DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT – What Doesn’t Kill Us.  Rushmore MacKenzie #18. Minotaur Books, hardcover, May 2021.

First Sentence: I was shot in the back at close range by a .32-caliber handgun yet did not die, at least not permanently.

   Rushmore “Mac” MacKenzie is a former cop now spending his time doing unofficial private investigations for his friends, some more law-abiding than others. It all starts when his friend Deese takes a genealogy-site DNA test and learns his father is not his father. But is that what led to Mac being shot in the back? Now lying in a medically-induced coma, it is up to Mac’s friends to do a favor for him to track down his would-be killer.

   What a unique premise. While the solving of the crime is left up to his diverse and fascinating assortment of friends with incidents shown from their perspective, the story is told, by post coma, by Mac. This gives a somewhat out-of-body feel to the narration. The book does mention COVID-19, although it was clearly written at the very beginning of the pandemic.

   Housewright has compiled a fascinating collection of characters. Many are recurring characters that add to the overall series. Some, such as Detective Shipman, are new and add a touch of vinegar to the story. That Nina, Mac’s wife, confesses being jealous of Shelby, the wife of Mac’s best friend, is perfectly written and exemplifies how women almost never realize their own worth or successes.

   The story segues into various relevant topics are insightful and add a layer to the story beyond the basic investigation. Rather than being intrusive or slowing the pace, they add a layer of significance.

   Housewright is an eminently quotable author. Whether talking about emotional pain— “It reminds me of that old Skeeter Davis song. I wake up in the morning and I wonder why everything’s the same as it was.” —or referencing Shakespeare to impart a facial expression— “I need you to do something for me,” she said. The way Smith and Jones glanced at each other yet again somehow reminded Shipman of Shakespeare’s Richard III – I am not in the giving vein today. “—or a t-shirt meme— “YOU MATTER unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared…then you energy.” —his words are relatable.

   Unconventional twists are sometimes so cleverly done as to make one smile. The story of Deese and the unintended result of taking the DNA test is one that could serve as a caution. But there is also a well-done twist that circles the plot back to the motive.

   What Doesn’t Kill Us  is a well-done, non-stop read. This may not be Housewright’s best book, only due to the plethora of characters which can be confusing, but it is certainly an entertaining one.

Rating: Good Plus.

VIRGIN OF THE SECRET SERVICE. “Entente Cordiale. ITV, UK, 11 April 1968 (Season One, Episode Three). Clinton Greyn, Alexander Dore, John Carter, Veronica Strong, Noel Coleman, Katherine Shofield, Frederick Preisly. Devised by Ted Willis. Teleplay by Betty Paul (as Betty Lambda). Directed by Paul Bernard. Currently streaming on YouTube.

   Captain Robert Virgin (Clinton Greyn) of the British Secret Service finds himself in Paris to attend the funeral of the son of a peer of the realm, an artist who was murdered, a John Bull figure with a knife through his chest found,  his body signaling that a Chinese Secret Society wanting revenge for the humiliation of the Boxer Rebellion is about to strike.

   The mostly likely target, according to Virgin’s chief Colonel Shaw-Camberley (Noel Coleman), is the Duke of Albany (Frederick Preisly) in Paris to negotiate the Entente Cordiale between the British and French against Germany, but more interested in the Can Can at the Moulin Rouge and its star, Cigarette (Katherine Shofield), the dead artist’s lover/model.

   Virgin and his batman Doublette (John Carter) pose as an artist and his servant to get close to Cigarette, is she part of the scheme or does she know something? She’s not particularly fond of the British despite her tastes in men, and her casual nudity modeling when she meets Virgin disconcerts him and Doublette both.

   Of course as feared there is a plot afoot, the Yellow Peril raising its ugly head, but in full irony more in the mood of Thoroughly Modern Millie than Dr. Fu Manchu.

   German secret agent Karl Von Blauner (Alexander Dore) has allied with Chinese assassins to assassinate Albany and they want to know what Cigarette knows too, leading to a white slavery ring, Virgin and Doublette trapped in a flooding chamber beneath enemy headquarters, an assassination attempt at a concert, and a final blowout at the Moulin Rouge with Albany surrounded by would be assassins.

   Along the way the mysterious Mrs. Virginia Cortez (Veronica Strong) appears across the hall from the Albany to lend a hand foiling the assassination while Virgin rescues Cigarette and others sold into White Slavery from a Chinese laundry. Mrs. Strong’s unexpected appearances no matter where Virgin’s adventures take him are a running joke in the series, likely an unsuccessful attempt to do a Victorian Mrs. Peel.

   It’s all played tongue in cheek and completely straight-faced despite the absurdity of the plot and dialogue. It’s no easy thing to pull this kind of thing off, but the British do it splendidly and this plays many of the notes of The Avengers (not as stylish and closer to the Honor Blackman than the Diana Rigg episodes) and Adam Adamant Lives, with Greyn appropriately dashing, rather thick headed but good at his job, brave, and veddy British. It’s a played broader than say The Wild Wild West, but the same general feeling of laughing up the sleeve while still attending to the action and adventure elements applies here.

   Everyone plays it straight but with more than enough humor with Dore particularly good as the villain, Carter as Doublette, and tall, blonde, handsome Greyn well cast as the hero. Unlike many attempts at this kind of thing the jokes mostly land and do so without the characters having to wink at the audience or step out of character.

   Virgin of the Secret Service was devised by Ted Willis (Lord Willis) creator of the legendary long running police procedural television series P.C. 49 and author of Man-Eater, The Buckingham Palace Connection, and The Churchill Commando. It ran thirteen episodes in 1968 from ITC, and while it only ran the one season it is worth catching the episodes available on YouTube

CLIFTON ADAMS – The Desperado / A Noose for the Desperado. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017. // The Desperado. Gold Medal #121, paperback original, 1950. // Noose for the Desperado. Gold Medal #683, paperback original, 1957.

   First heard about this via George Tuttle’s defunct website defining noir and suggesting some titles:

   He says there: “The Desperado by Clifton Adams … though a Western, this novel is a landmark of early Gold Medal noir. Set in Texas during Reconstruction, the story traces the subtle transformation of Talbert Cameron from battler of injustice to outlaw.”

   Never before having thought of westerns as part of the noirboiled genre, this way eyeopening and provided this bibliomaniac with a whole new reading source to plunder.

   Though westerns seem like they are 1800’s rather than 1940’s, the genre started around the same time as noirboiled crime, involved many of the same writers, and contains many of the same themes and styles as the Hammett’s and Chandler’s whose bibliographies I’d exhausted.

   The lone gunman, the town harlot, and the marshall of the western are fairly transposable to the hardboiled detective, Jim Thompson psycho, and the femme fatale. The town always corrupt.

   The Stark House edition I read has the following Donald Westlake quote on its cover:

   â€œA compact, understated, almost reluctant treatment of violence, first introduced me to the notion of the character adapting to his forced separation from normal society.” Sounds like the Desperado’s the Parker template.

   Onto the books themselves (in a recent read (Blue of Noon) a female character says: “Get to the point. I never listen to prefaces.”).

   Talbert (“Tall”) Cameron is around 18 years old, with a temper, in small town Texas during reconstruction. His folks have a little homestead, raise cattle and horses. It’s all real homey.

   But then Talbert punches a carpetbagging cop who insults the local ladies, and he’s due to do time on the work gang.

   He ain’t going.

   He takes off, and when the cops beat his dad to death when his dad refuses to squawk of Tall’s whereabouts, all bets are off.

   Tall comes back, exacts his revenge, and from there on out he’s a desperado.

   It’s well written. It’s hard. It’s dark. It’s boiled.

   The Desperado is quite good. Quite archetypal. Innocence lost. Young love. Honor. Revenge. Betrayal.

   And like the typical hard-boiled detective, he’s got an ethos. He doesn’t steal. He only kills in self-defense.

   And then comes the sequel: A Noose for the Desperado.

   First of all: Spoiler alert: No Noose. Not even the suggestion of a noose.

   He takes over a western version of Poisonville for no apparent reason than greed.

   Now, for some unexplained reason, the Desperado has lost his morals. Or at least traded them for ambivalence.

   He’s like Yogi Berra’s old saying that if you see a fork in the road, take it.

   He steals. And then he decides that money doesn’t matter. He uses people. And then he looks after them. And then he doesn’t.

   One of the main Aristotelian virtues is constancy. It’s a virtue all the great heroes have.

   The Desperado has it in the first novel and loses it in second.

   While he escapes the noose, we do not.

THOMAS B. DEWEY – Deadline. Mac #13. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1966. Pocket 55002, paperback, 1968. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1984. Presumably expanded from the short story “Deadline” appearing in Sir!, August 1968.

   For a hardboiled PI detective novel, which this one definitely is, it’s a little different from most hardboiled PI novels – but probably not different enough to be unique, one of a kind. Mac – that’s the only name we ever know him by in all 17 of his novels – has been hired by a panel of psychologists and social workers, not to prove a young boy on death row is innocent – he’s already confessed – but to prove that he’s legally insane, and to persuade the governor to issue a stay of execution.

   Most of Mac’s cases take place in the down and dirty streets of Chicago. (The second and last two take place in Los Angeles.) Deadline takes place in the small farming community of Wesley, Illinois. Dominating the town is the local John Deere dealer, and since it was his daughter who was brutally murdered, the man most certainly does not want Mac to stop the execution.

   Mac does not have much to work with. His “client” is socially challenged and it is difficult for him to give any coherent information about the day of the girl’s killing. Her best friend, still in high school, has an emotional disorder. Mac’s only ally in Wesley is Miss Adams, a teacher in the local high school, and since she is dating the girl’s father, her help is only reluctantly provided at best.

   Mac is beaten up at least once in this one, and chained up in a barn so he can’t do any damage to the case against the boy about to be executed. The title, Deadline, is certainly an appropriate one. Mac’s efforts to figure out what exactly did happen come down to the last minute. Somewhat unfortunately, the clue that’s the key one is rather an obvious one. (I spotted it, after all.)

   There’s a hint of attraction between Mac and Miss Adams, but it’s clear by book’s end that anything more than that is not going to happen. That’s an ending that quite probably happened to him more than once.

FUN IN ACAPULOCO. Paramount Pictures, 1963. Elvis Presley, Ursula Andress, Elsa Cárdenas, Paul Lukas, Larry Domasin, Alejandro Rey. Producer: Hal Wallis. Director: Richard Thorpe.

   I realize that movies such as this one don’t turn up on this blog very often, but other than the fact that Elvis is in it, it marks a significant milestone for me. It’s the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in almost two and a half years. It was the matinee film shown at the New Beverly Theater in Hollywood last Sunday. The New Beverly is owned by Quentin Tarantino and specializes in retro films from 60s through the 80s, many of them prints coming from Tarantino’s own collection, such as this one. The poster below is the one on the sidewalk in front of the theater as you entered.

   The movie was a big hit in its day, but to call it fluff from today’s perspective would be exaggerating by a factor of ten. The plot has something to do with Elvis’s character, the object of affection of two women in competition for his sole attention, and not much more than that —  Elsa Cárdenas as a lady bullfighter, and Ursula Andress as the assistant social director at the resort hotel in Acapulco where Elvis has a combined job as a lifeguard and (of course) a singer.

   I didn’t recognize any of the songs, but the teen-aged girls who came in hordes to see this movie in 1963 surely did. Besides Elvis, the other star attraction, the one aimed for the guys whose girls came to see him and were forced to come along, was of course Ursula Andress, this being the very next film she made following her bombshell appearance as Honey Ryder in the James Bond movie Dr. No. They made for an interesting couple on film. One can only wonder how they may have gotten along in real life.

   I probably would never have sat down to watch this on TV, but it served its primary purpose very well. A movie in brilliant technicolor on a big screen with lots of people in it singing and dancing and just plain having a good time – and all that was only a bonus. It just felt great to be back in a movie theater again!

IT HAPPENED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Switzerland,-West Germany-Spain, 1958. Original title: Es Geschah am Hellichten Tag. Heniz Ruhmann, Michel Simon, Gert Frobe, Maria Rosa Salgado, Anita Von Ow. Screenplay by Friedrich Durrenmatt (his story), Hans Jacoby, and Director Ladislao Vaja.

   This offbeat German noir film is based on Swiss novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt’s novel The Pledge, but takes off from the main conceit of that novel in some interesting directions of its own as a powerful suspense film about the nature of obsession, guilt, and the lengths a man will go to accomplish his ends.

   It opens in the woods outside a small town where Jacquier (Michel Simon), a peddler, discovers a child’s body and flees to town and the local pub where he calls chief investigator Matthai (Heniz Ruhmann) who once treated him well.

   Matthai is on his last day before a new important job in Jordan, but calls out the authorities and they are guided to the body of the girl by Jacquier who in short order becomes the chief suspect, Matthai only saving his neck from angry locals when he points out that all who claim they saw Jacquier in the woods are just as much suspects as he is.

   Matthai isn’t so sure about Jacquier’s guilt though. One of the girl’s friends shows him a picture the victim drew of her friend ‘the giant” a man she met in the woods and befriended. Surely a fairy tale, but …

   When Jacquier commits suicide under the relentless police interrogation Matthai is not sure he was guilty but the police are happy to close the case and that of other girls who died similarly over the last four years.

   Not Matthai though. He continues to investigate and begins to put together a picture of the killer, a man henpecked by his bitter Mother who strikes out in frustration with a razor against the children he has targeted.

   Following a trail of clues Matthai closes in on the killer, but knows he can never trap him without the ideal bait, and in a small town he finds it in a lonely little girl like the ones killed before and her widowed mother, Frau Heller and Annemarie (Maria Rosa Salgado and Anita von Ow) . Taking a job at a gas station and living with the mother and daughter he begins to lay his trap.

   By this point we know the killer is one Schott, a henpecked giant (Gert Frobe) who lives with his cruel mother.

   Vajada skillfully inter-cuts scenes of Schott and Matthai almost encountering each other, Matthai filling Schott’s tank with gas as Schott watches Annemarie in his side mirror, the two men passing on the road, all building tension as Annemarie and Schott, her “Magician” meet in the woods and the pressure on Schott from his mother pushes him closer to action and the straight razor in his bath he has used before.

   Even with Matthai finally seeing Schott he still has to catch him in the act, but that means using Annemarie as bait, something he cannot do because he has come to care for the child.

   Matthai plants a doll dressed like Annemarie in the woods like the little girl Jacquier found, but Annemarie escapes from her room and heads for the woods to meet with her “Magician…”

   Heinz Ruhmann was a beloved German star in the period perhaps best known here for his films playing Georges Simenon’s Maigret that were dubbed in English and shown on American television in the Sixties. His humanity, gentle screen presence, and surprising strength made him a popular Maigret, but also lend themselves to the drama in the far more complex Matthai, a rather cool character whose cold calculations are complicated by his feelings for a lonely child.

   This is supposedly the role that got Gert Frobe the role of Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film. Around this time he would be introduced in more familiar form to American audience as the police inspector in Fritz Lang’s 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and its sequel. A hero of the War who smuggled many Jews out from under the Nazis, Frobe would have a successful career in the West in films such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Bloodlines despite not speaking English.

   Durrenmatt’s The Pledge was filmed with Jack Nicholson in a form much closer to the book. The author was a noted playwright and novelist perhaps best known among Mystery fans for his Inspector Barlach novels, one of which became a film with Jon Voight and Robert Shaw. His novels and plays often deal with mystery and suspense, but seldom in a straightforward manner. He is far more interested in the psychology of his characters and the paradox involved than straight detection or suspense alone. He’s an extremely important writer, if not always an easy one, and this does justice to his work.

   That this film captures so much of the feel of his work despite having to play to a somewhat more standard model is one of its strengths. Evocatively filmed and well acted, particularly by Ruhmann, Simon, and the mute Frobe it plays like the best of film noir with all that implies about flawed wounded human beings, and how they sometimes destroy each other. It is a powerful and disturbing film that can jolt more with the image of a dead child’s hand emerging from a pile of leaves than a hundred gory horror films, a single cry of rage from Frobe when Schott realizes he has been tricked tells more than pages of dialogue about this repressed monster.

   I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s hardly a lost film, but one that doesn’t get the kind of attention many of its French and American cousins do in the genre, and that is a shame. You really owe it to yourself to find it on YouTube (there are several versions, but the one by Old Movies B/W and Colour Simonbartbull has English subtitles and is a clear looking print).

   See this one. It is a classic.

ELLERY QUEEN – Double, Double. Little Brown, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #874, paperback, 1952. Dell, paperback, 1965. Ballantine, paperback, 1975, 1979. Also published in a Signet double novel edition, and as The Case of the Seven Murders (Pocket, paperback, 1958).

   A series of anonymous envelopes sent to Ellery Queen from Wrightsville filled with clippings from the local newspaper there is what first piques the well-known mystery writer’s interest. This is followed up by a visit from the daughter of the local “town drunk,” who has mysteriously disappeared and is assumed to have met with foul play and to be dead, his body swallowed up by quicksand at the bottom of a cliff.

   The girl is somewhat of a “bird child,” living barefoot and alone in a shack at the edge of a swamp. (You should not be surprised to learn that her name is Rima.) Before the two of them return to Wrightsville, Ellery plays Pygmalion with her, furnishing her with new clothes, up-to-date hair styling and the like.

   Wrightsville is a small town somewhere in New England, with small town stores and small town businesses, a local doctor who still makes house calls, and a place Ellery has a strange affinity for, with at least three previous cases having taken place there. The townspeople know him well.

   Three deaths have already occurred, one suspicious, the other two not. Before the book is done, a total of seven have taken place. I suppose it does no harm to tell you now that the pattern that Ellery discovers connecting them comes from the nursery rhyme that begins “Rich man, poor man…”

   This being the first Ellery Queen novel I’ve read in a while, I was caught by surprise at how chaotic his detective stories could be: swirling winds of surrealism and the unknown. Added to the mix are suspicion, doubts, small town nostalgia, and karma. The final solution, the one that unravels the mystery at the end, is, in fact, greatly dependent on the latter. Events have happened that even the killer could not control.

   The detective work is superb – it is utterly fascinating to read a novel in which so many threads of the story could be so knotted up and elusive – then unsnarled so the pieces all fit together. Except … except for the fact that in an Ellery Queen story the people do not act or react as real people would. They are in a sense both naive and artificial, and they do things that real people would not do – especially the killer, as hard as Ellery Queen the detective does his best to explain his or her thinking.

   I do not mean to suggest that this is a bad thing, except perhaps for present day readers who do not understand the worth of a pure puzzle story.  You start to read an Ellery Queen novel, and you  will find yourself at once in an Ellery Queen world governed by Ellery Queen rules and Ellery Queen ways of thinking.

   Opinions on this may vary, but I found myself enjoying this return visit to the world of Ellery Queen, a visit I’ve delayed for far too long. Shame on me.

THE TEXAS RANGERS. Paramount, 1936. Fred MacMurray, Lloyd Nolan, Jean Parker, and Jack Oakie. Screenplay by King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, and Louis Stevens, from the book by Walter Prescott Webb. Directed by King Vidor. Currently streaming on YouTube.

   A trio of desperadoes get separated while fleeing from a posse. Two of them join the Texas Rangers as cover, and gradually find themselves becoming committed to the Ranger mission, while the third forms a new gang and continues on his thievin’ murderin’ way, and if you can’t tell what develops….

   Despite the formulaic plot, this is far far from routine, thanks to Vidor’s assured direction and the performances from the leads. Until he hooked up with Disney and My Three Sons, MacMurray always lent a kind of equivocal edge to his roles that contrasted uneasily with his bluff good looks, and it makes him perfect as the bad guy turned hero (for now). Oakie’s good-for-little bravura makes a fine comedy relief, and Nolan’s big-city look suits his character just fine.

   But it’s Vidor’s sensitive handling of stock situations and his flair for action scenes that lifts Rangers out of its cliche’d roots.

   F’rinstance, there’s a bit where the Rangers are trapped on a cliffside, holding off angry Apaches down below. A few of the more ambitious Native Americans climb up above and start laboriously rolling boulders down at the Rangers. Vidor’s smooth way of cutting (The boulders come at intervals, thundering down the near-sheer wall like a cannon shot, as the rangers claw their way up the cliff to stop them) from long-shots, to medium exteriors, to studio “exteriors” propels the scene to epic proportions.

   Then, in quieter moments, the emotional resonance he puts into the scene where Nolan and Oakie have it out — Oakie’s braggadocio melting as he realizes how dangerous his old pal has become, Nolan losing control of himself, and visibly enjoying it — has stuck with me since I was a kid, and followed me into my dotage.

   Jimmy Stewart called moments like these “Pieces of time.” I call it fine movie-making and great fun.

FRANK KANE – Red Hot Ice. Johnny Liddell #9. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 901, paperback, 1956, Cover by Victor Kalin.

   Johnny Liddell is hired by the long-suffering agent of a luscious former star who’s become an uncontrollable lush, and as a result, she now owes $12,000 to the owner of an traveling airborne casino (which is quite an  opening gimmick in its own right). To that end she agrees to pay him off using a small fortune in uncut diamonds she’s hidden from the IRS over the years.

   When Johnny hires a guy to monitor the transfer, both the guy and the blonde end up dead. The cops think Johnny’s buddy couldn’t resist temptation, and things went bad when he did. Johnny naturally sees things differently, but it’s up to him to prove it.

   Kane’s prose is smooth and easy in this one. There are no highs, à la Raymond Chandler — I found no particular lines or longer passages worth quoting, as on occasion I do do – but there are no lows, either. What follows is a lengthy and straightforward murder investigation, in which Frank Kane, the author, is quite good in describing rundown if not out-and-out squalid settings in the city (Manhattan) and environs (New Jersey and Long Island). The latter in fact is where in fact Johnny is at one point taken for a ride – a fairly standard cliché in these kinds of stories, but Kane somehow manages to make it seem fresh again.

   Even better is that not only is Red Hot Ice a pretty good PI novel, it is also a detective story, complete with fair play alibis and other clues – well almost. If the New Jersey police had done their job thoroughly, and not just a one-sided one, the case would have been solved all that more quickly – the only semi-sour note I found in this one. Not a classic, in other words, but you can do a lot worse.

RIO. Universal Pictures, 1939. Basil Rathbone, Sigrid Gurie, Victor McLaglen, Robert Cummings, Leo Carrillo, Billy Gilbert, Samuel S. .Hinds. Screenplay by Abden Kandel, Edwin Justus Mayer & Frank Partos. Directed by John Brahm. Current;y available om YouTube.

   Contrary to director John Brahm’s film noir credentials (The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Brasher Doubloon) Rio is not an early example of that genre as often suggested half as much as a late blooming of German Expressionism and silent melodrama that anticipates those elements in film noir.

   It probably didn’t help that the title Rio sounds more like a musical with Fred and Ginger dancing on the wings of an airplane than a melodrama loosely based on an international scandal.

   Here Rathbone is Paul Reynard (rather obviously named, reynard being “fox” in French), a fantastic Parisian financial figure whose massive empire proves to be merely a paper facade held together by unsecured bank loans upon bank loans and Reynard’s superhuman cool. When that empire collapses after a loan is called in by a rival taking many of his investors fortunes with it the whole thing implodes.

   Loosely based on the Stavisky scandal that shook France and inspired a film (Stavisky, 1974) that starred Jean Paul Belmondo as Serge Stavisky the great swindler Rio adds to the character of the real life Stavisky a kind of cold genius and Svengali like influence over Reybard’s wife a once popular entertainer Irene (Norweigian actress Sigrid Gurie, Algiers, The Adventures of Marco Polo) who he possessively loves in his own controlling way.

   Following the collapse of his financial empire the coolly unrepentant Reynard is arrested and put on trial. On conviction he is sentenced to a Devil’s Island like prison near Brazil and Irene, with his right hand man and bodyguard, Dirk (Victor McLaglen), agree to follow him to wait for him in Rio, Reynard urging her to divorce him and bragging to Dirk that he knows giving her that out will only serve to assure she doesn’t leave him out of loyalty. Even from his island prison he will continue to manipulate her, which is his only true pleasure.

   There Irene takes up singing again in a bar owned by Roberto (Leo Carillo), a slinky type hoping to undermine her devotion to Reynard, while Dirk works as a bartender to be near Irene and protect Reynard’s interests.

   Meanwhile in prison Reynard is the same arrogant Nietzschean ubermensch, content with his lot so long as he knows he still controls Irene even from afar, her letters proof of that control.

   Back in Rio Irene meets drunken American Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), an engineer who was responsible for a bridge that collapsed thanks to investors who supplied him with inferior materials. Now he is drinking himself to death in disgrace and shame.

   But he has some charm, and unlike the cold Reynard he needs Irene. She helps him to reform, sober up, and get a job as an engineer, and this time he does a spectacular job of it. Redeemed and in love he convinces Irene to divorce Reynard and marry him.

   Humiliated by the guards he has taunted because he letters have stopped and furious his control of Irene has been lost Reynard vows to kill the two lovers and plots escape, luring another prisoner into the suicidal attempt planning to kill the other prisoner and plant his id on the unidentifiable body,

   Able to contact Dirk for help Reynard escapes, “dies,” murders his fellow prisoner, and is free, if only he wasn’t insistent on coming to Rio to murder Irene and Bill for their betrayal despite Dirk’s pleas.

   Rio is a peculiar film. It seems closer to silent melodrama than modern film noir, and while it could be noir with just a turn here or there it isn’t in this incarnation, not quite.

   Rathbone is perfect as Reynard, by turns cooly charming and sadistic, admiring his wife the way a snake looks at a bird, reading volumes into a glance. Gurie is quite lovely and persuasive both as the wife under Reynard’s hypnotic control and as the woman slowly freeing herself from his interest. While he had no need to model his performance on anyone Rathbone does, at times, seem to be channeling the kind of silent film roles often played by Conrad Veidt.

   The film belongs to Rathbone though. Cummings has some good moments as a charming drunk but soon enough sobers up to be a somewhat standard, but far more skillful than usual, male ingenue. He seems a bit young for Gurie, but you can see the appeal after Rathbone’s snake like Reynard.

   There are a number of evocative scenes and shots (nice cinematography by Hal Mohr) showing how well Brahm had absorbed the lessons of German expressionism and would later use them in his film noir works. Stylistically Rio is an attractive film.

   It’s odd how misused and underused McLaglen is in this film. He has relatively little screen time and what time he does have is mostly in the kind of role you were more likely to see Walter Brennan or Thomas Mitchell in. McLaglen at this point was an Oscar winning actor and a star in his own right both teamed in films with the likes of Edmond Lowe and Chester Morris, and as a lead on his own having played the lead in two John Ford films (The Informer, Black Watch).

   It’s downright strange to see him play so small, if important, a supporting role in the film. Leo Carrillo is wasted too as the wastrel owner of the place where Irene performs. He is suggested as an oily type after Irene’s honor, but is awfully jovial about giving up when she ends up with Cummings. His role mostly consists of trying to scare gossipy waiter Billy Gilbert into shutting up. He never more than annoys Irene a little.

   Rio is an odd film. Rathbone is the main reason to watch, but by no means the only one. It’s also interesting to note American audiences in 1939 would be expected to immediately draw the inference to the Stavisky scandal that rocked France earlier in the decade. I’m not sure a modern film would dare to imagine an American audience would be that familiar with an international scandal, but here the film expects the audience to have some familiarity with those events and connect Reynard with Stavisky effortlessly.