THE PHANTOM SPEAKS. Republic Pictures, 1945. Richard Arlen, Stanley Ridges, Lynne Roberts, Tom Powers, Charlotte Wynters, Jonathan Hale. Screenplay: John K. Butler. Director: John English.

   The Phantom Speaks is an unusually downbeat crime/horror hybrid programmer from Republic Pictures. Overwrought and over explained, the story centers around a paranormal researcher’s quest to bring the dead back to life, albeit in spirit form. Dr. Paul Renwick (Stanley Ridges) is about as sincere as can be. He truly believes in the supernatural, even though he knows he is an object of ridicule for his obsession. When Renwick learns that convicted murderer Harvey Bogartus (Tom Powers) is about to be put to death, he arranges for a brief meeting in which he explains his desire to bring Bogartus’s spirit back from the grave following the execution.

   As one might imagine, things don’t go entirely according to plan. While Renwick is able to bring Bogartus back, it doesn’t play out the way he expected. Bogartus, a thug to his core, fully takes over Renwick’s body and uses it to commit a new string of heinous murders. Renwick, for his part, becomes the victim of his own hubris and doesn’t even realize how his body has been co-opted by an evil spirit. Investigating the weird occurrences is reporter Matt Fraser (Richard Arlen), who in ths one isn’t a particularly compelling protagonist.

   All told, The Phantom Speaks is a rather mediocre horror film. But, at a running time of less than seventy minutes, it doesn’t get a chance to wear out its welcome. It’s watchable, but nothing really more than that.

STANTON FORBES – If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1970.

   During Mime Day at Shenley College, a small eastern school, students from the Classical Cinema Department all decide to dress up as Laurel and Hardy for their annual high jinks. One pair of actors takes the opportunity to murder the president of a nearby electronics corporation, Sacheville, Inc., and newly hired PR director Larry Evans is implicated in the crime. In order to save his bacon, Evans undertakes an investigation of his own, pokes around among a bunch of rather quirky (to say the least) suspects, and eventually unmasks the culprits.

   This is a fine idea for a mystery, but the execution is poor. Forbes’s style is a cross between eccentric and sophomoric; so is her humor. Some might find this sort of thing clever and amusing, but this reviewer isn’t one of them. (The best thing about the book, in fact, is its wraparound dust jacket depicting thirteen sad-faced Laurels against an orange background — one of the niftiest jackets on any contemporary crime novel.)

   Forbes is the author of numerous other novels, among them the likewise fancifully titled Go to Thy Death Bed (1968), The Name’s Death, Remember Me? (1969), and The Sad, Sudden Death of My Fair Lady (1971). She has also written numerous mysteries under the pseudonyms Tobias Wells  and Forbes Rydell (collaborations with Helen B. Rydell).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

SARA GRAN – Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Claire DeWitt #1. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, June 2011. Mariner Books, trade paperback, May 2012.

   So once in a long while I read something written recently. Just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Just to make sure that no one’s figured it out.

   And by ‘figured it out’ I mean figured out how to write a hardboiled detective novel like they did in the good old days. I mean contemporaneously — not as a historical novel or as pastiche. In other words: I want hardboiled detectives doing their hardboiled detection right now. In this world we live in today. Not in some synthetic imagined yesteryear. Because if I wanna read yesteryear, I’ll go straight to the Hammett’s mouth. I don’t need a ventriloquist.

   Anywho. So this one is written contemporaneously. So there’s that.

   It takes place in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina. A DA went missing in the flood. Presumed dead. Left all his considerable coin to his nephew. Who feels he owes it to his uncle to find out what happened to him. Until it begins to seem like maybe he had it coming.

   What is unique and disconcerting about Claire DeWitt is that she does not depend upon traditional investigation or procedure. Rather, she depends on vibes and seeming coincidence. She does not run down the list of suspects and evaluate alibis and hard evidence. Instead, she uses a lot of hallucinatory drugs and relies on leads received in dreams. She takes her cue from a (fictional) obscure French handbook called ‘Détection’ by Jacques Silette, from which she constantly quotes.

   And it’s the quotes that make this a compelling read. Not the detection. Which is hair-brained and unconvincing.

   Here are some of my favorite quotes:

         Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we’re unhurt is where we are false.

         There are no coincidences. Just opportunities you’re too dumb to see, doors you’ve been too blind to step through.

         The truth lies — at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.

         He’d been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show.

         Consider the possibility that what we perceive as the future has already happened, and intuition is only a very good memory.

         There will always be people who need to be rescued. And there will never, ever be enough people to save them all.

         NO ONE IS INNOCENT. The only question is, how will you bear your portion of guilt?
   
   

SPOILER ALERT: The entire case is solved by a single ‘clue’. A discarded calling card randomly found near the table at the restaurant where Claire Dewitt initially meets with her client. Nearly the first thing Claire does in the book is find and pocket the random calling card.

   Nearly the last thing she does is call the number. And that’s it. That’s how the mystery is solved. Calling the number on a random calling card you found during your initial client meeting at a random restaurant. If she’d called the number at the beginning of the novel, the novel would be about three pages long.

   Everything that takes place between finding the card and calling the number is just one big mcguffin. Which is to say, the mcguffin is the mystery itself. END OF SPOILER ALERT.
   
   

VERDICT: Sara Gran is a really good writer. Claire Dewitt is a terrific character. Line by line, they are fresh and new. And I went out and bought a couple more Sara Gran (non-series) novels based on how good her writing is, if that tells you anything.

   But the mystery itself? The detection? Strictly for the birds.

   Previously reviewed here on this blog: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=22628
   

      The Claire DeWitt series —

1. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011)
2. The Bohemian Highway (2013)
3. The Infinite Blacktop (2018)

   It seems ludicrous to discuss Harry Stephen Keeler as a deep, metaphysical author on the order of Kafka or Genet. In fact, it is ludicrous, and I’m not going to attempt it. I just want to point out that for a writer generally dismissed, even by his admirers, as “wacky,” he touches on some complex and unsettling themes.

   I think the salient point of Keeler’s writing is its intensely Dickensian quality. His work on characters like Xenious Jones, Christopher Thorne, Casimir Jech and Simon Grund of the Lincoln School for the Feeble Minded, irresistibly reminds one of the imagination and care that Dickens put into Uriah Heep, Fagin, Macawber et al. Nor should one overlook Dickens’ penchant for tangled interrelationships and the occasion wild coincidence.

   Having made that point, I think it best forgotten. Keeler’s love (one might almost call it a fetish) for these elements, though it constitutes much of the charm of his work, has been entirely too much the focus of his admirers and detractors.

   Without denying this considerable charm, I’d like to consider some of the less apparent underpinnings of some of his books.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Mysterious Mr. I. Dutton, hardcover, 1938.

   The eponymous narrator of The Mysterious Mr. I guides the book through something that is not so much a plot as a series of short stories. Or maybe they’re fragments of novels, since each seems to have started long before his intrusion into it. We first meet him on a Chicago street corner, holding a skull under his arm. We follow him through an odd procession of introductions in which he meets total strangers, convinces them that they are acquainted with him, and causes six suicides simply by telling some of the strangers what he knows about their guilty pasts.

   Wacky, yes, but grim. Like a Max Fliescher Cartoon. Throughout the book, there is something that could be called a plot, about the search for an escaped maniac and a scheme to defraud “I” of a fortune that he doesn’t have. Keeler pretty much ignores it, and, in fact leaves it unresolved at the end, along with I’s true identity.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Chameleon. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1939.

   The Chameleon continues the story in a somewhat lighter vein. No deaths this time, just a dizzying succession of identity-changes that make one wonder at the complexity of Keeler’s imagination and the strength of his sheer gall in the face of so many improbabilities.

   The fascinating thing about this multiplicity of identities is that although the narrative stays firmly in the first person, the narrator remains tantalizingly concealed from the reader. His constant assertions of new identities — besides pushing the plot along — says something about the nature of Identity itself.

   If an apparent amnesiac can bring total strangers to take their own lives simply by pretending to know them too well, then Identity and the knowledge of it assume a mystic power. In fact, there are religions that hold that one’s true name is sacred, that knowledge of it gives the knower power over the named. One could find significance, then, in the fact that I’s lack of identity makes him all-powerful and when he does assume a final name, it makes him impotent.

   Hmmm. That’s heavy stuff for a wacky writer, and I think I should put in here that this is not the sort of thing that one should read Keeler in search of. I just find its presence wonderful in a contrived thriller.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Defrauded Yeggman. E. P. Dutton, hardcover,

   The Defrauded Yeggman is equally odd for a mystery in that it ends with a solved murder, but the solution is absolutely pointless.Nearly half the book is a framing device, setting up a situation in which three vagrants (who are not what they appear to be) are arrested for espionage and each must tell how he came to be in possession of damning evidence or be hung. Shades of Sing Sing Nights.

   The first to tell his story is the Yeggman  of the title and his tale takes up the rest of the book. For matters extraneous to his story, we are directed to a sequel, 10 Hours. The bit of incriminating evidence he is carrying is another skull. His explanation of why he is traveling with it ranges from a South American jail to Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago, to Hawaii, and finally to Texas.

   But when the book ends, Keeler has only solved a murder — that is, revealed the identities of murderer and victim. He doesn’t redress the crime or even (here) get the Yeggman out of his Kafka-esque trial.

   Keeler’s ability to generate so much smoke, raise so many questions, ring in so many absurdities, yet refuse — in the face of all the conventions of “light fiction” or fiction per se — to give his blood-and-thunder story any ending at all raises thoughts about the absurdities of life and death that…. Well, I almost said that they evoke Sartre, but I caught myself just in time.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – 10 Hours. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1937.

   10 Hours, the purported sequel to Yeggman, deals more with nature of reality. At an accelerated pace, other stories told, proven, disproven, and partly re-proven. Alternate realities seem to flash by like cards flipping through a deck. At tale’s end (WARNING: ENDING ABOUT TO BE HINTED AT) not only is the trial itself proved to be unreal, but the final unmasking of the three vagrants reveals — very suitably, I think, palpable pseudonyms. (END OF WARNING: THOSE WHO READ KEELER FOR THE SAKE OF THE MYSTERY CAN NOW SAFELY RESUME READING)

   Every Science-Fiction author who ever wrote an “alternate world”. including Philip K. Dick, who seems to have won his struggle with reality, could pick up some thoughts on what is and what ain’t in 10 Hours.

   I’ll end by reiterating what I’ve already iterated: Philosophic contemplations of reality, identity, and the Meaning of Life are not what one reads Keeler for. The man cannot be pigeonholed as a mere philosopher. He created a universe all his own and that he created a metaphysics to go with it is incidental. But I can’t help thinking that just calling him “wacky” is an equally confining pigeonhole. Like a lot of good, comedy and Drama, Keeler s books can also evoke some deeper questions and respond with some darker thoughts.

TRANSATLANTIC. Fox Films, 1931. Edmund Lowe, Lois Moran, John Halliday, Greta Nissen, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt. Director: William K. Howard

   Just lately I’ve been catching up to a lot of films I’ve wanted to see — or see again — for quite some time, films lost or just unavailable for a generation or more. First and best of the bunch is Transatlantic,   which I’ve been keen to watch ever since I saw a still from it in a book on Hollywood Cameramen thirty years ago.

   Made at the dawn (or early morning anyway) of talking pictures, Transatlantic defies every notion you ever had about early talkies; it’s a fast-paced, highly visual thriller, set on a luxury liner with a clever story (by Guy Standing, whose credits include the book for Anything Goes) centered around Edmond Lowe as a shady character fleeing the law, mingling aboard ship with con men, kept women, and the loyal trophy wife (Myrna Loy, back when she usually played oriental temptresses) of a nearly murdered millionaire — who apparently ran a bit of a con himself.

   Director William K. Howard and photographer James Wong Howe take this snappy mystery and serve it up with splendid sets that give the huge ship the appearance of a Byzantine palace or gothic cathedral, jazzed up with snappy editing and a restless, roving camera that follows the action perfectly. All capped off very effectively by a tour-de-force cat-and-mouse shoot-out in the labyrinthine guts of the ship itself.

   Simply dazzling. Not a well-known film, but one I can recommend highly.

KEN FOLLETT – Eye of the Needle.  Arbor House, US, hardcover, 1978. Signet, US, paperback, 1979. First published in the UK as Macdonald and James, London, 1978, as Storm Island. Reprinted many times since. Film: United Artists, 1981, with Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan.

   Eye of the Needle is one of the best of the recent spate of World War II espionage novels. Ken Follett combines a very believable plot based on astounding. historical fact with excellent pacing and-a real boon in this type of thriller-well-rounded. sympathetic characters.

   The historical fact is that in 1944 the Allies created a fake army in southeastern England. To Nazi reconnaissance planes. it looked like a huge encampment set to invade France at Calais. But seen from the ground, the “barracks” had only one side and a roof; the “airplanes” were mere carcasses sunk into the ground. with no engines or wheels. It was a hoax of gigantic proportions that convinced the Nazis to concentrate their defenses at Calais instead of Normandy, and it affected the outcome of the war.

   But this outcome would have been very different had there been one German spy who saw the phony encampment al ground level and reported it to Berlin. Suppose there had been such a spy. a master spy, an upper-class German, somewhat of a rebel, who refused to join the Nazi party but still had the ear of Hitler. Suppose such a spy had lived in London long enough to pass as an Englishman ….

   This is the central premise of Eye of the Needle. Here Follett gives us Die Nadel — the Needle — who uses a stiletto to kill anyone who threatens his mission or his cover. He kills as a soldier; he doesn’t enjoy it. In a moment of self-inquiry. he wonders if his personality — the ever-present wariness that keeps him at a distance from everyone else — has really not been foisted upon him by his occupation, as he likes to suppose; perhaps, he thinks, he has instead chosen his profession because it is the only type of work that can make him appear normal, even to himself.

   Such self-doubt (although it is a luxury the Needle rarely permits himself) has us at least nominally on his side for much (but not all) of the novel, even as the British agents — a typically tweedy ex-professor named Godliman and a former Scotland Yard man named Bloggs — match him in intelligence and quickly realize he has discovered their great hoax.

   With this discovery, the chase becomes faster and more desperate. Circumstances lead Die Nadel to a storm-battered island in the North Sea, where a frustrated young woman, Lucy Rose, and her wheelchair-bound husband (he lost both of his legs in a traffic accident) live in bitter isolation and where much of the novel’s action takes place.

   Lucy’s attraction to the Needle, her fear and revulsion when she finds out what he is, and finally her desperate struggle to keep from becoming his latest victim make for some the best edge-of-the-chair suspense writing of the past decade. (The 1981 film version starring Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan has its moments but unfortunately falls far short of the novel.)

   Follett’s success with Eye of the Needle led to a number of other best sellers, none of which has the same raw powe1 and tension. Those other thrillers include Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man from St. Petersburg (1982), and On the Wings of Eagles (1983).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

CALCUTTA. Paramount Pictures, 1946. Alan Ladd, Gail Russell, William Bendix, June Duprez. Directed by John Farrow.

   While definitely not one of the better known films Alan Ladd ever starred in, Calcutta (1946) definitely punches above its weight and is well worth a look. Similar to the other exotic location films Ladd starred in throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Ladd portrays an adventurer who is caught up in a whirlwind of crime and intrigue.

   When Neale Gordon (Ladd), a commercial pilot in post-WW2 India, learns that his colleague and friend Bill Cunningham was strangled in a Calcutta back alley, he becomes determined to solve the case on his own. Along for the ride is fellow pilot Pedro Blake (William Bendix).

   The main problem that Gordon encounters is that everyone he meets could potentially be a suspect, including the lovely Virginia Moore (Gail Russell), Cunningham’s fiancee. And that is what makes Calcutta work. There are layers upon layers of intrigue, suspicious characters with ulterior motives, and men and women with dubious intentions. The film captures the mood of post-WW2 Asia very well. The Japanese have been defeated, but what comes next?

   In some ways, Calcutta reminded me of The Maltese Falcon (1941). No, it’s not nearly as good a film and Ladd isn’t Bogart. But there’s a similarity in the sense that, at some point, the labyrinthian plot doesn’t matter as much as the characters and the atmosphere. That’s definitely true for this John Farrow-directed feature.

BRETT STERLING – Danger Planet. Captain Future #18, Popular Library 60-2335, paperback; 1st printing thus, 1968. Cover artist: Frank Frazetta. Previously published in Startling Stories, Spring 1945, as “Red Sun of Danger.”

   The solar system’s supply of vitron, the chemical giving mankind lengthened life, is being threatened. Captain Future is sent in disguise to the planet Roo to investigate the native uprisings which threaten to bring about the colonists’ open rebellion, And independent government would then control a monopoly on vitron.

   With the help of his Futuremen and several scientists, Captain Future discovers what is upsetting the Roons – imminent release of the monstrous Kangas imprisoned on their moon.

   On page 7, one scientist’s opinion of Captain Future is that he is nothing but a cheap popular hero. Unfortunately not much happens to change the reader’s mind. Obviously a juvenile tale, and it does seem adequate on that level, though bad science and idiot plotting hurt. Actually a detective story, as enough clues are given to discover the evil Lu Suur’s secret identity before Captain Future does.

Rating: *½

   Rex Stout’s 13th Nero Wolfe collection, Trio for Blunt Instruments (1964), contains the previously unpublished novella “Murder Is Corny”; both were the last to appear during his lifetime. “Kill Now—Pay Later” had been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (December 9-23, 1961), while “Blood Will Tell” was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (December 1963). In “Kill,” Wolfe must clear the name of his Greek immigrant bootblack, Pete Vassos — not to be confused with Pete Drossos of The Golden Spiders (1953) — who was found at the bottom of a cliff, an apparent suicide, after being implicated by circumstantial evidence when Dennis Ashby plunged from a high window.

   Like “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” (1962), “Blood” involves a necktie, if neither the murder weapon nor owned by Wolfe; it was mailed to Archie with the stationery of musicologist James Neville Vance, who ostensibly calls later asking him to burn it, yet when visited by Archie, he denies any knowledge of the incident, although confirming that the tie was his. It bears a stain that may be human blood, and when Vance’s tenant, Bonny Kirk, is found bludgeoned to death, Archie gets confirmation from Hirsh Laboratories, also seen in The Mother Hunt (1963). Her estranged husband, architect Martin Kirk, is the prime suspect, but Wolfe accepts him as his client: “That wasn’t only unheard of, it was unbelievable.”

   “Corny” opens with the arrival of Cramer, unexpectedly bearing the weekly carton of 16 ears from Putnam County farmer Duncan McLeod; freelance cartoonist and delivery man Kenneth Faber was found bludgeoned in the alley behind Rusterman’s restaurant, where Wolfe’s trusteeship under Marko Vukcic’s will ends the next year. In his notebook were the names of Archie, Carl Heydt (a couturier to Lily Rowan), fashion photographer Max Maslow, and ad man Peter Jay. All three were rivals with Ken for McLeod’s daughter, Susan — who’d gotten him the job, while Lily, in turn, got her one modeling for Heydt —  giving them a motive, but Cramer arrests Archie, believing that Ken had supplanted him.

   After being gone over by Cramer, Lieut. Rowcliff, and A.D.A. Mandel, and bailed out by Nathaniel Parker for $20,000, Archie learns why: Sue, who’d arranged to meet Ken there and found him dead, explained her presence by stating they were to be joined by Archie, confident that he could prove he was elsewhere. She believes Ken told all four men that she thought she was pregnant by him, so she wanted to kill him herself, stating that she is a virgin and regrets agreeing to marry him in a few years if he could support a family. To clear her and Archie, Wolfe must identify the perp, but before he can see the three suitors he gets a pre-emptive visit from McLeod, asserting that Ken picked the substandard corn.

   Convened at Sue’s request, the suitors say they have no desire to help identify the killer, although Wolfe warns that, if need be, he will focus suspicion on her to help Archie, and has Lila Pinelli notarize an affidavit of their conversation with her, which he must give to Cramer to forestall Archie’s re-arrest. Refused entry by Wolfe when they return, the trio agrees to Archie’s questioning at Jay’s apartment, but all they can agree on is a dislike for him, so he foils their joint attack and leaves. Predictably, the corn turns out to be pivotal, and after Delbert Palmer brings a new batch, picked and packed by McLeod, Wolfe asks Cramer to send the bomb squad — which confirms that it is booby-trapped with dynamite.

   Wolfe reveals having sent Saul to McLeod’s with a list of questions to which he should have acceptable answers ready, based on the “reasoned conclusion” that, also told Ken’s lies, he had killed him and was seen leaving the alley by Sue, who thus was certain that none of the suitors did it, but unwilling to name him. “It must have been something more urgent than [purportedly dynamiting] stumps and rocks that led him to risk losing such desirable customers” as Wolfe and Rusterman’s by having Faber pick the corn. Cramer asks Sgt. Purley Stebbins to have the Carmel sheriff’s office pick up McLeod, then learns that he “sat or stood or lay on a pile of dynamite and it went off,” blowing him to pieces.

   As with “Poison à la Carte” (5/26/02) — another second-season episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery — “Murder Is Corny” (5/5/02) was directed by George Bloomfield and adapted by the team of William Rabkin & Lee Goldberg, with repertory player George Plimpton in his second of two appearances as Parker. The tone is admirably set with the petulance of Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) at the overdue corn, forcing Fritz Brenner (Colin Fox) to stuff some eggplant instead, and his lecture to Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) about how it should be roasted in the husk, not boiled. Sometimes seen as Lily, Kari Matchett essays Susan with her usual aplomb, explaining to Archie (Timothy Hutton) why she’s put him on the hook.

   Flashbacks show Faber (Troy Skog) pestering Sue with his attentions, the real reason he wanted the job with McLeod (Bruce McFee, briefly seen in “The Silent Speaker” [7/14 & 21/02]), his lies an attempt to force the wedding. Sharing McLeod’s disinclination to nail his killer, Heydt (David Calderisi), Maslow (Robert Bockstael), and Jay (Julian Richings) resort to fisticuffs both among themselves and against Archie — who fends them off in the hall while still holding his coffee cup. The Bomb Squad Leader (Marvin Hinz) examines the carton brought by Palmer (Angelo Tsarouchas) in Wolfe’s office, rather than taking it away, and the scenarists omit a coda between Archie and Sue at a dancing party at Lily’s.

            — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: The Doorbell Rang

Edition cited:

      Trio for Blunt Instruments: Bantam (1974)

Online source:

BILLY BUDD. Allied Artists, 1962. Robert Ryan, Terrence Stamp, Peter Ustinov, Melvyn Douglas, John Neville, David McCallum, Lee Montague, and Niall MacGinnis. Adapted by Peter Ustinov, DeWitt Bodeen, and Robert Rossen, from the novel by Herman Melville. Produced & directed by Peter Ustinov.

   I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating: “If you only see one movie in your entire life, it should be… Chamber of Horrors” (Warners, 1966).

   But if you think you could possibly stretch it to Two, you could do a lot worse than Billy Budd.

   Actor/writer/producer/director Ustinov shaped Melville’s ponderous novella into a compelling fable of Good vs Evil, played to perfection by Terrence Stamp as Billy, the ingenuous merchant seaman pressed into the Royal Navy, and Robert Ryan as Claggett, the sadistic Master-at-Arms who sets out to destroy him.

   It’s a film that works on many levels, mostly because Ustinov chose to write it that way. The story of Budd and Claggett plays out against a backdrop of colorfully painted characters, all the way from Ustinov’s cautious Captain, down to Melvyn Douglas’ thoughtful sail-mender, with stops along the way for class-conscious officers, scrappy sailors, squealers, and entry-level killers.

   The conflict that plays out against this background is not so much a clash of personalities as it is one of alternative realities. Budd is so genuinely guileless and decent that he quickly becomes beloved by his crewmates and respected by his superiors. Claggett, on the other hand, lives on hate. He breathes it in and out as decent men breathe air. And when he and Billy confront each other — in a brilliantly imagined and deftly played scene — it’s Claggett who wavers. And Billy who pays the price.

   Ustinov also owes a debt of gratitude to Producer Ustinov for getting most of this filmed outdoors on shipboard (or a reasonable facsimile) with a minimum of fakey process shots. The total effect is to demystify the tale and lend the natural power of the Seas to its telling.