NEVER LET GO. Rank Film Distributors Ltd., UK, 1960. Richard Todd, Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Sellars, Adam Faith, Carol White, Mervyn Johns. Co-screenwriter/director: John Guillermin. Currently available on YouTube here.

   You’d hardly believe it was Peter Sellers. Well, that’s not quite true. It’s just that one doesn’t necessarily think of Sellers when one thinks of a cinematic villain. Indeed, Sellers almost never played completely straight roles, let alone villainous ones. That, above all else, is what makes Never Let Go worth watching. For here one gets to see how much of a range Sellers had and how incredibly captivating a performance he was capable of when presented with the opportunity.

   Directed by John Guillerman, this late British noir exudes a somewhat sleazy, definitively downmarket atmosphere boosted by a jazzy John Barry score. This is not posh London, but the London of juvenile delinquents and the lower middle class struggling to get by. Among them is perfume salesman John Cummings (Richard Todd), a perpetual dreamer who thinks success is just over the horizon. When his recently purchased 1959 Ford Anglia is stolen, he sets out on a frenzied quest – think Moby Dick – to get his beloved car back.

   This puts him at odds with both the police and the leader of a vehicular theft ring by the name of Lionel Meadows (Peter Sellers). Meadows is a brute of a man. Cruel and vindictive, he isn’t above hitting women, killing animals (note: there is a particularly disturbing scene where a real fish is left flopping on the ground), and forcing a lonely, elderly man into taking his own life.

   As much as Meadows is cruel, Cummings is determined. He will get his car back, even if it costs him his marriage or his life. This obsessive desire can be best understood as reflective of the perilous economic status of England’s middle class. It’s not so much the car that he wants, as it is what the car represents; namely, the post-war dream for societal and economic advancement in a rigidly stratified society.

   Even though Cummings is the titular hero in his psychodrama, it is Meadows who is the most memorable character. Richard Todd simply can’t compete with Peter Sellers in holding the audience’s attention. It’s a downright chilling performance from a legendary actor most associated with his comedic roles.

ROBERT LOPRESTI “The Charity Case.” Marty Crow #9?? Black Cat Mystery Magazine #7, paperback, November 2020 (Special Private Eye Edition).

   Private eye Marty Crow’s home base is Atlantic City, and if this fairly recent example is at all representative, even though that particular town must have its dark and dangerous streets, his adventures are not to be taken all that seriously. In “The Charity Case” he’s hired by a couple visiting from some prairie state who claim they’ve been robbed of $800 by a beggar on the street.

   But when Crow talks to the husband alone, the latter admits that he simply gave the man the money. It seems that he’s a member of the Final Days Punctionalist Church, and they believe devoutly in helping outsiders and people down on their luck. There is about to be a schism in the church, however, a religious issue, concerning to whom charity should be given. And if Crow doesn’t get the money back, a marriage is likely to break up as well.

   But what about the bum he gave the money to? Ah, that’s where the story lies. Neither Sam Spade nor Philip Marlowe would be caught in a story such as this, but the world of PI fiction is a whole lot larger than what they could ever have imagined. This story proves it.
   

      Earlier stories in the series include:

• “Crow’s Game” (Summer 1989, P.I. Magazine)
• “Crow in a Storm” (Winter 1990, P.I. Magazine)
• “Big Heart Harry’s Case” (Summer 1990, P.I. Magazine)
• “Crow’s Feat” (1993, Constable New Crimes 2)
• “The Federal Case” (May 1991, AHMM)
• “Four of a Kind” (May 1994, AHMM)
• “Crow’s Avenue” (2003, Hardbroiled)

      Thanks to the Thrilling Detective website for the list of stories above.

Added later, taken from Robert Lopreski’s website:

• “Crow’s Lesson.” (2013, Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble.)

CODE 7: VICTIM 5. British Lion Film Corp., UK, 1964. Columbia Pictures, US, 1965. Lex Barker, Ann Smyrner, Ronald Fraser, Walter Rilla. Co-producer (uncredited): Harry Alan Towers. Director: Robert Lynn.

   Code 7: Victim 5 has the distinction (?) of being one of the first films to try and cash in on the post-Goldfinger James Bond craze. This was marketed as a spy thriller (The original title was simply Victim 5) but it’s actually … well, what is it exactly? Something about a New York Private Eye named Steve Martin (is he meant to be the same character Raymond Burr played in Godzilla? Could this be the basis of future academic discussion?) called to Cape Town South Africa to find out who killed a millionaire’s butler, and learning this is simply one in a series of murders involving former POWs from World War II who … who … zzzzz.

   Steve (played here by Lex Barker) Martin’s investigative technique consists of going from one tourist spot to another – any place where there’s scenery, really — looking for clues or something and getting in fights, shoot-outs and car chases, all of which, the background music Insists, must be very exciting, but they seemed sort of blah to me.

   There’s a bit of imagination In one sequence involving Death by Ostrich Stampede, and late in the film we get to see the former Tarzan once again stalking lions through the jungle, but mostly this is the kind of film that is usually (and charitably) dismissed as “routine.” The smutty-sub-Bond double-entendres and the plethora of girls In Beach Party bikinis, sporting 1960s hairdo’s maybe made the movie look hip back in ’65, but now it just looks quaint — it doesn’t have a quaint charm, it’s merely quaint.

OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Don’t Ever Love Me. Macmillan, hardcover, 1946. Popular Library #332, paperback, 1951.

   Octavus Roy Cohen’s mysteries are slick and entertaining, smoothly written in a style that no doubt appealed to the readers of the Saturday Evening Post and other publications where many of his stories. appeared. Don’t Ever Love Me is a good example of his novel-length work, a light romantic mystery featuring a fairly liberated heroine, at least by the standards of 1946.

   Lynn Sheridan, a successful copywriter for a New York advertising firm, is the victim of what seems to be a series of bizarre practical jokes: Someone calls the police to report her murder: someone calls an ambulance service to report that she has been badly hurt; and her escort to the opera is killed by a bullet that passes so close to her that she can hear it buzz by. Naturally all this puts quite a strain on Lynn and her fiancé, Alan Gordon.

   To say much more about the plot would be unfair, but it involves two more murders and a goodly number of suspects. Cohen manages some adroit misdirection before Gordon, to the astonishment of the homicide detective on the case, manages to figure out just exactly what has been going on. And of course, it’s fun to consider the detective’s final words on the case in light of today’s methods of law enforcement: “The confession is what counts – not how you get it.”

   Paperback collectors will find the cover of the 1951 Popular Library edition of Don’t Ever Love Me irresistible, even though the beautiful blonde with the dark eyebrows and the automatic pistol has nothing at all to do with the story.

   Jim Hanvey, Detective ( 1923) is a collection of short stories that demonstrates Cohen’s ability in that form. And Cohen came up with the title Scrambled Yeggs (1934) years before Richard S. Prather.

     ———
   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.
   

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, December 1966. Overall rating: 3 stars.

JACOB HAY “The Opposite Number.” The “inside” story of the spy business. (3)

AGATHA CHRISTIE “Hercule Poirot and the Sixth Chair.” Original title: “Yellow Iris.” Poirot stops a murder from occurring at a dinner party. (3)

WILLIAM BRITTAIN “The Boy Who Read Agatha Christie.” Schoolboy foils plan of college students. Enjoyable but trivial. (3)

ARTHUR PORGES “Private Beachhead.” Gimmick with radios too uncertain for story basis. (2)

YOUNGMAN CARTER “Seeds of Time.” SF story about visitor through time. Nothing unusual. (3)

CORNELL WOOLRICH “All It Takes Is Brains.” Novelette. Original title “Crime of St. Catherine Street.” Man on a bet enters Montreal with 75¢ and leaves with $1500, being wanted for murder in the meantime. Exciting in pulp style. (4)

CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “The Problem Solver and the Defector.” Verner finds secret plans. (3)

GEORGE EMMETT “Pushkin Pays.” Attempt to dispose of body in ocean fails, thanks to appearance of Russian submarine. (1)

HELEN NIELSEN “The Chicken Feed Mine.” Three ex-servicemen kill a desert rat for his “savings.” (3)

JOHN T. SLADEK “Capital C on Planet Amp.” SF, but in far-out camp style. Garbage. (0)

L. E. BEHNEY “The Long Hot Day.” Tale from home. Husband kills stranger his wife falsely accuses. (3)

JOHN DICKSON CARR “To Wake the Dead.” Original title “Blind Man’s Hood.” An adequate locked room mystery, but supernatural tone of story is forced. (2)

RUFUS KING “Anatomy of a Crime.” hort novel. Stuff Drscoll solves a murder made to appear a textbook suicide. Actually an inverted detective story as the reader follows the battle of wits between murderer and investigator with fascination. (4)

UNION PACIFIC. Paramount Pictures, 1939. Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, Robert Barrat, Henry Kolker, Anthony Quinn, Lon Chaney Jr., Stanley Ridges, Evelyn Keyes, Regis Toomey, Joe Sawyer, J. M. Kerrigan, Richard Lane, Fuzzy Knight. Screenplay by Walter DeLeon, C. Gardner Sullivan, and Jessie Lasky Jr.; adapted by Jack Cunningham from a story Ernest Haycox (also uncredited on the screenplay, along with Frederick Hazlitt Brennan). Directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

   One of Cecil B. DeMille’s better epics, and probably his best Western, the story of the race to Ogden, Utah, by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad centers on the efforts of trouble-shooter Jeff Butler (Joel McCrea) in the employee of General Dodge (Francis McDonald) to prevent murderous gambler Syd Campeau (Brian Donlevy) from sabotaging the advance of the title railroad for crooked Chicago businessman A. M. Barrows (Henry Kolker), who plans to fund the Union Pacific, buy Central Pacific stock and make a fortune selling the former short when it fails by his machinations.

   It’s based on a tight well written story by Ernest Haycox, ironically whose story “The Last Stage to Lordsburg” was filmed as Stagecoach the same year. Cecil B.DeMille and John Ford both using your work as a source the same year was a pretty heady place for a pulpster to be, and it showed when Haycox, already in the slick, soon graduated to the Book Club circuit and best seller list too.

   Complicating things is the three-way romance between Irish postmistress Molly Monahan (Barbara Stanwyck, beautiful, though you can take some issue with her Irish accent), daughter of engineer Monahan (J. M. Kerrigan) who drives the General McPherson, charming rogue Dick Allen (Robert Preston), Butler’s former wartime friend and Campeau’s partner, and Jeff.

   As usual the history in any DeMille epic is only there to back up a good deal of myth and legend and a certain amount of flag-waving and or Bible-thumping, but it is pretty good corn here with lots of riding, shooting (a memorable shootout between McCrea and Anthony Quinn, “It’s a good thing you keep that mirror clean.”), fighting (a good fight between McCrea and Robert Barratt), and romance between Stanwyck and charming Preston and reticent stalwart McCrea (“I loved him from the first time I hit him.”).

   When Allen steals the railroad payroll Molly covers for him, but forces him to return the loot in exchange for marrying him which puts him on the wrong side of Campeau.

   
   Akim Tamiroff is Fiesta and Lynne Overman, Leach Overmile, Butler’s seedy comedic companions. They were similarly teamed, only on opposite sides, in Northwest Mounted Police. Preston played similar rogues in the former and in Reap the Wild Wind (also with Overman). Virtually everyone in the film from son-in-law Quinn to the least bit part is from a DeMille regular (Monte Blue, Elmo Lincoln, Frank Lacteen, and Iron Eyes Cody all are uncredited and look for a young Richard Denning).

   There is an old saw about the basic kinds of Western, and this one fits clearly in the Empire building category of silent classics like The Iron Horse and Covered Wagon. It’s a bit old fashioned even for 1939, considering it competes with Stagecoach.

   Molly marries Dick to save Jeff, but Campeau talks and Jeff arrests him the day of their wedding. She helps him escape, but when Dick hides out on Molly’s car on the way to Laramie he discovers she really loves Jeff just before they are attacked by a Sioux war party stirred up by Campeau.

   However you view the whitewashing of Western history or the exploitation of Native Americans it is a splendid sequence visually with DeMille at his best right down to the cavalry coming on another train.

   There is some sympathy for Native Americans expressed here, more than in Stagecoach where Ford uses them only as a force of nature.

   That rescue train crossing a burning trestle is beautifully shot, right down to the comic relief when Tamiroff’s mustache is burned off (Overman: “I never liked it in the first place.”)

   There are a number of scenes like that in the film including Irish track layer Regis Toomey murdered by Anthony Quinn speaking of the light as a shadow passes over his dying face and a weeping Stanwyck holds him in her arms on the saloon floor.

   Another nice set piece features Jeff and Monahan pushing the General MacPherson across a snow bridge to cut around a tunnel they can’t complete in time. “’Tis the first time for an engine to run on snow, and if he don’t like it, I’ll put snowshoes on him.”

   Yes, it is corny, right down to the use of “My Darlin’ Clementine” as a running theme throughout the film even as a funeral dirge for Monahan when the first attempt at crossing the snow proves fatal, but it still has cinematic power in the old Hollywood tradition. It may be model work, and obvious to us today, but it was state of the art in 1939.

   Finally at Promontory Point Jeff, Molly, and Dick are reunited as the golden spike is driven in with Campeau planning revenge.

   Just before the vintage railroad becomes a gleaming modern engine cutting across America as the music swells.

   I’ll grant some of you have grown too sophisticated for this to work, some will find a million reasons to find offense at something or other, and I don’t fault you if you do, but even recognizing its flaws, it is splendid film making, a classic Hollywood cast and creative talents working at the top of their form, and Western mythologizing in the epic mode at its best. I still think there is something to be said for the lost arts that made it possible that is worth recognizing and applauding whatever the social flaws or the lack of modern sophistication.

   I hope I never reach the point I can’t still respond to this kind of film a little like the kid lying on the living room floor looking up at a twenty-seven inch black and white screen, eating popcorn, and watching this unfold between commercials. I hope every one of you still has some films that bring back something like that for you.

   There was a reason Hollywood was called the Dream Factory.

JANE ADAMS – The Greenway. Det. Inspector Mike Croft #1. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1995. Fawcett Gold Medal, US, paperback, 1997. Setting: Contemporary England.

   Cassie Maltham’s cousin disappeared while they were taking a short-cut home through the Greenway, an ancient passageway in Norfolk. Cassie couldn’t remember what had happened, but has suffered from depression and nightmares ever since. Now, 20 years later, Cassie has returned to Norfolk trying to let go of the past. But when another young girl disappears, it draws Cassie back into her nightmares. Detective Inspector Mike Croft, through the urging of Sergeant Bill Enfield, elicits the help of John Tynan, the retired detective who investigated the disappearance of Cassie’s cousin.

   Ms. Adams has written a haunting, yet very human book about guilt and loss. Cassie suffers survivor’s guilt; why did her cousin disappear rather than she. Croft knows the anguish of losing a child, although his son had been killed in a hit-and-run. The story was absorbing with good twists along the way and touches of the supernatural. I shall definitely read more of Ms. Adams’ work.

Rating: Good Plus

      The Det. Inspector Mike Croft series –

1. The Greenway (1995)
2. Cast the First Stone (1996) aka The Secrets
3. Fade to Grey (1998) aka Their Final Moments / Final Frame
4. The Liar (2019)

   This one flew under the radar and was generally perceived to be a box office flop. Adapted from the eponymous Jack London adventure novel, The Call of the Wild is equally part spectacle and part sentiment. The trailer does a fairly accurate job in conveying the general story. This is to be a tale about a dog, Buck, as he leaves the comforts of northern California and embarks on a new life in the Yukon. And as you can quickly ascertain, Buck is a CGI creation and not a “real dog.”

   But that doesn’t stop the movie from being emotionally resonant. The moments in the movie in which Harrison Ford’s character bonds with Buck are quite powerful. It’s nice to see Ford back in a major motion picture. The cinematography by Janusz KamiÅ„ski, a frequent collaborator with Steven Spielberg, is quite striking and shows how much investment, financial and otherwise, was put into this overall family friendly film.

   Unfortunately, despite the filmmakers’ best intentions, this cinematic adaptation of a classic work simply does not rise to the level of greatness to which it clearly aspired. There’s something flat about the whole affair, despite the moments in which it shines bright. I think that flatness is fairly well captured in the trailer as well.
   

RICHARD FORREST – The Death at Yew Corner. Bea & Lyon Wentworth #5. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1980. Dell / Scene of the Crime #76, paperback, 1984.

   Connecticut’s own amateur sleuthing team of Bea and Lyon Wentworth are back at it again. This is the fifth case they’ve tackled in tandem, which doesn’t yet put them into the superstar category of a Mr. and Mrs. North, but it is enough to start attracting them some attention.

   In this one Bea, who has just lost her bid for a state congressional seat, finds a place to vent her energies when an old friend dies in a mysterious nursing home accident. Joining her in her investigation is her husband, Lyon, author of all those marvelous children’s stories about the Wobblies.

   Murphysville, which may or may not be Middletown in disguise, is also the scene of an ugly ongoing confrontation between the management of the convalescent home and its angry, militant employees. There is a connection, as Bea soon discovers.

   A surprising number of other bizarre deaths follow, culminating in the fascinating puzzle of a murder committed in a locked bathroom. Just as you begin to think that the book has gone off the deep end completely, however, author Richard Forrest suddenly snaps everything into place, and what’s more he makes it look easy.

   Bea Wentworth, as the star of the show, may remind you a bit of TV’s ultra-liberal Maude, from the series of the same name. Bea, however, is not nearly as prone to loud histrionics to make her point. In spite of various and sundry temptations, she manages to stay her level-headed best in this outing, and she helps pull it off rather nicely.

Rating: B

      The Lyon and Bea Wentworth series —

1. A Child’s Garden of Death (1975)
2. The Wizard of Death (1977)
3. Death Through the Looking Glass (1978)
4. The Death in the Willows (1979)
5. The Death At Yew Corner (1980)
6. Death Under the Lilacs (1985)
7. Death On the Mississippi (1989)
8. The Pied Piper of Death (1997)
9. Death in the Secret Garden (2004)
10. Death At King Arthur’s Court (2005)

BILLY TWO HATS. United Artists, 1974. Gregory Peck, Desi Arnaz Jr, Jack Warden, David Hudddleston, and Sian Barbara Allen. Written by Alan Sharp. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Currently available for viewing online here.

   An unjustly neglected western well worth your time.

   Gregory Peck, portly, bearded, and sporting a Scots accent, charms the screen as a principled outlaw on the run, partnered with Desi Arnaz Jr (don’t laugh; he’s not bad at all here as the eponymous mixed-race youth.) and, briefly, Vic Armstrong, an actor-stuntman blasted into a hotel wall early on by lawman Jack Warden.

   Warden captures Desi, Peck escapes, then rescues Desi at a lonely wayside stop on the edge of the desert, wounding Warden in the process. But Warden’s old buffalo-hunting pal (a surprisingly grizzled Huddleston) shoots Peck’s horse out from under him, breaking Greg’s leg.

   The ensuing chase — wounded lawman & fat buddy, riding after crippled bad guy & partner sharing a horse — feels not so much leisurely as repressed. Every time one party or the other starts to make progress, something stops them dead, sometimes literally.

   Fortunately, Alan Sharp’s witty script and Ted Kotcheff’s nimble direction keep things from getting dull. The sparse action scenes are well-handled, and the characters consistently engaging, particularly Sian Barbara Allen as a pioneer woman whose speech impediment provides a thematic bond with the disabled antagonists.

   And I found a cute sidelight on IMDb: Billy Two-Hats was filmed in Israel, standing in for the rugged terrain of Arizona. Years earlier, when Gregory Peck starred in David and Bathsheba, Arizona stood in for Israel. That means something, but I don’t know what.