REPEAT PERFORMANCE. Eagle-Lion Films, 1947. Louis Hayward, Joan Leslie, Virginia Field, Tom Conway, Richard Basehart, Natalie Schafer, Benay Venuta. Director: Alfred L. Werker; based on the mystery novel of the same title by William O’Farrell.

   William O’Farrell wrote 13 or so crime novels between 1942 and 1962. Toward the end of his career he wrote paperback originals (Dell, Gold Medal, Lancer), but the first one he wrote was Repeat Performance, a hardcover from Houghton Mifflin in 1942. His next book didn’t come out until after the war, in 1948.

   As sometimes happens, it’s the first book that attracts the most attention, and so it was with this book. It was the only one of O’Farrell’s novels that was made into a movie until 1987, when a French company made Dernier été à Tanger, based on The Devil His Due (Doubleday, 1955). O’Farrell does have a handful of TV credits, according to IMDB: Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock, and so on, and a TV remake was made of Repeat Performance in 1989, a film entitled Turn Back the Clock, with Connie Sellecca in the leading role.

   In 1947, it was Joan Leslie who was the star, one of a number of leading roles she had for smaller companies like Eagle-Lion, and her career lasted long enough, thanks to television, for her to be given a walk-on role in the remake as a guest at a party. She was full-faced and very pretty without quite being beautiful, but then again your opinion need not necessarily be the same as mine.

   The beginning and end of Repeat Performance is dark and stylish enough for it to be considered in many quarters as a noir film, but without the beginning and end, it is frothy and soap opera-y and very nearly not a crime film at all. It begins with Sheila Paige (Joan Leslie) shooting a man in a Manhattan apartment on New Year’s Eve, then fleeing the scene of the crime through streets crowded and filled with merry-makers.

   The man, as it turns out, was her husband Barney, a failed and now-alcoholic playwright played by Louis Hayward. We don’t know any of the details right away, only that Sheila is frightened and needs help. And on the brink of the New Year, her wish to live the year over again, and to make things come out right, is granted.

   A nice fantasy touch. She remembers the year before, but no one else does, except (gradually) poet William Williams (Richard Basehart, in his first film), a tragically weak creature with hints of self-esteem. Sheila’s husband is not only a lush, but a louse and a womanizer, the woman in this case being an ultra- glamorous British playwright named Paula Costello (Virginia Field).

   Can Sheila live the year over again and make the outcome turn out differently? Can she keep her husband away from Paula by shuffling him off to California? Can she convince William that having Mrs. Shaw (Natalie Schafer) as a patroness, and a controlling one at that, is not likely to be in his best interest?

   You’ll have to watch and see. The fantasy elements give the movie a premise, but otherwise they are not followed up on. The crime element is shoved to the background. It’s always there, mind you, as you watch Sheila relive her life, with differences, but as I say, trim five minutes from both the beginning and the end, and you don’t have a mystery movie at all. And probably not much a story, either, so no, don’t trim it … a mystery film it is.

   Is it noir? Yes, if one aspect of noir films is seeing lives swirl and careen out of control, and another is a dark beginning and (hints are) a dark ending. No, if noir does not involve froth and soap flakes, which too much of this one does.

[UPDATE.] 01-22-08. For those of you conveniently located near San Francisco, Repeat Performance will be the lead-off attraction for this year’s Noir City film festival. Date: Friday, January 25th. Joan Leslie will be in attendance, and after the screening she will be interviewed by festival host Eddie Muller.

   Connecticut, unfortunately, is a mere 3000 miles away, else I’d be there for sure.

   I am always fascinated by the credited (as well as the uncredited) work of interesting genre authors for television: not, generally, that it really signifies anything very much, but there is considerable satisfaction to be drawn from recognising, or kidding oneself that one recognises, the hand of a favourite author in some otherwise unremarkable small screen work.

   Rather sadly, not too many such opportunities present themselves these days.

   David Goodis is an interesting case in point: while his novels and his source-as-screenplays are duly honoured in their respective quarters (read, viewed, reviewed), his admittedly slim trail of TV credits have been all but forgotten.

   Thank you, Mr. Nevins, for your astute observations once again (the Bourbon Street Beat segment). (I am still indebted to you for your enlightening article ‘Cornell Woolrich on the Small Screen’ in The Armchair Detective of Spring 1984.)

   The earliest Goodis television credit that I’ve been able to unearth belongs to the live anthology series Sure As Fate (CBS, 1950-51), which staged ‘Nightfall’ in September 1950, adapted by Max Ehrlich and directed by Yul Brynner in his days as a studio director with CBS-TV. John McQuade featured as the young artist on the lam from both gangsters and police. A version of ‘Nightfall’ was also presented by (Westinghouse) Studio One in the following year (July 1951).

   Edmond O’Brien and Maria Riva featured in ‘Ceylon Treasure’, adapted by Irwin Lewis from a Goodis story for Lux Video Theatre in January 1952. This was a Far East adventure yarn in which treasure hunter O’Brien tries to keep safe a fabulous sapphire against the larcenous efforts of Riva and her cohorts. Adapted from the 1953 short story “The Blue Sweetheart”, I believe.

   In January 1956, Lux presented their version of Warner’s 1947 The Unfaithful, featuring Jan Sterling and Hugh Beaumont in a noirish tale of murder and infidelity. Benjamin Simcoe adapted the Goodis-James Gunn story and screenplay for the hour-long play.

   The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (CBS/NBC, 1962-65) was one of the most effective chiller-suspense anthologies of its period, and it seems fitting that Goodis developed for the series the teleplay ‘An Out for Oscar’ from Henry Kane’s story My Darlin’ Evangeline (Dell, 1961). Telecast in April 1963, the multi-twist story has Larry Storch’s bank clerk being set up as the fall guy by his unfaithful wife (Linda Christian) and her killer boyfriend (Henry Silva) in a turnaround heist thriller.

   An anthology package of more recent years, the superbly dark and diverting Fallen Angels (Showtime, 1993; 1995), presented the 1953 Goodis short story ‘The Professional Man’ (1995), with Brendan Fraser as a hit man with a conscience. Teleplay veteran Howard Rodman (Naked City, Harry-O) adapted the half-hour episode for director Steven Soderbergh.

   By happy coincidence, another favourite from the past, W.R. Burnett, whose novel Dr. Socrates has recently been revived by O’Bryan House. It may therefore be of interest to overview the TV work of Burnett, another original whose credits cropped up on the small screen, albeit intermittently, between 1950 and 1967, but whose name as screen value seems now to have faded from view.

   Following adaptations of his works, by others, for the anthology series Danger (with ‘Dressing Up’ in October 1950) and Studio One (‘Little Man, Big World’ in October 1952, from teleplay by Reginald Rose), Burnett supplied two notable teleplays for episodic series in 1960. The first was ‘The Big Squeeze’ (February 1960; co-scripted with Robert C. Dennis from Dennis’s story) for The Untouchables, an exciting hour with Dan O’Herlihy as a bank robbery mastermind (of almost Dillinger dimensions) capable of outwitting Robert Stack’s Eliot Ness at almost every turn.

   The second teleplay, ‘Debt of Honor’ (November 1960) for the excellent Naked City series, was a moody, sensitive piece about gambler Steve Cochran repaying an old debt to a man in Italy by marrying the man’s daughter so that she can enter the U.S.

   The following work was skipped from the above chronology because, while sharing Mr. Nevins’s dread of the Warner Brothers TV ‘sausage factory’ of the day, one still wonders what was made of the race-track thriller ‘Thanks for Tomorrow’ (October 1959) for 77 Sunset Strip. With a teleplay adapted by William L. Stuart — whose own 1948 Night Cry was turned into the memorable Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1950 by Preminger — from (and I’m not certain here) Burnett’s Tomorrow’s Another Day (1946), there just may be a little of something left to savor.

   In 1961, MGM used the title of their 1950 Burnett/John Huston movie, The Asphalt Jungle, for a short-lived police detective series which, while fairly interesting in itself, bore absolutely no relation to the taut caper feature. Burnett was credited (with Paul Monash) for the screenplay of the European-released ‘feature’, The Lawbreakers (1961), an extended version of the series’ second episode (‘The Lady and the Lawyer’).

   His non-crime genre work for television included John Ford’s 1955 baseball drama ‘Rookie of the Year’ (story only) for Screen Directors Playhouse, ‘Manhunt’ (1965) for The Legend of Jesse James, ‘The Hellcats’ (1967), a pilot episode co-scripted with Tony Barrett about barnstorming flyers in the 1920s, and ‘The Fortress’ (1967) episode of The Virginian series (co-story with Sy Salkowitz), focusing on a Canadian border manhunt.

   Earlier talents and their moments of television (and cinema) remain, unfortunately, much in need of discovery.

MICHAEL SHAYNE: PRIVATE DETECTIVE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Lloyd Nolan, Marjorie Weaver, Walter Abel, Elizabeth Patterson, Donald MacBride, Douglas Dumbrille. Based on the novel Dividend on Death, by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Ford.

   Some random thoughts that may shape themselves into a review, and maybe not. What you see is what you get. The recently released DVD set of the first few Shayne movies calls them noir. Not so. It’s a good selling point, but when it gets to the point that every black and white movie made in the 1940s with a crime or mystery in it is called noir, the word simply no longer has any meaning.

   The first true noir film may have been The Maltese Falcon; I really haven’t thought about it too much, but it certainly could have been one of the first. I suppose it all depends on your own personal definition of noir.

   MSPD came out a few months before TMF, and it may have been a step in the right direction, but it’s way too light-hearted, and Lloyd Nolan is a little too goofy in the leading role, for the film, based on author Brett Halliday’s Dividend on Death, to be anything close to noir, using anyone’s definition. TMF is played straight, giving audiences the feeling for what a tough mystery film (as opposed to gangster movie) could really be like.

   At least, as I thought for a while, Michael Shayne doesn’t have a stooge for a sidekick in this movie — another step in the right direction — but on the other hand, Chief Painter (Donald MacBride) has a cop as his right hand man who is as dumb as they come, and Shayne does have Aunt Olivia (Elizabeth Patterson), who’s a dedicated fan of Ellery Queen, murder mysteries and The Baffle Book, to give him strong support when it counts.

   Nolan I called goofy, but he’s still immensely enjoyable in the role, as long as you don’t think of him as Brett Halliday’s Michael Shayne. Seeing the repo men moving the furniture out of his office at the beginning of the film, when cases have apparently been tough to come by for him, certainly sets a certain tone. And watching him cover himself with a blanket when Phyllis Brighton (Marjorie Weaver), whom he’s been hired to bodyguard by her rich father, catches him with his pants down, is mildly funny but hardly, I suspect, how the real Michael Shayne might have reacted in the same situation.

   Not that the real Michael Shayne was really truly tough-as-nails hardboiled or one of theose super-sexed PI’s who came along later, but Lloyd Nolan, he wasn’t either.

   Perhaps as the series goes along, given the TMF influence, the humor lessens and the mystery is played straight, but even if it doesn’t, I’m not going to be concerned about it.

   The story has to do with a gambling casino, horse-racing, a murder, a ditched dame, a possible suicide note, the switching of the barrels of two guns, a bottle of ketchup and a piece of jewelry that comes unpinned at the wrong time, perhaps even a couple of times. It really is a complicated case, I grant you that, which is one of the things I had in mind when I called this a possible transition into true noir from detective films that felt they also had to make the audience laugh.

   It’s remarkable, looking back now, how all of the plot is made to fit into a tight 77 minutes, which I have a hunch is a little longer than the average murder mystery movie at the time. I’ve watched it twice now, and there’s not a minute that’s really wasted. It was well worth the time, and if I may say so, probably yours as well.

MIKE HAMMER: SONG BIRD. 2003. Movie compiled from two episodes of Mike Hammer, Private Eye, May 10 & 17, 1998. Stacy Keach, Shannon Whirrey, with Jack Sheldon, Moira Walley, Frank Stallone. Based on characters created by Mickey Spillane. Director: Jonathan Winfrey.

   As far as I’m concerned, Stacy Keach is Mike Hammer on TV. Not Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, I didn’t say that. But as a savvy, trenchcoat-wearing private eye handy both with a gun (Betsy) and a quip – “Lila B. went through piano players like Janis Joplin did bottles of whiskey” – who just happens to be named Mike Hammer on the small screen, there simply is or was no better.

   The TV series that this film was taken from was the third or fourth time he’d taken the role, if I have the chronology correct. I’m taking this information from http://www.stacykeach.com/hammer-series.htm, but I’ll take the responsibility if I happen to be restating it incorrectly.

1. MICKEY SPILLANE’S MURDER ME, MURDER YOU. (1983, CBS, TV movie)

2. MICKEY SPILLANE’S MIKE HAMMER. (1984-1985, CBS, series). 22 60-minute episodes.

3. THE NEW MIKE HAMMER. (1986-1987, CBS, series). 22 60-minute episodes.

4. MIKE HAMMER, PRIVATE EYE. (1997, syndicated series). 26 60-minute episodes.

    By the time the syndicated series came along, episodes of which I don’t remember ever seeing before, he seems to have mellowed into the part, fitting into the role as if it were an old shoe, an old dog who no longer needs to learn new tricks. In this series Velda was played by Shannon Whirrey, who gets second billing on the DVD case. Whirry began her career playing what are generically called erotic B-movies. Playing Velda was a step up into better roles.

    “Song Bird” is a heartfelt homage to jazz, smoky jazz clubs, jittery, jiving jazz musicians and jazz singers that doesn’t make a lot of sense as a murder mystery, but I’ve watched it twice in the last couple of months, and I’m bound to be watching it a few times more.

    Jack Sheldon in the real world is a wise-cracking jazz singer and trumpet player who in “Song Bird” plays a wise-cracking jazz singer and trumpet player named Des Long who has a jazz band and who’s a good friend of Mike Hammer. Moira Walley’s name is not even on the DVD case. She’s the thin, blonde, and slightly flighty jazz singer Lila B. who drops in for a few sets with Des’s band every so often, as the mood strikes her, and who’s in love with Johnny Dive (Frank Stallone) a gangster who’s gotten in bad with the boss of the mob he’s a member of, and who is not likely to survive very much longer as a result.

    Forget the story. I can’t even find a decent photo of Moira Walley to show you, but she’s as perfect in the role of Lila B. as Jack Sheldon is playing Jack Sheldon. Or Stacy Keach playing Mike Hammer. The rest of the cast may not even need to be there, except that there is a story, one which I’ve already suggested that you forget.

    And forget the lousy reviews that Moira Walley received. Off-key warbling? No way. The role she plays may be off-key, intentionally, but hardly the warbling. A weak vocalist who reaches for every note and only looks flustered and out of it when she’s required to say lines? The guy must have been watching another movie altogether. Forget him too.

    Watch this one for the music, and don’t forget to listen. They’re all having a great time, gats, gorgeous girls and gams (and more), gangsters and jazzheads, and so did I.

   Palmer’s last Hollywood film Step by Step (1946), is an entertaining comedy espionage-thriller. Palmer scripted, from George Callahan’s story. The tale has some elements in common with Palmer’s prose mysteries:

   One wonders if “B-13,” part of the spy code, is Palmer’s homage to John Dickson Carr’s radio play, “Cabin B-13” (1943).

   The other members of the creative team also have personal elements in Step by Step. George Callahan’s use of electronic bugs by the spies recalls the even more unusual television jukebox in The Shanghai Cobra, for which he also wrote the story.

   Director Phil Rosen was reduced in 1946 to low budget B-movies like Step by Step, but during the silent era he had worked on major films like The Young Rajah (1922).

THE AMAZING MR. BLUNDEN. Hemdale/Hemisphere, UK, 1972. Laurence Naismith, Lynne Frederick, Garry Miller, Rosalyn Landor, Marc Granger, Diana Dors. Based on the novel The Ghosts by Antonia Barber. Directed by Lionel Jeffries.

   Am I stretching things to include this not-really-so-spooky children’s movie about ghosts and time-travel – apparently a staple on British television every Easter morning for years – as a mystery movie?

   Well, no, not really, according to my standards. This is, after all, a murder of two young children to be solved – no, I’ll take that back. There is the murder of two young children to be undone. We know who committed the murder – their uncle’s in-laws, of whom one (Diana Dors) you probably wouldn’t recognize even under duress.

   To start from the top. In the year 1916 or so, a family without a father is visited by an aged lawyer (Mr. Blunden, played by Laurence Naismith) who saves them from a wretched life in a basement hovel, giving them a new home in the caretaker’s cottage for a manor in which the two children perished in a fire 100 years before.

   When the two dead children appear (in solid ghostly form) to Lucy and Jaime, it is to take them into the past, where it is hoped, the past can be undone, and redeem Mr. Blunden’s error at the time in not taking the children’s warning more seriously. (Lucy is played by Lynne Frederick at 18, she being the future Mrs. Peter Sellers, five years later.)

   The DVD print I viewed was not very good, as if it were taken from an indifferent video tape, but if re-processed properly, this would be quite a period spectacle for the eye indeed – two periods of British history, as a matter of fact. As it is, it’s charming, warm-hearted and delightful and – I hate to mention it – flawed.

   In terms of time-travel and logic going together, maybe they’re totally incompatible, and maybe not, but this one has a gigantic gaff in it that’s easy enough to ignore, simply because you want to, but it still needs a mention, even by the most sympathetic reviewer. Such as the one you have here.

   As a followup to an earlier discussion about the movie version of The Big Sleep here on the Mystery*File blog:

   At this rate, it won’t be long before the entire movie is up on YouTube. Thanks to Jeff Pierce, head man at The Rap Sheet, for getting me started in looking.

FRAMED. Columbia, 1947. Glenn Ford, Janis Carter, Barry Sullivan, Edgar Buchanan. Director: Richard Wallace.

   More than a B-movie, but not quite an “A,” Framed is generally considered to fall into the noir style of filmmaking. One definition I found online (Encyclopædia Britannica) is that noir is “a film genre that offers dark or fatalistic interpretations of reality. The term is applied to U.S. films of the late 1940s and early ’50s that often portrayed a seamy or criminal underworld and cynical characters. The films were noted for their use of stark, expressionistic lighting and stylized camera work, often employed in urban settings.”

   I’ll tell you the general plot line, then you tell me. An unemployed mining engineer named Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford) comes into a cheap bar where a beautiful girl named Paula (Janis Carter) is a waitress.

   Bad luck seems to follow Lambert, even getting him into trouble almost as soon as he hits town (literally), but – good luck at last? – Paula is there to bail him out of jail. Of course she has ulterior motives, and Lambert almost realizes it, but he can’t quite make a break from her.

   One of Paula’s bedtime buddies is a local banker named Steve Price (Barry Sullivan), and their plans for Mike Lambert are both sinister and obvious. Of course we, the viewer, know full well that plans of this nature do not always work out the way they’re expected to, and in this movie, no exception is made.

   Noir? I thought you’d say so, and I’d agree, but I don’t think it fits the definition above, unless it’s expanded to include “… dark or fatalistic interpretations of reality, often involving unexpected twists of fate, against which the participants feel helpless to react.” Well, maybe the phrasing needs some work, but work on it I will.

   Glenn Ford’s sometimes goofy-faced grin serves him well in this film, but the chemistry between Paula and him doesn’t quite seem to work. She’s also a little too glamorous – especially to be a waitress in a cheap bar – and not quite vampish or seductive or dangerous enough. (If I include enough words here, maybe the point I’m making will also make itself clear.)

   As Jeff Cunningham, though, the genial old prospector whom Lambert hopes to work for, and who – completely bewildered – ends up in jail, Edgar Buchanan is in a role made expressly for him. All in all, while you may find the plot line a little too familiar, if this is the kind of movie you like, then you won’t mind seeing yet another variation on the same theme, one more time, with just enough gusto to get by.

   Peter Rozovsky has just left a comment after my review of Step by Step, posted about this same time yesterday. Peter found what NY Times movie critic Bosley Crowther said about the film to be very interesting. (Crowther didn’t like it very much, and he said so.)

   What’s even more interesting is that in the same column Crowther also reviewed the film version of The Big Sleep, which many people today find one of the classics of the hard-boiled private eye genre. He didn’t care for this one either, and he said so – and at even greater length. You can read the entire review online yourself, and you should, but here are some excerpts:

   If somebody had only told us – the script-writers, preferably – just what it is that happens in the Warners’ and Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, we might be able to give you a more explicit and favorable report on this over-age melodrama which came yesterday to the Strand. But with only the foggiest notion of who does what to whom – and we watched it with closest attention – we must be frankly disappointing about it.

   For The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself. What with two interlocking mysteries and a great many characters involved, the complex of blackmail and murder soon becomes a web of utter bafflement. Unfortunately, the cunning script-writers have done little to clear it at the end.

      […]

   Through it all, Humphrey Bogart stalks his cold and laconic way as the resolute private detective who has a mind and a body made of steel. And Lauren Bacall (Mrs. Bogart) plays the older of the daughters languidly. (Miss Bacall is a dangerous looking female, but she still hasn’t learned to act.) A dozen or so other actors play various tramps and tough guys acidly, and the whole thing comes off a poisonous picture lasting a few minutes shy of two hours.

   On the other hand, to pick a critic whose comments are always handy, Leonard Maltin gives The Big Sleep four stars (****) and in part agreeing with Crowther says, “So convoluted even [Raymond] Chandler didn’t know who committed one murder,” then going on immediately to say, “but so incredibly entertaining that no one has ever cared. Powerhouse direction, unforgettable dialogue…”

   I realize that it’s unfair not to give Mr. Crowther a chance to reconsider – and later on perhaps he did. No one always gets everything right the first time, and I do mean no one.

   And, just in case you might be wondering, Mr. Maltin gives Step by Step two stars (**), but other than a one line summary of the plot, his only critical judgment is that it is a “patriotic programmer.”

STEP BY STEP. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Lawrence Tierney, Anne Jeffreys, Jason Robards Sr., George Cleveland. Screenwriter: Stuart Palmer. Director: Phil Rosen.

   I don’t know his career all that well, but I know enough to make it awfully hard to imagine that the tough-looking Lawrence Tierney had many leading roles in which he wasn’t the villain. Nonetheless, here he is in this low budget postwar mystery movie, pairing up with a deliciously blonde Anne Jeffreys to help nab a gang of Nazi spies somewhere along the sunny California coast.

   Fresh out of the Marines, Johnny Christopher (Tierney) spots Evelyn Smith (Jeffreys) while she’s swimming in the ocean, and in a two-piece bathing suit yet. Not easily taking a friendly no for an answer, he follows her to the house where she’s working as a Senator’s secretary, but another Miss Smith seems to have taken her place. Johnny’s Miss Smith is nowhere in sight.

   Bringing the police in does not help, and in fact makes things worse. When the bodies start to pile up, he’s immediately been tagged as being a semi-delusional if not cracked-up war veteran, and his Miss Smith, when found, quickly becomes his partner on the lam.

   Although I admit that the plot is ridden with as many holes as that legendary slice of Swiss cheese, it still tickled my fancy to see fate conspire against the pair of fugitives, with every step they take getting them more and more deeply into trouble. George Cleveland, playing a cranky but lovable old motel owner, is the only one who believes in them.

   Since I watched a print that omitted the opening credits, I didn’t recognize Anne Jeffreys until I looked it up after the movie was over, but with her long blonde hair curled up slightly at the ends, I didn’t take my eyes off her very often. Even as a misunderstood hero, Lawrence Tierney played his part as if he were an old-fashioned pocket watch that has been wound up too tightly and is ready to burst into a flying display of gears, cogs and pieces of broken springs at the slightest provocation.

   And on two occasions, he does, in a couple of high-flying, hard-punching fist-fights in which he nearly bounces off the walls in the bargain. A good film that the critics didn’t care for (*), but on the other hand, five out of six IMDB viewers so far have thought it was as much fun to watch as I did.

   —

   (*) Here, for example, are some of Bosley Crowther’s contemporaneous comments as they appeared in The New York Times: “Even two murders don’t relieve the tedium of this incredible tale about an ex-Marine and a chance feminine acquaintance who stumble into a Nazi espionage plot in sunny California and get quite a pushing around before their innocence is established and the spies are apprehended. As the principals Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys move through the film like two bewildered innocents in search of a director.”