THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE. Universal Pictures, 2002. Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins, Christine Boisson, Simon Abkarian, Charles Aznavour. Based on the film Charade (1963). Director and co-screenwriter: Jonathan Demme.

   There was a lot of talent involved in making this movie, but the end result certainly doesn’t show it. I came across this film by researching the credits of the leading female star, Thandie Newton, whom I most recently saw in the mini-series Rogue, which I recently reviewed here.

   She has the second-most undesirable task of playing the part that Audrey Hepburn played in the movie this one is a remake of, and I’m happy to saw that she does a creditable job of imitating the pixieish charm of Miss Hepburn. On a scale from one to a hundred, I’d give her a 60. Mark Wahlberg, however, displays — well, let’s put it this way. Cary Grant had more charm in the pinkie of his left hand than Mark Wahlberg shows in trying to follow in his predecessor’s most considerable footsteps.

   I know Wahlberg has gone on to bigger and better things, but at this stage of his career, he was out of his league. And Tim Robbins in Walter Matthau’s shoes? Not on your life, not ever.

   The story’s almost the same. A young woman who’s not been married long but is already thinking divorce comes home from a brief vacation to find the apartment they share all but empty and what furniture there still is destroyed. Turns out the man is dead, he had many many secrets, and many people want something — a fortune in diamonds that he had in his possession.

   All of the fancy camera doesn’t help a muddled and badly told story, and it often served to make me dizzy. This was a mess, through and through — there’s no better word to describe it — a film best avoided if possible, and I don’t say that lightly. The only reason I watched until the bitter end was to see Thandie Newton, whose name and fame does not match that of any of the others involved in this production, but it should.

PS. There is still the same fatal flaw in the plot that the first movie had, and if anyone wants to know, I’ll bring it up in the comments. That’s the one thing they could have improved upon in putting this remake together, and why they didn’t, I can’t possibly imagine.

REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:

BRETT HALLIDAY – Blood on the Black Market. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Dell #64, paperback, 1944. Many other paperback edition exist. Revised edition: Heads You Lose. Torquil/Dodd, hardcover, 1958.

   As I mentioned in my review of Death from a Top Hat, having watched the Mike Shayne movies, I decided to re-read one of the Shayne books in my vast, well-organized files. This one is the earliest of the five Shayne map-backs in my collection.

   Mike Shayne, still grieving over the death of his wife, is woken from a sound sleep by a telephone call from Clem Wilson, a friend of his who owns a gas station. Before Clem can really tell him anything, Shayne hears a shot and the sound of a falling body. Telling the desk clerk of his hotel to call the police, Shayne rushes to Wilson’s filling station where his friend Chief Will Gentry is on the scene.

   Shayne intimates to Gentry and a few others that Wilson has told him enough about a ring trying to get him to sell black market gas (during World War II) to make Shayne dangerous to them. Soon he finds himself a target for would-be assassins as well as being courted by the newly-fanned Motorists Protective Association and its pretty female lawyer Edna Taylor.

   It’s a passable effort, with Shayne breaking the law at will and treating women in the time-honored way of the American tough-guy. I pretty much remembered who the killer was, or it was relatively easy to figure out. In a rather egregious implausibility, two different characters shoot someone down in cold blood in front of Shayne on the pretext that they thought those unarmed someones were dangerous. Once I could swallow with difficulty but twice is getting preposterous.

CALEB CARR – The Alienist. Random House, hardcover, 1994. Bantam, paperback, 1995. TV adaptation: A ten-episode limited series on TNT, January 22 to March 26, 2018.

   Carr is a young native of NYC with a degree in history who writes frequently on political and military affairs. His first novel was one of the bigger ones of ’94, and I missed it. Why is it that I get review copies by the basket that I wouldn’t read on a bet, but not the ones I want to? I actually had to buy a second-hand copy. It’s not fair.

   It’s 1896, and Theodore Roosevelt is Police Commissioner of New York City. Dr. Lazlo Kreizler is a controversial psychologist, or “alienist.” John Schuyler Moore is a crime reporter for the New York Times. The three men met in their youth at Harvard, and now they must form an unlikely and secret alliance. Someone is killing the city’s children, and viciously mutilating their bodies.

   Dr. Kreizler believes it is the same someone, and that he will kill at increasingly shorter intervals. His theories about insanity are so unpopular that Roosevelt cannot be publicly associated with him, so they must work covertly to catch the murderer, a serial killer before that was a phrase for it, or public that would or could believe in it.

   I’m enough of a literary snob that it goes against the grain for me to admit I like a bestseller, but I’ve got to ’fess up — this was a damned good book. A serial killer book, too, and I don’t like those at all. I’m always amazed when a young writer and first time novelist writes so well.

   It’s a fascinating detective story, as well as being an equally fascinating picture of New York City at the end of the 19th century. Carr’s slowly painted portrait of the killer is chilling, and his characterizations of the team following him solid. I would have liked to have seen Moore, the narrator, a little better developed. But it’s hard to quarrel with the foci Carr chose.

   It’s a thick book, and at times I thought the very picture of the city that I found so interesting slowed the story a bit too much. All told, though, it was an excellent book and would surely made my 1994 awards list.

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN. United Artists, 1934. Douglas Fairbanks, Merle Oberon, Bruce Winston, Benita Hume, Gina Malo, Binnie Barnes. Director: Alexander Korda.

   The Private Life of Don Juan lacks wit or pace of action, but it offers an elegant coda to the career of its star, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., here in his fifties and looking tired of the whole thing. When an imposter masquerading as Don Juan is killed by a jealous husband, the legendary lothario takes advantage of the situation and retires to the country, with tepid results. Doug doesn’t do any stunts, there’s no swordplay, little plot, and yet …

   … Halfway through the film, Don Juan attends his own funeral, and director Alexander Korda deals it out with his usual splendour, all billowing cloaks and wailing women, as America’s cavalier strolls through the palazzo contemplating his own mortality. Fairbanks never made another movie, lending an odd elegiac tone to a film that doesn’t really deserve it.

BILL PRONZINI – Games. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1976. Crest, paperback, 1977. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2007, published in tandem with Snowbound.

   A Senator from Maine, burdened by a marriage in name only, takes his mistress to his isolated island retreat for a quiet Memorial Day weekend. He intends that they should be alone, but on the first night, they discover that the house has been broken into. Guns have been stolen. A squirrel is found bloody and disemboweled near what looks like an altar. The crash of a broken window, a jagged piece of bone.

   A senator’s games are of politics, as well as he games everyone plays, games of love, of life itself. Senator Jackman finds himself in a chilling, then mind-exploding game of cat-and-mouse – the most dangerous game. The horror of something unpleasant of something happening to someone else is compounded when you’re forced to realize how each of us is to becoming the object of the crazed torment of persons unknown. You won’t escape this book without being shocked at least once.

   This is a suspense story with a kick, some twists, and an impact that’s as real as anyone’s worse nightmares. Yet what’s also remarkable is seeing a person’s philosophy change before your eyes. Jackman is forced to understand himself for the first time, as few of us do.

Rating: A

DELLAVENTURA “Above Reproach.” CBS. 23 September 1997 (Season One, Episode One). Danny Aiello (Anthony Dellaventura), Ricky Aiello, Byron Keith Minns, Anne Ramsay. Guest Cast: Meg Gibson, Anthony Franciosa. Cameo: Rudolph Guiliani. Created by Richard Di Lello, Julian Neil and Bernard L. Nussbaumer. Director: Peter Levin.

   Anthony Dellaventura is a Manhattan-based PI who once worked for the police department but quit when he became fed up with internal politics and crooks getting off too easily. One of the D.A. he approves of, though, is Sarah Macalusso (Meg Gibson), who is scheduled to soon be sworn in as a municipal judge. A small problem has arisen, however. She was kidnapped overnight, drugged, and videotaped in shall we shall we say compromising positions.

   Even though Dellventura talks quietly, he’s also the kind of street guy who also talks tough, or that’s the premise of the show. I think he’s also the kind of guy who doesn’t think before making promises too quickly. There’s also no sense of real danger or suspense when he charges in without a plan other than confrontation and hoping for the best. He’s all brave braggadocio, but little more than that, and without a small gang of loyal assistants, I don’t think he’d get very far in the real world.

   The show is still mildly enjoyable, in a homespun sort of way, but overall, viewers seem to have agreed with me. Thirteen episodes and that was it for this short-lived PI series, now probably forgotten by everyone other than those involved. Incidentally, and for the record, Episode Two is titled “Pilot,” This wasn’t it.

ROBERT CARSON “Aloha Means Goodbye.” Serialized in five parts in the Saturday Evening Post (*), June 28 to July 26, 1941. No book publication known. Filmed as: Across the Pacific (1942), with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet. Screenplay and Directed by John Huston.

   Richard (Ricky) Leland is sailing from Vancouver on the Japanese freighter the Genoa Maru, with fellow passengers Alberta Marlow (a very calm dame), whose eccentric Uncle Dan owns a plantation on his own island in Hawaii, and the mysterious Dr. Barca, a mysterious Filipino (…he looked genial and unimposing, except for his eyes which were cold and black). No one is quite what they seem including Ricky who appears to be a disgraced American Artillery Officer, but we soon learn is in reality an American agent.

   Even the Genoa Maru isn’t quite what it seems.

   If you have seen the John Huston film Across the Pacific, his first after The Maltese Falcon, and his last before going off to the war, you know the basic story. Barca and the Japanese are part of a dastardly plot to invade and lead a sneak attack on the States involving Alberta Marlow’s Uncle Dan and his plantation, and Ricky Leland is not who or what he seems to be.

   In the film Barca becomes the German, Sidney Greenstreet, and the plot, thanks to Pearl Harbor, turns to Panama instead of Hawaii (coming once the title had been released and making no sense in the film since they never cross the Pacific), but just how close the movie is to the serial (I’m not sure the serial ever appeared in book form) is surprising (right down to the shootout in the Japanese movie theater — that makes more sense in Hawaii than Panama), because the real joy of the film is the by play and double entendre between Bogart and Mary Astor and the war of wits with Greenstreet, and much of that is lifted directly from the dialogue in the serial.

   Carson was a successful author who frequently contributed stories to the Post, and this serial that ran there between late June and early August of 1941 is a lively tale, accompanied by handsome full color illustrations by Ben Stahl.

   Just as Huston virtually transcribed Hammett’s novel the same seems to be true of this serial, though obviously Carson is no Hammett, as Pacific is no Falcon.

   There are minor differences, of course, but Huston was always the most literary of directors and famously honed close to his source material.

   â€œAloha” is a product of the slicks as magazines like the Post, American, Liberty, and Collier’s were then known, and much has been written belittling the slick style in comparison to the pulps, but some of the best writers of the time, from Fitzgerald and Faulkner to Philip Wylie and John P. Marquand worked there, and pulp favorites like Erle Stanley Gardner, Fred Nebel, Robert Carse, Edison Marshall, Sax Rohmer, and Rex Stout crossed over into the slicks, and were often paid more. They might get up to $5,000 for a serial at a time a novel might bring as little as $500.

   The Post was always well associated with the mystery genre as the home of Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Perry Mason, Albert Campion, Roderick Alleyn, and Hercule Poirot.

   â€œAloha Means Good-bye” is a fast moving tale in the best sense, with something of the same pace and style of the tongue in cheek movie. I’m not sure if you can really call a book prescient for predicting a Japanese attack on the US in the summer of 1941 (Van Wyck Mason predicted one in 1932 in The Branded Spy Murders; it was something that had been inevitable for much of the century), but it was great timing, however you look at it, and even now an entertaining tale thanks to its lighthearted style.

       —

(*) For anyone interested you can go to Internet Archive and find over 6,000 issues of the Saturday Evening Post from the twenties to the mid-sixties with full serials by Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Earl Derr Biggers, P. G. Wodehouse, Dornford Yates, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Alan LeMay, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, John P, Marquand, Luke Short, Jack Finney, C. S. Forester, Paul Gallico, James Warner Bellah, and many more, as well as short fiction by Philip Wylie, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Fred Nebel, Lester Dent, and others, illustrated by the likes of Matt Clark, Harold Von Schmidt, and Mitchell Hooks.

HUSTLE “The Game Is On.” BBC One, UK. 24 February 2004 (Series One, Episode One). Adrian Lester, Marc Warren, Robert Glenister, Jaime Murray, Robert Vaughn. Creator-screenwriter: Tony Jordan. Director: Bharat Nalluri.

   Of the eight seasons this British TV series was on, only four have been released on DVD in the US. I recently caught up with the first episode when I saw that it was streaming online. Well worth the wait, I’d say, on one hand, but on the other, I have to ask myself, why did I wait so long?

   I have known what the basic premise was all along, of course. Every week it was on a gang of very experienced con artists pull off a long complicated scam on some unsuspecting victim. One crucial ingredient, or so I’m told, is that very often in each episode when it looks as though their plan is going to collapse, that’s when the real con takes over. It is difficult to imagine how many times the writers of this show can fool the viewer for eight seasons like this, but spread out over as many years, well, why not? Obviously they did it.

   In “The Game Is On,” not only do the basic members of the gang get together for “one last con,” but a new member of the team invites himself in, all the while playing on the greed of a victim who thinks he’s about to make a no-risk fortune on the stock market.

   The story is told in very obvious tongue in cheek, and it’s pleasure to see Robert Vaughn (the senior member of the group and the only member of the cast I recognized) play a role obviously meant for him. It is also very obvious that this is a series that I will be watching more of.

PETER RABE – Agreement to Kill. Gold Medal #670, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1957. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2006 (published in tandem with My Lovely Executioner).

   I have in my collection nearly 300 original mystery/suspense/crime novels published by Gold Medal during the 1950s. Very few of them deal with detection in the classical sense, but in quality they often far outclass the pulp stories they are descended from. The types of stories are indeed the same pulpish stuff,with many of the same writers, their apprenticeship already served. Private eyes and tough hoodlums dominate.

   This is the first of Peter Rabe’s books that I’ve read. As far as I know, he came along after the pulps had gone. My impression is that he was popular (14 books in 5 years, for Gold Medal), writing largely from the criminal point of view, giving readers a realistic inside look into the hard and tough world of organized crime.

   Agreement to Kill is unusually strange. Jake Spinner, just released from prison, finds himself on the run for the shooting of the man who put him there. Running with him is Loma, the professional who really did the killing, on a contract from bosses in St. Louis. Loma is a cripple, an enigmatic clubfoot who never does anything for no good reason, no matter how temporarily. And Spinner? He thinks it may be time to change sides, and he wants a job and connections to the people in St. Louis.

   The ending reminds me of Cornell Woolrich. A guy and a girl are walking hand-in-hand into their future when fate intervenes. All in all, the book is very much off the beaten track, and the result is a puzzling piece of action that may either repel or wholly fascinate.

Rating: A minus.

TAKEN. “Pilot.” NBC, 27 February 2017. Clive Standen as Bryan Mills and Jennifer Beals as Christina Hart. Large ensemble cast, including guest stars, some of whom may return; others who won’t. Showrunner/screenwriter: Alexander Cary. Director: Alex Graves.

   Now as most of you already know, those of you who are well ahead of me on this, Liam Neeson played Bryan Mills, a former CIA operative whose life takes three separate and serious turns of events, each turned into a  fast action film and huge box office successes. Rather than a fourth film, what to do with the character? Go back to his beginnings and build a TV series around them.

   It lasted for two years, and believe it or not, this is the first I’ve known about it. I was scouting around on Amazon Video looking for something else to watch with Jennifer Beals in it, and there I found it.  I haven’t watched the movies either. Always meant to. Haven’t yet.

   Of course you realize that the TV series is totally generic. Take the name of the character and the title (Taken), and voila. There you have it. Name recognition from day one.

   The pilot has, unfortunately, no plot in and of itself. It’s an “origin” story all the way, nothing more. But nothing less, either. When terrorists kill Mills’ younger sister in retaliation for killing a drug lord’s son, Mills takes matters into his own hands – but not quite. He’s tracked all the way and given help (rescued) by Christina Hart’s team of operatives. She’s a Deputy Director with Special Portfolio at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (Confession time. I had to look this up online.)

   The story ends with Mills being recruited by her. I hope I’m not giving too much away. The pilot is well enough done, but what kind of stories will follow next is not entirely clear. We are left with only our imaginations at work. I might watch the movies next, but on the other hand, since Jennifer Beals is in the series, I can’t tell you that I’m all that sure about that.