CAPTAIN SINDBAD. MGM-Germany, 1963, aka Kapitän Sindbad. Guy Williams, Heidi Brühl, Pedro Armendariz, Abraham Sofaer, Bernie Hamilton, Helmuth Schneider, Henry Brandon, Guy Doleman. Co-screenwriters: Ian McLellan Hunter and Guy Endore; director: Byron Haskin.

   Like Son of Sinbad [reviewed here] Captain Sindbad is in Technicolor too, but it’s a ruddy, comic book color: cheap, gaudy, and enjoyably eye-watering. The sets are lavish but cheesy-looking, costumes likewise, and everything seems pointed at an ostentatious show of threadbare splendor, with swordfights, shipwrecks, riots and magic stuff tumbling out like cut-rate toys from a shabby bag.

   Simply splendid.

   Guy Wiliams, in between Zorro and Lost in Space, stars as Sindbad, pitted against evil poo-bah Pedro Armendariz, an actor who appeared in real movies, like Three Godfathers and From Russia with Love.

   Here though, he just sits around in a chintzy palace with vaulted purple ceilings, blood red carpets and golden dragons all over (just the way you or I would decorate a palace if money and taste were no object) and hatches evil schemes with the kind of hammy relish I hadn’t seen since Tod Slaughter.

   Okay, it’s kind of a catch-penny thing, but as written by Guy Endore, and directed by Byron Haskin, Captain Sindbad has a sleazy charm I just can’t resist. There’s always something happening on screen, and the special effects, though never convincing, are always imaginative and even kind of poetic at times.

   I particularly liked how the bad guy can’t be killed because he keeps his heart locked up in a tower an enchanted forest, guarded by a giant hand — I guess we’ve all known someone like that, haven’t we? It’s storybook stuff presented with childlike gusto by people old enough to know better and a film no eight-year-old should miss.

                  

LOUISE PENNY – Still Life. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, July 2006; paperback reprint, May 2007. First published in Canada & the UK: Headline, hc & pb, 2005.

   A Canadian rural mystery, with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his team called in to investigate the suspicious death of Jane Neal, a reclusive resident of Three Pines, felled by an arrow.

   The strength of the novel is in its portrait of the town and its colorful inhabitants, but Gamache and his team are also nicely portrayed, with Gamache’s sharply observant eye seldom missing a significant detail in the convoluted relationships that make the investigation difficult to pursue. A promising debut for the series.

Bibliographic data:   The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries.

1. Still Life.

2. Dead Cold (UK/Canada), A Fatal Grace (US).

3. The Cruelest Month.

4. The Murder Stone (UK/Canada), A Rule Against Murder (US).

5. The Brutal Telling.

SHERLOCK: CASE OF EVIL. USA Network, made for TV, 2002. UK title: Sherlock. James D’Arcy (Sherlock Holmes), Roger Morlidge (Dr. Watson), Gabrielle Anwar (Rebecca Doyle), Vincent D’Onofrio (Professor Moriarty), Nicholas Gecks (Inspector Lestrade), Richard E. Grant (Mycroft Holmes). Based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Director: Graham Theakston.

   I’m not sure whether this was originally a British production or not, but from the names of the people involved, actors and otherwise, I suspect that it was. What I am sure of is that a lot of the people who commented on this film on IMDB really hated it — really really hated it — and for the usual and obvious reasons.

   I’m also not sure if this was meant to be the first of the series — and if it was, it hasn’t turned out that way — but it very easily could have, as the movie takes us back to Holmes’ earliest days as a consulting detective, before he had met Dr. Watson (a police autopsy surgeon in this film) but not before Holmes was aware of Professor Moriarty and his dastardly schemes against polite society.

   I read somewhere that Holmes is supposed to be 28 in this movie. Unfortunately James D’Arcy appears to be closer to 18, hardly old enough to handle the liquor, narcotics and the wild Victorian women who flock to his doorstep when they read about his latest exploit in the daily news. (They call them groupies today, or at least they used to in the 1970s. Maybe I’m dating myself.)

   Holmes is also something of a publicity hound, an aspect of his personality that turns Dr. Watson off when first they meet. And if by now you haven’t realized why the howls of protest went up so quickly after this movie was released, you can hardly consider yourself a true believing Sherlock Holmes fan.

   But if I’m evidence of the fact, I think you can be a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan and still enjoy this movie. I didn’t mind the alterations to Holmes the character, and besides, who knows what he might have been like in his younger days (though the bedroom scene with the two young ladies removing their chemises or whatever was obviously designed to tweak somebody’s noses).

   And by movie’s end, Holmes is definitely chastened and perhaps has “come of age” a bit.

   I rather didn’t care for all of the guns that were used in the raid by the police on Moriarty’s dope-processing warehouse, and while there were several nicely done attempts to show Holmes’ deductive abilities — the scene with Mycroft is a small gem — there is, sad to say, no great attempt by the end of the movie to be little more than just another action flick.

   The atmosphere and general ambiance is nicely done, though. One twist of the plot that came early on is easily spotted, but I shall restrain myself from even beginning to describe it, so as not to keep you from having the same pleasure, otherwise I surprised myself by warming more and more to the characters as the movie went on. Who knows. You may, too.

PostScript: I seem to have ended this review with leaving myself room to show you one more photo. Miss Doyle is a client that both gets herself into trouble and helps to get Sherlock out of some trouble that he gets himself into. She’s an important part of the story, and I really can’t leave her out:

VAN WYCK MASON – The Singapore Exile Murders. Pocket 129, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 1941. Hardcover edition: Doubleday Crime Club, 1st printing, June 1939. Hardcover reprint: Sun Dial Press, June 1940.

   Widely respected for his historical fiction, Van Wyck Mason (1901-1978) is equally if not better known for his roughly two dozen book length adventures of Captain Hugh North, a American agent working for a government outfit called G-2. The first of the latter was Seeds of Murder (1930), the last being The Deadly Orbit Mission (1968).

   A complete list of all Mason’s books can be found on his Wikipedia page, along with a photo and a short biography.

   Thirty-eight years is a long time to be writing spy fiction, a run that I suspect few authors can match. The setting of The Singapore Exile Murders is obvious, I should think, and the date of publication (1939) is just as important — the entire city is on edge with news of the seemingly unavoidable oncoming war streaming in non-stop from Europe.

   One of the more important characters in the book is suspected by being an agent for the Japanese, and the local Japanese fleet is decidedly on maneuvers, but Hitler and the events ongoing in France, Hyde Park and Czechoslovakia seem to be causing the most jitters.

   From page 155 of the Pocket edition:

   Here’s another sample of Mason’s writing, this time from page 163. This scene takes place at the home of a wealthy Dutch resident of Singapore, and one of the men and women most interested in the formula for a new lightweight metal alloy that Leonard Melville, the man everyone is looking for, has discovered:

   Of course there beautiful women involved — two of them, in fact — and North has to balance his own search for Melville between them. (There would have been a third, but she dies early on in the book, in what was for me quite an disturbing turn of events, but I think it was Mason’s way of letting the reader know not to take anything for granted.)

   North himself is very much an earlier generation’s James Bond, US style, without the same license to kill, but perhaps it was an authorization that was purely tacit. In a similar sense, he’s an agent who’s pretty much left on his own, a la Edward S. Aarons’s Sam Durell, with lots of exotic locales included in fine detail. (See above.)

   After a fairly tense few opening chapters, as North’s plane is forced down in a horrendous storm somewhere en route to Singapore, the middle portion of the book is a textbook example of how to fill lots of pages with action and twist after twist without anything actually being accomplished.

   The ending is a considerable improvement in comparison, but to me, the grand finale was still rather flat — not pancake style, to make a totally inappropriate simile — but neither did it push the overall effort over the top. About average, then, overall, with parts of this eve of World War II spy adventure novel that are far better than that.

MILTON K. OZAKI – The Dummy Murder Case. Graphic Books #33; paperback original; 1st printing, 1951.

   As part of Professor Caldwell’s class in psychology, the Professor plans a visual presentation to instruct perceptual responses. Instead of the usual classroom show, a rather comlex presentation is given to the class outdoors:

   Two friends of the Professor’s assistant, Bendy, stage a mock murder, with a young lady being shot at the end of a, pier and falling into the water. A mannequin has already been sunk at on the spot. The police, with prior arrangement, are to come and drag for the body.

   Instead of finding the mannequin, the draggers recover the body of a young woman with her throat slit. The police report to Caldwell that the woman had no visible means of support — and no visible person to support her — and has in her apartment a room equipped like the wrapping department of a store, with paper from several first-class establishments and totally empty boxes already wrapped.

   If there were no other reason for him to investigate, this puzzle would bring Caldwell into the case, despite the objections of Bendy, who knows he will have to do all the work while the Professor does the thinking.

   There are enough coincidences in the novel to keep a reader muttering, “It’s a small world,” or maybe even “It’s an infinitesimal world.” Only an interest in the explanation for the wrapped empty boxes kept me reading to the end.

EDITORIAL COMMENT.   An homage to Milton K. Ozaki’s prose style, along with a complete checklist of all his mystery fiction, can be found here on the primary Mystery*File website.

   A longer profile on Mr. Ozaki himself can be found here, where it is said: “Even though he was the product of a mixed marriage, we believe that Milton K. Ozaki is among the earliest mystery writers of Japanese heritage writing in English as his (or her) primary language.”

RED MOUNTAIN. Paramount, 1951. Alan Ladd, Lizabeth Scott, Arthur Kennedy, John Ireland, Jay Silverheels, Francis McDonald. Director: William Dieterle.

   There’s no doubt in the world that Alan Ladd is the star of this movie. As soon as he first sets foot on screen, you get the feeling that the eyes of everyone in the theater are on him — or they would be if you were in a theater and not watching the film alone with a DVD and the TV set in your bedroom.

   This is so, even with a co-star such as the beautifully sad-eyed Lizabeth Scott as Chris, the woman in the movie who’s torn between Lane Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), wanted for a murder he didn’t commit, and Captain Brett Sherwood (Alan Ladd), an officer of the Confederate Army about to join up with General William Quantrill (John Ireland), the man responsible for wiping out Chris’s parents back in Kansas.

   So Brett Sherwood has a big job ahead of him, but as quiet-spoken as he is, and as conflicted as he is between what he sees as his duty (fighting for South) and what he recognizes as evil (Quantrill’s plans for taking over the entire western United States, with the aid of renegade Native American tribes), he’s up to the task.

   Even Lane Waldron sees that attraction between Brett and the woman he was going to marry is futile, even over Chris’s protestations to the contrary.

   The scenery is wonderful — a mountain standing almost vertically against an achingly blue sky — and in color, even more spectacular. (It’s a shame that the only images I can show you are in black and white.)

   The story neither quite as wonderful or spectacular, even with a fast and furious final battle scene, with a rousing musical overture in the background as the Cavalry as usual comes riding in to the rescue. (Lane and Chris have been held prisoner, he with a broken leg, by Quantrill in a cave in what must be Red Mountain.)

   But it’s the Quantrill end of the story that’s the less interesting. Watching (and listening to) Alan Ladd, as he allows Brett Sherwood grow as a character several ways at once, unable to deny his attraction to Chris while becoming more and more disenchanted with Quantrill, is worth the price of admission, as if — as I said earlier in the first paragraph these comments — there were any doubt.

   The presence of Lizabeth Scott, a queen of noir films, if ever there was one, is only icing on the cake.

ROBERT B. PARKER – The Judas Goat. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1978. Reprinted many times, both in hardcover and soft.

   Another book in the hard-boiled Spenser series is always more than welcome. Promised Land, the one just preceding this one, won a great deal of critical acclaim, including an Edgar award, but in spite of extraordinarily good writing, it was noticeably thin on plot, and in many ways it was largely an introspective character study of the tough Boston private eye named Spenser, and the world around him.

   As if to compensate, this time the pace is fast and bloody, regenerating the series completely by means of extreme violence. A gang of terrorists wipes out most of a wealthy industrialist’s family, and Spenser is hired to track them down. After a cleansing process of this ferocity, digging out those responsible, we can only look forward to what’s in store for the future — and, no, Spenser’s proven that he’s not yet too old for this sort of thing.

   Not a perfect book, but then again, so few are.

[UPDATE] 07-04-09.  More often than not, I’ve been revising these old reviews slightly, not to change my opinion — not ever — but to correct small typos, to change some wording around and — every once in a while — to clarify points that I’ve thought I expressed poorly the first time.

   This one I decided to leave exactly as it first appeared, except for the letter grade I assigned to each book back then, which I haven’t using at all in the reprint appearances of these reviews. I gave this one an “A,” so I obviously I enjoyed it, even though the plot as I described it, I have to admit, I don’t remember very much, if at all.

   Over the past few years, Robert B. Parker and I have been drifting apart. It’s not his doing, and it’s not for a lack of appreciation of my part. I think he’s a terrific writer, and for a long time, he was one of a small grouping of authors, less than only five of them, whose books I bought in hardcover as soon as they came out.

   I mention this because the flaws that many friends of mine keep pointing out to me in his work, I see them too. I guess they (the flaws) bother them (my friends) more than they do me.

   So why haven’t I read any of his Spenser books recently? Why have I never read a Jesse Stone novel? Or one of the Sunny Randall books?

   He just seems to be writing books faster than I can read them, that’s about the only excuse I can think of, and what’s really amazing is that he’s going to be 77 this year. Unbelievable.

   It’s time, I think, to make time in the day to read another Spenser novel or two, and maybe even some of those with his other characters. I think that in the 1970s and 80s, Robert B. Parker almost single-handedly saved the PI novel from extinction. I really do.

MIGNON G. EBERHART – Woman on the Roof.

Paperback reprint: Popular Library; several printings, including 1968, 1973. Hardcover editions: Random House, US, 1967; Collins Crime Club, UK, 1968. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, January 1968.

   Mignon Eberhart’s started out by writing detective stories, more or less. Her first five books, starting with The Patient in Room 18 in 1929, featured the mystery-solving duo of nurse Sarah Keate and private eye Lance O’Leary, and they were highly regarded enough that all five were made into movies.

   Allow me to digress, if you will. I did some investigation, and here’s a complete list of all the films that have been based on Eberhart novels. I’ve underlined the ones mentioned above as being the first five Keate and O’Leary books.

   There was one book in which only Sarah Keate appeared and which did not become a movie, and that was Wolf in Man’s Clothing, which was published in 1942.

   Over the years I may have seen one or two others in this list, but the only one I remember watching is The Patient in Room 18. And you can, in fact, read my review of this it here, posted earlier on this blog. I enjoyed it, but it was in spite of all of the movie’s flaws, including being played primarily for laughs.

   Eberhart’s final mystery was Three Days for Emeralds, which came out in 1988, when the author was in her late 80’s. She died in 1996, with well over 50 novels to her credit.

   From the book at hand, however, try the following first line on for size: “There were times when the shadow on the terrace seemed to take on the shape of a woman’s body flung down, left in its blood and beauty.”

   It’s a pretty good indication, I think, of the kind of book you’re going to get when you read it. As it happens, the first wife of Susan Desart’s new husband had been murdered on that very same penthouse terrace five winters and four summers earlier. Ssusan had married Marcus when the Jim, the man she really loved — and still mourns for — died in Viet Nam.

   And other than that one single reference, this is a book that could have just as easily have been written in the 1940s. It’s an old-fashioned mystery story in which the staging creaks once in a while, but when Jim turns up not dead after all, and Marcus refuses any discussion of a divorce, revealing his true nature in surprisingly violent fashion, old-fashioned chills started to creep up and down this still rather modern spine of mine.

   In her later years Eberhart wrote what’s probably best described as romantic suspense, perhaps, but this is no cozy. There’s some real emotion involved in this book. I’d cast Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck in two of the parts, and maybe John Payne as the other.

   But why it was never made into a movie, nor any other of Mignon Eberhart’s books after 1945, I can’t tell you. Woman on the Roof came along too late, but if her 1940s and 50s books are as good as this one is — and I think they are — then I’d have thought that they’d have fit right in with the Film Noir era.

   At the least, based on what Hollywood did to The Patient in Room 18, they would turned out better than the movies based on her early detective fiction. If ever an opportunity was missed, this was it.

WHO WAS THAT LADY? Columbia, 1960. Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin, James Whitmore, John McIntire, Barbara Nichols, Joi Lansing, Simon Oakland, Larry Storch. Screenplay: Norman Krasna, based on his play. Director: George Sidney.

   Some days nothing goes right.

   It’s one of those days for Tony Curtis, who teaches chemistry at Columbia in New York. A beautiful student waltzes in to thank him for a make-up test, and gets a little over enthusiastic just as his wife, Janet Leigh comes in. Janet stomps out, and Tony is in hot water. All over a make-up test.

   All this is shown in the opening titles without a word of dialogue. It doesn’t really need dialogue. We get the point immediately, and the title song, catchily sung by Dean Martin fills us in on anything else we don’t know.

   This is a sex farce, American screwball style.

   So what would you do? Well, you probably wouldn’t call your overly imaginative bachelor buddy Dean Martin who writes for television and has a wonderfully twisted imagination.

   How does Curtis explain his innocent kiss? Why of course, tell your wife you are a an FBI agent and the student was a foreign exchange student and a spy. You even go to CBS where Dean works and have FBI badges made and guns from the prop department.

   Just what any sensible husband would do.

   Of course, whenever the prop department at CBS makes a phony FBI badge, they notify the Bureau so it lands on local agent-in-charge John McIntire’s desk, and he passes it on to weary James Whitmore.

   Meanwhile Dean and Tony have sprung the story on Janet, who is one of her less bright moments buys the story. (In fairness almost no one in this film is an intellectual giant.) Dean, though, has plans. He has a date with a sister act of exotic dancers — Barbara Nichols and Joi Lansing — and he needs a wingman. Tony is elected. And Janet even pushes him to go — it’s his duty.

   Whitmore shows up at Tony and Janet’s apartment just as a panicked Janet discovers Tony had gone on his mission without his gun. Whitmore sees his daughter in her and decides to throw a scare in the boys without arresting them or revealing the truth to her.

   That’s going to cost him.

   Before the evening is over, Whitmore has taken a bullet and Leigh has blabbed to the press how her husband was hunting spies.

   It’s been one of those days. And it’s about to get worse.

   Because the CIA, more than a little miffed that the FBI is running a spy op without them, shows up. Seems the boys have drawn out an actual KGB cell. Now the FBI has to keep quiet and use the boys to draw out the real spies.

   They should have known better.

   Which is how the boys end up kidnapped by Russian spies Simon Oakland and Larry Storch, drugged, and locked in the sub basement of the Empire State Building — which they mistake for a Russian sub and proceed to sink while singing patriotic songs.

   Which explains why it is snowing on some floors of the building and sweltering on others, not to mention the geyser spouting from the roof. And they thought the cleanup after King Kong was rough.

   In the wrong hands, this kind of froth can go horribly wrong, but when everyone involved is a seasoned pro, and sheer charm and skill compete with fast quips and sheer nonsense, the result is a souffle of a movie, smart, silly, and great fun.

   Don’t tune this one in looking for great art, but if belly laughs are the mood you are in, this is the perfect film. When you watch today’s latest comedy fall flat on its face at the mall and see ham-handed performances and obvious direction, you can appreciate how hard this is to do, and wonder that in this period it was done so well so often.

   At the time this must have seemed just another playful comedy from a team of pros. Today it seems like art.

   Dying is easy, comedy is hard. But if you do it right, it looks easy. And isn’t that the trick in farce, not to let the audience see how hard the actors are working to make it all seamless and easy?

   On that level, this one is the highest of art.

TCM Alert:    Monday, July 6.   6:00 PM.    Who Was That Lady? (1960)
   A cheating husband convinces his wife his flirtations are actually spy missions. Cast: Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin. Dir: George Sidney. BW-114 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format.

THE SYSTEM. Bryanston Films, UK, 1964. Released in the US as The Girl-Getters, American International Pictures, 1966. Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, Barbara Ferris, Julia Foster, David Hemmings. Director: Michael Winner.

   There’s not a crime to be seen in this British-made movie, unless it’s the breaches of trust committed by a group of local lads who prey on the girls (birds, or thrushes) who come down from London and elsewhere to their small bailiwick on the sea every summer. Seduce and abandon, is their modus operandi, and their system is simple.

   The leader of their lot, a chap named Tinker (Oliver Reed) has a job as a roving beach photographer.

   He takes pictures of likely victims, obtains their local addresses, and distributes the same to the others of the group. When the summer’s over, they’ve left their ladies with lots of memories, perhaps, and – also perhaps – many of the memories are good ones. But lasting ones? Hardly ever.

   No big crimes involved here, right? There are lots of swinging sixties beach party scenes, and the film is certainly not without lightness and humor, but no Annette Funicello beach blanket movie is this. If ever a film might be called Noir without even the hint of a murder being committed, it might be The Girl-Getters.

   The question is, as it slowly dawns on Tinker, is who are the Takers and who are the Taken?

   His pursuit of the wealthy Nicola (Jane Merrow) only shows how strong the “caste system” in England really was, and how futile it may have been to fight it. The one-set tennis match he plays with one of Nicola’s gentlemen friends, or tries to, and then tries to laugh it off, is a turning point that comes, one supposes, in everybody’s life – at which time they learn their limitations, and at the same time learn they cannot do anything about it.

   The glowing embers behind Oliver Reed’s fiery, dark-shadowed eyes, and his memorable performance in this film, show that when the occasion presented itself, he was one of the finest actors of his day. Up until this movie, most of his work was done for Hammer Films, but I’d like to think that a lot of doors were opened to him afterward.

   Not that The Girl-Getters was recognized as anything close to a work of art at the time, but it was among the vanguard of British films dealing with modern (if not mod) themes such as class differences and sexual awareness like Alfie and Georgy Girl (both 1966) that turned the world of film-making upside down.

   I didn’t see The Girl-Getters back then, but that’s the era when I started to really enjoy what film-making was all about, rather than simply film-watching. Blow-Up (1966 as well, and starring David Hemmings, who also had a small role in this earlier movie) was a revelation to me, nor was I the only one who felt that way.