r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of the 1927 silent film The Beloved Rogue, which my husband Charles had no recollection of having seen before even though I posted about it to moviemagg on October 6, 2010 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/10/beloved-rogue-united-artists-1927.html). The star was John Barrymore and the film was yet another attempt, after Beau Brummell and Don Juan, to cast Barrymore as a Douglas Fairbanks-style action hero even though TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart said Barrymore didn’t care for these sorts of parts. She even told a story about him getting up from his seat during a screening of one of his action silents – she didn’t say whether it was this film or another – and pointing to his own image on screen, saying, “What a ham!” The impression I had from reading Gene Fowler’s biography of John Barrymore (and Fowler had actually known him!) years ago was that the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the only silent film Barrymore made that he actually liked.
But it’s also possible that one reason Barrymore didn’t care for action roles is that, unlike Fairbanks – who at least in the teens and 1920’s took good care of himself physically and was able to do his own stunts – Barrymore knew he would need a stunt double for the heavy-duty action scenes. In The Beloved Rogue Barrymore’s stunt double was Paul Malvern, who in the 1940’s became a producer at Universal, and in my previous comments on The Beloved Rogue I praised the efforts of director Alan Crosland(who had just directed Barrymore in Don Juan, the first feature released with a Vitaphone music and sound-effects track even though it didn’t contain dialogue; after he did The Beloved Rogue Crosland would return to the studio that had made Don Juan, Warner Bros., and direct The Jazz Singer, the film whose smash success would put an end to the silent era even though only about 10 percent of it contained dialogue) and editor Hal Kern (who would later head David O. Selznick’s editing department) for making the transitions between Barrymore and Malvern and back almost seamless.
The Beloved Rogue isn’t a great movie even though the life and career of the real-life medieval French poet François Villon would seem to have the potential for a masterpiece; But it’s a quite charming one and quite well cast: Barrymore as Villon, Conrad Veidt (in his first American film) as King Louis XI – a superstitious monarch under the thrall of his court astrologer (played to the nines by the great character villain Nigel de Brulier) – and the unfortunately-named Lawson Butt as Charles, King of Burgundy, which when this film takes place was still an independent principality and who was seeking to take over France and become its king. To accomplish this, Charles wants his friend Thibault d’Aubigny (Henry Victor, who 14 years later would turn up at Monogram in King of the Zombies in a part originally intended for Bela Lugosi) to marry the king’s ward, Charlotte de Vauxcelles (Marceline Day, a year before she was Buster Keaton’s leading lady in his first MGM film, The Cameraman), but it’s hate at first sight between them because Charlotte has such a bad case of the hots for Villon she’s actually got one of his books in her home altar and is actually disappointed when she first meets him because he’s not the “beloved rogue” she was expecting.
But, of course, her initial distaste soon ripens into love and by the end of the movie she and Villon are together after Villon has rallied the eggars and lowlifes of Paris to defend the city and Louis’s throne against the attempt of the Duke of Burgundy to overthrow him. At one point Villon has managed to convince the superstitious king not to execute him because Louis’s own death will fall just 24 hours after Villon’s. The rhel hero of The Beloved Rogue is the production designer (a job title he actually coined!), William Cameron Menzies, who designed utterly magnificent sets for a movie that – unlike some of the others Menzies worked on later, especially ones he directed himself (like the original Invaders from Mars) – had a big enough production budget to do credit to his designs.
Monday, October 3, 2022
Sunday, October 2, 2022
The Gabby Petito Story (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2022)
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 I watched a Lifetime movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good: The Gabby Petito Story, a much-hyped story about the monumentally dysfunctional relationship between Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie (that really was his name!), which ended when he murdered her during a cross-country trip they took from Florida, his home region (his parents lived there and according to the movie that’s where they left from on their trip, though a Behind the Leadlines documentary shown afterwards said they left from her home region in New York), to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, where he killed her and then drove the van back to Florida alone. Thora Birch, usually an actress, directed the film and also appeared in it as Nicholle Schmidt, Gabby Petito’s mother. (Gabby’s parents divorced and both remarried, and there’s a funny scene in the script where Brian has dinner with all of Gabby’s parents and she jokes about having two moms and two dads.) Though a woman directed this film, it was written by two men – Richard Blaney and Gregory Small – but they did a great job of showing how Gabby and Brian got together and how their relationship evolved over the two years they were together. Gabby was killed in September 2021 and the date is important because her trip was heavily documented on social media, both her own video blog (“vlog”) and other people’s. Ini fact, it’s arguable that Brian might never have been caught if he’d committed his crime in the pre-social media age, since he killed Gabby in an especially out-of-the-way location. Given that he was from Florida, she was from New York and the crime took place in Wyoming, the Federal Bureay of Investigation (FBI) took jurisdiction because there wasn’t any local authority which could claim it.
The FBI agent who took charge of the case was a Black woman named Shaw (Matisha Baldwin,who turns in a properly authoritative performance) who worked out of the Bureau’s offices in Long Island, and she was able to coordinate and gather information from various social-media contacts. The key people who provided the clue were a straight couple named Kyle and June Bethune, who responded to a nationwide call for information about the case and reviewed their own video footage from the part of the park where Gabby Petito had last been seen. The Bethunes, who consider themselves part of the “van culture” that was celebrated in the 2020 Academy Award-winning film Nomadland and saw Gabby as part of their community whom they had an obligation to protect, spotted the Laundrie-Petito van in some of their video footage and reported its location to the FBI, which allowed law enforcement in general to zero in on the part of the park where Brian had buried Gabby’s body after he killed her. For me, though, the best part of the film was the long,slow build-up to the final confrontation, in which Brian and Gabby meet – or rather re-meet, since they knew each other when she was still in high school and he was too scared to approach her. He was also convinced that she already had a boyfriend named Steve, but when they finally hooked up years later when Gabby was in her early 20’s she explained that she and Steve had just been friends because Steve was Gay.
LGabby and Brian start dating and sharing a bed, but soon Brian, who’s been sorta-kinda pursuing a career as a landscaper but really hasn’t knuckled down to do the work, announces that he’ll be moving to Florida within the month to move back in with his parents because he’s not making enough money to survive on his own., Gabby impulsively offers to move with him, figuring they can both find jobs and make enough money to afford their own place, and they both get jobs at a local supermarket in Florida until Gabby lands a more high-paying and more fun job at an ice cream parlor. Brian gets incensed that she won’t be working for the same employer as he, and he gets even more upset when she uses a friend-matching service to hook up with a woman named Rose (Monica Moore Smith). The two of them go out together to dance clubs, since Brian has no interest in dancing, until one night when Gabby is carded at the door, reaches for her I.D. and finds she doesn’t have it. Brian, without telling her, had stolen it out of her purse and thus prevented her from going on her “friend date” with Rose. That should have been enough of a warning for her to get out of that relationship and head back to Long Island and the friends she had walked out on to be with Brian, but he keeps getting neurotically possessive. There are several dark references to him being off his meds, and her pressuring him to get back on them, which is the one indication we have that Brian had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness and requires professional care.
LFinally the two go off on their great adventure, and though Brian wants to do it in their existing car, the more practical Gabby buys a small van and outfits it herself with a built-in table for eating and a mini-bed to sleep in. At one point there’s an altercation between Gabby and Brian that attracts the attention of lae enforcement. A couple of passers-by take out their smartphones and record the argument between Gabby and Brian, including Gabby hitting him and him belting her a good one in the face in retaliation. The pacers-by call 911, but when the cops separate them for their interviews Gabby admits she hit Brian first and the police thus decide that she is the aggressor and he the voctim. They order them to separate for 24 hours and Gabby is briefly tempted to get into the van, drive home and leave Brian to fend for himself and figure out how to get home on his own. But, alas for her eventual fate, she has second thoughts and is there to meet Brian again when the 24 hours are up. Eventually, after a series of further arguments, they end up in Wyoming, and two days later Brian returns home to Florida in the van but without Gabby. The cops are immediately suspicious of him – as we hear from several characters at different times, if two people set off on a trip and only one returns, the cops are going to suspect that the survivor killed his companion along the way.
LThe last half-hour shows the ending of the story including the discovery of Gabby’s remains thanks to the tip the Bethunes gave them the clue,the decision of Brian’s parents to stop stonewalling lae enforcement and start cooperating with them; and the finale, in which Brian’s parents identify the patch of Florida wilderness where Brian used to go and the cops finally find him … dead. He committed suicide after leaving behind a notebook in which he wrote a self-serving account of Gabby’s death in which he said he had killed her after she’d had a serious injury and begged him to put her out of her misery. The film concludes with a conjectural reconstruction of how the murder might have gone down, in which Gabby tells Brian that as soon as they get back to civilization she’s going to leave him and drive back to Long Island in the van while he can find his own way back home – exactly what she considered doing earlier on – and he reacts by grabbing her and eventually strangling her in a rage. Since both Gabby and Brian were dead, this is pure conjecture on the part of writers Blaney and Small, though it’s at least conceivable given what we’ve seen so far about Brian’s character and in particular his intense jealousy and possessiveness.
LThe Gabby Petito Story is presented as, among other things, a cautionary tale warning women involved in this kind of abusive relationship with a man to get the hell out of it as soon as they can, and the post-film documentary featured an interview with a British woman named Laurie Richards who described Brian as a classic abuser, using strategies of social control to dominate his partner until he ultimately killed her. There are other intriguing interviews, including with a New York friend of Gabby’s named Nikki Passennante who, alas, is not depicted in the film, and a filmmaker named “Swoon,” a woman with long blue-green hair. Both of them claim they are in abusive relationships themselves and got otu of them, but their own experiences with bad men gave them a point of identification with what Gabby had gone through. Director Thora Birch said that one of her motives for making this film was to ensure that no woman ever again meets the sort of fate Gabby Petito did – which of course is preposterous. No one is going to stop the human reproductive system from making either abusive men or vulnerable women (and these kinds of relationships exist in other pairings as well: there have been both Gay men and Lesbians who have ended up in relationships like this, as well as straight couples in which the women was the abuser and the man the victim). But The Gabby Petitu Story is a quite well-done tale of one abusive relationship and the bad end it brought to both participants, and it moved me in ways I hadn’t really expected it to.
Last night at 8 I watched a Lifetime movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good: The Gabby Petito Story, a much-hyped story about the monumentally dysfunctional relationship between Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie (that really was his name!), which ended when he murdered her during a cross-country trip they took from Florida, his home region (his parents lived there and according to the movie that’s where they left from on their trip, though a Behind the Leadlines documentary shown afterwards said they left from her home region in New York), to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, where he killed her and then drove the van back to Florida alone. Thora Birch, usually an actress, directed the film and also appeared in it as Nicholle Schmidt, Gabby Petito’s mother. (Gabby’s parents divorced and both remarried, and there’s a funny scene in the script where Brian has dinner with all of Gabby’s parents and she jokes about having two moms and two dads.) Though a woman directed this film, it was written by two men – Richard Blaney and Gregory Small – but they did a great job of showing how Gabby and Brian got together and how their relationship evolved over the two years they were together. Gabby was killed in September 2021 and the date is important because her trip was heavily documented on social media, both her own video blog (“vlog”) and other people’s. Ini fact, it’s arguable that Brian might never have been caught if he’d committed his crime in the pre-social media age, since he killed Gabby in an especially out-of-the-way location. Given that he was from Florida, she was from New York and the crime took place in Wyoming, the Federal Bureay of Investigation (FBI) took jurisdiction because there wasn’t any local authority which could claim it.
The FBI agent who took charge of the case was a Black woman named Shaw (Matisha Baldwin,who turns in a properly authoritative performance) who worked out of the Bureau’s offices in Long Island, and she was able to coordinate and gather information from various social-media contacts. The key people who provided the clue were a straight couple named Kyle and June Bethune, who responded to a nationwide call for information about the case and reviewed their own video footage from the part of the park where Gabby Petito had last been seen. The Bethunes, who consider themselves part of the “van culture” that was celebrated in the 2020 Academy Award-winning film Nomadland and saw Gabby as part of their community whom they had an obligation to protect, spotted the Laundrie-Petito van in some of their video footage and reported its location to the FBI, which allowed law enforcement in general to zero in on the part of the park where Brian had buried Gabby’s body after he killed her. For me, though, the best part of the film was the long,slow build-up to the final confrontation, in which Brian and Gabby meet – or rather re-meet, since they knew each other when she was still in high school and he was too scared to approach her. He was also convinced that she already had a boyfriend named Steve, but when they finally hooked up years later when Gabby was in her early 20’s she explained that she and Steve had just been friends because Steve was Gay.
LGabby and Brian start dating and sharing a bed, but soon Brian, who’s been sorta-kinda pursuing a career as a landscaper but really hasn’t knuckled down to do the work, announces that he’ll be moving to Florida within the month to move back in with his parents because he’s not making enough money to survive on his own., Gabby impulsively offers to move with him, figuring they can both find jobs and make enough money to afford their own place, and they both get jobs at a local supermarket in Florida until Gabby lands a more high-paying and more fun job at an ice cream parlor. Brian gets incensed that she won’t be working for the same employer as he, and he gets even more upset when she uses a friend-matching service to hook up with a woman named Rose (Monica Moore Smith). The two of them go out together to dance clubs, since Brian has no interest in dancing, until one night when Gabby is carded at the door, reaches for her I.D. and finds she doesn’t have it. Brian, without telling her, had stolen it out of her purse and thus prevented her from going on her “friend date” with Rose. That should have been enough of a warning for her to get out of that relationship and head back to Long Island and the friends she had walked out on to be with Brian, but he keeps getting neurotically possessive. There are several dark references to him being off his meds, and her pressuring him to get back on them, which is the one indication we have that Brian had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness and requires professional care.
LFinally the two go off on their great adventure, and though Brian wants to do it in their existing car, the more practical Gabby buys a small van and outfits it herself with a built-in table for eating and a mini-bed to sleep in. At one point there’s an altercation between Gabby and Brian that attracts the attention of lae enforcement. A couple of passers-by take out their smartphones and record the argument between Gabby and Brian, including Gabby hitting him and him belting her a good one in the face in retaliation. The pacers-by call 911, but when the cops separate them for their interviews Gabby admits she hit Brian first and the police thus decide that she is the aggressor and he the voctim. They order them to separate for 24 hours and Gabby is briefly tempted to get into the van, drive home and leave Brian to fend for himself and figure out how to get home on his own. But, alas for her eventual fate, she has second thoughts and is there to meet Brian again when the 24 hours are up. Eventually, after a series of further arguments, they end up in Wyoming, and two days later Brian returns home to Florida in the van but without Gabby. The cops are immediately suspicious of him – as we hear from several characters at different times, if two people set off on a trip and only one returns, the cops are going to suspect that the survivor killed his companion along the way.
LThe last half-hour shows the ending of the story including the discovery of Gabby’s remains thanks to the tip the Bethunes gave them the clue,the decision of Brian’s parents to stop stonewalling lae enforcement and start cooperating with them; and the finale, in which Brian’s parents identify the patch of Florida wilderness where Brian used to go and the cops finally find him … dead. He committed suicide after leaving behind a notebook in which he wrote a self-serving account of Gabby’s death in which he said he had killed her after she’d had a serious injury and begged him to put her out of her misery. The film concludes with a conjectural reconstruction of how the murder might have gone down, in which Gabby tells Brian that as soon as they get back to civilization she’s going to leave him and drive back to Long Island in the van while he can find his own way back home – exactly what she considered doing earlier on – and he reacts by grabbing her and eventually strangling her in a rage. Since both Gabby and Brian were dead, this is pure conjecture on the part of writers Blaney and Small, though it’s at least conceivable given what we’ve seen so far about Brian’s character and in particular his intense jealousy and possessiveness.
LThe Gabby Petito Story is presented as, among other things, a cautionary tale warning women involved in this kind of abusive relationship with a man to get the hell out of it as soon as they can, and the post-film documentary featured an interview with a British woman named Laurie Richards who described Brian as a classic abuser, using strategies of social control to dominate his partner until he ultimately killed her. There are other intriguing interviews, including with a New York friend of Gabby’s named Nikki Passennante who, alas, is not depicted in the film, and a filmmaker named “Swoon,” a woman with long blue-green hair. Both of them claim they are in abusive relationships themselves and got otu of them, but their own experiences with bad men gave them a point of identification with what Gabby had gone through. Director Thora Birch said that one of her motives for making this film was to ensure that no woman ever again meets the sort of fate Gabby Petito did – which of course is preposterous. No one is going to stop the human reproductive system from making either abusive men or vulnerable women (and these kinds of relationships exist in other pairings as well: there have been both Gay men and Lesbians who have ended up in relationships like this, as well as straight couples in which the women was the abuser and the man the victim). But The Gabby Petitu Story is a quite well-done tale of one abusive relationship and the bad end it brought to both participants, and it moved me in ways I hadn’t really expected it to.
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer Productions, United Artists, 1960)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. on Friday, September 30 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a screening of the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of the 1955 hit Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (not that Robert E. Lee!) based on the real-life 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee in which biology teacher John T. Scopes was charged with violating a newly passed Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools. I had not realized until just now that there have been at least three TV-movie remakes of Inherit the Wind – in 1965 with Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley, in 1988 with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards, and in 1999 with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott – as well as a 2017 short directed by and starring Langston Tillman as “Henry Drummond.” I first encountered Inherit the Wind in high school, when I ordered a copy of the play and it became one of my favorite books, so when I first saw this movie on TV I was disappointed that the actors didn’t perform the way I had fantasized they would when reading the playscript. The second time I saw the film was at a public screening at the College of Marin during which a group of Fundamentalist Christians hung out outside the theatre with copies of a Chick’s Tract called “Big Daddy?” which attacked the theory of evolution; the comic-book tract told the story of a biology professor who becomes convinced that creationism is scientifically correct and resigns his job.
It was a real-life reminder that the issues raised by the Scopes trial, and particularly the attempts of state lawmakers in 1925, 1972 or 2022 to legislate what can and can’t be taught in the schools. Since then I’ve seen this several times, including at least once with my husband Charles, who was upset that Lawrence nad Lee changed the names of the location and the principal characters – Dayton became “Hillsboro” (and though it’s clearly Southern it’s not specified that it is in Tennessee), Scopes became “Bertram Cates” (Dick York – and I couldn’t help but think that if the Fundamentalists in town were upset by him teaching evolution, they’d have freaked out totally if he had shown up with an actual witch as his wife, as in his best-known role in the TV series Bewitched), prosecutor William Jennings Bryan became “Matthew Harrison Brady” (Fredric March), defense attorney Clarence Darrow became “Henry Drummond” (Spencer Tracy), and H. L. Mencken, the nationally known reporter who broke the story and made it a media cause célèbre, became “E. K. Hornbeck” (Gene Kelly, continuing Kramer’s penchant for casting musician dance stars in non-musical roles he’d started with Fred Astaire in On the Beach – though Kelly, unlike Astaire, had played non-musical roles before). “Why didn’t they just use their real names?” Charles asked.
This time around Charles was struck at the sheer number of actors in the film who went on to do parts in ling-running TV series – not only Dick York but Paul Hartman as the bailiff, Norman Fell as a radio technician. and Henry Morgan as the judge, called “Mel Coffey” in the film even though the judge in the actual Scopes trial was John Raulston. I didn’t like Inherit the Wind when I first saw it, and today I know why: Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, both usually restrained performers, overacted terribly – was Kramer in such awe of his legendary stars he didn’t dare tell them they were overdoing it? He worked hard to get both stars into the film, at one point signing Tracy on the basis that March was going to be in the film even though March hadn’t yet confirmed. (Tracy and March were long-time friends, and when Tracy made a film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nine years after March had, March publicly defended Tracy against critics who had thought Tracy had been miscast and March had played the part far better.) Lawrence and Lee also gave “Cates” a love interest, Rachel Brown (Donna Anderson), daughter of the local pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Brown (Claude Akins). Seen today, it’s hard not to regret the opportunities the facts of the Scopes trial gave that the filmmakers ignored or miffed. The real Judge Raulston was a deeply religious man who opened every session of the trial with a prayer, and when Darrow objected on the ground that the judge opening each session of a trial dealing with the whole question of separation (or lack thereof) between church and state might make it look like the judge was taking sides, Raulston was perplexed and deeply hurt because it had been his routine in every case to open court with a prayer.
The trial in both the movie and in fact took place during a major heat wave, but because everyone in the court – judge, attorneys, jurors, spectators – was sweltering, Raulston had the trial moved outdoors, so most of it took place on the lawn of the courthouse rather than inside it. (One could readily understand how Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee weren’t about to write that into their play, but I think Kramer and his writers, Nedrick Young – who was getting his first credit here since coming off the blacklist, which gave him a point of identification with “Cates” – and Harold Jacob Smith, missed a major opportunity by not including this in the film.) Also, in the real trial townspeople clamored to get onto the jury because that would presumably give them better seats than they’d have in the spectators’ section – only the jurors actually missed most of the trial, including Darrow’s legendary examination of Bryan as a witness on the Bible, because Judge Raulston excluded the jury from it. Still, despite its flaws, the 1960 Inherit the Wind tells a profound story well, and what strikes me most strongly about this movie is its continuing relevance. Amazingly, the nutso brand of Fundamentalist Christianity that gave rise to the ridiculous law under which Scopes was prosecuted (and which the Tennessee state government didn’t repeal until 1966) is not only alive and well but ascendant in this country, especially in the current radical Right-wing majority (mislabeled “conservative”) of the U.S. Supreme Court, which sees nothing wrong with hegislating their own moral principles from the bench regardless of public opinion or basic sanity.
The forces that pilloried John Scopes are alive and well in states like Texas and Florida, where state leaders like governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis (respectively) are working to purge their states’ public-school curricula of anything they consider “woke,” including the ideas that slavery was evil, that human-caused climate change is real, that Queer people – especially Trans people – have any rights that straight people are obliged to respect, and that abortion is the murder of innocent babies and therefore a moral horror. MS-NBC host Alex Wagner kicked off the first week of her new show with accounts of Florida social-studies teachers who were forced, on pain of being fired, to pay $700 each to attend weekend workshops in which state officials gave them their marching orders on how to teach anything that might make white, straight Christian students uncomfortable – and, to add insult to injury, the teachers were forced to pay for their own indoctrination sessions in a state that ranks in the low 40’s in terms of how much they pay their teachers.
As Clarence Darrow said in his opening statement in the real Scopes trial (a portion of which got plugged into Young’s and Smith’s script just before the scene in which the judge holds “Drummond” in contempt, which also actually happened), “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.” Also, Lawrence and Lee somewhat overdid making “Brady” into a mental and moral doofus; in the early 2000’s PBS ran a documentary on the real William Jennings Bryan which made him seem like a far more thoughtful and intellectually interesting figure than he comes off in this movie. The real Bryan was an economic liberal who staunchly opposed so-called “social Darwinism,” the idea that the homan race was still evolving and rich people were biologically superior to non-rich people. One Social Darwinist said that “the millionaires are products of natural selection,” and Bryan’s opposition to the Social Darwinist call for lassiez-faire capitalism seemed to have led him to his crusade not only against social Darwinism but original Darwinism as well.
Gay Girls' Riding Club: Five Short Films (Gay Girls' Riding Club, American Genre Film Archive, 1962-1070's)_
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Inherit the Wind, which my husband Charles joined me for the last half-hour of (he arrived home from work in the middle of the great confrontation between “Brady” and “Drummond”), the two of us stayed up and watched five short films from a collective known as the “Gay Girls’ Riding Club.” As you might suspect from their name, they were Gay but they were not girls; they were a cooperatmve that got together in Los Angeles in the early 1960’s and made ultra-low-budget short films, many of them parodying then-recent mainstream movies, with Ray Harrison as overall director and auteur. The first films on TCM’s program of Gay Girls’ Riding Club shorts were obvious spoofs of recent iflms – Never on Sunday became Always on Sunday, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? became What Happened to the Real Baby Jane?, and an obscure film called The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone – a 1961 vehicle which reunited star Vivien Leigh and author Tennessee Williams from A Streetcar Named Desire and featured a young Warren Beatty in his second film (after Splendor in the Grass), became The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone. (The original The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was a major commercial flop, though to my surprise it was remade in 2003 with Helen Mirren in Leigh’s role.)
The fourth film in the program, Spy on the Fly, was a generic spoof of secret-agent movies in general and James Bond in particular. The fifth, All About Alice, was a return to an outright parody – in this case of All About Eve – and marked a major budget escalation: it had synchronized sound (the other four were shot silent with dialogue titles, though the performer playing Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane parody lip-synched to “I”ve Written a Letter to Daddy” and I suspect they used the soundtrack recording from the original film) and it was shot in color. It also was shot in the early 1970’s; we could tell because they shot B-roll footage of the actual Broadway theatre marquees of the time, and the shows they were running were all from the late 1960’s or early 1970’s: No, No, Nanette, Follies, Hair and others of similar vintage.
Of the five films, Charles liked the first one, Always on Sunday (also a title used for two mainstream features from Europe in the wake of the international success of Never on Sunday one of which starred Ugo Tognazzi, the Italian actor who later played in La Cage aux Folles, the movie that mainstreamed the drag-film genre), best, and I could see why. The raffish settings of the original film, which dealt with sailors and prostitutes in the Greek port of Piraeus, translated well tot he drag community, even though one of the things I remembered when I was watching the movie was getting to know several drag-queen hookers who worked the docks and offered oral sex exclusively so the straight guys who paid them for blow jobs wouldn’t know that “she” was really a he. I couldn’t help thinking how much ouzo the johns would have had to drink before they were fooled by these “girls” who were really guys. The gag I liked best was one in which two blond sailors in dress-white uniforms walk in the bar and walk out with a third man, dressed in blue jeans and a masculine shirt, and it’s only when we see the three walk out together that we realize the two sailors, though otherwise butch, are wearing high heels.
The Baby Jane parody that followed showed that the members of the Gay Girls’ Riding Club were music geeks as well as movie geeks – not only did they copy the old PRC logo for the opening credits of their films (accompanying it with Alfred Newman’s famous 20th Century-Fiox fanfare), but the soundtrack included the Polka from Shostakovich’s The Age of Gold ballet (one of the pieces of anti-capitalist agitprop Shostakovich had to compose to keep the Soviet regime happy) but also appropriate 1920’s songs like Louis Panico’s “Wabash Blues” and Felix Arndt’s “Nola.” (“Nola” became so notoriously overplayed that in the 1933 musical Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Ira Gershwin inserted a call for the execution of bandleaders who performed it.) The most impressive thing about the Baby Jane parody was the impressive vintage Rolls-Royce that appeared in several scenes; I wondered what it cost the Gay Girls’ Riding Club to rent it and whether that was the biggest-budgeted item in the film. Charles also noticed the troupe’s sole Black member, who was just one of the “girls” in Always on Sunday but in the Baby Jane parody and the subsequent movies was cast as a servant or domestic; in Baby Jane she’s cast as Blanche Hudson’s caregiver and, in a weird scene, has to clean birdshit off Blanche’s chest as her lovebirds take a dump on her. At least there was a scene in which Blanche’s caregiver serves her a blazing hot flaming dish – and when she puts a cover on it and then removes it, the lovebirds fly off, alive, well and definitely uncooked. The “club” gave Baby Jane a happy ending that’s right out of Fellini: Blanche miraculously regains her ability to walk and all five of them, including Victor Buono’s character and his mother, dance for joy on the beach.
I’d probably have liked The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone better if I’d actually seen the film it was ridiculing; as it was, it had its moments but didn’t do much for me, except for a scene in which “Paulo” (the parody version of Warren Beatty’s character from the original) is with Mrs. Stone but is also being cruised by a mystery man whom he goes off with at the end. Ray Harrison and his crew seem to have been big on the idea of having all the drag queens lust after a hot man, only to have another butch man end up with him! Spy on the Fly was the weakest of the five – just a bunch of dreary chase sequences that worked their way up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco (with a scene set on a beach walkway at Big Sur that I remember from the one time I was there, in January 1999), though there were some nicely raunchy gags. The basic plot, to the extent there is one, is that a homely guy who’s really “Secret Agent 0069,” is charged with the task of delivering nuclear secrets because the previous courier, “Fonda Peeters,” has been murdered by the bad guys by being literally fried to death in one of those helmet-like hair dryers. So Secret Agent 0068 has to disguise himself as a woman to pose as “Fonda Peeters” and get the plans where they’re supposed to go.
“The Fly” is the name of a bar where both sides hang out, and there’s a quite funny gag in the sign announcing that this club is in business: “‘The Fly’ Is Open.” Eventually 0069 has to burn up the nuclear plans to make sure the bad guys don’t get them – he blows up the bad guys in the process – only the real plans are safe because they were engraved on his press-on fingernails. In the final sequence 0069 says he’s quitting being a secret agent and taking up a new line of work – and the last shot shows him ascending the staircase of San Francisco’s legendary drag nightclub Finocchio’s. My favorite story about Finocchio’s was about the time Marilyn Monroe was in San Francisco in 1959 and insisted on going there. She particularly wanted to meet the drag queen who played her in the show, and when she met him backstage she ended up giving him pointers on how to do her famous walk.
All About Alice was a much better movie technically than the other Gay Girls’ Riding Club productions – not only was it in color and with normal dialogue instead of intertitles, but it ran a little over an hour, just over half the length of the original it was parodying – though the dialogue hurt the film in one way. Anyone who’s seen All About Eve as often as I have will have embedded in their memories the original voices of the various actors, particularly Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Thema Ritter, Gregory Ratoff and George Sanders – and the Gay Girls’ Riding Crew actors, try as they might, can’t duplicate the authority of the originals. Fortunately, the drag queen who plays the Bette Davis role at least gives a marvelous comic impersonation of it (and both Charles and I were sure it was the same performer who played Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane spoof). Since this was an early-1970’s “post-Code” movie, the Gay Girls could take the sex quotient up several notches; not only id the dialogue peppered with lots of insteaces of the words “shit” and “fuck,” but we actually get to see the hot blond stud who plays “Mona Manning’s” fiancé full-frontal and with his dick showing, though they didn’t or couldn’t go as far as actually to show him having sex.
We just see “Mona” get under the covers with him and blow him with a blanket over them, and we see him snort a popper as she brings him to climax. (In one of the earlier film we saw the first version of a popper: the kind that came in a glass ampule which you broke under the nose of someone who was about to have a heart attack in order to dilate their vessels and short-circuit it.) The Gay Girls’ version runs just over an hour and manages to include all the major plot points of the original, down to a screamingly funny parody of the film’s ending. In this case, the fan who meets “Alice Barrington” in her hotel room as she’s just won the Tony Award ans id eon route to Hollywood to make her first film is a man, and as she steps out of the room he tries on her filmy garment, we see him step in front of the iconic three-way mirror from the original movie, there’s a dissolve – and suddenly we see him in full drag and we realize he’s the same performer who played “Alice Barriington” in the overall movie!
After Inherit the Wind, which my husband Charles joined me for the last half-hour of (he arrived home from work in the middle of the great confrontation between “Brady” and “Drummond”), the two of us stayed up and watched five short films from a collective known as the “Gay Girls’ Riding Club.” As you might suspect from their name, they were Gay but they were not girls; they were a cooperatmve that got together in Los Angeles in the early 1960’s and made ultra-low-budget short films, many of them parodying then-recent mainstream movies, with Ray Harrison as overall director and auteur. The first films on TCM’s program of Gay Girls’ Riding Club shorts were obvious spoofs of recent iflms – Never on Sunday became Always on Sunday, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? became What Happened to the Real Baby Jane?, and an obscure film called The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone – a 1961 vehicle which reunited star Vivien Leigh and author Tennessee Williams from A Streetcar Named Desire and featured a young Warren Beatty in his second film (after Splendor in the Grass), became The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone. (The original The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was a major commercial flop, though to my surprise it was remade in 2003 with Helen Mirren in Leigh’s role.)
The fourth film in the program, Spy on the Fly, was a generic spoof of secret-agent movies in general and James Bond in particular. The fifth, All About Alice, was a return to an outright parody – in this case of All About Eve – and marked a major budget escalation: it had synchronized sound (the other four were shot silent with dialogue titles, though the performer playing Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane parody lip-synched to “I”ve Written a Letter to Daddy” and I suspect they used the soundtrack recording from the original film) and it was shot in color. It also was shot in the early 1970’s; we could tell because they shot B-roll footage of the actual Broadway theatre marquees of the time, and the shows they were running were all from the late 1960’s or early 1970’s: No, No, Nanette, Follies, Hair and others of similar vintage.
Of the five films, Charles liked the first one, Always on Sunday (also a title used for two mainstream features from Europe in the wake of the international success of Never on Sunday one of which starred Ugo Tognazzi, the Italian actor who later played in La Cage aux Folles, the movie that mainstreamed the drag-film genre), best, and I could see why. The raffish settings of the original film, which dealt with sailors and prostitutes in the Greek port of Piraeus, translated well tot he drag community, even though one of the things I remembered when I was watching the movie was getting to know several drag-queen hookers who worked the docks and offered oral sex exclusively so the straight guys who paid them for blow jobs wouldn’t know that “she” was really a he. I couldn’t help thinking how much ouzo the johns would have had to drink before they were fooled by these “girls” who were really guys. The gag I liked best was one in which two blond sailors in dress-white uniforms walk in the bar and walk out with a third man, dressed in blue jeans and a masculine shirt, and it’s only when we see the three walk out together that we realize the two sailors, though otherwise butch, are wearing high heels.
The Baby Jane parody that followed showed that the members of the Gay Girls’ Riding Club were music geeks as well as movie geeks – not only did they copy the old PRC logo for the opening credits of their films (accompanying it with Alfred Newman’s famous 20th Century-Fiox fanfare), but the soundtrack included the Polka from Shostakovich’s The Age of Gold ballet (one of the pieces of anti-capitalist agitprop Shostakovich had to compose to keep the Soviet regime happy) but also appropriate 1920’s songs like Louis Panico’s “Wabash Blues” and Felix Arndt’s “Nola.” (“Nola” became so notoriously overplayed that in the 1933 musical Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Ira Gershwin inserted a call for the execution of bandleaders who performed it.) The most impressive thing about the Baby Jane parody was the impressive vintage Rolls-Royce that appeared in several scenes; I wondered what it cost the Gay Girls’ Riding Club to rent it and whether that was the biggest-budgeted item in the film. Charles also noticed the troupe’s sole Black member, who was just one of the “girls” in Always on Sunday but in the Baby Jane parody and the subsequent movies was cast as a servant or domestic; in Baby Jane she’s cast as Blanche Hudson’s caregiver and, in a weird scene, has to clean birdshit off Blanche’s chest as her lovebirds take a dump on her. At least there was a scene in which Blanche’s caregiver serves her a blazing hot flaming dish – and when she puts a cover on it and then removes it, the lovebirds fly off, alive, well and definitely uncooked. The “club” gave Baby Jane a happy ending that’s right out of Fellini: Blanche miraculously regains her ability to walk and all five of them, including Victor Buono’s character and his mother, dance for joy on the beach.
I’d probably have liked The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone better if I’d actually seen the film it was ridiculing; as it was, it had its moments but didn’t do much for me, except for a scene in which “Paulo” (the parody version of Warren Beatty’s character from the original) is with Mrs. Stone but is also being cruised by a mystery man whom he goes off with at the end. Ray Harrison and his crew seem to have been big on the idea of having all the drag queens lust after a hot man, only to have another butch man end up with him! Spy on the Fly was the weakest of the five – just a bunch of dreary chase sequences that worked their way up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco (with a scene set on a beach walkway at Big Sur that I remember from the one time I was there, in January 1999), though there were some nicely raunchy gags. The basic plot, to the extent there is one, is that a homely guy who’s really “Secret Agent 0069,” is charged with the task of delivering nuclear secrets because the previous courier, “Fonda Peeters,” has been murdered by the bad guys by being literally fried to death in one of those helmet-like hair dryers. So Secret Agent 0068 has to disguise himself as a woman to pose as “Fonda Peeters” and get the plans where they’re supposed to go.
“The Fly” is the name of a bar where both sides hang out, and there’s a quite funny gag in the sign announcing that this club is in business: “‘The Fly’ Is Open.” Eventually 0069 has to burn up the nuclear plans to make sure the bad guys don’t get them – he blows up the bad guys in the process – only the real plans are safe because they were engraved on his press-on fingernails. In the final sequence 0069 says he’s quitting being a secret agent and taking up a new line of work – and the last shot shows him ascending the staircase of San Francisco’s legendary drag nightclub Finocchio’s. My favorite story about Finocchio’s was about the time Marilyn Monroe was in San Francisco in 1959 and insisted on going there. She particularly wanted to meet the drag queen who played her in the show, and when she met him backstage she ended up giving him pointers on how to do her famous walk.
All About Alice was a much better movie technically than the other Gay Girls’ Riding Club productions – not only was it in color and with normal dialogue instead of intertitles, but it ran a little over an hour, just over half the length of the original it was parodying – though the dialogue hurt the film in one way. Anyone who’s seen All About Eve as often as I have will have embedded in their memories the original voices of the various actors, particularly Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Thema Ritter, Gregory Ratoff and George Sanders – and the Gay Girls’ Riding Crew actors, try as they might, can’t duplicate the authority of the originals. Fortunately, the drag queen who plays the Bette Davis role at least gives a marvelous comic impersonation of it (and both Charles and I were sure it was the same performer who played Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane spoof). Since this was an early-1970’s “post-Code” movie, the Gay Girls could take the sex quotient up several notches; not only id the dialogue peppered with lots of insteaces of the words “shit” and “fuck,” but we actually get to see the hot blond stud who plays “Mona Manning’s” fiancé full-frontal and with his dick showing, though they didn’t or couldn’t go as far as actually to show him having sex.
We just see “Mona” get under the covers with him and blow him with a blanket over them, and we see him snort a popper as she brings him to climax. (In one of the earlier film we saw the first version of a popper: the kind that came in a glass ampule which you broke under the nose of someone who was about to have a heart attack in order to dilate their vessels and short-circuit it.) The Gay Girls’ version runs just over an hour and manages to include all the major plot points of the original, down to a screamingly funny parody of the film’s ending. In this case, the fan who meets “Alice Barrington” in her hotel room as she’s just won the Tony Award ans id eon route to Hollywood to make her first film is a man, and as she steps out of the room he tries on her filmy garment, we see him step in front of the iconic three-way mirror from the original movie, there’s a dissolve – and suddenly we see him in full drag and we realize he’s the same performer who played “Alice Barriington” in the overall movie!
Law and Order: "Battle Lines" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal,NBC-TV, aired September 29, 2022)
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, on September 29, NBC ran three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: the original Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode, “:Battle Lines,” was actually quite good; it’s one of Dick Wolf’s ripped-from-the-headlines specials in which a teenage woman is walking alone through a New York park at night. She gets accosted by various unsavory types, including gang members and others who mean her no good, but ultimately she’s chased down and tries to run away by crossing a bridge, only she’s pushed off it and dies. The young woman turns out to be Rebecca “Becca” Carter (Angelina Boris), daughter of Texas Governor Ron Carter (Ric Reitz). The Carters – Ron, his wife Barbara (Sally Murphy) and their son Blake (Jim Schubin) – all show up at the police station to identify the body and take custody of it, but it turns out that Blake Carter went to New York days earlier, while his sister was still alive. Becca left Texas in the company of another woman, Drea Clark (Liza Bennett), and the two of them headed for New York.
At first the police, detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks, whom I like but I miss the chemistry Donovan and Anthony Anderson had together even though I give kudos to Dick Wolf and his writing staff for keeping Donovan’s occasionally racist character with a Black partner) and their supervisor, Lieutenant Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim, whom I got to know first as the villain in the Lifetime movie Cruel Instruction so it’s a bit hard to take her as a hero) – thnk the women were a Lesbian couple fleeing the wrath of Becca’s father, a Fundamentalist Christian who’s built his whole political brand on opposing abortion and Queer rights. Later it turns out that Becca actually got pregnant by her boyfriend, Tyler Robbins (Liam Obergfolt), and Drea was a volunteer with a group called “Project Circe” aimed to get women seeking abortions out of Texas and to a friendly state where women still have control over their own bodies (at least until Republicans are again in power in Washington, D.C. and can pass a ban on all abortions nationwide, as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have already signaled they will do).
Blake flew to New York to stop his sister from having her abortion, but he arrived too late to stop her. In a fit of rage, Blake cornered Becca on the bridge and pushed her off it. When he’s prosecuted for the murder, his family flies in a defense attorney who says that it was actually Drea Clark who murdered Becca when she had second thoughts about the abortion and tried to get out of having it. Drea tried to back out of testifying at the trial for fear of being prosecuted for violating the Texas law that makes it a crime to help a woman travel out of state to secure an abortion, but when Blake fingers her as the killer Drea realizes she has to testify. Blake is duly convicted and Drea is offered a police escort to leave the courthouse by the back door to avoid the anti-abortion protesters in front – but she insists on marching strong and proud out the front door and through the crowd. In a finale I could have done without even though it’s a trope the Law and Order writers have used quite often before, Drea is accosted by an anti-abortion protester with a gun (Kara Rosella) and is shot, though it’s unclear at the end whether she ilves or dies. Personally, I’m hoping she lives; she’s just too good and interesting a character to lose, and Dick Wolf’s writers (in this case, Art Alamo; in the previous case, Rick Eid and Gwen Sigan) have already killed off an utterly fascinating character in the person of Vince (Andrew Yackel) in the opening crossover episode of all Wolf’s New York-based shows this season.
Two nights ago, on September 29, NBC ran three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: the original Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode, “:Battle Lines,” was actually quite good; it’s one of Dick Wolf’s ripped-from-the-headlines specials in which a teenage woman is walking alone through a New York park at night. She gets accosted by various unsavory types, including gang members and others who mean her no good, but ultimately she’s chased down and tries to run away by crossing a bridge, only she’s pushed off it and dies. The young woman turns out to be Rebecca “Becca” Carter (Angelina Boris), daughter of Texas Governor Ron Carter (Ric Reitz). The Carters – Ron, his wife Barbara (Sally Murphy) and their son Blake (Jim Schubin) – all show up at the police station to identify the body and take custody of it, but it turns out that Blake Carter went to New York days earlier, while his sister was still alive. Becca left Texas in the company of another woman, Drea Clark (Liza Bennett), and the two of them headed for New York.
At first the police, detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks, whom I like but I miss the chemistry Donovan and Anthony Anderson had together even though I give kudos to Dick Wolf and his writing staff for keeping Donovan’s occasionally racist character with a Black partner) and their supervisor, Lieutenant Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim, whom I got to know first as the villain in the Lifetime movie Cruel Instruction so it’s a bit hard to take her as a hero) – thnk the women were a Lesbian couple fleeing the wrath of Becca’s father, a Fundamentalist Christian who’s built his whole political brand on opposing abortion and Queer rights. Later it turns out that Becca actually got pregnant by her boyfriend, Tyler Robbins (Liam Obergfolt), and Drea was a volunteer with a group called “Project Circe” aimed to get women seeking abortions out of Texas and to a friendly state where women still have control over their own bodies (at least until Republicans are again in power in Washington, D.C. and can pass a ban on all abortions nationwide, as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have already signaled they will do).
Blake flew to New York to stop his sister from having her abortion, but he arrived too late to stop her. In a fit of rage, Blake cornered Becca on the bridge and pushed her off it. When he’s prosecuted for the murder, his family flies in a defense attorney who says that it was actually Drea Clark who murdered Becca when she had second thoughts about the abortion and tried to get out of having it. Drea tried to back out of testifying at the trial for fear of being prosecuted for violating the Texas law that makes it a crime to help a woman travel out of state to secure an abortion, but when Blake fingers her as the killer Drea realizes she has to testify. Blake is duly convicted and Drea is offered a police escort to leave the courthouse by the back door to avoid the anti-abortion protesters in front – but she insists on marching strong and proud out the front door and through the crowd. In a finale I could have done without even though it’s a trope the Law and Order writers have used quite often before, Drea is accosted by an anti-abortion protester with a gun (Kara Rosella) and is shot, though it’s unclear at the end whether she ilves or dies. Personally, I’m hoping she lives; she’s just too good and interesting a character to lose, and Dick Wolf’s writers (in this case, Art Alamo; in the previous case, Rick Eid and Gwen Sigan) have already killed off an utterly fascinating character in the person of Vince (Andrew Yackel) in the opening crossover episode of all Wolf’s New York-based shows this season.
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The One You Feed" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 29, 2022)
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after such a compelling Law and Order, the other two shows on the NBC program September 29 were considerably less interesting, though they had their points. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit featured a gang of teenagers from El Salvadoran immigrant families, obviously patterned on the real-life MS-13, who target a Midwestern family – a husband, wife and their two daughters – who are in New York to check out potential colleges one of their daughters could attend. The gangsters waylay them on a subway train and their leader takes a machete to the father, killing him, and they gang-rape the daughter who was there to check out potential colleges. The real antagonism is between SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Nick Duarte (Maurice Compte), who has just been assigned to SVU by chief of detectives Tom McGrath (Terry Serpico), who has clashed with Benson before. Duarte previously worked in the anti-gang unit and he’s obsessed for personal reasons with bringing down this gang in particular, so much so that he pleads with district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and his associates to give the two gang members they’ve been able to arrest immunity from prosecution in exchange for information on the whereabouts of “Oscar Papa,” the head of the gang.
Benson insists that the business of her unit is to prosecute rapists, not let them go in the interest of capturing someone higher up the food chain of crime. Of the original four suspects, two of them are killed before they can be indicted or put on trial, and Benson suspects at least one of the deaths was deliberately caused by Duarte and wasn’t the “accident” he said it was. Duarte makes the case that just as it took Italian-American police detectives and officers to bring down the Mafia, so it’s going to take Latinos on the police force to bring down the Latino gangs. He even tries to recruit Benson’s own Latino detective, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisan0), to join him on the anti-gang unit, but Benson – who didn’t care for Velasco at first because he was another detective McGrath forced on her, but he’s since matured and become “one of the team” for her – esents that Duarte tried to poach one of her people without telling her first, and in the end Duarte returns to the anti-gang unit from whence he came and the two surviving gangsters get convicted and go to prison while the gang itself continues to terrorize Salvadoran teens into joining and the evil spreads.
Alas, after such a compelling Law and Order, the other two shows on the NBC program September 29 were considerably less interesting, though they had their points. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit featured a gang of teenagers from El Salvadoran immigrant families, obviously patterned on the real-life MS-13, who target a Midwestern family – a husband, wife and their two daughters – who are in New York to check out potential colleges one of their daughters could attend. The gangsters waylay them on a subway train and their leader takes a machete to the father, killing him, and they gang-rape the daughter who was there to check out potential colleges. The real antagonism is between SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Nick Duarte (Maurice Compte), who has just been assigned to SVU by chief of detectives Tom McGrath (Terry Serpico), who has clashed with Benson before. Duarte previously worked in the anti-gang unit and he’s obsessed for personal reasons with bringing down this gang in particular, so much so that he pleads with district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and his associates to give the two gang members they’ve been able to arrest immunity from prosecution in exchange for information on the whereabouts of “Oscar Papa,” the head of the gang.
Benson insists that the business of her unit is to prosecute rapists, not let them go in the interest of capturing someone higher up the food chain of crime. Of the original four suspects, two of them are killed before they can be indicted or put on trial, and Benson suspects at least one of the deaths was deliberately caused by Duarte and wasn’t the “accident” he said it was. Duarte makes the case that just as it took Italian-American police detectives and officers to bring down the Mafia, so it’s going to take Latinos on the police force to bring down the Latino gangs. He even tries to recruit Benson’s own Latino detective, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisan0), to join him on the anti-gang unit, but Benson – who didn’t care for Velasco at first because he was another detective McGrath forced on her, but he’s since matured and become “one of the team” for her – esents that Duarte tried to poach one of her people without telling her first, and in the end Duarte returns to the anti-gang unit from whence he came and the two surviving gangsters get convicted and go to prison while the gang itself continues to terrorize Salvadoran teens into joining and the evil spreads.
Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Everybody Knows the Dice Are Loaded" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 29, 2022)
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was about the Silas family, notably father Robert Silas (John Dornan) and his son Teddy (Gus Halper) – I suspect writer Bryan Goluboff was thinking of Donald Trump Sr. and Jr. here – who are building “The Majestic,” which will be the first full-service gambling casino in Manhattan. Only a Black tenant named Harry Cole (Jorge Bennett Watson) who owns a building on the lot where the Silases want to build The Majestic” and refuses to sell, has so far delayed construction on the monstrosity. Silas, Sr. orders Silas, Jr. to deal with the “problem” of Cole’;s obstinacy, which Silas, Jr. does by plotting with a thug-for-hire named Kenny Kyle (Michael Dreyer)/ The two buy black African rats – which supposedly are the only rats that make their own venom, like poisonous snakes, instead of just transmitting toxins they’ve acquired elsewhere – from a crooned animal dealer and introduce them into Harry’s apartment, which causes him to fall off his balcony in an apparent “drunken accident.” Then Teddy tries to eliminate Kenny as well.
The cops on this one include Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and somewhat the worse for wear than he was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but still incredibly sexy in a world-weary sort of way) and his supervisor, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), a Black Lesbian who as the show opens is in the process of getting a rather bitter divorce from her wife, Denise (Keren Dukes). The battle includes a fight for custody of their child, though we haven’t seen this person before and don’t know whether they’re a boy or girl, whether she was adopted or was the biological child of one of the couple (though it’s unlikely that either member of the couple gave birth given that we’ve seen them regularly and neither looked pregnant), or how old she is, questions that would loom large in any real-life custody hearing. Like previous Organized Crime episodes, this one has an open-ended finish instead of the clean, resolute endings of previous Dick Wolf shows – unfortunately Dick Wolf has become a charter member of the church of the Great God SERIAL with this show, and writer Goluboff was clearly given the mission to create a multi-episode plot line rather than create a script that actually ends. My favorite part of this episode was the scene in which Stabler and Bell commiserate about the difficulties of being married and having to deal with the anxieties of each of their wives over being in a relationship with a police officer and having to deal with their long work hours, unpredictable schedules and the dangers of the job.
The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was about the Silas family, notably father Robert Silas (John Dornan) and his son Teddy (Gus Halper) – I suspect writer Bryan Goluboff was thinking of Donald Trump Sr. and Jr. here – who are building “The Majestic,” which will be the first full-service gambling casino in Manhattan. Only a Black tenant named Harry Cole (Jorge Bennett Watson) who owns a building on the lot where the Silases want to build The Majestic” and refuses to sell, has so far delayed construction on the monstrosity. Silas, Sr. orders Silas, Jr. to deal with the “problem” of Cole’;s obstinacy, which Silas, Jr. does by plotting with a thug-for-hire named Kenny Kyle (Michael Dreyer)/ The two buy black African rats – which supposedly are the only rats that make their own venom, like poisonous snakes, instead of just transmitting toxins they’ve acquired elsewhere – from a crooned animal dealer and introduce them into Harry’s apartment, which causes him to fall off his balcony in an apparent “drunken accident.” Then Teddy tries to eliminate Kenny as well.
The cops on this one include Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and somewhat the worse for wear than he was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but still incredibly sexy in a world-weary sort of way) and his supervisor, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), a Black Lesbian who as the show opens is in the process of getting a rather bitter divorce from her wife, Denise (Keren Dukes). The battle includes a fight for custody of their child, though we haven’t seen this person before and don’t know whether they’re a boy or girl, whether she was adopted or was the biological child of one of the couple (though it’s unlikely that either member of the couple gave birth given that we’ve seen them regularly and neither looked pregnant), or how old she is, questions that would loom large in any real-life custody hearing. Like previous Organized Crime episodes, this one has an open-ended finish instead of the clean, resolute endings of previous Dick Wolf shows – unfortunately Dick Wolf has become a charter member of the church of the Great God SERIAL with this show, and writer Goluboff was clearly given the mission to create a multi-episode plot line rather than create a script that actually ends. My favorite part of this episode was the scene in which Stabler and Bell commiserate about the difficulties of being married and having to deal with the anxieties of each of their wives over being in a relationship with a police officer and having to deal with their long work hours, unpredictable schedules and the dangers of the job.
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