CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS. Republic, 1953. Gig Young, Mala Powers, William Talman, Edward Arnold, Chill Wills, Marie Windsor, Paula Raymond. Writer: Steve Fisher. Director: John Auer.

   Form sometimes triumphs over substance in the oddest ways. Like a film called City That Never Sleeps.  Tired story, slack direction, (from John Auer, who is remembered, if at all, for The Crime of Dr. Crespi), hackneyed dialogue carrying a load of cliched situations, and yet …

   Mere description of the story doesn’t do it justice, but here goes: Chicago cop Johnny Kelley (Gig Young in an ill-fitting uniform) is about to leave his wife and the force to run off to California with a stripper, financed with a dirty deal from crooked lawyer Edward Arnold, who wants to get rid of troublesome henchman William Talman. Then, (WARNING!) on his last night on patrol, Johnny is partnered with Sergeant Joe, the angelic Spirit of the City (Chill Wills, and no, I’m not making this up!) whose divine intervention sets Johnny back on the right path. (END OF WARNING!)

   Woof.

   A film like this shouldn’t be watchable at all, but Sleeps is surprising grabby. Edward Arnold and William Talman (who had a nice line in noir bad guys until he got caught up by Perry Mason)   play off  nicely against each other, with Marie Windsor perfectly slutty as the girl who comes between them. Wally  Cassell does a  memorable bit as a broken-down actor  reduced to playing a mechanical man in a nightclub window, but the real star is cinematographer John L. Russell, who is gives the movie the stark, angular look of  an old Batman comic.

   Russell had a mildly distinguished career imparting a distinct  style to the Welles’ Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Psycho, and his look here is perfect 1950s Bob Kane: the characters grotesque, lantern-jawed and gimlet-eyed,  buildings (mostly shot on location) shot with  just a touch of expressionism, and a  pervasive sense of comic-book weirdness. It gives the sappy story just the right edge and makes for a film worth seeing.

   Perhaps best known for her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), and the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film version, Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) created con artist and murderer Tom Ripley with her “Ripliad”: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991). The first was adapted by René Clément with Alain Delon as Plein Soleil (Full Sun, aka Purple Noon) in 1960, by Anthony Minghella with Matt Damon in 1999 (*), and by Steven Zaillian with Andrew Scott as a 2024 miniseries, Ripley. Yet that was not the last of Ripley on screen, as the next two novels generated a total of three adaptations.

   Ripley’s Game was filmed by Wim Wenders with Dennis Hopper as Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend; 1977), and by Liliana Cavani with John Malkovich under its original title in 2002. But The American Friend also incorporated plot elements from Ripley Under Ground, filmed by Roger Spottiswoode with Barry Pepper in 2005, from a script by William Blake Herron and Donald Westlake. Herron contributed to The Bourne Identity (2002), while Westlake (aka Richard Stark, et alia) earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America—one of three, as well as being named a Grand Master—and an Oscar nomination for The Grifters (1990), based on the 1963 Jim Thompson book.

   Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground finds Tom living near Paris in Villeperce-sur-Seine in Belle Ombre, the house a wedding gift from his father-in-law, millionaire pharmaceutical manufacturer Jacques Plisson; Heloise is vacationing in Greece. He supplements Dickie Greenleaf’s inheritance with 10% of Derwatt Ltd., e.g., Perugia’s Derwatt School of Art, Derwatt-branded art supplies, and the sale at Bond Street’s Buckmaster Gallery of works by the reclusive artist, who lives in a tiny Mexican village. These are forged by Bernard Tufts, a scheme Tom hatched (after Philip Derwatt vanished in Greece) with the apparent suicide’s pals, freelance journalist Edmund Banbury and photographer Jeffrey Constant.

   American collector Thomas Murchison is headed to the gallery, rightly convinced that his Derwatt is fake, so Tom yet again turns to imposture, posing as Derwatt to “authenticate” The Clock. Despite his assurances, Murchison is convinced that Derwatt misremembered painting it and is being forged; sans disguise, Tom contrives an encounter, alarmed to see him meeting with Bernard, who warns him not to buy any more. Invited to Belle Ombre, Murchison admires Derwatt’s The Red Chairs, correctly pegs Man in Chair as bogus, and insists on consulting the Tate Gallery’s Riemer, but on a visit to the wine cellar, he intuits that Tom is in on it and is abruptly killed, hit on the head with a bottle and a coal scuttle…

   More houseguests follow in quick succession, Tom burying the body in the woods behind the house in between Count Eduardo Bertolozzi, who unwittingly carries in his toothpaste a microfilm that Tom intercepts and mails to Paris, on behalf of fence Reeves Minot, and Christopher Greenleaf, Dickie’s cousin. Then the distraught Bernard appears, planning to confess his forgeries, but with the police making inquiries, he helps Tom dig up the body, dumping it into the river; Detective-Inspector Webster from London seems satisfied with their answers. Chris departs, and Heloise returns briefly, then heads to her parents’ after finding a dummy of the penitent Bernard, who has hanged himself in effigy, in the cellar.

   The title is literalized as Tom, knocked out by Bernard and buried in Murchison’s former grave, frees himself; since being believed dead might be advantageous, he heads to Paris, joined by Heloise, and adopts a series of aliases (Daniel Stevens, William Tenyck, Robert Fiedler Mackay). Calling in a favor from Reeves for a new passport, he seeks Bernard in Greece to no avail, then returns to London to be seen as Derwatt, considered missing, and runs into Bernard’s ex-girlfriend, Cynthia Gradnor, who refuses to see him. Spotting him at last in Salzburg, Tom plays cat and mouse with Bernard, who finally leaps to his death from a cliff in the woods outside of town, and burns his body to fake Derwatt’s “suicide.”

   The film opens as Tom, in arrears, placates his landlady (Dinah Stabb) by returning her “missing” cat, which he had abducted, then is busted by Dean Bentliffe (Simon Callow) just before going on stage in Shakespeare’s Richard III for falsifying his credentials and trust fund. Rifling a purse in an open car, he sees Heloise (Jacinda Barrett) asleep in the back and, concerned for her safety, awakens her, enraging her companion, Nigel (Peter Serafinowicz). Like Tom, she is en route to a gallery opening by Jeff (Alan Cumming) for “new sensation” Derwatt (Douglas Henshall), although Cynthia (Claire Forlani) tells Tom that she’s cheated on Derwatt, fed up with his sexual oddities and other obsessions.

   Jeff says he’s not sure which makes Bernard Sayles (Ian Hart, who played Ripley in the 2009 BBC Radio Four Ripliad adaptations) more jealous, Derwatt’s eclipsing his artistic career or bedding his ex. At a celebration afterward, Cynthia shocks Derwatt by refusing a proposal, and the quintet follows as he drives off distraught, dying in a crash; exhausted from studying for finals, Heloise has dozed off again while they stash him in Jeff’s meat freezer, conspiring to keep his work—with its attendant income—alive. Neil Murchison (Willem Dafoe), a patron of Dayton’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Derwatt’s first collector, learns that Jeff’s show is sold out, and gives him a big check for his next work.

   The deal sweetened with Cynthia’s renewed favors, and a promise of his own exhibition, Bernard is persuaded to complete the unfinished Derwatts with a four-way split, and all is going well until she says she’s breaking it off again, and Murchison drops his bombshell. Meanwhile, on Paris in business, Tom visits Heloise, only to learn that she is the daughter of wealthy Antoine Plisson (François Marthouret), who warns her of Tom’s shady past at his lavish estate, Belle Ombre, but this just drives her into his bed even faster. He forges a letter from Derwatt, authenticating the painting; after an anonymous call to Murchison, saying he should ask to see Derwatt, Bernard is barely stopped from immolating himself.

   With Murchison threatening to go to the police, a panicked Jeff gives him Belle Ombre as Derwatt’s location, so Tom draws on his thespian skills, an addition by the scenarists that would make his impersonation more plausible, to defend the aptly titled Faust’s Bargain. Yet here, Murchison sees through him immediately, and is instead killed accidentally in a scuffle; black humor ensues as Tom must bathe Plisson’s blood-stained white dogs before he and Heloise return. He tells John Webster (Tom Wilkinson) that Murchison saw only him and was totally reassured, then—out of earshot—has Jeff arrange a press conference so Derwatt can explain, but before Webster can leave, Bernard arrives and is recognized.

   As they talk, one of the dogs appears with Murchison’s toupée, which Heloise discards; on a rainy night, when Bernard speaks of absolution, Tom shows him the grave, arguing that he is responsible, but is attacked and left for dead. By the time Bernard fesses up to Webster, Tom has revived and relocated the body, then departs for London with Heloise, winding up on the same Eurostar train as Bernard and Webster, who is alerted by Plisson, and Tom evades his search via a lavatory tryst with Heloise. Bernard has pledged to lead Webster to Derwatt’s corpse, absent the other two, yet his search for Jeff’s property gives Tom time to put it in his trunk as Heloise, who seems increasingly clueless, sits in the car.

   Although held at gunpoint by Bernard as he leaves the gallery, aware that Webster is onto him, Tom crashes the car, places Derwatt at the wheel, ignites it, and pulls Bernard out at the last minute, telling Webster that he’d come unhinged en route to the press conference. On Tom’s wedding day, Webster shows him a painting depicting Murchison sans toupée, convincing him Bernard really had seen the body, and appearing to explain Tom’s sudden interest in gardening. Yet Heloise, not so stupid after all, not only has relocated the body yet again but also, as they drive away for their honeymoon—with Murchison in the trunk for disposal—proposes that they eliminate her hateful father, leaving Belle Ombre to her.

   Ripley’s Game opens as Tom tells Reeves, “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder. That’s just a parlour game, trying to dream one up,” while differentiating that from an unsolved murder. Visiting from Hamburg, he asks Tom to “suggest someone to do one or perhaps two ‘simple murders’ and perhaps one theft, also safe and simple,” in order to protect the gambling world from Italian sharks, including a Mafia button man, and let the police, thus alerted, handle the rest. Tom recalls Jonathan Trevanny, an English picture framer in Fontainebleau with a French wife, Simone; a small son, Georges; and a severe case of myeloid leukemia, leaving him in need of Minot’s $96,000, with nothing to lose.

   A letter from a friend, Alan McNear, says he’s heard Jon is getting worse, yet Dr. Perrier assures him this is not so, and that even if it were, he would never divulge that to anyone; Alan writes again, identifying his source as Pierre Gauthier, who runs an art supply shop, and had brought Tom to Simone’s birthday party. Pierre, in turn, says he heard it from an unspecified customer who noted he wasn’t sure, i.e., Tom. He “started the…game out of curiosity, and because Trevanny had once sneered at him—and because Tom wanted to see if his own wild shot would find its mark, and make [him]…uneasy for a time. Then Reeves could offer his bait, hammering the point…that [Jon] was soon to die anyway.”

   Working on a portrait of Heloise, Tom buys a tube of zinc white from Gauthier; he says he did not identify Tom, who claims he was told at the party but does not recall the man’s name. Urged by Tom to keep him out of it, Reeves approaches Jon, explaining that he wants someone with no criminal connections, and is turned down as Perrier retests Jon, admitting that the results are less favorable. Invited to Hamburg, Jon visits Dr. Heinrich Wentzel, although suspicious of Reeves’s med-student “interpreter,” Rudolf, and listens to the plan, in which tax-driver Fritz will identify the target, Salvatore Bianca, aboard the U-Bahn (subway), and Jon will shoot him amidst the crowd as he gets off at Steinstrasse.

   Wentzel’s report is worse, so Jon, impenitent over a Mafioso, pulls the first job—which Reeves hopes will start a war between the Di Stefano (Bianca’s) and Genotti families—and tells Simone he may have to return, expenses paid, to try some new drugs. In Paris, Reeves asks Jon to garrotte Vito Marcangelo, a Genotti capo in Munich, in “retaliation” on the Mozart Express, or perhaps push him out the door, if the opportunity arises, again refused at first. With partial payment put into a Swiss bank account, Jon goes to Munich, where Reeves makes him an appointment with Dr. Max Schroeder, and agrees at least to ride the train, provided he has the less desirable option of a gun, and see what eventuates.

   Ready to shoot himself after the capo, but afraid Simone will refuse the money if aware how he earned it, Jon is astonished when Tom—whom Reeves denied knowing, and vice versa—suddenly appears, offering to help. “The Mafiosi made Tom feel almost virtuous by comparison,” and he garrottes Marcangelo in the W.C., though they must subdue one of his bodyguards and toss him out the door as well, yet Turoli survives, albeit in a coma, and may be able to i.d. them. Back in Paris, Tom admits that he falsified Jon’s condition, but relieves him of the unused gun, promising that he desires none of the money, wants to protect Jon, and is potentially just as much in his power as Jon is in his should either talk.

   Turoli (his first name given variously as Filippo or Vincent, as Heloise’s maiden name is now inexplicably Plissot) revives, and Tom fears he has compared notes with his partner, then Reeves’s flat is bombed. At a concert, the Trevannys bump into Gauthier, who beats feet when he sees Tom; Jon later warns Ripley that Simone, already suspicious of his new income, noticed and is connecting the dots—especially when a hit-and-run kills Gauthier. Relocated to Amsterdam, Reeves reports Turoli’s death and Fritz’s beating, and Tom gets two more calls, one an unnerving “wrong number,” and the other from Jon to arrange for a meet, seeking advice now that Simone has seen his Swiss bankbook, worsening things.

   Tom leaves Jon with the Italian gun to keep in his shop and has both a Luger acquired via Reeves and a rifle, but sends Heloise and Mme. Annette away for safety, then learns from Minot of another “near thing.” Simone disbelieves the story suggested by Tom, that Jon holds the stakes for a macabre bet between doctors regarding his fate, then Tom asks him to come armed to Belle Ombre to hold the fort, denying his presence when Simone calls. Sure enough, making fast work of an intruder, they see it is the second bodyguard, Angy, then get the drop on Lippo, reports of his death exaggerated; he is “persuaded” to call his boss, Luigi, to report that Tom was not the man they sought, and they are being followed.

   Simone arrives as Tom is garrotting him and, seeing the bodies, reluctantly returns home while they drive the pair far away and burn them in their Citroën, with Jon following in Tom’s Renault. The effort weakens him, so Tom takes him in for a transfusion, alerting an irate Simone, who is unmoved when he says Jon was just helping to defend him from vengeful Mafiosi after he took the law into his own hands, insisting that Gauthier’s death was accidental. She is planning to leave Jon when Reeves is tortured into giving him up, and although Tom kills two Mafiosi who invade the Trevanny home with a hammer, Jon is shot by another from their car; Tom is convinced that Jon shielded him from the bullet.

   The American Friend features notable noir filmmakers Samuel Fuller, seen in Wenders’s The State of Things (1982) and The End of Violence (1997), as a gangster known only as “the American,” and Nicholas Ray as Derwatt, in this case having faked his own death to drive up prices. While dying of cancer, Ray recorded his own last days in Lightning Over Water (1980), which he wrote and directed with Wenders, thrice nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Frequent collaborator Robby Müller shot his Paris, Texas (1984), and the script by Wenders, who also produced, eliminates the peripheral Heloise, with Hopper’s existentialist Ripley a marked contrast to the suave Delon in Purple Noon.

   Highsmith had offered Wenders the novel’s unpublished manuscript upon learning of his disappointment that the rights to The Cry of the Owl (1962) and The Tremor of Forgery (1969) had already been sold; she initially disliked Hopper’s interpretation, then praised the film after her second viewing, saying that it captured Ripley’s essence. The American Friend retains its international milieu, with dialogue in character-appropriate English and German and location shooting in Germany, France, and the U.S. It is in New York City, where they chat over the West Side Highway, that Ripley visits “Pogash” (Derwatt), and in a nice metacinematic twist, Ray had directed Hopper in Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

   Title notwithstanding, Ripley’s Game is as much Jonathan’s story, and Wenders elicited a performance by Bruno Ganz equally nuanced as his Jonathan Harker in Werner Herzog’s superb Nosferatu—Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu—Phantom of the Night, aka Nosferatu the Vampyre; 1979). Ganz starred as the unseen angel Damiel in Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (The Sky over Berlin, aka Wings of Desire; 1987) and its follow-up, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!; 1993), and earned multiple international awards for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). Here, Ganz is Jonathan Zimmermann, with Lisa Kreuzer, herself then married to Wenders, as his wife, Marianne.

   In his DVD audio commentary with Hopper—recommended to him by John Cassavetes when declining the role—Wenders noted, “I’m not good in depicting bad characters,” so he cast several fellow directors as criminals, e.g., Hopper, Gérard Blain (as Raoul Minot), Peter Lilienthal (Marcangelo), Daniel Schmid (Bianca’s analog, Igraham). Also on board the train are Lippo (Axel Schiessler); the American; his henchman, Angie (Hopper’s own assistant, Satya De La Manitou); his female companion, Mona (Rosemarie Heinikel); and a man with a dog (Heinrich Marmann, a hatmaker whose shop was converted into Jon’s). Rodolphe (Lou Castel), who fingers Igraham for Jon, is a composite of Fritz and Rudolf.

   At an auction in Hamburg, with Ripley’s confederate pushing up the price, Allan Winter (David Blue) buys a Derwatt despite his friend Jon, a former art restorer, saying that he is “doubtful” of the painting, which uses a different blue. To help support their son, Daniel (Andreas Dedecke), Marianne works at the auction house, and her boss, Gantner (Rudolf Schündler), privately informs Ripley about Jon’s condition; a deleted scene confirms her suspicions that “Allan’s” telegram was forged. When Gantner introduces Ripley—with whom he is apparently in collusion—to Allan and Jon, the latter makes his literally fatal snub by refusing to shake Ripley’s hand and coldly saying simply, “I’ve heard of you.”

   The narratives largely coincide as Jon, doubting Dr. Gabriel (Heinz Joachim Klein), goes to Paris to get a second opinion (with Minot falsifying the results) and kill Igraham, until an ending that conflates Highsmith’s. Angie dies outside Ripley’s house, while waiting in an ambulance—a Mercedes later bought by Hopper—are the American, whom he and Jon pursue and shoot; a bandaged figure, presumably Lippo, killed by the captive Minot as he escapes; and Mona, who then decamps. On arrival, Marianne agrees to follow the ambulance with Jon in his red VW Beetle, but as he leaves Ripley stranded after torching the bodies, Jon succumbs to his exertions en route back to Hamburg, dying at the wheel.

   Best known for Il portiere di Notte (The Night Porter, 1974), Cavani co-scripted Ripley’s Game—scored by the great Ennio Morricone—with Charles McKeown, long associated with various members of Monty Python on both sides of the camera. It opens in Berlin, where Ripley learns that Reeves (Ray Winstone) has tried to cheat him, dissolving their art-scam partnership after he takes both forgeries and payment from the customer, killing his bodyguard, Terry (Uwe Mansshardt). Three years later, in Italy, Jonathan (Dougray Scott) and Sarah (Lena Headey) Trevanny invite Ripley and his wife for drinks; Louisa Harari (Chiara Caselli), a harpsichordist, is preparing for a concert, so Tom attends alone.

   A drunken Jon is conspicuously rude to Tom (“Too much money and no taste”), backing down when asked what people have heard, and at home Tom finds Reeves, who has three clubs and a restaurant in Berlin with “competitors that need deregulating.” Tom declines, discussing the job openly with Louisa, who tells him about Jon’s illness; soon, as Holmes would say, the game’s afoot, with Reeves posing as headhunter “Peter Wester.” Noting as he walks by how Sarah’s boss, a shoe shop owner (Emidio Lavella)—as in the novel—ogles her, Jon is surprised by knowledge of his son, Matthew (Sam Blitz), and condition, but he turns down $50,000, which Tom tells Reeves to double, offering to put up the rest.

   Told by Dr. Wentzel (Nikolaus Deutsch) in Berlin that his “situation…remains grave,” Jon shoots Russian mobster Leopold Belinsky (Wilfried Zander) on his weekly visit to the insect room at the zoo. Reeves then warns him that his family may be in danger if he doesn’t “tidy things up” by using a garrotte—Belinsky’s signature—to strangle his chief rival, Ukrainian mob boss Guleghin (Yurij Rosstalnyj), in apparent reprisal on the Berlin to Dusseldorf Express, starting “a nice little war.” Again, Tom appears to take the point, and they kill both bodyguards, although Jon has to shoot Gregory (Ronnie Paul) to save Tom, who assures him, “The world is not a poorer place because those people are dead.”

   Reeves escapes an attack on his home (unlike his male bedmate), Tom sends Louisa and cook Maria (Evelina Meghnagi) out of danger, and Jon learns that Gregory has survived, ignoring an order to stay clear and promising to discuss their declining relationship with Sarah upon his return. Following the siege chez Tom, whose defenses include man traps, they put the gangsters’ bodies in their car for disposal and find Reeves dead in the trunk. Dropping off Jon with his final payment, Tom sees a suspicious car parked in the bushes, bursts in to kill the hoods holding Sarah hostage—again shielded by Jon at the cost of his life—and arrives in the nick of time for the start of Louisa’s concert at Teatro Olimpico…

   Where Cavani differs from Wenders is less in incident than in attitude, e.g., Jon’s overt initial hostility and maudlin outburst after the train killings, Tom’s rift with Reeves and transparency with Louisa. Winstone is the antithesis of the smooth Blain’s Minot, a total pig who splatters egg yolk on Tom’s furniture out of spite, and there is a greater focus on Ripley, with the decidedly different interpretation by Malkovich, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for Places in the Heart (1984) and In the Line of Fire (1993); he’s a yoga practitioner, ardent lover, chef, and gardener. “I’m a gifted improviser….I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching,” he explains to Jonathan.

*  Interested parties may read my take on The Talented Mr. Ripley and the two feature-film versions here: https:/bradleyonfilm.wordpress.com/2017/11/11/talent-show/ Ripley’s final adventures will be the subject of a future post here on this blog.

Edition cited:

Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game in The Mysterious Mr. Ripley: Penguin (1985)

Online sources:

HOLIDAY IN SPAIN. Michael Todd Co., 1960. Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre, Beverly Bentley, Paul Lukas, Liam Redmond, Leo McKern, Peter Arne, Diana Dors. Screenplay by Audrey and William Roos, based on their novel Ghost of a Chance as by Kelly Roos (novelized as Scent of Mystery). Directed by Jack Cardiff.

   Once upon a time Mike Todd married Elizabeth Taylor and wanted to make a movie of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, a big movie, and in that movie he wanted to use his new wide screen Todd-Ao process and new technology in sound, and generally revolutionize film in general because it was getting harder and harder to compete with television. And related to that he made a sort of experimental film called Scent of Mystery.

   As part of this he came up with a process called Smell-O-Vision where scenes in the film could be accompanied by scents that were sprayed onto viewers in the theater, and to best utilize this technology, he came up with a mystery where the scents would be clues to the mystery.

   For this project he purchased the rights to a book by Audrey and William Roos, who wrote as Kelly Roos, about a young man rushing around New York to prevent an innocent whose name he didn’t know and who did not know they were in danger from being murdered.

   Because the film was designed to show off Todd-Ao and Todd’s new sound system as well as Smell-O-Vision, he shot it in Spain, better scenery and more exotic scents, and being too clever for his own good called it Scent of Mystery.

   It was a pretty dismal failure. All the scents smelled the same and none of them any too good, and frankly the two hour and five minute running time was far too much for the slim plot, and despite a fine cast and a droll teaming of Denholm Elliott and Peter Lorre as the hero, mystery writer Oliver Larker on holiday, and a somewhat rascally taxi driver accompanying him on his Cook’s Tour of Spain, it was all a little much. Even an intermission that included a literal cliffhanger couldn’t help.

   It eventually played on television with scratch and sniff cards and in a more truncated form, but it didn’t really fare any better there.

   There is an unwritten rule that all films must be lavishly restored, so Scent of Mystery was lavishly restored as Holiday in Spain, and the good news is that it is gorgeous to look at. The bad news is that it is still a rather diffuse plot, and the experimental multi channel sound system doesn’t work at all on television and makes for confusing viewing as one track is dialogue and the other supposed to be the characters thoughts (well, Elliott the narrator and Lorre anyway).  It is difficult at times to know if they are actually talking to each other or thinking and if the other characters can hear them or should respond.

   The plot, as such is perfectly good, and the original Roos novel (Ghost of a Chance) handles it quite well. Here Oliver Larker and taxi driver/guide Lorre see a woman (Beverly Bentley) nearly run over. They think nothing of it at first until an unsavory character (Liam Redmond) says it was deliberate. Oliver dismisses that but then feels guilty and decides to find the woman and warn her, still feeling a bit of a fool until the unsavory type is murdered by Baron Paul Lukas, and Larker and his companion begin a scenic tour of Spain trying to reach the young woman before she can be killed.

   Is it her half brother, bullfighting aficionado Leo McKern who owns a resort where she appears to be hiding out at trying to kill her and who is the mysterious man in glasses (Peter Arne)? Who is the Baron, and why is he so friendly with McKern, and why are he and his henchmen trying to kill her and shooting at Larker? Even when you think you know, you don’t, and if they had cut this by forty minutes, left out the narration, and forgotten about the Smell-O-Vision it could have been a charming romantic suspense film.

   It is still gorgeous to look at and a little touch at the end with Todd’s un-billed wife Elizabeth Taylor is pleasant, but for the most part this film is a chore. It’s a gorgeous chore, but clearly a chore.

   Travelogues really shouldn’t have plots and plots really shouldn’t be travelogues, and when a movie stinks, it doesn’t help if that is also an actual physical fact. These are the lessons from Holiday in Spain.

   Critics as you might imagine had a field day with Scent of Mystery and Smell-O-Vision. It deserved it. Holiday in Spain is a better title, but the film is no holiday in Spain or anywhere else. One only hopes Elliott, Lorre, Lukas, McKern, and Arne enjoyed the paid vacation and wonders that it didn’t destroy any careers.

RIDE THE PINK HORSE. Universal, 1947. Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King, Thomas Gomez, Fred Clark, Art Smith, Martin Garralaga and John Doucette. Screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Directed by Robert Montgomery.

   The one non-Boston Blackie film I’ve seen on TV lately was Ride the Pink Horse, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery. Not a great film by any means, but interesting throughout. Montgomery had, by all accounts, an unusually high IQ, and it has always seemed to me that his films are all marked by an almost intangible quality of Intelligence. The failures as well as the successes seem to presuppose a certain degree of of the movie-going audience (a classically underestimated group) and work from there.

   The well-known extended subjective camerawork in Lady in the Lake, for example, is hardly an unqualified triumph, but it’s the sort of thing somebody had to try sooner or later; All it took  was a director who had some confidence in his audience.

   Likewise the sly references in Montgomery’s autobiographical daydream-movie Once More, My Darling, where Ann Blyth conveys a hitherto-unsuspected and startling sensuality while we wait for things to get funny, which they never really do.

   Montgomery’s intelligence often showed itself even in films he didn’t direct but merely acted in. There’s his effete quisling in The Big House, the blandly ingenuous psycho in Night Must Fall,  the Detective/Prince in Trouble for Two, and the memorable Here Comes Mr. Jordan   and They Were Expendable,   all films marked by much more thoughtfulness than is common in movies of their sort.

   Oddly enough, it’s this very intelligence that mitigates against Ride the Pink Horse,  in which Montgomery portrays Lucky Gagin, a not-too-bright petty crook out for revenge against Fred Clark as a murderous Political Boss; He just never convinces us that he’s as dumb as his character is supposed to be. Montgomery walks and talks just like a pug throughout the film, but every so often he visibly relaxes and just listens while another character talks, and in these moments his face betrays him with a perceptive, alert expression that all the Dis ‘n’ Dats in his dialogue just can’t hide.

   What we have here is an educated man playing a Dummy, and for all his brains, Montgomery just ain’t a good enough actor to hide it.

   I should go on to add, though, that except for this, Ride the Pink Horse is just about everything you could want in a film noir and more, with moody lighting, long, expressive takes, a host of skillfully limned minor characters, and the showy stylistic flourishes one expects from this genre.

   Yet even the standard film noir brutality takes an oddly thoughtful turn here: for though the Good Guys in this movie take an awful lot of physical abuse — very graphically portrayed — the Baddies get their lumps off-camera, if at all. And this is not a small point when you’re talking about film noir.

   One of the staples of Classic noirs no one ever mentions is that grin of Guilty Pleasure lighting the features of Bogart, Powell, et. al. as they prepare to deliver a well-deserved ass-kicking to their erstwhile tormentors. Nothing like that ever happens in Ride the Pink Horse, as if Montgomery were trying to subtly convey that violence is, after all, the province of the Bad Guys, and we grown-ups must look elsewhere for catharsis.

   Hmm. Bob Montgomery may not be the best moviemaker ever, but he maybe deserves more attention than he’s been getting.

M. Columbia, 1951. David Wayne, Howard Da Silva, Martin Gabel, Luther Adler, Steve Brodie, Raymond Burr, Glenn Anders. Director: Joseph Losey.

   Speaking of re-makes, Joseph Losey’s version of M is not an easy film to see, and I’m not sure it was worth the effort. It’s from his “promising” period (before he went to Europe to make deliberately boring pictures) when he was doing movies like The Lawless, The Prowler, and other modestly stylish thrillers hinting he might someday approach the level of Sam Fuller or Joseph H. Lewis.

   M gives us a bit of fine photography, a few neat directorial effects (mostly swiped from Fritz Lang’s original) and some really effective acting: David Wayne as the child-killer; Howard Da Silva as the conscientious cop on his trail; and a team of gangsters (also out to get the killer) that includes Martin Gabel, Raymond Burr, Luther Adler and the inimitable Glenn Anders at his irritating best, as a crook who thinks having a child-murderer at large  may be good for business.

   Unfortunately, Losey can’t seem to think his way around the censorship of the times, which dictated that Law and Order must be seen to prevail at all times, and the result is a rather muddled ending which  is not exactly Losey’s fault, but which when you see how directors like John Huston and Robert Aldrich slipped subversive comments past the censors in things like Asphalt Jungle and Kiss Me Deadly, you can’t help wishing he’d been a bit more inventive.

   Worse, Losey can’t get past his own tendency to preach, and things get badly bogged down while various characters stop the action to explain his moral points to the movie-going masses.
   

BACKLASH. 20th Century Fox, 1947. Jean Rogers, Richard Travis, Larry Blake, John Eldredge, Robert Shayne, Douglas Fowley, Sara Berner. Screenwriter: Irving Elman. Director: Eugene Forde.

   Not a very promising list of players, I thought while researching this B-level crime film before I watched it, nor did they exceed expectations. And yet they all did the jobs they were assigned, and the photography was fine as well. The story, with one five minute exception, was what left everything down, and I’ll get to that a couple of paragraphs further down.

   Richard Travis is the actor who nominally has the leading male role, but as the district attorney who’s handling the case, he seems to have more interest in the wife (Jean Rogers) of the man who’s presumed dead in an automobile accident (John Eldredge), a noted defense attorney named John Morland who gotten Red Bailey, an even more noted bank robber and killer (Douglas Fowley), off on charges before.

   The movie opens with yet another opportunity for Morland to defend Bailey with the former picking up the latter on a back road and helping him avoid roadblocks and imminent capture. As a prologue, it fails rather badly, as it easily allows the viewer to think Morland’s death later to be a lot more suspicious than (I think) it should have been.

   No matter. The police, in the form of Det. Lt. Jerry McMullen (Larry Blake), seem to be equally suspicious of the death, or in particular, who it was who died soon enough on his own, even though the evidence is pointing directly to Morland’s wife (the lady who again seems to be in a very close relationship with the D.A. See above.)

   If all of this sounds rather complicated it is, but even so, it doesn’t make the story that connects all these people very interesting. It takes a lot of talking to all of these people (and quite a few others) on the part of the homicide detective in charge of the case to move the story along, and then in only fits and bits, and flashbacks, too.

   There is one strange interlude toward the end of the movie that seems to come out of nowhere, but once there becomes a small highlight of the film. John Morland, on the run at the time, tries to take over a hobo’s flop, and they have a short but scintillating conversation together in dim but oh so effective lighting as the hobo gradually realizes who it is he’s talking to. This is the part of the film that’s pure noir. The rest is no more than a less than ordinary crime film.
    

              ___

   On the other hand, Arthur Lyons, reviewing this film in his book on B level films noir, Death on the Cheap, liked this more than I did. After a couple of paragraphs outlining the plot, he says “Told in a series of complicated flashbacks, this is not a bad little flick.”

   He may be right. I may have been harder on it than it deserves. I’ll think about it.

   Later: No, reading my review again, I don’t think so.

APOLOGY FOR MURDER. PRC, 1945. Hugh Beaumont, Ann Savage, Russell Hicks, Charles D. Brown. Director: Sam Newfield.

   Not so very long ago, as you may recall, David Vineyard reviewed a film entitled The Walls Came Tumbling Down, which he called a probably intentional homage to another film entitled The Maltese Falcon. As coincidences sometimes do, coming in pairs, here’s another film, this time from low budget PRC (which does *not* stand for Poverty Row Corporation, although it easily could do so) which is another homage, this time in honor of another well known film noir, this one entitled Double Indemnity.

   As legend or even truth may have it, the working title of Apology for Murder was Single Indemnity, or it was until the people at Paramount got wind of it, and that was the end of that.

   Playing Fred MacMurray’s role was Hugh Beaumont as a brash young reporter who gets involved with the wife (Ann Savage, shortly before she became a short-lived star in a movie titled Detour) of a much older businessman who is becoming more and more tired of her extravagant ways. And she more and more tired of him. What she needs is a way out.

   Her solution to this well-traveled dilemma comes along, most fortuitously for her, in person of Hugh Beaumont’s character, who, as brash as he is, is no match to the charms of the unhappy wife. Their mutual solution (but mostly her idea, when it comes down to it) is the obvious one. After which point things most naturally so sour. When Miss Savage takes up with a lawyer to help break her late husband’s will, it leaves Mr. Beaumont with, well, nothing, and when his editor gets this crazy idea that the accidental death was not really an accident, the walls really start closing in.

   It’s not really a bad picture, but even the dimmest member of the audience will know exactly what will happen next, each step of the way.
         ___

    Arthur Lyons, in his book on B level films noir, Death on the Cheap, somewhat challenges the generally accepted idea that the film was a direct ripoff of Double Indemnity. What he suggests is that it might have been based on the same true story which James Cain based his book of the same title on. Lyons goes on to say: “… either way, this is no Double Indemnity, although Ann Savage paints as powerful a picture of sinister femininity as she did of a nasty virago in the noir cult classic Detour.”

THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN. Columbia Pictures, 1946. Lee Bowman, Marguerite Chapman, Edgar Buchanan, George Macready, Lee Patrick, Jonathan Hale, J. Edward Bromberg, Miles Mander, Elizabeth Risdon. Screenplay by Wilfred H. Pettitt, based on the novel by Jo Eisinger. Directed by Lothar Mendes.

   The title of the film, and the McGuffin (Leonardo’s The Fall of Jericho), are the only original touches in this out and out rip off of The Maltese Falcon, right down to Lee Patrick as the hero Gilbert “Archer’s” (Lee Bowman) secretary.

   A priest has been murdered to make it look like suicide and gossip columnist Gilbert Archer is out to find his killer which seems to have something to do with a lost Leonardo masterpiece, the priest was hiding to protect it.

   Patricia Foster aka Laura Browning (Marguerite Chapman) is the mystery woman in the case supposedly seeking the painting with her excitable father Ernst Helms (J. Edward Bromberg, think Joel Cairo), while the Reverend Matthew Stoker (Macready) is none too subtle about what he would do to find it with his patroness Catherine Walsh (Elizabeth Risdon) and their lawyer George Bradford (Edgar Buchanan). There’s even a hood name Rausch (Noel Cravat) in the role of an over aged Wilbur.

   Most of the subtlety is gone, as well as any erotic tension between Bowman and Chapman (or the Gutman, Cairo, and Wilbur stand-ins who are all straight), but it is virtually a scene for scene steal from Falcon beyond that down to the bit where Archer (Spade) tips a hotel detective off about Rausch (Wilbur).

   It does vary a bit at the end, the McGuffin isn’t a lead bird, and Chapman and Bowman end in a clinch, but it so blatantly rips off Falcon it’s shocking Hammett or Huston didn’t sue for plagiarism.

   I assume the Eisinger novel was very little like the film, or action surely would have been taken. It feels as if the book might have been rather more pious than this, and too dull to film if you go by the preamble before the Falcon plot kicks in, so it was dressed up with the plot of the Hammett film and novel.

   Macready is sufficiently evil and threatening as a crooked evangelistic type, and Buchanan oily as a crooked lawyer, while Bromberg is about as subtle as a train wreck, but thankfully the plot is changed up enough he makes an early departure as the bodies stack up.

   As far as production values go it looks good, none of the actors are bad, but none of them overly good either. Bowman fared better in a few comedies as a lead or second lead when he had good material. He isn’t awful, he just has nothing to work with other than look like a poor substitute for Bogart (honestly, in this he’s a poor substitute for Ricardo Cortez; the attempts to change his character from solemn avenger of his priest friend to bright fast talking Spade substitute are jarring enough to loosen fillings). His hero has all the charisma of his television Ellery Queen, which is none.

   The whole business about his being out to avenge his friend the priest just doesn’t work with the Falcon plot that requires a fast talking Spade who may or may not be quite honest and didn’t even like his partner, and this being 1946 they don’t dare suggest anything untoward about the dead priest to enliven the plot a little. Hammett’s plot can’t bear any saintly characters other than Effie.

   I suppose if you had never seen The Maltese Falcon and stumbled on this one late one night you might enjoy it. It’s not incompetent, badly acted, cheaply made, or poorly directed. In fact if they had just honestly remade Hammett I might have given it a C for effort, it’s not as bad as the Warren William film by any means.

   But it is a jarring film, lurching from fairly solemn to wise cracking and back again as if Sam Spade had been rewritten as Father Brown, and the result is a film that doesn’t know what it is and as a result isn’t very good as anything.

THE JANUARY MAN.  MGM, 1989. Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello, Rod Steiger, Alan Rickman. Writer: John Patrick Shanley. Director: Pat O’Connor. Streaming online with ads on various platforms. Available for rent on Amazon Prime as well as other outlets.

   You have been unjustly fired from a job you did well,and now your ex-employers, faced with a crisis Only You Can Handle come crawling to ask you back. Along the way they almost interrupt you in a casual act of heroism, but you agree to come back, whereupon the Red Carpet is rolled out, you meet a sexy young girl who falls madly in love with you, your ex-girlfriend suddenly wants you back, and everybody who ever talked nasty to you is now at your beck and call.

   And wouldn’t it be great if they all brought Beer?

   Well, I suppose there are worse male fantasies, and although The January Man is neither as suspenseful as it should be nor as amusing as it could be, it still deserves some credit for realizing its limited aspirations in a light-hearted and relatively non-violent way. In fact, for a movie about a serial killer of women, it’s surprisingly un-sadistic in concept and execution (no pun intended — honest).

   The January Man also offers some decent thespic opportunities to its performers, who try not to look too surprised at getting them. Kevin Kline is engagingly off-beat as the Cop-turned-Fireman Hero called back to solve the Calendar Girl Murders, Danny Aiello and Rod Steiger are appropriately choleric as his superiors, and Susan Sarandon purveys her own brand of predatory sexuality as Kline’s ex-sweetie.

   Best of all is Alan Rickman, looking more than ever like a young Vincent Price, as the Maynard Krebbs to Kline’s love-happy Dobie Gillis.

BRICK. Focus Features, 2005. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan Frye, Nora Zehetner as Laura Dannon, Lukas Haas as the Pin, Noah Fleiss as Tug, Matt O’Leary as The Brain, Emilie de Ravin as Emily Kostich, Noah Segan as Dode, Richard Roundtree as Assistant V.P. Trueman, Meagan Good as Kara, Brian White as Brad Bramish. Written and directed by Rian Johnson.

   If there is or ever has been a category of films called “high school neo-noir” – or let’s put it this way, if there isn’t, there should be, even if there’s only one film in it, and that film would be this one, a small little gem called Brick.

   Emily, the former girl friend of Brendan, a loner if not loser in high school, has left him for the higher “societal” levels of that same institution, calls him and asks for help, giving him hints that she’s over her head, and she has gotten into serious trouble. But se gives him only hints as to what that trouble might be, using the words “pin,” “tug,” and “brick.”

   Soon enough she is telling him to back off, but of course he does not. Following her trail through paths that only those of us who have managed to survive high school, except that was then and this is now, Southern California style, Brendan does find her, but alone, dead, next to a ditch filled with water leading to (or from) a circular sewage tunnel.

      “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business.”

   And so is Brendan, whether he realizes it or not, a detective, as he (very painfully) struggles to avenge Emily’s death. This being a contemporary high school story (although not a single scene is filmed in a classroom) drugs are involved, and Brendan’s investigation leads straight to (and not through) the local kingpin of the local drug trade, as well as other well-hidden secrets, or so they thought.

   Most striking is the language, a local slang used in a combination of (yes) Dashiell Hammett and William Shakespeare, flowing like poetry in this small but ever expanding drama, and thanks to IMDb, I’ll finish the rest of the review by quoting some of it:

Brendan Frye: Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.

Laura Dannon: Do you trust me now?
Brendan Frye: Less than when I didn’t trust you before.

Brendan Frye: Emily said four words I didn’t know. Tell me if they catch. Brick?
The Brain: No.
Brendan Frye: Or Bad Brick?
The Brain: Nope.
Brendan Frye: Tug?
The Brain: Tug? Tug might be a drink, like milk and vodka, or something.
Brendan Frye: Poor Frisco?
The Brain: Frisco? Frisco Farr was a sophomore last year, real trash. Maybe had a class a week, I didn’t know him then, haven’t seen him around.
Brendan Frye: Pin?
The Brain: Pin. The Pin?
Brendan Frye: The Pin, yeah?
The Brain: The Pin is kinda a local spook story, you know, the King Pin.
Brendan Frye: Yeah, I’ve heard it.
The Brain: Same thing, he’s supposed to be old, like 26. Lives in town.
Brendan Frye: Dope runner, right?
The Brain: Big time. See the Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they’ll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said “Show your hands” if any of them’ve actually seen The Pin, you’d get a crowd of full pockets.
Brendan Frye: You think The Pin’s just a tale to take whatever heat?
The Brain: Hmm… So what’s first?
Brendan Frye: Show of hands.

Brendan Frye: Maybe I’ll just sit here and bleed at you.

Kara: You better be sure you wanna know what you wanna know.

Emily: Brendan, I know you’re mad at these people because you think I went away from you and went to them but, you need to start seeing it as my decision. Stop getting angry because where I want to be at, is different from where you want to be at.
Brendan Frye: Who fed you that line, Em?
Emily: Stop picking on Dode. He’s a good guy.
Brendan Frye: The pie house rat?
Emily: He’s a good friend.
Brendan Frye: So, what am I?
Emily: Yeah, I mean what are you? Just sitting back here, hating everyone? Who are you to judge anyone? God, I really loved you a lot. I couldn’t stand it. I had to get with people. I couldn’t have a life with you anymore.

Laura Dannon: Listen, you’re scratching at the wrong door. I didn’t know Em well enough to know what she was in. I just got wind of the downfall.
Brendan Frye: If you haven’t got a finger in Em’s troubles, why did her name get me into your rather exclusive party?
Laura Dannon: Keep up with me now. I don’t know, but it sounded like you did. And a body’s got a right to be curious. Now I’m not so sure.
Brendan Frye: Oh, put that body to bed. I don’t know a damn thing about whatever troubles and that works for me. Just in fun.
Laura Dannon: Coffee and Pie.
Brendan Frye: Coffee and Pie, Oh My?
Laura Dannon: You didn’t hear it from me.

PS. This is one outstanding movie.