THE BLACK CASTLE. Universal, 1952. Richard Greene, Boris Karloff, Stephen McNally, Rita Corday, Lon Chaney Jr., Michael Pate, Henry Corden. Written by Jerry Sackheim. Directed by Nathan Juran.

   You watch this and that trite old praise-phrase “for kids of all ages” comes irresistibly to mind. Black Castle is packaged as a horror flick, but it looks more like a swashbuckling adventure film, with sword fights, suave villainy, chases through the eponymous castle and a last minute “save” that presages The Princess Bride.

   The story is an appropriately simple affair: Richard Greene, the definitive Robin Hood of my youth, is an 18th-Century British nobleman who travels to Austria incognito to find out what became of two old war buddies who disappeared after visiting the estate of Count Karl Von Bruno. (German villains had not yet gone out of fashion in ’52, and this one is played by Stephen McNally.) It seems that Green and his vanished comrades apparently had some sort of run-in with McNally years ago in Africa, but the script is vague on this point, and for plot purposes they have never actually met.

   Von Bruno’s castle is filled with all sorts of kiddie-delights: crashing gates, alligator pit(!) murky dungeon and a host of sinister players, chiefly Boris Karloff as the Royal Sawbones, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Castle Goon, and Michael Pate as a fawning toady. There’s also Rita Corday (not to be confused with Mara Corday, another Universal starlet of that era) as the requisite Damsel, but writer Jerry Sackheim keeps her in distress, so the story doesn’t get slowed down by mushy stuff.

   And soon enough we’re running through all the thrills I enumerated earlier, handled very stylishly indeed. Black Castle was produced by William Alland, who was responsible for a series of above average 50s sci-fi flicks, but will always be remembered as the half-seen reporter in Citizen Kane.

   Cinematographer Irving Glassberg (The Web, Bend of the River, The Tarnished Angels, etc.) underlines the mood with appropriately bizarre lighting, and director Nathan Juran….. Well, Juran was never considered much of a stylist, but with cult films like Seventh Son of Sinbad and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman to his credit, you can’t write him off completely.

   And then there’s the cast: Stephen McNally was one of those actors who should have gone all the way to the top and I can’t figure why-the-hell he didn’t. Or maybe it was his performance here; don’t get me wrong, it’s marvelously full-blooded and perfectly suited to this movie. But it’s not the sort of thing that gets you noticed at Awards time.

   Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. don’t have any scenes together and in fact aren’t in the film all that much. Henry Corden gets more screen time than they do, and if you don’t know who Henry Corden is, shame on you. Still it’s nice to see them headlining a horror film once again, particularly since most of the music here is cribbed from House of Frankenstein — their only other co-starring film.

   In all, a truly enjoyable waste of time, and one I recommend heartily.

   Before you begin, may I suggest you read my earlier review of T.H.E. Cat here.

   Since the sixty-minute drama became common in the 1960s, it has become rare for a half-hour drama to be successful on prime-time TV. Today the thirty-minute drama has virtually vanished from television.

   I decided to take one of my favorite TV series T.H.E. Cat and examine how it worked and how it didn’t due to its thirty-minute format. Would adding a half-hour to each episode have made the series a success?

   Airing in the TV season of 1966-67, the series was a rating failure in a way that made the audience rejection clear. T.H.E. Cat aired on NBC, Friday at 9:30-10pm. It followed rating success Man from U.N.C.L.E. With the last half hour of U.N.C.L.E. beating the first half hour of ABC’s hour long Milton Berle and competitive with CBS’s Friday Night Movie, one would expect the audience not watching the movie to stay with NBC’s T.H.E. Cat. Instead much of the audience changed channel to the movie on CBS and to a lesser extent ABC’s Milton Berle.

   Chicago Tribune (September 17,1966) critic Clay Gowran liked the series citing “the spectacular photography, dramatic change of pace, and the human talent…” He also believed many would be upset by the “bloody action and the bizarre plots.”

   Later (October 31,1966) Gowran would interview star Robert Loggia who was on a publicity tour for the series. Gowran expressed his surprise that there had been no complaints about the violence. Loggia claimed that was because of how the violence was visualized and the “bizarre quality of the show.”

   One can argue that the failure of T.H.E. Cat was not due to its episodes’ length but to the series surreal world. This may explain the series ratings failure but what about creatively? What worked and what didn’t and could it have been fixed with more time per episode?

   One of the things that worked best for the series was the opening. There was no time to slowly introduce the hero or the story of the week. Instead episodes began with an action scene. At the end of the short scene someone would ask Thomas who he was. In the style of the famous “Bond, James Bond,” Cat would reply, “Cat. T. Hewitt Edward Cat.” One of the best TV intros ever would follow featuring exciting animated titles with a great jazz theme written by Lalo Schifrin.

   Arguably, the most successful form of drama for the thirty-minute TV series is the morality play. A good example of this is the episode “Crossing At Destino Bay.”

   Special note: this is one of the few T.H.E. Cat episodes where some of the color remains. The series color consultant Alex Quiroga would be disappointed to learn that the quality is so poor in most of the surviving prints that the color has usually vanished.

   â€œCrossing At Destino Bay.” Written by Robert E. Thompson. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Robert Duvall, Fred Beir and Suzanne Cramer. *** Hired to protect a man he has yet to meet, Thomas finds Scorpio a paid killer holding four people, including Thomas’ client, hostage. They are waiting for Scorpio’s client to arrive and tell the assassin which one of the four to kill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hmHB1T12c

   This is a morality play, so it is no surprise that all four of the characters held hostage have reason to fear, each guilty of his or her own sin. The adulterer couple, the killer, and the embezzler who had associates hire Thomas, all are trapped not just by the killer but their own fears and guilt as well.

   As all wait to learn who will die, killer Scorpio’s attention turns to Thomas. Duvall plays Scorpio with an odd soft-spoken accent and pride in his professionalism. He sees Thomas as his equal and knows one of them will not survive.

   This is one of director’s Boris Sagal’s best works, as he takes the stylized dialogue and heavy symbolism of this virtual stage play and makes it visually interesting. Thompson’s script with one great twist is another plus for the episode. Thompson wisely sets the action in the waiting area for the Destino Bay ferry, a place where people escape from one side to the other, but now it is a prison for the characters surrounded by walls and an iron gate.

   More time would have weakened the story, exposing the logic flaws and plot holes. Realism had no place here — expanding the mystery, developing the characters or the story would have just distracted from the story’s point.

   Another way to create a successful story for the short format is with a simple plot and stock characters. The episode “The Sandman” did this well.

   â€œThe Sandman.” Written by James D. Buchanan and Ronald Austin. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Signe Hasso, Lee Bergere and Dennis Patrick *** Once the world’s greatest thief and mentor to Cat, a man known as The Sandman has returned for one last crime. A return to his first crime where he stole a famous jewel, now he plans to steal it back and return it to the museum he had stole it from many years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnEe448qrqg

   Hour long series such as Perry Mason would spend a great deal of time introducing the mystery and characters. But by using standard characters such as the great old thief in the tradition of Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the patient forgiving lover, and Thomas as the old thief’s former student, the audience fills in the blanks reducing the need for exposition.

   While at times dull, series such as Perry Mason used the extra time it had to give the story a more interesting complex mystery, its characters more depth, and showed us exposition rather than having the characters artificially tell us.

   Set in such a strange world T.H.E. Cat entertained through its unique style. Yet sometimes an episode needed more. In “Payment Overdue” there are too many characters, too many story lines, to fit in just thirty minutes.

   â€œPayment Overdue.” Written by Robert Hamner. Directed by Boris Sagal. Guest Cast: Laura Devon, Paul Stewart, and Dean Harens. *** Why does the Mob want press agent Arnie Bliss dead? Arnie wishes he knew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C59UoH_HjQA

   The plot of Arnie and the Mob could have filled the thirty minutes without adding the subplot of the relationship between Arnie and his client Jerri the singer working at Casa del Gato that week. The backstory of the singer and her guilt about her past was wasted, and it distracted from the central plot.

   Worse, the viewer was left half satisfied, wanting to know more about the Mob that used a mortuary as a front, more about loser Arnie, more about the relationship between Arnie and the singer, and more about the life of the regretful singer. This is a story that would work well in today’s modern sixty-minute drama with a main plot and subplot.

   So why has the thirty-minute drama vanished from television? Ignoring the commercial reasons, the longer hour series offers an easier path to better drama. There is more time to develop the characters, not only the guest characters of the week but the regulars as well.

   One of the appeals of the weekly series are the regular characters who become like friends, people we want to spend time with every week, people we want to learn more about. In these times of long story arc and an audience that care about continuity, it is difficult for the half-hour series to find the time to satisfy those needs and still tell a story. It is not that it is impossible for the thirty-minute series to entertain us it is just easier for the hour-long episode to tell a story and satisfy the audience other needs.

   If I were to pick one TV series I think should be remade it would be T.H.E. Cat. Its style and bizarre world would fit in well with today’s popular series of fantasy, strange mysteries and superheroes. More importantly an hour long weekly episodic series would have the time to develop Thomas and his world, a world where I would have liked to spend more time.

MINNESOTA CLAY. Ultra Film, Italy/France/Spain, 1964. Orinally released as Le Justicier du Minnesota. Cameron Mitchell, Georges Riviere, Ethel Rojo, Diana Martín, Antonio Roso, Fernando Sancho. Director: Sergio Corbucci.

   Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay has all of the great elements of a Spaghetti Western: a man wrongly imprisoned, a town held hostage, an outlaw who becomes a lawman, a corrupt Mexican general, beautiful women, and a hero with whom the audience can identify. Most importantly, it has Cameron Mitchell, an actor whose work I’ve increasingly grown to appreciate. (My earlier reviews of his The Unstoppable Man and The Last of the Vikings can be found here and here).

   Mitchell portrays the eponymous title character, a man who has been wrongfully imprisoned in a U.S. Army labor prison camp. After making his escape, he seeks out the man responsible for his confinement. As it turns out, Minnesota Clay’s problem is neither his willingness to seek vengeance, nor an inability to locale his nemesis. It’s that he’s gradually losing his eyesight, a unique twist on the gunfighter-seeks-villain theme.

   While Minnesota Clay may not have much in the way of memorable dialogue or the breathtaking cinematography of John Ford’s or Sergio Leone’s westerns, it nevertheless has its moments. The final fight sequence, in which our bloodied and battered hero uses his hearing, rather than his sight, to identify and kill his antagonist, is one for the ages.

PHILIP KERR – If The Dead Rise Not. Putnam, hardcover, March 2010. Penguin, trade paperback, April 2011. First published in the UK by Quercus, hardcover, 2009.

   Combine the worlds of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene with that of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and you begin to have something that resembles the world of Philip Kerr’s Berlin private eye and ex-cop Bernie Gunther, whose mean streets are those of Nazi Germany and the Post War world.

   Bernie made his debut in what by now is the almost legendary Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, The German Requiem) about a private eye in Nazi era Berlin. While Bernie’s voice echoes that classical American eye in the tradition of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer, Bernie is something more than a lonely knight in a violent broken world, his mean streets meaner and more dangerous, and it is not always enough to be a good man; at times it is even a disadvantage. He is a complex man, surviving in a complex world, his muscular prose reflecting a morally gray world and a layer of sophistication and depth rare to the thriller, certainly these days.

   Bernie is too self-aware for his own good, and his passion for justice can be inconvenient to say the least in the world and time he inhabits. Cynical one liners and a pure heart won’t even buy a cup of coffee, much less keep him alive.

   The book takes its title from a passage in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer: “…if the dead rise not again? Let us eat, and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.”

   It is 1934 and in Berlin the Nazis have taken hold of both government and the public imagination. Only a handful of people dare to speak of the madness to come, and they are too dangerous to be around. Berlin is readying itself for the 1936 Olympiad, the centerpiece of Adolph Hitler’s great vision of the Third Reich, and with Avery Brundage, head of the Olympic committee, there is a conspiracy of silence about the parties anti-Semitism designed to make sure the games are well attended and not boycotted.

   A Jewish boxer has been murdered, and Bernie is encouraged to quietly find the culprit before it becomes complicated, which leads him to American crime figure Max Reles, currently in Berlin. He also meets an attractive American journalist of Jewish heritage, Mrs. Noreen Charalambides:

   It proves a messy murder case and an even messier conclusion and Bernie has to let the killer go in order to save Noreen. Max Reles walks and Noreen gets out of Germany safely and Reles promises to keep her that way in return for Bernie’s silence and Bernie has to live with how and why.

   Nothing subtle about Max Reles.

   Twenty years later Bernie is in Havana, Cuba. His welcome wore out in Buenos Aires, and Havana is a good place to be. Among other things Bernie ended up in the SS in Russia through no fault of his own, and if not a war criminal isn’t entirely welcome either. Fidel Castro is in prison, Hemingway is in his last days of greatness, Batista, with CIA help, has just seized power, and the American mob has a strangle hold on the gaming industry burgeoning there, and Bernie Gunther isn’t the sort to settle in too peacefully no matter how much he tries. When Noreen Charalambides shows up and old feelings are stirred it gets complicated because Max Reles is back as well. Max Reles who murdered a good man in 1934 Berlin, and threatened Noreen’s life to buy Bernie’s silence …

   Bernie’s victory, or sorts, makes for a suspenseful and dark novel that relishes that ‘poetry of violence’ and an authentic voice from the darkness.

   If you want something that echoes the stark beauty and dark revelation of the noir style, you won’t do better than Philip Kerr or Bernie Gunther. This was his sixth outing, and there were more to follow, and you could do much worse than to find and read all of them. I can say with conviction I haven’t read a hard-boiled novel that effected me this much since James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, certainly not in this century. Philip Kerr and Bernie Gunther are both someone lovers of the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction should get to know.

NAVY SPY. Grand National Pictures, 1937. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Judith Allen, Jack Doyle, Phil Dunham, Don Barclay, Howard Lang, Crauford Kent. Directors: Crane Wilbur & Joseph H. Lewis (the latter uncredited and unconfirmed, according to IMDb).

   According to the American Film Institute, Joseph Lewis was the director of retakes. I haven’t checked it out any further than this, so if anyone knows more, you can tell me about it in the comments. The reason it is worth mentioning is that if so, this movie would be Lewis’s first director’s role.

   But it isn’t much of one, I have to admit, the movie, I mean. I enjoyed Yellow Cargo, the first of four low-budget films starring Conrad Nagel and Eleanor Hunt as a pair of federal agents.

   In that one their task was bringing to justice an illegal immigrant racket, and reviewed here, but while the two stars do their best, there’s not much they can do with a story as weak as this one is, the second in the series.

   Which has to do with a scientist with a formula for a new advanced fuel, for airplanes, I believe, who is lured off a ship by a femme fatale and straight into the arms of a gang of bad guys. Problem is, the formula exists only in the head of the kidnapped scientist, and nothing is going to make him talk. And what kind of security would allow a note from the lady to be brought in, and the doctor be allowed to walk right off the boat?

   Part of what was intended to make this amusing and fun to watch is that Nagel’s character is determined to keep Hunt’s character off the case, simply because she’s female. Bobbie Reynolds is not a woman to be denied easily, however, and at every stage of the way, she’s there before Alan Reynolds (Nagel) or just behind him, ready and able to lend more than moral support.

   But otherwise the chase is dull and uninteresting, and not even the witty byplay between the two leads can make a souffle out of nothing more than good wishes.

BRIAN STABLEFORD – The Werewolves of London. Carrol & Graf, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1994. First published by Simon & Schuster, UK, hardcover, 1990.

   I don’t read too much fantasy that I like any more, and much less that impresses me. This did. Stableford has been around awhile, and wrote a good bit of stuff I liked for Ace and DAW many years back, but this is quite different from his early work.

      It’s set in 19th century London, in the main, and involves the Werewolves of London, demons, angels, the Sphinx, aspiring saints, and any number of other interesting characters. It really isn’t a werewolf story, though. It deals with the conflict of evolution and creationism, how we look at the world, and what it’s really all about, Alfie.

   It presents a view of creation that’s a bit different and wholly intriguing. The characters are quite believable, even the non-human ones, and Stableford tells his story in a sometimes leisurely, sometimes rapid-paced, always entertaining way.

   It’s a big book, and I was sorry to see it end. Though the first in a trilogy, it‘s quite self contained. Unless period fiction and/or fantasy really turn you off, you ought to give this one a try. It’s good.

        The David Lydyard (Werewolves) trilogy —

The Werewolves of London. Simon & Schuster, UK, July 1990.
The Angel of Pain. Simon & Schuster, UK, August 1991.
The Carnival of Destruction. Pocke, UK, October 1994.

EDWARD RONNS – Catspaw Ordeal. Gold Medal #133, paperback original, November 1950. Also: Gold Medal, #766, May 1958.

   This was the third book Ronns had published by Gold Medal, the two earlier ones being Million Dollar Murder (Gold Medal #110) and State Department Murders (Gold Medal #117), all three published right after each other in 1950. The first Gold Medal to appear under his own name, Edward S. Aarons, Escape to Love, appeared in 1952, and the first in his long series of Sam Durell spy novels was Assignment to Disaster, came out in 1955.

   There’s no spy activity in Catspaw Ordeal, however. It takes place in the wealthy southeastern corner of Connecticut, popularly know as the state’s Gold Coast, where Danny Archer, as in all true noir novels, finds himself in a perfect storm of double (or triple) disasters, none of which (in this case) are his fault. It’s only how he decides to handle them that makes this noir, where he finds himself off stride from the first event, making him an easier victim to the others.

   And causing him to make bad decisions. After an argument with his wife who then leaves him, two people from his past unexpectedly enter his life again, one of them the girl he was in love with at one time, the other a good friend whom he presumed dead after an attack at sea during World War II. Turns out that he’s alive, and not very much of a friend any more.

   Quite a few bodies turn up in this book, and Archer is hard pressed to stay ahead of the police, who are hard on his heels throughout most of the tale. By the time the ordeal is over, Archer is more than happy to settle down in peaceful but dull suburban life. His restlessness is cured for good.

   Even though Connecticut is far removed from the exotic places that Sam Durell’s adventures took him later, the descriptions of the sights and sounds of suburban life are picturesque and very effective. What doesn’t work out quite as well is the mystery itself, as even with most of the threats against having been nullified, the identity of the primary killer remains to be solved.

   Ronns puts it off as long as possible (otherwise of course the book would be a lot shorter than it is) but it’s not done as smoothy as it should have been. The book is told in the third person, but solely from Archer’s point of view, and given that Archer knew what we the reader aren’t told at the beginning, it seems as though he should have known the killer a lot earlier than he says he did.

PHANTOM LADY. Universal Pictures, 1944. Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Alan Curtis, Aurora Miranda, Thomas Gomez, Fay Helm, Elisha Cook Jr. Based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Robert Siodmak.

   [Phantom Lady, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich] is a handsomely staged but wildly improbable tale of an architect (Curtis) who is wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder and of his Girl Friday’s attempt to track down the real murderer.

   Curtis is, as usual, bland, and G .F. Raines overacts (something of a feat for someone with very modest acting talents), but Tone has some good scenes as a charmer with a flaw and Elisha Cook’s murder is well-staged. At its best, Woolrich’s world in which shadows seem to pulsate with threats and menace is splendidly captured in this uneven film with its uneasy blend of glibness and implicit peril. Woolrich can’t be beat for texture and atmosphere, and Siodmak and his team have managed to get some of that on film.

  ELIZABETH DALY – Death and Letters. Dell/Murder Ink #21, paperback, 1981. First edition: Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1950. Also: Mercury Mystery #165, digest-sized paperback, 1951. Berkley, paperback, 1963.

   It’s nice to see some of Elizabeth Daly’s work back in print again. Her books are increasingly hard to find in used paperback shops, and the demand for them is high, as Carol Brener, the proprietress of Murder Ink [in part responsible for this line of paperbacks], most assuredly well knows.

   And I’ve known it, too, for quite some time now, and yet I’ve never gotten around to reading anything by her until now. This book, written toward the end of Miss Daly’s writing career, was my introduction to Henry Gamadge, and do you know, from reading it I’m still not sure what it is exactly that he does for a living. Private eye work, apparently, but dealing primarily with bookish matters, perhaps?

   Which certainly doubles the appeal to mystery fans, most of whom are collectors and savers of one sort or another.

   In this case, a message via a crossword puzzle, and a Gamadgian response, with a little help from G.K. Chesterton, help spring a lady whose family has shut her up in her room as mentally incompetent. It seems she suspects something wrong about her husband’s “suicide.” One of the family knows for a fact there was. The others are merely afraid of scandal.

   At first Daly’s storytelling methods seem rather dry and aloof, more British in tone than American, but the effect begins to diminish as the characters and the proceedings start to sort themselves out a bit. The quiet little climax/resolution only serves to reinforce the obvious statement. Here is the ultimate antithesis of the Mickey Spillane school of writing!

“THE BEARDED LADY.” An episode of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. BBC, UK, 3 January 1996. (Season 1, Episode 1.) Patricia Routledge, Derek Benfield, Dominic Monaghan, John Graham-Davies. Based on characters in the book Missing Persons by David Cook (also co-screenwriter). Director: John Glenister.

   The book Missing Persons itself had been adapted for television nearly six years earlier (30 May 1990), also starring Patricia Routledge in the leading role. It was the pilot for a proposed series by Yorkshore TV, but the project went nowhere until it was finally picked up by the BBC in this series and later shown in the US on PBS.

   This first episode begins with Hetty Wainthropp waking up on her 60th birthday, married but with no pension of her own, and two years short of qualifying for one. She decides on the spot to go to work, and while on the job as a postal clerk, she finds herself intrigued by the mysterious death of a local homeless woman.

   Assisting her (reluctantly) is her elderly husband (Derek Benfield) and 17-year-old Geoffrey Shawcross (Dominic Monaghan), whose street smartness gives the new private detective agency a dimension that Hetty herself, with an inborn curiosity and a knack for putting details together, soon realizes she is lacking.

   The characters are wonderful, especially Benfield’s puzzled reaction to his wife’s new vocation. He is at first vehemently opposed, but he gradually (and grudgingly) finds himself assisting, while his wife and their new ward go off detecting, using buses and the occasional motor scooter for transportation.

   As for Hetty herself, she’s what I can only call a middle class Miss Marple, and quite active for her age. Her environment is that of a midsize city, crowded and a bit rundown, with plenty of ethnic minorities (definitely unlike Midsomer Murders). No scenic villages or large manors for her. What ever the opposite of the word “posh” is, that’s the word I think would fit best.

   While the detection is fun (and more than a little dangerous), this first case is, in all honesty, not very interesting (something to do with mollusks) and worse, more than a little muddled. The ending came much too abruptly, before all of the loose ends had been tied up, or so I thought. Some of the accents were tough to follow, though, so I admit that I may have missed something.

   But it is the characters that make or break shows like this one. It went on from this first episode for four seasons, so the original viewing audience seems to have become attached to them fairly quickly. All quibbles aside, both major and minor, I’m willing to watch more of them myself.