December 2013


REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME 1932

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. RKO Radio Pictures, 1932. Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Leslie Banks, Noble Johnson. Based on the story by Richard Connell. Directors: Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack.

   I caught Danger: Diabolik a week or so ago and enjoyed it but wasn’t overwhelmed, despite all the talk about it being just like a comic book on film. If you want a movie that looks like a 60s comic book, try Deadlier Than the Male, with Richard Johnson as Bulldog Drummond battling Elke Sommer. Some real Batman-sty!e visuals here.

   Anyway, the extra features on the Diabolik DVD said a lot about making the movie look like a fumetti, which rang a bell, so I pulled out my tape of The Most Dangerous Game, and I have to say every frame looks like it was ripped from the cover of an old pulp magazine, dyed Black & White, and flung across the screen.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME 1932

   Splendid sets, atmospheric lighting, fast pace, and as I say, the constant lurid imagery. There’s a bit where Joel McCrae is in the dungeon freeing Faye Wray when a Chinese guy comes at them with a hatchet and McCrae turns and shoots him in one smooth motion. That image, of Wray in bondage, McCrae blasting away at the hatchet man amid the Gothic surroundings … well, it’s just one of thousands in this pulp-cover film.

   I also want to add a word about Leslie Banks as the villain. Brilliant. It would have easy to play Count Zaroff as just suave and sadistic, but Banks adds a subtle layer of Twit. His Zaroff boasts and preens and leers, but there’s a hint of insecurity in his shifty eyes, a nervousness in the mouth…

   It’s the same look one used to see on those pathetic and obviously chemical-dependent play-actor “sadists” in the old bondage films, or the face one saw on former President Bush when he talked about executions, and it adds a dimension to the part that goes way beyond its pulp-paper charms.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME 1932

Reviewed by
CAPTAIN FRANK CUNNINGHAM:


WILLIAM JOHNSTON The Mystery of the Ritsmore

WILLIAM JOHNSTON – The Mystery in the Ritsmore. Little Brown & Co., hardcover, 12 June 1920, $1.75.

   A bride on her honeymoon opens the door of her bedroom closet in the Ritsmore Hotel, and the body of a beautiful stranger with a dagger thrust through her heart falls out at her feet.

   The sympathy of Anne Blair, a young woman guest at the same hotel, is aroused by the sad predicament of the bridal couple, since the husband is at once accused of the murder. From sheer love of mystery, Anne starts an investigation of her own, helped by John Rush, the private secretary of another guest, multi-millionaire Harrison Hardy.

   Her quest leads through a labyrinth of clues, among complications of an international character, into most amazing developments. From a simple murder mystery, seemingly solved without difficulty by the police, it becomes an affair of such magnitude that its finals clearance discloses a plot with almost endless ramifications.

— Reprinted from Black Mask magazine, August 1920.


Bibliographical Notes: Of the author, Al Hubin in Crime Fiction IV says: “WILLIAM (Andrew) JOHNSTON, 1871-1929. Born in Pittsburgh; graduate of Western University; newspaperman and public relations executive.” Although it seems possible that it was, this book was not part of a series. Between 1910 and 1928, Johnston wrote nine crime and mystery novels included in CFIV. Of this particular novel, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review (18 July 1920) said: “Opening a closet door in her room at the Ritsmore Hotel, Betty Le Baron, a bride of three days, is horrified at … This is the beginning of one of the most thrilling and up-to-date detective and mystery stories of the year.”

Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:         

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER. General Film Distributors, UK, 1950; Eagle-Lion Classics, US, 1951. Trevor Howard, Anouk (Aimée), Herbert Lom, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Walter Rilla, Miles Mallenson, Jacques Sernas, Peter Copely Screenplay: Ronald Neame, Leslie Storm & Victor Canning, based on the latter’s novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Director: Ronald Neame.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

   â€œWe are given eyes, but not without the wisdom to keep them shut.” : Aribe (Peter Copely) to archaeologist David Redfern (Trevor Howard).

   David Redfern is a British archaeologist sent to Tunis to recover Etruscan art treasures washed ashore years earlier in a storm, and now in the cellar of Serafis (Walter Rilla), a wealthy man who lives in the villa Ben Negro in the small village of Kabarta on the coast. For Redfern it promises to be a nice trip, an interesting job of cataloging and repacking the treasures, and a few weeks of sun and fishing in between.

   His arrival is none to promising though, in a driving rain storm and on a narrow rocky road, he runs into a rock-fall blocking the road. Nothing for it but to foot it to Kabarta in the driving rain and the cafe/inn where he has a reservation. But on the other side of the rock-fall he spies a wrecked lorry — and carrying a cargo of Browning automatic pistols. Gun runners.

   When he hears another lorry coming Redfern decides not to get involved and watches from a grove of cork trees near the road. Two men get out of the lorry, Herbert Lom, and Jacques Sernas. Redfern decides to stay out of it though. A little gun running is none of his business. He hikes to the cafe where he meets piano player Agno (Wilfrid Hyde-White) and the beautiful French expatriate owner, Anne Tabu (Anouk) to whom he is immediately attracted. It promises to be a good trip after all.

   The next day he meets Serafis (Walter Rilla), a charming type happy to be rid of the treasures he has been guarding, and Douvet (Miles Mallinson) the local police chief. He has almost forgotten the lorry and the guns until the two men come in the cafe — one Rankl (Lom) and the other Max (Sernas), Anne’s brother.

   There were many fine writers of adventure and suspense in the late forties and well into the eighties, names like Hammond Innes, later Gavin Lyall, Alan Williams, Alistair Maclean, but there was always something more to Canning, a weight, almost a gravity, to his grounded professional heroes, reluctant perhaps, but capable and when needed ruthless.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

   Though Canning’s novels became darker, especially about the security services, his capable and professional heroes only grew deeper. Even the hapless vicar in The Great Adventure turns out to be adept at crime and skullduggery. Eric Ambler and Graham Greene’s trapped and often foolish heroes weren’t for him. A Canning hero is always a professional man, engineer, archaeologist, reporter, ships captain, private detective, spy …

   And perhaps because Canning began as a novelist rather than a thriller writer his books had something more, an indefinable quality that you could distinguish in only a few pages. His books were vivid and cinematic, but never at the expense of character or style.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

   David Redfern is a typical Canning hero, and facing a typical Canning dilemma: are we responsible to confront evil, or only spectators who should, as Aribe the Arab worker suggests, keep our eyes shut. Among the Etruscan artifacts is a golden salamander and on it engraved: “Not by ignoring evil does one overcome it, but by going to meet it.” The two sides of the coin, alpha omega, become part of the evil by denying it exists, or confront it and risk the consequences.

   Falling for Anne and admiring her brother’s art and devotion to his sister is the difference for Redfern, the weight on the scale, he offers Max a way out — passage to France, and work as an artist, and Max accepts.

   Small actions have big repercussions. A few days later David and Anna spend a day fishing and swim at the beach — where they find Max’s weighted body, murdered by Rankl.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

   Guilty and angry David decides to go to the authorities, but Douvet is a pawn of the conspiracy, the phone lines are down to Tunis, and even the mail is controlled By Douvet’s mistress. Finally he goes to Sernas for help, only to find Sernas is the leader of the criminals and plans for David to have an ‘accident’ at the towns big yearly boar hunt the next day. With only Anne on his side he’s hopeless. Even Agno is part of it.

   But Agno has weakness other than absinthe — he loves Anna and Max.

   Location shooting, Neame’s sure hand directing suspense films (David Lean was once his editor), the cinematography by Oswald Morris, camera work by cinematographer and director Freddie Francis, and a fine cast combine for a truly enjoyable adventure, slow to build, but with a fine chase at the end. This is the traditional adventure film, not an endless concussive assault of constant action, but actual characters with inner lives and difficult choices to make.

   Lom is at his slimy best, and manages to even slip a hint of an unhealthy obsession about Max into his meaningful glances, Rilla, always a smooth villain in the Claude Rains mode brings a fine sinister streak to Serafis bluffing a playing up to the last moment, and Hyde-White, different than you usually see him as Agno, the absinthe addicted piano player who observes even participates in conspiracy, but will only go so far, gives a fine little performance looking quite different than you likely picture him.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

   Anouk is a revelation here. Wearing little makeup and playing as a sensual innocent she has something of the freshness and promise of a young Ingrid Bergman. You can see why Redfern falls in love with her innocent rather melancholy Anne, and why a man would confront dragons for her — or even salamanders. She is well matched with Howard whose presence as a leading man was as assured as his later character roles.

   Howard did several films in this vein in this period, Malaga (with Dorothy Dandridge), They Made Me a Criminal, the Archers The Adventuress, and the legendary The Clouded Yellow. Neame’s experience in this genre dates back to the fine thriller Take My Life based on Winston Graham’s novel in the thirties and he was adept in other genres as well. It was a natural collaboration.

   This solid entertaining thriller isn’t all that well known, but deserves better. You can watch it online at several movie sites (most requiring a paid subscription), and the print is a good clean one. Catch it and see how effortless they used to make it look. This is a fine example of the British thriller at its near best, and a fine adaptation of one of Victor Canning’s best.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER Victor  Canning

THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


ELIZABETH GRESHAM – Puzzle in Porcelain. Duell Sloan & Pearce, 1945. Bart House #29, paperback, June 1946. Curtis, paperback, no date [1973]. See also below.

ELIZABETH GRESHAM pUZZLE SERIES

   Tom Pottle comes to Hunter Lewis, a tinkerer or handyman, to get a statue of Psyche repaired. Pottle had bent over in his garden and something hissed by him and struck the porcelain statue doing a fair amount of damage. A young man, something of a natural, who lives in the woods and cares for animals of all kinds is blamed for the shattering of the statue.

   Pott!e is a cad, a scoundrel, a bounder, a parvenu, a philanderer, and, much worse, a Northerner who has settled near Richmond, Virginia, and has social and power ambitions. When Lewis goes to see the remains of the statue the next day, he discovers that Pott!e has been found dead at his doorstep, the victim of a rattlesnake bite, Lewis notes some oddities in the death and gets the local police interested.

   When the young man who lives in the woods dies shortly thereafter — suicide maybe — the police are convinced that Pott!e was really bitten by a snake, probably handled by the young man. Lewis is unconvinced, and he and Jenny Gilette, a young lady hopelessly, or so it would seem, in love with him, continue to seek out the real story.

   Gilette is the first person narrator of the proceedings and makes for a good Watson. She and Lewis are an interesting and enjoyable pair. The novel is mostly fair play, with the clues, though not the motive, necessary to figure it out along with Lewis.

   There is something of a mystery about Elizabeth Gresham. Puzzle in Porcelain was published in 1945 as by Robin Grey. Another novel under that name was published in 1947, and then came a long silence, broken finally in 1972, 25 years later, with the publication of Puzzle in Paisley and the republication in paperback of her first two novels, this time under her real name.

   Paisley is a gothic-type novel, which nonetheless features Jenny Gilette and, to a small extent, Hunter Lewis. Like Porcelain, it has no specific period setting; both could have taken place at any point, except for the Second World War years, from the ’20s to the ’50s and maybe even ’60s.

— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter 1988.


The Jenny Gilette & Hunter Lewis series

    As by Robin Grey:

Puzzle in Porcelain (n.) Duell 1945
Puzzle in Pewter (n.) Duell 1947

    As by Elizabeth Gresham:

Puzzle in Paisley (n.) Curtis 1972
Puzzle in Parchment (n.) Curtis 1973

ELIZABETH GRESHAM pUZZLE SERIES

Puzzle in Parquet (n.) Curtis 1973

ELIZABETH GRESHAM pUZZLE SERIES

Puzzle in Patchwork (n.) Curtis 1973

   The author has five other entries in Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, one indicated as marginally criminous, all from the late 1970s when she was in her seventies, and from the titles, probably romantic suspense novels (Gothics), at their height of popularity at the time.

REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


A TALE OF TWO CITIES Farnum

A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Fox Film Corporation, 1917. William Farnum, Jewel Carmen, Charles Clary, Herschel Mayan, Rosita Marstini, and many others. Scenario by Frank Lloyd. Director: Frank Lloyd. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   This is a lavish, entertaining version of the Dickens novel, adapted and directed by Frank Lloyd (later director of the 1924 version of The Sea Hawk), which undoubtedly takes many liberties with the original to fit into a seventy-minute running time.

   The most startling departure is the murder of Mme De Farge (certainly well-deserved but not canonical) but otherwise the story sticks to the familiar central plot of wrongs righted with new wrongs committed in the name of “justice,” and Sydney Carton delivering, as expected and anticipated, his famous curtain speech in intertitles.

   The key roles of Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are both played by William Farnum, and played superbly, and the supporting cast is uniformly excellent The 1935 version will probably always be considered the definitive screen adaptation for its typically lavish MGM production and casting, but this silent film seems somehow closer in spirit and style to the historical period.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES Farnum

KALEIDOSCOPE. Warner Brothers, 1966. Warren Beatty, Susannah York, Clive Revill, Eric Porter, Murray Melvin. Director: Jack Smight. A novel based on the movie was written by Michael Avallone (Popular Library 60-2132, pb, 1966).

   Mark me down for one of those guys who distinctly and diligently dislike movies revolving around sporting events of any kind, whether it’s baseball, football, boxing, horse races or even card playing. With everything in the hands of the screenwriter and director, for me there’s not even a dollop of suspense. What happens next is completely in the hands of those two guys. Even if you don’t know know what happens next, it’s not the same as not knowing which two faces of the dice are going to come up.

   Movies simply can’t compete with real life sporting events. If someone were to make a film in which one of two diehard rivals wins a football game with no seconds remaining on the clock by running back 109 yards on a missed field goal attempt, you’d never believe it.

   So Kaleidoscope, based on Warren Beatty’s attempt (under duress) to bring down a notorious crime lord with a Napoleonic complex (Eric Porter) by wiping him out at a game of cards, was a big bad dud of a movie for me, even with some color photography that’s out of the world (taking place mostly in European casinos, but not entirely).

   There’s a long lead-in to this movie that consists of Beatty breaking into a card manufacturing plant and doctoring the backs of the plates used in the process to his own advantage, and along the way attracting the eye of a young and very beautiful Susannah York, who also just happens to be the daughter of a British police inspector.

   Your opinions may vary on card-playing movies like this one, and I grant you that, but as a slow as molasses movie of the “swinging sixties,” that’s another matter altogether. More of Susannah York in this regard may have helped.

KALEIDOSCOPE

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


MAN AT LARGE

MAN AT LARGE. Fox, 1941. Marjorie Weaver, George Reeves, Richard Derr, Steve Geray, Milton Parsons, Spencer Charters, Lucien Littlefield, Elisha Cook Jr., Minerva Urecal. Director: Eugene Forde.

   An un-sung little B-movie that seems at times like an episode of the old Superman TV show, starting off at a great metropolitan newspaper with a grouchy editor, a plucky girl reporter (Marjorie Weaver) and even a visit from George Reeves!

   What follows is a tricky, fast-moving and mostly-fun farrago about the search for a fugitive German escapee from a Canadian POW camp (this was made before Pearl Harbor, but the movie doesn’t hesitate to peg the bad guys as Germans) on the run in the US.

MAN AT LARGE

   Then a surprise as it quickly pivots into a game of cat-und-mouse between the FBI and a nest of spies preying on American cargo ships, who relay their secret messages in pulp-magazine stories written by a Master Spy.

   Said spymaster is played by Steven Geray, an actor normally typed as milquetoasts, who seems to have a lot of fun here playing it sinister. And since he’s a writer for the pulps, Geray’s character is naturally a cultured tea-drinking man of affluence, living in a luxury apartment surrounded by servants—like all pulp writers of his day.

   Obviously none of this can be taken seriously, and to their credit, Writer John Larkin and director Eugene Forde (both veterans of Fox’s Charlie Chan series) don’t try. Forde directs with an eye for pace, helped out by the photography of Virgil Miller, who heaped atmosphere into Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series and Larkin fills his script with twists and jokes, both surprising and funny.

MAN AT LARGE

   He also “borrows” heavily from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, with our hero suspected of murder after hearing a vital clue gasped out by the victim, a search for a clandestine group known as “The 21 Whistlers” a bit in a noisy music hall, and even some by-play with handcuffs on the hero and heroine.

   To Larkin and Forde’s credit though, there’s also a dandy and highly original climax with Reeves and Weaver stalked through a locked apartment by a sharp-shooting blind man.

   The result is a film that’s easy to like, and over-and-done-with before you notice it’s gone, considerably enlivened by the playing of Reeves, who looks here like an actor on the verge of stardom, and Ms Weaver, Fox’s all-purpose perky B-movie queen, whose lively thesping never quite lifted her from the low-budget rut — with the astonishing exception of her role as Mary Todd in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln.

MAN AT LARGE

FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins


   During the late Sixties and early Seventies I seem to have developed the habit of reading, and writing up for my eyes only, a number of first mystery novels (either for an author or a byline) that for the most part I admired. Restricting myself to books by dead Americans that were first published under pseudonyms never seen before, I venture to cobble together my end-of-year column out of this ancient raw material.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   The year before Davis Dresser (1904-1977) began using the name of Brett Halliday for his endlessly running Michael Shayne private eye series, he created a byline all but unknown today to chronicle the cases — all two of them — of Jerry Burke, an El Paso police administrator who favors brainwork over PI tactics.

   In MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER, as by Asa Baker (Stokes, 1938), his adversary is a serial-killer who advertises in the local paper, daring Burke to stop him. After three apparently unconnected murders our hero comes up with a neat solution which is also found in at least three later crime novels much more familiar to readers than this one. (I’d be a toad if I revealed their titles or authors.)

   Occasional realistic insights into poverty, anti-Mexican racism and literary amateurs make up for the ill-informed excursions into law and psychoanalysis. That the book Burke’s Watson is trying to write turns out to be the book we’re reading adds a Pirandelloesque fillip to a fine fast-moving unpretentious novel, which of course was reprinted as by Brett Halliday after that name had become a staple item in the genre.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985) had been writing whodunits since 1935, first as George Bagby and then also under his own name. After wartime service as an Army cryptographer he launched a second pseudonym and a third series. THE CORPSE IN THE CORNER SALOON, as by Hampton Stone (Simon & Schuster, 1948), introduces Gibson and Mac, two investigators from the New York District Attorney’s office who get assigned to a case of apparent murder and suicide with grotesque sexual overtones.

   Along with a raft of suspects and some deftly juggled criminal possibilities we are offered knowing evocations of the postwar clothing business, the old-style saloon milieu, and the postwar apartment shortage. The solution is so nobly complicated that I shrugged off the few loose strands of plot and the sniggering tone of the sex passages as minor annoyances.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) wrote whodunits under her own name and several pseudonyms, each book being written in about two weeks. In CASE PENDING, as by Dell Shannon (Harper, 1960), she introduced Lt. Luis Mendoza, an arrogant, amorous, brilliantly intuitive LAPD Homicide detective who senses, and almost succeeds in tracking down, the link between two unconnected female corpses each with one eye mutilated.

   Shannon interweaves the murder case with counterplots involving illegal adoption, the planned disposal of a blackmailer, a narcotics drop, and Mendoza’s pursuit of a bemused charm school instructor, but in every part of the book she irritates us by recording characters’ thoughts in the same monotonous ungrammatical shorthand they use when they speak.

   On the plus side she has a gift for probing agonized minds (a 13-year-old boy who knows too much, a petty civil servant plotting the perfect murder), for adopting at least some of the values of the strict detective novel, and for presenting an explicit atheistic viewpoint without pretentiousness or propagandizing.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   Emma Lathen, the joint pseudonym of Mary Jane Latsis (1927-1997) and Martha Henissart (1929- ), first appeared on the spine of BANKING ON DEATH (Macmillan, 1961), in which John Putnam Thatcher, vice-president of a prestigious Wall Street bank, has to elucidate a murder problem with ramifications in New York City, Buffalo, Boston and Washington.

   The bank’s search for a missing trust fund beneficiary ends with the discovery that he’s been bludgeoned to death in the middle of a blizzard, and its duties as trustee require Thatcher to take a hand in the investigation.

   The characters and writing are nothing special but there are fine evocations of Wall Street, Brahmin elitism, and the curious behavior of airports during snowstorms, and the deductive puzzle is neatly constructed.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   It certainly wasn’t his first novel, but KINDS OF LOVE, KINDS OF DEATH, as by Tucker Coe (Random House, 1966), introduced a new byline and a new series character for prolific Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008).

   A Syndicate boss who for obvious reasons can’t go to the police hires disgraced ex-cop Mitch Tobin to take a break from building a high wall around his house and find out who inside the “corporation” first seduced his lover and then murdered her.

   The trail to the truth is basically psychological and unmarked by incidents of violence. Tobin guesses right far too often and the killer turns out to be a walk-on part, but Coe deals skillfully with a variety of failed relationships and unsentimentally with the insight that professional criminals are no different from other successful American businessmen.

***

MIKE NEVINS Reviews

   A DARK POWER, as by William Arden (Dodd Mead, 1968), was also not a debut novel except in the sense that, like KINDS OF LOVE, KINDS OF DEATH, it introduced a new byline and a new series character for its author, the equally prolific Dennis Lynds (1924-2005).

   Industrial spy Kane Jackson, who seems to have been modeled on Lee Marvin’s screen persona, is hired by a New Jersey pharmaceutical combine to recover a missing sample of a drug potentially worth millions. The trail leads through mazes of inter-office love affairs and power struggles and several bodies, some naked and others dead, come into view along the way.

   Arden meshes his counterplots with precision, draws several vivid characters trapped by their own ambitions in the jungle of high-level capitalism, and caps the story with a double surprise climax. The plot is resolved by clever guesswork but that’s the only weakness in this admirably tough-minded whodunit.

***

   I’ve just discovered on the Web that half of Emma Lathen seems to be still alive, which means that I haven’t completely restricted myself to the dead. But I also discovered, while combing through comments I first typed up on my trusty Olympia Portable almost half a century ago, that I have enough material for January 2014 if the seasonal blahs continue to get me down.

   Next time the subject will be American debut novels published under their authors’ own names. Meanwhile, until I cobble together my first column of the new year, happy holidays to all who may see this one.

BRIAN WYNNE – The Night It Rained Bullets. Ace Double M-128, paperback original, 1965 (packaged back-to-back with Nemesis of Circle A, by Reese Sullivan).

BRIAN WYNNE The Night It Rained Bullets

   The author is, of course, better known as Brian Garfield. (Wynne is his middle name.) I didn’t do a lot of research on Mr. Garfield – what I’m about to pass on to you is only what Ace told his readers inside the front cover. In 1965 he was only 26, for example, and he was already the author of 10 other western novels for Ace, and of course who knows how many others from other publishers?

   And many (if not most) of the others from Ace were, like this one, short but intense tales of Jeremy Six, long-time marshal of Spanish Flat, Arizona, confirmed by a quick excursion to Google, without which we can obviously no longer live as a successful civilization. Of the westerns that Garfield did for Ace, eight of them were about Jeremy Six.

   Even more, when Garfield stopped writing them, they were evidently so popular that Ace hired a ringer to write a ninth one, called Gunslick Territory, in 1973. They even went so far as to use the Brian Wynne byline until Brian Garfield said nothing doing, and that was the end of that. (I am paraphrasing Mr. Garfield’s email to me in April 2006. The actual author of Gunslick Territory was Dudley Dean [Owen] McGaughey.)

   Here, from page 18, is a long quote that will tell you something about Mr. Six:

   Jeremy Six had wide shoulders and lean hips. His hair was brown, and his face was shaped like a shield, with a long, hard jaw. He was no longer a young man – he was near forty, now – but he had the quickness and vigor of a youth, and his muscles were hard and trim. His had big bones and large, ungainly hands. Going on four years now, he had been chief town marshal of Spanish Flat. Most of the time the job was routine and drab: each night, with a schedule that changed constantly to prevent ambush, he made the rounds of the town several times. He crused (sic) Cat Town, checking on the saloons and bawdy houses. Fat Annie always had a kind word for him, a bubbling laugh and a hoarse obscene remark or two. He had friends in all the quarters of town. He liked the job; it kept him busy, it kept him alert, now and then it challenged his wits or his strength, and in that manner, it kept him finely tuned so that he was always alive to the smallest pleasures and warm subtleties of each day’s quiet adventures. Once in a long while there was a bad time, a time of regret: last summer he had lost a deputy and a friend in a drawn-out chase and series of gun battles with the Madden gang. That had been summertime, and hot on the rim of the desert. Now it was the dead of winter, and Jack Lime had come with his three toughs to take the place of the Madden gang in the mountains.

   Not only do Lime and his men come to town, but they kidnap Jeremy’s lady friend Clarissa, who is the owner of a saloon on the wrong side of town, during the worst blizzard Spanish Flat has ever seen. This is not all. There is more. A gambler and a notorious gunman is in town, as well as many other drifters and ne’er-do-well’s, along with the naive young (and hot-headed) owner of a local mine, who resists (and resents) being watched over by his sister, and a confrontation between some or all of these elements is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

   This was written when television westerns like Gunsmoke had become more and more popular, and the B-western heroes had all but hung up their spurs. (Now, I don’t imagine anyone has ever used that metaphor before, have they?)

   And there’s little that happens here that could not also have happened in Matt Dillon’s Dodge City. The scope is narrow, and yet, when all of the various small crises are over, it is not with any immediate sense of closure. The ending is off-beat and subdued, and if you expect the book to fade out with a clinch and a kiss, you’re reading the wrong author, I suspect, and almost definitely the wrong book.

   And once you realize that, ah, yes, that’s when the impact finally hits. It’s like a delayed reaction, and a heftier punch is seldom packed. At only 130 pages, the book is short, but it’s as long as it needs to be, and if you’re like me, you’ll find many scenes still playing their way through your head several days later.

   I don’t know the technical name for this effect. Maybe it’s just called heavy duty staying power.

— Reprinted from Durn Tootin’ #5,
   July 2004 (slightly revised & updated).

Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         

BIG JIM McLAIN. Warner Brothers, 1952. John Wayne, Nancy Olson, James Arness, Alan Napier, Veda Ann Borg, Hans Conreid. Screenplay: James Edward Grant, Richard English, Eric Taylor, James Atlee Phillips (uncredited), William Wheeler (story); quotes from “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Director: Edward Lustig.

   It’s 1952 and all that stands between us and ruin is Joe McCarthy, Big Jim McLain, and Mal Baxter …

BIG JIM McLAIN

   Things were never blacker — or is that redder?

   Sadly only two of those are fictional characters, though Tailgunner Joe was at least ninety percent a product of his own vivid alcohol mist of a mind. I suppose we should be grateful no actual communists were harmed in the making of this movie — come to think of no actual communists were harmed by Joe McCarthy either… It was a strange era.

   You can’t separate the Red-baiting hysterical witch-hunts of the era from this badly written, acted, directed, and intended film. The Duke would have been better served to get his buddy Mickey Spillane to write the script, at least that might be watchable. I warn you this one isn’t. Even location filming in Hawaii doesn’t help, since the scenes there are mostly interiors probably shot back in the states, and the few outdoor scenes in the tackiest parts of the island. It’s a half-assed attempt at the docu-noir style so popular then, and handled with no subtlety whatsoever.

   So, now to our plot — such as it is. Jim McLain (John Wayne) and Mal Baxter (James Arness, who was pretty much owned by Wayne at that point of time, acting-wise) are investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the beloved HUAC of every crackpot right-winger’s dreams (“Were you prematurely anti-fascist? Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party …”) sent to investigate the hold the party seems to have gained in our then territory. Apparently our vital supply of pineapple was under extra-ordinary threat by Communist labor organizers (those radicals who believed in revolutionary ideas like minimum wage).

   Have a sense of humor guys, I know Hawaii was a vital military and shipping asset, I remember Pearl Harbor, that and a trip to the island are why they chose it in the first place to associate communist with the sneak attack by the Japanese. Clever these occidentals.

BIG JIM McLAIN

   I’m sorry, but it is hard to take this clunker seriously, and it stands an insult to those who fought the actual cold war against the Soviets and not the headline war against drunken screenwriters, labor organizers, and actors. Red’s weren’t only in your community, they were in our entertainment — and — gasp — thanks to the garment union, our underwear.

   Meanwhile Jim and Mal are tracking down Mr. Big with stops along the way for a suspicious Nancy Olsen (Nancy Olsen femme fatale), Veda Ann Borg (she’s virtually a Wayne regular from this period on), and Hans Conreid (say it ain’t so Uncle Tunoose). Conried was also in John Wayne’s much more entertaining Red-baiting Jet Fighter — which thanks to producer Howard Hughes had sex appeal to spare from Janet Leigh as a Russian fighter pilot — a film that at least knows it is stupid and enjoys itself. I guess Conreid struck the Duke as more frightening than he did me. Maybe The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T scared him. In Jet Fighter he’s a Russian officer, here he’s only a traitor.

BIG JIM McLAIN

   Of course from scene one you know Arness isn’t leaving this one alive, and since he’s the only person in the film even pretending to try, you will miss him. So now it’s personal for Big Jim against those dastardly Reds. At least this promised to be good for a rousing Spillane style bloodbath finale, but if anyone could kill a good payoff it seems to have been director Edward Lustig, who seems to think he’s making a serious and important film and so develops no thrills and no surprises when Big Jim almost casually catches up with with Struac, the dirty Commie ring leader — played by Brit accented Alan Napier (Alfred to Adam West’s Batman), because to be a Commie you had to have an accent or a foreign sounding name. No red-blooded American with the right amount of vowels in in his name could ever be a Red. For instance no red blooded name like Hammett …

   I wish I was being unfair to this film in the name of a few laughs, but sad to say I’m not. This has all the drama and suspense of cottage cheese (less if you leave the latter out too long).

   Now before you start, I’m a huge John Wayne fan. The High and the Mighty, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man are among my all time favorite films, and I admit unashamedly I held back a few tears when he died in The Shootist. But that’s no excuse for this lunk-headed thud-ear piece of propaganda disguised as a movie. It doesn’t even flag-wave well, being so dull as to negate any patriotic fervor — the only fervor this movie generates is how fast you can reach the remote and cut it off. It needs much more than a few quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” If you want to hear that masterpiece quoted watch the delightful film Anything For Money with Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold’s Dan’l Webster.

   You might well emerge from this film thinking, that if that’s the best the Communists could do maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all — it is literally such a bad film it achieves the opposite of it’s intent. It diffuses the communist menace with its comic book plot — no. I take that back the anti-commie comics were better written.

   He’s a Go-Get-‘Em Guy for the U.S.A. on a Treason Trail that leads Half-a-World Away!

   That tagline is the most exciting thing about this snoozer.

   You can watch this full movie at Amazon. Do yourself a favor and don’t.

   Incidentally in this film both HUAC and the Duke don’t seem to know it wasn’t illegal to be a Communist in 1952, so Congress hasn’t changed all that much over the decades.

BIG JIM McLAIN

   If you would like to see this done right check out I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., My Son John, Woman on Pier 13, Walk East on Beacon Street, A Bullet for Joey, or Walk a Crooked Mile. They all surpass this film by miles, with genuine suspense and menace even when they are silly or over the top. Even The Whip Hand with rough tough all American Eliot Reed battling commie Raymond Burr is better, and that’s saying a lot.

   Wayne did a little better in contemporary dress in McQ and Brannigan, not a lot, but a little, and the latter has one of the funniest scenes ever filmed with the Duke doing that famous walk across the floor of a London disco replete with mirrored ball and strobe lights. Take that John Travolta.

   Alas Big Jim McLain has nothing going for it despite the screenwriters who have done much better, and the stars who were do doubt sincere. Truth be told a lot less sincerity and more melodrama would have helped. A better movie than this could have been made about the threat of tooth decay and gingivitis. Talk about a red menace …

BIG JIM McLAIN

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