WITHOUT A TRACE. 20th Century Fox, 1983. Kate Nelligan, Judd Hirsch, David Dukes, Stockard Channing, Jacqueline Brookes, Keith McDermott. Screenwriter: Bess Gutcheon, based on her novel Still Missing. Director: Stanley R. Jaffe.

   One of the things that has always struck me in the classic “Damsels in Distress” (DID) films is the almost total absence of women other than the star. DIDs attract either psychos or sympas but never, or almost never, another woman.

   However, the revolution in social roles has not gone unnoticed by filmmakers, and a recent example of the DID film reflects some of the changes. Without a Trace, a film version of Bess Gutcheon’s Still Missing, based on the real-life story of the still unsolved disappearance of a six-year-old boy on his way to school, was promoted by our local critics as an entertaining, well-made film.

   In the face of overwhelming apathy, the film was held over for two or three desultory weeks and then shunted off to the Regency Square, where I saw it on a Friday night with a substantia1 family audience.

   Without a Trace stars British actress Kate Nelligan (who earned her credentials as a DID specialist in Eye of the Needle) and Judd Hirsch. playing the police lieutenant who’s put in charge of the investigation when Nelligan reports her son missing.

   As we were asked to believe that stewardess Day could be prompted into landing a plane [in Julia, reviewed here], so are we asked to believe that Nelligan is a university English professor who teaches a course in modern poetry in which she lectures to a sizable audience of over-age actors, in the kind of amphitheater that in my part of the university world is only used for science courses. (Does anyone in Hollywood have any idea what has happened to registration in literature courses in the past decade?)

   My wife pointed out to me that the quote attributed, during a lecture on Robert Frost, to Pope was actually from Emerson, but I found the slip (for which we should really hold the screenwriter responsible) engaging and a reminder that no film based on “real life” is real and that a British actress posing as a professor of American literature in an American university is, after all, only playing.

   (The British usually are much better at playing Germans than they are at playing Americans. The current PBS series, Private Schulz, presents a Germany completely inhabited by British accents. I’m looking forward to the episode in which Private Schulz, “disguised” as an Englishman, is set down in wartime England where he must play a German impersonating an Englishman. The dilemmas posed for the hapless English actor are mind-boggling.)

   In Without a Trace, Nelligan has a mother, a best friend, and some sympathetic women neighbors, but true to the demands of the DID film, she is abandoned by all of them, and at the moment of crisis she is alone, without even the male policeman apparently willing to listen to her.

   And it is at this moment, when everything seems hopeless and she’s almost ready to give up, that a deus ex machina is introduced to turn the situation around. And, since these are the eighties, the deus is a dea.

   In the Doris Day film, Doris hung in until the very end, and although the men are, at times, almost literally propping her up to get her out of the Perilous Predicament, the Star is always center stage.

   In this example of female New Cinema, the star is allowed to go off-stage during the climactic chase. This permits the Inferior Male (Hirsch) to redeem himself but also involves one of the most unlikely coincidences (“Daddy, let’s go to the park”) and extreme double-takes that I’ve suffered through since the days of the Monogram serials.

   Nelligan is attractive and probably intelligent, and Hirsch is fine, but this DID variation finally succumbs to the same weakness that plagued the romantic DID vehicles: implausibility. And the virtues of Without a Trace — the good cast, fine photography, and tragic but not unusual situation — only serve, finally, to expose rather conceal the threadbare plotting.

Previously on this blog:   DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, PART ONE (Julia, 1956).

Editorial Comment:   The author’s book and the movie are based on the true-life disappearance of Etan Patz, who went missing in New York City’s Lower Manhattan on 25th May 1979. On May 24, 2012, Police Commissioner Kelly announced that a man was in custody who had implicated himself in the Patz disappearance. According to a New York Times report from 25 May 2012, the police had at that time no physical evidence to corroborate the man’s confession.

  THE COUNTERFEITERS. Conn Pictures, 1948. John Sutton, Doris Merrick, Hugh Beaumont, Lon Chaney Jr., George O’Hanlon, Robert Kent, Herbert Rawlinson, with Joi Lansing, Scott Brady (as Gerard Gilbert). Producer: Maurice Conn (also original story). Director: Sam Newfield (as Peter Stewart).

   The nominal star of this minor B crime drama is John Sutton, who plays the part of a Scotland Yard policeman who comes to the US hoping to track down the source of a large supply of counterfeit money that’s flooding his country. Sutton had a long career in both the movies and TV, starting in 1936 on through 1961.

   But I’m sure that the name that caught your eye first in the credits was that of Hugh Beaumont, and believe it or not, he’s the bad guy in this one, the head of the gang of crooks the fellow from overseas is after.

   And “Beaver’s Dad” is as tough as they come. If it weren’t for the intervention of his girl friend (Doris Merrick) who’s also a member of his gang, Inspector Jeff MacAllister would be as dead as the proverbial doornail as soon as he walks off his plane.

   Margo Talbot (Merrick) seems to be as tough as Philip Drake (that’s Beaumont), who owns the plates that are producing the phoney moolah, but it’s obvious she’s working another angle. The only question is what that angle might be.

   Lon Chaney Jr and George O’Hanlon are in the movie a good percentage of the time, all in comedy relief, but unlike some comedy relievers, they’re actually funny.

   At seventy minutes, The Counterfeiters is longer than most B-movies were at the time, and with no time wasted, either. The ten extra minutes or so allows time for the plot to breathe, with a couple of good twists to boot. The story is also fairly clued, and in fact it’s relatively easy to catch on to what’s going on, but it would help if you’re paying attention.

   I enjoyed this one, perhaps needless to say.

THE HAT BOX MYSTERY. Screen Art Pictures, 1947. Tom Neal, Pamela Blake, Allen Jenkins, Virginia Sale. Director: Lambert Hillyer.

   There are a few remarkable things about this 45 minute movie, and the first is that it is a 45 minute movie, obviously the quick second half of a double feature on a Saturday matinee. The second remarkable thing is the opening scene, in which the four above-mentioned actors introduce themselves to the viewing audience and the characters they play. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

   One other remarkable thing, at least to me, is that this movie was produced and appeared in 1947. While watching it, I was assuming all way through that it was a much earlier film, one from perhaps around the time that Chester Morris was beginning his run of Boston Blackie pictures (1941), but no. It must have been the story line, which is straight from the budget B-mystery movies of the even earlier 1930s.

   Tom Neal plays private eye Rush Ashton, while Pamela Blake is his girl friend, secretary and assistant, Susan Hart. Allen Jenkins is “Harvard,” no last name given as I recall, is Ashton’s second-in-command, strangely enough, since “Harvard,” unable to get into Yale, seems barely able to steer himself across the street, where his girl friend Veronica Hoopler (Virginia Sale) owns and operates a hamburger joint.

   Not too surprisingly, it is only Miss Hoopler who has any common business sense, as it is from her that Ashton’s struggling PI agency must keep borrowing money to keep afloat. You must have come to the thought by now that at least half of this movie is played as a comedy, and if I’d kept track, I’d be willing to say that you are correct.

   Here’s the mystery portion: While Ashton is out of town on another case, a man in obvious disguise (glasses, phoney goatee) hires Susan to take his wife’s photograph with a camera disguised in turn as a hat box.

   Little does Susan know, but happily accepting the man’s thirty dollars, that inside the hat box is not a camera, but a gun.

   I’ll not say more. But surprisingly enough, Ashton does do some detective work in the case, the D.A. not being all that unfriendly, and the story is not a total disaster. If the script had been been revised so that the clues could have incorporated more into the story, instead of lumped into one great expository dump at the end — more viewers probably having figured it all out on their own anyway — this movie might have been — a contender? No, but something better than the (in all likelihood) throwaway second half of a double feature.

   Also surprisingly enough, the four players got to play the same roles all over again the following month, in a follow-up film titled The Case of the Baby-Sitter. While The Hat Box Mystery is readily available on DVD, copies of the second movie do not seem to exist, although one reviewer on IMDB must have seen it, as he complains in passing that Allen Jenkins may have gotten more screen time than Tom Neal.

   That’s rather discouraging news, but if a copy came along, would I watch? I don’t know what this says about me, but you bet I would.

[UPDATE] 05-08-12.   This review was first posted on this blog on May 30, 2008. I’ve bumped it up in time because a lively discussion has been taking place in the comments section over the last day or so. Not only has the conversation been lively, but it’s also been very informative. I thought the rest of you might like to know about it, rather than keep it buried, as it were, nearly four years in the past. I’ve altered and (hopefully) improved the selection of images, too.

THE CRIMSON KEY. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Kent Taylor, Doris Dowling, Dennis Hoey, Louise Currey, Ivan Triesault, Bernadene Hayes, Victor Sen Young. Original story and screenplay: Irving Elman. Director: Eugene Forde. Shown at Cinevent 39, Columbus OH, May 2003.

   This “B” film, independently produced by Sol Wurtzel for release by Fox back in 1947, was an entertaining (if somewhat muddled) crime drama, with Kent Taylor as private eye Larry Morgan attempting to sort out the conflicting loyalties (and dubious innocence) of the various characters (mostly women) who keep hiring him for what turn out to be motives that don’t make him a great favorite of the police.

   It was fun to see Dennis Hoey, the befuddled Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes series, as a befuddled husband, and Victor Sen Young, buried at the bottom of a very long list of credits (from which I resurrected him), registers strongly as a faithful, possibly sinister Oriental servant.

   Kent Taylor’s crisp performance, dotted with breezy one-liners, validated his star billing, and Doris Dowling, Bernadene Hayes, and Louise Currie, played (respectively) two women who hire Taylor, and his faithful, seldom paid secretary.

THE LAST CROOKED MILE. Republic Pictures, 1946. Donald Barry, Ann Savage, Adele Mara, Tom Powers, Sheldon Leonard, Nestor Paiva, Harry Shannon, Ben Welden, John Miljan, Charles D. Brown, John Dehner. Based on a radio play by Robert L. Richards. Director: Philip Ford.

   Don “Red” Barry, as he usually was billed – he got the nickname from playing Red Ryder in the 1940 serial – was 5’ 4 ½” tall, making him an easy comparison with Jimmy Cagney, with same on-screen persona: brash and cocky, but as someone on IMDB has pointed out, without the same degree of menace. In the 1940s he had mostly western roles before switching to a more varied list of credits when TV came along.

   In Last Crooked Mile, though, he plays a brash and cocky private eye named Tom Dwyer, who horns in uninvited on an armed robbery investigation to get a 10 percent reward for recovering the $300,000 that was stolen. The gang who pulled the job all died trying to make their getaway, and no one knows where the money went.

   The car, though, that three of them cracked up in has been restored and is on display in a carnival. Although the car was searched many times with no success, Dwyer thinks it’s a good place to start, and do you know what? He’s right.

   While chasing down and avoiding the various thugs and hoodlums who have the same idea, Dwyer meets two attractive women, which is one more than usual in short hour-length B-films like this. One is Adele Mara, who plays an old flame who resents being stood up too many times, and the other is Ann Savage (of Detour fame), who plays a nightclub singer and an old flame of the head of the gang who pulled off the robbery but who is now going straight.

   Although the hiding place for the money is no big secret, there are a couple of twists to the tale, and one of them is actually a fairly good one. There is a decent amount of action, some humor (maybe a little too much) and some singing. That plus a storyline that makes sense, and you have a good 60 minutes of entertainment. Not noir, by any means, but still entertaining.

WHISTLING IN THE DARK. MGM, 1933. Ernest Truex, Una Merkel, Edward Arnold, John Miljan, C. Henry Gordon, Johnny Hines, Joseph Cawthorn, Nat Pendleton. Screenwriter/director: Elliott Nugent.

   If you have seen His Girl Friday with Rosalind Russell, you might remember the pretentious little pipsqueak poet whose desk Cary Grant tries to steal. That part was played by Ernest Truex, a busy character actor specializing in milquetoast roles, who once actually starred in a film, Whistling in the Dark, a second feature served up in lavish MGM style, with Edward Arnold (who starred with Truex on Broadway in this), Una Merkel and a host of gangster-types.

   The plot has Truex as a mystery writer eloping with heiress Merkel when they blunder into a house full of crooks — who are plotting to murder somebody. Truex is quickly drafted into service as plotter-in–chief, and his efforts to devise a scheme, foil the scheme, and escape with Merkel form the basis of a mostly fast-moving hour or so.

   Truex plays off his typecast meekness to good effect against menacing actors like Nat Pendleton and C. Henry Gordon, Una Merkel is charmingly simple and sexy in her underclothes, and Edward Arnold radiates ruthless geniality with his usual aplomb.

   I just wish they hadn’t tried to open this out by tacking on fifteen minutes of rather lackluster gangster-movie stuff at the start. It slows things down considerably.

SMOOTH AS SILK. Universal Pictures, 1946. Kent Taylor, Virginia Grey, Milburn Stone, John Litel, Jane Adams, Danny Morton, Charles Trowbridge, Theresa Harris. Remake of the film A Notorious Gentleman (1935). Director: Charles Barton.

   I don’t know, but if you were to ask me, the movie theaters in the US during 1946 and 1947 were filled with an abundance of crime films just like this one, filmed in black-and-white and on a budget and therefore considered by many to be “noir” looking back today.

   But not by me, not really, not in this case. There’s no sense of “doom” nor “fate” in Smooth As Silk, only a whole lot of crooked activity going on by people that ought to have known better, but of course they don’t, starting with Kent Taylor’s character, a lawyer you might even call shady, simply because he can get a rich man’s nephew, a drunken playboy, acquitted from a charge of manslaughter, simply by coming up with a couple of mighty convenient witnesses.

   Or maybe it is noir, since his success in the courtroom does not carry over to his love life, as the uncle (aka the rich man) repudiates his side of deal and refuses to consider Taylor’s girl friend (Virginia Grey) for the part he promised to do so for her. Whereupon the girl friend’s true colors come out, since she really does want the part and decides to make a play on her own, or make that two plays, and either way, no pun intended.

   Things turn sour for him, in other words, and quickly. When the rich uncle is found murdered, there are several ways the D.A. (played by Milburn Stone, who is also making a play for the would-be actress’s kid sister, Jane Adams) can decide to play the investigation, and that goes for the killer as well. The title of the movies refers, I believe, to Kent Taylor’s character, but as slick as he is, he can’t find a way out of this one.

   As you can see, I’m sure, there is a lot of plot to this story, just over 60 minutes long. There’s no depth to the characters, needless to say, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch, should you ever come across it, wherever your travels may take you.

PASSPORT TO SUEZ. Columbia, 1943. Warren William, Ann Savage, Eric Blore, Sheldon Leonard, Lloyd Bridges, Lou Merrill, Jay Novello, Sig Arno. Director: Andre de Toth. Shown at Cinevent 35, Columbus OH, May 2003.

   This was Warren William’s eighth (and final) appearance as The Lone Wolf and the close-ups showed him looking haggard and worn. His urbane performance was professional but tired, and I’m chagrined to say that Eric Blore’s antics as Lanyard’s sidekick, Jameson, went a bit overboard in trying to compensate for William’s lethargy.

   The film also suffered from the same flaw that beset the script for Cinecon’s Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back [last Labor Day], variations on the HIBK device in which a character (usually a supporting character) repeatedly falls into the same trap.

   On the plus side, Sheldon Leonard played a suave cabaret owner (I wonder where the idea for that came from?) with connections on both sides of the law, and a trio of second bananas (Lou Merrill, Jay Novello, Sig Arno as Rembrandt, Cezanne and Whistler, respectively) showed a laudable attempt to raise the cultural level of the film.

   Ann Savage was regrettably underused and Lloyd Bridges was a bland accomplice of the bad guys, in an early role for the actor.

   Clearly, a disappointing entry in the series, but probably a better choice for the afternoon than either the Gildersleeve film or Henry Aldrich Haunts a House, the radio-based films that preceded and followed Passport.

Editorial Comment: Apparently the whole movie can be watched on YouTube, beginning with Part One here.

   When the present loses its savor, turn to the past. I recently reread a suspense novel first published in my childhood and first encountered something like 45 years ago. I remembered very little about it except that it hadn’t impressed me much back in the Sixties. It still doesn’t, but some aspects of it merit space here.

   The byline on the first edition of Fallen Angel (Little Brown, 1952) was Walter Ericson but the author was Howard Fast (1914-2003), who is best known for mainstream novels like Spartacus and for his Communist affiliation, which sent him to prison for three months during the McCarthy-HUAC era.

   According to his memoir Being Red (1990), he decided to present his first crime novel under a pseudonym because in those years of Red Menace paranoia he was afraid publishers would soon be boycotting all books by openly Marxist writers like himself.

   Then some patriotic munchkin at Little Brown tipped off the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover himself called the CEO with the message that it was okay for the book to appear under Fast’s own name but that the house would be in trouble if it came out under a pseudonym. With the book already printed and bound, the dust jacket copy was hastily revised to announce that Ericson was Fast’s newly minted byline for mystery fiction.

   Critical reaction ran the gamut. Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review called the book “something short of sensational… [It] has a few adroitly contrived pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner, but a limp, tired plot, an equally tired set of stock characters, rather heavy prose and unlikely dialogue, and a general air of never quite making sense.”

   At the other end of the spectrum, the reviewer for the Boston Herald found the novel “surprisingly absorbing and masterfully created…,” evoking a “mood that is often savage with a skein of madness.”

   The Michigan City News-Dispatch described it as “full of chills and thrills, ripe with suspense and psychological undertones.” The Cincinnati Enquirer praised the “good creepy atmosphere and excellent fast writing.” (Pun intended?)

   These and other raves were reprinted in two pages of front matter when Fallen Angel appeared in paperback, retitled The Darkness Within. This early Ace Double (#D-17, 1953) was bound together with the softcover original Shakedown by Roney Scott, who turned out to be PI novelist William Campbell Gault.

   Apparently no one tipped off J. Edgar this time: the byline on the Ace edition is Walter Ericson and there’s no hint anywhere that Fast was the author.

   The springboard situation here is as purely noir as in any Woolrich novel. The narrator, David Stillman, is in a Lower Manhattan skyscraper late one March afternoon when the lights suddenly go out and the building loses all power.

   Descending 22 stories by the fire stairs, he encounters a lovely woman who seems to know him well but whom he doesn’t know at all. He follows her into the bowels of the building but loses her. Out on the night street he finds that a renowned public figure who kept an office in the building has fallen 22 stories to his death.

   Arriving home, he discovers a gunman in his apartment who presents him with a forged passport and orders him to leave for Europe at once. All this in the first four chapters!

   Stillman soon becomes convinced that he’s been suffering from amnesia for the last three years, but in Chapter Five he visits an obese and grotesque psychiatrist who calls him a liar to his face:

   Whether Fast is right or not I have no idea but this passage seems to be a clear reference to Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941; filmed the following year as Street of Chance), which begins with the restoration of the protagonist’s identity after an amnesia lasting precisely three years.

   Fast devised a storyline squarely in the Woolrich vein, and left as much unexplained at the end as Woolrich ever did, but he simply didn’t have Woolrich’s awesome skill at making us live inside the skins of the hunted and the doomed, feeling their terror as they run headlong through the night and the city.

   David Stillman’s first-person narration constantly seeks to evoke a sort of existential dread — perhaps the threat of World War III and the fear of nuclear holocaust — but the style is absurdly pretentious and didactic:

   That last quartet of nouns illustrates another problem with the style: endless repetition. I’ll limit myself to two exchanges of dialogue, both from the climactic scene:

   And then:

   Multiply by hundreds and you’ll get it. The picture that is.

   Speaking of pictures, The Black Curtain was filmed the year after its publication but Fast’s novel didn’t make it to the big screen until after his post-imprisonment break with the Party.

   Mirage (1965) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, another member of the creative Left (although he avoided prison and salvaged his career by “naming names” before HUAC), and starred Gregory Peck and Diane Baker, with the performance of a lifetime by Walter Matthau as the hapless PI Peck consults.

   Dispensing with first-person narration, Dmytryk and screenwriter Peter Stone eliminate the novel’s stylistic faults, but the film never generates the powerful mood of the finest noirs of the Sixties, like Cape Fear and Point Blank.

   As a tie-in with the movie there came a paperback edition of the novel (Crest #d808, 1965), for obvious reasons retitled Mirage but now credited to Fast.

   The back cover is graced by an amusing six-word condensation of Tony Boucher’s Times review: “Pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner.”

   Just a few years later Mirage was loosely remade as Jigsaw (1968), directed by James Goldstone in a hallucinogenic visual style, with Bradford Dillman and Harry Guardino replacing Peck and Matthau.

   When Fast was in his early eighties I had a brief exchange of letters with him about his World War II court-martial novel The Winston Affair (1959) and the very different film version Man in the Middle (1964), which starred Robert Mitchum as a sort of Philip Marlowe in khaki. (Google my name and the movie title and you’ll find my University of San Francisco Law Review essay on that subject.)

   If only I had reread Fallen Angel back then and asked him about that book too!

THE BAT WHISPERS. United Artists, 1930. Chester Morris, Chance Ward, Una Merkel, Richard Tucker, Wilson Benge, Maude Eburne. Based on the play by Avery Hopwood & Mary Roberts Rinehart. Director: Roland West.

   This, if memory serves, is the film that inspired Bob Kane to create Batman, and I was much struck by the similarities between it and the Tim Burton film Batman with Michael Keaton: The Bat Whispers offers deliberately cartoonish sets, which the camera sweeps across like a hurtling winged thing; a nocturnal protagonist lurking about rooftops casting bat-like shadows; and a doppleganger relationship between a neurotic detective and a mad master criminal, who gets the last laugh in an eerie fadeout.

   Fine stuff, this, done with style and obvious relish, and a pleasure to watch.

   Unfortunately, Director Roland West (who was implicated in the death of his mistress Thelma Todd a few years later) occasionally has to pay attention to the Mary Roberts Rinehart play this was based on, at which times the action pretty much grinds to a halt while characters stand around and explicate.

   Also to its detriment, The Bat Whispers features Three (count ’em) Three “comedy” relief characters, each funnier than the next and all of them put together about as amusing as Hepatitis. Definitely a flawed film, then, but also quite engaging at times, with the Batman parallels an added interest.

   I should also make note of Chester Morris’s intriguing performance as the slightly-off-kilter Detective. No sane-on-the-surface madman, this, but a character whose carefully limned ticks get eerily unsettling very quickly. There’s a scene where he’s laying down the law to red herring Gustave Von Seyfertitz that drips with restrained menace.

   Chester Morris never really hit the Big Time, despite a couple of chances, ended up his career in things like The She Beast (’57) and is little remembered today, but after this and Three Godfathers (’36) I’ll be seeking out his films a bit more carefully.