THE NOVEMBER MAN. Relativity Media, 2014. Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Smitrovich, Amila Terzimehic. Will Patton. Director: Roger Donaldson.
The concept is compelling; it’s the execution that’s flawed. That’s pretty much how I would describe The November Man to anyone who wanted a brief, succinct answer to the question: “What did you think of the movie?â€
Adapted from Bill Granger’s espionage thriller There Are No Spies, the seventh entry in the author’s “November Man” series, the movie is grounded in the realities of the post-Cold War world and has a solid, reliable lead in Pierce Brosnan. But it ultimately ends up being nothing more than a stunningly average spy film, one that relies on twists and turns that are – for those familiar with the genre, at least – clearly visible from miles away.
The movie opens at a fast clip, with the viewer immediately thrust into the action. CIA operative Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) and junior partner, David Mason (Luke Bracey) are in Montenegro and are on an assassination mission. Things don’t go according to plan. Brosnan is hit. And a young child is wounded, perhaps fatally.
Years pass and we find a retired Devereaux (the spy in retirement trope!) living in Lausanne, Switzerland. That’s when his former boss, John Hanley (Bill Smitrovich) shows up, asking Devereaux to take on one last mission: to extract a CIA asset from Russia by the name of Natalia Ulanova. She’s currently working for Arkady Fedorov, a former Russian Army general who is on his way to becoming president of the Russian Federation and has information that supposedly could bring Federov crashing down.
That’s where the twists and turns begin. Can Devereaux really trust that he is taking on a legitimate mission or has he been set up? Things get interesting when we learn that Federov apparently kidnapped and sexually assaulted a young girl during the Second Chechen War.
Things get more interesting when we learn that this girl may still be alive and that she may have been witness to a meeting between a CIA Agent and Federov that set into motion that deadly conflict.
Most of the film follows Devereaux as he attempts to make sense of a confusing, fast-moving situation. He not only finds himself at odds with Mason, his former protegee, but having to protect a social worker (Olga Kurylenko) who supposedly knows the whereabouts of Federov’s victim.
Now don’t get me wrong. I like Roger Donaldson’s work and consider his thriller, No Way Out (1987) one of the best, if consistently underappreciated, spy films ever. But here he feels as if he was just going through the motions. While there’s not necessarily anything wrong with the direction, there’s nothing particularly captivating about it either. The action sequences, filmed on the streets of Belgrade, are about as ordinary as can be. If it weren’t for Brosnan, one wouldn’t really pay much attention to them at all.
FUN IN ACAPULOCO. Paramount Pictures, 1963. Elvis Presley, Ursula Andress, Elsa Cárdenas, Paul Lukas, Larry Domasin, Alejandro Rey. Producer: Hal Wallis. Director: Richard Thorpe.
I realize that movies such as this one don’t turn up on this blog very often, but other than the fact that Elvis is in it, it marks a significant milestone for me. It’s the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in almost two and a half years. It was the matinee film shown at the New Beverly Theater in Hollywood last Sunday. The New Beverly is owned by Quentin Tarantino and specializes in retro films from 60s through the 80s, many of them prints coming from Tarantino’s own collection, such as this one. The poster below is the one on the sidewalk in front of the theater as you entered.
The movie was a big hit in its day, but to call it fluff from today’s perspective would be exaggerating by a factor of ten. The plot has something to do with Elvis’s character, the object of affection of two women in competition for his sole attention, and not much more than that — Elsa Cárdenas as a lady bullfighter, and Ursula Andress as the assistant social director at the resort hotel in Acapulco where Elvis has a combined job as a lifeguard and (of course) a singer.
I didn’t recognize any of the songs, but the teen-aged girls who came in hordes to see this movie in 1963 surely did. Besides Elvis, the other star attraction, the one aimed for the guys whose girls came to see him and were forced to come along, was of course Ursula Andress, this being the very next film she made following her bombshell appearance as Honey Ryder in the James Bond movie Dr. No. They made for an interesting couple on film. One can only wonder how they may have gotten along in real life.
I probably would never have sat down to watch this on TV, but it served its primary purpose very well. A movie in brilliant technicolor on a big screen with lots of people in it singing and dancing and just plain having a good time – and all that was only a bonus. It just felt great to be back in a movie theater again!
IT HAPPENED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Switzerland,-West Germany-Spain, 1958. Original title: Es Geschah am Hellichten Tag. Heniz Ruhmann, Michel Simon, Gert Frobe, Maria Rosa Salgado, Anita Von Ow. Screenplay by Friedrich Durrenmatt (his story), Hans Jacoby, and Director Ladislao Vaja.
This offbeat German noir film is based on Swiss novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt’s novel The Pledge, but takes off from the main conceit of that novel in some interesting directions of its own as a powerful suspense film about the nature of obsession, guilt, and the lengths a man will go to accomplish his ends.
It opens in the woods outside a small town where Jacquier (Michel Simon), a peddler, discovers a child’s body and flees to town and the local pub where he calls chief investigator Matthai (Heniz Ruhmann) who once treated him well.
Matthai is on his last day before a new important job in Jordan, but calls out the authorities and they are guided to the body of the girl by Jacquier who in short order becomes the chief suspect, Matthai only saving his neck from angry locals when he points out that all who claim they saw Jacquier in the woods are just as much suspects as he is.
Matthai isn’t so sure about Jacquier’s guilt though. One of the girl’s friends shows him a picture the victim drew of her friend ‘the giant†a man she met in the woods and befriended. Surely a fairy tale, but …
When Jacquier commits suicide under the relentless police interrogation Matthai is not sure he was guilty but the police are happy to close the case and that of other girls who died similarly over the last four years.
Not Matthai though. He continues to investigate and begins to put together a picture of the killer, a man henpecked by his bitter Mother who strikes out in frustration with a razor against the children he has targeted.
Following a trail of clues Matthai closes in on the killer, but knows he can never trap him without the ideal bait, and in a small town he finds it in a lonely little girl like the ones killed before and her widowed mother, Frau Heller and Annemarie (Maria Rosa Salgado and Anita von Ow) . Taking a job at a gas station and living with the mother and daughter he begins to lay his trap.
By this point we know the killer is one Schott, a henpecked giant (Gert Frobe) who lives with his cruel mother.
Vajada skillfully inter-cuts scenes of Schott and Matthai almost encountering each other, Matthai filling Schott’s tank with gas as Schott watches Annemarie in his side mirror, the two men passing on the road, all building tension as Annemarie and Schott, her “Magician†meet in the woods and the pressure on Schott from his mother pushes him closer to action and the straight razor in his bath he has used before.
Even with Matthai finally seeing Schott he still has to catch him in the act, but that means using Annemarie as bait, something he cannot do because he has come to care for the child.
Matthai plants a doll dressed like Annemarie in the woods like the little girl Jacquier found, but Annemarie escapes from her room and heads for the woods to meet with her “Magician…â€
Heinz Ruhmann was a beloved German star in the period perhaps best known here for his films playing Georges Simenon’s Maigret that were dubbed in English and shown on American television in the Sixties. His humanity, gentle screen presence, and surprising strength made him a popular Maigret, but also lend themselves to the drama in the far more complex Matthai, a rather cool character whose cold calculations are complicated by his feelings for a lonely child.
This is supposedly the role that got Gert Frobe the role of Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film. Around this time he would be introduced in more familiar form to American audience as the police inspector in Fritz Lang’s 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuseand its sequel. A hero of the War who smuggled many Jews out from under the Nazis, Frobe would have a successful career in the West in films such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Bloodlinesdespite not speaking English.
Durrenmatt’s The Pledge was filmed with Jack Nicholson in a form much closer to the book. The author was a noted playwright and novelist perhaps best known among Mystery fans for his Inspector Barlach novels, one of which became a film with Jon Voight and Robert Shaw. His novels and plays often deal with mystery and suspense, but seldom in a straightforward manner. He is far more interested in the psychology of his characters and the paradox involved than straight detection or suspense alone. He’s an extremely important writer, if not always an easy one, and this does justice to his work.
That this film captures so much of the feel of his work despite having to play to a somewhat more standard model is one of its strengths. Evocatively filmed and well acted, particularly by Ruhmann, Simon, and the mute Frobe it plays like the best of film noir with all that implies about flawed wounded human beings, and how they sometimes destroy each other. It is a powerful and disturbing film that can jolt more with the image of a dead child’s hand emerging from a pile of leaves than a hundred gory horror films, a single cry of rage from Frobe when Schott realizes he has been tricked tells more than pages of dialogue about this repressed monster.
I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s hardly a lost film, but one that doesn’t get the kind of attention many of its French and American cousins do in the genre, and that is a shame. You really owe it to yourself to find it on YouTube (there are several versions, but the one by Old Movies B/W and Colour Simonbartbull has English subtitles and is a clear looking print).
ELLERY QUEEN – Double, Double. Little Brown, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #874, paperback, 1952. Dell, paperback, 1965. Ballantine, paperback, 1975, 1979. Also published in a Signet double novel edition, and as The Case of the Seven Murders (Pocket, paperback, 1958).
A series of anonymous envelopes sent to Ellery Queen from Wrightsville filled with clippings from the local newspaper there is what first piques the well-known mystery writer’s interest. This is followed up by a visit from the daughter of the local “town drunk,†who has mysteriously disappeared and is assumed to have met with foul play and to be dead, his body swallowed up by quicksand at the bottom of a cliff.
The girl is somewhat of a “bird child,†living barefoot and alone in a shack at the edge of a swamp. (You should not be surprised to learn that her name is Rima.) Before the two of them return to Wrightsville, Ellery plays Pygmalion with her, furnishing her with new clothes, up-to-date hair styling and the like.
Wrightsville is a small town somewhere in New England, with small town stores and small town businesses, a local doctor who still makes house calls, and a place Ellery has a strange affinity for, with at least three previous cases having taken place there. The townspeople know him well.
Three deaths have already occurred, one suspicious, the other two not. Before the book is done, a total of seven have taken place. I suppose it does no harm to tell you now that the pattern that Ellery discovers connecting them comes from the nursery rhyme that begins “Rich man, poor man…â€
This being the first Ellery Queen novel I’ve read in a while, I was caught by surprise at how chaotic his detective stories could be: swirling winds of surrealism and the unknown. Added to the mix are suspicion, doubts, small town nostalgia, and karma. The final solution, the one that unravels the mystery at the end, is, in fact, greatly dependent on the latter. Events have happened that even the killer could not control.
The detective work is superb – it is utterly fascinating to read a novel in which so many threads of the story could be so knotted up and elusive – then unsnarled so the pieces all fit together. Except … except for the fact that in an Ellery Queen story the people do not act or react as real people would. They are in a sense both naive and artificial, and they do things that real people would not do – especially the killer, as hard as Ellery Queen the detective does his best to explain his or her thinking.
I do not mean to suggest that this is a bad thing, except perhaps for present day readers who do not understand the worth of a pure puzzle story. You start to read an Ellery Queen novel, and you will find yourself at once in an Ellery Queen world governed by Ellery Queen rules and Ellery Queen ways of thinking.
Opinions on this may vary, but I found myself enjoying this return visit to the world of Ellery Queen, a visit I’ve delayed for far too long. Shame on me.
◠A recent blog (only three entries, so far, unless I’m missing others) is called Crime Film Hub Daily, with links to news and reviews of, guess what, crime films online.
â— From a follower of this blog named Greg Karber: “I’m a huge fan of fairplay mysteries, and I’ve channeled that affection into an interactive murder-mystery logic-puzzle game called Murdle.â€
“I’m trying to share it with people I think might be interested. The mysteries get more complicated and difficult throughout the week, like the crossword, so if today’s too easy, just wait for tomorrow’s!â€
â— From Bob Byrne, a regular contributor to the Black Gate website:
“Back when the world blew up early in 2020, I began writing about a thousand words a day, about Archie Goodwin’s life, locked in the brownstone with Nero Wolfe.
“I wrote about 42,000 words over 45 days, posting them nightly at the Wolfe Pack FB page.
“I’m posting them weekly now at Black Gate, giving them a more permanent home. Here is this week’s entry – I’m up to Day 38:
THE TEXAS RANGERS. Paramount, 1936. Fred MacMurray, Lloyd Nolan, Jean Parker, and Jack Oakie. Screenplay by King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill, and Louis Stevens, from the book by Walter Prescott Webb. Directed by King Vidor. Currently streaming on YouTube.
A trio of desperadoes get separated while fleeing from a posse. Two of them join the Texas Rangers as cover, and gradually find themselves becoming committed to the Ranger mission, while the third forms a new gang and continues on his thievin’ murderin’ way, and if you can’t tell what develops….
Despite the formulaic plot, this is far far from routine, thanks to Vidor’s assured direction and the performances from the leads. Until he hooked up with Disney and My Three Sons, MacMurray always lent a kind of equivocal edge to his roles that contrasted uneasily with his bluff good looks, and it makes him perfect as the bad guy turned hero (for now). Oakie’s good-for-little bravura makes a fine comedy relief, and Nolan’s big-city look suits his character just fine.
But it’s Vidor’s sensitive handling of stock situations and his flair for action scenes that lifts Rangers out of its cliche’d roots.
F’rinstance, there’s a bit where the Rangers are trapped on a cliffside, holding off angry Apaches down below. A few of the more ambitious Native Americans climb up above and start laboriously rolling boulders down at the Rangers. Vidor’s smooth way of cutting (The boulders come at intervals, thundering down the near-sheer wall like a cannon shot, as the rangers claw their way up the cliff to stop them) from long-shots, to medium exteriors, to studio “exteriors†propels the scene to epic proportions.
Then, in quieter moments, the emotional resonance he puts into the scene where Nolan and Oakie have it out — Oakie’s braggadocio melting as he realizes how dangerous his old pal has become, Nolan losing control of himself, and visibly enjoying it — has stuck with me since I was a kid, and followed me into my dotage.
Jimmy Stewart called moments like these “Pieces of time.†I call it fine movie-making and great fun.
FRANK KANE – Red Hot Ice. Johnny Liddell #9. Ives Washburn, hardcover, 1955. Dell 901, paperback, 1956, Cover by Victor Kalin.
Johnny Liddell is hired by the long-suffering agent of a luscious former star who’s become an uncontrollable lush, and as a result, she now owes $12,000 to the owner of an traveling airborne casino (which is quite an opening gimmick in its own right). To that end she agrees to pay him off using a small fortune in uncut diamonds she’s hidden from the IRS over the years.
When Johnny hires a guy to monitor the transfer, both the guy and the blonde end up dead. The cops think Johnny’s buddy couldn’t resist temptation, and things went bad when he did. Johnny naturally sees things differently, but it’s up to him to prove it.
Even better is that not only is Red Hot Ice a pretty good PI novel, it is also a detective story, complete with fair play alibis and other clues – well almost. If the New Jersey police had done their job thoroughly, and not just a one-sided one, the case would have been solved all that more quickly – the only semi-sour note I found in this one. Not a classic, in other words, but you can do a lot worse.
RIO. Universal Pictures, 1939. Basil Rathbone, Sigrid Gurie, Victor McLaglen, Robert Cummings, Leo Carrillo, Billy Gilbert, Samuel S. .Hinds. Screenplay by Abden Kandel, Edwin Justus Mayer & Frank Partos. Directed by John Brahm. Current;y available om YouTube.
Contrary to director John Brahm’s film noir credentials (The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Brasher Doubloon) Rio is not an early example of that genre as often suggested half as much as a late blooming of German Expressionism and silent melodrama that anticipates those elements in film noir.
It probably didn’t help that the title Riosounds more like a musical with Fred and Ginger dancing on the wings of an airplane than a melodrama loosely based on an international scandal.
Here Rathbone is Paul Reynard (rather obviously named, reynard being “fox†in French), a fantastic Parisian financial figure whose massive empire proves to be merely a paper facade held together by unsecured bank loans upon bank loans and Reynard’s superhuman cool. When that empire collapses after a loan is called in by a rival taking many of his investors fortunes with it the whole thing implodes.
Loosely based on the Stavisky scandal that shook France and inspired a film (Stavisky, 1974) that starred Jean Paul Belmondo as Serge Stavisky the great swindler Rio adds to the character of the real life Stavisky a kind of cold genius and Svengali like influence over Reybard’s wife a once popular entertainer Irene (Norweigian actress Sigrid Gurie, Algiers,The Adventures of Marco Polo) who he possessively loves in his own controlling way.
Following the collapse of his financial empire the coolly unrepentant Reynard is arrested and put on trial. On conviction he is sentenced to a Devil’s Island like prison near Brazil and Irene, with his right hand man and bodyguard, Dirk (Victor McLaglen), agree to follow him to wait for him in Rio, Reynard urging her to divorce him and bragging to Dirk that he knows giving her that out will only serve to assure she doesn’t leave him out of loyalty. Even from his island prison he will continue to manipulate her, which is his only true pleasure.
There Irene takes up singing again in a bar owned by Roberto (Leo Carillo), a slinky type hoping to undermine her devotion to Reynard, while Dirk works as a bartender to be near Irene and protect Reynard’s interests.
Meanwhile in prison Reynard is the same arrogant Nietzschean ubermensch, content with his lot so long as he knows he still controls Irene even from afar, her letters proof of that control.
Back in Rio Irene meets drunken American Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), an engineer who was responsible for a bridge that collapsed thanks to investors who supplied him with inferior materials. Now he is drinking himself to death in disgrace and shame.
But he has some charm, and unlike the cold Reynard he needs Irene. She helps him to reform, sober up, and get a job as an engineer, and this time he does a spectacular job of it. Redeemed and in love he convinces Irene to divorce Reynard and marry him.
Humiliated by the guards he has taunted because he letters have stopped and furious his control of Irene has been lost Reynard vows to kill the two lovers and plots escape, luring another prisoner into the suicidal attempt planning to kill the other prisoner and plant his id on the unidentifiable body,
Able to contact Dirk for help Reynard escapes, “dies,†murders his fellow prisoner, and is free, if only he wasn’t insistent on coming to Rio to murder Irene and Bill for their betrayal despite Dirk’s pleas.
Rio is a peculiar film. It seems closer to silent melodrama than modern film noir, and while it could be noir with just a turn here or there it isn’t in this incarnation, not quite.
Rathbone is perfect as Reynard, by turns cooly charming and sadistic, admiring his wife the way a snake looks at a bird, reading volumes into a glance. Gurie is quite lovely and persuasive both as the wife under Reynard’s hypnotic control and as the woman slowly freeing herself from his interest. While he had no need to model his performance on anyone Rathbone does, at times, seem to be channeling the kind of silent film roles often played by Conrad Veidt.
The film belongs to Rathbone though. Cummings has some good moments as a charming drunk but soon enough sobers up to be a somewhat standard, but far more skillful than usual, male ingenue. He seems a bit young for Gurie, but you can see the appeal after Rathbone’s snake like Reynard.
There are a number of evocative scenes and shots (nice cinematography by Hal Mohr) showing how well Brahm had absorbed the lessons of German expressionism and would later use them in his film noir works. Stylistically Rio is an attractive film.
It’s odd how misused and underused McLaglen is in this film. He has relatively little screen time and what time he does have is mostly in the kind of role you were more likely to see Walter Brennan or Thomas Mitchell in. McLaglen at this point was an Oscar winning actor and a star in his own right both teamed in films with the likes of Edmond Lowe and Chester Morris, and as a lead on his own having played the lead in two John Ford films (The Informer, Black Watch).
It’s downright strange to see him play so small, if important, a supporting role in the film. Leo Carrillo is wasted too as the wastrel owner of the place where Irene performs. He is suggested as an oily type after Irene’s honor, but is awfully jovial about giving up when she ends up with Cummings. His role mostly consists of trying to scare gossipy waiter Billy Gilbert into shutting up. He never more than annoys Irene a little.
Rio is an odd film. Rathbone is the main reason to watch, but by no means the only one. It’s also interesting to note American audiences in 1939 would be expected to immediately draw the inference to the Stavisky scandal that rocked France earlier in the decade. I’m not sure a modern film would dare to imagine an American audience would be that familiar with an international scandal, but here the film expects the audience to have some familiarity with those events and connect Reynard with Stavisky effortlessly.
A. G. E. CROMWELL – Death in the Copse. Rodney Wayne #2. Wright & Brown, UK, hardcover, 1940.
This is the second of just two private detective novels written by the almost entirely unknown A. G. E. Cromwell, the first adventure of Rodney Wayne being Murder in Flat 14 (Wright & Brown, 1939). The two books can be found on the Internet at varying prices, but as for the author himself, I have found only a single reference to him, that being an announcement for one of his books in a contemporaneous Australian newspaper. (If you can find more, please by all means, let me know.)
Wayne eventually has a client in Death in the Copse, but at the beginning, he’s only on his way to a weekend stay at a good friend’s countryside mansion, a short train ride from London. The friend is Archie Crofts, a good-natured, self-made but very wealthy businessman. Besides the staff, there is a small groups of other friends also staying for the weekend, so when Archie is found shot to death at night in a small area of a forest, the number of suspects is also very limited. (The killer is seen running back to the house after the fatal shot is heard, so there is no talk of a passing tramp being responsible.)
Wayne finds himself somewhat at odds with the local police inspector, at least at first, but when Wayne decides he won’t get anywhere by going head to head with him, he persuades himself to join forces with him. There is a lot of discussion of alibis between the two of them, including the strange behavior of one possible witness who has to have an alibi for another twisted out of him instead of his being up front and forward about it. We have probably read enough mysteries ourselves to know what that means, don’t we?
Cromwell himself clearly had read enough works of detective himself to be able to produce a quite decent and very readable one on his own. Until the last chapter, that is, which is, to put it bluntly, a disappointment. Once you put the book down and you start asking yourself, in terms of the figuring out what really did happen, why does the final explanation almost completely contradict what we told was observed earlier?
An interesting artifact of its day, but not one, I’d say, worth searching out for. (I’d send you mine, but unfortunately it has a page missing from the end of a chapter somewhere in the middle. By no means is it an essential one, but it *is* missing.)
LEO BRUCE – Death in Albert Park. Carolus Deene #13. W. H. Allen, UK, hardcover, 1964. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1979. Academy Chicago Publishers, US, paperback, 2005.
This thirteenth case of Senior History Master Carolus Deene of the Queen’s School, Newminster, was originally published in 1964 by W. H. Allen & Co. of London, and there have been at least ten subsequent titles featuring the forty-year-old teacher. The present title, however, would appear to be only the sixth to be published in the United States to date. Since it is the first of the “Death” titles, however, perhaps Scribners intends to continue the series., which would be a real treat.
Deene bakes an interest in London affairs when three middle-aged women from the depressing suburb surrounding Albert Park in the remote southeastern part of the city are fatally knifed between the shoulder blades. The teacher’s interest in crime as history prompts him to investigate the backgrounds of the victims to see if, indeed, they were just random targets of a crazed psychotic popularly called the Stabber.
There is some hilarious satirizing of the excesses in the contemporary theater along the way; and we meet some of the not-too-likeable regulars in the persons of Deene’s housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Stick, a stickler for appearances, and young, precocious student Robert Priggley who even annoys Deene but who sometimes serves as bis own personal “irregular.”
Deene’s interference is not in the least appreciated by Detective Superintendent Dyke who does everything to thwart his interviews. Also adverse to his investigative hobby is his school headmaster, the cowering Mr. Garringer.
This particular novel employs a plot device reminiscent of a famous 1936 Christie, though handled quite differently. Mr. Bruce is a deft hand in creating suspense, and he carefully plays fair with the reader in his deployment of clues. The first Carolus Deene novel was At Death’s Door (1955) , and Leo Bruce is also the creator of series Character Sergeant Beef.
– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 3, Number 2 (March-April 1980).
