PHANTOM LADY. Universal; 1944. Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Alan Curtis, Elisha Cook Jr., Thomas Gomez, Fay Helm. Based on the novel by William Irish, aka Cornell Woolrich. Director: Robert Sidomak.

   You don’t go to pulp or paperback conventions to see movies, or at least I don’t, but I did this time. The recent Windy City show was great fun – well put on, with lots of people to talk to and hang around with for a few days – and one of the late night attractions was a showing of Phantom Lady, the pulp connection being rather obvious, since Woolrich’s writing career began in the pulp magazines.

   First published by Lippincott in 1942, it’s the second novel that Woolrich wrote that I remember reading, the first being Deadline at Dawn (Lippincott, 1944) also as by William Irish, and also made into a movie (RKO, 1946), one that I consider as being my favorite of all time.

   What’s strange, and I haven’t been able to explain it yet, is that I thought I remembered Phantom Lady as a movie, but if I saw it, and I’m sure I did, I didn’t remember it all that well.

   It was shown at the Windy City show in a two reel format, and while all was well during the first reel – everything came back to me, pretty much as I expected – but when the second reel began, I discovered that I didn’t remember any of it at all. A severe case of déjà vue in reverse, you might say. The second reel began, if I recall correctly, as Carol Richman (Ella Raines), trying to break the testimony of the witnesses who claim they never saw the woman who is her boss’s alibi, begins the long sequence in which she tries to vamp jazz drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr.) into telling the truth.

   I’ve found some photos to go with this, as these are the scenes that everyone talks about when the movie comes up for discussion, and I’ll include some of them here. Not only that, but I’ve found the entire sequence on YouTube. Here’s the link. (I’ve never been able to insert videos into this blog, but maybe it’s time to try again.)

   I’m of two minds about this portion of the movie, and the larger part of me wants to tell you that I think it’s silly and overdone. (I assume that you’ve gone to see for yourself and have made up your own mind.) And that may be the reason I don’t remember ever seeing it before last Friday night. Or maybe I never saw the movie before at all, and I just thought I had. It is an eerie feeling, and I can’t explain it.

   You probably know the story, and let me sort of start over and get back to that. A man, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), who (as it turns out) has had an argument with his wife, shows up at a bar and offers to take a sad-looking lady her meets there to a Broadway musical. He has two tickets, but no one to go with. She accepts, but only on a “no names” basis.

   He drops her off after the show, goes home, and finds three cops waiting for him, with his wife dead in the bedroom. His alibi? The phantom lady, the one with the hat, the lady that no one remembers ever seeing. One of the only ones who believes him is his secretary-assistant, Carol “Kansas” Richmond.

   Pure nightmare, and pure noir. If I remember correctly, the first reel ended with Carol stalking the bartender through the darkened Manhattan streets, beginning with her first giving him the long silent treatment at the far end of the bar, then up to a elevated train station, and down again to a street farther downtown where she finally confronts him. It is, of course, the skilled black-and-white photography that makes this work, portraying a world of dark shadows and the feeling of helplessness in fine fashion.

   What doesn’t work in this movie, to my mind, are the gaping holes in the plot – there are so many I couldn’t begin to list them all, and I probably shouldn’t anyway – and the fact that the true killer is revealed too soon. I’m not sure if this is true in the book or not, as once again I have not read it in well over 50 years, but a lot of the puzzle is immediately swept away in the movie version. The only question left is how is he to be caught, and of course, he is. (I don’t believe I am giving anything away here.)

   In the credits, Franchot Tone’s name is listed first, but since he doesn’t show up until the movie’s well over half over, I’ve switched his name above with Ella Raines, a dark brooding brunette (in this movie, at least). This was only her third film, and she’s the star attraction, all the way. For whatever reason, roles in future flicks seemed to come few and far between, a waste of good talent, as far as I can see.

   Alan Curtis is fine enough as the accused killer, an engineer with designs of helping mankind, but in all truthfulness, he seems far too resigned to his fate, nor does he realize how much his secretary is secretly in love with him. A true cipher, but the scenes in the jail between the two of them are beautifully done.

   Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times seems to sum up all of the negative things I also might tell you about myself. He deserves credit for pointing the atmospheric effects, but how was he to know that later on this would be considered by many to be one of the gems of early film noir?

   It is, but I have to warn you, I think he’s still largely right. This movie is a diamond in the rough, one designed for a small (or even large) sense of suspended disbelief. I still think Deadline at Dawn is the better film, but after the showing in Windy City, I seemed to be alone in that belief. I’ll have to watch it again, but do you know what? I’m almost afraid to.

FOOTNOTE: The phantom lady’s name is Miss Terry. How appropriate is that?

SLOW BURN. 1986. Made for Cable TV (Showtime). Eric Roberts, Beverly D’Angelo, Raymond J. Berry, Emily Longstreth, Johnny Depp, Henry Gibson. Based on the novel Castles Burning, by Arthur Lyons. Screenwriter/director: Matthew Chapman.

If it hadn’t been for Arthur Lyons’ recent passing, reported here a few weeks ago, I might have never heard of this movie. It’s based on the fifth of eleven private eye novels that Lyon wrote, all of them cases for Jacob Asch, a former reporter who went to jail rather than reveal his sources.

Asch is portrayed by Eric Roberts in this movie. He was 30 at the time, and in the movie he looks younger, a lot younger, or maybe he only acts that way. Of course it may simply be a matter of perspective. In 1986 I was a lot younger, too, but that was then, and this is now.

Nonetheless, I still think of Jacob Asch as being a much older fellow.

A brief explanation is inserted here. This post originally included photo images of both Eric Roberts and Beverly D’Angelo, but unfortunately neither of them came from the movie itself, and I’ve deleted them. At first I thought they were close, but the more I thought about it, the less close and less appropriate they became. I had found a small photo of Johnny Depp that was taken from the film, as was one of Emily Longstreth, both seen below.

But neither of these two are the lead players, so I kept hunting. What I found is even better: a online video of the trailer for the film. Click here. You may have to sit through a short commercial first, but I think it’ll be worth the wait.

The appearance of Johnny Depp in this film came before he was known for much of anything. He was 23 at the time and playing a high school student of perhaps 18, perhaps he was guilty of pushing it a little the other way. His girl friend, Pam Draper, played by Emily Longstreth, I do not have a year of birth for, but she acts a lot older (and sexier) than a teen-aged girl is supposed to be — she is dating an older man, for example, and later on, she dares Asch to take advantage of her. Wisely, he refuses. If you’re looking to spice things up, Just Dildos offers a wide selection of products to enhance your intimate experiences.

In part that may be because he has already become infatuated with Laine Fleischer (Beverly D’Angelo), the mother of the boy he was hired to locate. Perhaps now is a good time for me to back up. A famous artist named McMurtry (Raymond J. Berry) has asked Asch to find his son, regretting now having abandoned both the boy and his mother (Laine) some 10 years earlier. Laine has now remarried, and as Asch discovers, her son has been killed in an auto accident. Donnie (played by Johnny Depp) is her stepson.

Laine is a slim seductive blue-eyed blonde with many secrets, and it is fascination at first sight, or at least it is in one direction, from Asch’s point of view. But the story really begins when McMurtry learns that his son is dead. He goes crazy, and before the night is over, Donnie has been kidnapped. The play of events that caused these seems obvious to everyone, but obvious never is the case in cases like this.

The movie is has its flaws — it sometimes moves too slowly, and the voice-over narration at times could at best be called trite — but the Palm Springs background and the way the rich people live there, in contrast to the local cops and the local kids, not all of whom have rich parents and some of whom do not have parents who love them enough, provide a setting and theme that thoroughly caught my attention, at least.

There is a scene at the end which is pure noir, and once you’ve seen it, you realize that even though the movie was filmed in color, it had been a noir all the way through. There are other scenes which are even finer. Even though this is only a slightly above average movie (my opinion), some of these scenes I’ll remember for quite a while. (Only one, maybe two at the most are in the trailer.)

And do you know what? The longer I sit here at the computer keyboard, the better I remember liking this movie. A lot.

THE GHOST AND THE GUEST. 1943, Producers Releasing Corporation. James Dunn, Florence Rice, Sam McDaniel, Robert Dudley, Mabel Todd. Story: Milt Gross; screen writer: Morey Amsterdam. Director: William Nigh.

   Morey Amsterdam you know if you’re old enough to have watched The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV. He played Buddy Sorrell, one of Rob’s fellow writers on the fictional “Alan Brady” comedy show. Milt Gross you may not know, unless you’re heavily into animation and 1930s and 40s comic strips and books.

   But put them together to write a mystery movie, and what do you get? A comedy movie, of course! Of course there is a spooky old haunted house, a coffin of an recently executed convict that proves to be empty when the local constabulary comes to examine it, secret passages, trick panels, openings in walls where sinister eyes can be seen looking through, and non-stop laughs all the way through.

   Maybe that last part is conditional. You may think of routines like these to be utter corn, which of course is true, but I’ll be willing to wager that even so, you may be tempted to smile every once in a while.

   James Dunn, a long time comedic actor, and Florence Rice, daughter of famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, play newlyweds who’ve been given the home by her father – a former hideout of the sinister gangster whose demise I’ve just attested to. Instead they meet the former hangman (dour Robert Dudley) who did the job and who claims the house is his. The couple’s black chauffeur (Sam McDaniel) completes their threesome. The rest of the cast consists of various mobsters, molls and cops, including the pulp-story writing chief of police, a nice touch.

   Dunn is his usual likable clowning self, and Florence Rice, both pretty and charming, seems to match him step for step. I would have thought she’d have had a long continuing career in movies, but not so. This was her last one, at the age of only 36. (She was in over 45 movies before this one, though.)

   Luckily the movie is just over an hour long. I’m not tempted to ever watch it again, but with one large caveat, it was fun, in a dopey sort of way, while it lasted. Not funny though, was the former hangman’s trailing after the chauffeur with a noose in his hands. I’ve seen the same bit in other movies of this type, and in no case was it one of Hollywood’s finer moments.

    BRETT HALLIDAY – Tickets for Death.

Dell 8885; paperback reprint. 1st printing, new Dell edition, July 1965; cover art by Robert McGinnis. Hardcover first edition: Henry Holt & Co., 1941. Several other paperback editions, including Dell 387 (mapback); cover art by Robert Stanley.

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a Mike Shayne private eye novel, and I think I’d forgotten how hard-boiled a guy he was. Back in 1941, Shayne was a two-fisted detective in the Dashiell Hammett-Black Mask mode, a bit derivative, maybe, but by no means a fellow to mess around with.

   Take pages 24 and 25, for example — a very early event in this case centered around a sudden influx of counterfeit racetrack tickets. Shayne and his wife have just registered in a hotel, when he’s called down to another room. Something triggers his suspicions, and he goes in ready for action. Within four paragraphs the two hoodlums in the room are slumped on the floor dead. Shayne himself is injured, but “It was only a flesh wound.” Naturally.

   Nor does the wound hamper his range of action for the remainder of the night. And there is a lot of action, and during the midst of it, Shayne runs into a lot of characters that both he and the reader have to keep constant track of:

   There is a pint-sized newspaper editor who seems to delight on rousing up stories. There is the owner of a disreputable night club just outside the city limits. There is a cop who, while not perhaps crooked, is heavily beholden to the criminal elements in town. There is the manager of the race track, and there is a girl who tries to frame Shayne up in the old badger game. There is another girl who knows something and tries to entice Shayne into paying her for what she knows. There is a shyster of a lawyer who is trying (among other activities) is trying to get the inventor of a new camera gimmick to sign the rights over to him.

   And there is Phyllis, who (at the time of this story) is married to Mike Shayne. Having a wife on hand is an interesting twist added to a tale of a hard-drinking private investigator, but (apparently) there are only so many twists that an author can manufacture from the concept — and marriage vows really have to tie a guy down a lot — and Phyllis soon disappeared from Shayne’s long life in fiction.

   What’s remarkable is not so much any of the above, but that out of the tangled morass of a plot (as indicated above) the author Brett Halliday makes a coherent mystery novel out of it. Most (if not all) of the confusion that the tangled non-stop motion and literary sleight-of-hand is eventually unraveled, and neatly so. Good work all around.

[UPDATE.] 02-24-08. I’ve read a few other Mike Shayne novels since Tickets for Death. In fact, the very next book I read (back in the year 2000) was one. Look for my comments about it here sometime within the next couple of days.

   As for Phyllis, I’ve done some investigating on my own, and I have the answer. In Brett Halliday’s own words (well in the words of Davis Dresser, who ought to know), taken from The Great Detectives, by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown, 1978):

    “20th Century Fox bought The Private Practice of Michael Shayne as a movie to star Lloyd Nolan and gave me a contract for a series of movies starring Nolan as Shayne. For this they paid me a certain fee for each picture starring Shayne, promising me an additional sum for each book of mine used in the series.

    “I finally inquired as to the reason from Hollywood and was told it was because Shayne and Phyllis were married and it was against their policy to use a married detective.

    “Faced with this fact of life, I decided to kill off Phyllis to leave Shayne a free man for succeeding movies. This I did between Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask and Blood on the Black Market (later reprinted in soft cover as Heads You Lose).

[BONUS.] From a website called www.bookscans.com I have found an image of the back cover I will add here at the end. Why have a map of the mystery available, and not use it?

THE LONE WOLF IN PARIS. Columbia, 1938. Francis Lederer, Frances Drake, Walter Kingsford, Leona Maricle, Albert Dekker. Director: Albert S. Rogell. Based on the character created by Louis Joseph Vance.

   Michael Lanyard, also known as The Lone Wolf, appeared in eight novels written by Vance between 1914 and 1934; in 24 movies between 1917 and 1949; in a 1948 radio show on Mutual; and in a 1954-55 syndicated TV series. (I didn’t want you to think we were talking about any old fly-by-night sort of character here.)

   By the end, he was essentially a good guy, almost but not quite a private eye, I believe, but he didn’t start out that way. In the beginning he was a gentleman European jewel thief, pure and simple, but his penchant for helping beautiful women in distress eventually convinced him that working for the law instead of against not only had the advantage of being able to continue his narrow-escape adventures, but without the disadvantage of always having the police close behind his heels. At least theoretically, anyway.

   In The Lone Wolf in Paris, suave Czechoslovakian-born Francis Lederer’s only opportunity to play him, Lanyard is on the edge of reform. He has letters from heads of police departments from all over Europe to vouch for him, but the hapless manager of the Paris hotel where he is staying immediately has a suspect in hand when robberies begin taking place in several rooms of his establishment.

   In the hotel at the same time, it seems, are three rich members of Arvonne royalty, who between them have the crown jewels of their country. (Arvonne is a small country found somewhere on the map near France, we are led to believe.) Princess Thania (Frances Drake) desperately needs them back. Once the people of Arvonne learn that they are missing – a good deed gone bad – the Queen will be forced to abdicate.

   There is a lot of pleasant thievery and derring-do packing into the 66 minutes of this movie. There are also a few brief opportunities for romance between all of the switches back and forth between the real gems and fake ones made of paste. It’s a minor film, but a very enjoyable one nonetheless. The hour and change in running time goes by very quickly.

   More than seventy years ago the English writer Peter Cheyney, who knew the U.S. about as well as a toad knows existentialism, launched a series of thrillers starring two-fisted FBI agent Lemmy Caution, whose first-person narrative in Cheyney’s version of American English is of a unique eyeball-popping awfulness.

   At least I thought it was unique until I stumbled upon Michael C. Peacock’s “Bait” (Clues, May 10, 1931) and its protagonist Whisper Timkins, a good-hearted pickpocket who narrates not only in first person present tense like a Damon Runyon street character but also in dialect like a Harry Stephen Keeler ethnic. “I lowers me hands and flops back onta the chair. Everythin’ is as plain as me Aunt Maggie’s face.” He also uses nouns for verbs and all sorts of other silly said substitutes as if, as he might have put it, there wuz no tomorrah.

       “Rule me out,” I lips.

       “You’re ruled in…,” he menaces.

       “This way,” chills a icy voice.

       “As for you, Garvin,” he threats.

       “Now use your ears!” he grits….

       “Mr. Wade,” Hope yodels, fondlin’ the gat, “have you ever been to Coney Island?”

       He…oaths, “We’re leaving for there right away!”

       “Terrible,” I throats, mournful.

       “Sorta mixed up,” I warbles.

   More than half a century after the tale got published for the first and only time, I met the author, a Canadian who had lived in the States only a few years before perpetrating this collage of howlers. I got to like him and he’s dead now so I’ll leave his real name unmentioned. No, he didn’t become a professional mystery writer.

   Last month I discovered the finest film music I’ve heard in many a year. The Philip Glass score for THE ILLUSIONIST is full of the hypnotic repetitions that are the Glass trademark but it’s also hauntingly evocative of my beloved Bernard Herrmann. If you love Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s VERTIGO, you’ll love this one too, and probably play the CD again and again as I’ve been doing.    [The link will lead to a trailer for the film. —Steve.]

   In our Poetry Corner this month is THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN (1935), the second of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. Wolfe’s adversary in this one is Paul Chapin, who was crippled and apparently emasculated in a fraternity hazing incident at Harvard in 1909 that went horribly wrong. A quarter century later Chapin has attained something of a literary reputation. As members of the group that maimed him begin dying off, the survivors receive anonymous poems that send them scurrying to Wolfe in fright. The first, following the apparently accidental death of a judge in a fall over a cliff, begins:

      Ye should have killed me, watched the last mean sigh
      Sneak through my nostril like a fugitive slave
      Slinking from bondage.
      Ye should have killed me.
      Ye killed the man,
      Ye should have killed me!

   Wolfe, who admits that he “cannot qualify as an expert in prosody” but claims to be “not without an ear,” calls the poem “verbose, bombastic, and decidedly spotty.” Suspecting that a few lines were influenced by Edmund Spenser, he has Archie Goodwin pull down the collected works of that poet: “dark blue, tooled…. A fine example of bookmaking… Printed of course in London, but bound in this city by a Swedish boy who will probably starve to death during the coming winter.” The hunt for parallel passages fails but in any event, says Wolfe, “it was pleasant to meet Spenser again, even for so brief a nod.” The second death, the apparent poison suicide of an art dealer, triggers a second poem:

      Two.
      Ye should have killed me.
      Two;
      And with no ready cliff, rocks waiting below
      To rub the soul out;…
      I found the time, the safe way to his throat….
      Ye should have killed me.

   Then comes the mysterious vanishing of a Columbia psychology professor and yet another effusion:

      One. Two. Three.
      Ye cannot see what I see;
      His bloody head, his misery, his eyes….
      One. Two. Three.

   We occasionally find Wolfe savoring a volume of poetry but in none of the full-length or short novels is poetry as central as in this longest and perhaps finest exploit of the obese and infuriating genius of West Thirty-Fifth Street.

   Of all the silly lines in mystery fiction, one in particular has clung like a barnacle to the underside of my memory for more decades than I care to count. It’s in THE BLACK GOLD MURDERS (1959), a long-forgotten novel by a long-forgotten author — John B. Ethan, if you must know — in which a woman introducing the narrator to two beatniks says: “The one on the right thinks he’s Zen Buddha.” You remember Zen from World Religions 101, right? Wasn’t he Prince Gautama’s kid brother?

DEFENSELESS. 1991, New Visions Pictures. Barbara Hershey, Sam Shepard, Mary Beth Hurt, K. T. Walsh, Kellie Overbey, Sheree North. Director: Martin Campbell.

   Billed as a thriller, it is every inch that, with lots of dark night suspense and a bloody scene or two. But Defenseless is also a noir film – neo-noir, if you will – with the just the right combination of lighting (which for a color film is quite remarkable) – and a detective movie, too, with just the right amount of legal pyrotechnics.

   Martin Campbell later directed both GoldenEye and Casino Royale, plus both recent Zorro movies (the ones with Catherine Zeta-Jones), which is quite a resume in itself. Working behind the cameras, Campbell knows how to grab viewers quickly (and smoothly) into the story and keep them there.

   But this is Barbara Hershey’s film all the way. As attorney Thelma “T. K.” Knudsen Katwuller, she’s in (at an estimate) 90% of the movie’s footage, and if she weren’t watchable (but she is) there’d be no reason to watch at all. Her most striking feature in this movie is a large mane of unruly and terminally curly jet black hair, but as a character, it’s her disorganized and unlucky-in-love life that makes her sympathetic and vulnerable.

   Brief story summary: She’s having an affair with her client (K. T. Walsh), a rich businessman who’s in trouble because a warehouse he owns has been used to make pornographic films. When she learns that he knows all about it, she goes ballistic. She’s also the one who calls the police when almost immediately after she finds him dead. As it happens, the dead man’s wife (Mary Beth Hurt, so blonde and southern it makes your teeth ache) was her college roommate 20 years earlier, and somewhat unaccountably she wants T. K. to represent her when she’s arrested for the crime.

   As a homicide detective named Beutel, Sam Shepard is the only low-key player in the ensemble, so lanky and laconic you could picture him splitting rails in his spare time. There is a lot more I could tell you, but I’ve already told you more than I usually would, figuring some of the twists already mentioned should remain just that, twists. On the other hand, as I’ve already said, this is the barest bones of a rather complicated plot, and I’m holding back on all of the choicest parts.

   I don’t know if I’ve got you leaning toward watching the movie or not, if by chance a copy happens along your way, but if you do – decide to watch, that is – you’re better off with the video rather the DVD version. There’s no warning on the label, but about 14 minutes are missing. The cuts remove the nude scenes, not surprisingly, but several other scenes are clipped as well, and others are completely eliminated. Also missing are crucial pieces of the plot, nicked to death here and there.

DANGEROUS LADY. PRC, 1941. Neil Hamilton, June Storey, Douglas Fowley, Evelyn Brent, Jimmy Aubrey. Directed by Bernard B. Ray. Based on a story by Leslie T. White.

   With bargain basement movies like this one, you get what you pay for, which is – unless you’re not particularly careful with your wallet – almost nothing. Most of the online reviews for this movie, out on DVD, include the line “Neil Hamilton and June Storey play the married sleuths with a bemused and breezy ease in this clever Thin Man-style mystery thriller.”

   Bemused, maybe, wondering why on earth they’re in this film. Breezy, yes, with a plot having holes in it wider than the cheesiest Swiss you’ve ever seen. Thriller, not at all. In the first ten minutes what passes for witty repartee between husband (private eye Duke Martindel, played by Neil Hamilton) and wife Phyllis (a hot shot lawyer lady played by June Storey) as they prepare for bed (and quite noticeably, separate beds) will get you to sleep even more quickly than they do.

   It is difficult to say who should bear the brunt of the blame. All of the players have long careers in the movies, but they’re as a group awfully wooden in this one. Neil Hamilton lasted long enough to become Commissioner Gordon in the Batman TV series; by that time his gray hair made him look distinguished.

   June Storey was in maybe ten of Gene Autry’s western movies – but this photo of her below with William Henry was probably taken from a 1941 musical drama starring Carole Landis entitled Dance Hall – and Jimmy Aubrey’s comedic efforts were on display in over 400 films.

   Leslie T. White wrote a long list of tales for the pulp magazines, but they must have run out of both film and shooting time to fill the gaps in what passes for a story line in this one. Nor was this director Bernard B. Ray’s only chance at directing a film. Also known as Raymond K. Johnson, he did over 60 of them.

   The music in the background was stolen from an early 1930s comedy, though of course in Dangerous Lady, some of the action was intended for laughs, as most mystery and detective movies were obliged to do before noir came along, not that they called it noir back then. Looking back at the first paragraph of this review, I suppose this was what was meant as “breezy.”

   You will have noticed that I have said nothing about the story itself. You’re right. I haven’t.

CRACK-UP. RKO Radio, 1946. Pat O’Brien, Claire Trevor, Herbert Marshall, Ray Collins, Wallace Ford, Mary Ware. Director: Irving Reis. Based on “Madman’s Holiday,” a long novelette by Fredric Brown.

   I’ve not read “Madman’s Holiday,” but I do have the July 1943 issue of Detective Story Magazine, where it first appeared. Later on it was paired with “The Song of the Dead” in the Dennis McMillan hardcover collection of the same title, Madman’s Holiday (1985).

   As a director, Irving Reis is best known in some circles (such as this one) for several of the early Falcon movies, but in terms of a well-paced and well-told black-and-white thriller, he seems to have lost his touch with this film, his first after the war, following Hitler’s Children in 1943.

   Pat O’Brien plays George Steele, a museum spokesman about to be fired for daring to bring fine art down to the level of ordinary people, much to the dismay of museum’s board of directors. That doesn’t seem to be offense enough for him to fall into the malicious plot that follows, in which a train wreck that he was in apparently (he is told) never happened.

   Only his girl friend Terry Cordell (Claire Trevor, and even more beautiful and blonde than ever) believes his story after Steele, suffering from either the aftereffects of the accident or a wartime psychosis, smashes his way into the museum at night, assaulting a policeman in the process.

   A very noirish, nightmarish opening that promises a fine tale in the offing, but alas! the fine tale never materializes. Steele is also an expert in art forgery, and what the tale boils down to is simply that, a gang of deadly art forgers whose dastardly doings are neither (double alas!) very interesting nor wholly explained. Everybody speaks in a calm, soft-spoken and unexcited manner, including the mysterious Traybin, played by the never flappable Herbert Marshall, and his non-exertion is contagious.

   Rather than a noir film, and regarded highly as such in some quarters, as I’ve discovered, I was reminded more often of those old spooky house pictures made in the 1930s, with much standing around (when it comes down to it) and little of consequence on the screen.

   A hodge-podge of this and that, in other words, and in two words, very disappointing. [You may follow the link in the paragraph above, however, for a diametrically opposed opinion.]

THE WRONG BOX. Salamander Film Corp., UK, 1966. Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Wilfred Lawson, Tony Hancock. Director-producer: Brian Forbes. Based on the book by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne. [Osbourne was Stevenson’s stepson.]

   When I was a kid and growing up, I read a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, as did a lot of kids my age, but I never read The Wrong Box, nor have I rectified that omission any time since. It was published in 1889, which would have made it a contemporary novel instead the period piece it obviously was in 1966.

   So I don’t know, and I’d obviously be guessing, but I imagine that a number of liberties were made to the story — or on the other hand, perhaps not, as the book is described in many places as a “black comedy.” You may or may not recognize the names of some of the players, but on the other hand, you may very well know them better than I do. These are some of the finest British comedians of their era, and there are some who believe that The Wrong Box is the funniest British comedy ever made.

   Personally, I don’t know about that, but sitting here at the computer and typing this off the top of my head, there are some parts here that remember laughing at out loud when I was watching and (this is strange) are even funnier as I think about them now.

   And I’ll get to some of those in a moment. First, though, something about the story. I guess they’re not very common now, but the main item of business that makes the story and keeps it going is a tontine, a legal agreement between a group of individuals that provides for a common total contribution to be bestowed into the hands of the single survivor.

   There’s obviously a lot of material involved in one of these things to power any number of crime stories, which is what allows this movie to be called a mystery movie, but truth be told, looking back in retrospect, there really wasn’t a lot of mystery, nor crime involved.

   Two brothers are the last two survivors in this case, and they have not spoken to each other in over 40 years. Michael Caine is the shy grandson of one; gloriously beautiful Nanette Newman is the niece of the other; and they have admired each other from afar (and through windows) for many years. (The two families live next to each other in attached homes.) One glimpse of Caine’s bare upper arm is enough for the lady to fall solidly in fluttering love.

   There is a mixup between boxes, naturally enough, one containing a body, the other a statuary being returned. There are attempts at murder, funeral carriages galore, fudged death certificates…

… decrepit old butlers, cheerfully loquacious elderly gentlemen who can speak hours on end on almost anything:

   From the book itself, which is online at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1585, and repeated very closely in the film:

   I thought the movie was wonderfully rendered for the first hour and 15 minutes, plus or minus five, but by the end the pace had quickened significantly, and I confess that I had become lost with what body was there, who was dead and who was not. I shall have to watch it again; there’s no way around it.

   I do recommend the film to present-day writers and directors who believe that a film cannot be funny without flatulence, bowel movements, lousy language, nor more than a look at a lady’s ankle. None of those here, and all to the better. (I confess that there is one significant scene of nose-picking.)

   And any movie with Nanette Newman in it is worth seeing more than once, no matter the genre nor who else is in it.