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.

THE THIRD KEY. J. Arthur Rank / Ealing Studios, UK, 1956. Original title: The Long Arm. J ack Hawkins, John Stratton, Dorothy Alison, Michael Brooke, Sam Kydd, Glyn Houston. Director: Charles Frend.

   A business in Westminster is burgled, and when the police arrive they are greeted by a nightwatchman. The safe has been opened with a key and its contents stolen. The following day, however, it emerges that the nightwatchman was actually the thief in disguise, and the real nightwatchman is in hospital with a burst appendix. Superintendent Tom Halliday (Jack Hawkins) and his new Detective Sergeant Ward (John Stratton) begin their hunt for the fraud.

   With the help of his boss and friend Chief Superintendent Jim Malcolm (Geoffrey Keen), Halliday discovers that there have been more than a dozen safe-breaking jobs all across Britain, with each involving the same make of safe.

   With no suspects at the manufacturer, the case seems to have reached a dead end, until the thief strikes again and an innocent bystander is killed with the getaway car. The vehicle is later found in a scrapyard, inside of which lies a newspaper that leads Halliday and Ward all the way to Snowdonia, North Wales, and a Mr Gilson, a deceased former employee of the safe manufacturer.

   The pair discover that there are twenty-eight identical safes in London. The most lucrative haul will come from one that is located at the Royal Festival Hall, where a trap is duly set for the thief…

   This mid-fifties police procedural plays like an ever so slightly grittier episode of Dixon of Dock Green, with always-reliable Jack Hawkins, famous at the time for playing resolute men of sturdy, sensible authority, as the investigating officer. An almost documentary style keeps this part of the realist school of detective drama, with only occasional moments of gentle humour, mostly between Halliday and his new sidekick, who, in a running gag that’s more of a leisurely stroll, is forever interested in getting off work to see his girlfriend.

   The cast is made up of dependable stalwarts of the era, with the likes of Geoffrey Keen (so often excellent in these sort of roles, who sometimes got the chance himself of playing the main detective in lower-budgeted B-films), Sydney Tafler (a big favourite of mine, here playing a character named ‘Creasey’, presumably because of big-name crime writer of the time John Creasey), and Ralph Truman.

   Ian Bannen also appears as the victim of the hit and run, to whom Halliday somewhat insensitively questions while on his death bed, and would go on to play the lead role in the amiable Scottish farce Waking Ned over forty years later.

   A bunch of other actors with walk-on roles, such as Stafford Johns, would go on to appear as police officers again in the rather more grim Z Cars and Softly, Softly, a dramatic direction which would lead to The Sweeney and everything else that makes The Third Key now seem antiquated and, despite its efforts at realism, a little unsophisticated.

   That’s probably ungenerous, as middle-class police investigating mostly non-violent crimes is no less realistic than cockney, blue-collar police chasing rapists, but it nonetheless feels more genteel when you have Hawkins’ wife fussing about him being late for tea.

   She is, by the way, one of only three women to be given any meaningful role, out of five who appear in the whole film, while most of the cast are middle-class, middle-aged men, with the only ones left over being a street-seller hawking his wares, and Nicholas Parsons as a beat constable.

   In fact, thanks to a scene in which Halliday’s son has a birthday party, and another in which a young urchin played by Frazer Hines (of ‘60s Doctor Who and evergreen rural soap Emmerdale) offers a significant lead, there are several more prepubescent boys in the film than women.

   Much of which you have to accept with a picture of this vintage, not least as these glimpses into a bygone era are often so interesting, with the location work in particular standing out. The narrative itself may seem a little ho-hum, with the only action being an exciting finale in which Hawkins grips recklessly to the bonnet of an escaping car (the idea of handcuffing the villain not having occurred to the experienced detective).

   The film isn’t long, and more focused and markedly less grim than its spiritual successor Gideon’s Day a couple of years later, in which Hawkins plays another Scotland Yard man struggling to juggle serious police work with his home life and family. The main difference there is that he has a teenage daughter instead of a young son, and his wife is rather less worried about him.

Rating: ***

LARCENY, INC. Warner Bros., 1952.  95 min. Edward G. Robinson, Broderick Crawford, Jane Wyman, Jack Carson, Edward Brophy, Anthony Quinn, Harry Davenport, John Qualen, Grant Mitchell, Barbara Jo Allen, Jackie C. Gleason. Based on the play The Night Before Christmas by Laura and S. J. Perelman.  Director: Lloyd Bacon.

         “Weepy, I don’t like the idea of going into a bank through the front door.”

   Edward G. plays J. Chalmers Maxwell, known to his associates as “Pressure.” He and his not-so-bright pal Jug Martin (played to lunk-headed perfection by the greatly underrated Broderick Crawford) have just been released from prison and plan to go straight. All they need is some money to buy a dog track in Florida, but when Pressure applies for a loan at the bank. he is turned down — the “c” word: collateral. (Those were the days when bankers actually considered such things.)

   Pressure figures that to get the dough he needs for his enterprise, why he’ll just have to extract it from the very bank that turned down his application, nyah. But he’ll need a cover and finds it in a luggage shop located right next door. He buys the shop, not realizing until later that he has acquired a cash cow.

   Oddly enough, in spite of a plethora of criminals, some with guns, nobody dies in this movie.

   The entire cast is great, but this is still very much Edward G.’s show.
   

GUNS, GIRLS AND GANGSTERS. United Artists, 1959. Mamie Van Doren, Gerald Mohr, Lee Van Cleef, Grant Richards, Elaine Edwards, John Baer, Paul Fix. Director: Edward L. Cahn. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   A heist movie, and everyone reading this knows exactly how heist movies, go, if not having possible scripts already in mind and ready to go, if only someone would come along and offer you the money to start filming it tomorrow. In this one, Gerald Mohr’s character has just been released from prison and has a armored car hijacking all figured out.

   He hooks up with a night club owner (Grant Richards) who could use a sizable cut of the loot (somewhere in the two million range) to help finance the robbery. Working for Richards is a singer (Mamie Van Doren) who, as it happens, is/was (I’m not clear on this point) married to Mohr’s cellmate (Lee Van Cleef), who is still in prison.

   I won’t go into how the heist goes wrong, but the movie certainly picks up its rather slow and sluggish pace when Van Cleef breaks out of prison, even with only a few months before he is due for a parole. Livens the movie right up, it does.

   Unfortunately, while Gerald Mohr had a great tough-sounding voice for radio (Philip Marlowe), he has been rather stiff in any of the movies I’ve ever seen him in. Mamie Van Doren is always easy to look at, but in this movie her voice is harsh and bitter-sounding. Lee Van Cleef’s eyes brighten up with glee whenever he can do some damage to whatever the plot is that he’s walked in on, and he walks away with full acting honors in this otherwise lackluster black-and-white crime film.

BULLET SCARS. Warner Bros. / First National, 1942. Regis Toomey, Adele Longmire, Howard Da Silva, Ben Welden, William Hopper (uncredited). Director: D. Ross Lederman. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below).

   The plot of this one is definitely second-hand, if not third. When the members of the Frank Dillon gang hold up a small town bank, one of the thieves is shot and seriously wounded. They need a doctor for him right away. They kill the first one, who gets too wise too quickly. The second one, played by Regis Toomey, is a lot slower on the uptake, and agrees to operate (brain surgery, no less) is a small cabin in the mountains, with only a nurse (the wounded man’s sister, but under duress herself) to assist.

   As I say, Dr. Bishop may be a whiz at the operating table, but then again, he’s the kind of guy who’s interested in doctoring and doing research and never listens to the news. It is Nurse Madison (sharp-featured and pretty brunette Adele Longmire) breaks the news to him, they both realize that they have to keep the patient alive, or else. Complicating matters is that Dillon, whose mob it is (Howard Da Silva) is sweet on Nurse Madison. (She does not reciprocate the feelings.)

   In spite of the well-worn plot, the cast is fine, the pacing is marred only by one of the hoods always whining comically about his health, and the ending has a lot of firepower – at least ten minutes’ worth. This was female star Adele Longmire’s first film, and while more than satisfactory in the role, she didn’t make another movie or TV appearance for another six years, with no more than a dozen additional credits on IMDb after that. And even though William Hopper was on the screen very early on (as a bank teller) for only maybe two or three seconds, I think I recognized him, but only because I went looking.