The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Sour Grapes" (South Pacific Pictures, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 7) at 10 I watched the intriguing second episode of the New Zealand-set and -made detective series, The Brokenwood Mysteries. This was made in 2014 and was almost inevitably called “Sour Grapes,” since it dealt with the annual Brokenwood wine festival and competition. The lead detectives are Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) and a third sidekick introduced in this episode, Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), a tall, striking-looking redhead who mostly does legwork for the other two cops. The plot kicks off with the murder of Paul Winterston (Alistair Browning), out-of-town judge who was brought in to award the prize to the winner of the wine contest. His body is found in an open fermentation vat full of raw red wine after he was pushed under with a giant stirring paddle and held there until he drowned. The prime suspect is Amanda James (Jo Davidson), whose winery had won the contest for the last five years in a row but this time has lost to a brand called “Bright Valley,” owned by Julian Bright (Peter Elliott). Bright hosts a nationwide radio program about wine in addition to making the stuff himself. Amanda was counting on her sixth victory in a row to win a contract with a major supermarket chain to sell her wines, and among the people who don’t like her is her own father, Ned James (Geoff Snell). Ned has dropped out of the wine business and just makes private stock for himself and his friends, and he tells Shepherd that what he doesn’t like about Amanda’s approach to wine-making is she’s taken all the heart out of it and made it too scientific. The evidence seems to build up against Amanda, especially when Shepherd learns that she had a brief affair with Winterston even though she tries to lie her way out of it – at several points she tells him, “I don’t like sex” (throughout the show the characters turn short “e”’s in the middle of words into long ones – “sex” becomes “seex,” “dead” becomes “deed” and, as it did in the first episode, “detective” becomes “duh-TEEK-tive” – which I presume is a peculiarity of either the New Zealand accent in general or the particular dialect of this mostly rural part of it).

Though she’s still considered a suspect, Shepherd relies on Amanda’s expertise to analyze the wine samples and determine just how her primo product became so contaminated Winterston and the other judges literally turned up their noses at it – or at least spat it out as soon as they drank it – because it was so terrible. Amanda’s chemical analysis of the bad batch of her wine indicates that the contaminant was urine (presumably human), which the killer used to spike her wine. He actually stole two cases of her wine, one of which he spiked with urine (and then carefully replaced the seals on the bottles with new ones, though one of the key giveaways between the contaminated bottles and the good ones was that the insides of the seals didn’t exactly match in color) and one of which he kept pure but used to refill his own Bright Valley bottles, so Amanda really won the contest prize after all since the winning wine came from her vineyard. The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Julian Bright, who murdered not only Paul Winterston (who figured out Julian’s plot and tried to blackmail him) but also a rival local vintner named Rob Visnic (Jeff Szusterman), who figured out the plot and tried to expose it but also got drowned in a vat of raw red wine. Thanks to Amanda’s analyses of the wine samples found inside the corpses, Shepherd deduces that they were both killed in the same place – in Julian’s vineyard in vats of fermenting merlot – even though Paul’s body was found at Amanda’s operation in a vat of pinot noir because Julian had moved it to frame Amanda. (One wonders just how he handled the literal “dead weight” of a corpse.) Ultimately Shepherd and Sims confront Julian with the evidence, though Julian insists on recording the conversation with the threat that he’ll play the tape on his radio show to bolster his Trump-like claim that he’s being framed by authorities who want to drive him out of business. Eventually he gets captured, though he puts up a major struggle and it takes the brute strength of Shepherd and Sims combined to subdue him.

There are a few glitches in this one, directed by Josh Frizell from a script by Tim Balme, notably the fact that in the wine-tasting scene that opens the show there are no plain crackers at the testing stations. In fact, there are usually plain crackers at wine-tasting events so the people doing the testing can eat something to get the taste of the last wine sample out of their mouths and freshen their palates for the next batch. Also I missed the clever use of American country music in the first episode, “Blood and Water,” both to illustrate Shepherd’s own musical taste and his thoughtlessness in blasting away with it whether the other people in his car like it or not. But “Sour Grapes” is ultimately an engaging TV episode even though its debt to British crime shows in general and Midsomer Murders in particular (especially the use of an annual contest no one in the dramatis personae seem to have ever heard of before as the setting and the multiple murders, though the writers of Midsomer Murders generally don’t make us wait as long between the first murder and the second as Tim Balme did here) is pretty obvious, and I missed the character from “Blood and Water” of the woman police supervisor who’s also one of Mike Shepherd’s three or four ex-wives, since he’s such a womanizer even he can’t remember how many times he’s been married before. Instead there was a young character who basically functions as Shepherd’s “wine whisperer,” Jared Morehu (Pana Hema-Taylor), a Maori (I’m presuming) who explains to him just how to sample wine properly but doesn’t seem to have any other function in the plot.

The Goddess (Carnegie Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 6) I watched an intriguing if not great movie on Turner Classic Movies: The Goddess, co-produced by Columbia Pictures and something called “Carnegie Productions” in 1958. Written by Paddy Chayevsky and directed by veteran John Cromwell (his first film in seven years, since he and two other directors – Tay Garnett and Mel Ferrer – worked on Howard Hughes’ remake of The Racket in 1951; his son James Cromwell, actor best known as the human lead in Babe, told The Progressive that his dad had been blacklisted), The Goddess is about a troubled young woman from Tennessee, Emily Ann Faulkner (Patty Duke as a child, Kim Stanley as an adult), who goes through two troubled marriages after her mom Laureen (Betty Lou Holland) palms her off on her aunt and uncle, both hard-core Seventh-Day Adventists, to raise. Ultimately she settles in Hollywood and becomes movie star “Rita Shawn” (though we don’t see the name in print during the film, so I’m not sure that’s the correct spelling, though that's what’s listed on the film’s Wikipedia page) after literally sleeping her way to the top. The Goddess was widely rumored to be a film à clef about Marilyn Monroe – who was originally suggested for the female lead until Monroe’s then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller, made it clear to the studio that she wouldn’t be interested – though there were certainly enough other troubled movie stars of the period, including Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth, on whom Chayevsky could have been drawing. Emily’s first husband is John Tower (Steven Hill, whom I’d known from his role as the original D.A. on Law and Order in the 1990’s and it wasn’t until the recent TCM screening of the 1955 film noir Storm Fear that I’d ever seen him young!), son of a major movie star and a troubled young alcoholic whom Emily literally picks up off the street. It’s 1942, he’s a World War II draftee training in Tennessee before he’s sent off to combat, and he tells Emily that he’s already attempted suicide at least twice and he hopes he gets killed in the war.

John and Emily get married and have a daughter, but Emily isn’t exactly one of nature’s mothers (symbolized by a scene in which her baby daughter is crying uncontrollably and nothing Emily does, including bottle-feeding her, can stop her). Eventually she signs a document giving up her parental rights so John can raise the kid as a single father – and doing so gives him a purpose in his life and turns him around, though we don’t learn that until the very end. Emily’s second husband is former light-heavyweight boxing champion Dutch Seymour (Lloyd Bridges out of his wet suit; at the time he was most famous for playing a deep-sea diver in the syndicated TV show Sea Hunt) – it’s pretty obvious Chayevsky was thinking of Marilyn Monroe’s second marriage to retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Unfortunately, as “Rita”’s career rises Dutch becomes a self-pitying mess; he briefly contemplates returning to his home town, St. Louis, and joining his older brother’s contracting firm, but he decides not to when she refuses to give up her burgeoning film career and move with him. In the film’s third act, “Portrait of a Goddess,” Rita Shawn is a major movie star but has just come back from a nervous breakdown which cost her studio $150,000 because of the delay in production. She’s living under the iron rule of a caregiver, Harding (Elizabeth Wilson), who doles out her pills to make sure she doesn’t kill herself with an overdose. When her actual mother dies, Emily a.k.a. Rita returns home for the funeral (at which she’s predictably surrounded by paparazzi – even though the term wouldn’t exist for another two years until Federico Fellini coined it for his film La Dolce Vita) but has another wing-ding of a nervous breakdown at the gravesite. John Tower shows up with Emily’s daughter, who understandably wants to meet her now-famous mom, but Emily is too much of a space case to handle it. Harding takes the now responsible John Tower aside and explain that “Rita” will continue to make movies because there’s nothing else she can do, but she will always be the way she is.

If there’s a problem with The Goddess, it’s that it’s way too negative. We never see “Rita Shawn” at work making movies, and it’s hard to believe that someone who’s such a total basket case off screen could be a convincing actress on screen. Chayevsky and Cromwell even miss the obvious irony of having the small town movie theatre advertising a “Rita Shawn” movie when the real Rita, t/n Emily, returns there. Ultimately The Goddess is a movie that dies from its own misanthropy. Emily’s character is depicted as a woman so hungry for love she puts up with being exploited sexually, first by the local young men (even as a teenager she’s attracted the reputation of being “easy”), then by her Hollywood producers (it’s as clear as Chayevsky could make it with the dying embers of the Production Code still in effect that she got her contract with studio head Lester Brackman [Bert Freed] by having sex with him and at least one other man who might be another executive or her agent. One could readily imagine The Goddess being remade today as a propaganda piece for the #MeToo movement) and finally with a series of anonymous tricks in out-of-the-way motel rooms. At a time when Paddy Chayevsky was mostly known for his live TV scripts, which were generally about emotionally wounded characters who ultimately achieve at least a degree of fulfillment, The Goddess was written directly for film and was just too negative and misanthropic to reach a mass audience. It’s a film you want to like, especially since the acting is fine all around and Stanley, Holland, Wilson and Hill particularly stand out, but ultimately it doesn’t let you in – and it also doesn’t help that the filmmakers got Virgil Thomson to write the musical score, and he did so in his most all-out “folky” vein that works to set the scene of rural Tennessee where Emily grows up but plays totally against the dire emotions of the rest of the film. And Cromwell’s direction is workmanlike but hardly inspired, though he and cinematographer Arthur J. Ornitz do get in a few vaguely noir-ish compositions when they’re called for in the script.

Christmas in Connecticut (Turner Pictures, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday, December 2 my husband Charles and I, on vacation to see his mother Edi for her birthday December 4, hung out at her place and she asked if there were any Christmas movies we wanted to watch. Charles suggested the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, which starred Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan and Sydney Greenstreet in a tale of a supposed homemaking diva (Stanwyck) who really can’t cook worth a darn and allegedly lives on a farm in Connecticut. Actually the farm is the property of an architect friend of hers (Reginald Gardiner) and the spectacular recipes in her column come from another friend, a Hungarian restaurateur (S. Z. Sakall). Elizabeth Lane (Stanwyck) has to fake it big-time when her publisher, Alexander Yardley (Greenstreet), invites a recently rescued sailor (Morgan) who was stranded on a raft for 18 days at sea with no food after his destroyer was torpedoed by Germans. Elizabeth has to borrow her friend’s farm, invite her other friend to cook his spectacular dishes, and fake being the architect’s wife and mother to his child (the baby is actually the child of a war worker who’s being sat for by Gardiner’s servant, the inimitable Una O’Connor; she’s actually looking after two babies, a girl and a boy, and of course the other characters wonder about the gender switches). Of course it all ends happily with the columnist and the sailor paired off after some quite engaging and hilarious complications. I’d shown Charles this movie years ago and it had become enough of a favorite of his that he wanted to see it again – and given that Edi’s Amazon Prime page listed not only the 1945 Christmas in Connecticut but its 1992 made-for-TV remake, I suggested we watch both of them consecutively.

The 1992 version was directed by (but did not star) Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Dyan Cannon (the fourth of Cary Grant’s five wives and the only one who had his child, daughter Jennifer) in the Stanwyck role, Kris Kristofferson in Morgan’s, and Tony Curtis’s as a combination of Greenstreet’s and Gardiner’s. It was written by Janet Brownell, based on the 1945 screenplay by Aileen Hamilton (story) and Lionel Houser and former Deanna Durbin writer Adele Commandini (script). There were a number of intriguing changes to the story; for some reason Elizabeth’s last name acquired a “B” at the beginning so she became Blane, not Lane; Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, playing Dennis Morgan’s character from the original), became a forest ranger in Colorado whose house burned down while he was trapped for six days rescuing a boy (whom we never see) from an avalanche; and the big luxury item Elizabeth treats herself to was changed from a full-length mink coat to an antique statuette because furs in general and minks in particular have become so politically incorrect these days. (In the 1945 version S. Z. Sakall gets a line, “Nobody needs a mink coat except the minks,” which comes closer to a modern sensibility on the subject than anything else in the original film.) Brownell was quite clever at figuring out ways to integrate well-known scenes from the 1945 version into this one, including a big town dance and the scene in which the romantic leads sit in a carriage and end up taking it for a joy ride through the Connecticut back roads and ultimately get arrested for stealing it.

She also added some new wrinkles; this Elizabeth Blane is portraying not only a mother but a grandmother. Her “daughter” is actually Yardley’s sister Josie (Kelly Cinante), and her alleged son-in-law is Tyler (Gene Lythgow), an aspiring actor who has an audition coming up to play a serial killer on a soap opera and is running around the house muttering serial-killer dialogue that spooks Yardley into believing he really is a serial killer. The two kids are Anthony, a.k.a. Kevin (Jimmy Workman) and baby Melissa (unidentified on imdb.com). Her cook, Norah (Vivian Bonnell), combining the S. Z. Sakall and Una O’Connor characters from the original, is also her personal assistant, and Charles joked that the servant character was changed from one ethnic stereotype (Irish) to another (Black). The big climax is a live telecast of the fabulous Christmas meal from Elizabeth’s supposed farm, only it turns into the predictable shambles as the kids break Yardley’s prized antiques and Elizabeth finally realizes she can’t sustain her deception anymore and admits to the live TV audience that she really can’t cook and is faking it all. The executive at the TV network, Prescott (Richard Roundtree – it’s a nice indication of racial progress that this role could be portrayed by a Black man, and Roundtree was still relatively good-looking instead of his later “Black Sydney Greenstreet” dimensions), pulls the plug on the show but later relents and offers to keep Elizabeth on at double her previous salary. Brownell changed the ending, ironically, to make it even closer to old-movie cliches than the 1945 original. In the 1945 version, Stanwyck’s Elizabeth accepted the raise and continued as the era’s Martha Stewart (the modern-day parallel that usually gets mentioned when this movie is discussed); in 1992, Dyan Cannon’s version goes off to live with Kris Kristofferson in the wilds of Colorado, forsaking big-city success to live in the country with her man. This takes the story into the 1930’s movie convention of “country good, city bad,” and also left me wondering – like the endings of such different novels as Ramona and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, just how a relatively pampered, spoiled young (or youngish) woman is going to be able to handle “life in the wild” with a man, however sexy he might be!

The Front (Columbia, Devon/Persky-Bright, Jack H.Rollins-Charles Joffe Productions, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday, December 3 my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched a movie: The Front, part of Amazon Prime’s redoubt of films by Woody Allen. The Front was a film made in 1976 about the blacklist in the entertainment industry, and it was largely made with blacklist veterans, including director Martin Ritt, writer Walter Bernstein and stars Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi. Allen played Howard Prince, a cashier at a bar and a spectacularly unsuccessful bookie who gets enlisted by a blacklisted TV writer, Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy), to serve as his “front.” The gimmick is that Miller will actually write the scripts for the hit TV series Grand Central, Prince will submit them as his own work, and Prince will kick back 10 percent of the writing fee to Miller so he can still work. It seemed odd that a movie both written and directed by blacklist veterans would have been based on a false premise; “front” writers actually existed, but they had to be real writers with a few credits under their belts. The best “front” story I can think of involved the script for the 1953 movie Roman Holiday, allegedly written by Ian McClellan Hunter but really written by Dalton Trumbo. Hunter was himself blacklisted just as the film was about to be released, and Paramount told Hunter they would have to remove his name from the credits. Trumbo was indignant and told Hunter, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter had to remind him, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script!” In the movie, Howard Prince is virtually illiterate – “I can’t even write a grocery list!” he eventually confesses to his girlfriend, Florence Ballard (Andrea Marcovicci) – though Allen wasn’t the official director or writer I suspect he had a hand in the script and helped write his character as the typical Allen nebbish. Neither Charles nor I had seen this film in decades, and this time around I was particularly impressed by the performance of Zero Mostel as blacklisted actor and comedian Hecky Brown (true name: Herschel Brownstein).

For once in his career Mostel calmed down enough and showed some real pathos; he was able to use the “Zero Mostel characterization” while also making an effect, especially when he recalls that the only reason he ever got involved in Communist-front causes (he never joined the Party but what he did do for them, including briefly subscribing to the Daily Worker, marching in a May Day parade and signing a petition to support Loyalist Spain, was enough to get him into trouble with the inquisitors) was he was cruising a hot-looking young Communist woman. “And I never even got laid!” he moaned. It also occurred to me that the night after we’d seen both versions of Christmas in Connecticut we were watching yet another movie about a fraud; Woody Allen is shown receiving script revisions on the fly from a cab containing the real writer just like Barbara Stanwyck received recipes from S. Z. Sakall in the earlier Christmas in Connecticut. And the fact that Stanwyck was a major supporter of the Hollywood blacklist – she and her then-husband Robert Taylor were members of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals – just added to the irony. Also some of the blacklisting characters in the movie were based on real people: former FBI agent and current head of something called “Freedom Information” Francis Hennessey (Remak Ramsey) was really Vincent Hartnett of “Aware, Incorporated” (he published a book called Red Channels, whose cover showed a red hand smothering a microphone, and that and his later books, Confidential Report and File 13, were literal blacklists naming writers, actors and others he said the broadcast industry shouldn’t employ), and supermarket chain owner Hubert Jackson (David Clarke) is really Laurence Johnson, who successfully intimidated networks and advertisers alike by threatening to put up signs in his markets targeting certain products as “un-American” if they bought commercials on shows with blacklisted talent. Given that the impulse to blacklist has hardly died – one of Donald Trump’s promises in his 2024 Presidential campaign is to use the power of government to put MS-NBC out of business – The Front is an unexpectedly timely movie today, especially given that last Friday the real-life version of the Stanwyck and Allen characters, George Santos, was finally thrown out of Congress for his lies.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (Hughes Entertainment, National Lampoon, Paramount, 1989)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, December 4 my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched the 1989 movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which was written by and co-produced by John Hughes and directed by someone named Jeremiah Chechik. I’d avoided the National Lampoon movies because I’d assumed they were stupid sex comedies, but despite a few of those elements most of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was actually quite funny. It’s obvious Hughes had been studying the great silent and early-sound comedians from the 1910’s, 1920’s and early 1930’s – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy in particular. The plot deals with Clark Griswold (former Saturday Night Live star Chevy Chase), his wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) and their kids Rusty (Johnny Galeki) and Audrey (Juliette Lewis) inviting their extended families for Christmas as their house guests, and the mayhem that predictably ensues. It was a joy to see veteran actor E. G. Marshall as D’Angelo’s dad, and Randy Quaid and Miriam Flynn as a nomad couple who show up in an R.V. in which they live. (I’ve mentioned before that in addition to all his other innovations, Buster Keaton essentially invented the R.V.; he converted a bus into a living space he called his “land yacht,” and when he was under contract to MGM and drinking a lot he parked it on the studio grounds when he was working so he wouldn’t have to deal with a drunken commute home.) The film began with a great sequence in which the Griswolds have to deal with two drunken rednecks in an old van who are trying to run them off the road, and they end up literally trapped under a truck. I admire the film’s stunt drivers who were able to handle literally driving under a truck and make it convincing. I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised at how good this movie was – though now that decades later I’ve finally started catching up with John Hughes’s oeuvre I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how good a lot of it was, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation also featured a neighbor couple, Todd and Margo Chester (Nicholas Guest and the young Julia-Louis Dreyfus), whom I didn’t realize until Charles pointed it out were actually parodies of yuppies, and a great performance by former Betty Boop voice actor Mae Quetzal as Aunt Bethany, an Alzheimer’s patient who gets things so mixed up that when Clark Griswold asks her to say grace before the Christmas meal, she leads the table in the Pledge of Allegiance instead.

The Man Who Lived Twice (Columbia, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 30) I watched a surprisingly good 1936 Columbia “B” movie on Turner Classic Movies called The Man Who Lived Twice – not to be confused with The Man Who Lived Again, the U.S. release title of the excellent British science-fiction thriller The Man Who Changed His Mind, also from 1936. TCM was showing The Man Who Lived Twice as part of a night-long tribute to its star, Ralph Bellamy, who’s quite good in a movie that effectively mixes gangster and sci-fi plot elements. Directed by Harry Lachman – who turned out to have had far more visual imagination than I’d previously given him credit for (I’d assumed that the visual power of the 1935 Dante’s Inferno came from its cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, but working with a less illustrious cameraman, James Van Trees, here Lachman still came up with a surprisingly stunning film visually) from a committee-written script (Tom Van Dycke and Henry Altimus got credit for an original story – and for once the word “original” doesn’t have to be in quotation marks! – and Van Dycke, Arthur Strawn and Fred Niblo, Jr. wrote the actual script), The Man Who Lived Twice is basically Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse. (Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic is actually name-checked in one of the newspaper headlines that chronicles the protagonist’s trial.) Instead of being about a respected doctor who takes a drug that transforms him into a psychopathic monster, The Man Who Lived Twice is about an habitual criminal, “Slick” Rawley (Ralph Bellamy), who’s on the run from the police in general and one cop in particular, Inspector Logan (Willard Robertson), because Rawley shot and killed Logan’s partner in a bank robbery.

He ducks into a medical school where prominent surgeon Dr. Clifford Schuyler (Thurston Hall, giving a surprisingly restrained performance) is lecturing about his theory that certain people become criminals because they have tumors in their brains, and by operating on them he can eliminate their criminal tendencies and make them productive members of society. But he laments that, though he’s done this operation before successfully on dogs and monkeys, the law won’t allow him to operate on a human. “Slick” volunteers to undergo the operation if Dr. Schuyler will also give him plastic surgery to clean up his badly scarred face. Dr. Schuyler is initially reluctant but agrees to do it, and when “Slick” recovers from the operation he literally has no memory of his past life. Dr. Schuyler gives him a new identity, “James Blake,” and tells him the reason he can’t remember anything about his past is he was in a severe auto accident which gave him amnesia. The newly minted James Blake asks Schuyler to give him a home-schooled version of a medical education, and Blake becomes an M.D. who takes a job at a prison hospital. Alas, he’s recognized by two members of his old gang, John “Gloves” Baker (Ward Bond) and his ex-girlfriend Peggy Russell (Isabel Jewell, turning in a marvelously hard-bitten performance). Blake is able to buy off “Gloves” by hiring him as his chauffeur, but Peggy demands $5,000 from him as blackmail and threatens to turn him in to Logan if he doesn’t pay. Meanwhile, Blake has fallen in love with his nurse, Janet Haydon (Marian Marsh, best known as Trilby to John Barrymore’s Svengali), and the two have a decorous Production Code-licit courtship that involves him taking her to symphony concerts and posh nightclubs.

Ultimately James Blake is arrested and put on trial for the murder of Logan’s late partner, and a script that until now has been quite subtly and sensitively written veers off the road into melodrama. “Gloves” Baker and Peggy Russell are subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify against Blake in his trial, but just before he’s scheduled to testify “Gloves” receives a telegram that his mother has just died in Belfast, Northern Ireland. So he offers Peggy a ride and then deliberately crashes his car, killing both of them so they can’t appear as witnesses against Blake. The defense attorney, Henry Treacher (Henry Kolker) – a former judge who was so impressed by Blake’s case he stepped down from the bench to represent him – gives a closing argument essentially telling the jury that James Blake shouldn’t be held responsible for “Slick” Rawley’s misdeeds and society will benefit more from Blake’s continued freedom than Rawley’s execution. Kolker delivers this speech in a way that suggests he learned how to play an attorney giving an impassioned closing argument from watching Lionel Barrymore do it in the 1931 A Free Soul. Nonetheless, the jury finds Rawley a.k.a. Blake guilty, though eventually the state governor pardons him at the urging of the American Medical Association. Despite its over-the-top ending, The Man Who Lived Twice is an excellent movie, one of the minor gems I’ve discovered over the years I’ve been watching TCM, with Ralph Bellamy showing a surprising range that extended far beyond his usual roles losing the film’s heroine (usually to Cary Grant). It’s a well-made movie, effectively and inventively directed by Lachman and with a marvelous tough-gal performance by Isabel Jewell and a quite sympathetic one by Thurston Hall, who for once didn’t have to play a boor.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Blood and Water" (South Pacific Pictures, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I switched to PBS and watched the opening episode of a good if quirky policier from New Zealand, The Brokenwood Mysteries. It’s about the murder of a drunken boor named Nate Dunn (Chris Sherwood), who 10 years earlier was widely believed to have killed his wife Evelyn (Sophie Henderson) in a hit-and-run “accident.” He’s thrown off a local bridge in an attempt to make it look like suicide, but the police investigating the case, out-of-town detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) and his local partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), deduce that he was murdered. Among the principal suspects are Nate’s son Dwayne (Marc Pritchard, a ruggedly handsome young man and easily the sexiest guy in the cast), who was with his girlfriend Sally (Shoshana McCullum) the night his dad was killed; local organic farmer Phillip Henderson (Mike Edward), who complained that it was hard for him to keep his organic certification because the pesticides Nate was using on his fields blew over into Henderson’s; and retired police detective Gary McLeod (Mark Clare), who settled in Brokenwood and is still obsessed with Evelyn’s case after he failed to solve it a decade earlier. Nate Dunn acquired a reputation for physically abusing his wife Evelyn, but it turned out he was covering for his son Dwayne, who regularly beat up his mom – something we learn when Dwayne’s girlfriend Sally shows up with a black eye from a punch from Dwayne. Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Evelyn’s sister, Meredith Wilmott (Andi Crown), who killed Evelyn by mistake a decade earlier – she deliberately ran her down thinking she was Nate because at the time Evelyn was wearing Nate’s oil-skin jacket – and killed Nate more recently to cover up her original crime and because she, like everybody else in town, thought Nate was abusing Evelyn. It ends with a bizarre sequence in which Mike and Kristin are able to chase down Meredith and arrest her even though they're only in a car while Meredith is trying to make her getaway in a private plane.

Mike Shepherd is drawn as a typically eccentric British (or British Commonwealth) mystery cop, with a penchant for listening to American country music (his favorite is Patsy Cline) and inflicting it on everyone who goes for a ride with him in his well-preserved 1971 Holden Kingswood. He plays the country records on cassette, which startles Kristin Sims. He also treats Sims in a decidedly sexist fashion, having her sort through boxes of Nate’s papers looking for a clue as to who murdered him while he does the fun work of actually doing field interviews with people. Mike has three or four ex-wives – even he’s lost count of just how many times he’s been married – and one of his exes is his supervisor on the police force while another one, Tania Stokes (Miriama McDowell), is dating Phillip Henderson and was his alibi witness. In the end Mike accepts an appointment to head the homicide department in Brokenwood – replacing McLeod, who has terminal cancer and goes into a coma just before the show ends, with his death clearly imminent (though McLeod is at one point the prime suspect and he luckily comes to just long enough to learn he’s been cleared) – even though this means a demotion and corresponding cut in pay. Judging from this first episode, The Brokenwood Mysteries is a pretty typical British (or British Commonwealth) crime show, with quirky detectives who are often more interesting than the crooks they go after, though it suffers from the thick New Zealand accents of the cast members. It was often hard for me to understand the dialogue, especially when the actors insisted on pronouncing the word “detective” as “duh-TEEK-tive.”