THE SYSTEM. Bryanston Films, UK, 1964. Released in the US as The Girl-Getters, American International Pictures, 1966. Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, Barbara Ferris, Julia Foster, David Hemmings. Director: Michael Winner.

   There’s not a crime to be seen in this British-made movie, unless it’s the breaches of trust committed by a group of local lads who prey on the girls (birds, or thrushes) who come down from London and elsewhere to their small bailiwick on the sea every summer. Seduce and abandon, is their modus operandi, and their system is simple.

   The leader of their lot, a chap named Tinker (Oliver Reed) has a job as a roving beach photographer.

   He takes pictures of likely victims, obtains their local addresses, and distributes the same to the others of the group. When the summer’s over, they’ve left their ladies with lots of memories, perhaps, and – also perhaps – many of the memories are good ones. But lasting ones? Hardly ever.

   No big crimes involved here, right? There are lots of swinging sixties beach party scenes, and the film is certainly not without lightness and humor, but no Annette Funicello beach blanket movie is this. If ever a film might be called Noir without even the hint of a murder being committed, it might be The Girl-Getters.

   The question is, as it slowly dawns on Tinker, is who are the Takers and who are the Taken?

   His pursuit of the wealthy Nicola (Jane Merrow) only shows how strong the “caste system” in England really was, and how futile it may have been to fight it. The one-set tennis match he plays with one of Nicola’s gentlemen friends, or tries to, and then tries to laugh it off, is a turning point that comes, one supposes, in everybody’s life – at which time they learn their limitations, and at the same time learn they cannot do anything about it.

   The glowing embers behind Oliver Reed’s fiery, dark-shadowed eyes, and his memorable performance in this film, show that when the occasion presented itself, he was one of the finest actors of his day. Up until this movie, most of his work was done for Hammer Films, but I’d like to think that a lot of doors were opened to him afterward.

   Not that The Girl-Getters was recognized as anything close to a work of art at the time, but it was among the vanguard of British films dealing with modern (if not mod) themes such as class differences and sexual awareness like Alfie and Georgy Girl (both 1966) that turned the world of film-making upside down.

   I didn’t see The Girl-Getters back then, but that’s the era when I started to really enjoy what film-making was all about, rather than simply film-watching. Blow-Up (1966 as well, and starring David Hemmings, who also had a small role in this earlier movie) was a revelation to me, nor was I the only one who felt that way.

SWAMP WATER. 20th Century-Fox, 1941. Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Virginia Gilmore, John Carradine, Mary Howard, Eugene Pallette, Ward Bond, Guinn Williams. Based on the novel by Vereen Bell. Director: Jean Renoir.

   From what I’ve learned recently that I didn’t know about director Jean Renoir before I sat down to write up some thoughts about this movie, his first American film, Orson Welles considered him the greatest director of all time, and he was voted the 12th-greatest director of all time in a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly magazine.

   I think I could easily go along with Orson Welles. Even though the critics don’t seem to have thought too highly of Swamp Water, the general public did, and it was one of Fox’s highest grossing films of 1941. I agree. The general public was right this time.

   There is a lot to like in this film, even though it doesn’t seem to be regarded even now as one of Renoir’s best, and while I haven’t done so yet, I think that it will bear one or more viewings by me, very easily.

   That the atmosphere of a small Georgian community on the edge of the huge Okefenokee Swamp is portrayed in a highly realistic fashion almost goes without saying — or maybe it doesn’t, so I will.

   It’s not clear how someone having come to this country straight from Europe could have visualized and reproduced life in a small Southern town so well that it feels like everyone in the movie had lived there all their life — but that’s the feeling I received, only slightly cliched in (unfortunately) standard Hollywood fashion.

   Of course it helps that a good portion of the movie was filmed on location. The only serious omission, I think, is that I do not remember seeing any blacks in the film, only whites, and yet even so, the idea that not all men were created equal in the US in the 1940s still manages to make itself felt, if even only subtly.

   And it is a crime film, although when it comes to movies, as you will have seen on this blog, I’ve been insisting on that less and less as time has gone on. You could even call it “swamp noir.” The mood is dark enough at times, as life seems to go wrong at every turn for trapper Ben Ragan (Dana Andrews) after he stumbles across fugitive from justice Tom Keefer (Walter Brennan) hiding in the swamp while hunting for his lost dog Trouble.

   Agreeing not to turn Keefer in, Ben returns home and tries to keep Keefer’s secret from everyone but the latter’s daughter, the wild-haired Julie (Anne Baxter), who’s treated as little more than a scullery maid by the family who has taken her in, but with little success, no thanks to his jealous girl friend Mabel MacKenzie (Virginia Gilmore), blonde and far more perfectly coiffed.

   Ben is also on the outs with his father Thursday (Walter Huston), who second marriage to Miss Hannah (Mary Howard) is beginning to falter, thanks to the attention being paid to her when Thursday is gone by the pathetic and largely contemptible Jesse Wick (John Carradine).

   There’s a lot more to the story, with all of the pieces dovetailing nicely, and all of the players fitting their parts to a T, especially (and this came as a surprise to me) Walter Brennan, whom I usually think of as overacting greatly, but not in this role. As a speaker of soliloquies to the stars and to nature in general, his presence on the screen I found to be as mesmerizing as any I can recall in quite a while.

   Not that he was on screen a high percentage of the time. The honor in that regard goes to Dana Andrews, whose Southern accent was the most pronounced, but which started to sound more and more natural as the movie went on. As did the movie itself.

   Flawed by more of a sentimental ending than I expected, perhaps, and also because (and this is another perhaps) Renoir had the movie selected for him rather than the other way around, this is a movie that I enjoyed immensely. If you have a chance to see it, given that you’ve read this review all the way here to the end, I recommend it to you highly.

[UPDATE] 6-20-09. First an email note from Bill Crider, who says, “You know my fondness for this kind of book means that I own a copy.” And here it is, or the cover, at least, thanks to Bill:

      Bantam 97, June 1947. (Originally Little Brown, hardcover, 1941.)

   Then another note, this one from Al Hubin, who agrees that the book belongs in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, not previously incuded. He also points out the existence of the second filmed version, Lure of the Wilderness, 1952, with Jean Peters and Jeffrey Hunter, and directed by Jean Negulesco.

LORNA DOONE. Columbia/Edward Small Productions, 1951. Barbara Hale, Richard Greene, Carl Benton Reid, William Bishop, Ron Randell, Sean McClory, Onslow Stevens, John Dehner. Loosely based on the book Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (1869) by R. D. Blackmore; adapted by George Bruce. Director: Phil Karlson.

   Cramming a long book into a 90-minute movie is not an easy task, but as far I know, the essence of the story is all there. The reason I’m hedging in that last statement is that all I’ve ever read of the book, which has never been out of print, is the comic book version, Classics Illustrated edition (#32), the cover of which I show you here.

   I had this comic book for many years, primarily for the cover, I think, but it finally went with the rest of my hoard of Golden Age comics about 15 years ago. I sold most of them off — unfortunately so, as I sorely miss them now.

   But speaking of the cover, I didn’t know this when I was young, but it was done by Matt Baker, famed GGA artist of the late 1940s and 50s. GGA stands for Good Girl Art, a statement with which (in Baker’s case) I heartily agree. (And do follow the link. The covers on that site are terrific.)

   The story of Lorna Doone takes place in an isolated valley in England in the late 17th century, isolated enough that the Doones rule the area at their whim, taxing the peasants unmercifully and punishing them viciously if they protest — roguish if not utterly outlaw actions which take place unknown to King Charles II.

   When John Ridd’s father is killed at the hands of the Doones while he is yet a young lad, he vows revenge. When he is older (and looks like Richard Greene — an obvious choice, the latter later becoming TV’s Robin Hood), he’s also in love with Lorna Doone, the granddaughter of Sir Ensor, the patriarch of the family.

   The movie is beautifully filmed — the colors are generally top notch, and the waterfall plunging downward near the Doone castle is rather spectacular — but it’s the actors that often seem to get in the way.

   I don’t mean that as disparagingly as it sounds. There’s enough action and romance to satisfy almost anyone who watches, and Barbara Hale (who later became Perry Mason’s Della Street) is as ravishing beautiful as a young royal damsel could be — a perfect replica, I thought, of a Matt Baker drawing.

   Otherwise, though, if you were to take another look through the cast, I think you will see as well as I what’s missing: no one of star quality. Workmanlike actors all, but no one with the flair of an Errol Flynn or an Olivia de Havilland (to pick a couple of obvious examples) who might have taken this film a step or two out of the ordinary.

   Pleasurable enough then, but still ordinary and not more than mildly satisfying. The book been made into numerable films and various TV movies and mini-series. I’ll try another of them sometime, I think, as well as see if I can’t find another copy of the comic book as nice as the one I had.

BLACK MAGIC. Edward Small Productions/United Artists, 1949. Orson Welles, Nancy Guild, Akim Tamiroff, Frank Latimore, Valentina Cortese, Margot Grahame, Berry Kroeger, Raymond Burr. Based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas père. Director: Gregory Ratoff.

   Call me nostalgic to the point of narcissism, but I enjoy revisiting from time to time the things that thrilled me as a kid, and at the tender age of Fourteen or so, I was convinced that Black Magic was the greatest film ever made.

   Well, the intervening forty-four years have dimmed its splendor somewhat, but This is still an enjoyably campy comic book of a movie, purportedly based on Alexandre Dumas’ tale of Cagliostro (Orson Welles) and the affair of the Queen’s necklace.

   The script is corny, Welles is hammy, and the direction (There are the usual rumors that Welles himself took a hand) over-emphatic, but it’s still fun, with swordfights, gypsy curses, hypnotic spells and lord-knows-what-all jamming its brief running time.

   Producer Edward Small made an industry (Not a cottage industry; a real celluloid-and-press-book industry) out of adapting Dumas, whose works were in public domain, on the screen (with varying degrees of faithfulness) a passion that started with The Count of Monte Cristo in 1934, right up to Black Magic in ’49, with a stop along the way for James Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask.

   Small moved on to other projects, such as Witness for the Prosecution and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, until he at last turned to popcorn fantasy and finished his career with The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, which at last gave us Elke Sommer naked.

   For Black Magic, he seems to have stuffed ten pounds of Publicity into a Five-Pound-Bag, with outlandish posters, breathless trailers and even a tie-in with Superman comics, a feat of dubious artistry maybe, but executed with a modicum of wit.

RAMONA. Biograph, 1910. Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Francis J. Grandon, Kate Bruce, W. Chrystie Miller. Based on the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Director: D.W. Griffith.

   If cutting Crime and Punishment down to a 90 minute movie was a considerable feat, as discussed briefly here, a few posts back, then how about a 200 to 300 page novel that’s trimmed down to a very quick 17 minutes?

    It can’t be done, but it was, and the result is about as good (or bad) as you might expect.

   Starting with the positive, the photography is quite remarkable. But there are no dialogue cards, only brief statements of what the next scene is to display, and in the two reels, there’s only enough time to get the gist of things, no more.

   Subtitled “The Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian,” a Spanish girl in California (Mary Pickford) marries an Indian (Henry B. Walthall), they have a child, and as the subtitle suggests, they do not live happily ever after. The gun-toting white settlers who keep moving the small family on do not come off at all well in this movie.

   This movie is to be watched for its historical significance, and — unless you tell me otherwise — for little other reason. Thankfully it still exists to be watched today, nearly 100 years later.

   If you’re interested in Cornell Woolrich and get Turner Classic Movies on satellite, I strongly suggest that, the next time it’s scheduled, you check out Blind Date (Columbia, 1934). It’s not based on anything Woolrich wrote and isn’t even a film noir, but this obscure little gem breathes the spirit of Woolrich’s early non-crime fiction like no other movie I’ve seen.

   Ann Sothern stars as a young woman of Manhattan, supporting her parents and a kid brother and sister in the pit of the Depression. As in the country-western song she is torn between two lovers: her steady boyfriend (Paul Kelly), who is “shanty Irish” like herself, and the wealthy young playboy (Neil Hamilton) whom she met on the blind date of the title.

   Anyone who’s familiar with the early Woolrich stories, and their recurrent theme that relationships and anguish are inseparable, is sure to feel that this movie must have been based on one of them.

   (Homework assignment: read Woolrich’s 1930 tale “Cinderella Magic,” collected in my Love and Night, just before or after watching the movie.)

   Even more amazing is the number of links between this film and Woolrich’s future. There’s a short and brutal scene at a dance marathon prefiguring the suspense master’s powerful 1935 tale “Dead on Her Feet.”

   Second male lead Paul Kelly was to play the second male lead a dozen years later in the Woolrich-based “Fear in the Night” (1947).

   The director, Roy William Neill, would later, and just before his death, helm Black Angel (1946), arguably the finest movie ever based on a Woolrich novel.

   Even the title Blind Date figures in the Woolrich canon: first in his pulp story “Blind Date with Death” (1937), later as the new title for the 1935 story better known as “The Corpse and the Kid” and “Boy with Body” when, in 1949, Fred Dannay reprinted it in EQMM.

   All these links are coincidences, of course, but what an eye-popping network of them!

   Speaking of Fred Dannay, a Japanese film crew will soon be coming to America to make a documentary on Ellery Queen. Since this is the first segment of a projected series to be called The Great Mystery Writers, I assume (and hope) that the emphasis will be on Fred and his first cousin Manny Lee, not on the detective character whose name they chose as their joint byline.

   I’m going to be involved in this project but exactly to what extent and in what capacity isn’t clear yet. For updates, stay tuned to this column.

   Soon to be published by the ABA Press (that’s ABA as in American Bar Association) is an anthology entitled Lawyers in Your Living Room! which deals, as you must already have guessed, with the countless series about the legal profession that have graced or disgraced our TV screens for more than half a century.

   As you also must already have guessed, I wrote the chapter on Perry Mason. There’s also a chapter on The Defenders, but most of the series discussed in the book are much more recent than Mason. For more details you needn’t wait for my next column, just google the title.

   During much of the next week my eyes are going to be glued to the PDF of the second volume of The Dark Page, which I am checking over for author Kevin Johnson.

   The first volume was a lavish coffee-table book dealing with those films noirs of the 1940s that were based on novels or short stories and with their literary sources.

   The sequel covers the noirs of the Fifties and early Sixties and their literary sources, ranging from Dreiser and Hemingway and Graham Greene, through a slew of specialists in noir fiction — Horace McCoy, Steve Fisher, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and (need I mention?) Woolrich — to such long-forgotten pen wielders as Ferguson Findley and Willard Wiener.

   Mickey Spillane, of course, gets full coverage. The choices of what films count as noir are at times quite unusual: The Bad Seed and the first version of Death of a Salesman are in, as is Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, but Psycho is out.

   The illustrations aren’t part of my PDF but, if the first Dark Page volume is any indication, they’ll be stunning.

   If you groove on Harry Stephen Keeler, the greatest nut who ever wrote a book, you’ll be pleased to hear that Strands of the Web, a collection that brings together the vast majority of his early short stories — not all because two or three remain lost — is about to be published by Ramble House.

   Most of these tales were written between 1913 and 1916, when Keeler was in his early and middle twenties and just beginning to develop the webwork patterns of wild coincidence that were to become his trademark but the earliest story dates back to 1910 and the latest to 1962, a few years before his death.

   You’ll find a few foreshadowings of his wacky webs now and then in this collection, but the prose is much more ordinary than the labyrinth sentences he eventually came to favor. The most noticeable influence on these stories is O. Henry, perhaps the most popular American short-fiction writer of all time, who died the same year Keeler first set pen to paper.

   For more details, go to www.ramblehouse.com.

SHE LOVED A FIREMAN. 1937. Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan, Robert Armstrong, Eddie Acuff, Veda Ann Borg. Director: John Farrow.

   If you don’t like movies about firemen, the only reason I can come up with as to why you might want to watch this one anyway is that Ann Sheridan is in this one, too. (See my review of The Patient in Room 18 which I posted here not so long ago.) TNT recently ran these movies back-to-back, and I didn’t get the connection until I finally got around to watching them.

   There is very little plot to She Loved a Fireman. What there is, is a lot of documentary footage showing what it takes to become a firemen, how to get through fire college and so on, but the story itself is pretty slim.

   Dick Foran plays “Red” Tyler, an ex-bookie and a small-time political hack who, when he needs a job, decides to become a fireman. He gets on the wrong side of the captain, however (Robert Armstrong), and to get his goat he tries to charm his way into the life of the older man’s sister, which is where Ann Sheridan comes in.

   While Foran is an oaf — a good-natured one, but still an oaf — I think you can tell even from this mediocre film that Miss Sheridan had chances to go places in the movies.

   Other than this one small positive note, you’ll have to wait for the final scenes — there’s just got to be a big fire in a movie like this, doesn’t there? — to find any other excuse for not doing whatever else it was you were supposed to be doing instead of watching this movie. (Never mind. Ann Sheridan is reason enough.)

[UPDATE] 01-12-09. Even though we really are digging into obscurity when we watch picture shows like this one, there’s almost always something positive that can be said about even the most underwhelming B-movie (like this one).

   Don’t take just my word for it. It’s not only me. Everyone who’s left a comment about this film on IMDB is in total agreement that Ann Sheridan is the standout attraction, if not the only one.

   But if that isn’t enough to help you decide whether or not to watch this movie the next time it comes around on TCM, they’ve helpfully provided an online trailer for it. I’ve just watched it, and if you’ve read this far, I think you should too.

   Truth in advertising. The photo you see here of Miss Sheridan has no other connection with Fireman. It’s a publicity shot for a movie called Winter Carnival, which came out a couple of years later, in 1939.

CHINA GIRL. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Gene Tierney, George Montgomery, Lynn Bari, Victor McLaglen, Sig Ruman, Robert Blake, Philip Ahn. Screenwriter: Ben Hecht; director: Howard Hathaway.

   Many reviewers do not appear to know what to make of this film, and without a sense of perspective — and history — I’d have to agree that it doesn’t fit into any kind of standard category I can think of either, not satisfactorily, at least.

   Eighty percent of the film would have constituted a well above average B-movie adventure thriller, but the scenes at the beginning, with the Japanese army shooting Chinese peasants lined up along (and falling into) a long earthen burial pit belie any sense of light amusement value right from the start.

   Nor is the ending, with Japanese warplanes wiping out an entire Chinese village, filled with screaming people, many of them children, intended to have anyone whistling their way out of theater. No, what this is is a bitterly honest anti-Japanese wartime propaganda film disguised as an everyday spy story and romance, with a budget and production values a notch higher than would have been given to it if that was all it was intended to be.

   George Montgomery plays an ace newsreel cameraman, Johnny ‘Bugsy’ Williams, who’s assisted in escaping from a Japanese detention center by Lynn Bari and Victor McLaglen, who have their own irons in the fire. Gene Tierney is Haoli Young, the half-Chinese girl whose life is interrupted by Williams, not smoothly at first, but her self-applied veneer of protection is first cracked, then weakened, and finally disappears.

   Comic relief is provided by Robert Blake as a young Mandalay street urchin who attaches himself to Williams. Haoli�s father is played by Philip Ahn, a teacher whose classroom demeanor was exactly the same in 1942 as it was 30 years later as the mentor to David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in the TV series Kung Fu.

   George Montgomery plays earnest very well, once his sharp edges have been worn away, while Gene Tierney is both beautiful and exotic as well as totally natural. No surprise there. Lynn Bari seems to have caught the eyes of some reviewers, but for me, not this time around.

   As for the movie as a whole, it is as I’ve suggested, a mishmash of this and that, a movie made by design and good intentions, but when the design is no longer needed, then neither are the intentions.

   And you can take the following to the bank, too. When any movie takes place in western Asia in November 1941, and one of the characters comes across a secret codebook containing the number 7 and the deciphered word “pearl,” you will know that you now know more than any of the characters know, except for the bad guys, and you will know exactly who they are.

   Not that you exactly need a scorecard.

DOWNHILL. US title: When Boys Leave Home. Gainsborough, 1927; Alfred Hitchcock, director; Claude McDonnell, cinematographer; Ivor Novello, Ben Webster, Robin Irvine, Sybil Rhoda, Isabel Jeans, Ian Hunter. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   Ivor Novello stars in a film adaptation of his own play, and is once again directed by Hitchcock, whose previous film was The Lodger in which Novello played the prime suspect.

   Although Novello is best known as a consummate stage performer and composer of popular songs, the screen persona I’ve seen in at least three films shows a darker, risk-taking side.

   In Downhill, he’s a popular public school student, from a wealthy family, who takes the blame for a friend’s indiscretion with a barmaid and slides downhill after his father throws him out.

   The film shows the influence of German expressionism on Hitchcock, with some striking photography in an extended dance-hall sequence that, although it takes place in Paris, recalls images of decadent Berlin settings in the 1920s.

WASHINGTON STORY. MGM, 1952; Robert Pirosh, screenplay and direction; John Alton, cinematography; Patricia Neal, Van Johnson, Louis Calhern, William Self. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This attractive, if slight, MGM political drama was scheduled to showcase the talent of Patricia Neal, the convention’s featured guest, but it’s Louis Calhern, as a seasoned congressional representative and mentor of freshman representative Van Johnson, who walks off with the film with a scene in which he mimics several of his colleagues, a demonstration of acting technique that received an ovation from the audience.

   (The not very nimble interviewer “explained” to Miss Neal, and this came off as patronizing, that the audience reacted so strongly to Calhern’s scene in recognition of an old Cinecon favorite actor. Balderdash. We were applauding a scene-stealing star.)

   I don’t remember ever seeing the film, in which reporter Neal is interviewing Johnson for a story as he’s up for reelection, but it’s very engaging.

   Neal does a fine job in a not very demanding role, and Johnson surprised me with his command of his role. I never thought much of him as an actor.

   Neal’s most striking comment, in her interview after the screening, was that Gary Cooper was the “love of my life,” to which the interviewer (who should have kept his mouth shut) responded weakly that “we’re all great fans of Cooper.” I would like to think I wasn’t the only one who snickered at that.

   I was surprised at how small Neal is (she seems tall and rangy on-screen), but being in a wheelchair didn’t help. She’s clearly bright and very articulate, with an impressive memory of her career (with only some minor forgetting of names). A great actress and lady.