● CHARLES WILLIAMS – All the Way. Dell First Edition A165, paperback original, 1958. UK title: The Concrete Flamingo. Cassell, hardcover, 1960.

● THE 3RD VOICE. Columbia, 1960. Edmond O’Brien, Julie London, Laraine Day. Based on the novel All the Way, by Charles Williams. Director: Hubert Cornfield.

   This speculation began in a roundabout way while watching Deadlier Than the Male (reviewed here ); I noticed that one of the credited screenwriters was listed as “Liz Charles-Williams.”

   Hmmm. Seems to me the oughta-be legendary writer Charles Williams was doing things at Universal about that time: The Wrong Venus was being filmed as Don’t Just Stand There!, and wasn’t The Pink Jungle some of his work? So could “Liz Charles-Williams” have some connection with the author of Dead Calm and The Big Bite?

   Well, after several minutes of painstaking research, I still couldn’t say, but I was prompted to pull out my video of The Third Voice and my copy of the Charles Williams book it was based on, All the Way, and revisit both.

   Williams’ novel is a compact, neatly built thing based around an intriguing premise: in order to commit the perfect crime, Jerry Forbes has to spend a week impersonating a man he doesn’t resemble… whom he helped murder.

   The hook is that the victim is a neurotic Midwestern businessman on vacation in Florida, and Forbes’ voice sounds exactly like his, so the plot — hatched by the dead man’s jilted mistress — is to kill the businessman, then drain his accounts by phone calls to his underlings back home, all this with her help.

   It takes talent to hold a complicated thing like this together in a novel, much less put it across in 160 pages, but Williams was at the top of his form here, with well-wrought characters and nicely judged situations that build suspense beautifully.

   Hence All the Way emerges as a deft little book that deserves to be better known. I particularly liked the little character quirks that lead up to an emotional double-cross that you won’t see coming, even now that I’ve told you it’s on its way.

   In 1960 Columbia filmed this as The Third Voice which may make it the first paperback original made into a movie; I don’t know. At any rate, while not quite up to the level of the book, Voice is a nice, sick little item which falls well short of Classic Status but still repays watching.

   Voice was written and directed by Hubert Cornfield, who put some interesting things on film (Plunder Road, Pressure Point) before the experience of trying to direct Brando in Night of the Following Day crippled his talent.

   Or maybe there wasn’t much talent to begin with: Cornfield’s films all look like the work of a promising new talent, but somehow he just never followed through. At any rate, The Third Voice is still nasty and promising.

   It’s set in a swanky Mexican resort, but there are no sun-drenched views of lovely beaches; just lots of sweaty close-ups of Edmond O’Brien moving through rooms of cloying chintziness as he bullies strangers over the phone and plots his own little turnabout, leading to a typical noir ending. The effect is claustrophobic, but tellingly so, and I like this movie perhaps more than it deserves.

ASSASSIN FOR HIRE. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK, 1951. Sydney Tafler, Ronald Howard, Katharine Blake, John Hewer, June Rodney. Director: Michael McCarthy.

   Since this is an obscure British film of some 60 years in age, other than, of course, Ronald Howard, none of the names above meant anything before I watched this movie. Even afterward — even while noting that all of the participants were professionals through and through — I may be hard pressed to remember them the next time I come across them. (Ronald Howard was the star of the 1950s Sherlock Holmes series that made its way the US back then, so anyone of a certain age, as I am, should pick him out right away.)

   He plays a Scotland Yard inspector in Assassin for Hire, an officious type who declares at the beginning that if the criminals don’t play by the rules, why should he? His eye in particular is on Antonio Riccardi (Sydney Tafler) whom he suspects is a hitman for anyone who cares to hire him. He is very good at what he does, including making sure that he has an ironclad alibi for every one of the extracurricular job he does.

   Every criminal has a weakness, believes Inspector Carson, and Riccadi, by day a dealer in rare stamps, may have his in his brother, a classical violinist whose career he keeps under an iron thumb. Well, there’s no “may have” about it. The question is, how might the inspector take advantage of it?

   This is a short film, just over an hour long, and it would have been ideal for an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour on TV, say, with several twists along a way, mostly toward the ending. I will not tell you how many twists, for if I were to do so, you’d be counting along as you’re watching. (Of course I could tell you that there were three, say, with the third one being that there is no third one.)

   There’s nothing here for any of the players to have built a career on, but it’s competently done, and if you were to find a copy on DVD, I don’t think you’ll begrudge the short time it would take you to watch it.

TAXI! Warner Brothers, 1932. James Cagney, Loretta Young, George E. Stone, Guy Kibbee, Leila Bennett, Dorothy Burgess. Screenplay: Kubec Glasmon & John Bright. Director: Roy Del Ruth.

   Also in the film is a cameo by George Raft (as the winner of a dance contest; Cagney outsteps him all the way but the dance-hall audience registers its approval for the Raft team). Cagney and his brother (George E. Stone) are taxi drivers caught in a Manhattan taxi war.

   Loretta Young is the daughter of “Pops,” a taxi-driver played by Guy Kibbee, murdered by the mob-run opposing taxi company. Cagney believes in fighting, not compromising, and when a truce is arranged, he is outraged and convinced no good will come of it. When his brother is killed, Cagney goes on a one-man vendetta, and it’s a toss up whether his brother’s killer, the police, or his temper will get him first.

   William Everson characterizes this as a “tough, cocky comedy-melodrama.” The comedy is supplied by Young’s waitress friend. Marie, played by Dorothy Burgess. The character’s whine gets a bit tiring after a while, but there is no gainsaying the skill with which Burgess plays this role.

   The movie is short (seventy minutes), and Cagney delivers his “you dirty yellow dog” line with an appropriate snarl. All the familiar Cagney mannerisms are used to good effect, and Young has a few moments in which she doesn’t have that plastic look she adopted for most of her career.

   A minor Cagney and Warner Brothers melodrama with a weak resolution, but fun, with a very striking opening behind the credits with some jazzy editing to set the big city/taxi war context.

IMPULSE. 1990. Teresa Russell, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alan Rosenberg, Nicholas Mele, Lynne Thigpen. Director: Sondra Locke.

   For the first thirty minutes of this movie, the type you’d see on late night cable, you’ll be tempted to dismiss this as just another “undercover-female-cop-with-an-attitude-problem” type of picture, but I think you’ll regret it if you turn it off too soon.

   After the relatively slow beginning — brief bursts of action on the streets of Los Angeles, combined with a lot of talking about various problems, including brief glimpses of Lottie’s therapy sessions with the department’s resident psychologist – things pick up in a big way.

   An undercover operation goes bad. There is a lot of shooting, and some guys dealing in drugs end up dead. Lottie is responsible for a couple of them. On her way home, she stops in a bar, she’s picked up by a guy with a billfold of $100 bills, and on impulse she goes to bed with him.

   Which is when the real story begins. There are some small quirks of fate involved, a la Cornell Woolrich. and some giant-sized one. This movie is solidly in the pulp-oriented, hard-boiled tradition, but with a difference. The protagonist is female, and no shrinking violet.

   Female, but aggressively active in the role, not passive, not a behind-the-back sort of manipulator. There are sane loose ends in the plot, I think, but in the final sixty minutes or so there’s one of the finer, more engaging mini-movies made recently that I’ve seen in a while. (There’s one well-behaved love scene, too, in which both participants seem to want to make the other party happy to be involved, as well as themselves.)

[UPDATE] 10-24-11. I will have to see this movie again. I remember only parts of it, and I have a feeling that if I hadn’t read this review just now myself, I might not remember even those.

   Reviews are IMDB are mixed. Those leaving comments are mostly positive, and those that are say very much the same sort of things as I did. The overall rating for the film is only 5.6 out of 10, though, which suggests the possibility that some viewers who watched saw the movie were looking for something else.

   I also wonder if the fact that Impulse has a female director had more than little with the way it came out. (That’s a lie, actually. I’m not wondering.)

   I wish I’d found a copy of the scene below in color, but perhaps in black and white it will enhance the movie’s (neo)noir credentials all the more:

RIDE THE PINK HORSE. Universal, 1947. Robert Montgomery, Thomas Gomez, Rita Conde, Iris Flores, Wanda Hendrix, Fred Clark, Andrea King, Art Smith. Screenplay: Ben Hecht & Charles Lederer, based on the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. Director: Robert Montgomery.

   Starring and directed by Robert Montgomery, Ride the Pink Horse is 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 Smarts on the part 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 movie-maker ever, but he maybe deserves more attention than he’s getting.

ABANDONED. Universal International Pictures, 1949. Dennis O’Keefe, Gale Storm, Marjorie Rambeau, Raymond Burr, Will Kuluva, Jeff Chandler, Meg Randall, Jeanette Nolan, Mike Mazurki. Director: Joseph M. Newman.

   Dennis O’Keefe makes for a good newpaper reporter in Abandoned, and Raymond Burr makes an even better private eye, one definitely on the shady side. Before he became Perry Mason and famous, as we’ve said before on this blog, he was best known for his villainous roles in cheap crime dramas, albeit often weak and shifty ones. His part in this movie, in other words, was tailor made for him.

   So what this is, as you may have guessed, is a cheap crime drama, but is it noir, as it’s often advertised as being? Not with Gale Storm in the leading role, even though the movie’s in black and white, with lots of noirish lighting and noirish dialogue.

   As the sister who died trying to regain her baby from a gang specializing in illegal baby adoptions, calling on Dennis O’Keefe for help, she’s too giggly and perky for the part (think My Little Margie). The ending, after a lot of gunfire and fatal automobile accidents, is also too upbeat for Abandoned to really fall into the noir category.

   But it comes close, indeed it does. And if the entire script had been part of the movie, if as I have a feeling it wasn’t, it would have been a whole lot closer.

   Unanswered by the movie I saw is the question of the two girls’ father, who hired Raymond Burr (the shady PI) in the first place, and the connection with the baby racketeers, whom Burr works for as well.

   And I’m sure I remember a scene in which Gale Storm’s character tells O’Keefe (the reporter) that the reason her sister left home and headed for LA, was because their father wouldn’t leave either one of them alone.

   Neither of these two threads of the story line is followed up on, but at the time this movie was made, all they could probably do is leave hints.

WEST 11. Warner-Pathé, UK, 1963. Alfred Lynch, Kathleen Breck, Eric Portman, Diana Dors, Kathleen Harrison, Finlay Currie. Director: Michael Winner.

   A minor, all-but-forgotten film, one that Leonard Maltin’s book (2009 edition) gives only one and a half stars to, but it’s far better than that. Filmed on location in London’s Notting Hill section, West 11 (named after the postal code) is a true noir film. If you’re ever able to see this film, you’re likely not to forget it for a while.

   That it’s filmed in black-and-white only adds to the mood: rundown post-war apartment complexes, seedy eating establishments and swinging basement level jazz clubs, rain-slicked streets, and members of both sexes searching for love and the meaning of life (with sex on sweat-stained sheets standing in as a poor substitute for companionship).

   The movie is slow in getting going, I admit that (which I’m sure explains Maltin’s use of the word “lumbering” to describe it). One might easily get frustrated in following Joe Beckett (Alfred Lynch) around – Beckett is an emotional cripple stumbling from job to job, from girl to girl (Kathleen Breck, and the slightly older Diana Dors), unable even to love his mother (Kathleen Harrison) – if one were not fully aware of the interest that the old soldier-type Richard Dyce (Eric Portman) has in him.

   The criminous portion of this film is confined to the final 20 minutes – Dyce has an aunt who he believes has lived long enough, and Beckett might be just the person to do something about it – but the slow build-up is worth the wait. And it should be noted that by the time the 60s had rolled around, noirish films like this one were no longer required to have “happy” endings, as most of them in the 40s and 50s needed to do.

Note:   Here’s an amusing two minute clip from YouTube. I think what’s happening is self-explanatory.

THE SCREAMING MIMI. Columbia, 1958. Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey, Gypsy Rose Lee, Harry Townes, Linda Cherney, Romney Brent, Red Norvo (and Trio). Based on the novel by Fredric Brown. Director: Gerd Oswald.

   The Screaming Mimi offers some kicking-and-kinky direction from Gerd Oswald, a cult director in the Jim Jones tradition, which is to say he showed a lot of potential in low-budget westerns and thrillers, and managed one classic, A Kiss Before Dying (1956) before drinking the kool-ade of network television.

   Mimi belongs to his Promising period, with a pleasingly straightforward (for the 50s) approach to homosexuality, bondage, obsession and amour fou, but it’s undone by a screenplay that seems way too limp for a movie about serial killings.

   There’s never a sense of momentum here, no feeling of progressing towards some resolution. Instead, events just seem to come along and happen in no particular order, then head off in any direction whatever, just sort of strutting and fretting across the screen till their allotted hour-or-so is over at last. A pity, because there are glimmers here and there of what could have been a perverse classic.

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. Central Cinema Company, Italy, 1970. Original title: L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo. Tony Musante. Suzy Kendall, Enrico Maria Salerno, Eva Renzi, Umberto Raho, Raf Valenti. Based on the novel The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown (uncredited). Director: Dario Argento.

   The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italy, 1970) on the other hand, is a certified wowser. The directorial debut of Dario Argento, who became something of a Name in Horror films, this is a garish, fast-moving, humorous movie about serial slashing, stalking, knifing and general mayhem set against colorful locations, played and/or dubbed by a cast a cut (sorry!) above the usual run of Italian imports.

   Fredric Brown got no screen credit for this film, and for years critics who knew nothing about Pulp averred that it was based on an Edgar Wallace story, but I defy anyone out there to show me an Edgar Wallace book with this plot. In fact, I’ll wrestle anyone in the crowd who thinks he can do it. No takers? I thought not.

   Anyway, getting back to the story, this follows Brown’s novel pretty closely, right down to the minor characters and bits of by-play. Argento tossed away the thematic framework of Brown’s novel, and he turned the hard-drinking loner of the book into a young married couple, but that’s a fate that befell many of us in the 70s.

   The fact is, this is a fairly faithful translation of The Screaming Mimi into film, and if not all it could have been. (The real meaning of the book isn’t revealed until the last page, and it’s truly harrowing.) It’s at least a fun ride.

MILLER’S CROSSING. Twentieth Century Fox, 1990. Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay, John Turturro, Jon Polito, J. E. Freeman, Albert Finney, Mike Starr, Al Mancini, Richard Woods. Story: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen; & Dashiell Hammett (uncredited). Director: Joel Coen (& Ethan Coen, uncredited).

   The best adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s highly-regarded hardboiled novel The Glass Key, the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, does not even have Hammett’s name attached to it. But it’s Hammett all right. Hammett all over.

   Characters’ names have been changed (to protect the guilty?), but many of the fundamental relationships of the novel survive intact:

    ● There’s the central Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne)/Leo (Albert Finney)/Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) “love/loyalty triangle.” This equals Ned Beaumont/Paul Madvig/Janet Henry from the book.

    ● There’s Leo’s rival gang leader, who attempts to usurp his place, Johnny Caspar (John Polito). He’s Shad O’Rory in the book.

    ● There’s Caspar’s/O’Rory’s scarily violent homosexual sidekick, Eddie Dane (J. A. Freeman). He’s Jeff in the book.

    ● And there’s Janet Henry’s “degenerate” brother, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). He’s Taylor Henry in the book (though in the book he’s belly-up when the action starts).

   Tom Reagan/Ned Beaumont is still a tight-lipped, ambiguous character, who keeps us guessing as to the exact nature of his thoughts and emotions. He has debt to a bookie to be concerned about but he also seems to have genuine feelings for Leo/Paul and Verna/Janet (indeed, in the film there is an ongoing physical relationship between Tom and Verna, strengthening this element from the book).

   Tom’s conflicting loyalties, his feelings of honor and his attitude to violence are at the center of the film, just as they are in the book. And he sure gets beaten just about as much!

   The symbolic dream of the glass key (discussed by Ned and Janet in the book) has disappeared, to be replaced by a symbolic dream of a flying hat (discussed by Tom and Verna).

   Throughout this film the Coens are obsessed with hats. The film opens with a focus on a hat and closes with a focus on a hat. Tom is always losing his hat (usually while getting slapped/shoved/punched) and trying to recover it. Caspar is angered when Leo and Tom give him “the high hat” (i.e., act superior). He wants to be the one wearing the hat in Leo’s gangland kingdom.

   Obviously the male hat is a symbol of power and authority. This reading is strengthened by the fact that the murder of one Leo’s henchman, Rug Daniels, results in the fallen Rug losing not only his hat but his hair (the toupee he wore).

   Rug, incidentally, replaces Taylor Henry from the novel as the opening murder victim, giving his cinematic doppelganger, Bernie Bernbaum, a stage upon which to strut his nasty ways. John Turturro, who plays Bernie, performs splendidly in this capacity.

   Also more memorable than his book counterpart is John Polito’s Caspar, who almost steals the show from his fellow performers — all of whom are terrific — with his colorful performance and his frequently expressed, heartfelt concern over the sad decline in gangster ethics.

   J. A. Freeman’s Eddie Dane is not necessarily superior to the novel’s Jeff, but he’s unforgettable in his own right. “The Dane,” as he’s called, is smarter than Jeff and also openly homosexual (somehow “gay” simply doesn’t seem the right word for this darkly malevolent guy), being involved in his own love triangle involving Bernie and another, rather swishy character named Mink (Steve Buscemi, underused) — a plot element very important to the film’s story. In the novel and the 1942 film Jeff’s homosexuality seemed sublimated and twisted in the beatings he so enjoyed giving Ned.

   While the Coens keep many of Hammett’s central concerns, they jettison class issues completely (Verna ain’t the daughter of an aristocratic senator and she certainly ain’t no lady) in favor of ethnic ones. Divisions among Irish (Leo and Tom), Italians (Caspar) and Jews (Bernie) are much emphasized in the film.

   Certainly the Coens play up The Glass Key’s urban corruption angle as well, but it’s done in such a surreal, black comedy fashion it’s hard to take it too seriously as social commentary. (There’s no pretense in the film that duly elected government officials have any free hand whatsoever in determining anything that goes on in this city.)

   What we are left with in Miller’s Crossing is the high hat. Which people will get to wear the hat, and how will they exercise the power that comes with it?

   Anyone who enjoys Dashiell Hammett will want to see the answers the Coens come up with in this fine film.

OUT OF THE FOG. Warner Brothers, 1941. John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell, Eddie Albert, George Tobias, John Qualen, Aline MacMahon, Jerome Cowan, Odette Myrtil, Leo Gorcey. Based on the play The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw. Director: Anatole Litvak.

   After the three Paula the Ape Woman movies [reviewed here ] and moving on to things more criminous, I watched Out of the Fog, one of those movies that seem to typify a whole era; casting, story, sets and the overall feel of the picture somehow evoke the 1940s Warners “look” so completely, one gets lost in time just watching it.

   John Garfield and Ida Lupino, those two echt-40s sub-stars, light the marquee on this one, he as a petty gangster and she as a pretty working girl, drawn to his shallow glamour and staccato sexuality, but the weight of the plot is carried by Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen as a couple of working stiffs leaned on by Garfield for protection money and finally summoning up the courage to rid the world of him — or so they think.

   That’s the plot, but the charm of Fog lies in its stylish execution. Anatole Litvak, a Warner’s house director with a European touch, handles the actors well and moves the plot quickly, with some clever quirky moments, like murder plotted in a bath-house under the rantings of George Tobias as a loud-mouth émigré, or a tense interview with a bland and nasty assistant DA played with complete lack of charm by Jerome Cowan (of whom more later) and best of all, the scenes at night, on a foggy river, with Mitchell and Qualen in the foreground like figures out of Winslow Homer, while small boats blink at them and large ships pass in the rippling background — all shot on a studio set with the artistic camera of James Wong Howe, a cinematographer whose credits stretch from Shanghai Express to Hud and beyond, and who imparts a glowing intimacy to a genuinely likable film.