A BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER. 20th Century Fox, 1953. Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, Gary Merrill, Catherine McLeod, Jack Kruschen, Barney Phillips, Freddy Ridgeway. Written and directed by Andrew L. Stone.

   When his young niece dies a painful death of unknown causes, Whitney Cameron (Jospeh Cotten) is inclined to think it only a fluke of fate until the wife of the family attorney, a woman who also writes for the pulp magazines, does some investigating on her own and comes up with the possibility that the girl was poisoned. With strychnine.

   If this is true, it’s next to impossible that it was an accident. And this being a movie, of course the answer is yes, the girl was poisoned, as an autopsy finally reveals. Could it be murder? Cam cannot believe it, but his suspicion (and that of the police) soon turns to the child’s stepmother (Jean Peters), who is as cool as they come and is calmly acquitted for lack of evidence.

   Cam’s only concern now is the fate of the dead girl’s young brother. Did the stepmother do it? Who else could have done it? Who else had a motive? It’s a battle of wits between Joseph Cotten, as solid an actor as they come, and the cool and collected Jean Peters. I know, I know. I’m repeating myself, but this is the heart of the film.

   I only wish is that the ending was able to live up to the rest of the story, and sad to say, it does not. This movie is sometimes categorized as “noir,” and a goodly part of it is. The middle portion, though, is straight out of Dragnet, which is fine, but the rest of the film wants to be a detective puzzle, and it simply isn’t there.

   Since my last column I’ve seen Pièges, the French film from 1939 with so many strange links to Cornell Woolrich, and discovered even more of the same. I’ll limit myself here to three.

   First of all, the movie is episodic in just the way so many of Woolrich’s best-known novels are episodic. It’s impossible that director Robert Siodmak and the screenwriters borrowed the structure from a Woolrich novel of that sort since all of those novels, beginning with The Bride Wore Black (1940), postdate Pièges.

   Could the filmmakers have known of Woolrich’s first use of episodic structure in the long 1937 novelet “I’m Dangerous Tonight”? Barely possible but most unlikely since that tale remained buried in the pulps for decades and wasn’t collected until 1981.

   Secondly, for just a minute or two, beginning with Marie Dea’s discovery of her vanished girlfriend’s bracelet in Maurice Chevalier’s desk, Pièges evokes the classic Woolrich situation where the protagonist is made to seesaw back and forth between believing the person he or she loves is innocent and accepting the evidence of the other’s guilt. The earliest Woolrich story in this vein is “The Night Reveals” (1936) so the filmmakers could have known of it.

   Third, when Chevalier in Pièges is put on trial for murder, director Robert Siodmak covers the scene in just a few impressionistic fragments. Woolrich in Phantom Lady (1942) covers the trial of Scott Henderson in somewhat the same way: prosecutor’s closing argument, jury verdict, death sentence. He could have chosen this approach simply because he knew no law and didn’t care to learn any, or because it was suggested to him from seeing Pièges. We’ll never know.

   Pièges was released in France late in 1939, apparently just before the outbreak of World War II. Was it ever released in the U.S.? Yes it was. In the chapter on Siodmak in his 1994 book Beyond Hollywood’s Grasp: American Filmmakers Abroad, 1914-1945, Harry Waldman tells us that its original English-language title was Personal Column and quotes from the review of it that appeared in the New York Times. Clearly Woolrich could have seen the picture.

   But did he? Since there’s no reason to believe he knew French, it’s unlikely he would have gone unless the print shown in New York was subtitled. Was it? Waldman doesn’t tell us and so far I haven’t found the answer elsewhere.

   Siodmak is included in Beyond Hollywood’s Grasp because Harry Waldman believed he was American by birth. In fact, as I mentioned last month, the director was of German Jewish descent and his birthplace was Dresden. But the myth that he was a son of the South, born in Memphis, has circulated for generations. I must say I’m grateful that Harry Waldman accepted that myth. His mistake made my research for this month’s column ridiculously easy.

   In my high school and college days I read just about all of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels — except those that hadn’t been published yet! — and some but not all of the novels about Bertha Cool and Donald Lam that he wrote as A.A. Fair.

   Last month I pulled out one that as far as I could remember I hadn’t read before and gave it a try. The results are mixed. Bedrooms Have Windows (1949) opens in the lobby of a large hotel to which, as we learn later, Lam has trailed a suspected con man. Suddenly a petite and gorgeous blonde, clearly meant to evoke Veronica Lake, invites Donald to escort her into the hotel’s cocktail lounge.

   There she spins a yarn that takes them both to a remote motel where they register as husband and wife. The woman walks out on Lam around the same time that a man in another unit of the motel apparently kills his mistress and then himself. All this in the first couple of chapters!

   Eventually we learn that the counter-plotting stems from the blonde’s determination to break up the marriage between the man her sister loves and the tramp he actually married and a blackmail ring’s determination to cash in on the situation. But, if I may mangle metaphors, under scrutiny much of the plot labyrinth collapses like a house of cards, which is an all too common fault in Gardner.

   The coincidences that keep things moving might have fazed a Harry Stephen Keeler, and the storyline suffers from a number of coffee-out-the-nose elements, for example that the police accept as an obvious suicide the death of that guy in the motel who, as Gardner omits to tell us till near the end of the book, was shot between the eyes.

   I wouldn’t rank this as one of the finest in the Cool and Lam series, but it moves fast and has plenty of the adversarial dialogue that was a Gardner trademark and reflects its time well, with plenty of references to the skyrocketing inflation of the years right after World War II. I don’t recommend it strongly but I can’t call it worthless either. Shall we say one thumb down?

   This month’s column is both shorter and later than usual. Why? Because I have been and still am putting in a slew of hours on the index to Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection. Gad, what drudgery! The book will come out around February and a short excerpt will appear in the January 2013 EQMM. I hope those who read this column regularly will keep an eye out for both.

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE. 20th Century, 1934. Spencer Tracy, Constance Cummings, Jack Oakie, Morgan Conway, Arline Judge, Judith Wood, Paul Harvey, Joseph Sawyer, Franklyn Ardell, Paul Porcasi, Charles Lane. Director: William A. Wellman. Shown at Cinevent 38, Columbus OH, May 2006.

   Tracy made a number of very enjoyable films before his MGM years that include this pairing with Jack Oakie in which the two star as telephone lineman troubleshooters.

   The brash, fun-loving Oakie is thrown off-balance by his assignment with the more experienced, hard-bitten and terse Tracy. Tracy, disillusioned by the shady activities of his former partner (Morgan Conway, whom Tracy has had dismissed) and by problems with his girlfriend (Constance Cummings), not the least of which is her occasional dating of Conway, quits, only to return precipitously when Oakie learns of an impending bank robbery in which Conway is involved and which implicates Cummings.

   Wellman’s tight direction of this Zanuck production and the highly capable cast made this one of the more satisfying films of the weekend. A contrived earthquake (several production levels below the mighty quake of San Francisco) added little to the film beyond some obstacles for Oakie and Tracy to overcome in rescuing Cummings, but this momentary lapse didn’t significantly diminish my enjoyment of the film.

THE HOUSE OF THE ARROW. Associated British Pictures, UK, 1953. Oskar Homolka (Inspector Hanaud), Robert Urquhart, Yvonne Furneaux, Josephine Griffin, Harold Kasket, Pierre Lefevre, Pierre Chaminade. Based on the novel by A. E. W. Mason (Hodder, 1924). Director: Michael Anderson.

   This is the third of three adaptations of Mason’s classic detective novel to the screen. The other two (1930 and 1940, respectively) are said not to exist. (If this is not true, I’d like to be corrected on this statement.) I first read the book a long time ago – a Modern Library Giant that contained two other works I also consider classics: Trent’s Last Case and Before the Fact – but alas, never since. (It has since been reprinted in an easy to obtain paperback published by Carroll & Graf in 1984.)

   In any case, while I’d like to be able to contrast the book with the film, I cannot. My memory does not go back nearly that far, almost 60 years ago. So I must encourage you to take the comments that follow with as large a grain of salt that you can muster, but they are, I assure you, well intentioned and (I hope) worthy of further discussion.

   As good as this movie is – and it is very good – I think what it displays is that no one can make a movie based on a work of detective fiction and have it work as well as it did in printed form. Movies and episodes of various TV series have been made that are excellent detective puzzlers, so it can be done.

   I’d include the Jim Hutton season of Ellery Queen shows in the latter category, and many of the Murder, She Wrote series. You can name your own movies, including those made for TV, but I doubt that many of the ones you might bring up were based on printed novels or even short stories, if any at all, and if they were, I’m willing to wager that the original printed version was better.

   I’m talking fair play detective fiction, mind you, not suspense thrillers, or noir fiction. Some of the Suchet versions of Poirot stories follow the originals closely, but are they better? I’ve been watching the first season of the Perry Mason television series, for example, and most of the shows I’ve watched are simply awful, with gaps in continuity and logic that are simply bewildering. Maybe they existed in Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, too, and I’m willing to concede that maybe they were. I’m almost afraid to go back and see for myself.

   Perhaps it’s that the pure puzzle category of detective fiction doesn’t translate well to film, or that film people simply don’t know how to do it. They have to jazz up Miss Marple and even Hercule Poirot so much, even to changing the endings (is that really so?), that they could change the names of all the characters and no one would have any ideas where the stories came from.

   I think (but as I suggested above, I am not sure) that the producers of this cinematic version of The House of the Arrow intended to follow the story line of the book as closely as possible. I’ll assume that to be the case.

   There are plenty of false trails for this to be true, although only a small number of suspects, a French manor house where the murder takes place (if it was indeed murder) so intricately filled with connecting rooms and corridors that Inspector Hanaud of the French Surete must carry floor plans of the building around with him as he goes, a mysterious poison brought back to France from South America (I believe) on an antique arrowhead, and a detective (the aforementioned Hanaud) who is the epitome of Golden Age detectives: jaunty, pugnacious, all-knowing, and positively beaming with delight to be confronted with a case that’s up the challenge of his abilities, of which he can assure you, are second to none.

   And Oskar Homulka is positively the right actor for the job. Not particularly handsome, his flair for the dramatic, as well as the comic jest at just the right time, is right on, every moment of the film. The black-and-white photography is superb, near noir-like in the angles that are taken and the mood that is invoked. Dead is an old woman, presumably of natural causes, but some anonymous letters and a disgruntled would-be heir cause suspicion to be aroused.

   But I confess, it took me two viewings to follow the story, and while I know who and why, I’m still not sure exactly sure how the many details that put who, why and how fit together in a nicely satisfying whole. Nor is this is not a fair play mystery, one in which you say to yourself “Of course,” and slap yourself on the head with a “Doh” when all is revealed. The book may be equally at fault in this regard. If any of you reading this have read the book more recently than I, or have better memories, can say yea or nay in this regard, please do.

   A very enjoyable movie, nonetheless, in spite of this long and perhaps rambling preamble, with lots of thoughts and no complete answers on my part, I’m afraid, but if you’ve read this far, you really ought to see this movie, if it ever comes your way.

THE SAINT’S VACATION. RKO Radio Pictures, US/UK, 1941. Hugh Sinclair, Sally Gray, Arthur Macrae, Cecil Parker, Leueen Macgrath, John Warwick. Based on the novel Getaway (1932), by Leslie Charteris (also a co-screenwriter). Director: Leslie Fenton.

   Whenever a series character such as Simon Templar, known more familiarly as The Saint, decides to go on a vacation trip, say to Europe, you can bet your last bottom dollar that as soon as he and his companions check into their hotel, their paths will cross those of some evil ones.

   Nazis, in this case, or so one suspects, as I do not believe they were ever identified as such – as well as an adventure involving several deaths and a mysterious music box that is the key to something – that something never revealed, of course, until way at the end of the movie, which by that time, we may not care any more.

   Luckily the movie is just over 60 minutes long, as very little of what happens makes any logical sense, but as they say in France, it’s fun while it lasts. The was the first of two chances that British actor Hugh Sinclair had to impersonate The Saint, and if you’d like to know my impression, I think he was far too stiff and formal to be what I think of as the dashing and debonair hero I remember from the books.

   Patricia Holm, Simon’s close companion who was in the book Getaway, does not show up in this filmed version. She’s replaced instead by a reporter named Mary Langdon who is played by husky-voiced Sally Gray, of whose vivacious performance I heartily approved – feminine but just brash enough to be a fitting replacement for Miss Holm, although in the movies it is a strictly separate bedrooms kind of arrangement. In the books you’re never quite sure, but somehow you just know.
   

   I happened to be in New Jersey during the week in the middle of last month when an event took place in Manhattan which, had I known about it, would have led me to cross the Hudson and attend, and maybe get asked questions I couldn’t have answered on the spot.

   On Thursday, August 16, as part of its ongoing series of French crime thrillers, the Museum of Modern Art ran the little-known 1939 film Pièges (Traps), starring Maurice Chevalier and directed by Robert Siodmak (1900-1973). Born in Dresden to Jewish parents, Siodmak wisely left Germany for France soon after Hitler came to power and, after completing Pièges, left France for a new life in Hollywood as a specialist in what became known as film noir.

   Our interest here is in the skein of connections between Pièges, its director, and the most powerful of all noir authors, Cornell Woolrich.

   First, the film’s springboard situation. After several young Parisian women mysteriously disappear, the police suspect that their adversary is a serial killer who finds his prey by placing newspaper ads seeking single young women. The cop in charge of the cases enlists the lovely taxi-dancer who roomed with the latest victim to go undercover, answer some of those ads, and serve as bait for a trap.

   Sound familiar? To my ears the echoes of Woolrich’s pulp classic “Dime a Dance” (Black Mask, February 1938; first collected in The Dancing Detective, 1946, as by William Irish) are as loud as the roar of the sea, although to the best of my knowledge no one has commented upon the resemblance in print or on the Web.

   Introducing Pièges to the MoMA audience, curator Laurence Kardish mentioned that the print, with new English subtitles, had arrived from France just two hours earlier. If the film had ever been shown in the U.S. before, it came and went in a blink.

   Among the huge audience listening to Kardish was noir connoisseur Kurt Brokaw, who in an email (not to me) described “the first meandering hour” of the film as “more florid melodrama than noir… Chevalier sings and mugs and mopes around and is such a pain. The femme Marie Dea is good, but the picture seems to run forever.”

   Eventually, Brokaw pointed out, the film assumes a noir look and feel — and takes on a strong resemblance to Woolrich’s classic suspense novel Phantom Lady.

   The problem here, as most Woolrich lovers know, is that that novel first appeared in hardcover in 1942, three years after Pièges. As they say in the cafés of Montmartre, was ist hier los? Could Woolrich have lifted Phantom Lady’s plot from a French film that had lifted its springboard situation from a Woolrich story?

   When Brokaw’s correspondent invited me to weigh in on the issue, I replied that the original version of Phantom Lady was Woolrich’s short novel “Those Who Kill” (Detective Fiction Weekly, March 4, 1939).

   The pub date would make it seem more likely that Pièges borrowed from Woolrich than the opposite. And when you factor into the equation that “Those Who Kill” takes place in France–!

   At this point our conversation was joined by West Coast noir maven Eddie Muller, who told us that the Pièges/Phantom Lady connection was not a new discovery but had been discussed by Deborah Alpi in her 1998 book on Siodmak.

   According to Alpi, the French film was based on the trial and conviction of a young German intellectual named Eugen Weidmann, who had murdered several women traveling in France.

   Time out for a sidebar. Weidmann was the last criminal in France to be publicly guillotined. The execution took place in 1939, the same year Siodmak made Pièges, the same year Woolrich wrote his classic “Men Must Die” (Black Mask, August 1939; usually reprinted as “Guillotine”), which is about a French criminal desperately trying to avoid his date with the headsman. Coincidence, or had Woolrich been reading about the beheading of Weidmann?

   As if our skein weren’t tangled enough already, there is one final knot. When Phantom Lady was itself filmed, in 1944, would anyone care to guess who got the job directing the picture? Yes, it was Robert Siodmak.

   However we interpret this sequence of events, we seem to be stuck with some coincidences worthy of Woolrich himself, and maybe even of Harry Stephen Keeler. Someday I’ll track down Alpi’s book, and also a DVD of Pièges if there is one.

   Anyone who sampled Boston Blackie on YouTube after reading my last column doesn’t need to be told that it was hardly a detective program at all but much more like an action-packed Western series set in the present, i.e. the early 1950s.

   Also accessible on YouTube is another series of the same vintage which is closer to the detective genre and even features reasoning of sorts, but I didn’t care for it 60 years ago and still don’t today.

   The 39-episode Front Page Detective was produced by small-screen pioneer Jerry Fairbanks (1904-1995), first broadcast on the short-lived Dumont network in 1951 and rerun times without number on local stations throughout the rest of the Fifties.

   The title came from a pulp true-crime magazine but its protagonist, café-society columnist and amateur detective David Chase — described as a sleuth with “an eye for the ladies, a nose for news, and a sixth sense for danger” — was created especially for TV.

   â€œPresenting an unusual story of love and mystery!” the unseen announcer would purr in dulcet tones at the start of each episode. His introduction concluded with: “And now for another thrilling adventure as we accompany David Chase and watch him match wits with those who would take the law into their own hands.”

   Starring as Chase was one-time matinee idol Edmund Lowe (1892-1971), a name familiar to moviegoers for a third of a century before his entry into television. During the 1920s he specialized in suave romantic roles complete with waxed mustache, but the biggest boost in his film career came when director Raoul Walsh cast him opposite Victor McLaglen in What Price Glory? (Fox, 1926), first of the Captain Flagg-Sergeant Quirt military comedies.

   Lowe’s foremost contribution to the detective film came ten years later when he portrayed Philo Vance in The Garden Murder Case (MGM, 1936), but he also played a New York plainclothesman of the 1890s opposite Mae West in Every Day’s a Holiday (Paramount, 1938).

   By the early 1950s Lowe had begun to show his age, and in Front Page Detective he looked all too convincingly like a man of almost sixty who’s determined to pass himself off as 25 years younger.

   In many an episode he’d romance the woman in the case, rattle off a few deductions — once he reasoned that a letter supposedly from an Englishwoman was a forgery because the writer used the U.S. spelling “check” rather than the British “cheque” — and then collar the villain personally after a pistol battle or fistfight underscored by Lee Zahler’s background music for Mascot and early Republic serials.

   Supporting Lowe were Paula Drew as Chase’s fashion-designer girlfriend and crusty George Pembroke as the inevitable stupid cop. Appearing in individual episodes were such stalwarts of TV’s pioneer days as Joe Besser, Rand Brooks, Maurice Cass, Jorja Curtright, Jonathan Hale, Frank Jenks and Lyle Talbot.

   Filming was 99% indoors, on some of the cheapest sets ever seen by the televiewer’s eye. The director of every episode I’ve seen recently was Arnold Wester, whose name crops up almost nowhere else in TV history, hinting that it may have been an alias for producer Jerry Fairbanks.

   Whoever he was, his idea of directing was to point the camera at the actors and leave the room. Many scripts were by veterans of pulp detective magazines and radio like Robert Leslie Bellem and Irvin Ashkenazy, with an occasional contribution by Curt Siodmak, the younger brother of director Robert Siodmak — do I connect the items in this column or what? — and author of the classic horror novel Donovan’s Brain.

   Three episodes of the series — “Murder Rides the Night Train,” “Seven Seas to Danger” and “Alibi for Suicide” — are accessible on YouTube, and a few others can be found on various DVD sets in the bins of dollar stores.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPaS6qp3-A

   Most seem to have vanished but their gimmicks can often be deduced from the brief descriptions in crumbling issues of TV Guide. In “The Case of the Perfect Secretary” Chase tries to find out why Dr. Owens, the inventor of a synthetic cortisone, didn’t show up for a scheduled lecture. He finds Owens’ laboratory deserted and later discovers that the doctor has been murdered, the letter M imprinted on his forehead. It takes no Charlie Chan to figure out that the M is most likely a W.

   â€œHoney for Your Tea” finds Chase looking into the claim of a young actress that her fiancé was brutally murdered by her dramatic coach (Maurice Cass), a gnarled and crippled old man whose hobby is beekeeping. Anyone want to bet that this isn’t the old bee-venom poisoning shtick?

   In “The Other Face” Chase investigates the death of a handsome actor who “accidentally” fell from his penthouse terrace shortly after telling his psychiatrist of his desire to fall through space. If the murder victim didn’t turn out to be not the actor but his look-alike understudy, toads fly.

   Other episodes seem to have more intriguing story lines. In “Napoleon’s Obituary” a man named for Bonaparte dies the day after asking Chase to write his obituary, and the trail leads our sleuth to a house all of whose inhabitants sport the names of historic figures.

   In “Ringside Seat for Murder” Chase witnesses a bizarre murder during a wrestling match where one of the athletes (using the term loosely) is stabbed in the back with a poisoned dart while pinned to the mat by his opponent.

   Front Page Detective never pretended to be a classic, but for all its cliches and Grade ZZZ production values it was a pioneering effort in tele-detection that deserves perhaps a wee bit more than to be totally forgotten.

FINGERPRINTS DON’T LIE. Spartan Productions / Lippert Pictures, 1951. Richard Travis, Sheila Ryan, Sid Melton, Tom Neal, Margia Dean, Lyle Talbot, Michael Whalen, Karl Davis. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Early this year an old childhood buddy of mine gifted me with a box of perfectly-chosen DVDs: no classics, just a lot of stuff I kinda wanted to see but didn’t want to spend much money on. So far, the gem of the set has been Fingerprints Don’t Lie (Spartan Productions, 1951) an enjoyably bad film that passes too quickly for its deficiencies to grow irksome.

   Yeah, this is listed as “A Spartan Production,” and Spartan it is, but “Cheapo” might have caught the spirit better, as it was produced by Sigmund Neufeld and directed by Sam Newfield, the driving talents (for want of a better word) behind PRC, which has been widely celebrated as the most penurious studio in Hollywood. Fingerprints carries nobly on in the PRC tradition, with tacky sets, perfunctory acting, and a screenplay that seems more interested in killing time than actually getting anyplace.

   What makes it fun to watch, though (for me anyway) is the amusingly slip-shod nature of the thing. Instead of background music we get an organ soloist, just like in the old-time soaps, bridging scenes and setting moods with a turgid melancholia that broke me up every time.

   Then, late in the film, we get one of those cinematic conventions that normally go unnoticed: two characters talk about checking out a suspect’s apartment on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Hotel, and we cut to an exterior shot of the Metropolitan, the camera sweeps up to the sixth floor, and we cut to the two characters walking into the apartment.

   It’s the kind of movie-shorthand you’ve probably seen dozens of times and never noticed. Only in this case they couldn’t afford to send a cameraman out for an exterior shot, so they simply panned up a photograph of the hotel —- which might have worked except that no one noticed the photo was printed backwards and we see the words LETOH NATILOPORTEM in mirror-image!

   Still later, the gaffes come fast and funny as the Police close in on the Crime Boss and his Moll in a rather economical–looking suite. When they tell the baddie he’s going Downtown, the obliging Moll opens her purse, ostensibly for lipstick, but holds it up what seems like an eternity as he sees the gun inside and they exchange significant glances. At some length.

   Much later (it seems) he reaches inside the purse and fumbles around for several seconds before finally pulling the gun out — upside down! Whereupon he spends several more seconds getting it pointed at the cops, who promptly register surprise. Now that’s acting!

   Following a bit of stand-off, the Crime Boss eventually shoots a cop, who bends sharply forward, as if hit in the stomach, then apparently remembers some long-ago instruction from the director, straightens up and grabs his supposedly-wounded shoulder. Bullets fly (or rather, bullet-type noises fill the soundtrack) till our bad guy (WARNING!) “falls” out a window.

   Actually, we see him slide out the window-set, lie down on a not-quite-hidden platform and roll out of view. Which at least gets him mercifully out of this turkey.

   I should perhaps add that the unfortunate actors in this thing at least carry on manfully, ignoring the paucity of their surroundings and the deficiencies in the script. In one scene, the prosecutor is played by Tom Neal, who would soon be facing a prosecutor himself. An actor named Sid Melton gamely struggles to apply comic relief as a newspaper photographer who can’t work a camera, and Karl “Killer” Davis makes a rather effective Hood. Altogether a game bunch, and it’s just a pity they had so little to work with.

Editorial Comments:   This film, if you would like to obtain a copy, is easily available on DVD, as part of a two-for-one “Forgotten Noir” pair of offerings. See the image above. I’ll Get You, with George Raft and Sally Gray, is the main feature, with Fingerprints getting only second billing (in very small print).

   Also worth noting, as Dan has already pointed out in a comment following Michael Shonk’s recent review of Philo Vance, Detective, this is one of the movies that was re-titled (as Fingerprints) and edited down to less than thirty minutes in a syndicated package of films sold to TV stations in the early 1950s.

NEWS IS MADE AT NIGHT. 20th Century Fox, 1939. Preston Foster, Lynn Bari, Russell Gleason, George Barbier, Eddie Collins, Minor Watson, Paul Harvey, Richard Lane, Charles Lane, Betty Compson, Paul Fix. Screenplay: John Larkin. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   Of all the thousands (millons?) of sites on the Internet, I believe the one I visit the most is IMDB, even more than Wikipedia, but excluding (of course) my own blog, the one you’re reading right now.

   Back in the olden days, you’d watch a movie on the late show, try to catch the list of credits as they flashed by, and if you were lucky, you might recognize some the cast from other pictures you’d seen them in. You’d know the top two or three stars, of course, but not the ones listed any farther down than that.

   For example, you might have known who Preston Foster and Lynn Bari were, but the rest of the names in the credits above? Mission: Highly Unlikely. I’ll let you have the honors on seeing what you can learn about them, but they were all professionals in the movie business, with lots of credits, and they – all of them – are part of what make this relatively low-budget movie so enjoyable.

   Preston Foster and Lynn Bari are included in that last comment, of course, but what IMDB cannot do is help you find out what other movies they may have made together, unless there’s some way to do that that I don’t know about. What I do know is that they teamed up once before, in a movie called Chasing Danger, and that’s because I reviewed it here on this blog earlier this month.

   I enjoyed watching that one, but all in all, I think I enjoyed this one more. In fact, I know I did, because News Is Made at Night falls into the category of a detective mystery tackled by a pair of newspaper people, one of my favorite kind of stories — lacking a PI anywhere in sight, that is.

   Foster plays the hard-nosed editor who isn’t above the cheapest of tricks to get a story (publishing phony affidavits on the front page to stir up trouble; using an extension line to impersonate the acting governor to grant a reprieve to a convicted killer at the last minute; that sort of thing) while Lynn Bari plays the brash lady reporter whom Foster won’t hire because he doesn’t hire women.

   Lynn Bari, of course, won’t be put off for any reason anything like that, nor is she above a little minor blackmail when she gets wind of one of Foster’s schemes.

   Any movie that begins with a small plane strafing a prison yard has something going for it already, but the snazzy snap crackle and pop of the “animosity” between Foster and Miss Bari keeps the movie moving right along, even though the plot itself is rather ordinary and somewhat confusing, at that.

   (Something to do with a gang of gangsters trying to run a town, or are they merely dirty politicians? Either way, they are all busy trying to gun each other down for most of the film’s 70 minute length.)

   But believe it or not, there is a pretty good detective story that emerges from all this gang-oriented violence – not one worthy of a Christie or Carr, mind you — but if you’re a fan of detective fiction more than out and out crime fiction, you’ll find the ending satisfactory in that regard too — as well as the romance we all know is what this movie is really all about.

PostScript:   I am amazed at how many posters and movie stills I found of this slightly obscure film — more, in fact, than I could use. On the other hand, there are no reviews or external links on IMDB to this movie. This one will be the first.

WILLIAM LUHR – Raymond Chandler and Film. Frederick Ungar, hardcover/softcover, 1982; bibliography and index, photographs, filmography. Florida State University, trade paperback, 1991.

AL CLARK – Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. Proteus, hardcover/softcover, 1983; index, filmography. Silman-James Press, trade paperback, 1996.

   I have paper editions of both these books: the Luhr is a 5-1/2 x 8″ yellowback, the cover sporting a portrait of Chandler set into an oval frame next to a pulp illustration; the Clark is a large-sized 8 x 10-3/4″ book, the cover featuring a brown hat with a revolver resting on the brim.

   The Luhr pages are densely packed with text in small type, while the Clark is profusely illustrated with stills, lobbycards and other advertising material for the films. Luhr is an associate professor of English and film at St. Peter’s College, and Al Clark is a Spanish-born publicist and magazine editor who is currently creative director of the Virgin Records group, based in London.

   The copy for Clark’s biography is probably written by him and is a tongue-in-cheek view of his life; Luhr’s credentials are presented soberly. The casual reader is likely to assume that Luhr is writing a serious study of Raymond Chandler’s Hollywood career and that Clark has put together an album for the film buff.

   In fact, both books are valid contributions to the literature on Chandler’s Hollywood years. Luhr’s approach is largely analytical, a close reading of his films. Clark went to Los Angeles where he interviewed people involved in the films and people who knew Chandler, and his narrative is a mixture of production information and film analysis.

   Clark unfortunately only cites his sources in his preface: there are neither notes nor bibliography. He seems more sensitive than Luhr to information furnished by people like Leigh Brackett, but both men communicate their enjoyment of the films and of Chandler’s fictional world, and I would not want to be without either book.

   The layout on the Clark book is handsome, and the stills, not the tiny postage stamps one often sees, are generously displayed in an attractive format. I compared the two accounts of The Long Goodbye, and while they are not perfectly congruent they are in general agreement, with, as one would expect, Luhr going into greater detail about the film and Clark more enlightening on the actual production. He incorporates a lengthy interview with Nina Van Pallandt into the chapter, and it is the insight furnished into the making of the film that makes Raymond Chandler in Hollywood a more intimate look at the Raymond Chandler film world.

DEAD RECKONING. Columbia, 1947. Humphrey Bogart, Lizabeth Scott, Morris Carnovsky, Marvin Miller, Wallace Ford. Screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Steve Fisher, based on a story by Gerald Adams and Sidney Biddell, who also produced. Director: John Cromwell.

   Humphrey Bogart spent most of his career at Warner Brothers, where all his best films were produced. From The Petrified Forest to The African Queen, and all the way through The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, and countless others, when you think of a Bogart Movie, you are probably thinking of the Warners’ ambiance: the stock company of supporting players, cameramen, composers and all the other technicians, who contributed so much to the Bogart mystique.

   For some reason, though, Warner’s decided in the late 40s to loan their top male star to Columbia, the smallest of the Major studios. It was run in those days by Harry Cohn, a man of epochal unpleasantness, whose massive funeral prompted the comment, “Give the people what they want and they’ll come out for it.”

   Under his reign, Columbia was Home to Frank Capra and the Three Stooges, with most of its product canted toward the latter end of the scale. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that when Cohn got hold of a good thing he milked it dry, and turned out not a few classics in the process.

   So when they got their hands on Humphrey Bogart for a single picture in 1946, Columbia beat their live horse for all it was worth, by hiring a corps of writers to steal all the best bits from Bogie’s biggest hits, and surrounding him with (mostly unknown) character actors, who somehow managed to look and act like a close approximation of the Warners Stock Company. The result was the Ultimate Bogart Picture.

   Dead Reckoning is not particularly witty, not noticeably intelligent, and not at all original, yet it has a certain memorable quality all its own: It contains so many elements from so many (better) Bogart movies, that it somehow becomes the apotheosis of them all.

   The plot, as nearly as I can determine, involves the efforts of cynical, world-weary Rip Murdock (Bogie, of course) to clear the name of a dead army pal, a quest that takes him to one of those echt Film Noir cities populated by Dumb Cops, Cultured Gangsters, Sadistic Goons, Regular Joes, and a blonde, husky-voiced femme fatale played by Lizabeth Scott, a cross between Lauren Bacall and Eugene Pallette.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL1X3s1R0cE

   All of the above, replete with beatings, gambling joints, frame-ups and shoot-outs, gets served up with more precision than originality, accompanied by a Chandleresque voice-over narration that strains its metaphors so hard you can hear their knuckles turning white. (Like that one.)

   Yet if you like Bogart Pictures, it’s hard not to enjoy Dead Reckoning, thanks mainly to John Cromwell, a director who deserves a digression all his own:

   Cromwell has even less of a reputation than Michael Curtiz, as Hollywood Directors go, and holds an even smaller claim to Personal Style, yet he directed films that somehow outshone the classics of better-known auteurs, perhaps because he never made a fetish of Originality.

   Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Since You Went Away, Algiers, Made for Each Other, Son of Fury and The Enchanted Cottage all bear comparison with better-known films like Young Mr. Lincoln, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Casablanca, and his The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and Caged are arguably the best Swashbuckler and Prison films Hollywood ever produced, even if they came too late in their cycles to be considered “Influential.”

   When Columbia turned to John Cromwell to make a film in the Classic Bogart Mold, they knew what they were doing. Cromwell approaches Dead Reckoning totally undaunted by the cliched script and predictable story line.

   He gives each tried-and-true scene the freshness that Hawks, Curtiz and John Houston brought to them a few movies back, and backs off at all the right moments to allow his star enough room for the well-known mannerisms, wise-cracks and reaction shots that Bogart buffs dote on.

   The result is a film that seems familiar the first time you see it, but none the less likable for that. I didn’t respect Dead Reckoning the morning after I saw it, but I suspect I’ll sleep with it again.