NATIONAL TREASURE. Walt Disney Pictures, 2004. Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Sean Bean, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Plummer. Director: Jon Turteltaub.

   National Treasure was released about twenty years ago. I’d heard of it, of course. But never took the time to watch it as I always thought it was going to be merely a shallow imitation of the Indiana Jones franchise. I was wrong. Although the film has its myriad flaws and lacks grit, this Nicholas Cage vehicle is definitely its own thing.

   For those unfamiliar with the basic premise, Cage stars as Benjamin Franklin Gates, an early American historian and adventurer who decides to steal the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives. Why? Because he’s convinced it’s got an invisible treasure map on the back, one that would lead to the Templar Knights’s war spoils.

   Along for the ride are Gates’s sidekick, computer expert Riley Poole (Justin Bartha), and Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), an archivist and Gates’s nascent love interest. Opposing the intrepid trio are Ian Howe (Sean Bean), a criminal who wants the treasure for himself and FBI Agent Sadusky (a somewhat miscast Harvey Keitel). Then there’s Gates’s father, Patrick Henry Gates (Jon Voight), a disillusioned old man who no longer believes there’s a national treasure to find. He’ll eventually change his mind.

   There’s something very childlike and innocent about National Treasure, which makes sense given that the movie was released by Walt Disney Pictures. But there’s plenty to admire about a film that tells a story, sticks to it, and never cheats the audience. Just because the critics didn’t particularly like this one doesn’t mean you can’t. Overall assessment: goofy, watchable fun with a cast committed to the bit. You don’t have to feel guilty if you like it.

R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – The Singing Bone. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1912. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1923. Popular Library, US, paperback, as The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. Reprinted many other times.

   The Singing Bone consists of five novelettes, averaging a bit over fifty pages each: “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” “A Case of Premeditation,” “The Echo of a Mutiny,” “A Wastrel’s Romance,” and “The Old Lag.” Though the final story is fairly routine, Freeman broke new ground with the first four and invented the “inverted” detective story.

   Each of the tales is told in two parts of about equal length. In part one, “The Mechanism of Crime,” as it is subtitled in the first story, we actually see the crime committed and are furnished with all the facts that could be used in solving it. In part two, “The Mechanism of Detection,” we follow Dr. Thorndyke as he investigates the crime, finds the clues, and finally solves it.

   Although the classic question ‘Whodunit?” is necessarily absent for the reader, there is a challenge of a sort to match wits with the detective and spot the clues in advance.

   The inverted form has never been popular in fiction, although Freeman used it in three more stories and two novels, and the popular television series “Columbo” did very well by it for several seasons. Perhaps the secret was that Peter Falk’s Sergeant Columbo was a far more interesting character than Dr. John Thorndyke. whose microscopic examinations lack the flair and showmanship of Sherlock Holmes. Still, the stories in The Singing Bone deserve rediscovery, especially “The Echo of a Mutiny,” which is probably the best of them, with its atmospheric setting in a lighthouse.

   Dr. Thorndyke was first introduced in the novel The Red Thumb Mark (1907), notable for its first use of fingerprint forgery in detective fiction. The collection John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909) features eight conventional detective stories and is especially noteworthy for “The Blue Sequin” and “The Aluminum Dagger.”

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   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 HUNTER. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Steve McQueen (Papa Thorson), Eli Wallach, Kathryn Harrold, LeVar Burton, Ben Johnson. Director: Buzz Kulik.

   Steve McQueen, in his final movie role, portrays bounty hunter Ralph “Papa” Thorson, a towering real life figure whose unorthodox career choice was the source material for The Hunter. The movie is very much a mix of action, drama, and romance, with plenty of time devoted to Thorson’s relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, Dotty (Kathryn Harrold).

   As far as the aforementioned action sequences, they are probably the best part of the film. We get to see McQueen drive a combine harvester while chasing outlaws; fight bare-fisted with a sheriff’s nephew who skipped bail; and chase a vicious killer through Chicago, with a particularly breathtaking scene taking place on a train. Literally.

   The glaring problem that The Hunter has is similar to the flaw found in many biopics. The writers simply don’t choose a good entry point into the story. Here, it takes nearly thirty minutes for the movie to find its legs. There’s a lot of effort devoted to showcasing Thorson’s eccentricities, such as his love of classical music and old vintage toys.

   Which is fine. But not as the expense of introducing a primary antagonist early on in the running. (Eventually, there is a primary villain: an ex-con who blames Thorson for being sent away to prison.)

   Overall assessment: in many ways, the movie feels more like a TV pilot tasked with introducing a character than a comprehensive feature film with a solid plot. But there’s plenty of good stuff in here too. Eli Wallach being one of them.
   

ROSS MACDONALD – Sleeping Beauty. Lew Archer #17 (of 18). Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, March 1973. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing thus, May 1974. Reprinted many times since.

   One of the later books in the series, and to my mind, not one of the better ones. Archer meets a young woman against a backdrop of a huge oil slick off the southern California coast. She is married but distraught, not only because of the disaster, but the oil company responsible for the damage is owned by her parents and other members of her family.

   After he takes her home with him, she leaves with a massive amount of sleeping pills along with her. And then disappears completely. Archer is hired by her husband to help find her, but matters are complicated by a ransom note received by her family. Is it real, or is it a fake? A scheme designed for revenge. For the money? Is she part of her disappearance herself?

   This is something that has happened in the past, several years earlier. It is part of her makeup. Part of her history.

   The opening is fine. It’s the investigation Archer undertakes that follows this that struggles to match it. The woman has a large, complicated family, and there is a lot of baggage that has accumulated over the years. Archer’s job: to make his way through all the physical and mental debris that has piled up, including murder, questioning everyone as he goes, driving from family member to family member to near exhaustion.

   There is not much action. This is adult stuff. It is also a book I had not read until now, but I’m sure if I had read it earlier, a lot of what Archer brings out into the light of day would have been over my head, in terms of having experienced anything similar. I would have been too young. And then there’s this. The back story, as revealed, is not as interesting even now as it should have been. A list of characters and who they are would have helped.

   But, and I am still trying to work out how this is true, the story is compelling. There’s plenty of guilt to spread around, and that includes that caused directly by the killer. My greatest wish is that I’d rather have had the killer’s identity come out as something other than an anti-climax.

SHOPWORN. Columbia, 1932. Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, Zasu Pitts. Director: Nick Grinde.

   In this Columbia pre-Code romantic drama, Barbara Stanwyck portrays Kitty Lane, a waitress who falls in love with David Livingston, an upper crust university student (Regis Toomey). The latter’s overbearing mother disapproves, to put it mildly. To separate the lovebirds, her friend, a prominent judge, creates a bogus charge against Kitty, alleging a public morals violation.

   That gets Kitty  sent to a women’s reformatory. After she gets out, however, she doesn’t return to her humble job at the diner. Instead, she becomes a world famous showgirl. Years later, David (Toomey) shows up at her doorstep. He’s still madly in love with her. But his mother, who now owns a gun, is still adamantly opposed to having Kitty as her daughter-in-law.

   Truth be told, there’s not a whole lot to recommend about Shopworn. It’s not that the movie is completely abysmal or anything like that; it’s just rather tedious with a color by numbers type of script that gives the viewer the bare minimum of drama and conflict but nothing more. It’s anemic.

   Overall assessment: Stanwyck takes her role seriously, but the overall product remains something of a dud.

R. AUSTIN FREEMAN – Mr. Pottermark’s Oversight. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1930. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1930. Reprinted a number of times, including Dover, US, softcover, 1985.

   R. Austin Freeman was one of crime fiction’s true innovators. He developed the “inverted” mystery story to an art; and in Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, he created a series detective of significant capabilities one who has been called “the only convincing scientific investigator” in the genre.

   Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke novels and short stories can be said to rival Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon in quality and cleverness of plot. Where Holmes uses deductive methods, Dr. Thorndyke draws on a wealth of scientific knowledge — everything from anatomy to zoology-to solve his cases. And although many of his plots involve technical explanations, Freeman was a master at making science and its jargon explicable to the lay reader.

   Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight is Dr. Thorndyke’s most celebrated case. Anthony Boucher called it “a leisurely, a gentle novel, yet an acute one …. No other detective in fiction has ever equaled Thorndyke in the final section of explication, often so tedious in lesser hands. The scene is especially effective in this novel; and the lucid unfolding of the reasoning of John Thorndyke carries that intellectual excitement and stimulus so often attributed to the detective story so rarely found.”

   Marcus Pottermack is a gentleman of leisure who spends most of his time studying British mollusca (snails) in his garden. As the novel opens, he has realized his dream of purchasing a sundial for the garden, and in preparing the site where he intends to place it, he uncovers an old well. The discovery proves fortuitous; Mr. Pottermack receives a visit from a gambler named Lewson, who has been blackmailing him.

   It seems Pottermack is in reality Jeffrey Brandon, a runaway convict who is supposed dead. Lewson has had financial reverses, and once again he puts the bite on “Jeff.” Pottermack lures Lewson into the garden, has a fight with him, and Lcwson falls, hitting his head on the edge of the well before tumbling in. Mr. Pottermack then sets about covering up his crime.

   The main problem is footsteps leading to his house in the soft earth. He can’t obliterate them, and so he decides to continue them on, past his home. There is a problem, though: Lewson’s shoes are on him in the well.

   The resourceful Mr. Pottermack decides to manufacture shoes, taking a plaster cast of the footprints and reproducing their soles. He then walks some distance in them, creating the impression that the person passed on by. Of course, there are other details to be dealt with, and Mr. Pottermack takes further steps (no pun intended) to assure his crime will never come to light. But he hasn’t counted on John Thorndyke’s scientific methods —  methods that eventually reveal Mr. Pottermack’s oversight.

   Readers who enjoy the inverted detective story and/or a good intellectual puzzle will find this an absorbing novel.

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   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.

STAR OF MIDNIGHT. RKO Radio Pictures. William Powell, Ginger Rogers, Paul Kelly, Gene Lockhart. Director: Stephen Roberts.

   In this case a suave lawyer must both solve a murder and find a missing leading lady. He’s aided in this by his determined young girl friend, who is equally determined to make the relationship permanent.

   The plot is complicated, but the result is not much of a detective story, when it comes down to it. Powell, who is his usual urbane self, finds the killer, but only in cooperation with a police lieutenant whose aching feet nearly steal the show.

SEPTEMBER 5. Republic Pictures, 2024. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch. Director: Tim Fehlbaum.

   September 5 is a different kind of movie. First of all, it’s a new drama/thriller with a running time of around ninety minutes or so – a rarity these days. Second, it’s a fully immersive experience, with the viewer plunged into the action as if he were there, standing on the side and watching everything transpire.

   Finally, it’s different because it tells a familiar story – that of the 1972 Munich Olympics kidnapping and massacre of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group, Black September – from the vantage point of the ABC Sports crew covering the events live and as they unfolded.

   As the film recounts, this was the first time in television history that a terrorist attack was broadcast live to the world, with some 800 million people watching.

   Peter Sarsgaard portrays ABC Sports President Roone Arledge who, along with colleagues Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), are forced to make split second decisions on if, and how, to broadcast the ongoing terrorist attack in real time without being exploitative.

   Realizing that this is a huge story, Arledge  plays hardball with CBS to ensure that ABC Sports has access to the shared satellite feed. Mason, for his part, has to run the control room in a manner that gets the story out quickly without sacrificing accuracy. There’s a lot of interoffice drama, intrigue, and tension among the crew, all of whom seem to be wrestling with uncomfortable questions without easy answers.

   Overall, September 5 is quite an achievement and it’s no surprise that the original screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

   One complaint however: a good portion of the movie seems (deliberately) poorly lit. I get that the filmmakers were trying to recreate as close as possible what it looked like in the ABC Sports control room, but a little more illumination would have helped immensely and wouldn’t have detracted from the claustrophobic atmosphere.

NICOLAS FREELING – The Back of the North Wind. Viking, hardcover, 1983. Penguin, paperback, 1984.

   The crime novels of Nicolas Freeling follow the giant footsteps of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. But the more you read of Freeling, the more you realize that they follow not in but alongside those footsteps, sometimes wandering to explore at greater depth character and social relevance.

   Freeling writes of ordinary, unexciting policemen — Dutch police inspector Piet Van der Valk, and Inspector Henri Castang of the French National Police — who have a private eye’s conscience. He presents sympathetic character studies of all the players in each of his dramas, and his detectives examine all aspects of the various crimes they are investigating, whether broad or narrow in scope.

   Freeling, who was born in London and presently lives in France, began writing romans policiers in 1962 with Love in Amsterdam and followed it with nine more books featuring Van der Valk; then, in Aupres de ma Blonde ( 1972), he committed the rather shocking act of doing away with his series detective because he had grown tired of him and wanted to experiment with other types of stories and protagonists.

   Van der Valk’s widow, Arlette, finds his murderer and concludes that particular case, among much social commentary and existential thought. She appears in two other books of her own (The Widow, 1979; Arlette, 1981) — perhaps not so successfully: at least one critic felt that widows should “wear black and smoke cigars … instead of solving crimes.”

   In 1974 Frceling published the first of his novels about Henri Castang, Dressing of Diamond. In contrast to Van der Valk, the veteran Castang (thirty years with the French police) possesses a sense of humor and a more dynamic wife, Vera, who is fond of quoting Conrad. Castang’s relationship with his wife is a nice counterpoint to the grim realities of the murder cases he is confronted with especially the central case in The Back of the North Wind.

   Returning from vacation, Castang investigates the particularly heinous murder of a young woman. In a boggy part of a nature reserve in the French countryside, a forester discovers a plastic carrier bag containing a rotting mass of human flesh. A search is organized and six other plastic carrier bags are found, each containing a part of a human body.

   Lab analysis reveals the murder victim to have been a female of North European origin, approximately twenty years old. The dismembered parts also show human bite marks: Castang is evidently faced with a murderer who is also a cannibal.

   His investigation is complicated by other pressing matters: a series of killings of ordinary citizens beaten over the head with a heavy weapon; a very strange and sinister prostitute; and political corruption within Castang’s own department. Each of the interwoven plot lines is untangled neatly through procedural and psychological methods, and the result is a grim but absorbing novel packed with Gallic atmosphere.

   The Henri Castang series ranks with Freeling’s Van der Valk novels and with the Martin Beck series written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo  as the best of the European police procedurals. Other recommended titles are The Bugles Blowing (1976) and Castang’s City (1980).

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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.
   

PICKUP ALLEY. Columbia Pictures, 1957. Victor Mature, Anita Ekberg, Trevor Howard, Bonar Colleano. Directed by John Gilling.

   Victor Mature portrays Charles Sturgis, a federal narcotics agent tasked with bringing down the enigmatic Frank McNally (Trevor Howard), a man also responsible for the death of his sister. Sturgis travels widely – there are a lot of shots of planes taking off and landing – in order to bring McNally to heel.

   There are a couple of subplots, but essentially the gist of the film is about a federal agent seeking to bring a devious international criminal to justice. Sounds compelling enough, right?

   Let me be blunt. For an international thriller, Pickup Alley aka Interpol is remarkably unadventurous. Dull, even. Part of this is Mature’s fault. But the script doesn’t help, either. Sure, you have the on location shots of Lisbon, Rome, Athens, and other cities.

   And then you’ve also got Anita Ekberg as a drug courier tasked with moving heroin from city to city. That must count for something too, right? Sadly, no.

   When all is said and done, this British crime film punches well below its weight and remains a case of ‘what might have been’ had the producers used the locations more to their benefit.

   Overall assessment: a structurally sound film with a not particularly captivating story about the international narcotics trade.