Steve and David —

   Hi, it’s me again. I’m the one who suggested the recent “Man on the Run” lists which appeared on your blog, for which I am eternally grateful. They have been of enormous assistance.

   Here’s another question, based on a thought that came to me, one somewhere between screwball and noir. It is about a retired single man who places a Personal ad in a sailing magazine (this is very common) seeking a woman to sail around the world with him “as long as it’s fun.” He finds the right woman and they set off, he falls in love and they get married. But of course she has another husband who wants her to kill the new husband to collect the insurance.

    So it’s a noir on a boat.

    Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly come to mind but I’m sure I’m missing some good ones. Murder on the High Seas (1932, aka Love Bound) is very dated. Body Heat meets Dead Calm meets A Fish Called Wanda is probably what I’m going for.

   If there are any films you could recommend I would be even more eternally grateful. Thank you.

         Josh

       — —

   Steve here first. I believe the most recent variation of the “Man on the Run” movie lists was actually a “Couples on the Run” list, which you can find here. (There are links in that post that you can use to find most if not all of the earlier ones.)

   David Vineyard is much better at this than I am. Here’s his reply, which I received soon after I sent Josh’s new inquiry on to him:

DEAD CALM was the first to come to mind, but I can’t think of a lot of films with a similar premise. Most of the films with a sailing theme tend to be adventure films involving treasure or pearls, deep sea diving, and some tough skipper like John Payne (CROSSWINDS), Errol Flynn (MARA MARU), or John Wayne (WAKE OF THE RED WITCH).

John Sturges’s UNDERWATER with Jane Russell, Richard Egan, and Gilbert Roland is typical, but again it’s a treasure hunt movie, and existed mostly to exploit the then new technology allowing for extensive technicolor photography underwater.

There is a true story with a similar theme — minus the murder — Nicholas Roeg’s CASTAWAY from 1987 where Oliver Reed advertises for a woman to be marooned on a desert island with him and Amanda Donohoe answers the ad; based on Lucy Irvine’s book about her experiences. Oddly enough Irvine is every bit the knockout Donohoe is and the odder bits of the film are true.

As I said, there is no murder or crime — other than criminal stupidity on the part of Reed’s character — but you might pick up some ideas and Donohoe is nice to look at nude, semi nude, and in a bikini while the book is fully illustrated with color photos of Irvine in the same state.

You might also check out the miniseries AND THE SEA WILL TELL with Richard Crenna, based on Vincent Bugliosi’s book of the trial and investigation of a couple accused of murdering another couple on a yacht who were sharing a deserted island with them. Rachel Ward played Bugliosi’s client, on trial for murder. It used to show up regularly on cable and there may be a VHS or DVD.

Again, no murder, but THE LITTLE HUT with Ava Gardner, Stewart Granger, and David Niven has the wife, husband, and boyfriend all stranded on a desert island together after a shipwreck. Diverting little sex comedy handsomely shot in technicolor. At least you get to see what sort of a Tarzan Granger might have made.

Most of these are going to be set on islands rather than the boat.

A TOUCH OF LARCENY is a wry tale based on Andrew Garve’s THE MEGSTONE PLOT where Naval officer James Mason contrives to shipwreck himself on his holiday and be accused of treason while missing in hopes of making a fortune suing the British tabloids when he is rescued — everything goes wrong of course. You can check out my review here on the blog

A RAW WIND IN EDEN has wealthy Esther Williams plane crash and she is rescued on a remote island by Jeff Chandler where jealousy, murder, and every other complication ensues.

L’AVVENTURA by Michelangelo Antonioni is of course the classic film (skip the remake with Madonna) of a spoiled rich woman (Monica Vitti) ship wrecked with a crude sailor (Gabriele Ferzetti) .

At least a small section of ARRIVEDERCI BABY! features lonely hearts killer Tony Curtis and Black Widow Rossano Shiaffano trying to kill each other while sailing in a black comedy.

And you might check out CAPTAIN RON a particularly unfunny comedy in which Martin Short and family inherit a sail boat and take on captain Kurt Russell an eye patched drunken lecher for a vacation from Hell — if you are masochistic enough to sit through it.

Almost as bad is THE ISLAND based on Peter Benchley’s book about a modern man (Michael Caine) and his son whose yachting holiday is disturbed when they are taken hostage by latter day pirates. This is the one where Leonard Maltin’s terrible review noted “You know you are in trouble when David Warner is the most normal guy on the island.” He’s absolutely right, if anything he is too kind, though in fairness he has no lower rating than BOMB.

Again most are going to be the shipwreck theme more than the boat itself, everything from THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON (Kenneth More, Diane Cliento) — which was also a Bing Crosby musical PARADISE LAGOON — to SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON.

You might check out EBB TIDE, a tough little adventure film based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s story with Ray Milland, Oscar Homloka, and Lloyd Nolan and remade as ADVENTURE ISLAND with Rory Calhoun. Nolan is quite good as the monomaniacal madman in the original, shot in early color.

There is a little British film from the post war period where a honeymooning couple sailing to Calais pick up a ship wreck survivor and find themselves involved in a smuggling plot, but the name escapes me — it’s a slight and very short comedy.

And there is another with John Cassavettes (of all people) where a honeymooning couple try living on a small island in the Caribbean, but again the name eludes me — should be easy enough to find though as Cassavettes didn’t do a lot of comedy. Laurel and Hardy’s last feature involved them on a small boat, shipwrecked, and with a nuclear bomb if my memory is right.

Ship board crime and murder is a little better represented, with THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS (Carol Lombard and Fred MacMurray, reviewed here, DANGEROUS CROSSING (based on John Dickson Carr’s “Cabin B-13” with Jeanne Crain and Michael Rennie remade for television as TREACHEROUS CROSSING), THE GREAT LOVER ( Bob Hope and Rhonda Fleming), JUGGERNAUT (Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif battle an extortionist), DARKER THAN AMBER (Rod Taylor as Travis McGee), and THE LAST OF SHEILA (James Mason, James Coburn, Anthony Perkins …).

That last one is an outstanding mystery/suspense film with an all star cast including Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, and Raquel Welch and written by mystery fans Perkins and composer Stephen Sondheim (who collaborated on Broadway with Hugh Wheeler, one half of Q. Patrick).

And of course disaster at sea is well represented in all three films entitled TITANIC (1943, 1953, 1997), A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, THE LAST VOYAGE, SHIP OF FOOLS, VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (the last two more drama than disaster— save the emotional kind), ABANDON SHIP, ARISE MY LOVE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, GOLDEN RENDEZVOUS, CAPTAIN CHINA, KRAKATOA EAST OF JAVA (and it’s not East of Java, in fact it is West of Java), and Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT.

Hammond Innes THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE was filmed by Michael Anderson with Charlton Heston and Gary Cooper and involved the skipper of small salvage ship uncovering skullduggery at sea. BREAK IN THE CIRCLE (based on the novel by Philip Loraine), THE HOUSE OF SEVEN HAWKS (based on Victor Canning’s HOUSE OF TURKISH FLIES), NEVER LET ME GO (based on Andrew Garve’s TWO IF BY SEA), ACTION OF THE TIGER (based on John Welland’s novel), and A TWIST OF SAND (based on Geoffrey Jenkins novel) all deal with international intrigue and small boats,

S.O.S. PACIFIC is a solid little suspense film about a plane load of Grand Hotel types who crash on an island that is about to be used for nuclear test — Eddie Constantine (for once in his own voice), Pier Angelli, Richard Attenborogh (outstanding), and John Gregson star and Guy Green directed. Really nerve wracking suspense — sort of a South Pacific version of Dick Powell’s SPLIT SECOND.

Hopefully this will be some help. Nothing really fits quiet as well as DEAD CALM, but some of these are in the same general area. There are a handful of horror and sf films that come close — everything from THE CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON to some of the made for television Bermuda Triangle movies, but that list could go on forever, and I really don’t think you are interested in mutant sharks, zombies, aliens, and man eating fish.

But that’s all I can come up with off hand. Book wise you might try the novels of J.R.L. Anderson and Bernard Cornwell’s thrillers, they are to small boats what Dick Francis is to racing, and of course Charles Williams who wrote the novel DEAD CALM.

Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson books usually involve sailing too, and so do many of the thrillers in the Buchan mold by Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Jenkins, Wilbur Smith, Desmond Bagley, Eric Ambler (as Eliot Reed with Charles Rodda), Andrew Garve, and such.

SEVEN SINNERS. Gaumont British Pictures, 1936. Released in the US as Doomed Cargo. Edmund Lowe, Constance Cummings, Thomy Bourdelle, Henry Oscar, Joyce Kennedy, Felix Aylmer. Screenplay by Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launder; story by Arthur Ridley & Bernard Merivale based on the play and novelization The Wrecker by Arthur Ridley. Director: Albert de Courville.

   Tankerton Agency detective Edward Harwood stumbles on a body in his hotel room in Nice during Carnival and as quickly loses it, and Caryl Fenton (Constance Cummings) the insurance agent sent to fetch him to Scotland to solve a case of missing jewelry is convinced it’s all part of an alcoholic haze, and hustles him off to Scotland.

   Until they are both victims of a train wreck on the Riviera Express where the corpse Harwood lost shows up as one of the hundreds of victims.

   Learning from M. Turre, the Assistant Prefect of Police, that the wreck was deliberate Harwood and a reluctant Fenton are off to Paris and a trail that leads from an elegant Paris flat to London’s Guild Hall; to a small village in the West of England; to a man who died three years earlier but who they just met in Paris; to another train wreck to silence a doctor who falsified a death certificate; to the Pilgrims of Peace and a phony charity; and to a deadly confrontation on a train to Southampton where the Wrecker is determined to silence anyone who might lead to him — including Harwood and Fenton.

   It should come as no surprise if this fast paced thriller reminds you of some of Hitchcock’s thrillers of the period, such as The Thirty Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes, since screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder would go on to write and direct some of the best British films of all time.

   Among them, and rivaling Hitchcock in popularity and skills, are Green for Danger, State Secret (The Great Manhunt), The Lady Vanishes (with Alma Reville, directed by Hitchcock), The Green Man, She Played With Fire, Waterloo Road, and Belles of St. Trinian’s. Their last film was Agatha Christie’s Endless Night with Haley Mills and George Sanders in 1972.

   Seven Sinners, also known as Doomed Cargo when released in the US, is a fast paced, clever, and witty thriller with echoes of The Thin Man and first rate performances by Lowe and Cummngs.

   The film is based on the story (co-written with Bernard Merrivale), play, and novelization of The Wrecker by Arthur Ridley, a popular “barn burner” as such plays were known. Ridley specialized in these, also writing Ghost Train, another “barn burner” that became a hit film and was also novelized by Ridley (remade as the hilarious Runaway Bus with Margaret Rutherford).

   Edmund Lowe seemed to specialize in detective roles, playing Nick Carter, Philo Vance, Lawrence Blochman’s Inspector Prike (changed to Dyke in Bombay Mail), and Chandu the Magician, starting in films in 1915 and ending with George Cukor’s Heller in Pink Tights in 1960. Along the way he was Captain Quirt in What Price Glory?, his biggest role, and appeared in such films as Dinner at Eight, The Last Hurrah, The Great Impersonation, Dillinger, and Mister Dynamite. He was sleuth/reporter David Case on early television’s Front Page Detective.

   Constance Cummings played Harriet Vane opposite Robert Montgomery’s Lord Peter in Haunted Honeymoon, but fared much better in this and Blithe Spirit with Rex Harrison and Kay Hammond. Her scenes with Lowe have real crackle and snap to them, with a slight hint of the American screwball school well played by both actors.

   Albert de Courville was a successful director and producer (probably best known on this blog as the producer of The Shanghai Gesture). [Reviewed here. ]

   The train wrecks are well staged, and while there is some obvious model work and rear projection, they were state of the art at the time, and you can imagine the final train wreck with the train boring down head on had audiences jumping in the theaters of the time. It’s still pretty exciting stuff.

   The finale, a shoot out in a movie theater during a newsreel about the Wrecker, likely inspired the similar scenes in Hitchcock’s Saboteur and John Huston’s Across the Pacific. If it doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense it’s a well done set piece and a fitting ironic end as the Wrecker meets his fate while the newsreel announcer asks “Where is the Wrecker?”.

   One word of warning. When you are looking for this you are going to encounter the 1940 Tay Garnett John Wayne/Marlene Dietrich film Seven Sinners more often than this one. It’s a good film too, but nothing to do with this.

   The title refers to the conspirators in the scheme and the Wrecker himself, if you come up one short, listen carefully and you’ll discover there was an off screen murder and train wreck they mention that happens before the point where the film starts.

   Highest recommendations for this first rate comedy mystery. This is how it should be done, smart, witty, and moving at a gallop. Luckily the print available is very good despite being on the “gray” market and you can enjoy it in all its glory.

   See it. It’s well worth the effort.

THE BLACK DOLL. Universal Pictures/Crime Club Productions, Inc., 1938. Donald Woods, Nan Grey, Edgar Kennedy, C. Henry Gordon, Doris Lloyd, John Wray, Addison Richards, Holmes Herbert, William Lundigan, Fred Malatesta. Based on the novel by William Edward Hayes (1936). Director: Phil Karlson. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   The usual excellent program notes failed to include the name of the author of the book, and it was incorrectly listed as by “William Edward Haynes” in the credits on IMDb. Ellen Nehr’s Doubleday Crime Club Compendium provided the correct attribution, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the plot that showed that the film made some attempt to follow the novel.

   I say “some” because it was largely sabotaged by the performance by Edgar Kennedy as bumbling Sheriff Renick. And that’s a point I make with regret, since I’m a great fan of Kennedy, given the proper circumstance for his comedic gifts.

   The film begins promisingly in the remote mansion of recluse Nelson Rood (C. Henry Gordon), who lives with his sister Laura Leland (Doris Lloyd) and her son Rex (William Lundigan). Rood’s relationships with his family are dysfunctional, as he rules his small kingdom with an iron and unforgiving fist.

   The sudden appearance of a child’s toy, the titular black doll, arouses phantoms from his troubled past. When Rood is murdered that night, the police are summoned, with the arrival of Sherlff Renick and his antic crew dissipating the forbidding atmosphere that lent the film some tension and promise in the opening scenes.

   Donald Woods plays the detective Nick Halstead (already on the scene as the boyfriend of Rood’s daughter Marian played by a distraught Nan Grey) with some grace and a dash of humor, as he negotiates the obstacles posed by the sheriff’s ineptitude and those members of the cast who are expected to take the proceedings seriously and form a veritable phalanx of red herrings.

   As I recall, the other films in the Crime Club Series treated their material more seriously, if without enough distinction to make any of them figure in my pantheon of notable crime films.

   Universal’s Crime Club series:

THE WESTLAND CASE (1937)
THE BLACK DOLL (1938)
THE LADY IN THE MORGUE (1938)
DANGER ON THE AIR (1938)
THE LAST EXPRESS (1938)
THE GAMBLING SHIP (1938)
THE LAST WARNING (1938)
THE MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM (1939)
INSIDE INFORMATION (1939)
HOUSE OF FEAR (1939)
THE WITNESS VANISHES (1939)

[UPDATE] 09-15-10.   For more information on the movies in this series, including the books and stories they were based on, see Comment #3. Not all of the films were based on Crime Club novels.

COLLEGE SCANDAL. Paramount, 1935. Arline Judge, Kent Taylor, Wendy Barrie, William Frawley, Benny Baker, William “Billy” Benedict. Screenplay by Frank Partos, Charles Brackett & Marguerite Roberts, based on a story by Beulah Marie Dix & Bertram Millhauser. Director: Elliott Nugent.

   College Scandal sounds like a story ripped from today’s headlines or a typical 1930s musical with superannuated students indulging in sophomoric capers.

   And in fact, it starts off with Billy Benedict as a manic Mickey Rooney type whipping up a college musical revue. Then we go to the offices of the College Newspaper, where an earnest young editor ponders the ethics of running a story about a handsome teacher dating the campus flirt.

   Everything seems set for a mid-autumn night’s dream of misunderstanding, music and romance, when suddenly the editor turns up poisoned in his own office.

   Whoa! I didn’t see that coming. Nor the hints in the script about the campus flirt’s awkward relationship with her stepfather. Nor a strangling in the middle of a musical number. Or a wrinkle in the plot about death by hazing as College Scandal quickly turns into a fast-paced and quirky mystery that delighted this jaded viewer with every twist.

   No fewer than five writers worked on this (including Billy Wilder’s partner-in-wit Charles Brackett, and Bertram Milhauser, who worked on the Universal Sherlock Holmes series) and they all seem to have added something worthwhile without tripping each other up.

   Staffed with a cast of reliable “B” players, including Wendy Barrie and Kent Taylor, under the slick direction of Elliott Nugent, this turns into a real surprise, and a flick worth checking out.

SUSPENSE. Monogram, 1946. Belita, Barry Sullivan, Bonita Granville, Albert Dekker, Eugene Pallette. Story & screenplay: Philip Yordan; director: Frank Tuttle.

   Back in 1946, Monogram Studios, home of Sam Katzman, the Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi, made a bid for respectability with a couple of films noirs starring Barry Sullivan and skating star Belita.

   The Gangster bloats itself on pretension, but Suspense comes in right on the money, with a clever script by Philip Yordan and solid performances by a cast that includes Albert Dekker and Eugene Pallette.

   The story uses the framework of the rise-and-fall of a hustler, played by Sullivan with his usual assurance, who leeches onto a classy ice show run by Belita and her husband Dekker, playing a role he patented: the crook too smart for his own good.

   Things take off when Sullivan and Belita fall for each other, Dekker decides to kill at least one of them, and an old flame turns up from Sullivan’s past with romance and/or blackmail in mind.

   But that’s just the start of a clever, elliptical screenplay that implies more than it shows and keeps the viewer guessing for its entire length. The ice-dance numbers slow things down a bit — in fact they bring the whole story to a wheezing, protesting halt for minutes at a time — but they’re well-mounted and anyway that’s why God gave us the fast-forward button. Even with the interruptions, Suspense is a film to gladden all fans of gritty little B-movies.

   Editorial Comment:   The movie is available on DVD from Warner Archives.

THE CORPSE CAME C.O.D. Columbia Pictures, 1947. George Brent, Joan Blondell, Adele Jergens, Jim Bannon, Leslie Brooks, John Berks, Grant Mitchell, Marvin Miller, Una O’Connor. Screenplay by George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock, based on the novel by Jimmy Starr (1944). Directed by Henry Levin.

   When Hollywood jewelry and dress designer Hector Rose is murdered (shot at the studio, the sound covered up by a prison escape being filmed nearby), his body is shipped C.O.D. to the home of movie star Mona Harrison (Adele Jergens) whose numerological charts predicted a bad day, as she tells her butler, Fields.

   [ It’s too small for you make it out otherwise, but that’s a book on numerology that she’s reading over there on the right. Trust me.   — Steve.]

   She also calls on wanna-be boyfriend Joe Medford (George Brent), a fast talking newspaper man who isn’t above playing fast and loose with the facts to get a scoop.

   Joe calls in cop Lt. Wilson (Jim Bannon), who hangs around the studios, hoping the apparently starstruck detective will give Mona a break, while at the same time keeping some facts from him, like the dress fabric he saw Mona take from the packing case that contained Hector’s body.

   Back at Palisades Studio Joe finds things complicated by fellow reporter Rosemary Durant (Joan Blondell) and a lot of people with something to hide.

   Between flirting with every woman who crosses his path but Rosemary, Joe heads for Hector Rose’s home, still two steps ahead of the police, where he tussles with someone who leaves him unconscious and with Rose’s unconscious business manager on his hands just as Rosemary shows up.

   Jimmy Starr who featured Joe Medford as a reporter sleuth in two other slightly hard-boiled screwball detective novels (Three Short Biers, 1945; Heads You Lose, 1950) was a Hollywood reporter (he’s even mentioned in the film’s opening, along with Heda Hopper and Louella Parsons).

   The screenplay is co-written by Black Mask alumnus Dwight V. Babcock (Homicide Hannah), with direction by studio stalwart Henry Levin.

   Joe spots Mona with Rudy Frasso (Marvin Miller), a tough guy who is “always around the clubs,” and who threatens Joe if he involves Mona. Meanwhile Joe is called back to the studio by studio head Mitchell Edwards (Grant Mitchell) where Rosemary is already prowling around in the dark.

   Hector Rose was importing something from New York, maybe something worth dying for, and Joe and Rosemary both soon find themselves in the dark among the bolts of cloth in the studio costume department with someone with a gun looking for it. At which point Joe stumbles on yet another murder — this time of a studio executive, the Director of Publicity.

   This is programmer fare, but with an attractive and capable cast. The humor is a bit forced at time, and Brent isn’t at his best (to see him handle this same kind of material much better, see Front Page Woman, with Bette Davis as his newspaper rival), but the film is still fun and moves quickly, and he gives a perfectly good performance.

   It’s no great discovery, but well worth a little time and fun to watch the pros at work, especially Blondell, who brings what energy the film has to her rivalry/romance with Brent.

   Mildly screwball — it never quite rises to the occasion, but strays near it once or twice — and pleasant, the film is worth a small investment of your time as a minor but entertaining example of the comedy-
mystery form.

   Joe gets clobbered (again) at the studio after a tussle with Rosemary over photos of the latest murder and wakes up in the infirmary where he and Rosemary decide to team up.

   How many times have we heard that one in one of these?

   Frasso turns out to have a past with Mona Harrison and Hector Rose, and an iffy criminal record including some shady dealings in the jewelry racket.

   Back at Mona Harrison’s Rosemary gets to dope from her on her past marriage back in Denver while Joe examines the bolt of cloth she hid with a fortune in diamonds in it. Mona used to be married to a man who hates her now — maybe enough to frame her for murder, but she is too scared of him to say more.

   Joe manages to lose the diamonds, but not before he figures out who done it, and closes in on the killer back at Mona Harrison’s place, about the least “least likely” suspect in the history of these things.

   I’m not sure even Agatha Christie could have pulled this one off, but to be fair the clues are there if you look for them, which is more than many of these manage to do. Once you know who the killer is you can honestly look back and see where you had half a chance to figure it out if you were paying close attention.

   The Corpse Came C.O.D. is no lost classic, but in the right mood it’s fast paced, fairly funny, and the mystery a bit better than average with some decent misdirection along the way.

   I must say I found it generally more entertaining than I expected, and only wished the energy of the actors and the comedy had been as good as the mystery element — which is a unique complaint about a comedy-mystery from this era.

KID GLOVE KILLER. MGM, 1942. Van Heflin, Marsha Hunt, Lee Bowman, Cliff Clark, Eddie Quillan, John Litel, Cathy Lewis. Director: Fred Zinneman. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   Marsha Hunt, who co-starred with Van Heflin and Lee Bowman in this crackerjack MGM programmer, was sitting a couple of rows in front of me for the screening. She looked about forty when she turned around to acknowledge the audience applause and she gave the best interview I heard at the convention, answering questions precisely, fully and intelligently.

   In Kid Glove Killer she played the assistant of a crime-lab doctor (Van Heflin), with her attentive suitor and eventual chief suspect in a bombing-murder played by Lee Bowman, perennial lose-the-girl second lead in romantic comedies.

   This was Fred Zinneman’s first directorial stint and Hunt described how he won over the entire crew on the first day of the shooting with a short speech in which he welcomed suggestions from his experienced cast and crew.

   Zinneman, of course, went on to a distinguished career, as did Van Heflin, while Hunt, when her movie career faded in the early fifties, moved on to TV and Broadway. She was at Cinecon to sign copies of her new book, Marsha Hunt’s Hollywood. She seemed genuinely touched by the audience’s appreciation and a nice person into the bargain.

   Luckily, the film was another sleeper that everybody seemed to enjoy. All that wonderful MGM polish lavished on a B-movie script. Quite a tribute to the old studio system.

LADY CHASER. Producers Releasing Corporation, 1946. Robert Lowery, Ann Savage, Inez Cooper, Frank Ferguson. Based on the story “Lady Killer,” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts (Detective Tales, July 1945). Director: Sam Newfield.

   It’s surprising, when you stop to think about it, that more movies weren’t based on stories that appeared in the pulp magazines, or at least those of the B-movie variety, either mysteries or westerns and even love stories.

   Both genres are based on quick action and minimal characterization, they’d be a natural for each other, and probably there are more adaptations than I’m thinking of, speaking off the top of head as I usually do when I sit down to write a review.

   A quick synopsis of Lady Chaser ought to be what I really begin with, seeing that there isn’t one on IMDB, nor any comments either, at the present time. The movie begins with two women writing letters across from each other in a room designed for that purpose in a downtown department store. One’s a blackmailer (Ann Savage), the other (Inez Cooper) is writing a letter to her fiancé (Robert Lowery).

   The latter has an uncle who’s opposed to the marriage, the former is, unfortunately, in over her head. The latter has a headache; the former gives her an aspirin. The latter gives the aspirin, unused, to her uncle, who dies. The aspirin was poisoned.

   You can figure out what happened, can’t you? And so can the fiancé, eventually, only he can’t prove anything, nor can he can convince the dunderheaded head of homicide (Ralph Dunn) that there’s anything to her story, and with the lack of a better one, she’s quickly convicted of the crime. Amateur detective work is always better than that of the police, in stories like this.

   There are a surprising number of twists that occur in Lady Chaser, especially when you consider that it’s only 58 minutes long. The problem is that to get to the twists there are some awfully creaky plot devices that have to be swallowed whole, or if not, there’s no other alternative but to throw up your hands and say Enough.

   I’d also have tried to conceal the killer’s identity a little while longer, but neither can I think of a way to avoid it, so we’ll have to call that a draw. My recommendation, if this movie should ever come your way, is to simply sit back and enjoy it, warts and all.

NOTES:   Previously reviewed on this blog was The Limping Man, by Frank Rawlings, a pen name of G. T. Fleming-Roberts.

   For a complete bibliography of Fleming-Roberts, including several articles and reviews, check out this page on the primary Mystery*File website.

THE MISSING JUROR. Columbia Pictures, 1944. Jim Bannon, Janis Carter, George Macready, Jean Stevens, Joseph Crehan, with Trevor Bardette & Mike Mazurki (both uncredited). Director: Oscar Boetticher Jr.

   Two stars carry over from the movie which I previously reviewed here, Janis Carter and George Macready (in The Fighting Guardsman), and Jim Bannon was in the one I reviewed before that (in The Great Jesse James Raid). It’s like old home week here on the blog.

   Jim Bannon plays Joe Keats in The Missing Juror, an ace reporter who saved a man from going to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. Too late, though, for the previously condemned man (played most convincingly by George Macready) had gone mad while on Death Row, and he perishes instead in a mental institution – by his own hand, his body burned beyond recognition.

   Bad karma all round, you might say, but then things start to get interesting. The members of the jury who convicted the innocent man have begun to disappear or to die in a series of unfortunate accidents. Janis Carter plays Alice Hill, one of the jurors who has survived so far, and in the process of warning her – she doesn’t believe a word of it at first, naturally – Keats finds himself falling in love with her.

   It’s a great premise for a real noirish tale. It’s only too bad that no one involved in the production of this movie knew how to produce a real noirish tale, nor even how to tell a tale that makes any more sense than this one does.

   There are enough holes in the story to sink a battleship, and no one in the cast ever stops to make the obvious questions – with the answers equally obvious – if there are any. Some questions simply don’t have any answers, or at least none that I can think of.

   It may be as obvious to you, if you’ve read this far. I’ve tried to careful in how I described the basic structure of the plot, but with deficiencies as great as those that this movie has, I’d have to say nothing to avoid saying anything.

   But do you know what? It doesn’t really matter that the story has more leaks in it than a sieve that’s been used for target practice. This is a fun movie to watch, from beginning to end. And some (if not most) of that is due to the director, more familiarly known as Budd Boetticher. Unusual camera angles, imaginative lighting and clever dolly shots keep things interesting, and the story doesn’t stop moving once, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

   Thanks to Turner Classic Movies I recently discovered a detective film series I had never heard of before. Before Midnight (RKO, 1933) debuted on TCM in June and starred a young Ralph Bellamy as Inspector Trent of the NYPD.

   A procedural this ain’t: Trent comes out on a dark and stormy night to a Toad Hall fifty miles from New York City at the request of a millionaire who expects to be killed before the ancestral clock strikes twelve. Sure enough, the murder takes place, and Trent immediately takes over the investigation, such as it is, smoking up a storm as he interrogates the dead man’s lovely ward, the doctor who loves her, the enigmatic Japanese butler, the sleazy lawyer, etc. etc.

   Eventually, donning a white lab coat for forensic cred, he holds up two test tubes with blood samples in them and announces to his bug-eyed stooge that both came from the same person. How he managed to do that, generations before anyone ever heard of DNA, remains a mystery after the murder method (obvious to most viewers) and the murderer (obvious to all) are exposed.

   A bit of Web surfing taught me that Before Midnight was the first of four Inspector Trent films, all starring Bellamy and dating from 1933-34. The titles of the other three are One Is Guilty, The Crime of Helen Stanley and Girl in Danger.

   Columbia had released an earlier detective series with Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbot’s Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt but had dropped it after two films. The Trent series lasted twice as long but who today has ever heard of it? Bellamy of course went on to star in Columbia’s bottom-of-the-barrel series of Ellery Queen films (1940-41).

   Second of the four EQ films with Bellamy in the lead was Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery (1941). For most of my life I was unsure whether this picture was based on any genuine Queen material.

   In Royal Bloodline I speculated that it might have come from one of the early Queen radio plays. Recently I learned that my hunch was right. Its source was the 60-minute drama “The Three Scratches” (CBS, December 13, 1939).

   Someday I’d love to compare the Dannay-Lee script with the infantile novelization of the film by some anonymous hack that was published as a tie-in with the movie, but unfortunately that script was not included in The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005).

   Does the name Peter Cheyney ring any bells? He was an Englishman (1896-1951), the son of a Cockney fishmonger who specialized in whelks and jellied eels.

   He had never visited the U.S. but in 1936 began writing a long series of thrillers narrated in first person by hardboiled G-Man Lemmy Caution, beginning with This Man Is Dangerous (1936).

   For the most part these quickies were laughed off as unpublishable over here but became huge successes in England and also in France, where translation concealed Cheyney’s habit of peppering the dialogue of American characters with British slang, not to mention self-created idioms which are like nothing in any language known to humankind.

   The one that has stuck in my mind longest is “He blew the bezuzus,” which is not a musical instrument but just Cheyney’s way of saying “He spilled the beans.”

   According to Google the only known use of the word was in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, where a character is said to have a degree from Bezuzus Mail Order University.

   Could Cheyney have read that acerbic satire on the American middle class or did he come up with the word independently? Googling “bezuzus” with Cheyney’s name produces no matches, but I suspect that situation will change as soon as this column is posted.

   With The Urgent Hangman (1938) Cheyney launched a series of utterly conventional ersatz-Hammett novels about London PI Slim Callaghan, and during World War II he wrote a series of rather bleak espionage novels, all with “Dark” in their titles and lavishly praised by Anthony Boucher and others.

   I don’t know if he’s worth rediscovering, but you can catch him as he looked in newsreel footage from 1946, dictating his then-latest thriller to a secretary, by going to www.petercheyney.co.uk and clicking first on “Links” and then on the image at the bottom of the screen.

   The mail has just brought me the proof copy of my latest assault on the forests of America. Cornucopia of Crime is a 449-page gargantua bringing together chunks of my writing over the past 40-odd years on mystery fiction and some of my favorites among its perpetrators, from Gardner and Woolrich and Queen to Cleve F. Adams and Milton Propper and William Ard, not to mention screwballs like Michael Avallone and mad geniuses like Harry Stephen Keeler.

   One small problem with this copy: on the title page the author’s name is conspicuous by its absence. This glitch will soon be corrected but I’m told that ten or twelve uncorrected copies are on the way to me by mail.

   If they arrive before I leave for the Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio late next week, I plan to bring them with me and — assuming there are a few collectors in attendance who are in the market for perhaps the most limited edition of any book on mystery fiction ever published! — sell them off. Consider this an exclusive offer to Mystery*File habitues.

Editorial Comment. 07-22-10.   Inspired by David Vineyard’s comments on Peter Cheyney’s contributions to the world of crime fiction, I checked out the website devoted to him that Mike mentioned. It’s definitely worth a look. I especially enjoyed the covers, a portion of one I’ve added below. Who could resist a book with a lady like this on the cover? Not me.

   Artwork by John Pisani. For more, go here.