THE BARON OF ARIZONA. Lippert Pictures, 1950. Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Tina Rome, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale. Written and directed by Samuel Fuller.

   Vincent Price, as an actor, had unforgettable charm, an unmistakable voice, and an uncanny ability to convey meaning through an over-exaggerated posture, a wry knowing smile, or, better still, the raising of an eyebrow. Indeed, there are some movies that it is difficult to imagine working at all were it not for Price’s singular presence.

   The Abominable Dr. Phibes, which I reviewed here, is one such film. Samuel Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona, based on the true story of a notorious Old West con artist, is another. In this early Fuller-directed project, Price portrays James Reavis, the self-styled Baron of Arizona, a man who devised an elaborate scheme to defraud the United States government into transferring title of the Arizona Territory to him and his wife. The best scene, bar none, in The Baron of Arizona involves a conniving Reavis gleefully sitting at his desk in front of a gigantic Arizona map ensconced on the wall behind him.

   The plan, at least as depicted in this film, involves him forging land grant documents dating back to the mid 18th century and King Ferdinand VI of Spain. His scheme hinges upon his marrying a peasant girl, Sofia (Ellen Drew), whom he successfully convinces is the direct descendent of Spanish nobility and the legitimate titleholder to the Arizona Territory. Reavis shrewdly cultivates the young Sofia into seeing herself not as a dirt-poor peasant girl who grew up in a shack, but rather as the graceful and sophisticated Baroness of Arizona.

   Along for the wild ride in this unconventional movie is Sofia’s adoptive father Pepito, portrayed with tenderness by veteran character actor, Vladimir Sokoloff. Pepito is smarter than he looks and ends up playing a pivotal role, albeit not in the way you might think, in the unraveling of Reavis’s scheme.

   Reed Hadley, well known to Western fans for his distinctive voice, plays an unusual, slightly jarring, role in the film. He portrays Griff, an Arizona politician celebrating the entry of his State into the Union. His character is film’s narrator for the first thirty minutes or so of the film, recounting the story of Reavis from the perspective of 1912.

   It’s a narrative technique that really doesn’t work and is by far the weakest aspect in this otherwise well-crafted quixotic Western.

CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG – The Balloon Man. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1958. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1969; Berkley, paperback, 1976; IPL Crime Classics, paperback, 1990.

       — The Gift Shop. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1967. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1968. Zebra, paperback, 1990.

   In her twenty-six-year career, Charlotte Armstrong published dozens of novels and short stories as well as plays and screenplays. Her series detective, MacDougal Duff, appears in only the first three novels; Armstrong is better known for her later works, which combine suspenseful plots with a sensitive depiction of ordinary American people whose moral character is severely tested by extraordinary circumstances.

   Armstrong’s heroes and heroines are normal people with considerable inner resources upon which they can to extricate themselves from dangerous situations that they are in through no fault of their own. The author does not flinch from dealing with such thorny moral issues as the abuse of power by the wealthy, the failure of parents to take responsibility for their offspring, and man’s free will; and she has been known to stand firmly on the side of the underdog. These philosophical issues in no way detract from the suspense of her stories, which is always considerable.

   As shown by The Balloon Man, Armstrong likes young women with guts. The heroine, wife of a rich-boy-tumed-drug-addict, sees her husband throw their young son against the kitchen wall, breaking his leg in a fit of drug-induced hallucination. The down-to-earth young mother leaves quickly, with her son, never to return, knowing her husband’s drug problem is beyond her help. She figures his rich family will take care of him; they’ve always hated her anyway, low-class street girl that she is.

   The husband’s father, however, won’t let it go at that and displays an almost insane resentment of her. He’s determined to get custody of his grandson, and while the heroine waits in a boardinghouse near the hospital until her son is well enough to take back east, the father-in-law bribes an unsavory school pal of his son’s to take a room in the boardinghouse and do all that’s necessary to prove her an unfit mother.

   What follows is a delightful picture of the lives of the boarders and the inner workings of greed and evil that will stop at nothing to separate a child from its mother. A wonderful celebration of good old American grit. And, we might add, wit.

   The Gift Shop is a classic example of Armstrong’s talent and view of the world.Here we have an unassuming, lower-middle-class American girl who is putting herself through college by clerking in an airport gift shop. Her life is ruffled by little more than her boss’s occasional temper tantrum.

   Enter the rich, good-looking bachelor — the youngest of three professionally successful sons who are sources of pride and solace to the patriarch who fathered them. The almost unbelievable hero (are there really such soulful rich young men in the world today?) is hot on the trail of an old school chum who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances (last seen in the gift shop) while researching the whereabouts of the young man’s sister, whose existence has just been revealed to the family.

   And the circumstances of this revelation — a demand that the oldest son, governor of the state, stay the execution of an internationally known crime figure in exchange for the sister’s life — are sinister indeed.

   The adventure that the gift-shop clerk becomes embroiled in is refreshingly humane; and in the course of it, the bachelor overcomes the girl’s resistance to arrogant rich young men. The romance does not proceed without difficulty, however; like many of Armstrong’s heroines, she is the self-sufficient kind and not prone to stroking the male ego.

   This is high adventure, the stuff about which any righter-of-wrongs dreams. It is almost unbelievable, but the author has a way of making us feel it would happen to any one of us, any day now.

   Other excellent Charlotte Armstrong titles are Catch-as-Catch-Can (1952), The Better to Eat You (1954), A Dram of Poison (winner of the Edgar for Best Novel of 1956), The Turret Room (1965), and Protégé (1970). The best of her fine short stories can be found in the collections The Albatross (1957) and I See You (1966).

         ———
   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.

   In the late Fifties and early Sixties private eye series on TV were a dime a dozen. One of the lesser known of these was released on DVD by Timeless Media not long ago and, never having watched it back in 1960 when it was first run, I decided to check it out more than half a century later.

   CORONADO 9 was a 30-minute syndicated series, released by Revue Studios, largely shot on location in San Diego and elsewhere, and starring 6’5″ Rod Cameron (1910-1983) as PI Dan Adams, a big beefy guy who conjures up images of a pro football player in middle age.

   What makes the series unusual is that its directors and writers went out of their way to avoid the tried-and-true elements we tend to associate with the PI genre except for the chases and fights, which we also associate with Westerns, and of course for the first-person narration, although almost every episode cheats with scenes outside the narrator’s presence. Adams is so untypical an eye that, assuming he has an office, we literally never see him in it.

   The main reason the series attracted me is that 16 of its 39 segments were directed by William Witney (1915-2002), the Hitchcock of the action film and my best friend in Hollywood. When it comes to visual excitement, most of Bill’s are not on a par with his great cliffhanger serials (one of which starred a much younger and leaner Rod Cameron) and Western features and episodes of TV series like BONANZA and THE WILD WILD WEST and THE HIGH CHAPARRAL, but the best of them are very good indeed.

   Whenever he could take over a locale and shoot his climax there, he did it with glee, commandeering a Coast Guard cutter for “The Day Chivalry Died” and the San Diego Zoo for “Obituary of a Small Ape,” just to give two examples. My favorite among Bill’s dozen-and-a-third is “Hunt Breakfast,” which despite its unintelligible title is a near-perfect film equivalent to those Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original novels that are central to the Fifties experience for many of us. In this episode Adams tries to save a friend and his family whose home has been invaded by three bank-robbing psychos, and the Witney visual fireworks run neck and neck with the violence.

   Of the 23 episodes not directed by Witney the most deserving of mention are at least four which were apparently shot on location in New Orleans and helmed by Frank Arrigo (1917-1977), who usually worked in Hollywood as an art director.

   The segments which take place overseas seem to have been filmed on the Revue back lot with help from stock footage and process plates. I certainly don’t believe that Arrigo shot “Film Flam” in Algiers, or “Caribbean Chase” in then newly Communist Cuba!

   Among the actors who appeared once or more often in the series are John Archer, Richard Arlen, Al Hodge (early live TV’s Captain Video), DeForest Kelley and Doug McClure. The veterans of Witney’s Western features and earlier TV films whom Bill found roles for in CORONADO 9 episodes include Jim Davis, Faith Domergue, Patricia Medina and Slim Pickens.

   Featured in two segments not directed by Witney is Lisa Lu, a well-known Asian actress best known over here as Hey Girl in HAVE GUN–WILL TRAVEL. A friend of mine who recently interviewed her tells me that in her eighties she is still acting.

   As so often when Timeless Media releases a TV series, there are a few technical problems with the transfer of CORONADO 9 to DVD. But if you can snag it for a decent price—it’s listed on Amazon.com for $17.99, and someone on the Web claims to have found it at Sam’s Club for $12.88 — it’s worth having.

   No one would rank Rod Cameron with the great cinematic PIs, like Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP, Ralph Meeker in KISS ME DEADLY and Jack Nicholson in CHINATOWN. But Liam Neeson comes within shouting distance as Lawrence Block’s recovering alcoholic and off-the-books investigator Matt Scudder in A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, which is based on Block’s 1992 novel of the same name and came to theaters a few weeks ago.

   Directed and written by Scott Frank and filmed noirishly in Brooklyn where the novel takes place, the movie has garnered mixed notices to date, with the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times going so far as to call it torture porn. I’ve seen nothing on the Web or in print that attempts to stack it up against the novel (except for one cyber-comment that I stumbled upon as I was finishing this column) so I might as well do the honors.

   Since the book is narrated by Scudder, nothing can happen outside his presence, although Block cheats a bit in the first chapter where lovely Francine Khoury is abducted on a Brooklyn street and, after payment of $400,000 ransom by her narcotics-trafficker husband, is returned cut up into fresh meat.

   Unrestricted by first-person narrative, Scott Frank shows us the psycho kidnappers at work here and later in ways Block couldn’t. The novel takes place in 1992, the film in 1999, so that we’re treated to a few allusions to the Y2K panic, which has nothing to do with the plot, and also to the sight of pay phones on the streets of New York City, which do figure in the plot and still existed, I assume, at the end of the 20th century but are rarae aves in today’s cell phone era.

   The film’s climax is something like Block’s but also quite different, in ways that I won’t reveal here. Between beginning and end Frank touches base with Block only on rare occasions.

   A host of the novel’s characters make no appearance: Scudder’s wealthy call-girl lover, the teen-age computer hackers, the various cops Scudder hits up for information. Although one of the perps’ victims in the novel survives her ordeal and gets to talk with Scudder, in the movie there are no surviving women. Indeed two important male characters make it through the novel alive but wind up dead in the film, and several other men in the movie, like the obese groundskeeper and the DEA agents, have no counterparts in the book.

   The bloody incident that made Scudder a boozer is never mentioned in the novel but is dramatized for us in a flashback at the movie’s start, with the difference that Scott Frank morphs it into the catalyst for Scudder’s giving up the sauce and joining AA.

   The streetwise black teen who calls himself TJ has a big role in both novel and movie but Frank’s version of the character unlike Block’s is a vegetarian and a victim of sickle cell anemia, although Frank mercifully spares us the rhyming patter and much of the it-be-rainin-out jivetalk of TJ according to Block.

   Ironically enough, two of Frank’s alterations in the storyline seem to have been expressly rejected by Block. Late in both versions comes a scene in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery where a million dollars, much of it counterfeit, is exchanged for the 14-year-old girl who is the psychos’ latest victim.

   In the novel the exchange comes off without incident, and Scudder specifically tells the girl’s family (on page 269 of the hardcover edition) that “it’s crazy to get into a firefight in a graveyard at night”. That craziness Scott Frank embraces, letting the bullets fly and the cars screech and crash away as in a thousand other action flicks.

   After Block’s badguys have fled the cemetery, TJ tells Scudder (on page 286): “[I]f this here’s a movie, what I do is slip in the back [of the psychos’ vehicle] an’ hunker down ‘tween the front an’ back seats. They be puttin’ the money in the trunk and sittin’ up front, so they ain’t even gone look in the back. Figured they’d go back to their house…an’ when we got there I just slip out an’ call you up an’ tell you where I’m at. But then I thought, TJ, this ain’t no movie, an’ you too young to die.”

   Well, what Scott Frank wrote and directed is a movie and that’s exactly what his TJ does and how Neeson as Scudder finds the perps’ home base.

   What Larry Block thinks of the picture I have no idea. It does capture something of the spirit of the Scudder series, and Neeson’s performance is excellent, thanks in part to his wisely not attempting a New York accent.

   Most of Frank’s innovations help make the movie cinematic in ways that the dialogue-driven novel wasn’t and couldn’t have been. In the same league with THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP and CHINATOWN it isn’t, and the moments of extreme violence, especially to women, are integral to the storyline but may turn off potential viewers. (I saw it with a Vietnam veteran who later told me he had to close his eyes during some scenes.)

   To anyone wondering whether to see it or not, all I can say is: Hit the Web, do your homework, make (or as the Brits would say, take) a decision.

WATERLOO BRIDGE. MGM, 1940. Vivien Leigh, Robert Taylor, Lucile Watson, Virginia Field, Maria Ouspenskaya, C. Aubrey Smith. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Waterloo Bridge has elements that all combine to form an excellent movie: two exceptionally talented and strong leads, a hauntingly tragic romance, and Academy Award-nominated cinematography. There’s also a memorable, Academy Award-nominated score by Herbert Shothart, who won an Oscar for his score to The Wizard of Oz the previous year.

   Waterloo Bridge stars Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor as hopelessly doomed lovers, their romance both kindled, and interrupted, by the violence of the Great War. As the film’s narrative begins, a camera pans a London crowd. It’s early September 1939 and Britons are in the street listening to a newscast announcing that Great Britain is now at war with Germany.

   Soon, we see a grayed and somewhat tired looking Colonel Roy Cronin (Taylor) entering a car en route to London’s Waterloo Station. He asks the driver to go by way of Waterloo Bridge and to drop him off at the bridge. He’ll walk across, he says. Cronin exits the vehicle and stands on the bridge amidst the steel girders, his forlorn eyes looking out in the distance.

   We witness him removing a small, white figurine from his jacket pocket. As he remains lost in thought, we hear a voice. It is unmistakably that of actress Vivien Leigh. Through this scene we learn that his story will be told by way of Cronin’s mental flashback, a glimpse backward to an earlier time, a more innocent time. The image on the screen morphs back in time, but not in place.

   Cronin is now standing on Waterloo Bridge, but the steel girders are gone. And there’s an unruly combination of automobiles, horse-drawn carriages, bicyclists, and pedestrians. We’re now seeing a younger, more vibrant Cronin. It’s the Great War and London’s under German bombardment.

   The air raid causes a panic, especially among a group of ballerinas bustling their way across the bridge. Among them, a beautiful woman, Myra Lester (Leigh), who drops a white figurine – her good luck charm – in the street in front of Roy. The two meet for the first time and soon make their way to shelter in the Underground. Their physical proximity in the subterranean transportation network leads to emotional closeness. An unlikely whirlwind romance begins.

   But if war is anything, it is cruel. And the First World War will be mercilessly cruel to these two would-be spouses. Myra is a ballerina, working under the direction of the authoritarian Olga Kirowa (Maria Ouspenskaya) who forbids her to have contact with Roy. But no bitter old woman will let the vibrant Myra from seeing her love. Their love blossoms, and there is talk of marriage. But alas, it is not to be. For Roy, at the very last minute, is called to the front.

   Things get worse. Myra, along with her friend, is promptly dismissed from the ballet company and lives a meager existence, hoping to see Roy again one day. Things then become even worse. She reads in the paper that Roy died in the wartime. It is soul-crushing, causing her to spiral downward into a life of prostitution. Her entrée into the world’s oldest profession is, symbolically, on Waterloo Bridge.

   It is at Waterloo Station, however, that Myra’s tragic fate will be forever sealed. In one of the most vividly portrayed tragic scenes I’ve seen in a 1940s film, Myra makes her way through a crowd in Waterloo Station. Men are returning from the front and she is on the prowl for a client. She tries to look pretty. A smile is forced. She looks awkwardly confused, her face betraying a remarkable sadness. Then we see her eyes and a close up of Myra’s face.

   Her horror is unmistakable. Whom does she see? Roy, of course, a smiling, gallant Roy emerging returning from France. The man who she thought dead, the soldier’s whose non-death caused her to chose to sell her body as a wartime commodity. Roy pursues her and there’s talk of marriage once again. But this is a tragedy, after all. Unless you are a complete cynic, it’s difficult not to be moved by Myra’s fall from an almost marriage into the depth of psychological despair.

   Waterloo Bridge is also a metaphor for innocence lost on a much grander scale. The carnage of the Great War tore British society asunder, ushering in a wave of poetry and literature that reflected the tragic break from the Victorian Era. The peaceful pre-war world would never return. So it is with Roy Cronin, a man scarred by sadness, standing on Waterloo Bridge in 1940, remembering his lost Myra as the world plunges into another maelstrom.

   It’s a wonderfully sad film, with some great moments. Leigh, who apparently wanted real life husband Laurence Olivier to portray Roy Cronin, is simply magnificent. Taylor is very good here too, if a bit – how shall I put this – just too American to convincingly portray a British officer. But that doesn’t stop the on-screen chemistry between the world-weary Myra and the ebullient, if unconvincingly naïve, handsome Roy.

   All told, Waterloo Bridge is a very good film, although one must suspend disbelief to image these two characters falling in love so fast. But war has a strange way of doing things to people. The prostitution angle, which is exceedingly important to the plot, is more hinted at than anything else, probably due to the Production Code. We never even see Myra with a client. But we all know what path she chose for herself. And by the time the film is over, we know how the Great War ended for Myra and Roy. A well made tragedy that is worth seeing.

JOHN McPARTLAND – Big Red’s Daughter. Gold Medal 354, paperback original, November 1953. Macfadden, paperback, 1968. Black Curtain Press, softcover, POD, 2013. Also: Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2017, 2-in-1 edition with Tokyo Doll (added March 2018).

   Her name is Wild Kearny, and for young Jim Work, fresh out of the war in Korea and attending a small college in southern California, it is love at first sight. There are two problems, though, besides the young and hip crowd of friends she hangs out with, and the first is the man she is with, a tough guy named Buddy Brown, who is apparently a good friend, and as happenstance would have it, he makes quick work of Jim Work in a couple of very short rounds of fisticuffs.

   Not the best impression to make on a first meeting, but Wild Kearney must see something in Jim Work who tells the story, because it is not Buddy Brown she takes to the airport to meet her father flying in from the East Coast. No, it is Jim Work whom she introduces to her father as her current live-in boy friend, a guy she has met only four hours earlier.

   And her father is the second problem: Broadway Red Kearny, last of the big gamblers, a honest and tough headline-making fellow whom you know does not want just anyone making hay with his daughter. Ever meet the father of the woman you love for the first time? Double that, or quadruple it, and you’ll know how Jim Work feels.

   This all happens with the space of 22 pages, and to tell you the truth, it’s the best part, but the rest of the book is no slouch ether. There’s a murder involved, and while Buddy Brown may be the killer, it is Jim Work who is accused, locked up, and who with the help of a magician friend in the same cell, makes his escape, only to confront Buddy Brown again, and this time the tables are turned, which merely makes Jim Work’s predicament all the worse.

   Only this time he has Wild Kearny on his side.

   The story is plagued with what seems like gigantic coincidences, but somehow or another, McPartland, a writer with a smooth and easy way with words, pulls all of the threads together and more or less makes a coherent whole of them, I think.

   It would make one heck of a movie, that’s for sure. From the cover, I’d say that Robert Mitchum might have made a good choice to play Jim Work, a young Robert Mitchum, though, and I’d to qualify that to say it would work only if you could ever picture a young Robert Mitchum as a serious-minded college student.

   Take a look at that cover again. I’ll let you decide who should play Wild Kearny, if you’d care to.

MARGARET ARMSTRONG – The Man with No Face. Random House, hardcover, 1940. Tower, hardcover reprint, 1943 [cover shown]. Bestseller Mystery #B30, digest-sized paperback, abridged, no date [1942].

       — The Blue Santo Murder Mystery. Random House, hardcover, 1941. Detective Novel Classic #12, digest-sized paperback, 1942.

   Though they are no kin of his, Donald Bell of Australia leaves his fortune to “the descendants of Robert Bell of Irongray,” Scotland. The reader learns of the disappointment of Percy McGuire, Bell’s stepson and something of a rotter, and then it’s off to the States to meet Clare Beaumont. But only briefly. For she commits suicide shortly after we make her acquaintance.

   Minion Marbury, who had been on the point of proposing to Clare for five years, and Jim Northcote, who was painting her portrait, are certain the suicide verdict is false. Clare was quite happy and had recently become excited over her discovery that she was descended from the Bells of Irongray.

   Despite their amateur status, Marbury and Northcote investigate those who might have thought they would profit from Clare’s death and discover that her relatives, though quite distant, are themselves expiring through various ostensible accidents.

   Those who admire Philip MacDonald’s The List of Adrian Messenger should enjoy this novel. It isn’t quite as good as MacDonald’s — not many novels are — but it was earlier and does not suffer too much in comparison.

   Something of a disappointment is Armstrong’s third novel — Murder in Stained Glass (1939) was the first — The Blue Santo Murder Mystery. The setting is an interesting one — Tecos, New Mexico, which I presume is actually Taos — but the disappearance of Louisa Kearney-Pine, richest woman in the world, from the Blue Santo Hotel does not grab the reader since all the characters are insipid.

   An occasional good paragraph, for example the description of Kansas as viewed by a train rider, does not make up for the novel’s drawbacks. Of interest, I’d say, only to the regional collector.

Editorial Note:   Margaret Armstrong (1867-1944) has only the the three entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

ZORRO. ABC/Walt Disney Productions, 1957-1959 (30min), 1960-61 (four 60min episodes). Guy Williams (Don Diego de la Vega), Gene Sheldon (Bernardo), Henry Calvin (Sgt. Demetrio Lopez Garcia), Don Diamond (Corp. Reyes), George J. Lewis (Don Alejandro de la Vega).

   A short while back someone opined to me that Guy Williams was probably the best Zorro and I carped a bit, since I really prefer Tyrone Power’s film version of Don Diego. Since then, however, I’ve gotten hooked on old Zorro reruns on the Disney Channel, and I have to say I gave the show short shrift.

   I loved this program as a kid, and now it’s even better than I remember. I note from the credits that Fred Cavens — who did on all the best MGM swordflght movies, like Scaramouche and Prisoner of Zenda — worked as fencing master on the series, and it shows in Williams’ (or his stuntman’s) stylish swordplay and well-choreographed bits of business. The sets are lavish for a TV show, with plenty of extras and horses, the acting passable (Henry Calvin does some delightful mime) and the stories…

   I never realized as a kid that most episodes of this program were designed like a Serial, with Zorro each week thwarting some element of the Evil Villain’s Master Plan until the two finally work up to a showdown. This may seem like a small thing, but when you’re doing a half-hour action story, it saves time not having to establish characters and situations each week. The directors even include Bill Witney, who did the best of the Republic serials, and Norman Foster from the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto movie series.

   Some intelligent writing also came to the fore as Sergeant Garcia quickly evolved from a pure buffoon to a slightly better developed character, and even got a comic foil of his own in the weary Corporal Reyes, played with languid gusto by someone named Don Diamond. Which reminds me:

   Another thing I never realized until I began watching this is that Donald is a common Spanish name. Yeah, really. Seems like half the characters are called Don Something or Don Other.

   Hey, was Don Ameche Spanish?