DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. Bantam Street, 2009. Jim Beaver, Jennifer Blaire, Larry Blamire, Bob Burns (as Kogar the Gorilla) Dan Conroy, Robert Deveau, Bruce French, Betty Garrett, Trish Geiger, Brian Howe, Marvin Kaplan, and H.M. Wynant. Written and directed by Larry Blamire.

   A Larry Blamire thing.

   That should be description enough for those familiar with The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra  (2001) and Blamire’s other delicious send-ups of films no respectable critic would deign to notice. Night, however, offers a thin patina of low-budget Class missing from Cadavra, and a script well-attuned to the niceties of old Dark House movies.

   The story line here follows the classic Cat/Canary recipe: mix greedy relatives on hand for the reading of the will; stir in a crooked lawyer, wise-cracking reporter, and a clutching hand or two, and heat until it all catches fire quite nicely.

   Don’t get me wrong, like most of Blamire’s things, Night is far, far from perfect. Often it’s not even very good. Running jokes get run into the ground, and the level of hysteria frequently rises too high for comfort. Then again, while director Blamire lavishes B-movie (1930s variety) atmosphere on this, writer Blamire sometimes forgets to be funny.

   But this is balanced by some genuine wit, rapid-fire dialogue in the Howard Hawks tradition, and an attitude of affection for the genre that puts the viewer in a receptive mood when good jokes (and there are many) do come along.

   Which may be the key to the charm of any Blamire thing; it’s done with love.

NIGHTMARE. Universal, 1942. Diana Barrymore, Brian Donlevy, Henry Daniell, Arthur Shields, Gavin Muir, Ian Wolfe, Hans Conried, and John Abbott. Screenplay by Dwight Taylor, from a story by Philip MacDonald. Directed by Tim Whelan. Currently available here on YouTube.

   A fast-moving “B+” from Universal.

   Brian Donlevy headlines as an American in London who finds himself blitzed out of his gambling club (This is 1942, remember.) leaving him homeless and penniless, with nothing but the tuxedo he stands in. In a fit of casual desperation, he breaks into an empty-looking town house, only to find it occupied by Diana Barrymore, and, to a lesser extent, by her estranged husband Henry Daniell, who sits slumped over his desk with a knife in his back.

   Diana asks him to help dispose of the corpse and he agrees, which leads to a whole mess of complications involving the Police, Nazi Saboteurs, attack dogs, and Ms Barrymore, who may not be what she seems.

   This was made concurrently with Universal’s updated Sherlock Holmes series (It was released two months after Voice of Terror) and shares some of the regular players, sets, and background music, albeit in service of a higher budget. Henry Daniell, then a contract player at Universal, doesn’t get much to do, playing a corpse except for a short flashback, but Hans Conried makes the most of a nearly wordless bit part as a Nazi Goon.

   Overall, Nightmare is nothing really special, but Director Whelan moves Dwight Taylor’s screenplay along with a snappy pace that makes up for the lack of any discernible style, and the players take it seriously even when the viewer (this viewer anyway) can’t.

THE SECRET PARTNER. MGM, UK/US, 1961. Stewart Granger, Haya Harareet, Bernard Lee, Hugh Burden, Lee Montague, Norman Bird. Director: Basil Dearden.

   The Secret Partner is one of those films where the entire story hinges on the big reveal at the end. Just who is the “secret partner” in the criminal scheme that forms the basis for the film’s plot? There is, of course, more than one red herring; the viewer is supposed to be suspicious, wondering whether that man or that guy is the masked villain.

   The problem with films like these, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is that once you see the ending, you realize a good part of what makes the film work (or not, depending on your perspective) was the guess work you put in throughout the proceedings and how much you think it was worth your time.

   The story is one of blackmail, deceit, and criminality. Stewart Granger portrays John Brent, a shipping company executive who has a secret. He’s living under an assumed name, because he has a criminal past, having served time in prison for embezzlement. But that’s not his main problem right now. Not only has his wife (Israeli actress Haya Harakeet) left him, but he’s being blackmailed by his dentist (Norman Bird), a seedy little man whose avarice outweighs his common sense.

   Enter the secret partner, a masked man using a voice distortion device. He comes into the dentist’s office with a proposition: when Brent is under the gas for a tooth removal, the dentist is to make a clay impression of his keys and to get the combination to the shipping company’s safe. It’s ludicrous, but it works in a quirky, offbeat sort of way.

   Soon enough, the shipping company’s safe has been looted and Brent (Granger) is the top suspect. Thus begins his very noir journey – a falsely accused man seeking the “secret partner” to clear his name. Who can it be? Is it his colleague at the office? The doctor quietly from a distance in love with his estranged wife? Or the hipster interior designer who is having an affair with her? It’s up to Detective Superintendent Hanbury (Bernard Lee) to investigate. It is – using an all too familiar trope – his last case and he intends to do it justice.

   What I appreciated about The Secret Partner was not so much the plot – although it’s perfectly fine – but the atmosphere. Although it’s rather talky for a film noir, it has its share of noirish moments, even those fleeting ones that are enough to make a visual impact. The film is buttressed with an early 1960s jazzy score, one that works because is not too intrusive. Directed by Basil Dearden, it has a very London feel to it. The city is a character.

   In sum, The Secret Partner is a solid crime film, but it’s not exceptional. After you see the big reveal, it’s difficult to want to put in the effort to watch it again. But I enjoyed well enough it for what it was, flaws and all.

   It is no surprise that the term film noir is French, given how avidly Gallic filmmakers and/or critics (some were both) embraced what we now know as noir fiction and its cinematic counterpart, or that they turned to the former as source material. The novels of David Goodis, for example, were adapted into not only the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) but also the likes of François Truffaut’s Tirez sur la Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), based on Down There (1956); Henri Verneuil’s Le Casse (aka The Burglars, 1971), based on The Burglar (1953), filmed Stateside in 1957; and La Lune dans le Caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter, 1983), directed by Diva (1981) phenom Jean-Jacques Beineix.

   While Henry Farrell may be best known as the original author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), and thus the “Godfather of Grande Dame Guignol,” Truffaut’s 1972 adaptation of his 1967 novel Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (aka Une Belle Fille comme Moi [A Gorgeous Girl Like Me]) is surely noir, and Truffaut also filmed two books by the arguably definitive noir writer, Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black (1940), part of his celebrated series of “Black” Novels, and Waltz into Darkness (1947), published under his pen name of William Irish.

   Made in England, Truffaut’s controversial 1966 version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) had been a considerable departure, his first film in English and in color and his only SF effort, shot by future director Nicolas Roeg rather than usual cinematographer Raoul Coutard. But he was back on his literal and metaphorical home turf with La Mariée Etait en Noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1967), shooting in France and adapting another noir novel with familiar faces both behind the camera (Coutard and co-scenarist Jean-Louis Richard) and in front (Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy).

   The legendary book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) had recently been published, and the fact that the Master of Suspense’s Rear Window (1954) was also based on Woolrich story is one aspect that makes this perhaps Truffaut’s most Hitchcockian work, as is carrying over composer and Hitch mainstay Bernard Herrmann from Fahrenheit in their second and final collaboration.

   The film is basically a quintet of set pieces in each of which the title character, Julie Kohler (Moreau), kills a man, making sure he knows her identity, e.g., she pushes Bliss (Claude Rich) from his balcony during a party when he tries to retrieve her windblown scarf; lures Coral (Michel Bouquet) to a rendezvous where she poisons him; and leaves Rene Morane (Michel Lonsdale) to suffocate in a sealed closet while his son, Cookie (Christophe Bruno), slumbers upstairs.

   Flashbacks gradually reveal that she is avenging the death of her childhood sweetheart, David (Serge Rousseau), shot dead on the church steps after their wedding as the five fooled around with a loaded rifle across the street. The film addresses neither how Julie tracks down the men — strangers drawn together on a single occasion, sharing only a predilection for guns and women (the latter ultimately their undoing), who fled, never to meet again — nor whether David’s accidental killing justifies theirs.

   Julie clearly has her own idea of justice, leading her to call the police and clear Cookie’s teacher, Miss Becker (the striking Alexandra Stewart), as whom she posed, by providing details only the killer could know.

   I don’t know how, or even if, the novel tackles any of these questions, yet in a sense, it doesn’t matter; we don’t turn to Cornell Woolrich for rigorous logic but for his fever-dream imagination and style, and Truffaut himself, obviously interested more in the effect than in explanations, begins to play with our expectations as Julie’s next target, Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), is suddenly arrested for unrelated crimes, so she turns to the last on her list, artist Fergus (Charles Denner).

   When she begins posing for him as the bow-wielding huntress (how apt!) Diana, we suspect how he will meet his end, yet for the first time, she seems hesitant after Fergus, anticipating Denner’s role as Truffaut’s L’Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977), avows his amour.

   It is around this point that Truffaut uses maximum cinematic sleight of hand, misdirecting us with a subplot about how Fergus’s friend Corey (Brialy) remembers seeing Julie at Bliss’s party and tries to identify her.

   Having watched in step-by-step detail as she dispatched each of her previous victims, we are genuinely surprised when Truffaut abruptly cuts back to Fergus lying dead with an arrow protruding from his body, and even more so when the seemingly relentless avenger leaves an incriminating mural of herself on the wall, which along with her attending the artist’s funeral leads to her arrest and confession, albeit without explanation.

   But — as my first-time-viewer wife quickly deduced — it is all a means to an end, and as Julie, with knife concealed, delivers meals to inmates of the same prison where Delvaux is confined, we await the inevitable off-screen shriek as she finishes her mission.

   Asked by Le Monde in 1968 if Hitchcock had influenced the film, the director said, as quoted in Truffaut by Truffaut (*), “Certainly for the construction of the story because, unlike the novel, we give the solution of the enigma well before the end [as in Hitch’s Vertigo (1958)]…. Contrariwise, the desire to make the characters speak of everything else but the intrigue itself is decidedly not very Hitchcockian and more characteristic of a European turn of mind.”

   In 1978, he called it “the only one I regret having made… I wanted to offer…Moreau something like none of her other films, but it was badly thought out. That was a film to which color did an enormous lot of harm. [A permanent rift with Coutard reportedly left Moreau sometimes directing the actors.] The theme is lacking in interest: to make excuses for an idealistic vengeance, that really shocks me…. One should not avenge oneself, vengeance is not noble. One betrays something in oneself when one glorifies that,” as he opined to L’Express.

   Truffaut’s Woolrich adaptations were made with only one film (my personal favorite of his), Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), in between; the fatalistic nature of the second, Mississippi Mermaid (1969) — whose title seems more appropriate in French, La Sirène du Mississippi, given the sinister connotations of “siren” — makes it not too surprising that, per New York Magazine critic David Edelstein’s TCM introduction, it was his biggest financial failure, but I think it deserved better.

   The first of his features on which Truffaut had sole screenwriting credit, it updates Woolrich’s 1880 New Orleans setting to the contemporary French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, to which the ship Mississippi brings a woman (Catherine Deneuve) claiming to be Julie Roussel, the mail-order bride of Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo, whom I have loathed since seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal French New Wave debut, À Bout de Souffle [Breathless, 1960]). She doesn’t match the photo that Julie had sent him, but Louis clearly falls for her at first sight and marries her anyway.

   She says she sent a photo of a neighbor to ensure that Louis did not marry her for her looks, while he wrote that he was the foreman and not the owner of a cigarette factory, because he did not want to be married for his money. After “Julie” cleans out his bank accounts and disappears, Berthe Roussel (Nelly Borgeaud) arrives, and we learn that her sister was murdered aboard the ship by Richard (Roland Thénot), who later abandoned accomplice Marion Vergano, so they hire private detective Comolli (Bride alumnus Bouquet) to find the impostor.

   In France, Louis spots Marion in some news footage — precisely paralleling D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead, 1954) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the source novel for Vertigo — then locates and confronts her, but is unable to kill her; Louis shoots Comolli when he gets too close and refuses to take a bribe, and the couple’s peripatetic future as fugitives seems bleak, despite Louis forgiving Marion for trying to poison him and her declaration of love.

   When I saw this for the second time (c. 2014), the first being in the 1999 “Tout Truffaut” retrospective at the hallowed ground of New York’s Film Forum, it seemed surprisingly familiar. It’s true that at various times I have also read Waltz into Darkness (I was honored to be asked to weigh in on whether Viking Penguin, where I was then employed, should reissue it, which they did) and seen the 2001 remake, Michael Cristofer’s Original Sin, notorious for its steamy scenes between Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie — talk about something for everyone — but I think there’s more to it than that, perhaps something distinctively Woolrichian.

   His future biographer, Francis M. Nevins, Jr., wrote in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers that “love dies while the lovers go on living, and [he] excels at showing the corrosion of a relationship between two people,” plus the theme of imposture recurs in I Married a Dead Man (1948), also filmed in France as J’ai Éspousé une Ombre (I Married a Shadow, 1983), starring Nathalie Baye.

   â€œI read [the novel] when I was doing the adaptation of The Bride Wore Black,” Truffaut told Le Monde in 1969. “At that time, I actually read everything [he] wrote in order to steep myself in his work and to keep as close as possible to the novel, despite the unfaithfulness necessary in films. I like to know thoroughly any writer whose book I transpose to the screen [as he had with Goodis and Bradbury]…. My final screenplay was less an adaptation in the traditional sense than a choice of scenes. With this film, I was finally able to realize every director’s dream: to shoot in chronological order a chronological story that represents an itinerary…. [The] shooting began on Réunion Island, continued in Nice, Antibes, Aix-en-Provence, Lyons, to finish in the snow near Grenoble. The fact of respecting the chronology permitted me to ‘build’ the couple with precision….The Mermaid is above all else the tale of a degradation through love, of a passion.”

(*) Text and documents compiled by Dominique Rabourdin; translated from the French by Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Abrams, 1987).

      ___

Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.

TWO MERRY ADVENTURERS. Germany, 1937. Also released as The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes; original German title  Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war. Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Hilde Weisner.  Screenplay by  R. A. Stemmle and Karl Hartl (the latter also director). Currently available on YouTube.

   An official entry in the Venice Film Festival, Two Merry Adventurers is a curiosity all around. It’s set in a never never land where everyone in contemporary Europe believes Sherlock Holmes to be real and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is still alive eight years after his death.

   The other curiosity is that this good-natured comedy mystery with musical interlude was made in Nazi Germany well after they had taken over all aspects of the German film industry. There is no sign of that in this film, not even subtly. It might as easily have come out of Hollywood or the United Kingdom in the same period, fast paced, funny, and light of step.

   Hans Albers, who would still be going strong twenty years later in German film, may seem an unlikely choice to play any variation of Sherlock Holmes. Blond, pale eyed, stocky, and ruddy cheeked, it’s quite a stretch to imagine anyone could see him as the image of Sherlock Holmes, but the titles to the film show countless covers to the German pulp editions of Holmes adventures that do show Holmes vaguely resembling Albers’ interpretation.

   Not that any of that matters. Albers was a natural on screen much closer to his American and British counterparts than most of his European contemporaries. His best film would probably be the 1943 fantasy The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, also an unusual film to have come out of Nazi Germany, certainly in wartime since it is not only a comedic fantasy but vaguely anti-war (while I can’t speak for this film, the cast and crew of Münchausen were apparently hiding several Jewish production members while making the film).

   Albers is Morris Flint, who with his companion Macky Macpherson (Heinz Rühmann, who would become the popular West German Maigret in the late Fifties and Sixties) has dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (save only in German pulps did Holmes every wear a flat cap and checkered coat) stop a train on the way to Brussels.

   Though denying they are Holmes and Watson they act very mysterious and everyone jumps to the conclusion that they can’t be anyone else. What they are really after is a free ride and maybe a compartment, if they can scare any crooks on board by their appearance. Sure enough a pair of bank robbers jump train at the sight of them.

   In the compartment next to the crooks are a pair of young English women the crooks have tried to compromise. The girls are on their way to visit the estate of their late uncle near Brussels and collect on their inheritance, but for the time being that takes a back seat to Morris and Macky finagling a nice hotel room in the best hotel in Brussels and discovering among the criminals luggage a fortune in what they assume is stolen money.

   Having foiled bank robbers, the two are approached by the police to deal with a desperate case involving priceless missing stamps — that belonged to the two English women’s uncle.

   The boys are more than happy to help the two attractive women, only to discover their Uncle, far from wealthy, was hiding a massive international counterfeiting operations of not only money but collectible stamps.

   But there are also the real stamps used to copy the counterfeits from, and soon Morris and Macky find themselves surrounded in the criminals lair hoping the police arrive in time to save their necks.

   In capturing the gang though, they have exposed themselves and are put on trial by a tribunal for fraud, where Morris almost talks their way out of prosecution, but when things start to look bad Conan Doyle himself shows up and asks the court to spare the two who were just trying to start their own private detective business and never actually claimed to be Holmes and Watson.

   All Doyle wants for his efforts is to write their story, “The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes.”

   It’s a surprisingly bright and brittle mystery comedy that moves at a rapid pace and turns on the charming lead performances by Albers and Rühmann, who went on to long careers in film as did screenwriter Stemmle and director Hartl.

   Accept it as pure cinema and it is an entertaining romp handsome to look at and harmless fun to watch. It makes for an oddity in the history of Sherlock Holmes films, but one well worth catching.

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET. Episode 25, Season 1, of Tatort, Germany, 07 January 1973. Original title: Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße. Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Sieghardt Rupp, Anton Diffring, Stephanie Audran, Eric P. Caspar. Screenwriter-director: Sam Fuller. Novelization: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, by Samuel Fuller (Pyramid V3736, paperback original, 1974).

   To point up the difference between Promise and Genius, there’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street, written and directed by that certifiable madman Sam Fuller, auteur of Shock Corridor, Underworld USA and I Shot Jesse James.

   When he made this, Fuller hadn’t had control of a film since The Naked Kiss, seven years earlier, and it’s wonderful to see him right back in form, taking a standard plot (Glenn Corbett as an American Pl in Germany out to avenge the death of his partner . and retrieve incriminating photos of a client), pumping it full of energy and suffusing it with his own perverse artistry.

   There are some brilliantly edited action scenes, jarringly surreal tnise-en scene, and a story that stubbornly refuses to stay in its accustomed place. Fuller throws in some nifty extras as well, including bits of Rio Bravo in German, a cameo by Stephane Audran, and a wonderful turn from veteran character actor Alex D’Arcy.

   With his oily hair, vacuous leer and pencil mustache, D’Arcy was a Hollywood Fixture from the Silents through the Golden Age and well beyond, specializing in worthless heirs, effeminate gigolos and brainless fortune hunters (Remember him swapping derbies with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth?), and it’s a pleasure to see him once more, strutting his gaudy Nothing as amiably as ever, and kissing Glenn Corbett.

BLACK EYE. Warners, 1974. Fred Williamson (PI Shep Stone), Marie Cheatham, Rosemary Forsyth, Teresa Graves, Floy Dean, Richard Anderson, Richard X. Slattery, Bret Morrison. Based on the novel Murder on the Wild Side (Gold Medal, paperback original, 1972). Director Jack Arnold. Available for rental at Vudu/Fandango.

   The nicest thing you can say about Black Eye is that it will probably do no lasting harm to Jack Arnold’s reputation. In his hey-day, Arnold directed solid-if-minor classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarantula, and The Tattered Dress. He directed Orson Welles in Man in the Shadow and some sources credit him with parts of Touch of Evil. Sad to see him, twenty years after, wasting his time and ours on a lackluster “blaxploitation” pie like this.

   Not that Black Eye is terrible — it’s just not very interesting. In fact, it has some pretty good credentials: based on a Gold Medal Original by Jeff Jacks; starring ethnic auteur Fred Williamson, with help from Teresa (Get Christie Love) Graves as his sexually ambivalent girlfriend and Brett Morrison (Radio’s The Shadow) as a sleazy suspect.

   There are one or two passable fight scenes, and a car chase of flickering interest, but by and large this story of… of … what’s it about? … oh yeah, something about drug dealers and a fancy cane stolen from a dead movie star. Well, it leaves one wondering why they bothered.

P.J. Universal, 1968. George Peppard, Raymond Burr, Gayle Hunnicutt, Brock Peters, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jason Evers, Coleen Gray,Susan Saint James, Severn Darden, George Furth, Herb Edelman, John Qualen, Bert Freed, and Arte Johnson. Written by Philip Reisman and Edward Montagne. Directed by John Guillermin.

   Universal raised tastelessness 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 George Furth, doing a 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 gorilla suits, 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. PJ 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 about thirty years ago for DAPA-EM and at that time I reviewed it in the past tense because it didn’t exist anymore; when PJ 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, PJ 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 a vice-president from earlier in this century 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 a previous administration.

A LOVELY WAY TO DIE. Universal Pictures, 1968. Kirk Douglas, Sylvia Koscina, Eli Wallach, Kenneth Haigh, Sharon Farrell, Ralph Waite. Screenplay by A. J. Russell. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Currently available on YouTube.

   I confess I like this slightly smarmy, somewhat generic private eye tale more than it has any right to be liked.

   I hadn’t seen it since the mid-eighties, and then on television with commercials, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it on YouTube and discover it was pretty much the film I remembered, with all the caveats above including a few new ones about how quickly it veers from near comedy to melodrama like a leaf in the wind.

   Kirk Douglas is Jameson “Skye” Schuyler, a New York City cop who as the film opens resigns from the force after busting one too many heads. Schuyler is that staple of the movies, the tough cop whose methods are too direct for his own good.

   He’s no Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle. He’s about as generic tough guy cop fed up with bureaucracy as you can imagine. That’s okay because it only takes up about three minutes of plot time anyway.

   He’s also a womanizer and a bit of a rat as the opening scene demonstrates, but this isn’t film noir by any stretch. His playboy lifestyle is played strictly for comedy up to the point he spots some made men in a bar and busts heads.

   To be honest I don’t think anyone involved with this other than Douglas or Wallach would know film noir if it bit them.

   No sooner is Douglas out of a job than he gets a call from Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach), a smooth talking Southern Fried criminal defense lawyer who never lost a case and isn’t planning on doing so with his latest client, Rena Westabrook (Sylvia Koscina), whose husband took a bullet in their pool after they argued while she was out on the town with playboy Jonathan Fleming (Kenneth Haigh).

   Now Rena and Fleming are about to go on trial for murder and Fredericks wants Schuyler to baby sit her on her estate, keep Fleming away, and do a little private investigating into anything Fredericks can use, including the only witness he has, local tree trimmer Sean Maguire (Ralph Waite) who saw the couple outside a local bar when the murder happened.

   It’s pleasant work, pleasant wages, and pleasant scenery in the person of Rena and her maid (Sharon Farrell) who liked to wear her clothes and flirt with her husband. Farrell has nothing to do, but she fills out a maid’s uniform nicely.

   Rena is a bit of a kook, honest to a fault that she married her husband for his money and didn’t love him or even like him. Her nickname is Gypsy, and it fit her even if her in-laws meant it as an insult. She wears it as a badge of honor.

   And Fredericks is too slick by half: “Would you trust someone who hadn’t been south of Mason-Dixon since he was eight and talks with that accent?” Schuyler asks him.

   Things start going wrong almost as soon as Schuyler moves in. It’s hard to keep Fleming away and Rena doesn’t cooperate much. Then Maguire disappears, their only collaborating witness, and there is something going on at the neighboring mansion of a reclusive Englishman that has men with guns hanging around and a body in a freezer.

   Still, even with all that going on Schuyler and Rena start to flirt and play at the edges of things.

         Rena: You’re really a terrible man, did you know that?

         Schuyler: You’ve got some admirable qualities yourself.

   You know they are going to end up horizontal, and true to the somewhat bi polar nature of the film there is a funny morning after scene when Schuyler does the walk of shame back to his room barefoot past the staff.

   As the trial goes on there is an attempt to kill Schuyler, then a body shows up and the police want to question him, but slowly he starts to put the pieces together, and finds a tie other than Rena and Fleming between her husband and the tree trimmer. Meanwhile Rena is lying about Fleming and sneaking out to see him. Did she murder her husband after all?

   The film is pretty to look at. New York seldom looked prettier outside of one of those glamorous Doris Day pictures from a decade before, though the sets are pretty generic. Douglas seems to be having fun in a much lighter mode than usual, and Koscina in a series of bikinis, sleek outfits, and negligees is more than worth looking at in widescreen technicolor as well as good on screen.

   She seldom got to act in American films, but she was certainly worth watching.

   Basically this is the film equivalent of a Frank Kane Johnny Liddell book or a lesser Peter Chambers novel by Henry Kane. There’s nothing special, but the mystery isn’t bad, there’s some action, only one really big slap up the head moment I won’t give away, pretty girls in various states of undress, and big name stars like Douglas and Wallach having fun without phoning it in.

   In the years since I first saw this in the theater it still holds up for me. I will not be shocked if it doesn’t for you. It’s not any kind of a classic, not special in any way, not overly witty, or exceptionally well directed or photographed (some of it looks like it was made for television as too many films of that era do).

   I just happen to like it, smarmy as it may be. It does its job for its running time, doesn’t embarrass itself, and says goodnight politely without leaving a bad taste, but I admit freely I might not like it half as well if I had first seen it at thirty and not eighteen.

   You might want to keep that last thought in mind if you seek it out.

PLEASE MURDER ME! Distributors Corporation of America, 1956. Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehner, Lamont Johnson, Denver Pyle, Russell Thorson. Director: Peter Godfrey. Available for viewing on YouTube.

   As almost all of the user reviews on IMDb point out, this inexpensively made feature attraction could easily have been a dry run for Raymond Burr in being chosen for the leading role in the Perry Mason TV series the following year. A small but significant portion takes place in a courtroom, one which looks a lot like the one on Perry Mason – but then again, don’t all courtrooms in the movies or on TV look alike?

   As well-known lawyer Craig Carlson, Burr plays a defense attorney in this one. Accused of murder is the woman he loves, Angela Lansbury as Myra Leeds. Dead is Carlson’s best friend, Myra’s husband, from whom she was seeking a divorce. She claims she shot him in self-defense, and with a ploy that shocks all of the onlookers in the courtroom, including a gaggle of eager reporters, Carlson makes it stick.

   Then comes the truth, which I won’t reveal (but which I’ll allow you to guess), which is when the movie takes off at double speed, ending in the kind of moment that is only allowed in the movies, but which I found quite engrossing. The fancifulness of it all can easily be overlooked in light of the intensity of Raymond Burr’s character, which is almost but not quite over the top. Angela Lansbury, as a femme fatale, not so very much. In my opinion, of course.