THE ENFORCER. Warner Bros., 1951. Humphrey Bogart, Zero Mostel, Ted De Corsia, Everett Sloane. Directors: Bretaigne Windust, Raoul Walsh (the latter uncredited).

   I initially didn’t know exactly what to make of The Enforcer. It’s structured in such a way that a viewer could get lost in the proceedings. Not only are there flashbacks, but there are flashbacks within flashbacks and, if I am being honest, I found myself somewhat disappointed with the film by the halfway mark. But I am really glad I continued watching, because by the time this Humphrey Bogart movie wraps up, you realize that the intricate narrative structure does the story justice and then some.

   Directed by Bretaigne Windust (with the action sequences helmed by an uncredited Raoul Walsh), this picture stars Bogart as Ferguson, a crusading district attorney tasked with prosecuting Mendoza (Everett Sloane), the boss of a murder-for-hire syndicate. When his star witness, Rico (Ted De Corsia) falls to his death, he is forced to find another witness who could put Mendoza in the chair, and that’s where the aforementioned flashbacks come in.

   Ferguson begins to revisit the case and hopes to find some forgotten detail that could help him as the clock ticks down to the next day’s courtroom proceedings. As it turns out, there is one witness who can positively identify Mendoza for committing a years ago murder at an all night diner. Whether Ferguson can find and save her before the killers get to her provides the necessary suspense to keep the viewer engaged.

   One thing that irked me a little about the movie is how some of the toughest criminals in the murder-for-hire racket go completely soft as the first sign of trouble. Rico, the tough as nails ringleader of the outfit, becomes implausibly scared of Mendoza when he decides to testify against him.

The same goes for Zero Mostel’s character, Big Babe Lazick, who whimpers in police custody, and for hired killer Duke Malloy (Michael Tolan) whose teary confession to the cops is pivotal to how the investigation plays out.

   I get what the filmmakers were going for – namely, that Mendoza is such a ruthless man that even the hired killers who work for him are terrified of him – but it really doesn’t work to the film’s benefit.

   That said, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. The Enforcer reminded me somewhat of The Killers (1946). It’s not quite at that level. But it’s solid movie-making and benefits immensely from Bogart’s presence. I’m not quite sure that anyone else would have been as good in the role. Final note: a lot of crime movies from this era are erroneously called film noir. For what it’s worth, this one I think fits that category well. Thumbs up.

PLUNDER ROAD. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: Hubert Cornfield.

   This one is lean and mean and doesn’t take its sweet time in plunging the viewer into the action. The opening sequence, set on a dark rainy night, involves five masked men as they steal a shipment of US Mint gold from a train. This scene, as well as its immediate follow up, in which the bandits load their getaway trucks with the loot, is largely silent with very little dialogue to accompany it. It works well enough. Indeed, that much can be said for the entirety of Plunder Road. For what it is, namely a short, punchy crime film, it works well enough.

   Gene Raymond helms the cast as Eddie Harris, the ringleader of the outfit, whose cool demeanor helps him pull off an impossible heist. His cohorts are portrayed by Wayne Morris, Steven Ritch, Stafford Repp, and the always enjoyable-to-watch Elisha Cook whose character dreams of absconding to Rio with his young son.

   There’s not that much tension between the main characters, which is somewhat unusual and may contribute to a sense of the movie not quite clicking. As readers of this blog well know, more often than not films of this sort will have the criminals turning on each other. That’s not what happens here. It’s more bad luck or their own guilt that gives them away.

   What else to say? I particularly appreciated the on location shooting, be it the California highways or, in the last fifteen minutes of the film, gritty Los Angeles. Speaking of the last fifteen minutes, a new character is introduced quite close to the end of the movie. Jeanne Cooper portrays Fran, Eddie’s   girl. There’s an argument to be had that she should have been introduced earlier. Then again, this is a 72 minute film without much padding.

TWISTED. Paramount Pictures, 2004. Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Andy García. Director: Philip Kaufman.

   Apparently people don’t like this movie very much. In fact, it currently has a 2% positive – that’s right two percent positive – rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The question then becomes: is it really that bad? My resounding answer is no. Not at all.

   Directed by Philip Kaufman, whose work I generally admire, Twisted is a paranoid thriller in which newly minted San Francisco detective Jessica Shepard (Ashley Judd) finds herself in a precarious position. Her lovers and one-night stands alike are turning up dead with cigarette burns on their hands.

   This is especially traumatic, given her parents’ death in a murder-suicide years ago. Luckily, she has a mentor in Police Commissioner John Mills (Samuel L. Jackson). But whom can she really trust? Her new partner (Andy Garcia), her psychiatrist (David Strathairn), and her ex-boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino) all seem like viable suspects. Eventually, Shepard (Judd) begins to doubt her own sanity and casts suspicion on herself.

   The main problem – and it’s a glaring one – with Twisted is that its resolution really doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s cheap and tawdry and strains credulity to the nth degree. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the movie is worthless. It’s an extremely watchable lowbrow sleazefest with a coterie of great character actors and a director who did his best with the deeply flawed source material.

   How’s that for a recommendation?
   

JO PAGANO – Die Screaming. Zenith ZB-4, paperback, 1958. Published earlier as The Condemned (Prentice-Hall, hardcover, 1947), and by Perma Star 286, paperback, 1954. Film: The Sound of Fury (United Artists, 1950), re-released as Try and Get Me.

   A little gem I recently picked up almost by accident is Jo Pagano’s Die Screaming, which was filmed in 1950 as Try and Get Me. I exaggerated just then for dramatic effect. Die Screaming is the Cheapo-house paperback reprint title of a work which was originally (and rather uninspiredly) titled The Condemned. And the title of the movie was originally (equally pretentious) The Sound of Fury. Fortunately for both book and movie, trashier heads prevailed.

   Content-wise, they both book and film are intelligently done, but marred by attempts to pump Social Significance into their slender frames. Howard Tyler, broke, married with child, hard-working but jobless and luckless (well-played in the film by Frank Lovejoy) hooks up with smart guy Jerry Slocum and ends up pulling a few quick robberies.

   As Howard flounders in bewilderment, the robberies turn into kidnapping and murder: Movie and book both brilliantly describe Howard’s total inability to come to grips with what has happened. Overwhelmed with guilt and fear, totally incapable of hiding his emotions from his family or even from strangers on the street, he seems like some vividly-drawn, well-tortured animal.

   Unfortunately, both book and movie dissipate the energy of all this with endings that come off as self-important and preachy. But while the ride lasts, it has its moments. I particularly liked the intelligent writing that went into the Jerry Slocum character, played in the film by Lloyd Bridges. (An actor, it seems, who came to Hollywood too late. In an expanding film industry, he could have been another Dan Duryea.)  The implicit sexuality of his dominance over Howard is cunningly conveyed in meaningless little requests that somehow sound like orders.

   When I talk (as I often do) of the way cheap books and B-movies sometimes surprise one with the care and thoughtfulness that goes into them, I’m talking about efforts like Die Screaming.

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.
    

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   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.