SWEET AND LOW-DOWN. 20th Century-Fox, 1944. Benny Goodman and His Band, Linda Darnell, Jack Oakie, Lynn Bari, James Cardwell, Allyn Joslyn; with Terry Moore, Gloria Talbott, and The Pied Pipers (all uncredited). Director: Archie Mayo.

   Despite what a couple of viewers who’ve left comments on IMDB might tell you, Benny Goodman is not all that bad an actor. After all, it’s the perfect part: himself. But OK. If you were to pin me down, I’d have to tell you the truth. The only reason anyone would want to see this movie is to see both Goodman and his band in action. On the bandstand. At least half the movie is filled with musical numbers, one song after another, and you can take it from me, they’re all great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOCg91Rv54M&feature=relmfu

   In between the songs? Well, that’s a whole other matter. Let’s assume that the truth serum you dosed me with is still working. The story is not so hot. It’s not terrible, but it sure isn’t good. James Cardwell plays a young trombone player whom Benny takes a liking to, puts him in his band, young man makes good, meets a couple of girls, starts his own band, and …

   Lynn Bari plays the singer in Benny’s band, and according to IMDB, she may have done all her singing herself. I rather doubt it, but she was still a beautiful lady. The other girl in the new band member’s life is Linda Darnell, a young social heiress whose league he doesn’t belong to, but…

   It’s a pleasant enough way to spend 72 minutes, if you’re a fan of the big bands. If not, you won’t last more than ten. The movie did earn one Oscar nomination. You can look it up. If you were think about it for a few seconds, though, I’m sure you can easily guess the category.

   Short-story anthologies are good for the reader, as well as the writer who earns some more royalties, and there are more around than usual. The Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories, 1988, edited by Edward D. Hoch (Walker, 1988), inevitably contains a selection of the best of the previous year.

   It is the strongest in this series in many years and includes Harlan Ellison’s Edgar winner, “Soft Monkey,” regarding a New York bag lady, and Robert Barnard’s “The Woman in the Wardrobe,” which EQMM‘s readers selected as their favorite story of 1987.

   I’m glad editor Hoch showed no false modesty and included his own “Leopold and the Broken Bride,” the year’s best example of pure detection, in which a woman disappears as she is ready to walk down the aisle at her wedding.

   MWA’s 1988 anthology, Distant Danger, edited by Janwillem van de Wetering (Wynwood, 1988), shows both variety and quality in thirteen reprints by authors like Hoch,Gores, Lillian de la Torre, Margaret Maron, and Amanda Cross. There were also three new stories, including one by Stephanie Kay Bendel that reminds me of some of the fine short novels American Magazine once published.

ROBERT GOLDSBOROUGH – The Bloodied Ivy. Bantam, hardcover, 1988; paperback, 1989.

   The third of Robert Goldsborough’s re-creations of Nero Wolfe, The Bloodied Ivy, is, alas, the weakest of the trio. A professorial type from upstate New York’s Prescott University comes to see Archie Goodwin, of all people. He believes the recent death of Prescott’s leading luminary, the acerbic arch-conservative Hale Markham, was no accident but murder most foul.

   He produces no evidence and names no suspect, but Archie agrees to investigate on his own time in hopes of awakening Wolfe’s interest. A journey to Prescott demonstrates to Archie that Markham was not beloved, and that just possibly he might have been helped to fall into the campus ravine called Caldwell’s Gash.

   That’s not enough to attract Wolfian attention, but doubtless Archie will find a way. The action here divides between New York and Prescott, and, while academia takes some well-aimed jibes, the narrative does not have enough zest and substance to stay aloft.

       Robert Goldsbrough’s Nero Wolfe series —

1986     Murder in E Minor

1987     Death on Deadline
1988     The Bloodied Ivy
1989     The Last Coincidence
1990     Fade to Black

1992     Silver Spire
1994     The Missing Chapter

BANYON: WALK UP AND DIE. NBC World Premiere Movie, 15 March 1971, Monday at 9-11pm. NBC World Premiere Movie / Warner Brothers Television. Cast: Robert Forster as Miles C. Banyon, Darren McGavin as Lieutenant Pete Cordova, Jose Ferrer as Lee Jennings, Anjanette Comer as Diane Jennings, Herb Edelman as Harry Sprague, Ann Randall as Linda. Written and Produced by Ed Adamson. Executive Producer: Richard Alan Simmons. Director: Robert Day.

   NBC World Premiere Movie began in 1966 as a means for the network and the studios (it was an idea of Universal Studios) to profit from pilots for possible television series. When Banyon aired in 1971, the movie series had all ready produced twelve series for NBC, and even the failures were profitable for their studios in syndication.

   A note about the title: the movie was called Banyon, but in syndication to separate it from the series it was also known as Banyon — Walk Up and Die.

   The problem with TV Movie pilots is telling the best story is not the primary goal. Instead you need to establish premise, setting and characters for the possible weekly series while hopefully providing an entertaining drama or comedy.

   For example, several scenes were forced into this story to establish the series’ comedy relief in the form of Banyon’s secretary. Banyon’s office was down the hall from Peggy Revere’s secretary school. Banyon “confesses” his passion and love for the much older Peggy (Hermione Gingold). She is not sure if he is kidding or needs a psychiatrist. They have an agreement for him to use one of her students whenever needed. This gave the young secretary-to-be some experience, and Banyon got his secretary for free.

   The opening titles attempted to establish the time (1933-1938) with newsreel photos and art. The theme by Leonard Rosenman (Combat) sounded more generic 70s than something suitable for a hardboiled PI mystery set in the 30s. However it was better than the series theme by Johnny Mandel (M*A*S*H) that only reminded us the series was a Quinn Martin Production. (Quinn Martin had no involvement with this TV movie pilot, but more on that later.)

   Irene (Deidre Daniels) is told her ex-boyfriend, mobster Victor Pappas (Ray Danton) is out of prison. Because of her involvement in sending him to jail, she fears for her life. A friend sends her to a guy who can help her. She has to introduce herself to the guy who pulls out a gun and kills her. The killer leaves, removes the fake sign on the door that had covered the office sign of Miles C. Banyon, PI.

   Meanwhile, Miles finishes another case and is sulking because he hates his job as a PI. He enters his office and finds Lieutenant Pete Cordova (Darren McGavin) waiting with the dead body. Miles barely reacts. Cordova notes the murder weapon was Miles’ gun. The Lieutenant is ex-cop Miles’ former partner and tries to play nice, but Miles still holds a grudge against Cordova and offers him no help.

   A few years before, Miles had gone undercover as a cop-on-the-take to get the evidence that convicted Pappas. But there had been a political mess involving the department at the time and Miles had been picked to be the fall guy. Worried about how he would support his family without his job, Cordova had helped the department frame bachelor Miles.

   Miles arrives at home only to find his best friend and legman Harry (Herb Edelman) drunk and asleep. Harry is avoiding his wife Ruthie (Leslie Parrish). Before Harry and Ruthie married, she had dated Miles. Now Harry is convinced she wants Miles because he is a broke loser working for others as a legman and Miles is a disgraced ex-cop turned sulking PI. And all three know Harry is right.

   Miles sends Harry home, has some China tea (he doesn’t drink liquor) and begins to work on the only thing that makes him smile, his erector set. Sadly, he is interrupted by a phone call from Pappas who invites Miles to his place to talk. Miles agrees to meet with the man who swore revenge against him and others who had put him in jail, others such as the dead ex-girlfriend Irene.

   Miles finds no one in the apartment. He looks around and finds and plays a record with music (“Remember When”), followed by the voice of powerful radio gossip Lee Jennings (Jose Ferrer) informing his listeners he is upset over Pappas parole and brags about his role in getting the mobster behind bars, then the record cuts to Pappas’ voice threatening Miles.

   The cops arrive and haul Miles off to the police dungeon where Cordova takes away Miles licenses to be a PI and carry a gun.

   Miles is summoned to meet the all-powerful Lee Jennings who wants Miles to find Pappas and stop him from killing anyone else (especially him). Banyon says no and humiliates the bully in front of his lackeys and his popular wife (with all the men).

   Miles is not afraid of Jennings because he had nothing that Jennings can take…except Harry. When Jennings threatens to ruin Harry, Miles agrees to work for Jennings. After another killing or two, Miles, with the help of Harry, finds Pappas.

   Banyon was the creation of writer Ed Adamson who had written the script specifically for actor Robert Forster. Adamson had written in radio for several series including That Hammer Guy (Mike Hammer). In TV his resume featured such series as Richard Diamond, Wanted Dead or Alive, and Mannix.

   Adamson’s script had its flaws, the most serious of which was it lacked any reason for the viewer to care about Miles C. Banyon. On the plus side the movie has a final act that makes Banyon — Walk Up and Die worth watching.

   The Oscar-nominated actor Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) is a rare disappointment. Usually the highlight of anything he does (Kate Sisco, Hollywood Harry, Alcatraz), he played the self-pitying Miles with a dull disinterest through most of the movie. He does redeems himself in the final act as he finally brings Miles to life.

   With the focus on Miles, the story, and setting up the weekly series, there was little time left for developing the rest of the characters. The cast did what they could with their clichéd one-dimensional characters.

   Director Robert Day (The Avengers, Murder by Natural Causes, The Man with Bogart’s Face) made some odd choices, most noticeably during the scenes of violence. Twice, Banyon knocks out someone while the camera focused on another character’s reaction. All deaths took place off camera. Perhaps caused by Congress continued pressure on the networks over violence on television, but this visual style soft-boiled the hard-boiled PI.

   The vintage clothes, the use of 30s music and radio shows such as Fibber McGee and Molly, as well as vintage automobiles driving a few feet along the studio lot 1930’s street gave Banyon — Walk Up and Die less a sense of the real 30s and more a 1930s movie feel.

   While I was unable to discover what exactly was on television opposite of this TV Movie, ABC was scheduled to run ABC’s Monday Night Movie, while CBS was scheduled to air Mayberry RFD (9pm), Doris Day (9:30pm) and The Carol Burnett Show (10pm).

   NBC liked this pilot and considered ordering it as a series for a possible 1971 -72 mid-season replacement. Someone else liked the movie, Quinn Martin. QM Productions was one of the top independent TV Production companies of the time and had never had a series on NBC. NBC offered Banyon to Quinn Martin, creating a behind the scenes turmoil between Ed Adamson and the QM people forced on him.

   The first episode of the NBC series aired September 15, 1972 and had a ratings share of over 30 and finished 31st out of 65 shows. Broadcasting (September 25, 1972) sampled reviews of the first episode from various critics who were near united in their disappointment.

   The next week’s episode dropped to low 20 shares and from then on the series would finish each week in or near the bottom ten. It aired Friday night at 10pm opposite CBS Friday Movie and ABC’s Love American Style.

   On October 2, 1972, Ed Adamson (58) died of a heart attack. His dream TV series Banyon would soon follow with its last original episode airing January 12, 1973.

For more information about the series, check out this post on The Rap Sheet blog.

For a updated link to sample the book Quinn Martin, Producer by Jonathan Etter:

http://books.google.com/books?id=5k7Z31qKsZ0C&lr=

Other source: “Broadcasting” Magazine

RICHARD SALE – Death at Sea. Popular Library #163; paperback original; 1st US printing, 1948. First published in the UK as Destination Unknown: World’s Work, hardcover, 1940.

   That there were eight years between when this book was published in England and when it finally came out in the US is an interesting fact, and there may even be a story behind it. Or perhaps not. Even more likely, we may never know, but the passage of time certainly affected the immediate relevance of the story, which takes place in 1940 on a Dutch freighter in the Caribbean, a ship that also takes on passengers.

   What’s significant here is the year, 1940, and Nazi agents are everywhere – and something they may have their eyes on is the S. S. Apeldoorn. On board is a passenger named Gabriel Adams, an ichthyologist by trade, and as a brief side trip on his way to a conference in Brazil, he stops to pick up a rarity, a modern-day specimen of a fish long since believed to be extinct.

   Getting back to the ship, though, all of the other passengers have cancelled, and two members of the ship’s crew were replaced at the last minute before the voyage by two others, neither of who are known to the captain. Signs of dangerous waters on the horizon?

   There are, not too surprisingly, a couple of good-looking women involved. Richard Sale didn’t spend most of the 1930 writing thrillers like this for the pulp magazines for nothing. Adams proves himself to be more than an expert on fish when he sees through the first one’s wiles almost immediately, but he’s saved in the nick of time by the second when she claims to be his wife when the first follows up by attempting to pull a version of the old badger game on him. (Perhaps I ought to start taking Caribbean cruises. Such things have never happened to me by staying on dry land.)

   The first half of this sea-going adventure is far better than the second. Once the mystery of what is going on is resolved, about half way through, everything falls into place rather sedately, figuratively speaking.

   But here is a portion of the story as it appears on page 125. I could hear the voices of two rather famous movie stars in the roles, and perhaps you can, too. (Merrill is the second of the two ladies mentioned above. Setting: The pirates have just taken over the ship.)

   It’s official, gang. I’ve just signed a contract with Perfect Crime Books for the publication of — how shall I describe it? It may not be quite as hefty as my book on Cornell Woolrich, whose title I adapted for the titles of these columns, but it will certainly qualify as a literary doorstop.

   Back in the 1980s I wanted my Woolrich book to answer almost any imaginable question about the haunted recluse I’ve called the Hitchcock of the written word. Now as I slipslide into senility I want my new book to be just as comprehensive about the two first cousins from Brooklyn who wrote some of the most complex and involuted detective novels of the genre’s golden age.

   Are you familiar with everything bagels? This tome will be, I hope, the Everything Book on Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Its tentative title is Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection.

   I think I heard a question from cyberspace. “Hey, didn’t you do that book already, back in the Watergate era?” Well, sort of. But as I got older I became convinced that I hadn’t done all that good a job.

   Fred Dannay was the public face of Ellery Queen, and in the years after we met he became the closest to a grandfather I’ve ever known, but I never really got to know the much more private Manny Lee. He and I had exchanged a few letters, and we met briefly at the Edgars dinner in 1970, but he died before we could meet again.

   Because of his untimely death Royal Bloodline inadvertently gave the impression that “Ellery Queen” meant 90% Fred Dannay. One of the most important items on my personal bucket list was to do justice to Manny.

   Thanks largely to the memoirs published by his son Rand Lee, and to the Dannay-Lee correspondence (in Blood Relations, published early this year by the same Perfect Crime Books that will issue The Art of Detection), and to the correspondence between Manny and Anthony Boucher, which is archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, I’ve come to a much clearer understanding of Manny, of who he was and how he lived and worked and thought.

   The Art of Detection improves on Royal Bloodline in all sorts of ways but for me this one is the most important. In addition it provides much more detail on subjects like the EQ radio series (1939-48) and the decades-long interaction between the cousins and Boucher.

   And of course it covers all sorts of subjects that postdate the early 1970s, like the EQ TV series with Jim Hutton, and Fred’s third marriage and last years and death. And there will be a number of photographs never seen before.

   When I first discovered the Ellery Queen novels, that byline was a household name. It still was when I first met Fred Dannay. I can’t believe that in my lifetime the Queen name has (except in Japan) been so completely forgotten. Maybe, just maybe, with the publication of Blood Relations this year, and of my book next year, and of Jeffrey Marks’ biography-in-progress two or three years from now, I’ll live to see the return of Ellery Queen to the public eye.

   On June 5, at age 91, Ray Bradbury died. In his own field he was and will remain a giant. As far as I can determine, among the hundreds of authors whose work Anthony Boucher reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle during and for a while after World War II, he was the last one standing.

   Reviewing Bradbury’s Dark Carnival collection in his Chronicle column for June 22, 1947, Boucher called the author “the most fascinating and individual talent to appear in the fantasy field for a long time….[T]here’s no telling what may come of this still very young man.”

   During his early and middle twenties Bradbury also wrote stories for crime pulps like New Detective, Dime Mystery and Detective Tales. Was Boucher familiar with them?

   â€œFor years,” he wrote in his Dark Carnival review, “I have been prowling newsstands and buying any magazine with a Ray Bradbury story.” Observe that that sentence isn’t limited to fantasy-horror magazines.

   In any event Boucher was long dead by the time Bradbury’s earliest crime tales were collected in the paperback original A Memory of Murder (Dell, 1984). We know that Bradbury was a great admirer of Cornell Woolrich, and he may well have been the first writer for whose short crime fiction Woolrich was the model and polestar.

   Woolrich never once used a series character. After two tales about a character called the Douser — for my money the weakest of the fifteen in the collection — Bradbury followed that lead. He never approached Woolrich’s mastery of pure edge-of-the-chair suspense but, for a kid in his middle twenties, did a noble job creating noir atmosphere Woolrich style.

   The more you’re at home in Woolrich, the more you feel a sense of deja vu when you read Bradbury’s stories. “Yesterday I Lived!” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, August 1944) echoes Woolrich’s “Preview of Death” (Dime Detective, November 15, 1934; collected in Darkness at Dawn, 1985) in the sense that both are about a Hollywood plainclothesman of low rank investigating the death of a lovely actress while she’s filming a scene:

   In that paragraph and countless others in these stories, it’s obvious whom Bradbury is channeling.

   Sometimes Bradbury offers his own take on a Woolrich springboard situation, for example in “It Burns Me Up!” (Dime Mystery, November 1944), which tracks Woolrich’s “If the Dead Could Talk” (Black Mask, February 1943; collected in Dead Man’s Blues, 1947) in that each is narrated in first person by a corpse.

   Sometimes there’s an echo even in the titles, for example “Wake for the Living” (Dime Mystery, September 1947), which evokes Woolrich’s classic “Graves for the Living” (Dime Mystery, June 1937; collected in Nightwebs, 1971).

   Bradbury’s prose tends to be more shrill and lurid than Woolrich’s, and pockmarked with exclamation points — even in the titles! — as Woolrich’s never was, but the influence is crystal clear.

   In his introduction to A Memory of Murder, Bradbury was quite modest about his contribution to our genre:

   This old jurist has done just that, and urges others who reread these stories to bang their gavels softly.

   No one seems to have guessed who wrote those ludicrous lines, supposedly from the viewpoint of an educated woman, that I quoted in my last column.

   Maybe that’s because in a sense I was trying to mislead. The malapropisms from Keeler, Avallone, John Ball, William Ard and myself were false clues in the Carr-Christie-Queen manner, playing completely fair with the reader but designed to give the impression that the sixth quotation was by a sixth person.

   In fact it wasn’t. The perp, as at least one reader should have figured out, was the ineffable Avallone. Here’s another from the same inexhaustible cornucopia:

   Ah yes, who can forget the climax of Stagecoach, with those damn red savages chasing the coach across the salt flats, blowing their poison darts at the Duke and Claire Trevor and all the other passengers?

FALLON EVANS – Pistols and Pedagogues. Sheed & Ward, hardcover, 1963.

   A placid town, at least on the surface, is Stratford, home of Saint Felicitas, a small Catholic college for girls. About the biggest thing that has happened there is the recent ostensible elopement of a professor with one of the students, the daughter of a Chicago gangster.

   Into this placidity comes Red Withers, professional student and sponger. Withers has been invited to temporarily give up racking balls in a billiard parlor and lecture on James Whitcomb Riley at the college.

   The invitation has come about through the good offices of a friend, who should have known better. The lecture doesn’t go well, though the reader will enjoy it, Withers is mistaken for the eloping professor by the gangster and for a flasher by the police, finds himself under attack by all sides, discovers a murder, and has to clean up the town’s drug element.

   Withers is five foot three in his elevator shoes, when he has them. He also has a scraggly red beard, without which he looks like a wizened juvenile. People think that he is trying to conceal something with the beard, and he is: all that wizen.

   This is an amusing picaresque novel, with a rogue who does not laugh in the face of death but who can joke about it afterwards. [Hubin says the setting is Chicago, but Stratford is half a day’s journey from Chicago by train.]

Bibliographic Data:   This is my nominee (so far) for the most obscure detective novel to be reviewed on this blog this month. It was the author’s only work of detective fiction. Evans’ other novel, The Trouble with Turlow (Doubleday, 1961), is described by one online bookseller as “A light-hearted spoof on life and the education system.”

   If this might lead you to believe that Evans real-llife profession was in the realm of academia, you would in all likelihood be correct. A “Fallon Evans” was the editor of the Twentieth Century Literature: a Scholarly and Critical Journal in the late 1960s and early 70s. Although the online WhitePages site finds 13 Fallon Evans in the US, the name is still relatively uncommon, and one can easily assume the two to be one and the same. [Perhaps the Fallon Evans described on one website as being “a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University” in the mid-1980s.]

   Also note that Hubin’s current edition of Crime Fiction IV has updated the setting of the novel to Illinois.

NO MAN OF HER OWN. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, J. Farrell MacDonald, Paul Ellis. Director: Wesley Ruggles.

   One big reason this pre-Code movie is worthy of note is that this was the first and only onscreen pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, later one of the most famous of married couples in Hollywood. A good second reason, though — if that’s possible — is that No Man of Her Own a pre-Code movie; in fact, it may have been one of the tipping points that caused the Code to go into effect.

   Clark Gable, sans mustache, plays a card shark and con man who fairly obviously makes a good living at it. But when the heat is on, he heads out of Manhattan in a hurry. Picking a destination at random, he ends up in the small upstate town of Glendale, NY. Being the ladies’ man that he is, and is he ever, Babe Stewart’s eyes falls almost immediately upon Connie Randall, Carol Lombard’s character, one of the town’s librarians.

   It is lust at first sight. Connie is about to burst from boredom. Glendale is far too small for her. But she knows better than to be too easy, although Babe is awfully hard to resist.

The scene that takes place in the stacks in the back of the library is one of the more famous ones in early cinematic history.

   But a later scene that takes place in a cabin up at the lake, in which Connie is seen clad only in bra and panties, is also well worth a second look. Add in a couple of shower scenes, albeit separately, and (in another vein) the scene following the one which ends with Babe saying, “See you in church,” and you have the beginning of a humdoozer of a movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J733OtRwgw

   Alas and alack, once the two are married, all there’s left to do is for Babe to reform, if Connie can accomplish it, and the last third of the movie limps to one dull thud of an ending. “Is that all there is?” you may ask yourself. But it’s the getting there that’s the attraction, and it’s why this movie is lot less likely to be forgotten than most of the others made in 1932.

  RICHARD & FRANCES LOCKRIDGE – Murder Comes First. Pocket, paperback reprint, July 1982. Originally published by J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1951. Also: Avon #434, paperback, 1952.

   There is simply no mistaking a Mr. & Mrs. North mystery novel, and it is great to have [some of] them back in print again. Why hasn’t anybody thought of it sooner? The warm, comfortable sounds of their adventures together have been sorely missed.

   In this one of two just reprinted by Pocket, three of Pam’s maiden aunts from Cleveland have come to the big city for a visit. Disaster strikes when another friend they are calling on mysteriously dies of poison. While Pam’s Aunt Thelma may be as unlikely a murder suspect as you can imagine, that doesn’t stop Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley from thinking he can wrap it up quickly.

   The inspector, Bill Wiegand admits to Pam, likes things simple. Sergeant Mullins, of course, knows better. “I should have known,” he says. “It’s begun to go screwy.”

   Part of the screwiness is that the FBI eventually gets involved, for reasons somewhat pertinent to the date of the story. (It was first published in 1951.) Even so, in spite of this worn-out bit of misbehavior at the core, this is still as bright and irresistible a work of entertainment as it ever was. More!

Rating:    B

[UPDATE] 07-11-12.   According to my records, which are, I’m afraid, woefully incomplete, Pocket published at least eight of the North’s adventures between 1982 and 1983. There were in total something like 26 of them in all, so they fell way short of doing the complete series. I don’t think many of them, if any, have been in print ever since.

JULIE. MGM, 1956. Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, Barry Sullivan, Frank Lovejoy, Jack Kelly, Ann Robinson, Barney Phillips, Jack Kruschen, John Gallaudet, Carleton Young. Screenwriter-director: Andrew L. Stone.

   I must admit that I have never been fond of those damsel-in-distress films in which an anxious heroine (her brow is usually creased), married to a homicidal maniac, is so enamoured of her prospective murderer that she can’t bear to take the most elementary precautions to protect herself.

   A typical example of this genus horribilis is Julie, starring Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, and Barry Sullivan. Day plays an airline stewardess who loses her bearings when she’s on the ground and marries handsome psycho Jourdan after her first husband dies under circumstances which are only mysterious to her.

   Barry Sullivan plays the attentive other man hovering protectively around Julie with little success in persuading her that her husband is up to no good, again. Eventually, Julie is alone in an apartment to which Jourdan has traced her and when I unexpectedly had to leave the room, she was pacing nervously while the camera cut frequently to shots of Jourdan closing in.

   When I returned, to my surprise I found that Julie, with grim but plucky determination, was attempting to land a very large plane. The pilot was nowhere to be seen, the co-pilot kept lapsing into a coma from which an attentive man (not Barry Sullivan) kept reviving him, and a phalanx of air controllers was giving landing directions from the flight tower of an airport which she was probably in imminent danger of demolishing.

   In line with my policy of not revealing endings. I will draw a discreet curtain over the remaining action.