THE TOUGHEST MAN ALIVE. Allied Artists, 1955. Dane Clark, Lita Milan, Anthony Caruso, Ross Elliott. Screenplay: Steve Fisher. Director: Sidney Salkow.

   When it comes down to it, all things considered, they couldn’t have made a better choice to play the title character than Dane Clark. Short, wiry, but not overly pugnacious, he still carried himself in all of the films he made as if he had a chip on his shoulder, one that he all but asked anyone who crossed his path to knock off.

   To nab a gang of crooks who’ve been stealing US government munitions and selling them to the highest bidder on the open market, Dane Clark as agent Lee Stevens goes underground, posing as the notorious soldier-of-fortune (and all around bad guy) Pete Gore (Anthony Caruso) to make contact with the gang.

   And where is Pete Gore? Locked up in some Latin American prison, and of course we all know what’s going to happen down there. Stevens’ means of tracking down the high honcho of gang is Lida Velasco (the statuesque Lita Milan, who later married Ramfis Trujillo, the son of the well-known Dominican Republic dictator). Lida herself is the daughter of a recently deposed banana republic dictator, and she needs guns to overthrow the current regime.

   That about sums it up, except for agent Cal York (Ross Elliott), Stevens’ primary contact with his own office. Once it’s known that his buddy is happily married, we know how that particular sidebar of the story is going to work out. Actually we pretty much how the entire story is going to end up, once it’s properly underway.

   No surprises here, nor anywhere along the way.

BRIAN FLYNN – The Billiard-Room Mystery. Macrae Smith, US, hardcover, 1929. Originally published in the UK by John Hamilton, hardcover, 1927.

    It is Cricket Week at Considine Manor. Gathered there are the friends of the son of Sir Charles Considine, and among them is Anthony Bathurst. Bathurst at this point had done no detecting — this is the first novel in which he appears — but he believes he’d be good at it. His opportunity arises when one of the cricketers is found dead in the billiard room, strangled and then stabbed.

    The regular policeman is beyond his depth, and even Bathurst struggles for a while putting the clues together. Not quite fair play here, I’d contend, and the writing is Boys’ Own Paper style for the most part, but it is an adequate first effort close on the heels of a similar and certainly a more famous novel written two years earlier by another mystery novelist.

    One does wonder how much influence was wielded by that earlier novel, but Flynn, let’s face it, does not come close to his predecessor.

    An interesting sidelight is Bathurst’s comments on fictional detectives. Like Sherlock Holmes, Bathurst has great contempt for Lecoq, although he admits that Poe’s Dupin wasn’t so bad. When asked if he thinks Holmes stands alone, Bathurst replies:

    Someone mentions Bernard Capes’ “Baron” of The Skeleton Key — regrettably unknown to me — G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and H. C. Bailey’s Reginald Fortune. Bathurst responds:

    Even keeping in mind that Bathurst was talking about detectives who reason, it is a commentary on such judgments that he gave the lowest ratings to the two — Poirot and Father Brown — who remain popular today. Still, how many of us, asked for our own preferences, would do as well after sixty years had passed?

    Let me be frank: I’m still flogging the apparently moribund carcasses of Bailey, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine.

Editorial Comment:   Mystery readers on this side of the Atlantic may be surprised to learn that Anthony Bathurst and author Brian Flynn combined on well over 50 (fictional) murder cases solved by the former and chronicled by the latter. Only a small handful were published in this country. For a complete list, see my review of The Sharp Quillet posted here, earlier on this blog.

    Does anyone recognize the famous novel by another writer that Bill refers to at the end of the second paragraph?

TRIAL MARRIAGE. Columbia, 1929. Norman Kerry, Jason Robards, Sr., Sally Eilers, Thelma Todd, Charles Clary. Director: Erie C. Kenton. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    Constance Bannister (Sally Eilers), a vivacious party girl, engages in a trial marriage contract with the reserved Dr. Thorvald Ware. When she slips out to a party while her husband is at work, he dissolves the contract, then marries her conniving sister Grace (Thelma Todd), who’s been scheming to ensnare Thorvald for herself.

    The film opens with a lively party scene, highlighted by a black bottom dance by Eilers, an eye-catching performance that clearly intrigues Thorvald but, at the same time, makes him a bit wary of the high-living Constance.

    The subsequent drama of rupture and eventual reconciliation is enhanced by first-rate acting and direction, making this a period piece that still charms. The sentimental twist that finally reunites the couple is the only major flaw in an otherwise engrossing period piece that retains much of its original charm and poignancy.

   If you want a really scary story or two… or more… you have to go to the masters, the inspired hacks who made a living off cheap thrills. Fredric Brown’s short-short stories (some only a page or two) collected in Honeymoon in Hell and Nightmares and Geezenstacks (Bantam, 1958 and 1961, respectively) aren’t all that great taken individually — though some are quite nice indeed.

   Brown can find pathos in a dinosaur and horror in three feet of water — but read as a whole, they have an effect like the Rubaiyat, sort of an extended meditation on fates already writ, that set me to thinking of things unhallowed.

   So I picked up Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (Belmont, 1962) a collection of the best of Robert Bloch’s stories from Weird Tales. I hadn’t read these since grade school, when they kept me up all night, and I have to say they still pack a creepy punch.

   In the wisdom of my advancing years, I was able to sit back and admire the way Bloch — a lean and hungry writer in those days –could shift voices, writing sometimes in victorian academic, sometimes in modern hard-boiled or omniscient 3rd person … whatever it took to hone the story at hand to a sharp, unsettling edge.

   Besides the title tale, there are such classics here as “The House of the Hatchet,” “Beetles,” and “The Faceless God,” all guaranteed to keep you up at night.

THE KREMLIN LETTER. 1970. Patrick O’Neal, Richard Boone, Barbara Parkins, Bibi Anderson, George Sanders, Nigel Green, Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow, Micheál MacLiammóir, Raf Vallone, Dean Jagger, Marc Lawrence, Nial McGinnis, Lila Kedrova, John Huston, Vonda McGee. Screenplay: John Huston & Gladys Hill. Based on the novel by Noel Behn. Directed by John Huston.

   Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a genius with a photographic memory and a possible death wish, is seconded to a legendary intelligence operation with roots in the Second World War to recover the Kremlin Letter, a letter from a high ranking American intelligence officer promising the United States would back the Soviet Union in trouble with Red China, passed to a Soviet politician in secret talks with the West. Neither side can afford for the letter to come to light.

   The team is lead by the legendary Highwayman (Jagger); Ward, the smooth, cruel, and avuncular Boone; Lord Ashley’s Whore (Nigel Green); the cross dressing Warlock (Sanders); and Barbara Parkins as the daughter of an aging cracksman who has withdrawn from the team.

   After a nasty bit of sexual extortion against a Russian agent in the US involving his wife and daughters and lesbian seduction, the team is off to Moscow, where the complex game of cross and double cross involves them with Soviet counter spy Colonel Koskov (Von Sydow) of the Third Department who is being spied upon by his own boss Bresnivich (Orson Welles). Koskov’s marriage to the wife (Bibi Anderson) of a former agent who had been bribed to retrieve the Kremlin letter also threatens his future.

   While the atmosphere of cross and double cross and the day-to-day details of espionage tradecraft are emphasized as in Behn’s best-selling novel, and the complex plot is kept as straightforward as possible, the film is curiously distant, and O’Neal’s Rone difficult to warm to.

   The suspense never really kicks in, and the real purpose of the deadly games being played comes as only a minor surprise to anyone who has been paying attention or is at all familiar with spy films and novels in general, despite the fact Huston had been involved with spy movies as far back as his second directorial effort, the under-appreciated Across the Pacific with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet..

   For that matter the film is handsomely shot by cinematographer Ted Scaife, and Huston’s direction is as usual stylish and certain, if as distant as his leads.

   Richard Boone is particularly good, though if you don’t figure out who he is within seconds of him coming on screen you aren’t paying attention. George Sanders has some fun playing the homosexual Warlock who is a cross dresser and likes to knit and uncovers Koskov’s former homosexual liaisons from the past; and Orson Welles has a few showy scenes as the Russian master spy as wary of Koskov as the west, who has secrets of his own. Nigel Green also has some good scenes as an amoral pimp and drug dealer who is a key figure in the spy ring.

   Behn wrote only two other novels, Shadowboxer, about a troubled agent who rescues prisoners from the Nazi death camps and finds himself caught in a double dealing plot involving the future of post war Germany, and Seven Silent Men, a caper novel.

   His non-fiction book The Big Stick Up at Brinks was the basis for the William Friedkin film The Brinks Job, and he wrote the teleplay for several episodes of Homicide. His book Lindbergh: The Crime offered the controversial theory that there was no kidnapping and the crime was staged to cover up the Lindbergh baby’s accidental death.

   In addition he was an important figure in the development of Off Broadway theater. He is one of the few American writers of his era to rival the British at the serious spy novel.

   The Kremlin Letter probably works better on television than it did on the big screen. O’Neal is a good actor, but he is too dispassionate here, and we are never allowed inside, a fact overcome in the novel by Behn recounting in detail the events in Rone’s past that formed his character and made him ideal for this deadly game. The scenes he has with Bibi Anderson are one of the few times in the film he shows any signs of emotion at all. For most of the film he only manages to look as if he is smelling something vaguely distasteful.

   Even when everything begins to fall apart in Moscow, the film maintains a leisurely pace that neither raises O’Neal’s pulse rate or our own. It’s as if everyone is too cold to work up a sweat even about the possibility of torture and death.

   The Kremlin Letter is dark and grim, and deals with the dark side of espionage, where human emotions and desires are merely pawns for the greater games being played. Neither O’Neal or Parkins, as the only two humans in this inhuman game, involve us enough to become really concerned with their plight, however, or the moral conundrums they are caught up in.

   Even at the end when the real plot is uncovered and O’Neal is sent home with one last murderous job to clean up the lose ends of the nasty affair, it seems less a painful torment than a mildly troublesome detail. By this point it’s too late to suddenly inject human emotions in these puppets. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation creations showed more human reactions than O’Neal does here, despite some rather flashy and trite business by director Huston to bring home the impact of Boone’s last macabre act of sadism.

   Huston did a good deal better with his film of Desmond Bagley’s The Freedom Trap, The MacKintosh Man, a spy thriller suggested by the George Blake case, where a charismatic Paul Newman in the lead kept the film and the viewer centered.

   The Kremlin Letter is a faithful rendition of a good book, and I like the film much better than what I’ve indicated, but it’s a curiously distant and uninvolved film as unemotional and amoral as its characters.

   It may be accurate about the world of spies and counterspies and the Byzantine games played by flawed human beings in that world, but it’s as cold as a snow drift on the streets of Moscow, and a handful of colorful secondary characters and Boone’s showpiece avuncular monster, aren’t enough to make up for the fact the film has no emotional core for the viewer to identify with.

NIGHT AND THE CITY. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers, Hugh Marlowe, Francis L. Sullivan, Herbert Lom, Stanislaus Zbyszko, Mike Mazurki, Charles Farrell. Screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the novel by Gerald Kersh. Director: Jules Dassin.

   From the moment you see Richard Widmark running through dark alleys in the opening scene of Jules Dassin’s 1950 classic, Night And The City, you know he’s totally screwed. If only he knew it.

   But such is the lot of film noir protagonists. Caught up in the backwash of their own bad choices, they can only hope to put off, not avoid, what inevitably awaits them. And they’re always the last to know.

    Night And The City, adapted from the 1938 Gerald Kersh novel of the same name, takes a look at the London demimonde of the era, where Harry Fabian plies his trade as a nightclub hustler. He periodically “borrows” money from his girlfriend to finance his big dreams, not the least of which is setting up a life of ease and plenty without having to work.

   Standing in his way are the sinister fat man, played by Francis L Sullivan, pursuing a personal vendetta against Fabian, and the East End godfather, played by the dark-suited Herbert Lom, whose intense presence fires up the proceedings every time he walks onscreen.

   This is truly one of the greatest films, not only of the noir genre, but of all cinema. Dassin’s direction is flawless, capturing perfectly the seedy filth of London’s underbelly, while telling the riveting story of one man’s misplaced dreams.

   Max Greene, the director of photography, is superb, never allowing the viewer to get comfortable. The expressionist look of the film is all sharp black-and-white contrast and angular shadows, and this, along with his off-center camera angles, produces an unsettling effect throughout. This is never more evident than in a nightclub scene, where a mirrored disco-type ball casts its little gleaming points over the oddly-lit club, bleeding into the office above.

   Toward the end, as Fabian’s reckoning approaches, dawn breaks over London, and suddenly the film takes on a pasty, grayish cast. By then, I felt like I was covered with dirt and needed a shower.

   Meanwhile, the stressful score of Franz Waxman pumps up the adrenaline in all the right places. As Fabian runs deep through the back streets of London, the music pulls you to the edge of your seat.

   But most of all, this is Widmark’s tour de force. Fabian is a complex character, driven by his own twisted ambitions, and beset by deep emotions. When he whines to Gene Tierney, “I just want to be somebody,” he injects a whole new feeling, a real truth, into that tired line that has been uttered by countless lesser actors.

   Widmark makes it all look so easy, so real, that he pulls you with him, deep inside Harry Fabian’s head and heart, as he’s sucked down into the whirlpool. Never again would he be given a role so challenging, showing us how he was so tragically wasted through his long career.

PAULINE GLEN WINSLOW – The Witch Hill Murder. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. UK edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1977 (shown). Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, March-April 1978. Trade paperback reprint: St. Martin’s, 1983.

   Winslow has created a religious community, Siderea, complete with charismatic founder, Noah Hightower, and his Army of the Stars, mostly populated by young people. It has taken over Witch Hill Manor on the edge of the little town of Daines Barington, and threatens to overrun the village.

   The youthful leaders, angry because the town counsellors have refused them permission to erect another building on the manor site, see Town Clerk Richard Brewster as their preeminent enemy and send him threatening letters.

   Superintendent Merle Capricorn is called in privately by his old friend, widowed Rose Lavendar, who is engaged to marry Brewster. While he is downplaying her concern, a murder does take place and the Sidereans are the first suspects.

   But nothing is as simple as it seems. A number of people, both from the manor and from the town, are involved in some way. So is Brewster’s dead stepmother, Lucrezia, who has left her mark on his stepsister as well as on their home.

   This is a satisfying book, with considerable depth in its characters and an interesting display of contrasting environments. My only caveat is that Siderea seems all too obviously a takeoff on Scientology, and the sympathetic treatment of Siderea may or may not sit well with readers.

Bibliographic Data: Ms. Winslow has 15 novels listed in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Of these, six are cases solved by her one series detective, Supt. Capricorn, whom I suspect has been forgotten by all by the most dedicated of detective mystery fans:

CAPRICORN, SGT. (Supt.) MERLIN

       o Death of an Angel (n.) Macmillan 1975
       o The Brandenburg Hotel (n.) Macmillan 1976

       o The Witch Hill Murder (n.) Collins 1977
       o Coppergold (n.) Collins 1978
       o The Counsellor Heart (n.) Collins 1980
       o The Rockefeller Gift (n.) Collins 1982

LUCRETIA GRINDLE – So Little to Die For.   Pocket, paperback original; 1st printing, October 1994.

   One might imagine that Lucretia Grindle is too good to be a mystery author’s real name, but if so, one would be wrong. And since her first two books are decidedly British (with a bit of Scottish thrown in) one might imagine that she is from England, or Scotland, but no, she was born in Massachusetts and went to Dartmouth — a native New Englander.

   And speaking of her first two books, of which this is the second, both cases are solved by the strong, diligent police work of one Chief Inspector Ross. The first was The Killing of Ellis Martin (Pocket, 1993), then this one, then nothing. Until this year, that is, or 2003, when Grindle’s most recent thriller. a book entitled The Nightspinners, came out, complete with no Inspector Ross.

   The Nightspinners is quite a total change of direction, as a matter of fact. It appears to be a semi-psychic psychodrama about two twins who can communicate with other — and then one is murdered.

   As for the Ross books — no strike that, as I’ve only read the one, but the one I have read is a straight-forward detective story. One in which two married couples are brutally murdered while vacationing in a small isolated cottage along the English-Scottish border. Ross, who is vacationing in the area, happens also to be one of the last few persons to see them alive.

   Incidentally, for whatever it might be worth, the two women who happen to be among the victims are also twins, but so far as I can tell, this small fact has little or no bearing on the story. They could be sisters, and it would make no difference.

   The story is strong on both setting and atmosphere. I’ll chance it and submit you to a longish sort of quote, from page 48:

   This is a not a cozy, in other words, nor a murder that depends strongly on the domestic lives of those involved, one in which the circle of evidence circles in, but rather one in which the path of the investigation spirals outward instead.

   Ross has the instincts of a true policeman, however. Here’s another quote, this time from page 129:

   The very neat, dovetailed plot gradually takes shape and comes into focus for a instant or two before being allowed to squander itself into a rather inept made-for-TV-movie showdown with the villain(s) involved.

   Grimes tries to make amends with some pleasant jiggery-pokery later, but — the word I’m looking for is “uneven” — and with this second effort, we’re likely to have seen the last of the slightly stodgy but still likable Inspector Ross.

[UPDATE] 01-10-10.   I don’t remember this one at all, I’m sorry to say. It sounds as though I might enjoy it! Or parts of it, at least.

   Also of note, I hope, since this review was written, Ms. Grindle has written two more books, both of which seem to be criminous in nature: The Faces of Angels (2006) and The Villa Triste (2010).

THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF. 20th Century-Fox, 1950. Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, John Dall, Lisa Howard. Co-screenwriters: Seton I. Miller & Philip MacDonald. Director: Felix E. Feist.

   Not all of ladies in film noir movies were sultry sirens who manipulated men around their fingers with their come-hither eyes. As Lois Frazer in this small gem of a movie, Jane Wyatt is as petite and innocent-looking as they come, even as much, say, as Margaret Anderson in the long-running TV series Father Knows Best, except for one thing.

   Well, make that several things. Margaret Anderson never smoked, or at least I don’t think she did. Nor did Margaret Anderson have a lover on the side – I’m sure she never did that!

   Nor did she ever kill a man – in this case, her husband – before he had the chance to kill her.

   Lee J. Cobb may be slightly miscast as Lois Frazer’s man on the side – for one thing, he’s several sizes larger – but he’s absolutely the right man to play a grizzled homicide detective who puts his career on the line to save his wealthy lover’s reputation, if not some time in the Big House, by dumping the body at the airport and covering up the crime.

   Pure noir, all the way. He has an itch for her that just can’t be scratched. And do things go well? Two guesses, or on second thought, make it one. It’s always the cover-up that goes badly, and there’s no exception here.

   Complicating matters is that Lt. Cullen’s partner is his brother Andy, a rookie cop just assigned to him, and brother Andy is nothing but persistent in following up leads and fretting over details and small things that just don’t fit.

   There are, of course, coincidences galore, as there always are in movies like these, and stupid mistakes that are made that make the viewer simply cringe inside. If I were going to pull off a scam like this, I’d sure make a better job of it – wouldn’t I?

   You may be wondering how it all comes out, and obviously for that you will have to watch the movie. I will tell you this, though. The final scene is about as perfect as they come, bar none.

[LATER.]   I have now gone to read the comments left by viewers of this movie on IMBD, and more than usual, I am amazed.

   Reaction to seeing Jane Wyatt in a noir movie was decidedly mixed, about half and half, I’d say, and I guess that’s understandable, but I thought she was perfect in the part.

   A large number of people also did not understand many of the twists and turns of the plot, and at least one wanted the ending to be explained to him. My goodness.

UNNATURAL. Carlton-Film, Germany, 1952. Also released as Alraune. Hildegard Knef, Erich von Stroheim, Karlheinz Böhm, Harry Meyen, Rolf Henniger, Harry Halm. Based on the novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Director: Arthur Maria Rabenalt.

    Perhaps the best film of that recent flurry of horror movies I watched was a much-maligned, badly-dubbed little thing called Unnatural (Germany, 1952). Or maybe it’s called Alraune; it was released under both titles and generally ignored no matter what they called it.

    Hard to say just what it is about this film that draws me so irresistibly. Maybe it’s the atmosphere of romantic depravity — it’s certainly not the choppy editing or the atrocious dubbing, though they add an element of dream-like unreality to the experience, particularly when the camera cuts from a scene filmed on some elaborate set or colorful location to one obviously shot in front of a painted backdrop — or even, in one case, on an empty black soundstage.

    Scenes seem to start and stop for no discernible reason: the film may come in on the middle of an argument or cut away before it’s resolved, yet it somehow still tells its twisted story.

    The story. Yes, the story. Well, in 1911 when Hans Heinz Ewers wrote the source novel, Artificial Insemination was a relatively new science, practiced only on animals, and ripe for exploitation by Science Fiction.

    Ewers became a major figure in the heady days of early German silent movies, and his story prefigures the morbid fascination with science and sex found there so often. Alraune tells of a woman created by artificial insemination (purest Sci-Fi back then) who has no soul: innocent herself, but compelled to drive those who love her to recklessness, crime and self-destruction.

    Well, we’ve all known someone like that. I think I went out with her a few times in College. But Ewers gives it to us in its purest form, and this film (the fourth made from the novel) relates it with a strange, syrupy romanticism: like what you’d get if Max Ophuls directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

    Like I say, I’m not sure why I find this so rich and watchable. Maybe it’s the patently ersatz innocence of Hildegard Knef (sometimes looking alarmingly like Eve Arden!) as Alraune, set against the relaxed depravity of Erich Von Stroheim as her creator: complementing rather than contrasting.

    But mostly I think it’s the rich imagery. The photographer of Alraune was himself a veteran of the German Silent Cinema, having worked with Lang and Murnau, and he makes this film a delight for the eyes as he picks out unsettling details in the background, or sets up a love scene in dark, sinister lighting.

    There’s a splendid final montage, dissolving from a dead figure to a withered root, which assumes the shape of a twisted man and finally settles on the image of one ascending the gallows as Alraune’s destiny works itself out. Pure abstract cinema and a film I’ll revisit.

Editorial Comment:   There is a three-minute clip on YouTube (follow the link) that demonstrates quite successfully Hildegarde Knef’s mesmerizing effect on a smitten suitor. A recent DVD of the film is apparently out of print, but copies are available (on Amazon, for example).