HARD EIGHT. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1996. Philip Baker Hall (Sydney), John C. Reilly (John Finnegan), Gwyneth Paltrow (Clementine), Samuel L. Jackson (Jimmy), Philip Seymour Hoffman. Screenwriter-director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

   I watched this one late last year, and if I actually rated movies and kept lists of such rankings, this one would have come out close to the top. (Please note that if I were to put together such non-existent lists, they would be for the year that I watched them, not the year they were released.)

   It was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in his feature film debut, and cinematically speaking it’s a dazzler. Or it is if you like movies set in casinos (in Reno), with lots and lots of neon lights, cheap diners and even cheaper hotels and drab apartment buildings. Anderson also wrote the screenplay, and it’s a dazzler, too, wordwise. Not in a David Mamet sense, but in the sense that the words the characters in this movie are exactly the words the characters would say, if they were in the real world.

   Plotwise? That’s something of another matter. It is thin, I admit, and it seems thinner than it really is since it is so slow to develop. An elderly man named Sidney whose face looks like it’s seen all of the woes of the world (Philip Baker Hall) takes a young man named John (John C. Reilly) whom he finds slumped outside the door of a diner, the money he needs to bury his mother all gambled away, under his wing.

   The young man, not the most sophisticated young man in any part of the world, but especially not in Reno, becomes the older man’s protégé, the latter obviously knowing his way around a gambling hall very well. Why he does so we do not know, but we are forced by the script (I do not know how) to assume (hope) it is for a good reason. And do we keep watching, although nothing really is happening? Indeed we do.

   There are two more players: Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) as a casino waitress who moonlights as a hooker and if anything is less sophisticated than John. What we do know is that he is attracted to her. Then there is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), whose brashness Sidney dislikes immediately but whom John considers his new best friend. At this point we still do not know what is really happening, but this is also the point at which the plot finally does kick in.

   And it is also the point at which I ironically will stop talking about the plot of this movie. Suffice it to say that from this point on, some of players will do some stupid things, and we are not surprised because these are some of the stupid things people like this would do.

   We also learn a good many things that we did not know before, and although we did not know them before, everything all of sudden falls into place exactly as they would have all along, if we had known what they were.

   I’d call this neo-noir, even though it ends on what I consider a good note, but shakily so, as people such as those in this movie are not exempt from the realization on the part of the viewer that it is not guaranteed that people such as these will only do one stupid thing in each of their lives.
   

RAOUL WHITFIELD “A Woman Can Kill.” Novelette. Dion Davies #1. Published in Black Mask, September 1933. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1953.

   
   That is one heck of a tricky plot, but there is more, because this story has more people not quite who or what you think they are than you can imagine.

   First there is our hero Dion Davies, a successful private detective, part of Davies and Dancer Ltd., a private detective agency. Davies is the face of the operation and his partner Stephen Dancer, a lawyer who financed the partnership and went into business with him and his attractive secretary Julie Ryan.

   Seems simple enough, but this one veers off into Remington Steele country pretty fast. There is no Stephen Dancer, and there is no Julie Ryan, instead there is Julie Hazard, who is the senior partner and created the mysterious Dancer to attract customers and posed as Julie Ryan Davies secretary to keep close. She put up the front money and is the silent partner as handy with a gun or her wits as Dion.

   Tay is a crooked club owner who tricked nice old philanthropic Mrs. Greenaway into selling her non-profit theater and then set about turning it into a swank beer joint. Mrs. Greenaway has always been dead set against beer so she feels doubly upset that Tay tricked her.

   Her revenge is to buy up the property across the street and open up an even bigger joint, put Tay out of business and then close down both places, so Tay sends his man McQuirter to hire Davies and Dancer to get something on Mrs. Greenaway’s wild society granddaughter Nancy Gale who is engaged to a no good society type.

   When Tay tries to set Davies up with a phony Gale he quits and gets a warning from Tay not to hire on with Mrs. Greenaway if she shows up — and a speeding sedan opens up on him from the street with a machine gun to emphasize the fact.

   Then Mrs. Greenaway shows up at his office to hire him — not to protect her from Tay, but from her granddaughter.

   Still with me?

   On top of everything else the Old Lady is lying about why she fears her granddaughter. It’s not the girl doesn’t have a motive, but killing Mrs. Greenaway would do her no good, the Old Lady fixed it so she would never inherit, so why is the Old Lady afraid of Nancy Gale?

   Then they find Nancy Gale murdered, and the police think her grandmother tricked her, trapped her, and murdered her out of fear.

   And the twists keep coming until the final shootout when everything gets more or less sorted out.

   This isn’t prime Whitfield. The set-up is too cute, the plot too complex for its length, and there isn’t much character development. Davies and Dancer/Hazard/Ryan are interesting and the byplay between them good, but we never get enough insight into why she does what she does and why he bought into it in the first place.

   Everyone else is strictly from hard-boiled Central Casting.

   Of course this is Whitfield, and even minor Whitfield is well written, observed, snappy, and written with that famous word savagery the Black Mask school of writers were famed for.

   Whitfield was only just below Hammett and Chandler, and light as this fare is, it also shows why. It is fast, clever, and I read it at a sitting compelled to keep going.

   Reading this, it is hard not to imagine it as a slick B movie full of snappy lines and moving at a decided clip for the fade to black, and that’s a compliment and not a knock.

Bibliographic Note: There was to be only one more Dion Davies story, that being “Money Talk,” Black Mask, October 1933.

HUGH MUNRO – A Clue for Clutha. Clutha #3. Macdonald, 1960. No US edition.

   Scottish detectives are invariably portrayed as hard men, but none is harder than Clutha, the Dockyards detective. In this, his third reported case (and my first meeting with him) the book commences with the suicide of an old friend, whose only son has been murdered at a West Coast (Scottish) resort.

   Clutha determines to investigate and uncovers a heaving brew of villainy – and even buried treasure. The hardness and relentlessness of the man come over vividly and the writing is well above average. The action is fast and fairly furious, and the impact of the opening chapter is something you won’t forget in a hurry.

      The Clutha series –

Who Told Clutha (n.) Macdonald 1958
Clutha Plays a Hunch (n.) Macdonald 1959
A Clue for Clutha (n.) Macdonald 1960
The Brain Robbers (n.) Hale 1967
Clutha and the Lady (n.) Hale 1973
Get Clutha (n.) Hale 1974
Evil Innocence (n.) Hale 1976
   

Editorial Notes: Only the first two have had US editions. For some biographical information on the author, go to Steve Holland’s Bear Alley blog here.

   Steve describes Clutha as “Scotland’s answer to Philip Marlowe, a tough, bowler-hatted, uncrushable detective who worked for a Glasgow shipyard. He had a nice turn of sentimentality and a thorough knowledge of all kinds of infighting and trickery.” I don’t know whether that classifies him as a PI or not.

  And apologies for the badly out-of-focus cover image. At the moment, it is the best I have been able to come up with. This is a scarce book. There are only two copies offered for sale on abebooks, for example; luckily one of them supplied a very small photo of the cover, which is what you see here.

UPDATE: I have found a review of this book online, complete with cover image, one I can’t borrow, but it does say that “This is the first Clutha story to move away from shipyard goings on. In later novels he retires from the yard and becomes a private detective.” I’m going to add PI to the title of this review.

   After completing five novels about William Crane, Latimer took a break from crime fiction and made an attempt to go mainstream. The result was DARK MEMORY (1940), his last hardcover book to appear in the U.S. for fifteen years, offering us what John Fraser in a Mystery*File essay many years ago called “a Hemingwayesque African safari novel” with “no mystery/thriller/crime fiction aspects to it at all….”

   Then Latimer returned to the PI genre, but carelessly and in great haste and with trimmings American publishers seem to have found repulsive. SOLOMON’S VINEYARD (1941) was issued and apparently sold quite well in Blitzkrieg-battered England but on this side of the pond was available for decades only under a different title and in bowdlerized form. I am lucky enough to have copies of both the censored and the uncensored versions and therefore am in a position to compare them in detail.

   First however I need to describe what happens in VINEYARD, in which Latimer’s obvious goal was to incorporate as many elements from Dashiell Hammett as was humanly possible. Our first-person narrator, St. Louis-based PI Karl Craven, is both fat and tough like Hammett’s Continental Op, although Craven tells us flat out that he cares about nothing but eating, boozing, fighting and sex, while the Op’s only passion is detective work.

   If VINEYARD had made it to the movies he might have been played very effectively by William Conrad as he looked when he portrayed one of the killers in THE KILLERS (1946). Paulton, the Missouri city at which Craven steps off the train as the book begins, is clearly modeled on Poisonville from RED HARVEST, complete with ubiquitous gangsters and corrupt officials and even a sloppy cop in the first chapter.

   Several characters, such as fat Chief Piper and the good-hearted hooker Carmel Todd and her tubercular half-brother, come straight out of HARVEST where their names were Chief Noonan (another fat man), Dinah Brand and Whisper Thaler. Events in both novels are (dare I say it?) triggered by the killing of the son of the town’s richest man (Donald Willsson in HARVEST, Caryle Waterman in VINEYARD), although the latter’s death is not a deliberate murder. Like the Op in HARVEST, Craven spends a good part of VINEYARD manipulating the gangster factions in the town so that they wind up killing each other off.

   But Latimer doesn’t neglect the other Hammett novels. Deeply involved in the sleazy affairs of the community is a bizarre religious cult such as the one the Op tackled in THE DAIN CURSE, and Craven’s mission in Paulton is to get a young woman out of the Temple’s clutches just as the Op tried to do in DAIN. He was preceded on this mission by his partner, who was shot to death not long before Craven’s arrival, and as we all know from THE MALTESE FALCON, when a PI’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.

   It’s not clear whether Latimer borrowed anything from THE GLASS KEY, but Craven does get punched around several times although, unlike Ned Beaumont, he gives back at least as many blows as he receives. From THE THIN MAN nothing seems to have been lifted, perhaps because Latimer had taken his fill from that final Hammett novel in RED GARDENIAS.

   Soon after the war a modified version of VINEYARD was published in Mystery Book Magazine (August 1946) and, a few years later, as a paperback original (Popular Library, pb #301, 1950). Both versions had a new title, THE FIFTH GRAVE, and differed from VINEYARD in several ways, which deserve some exploring:

   (1) The most defensible alteration corrects some gaffes. Three of the minor characters in VINEYARD — the hotel porter, the salesman who gets into a fight with Craven in the hotel bar, and the good-hearted whore’s half-brother — -are all named Charley. In the U.S. version the salesman is rechristened Teddy and the half-brother Donnie. (The corrupt police chief in VINEYARD is named Piper and one of the gangsters killed in a shootout is called Piper Sommes, but the American editors missed this overlap and left both names intact.)

   An especially huge gaffe takes place in Chapter 15 when Craven searches the temple’s treasure vault and finds more than $50,000 in cash including, I am not making this up, thirty $600 bills. In THE FIFTH GRAVE this becomes thirty-one $500 bills. Both versions tell us that a total of $52,100 was found but if you add up the figures in VINEYARD — 25 $1,000 bills, 30 $600, 27 $200, 62 $100 — the sum total is $54,600. It seems that Latimer was writing so fast he couldn’t even get the math right. At least the American editors could add properly.

   (2) The dates on the five gravestones Craven discovers in Chapter 15 of VINEYARD are given as 1937 through 1940, the year the events take place. In the U.S. version, supposedly set when the tale was published in Mystery Book, the years are updated to between 1942 and ‘46. For the same reason the poster Craven notices early in Chapter 17, advertising the Clark Gable movie SAN FRANCISCO (1936), is eliminated.

   (3) Early in VINEYARD Craven sends the hotel porter for magazines, specifying: “Film Fun and some of those others with photographs of half-naked babes, and Black Mask.” In Mystery Book, whose editors weren’t interested in plugging other publications, this becomes “Movie magazines and a pulp detective.” The phrase about the half-naked babes remains untouched.

   (4) But elsewhere the sexual innuendo is toned down. Compare these sentences from the first pages of the two versions:

   For a much more drastic bowdlerization, take a look at the rough-sex scene in Chapter 9. The “she” is the woman from the first paragraphs, who’s known as the Princess. Everything that was dropped when VINEYARD was published in the U.S. I’ve put in caps:

   (5) You noticed, I’m sure, that among the items eliminated from the quoted passages were two “goddams.” Other words that might offend American readers’ religious sensibilities were also omitted here and there. For example, in Chapter 6 Craven tells us: “Jesus, I was tired!” Three guesses which word was dropped by Mystery Book and Popular Library.

   (6) Finally and most significantly, at least for us in the 21st century, the U.S. versions deep-six Craven’s frequent habit of using our least favorite six-letter word, or its first three letters as a diminutive. This form of censorship is defensible, I suppose. But, keeping in mind that VINEYARD is narrated in first person, and that Craven seems the kind of guy who would frequently use these words, to me at least it’s also questionable. In any event it was done and we can’t undo it.

   Despite changes the basic story in both versions remains the same. No attempt was made to plug the numerous holes in the plot, so that we never learn why the Princess won’t let Craven kiss her on the mouth, or what his murdered partner’s American Legion button was doing in the temple’s treasure vault.

   Whichever version you read is a tribute to Latimer’s carelessness and haste. The Popular Library paperback came out alongside the first wave of Mickey Spillane novels but if the 1941 version had found a U.S. publisher back then, Mike Hammer might not have seemed so shocking after the war.

   During the run-up to Pearl Harbor Latimer moved to southern California and began concentrating on B movie work including THE LONE WOLF SPY HUNT (1939, starring Warren William) and PHANTOM RAIDERS (1940, with Walter Pidgeon as Nick Carter). After graduating to A pictures and completing the screenplay for the 1942 remake of Hammett’s THE GLASS KEY he enlisted in the Navy, returning to Hollywood and script writing after the war.

   Ten of his screenplays were for director John Farrow (1904-1963), with whom he seemed to have a special affinity. The first two established both Farrow’s and Latimer’s credentials in film noir. THE BIG CLOCK (1948) was an excellent noir about the editor of a Time-like true crime magazine (Ray Milland) who discovers that the murder he’s investigating was committed by his media-tycoon boss (Charles Laughton).

   NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948) differed radically (due in large part, I suspect, to the devoutly Catholic director) from the 1945 Cornell Woolrich novel of the same name on which it was based, with Edward G. Robinson transformed from Woolrich’s haunted prophet to a sort of Jesus figure who goes to his death to save his quasi-daughter (Gail Russell).

   Either before joining the Navy or soon after his discharge, Latimer had moved to La Jolla, California, a genteel suburb of San Diego. Late in 1946 that town became the home of the reigning monarch of his and Latimer’s common genre, Raymond Chandler. The two veterans of PI fiction and the Hollywood studios became friends. Latimer, said his more celebrated and also more reclusive colleague in crime, “knows everybody and likes everybody….” He was one of the few people who attended the funeral service for Chandler’s wife, who died in December 1954.

   At the tail end of his screenplay-writing years Latimer published two stand-alone crime novels — SINNERS AND SHROUDS (1955) and BLACK IS THE FASHION FOR DYING (1959) — but these are not in the PI genre and won’t be considered here. During his final period as a writer he concentrated on television, turning out 32 scripts for the PERRY MASON series. Among those based on Gardner novels, I especially recommend “The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll” (24 January 1959); among the originals, “The Case of the Capricious Corpse” (4 October 1962).

   As far as I can tell, his final TV script was “The Greenhouse Jungle” for COLUMBO (15 October 1972). He died of lung cancer on 23 June 1983, a few years after my almost conversation with him. He’s been dead almost forty years now but for my money, he and Raoul Whitfield, whom I discussed in previous columns, still rank as the most interesting PI writers between Hammett and Chandler.

IMAGINATION. September 1954. Overall rating: One star.

GEOFF ST. REYNARD “Vengeance from the Past.” Short novel. Neanderthals try to take over space station. Nonsense. (0)

Update: Geoff St. Reynard was the pen name of Robert W. Krepps, about whom I know nothing. The story itself has never been collected or reprinted.

JEROME BIXBY “The Battle of the Bells.” In which an angel praises the rustic outhouse and the devil is flushed away. (1)

Update: Collected in Space by the Tale (Ballantine, paperback original, 1964) and in “One Way Street” and Other Stories (Armchair Fiction Masters of Science Fiction #2, trade paperback, 2011). I’ll let you comment on the basic concept of this one, if you’d care to.

DANIEL F. GALOUYE. “Immortality, Inc.” Novelette. Two immortals try to cheat a non-Stockholder of his life. (2)

Update: Never collected or reprinted. Galouye wrote perhaps a half dozen novels, but was better known for his short fiction. Of note, however, is his first novel, Dark Universe (1961), which was nominated for a Hugo.

ALLYN DONNELSON “Welcome to Paradise.” A repairmen exposes a secret military project by writing the President. (1)

Update: The author’s only published story.

RUSS WINTERBOTHAM “Three Spacemen Left to Die!” The last Earthmen sacrifice their lives to save another civilization. (3)

Update: Never collected or reprinted. Winterbotham’s writing career was broken in two parts. Part one between 1935 to 1943, then between 1952 and 1958, but even though I rated this story as the best of the issue, nothing he produced seems worthy of attention now.

   
   
Overall thoughts: A footnote to this page in my diary is telling: NO LONGER IN COLLECTION.

CARL JACOBI “Crocodile.” Short story. First published in Complete Stories, 30 April 1934. Collected in East of Samarinda, edited by Carl Jacobi & R. Dixon Smith (Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1989).

   If Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) is remembered as a writer today, it is by collectors of such long ago pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Thrilling Mystery, Marvel Tales, Planet Stories and the like. He was, however, an equal hand with adventure stories that appeared in titles such as Top Notch, Short Stories, and Complete Stories, which is where this lead-off story in the collection East of Samarinda first appeared.

   I haven’t read all of the stories in that modest compendium yet, more than twenty of them, but the ones I’ve read or browsed though take place in Dutch Borneo, which in the 1930s was as much an out of the world place for adventurers tohave adventures as there ever could be. The jungles teeming with snakes, the native Dyaks, not all friendly, the rivers filled with crocodiles, all grist for Jacobi’s mill.

   But was he ever there? In a word, no. He may have never taken a step outside his native Minnesota. So how did he get the details to sound so right? In another word, research. Libraries existed before Google came along, and as a matter of fact they still do.

   In “Crocodile,” a collector of animals for zoos and the like, comes staggering into the camp of a surveyor for the Dutch named McNair, and once fortified with enough whiskey, the former tells the latter of how he killed his partner who’d come across a priceless emerald by tricking him into falling into a river swarming with crocodiles.

   Sometimes fate needs a helping hand, and that’s exactly what happens here.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

TERENCE FAHERTY – Die Dreaming. Owen Keane #4, St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1994. Worldwide Library, paperback, 1996.

   This is the first of Faherty’s books I’ve read, at least that I can remember.

   In 1978 Owen Keane, failed seminarian, drinker, and general failure in life, attends his high school class tenth reunion, hoping to regain some lost something. Instead, he finds that several class members whom he had looked up to share a guilty secret, one that still haunts them. He walks away with his knowledge, and buries it until ten years later when he receives an anonymous second invitation to the twentieth reunion.

   He had thrown away the first, not intending to go, but now he finds that a class member has died – the member at the root of the guilty secret he uncovered a decade earlier. Always cursed with his need to know, he makes the journey into the painful past again.

   I like the way Faherty tells a story. The mood of the book reminds me somewhat of John Riggs, though there aren’t that many similarities in the types of story they tell, or in the protagonists. Keane is a different detective in some ways, in others not so; perhaps more humanly fallible, weaker in some ways than most, and with a compulsion to look for answers about everything in life.

   Faherty writes good, melancholy prose, and has a story to tell that in most ways is all too believable, about people equally so. I think I’ll see if I can find the earlier ones.

      The Owen Keane series –

1. Deadstick (1991)
2. Live to Regret (1992)
3. The Lost Keats (1993)
4. Die Dreaming (1994)
5. Prove the Nameless (1996)
6. The Ordained (1997)
7. Orion Rising (1999)
8. The Confessions of Owen Keane (short story collection; 2005)
9. Eastward in Eden (2013)
   

Editorial Update: I don’t know at what point Keane becomes a PI. I’m not sure he ever does, officially, but somewhere along the way, he starts taking on cases for hire, sort of.

E. X. FERRARS – Frog in the Throat. Doubleday/Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1980. Bantam, US, paperback, 1981. Published earlier in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1980.

   Although E. X. Ferrars has been writing mysteries for over forty years, she’s nowhere as well-known as she should be. One big reason I can see for that is that since her first five books, until very recently has she not used a series character of any kind. (And of Toby Dyke, who has not been heard from since 1942, I know nothing at all.)

   Where would Christie have been without Poirot or Miss Marple? Ingenious mystery plots may be totally fine in the abstract, but unfortunately they just don’t grab the reader’s attention in the bookstore.

   There is a bare chance – but don’t count on it – that Virginia Freer’s errant ex-husband Felix, who has appeared at least one time before, may return again and “solve” another case. He slips in and out of her life with such casualness that it is not a foregone conclusion that he will. Nor is his idea of finding a killer a very useful one for the police.

   Dead is a writer of historical novels, on the night of her engagement party to poet Basil Deering, who is the murderer’s next target. Or are there two murderers? A bigamous marriage some years in the past seems to be the crux of the matter, as well as some other more recent romantic entanglements, and a bit of injudicious blackmail.

   The ending is vaguely unsatisfying. Perhaps just a bit of a letdown. I think it’s because it’s clear that the police this time are perfectly capable of solving the murders by themselves, without the odd couple assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Freer.

   On the other hand, while the fuss they generate may not have been wholly necessary, it is nonetheless a fascinating and wholly absorbing sort of fuss. (And why else do we read mysteries?)

Rating: B

      The Virginia (& Felix?) Freer series –

Last Will and Testament (n.) Collins 1978.
Frog in the Throat (n.) Collins 1980.
Thinner Than Water (n.) Collins 1981.
Death of a Minor Character (n.) Collins 1983.
I Met Murder (n.) Collins 1985.
Woman Slaughter (n.) Collins 1989.
Sleep of the Unjust (n.) Collins 1990.
Beware of the Dog (n.) Collins 1992.

GERALD BUTLER – Mad with Much Heart. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1946. Originally published in the UK by Jarrolds, hardcover, 1945.

ON DANGEROUS GROUND. RKO, 1952. Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bond, Sumner Williams, Charles Kemper, Ed Begley, Ian Wolfe, Cleo Moore and Olive Carey. Screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides and Nicholas Ray. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Currently available for streaming on TCM.

    I was much impressed with Butler’s first novel, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, and While Mad with Much Heart isn’t quite as well-built, there’s still much to be glad of. It’s a terse chase story, set in the snow-bound English countryside, with Inspector James Wilson detailed from Scotland Yard to help the locals pursue a mad killer who has attacked two schoolgirls. As the story spins out, though, Wilson has less trouble with the killer than he has dealing with the vengeance-crazed father of one of the girls, with the killer’s blind sister, and with his own loneliness and self-doubt.

   This isn’t really enough to carry a story successfully (asked for his opinion, Raymond Chandler advised against filming it), but Butler does a very nice job conveying the physical effort of running and driving through deep snow, the slippery suspense of a slow-motion car-chase over icy country lanes, and the sheer exhaustion of mind and body brought on by the cold. Somehow the visceral quality of the story and his prose keeps one turning the pages.

   The film that John Houseman and Nicholas Ray made out of this despite Chandler’s advice is an oddly moving affair, rather disjointed (like many RKO films under Howard Hughes’ regime) and all the better for it. It opens with twenty minutes of sheer Big City noir, with Robert Ryan as a psychotic cop on the verge of murder, then shifts neatly to the snowbound countryside, where Ryan sees his own violence mirrored in the rampaging father (a fine performance by Ward Bond) setting up one of those narrative metaphors that Ray did so well: If Ryan can keep the berserk parent from blasting the frightened fugitive, then maybe (?) he can control his own sickness.

   This is the sort of film on which Nicholas Ray built his reputation. The early city-set scenes are purest noir, with George E. Diskant’s camera sliding fluidly through seedy bars, sleazy apartment houses, and shadowy alleys, punctuated by short bursts of jerky hand-held shots to accentuate the violence. And when we move out into the country, Ray and Diskant impart the feel of icy snowscapes, jagged rocks, and rustic farms just as vividly.

   Then there’s the plu-perfect playing, from the sleazy bit players, to Robert Ryan at the edge of violence, Ward Bond well over the top, charging through a landscape that barely holds him, and in the midst of this Ida Lupino serenely dominating the screen, while Sumner Williams as her disturbed brother darts about like some dangerously wounded animal.

   In short, this is a totally unique film, done with consummate artistry, and if you’ve been a good little boy-or-girl this year, you owe yourself a viewing.