Benise: 25 Years of Passion! (Spanish Guitar Entertainment, PBS, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

By the time I got home from the stunning Vox Humana concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 5, 2025, it was already 8:35 p.m., too late to watch the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter, and for some reason Turner Classic Movies isn’t doing the dedicated “Noir Alley” and “Silent Sunday Showcase” time slots usually hosted by Eddie Muller and Jacqueline Stewart, respectively, this month. So I looked online for something else to watch and found it in a PBS special called Benise: 25 Years of Passion! This is apparently the eighth PBS special for Benise, though I’d never heard of him before and judging from the widely disparate settings for the various songs (including Cuban music performed on a giant set representing “Club Havana” and Asian music from an equally monstrous set in China), this appeared to be a Greatest Hits compilation from all Benise’s seven previous PBS shows. So who or what is Benise? According to Wikipedia, his full name is Roni Benise (not pronounced like “Denise,” as I had assumed, but “Buh-NEE-say”), he’s 60 years old (and looks damned good for that age, even though many of the songs heard and seen tonight are from considerably older clips), he’s got a son named Bodhi, and he’s not from Spain but from Ravenna, Nebraska. Benise started out playing electric guitar, and in 1999 he moved from Nebraska to southern California to pursue a career in rock music in the manner of his idols, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Then he happened to catch a flamenco record on a local station. “I think there are times in everyone's life when everything changes,” he said. “Hearing the Spanish guitar in the car was that moment for me because the sound takes you away to an exotic place, and it was a perfect fit, especially when I was in this crossroads of my life.” So he junked his electric guitars and bought a nylon-stringed acoustic.

He started developing a style that would combine flamenco and rock, only to be turned down by most of the music-industry people he auditioned for, most of whom said things like, “Spanish guitar? Forget about it.” Instead he started busking on the streets of Los Angeles and eventually got an agreement with the owner of a club called Golleto’s who let him play there nightly, presumably for tips. That got him noticed not only by music-industry bigwigs but also by producers working for PBS, who decided he had the makings of a major crossover sensation. Benise was able to pull together enough funding to rent out theatres and present elaborate programs with other musicians and dancers, and his first PBS special, Nights of Fire!, followed the same pattern. Benise looked to PBS for a TV outlet because of their success promoting and presenting previous crossover acts like the Riverdance Irish dance troupe, singer Sarah Brightman (the former Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber), and musician Yanni. Alas, if the local San Diego a cappella vocal group Vox Humana had presented an example of how to do good musical crossovers (see my review on musicmagg at https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/04/eight-person-vox-humana-cappella-group.html), Benise’s leaden, overblown TV special 25 Years of Passion! was a cautionary tale in how not to do them. One of the arguments he said he had with would-be managers was when they asked him to downsize his shows, and judging from last night’s special he should have listened to them. Much of last night’s Benisextravanga reminded me of a review I read about 30 years ago in the Los Angeles Times from a film critic who, writing about a new action-driven blockbuster, said, “The audience was not so much entertained as bludgeoned into submission.”

Benise rammed a lot of disparate pieces of music into his “flamenco rock” approach, including such traditional Spanish or Latin tunes as Agustín Lara’s “Granada,” Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña” (which he used as background for a major production number in a bullring called “the Duel”), Consuelo Velásquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” and Latin mashups like “Running with the Bulls” and “Salsa Salsa” (one salsa was just fine for me, thank you); classlcal pieces like the opening “Adagio” from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the slow movement from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez; light-rock standards like The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”; and originals like “Galleto’s Jam” and “I Will Always Love U.” That last was not the Dolly Parton song that Whitney Houston covered as the theme from her film The Bodyguard (a rare instance of a Black artist taking a big hit away from a white one; usually it’s been the other way around!), but a Benise original dedicated to his son Bodhi. (Just why Benise and whatever wife, partner, girlfriend or female other co-conceived the kid with him decided to name him after the species of tree under which Buddha famously meditated and received his message is a mystery to me.) Benise casually mentioned that he’s just had a daughter as well, and he’s going to have to write a song for her, too. Benise also played a mashup called “AC/DC vs. Bach” (naturally I couldn’t help but wonder whether a mashup of AC/DC and Bach would produce a highway to heaven), which referenced the song “Thunderstruck” and dragged in a gospel choir, though all he had them do was chant the word “Thunder” over and over again. He also played a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” at a concert from China, which had me scratching my head given that the real-world Kashmir is on the Indian subcontinent and India and Pakistan have been fighting over it since the British quit India in 1947. (Since then I’ve looked up the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Kashmir and it says that China, which is one of the countries that borders Kashmir, has got involved in the struggle over its future, too, so Benise may have had a point about that.) And Benise closed his show with another Latin number, “Bamboleo,” which showed him at his best.

Frankly, I think I’d have liked Benise better if I’d caught him in his days as a street busker in L.A. without all the bombastic production he surrounds himself with, including flamenco dancers (one of whom was wearing tight stone-washed blue jeans that did show off a nice basket); a loud, obnoxious drummer; a plethora of various musicians, including at least two other guitar players as well as a Black bassist; at least two guest stars (his brother Pablo on “Hotel California” and guest singer Daniel Emmett on “Hallelujah,” just another voice incapable of doing justice to this overwhelming song); and all the other overdone production elements that just took away from the basic appeal of Benise’s guitar playing. What we could hear of him as a guitarist is quite good – he even manfully attempted to shred on an acoustic guitar – though I found myself resenting every time the director cut away from him the way I get with the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix, which likewise kept cutting away from what we wanted to see: what he did with his fingers to get those awesome sounds out of a guitar. (Benise’s anecdote about falling in love with the acoustic guitar after trying to make it as an electric player is just the opposite of Hendrix’s; his dad, Al Hendrix, got Jimi an acoustic guitar and he wasn’t that interested in it. Then Al got his son an electric and Jimi couldn’t stop playing it, even taking it into the bathroom and strumming it whether it was connected to an amp or not.) Overall, 25 Years of Passion! is the typical PBS pledge-break special, taking a basically talented but not “great” musician and building him or her up to look like the best thing since sliced bread.

Law and Order: "A Perfect Family" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 3, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 3) I watched episodes of Dick Wolf’s remaining Law and Order series: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. (They’re reviving Law and Order: Organized Crime, but only as a “streaming” exclusive on NBC Peacock – barf.) The Law and Order show, “A Perfect Family,” proved to be a challenging tale about a supposedly perfect family that unravels when the mother, Melinda Chapman (Allison Miller), gives birth to new daughter Sophie a decade after having had her previous two girls, Emily (Riley Vinson) and Amanda (Delaney Quinn). This sends her into post-partum psychosis big-time; she hears voices telling her “demons” are out to kill Sophie, and Emily has been taken over and possessed by one of them. We first see Emily out for a walk with her father, investment broker and former Navy SEAL Derek Chapman (Brett Zimmerman), who’s telling her to be strong and assertive in ways that make this seemingly innocuous advice sound toxic. There’s an intriguing red herring in the person of Walter Jeffries (Todd Gearhart), Emily’s volleyball coach, who takes an interest in her above and beyond the call of duty. They exchanged text messages on an app that deleted most of them within hours, but her last one survives and reads, “I just can’t take this anymore.” Had this been a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode he’d have been the culprit, a nasty pedophile who’d been driven from several previous schools for taking an undue interest in his 12-year-old female charges. Instead both the cops investigating the case, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), and we are shocked when surveillance video surfaces showing Melinda herself killing Emily by pushing her off a high pedestrian bridge.

At first her attorney enters a not-guilty plea but then changes it to guilty by reason of insanity. Among the people they interview is a therapist Melinda saw just once, since at her husband’s insistence she refused to take an anti-psychotic medication, check in at the day clinic the therapist recommended, or do anything to report the danger she was putting her children in by her mental illness. The therapist tells the police that the husband was so insistent that his wife not go on psychotropic drugs he literally tore up the prescription as soon as the doctor ordered it and gave it to her. Accordingly, lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) talks district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) into indicting Derek Chapman for manslaughter, second degree, in Emily’s death on the ground that if he hadn’t pressured his wife into not taking medications and getting treated for her post-partum psychosis, Emily would still be alive and Melinda wouldn’t have heard “voices” from inside her head telling her to kill Emily to save Sophie from nonexistent “demons.” Alas, the case doesn’t go well for Price because Derek’s lawyer is able to sow reasonable doubt by pointing out (correctly) that it was Melinda who actually killed Emily and she’s acknowledged herself insane under oath, so not a word she says should be taken seriously. Rather than call the psychiatrist who said she saw Derek literally tear up the prescription she’d written Melinda for anti-psychotic medications, Price figures that the only way he can get Derek’s hostility towards psychiatric treatment in general and treatment for his wife in particular is to call their other daughter, 10-year-old Amanda, to the witness stand to testify against her dad. Oddly, writers Rick Eid (an old Law and Order hand and one who was credited with the reboot of this series after it was off the air for nearly 12 years from 2010 to 2022) and Jennifer Vanderbes do a major cop-out here: they have Price have a crisis of conscience about grilling Amanda himself and even more of one about subjecting her to cross-examination. So he excuses her from the witness stand without asking her any questions, the jury acquits Derek, and the reason I thought this was a cop-out is that whatever traumas Amanda would have faced on the witness stand, having her dad acquitted and having to go back and live with him and his asshole ways would be far more traumatizing both short- and long-term.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit "Accomplice Liability" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 3, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed Law and Order on April 3 was called “Accomplice Liability” and was a follow-up to an episode originally broadcast November 21, 2024 called “Cornered” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/11/law-and-order-special-victims-unit_25.html). In “Cornered,” Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), the assistant district attorney assigned to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, gets caught in a robbery turned hostage situation when he stops in a Brooklyn bodega for his usual cup of coffee and a card for a bouquet he’s bringing his paralegal. Alas, he walked in just after newly released convicts Boyd Lynch (Silas Weir Mitchell), a 50-something white guy, and his 20-something Black “prison bitch,” Deonte Mosley (Keith Machekanyanga), are holding up the place. The hostages include Carisi and two young women, Tess Milburn (Paige Mitchell) and her roommate, Elizabeth Alden (Toni Khalil), who stopped in at the bodega on their way from a yoga class. At one point Lynch decides to take both Tess and Elizabeth and lock them in the store’s walk-in freezer, and later he gets Tess alone in there and rapes her. Then Carisi, after an abortive attempt to get the bad guys to accept Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of the Manhattan SVU as a hostage in his place, goads Mosley into shooting his partner by telling him that if he does so, the law will consider it self-defense and he won’t be prosecuted for it. Mosley takes the bait – and is then promptly arrested by the police. He’s understandably upset that he was lied to, though writers David Graziano and Julie Martin (both old Law and Order hands) seem to want us to believe that by deliberately deceiving Mosley, Carisi was acting ethically and in an above-board manner by doing what he had to do to end the hostage situation and save innocent lives.

“Accomplice Liability” picks up as Deonte Mosley is about to go on trial for the various crimes, including murdering the bodega owner, under the doctrine that even if you didn’t do the specific crimes of murder or rape, because you were there as part of a criminal conspiracy you’re every bit as guilty in the eyes of the law as if you had pulled the trigger (or your dick) yourself. The case falls into the hands of Brooklyn assistant district attorney Camille Rourke (Stacey Farber), who unsurprisingly makes it clear to Carisi that it’s her case and she doesn’t appreciate his second-guessing her trial strategy. The case falls on the testimony of Tess Milburn, who in the meantime has become so traumatized by having been raped that she’s become a drug addict. She nearly dies from an overdose of benzodiazepine and fentanyl, and she’s also acquired a large Black quasi-boyfriend, Marquis Wallace (Miles Dausuel), who’s obviously taking advantage of her and getting her to have sex with him in exchange for drugs. The Manhattan SVU detectives and the Brooklyn D.A.’s office are both naturally worried about keeping Tess alive and in coherent enough shape to testify. Benson even gives her one of her usual lectures to convince her that as traumatic as it will be for her to relive the rape, the experience will be cathartic and she’ll come out a better and mentally healthier person. Tess sneaks out of her police-provided hotel room the night before she’s supposed to testify and the cops ultimately track her down and find her pretty non compos mentis, though they’re able to sober her enough to enable her to testify. One of the plot points is whether or not Carisi can keep his cool on the witness stand or can be goaded into losing his temper; he manages to avoid a temper tantrum on the stand but goes into one when he sees Deonte smirk at the defense table after talking to his attorney. Rourke gets upset with him and fears that his outburst has blown her whole case. Ultimately the jury convicts Deonte of the murders (including his partner, whom he did kill directly, as well as the bodega manager whom Boyd Lynch actually shot fatally) but not of raping Tess – though she seems to have gained from the experience and she and Elizabeth make up after Tess, at the height of her addiction, stole Elizabeth’s laptop and gave it to Wallace for drugs.

Elsbeth: "Hot Tub Crime Machine" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 3, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As usual on Thursdays, once the two Law and Order shows on Thursday, April 3 were finished, I switched the channel to CBS and watched the latest Elsbeth. It was a quirky story about a physical trainer named Axel Frostad (Will Swenson), with long black hair and a stocky, compactly built body I found very sexy, whose wife Freya (a beautifully honed performance by Mary-Louise Parker) has insisted that the two invite another woman, Taylor (Jess Darrow), into their relationship for a “thruple.” So we get to see Axel make out with Freya, Axel make out with Taylor, and Freya make out with Taylor. Only Freya apparently gets tired of feeling like the odd woman left out in the “thruple,” and she kills Axel in a carefully planned way. She clogs up the drain of his carefully designed state-of-the-art hot tub (the company that made it is called “Tub Tops” and the episode’s title is “Hot Tub Crime Machine,” after the film Hot Tub Time Machine that was apparently the last movie MGM made under its old management before Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com bought it) with Axel’s hair – old hair of his that she’s filched from one of his brushes – and locks him into the hot tub with a remote-control device. At first I thought it was one of those Roomba self-propelled round vacuum cleaners (though that was hard to believe given that there are no carpets in the Frostads’ apartment; all the floors are hard). But it turns out to be an odd gimmick that, among other things, can crash itself into the outboard on-off switch on the hot tub and disable its mechanisms, including the security feature that’s supposed to keep you from being locked in.

Axel is found drowned in the hot tub, and naturally the official police detective assigned to the case, Edwards (Micaela Diamond) – and what happened to the intriguing character of Nicky Reynolds, a gender non-binary person who appeared on the last new Elsbeth, “I See … Murder,” who appeared as Elsbeth’s official police partner, insisted on being called “they” and “them” as their personal pronouns, and was played by an equally gender-ambiguous performer billed only as “b” (one letter, lower-case)? I was really hoping to see more of them! – wants to dismiss it as an accident. There are also two officials from the Tub Tops company, who are worried that the incident will discredit their product and hurt sales. One of them is a middle-aged white guy and the other a quite hot-looking young Black woman who wears her hair in a Jimi Hendrix-style “natural.” The two Tub Tops reps decide that a murder would be a better image for their product than an accident or a suicide. Complicating the issue is the fact that Freya Frostad is also at least a minor celebrity, author of a major best-seller for people who want to discipline themselves from hoarding. She’s made a rule that no one can bring a new item into the house without giving up another because her book proclaims a “Rule of 44,” that being the total number of personal possessions you can have. (My husband Charles, who watched this with me and looked at it rationally – arguably more rationally than the actual writers, Erica Larsen and Jonelle Lightbourne – wondered how clothes would count. Would a pair of socks and shoes count as one item, two, or four, he asked?)

As with the old TV series Columbo (to which this show owes a lot, mainly in the character of a police-affiliated person who basically annoys and browbeats a murderer into confessing), we see Freya commit the murder in the opening sequence, so there’s no suspense as to who the guilty party is but rather in how they will be found out. While Freya’s motive for knocking off Axel seems to have been that she wanted Taylor all to herself (which poses some interesting possibilities the writers didn’t explore, including the character of a previously heterosexual woman who explores Lesbianism and finds she likes it a hell of a lot better than just letting guys stick their dicks into her), Taylor isn’t into old-fashioned two-person relationships. In the show’s best scene, the two women interview a young Black man whom they’d like to invite to take Axel’s place in their “thruple,” but though Freya obfuscates and says their previous male partner just “went away,” Taylor tells him the truth that Axel drowned in their hot tub, and the Black hunk gets scared, decides he’s not willing to take the risk, and leaves. There’s also a subplot between Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his on-again, off-again partner Roy (Hayward Leach), who genuinely love each other but are having commitment issues and are also fighting over where they’re going to live if they move in together, since one of them has a gig in Washington, D.C. and the other doesn’t want to leave New York. At one point Teddy asks Roy if he’s staying with him just because Elsbeth likes Roy so much – and of course I couldn’t help but joke with Charles about how well my mother-in-law and I get along. And there’s still another subplot about Elsbeth’s friend, official police detective Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), and how Elsbeth and Kaya’s boyfriend, Dr. Cameron Clayden (Sullivan Jones), are secretly meeting to plan a surprise birthday party for Kaya. I’m a bit surprised the writers didn’t think of having Kaya worry about these clandestine meetings between her partner and her best friend for fear Elsbeth is going to ask to join them for a “thruple” of their own!

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had a nice dinner “out” at Gnarly Girl Pizza, and as we were wrapping up and preparing to head home, he asked me if I had a movie I wanted to watch. Given that we’d just watched footage of U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) starting his real-life filibuster to protest the Trump administration in general and Elon Musk’s firings of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and unilaterally shutting down entire federal agencies, I said, “I think I’m going to let Cory Booker pick our movie tonight.” Of course I was referring to Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), written by Sidney Buchman (so the director was a Republican and the writer a Communist – and not just an unfairly scapegoated liberal or Leftist but the real hammer-and-sickle McCoy) and starring James Stewart as Jefferson Smith. Smith is the leader of a Boy Scouts knockoff called the “Boy Rangers” when he’s suddenly catapulted into the limelight when Governor Hubert “Happy” Hopper (Guy Kibbee) appoints him to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate following the sudden death of an incumbent. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was based on The Gentleman from Montana by Lewis R. Foster, which depending on your source was either an original screen story (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave Foster the only Oscar this film won), an out-of-print novel (Capra’s autobiography), or a novel never published at all (Wikipedia). Though Foster’s title makes clear what state Jefferson Smith is from, and at the gala premiere in Washington, D.C. Capra and his wife Lucille shared a box with U.S. Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Montana) and his wife Lulu, the film never quite comes out and says what state Smith is from. Capra gravitated to Foster’s book when his plan to make a biopic of Chopin failed because of his insistence that Marlene Dietrich at the height of her “box-office poison” infamy play George Sand – Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn vetoed her (though he revived the Chopin project in 1945 as A Song to Remember with Charles Vidor directing, Buchman as screenwriter, Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as Sand).

He got a story that was a “natural” follow-up to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and featured a large cast of characters: 24 credited roles and 189 uncredited ones, according to imdb.com. When Governor Hooper is undecided as to whether to fill the vacant Senate seat with party hack Horace Miller, the man machine boss Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) orders him to pick, or a crusading journalist named Hill (the choice of the voters who flock to his office and lobby him about the appointment in a scene that, like much of this film, looks all too current today), he decides to toss a coin. When the coin lands on its side, propped up by a folded newspaper on the floor, Hopper decides to appoint neither but instead take his children’s suggestion and pick Jefferson Smith. Taylor and his protégé, senior U.S. Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), nicknamed the “Silver Knight” by Taylor’s publicity apparatus, are horrified because they plan to have a dam built on Willitt Creek in the northern region of their state. They’ve been secretly buying up the property around Willitt Creek for two years under phony names so they can make a killing when the dam project is finally authorized by Congress, which is a virtual certainty because they’ve sneaked it into a must-pass piece of legislation called the “Deficiency Bill.” (Today I think it would be called “budget reconciliation.”) They’re convinced that Smith is so naïve they’ll be able to sneak the project through because Smith is in awe of Paine and will vote however he tells him to – a relationship that goes back to Smith’s father, Clayton Smith, a newspaper editor and former friend of Paine’s until he was shot in the back by a mining company goon squad for supporting a miners’ strike. What they don’t realize is that Smith has an idea for a national boys’ camp in his state, and he’s picked Willitt Creek for its site. With the help of Saunders (Jean Arthur, top-billed – which amused Charles), a holdover from the late previous Senator whom Smith is replacing and who appears to be his only staff person, Smith drafts a bill for his national boys’ camp at Willitt Creek. The next day he’s called away from the Senate by Paine’s daughter Susan (Astrid Allwyn), who takes him to a reception for a princess so Smith won’t be on the Senate floor when the Deficiency Bill, including the provision for the Willitt Creek Dam, is read.

When Smith hears about the dam he’s outraged, but he’s sandbagged on the floor by Senator Paine. Assigned by the Taylor political machine that essentially owns him to destroy Smith by any means necessary, Paine presents forged documents that make it appear that Smith himself owns the land on either side of Willitt Creek and would profit personally by the government’s purchase of it. Paine demands that the Senate expel Smith, and the case is referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections (today it’s called the Ethics Committee). Smith is so hurt by the nasty things that are being said about him in the Committee, including by people back home he thought were his friends, that rather than mount a defense he storms out of the hearing room and disappears. Saunders, who by now is in love with him, guesses he’s at the Lincoln Memorial and tells him to fight back. Whatever she tells him we don’t hear, but the next day on the Senate floor Smith starts a one-person filibuster, egged on by Saunders, two reporters in the press gallery – Saunders’s non-serious sort-of boyfriend Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell, who had a busy 1939 since he was also in Gone With the Wind and Stagecoach) and Sweeney Farrell (an uncredited but easily recognizable Jack Carson) – and ultimately the vice-president (Harry Carey, whose homespun eloquence makes him unforgettable in the role), he holds the floor for nearly 24 hours, taking up time by reading the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (well, it’s better than Green Eggs and Ham, the children’s book Ted Cruz read on his filibuster to hold up a government-funding bill that included money for the Affordable Care Act; Cruz explained that he read Green Eggs and Ham because his kids would get a kick out of hearing dad read it on C-SPAN, but it was an ironic choice given that Dr. Seuss wrote a fable denouncing closed-mindedness and Cruz’s filibuster was closed-mindedness personified) and ultimately ending up hoarse from speaking and staying on his feet for nearly 24 hours. (In his autobiography Capra said he helped Stewart with this part of his performance by calling in a throat specialist to give him a preparation that would make him more hoarse. The doctor was amused because usually his job was to make people less hoarse.)

Smith is hoping that word of what he’s saying will be reported back home and people will come to his defense, but Taylor has such total control of the mainstream media in his state that he’s able to fill it with anti-Smith propaganda and thousands of people write letters urging Smith to stop the filibuster and resign. Members of the Boys’ Rangers try to answer the charges in their own hand-typeset, letterpress-printed paper Boys’ Stuff, but Taylor’s goons literally seize their papers and run their wagons off the road – something that especially struck me when I first saw this film in the early 1970’s; its scenes of authority figures violently suppressing peaceful protests rang all too true after the massacres at Kent and Jackson State. Paine, who all through the movie has been having crises of conscience but has gone along with Taylor at every turn after Taylor promised him his support for a Presidential run, brings in huge baskets of anti-Smith letters, and Smith reads a few of them and becomes so demoralized he faints and collapses on the Senate floor. Then Paine’s will breaks; he loses it completely, admits on the floor that Smith was right all along: the Willitt Creek Dam was nothing but a piece of graft to fatten the pockets of Taylor and his gang, and says if anybody should be expelled from the Senate it should be he, not Smith. Then Paine bursts into the Senate hallway and fires two shots in an attempt at suicide – one of the bullets breaks a lamp cover in the hallway and when I first saw the scene (at a 1970 San Francisco Film Festival Capra retrospective at which the man spoke himself) I had thought Paine was attempting suicide either by slashing his arms with the lamp glass or by smashing a fixture and inhaling lighting gas. (Did they still have gaslights in the U.S. Senate in 1939?) Ultimately Smith is vindicated and he and Saunders – whose first name, “Clarissa,” he’s wormed out of her in an earlier scene – get together for a final clinch.

One scene of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington so impressed me I even had a chance to re-create it; it’s the scene in which a boy, visiting the Lincoln Memorial with his grandfather, reads him Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural from the carvings at the Memorial. I got to reproduce this scene in 1987, when I was in D.C. for the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I traveled there with a Gay couple from San Diego, one of whom was blind, and when we visited the Lincoln Memorial I got to read him Lincoln’s words from the monument’s carvings just as the boy did in Capra’s film. Though Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was widely criticized in 1939 for allegedly making democracy look ridiculous and giving Fascists and Communists ammunition for their propaganda against it, Capra was particularly proud that in 1942, when the Nazis ordered their puppet French government at Vichy to stop showing American films, many theatre owners picked Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as the last U.S. film they would show before the ban went into effect. Today, as the U.S. is once again threatened by Right-wingers both at home and abroad, the message of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington couldn’t be more timely – and watching it as Cory Booker was essentially duplicating the fictional Jefferson Smith’s heroism on the real Senate floor just gave it that much more punch. Oddly, Charles told me after it ended that he’d never seen it start to finish before – which I find a bit hard to believe; I’m pretty sure I’d shown it to him in the 1990’s in the days in which I was making VHS tapes off TCM literally by the yard – but it’s clear the film made the same impact on him that it always has on me.

One thing that’s long struck me about Capra is that as his career progressed, it was harder and harder for him to find happy endings for his films. He made a succession of movies with Edward Arnold as his principal villain – You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941) – and, as one critic pointed out, Arnold’s characters became more powerful and more unscrupulous with each new film. In You Can’t Take It With You Capra and writer Robert Riskin, adapting a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, ended it with Arnold’s character regaining his humanity by playing harmonica duets with Lionel Barrymore. In Mr. Smith there’s that preposterous scene of Claude Rains literally having his breakdown on the Senate floor. In Meet John Doe, Arnold’s character is a press baron – in the film’s opening scene, he’s shown having the façade of the building housing The Bulletin, the newspaper he’s just bought as a vehicle for his political ambitions, jackhammered to remove its stated commitment to truth and a free press and instead proclaiming itself “A Streamlined Paper for a Streamlined Era” (an eerie anticipation of what Elon Musk would do with his various enterprises, first Twitter and now agencies of the U.S. government) – who seeks to use his media holdings to become dictator of the entire U.S. Like his younger contemporary, Orson Welles, Capra was clearly fearful of the power of the media not only to report the news but to shape people’s perceptions of it and the reality in which they live. In Meet John Doe Capra actually shot five different endings, looking in vain for one that would work; and in his first post-war film, It’s a Wonderful Life, to get his happy ending Capra literally had to resort to divine intervention. And there’s an interesting connection between this film and the Bible: two of the actors in it worked on Biblical projects. The Senate Majority Leader is played by H. B. Warner, Jesus Christ in the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille biopic The King of Kings (1927), while Edward Arnold narrated the fascinating 1945 multi-composer recording Genesis Suite.

You, the People (MGM, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Sunday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had watched an intriguing 20-minute short on Turner Classic Movies called You, the People, a 1940 “Crime Does Not Pay” series entry, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Douglas Foster, in which an actor, Robert Elliott, introduces the film by representing himself as an attorney general from a (not specified, and probably fictitious) Midwestern state. (For some reason screenwriter Foster named this character “Edward Gibbon,” after the famous author who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) He announces that the crime it’s going to deal with is election fraud, and specifically the attempt by political machine boss Bailey (C. Henry Gordon) and his stooge, Mayor James Wheelock (Paul Everett), to stay in power against the challenge of a reform candidate, Frank Y. Carter (John Hamilton). I suspect the writer had Tom Prendergast’s legendarily corrupt machine in Kansas City, Missouri in mind. Among Bailey’s tactics are extorting campaign contributions from city employees as well as small businesspeople by threatening them if they don’t comply (telling city workers who don’t contribute they’ll be fired and making the familiar “protection racket” threats against the business owners); forging fake ballots with votes for Wheelock already pre-cast; starting rumors that Carter is himself as corrupt and machine-controlled as Wheelock to drive down turnout overall; and, when all else fails, literally setting fire to the ballots and the warehouse containing them so they can’t be checked for authenticity and inspected for the minute details of difference between the phony ballots and the real ones.

You, the People suffers, like so many other films of its time, from the fact that classic Hollywood knew only one way to depict urban evil: the corrupt political bosses in this short act the same ways the gangsters had acted in 1930’s movies, the Nazi Fifth Columnists would in the 1940’s, and the equally malevolent (if not more so) Communists in the early-1950’s films that enjoyed a brief vogue as Hollywood tried to suck up to the House Un-American Activities Committee by making them. But seen today it’s a chilling reminder of how relatively easy it was – and still is – to rig elections. It’s also a timely depiction of how often both sides in an American election claim “Fraud!” whenever they lose. Donald Trump and his minions made up an elaborate set of phony claims after Joe Biden beat him in 2020; that Trump actually won in a landslide, which he didn’t. Trump’s masses rallied to his call to “Stop the Steal!” and staged a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Biden from being formally elected as President by any means necessary, including violence. The Biden administration slowly and reluctantly tried to prosecute at least some of the rioters; Trump gave them all a blanket pardon when he regained the Presidency, creating a cadre of people who’d already shown a willingness to commit political violence on his behalf and many of whom went on social media to boast about their willingness to do it again. This is one reason why there’s been so little resistance to Trump’s agenda among Republican officeholders; either they’re on board with Trump’s anti-democratic “MAGA” agenda or they’re in fear for their own or their families’ lives if they stand up to him. And it’s not just the Republicans who try to sow distrust in the outcomes of elections that go against them; in both 2004 and 2024 – the only Presidential elections since 1988 in which Republicans have won pluralities of the popular vote – Democrats have tried to explain away their losses with the same kinds of statistical B.S. Republicans used in 2020.

Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope (Science North, Cosmic Picture Distribution, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday afternoon, March 30, my husband Charles and I went to the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park after the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert and saw Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope, a 2023 vest-pocket documentary issued in both 45-minute and 25-minute versions. (We saw the shorter one.) Written and directed by David Lickley, Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope is framed around footage of Goodall, the legendary primatologist who in the early 1960’s went to Tanzania, lived with chimpanzees, established that they used tools (which previously had been thought to be the key line separating humans from other primates), and starred in a National Geographic TV special in which the narrator announced at the end that if Goodall was right, we’d either have to redefine “human,” redefine “tool,” or accept chimps as human. A much older and more wizened Goodall is shown giving a lecture at the University of Arizona (in a hall that I’m guessing is usually used for rock or pop music concerts, since one of the stage entrances has a black front door with a white outline of an acoustic guitar painted on it), but the main agenda of the movie is to tell stories from around the world of people intervening in potential environmental catastrophes and either mitigating or actually reversing them. One is the site of a former nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada whose emissions severely polluted a nearby lake and, among other things, generated acid rain and almost totally killed off the local population of loons, a water-dwelling bird. A group of environmentalists launched what they called the “Regreening Project,” first sowing the land around the former nickel mine with ground-up limestone to neutralize the harmful effects of the effluent, then replanting trees once the land was sufficiently rehabilitated it could support them again.

Another of Goodall’s hopeful stores was the return of buffalo to Native American lands following their near-total extermination in the late 19th century. This is a story told in even more detail in Ken Burns’s four-hour documentary The American Buffalo, which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-american-buffalo-part-1-bloody.html, and though it’s unclear whether white Americans deliberately set out to exterminate the buffalo as part of their genocidal campaign against the Native population or the buffalo simply fell to a clash of cultures, Burns included this chilling justification from President Theodore Roosevelt’s book on the buffalo: “While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, it must be remembered that its destruction was the condition necessary for the advance of White civilization in the West. Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question … and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life.” One of the ways the buffalo were preserved was some of the surviving herds were taken to Canada and cared for there (it’s interesting that so many of these stories portray Canada as a place of unique enlightenment, especially at a time when President Donald Trump has set out either to destroy Canada economically or force it to become part of the United States!), and now they’re slowly being reintroduced into the Great Plains with the help of Blackfeet Natives like Ervin Carlson and Cristina Momorucci, both of whom appear in the film. The third story is the reintroduction of the ibis, another bird species, to its former home in Austria and Italy, including astonishing footage of powered paragliders flying alongside the birds to help them relearn their former routes of migration. Lickley and his team were as environmentally conscious off screen as they were on it; according to the Wikipedia page on the film, “The production team undertook significant efforts to work in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way, such as working with local crews to minimize the number of people who had to travel to each location, and careful planning to ensure that all waste materials generated by the production were recycled, inclusive of being prepared to bring any waste back to Canada for recycling if it could not be recycled locally.”