EDWARD ACHESON – The Grammarian’s Funeral. Macrae Smith, US, hardcover, 1935. Hutchinson, UK, hc, 1935.

   Choosing a book by its title is much like buying a pig in a poke. The contents are always a surprise — sometimes pleasant, sometimes disappointing, sometimes uncertain.

   The Grammarian’s Funeral turned out to be nothing like I imagined it would be. It is the story of Crane Adams, meek, mild, downtrodden, and abused by the principal of his school, his wife, his students, and almost anyone else he comes into contact with.

   Adams’s cousin, Chatterton Manley, to whom Adams owes a significant sum which he is paying back, apparently sporadically, disappears. Everybody but Adams is aware that Manley’s wife is in love with him. Manley’s suitcase is found in Adams’s garage. All that the police are lacking is a corpse.

   The arrest of Adams by the police as “a material witness,” though they are sure he has done away with Manley, changes him from, if I may put it this way, a Casper Milquetoast to something like Mr. Hyde, although not quite as bright as the latter. Because of Adams’s efforts — if blundering about does not describe it better — the corpse is found and the real murderer is unmasked.

    Adams’s alteration was unconvincing, as was the story that mumps in an adult male can cause impotence. But I was anticipating — why, I cannot say — a lighter, more frivolous novel from the title, and thus my judgment is probably suspect.

       Bibliographic data [taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin] —

ACHESON, EDWARD (Campion). 1902-1966.
      Red Herring. Morrow, 1932; UK title: Murder by Suggestion, Hutchinson, 1933.
      The Grammarian’s Funeral. Macrae-Smith, 1935; Hutchinson, UK, 1935.
      Murder to Hounds. Harcourt, 1939; Harrap, UK, 1939.

BERMUDA MYSTERY. 20th Century-Fox, 1944. Preston Foster, Ann Rutherford, Charles Butterworth, Helene Reynolds, Jean Howard, Richard Lane, Theodore von Eltz, Jason Robards (Sr). Based on a story by John Larkin. Director: Benjamin Stoloff.

   While there is more comedy and romance in this detective story, there is still enough mystery involved to make this strictly B-movie interesting and enjoyable, not to mention that the comedy and romance have a lot to do with it, too!

   It’s also a private eye novel, straight from the pages of a 1940s Dime Detective magazine, which is to say slightly wacky and screwballish in nature, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Preston Foster is the PI, a guy named Steve Carramond, and his client is a girl (naturally), the vivacious dark-haired Constance Martin (Ann Rutherford), and the niece of one of the members of a tontine who has recently died under suspicious circumstances.

   A tontine is one of those agreements in which the last surviving members of a group of individuals who’ve put money into a large pot, so to speak, split the proceeds. Not that the word tontine is ever mentioned in the movie, but it’s explained well enough for everyone in the audience to know exactly what’s going on.

   Well, more or less, that is, as any resemblance to actual police procedure goes by the boards fairly quickly. Did I mention that the story takes place in New York City? I should. Only the opening scenes take place in Bermuda, where Connie’s uncle lived. The other members all live in Manhattan, or they did, until they start to die off shortly before the end of the group’s agreement.

   Here’s where the romance comes in. Steve is hired a little under protest, as he’s supposed to be getting married the next day, but when Connie winks at us (the audience) we know precisely how that’s going to come out. Which it does.

   How the movie comes out, and who the killer is, is another matter altogether.

   In a tontine story, there are so many possible choices as to who might be the killer, a story writer really doesn’t have to be all that clever — just keep the action going, which it does, fairly nearly foot-on-the-floor and non-stop all the way.

   Ann Rutherford, who was only 24 when she made this movie, is a charmer all the way, having already finished a long career through her teens as Polly Benedict in the Andy Hardy movies. Preston Foster, besides doing the heavy lifting, also does “put upon” very well in the comedy and romance end of things.

   (For more on director Benjamin Stoloff, as well as some early discussion of Bermuda Mystery, see the comments following Walter Albert’s review of Super-Sleuth, which he also directed.)

   But don’t get me wrong. In spite of the usual nonsense that accumulates in B-movie mysteries like this, there actually is some cleverness involved. You may scope it out as easily as I, or maybe even easier, as I wasn’t really trying. Mostly I was just enjoying myself.

PostScript. In those earlier comments following Super-Sleuth, here’s what David Vineyard had to say about this movie in particular:

    “Though it isn’t listed as such at IMDB, Bermuda Mystery is a remake of the Crime Club Mystery film The Last Warning based on Jonathan Latimer’s The Dead Don’t Care. Foster played PI Bill Crane in the Last Warning. The mystery is something of a Thin Man style romantic mystery, though in some ways so is Latimer’s novel.

    “Bermuda Mystery has a screenplay by John Larkin (Quiet Please, Murder!) who wrote several good screenplays and directed a bit too.”

JOHN LUTZ – Tropical Heat.

Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, 1986; paperback reprint: Avon, 1987.

   The setting is central Florida and the private detective is Fred Carver, a fortyish balding ex-cop whose police career abruptly ended when he was kneecapped by a Latino street punk.

   A new protagonist and a new scene, but the world caught on the pages of Tropical Heat is unmistakably the world of John Lutz, the St. Louis area’s foremost suspense novelist, and the superficially tough and cynical Carver clearly belongs in the post-Ross Macdonald fraternity (or is the word siblinghood?) of concerned and compassionate PIs, right alongside Lutz’s earlier detective character, the timid and soft-hearted Alo Nudger.

   Vegetating in the beachfront bungalow he bought with his disability pay, Carver is visited by upscale real-estate salesperson Edwina Talbot and in effect challenged to stop pitying himself and do something with the rest of his life.

   The particular something she wants him to do is to find her lover, Willis Davis, who in the middle of a solitary continental breakfast on her terrace either walked out on her for no reason, or jumped off a cliff into the ocean, or was pushed off.

   The search leads Carver to a condominium time-sharing scam, a drug deal (in Florida, what else?), an assortment of close calls, and an emotional entanglement with his lovely and much-abused client which neither he nor she is well equipped to handle.

   The plot of Tropical Heat is the bare-bones variety, but the meat on those bones is prime Florida noir. Lutz does a blazingly vivid job not only with the sun-soaked atmosphere and the wild action scenes (including Carver’s underwater duel with a Marielito knife killer and an airboat chase through the midnight Everglades) but also with the anguished relationship of a man and a woman each struggling against a personal darkness.

   This novel makes great summer reading — provided the reading is done in an air-conditioned room to counteract Lutz’s descriptions of the oppressive Florida heat.

FRED CARVER. Private eye series character created by John Lutz. For a complete profile of Fred Carver, check out his page on the Thrilling Detective website. The following complete list of recorded cases is expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

      Tropical Heat. Holt 1986; Avon 1987.
      Scorcher. Holt 1987; Avon 1988.

      Kiss. Holt 1988; Avon 1990.
      Flame. Holt 1990; Avon 1991.
      Blood Fire. Holt 1991; Avon 1992.
      Hot. Holt 1992; Avon 1993.

      Spark. Holt 1993; no ppbk edition.
      Torch. Holt 1994; no ppbk edition.
      Burn. Holt 1995; no ppbk edition.

      Lightning. Holt 1996; no ppbk edition.

Short stories —

       “Someone Else” (Justice for Hire, 1990)
       “Night Crawlers” ( EQMM, April 1997)

THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER. Seven Arts, 1961. Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Pierre Mondy, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Allégret (debut), Charles Denner. Based on the novel Compartiment Tueurs (aka The 10:30 From Marseille) by Sébastien Japrisot. Director: Costa-Gravas.

   Before he made his mark as a political director with leftist leanings, Costa-Gravas made his debut with this slick little police thriller about the hunt for a mad killer.

   The police are represented by Inspector Grazziano (Grazzi) played by Yves Montand and his younger partner Grabert played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose involvement begins with the discovery of a body on the Phoce’en, the 10:30 morning train from Marseille, and an attractive young woman who has been murdered.

   We are almost instantly in Maigret country, but to Costa-Gravas’s credit, he establishes his own visual style and technique rather than rely on memories of films of Simenon’s novels. There is nothing leisurely or casual about Montand and Grabert. They are real policemen who chew on antacids, smoke too many cigarettes, and take endless notes, and almost from the top they are up to their necks in it, because before they have finished sorting the first corpse there’s a second waiting for them. The weariness in Montand’s lined doggedly handsome features becomes a character in itself.

   Police and authorities are seldom sympathetic characters in Costra-Gravas’s films, so it comes as a shock how much this film identifies with its put-upon policeman heroes.

   They are decent men with lives outside the office, and would rather do just about anything than have their superiors down their necks as they face an increasing number of corpses and a possibly mad killer.

   Costa-Gravas relies less on flashy camerawork and more on storytelling in this one, with atmosphere to spare, thanks to cinematographer Jean Tournier’s brilliant camera work, the film’s quick pace and the well-done action scenes.

   Signoret and the rest of the cast are fine, as might be expected, and thanks to staying close to Japrisot’s tight cinematic script, the film is both suspenseful and a good mystery well-solved.

   That said, you would do well to find a copy of the film with subtitles and avoid the awful dubbed version I first saw.

   Costa-Gravas became a world wide sensation with his next film, Z, but his increasingly leftist films became more propaganda than entertainment, though his one American film Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, was highly thought of. Since then politics outstripped the film-making in too many of his later works. Montand also appeared in Z, State of Siege, and The Confession all helmed by Costa-Gravas, forming one of the French cinema’s most productive teamings.

   Sébastien Japrisot is one of the more familiar French writers on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to the films of his works, including his original screenplays for Rider on the Rain and Goodbye Friend, and adaptations of many others like Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun and One Deadly Summer. Most recently the 2004 film of his novel A Very Long Engagement was an international hit.

FRANK KANE – Esprit de Corpse. Dell 2409, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1965. Cover by Ron Lesser.

   Yes, there’s nothing new in one individual taking on the crooks and corrupt officials in a city. And it’s been done better and in greater depth — The Fools in Town Are on Our Side and Red Harvest come immediately to mind. Nonetheless, this thriller is quite satisfactory for the second rank.

   When a private eye, out of his depth, gets framed for murder in the sleazy Barbary Coast of Carsonette City in Southern California and is, with the eager assistance of his estranged wife, doomed to spend his life in the loony bin, he asks his partner to call in another private eye, Johnny Liddell.

   His partner — a she, although by no means another V.I. Warshawski — flies to New York to enlist Liddell’s help. Apparently she goes in person since her argument isn’t a strong one and she must compensate by “the hemispherical roundness of her full breasts.” Upon viewing them, even clothed, Liddell’s jaw drops and his good judgment vanishes.

   She knows her man.

   (Has there ever been a female client in private-detective literature who had “empty” breasts? Have no tough PI’s been weaned?)

   Though threatened and attacked by the crooks and threatened and arrested by the corrupt police, Liddell emerges triumphant. He understands, and I’m taking his word for it, why the frame took place and how the bookies and the Mafia were being taken by other crooks.

   As an added attraction, one of the villains ostensibly is a closet Edgar Wallace reader. When Liddell catches this desperado in a felonious act, the man says, “Okay, Mac. It’s a fair cop.”

EDITORIAL COMMENT. Bill Deeck, who died far too young in 2004, was a well-known mystery fan and over the years the author of a tall stack of articles and reviews for The Armchair Detective, Mystery Readers Journal, and a number of other zines, including The MYSTERY FANcier.

   Before posting any of his work here, I consulted with Richard Moore, a close friend of his who lived not very far away, and Bill Pronzini, who helped ensure that Murder on 3 Cents a Day, Bill Deeck’s reference work on hardcover lending library mysteries, finally saw publication.

   For covers of many of these books and more on Bill Deeck and how the book came into being, go here.

   Said Richard, when I asked, “I am positive that Bill would be pleased to have his reviews receive another life. They were done without pay originally and the reprinting does not involve revenue. It is hard to imagine an objection.”

   Bill Pronzini: “I agree with Richard. Bill D. would be delighted to see his reviews reprinted on the M*F blog. By all means go ahead.”

   And so I have. This is the first of many of Bill Deeck’s reviews that I will be posting here. I feel greatly privileged to be able to do so.

JOHN GREENWOOD —
        ● Mosley by Moonlight. Quartet, UK, hardcover, 1984. Walker, US, hc, 1985; Bantam, US, pb, April 1986.
        ● Mists Over Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1986; Walker, US, 1986; Bantam, US, pb, September 1987.

   The best work on mysteries in the British village is the chapter by Mary Jean De Marr in Comic Crime (1987), edited by Earl Bargainnler and published by Bowling Green’s Popular Press.

   Although Ms. De Marr covered some recent examples, I suspect that she hadn’t caught up with John Greenwood’s series of six books about Inspector John Mosley, whose territory covers the small towns on the very flexible border between the counties of York and Lancaster.

   British-village mysteries, contrasted with the generally unsophisticated examples of rural-American detective stories, are told in a sophisticated style and permit the reader to have fun at the expense of the local characters.

   Greenwood, the pseudonym of the late John Buxton Hilton, was excellent on atmosphere, if a bit weak on plotting. Prime examples are the second and fourth books in the series, Mosley by Moonlight, in which a British television crew invades the town of Hadley Dale when extraterrestrial sightings are reported, and Mists over Mosley, about a coven of witches and municipal corruption.

   Mosley is an unusually enigmatic sleuth, one who likes to “keep himself to himself” as the British say. He has a knack of disappearing but then turning up under strange circumstances, properly surprising Greenwood readers.

INSP. JACK MOSLEY.    Series character created by John Greenwood, pseudonym of John Buxton Hilton, 1921-1986.    [Data expanded from that found in Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

       Murder, Mr. Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1983. Walker, US, 1983; Bantam, US, pb, Feb 1986.

       Mosley by Moonlight. Quartet, UK, 1984. Walker, US, 1985; also Bantam, US, pb, April 1986.
       Mosley Went to Mow. Quartet, UK,1985. Walker, US, hc, as The Missing Mr. Mosley, 1985; also Bantam, pb, Dec 1986.

       Mists Over Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1986. Walker, US, 1986; Bantam, US, pb, Sept 1987.
       The Mind of Mr. Mosley. Quartet, UK, 1987. Walker, US, 1987; Bantam, US, pb, July 1988.
       What, Me, Mr. Mosley? Quartet, UK, 1987. Walker, US, 1988; Bantam, US, pb, 1989.

DELUSION. Cineville, 1991. Jim Metzler, Jennifer Rubin, Kyle Secor, Jerry Orbach. Director & co-screenwriter: Carl Colpaert.

   This is a pretty good example of a category that can’t be called anything but neo-noir. Produced way past the usual late 1950s closing date for the first grouping of noir films, and made especially with the term (and the goal of making a) noir film in mind, movies in this particular genre are also made cheaply and have many of the same themes as the originals …

   … but they’re almost always in color — often brilliant, blinding color — and obviously they include a lot more overt violence and sexuality than the directors in the 1940s could ever have dreamed of.

   Most of them have had very limited theatrical releases. Many of these crime-oriented features were direct-to-video (and now direct-to-DVD) and used to show up on HBO, Showtime and Cinemax after 11 o’clock all the time.

   (For some reason they don’t any more, and I don’t know why. Late night programming seems to consist of regular movies that run all day long, over and over, or really awful softcore pornography.)

   Reviews I’ve seen of Delusion have been mixed. The New York Times hated it, but two reviewers for the Washington Post were of totally opposite opinions. I thought the first half was also first-rate; the second half, well, second-rate.

   Here’s a question for you. Suppose you’re a guy into computers, and you’re on the run from your former employer with nearly a half million dollars in cash stashed in the trunk of your car. You’re on the road somewhere in the desert (Nevada, let’s say) and you see the car that just careened past you moments before spin off the highway and land upside down in the sand. Two people, a man and a woman, are struggling to get out.

   Would you stop? Would you offer them a lift?

   Generally speaking I guess most people would, and like George O’Brien (Jim Metzler), I guess a lot of people would be ruing their decision within minutes, kicking themselves no end for being so kind-hearted.

   Two more flaky people — seriously flaky, let’s be emphatic here — than Patti (Jennifer Rubin) and Chevy (Kyle Secor), could scarcely be imagined. How soon can he possibly get them out of his car, George is thinking, and you can just see it in his face and tortured body language as the predicament he’s in starts to sink in.

   Do they have guns? Yes. Do they have other plans in mind? Yes. Or at least Chevy does, on both counts. Patti’s involvement is not so clear. There are a couple of really good twists coming, one of them (or maybe both) involving Chevy’s friend Larry (Jerry Ohrbach) who is living alone in a trailer beside a small lake in the middle of the desert.

   The couple of good twists come a little bit too early, though. I was set up to expect one or two more, and I was disappointed when I didn’t get them – or in other words, as I previously implied, the second half doesn’t begin to match up in a direct comparison with the first.

   It’s still a noir film all the way, however, allowing some forgiveness for a couple of allegedly comic touches, also in the second half.

   As George finds himself sinking more and more quickly into the quicksandish trap he’s let himself in for, the question he finds that he must keep asking himself is, how important is the stolen money to him?

   Jennifer Rubin, by the way, was the original model in Calvin Klein Obsession ads, and this movie was relatively early in her career. She’s quite beautiful, obviously, and in the first half (I keep getting back to this, don’t I?) she’s plays enigmatic very well. Make that extremely well. Once she’s given some dialogue, you know that an actress she wasn’t yet.

   Not that her career went uphill from here. Other than the lead role in the remake of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman, which came along later, I don’t see anything but mediocre parts in even more mediocre movies on her resume.

   Edward Candy (Barbara Alison Boodson Neville, 1925-1993) spaced her mysteries widely: two in the first part of the 1950s were followed by two more in the 1970s. Her Words for Murder, Perhaps (Gollancz, 1971; Hogarth Press, 1985) is subtitled “A Detective Story,” but as the most recently published book among those being now reviewed, it is not one in the Golden Age sense: it would appear not to be the author’s objective to fairly challenge the reader.

   But the tale is quite a pleasant one, a neat puzzle in an academic setting. Gregory Roberts (misidentified on the dust jacket as Robert Gregory) lectures at Bantwich University, and teaches also in the “Extra-Mural” (adult education) department.

   He’s about 40, living with his mother after barely surviving a disastrous marriage and ensuing cuckolding, attempted suicide, psychiatric treatment, and divorce. Now his cuckolder and ex-wife’s present husband disappears, and the ex-wife receives a typewritten excerpt from an elegy in the mail.

   Signs seem to point to Roberts, who’s presenting Detective Fiction to a class of adults, including Nan Jones, a widow who seems to be reviving the youth of his soul. Then a fellow extramural lecturer dies of cyanide, amidst evidences of another elegy. Police continue to sniff about, Roberts fears his life is coming unglued, and death marches on…

   Death on the Cliff (Benn, 1932) is my first exposure to Thomas Cobb, who produced a number of works in our field during the Golden Age. Cliff is not a brilliant representative of its hallowed era: the puzzle is neither baffling nor compelling, the detection is slight, the people are not fascinating, and the rural English setting is ordinary.

   Lady Roperson, whose 50ish husband is straying regularly from the connubial fold, is found dead on the rocks at the bottom of a cliff near their home. “Misadventure,” says the coroner’s jury – but Margaret Fairbrook, the dead woman’s daughter, immediately turns on her step-father, and Susannah Roperson (his daughter) develops an awful sense that murder has been done. Especially after a second death at almost the same spot as the first.

   A private detective (once of the Yard) comes into the picture but plays a minor role. The truth emerges as Susannah comes to ask the right questions of the right people.

   It’s been established that Sefton Kyle was an alter ego for Roy Vickers, who achieved a certain currency in this country when discovered by Ellery Queen. So I was interested to try one of the Kyle novels (none of which was ever published in this country): Red Hair (Jenkins, 1933).

   Although from the publisher’s plot summary this appeared to be wholly non-criminous, a perusal proved this not to be the case. A murder occurs early and is pivotal to resulting events (though the reader knows at once who did it), and Kyle/Vickers/David Durham’s series Insp. Rason is our contact with Scotland Yard. (Rason’s adventures were chronicled under all three bylines, although the good inspector’s first initial seems to vary from book to book.)

   The book is basically a gothic, and provides all the frustrations of the species. Secretary Patricia Ridge marries her politically rising boss, Sir Brennan Grantley, then discovers his first wife – long thought dead – has resurfaced.

   Instead of confiding in Grantley, she tries to save his career, embarking on a course dotted with deception, theft and murder – a quagmire in which her every effort at extrication results in increased danger. Of course, all ends well as expected. Not recommended.

   Charles Ashton was another Golden Age practitioner not known in this country. My first sampling was Death Greets a Guest (Nicholson & Watson, 1936).

   Here a regular meeting of a rural archeological society at Squire Eastwood’s Heatherling Hall is interrupted by a sudden downpour. And by murder: a guest, an artist who accompanied a regular member, is found shot in Eastwood’s summerhouse.

   It seems that no member can be guilty, that no motive exists, and that premeditation could not have been possible. Colonel Bretherton, Chief Constable, and Inspector Williams are baffled, but Major Jack Atherley, champion cricketeer and amateur sleuth, is on hand to sort matters out.

   Competent, readable, pleasant, and quite forgettable.

   NOTE: Go here for the previous installment of this column. Unfortunately this marks the end of this particular grouping of reviews, which were first published on the main Mystery*File website some four years ago. It was my thought that reprinting them here on the blog would bring fresh attention to them. By all accounts, it has. Thanks to everyone for their comments over the entire eight installments!

BOB LE FLAMBEUR. Mondial, France, 1956; William Mishkin, US, 1959, as Bob the Gambler. Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, André Garet, Gérard Buhr, Guy Decomble. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville.

   One of the advantages of being something of a round peg in a department of square holes is that I am occasionally allowed to teach something that “nobody else” has any interest in doing, like the course on French Film that I have just finished teaching.

   Most of the films are by directors like Renoir, Clair, Virgo, Carne, and Ophuls, but I always manage to slip in a genre film by a director not many people would consider essential. In past years this meant films by Clouzot (Le Cor beau and Jenny Lamour).

   This year it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 thriller, Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler), a film that Melville had repudiated before his death in 1972 (“I will not allow this film ever to be screened again”) but that many critics now consider to be his finest achievement in a series of studies of criminals and the criminal milieu.

   Ostensibly, Bob the Gambler is an extended character study leading to a climactic caper, the robbery, by a team of well trained specialists, of the casino at Deauville.

   But Melville manages to undermine almost every cliche of the caper film with a rigorously analytic style that manages to distance the spectator from the characters and cut away from the caper at the climactic moment, only returning to it in the final moments to dispense almost briskly with the basic plot elements and provide a final, comically ironic look at the protagonist, Bob the gambler.

   Melville, in an interview, related how, after seeing Huston’s film The Asphalt Jungle, he realized that he no longer wanted to — or could not — make a classic caper film. He decided instead to make what he called a “comedy of manners” (“comedie de moeurs”), but most American viewers will probably, like the students in my class, find this an odd film indeed.

   Melville’s film preceded New Wave films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by about four years, but the look of the film (shot on location in the streets and buildings of Montmartre) and the use of a jazz sound track seem to look forward to the innovative filmmaking of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The credits are presented over shots of Montmartre from the “heights” of Sacre-Coeur (the church) to the “depths” of Place Pigalle, a moral distance underlined by the matter-of-fact narration of Melville.

   But the spectator who expects an explicit moralistic study of the contrasts between the sacred and the profane will be disconcerted as the camera prowls restlessly along the streets, into the back rooms of cafes and restaurants, with Sacre-Coeur only present as a shape dimly glimpsed through the closed curtains of Bob’s elegant apartment.

   The affection the camera shows for the landscape may be disconcerting to the viewer who is looking for a narrative thread that will engage him, but location filming is a prominent feature of New Wave films, as in The 400 Blows, whose “travelogue” beginning is reminiscent of the beginning of Bob, all the more so in that both films benefited from the same superb photographer, Henri Decae.

   The final shot in Bob is of an empty car parked on a lonely stretch of beach and completes a circle initiated by the documentary shots of buildings at the beginning of the film.

   The inner life of the characters is never explored in a way that is satisfying to the viewer, and it is perhaps appropriate that the frame is emptied of people at the beginning and the end.

   The viewer expecting the tight plotting of Hitchcock or the claustrophobic, fatalistic character study of Huston, will be disappointed. In Melville’s work, fate is chance, but the camera lingers on geometric patterns (wall-paper, windows, a floor covering) that suggest an intercrossing of plot lines that will only be evident on repeated viewings.

   The characters are elusive and the “content” of their relationships is like a crossword puzzle that may or may not be correctly filled in by the spectator.

   Melville’s expressed wish that the film not be re-released has been ignored. The formal, discreet patterns of this apparently open but controlled narrative with something of the look of a photograph by Walker Evans have lost none of their capacity for frustrating the viewer accustomed to the heightened, mounting suspense of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

   All three of these films are about defeat and loss, but Bob manages to retrieve an ironic victory from a failure, and the sardonic humor of this victory appears to clash with the conventions it has intermittently adhered to.

   In Breathless, Goddard paid tribute to Melville by including, a reference to the character, Bob (Roger Duchesne), and by using Melville to play the role of a novelist interviewed by Patricia, the young American with whom the small-time Parisian hoodlum, Michel, has fallen in love.

   She betrays Michel, echoing the thematics of betrayal in Bob, where Anne (Isabelle Corey) betrays Paulo and Bob’s careful planning, but the final irony is perhaps Melville’s attempted betrayal of his beautiful and still fascinating portrait of Bob the gambler and his Parisian milieu.

   And one can only wonder to what extent Godard was again tipping his hat to Melville when one of his characters comments that he and his friends avoid Montmartre, which is dangerous for them and their “kind.”

   But Godard met successfully the cinematic challenge of his gifted predecessor and his tribute is, finally, the best witness to Melville’s achievement.

BRUTE FORCE. Universal International, 1947. Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford. Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines, Anita Colby, John Hoyt, Howard Duff, Whit Bissell, Art Smith. Director: Jules Dassin.

   A movie that takes place almost entirely behind the walls of a prison is not likely to have many women in it, and if it weren’t for brief flashbacks, there wouldn’t be any at all. Anyone in 1947 who paid 25 cents to see Yvonne De Carlo in this film should have marched right up to the box office afterward and demanded his money back.

   In spite of the posters and lobby cards, a prime example of which you can see below, Miss De Carlo graces the screen for less than five minutes, but I have to admit, she makes the most of them.

   In this movie she plays the Italian girl friend of the GI in World War II (Howard Duff) who took the rap for her after she shot her father when he broke down and tried to turn him in to the authorities.

   In fact, it seems that the women in their lives are part of the stories of all of the men in Cell R-17, in one way or another.

   Some are weak (Whit Bissell) and some are strong (Burt Lancaster), but none are really evil — except perhaps Joe Collins (Lancaster), who seems to be a leader of a small gang but whose soft spot is a crippled woman whom he loves (and who does not know what he did for a living).

   No matter. When Burt Lancaster glowers at you, with those dark accusing eyes, you know you’ve been glowered at. This seems to have been only his second movie, the first being The Killers (1946), and if his performance in that earlier picture didn’t make an impression on the movie-going public, this one surely did. Joe Collins means to escape, and he doesn’t care how.

   Standing in his way, however, is not the weak-kneed warden, who simply wants everyone to get along — including Gallagher, the grizzled but pacifistic Charles Bickford who’s in charge of the prison newspaper and expecting to get a parole any day now. No, the other person whose role in this movie you will remember for a long time is Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn), the slim but sneering and slickly sadistic head of the prison guards whom everybody locked up inside hates with a passion, to the utmost fiber of their being.

   Some prisoners break under his thumb of iron, some don’t. The ending of this movie — I don’t think it will surprise anyone if I say that indeed there is a break-out eventually does take place — is filled with the chaos of lights blazing, sirens wailing, and the sound of gunfire ringing off the walls.

   Who gets out, who survives? That I can’t tell you, but I can tell you this. No one walked out of the movie when it was playing, and no one asked for their money back. (That the movie gets a little preachy toward the very end is forgivable. No one paid any attention to that anyway. Prison life was hard in 1947, and while it may have changed, it never got any easier.)