Monday, March 25, 2024

The Boob (MGM, 1926)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 24) I saw a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that unwittingly had something in common: they were both surprisingly mediocre (or, in one case, even worse than that) efforts by directors with major reputations. The first was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” movie called The Boob, a not-particularly-funny comedy made at MGM in 1925 but not released until a year later. It was directed by William A. Wellman and was such a total flop that MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer fired him after its release – whereupon he decamped to Paramount and made the first Academy Award winner for Best Production, Wings, in 1927. Then Wellman moved on to Warner Bros. and directed James Cagney in his star-making role in The Public Enemy (1931) and made a minor masterpiece, Safe in Hell, a precursor to film noir and a great movie in which, given a script with two African-American characters speaking in Hollywood’s stupid excuse for “Negro dialect,” he overruled the writers and told the actors, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to speak their lines in normal English. I was thinking of this because “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself, criticized The Boob for its stereotypical Black character, “Hamm,” a boy played by an actor unidentified on imdb.com – though actually the Black boy is smarter than just about any of the white people in the movie and his dog, “Benzene,” is smarter than any of the humans!

The writing credits on The Boob are typically convoluted for a late silent: George Scarborough and Annette Westbay get credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited!); Kenneth B. Clarke for “scenario” and Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell for writing the intertitles. The Boob lists four principal cast members: Gertrude Olmstead, George K. Arthur, Joan Crawford and Charles Murray, in that order – but the two men get a lot more screen time than the two women. Plot-wise it’s the old chestnut about the country hayseed, Peter Good (George K. Arthur), whose girlfriend Amy (Gertrude Olmstead) has dumped him for a city slicker, Harry Benson (Antonio D’Algy – and given the overall creepiness of his character, it’s entirely appropriate that he be played by an actor named after a slimy underwater plant), who turns out to be a bootlegger. Benson is there to supply a new roadhouse called “The Booklovers’ Club” which, in one of the few genuinely witty touches in the script, dispenses alcoholic potables out of fake books with titles tweaked to reflect their real contents. Benson takes Amy to “The Booklovers’ Club” and promises to marry her the next day, much to the discomfiture of his gang, who understandably don’t want a woman – especially an innocent country girl who at best will be a fifth wheel on their operation and at worst might blow the whistle on them – tagging along. In case you’re wondering where the young Joan Crawford fits in (The Boob was her 11th movie and it’s pretty obvious that MGM didn’t yet know what to do with her; she’d had bit roles in great movies like Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and the 1926 Ben-Hur and she’d just come back from a loanout to First National for Harry Langdon’s first starring feature, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp), she plays a Prohibition enforcement agent named Jane who’s part of a crew of feds staking out The Booklovers’ Club and trying to bust Benson and his gang.

Though Charles Murray, as “Cactus Jim,” is billed fourth, he actually gets more screen time than any of the principals; he’s shown repeatedly breaking the glass flask containing his bootleg booze (one wonders why it never occurred to him to buy one of the metal flasks my husband Charles and I have seen in many other movies set during Prohibition and often made while it was still in effect), and as I once said about rustic comedian Bob Burns’s role in the 1937 Jack Benny vehicle Artists and Models, it’s unclear just why the people at the studio thought a film that was already a comedy (at least, as Dwight MacDonald put it, in thought and intent) needed a comic-relief character, and such a stupid, oppressive and unfunny one at that. The low point in Murray’s performance comes when the bootleggers dump a cache of illegal liquor to avoid getting caught with it, and Murray thinks he’s in hog heaven and picks up as much of the booze as he can grab. He ends up looking like a porcupine with bottlenecks sticking out of him at every conceivable hiding place, and ultimately he drinks his whole stash in one night, with predictable results. (The Black kid and the dog come upon him and try as best they can to sober him up.) The gimmick is that Peter Good thinks he can win Amy back by becoming a free-lance detective and busting Harry Benson’s bootlegging ring, and to ready him for this task Cactus Jim outfits him in a preposterous outfit of pseudo-Western dude-ranch decorations that, when Amy sees him, she actually compares to Tom Mix’s costumes.

The Boob actually has two quite good special-effects sequences, a movie-within-the-movie illustrating Cactus Jim’s boasts of his prowess as an Indian fighter and a remarkable dream in which Peter is driving Benson’s white car and it takes off and flies, with various other characters falling out of it as it travels through the skies. It ends about the way you’d expect it to, with Peter busting the bootleggers and earning a $2,000 reward and the promise of a federal enforcement job whenever he wants it, and while I was hoping he’d take the job and end up with Joan Crawford at the end, he returns to Amy and his dull hayseed existence after the other members of Benson’s gang inform him, to absolutely no one’s surprise, that Benson can’t marry Amy because he’s already married. It was ironic that Crawford made this movie right after working with Harry Langdon because, with my habit of mentally recasting classic-era movies with other actors who were around at the time, I’d been thinking of Langdon as the right actor to play Peter. With Langdon’s peculiar talent of bringing his baby-ish character and his adult reality into comedically effective contrasts, he could have made Peter sympathetic and even lovable in ways that totally eluded George K. Arthur.

All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) (Svensk Filmindustri, 1964)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the next film on the Turner Classic Movies schedule March 24 was even lamer: All These Women (1964), a rare attempt at comedy from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Alicia Malone, who hosts TCM’s weekly showcase for foreign films, said this was his attempt to do a box-office hit after his dour faith-based trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), which had been released to critical acclaim but not much of an audience. Its original Swedish title was a real mouthful, För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, and Bergman not only directed but co-wrote the script with Swedish comedian Erland Josephson. For the first time in Bergman’s career he worked with color – Eastmancolor – and he used his regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. (American cinematographer Conrad Hall once said he was professionally jealous of Nykvist because of Sweden’s relative position to the sun, which gives it naturally indirect light.) All These Women is set in the 1920’s – as we learn from the elaborate cars of the period and the use of overly strident records of 1920’s songs like “Yes! We Have No Bananas” – and deals with an internationally famous cellist, Felix (we get a couple of glimpses of him but no one is identified on imdb.com as playing him); his biographer, Cornelius (Jari Kulle), who’s also a composer trying to get Felix to play a piece of his and hinting that the book he’s writing about Felix will make him look good, or not, depending on whether Felix plays Cornelius’s composition; and the harem of women Felix has assembled around him.

He calls them his “mistresses” and he’s given them names different from the ones they were born with: Bumblebee (Bibi Andersson, top-billed), Isolde (Harriet Andersson), Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck), Traviata (Gertrud Fridh), Cecelia (Mona Malm) and Beatrica (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs). You’ll note that at least some of these characters are based after famous pieces of music – “Adelaide” is from a song by Beethoven which gets croaked by Jari Kulle as Cornelius in a raspy non-voice – though the main girl in Felix’s harem (Ghislaine Maxwell to Felix’s Jeffrey Epstein, as it were) is a heavy-set middle-aged woman named Madame Tussaud (Karin Kavli), named after the proprietress of the famous London wax museum (which actually gets name-checked in the script). Felix also has a long-suffering manservant and butler named Tristan (Georg Funkquist), who used to be a major cellist himself until Felix beat him at an international music competition, whereupon he withdrew from his career like Erich von Stroheim with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and devoted the rest of his life to serving the Great Man. There’s also Felix’s manager, Jilliker (Allan Edwall), who has to deal with Felix’s refusal to announce the programs for his concerts in advance (Felix insists that the audiences come to see him perform and don’t care what he’s playing) and who ultimately quits after he’s appalled at Felix’s open flouting of conventional sexual morality. The film actually begins at Felix’s funeral, in which all the women in his life parade past his coffin and say, “He looks just the same – only different.” Then it flashes back to the last four days of Felix’s life, in which we see one of the mistresses shooting at statues of Felix in his garden; it’s not clear just how Felix is supposed to have died, though the hint is that he was shot.

There are some clever gags in the movie, including a scene in which we get a title saying that because of censorship the director won’t be able to show Cornelius and Bumblebee actually having sex and then the scene cuts to a black-and-white shot of them doing a Valentino-esque tango dance. But for the most part it’s just a dismal assemblage of would-be gags. One irony is that Bergman had proven in his 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night that he could do comedy, but Smiles of a Summer Night was a romantic farce while All These Women is slapstick, and badly staged slapstick at that. I had much the same feeling about All These Women as I’ve had for years about Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – both are the works of basically serious artists who tried to make us laugh and couldn’t (though at least Die Meistersinger has moments of genuine pathos and a few drop-dead gorgeous set-piece arias of the kind Wagner deliberately avoided in his other mature works) – and I’d be tempted to offer All These Women on a double bill with Woody Allen’s Interiors as a pairing of works by highly regarded artists each trying to play on the other’s turf. (Other examples I’d have in mind include a double bill of Bela Lugosi playing the Frankenstein monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Boris Karloff’s one vampire role, in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath; and a pairing of Alfred Hitchcock’s one musical, Waltzes from Vienna, with They Made Me a Criminal, a quite good 1939 thriller directed by Busby Berkeley.)

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Coogan's Bluff (Malpaso Productions, Universal, 1968)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On my way back from the Musica Vitale “Celebrating Women in the Arts” concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Saturday, March 23 (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/musica-vitale-brings-life-to-widely.html), I had excellent bus luck and had no trouble getting home in time to watch two noir-ish films on Turner Classic Movies I really wanted to see. The first was Coogan’s Bluff, made in 1978 by Universal in association with Malpaso Productions, a company started by the film’s star, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood’s career had had a rather quirky beginning; he was signed as a contract player by Universal in 1955 and put in an unbilled bit role in the 1955 sci-fi/horror film Revenge of the Creature as an inexperienced lab assistant who loses one of the four rats in his care. In 1959 he landed the second lead, “Rowdy Yates,” on a Western TV series called Rawhide that ran six seasons and had a long afterlife on reruns. In 1964 an Italian studio was about to shoot a U.S.-set Western called A Fistful of Dollars and they wanted the male lead of Rawhide, Eric Fleming, to play the lead. When Fleming turned it down, the Italian casting director no doubt thought, “Wait – why don’t we ask the other guy in that show to do it?” So they offered the part to Eastwood, he said yes, and when A Fistful of Dollars was released it became a worldwide hit and made Eastwood and director Sergio Leone international stars. It also sparked a whole cycle of Italian films about the U.S. West inevitably nicknamed “spaghetti Westerns,” including two more with Eastwood: For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Eastwood was suddenly in demand in his homeland, and after making a U.S. Western called Hang ‘Em High he ended up doing a modern-dress police thriller titled Coogan’s Bluff that was in essence the beta version of his 1971 mega-hit Dirty Harry. Both films were directed by Don Siegel and co-written by Dean Riesner, who’d had an interesting career backstory of his own; his father, Charles Riesner, had been an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s and later a director himself. Under the name “Dinky Dean,” the five-year-old Dean Riesner played a bratty boy in Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1922), and decades later he was establishing himself in Hollywood as a screenwriter and ended up working on both these Eastwood projects. Coogan’s Bluff is a nicely done thriller in which Coogan (Clint Eastwood) – no first name, at least none that we ever learn – is a sheriff’s deputy in Arizona whom we see taking insane risks trying to arrest a Native American in the Arizona desert. Though his quarry shoots at him with a high-powered rifle while all Coogan has is a standard-issue handgun, Coogan ultimately gets his man, but then antagonizes his boss, Sheriff McCrea (long-time Siegel “regular” Tom Tully), by leaving the prisoner hog-tied on a front porch without formally arresting him or reading him his rights. Then McCrea sends Coogan to New York City to pick up another prisoner, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), who’s wanted in Arizona but managed to escape to New York. Coogan ends up in the Big Apple and writers Riesner, Howard Rodman and Herman Miller cook up a lot of fish-out-of-water gags for him.

When Coogan hails a cab to take him to the police precinct where Ringerman was being held, he’s told by the cab driver the ride will be an extra 50 cents because he was carrying “luggage” – a small mini-suitcase – and later when he checks in at the spectacularly misnamed “Golden Hotel” (a sleazy dive whose main business is obviously renting rooms to prostitutes and their clients), he’s told he’ll need to pay $7 instead of the posted rate of $5 because he doesn’t have luggage. Coogan makes it to the police station, only Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), the precinct captain, tells him that Ringerman is in Bellevue Hospital after he OD’d on LSD (our Hayseed Hero asks how he got LSD while in custody, and I was wondering why he would want such a chancy drug instead of something more predictable like amphetamines or heroin). McElroy tells Coogan the procedure he has to go through, including petitioning the New York Supreme Court for an official writ of extradition and then getting the authorities at Bellevue formally to turn over custody of Ringerman to Coogan, only Coogan can’t be bothered. When I first heard of this movie I’d assumed “Coogan’s Bluff” was a geographical feature, but it really refers to the elaborate bluff Coogan pulls on the hospital authorities to get Ringerman by pretending he’s already dotted the bureaucratic “i”’s and crossed the “t”’s. Coogan gets Ringerman but almost immediately loses him again, thanks to an ambush staged by Ringerman’s girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling, whom director Siegel remembered as just as much of a handful during the shoot as her character is on screen) and two male thugs, one of them played by the young Seymour Cassel.

The Terrible Trio manage to steal Coogan’s gun (a piece of symbolic castration the writers apparently borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film Stray Dog, another modern-dress police thriller), and Coogan’s subsequent attempts to recapture Ringerman lead to him harassing Ringerman’s mother Ellen (Betty Field) and compromising an elaborately staged NYPD “sting” operation involving Sgt. Jackson (James Edwards, who in 1949 starred as a Black serviceman victimized by racism in Stanley Kramer’s and Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave and briefly looked like he’d be the first African-American actor to be a star in leading roles, but his career didn’t take off while Sidney Poitier’s did). McElroy threatens to arrest Coogan, pointing out that while he may be a cop in Texas (there’s a nice running gag in which people assume Coogan is from Texas because he wears a cowboy hat, and he continually corrects them and says, “Arizona”), in New York he’s just another private citizen subject to arrest for obstruction of justice. Meanwhile Coogan cruises Linny Raven’s probation officer, Julie Roth (Susan Clark), and gets her to have sex with him by sheer persistence and star prerogative. Later he encounters Linny herself at a 1960’s-style discothéque called The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel (a name Siegel said he got from his then pre-pubescent son Kris), goes home with her and they have sex – only when he asks her where Ringerman is, she leads him into another trap. Siegel was particularly proud of this plot twist; he said he was tired of movies in which the hero gives the villain’s girlfriend such a good fuck she changes sides and betrays him, and in his film he’d have Coogan’s male ego set him up for her trap. The film climaxes in a motorcycle chase in which Ringerman is driving his own bike and Coogan follows in a cycle he’s commandeered from a middle-aged straight couple who were thrown from it after Ringerman crashed into them. “What are you doing with my bike?” the man futilely complains.

The two confront each other at The Cloisters, an old religious building we’ve seen before when Julie tried to take him there and he couldn’t have been less interested; Ringerman falls off his motorcycle and he and Coogan have a fist fight which Coogan wins. Then Coogan announces to the New York police that he’s making a citizen’s arrest of Ringerman, and in the film’s final scene the two are handcuffed together in a helicopter taking them to the airport and Coogan offers Ringerman a cigarette and lights it for him. (These days it’s a shock to see anyone smoking on board an aircraft.) As I noted above, Coogan’s Bluff is essentially a warmup for Dirty Harry: in both films Eastwood is playing an incorruptible but single-minded cop who’s so intent on pursuing his prey (a word that’s actually used in this script) he doesn’t care about such minor little details as the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of equal protection and due process. It’s also very much a film of its time in its open ridicule of the hippie movement and in particular its pretensions about being for “peace” and “love” (among the fixtures in Linny Raven’s apartment are a plate for a light switch that says, inevitably, “You Turn Me On”) when hippies really – at least in this movie – protect and hang with lowlifes and crooks. It’s not really much of a film noir – the characters are too black-and-white (while the film itself is in color) and Lalo Schifrin’s musical score too bouncy and not dire enough – but Coogan’s Bluff works as a police procedural, a fish-out-of-water story and a way of fitting Clint Eastwood’s Western character into a modern-dress tale.

Where Danger Lives (Westwood Productions, RKO, 1950)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Coogan’s Bluff TCM ran an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a really quirky film by director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father) from the Howard Hughes-owned RKO in 1950, Where Danger Lives. This one had high-powered talent at the typewriters: the original story was by Leo Rosten and the script by Charles Bennett, the British-born thriller writer who had worked for Alfred Hitchcock on six films from 1934 to 1940, including the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and earlier one of his plays, Blackmail, had been the basis of Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929. I’ve long thought Bennett was to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra: the writer who helped an auteur in the making crystallize his style and set his overall basic themes. The film is credited as “A John Farrow Production” – which seems to have been one way RKO lured Farrow from his previous studio, Paramount, where he made two back-to-back film noir masterpieces, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in 1948 – though the credits list two other producers, Irving Cummings, Jr. and Irwin Allen. (Allen would later become a major Hollywood figure specializing in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno in the early 1970’s.)

Where Danger Lives is an odd movie in many ways; though the original poster art promoted Robert Mitchum and promised, “MITCHUM IN ACTION!,” the film itself makes Mitchum’s character, Dr. Jeff Cameron, pretty much a patsy in the hands of a scheming woman, Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue in her first major release, though Howard Hughes had bought her contract from Warner Bros. in 1941 when she was only 15; Warners had changed her name to “Faith Dorn” but Hughes changed it back and spent the next nine years starring her in a film called Vendetta that cycled through four directors – Max Ophuls, Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler and Mel Ferrer, as well as Paul Weatherwax and Hughes himself in a few scenes – over five years of pre-production and four years of actual shooting before Hughes finally released it a month after Where Danger Lives). Unlike most of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum actually got along with Howard Hughes; in 1948, as Hughes was buying RKO, Mitchum got himself arrested for possession of marijuana. Hughes worked out an ingenious plan to get Mitchum released from state prison; he dredged up a pretty stupid script called The Big Steal and had one of his aides present it to the judge in Mitchum’s case. Hughes’s agent persuaded the judge that he had 120 people on his payroll ready to shoot this movie in Mexico, and if the judge didn’t release Mitchum he’d have to lay off all those workers. It worked; The Big Steal got made (it’s a pretty mindless action movie but also a lot of fun), and Mitchum was once again available for future projects while his bad-boy image was actually bolstered by his pot bust. Unfortunately, Hughes preferred to use Mitchum as a basic weakling and a sucker for a pretty female face and a hot bod attached to it.

Dr. Cameron meets Margo in an emergency room in San Francisco where she’s been taken after an attempted suicide. Once she’s well enough to be discharged, the two start dating, to the understandable discomfiture of Dr. Cameron’s nurse, Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, then Mrs. John Farrow and Mia’s mother), who’d been in love with him herself and was hoping they’d get married when he left the hospital staff and started his own medical practice. Jeff is anxious to meet the mystery man whom he’s been told is Margo’s father, Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains in a part that ends way too soon; he plays with the cool authority he showed in Casablanca and Notorious), and when the two finally meet Jeff tells him he wants to marry Lannington’s daughter. “I’m afraid she’s not my daughter,” Frederick tells the shocked Dr. Cameron. “She’s my wife!” Jeff and Frederick end up in a brawl in Frederick’s fancy living room and Frederick repeatedly beats Jeff with a fireplace poker. Then Jeff pushes Frederick to the floor near the fireplace, though John Farrow is careful to show us where Frederick’s head landed: not anywhere near an andiron, which in previous people’s movies had meant certain death. Given how high Claude Rains had been billed (third, on an above-title card below Mitchum and Domergue) and how well his character had been established, I was fully expecting him to return later on in the film, not dead at all but just embittered and out for revenge. Alas, he’s dead, all right, and Jeff and Margo flee the country, or try to, sure that they’ll be arrested as soon as Frederick’s body is found.

Their first plan is to use the plane tickets to Nassau Frederick had bought before his death to take himself and Margo on a Caribbean vacation, but they get scared by a page asking “Nicholas Lannington” to come to the desk at the airport. It’s just a letter bidding him bon voyage signed by his office staff, but the two guilt-ridden love/hatebirds run out on their flight thinking it’s a sign that the police are after them. Messrs. Farrow, Rosten and Bennett pull the same gag later when Jeff and Margo pull up at a police roadblock – though it’s really just an agricultural quarantine inspecting people’s fruits and vegetables for pests. The two unlikely fugitives finally make it to Arizona and prepare to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, but in the meantime they’re taken into custody by the sheriff in Postville, Arizona. It seems that Postville is in the middle of its annual “Wild West Whiskers Week,” and every male in Postville is required to wear a beard – real or fake – during the event. Down to their last $13, they are forced into a quickie wedding and given the bridal suite, which they won’t be allowed to leave. They finally work up an escape plan involving a traveling carnival (one of whose entertainers is a buxom woman who sings a raucous version of the song “Living In a Great Big Way” from the 1935 RKO musical Hooray for Love) and $1,000 in money a local pawnbroker paid them for a valuable bracelet Margo was carrying, but in the end Jeff learns that Margo is certifiably crazy – she was under the care of two New York psychiatrists – and, what’s more, she killed Nicholas by smothering him with a pillow and Jeff had nothing to do with it and is in the clear legally. Ultimately the police kill Margo in a shoot-out at the border and Jeff goes back to San Francisco and the waiting arms of Julie Dorn (ya remember Julie Dorn?), presumably to marry her and set up his own medical practice.

Robert Mitchum is hardly the late-1940’s Hollywood actor you’d think of in terms of playing a doctor, but he’s good enough to create a tough and multidimensional character out of what Farrow and the writers have given him. Aside from that, however, Where Danger Lives is pretty much a mess – a stylish mess, it’s true (Nicholas Musuraca is the cinematographer; he was a master of RKO’s frequent attempts at shadowy menace, and looks it), but still a mess. I was especially disappointed in the whole Postville sequence; as in the next film Mitchum made for RKO with Farrow as director, His Kind of Woman (1951), the film’s climax is terminally silly but also a sheer delight for overwrought camp, but it’s the sort of madcap humor that really doesn’t belong in a film noir. And I was wondering just how the issues surrounding Jeff’s future were going to sort out: remember that he and Margo were legally married before the cops croaked her, and that would presumably mean that with both Lanningtons dead Dr. Jeff Cameron would hold the entire Lannington fortune and he’d have no trouble with the seed money to start his practice.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Law and Order: "Façade" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 21) I watched a three-episode run of Law and Order shows on NBC, and my husband Charles joined me midway through for the last half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and all of Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order series episode was called “Façade” and was directed by Michael Smith from a script by Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson. It opens with a chilling prologue in which a woman on her way home late at night on the New York subways first has a homeless man burst out at her from his encampment in a subway station. Then she’s approached by three young thug-type men and she changes to another car, where she runs into a Black man named Ellis Joyner (Tyler Thomas Moore). In the next scene we see the police detectives Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) arrive on the scene, only when they pull back the cover on the dead body it’s Ellis Joyner’s corpse we see, not the woman’s. It turns out that Ellis was a) a Black stand-up comedian, b) an asthmatic and c) a closeted Gay man. The police initially investigate an older Black comic, Malcolm Paige (SaMi Chester), whom Ellis had “dissed” in his act (were the writers thinking Hamilton Burress and Bill Cosby here?), but Paige has a solid alibi. Then they zero in on a white man, Brandon Arnou (Daniel Marconi), who trains at a gym run by Domhnall Kovac (Kevin Makely). Arnou is taking a class Kovac teaches on “urban combat,” which not surprisingly turns out to be a front for white supremacism and urban terrorism. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, an Israeli actress playing an Arab-American) indict Arnou for Joyner’s murder, but just when they appear to have the case won the defense attorney springs a surprise witness on them. (“Surprise witnesses” are a staple of crime fiction but almost never occur in real life because the rules of courts require that each side notify the other in advance of all the witnesses they intend to call; if you want to add an extra witness in mid-trial you have to petition the judge for permission and have a good explanation of just why you couldn’t have mentioned this person in previous proceedings in the case.)

The surprise witness is Rebecca Lasky (Ashlyn Fitch), the woman in the prologue, who insists that she was being attacked by Ellis Joyner and Brandon Arnou was a hero who came to her rescue and saved her from the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death. Price does the best he can to rehabilitate his case in cross-examination, including getting Rebecca to concede that what she interpreted as him grunting like an animal in anticipation of raping her might have actually been him having an asthma attack, but he also sends the cops out to Kovac’s gym to see if he can uncover evidence that Brandon was a racist and he attacked Joyner out of prejudice. They find it, all right, but the person who offers it to them is an undercover agent for the federal government (probably the FBI, though we’re not told for sure) who’s been infiltrating Kovac’s operation for nine months and has just got wind of a major terrorist attack they’re planning in New York City. Unfortunately, having him testify against Brandon Arnou on the Joyner murder case would blow his cover, and Price and his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), agree not to call him for the “greater good” of stopping the terror plot. So Brandon Arnou is acquitted, and the last shots are of him, Kovac and their cronies high-fiving each other outside the courtroom as they get to go home. Usually Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners would end an episode like this with a hint that the bad guys were arrested anyway and put away for long stretches for their terrorist activities, but this show didn’t go there and instead left the story chillingly open-ended with a shot of Ellis Joyner’s partner, Michael Zane (Kameron Kierce), obviously devastated that Ellis’s murderer got off scot-free on grounds of “justifiable homicide.”

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Third Man Syndrome" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Third Man Syndrome,” also dealt with prejudice and Queer-bashing, though this time the victims aren’t really Gay – just perceived as such – and they are immigrants from Colombia, while they’re attacked by a gang of two whites and a fellow Latino. The principal victim is Javi Lopez (Martin Martinez), who’s just come to join his cousin Teo Garcia (Sebastian Barba) in New York. Teo previously immigrated to New York three years before; he came on a legitimate visa but overstayed it and so is technically “illegal.” He gets Javi an under-the-table job as a construction worker for his own employer, and as a celebration he invites Javi for a night on the town in Greenwich Village and buys him a white shirt which spells out “New York” in spangles. The two walk the streets of Greenwich Village vainly searching for a nighttime establishment that isn’t a Gay bar, though they settle on one which is because there’s a sing-along going on featuring Broadway show tunes and Teo figures that’s a way to introduce Javi to American culture. Unfortunately, as they’re coming out of the bar with their arms over each other’s shoulders (a quite common thing for Latino men to do with each other whether they’re Gay or not), they’re set upon by three thugs in a black SUV which they’ve stolen to go for a night of Queer-bashing. Teo gets away relatively unscathed but Javi is nowhere near so lucky; one of the assailants is carrying a baseball bat and gives him a nice hard smack on the groin with it. Ultimately he’s taken to an emergency room, where the doctor announces to the cops in charge of the case – it’s gone to the Special Victims Unit because Javi’s pants were pulled down and he was bleeding big-time from his crotch – that they’ve had to remove one of his testicles and he may never be able to have children.

The white assailants are Zach Swann (Daniel Sovich) and Mo Franks (Collin Linnville), both of whom have nicely styled longish hair that reminded me of one of our neighbors, while their Latino companion is Jordan Ramirez (Rene Moran), who hung back in the car and served as a lookout while the other two did the actual attack. It’s an indication of the extent of Jordan’s brushes with the law that when the police come to his house to arrest him, his mother Dora (Marcia Hopson) asks, “What’s he done now?” Ultimately the police can’t get a positive ID out of the victims themselves – both of whom didn’t see their assailants well enough in the dark to recognize them later – or out of the homeless man who happened on the incident but made discretion the better part of valor and ran away just after the attack started. Fortunately the whole assault was witnessed by a young woman named Anne Holmes (Caitlin Houlahan) who watched it from the window of her apartment just above the crime scene. Unfortunately, she’s an agoraphobic who won’t leave her home because she’s terrified of the world outside – though given what she’s just seen it’s hard not to be sympathetic to her reasons for not wanting to venture out – and it’s up to Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to coax her out of the protective cocoon of her apartment and over to the police station to ID the alleged assailants. (I was wondering why they couldn’t have her do the lineups over Zoom; a lot of courtroom proceedings were held via Zoom in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was a bit perplexed that no one thought of asking a judge for permission to do that in this case since it would have seemed to me to be a reasonable accommodation for a person with a disability.) She ID’s all three participants and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is able to get guilty pleas from them all so she wouldn’t have to come to a courtroom and testify. While not quite at the level of the Law and Order episode that preceded it, this SVU was a good and quite chilling tale, though the person I felt sorriest for in the dramatis personae was Javi Lopez because cold, hard, unforgiving New York City gave him such a wretched first impression and at the end of the show he can’t wait to get back to the much warmer climate of Colombia!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Sins of Our Fathers" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards the Dick Wolf night continued with a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that, as usual, wasn’t as good as the Law and Order and SVU shows that preceded it but had its points. It was basically a continuation of the earlier run of episodes that were kicked off by the discovery of women’s bodies on the beaches outside the fictional (I presume) Long Island town of “Westbrook,” and the overall role played by the town’s political and social boss, retired judge Clay Bonner (Keith Carradine), in covering up a series of serial murders of real or suspected prostitutes by Bonner’s son Eric (Will Janowitz). In the last episode, “Original Sin,” Eric was caught in the act of torturing and preparing to murder New York police detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) when his sister, Westbrook police chief Meredith Bonner (Jennifer Ehle), burst in and shot him dead to protect Stabler and save his life. This episode was called “Sins of Our Fathers” and centers around Meredith Bonner’s growing realization that her mother, Karen Bonner (Patricia Hurley), whose remains were found on the same beach as all of Eric’s victims, was killed not by her brother but by her dad. Officially Karen just left the family and disappeared for parts unknown – at least that’s what Clay told both his kids, though later we learn that Eric actually saw his dad dispose of his mom’s body on That Beach and that’s what gave him the psychological compulsion to kill supposedly “loose” women and bury them in similar fashion.

The longer this episode ran the more I noticed the similarities between this storyline and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 film Bluebeard, which starred John Carradine – Keith Carradine’s father – in a similar tale of an outwardly good and even charming young man who is a serial killer laboring under a similar psychological compulsion. In Bluebeard John Carradine’s character was an artist and puppeteer, Gaston Morel; in this Organized Crime story ark Eric was a woodworker who made his living restoring old churches, Both characters singled out their victims out of an obsession with fear, guilt and religious mania; Morel killed his models after learning that the woman who’d posed for his portrait of Joan of Arc was a prostitute, and Eric tortured his victims, all prostitutes hired to service the party guests of the Westbrook prosecuting attorney (his dad’s good friend), to death inside the churches he was hired to restore before bringing them home and burying them on the beach. And the 1944 Bluebeard featured both of Keith Carradine’s parents; not only was his dad the star but his mom, John Carradine’s then-wife Sonia Sorel, was in the film in a small role. (Keith’s late older brother David was John Carradine’s son by a previous wife, Ardelle McCool.) In “Sins of Our Fathers” we learn that Clay Bonner was the mastermind of a private-prison investment scheme that enriched himself and his friends; by controlling both the Westbrook prosecutor’s office and its judicial system, Clay Bonner ensured that there would be a steady stream of inmates for the network of private for-profit prisons he and his business partners were building in the neighborhood. Meredith Bonner and Elliot Stabler learn all this through a prisoner named Logan (Jon Collin Barclay) who 20 years before had been convicted of murdering a Westbrook police officer. He’s been insisting all along he was framed, and it turned out Clay Bonner killed two birds with one stone, so to speak: he had the cop who was on the point of uncovering his own corruption killed and framed Logan for the crime.

Meanwhile there’s a considerably less interesting subplot involving Stabler’s investigation by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, led by a Black cop named Moses Warren (Malcolm Goodwin) who blames Stabler for the recent suicide of his mentor on the force, who had formerly been Stabler’s father’s police partner until both of them were busted from the force for being “dirty.” This part of the show features the welcome return of Dann Florek as Daniel Craigin, who was the captain of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit during Meloni’s SVU tenure and for a season or two thereafter, who luckily talks Stabler into cooperating with the Internal Affairs investigation against him instead of trying to blow it off, and who ultimately talks Warren out of his vendetta against Stabler by persuading it’s O.K. to let bygones be bygones and not keep nursing old wounds. Though in general I don’t like Organized Crime as much as its companion shows, at least in part because in Organized Crime Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are paying obeisance to the Great God SERIAL instead of making each episode a complete and discrete story in itself (I know that’s what modern-day viewers expect, but I’m sufficiently old-school I don’t like it), this story arc was unusually powerful and it ends with Clay Bonner massacring everyone else in his crime ring because he got word that the others were about to freeze him out and make him the fall guy for their corrupt enterprise. The episode climaxes with daughter Meredith coming on her dad as he’s just turned his gun on himself and is about to commit suicide, only she talks him out of it and arrests him instead.