UNDERCOVER DOCTOR. Paramount Pictures, 1939. Lloyd Nolan, Janice Logan, J. Carrol Naish, Heather Angel, Broderick Crawford, John Eldredge, Raymond Hatton, Paul Fix, Richard Denning. One of four short films made in 1939-40 based on the book Persons in Hiding), by J. Edgar Hoover. Director: Louis King.

   Lloyd Nolan gets top billing, although at least fifteen minutes have gone by before he shows up on the screen. (It pays to have a good agent.)

   It’s J. Carroll Naish as the titular doctor instead who gets most of the screen time, he along with semi-brutish Broderick Crawford, whom I’ve never seen so young, as Public Enemy #1, Eddie Krator, a role he was (as they say) born to play.

   You might get the idea from the title that Dr. Bartley Morgan (Naish) is working undercover for the FBI, for whom Nolan is of their top agents, but if so, you would be wrong. The title of this film really ought to be Underworld Doctor, since Morgan, in a moment of weakness (and the love of money) works for Krator and not against him.

   He’s a high society kind of guy, or so are his aspirations. Loving him in vain is his nurse and devoted assistant (and keeper, if truth be known), played by Janice Logan, whom you may also have seen in Dr. Cyclops (1940) as Dr. Mary Robinson. If you missed that one, you probably missed her career, as she was in only six feature films in all. At times and at the right angles, she reminded me of a slightly prettier Veda Ann Borg.

   In any case, if Dr. Morgan is content to ignore the woman who works for him, aiming for a society marriage instead, it is cool Lloyd Nolan who was never loath to pass up a chance like this. Dumping Krator when his usefulness is up, Morgan suddenly finds himself short of funds and has to do one more job for his former mentor. Which is when the bottom falls out of his life, which I hope does not reveal anything I should not. (I do not believe so.)

   The movie’s a solid piece of work all the way through, even though you will see all of the twists coming a mile away. You will also see lots of lots of familiar faces. I’ve listed some of them that I could put a name to, but there are many others that I couldn’t, and so I didn’t.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE. Europa Corp., 2010. John Travolta (Charlie Wax), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (James Reece), Kasia Smutniak, Richard Durden. Bing Yin, Amber Rose Revah, Eric Godon, François Bredon. Director: Pierre Morel.

   A movie from the director of Taken, a movie I really liked. In this one, low level intelligence agent James Reece (he does stuff like change the license plates on cars in parking lots) is the only person available to help top agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta with a shaved head) who has just arrived for a special operation in Paris.

   Mostly Reece is a driver, and he is appalled when Wax starts killing massive numbers of people in a HK director John Woo-inspired slow motion ballet. There’s a lot of action, but the first half of the movie left me cold. Travolta, who has a great deal of charm, is a very unlikeable character in this one, and he starts killing people right from the start without our knowing the reason — is there method behind the madness, or has Travolta’s character gone psycho?

   Halfway through the movie turns in another direction and becomes not just a shoot-em-up but a darker thriller — and at that point I started getting drawn in. The last half of the movie is good, and it packs a dark and surprise ending.

   The movie also features a great car chase. In French movies (and even though this movie is in English, it was a French production, with a script by Luc Bresson) they drive really fast, they don’t crank the camera speed to make it look fast like they do in a lot of American TV shows. If you can get through the first half you might like this movie.

Rating:   B minus.

HIGHWAY 13. Screen Guild Productions, 1948. Robert Lowery, Pamela Blake, Clem Bevans, Michael Whalen, Gaylord Pendleton, Lyle Talbot, Maris Wrixon, Mary Gordon. Director: William Berke.

   If you were to go looking for this film on DVD, you’ll find it easily enough in an inexpensive box set of noir films recently released to the market.

   Noir? Don’t believe everything you’re told. Even though there are noirish elements to it, there aren’t any more than you’ll find in any black and white crime film made in the 1940s or early 50s, and that’s all that this movie is. No more — or no less.

   It turns out that California’s Highway 13 is a death trap for truckers, with six accidents having occurred in as many weeks. The problem is that the accidents have happened only to the drivers working for one company, the one that Hank Wilson (good-looking and well-built Robert Lowery, soon to become serial-world’s Batman) has hired on for. Sabotage is suspected.

   Most of the movie takes place in or around Pops Lacy’s isolated restaurant and truck stop somewhere along that same Highway 13 where Wilson’s steady girl friend Doris (Pamela Blake) works as a waitress behind the counter. Pops himself is a sour cantankerous old cuss played by Clem Bevans, who is (no surprise) perfect for the part. The players are fine, in other words; it’s the story that doesn’t match up.

   Most other reviewers of this film rate it a whole lot higher than I do, but personally I don’t care for crime films in which the culprit(s) is/are obvious; the scenes while individually fine are jammed together in haphazard fashion; and the reason for the whole affair doesn’t make any more sense than a chicken caught in a fence.

   It isn’t really all that bad, but reading that last sentence back again, almost.

OUT OF THE PAST. RKO, 1947. Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Huston, Paul Valentine. Screenplay by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) based on his novel Build My Gallows High. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. Director: Jacques Tourneur.

   I recently took time out to revisit the ultimate film noir, Out of the Past, (RKO, 1947) and the book it was based on, Build My Gallows High (Morrow, 1946) by Geoffrey Homes.

   I wasted an awful lot of my precious youth reading other books by Homes, thinking on the strength of Gallows that he must be pretty good. ’Tain’t so. In fact, Homes’ book, which suffers from over-complication and a surfeit of stock characters, is perceptibly inferior to the screenplay he adapted from it.

   The film’s plot is still dense and impenetrable, but the characters are more developed and streamlined, the action is well-calculated and surprisingly stark, and though the nature of the story is quite leisurely, momentum never flags, probably thanks to director Jacques Tourneur, who learned early on in his career how to get things moving, and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who fills the screen with some truly striking imagery.

   Interestingly, though the book Build My Gallows High is written in the third person, the movie Out of the Past is very much a first-person thing; Robert Mitchum narrates most of the first half as he recounts the story of why he has to go to Tahoe and pay a call on gang-boss Kirk Douglas. It seems years ago

         (WARNING! PLOT DETAILS AHEAD!!)

Mitchum was hired to find Douglas’ runaway mistress Kathy (Jane Greer) but ended up running off with her and living happily ever etc. until she framed him for murder and ran out on him.

   Well, we’ve all had relationships like that, and all this is told voice-over by Mitchum till he arrives at Tahoe and finds Kathy there, once again sharing Douglas’ bed.

   That, as I say, is the first half. Having brought us up to date,

          (WARNING! Continued.)

the movie gets Mitchum embroiled in a blackmail scheme and involved with a second femme fatale, this one named Meta and played by Rhonda Fleming as a less-classy version of Kathy.

   For this second half of the film, there is no more voice-over, but Tourneur and Musuraca increasingly photograph Mitchum from behind or in silhouette, and they employ more subjective shots, showing events from his point of view, visually forcing us to identify with the character, though he’s no longer narrating.

   And then there’s a moment no one talks about: having been betrayed by Meta, Mitchum makes his way back to her apartment and hides there to wait for her return. The door opens and Kathy comes in, goes to the phone and identifies herself as Meta.

   Now logically, there’s no reason for her character to even be in that part of the country, but dramatically, it makes such perfect poetic sense for the two femme fatales to merge into each other that most reviewers don’t even notice.

   Mention should also be made — and here it is — of an actor named Paul Valentine [above, on the right] who plays Douglas’s sinister gofer. Smooth, balletic, and lethal, displaying an easy-going manner that never seems less than deadly, it’s an outstanding performance that should have led to bigger things. But alas, did not.

THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN. Columbia, 1958. Darren McGavin, Warren Stevens, Margaret Hayes, Peggy McKay, Bobby Helms. Screenplay: Bernard Gordon, based on a story adapted by Daniel Ullman from Ed Reid’s True Magazine article “I Broke the Brooklyn Graft Scandal.” Director: Paul Wendkos. Shown at Cinecon 44, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2008.

   This was screened to highlight the career of Cinephile guest Warren Stevens, a perennial and very talented supporting actor, in a film in which he may have been supporting Darren McGavin, but to whom he didn’t give an inch in acting skill.

   McGavin is a rookie who agrees to go undercover in an attempt to expose the dirty cops who have been collaborating with underworld gambling interests for years. Stevens is player in the underground network, and when McGavin’s cover is blown, Stevens engineers a scheme to eliminate McGavin that backfires and kills McGavin’s young wife.

   McGavin is almost brought down when he sets off on a vendetta in search of his wife’s murderers, at the climax, pitting McGavin and Stevens against one another in a deadly confrontation, is an exciting conclusion to a well-crafted thriller.

DOLORES HITCHENS – Fools Gold. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1958. Paperback reprint: Pocket #1239, 1959.

Film: BAND OF OUTSIDERS. Columbia Pictures, 1964. French title: Bande à part. Anna Karina, Danièle Girard, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur. Director: Jean-Luc Godard.

   Very similar in vein to Rififi in New York [reviewed here ], there’s Fools Gold, by Dolores Hitchens, a nasty piece of work about a nasty piece of work names Skip, barely graduated from juvenile delinquency, sho has enthralled a cute blonde named Karen and a dim ne’er-do-well named Eddie with whom he hopes to pull a major caper.

   But this thing has wheels within wheels, and when a big-time professional crook gets wind of the deal and decides to hijack it, that’s only the beginning of the complications that ensue.

   I never read any Hitchens before, but I found this quite well done. She has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.

   Fools Gold was turned into a rather unlikely film called Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) in 1964 by the legendary and quite mad Jean-Luc Godard, who threw out half the plot but stayed surprisingly faithful to the rest.

   Bande stars Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur and the lovely Anna Karina as the aspiring felons, and it’s played out on actual locations rather than sets, giving the thing that rough, seat-of-the-pants look typical of Godard and perfect for a gritty crime movie.

   There’s also a bit more attention to the characters here. Hitchens’ cast was well-drawn and believable, but — how shall put this? — you know how in pornography, the characters think about sex all the time? Of course you do.

   Well in crime novels the characters are pretty well occupied with crime. So it is in Hitchens’ novel, but not so in Godard’s film, Here, they have their secret thoughts, playful moments and private ambitions. And sometimes they break out of the story just to be young.

   The result is a film worth coming back to: mysterious, exciting, and highly satisfying.

HEAT LIGHTNING. Warner Brothers, 1934. Aline MacMahon, Ann Dvorak, Preston Foster, Lyle Talbot, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Jane Darwell, Edgar Kennedy. Based on a play by Leon Abrams & George Abbott. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   There is some similarity between Heat Lightning and the much more famous The Petrified Forest, but the latter came along later (1936) and the plots (in my opinion) diverge rather quickly. But if you’re familiar with the later film, see how much alike the settings are: Heat Lightning takes place in the middle of the Mohave desert and an isolated gas station/restaurant/tourist camp is miles from the nearest town.

   Two women, sisters, own the place. The older (and wiser) has a past she would like to think is forgotten (Olga, played by the efficient but rather glum and weary-looking Aline MacMahon), while Myra (Ann Dvorak) is looking forward to a future involving men and romance that she’s not likely to have, not as long as her older sister has any say about it.

   For such an isolated location, there is a lot of traffic that goes by, but perhaps because it is one of those places that a sign saying “Last Gas for 20 Miles” is the absolute truth. Some come in, add water to a radiator, gas up and have a couple of Cokes (for a grand total of $3.65) before heading off again, while others hang around for a while.

   The latter include a pair of fleeing would-be bank robbers — or make that killers, since at least one guard was killed in the process — one of whom knows Olga from before; and in fact they knew each other very well. Also staying overnight are two wealthy divorcees (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly) returning from Reno, along with their hardworking chauffeur (Frank McHugh), who on occasion is called upon to do other jobs as well.

   Criminals on the run, an old flame, and two rich women make for a combustible situation, and the 63 minutes of running time is almost not enough to fit it all in. This was one of the last movies made before the Code came into being, and while there are no overt sexual scenes, there are several times there is no doubt what was going on when the cameras weren’t around and weren’t rolling.

   The overall plot may be a little predictable, but not entirely. How will Olga get rid of George (Preston Foster) or will she fall for him again? The drama itself unfolds in fine fashion, with more than a dash of humor saucily tossed into the boiling kettle, figuratively speaking. The photography and staging are more than fine, enhanced by the equally fine remastering job done to the film before it was recently released on DVD.

   Recommended.

CALCULATED RISK. Bry/McLeod, UK, 1963. William Lucas, John Rutland, Dilys Watling, Warren Mitchell, Shay Gorman, Terence Cooper, David Brierly. Screenplay: Edwin Richfield. Director: Norman Harrison.

   As you may have noticed already, except for Dilys Watling, who plays the young factory worker who undresses at night in a second story apartment overlooking the bombed-out lot where a gang of safecrackers are digging their way under ground into the bank building next door, everyone else in this movie is male.

   Even so, Miss Watling’s part is almost a cameo role, almost but not quite, and as caper movies go, even though very few people will have seen it, this one’s a good one.

   It begins with a gent named Kip (John Rutland) getting out of prison and being picked up in a car by his brother-in-law Steve (William Lucas). Kip is a crook, but not a very good one. He’s been in and out of jail most of his life. He even missed his wife’s funeral while he was in this last time.

   But now that he’s out, he has a plan and to pull it off, he needs some help. He’s been told about an undisturbed underground WWII air raid shelter that’s only two walls away from a bank vault, and inside the vault is a fortune in cash. Even though Kip is considered something of a Jonah on the job, it isn’t difficult for Steve to come up with a small crew of others to add their talents in.

   All things considered, it’s a good plan, and it’s one that might actually work, but plans and the carrying out of them are hardly ever the very same thing. Small things can be adjusted for – Kip’s heart problems, for one, but I won’t tell you about the big one, but if you read the first paragraph above again, maybe you can figure it out on your own.

   The script is tight, the vivid black-and-white photography perfect for the tale that’s told, and even though none of the actors are known in this country – and maybe not even in England – they all fit their characters well, and what more could you want?

   Perhaps a little longer running time — it’s only 72 minutes long — but with anything longer you run the risk that the tension is going to be as big a fizzle as the… Or does it?

   According to his entry in Wikipedia, before he became a writer, the multi-talented Lou Cameron was a comic book illustrator, a fact that I did not know before putting this page together, with his work for Classics Illustrated being perhaps the most well known.

   Listed below are his crime fiction titles (only) as included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, along with as many covers as I have been able to come up.

   He also wrote many westerns, both in the traditional vein and for several of the “adult” sexy western series. He created the “Longarm” series, for example, as Tabor Evans; wrote most if not all of the Stringer series; and as Ramsey Thorne, the “Renegade” novels.

   In 1976, Cameron won a WWA Spur award in 1976 for his novel The Spirit Horses.

   More? He has written war novels, adventure novels, science fiction, movie novelizations and more, most of which you can find listed on the Wikipedia page (see above).

   When James Reasoner reviewed Cameron’s western novel The Buntline Special on his blog last year about this same time, he filled in some the details of Cameron’s career and spoke highly of his very effective and distinctive writing style.

   Lou Cameron didn’t write for the pulp magazines, but throughout his writing career, he has been a Grand Master of pulp fiction, no doubt about it.

LOU CAMERON. 1924- . Pseudonyms: Julie Cameron & Dagmar.

    Angel’s Flight (n.) Gold Medal 1960

    The Empty Quarter (n.) Gold Medal 1962 [Saudi Arabia]
    The Sky Divers (n.) Gold Medal 1962

    The Block Busters (n.) McKay 1964 [New York City, NY]
    The Dragon’s Spine (n.) Avon 1968 [Viet Nam]
    File on a Missing Redhead (n.) Gold Medal 1968 [Las Vegas, NV]

    The Outsider (n.) Popular Library 1969 [Los Angeles, CA]
    The Amphorae Pirates (n.) Random 1970 [Italy]
    Before It’s Too Late (n.) Gold Medal 1970

    Behind the Scarlet Door (n.) Gold Medal 1971

    The Girl with the Dynamite Bangs (n.) Lancer 1973 [Brazil]
    Barca (n.) Berkley 1974 [New Jersey]

    The Closing Circle (n.) Berkley 1974 [New York City, NY]

    Tancredi (n.) Berkley 1975 [New Jersey]
    Dekker (n.) Berkley 1976

    The Sky Riders (n.) Gold Medal 1976 [Greece]
    Code Seven (n.) Berkley 1977
    The Subway Stalker (n.) Dell 1980
    The Hot Car (n.) Avon 1981 [Los Angeles, CA]

JULIE CAMERON. Pseudonym of Lou Cameron.

    The Darklings (Berkley, 1975, pb)

    Devil in the Pines (Berkley, 1975, pb)

DAGMAR. Pseudonym of Lou Cameron.

    The Spy with the Blue Kazoo (Lancer, 1967, pb) [Regina; Central America]

    The Spy Who Came In from the Copa (Lancer, 1967, pb) [Regina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil]

[UPDATE] 03-04-11.   Bill Crider’s nostalgic review of File on a Missing Redhead appears today on his blog, complete with details of what was happening on the same day that he read it the first time, January 27, 1969.

THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE. Paramount Pictures, 1933. Miriam Hopkins, William Gargan, Jack La Rue, Florence Eldridge, Sir Guy Standing, Irving Pichel. Based on the novel Sanctuary, by William Faulkner. Director: Stephen Roberts.

   I don’t know about you, but I like to know as little about a movie before watching it as I can. Most of the time you can’t help but knowing something about a movie – you’ve read a review, somebody’s recommended to you, or it was based on a story or a character you’ve already read or heard about it.

   None of the above this time. It came in a white envelope along with 20 or so others I’d bought from a dealer specializing in classic (old) detective and crime noir films, and that’s all. I didn’t know what year it was made, who was in it, that it was based on a William Faulkner novel, and if I’d have known that it was Sanctuary, it wouldn’t have made any difference to me, since that’s a novel I’ve never read.

   But here’s the shameful truth. William Faulkner and I had a bad experience together back in high school English class. It wasn’t his fault. Silas Marner and Pip and all their adventures had the same problem. If they wanted me to read it, I wasn’t interested. All I wanted to do was to use determinants to solve systems of three or more simultaneous linear equations.

   Miriam Hopkins is the star. She’s the one who plays Temple Drake, the spoiled granddaughter of the town judge, a southern belle whom in high school we’d have called a – well I won’t say the word, but her dates always seem to end with the male half panting and wanting more.

   She has an evil streak in her, she admits to Stephen Benbow (William Gargan) who has been in love with her for a long time and has asked her to marry him, but as many times as he has asked, she has turned him down. By profession, Bendow is a local attorney whom the judge calls upon to defend penniless clients in his jurisdiction.

   I’ll make this shorter, perhaps. Temple Drake, on yet another date gone bad, is kidnapped by a local gang of bootleggers hanging out in a decaying Southern mansion, and in doing do, catches the eye of the Trigger (the vicious and malevolently evil-looking Jack La Rue), head of the gang.

   She witnesses the cold-blooded murder of the young lad guarding her at night, is raped by Trigger (a scene not seen but oh so strongly suggested), and forced into a privileged life of prostitution (again only suggested but everyone in the audience knows exactly what is going on).

   There is more to come, but the purpose of a review is not to tell the whole story, but to give you a sense of the story, if you should so want one (see above), and the fact that Benbow is a public defender is important. The concluding trial scene is as tense and moving as anything I’ve seen in a movie in quite a long while.

   It’s also a movie that should be much better known than it is, and perhaps it will be soon. If I’ve intrigued you enough – if you’ve read this review all the way to here – for now, the only way you can watch this film is from one of those online dealers that sell old movies in white envelopes with only the name of the movie on them.

[UPDATE.]   Later the same day.   Since writing this review, I’ve done some browsing on the Internet, and from what I’ve read, this pre-Code movie did not last long in the theaters when it was first released. It was, rather, one of the straws that brought the Hays Office into being. I am not surprised.

   Its notoriety, however, and the fascination of today’s audience for pre-Code films means that it may be more well-known than I’d thought. There’s still no official DVD release for Temple Drake, but it’s been shown recently at several film festivals that specialize in old and otherwise forgotten films such as this one, and a good print is said to exist. Thank goodness for film fanatics!

[UPDATE #2.] 03-01-11.   Todd Mason has included this as one of this week’s Overlooked Films on his blog. For the others, follow this link.

   Dan Stumpf’s comment about the “nightmarish feel [of] Temple’s night at the farm house” is a perfect description. Once seen, you won’t forget it. It also reminded me that I’d temporarily misplaced one of the images I meant to include. I’ll add it here: