REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:

NEVER LET GO. Rank, UK, 1960. Richard Todd, Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Sellars, Adam Faith and Carol White. Written by John Gullermin, Peter D Sarigny, and Alun Falconer. Directed by John Guilllermin.

   British Noir, dark as Detour and brutal as Big Heat, from the director of PJ and Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, with veteran funnyman Sellers in a straight and very effective performance as the lead heavy.

   I detected understandable echoes of The Bicycle Thief here, along with surprising vibes from Death of a Salesman, in a story centered around Richard Todd, a cosmetics salesman who has lost his touch and quickly loses his car to a chop shop ring run by Adam Faith under the glowering eye of Peter Sellers.

   Let’s pause for a moment and look at Sellers here because his presence in the film positively sank it with the Public. A pity that, because it’s right up there with Francis Sullivan in Night and the City or Oscar Homolka in Sabotage, a figure of oversized villainy more compelling because he’s so real. Indeed, the more I watched, the clearer it became that the character’s arrogant brutality rose from a poignant desire to be loved.

   Pit this character against Todd’s anger at being treated like the Nobody he is, and you have a cosmic collision of irresistible force against irresistible force. The stolen car is vital to Todd’s work, but the police treat it as just another statistic. Spurred on to find it on his own, Todd finds himself hopelessly outmatched by motorcycle gangs and menacing goons — but he keeps on coming.

   Todd’s futile devotion to a lost cause — himself — puts Never Let Go solidly into Noir territory. He loses his job, gets beat up, causes a death, gets beat up, his wife leaves him, and he gets into one of the nastiest fights ever thrown onto the screen, leading to an ending that is at best equivocal. And all the while he’s struggling, Sellers’ character visibly deteriorates before our eyes until what we get is a conflict more dramatic because its antagonists are two sides of a very small coin indeed.

   I should add that the film is nowhere near as turgid as this review. John Guillerman’s style was marked by unpretentious (Some say he had a lot to be unpretentious about) craftsmanship and stylish bad taste, and it suits Never Let Go right down to its bloody fingernails.
   

WILLIAM KAYE – Wrong Target. Chickie French #1. Leisure, paperback original, 1981.

   You might call this a private eye procedural. Not in the Joe Gores/DKA Agency sense, though, for I get the distinct impression that the closest William Kaye ever came to real life investigator was about the same as you or I. In print, that is. From reading about them.

   But in deciding to write about the adventures of a PI named Chickie French, Kaye probably made the right choice, since, if anything, he is even less apt at describing how real-life police operate.

   For example, after French’s sister, the wife of mayoral candidate, Whit Davidson, is shot and killed at a political rally (note the title) , French comes in late and still manages to get in his share of interrogating the witnesses. And when he’s done, he and Davidson simply drive away. Methinks the cops clamp down harder than that, even in small towns.

   Returning, though, to my original thoughts, French does do a neat job of shuffling several cases around at the same time – some of which are completely followed through upon, some not; some are connected, some are not – and he still manages to solve his sister’s murder.

   Although I am still wondering about his secretary’s strange behavior in Chapter Four – it is never referred to again – there are some very good moments in this book, many of them occurring when French is feeling nostalgic and retrospective.

   Unfortunately, there is not much of a mystery that’s involved. Apparently Mr. Kaye has no sense of misdirection at all.

   So, to sum things up, the book is terribly uneven, and yes, even amateurish in style and technique. Nonetheless, the moments that are very good suggest that as a writer Kaye does show some promise. (On the other hand, whoever it was wrote the copy for the back cover is simply and utterly incompetent. There are no other words for it.)

Rating: C minus.

   
UPDATE; This is the only entry for William Kaye in Hubin, and thus also making this Chickie French’s only recorded case.

PHILIP MARLOWE “The Ugly Duckling.” ABC. 06 October 1959 (Season One, Episode One.) Philip Carey (Philip Marlowe), William Schallert. Guest Cast: Virginia Gregg, Rhys Williams, James Griffith, Barbara Bain, Addison Richards. Writer: Gene Wang. Director: Robert Ellis Miller.

   It is difficult to say for sure, since very few of the series’ episodes have survived (a second one can be found below), but this early attempt at adapting Raymond Chandler’s iconic character Philip Marlowe did not really have a lot going for it. The star Philip Carey has the right first name, and physically he looks the part, but he has none of the star power that was needed to push the series anywhere near the top.

   It is a young Barbara Bain, pitch perfect in her role of a golddigger “other woman,” who makes this first episode of the season worth watching. She has her hooks in nebbish James Griffith’s character, and won’t let go. Not even the $10,000 dollars Marlowe offers ger on the man’s wife’s behalf will make her change her mind.

   It comes as no great surprise the, that she is a mysterious killer’s first victim. There are enough people in the story for the deceptive fans watching to puzzle over, but the fact remains that (again based on only this first episode) that it need not have been Marlowe who was the detective. Any generic PI would do just as well.

NOTE: Michael Shonk covered this episode very briefly on this blog quite some time ago. The accompanying video disappeared from YouTube very quickly thereafter, but as you see, it has returned, at least for a little while.

   Michael later did a more complete overview of the series. You can read it here, and I strongly suggest you do.

RAYMOND CHANDLER “Wrong Pigeon.” Short story. PI Philip Marlowe. First magazine publication in Manhunt, February 1960. Previouslypublished, possibly in abridged form, in a British newspaper as “Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate.” Later reprinted as “Philip Marlowe’s Last Case” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 1962) and as “The Pencil” in Argosy (September 1965). Collected as “The Pencil” in The Smell of Fear (H. Hamilton, UK, 1965). Reprinted in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, edited by Byron Preiss (Knopf, 1988) and as “Wrong Pigeon” in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carroll & Graf, 1988), among others. TV adaptation: As “The Pencil” on Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, 16 April 1983 (season 1, episode 1), starring Powers Boothe.

   And with all of that, I’ve still probably missing something obvious. It was, as the title of the story as it appeared in EQMM, PI Philip Marlowe’s last case, Raymond Chandler having died in 1959, and it’s a good one. Marlowe takes on a job for a guy who wants to get out of the mob, but there’s been a pencil drawn through his name, and he knows the syndicate does not take defections lightly.

   It’s a fool’s task, but the promise of $5000 upon completion of a successful escape has a loud way of talking, and that’s in 1959 money. And Marlowe is no fool. He knows that there’s a reason why the job is done so easily. He’s right, of course, and you should be. too, the reader.

   It’s been a long time for me to get around to reading this one, and I’m glad I did. I don’t know what the general opinion is of this story, but I think Chandler was still in fine form when he wrote it. The story is light and breezily told, but when it comes down to it, Marlowe is as hardboiled as private eyes really ought to be, especially when it comes to dealing with the syndicate. Very enjoyable.

FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE “High Stakes” Dante’s Inferno #5. 26 January 1956 (Season 4, Episode 15). Dick Powell (Willie Dante), Herb Vigran, Walter Sande. Guest Cast: Frances Bergen, James Seay, Morris Ankrum. Writer: Richard Carr. Director: William A. Seiter.

   After reviewing one of the episodes of Dante starring Howard Duff, I found that Alpha Video had released four of the earlier Dick Powell episodes of them on DVD, and not only that, but I had a copy.  While I’ve indicated below which four of them (*) are on the DVD, there were a total of  eight that Dick Powell did, but as it turns out, the one I watched is available on YouTube as well:

   Willie Dante is the owner and manager of a nightclub called, fittingly enough, Dante’s Inferno; it’s successful enough, but for patrons who are in the know, he has a casino in the back room, which is even more successful.

   Based on this single episode, which is all I’ve watched so far, Dick Powell demonstrated a lot more gravitas in the part than Howard Duff did. To me, Duff seemed to have a secret twinkle in his eye in the role, while Powell is a lot more serious and solemn. He is in fact a hands on micro-manager of his nightclub, knowing for example, exactly how much money he should extend as credit to a customer and when to cut her off.

   And this is what gets him into trouble in “High Stakes,” as when her angry husband comes in with a gun ablazing, Dante stays cool, fires back, and ends up seriously wounding the man. What the police can’t figure out, though, is that there is no gun in the room, nor any bullet holes.

   It’s an excellent, tightly knit episode, showing that good defective stories on TV can be done in only 30 minutes, and still have time to let the star’s personality show through.
   

   

      The Dante series on FOUR STAR PLAYHOUSE —

“Dante’s Inferno” October 9 1952
“The Squeeze” October 1 1953 (*)
“The Hard Way” November 19,1953
“The House Always Wins” April 28 1955. (*)
“High Stakes” January 26 1956 (*)
“No Limit” February 16, 1956
“A Long Way from Texas” May 3 1956
“The Stacked Deck” June 28 1956 (*)

NEW JACK CITY. Warner Brothers, 1991. Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Allen Payne, Chris Rock, Mario Van Peebles, Vanessa Williams, Judd Nelson. Director: Mario Van Peebles.

   The movie begins with a panorama aerial view of New York City, focusing squarely on the World Trade Center. (This was a decade before 9/11). That’s the cosmopolitan New York of high finance, of reaching for the heights and succeeding beyond all possible measure. But the camera doesn’t linger on that particular landmark for very long. Instead, it heads uptown and stops in Harlem. That’s where we see two men dangling another man from a bridge. Sure enough, they drop him into the river below. Just another casualty of the violent drug trade.

   What New Jack City does best is immersing you in the mean streets of Harlem in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing upon blaxploitation cinema from the 1970s, the movie most definitely has a political point of view. Yes, the drug trade is horrible and is controlled by self-serving sociopaths. And yes, Blacks who partake in that criminal enterprise are killing their own people. And this needs to be understood within the context of a broken economy with staggering unemployment rates in neighborhoods like Harlem.

   Lest you think that the film excuses or glamorizes the crack cocaine dealers, I will let you know that it assuredly does not. The movie actually takes the point of view of Scotty Appleton (Ice-T) a New York cop whose animosity toward drug dealers isn’t merely professional; having lost his mother to a dealer’s violence, it’s deeply personal. Appleton enlists the help of a recovering crack addict (a youthful Chris Rock) to bring down Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes), a vicious drug kingpin whose gang has taken over an entire apartment building. Much of the movie moves along at a quick enough pace, with occasional interspersed vignettes in which the viewer gets to witness the degradations of addiction.

   While there’s nothing wrong with the movie’s narrative per se, it suffers from wearing its influences far too flamboyantly on its sleeve. There’s barely a gangster movie trope that doesn’t make its appearance here. And having Nino (Snipes) watching Al Pacino’s Scarface on television and mentioning James Cagney in passing only serves to remind the viewer that pretty much everything you’re seeing in the story is something you’ve seen done better and with more originality before.

   Wesley Snipes is great, though. He exudes a dangerous swagger, a ruthless confidence in his invincibly. The world is his, he exclaims at one point. He’s not a villain, he implores. He’s merely a victim of an unjust world. It’s a thoroughly convincing portrait of a man hopelessly deluded by the chimera of power. Like gangsters in movies time and again, it will be his hubris that brings him down to earth.

STUART TOWNE – Death Out of Thin Air.  Don Diavolo #1. Coward McCann, hardcover, 1941. First published as a pair of stories from Red Star Mystery magazine: “Ghost of the Undead” (June 1940) and “Death Out of Thin Air” (August 1940). Kindle edition: Mysterious Press, 2012.

   Fresh from the pages of the too short-lived Red Star Mystery, the scarlet-clad magician detective plunges into two full blooded pulp adventures combating clever villains and outwitting frustrated police Inspector Church in both the title piece “Death Out of Thin Air” and its companion “Ghost of the Undead.” Like his creator Clayton Rawson’s other sleuth, the Great Merlini, Don Diavolo, Nicolas Alexander Houdin, is a magician sleuth mystery man who specializes in solving Impossible Crimes, though of a more fantastic and melodramatic nature than his more literary companion.

   In “Undead” Don Diavolo finds himself pitted against “the living ghost of a medieval” murderer, none other than the original Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, that has already struck terror in the heart of London:

   â€œUndead” even features a pretty good dying message clue that would have pleased Ellery Queen.

   In “Thin Air” Don Divallo is faced with invisible killers who fade in bright light in front of the eyes of reliable witnesses, and comes to the aid of hard-nosed Inspector Church, his police ally/nemesis who, as usual, is more concerned Don Diavolo is up to no good than catching the real killer after he witnesses the murder of Sergeant Healey by an invisible killer in a locked room with no possible exit but the front door. The case also involves the infamous necklace of Marie Antoinette that started the French Revolution, and, as Diavolo, framed for the crime, tells Church, “… an Invisible Man, but he’s a different sort than you expect.”

   Despite his penchant for footnotes explaining the historical veracity of the tricks used in the story, it should be admitted going in that Stuart Towne is hardly as scrupulous as his more restrained Clayton Rawson persona, and Don Diavolo, as that red costume and opera cape suggest, is given to a deal more melodrama than the Great Merlini.

   I can’t see Merlini tooling around Manhattan in white tie and tails in a scarlet Packard.

   Along the way the Don Diavollo books often include a colorful cast of grifters, magicians, con-men, and other theatrical types, Diavolo’s assistant/valet Chan, several beautiful women assistants, his manager, trick designer, the theater owner, and favorite publicist as well as murderous bad guys and cunning plots which Diavolo solves with flair, if not quite as carefully staged as a Rawson, John Dickson Carr, or Hake Talbot impossible crime, but what the stories lack there they make up for in speed and pulp style energy.

   Hardly the only magician detectives in the mainstream or the pulps, Merlini and Diavolo are still standouts in a company that includes Walter Gibson’s Norgil, and though no magician, the impossible crimes of Edward D. Hoch’s Nick Velvet. Other sleuths who show a fair hand at misdirection would include the Shadow and Arsene Lupin both given to performance art as much as crime prevention. No few writers have even trotted Harry Houdini out as amateur sleuth, notably Daniel Stashower in a series of well done mysteries.

   There are two collections of Towne novellas from Mysterious Press available in E-book form, this, and Death From Nowhere, and both are worth the effort, bright and entertaining pulp adventures with a bit more going for them than just the speed and invention of the average pulp mystery. While far from perfect they move fast enough you may not pause to overthink things, and the mystery and detective angle is much better developed than the usual pulp hero mystery. Don Diavolo may not have had a long run on the pulp stage, but his act is worth catching.

SERGEANT RYKER. Universal Pictures, 1968. Lee Marvin, Bradford Dillman, Peter Graves, Vera Miles, Lloyd Nolan, Murray Hamilton, Norman Fell. Screenplay: Seeleg Lester and William D. Gordon. Director: Buzz Kulik.

   There is a story behind this movie, both before and after. It first appeared as a two-part episode to begin the 1963 season of NBC’s Kraft Suspense Theater, October 10th and 17th, as “The Case Against Paul Ryker,” then once Lee Marvin became a star (Cat Ballou, The Dirty Dozen), the studio pulled it out of the vaults and cobbled them together to make a 90 minute theatrical release for overseas distribution. It was released in the US on DVD in 1988, again playing up Lee Marvin’s leading role.

   The two TV episodes also served as the pilot for a television series on ABC (1966-67) entitled Court Martial, starring Peter Graves and Bradford Dillon, but this time working together fo JAG instead of against each other, and shifting the time frame to World War II rather than the Korean conflict.

   In the film itself Sergeant Ryker (Lee Marvin) is being charged with treason, being caught after trying to cross back into US territory after deserting his outfit and being identified as consorting with the enemy. His only alibi for his actions is through a superior officer, now dead, whom he claims sent him there on a secret mission.

   Complicating matters as well is his former prosecutor (Brad Dillman) has been seen staying overnight with Ryker’s wife, and when he now tries to intercede on Marvin’s behalf, there is an obvious conflict of interest. Trials on TV always hold my interest, starting with Perry Mason, of course, and even though the real culprit is obvious, this one’s no exception.

   Both Peter Graves and Bradford Dillon are rather bland in this one, and so is Vera Miles. The star of course is Lee Marvin as the beleaguered Sgt. Ryker. His character is at turns withdrawn and belligerent, simmering with anger for many reasons, subject to violent outbursts when pressed, and while not particularly intelligent, he is absolutely loyal to his lifelong career, that of a US soldier. I can’t picture another actor in the role. He’s perfect for it.
   

POUL ANDERSON “Flight to Forever.” Novella. First published in Super Science Stories, November 1950 First reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952, edited by Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty (Frederick Fell, hardcover, 1952), and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, & Charles G. Waugh (Carroll & Graf, softcover, 1990), among others. Collected in Past Times (Tor, paperback, 1984) and Alight in the Void (Tor, paperback, 1991), among others.

   This is one of Poul Anderson’s earliest stories, written when he was only 24, and a better story of Gosh Wow time travel, I can think of none better. And I do not mean that disparagingly! This tale was written back when time-traveling machines could be constructed in a garage, or if not, then in a single scientist’s laboratory, with only a modicum of assistance. Such a scientist is Martin Saunders, and his machine has been working perfectly. Inanimate objects have been sent farther and farther into the future, and in case they have also returned.

   Until now. An object sent 100 into the future has not come back, and Saunders an assistant decide to take a trip there themselves and see if they can’t figure out what went wrong. Now you and I know that this might not be the wisest thing to do, but this was also in the age (1950) when scientists did not think things out too clearly ahead of time before jumping into either homemade spaceships or time machines as they should.

   The problem does not consist of getting there. It seems, however, that there is a limit of only 70 years in going backward in time. The solution: keep going ahead into the future until they reach such a time when scientists have figured out a way to overcome the difficulty in going backward in time. Ahead they go, each stage of the in larger and larger increments of time. Fifty tears, a hundred years, a thousand years, five thousand years. Empires come and go, as they discover, oftentimes with barbarians at the gates. Some people they find are friendly; others not. A million years, a million million years, and on to the end of time?

   Well, I will leave it to you to read this to see if Saunders ever finds his way home again, but wow, what a trip he makes!
   

THE FILE OF THE GOLDEN GOOSE. United Artists, UK/US, 1969. Yul Brynner Yul Brynner, Charles Gray, Edward Woodward, John Barrie, Adrienne Corri, Graham Crowden. Director: Sam Wanamaker.

   I was skeptical at the beginning. Very skeptical. For the first ten minutes or so, The File of the Golden Goose has that cringeworthy voice-over narration found most often in second rate crime and science fiction pictures from the 1950s. Here, it is not merely grating, but downright unnecessary. Any viewer paying even the slightest bit of attention would be able to follow the proceedings without a narrator’s most unwelcome assistance.

   But a few things happen pretty quickly that make this thriller far more enjoyable than it has any right to be. First of all, the casting. While Yul Brenner may have been a bit of a fading star by 1969, his presence here as Peter Novak, a tough as nails treasury agent is most welcome, even if his character’s go-it-alone persona is more than a bit over the top. It’s the supporting, cast, however that makes this work.

   Edward Woodward, years before he got top billing in The Wicker Man (1973), portrays Arthur Thompson, a Scotland Yard inspector assigned to work alongside Novak to crack a deadly counterfeiting ring. And who might just be among the leaders of the forgery network? Well, Walter Gotell for starters. You might remember him as General Gogol in some Roger Moore-era James Bond films. Then, there’s Charles Gray who portrays Harrison, a flamboyantly gay gangster with a predilection for gamblers, bath houses, and drug-induced parties in swinging London.

   There is, to be sure, nothing remotely cinematic about The File of The Golden Goose. Sam Wanamaker, who may be more known in England today for restoring the Globe Theater than for his acting and directing, lends this movie a middling made-for-TV quality. There isn’t much in here that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a typical The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode, some of which were turned into theatrical releases. That’s the aesthetic style at work here. Yet, there is something undeniably charming about the clunky, haphazard direction. It’s never amateurish and it’s always imbued with a certain misguided passion.

   What the film lacks in cinematic merit, it more than compensates in storytelling. It does what a thriller is supposed to do. It keeps you guessing. If you allow yourself to immerse yourself in the proceedings, you might find yourself genuinely impressed by Wanamaker was able to do with his actors. None of the characters, however minor, the viewer encounter along the way are remotely the same. Each has some unique characteristic that makes them stand out from all the rest, be it the sleazy Liverpudlian hotel manager or the counterfeiting gang’s hitman.

   Now, don’t get me wrong. This movie is not remotely comparable in quality to the best thrillers of the 1970s. Not at all. In fact, I found myself to be quite surprised that I ended up enjoying The File of The Golden Goose as much as I did. Perhaps it’s the isolation recently engendered by the Coronavirus, but I found this movie to work in one particular way that genre movies are intended to do. As escapism pure and simple. It may not be overly memorable as a cohesive film, but there are most definitely scenes in the movie that I will remember fondly.