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.

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.