MAN AT LARGE. Fox, 1941. Marjorie Weaver, George Reeves, Richard Derr, Steve Geray, Milton Parsons, Spencer Charters, Lucien Littlefield, Elisha Cook Jr., Minerva Urecal. Director: Eugene Forde.

   An un-sung little B-movie that seems at times like an episode of the old Superman TV show, starting off at a great metropolitan newspaper with a grouchy editor, a plucky girl reporter (Marjorie Weaver) and even a visit from George Reeves!

   What follows is a tricky, fast-moving and mostly-fun farrago about the search for a fugitive German escapee from a Canadian POW camp (this was made before Pearl Harbor, but the movie doesn’t hesitate to peg the bad guys as Germans) on the run in the US.

   Then a surprise as it quickly pivots into a game of cat-und-mouse between the FBI and a nest of spies preying on American cargo ships, who relay their secret messages in pulp-magazine stories written by a Master Spy.

   Said spymaster is played by Steven Geray, an actor normally typed as milquetoasts, who seems to have a lot of fun here playing it sinister. And since he’s a writer for the pulps, Geray’s character is naturally a cultured tea-drinking man of affluence, living in a luxury apartment surrounded by servants—like all pulp writers of his day.

   Obviously none of this can be taken seriously, and to their credit, Writer John Larkin and director Eugene Forde (both veterans of Fox’s Charlie Chan series) don’t try. Forde directs with an eye for pace, helped out by the photography of Virgil Miller, who heaped atmosphere into Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series and Larkin fills his script with twists and jokes, both surprising and funny.

   He also “borrows” heavily from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, with our hero suspected of murder after hearing a vital clue gasped out by the victim, a search for a clandestine group known as “The 21 Whistlers” a bit in a noisy music hall, and even some by-play with handcuffs on the hero and heroine.

   To Larkin and Forde’s credit though, there’s also a dandy and highly original climax with Reeves and Weaver stalked through a locked apartment by a sharp-shooting blind man.

   The result is a film that’s easy to like, and over-and-done-with before you notice it’s gone, considerably enlivened by the playing of Reeves, who looks here like an actor on the verge of stardom, and Ms Weaver, Fox’s all-purpose perky B-movie queen, whose lively thesping never quite lifted her from the low-budget rut — with the astonishing exception of her role as Mary Todd in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln.

CLEMENTS RIPLEY – Black Moon. Harcourt Brace & Co, hardcover, 1933.

BLACK MOON. Columbia, 1934. Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess, Cora Sue Collins, Arnold Korff, Clarence Muse. Based on the novel by Clements Ripley. Director: Roy William Neill.

   Clements Ripley’s Black Moon amounts to very little really, but it has its moments. Steven Lane is one of those wealthy, athletic, handsome and single young men who crop up regularly in adventure stories of that day, and as this one opens he’s on his way to an island somewhere south of Haiti to marry Amalia Perez, your typical fiery Latin beauty, who mysteriously returned to the tiny isle of her birth just as they were getting serious about each other back in New York.

   Lane is barely past the first page when he gets a bit of foreshadowing from a cagey servant — a black man named “Lunch” whose depiction is regrettably condescending — and it’s not much later that he encounters Amalia’s uncle, Dr. Perez, who owns the island (and the people on it, he presumes) and looks over his niece’s interests with a solicitude bordering on the pathological.

   Amalia herself appears not much later, but she seems so remote and disinterested that Lane wonders how serious they were about each other to begin with. Fortunately, there’s a perky level-headed young American girl around on the island and the veteran reader of this sort of thing can see their attraction coming several chapters before they do.

   The plot develops apace, with unrest among the natives, sinister drums, mysterious disappearances and even more mysterious antics from the sultry Amalia, who turns out to be a High Priestess of the local Voodoo cult, bent on human sacrifice.

   Well we’ve all dated girls like that from time to time, but oddly enough it is not Amalia who emerges as the villain of the piece but her uncle, the good doctor whose fine manners mask a control freak on the order of Count Zaroff, gradually spinning out of bounds as he countenances murder, cover-up and even cold-blooded savagery in the name of tradition and family pride—all with the suave graciousness one expects from baddies in pulp fiction.

   And even more surprising, the racially stereotyped Lunch starts taking on more and more of the heroics, performing handy bits of business like chewing through ropes and even a bit of convenient killing that our nominal hero is just too decent a chap to commit. Before we get to the end, Ripley has treated us to a fine panoply of thrills, including capture by natives, murder on the garden path, black magic rites and a running gun battle across the island by hero and villain with the natives in hot pursuit of them both. Possibly not the most intelligent book you could pick, but undeniably lively.

   Black Moon had the good fortune to be filmed by Roy William Neil at Columbia in 1934, and it’s really a crackerjack little film, handled by Neill – he of the Universal / Rathbone / Holmes movies — with his usual flair for atmosphere and pace. Dorothy Burgess plays the mysterious Latina, but as the film opens she’s already married to Lane, who has become a solid businessman, played by square-jawed and middle-aged Jack Holt.

   But Burgess is yearning to return to the Caribbean island of her birth, and Holt lets her take their daughter and his secretary (Faye Wray) down there while he wraps up some business stateside, and in his absence things in the tropics go quickly hellward as Dorothy recalls her upbringing and realizes she was raised to be the priestess of a local voodoo cult – a destiny she will embrace even if it becomes the spark of a bloody religious uprising.

   This has it all: steamy tropical suspense, bursts of action, and those incessant drums pounding-in-my-head-night-and-day-Oh-why-won’t-they-stop? Neill, who brought elegance to predestined piffle like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, directs with real feeling for the lurid essence of the material, and the result is a splendidly watchable little film I can highly recommend.

   And though there’s no way to segue smoothly into this, I should add that Clarence Muse, one of the few minority performers of his day to consistently invest his roles with intelligence and dignity, brings real depth and feeling to the role of “Lunch” lifting the character out of the rut most black-servants-in-the-movies found themselves stuck in.

SILENT RAGE. Columbia Pictures, 1982. Chuck Norris, Ron Silver, Steven Keats, Toni Kalem, William Finley. Director: Michael Miller.

   Silent Rage is the annual Chuck Norris action melodrama, an event that seems to attract the kind of involved, excitable audience the early Clint Eastwood films drew into the theaters. I saw this on a Sunday night with my seventeen-year-old son in a suburban theater with an audience of young wiseacres, some motorcycle freaks, and a smattering of older couples who looked as if they would have been more comfortable watching the American Film Institute tribute to good-hearted Frank Capra.

   Local reviewers — who apparently loved the film even while hating it — have criticized Norris for his blatant use of the psychotic horrors of the Halloween-type film and have missed the point that this is not just Halloween Whatever but Frankenstein 1982.

   I must admit that it is good to welcome back the devoted, amoral scientist who gives life to a powerful, inhuman creature and cries out in the best Colin Clive tradition, “We’re scientists, not moralists!” This time there are three devoted scientists: a good, moral type with a beard and a lovely, talented wife; an intermediate scientist who knows that what he’s doing is wrong but continues to do it with a perpetually perplexed knotting of his forehead; and the super-baddy who has a neat moustache and burning eyes and keeps repairing the monster when it returns to the laboratory after each of its murderous sorties.

   Settings are always handsome in Chuck Norris films. The laboratory is bathed in a penumbral, soft green light that kept distracting me from the actors when they babbled on too long about their great work and its unfortunate consequences. The art director also designed an attractive house for the good doctor and his artistic wife, with stairs into the basement and up to the attic so that the monster can chase people up and down a lot.

   Norris has moved from his expensive town house on the bay in last year’s Eye for an Eye into a frame structure with a multi-level living room nestled among the pines and a deck that looks out onto a cycloramic shot of mountains. (I just wish that movie-makers would master the art of meshing these rear-screen projections with the actors’ foreground posturings.)

   The monster spends most of his time lurching about the good doctor’s house or lying on his table and peering slyly at the unobservant doctors who think he’s unconscious. The green lab is his home and some jaundiced types may wonder why monsters have to have more attractive surroundings than ordinary folk. The bad doctor has an apartment in the hospital, but it’s a functional, undistinguished place that suggests he’s insensitive to his living space — if not to his working space — and probably makes an implicit statement about his limited moral sense.

   The middle-sized bear — sorry — the middle doctor doesn’t seem to live anywhere but the laboratory and will probably remind some of you of professors you had in college who looked like fish out of water when you met them walking on campus.

   The dilemma in the film is the problem Norris — a fancy judo type — has in dealing with a creature who just wants to break his neck or spine or slam him up against a wall. The creature also has a limited ability to repair itself, is almost indestructible, and couldn’t care less for the niceties of the carefully choreographed Norris style. Coincidence solves that problem and it may or not satisfy you.

   The most spectacular scene is the obligatory one in which a character is flung through a closed window and the camera catches him in mid-air amidst showering slivers of glass. The director and cameraman are very professional, and, while I may have treated this film with a light touch, it’s probably because I was a nervous wreck by the end of it, and the various chases and fights are real nerve-tinglers.

   Norris is his usual likeable, unflappable self. In his first appearance in the film, he walks up on the porch and knocks on the screen door of a house in which a clearly certifiable loony has just axed two people. To me, this captures the essence of the Norris persona, with a polite respect for rules but the willingness to deploy great physical skill to combat the baddies when it is clear that violence is the only solution.

   Whatever else may be happening on the screen and in the real world these days, it’s good to know that the mad scientist and his fiendish creation are still running amok on neighborhood screens and that right still triumphs over might. But don’t despair — the final frame of the film is right out of Halloween and all its imitators and don’t be surprised next summer to find me reporting on Silent Rage II.

THE VENGEANCE OF FU MANCHU. Anglo-Amalgamated Films, UK, 1967. Christopher Lee (Dr. Fu Manchu), Douglas Wilmer (Nayland Smith), Tsai Chin, Horst Frank, Wolfgang Kieling, Maria Rohm, Howard Marion-Crawford (Dr. Petrie). Based on the characters created by Sax Rohmer. Screenwriter (as Peter Welbeck) and producer: Harry Alan Towers. Director: Jeremy Summers.

   Christopher Lee spent half his career playing Fu Manchu, a role he was born to play, or does it only seem that way? This is the third of a series of five that came out in quick succession in the 60s, the others being:

   I don’t know why I started watching this list of movies in the middle, but I did. And after watching this one, I really don’t know if I’ll watch the other four. It’s really that bad. Not bad in any sense that’s interesting, but just bad.

   I suppose I ought to explain myself. When I watch a movie, I really would prefer that it make sense. I really kind of resent it when there are a lot of scenes that have no connection with the rest of the story, scenes that are there only to lengthen the running time of the movie and no other reason, and when a movie has a non-existent plot that also has holes in it, you really know you have one dud of a movie.

   Christopher Lee really ought to have been ashamed to have taken money for this one. His only role in the film is to step out of the interior of his palace, squint into the light a few times, with an engagingly enigmatic expression on his face, and let his daughter (played by Tsai Chin with suitably impressive imperiousness, not to mention an equally suitable innate wickedness) have all of the fun. (Tsai Chin is still active in making films today.)

   There is torture in this film, a beheading, lots of really phoney-looking sword and spear play, but not one hint of sex. What’s up with that? There is one very funny subplot of the movie, which is where the vengeance comes in, in which Fu Manchu manages to replace Nayland Smith by a surgically altered and waxen-faced lookalike who then commits a murder “Smith” is hanged for. Ha, ha!

   That the British judicial system would fall for such nonsense is a pure comedy delight, one that I can almost recommend that you see for yourself, but I can’t, for if I did, you’d never believe another review I ever wrote again. And we can’t have that, can we?

   Dated but fun is Robert Sylvester’s The Big Boodle (Random House, 1954; Permabook M-3022, 1955) set in pre-Castro Cuba and dealing with PI Ned Sherwood’s efforts to disentangle himself from an elaborate counterfeit scheme involving Mexican film stars, Cuban hit-men, ex-revolutionaries and corrupt officials.

   There’s a lot of foreshadowing in the early pages — so much that I nearly gave up on this after Sherwood said for the umpteenth time that he’s too smart to get mixed up in etc.etc — and I saw the plot resolution come marching down Main Street from a long ways away, but Sylvester creates some interesting characters, handles them effectively, and throws in enough action (also very well-handled) to make a worthwhile read. His hero also has a cute habit of comparing himself to Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe and other fictional PIs, sometimes very cleverly.

   This was, incidentally, turned into one of those lackluster films of Errol Flynn’s later years (UA, 1957) of which I am so morbidly fond. It offers some fine Cuban locations (Unlike We Were Strangers, reviewed here, Flynn appears to be actually filming in them.) and Pedro Armendarez appears once again as a cop, but aside from this it bears little relation to Sylvester’s work.

   Directed by Richard Wilson and written by Jo (House of the 7 Hawks) Eisinger, it changes Ned Sherwood into a world-weary croupier, handed a stack of counterfeit money by a mysterious femme you-guessed-it and subsequently beaten, shot at, picked up by the police and generally chased around Havana until they run out of picturesque locations, whereupon, having lumbered up to a respectable running time, things wrap up without too much fanfare.

   Critics at the time remarked that by now Flynn was good at looking world-weary, but he seems more movie-weary than anything, visibly sucking in his gut and trying to focus his bleary eyes as he reads lines to the other actors mired in front of him. And aside from the location shooting, little care seems to have been taken with The Big Boodle; in one fight scene, Flynn’s part is taken by a stunt double who looks so little like him that I actually re-wound to see if I’d missed a part where someone else comes into the room.

   This is must-see for fans of the late actor, but anyone else would be well-advised (as Flynn himself should have been) to steer clear of it.

   We Were Strangers (Signet #716, 1949) is an interesting book with an interesting story behind it. The author (Robert Sylvester) wrote the novel Rough Sketch (Dial Press, 1948), parts of which deal with the Cuban Revolution (referred to in To Have and Have Not) of the 1930s. Then when it was filmed as We Were Strangers he re-organized (but did not re-write) the chapters to conform to the movie. It might be fun some time to look up Rough Sketch and see how it differs, but for now Strangers offers entertainment enough.

   The story starts off unpromisingly — a result of the chapter-shuffling? — with an off-putting stretch about a bunch of sycophants spending a weekend on a rich man’s island, but after about 50 pages things shift radically to the Cuban thing, with some really fine background, interesting characters (including a tough street girl named China Valdes) and details of a regime so casually brutal as to seem all the more chilling — embodied in Ariete, a murderous cop and one of the Great Bad Guys of Literature. Really. Every time you see him even referred to in the book, somebody dies or disappears, and the scenes where he stalks the Valdes girl are like something out of Night of the Hunter.

   This gradually morphs into a plot to kill the dictator, engineered by Tony Fenner, a Cuban-American hustler who appeared in other work by Sylvester. We get some taut business with clandestine meetings, phony deals, and a lot of sweaty work as the conspirators dig a tunnel to plant a bomb. It’s good stuff, intercut with scenes of Ariete harassing China Valdes as he closes in on them, all culminating in an ironic conclusion that… that would be spoiling things to reveal. Suffice it to say it’s a suspenseful and emotionally riveting ride.

   But the end of the story isn’t the end of the book, which moves on to a rather unexpected and haunting conclusion. Suddenly the characters get caught up in real life, with truly poignant results. And I have to say that when I think back on Strangers, I’m going to remember this ending and the bittersweet feel Sylvester imparts to it as the characters realize that the life-and-death struggle that brought them so close is now just a finished chapter in a story that has to move on.

   Like I said, there was a movie made of this (Columbia, 1949) and I can see why the themes of struggle and irony in Rough Sketch appealed to John Huston, who directed and co-wrote the film We Were Strangers.

   Huston wisely jettisoned the sycophants on the island and (less wisely) replaced the sadder-but-wiser ending of the book with a blood-and-guts shoot-out. But his sure hand at directing the actors and action got severely undercut by budget constraints, or possibly just laziness; the stars never appear on any authentic Cuban locations, but only in unconvincing back-projection shots that make the whole thing look phony as a fast shuffle.

   If you can get past that (and I couldn’t) the rest of the film has its moments. There are fine turns by Pedro Armendariz as Ariete, and Gilbert Roland in a supporting role that he credited with reviving his career. Jennifer Jones would probably be convincing as China Valdes if you could forget that she’s Jennifer Jones, but John Garfield just looks tired and bloated—perhaps understandable since he died just three years later. In all, I’d say We Were Strangers may be well-intentioned, but we know where the road paved with Good Intentions goes, don’t we?

VICTOR CANNING – The House of the Seven Flies. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1952. Mill-Morrow, US, hardcover, 1952. Berkley #F730, US, paperback reprint, 1963.

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN HAWKS. MGM, UK, 1959. Robert Taylor, Nicole Maurey, Linda Christian, Donald Wolfit, David Kossoff, Eric Pohlmann. Screenwriter: Jo Eisinger, based on the novel The House of the Seven Flies, by Victor Canning. Director: Richard Thorpe.

   Victor Canning’s THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN FLIES (Morrow, 1952) has intrigued me for various and sundry reasons since I came across it in my late teens, but I should tell you for starters, it’s pretty much a generic adventure/crime novel of its time, with little to distinguish it from a dozen others.

   The story opens in 1944 with some Nazi big-wig looting valuable jewels from a Dutch bank—or trying to; the boat he’s leaving in gets sunk in the canals near a city called Veere and the treasure is lost forever.

   Yeah (as they say) right.

   The story picks up again in 1952 with Roger Furse, an American ex-serviceman now operating a charter boat in the North of England. Like any hero in this sort of thing, Roger’s a straightforward guy, but he’s not above bending the law a bit, so when a Dutchman who chartered the boat for a bit of coastal mucking about offers him extra to take him across the North Sea to the Dutch town of Veere, Roger doesn’t need much persuading. But when the Dutchman dies (mysteriously, but apparently of natural causes) Roger decides he should make sure he’s not carrying anything incriminating, goes through the man’s baggage and finds (you guessed it) a map to the “lost” treasure.

   Whereupon Canning rounds up the usual complications: a cute-perky-bouncy young lady who was working with the Dutchman to recover the loot; a lugubrious police detective who tells Furse that his passenger was murdered before he ever got on board, victim of a slow poison; a showy crook with an entourage of nasty thugs, and a lovely femme fatale-type who may have killed the Dutchman.

   Having assembled his cast, Canning puts them through the usual paces: Furse and the cute girl fall in love; the Dutch cop plods patiently; the showy crook offers bribes and threats; his hired nasties get tough, and the femme tries seduction. We get a couple of chases (well-handled, I must admit) a couple fights (likewise) and some sea-going stuff that Canning handles particularly well, all capped by the usual ending.

   Okay so the first thing that intrigues me about this book is the title; who-the-hell would call a book THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN FLIES? Who would publish anything with a title that connotes dull classics and household pests? Who did they think was going to buy anything labeled THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN FLIES? I mean I wrote a book a couple years ago called EASY DEATH, and I have an eight-page list of publishers and agents who won’t even look at it, so how does Canning put out a book with a title like that?

   Well in point of fact, Morrow published it and it was bought by no less than MGM, who packaged it as a medium-budget flick for their declining star Robert Taylor in 1959, adapted by Jo Eisinger and directed by that reliable workhorse Richard Thorpe. Just a few years earlier, Thorpe and Taylor had worked together on big-budget extravaganzas like IVANHOE and KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, but here they were clearly just treading water.

   For most of its length, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN HAWKS (as they wisely re-titled it) is as undistinguished a movie as the book was a book. Except for Taylor, there are no big stars or even any memorable character actors. The chase scenes and sea-going stuff are jettisoned for reasons of economy, and the stunt work in the fights could be charitably described as duller than ditchwater. Yet HAWKS stayed in my memory for years, and I don’t know whether to blame Director Thorpe or Writer Eisinger — or to praise them.

   The thing is this: about 20 minutes in, HAWKS segues into a fugue from THE MALTESE FALCON; Taylor (now named John Nordley for some reason!) is approached by an effeminate little perfumed man with a cane who works for a fat, loquacious boss associated with a lying femme fatale. Big chunks of dialogue are ripped from FALCON, with the fat man AND Taylor bluffing about what they need to find out, and later Taylor tells the femme what a good actress she is … then they kiss and he sees the fat man’s henchman outside the window, just as in FALCON.

   Like I say, I don’t know who was responsible for this wholesale rip-off/homage, but it’s worth remembering that Thorpe once re-shot the 1937 PRISONER OF ZENDA scene for scene. Whatever the case, when I saw this on Network TV back in the late 60s, before videotapes, DVD or even Turner Classic Movies, the blast from a classic seemed delightfully amusing.

   Or at least it made the film a little less forgettable.

THE CORRUPT ONES. Warner Brothers, 1965. Robert Stack, Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan. Screenplay by Harald Bloom, Arp Brown, Brian Clemens, Georges Farrel and Ladislas Fodor. Directed by James Hill and Frank Winterstein.

   A splashy Technicolor B-movie without a single deep thought in any of its 87 minutes — and great fun if you’re in the mood.

   This stars Robert Stack and Elke Sommer, with support from Nancy Kwan, so right away you know it ain’t gonna get any awards for acting, but then you don’t come to a film like this expecting to see Laurence Olivier; you come for action, and Corrupt Ones has plenty.

   The film opens with scenes of a few score uniformed Red Chinese soldiers guarding about a half dozen women working in a rice paddy, with Robert Stack hiding nearby snapping pictures. I thought at first this must be some super-secret scientific project — atomic rice taking over the world or something — but it turns out it’s just how the filmmakers thought things were like in Red China: peasants toiling and hordes of gun-toting goons keeping them in line, so it turns out Robert Stack is merely a free-lance photographer working out of Hong Kong, getting all this for a magazine. Well a chase ensues and Stack is rescued by a guy who dies, but before he goes he passes on a medallion that bears the key to a lost treasure.

   So you’ve got your lost treasure, and your hero, and pretty soon you get your stacked heroine, Elke (who else?) Sommer and a gangster played by Christian Marquand and a dragon-lady played by Nancy Kwan.

   Having walked onstage, the four of them proceed to chase each other around, shooting, fighting, kidnapping, fighting some more, torturing, chasing some more, and generally filing the screen with mindless carnage for eighty minutes. Yeah, Stack’s character is supposed to be a photographer, but he’s so handy with his fists that when Elke gets kidnapped (again) he thinks nothing of walking into the local den of heavily-armed thieves and setting about the blighters single-handed.

   Nancy Kwan looks suitably imperious in her jade palace filled with S/M goodies, and Christian Marquand — well, his job here is to supply a lot of thugs to be knocked about and he performs this undemanding task reliably. Likewise, Elke Sommer has little to do but look good, which she does quite nicely, thank you.

   Director James Hill (his credits include Born Free and A Study in Terror) handles all this in appropriately slap-dash fashion, with no discernible artistry, but never so clumsy as to be noticeable, and always fastfastfast. The photography is similarly loud, unfussy and colorful enough to distract the viewer from the inane things the characters say and the dumb stuff they do. Mostly.

   What got me wondering though was the title of the piece: The Corrupt Ones. I mean, the bad guys in this are mean and nasty, but they’re pretty forthright about being bad guys; there’s a bent cop in the mix, but just one. So who are the corrupt ones? Then I took a closer look at the credits; it took two men to direct this bit of gaudy fluff and five to write it. Five. To write this?!?! What the hell were they doing for their money? Or perhaps when they titled it, they were talking about themselves….

   Nowadays, weird movies are so numerous as to pass unnoticed; it is, in fact, common practice lately to layer a certain amount of weirdness deliberately onto quite ordinary films to increase their appeal to trendy movie-goers and boost the box office.

   But in my youth, the truly weird movies were something subversive filmmakers got away with, mainly in the B-features when no one was looking. Hence, the old weird movies played at neighborhood grind-houses to audiences of uncomprehending kids and drunks, then on local TV stations at obscure hours of the morning, diced up with ads for used cars and the amazing veg-O-matic.

   Hold that thought. I’ll get back to it.

   The things I read, given world enough and time, begin to amaze me. A few weeks ago, f’rinstance, I found myself somewhere deep inside Thomas DeQuincey’s memoir (sensationally serialized in the London papers circa 1821-22) Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

   This is not a book I’m going to recommend to lovers of Junkie or Musk, Hashish & Blood. The density of DeQuincey’s prose is such as will daunt most readers, and I don’t blame ’em a bit. Take one typical sentence —

    — and you’ll see it takes a Sherpa guide to get through some of these passes, and the reader with any sense at all for brevity and clarity may justifiably fling deQuincey’s book across the room.

   Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself not just enjoying this thing, but actually pursuing the tale (such as it is) eagerly to its end. For those who can fight through the dense prose, Confessions holds some powerful bits of sheer writing: harrowing descriptions of starving in London; stark descriptions of beggars and streetwalkers going desperately down winding, shadowy streets; gaudy evocations of wild opium dreams, and even the odd bit of humor jumping out from hiding, as his advice on taking Opium:

   Now to return to that thought you’ve been holding, DeQuincey’s title, somewhat abbreviated into Confessions of an Opium Eater was used for a film completely unrelated (or almost completely; the hero’s name is Gilbert DeQuincey) to the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoRBNxuweP0

   Released by Allied Artists (formerly Monogram) in 1962, produced and directed by that wild card of the Cinema, Albert Zugsmith (look him up) this was a cult film before there were cult films, a movie that emerges as simply weird for its own sake, rather than aimed at any particular audience. Spawned by a filmmaker known equally for his work with geniuses and for his own trashy bad taste, Confessions will easily boggle the mind of anyone unprepared for its tawdry neo-surrealism.

   Vincent Price stars as a black-clad and bemused soldier-of-fortune charged with ending the Oriental slave trade in San Francisco, circa 1920s — an action hero if you will, and if the mantle seems to rest a bit awkwardly on his shoulders, he still bears it manfully, jumping from rooftops, hatchet-dueling with Tong assassins, freeing fair young maidens and trading repartee with the Dragon Lady — in short, everything you expect from a two-fisted hero, but done with a sardonic lyricism never seen outside this cheap little movie, with lines like: “They say in every drunkard there’s a demon, in every poet a ghost. So here am I ghost and demon…”

   There are other surprises along the way, including an oriental den of iniquity filled with several hundred doors, sliding panels and secret passages; a tiny slave girl locked in a cage who turns out to be a jaded and diminutive old woman; an extended slow-motion dope-dream fight sequence, and an ending that made me doubt my senses. In short, this is the goods: a genuine Old Weird Movie and like nothing else you’ll ever see.

MANPOWER. Warner Brothers, 1941. Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Alan Hale, Frank McHugh, Eve Arden, Barton MacLane, Ward Bond, Walter Catlett, Joyce Compton. Director: Raoul Walsh.

   I’ve often said that Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz were the two most artistic directors ever to come out of Hollywood, and the next time someone doubts it, I’ll show them this film.

   Back in the early 30s, Howard Hawks made a film called Tiger Shark, with Edward G. Robinson, Richard Arlen and Zita Johann, about two fishermen-buddies drawn to the same woman, and what happens when she marries the wrong one.

   It made a lot of money for Warner Brothers, so the Studio Heads, with the wisdom of their breed, used to dust off the script, every other year or so, change the profession to Well Drilling, Stunt Flying or what-have-you, and make it again with a different cast and director. No wonder the Warners’ Script Department was known as Echo Valley!

   By 1941, Edward G. Robinson had again rotated into the Chump role, with George Raft and Marlene Dietrich as his friends and lovers. The profession this time was Power Line Repairmen, and the director was Raoul Walsh.

   The result is Hollywood Filmmaking at its Absolute Apex. The whole idea of making a film about a vast, outdoorsy job like Power Line Work entirely on Studio Sets seems audacious when you think about it, but it probably never occurred to Walsh or Warners to do it any other way.

   The studio “exteriors” are beautifully constructed, and Walsh moves his craning camera through them with an easy grace that recalls the best of Fred Astaire.

   He gets real excitement from shots of men clinging to icy towers, in no way diminished by their obvious fakiness, and he manages to break down George Raft’s usual reticence almost completely; there’s a strong sense of Feeling in the scenes between Raft and Robinson, and startling, genuine sexual tension between Raft and Dietrich.

   Best of all, despite the fact that this plot had been done to death by the time he got to it, Walsh makes it seem almost spontaneous. As the characters move on their predestined routes towards Betrayal and Murder, there’s never the sense of Fatalism that could so easily suffuse a worn-out storyline like this.

   Of course, Walsh does all this and a lot more with a quiet professionalism that entirely eludes most critics, but a careful look at his camerawork, pacing, and feel for the material show a director who deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than many of his better-known contemporaries. Maybe someday he will be.