ROSS MACDONALD – The Goodbye Look. Lew Archer #15. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, April 1969. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, June 1970. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.

   Published toward the end of the Lew Archer series, The Goodbye Look had a strong feeling of weariness to it when I read it this past week, that and a sense of déjà vu, as if Macdonald were repeating in it many of the same themes he’d already gone through several times before.

   It begins when Archer is hired by a lawyer to find an old gold box that has just been stolen from the family of one of his long time clients. His family and theirs are close — so close, in fact, that not only do they live across the street from each other, but the lawyer’s daughter is engaged to be married to the son of the couple for whom he’s been working for so long.

   One strong suspect is the son, a college student who is a very emotionally disturbed young man, and one possibly important factor is that he has recently been taking up with an older woman. A private detective has also been seen in town looking for someone, and when Archer finds his dead body in a car on the beach, the case begins in earnest.

   And as is always true in Lew Archer’s cases, the problems that exist in the present have long-standing roots in the past. Lost loves and lost lives, intricately interlaced with relationships known and unknown between (in this case) three if not four families.

   I always get a pervasive feeling of melancholy, of dark clouds above, whenever I read one of Macdonald’s books, no matter how sunny the Southern California sky may be. The Goodbye Look is no exception. Archer may make his way from San Diego to Pasadena and back several times in this book, but the case itself he always has with him. It is part of him, and he won’t let go.

THE FRIGHTENED CITY. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK. 1961; Allied Artists, US, 1962. Herbert Lom, John Gregson, Sean Connery, Alfred Marks, Yvonne Romain, Olive McFarland. Director: John Lemont.

   A black-and-white British gangster film that the number three cast member takes over and makes his own. Sean Connery plays Paddy Damion in The Frightened City, a petty crook who is roped into the protection rackets covering all of London by the smooth-talking Harry Foulcher (Alfred Marks) who is secretly working for a malevolent crime boss by the name of Waldo Zhernikov (Herbert Lom).

   It is the latter’s idea to form an association of all the local mobsters in the same racket and make the entire city cry out for help. It is Paddy’s job to help keep everyone in line. Until, that is, one of the head gangsters objects to Zhernikov’s plans to escalate their criminous activities, and unknowingly to Paddy, he is the one who is chosen to help eliminate him.

   Even at this early stage of his career, and even though he’s on the wrong side of the law, Sean Connery is both cool and urbane, with a unmistakable eye for the ladies. He’s also the absolute focus of attention whenever whenever he’s on the screen. Solidly if not slickly produced, The Frightened City has the look of having had a bigger budget than usual for British crime films of the same era — no Hammer quickie this.

ERIC AMBLER – Journey Into Fear. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1940. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Movie: RKO, 1943. Also: New World, 1975. TV adaptation: Climax!. Season 3, Episode 2, 11 October 1956.

JOURNEY INTO FEAR. RKO, 1943. Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Everett Sloane, Orson Welles. Screenplay: Joseph Cotten (and Orson Welles, Richard Collins & Ben Hecht uncredited), based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Directors: Directed by Norman Foster & Orson Welles (the latter uncredited).

   With a plot featuring a regular man caught up in a high stakes game of international espionage, Journey Into Fear remains a classic of the spy fiction genre. And for good reason. It gives the reader with a protagonist that most readers can sympathize with, a British naval engineer named Graham. It also provides a recognizable and formidable foe in Nazi Germany. Because Graham has been hired by the neutral Turks to bolster their naval forces, he has come to the attention of the leadership in Berlin.

   Not wanting Turkey to enter the war on the side of the Allies, the Nazis dispatch a pair of killers to neutralize Graham and to delay the possible Turkish entry into the Second World War. All Graham wants to do is return from his work in Istanbul back to his native England in safety.

   What makes Journey Into Fear work so extraordinarily well is that the novel in actuality features two stories, one external and one internal. The external story follows Graham as he descends into the seedy world of Istanbul nightlife, into a Turkish police station where he comes face to face with the head of the Turkish secret police, and aboard a freighter bound to Genoa. Much as in a locked door mystery, the coterie of strange characters along for the ride provides imaginative readers with plenty to grapple with intellectually. Who might be a Nazi agent? Who might be looking after Graham on behalf of the Turks who want to see him return to England in one piece?

   Graham’s internal journey, the one that takes him deep into his innermost fears is the more compelling one. Here’s one example of how Ambler’s utilization of close third person narration allows the reader to get a glimpse of Graham’s particular way of thinking. This is from the latter portion of the novel when he faces down the very real possibility that his death at the hands of Nazi agents is imminent:

   It is this aspect of Graham, the psychological one, that fails to make its way into the 1943 RKO cinematic adaptation. In the movie, Graham, rather than a Brit, is an American and he is portrayed as a rather cowardly and charmless doofus by Joseph Cotten. A far cry from his role as the complex, multilayered Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Cotten plays Graham as a rather bland, one dimensional everyman.

   True, he is able to summon up the courage to face down his opponents when it becomes absolutely necessary. But Cotten’s Graham is hardly the stuff that the best spy films are made of. Neither a doomed protagonist in the film noir sense of the term, nor an average man forced to do extraordinary things to survive (think: Cary Grant in North by Northwest), the cinematic Graham is somewhere in the vast middle. This makes him a far less compelling character than the psychologically tormented Graham that the reader identifies with in the novel.

   The greatest pleasure in reading Ambler’s masterwork in espionage fiction may not necessarily found in the story, compelling though it may be. Rather, it is in Ambler’s sparse but descriptive prose that one can easily lose oneself. Ambler’s prose flows naturally, with each sentence logically progressing from the previous one.

   Perhaps it was his training as an engineer which allowed him to map out his paragraphs as if they were each small blueprints for a much larger project. This is not to imply that his language is mechanical in the pejorative sense of the term. Rather, it is to highlight how fine tuned his prose actually is. It neither meanders nor muddles. It just flows. Brilliantly.

MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Police at the Funeral. Albert Campion #4. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1931. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1932. Paperback reprints include Bantam, US, TV tie-in, 1989. TV adaptation: Mystery!: Campion “Police at the Funeral, Parts 1 and 2,” Season 1, Episodes 3 & 4, February 5 & 12, 1989.

   In the book immediately following The Gyrth Chalice Mystery (published in the UK as Look to the Lady), Mr. Campion has become, if not a full-fledged PI, at least in his own words, a “Deputy Adventurer.” Here he’s asked to help investigate a series of deaths befalling the Faraday family.

   All of whom are elderly and a bit more than eccentric in their behavior, and the murders are equally bizarre. If you completely ignore the role that coincidence plays in this one, you should have a good tie trying to match wits with Campion in this one.

       —

FOOTNOTE:   As a bit of warning, however, I think the book is starting to show both its age and its trans-Atlantic origins. There were a couple od short passages that were so determinedly British that I could have used a footnote or two to help with a translation.

   But have you seen the TV version of Albert Campion on public TV? I can’t help but think that Peter Davison is nothing but perfect in the role. His blend of blank vacuousness with obvious underlying intelligence is absolutely unnerving.

ROBERT CRAIS – The Wanted. Elvis Cole #17 (*). G. P. Putman’s Sons, hardcover, December 2017; premium paperback, December 2018.

   It’s been a while since I read one of the Elvis Cole books, several years at least, but nothing seems to have changed in the interim. Cole is still the laid back kind of guy he’s always been. Maybe not quite as glib and quick with the quips as he was in the early books, and maybe (probably almost assuredly) I’ve missed some character growth along the way, but at least I didn’t see any big changes in this one.

   (*) The count may be off. I believe my number includes three Joe Pike books in which Elvis pops up as a secondary character. Pike is Elvis’s strong arm assistant whom he calls upon when he needs strong arm assistance. Elvis is tough enough too handle most most situations, but there almost always comes a point in any case he’s working on that Pike comes in awfully handy.

   For a book that’s almost 400 pages long in its tall paperbark version, the case is a simple one. He’s hired by an immature teen-aged boy’s mother to find out where all of the money he’s flashing around is coming from.

   It turns out that he’s been part of a gang of youthful burglars, two boys an a girl who’ve found that stealing things is an absolute lark. That is to say it’s been fun for a while. Now two literate hitmen are on their trail. It seems as though the youthful gang has stolen something that someone desperately wants back and is willing to kill to get it back.

   The book is very smoothly done, with a caveat I’ll get to in a minute. I did find the shifting points of view jarring at first, but slowly but surely Crais convinced me that he knew what he was doing, and he did.

   The caveat I mentioned, though. It’s frustrating that after 380 pages of methodical detective work on Cole’s part, the book ends with him making a rookie mistake, a decision so wrong-minded that I winced as soon as he made it. It does allow for Joe Pike to come riding in to the rescue, as well as help from another unexpected source, but what I was was disappointed.

THE PREVENTERS. ITV, UK, 16 December 1996. One-off, 30 minutes. Absolutely Productions / Carlton Television. Cast: Morwenna Banks as Penelope Gold, Robert Harley as Craig Sturdy, Chris England as Mike Stallion, William Gaunt as The Controller, Ed Devereaux as Roger Stavro Mordik, and Simon William as Lord Timothy Belvoir St. Nash. Written by Morwenna Banks, Chris England and Robert Harley. Directed by Liddy Oldroyd. Executive Producer: Miles Bullough; Line Producer: Terry Bamber.

   THE PREVENTERS is a near perfect satire of my favorite form of television fiction – the “troubleshooters” of ITV (era: 1960-70s). In reaction to the stuffy BBC and a desire to break into the American market, ITV produced a variety of troubleshooter/spy series from the serious DANGER MAN to the surreal DEPARTMENT S to the adventure series of puppet master Gerry Anderson (THUNDERBIRDS). The lighter part of the ITV brand became very popular to the British audience and cult favorites over in America.

   Filmed in 1996, THE PREVENTERS could almost be considered a lovely tribute to the style of television that gave us THE AVENGERS, THE BARON, THE CHAMPIONS, THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE, THE PRISONER, THE PRESUADERS, THE PROTECTORS, THE SAINT, THE SENTIMENTAL AGENT, THE ZOO GANG and the many others that title did not begin with THE.

THE PREVENTERS “Hippy Daze”

   The villainous group The Consortium’s latest plan to take over the World is to use television to brainwash everyone to believe it is the 1960s again and turn hippies into assassins. Good guy organization The Movement calls for The Preventers. Only they – three ordinary citizens now trained top agents – can prevent the evil plan from succeeding.

   We open in typical ITV style – a car driving through the British countryside via horrible rear projection shots. The driver, the head of British Television believes he is alone but he shares his last ride with his killer. According to IMDb, the footage here is lifted from ITV’s RANDALL AND HOPKIRK (DECEASED) episode “Its Supposed to Be Thicker Than Water” (February 20,1970).

   The opening theme begins as we have our heroes stylishly posing in THE AVENGERS (and other series) style. The Preventers are introduced, banter and backstory is exchanged.

   After a clue and the first attempt to kill them, The Preventers decide to split up. Craig and Penelope rush off to Paris and then Monte Carlo via rear projected stock footage and interior studio action. Mike, “The Third One” (a joke anyone familiar with THE CHAMPIONS would appreciate) gets stuck with the dirty disgusting hippies and their Woodstock-like rock concert. Mike’s establishment attitude towards the hippie style and his taste in fashion reveals him to be a “square” and he barely escapes.

   At Monte Carlo, Mike joins Craig and Penelope as they search for the mastermind behind it all. Penelope meets Lord Tim whose last name Belvoir St. Nash – according to Lord Tim – is pronounced Beaver Snatch. The Consortium’s representative is there, an Australian media mogul who is dressed for the Outback and carries a small wallaby with him.

   What follows is typical ITV low budgeted action. Penelope seduces Lord Tim and goes with him to his country home. Craig and Mike rush to rescue her. The three are captured and Lord Tim attempts to brainwash Craig. The plot is defeated but the mansion is about to self-destruct. Our heroes get out in time and join The Controller to celebrate with toasts of champagne. But there is a final twist and we end with a cliffhanger.

   This episode succeeds on all levels. Not just the writing, acting, and direction, but from every phase of TV production. Beginning with the cheap grainy look of the film done by cinematographer John Walker, no element of the ITV style goes untouched. Constant stream of gags and shout-outs flow non-stop through the thirty minutes. ITV fans will enjoy the opening titles, the set designs (Chrysoula Sofitsi), costumes (Debbie Scott), and music (Peter Baikie).

   THE PREVENTERS’ writers played the three heroes with the same insight to the ITV style of protagonist that the entire production showed. It was also fun to see William Gault as The Controller. Gault was in THE CHAMPIONS and his character was represented here as Mike Stallion “The Third One.”

   The episode ends with a cliffhanger and a graphic telling us the story is “to be continued.” But it never was. Perhaps it was not supposed to continue. It certainly would have been difficult to continue to satirize a form of fiction that was virtually a spoof itself as ITV pushed against the old conservative but socially conscious BBC that had programs such as THE WEDNESDAY PLAY.

   It didn’t help that when THE PREVENTERS aired in 1996 the role of the spy had changed. With the British government spy scandals of the 70s and the end of the Cold War in the 80s by the 90s the TV spy had been reduced to sitcoms such as THE PIGLET FILES.

   I miss the style of the 60s ITV light dramas. Writers such as Brian Clemens (THE AVENGERS) and Dennis Spooner (THE CHAMPIONS) had the talent to create light drama with surreal plots and weird characters while maintaining believability with the audience. The style fit in with the real world of 60s sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The ITV troubleshooters may not have always approved of the changing world in fashion, music, and young people’s behavior, but many of those ITV shows existed best in such a world.

   For those who are not familiar with the ITV style here is a sample, the final episode of THE CHAMPIONS. (The occasional movement of the picture is a problem caused by downloading it on YouTube.)

“Autokill”. April 30, 1969. Written by Brian Clemens – Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Cast: Stuart Damon as Craig Stirling, Alexandra Basted as Sharron Macready. William Gaunt as Richard Barrett and Anthony Nicholls as Col. W.L. Tremayne. Guest Cast: Eric Pohlmann and Paul Eddington. *** Someone has found a way to brainwash Nemesis agents to become assassins. The latest to be brainwashed is Colonel Tremayne, the man who commands The Champions.

   THE CHAMPIONS is not one of my favorites ITV series, but it does have the ITV style. The plots range from strange to stupid. Why brainwash the boss Tremayne to kill the doctor? The bad guys had nothing more evilly productive to do to Tremayne?

   The characters are likable, simple but believable. The writing and direction adds the proper amount of humor and pace to entertain and prevent the audience from actually thinking about what was happening and why.

   The ITV light drama of the 60s and 70s worked because the audience was in on it. This was not some brilliant serious filmmaker such as Dennis Potter (STAND UP, NIGEL BARTON) or Ken Loach (CATHY COME HOME) examining the troubles of modern society, ITV shows were fun. THE PREVENTERS got that right too.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY. Grenadier, 1978. Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, Edward Fox, Wendy Hiller, Olivia Hussey, Betrix Lehmann, Carol Lynley, Daniel Massey, Peter McEnery, AND Wilfrid Hyde-White. Produced by Richard Gordon. Written & directed by Radley Metzger.

   Apparently you can’t go wrong with this title. The original 1927 film is a classic of silent era style and wit; the 1938 version offers a great cast and a star-making turn by Bob Hope; and this version, made by soft-core maven Meztger, has wit, color, and a cast of mostly one-shots and has-beens, shining in the kind of parts they weren’t used to getting.

   TIME OUT: Let me emphasize that the cast is only MOSTLY moth-eaten. Actually, many of them distinguished themselves on the stage, some went on to do interesting work in and out of the movies, and lovable old Wilfrid Hyde-White was always in a world of his own. But the fact is that when this movie was made, there wasn’t enough Hollywood star power between them to light up an “EXIT” sign.

   Yet they are consistently excellent here. Honor Blackman does a perfect Queen Bitch, paired up with Olivia Hussey as her submissive partner. Daniel Massey and Peter McEnery play vigorously off each other as bickering relatives. As the Doctor from the local Insane Asylum, Edward Fox acts nasty enough to make one suspect that the sobriquet “head shrinker” might be literal in his case, while Wendy Hiller and Beatrix Lehmann skulk about in the background as Shady Lawyer and Sinister Housekeeper.

   All of whom are gracefully counterbalanced by Carol Lynley and Michael Callan as the Young Lovers of the piece: She a frightened but sensible heiress; he a hack song-writer, ruefully aware of his insignificance in the scheme of things, but ready to roll the dice with a hostile universe.

   And then there’s Wilfrid Hyde-White as dead Uncle Cyrus, whose presence in the story is a clever ploy, handed off to an actor who carries it charmingly.

   I can attribute the presence of all this talent to Producer/Old-Movie-Buff Richard Gordon, but credit for their classy playing in well-written parts must go to writer-director Radley Metzger, whose stylish porno movies and erotic films of the 60s and 70s are reflected in the elegance of this, his only PG-rated effort. And some day I’d like to hear how he got the job.

   Just in case anyone still wonders what The Cat and the Canary is all about, it has to do with greedy relatives gathered for the reading of the last will & testament of their rich uncle Cyrus. And what happens when they find only one of them will inherit. And what happens when they find out that the putative heiress may be “disqualified.” And what happens when a Homicidal Maniac escapes from a nearby Madhouse. And one damn thing after another.

   That’s what the story’s about. The film is about style, pace, polish and wit, and how they can burnish an old gem like this into a real delight.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Dutch Shoe Mystery. Ellery Queen #4. Stokes, hardcover, 1931. Paperback reprints include Pocket #202; 1st printing, December 1942.

   Subtitled “A Problem in Deduction” (*) and that is exactly correct. The wealthy benefactress of a New York City hospital is murdered just before undergoing an emergency operation on the same building, and the only clue is a pair of shoes with a mended shoelace.

   No one should read an Ellery Queen novel of this vintage for a study of the characters involved, but for the most part the prose is clean and uncluttered. The only exception being a tendency toward flowery language at the beginning of every section. The rest of the story is punctuated only occasionally by the presence of yet another footnote. The lack of action is made up for by a plot that, when unraveled, has no flaws, so far as I can see.

   (*) There is a ‘Challenge to the Reader’ on page 241 of the Pocket edition, and as usual, I flubbed it up. And yet, if I’d followed through on the thought that occurred to me on page 32, I’d have nailed the culprit in no tie flat. I kid you not.

THE ROOKIE COP. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Tim Holt, Virginia Weidler, Janet Shaw, Frank M. Thomas, Ralf Harolde, Muriel Evans, Ace the Wonder Dog. Director: David Howard.

   Tim Holt, who came up for discussion as a B-western movie star following my review of Sagebrush Law a while back, was only 20 years old when he made this film, and as a rookie cop Clem Maitland, he’s really perfect for the part, since he’s young and eager and as wet behind the ears as they come.

   Although he’s billed first, this film is really built as a showcase for all the clever things Maitland’s dog Ace can do, which I didn’t find all that interesting, but back in 1939, audiences may have enjoyed his tricks a whole lot more. As for me, I was more impressed with the performance of even younger Virginia Weidler, 12 at the time playing a 9-year-old tomboy named Nicey who wants to become a cop herself, when she grows up — and she can hardly wait.

   It’s too bad that with all the screen time Nicey gets, they really didn’t have a lot for her to do. Part of the story has to do with Clem convincing the police chief that dogs can be of great help to a police force, but even though the police chief is the father of his girl friend, he stubbornly can’t see it Clem’s way.

   The other half of the story is nabbing a gang of crooks, which is a whole lot easier than convincing a stubborn police chief to see the light. The end result is competently done, but it’s certainly nothing special.

   Two weeks or so after this column is posted I’ll be traveling by Amtrak to the east coast, where on the evening of March 29 I’m giving a talk in New York City at Columbia University’s second annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. Anyone who wants to learn more about this festival should visit its website. (Follow the link.)

   Why was I asked to take part in the program? Because this year the theme is Cornell Woolrich, and in certain quarters I’m rumored to know a bit about that haunted recluse. Just before my talk there will be a screening of BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946), which was based on Woolrich’s novel of the same name, and I expect to be concentrating on the relation between the novel and the movie. For the benefit of readers who won’t be able to attend the festival, I’ll cover the same subject here.

   THE BLACK ANGEL (1943) is one of the strongest, strangest and most wrenching of all Woolrich’s novels and the only one narrated throughout in first person by a woman. Superficially it’s a conventional Woman Menaced suspenser but once we crack its thin surface we’re in the jolting nightworld that is Woolrich’s private domain, and locked inside the mind and heart of one of his most twisted people.

   Like most Woolrich novels, it reminds us of other novels of his. It shares with PHANTOM LADY (1942) the race against the clock to save an innocent man convicted of murder, but this time it’s the man’s girlfriend not his wife who’s been killed, and it’s his wife who risks everything to save him from the chair.

   Like THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940) it consists of a series of disconnected episodes with a tormented psychotic woman entering the lives of various men and devastating each in a different way. The angel of the title is Alberta French Murray, whose husband Kirk has taken up with nightclub entertainer Mia Mercer. Finding Kirk’s packed suitcase hidden in a closet, and knowing what until now she had only feared, she forces herself to go to Mia’s lavish Sutton Place apartment and beg for her man back.

   She finds the entrance door unlocked and Mia on the bedroom floor, smothered to death with a pillow. At that moment Mia’s phone rings. Alberta in a panic lifts the receiver to shut off the sound, hears Kirk’s voice on the other end, and hangs up without a word. Convinced that Kirk is innocent and frantic to protect him, Alberta steals Mia’s address book from the apartment. On the way out she notices and also takes with her a match folder, monogrammed with the letter M, which she finds wedged in the seam of the entrance door, apparently by the real murderer, who visited Mia openly once and then sneaked back to kill her.

   Alberta doesn’t report the murder to the police and doesn’t even think to call Kirk at his office and tell him Mia’s dead until it’s too late and he’s on his way to her place. The next time she sees her husband he’s handcuffed to a cynical cop named Flood and under arrest for Mia’s murder.

   A few pages later, thanks to the legally challenged Woolrich having wisely spared us a trial scene, he’s awaiting execution. While he’s sitting in the death house, she goes through his belongings, which the police have returned to her, and discovers that the monogrammed match folder she took from Mia’s apartment doesn’t belong to Mia herself. Therefore she concludes at once — and the intensity of Woolrich’s prose makes it easy for us to forget that her reasoning is ridiculous — that the real murderer must be one of the four names on the M page of Mia’s address book.

   She goes to Flood, who doesn’t send out underlings to check whether any of the four M’s uses monogrammed match folders but agrees to backstop Alberta’s crazy and time-intensive plan: to enter the life of each M in turn and try to pin the murder on him.

   For the rest of the novel we are with her and inside her as she carries out her mission. The first M is Martin Blair, a hopeless alcoholic into whose wretched life she insinuates herself until he commits suicide. Does she blame herself? “No, I was kind to him. I gave him something to die for…. It is better to die for something than to live for nothing.”

   The second M is Mordaunt, a foul-smelling doctor with a sideline of pushing narcotics, who soon takes her into his operation as a delivery person. This episode is full of suspense and anguish but Mordaunt never rises above the pulp monster level.

   Alberta emerges from the nightmare intact and with proof that the doctor isn’t the man she’s after. M3 is wealthy bon vivant Ladd Mason, whom Alberta entices into a relationship, then has Flood set up a hidden dictaphone device in her apartment to preserve any damning admission Mason might let slip. Eventually he admits that he’d visited Mia on the day of her death and found her body on the floor.

   She leaves him asleep in her apartment and goes on to her fourth quest, a man named McKee, a gambler-gangster-nightclub owner of a sort familiar from many pulp stories by Woolrich and countless others.

   Auditioning for and landing a spot in his club’s chorus line, she is soon installed in his Central Park West penthouse. She induces him to give her the combination to his safe and, at the earliest opportunity, opens it to hunt for evidence of his connection with Mia Mercer, but is caught by his goons and taken out to be executed.

   There’s no need to describe the rest of the novel, which ends with our black angel torn by love for one who is dead, shattered inside as she had shattered others, executioner and victim in one flesh.

   Fred Dannay once said of Woolrich that his “driving narrative power…carries readers on the crest of a tidal wave, and they are equally oblivious of the long arm of coincidence and the long arm of incredibility” when immersed in his fiction even though there “might be a hole in the plot structure that would destroy an ordinary story.”

   That is an inspired description of the raw material that the makers of the movie BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946) had to contend with: a wrenching, bizarre episodic novel whose protagonist’s obsessions grow to madness as she ruins others and herself to save her man from Mister Death.

   The film was directed and co-produced by British-born Roy William Neill (1886-1946), an industry old-timer fondly remembered for his Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. He and screenwriter Roy Chanslor took on the jobs of tightening the novel’s structure, reducing the number of male characters, making the female lead more sympathetic, and at the same time preserving the Woolrich qualities of suspense and emotional anguish. A tall order!

   June Vincent starred as Catherine Bennett and Dan Duryea as the alcoholic pianist Martin Blair, who is an amalgam of Woolrich’s Martin Blair and his haunted socialite Ladd Mason. The Dr. Mordaunt episode was scrapped, and in the movie the M-monogrammed matchbook leads the black angel not to several men as in the book but only one, nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre), who more or less corresponds to Woolrich’s love-struck gambler McKee.

   Vincent’s Catherine Bennett doesn’t carry out her quest alone as Woolrich’s black angel did but is joined by Duryea’s Marty Blair character. Although Woolrich’s Marty kills himself after his brief encounter with the angel, Duryea not only lives through the movie but is recovering from his alcoholism by the fadeout. Duryea falls in love with Vincent somewhat as Ladd Mason had with Woolrich’s protagonist but in the movie she doesn’t return his love but stays loyal to her convicted and unfaithful husband.

   Yet despite these changes and many more, every frame of this fine film noir is permeated with the Woolrich spirit, Neill and his cinematographer Paul Ivano investing every shot with a visual style that translates the novel into film with total fidelity to its soul and precious little to its literal text. It was Roy William Neill’s finest film, and his last.

   In November 1965, less than two years before his own death, Basil Rathbone in a talk before a group of Sherlock Holmes fans described how the director of so many Holmes movies and of BLACK ANGEL had died. Late in 1946, Rathbone said, he was appearing on Broadway in a production of THE HEIRESS.

   â€œOne night to the theatre came dear little Roy Neill. We loved him. We called him Mousie. He was a little guy and as sweet as they come, though a damn good disciplinarian….[W]e didn’t disobey orders and we were always on time and we always knew our lines….There came to my dressing room, in a gray flannel suit and a white carnation, little Roy Neill. And he was going home, which was Maidenhead on the Thames, in England, for the first time in…something like fifteen-odd years….[He] took the keys out of his pocket, and he showed me one and said to me: ‘….That opens the door to my home at Maidenhead on the Thames.’ And he had had a housekeeper stay there for all this time, waiting for this wonderful moment when, after making substantial money, he was able now to go home and enjoy his life on the river Thames. And he boarded the ship, and—I only learned this later—and he arrived, and he went to Maidenhead, and he put the key into the front door, he turned it, and walked into the hall of his home, and dropped dead.”

   According to the brief New York Times obituary on Neill, the 59-year-old director had died of a heart attack in the London home of a nephew. But if Rathbone wasn’t embellishing the facts for the sake of a good anecdote, what a Woolrich-like death for the man who had just made what up to that time was the finest Woolrich-based film!

   Woolrich himself thought the picture a disaster. Early in 1947 he received a letter in which the poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, who had been one of his professors when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, mentioned having recently seen the movie.

   Woolrich then went to see the picture at a neighborhood theater. “I was so ashamed when I came out of there,” he wrote Van Doren on February 2. “All I could keep thinking of in the dark was: Is that what I wasted my whole life at?”

   Keeping in mind how radically the movie altered his novel, one can understand Woolrich’s point of view. Perhaps those who are there for the screening and my comments later this month will understand too.

   But that doesn’t mean he was right. For my money, if a single theatrical feature based on a Woolrich novel (as opposed to the features based on shorter work like Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW) could be preserved for future generations and all the rest had to be destroyed, BLACK ANGEL is the one I would opt to keep.