MACUMBA LOVE. United Artists, 1960. Walter Reed, Ziva Rodann, William Wellman Jr. and June Wilkinson. Written by Norman Graham. Produced and directed by Douglas Fowley.

   Persons of a certain age will remember Douglas Fowley as Doc Holliday in the “Wyatt Earp” teleseries. Going back a little further, others may recall his turn as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain. To me, he’ll always be the snaky bad guy of countless B-westerns, but it’s a safe bet that damn few will think of him as the auteur of Macumba Love, and I suspect his ghost will walk a little easier for it.

   Sad to think that a film with such a promising title proves a waste of time but the sad fact is that Macumba Love takes all the elements of a good trashy film— bad script, bad acting, low budget, sex, torture and voodoo—only to squander them.

   The story has potential: Walter Reed plays an investigative writer looking into the local folkways (this was filmed in Brazil, as was Love Slaves of the Amazons) up against a hostile voodoo queen, diffident authorities, and a strange moodiness on the part of his Latino girlfriend (Ziva Rodann, appropriately named “Venus de Viasa” here.)

   When Reed’s newlywed daughter (June Wilkinson) arrives with her husband (William Wellman Jr.) in tow, Ziva starts putting the moves on the young man, an enterprise helped along considerably by her dresses, none of which seem to cover her quite adequately. Meanwhile, the natives stay up late pounding drums and dancing around a fire, zombie-corpses wash up on shore, veiled threats are tossed about, Voodoo trinkets passed around like re-gifted Christmas presents, and Ziva gets less and less subtle about her campaign of seduction.

   Unfortunately, that’s about it. Instead of a plot developing, tension rising or anyone actually doing anything, we just get more drums, dancing, threats, trinkets and teasing. And then a little more drums, threats, teasing, etc. And then a little more…. you get the idea? The discerning viewer, having seen and appreciated films like Voodoo Woman or The Disembodied has come to expect the drums-and-dancing scenes; indeed, they’re practically the sine qua non of the genre. But one can only sit through a certain amount of it before a certain familiarity begins to creep in, and in this film it doesn’t so much creep as gallop.

   Or take the scene where the vamp lures the newlywed hubby to her boudoir: She invites him with a palpably fake pretext, he agrees and… and we get interminable shots of them riding along the beach in a carriage! By the time they reach her den of iniquity we’ve pretty much lost interest.

   Macumba Love has B-Movie street creds aplenty: Walter Reed, starred in Flying Disc Man from Mars and was a featured player in Superman and the Mole Men. Ziva Rodann worked in Pharaoh’s Curse and Forty Guns, and whoever designed her outfits seems to have enjoyed his work. Likewise June Wilkinson, who appeared (in the best sense of the word) in that classic The Immoral Mr. Teas And William Wellman Jr. … well he gets a scene staked out bare-chested for torture, if your tastes run to that sort of thing.

   With all this going for it, Macumba Love should have set a bad-movie standard all its own, but alas, it’s just too damn slow and repetitious, smothering its tawdry promise in tedium, doubly disappointing because an actor of Douglas Fowley’s sleazy expertise should have known how to do it right.

A GUNMAN HAS ESCAPED. Monarch Films, UK, 1948. John Harvey, John Fitzgerald, Robert Cartland, Ernest Brightmore, Maria Charles, Jane Arden, Frank Hawkins. Scenario: John Gilling. Director: Richard M. Grey.

   Sometimes films have more to offer in terms of historical interest than any entertainment value they may or may not have. In all honesty, if anyone could call this late 40s low budget crime drama from England anything more than mediocre, I’d have to consider their critical judgment something between low and none.

   But consider the date. For most of the players in this movie, the war was barely over and this was the beginning of long careers for them, mostly in TV when that came along, but movies as well. In fact one of them, Maria Charles, who plays a gun moll named Goldie and whose first movie this was, is still alive at the age of 86 and was on TV as recently as 2009.

   The director (and producer) of A Gunman Has Escaped, Richard M. Grey, made one or two other films then disappeared, and so did his production company. Perhaps the most well known of the actors was Jane Arden, whose second film this was, later became a noted film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. (You can follow the link to a long Wikipedia entry on her.)

   In this movie, though, she plays an unmarried and very naive farmer’s daughter who falls in love with one of three gunmen who botched a jewelry robbery, killing a bystander in the process, and who are now on the lam, and who take refuge on her father’s farm.

   This is a very short film, well under an hour in running time, and although almost all the violence is offstage, quite a brutal one. The actors all know their lines, though, and although the story is nothing more than perfunctory — I’ve told you all there is to know — I never had the urge to turn it off while I was watching.

REGINALD HILL – Recalled to Life. Dalziel & Pascoe #13. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1992. Dell, paperback, 1993. First pubished in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1992. TV-Movie: BBC/A&E, UK/US, 19 June 1999 (Season 4, Episode 2 of Dalziel and Pascoe). Warren Clarke as Det. Supt. Andy Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Det. Insp. Peter Pascoe.

   In my opinion, Reginald Hill is one of the three or four best British crime writers practicing today. There are none, I think whose latest book I pick up with any more pleasurable anticipation, and none who disappoint me less often.

   One of the strengths of his Dalziel-Pascoe books is that although featuring the same characters they are never the same book; a distinction missing, for better or worse, from many series.

   The latest featuring the unlikely pair is even more of a departure than usual. It begins almost 30 years ago, just after the time of the Ward-Profumo scandals that rocked the government. A woman is murdered at an aristocrat’s house, during a weekend in which several notables were present, including a successful businessman, a distant relation of the Queen, a young American agent, and the father of a modem-day member of the British government.

   The owner of the house is arrested and convicted, mainly by virtue of the confession of his accomplice, the nanny of one of the guest’s children. He is hanged, while her own death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. As the story proper opens, she is paroled because of new evidence uncovered which casts doubts on the probity of the police official who made the case — Dalziel’s mentor and protector, who is now deceased. Dalziel himself had been present and played a major part.

   An investigation is opened which threatens to blacken his mentor’s name, and Dalziel begins his own to counter. The plot eventually involves secret agencies of both British and American governments, and results in Dalziel traveling to the United States. Neither are quite the same afterwards. Dalziel, when asked for his impression of the country, re-plies that “it’ll be right lovely when they finish it.”

   Hill is a superb storyteller. The viewpoint switches back and forth between Dalziel and Pascoe, and occasionally to others as well, briefly but clearly illuminating them in passage. The tale is an exploration of guilt, and of expiation, but not of innocence. There is little of that, except of course for Pascoe, who has somehow retained his, along with the sense of outrage he feels when it is violated.

   Hill has disturbing things to say about the people who govern us and their methods, and I would not call it a comfortable book at all. It is, however, one you should read.

FIRST MAN INTO SPACE. MGM, UK/US, 1959. Marshall Thompson, Marla Landi, Bill Edwards, Robert Ayres, Bill Nagy, Carl Jaffe, Roger Delgado. Director: Robert Day.

   Watching First Man into Space, one cannot help but be reminded of The Quatermass Experiment, in which a rocket ship returns to Earth with an extraterrestrial menace in its midst. The same is essentially true for this surprisingly effective low-budget science fiction flic about a hubristic Air Force pilot who, in his obsessive quest to become the titular first man in space, ends up a victim of cosmic rays or such.

   And by “victim,” I mean that his endeavor in the stars transforms into a genuinely creepy looking bloodsucking monster that needs to kill and to feed in order to survive. Although First Man into Space is, at times, exceedingly talky (much like similar science fiction films from the era), it nevertheless has enough chills and thrills to keep the viewer engaged for the relatively scant running time.

   The crisp black and white cinematography, while nothing spectacular, is nevertheless much better than in many of the cheapie creature films from the same era. I can’t promise that you’ll love this movie, but I think that you’ll find that it’s a bit better than its title and premise suggest.

CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE. Howco International Pictures, 1976. Jack Elam, Dub Taylor, Dennis Fimple, John David Carson, Bill Thurman. Director: Joy N. Houck Jr.

   For a horror movie, Creature from Black Lake honestly isn’t all that good. For a spunky low-budget thriller, however, this mid-1970s creature feature really isn’t all that bad.

   While it’s hardly a classic, the movie simply exudes passion and spirit. Combining both shaky handheld camera effects with creepy music, Creature from Black Lake has campy humor, chills and thrills, and some interesting things to say about the counterculture and the place of Southern whites in American society. Ultimately, however, it’s a buddy film – the story of two University of Chicago classmates who travel down South to investigate the sighting of an apparent Bigfoot type creature in the Louisiana swamps.

   Although many of the actors aren’t particularly well known, one of them is certainly well known, especially by Western genre fans. That would be Jack Elam who, in this film, portrays a bearded and often drunk Bayou wild man who has a run in with the mysterious swamp creature.

   Elam’s presence in this film, while hardly a highlight of his career, lends the film both comic relief (Elam can be really funny!) and a sense of campy fun. Sometimes a film doesn’t need to be all that good – in a technical sense – to be enjoyable.

YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN. An episode of Armchair Theatre, ABC/ITV, UK, 16 August 1959 (Season 3, Episode 49). Ben Gazzara, Leo Genn, Brenda de Banzie, James Hayter, Derek Aylward, Jacqueline Ellis. Based on the story by Cornell Woolrich (Detective Story Magazine, November 1939; reprinted as by William Irish, Dell 10 Cent series #26, paperback, 1951). Director: Ted Post.

   A real oddity turned up on Cable in the middle of the night last week: You’ll Never See Me Again was made for Britain’s Armchair Theatre back in 1959, and to my knowledge has never aired before on American Television. At least Mike Nevins hadn’t seen it as of 1988, when he wrote his exhaustive Woolrich bio-bibliography, First You Dream, Then You Die.

   And it’s not bad at all. Somewhat on the level of a really good episode of The Avengers or Secret Agent. Ben Gazzara stars, playing the lead as a rather cold, unlikable sort, in the Laurence Harvey mode. He’s had a spat with his wife, it seems, and she ran home to Mother. Only she never got there. And no one saw her go.

   So when days pass, and she doesn’t show up (she is, in fact, never seen in the hour-long film) Ben finds himself haunted by a lackadaisical but persistent Police Inspector, intelligently played by Leo Genn. Their escalating cat-and-mouse game builds up very nicely to heights of Woolrichian paranoia (he imagined the Police to be literally everywhere) as the bereft husband tries with increasing desperation to find some shred of proof that he didn’t kill his wife, and at the same time come to terms with his feelings about her.

   And all the while, Genn keeps turning up in the oddest places, generally supine on a sofa, asking languidly if he’d care to confess to something.

   It’s all directed very competently by Ted Post, a filmmaker I’ve never cared much for, and despite the truncated late-night presentation, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Look for it.

BLUE VELVET. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group / 20th Century Fox, 1986. Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell. Screenwriter-director: David Lynch.

   I have never listened to much popular music — other than show music — and for all I know Bobby Vinton’s recording of “Blue Velvet” may be a period piece that captures the feeling of a year or even of a decade. Whatever its importance as a popular icon, David Lynch has used it effectively in his film Blue Velvet where the plushy, languorous singing, returning insistently like a haunting~ refrain, provides an erotic, languorous counterpoint to the often brutal events of a film that, like Lynch’s first movie, Eraserhead, shows some promise of becoming a cult classic.

   Kyle MacLachlan, the apple-cheeked hero of Lynch’s film of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic novel, Dune, plays a seemingly innocent hero who, like the heroine of many an insufferable Gothic romance, blunders against all good sense into a situation in which his life and even his virtue are at peril.

   Lynch’s intention is, in part, satiric — as it was in the memorable Eraserhead — and, against the background of an idealized all-American city captured in colors that have the intensity of pop art painting, Kyle/Jeffrey, obsessed with the masochistic needs of a sexually tormented singer — played by Isabella Rossellini- attempts to unravel the intricate psycho-sexual empire presided over by a demented Dennis Hopper.

   MacLachlan is aided by a somewhat mature Nancy Drew, splendidly portrayed by blond Laura Bern, the “good” woman in his life (as sultry, raven-haired Rossellini is his “dark” mistress), who, in some perplexity, asks him if he is a “pervert” or a detective. Summoning up as much of a leer as his somewhat limited acting skill will allow, Maclachlan replies that it is for “me to know and you to find out.”

   This gauntlet is, of course, also thrown down to the sometimes bemused viewer, and this Chinese-box film, with its blue velvet song and fabric serving as an opening and closing frame, will not find a disinterested audience.

   If some equivalent of the League for Moral Decency is still functioning, an extended sequence in which Rossellini seduces a fascinated but somewhat reluctant hero into a sado-masochistic tumble should have its adherents taking to the streets in self-righteous outrage.

   MacLachlan keeps protesting that he only wants to help while Rossellini pleads with him to hurt her, and it is this psychological ambivalence that lies at the heart (and it is an amused and perverse intelligence which controls it) of this brilliantly directed film.

   Blue Velvet is impeccably cast and often memorably played. Rossellini and Hopper are an unforgettable apparently mismatched pair, while former MGM child star Dean Stockwell plays the stoned proprietor of a peculiarly staffed whorehouse with deadly, pointillist accuracy. Once again, Lynch has shown a particular genius for undermining the American family. Machlachlan’s father, mother, and aunt are Grant Wood figures in a Charles Burchfield darkling wood. Not to be missed are the quick shots of the family’s prime-time TV viewing and the robin-with-beetle episode that closes the film.

   Whatever your view of small-town America may be, it is not likely to be the same after seeing this absorbing movie. Do not expect to be moved or to care about the characters’ fates. Some viewers will feel the film is an assault on basic virtues and common decency, and it is.

   Others will revel in the photography, delight in the often witty script, and find in themselves unsuspected depths of playful decadence in their response to Blue Velvet. The viewer is invited to become a detective but also to participate vicariously in the complex games Lynch plays.

   And it is up to you, dear reader, should you see this film, to answer that provocative question posed by Laura/“Nancy” to Kyle/Jeffrey. But you may not want to share your answer with your best friend, your lover … or yourself.

CALIFORNIA. American International Pictures, 1963. Jock Mahoney (Don Michael O’Casey), Faith Domergue (Carlotta Torres), Michael Pate (Don Francisco Hernandez), Susan Seaforth (Marianna De La Rosa, Rodolfo Hoyos, Nestor Paiva. Story & Screenplay: James West. Producer-Director: Hamil Petroff.

   I didn’t realize they were still making low budget black-and-white westerns like this as later as 1963, which is when I first started grad school. The stated ambition of the film, according to a short prologue, is to tell the story of California’s fight for independence.

   All the fighting, though, except for a well-choreographed sword fight between leading man Jock Mahoney very near the end of the proceedings, is the stock footage of Mexican soldiers marching their way up the coast to wreck havoc on all the disloyal landowners who stand in their way.

   Once the movie itself begins, it settles down instead to your basic four-sided romantic triangle. Half-Irish half-Spanish Don Michael O’Casey is in love with heiress and black-eyed beauty Carlotta Torres, who is engaged to be married to sinister Don Francisco Hernandez (who not so incidentally was responsible for the death of O’Casey’s father), who spends his time and kisses with cantina owner Marianna De La Rosa.

   The story is mediocre at best — I kept wishing that Zorro would show up — not that Jock Mahoney (looking very much like Yancy Derringer, for some reason) is not very nearly the next best thing, or he would have been, had the story taken a turn for the better that way.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Skull of the Waltzing Clown. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1935.

   I picked this one up at the last minute to read on a Plane Ride a while back, and I have to say I couldn’t have picked any better.

   It had been a few years since I’d read any Keeler, and though I remembered him fondly as the author of the Strangest Mysteries Ever Written, I’d somehow forgotten just how uniquely talented a writer he really was — in his own way.

   I’ve never read a line of dialogue in a Keeler book that really rang true, never paused over an evocative description nor savored a poetic passage. Keeler’s characters are memorable enough, but none have ever really sprung to life for me, and there are no striking action scenes, breathless chases, or any of the other fol-de-rol that marks lesser writers like Woolrich, Hammett or Chandler.

   No, what makes a Keeler novel is his sheer audacity. No writer before or since has ever dared give such free rein to his own imagination, thrown down the gauntlet to Conventional Realism with such elan, hazarded Disbelief so cavalierly, or sneered so easily in the face of Wildest Coincidence. Nothing is too outrageous for a Keeler novel, and it is this sensation — that literally anything at all might occur — that makes reading him such a delight.

   The Skull of the Waltzing Clown consists mostly of an extended conversation between two men in a room in Chicago. At the same time, though, it’s much more than that: Tales are told, adventures recounted, characters described, letters produced, facts and fictions proven and disproven, bought and sold, until finally the conversation turns into a sort of Metaphysical Crap Shoot, where the players take turns tossing dice at Reality until the classic, last-paragraph denouement.

   I could describe the plot more concretely, I guess, but there’s no point in summarizing a Keeler novel. They have to be read, experienced, to be appreciated, and this one … well it was the perfect literary equivalent of DisneyWorld.

HELEN REILLY – Not Me, Inspector. Random House, hardcover, 1959. Ace Double G-531, paperback, 1963 (packaged with the author’s The Canvas Dagger). Macfadden-Bartell, paperback, 1971.

   Puzzle plots were beginning to make their way out in the late 50s, as far as mystery fiction was concerned, but the authors who’d been writing them since the 30s and 40s were still holding on. Helen Reilly is an author who fits the bill. By 1959, she’d been writing mysteries since 1930 (The Thirty-First Bullfinch, a standalone novel), with this one the 25th of 28 Inspector McKee mysteries.

   Not Me is not a sudden throwback to a period some 15 or 20 years earlier, but rather a continuation of good but not outstanding detective novels by Reilly. The not-so-good news is that while the intricately worked out puzzle works to perfection — it really does — there is a huge problem with the telling of it, and I’ll talk about that shortly.

   It’s not entirely because Inspector McKee has such a small role to play in it, but in a way, it is, because that leaves the characters themselves, innocents and suspects alike, to carry the load, and for a long portion of the book, they don’t.

   To specifics: Mercedes “Dace” Allert’s somewhat weak and definitely bad-tempered husband Harvey disappears soon after it is discovered that he cashed a forged check written on his stepmother’s account. When she dies a lingering death after an automobile accident in a car that Harvey worked on shortly she left the city for upstate New York, he is only spotted here and there, apparently afraid to come home to face the questions that he will be asked and avoiding the consequences. The only thing keeping Dace going is that he does not know that his stepmother died and will not be pressing charges. Not only that, but he has inherited all of her money.

   Reilly was usually very good at pacing her novels, but even the best of authors would find some difficulty in keeping the reader’s attention focused on Dace’s tortured mind, thinking this about her missing husband, then that. In the meantime, though, as a small bonus, we also get a picture of upper middle class society as it was in Manhattan in the 50s, or least one version of it.

   The reason that Inspector McKee is seldom seen in this novel is that there is no obvious homicide victim whose murder needs to be solved, not until page 121 of a 176 page paperback, and that of a woman in Danbury, Connecticut, who has no possible connection to Harvey Allert, other than that a man who called himself Harold Allen had just checked in there, and it was from his room from the dead woman was pushed.

   It seems well nigh impossible for Reilly to tie everything up as neatly as she does, but she does, and no, McKee never has a lot to do with everything but to explain it all up at the end. It’s an ending worth waiting for, and I don’t think the story could have been told any other way, but if there had been, I’d say that this one could have been a contender.

JOHN LUTZ – Buyer Beware. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1976. Paperjacks, paperback, 1986. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1992.

   Private eyes tend to specialize these days. Alo, Nudger, for example, comes highly recommended in child custody cases. That he’s not the hard-boiled type is well illustrated by his dependence on antacid tablets, but enough money can overcome many qualms.

   Murder is not in his line, but once persuaded, he takes his investigation into the efficient world of business and finance, which is faced with a deadly extension of the rules it plays by.

   Lutz has an eye for people and background that adds greatly to a tale that holds its own most of the way, yet I did wish the scheme were not ultimately so far-fetched, made all the more so by the rushed wrap-up.

Rating: C plus.

      The Alo Nudger series —

1. Buyer Beware (1976)
2. Night Lines (1985)

3. The Right to Sing the Blues (1986)
4. Ride the Lightning (1987)
5. Dancer’s Debt (1988)

6. Time Exposure (1989)
7. Diamond Eyes (1990)
8. Thicker Than Blood (1993)

9. Death by Jury (1995)
10. Oops! (1998)
11. The Nudger Dilemmas (story collection, 2001)