Not a review per se but something I wanted to put out to the others here and see if it got any reaction. A College Professor once told me that the function of Innocence is to be destroyed. Well maybe, but I’m not sold on the notion.

   I was discussing Out of the Past and a few other films yesterday, and reflecting on the value of Innocence: When I first watched Out, I knew nothing about film noir and so wasn’t prepared for the plot developments or the ending — which made them much more powerful.

   Nowadays you can’t get close to it without knowing in advance that it’s one of the essential noirs, and setting your expectations accordingly. Similarly, there;s something magical about being 15 and watching The Maltese Falcon or Angels with Dirty Faces, not knowing the endings. Or being 19, going to an all-night drive-in-movie triple feature and seeing Night of the Living Dead before it had such an awesome rep, when it was just another monster movie.

   In each case, my enjoyment of the film was keyed by not expecting, not knowing in advance… Doesn’t happen much anymore. These days I’m more likely to hear a film praised or a scene described or a book synopsized, and build up my expectations. By the time I saw The Searchers I’d heard so much about it, it couldn’t possibly live up to my mental hype; had to see it a few more times to really appreciate the film for what it was.

   So I’m just wondering if anyone here has similar memories of reading or watching something that turned out to be a classic, and if you can still recall that first youthful thrill of discovery.

   Or am I just getting into my dotage?

CRUEL GUN STORY. Nikkatsu, Japan, 1964. Originally released as Kenjû zankoku monogatari. Jô Shishido, Chieko Matsubara, Tamio Kawaji, Yûji Odaka, Minako Katsuki, Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi. Director: Takumi Furukawa.

   I’m not going to fake it. This is the first Japanese crime film I’ve seen in a good long while, and there’s no way I can possibly place it in any kind of context where it belongs. I don’t know the actors nor the director, nor what the intentions were of the people who were responsible for the making of the film — only the results, as I saw them.

   But on the basis of this first toe-in-the-water attempt on my part, I’m enthusiastic enough to try another, and perhaps even soon. I feel as though I’m on the verge of entering a very big field here, and I hope it doesn’t go to my head.

   Just released from prison, a small-time gangster named Togawa (Jô Shishido) discovers that he has a benefactor who negotiated his release, and expensively, and that he is expected to reciprocate. (It wasn’t that he was a gangster that sent him to prison, it was for the murder of the man who ran over his sister with a truck, causing her to lose both legs.)

   The job he’s supposed to do? Nothing more than to hold up an armored car, along with a easily supplied crew of assistants. The prize: millions of dollars yen being transported from a race track to a nearby bank.

   Togawa agrees. His sister needs an operation, he believes. And as they always do in heist films like this, things go wrong. And boy howdy, do they ever go wrong. The body count is as high as any movie I’ve seen in recent months, including lots and lots of American-made westerns.

   Although filmed in black-and-white, and often dazzlingly so, please do not think of this as a film noir. It’s only a heist film populated by lots of guns and gangsters, flawed by a plan which could never have worked in the first place, and done in by plain old greed, pure and simple.

   My July column, the longest I’ve ever written, was completely devoted to the Mike Hammer TV series of 1958-59 but there are a couple of related items that I couldn’t squeeze in last time. I trust no Hammerhead will mind if I begin with these.

   Two questions surrounding the series caught my attention as I was fiddling with the column. First, was there a Hammer pilot episode and if so which was it? The order of original broadcast in New York or any other city doesn’t help because it was different in every market and completely up to the station owning the local rights. Copyright registration dates don’t help either, nor does the order in which they appear on the recently released DVD set. If the episodes had production numbers, I haven’t been able to find them.

   However, I think I’ve solved the puzzle while slowly making my way through the set. Throughout the series the role of Hammer’s friendly enemy Captain Pat Chambers is played by Bart Burns. But in one early segment there’s a plainclothes cop who’s referred to only as Pat but is clearly meant to be Chambers. The actor who plays him is not Bart Burns but Ted De Corsia, who also played Sergeant Velie for much of the run of the Adventures of Ellery Queen on radio.

   The episode is “Death Takes an Encore,” directed by Richard Irving and written by Frank Kane based on one of his short stories about New York PI Johnny Liddell (“Return Engagement,” Manhunt, February 1955, collected in Johnny Liddell’s Morgue, Dell pb #A117, 1956). For my money, that was the pilot.

   The second question also involves Frank Kane. Back in the late Forties he wrote around 45 scripts for that classic radio series The Shadow, and for several years there have been rumors that at least one of his Hammer scripts was a rewrite of one of his Shadow scripts. But which?

   I believe I’ve solved that puzzle too. Another early episode written by Kane, “Letter Edged in Blackmail,” shares a springboard with Kane’s Shadow script “Etched with Acid” (March 17, 1946): the protagonist in both tries to shut down a racket in which wealthy women with heavy gambling debts are forced to fake robberies of their own jewels. As neither Mike Hammer nor The Shadow would ever dream of saying: Q.E.D.

   Death has claimed two actors who were well known for having played TV detectives. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was the first to go. He died on May 2 at age 95, reportedly while mowing the lawn of his house in the horse-ranching community of Solvang, California.

   People of my generation first got to know Zimbalist on the Warner Bros. TV series 77 Sunset Strip (1958-64), in which he starred as ultra-suave PI Stuart Bailey. No sooner had that series left the air than he started playing Federal agent Lewis Erskine on the even longer-running The FBI (1965-74).

   When I met him — very briefly, at a film festival in Memphis — he was over 80 and still looked great. Judging from the photos of him I found on the Web, he still looked great in his 90s. Way to go! May we all be so lucky.

   The other recently deceased tele-icon was James Garner, who at age 86 was found dead in his Los Angeles home on July 19. Like Zimbalist he was best known for two long-running TV series but his were in different genres.

   His earliest claim to fame was as star of the Warner Bros. Western series Maverick (1957-63) but his interest for us stems from his years playing an un-macho PI in The Rockford Files (1974-80).

   In his autobiography The Garner Files (2011) he claimed that Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford were basically the same character, but he never said and probably never knew that the character from which both were sort of spun off was an icon of U.S. detective fiction, namely that quintessential American wiseass Archie Goodwin.

   I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if only there had been a Nero Wolfe movie with the middle-aged Orson Welles as Wolfe and the young Garner as Archie!

   Both Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip were created by the same man, who was also a co-producer and, as John Thomas James, a frequent scriptwriter for The Rockford Files .

   He first came to attention, however, as a mystery novelist. Roy Huggins (1914-2002) debuted in the genre with The Double Take (1946), whose protagonist, PI Stuart Bailey, was a character and first-person narrator owing a great deal to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and very different from the suave and perhaps a bit bland Bailey of 77 Sunset Strip.

   Anthony Boucher’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle (February 3, 1946) was spot on as usual: “Mr. Huggins adds nothing to the established hardboiled formula but does an unusually able job within its possibly overfamiliar frame.”

   At that time, with Dashiell Hammett having written nothing since The Thin Man (1934), “the established hardboiled formula” meant Chandler. The latter may not have read The Double Take himself but he clearly found out about it and, as witness his letter to fellow pulp veteran Cleve F. Adams (September 4, 1948), he was not amused.

   Somebody else informed Chandler that “the publishers told Huggins, in effect, that it was bad enough for him to steal my approach and my method or whatever, but stealing my characters was going a little too far. I understand there was some rewriting, but cannot vouch for any of this.”

   The letter to Adams can be found in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (1981), pp. 125-126. This is the only reference to Huggins in the index to MacShane’s book, but a careful reader will find Chandler revisiting the incident in later correspondence. Writing to spy novelist and later Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt on November 16, 1952, he says:

   Exactly nine months later, on September 16, 1953, writing to a master at his alma mater Dulwich College, he adds a bit more detail to the story.

   These quotations come respectively from pp. 334 and 352 of MacShane’s collection.

   Huggins’ Hollywood career began when The Double Take sold to the movies and he was hired to write the screenplay for what was released as I Love Trouble (1948), with Franchot Tone as Bailey. By the time Chandler died, in 1959, Huggins had created Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip and both series were prime-time hits, but the creator of Philip Marlowe watched very little TV and may never have known that a sardonic prophecy he had made in his letter to Cleve Adams had come true:

   Which is precisely what Huggins did.

PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN. Monogram Pictures, 1940. Keye Luke, Grant Withers, Lotus Long, Charles Miller, Huntley Gordon, Virginia Carpenter, John H. Dilson. Screenplay: George Waggner. Director: Phil Rosen.

   The final film in Monogram’s Mr. Wong series, Phantom of Chinatown is notable for being the only movie in which an American actor of Chinese heritage, rather than the veteran horror film actor Boris Karloff, portrayed the Chinese-American detective.

   With a screenplay by George Waggner, director of Man Made Monster, which I reviewed here, and The Wolf Man, it’s also a fairly good, if at times excruciating slow moving, mystery and spy film, set during an era when Imperial Japan threatened the territorial integrity of China.

   Directed by Phil Rosen, Phantom of Chinatown doesn’t have a phantom or anything supernatural in it at all. It’s simply an entertaining and overall well-crafted mystery story with a dash of international intrigue. There are also some memorable scenes, including one with a trap door, which fans of 1930s pulp fiction, will most likely appreciate.

   Most importantly, however, the film has Keye Luke as the youthful Jimmy (not Mr.) Wong. Fans of mystery films will know Luke primarily for his portrayal of “Number One Son” in the Walter Oland Charlie Chan films or for his role as Kato in The Green Hornet. Indeed, Phantom of Chinatown was the only film in which Luke was both the star and lead character.

   In many ways, that’s a real shame. Luke’s portrayal of Jimmy Wong, although a bit too stiff, wasn’t bad at all. In fact, he was quite fun to watch, particularly in those scenes in which his character appeared to have a better understanding of the case at hand than Captain Street (Grant Withers). It’s too bad, then, that the filmmakers didn’t realize that Withers’s height advantage over Luke would, in some ways, make his character appear to almost overshadow Jimmy Wong.

   The story follows Jimmy Wong (Luke) as he teams up with San Francisco policeman, Captain Street (Withers), to solve the murder of Dr. Benton, an archeologist who recently returned to the United States from Mongolia. The university professor brought back a scroll with him.

   And as it turns on, what’s written on the scroll has something to do with why he was murdered! Adding to the mystery is Dr. Benton’s Chinese secretary, Win Lee (Lotus Long), whom Captain Street initially suspects as playing a part in her employer’s murder. There’s also a butler, who’s of course a potential suspect, but he gets ruled out pretty quickly once he’s found with a dagger in his chest. The movie wraps up in a similar fashion as other B-film mysteries from the same era, namely with a final showdown and a generally satisfying, if somewhat clichéd, explanation of all that’s transpired.

   In conclusion, Phantom of Chinatown, while hardly ranking among the greatest of mystery films, is nevertheless worth a look. It’s just a fun little film.

FRAMED FOR MURDER. Goldsmith Productions, 1934. Wallace Ford, June Clyde, Bradley Page, Fuzzy Knight, Barbara Rogers, Shirley Lee. Also released as I Hate Women. Director: Aubrey Scotto.

   If you were to do an accurate measurement of how many of the 70 or so minutes of this murder mystery movie are those of an actual murder mystery movie and how many are those of a romantic comedy, I’d be willing to wager that it would come out to about half and half, plus or minus five minutes.

   The comedy is corny and the romance is sappy — who’d ever think of Wallace Ford as a romantic leading man? — but Wallace Ford as a hard-drinking newspaper reporter who accidentally ends up sharing an apartment with the widow (June Clyde) of a murdered millionaire who’s on the run from the police who think she had a hand in it — why that you might believe.

   The murder mystery portion of the movie is OK, which is the technical term used to describe a murder investigation that moves forward in fits and starts but hangs together at the end, sort of. Part of Ford’s problem, besides decides who gets to sleep in the one bed in the apartment they’re sharing, he or the widow, now a blonde, is another reporter intent on snatching the story right from under Ford’s nose.

   Also worth mentioning is the date of release of Framed for Murder, 10 May 1934, which according to my sources, makes this predate the enforcement of the Movie Code, and just barely, it shows. No pun intended. Besides the byplay about who sleeps in the bed, June Clyde’s character was previously seen hiding in a shower with no clothes on with another good-looking and easy-going lady who happens to be Ford’s next door neighbor. (All we really see is two pair of very shapely legs as they step in unison from behind the curtain.)

   The actual killer (Shirley Lee) is so far down in the list of cast members, that if you dig for her name, you might never be able to come up for air, but she does a night club act in the skimpiest of apparel that has to be seen to be believed. (This was her only movie.)

   How’s that for a come on?

LAW AND ORDER. Universal International, 1953. Ronald Reagan, Dorothy Malone, Preston Foster, Alex Nicol, Ruth Hampton, Russell Johnson, Barry Kelley, Chubby Johnson, Jack Kelly, Dennis Weaver. Based on the novel Saint Johnson, by W. R. Burnett. Director: Nathan Juran.

   If the film Law and Order tells us anything, it’s that Ronald Reagan was a natural both in the saddle and in his ability to portray a lawman of the Old West. Based on a novel by W. R. Burnett and directed by Nathan Juran, Law and Order is an above average Western worth watching.

   The film benefits from good acting, fairly believable characters, a solid (if admittedly somewhat clichéd) plot in which two brothers are pitted against one another, notable use of color, well decorated interiors, and some breathtaking western scenery.

   Law and Order has the texture of an early 1950s Western, as if it were straddling a middle ground between an era of simple, Saturday morning fare and those darker, gritty Westerns in which the lines between good and evil were deliberately blurred.

   More than anything else, however, the film is a character study of a U.S. Marshal by the name of Frame Johnson (Reagan). Frame wants to clean up the Old West, but despises vigilantism. When it comes to giving suspects and outlaws a fair trial and their day in court, Frame is a true believer.

   As the film unfolds, we see Frame willing to confront both the townsfolk of Tombstone, Arizona, including his own younger brother, just to ensure that an outlaw does not become the victim of a lynch mob. But he’s stubborn too, as if blinded by his devotion to an ideal that may not really be applicable to the time and place in which he finds himself.

   The story follows Frame Johnson, his two brothers, Lute and Jimmy, and their friend/sidekick, Denver, as Frame attempts to make a new life for himself on a ranch outside Cottonwood. He’s had enough of enforcing the peace in Tombstone and is ready to begin a life as a man, not a Marshal. Even better, he’s got himself a girl, a beautiful Tombstone saloon owner named Jeannie (Dorothy Malone), who’s ebullient that Frame’s gotten out of the justice business.

   Things ought to be good for Frame. Alas, there’s trouble brewing. Soon after arriving in Cottonwood, he encounters the villainous Kurt Durling (Preston Foster) and his son, Frank (Dennis Weaver). Turns out that Durling and his son all but run the town. They’ve even got the pathetic excuse for a sheriff under their thumb.

   The senior Durling loathes Frame, blaming the strong willed lawman for his crippled hand. You just know that these the two men are eventually going to go at it at some point. And sure enough, they do in what is a harrowing fight sequence on a dusty street.

   There’s another conflict at play in Law and Order, one that pits Frame against his younger brother, Jimmy, who skips town after shooting Frank Durling (Weaver). This conflict between two brothers, both hotheads each in their own way, is pretty standard Western fare. But here it works.

Despite being a solid, if somewhat overlooked Western, Law and Order certainly has its weaknesses. These include its depiction of an unbelievably quick-to-develop love interest between Jimmy Johnson and Maria Durling as well as an ending that’s just a bit too pat and sentimental. Similarly, the film’s attempts comic relief end up feeling a bit forced.

   Law and Order may never achieve any achieve any sort of status as a classic or as a “must see” Western. It’s not a brooding or overly introspective sort of film. But that doesn’t stop it from being a quite enjoyable movie to watch. Reagan and Malone have great on screen chemistry, Foster and Weaver make great villains, and the scenes with Reagan riding alone on horseback through the desert landscape are nearly iconic.

   In this movie at least, the good guy sticks to his principles, defeats the bad guy, and still gets the girl.

WILLIAM MacHARG – The Affairs of O’Malley. Dial Press, hardcover, 1940. Popular Library #340, paperback, 1951, as Smart Guy.

   While O’Malley claims he’s not too bright, he gets his man (or woman) in all of the cases presented in this collection of six-to-ten-page short stories. Often O’Malley — first name and rank on the New York City police force not known — is assigned to investigate a crime when all hope is lost of solving it. Clear them up he does, with no assistance from the anonymous narrator, though he seldom gets the credit.

   Many of these stories are fair-play and well constructed in spite of the brevity with which they are presented. In non-fair-play cases, O’Malley doesn’t know who did it but has the intelligence to trap the malefactor. In one story O’Malley says: “That gag has got whiskers on it like Methuselah, but being that old just shows how good it works — a gag that don’t work don’t never get no chance to get old.”

   Delightful hard-boiled police procedural tales from the ’30s. Prohibition is still in force in at least one of them.

       CONTENTS:   (listed alphabetically)

Almost Perfect · Collier’s Jun 25 1932
Best Clue Missing · Collier’s Jun 23 1934
Broadway Murder · Collier’s Oct 8 1938
The Cat’s Eyes · Collier’s Apr 4 1931
The Checkered Suit · Collier’s Oct 10 1936
Dumb Witness · Collier’s Sep 24 1938
The Fourth Girl · Collier’s Mar 26 1932
Just Too Smart · Collier’s Jan 3 1931
The Key Man · Collier’s Oct 27 1934
Last Look · Collier’s Mar 11 1939
A Little More Evidence · Collier’s Oct 3 1936
The Locked Door · Collier’s Dec 10 1932
Lost Girl · Collier’s Jan 15 1938
Man Missing · Collier’s Jun 8 1935
The Man on the Truck · Collier’s Jun 9 1934
Murder Makes It Worse · Collier’s Sep 23 1939
No Clues · Collier’s Jun 20 1936
No Evidence · Collier’s Sep 11 1937
No Fingerprints · Collier’s Mar 18 1933
The Right Gun · Collier’s Feb 18 1939
The Ring · Collier’s Dec 13 1930
The Scotty Dog · Collier’s Jan 17 1931
Sinister Gifts · Collier’s Jul 30 1938
The Sleeptalker · Collier’s Apr 18 1931
Smart Guy · Collier’s Nov 21 1936
Soiled Diamonds · Collier’s Sep 17 1932
Too Bad · Collier’s Oct 10 1931
Too Many Enemies · Collier’s Feb 11 1933
Too Many Miles · Collier’s Apr 1 1933
The Unconvincing Note · Collier’s Jul 22 1939
The Weak Spot · Collier’s Apr 18 1936
The Widow’s Share · Collier’s Jul 3 1937
Written in Dust · Collier’s Dec 12 1931