THE LONG WAIT. United Artists, 1954. Anthony Quinn, Peggie Castle, Gene Evans, Mary Ellen Kay, Shawn Smith, Dolores Donlon, Charles Coburn. Based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Director: Victor Saville.

   In a comment that he left following my review of the movie The Guilty, based on the novelette “He Looked Like Murder,” Walker Martin commended me on comparing and contrasting the film version with Cornell Woolrich’s original story.

   I wish I could always do it, but usually it doesn’t work out that way. If I’ve just seen the movie, the book is nowhere to be found. If I’ve just read the book, finding a copy of the film is another question altogether.

   Case in point, and another small confession. If I’ve ever read The Long Wait as a novel, it was so long ago (50 years maybe) that if I did, I’ve forgotten it. And if I did read it, the other voice in my head says, how could I have possibly forgotten it?

   This last statement was prompted by the post that appeared just before this one. If I ever read a book anything like the one Bill Crider talks about, I think it would have stuck in my memory forever.

   Not being able to find my own copy of The Long Wait, I thought that Bill’s review would serve the purpose almost as well. Probably better, but I won’t tell him that.

   But before I being telling you about the movie, you might want to take a look at a short clip of the movie I found on YouTube. It’s the opening few minutes, in which you see Anthony Quinn being picked up as a hitchhiker, the fiery accident that follows, and a brief glimpse of the next scene, with Quinn in a hospital with his hands completely bandaged.

   He also has amnesia and no idea of who he is, where he was going, and more importantly, where he was coming from. A prankster, though, with hardly the best intentions in mind, sends him back to Lyncastle, where he’s known as Johnny McBride – and where also a wanted poster proclaims him wanted for murder.

   If you read Bill’s review again, you’ll get the idea that the book runs generally along the same lines. I don’t see Anthony Quinn as a “Johnny McBride,” however. His face and that name simply don’t match. I don’t say that he’s miscast, exactly, but I also don’t see him as the girl magnet he becomes as soon as he returns back to Lyncastle. (The police, by the way, have a problem matching him up with their fingerprint evidence. Due to the accident he was in, he no longer has fingerprints.)

   In any case, from here on in, I’ll be reviewing the movie, not the book. There is more actual violence in this film than in most noirs – with one early scene standing out in particular, when McBride is trussed up and about to be thrown into a 200-foot-deep quarry, and ends up alive – and the three hoodlums all dead.

   And another one later which has to be seen to be believed – and I’ll get back to that later. There is also an elaborate detective story going on as well, or actually a pair of them. First of all, the question is, who’s the real killer? But the second, and the more interesting, is who of the four woman who McBride becomes involved with is his old girl friend, Vera West?

   McBride’s memory is gone, of course, and since Vera’s had plastic surgery done before she came back, no one else knows who she is either. Well, one man knows, but he’s killed, shot to death early on. Working against McBride all the way is Servo (Gene Evans), the gangster who practically owns the town. (Evans was last seen by me as the leader of the pack of thieves doggedly hounding the trail of Clint Walker and Roger Moore in Gold of the Seven Saints, reviewed here back in July.)

   You do have allow some license to the screenwriter in working all of this into a sensible plot, let alone go down smoothly. (My copy of the film is unfortunately one that originally had color commercials for a California used car dealer in it, and whoever cut them out did not do a very good job of it. Some transitions are jarring, and I am slightly suspicious of them, thinking that maybe some small bits and pieces have been removed.)

   There is one long scene in this movie that makes definitely worth watching, even if all you can find is a crummy copy. That’s the one that comes toward the end, with Quinn as McBride tied in a chair in the middle of an empty warehouse, and Peggy Castle as Venus (one of the possible Vera’s) with her feet bound and her hands tied in front of her as she works herself slowly across the floor to him on her elbows, with Servo laughing and deriding her efforts the entire way.

   Beautifully photographed in glorious black-and-white, with lots of deep shadows and contrasting areas of light, this is a scene that will stick in your mind for a long time. The movie’s hard to find copies of, but it does exist. It has some flaws, but I hope I’ve made you want to see it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

PostScript: I sent an advance copy of this review to the previously mentioned Mr. Crider, hoping to come full circle, if possible, and let him compare the film (unseen by him) with the book. His reply, short but succinct:  “The quarry scene’s in the novel, and the scene you mention at the end is (probably) much more violent in the novel, a real torture scene.”

   I don’t know about you, but I think I’m going to have to find a copy of the book, and soon.

INCIDENT IN AN ALLEY. Robert E. Kent/United Artists, 1961. Chris Warfield, Erin O’Donnell, Harp McGuire, Virginia Christine, Willis Bouchey. Based on a story by Rod Serling. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

   The earlier version of this nearly bottom-of-the-barrel movie, based on production values, appeared as the eleventh episode of the third season of the television series The United States Steel Hour, November 23rd, 1955. The author, Rod Serling, later became, of course, probably the best known writer for television there ever was, or ever will be.

   Which means that the story value is above average – I won’t say high – in spite of some serious gaffes, but the sets the play is staged on are only one step above that of the original “Honeymooners” series, say, and pitiful indeed – never mind the fact that a key portion of the little action there is supposedly takes place outdoors. The TV roots are showing badly, in other words.

   Chris Warfield plays a cop named Bill Joddy (pronounced “Jody”) in this one. After a theft of some musical instruments from a small store in a bad section of town, Joddy hears a woman scream after being knocked down, and he chases the assailant down an alley. After warning him to stop or he’ll shoot, the person fleeing doesn’t stop, Joddy shoots …

   … and it turns out to be a small 13-year-old boy he has killed. A trial as well as a small courtroom morality play ensues. I won’t tell you the result of the trial, but in some ways it could have come out either way, as the story is not over, not for Joddy, and not for the gang of hoodlums who pulled the original robbery.

   Erin O’Donnell, who plays Joddy’s wife, had a short career in TV and the movies. I hate to say not surprisingly, but there’s certainly no chemistry or rapport that I could discern between her and Chris Warfield in any of the scenes they had together. Which may not entirely be her fault. Warfield’s career took a nosedive into adult film-making in the late 60s through the 1970s, mostly as a producer and/or director.

   I’ve not been able to come up with proper photos of either O’Donnell or Warfield, only a set of lobby cards once offered on eBay, and I apologize that they’re too small to be of any value.

   But if it helps at all, in the card in the lower right corner, that’s Warfield in a close-up taken during the trial. Above that, in the center right position, is a scene with Erin O’Donnell as Mrs. Joddy in her husband’s arms.

   Only Virginia Christine, as the dead boy’s mother, and Willis Bouchey, as Joddy’s immediate superior in the police department, show much in the way of acting ability, and even they are hampered by the lack of any real depth to the tale.

   Major errors, I believe – and if I’m wrong, please correct me – come in the courtroom scenes, which have the defense putting on their case first, the prosecution calling the defendant as one of their witnesses, and the judge in general allowing all kinds of extraneous testimony being allowed with the jury still in the room.

   And from a detective story point of view, not until the jury’s verdict has been given is any real investigation made, and that is done by Joddy himself, the accused child killer.

   Director Edward Cahn is a new name to me, but apparently not to movie fans who follow the careers of movie directors more closely than I have. He started in 1931, but not until 1955 did the most active part of his career begin, doing literally tons of bargain basement budgeted films of all kinds, but in large part SF movies like Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Other crime movies he directed in this same time period are Hong Kong Confidential (1958) and Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (1959).

   Overall, then, for Incident in an Alley? Interesting enough to watch all the way through, but if I’d been interrupted, I might not have gotten back to it right away.

[FOLLOW-UP.]  Later the same day. Here are some of the results I’ve come up with after doing some Googling for information about Edward Cahn:

  From Mike Grost’s website, an overview of some of Cahn’s directorial techniques:

      http://members.aol.com/MG4273/cahn.htm

  From the New York Times, a complete biography:

      http://movies.nytimes.com/person/83815/Edward-L-Cahn/biography

  From Fandango, an annotated list of many of his films:

      http://www.fandango.com/edwardl.cahn/filmography/p83815

THE LONE WOLF RETURNS. Columbia, 1935. Melvyn Douglas, Gail Patrick, Tala Birell, Henry Mollison, Thurston Hall, Raymond Walburn, Douglass Dumbrille. Based on the novel by Louis Joseph Vance (Dutton, 1923). Directed by Roy William Neill.

   I included some background on “The Lone Wolf” as a character in this earlier post, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that I’ve watched the two movies in the wrong order, since The Lone Wolf in Paris, the previously reviewed film, came out three years later, and starred Francis Lederer, not Melvyn Douglas, as Michael Lanyard, the notorious jewel thief.

   Not that there’s any sense of continuity between the two films, as enjoyable as each of them happens to be. I don’t imagine it will spoil anything to say that at the end of The Lone Wolf Returns wedding bells seem to be in the offing, while I don’t remember anything of the sort being referred to in The Lone Wolf in Paris.

   As it happens, I think that Melvyn Douglas was perfect for the part: suave, debonair, and just the kind of man who would rob wall safes in a top hat and tails. He’s in New York City in this one, or Michael Lanyard is, and not his usual European stomping ground

   And when he meets beautiful society girl Marcia Stewart, played by beautiful Gail Patrick, he decides at once that that’s it, his days of criminal activity are over, much to the consternation of Jenkins, his devoted valet and primary assistant in thievery, played to great comedic effect by Raymond Walburn.

   Gail Patrick, by the way, dropped out of movie roles in the late 1940s, only to become the executive producer for (I think) the entire run of the Raymond Burr “Perry Mason” television series in the mid-1950s.

   Getting back to the Lone Wolf, though, another gang of jewel robbers is not pleased to see Lanyard anywhere in the vicinity of their next job – and you get only one guess as to whose emeralds they plan to steal – and implicating him for the theft fits very nicely into their plans.

   If you can ignore the funny stuff – other than the top man in command, most cops that you find in 1930s mystery movies are funny, and so are the underling henchmen, always – I think you will find this movie as entertaining as I did. (And even some of the funny stuff is funny.)

   There was an earlier version of the movie, a 1926 silent film also based on the book by Louis Joseph Vance, and starring Bert Lytell and Billie Dove in the two leading roles. You can make out their likenesses on the cover of the book shown above, a Grosset & Dunlap photoplay edition.

TERROR STREET. Lippert Films (US) / Hammer Films (UK), 1953. Known as 36 Hours in the UK. Dan Duryea, Elsy Albiin, Ann Gudrun (Gudrun Ure), Eric Pohlmann, John Chandos, Kenneth Griffith. Story & screenplay: Steve Fisher. Director: Montgomery Tully.

   This is one of several (if not many) joint British-American productions in which a single star was imported from the US (Dan Duryea, of course, in this case) to make a movie, often a crime film, on the cheap in England, with the rest of cast consisting of only British and European actors and actresses.

   Two box sets of these Hammer Film Noirs, as they’re called, have been issued so far. On the basis of Terror Street, and the only one in either set that I’ve seen, I’d say that the emphasis is on the cheap. I can’t say in what way, exactly. Maybe it was only poorly done, leaving me with little more to say. (But of course I will.)

   Let me tell you about the story first. Dan Duryea plays an American flier names Rogers who marries a Norwegian girl (played by Elsy Albiin) he meets in England after the war, and they settle down there. When he’s called back to the States for some sort of training program, they have their first fight. Three months having turned into a year without hearing from her, he goes AWOL and heads back to England to see her and to learn why she’s cut off all contact with him

   And guess what. She opens the door to her apartment to find him waiting there, he’s clunked on the head from behind, and he wakes up to find her shot to death beside him, his gun (and the murder weapon) in his hand.

   Not waiting for the police to arrive for them to not believe his story, he heads out on the lam – and straight into the arms of Jenny Miller (Ann Gudrun) who works in a charity kitchen, which may help to explain why she takes him on as a charity case of her own.

   This is not a detective story – we the viewers have already seen the killer do the deed, although of course we do not know why – nor, believe it or not, is it much of a suspense yarn, even though that’s the gimmick that’s meant to keep the story moving: Rogers has only 36 hours before his superiors learn that he’s gone, having smuggled himself into England without their knowledge or permission.

   In those 36 hours, his quest is not only to find the killer and clear himself, but to discover why the long-distance romance with his wife broke up so badly. (Not realizing in the meantime that Jenny is becoming more and more important to him, and vice versa, only I think she realizes it first.) Various sleazy types try to stop them.

   A true noirish situation, right? It was concocted by a writer who started his career writing for the pulp magazines, but this time, nothing that happens seems to ring true, and Duryea appears almost too tired and out of sync to pull off the role he’s to play here, that of both hero and victim. (In his early days of film-making, as you probably need not be told, Duryea was usually a villain.)

   It is hard to say otherwise what goes wrong. The sets are cheap but for the most part, not that cheap, and there is plenty of exterior shooting that provides a glimpse of the non-touristy areas of London in the early 1950s.

   Other than Duryea, the actors are rather stolid folk, with only Ann Gudrun, who was born in Scotland, showing much spark. She was only 5 foot 3, I’m told, but she plays her role with a restrained combination of wistfulness and strength. (In this regard, I wish I had another photo to show you, one without the tears, but so be it.)

   Elsy Albriin is pretty without being beautiful, and if she’d been given a longer role, maybe some of the stiffness she shows early on would have worn away. (She did not have a very long career in either TV or the movies, especially in English-speaking roles.)

   One last generalization, then, and I think it applies here as well. Whenever I watch a movie and all I see are actors standing on a soundstage, that’s when I know when neither the story nor the players has any kind of hold on me. No mesmerizing movie-time spells this time. While in no sense did I find it disastrously bad, Terror Street was largely a disappointment for me.

THE MAN INSIDE. Warwick Films/Columbia, 1958. Jack Palance, Anita Ekberg, Nigel Patrick, Anthony Newley, Bonar Colleano, Sid James, Donald Pleasence. Based on the novel by M. E. Chaber. Director & co-screenwriter: John Gilling.

   Jack Palance plays Chaber’s well-traveled insurance investigator Milo March in this black-and-white Cinescope feature from the late 1950s. Considering all of the capital cities in Europe that the film takes place in, not to mention the opening scenes in New York City, I think the film ought to have been in color.

   Especially considering who his co-star was, and I don’t mean Nigel Patrick. The look that Palance gives Anita Ekberg from the bottom of a rooming-house set of stairs, with her at the top looking down, in the tightest-fitting dress you can imagine — well, maybe you can imagine, and no, while black-and-white may cut it in some movies, it does not in this one.

   Reviews for this movie online are few and far between, but they range from “tawdry” to “classic British noir,” and of course the truth (or rather, my opinion) is somewhere around halfway between. (Although it is a crime film, sure enough, it doesn’t really qualify as noir, and if it had been filmed in color, as suggested above, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to call it noir.)

   Story line: A mousy accountant named Sam Carter (played by Nigel Patrick, last seen here in The League of Gentlemen) waits 15 years before finally stealing a near priceless diamond from a Manhattan jewelry dealer, and Milo is the guy the insurance company sets on his trail.

   Complicating matters is that Milo is not the only one after the diamond, and Trudie Hall is one of them, although (according to her) she has a legitimate claim on it. Villainous Martin Lomer (Bonar Colleano) does not, and ever their tracks shall cross.

   From Lisbon, to Madrid (where March picks up an eager-to-please taxidriver assistant, amusingly played by Anthony Newley), to Paris, to London by train — I love movies that take place on trains, and this one’s no exception.

   There is, in fact, to pick up on a word I just used in the last paragraph, as much light humor in this mystery as there is violence, and I enjoyed that as well — the humor, I mean.

   The title of the movie (and of course prior to that, the book) comes from the fact that everyone has two sides to them: the outward one that everyone sees, and the man inside, who finds he cannot resist temptation and if and when given the opportunity, will take immediate action and advantage of it.

   As a small side note, one that I meant to mention above, Nigel Patrick was so well-disguised as the accountant-turned-thief (and then killer), I did not recognize him. With glasses and a mustache, he was that accountant, played to perfection with a capital P.

   Jack Palance’s youthful skull-faced features take some getting used to, as does his Texas accent, but his brash way of approaching matters soon make the unusual casting decision long-forgotten.

   As for Miss Ekberg, in 1958 she was very nearly the Eighth Wonder of the World. No acting ability would have been required, but the modicum she possessed at the time this movie was made was surely enough.

   Of movies recently reviewed here on the blog, director John Gillings’s previous one was The Pirates of Blood River (1962). The Man Inside apparently came before the bulk of the ones he did for Hammer.

FIVE GOLDEN HOURS. 1961. Ernie Kovacs, Cyd Charisse, George Sanders. Director: Mario Zampi.

   Even though American comedian Ernie Kovacs was a great favorite of mine, he’s not the primary reason for watching this very slight comedy caper of a film made by a largely British crew, and after him, you have no guesses left at all.

   Kovacs, of course, was much better known for his work on television, but who knows what sort of success in the movies he might have had, had it not been for his fatal automobile accident in January, 1962. He made only one additional film, a wacky comedy called Sail a Crooked Ship, which premiered just before his death and remains fondly in my memory as a Very Funny Movie.

   Perhaps I should leave it there — in my memory, that is — as perhaps I should find it not nearly as side-splitting today as when I was a mere lad barely out of my teens. His mugging in Five Golden Hours is exactly how I remember him, and yet — I barely cracked more than a smile. Subtle, I don’t imagine he ever was.

   He’s an assistant funeral director in Italy, you see, and what you might call a professional pallbearer, offering his abundant sympathies to bereaved widows for accommodation and reward: three of them — widows, that is — at the beginning of this movie.

   Enter the Baroness Sandra (Cyd Charisse), having just lost her fifth husband, and about to be evicted from her small castle of her home. Enter Aldo Bondi, whose charm seems surprisingly (to him) ineffective. Until, that is, the Baroness decides that she may have a use for him after all.

   All is not what it seems. Her latest husband had had a scheme, something to do with the five hours difference in time between financial centers on the continent and New York City, but as the scheme did not work out according to plan, the aforementioned creditors are beginning to circle around.

   Aldo gladly offers to help. The lady, that is, not the creditors. Enter the rich widows who have most recently been supporting him. Exit the Baroness.

   And then, at last, the twists in the plot begin, including an abortive (but funny) attempt at murder. Take George Sanders, for example, whom I have not mentioned before now, as there was no need to, as he does not show up until very nearly the next to the last reel, and then in only one room, the one in the mental institution where … just before one widow … and Bondi has to go off to the monastery where … I told you there were twists, didn’t I?

   Too bad that they’re not very interesting ones, and none of them bring Cyd Charisse back on the set for more than another small glimpse or two. What a waste of on-screen talent. They really should have filmed this movie in color, too. Who wants to see the grand Italian countryside in black-and-white?

   The post-war British crime film floated in and out of phases where ex-servicemen are seduced into criminal activity (through a sense of adventure or, more often, the fleeting rewards of black-marketeering and/or corruption by a ‘good time girl’) and, quite often, band together to use their war-time experience to commit crime.

   The late 1940s produced such noirish British thrillers as They Made Me a Fugitive (1947; d. Cavalcanti, from the novel A Convict Has Escaped by Jackson Budd), in which Trevor Howard’s down-on-his-luck ex-RAF pilot is drawn into a black marketeering racket; The Flamingo Affair (1947; d. Horace Shepherd) where an ex-Commando captain, infatuated by a femme fatale, agrees to rob his employer’s safe just to keep her in nylons; and in Night Beat (1948; d. Harold Huth) two soldiers returning to civilian life are caught up in black market dealing which inevitably leads to murder.

   These films depicted the post-war malaise of returning servicemen trying to readjust to civilian life but, unable to handle various personal disappointments, find themselves sucked into what initially appears an appealing underworld escape. Unlike their U.S. counterpart, at that time, these films were more a case of social commentary than full-blown adventure (such contemporary American films noir as The Blue Dahlia, 1946, and Dead Reckoning, 1947, for example).

   Later British films tended to utilise the dependancy on cameraderie of ex-military types. The Intruder (1953; d. Guy Hamilton, from Robin Maugham’s novel Line on Ginger) saw ex-Colonel Jack Hawkins discover his flat being burgled by one of his former troopers, leading to a search through men in the same Army company for psychological/social motives. Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young (1954; from a novel by Richard Macauley) follows four men – an American ex-soldier, an ex-boxer, an American Air Force sergeant who has deserted, and an unscrupulous playboy (a menacing Laurence Harvey) – who plan and carry out an armed mail van robbery. The Ship That Died of Shame (1955; d. Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, based on a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat) brought together a group of ex-Navy men and a wartime motor gunboat to go into the business of cross-Channel smuggling. A thieves-kitchen atmosphere pervaded Tiger in the Smoke (1956; d. Roy Baker, from the story by Margery Allingham) where a gang of war veterans search for their former sergeant who, during a wartime commando raid, deprived them of some hidden loot.

   Next to The League of Gentlemen, perhaps the most rewarding of the military-operation type robbery films of this period is Cliff Owen’s suspenseful A Prize of Arms (1962; scripted by Paul Ryder from a story by Nicholas Roeg and Kevin Kavanagh) in which ex-Army officer Stanley Baker and two others pull off (well, nearly) a quarter of a million pounds (£) army payroll robbery. The heightened suspense of the meticulous operation builds and sustains in best ticking-clock fashion.

   Fascinating as most of these films are, whether as social observations or caper thrillers, you are quite right, Steve, in observing that the viewers’ edge-of-the-seat experience develops in the unexpected (and unwanted) instances leading to the inevitable downfall. But what an exhilarating journey they lead.

   Incidentally, I recently enjoyed The Kill Point (2007), an eight-hour US miniseries taking on the social/psychological angles of a group of ex-Special Forces vets as they sustain a siege following a failed bank robbery. The sub-genre, if indeed it is one, seems to continue quite happily.

   A forgotten footnote to the above:

   The author of The League of Gentleman, John Boland (who held the post of Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, 1963-64), also scripted an episode of the long-running and popular Scotland Yard detective drama No Hiding Place (ITV, 1959-67) called ‘The Smoke Boys’ (1963). The episode was tantalisingly described in contemporary TV listings as a baffling series of bank robberies which our regular Scotland Yard detective heroes realise are not committed by any ordinary gang of criminals.

   Any ordinary gang of criminals? Could this have been a small-screen reworking of the League …? Perhaps, one day…

THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN. Allied Film Makers / J. Arthur Rank. 1960. Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesey, Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, Kieron Moore, Terence Alexander, Norman Bird, with Robert Coote, Nanette Newman & Oliver Reed (the latter uncredited). Screenplay: Brian Forbes; based on the novel of the same name by John Boland. Director: Basil Dearden.

   When this movie was first released in England, it proved to be one of the most popular films of the year. It’s been released there recently as a Special Edition DVD, a long detailed synopsis is available on Wikipedia and an equally in-depth analysis of the film, including its sociological significance re Britain and that country’s post-war malaise, can also be found online.

   I’ve also found a two-and-a-half minute trailer on YouTube, which you can go watch if you like, but of course I’ll have something more to say when you come back.

    “Heist” films were common in the US in the 1950s — and maybe even before — that is to say, a crime film in which a gang of crooks get together and plan out a robbery in detailed form, sometimes getting away with it and more often not. But apparently this is one of the first British films in the genre, with Jack Hawkins, as Lt.-Col. J. G. Norman Hyde, the ex-military officer in charge.

   The others in his squadron of recruits are all down-on-their luck former army officers as well, having been forced out of the service for various wrong-doings and/or squeaking by on the just over the wrong side of the law since entering civilian life. (This aspect of the film gives rise to commentary about post-war Britain and what to do with men like these at variously loose ends with no wars any longer to fight.)

   The resulting caper, while entertaining enough, is top-heavy on the front end. There is too much recruitment — with brief glimpses into the players’ current lives, just enough to establish their character (or lack thereof) — and too much preparation for the attack on the bank itself, an act that takes at most only ten minutes in screen time. But “attack” is precisely the right word. These men are fighting back against the establishment — mostly metaphorically speaking, that is, as their eyes are largely on the reward of over a million pounds each.

   Here’s another short clip from YouTube, soon after Major Race (Nigel Patrick) has ingratiated his way into becoming Hyde’s second-in-command (with some homosexual implications freely flying, if you’re looking for such things, and I’m not about to go any further than what you see on the screen yourself).

   Note that Brian Forbes (who later wrote and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon, for which he won an MWA Edgar Award in 1965 for Best Foreign Film Screenplay) not only wrote the film but starred in it as well. His wife Nanette Newman (mentioned here once before for his performance in The Wrong Box, produced and directed by Forbes) has a very small role at the beginning of the film, with next to no clothes on (in a bathtub full of suds, I’m sorry to add).

   I wish I could say that I was more involved in the film more than I was, but I found the Gentlemen far too seedy, too dishonest, and too corrupt (not all of them and all in different ways) for me to root for them. Waiting and watching for clues as to how their downfall would occur (not if) was, I admit it, a large part of the attraction for me.

   The comedy involved — you will find this movie described by some sources as a comedy thriller — is that of the low-key sort of nudge-nudge sort of way that the British so do well, although I wonder if in a crowded theater, several instances of contagious laughter could have broken out, especially back in 1960, when seven men against the establishment was — historians, help me out here — a revolutionary idea still in the making.

POSTSCRIPT. I see that I have failed to say anything about the book this movie was based on. It was published in 1958 by T.V. Boardman in the UK, with a paperback (I think) from Pan. In the US it was published only by Beacon in 1961, a company otherwise known for its long line of sleazy fiction.

   In any edition, though, it’s scarce, and so far I’ve failed to come up for a cover image to show you. The second of the non-YouTube links above states that Boland rewrote the ending of the book after the film came out, thus allowing for two more books in the series: The Gentlemen Reform (Boardman, 1961) and The Gentlemen at Large (Boardman, 1962).

[UPDATE] 06-26-08.    Bruce Grossman just emailed me to say that he found a copy of the US paperback edition up for sale on eBay. I’d buy it, but sellers who want money orders and not Paypal just don’t get my money. But here’s the cover. I’ll find another copy one of these days:

   Note that this is obviously a movie tie-in edition, with Jack Hawkins’ easily recognizable face front and center.

ALIAS NICK BEAL. Paramount, 1949. Ray Milland, Thomas Mitchell, Audrey Totter. Screenwriter: Jonathan Latimer, based on a story by Mindret Lord. Director: John Farrow.

   First of all, you may as well go watch this short clip from the movie at YouTube right now, as long as you come back. It’s the first time the viewer gets to see Nick Beal on the screen, played to superb perfection by the ultra-urbane (and more than slightly creepy, in a subtle but obvious, just-under-your-skin sort of way) by Ray Milland, an actor who throughout his career could apparently play both hero and villain with equal ease.

   Meeting him at this rundown waterfront bar is Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), an ambitious but reform-minded District Attorney who doesn’t know it yet, but who has eyes on the governor’s office. Mitchell played rumpled and generally honest guys like this by hardly getting out of bed.

   I’m going to tell you something now that I didn’t know when I started to watch the movie (or was able to conveniently forget), so if you don’t want to know, stop reading now. For some reason this movie is not readily available on video or DVD, but every write-up about it — and there are quite a few of them — talks about it freely, so I think that maybe I won’t be revealing anything too crucial by continuing.

   Still with me? As the story goes, or at least this one does, if Nick Beal is not the Devil, he has strong connections to him.

   If this first scene doesn’t come out and say so, each time he’s on the screen again, he simply knows too much or can do too much and pretty soon he’s got Foster in the palm of his hand, urging him on as only the Devil could do: “Think of all the good you could do if you were the governor,” he says, the unspoken context and agreement being: no matter how you get there or who you have to consort with to do so.

   Is this noir? If you’ve seen the film clip, how could you say no? Is this a crime film? No, not unless a few cheap gangsters, blackmail (on the part of Nick Beal), graft and corruption on a strictly state and city level makes a movie a crime film, and then, of course, it is.

   What this is movie really is a fantasy film, not a soft fluffy one, but one with some sharp corners and awfully hard edges. And with the atmosphere of seduction and crime always in the background — did I mention Audrey Totter yet? If I haven’t, I will. And with, as I began to say, seduction and crime the absolute focal point of this morality tale of ambition and greed, the movie is as noirishly dark as anyone could wish for.

   Until the ending that is, and if noir means unhappy endings, than this isn’t noir. Unless noir means learning about the darkness that exists in everyone’s heart, and even when he’s bested once or twice, a third time out of three is good enough for the likes of Mr. Beal.

   Audrey Totter plays Donna Allen, a woman who has traversed far too many bars in her young lifetime — presumably as well a lady of ill-repute — but here I am going into things the movie dares not quite come out and say. But recruited by Mr. Beal with promises to her of the finer things in life, she goes to work for Mr. Foster, and upon Beal’s request, soon has him in the palm of her hand, ready to leave his wife and do things with her that 48-year-old men have no right thinking about doing with anyone other than their wives.

   None of which we see, and which probably didn’t happen, but might have, and about we can easily surmise what Thomas Mitchell’s character would have like to have happened if it didn’t.

   In this film, though, we see another side of Audrey Totter, the actress. Quite often in the films she’s in — see Tension, in which she plays the two-timing wife of druggist Richard Basehart as a prime example — her characters are always tough and totally in contempt of the men whose emotions she plays with.

   In Alias Mr. Beal, we also see that she can play a character of a less hard-boiled nature, and she’s a marvel to watch as she gradually begins to realize, to her dismay, just whom she has fallen in league with.

   A lot of the attraction for many films that are hard to find copies of is that, well simply, that they’re hard to find. Their reputation is enhanced, in other words, by their unavailability. That’s somewhat the case here. I’d heard many good things about this movie, without knowing most of the details, that when I finally got to see the film, its immediate impact was less than I’d anticipated.

   No matter. A score card rating of 80% isn’t at all bad, at least in my book, especially since it’s an 80% based on already enhanced expectations.

[UPDATE] 06-17-08.   Not being very happy that I hadn’t provided a better photo of Thomas Mitchell, I went looking for one, and here’s what I came up with. Rather nice, in my opinion:

THE MAN I LOVE. Warner Brothers, 1947. Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Bruce Bennett, Alan Hale, Dolores Moran. Based on the novel Night Shift, by Maritta Woolf. Screenplay by Jo Pagano, Catherine Turney & W. R. Burnett (the latter uncredited). Director: Raoul Walsh.

   Believe it or not, the book this movie is based on is still in print (Scribner, trade paperback, 2006). From the Amazon description:

   Night Shift is not included in Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, but Whistle Stop is, although only marginally:

WOLFF, MARITTA M(artin). 1918-2002.
      -Whistle Stop (Random, 1941, hc) [Michigan] Film: United Artists, 1946 (scw: Philip Yordan; dir: Leonide Moguy).

   Whistle Stop the movie starred Ava Gardner and George Raft – now there’s a combination, for you – and IMDB describes the plot thusly:

   This latter film is available on DVD, most easily by means of one the various box sets of Noir Films that everybody seems to be packaging together these days.

   Both Jo Pagano and Catherine Turney have one book each in CFIV. For the former, it’s The Condemned, filmed in 1951 as Try and Get Me; for the latter, it’s The Other One, filmed in 1957 as Back from the Dead. Everybody reading this knows W. R. Burnett, or should, and of course in our circle director Raoul Walsh is even more well known, the circle being, of course, the extended realm of crime, mystery and adventure fiction.

   Which is a long, long introduction to convince myself, first of all, then maybe you, that The Man I Love actually belongs and should come up for discussion in a mystery-oriented blog.

   I’ll keep writing, and later on, I’ll ask what you think.

   The basic synopsis of the story as being the same as the book, as stated above. Ida Lupino is Petey Brown (not Braun; that was changed, for obvious reasons), the nightclub singer from New York who comes to visit her family in California and decides that their problems might as well be hers for a while. Robert Alda plays Nicky Toresca, the slick-talking nightclub owner she goes to work for, a man who’s hot for every woman he knows and meets, including Petey’s married sister, until the former puts an end to that.

   Not mentioned in the Amazon description is former jazz pianist San Thomas, played in solid if not stolid brooding fashion by Bruce Bennett (formerly Herman Brix, but who turned out to be an actor after all). Petey has been dallying around with her boss on a strictly hands-off basis – perhaps the only woman who’s been able to handle him that way – but when she meets San, it is lust at first sight, movie code or no.

   Turns out, though, that San has baggage of his own. He’s divorced but still loves his wife who dumped him, and he’s currently but only temporarily AWOL from the Merchant Marine. There’s more. The woman living across the hall from Petey’s sister is bored with her marriage and her small twin babies, and she’s cheating on her husband, who’s a naively nice guy that Petey’s younger sister has eyes for.

   I think you have the picture by now. There is way too much plot to be covered adequately in one ninety minute movie, but what this is is obviously drama of the soap opera variety, gussied up a bit for the night time audience. Is it also a crime movie, as IMDB says it is? Not a bit of it.

   But is it Noir, as IMDB also suggests? Yes, absolutely, not completely, but yes. It’s the lighting. It’s the location. (Outside of the drab apartment where the Otis family lives, nightclubs and after-hours jazz spots predominate, with the opening scene worth 100% of the price of admission. Even though Ida Lupino is only lip-synching the words, the music is terrific).

   It’s also the sense of quiet desperation that exists in these people’s existences. It’s the ray of hope that exists and blooms in one area of their lives, only to diminish in another.

   So noir, yes. A crime film, no. I wish I could find a longer clip, but this one will have to do. It’s about the only scene of almost actual violence in the movie, and in it Petey stops the husband next door from committing a real act of violence on Nicky, the nightclub owner. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve never seen anything like it, and even if you have, you still haven’t seen anything like it.

   Are you back? To get back to the question I told you I was going to ask later, what do you think?