KILL ME AGAIN. 1989. Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Michael Madsen. Director & co-screenwriter: John Dahl.

   PI Jack Andrews is down on his luck, you might say. After the death of his wife a few years back, his life has gone downhill ever since. Right now a local Reno gambler has a couple of hoodlums on his neck, and Jack has no idea where he can raise $10,000 in three days.

   Such is his life when the beautiful girl knocks on his office door. She has a proposition for him, she says. She’s in this terrible relationship with a man, and to get out from under, she wants Jack to help her fake her own murder. Jack demurs for a moment, but the sight of $5000, payment in advance, quickly changes his mind, and the deal is struck.

   What Jack doesn’t know could kill him. Soon he not only has the two hoodlums on his heels, but the police, and the boy friend from whom the money came — and he’s not about to give it up easily — but also the mobsters from whom the boy friend stole the money, nearly $1,000,000 worth.

   And they aren’t about to give it up easily, either. Double cross is soon followed by double and triple cross. Val Kilmer seems too boyish looking to be in such a game, sort of a Jack Tripper caught up in a Jim Thompson crime caper, if you see what I mean, but Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is a smoldering keg of sexual dynamite, and if it weren’t for her presence in the story, it’d have no place to go.

   I wasn’t expecting too much from this movie — I watched it only because of the private eye connection — but once I started, I couldn’t turn it off. There were some minor gaps in the plot, so far as I could see, but it’s also as current an example of authentic “film noir” as I’ve seen in a while. And even if it strongly reminds you of something you’ve already seen before, it’s still a spine-tingling thriller.

Editorial Comment: As I was formatting this review in the process of getting it posted, it started to sound awfully familiar to me. You may not believe this, but when I reviewed it here on the blog in February of 2008, I’d completely forgotten I’d seen it before.

   My comments back then, a couple of years ago, were a lot lengthier, so I was able to include a couple of scenes from the movie I didn’t have room for this time, but my opinion on the movie? Exactly the same.

   And I’ll probably watch and review this same movie again in five or ten years. It’s my kind of movie. Don’t believe me? Stick around and find out.

NORA PRENTISS. Warner Brothers, 1947. Ann Sheridan, Kent Smith, Bruce Bennett, Robert Alda, Rosemary DeCamp, John Ridgely. Director: Vincent Sherman.

   As you can see from the photo to the right, this previously hard-to-find film noir drama has recently been released on DVD as part of the Warner Brothers Archive Collection. Every fan of old movies should be buying these.

   Even though they’re essentially print on demand items, the quality is good, and every one that’s purchased will convince the Powers That Be that there’s a small but steady market for them – I wouldn’t count on more – but continued income for Warners will convince Universal and MGM to step up their own programs of releasing old movies in their vaults on DVD.

   And sometimes they go on sale, as this one was, and very well may still be, if you’re reading this early enough. It’s also one of the good ones, which you probably knew already before I came along to tell you about it.

   I don’t imagine that Ann Sheridan ever made a really bad movie, and if she did, I don’t want to know about it.

   She’s the title character in this one, of course, a singer and night club entertainer who has a small traffic accident one evening, and the good Samaritan who comes to her rescue happens to be a doctor (Kent Smith) with a partner and a thriving practice who’s also a happily married man with two teen-aged children.

   Well, maybe not so happily married. Doctor Talbot’s a mild-mannered creature of punctuality and habit, and his love life at home has gradually disappeared to less than nothing.

   Some mild, good-natured flirting by Nora Prentiss during her first office visit does more than remind him of that, it shakes him up and down and back again.

   She finds his reaction amusing at first, but more and more she finds herself taking his intentions seriously. We (the viewer) do not get to see the details of the burgeoning romance, but we certainly know what’s going on.

   And if it were not for the prologue, in which we see a man in a jail cell, accused of Dr. Talbott’s murder, we would not know we are in a film noir movie at all, but since we do, we have a different perspective throughout the movie than even the characters themselves do, and into more and more difficulty do they certainly get — in true noir fashion all the way.

   Ann Sheridan, she of the lovely face and body and low contralto voice, is obviously the star, but even though she is the “other woman” in this film, it is nearly innocently so. It is Kent Smith who undergoes the drastic twists of fate which this movie provides, in abundance, and on whose shoulders rests the burden of making the viewer feel as though it could actually happen.

   I think he succeeds, but Kent Smith, a long-time but strictly second-tier movie and TV star and one you perhaps never heard of, lacks the charisma or sex appeal, to put it bluntly, to pull it off his role in this movie completely.

   One wonders, at times, what a real life Nora Prentiss would see in an equally real life Dr. Talbot, best described as I said above as mild-mannered. Distinguished and accomplished, yes, but still rather weak and ineffectual.

   Given that small quibble, plus a much more outrageous trial that takes place after the prologue is caught up to, in terms of chronological events, this is nonetheless a noir film that is very much worth watching.

   If you have not seen it, and if you’ve read this far in the review, I very strongly recommend that you do.

FORBIDDEN. British Lion Film Corp, UK, 1948. Douglass Montgomery, Hazel Court, Patricia Burke, Garry Marsh, Ronald Shiner, Kenneth Griffith. Director: George King.

   By sheerest of chances, one imagines, I’ve come across both an episode of a TV show (Adam Adamant Lives) and a movie (Forbidden) which takes place along the “Golden Mile,” a stretch of Promenade between the North and South piers in Blackpool, England, filled (in its heyday) with carnival booths and amusement arcades, slot machines and various other means of taking money from the pockets of passers-by.

   The episode (Adam Adamant Lives) was the second of the series, “Death Has a Thousand Faces” (30 June 1966), in which Adamant (Gerald Harper) and Georgina Jones, his female assistant (Juliet Harmer) meet and recruit the third member of the program’s recurring cast, a barker by the name of William Simms (Jack May). Unaccountably, Simms does not appear in the third episode, reflecting some of the production problems the TV crew were having at the time.

   But this is not a review of Adam Adamant, nor of the Golden Mile, but of Forbidden, in which one actor on the way down, Douglass Montgomery – this was his last movie before heading over to solely a television career – meets one on the way up, Hazel Court, red-headed beauty of many a later Hammer horror film, several years in her future yet.

   She’s the girl behind a candy counter along the Golden Mile, and across the way is Montgomery’s booth, in which he sells tonics of all sorts for all kinds of maladies – a sort of stationary medicine wagon. Baldness, sore feet, upset stomach? Stop in, please.

   But it must pay well. Jim Harding (that’s his name) could be a research chemist instead, and for real, but his wife, determined to become an actress, has a standard of living that demands he say no to mere (and low-paying) academic pursuits.

   The girl’s name is Jane Thompson (played by Hazel Court) and she’s not his wife, but she’d like to be. But don’t get the wrong impression here. She’s an innocent and doesn’t know that he’s even married. But he does — boy does he ever — and here is where the noir aspect of this relatively mild British thriller kicks in.

   Harding is a weakling, though, though not strictly in a physical sense. Maybe mild-mannered is a sufficient description — not a forceful fellow at all. Things do take their course, however, and after his wife’s death and a suspenseful chase scene taking place in the tower high above the promenade, there is a happy ending – or at least an ending that’s as happy as it could be, given the circumstances.

   I’ve used the word “mild” a couple of times. As thrillers go, that just about sums this movie up in one word: mild. The presence of Hazel Court in this movie was enough to keep me watching it, even in black and white. She may, or may not, be reason enough for you.

[UPDATE.] 04-22-10.   While the DVD cover shown is that of the UK edition, I thought I should let you know that Forbidden has been commercially released in the US also, and that’s the copy I have.

THE STRANGER. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Billy House. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller. Director: Orson Welles.

   The dark nature of this movie of course is what consigns it to the noir category, that plus the moody but still dazzling black-and-white photography, complete with unusual camera angles, especially during the many trips up and down the inside of the bell tower facing the green in a small one-horse town in Connecticut right after the war.

   But is it really a noir film? Not really by subject matter, that of a post-World War II manhunt. A former top member of Nazi party in Germany (Orson Welles) who by posing as a history teacher at a local academy, has somehow managed to infiltrate his way into local society so solidly enough that he is about to marry the daughter (Loretta Young) of a US Supreme Court justice who lives in town.

   On his trail is one man, a representative of the US government known only as Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson). His problem? He does not know the face of the man he is after, a world-class criminal who managed to keep his identity a secret while the Nazis were in power, a man with vicious ideas who preferred to do his nasty work behind the scenes only.

   The noirish concept of an innocent man in over his head through his own weakness and/or the sheer vicissitudes of fate do not apply here. Professor Charles Rankin, as he is known now, is a bad man, and as a killer who senses he is about to be trapped, he needs to be caught. It is only the camera work and Welles’ direction that makes this movie qualify as noir, and then by only the slimmest of margins.

   Edward G. Robinson is as earnest as only Edgar G. Robinson could be, and Loretta Young I do not believe could look only lovelier. It is her predicament that is the most heartbreaking. In love with a man who is a monster, she cannot accept it, even as a mountain of facts begins to pile up against him.

   As for fierce-looking Mr. Orson Welles himself, he is dark, brooding and sullen throughout the movie. It is difficult to believe that the cheerful Loretta Young could fall in love with such a man, much less go on a honeymoon with him.

   It is also hard to believe, that even in simpler times, the credentials and background of the man to whom the daughter of a Supreme Court justice is married would not have been checked more thoroughly earlier on. Before enjoying this movie to the fullest, we in this more cynical age must accept that life (and politics) were easier then.

   Otherwise this well-meaning movie, the first to show footage of concentration camps in Germany, or so I am told, is only a well-designed and well-produced relic of the past, a magnificent artifact caught up in amber and preserved for us today, a different time altogether.

P. J.   Universal, 1968. George Peppard, Raymond Burr, Gayle Hunnicutt, Brock Peters, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jason Evers, Coleen Gray, Susan Saint James, Severn Darden. Director: John Guillermin.

    A year after Gunn (1967, and reviewed here ) at Universal they took tastelessness and raised it to a high art in a B-movie I dearly love called P. J., with George Peppard surprisingly believable as a not-too-bright PI up against Raymond Burr as a nasty gazillionaire who hires him to protect his mistress (Gayle Hunnicutt) who’s been getting anonymous threats — or has she?

    The threats are understandable since Burr’s family (including Colleen Gray, Susan St James and some guy doing a bad Paul Lynde impression. Remember Paul Lynde?) don’t like the way Burr flaunts his girlfriend around. In fact, there isn’t much to like about him in this film; it’s one of his nastiest parts in a film career full of brutes, wife-killers and at least one gorilla suit, leading Peppard to quip, “That’s what I like about you; you’re all arm-pit,” which is about the level of wit here.

    In fact, tackiness is the major charm of a film that loves to wallow in its own disrepute. P. J. starts off in a seedy motel room and moves on to a run-down gym where worn-out pugs fight for a job. When it moves to the haunts of the very rich, we get garishly decorated apartments, sterile offices, and a nightclub where bikini-clad dancers swish their butts around in a giant martini. Real class.

    Later on, a studio jungle in a back-lot Caribbean island elevates the cheapness to something like epic scale, followed by a return to New York for some more engagingly crude violence, including a guy getting dragged to his death in a subway tunnel and a fight in a gay bar where our hero gets mauled.

    But like I say, these things are the backbone of a movie that returns the Private Eye to Chandler’s Mean Streets, updated to the 1960s and slashed with Technicolor, but meaner than ever, with an added layer of corporate greed that seems relevant today but may be merely timeless.

    Peppard stalks through it all like a once-promising leading man resigned to doing B-pictures, with added zing provided by John Guillermin’s punchy direction (he did Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure) and a script that tries for wit but settles for sarcasm.

    A few other points before I leave this charmer: I reviewed this movie once before about thirty years ago, and at that time I reviewed it in the past tense because it didn’t exist anymore; when P. J. was released to television (which was mainly where you saw old movies back then) they cut out all the sex and violence, toned down the unsavory elements and turned a crude movie into an insipid one.

    For decades, this was the only print available, but thanks to the internet and cheap DVD technology, the film has risen again, with all the ugly charm of a monster in an old movie.

    Secondly, I should caution prospective viewers that this film takes a very retro view of gays. The movies openly recognized homosexuals in the late 1960s, but they were almost invariably portrayed unsympathetically and even demeaningly.

    Like everything else in the movie, P. J. turns this up a notch, with Severn Darden in a performance he should be heartily ashamed of as a lisping, mincing, quivering sissy. Add to this an extended fight in a gay bar that looks like one of the lesser circles of Hell, and you can see how gays — or those who believe they should be treated like human beings — could get quite offended here.

    Finally, a word about Raymond Burr’s performance. In my youth I watched films like this in search of a role model. Well, Raymond Burr in this movie looks so eerily like one of our recent vice-presidents that I wonder if someone else saw the film back in ’68 and fixated on him.

    The character enjoys nastiness for its own sake, relishing the humiliation and even torture he can inflict on others.

    He even goes to one of those clubs where birds with clipped wings are released on cue for “hunters” to blast away at. The similarities are positively unsettling, and I begin to wonder if the film was simply unavailable for so many years, or actually repressed by the previous administration.

Editorial Comment:   I’ve scouted around some, and what I’ve discovered is that P. J. has apparently never been officially released on DVD, but it does exist in its original “unexpurgated” form and can be easily found on the collector-to-collector market.

PHILO VANCE’S SECRET MISSION. PRC, 1947. Alan Curtis (Philo Vance), Sheila Ryan, Tala Birell, Frank Jenks, James Bell, Frank Fenton, Paul Maxey. Screenplay: Lawrence Edmund Taylor. Director: Reginald Le Borg.

   I have three major complaints about the title of the film. First of all, handsome and dashing Alan Curtis does not fit the picture I have in my head of Philo Vance at all. Secondly, he’s not on a mission in this movie, and even if he was, it’s hardly a secret.

   So, scratch the title. What do you have left? Plenty, if you think murder mysteries ought to be filled with witty banter between the detective and the pretty girl (Sheila Ryan) who tags along with him as he questions suspects and investigates shots in a house in the middle of the night.

   Or not so witty banter between the detective and his not so witty sidekick (Frank Jenks), who only purpose in the movie is to — scratch that. I don’t think he had one, except to ogle good-looking women and pretend to one of them that he’s the real “detectative” of the pair.

   Dead is the head of a pulp magazine publisher — this was interesting — who wants to branch out and publish mystery fiction in hardcover as well as magazines with lurid covers. (Sheila Ryan is posing for one of them as the movie begins.)

   But to get back to the pulp magazine publisher, what he wants Vance to do is to write a story about a case he (the publisher) has solved — that of the disappearance and probable murder of a third partner of the firm seven years earlier.

   And of course he, the publisher, gets bumped off before he can tell Vance his theory of the case. There is a lot of foolishness that ensues, but there is at least one truly surprising turn of events that occurs before it all ends, in less than an hour’s total time, and an ending that’s at least decent from a perspective of a detective story fan, which I am assuming you are as well as I.

   I’m told by IMDB, that of the three Philo Vance movies PRC made in 1946 and 1947 (with Alan Curtis in two of them) that this was the first to be filmed and the last to be released. I don’t know how that squares with Vance and his lady sidekick apparently heading to a wedding chapel at the very end of the film, but they do, and for some reason that tickled me as much as anything else in this movie.

GUNN. Paramount, 1967. Craig Stevens (Peter Gunn), Laura Devon (Edie), Edward Asner, Albert Paulsen, Sherry Jackson, Helen Traubel (Mother), Regis Toomey. Story-screenplay-director: Blake Edwards.

    Gunn is an elegantly tasteless thing, from the TV series Peter Gunn, with Craig Stevens tossing off bemused sophistication like a blonde wiggling out of a nightie. As written and directed by Blake Edwards (a variable commodity, but rather effective here) the film offers dry wit delivered with deadpan dexterity, stylish violence (including torture by racquetball) and a fine, kinky, savage wrap-up.

    It also offers Sherry Jackson popping up nude in Gunn’s apartment like the cinematic equivalent of a cheap paperback. Thinking it over, I have to say her motivation for this isn’t really convincing, but as I recall seeing it at the movies, it didn’t bother me a bit. I should also put in good words for Ed Asner, who inherits the Lt. Jacoby role and plays it quite well, and a minor actress named Marion Marshall as “Daisy Jane,” a tricky part which she brings off neatly.

            

  THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER. RKO, 1949. Charles Laughton (Inspector Jules Maigret), Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, Robert Hutton, Jean Wallace, Patricia Roc, Belita.

 Screenplay: Harry Brown, based on the novel A Battle of Nerves (La Tete d’un Homme, Paris, 1931) by Georges Simenon. Director: Burgess Meredith.

   The Man on the Eiffel Tower can be picked up on DVD for about a buck at bargain stores, and it’s well worth the effort. Burgess Meredith took a one-time shot at directing this and stars as a myopic scissors-grinder set up to be the patsy when Franchot Tone commits murder-for-hire.

   Tone’s scheme works with creepy efficiency (A scene of Meredith stumbling about the murder scene looking for his smashed glasses prefigures the well-known Twilight Zone episode.) and Burgess seems headed for the Gallic equivalent of Slice-o-Matic till Inspector Maigret intuits the solution and sets about putting things right

   The plot moves swiftly and with some intelligence, but this is basically an actor’s movie — watch it to see Burgess Meredith’s hammy underplaying, or Franchot Tone’s manic-depressive killer, a brilliant Raskolnikov flinging himself up against Charles Laughton’s relaxed, authoritative Maigret/Porfiry, who realizes the only way to resolve the problem is to gently coax a confession from a psychotic.

   This felicitous mix of writing (courtesy of Harry Brown) directing and acting doesn’t come along all that often, and it provides here a deal of genuine pleasure for mystery fans and movie lovers like me.

TRICK FOR TRICK. Fox, 1933. Ralph Morgan, Victor Jory, Sally Blane, Tom Dugan, Clifford Jones, Luis Alberni, Edward Van Sloan, Willard Robertson, Dorothy Appleby. Photography: L. William O’Connell; art director: Duncan Cramer; technical effects: Wm. Cameron Menzies. Director: Hamilton McFadden. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   Six months after the unsolved murder of a young woman who had been an assistant to magician Azrah (Morgan), Azrah arranges for a seance that will be attended by his former partner La Tour (Jory), as well by detectives and interested parties who may also be suspects.

   The seance is abruptly ended when la Tour is murdered and general confusion and much activity inside and outside Azrah’s stone fortress, a veritable castle of magic, ensues until everything is sorted out and the culprit is revealed.

   “Sorting out” is probably something of an exaggeration since the plot of this hokey Gothic melodrama is even more confusing than the plot of The Big Sleep

   I had seen this film many years ago, probably at Cinevent, and had remembered it as an entertaining mystery, with its most striking feature the magician’s castle, a cornucopia of special effects engineered by film wizard William Cameron Menzies.

   Those effects are still a treat, but the wildly improbable plot that brings in a sinister midget and his Chinese sidekick, a mad scientist wonderfully played by Luis Alberni in a style just the other side of manic, and the woeful relegation of Jory to what almost amounts to a cameo role, make this somewhat more animated than Sh! the Octopus but even more confusing.

   Having said all that, I must still admit that I enjoyed the film, although I’ll not be teasing people, as I have for some years, with the admonition that this is a film “you just can’t miss.”

QUIET PLEASE: MURDER.   20th Century-Fox, 1942. George Sanders, Gail Patrick, Richard Denning, Lynne Roberts, Sidney Blackmer, Kurt Katch, Byron Foulger. Screenplay: John Larkin, based on the story “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” by Lawrence G. Blochman. Director: John Larkin.

   According to IMDB, the Blochman story that this 1940s crime and mystery film wass based on was one titled “Death From the Sanskrit,” but other than IMDB, neither David Vineyard nor I have found a reference to a Blochman tale anywhere else by that name.

   We may be wrong about this, but we’re sure (say 99.99%) that Quiet Please: Murder was adapted instead (and loosely so) from “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” a short novel that first appeared in The American Magazine, September 1942. It appeared later in EQMM as “Murder Walks in Marble Halls,” and was reprinted under its original title in 1951 as #19 in Dell’s short-lived series of slim-sized 10-Cent paperbacks.

   Says David, who may be the only person to have both watched the movie and read the book:

   Me again, Steve. I’ve watched only the movie, and what follows is the basic outline of the plot. As you’ll see, other than the basic library setting, there isn’t a lot in common, as David says. The forger in the film who isn’t in the book, as he mentions, is Jim Fleg (an oilier than usual George Sanders), who’s stolen a rare copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a downtown library and who’s planning, with the able assistance of femme fatale Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), to make multiple copies and sell them to equally unscrupulous collectors as a continuing source of income.

   Unfortunately Myra makes the mistake of selling one of the forged copies to a Nazi agent (Sidney Blackmer), who wants his money back. At which point enters PI Hal McByrne, a lanky womanizer played by Richard Denning, causing Myra (the femme fatale he falls for) to realize she can kill two birds (at least) with one stone.

   At which point the rest of movie moves to the aforementioned library, where several murders do occur, as the title of the film suggests (I confess I lost track of how many), along with many well-constructed chases of one character by another between the stacks of books, plus a very timely blackout monitored by a comically excitable librarian cum war raid warden played to perfection by Byron Foulger, a name long-time old movie fans will certainly remember.

   Either the movie was actually filmed in a library — and believe it or not the Dewey Decimal System, carefully explained earlier on, is part of the plot — or the producers of this film raided the shelves of several nearby furniture stores. (The library is said to have two miles’ worth of books, but naturally we do not get to see them all.)

   The plot is a complicated one. You have to pay attention every minute of the way. (My usual technique of watching the movie a second time did not help, and in fact I only found myself confused in other ways.) In terms of production values, they’re probably only par for the course in terms of black and white mystery movies made in 1942, but the film itself is surely an entertaining one.

PostScript:   Mike Grost reviews the novella, not the movie, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. He says of it, in part, and I quote: