NOOSE. Pathé Pictures International, UK, 1948. Monogram Pictures, US, 1950, as The Silk Noose. Carole Landis, Joseph Calleia, Derek Farr, Stanley Holloway and Nigel Patrick. Screenplay: Richard Llewellyn. Director: Edmond T. Greville.

   An enjoyably lop-sided thing in which disparate elements (nasty gangsters, snappy dialogue, dead women, comedy, torture, slapstick, guilt, laughter) work against each other throughout to produce a film that is actually quite fun to watch.

   Carole Landis, in her penultimate film, stars as a plucky gal reporter of the Lois Lane school, working for the fashion department of a great metropolitan (London) newspaper, who tumbles onto the startling fact that there is Vice going on in town and someone’s making money off it.

   Dampened by her editor, deprecated by her fiancé and daunted by gangland, our heroine promptly smashes the rackets in about an hour and a half, with the assistance of her ex-commando boyfriend (Derek Farr) a bunch of his mates down at the boxing gymnasium, and the bemused gaze of Stanley Holloway as a crusty cop.

   I know it all sounds like pretty standard stuff but Noose is a film that has to be seen to be appreciated. Richard Llewellyn’s (yes, that Richard Llewellyn’s) dialogue carries a pleasant bite, and director Greville moves the action along at a nice clip, pausing long enough to savor a bite of suspenseful unpleasantness or evoke a slice of character, then moving right along.

   He does particularly well by Joseph Calleia as a gangland mastermind complete with a nasty personal assassin known as “the Barber” who scuttles about like some sort of loathsome land-bound crab with a perpetual and unsettling leer. And the fact that this nasty toad is played by the comedic Shakespearean trouper Hay Petrie only adds to the cachet.

   You may gather from the above that Noose is a grim exercise in Gangland procedure, and you’d be quite right; there are some bits of suspense and sadism that match anything you’re likely to see in American film noir. Imagine my surprise then when the story wraps up in a burst of farcical slapstick so silly one looks around for the Three Stooges to show up. It doesn’t spoil the film by any means, but it does edge it closer to Monty Python than Mickey Spillane.

   A few more points that deserve to be outed:

   One seldom praises the editing in a film because when it’s really good, editing goes unnoticed. But here it calls attention to itself with brassy charm as editor David Newhouse (who only did one other film) keeps changing scene by cutting from one moving figure to another moving in the same direction, or from one image to its mirror-twin, polishing the flashy narrative even brighter. One notices the editing in Noose and appreciates it.

   Then there’s Nigel Patrick as Calleia’s second-in-command, delivering a perfect performance in such a well-written part that at times it quite overbalances the whole film, and no one cares. Words can’t do it justice; you just have to see Patrick strutting about like a wind-up toy barking out staccato tongue-twisters to fall in love with him.

   And finally mention must be made of an actress in another throw-away part, Carol van Derman as a momentary object of Calliea’s attentions. She spends several minutes toward the end of this film stepping about in her step-ins, and she’s rather good at it.

WILBUR DANIEL STEELE – The Way to the Gold. Doubleday, hardcover, 1955. No paperback edition.

THE WAY TO THE GOLD. 20th Century Fox, 1957. Jeffrey Hunter, Sheree North, Barry Sullivan, Walter Brennan, Neville Brand, Jacques Aubuchon, Ruth Donnelly. Based on the novel by Wilbur Daniel Steele. Director: Robert D. Webb.

   Buried somewhere deep inside the three hundred and seventy-five pages of Wilbur Daniel Steele’s The Way to the Gold, there’s a taut adventure tale screaming to get out, and it’s just too bad it didn’t make it, poor thing.

   The story starts out like a Gold Medal Original, with Joe Mundy, a young loner embittered beyond his years, jailed for a killing he never done. Joe’s cell mate turns out to be legendary outlaw Ned Glaze, the last of the old-time train robbers, who still holds secret the hiding place of his last haul, a hundred thousand in gold taken in a heist that cost the lives of his partners.

   And over the course of about a hundred pages we get to where we knew we were going all along: Joe is a free man, out of jail and on his way to the gold.

   Things, of course, just ain’t that simple. Joe’s passport to the small town where the loot is stashed turns out to be a genial, cherubic and very mysterious character named Hannibal, and Joe very quickly finds himself parked in a boarding house populated with surviving relatives of Ned Glaze’s old gang, who seem to think they have a claim on the money. There’s also a hard-boiled waitress with a soft spot for embittered loners and a tough-but-friendly cop who’s clearly got cards he ain’t showing.

   Steele takes these promising characters, and over the course of the next hundred-and-some pages, does nothing very much with them as Joe and the story get swallowed up in the trivia of getting along in a small town. And I mean “trivia”. And I mean “swallowed” as The Way to the Gold seems to lose its way somewhere in a novel of suburban life in the mid-50s.

   By the time we actually get on our way to the gold, a couple hundred more pages have grunted their way past in constipated movement — at which point we get to where I suspected we were headed all along, and if you didn’t see it coming a long ways back, you just wasn’t looking.

   Two years later, Twentieth Century Fox turned this into nothing more than a run-of-the-mill movie with a low-voltage cast, but they did rather well by it. Direction was entrusted to Robert D. Webb, whose films were never all that memorable, but the writing chores were handed to one Wendell Mayes, a writer whose name should be better known.

   Mayes was responsible for blockbusters like The Poseidon Adventure and The Spirit of St. Louis, but he also brought in smaller, quirkier efforts like The Hanging Tree and From Hell to Texas in fine form.

   Here he trims away the fat and returns the story to Gold Medal Original country, where it really always belonged. Gone is the minutia of small town life and endless domestic complications, replaced by a tight, fast-moving narrative that still takes time to appreciate the characters.

   Jeffrey Hunter comes off well as bitter, untrusting Joe Mundy, played off against Sheree North in full Kim-Novak-mode as the hard-boiled waitress. Barry Sullivan shows off his type-cast toughness as a local lawman who seems too smart to be hanging around this one-whore town, but pride of place must go to the family of dim-wit bad guys, winnowed down to four by writer Mayes, and perfectly realized by Walter Brennan as a senile old crackpot, Ruth Donnelly as a matriarch in the Lady Macbeth mode, Neville Brand as the brawn of the outfit, and especially Jacques Aubuchon, a busy actor you never heard of, absolutely perfect as the totally inadequate “brains” of the gang.

   Given Maye’s ability to impart fast touches of character, and director Webb’s gift for getting out of the way, this cast runs quite capably with a story that really moves, somehow giving the impression that there are real people involved in this paperback plot and bringing things to a fast, satisfying conclusion. The Way to the Gold turns out as a fun thing to watch and a film much much better than its source.

LURED. United Artists, 1947. George Sanders. Lucille Ball, Charles Coburn. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, George Zucco, Joseph Calleia, Alan Mowbray, Robert Coote, Alan Napier. Screenplay by Leo Rosten. Story by Jacques Companéez, Simon Gantillion & Ernest Neuville. Directed by Douglas Sirk.

   Douglas Sirk’s name is primarily associated with a series of glossy brilliant soap operas made in the 1950’s such as Written on the Wind, Tarnished Angels, and All That Heaven Allows, but before turning to these lush technicolor films the European Sirk produced three droll crime films: A Scandal in Paris with George Sanders as the thief turned policeman Eugene Francois Vidocq, Summer Smoke again with George Sanders and based on Anton Chekhov’s short novel The Shooting Party, and this, Lured.

   The setting is post war London where the city is paralyzed by a series of murders of young women who all answered ads in the agony column of the London Times. After each killing the murderer sends a taunting poem to Scotland Yard daring them to catch him.

   Inspector Harley Temple (Charles Coburn) is in a bad mood, because so far his investigation is getting nowhere, but when he meets Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball), the best friend of the latest victim, he has a bright idea. What if he turned the killers method of meeting his victims against him — set a trap for him with an attractive lure — and Sandra Carpenter a smart savvy American showgirl is the perfect lure.

   George Zucco is the sardonic Officer Barrett assigned as Ball’s bodyguard. She will answer the ads, meet the men who sent them, and when the killer shows his hand Barrett will pounce.

   After a couple of false starts, including a fine performance by Boris Karloff as a mad dress designer, they get their first real lead, Robert Fleming, a nightclub producer and impresario whose shows Ball had been trying to get into from the beginning.

   But the game is complicated when Ball starts to fall for Sanders even though she has been warned by his business partner Julian Wilde (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), and he fits the bill of the killer all too well.

   Ball resigns, convinced Sanders is innocent, but then a turn convinces her she was wrong, he is arrested, and then the real killer makes his move …

   Coburn is a pleasure as the Inspector, and Zucco, fine in a rare comic performance, is a droll delight. In fact Zucco comes near stealing every scene he appears in, which is no easy thing because Ball is not only beautiful, but holds the screen with real star power.

   If you ever thought George Sanders would be an odd match for Lucille Ball you’d be wrong. They are a perfectly matched romantic pair here, and Sirk builds some real suspense because even cast as the hero Sanders had played so many villains it was no sure thing which side he would turn out to be on.

   The word that best defines this movie is droll. The screenplay by Leo Rosten is sharp (Dark Corner, Captain Newman MD, Where Danger Lives, Silky …), and the cast is a fine collection of character actors from the Hollywood Raj. It’s the kind of film where the smallest performance is perfectly timed and delivered.

   Comedy, romance, and suspense are expertly blended in this one. Sirk’s notable cinematic eye never lets the viewer down and a fine cast are all at their best.

   Still even among that fine cast. Lucille Ball and George Zucco are standouts and even if it is little more than a bit, it is nice to see Boris Karloff in a first class production having a bit of fun on screen.

   These three films were impossible to see for many years, but A Scandal in Paris and Lured have been issued in handsome DVD’s from Kino Video and both have played on TCM. Summer Storm was released on DVD by VCI in 2009 and is worth obtaining since it contains fine performances by Sanders and Edward Everett Horton as nineteenth century Russian noblemen caught up in a crime of passion.

SHADOW OF THE LAW. Paramount Pictures, 1930. William Powell, Marion Shilling, Natalie Moorhead, Regis Toomey, Paul Hurst, George Irving, Frederick Burt. Screenwriter John Farrow, based on the novel The Quarry by John A. Moroso (Little, Brown, 1913). Director: Louis Gasnier.

   Back in 1922 a man named Robert Elliott Burns was sentenced to hard labor on a Georgia chain gang for his part in an armed robbery that netted him and two other men less than six dollars. Probably only Steve and Walter are old enough to remember, but Burns escaped from the chain gang and made a new life for himself under another name, eventually becoming a prominent businessman in Chicago and something of a celebrity when his wife (who had been blackmailing him) betrayed him to the law after getting a cash settlement from him in exchange for a divorce.

   Burns could have fought extradition but agreed to return to Georgia when corrections officials there promised him quick release after some nominal service. Instead, they reneged on their promise and he was returned to the chain gang for “extra attention” from the guards, with no release in sight. Eventually Burns escaped again and wrote I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (Vanguard, 1932), which finally secured his freedom.

   Burns is best remembered for the movie made from his book, but his personal story seems to have been much on the mind of John Farrow, screenwriter of the film Shadow of the Law, which appeared a full two years before I Am a Fugitive hit the bookstands and movie screens.

   The story in Shadow of the Law is slightly changed, but the essential elements are there: William Powell stars as a decent if amorous gentleman who gets in a scrape over a lady (perennial vamp Natalie Moorhead) and ends up accidentally killing a man—whereupon Ms. Moorhead, fearing scandal or worse, promptly decamps, leaving Powell with no witness to clear him of a murder charge that sends him to prison.

   A few years later, Powell is a hardened-enough convict to pal up with a thief (well played by Paul Hurst) and exploit the warden’s trust in him to break out of jail. When we next see him, he has become a highly-placed executive, respected by the workers in his factory and engaged to the owner’s daughter — but determined to find Moorhead and clear his name.

   He does eventually find her, or rather Hurst does, but she proves smarter than Hurst thought and more avaricious than Powell suspected, leading to some plot twists both melodramatic and highly entertaining.

   In fact, the writing and direction (by Louis Gasnier) in Shadow keeps the story right on its edge, offering some juicy plot twists and a couple of suspenseful moments, one of which – as I realized what Powell was going to do to himself and watched him calmly set about it — I swear made my skin crawl. Director Gasnier is not well known as an auteur (unless you count Reefer Madness) but his work here shows a stylishness and pace perfectly suited to the subject.

LOVE CRIME. French; original title: Crime d’amour, 2010. Ludvine Siegneur, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillame Marquet. Directed by Alain Corneau, also co-screenwriter with Natalie Carter.

   Love Crime may seem like a leisurely suspense film at the beginning, and granted it takes its time to establish the two main characters, but once it kicks into gear it is a fascinating character study with enough twists and turns to keep any fan of suspense films happy.

   Kristin Scott Thomas has a showy role as Christine, a ruthless bisexual female executive who becomes mentor to the rather mousy Isabelle (Ludvine Siegneur). The sexual tension between them is obvious, and Siegneur, while shy, is not all that reluctant to be seduced. It becomes obvious this won’t end well early on.

   Siegneur seems to slowly blossom under Thomas’s guidance, until things go south when Thomas sends Siegneur to Cairo on an important business trip. Siegneur seduces Thomas’s lover (Phillipe Mille), and pulls off a triumphant business coup that is certain to insure her quick movement up the corporate ladder.

   Then Thomas takes all the credit for Siegneur’s coup.

   A relentless no holds barred competition begins between the two women, played out in the boardroom and the bedroom. Blackmail, humiliation, and extortion all play a role in the game between them until Siegneur finds herself publicly humiliated by Thomas and firmly under her thumb again.

   Aided unwittingly by her Iago, her assistant Daniel (Marquet in a perfectly under played performance), Siegneur begins a ruthless plan of revenge, but it seems more mad than anything else. Humiliated, she spins out of control into uppers and downers and what becomes increasingly obviously a plan to murder Thomas and doing her best to frame herself.

   When she does murder Thomas, she even draws the first three letters of her name in Thomas’s blood. She is arrested and the police all too easily follow her self-incriminating trail. Still heavily drugged, Siegneur confesses. The film seems to be over, having driven itself into a wall.

   I can’t say much more about the plot without giving too much away, but all is carefully unraveled as Siegneur’s true/false trail by turns leads the police in unsuspected directions. One by one as each pawn falls and each part of Siegneur’s plan is revealed, this worm-turns tale slowly reveals just how much the viewer as well as everyone else has been played by Siegneur from the beginning. She gives new definition to the term passive-aggressive.

   Love Crime is handsomely shot in beautiful color and on sleek modern sets, and moves at such a deliberate pace you may not recognize this is the model of classic film noir, with two femme fatale’s in a cat and mouse game that mid-film turns into a Simenon psychological suspense story with enough twists for Agatha Christie.

   It won’t be until the very last scene and the very last moment you realize how well you have been played, and how important that deliberation was to the final outcome of this clever film. Despite the two female leads don’t mistake this for a “woman’s” picture on Joan Crawford lines. This film is as hard and unsentimental a film as you will ever see.

   The cast is uniformly good, but it is Siegneur and Thomas who carry the film and without either character ever becoming a really sympathetic character. Both have obvious personality problems and possibly borderline personality disorders. At one point in the film you will be convinced Siegneur is mentally unbalanced, a sociopath with an unhealthy obsession with Thomas. It’s not until the end you even begin to suspect the truth.

   If you stay with this film you will find at the end you enjoyed it much more than you thought, and may even want to watch it again, to see if you can catch the places you were played, mislead, and bamboozled by the intelligent script. This film has the courage to ask you to stick with it, and rewards that effort with a final moment that will leave you frostbitten.

   Love Crime was remade by Brian de Palma as Passion in 2012 with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. Despite that cast and a co-script by the screenwriter Natalie Carter, skip it and see the original, Corneau’s last film and a worthy one.

SHERWOOD KING – If I Die Before I Wake. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1938. Mystery Novel of the Month #16, digest-sized paperback, [1940]. Ace Double D9, paperback, 1953 (published back-to-back with Decoy, by Michael Morgan). Curtis 7154, paperback, 1965.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Columbia Pictures, 1947. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders. Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake, by Sherwood KIng. Director: Orson Welles.

   Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake offers an intriguing premise: Laurence Planter is something of a footloose jack-of-some-trades marking time, as the story starts, as a chauffeur to criminal attorney Mark Bannister and his trophy wife Elsa. He also spends a lot of time running Bannister’s partner Grisby back and forth from the Bannister house to the office.

   It’s on one of those runs that Grisby offers Laurence five thousand dollars to commit murder — the murder of Grisby himself.

   It’s a neat book, with an even neater twist to it: Grisby wants to fake his death by having witnesses see Laurence walk to the end of a dark pier with him, hear a shot and see Laurence come back alone. But no corpse will be found — Laurence can’t (he thinks) be charged with murder, but Grisby will (he thinks) be legally dead.

   And the scheme seems to work quite nicely until Laurence goes through with it and signs a confession,only to have Grisby’s body turn up after all — very very murdered.

   As I say, it’s a clever hook for a story, and Cornell Woolrich could have made a nightmarish classic of it, but Sherwood King just lets it lie there with the sharp end sticking up. There’s not much action in the story and very little movement at all, as if King were too lazy to describe new locations for us. Instead,he opens the tale with awkward dialogue, then gets bogged down in a lengthy trial scene capped off with a resolution that’s all talk. And so another good idea misfires.

   But wait….

   The story goes that in 1946 Orson Welles was trying to raise money from Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, and during a desperate conversation in a drugstore phone booth his eye fell upon a paperback book he’d never read and he suddenly convinced Cohn it would make a great movie, which he could direct and star in with his then-wife, Columbia’s leading lady Rita Hayworth.

   Well, it’s a nice story and it may even be true, despite reports that Columbia already owned If I Die Before I Wake and was planning to have contract director William Castle make it as a B movie. (It would have made a good entry in the Whistler series.)

   Whatever the case, Welles took the basic plot and most of the details and turned The Lady from Shanghai (its new title) into his most enjoyable film, a tricky, fast-moving, witty, careening ride form Central Park, through Acapulco (some of this was filmed on board Errol Flynn’s yacht) to San Francisco’s Chinatown, culminating in a visual tour-de-force: the shoot-out in a hall of mirrors where, as one critic noted, the characters have to come face-to-face with themselves before meeting their end.

   Welles plays the hero like a young Falstaff, lustful, charming, and all too aware of his own fecklessness. He’s abetted by Rita Hayworth as the duplicitous wife — though he doesn’t give his then-wife much to do. I’ve seen her more effective in the hands of lesser directors — but the films is helped along splendidly by Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders as lawyers Bannister and Grisby.

   Except for a part in Tarzan’s Peril, I never heard of Glenn Anders before and after this film, and he reportedly had an awful time making it, but his performance as Grisby is one of high points of the American Cinema: sweaty, smiling, whiny and worming, he seems so devoid of humanity — of perhaps so excessively human — that you can’t figure out why no one ever killed him before the picture started.

   His performance complements Welles’ visual excesses perfectly, and I’ve always thought it an overlooked gem in a treasure-trove of a film.

THE BIG HEAT. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan, Peter Whitney. Based on the novel by William P. McGivern. Director: Fritz Lang.

   This one preceded Human Desire, which came out in 1954, with the same two stars (Ford and Grahame), the same director, and if you were to ask me which one I like better, I’m not sure I can tell you.

   This is the one that’s freshest in my mind, however, so right now I’d probably give it the edge. While The Big Heat is not a movie without flaws, it has a lot of things going for it: atmosphere (crime and corruption in a big city), a plot that takes some interesting twists and turns, and some good performances, especially by Gloria Grahame as a gangster’s girl who dies in the end, with Glenn Ford playing the homicide detective who’s trying to run the city’s crime boss to earth.

   Lee Marvin, in what must have been an early film for him, also makes a strong impression as the sadistic hoodlum who takes great pleasure in burning and tormenting women. Surprisingly, its Glenn Ford himself who seems rather innocuous and bland, as if to say there is nothing interesting to say about knights in white armor.

   Villains, or at least those with pasts they are trying vaguely to shed (such as Gloria Grahame’s character) turn out, as often as not, to be the ones that stories revolve around. Ford’s character, while suffering a great deal of anguish and pain, as long as he’s as incorruptible as he is here, really doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

MAKE MINE MINK. The Rank Organisation, 1960. Terry Thomas, Athene Seyler, Billie Whitelaw, Hattie Jacques, Elspeth Duxbury, Jack Hedley, Raymond Huntley, Kenneth Williams. Screenplay: Peter Blackmore, Michael Pertwee, Peter Coke (his play A Breath of Scandal). Director: Robert Asher.

   Mannish Miss Parry (Hattie Jacques) complaining about her buxom student, in a low cut blouse, not being ready for her debut in society: “She’s coming out next week and she’s not ready.”

   Major Rayne (Terry Thomas) face to face with the young lady’s cleavage: “It looks to me as if she’s already come out.”

   That sums up British comedies of this era, and the mix of droll wit, music-hall vulgarity, satirical barbs, and affectionate jape that mark the typical British comedy from the post war era on. Faced with Little Britain as the empire came apart and the economy struggled to rebuild; the British comedy came into a golden era not unlike the romantic and screwball comedies this side of the pond in the wake of the Depression. Hard times seem to be good for comedy.

   Major Rayne, Miss Parry, and Miss Pinkerton (Elspeth Duxbury) are boarders in the flat owned by Dame Beatrice (Athene Seyler) and kept in some line by Lily (Billie Whitelaw) the ex-con maid. Dame Beatrice doesn’t really charge what she should, and spends her time funding her favorite charities while neglecting herself. She doesn’t even have a new coat.

   Which is why when the arguing neighbors throw out a mink stole Lily picks it up — via Major Rayne’s fishing line. Dame Beatrice is pleased but horrified, and enlists Major Rayne, Miss Parry, and the nervous flighty Miss Pinkerton to return the fur after an attractive young policeman (Jack Hedley) shows up asking about furs.

   The Major (he was in the vital business of providing tea time to the troops) plans the campaign, and each is assigned a role. And despite a spate of miscalculations and miscommunication they succeed, returning the fur and even convincing the neighbor his senile mother in law had the fur all along.

   And they have a fine time doing it.

   That may be why when Dame Beatrice reveals she can no longer care for her numerous charities or continue their residence the four proto-felons begin to think in terms of heisting furs for fun and profit.

   Of course it might have helped if Lily wasn’t curious what was going on and dating that attractive young policeman Jim Benham.

   With the plot in motion the cheerful quartet set themselves increasingly difficult heists (always complicated by the exasperating Miss Pinkerton’s shambled nerves) until police and press are spreading sensational accounts of the daring criminal gang pulling off fur heists all over London. None of them actually work right, but somehow all of them are successful.

   There are other complications. Turning those furs into money being the first one. Just how does one find a fence? Major Rayne tries his hand at a rough club in the East End whose name he pried out of Lily (in a leggy funny awkwardly sexy scene where she thinks he is coming on to her after her shower) by claiming he was writing a novel (she was so relieved she would have told him anything).

   That excursion into the underworld is a fine little set piece of misunderstanding with Thomas waving Dame Beatrice’s pearls about and drawing absolutely no attention. And the reason is frustratingly apt.

   They do find a fence though — Dane Beatrice’s fashionable nephew the Hon. Freddie (Kenneth Williams much less broad than in his Carry On persona) who is delighted at the old girl’s new career — he even invites her to his casino night — all the best people, and the gang’s next target. Which gets really complicated when the police raid for real in the middle of the gang’s fake raid.

   Meanwhile Lily has found them out and is horrified. She even plans to take the blame and get the others off when Inspector Pape (Raymond Huntley) shows up the next morning with her young man in tow asking questions.

   Needless to say the ending is happy, Lily has her man, and the gang got away with it and learned their lesson swearing to never steal furs again. But Lily’s young man did mention to Dame Beatrice the police home for foundlings is desperately in need of help.

   And after all they only swore not to steal furs …

   I’ve always preferred Terry Thomas when his brash British snobbery and self satisfaction were combined with a bit of humanity and even reluctant humility. Fine as he was as dastardly cads, there was more there, and in films like this he was more than a cartoon. Good as he was in Snidely Whiplash mode, he could do more when he got the chance (A Matter of W.H.O.).

   Athene Seyler was a gifted veteran at the slightly dizzy grand dame game, and having the wonderful Hattie Jacques and Elspeth Duxbury in a single film is a coup. They were among the best the distaff side of British comedy had to offer at that point, and all three are at their bests here.

   Now Billie Whitelaw … yes, Billie Whitelaw … I don’t know what it is about Billie Whitelaw, she’s attractive, but not a sex bomb; she has a nice figure and very nice legs, but not exceptional; yet there’s that voice — a little husky with a hint of whiskey-throated seduction there; and that look — the Billie Whitelaw look — could melt glaciers; and there is just something in the way she walks, moves, even stands that is just plain sexy. Not all that long ago she showed up in one of the last seasons of The Last of the Summer Wine, and she hadn’t lost a whit if it.

   Did I mention Billie Whitelaw …?

   Make Mine Mink may not be at the level of the best of the Ealing comedies, but very close, more broadly observed than some of the legendary films of that era, but for that a very very funny caper film both gentle and barbed, sweet and a bit sexy, silly and rather touching. No it isn’t The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers, Tight Little Island, or The Titchfield Thunderbolt, but it is a delight, a romp, and a wonderful evening of sly humor and even belly laughs.

   Make mine Make Mine Mink.

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT. 20th Century Fox, 1946. John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte, Josephine Hutchinson, Fritz Kortner, Sheldon Leonard, Lou Nova, with Jeff Corey, Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, and John Russell. Screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz & Howard Dimsdale; adapted by Lee Strasberg, based on a story by Marvin Borowsky. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.

   The Red Scare of the post war era kept this terrific noir film from 20th Century Fox off television and forgotten for years thanks to the blacklist, and even today it is one of the harder major noir outings to find and one better known by genre historians than film fans.

   That’s despite the fact this one has everything, including a private eye, a sympathetic cop, a nightclub chanteuse with a husky voice, an amoral fat man, his brutal henchman, a haunted woman with a failing mind, a sanitarium where a madman holds the clue to the mystery, and a hero with amnesia.

   Perhaps because none of the iconic noir actors (other than Conte and to a lesser extent Nolan) are in it, and because Mankiewicz is better known for films like Gentlemans’ Agreement and Letter to Three Wives than this one, it is less appreciated. It often seems to be a forgotten noir despite the fact it is an A production with an A cast. It also has a smart script with more twists than Agatha Christie and direction by one of Hollywood’s best (Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

   George Taylor (John Hodiak) fell on a grenade to save his buddies in the South Pacific and now he has amnesia, a new face, and more than a little paranoia about it, enough so he doesn’t let the Marines know he doesn’t know who he is. Back in the states and about to be released by the service he finds a letter to a man named Larry Cravat from an angry woman that leads him to Los Angeles to find Cravat, who may know who he is.

   Following Cravat’s trail isn’t as easy as he thinks though. No one seems to know Cravat or George Taylor, and when he discovers Cravat left him a bag in unclaimed luggage he finds a gun and shoulder holster and a note that Larry Cravat left $5,000 in a bank account for him.

   The trail leads to a club called the Cellar where a pair of thugs get on his trail and he meets chanteuse Chris (Nancy Guild) whose girl friend was the woman who wrote the letter to Cravat. When he is hijacked by the mysterious Anselmo (Fritz Kortner), who has him worked over trying to learn where Cravat is, he gets dumped on Chris doorstep because her address was in his pocket.

   Chris is a sucker for a sob story (“You’re tough as a love song.”), and calls in her charming boss Max Phillips (Richard Conte) who suggests Taylor talk to cop Lt. Kendall (Lloyd Nolan), a sympathetic homicide detective who hates the movie cliche of cops always having their hats on.

   From Kendall they learn Cravat was a small time private eye who somehow got involved in a scheme to launder two million dollars in Nazi loot. The loot and Cravat both disappeared three years earlier leaving a dead body, the Nazi trying to launder the money.

   There was another man with Cravat that night, and Taylor begins to suspect it was him — but which of them killed the mysterious Steel?

   Taylor finds there was a witness to the shooting, Conway, but he was the victim of a hit and run and went insane, and is now in a sanitarium where no one is allowed to see him. Taylor gets to him, but not before Conway is stabbed by a small bespectacled man who has been following Taylor.

   The twists and surprises are too good to ruin with even a spoiler warning, so I won’t go any farther with the plot. I will say there are fewer holes in the plot than most noir films, and the twists my well surprise you the first time you see it. Certainly there are at least two good red herrings that don’t pay off the way you expect, but they do pay off. You may well be suspecting a Third Man payoff and get something much different.

   One thing to note is that most of the characters are well developed, and far from the cliches you expect. Fritz Kortner’s Anselmo is a former big time crook making a last desperate bid for the big time, and resigned to the fact he probably won’t get the brass ring. He’s almost sympathetic, and his last line is delivered with a sort of sad irony and a resigned shrug (“The jig is up.”).

   Josephine Hutchinson has a good role as the witness sister who has wasted her youth and beauty on her sick father and seems to know Taylor when no one else does. Hodiak plays well in this scene, at once hopeful and compassionate.

   Conte proves a tough good-hearted sort, a far cry from his usual bad guys, and it’s only at the end you may recognize the Conte you know. Finally there’s Lloyd Nolan as Lt. Kendall, a cop with a brain and a heart, who lets the players act out the drama while he waits to sort out the survivors, but can’t help having his favorites. He has little screen time, but makes the most of it, and the running gag about his lack of a hat is all the funnier if you recall his Michael Shayne almost never shed his chapeau. Henry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and John Russell all have bits.

   Hodiak is very good as the haunted man who can trust no one, not even himself. He is much more victim than tough guy, paranoid with good reason, and not certain he really wants to know the truth even if it has $2 million tied to it.

   It’s a role that could easily be played over the top or as a cliche, but Hodiak is believable and sympathetic as a man uncertain if he wants to know the truth.

   Nancy Guild is doing a road-show Lauren Bacall, down to the hairdo, but she does it well, and makes a satisfying substitute for Bacall or Lisbeth Scott, well worth looking at, and playing a woman who is leading with her chin going to bat for a man who may not be as nice as he seems.

   It’s not a particularly good part and probably the least well written in the film, but she makes up for that by managing to embody her character with strength and intelligence, and a kind of understated teasing sexuality.

   Somewhere in the Night is a slick well done studio noir and well worth seeing if you have missed it.

   The film’s last line is Lt. Kendall’s and a good one:

KALEIDOSCOPE. Warner Brothers, 1966. Warren Beatty, Susannah York, Clive Revill, Eric Porter, Murray Melvin. Director: Jack Smight. A novel based on the movie was written by Michael Avallone (Popular Library 60-2132, pb, 1966).

   Mark me down for one of those guys who distinctly and diligently dislike movies revolving around sporting events of any kind, whether it’s baseball, football, boxing, horse races or even card playing. With everything in the hands of the screenwriter and director, for me there’s not even a dollop of suspense. What happens next is completely in the hands of those two guys. Even if you don’t know know what happens next, it’s not the same as not knowing which two faces of the dice are going to come up.

   Movies simply can’t compete with real life sporting events. If someone were to make a film in which one of two diehard rivals wins a football game with no seconds remaining on the clock by running back 109 yards on a missed field goal attempt, you’d never believe it.

   So Kaleidoscope, based on Warren Beatty’s attempt (under duress) to bring down a notorious crime lord with a Napoleonic complex (Eric Porter) by wiping him out at a game of cards, was a big bad dud of a movie for me, even with some color photography that’s out of the world (taking place mostly in European casinos, but not entirely).

   There’s a long lead-in to this movie that consists of Beatty breaking into a card manufacturing plant and doctoring the backs of the plates used in the process to his own advantage, and along the way attracting the eye of a young and very beautiful Susannah York, who also just happens to be the daughter of a British police inspector.

   Your opinions may vary on card-playing movies like this one, and I grant you that, but as a slow as molasses movie of the “swinging sixties,” that’s another matter altogether. More of Susannah York in this regard may have helped.