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

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

Last night (Thursday, October 29) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episodes of Dick Wolf’s series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order. The SVU, called “Arcana,” turned out to be an odd, quirky show that begins with self-proclaimed psychic Beatrice Witt (Susannah Flood) giving a reading to a hot-headed middle-aged man who demands to be put in contact with the spirit of his dead mother. All goes reasonably well until he demands to know the whereabouts of the valuable stash of Nikon cameras his late mom owned, and just then Beatrice tells him that she’s lost contact with his mom’s spirit. He gets angry and grabs her wrists, leaving bruises on her arms. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether the main plot (the writer was Brant Englestein, a relative newcomer to Dick Wolf’s franchise) was going to turn out to be that the cameras would be recovered, there would be exposed film inside them, and on one of the rolls would be photographs of a sexually related murder or assault, instead the guy just walks out and the location of the camera stash remains unknown. Later Beatrice Witt complains to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit that she was raped by an unknown assailant who allegedly broke into her home through a window whose lock was broken. The cops come out to investigate and Beatrice assures them that she lives alone except for her seven-year-old daughter Emma (not listed on imdb.com). When the police, in the persons of Captains Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), show up they find there’s a third person there: Sarah Witt (Lisa Emery), Beatrice’s mother, who’s come down with Alzheimer’s and has been locked up inside a room, sort of like the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre. When the police enter her room she literally screams at them.

Eventually it turns out that Sarah’s late husband, Beatrice’s father, was an alcoholic who regularly beat, assaulted, and raped her while “in his cups” until he was killed. The police who investigated his killing at the time assumed that Sarah had killed him in self-defense and she wasn’t prosecuted, but as part of the investigation into Beatrice’s current assault they uncover evidence that Beatrice herself was the killer. She’d picked up dad’s revolver off the floor where he’d dropped it in an alcoholic stupor and used it to knock him off before he could do in her mom. At this point I was wondering whether the payoff would be that dad actually didn’t die; he was still alive and secretly living in the house’s attic (where the police had found evidence of recent habitation), where he could occasionally sneak out and go after Beatrice. Instead Englestein did one of the most annoying tricks a mystery writer can pull: he had the assailant be someone totally unrelated whose existence we had no idea of until he got brought on as a culprit ex machina in the final act. He turns out to be Chris Garibaldi (Bryan Manley Davis), whom Beatrice dated while still in high school and later went crazy and was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life. He’d just got released from his latest incarceration three weeks before and he’d gone back to the Witt home, secretly moved into her attic, obsessed over her and finally made his move on her one night.

This reminded me of a Lifetime movie called Boy in the Attic which I quite liked, and another Lifetime film that also involved a man secretly living in the heroine’s attic that took on an unintended aura of comedy. In fact I reviewed that one on imdb.com and got a rather testy response from someone who said there was nothing funny about the situation and in fact it had been based on a real-life story in which the man in the attic had terrorized the woman who was unknowingly hosting him. The character I felt sorriest for was Sarah’s former caregiver, a hot young Black guy who’d been accused of stealing Sarah’s jewelry and been fired for that by Beatrice – only when the cops finally busted Chris Garibaldi they found all Sarah’s jewels in his attic redoubt and gave it back to Beatrice. There’s also a subplot in which Captain Curry makes her distaste for Beatrice’s line of work clear because after her husband died, her mother had urged her to go to a psychic, and said psychic had told her that her late husband missed her in the afterlife and wanted them to communicate. That raised Curry’s hackles because in this life she and her husband had agreed to separate because they weren’t getting along, which of course reminded me of the plot of the film A Stolen Life (the 1946 Curtis Bernhardt-directed Bette Davis vehicle in which she played twins, and when the bad sister dies the good sister tries to take her place without realizing that the bad sister’s husband, whom the good sister had always wanted, had got tired of her extra-relational activities and was about to divorce her; I reviewed it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-stolen-life-bd-productions-warner.html) which Charles and I had just watched. “That was a weird one,” I acknowledged to Charles afterwards, and of course he agreed.

Law and Order: "Property" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

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

The Law and Order episode my husband Charles and I watched last night (Thursday, October 29) was considerably better than the SVU that preceded it. It was called “Property” and was written by Jennifer Vanderbes and Will Lapp (the latter credited as “staff writer”). It begins with an auction of expensive Middle Eastern and Indonesian artifacts organized by a not bad-looking young man named Andrew Carson (Matt Leisy, who for some reason looks a lot hotter in his imdb.com head shot than he did on the show). For some reason Carson is late to his own auction, and later he turns up dead, murdered in his apartment by being clubbed to death with one of his own statuettes. Vanderbes and Lapp first give us a couple of red herrings: an Afghan-American professor, Abdul Ahad Farhadi (Sevan), who was upset with Carson for selling a statue of the Buddha that had been looted from Afghanistan by the Taliban and would thereby be able to finance their inhumane regime; and a Black rapper who accused Carson of selling him an ancient Egyptian mask that turned out to be a fake. The police, in the persons of detectives Theo Walker (David Ajala) and Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale), then turn their attention to the two women in Carson’s life (at least the two women we know about; we’re told that he was an inveterate womanizer and that was at least part of the reason his marriage broke up): his ex-wife Caroline Sanders (Kate Siegel) and his current girlfriend Lucy Butler (Vivian True). The episode’s story takes a weird right turn in the second “Order” part of the story; Caroline Sanders turns out to have killed her husband and faked an elaborate false alibi to cover for it. But her motive was to protect the frozen embryos she and Carson had conceived via in vitro fertilization either just before or just after she got cancer and therefore could no longer have children the normal way. She was waiting for her oncologists to declare her cancer-free so she could have one or more of the embryos implanted and thereby fulfill her lifelong dream of being a mother. Only Andrew had meanwhile unilaterally decided not only to leave her but to have the embryos destroyed because New York is a “two-party state” in regards to IVF: the embryos could only be implanted if both biological parents agreed to it. Yet the embryos were being stored at a facility in Pennsylvania, which only requires one-party consent for any decision involving embryos, frozen or otherwise.

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battled royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battles royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)

The Greatest (Columbia, EMI Films, John Marshall Productions, 1977)

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

Last night (Wednesday, October 28) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of interesting films, 1977’s The Greatest on Turner Classic Movies and 1947’s Desire Me on a DVD I’d ordered from Amazon.com and had just got in the day’s mail. The Greatest was a biopic of legendary boxing champion, Nation of Islam member, and anti-war activist Muhammad Ali in which Ali played himself (quite credibly, too) and various members of his entourage also appeared as themselves. It was directed by Tom Gries, a quirky filmmaker best known for his 1968 Western Will Penny, starring Charlton Heston. The film’s closing credits announce that Gries died on January 3, 1977 and it was dedicated to his memory. Apparently Gries lived long enough to finish the actual shooting, but he died before post-production was complete and another director, Monte Hellman, was called in to get the film into releasable form. The Greatest is also known as the movie for which the song “The Greatest Love of All” was written; it was composed by Michael Masser (who also did the film’s background score) with lyrics by Linda Creed, and it was sung under the credits by George Benson. Masser gave an interview in which he explained the inspiration for the song: “Here was a man who wanted to change his name and religion. That’s all. Ali hadn’t believed in the war in Viet Nam and had refused to fight in it. He won that battle through the legal system. Still, he lost everything—including his title. But Ali retained the most important thing of all—his dignity.” The song is best known today for Whitney Houston’s stunning cover, recorded in 1984 and released in 1985, and compared to hers Benson’s sounds pretty lame, but there’s another song in The Greatest, “I Always Knew I Had It In Me,” also sung by Benson (over the film’s closing credits) with lyrics by Carole King’s ex, Gerry Goffin. I ignored The Greatest when it first came out because I assumed it was nothing more than a cheap, crudely made exploitation film. In fact it’s a quite capable piece of filmmaking, written by Ring Lardner, Jr. and an uncredited Bill Gunn (a Black writer and friend of James Dean’s), and unlike a lot of celebrities who got cast as themselves, Ali actually does a creditable job in the role. It helps that the real Ali was such a theatrical person he was already enough of an actor to pull off the task of playing himself.

The film was based on a memoir, The Greatest: My Own Story, Ali co-authored with Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad and Ali’s manager for a time) and Richard Durham, which Ali had published in 1975. Its story takes Ali from his gold-medal win at the 1960 Olympics in Rome (when he was still known as Cassius Clay, Jr., a name he got from the 19th century abolitionist leader and son of Senator Henry Clay; I ran across him in Irving Stone’s historical novel Love Is Eternal, about President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, because the 19th century Cassius Clay had briefly dated Todd before she married Lincoln) to the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire (before and since known as Congo) in 1974 in which he finally regained the heavyweight world’s championship that had been stripped from him in 1967 when he defeated George Foreman, who had previously taken the title from Ali’s nemesis, Joe Frazier. The teenage Cassius Clay is played by Chip McAllister, whose resemblance to the real Ali is uncanny. According to TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Donald Bogle (a Black writer who’s written extensively on the history of African-Americans in U.S. films), The Greatest was a sufficiently prestigious productions a lot of major stars, both Black and white, wanted to be in it. The cast includes Ernest Borgnine as Ali’s long-time trainer, Angelo Dundee; James Earl Jones as Malcolm X; Roger E. Mosley (who’d played Leadbelly in Gordon Parks’s 1976 biopic of the great blues singer) as Sonny Liston; and Robert Duvall as Bill McDonald, who warns Ali to keep quiet about his change of name and religion (from Christianity to Islam, or at least the oddball variant of Islam practiced by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam) until after his first heavyweight title fight against Liston. Where The Greatest succeeds most effectively is in dramatizing the sheer extent of the racism Ali had to deal with every day as a young Black man in Louisville, Kentucky (including having to deal with an obnoxious white guy on the grounds of his original white female senior-citizen mentor who orders him off the premises until Clay convinces his Black colleague that he’s been invited) and later (when he’s at a resort cabin warming up for his latest fight, Ali and his entourage are attacked by a white lynch mob with rifles and barely escape with their lives). One wonders watching this movie why more African-Americans didn’t join revolutionary movements and why the mainstream civil-rights movement stayed nonviolent as long as it did.

One item I wish they’d included was the comeback Ali gave to people who questioned how he could be a conscientious objector to military service when he made his living in a violent sport like boxing. Ali said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” Also I’m a bit sorry that they chose to open the film with his 1960 Olympic win if only because I’d like it to have included the marvelous story of how Ali got into boxing in the first place. As a child, when two white kids stole his new bicycle, Clay hunted them down and threatened to beat them up – until a white police officer intervened. The policeman offered to take him to a gym to show him a more constructive and socially sanctioned way to get out his aggressive urges. Fortunately, since Ali was playing himself, Gries could use actual footage of his fights to represent them, though I could have done without the cheesy music Masser put under the clips (from the awkward moment in Black musical history when disco was just starting to emerge from what had been R&B and soul). Overall, though, The Greatest was quite good entertainment, and in the scenes dramatizing Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army over his principled opposition to the Viet Nam War it gets even better than that. Ali, Gries, Lardner, and Gunn do a great job showing both Ali’s principles (at one point someone in the U.S. military says that if he cooperates with the draft they’ll use Ali as a morale booster the way they did with Joe Louis in World War II and he won’t have to see combat, and Ali says that would still be supporting a war he doesn’t believe in) and their enormous cost, including being banned from his chosen profession during his potentially peak years. There was a later fiction film about Ali called simply Ali (2001), with Michael Mann directing and Will Smith playing him, and somewhere in my collection I have a two-DVD set containing both The Greatest and Ali. There’ve also been a number of documentaries, including a quite good four-part PBS presentation from 2013 (three years before Ali’s death) produced and directed by Ken Burns.

Desire Me (MGM, 1947)

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

After The Greatest on Wednesday, October 28 my husband Charles and I watched a highly quirky 1947 romantic melodrama from MGM called Desire Me, starring Greer Garson, Robert Mitchum, and a new discovery named Richard Hart whom MGM had great hopes for, judging from how they promoted him in the trailer. The film began life as a 1926 novel by German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank called Carl and Anna, and the screenwriting credits are Casey Robinson for “adaptation” and Marguerite Roberts and Zoë Akins for the actual script. At one point Robinson had refused to take credit for any screenwriting he hadn’t done entirely by himself; he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca but, because he declined credit, he did himself out of the Academy Award won by Casablanca’s other writers, Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. I guess Robinson learned his lesson, and indeed the plots of Casablanca and Desire Me have one major commonality: they both feature heroines who have adulterous affairs but don’t realize they’re doing so because they think their husbands are dead. Desire Me takes place on an island off the coast of Brittany in northern France, and the heroine is Marise Aubert (Greer Garson, who’s referred to as a redhead in the dialogue; she was a redhead for real, too, but we hardly ever got to see her that way because she made so few films in color). She had been born and raised in Paris until she met Paul Aubert (Robert Mitchum), who married her and brought her back to the fishing village in Brittany where he’d grown up. Then World War II started and Paul got into the French army, only he didn’t serve very long because he was quickly taken prisoner by the Germans and put in what was called a “reprisal camp,” a particularly nasty POW camp reserved for troublemakers who tried to escape multiple times. Paul befriended a fellow prisoner named Jean Renaud (Richard Hart), who before the war had been a scapegrace thief in Paris, and told him extensive details about his life in Brittany that made Jean fall in long-distance love with Marise despite not having met her. Then the two try to escape from the prison camp, only they’re recaptured by the Germans and Paul is apparently killed.

All this happens in the backstory or in a few flashback scenes; the entire movie is a flashback told by Marise to her doctor in Paris, André Leclair (veteran character actor Cecil Humphreys), and as is typical for a Robinson script there are flashbacks within the flashback. When the film opens the war has just ended and Marise is still living on the island and mourning the loss of Paul. Jean shows up and uses his extensive knowledge of her life with Paul to seduce her (though given the limitations of the Production Code it’s almost certain they don’t get to do the down ‘n’ dirty with each other), and midway through the film they’re preparing to get married and flee with each other to Paris when Paul turns up, not dead after all. Naturally he’s fiercely jealous of Jean, and the two have a long confrontation scene in which Jean is armed with a gun and Paul with a knife. Jean tries to shoot Paul but keeps missing him – Paul grimly jokes that Jean was never any good with a gun, and that’s probably why he was so easily captured by the Germans in the first place – and eventually Jean falls off a cliff into the sea and drowns. Then the film cuts back to the scene between Marise and her doctor in Paris; Dr. Leclair assures her that there’s nothing wrong with her physically, and in the end she returns to Brittany and reunites with Paul. What makes Desire Me a particularly strange movie is that there isn’t a director credit: just the writers and producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. (whose name is in cursive script, as was usual for him). According to imdb.com, four directors actually worked on the film: Jack Conway, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, and Victor Saville. The cinematographer was Joseph Ruttenberg, and as Charles pointed out afterwards, though it’s really a Gothic melodrama rather than a film noir Desire Me looks more like a noir than some of the borderline cases Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller has been showing lately.

The entire musical score by Herbert Stothart is based on a French sing called “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir,” written by Johnny Hess, which though it isn’t sung on the soundtrack serves much the same purpose as “As Time Goes By” did in Casablanca. Its bittersweet lyrics not only don’t reflect the plot but actually seem at cross purposes with it; it’s about a man who sees his ex on the street and is miffed that she makes no sign of recognition towards him (the title literally means “You who pass by without seeing me”), while Marise has the opposite problem: two actual or potential mates instead of zero. (There’s another pre-existing song in the film: Maurice Chevalier’s 1925 hit “Valentine,” composed by Henri Christiné with lyrics by Albert Willemetz, which Marise plays as an instrumental on the piano in her cottage.) Desire Me has obvious references not only to Casablanca but a previous Garson vehicle, Random Harvest, filmed in 1942 with Ronald Colman co-starring as a World War I veteran who suffers from amnesia that causes him temporarily to forget that they were a couple before the war. Incidentally, while filming one of the beachfront storm scenes with Richard Hart, Greer Garson was swept up by a wave and injured her back so severely she spent several years and some painful surgeries to recover. Also an imdb.com “Trivia” item reports that “it took Greer Garson dozens of takes to enunciate the word ‘no’ to the director’s satisfaction. Co-star Robert Mitchum claimed later that this incident was when he first stopped taking Hollywood seriously.” One wonders which director that was; the incident anticipates what Billy Wilder put Marilyn Monroe through on the set of Some Like It Hot when he had her repeat the line, “Where’s the bourbon?,” over 64 takes. Desire Me is not by any standards a great, or even particularly good, movie (and one wonders why Robert Mitchum gets second billing when he only has about 20 minutes of screen time), but it has a haunting quality that makes up for its deficiencies and renders it surprisingly watchable.

A Stolen Life (B.D. Productions, Warner Bros., 1946)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 27) my husband Charles and I watched a quite intriguing Bette Davis vehicle from Warner Bros., A Stolen Life (1946), in which she was cast in a dual role as Kathleen and Patricia Bosworth, twin sisters from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The film was at least nominally produced by Davis’s own company, “B.D. Productions,” though like Rita Hayworth’s “Beckworth” (named for Hayworth and her daughter Rebecca Welles) it was really just a tax dodge. When the film was shot it was 1944, World War II was still going on, and the federal government (back when we still had a progressive government that believed in taxing the rich and making them pay their fair share) imposed a top income tax rate of 90 percent. As the highest-paid woman in America Davis qualified, and so like Hayworth and a number of other stars of that era, she formed a dummy corporation in partnership with the head of her studio so her fee for the film could be considered a capital gain, not a salary, and therefore subject to only 25 percent tax. “B.D. Productions” was supposed to produce six films at Warner Bros.’s expense and for their release, but this one was the only one made under that banner. Davis and director Curtis Bernhardt, whom she requested after she’d seen his film My Reputation starring Barbara Stanwyck, clashed in subsequent years over who had actually produced the film, though Davis in her first autobiography, The Lonely Life, complained that even though she was the nominal producer, she still had to fight Jack Warner every step of the way over every creative decision, and if that was producing, “I had been a mogul for years.” Davis chose a story that had started out in 1935 as a Czech novel called Uloupený život (which literally translates to “A Stolen Life”) by Karel Josef Beneš. It had previously been filmed in 1939 by Orion Productions, released by British Paramount, under the same title with Paul Czinner directing and Elisabeth Bergner and Michael Redgrave as the leads.

A Stolen Life takes place in New Bedford, Massachusetts (also the location from which Herman Melville’s Moby Dick starts) and deals with twin sisters, Patricia and Kathleen Bosworth (both played by Bette Davis). In essence it’s a typical Davis vehicle which casts her as a bad girl who takes the good girl’s boyfriend away from her, though the big novelty is that Davis is playing the good girl, too. Kathleen, an aspiring artist who moved to New York, comes back to New Bedford and misses the ferry to the island where Patricia is living with their uncle, Freddie Linley (Charlie Ruggles, odd casting for a part that is specifically not played for comic relief). She catches a ride from Bill Emerson (Glenn Ford), assistant to lighthouse keeper Eben Folger (Walter Brennan in a “with” performance; Brennan was infamous for asking his directors, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” he’d say, “Teeth”). Katie (as she’s called through most of the film) instantly falls in love with Bill. She also buys a ship in a bottle that Eben Folger had coveted for years and offers to give it to him if he’ll pose for her for three hours every day for three weeks, though later she admits that she didn’t have any particular interest in painting him and only made the offer to have an excuse to visit the lighthouse so she could see Bill. (Incidentally the name “Folger” for the Brennan character ties this film directly to New England’s real-life history as a whaling center; my stepfather was named Folger and he told me he had descended from a whaling family in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. He even once gave me an American Heritage book about whaling that mentioned some of his ancestors.)

Alas, when Katie makes a lunch date with Bill, her sister Pat (who Bill had had no idea existed) snaps him up and poaches him. She does worse than that: she totally enthralls Bill and gets him to marry her, though what he doesn’t know is that not only is she still seeing her previous boyfriend, Jack Talbot (Bruce Bennett), she’s had a long history of casual affairs. Katie slinks back to New York and wins enough of a reputation as an artist a gallery gives her a one-woman show (and gives her portrait of Eben Folger top pride of place). But her show is attended by a much more talented (though also with a major attitude) artist, Karnock (Dane Clark), and she eventually decides she’s no more than a third-rate artist. So she gives up her career and moves back to New Bedford, where Pat is still ensconced with Bill. Katie and Pat go out together on a sailing boat, whereupon a storm ex machina comes along and one of the sisters drowns. Katie tries desperately to save Pat’s life, but eventually she loses control and Pat dies, though in the process Pat’s wedding ring came off and ended up in Katie’s palm. The officials who rescue Katie naturally think she’s Pat, and Katie decides to steal her late sister’s life and continue to live as Pat, including being married to Bill, who of course was the man Katie loved all along. Then she learns that Bill had already decided to divorce Pat because of her “manizing” ways and history of extra-relational activities. Stuck as to what to do now, she seeks the advice of her uncle Freddie, who tells her that she’ll only be happy if she tells the truth about who she is and trusts Bill to be understanding – which he is. Eventually they end up in a clinch as the film fades out, though one wonders how Katie and Bill are going to handle having to get married first when all the world thinks Katie is Pat and she and Bill are already married.

The double-exposure shots of the two Bette Davises are utterly convincing, though director Bernhardt had a major advantage. Bette Davis was using a stand-in named Sally Sage who was virtually a dead ringer for her, and whenever one Davis has her back to the camera it was always Sage doubling for her. For scenes in which both sisters face the camera at the same time, they used traditional split screens. (Four special-effects people were credited: Russell Collings, Roy Davidson, William C. McGann, and Willard Van Enger.) The effects were so convincing that the next time Bette Davis made a film playing two sisters, 1964’s Dead Ringer, its director, longtime friend and former co-star Paul Henried, sought out Bernhardt to ask how they’d done the shots with two Bette Davises. When the film was released an anonymous reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle write that it was “a challenge to an actress but not a very rewarding drama. It is filled with emotional high spots and it scores an exciting melodramatic climax, but it fails utterly to be convincing.” That about sums it up; it’s a great showcase for Bette Davis, who finally got to play both good and bad in the same film, but it’s a rambling movie with great scenes alternating with some pretty banal ones. Still, I’d seen it before and it was nice to catch up with it again.

North by Northwest (MGM, 1959)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 25) my husband Charles and I watched an Alfred Hitchcock double feature on Turner Classic Movies. First we turned on the 1959 classic North by Northwest as the final film in their all-day tribute to its female star, Eva Marie Saint, who’d died October 6 at age 102. Then the “Silent Sunday Nights” feature was 1926’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, first and best of the five films based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s (Hiliare Belloc’s sister) 1913 novel inspired by a chance remark made by a guest at one of the Lowndes’s parties: “I think I might have had Jack the Ripper as a lodger in my boarding house.” I’ve already written extensively about The Lodger recently enough (October 17, 2022) at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lodger-story-of-london-fog.html that I don’t feel I need to repeat myself other than to note at least two oddball titles, both said by other characters describing the mystery lodger (Ivor Novello). One ran something like, “It’s good he doesn’t go for the ladies,” and another said, “He’s queer, but he’s a real gentleman.” I wondered if the title writers (Elliot Stannard got screenplay credit but often in the silent era the title cards were written by someone other than the overall screenwriter) were playing the same game I’ve long suspected some of Rock Hudson’s writers were doing at Universal in the 1950’s: sneaking veiled but unmistakable references to their star’s real-life status as a Gay man into their dialogue. As for North by Northwest, it had one of the most unusual geneses of any Hitchcock project. MGM had borrowed Hitchcock from Paramount, his usual studio at the time, to make a film called The Wreck of the Mary Deare, based on a 1956 novel by Hammond Innes about a derelict vessel found in the English Channel. MGM assigned writer Ernest Lehman to work with Hitchcock on adapting this novel, but after three weeks neither Hitchcock nor Lehman were satisfied with the results. Lehman went up to Hitchcock and told him that, despite his long-held desire to work with him, he was quitting the film because he really couldn’t relate to the story they were supposed to be making. “Don’t be silly,” Hitchcock said. “We get along so well together, we’ll simply do something else.”

The two began brainstorming ideas for typical Hitchcock action sequences, and Hitchcock said rather ruefully, “I’ve always wanted to do a chase scene across the faces of Mount Rushmore.” Eventually Hitchcock and Lehman came up with a list of sequences, but they still didn’t have a way to connect them to a story that made sense. Then Hitchcock remembered that at one point journalist Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. had suggested to him that he make a film about a nonexistent secret agent made up by the CIA or some other country’s spy agency to cover up for a really existing agent, and he and Lehman got the idea that the central character of their film could be mistaken for this dummy agent and be pursued by the real bad guys the dummy had ostensibly been after. But who should the central character be? At first Hitchcock and Lehman thought of making him an entertainer and casting either Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin in the role, but they decided that those personalities would be too well known to be mistaken for someone else. Later Hitchcock told the plot of North by Northwest to James Stewart, star of his immediately previous film, Vertigo, and Stewart immediately fell in love with the story and wanted to play the lead. But by then Hitchcock and Lehman had already decided that the right man for the part was Cary Grant, though they waited to start the film until Stewart was already tied up with Otto Preminger’s film Anatomy of a Murder and would therefore be unable to do anything else. (MGM actually asked Hitchcock to use Gregory Peck, whom Hitchcock had already worked with before on Spellbound and The Paradine Case, but Hitchcock thought he was too stiff for the role.) Eva Marie Saint got into the film similarly; after Grant asked Sophia Loren to play it and Loren turned it down, other names mentioned included Elizabeth Taylor and Hitchcock’s own choice, Vertigo star Kim Novak. Hitchcock was reportedly nervous about using Saint because she’d been a graduate of Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, which taught the “Method” style of acting. Hitchcock had had bad experiences the last time he’d worked with a Method actor, Montgomery Clift on I Confess. They had fought throughout the shoot because Clift kept resisting Hitchcock’s directions and asking things like the archetypal Method actor’s question, “What’s my motivation?” But Hitchcock and Saint got along quite well; all he asked from her was that she drop the register of her voice a bit, and she agreed. When both Hitchcock and Saint saw the costumes Edith Head had designed for her character, neither liked them, so Hitchcock flew her to New York City and bought a whole new wardrobe for her at Bergdorf Goodman’s. It’s been reported that Hitchcock meticulously picked out her purchases for her the way James Stewart did with Kim Novak in the plot of Vertigo, but according to Saint herself, he didn’t. Instead he let her buy anything he wanted, and Saint called Hitchcock “my sugar daddy – and I mean that in a good way.”

North by Northwest opens in New York’s Plaza Hotel (before the Beatles stayed there and well before Donald Trump’s miserable stint as its owner), where advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for nonexistent spy “George Kaplan.” (Thornhill explains that he doesn’t have a middle name – the “O” doesn’t stand for anything – an in-joke reference to Hitchcock’s former employer, David Selznick, who also gave himself “O” as a middle initial even though he didn’t have a given middle name.) He’s kidnapped by two well-dressed gunmen and taken to the home of Lester Townsend in Glen Cove in upstate New York. The piece’s villain, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), poses as Townsend and interrogates Thornhill, who doesn’t know anything about “Kaplan” or any of the things Vandamm is asking him about. One of the thugs force-feeds Thornhill with liquor and sends him out in a neighbor’s Cadillac convertible, with the idea that he’ll be unable to steer the car and will eventually get killed in a drunk-driving crash. Instead he survives but is arrested by the Glen Cove police for drunk driving. Thornhill’s mother Clara (Jessie Royce Landis, who had previously played Grace Kelly’s mother in an earlier Hitchcock/Grant film, To Catch a Thief) sends defense attorney Victor Larrabee (Edward Platt, who a few years later would be the head of the spy agency CONTROL on the spoof TV series Get Smart!, and whose assistant would be called “Larrabee” in an in-joke reference to his role in this film) to bail him out. Thornhill and his mom sneak into “Kaplan”’s empty room at the Plaza, followed by the thugs. Having learned along the way that Townsend is a United Nations official who’s scheduled to address the General Assembly that afternoon, the Thornhills head for the U.N. building and page the real Townsend – who turns out to be a totally different person from the one who ordered Thornhill’s abduction. What’s more, the real Townsend immediately gets killed by a knife thrown by one of Vandamm’s thugs – and Thornhill pulls the knife out of Townsend’s back. He’s immediately suspected of Townsend’s murder and is photographed with the knife in his hand. Now he’s a fugitive from justice, in the same predicament as previous Hitchcock heroes like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Robert Cummings in Saboteur. Thornhill tries to buy a ticket for the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, the next stop on “Kaplan”’s itinerary, but when the clerk at the counter recognizes him from the newspaper photographs of Townsend’s alleged killer and calls the police, Thornhill sneaks aboard the train without a ticket.

There he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides him out first in the train car’s restroom (having traveled on trains and used their bathrooms a lot, I related to these scenes more than I have before!) and then in Chicago after the police try to arrest him. She receives a phone call, allegedly from “Kaplan,” setting up a meeting between them at a deserted bus stop in the middle of Indiana. (Hitchcock and Lehman worked out this famous scene because, as Hitchcock said, “People in movies are always being ambushed after dark on deserted city streets. Let’s do one in totally the opposite way: alone in broad daylight.”) A nervous Thornhill first awaits “Kaplan,” then realizes that it's a trap and he’s been put into danger. But from where? He gets the clue he needs from a passer-by who’s waiting for the next bus at the stop where Thornhill came off and points out, “There’s a plane over there dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” The crop duster turns out to be a paid assassin, part of Vandamm’s gang, and Thornhill is saved only when the pilot of the crop dusting plane loses control and crashes into an oil truck. Thornhill, sure that Eve has betrayed him to Vandamm, traces her to an art auction, where Vandamm and his men corner him. Vandamm and his gang are there to buy an Asian statuette that’s full of microfilm containing secrets they’ve stolen and are selling to unspecified foreign powers. (This is one Hitchcock film in which what he called the “MacGuffin” – the all-important object the villains are after but the audience couldn’t care less about – is even more pretextural and less relevant than usual.) Realizing that he has no other way to get out of the auction room alive, Thornhill stars disrupting it by bidding in crazy ways so he’ll be arrested by real, legitimate police rather than assassinated by Vandamm’s thugs. The cops turn him over to “The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll), head of the spy agency that created “George Kaplan” in the first place (which we’ve already learned about in a surprisingly boring expository scene both Hitchcock and Lehman should have been ashamed of). He also recruited Eve Kendall as their real agent to bring down Vandamm, who as a playgirl she previously fell for because of his surface charm and only later realized how evil he really was. “The Professor” gives Eve a blank-loaded gun and has her shoot Thornhill in a mock assassination attempt at the visitors’ center for Mount Rushmore, where Vandamm lives in a spectacular house copied from Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous designs (though actually a model built by the MGM sets and props departments). This is supposed to convince Vandamm that Eve is still on his side, but it doesn’t work because Vandamm’s right-hand man Leonard (Martin Landau) is convinced that she’s betrayed them to the U.S. government.

Interestingly, it was Martin Landau’s idea to portray Leonard as a Gay man in love with Vandamm and personally jealous of Eve. James Mason didn’t like the idea of being pushed into playing Vandamm as a Bisexual with Eve as his girlfriend and Leonard as his boyfriend, but he was stuck with it because Hitchcock and Lehman both supported it. Indeed, Lehman actually gave Landau an extra line in which he tells Vandamm that he's sure Eve has betrayed them because it’s “my woman’s intuition,” and later Vandamm, refusing to believe Leonard’s warnings that Eve has gone over to the other side, says, “You’re jealous!” (Landau later told interviewers that he wanted to play Leonard as Gay because he’d just come off playing a really butch heterosexual on stage in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night, and for his first film he wanted to do something totally different. “Everyone told me not to do that because it was my first big movie and people would think I was Gay,” Landau recalled. “I’m an actor. I said it wasn’t going to be my last movie, and it certainly wasn’t. I’ve never played a character like that since.”) The famous climax takes place across the faces of Mount Rushmore, and Hitchcock repeated a setup he’d done 22 years earlier in the film Young and Innocent with Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam: Eve is dangling from a precipice on the mountaintop and Thornhill has to summon his last bit of strength to pull her to safety. Then Hitchcock cuts suddenly to a scene of Thornhill pulling Eve, now his (third) wife, into the upper berth of a Pullman car on a train, which in a stunningly phallic shot goes into a tunnel: the sort of thing directors working under the Production Code limitations had to work out to indicate sexuality without being able to depict it directly. My husband Charles joked it was the most dramatic jump-cut in a movie until the one between the ape throwing the bone and the spacecraft in the sky in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hitchcock also had run-ins with the officials at the National Park Service who ran Mount Rushmore. They were especially down on him for wanting to do a scene in which Thornhill would have a sneezing fit while hiding in President Lincoln’s nose. For a while Hitchcock had even wanted to call the film The Man in Lincoln’s Nose, but the Park Service officials vetoed it. Hitchcock responded by ordering MGM to remove the credit thanking the National Park Service for their cooperation during the filming, though some prints contain it. The working title was In a Northwesterly Direction, after Hitchcock and Lehman both realized that that was indeed the direction in which they’d had Thornhill and Eve travel, but they realized that sounded clunky and ultimately they settled on North by Northwest, though both director and writer insisted they did not mean it as a reference to the line in Act II, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Also Hitchcock had a run-in with MGM executives when he turned in a release cut that ran 136 minutes. MGM’s “suits” wanted it cut to under two hours, but Hitchcock re-read his contract and noted that, even without him specifically asking for it, Hitchcock’s agents had won him final cut, so he was able to tell the folks at MGM to screw themselves and the film went out with only a few seconds removed from Hitchcock’s cut. It was a major box-office success and helped make up for the failure of Hitchcock’s two immediately previous films, The Wrong Man and Vertigo. North by Northwest is also remarkable for Bernard Herrmann’s music, which is so strong that one DVD edition of the film gave you the option of watching it with only Herrmann’s score on the soundtrack: no dialogue or effects noises. I was also amused to note this time around that three actors in the supporting cast went on to play leads in TV series dealing with the same plot issues of espionage and intrigue as this movie: Leo G. Carroll went on to play the head of the United Nations Committee on Law Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.) on both The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. Martin Landau went on to play a lead in Mission: Impossible, and Edward Platt became the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond spoof Get Smart! North by Northwest is one of Hitchcock’s greatest “chase” movies, and while frankly I like Hitchcock better in what I call his “suspense of character” mode – in stories like Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, Rear Window, and Vertigo in which he’s using suspense technique to reveal the characters to us and not just excite us with thrilling chase sequences – it’s great fun and, in the slow development of the relationship between Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters, more than that. There’s a revealing quote from Hitchcock offered by Lehman, who said that while they were working on it the director told him, “Ernie, do you realize what we’re doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way, and someday we won’t even have to make a movie, there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons and they'll go ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaah’ and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?” That explains why later, when Hitchcock visited the psychiatry labs at UCLA to check whether the script of his next film, Psycho, was scientifically accurate, he saw a lab in which the researchers had attached electrodes to lab monkeys and were using them to stimulate immediate emotional responses in them. “Oh, great!” Hitchcock said, “Once you learn to do that with people, I won’t have to make movies anymore!”

The House on Telegraph Hill (20th Century-Fox, 1951)

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

Last night (October 24, 2026) my husband Charles and I watched a bizarre and ultimately unsatisfying film from 1951 called The House on Telegraph Hill on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, though for some reason they didn’t show Muller’s usual intro and outro but went right into the film itself, and right out of it again once it ended. Directed by Robert Wise and written by Elick Moll and Frank Partos from a 1948 novel called The Frightened Child by Dana Lyon (her full name was Mabel Dana Lyon but she dropped her first name professionally, sort of like James Paul McCartney). It’s really much more of a Gothic melodrama than a film noir, and it got quite good reviews when it was released (New York Times reviewer wrote that it was “an effective tale of evil intent that adds up to good entertainment”) but doesn’t hold up that well today. It begins with a brief bit of narration by the central character, Polish internee Victoria Kowalska (Italian actress Valentina Cortese, playing a Pole on Hollywood’s usual assumption that one foreign accent was as good as another), showing off two houses. One is the titular house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, which has a “For Sale” sign in front while Victoria explains it’s the house she thought would be a refuge for her. The other is her own house in Warsaw, which was bombed by Nazi German forces at the start of World War II, where her husband and her entire family were killed. Then we catch up to Victoria in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany, where she befriends a fellow prisoner named Karin Demakova (Natasha Lytess, best known as Marilyn Monroe’s early dramatic coach and, it’s rumored, her Lesbian lover). Karin tells Victoria that she has an aunt who lives in San Francisco who’s raising her son Chris (Gordon Gebert), and is hoping to rejoin her after the Allies finally liberate the camp and let everyone go. Unfortunately, Karin dies just a few days before the Allies liberate Belsen and Victoria steals her ID papers and decides to pass herself off as Karin, get sent to San Francisco, and escape the round-robin of refugee camps through which most concentration-camp survivors went. Along the way she’s interviewed by two Allied officers, one of whom addresses her in German while the other, Major Marc Bennett (William Lundigan), speaks to her in English after she reveals she learned it in school.

Alas, when she gets to New York she receives a cable dated May 31, 1945 that says her (or Karin’s) Aunt Sophia is dead. In New York she meets Alan Spender (Richard Basehart), a distant relative of Sophia’s, and arranges with him to get the documents making her an heir to Aunt Sophia’s estate and the legal guardian of 11-year-old Chris. While she’s in New York Alan starts dating her and, at least partially because it will be easier for her to stay in the U.S. if she marries an American citizen, they get hitched and move to San Francisco to the big house on Telegraph Hill. Once she settles into the house she meets Margaret (Fay Baker), Chris’s governess, who takes an instant Mrs. Danvers-esque dislike to her. She manages to break the ice with Chris by offering him ice cream and cake just before he goes to bed – though Margaret says that’s against house rules and pressures Chris to decline the snack – and playing catch with him on the grounds of the estate. Only one afternoon she misses the ball and discovers an old playhouse where Chris used to play until a fire severely damaged it. Chris tells Victoria that the playhouse caught fire after he inadvertently caused an explosion with a chemistry set. Both Chris and Margaret tell Victoria not to tell Alan about the fire, but Alan already knows about it. Later Victoria goes back to the ruined playhouse to explore it (and Charles laughed out loud that she did this while wearing high heels), only she loses her footing and is about to plunge through the burned-out floor when Alan rescues her in time. At one point Alan offers to take her to dinner and a movie, and I joked that the movie was going to be a double bill of Rebecca and Gaslight, two earlier (and much better!) movies of which this one was reminding me. Then Victoria is scheduled to take Chris to an afternoon baseball game, only at the last minute she bails out on the mission and Margaret takes him instead. Victoria goes off in the family car to do some grocery shopping, only in the middle of her drive the brakes to her car suddenly stop working – an especially dangerous situation in a notoriously hilly city like San Francisco – and though she’s relatively unharmed, the car crashes onto a dirt embankment made by a construction crew. The mechanic who fixes the car suspects that the brake fluid line was cut deliberately.

Meanwhile, Marc Bennett has moved to San Francisco and set up a law practice in the city. He makes no secret of his attraction to Victoria, though they don’t act on it (this being a Production Code-era movie), and she confesses to him that she’s not really Karin Dernakova even though she’s living in Karin’s identity. Gradually Victoria becomes convinced that Alan is deliberately trying to kill her; she attempts to reach out to Marc for advice, but Alan continually shows up and/or answers his attempts to return her panicked phone calls. Victoria breaks the lock on an elaborate scrapbook that contains a newspaper clipping which establishes the date of Sophia’s death as June 3, 1945 – three days after Alan sent the cable announcing that she was dead already. From this Victoria deduces that Alan murdered Sophia to grab her fortune, only his plan was complicated by her sudden appearance as “Karin.” Ultimately Alan, who’s after Sophia’s fortune (he’s bitter at having literally been the black sheep of the family, the one who had no money) and is determined to kill everyone in between him and inheriting it, attempts to kill Victoria by feeding her a glass of poisoned orange juice, but Victoria tricks him into drinking the poisoned glass himself. Margaret is arrested by police for not having helped save Alan, and at the end Victoria hooks up with Marc and the two of them, along with Chris, leave San Francisco to start a new life as a family. The House on Telegraph Hill is one of those movies that seems to have been assembled, Frankenstein’s monster-style, from bits and pieces of older and considerably better films. Early on Charles joked that it looked like The Old Dark House, and while it has little in common with James Whale’s 1932 horror-comedy masterpiece there are plenty of films it does evoke, notably the aforementioned Rebecca and Gaslight. Even the business with the heroine tricking the villain into drinking the poison intended for her was done 19 years earlier and considerably better by director Clarence Brown, writers Marie Belloc Lowndes, John Meehan, and Wanda Tuchock, and star Joan Crawford in the recently rediscovered film Letty Lynton.

Oddly, the first half of The House on Telegraph Hill is considerably better than the second; the opening looks like an Italian neo-realist film and the Rebecca-ish intrigues in the early scenes in San Francisco, especially between Valentina Cortese and Fay Baker, are considerably more interesting than the rest. Once the writers start dropping hints that Alan Spender is not the solicitous husband he seemed but a cold-hearted killer, the films turns a lot flatter and more ordinary and dreary. It also doesn’t help that Richard Basehart and William Lundigan look so much alike; through much of the movie it’s unclear which of the two men in Victoria’s life is solicitous and wants to help her, and which wants to kill her. It’s also amazing that Robert Wise made this incredibly lame movie in the same year, and for the same studio (20th Century-Fox), as his quiet, understated science-fiction masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still. Early on in the scenes in the concentration camp I joked to Charles, “This film started at 11, and it’s already up to 20 by now.” The House on Telegraph Hill isn’t thematically a film noir – at least once we know which ones are which, the good guys are 100 percent good, the bad guys are 100 percent bad, and Margaret is the only truly conflicted character (not that Fay Baker has much of a chance to show that!). Despite beautiful Gothic cinematography by Lucien Ballard, it’s not that much of a film noir visually either; the atmosphere is too much Gothic horror and too little noir. Like Wise’s later The Haunting, The House on Telegraph Hill has a stiffness in its approach that takes away from the thrills. Incidentally, and ironically given that they were making a film in which he tries to kill her, Richard Basehart and Valentina Cortese fell in love with each other, started dating, and married as soon as the film wrapped. At her insistence the couple moved to Italy, where they lived the next eight years. By relocating to his wife’s home country Basehart pretty much killed his career in American films, but he got the role of his lifetime as the second (and less sympathetic) male lead in Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), probably his best-known credit. Basehart ultimately returned to the U.S. and did his best to re-establish his American “rep” after he and Cortese broke up in 1960.

Black Eye (Pat Rooney Productions, Jerry Buss Presentations, Warner Bros., 1974)

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

Last night (Friday, October 23) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good 1974 “Blaxploitation” movie called Black Eye, the first of two collaborations between director Jack Arnold and star Fred Williamson. I somehow missed this on Turner Classic Movies during their night of showing films featuring real-life Black athletes, including the Harlem Globetrotters, Muhammad Ali (who played himself in a 1977 biopic called The Greatest, for which the song “The Greatest Love of All,” later a hit for Whitney Houston, was written), and 1950’s tennis star Althea Gibson (in the John Ford/John Wayne/William Holden Civil War vehicle The Horse Soldiers, which we actually watched together as it aired on TCM at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-horse-soldiers-mirisch-corporation.html). Williamson was a defensive back for the American Football League before its 1970 merger with the National Football League; he played for the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs (as well as one season with the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers). As a Chiefs player he was in the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967, though his team lost to the Green Bay Packers 35-10. Williamson made his film debut in 1972 with a Blaxploitation Western called The Legend of Nigger Charley (the “N-word” featured prominently in many of Williamson’s film’s titles), and by 1974 he was a well-established attraction for Blaxploitation audiences. (“Blaxploitation” was the genre term for films, mostly cheap exploitation movies with low budgets and schedules, aimed at the Black audiences after changing patterns of urban settlement had left many of the great movie palaces of the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s in neighborhoods whose populations were now mostly Black. The new residents of these areas naturally wanted to see films about people who looked like them.)

I was interested in Black Eye – a punning title signifying that the male lead was an African-American private investigator – mainly because of its director, Jack Arnold. He’d been a contractee at Universal-International in the 1950’s and had made a number of quite good films, including the first two movies in the Creature from the Black Lagoon sequence as well as It Came from Outer Space (a quite chilling flying-saucer adventure based on an outline and suggested dialogue by Ray Bradbury), This Island Earth and the flawed but haunting The Space Children. Fortunately, Arnold was also no stranger to film noir, as he’d done noirs at Universal like The Glass Web and The Tattered Dress (not The Tattooed Stranger, a film I’ve mistakenly attributed to Arnold even though Edward Montagne was the actual director). Later that year Arnold and Williamson would team up again for a Blaxploitation Western called Boss Nigger – a title that raised some hackles then and even more now. Barbara Leigh, who played the film’s main white role, schoolteacher Miss Pruitt, insisted on calling the film Bossman and when it was issued on VHS and then on DVD the title was abbreviated just to Boss. The plot of Boss Nigger has been compared to that of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles – a straight-shooting Black sheriff comes to tame a lawless Western town – only Arnold and Williamson (who wrote the script as well as starring) intended it seriously.

Black Eye was written by Mark Haggard and Jim Martin based on a novel by Jeff Jacks called Murder on the Wild Side, and though the pioneering Blaxploitation film, Gordon Parks’s Shaft, had also featured a Black private eye, John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), the concept was still relatively novel (Walter Mosley’s first Black detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, wouldn’t be published until 1990). The film opens with a weird prologue featuring a clip from a (fictional) silent film from the late 1920’s in which a woman and her extra-relational lover are surprised by the husband; he takes out a gun to shoot him, but she stands between them and takes the bullet originally meant for her boyfriend. Then we cut to the 1974 present and the funeral of the legendary star of this film, who was famous for always carrying around a silver-handled cane. Only a woman shows up at the gravesite and steals the cane just before the star’s coffin is laid in the ground. She turns out to be a prostitute, Vera Brownmiller (Nancy Fisher), who regularly serviced the star as one of her tricks. Vera stole the cane at the behest of Chess (Frank Stell, later known as Frank Ashmore), only Chess, who’s easily the hottest, hunkiest male in the film of either color (methinks Williamson, Arnold, producer Jerry Buss – who as longtime owner of the Los Angeles Lakers also had a major association with Black athletes – and their casting directors were blazing the trail later followed by the Lifetime producers of having the hunkiest man be the villain), breaks into Vera’s apartment, kills her and steals the cane. Black Eye has a rambling plot line featuring Shepherd Stone (Fred Williamson), a chronically broke Black P.I. who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for being too hot-headed; his former LAPD commanding officer, Lt. Bill Bowen (Richard X. Slattery); his Black girlfriend, Cynthia (Teresa Graves); her Lesbian affair partner, Miss Francis (Rosemary Forsyth), who’s so polymorphously perverse she not only has a man she’s married to but also has the hots for Stone when they meet; and Dole (Richard Anderson), who hires Stone to find a runaway teenager he says is his daughter Amy (Susan Arnold).

Stone traces Amy to a religious cult led by Rev. Avery (Larry D. Mann), who takes young runaways off the street and converts them to Jesus-freak Christianity. In one of the film’s most grimly amusing sequences, Amy accosts a middle-aged Jewish woman on the beach where the cult is doing mass baptisms and tries to convert her on the spot – and she couldn’t be less interested. Gradually it dawns on Stone that there must be something in that cane that has attracted the attention of a lot of nasty crooks, though when he takes the top off and opens it he realizes it’s just a hollow tube of metal. Stone chases a young white male dope dealer up a tree – literally – to get the information about Amy’s whereabouts (beating and roughing up drug dealers was one of the offenses that got him fired from the LAPD). There’s a quite amusing sequence in which Stone and Cynthia are on the beach together in what looks like a playful date; he’s dressed in loose-fitting white pattern swim trunks (which show off a quite impressive basket) and she’s in a two-piece swimsuit and is carrying a lime-green toy football in the film’s one reference to Williamson’s former career. There’s also a sequence in which Stone is trapped inside an elevator shaft by people he met at a party being thrown by Miss Francis (who once again makes a play for Stone) at which he’s assailed by four men who want to kill him for the cane (ya remember the cane?). And there’s a plot digression involving a character called Talbot Talbot (Cyril Delavanti), a psychic and Tarot card reader who was supposed to perform at Miss Francis’s party, only someone killed him before he could do so. There’s also a scene in which Stone is in his favorite bar, whose owner has comped him to the point where he’s run up a $200 tab, only the bar owner is roughed up by a team of four thugs in search of the whereabouts of that mysterious cane.

Eventually it turns out that the cane once contained $500,000 worth of pharmacologically pure heroin; that the drugs were provided by a smuggling ring who reached out to various people, including the silent-era film star, got them addicted to drugs and then forced them into being the gang’s mules in exchange for continued supplies; and the mastermind of all this is Dole. Stone brings Amy to the beach where the cult is doing the mass baptism and introduces her to Dole, who says he’s her father. “You’re not my father! Jesus is my father!” she insists, and just as we’re about to write her off as a typically brainwashed cult member, we realize that Dole isn’t Amy’s father. He was just posing as her dad so Stone would find her; he’s really the man behind the drug ring, and he’s after Amy because she and her cult boyfriend previously discovered the heroin hidden in the cane, stole it, and planned to sell it on the streets to raise money for the cult. Ultimately Stone corners Dole on a pier and, as the official police led by Lt. Bowen arrive ready to arrest Dole, Stone pushes him off the pier and tells Bowen, “You’re going to have to do some swimming to get him.” Then he and Cynthia run off together to the strains of a pop-soul ballad sung by a quite good woman singer which we heard earlier in the scene of Stone and Cynthia cavorting on the beach. This song isn’t listed on the film’s imdb.com page and the only online information I’ve been able to find about the music is about the background score composer, Mort Garson, a pioneer of electronic synthesizers. Though it suffers from the oddly disjointed plot and also from the cartoon-ish violence Blaxploitation producers and audiences insisted on – in one fight scene set in Cynthia’s apartment Charles joked that all her furniture was breakaway – Black Eye is actually pretty good neo-noir. Like The Horse Soldiers, it’s not a masterpiece but it’s a genuinely entertaining film that holds audience interest (it held mine, anyway). It also benefits from having been shot exclusively on L.A. locations (featuring glimpses of the city a half-century ago, including neighborhoods that have radically changed as well as ones that are pretty much the same) and from Fred Williamson’s highly personable and surprisingly credible acting.

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

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

Last night (Thursday, October 22) my husband Charles and I watched the next episodes in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the flagship Law and Order itself. These days they’re showing SVU before Law and Order because at 8 p.m. they’re running a typical piece of so-called “reality” crap called Traitors, set in a Scottish castle and hosted by Alan Cumming (an actor I used to like until he took this awful job), so I watched SVU at 9 p.m. and Law and Order at 10. The SVU episode was called “Anonymity,” and it opened with the sudden appearance of John DeMarco (Alejandro Hernandez), a typical proletarian-type for national TV, at the Special Victims Manhattan squadroom with his son Michael (Sebastian Albuquerque) in tow. It seems that John was giving Michael (whose age is given at five but he looked more like eight to me) a bath, only while washing him between his asscheeks Michael cried out in pain. John immediately assumed that Michael had been sexually molested and anally raped, and dragged his kid along to SVU to demand immediate action to apprehend the perpetrator. In the manner of all too many previous parents of child sex abuse victims on SVU, John’s overbearing demeanor is counterproductive in Captain Olivia Benson’s (series star Mariska Hargitay) ability to interrogate Michael and find out just what did happen to him and who was responsible. It turns out that Michael’s abuser was his babysitter, Brandon Klein (Giuseppe DiDomenico), who realized he had pedophilic attractions and went on a “dark Web” site called “The Gate” catering specifically to pedophiles attracted to children five years old or younger. Klein had previously kept his hands off Michael until the previous evening, when he was effectively blackmailed by another “The Gate” member, a realtor, to bring Michael to a location (a condo the man was trying to sell as part of his job) so he could be stripped, photographed for child porn, and raped by the other man. The SVU detectives arrest the realtor while he’s in the middle of showing the condo that was the scene of the crime, and through his computer they’re able to hack into the site. They download all the sick images and, much to Captain Benson’s dismay, Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) goes through the entire file in an all-nighter.

Through this they’re able to track down 26 other victims, some of whom go to an exclusive private pre-school. Ultimately they’re able to set up a meeting with the elusive manager of the site, only when Bruno shows up the people he’s meeting with turn out to be two FBI agents, white man Craig Lynch (Jeremy Landon Hays) and Asian woman Lauren Fei (Nanrisa Lee). The FBI agents have known all along about “The Gate” but they’ve been letting it operate in search of the individuals behind it, who they say are part of an international human-trafficking ring that not only kidnaps kids but sells them into sexual slavery abroad. The most vividly intense parts of the show are the confrontations between Benson and Fei, two women who seem to have OD’d on testosterone in an attempt to out-butch each other. Fei insists that whatever collateral damage is being done by “The Gate”’s current users is acceptable if it helps them bust the trafficking ring. Benson, thundering back in Mariska Hargitay’s toughest tones, says she’s more concerned with the crimes that are happening now rather than ones that may (or may not) occur in the future. The SVU detectives manage to trace down the operator of “The Gate,” a typical nerd type named Sam Caldwell (Quinn Blades), who’s been running the site from the spare bedroom of his sister Bernadette (Clare Latham), whom he was staying with and who was aware that he spent hours on his laptop without any idea of what he was doing on that computer all that time. Without Sam around to give “the canary,” the signal to “The Gate”’s users that everything was still all clear, SVU detectives stage a series of raids and bust the users. This happens in a grim scene that reveals how pervasive the pedophile community is and in particular how these sickos come from all walks of life, from a man who runs a pizza place to a high-end financial services executive.

Ultimately Agent Fei shows up at SVU to denounce Benson and threaten her with retaliation for having blown their long-term sting, while Sam had already been transferred from state to federal custody, albeit only after the SVU detectives got all the information they needed out of him. This was a pretty somber SVU episode whose message that child sex abuse is ubiquitous (despite the inability of those of us who aren’t sexually attracted to kids to understand the why of this crime; as I’ve written before, many people who would never commit murder or robbery at least understand the impulses that led people to commit such crimes, but the sexual abuse of children is unfathomable to most of us, including most lesser criminals, which is why sexual abusers of children are referred to in prison slang as “short eyes” and are often in danger of being murdered by fellow inmates who are as disgusted by them and what they did as the rest of us) just got reinforced by the lead story on the local NBC affiliates. It was about a 35-year-old man who was just busted for allegedly molesting three girls whom his mother, whom he lived with, was taking care of in a day-care center she ran out of her home.

Law and Order: "Bad News" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 22, 2026)

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

The Law and Order episode that followed SVU’s “Anonymity” last night (Thursday, October 22) starts out with some footage of Alexander West (Robert Lee Harvey) nervously pacing around “The Ramble,” a well-known Gay men’s cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. The next time we see him his body is being pushed off a land bridge in the park, where he falls on his head and dies almost immediately. New York police detective Theo Walker (David Alaja) arrives on the scene late to find his new partner, Detective Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale – with a middle name like that he would be playing a cop!), who replaced his old one when the former partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), was unexpectedly killed during last week’s episode (usually when they’re going to replace a leading actor on a show like this, they do so at the end of a season), has already beat him there. The two find out from the victim’s wallet and cell phone, both of which were left behind by whoever killed him, that Alexander West was married and had the obligatory three children (for a while I was wondering if every Hollywood actor playing a Gay man had to have exactly three children, like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, to establish his real-life hetero bona fides). He was also the news editor of the New York Ledger (a fictional paper that’s been part of Law and Order from its beginnings and is quite obviously based on the real-life New York Post). Among the people who might have had a motive to kill him was Zayne Hassim (Ahmad Kamal), who ran a legitimate taxi company in New York who lamented the good old days when a taxi medallion (the official license to drive a cab in New York City) was worth $1.2 million before the successive competition from ride-shares and Waymos made it virtually worthless. So he’s reduced himself to hiring undocumented immigrants to drive for him, which is illegal, and that was the story Alexander West and the Ledger was working on to expose. The use of an illegally run taxi company as the MacGuffin hearkens back to one of the very first Law and Order episodes from the early 1990’s, which was loosely based on the 1986 suicide of then-Queens borough president Donald Manes after he was exposed for his role in a scandal involving the New York City Parking Violations Bureau and his steering city contracts for collecting parking ticket fees to a company he co-owned.

But eventually Hassim turns out to be a red herring and the real killer is [spoiler alert!] West’s associate on the Ledger staff and close friend Mark Lancer (Derek Webster). Lancer turned against West partly because the Ledger’s publisher gave him an ultimatum to cut the newsroom staff by 40 percent as part of a plan to rely mostly on artificial intelligence to write most of the paper’s stories and keep humans on only to “tweak” the AI copy to make it seem more credible as coming from real people. They also crossed swords over a piece the Ledger was doing about Tanner Hunt (Andrew Burnap), a surprisingly competitive young Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina. Hunt’s chief of staff, Brandon Rex (Patrick K. Dooley), was leaking information about an alleged sexual abuse scandal involving Hunt and a woman from 10 years earlier that, if exposed, would sink his campaign. (That’s one difference between the two major parties for you; a Republican politician exposed as a sexual abuser not only doesn’t have to worry about his voters turning against him, there’s a strong chance it will establish his credentials as a “real man” and actually help him with base voters, as it did for Donald Trump.) The biggest surprise for me is that Hunt’s alleged victim was a woman; Andrew Burnap played him as so Gay-presenting I thought the big secret would be that Hunt was Gay, that he was in the Ramble for sexual satisfaction, and this was what Rex was alternately covering up and finally becoming ready to “out” him in both senses of the term. Rex had agreed to become a confidential source for the Ledger and Lancer wanted to go ahead with the story even though it would destroy Hunt’s chances at the South Carolina ballot box. But West wanted to maintain the cover-up because he and the Ledger management believed that Hunt’s election to the Senate would be a good thing for the country. Between those two things, Lancer got so mad at West he pushed him off the bridge, then oddly confessed to it in open court during his trial under cross-examination by prosecutor Nolan Price (series regular Hugh Dancy).

That almost never happens in real life; real defendants, even guilty ones, under cross-examination usually spin an increasingly complicated web of lies that ultimately undermines their credibility with jurors. It’s a leftover of the old Perry Mason myth in which defense attorney Mason was regularly shown cross-examining the real perpetrator of the crime his client was on trial for and ultimately wresting a confession out of them. (This was one of the quirkier aspects of Perry Mason; it convinced a lot of people, including my late ex-roommate and ex-home care client, that the job of a defense attorney was not only to exonerate their clients but figure out who did commit the crime. In reality, most defense attorneys know their clients are guilty and their task is to mitigate their punishment, often in plea negotiations with prosecutors before the cases even get to trial.) The script for “Bad News,” written by old Law and Order hand Art Alamo, raised a lot more questions than the show could answer in a 45-minute running time (an hour time slot less commercials), including what happens to our general awareness of the world we live in when great chunks of what we think we know about it are being secretly fed to us by computer algorithms and written by robots. It also dramatizes the dilemma journalists often face: do we print everything we know about someone or hang back and protect them against revealing information that could trash them and hurt our overall interests in seeing good triumph over evil?

The Horse Soldiers (Mirisch Corporation, Mahin-Rackin, United Artists, 1959)

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

Last night (Wednesday, October 21) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies called The Horse Soldiers, made by the Mirisch Corporation and various other concerns for United Artists release. It was a Civil War-era action film directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and William Holden, based on a 1956 novel of the same title by Harold Sinclair which in turn was based on actual events. In April and May 1863 Union Col. Benjamin Grierson led a cavalry company from La Grange, Tennessee deep into Confederate territory to support General Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to take the port of Vicksburg, Mississippi. His initial target was the railroad depot at Newton’s Station, Mississippi, through which the Confederates were sending supplies to support Vicksburg. (Ironically, the film’s script by John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin already depicts Grant as overall commander of the Union forces. In fact he wasn’t yet; it was Grant’s success at taking Vicksburg that convinced President Abraham Lincoln to hire him for that role.) Grierson’s ultimate destination was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the film Grierson is renamed “John Marlowe,” his civilian job is changed from music teacher to railroad construction foreman, and he’s played by John Wayne. After the previous Wayne/Ford collaboration The Searchers, in which he’d played a former Confederate officer who solemnly declares that the only oath he ever took was to the Confederacy, it was nice to see him on the Union side! The other male lead was named Dr. Erastus Dean Yule in real life but he’s called “Hank Kendall” in the movie and is played by William Holden. Marlowe is ordered to take Kendall on his mission because Union army regulations require that a doctor be along to treat anyone who gets wounded in combat. Marlowe is immediately antagonistic towards Kendall and it’s only about two-thirds into the movie before we’re told why: Marlowe delivers a long monologue about how years before his young wife was diagnosed by two doctors with a tumor. After they opened her up and subjected her to the inevitable pain associated with surgery in those pre-anesthetic days, they realized they had misdiagnosed her and she hadn’t had a tumor – only she died from the shock effects of the unnecessary operation. That led Marlowe to an insane prejudice against all doctors.

Part of the problem with this operation is that its success depends on complete surprise, to the point that when Marlowe’s troops encounter Confederate resistance, instead of fighting a pitched battle against it they’re supposed to lie low so no Confederates get to report to their high command that Union troops are operating in the area, heading towards Vicksburg and obviously up to no good (for the Confederate cause; given that the Confederates were fighting for their “right” to own Black people as slaves, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for them!). Along the way they take over Greenbriar Plantation and there encounter a young Confederate widow, Hannah Hunter (played by a truly awful “actress” named Constance Towers; obviously producers Mahin, Rackin, and Walter Mirisch had blown their casting budget on Wayne and Holden and therefore couldn’t afford a woman who could actually act!), and her Black slave Lukey (Althea Gibson, who in the 1950’s had been a star tennis player and won the women’s divisions at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in both 1957 and 1958). Realizing that they could compromise the security of the mission, Marlowe orders both of them to be taken prisoner and forced to travel with his unit. Midway through the march Dr. Kendall peels off the company in order to attend the birth of a new Black baby, and Marlowe puts him under arrest, allowing him to keep marching with the unit but forbidding him from treating anyone who isn’t part of it. Marlowe makes Hannah pledge on her honor (despite her belief that “Yankees” have no honor) not to run away from his column to warn the Confederates that they’re coming, but when the unit is stationed across the river from a Confederate one, she calls out to them and Marlowe grabs hold of her and stuffs his hand in her mouth. Of course she bites him. Also along for the ride are blowhard Lt. Col. Phil Secord (Willis Bouchey), who’s hoping he’ll win enough glory from the operation to run for public office in his native Michigan; and Corporal Wilkie (Ken Curtis), who’s badly wounded in the leg in one of the skirmishes. Kendall prescribes a homemade ointment made from tree mold, which he says he learned from the Cheyenne tribe, but Wilkie takes the stuff off as soon as it starts itching (later an angry Kendall said that itching was the first indication that the treatment was actually working) and he ends up dying from surgical shock after Kendall, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, amputates his leg.

The Union soldiers take Newton’s Station and, after first using the cotton bales they find there as impromptu shields against a Confederate counterattack, they burn them and also uproot the train tracks, not only burning the crossties but bending the metal rails so they can’t be re-laid. Naturally Marlowe muses on the irony that before the war his job was to build rail lines for trains, and now here he is destroying one. Throughout the movie the name “Andersonville” is used as a dire warning of the fate awaiting any Union soldiers who were taken as prisoners of war, even though in fact the real prison at Andersonville, Georgia didn’t open until February 1864, almost a year after the events of this film take place. The film ends with Marlowe and his remaining troops marching on to Baton Rouge while Kendall agrees to stay behind and take care of the wounded even though that means they’ll probably all become Confederate prisoners of war. One of the movie’s most chilling scenes is one in which a batch of boys from the Jefferson Military Academy in Mississippi mobilize to fight the Union troops. This actually happened, though not as part of the same true-life story as the Garrison raid that inspired the overall plot; it was part of the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia a year later. The film features one boy who’s eager to fight in the war and brings along a drum; his mother, who’s already lost every other male in the family to the conflict, grabs him out of the line, much to his displeasure. When I saw his drum roll away from him I was thinking Ford, Mahin, and Rackin would have that be the signal to learn that the Southerners were on the march against them and knew where they were, but no-o-o-o-o. The film oddly peters out with the destruction of a bridge Marlowe and his men have just crossed; Marlowe and his men have lined up gunpowder along the route to destroy the bridge before the Confederates can use it to chase them. Originally it was supposed to end with Marlowe’s unit actually arriving in Baton Rouge, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page, quoting Ford biographer Joseph Malham, Ford was so upset when his stunt person Fred Kennedy broke his neck on set in an accident that he ended the film inconclusively. Also Althea Gibson’s biographer noted that when she got the script she was appalled that her lines were written in the usual stupid “Black” dialect, and (like William Wellman with Clarence Muse and Nina Mae McKinney in his proto-noir masterpiece from 1931, Safe in Hell) Ford let her speak her lines in normal English.

The Horse Soldiers today is dismissed as a minor work in the Ford canon, largely because no fewer than six production companies, including ones owned by Wayne and Holden, were involved and key decisions were being made essentially by committee. (According to an imbd.com “Trivia” item, the contracts to make this film ran 250 pages, twice as long as the actual script.) But I quite liked it; it’s certainly not a masterpiece (though in the remaining seven years of Ford’s career he’d rack up one more masterpiece, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also with John Wayne!), but it is solid, relatively unpretentious entertainment and it came off a lot better than more highly regarded items in the Wayne/Ford canon as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956). There are a few hints of a critique of war that, if expanded on, could have made The Horse Soldiers a richer and deeper film than it is, but though it has its flaws (including a non-performance by Constance Towers in a role that really needed the Barbara Stanwyck of three decades earlier – the real-life model for Hannah was in her 60’s and Stanwyck could have played that incarnation of the character – and John Wayne looking prematurely embalmed, as he did in most of his later films) it’s solid, unpretentious entertainment. It benefits from Ford’s lifelong love of the military’s rituals and his effective use of music, particularly popular songs from the period (we get to hear both “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the Union side and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” on the Confederate side, as well as a new Union anthem composed by Stan Jones for the film that hails “Ulysses Simpson Grant” as the top commander of the Union army months before Lincoln appointed him as such). The Horse Soldiers is no world-beater, but it’s a pleasant surprise.

The Great Lie (Warner Bros., 1941)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 20) my husband Charles and I watched the 1941 film The Great Lie, directed by Edmund Goulding and written by Lenore J. Coffee based on a novel, January Heights, by Polan Banks (a man, by the way, whose other movie credits include the 1932 Warner Bros. “B” Street of Women and the 1952 film My Forbidden Past, based on a novel of his called Carriage Entrance). The film stars Bette Davis as Maggie Patterson, long-time girlfriend of fellow Maryland native Peter Van Allen (George Brent), only on a trip to New York City Van Allen has spontaneously met, fallen for, and married world-renowned concert pianist Sandra Kovak (Mary Astor). I gave Charles a heads-up that The Great Lie is one of my “doubles” movies, since both Davis and Astor played the female lead in versions of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (Davis in a highly tweaked rewrite from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady that turned Hammett’s mystery into more of a screwball comedy, and Astor in the classic version from 1941 with John Huston directing and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade). And it turned out that Astor was not the only Maltese Falcon cast member who turned up in The Great Lie: Jerome Cowan, who played Spade’s hapless partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon (and got killed in the first reel!), is here as Jock Thompson, Van Allen’s long-suffering attorney. In the opening reel Thompson informs Van Allen that his marriage to Sandra Kovak is not legal – she married him too soon, before her divorce from her previous husband had become final. But in the meantime he and Sandra have already had sex and Sandra has got pregnant, and in the days when abortion was illegal nationwide Sandra has no interest in putting her career on hold to have a baby, especially a baby whose father is not legally her husband. (One wonders how Warner Bros. and producers Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke got this situation past the Production Code Administration.)

Van Allen responds by flying his private plane back to Maryland and the home of Maggie and her family. They start dating and ultimately get married themselves, only they decide to honeymoon in New York. They’re at a fancy nightclub when Sandra confronts Maggie and announces that she’s going to have Peter’s baby. Maggie hits on the idea of booking a remote cabin in Arizona (where you’ve got a lot of fuller’s earth blowing past the door in dust storms and Bette Davis might have been reminded of the previous movie she made with that setting, The Petrified Forest) where she and Sandra will stay together until Sandra gives birth, after which Maggie will pass off the baby as hers. Ultimately the ruse works, only in the meantime Peter, who on Maggie’s advice has gone to work for the government as a consultant on aviation (one wonders what he was doing before), has crashed his plane in the interior of Brazil and just about everyone in the movie assumes he’s dead. The baby is born and Maggie names him Peter Van Allen, Jr., after his presumably deceased dad. Then a rescue party finds Peter Van Allen, Sr. and brings him back from the interior of Brazil to the U.S. Sandra shows up at the grand reunion of Peter and Maggie and demands that Maggie tell Peter the truth about who the baby’s mother is. Sandra also demands custody of the boy even though the reasons she agreed to the “great lie” deal with Maggie in the first place – she’s an internationally famous concert pianist and also a “woman of the world” – still apply. Maggie does indeed level with Peter that the boy is Sandra’s biological child, and eventually Sandra realizes that the boy is better off with Peter and Maggie. I’d seen The Great Lie only once before, at my father’s home in the early 1970’s, and I’d remembered much of it but not the fact that the George Brent character was supposedly dead through most of the middle section.

I’d also forgotten how relentlessly over-the-top the film is; a stronger director like William Wyler might have toned down Bette Davis’s overacting and got a better, more believable performance out of her, but Goulding at best seemed disinclined to do so and at worst let her open up to full throttle and let ’er rip. I give Goulding credit for keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby giving cinematic life to what could have otherwise been a really stagy and dull story. Tony Gaudio was the cinematographer, and he used red filters on so many of the exteriors one expects John Wayne and a troupe of cowboys to ride in at any moment. Max Steiner did the music, basing most of it on the famous opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which not only is played by Sandra Kovak in her concert sequences but is tweaked in various ways. I especially loved the version with sleazy saxophones heard in an early sequence in which the newly married Peter and Sandra are waking up from an all-night party during which a lot of records got strewn about the floor and presumably broken, since this was the era in which records were made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay. The Great Lie also suffers from George Brent’s terminal weakness as a leading man; through much of the film I was wishing Warners had cast Errol Flynn in the role (despite his and Davis’s well-known dislike for each other in the two previous films they’d made together, The Sisters and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex). Quite a few people who knew Brent, including Bette Davis herself, said he was almost irresistibly sexy in person, but on screen he comes off as an acceptably attractive man but hardly a male sex magnet. (Compare that to the accounts of people who knew Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, who were no more than reasonably attractive in person but they lit up the screen when photographed for film.)

Among the things I liked about The Great Lie is that Gaudio didn’t go out of his way to make Bette Davis look sexy; as the plainer woman in Peter’s life she spends much of the movie wearing slacks and her makeup by Perc Westmore is rather harsh, though this is not one of those movies (like the post-scarring scenes of Marked Woman or the whole of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) in which Davis was willing to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it, which is one of the big things I like about her. The scenes with Bette Davis and Mary Astor alone together in their Arizona redoubt were the ones I remembered most vividly, and they’re still the high points of the movie. Sandra resents that the cabin they’re sharing is lit only by lamps, she bitches that Maggie should at least have found them a place with electricity, and Maggie points out that places with electricity also have other people, some of whom are reporters who’d love to grab hold of the scandal surrounding a major celebrity like Sandra. I particularly liked the scene in which Maggie has sent for a couple of piano-and-orchestra records so Sandra can listen to her kind of music on the wind-up phonograph with which the place is equipped – and Sandra takes a look at who the pianist is on the label and denounces him as nonmusical. (Charles asked me if she meant Vladimir Ashkenazy – whose star career didn’t start until 1962, over two decades after the film was made. The principal real-life male rivals to Sandra’s character in 1941 would have been Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz.) Mary Astor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film, and she credited Bette Davis for much of that because Davis had let Astor dominate the screen again and again.

Unlike most of the women who worked with Davis as co-stars, Astor liked her and got along with her just fine. Davis also actively lobbied with Warner Bros. to get Astor the part because, among other reasons, Astor could actually play piano and therefore they could shoot her with her fingers actually touching the keyboard even though the music on the soundtrack would be played by someone else. (The film’s imdb.com page lists Max Rabinowitz as Astor’s piano double and says she also had a hand double, Norma Drury.) The Great Lie holds up surprisingly well as a movie, even though it was first and foremost a ”women’s picture” (though billed third, Mary Astor gets a lot more screen time than George Brent!), and I found myself imagining a modern remake/sequel with a framing scene set 20 years after the main story in which Peter Van Allen, Jr., now a young adult, gets his DNA tested and learns from that that the woman who’s raised him all his life isn’t in fact his mother. A tastefully done modern treatment of this story premise could be a quite interesting and effective movie for any modern-day filmmakers who want to take the barnacles off this story and reimagine it for today.