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.

BEDELIA. British National Films, 1946. Margaret Lockwood, Ian Hunter, Barry K. Barnes, Anne Crawford, Beatrice Varley, Louise Hampton, Jill Esmond. Co-screenwriter: Vera Caspary (with Herbert Victor and Isadore Goldsmith) based on her novel of the same title. Director: Lance Comfort.

   I’m not sure if anyone could review this film without giving away more of the plot than you’d like to know – certainly more than I’d care to read myself – so take this as a [WARNING] that there’s a good strong possibility I may cross some sort of line you’d rather not have crossed, as far as you’re concerned.   (Personally I like to know as little about a movie I’m watching or a book I’m reading as I can get away with.)

   In one sense this is a straightforward and relatively minor crime novel, but if you have the chance to see this movie, I am willing to wager that you will agree that this is not so.

   We quickly learn that Margaret Lockwood’s character has just married Ian Hunter’s character, Charles Carrington. She’s young and beautiful; he’s an older, well-established type. Not exactly rich, but well enough off that we quickly know why she married him, or we think we do.

   Following her (and then them) around during their honeymoon in Monte Carlo with unknown intentions, however, is Barry Barnes’s character, Ben Chaney (on the right), insinuating himself into their life first with a small dog, then as an artist who’d like to paint her portrait. (She, Bedelia, does not like to have photographs of herself, but agrees to sit for Chaney to please her new husband.)

   We’d like to know that Bedelia is innocent of any wrongdoing, since Chaney’s persona is that of a sneaky weaselly sort of fellow, but she is far from convincing in the falsehoods she tells, and we fear the worse, even back in England when Charles needs to get back to work, where he’s assisted (and more than likely, secretly loved) by his secretary Ellen (Anne Crawford).

   Straightforward enough, as I said up top, but there is also a strange undercurrent going on in this movie. Eventually Bedelia’s lies catch up to her, but who will her husband believe? Bedelia, or the artist who’s also living under false representation?

   If you don’t sense what’s not precisely stated in the story line, you probably won’t make much of this movie, translated from Connecticut in 1913 in the book to England perhaps 25 years later. (The manor house snowed in during a storm makes one think of the standard cliche of the Golden Age of Detection, but no, that’s not the kind of mystery this movie is.)

   But there’s more to the story than exactly meets the eye, and as I said in my opening remarks, I hope I haven’t said more than I should have. And to their discredit, the other reviews I’ve read on this movie have almost always said more. I’m glad I didn’t read them before I watched the movie for myself. I enjoyed it.

Note:   To watch the first eleven minutes of the film, check out this YouTube clip here.

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Lynn Merrick, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Williard Robertston, William Demarest, Lester Matthews, Grady Sutton. Director: Leigh Jason. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

   This was the third of the Leigh Jason films that have become an eagerly awaited event at Cinecon. (The earlier films were Dangerous Blondes and Three Girls About Town.)

   A bevy of sorority sisters, chaperoned by Ann Harding (recovered from her tragic demise in East Lynne), drives to a mountain lodge where almost immediately Anita Louise, the most unpleasant member of the group, is murdered. Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes are the prime suspects as the cops arrive and the entire crew is prevented from leaving by a convenient storm.

   The humor is somewhat broader (and less effective) than in the other two films, but this was still a delightful film. The screenwriters (Karen DeWolf and Connie Lee) also wrote for the Blondie series, one of my early affections (or rather, Penny Singleton was the affection).

Editorial Comments:   My own review of this film appeared earlier on this blog. Check it out here. Of the three lobby cards shown below, only the first two are (as I recall) from the movie itself. I have a feeling that the one at the bottom (with the girls in bathing suits) is only a promotional pose.

PLEINS FEUX SUR L’ASSASSIN. Champs-Élysées Productions, France, 1961. English title: Spotlight on a Murderer. Pierre Brasseur, Pascale Audret, Marianne Koch, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dany Saval, Philippe Leroy. Screenplay: Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac. Director: Georges Franju.

   Boileau and Narejac are to me the most recognizable names in the credits above, but truthfully I know very little about either, except for the fact they wrote the novels on which the films Diabolique and Vertigo were based. They have a long list of other credits on IMDB (here or here ) but the two mentioned will probably catch your eye right away too.

   Georges Franju, the director, may be known to those who have been following the French film industry longer than I have. His most famous film may be Eyes Without a Face (1960), known in the US as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. I assume that if anyone knows more about him, they will tell us more in the comments. (Please do!)

   As for the players themselves, I shall embarrass myself even further, and say that only the name of Dany Saval is familiar. She made one or two films in the US, but no more than that. The one that came to mind right away was Boeing Boeing, a sexy comedy from 1965 with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis in the two leading roles.

   Moving on to the story. When an aging French aristocrat realizes that he’s dying, he hides away in small room behind a one-way mirror, the better to watch his befuddled heirs after his death. His motive is not clear, but perhaps he holds a grudge against all of them, as they cannot inherit until his body is found.

   There are six or perhaps eight of them at first, their number gradually begins to dwindle, their deaths occurring in mysterious ways, perhaps of accidents or natural causes, but more likely not. Strangely enough, the police do not seem to be suspicious, as there is no investigation to speak of.

   To obtain the funds they need to maintain the castle where they are now living, their plan is to produce a spectacular Son et Lumière show based on an old legend of a cuckolded husband and lord of the estate hundreds of years before.

   The story line itself, as described above, is fragmented and difficult to follow. Neither the screenwriters nor the director care to give any of the players any personality. They are only players in a game. If this were all the film had to offer there is no way I could recommend it to anyone — even those who have read this far!

   But the setting, the black and white photography, the atmosphere: all splendid, indeed. A spooky old castle filled with large and well-appointed rooms, staircases spiraling upward in the gloom, a sound and light show without parallel — including a suicidal fall from the highest tower at the climactic moment — hidden motives and fearful, wary eyes, that’s what I will remember, not the very basic story line — not even who the killer is, not at all.

NOTE:   A short three-minute clip can be found on YouTube here.

NIGHTMARE. United Artists, 1956. Kevin McCarthy, Edward G. Robinson, Connie Russell, Virginia Christine, Rhys Williams, Gage Clarke, Marian Carr, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Billy May and His Orchestra. Screenplay by Maxwell Shane, based on a story by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Maxwell Shane. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

    “We welcome Kevin McCarthy with a screening of this nifty noir mystery than (sic) crackles with the sense of paranoia that pervades much of Cornell Woolrich’s fiction.”

   Oh, my. The film was scheduled when the program committee was unable to get permission to show Death of a Salesman. It was neither nifty nor did it crackle, but the Woolrich novel at least provided an interesting plot (musician/composer McCarthy dreams he’s committed a murder and eventually discovers the dream is apparently true), and Robinson, somewhat miscast but making the best of it, plays the detective brother-in-law of McCarthy who sifts through the damning scenario to unravel the plot that has ensnared and almost brings down McCarthy.

   The location filming in New Orleans added some color to the film, and the appearance of Meade Lewis and Billy May spiced the film for their fans.

   McCarthy was interviewed at some length about his film and theater career, and he was less obstreperous as an interview subject than he was reputed to be in his Hollywood years. He’s probably best known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I don’t recall that he had much to say about the film.

   As prolific as Edward D. Hoch was — with over 900 short stories to his credit — the movie and TV media have made virtually no use of his output. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists just 9 films derived from his works (9/900 = 1 percent). No more eloquent testimony against the obtuseness of Hollywood can be adduced.

1. “Off Season.” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, May 10, 1965. With John Gavin, Richard Jaeckel, and Tom Drake. Based on Hoch’s story “Winter Run,” this is a nice little crime drama with a nasty twist. This show was the final one of the Hitchcock series.

2. It Takes All Kinds. Film, 1969, based on the story “A Girl Like Cathy.” With Robert Lansing, Vera Miles, and Barry Sullivan. Film critic Leonard Maltin describes it this way: “Fair double cross drama about Miles’ shielding of Lansing when he accidentally kills sailor in a brawl in Australia. Nothing special.”

3. “The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes.” Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, November 5, 1972. With Gary Lockwood, Joan Van Ark, and Chuck Connors. I’m sure I saw this one but don’t remember a thing about it.

    The TV series McMillan & Wife (1971-77) made good use of Hoch’s stories:

4. “Cop of the Year.” November 19, 1972. With Rock Hudson, Susan Saint James, John Schuck, Nancy Walker, and Edmond O’Brien. Based on “The Leopold Locked Room,” with John Schuck’s character doubling for Captain Leopold. Neat little impossible crime plot, with Schuck accused of murdering his ex-wife.

5. “Free Fall to Terror.” November 11, 1973. Guest stars: Edward Andrews, Tom Bosley, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Dick Haymes, James Olson, and Barbara Rhoades. Based on one of Hoch’s best stories (“The Long Way Down”), a businessman evidently crashes through a plate glass window, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground — three hours later.

6. “The Man without a Face.” January 6, 1974. Guest stars: Dana Wynter, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Donna Douglas, and Steve Forrest. Cold War espionage with a mystery slant.

    The French produced a mini-series in the mid-’70s:

7. Nick Verlaine ou Comment voler la Tour Eiffel. Five episodes, France, July-August 1976. If anybody knows anything about this production, please inform us.

   The British horror/fantasy series Tales of the Unexpected used a couple of Hoch’s stories as inspiration:

8. “The Man at the Top.” June 14, 1980. Introducer: Roald Dahl. With Peter Firth, Rachel Davies, and Dallas Cavell.

9. “The Vorpal Blade.” May 28, 1983. With Peter Cushing, Anthony Higgins, John Bailey, and Andrew Bicknell.

    — and, unless the IMDb list is woefully incomplete, that’s the extent of the film industry’s use of Edward D. Hoch’s stories.

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR. Monogram Pictures, 1942. Robert Lowery, Edith Fellows, John Miljan, Jan Wiley, Charles Jordan, George O’Hanlon, Vivian Wilcox. Director: Jean Yarbrough.

   There are a few reasons to watch this terrifically inept murder mystery movie, but the plot is not one of them. In recent months I’ve come to enjoy Robert Lowery’s performances, and seeing juvenile star Edith Fellow’s last movie before her comeback in television in 1949 comes as a distinct pleasure as well. (She was Polly Pepper of Five Little Peppers fame, for example, as well as one of Mrs. Wiggs children in the Cabbage Patch movie.)

   Lowrey’s a brash newspaper reporter in this movie, but he got the job only because his father is the commissioner and he has it only until he messes up, which his editor suspects is going to be right away. But luckily Bob Martin (that’s Lowery), college grad, knows sign language, which he uses to talk to a formerly uncommunicative prisoner after sneaking his way into jail to interview him. Unlucky for him, though, the guy behind the bars pulls a fast one, and uses a phony story to send a message in code to his lawyer.

   Why the elaborate scheme? Don’t ask. Martin’s next assignment is even more mind-boggling. He arrives too late to see Joyce Greeley being released from prison on parole, and she ends up dead, dumped on a suburban lawn and found by Martin as he nonchalantly walks by. Who’s Joyce Greeley, you ask? None other than the girl who was the subject of the coded message in the previous paragraph.

   Wait, wait, there’s more. Martin then happens across the dead man’s sister (Edith Fellows) in the bus station waiting for his sister to show up. Totally by accident, of course, and the sister has no idea why the bad guys are after her, nor even that her sister was in jail. (A propos of nothing, Ellen Farrell was at least a foot shorter than Robert Lowery, but they do make a good team together.)

   Some of the action takes place in a theater where a musical revue is being rehearsed, which gives Jan Wiley a chance to sing a couple of songs while some long-legged beauties show off their talents in the background.

   I’ll give this movie two stars (out of ten) and give you a break by telling you no more about the plot, which I admit had some promise, but as you know full well, not all promises are always kept.

MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Screenplay by Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Conner based on the novel Dividend on Death by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Forde.

   Lloyd Nolan plays Mike Shayne; Marjorie Weaver is the spirited female protagonist; Joan Valerie plays the femme fatale; Donald MacBride is the irascible, incompetent police chief (Peter Painter) with an even dumber but less irascible sidekick, Michael Morris; Walter Abel, Douglas Dumbrille, Clarence Kolb, and George Meeker impersonate a quartet of heavies and candidates for chief murder suspect.

   Irving Bacon, who was regularly flattened by Arthur Lake as he tried to deliver the mail to the Bumstead residence in the popular Columbia series has a cameo as a fisherman neatly manipulated by Shayne into concealing testimony that would have implicated the latter in the murder.

   This is a race-track, night-club mystery and is notable for two things:

   Some really dumb situations for Shayne (his car stalls at the murder scene as the police are arriving; he throws what he believes to be the murder weapon — his own gun — into the bushes from which he handily retrieves it the next day after the police have presumably searched the area; he sticks his head into a dark room into which a man with a gun has just fled and is knocked out by the mug; and in the hoariest and most predictably resolved plot gimmick in the film, he stages a mock murder using ketchup as blood, and when he attempts to play out his mini-drama, discovers that the ketchup has been enriched with some very real blood, from a fatal bullet wound).

   …And the introduction of a Little Old Lady detective (Elizabeth Patterson) whom he embraces at the end as his “partner” while he whispers to her, “And we’ll split the money.”

   I have not seen one of these Lloyd Nolan Shayne films in forty years. I would hope the others in the series have aged better. Patterson is a graceful actress who makes the best of an awkward role. She has read all the Ellery Queen mysteries and the Baffle Book and she keeps wanting to share a particularly difficult “baffle” with Shayne.

   Superior to The Gracie Allen Murder Case, to take an contemporaneous example, but you may not see that as a recommendation.

ARSÈNE LUPIN. MGM, 1932. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan, Tully Marshall. Adapted from the stage play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. Director: Jack Conway.

   John Barrymore plays Lupin and Lionel Barrymore is Inspector Guerchard, with Karen Morley playing a criminal who agrees to help Guerchard trap Lupin in exchange for her freedom.

   There is some disagreement among, the various characters on the proper pronunciation of “Arsène,” with Lionel the must skillful at mispronouncing it, but this is a charming film climaxed by a spectacular theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

   Morley, predictably, falls in love with Lupin; the Lupin character is laundered in the final scene to provide a conventional ending, and the transition from play to movie is not always successful. But John Barrymore plays the gentleman master criminal with an ease and casualness that give the film an illusion of freshness and spontaneity, while Morley is a beautiful and elegant foil to the two brothers.