THE WRATH OF GOD. MGM, 1972. Robert Mitchum, Frank Langella, Rita Hayworth, John Colicos, Victor Buono, Ken Hutchison, Paula Pritchett, Gregory Sierra. Screenplay by Jack Higgins, based on his book of the same title, but written as by James Graham. Director: Ralph Nelson.

   To tell you the truth, I liked this movie more than I thought I would, but if Robert Mitchum hadn’t been in it, and if it hadn’t been the last movie Rita Hayworth ever made, I wouldn’t have watched it at all. The story takes place in an unnamed Central American country (circa 1930?) currently plagued with generals, revolutionaries, gun runners and hordes of poor peasants whose only role is that of being raped, taken hostage or simply getting underfoot.

   What my problem is, though, is that I don’t care much about seeing priests with machine guns, whether they’re fake priests, excommunicated priests, or whatever. That’s Mitchum’s role, his task that of killing the leader of a band of renegades who have taken over a town, which he does, with a bloody vengeance.

   Rita Hayworth, who plays the mother of the outlaw leader, seems confused about her part; she certainly should be. On the other hand, Paula Pritchett is very pretty as the mute Indian girl. What other movies was she ever in?

   
UPDATE:   When I wrote this review, I did not know that when she made this movie Rita Hayworth was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, so that line about her being “confused about her part” is now very unfortunate. It is not what I intended — only that her part as written and filmed was not well established.

   As for Paula Pritchett, in those pre-IMDb days, questions such as the one I ended this review with often went unanswered. Now all one has to do is to click here to discover that she made two movies before this one, and none afterward.

CRAIG McDONALD – One True Sentence. Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2011. Betimes Books, softcover, revised edition, August 2014.

   The year is 1924 and expatriate Hector Lassiter, one of the “Lost Generation,” is in Paris writing when on a dark night he hears a scream as he walks in the snow on the Pont Neuf bridge.

   He doesn’t see anything that night, but soon enough, he and his friend Ernest Hemingway are up to their necks against a bizarre Nihilists cult called Nada, led by a mutilated man in a black mask calling himself Nobodaddy (from William Blake) who seem to be murdering off the editor publishers of impoverished little small press magazine of the type common in Paris at the time, and eventually playing at detectives under the direction of Gertrude Stein, a fact complicated when Lassiter is also drafted by Commissaire Aristide Simon as an agent of the police.

   One True Sentence is a historical thriller in the nine-book series by Edgar and Anthony award nominee Craig McDonald featuring Hector Lassiter, a crime writer who made his debut in 2007’s Head Games (set in 1957). Now the series has been reissued by Betimes Books in internal chronological order, beginning with One True Sentence. (See below.)

   Lassiter is an attractive protagonist (literally, he looks like William Holden), whose life covers much of American history in the 20th century. Here, amidst poseurs, literary icons, painters, poets, Dadaists, Surrealists, and a cold Paris winter he meets and falls in love with the dark mysterious Blinke Devlin, who also writes mystery novels of the locked room kind, under a male pseudonym, and has other mysteries to hide; Molly Wilder, a beautiful poet with a possibly fatal crush on him; Phillipe her painter boyfriend who involved her with the Nada movement; and the rather nasty Estelle Quartermain, an English mystery writer and expert on poisons.

   One theme running through the book is that almost no one is exactly who they claim to be, leaving Hector stumbling through a maze of aliases, lies, secrets, and puzzles, each arising as another has been seemingly solved.

   One True Sentence is a sexy, fast-paced mystery that generates more than a little suspense and includes appropriately bitchy portraits of actual figures of the era including Aleister Crowley, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Beach, and others.

   There is more going on here than just a fine evocation of Paris in that era, though. This is also a funny, tricky, horrifying, sexy, and ultimately involving mystery with enough twists and turns to delight any fan of the Golden Age puzzle school, and a protagonist of the two-fisted hard boiled type who even writes for Black Mask.

   Each book stands alone, but characters, both major and minor weave in and out of the rest of the series and the four books of McDonald’s Chris Lyon series which is also tied to the Lassiter books.

   The background is smartly sketched in, the characters witty and interesting, the action moves fast, the hero and various heroines aren’t eunuchs or virgins without the sex being overly graphic, and the more preposterous elements of the books are done with such sense of fun that only a grouch could really complain.

   I’m looking forward to exploring more of the century with Hector Lassiter. The books are literate without being literary, funny without being silly, and smart without shouting out loud at you how clever they are. Any one of those would be reason to read most books.

       The Hector Lassiter series —

1. One True Sentence (2011)
2. Forever’s Just Pretend (2014)

3. Toros & Torsos (2008)
4. The Great Pretender (2014)
5. Roll the Credits (2014)
6. The Running Kind (2014)

7. Head Games (2007)
8. Print the Legend (2010)
9. Death in the Face (2015)

10. Three Chords & The Truth (2016)

       The Chris Lyon series —

1. Parts Unknown (2012)
2. Carnival Noir (2013)
3. Cabal (2013)
4. Angels of Darkness (2013)

THE MAN FROM HONG KONG. British Empire Films, Australia, 1975. Released in the US as Dragon Flies. Jimmy Wang Yu, George Lazenby, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Roger Ward, Ros Spiers, Rebecca Gilling, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung. Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith.

   There’s no shortage of fisticuffs and fantastically choreographed martial arts fight scenes in The Man From Hong Kong. Directed by Ozploitation auteur Brian Trenchard-Smith, this entertaining, if deeply uneven, action movie features martial arts legend Jimmy Wang Wu as the titular character and one-time James Bond portrayer George Lazenby as his nemesis.

   Occasionally uneven in its pacing, this thrill ride of a movie nevertheless moves along at a steady clip, with bloody and brutal fight sequences interspaced with calm, romantic interludes that seem oddly out of place. But with some great car chases and a 1970s disco-inspired soundtrack, The Man from Hong Kong doesn’t stray from its mission of providing viewers with pure escapist entertainment for very long.

   The plot. Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu) of the Hong Kong Royal Police Force Special Branch heads to Sydney in order to extradite a drug runner (future Hong Kong director and producer Sammo Hung) held by the local authorities.

   But when a lone assassin murders Leng’s prisoner in broad daylight, Leng decides that he’s going to take down the entire international drug cartel run by an Australian businessman named Wilton (Lazenby).

   Leng fights his way through Sydney, leaving death and mayhem in his wake. But he’s determined to bring down Wilton, no matter what the cost. And when Wilton’s men murder Leng’s Australian love interest, all bets are off. Leng is set to wreak havoc. And wreak havoc he does. Look for the scene in which he stuffs a live grenade in Wilton’s mouth. It is pure grindhouse mayhem.

PATRICIA WENTWORTH – The Alington Inheritance. Maud Silver #31. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1958. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1960. Reprinted several times, including Perennial, paperback, 1990 (shown).

   A Miss Silver mystery, even though she doesn’t appear until about halfway through, and even though who did it is known even before he’s decided to do it. No mystery at all, in other words. The background is what’s important here, and watching Miss Silver at work once again.

   At stake, not surprisingly, is ownership of the Alington estate. The family relationships that are involved are frustratingly vague at first, but once established, they are the key to solving the case. Wentworth in this book is especially good at portraying children and gossipy old women. In terms of the setting, the story could have easily taken place in 1928 as well as 1958, when it was published.

PostScript:   I don’t know how relevant this fact is, but it may interest you to know that this is the first book by Patricia Wentworth that I’ve ever been able to read. Since Miss Silver is always listed among the names of the great detectives of the so-called Golden Age, I’ve always felt I should at least have read one of the cases she was involved in. And yet, in spite of all my good intentions, I’ve always quit after a chapter or two.

   This time was different. I found myself reading on, almost in spite of myself, fusty old ladies and all. Will I read another, you ask? The truth is, you’ll know the answer to that almost as soon as I do.

Bibliographic Notes:   This was #31 of 32 Miss Silver novels, and it was written when the author was 80 years old. The first was Grey Mask (Hodder, 1928). It was quite a long career for the character. I do not know how old she was when she started.

THE PRAIRIE. Edward F. Finney Productions / Screen Guild, 1947. Lenore Aubert, Alan Baxter, Russ Vincent, Chief Thundercloud, Chief Yowlachi, Jay Silverheels. Screenplay by Arthur St. Claire, from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Directed by Frank Wisbar.

   Sometimes they do things in B-movies that seem avant-garde when they were probably merely necessary, but this time I’m not so sure. I mean, why would anyone try to make a movie about a wagon train headed West without enough money to even shoot it outdoors? Not unless they were plain-damn crazy — or, as the Indians in old Westerns put it: Touched by the Sun.

   I think this is the case with The Prairie. Director Frank Wisbar (or Wysbar) was one of those German filmmakers who fled the Reich and ended up making films in the U.S. though he never achieved the success of Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder, or even the cult status of Edgar Ulmer. He’s remembered (if at all) for making Fahrmann Maria in Germany, with striking imagery of Death on horseback dressed in SS regalia, then re-making it at PRC as Strangler of the Swamp.

   And then there’s The Prairie, and one can almost see Wisbar stepping up to the challenge of transforming Cooper’s sagebrush saga into a visual metaphor, evoking not the wide vistas of the West, but the cramped psyches of the emigrants with tight, claustrophobic compositions.

   Well it almost works. There’s a fine sense of sexual tension as Lenore Aubert is taken into the mostly-male wagon train after her family is wiped out in a buffalo stampede (done with silent-movie stock-footage superimposed over studio sets!) followed by jealousy, murder, and a grim comeuppance for the killer, but even the earnest playing of all concerned can’t make it quite convincing.

   What is convincing is Wisbar’s commitment to painting an allegory. After a while, the fakey sets take on a painterly quality, like stylized representations, almost lifting the film into a realm one seldom sees outside an art film. It doesn’t really work, but I marveled at Wisbar’s artistic daring in even trying it.

   And I’ll add as a post-script that Ms. Aubert is fondly remembered by her legions of fans as the femme fatale in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.

   Two months ago I devoted my column to Stanislas-André Steeman, a European crime novelist who was almost never published in this country and unsurprisingly has long been forgotten here. This month’s topic is an English writer who was once published regularly over here but has been just as completely forgotten.

   Christopher Bush (1888-1973) was one of the stalwarts of the British detective novel’s golden age, but almost nothing is known of his life. According to the Penguin paperback edition of one of the books I’ll be talking about shortly, he was born of Quaker ancestry in an East Anglian village and served in both World Wars. At the time of the Penguin reprint in the early 1950s he was living in Suffolk and pursuing his hobbies of bridge, crossword puzzles and what he called “post-middle-aged self.”

   Back when I was a mystery fiction newbie I read at least a dozen of his books. After a few years I concluded that there wasn’t much of interest in what he wrote after World War II, when his series character, a moneyed bloke named Ludovic Travers, opened a detective agency and began narrating his exploits in soporific first-person prose.

   But the pre-war Travers novels I found much better written and characterized and much more engaging. Bush’s specialty was the perfect alibi, with which in most of his novels several suspects happen to be supplied. You won’t lose money if you bet that the one with the apparently most impregnable alibi is the murderer.

   The earliest of the three Bushes I recently decided to tackle is THE CASE OF THE CHINESE GONG (1935). The Great Depression, or as Bush calls it the slump, is very much in evidence and has laid low three of the four principal characters, the father of two of whom was the brother of the other pair’s mother. The failed toy manufacturer, his brother the painter on his uppers and their cousin the struggling schoolmaster are in desperate financial straits and stay precariously afloat only thanks to the generosity of the cousin’s brother, a gassed veteran of World War I, who is himself near broke thanks to bailing out his brother and cousins.

   The only hope of the four is their uncle, a wealthy and vindictive old tyrant who reigns in a stately home near the town of Seaborough. He has refused to help any of them, but when he dies they’ll each inherit enough to make them whole again. All four come down to celebrate (if that’s the word) the old man’s 74th birthday, at which the festivities (if that’s the word) are marred when he’s shot to death in his drawing room, in the presence of his solicitor and three of the four next of kin (the painter being in a summerhouse about twenty feet away), while across the room the resident butler is loudly ringing the titular gong. Happily Travers is in the area, visiting Major Tempest, chief constable of the county, and as usual takes a hand in the investigation.

   I wouldn’t call this book a model of fair play with the reader, and there are a number of gaffes. Would you believe that three independent plots to kill the old man are going on at the same time? (At one point Travers ventures the suggestion that everyone did the crime together, showing the influence of Christie’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS just a year after its publication.)

   The sinister letter Uncle Hubert received early on, supposedly from the husband of his estranged sister, is never explained, and the diagram that precedes the book fails to show the side door to the summerhouse, which figures heavily in the plot. Even back in 1935 I should think that simple police routine would have uncovered the scorch marks in the screen that Travers finds at the climax, proving where the fatal shot was fired from.

   But it’s a readable enough effort, and studded with the kind of lines one never finds in postwar Bush. Here for example is a description of the Toad Hall in which Uncle Hubert lives. “It was a biggish Victorian house, with gardens chock-full of second-rate rubbish—monkey-puzzle trees, laurel shrubberies, mossy croquet-lawn and miniature temple-cum-pagoda summer-house—as in the year its first owner had had them laid out.” GONG leaves much to be desired but showed me that I still have an affection for Golden Age puzzles.

   THE CASE OF THE MISSING MINUTES (1937; U.S. title EIGHT O’CLOCK ALIBI) takes place in the same area but it’s far superior to CHINESE GONG and indeed may be Bush’s finest novel. Travers is approached by his sister after a former maid tells her of strange doings and horrible night shrieks in the house called Highways where she and her husband are the servants.

   Soon after Travers makes an investigatory visit to the village of Seabrake — which happens to be not far from Seaborough where CHINESE GONG took place — he finds stabbed to death the bizarre old man who was living at the house with his 10-year-old granddaughter. Among the prime suspects are the child’s tutor and a classical pianist who happens to be in Seabrake on vacation.

   As usual in Bush novels, both men and some other characters as well have seemingly airtight alibis. At the head of the police team who come to the scene are the trio we met in CHINESE GONG — chief constable Major Tempest and his subordinates Inspector Carry and Sergeant Polegate — and all three are delighted to have Travers’ help in sorting things out.

   I can discuss this novel without revealing the murderer but not without giving away a central part of the plot. At about the two-thirds mark Travers connects the dots between a large number of subtle indications, concludes that the dead man had been a sadistic child-abuser obsessed with inflicting physical and psychological torture on his half-Jewish granddaughter with the aim of driving her insane, and refuses to give the police any more help finding the murderer.

   In Golden Age British detective novels this was a radical story element indeed, and Bush exerts all of his skill persuading us that if anyone ever deserved killing it was the old monster whose murder Travers is investigating. Readers who want to know whether or not the killer was caught will have to track down their own copy of the book. Mine is not for sale.

   CHINESE GONG and MISSING MINUTES are unusual in the Bush canon in that they take place outside the London area and therefore are without Travers’ usual Scotland Yard counterpart Superintendent George Wharton, who sports “a huge weeping-willow of a moustache” and, to me anyway, looks and sounds something like the late great Leo McKern when he played Rumpole of the Bailey.

   In THE CASE OF THE TUDOR QUEEN (1938) the setting is close to London and Wharton is front and center as usual. Passing through the village of Arneford, he and Travers encounter a frightened maid and wind up in a house in the London suburb of Westmead where they encounter two dead people: an actress who had recently scored a success playing Mary Tudor and the horserace-loving old rip who served as a sort of factotum to her.

   Both have died of poison, and as far as anyone can prove it was a case of double suicide, unless the man killed the woman and then, a day or so later, poisoned himself. Various parties are interviewed — the owner of the theater where the Mary Tudor play ran, the playwright, the actors who played the male leads opposite the dead woman — and eventually Travers comes up with a theory of how the most elaborate alibi might have been faked.

   At the fadeout the police are preparing to arrest the person Travers’s analysis points to. But since his reconstruction is speculative to say the least, and since there’s no proof even that the two deaths weren’t suicides, I would hate to have been the prosecuting attorney trying to get a conviction on this state of the evidence.

   Well, I’ve beaten around enough Bushes for one column. I do own several more pre-WWII Ludovic Travers novels that predate the three I’ve talked about here. Perhaps someday I’ll dig them out and report on them. If I hold out that long.

Editorial Acknowledgement:   The photo of Christopher Bush at the top of this post was borrowed from J. F. Norris’s “Pretty Sinister” blog. Thanks, John!

JANET NEEL – Death Among the Dons. Francesca & John MacLeish #4. St. Martin’s, US, hardcover, 1994. Pocket, US, paperback, 1995. First published in the UK by Constable, hardcover, 1993.

   My only problem with Janet Neel is that she’s just written four books. She’s among my favorite British writers.

   Francesca Wilson, now married to Superintendent John MacLeish, is having a rough time of it. Her 6-month old son won’t sleep, and neither can Francesca. She and motherhood aren’t sgreeing at all. During a more-or-less enforced visit to a health spa, she makes the acquaintance of a woman who is tapped to take over Gladstone University, an all-female College, after the former head is found dead of an overdose of Valium.

   Francesca is asked to assume the part-time and temporary post of Bursar as the school, to straighten out its horrendously messed-up finances. She accepts and steps into a mare’s nest of political intrigue and academic in-fighting. Then two students are attacked, and a professor is almost killed.

   Neel’s major (though certainly not her only) strength lies in her characters. Though Francesca (MacLeish’s role is secondary) is kept at he center of the story, she is only one of the major characters. The story is told in the third person from several viewpoints, and the most prominent one is that of the newly-appointed head, an aging but still strong woman.

   Numerous other characters play significant roles, and all are sharply and convincingly drawn. Francesca and John remain one of the most likale pairs in crime fiction, and their personal lives are mixed unobtrusively with a very good and well-told story.

   This is an excellent book in all respects, by a writer who deserves to be recognized as one of the best if she already isn’t.

The Francesca Wilson & John MacLeish series —

1. Death’s Bright Angel (1988)

2. Death on Site (1989)
3. Death of a Partner (1991)
4. Death Among the Dons (1993)
5. A Timely Death (1996)

6. To Die For (1998)
7. O Gentle Death (2000)

CARTER BROWN – The Wench Is Wicked. Al Wheeler #1. Horwitz-Transport, Australia, paperback original, 1955, as by Peter Carter Brown. To be published by Stark House Press, trade paperback, October 2017, in a threesome with Blonde Verdict and Delilah Was Deadly. (See the end notes for more information.)

   Carter Brown was the primary working byline of an Australian writer named Alan Yates (1923-1985), but his short breezy detective novels, featuring both cops and PI’s, almost always took place in the US. They appeared first in Australia, but when they were picked up by Signet in the US in the mid-1950s, they took the country by storm. With over 300 titles to his credit, a good estimate is that Carter Brown eventually totaled over 100 million copies in print.

   One of his most commonly used characters was a freewheeling police lieutenant named Al Wheeler. Based in Southern California, Wheeler appeared in almost 60 of his books. Stark House Press has gotten the rights to the first six of them and will be reprinting them in order, including several never before published in this country. (And if sales go well, I’m sure there’ll be more.)

   In this case Wheeler investigates the case of a man who’s been found shot to death in a deep quarry. It turns out that he was known well by all of the members of a Hollywood cast and film crew that’s shooting a movie nearby. When it turns out that the man was also writing a series of bombshell articles for Dynamite magazine (self-explanatory) the list of suspects goes sky high.

   Wheeler does a better than average job of investigating, but to tell you the truth. solid police procedure is not the reason so many people (mostly guys) read all those Carter Brown paperbacks over the years. The women that Wheeler meets are always luscious, full-bosomed and wear their clothes — what there are of them — so tight one wonders how they manage to move and breathe. The banter that Wheeler has with these ladies is full of good-natured innuendo, and (you will not be surprised to know) a good deal of extracurricular activity goes on as well.

   Tastefully, I hasten to add. Nothing explicit, not in 1955. Just enough to get the pulses of red-blooded males pumped up a notch or two, and the pages turning about as fast as they could. And so it is here, starting with book one, never before published in this country.

Bibliographic Notes:   The forthcoming Stark House three-in-one volume will also mark the first US publication of Delilah Was Deadly (Horwitz, Australia, 1956). The history behind Blonde Verdict (Horwitz, Australia, 1956) is a little more complicated. This will be its first US appearance in its original form, but previously unknown to Al Hubin, it was revised and reprinted in the US by Signet under the title The Brazen in 1960. This is new information that will appear in the next installment of the online Addenda to Crime Fiction IV.

LEO BRUCE – Case for Three Detectives. Geoffrey Bles, UK, hardcover, 1936. Stokes, US, hardcover, 1937. Academy Chicago Press, paperback, 1980.

   Case for Three Detectives is at once a locked-room mystery worthy of John Dickson Carr and an affectionate spoof of the Golden Age detectives created by Sayers, Christie, and Chesterton.

   When Mary Thurston is found in her bedroom, dead of a slashed throat, during a weekend party at her Sussex country house, it seems to all concerned an impossible, almost supernatural crime: The bedroom door was double-bolted from the inside; there are no secret passages or other such claptrap; the only windows provide no means of entrance or exit; and the knife that did the job is found outside the house.

   The following morning, three of “those indefatigably brilliant private investigators who seem to be always handy when a murder has been committed” begin to arrive. The first is Lord Simon Plimsoll (Lord Peter Wimsey): “… the length of his chin, like most other things about him, was excessive,” the narrator, Townsend, observes.

   The second is the Frenchman Amer Picon (Hercule Poirot): “His physique was frail, and topped by a large egg-shaped head, a head so much and so often egg-shaped that I was surprised to find a nose and mouth in it at all, but half-expected its white surface to break and release a chick.” And the third is Monsignor Smith (Father Brown), “a small human pudding.”

   The three famous sleuths sniff around, unearth various clues, and arrive at separate (and elaborate) conclusions, each accusing a different member of the house party as Mary Thurston’s slayer. But of course none of them is right. The real solution is provided by Sergeant Beef of the local constabulary, “a big red-faced man of forty-eight or fifty, with a straggling ginger moustache, and a look of rather beery benevolence.”

   Along the way there is a good deal of gentle humor and some sharp observations on the methods of Wimsey, Poirot, and Father Brown. The prose is consistently above average, and the solution to the locked-room murder is both simple and satisfying.

   Sergeant Beef is featured in seven other novels by Leo Bruce (a pseudonym of novelist, playwright, poet, and scholar Rupert Croft-Cooke), most of which have been reissued here by Academy Chicago in trade paperback. Among them are Case Without a Corpse (1937), Case with Four Clowns (1939), and Case with Ropes and Rings (1940). Each is likewise ingeniously plotted and diverting.

LEO BRUCE – A Bone and a Hank of Hair. Peter Davies, UK, hardcover, 1961. British Book Centre, US, hardcover, 1961. Academy Chicago, US, paperback, 1985.

   Croft-Cooke abandoned Sergeant Beef in 1952 and three years later began a second notable series of detective novels, also published under the Leo Bruce by-line, this one featuring Carolus Deene, ex-commando and Senior History Master at Queen’s School, Newminster, who solves mysteries as a hobby. Until recently, when Academy Chicago began reprinting these, too, in trade paperback, most of the twenty-three Deene titles were available only in England.

    A Bone and a Hank of Hair involves Deene in the strange disappearance of Mrs. Rathbone, Mrs. Rathbone, and Mrs. Rathbone — or are all three the same woman in different guises? Deene’s investigation, prompted by relatives of the original Mrs. Rathbone, takes him to an unpleasant home in remote East Kent, some curious parts of London, and an art colony in Cornwall.

   The jacket blurb says, more or less accurately, “Everywhere he meets bizarre, sometimes richly comic, sometimes sinister characters who bring him at last to the (guaranteed unguessable) conclusion.” On hand as usual in this series, in minor roles, are Mrs. Stick, Deene’s housekeeper and conscience; and the Gorringers, Deene’s headmaster and his (half)witty wife.

   Deene and his investigative methods, and Bruce and his blend of sly humor, tricky plotting, and eccentric characters may not be for every taste. But in this and such other adventure as A Louse for the Hangman (1958),Jack on the Gallows Tree (1960), Nothing Like Blood (1962), and Death in Albert Park (1964), both perform admirably.

   Croft-Cooke also published several worthy criminous novels under his own name, including Seven Thunders (1955) and Paper Albatross (1968).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

TOUGH GUYS. Touchstone/Buena Vista Pictures, 1986. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charles Durning, Alexis Smith, Dana Carvey, Darlanne Fluegel, Eli Wallach. Director: Jeff Kanew.

   A buddy movie. A message movie about how American society treats senior citizens. A comedy-crime film. Those are all perfectly adequate ways of describing Tough Guys. But at the end of the day, the movie was really one thing: a golden opportunity to bring Hollywood legends Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas together on the big screen for one last time.

   The two actors who appeared in a total of seven movies together, but who are perhaps best known for their work together in John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (reviewed here ), portray best friends in Tough Guys. Best friends who happen to be finishing up a 30-year stint in prison for robbing the Gold Coast Flyer. These two men, the last two to rob a train in the United States, are truly the last of a dying breed.

   But if prison is tough, getting out is even tougher. Both men are fish out of water. Not only have times change, but they’re old men now. But they still love women.

   Through a series of romantic mishaps and comedic adventures, they learn the hard way that very few people want to treat senior citizens with much respect or dignity. There’s definitely a message here, one that Lancaster, in an interview with the New York Times, suggested takes the movie out of the real of action-comedy into something more meaningful.

   Despite this being a lightweight, perfectly innocent affair that doesn’t stay with you long after you’ve finished watching, Tough Guys works. The pairing of Lancaster and Douglas as two aging criminals trying to regain one last moment of glory is pure entertainment. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good one.

   One last thing: without Lancaster and Douglas, this movie never would have worked. It’s their vehicle from start to finish.