SECOND SKIN. 2000. Natasha Henstridge, Angus Macfadyen, Liam Waite, Peter Fonda. Directed by Darrell James Roodt.

   Opening scene: the front of a shabby-looking bookstore, in what is apparently a small Californian beach town. A stunning blonde approaches, enters. From inside, as the owner looks up, her thin white dress is nearly translucent in the sunlight.

   She’s looking for a job, but he – a dissheveled-looking fellow not dissimilar to all of the semi-seedy bookstore owners of every shop you’ve ever been in, right? – he doesn’t know that yet. She browses the shelves. “You’ve got some original editions, here,” she says. “Hammett, Thompson, Cain. That’s a nice collection.

    “Some of the new ones are good, too,” she goes on, having waited in vain for a response more expressive than a shrug. “Ellroy, Block, Kent Harrington.” The bookstore guy doesn’t recognize the last one. “Who’s that?”

    “Dia de Los Muertos,” she murmurs. “The Day of the Dead.”

   What an opening! You won’t be able to see the whole scene without finding a copy of the movie on DVD – not difficult to do – but you can see part of it in the trailer for the film. Go here, but please come back.

   Why there is a trailer made for a movie that was never released to the theaters, I’m not sure, but maybe for cable TV? It’s a pretty good representation of the film, too, although most of the violence that’s in the film is shown in this short teaser – but not all.

   It seems that Crystal Ball – that’s her name, played to icy perfection by former model Natasha Henstridge – is new in town, has no friends, and business is so bad for Sam Kane – that’s his name, played to rumpled perfection by Irish actor Angus Macfadyen – that doesn’t need anybody to work for him. Intrigued, however, he takes her address and phone number …

   … and as she is standing outside his shop as she is leaving, she’s hit by a car, by a hit-and-run driver who doesn’t stop. When she wakes up in the hospital, Sam standing by, she does not remember him, does not remember anything. Amnesia.

   It seems she has some secrets. Visiting her place on the beach, Sam finds a gun under her pillow. Someone is also following her trail, a nasty piece of work named Tommy G (Liam Waite) complete with tattoos and nifty knack with both guns and knives. Meanwhile, Sam has his own problems and his own secrets. Plagued by a blackmailer, he …

   Hold on, hold on. Too much story. If you’ve read this review this far, you’ll want to watch this movie yourself. Beautifully photographed, this neat little neo-noir tale of crime, secrets and surprises sometimes goes over the top, and in general may try just a little too much, but sometimes excesses with the right kind of intentions can be forgiven.

   I did, at least, and I do recommend the movie to you. Most of the people commenting on IMDB didn’t know what to make of the film. Too many cliches, they say, and they may be right, but for me, they’re the right kind of cliches. For me, I might say that the film is a little too violent – and there is one cliche it definitely does not include. Most crime thrillers like this make it seem all too easy to kill someone with only your bare hands and a belt. This one does not.

   Getting back to the people commenting on IMDB. They did not like the ending all that much. Obviously knowing the cliches of neo-noir films like this one sadly does not mean that they know what neo-noir films are all about – what on earth does noir mean? – and the ending of this one is a beauty.

   Some of them also claim that the ending came from nowhere. Obviously they were not watching all the way through, as I certainly knew that something was happening that was not immediately explained – and I readily confess that I did not know exactly what – and the ending, a near perfect one, came as no surprise to me. (Well, just a little.)

   I do not know why films like this are not shown in theaters anymore – well, actually I do. Nobody would come to see them. There must be money to be made, though, in making them and releasing them only on DVD and cable TV, and relying on the fact that word of mouth will catch up to them and a profitable time will be had by all. I hope so.

   Using a line that I’ve closed many a movie review with before, if this sounds like your kind of movie, it is.

EDGAR WALLACE – The India-Rubber Men.

Hodder & Stoughton, UK. hc, 1929. Doubleday-Doran Crime Club, US, hc, 1930. UK reprint paperbacks include: Pan 204, UK, 1952; Pan G605, 1964; 3rd Pan printing, 1967. Film: Imperator, 1938, as The Return of the Frog.

   Of the film, the New York Times had this to say: “Following a string of mysterious robberies, Scotland Yard assigns its best detective, Inspector Elk, to bring the crooks to justice. The only clue the villains leave at the crime scene is a rendering of a frog. Still that is enough for intrepid Elk to solve the case, but not after considerable danger, excitement and comedy. This is the sequel to 1937’s The Frog.”

   The latter, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, is a film based on:

   The Fellowship of the Frog Ward, UK, hc,1925; Small Maynard, US, hc, 1923. Silent film: Pathe, 1928, as Mark of the Frog. Sound film: Wilcox, 1937, as The Frog.

   But I digress. If the Times is correct in its description of the plot line of the film, it differed in several ways from the book, which I just finished reading. Inspector Elk is in the book, but he’s a relatively minor character, a colleague only of the major player, Inspector John Wade of the London Police, with his general jurisdiction being that of the waterfront area along the Thames.

   See the first Pan cover image for an illustration of that.

   There are also no frogs in The India-Rubber Men, the book, only a powerful gang of burglars, bank-robbers, and thieves plaguing the river district, their distinctive m.o. being their garb: rubber masks, rubber gloves and crêpe rubber shoes.

   See the second Pan cover image (below) for an illustration of them.

   Nor is there much in the way of comedy, but movie-makers (as you know) have never hesitated for a moment to add funny stuff to their films.

   I enjoyed the first half of the book, which in the first Pan edition consists of nearly 200 pages of small print. The writing is picturesque, with the reader traveling with Wade as he makes his way up and down the river looking for clues, and stopping in every so often at the “Mecca,” a disreputable officers’ club and lodging house whose only attraction is the beautiful Lila Smith, a ward of some sort of the proprietress, Mum Oaks.

   The mysterious goings-on in and near the “Mecca” also suggest that a significant amount of criminal activity is going on there as well, as – without revealing anything to you of any great importance – it is.

   But with no great progress ever being made in coming upon the trail of the India-Rubber Men, eventually the investigation becomes tedious, if not outright stagnant. The telling of the tale is episodic, with major small crises (my words are deliberately chosen here) followed by lulls in which the coppers regroup and head their investigation off in yet another direction, while the bad guys seem directionless – but still very dangerous and deadly – in return.

   It is as if the tale were originally told in serial installments, and perhaps it was, although I have no evidence in this regard, but the lack of any forward progress in the case, except in very small increments – three steps ahead to two back – is what contributes so greatly to the lack of thrills in the overall affair, at least from one reader’s point of view.

   Let me be more specific. In spite of Inspector Wade’s being gassed in his own home, nearly drowned in a secret cellar under the “Mecca,” and being shot at from ambush, there is never any great sense of urgency on his part – even, mind you, when Lila is kidnapped from under his very eyes, figuratively speaking. He doesn’t blink an eye. A milder reaction could hardly be imagined.

   Nor none on her part either. Nor, in fact, on the part of the titular gang of crooks and thieves, who are — when it comes down to it — little more than a squabbling bunch of incompetents, hardly worthy, as it turns out, of being called a gang.

   But here’s what it is that’s missing. It’s any sign of intellectual curiosity on the part of the characters. Except for mere sparkles here and there, they’re as dull as ditch water, even the villains. Nor is there any great ingenuity or cleverness in the twists and turns of the plot. This is a deadly combination. There’s nothing much left in the telling of The India-Rubber Men to grab or hook the reader’s interest, at least not this one’s.

   I no longer assign stars or letter grades to books anymore, but if I were to tell you that I skimmed the last third of the book, that may tell you all you need to know.

   But for the record, Edgar Wallace published on the order of 24 novels or story collections in the same year, 1929. While perhaps known today to only a small coterie of fans, his reading public at the time was enormous. On that basis, I’m willing to call his writing an acquired taste, one that I’ve haven’t acquired myself — or perhaps it’s one that I’ve lost and haven’t yet re-acquired. On the basis of the first half of this book, while not making promises I cannot keep, it’s possible — just maybe — there’s a chance that I’ll try again.

HOLLYWOOD MYSTERY. Fanchon Royal Pictures, 1934. Originally released as Hollywood Hoodlum. June Clyde, Frank Albertson, José Crespo, Tenen Holtz, John Davidson. Directed by B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason.

   It is a mystery – if for the sake of the review, for this and nothing else – why bottom of the barrel movies like this exist and are distributed on DVD, and films that people really want to see are either available only through collector-to-collector conditions or cannot be found at all.

   At least it’s short, just over 50 minutes long, and at least the people making it seemed to be having a good time doing so. As hinted at above, there is very little mystery to this strictly Grade D movie, only the fact that the head of publicity for a small time movie outfit (Frank Albertson) gets the grand idea of persuading a director of a gangster film (John Davidson) to hire a real gangster as its star.

   Only thing is, the gangster (José Crespo) is no gangster, but the guy he socks in a nightclub really is. Much hilarity results, or it was supposed to have, and even so, it might have, if the plot really made any sense.

   I should of course mention June Clyde, who plays the leading lady in the film within the film. Like Frank Albertson and some of the other players, she had a long career in movies and TV, but as a bright spot on any of their careers, this wasn’t it.

   One additional warning: On the DVD you can easily find of this movie, the picture is so poorly cropped that in one scene with two people at either end of a table, you see the table but neither party to the right or left of the screen. It made me smile as much as anything I saw, and I’m almost embarrassed to say I saw any of it. Or that I’m writing this review of it.

DOUBLE DEAL. RKO Radio Pictures, 1950. Marie Windsor, Richard Denning, Fay Baker, Taylor Holmes, James Griffith, Carleton Young. Director: Abby Berlin.

   How many black-and-white crime movies from the 1940s and early 50s have you seen beginning with the leading man swinging off a bus in a strange town, looking for a job and not trouble, but ending up finding both?

   I’ve seen a few, although I can’t name them all, and not only that, but I think Richard Denning was in one of them.

   Besides this one, that is.

   I’m probably all wrong about that, but what’s another movie in which the leading guy is a mining engineer and is hired to help bring an oil well in or a start a mine up in operation again? It’s an oil well in this one, and I can’t think of either the movie or the star of the other one I’m thinking off — the one with an opening scene so close to the one in Double Deal that after five minutes I was ready to turn it off. (Maybe Richard Carlson? Alan Ladd?)

   I’m glad I didn’t, though, since this one’s a keeper. Not only that, but it has Marie Windsor in it. She plays Terry Mills in this one, a good friend of Reno Sebastian (Carleton Young), the man who owns the well that so far has hit nothing but sand. It seems that his sister Lilly (Fay Baker, who makes a terrific villainess) hates him, and she’ll stop at nothing to keep Reno from succeeding.

   I was once asked, a couple of years ago, to continue with the thought I began the last paragraph with, before I got distracted, which noir movie actress was my favorite. You guessed the answer, and congratulations! You didn’t need two tries.

   This rather obscure crime film, not quite a noir, pretty much has me stumped. The only photos I can provide you of the movie itself come courtesy of a Spanish language poster from Mexico. The one of Marie Windsor below comes from Narrow Margin, and I think the one of Denning comes from the (much later) days when he was playing Michael Shayne on TV.

   I’ve already told you about the basic story line. There are quite a few twists and turns in the plot that come after this, though, and these are what keep the movie watchable, even if you’re not as fond of Marie Windsor as an actress as I am.

   I’ve also already mentioned my opinion that this movie is not a noir film, even though it is a crime movie filmed in 1950 and in black-and-white. The presence and over-the-top antics of a drunken former lawyer named “Corpus” Mills (Taylor Holmes) takes care of that very nicely, thank you. Of course, he does come in handy when Terry is accused of murder, making sure that’s she free (as it happens) to act as bait to catch the real killer.

   But there are some definite noirish aspects about this film, no doubt about it — if not so much the overall mood and the happy ending — then in the lighting and the definite sense of danger that Terry’s in after her release from the local sheriff’s custody, as mentioned above.

   There’s a general rule to which the most conspicuous exception in our genre is Agatha Christie: when an author dies, his work dies too. Certainly Aaron Marc Stein’s has. He was born in 1906, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, wrote a couple of avant-garde novels which were published thanks to endorsements from Theodore Dreiser, then turned to mystery fiction under the pseudonym of George Bagby and, a few years later, under his own name too.

   He quickly learned how to parlay his day jobs and other activities into backgrounds for the early Bagby novels, using his time as radio critic for a New York paper to create his own station in Murder on the Nose (1938), dipping into his memories of apparently liquor-soaked Princeton reunions for The Corpse with the Purple Thighs (1939), employing his stint at the madhouse known as Time magazine in Red Is for Killing (1941).

   During World War II he abandoned fiction to serve as an Army cryptographer, but after the war he became a full-time author and wrote so prolifically and skillfully that in the early 1950s, when he was turning out four or more titles a year, New York Times mystery critic Anthony Boucher called him the most reliable professional detective novelist in the United States.

   Between 1935 and his death half a century later he produced an astounding 110 book-length mysteries: 51 as Bagby chronicling the cases of the NYPD’s sore-footed Inspector Schmidt; 18 as Hampton Stone about New York Assistant District Attorneys Gibson and Mac; 18 under his own name with the archaeologist-detective duo of Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt as protagonists and, when his publishers demanded stronger beer in their Steins, 23 with adventurous civil engineer Matt Erridge in the lead.

   Factor in his one non-crime novel as Bagby plus one stand-alone crime novel under his own name and those two early literary experiments and you have a total of 114 books. He also wrote occasional short stories, which cry out to be collected. Most of his Bagby and Stone novels are set in and around New York, which Aaron knew and loved and characterized as vividly as any of his human beings, while most of his orthonymous books feature exotic locales in Central and South America or Europe.

   I had been reading him since my teens but never got to spend quality time with him until the mid-1970s when we both joined the board of the University of California’s Mystery Library, and we remained friends for the rest of his life. In 1979 he received the Grand Master award from Mystery Writers of America. Later he and I served together on the board of Bantam s Collection of Mystery Classics.

   His health was failing but he continued to turn out a book or two a year well into his seventies. Acclaimed by colleagues and connoisseurs, he never attained the popular success he so richly deserved. He died of cancer in 1985. That was almost a quarter century ago but I still remember him fondly.

   Since the early 1960s he had lived in a co-op on Park Avenue and 88th Street with his sister Miriam-Ann Hagen (who also wrote a few whodunits of her own) and her husband Joe. They had bought it for $34,000 which they’d won gambling at Las Vegas in a single night. At the time of his death the unit was worth well over a million. In effect he had an apartment inside the apartment, and after he and Miriam had died Joe invited me to stay in Aaron’s quarters whenever I was in New York – which allowed me the unique experience of reading several of Aaron’s later novels in the room where he’d written them.

   For most readers today his huge body of work remains an undiscovered treasure. Any who care to remedy that loss would do well to begin with his books from the years when he earned that accolade from Boucher: perhaps the Bagby titles Drop Dead (1949) and Dead Drunk (1953), or The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949) as by Stone, or Days of Misfortune (1949) under his own name. I still reread him regularly and with pleasure.

   Of all the 20th-century poets who made significant contributions to the whodunit, our Poetry Corner guest this month is probably the most distinguished. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) is best known today as the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, but in his lifetime he served as England’s Poet Laureate and, as Nicholas Blake, the creator of amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, he was considered one of the finest crime novelists of his generation.

   He combined both interests in the Strangeways novel Head of a Traveler (1949), which Thomas M. Leitch summarized superbly in his chapter on Blake for Volume One of Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage (1998). “The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse….[T]he 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, reviewing the novel in his “Speaking of Crime” column (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1949), suggested that “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.” But those with twin passions for poetry and mystery fiction may well find Head of a Traveler the single most rewarding whodunit they’ve ever read.

   As one whose usual breakfast is fruit and a piece of whole-grain toast, I am avocado-green with envy at the morning meals characters like Nero Wolfe can tuck away. But Wolfe’s most lavish spread seems Spartan next to that of Walter Kilbourne, the cartoonish take on Sydney Greenstreet in Ross Macdonald’s second Lew Archer novel, The Drowning Pool (1950):

    “He ate with a gobbling passion. A piece of ham and four eggs, six pieces of toast; a kidney and a pair of mountain trout; eight pancakes with eight small sausages; a quart of raspberries, a pint of cream, a quart of coffee. I watched him the way you watch the animals at the zoo, hoping he’d choke to death….”

   What, no platter of cream-filled tortes for dessert?

   Just as this column was about to sail off into cyberspace to its destination came the news that Sydney Pollack died of cancer on Memorial Day at age 73. He was a Hoosier, born in Lafayette, Indiana on July 1, 1934, and began his show-business career as an actor. In the early Sixties he moved into directing and helmed episodes of many network TV crime-suspense series including Cain’s Hundred, Target: The Corruptors, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Defenders, The Fugitive.

   His Hitchcock episode “The Black Curtain” (November 16, 1962) was nominally based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1941 noir novel of the same name but had almost nothing in common with the book except for the springboard situation as Frank Townsend (Richard Basehart) recovers from a second blow on the head and learns that for the past few years he’s been suffering from amnesia and leading another life.

   Pollack’s most successful feature-length contributions to our genre were the cynical thrillers Three Days of the Condor (1975) and The Firm (1993), whose bad guys were respectively the CIA and the legal profession: not bad choices at all.

Hi Steve,

   Regarding your recent posting, in the interests of perhaps useless footnotes and trivia, I’d like to add some further film and TV notes to the following names:

      Stephen COULTER

Film: Embassy (UK, 1972) d. Gordon Hessler. Screenplay by William Fairchild, based on the novel by Stephen Coulter. Story revolves around the efforts of a U.S. diplomatic mission in Beirut to smuggle out Max Von Sydow’s Russian defector. For followers of the absurd, this Mel Ferrer production cast Chuck Connors as a KGB assassin impersonating an American Air Force colonel.

      Ian MACKINTOSH

TV: Warship (BBC, 1973-77) co-creator with Anthony Coburn of this 45 eps x 50 mins. drama about Royal Navy life onboard a frigate.

TV: Wilde Alliance (ITV, 1978) producer and occasional scriptwriter of the 13 x hour comedy-thriller featuring the amateur sleuthing adventures of a thriller novelist and his busybody wife (the latter in the Pamela North, Jennifer Hart vein).

TV: The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978; 1980) creator and main writer (until his death in 1979) of this tightly made and occasionally grim espionage saga.

TV: Thundercloud (ITV, 1979) creator/writer/executive producer of the 13 half-hour comedy series featuring a group of sailors operating on a shore-based station that the Admiralty thinks is a destroyer in the North Sea.

      William MARSHALL

TV: Yellowthread Street (ITV, 1990) was a 13-episode series adapted from the novel by William Marshall focusing on British detectives in the Hong Kong force; a costly, on-location production attempting Miami Vice on the seemingly Triad-ridden streets of steamy Hong Kong. Marshall also scripted the episode “Spirit Runner.”

      James MAYO

Film: Hammerhead (UK, 1968) d. David Miller. Screenplay by William Bast, Herbert Baker, based on the 1964 novel by James Mayo. Features Vince Edwards as U.S. secret agent Charles Hood. The Variety review in July 1968 suggested that it ‘might be dubbed a junior edition of Goldfinger without any of the sock elements of the James Bond film’.

      Alfred MAZURE

Film: Secrets of Sex (UK, 1969) d. Antony Balch. Screenplay by Martin Locke, John Eliot, Maureen Owen, Elliott Stein, Antony Balch; ‘Lindy Leigh’ segment based on the story by Alfred Mazure. Exploitation sex film featuring a collection of titillating stories connected by the view that sex is less often fun than funny (with truckloads of 1969 nudity for the furtive front-row viewer).

   Mazure’s story tells of Agent 28 Lindy Leigh’s assignment by the British Home Office to rob the safe at the Moravian Embassy; she succeeds in her mission to enter the safe, only to discover that it’s a harem housing female agents who have failed in the same mission. The topless Maria Frost plays the topless Lindy Leigh.

      Alan WHITE

Film: The Long Day’s Dying (UK, 1968) d. Peter Collinson. Screenplay by Charles Wood, based on the 1965 novel (US: Death Finds the Day) by Alan White. Men trained in the art of killing, in this instance three British paratroopers somewhere in occupied Europe during the Second World War, as skilled practitioners in nothing more than a competitive game (war) is the core of this film, starring David Hemmings, Tom Bell and Tony Beckley. The director takes some 95 dreary minutes to make his point.

   Now, if only Secrets of Sex was available on DVD (for research purposes, of course)…

               Regards,

                  Tise

>>> Thank you very much, Tise, and do I have news for you. Secrets of Sex is available on DVD in this country, subtly disguised as the following:

BORDERLINE. Universal Pictures, 1950. Claire Trevor, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Burr, Jose Torvay, Roy Roberts, Charles Lane. Directed by William A. Seiter.

   I was sold a bill of goods by Oldies.com when I bought this DVD. The last line of the promotional copy on the back cover says, and I quote: “MacMurray’s icy cool performance and Trevor’s jittery energy create a chemistry that ignites this classic film noir.”

   Film noir? It is to laugh, and believe it or not, even with another bravura performance by Raymond Burr as a thuggish dealer of dope in Mexico, you (the audience) were supposed to.

   What a strange combination. Is this a noir film disguised as a comedy romance, or a comedy romance disguised as a noir film? My vote’s on the latter.

   The only problem is – well, I’ll get back to that. Here’s the basic story line. Claire Trevor plays Madeleine Haley, aka Gladys LaRue, a Los Angeles policewoman in Mexico to see if she, as a woman under cover as a dancer and/or gang moll, can get some evidence on a slick crook named Pete Ritchie (that’s Raymond Burr, in fine form, as always). Fred MacMurray enters the film as Johnny Macklin, aka Johnny McEvoy, a henchman of an opposing gangster intent on taking over Ritchie’s trade.

   And the two of them, Trevor and MacMurray, take a trip up north together with a bird cage, complete with parrot, a music box, both filled in hidden compartments with packages of unspecified contraband. Both think the other is crooked, but somehow seeing beyond that, both begin to fall in love with each other. (Even so, Clare Trevor modestly sleeps with a gun in her hand in the room they stay in overnight together.)

   Which is the way the movie goes, as well as the prevailing wind, until they reach the border, which is where the question becomes, does duty take over? I’ll not answer that, as I may have revealed too much already, but what I will say is that whatever type of movie this, it falls apart completely from this moment on. (And maybe I have a larger tolerance for misguided ventures like this than you do.)

   The problem is, for a romantic comedy, there are too many shootings and dead bodies to be completely funny, and for a film noir, there is simply too much silly nonsense going on. Pete Ritchie gives a good chase, but even that end of things fizzles out without so much as a bang.

THE SAINT. 1997. Val Kilmer, Elizabeth Shue, Rade Serbedzija, Valery Nikolaev, Alun Armstrong (as Inspector Teal), Roger Moore (voice only). Based on the character created by Leslie Charteris. Directed by Philip Noyce. [Novelization by Burl Barer; Pocket, 1997.]

   My first reaction? Beware of movies about fictional characters whose creators are not included in the on-screen credits. That’s what the common wisdom says, or if it doesn’t, it should.

   Be also wary – this is my own advice – of movies that begin by telling the childhood origins of the character. Especially when said character’s exploits extended for well over a fifty year period (1928-1983) – under the control of said creator if not always written – without the creator ever finding the need to chronicle the characters origins, which are always (perhaps) best left to the reader’s imagination.

   The reviews of this movie were almost universally bad, although in some cases as if reluctantly so, but – and this is a big but – the reaction of ordinary civilian reviewers (on IMDB, for example) have been almost universally positive. Some call it their favorite movie of all time, others while not going that far, admit to having watched it over and over again many times.

   Why the great disconnect? I’ve thought it over for a couple of days now, and I’ve listened to the director’s voice-over commentary, which (as usual) pointed out any number of items I missed the first time through, and I think the division of opinion comes down to this.

   Those who liked the movie did not know anything about Charteris’s character – a devil-may-care adventurer with an ever-present twinkle in his eye as he swindled the bad guys’ loot right from under their eyes – nor did they know anything of Roger Moore’s TV version of the character (much less George Sanders in the movie versions).

   Roger Moore, I personally liked in the role, although (as I remember) he was a little stiff and not quite as rakishly (more impishly, perhaps) devil-may-care as I would have liked.

   But Moore stopped playing the Saint in 1969, which (I’m guessing) is well before most of the viewing audience for this new version was born, and Val Kilmer is all they know (and all they got). Which may sound snarky, and if so, I mean only 30 to 40 percent of it.

   For in fact, if you take the character he plays – he is not even Simon Templar yet, as this revisionist story would have it – without an idea of who he is to become – I think you might even enjoy watching this tormented loner, unsure of his true identity, a thief with undated Internet gimmicks and capabilities – not to mention his many disguises which are as varied and clever as they are numerous – and seeing him grow into someone whom the director refers to as “worthy of Sainthood.”

   Thanks, of course, to the love of a beautiful woman, Dr. Emma Russell, played by Elizabeth Shue, an expert on cold fusion, the formulas for which some scummy post-Communist Russians would love to get their hands on.

   That Emma Russell acts like she is sixteen years old and has never been within two feet of a man before is very nearly beside the point. She is innocent and vulnerable, and she is what Val Kilmer’s character needs to shake up his life and start him over again. (He certainly needs it.)

   It also does not seem to matter that cold fusion does not seem to work, then or now, even though when a miracle is desperately needed in the movie – and in the middle of Red Square yet! – a miracle is certainly what indeed does happen.

   Emma Russell’s heart condition also seems improve greatly as the movie goes on. Perhaps it is all the running she does, or edging her way with Simon along the icy flank of the Moscow River, or escaping with him through the city’s underground tunnels. Exercise like this is just what the doctor ordered. Or needed.

   An earlier version in which she dies in the end was wisely, wisely reconsidered. The ending is a bit of a muddle anyway, but if her cheery optimism had been squashed in the end like a bug, the audience would have roundly booed. I would have, at least, and loudly.

   My second reaction, then, ignoring the fact that movie is about a character I think I should know — but as the film goes on, I realize in frustration (if not something akin to anger) that I do not — with my expectations suitably altered, I enjoyed the movie considerably more the second time through than I did the first.

   But will I ever watch it again? The future is hazy on that, but the possibility is higher than the chance that I will ever watch a version with George Sanders in it more than once. One with Roger Moore in it, from TV? Yes.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. 1999. Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Ben Gazzara, Faye Dunaway. Director: John McTiernan.

   A remake, of course, of the film with the same title that starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in 1968. To most critics, the remake suffered in comparison, but except for a few plot holes, but major ones, I liked this more recent version just fine. Of course, while my wife Judy says we saw the earlier film when it came out, I don’t remember it at all, for whatever that’s worth. (The link leads to Roger Ebert’s online review. Even when I don’t agree with him, I find myself nodding my head as I read his work, agreeing with every word he says.)

   As a matter of fact, I’ve just watched this more recent version twice. Over the period of three evenings I watched it once all the way through, and then, split over the last two nights, I watched it again with the director’s voice-over commentary turned on.

   Which I found fascinating. The technical terms are beyond me, what with dolly shots and so on, the former apparently an all-but-forgotten skill, with impressive results, but as he goes along McTiernan also points out little bits and pieces which he realizes that the audience doesn’t really grasp the significance of as they’re watching, including me, but which (perhaps subliminally) begin to add up and start them thinking in the right direction. (Or later on to say, aha, that’s what that was all about.)

   Story line: fabulously wealthy financier Thomas Crown (Brosnan) steals in elaborate fashion a valuable painting by Monet from an unnamed Manhattan Museum of Art. Immediately on the case is Catherine Banning, insurance investigator, tough as nails and all woman (Russo). Her instincts are also immediately on target, as she picks Crown for the crime the first day she’s on the job.

   She confronts him directly, in violation of all standard police procedure, and thus the game begins. Denis Leary plays the role of Detective Michael McCann, and even though he’s obviously attracted to her, all he can do is stand back and watch the sparks spy.

   You have to take the point of view of view, as the script strongly suggests, that stealing works of art is only a prank, a jest, and teasing the cops is all part of the fun. In that sense it’s Brosnan and Russo’s movie all the way, with lots of smooth, colorful photography to illustrate the lives of the rich and the semi-famous. (Detective McCann, in contrast, lives alone, in a dumpy apartment with a TV on the kitchen table. He’s a good sort, though, not jealous – well, maybe just a little, but what can he do?)

   At the time the movie played in the theaters, there was a great to-do about Miss Russo’s nude scenes, with a lot made of the fact that she was 45 at the time. Rightfully so. She is also a very good actress, having plenty of opportunity to demonstrate both her repertoire of facial expressions and fully clothed body language.

   Faye Dunaway, from the first movie, has an extended cameo role as Crown’s psychiatrist, giving Pierce Brosnan, as the man on the couch, plenty of opportunity to look reflective and puzzled about his own thoughts and behavior. Nonetheless, Miss Russo, who seems to grow softer and more feminine as the movie goes on, shows a bit more range. Even her ever-changing hair-styles are expressive.

   In the second half of March, film noir lost three giants. First and youngest was 54-year-old Anthony Minghella, who died on March 18 of a hemorrhage following surgery. The son of Italian immigrants who owned an ice-cream factory on the Isle of Wight, Minghella came to the attention of mystery lovers when he wrote the scripts for three of the early Inspector Morse telefilms: “The Dead of Jericho,” “Deceived by Flight” and “Driven to Distraction.”

   Then he moved to the big screen and made a much larger mark in contemporary noir as director and screenwriter of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999). From Colin Dexter to Patricia Highsmith: that, friends, is range. Just before his death he had completed the first two-hour film in what may well become another series of Morse-like longevity, THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY, based on the novels of Alexander McCall Smith.

   Less than two weeks after Minghella’s death we lost Jules Dassin, the last survivor of film noir’s first generation of directors, who died in Athens on March 31 at age 96. Despite his name, Dassin was born and raised in New York. In the years before the McCarthy-era blacklist forced him to leave Hollywood he directed four noir classics in a row: BRUTE FORCE (1947), THE NAKED CITY (1948), THIEVES’ HIGHWAY (1949), NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950).

   He relocated to Paris in the early Fifties but had to learn French before directing the celebrated noir Euro-heist movie RIFIFI (1954). He was married to Greek actress Melina Mercouri and directed her in NEVER ON SUNDAY (1960) and TOPKAPI (1964).

   Between the two directors, Richard Widmark, who had starred in Dassin’s NIGHT AND THE CITY (above) and played lowlifes in a number of other noirs, died at 93. And now in the first week of April we lost Charlton Heston, who will always be remembered as the embodiment of larger-than-life figures from Moses to Michelangelo but also contributed to film noir, making his movie debut as star of THE DARK CITY (1950) and, between THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and BEN-HUR, co-starring with director Orson Welles in the superb TOUCH OF EVIL (1958).

   May they all rest in peace. Their film work survives them and will outlive us too.

   Thanks to Steven Slutsky, a professor of economics at the University of Florida, I recently learned of a little book that will fascinate all fans of Ellery Queen. The 107-page CHILLERS & THRILLERS was published in 1945 by Street & Smith and exclusively distributed by the Special Services Division of the Army Service Forces.

   It appeared as Volume 18 of the “At Ease” series, whose purpose was “to assist the Special Service Officer, the Theatrical Advisor and all other military personnel concerned with the development of the Army recreation program.” These volumes were “not to be resold or made available to civilians.”

   Pages 40 through 107 of CHILLERS & THRILLERS are devoted to three episodes of the long-running ELLERY QUEEN radio series: “The Blue Chip” [June 15/17, 1944], “The Foul Tip” [July 13/15, 1944], and “The Glass Ball” [March 23/25, 1944; based on “The Man Who Wanted To Be Murdered,” December 3, 1939].

   Each episode was adapted for live impromptu staging in GI recreation halls, “with the performers reading from scripts and acting out the action without the use of scenery, costumes or props.” It was expected that these unrehearsed performances would include plenty of boners, which were supposed to “add to rather than detract from the audience’s enjoyment.”

   In charge of each staging was a Master of Ceremonies, who “helps the players, prompts them and carries the action when it shows any signs of faltering. He bridges the scene changes and time passages by telling the audience what is happening. He pantomimes such actions as swimming, climbing stairs, walking, running, etc. He simulates sounds when necessary. He may in the course of a sketch become a prop, a corpse, a ferryboat, a radiator or any of a dozen things that are required for the action.”

   In lieu of the guest armchair detectives of the radio series, these versions call for “a jury composed of members of the audience. These jurors should be the men in the unit who would be most amusing on the stage, such as the CO, the mess sergeant, the company clerk, and any other ‘characters’ among the men….The jury should be an odd number of men, to avoid a tie vote.”

   After the GI playing Ellery announces that he knows who the murderer is, “the jurors are called onstage and polled individually… As they give their choice[s], the MC should question them on the reason for such selection….After the last juror has been polled, the jury is told that it must decide among them which [suspect] is the criminal.

    “All discussion of the case takes place in front of the audience. When the MC thinks the discussion has reached the ballot-taking stage, he directs them to vote. After the vote has been taken, the play is resumed and the true solution is unveiled. Prizes are then awarded to the members of the jury who have guessed the correct culprit.”

   None of the three EQ scripts has ever been published elsewhere, although “The Foul Tip” is available on audio. CHILLERS & THRILLERS is a must-read volume not only for Queen fans but also for anyone interested in how the men of “The Greatest Generation” were entertained as they fought their war.

   In our Poetry Corner this month is someone who – surprise! – is actually well-known as a poet. Richard Hugo (1923-1982) published his first volume of poetry in 1961 but remained unknown to the mystery-reading world until the appearance of James Crumley’s THE LAST GOOD KISS (1978), one of the finest private-eye novels ever.

   Crumley dedicated the book to his friend and fellow Montanan, whom he called the “grand old detective of the heart,” and took its title from Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” (“The last good kiss/you had was years ago”).

   Hugo made his own pass at the crime genre with DEATH AND THE GOOD LIFE (1981), whose protagonist Al Barnes is a cop, based in western Montana but stopping over in Portland to look into the one ax murder that a recently apprehended serial killer didn’t commit.

   Some cop! Overwhelmingly gentle, optimistic about human nature, feeling guilty for the world=s woes, a klutz at police procedure (his idea of a Miranda warning being “You’re under arrest. You know your rights because you’re rich.”), Barnes is de facto a variant of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, a PI investigating a crime of the present with deep psychological roots in the past.

   Hugo’s prose is less colorful than Crumley’s and his plotting more complex, but he shares his friend’s genius for creating softly quirky incidental characters, like the tough Homicide captain and the wily criminal-defense lawyer who on the side are both published poets. If he hadn’t died the year after his first novel came out he would surely have written more, with Barnes reconfigured as the Archeresque PI that he is in all but official title in DEATH AND THE GOOD LIFE.

   For those who want to check out Hugo’s poetry, perhaps the best starting point is the posthumously published collection MAKING CERTAIN IT GOES ON (1984).