Father Brown: "The Show Must Go On" (BBC Studios, Britbox, American Public Television, PBS, copyright 2022, released 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 11) I watched a Father Brown episode called “The Show Must Go On” after an unnamed episode of the show on just before it, Hope Street, a contemporary policier set in a small town in Northern Ireland. Aside from one of the regular characters being a Lesbian, the Hope Street show was an odd one about a flock of homing pigeons being stolen, and the thief turns out to be the owner’s wife, who wanted to get rid of the birds because he’s literally developed a life-threatening allergy to them. The Father Brown episode was considerably better: it was about an amateur theatrical troupe called the Kembleford Players who are producing Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Only Jeremy Sandford (Mark Fleischmann), who’s playing the male lead, Benedick, is found poisoned with pesticide fed to him in his ubiquitous whiskey flask. (Previously his leading lady had complained that she could always smell whiskey on his breath.) Father Brown (Mark Williams), who’s been drafted for a role in the production as – what else? – a friar, naturally investigates, though it’s a refreshing change from where this show usually goes that not only is he getting along with the representative of official law enforcement, Sgt. Goodfellow (John Burton), Goodfellow is drafted into the cast as a replacement Benedick.

Of course the good sergeant immediately orders the arrest of the most obvious suspect, Thomas Church (Jack Loxton), whose right arm is partially paralyzed from an accident with the same sort of pesticide. His motive is presumed to be that Jeremy was trying to seduce Church’s fiancée, Penny Briggs (Helena Barlow), but in the end Father Brown deduces that Jeremy’s murder had something to do with the swindle Jeremy was running in London in the guise of an “investment company.” Jeremy had extracted the life savings of more than one local woman, and it turns out the murderer was [spoiler alert!] Charlotte “Charlie” Maidland (Sonita Henry), wife of Patrick Maidland (Sam Phillips). It seems that Jeremy and Patrick were old college buddies and Jeremy had recruited him to be his accomplice in the fraud – and Charlotte’s homicidal rage at Jeremy was because he’d been able to persuade her husband to participate in his swindle for the promise of a share in the illegal proceeds … which, of course, Jeremy never delivered. At just 45 minutes, Father Brown can’t have the depth and richness of Midsomer Murders, which is twice as long, but that also means the writers (here, Tahsin Guner and Sarah-Louise Hawkins) don’t have to work as hard and seemingly have virtually the entire cast arrested at the end. It works as well as it does largely due to the pitch-perfect performance of Mark Willliams in the title role as a busybody Roman Catholic priest who helps the local constabulary solve murders whether they want him to or not.

Cry Terror! (Andrew L. Stone Productions, MGM, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the Father Brown episode I watched a quite interesting movie on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies even though it really wasn’t much of a film noir. It was called Cry Terror! (with the exclamation point) and was made by the independent production company of Andrew Stone and his wife Virginia, released through MGM. The Stones made this film after coming off the success of their previous film, Julie (which starred Doris Day and was made via her production company, Arwin, also for MGM release), and they came up with a doozy of a plot: Jim Molner (James Mason) owns a hi-fi shop when he’s approached by an old army buddy from World War II, Paul Hoplin (Rod Steiger). Hoplin asks Jim to make some bombs for him, promising him a government contract if he does, but the real reason Paul wants the bombs is he’s worked out an elaborate plot to extort money from the fictitious “20th Century Airlines” by planting the bombs on their planes, then calling the company’s CEO, Roger Adams (Carleton Young), and demanding $500,000 to tell him where the bombs are so they can be disarmed. Otherwise, the planes will blow up in mid-air and Adams will be responsible for all the lives lost. One plane in particular contains two bombs, and when the first one is discovered Chet Huntley (playing himself) shows it on TV and Jim recognizes it as his work. Later Paul Hoplin shows up at the home Jim shares with his wife Joan (Inger Stevens) and their daughter Pat (Terry Ann Ross; Mason’s real-life son Portland is also in the cast list, but he played a school friend of Pat instead of Pat herself; the Stones could have made the character a boy instead of a girl and allowed Mason fils to play his child!). Hoplin’s plot extends from San Francisco to Chicago to New York – and so did Stone’s shooting schedule: he always preferred to shoot on real locations rather than studio backlots.

Paul is pretty psycho but he’s also carefully worked out his plan, and among his associates are Eileen Kelly (Angie Dickinson), who planted the second bomb on the plane in Chicago and then got off the plane without going on to New York; Vince (Jack Klugman), identified only as “A Thug” on the cast list; and Steve (Neville Brand, older and seedier than he was in the original D.O.A. and Riot in Cell Block 11), a convicted rapist and Benzedrine addict (writer/director Andrew Stone was taking advantage of the loosening of the Production Code’s former flat ban on depicting drug addiction Otto Preminger had obtained to film The Man with the Golden Arm) who naturally goes after Mrs. Joan Molner. He’s only supposed to be guarding her, but he sexually assaults her and she successfully defends herself by stabbing him with a shard of broken glass from a window. Then she has to hide the body because she’s afraid that Hoplin will take it out on her if he realizes Steve is dead. Jim, meanwhile, is being held hostage by Vince and Kelly in her New York penthouse, only he figures out a way to escape by climbing down the elevator shaft – which means near-certain death if someone actually tries to use the elevator while he’s in the shaft. When Hoplin returns to the apartment where he’s holding Joan, he sees a New York Globe headline announcing that Jim and his daughter Pat are safe and have escaped the crooks, and that sends him ballistic. He chases Joan after she sneaks out of the apartment, and there’s a final scene inside a New York subway (though Stone actually shot the scene in a disused subway in Hoboken, New Jersey) in which Hoplin gets electrocuted by touching the third rail (well, it’s not quite as messy an exit as having him run over by a passing train) and Joan is pulled to safety just as she’s about to be run over by a passing train.

Cry Terror! isn’t really a film noir – only the final scenes at night even look noir, and the characters are either all-good or all-bad with none of the moral ambiguity of true film noir. But it’s also a quite good thriller if you can take the sheer preposterousness of the ending – to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, Andrew Stone was the sort of writer who had to write at least six impossible things before breakfast. It’s the sort of movie that later made Liam Neeson a late-in-life action star with his film Taken, much to his surprise (indeed, one could readily imagine a remake with Neeson in Mason’s role), though part of me wishes Stone had switched Mason’s and Steiger’s roles. Steiger’s overall appearance, especially the horn-rimmed glasses he wears, give him an Everyman appearance that seems more in line to be a milquetoast regular guy than a dastardly super-villain; while Mason, who the year after this film was made would play the role of his life as the dastardly super-villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, could have played the villain’s role here as well. The other quirky thing about Cry Terror! is how many of the bad guys went on to play law enforcers in their later roles: Steiger as the racist Southern county sheriff in In the Heat of the Night; Klugman as medical examiner Quincy in an NBC-TV series; and Dickinson as Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson, the title character on Police Woman, also an NBC-TV series. But the real surprise of Cry Terror! is the superb, highly nuanced performance by Inger Stevens as Joan Molner. She was a troubled woman with various drug addictions and a penchant for seducing her co-stars, though throughout her career she was married to Black film producer Ike Jones but had to keep it a secret for fear that the revelation that she had a Black husband would have destroyed her career. But Inger Stevens’ tragic fate – she died of alcohol and barbiturate intoxication in 1970 at age 35, and her death was ruled a suicide – has overshadowed her career, and if her performance in Cry Terror! is any indication, she had real potential as an actress on which she didn’t live long enough to deliver.

Midsomer Murders: "The Witches of Angel's Rise" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, copyrighted 2021, premiered 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 9) I watched a Midsomer Murders episode that’s listed on the show’s imdb.com page as the most recent one: “The Witches of Angel’s Rise,” about an annual “Psychic Fayre” [sic] held on a central English estate owned by Peter Saint-Stephens (Clive Mantle) and his African-British wife Jeanie (Caroline Lee-Johnson). The Saint-Stephenses had two children, a teenage daughter named Bea who dies under mysterious circumstances in a black-and-white prologue and a scapegrace teenage son named Isaac (Jordan Ford Silver, a nice hunk of man-meat who looks credible as the offspring of a mixed-race couple), who never gets out of bed before noon and doesn’t seem to have any plans for what to do with the rest of his life. The prologue showed Bea waiting in the ruins of an abandoned castle for a visitor to show up – it’s not clear whether the visitor she was expecting was alive or dead, since she’s drawn as a major believer in spiritualism – and we see a shadowy figure calling out to her just before she takes a header out of a window opening that long before lost its window and falls to her death. In the present her parents are still grieving for her even though they have radically different attitudes towards the New Age stuff being peddled on their property: she’s convinced that there’s something to it while he’s sure it’s all bunk, but is willing to accept the rental income from the Psychic Fayre to help maintain the estate.

The Psychic Fayre attracts all manner of exhibitors, including accountant by day and Tarot reader by night Simeon Dagley (Richard David-Caine); empaths Sally Ann Barker (Tracy-Ann Oberman) and Rachel Finn (Sarah Paul); star psychic Hattie Bainbridge (Janine Duvitski), who suddenly retired from public appearances a few years earlier and is attempting a comeback with this one; and Gerard King (Colin Salmon), a local landowner and another Afro-Brit who’s having an affair with Jeanie Saint-Stephens and has seduced her by telling her she was Cleopatra in a previous lifetime. Simeon has caught her taking money from the Saint-Stephens family account to lavish on Gerard as part of his scheme to rip her off, though she remains in thrall to him until another victim confronts her and tells her Gerard had said she was Cieopatra, too. The first victim besides Bea is Tilly Mulroney (Erin Mullin), who’s fired from the staff of the Psychic Fayre just a week before it’s supposed to begin and is later found dead in a field with a number of ritualistic symbols surrounding her body, as if she were a sacrifice to witchcraft. Later Simeon Henry is also found dead, with his body hung from trees and arranged to look like the Hanged Man in a Tarot deck. Also in the dramatis personae are Felix Marshall (Tristan Sturrock), a formerly respected scientist whose work on string theory was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in physics; and his assistant, Jonas Wilson (Cian Barry). Felix has been collecting books on the occult with the intent of studying it scientifically and discovering whether there’s any truth in it. Jonas, who was Bea’s boyfriend until her mysterious death and was supposed to meet her on the night she died – only he was delayed and still suffers from guilt that if he’d made their date on time, she’d have lived – is a hard-line disbeliever in all forms of spirituality, both conventional religion and the New Age occult.

Eventually it turns out that Jonas killed both Tilly and Simeon, and his motive was his militant, hard-core atheism; he literally became homicidally angry at all the people around him who were telling him that Bea was alive and well in another plane of existence and therefore he shouldn’t feel too terribly about her death. This Midsomer Murders episode ends with quite a few people getting arrested; Gerard King ends up in custody on fraud charges, Felix Marshall is revealed as a fake whose supposed “discovery” in string theory was really the work of a Romanian scientist he ripped it off from and later paid a “retainer” (a more polite term than “blackmail”) to keep quiet, and of course Jonas is arrested for the murders of Tilly and Simeon. While one of the things that annoys me about Midsomer Murders is the sheer number of crimes the police, led by Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), uncover in each episode. At times it seems like the fictional Midsomer County, England is living up to Bob Dylan’s comment that “the whole world is one big prison yard/Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards.” But there’s still a real charm to this show – and did I mention that there’s also a subplot dealing with a river that runs through the Midsomer County estate and the battle between a local landowner and the townspeople over whether the water can be diverted and that’s going to have an adverse impact to a species of newt that now lives in the water? That’s just one of many subplots in this show that gets developed for a while and then dropped as the ultimate explanation for the murders turns out to be something, as the Monty Pythoners would have said, completely different.

57th Annual Country Music Association Awards (Omaha Productions, Country Music Association, ABC-TV, aired November 8, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, November 8) I watched the 57th annual Country Music Association awards show on ABC-TV. What impressed me most about the show was the sheer quality of the music presented; I could make a case that we’re living in a new Golden Age of country music, and at least part of that may be due to the fact that at last Nashville has embraced the African-American heritage that was fundamental to the evolution of country music. When I wrote about the first episode in Ken Burns’ eight-part mega-documentary about the history of country music, I argued that all the great American musical genres have come from the combination of Black American music with something else. You combine Black music with the white marching-band tradition, and you get jazz. You combine Black music with Jewish music, and you get Broadway, Hollywood and the so-called “Great American Songbook.” And you combine Black music with the British and Irish folk tradition, add bits of Mexican and Hawai’ian music, and you get the bluegrass, hillbilly and cowboy styles that later fused to form what we know as “country music.” Blacks have invaded the country world big-time – the days when Charley Pride’s record company, RCA Victor, left his picture off the covers of his early albums and audiences gasped when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man came out are long gone – with not only top stars like Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton but up-and-comers like a married Black couple who call themselves “The War and Treaty,” African-Americans have cracked the color bar in country music wide open. The CMA Awards began this year with the heavy-set white singer Jelly Roll singing his star-making hit, “God, I Need a Favor,” with Wynnona Judd singing an impassioned second vocal and turning the song into an electrifying duet. Then there was a gag clip of co-host Peyton Manning (the multi-Super Bowl-winning quarterback) joining country singer Peter McCullough on stage for a bit of a song called “Red Dirt Road,” and Manning got his back on his co-host, country singer Luke Bryan, by showing a clip of Bryan absent-mindedly appearing on stage with his fly open (he noticed it and stopped the song to zip up again).

The first two awards went to country singer Luke Combs for his cover of Tracy Chapman’s 36-year-old classic “Fast Car”; Combs’ record won for Single of the Year and Chapman got the award for Song of the Year (and though she wasn’t there to accept the award in person, she sent a nice memo of thanks). Then Luke Bryan came out for a medley of his biggest hits – as often happens in awards shows like this, I had to guess at the titles since I’m not that familiar with the Luke Bryan oeuvre. They were “Hunting, Fishing and Loving Every Day,” “One Margarita, Two Margarita, Three Margarita, Shot,” a song title I scrawled in my notes as “Lay Down and Love You Right,” “Play It Again” and “Country Girl.” Then Ashley McBryde did a really beautiful ballad called “Leave a Light On in the Kitchen” (and did it in a powerfully understated performance that, like much of what gets performed in shows like this, belies country’s reputation as a genre of overwrought excess), and Cody Johnson followed in a similar vein with “The Painter,” in which the singer tells his girlfriend that he is just the canvas and she is the painter. After the Brothers Osborne won their sixth-ever CMA award for Vocal Duo of the Year, Morgan Wallin and Eric Church did a charming duet on a song called “Man Made a Bar” – whose central theme was that God may have made everything else but it was man who created the bar to make the rest of God’s creation endurable. Then Luke Combs did, not the “Fast Car” cover I was hoping for, but a song of his own called “Where the Wild Things Are,” and Chris Stapleton (a homely man whom I’ve referred to as the Bruce Vilanch of country music; at a time when virtually all the male country singers were hot, rail-thin hunks wearing skin-tight jeans and showing ample baskets, Stapleton came on and showed his vocal and guitar chops rather than his looks) came out with a song called “White Horse.” After that I got to hear Jordan Davis do a song called “Next Thing You Know” which I’d previously seen him do on one of the late-night talk shows, and then Old Dominion won Vocal Group of the Year; like the Brothers Osborne, they’d won the award five times previously and I had the feeling it would be nice if the old geezers would move out of the way and give younger people a chance (much the way a lot of American voters feel now about the likely choice in the 2024 Presidential election between 80-year-old Joe Biden and 77-year-old Donald Trump).

Then Lainie Wilson did a lovely song called “Wild Flowers and Wild Horses”; I think the presentation, with a large circle of barbed wire through which Wilson made a seemingly spectacular entrance and which burst into flames at the end, was overdone, but Wilson’s singing was powerful enough to overcome the pyrotechnics. (One of my musical biases is a mistrust of singers who do overly elaborate stage tricks; my feeling is that if they were confident enough in their voices, they wouldn’t need to do all this bizarre stage production.) After that, Dan + Shea (one of the many vocal duos crowded out of a win by the Brothers Osborne) did “Save Me the Trouble” and then came one of the highlights of the evening: Kelsea Ballerina doing a stunning song called “I Hope I Never Leave Me Again” (a breakup song with a difference; she hopes she never again subsumes herself by trying to reinvent herself as what her man of the moment thinks she should be) and doing it utterly alone, just her voice and acoustic guitar. Then came another of the most stunning acts of the night, the Black husband-and-wife duo The War and Treaty doing a powerful song called “That’s Not How Love Is Made” – and the female member had one of the most amazing soul voices I’ve heard in quite a while. Then they gave Jelly Roll the award for Best New Artist (I’d have rather seen it go to the woman singer Megan Moroney), and after that they brought various living stars for a tribute to Jimmy Buffett. Surprisingly, Buffett was the only recently deceased artist they mentioned – they didn’t do an “In Memoriam” segment – and it began with a beautifully understated version of Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at 40” by Kenny Chesney and Mac McAnally. Then the Zac Brown Band and veteran Alan Jackson came on to extend the Buffett tribute with a little-known song (at least to me) called “Adios, My Friend” followed by the inevitable classic “Margaritaville,” which they sang to a giant photo of Buffett on a yacht moored at a pier in Florida. Then Megan Moroney and Old Dominion came together for a song called “Can’t Break Up Now,” after which Lainie Wilson’s Bell Bottom Country won for Album of the Year (and she’d also win Female Vocalist of the Year) and Carly Pierce and Chris Stapleton joined forces for “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” about a long-term couple who are so bored with each other they no longer even bother to argue.

After that there was a tribute to country singer Joe Diffie which his son introduced; HARDY (apparently he spells his name in all caps) and Morgan Willen did “John Deere Dreaming” and were joined by the heavily tattooed Post Malone for “Pickup Man.” The last two awards of the evening went to Chris Stapleton as Male Vocalist of the Year and Lainie Wilson as Entertainer of the Year, and the two final songs were truly special: Tanya Tucker coming out to sing her star-making hit, “Delta Dawn,” with the group Little Big Town; and the finale, “Let Love Build a Bridge,” done as a duet with L. Michelle and Jelly Roll. My husband Charles got back from work early and caught the last fourth of the show, and we also watched a Jimmy Kimmel Live episode featuring two country stars who hadn’t been on the CMA Awards, Blake Shelton and Luke Grimes. Shelton didn’t sing – he merely talked – but Grimes both did an interview and sang a quite lovely song called “Burn” from a new EP, Pain, Pills and Pews. The comma isn’t in the official title, but I added it to indicate that the title is supposed to be read as four words, not three – “Pain” and “Pills” are separate objects, not “pain pills” as one thing.

FRONTLINE: "Shattered Dreams of Peace: The Road from Oslo" (GBH, PBS, originally aired June 27, 2002; rebroadcast November 7, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, November 7) the PBS show Frontline re-ran a show about Israel and Palestine from June 27, 2002 called “Shattered Dreams: The Road from Oslo.” Obviously the re-run was occasioned by the current violence between Israelis and Palestinians kicked off by the reprehensible October 7 attacks on Israeli civilians, including the murder of 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240 as hostages, who were forcibly taken to Gaza and are being held there now, by fighters from the terrorist group Hamas. The show was produced and directed by Dan Setton and Tor Ben Mayor, and featured interviews with the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who first won election in 1996, served until 1999 and has been in and out of the prime ministership ever since – along with diplomats on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who desperately tried to negotiate an agreement for peace in historic Palestine. U.S. President Bill Clinton made Middle East peace a major goal of his administration, including sponsoring the Oslo agreements in 1993 that supposedly set up a framework for an ultimate resolution. Key to the Oslo accords was the so-called “two-state solution” in which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, and the two countries would live together side by side as neighbors. Clinton was frantically leading or hosting negotiations to achieve that end until the end of his presidency in early 2001 at a variety of venues, including Sharm-al-Shaikh, Egypt; Wye, Maryland; and ultimately Stockholm, Sweden.

When I was still publishing the print edition of Zenger’s Newsmagazine I riffed off the phrase “the heckler’s veto” – the ability of organized (or not-so-organized) mobs to silence speakers they don’t like by disrupting their events – and coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto” to indicate the ability of terror groups in highly fraught situations like the ongoing hostility between Israel and Palestine to sabotage attempts at a peaceful resolution by staging well-timed attacks to sow mistrust on the other side. Time and time again, both Israelis and Palestinians have used “the terrorists’ veto” to stoke the fires of the conflict and keep any peaceful solution from even being negotiated, much less implemented. The downward spiral began, at least according to this program, when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who had helped negotiate the Oslo accords, was killed by a Right-wing Jew in 1995, two years after the agreement. Rabin’s funeral drew leaders of the Arab world, some of whom had never set foot in Israel until then. King Hussein of Jordan said of Rabin, “You lived as a soldier, you died as a soldier for peace. And I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak our piece.” President Clinton said, “Your prime minister was a martyr for peace, but he was a victim of hate.” Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat didn’t attend Rabin’s funeral – he stayed home and watched it on TV for what he said were “security reasons” – but he told Frontline, “It was very, very difficult and painful for me personally. But the most important thing for the Palestinians and for the Israelis and for the whole Middle East area is to return back to protect the peace of the brave which I had signed with my partner, Rabin, and to live together as we had decided.” But the negotiations faced opposition from both hard-line Jews in Israel and Palestinian militants in organizations like Hezbollah in the north (on Israel’s border with Lebanon) and Hamas in the south (on Israel’s border with Egypt).

According to this documentary, written by Setton and Mayor and narrated by long-term Frontline commentator Will Lyman, Hamas had “gained power among Palestinians by controlling the mosques and providing food and education to the poor.” The show featured a chilling clip of a Hamas leader haranguing a crowd and saying, “We will invade Palestine and drive out the Zionists, the oppressors, the rapists. And the only way is the way of the gun! This is the only way! This is the only way!” As called for in the Oslo agreements, Israel gradually withdrew from the largest population centers in the West Bank, and on August 15, 2005 – three years after this documentary premiered – Israel totally pulled out of Gaza. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Israel maintained a security infrastructure on their border with Gaza and controlled Gazans’ access to food and energy – and they used that power arbitrarily, periodically cutting off Gazans’ ability to obtain the necessities of life. Gaza has since been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison,” and the Israeli jailers have been relentless in their pressure on the territory. Ironically, the Israeli government’s policy to wall off Gaza and keep its citizens from having reliable access to basic needs and also the education they would need to better themselves uncannily resembles the way European governments from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century generally oppressed their Jewish populations. It’s amazing, given the deep-seated mistrust of both Israelis and Palestinians for each other, that they came as close as they did to an agreement despite the ins and outs of politics in both Israel and Palestine. In 1996 Israeli secret agents blew up Yehiya Ayash, Hamas’s chief bomb-maker, and triggered a visceral response among Palestinians who saw Ayash as a shaheed – a holy martyr – and vowed revenge. Three weeks later, at least three suicide bombers from Hamas launched attacks inside Jerusalem, killing 46 and wounding hundreds more, followed by another attack in Tel Aviv that killed 17 people, all 17 years old or younger. This led to a nosedive in popularity for Rabin’s successor as Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, just as he was facing a new election. “They called me traitor,” Peres told Frontline. “They called me killer or murderer.”

In retaliation, Israel orders a counterattack that mistakenly targets a United Nations compound. Israeli Arabs, who made up 20 percent of Israel’s voting population at the time, call for a boycott of the upcoming election – and Netanyahu beats Peres, albeit barely. Netanyahu’s political “brand” is opposition to the peace process he is now obliged to carry out. He told Frontline, “I thought it was important to lay down the ground rules so Arafat would know exactly where I was coming from. Two-thirds of the public supported Oslo at the time. The international community supported it. They really thought that Arafat meant peace. I didn't think that he meant peace. And I said I would honor it under two conditions: One, that Arafat honor it. The second was that I would reduce the dangers in Oslo, reduce the withdrawals, reduce the price that Israel would have to pay.” Among the issues on which Netanyahu took a harder line than Rabin or Peres was the building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank – thereby eating up more and more of the land that was supposed to constitute the eventual Palestinian state – and the “right of return” by which Palestinian families demanded to be re-admitted to the territories within Israel they’d been forced out of by the Nakba, the driving out of Palestinian Arabs at gunpoint in the late 1940’s when the state of Israel was created in the first place. The “right of return” is a big non-starter for most Jewish Israelis because it would mean the end of Israel’s status as a “Jewish state” if millions of Arabs were permitted to return there, where they could conceivably vote the Jews out of power the way Black South Africans did to whites after the fall of apartheid. Since 2002 the political rhetoric inside Israel about what to do with the Palestinians has become even more uncompromising.

In a recent post to the New Yorker’s Web site (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside-the-israeli-crackdown-on-speech) journalist Masha Gessen tells stories about Israeli Jews who have faced violence or the threat of violence from fellow Jews for allegedly not being militant enough in their attitudes towards Hamas. Jewish Israeli journalist Israel Frey told Gessen he was nearly lynched by a mob outside his home a week after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, and though he called the police, the cops who came clearly indicated that their sympathies lay with his attackers. “The police protected my life only in the sense that they prevented people from entering the building, and escorted me out,” Frey said. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home, if I can go home at all.” Israeli officials in 2023 denounced United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he said at a U.N. Security Council meeting, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Israeli officials canceled their scheduled meetings with Guterres and called for his resignation. “On October 17th, Kobi Shabtai, the head of Israeli police, announced that he would not allow any demonstrations against the war,” Gessen reported. She quoted Shabtai as saying, “Anyone who wishes to identify with Gaza, is welcome to — I will put him on the buses that are heading there now.”

It’s become clear over the last month that Israel has launched a genocidal assault on the entire population of Gaza – and is using the Hamas attacks as a pretext. Mutual trust and peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems farther away than ever – which adds poignance to the sad commentary of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat at the end of the 2002 Frontline show: “I know Palestinians and Israelis can make peace. If it's not next year, if it's not in 10 years, the day will come when Palestinians and Israelis will build on what I, my colleagues and the Israelis achieved in the negotiations of permanent status. I don't think they will ever re-invent the wheel. And the difference between this moment until the moment of reaching an agreement will be how many names — Palestinians and Israelis — will be added to the lists of death and agony. At the end of the day, there will be peace.”

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, copyright 1965, released 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched the 1965 (that’s the copyright date, though imdb.com lists it as from 1966) film The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, directed by Norman Jewison based on a script by William Rose adapted from a novel called The Off-Islanders (1961) by Nathaniel Benchley. Nathaniel’s father, Robert Benchley, was a well-known author and actor who’s best remembered for his marvelous series of one-reel (10-minute) shorts for MGM in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Nathaniel also had a son, Peter Benchley, who’s best known as the author of the novel Jaws on which Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster hit film was based. Both Charles and I remembered this film from its early days – I saw it in a theatre on its initial release with my father and stepmother, and Charles said he caught it with his family on its first TV showing – but neither of us remembered having seen it since. It’s a Cold War spoof in which a Russian submarine called Спрут (pronounced "sproot" and meaning "octopus") runs aground off Gloucester Island in New England (the Wikipedia page on the film says the island is fictional, but on my last walk through the neighborhood I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt with the island’s logo). The sub’s captain (Theodore Bikel, folk singer and the first Captain Von Trapp in the Broadway premiere of The Sound of Music, with Mary Martin as Maria) sends out a delegation led by Lt. Rozanov (Alan Arkin in his first feature film; he won an Academy Award nomination for his role here and he shows off his fluency in Russian, which he learned from his grandparents) to find a boat somewhere on Gloucester Island which they can use to tow their sub off the sandbar where they’re grounded so they can just head home.

They show up at the summer home (the time is September, right when all the summer tourists on Gloucester are leaving for their normal homes and the population is thinning out so only the year-round “regulars” remain) of musical-comedy playwright Walt Whittaker (Carl Reiner), his wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint, overqualified as usual in a nothing role that doesn’t challenge her the way her most famous parts in On the Waterfront and North by Northwest did) and their kids, nine-year-old Pete (Sheldon Collins, billed here as Sheldon Golomb) and three-year-old Annie (Cindy Putnam). The Russians show up at the Whittaker home with guns drawn (one of them has a pistol and one has something that looks ominously like an assault rifle) and demand access to a boat. When Walt explains to them that there are no boats on that side of the island, Rozanov demands that Walt “lend” them his car so they can drive to the other side. Walt tries to explain to Rozanov that there’s very little gas in the car, but the Russians take it anyway – and duly run out of fuel not far from the Whittaker home. The sight of Russian sailors in Navy uniforms sparks the predictable fear of an armed Soviet invasion among the U.S. townspeople. The Russians steal an old car from postmistress Muriel Everett (Doro Merande), whom they tie up in a singularly inconvenient position hanging her upside-down from her wall and cutting the phone lines so she can’t communicate with anyone. But before Muriel is immobilized she manages to reach gossipy telephone operator Alice Foss (played by the great British music-hall singer Tessie O’Shea, who appeared on the first Ed Sullivan Show featuring The Beatles on February 9, 1964), who ends up literally tied together with Walt Whittaker. Their attempts to break free from each other despite the Russians’ bondage take on a weirdly sexual aspect – though for Walt to go extra-relational with Tessie O’Shea when his wife is played by Eva Marie Saint would definitely be trading down – especially all the moaning they do as they try to snap the ropes open and get free from each other.

One of the Russian sailors, Alexei Kolchin (John Philllp Law, still in his handsome prime before years of drugging and partying cost him his almost unearthly good looks), falls in love with the Whittakers’ babysitter, Alison Palmer (Andrea Dromm), and the two go for long walks on the local beaches dreaming about each other and lamenting that they’re on opposite sides of the Cold War. The police chief of the town, Link Mattocks (Brian Keith), is actually a voice of reason in the growing hysteria, but he leaves most of the official police response to his hare-brained assistant, Norman Jonas (Jonathan Winters, best known then as a stand-up comedian but oddly cast here in a character that offers him little to work with, though he makes the best of that little). They also have to deal with would-be militia leader Fendall Hawkins (Paul Ford), who keeps accidentally sticking Jonas with his ceremonial sword, and town drunk Luther Grilk (veteran screen comedian Ben Blue), who in one of the film’s funniest running gags tries to do the Paul Revere number and capture a horse, only the horse keeps getting away from him and when he finally mounts it to ride through the streets telling the townspeople that the Russians are coming, the Russians have already left. One unexpected aspect of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! is the sheer level of paranoia on both sides of the Cold War; the film’s climax features the Russians threatening to fire on the townspeople – and brandishing a cannon with which to do it – immediately if the townspeople don’t return the seven sailors from the submarine (which in the meantime has got itself ungrounded when the tide came in). We know, though nobody in the film does, that the seven sailors are in the cabin cruiser they’ve stolen from the harbor thinking their crew still needs it to get the sub free. Ultimately two children sneak into the old church steeple to get a better look at the confrontation – only one of the kids falls out of the steeple and is impaled on a bracket on the side of the building. Americans and Russians join forces and successfully rescue the boy, and the two sides make their uneasy piece. The Americans even agree to escort the Russians out of the harbor and back onto the open seas, a lucky thing since in the meantime one of the townspeople had alerted the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force sends two pilots to reconnoiter the situation and bomb the Russians if necessary, but fortunately they see the escort and realize it isn’t.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! is a reasonably amusing film, though as a Cold War satire it’s hardly on the level of The Mouse That Roared, let alone Dr. Strangelove, and it did occur to me that it might have been considerably funnier if the part of Walt Whittaker had been played not by Carl Reiner but his performing partner Mel Brooks. It’s an amusing movie and a real curio, but I suspect both Charles and I remembered it as considerably funnier than it turns out to be now. Worth mentioning is the film’s opening credits sequence, which features American and Russian flags doing animated battle with each other as the U.S. is symbolized by “Yankee Doodle” and Russia by three songs – the familiar “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” “Meadowlands” (the hauntingly beautiful World War II-era song, recorded during the war by Paul Robeson in a bilingual English/Russian mix and Alexander Kipnis in Russian) and a third piece I didn’t recognize.

Maid for Revenge (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 5) at 6 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies in a row, including a better-than-average one called Maid for Revenge about a youngish woman, Annie Wilkerson (Kathryn Kohut), a widow with an eight-year-old son named Tate (Lincoln MacNeil, who looks more like about 12, but that’s a common enough failing in movies generally). She served 2 ½ years in prison for allegedly driving under the influence in the car crash that killed her late husband, during which time Tate was in the custody of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hale (Barbara Gordon). Annie shows up to work as a maid for a couple she’s never met – they’ve instructed her to let herself in and go to work immediately. They’ve also left her a pitcher of water with a note reading, “Help Yourself” – only the water is spiked with something or other. She collapses beside the swimming pool, and when she comes to hours later there’s a dead woman in the pool. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police – though later we learn that because of her prison record she’s convinced the police would never believe her and in fact would assume that she killed the woman herself – Annie grabs the cordless phone in the kitchen and calls the contact number she’s been given for the place’s owners. (She doesn’t use her own phone because she doesn’t have one; she’s lost it.) Only there’s no answer, so, desperate to get away, Annie tries to steal a truck belonging to neighbor Billy (Matt Wells), only Billy catches her. Eventually he agrees to drive her home, but when she arrives she finds Tate and her babysitter Katy (Zara Matthews) aren’t there.

Ultimately she gets in touch with Katy and finds that the sitter took Tate to his grandmother’s when Annie didn’t show up when expected. Annie talks to her family lawyer, who urges her to turn herself in, but she refuses. Eventually she realizes that she’s being framed, and with Billy’s help she traces the frame to two crooks, Maynard Barnes (Terry WJ Ryan) and baby-faced Marcus (Tim Myles). Only they’re being paid by a mysterious big boss who turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Annie’s former mother-in-law, Elizabeth Hale, who wants Annie sent back to prison or executed so she can have permanent custody of Tate and raise him in the material affluence she thinks he deserves. Writers Justin B. James and Shawn Riopelle (the former a new name to me – though according to the imdb.com page for the film he’s credited as “Dustin Hames” – but the latter a “regular” on films from the Johnson Production Group, which this is) actually reveal Elizabeth Hale as the villainess about an hour and 10 minutes into the movie – which is a bad thing in terms of the suspense and keeping us guessing, but a good thing in that it allows Barbara Gordon to turn in a no-holds-barred bad-girl performance from then on, and she seizes on the opportunity. James and Riopelle do a good job of throwing us red herrings – at one point Charles was convinced that the babysitter was in on the plot, while for much of the movie I thought Billy would turn out to be the (or at least a) villain, not only because Matt Wells is drop-dead gorgeous (usually a sure sign of evil for a male in a Lifetime movie) but also because there are hints that he’s a drug abuser. The first time Annie comes to see him at his place he hurriedly scoops up a metal hash pipe and hides it in a styrofoam fast-food container, and later we see him take a whole lot of ibuprofen (seemingly much more than he would need as a legitimate painkiller) and wash it down with a can of cheap beer.

Annie is ambushed by Maynard and Marcus but escapes them absurdly easily when they won’t cross through a shallow creek and get their legs wet, which she’s been willing to do. Grandma Elizabeth gets Billy to drive her to a deserted mountain cabin (not another deserted mountain cabin as the site of a Lifetime movie’s climax!) because Maynard and Marcus are holding Tate as hostage (ya remember Tate?) and demanding $200,000 in $20 bills. Charles questioned not only whether there’d be enough room in Elizabeth’s handbag for that much money but also how she was able to get that much cash together in the middle of the night, though later she explains that it came from a safe where she stashed it as a sort of rainy-day fund. Elizabeth knocks out Billy with a tire iron and goes into the cabin to pay the ransom, which Maynard and Marcus insist on counting – director Alexandre Carrière periodically cuts away to shots of Tate under a blanket with his feet twitching to let us know he’s still alive – but Billy recovers, calls the cops and ultimately they arrest Elizabeth while Billy offers to take both Annie and Tate on a vacation that’s pretty obviously going to turn into a honeymoon. I give Maid for Revenge credit for not always going in the most obvious directions stipulated by Lifetime in its formulae; it’s not much of a movie in terms of overall quality, but it’s an above-average Lifetime thriller and, despite some whopping improbabilities, the plot actually makes sense.