THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Lizabeth Scott, Jane Greer, Dennis O’Keefe, Fay Baker, John Hoyt. Director: John Cromwell.

    I picked this one to watch for two reasons. First, Lizabeth Scott was in it. Secondly, because Jane Greer was in it. And if you’d like me to keep going into thirdsies, with both of the aforementioned two ladies in it, the movie had to be a noir film, not so?

    Not so, or if it is, it’s the most borderline of touchy-feely noir films I’ve ever seen. Not that that’s so bad, I hasten to add, but in no way nor at no time did this movie go in a way I thought it was going to go, and I enjoyed (almost) every minute of it.

    The movie opens with Jane Greer’s character (Mildred Lynch, later to be known as Diane Stuart) up for parole at the women’s detention center where she’s serving an indeterminate sentence. She’s polite, she’s mild, she’s humble, and she convinces the three or four old biddies on the board. The one male member is not so sure.

    And sure enough, once she’s out, her real personality comes to the fore, and taking the brunt of her built-up frustration and anger at society is one of the kindest, most understanding parole officers the world has ever seen, Joan Wilburn (Lizabeth Scott).

    How understanding is that, Steve? Try this. When Diane steals Joan’s fiancé right out from under her, does she (Diane) get mad? Does she get even? I won’t tell you, but maybe if I hint loudly enough, you will get the idea.

    Nor does the world treat Diane all that well, either, which is maybe where the noir aspect might come in, but no, I’ve been thinking about this overnight, and it’s not really enough. Jane Greer might overplay her role just a little, but if one can act with only facial expressions to indicate his or her thoughts, she does it in this movie, and extremely well.

    As for Lizabeth Scott, she may underplay her role, that of an Ice Princess who sees and knows what her duty is, and goes ahead and — well, I won’t say, but I’m sure that if you read any other review of this movie, you can find out easily enough anyway, without having to watch this movie, which you should.

    Part of Joan Wilburn’s problem may indeed be the Ice Princess part of her make-up. If she weren’t so cool and collected even with her fiancé (Dennis O’Keefe, by the way), their relationship may have meant more to him than it appears it does. I don’t think he even ever got to First Base with her, if they had Bases back in 1951.

DOUGLAS FAIRBAIRN – Street 8. Delacorte, hardcover 1977. Reprint paperback: Dell, 1978.

   That’s the sentiment expressed by a Miami native in Street 8, a hot-blooded 1977 noir novel by Douglas Fairbairn.

   The title street, an English translation of Calle Ocho, the main drag of Miami’s Little Havana, is the site of Bobby Mead’s used car lot. Out of habit, Bobby still calls it by its original name, Southwest 8th Street, and from the office window of his lot, he’s seen Miami transformed from a sleepy, one-season tourist town into a vibrant Latin city.

   The Cubans are everywhere. They’re even buying cars from him, so for the first time, he hires a Cuban salesman, Oscar P?rez, to accommodate them. Oscar, however, soon becomes embroiled in the hornets’ nest of exile activity, and the trouble begins.

   The problem with Miami’s exile community in 1977 is that, while they’re committed to eliminating Fidel Castro, they also want to wipe out his sympathizers and spies who have infiltrated their organizations. But exactly who is who?

   Told entirely from Bobby Mead’s point of view, Street 8 allows him no letup. His world is contracting around him, threatening to choke him, and not even his ratty South Beach hotel room offers him any sanctuary. He has a teenage daughter, but his incredibly twisted relationship with her only serves to further cut him off from the city he once loved.

   Fairbairn deftly ushers the reader through the dark fringes of the byzantine world of Miami Cubans in 1977, and we eventually learn that some of them are more interested in acquiring power in Miami itself than they are in retaking their homeland to the south.

   This little-known novel is an excellent noir tale, highly recommended, as it offers an uncompromising look at one man caught up in a city’s convulsive transition.
   

Bibliographic Data:   While he has a number of other novels and creenplays to his credit, Douglas Fairbairn has only one other crime novel included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. That novel, Shoot (Doubleday, 1973) was also the basis for a movie of the same name.

   The film version stars Cliff Robertson and Ernest Borgnine. Here’s a short synopsis from the one found on IMDB: When a hunter is shot dead by another party also hunting in the Canadian hills, retaliation is the order of the day.

THE MIRACLE MAN. Paramount, 1932. Sylvia Sidney, Chester Morris, Robert Coogan, John Wray, Ned Sparks, Hobart Bosworth. Lloyd Hughes, Virginia Bruce, Boris Karloff, Irving Pichel.

Screenplay by Waldemar Young and Samuel Hoffenstein, based on the novel by Robert Hobart Davis and the play by George M. Cohan. Director: Norman Z. McLeod. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    A remake of a silent film with Lon Chaney Sr. (and which is today a lost film except for two short fragments), the sound version has a dramatic power that transcends its sentimental story of four con artists (Sidney, Morris, Sparks, and John Wray recreating the Chaney role) who fall under the spell of a charismatic faith healer.

    The miracle man is played by Hobart Bosworth, whose restrained, moving performance is extraordinary in the sense of spiritual grace it communicates. The only other film performance that I can recall that rivals it is that of another fine silent actor, H. B. Warner, who starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical drama, King of Kings.

“Who Needs an Enemy?” An episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. First air date: 15 May 1964 (Season 2, episode 28). Steven Hill, Joanna Moore, Richard Anderson, Barney Phillips, Dee Carroll, Paul Baxley, Wally Rose. Teleplay: Arthur A. Ross; story: Henry Slesar, based on a story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (title and issue unknown). Director: Harry Morgan.

   Charlie Osgood (Steven Hill) has been embezzling money from his firm to the tune of $60,000; his partner Eddie Turtin (Richard Anderson) has found out and isn’t at all happy about it. In the opening scene, in fact, Eddie literally has a gun to Charlie’s head and wants him to return the money — or else he’ll go to the cops, which would mean seven felony counts and thirty-five years in prison for Charlie.

   What’s a fella to do? One solution Charlie explores is to kill his partner — but things don’t quite work out as planned.

   Plan B, although complicated and risky, seems to have more promise of succeeding. With his blonde girlfriend Danielle (Joanna Moore), Charlie fakes his own “suicide.” The plan is going along smoothly until Charlie decides to share the wealth; then he finds out who his friends really are ….

   This brief synopsis may give the wrong impression of the show’s tone. It’s not as grim as it sounds; indeed, it comes close to being a screwball comedy, with all the main characters not being too tightly wrapped.

   Steven Hill (Mission: Impossible, Law and Order) is surprisingly funny as Charlie, a guy who expects loyalty from people he cheerfully cheats. Joanna Moore proves that not all blondes are dumb. And Richard Anderson, normally cast as a stolid authority figure, steals the show with his frazzled businessman portrayal.

   Two highpoints: Moore’s interview with a policeman (Barney Phillips) as she tries to say “I don’t know” a half dozen different ways, and Anderson’s hilarious eulogy for his “dead” partner at a memorial service as he manfully struggles to say good things about a guy who has consistently driven him crazy over the past twenty years.

   The show ends with a bang — literally — which, all things considered, seems entirely just.

   You can see “Who Needs an Enemy?” on Hulu.

Two by NGAIO MARSH —

    ●   Overture to Death. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1939. Lee Furman, US, hardcover, 1939. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.

    ●   Black As He’s Painted. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1974. Little Brown, US, hc, 1974. Also reprinted many times.

   For new generations of mystery fans some other fine works are available in recent reprints, including Ngaio Marsh’s best book, Overture to Death (1939), provided to us by Jove. Here are some devastating portraits of people in a small British village and a murder method as unusual as any I can recall.

   Roderick Alleyn’s questioning of suspects, sometimes too lengthy, seems just right here, and everything gets wrapped up in one of Marsh’s best solutions.

   For Marsh in a more modern vein, try Black As He’s Painted (1974), also from Jove. Not only do we get the contemporary London scene, but we even have a murder at the embassy of an emerging African state, the ruler of which went to school with Alleyn. (Troy Alleyn has been commissioned to paint his portrait while he is in London.)

   Some 35 years after she hit her peak, Marsh was more interested in bringing realism to her scenes and her characters. She did this successfully in her later books, and while her puzzles were not as good as they once had been, they were adequate, and the overall effect was to give us books, such as Black as He’s Painted, which could be enjoyed on several levels.

FREDERICK C. DAVIS – Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1954. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, Jan 1955. Digest-sized paperback reprint: Bestseller Mystery B192 (abridged), no date stated [1956]. Published in the UK by Victor Gollancz, 1955, hc, as Deadly Bedfellows as by Stephen Ransome.

   In response to an appeal from a boyhood friend, Luke Speare, of the Cole Detective Agency, goes to Lake Haven in an unknown state to investigate he knows not what. Under protest, his boss, Schyler Cole, always uncomfortable outside of New York City and demanding the noisiest hotel room in the small town so he will be able to get to sleep, accompanies him.

   Speare’s friend is running a political campaign and has been receiving anonymous phone calls about some major problem. But is the problem political or personal? The friend won’t say, the friend’s estranged wife lies and tries to get Speare and Cole to return to New York, and then murder occurs.

   At one point Cole says: “Every woman is a special case, all right, and that’s for sure. Everyone of them thinks of herself as an exception, and what’s more she is.” The politician’s wife fits this description, and without her silence two murders and an attempted murder would not have taken place.

   A good investigation here, though not strictly fair play. Most enjoyable is Cole, who heads the two-man agency of which Speare is the brains. Cole would have pulled out of this investigation early on if he hadn’t been afraid he’d lose Spear and have to start doing some work himself.

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

         SCHYLER COLE and LUKE SPEARE:

       o The Deadly Miss Ashley (n.) Doubleday 1950.

       o Lilies in Her Garden Grew (n.) Doubleday 1951.

       o Tread Lightly, Angel (n.) Doubleday 1952.
       o Drag the Dark (n.) Doubleday 1953.

       o Another Morgue Heard From (n.) Doubleday 1954.
       o Night Drop (n.) Doubleday 1955.

NEVER TRUST A GAMBLER. Columbia, 1951. Dane Clark, Cathy O’Donnell, Tom Drake, Jeff Corey, Myrna Dell, Rhys Williams. Story and screenplay: Jerome Odlum. Director: Ralph Murphy.

   It wasn’t planned this way — it happened only by chance — but here immediately on the heels of another Dane Clark film, The Toughest Man Alive, reviewed here, is another one, this one coming out four years earlier. (In between but not reported on here was a TV show I watched, the first episode of Vega$, vintage 1978, in which Clark played a no-good talent agent up to his ears in debt.)

   Clark’s career lasted until 1989, when he was 77 and an appearance on an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I don’t know how feisty he was then, but in 1951 he was definitely a small keg of dynamite about to go off, and go off he does.

   To back up just a little, in Gambler he plays a key witness who goes on the lam during a murder trial in San Francisco and heads for Los Angeles where his ex-wife (beautifully petite Cathy O’Donnell) lives. It seems she divorced him because of his addiction for gambling.

   Swearing that he’s turned over the new leaf and that he’s a new man, he asks her to hide him out for a while. If he were to testify, he says, it would put his best friend in the death house, a friend who’s innocent.

   If he doesn’t testify, the friend goes free. It’s a long set-up, and forgive me for telling it all to you, but it’s only the beginning. When a lecherous off-duty cop makes a play for his ex-wife, Clark’s character explodes, and while it’s an accident, the cop ends up dead.

   Convincing the ex-Mrs. Steve Garry to go along with him — and at this point she doesn’t know how much of his story to believe or not — Garry goes for the cover-up. Big mistake, as things begin to unravel quickly from there, as cover-ups always do.

   I’m sure that the story line sounds completely over the top, and perhaps it is, but both the screenwriter and the director had me hooked from the first scene on. Disregarding all of the coincidences that clutter up small B-movies like this one, the film is a small and all-but-unknown gem, tautly plotted with lots of small scenes each of which add little to the story but (in total) plenty in verisimilitude. (Though personally I could have done without the long, drawn-out escape scene at the end — who’s trying to escape, and from whom, I will not tell you).

MAX BRAND – Big Game. Warner Paperback Library, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1973. First published in Argosy as a six-part serial, beginning 9 May 1936.

   It’s hard to think of Max Brand, Frederick Schiller Faust, in terms of anything but superlatives and broken records.

   One of the great pulp writers, he went on to live in an Italian villa where he hosted guests like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, then became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood penning, among others, Errol Flynn’s last great swashbuckler, The Adventures of Don Juan. He died in World War II Italy as a war correspondent for Harpers Magazine during the battle of Santa Maria Infante.

   Though he is best known for his westerns, Max Brand penned a little of everything under a dizzying array of names, from science fiction, to historical novels, to the Dr. Kildare series, to spy stories, to hard boiled crime tales.

    Big Game falls in the latter category and involves Terry Radway, a one time big game hunter still bearing the scars of a too close encounter with a tiger, and down on his luck. Looking for adventure closer to home, Radway finds it right under his nose when he spies the pretty girl in a room across the street preparing to kill herself.

   At first Radway only watches in a somewhat detached manner, but pretty soon he can’t help himself and intervenes. Seems the girl, Nell, is in trouble with a Hollywood big shot named Hugo Bigi. Radway decides to take matters in is own hand and pays a visit to Bigi, and being who he is puts the game to the big shot in the only way he knows how:

   But things aren’t that simple, and soon Radway also finds himself involved with civic minded reform committee lawyer John Battersby Wilson, who has begun a private crusade to shut down the rackets in New York.

   After saving Wilson from a car full of killers, Radway is enlisted in that crusade — which leads to the doorstep of banker Chandler Orme Gregor, and back to Bigi who ends up ironically enlisted in Radway’s crusade to smash the men behind the crime ring.

   With the help of a couple of hoods originally hired to follow him, and the beautiful Lady Nell, who isn’t all she seemed, Radway tackles the drug ring and begins to root out the men behind the rackets, including the biggest of them all, the big game, the secret face behind the rackets controlling the city.

   The prose is tough and lean in the appropriate manner:

   There is nothing terribly original here. It’s a fairly standard tough story in the pulp vein, well enough written and competently plotted by one of the masters of the form.

   It’s a tightly written book, slick and fast moving, the plot a fairly familiar one often used in that era (both in The Secret Six (MGM, 1931) and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint in New York, and Raoul Whitfield used the big game hunter angle in Killer’s Carnival written as Temple Field), but it’s well handled here, and it touches on the classical references common to Brand’s work (here Radway playing at Theseus negotiating a labyrinth of lies).

   Still, it’s prime Brand and well worth the time it takes to read. It may lack that word savagery that marks the best of Black Mask or Dime Detective, but it’s fast paced, fun, and a reminder of that special quality that made Max Brand one of the most successful writers of all time.

   Brand did somewhat better with The Night Flower (Macauley, 1936, as Walter C. Butler), another of his tough crime novels, but Big Game is well worth looking for. Even if you find you’re more than a few steps ahead of the hero and the writer in terms of the plot, it moves at an action-packed pace, and Brand keeps the big revelation hidden right down to the wire; in the true pulp tradition you can’t ask for much more than that.

SINGLE-HANDED. Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ), Ireland. TV mini-series: 1-2 Jan 2007; 1-2 Jan 2008; 12-13 Apr 2009. Owen McDonnell, Ruth McCabe, David Herlihy, Briain Gleeson, Ian McElhinney, Marcella Plunkett.

   This is an Irish production that has just been shown here in England as a three part series, but, checking the Internet, I find that it was original broadcast in Ireland at one episode a year, two parts each, from 2007 to 2009

   Jack Driscoll is a sergeant in the Irish police force who has moved back to the rural and sparsely populated west of the country where he becomes effectively a one man force (hence the title) though he has a helper and a superior turns up from time to time. (Jack’s the one on the left in the photo.)

   He has taken over from his father but as his investigation into the death of young female immigrant proceeds he finds that the squeaky-clean reputation that his father holds is, in reality, somewhat blemished. In the second episode this story comes to a head and in the third an old flame, and former colleague, comes to the area as part of an operation.

   This was an intriguing series with an intriguing setting and with very bleak story lines. It is well worth watching and I would recommend watching them in the order of production as the consequences of each programme are evident in the next.

MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Tether’s End.   Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1958. First published in the UK as Hide My Eyes: Chatto & Windus, hardcover, 1958. Also published in the US as Ten Were Missing: Dell, 1961. Other US paperback editions include Macfadden-Bartell, 1970; Bantam, 1983.

   Allingham creates a tremendously creepy, cozy-strange atmosphere in the neighborhood around a tiny London square, and a creepy, colorful murderer to match, but this is not up to Allingham’s standard.

   Campion is barely present, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but the crime is solved in large part by Campion and various police officers (who are impossible to tell apart) practicing amateur psychology that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

   Older books in the series are better.