Mon 21 Feb 2011
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: GEOFFREY HOMES – Build My Gallows High.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[5] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
GEOFFREY HOMES – Build My Gallows High. William Morrow, hardcover, 1946. Paperback reprints include: Jonathan Press J35,digest, no date [1948]; Ace D-185, 1956, published dos-Ã -dos with The Humming Box, by Harry Whittington; Zebra “Movie Mystery Greats,” 1988.
From 1936 to 1946, Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) published a dozen very good mysteries set primarily in the valleys and foothills of north-central California. Build My Gallows High is the last and best of the twelve, and so firmly established Mainwaring in Hollywood (he had been writing B movies since 1942) that he produced no more fiction during the last thirty-two years of his life.
This novel was filmed, from Mainwaring’s screenplay, as Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas — one of the half-dozen best noir crime films ever made.
Both novel and film are powerful studies of one man’s struggle to maintain the hope of his future when his jaded past catches up with him. Red Bailey is a former New York private detective, the kind “who first looked at a client’s supply of thousand-dollar bills, then at his social-and legal-status” before taking on a job; an angle player who made his big mistake when he went to work for a gambler named Whit Sterling.
The job (told through flashback) was to find Sterling’s ex-mistress, Mumsie McGonigle, who shot and wounded Sterling and then ran off with $56,000 of his money. Red tracked Mumsie to Mexico, met and fell in love with her; and when she claimed she’d only shot Sterling in self-defense, Red stupidly double-crossed the gambler and helped Mumsie cover her tracks from Mexico to California.
But their relationship wasn’t what Red expected. When his former partner showed up at their country hideaway, murder drove the final wedge between them — and Red realized how badly he’d screwed up his life.
Determined to put Mumsie and the rest of it behind him, he made his way to a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, opened a gas station, and spent most of his free time fishing. He even met a new woman, one he learned to love more than Mumsie, one he planned to marry. Now, for the first time in his life, he is content.
But then one day his past shows up in the person of a flashily dressed Greek gunman employed by Guy Parker, a crooked cop Red knew in the old days who now operates a gambling club in Reno. Red accompanies the Greek to see Parker, and finds that Mumsie is now Parker’s live-in girlfriend.
Parker wants Red to do a detective job for him; if he doesn’t agree, then Parker will tell Whit Sterling where to find him. Red smells a setup of some kind, with himself square in the middle, but what choice does he have except to do as Parker asks? Up to a point, that is …
This is a taut, hard-edged thriller, powerfully told in a clipped style reminiscent of Hemingway’s, with superb characterization and a hammer-blow climax. Anyone who has seen and admired Out of the Past will find Build My Gallows High every bit as memorable.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
February 21st, 2011 at 7:51 pm
One of the greats no doubt about it, book and film.
The film was done on a really tight budget, and actor Robert Mitchum attributed at least some of the dark oppressive look of the film to the fact director Jacques Tourneur couldn’t afford better lighting or sets.
The film also contains one of the great flubs of all time. If you look closely in one scene actress Jane Greer enters a darkened room where she is supposed to be alone. The telephone rings, and someone hands her the reciever out of the shadows.
It doesn’t matter though because the film is so good.
The character in the film is Jeff instead of Red — couldn’t really have Mitchum playing a Red, and there are some minor variations, but overall it is a remarkably satisfying film — more that can be said for the remake AGAINST ALL ODDS with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, and James Wood (Greer makes an appearance).
The original though still has a kick, as does the novel — it is a tough minded, but also powerfully romantic film, the book perhaps a shade less so but only a shade.
Mainwaring went on to write the screenplay for Don Siegel’s version of Jack Finney’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and even a episode of THE WILD WILD WEST for television among many others.
February 21st, 2011 at 9:30 pm
One the great movies of all time, no matter the category, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never read the book though. Whatever on earth is wrong with me?
February 22nd, 2011 at 5:52 pm
I believe this is the same Jane Greer who later appeared in the 1973 Parker film THE OUTFIT.
February 22nd, 2011 at 7:58 pm
It was indeed. She was only 22 or 23 when OUT OF THE PAST was made. Jane Greer’s other big film, as far as I’m concerned, was THE BIG STEAL (1949), also with Robert Mitchum. (And Daniel Mainwairing was one of the hands that was in on the screenplay.)
February 22nd, 2011 at 10:42 pm
Doesn’t Greer make a very brief appearance in CRIME BY NIGHT based on Homes/Mainwaring’s FORTY WHACKS? She’s not listed at IMDb, but I seem to recall her being mentioned on TCM as being in the film, and the 1945 date is about right.
Then again it may be two other movies.
She plays Lon Chaney’s second wife in THE MAN WITH A THOUSAND FACES and Antoinette de Mauban in Stewart Granger remake of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA as well as the journalist on the run from Nazi war criminal’s Trevor Howard and Peter Van Eyck in the Mexican jungle with Hemingwayesque writer Richard Widmark in RUN FOR THE SUN based on ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’
She was ‘Charlie’in the noirish western STATION WEST with Dick Powell (based on Luke Short’s story), and the judge deciding the fate of Joey Heatherton in WHERE LOVE HAS GONE, but sadly has no on screen scenes with Susan Hayard or Bette Davis. She’s also one of the three women in the life of Robert Young in the noir classic THEY WON’T BELIEVE ME with Susan Hayward and Rita Johnson.
She mostly retired to be a mother, though did appearances in films and on television, in later years often cast as a sort of film noir icon for her role in OUT OF THE PAST.
A good small film of hers worth catching is Joseph H.(Wagon Wheel) Lewis DESPERATE SEARCH about two children lost in the wilderness and the search for them by their bush pilot father (Howard Keel) his ex wife and his girl friend. Patricia Medina is the ex wife — also a pilot.