LUKE AND THE TENDERFOOT “The Boston Kid.†Ziv Productions, unsold pilot, 1955. Edgar Buchanan, Carleton Carpenter. Guest Cast: Nancy Hadley, Lee Van Cleef, Dabbs Greer, Michael Landon, Leonard Nimoy, Jim Bannon. Producer/screenwriter: Steve Fisher. Director: Montgomery Pittman. Currently available on YouTube here.
In this early 30 minute black-and-white western pilot, Edgar Buchanan plays Luke Herkimer, a bewhiskered itinerant peddler slash con man in the Old West, and if you can picture Edgar Buchanan in such a role, you probably will not be surprised if I were to tell you that he’s not all that good as either of the two.
As he pulls into the nest town on his travels he meets a naive young man named Pete Quinn (Carleton Carpenter) stepping off a stage, straight from the East and wearing straight from the East clothes, which makes him the center of laughter from a gang of school kids as well as a bunch of local rowdies. You know, the kind of rowdies who are always hanging around small western towns in the movies being, well, rowdy.
Before he knows it, Pete has been persuaded by Luke to fight three of the rowdies in a boxing match, posing as the “Boston Kid.†Pete’s resemblance to a notorious boxer is nil, zilch, none, and much hilarity ensues.
In spite it all, though, Luke and Pete decide to patch things up and become partners of some sort, tin pans clanging as their wagon heads on out of sight.
Enjoyable enough, you might say, but there’s certainly not enough meat on this to build a series on. There was a second episode made, one entitled “The John Wesley Hardin Story,” that one source says was actually aired by CBS in 1963. Most of the fun in watching this one comes from looking for members of the cast whose faces you can still recognize today. Well, mostly so. For some reason I never placed Leonard Nimoy in this one by his face. I will have to watch it again.
But to be honest, though, not right away.
Note: Thanks to Mike Grost and his occasional email newsletter for tipping me off to this one.
JACK VANCE “Phalid’s Fate.†Novelette. First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1946. First collected in The Dark Side of the Moon(Underwood-Miller, hardcover, 1986).
As a strike against the enemy in the ongoing Earth-Phalid war, Ryan Wratch agrees to have his mind transferred to that of a Phalid that has been captured. Ryan’s own body had been all but destroyed in a Phalid attack, his brothers having been killed in the same incident. The Phalids are insect-like creatures with long black carapaces, oddly jointed legs, and rubbery tentacles with mottled gray undersides, hardly human looking at all.
The plan is to have Ryan rescued in space by the Phalid, then taken to their hitherto unknown home planet, where he can act against them from the inside. The plan succeeds exceedingly well, and if you don’t realize that there has to be a beautiful female captive that also needs rescuing, you haven’t read all that many space opera stories like this one.
And that is exactly what this story is. Out-and-out space opera. And I enjoyed it immensely. This was only the third published story in Vance’s long career, and it’s hardly representative of the kinds of story he became famous for. You can tell that he was a writer, though, even at this early stage, or that he was going to be one, especially in passages in which he is describing the Phalids’ home planet, in what I’m going to refer to as what became his well-established baroque style.
CAMERON KAY – Thieves Fall Out. Gold Medal #311, paperback original, 1953. Hardcase Crime, paperback, April 2016.
The bright Cairo noon dazzled his eyes. Shimmering waves of heat made the modern buildings across the wide street quiver as though they were fashioned of gray rubber… It must have been a rough night, he thought, moving toward a booth where a grizzled, bearded villain was selling cigarettes.
It was when he came to pay for the cigarettes that he discovered he had been robbed.
If you ever wondered what a Casablanca-style Fawcett Gold Medal original (GM 311) novel by Gore Vidal might read like, Thieves Fall Out is your chance to find out.
The hero, who we meet when he wakes up in what appears to be a whorehouse (never stated), having been drugged and robbed on his first night in Cairo is Pete Wells, ex-roughneck, combat veteran, and recently deck hand on a freighter to pay his passage to Cairo, where he feels something will come his way because things are happening in post-war Cairo.
It has to be pointed out that the world of thriller fiction would be seriously diminished if the protagonists had the common sense of a poodle.
Vidal was one of the enfant terrible of the literary scene. His work was almost always brilliant and often shocking to be shocking, spinning dizzyingly from the serious literary fictions like his war novel Williwaw and his controversial The City and the Pillar;to broad social satire like Myra Breckenridge written to shock for the sake of shocking; well-written historical novels like Julian, Burr , 1876, and Lincoln, prize winning plays like The Best Man; and as Edgar Box, a trio of sophisticated mystery novels modeled loosely on Mickey Spillane’s formula as Vidal saw it, featuring Public Relations man Peter Cutler Sargeant.
In addition he twice sought public office, became a political commentator, was outspoken about his sexuality and sex in general, and famously feuded with both William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, both of which threatened him with violence and different points. His interests were catholic and you might find him waxing eloquent about American politics one day and writing nostalgically about Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan in Esquire the next.
His long public career was marked by deliberate provocations of just about any sensibility he could manage as well as fascinating insights into the famous and infamous including his childhood friendship with Amelia Earhart. He was related to both Al Gore and John Dickson Carr among numerous other figures in American history, and impressed with almost none of them.
It’s little wonder one his best books was narrated by the infamous Vice President Aaron Burr who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and barely escaped with his neck in one of the most infamous plots in American history.
For much of the 20th Century following WW 2 it was simply impossible to avoid Gore Vidal even if you wanted to in American politics, culture, or letters.
For Pete Wells, his foray into foreign adventure starts with a bit of smuggling in a country where smuggling relics was virtually a national sport to revolution, arms trafficking, assassination, no little sex (though no more so than any other books of its kind), Nazi war criminals (there may have been a law at this point certain kinds of thrillers must have at least one), and just about any other trope of the novel of international intrigue and adventure of its time for good and ill.
At its best, like the evocative opening, it is immediate and puts you down in the middle of the action with almost cinematic grace. At its worst, it gets a bit lost at times in the attempts to evoke place and time and the characters, at least the two main ones, remain a bit too much Central Casting for the author’s own good, as if having got them in position, his literary instinct was at odds with the needs of an adventure story.
You can almost feel Vidal the literary figure being reined in by Vidal the pseudonymous writer looking for a paycheck and trying to color in the lines.
For the most part he does it pretty well.
Like Graham Greene’s long lost novel Name of the Action, Vidal kept it out of print in his lifetime. Like the Greene novel it is nowhere near that bad, but it does read as if it may have been written quickly for money, not exactly a flaw in the eyes of collectors of Gold Medal originals, whose very charm is sometimes that exact feeling of immediacy and energy.
Nor is Vidal alone in his sojourn into the original paperback with Gold Medal. Robert Wilder, Mackinley Kantor, Eric Hatch, Cornell Woolrich, and Vivian Connell alll ventured there as well, and not all only for a quick buck.
He waited until there was neither light nor sound; then he looked out into the square. It was deserted except for four huddled shapes. He tried not to look at them as he quickly crossed the courtyard, but one brief glimpse showed him they had been beheaded.
He plunged once more into the maze of streets, all deserted now. Not even lamplight shone in the narrow windows. The wooden balconies were empty. The passage of the mob had frightened even its own kind, and the people hid behind shutters in darkened rooms.
Evocative stuff, and the best of this not-bad thriller by a major literary figure slumming, but not embarrassing himself or his readers, and much more authentic than you might expect from the source.
My good friend Richard Meli has just sent me images of two pieces of art for which he’d like to know the artist. Perhaps someone seeing this can help identify her or him:
There is some resemblance in style to the artist who did this cover for the British edition of the book The Bang Bang Birds, by Adam Diment:
THE SECRET PARTNER. MGM, UK/US, 1961. Stewart Granger, Haya Harareet, Bernard Lee, Hugh Burden, Lee Montague, Norman Bird. Director: Basil Dearden.
The Secret Partner is one of those films where the entire story hinges on the big reveal at the end. Just who is the “secret partner†in the criminal scheme that forms the basis for the film’s plot? There is, of course, more than one red herring; the viewer is supposed to be suspicious, wondering whether that man or that guy is the masked villain.
The problem with films like these, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is that once you see the ending, you realize a good part of what makes the film work (or not, depending on your perspective) was the guess work you put in throughout the proceedings and how much you think it was worth your time.
The story is one of blackmail, deceit, and criminality. Stewart Granger portrays John Brent, a shipping company executive who has a secret. He’s living under an assumed name, because he has a criminal past, having served time in prison for embezzlement. But that’s not his main problem right now. Not only has his wife (Israeli actress Haya Harakeet) left him, but he’s being blackmailed by his dentist (Norman Bird), a seedy little man whose avarice outweighs his common sense.
Enter the secret partner, a masked man using a voice distortion device. He comes into the dentist’s office with a proposition: when Brent is under the gas for a tooth removal, the dentist is to make a clay impression of his keys and to get the combination to the shipping company’s safe. It’s ludicrous, but it works in a quirky, offbeat sort of way.
Soon enough, the shipping company’s safe has been looted and Brent (Granger) is the top suspect. Thus begins his very noir journey – a falsely accused man seeking the “secret partner†to clear his name. Who can it be? Is it his colleague at the office? The doctor quietly from a distance in love with his estranged wife? Or the hipster interior designer who is having an affair with her? It’s up to Detective Superintendent Hanbury (Bernard Lee) to investigate. It is – using an all too familiar trope – his last case and he intends to do it justice.
What I appreciated about The Secret Partner was not so much the plot – although it’s perfectly fine – but the atmosphere. Although it’s rather talky for a film noir, it has its share of noirish moments, even those fleeting ones that are enough to make a visual impact. The film is buttressed with an early 1960s jazzy score, one that works because is not too intrusive. Directed by Basil Dearden, it has a very London feel to it. The city is a character.
In sum, The Secret Partner is a solid crime film, but it’s not exceptional. After you see the big reveal, it’s difficult to want to put in the effort to watch it again. But I enjoyed well enough it for what it was, flaws and all.
DOUG ALLYN “Puppyland.†Dr. David Westbrook #4. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October, 1996. Second place Ellery Queen Award winner in 1996, losing out only to his own story “Roadkill” (5/96). Collected in All Creatures Dark and Dangerous(Crippen & Landru, 1999). Reprinted in Master’s Choice, Volume II, edited by Lawrence Block (Berkley, hardcover, 2000).
Although he’s written at least eight novels, Doug Allyn is one of those authors who over the years has gained a lot more acclaim for his short fiction than he has for his longer work. He has been, for example, a consistent award winner for his stories in EQMM, sometimes two stories (out of three) a year.
One of his continuing short story characters is a veterinarian named David Westbrook who plies his trade in a small town in Michigan. And naturally most, if not all, of these stories involves animals. Such is the case in “Puppyland,†in which a small puppy is born with a cleft palate. This means that he can never eat on his own. His only chance for life is to be hand fed for all his meals.
Which is what his owner, a woman who is disabled herself, is willing to do. But when she is found dead after her respirator fails, her husband immediately blames the dog, whose chew marks are found on the plug to the wall. Dr. Westbrook thinks there is more to the story, however, and he decides to play detective, to good avail.
But there is more than detective work involved. Even before the dog’s eyes are open, he can be seen to be dreaming. But of what? The woman thinks he is dreaming of Puppyland, “a kind of hound heaven, where [puppies] can run and play all day.”
Anyone who has had, and lost, a pet will enjoy this story, especially the ending.
ALLEN ESKENS – The Stolen Hours. Mulholland Books, hardcover, September 2021; trade paperback, August 2022. Legal Mystery. Setting: Contemporary Minnesota.
First Sentence: Lila Nash counted her steps as she walked from the kitchen to the bathroom of her apartment.
Lila Nash needs one thing — to pass the bar exam to become a licensed attorney and prosecutor in the office of the Hennepin County Attorney. That is, if Frank Dovey, a powerful defense attorney, doesn’t destroy her reputation beforehand. Of greater concern to Lila is a woman pulled barely alive from the Mississippi River, evoking memories of a horrible attack she suffered eight years prior. The police believe they know the current attacker, but they, along with Lila, are in a fight to bring him to justice.
What an evocative opening chapter. Can anyone ever really comprehend the effects of an experience such as Lila’s? Not wasting any time, Eskens introduces the villain, creating a sense of fear.
The principal characters are immediately identified with the standouts being Lila, Detectives Niki Vang, and Marty Lopez. One can’t help but admire Lila’s determination and resolve to assist the investigation despite the possible risk to herself, and the trauma she suffered eight years ago. However, it can be hard to feel a connection with Lila.
Eskens’ interesting approach makes the case seem almost too easy, yet he makes a smooth transition of the story from being a police procedural to a legal thriller. Although there are some very good twists, some are predictable.
In the past, some of Eskens’ work has been deeply disturbing and emotionally charged. In contrast, this book seems too superficial. The story touches on hard, serious topics, yet the author skims across them as if they are under the ice. One knows they are there, but they feel glossed over.
The Stolen Hours is part police procedural, part legal suspense. While it is a good read, it’s not Eskens’ best work.
RAILROADED! PRC, 1947. John Ireland, Sheila Ryan, Hugh Beaumont, Jane Randolph. Screenplay by John C. Higgins, based on an original story by Gertrude Walker. Director: Anthony Mann.
Pretty much everything about Anthony Mann’s Railroaded! is hard-boiled: the dialogue, the atmosphere, and the attitude. Especially the dialogue, which cracks with an unpolished cynical toughness. Such is the case for the first main character we meet: hairstylist Clara Calhoun (Jane Randolph), a salon proprietor who, along with Marie Weston (Peggie Converse) is running numbers in the backroom.
The mood is cynical to begin with, but immediately turns violent when two masked gunmen enter the shop, take the loot, and kill a policeman who rushes to the scene. But before they get away, the cop gets off a shot and hits Cowie Kowalski, the junior partner in the holdup. The ringleader, on the other hand, strategically drops a scarf with initials on the floor, hoping to frame a local boy for the whole affair.
That’s where Pittsburgh detective Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont) comes into the picture. He recognizes the initials on the Navy scarf as those of his former childhood neighbor, one Steve Ryan. Pretty soon, Ferguson arrests Ryan, but not without really perturbing Steve’s sister, the intrepid Rosie Ryan (Sheila Ryan). Most of the film involves an interplay between Mickey and Rosie as each seeks to investigate the holdup.
While Ferguson plays it by the book, Rosie takes a different tack. She gets close to Duke Martin (John Ireland), a local thug who, as it turns out, is the very one who tossed her brother’s scarf on the floor at the hair salon.
Now, if the plot seems a little complex for a film with such a short running time (72 minutes), let me assure you: there’s also a few other subplots to keep you busy, including the fact that Clara was also working for an organized crime racket and that she was in on the holdup with Duke.
However, as much as Railroaded! is very much a plot-driven movie, it’s also a character study and an all-enveloping atmospheric noir buttressed by both Mann’s direction and John C. Higgins’s screenplay. One might think a movie with the title Railroaded! would focus on the existential dread of a falsely accused character, such as Steve Ryan. But that is not the case here. For the most compelling – by far – character in this gritty crime drama is not the unforgettable Steve Ryan, but the brutal, violent Duke Martin.
Portrayed by John Ireland, who had not yet won his Oscar, Duke is a man without a conscience. He puts himself and himself alone first, the rest of the world be damned. That means selling out his co-conspirator, killing off Marie and dumping her body in the river, or shooting his boss in cold blood. The world he inhabits is a cold, dark, and violent one and he fits into it like a hand in a glove. The only true pleasure he seems to obtain is when he is acting out violently.
Railroaded!, as I mentioned, is also an atmospheric noir, one that can be appreciated irrespective of the plot. There are a few singular moments that stand out, such as a long down and dirty fight between Clara and Susie. Never do I recall seeing something quite like this in any other movie from the 1940s or 1950s. It’s a truly unique noir moment, akin to the coffee-in-the-face scene in The Big Heat (1953).
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the nightclub scenes in the movie. Duke’s boss owns a seemingly respectable nightspot called The Bombay Club. It seems like a lot of viewers particularly appreciated the final shootout at the club, but for me, it’s the nominally slower moments, such as the barbed conversations in the backroom that give the movie its enduring power to captivate an audience.
CORNELL CLUB:
The Woolrich Adaptations of François Truffaut
by Matthew R. Bradley
It is no surprise that the term film noir is French, given how avidly Gallic filmmakers and/or critics (some were both) embraced what we now know as noir fiction and its cinematic counterpart, or that they turned to the former as source material. The novels of David Goodis, for example, were adapted into not only the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (1947) but also the likes of François Truffaut’s Tirez sur la Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), based on Down There (1956); Henri Verneuil’s Le Casse(aka The Burglars, 1971), based on The Burglar (1953), filmed Stateside in 1957; and La Lune dans le Caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter, 1983), directed by Diva (1981) phenom Jean-Jacques Beineix.
While Henry Farrell may be best known as the original author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960), and thus the “Godfather of Grande Dame Guignol,†Truffaut’s 1972 adaptation of his 1967 novel Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (aka Une Belle Fille comme Moi [A Gorgeous Girl Like Me]) is surely noir, and Truffaut also filmed two books by the arguably definitive noir writer, Cornell Woolrich: The Bride Wore Black (1940), part of his celebrated series of “Black†Novels, and Waltz into Darkness (1947), published under his pen name of William Irish.
The legendary book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) had recently been published, and the fact that the Master of Suspense’s Rear Window(1954) was also based on Woolrich story is one aspect that makes this perhaps Truffaut’s most Hitchcockian work, as is carrying over composer and Hitch mainstay Bernard Herrmann from Fahrenheit in their second and final collaboration.
The film is basically a quintet of set pieces in each of which the title character, Julie Kohler (Moreau), kills a man, making sure he knows her identity, e.g., she pushes Bliss (Claude Rich) from his balcony during a party when he tries to retrieve her windblown scarf; lures Coral (Michel Bouquet) to a rendezvous where she poisons him; and leaves Rene Morane (Michel Lonsdale) to suffocate in a sealed closet while his son, Cookie (Christophe Bruno), slumbers upstairs.
Flashbacks gradually reveal that she is avenging the death of her childhood sweetheart, David (Serge Rousseau), shot dead on the church steps after their wedding as the five fooled around with a loaded rifle across the street. The film addresses neither how Julie tracks down the men — strangers drawn together on a single occasion, sharing only a predilection for guns and women (the latter ultimately their undoing), who fled, never to meet again — nor whether David’s accidental killing justifies theirs.
Julie clearly has her own idea of justice, leading her to call the police and clear Cookie’s teacher, Miss Becker (the striking Alexandra Stewart), as whom she posed, by providing details only the killer could know.
I don’t know how, or even if, the novel tackles any of these questions, yet in a sense, it doesn’t matter; we don’t turn to Cornell Woolrich for rigorous logic but for his fever-dream imagination and style, and Truffaut himself, obviously interested more in the effect than in explanations, begins to play with our expectations as Julie’s next target, Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), is suddenly arrested for unrelated crimes, so she turns to the last on her list, artist Fergus (Charles Denner).
When she begins posing for him as the bow-wielding huntress (how apt!) Diana, we suspect how he will meet his end, yet for the first time, she seems hesitant after Fergus, anticipating Denner’s role as Truffaut’s L’Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes (The Man Who Loved Women, 1977), avows his amour.
It is around this point that Truffaut uses maximum cinematic sleight of hand, misdirecting us with a subplot about how Fergus’s friend Corey (Brialy) remembers seeing Julie at Bliss’s party and tries to identify her.
Having watched in step-by-step detail as she dispatched each of her previous victims, we are genuinely surprised when Truffaut abruptly cuts back to Fergus lying dead with an arrow protruding from his body, and even more so when the seemingly relentless avenger leaves an incriminating mural of herself on the wall, which along with her attending the artist’s funeral leads to her arrest and confession, albeit without explanation.
But — as my first-time-viewer wife quickly deduced — it is all a means to an end, and as Julie, with knife concealed, delivers meals to inmates of the same prison where Delvaux is confined, we await the inevitable off-screen shriek as she finishes her mission.
Asked by Le Mondein 1968 if Hitchcock had influenced the film, the director said, as quoted in Truffaut by Truffaut (*), “Certainly for the construction of the story because, unlike the novel, we give the solution of the enigma well before the end [as in Hitch’s Vertigo (1958)]…. Contrariwise, the desire to make the characters speak of everything else but the intrigue itself is decidedly not very Hitchcockian and more characteristic of a European turn of mind.â€
In 1978, he called it “the only one I regret having made… I wanted to offer…Moreau something like none of her other films, but it was badly thought out. That was a film to which color did an enormous lot of harm. [A permanent rift with Coutard reportedly left Moreau sometimes directing the actors.] The theme is lacking in interest: to make excuses for an idealistic vengeance, that really shocks me…. One should not avenge oneself, vengeance is not noble. One betrays something in oneself when one glorifies that,†as he opined to L’Express.
In France, Louis spots Marion in some news footage — precisely paralleling D’Entre les Morts(From Among the Dead, 1954) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the source novel for Vertigo — then locates and confronts her, but is unable to kill her; Louis shoots Comolli when he gets too close and refuses to take a bribe, and the couple’s peripatetic future as fugitives seems bleak, despite Louis forgiving Marion for trying to poison him and her declaration of love.
When I saw this for the second time (c. 2014), the first being in the 1999 “Tout Truffaut†retrospective at the hallowed ground of New York’s Film Forum, it seemed surprisingly familiar. It’s true that at various times I have also read Waltz into Darkness (I was honored to be asked to weigh in on whether Viking Penguin, where I was then employed, should reissue it, which they did) and seen the 2001 remake, Michael Cristofer’s Original Sin, notorious for its steamy scenes between Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie — talk about something for everyone — but I think there’s more to it than that, perhaps something distinctively Woolrichian.
TWO MERRY ADVENTURERS. Germany, 1937. Also released as The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes; original German title Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war. Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Hilde Weisner. Screenplay by R. A. Stemmle and Karl Hartl (the latter also director). Currently available on YouTube.
An official entry in the Venice Film Festival, Two Merry Adventurers is a curiosity all around. It’s set in a never never land where everyone in contemporary Europe believes Sherlock Holmes to be real and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is still alive eight years after his death.
The other curiosity is that this good-natured comedy mystery with musical interlude was made in Nazi Germany well after they had taken over all aspects of the German film industry. There is no sign of that in this film, not even subtly. It might as easily have come out of Hollywood or the United Kingdom in the same period, fast paced, funny, and light of step.
Hans Albers, who would still be going strong twenty years later in German film, may seem an unlikely choice to play any variation of Sherlock Holmes. Blond, pale eyed, stocky, and ruddy cheeked, it’s quite a stretch to imagine anyone could see him as the image of Sherlock Holmes, but the titles to the film show countless covers to the German pulp editions of Holmes adventures that do show Holmes vaguely resembling Albers’ interpretation.
Not that any of that matters. Albers was a natural on screen much closer to his American and British counterparts than most of his European contemporaries. His best film would probably be the 1943 fantasy The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, also an unusual film to have come out of Nazi Germany, certainly in wartime since it is not only a comedic fantasy but vaguely anti-war (while I can’t speak for this film, the cast and crew of Münchausen were apparently hiding several Jewish production members while making the film).
Albers is Morris Flint, who with his companion Macky Macpherson (Heinz Rühmann, who would become the popular West German Maigret in the late Fifties and Sixties) has dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (save only in German pulps did Holmes every wear a flat cap and checkered coat) stop a train on the way to Brussels.
Though denying they are Holmes and Watson they act very mysterious and everyone jumps to the conclusion that they can’t be anyone else. What they are really after is a free ride and maybe a compartment, if they can scare any crooks on board by their appearance. Sure enough a pair of bank robbers jump train at the sight of them.
In the compartment next to the crooks are a pair of young English women the crooks have tried to compromise. The girls are on their way to visit the estate of their late uncle near Brussels and collect on their inheritance, but for the time being that takes a back seat to Morris and Macky finagling a nice hotel room in the best hotel in Brussels and discovering among the criminals luggage a fortune in what they assume is stolen money.
Having foiled bank robbers, the two are approached by the police to deal with a desperate case involving priceless missing stamps — that belonged to the two English women’s uncle.
The boys are more than happy to help the two attractive women, only to discover their Uncle, far from wealthy, was hiding a massive international counterfeiting operations of not only money but collectible stamps.
But there are also the real stamps used to copy the counterfeits from, and soon Morris and Macky find themselves surrounded in the criminals lair hoping the police arrive in time to save their necks.
In capturing the gang though, they have exposed themselves and are put on trial by a tribunal for fraud, where Morris almost talks their way out of prosecution, but when things start to look bad Conan Doyle himself shows up and asks the court to spare the two who were just trying to start their own private detective business and never actually claimed to be Holmes and Watson.
All Doyle wants for his efforts is to write their story, “The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes.â€
It’s a surprisingly bright and brittle mystery comedy that moves at a rapid pace and turns on the charming lead performances by Albers and Rühmann, who went on to long careers in film as did screenwriter Stemmle and director Hartl.
Accept it as pure cinema and it is an entertaining romp handsome to look at and harmless fun to watch. It makes for an oddity in the history of Sherlock Holmes films, but one well worth catching.
