BABY FACE. Warner Bros., 1933. Alfred E. Green, director; Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This screening of the original cut of a pre-code film restored scenes that contributed to editing and re-shoots that the Hays Office demanded to make the film less morally reprehensible.

   Stanwyck, in one of her most striking roles, plays a gold-digger who makes her way up the corporate ladder by seducing her bosses and moving to the next level when the opportunity presents itself. She leaves destroyed lives behind her until she reaches the top where she finds a love that restores her moral sense even as she loses almost everything she’s schemed for.

   There’s a somewhat happy ending in both versions (with the ending more jarring in the edited version). Arthur Hohl is especially good as her depraved father, while a besotted Donald Cook is the most damaged of her conquests.

   This is a black comedy whose taut direction and uniformly good performances keep it from veering into the absurd.

[EDITORIAL NOTE] Click here for a two minute trailer for the film, and here for nearly five minutes from the movie itself, courtesy of YouTube.   — Steve

AFTER THE DANCE. Columbia, 1935. Nancy Carroll, George Murphy, Thelma Todd. Director: Leo Bulgakov.

   As you will have noted, Thelma Todd is in both this movie and the one I previously reviewed on this blog, Lightning Strikes Twice. This may not strike you as remarkable as it does me, so allow me to explain further. I recorded both movies back-to-back on the same home-made VHS tape back in 1991, but Lightning was shown on American Movie Classics, and a day or so later, After the Dance was on The Movie Channel.

   You might guess that there was some sort of anniversary of Thelma Todd’s suspicious death around that particular time, but she died in December 1935, and the movies were shown in August. I’m going to assume that it was just chance, until or unless you can persuade me otherwise.

   As for After the Dance, to get right to it, it’s – well – not very good. One reviewer on Amazon has called it a “proto-noir,” but while I concede the point, it isn’t one that would have occurred to me.

   It is a crime movie in part — in fact, for the most part — with only a semi-happy ending – which was, I admit, very uncommon in 1935 – but the story is sappy, and George Murphy’s character Jerry Davis, aka Jerry Blair, a nightclub entertainer who’s railroaded off to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit, simply accepts the bad fate that’s thrust upon him with far too little emotion for the person watching to care very much either.

   Thelma Todd, as Mabel Kane, might have saved him, since she was in the room when the death occurred (which was before the movie started), but she clams up – she’s the villainess in this one – and off to the lime pits he goes. Only to escape, accidentally – Jerry Davis doesn’t seem to do anything on his own initiative – and to be found by Anne Taylor (Nancy Carroll), a vivacious nightclub singer and dancer (and a sheer joy to watch) who puts Davis, now Blair, into her act.

   Where he becomes the star attraction, and whereby the movie changes coats like a chameleon and becomes a song-and-dance musical, and not a crime film at all. But of course fate (Thelma Todd) intervenes once again.

   I liked the part of the film that was a song-and-dance musical. Some of the other Amazon reviewers suggest that parts of the rest of the film are missing, especially a big chunk at the end. It could be; it’s a better theory than mine that the criminous portions of the proceedings were made up as they went along.

   Nancy Carroll was an awfully cute actress, though.

HERMAN PETERSEN – Old Bones.

Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprint: Dell 127, 1947 [mapback edition].

   Herman Petersen was a prolific contributor to the aviation, adventure, and detective pulps of the Twenties and Thirties; one of his stories appears in the famous “Ku Klux Klan Number” of Black Mask (June 1, 1923). Between 1940 and 1943, he published four crime novels advertised by the publisher of three of them, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, as “quietly sinister mysteries with a rural background.”

   All four are set in an unnamed county in an unspecified part of the country (presumably upstate New York, Petersen’s home base). Three feature a team of more or less amateur sleuths: old Doc Miller, the county coroner; Paul Burns, the D.A.; and the narrator, Ben Wayne, a gentleman farmer. Miller does most of the sleuthing, Burns most of the worrying, and Wayne most of the leg work.

   Old Bones, the last and nominally best of the Doc Miller books, begins with the discovery — by Wayne’s wife, Marian — of a jumble of old bones wedged into the bottom of a standpipe at an abandoned gristmill.

   Before the authorities can remove them, someone else gets there first and tries unsuccessfully to hide them. Doc Miller’s eventual examination and investigation reveal that the bones are those of Nathaniel Wight, a black-sheep member of the district’s leading family; that he died of a crushed skull; and that he has evidently been dead for five years — ever since the night he was banished by old Aunt She, eldest and most imperious of the Wights, who believed he had seduced his cousin Amelia.

   It soon becomes apparent that someone in the Wight family, or someone close to it — perhaps more than one person — is willing to go to any lengths to keep the truth about Nate’s death from surfacing along with his bones.

   Much of the action takes place at or near the mill, and in the swamp that separates it from the Waynes’ farm, known as Dark House. In one harrowing episode, Wayne nearly drowns inside the standpipe; in another he is attacked in the mill loft and superficially stabbed.

   A second murder, the actions of a transient who has been bothering women in the area, a nightmarish stormy-night chase through the swamp on the trail of a kidnapped girl, and a tense and fiery conclusion are some of the other highlights.

   Old Bones drips atmosphere and understated menace. Its mystery is well constructed, with some legitimate detection on Doc Miller’s part; there is a nice sense of realism in the characters; and the touches of folksy humor are adroitly handled.

   The novel does have its flaws: We are told almost nothing about the backgrounds and private lives of the protagonists, people we want to know better; the solution to the mystery comes a little too easily and quickly; and more could have been done with the final confrontation. But the pluses here far outweigh the minuses. This and Petersen’s other servings of fictional Americana are well worth tracking down.

   Doc Miller, Paul Bums, and the Waynes are also featured in Murder in the Making (1940) and Murder R.F.D. (1942). The D.A ‘s Daughter (1943) also has a rural setting and emphasizes comedy along with murder and mischief.

   Petersen’s only other mystery novel, “The House in the Wilderness,” was published serially in 1957 and did not see book publication.

         ———
   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.

DENISE DANKS – Phreak.

Orion, UK, paperback reprint, 1999; reissued 2001. Hardcover edition: Gollancz, UK, 1998. No US edition.

   Big cities in England in today’s mass computer and telecommunication age are no longer very much like what they were like in Agatha Christie’s day (to pick an obvious example) and hard-bitten investigative journalist Georgina Powers might well be the most complete antithesis of Miss Marple (to pick another) I think you can find.

   Miss Marple was a pretty sharp lady, and there were quite a few secrets in rural English villages that she was aware of, but in her wildest imagination, I just don’t think there’s any way she could have foreseen anything as hard on the senses as this.

   A world of neon lights, computer hackers and phone phreakers, booze and dope, dingy buildings and easy sex, that is; a London teeming with Asians, informants and other unsavory and often unkempt individuals operating “at the edge of the post-modern world.” Without much warning, it’s like stepping into the science-fictional world of a Philip K. Dick, except that his worlds were often only props, and this is real.

   The first death of that of a young Muslim phone hacker Georgina had been cultivating for a story. His T-shirt has her lipstick on it, making the police as interested in her as they are in finding the killer.

   Since this is fifth Mrs. Powers novel, it takes some time to catch up with all of her friends and acquaintances. Other than that, there’s no need to ask questions. It’s sit back and go along for the ride time, and perhaps take a shower afterward. This is Raymond Chandler territory, without a doubt. Chandler is far the better writer, but Ms. Danks’ streets are darker and meaner, and the edges, if possible, are even sharper.

   Not for everyone’s taste, but if you’re a fan, say, of the SFnal cyberpunk movement, here’s a mystery novel that’s very much in sync.

Bibliographic data:    [Expanded from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

  DANKS, DENISE. Journalist and screenwriter living in London.

         Georgina Powers series:

   1. The Pizza House Crash. Futura, UK, paperback, 1989. Published in the US as User Deadly, St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1992.

   2. Better Off Dead. Macdonald, UK, hc, 1991.
   3. Frame Grabber. Constable, UK, hc, 1992; St. Martin’s, US, hc, 1993.
   4. Wink a Hopeful Eye. Macmillan, UK, hc; St. Martin’s, US, hc, 1994.
   5. Phreak. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1998.
   6. Torso. Gollancz, UK, hc, 1999.

   7. Baby Love. Gollancz, UK, hc, 2001.

   All of the books have been reprinted in the UK as Orion paperbacks.

[UPDATE] 11-12-08. Noting that the last book in the series came out in 2001, one wonders what has happened to Denise Danks’ career, and what she has been doing in the past seven years. If anyone can say, please let us know.

THE BAND WAGON. MGM, 1953; Vincente Minnelli, director. Screenplay by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; Sol Polito, cinematographer. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, Jack Buchanan, James Mitchell, Thurston Hall, Robert Gist. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This dazzling musical was programmed to introduce Nanette Fabray’s guest appearance. In his introductory remarks, Broadway and film musical historian Miles Kreuger tried to make a case for the film as the best of the MGM musicals for being “truest” to the theatrical experiences of Comden & Green, but even Fabray objected to this downgrading of Singing in the Rain.

   (I think that Swing Time and Meet Me in St. Louis are both at least as good as the Astaire/O’Connor miraculous pairing, but I won’t press this point.)

   Where The Band Wagon suffers is in the obligatory ballet, ‘The Girl Hunt,’ clever in its apparent references to Mickey Spillane (thanks, Jim) but with none of the ebullient vitality of the big ‘Broadway Melody’ number in Singing in the Rain.

   Still, it’s one of MGM’s best musicals. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ duet of Astaire and Charisse is arguably the dance highlight of the film, with Astaire’s opening number in the game arcade not far behind. Then there’s Thurston Hall, who as the show’s major backer still breaks me up in his brief scene outside the theater after the disastrous first night of the Oedipal musical.

   Fabray shared memories of her work on the ‘Triplets’ number, and she proved to be still as attractive and spirited as she was over a half-century ago.

   Certainly not the discovery of a lost masterpiece, but a reminder that the genre is better defined by its high spots rather than the lesser films we often see revived.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The links I’ve added to Walter’s review lead to clips from the film I discovered on YouTube.    — Steve

ROSS MACDONALD – The Drowning Pool.

Bantam, paperback reprint; movie tie-in edition, 1970s. Hardcover first edition: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   I wasn’t thinking very much about it, so when I picked this book up and started to read, I found myself caught up in a small time warp, which caught me by surprise, but it was one of my own making.

   I’ll explain.

   On both covers, front and back, there are a dozen or more color shots taken from the movie, released in 1975. Lots of photos of Paul Newman, in other words, in all kinds of situations, plus a handful more with Joanne Woodward in them — all rather tiny, but the immediate effect was to put me in a mellow 70s sort of mood, when both Paul and Joanne were much younger, and so was I.

   So when I hit page 9, where Lew Archer stops at one of those old-fashioned motor courts that consists of small cottages that the owner walks you down to and lets you inspect the accommodations before you register, it was jarring, and it immediately sent me back to the copyright page only to discover that — whoa! — the book came out in 1950.

   It wasn’t a 1970s book, at all. (And it took only a little more effort to look up the fact that The Drowning Pool was only the second novel that Archer appeared in; the first was The Moving Target, from 1949. Where does the time go?)

   We don’t learn a whole lot about Archer’s background in this book. Previously married and now separated, or perhaps more likely, divorced, that’s about all we learn about him — except for his strong standards of right and wrong. Beware to the client who hires him and changes her mind. Once hired to do a job — in this case, to discover who sent a woman with an already shaky marriage a letter that threatens to tell all — he’s in it to the end.

   Beginning with a marriage on the rocks, Archer’s slow but methodical investigation expands to include a daughter who at 15 is too young to attract the such serious intentions from the family chauffeur; her grandmother, the matriarch of the family; a police chief who is obviously smitten with Archer’s client; a weak-kneed husband who never had to work a day in his life; and oil — which means money, trouble, and murder.

   It’s a complex case, laid out by Macdonald in simple fashion. It would have been easy to make a tangled mess of the various threads of the plot darting here and there — Archer is on the road a lot, and in serious trouble more than once — but the telling is clean, straight-forward, and filled with enough picturesque similes and metaphors to fill a book.

   Here are just a few — I can’t resist:

   Page 77:   “For an instant I was the man in the [distorted] mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”

   Page 79:   [talking to a very young prostitute] “Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past.”

   Page 82:   “[Graham] Court was a row of decaying shacks bent around a strip of withering grass. A worn gravel drive brought the world to their broken-down doorsteps, if the world was interested. A few of the shacks leaked light through chinks in their warped frame sides. [The office] looked abandoned, as if the proprietor had given up for good.”

   Right now I don’t remember much of the movie, whether it followed the book very well or not, but either way, I think I’ll always have Paul Newman in mind when I read any of the Archer books. This one is a good one, and while all the clues point one way, except for one or two puzzling gaps, which — as it turns out — are nothing to be concerned about. Macdonald knew what he was doing, and any loose ends are firmly nailed down, solidly, to perfection, and with no seams showing.

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE. RKO Radio, 1934. Ben Lyon, Thelma Todd, Pert Kelton, Walter Catlett, Laura Hope Crews, Richard ‘Skeets’ Gallagher, Chick Chandler. Director: Ben Holmes.

   Sometimes lightning strikes twice. Of all the titles of all the movies in the world, this is the second under this title to be reviewed on this blog. The second was filmed in 1951, a noir movie with Ruth Roman and Richard Todd. There is absolutely no resemblance between that movie and this one.

   I’ve categorized this one as a mystery movie – and that’s exactly how it starts out – but truth be told, as it always should, except for little white lies, this turns rather quickly into a comedy film, a rather silly one, but it was at the silliest parts that I laughed the most.

   Opening scene: the rain is coming down in buckets, a bolt of lightning strikes, and two or three shots ring out. A policeman nearby calls in to headquarters, and he’s felled by a bullet — or so it seems. No body is found, compounding the mystery.

   Meanwhile, or rather the next morning, the two males occupants of the large mansion nearby, long-time buddies (Lyon and Gallagher) and the cook wake up with a hangover, or the long-time buddies do, to find that they have house guests: a pair of vaudeville performers (Pert Kelton and Walter Catlett) from the night before whom, at it turns out, were in an auto accident involving the two long-time buddies and (unbeknownst to the latter) were put up together in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

   Problem: the butler is missing, and Steve Brewster’s fiancée (Thelma Todd) is arriving with her father the same day his aunt (Laura Hope Crews) is due in for a visit to meet the newly intended bride. Somehow she confuses the rather risque Pert Kelton for the bride-to-be (don’t ask), Catlett as her father, and the butler is still missing.

   In the meantime, two policemen are futilely (and humourously) wading around in a nearby underground sewer system trying to find their way out. Don’t ask.

   As a leading man, Ben Lyon is fairly inconsequential, and Thelma Todd’s part is rather minimal. If it weren’t for the giddy antics of Pert Kelton and Walter Catlett, I’d have nothing to tell you about. You should see that latter’s attempt, at Steve Brewster’s request (plus $150 in cash), to show that madness lies in his family, allowing the impostering twosome to get out of the house and away from Aunt Jane, who unaccountably finds them adorable. Don’t ask.

   Laugh? Yes, I have to admit that I did, and (somewhat embarrassingly) all alone in a room by myself.

   The leading players were largely unknown faces to me, including even Thelma Todd, although I’ve seen them on the screen many times before. Lacking any scenes from the film, I’ve included photos of the four stars. They’re studio shots only, but all of them were taken around the time the movie was made, give or take a few years. Working their way downward, then, in order: Thelma Todd, Ben Lyon, Walter Catlett, Pert Kelton.

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS – The Hog’s Back Mystery. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1933. Paperback reprint: Pan #52, 1948. Trade paperback: House of Stratus, 2000. US title: The Strange Case of Dr. Earle, Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1933.

   Three mysterious disappearances from homes arrayed around the ridge formation known as the hog’s back? Sounds like a case for Inspector (soon to be Chief Inspector, on the strength of this case) French!

   One of Crofts’ most praised books yet one of the hardest to find (it’s a little more available under its clunky American title, The Strange Case of Dr. Earle), it’s a book for the true Crofts’ devotee, with a solution hanging mostly on locations, movements and alibis.

   There’s something intriguing about those multiple disappearances of seemingly blameless people, however; and the way French goes about solving the case, with no nonsense about love interest and such, also has interest.

   Crofts provides a little human interest in the beginning; but by the time of the final disappearance, he leaves off with the personal element and concentrates on French’s investigation, which is probably just as well with this author.

   Nor are there any of those foreign trips, something Crofts so loved to detail, with the action being confined within a narrow compass. A small-scale work, but very much the sort of thing Crofts does so well, for people who like Crofts.

   Historical note: John Rhode published the somewhat similar The Venner Crime the same year (though it depends characteristically on science rather than alibis). More I won’t say, except to ask, do great detective novelist minds think alike?

THOMAS PERRY – Metzger’s Dog.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1983. Paperback reprint: Charter, 1984. Trade paperback: Random House, 2003.

   This is a joyous romp of a thriller featuring the funniest band of brigands since Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder gang. While pulling a routine caper — a small matter involving a million dollars’ worth of cocaine — the gang inadvertently comes into possession of a Toyota-size dog and a worthless-looking manuscript.

   Immelmann, Kepler, Chinese Gordon, and Margaret the moll keep the surly canine only because Gordon’s cat, Dr. Henry Metzger, takes a fancy to it. The manuscript is more promising — it’s about psychological warfare, and they figure the CIA will pay plenty to get it back.

   A deal is struck, but the public servants of this great nation prove untrustworthy. Double-crossed, the tiny gang of four decides to teach the mighty CIA a lesson it’ll never forget. And then the real fun begins.

   Besides having one of the smartest mouths in the West, Chinese Gordon can think of dazzling plans on a moment’s notice. His revenge plot is a dandy; even the CIA’s ruthless Ben Porterfield, (“a man who had eaten armadillo. That said it all.”) can’t keep up with him. In fact, he can seemingly be outsmarted by only one being on earth — his own cat, Dr. Henry Metzger.

   A dynamite read-the plot is ingenious, the dialogue terrific, and the comedy wild and wacky.

   Perry’s previous book, The Butcher’s Boy, is totally different from this one — a tense thriller about an assassin and the government worker who must apprehend him; it won the MWA Edgar for Best First Novel of 1982. His latest title is Big Fish (1985).

         ———
   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.

THE CANADIAN. Famous Players-Lasky, 1926. William Beaudine, director; adapted by Arthur Stringer from W. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Land of Promise; Alvin Wyckoff, cinematographer; Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller, Charles Winninger, Billy Butts. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   For me, this was the revelation of the convention, an outstanding silent film, with superb photography by Wyckoff, dead-on performances by every member of the cast, with Mona Palma lighting up the screen as the English woman, brought up in modest but cultivated circumstances, who goes to live with her brother on a remote Canadian farm in a desolate landscape.

   To escape the indignities she feels she’s enduring from his wife and the rough farmhands she marries his foreman who’s shown her some kindness, a decision that she quickly regrets.

   Every performance is true to the character, seemingly natural and unaffected, the soul reflected in characterizations where there’s not an excessive gesture. The subtitles are almost superfluous, the drama playing out in the visuals, with moments that are almost unbearable in their intensity. It’s this kind of experience that makes attending film conventions an adventure with a potential for transcendence.

   (Fellow attendee Jim Goodrich’s comment on this sentence was “Wow!” Could he be suggesting that I was tripping here?)

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] The photo of Mona Palma is probably not related to the film, but after reading Walter’s review, I knew you’d like to have an idea of what she looked like at the time. Born in 1897, Mona Palma made only seven movies, all between 1923 and 1927, three of them as Mimi Palmeri. She died in 1989.

   Thomas Meighan is the tall fellow dominating the scene above, which was taken from the movie, and of course that’s him again in the publicity still on the right. His career was quite a bit longer than his co-star’s, consisting as it did of 82 movies between 1914 and 1934. Until talkies came along, he was quite a popular star.

   To make this post a little more crime-related, Meigan’s first movie was Dandy Donovan, the Gentleman Cracksman, in which he played the title role, and his first sound film was The Argyle Case (1929) in which he again played the leading character, this time homicide investigator Alex Kayton.