THE UNHOLY THREE. MGM, 1925. Lon Chaney, Mae Busch, Matt Moore, Victor McLaglen, Harry Earles, Matthew Betz. Based on the novel by Clarence Aaron ‘Tod’ Robbins; director: Todd Browning. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   There was, perhaps, one film at the convention in which acting, script; and direction combined in an often unforgettable combination: Todd Browning’s The Unholy Three, starring Lon Chaney, Victor MacLaglen, and, memorably, the fine midget actor, Harry Earles. This is the 1925 silent version.

   Chaney plays a side-show ventriloquist (Professor Echo) who engineers a scam in which he, strongman Hercules (McLaglen), and Tweedledee (Earles) gain entry to homes of the rich who are clients of a pet store where the trio’s foil, Mae Busch, works. Chaney, disguised as Busch’s grandmother, and Earles as a year-old baby, make service calls to treat “ailing” parrots who, once they have left the store, cannot talk.

   Earles is a malevolent presence who fully justifies W.C. Fields’ wariness toward children, and McLaglen, at moments, in makeup and hulking movements bears a striking resemblance to Karloff’s Frankenstein monster.

   Eventually, a sentimental ending weakens the somber power of the best scenes, but this is still a striking film, with a vein of nastiness that gives it an acerbic edge sixty years after its production.

TWO SMART PEOPLE. MGM, 1946. John Hodiak, Lucille Ball, Lloyd Nolan, Elisha Cook Jr., Hugo Haas, Lloyd Corrigan, Vladimir Solokoff. Screenplay: Ethel Hill, Leslie Charteris. Director: Jules Dassin.

   Two Smart People is a charming little romantic crime caper often falsely identified as a comedy thanks to the presence of Ball and the byplay between her, Hodiak and Nolan. Instead it could easily be an adventure of the Saint, as it plays a good deal on the cat and mouse game between con man Ace Connors (Hodiak) and cop Bob Simms (Nolan), who is hot on his trail.

   Connors has stolen some valuable bonds and is planning to sell them. Nolan wants the bonds even more than he wants Connors and hopes to convince the charming con man to turn them in for a reduced sentence. Lucy is a con woman on the lam from a charge in Arkansas.

   Simms has caught up with Connors in California, but Connors talks him into traveling back east on the train that will take them through the Southwest and end up in New Orleans — where Connors plans to elude Simms and sell the bonds.

   Complicating things are the presence of Ball’s Ricki Woodner, and Elisha Cook Jr. as Fly Feletti, a murderous accomplice of Ace’s hot on the trail of him and the bonds. Simms plays along hoping to get Ace and the bonds.

   Suspense isn’t really what director Dassin is after here. The train trip is an excuse for the romance to develop between Ace and Ricki as Simms works on Ricki to help him convince Ace to go straight before it is too late.

   There is a brief twist when Ricki gets Ace across the border into Mexico when they stopover in El Paso, but Simms lures him back, and now Ricki’s only hope is to get Ace to hand over the bonds, but Ace has plans of his own — it’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans and amid the chaos and costumes he and Ricki can elude Simms, sell the bonds, and head for Cuba.

   But Ace hasn’t counted on Ricki’s conscience or Feletti’s obsession, and when he goes to sell the bonds to fence Vladimir Sokaloff in New Orleans he finds Ricki, himself, and Simms all in danger.

   Though there are comedy elements in the film and even a few noir elements (notably Cook’s Fellitti), Two Smart People is neither a comedy nor film noir. But it is a charming little romantic crime film with elements of both and an exceptional cast at the top of their form.

   It’s one of only a handful of screenplays by Charteris, and though it is impossible to know how much he contributed to it, the film has many elements of the Saint in Ace Connors character, although he is more a professional and less an adventurer.

   Watching it I couldn’t help but think in many ways this was closer to how Charteris would have liked to see Templar played on the big screen than the previous series entries he was so vocal a critic of.

   Two Smart People may not be for all tastes, and it is only a minor work of Dassin’s, but it plays well, and the triangle of conflicting interests between Ace, Ricki, and Simms within the confines of the train journey with stopovers for a little scenic.tour and romance play smoothly and keep your interest.

   Hodiak and Ball are well cast opposite each other, and Nolan was making a career of playing very human cops (ironically he played one opposite Hodiak’s amnesiac private eye in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film noir Somewhere In the Night the same year as People) in this period.

   Cook is good as the nervous killer, a bit of a throwback to Wilbur in The Maltese Falcon instead of the nervous cowards he became typecast as, and the rest of the cast are all in high gear.

   Two Smart People isn’t a lost masterpiece, or a major work from director Dassin, just a very good and entertaining film with more to offer than might at first be obvious. It’s not going to become your favorite film, but it might just become a surprising discovery, one of those little films you might otherwise have missed or skipped, but are glad you discovered, and sometimes those are as rare and prized as lost masterpieces.

   I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have a number of these minor films on my list that I turn to when I might not be in the mood for something more challenging. Sometimes you just want to watch a movie, not change your life. Watch it in that light, and it’s likely to surprise you. These days sheer competence and skill and a tale well told are rare enough to be applauded and even treasured.

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers-First National (UK), 1938. Emlyn Williams, Shorty Matthews, Ernest Thesiger, Anna Konstam, Allan Jeayes, Anthony Holles. Based on the book by James Curtis, who also wrote the screenplay. Director: Arthur B. Woods. Shown at Cinevent 19, Columbus OH, May 1987.

   Film historian William Everson was very much in evidence at the convention, and his interest in the British mellers was responsible for the appearance of They Drive by Night on the program.

   (Only the title made its way across the Atlantic. The American film of the same name was based on the A. I. Bezzerides novel Long Haul.)

   In the first half of the film, Emlyn Williams is a recently released convict trying to evade the police, who believe he has murdered his former girl friend. Much of this is shot at night, in the rain, and is a taut chase in the Fritz Lang vein.

   In the second half of the film, Williams and a new girl friend set a trap for the real “mad sex killer” (in Everson’s pithy description) who is played by Ernest Thesiger, the unforgettable Dr. Pretorious of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein.

   The style clashes irreconcilably in the two sections of the film, but the casting and a nicely designed and staged scene in a period dance hall give the film some interest.

RAFFLES. Samuel Goldwyn, 1930. Ronald Colman, Kay Francis, Bramwell Fletcher, David Torrence, Alison Skipworth, Frederick Kerr. Based on the story collection (and the subsequent play based on it) The Amateur Cracksman (1899) by E. W. Hornung. Directors: Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast (uncredited); fired and replaced by George Fitzmaurice.

   I had a strange experience while watching this movie, and of course I’m ready to tell you about it. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I watched this movie over the span of two successive evenings, even though it’s only a miserly 72 minutes long.

   I’d enjoyed the first half immensely and was looking forward to the second half with considerable anticipation, only to find the second half a sorry letdown, and I for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

   What had happened? Were they off budget and the production crew had to wrap things up too quickly? Scouring the Internet after the fact, it seems as though something like that did happen — as you will spotted yourself if you haven’t skimmed through the credits above too quickly.

   A. J. Raffles, as you may know, is well-known even today as “The Amateur Cracksman,” quite fictional of course, and as a character, a gentleman burglar and house thief created by E. W. Hornung, who married a sister of Arthur Conan Doyle. The stories of his exploits were quite the rage in late Victorian England (approximately 1898 to 1905), but instead of my telling you more about them, I’d prefer to send to Mary Reed’s long and informative article about them, which you can find on the primary Mystery*File website.

   In this first talking picture version of the Raffles stories, it is Ronald Colman, of the well-modulated British accent (and therefore a perfect choice in that regard) who plays the title character, and Bramwell Fletcher who plays his good friend and close associate, Bunny Manders. (Fletcher was last mentioned on this blog as one of the players in the The Mummy, which came out in 1932, but he was young enough to wind up his career in television in 1967.)

   If my count is right, there were five earlier silent films with Raffles as a character. This 1930 version was followed by another in 1939, the one that starred David Niven, which I wish I could tell you that I’ve seen, but which I have to admit I have not. In spite of a good cast, however, including Olivia de Havilland, it does not seem to have gathered very good reviews.

   But as you won’t have forgotten my saying so earlier, this earlier production showed a lot of promise. After proposing marriage to his lady friend Gwen (Kay Francis), Raffles promises himself an end to his career as a burglar, only to be confronted with Bunny’s gambling debts — a matter of some thousand pounds — with only a weekend between then and disaster.

   So it’s off to the country and the Melrose mansion, which is also the home, not so coincidentally of the Melrose diamonds. And not only are Raffles and Bunny present, along with the usual assortment of house guests, but also a gang of lower class thieves with a Scotland Yard inspector hot on their trail, all of which are complications that Raffles had not counted on.

   And when Gwen suddenly appears as well … and this is where I had to stop watching on the first evening.

   To say that the next night’s continuing viewing proved disappointing is an understatement indeed. From a well-paced first half, an A-level production, the second half is a helter-skelter mish-mash of attempted break-in’s — some successful, some not — close calls, sudden shifts of scene, and gaps in the story line that a hansom cab could have plowed through easily.

   There is one plus, though, that I would be remiss in not pointing out. Kay Francis’s character seems to light up from the slightly soporific to a lady with a mission and a delightful gleam in her eye when she deduces the truth about the man she’s promised her heart to. What a delightful adventure! she thinks (in those not-so-innocent pre-Code days).

   And it should have been, and what’s more, it could have been, I’d like to believe, and I do.

RED LIGHT. United Artists, 1949. George Raft, Virginia Mayo, Gene Lockhart, Raymond Burr, Harry Morgan, Barton MacLane, Arthur Franz. Music: Dmitri Tiomkin. Director: Roy Del Ruth.

   First of all, I have little or no idea what the title of this semi- or quasi-noirish movie means. And second of all, I’m not sure that the people who made this movie had a well-conceived idea about what kind of movie they wanted to make. (Or perhaps if they did, it’s one that doesn’t square away with the kind of movie I wanted them to make, in which case the problem is mine, and not theirs.)

   While I stand to be rebutted on this, I found this film to be schizophrenic to an extreme. With Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan playing two of the most utterly nasty villains ever to appear on the screen, at least at the time of its first showing, this movie also contains some of the most vividly noirish scenes (dark alleys, neon signs, rainy rooftops, grotesque close-ups) to be seen in the entire first generation of the genre.

   And yet, the message of the film is a spiritual if not totally religious one, one that leaves vengeance to an all-powerful heavenly being, complete with a spirited — if not overpoweringly uplifting — musical background provided by Dmitri Tiomkin.

   To me, though, the musical score was intrusively inappropriate and working dramatically (and loudly) at cross-purposes against the darker images and story being portrayed on the screen.

   George Raft plays Johnny Torno in Red Light, the co-owner of a medium-to-large trucking company. Several years before he was responsible for the imprisonment of company embezzler Nick Cherney (Raymond Burr), who upon his impending release from prison hires Rocky to kill Torno’s brother, a priest just returned to the US after a stint as a wartime chaplain.

   At which point the movie also becomes a “dying message” mystery, for the dying man’s last words are, “In the Bible,” initiating a hunt by Torno for the subsequent guests in his brother’s hotel room, once Torno realizes that the Gideon Bible that was in it is missing.

   One of these guests is Carla North (Virginia Mayo), whose presence in the movie is needed, I suspect, only because otherwise there would be no women in it. Why Torno hires her to aid him in finding the other guests is not entirely clear, save for a jarring coincidental wartime connection between him and her through his brother.

   There are other major holes in the plot, often safely ignorable, and you might even call them minor, but major or minor, sometimes holes bother you, and sometime they don’t. This time, they did, perhaps because in the best of times, I’m not a George Raft fan, and even Virgina Mayo’s role in this movie I found too bland and watered down for my tastes.

   If it weren’t for Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan (at the time still called Henry Morgan) I’d have to call this film totally ordinary, or even a notch or two less. But sometimes it takes a villain or two to make a movie memorable, and in this case, that’s precisely what this perfect pair of sadistic hoodlums did.

ADVENTURE IN MANHATTAN. Columbia, 1936. Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, Reginald Owen, Thomas Mitchell. Suggested by the story “Purple and Fine Linen” by May Edginton. Director: Edward Ludwig.

   There are actually two stories involved in this moderately entertaining crime-romance trifle. The first is kind of a story within the story, if you will, and it’s the one by May Edginton listed in the credits. But I’ll back up a little, though, before saying more.

   Hot shot crime reporter George Melville (Joel McCrea) is one of those fellows the rest of the guys on the beat love to hate. While he gets along with them fine, he’s by nature smug and self-possessed, and for good reason. He gets scoops that no one else does, not by chance, but by pure intellect and a dispassionate viewing of the facts.

   If a good-looking woman comes along when he’s working on a story, she’d just be another clue, he is ribbed, and he good-heartedly agrees. But when a good-looking woman does come along (Jean Arthur), he falls for her story hook, line and sinker, just like every other guy would. Or is it a story? Well, it’s the one I mentioned by May Edginton above, and it’s a good one.

   You can even read the entire story online right here. It will suck you in too, I guarantee, a tale of a young woman down on her luck who has to resort to picking pockets in order to see her young girl who’s been living with her father and whom the mother has not seen since the divorce went through.

   This first part of the movie takes up no more than twenty minutes of the film, and while I hate to say it, given that I like both Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea as actors, but it goes downhill from here. I also say that even though the second half of the film is one of those grand high-stakes art theft movies I was talking about in regard to crime caper fiction not so long ago.

   What the segue is, and how the story makes the switch from the first part of the movie to the second, I will leave for you to watch (and enjoy) on your own.

   I think what the problem is, relative to the second half of the film, though, is that there’s too much story and not enough plot — and there’s somehow not enough time left to explain (convincingly) what the attraction between the two leading players is, other than that she’s a woman and he’s a man, and of course the twain have to meet.

   Nonetheless, moderately entertaining is what I said up above, and I’ll stand by what I said. But in terms of simple comparisons, if you’re a fan of romantic comedies, The More the Merrier (1943), with (quite coincidentally) the same two stars, this movie is not. Given a choice and a chance, I’d watch that one instead — any time — even if there’s no crime in it.

GRAHAM GREENE – This Gun for Hire. Doubleday, US, 1936. Previously published in the UK as A Gun for Sale, Heinemann, 1936. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft.

● Filmed as This Gun for Hire. Paramount, 1942. Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, Laird Cregar, Alan Ladd, Tully Marshall, Marc Lawrence. Screenwroters: Albert Maltz & W. R. Burnett; director: Frank Tuttle).

● Also filmed as Short Cut to Hell. Paramount, 1957. William Bishop, Robert Ivers, Georgann Johnson, Yvette Vickers, Murvyn Vye. Director: James Cagney.

   Written in 1936 and very much aware of its time, Grahame Greene’s This Gun for Hire spins a (mostly) taut tale of an ugly little paid killer played false by his employers, evading the law and pursuing his lonely revenge, but at the same time manages to evoke much more.

   There are themes of isolation and alienation here, vividly rendered by a simple plot that manages to turn most of its protagonists into outcasts at one point or another: the heroine goes from hostage to accomplice; her detective-boyfriend gets betrayed and bitter; the slimy go-between finds himself abandoned in his turn… and Greene sharpens his point with background motifs of Britain trying to celebrate Christmas on the eve of war. (In 1936, Europe was teetering on the brink of conflict like a drunk at the edge of a swimming pool, but there were still those who thought it could be avoided.) This Gun is filled with War headlines, nativity displays, civil defense drills and holiday shoppers in splendid counterpoint to its fast-moving tale of hunter/hunted.

   Some of the players in this thing get a bit too much detail, and things slow up for characters we never really care much about, but Greene’s heroine breaks the mold, a tough proto-feminist who gets kidnapped, shot at, beaten, bound and stuffed up a chimney without once losing her wise-cracking, hard-boiled aplomb. A marvelous creation in a classic thriller.

   This Gun for Hire was filmed twice, and both times the Christmas/War motifs were jettisoned as the action was moved from 1936 England to contemporary America.

   Greene’s preoccupation with man’s relationship to God and Society got short shrift too, while in the 1942 film writer W.R. Burnett focused on spies, poison gas, action and pace. Also, the hero/killer’s disfigured face, a major element in the book, was completely reversed by boyish Alan Ladd.

   Still, the 1942 film of This Gun for Hire is a fine thing, with Veronica Lake ably translating Greene’s heroine, Laird Cregar memorably sucking chocolates as he orders a killing, and Alan Ladd, who turned out to be an actor of rather limited resources, achieving stardom as a hired killer — the perfect fusion of Actor and Role.

   Then in 1955 producer A.C. Lyles (best remembered for a series of geriatric B-westerns in the 196Os) remade This Gun for Hire as Short Cut to Hell, directed by James Cagney, of all people.

   It’s a difficult film to like: crude, sloppy, brutal and rather pointless, but Robert Ivers and Georgann Johnson (whose careers went nowhere) do surprisingly apt interpretations of Greene’s ratty little killer and smart-ass heroine.

DELUSION. Cineville, 1991. Jim Metzler, Jennifer Rubin, Kyle Secor, Jerry Orbach. Director & co-screenwriter: Carl Colpaert.

   This is a pretty good example of a category that can’t be called anything but neo-noir. Produced way past the usual late 1950s closing date for the first grouping of noir films, and made especially with the term (and the goal of making a) noir film in mind, movies in this particular genre are also made cheaply and have many of the same themes as the originals …

   … but they’re almost always in color — often brilliant, blinding color — and obviously they include a lot more overt violence and sexuality than the directors in the 1940s could ever have dreamed of.

   Most of them have had very limited theatrical releases. Many of these crime-oriented features were direct-to-video (and now direct-to-DVD) and used to show up on HBO, Showtime and Cinemax after 11 o’clock all the time.

   (For some reason they don’t any more, and I don’t know why. Late night programming seems to consist of regular movies that run all day long, over and over, or really awful softcore pornography.)

   Reviews I’ve seen of Delusion have been mixed. The New York Times hated it, but two reviewers for the Washington Post were of totally opposite opinions. I thought the first half was also first-rate; the second half, well, second-rate.

   Here’s a question for you. Suppose you’re a guy into computers, and you’re on the run from your former employer with nearly a half million dollars in cash stashed in the trunk of your car. You’re on the road somewhere in the desert (Nevada, let’s say) and you see the car that just careened past you moments before spin off the highway and land upside down in the sand. Two people, a man and a woman, are struggling to get out.

   Would you stop? Would you offer them a lift?

   Generally speaking I guess most people would, and like George O’Brien (Jim Metzler), I guess a lot of people would be ruing their decision within minutes, kicking themselves no end for being so kind-hearted.

   Two more flaky people — seriously flaky, let’s be emphatic here — than Patti (Jennifer Rubin) and Chevy (Kyle Secor), could scarcely be imagined. How soon can he possibly get them out of his car, George is thinking, and you can just see it in his face and tortured body language as the predicament he’s in starts to sink in.

   Do they have guns? Yes. Do they have other plans in mind? Yes. Or at least Chevy does, on both counts. Patti’s involvement is not so clear. There are a couple of really good twists coming, one of them (or maybe both) involving Chevy’s friend Larry (Jerry Ohrbach) who is living alone in a trailer beside a small lake in the middle of the desert.

   The couple of good twists come a little bit too early, though. I was set up to expect one or two more, and I was disappointed when I didn’t get them – or in other words, as I previously implied, the second half doesn’t begin to match up in a direct comparison with the first.

   It’s still a noir film all the way, however, allowing some forgiveness for a couple of allegedly comic touches, also in the second half.

   As George finds himself sinking more and more quickly into the quicksandish trap he’s let himself in for, the question he finds that he must keep asking himself is, how important is the stolen money to him?

   Jennifer Rubin, by the way, was the original model in Calvin Klein Obsession ads, and this movie was relatively early in her career. She’s quite beautiful, obviously, and in the first half (I keep getting back to this, don’t I?) she’s plays enigmatic very well. Make that extremely well. Once she’s given some dialogue, you know that an actress she wasn’t yet.

   Not that her career went uphill from here. Other than the lead role in the remake of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman, which came along later, I don’t see anything but mediocre parts in even more mediocre movies on her resume.

   A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

BOB LE FLAMBEUR. Mondial, France, 1956; William Mishkin, US, 1959, as Bob the Gambler. Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, André Garet, Gérard Buhr, Guy Decomble. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville.

   One of the advantages of being something of a round peg in a department of square holes is that I am occasionally allowed to teach something that “nobody else” has any interest in doing, like the course on French Film that I have just finished teaching.

   Most of the films are by directors like Renoir, Clair, Virgo, Carne, and Ophuls, but I always manage to slip in a genre film by a director not many people would consider essential. In past years this meant films by Clouzot (Le Cor beau and Jenny Lamour).

   This year it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 thriller, Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler), a film that Melville had repudiated before his death in 1972 (“I will not allow this film ever to be screened again”) but that many critics now consider to be his finest achievement in a series of studies of criminals and the criminal milieu.

   Ostensibly, Bob the Gambler is an extended character study leading to a climactic caper, the robbery, by a team of well trained specialists, of the casino at Deauville.

   But Melville manages to undermine almost every cliche of the caper film with a rigorously analytic style that manages to distance the spectator from the characters and cut away from the caper at the climactic moment, only returning to it in the final moments to dispense almost briskly with the basic plot elements and provide a final, comically ironic look at the protagonist, Bob the gambler.

   Melville, in an interview, related how, after seeing Huston’s film The Asphalt Jungle, he realized that he no longer wanted to — or could not — make a classic caper film. He decided instead to make what he called a “comedy of manners” (“comedie de moeurs”), but most American viewers will probably, like the students in my class, find this an odd film indeed.

   Melville’s film preceded New Wave films like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by about four years, but the look of the film (shot on location in the streets and buildings of Montmartre) and the use of a jazz sound track seem to look forward to the innovative filmmaking of the late fifties and early sixties.

   The credits are presented over shots of Montmartre from the “heights” of Sacre-Coeur (the church) to the “depths” of Place Pigalle, a moral distance underlined by the matter-of-fact narration of Melville.

   But the spectator who expects an explicit moralistic study of the contrasts between the sacred and the profane will be disconcerted as the camera prowls restlessly along the streets, into the back rooms of cafes and restaurants, with Sacre-Coeur only present as a shape dimly glimpsed through the closed curtains of Bob’s elegant apartment.

   The affection the camera shows for the landscape may be disconcerting to the viewer who is looking for a narrative thread that will engage him, but location filming is a prominent feature of New Wave films, as in The 400 Blows, whose “travelogue” beginning is reminiscent of the beginning of Bob, all the more so in that both films benefited from the same superb photographer, Henri Decae.

   The final shot in Bob is of an empty car parked on a lonely stretch of beach and completes a circle initiated by the documentary shots of buildings at the beginning of the film.

   The inner life of the characters is never explored in a way that is satisfying to the viewer, and it is perhaps appropriate that the frame is emptied of people at the beginning and the end.

   The viewer expecting the tight plotting of Hitchcock or the claustrophobic, fatalistic character study of Huston, will be disappointed. In Melville’s work, fate is chance, but the camera lingers on geometric patterns (wall-paper, windows, a floor covering) that suggest an intercrossing of plot lines that will only be evident on repeated viewings.

   The characters are elusive and the “content” of their relationships is like a crossword puzzle that may or may not be correctly filled in by the spectator.

   Melville’s expressed wish that the film not be re-released has been ignored. The formal, discreet patterns of this apparently open but controlled narrative with something of the look of a photograph by Walker Evans have lost none of their capacity for frustrating the viewer accustomed to the heightened, mounting suspense of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

   All three of these films are about defeat and loss, but Bob manages to retrieve an ironic victory from a failure, and the sardonic humor of this victory appears to clash with the conventions it has intermittently adhered to.

   In Breathless, Goddard paid tribute to Melville by including, a reference to the character, Bob (Roger Duchesne), and by using Melville to play the role of a novelist interviewed by Patricia, the young American with whom the small-time Parisian hoodlum, Michel, has fallen in love.

   She betrays Michel, echoing the thematics of betrayal in Bob, where Anne (Isabelle Corey) betrays Paulo and Bob’s careful planning, but the final irony is perhaps Melville’s attempted betrayal of his beautiful and still fascinating portrait of Bob the gambler and his Parisian milieu.

   And one can only wonder to what extent Godard was again tipping his hat to Melville when one of his characters comments that he and his friends avoid Montmartre, which is dangerous for them and their “kind.”

   But Godard met successfully the cinematic challenge of his gifted predecessor and his tribute is, finally, the best witness to Melville’s achievement.