MONEY MADNESS. Film Classics, 1948. Hugh Beaumont, Frances Rafferty, Harlan Warde, Cecil Weston. Screenwriter: Al Martin. Director: Sam Newfield (as Peter Stewart).
There is a small but elite set of noir films that begin with a man getting off a bus (or train) with only a suitcase. The town is usually in warmer climes, and all he owns is likely to be in the suitcase, but that’s not a absolute requirement. It doesn’t take him long to find a girl, perhaps working in a small diner, night club or roadhouse on the outskirts of town.
In this case, however, before he meets the girl, he puts most of the contents of the suitcase into a bank safety deposit box: $200,000 in cash. We the viewer are suspicious immediately, but not the girl, who is as tired of slinging hash as she is of living with a crabby old aunt. So weary of life as she is living it as to be swept off her feet and be married only two days later.
Which is when the man (Hugh Beaumont) lets the girl (Frances Rafferty) what he has in mind to do with the aunt, and how he plans to launder the money, although I am not sure that’s a word that was in common use in 1948.
As the naive young woman, Frances Rafferty is perhaps a little too naive and too willing to go along with the other’s plan, but Hugh Beaumont as the man with the plan is a revelation as someone who can go in only a split second from a sweet-talking lover to a tough and out-and-out cad who won’t take no for an answer, and in no uncertain terms, lets his new bride know it.
It was a different era when men could dominate women this way, or is it? The story is taut and well-structured with only one caveat, and the minimal amount of money that was able to be spent on production fits in perfectly with the dinginess of life of the less than middle class in 1948.
The caveat? It’s too late now, but I’ve have told the producers of the film to drop the opening scene altogether. It doesn’t fit, no way no how. They’d have been far better off starting with man getting off the bus, which is where the movie begins anyway. Watch the film for yourself and see if you don’t agree.
TONY KENRICK – The Chicago Girl. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1976. Berkley, paperback.
The first line sets the tone: “He’d always said that older hookers were better value; they knew more tricks.â€
The idea is to find a Vassar girl willing to impersonate a prostitute realistically enough to con a fence out of a $800,000 emerald necklace. It’s a dangerous business, with plenty of authentic New York City street life as backdrop. Of course it’s going to be movie. Some of the complications are seen coming, but once you’re hooked, Kendrick has you all the way. A wild finish.
Rating: A minus.
–Slightly revised from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 1, No. 2, March 1977.
UPDATE. While a couple of Kenrick’s books were made into movies, The Chicago Girl was not one of them.
I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while. I don’t go to the comic pages in my daily newspaper first everyday, but they come close. The ratings below, on a scale from 0 to 100, are totally subjective, and if I were to do this again a few months from now, they’d probably change, but not by too much, I hope. I won’t describe any of them. If there are any you’re not familiar with, well, that’s what they invented Google for. Feel free to comment, however, and if you have any favorites that the Courant doesn’t carry, I’d like to know about them.
PEANUTS Charles Schulz. 98
CLASSIC DOONESBURY Garry Trudeau. Not read.
GARFIELD Jim Davis. 90
SHOE Gary Brookins & Susie MacNelly. 90
DUSTIN Steve Kelley & Jeff Parker 90
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE Stephan Pastis 94
MUTTS Patrick MacDonnell 92
ARCTIC CIRCLE Alex Hallett 40
JUMP START Robb Armstrong 30
GET FUZZY Darby Conley 10
BLONDIE Dean Young & John Marshall 95
DILBERT Scott Adams 98
GIL THORPE Neal Rubin & Frank McLaughlin Not read.
MARY WORTH Karen Moy & June Brigham Not read.
REX MORGAN, M. D. Terry Beatty Not read.
JUDGE PARKER Woody Wilson & Mike Manley Not read.
BALDO Canu & Castellanos 88
FUNKY WINKERBEAN Tom Batiuk 20
LIO Mark Tatulli 20
WIZARD OF ID Johnny Hart & Brant Parker 80
RHYMES WITH ORANGE Hillary Price 70
MONTY Jim Meddick 25
FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE Lynn Johnston 80
B.C. Hart 85
BEETLE BAILEY Mort, Greg & Brian Walker 92
HI & LOIS Greg & Brian Walker and Chance Browne 92
HAGAR THE HORRIBLE Chris Browne 94
NON SEQUITUR Wiley Miller 10
CURTIS Ray Billingsley 85
PICKLES Brian Crane 99
ZITS Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman 92
ROSE IS ROSE Pat Brady & Don Wimmer 40
MOTHER GOOSE AND GRIMM Mike Peters 92
ZIPPY Bill Griffith Not read.
Ha! Not as easy as I thought. I’ve changed some of these numbers several times already.
RELIC HUNTER “Buddha’s Bowl†A Canadian-produced series. 20 September 1999 (Season 1, Episode 1. Tia Carrera (Sydney Fox), Christien Anholt (Nigel Bailey), Lindy Booth. Guest Cast: Tony Rosato.
Any resemblance to the Indiana Jones movies is not only not incidental, but as far I can see, totally intentional. Sydney Fox is nominally a professor of archaeology and ancient history at Trinity College, but every week for three seasons on TV, she went off to yet another part of the world to track down a relic, if you will, of a large significance, importance, or (very often) of value. She’s also a master of martial arts, and if this first episode is any example, looks just fine in a simple black bra.
Accompanying her on all these adventures is her teaching assistant, Nigel Bailey, a much more reserved young man from England whom both Sydney and we, the viewer meet for the first time in “Buddha’s Bowl.†On his very first day on the job he’s swept off to Nepal, where a map is said to point the way to the relic’s present location.
Of course there is someone else looking for it as well, an old acquaintance and rival who knows Sydney well enough to call her “Sweet cheeks.” The scenery is great, the danger is real (stuck in a tomb filling with sand and no exit, for example), and Tia Carrera, in almost every scene, is a young woman whom every young male would most desperately like to trade places with Nigel to go on all 66 episodes with her.
JOHN GARDNER – License Renewed. Rochard Marek, US, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, US, paperback, 1982. Published first in the UK by Jonathan Cape, hardcover, 1981.
After the death of Ian Fleming, the holders of the James Bond copyright bestowed upon John Gardner the honor and responsibility of moving the British master spy, along with his galaxy of gadgets and arch-villains, into the 1980s. This established thriller writer has responded admirably.
Here Bond is assigned to infiltrate the castle of the Laird of Murcaldy, a renowned nuclear scientist who has had meetings with an international terrorist known as Franco. Bond manages to deftly extract an invitation to Gold Cup Day at Ascot. Very English. He is off to the castle in the highlands, where he meets people with names like Mary Jane Mashkins and Lavender Peacock and affects the courses of nations with names like England, France, and America.
If this novel isn’t a Fleming original, it is still great fun. Everything Bond fans would expect is here: the eccentric, larger-than-life villain with his sexy and thoroughly evil female companion and preternaturally tough henchman; the seductive and seduced beautiful woman of questionable allegiance; the slyly sexual double entendre; the infusion of ultramodern technology; and the name-dropping of expensive quality brands of everything from perfume to handguns.
So artfully has Gardner penetrated and captured Fleming’s style that one can only wonder if Bond’s old nemesis, SPECTER, might somehow be involved. No doubt Bond’s boss, the enigmatic M, could tell us; but. as usual, he is tight-lipped.
Another recommended title in the new Bond series by Gardner is Role of Honor (1984).
A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT. RKO, 1932. John Barrymore, Billie Burke, David Manners, Katharine Hepburn. Director: George Cukor.
Been wanting to see this one for years. It’s a bit stagey — more in the construction than in the filming — but quite nice. Hepburn is competent in her film debut, and maybe shows a glimmer of the overwhelming talent that made her career, but basically, there’s not much to separate her in this performance from say, Elissa Landi, Margaret Sullavan, or any other near- greats. David Manners, fresh from Dracula and The Mummy, manages to look not too far out of his depth, and Billie Burke is her usual fun self.
But the picture really belongs to John Barrymore, in a showy part as a recoverir1g Mental Patient who thinks he can pick up tl1e pieces of his long-dead marriage. Though he overacts a bit now and then, he’s quite moving at times. The curtain line is very effective and surprising as well.
So is the on-screen affection shown between Hepburn and Barrymore, considering that this film was the basis of yet another Hollywood anecdote: During production, Barrymore allegedly Put The Make on Ms. Hepburn in decidedly unsubtle fashion.
Class act that she was, she pointedly spurned him and did not mention the incident again, till the end of filming when she is alleged to have said, “I shall never do another scene with you,” To which John replied, “I wasn’t aware you ever had.”
“FATHERS AND SONS.” An episode of Republic of Doyle, CBC, Canada. 06 Jan 2010. (Season One, Episode One). Allan Hawco (Jake Doyle), Sean McGinley (Malachy Doyle), Lynda Boyd, Rachel Wilson, Krystin Pellerin, Marthe Bernard. Creators and co-screenwriters: Allan Hawco, Perry Chafe & Malcolm MacRury. Director: Mike Clattenburg.
You can’t tell the players without a scorecard. It’s a large ensemble cast, with already complicated history, even before this first episode begins. I’ll do my best in the next paragraph below, but as a first episode, it does the job quite well in terms of getting the viewers acquainted right away, or at least the screenwriters did.
Jake and Malachy Doyle are a father and son PI team in, of all places, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador — or at least, I believe so; in spite of all of the picturesque scenery, I don’t remember the town being specifically stated. Their office manager is Malachy’s second wife, Rose, and Jake’s stepmother. Staying with them is Malachy’s granddaughter Katrina, or “Tinny,” and Jake’s niece.
Jake is in the process of getting a divorce from his wife, Dr. Nikki Renholds, but he has an eye on Constable Leslie Bennett, who is in charge of the police end of the investigation. She tries to be aloof, but she is attracted in spite of herself (or so it appears). The would-be divorce is in jeopardy, however. As this episode ends, Constable Bennett had just let her hair down and is about to knock on Jake’s front door. On the inside, though, Jake and Nikki are busily taking off clothing and consorting with the “enemy.”
There is as much comedy involved in Republic of Doyle as there is mystery, which has to do with a boyhood friend of Jake’s from being held for manslaughter, but he refuses to say anything on behalf of himself, even though his father has hired the Doyles on his behalf. It’s a good mix of comedy and drama, and I only wish the acting were better. The two male stars are fine, but both the two main suspects, both female, and Krystin Pellerin, as the very good-looking police constable, seem too young and inexperienced for their roles.
But the season six has just ended (in December 2014), so there are a lot of episodes to watch, should I decide to, and I probably will. I would like to know, at the least, how the cliffhanger works out. (I suspect that she decides at the last second not to knock after all.)
NICHOLAS MONSARRAT – The Nylon Pirates. Cassell, UK, hardcover, 1960. William Sloane Associates, US, hardcover, 1960. Cardinal GC-131, US, paperback, 1962.
When she was sixteen, his ruthless good looks had totally overwhelmed her…six years later, the ruthlessness still softened only for her. She was the sole taming agent of a man who for some reason — for many reasons — regarded the world simply as a target.
The girl in question is Kathy, twenty eight years younger than Carl Wenstrom, her lover, and mastermind of a group of modern day pirates, con-men, crooked gamblers, gigolos, and beautiful women who prey on the rich, the weak, and the foolish.
They are five: the Professor working on his magnum opus on piracy (Unless one kept him under close-range scrutiny for quite a long time, the Professor was a figure of undoubted dignity.), Diane Loring the sensuous slut (…she did not look like a lady, but she did not miss it by too wide a margin…), Louis Scapelli the lover who despises women (…a homosexual, a gambler, a pickpocket, a dancing instructor…), Kathy the innocent under Carl’s spell, and Wenstrom himself, 54, and desperate for one last big game, a man walking on a razor’s edge between his nature and his mask of civility.
…this fantastic man was for her like an outlawed god. For him, robbery was an intellectual exercise; but it was still robbery, often dangerous, brutal, and without pity, and it was with this consistent wickedness in his head that he lived, made love, was kind to children and old people, paid his taxes, gave improvidently to beggars.
And now there is the opportunity of a lifetime, a millionaires cruise to the Caribbean, down the coast of South America, and back up the coast of Africa, eighty days as the wolves among the sheep, tired businessmen, jaded aristocrats, women hungry to be desired, greedy fools at cards and other games, lonely desperate people grasping at youth or happiness or escape, a feast for Wenstrom and his wolves and worth the $26,000 he has sunk into cabins aboard the S.S. Alcestis, a floating luxury hotel.
On board the ship are Captain Harmer an old hand at sea (Men liked him because they felt safe in his hands; women, because they did not.) who has gone from a DSO in the war to babysitting spoiled soft people, his too good looking first Officer Tiptree-Jones, and his favorite young Tim Mansell boyish and attractive but with a strength that didn’t show beneath the surface.
And of course three hundred and eight passengers all with weaknesses, flaws, personal agendas, personality clashes, and of course five wolves to feed on them.
The Nylon Pirates is a mainstream novel by the author best known for the classic of war at sea The Cruel Sea, but whose best sellers included The Tribe That Lost Its Head, The Kapillian of Malta, The Ship That Died of Shame, and at least one spy novel, Smith and Jones.
When Diana Loring gets an STD and goes to the ship’s doctor the whole thing starts to fall apart, as Purser Foxy Cutler puts it all together for the Captain,
“I’m just thinking as I go along. The Loring girl is sleeping around with a lot of older men — maybe for money. Scapelli is doing the same sort of thing, almost certainly for money; it could hardly be anything else. It begins to add up to a funny sort of family. And that’s not all.” He paused.
“What else?”
“The father, or uncle, or whatever he is. Wenstrom. He’s been cleaning up, too, at poker. And I understand their stewardess is very hot on the idea that he and the other girl—our little Kathy— aren’t father and stepdaughter at all, but something much cosier.”
Carl Wenstrom gradually comes unstrung by his ambitious game and the all too human pawns including Kathy whose worship turn sour as she finds herself falling in love with decent Tim Mansell, the man Carl can never be, the man Carl is not as his games begin to unravel, leading to murder (“Good God, do you think all this happened by accident? I like being a crook! It’s the only thing to be!”).
…he smelt danger. A lot of people—their victims —knew about their operations already; for various reasons, they would not talk, but if anyone else grew suspicious, if gossip started, the entire thing might collapse.
Now, at the break-even point, they could not afford that; the whole purpose of the trip was just coming over the horizon.
The book was racy for its day though it is more open about sex than pornographic, more adult in theme and concept than action. As always with Monsarrat it is a compelling read, literate, page turning, and painfully acute in its observation of people, both the victims pitiable and disgusting and those preying on them.
The Nylon Pirates is a mainstream novel, a bestseller, and not a genre novel, but it is well in John D. MacDonald territory, and a damn good read. It’s a grownup book written by and for grownups, a fascinating look at a very real world which we usually see in much more glamorous terms in movies full of charming con-men and women. Here the knife beneath the charm is visible.
SALT. Columbia Pictures, 2010. Angelina Jolie (Evelyn Salt), Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Olbrychski, August Diehl. Screenwriter: Kurt Wimmer. Director: Phillip Noyce.
I have a theory that that says that the reason they called this movie Salt was so that they could call the sequel Salt II. But even though this movie cries out for one – a sequel, that is – it never came about. It is a shame, because not only did it do well at the box office, but I found it both faster and flashier than several James Bond movies which I will not mention here.
Originally created with Tom Cruise in mind for the leading role, Angelie Jolie, as a CIA agent accused of secretly working for the Russians, proves that she can do the stunts (not herself, surely, all of them) and take as much physical punishment (on the screen) as any male actor in the world, including Tom Cruise.
If by which you take that to mean that there are plenty of car chases, gunfire, explosions and attempted assassinations to fill anyone’s dance card for the evening, that is exactly what I wish you to take, with eye-opening twists in the plot to give you enough whiplash to keep your chiropractor busy for a week.
It is not until it’s over until you realize how unlikely the whole affair was. And yet, even now that it’s over, I have to tell you that I found this the most enjoyable out-and-out thriller movie I have seen all year.
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
In previous columns I’ve discussed Lawrence Block’s earliest Matthew Scudder novels, in which the ex-cop turned unlicensed PI was a practicing alcoholic. That period culminated with EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1982), in the final chapter of which he admitted his alcoholism at an AA meeting, and WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES (1986) in which, a few years into sobriety, he tells a story from back in his drinking days.
From then on he remains sober—even if tempted at times to return to the bottle—and changes some of his habits, no longer tithing as in previous novels but giving away countless dollar bills to the panhandlers he meets on the street.
In OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE (1989) he’s working on the kind of case Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op called a wandering daughter job: a Subaru dealer from Indiana has hired him to locate the fourth of his six children, who came to New York in hopes of an acting career but dropped out of touch with her family a few months earlier and vanished from her usual haunts.
That is one of CUTTING EDGE’s two plot threads. The other begins after an AA meeting when fellow alcoholic Eddie Dunphy hints that, pursuant to Step Five of the organization’s program, he’d like to confess to Scudder all the sins of his past life. A few days later Matt discovers Dunphy’s body in the bathroom of his rent-controlled apartment. The evidence indicates death by autoerotic asphyxiation, which means that he hanged himself while masturbating.
In most crime novels this plot thread would turn out to be interconnected with the other one. Not here. While checking out the bars the vanished Paula Hoeldtke frequented, Scudder encounters Mick Ballou, a huge Irish professional criminal known for his brutal rages: he’s said to have beaten one informer to death with a baseball bat and to have displayed another’s severed head in a bowling bag. Oddly enough, this stone killer and Scudder become close friends of sorts. Ballou happens to know the truth about Paula and eventually shares what he knows with his newfound buddy, after which the two go off to attend the Butchers’ Mass, a ritual that will pop up regularly in future novels.
As for the second plot thread, Block blithely conceals from us until the climax that Scudder has linked Eddie Dunphy’s death with a whole series of murders, whose motivation would only be possible in New York. With even less of a unified structure than earlier Scudders, with entire chapters not the least bit relevant to what little story there is, CUTTING EDGE is certainly a minor entry in the series. But somehow it keeps us reading, almost as if we were being swept downstream by a swiftly flowing river. Very few authors could have pulled off this feat but Larry Block is one of them.
***
With A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD (1990) the series takes a quantum leap forward as, for the first time, Scudder is pitted against an adversary who might be described as a cross between Max Cady from CAPE FEAR and Hannibal Lecter, as close to a Satan figure as is possible in a godless world.
Scudder gets a late-night phone call from Elaine Mardell, the enterprising hooker from IN THE MIDST OF DEATH (1976), who has received an envelope with a clipping from an Ohio newspaper telling of the brutal slaughter of a family—a respectable furniture store owner, his wife, and their three children—which local police have written off as a murder-suicide case. The wife, Elaine tells Scudder, had been a colleague of hers in prostitution before her marriage, and in a flashback sequence from Scudder’s years as a cop we learn that, a dozen years ago, he and the two call girls had conspired to frame James Leo Motley, a sadistic psycho apparently beyond the law’s reach, and send him to prison on a one-to-ten-year sentence.
Motley had sworn vengeance on Scudder and the women, and now it seems that he’s slaughtered one of them, along with her husband and kids, and that Elaine is his next target. Motley comes on stage only a few times in this 300-page novel, but Block creates a sense of menace throughout the book as Motley (who thinks nothing of butchering children and having anal sex with a dead woman) claims several more victims, including a woman whose only link with Scudder is that they shared the same last name.
At one point he even lures Matt into a trap and, as a taste of what lies ahead, tortures him. Finally Scudder takes the offensive and—well, do you remember the climax of CAPE FEAR when Robert Mitchum as Cady is drowning Gregory Peck and Peck grabs a large rock at the river bottom and smashes Mitchum’s skull with it? All but a handful who saw that movie were clamoring for Peck to keep hitting Mitchum with that rock until his brains were mush.
When I interviewed J. Lee Thompson, who directed the picture, he told me that he too wanted Peck to kill Mitchum but was overruled by studio execs who demanded that the movie should end with a ringing endorsement of the legal system’s competence to protect us from feral humans. Whether the mano a mano between Scudder and Motley ends as CAPE FEAR ended or as Thompson wanted it to end, I’d be a toad if I revealed here. Most of Block’s readers won’t need three guesses, or even two, to reach the answer.
***
With A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE (1991) Block returned to the two-plot-threads structure he’d used without great success in OUT ON THE CUTTING EDGE, but this time the parts of the whole are connected in a fresh and unusual way. We open with Scudder and Mick Ballou attending a mediocre boxing match at a near-empty arena in the dreariest part of Queens. Amid the sparse spectators Matt happens to notice a man smoothing back a teen-age boy’s hair, and the gesture strikes him as strangely familiar.
Next comes a flashback chapter in which we learn what brought Scudder to the arena: not the fight but a job. A gay man with HIV, the brother of a brutally murdered young pregnant woman, has hired him to investigate her husband, an exec of the cable TV service that televises the matches in that Queens arena, whom the brother suspects of being behind the murder. That night in bed Scudder suddenly remembers where he’d seen that hair-smoothing gesture before: in a snuff film.
A second flashback, this one running two chapters, begins after an AA meeting six months earlier as a fellow alcoholic asks Scudder to look into a videocassette of THE DIRTY DOZEN that he’d rented from a local store, only to find that fifteen minutes of the film had been erased and replaced with footage of a man and woman in S&M costumes having sex with a teen-age boy in shackles and then apparently killing him.
Now we return to present time, and stay there. Trying to trace the boy in the snuff film and the boy in the Queens arena, Scudder encounters a black teen known as TJ who will become a fixture in the series from this point forward, his dialogue a compound of it-be-rainin-out argot and rhyming jivetalk that tends after a while to get on the nerves. My nerves anyway. Eventually our unlicensed PI finds the connection between the two plot threads—yes, this time there is one. The climax is a Walpurgisnacht of sex and gore in the same arena where the book began as Scudder and Mick (with some backup) take on a devilish pair of recreational killers (with some backup).
Afterwards they attend the Butchers’ Mass and both of them take Communion. Why did Scudder do that? “I don’t know,†he says on the last page. “There are lots of things I do without knowing why the hell I do them. Half the time I don’t know why I stay sober….â€
For me SLAUGHTERHOUSE is the breakthrough book, the one where Block worked out and perfected all the key elements of the Scudder series. The proper length and complexity. The guest appearances by characters from previous Scudders: not only Elaine and Ballou but the cop Joe Durkin and the pimp-turned-art-dealer Chance and the “albino Negro†Danny Boy Bell and Scudder’s mentor Jim Faber. The explosive climax in which Scudder imposes his own brand of private justice or vengeance or whatever you choose to call it against one or more sadistic sociopaths beyond the reach of the law.
An elderly Washington Heights woman had been killed watching television, struck in the head by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting on the street outside her apartment….The woman was the fourth bystander killed so far this year….
On Park Avenue…a man had leaned out the window of an unmarked white van to snatch the handbag of a middle-aged woman who was waiting for the light to change. She’d had the bag’s strap looped around her neck…and when the van sped off she was dragged and strangled….
In Queens, a group of teenagers walking across the Forest Park golf course had come upon the body of a young woman who had been abducted several days earlier in Woodhaven. She’d been doing her grocery shopping on Jamaica Avenue when another van…pulled up at the curb. Two men jumped out of the back, grabbed her, hustled her into the van, and climbed in after her….A preliminary medical examination disclosed evidence of sexual assault and multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen.
Don’t watch television, don’t carry a purse, don’t walk down the street. Jesus.
Or, as Hammett put it several years before Larry Block was born: We live while blind chance spares us.
