THE PETRIFIED FOREST. Warner Brothers, 1936. Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Charlie Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Porter Hall, and Adrian Morris. Screenplay by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves, from the play by Robert E. Sherwood. Directed by Archie Mayo.
Sherwood’s play and the film made from it have not aged well, but if you can accept the artificiality and pardon the pseudo-poetics, it remains oddly fascinating and very watchable.
Then into this mix of flammable futility walks Duke Mantee (Bogart) and his retinue of desperadoes, weary with hunting and fain would lie down. And the rest of the show is the collision of the gangsters’ irresistible force against the all-too-moveable dreams of the others.
It’s all quite talky and contrived, but I found myself drawn into it anyway. Time and again the aspirations of the ordinary folk get dashed to bits by the bad guys till only Leslie Howard’s doomed romanticism is left to counter Bogart’s lethal fatalism. They spar like gunfighters jockeying for position, edging toward the final shoot-out that must leave one of them dead in the dust, and when it comes, it hits with real intensity.
The actors carry Sherwood’s ideas with a bluff grace that rises to poesy. I was particularly taken by Dick Foran’s horny has-been football star and Porter Hall’s would-be tough-guy, perfect foils for Howard and Bogart. Davis evokes just the right note of dream-struck, and Grapewin’s old-timer is simply delightful, needy and comic at the same time.
And then there’s Bogart, splendidly awful in the film that established him in Hollywood.
Warners bought the play in a package deal with Leslie Howard pre-set to star. They had Cagney and Robinson under contract, but Howard insisted on Bogart, who played Mantee in the stage production. Bogey’s performance is stagey, mannered and over-emphatic, but it’s riveting. The minute he lurches in, arms akimbo, face stamped with the mask of tragedy, it’s as if Frankenstein’s monster had invaded the set. You simply can’t take your eyes off him, bad as he is. And he gets the best line in the whole movie: “You can talk sittin’ down, I heard ya doin’ it.â€
Yes, he’s way too theatrical, but somehow Bogie fits this film as no other actor could have. I’m glad he shed the mannerisms and moved on to become the legend that he was, but I still appreciate this hammy debut into the ranks of the Tough Guys.
Taking full advantage of the popularity of TV shows set in Las Vegas, except for the inclusion of naked showgirls, The Strip followed the adventures of private security consultants Elvis Ford (Sean Patrick Flannery) and Jesse Weir (Guy Torry) as the in-house detectives for Caesar’s Palace owner Cameron Green (Joe Viterelli). For reasons unknown to me, the pilot was shown last, six months after a nine week run on UPN between 19 October 1999 and 11 January 2000.
Some of their background is filled in, albeit rather sketchily. Circumstances required their resignation from the police force on unwarranted grounds, but Mr. Green saw fit to offer them a job as his personal trouble-shooters (there may be more to this). In this, the actual first story, they are asked to solve the murder of a young woman found dead in an unoccupied hotel room, without causing any fuss that would drive customers away.
I will possibly be giving away too much of the plot here. I’ll try to be careful. It seems that a heist of the casino is in the works, and to that end a female circus body manipulation specialist (contortionist) is required to make her way through a long passage of ceiling ducts, then out two rather bland good guys have a final confrontation with the bad guys.
It’s obvious that the producers assumed that Las Vegas glitz and a the timeworn story line of two detective buddies on the case would be all the series needed.They were at least partially correct. There was just enough in this first/last show of the series to keep me watching without looking at my watch, which is always a good sign.
The series didn’t last long, but then again, with the exception of Star Trek: Voyager, none of the series ever shown on UPN really did, either.
Everyone there will vouch for him, except for the owner, Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald, as slick and sleazy looking as usual). When Lucky’s secret financial dealings with the dead woman are discovered, Vicki does her best to find out more.
It really isn’t much of a story, and some of the loose ends are never tied up (to put it mildly), but both the photography and direction are above average for this level of B-movie, and it is fun to see a well motivated lady detective at work.
REGINALD HILL – One Small Step. Dalziel & Pascoe #12. Novella. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1990. No US print edition.
This is a slender (108 pages) little oddity that I’d heard about for some lime and finally managed to borrow a copy of. It takes Hill’s mainstays, Dalziel & Pascoe, into a future where a French astronaut becomes the first man to be to murdered on the Moon, in the year 2010. Pascoe is Commissioner of the Eurofed Justice Department, and Dalziel is in gouty retirement when the former is handed the politically sensitive case and enlists the aid of the latter. So there they are on the moon, grilling the international crew of the murdered man’s moon lander.
It’s a bit odd seeing Dalziel and Pascoe with their roles reversed, and even odder “hearing†Dalziel’s dialect in a hi-tech setting. In a way it seems almost like a parody, though in others there’s Hill’s always excellent prose and often mordant view of the human condition. There isn’t enough space for much characterization apart from the two detectives, but all told it’s an enjoyable if minor piece.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #14, August 1994.
FRED ZACKEL – Cinderella After Midnight. Michael Brennen #2. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, hardcover, 1980. No paperback edition.
When private investigator Michael Brennen agrees to help find his client’s daughter, he thinks he’s working on a run-of-the-mill custody case. Instead, the trail leads him straight into the gritty, grimy pesthole of San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district.
One of the primary obligations of the California private eye novel has always seemed to involve the public display of some of the sorrier undersides of the once-proud California dream. Here we get an eyeful. We’re led from alley to gutter and back again, and just as we’ve begun to feel there’s no escape – and for most of the inhabitants of this noxious world there is not – the trail suddenly takes a surprising twist upward, into the light of day and into the inner offices of some of the state’s leading politicians and financial leaders.
Brennen’s client turns out to be a hooker, but at one time she was a call girl with powerful government connections. He spots the daughter in a porno film, one she made with a live-in lesbian lover. The mother is murdered, the girl is kidnapped, and the underground revolution is blamed – but we know better. Big Business and Big Government are both involved – the twin Boogie Men that may grab us all yet.
The story is steeped in sour sex and melancholia. There is little to blow away the pervading gloom. The plot is wonderfully convoluted, a mystery addict’s delight, but its grip on the reader never wholly takes hold. Why this should be so is not entirely clear. There may be cause for beginning to wonder whether, just maybe, a message like this one might not have been a measure too much for its limited means of conveyance to handle.
Rating: B
–Very slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 5, No. 1, January-February 1981.
The Michael Brennen series —
Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978)
Cinderella After Midnight (1980)
TEQUILA AND BONETTI. “Street Dogs.†CBS, 60m. 17 January 1992. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Jack Scalia as Detective Nico “Nick” Bonetti, Charles Rocket as Captain Midian Knight, Mariska Hargitay as Officer Angela Garcia, Brad Sanders as Tequila (voice). Writer: Donald P. Bellisario. Director: Michael Zinberg.
In case you’re wondering, Tequila is a dog, a police dog, mind you, and a good one, but a dog, and one of the ugliest dogs you’ve ever seen. Police detective Nick Bonetti is a transplant to L.A. from New York City, and part of the basis thesis of the series is that he’s a fish out of water. I think Jack Scalia made a good part of his acting career playing an Italian from Brooklyn, a role which I’m sure came very easy to him, because that’s exactly who he is.
In “Street Dogs†he solves a murder which everyone else thinks was a suicide, but it takes Tequila’s strong sense of smell to catch the killer. And having written that, I see that I’ve neglected telling you what the kicker is in all this. We, the viewer, get to hear Tequila’s wry commentary on what’s going on around him. No one else, only us.
Well, someone thought this was going to be a very funny concept, and audiences would lap it up. It might have been a go – audiences like talking animals, as you well know – but in spite of Bonetti’s natural brashness, he also comes with his own baggage. He accidentally killed a 12-year-old girl while on duty back in NYC, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. Breaking down and crying in the arms of his ex-wife just doesn’t go with the flow. It broke the comic mood entirely, I can tell you that.
Apparently 10 of 12 episodes that were filmed actually made it onto the air. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
THE BRAVADOS. 20th Century Fox, 1958. Gregory Peck, Joan Collins, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, Herbert Rudley, Andrew Duggan, Ken Scott, George Voskovec, Barry Coe, Gene Evans. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke. Director Henry King.
“There’s only one man who could have followed us here. The strange one. The one with the eyes of a hunter.â€
— Henry Silva as the half-breed, to outlaws Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, and Lee Van Cleef.
This widescreen Technicolor western may not quite be a classic, but it comes close, and as the saying goes, I wouldn’t want to live on the difference. Directed by veteran Henry King and with a remarkable cast of actors, even for a Western from this period, it follows one man’s path to revenge and ultimately redemption.
Jim Douglass (Gregory Peck) rides into a quiet and tense little town on the eve of a public hanging of four outlaws who shot up the place and killed several people. All he will say is that he is from a small town one hundred miles away and he is there to see the hanging. The law (Herbert Rudley) is nervous about strangers in town and waiting for the hangman, unsure of this quiet sullen man who has traveled so far to see four men die.
Also in town is Josefa Valarde (Joan Collins, and quite good here) who knew Douglass five years ago in New Orleans. Through her we gradually piece together Peck’s nature and journey, his wife’s death, his six month quest to hunt down these four men he has never seen (that’s a key point later in the film).
There are several small characters from the town drawn sharply, the young lovers and the girl’s disapproving father who wants more than small town life for her (Kathleen Gallant, Barry Coe, George Voskovec), a gullible good natured deputy (Ken Scott), Rudley’s lawman, padre Andrew Duggan (who knows the secret Douglass hides from everyone).
During a church service the supposed hangman (Joe deRita — yes, that Joe deRita, unbilled and quite good in serious role) frees the prisoner, stabbing Rudley and getting killed for his efforts and the young girl Emma (Gallant), is taken hostage by the escaping killers.
There’s a fine scene when the wounded Rudley stumbles bleeding into the church, eloquently shot and staged for full effect.
In a scene that echoes The Searchers, Peck refuses to join the others in a pointless nighttime posse. He knows the hunt will be long and deadly.
Peck’s performance here as a man grown deadly and possessed by his anger, grief, and need for revenge anchors the film.
Boyd is his usual charming over-sexed sadist, a part he perfected (his showdown with Peck is well staged as less a duel than an execution), Salmi a vicious brute (a part he perfected), Van Cleef a hothead prone to losing his cool and a coward when it comes down to it (one of the stronger scenes key to the movie is when Peck’s character executes him in cold blood), and Silva the cool half-breed (Salmi: “I don’t trust the Indian. You never know what he’s thinking.â€}, the key to this Western drama that proves to be much more than just the typical Western revenge Kabuki theater we are so used to.
Uniquely for King, who usually composed his films like paintings, the camera work here is often nervous and edgy, especially when Peck is on screen. Shot by the great Leon Shamroy, who often worked with King, the film’s intelligence goes well beyond the screenplay and O’Rourke’s fine novel (he also wrote Two Mules for The Marquesa, the basis for The Professionals), to the films visual style which varies from wide sweeping shots to tense close ups.
A tensely shot fight between Salmi and Peck in a shadowy grove of woods is one of the best uses of outdoor Technicolor filming you will see in a film and the dramatic scene when the posse finds Salmi hanging upside down from a tree a masterpiece of implied violence. You’ll notice Peck wears a black hat and dark blue and black clothes throughout the film and rides a black horse, visual shorthand for what he has become.
What isn’t shown or even said is more eloquent than any dialogue could be in this film.
The key to the film lies in the duel of wits between Henry Silva’s half-breed and Gregory Peck. As the killers circle towards the Douglass ranch never knowing it, a gentle neighbor of Douglass is killed (Gene Evans), and the girl attacked by Boyd, but left alive at Silva’s insistence when he interrupts her rape by Boyd to force him to flee. Even Collins, who has sought to curb Peck’s wrath is ready to see him kill them all when they find the girl in Evans cabin.
Peck gives a subtle understated performance here. As the hunt goes on his humanity begins to reemerge, as he kills the men one by one until only he and Silva are left.
Peck: Why didn’t you kill me when you had a chance?
Silva: I had no reason to kill you. Why do you hunt me?
The answer changes this film from what it began as, and gives it a remarkable turn rare in a Western revenge film, one Peck plays to the hilt, and one that leaves this film feeling remarkably modern and marks its rare intelligence. That is is also beautiful to look at and the cinematography is part and parcel of telling the story is also notable. There is also a fine score by Lionel Newman with contributions by Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman uncredited.
The suspense here is less whether Peck’s character will survive and more whether he will end up worse than the men he is hunting.
Peck has a particularly good Western resume, from films like The Gunfighter, and Yellow Sky, to Only the Valiantand The Big Country and fairly late in his career, The Stalking Moon. This one fits well within the mold,
And if you want to call it a classic, you won’t get an argument from me.
FRANCIS CLIFFORD – Amigo, Amigo. Coward Mccann, US, hardcover, 1973. Pocket, US, paperback, 1975. Academy Chicago, US, paperback. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973.
Few writers of suspense/adventure novels, British or American, can match Francis Clifford for sheer elemental tension, depth of characterization, and prose of rare smoothness and creative imagery. Clifford’s novels are edge-of-the-chair thrillers with global settings – Mexico. Guatemala, England, Ireland, the Eastern Bloc states — and up-to-the-minute plots involving the IRA, espionage activities, the cold war, and random terrorism.
But more than that, they are psychological studies of considerable power that adhere to a common theme, as stated by Clifford himself in an interview: “Only during strain – a moral, a physical, or a psychological strain – do you get to know your own character … it is only under such circumstances that the right character of a man emerges.”
The personal trial by fire of Anthony Lorrimer, a cynical, self-involved, “cold fish” British journalist. begins in Mexico City. About to return to England, he is approached by a man with something to sell – a manuscript purportedly written by Peter Riemeck, a former high-ranking Nazi who was once Heydrich’ s deputy. This manuscript, according to the salesman, tells not only what happened to those Nazis who fled to South America after the collapse of the Third Reich, but which of them are still alive, their cover identities, and their present whereabouts.
Lorrimer isn’t about to buy a pig in a poke; he demands proof – and gets it: one name, SS-Oberführer Lutz Kröhl, a former Auschwitz administrator now calling himself Karl Stemmle and living the purgatorial existence of a curandero – a dentist and healer –in an isolated village on the rim of a Guatemalan volcano.
Lorrimcr goes to Guatemala to meet Kröhl/Stemmle face to-face: the final proof, After an exhaustive trip by plane, bus, and on- foot he arrives in the. village of Navalosa, where he finds Sternmle gone for the day and the German’s young, bored, and promiscuous native woman, Mercedes, a willing sexual partner. All along Lorrirner has been wondering: What kind of man is Sternmle? Why would he choose to lead the kind of life he does? When he finally meets the ex-Nazi, he realizes there are no easy answers. It isn’t until he and Stemmle and Mercedes find themselves captives of mountain bandits that Lorrimer begins asking those same questions of himself and learns who the real Anthony Lorrimer is.
Clifford makes the reader feel the heat, the thin air, the frightening desolation of the Guatemalan wilderness; he also makes the reader care about his characters, even the most incidental of them. The Chicago Tribune said that Amigo, Amigo “takes all superlatives,” and that it “will keep you mesmerized.” Indeed it will. If you enjoy literate thrillers that really are thrillers, don’t miss this one.
And don’t miss any of Clifford’s other suspense novels, especially The Naked Runner (1966), a tale of intrigue behind the Iron Curtain that was made into a rather poor 1967 film with Frank Sinatra; A Wild Justice (1972), a tale of strife in Ireland told against the backdrop of a bleak Irish winter; and Goodbye and Amen (1974), which Ross Macdonald lauded as “an extraordinary thriller about several people of importance who are sequestered with an armed killer in a room of a first-class London hotel. It is intricately and brilliantly constructed, and written with tremendous drive and flair. Not only the ending surprises. There are surprises on nearly every page.”
BLOOD MONEY. 20th Century, 1933. George Bancroft, Judith Anderson, Frances Dee, Chick Chandler, Blossom Seeley. Director: Rowland Brown
Where a movie like SOUND OF FURY (reviewed here, and Sweet Lord, how I hate that title!) tries to analyze its characters, a dandy little film called BLOOD MONEY seeks only to understand them, with much happier results: fast-paced and thoughtful, cynical and sentimental, BLOOD MONEY deals out the tale of a bail bondsman (flamboyantly played by beefy George Bancroft) and his sadder-but-wiser gal — a remarkable tum by Judith Anderson, better known for prim, patrician parts in REBECCA and LAURA, in slinky gowns, brassy makeup, and weary sang-froid.
This is a film that sustains itself on attitude rather than plot, but what story there is spins around Bancroft’s sudden infatuation with debutante Francis Dee, who (the script hints) likes men who play rough. Bancroft jilts Anderson for Dee, who ditches Bancroft for a fling with Anderson’s kid brother (Chick Chandler) a bank robber out on bail, then connives to have him betray Bancroft, thus heading the whole cast into shootings, gang war and general aggravation.
That’s the crux of the thing, but BLOOD MONEY doesn’t waste a lot of time on it; what it does is limn some vivid cameos of colorful characters and let them live and breathe on the screen a while. Chandler and Dee do a fine, understated sketch of flashy self-destruction, and there are some memorable bit parts of gang bosses, bent politicos and crooked cops. There’s even a flamboyant lesbian. But what stays in the mind is the relaxed and altogether real-feeling relationship between Bancroft and Anderson, as written by Hal Long (who also wrote ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES) and directed by Rowland Brown, a talented director whose penchant for violence got him black-listed.
The scene where Anderson and Bancroft break up tugs at all the right strings: it’s upstairs at Anderson’s speakeasy, with everyone partying down below. Bancroft tries to let her down gently, she grimly hands him his hat, and he slowly walks downstairs, feeling like a heel. As faded, jaded Blossom Seeley croons “Melancholy Baby,” he tosses off a last drink at the bar and mutters, “That song kills me,” before walking out of her life. It’s a moment worthy of the great romantic films, and all the more moving for showing up in a film as fast and tough as this one.
— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #40, September 2005.
EYES “Pilot.†ABC / Warner Brothers. 30 March 2005 (Season 1, Episode 1.) Tim Daly (Harlan Judd), Garcelle Beauvais, A. J. Langer, Laura Leighton, Eric Mabius, Rick Worthy, Natalie Zea. Creator: John McNamara. Director: Jon Amiel.
Harlan Judd (Tim Daly) is the head of a huge private detective agency, Judd Risk Management, with many operatives and many cases going on at one time. Their offices are in a large multi-story building, mostly open to the roof, with people at their desks or walking around doing busy things at any one time. There is one big problem. They’re barely breaking even, and rumors have it that someone is trying to do a leveraged buyout.
There is also one big solution. Daly is hired by one businessman to get the money back, amount in the millions, embezzled by another, a former associate. The problem is, the embezzler admits he has the money, but that he also has the goods on the man he embezzled it from.
There are several other smaller cases worked on in this first episode, which I won’t go into, but I will mention that there are also several non-work related relationships between some of the employees that are stating to interfere with their work. And I haven’t yet told you that there is a mole in the firm, someone telling tales out of hand to whoever it is that may or may not be trying to buy them out.
This is the high glitzy end of the PI business, and I’m not sure if there is anything like it in book form. Tim Daly is perfect in the role of the brash, perhaps way too brash, head of the firm, but he has good people working for him. Some, however, as mentioned above, not so good.
This was the first of what was intended to be twelve episodes, but only five were aired before ABC pulled the plug. Based on only the first episode, I’m not in a position to tell you what went wrong. Was glitzy not in style in 2005, or did viewers not particularly care for glitz and internal intrigue in the PI business? In any case, all twelve episodes were filmed and the entire series has been telecast in various parts of the world. Just not in the US.
