THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN. American International, 1960. Marguerite Chapman, Douglas Kennedy, James Griffith, Ivan Triesault, Red Morgan, Cormel Daniel. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer.
The Amazing Transparent Man is a low budget science-fiction film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. As you might expect, there’s an evil villain with a dim henchman, a semi-mad scientist, and a guy and a gal caught up in the whole mix. Not to mention an uncredited guinea pig with the privilege of being made invisible first.
Although The Amazing Transparent Man is not a particularly good film, it undeniably has its moments and low budget charms. While the acting is overall unmemorable, the special effects are actually fairly decent and the cinematography is quite good, particularly for an early 1960s science fiction B-film. The film’s music by Darrell Caluker, especially the eerie sequence during the opening credits, isn’t bad, either. In fact, it’s pretty haunting and worth listening to, even if you don’t make it through the rest of the movie.
Krenner has been forcing Ulof to experiment with nuclear materials, with the ultimate aim of creating an army of invisible soldiers. It’s a plan that strains credulity, even for a science fiction film. The major’s plan is to have Matson and his henchman, Julian (Red Morgan) hold the fugitive Faust hostage, turn him invisible, and have him steal more nuclear material from a tightly guarded facility nearby.
But the scheming Faust has other ideas. He realizes that invisibility has its advantages in the high-risk profession of bank robbery, and he convinces Matson to drive him into town for a heist. Problem is: the nuclear material providing him his new power was unstable, leading Faust to fade in and out of visibility, allowing bank employees to identity him. Faust and Matson then flee back to Krenner’s house in the country, where Faust and Krenner fight.
Then all of a sudden, the whole place blows up in an atomic cloud, leaving you not feeling particularly sorry for anyone but the guinea pig. Dr. Ulof survives, but it doesn’t much matter since he’s dying of radiation poisoning. It’s an ending that I certainly didn’t expect , and it made the whole mediocre affair a much darker film than many other movies of its kind.
In conclusion, Joey Faust is one mighty doomed protagonist. Looks like the tough guy would have been better off staying in the big house after all. But then again, there wouldn’t have been any movie had he done so.
When Captain Colt Saunders (Charlton Heston) comes home to Texas after the Civil War (he was on the losing side), he finds that carpetbaggers have infested the state and they have eyes on his old family ranch, all he has left in the world. But before he makes his way home, he somehow manages to find himself a wife, Lorna Hunter (Anne Baxter).
It turns out, although he does not know it, that Ms Hunter has something a bit more than a shady past, but she is willing to take the gamble that no one will recognize her on the Bar-S Ranch and miles away from the rest of the world.
It also turns out that Captain Saunders, a most righteous man, has a brother (Tom Tryon), who has only one arm, his left, and who is bitter about it. The local tax commissioner and his deputy, Northerners both (Bruce Bennett and Forrest Tucker) have their eyes on the ranch, and are far from scrupulous in their attempt to follow through on their ambitions.
Running the ranch in the captain’s absence has been Innocencio Ortega (a most elegant Gilbert Roland, even in working clothes) and his five sons, three of whom are played by young actors who went on to even more fame later in their careers (see the tail end of the credits above).
These are all the important threads of the story, and of course one of the tactics the crooked land-grabbers have at their disposal is using the fact that they know of Lorna’s past, and they are not at all reticent in revealing the secret to the tough but stubbornly aristocratic Captain Saunders.
He does not take the news well. Nor does he take kindly to his brother turning against him. Charlton Heston is a good actor, but he can turn hammy at times, and here is one of those times. He also plays Captain Saunders as rather slow when it comes to the thinking department — a man whose mind is rather dim, to put it bluntly — and it does seem to fit the character.
I think that Heston and Tryon do resemble each other enough to be brothers, as was not the case in Saddle the Wind, which Jon reviewed here a while ago, in which Robert Taylor and John Cassevetes were also supposed to be brothers, and not succeeding very well at it.
The color photography in Three Violent People is wonderful — I leave to you to decide who the three people are; I still haven’t figured that out — but while all of the ingredients are there, with several very tense scenes leading up to the finale, the ending simply isn’t up to the job. It’s forced and it’s overly moralistic, and it didn’t have to be either one.
It’s a case of being almost a great western, but it ends up barely holding onto its status as a very good one.
MOONLIGHT MURDER. MGM, 1936. Chester Morris, Madge Evans, Leo Carrillo, Frank McHugh, J. Carroll Naish, H.B. Warner, Grant Mitchell, Duncan Renaldo, Robert McWade. Directed by Edward L. Marin.
A well done little programmer with Chester Morris as detective Steve Farrell a homicide cop who finds himself up to his neck in murder with an opera troupe playing at the Hollywood Bowl. This solid little murder mystery has an actual plot, clever murder method, an armful of suspects who have motive, and a nice twist you will only see coming because of the actor cast in the role.
Leo Carrillo is Gino, opera star extraordinary, egotistical, vain, and ladies’ man playing the women in the cast off each other. His stand-in (Ivan Bosoff) wants to replace him on stage, conductor H. B. Warner is fed up with the whole cast, the young male ingenue (Duncan Renaldo) loves one of the women Gino is seducing, both young women (Benita Hume, Elizabeth Anderson) being played by Gino have motive, as does even his valet (Frank McHugh), as the only one who benefits from Gino’s will. Then there is mad composer J. Carroll Naish who is obsessed by Gino and overhears a threat to his life.
Police Chief Quinlin (Robert McWade) doesn’t think there is anything to it, but young detective Steve Farrell does, and between Gino’s bouts with illness and the insane Naish, there is enough to keep him around, not to mention his attraction to Gino’s physician friend Dr. Adams (Grant Mitchell)’s niece Toni (Madge Evans), a scientist who clicks with him as you can only click in the movies. Then Naish escapes from Steve on the opening night of the opera and Gino collapses on stage, dead, in mid performance.
Gino was murdered, but the poison was delivered airborne and he was on stage alone in front of thousands of witnesses including his doctor and the Chief.
There is some neat detective work going on, and this relies much less on dumb luck than most film murder mysteries. All the suspects have legitimate motives, and each one is suspected in turn. There are red herrings, misdirection, dead-end clues, and when a second murder occurs under Steve’s nose he ends up back on the beat for concealing embarrassing letters written by the opera’s diva.
Dr. Adams thinks he might find something at the site of the murder, but he is attacked too. He’s only shaken up, but Steve, on patrol at the murder scene, discovers the clue that will break the case, only to find himself confronted by two suspects, neither of whom he wants to believe could have murdered Gino.
I won’t give away the murderer or the method. because both are better than you might expect, and for once the least likely suspect is both logical and has a legitimate motive that the movie has actually played fair with. If you were paying attention you could actually watch this and solve the case: for once nothing is concealed and and you have as much chance of solving the case as Morris’s Steve Farrell does.
Like Edmond Lowe, Morris was born to play detectives. His rapid patter, razor profile, and direct acting style made him ideal for this sort of thing. You always felt there was a mind working behind Morris’s actions in this sort of film and that his brains weren’t all in his fists.
The cast is solid, though Naish chews the scenery to the point you may want to commit murder yourself. He’s generally a fine actor, but some of the grimaces on his face may have you laughing too hard to actually pay attention to what’s happening on screen. He plays his madman so crazy you have to wonder he wasn’t already locked away for life before the film began. It’s about the only misstep in the film though.
All in all, this little sleeper turns out to be a pleasant surprise, and a decent murder mystery you might well admire in a book, much less a film.
THE KING MURDER. Chesterfield, 1932. Conway Tearle, Natalie Moorhead, Marceline Day, Dorothy Revier, Don Alvarado, Huntley Gordon, Maurice Black, Robert Frazer. Director: Richard Thorpe.
People who read this blog on a regular basis are a lot more likely to recognize some of the actors and actresses who appeared in this movie, but I have to admit that until now I hadn’t heard of any of them. One I’d have liked to have seen more of in the film itself is Dorothy Revier, who had a long career in the silents before this one, as well as for another five or six years afterward.
Unfortunately she had the misfortune of playing the blonde gold-digger (and blackmailer) who ends up (not surprisingly) being the first murder victim no more than 10 or 15 minutes into the movie.
Given her rather shady way of making a living, in more ways than one, there is a long list of would-be killers, the sorting out of who might be the real one makes for a surprisingly entertaining 60 minutes or more. Even though talkies hadn’t been around for very long when The King Murder was produced, the people who made seem to have known what they were doing, even with the budget restrictions they must have been working under.
Don’t get me wrong. The movie certainly shows its age, and the method used to kill Miriam King and an unfortunate police officer is awfully creaky, if not downright impossible. But for a murder mystery made in 1932, you can do a lot worse.
And as a note in passing, the original review in Variety suggested that the movie is based on the 1923 unsolved Manhattan murder of Dorothy King, a model and nightclub hostess who may also have been a blackmailer. It was one of two similar murders dubbed “The Butterfly Murders,” both victims drawn to the glamor of Broadway, only to end up dead. If you’re interested, you can read more about it here.
FREDRIC BROWN – The Screaming Mimi. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1949. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #831, 1950; Carroll & Graf, 1989. Film: Columbia, 1958 (Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey).
– The Lenient Beast. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1956. Paperback reprints include: Bantam #1712, 1958; Carroll & Graf, 1988.
One of the best mystery writers ever is well represented in current reprints. Fredric Brown was equally gifted in both the mystery and science fiction, and Carroll & Graf has published two of this best books in the former genre. The Screaming Mimi is one of the earliest, and best, books about a Jack-the-Ripper type series killer.
Brown’s “fabulous clipjoint,” Chicago, is the well-realized setting, and the detective hero is, as in many Brown books, fascinating, albeit unlikely. Sweeney is a down-and-out alcoholic reporter: “… he was only five-eighths Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk.”
Brown does a superb job of taking the reader into his confidence, and we read compulsively as Sweeney tries to stay sober long enough to find who is killing nightclub beauties.
Among the similarities of Brown’s The Lenient Beast are a series killing and an alcoholic character, the wife of Tucson detective Frank Ramos. Otherwise, the books are very different except for their excellence.
Re-reading Beast thirty years later, I was surprised how well it stood up. A bonus is Brown’s integration of the macabre lyrics of Tom Lehrer into this book.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1989.
GIRLS ON PROBATION. Warner Brothers, 1938. Jane Bryan, Ronald Reagan, Anthony Averill, Sheila Bromley, Henry O’Neill, Elisabeth Risdon, Sig Rumann, Dorothy Peterson, Susan Hayward. Director: William C. McGann.
Girls on Probation stars Jane Bryan and Ronald Reagan. Although the title suggests that the film will be some form of woman’s prison drama, jail plays only a minor role in this altogether good, albeit uneven, crime film.
Although it’s not a film noir, Girls on Probation is still very much product of the late 1930s and does have several characteristics of what would later be considered film noir. These include a (somewhat) doomed protagonist, a series of events that spin out of control, and a mise-en-scène with a foggy night and a cheap boarding hotel.
The plot follows the steps, or should I say, missteps, of a rather naïve twenty-something woman, Connie Heath (Bryan). Her brutish, although well-meaning, father (Sig Rumann) makes her life miserable. Even worse for Connie is her misbegotten friendship with her friend, the scheming Hilda Engstrom (Sheila Bromley), a co-worker who ends up getting Connie mixed up in two criminal acts.
The first involves the quasi-theft of a dress, which leads to a police record for Connie. The second, and far more serious one, is an armed bank heist pulled off by Hilda’s thuggish boyfriend, Tony. This leads to a stay in the local jail for the two girls. As for Tony, he gets hard time, but later breaks out of prison to join up with Hilda in the girls’ hometown. Since his character is never really developed beyond that of an armed thug, it’s hard to feel bad for the guy when the cops plug him and he plunges off a stairwell.
Interestingly enough, Bryan, who retired from acting early, and Reagan would remain in touch throughout the years. She and her husband, drug store magnate Justin Dart, would form part of Reagan’s inner circle.
In the pantheon of great crime films from the 1930s and 1940s, Girls on Probation probably really doesn’t really amount to all that much. The film’s ending, in particular, is a bit too sentimental, with Connie needlessly apologizing to the dying Hilda.
Still, Girls on Probation is an above average film with consistently good acting from Bryan. Reagan’s pretty good in this one too, although he’d reprise the role of a prosecuting attorney to much fuller effect in Storm Warning, which I reviewed here. Both films are worth seeing, although the latter is a much more serious film.
NO HANDS ON THE CLOCK. Paramount Pictures, 1941. Chester Morris, Jean Parker, Rose Hobart, Dick Purcell, Astrid Allwyn, Rod Cameron, Lorin Raker, Billie Seward, George Watts, James Kirkwood, Robert Middlemass. Based on the novel by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring). Director: Frank McDonald.
Given a little more in the way of production values, including some time to tinker with and upgrade the screenplay itself, this obscure little B-mystery could could have had a future. Chester Morris and Jean Parker play a couple of newly-marrieds in Reno, Nevada — he the well-known private detective Humphrey Campbell — whose honeymoon is interrupted and taken over by a few murders and a host of beautiful women as suspects, in all varieties: a redhead, a blonde and a brunette.
Missing is the son of a wealthy rancher, and Oscar Flack (George Watts), Humphrey’s boss, is no one to turn down a big fee only because his star employee is on vacation. And since the incentive he offers is a fur coat to Mrs. Campbell, Humphrey cannot turn it down, nor can he persuade his beautiful bride to keep her nose out of his business. Especially when all of the women in the case are good-looking. (See above.)
If you were to go online and look for other reviews of this comedy adventure of a movie, you’d find that everyone one of them is going to tell you how complicated the plot is, nor are they exaggerating. The pairing of Morris and Parker is delightful, and the comedy is mostly fine (I could have done without the dumb policeman), but if you can make sense of the mystery part of the story the first time through, or even the second, you’re a better person than I.
I should point out that the version I saw on an Oldies.com DVD may be five minutes shorter than both IMDb and AFI say it should be, and if so, that might make a big difference. I have a feeling that what the makers of this movie wanted to do was put everything in that was in the original book, and it just couldn’t be done, whether in 71 minutes or 76. [FOOTNOTE.]
In any case, there was no chance for a series to have developed from this as a first one, if ever there was one in mind. Chester Morris immediately went on to bigger and better things as Boston Blackie, while Jean Parker, alas, had to settle for two later films as Kitty O’Day, which I also have on DVD and after watching this one I duly intend to watch any day now.
FOOTNOTE: As it turns out, the video copy I discovered on YouTube (see above) does have some if not all of the missing footage, all from the beginning. It is extremely helpful in making sense of much of what follows, but not all. I guess you get what you pay for.
HARRY STEPHEN KEELER, with Hazel Goodwin Keeler – The Case of the Barking Clock. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1947. Ward Lock, UK, hardcover, 1951, as The Barking Clock. (The British edition is 5-8000 words longer than the U.S.) No paperback edition.
One book I read recently is The Case of the Barking Clock, by Harry Stephen Keeler. Though late in the Keeler oeuvre, this has all the elements that make HSK the Master of Alternative Classic Mystery: colorful characters with Dickensian names (Nyland Finfrock, Umphrey Ibstone, and Tuttleton T. Trotter to name but a few), a convoluted plot, driven by wild coincidence (at one point, in a very minor element, a letter addressed to Trotter at “Occupant, Hotel so-and-so” is mistakenly delivered to a Mr. Occpunt residing at the same Hotel!), lengthy letters and speeches of pure explication:
“Cripes!” he said, still unbelievingly, “Cripes,” he repeated, “A guy what knows sci’nce an’ mat’matics! An’ ev’dently knows ‘em all the way from A to Izzardy and back ag’in. An’s gotta have one case what can be showed on a book jacket as — as a knockout! the one guy in the whole world who-who might an’lyze my strange case. My case what’s not only sci’ntific, but what’s got ten book jackets in it — if I know an’thing at ail o’ what that book jacket artist, Waxworth Goforth, teached me long ago when I was his errand boy.”
and the florid metaphor:
“. . .silk-upholstered, bulging where the upholstery was as obscene as the breasts of virgins confined in $1.98 dresses. . .”
that make Keeler’s writing so uniquely his own.
Barking Clock was published by Phoenix Press, the fabled firm described so vividly in Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek, and it has all the earmarks of hasty printing and sloppy proof-reading one would expect from an outfit like Phoenix — the kind distressingly common today, where the words have simply been scanned for correctness, not read for sense — but it contains one of those privileged passages that make Keeler singularly enjoyable.
On Page 188, Joe the Duck tells Tuttleton T. Trotter about Svenda Ulf, a platinum blonde Swede who dyes her hair black and pretends to be a Russian named Olga Russakov. Svenda/Olga plays no role at all in the book, except for this brief mention. She’s not a red-herring, witness, or even a bit-player. Her presence in this single sentence of the book was apparently written in by Keeler simply as another bit of pleasantly gratuitous ornamentation in his baroque tapestry.
That a writer as obscure as HSK, working for a cheap-jack outfit like Phoenix would take the time to throw in a touch like this is one of the wonders that keep me reading.
Editorial Comment: Mike Nevins talks a bit of the publishing history behind this book in one of his monthly columns for this blog.
JOHN FERGUSON – Death of Mr. Dodsley. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1937. White Circle Books, UK, paperback, 1939. No US edition.
When I bought this novel, I was not aware that this was the John Ferguson who had written Death Comes to Perigord, which I found both dark and tedious. Belatedly making this discovery, I began the book with some reluctance, which I need not have since it turned out most enjoyable.
What does M. G. Grafton’s fictional mystery novel “Death at the Desk,” have to do with the murder of Richard Dodsley, proprietor of a new- and rare-book store? Other, that is, than that Grafton is in love with Dodsley’s nephew, that the novel contains the sentence, “The prophet who was slain by a lion had a nobler end than Bishop Hatto who was eaten by rats,” and that certain aspects of the novel’s plot have been repeated in the book-store murder?
And what is one to make of the apparently drunken young man who shortly before the murder saw a cat open and close the book shop’s door?
Fortunately for the police, private detective MacNab had earlier unsatisfactorily investigated rare-book thefts from the shop and interests himself in the case, one that is somewhat less complicated than the police make it out to be.
— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 1991.
The Francis MacNab series —
A. Father, a policeman:
The Dark Geraldine. Lane, 1921.
B. Son, a private detective:
The Man in the Dark. Lane, 1928.
Murder on the Marsh. Lane, 1930.
Death Comes to Perigord. Collins, 1931.
The Grouse Moor Mystery. Collins, 1934.
Death of Mr. Dodsley. Collins, 1937.
MY GUN IS QUICK. United Artists, 1957. Robert Bray, Whitney Blake, Richard Garland. Screenplay: Richard Powell and Richard Collins, based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Directed by George White.
You’re going to make a movie based on a book by the bestselling writer of the decade, so naturally you totally ignore the plot and instead do a poverty row rehash of The Maltese Falcon only with Mike Hammer instead of Sam Spade.
Richard Powell, who wrote the screenplay with Richard Collins, obviously was no Spillane fan. A fine novelist (The Philadelphian) and top notch mystery writer (the Arab and Andy Blake series of screwball mysteries), he scrapped everything save the opening scene where Mike Hammer (Robert Bray) meets the prostitute Red in a late night diner, and sets out to avenge her death when she is brutally murdered.
We’re in Los Angeles and Mike does have an office, a secretary named Velda, a cop pal named Pat Chambers, and he is a brutal lout, but from that point on you won’t recognize Spillane or Hammer, or the plot of My Gun is Quick the novel.
Bray was a personable enough actor, most probably remembered as Lassie’s forest ranger owner in the color series, but as Hammer he is brutal, stupid, a slob, and can’t even wear the pork-pie right (neither could Kevin Dobson or Stacy Keach — the crown is not creased, which is why it’s called a pork-pie). Granted Spillane’s Hammer isn’t a barrel of laughs, but he is a snappy dresser, and however brutal and rude, he isn’t stupid.
The falcon — I mean the Bianchi jewels — are the meaningless McGuffin, and the femme fatale is wholesome Whitney Blake, Mrs. B from Hazel, the television series based on Ted Post’s Saturday Evening Post cartoons about the impossible maid of the same name played by Shirley Booth. She’s about as seductive as coconut cream pie. (Well, okay, she’s nowhere near as seductive as coconut cream pie, but she is as wholesome.)
The story and direction are all competent, but they are generic fifties private eye 101, which is the one thing Spillane’s Hammer never was. Love him or hate him, he was never just another private eye nor Spillane just another mystery writer. Hammer isn’t really a detective half as much as what Robert Sampson called a Justice figure, an avenger.
It’s no accident that Spillane’s roots lie in Carrol John Daly’s Race Williams, Tarzan, Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, Captain America, and the Saint (inspiration for Morgan the Raider). Hammer is closer to d’Artagnan (he’s a huge Dumas fan as well, with The Erection Set and The Long Wait both as inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo as Hammett’s Red Harvest) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo, Hawkeye, than Poe’s Dupin or Doyle’s Holmes.
Urban hero that he may be, Hammer is last of Rousseau’s ‘noble savages,’ the natural man arriving full blown without history or family, a force of nature, white hot, and consumed by a overarching sense of justice — if not law. The crudity of Spillane’s early work (he became a very good writer as he learned) never-the-less shows a deep seated identification with the post-war psyche and a natural affinity for the written word. You don’t have to like Spillane to recognize his power as a writer.
To ignore all that, to ignore Spillane for what he is and Hammer as himself, as this film does, negates the whole point of Mickey Spillane’s role in the world of fifties popular literature.
Bray’s Hammer is just another private eye, with just another case, and just another femme fatale. The plot would have been perfectly suited t,o an episode of 77 Sunset Strip (which did one Spillane plot seven times) or any of its numerous off shoots. Bray’s Hammer is everyman private detective, but he isn’t Mike Hammer though he is the closest physically to Spillane’s concept of the actors who have played the role.
I can’t say much more. The people you suspect are the ones who did it, the brutality mostly consists of grabbing one small owner of a diner by his shirt, Velda isn’t much of one thing or the other, only another faithful private eye secretary, and Pat Chambers is just another best buddy cop to warn the hero about crossing the lines the hero of these things can’t see anyway. There is no attempt to capture anything of the feel of Spillane and Hammer.
There’s a half decently shot bit where Hammer watches a murder investigation through the skylight of Blake’s split level beach house, but if that’s the films highlight’, you can guess what the rest is like. The climax and Bray’s version of the ‘I have to turn you in because I’m a detective’ speech are just flat. No one gets gut shot, blown away with a shotgun, or blown up by a gas-filled basement, much less shot by a baby in his crib, and Blake at worst looks like she never really expected to seduce anyone in the first place.
I won’t say skip it, it is Spillane and Hammer, but watch it on Netflix, don’t buy it, even for $5. It’s just not very good, nor bad enough to be fun. The posters for the film are nice though. And yes, it’s the kind of movie where you review the posters. Watch Kiss Me Deadly, The Girl Hunters, or the Keach or McGavin series, even that little one off made for television movie set in Miami is arguably more interesting than this.
Skip this, save as a completist, or just to see Hazel’s Mrs B. as a seductress.
