A MAN CALLED SLEDGE. Columbia Pictures, 1970. James Garner, Dennis Weaver, Claude Akins, John Marley, Laura Antonelli, Wayde Preston. Producer: Dino de Laurentiis. Directors: Vic Morrow (also co-screenwriter) & Giorgio Gentili (the latter uncredited).

   What were they thinking? A spaghetti western filmed in Spain starring three of the most likable guys in American TV at the time as despicable villains? No way. There’s no chance in the world that these fellows could have pulled it off, and they don’t.

   From the title alone, you might think that this bit of tomfoolery was meant to be a spoof, but as the movie goes on it will gradually sink in, as if against your will, that they were deadly serious about this. Filmed in beautiful knock-your-eyes-out Technicolor, the movie itself is a shake-your-head-in-wonderment deadly bore.

   All except for a few moments around the two-thirds mark, that is, when Luther Sledge and his gang manage to steal $300,000 in gold from a well-fortified prison from the inside out. The rest of the movie is filled with action, all right, but of the uninspired gratuitous kind, of which other spaghetti westerns are equally filled. Try to imagine James Garner with a truly evil glint in his eye, and you can’t.

   Henry Fonda could have done this. James Garner is essentially just too nice. In Sledge, he only succeeds in looking (and acting) dumb. Why would he need the money (to be split numerous ways) when his steady girl friend Ria (Laura Antonelli) begs him not to go through with his plan? She wants him (heaven knows why), not the money.

   The plan which does not turn out well in the end, as you might expect, but what you will not expect is how dull-witted (if not feeble-minded) the gents are who pull off this heist are, only to let the proceeds slip through their fingers again so easily. (Which of course is the whole point, and points, I will concede, we will accept however we obtain them.)

   While the scenery and the colors are absolutely wonderful, you do have to ignore all of the fancy camera positions and shooting angles whenever the actors get on stage, as they are prone to do. All the camera shots do is call attention to themselves, and why the movie had to be redubbed back into English is beyond me.

PostScript: It is my contention that you can take any western and by watching it, but totally ignoring who the actors are, place it in the right decade, whether it be the 1920s, 30, 40s and all the way up. The themes, the settings, the clothes, the hair styles, the atmosphere — the idea of what a western was supposed to be changed decade by decade — and reflected that decade exactly.

   This is neither the time nor place to develop this thesis further, but I will, someday.

THANKS FOR EVERYTHING. 20th Century Fox, 1938. Jack Haley, Jack Oakie, Adolphe Menjou, Arleen Whelan, Binnie Barnes, Tony Martin, George Barbier, Warren Hymer, Renie Riano. Songs: Mack Gordon and Harry Revel; photography: Lucien Andriot. Director: William A. Seiter. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   In this engaging satire of American mores, Jack Haley is a small-town nobody who wins first prize in a national radio contest in which his answers to 100 questions on his preferences for a variety of products establish him as “Mr. Average American.”

   However, Menjou, head of the company that promoted the contest, in collaboration with his flunky (played by jack Oakie), concocts a scheme to disqualify Haley and then hire him at a small salary to test products for their appeal to the average man, a ploy that’s an over-the-top success for Menjou and his newly-formed company, Guidance Inc.

   As you might suspect, the plan begins to unravel, with Menjou and Oakie forced to increasingly desperate measures to keep Haley in the dark, leading to an attempt to make Haley declare himself for or against going to war that culminates in the simulation of an enemy attack on New York City.

   This pushes Haley into the war camp but also precipitates a series of escalating farcical scenes that lead to a triumph for Haley that is an uncanny foreshadowing of Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero.

   The film has real comic bite, and the cast is uniformly superb, with a stand-out performance by Renie Riano as Haley’s stand-in telephone girl friend.

ARTHUR D. GOLDSTEIN – A Person Shouldn’t Die Like That. Random House, hardcover, 1972. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, September 1972.

   Several days after his chess-and-checkers-playing friend, Jacob Schneider, fails to show up at the New York City park where they play, Max Guttman visits him to see if all is well. Unfortunately it isn’t, for Guttman finds him in his apartment, beaten to death.

   Realizing that he knew little about Schneider other than that he had survived a concentration camp, Guttman begins trying to find out why a man should have to die like Schneider did. Guttman is also pressured, only a little bit externally but very much internally, to see what he can do to keep a presumably innocent black drug addict from being convicted of the crime.

   The police don’t care for Guttman’s inquiries, nor apparently does the murderer, who may have struck again.

   In Synod of Sleuths, edited by Jon L. Breen and Martin H. Greenberg, James Yaffe discusses the Jewish detective and Jewish characters in mystery novels — Guttman isn’t literally a detective, merely a not-very-well educated but definitely intelligent immigrant who wants to know why — and contends:

   At least in this novel — the first of three — Guttman, seventy-two-year-old widower, is not a practicing Jew. Indeed, he has not kept Kosher since his wife died. Is his Jewishness “simply a thin coating of local color?”

   Not a question I can answer, and Yaffe does not deal with Goldstein’s novels in his essay. What I can say is that Guttman is an amusing, thought-provoking and complex character whom it was it pleasure to spend time with.

Bibliography:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

GOLDSTEIN, ARTHUR D(avid). 1937- . Pseudonym: Albert Ross. Series character: Max Guttman, in all three titles below.
    A Person Shouldn’t Die Like That (n.) Random House, 1972. Nominated for an Edgar, Best First Mystery Novel, 1973.
    You’re Never Too Old to Die (n.) Random House, 1974.
    Nobody’s Sorry He Got Killed (n.) Random House, 1976.

ROSS, ALBERT. Pseudonym of Arthur D. Goldstein.
    If I Knew What I Was Doing (n.) Random House, 1974.

“Hangover.” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (Season 1, Episode 12). First air date: 6 December 1962. Tony Randall, Jayne Mansfield, Robert Lieb, Myron Healey, Tyler McVey, June Levant, William Phipps, Dody Heath. Teleplay: Lou Rambeau. Based on two short stories by John D. MacDonald and Charles Runyon. Director: Bernard Girard.

   Hadley Purvis (Tony Randall) has a major drinking problem, one bad enough to prompt his wife to threaten divorce if he doesn’t quit. One morning he wakes up to find his wife gone; in her place, however, is another woman named Marion (Jayne Mansfield).

   Now, we can all agree that worse things can happen to a man than to wake up to a woman like Marion, but Had’s problem is he doesn’t remember a thing from the day before. It’s only in little fragments that he gradually reconstructs what actually happened — and the final revelation will prove devastating …

   Note the unusual pairing of credits for the stories this television play was based on. You have to wonder what the situation was there.

   Tony Randall was excellent at light comedy (114 episodes of The Odd Couple, 44 installments each of The Tony Randall Show and Love, Sidney) and seldom ventured into crime drama. He did appear in Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit (1989, TVM) but was totally miscast as “Hercule Poirot” in The Alphabet Murders (1965).

   In “Hangover,” Jayne Mansfield reunites with her co-star Tony Randall from the screen comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), but the character dynamic is totally different. She also appeared in the latter-day film noir The Burglar (also 1957).

     Hulu: http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi1574436889/

Editorial Comments:   Mike may be too young to remember, but I’m not. Tony Randall had a solid career in old radio before becoming a long-time favorite of both movie and TV audiences. He was best known as Reggie, one of the three adventurers in Carleton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery series in the late 1940s.

   I also discussed the unusual story collaboration between John D. MacDonald and Charles Runyon with Walker Martin. Says Walker:

    “JDM had the same reaction as Mike. See his introduction in the paperback collection, End of the Tiger, which reprints the story. Originally published as ‘Hangover’ in the July 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan. His reaction is also brought out in Martin Grams and Patrik Wikstrom’s book on the Hitchcock TV shows.

    “JDM says, ‘…I realized some committee of idiots had decided to combine my story with another story by Charles Runyon. The result of course was cluttered nonsense.’

    “Runyon’s story was also called ‘Hangover’ and was published in the December 1960 Manhunt. I recently read the JDM story and the Runyon story addition is the Jayne Mansfield character. By the way she looks the best I’ve ever seen her look. She should have kept the short hair.”

PHILIP PULLMAN – The Ruby in the Smoke: A Sally Lockhart Mystery. Oxford University Press, hardcover, 1985. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft. TV movie: BBC, 2006 (with Billie Piper as Sally).

   First published in the U.K. in 1985, this was published in the U.S. in 2008, after the success of Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. It’s more of an adventure story taking place in London, 1852, than a mystery, in the vein of the penny dreadfuls that the character Jim devours.

   In this first book in the series, 16-year-old Sally receives a mysterious note related to the death of her father, a shipping agent who drowned in the South China Sea. As she begins to investigate the note, Sally tumbles headlong into a mystery involving opium, pirates, Chinese secret societies, the seamiest areas of Victorian London, a legendary ruby and the truth about her own identity.

   It’s a quick read, awash in Pullman’s wonderful writing. Here’s the sailor Bedwell describing how the sea looked the night Sally’s father died:

    “Our wake and our bowwave were great swirling tracks made up of billions of spots of white light, and all the sea on both sides was full of deep glowing movements — fishes darting through the depths, great shimmering clouds and veils of shadowy color, little surges and whirlpools of light far below — once or twice in your life you get a night like that, and it’s a sight to leave you breathless.”

   Recommended for craft and atmosphere.

    Bibliographic Data:

       The Sally Lockhart series —

    1. The Ruby in the Smoke (1985)
    2. The Shadow in the Plate (1986) aka The Shadow in the North (US)
    3. The Tiger in the Well (1990)
    4. The Tin Princess (1994)

BLUE MURDER. ITV, UK. Season Five: 7 September to 12 October 2009. Paul Loughran, Nicholas Murchie, Caroline Quentin, Ian Kelsey, Ceallach Spellman, Eden Garrity.

   This series, with Caroline Quentin as D. C. I. Janine Lewis juggling her job and the needs of her children, usually to the detriment of the latter, has combined the occasional good plot with a lot of uninteresting family squabbles.

   This new series (6 one-hour parts, less adverts) was a big improvement with Lewis concentrating on her work and her team, whose deficiencies were previously well to the fore, actually seemed efficient.

   The series dipped a little with a two-part finale when Lewis’s family problems cropped up again and the team took so many liberties with police procedure (or what is shown as police procedure on other programmes) that disbelief had to be firmly suspended.

   Nevertheless this was a series I enjoyed.

GARRITY – Kiss Off the Dead. Gold Medal #948, pb original, 1960.

   To get the unappealing taste of Brad Latham’s Hook book out of my head, I went to my collection of prime Gold Medal stock and more or less picked this one out at random.

   I’ve read enough of these early paperback novels to be convinced that the booze-babes-and-bullets approach to detective/mystery fiction does not automatically have to mean that it’s a book that I found as disappointing as I did The Gilded Canary.

   To tell you the truth, I was a little worried. Could it be that I was wrong, that my memory had gone bad? After reading this, though, my doubts were gone. I was completely reassured. They just don’t write ’em the way they used to, that’s all there is to it.

   This is the story of Max Carey, an ex-cop who’s gone bad, on the trail of a woman — his wife, as it happens — who’s to blame. She’s a tramp, although he refuses to admit it, even to himself. Just as he finds her — in a smoke-filled bar on the way to Florida — she disappears again, and the very next day (naturally!) her body turns up in the ocean.

   Small-town police officers being what they are, Carey is blamed, and he spends the rest of the book one step ahead of the law — and the mob– desperately trying to find the killer before either one of them finds him. A hat-check girl named Sherry is the only person who’s on his side.

   Not a terrifically original plot, I have to admit, but Garrity’s roughly-hewed writing style saves the day, even to the point of being nearly poetically effective in papering over the cliches. The non-stop action includes the prerequisite bedroom scene, but here at least the camera pulls away before the X-rated warning lights go flashing on.

   The book is filled with as much action as the Warner book, if not more, but what Garrity does that Latham doesn’t is to make you feel it — as nearly a participant as reading a book can do, not as a voyeur.

[UPDATE] 03-10-10. The revisions I just mentioned were designed to make the review stand more on its own, though I think it’s fairly clear that you might want to read the preceding review anyway, just to make the context clearer. I’ve made no changes in what you read now from what my opinion was then.

Bibliographic Data:  [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

   GARRITY.   Pseudonym of David J. Gerrity, 1923-1984.

        Kiss Off the Dead (n.) Gold Medal 1960
        Cry Me a Killer (n.) Gold Medal 1961

        Dragon Hunt (n.) Signet 1967, as by Dave J. Garrity.   (PI Peter Braid)
        The Hot Mods (n.) Signet 1969, as by Dave J. Garrity.

   GERRITY, DAVID J(ames).   Series character: Mafia hit man Frank Cardolini in all.

        The Never Contract (n.) Signet 1975

        The Plastic Man (n.) Signet 1976
        The Numbers Man (n.) Signet 1977

NOTE: Some of Garrity/Gerrity’s books were either dedicated to Mickey Spillane or had a blurb by the latter on the cover (“I wish I had written it!”). They were friends, I believe, or Spillane acted in some way as a sponsor or mentor, but I haven’t tracked down any more specific information than this.

STEVE FISHER – I Wake Up Screaming. Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1941. Paperback reprints: Handi-Book #27, 1944. Popular Library #129, no date stated [1947-48]. Bestseller Mystery B204, digest-sized, 1957. Bantam Books A2145, 1960. Black Lizard, 1988. Vintage, 1991. Film: 20th Century-Fox, 1941.

   Prior to this book, Fisher had written six mystery novels, under three different names, without any great success. For income he depended primarily upon being one of the best and most prolific pulp writers, one willing to write for almost every type of magazine, including Westerns, love stories, adventure, and war.

   After Screaming became a popular film noir from Twentieth Century Fox, despite the unusual casting of Betty Grable, along with Victor Mature and Laird Cregar, Fisher was able to pursue a career as a successful screen and television writer. He wrote dozens of films, including Lady in the Lake and Dead Reckoning. He also wrote hundreds of television scripts, including shows such as McMillan and Wife and Barnaby Jones.

   Fisher’s book is a Southern California mystery about a promoter suspected of murdering a starlet. Fisher’s friend and fellow mystery writer, Frank Gruber, once said of him, “Steve was never afraid to put his heart on a printed page,” and that is true of I Wake Up Screaming as he makes us identify with a protagonist on the run from a monomaniacal police detective who is determined to pin the murder on him.

   (Mike Nevins has claimed that the detective, named Cornell, was based in part on Woolrich, who had been a fellow pulp writer with whom Fisher and Gruber were acquainted when all lived and struggled in New York.)

   We get plenty of evidence here that Fisher had learned his pulp lessons well and was able to write crisp, fast-moving prose. We also get glimpses of the love affair Fisher had with Hollywood, one which, fortunately for him, the town’s major industry reciprocated.

Editorial Comment:   This book was revised and updated several times over the years. See this earlier post and the comments that follow for some of the details.

UNDERWORLD. Paramount Pictures, 1927. George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook, Fred Kohler, Helen Lynch, Larry Semon, Jerry Mandy. Based on a story by Ben Hecht, adapted by Charles Furthmann. Director: Josef von Sternberg, who replaced the fired and uncredited Arthur Rosson.

   The relevation of Cinevent 1979 for me was the silent film classic, Underworld. George Bancroft plays a self-confident gangster lord with a beautiful mistress (Evelyn Brent) and an educated, alcoholic friend (Clive Brook) who try to smooth his rough edges and find themselves drawn to one another in the process.

   The action is blunt and swift, but the genius of this film is in the direction of the actors (“My God, but they had faces then!”) and the superb playing of this unlikely trio, the kind of ensemble performance that also contributed greatly to the success of The Glass Key and all those other melodramas we doted on before television pulped the genre.

   There’s a final shoot-out that makes similar scenes in 1930’s gangster films look like well-laundered exercises in politesse, and the old melodramatic device of the secret passage is revitalized and made a necessary and believable part of the action.

   The camera work is remarkable (Sternberg was making great films long before he began to exploit Dietrich), with details that come from an older theatrical tradition that makes most recent melodramas look like uneducated exercises in bumbling.

   The film was meant to be shown with blue and yellow filters (for night and interior scenes), but this obscured the. photographic detail to such an extent that the projectionist abandoned the attempt after about twenty minutes.

   And anyone who thinks that silent films were primitive should be tied to a chair and forced to watch this and any number of other equally accomplished productions until he admits defeat.

LYLE BRANDT – Justice Gun. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, August 2003.

   Lyle Brandt is another in a long line of pseudonyms for Michael Newton, author of over 170 novels, including many of the men’s adventure “Executioner” series, as by Don Pendleton. This is a western, though, and once you start reading it, it’s one you won’t put down right away.

   The first 60 pages are intense. Gunman Matt Price is found by a migrating black family after being left for dead; is nursed back to a semblance of health; and then becomes the savior in turn when the small wagon is accosted by a gang of redneck outlaws taking exception to the color of the Carver family’s skin.

   Refuge is found in the town of New Harmony, founded on the principles of equality for all. The doctor, who has her work cut out for her in saving Price’s skin again, is indeed a woman, which makes for two largely unlikely happenings (historically speaking) in one short amount of time.

   New Harmony is, as it turns out, under attack, and Matt Price may or may not be their protector and their champion. Unevenly told — the middle section sags somewhat — and rather linear in terms of plot, but the story’s ending has all the gunsmoke and action you could ever hope for.

Bibliographic Data Justice Gun is the second in a series of western paperbacks labeled “The Gun Series.” Matt Price, I believe, is the leading character in all of them.

    The Gun (2002)

    Justice Gun (2003)
    Vengeance Gun (2004)

    Rebel Gun (2005)
    Bounty Gun (2006)

   Also by Newton as by Lyle Brandt are the books in his “Lawman” series, the lawman referred to being US Deputy Marshal Slade:

    The Lawman (2007)

    Slade’s Law (2008)
    Helltown (2008)

    Massacre Trail (2009)
    Hanging Judge (2009)
    Manhunt (2010)