DOROTHY B. HUGHES – The Fallen Sparrow. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1942. Paperback editions include: Dell #31, mapback edition, 1943 or 1944; Bantam, 1970/1979; Carroll & Graf, 1988.

THE FALLEN SPARROW. RKO, 1943. John Garfield, Maureen O’Hara, Walter Slezak, Patricia Morison, John Banner, John Miljan, Hugh Beaumont. Screenplay by Warren Duff. Directed by Richard Wallace.

   I’ve long been impressed by Dorothy B. Hughes’ ability to put the reader into the head of her protagonists while writing in the third person. In a Lonely Place featured a murderous sociopath; here it’s a paranoid who really is being persecuted, but in both cases we follow a narrative in which we’re not always quite sure of what is actually happening to the central character . Or if we can trust that he’s reading it right

   Sparrow opens two years before the story proper starts. Kit McKitrick, young, rich and idealistic, joined the International Brigade to fight Facism in Spain. As things fell apart he snatched some valuable relics from a looter, then spent two year in a prison cell being tortured to give up their whereabouts. His most vivid memory of that time is the periodic visits of a man he never saw… a limping man from Berlin, whose arrival always brought on new and more painful torment.

   Then we switch to New York City in Wartime, with Kit returned to his Park Avenue crowd, thanks to an escape engineered (he thinks) by a longtime cop-pal who plunged to his death from a window while Kit was recuperating out West. The papers say it was accident or suicide, Kit knows it was murder.

   This forms the springboard for a perfectly crafted tale of murder and subversion among the Smart Set, as Kit’s mission of detection becomes a journey of discovery that uncovers some troubling truths about the people he once called friends – and about himself.

   Hughes builds suspense with some clever twists: Kit starts hearing the limping man from Berlin here in New York — or does he? Then he learns that his captors engineered his “escape” from Spain as a ploy to get him to lead them to the relics. Or did they? And suddenly, in his mind (and ours?) he is as much hunter as hunted.

   When RKO filmed this the next year they wisely did it in early-noir style, with a few nods to The Maltese Falcon (1941) spiced up with expressionist lighting and oppressive camera angles. This being wartime, there are a couple of patriotic speeches about Why We Fight, but by and large the emphasis is on McKitrcick’s fragile sanity.

   Producer Robert Fellows (Hondo, The Screaming Mimi, Ring of Fear, etc.) casts this perfectly, with a trio of femmes fatales that includes Maureen O’Hara (icily coiffed and made up in an Audrey Totter look) Patricia Morision and Martha O’Driscoll. John Banner, Erford Gage and Hugh Beaumont skulk around nicely in the background under the sinister supervision of Walter Slezak as a wheelchair-bound (or is he?) aristocrat with an interest in torture and the Borgias, chewing the scenery with voracious relish.

   And best of all, there’s John Garfield, that edgiest of leading men, as the half-crazy hero of the piece. Nobody could convey angst like Garfield, and he sinks into the role wonderfully, veering from manic energy to desperation with a tic of the cheek. He even seems to sweat on cue!

   Scenarist Warren Duff (who produced Out of the Past) streamlines Hughes’ book quite well, shortcutting past some of the novel’s digressions and wisely letting the actors convey their characters’ complexities. The result is a film that brings the book to life and makes it pure Cinema — and a fun movie to watch.

  MURDER AT 3 AM Renown Pictures, UK, 1953; Ellis Films, US, 1955. Dennis Price (Inspector Peter Lawton), Peggy Evans, Rex Garner, Philip Saville, Leonard Sharp. Director: Francis Searle.

   Save for a trickle of recognition for Dennis Price, the leading man in this low budget British semi-thriller, the cast of Murder at 3 am was totally unknown to me. I think you may have had to be there — England in the early 1950s — for any of them to have made a lasting impression on you.

   Not that they didn’t do a professional job of ii. The budget may have been small and the story riddled with clichés, but there’s nothing in this film that you can lay any criticism of the cast to.

   The last of a series of robberies of well-to-do women, their money and jewelry stolen from them at the doorsteps as they arrive home at night, has ended in the death of one of them, putting a lot of pressure on Scotland Yard in general and Inspector Peter Lawton in particular.

   What the robberies have had in common is that they all took place at 3 am, and the women were all coming home alone in cabs from various night clubs in the area. What the new fiancé of the inspector’s sister, a budding mystery writer, discovers, however, is that the first letters of the names of the night clubs spell out P-L-A-Y-…, which suggests where the killer may strike next.

   We are traipsing on Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen territory here. Unfortunately additional clues start pointing to the fiancé himself as the one responsible for the crimes. I spoke of clichés up there earlier. The denouement is one of the oldest in the books.

   But what can I tell you? I both noted the limitations of the story and then ignored them, and I enjoyed the movie anyway.

BACKSTREET JUSTICE. Prism Entertainment Corporation, 1994. Linda Kozlowski (Keri Finnegan), Paul Sorvino, Hector Elizondo, John Shea, Tammy Grimes, Viveca Lindfors. Written and directed by Chris McIntyre.

   I’m not sure, but while this film has some rather well-known names in the cast, I believe that it was released straight to video. I taped it from cable nearly 25 years ago, and a couple of evenings ago I finally got around to watching it.

   Linda Kozlowski, best known for her work in the Crocodile Dundee movie series, plays Pittsburgh-based private eye Keri Finnegan. She’s been hired by the residents of a crime-ridden section of town to find the person responsible for the recent deaths of three residents of the area, the police apparently having given up on the crimes.

   As it turns out, Keri’s relationship with the police is absolutely none. Her father, a police officer who died in a deadly shootout several years ago, was assumed to have been on the take, and Captain Phil Giarusso (Paul Sorvino) will have nothing to do with her.

   Her investigation takes some twists and turns, but eventually it comes down to a mysterious corporation who’s been taking advantage of the deaths to buy up property in the area. I’m not exactly clear on the details, since the story line is rather muddled, to say the least. There are a couple of twists toward the end that maybe make sense, as the acting is at least OK and the photography even better.

   There is also one lengthy and quite graphic sex scene between Ms Kozlowski and her sometimes boy friend (John Shea), but I’d have to admit that it’s gratuitous enough that I can’t recommend your trying to track down the movie for that reason alone — it’s apparently on Amazon Prime, but otherwise it is rather hard to find.

   All in all, though, Ms Kozlowski is quite glamorous in this film, but perhaps too much so to be totally convincing as a private eye. For most of the film I gave up on the story line and watched her instead.

LADY IN THE DEATH HOUSE PRC, 1944. Jean Parker, Lionell Atwill and Douglas Fowley. Screenplay by Frederick C. Davis and Harry O. Hoyt, [based on the former’s story “Meet the Executioner” in the June 1942 issue of Detective Tales]. Directed by Steve Sekely.

   Well, it’s different.

   The story opens with Jean Parker walking that last mile to the Electric Chair. Then, as the door closes, we fade to Lionel Atwill as an avuncular criminologist, telling the tale of how he solved the baffling case of…. And we fade again into the first of many – many! — flashbacks.

   It seems Parker was a secretary working under an assumed name for the self-righteous moral crusader (George Irving) who railroaded her dad into prison and suicide years before. She uses her position to get Irving’s old file on her dad…. But never mind that; the writers soon forget about it.

   Parker is also being blackmailed by her sister’s shady boyfriend, who may have been responsible for the crimes pinned on her Dad. But don’t worry about that either, since the writers wander off on another tangent about halfway through.

   What they concentrate on is Douglas Fowley (bad guy in more than 100,000 B-movies and the harassed director in Singin’ in the Rain) who is in love with Ms Parker. She loves him right back, but is put off by his employment: Whenever somebody on Death Row gets the Hot Seat, it’s his job to flip the switch. Things get even stickier when Jean is convicted of murdering her sister’s boyfriend (remember him?) and now it’s Doug’s job to pull the rug out from under the woman he loves.

   BUT … it seems Doug also has a sideline as a research scientist, working on a way to restore life to the dead! And….

And nothing. Zip. Nada. Bupkis. Zilch. The writers once again wander off to different, if not necessarily greener, pastures, and Lady in the Death House eventually devolves into a desperate race against the clock to etc. etc.

   I am reminded here of Harry Stephen Keeler’s trick of building a story by drawing scraps of plot and sub-plot from a hat. Anyway, Steve Sekely directs all this with as much style as he can muster, given PRC’s meager resources. He had his moments (Hollow Triumph) and gives this thing a sense of pace and even a flash or two of visual elegance.

   What he can’t overcome is the crucial sequence where Parker is arguing with her sister’s beau, and their silhouettes are seen in incriminating outline from the street below. The more Sekely cuts from the street to the apartment, the more we see that the two of them ain’t nowhere close to that window – well, such are the vagaries of filmmaking at PRC.

   I will add though that Fowley and Atwill seem delighted at playing good guys for a change and make the most of it. In fact, their thesping and Sekely’s desperate efforts at directing kept me watching, even as I wondered what the writers were smoking and where I could get some for myself.
   

HOLLYWOOD STORY. Universal Pictures, 1951. Richard Conte, Julie Adams, Richard Egan, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Henry Hull, Paul Cavanagh. Screenplay and story by Frederick Kohener (story as by Frederick Brady). Directed by William Castle.

   A surprisingly good mystery that is a bit plot heavy and would have benefited without Jim Backus’s jovial press agent narration, but otherwise posits a fair Hollywood mystery. Richard Conte plays Larry O’Brien, a successful New York film producer, lured West by money-man and friend Sam Collier (Fred Clark).

   When he goes to visit his new studio, once home of silent films, he discovers it is where famed silent film director Franklin Ferrera was murdered in 1929 in his cabana in an unsolved mystery. Despite being warned off, O’Brien decides to look into the old murder as the subject of his first film and begins nosing around.

   He even hires washed-up screenwriter Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull) who worked with Ferrara to write the screenplay, and attracts the attention of Lt. Lennox (Richard Egan) who reminds him there is no statute of limitations on murder, and cops might come in handy.

   Not everyone is happy about the case being reopened. Sally Rosseau (Julie Adams) is the daughter of silent star Amanda Rosseau (Adams appears in a dual role but is billed as Julia Adams in it) who was involved with Ferrara and would as soon leave the whole thing in the past with her late mother’s memory. So would O’Brien’s friend Sam Collier, and former male lead Roland Paul (Paul Cavanagh), the latter the suspect whose career was ruined because everyone believed he murdered the director over Amanda. And when someone takes a shot at O’Brien at the studio late at night it seems as if someone is willing to kill to keep the past silent.

   Of course O’Brien and Sally will become romantically involved and secrets that hurt the innocent and the guilty will emerge, including a missing male secretary named Rodale who shows up willing to sell information and turns up murdered in his cheap hotel room.

   Despite the setting, direction by William Castle, Richard Conte in the lead playing at amateur private eye, and black and white photography, this is in no way film noir. Instead it’s a fair mystery with suspects and clues that unfolds more like the kind of thing done later on television on shows like Burke’s Law or Ellery Queen than what you might expect on the big screen from this era.

   There are lulls, the Jim Backus narration is a pointless distraction, and while it is nice to see them, brief cameos by silent film stars like Francis X. Bushman and William Farnum are more awkward than nostalgic, but get past that aspect, and there are actual clues here (the main one not shared with the viewer), a dangerous killer, and even a frame-up of not one but two innocent men.

   It’s a short fairly complex mystery, and if you solve it before the hero, it is likely based more on being familiar with the genre than anything else, and I have to say there is one clue shown early and right out in the open that proves key to unraveling the mystery that is good enough for any mystery.

   In fact the biggest mystery about this one is that they didn’t take that cast and story and make it into a noir. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to make the difference between a decent little mystery film and maybe a very good one. The problem here is that a pretty good idea is actually tossed off by everyone involved.

FRIEDRICH DÃœRRENMATT – The Judge and His Hangman. Originally published in 1950 in German as Der Richter und sein Henker. First published in English by Jenkins (UK, hardcover, 1954). First US edition: Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1955. Also published as End of the Game. Warner, 1976.

END OF THE GAME. Germany, 1975. Original title: Der Richter und sein Henker. Also released as Murder on the Bridge, Deception, Getting Away with Murder and The Monster That Devoured Cleveland. Jon Voight, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Shaw, Lil Dagover, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Donald Sutherland and Pinchas Zuckerman. Screenplay by Friedrich Durrenmatt and Maximilian Schell. Directed by Maximilian Schell.

   I read Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman back in the mid-1970s and again about 20 years ago, but early this year an attack of severe and prolonged acid reflux recalled it to mind and I thought I’d have another look and maybe check out the film made from it.

   Well, it’s pretty good. Ably constructed, well-translated (see Francis Nevins’ comments on the translation here ) with memorable characters and a tricky plot, plus that little something extra one always looks for in a mystery, and so seldom finds: the quirky element that makes a book stay in the memory and tug at the sleeve of your thoughts every now and again.

   As Judge starts, Police Inspector Barlach has been on the trail of a Master Criminal named Gastmann for 40 years. Barlach is prematurely old, in pain, and dying of gastritis. He’s also a slow, methodical cop, considered old-fashioned by his subordinates, superiors, and especially by the object of his pursuit, Gastmann.

   Barlach has set his best officer on the job of catching Gastmann, and that officer is found dead on the first page. Frustrated, in more pain than ever, Barlach puts his second-best man on the job, only to have Gastmann run circles around him. As the book progresses, Barlach becomes little more than a pathetic stooge for his brilliant nemesis, as the master thief plunders his files, disrupts his work, invades his home and even spirits him away at one point, all with the suave nonchalance and impudent ease of…

   That’s when it hit me that this relationship was eerily like that of The Saint and his frequent foil, Inspector Teal. Gastmann describes himself as “an adventurer roaming the world… driven to taste life to the very last drop….” and he sums things up to Barlach, “…I was always one step ahead of you. Time and again I turned up in your career as a gray spectre. Time and again I was tempted to commit, under your very nose, the boldest, wildest crimes, and time and again you were unable to prove them.”

   Yeah, that’s the Saint and Mr. Teal, all right, and as I remember, Teal used to complain of indigestion a lot.

   But this is a darker, more sardonic view of the relationship, and late in the book, when Barlach finds himself outsmarted once again, there’s a stunning moment when he turns to Gastmann and says, “I have judged you and condemned you to death. You will not survive the day. The hangman I have chosen for you will come for you today. You will recognize him. And he will kill you.”

   And from that point, it moves to a truly chilling climax, capped off by a scene so quirky and unsettling, I found myself re-reading it with genuine pleasure. This is one I mean to come back to, even if it takes another quarter-century. If my tattered paperback lasts that long. Or I do.

   Any movie that features Donald Sutherland as a corpse is bound to be idiosyncratic, and End of the Game is rewardingly so. Stylishly directed, with off-beat casting and a cinematic script courtesy of author Durrenmatt (who plays himself in the film) and director Schell.

   The U.S. release is dubbed, not always well, but has been capably translated — they persist in referring to small semi-automatic handguns as “revolvers” but that’s in the book too, and for all I know may be in the original German text. At least they stick to Durrenmatt’s dialogue. Also, for some reason, Ennio Morricone’s original score was replaced by some of his older compositions.

   Despite this, Durrenmatt & Schell capture that “something extra” perfectly, with images that evoke the author’s word-paintings in colors delicate but vivid. The pacing is fast, and the twists and turns of the plot conveyed visually where it suits best. The scene where the executioner calls on Gastmann crackles with tension and explodes in violence with the kind of flair one sees in Don Siegel and Gordon Douglas at their best.

   As for the actors, Friedrich Durrenmatt seems miscast, but Robert Shaw is dashingly sinister as the master criminal, Jon Voight sharp-eyed and ruthless, and Jacqueline Bisset gives her all to a complex and well-written part. But the big surprise is Martin Ritt as Barlach.

   Ritt did some acting in the early days of television, but only rarely thereafter, and as far as I know, this was his only leading part. And he’s perfect. He plods around looking like a plump Percy Dovetonsils, pot-bellied, phlegmatic and bespectacled, but radiating an innate intelligence that lets us know immediately that this is no Dumb Cop.

   This is not an easy film to find. It took me a month to get a copy in English from a dealer in the Czech Republic, but I have to say it was well worth the effort.

FOLLOW ME QUIETLY. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. William Lundigan, Dorothy Patrick, Jeff Corey, Nestor Paiva. Screenplay: Lillie Hayward, based on a story co-written by Anthony Mann. Director: Richard O. Fleischer.

   Even though noir maven Eddie Muller recently showed this as part of his “Noir Alley” series on TCM, in his comments afterward he had to fess up and admit that Follow Me Quietly is not a noir film at all. Never the less, it’s a film that comes closer to noir than a lot of films that also aren’t but are dumped into the category anyway.

   This is has little to do with the story line — if anything, this is nothing but a straight-forward police procedural — but it does have a lot to do with the filming, the stylish camera work and lighting, starting with the opening scene, as we watch girl reporter Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick)’s feet as she paces back and forth in the rain in front of a small diner while waiting for Lt. Harry Grant (William Lundingan) for some details of the case he’s currently working on.

   The sending is quite striking, too, as we see Grant chasing down the serial killer he’s finally closing in on. The conclusion takes place in some sort of waterworks plant (?), which allows for scene after scene filled with spectacular background shots of pipes and conduits of some sort, railings and walkways, taken from all kinds of angles.

   What comes in between? A fairly ordinary cop film, with an added plus of a romance between the two primary stars that’s only semi-convincing. One unusual visual aspect that I’ve never seen before is instead of the usual police artist’s rendition of the killer’s face (which no one still living has seen) is the creation of a three-dimensional rendition of his body in the form of a faceless dummy.

   This leads to one chilling moment in the middle of the film, which I won’t tell you anything more about — it will more effective if you see it for yourself without warning — but one that’s negated (and truthfully, so is the entire film, if you think about it) when the strangler of at least seven people turns out to be a quiet nebbish sort of guy.

   Lundigan was a competent actor but he was also probably too good-looking to be the primary protagonist in a noir film. Dorothy Patrick, on the other hand, an actress whom I don’t recall ever seeing before, does just fine as a pest of a reporter who’s always in his hair.

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THE FALLEN SPARROW. RKO Radio Pictures, 1943. John Garfield, Maureen O’Hara, Walter Slezak, Patricia Morison, Martha O’Driscoll, Bruce Edwards, John Banner, John Miljan, Hugh Beaumont. Based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Director: Richard Wallace.

   Although released in 1943 and nominally a spy film with patriotic undertones, RKO’s The Fallen Sparrow is far more of a film noir than many of the post-war crime melodramas that contemporary critics have attempted to pigeonhole into that movie genre. From a protagonist teetering on the edge of sanity to the noticeable absence of a traditional upbeat Hollywood ending, the film works best as a study of a man trying to survive in a world that is seemingly one step ahead of him.

   Based on the eponymous novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, the film likewise benefits from its casting of John Garfield as the lead protagonist. He portrays Kit McKittrick, the son of a New York cop who has spent the last two years imprisoned by fascists in Spain. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Kit is dealing with the traumatic psychological fallout resulting from his being tortured repeatedly by a Nazi official during his term in captivity. He doesn’t remember his torturer’s face. In fact, it’s not clear that he’s ever seen it. What he does remember is the sound of his persecutor’s limp. A shuffling sound followed by a distinct plodding thud.

   The plot follows Kit as he returns to New York to investigate the apparent suicide of his friend, a New York detective. He suspects not only that his friend was murdered, but also that his death had something to do with Kit’s imprisonment in Spain. And when Kit begins to hear the footsteps of his torturer he begins to wonder whether he’s lost his mind or whether his persecutor has followed him back home.

   Although an enjoyable suspense film, The Fallen Sparrow is not a movie that necessitates repeated viewings. The film can be slow going at times and is rather talky. It’s almost as if the screenwriters literally tried to adapt Hughes’s novel in total rather than capture the essence of her story and then use it to create something excitedly fresh in cinematic form.

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MANHANDLED. Paramount Pictures, 1949. Dorothy Lamour, Sterling Hayden, Dan Duryea, Irene Hervey. Director: Lewis R. Foster.

   I started writing this review by running through the basic plot, but after writing three or four lines, I gave up, realizing how dumb it all was. Let’s boil it down to this: crooked private eye frames psychiatrist’s secretary for murder.

   Dan Duryea plays the aforementioned PI in a manner that’ll curl your teeth — and I mean that in a good way. No one was better than he in roles like this. This is one he was meant to play.

   In an early role for him, Sterling Hayden plays a sympathetic insurance guy who’s nowhere to be seen when Miss Lamour needs him most, and the guys on the police force should be in the movies — as comedians. There will be times when I swear you will say that any resemblance to real life is totally coincidental.

   I enjoyed the movie anyway. It isn’t much of a detective or mystery story, but there are enough suspects involved for there to be a surprise or two, and if you can put up with the comedy bits, there are enough of the grimmer elements of the noir school of movie-making to make this a film worth watching out for.

PAID TO KILL. Lippert Pictures, US, 1954. First released in the UK as Five Days (Hammer Films, 1954). Dane Clark, Cecile Chevreau, Paul Carpenter, Thea Gregory, Anthony Forwood. Screenwriter: Paul Tabori. Director: Montgomery Tully.

   This a film that’s been recently released in a box set of DVDs as a collection of “Hammer Noir” films, and while it’s slower moving than I’d like, the basic plot line is very much noirish in nature, and some of the scenes do show some stylish black-and-white touches. (More on this later.)

   It’s hard to say what a British company called Amalgamated Industries actually does, but Dane Clark, even though obviously American, is the head of it. He’s been doing well on the job until he takes one gamble too many, and when the deal fails to go through, the company is ready to go down the toilet with it.

   With no other recourse at hand, he blackmails a business associate into killing him so that his wife will receive his insurance money. (Insurance companies do not pay off in cases of suicide.)

   Well, at this point we all know where this s going, don’t we? The bad deal goes through, and life is livable again. But the would-be killer can’t be found in order to call the whole thing off. Not even Dane Clark’s highly efficient private secretary (who is obviously but quietly in love with him) can find a trace of him.

      There are some twists that follow in this otherwise very familiar story line, which are all to the good, but it’s the final scene that’s the icing on the cake — and makes this film as noir as noir could be. I wish I could tell you about it, I really do, but I think it best that I don’t.

   The story is better than good, to sum things up, and the acting, while a little flat at times, is as good as it needs to be. I like Dane Clark as an actor, but on the screen I’d have to admit that he’s often brooding and moodier than he really needs to be, with a hint of some hidden demons deep inside, or am I the only one who sees that?