Don Trump, Mafioso Thug

DATELINE: Mad Dog Donald Trump

If you are the Secretary of State of Georgia, you have been served a warning by the head mobster of the United States, the Don of the Trump Family.  He has promised a dangerous end for crossing Trump.

All he wants is 12,000 votes to be “recalculated” to give him an undeserved, unwarranted, and unvoted win. If you don’t do it, he threatened the elected and not rich Republican of Georgia.

Trump has money and wants to keep his power. Look out! When you have a man who calls democratic elections “illegal,” you are walking in the shadow of Adolph Hitler.

There may be something to the Trumpist threat. We recall another man who crossed Trump was named Jeffrey Epstein. He ended up in prison with a couple of bedsheets tied around his neck.

Raffensperger could end up in the Potomac River with cement overshoes. It is not beyond the reach of a billionaire who hires hitmen with aplomb.

Some of Trump’s supporters, like Louis The Gun Guhmert, have promised violence in the streets. He hasn’t threatened the life of President-Elect Biden, but he is a razor blade to the throat close.

When you run with criminals, you have the godfather part 4.  Yes, we are worried about the future of the United States and its shredded Constitution of genius. Mad bomber Anthony Quinn Warner had one point correct: a reptilian ET is now in the White House.


Bela Lugosi’s Death Kiss

No Deadly Kiss from Bela Lugosi

Only rarely do we have a chance to see or to review a Poverty Row movie from 1932 that stars Bela Lugosi.  Death Kiss was made on the heels of Dracula. (1931) and provided the cast to reunite and play it for laughs.

Death Kiss starts out like a house afire. Its opening scene is well-produced and puts a movie within a movie. The star is shot to death in pivotal scene while on the sound stage. It seems real enough.

The film released 90 years ago, almost to the day, features colorized, tinted scenes. That alone was intriguing enough to want to watch a bad murder mystery.

Lugosi is a studio manager working under a bad impression of L. B. Mayer in New York Yiddish accent. The studio novelist/writer thinks he is Angela Lansbury, but acts like a supercilious Hercule. He is insufferable, as played by David Manners.

On top of interfering with inept Los Angeles police (how things never change), he is having an affair with the leading lady who is prime suspect as the ex-wife of the victim who is in for an insurance wind-fall.

Adrienne Ames is stunning in the movie star role. Her B-movie career was short and she died young, but she is highly watchable here.

Lugosi telegraphs villainy at every step. Indeed, he seems to be the shadowy killer in at least one scene where he can identified. He is the tallest member of the cast, imperiously straight-backed.

The film progressively deteriorates, but does end with a surprise or two. As far as the color tints are concerned, it was a weird experiment to say the least. It is minor and pointless.

Greatest Mysteries: Escape Artist?

Racist Murderer Booth

DATELINE: Racist Pin Up Boy

 History Channel gave its prestigious series a shot at the Booth mystery theory about his escape after killing Lincoln. It seems to be a culmination of finally legitimizing the idea that John Wilkes Booth managed to live out his life for four decades as Lincoln’s assassination.

In History’s Greatest Mysteries, a new Cadillac series, Laurence Fishburne narrates an updated look at the Booth murder/death with more cooperation from descendants of the assassin. In fact, they are prepared to use DNA to make their case that he lived for decades—and even fathered some children.

You will see again some of the familiar “expert” faces of the past few decades, though they are now aging and still dealing with the mystery. And here, Booth is described as charismatic and able to lead and to orchestrate a great conspiracy down to minute details. Yet, he is also shown as having drinks to fortify his resolve before shooting Lincoln.

In this version of events, the descendants contend Booth, married to a woman named Martha Izola, left the country with her and went to India for a time.

The great grandson of Harry is willing to be tested. There are other marriages, one discounted by handwriting and signature comparison.

The idea of exhuming Booth’s body and testing its DNA is impossible when he was buried in an unmarked grave with many other family members, under orders of Edwin Booth.

This show takes the same photos of John St. Helen and David E. George to a University of Virginia facial recognition expert who denies they can even be matched. So, they are not truly run through his program. And a handwriting expert dismisses both St. John and George as having handwriting that was not as artistic and flowery as the real Booth!

The issue of whether he shaved off his mustache is also left in obfuscation: sometimes he has one, and other times he does not.

The show does suggest that Booth, even today, has a bevy of fans—mostly white supremacists who want to hear he got away with his crime against Lincoln and the federal government.

The mystery of John Wilkes Booth is far from solved.

Holzer Files on Surratt’s Tavern

Surratt Tavern

DATELINE:  Travel Channel Excellence

A recent 2020 series on Travel Channel presents a sobering look at spirits and hauntings in historical settings. For the second season, the show visited the Surratt Tavern and its alleged hauntings related to the Lincoln Assassination. You may want to look for the Holzer Files.

The show’s premise is based on investigations in the 1960s by a man named Hans Holzer and his psychic medium Sybil Leek. Their encounters were taped on audio with the primitive tools of the era. Today, a modern team re-opens the cases with Holzer’s daughter to bring full new technology to bear.

According to old accounts, the Surratt tavern was once the home of Mary Surratt and her family. Reports of paranormal incidents go back to before 1900, but stronger accounts appear regularly in the 1940s. When the tavern became a museum in the 1960s, witnesses saw all kinds of disturbing activity.

Hans Holzer believed that John Wilkes Booth haunted the place, though he came here on his escape hours after shooting Lincoln. He thought Leek was in contact with Edwin Booth at the house—but the 2020 investigation seems to think the “John” at the house may be John Surratt, son of Mary who was hanged. They also believe Mary’s daughter Anna may also be present.

The audio and video activity is startling as the group tries to find out what is going on. One psychic, Cindy Kaza, suffers from headaches and another Shane Pittman feels he is being told to leave the spirits alone. Cindy receives a comparable message that the haunters of the tavern want quiet and to be left alone.

The show presents a voice of a woman who speaks, “Mother,” while video shows a hoop skirt peeking around the room’s doorway. The investigators conclude that mother and daughter Surratt are at the tavern.

Multiple seances over the years may have added problems to the spiritual energies at the museum. The latest director is sympathetic to the situation and may be channeling activity.

The episode becomes a coda that proves the story is endless.



Brian Jones of Rolling Stones

Lies and More Lies

DATELINE: Murder Won’t Out


A new documentary on the fate of one of the founders of the Rolling Stones legend has been produced, written and directed by Danny Garcia. This is surely one of the ultimate acts of a groupie of the first order. His paeon to Brian is truly sad.

Jones was another of those rock stars who died at age 27, resulting from a self-destructive lifestyle of drugs and drinking. By the end, one month after he was pushed out of the group by Mick Jagger, he was dead.

Jones was actually the one who put an ad out in 1962 to form a jazz band. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard came to see him and were blown away by his musical talent and brilliant mind. He was the original leader of the group, but his sensitivity led to a hasty downfall.

Keith wanted to sing an occasional song, but there was no way to supplant Mick Jagger. By the time of “Satisfaction,” Brian was mostly dissatisfied with the direction and tone of the group.

His drinking and unreliability made him anathema to the others, and they plotted his removal because he was so unable to show steadiness in a rock field of people out of control.

Jones was thrown out of his home by parents who did not want him to give up classical music, and he was a three time father of illegitimate children by age 19. He was excessive in a world of excess.

Jones was friends with bob Dylan and John Lennon who were more sympathetic than Mick Jagger, but Scotland Yard set-ups of the rock scene were growing. Fake drug busts enhanced any drug usage, and Jones was victim. He was shocked at the hostility and fell apart, even according to his father Lewis.

Was Jones murdered? Evidence suggests that police were not forthcoming about the possibility. Jones had only the equivalent of three pints of beer in his system—and prescribed drugs. He was involved in a fight with a thug contractor who was repairing his Sussex home—and to whom Jones owed him much money.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richard refused to participate in the biography made 50 years after Brian’s death.

A fictionalized movie called Stoned seemed to follow this theory.



Frank Lloyd Wright: Myth & Murder

DATELINE: Einstein of Architecture

With 400 buildings to his fifty year career, the self-styled genius of American architecture makes for a compelling hour streaming biography, entitled Wright: Murder, Myth, and Modernism.

His own foibles, constant and steady bad choices when it came to women companions, Wright’s life nearly was derailed by his scandal and the penance. He liked the wives of clients as lovers.

A servant murdered his common law wife, other servants, children, and burned down his Taliesin in Wisconsin.  Instead of being destroyed, he girded his powers and re-built. 

The prairie houses of Oak Park must have looked like spaceships landing in the suburbs. His organic houses were stunning, warm, and you better like living in the designer’s mind. Wright designed furniture and also the grounds.

After the murders, he found his professional life drying up. He became more inward and reclusive. It’s not a good style for a man who depends on social connections to have projects.

By 1930 he was broke and without clients. So, he created a mythology in an autobiography that became a best-seller. Yet, the Depression did not ease up—and he dropped another bipolar wife and found a woman 30 years younger. She urged him to use self-promotion.

His idiosyncratic dress and demeanor helped build his own architecture school—and students were slave labor, and slavish devotees.

It was not until he built a house over a waterfall that he returned to public acclaim. Falling Water was recreation in a nutshell.

The rest of his life, until his 90s, turned him into a celebrity like Einstein.  No matter that his houses seemed to have flaws because technology for construction did not match his visions.

Wright was unique and irritating and brilliant. His life-story here in a nutshell is organic and modernistic.

Death in the Bunker

DATELINE: Endings 

Appalling Parents of the Year?

When this documentary blurb stated, the true story, we were taken aback: you mean the hundred shows where we  have seen all the details, can be wrong!??

Death in the Bunker  really starts off by talking not about the final ten days, as they advertised, but the final twelve days. Our criticism was quickly allayed. This quickly turned into a magnificent and sharp picture of the end of the Nazi madness.

We were stunned by the rare footage, both newsreel and interviews, that we had somehow missed along the way. Later, they noted that the Soviets had forty newsreel guys shooting footage. It paid off with tons of interesting angles of the invasion of Berlin.

We were still overwhelmed by the photos of average Germans who were part of propaganda. If you looked closely, many of the bystanders looked like they were in a nightmare listening to maniacs.

Well, they were. And, absolutely staggering was the catatonic reactions from those low level functionaries who knew Magda Goebbels, Eva Braun, or even had conversations with Hitler in the final days.

The consensus was that he was a demoralized shadow, however insane. He clearly had not been replaced by a double while he escaped with space aliens, as has been postulated.

The Russians contend they have his teeth, Magda’s denture, and Joseph Goebbels’ club foot prosthetics.

To see their murder of their six children so they would not have to live in a world without Nazis is horrifying.

This turned out to be one of the most impressive documentaries on the end of the regime.

Apt Pupil Outruns Mentor

DATELINE: Crypto Nazis in Suburbia

Bryan Singer, director of Apt Pupil,first ran into hot water, not because of the subject matter that indicated Nazi youth were living in American suburbs, but because he filmed teenage boys in the high school shower after gym class.

This 1998 film should not be forgotten for more important reasons.

High crimes differ in every culture. Singer’s point made Stephen King’s novella more horrific than the original story where the FBI could identify your garden variety mass killer with a profile. In this film version an All-American boy on a bicycle discovers the old man in his neighborhood is no innocent immigrant, but a fugitive Nazi killer from Auschwitz.

It was an era when immigrants were welcomed into the United States at the border, no matter how dubious their credentials. After all, safe haven is often de rigueur for evil-doers.

Instead of turning the reprobate into authorities, the kid wants to be tutored in the fine art of Nazi supremacy. It was a wild idea twenty years ago, but today with neo and crypto Nazi supporters all over the landscape, we might discover this budding monster wins some sympathy. How many shooters in recent years were teenagers with MAGA caps?

Performances make this essential two-character drama into something special. Ian McKellan plays an older Nazi and Brad Refro is the innocent-looking teen. The sophistication of Refro’s work makes his early death a far greater loss to acting. Each star is brilliant as we watch their subtle sexually charged father-son jamboree.

At one point, Refro as Todd buys a Nazi uniform for his pal to see him march around. McKellan dryly announces, “I see I have been promoted.”

The revelation that Refro’s youth may be worse than the Master comes at different points for some audience members. You could think that the kid is a victim of a powerful influence, but his treatment of his high school teacher Mr. French who discovers the ugly secret is far more stinging than the headlines of today’s child abuse cases.

Who can you trust in this world? Everyone uses a façade to shield their hideous criminal intentsions.

Up to the ending, McKellan’s Nazi thinks he can outsmart the American Nazi, but the freedom of choice in the United States makes for a far more dangerous brand of Fascism, as we now know from Trump’s campaign for a second term.

This is a chilling look at Nazis, homegrown and imported.

On the Offence with Sean Connery

 DATELINE: Endeavour Predecessor!

Back in 1972, Sean Connery did not want to play James Bond: to arrange for him to do another film on 007 romp, Connery insisted he be allowed to play a disturbed police detective based on a dark and depressing play called The Offence.

The movie showed off Connery as a powerful actor, but was a box-office fizzle. Audiences were not ready to see James Bond in a dubious psychologically damaged role. The film remains topical and fascinating: it deals with a police sergeant detective in London who cracks up while investigating another hideous child molester case (shades of Jeffrey Epstein).

With its disturbing lead character finally at wit’s end, his response is police brutality and murder that is ripped out of the headlines of 2020 without the racial angle. It’s directed by Sydney Lumet, no less.

The film mirrors Endeavour, the PBS series, set at the same time of early 1970s, now dealing with police like Fred Thursday at the end of their rope, having to face brutality and violence day-after-day. Endeavouris accurate for the feeling and style of police work in those days.

One may have sympathy for these benighted knights of crime, but they have lost the ability to make good decisions.

Trevor Howard shows up to match Connery in an interrogation scene as the chief constable of Scotland Yard. Their acting in tandem is remarkable, but the film is depressing and unpleasant as it details the reasons why the police sergeant kills a child molester while he is in police custody.

If this is to be recommended for its relevance, it is to be watched with a barf bag handy. You will likely be unhappy to see Connery’s license to kill, in this role, is not for espionage fun. This is a dark, stark, cruel movie.



Endeavour Takes Turn for Worse

 DATELINE: Unpleasant Developments

 Morse, We Hardly Knew Ye! 

In this abbreviated seventh season, the second or middle part of the trilogy of related chapters will continue to indicate to us something bad has happened to the psyche of Endeavour Morse, our stalwart and brilliant young detective.

Perhaps the constant and unrelenting crimes of violence are having a terrible effect on all the characters. Well, in a thoughtful series like Endeavour, this means your characters are developing into something you may not like.

The three major characters (including James Bradshaw as the amusing coroner) watch a woman view her teenage son on the morgue slab and go mad with denial that he is dead. Not pleasant stuff for our hardened police.

In this case, we saw veteran Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) finally fed up with murders and cruel treatment people inflict on each other. When the old cynical pro goes obsessive, you know that he will have a more divisive relationship with his sergeant Morse (Shaun Evans) likely to destroy their relationship.

The overlap of the first episode is that Thursday still believes another man killed young waitress Molly. He is now obsessed, trailing the suspect off hours when another is going on trial for the crime.

We see more of Morse’s personal beliefs than ever before: He opines the “dead deserve justice,” as to why he does a job he dislikes. He also admits he is not the forgiving type (which we think may include forgiving himself). He loses his moral scruples at last and in disappointing fashion, going after the married woman after all.  Well, actually she goes after him with wanton disregard for her millionaire husband.

Morse’s quondam friend, the woman’s husband, we suspect, knows all about this and has been observing. We will find out in the final episode of the season whether our detective skills are up to Morse’s level. He seems not to see it.

The show is overlaid with racism against Pakistani immigrants in 1970, and cruel violence even among themselves in their diaspora. We were reminded of the old chestnut movie, My Beautiful Lauderette, from the 1980s that also covered the Pakistani prejudice in England.

If this is how the show will ultimately evolve, we may at long last lose our taste for the characters and the series, whether it returns for an eighth season or not. Morse’s moral scruples have been compromised and that is never a good sign for heroic TV detectives.

Doubles and Fakers on UnXplained

 DATELINE:  Local Connection!

 Imposter, Not Tony Curtis.

Here is another fascinating subject, not usually covered in any depth by the spate of paranormal, mystery investigators. These are stories about near criminal impersonation.

The UnXplained came across with another winning episode.

If the show were worth its weight in truth, it had to deal with the most famous impostor and faker in my resident town:  yes, Ferdinand Demara stayed here a while in the 1950s, pretending to be a elementary school teacher with fake credentials. A neighbor was actually in his class that year—and she laughed he was no Tony Curtis (the movie star who played Demara in The Great Impostor).

This faker and poseurpretended to be a Canadian doctor and performed surgery during the Korean War. Yes, he operated on suffering wounded soldiers!  Caught, he was still deemed a hero for saving them. He went on to act out his fantasies as a Trappist monk, a lawyer, a college professor, and other stolen identities.

Demara’s life was always pretending, but did not much evil other than deception. He died a fat faker of 350 pounds, not pretending to be a health nut.

However, subsequent figures that Shatner’s show uncovered were increasingly sociopathic and homicidal. A French fake in the 1990s took over Hollywood as an investor and party-thrower, friend to stars. He was stealing their money and allegedly wanted to produce movies. He claimed to be Sophia Loren’s son.

Then, there was Clark Rockefeller, a German low-brow who went by several identities—and he was no Rockefeller. He was, it seems, a murderer with a yard with at least one victim—and another still missing.

These were the worst: the women were a brain damaged Polish peasant who convinced herself she was Czarina Anastasia. They made movies and plays about her fakery. And, given a short shrift was Billy Tipton, famous jazz pianist, who was found to be a woman upon his death.

This was another fascinating show, featuring rare clips, interesting insights, and the underplayed narration of William Shatner who knows something about playing roles.

Endeavour’s Seventh: Crime Goes On!

DATELINE: Night at the Opera

 Shaun Evans, not Groucho.

To kick off the seventh season of egghead murder mystery, Endeavour once again turns to star hotshot, Shaun Evans, to direct the first episode of Endeavour.

He is even better the second time around: with aplomb when it comes to set-ups, color, and the new modern police office settings. He seems to have wasted time filming in Venice for a few scenes that could have been faked without much notice in a studio. Producers even created an opera for the clueless.

The series has grown darker, starting with Endeavour’s heavy narrative opening about the comedy and tragedy he is about to face. Even his boss, Thursday, is now fed up with grisly killings and his humor is turning sour while Morse goes on vacation to Venice.

The episode is over-wroughtly titled “Oracle” when “Psychic” would have done well.

It’s 1970 now, and a waitress at the New Year’s bash is killed walking home from work. It is the heavy-handed start of women’s equal rights—and it is played historically nasty. Most men of the era saw it as a fad and did not take it seriously. If you use this show as history, you see something far more sinister.

Crime goes on, even at Oxford’s new fangled psychic research center where remote viewing experiments are in their infancy.

The red herrings, as usual, pile up in this show, which now have caught Roger Allam’s Thursday short-tempered.

Endeavour (Evans) remains the kiss of death, or so we suspect, as he succumbs to an operatic affair in Venice that is over before vacation ends.

There are a few intrigues that may trip you up: an old former classmate, a millionaire bon vivant seems gay and has an interest in Endeavour, and who could blame him? However, it is the petty jealousy of fellow detective Jim Strange (Sean Rigby) that is most amusing.

Psychic research is given a once-over effectively here and respectfully. If you don’t have it, you can’t fake it—and the ending is going to be a surprise for most.

The series is now in serial form, not self-contained mystery. The three-parts will meld into one.






Capone’s Last Year

DATELINE: Just Call Al ‘Fonzie’ 

 The Ultimate Al Capone.

Forget those performances by Robert Di Niro, Rod Steiger, Paul Muni, or a half dozen other actors who played the version of Scarface. This version of Capone  is filled with hungry alligators and chilling dreams of slaughter under his rubric.

Add Hardy’s blithering performance as a seminal Al Capone to the canon. Traditional crime movie fans will hate this unpleasant bio-drama.

Tom Hardy plays the addled, diseased, paranoid, syphilitic Capone living in Florida under FBI surveillance in 1948.

It’s hard to believe he was only 48 when he died after being released from Alcatraz in physical and mental decline. This film features Hardy with bloodshot eyes, barely verbal, hallucinating, deluded, and incontinent. No wonder fans of crime movies and Capone as kingpin hate this movie.

This is your anti-Capone mobster: a fallen slob who hears re-enactments of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every time he turns on a radio. He can barely shuffle around his Florida estate and the feds believe he is faking it at the end.

The story of Capone’s vault being empty comes out of this storyline:  that Al, called Fonzo, hid ten million bucks and forgot where he put it. Agents of Hoover were eavesdropping to hear if he revealed where it was, as they never believed he was mad as a hatter from syphilis.

Kyle MacLachlan is around as a FBI-hired doctor to try to wheedle info out of him between his final strokes. Matt Dillon is not holding up well as a fantasy figure from Al’s past. Dillon is looking his age and is nearly unrecognizable nowadays from his youthful self.

How much of this is true? We can never know what delusions and nightmares Capone suffered at the end of his life, or if the stories of his family around him were accurate.

This is quite a performance by Tom Hardy, but you are looking at a fantasy world Chicago mob figure in utter decline. It is fascinating to behold.















Dark Dirk’s Shadow

DATELINE:  British Murder Mystery

 As a Charming Killer!

Of course, Janet Greene is no Agatha Christie, but English female mystery playwrights were big in the 1950s. Her big play has more sociopathic psycho than most.

So, the big cheese to play the role was a perfect choice.

From light comedy to darkest character drama with sociological implications, Dirk Bogarde stormed onto the scene in British, arty films in the 1950s. He could play a charming medical students in the film series, Doctor in the House,or he could be a dangerous sexual predator as in Cast a Dark Shadow  all within the same year!

No actor in the Hollywood system could do that sort of range.

In 1955, he managed to play one of his creepier wife-murdering fortune hunters, cast as the darkest shadow, Teddy Bare who is married to oldster Mona Washbourne. Her name is Moni, but it sounds like Mommy when Dirk speaks.

Moni makes a will, against Teddy’s wish. With no will, he receives all her money. He is forced to dispatch her immediately and must find another wife/victim.

In some ways, the young man after old ladies is not credible, but the idea of a young man hustling an older man was not feasible in 1955, but we give Bogarde credit for his unspoken suggestion. In one scene he is reading male health magazine with men in bikini photos.

That was about as blatant as you could be to send a gay message in 1955.

In glossy black and white, the film is a beautiful production with sharp sets and lovely photography from director Lewis Gilbert. The other women victims are younger and more apt, Margaret Atwood and Kay Walsh.

This is a lost gem that now is found on streaming services.

Epstein’s Murder Will Out

DATELINE: Prime Suspect.

Alex Acosta & friend.

Maybe we will learn what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein, but not while William Barr is AG and Trump is POTUS. The only prosecutor prepared to go after Epstein and his co-conspirators was fired by Trump recently.

Yes, Geoffrey Berman did what Alex Acosta would not, and Trump has dismissed him. Acosta was paid off with an appointment to Secretary of Labor, but resigned two days after Epstein’s death. Trump praised him, and he ignored victims of child abuse.

Why would a man be taken off suicide watch in the federal prison? Have his Bunkie removed? And be given dozens of sheets and extension cords? Someone certainly made sure he had a message to kill himself.

Who is ultimately in charge of the Federal Bureau of Prisons? None other than the man whose father was a pal of Epstein, William Barr. And who is Barr’s superior? The man who was a close friend of Epstein, Donald Trump.

All the dots are there in this series, but no one dares to connect them. It’s dangerous, and Ghislaine Maxwell has her helicopter pilot license and is off globe-trotting. Epstein put his will into the Virgin Islands legal system, an irony for the owner of the Lolita Express jet. It is also a means to deny anyone access to his estate for at least a decade.

Murder or suicide? Both Michael Baden and Cyril Wecht, America’s two most prominent pathologists, will give you an answer that is disturbing.