THE ADVENTURES OF LARIAT SAM. CBS, 1962. Terrytoons in association with Robert Keeshan Associates Voices: Dayton Allen did all the voices and Gene Wood sang the series theme.Written by Gene Wood and Tom Morrison. Produced by Gene Wood.
We tend to remember the early influences on us growing up. At an early age I developed a fondness for comedy cartoon sheriffs such as Lariat Sam. THE ADVENTURES OF LARIAT SAM was developed for CAPTAIN KANGAROO (CBS, October 3, 1955 – December 8 1984). The early morning kid show starred Bob Keeshan as Captain Kangaroo. The kindly grandfatherly Captain was joined at the Treasure House (later the Captain’s Place) by Mr. Green Jeans (Hugh Brannum), puppets Mr. Moose and Bunny Rabbit (Cosmo Allegtetti), cartoons and many more characters and special guests.
After five years of showing the same twenty-six episodes of TOM TERRIFIC Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan) wanted something new. CBS in-house cartoon studio Terrytoons (MIGHTY MOUSE, DEPUTY DAWG, etc) would make the new show (as it did TOM TERRIFIC).
Keeshan asked his writer Gene Wood (future successful announcer for game shows such as FAMILY FEUD) to produce and co-write a new cartoon with Terrytoons’ head writer Tom Morrison. With help from Keeshan, they came up with good guy Sheriff Lariat Sam and his sidekick Tippytoes, the Wonder Horse.
Together the two cartoon crime fighters protected the town of Bent Saddles. Keeshan wanted LARIAT SAM to be non-violent so instead of a gun Sam had a magic lariat to capture the bad guys, usually Badlands Meeney and his sidekick J. Skulking Bushwack. Thirteen episodes were made of the cartoon Western. Each story was told in five short parts.
Respected animation historian Jerry Beck wrote about ADVENTURES OF LARIAT SAM at one of his websites, Cartoon Research. The episode “The Mark of Zero†is included at the bottom of the article found here.
Our YouTube example is The People Catcher:
Badlands Meeney has a new science fiction toy he got to capture Lariat Sam, but Bushwack wrecks it. Luckily a scientist has just arrived in Bent Saddle and agrees to fix the People Catcher. Things don’t go as Badlands had hoped – they never do.
As with all the series episodes, ADVENTURES OF LARIAT SAM was a funny silly cartoon aimed at young kids. The evil plans were delightfully absurd. Characters often talked to the audience. Puns and jokes were non-stop. The cartoon remains fun to watch, even for this adult.
THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS. Vanwick Productions / Filmservice Distributors Corporation, 1959. Les Tremayne, Forrest Lewis, John Harmon, Frank Arvidson, Jeanne Carmen, Don Sullivan. Director: Irvin Berwick.
This is not a high-end creature feature. Filmed on a super low budget,The Monster of Piedras Blancasis a rather talky and amateurish production. Still, there are some great moments, including a rather bold – for its time anyways – scene in which the viewer witnesses a crab crawling across a decapitated head. And there’s a noir like sequence in which the eponymous monster chases threatens people on a spiral staircase.
But overall, this science fiction and horror hybrid remains a secondary, if not third rate, imitation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). There’s the girl who the creature seemingly ends up falling for, and the locals who are befuddled as to what is transpiring in their midst.
The story unfolds in a California beach community. When people start disappearing and then dying in a horribly gruesome manner, the town’s physician and police chief join forces to investigate. They soon learn that it isn’t a man that’s responsible for the recent beheadings. No. It’s a monster that they are after. With the technical assistance of a local scientist in training, the men devise a rather half-baked plan to capture the creature by means of throwing a net on him. I kid you not.
I wouldn’t particularly recommend your going out of your way to track this one down, although Olive Films recently put it out on BluRay and I must say, for an ultra low budget film, it looks absolutely fantastic. Trivia fact: the film’s cinematographer, Philip Lathrop, went on to an illustrious career and was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Despite the plodding pace and the clumsy dialogue, this creature feature is extremely well photographed.
WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – Killed in Paradise. Matt Cobb #5. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988; paperback, July 1989.
Officially Matt Cobb is a vice president in charge of special projects for a major TV network, but what that really means is that he’s a troubleshooter who’s put in charge whenever anything goes wrong. Not quite a private eye, but sometimes there’s not a lot of distinction between what he does and what PI’s do. (Think of all of the Hollywood troubleshooters who worked for movie studios in the pulps back in the 30s and 40s and bring them up to date.)
In this case, though, all he is is a glorified chaperone to the winner of a mystery contest put on by the Network’s FM station in New York City, and a friend of her choice (also female). The top prize? A trip on a cruise liner to an island in the Caribbean and back. The bonus? Also on board are a flock of mystery writers and a mystery scenario that the passengers are asked to play along and solve.
It is no wonder that the Chapter One is more or less a prologue to a scene that takes place much later in the book, one in which Cobb has just realizes who the killer is, just as he’s about to be tossed overboard. And that’s because otherwise there is no real mystery to be solved for well over a hundred pages, except for the mysterious disappearance of an arrogant mystery writer just after he is thoroughly trounced by Cobb in a not-so-friendly game of ping pong.
Luckily DeAndrea was a good enough writer with a flair for light comedy and romance to keep the reader going through the not very suspenseful first chunk of the book, as the characters get to know each other (and as Cobb gets to know the prizewinner’s friend very well). Do you know, and to tell you the truth, and I almost wish I didn’t have to bring this up, but I found the ending — the solution to the mystery and all — to be forced and the weakest part of the book. All in all, though, I enjoyed this one, and I’d gladly read more of the series, which I seem to have accidentally jumped into the middle of.
The Matt Cobb series —
Killed in the Ratings. Harcourt, 1978.
Killed in the Act. Doubleday, 1981.
Killed with a Passion. Doubleday, 1983.
Killed on the Ice. Doubleday, 1984.
Killed in Paradise. Mysterious Press, 1988.
Killed on the Rocks. Mysterious Press, 1990.
Killed in Fringe Time. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Killed in the Fog. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
MURDER AT THE VANITIES. Paramount, 1934. Carl Brisson, Victor McLaglin, Jack Oakie, Kitty Carlisle, Jessie Ralph, Charles Middleton. Written by Carey Wilson and Joseph Gollomb. Directed by Mitchell Leisen.
A backstage Musical/Mystery so strikingly off-beat and off-color one can quickly forget how dreadful it really is.
Charles Middleton plays Homer Boothby, a hammy actor who may have gunned down Gertrude Michael, who was blackmailing young lovers Carl Brisson and Kitty Carlisle (two romantic leads who seem singularly colorless even in a black & white movie) threatening to deport sweet old Jessie Ralph, abusing flighty maid Beryl Wallace, and threatening distaff detective Gail Patrick, who had the goods on her.
Got that? Well pay it no mind because the real leads here are Victor McLaglen and Jack Oakie, who play Bluff Lust and Brainless Cupidity to perfection, as a tough cop and a harried stage manager trying to solve the murder while the show goes on — as it must, you know.
Vanities offers a plethora of suspects, a tiresome plot and some impressive proscenium-bound production numbers, of which the most memorable is the musical ode to Marijuana, capped off when a cute young thing emerging nude from a Marijuana blossom (!) finds blood dripping from the catwalk down over her bare shoulders.
With all this going for it, one can almost overlook the fact that you don’t really give a damn about the bland young lovers or the cardboard suspects. Just sit back and enjoy the show, folks.
As a fan of John Barry and his Bond work especially, I enjoy this album. Based on a book by Len Deighton and featuring a nameless spy (who would become know as Harry Palmer due to this film), the movie starred Michael Caine, and was directed by Sidney J. Furie. The producer was one of the Bond producers, Harry Saltzman.
H. G. WELLS “The Magic Shop.” The Strand Magazine, June 1903. First collected in Twelve Stories and a Dream (Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1903) and The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (Thomas Nelson, US, hardcover, 1911). Reprinted and anthologized many times. Adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour by John Collier, 10 January 1964, with David Opatoshu as Mr. Dulong. Readable online here.
One of the many tropes in early science fiction was that of a shop or a building that is there one day, but gone the next. The very notion that one could randomly happen upon a commercial establishment one day and that it would be literally gone the next day is one of those quirky concepts that speculative writers play with so well.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that when I began reading H.G. Wells’s “The Magic Shop,†that one of the first things I thought of was whether the eponymous shop would exist one day and vanish the next. Lo and behold, I was not disappointed. For in this rather whimsical tale, a father and his son visit a magic shop in London wherein they discover a wide array of magical and mystical items for sale. The father, a skeptic, and his son Gip encounter a proprietor who may not be lying when he tells them that he deals in real magic.
There is something charmingly innocent about this story. The dialogue in particular harkens back to an almost fairy tale like innocence. Indeed, it’s Wells’s ability to conjure up a sense of wonder that makes this story about a magic shop doing its own disappearing act a short, but pleasurable read. Recommended.
ANDREW KLAVAN “All Our Yesterdays.” Lead story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March-April 2017.
The story begins with a horrific view of life (and death) in the army trenches in France in World War I, then tells the story of a survivor identified only as Brooks, as he recuperates in a make-shift hospital facility in Gloucestershire.
Suffering from uncontrollable blackouts, he finds a friend in Dr. William Haven, to whom he confides his fears that life will never be the same. Brooks believes that the Victorian era was the best time in the world to be alive. Standards have fallen. Women wear trousers now.
But then when a girl is found brutally murdered, Brooks also fears that he is the one responsible, and we have at last the reason this story was chosen as the lead for this issue, with the life of a young barmaid named Nancy at stake — a tale perfectly told.
Author of some 30 novels, Andrew Klavan has been nominated for the Edgar Award five times and has won twice, first for Mrs. White in 1984, which he wrote under the pen-name Margaret Tracy, as Best Paperback Original, then for The Rain in 1990 in the same category, a book he wrote as Keith Peterson.
THE SOMBRERO KID. Republic Pictures, 1942. Don ‘Red’ Barry, Lynn Merrick, Robert Homans, John James, Joel Friedkin, Rand Brooks, Stuart Hamblen. Director: George Sherman.
Despite being short — 5′ 4½”, according to IMDb — and not looking much like a cowboy hero, nor having a wide range as an actor, Don Barry had a presence about him on the screen that you could never manage to create if it weren’t there. But Barry managed to alienate himself from directors and other cast members, or so I’m told, and his career never got much higher than making B-westerns such as this one. [But see comments.]
Which, in spite of its running time of less than 60 minutes, is actually quite good, as far as low budget westerns from the early 40s go. There is enough plot in this one to be half again as long. I won’t go overly much into details, but it has to do with a marshal and his two sons, one of whom learns an unfortunate fact about himself as the three of them come to town to rid it of a persistent outlaw.
There is a girl that both sons find attractive, a villainous town banker, and a humorous hidey-hole than men of the town use to make their escape from a backroom card game when their wives come looking for them. And, yes, it also comes into play when the lead starts flying.
The title of the movie is something of a mystery. Apparently one of the sons, the one Don Barry plays, looks like a notorious outlaw called the Sombrero Kid — but isn’t him.
PHILIP ATLEE – The White Wolverine Contract. Joe Gall #13. Fawcett Gold Medal T2508, paperback original; 1st printing, December 1971.
Joe Gall’s in Vancouver BC in this one, on assignment to stop a breakaway movement on the part of several politicians (backed by a certain superpower) to annex the entire western coast of Canada to the US instead.
While certainly enjoyable enough — and at only 143 pages long, perfect for the first leg of a cross-country flight — I don’t consider this one of the better of the Joe Gall series. The setting, including a trip up North close to the Alaskan border, is a finely described as ever, but the action seems to come only in sporadic bursts, and only one or two of the characters ever seem to jell into place. Only a three-year-old terror on wheels named Malcolm is one I’ll remember for long. (Gall has reason to remember his mother more.)
But what we do get is Joe Gall’s mostly laid-back view of the world, including his observations on the hippies congregating in down town Vancouver at the time. White Wolverine was nominated for an Edgar for best paperback original, which may constitute a better recommendation for you than what I’ve had to say, if like me you’ve missed this one until now. And while no one has ever asked me, I think that Robert Ryan in his prime would have made a great Joe Gall in the movies.
THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK. MGM, UK, 1936. Re-released as Behind the Mask. Hugh Williams, Jane Baxter, Ronald Ward, Maurice Schwartz, George Merritt, Henry Oscar, Donald Calthorpe, Kitty Kelly. Screenplay by Jack Byrd, Syd Courtney, Ian Hay & Stanley Haynes, based on the novel The Chase of the Golden Plate by Jacques Fitrelle (sic). Directed by Michael Powell.
This short but fast moving and complicated thriller based on a novel by American mystery writer Jacques Futrelle (his name misspelled in the titles) has a better pedigree than most, with legendary director Michael Powell (half of the famous Archers production company with Emric Pressberger, and director of Black Narcissus and The 49th Parallel among others) at the helm and novelist Ian Hay working on the dialogue.
Nonetheless it is strictly B movie material, though slickly done and masterly paced so you never have time to ask questions as the novel’s complex plot and myriad mixed identities and double crosses unfold. It plays out like an Edgar Wallace thriller more than a Jacques Futrelle mystery.
Lord Slade (Peter Cawthorpe) is giving a masked ball to show off the prize of his collection, the golden shield of Khan. The police are in attendance in the person of Chief Inspector Mallory (George Merritt) dressed as Frederick the Great, and a mysterious fellow dressed as Voltaire (Henry Oscar) playing chess with him as they watch the shield.
Also in attendance are Lady June Slade (Jane Baxter) his daughter, the mysterious East Indian Harrah (Gerald Fielding), Dr. Walpole (Donald Calthorp) the famous surgeon, and Marion Weeks (Kitty Kelly) the doctor’s wisecracking assistant and housekeeper (“I’m dressed as Shirley Temple as Madame Dubarry.â€).
Not in attendance are Lord Slade’s wastrel son Jimmy (Ronald Ward) who argued with his father over money earlier and threatened to hold up a bank to get money if he had to, or Nicholas Barclay (Hugh Williams) a dashing pilot who is in love with June, and disliked by this lordship.
June and Nicky have plans though; he’s to wear a disguise and slip into the ball, and at midnight when the lights go down he and June will slip away and get married with a special license he has obtained. But before he can even don his costume, he’s shot by an intruder in a mask, an intruder he believes to be Jimmy because of a triangle tattoo on his wrist, a tattoo that Jimmy, Nicky, and their dead friend Allan Hayden (Reginald Tate) all got back in school.
With Nicky out, a man dressed as the Red Death enters the ball with Nicky’s invitation from June and the help of the butler aiding in the elopement. When the lights go down and everyone unmasks he steals the shield, and takes the car with June in it, being wounded in the shoulder by a detective whom he runs over as he escapes. June knows he isn’t Nicky, but is now a helpless captive.
Meanwhile the mysterious Harrah travels to the estate of the Master (Maurice Schwartz), the astrologer who paid to have the shield stolen, but who has been double crossed by the thief and by Nadja (Morya Fagan) a follower to report his failure.
Soon enough Jimmy is cleared, but Nicky didn’t go to the police thinking Jimmy shot him and instead went to be patched up by Dr. Walpole, and now the police want Nicky for the theft and running over the policeman and they know the thief was wounded in the shoulder, while the only clue Nicky has to the real thief is a tie he left behind sold by a haberdashery in a poorer part of London.
From then on it’s a chase with Nicky, Jimmy, the Dr,, and wisecracking Miss Weeks pursuing the thief and Nadja to rescue June and return the shield, the police after Nicky with the Dr. in tow, and Harrah and the Master’s gang pursuing Nadja and the thief for the shield and eliminating anyone in their way, and when the policeman dies, Nicky is wanted for murder.
The film is a fast paced diversion, confusing at times, fun with a solid cast, but mostly of interest for the direction of Michael Powell and being based on a novel by Jacques Futrelle (albeit one far inferior to his short stories).
The real highlight is some brighter than usual dialogue and the scenes in the Master’s observatory, giving the film an almost science fictional feel with Maurice Schwartz, eyes hypnotic and mad, and hair in the style of mad scientist everywhere since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, part Mabuse, part Fu Manchu, and madder than a hatter. It’s a little forgotten gem among mad villains.
A nod also to Richard Tate as Allan Hayden, who, sporting a black fedora and checkered overcoat, looks uncannily like the illustrations of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint that ran in Thriller. He’s good as an old school tie type who hasn’t quite forgotten the form.
The ending is a little rushed, and there isn’t so much as a final embrace for Nicky and June, at least not on screen, but it’s satisfying in its own way.
Editorial Comment: Most of the available prints of this film are less than an hour long, but this one (which I haven’t watched in its entirely) claims to be 1:33 long. If so, then IMDb does not know about it, stating that the original version is believed to be lost:
