), to buy a ticket to Argentina and a U.S. passport for $18,000, but tries to palm them off with a fake envelope containing clipped newspapers in the size of U.S. currency. The crooks confront him at a public swimming pool, where there are a lot of both male and female bystanders wearing swimming outfits (so we get a lot of cheesecake and beefcake in this movie!) who are forced to flee for their lives to avoid becoming collateral damage in the shootout between Nolan, Michaels, and O’Neal. Ultimately the real police deduce where Nolan hid the money and corner him at the site of the model home, where in scenes that indicate O’Brien and Koch had seen the 1940 High Sierra and were ripping off some of its setups, Nolan futilely tries to resist the police dragnet and commits what today is called “suicide by cop.”

Shield for Murder is a surprisingly well-constructed film, and the biggest triumph of Messrs. McGivern, Simmons, and Higgins is the care with which they depict Nolan’s gradual descent into outright criminality and psychopathology. He starts out as a basically decent and competent cop in the backstory, though by the time we see him he’s already sank so low in his morality that he’s willing to kill a crook in cold blood for his loot, and when his crime unravels he becomes a rage-filled unscrupulous monster. While Orson Welles, likewise as both director and star, would write the book on corrupt-cop movies four years later with Touch of Evil, Shield for Murder is quite a good one. We know from Don Siegel’s account of working with O’Brien on the 1953 film China Venture that by then O’Brien suffered from cataracts that had rendered him nearly blind; he’d have his wife read him the script pages he was supposed to shoot the next day and he’d memorize them from that. It’s a testament to both O’Brien’s skill and determination that he was able, despite his rotten eyesight, not only to act in a film that had so many strenuous action scenes but to co-direct it as well. Before the film, Eddie Muller said the part had originally been offered to Dana Andrews, who’d turned it down – possibly, Muller suggested, because of its similarities to the 1950 film Where the Sidewalk Ends – though to my mind the only other actor around in 1954 who could have played it as well was Bogart. Muller also joked about how many of O’Brien’s films – including his greatest noir, the original 1949 film D.O.A. and this one – show him sweating big-time. He wondered if O’Brien just sweated that much normally or if there was an assistant with a spray bottle of water on set spritzing him before each take to make him look that sweaty.

Sinners (Warner Bros., Domain Entertainment, Proximity Media, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 23) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC Mission Valley 20 movie theatres to catch Ryan Coogler’s latest film, Sinners. This was the day after the 2026 Academy Award nominations were announced, and Sinners had broken the record for total nominations for a film with 16. I wanted to see Sinners partly because Ryan Coogler is one of the most amazing living filmmaking talents and partly because its subject interests me: Black American culture in general and the blues in particular. AMC obviously viewed Sinners as a straight-out horror film, because the 25 minutes of previews they showed before it were all for standard-issue modern-day horror films, full of blood and gore, whereas Sinners transcended the horror genre much the way Coogler’s Black Panther transcended the conventions of movies based on comic-book superheroes. The film is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi (probably not coincidentally, where Bessie Smith died and John Lee Hooker was born) in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression. It’s centered around three main characters: twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s favorite actor; he’s been in all Coogler’s previous films), and their cousin Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). Smoke and Stack left Mississippi in the teens, fought as infantrymen in World War I, and acquired skills with guns that served them well in Chicago in the 1920’s. Coogler, who wrote his own script as well as directing, isn’t altogether clear what happened to them between 1918 and 1932, but they performed together as a blues-singing duo and also committed crimes, either for themselves or as part of Al Capone’s gang (or both). Now in 1932 they’ve returned home to Clarksdale with a major stash of cash with which they intend to buy a deserted cotton mill and play to turn it into a juke joint.

The film actually starts with a narrated scene explaining the West African concept of the griot (though they pronounce it “GREE-ott” instead of what I’d always assumed it was, “GREE-oh”), the traveling singers who made up their own songs and kept alive the memories and consciousness of the members of the tribe. They buy the old mill from a white creep named Hogwood (Dave Maldonado), who insists on spitting out his chewing tobacco on the floor and leaving them to clean it up. Smoke and Stack ask if there are any members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Hogwood insists that the Klan no longer exists – though we suspect he’s lying because on his bed we see a pile of sheets that looks like a Klan outfit, and much later in the film we learn that there is a Klan chapter in Clarksdale and Hogwood is the leader of it. We also learn that the racial politics of Clarksdale are a bit more complicated than the usual “Black and white” stereotype: the local general store is owned by a Chinese couple, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and there’s also at least one Native American (Mark L. Patrick) who tries to warn a local poor-white couple against inviting Remmick (Jack O’Connell) into their home. Alas, they get the warning too late: Remmick shows up looking like a badly burned white guy but he’s really a vampire, and he vampirizes the couple by literally putting the bite on them. The three vampires decide to attack the juke joint, which is having a spectacular grand opening featuring piano player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and Sammie Moore, who has ignored the warnings of his preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams, who judging from his imdb.com head shot looks like he’d be good casting for a biopic of Miles Davis) to avoid playing blues because it’s supposedly the music of the devil. Sammie’s extraordinary playing (Coogler required all the actors cast as musicians to do their own singing and playing, and judging from his performance here Miles Caton has a major career ahead of him as both singer and actor) literally summons up spirits of the Black race past, present, and future. We are told this via an amazing sequence set inside the juke joint that flashes us both backwards to the griots we saw in the prologue and forwards to a modern-day D.J. turntable setup as used in traditional rap.

The opening night, at which Smoke’s wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) serves as cook when she isn’t running her store selling voodoo charms and remedies, attracts Stack’s former girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), whom he broke up with because she’s only one-quarter Black and presents as white, so he arranged for her to marry a rich white landowner in another town to protect her from the local racists. Mary makes it clear she wants to get back with Stack, while Sammie and Pearline have sex in one of the back rooms of the club and Smoke butt-fucks Annie. Remmick and the Hogwoods show up at the club and demand admittance – as in the 1987 Joel Schumacher film The Lost Boys, the vampires cannot enter the home of a normal human unless they’ve specifically been invited. At first they’re kept out by Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), a local sharecropper whom Smoke and Stack have hired as their bouncer, but when Cornbread has to go outside to pee the vampires attack him and convert him into one of them. Remmick and the other vampires try their damnedest to get into the club, including staging their own mini-concert outside with white folk songs like “The Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Rocky Road to Dublin,” and “Old Corn Liquor.” (I remember most of those songs from my father’s collection of folk-music records.) Ultimately Mary leaves the club, where she’d be safe, and goes outside – where the vampires turn her. Mary attacks and transforms Stack when he lets her in in a vain attempt to save her. Annie makes the people still inside the club eat solid cloves of garlic to make sure none of them have been vampirized. Remmick makes the holdouts an offer he thinks they can’t refuse: they can all become vampires and therefore join a community of absolute equality and zero racism. He really wants Sammie because the unique power of Sammie’s music can summon spirits from the past whom Remmick could add to his cult. Remmick also reveals that Hogwood, the head of the local Ku Klux Klan, plans to attack the juke joint and destroy it. Sammie hits Remmick over the head with his National guitar (supposedly a souvenir of the great Charley Patton but actually the property of Smoke’s and Stack’s father), and the metal plate detaches itself from the body and bisects Remmick’s head.

Smoke gets out a collection of rifles and a Thompson submachine gun and successfully holds off the Klan’s raiding party, though he’s fatally wounded himself. Smoke is able to keep the vampires occupied until sunrise, which incinerates them immediately, and as he’s dying Smoke tells Sammie to return to his father’s church. In a scene that was prefigured in the second half of the prologue (between the griot scene and the ones at the juke joint), Jedediah tells Sammie to drop the broken neck of his guitar, thereby renouncing the evil of the blues and returning to the good fold of Black Christianity. Sammie heads to Chicago and literally becomes Buddy Guy – Coogler cast the veteran blues musician as Sammie’s older incarnation. (I’d seen Buddy Guy’s name on the imdb.com cast list for this film and wondered where and how he’d turn up; I presumed he’d be an older musician either busking on the streets of Clarksdale or playing at the juke joint, but instead Coogler cast him much more creatively than that.) As they’re wrapping up a late-night club set in 1992, the elder Sammie is visited by Stack and Mary, who because they’re vampires have not visibly aged. Once again they offer him immortality and freedom if he’ll consent to become a vampire, and once again he turns them down. The film has a lot of post-credits sequences – anyone who bolted from the theatre as if the onset of the credits were the starting gun of a sprint race missed more than usual – and it ends with a marvelous performance of the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine” played by Miles Caton as the young Sammie on bottleneck guitar. Sinners is an extraordinary movie, beset by the blood and gore typical of the horror genre as well as a few too many abrupt sound cuts, but mostly quite well made and thematically rich. It occurred to me that had Smoke gone to Jedidiah and mobilized the churchgoers to join him in vanquishing the vampire threat the film could have been even better than it is – then we would have seen the “good” Christian Blacks using the power of their version of African-American music to vanquish both the blues and the white vampires’ version of folk music – though maybe that would have been too much like The Jazz Singer to suit Coogler’s taste.

At first I worried whether I’d be able to accept this film given its seemingly uneasy mix of Black culture and white horror, but (as it had with Black Panther as well), Coogler’s filmmaking mastery overcame whatever reservations I might have had and I was swept along with the sheer energy and thematic richness of his film. I even applauded his name in the closing credits, and a few others in the audience joined me. I also found myself wondering if Coogler had based his script at least in part on the experience of Robert Wilkins, a stunningly talented blues musician of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s who abruptly quit the blues after a mass fight broke out at a juke joint where he was performing. Deciding that the evil of his music had caused the people to riot, Wilkins abruptly quit his blues career and became an itinerant preacher and faith healer. When he returned to music in the early 1960’s it was as a gospel singer, though he rewrote one of his old blues songs, “That’s No Way to Get Along,” to reflect the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son – and in that form the Rolling Stones covered it. There was also the case of Son House (also from Clarksdale, Mississippi), who went in the other direction; at age 25, having already trained for the ministry and pastored churches, he discovered the blues. Within a few years he had fallen so low down the moral totem pole he was serving time at the state’s notorious Parchman Farm prison after he shot and killed another man who was shooting at him in a juke joint. (Had House been white he probably could have successfully pleaded self-defense.) There was also the notorious case of Walter Barnes, who along with virtually his entire band lost his life in a catastrophic ballroom fire in Natchez, Mississippi in 1940 after the band kept playing to keep the rest of the people from panicking. (This incident inspired the invention of crash-bar doors that could be more easily opened in an emergency.)

Coogler himself said that the inspiration for the film came from Willie Dixon’s blues classic “Wang Dang Doodle,” an ode to the juke joints Dixon wrote for blues legend Howlin’ Wolf (true name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett) in 1960. Dixon once said the title “meant a good time, especially if the guy came in from the South. A wang dang meant having a ball and a lot of dancing, they called it a rocking style so that's what it meant to wang dang doodle.” This explains why there’s the anachronistic performance of “Wang Dang Doodle” early in the juke-joint sequences of Sinners, played by Cedric Burnside, Tierinii Jackson and Sharde Thomas-Mallory in the all-out electric blues style created in the early 1950’s when musicians like Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James left Mississippi for Chicago and started playing amplified guitars. But this performance was technologically impossible in 1932, when even if the current had been available to power them (one of the cleverest scenes in Sinners shows a man from the club climbing a power pole and plugging in their own cord to turn the lights on), electric guitars as we know them today simply didn’t exist yet. (There’s an ironic reflection of this in the 1992 postlude, in which the vampire couple tell Buddy Guy that they want to hear him play acoustic because they consider that purer.) I could go on and on and on about Sinners and the depths of Ryan Coogler’s imagination – and also my hope that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives Sinners the Best Picture award Coogler deserved for Black Panther seven years ago. The Golden Globes palmed off Sinners with the so-called “Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” award, while giving the Best Motion Picture-Drama award to Hamnet (Chloe Zhao’s “safe” take on the real or imagined life of William Shakespeare) and the Best Motion Picture-Comedy or Musical to One Battle After Another. I haven’t seen either of those films (I have seen Green Book, the film that beat Black Panther for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture, and it was a good movie but a typical socially-conscious slice of Hollywood liberalism in which the Black characters exist only to morally redeem the white ones, instead of a film like Black Panther in which the Black characters had real independence and agency), but it’s hard to believe that either of them were made with the depth of imagination, insight, and artistry Ryan Coogler brought to Sinners.

Law and Order: "The Enemy of All Women" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, January 22) my husband Charles and I watched the usual Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes on NBC and another Midsomer Murders show on PBS. The Law and Order was called “The Enemy of All Women” – though it’s a good thing they don’t flash the episode titles in advance because that would have been a giveaway of the entire plot. It begins with a long tracking shot that follows a young woman, Amelia Hardage (Ren Montero), through New York City as she heads home, and is told from the point of view of all the surveillance cameras that are recording her on her walk, including her own as she enters the townhouse in which she lives. Then a shadowy figure we don’t get a good look at points a gun at her and kills her with one shot to the head. After the corpse is discovered, the detectives of the New York Police Department routinely order copies of all the surveillance footage as well as Hardage’s e-mails – only to find them all literally disappearing as they attempt to load them. From this, and from what Hardage did for a living – she worked for a company that amassed huge amounts of surveillance data on every individual in the area and then sold those data caches to the highest bidder – detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their boss, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) deduce that the culprit is a person with an ultra-high level of expertise in computerized record-keeping and major hacker skills to erase all recorded data that might implicate him. This leads them to the victim’s boss, Marius Cole (Ennis Esmer), and also to her best friend, Vanessa Barrett (Virginia Kull), who had helped her get her current job and then had quit the same company and gone to work as information technology specialist for a women’s health care clinic. It turns out from an interview with Hardage’s psychological consultant, Sean Morris (Mathais Goldstein), that she had been raped one month previously. Sean had been trying to persuade her to report the crime to the police, which she’d been unwilling to do, until the day before she was killed, when her rapist returned to finish her off forever and thereby escape accountability. The cops briefly suspect Sean of murdering Hardage until he convinces them that he’s too ethical to do that and also that he’s Gay. (Presumably, since he’s not a licensed therapist, he’s not bound by the confidentiality regulations that would likely have been invoked by a professionally licensed person even though their client was dead.)

The cops take Marius Cole to trial before a tough woman judge, Angela Dillow (Eileen Galindo), only even before the trial begins Marius’s attorney makes a motion to dismiss the case because Marius has used elaborate AI software to manufacture himself an alibi. (This is one of my main concerns with the future of politics in this country; the use of AI to manipulate video footage so it no longer shows what actually happened, but what the government wants people to think happened. It won’t surprise me at all if the next time ICE agents kill an innocent bystander like they did with Renée Good, the authorities not only tell people they didn’t see what they actually saw in the video, they use the raw footage to create an AI version in which the victim actually was threatening to kill the ICE agent and he shot her in self-defense.) Marius, who like Harvey Weinstein has made a lot of big donations to women’s rights organizations to cover his tracks as a sexual abuser, presents a sympathetic figure and seems to be on his way to acquittal until the cops and the prosecutors – District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his associates on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) – guess that Vanessa Barrett was also raped by Marius Cole, only she signed a non-disclosure agreement and didn’t come forward. The prosecutors point out that NDA’s can’t be used to cover up a crime, but she still doesn’t want to come forward and testify because she’s afraid that her career in women’s health will be over if people find out she was a rape victim and did nothing about it. Then Nolan Price works out a stratagem; at first he offers Marius and his attorney a plea deal, which they turn down. Then he brings Virginia into court, and the mere sight of her seemingly about to testify scares Marius into agreeing to cop a plea after all and accept a 20-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. DA Baxter asks Nolan what he would have done if his trick hadn’t scared Marius into a cop-out – would he have risked destroying Virginia psychologically by making her testify? I suspect Ennis Esmer as Marius Cole is too good a villain for the Law and Order writing crew to let disappear; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he manages to engineer an escape by hacking into the prison’s computers and generating AI footage of himself in his cell while he’s really outside. While this was more like a Special Victims Unit story than one for the flagship show, it still worked really well even though in the real world people like Marius Cole don’t get held accountable for their crimes; they get themselves elected U.S. President and all the charges against them magically disappear.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Career Psychopath" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown on January 22 after the “Enemy of All Women” episode of Law and Order, “Career Psychopath,” trod over more familiar ground but had some interesting things to say about the bizarre cults that form around serial killers. During his long stretch in prison Charles Manson got a number of marriage proposals (one of which he actually accepted and went through a wedding ceremony via remote control) and innumerable requests for autographed photos. My husband Charles once read a report that Manson had actually farmed out the task of autographing some of these photos to fellow inmates. He seemed really put out by that until I reminded him that the reason Manson was in prison in the first place was not for killing people personally, but for getting other people to do it for him. Anyway, the “Career Psychopath” in this story is Henry Mesner (Ethan Cutkosky), who committed rape as a juvenile, served his sentence, then not only raped and murdered someone else but killed his parents too. His sister Ruby (Maxine Wanderer) survived and was taken in by foster parents, only they eventually cut her off because she was demanding too much money from them and using most of it to buy drugs. The show opened with assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and his wife, SVU detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), coming home from a dinner date. Rollins sees that their home has been broken into, and shortly thereafter the culprit, whom we don’t see enough of to get a recognizable image, is holding a knife to Carisi’s neck and ordering Rollins to toss him her gun. There’s a scuffle in which Carisi regains control of the situation, though his wrist is slashed and the assailant escapes despite Rollins’s attempt to track him down.

It turns out that the assailant is Phillip Wingate (Kimball Farley), who formed a sick attachment to Henry Mesner even though the real Mesner is safely in Sing Sing prison. Wingate goes as far as to date Ruby Mesner and enlist her as an accomplice in his assaults, including killing a Black woman court reporter who’d taken the transcript of the case and later retired. There are two confrontations between SVU detectives and Henry Mesner in prison; in the first of which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is the interviewing officer. Henry makes it clear he only wants to talk to Detective Rollins, even though Benson has taken her off the case because she’s too close to it and she came on too strong in the interview room when the SVU cops busted Ruby Mesner and get her to reveal Wingate’s current location. Nonetheless, Rollins goes to Sing Sing without formal authorization from Benson, her boss, and gets Henry to give her the fan letters he got from Wingate, which he was so contemptuous of he never even opened any of them. From these the SVU detectives are able to figure out where Wingate is living and arrest him. Once again, this show had a particularly interesting villain; Ethan Cutkosky’s chilling matter-of-fact performance as the titular career psychopath Henry Mesner is scary precisely because he doesn’t underline. He seems like jes’ plain folks and we have to keep reminding ourselves of what the character is supposed to have done. And unlike Manson and some other real-life psychopaths who served long prison terms, Henry if anything seems rather embarrassed at the cult that’s formed around him and certainly wishes that his admirers “outside” would get over it and get a life.

Midsomer Murders: "Claws Out" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 18, 2023)

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

Last Thursday, January 22, after the two Law and Order episodes I watched with Charles, I briefly lighted on CBS for what I hoped would be another Elsbeth episode but it was another Matlock show instead. So instead I went on to PBS for another rerun of Midsomer Murders, this one an episode called “Claws Out” that begins with the murder of Frank Bailey (Nathan Sussex). Frank Bailey formed a major tech company and then sold it and retired, but when he settled in Midsomer County he found a number of people complaining about the mysterious disappearances of their pet cats and dogs. So he started investigating and soon formed a business as literally a pet detective. He’s currently on the trail of a large dog named “Storm,” a Czechoslovakian variant of a German shepherd, whose owners are Aden Hughes (Adam Scarborough) and his wife Eshani (Mina Anwar). We first meet Eshani at an Indian restaurant called Tandoor (no “i”), where she’s predictably upset when a waiter spills food all over her tight-fitting red dress. We also learn that Andrew’s ex-wife is now the wife of the owner of Tandoor, only they had the occasional fuck for old time’s sake. While all this is going on Sarah Barnaby (Fiona Dolman), wife of the show’s central “sleuth” character Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon, who’s also listed as executive producer), is trying to train her dog for an upcoming “Dog Agility Contest” sponsored by Madeleine Saunders (Josette Simons), a tall, rail-thin African-British woman whose son Edison died years before while he was in medical school and seemingly headed for a stellar career as a doctor. Edison left instructions that on his death his organs were to be donated for transplants, and Madeleine gave Edison’s heart to Reece Fleming (Joe Edgar), either the younger son or the grandson of crusty, irascible old landowner William Fleming (Duncan Preston). Fleming also has a son named Perry (Charlie Condou), who works locally as a gardener and who’s supposedly Gay, though as with the Gay character on last night’s Law and Order and all too many “movie Gays,” we never see him either emotionally, romantically, or sexually involved with another man. There’s also a real young cutie named Tai Yang (Tom Moya), who’s more or less the boyfriend of Madeleine’s daughter Danielle (Tia May Watts) – we’re introduced to both him and Reese Fleming in Danielle’s bedroom, though when Madeleine walks in on them everything appears to be innocent.

Madeleine is determined to send Danielle to medical school to fulfill her ambition, frustrated by Edison’s death, to have a doctor in the family, but Danielle couldn’t be less interested in it. Instead she wants to take at least a year off her education and tour the world with Tai, starting with Canada. Tai is the nephew of Frank Bailey, and he’s living in a trailer (a “caravan,” they call it in Britain even though it’s just one unit) on William Fleming’s land. But when Frank Bailey is killed, and his body stuffed inside the kennel formerly occupied by the Hughes’s dog Storm, his will is read and it leaves Tai one-half of his estate. Needless to say, his widow Kim (Catherine Tyldesley) isn’t happy about this, and when Tai is himself murdered a week before his 21st birthday Kim heaves a sigh of relief that now she’s going to get all her husband’s fortune. (At the end she takes down the sign that said, “Frank Bailey/Pet Detective” and puts one up with her own name.) A third victim emerges: Lorna McIntosh (Josie Lawrence), who at first appears to be a dotty old lady, well out of it mentally, who’s collected other people’s cats and is raising them herself. Later she turns out to be a retired information technology professor (there’s a nice bit of dialogue where Barnaby’s associate, detective sergeant Jamie Winter – played by red-headed hunk Nick Hendrix – realizes that they’d been assuming that she was the widow of Professor McIntosh and now they know she was Professor McIntosh). Alas, Lorna gets strangled by an unseen assailant wielding a dog trapping device with which she’s dispatched to cat heaven. In the end [spoiler alert!] Perry Fleming turns out to have been the killer of both Frank and Tai, though he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer already (given that I lived through the 1980’s, once I heard a Gay man had been diagnosed with a terminal disease I immediately assumed it was AIDS!). The real villain turns out to be [double spoiler alert!] Madeleine Saunders, who for reasons that escape me at the moment (one of Charles’s complaints about this particular episode is how weak writer Helen Jenkins was in terms of giving people actual motives) wanted to target Tai for having allegedly led her daughter astray, though on her orders Perry killed Frank by mistake before she aimed him correctly at Tai because they were both wearing similar motorcycle outfits. Then Madeleine dispatched Lorna herself after she realized Lorna might be a witness. After the previous Midsomer Murders episode shown one week earlier, “Book of the Dead” – a well-constructed thriller with a plot that made sense – “Claws Out” was a real disappointment, and it’s hard to believe that Madeleine could get Perry to commit murders for her by threatening him with an allegedly “cancer-sniffing dog” that could “out” him as terminally ill.

Massacre River (Windsor Pictures, Allied Artists, 1949)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 21) my husband Charles got home from work relatively early, and I ran him a movie we’d run across on X nèe Twitter: Massacre River, a 1949 “B” Western from a company called “Windsor Pictures” releasing through Allied Artists, nèe Monogram. We’d both got interested in this film from an X post alleging that the two male stars, Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun, had had sex with each other in a parked car in front of the home of their manager, Henry Willson. The poster, who uses the screen name “The Gay Aesthetic,” wrote, “Claiming Rory was quite large, Guy was clearly feeling no pain, and that car was rocking; as often as Henry repeated the story, he obviously enjoyed the lascivious insinuation it wasn’t the first time.” Henry Willson was apparently a Gay version of Harvey Weinstein; his Wikipedia page diplomatically describes him as “an American Hollywood talent agent who played a large role in developing the beefcake craze of the 1950’s.” The page also quotes Richard Barrios’s book Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall as saying, “[T]alent agent Henry Willson... had a singular knack for discovering and renaming young actors whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability.” His most famous client was Roy Scherer Fitzgerald, whom he renamed “Rock Hudson,” as he’d renamed Robert Mosely “Guy Madison.” Willson represented both men and women, and both Gay and straight actors, but his reputation around Hollywood was so notorious, especially his full-blown operation of the “casting couch,” that straight actors generally avoided him for fear that if they signed with Willson they’d be branded as Gay. That story about Rory Calhoun allegedly “topping” Guy Madison so piqued Charles’s and my curiosity that I ordered Massacre River from Amazon.com. It turned out to be a lot less Gay than “The Gay Aesthetic” had advertised, but a surprisingly interesting movie.

The story began in 1916, when popular Western writer Harold Bell Wright published a novel called When a Man’s a Man about an effete Eastern man whose girlfriend rejects him because he isn’t butch enough, so he goes to the wild West to “become a man.” (There were plenty of stories like that, including the fascinating 1930 film Way Out West that starred another one of Hollywood’s legendary real-life Gay men, William Haines.) It was filmed twice before under Wright’s original title, as a silent in 1924 and a talkie in 1935, both times directed by Edward F. Cline. Cline had been one of the original Keystone Kops, and when he became a director he specialized in comedies. His most famous films are the ones with W. C. Fields: My Little Chickadee (with Mae West in a spoof of David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West), The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Fields’s last three films in starring roles before age and alcoholism reduced him to playing just bit parts). Massacre River, directed by John Rawlins (a former Universal contractee who’d made the studio’s first three-strip Technicolor feature, Arabian Knights, and Universal’s first Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror), was also shot with When a Man’s a Man as the working title, but the story was so far removed from Wright’s tale that writer Louis Stevens got credit for “original screenplay.” About all that was retained from Wright’s book was the name of the male lead, Larry Knight (Guy Madison), and the basic situation of him losing the upper-class girl he loved to another man.

The film begins with Col. James Reed (Art Baker) negotiating a treaty with Native American Chief Yellowstone (Iron Eyes Cody, a real-life Native and one of Hollywood’s go-to guys just then for a sympathetic Native leader) which will set up a four-cornered reservation into which white settlers will not be permitted so the lands can remain in Native hands. One of the boundaries is the Wachupi River, which has earned the nickname “Massacre River” because so many bloody battles between whites and Natives have occurred on its banks. Chief Yellowstone, who has to speak through both white and Native interpreters because he doesn’t know English, warns Col. Reed that some of his younger, more militant braves might not honor the treaty and might continue to attack white wagon trains. Col. Reed has two adult children living on the base with him, his daughter Kitty (Cathy Downs) and his son Randy (Johnny Sands). Randy has just graduated from West Point with an officers’ commission and has been assigned to his dad’s fort. Already on the staff there are first lieutenants Larry Knight (Guy Madison) and Phil Acton (Rory Calhoun), who early on in the film get into a quite physical confrontation over which of them will be the first to take a hot bath. Remember this was at a time and place when bathing involved waiting to fill a tub by hand with boiling water (or, as here, getting a maid to do that for you), and in this film the maid warns both men that the first one who gets in the tub will be the cleaner one because he won’t have to use already dirty second-hand water. That is what they’re fighting over as they strip to long johns and have at each other in what “The Gay Aesthetic” described as “a level of chemistry between two men not seen again until Brokeback Mountain.” But the relationship between Larry and Phil soon settles into a classic Hollywood-era “bromance.” Phil grew up with the Reeds and assumed as they got older that he and Kitty would marry, but Kitty has decided she’s no longer in love with him and instead is attracted to Larry.

Larry in turn is torn between Kitty and the film’s most fascinating and complex character, Laura Jordan (Carole Matthews), who runs the local casino/saloon. Laura is a widow with a “bad” reputation, and when her husband died she was supposed to inherit his half of the business – only his partner, Burke Kimber (Steve Brodie), tries to force her out of it, including holding a gun on her and threatening to kill her if she doesn’t sell out to him on the spot. She’s saved by Larry, who opportunely shows up and shoots Kimber in the back just as he’s about to kill Laura. At one point Larry is at Laura’s establishment when a drunken Randy Reed shows up and threatens to kill Larry for dishonoring his sister Kitty with Laura. Randy gets one shot off, which wounds Larry, but Laura shoots him in the back and kills him so he can’t kill Larry. (This business of people shooting other people in the back to save the lives of third persons they’re about to murder shows up at least twice in Stevens’s script for this film.) Then Phil and Kitty both get upset with Larry, thinking that he killed Randy. Laura nurses Larry back to health after Randy’s gunshot and the two plan to run away together, but their only route out of town runs through the Indian reservation – and sure enough, the bad braves Chief Yellowstone warned the whites about early on in the movie ride out and ambush them. They’re only saved by the good Indians led by Chief Yellowstone, but in the meantime Laura has been fatally wounded and has a nice extended death scene reminiscent of Jennifer Jones’s in Duel in the Sun. In the end Phil and Kitty get together again and Larry rides off into the sunset (one of the few plot elements from Harold Bell Wright’s novel screenwriter Stevens kept).

Ironically, Massacre River practically qualifies as a film noir in Western drag, which by the late 1940’s was actually becoming a common sub-genre; already Jacques Tourneur had made Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum (1948), and soon to come were films like Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 (1950) and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952). Laura Jordan is a typical noir heroine plunked down in the middle of the West: a tough, no-nonsense woman surviving on her wits and with a cheery indifference to traditional morality. She’s not really a femme fatale but she’ll definitely do, and I suspect writer Stevens was thinking of Marlene Dietrich’s role in the 1942 The Spoilers when he created this character. Massacre River is also surprisingly well produced for a “B” Western; they went out to the familiar Universal locations at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (where John Rawlins had previously filmed the last of the Jon Hall-Maria Montez Technicolor vehicles, Sudan) and had long strings of men on horseback riding through the countryside. Though these may have been stock shots clipped from earlier, bigger-budgeted Westerns, they are superbly integrated into the overall visual “look” of this film. Also, judging by the film’s high-contrast visuals, cinematographer Jack MacKenzie must have had a red filter on his cameras at almost all times. Massacre River is a surprisingly compelling film, with multidimensional characters instead of the all-good or all-bad figures of previous movies (another aspect in which it anticipates Winchester .73, High Noon, and the other “psychological Westerns” that became a craze in the 1950’s – though John Ford had anticipated them in his marvelous 1926 silent Three Bad Men). Charles was disappointed at the quite obvious papier-maché rocks in the setting of the final confrontation, which he found even more jarring since the film up to that point had been quite handsomely produced and free from the cheap shortcuts that marred all too many “B” Westerns of the 1940’s. But overall Massacre River is a surprisingly good movie, well worth watching; I’m glad we got the chance to see it even if, for my money, Howard Hawks’s 1948 Red River (with pretty-boy and real-life Bisexual Montgomery Clift actually out-butching John Wayne) remains the Gayest pre-Brokeback Mountain Western.

The Lemon Grove Incident (KPBS, 1985)

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

Last night (Monday, January 19) KPBS celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday with a couple of unusual TV shows that made a more appropriate commemoration, at least to my mind, than the four National Basketball Association games in a row NBC was running. The first was The Lemon Grove Incident, a 1985 hour-long TV-movie actually produced by KPBS itself under the supervision of the late Gloria Penner. It dealt with a little-known backwater of San Diego County history: a lawsuit filed against the Lemon Grove school district in 1930 after the school board voted to build a separate and decidedly unequal elementary school for the schoolchildren of Mexican descent. At the time Mexican-American children were just a shade over half of the total enrollment of the Lemon Grove school district, and the all-white school board voted in secret (they held the meeting at the private home of one of the members) to set up a converted barn as a “school” for the Mexican kids. This came at a time when the Great Depression was creating a major anti-immigrant backlash and the Hoover Administration was calling for mass deportations of Mexicans and other Latinos on the ground that they were taking jobs away from deserving white Americans. (Plus ça change, plus ça même chose.) Like the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 and the Trump anti-immigrant campaign of today, the Hoover sweeps targeted anyone who looked brown or spoke English either haltingly or with an accent, without regard as to whether they were undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, or U.S.-born citizens. Apparently the deportation campaign was also assisted by the government of Mexico (which was then under the leadership of one of the country’s most corrupt politicians, Plutarco Elías Calles), in hopes that Mexican farmworkers returning home after stints in the U.S. would have learned American agricultural techniques they could pass on to local growers.

The Mexicans in Lemon Grove had mostly settled in and around Olive Avenue and worked in the lemon and orange orchards that gave the town its name. It’s not entirely clear why the drive to segregate the Mexican students in Lemon Grove took the racist form it did, but it was pushed by the local Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders thought that the presence of a large Mexican community would interfere with their attempts to market Lemon Grove as a desirable place for white people. It was also based on the belief that the presence of Mexican kids in the classroom was harming the education of white children because the Mexicans didn’t speak English well and the teachers had to explain their lessons over and over so the predominantly Spanish-speaking children would understand them. Actually, a lot of the Mexican children were proficient in English and certainly knew it well enough to be able to learn in it (another racist stereotype that refuses to die). The Lemon Grove school board planned to do this in secret, without any advance notice to the Mexican-American parents, and present it as a fait accompli when the new school year started in January 1931. That plan was blown by the school principal, Jerome Green (played in the re-enactments by Donald Browning), who started a public survey to determine just what the Mexican parents would think of having to send their kids to a separate and decidedly unequal school. The first parent presented with Green’s survey, Juan González (played by local Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña), literally tore it up.

On January 5, 1931, Green, under orders from the school board, made the children at Lemon Grove Elementary form two lines and sent the Mexican children to the new “school,” which their parents derisively called La Caballeriza (“The Barn”). There’s one chilling scene in the film that shows the local whites were willing to use the same intimidation tactics regularly employed by white Southerners to stop civil-rights actions: a widow who’s supporting herself and her two children on county relief payments is told by a local truant officer that she will lose that income if she keeps her kids out of school. She asks, “What do you have to do with the county?” – obviously she was aware that the Lemon Grove School District and the County of San Diego were separate entities – but the man tells her, “Word gets around.” The Mexican parents, under the leadership of Gonzålez and Roberto Alvarez, sought a meeting with the Mexican consul in San Diego, who put them in touch with a local attorney named Fred Noon (John Mathers), who agreed to file a lawsuit on their behalf. The film alternates between re-enactments of the trial scenes and fresh interviews with some of the people involved, including Robert Alvarez, Jr., who (probably because of an accident of alphabetization) got to be the first plaintiff in the case. It’s a lucky thing that this film was made in 1985, when many of the original participants were still alive and available for interviews.

Amazingly, the Mexican plaintiffs in Lemon Grove actually won the case – the first time in U.S. history a lawsuit challenging segregation in education had resulted in a legal verdict against it – though at least part of the judge’s ruling is wince-inducing today. He said in his opinion that Mexicans were “of the Caucasian race” and therefore the California laws permitting the segregation of African-American, Asian-American and Native American children didn’t apply to them. A lot of people don’t realize that there was a time in the history of American racism that Mexicans and other Latinos were considered “white.” It’s how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to marry in 1940 despite California’s anti-miscegenation law because they were both “white.” I remember doing research in the early 1990’s on San Diego Gay rights activist Nicole Murray Ramirez in which I and my fellow researcher uncovered his birth certificate, which listed both him and his parents as “white” even though his parents had both been born in Mexico. This explained the long-standing rumor that he was appropriating a Latino identity that wasn’t his; though he actually is Latino, it’s likely a lot of people had got the idea from his birth certificate that he was “white” because that’s what it said on the form. The Lemon Grove school board decided not to appeal their loss in court, partly because the Chamber of Commerce withdrew their financial support on the ground that the suit had already damaged Lemon Grove’s reputation and it would be best for the community if they let the controversy die out. But they got their revenge against Principal Green by firing him when his teaching contract expired.

Atlanta Symphony and Ebenezer Baptist Church: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Concert (Georgia Film Commission, Georgia Public Television, filmed January 20, 2025)

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

After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s long irritated he that this lame piece of music has somehow become the African-American go-to song instead of a work by Duke Ellington, one of Black America’s true musical geniuses, but we seem to be stuck with it. The version was performed by the Atlanta Symphony and a mixed-race choir blended from the Atlanta Symphony’s and Ebenezer Church’s own ones. Then came brief speeches from Raphael Warnock, who in addition to being a U.S. Senator from Georgia is also the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist and therefore has Dr. King’s old job; and the orchestra’s (white, female) executive director, Jennifer Barlamont. After that came a quite remarkable sequence of compositions by young African-Americans, two of whom, Joel Thompson and Carlos Simon, were interviewed on screen. Thompson said that he’d originally been asked to set Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to music, but he’d decided that the speech was already so “musical” he’d have nothing to add to it. Instead, he composed a tone poem called An Act of Resistance which summed up Dr. King’s life’s work and message in purely instrumental terms.

Carlos Simon’s piece was “Lively,” the first movement of a suite he calls Amen! He said the work was inspired by his own childhood in the Pentecostal Church, where his father was a minister and his mother a trombone player. Accordingly he scored the work for three trombones plus orchestra, much the way Duke Ellington had written a hot trombone solo for Lawrence Brown in his song “Goin’ Up” from the 1943 musical film Cabin in the Sky. Simon used the three trombones much the way Ellington had used Brown: to represent a Black minister preaching an ecstatic sermon. During his interview Simon wore a shirt that read, “You Must Be Born Again” – a slogan that’s become associated with a far different sort of Christianity than Dr. King’s. Then came Gregory Porter, who in the online sources for the concert is listed as a jazz singer. He’s considerably more than that: he’s basically a dramatic performer whose music mixes classical, jazz, soul, and rap. Porter’s two pieces on the program, “1960-What?” and “Take Me to the Alley,” celebrated the explosion of the civil-rights movement on white America’s consciousness and King’s Jesus-like instinct to reach out precisely to the poorest and most marginalized people in the community. There was a bit of geographic confusion in “1960-What?,” since the song referenced Dr. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, but Porter also drew on John Lee Hooker’s famous blues ballad “Motor City Burning” and thus located at least part of his song in Detroit. After another brief speech, this one by Ebenezer Baptist’s minister of music, Patrice Turner, the concert continued with two movements of a suite by Margaret Bonds called The Montgomery Variations, after the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that lasted over a year and sparked Dr. King’s emergence as a major civil-rights leader nationwide. Like Carlos Simon’s piece, Margaret Bonds’s was good enough to make me want to hear the whole work sometime (record companies, are you listening?). Then there was a piece by Scott O. Cumberbatch called “Praise the Lord.”

Afterwards gospel singer Tamika Patton came out for a version of Thomas A. Dorsey’s classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which was Dr. King’s favorite song: Mahalia Jackson (who’d been instrumental in Dr. King’s most famous speech; at the 1963 March on Washington he’d been in the middle of a long, ponderous oration on the history of Southern racism and Mahalla hollered in his ear, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!”) sang it at King’s funeral in 1968 and Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral in 1972. Oddly, Patton sped up the tempo in mid-song for a gospel-rock version before slowing it down again, though when she was singing at Dorsey’s original tempo her version approached the eloquence of Mahalia’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s. The next song was Alma Basel Androzzo’s “If I Can Help Somebody,” also known as “My Living Shall Not Be in Vain,” sung by Timothy Miller. Miller was officially listed as a tenor but his voice sounded more like a baritone, or even a bass-baritone, to me, and I thought it had the plangent power of the great 1930’s and 1940’s Black ballad singers like Paul Robeson and Jules Bledsoe. After that came the one misfire of the night: a rather nondescript gospel song by Kurt Carr called “For Every Mountain” that the church’s music director, Patrice Turner, made the mistake of singing herself. She started at the piano but gradually stood up and furiously went into full-blown belt mode on the song, launching high notes like heat-seeking missiles but only rarely on a recognizable pitch. I found myself thinking, “This is what Ethel Merman would have sounded like if she’d been Black.” Fortunately the concert closed with a chorus-and-orchestra arrangement of “We Shall Overcome,” arranged by Uree Brown; it took a while for the melody to emerge from Brown’s rich orchestral textures, but soon enough the choir joined in and luckily the tech people had enough skill the singers’ rendition of the familiar melody rose over Brown’s dense orchestral textures. A number of pieces ended rather abruptly because the producers were rather over-aware of audience applause and tried to edit it out crudely. But overall I was quite impressed by the concert and particularly liked the big orchestral works; indeed, I hope recordings get made of the entire multi-movement pieces Amen! and The Montgomery Variations.