BACK FROM THE DEAD. Twentieth Century Fox, 1957. Peggie Castle, Arthur Franz, Marsha Hunt, Don Haggerty. Director: Charles Marquis Warren.

   Don’t let the title of this Gothic misfire fool you. Back from the Dead is, despite its title, an altogether lifeless affair that plods along without much in the way of visceral horror or even suspense. Set in Carmel on the California coast (although filmed in Laguna) with a coterie of presumably Old Money types, the movie features Peggie Castle as a woman who becomes possessed with the spirit of her husband’s ex-wife, Felicia.

   The husband, Dick Anthony (Arthur Franz), doesn’t know what’s going on, so he enlists the help of his sister-in-law Kate (Marsha Hunt) to investigate. This leads them to Felicia’s parents who are, or were, part of some black magic cult. And apparently it was Felicia who got them into it. You see: there is a Satanic mystic guru living in the area who is able to get young women under his spell, and she at one point fell under his control.

   It was probably all very intriguing on paper. The problem is that the movie has such a lack of style that what could have worked, doesn’t. The movie isn’t scary or salacious; it’s overall rather dull, despite the cast taking the material seriously.

   There is one scene though – and it’s in the beginning of the movie – which is truly captivating. The viewer sees two people, a man and a woman in cloaks, throwing a body into the water. It’s chilling and reminded me of the Val Lewton horror films of the 1940s.

   Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. Overall, a disappointment. But there’s enough in the source material that it could work as a remake someday.

CROSS-UP, aka TIGER BY THE TAIL. Eros Films, UK, 1954. Larry Parks, Constance Smith, Lisa Daniely, Cyril Chamberlai, Thora Hird. Screenplay by John Gilling and Willis Goldbeck, based on the novel Never Come Back, by John Mair. Directed by John Gilling.

   American reporter John Desmond (Larry Parks) meets attractive Anna Ray (Lia Daniely) soon after arriving in London and is instantly attracted to her, but no sooner than they are alone together than she argues with him, pulls a gun and tries to kill him, and in the ensuing struggle, he kills her.

   Desmond is rightfully concerned no one would believe him, and being a stranger in London, he thinks he might get away with just fading into the woodwork, but he soon discovers he didn’t go unobserved and he is being stalked not only by the police, but by a mysterious criminal organization that Ray worked for.

   Along with beautiful Jane Claymore (Constance Smith) Desmond is on the run and some of the sprightly dialogue has the snap of North by Northwest between them if nothing else comes up to that level. I don’t want to oversell it, but it is pretty good for a quota quickie, moves well, and Parks and Smith make an attractive film team.

   In fact the only real problem with Cross-Up is that until 1990 (a faithful made for television film) it was the only film version of John Mair’s early War novel Never Come Back, an innovative and entertaining thriller of the pre-War era that ended up being the only novel by a young literary writer who died shortly in an RAF accident.

   In Mair’s novel the hero is an anti-hero, if there ever was one, who seduces a young woman who becomes overly enamored of him leading him to murder her, only to discover she was tied up with a spy organization that he ends up infiltrating and destroying, recruited as a secret agent and now a hero or at least useful fellow despite of the fact he is a murderer or maybe because of it.

   Aside from the modern plot, the writing in the book is extraordinary making Mair’s loss all the more a tragedy.

   Cross-Up is an entertaining if minor variation on Mair’s novel with an attractive cast and certainly Gilling is a work horse director (Mother Reilly and the Vampire, The Pirates of Blood River) and screenwriter whose name has come up here on more than one film.

FREDERICK FORSYTH – The Day of the Jackal. Viking, hardcover, 1971. Bantam, paperback, 1972. Reprinted many times. Film: UK, 1973. TV series: Peacock, 2024- .

   As a Reuters correspondent, Frederick Forsyth reported from London, Paris, and East Berlin in the Sixties, and he brings to his fictional works the expected objectivity and thoroughness of a talented reporter. Against a background of real events and real people, he places both his fictional heroes and antiheroes: professionals in their fields who arc impeccable in carrying out their jobs and arc governed by unshakable commitments to their own internal standards.

   The heroes frequently combat established but morally corrupt government agencies, and their victories over them come about through preparation and planning. There is a great deal of motion in Forsyth’s work, and the scene shifts frequently between the heroes and the antiheroes, creating a tension that is sustained until the last page.

   The Day of the Jackal is Forsyth’s best-known and most meticulously drawn suspense tale. Seeking the best of professional killers to take over from their own bunglers, French dissidents intent on assassinating Charles de Gaulle hire the Jackal. Working alone, the Jackal makes painstaking preparations to obtain each essential piece of equipment from the appropriate craftsmen, whom he either gives a nodding respect, views with silent contempt, or occasionally, disposes of.

   In counterpoint to the Jackal’ activities are scenes in which the authorities work to uncover the plot, and when Commissaire Claude Lebel, “the best detective in France,” is brought in on the case, the contest becomes an even match.

   Forsyth’s skill is such that, despite the Jackal’s morally unacceptable line of work, we feel sympathy for the character. His integrity and total commitment to his internal standards are commendable — regardless of what those standards are.

   And the chess game between these ultimate professionals — which takes them back and forth across Europe and the English Channel — is a joy to behold. The game grows tenser and tenser, until its climax — and then Forsyth gives us one more superb twist.

     ———
   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.

THE GREEN HORNET “The Silent Gun.” ABC, 09 Sep 1966 (Season One, Episode One.) Van Williams (Britt Reid / The Green Hornet), Bruce Lee (Kato), Wende Wagner (Lenore Case), Lloyd Gough (Mike Axford), Walter Brooke (D.A. Frank Scanlon). Based on the long-running radio series created by George W. Trendle. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson.

   I remember waiting for a long time with a lot of anticipation for this series to begin, so I’m rather sure I was among those in the viewing audience with it finally came on the air. (It finally came to fruition by the tremendous success the Batman series had at the time.)

   I was disappointed then, and now. Before watching this first episode again after spotting it on YouTube earlier this month, I never turned it on again and did my best to forget it. (Without going into details, may I say I succeeded rather well at that, as I remembered none of the details.)

   For those of you younger than I, and perhaps totally unfamiliar with the show, here’s the opening bit of narration for the TV series:

   
   This first episode does all right in introducing the characters, but the story itself, is well, to put it bluntly, is pure dreck. It has to do with a new gun in town, one the works silently and without a flash. Two opposing gangs of mobsters in town want their hands on it, and it’s up to The Green Hornet and Kato to act as would-be go-betweens to foil the aspirations of each.

   And that’s it. They succeed, thanks to the smash-’em-up contributions of the Black Beauty (see the narration segment above), with nary a twist or interesting point to be made of any kind. I kid you not.

CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL. United Artists, 1957. Brian Keith, Beverly Garland, Dick Foran, Douglas Kennedy, Paul Langton, Elisha Cook Jr. Based on the book by Jack Lait & Lee Mortimer. Director: Sidney Salkow.

   This one’s for Brian Keith fans. In Chicago Confidential, Keith portrays intrepid and noble minded District Attorney Jim Fremont who is tasked with both prosecuting union leader Artie Blane (Dick Foran) and later working to prove his innocence. Pivotal to the case are a forged tape recording, the testimony of a local drunk named Candymouth Duggan (Elisha Cook Jr.), and a perjuring witness.

   The movie relies on semi-documentary filmmaking (complete with a rather unnecessary voiceover by an unseen narrator) and police procedural tropes to create a suspense-filled motion picture. The themes: unions, racketeering, and the miscarriage of justice.

   Although he’s not the movie’s prime star by a long shot, Cook’s character does play a pivotal role in how the story unfolds. His portrayal of a down and out alcoholic in Chicago Confidential reminded me how talented a character actor he truly was. There’s a harrowing scene in which he is taken by mob thugs to an overpass and is thrown to his death. It’s memorable not only for its violence, but for the manner in which Cook carries himself throughout the grim proceedings.

   Another character actor of note in the movie is Jack Lambert who portrays one of the mob enforcers. He was in a lot of movies and TV shows, often playing a tough guy. He has memorable features and there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen him in something you’ve watched.

   Final verdict: Overall, it’s not exceptional by any means, but it nevertheless works well enough for a 1950s crime film about union corruption. Recommended for those who find that sub-genre particularly compelling and, as I mentioned above, for Brian Keith fans. He’s good here.

RICHARD FORREST – A Child’s Garden of Death. Lyon & Bea Wentworth #1. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1975. Pocket, paperback, 1977. Dell, paperback, 1982.

   Take one children’s-book writer who is also a hot-airballooning enthusiast; add his fictional creations, the Wobblies, and his politician wife, plus his best friend from Korean War days, now police chief in their small Connecticut town. These staple ingredients of Richard Forrest’s series about Lyon Wentworth add up to an intriguing mix-even before the element of murder enters.

   In this first entry in the series — whose titles are variations on well-known children’s books — Lyon is called in by buddy Rocco Herbert to help solve an unusual type of killing: a thirty-year-old murder of a man, woman, and child whose bodies are uncovered by a bulldozer at a construction site. Rocco often relies on his friend’s “unusual kind of mind,” but this case is particularly painful to the writer. His own daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver some years ago, and he and his wife have yet to come to terms with their loss.

   Lyon’s investigation — which he frequently discusses with his imaginary friends, the Wobblies — takes him back to World War II and into a reconstruction of the life of a Jewish family who fled Hitler’s Germany only to find horrors in the new world. And the resolution of the case brings a measure of peace to the Wentworths. An excellent and sensitive novel whose serious theme is leavened by a wry good humor.

   Other titles featuring Lyon Wentworth: The Wizard of Death (1977), Death Through the Looking Glass (1978), The Death in the Willows (1979), The Death at Yew Corner (1980), and Death Under the Lilacs (1985).

     ———
   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.
   

NOTE: The series has continued on to include the following titles:

7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

SHOCK. 20th Century Fox, 1946. Vincent Price, Lynn Bari, Frank Latimore, Anabel Shaw, Michael Dunne, Reed Hadley. Director: Alfred L. Werker.

   Vincent Price plays a mad doctor in this one. But not a mad doctor as in a horror movie mad scientist. Rather, Dr. Cross (Price) is a seemingly mild mannered psychiatrist with a successful career. But he’s also having an affair with a nurse colleague (Lynn Bari) and has his share of anger issues.

   And when his wife threatens to spill the beans on him, he snaps and kills her with a silver candlestick holder. Little does he know that there was a witness to the crime, one Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw), who was in the same hotel as Cross while awaiting her husband’s return from a POW camp after the end of the Second World War.

   When her military officer husband finds her, Janet is in a state of shock. Apparently witnessing Cross murder his wife was too much for her mental state. And guess who gets called in to help with her mental health woes? You guessed it. The very same Dr. Cross. Yes, the doctor tasked with tending to a psychiatric patient is a murderer, she’s a witness, and no one will believe her. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the film.

   Price is in true form as a smug, calculating, and devious physician who is so corrupted by his love for his nurse that he’s willing to breach every moral code to get his way. Fortunately, an intrepid police investigator (Reed Hadley) is not so enamoured of the doctor’s charms and has his own suspicions about how and why Cross’s wife was murdered.

   Shock is a relatively short film (some 69 or 70 minutes), but packs a lot into it. Even though the movie doesn’t touch upon politics, it feels very much like a post-war paranoid thriller. Recommended.

VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES. Republic Pictures, 1946. Robert Livingston, Lorna Gray (as Adrian Booth), Ian Keith. Director: Philip Ford.

   By the title alone, you might think this was a horror movie set in Louisiana or Haiti with menacing zombies at every turn. In this case, however, you’d be wrong.

   In fact, I’m not even sure that there is a single legitimate zombie in this Republic Pictures programmer. Rather, there’s a criminally insane man named Ormand Murks (Ian Keith) who has come back from the dead to take revenge on those who have wronged him. He has a thirst for human blood, making him more a vampire than a zombie. I guess technical definitions weren’t that important to the filmmakers. Vampires? Zombies? Who cares? Just make the villain unexplainably spooky and hope the audience slops it up.

   But don’t less this oversight dissuade you. Valley of the Zombies is a fun, supernatural thriller with a romantic duo of doctor and nurse (Robert Livingston and Lorna Gray) playing sleuths. When their boss is killed by Murks, they begin to seek answers. Along for the ride are some bumbling (and not so bumbling) detectives and policemen who don’t believe for a minute that an undead man may be behind a recent spate of murders.

   There’s some humor in the film as well, including a giant cop named Tiny. It’s all dismally mediocre B-film material, but as I said before, it’s actually kind of silly fun.
   

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH – Strangers on a Train: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, January 19, 2021. Introduction by Paula Hawkins. First edition: Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1950.

   Guy Haines isn’t sure what will happen when he gets off the train to meet his estranged wife Miriam. Her track record of infidelities should make divorce simple, but if she’s pregnant, she may make things awkward for Guy and his soon-to-be fiancée.

   When he commiserates with Charles Bruno in the train dining car about his situation, he doesn’t pay much Bruno’s talk about having an insufferable father and how two people could “trade murders.” After police find Miriam’s strangled body in an amusement park, Bruno reappears, demanding that Guy “hold up his end of the deal.”

   Strangers on a Train is Highsmith’s first published novel, so there are moments where her style feels unvarnished compared to later works (Deep Water, the Tom Ripley novels). But she already knows how to create a vivid scene, especially the inner torments as her hero agonizes over how to escape Bruno’s game.

   While later books were more obviously literary (The Talented Mr. Ripley riffs on Henry James’ 1903 novel The Ambassadors), she already shows a clever ability to invert crime fiction into something stranger. Paula Hawkins’ introduction to this 2020 edition highlights how scarily Highsmith encourages readers to question what makes murder wrong, or if it is so bad after all.

   Hawkins also highlights how Highsmith uses a “pared-back, laconic style” to describe horrible crimes as well as everyday things (the sort of casual tone about murder contemporary readers associate with writers like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk). Put these elements together, not to mention the fine line between hate and love Hawkins notices is very thin indeed in some Highsmith stories, and this book becomes far creepier than it appears.

   If Highsmith is important to noir, and it’s probably impossible to talk about the genre without mentioning her, it’s because she excels at handling this ambiguity. Where other novelists draw clear lines between stalker and victim, tempter and innocent, she quietly suggested that these characters may be more similar, more drawn to each other, than they want to admit.

   It may not feel transgressive as Ellis, Palahniuk, or later female virtuosos like Gillian Flynn, but Highsmith was a master at producing a thriller that slowly invites readers into something more genre-bending and perverse than they expect.

RAOUL WHITFIELD – Laughing Gas.  Steeger Books. paperback, 2021. Originally serialized in Black Mask,  February 1929 to October 1929.  Revised and reprinted in book form as Five, by Temple Field.

   In his introduction to the Steeger reprint, James Reasoner uses the term “word savagery” which was coined by Lester Dent to describe the quality Black Mask brought out in writers, and that certainly fits Raoul Whitfield though I prefer the Raymond Chandler’s term ‘the poetry of violence.” Anyway you put it, Raoul Whitfield was a master of the form, the third spoke of the wheel that included Hammett and Chandler as the best Black Mask has to offer.

   Laughing Gas was Whitfield’s first attempt at a novel length work, written as a series of tightly connected short stories and intended to be published as a fix-up novel. It ended up replaced by another Whitfield serial, Green Ice, that would become Whitfield’s first novel (and wisely, it is a better book) while Laughing Gas was rewritten and published as Five, under the by-line Temple Field. This trade paperback edition from Steeger Books Black Mask collection is the works first appearance in its original form since its publication in the 1929 pages of Black Mask.

   The book covers nine stories. Gary Greer, the two-fisted protagonist, sets out to avenge the murder of his Prosecutor father Stanford by gangsters who laughed while he died at their brutal hands. Greer, a pilot in charge of the local airport, sets out for revenge, and neither the law nor criminals are going to deter him in his singular minded pursuit.

   This is Mike Hammer country, a revenge story much like Whitfield’s similar Green Ice and savage is a fair description of what happens as Greer tracks down the five men who killed his father.

   Whitfield wrote as much or more aviation fiction as crime novels including several juvenile aviation novels. This one mixes the two genres, flying and hardboiled action and does so in a convincing tough guy voice that compels the narrative along like an express train.

   It is a far pulpier work than his best hardboiled novel, Death in a Bowl, a work that comes close to rivaling Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, but it reads surprisingly modern in style, another Mask attribute. The dark salon cars speeding down roads, vintage planes, and Tommy guns may be dated, but the writing is as contemporary as anything you’ll read today.

   
   In addition to revenge intrigue and murder there is a well handled romance that leads you to wonder how Hollywood missed this one. Of course they would have had to tone it down a bit because Greer is a fairly grim avenger adopting multiple identities, names, and faces as he takes his revenge on hoods with colorful names like Frenchy Lamotte, Doll Jacobs, Sal the Dude, and “Fifty Mile” Liseman.

   Whitfield just misses the quality that set Hammett and Chandler apart from the pack, and it is hard to define exactly what it is. It may be because he never quite finds that single voice protagonist (though Death in a Bowl comes close and Jo Gar is a fine creation) or spread himself too thin with his other pulp work. I can’t say exactly. I know at his best he writes as well as either Hammett or Chandler with that same word savagery Reasoner mentions, but he also writes with just the slightest bit less conviction and dedication.

   Granted there is a fairly contrived twist at the end that allows for a happy ending, but it’s the pulps and the kind of thing common in movies at the time, and I can’t bring myself to complain much. After all that an unconvincing path to a happy ending seems a small price to pay. You wouldn’t want Whitfield’s protagonist taking revenge on you because you messed with his happy ending, believe me.

   Just let him have it and lump it.